Vox: White threat in a browning America

The country’s gender dynamics are also in flux. Hillary Clinton was not just the first female presidential candidate to win the popular vote but the first to be nominated by a major political party. Women now make up 56 percent of college students, and are 8 percentage points more likely than men to have earned a bachelor’s degree by age 29. [...]

Another way to say that is it’s often our perception of race and power that matters. In that case, though, most Americans feel the browning of America is happening even faster than the demographers report. Back in 2013, the Center for American Progress, PolicyLink, and the Rockefeller Foundation surveyed Americans and found that the median participant believed the country was 49 percent nonwhite; the correct answer was 37 percent. [...]

Before and after sending these Spanish speakers to the train platforms, I surveyed passengers on the platforms about their attitudes about immigration. After being exposed to the Spanish speakers on their metro lines for just three days, attitudes on these questions moved sharply rightward: The mostly liberal Democratic passengers had come to endorse immigration policies — including deportation of children of undocumented immigrants — similar to those endorsed by Trump in his campaign. [...]

Obama’s presidency didn’t force race to the forefront of American politics through rhetoric or action but through symbolism: Obama himself was a symbol of a changing America, of white America’s loss of power, of the fact that the country was changing and new groups were gaining power. That perception wasn’t incorrect: In his 2012 reelection campaign, Obama won merely 39 percent of the white vote — a smaller share than Michael Dukakis had commanded in 1988. That is to say, a few decades ago, the multiracial Obama coalition couldn’t drive American politics; by 2012, it could. [...]

It would be easy to dismiss these comments as the over-the-top rantings of pundits, but Limbaugh and O’Reilly’s views are widely shared. A 2016 Public Religion Research Institute poll found that 57 percent of whites agreed that “discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” A 2017 GenForward poll of white millennials found 48 percent agreed with a similar statement, showing that the sentiment isn’t confined, or even concentrated, among older whites. [...]

This dynamic is behind much of the frustration about “identity politics.” When a single group dominates the political agenda, their grievances and demands are just coded as politics, and the vast majority of policy is designed in response to their concerns. But that changes when no one group can control the agenda but many groups can push items onto it; then the competition between identity-based groups becomes visible. And it becomes particularly visible to the group that’s traditionally dominated the agenda and believes that their issues reflect what politics is supposed to be about and other groups’ concerns represent special pleading.

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WIRED: The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature

As numbers go, the familiar real numbers—those found on the number line, like 1, π and -83.777—just get things started. Real numbers can be paired up in a particular way to form “complex numbers,” first studied in 16th-century Italy, that behave like coordinates on a 2-D plane. Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing is like translating and rotating positions around the plane. Complex numbers, suitably paired, form 4-D “quaternions,” discovered in 1843 by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who on the spot ecstatically chiseled the formula into Dublin’s Broome Bridge. John Graves, a lawyer friend of Hamilton’s, subsequently showed that pairs of quaternions make octonions: numbers that define coordinates in an abstract 8-D space.

There the game stops. Proof surfaced in 1898 that the reals, complex numbers, quaternions and octonions are the only kinds of numbers that can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. The first three of these “division algebras” would soon lay the mathematical foundation for 20th-century physics, with real numbers appearing ubiquitously, complex numbers providing the math of quantum mechanics, and quaternions underlying Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. This has led many researchers to wonder about the last and least-understood division algebra. Might the octonions hold secrets of the universe? [...]

Günaydin, the Penn State professor, was a graduate student at Yale in 1973 when he and his advisor Feza Gürsey found a surprising link between the octonions and the strong force, which binds quarks together inside atomic nuclei. An initial flurry of interest in the finding didn’t last. Everyone at the time was puzzling over the Standard Model of particle physics—the set of equations describing the known elementary particles and their interactions via the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces (all the fundamental forces except gravity). But rather than seek mathematical answers to the Standard Model’s mysteries, most physicists placed their hopes in high-energy particle colliders and other experiments, expecting additional particles to show up and lead the way beyond the Standard Model to a deeper description of reality. They “imagined that the next bit of progress will come from some new pieces being dropped onto the table, [rather than] from thinking harder about the pieces we already have,” said Latham Boyle, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. [...]

