#i feel like they have more important things to worry about than harassing jews on tumblr dot com.

[intern-seraph]

.

[athenawasamerf]

What's life in Egypt like?

This is a very vague question so I’m not sure how to answer, really. It’s kind of tense these days, anyway.

Ig the day to day is pretty typical. I’m not exactly the average citizen, most of my time is taken up with med school so I don’t explore or go out as much as I should. I live in Alexandria, and I love it here. Coastal, the old section of the city is beautiful, lots of greenery. It’s pouring down rain all through winter, driving is near impossible because everyone is fucking insane (which is typical for Egyptian cities lol), it’s pretty densely populated, the food is phenomenal. We have a ton of museums and historical sites, and the library of Alexandria is pretty rad. The economy is shit and getting shittier, we’re under a military dictatorship (again but worse than last time), inflation is insane and the country is in a ton of debt to the point that the central bank of Egypt has stopped all foreign currency transactions on debit cards, and credit cards have a foreign currency limit of the equivalent of $250/month.

From a feminist perspective, it’s not the best place to be. Alexandria is better than most of the country, but I still get harassed regularly. Egyptian men are paternalistic and have a weirdly entitled attitude towards all women, we have in-jokes in feminist circles about the fruit vendor from down the street being mad at you for coming home late. Tbf I’m fairly open about my feminist opinions and that hasn’t caused me any trouble, and basically all my friends and acquaintances know that I wear a hijab in front of my family and take it off at school/when I’m out with friends, and 4 of my cousins know about the hijab thing as well. Dating culture is fairly normalised in Alexandria, so everyone in my circles including two of my cousins know about my love life (but not my sexuality). In some places of Egypt, I’d be honour killed for any one of these things, so I’m grateful to be where I am. There’s still a line of chauvinism running in the country, though that’s the least of our worries as feminists. I have a post about marriage and divorce in Egypt under my Egyptian feminism tag if you’re interested in learning more about that aspect.

From an LGB perspective, unfortunately the little progress we’d made in the late 00’s and early 10’s has been receding quickly. We’d gotten to a point of live and let live in some areas, but the introduction of trans ideology in the west caused a massive recoil in perception of LGB people here, and there’s been a crackdown on LGB-sympathetic ideas. Every time it’s brought up, you get a look of disgust and ‘they’re teaching kids to change their sex’. It’s going to take massive amounts of time and effort to repair this damage.

And finally, from a religious perspective, well. Not much has improved re acceptance of atheism or non-abrahamic religious beliefs. Egyptian law technically protects your right to freedom of belief, but, crucially, not your right to freedom of expression of religious belief. National ID cards must have your religion listed on them, and the only options are Muslim/Christian/Jew. Contempt of religion and ‘violating Egyptian family values’ laws are pretty strict and are used to prosecute everything from girls dancing on TikTok to blasphemy. I don’t see this improving any time soon, though foreigners (non-Arabs) are given some leeway.

I hope I’ve covered the most important points, but please feel free to reach out if you have more specific questions!

[trans-wojak]

Regarding your post about Palestine I definitely agree. Its honestly become a trend among "those" types of people to "support" Palestine, not because they actually care but because it suddenly became trendy to do so and they're just like "alright if I want to be seen as woke I guess I'm doing this now" and they begin spamming posts with the hashtags free Palestine, acting as if its a new thing even though its been going on for years.

I've also seen MANY and I mean MANY "woke" people using this whole thing to disguise their blatant antisemitism, they blame all Israeli's and all Jewish people for whats going on instead of the people ACTUALLY RESPONSIBLE, its to the point where some girl on TikTok said "Jewish privilege" was a thing and the video as far as I know is still up

Its honestly just a repeat of people showing "support" for BLM when police brutality became a "trending topic" back in 2020 even though police brutality against black people has obviously existed years before 2020

These people don't even do anything to "free Palestine" anyways, they just put a Palestinian flag in their bio, flood everyones page with posts about Palestine and call it a day, they don't donate anything or give anyone links to places we can donate, they don't talk about ways we can help, its just blatant that 90% of these people just want to keep up with the "trend" and as soon as this whole thing with Palestine isn't as "popular" in the media they'll just stop posting about it and begin talking about the next big problem going on

It was the same when the whole thing with Ukraine and Russia happened, everyone on TikTok made the Ukrainian flag their pfp, at most made 1 or 2 videos and did nothing else

And I will not even get started on those people who are like "If you don't make posts about Palestine you're evil and are contributing to genocide" because god forbid I don't want to talk about people dying and stuff

I've seen literal 13 year olds and teens get harassed for not talking about Palestine, what the hell is a child gonna do about freeing Palestine?!

