The Conversation: Facts are not always more important than opinions: here’s why

To call something a fact is, presumably, to make a claim that it is true. This isn’t a problem for many things, although defending such a claim can be harder than you think. [...]

It’s not only that facts can change that is a problem. While we might be happy to consider it a fact that Earth is spherical, we would be wrong to do so because it’s actually a bit pear-shaped. Thinking it a sphere, however, is very different from thinking it to be flat.

Asimov expressed this beautifully in his essay The Relativity of Wrong. For Asimov, the person who thinks Earth is a sphere is wrong, and so is the person who thinks the Earth is flat. But the person who thinks that they are equally wrong is more wrong than both. [...]

Matters of opinion are non-empirical claims, and include questions of value and of personal preference such as whether it’s ok to eat animals, and whether vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate. Ethics is an exemplar of a system in which matters of fact cannot by themselves decide courses of action.

Matters of opinion can be informed by matters of fact (for example, finding out that animals can suffer may influence whether I choose to eat them), but ultimately they are not answered by matters of fact (why is it relevant if they can suffer?).

Opinions are not just pale shadows of facts; they are judgements and conclusions. They can be the result of careful and sophisticated deliberation in areas for which empirical investigation is inadequate or ill-suited.

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The Intercept: France's Bernie Sanders Started His Own Party and Is Surging in the Polls

JEAN-LUC MÉLENCHON, an insurgent left-wing candidate for France’s presidency, is surging. His candidacy, organized under the newly-established party La France Insoumise (“Unsubmissive France”) has gone from a quixotic bid to a viable challenge in just a few months.

Railing against growing economic inequality, participation in foreign wars, and political corruption, Mélenchon has skyrocketed in the polls from distant fourth to within a hair’s breadth of the frontrunners. (This rise has been accompanied by the release of a web-based video game called “Fiscal Kombat” where Mélenchon fights corrupt politicians and bankers.) [...]

Many have drawn comparisons between Mélenchon and Bernie Sanders. Raquel Garrido, a spokesperson for Mélenchon’s campaign, told Jacobin Magazine in early April that, like Sanders, Mélenchon is embracing a populist platform that seeks to speak to every portion of society, not just the traditional left. [...]

Mélenchon is probably looking at the ruling Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon — polling at eight percent — and wondering if Hamon’s voters will prevent him from going to the second round of voting. Mélenchon was once a junior minister in the the Socialist Party, which is France’s version of the Democrats. But as the Socialists moved towards neoliberalism, he left the party and for a long time was in the political wilderness. When he announced last year that he would be challenging the mainstream parties in France’s presidential election, he was considered a non-factor.

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CityLab: Focusing on the Hidden Horror of American Lynchings

“It seems that many Americans, especially white Americans, either don't know much about lynchings or are reticent to discuss it,” Oliver Clasper, a London-born photographer and journalist, says via email. Clasper has set out to provoke a conversation with a project he calls The Spaces We Inherit. In photographs and interviews, he is documenting historic sites where African Americans were terrorized and murdered by white neighbors, and how individuals living in the orbit of this buried past are affected by it today.

With logistical support from the NAACP and the Equal Justice Initiative, as well as research assistance from the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis and others, Clasper has pinpointed and photographed 10 sites so far, in Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. That is only a small fraction of the 4,000-plus known lynchings that have occurred throughout the U.S. since the 19th century. But Clasper’s selections testify to the breadth of circumstances and historic moments in which racially-fueled, extra-judicial killings occurred—and the silence and obscurity into which they’ve often been cast. [...]

“There's certainly this notion that lynchings occurred in the distant past, but that's not the case,” says Clasper. In many cases, the town squares, roadsides, and neighborhood streets where these atrocities took place still exist—and remain unmarked, more often than not. [...]