After breaks from school spent ski-bumming, bartending abroad and intensely training as a mixed martial artist, Furey later met the division algebras again in an advanced geometry course and learned just how peculiar they become in four strokes. When you double the dimensions with each step as you go from real numbers to complex numbers to quaternions to octonions, she explained, “in every step you lose a property.” Real numbers can be ordered from smallest to largest, for instance, “whereas in the complex plane there’s no such concept.” Next, quaternions lose commutativity; for them, a × b doesn’t equal b × a. This makes sense, since multiplying higher-dimensional numbers involves rotation, and when you switch the order of rotations in more than two dimensions you end up in a different place. Much more bizarrely, the octonions are nonassociative, meaning (a × b) × c doesn’t equal a × (b × c). “Nonassociative things are strongly disliked by mathematicians,” said John Baez, a mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside, and a leading expert on the octonions. “Because while it’s very easy to imagine noncommutative situations—putting on shoes then socks is different from socks then shoes—it’s very difficult to think of a nonassociative situation.” If, instead of putting on socks then shoes, you first put your socks into your shoes, technically you should still then be able to put your feet into both and get the same result. “The parentheses feel artificial.”

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Vox: The biggest lie we still teach in American history classes

Everything is not a matter of nuance: everything is not up for grabs. It is simply true, for example, that the South seceded from the Union because of slavery, and not because of states’ rights. We know this to be true, and an alternative version of history that denies this is a lie. Period. [...]

I think a lot of them don’t even know they’re filled with lies. Many of them, it turns out, aren’t historians and haven’t taken a single course in US history in college. And yet here they are, teaching US history at the K-12 level. [...]

That gets back to the point about progress. I think that textbooks fail to teach what causes what. Everything is just one damn thing after another. You need to learn all those little facts. Therefore, they fail to impart the idea that we, as people, should be trying to achieve things, things that won’t happen without our efforts. [...]

I actually think our situation is far worse than it was in the past. For example, our federal government, under Nixon and Johnson, lied to us about the Vietnam War, but they never made the case that facts don’t matter or that my facts are as good as your facts.

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Jacobin Magazine Israel’s Mask Slips Off

There are two ways to look at this event. In one respect, it simply enshrines long-standing Israeli practices in law. Yet it also signals the abandonment of any pretense that Israel is, as it has long claimed, a democracy.

The Nation-State Law defines Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people and asserts that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” Similarly, it promises that “Israel will ensure the safety of the Jewish people” but mentions the protection of no other group.

Adalah attorney Fady Khoury puts it plainly: “In Israel, the new law explicitly defines the Jewish people as the only group with the only right to self-determination, while negating the rights of the indigenous people. This creates a system of hierarchy and supremacy.”[...]

For example, it is now impossible to say that the International Criminal Court’s definition of apartheid does not apply to Israel. According to the ICC, apartheid is “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” The new law establishes precisely such a regime.

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Vox: Why Jeff Sessions thinks Christians are under siege in America

The second explanation, and I think the more powerful one, has to do with LGBTQ rights. Religious conservatives have lost important LGBTQ rights cases, including, most prominently, Obergefell [which established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right]. So I think that’s where a lot of the tension is coming from.

But that doesn’t clear up the mystery entirely either, because the politics of LBGTQ rights are such that Obergefell probably won’t be reversed even by a court that includes, say, Brett Kavanaugh [who is nominated to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy]. And President Donald Trump hasn’t come out against gay rights, even though he has made some changes that are unhelpful to LGBTQ interests. So I think some mystery still remains as to where exactly the sense of victimization the attorney general expresses comes from. [...]

In 1990, all of that changed, when the Court decided Employment Division v. Smith, about Native American use of peyote. In that case, the Court announced a new rule, which was that normally religious actors would not receive exemptions from general laws. So unless the laws were discriminating against them in some way, they wouldn’t get exemptions.

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Vox: Living While Black and the criminalization of blackness

The incidents also speak to the persistence of residential segregation and isolation, particularly of whites, and how that isolation simultaneously maintains and heightens white mistrust of nonwhite groups. And with many of these calls leading to requests for police intervention, they highlight the use of law enforcement to “manage” the behavior of African Americans. That’s fraught with menace because of the racial disparities in police use of force that make people of color more likely to encounter violence or harassment. [...]

At its core, Living While Black is about racial profiling, the concept that a person’s race or ethnicity makes them an object of suspicion and heightened scrutiny from law enforcement. From the use of slave patrols to lynching to legal segregation, and in modern iterations like stop and frisk, racial profiling has long been used to maintain white authority by singling out the presence and behavior of people of color — especially African Americans — as requiring punishment. These systems rely on the participation of bystanders and observers to alert authorities to those deemed “suspicious.” [...]