(of course these issues are important, and what has been going on with Palestine and Israel is obviously awful, but I'm sick of people using it to get clout, using it as an excuse to crap on Jews, and just seeing it as a "trend" and not an actual problem)

Couldn’t have said it better myself, this is 100% how I feel too. I’ve seen these woke types literally say things like “guess the Jews learned nothing from WW2 now they’re just being Hitler” like bro?? That’s like saying America is responsible for Britain colonising over the world because they’re both predominantly Anglo christian nations.

This war has been going on since like, before 1950 from what I remember. No one remembers Ukraine now, no one mentions BLM, even though police brutality has been a thing since FOREVER especially targeting minority groups.

That chick was deadset being transphobic (not that I actually care, I just like irony) and she’s acting like she’s actually a good person because she spams the internet with shit about free Palestine lmao

I’m actually Jewish, I don’t have any ties to the culture cause my grandfather passed away really young. But there are deadset people still out there who deny the Holocaust happened and I’m seeing a lot of these people post “look a Holocaust survivor said X about Y, it means it’s true!” Like bro, just like Israel doesn’t represent all Jews, neither does one guy.

I simply don’t think wasting energy on caring about this is a good use of emotions or empathy. Unless people actually donate money and PHYSICALLY make an impact, it’s nothing more than signalling how “good” you are to me. I don’t pay attention the news on crap like this cause I don’t need to worry about it, it does not affect me and there’s nothing I can do even if I feel empathy or sympathy. Literally nothing changes besides I wasted some energy. Is it self serving? Yes. I just say the quiet part out loud. I don’t want to listen and talk about war crimes, it’s not productive nor interesting to me. I block tags about it but people rarely tag and it gets posted in meme tags, also by meme pages cause it’s trendy. It’s boring and I’m sick of seeing pretending they are these great activists for clicking reblog on a post they have no idea if it’s even verified.

[phoenixmakeswords]

Dented Ch. 3--AU

Finally thought of a name for the AU.

“Why haven’t you answered my texts? Do you not want me anymore?” I ask carefully. Just asking hurts. I forgot this much pain was possible.

“What? Kristoff, of course I want you. You’re my son. I just got your texts five seconds ago. Remember I was going on that camping trip? I told you about it at the restaurant. And that I wouldn’t have cell service.”

“I feel like a dumbass.”

“I still love you. Come in. You’re not okay. What’s going on?” She leads me from the entry hall to the spacious pale blue living room.

“Besides Regan being horrible? I went to a party on Friday. Clare’s girlfriend was having at her lake house. Anyway, it happened again.” My face twists into a grimace as I sink onto the matching blue sectional. It’s much softer and more plush than mine.

“What’d Regan do? Who was it?”

I show her the text reluctantly. It gives me a little time to dredge up the courage to tell her about the party.

“I was really drunk. Blackout drunk. Clare told me today he was blond and she thought his name might be James. I remember doing shots with Clare and then I woke up in a bed.”

“Did Clare know? Did anyone try to help you?”

“Yeah, she knew. Apparently, I could be heard over the music. Nobody did anything that I know of.”

“How’re you doing with this?”

“Oh, I'm peachy. I lashed out at the one guy I actually trust. I'm cutting class because I don’t want to look at Clare right now. Things are just fabulous. Oh, and I'm not sleeping and I'm really depressed. Can’t get better.”

“Have you thought about getting help? I believe you, Kristoff. I hope you know that. I'm sorry you’re suffering.”

“Yeah, telling a stranger about this sounds great.”

“Kristoff.”

“I might be leaving the bakery.”

“I thought you loved it.”

“I sorta slept with a guy’s brother and he’s being a jerk to me about it.”

“Were you a couple?” She sounds more excited than I expected by the possibility of me having a boyfriend.

“No. Just a hookup.”

“You know that’s not safe. Are you using protection at least?”