Though Clasper does not advocate for one approach or another, he was inspired after learning about the work of the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based civil rights organization dedicated to ending mass incarceration and “excessive punishment” in the United States. As part of EJI’s research on the history that shaped racial injustices in those systems today, volunteers have been collecting soil from scores of lynching sites throughout the South. Those bottles have already been exhibited at EJI headquarters, and represent a kind of preamble to a national lynching memorial the organization is currently raising funds to build outside Montgomery, Alabama. The design is composed of 800 heavy columns—one for every county where a lynching has been documented.

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FiveThirtyEight: ‘Reluctant’ Trump Voters Swung The Election. Here’s How They Think He’s Doing.

But not every Donald Trump voter was quite so enthusiastic. While we’ve always known his core base was a loyal one, Trump made it to the White House thanks in no small part to a group of voters who didn’t necessarily like him but were willing to give him a chance. Nearly 20 percent of voters in the 2016 presidential election had an unfavorable view of both Trump and Hillary Clinton, according to exit polls, and Trump won that group 47 percent to 30 percent. That made the difference. [...]

We can’t go back and find the voters who cast an unenthusiastic ballot for Trump.1 But FiveThirtyEight partnered with SurveyMonkey to survey more than 7,000 American adults during the first week of April and asked Trump voters how enthusiastic their vote for the president had been. (We gave respondents five levels of excitement to choose, from “very excited” to “not excited at all”.)2 About 15 percent of Trump voters said they weren’t excited to cast a ballot for him. This group differs demographically and has different policy priorities from the rest of the Trump cohort.

Who are the reluctant Trump voters? Like most Trump supporters, they are overwhelmingly white — 85 percent — and middle age and older. Forty-three percent of reluctant Trumpers were 55 or older, as were 49 percent of other Trump voters.

The biggest difference between the two groups is education level: 37 percent of reluctant Trumpers had at least a college degree, while only 25 percent of other Trump supporters had a college or postgraduate degree. This enthusiasm gap for Trump among better-educated Trump voters partly explains why Republicans — most prominently the president — are keeping an eye on the special election today in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, Republican Tom Price’s old seat. Georgia’s 6th has one of the highest levels of educational attainment in the country, and the race is tight, with Democratic newcomer Jon Ossoff making a strong showing in polls and fundraising.

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The Atlantic: It’s Not Enough to Dismiss Islamophobia

And yet, argues Nadia Marzouki in her new book, Islam: An American Religion, anti-Islam arguments in the West have become “surprisingly standardized.” It’s “no longer possible to discuss Islam’s place in Western societies without systematically invoking a series of normative oppositions: good/bad, moderate/radical, faith/law, West/Muslim, modernity/tradition, and so on,” she writes. “For a majority of Americans and Europeans, Islam remains an opaque object that one is unable to think of in any way other than as a problem, threat, or retrograde legal code.”

It’s not enough to understand this simply as Islamophobia, argues Marzouki, who is a research fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. She believes Islam has become a cipher in Western societies for the tough questions of secular, liberal democracies: how much to champion liberty over equality, for example, and whether legal rights should entitle Muslims to fully express their faith in public. As much as Europe and the U.S. have different histories and legal traditions, she claims, anti-Muslim groups in both places share their discomfort with these challenges. [...]

One major difference between Europe and the U.S. is that anti-Muslim arguments in the U.S. haven’t been very prominent within the Democratic Party or the left. Maybe you can find a few exceptions here and there, but broadly speaking, it’s mostly people from the right wing of the Republican Party. In Europe, some of the arguments about the fear of Islam, etc., have been endorsed by the right, but also by the left. [...]

What’s at stake is not just a hate of Islam or a hate of Muslims. It’s an unease toward the capacity of abstract language to capture their sense of being disgruntled, or being perceived as losers, or as people who have been hurt or offended. Understanding the role of emotions and affect is important, because it helps us better understand why people consider certain things sacred, like the constitution, or some territory where a mosque should be constructed. Focusing just on law is not enough to address what’s really at stake.

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