Robin DiAngelo, a sociologist and the author of White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, says these videos make it much more difficult for white people to deny that profiling has occurred. “These incidents have always happened, but white people do not always believe it because it doesn’t happen to us,” DiAngelo told me. “The only real difference we have now is that we are able to record it in a way that makes it undeniable.” [...]

The request to “justify my existence,” and the frustration that this sort of request creates, lies at the core of these incidents. Academics have noted that people of color, especially black people, are often asked to provide justification and proof when they enter spaces where they are in the minority. Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson explains that there is a difference between “white spaces,” where black people are often not present or exist in a limited number, and “black spaces,” communities and spaces occupied by larger numbers of black people.

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The Atlantic: The Tricksters of Afghanistan’s New Online-Dating Scene

Nasirahmad’s new friend, it turned out, wasn’t an aunt or a cousin but a stranger—and a male one at that. As she soon learned, many young Afghan men and women from cities and villages alike have begun using Facebook to skirt strict social rules governing interaction between the sexes. In fact, posing as a member of the opposite sex online has become a popular pastime. In the months following that first request, Nasirahmad received many other friend requests from fake females (a disproportionate number of whom, oddly enough, had profiles bearing Turkish soap-opera stars’ pictures).

Until recently, dating was almost nonexistent in Afghanistan, because of religious and cultural norms that prohibit relationships before marriage. Communication was difficult too: During Taliban rule, people had to cross the border into Pakistan to make an international phone call (domestic calls weren’t easy either). Today, with the arrival of cheap smartphones and affordable mobile internet—about 90 percent of Afghanistan’s population has access to a cellphone—even the poorest people can get on Facebook. Although premarital relationships are still taboo, social media have provided the younger generation with a covert means of online dating. [...]

Maryam Mehtar, an Afghan journalist, told me she has received so many friend requests from fake female profiles on Facebook that she’s lost count—and some are from people whose intentions are anything but amorous. Once, she accepted a request from a female user with whom she had many mutual Facebook friends, most of them relatives. “I thought I knew her,” she says. “Everything she asked me, I usually honestly answered.” Later, she found out from friends that the profile belonged to a man who tried to collect private information and photos from women and then use it to blackmail them.

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The Guardian: Oh for the days when it was all Brussels’ fault!

The foreign secretary betrayed this sense of nostalgia when criticising Brussels’ conduct over Brexit. “Without a real change in approach from the EU negotiators we do now face a real risk of a no deal by accident and that would be incredibly challenging economically,” he warned, adding that the British people would blame the EU for this and it “would change [their] attitudes to Europe for a generation”. So there he is, a Tory cabinet minister, saying that British problems are the EU’s fault. Just once more, for old times’ sake? [...]

We’re witnessing the end of a way of life. For decades, our political leaders, both Tories and Labour, have been able to blame things that went wrong, things they failed to do, anything that seemed unfairly constraining, or frighteningly liberating, on the Brussels bureaucrats. Anything that smacked of globalisation and corporate power, but also anything that seemed overly statist and controlling, anything that was bad for business and anything that left the individual citizen too exposed. Put simply: anything. [...]

This is why, despite the stratospheric importance of the question of whether or not Britain is in the EU – not just in terms of economics and geopolitics but of the hearts, minds and self-image of millions of Britons – the two main parties haven’t fought a general election on the issue for over 30 years. They’ve argued endlessly about privatisation and NHS funding and tuition fees and foxhunting and MPs’ expenses, but they’ve both avoided the main problem, this colossal, festering unresolved question and left it as a personal matter for individual members. That’s like having decades of religious debate in the 16th century between two groups both of which refuse to say whether they’re Catholic or Protestant.

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Quartz: Facebook found evidence of another coordinated political influence campaign

Facebook uncovered eight pages, 17 profiles, and seven Instagram accounts, identifying the first of them “about two weeks ago,” Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of cybersecurity policy, outlined in a post. They were all removed following Facebook’s investigation. More than 290,000 users followed at least one of the pages, which were created between March 2017 and May 2018. The pages ran about 150 ads, which cost around $11,000, paid for in US and Canadian dollars.

The accounts created more than 9,500 organic posts, and the most popular pages were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters.” The company shared examples of posts from these accounts.

The pages created about 30 events. It’s not clear whether the events occurred in real life—most were scheduled for some time within the past year, and two were supposed to take place in the next few months. The company’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said on a call with reporters that Facebook was sharing results of the investigation today because one of the events was scheduled to happen next week. Users who said they were attending or interested the event would be informed about the developments, the company said.

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