“If they don’t wanna use a condom, I don’t sleep with them. That’s like the only rule I have.”

“At least you’re being smart.”

“How was the camping trip?” I don’t want to discuss my sex life.

“It was good. There’s something really important I need to talk to you about.”

“You found a fae village in the woods.” I smirk teasingly at her. She’s my best friend. That might make me a mama’s boy. I don’t care.

“No. I met a guy. He’s really sweet. He asked me to dinner for this Friday.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s sweet. He’s genuine. He has kids of his own. He’s very respectful.”

“Does he work?”

“He’s a video game designer.”

“How’d you meet him? Was he a client?”

“His sister is my best friend. He came on the trip with us. The poor thing, he was the only man there. We started talking and we just…clicked.”

“You didn’t sleep with him, did you?” The idea fills me with horror.

“Kristoff!”

“Now you know how I felt.”

“You’re a brat. If you need to not be alone, you know you can stay here.”

“I know. Ransom’s been staying since it happened. He sleeps in the guest room. And he keeps making me breakfast.”

“Do you like him?”

“Does it matter? I'm so fu—screwed-up. I mean, yeah, we slept together before it happened.”

“You deserve to be happy, sweetie. I know that’s hard for you to believe. But you do.”

“If it hadn’t happened, he was gonna ask me out.” I sigh softly.

“And? How do you feel about that?”

“You sound like a therapist. It would’ve been nice. I mean, he’s a great person. He’s hot. He’s smart.”

“Is he still interested?”

“I think so.”

“Are you interested?”

I nod slowly. He’s someone I would like to date. Someone I could maybe be with.

“He sounds like a good guy. He might be good for you,” she tells me gently.

“He is a good guy. He deserves better than a mess like me.”

The depression has become a physical weight in my chest. What happened and the fact I don’t deserve to be happy or in a stable, healthy relationship don’t help any. I am worthless.

“Alright, you have me really worried. Kristoff, are you thinking about killing yourself?”

“I'm not quite there yet.”

“Bu you’re still really bad?”

“Yeah. I don’t get like this.”

“I know. If you need to check in somewhere, I’ll take you. You have my support.”

“I don’t want to. I don’t wanna be hospitalized. I don’t wanna start therapy. I just wanna get through this crap on my own and go on with my life.” I rub my fingers absently over my phoenix tattoo. It was the first piece of ink I got. And it’s the most meaningful. Because phoenixes rise from the ashes. No matter what I face, I'm able to bounce back eventually. Right now, I need that reminder.

“I hate to tell you this, but you’re not Superman. There’s no shame in getting help.”

“I know that.”

I don’t want to need help. I know how society sees people who have mental health issues. And I don’t want them to see me that way. Ransom comes over after his shift tonight. He has a black duffel bag with him this time. Anger flickers in his jade eyes, despite his friendly smile.

“If you don’t wanna babysit me, it’s fine,” I assure him quickly.

“You’re not the problem. I like you. I met your sister.”

“How’d that go? Regan’s a nightmare, isn’t she?”

“You’re nothing alike. We’ve already butted heads.”

“So, they hired her?”

“Don’t threaten me like that. Did you know your sister doesn’t like Jews?” An edge slips into his low voice. I don’t like the distrust in his green eyes.

“No. Ransom, if I had, I would’ve told you.”

“Riley told her off. I know she’s your family and everything, but she was an utter bitch to me.”

“That would be Regan. Are you okay?” I touch his forearm gently. The sleeve of his black hoodie is soft.

“I'm irritated with her. I'm more worried about you.” He smiles gently.

“You still like me? I'm sorry she was nasty.”

“You’re not racist. You okay? I’ve dealt with it a lot.”

I shake my head quietly. I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve talked about it enough today.

“What do you need? We can go do something. Or watch movies or whatever will help,” he murmurs gently.

“I'm sorry. You don’t have to stay.”

“You’re my friend. You’re in crisis. I'm not abandoning you.”

I didn’t think he’d want to stay. I know it’s inconvenient. A hassle. Which means I am. But here he is.

“Thanks.”

“How was class? Did anything interesting happen?” He sounds so genuinely interested it surprises me. Guys don’t do that.

“I walked out. Clare and I got into it and I didn’t want to look at her.” I sigh shakily. I feel like all I do anymore is break down. So much for ‘masculinity.’

“You cut class? You never do that. What happened?”

“She knew what happened. Everyone knew. And nobody tried to help me. She blamed me. I didn’t hear from her all weekend either.”

“I thought she was your friend.”

“Yeah, so did I.”

“For what it’s worth, I believe you. And it’s really crappy that they did nothing.”

“Thanks. How’d you meet my sister?”

“I did a tattoo for her. A simple rose she picked out of the book. Took twenty minutes. She argued with me about the aftercare. Called me a stupid kike. That was when Riley stepped in.” He rakes a hand through his hair.

“She should’ve never done that. You’re not stupid. And she should’ve never called you a slur. I'm sorry.”

“I didn’t get a tip. Because my people are ‘money hungry penny-pinching misers.’” He toys with his blue Star of David necklace. I’ve noticed he does this when he’s upset.

“How much was the tattoo?”

“Forty. It’s not a money thing, Kris. It’s the fact she played the anti-Semitic card. The fact she used my race as the reason to not give me a tip, not my work.”

“I knew you were tryin’ to get a new car. That’s why I asked. I'm sorry.”

“You’re not giving me the tip your sister should’ve. I don’t take handouts or pity.”

“I wasn’t tryin’ to piss you off. I'm sorry, Ransom. I was tryin’ to be nice.”

“Were you? Or were you trying to be my ‘rescuer’?”

“Yeah, I was! I thought you’d be happy that I was tryin’ to make up for her.” I flinch at the sound of my own raised voice.

“I stand on my own feet. By my own merit.” He sounds just as angry as I am.

“I don’t wanna fight with you.” I don’t have the energy. I’ve spent it on fighting the battle raging inside my head.

“Me either. And you didn’t need me arguing while you’re already feeling bad. Which makes me an ass. I owe you an apology for that. I'm sorry.”

“Forgiven. Thank you for staying.”

“You’re welcome. And I'm not being nice to you just so we can hook up again when you’re okay.”

“I wouldn’t hate you if you were.”

I wish that wasn’t true. I wish I would be angry with him if he was using me. But I can’t do that. Ransom’s sleeping soundly on the couch when I get up. He’s even more adorable asleep. I envy his easy sleep.

I start breakfast, even though I don’t feel much like eating. I don’t feel like going to work or class either, but I have to.

“Good morning. Did you get any sleep?” Ransom says, startling me.

“A couple hours.”

“You look exhausted.”

“I am. I'm gonna send my teachers a text and explain what’s going on.”

I know I can’t avoid Clare forever. I shouldn’t have to. She should’ve believed me and been on my side. But she wasn’t. We’ve known each other since we were fourteen. I mean, I used to go to her family’s holidays because Regan and I fought so much. Clare’s pretty much family to me.

“Good idea. Any way you can take your classes online?” He looks perfectly at home in my kitchen with one of my mugs clutched in his slender hands. I wish the thought didn’t make my stomach twinge. I’ve never had hope for a picket fence of my own.

“I’ll ask.”

I dread going to work almost as much as dealing with Clare. Maybe more.

“Text me on break?” he asks hopefully.

I agree easily. By the end of my shift, I'm ready to quit. Eight hours of being sexually harassed does my fragile mental health zero favors. My boss knows. She doesn’t care.

I don’t tell Ransom over text. I don’t want to upset him. If I tell him at all, it’ll be face-to-face.

I have a text from him, inviting me to dinner. He’s clarified that it’s not a date, which I appreciate. I agree easily.

Maybe if I wasn’t such a broken mess, I’d ask him out. Maybe if I thought he could like me more than for just sex. Maybe if I wasn’t so scared. But I am.

[hazel2468]

I love how both my aunt and my mother have told me that I need to “let it go” and “not make drama” with my cousin who voted for Trump, despite the fact that I played nice and said hi to her and she initially ignored me, and despite the fact that her goyische ass voted for the man who is inspiring people to kill Jews- you know, like most of her family? 

I did make a point of letting her know that I have a girlfriend during our conversation over dinner, when we were talking about life and school and stuff. And we were pretty cool by the end and IDK how she even feels about Trump anymore- I know my uncle who voted for him feels like shit about it and hates him now. 

But it’s the fact that I am the one being told to play nice and let it go when I was the one who told her that hey, you’re voting for someone who hates pretty much everything that I am and peddles rhetoric that puts your entire Jewish family at risk and wants me and my girlfriend to not exist anymore and her response was basically “I don’t care” and she voted for him anyway?? But no, I’m the one who needs to be nice and shut my mouth. 

I’m really fucking sick of this whole “be polite” thing we have going with families. Like... If my uncle says something racist or sexist or homophobic, or if one of my cousins does something shitty, or if someone misgenders my girlfriend for the umpteenth time, I should just sit there and nod and be like “oh well I don’t want to ruin Thanksgiving”?? Like newsflash- Thanksgiving is ruined for ME the second I hear that out of a family member’s mouth. But if I do say something, I get a lecture about stirring the pot and making trouble?

Nah. I’m fucking done. Most of my relatives know that I say shit at this point, and luckily this year no one started with anything political, but I say- fucking ruin Thanksgiving. Your relative says something racist? Ruin Thanksgiving. Says something transphobic or is rude to your fat cousin? Ruin Thanksgiving. Not calling out casual prejudice is (I believe) part of how we got to the shit situation we are in as a nation right now. It makes it acceptable- silence is acceptance. And I have had it up to fucking HERE with the idea that it is my responsibility to cater to the feelings of people who have basically said that they don’t care what happens to me as long as they get to sit there and have whatever benefits they get from voting (although at this point, what fucking benefit is there? Specifically for the people in my family... We’re not getting shit) while I’m worried about whether or not my girlfriend and I will be able to live together, since it looks like it’s going to be not-illegal to deny trans people housing. Or if she’ll be able to find a job. Or continue her healthcare. Or if both of us will be harassed or abused or assaulted or fucking killed for being queer or for being Jews. 

Sorry for the 5AM rant but this has been on my mind all night, and it bugs me every single damn year. We (collective we, society we) treat politeness as the most important thing- more important than the comfort and safety of our family members who might hear that shit uncle Jake is saying and not feel safe anymore. More important that challenging prejudice and legitimately dangerous ideas. More important than standing up for ourselves, our friends, our loved ones, and feeling welcome in our own family spaces. And I fucking hate that. Every single year I get the same talk, and in recent years I’ve started responding with “I think that making sure that I and everyone else feels welcome and safe as they are in our family space is more important than pandering to the feelings of someone who heard their family saying that they are scared and said ‘fuck you’ with their vote or who is telling my family that they only matter if they look or act a certain way”. 

[robertawilliams]

Psychologists surveyed hundreds of alt-right supporters. The results are unsettling.

The white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend were not ashamed when they shouted, “Jews will not replace us.” They were not ashamed to wear Nazi symbols, to carry torches, to harass and beat counterprotesters. They wanted their beliefs on display.

It’s easy to treat people like them as straw men: one-dimensional, backward beings fueled by hatred and ignorance. But if we want to prevent the spread of extremist, supremacist views, we need to understand how these views form and why they stick in the minds of some people.

Recently, psychologists Patrick Forscher and Nour Kteily recruited members of the alt-right (a.k.a. the “alternative right,” the catchall political identity of white nationalists) to participate in a study to build the first psychological profile of their movement. The results, which were released on August 9, are just in working paper form, and have yet to be peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal.

That said, the study uses well-established psychological measures and is clear about its limitations. (And all the researchers’ raw data and materials have been posted online for others to review.)

So while it is a preliminary assessment, it validates some common perceptions of the alt-right with data. It helps us understand this group not just as straw men but as people with knowable motivations.

A lot of the findings align with what we intuit about the alt-right: This group is supportive of social hierarchies that favor whites at the top. It’s distrustful of mainstream media and strongly opposed to Black Lives Matter. Respondents were highly supportive of statements like, “There are good reasons to have organization that look out for the interests of white people.” And when they look at other groups — like black Americans, Muslims, feminists, and journalists — they’re willing to admit they see these people as “less evolved.”

But it’s the degree to which the alt-righters differed from the comparison sample that’s most striking — especially when it came to measures of dehumanization, support for collective white action, and admitting to harassing others online. That surprised even Forscher, the lead author and a professor at the University of Arkansas, who typically doesn’t find such large group difference in his work.

There was a time when psychologists feared that “social desirability bias”— people unwilling to admit they’re prejudiced, for fear of being shamed — would prevent people from answering such questions about prejudice truthfully. But this survey shows people will readily admit to believing all sorts of vile things. And researchers don’t need to use implicit or subliminal measures to suss it all out.

How Forscher and Kteily surveyed the alt-right

In April, Forscher and Kteily got a sample of 447 self-identified alt-righters in an online survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (an online marketplace for gathering study participants and people for quick paid tasks) and led them through a barrage of psychological survey questions. They then compared the alt-righters to an online sample of 382 non-alt-righters. (See the demographic breakdown of the samples here.)

A note on some limitations: This survey was not designed to be representative of the entire “alt-right” movement or to generalize to other right-wing-leaning groups. It’s a convenience sample of alt-righters on the internet who were willing to take a survey for a small cash reward.

Even so, it’s instructive. The people who answered this survey are people who stood up and identified as alt-right, similar to the marchers in Charlottesville who put themselves out there in the public eye. Even if this survey only represents a small portion of the people who adhere to this ideology, it’s useful for understanding exactly how they are distinct as a group and what’s behind their divisive views.

Here are some of the biggest differences between the alt-right and control group the researchers found.

The alt-right scores high on dehumanization measures

One of the starkest, darkest findings in the survey comes from a simple question: How evolved do you think other people are?

Kteily, the co-author on this paper, pioneered this new and disturbing way to measure dehumanization — the tendency to see others as being less than human. He simply shows study participants the following (scientifically ) image of a human ancestor slowly learning how to stand on two legs and become fully human.

Participants are asked to rate where certain groups fall on this scale from 0 to 100. Zero is not human at all; 100 is fully human.

On average, alt-righters saw other groups as hunched-over proto-humans.

On average, they rated Muslims at a 55.4 (again, out of 100), Democrats at 60.4, black people at 64.7, Mexicans at 67.7, journalists at 58.6, Jews at 73, and feminists at 57. These groups appear as subhumans to those taking the survey. And what about white people? They were scored at a noble 91.8. (You can look through all the data here.)

Here’s how the alt-right rated the following groups (and people) on a 0-to-100 scale of how “evolved” they are. Journalists, Nigerians feminists, muslims, and Hillary Clinton fall to the bottom.

Forscher & Kteily

The comparison group, on the other hand, scored all these groups in the 80s or 90s on average. (In science terms, the alt-righters were nearly a full standard deviation more extreme in their responses than the comparison group.)

“If you look at the mean dehumanization scores, they’re about at the level to the degree people in the US dehumanize ISIS,” Forscher says. “The reason why I find that so astonishing is that we’re engaged in violent conflict with ISIS.”

Dehumanization is scary. It’s the psychological trick we engage in that allows us to harm other people (because it’s easier to inflict pain on people who are not people). Historically it’s been the fuel of mass atrocities and genocide.

The alt-right has high support for groups that support and work for the benefit of white people

This is — unsurprisingly — the largest difference Forscher and Kteily found in the survey. They asked participants how much they agreed with the following statement: “I think there are good reasons to have organizations that look out for the interests of whites.”

And the differences between the alt-right and the control sample were about as big as you could possibly find on such a survey. The average difference was 2.4 points on a 1-to-7 scale. That’s nearly a full 1.5 standard deviations. “In my work, I’ve never seen a difference that big,” Forscher says.

Here’s what those distribution look like plotted. The green on the right represents the answers of the alt-right. The red on the left represents the comparison group. They’re mirror images.

The alt-right wants and supports organizations that look out for the rights and well-being of white people. Historically, such groups have done so by striking fear in the hearts of immigrants, Jews, and minorities.

The alt-right is more willing to express prejudice toward black people

These survey questions ask respondents the degree to which they agree with statements like, “I avoid interactions with black people,”“My beliefs motivate me to express negative feelings about black people,” and, “I minimize my contact with black people.”

Again, these questions showed huge differences. Forscher explains it like this. When he runs these questions on samples of college students, he usually sees average scores around 2 (out of 9, meaning people largely don’t agree with these questions.) “In the alt-right samples, I’m seeing numbers around 3 or 4, relatively close to the midpoint. In all the samples I’ve worked with, I haven’t seen means at that level.”

In other words, members of the alt-right are unabashed in declaring their prejudices.

Alt-righters are willing to report their own aggressive behavior

The survey also asked participants to state how often they engaged in aggressive behaviors, like doxxing, the releasing of private information without a person’s permission. They also asked about how often respondents physically threatened another online, or made offensive statements just to get a rise out of people.

Here, too, the alt-righters were much more likely to admit to engaging in these behaviors.

“In the comparison sample, people basically never did those things, or reported [doing them],” Forscher says. But it wasn’t like the alt-righters were uniformly admitting to these behaviors.

“We found evidence that there’s a much more extreme group of [alt-right] people who are reporting harassing and being offensive intentionally,” he says. He calls them “supremacists.”

“But there’s a group of people who doesn’t do that that much, or not that much at all,” he says. Forscher and Kteily label this less extreme group “populists.” They’re less aggressive and dehumanizing overall, and more concerned with government corruption. But even these milder “populists” are as supportive of collective white action, and as opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement, as the supremacists.

Personality traits that frequently show up among alt-righters: authoritarianism and Machiavellianism

Alt-righters in the survey scored higher on social dominance orientation (the preference that society maintains social order), right-wing authoritarianism (a preference for strong rulers), and somewhat higher levels of the “dark triad” of personality traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism.)

Alt-righters aren’t particularly socially isolated or worried about the economy

Among the measures where the alt-right and comparison groups don’t look much different in the survey results is closeness and relationships with other people. The alt-righters reported having about equal levels of close friends, which means these aren’t necessarily isolated, lonely people. They’re members of a community.

Also important: Alt-righters in the sample aren’t all that concerned about the economy. The survey used a common set of Pew question that asks about the current state of the economy, and about whether participants feel like things are going to improve for them. Here, both groups reported about the same levels of confidence in the economy.

What’s more, “the alt-right expected more improvement in the state of the economy relative to the non-alt-right sample,” the study states (perhaps because their preferred leader is president).

It goes to show: The alt-right is motivated by racial issues, not economic anxiety.

But it goes deeper than that. The survey revealed that the alt-righters were much more concerned that their groups were at a disadvantage compared with the control sample. The alt-right (and white nationalists) is afraid of being displaced by increasing numbers of immigrants and outsiders in this country. And, yes, they see themselves as potential victims.

Knowing the psychology of the alt-right may be the key to stop white supremacist views from spreading

This is the quixotic hope behind a lot of social science research: The first step to solving a problem is defining the nature of that problem.

Once we understand the psychological motivations behind the alt-right worldview, maybe we can learn to stop it.

This survey is just a first step in that direction. “One of the biggest reasons I wanted to do this in the first place was to find some leverage points for change,” Forscher says. If we know, for instance, that alt-righters rapidly dehumanize others, we can turn to the psychological literature on dehumanization for clues to stage interventions (or prevention).

In their preliminary analysis, Forscher and Kteily found that willingness to express prejudice against black people was correlated with harassing behavior. “If we can change the motivation to express prejudice, maybe that gives us a way to prevent aggression,” they say.

Again, this is all early work. Forscher hopes to track some of these survey participants over the coming months and years, and see if they remain adhered to the alt-right. Or if not, he hopes to learn what caused them to ditch the worldview.

“When we’re thinking about current events, our thinking should be grounded in evidence rather than intuition,” he says. “This provides some evidence. It’s definitely not the be-all and end-all.”

Source

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/15/16144070/psychology-alt-right

[theconservativebrief]

Why are human beings so cruel to each other? And how do we justify acts of sheer inhumanity?

The conventional explanation is that people are able to do terrible things to other people only after having dehumanized them. In the case of the Holocaust, for example, Germans were willing to exterminate millions of Jews in part because Nazi ideology taught them to think of Jews as subhuman, as objects without the right to freedom, dignity, or even life itself.

Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale, thinks this explanation of human cruelty is, at best, incomplete. I spoke to him about why he thinks its wrong to assume cruelty comes from dehumanization — and about his grim conclusion that almost anyone is capable of committing staggering atrocities under the right circumstances.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

Can you sum up your argument about the roots of human cruelty?

Paul Bloom

A lot of people blame cruelty on dehumanization. They say that when you fail to appreciate the humanity of other people, that’s where genocide and slavery and all sorts of evils come from. I don’t think that’s entirely wrong. I think a lot of real awful things we do to other people arise from the fact that we don’t see them as people.

But the argument I make in my New Yorker article is that it’s incomplete. A lot of the cruelty we do to one another, the real savage, rotten terrible things we do to one another, are in fact because we recognize the humanity of the other person.

We see other people as blameworthy, as morally responsible, as themselves cruel, as not giving us what we deserve, as taking more than they deserve. And so we treat them horribly precisely because we see them as moral human beings.

Sean Illing

I’ve always thought a campaign of genocide or slavery requires two things — an ideology that dehumanizes the victims and a massive bureaucracy.

Paul Bloom

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I disagree that those things are “required.” I think a lot of mass killings unfold the way you described it: People do it because they don’t believe they’re killing people. This is what some call instrumental violence, where there’s some end they want to achieve, and people are in the way, so they don’t think of them as people.

This is obviously what happened in the Nazi concentration camps. People were reduced to machines, treated like animals for labor. But a lot of what goes on in concentration camps is degrading and humiliating, and it’s about torturing people because you think they deserve it. It’s about the pleasure of being dominant over another person.

But if you merely thought of these people as animals, you wouldn’t get that pleasure. You can’t humiliate animals — only people. So dehumanization is real and terrible, but it’s not the whole picture.

Sean Illing

What does that say about us, about our psychology, about our susceptibility to this kind of violence?

Paul Bloom

Think about it this way: We’re all sensitive to social hierarchies and to a desire for approval and esteem. So we often fold to the social pressures of our environment. That’s not necessarily evil. I come into my job as a professor and I want to do well, I want the respect of my peers. There’s nothing wrong about that.

But our desire to do well socially can have an ugly side. If you can earn respect by helping people, that’s great. If you can earn respect by physically dominating people with aggression and violence, that’s destructive. So a lot depends on our social environment and whether it incentivizes good or bad behavior.

“If you and I were in Nazi Germany, we’d like to think we’d be the righteous ones, we’d be the heroes. But we might just be regular old Nazis.”

Sean Illing

Are our intuitions about why people do terrible things wrong? Are we too sanguine about human nature?

Paul Bloom

I think our intuitions are wrong in just about every way they can be. First, there’s this myth that people who do evil are psychopaths or sadists or monsters who are driven by the sheer pleasure of watching other people suffer. The truth is far more complicated than that.

Then there’s the myth of dehumanization, which is that everybody who does evil is making a mistake. They’re just failing to appreciate the humanity of other people, and if only we could clear up that mistake, if only we could sit them down and say, “Hey guys, those Jews, the blacks, the gays, the Muslims, they’re people just like you,” then evil would disappear. I think that’s bogus.

Sean Illing

Why is that bogus?

Paul Bloom

Consider the rhetoric of white supremacy. White supremacists know about the humanity of Jews and black people and whoever else they’re discriminating against — and it terrifies them. One of their slogans is, “You will not replace us.” Think of what that means. That’s not what you chant if you thought they were roaches or subhuman. That’s what you chant at people you’re really worried about, people who you think are a threat to your status and way of life.

Sean Illing

So cruelty isn’t an accident or an aberration, but something central to who and what we are?

Paul Bloom

It’s many things, and I don’t think there’s ever going to be a magic bullet theory of cruelty. I think some cruelty is born of dehumanization. I think some cruelty is born out of a loss of control. I think some cruelty is born out of an instrumental desire to get something you want — sex, money, power, whatever.

I think a lot of cruelty is born out of a normal and natural appreciation of the humanity of others, which then connects with certain important psychological appetites we have, like an appetite to punish those we think have done wrong. I think that, for the most part, people who do terrible things are just like us. They’ve just gone astray in certain specific ways.

Sean Illing

I tend to think of human beings as more malleable than we’d like to believe. Under the right conditions, is anyone capable of almost anything?

Paul Bloom

Wow, that’s an interesting question. I sort of believe that. I think, under the right conditions, most of us are capable of doing terrible things. There may be exceptions. But we’ve seen, both in laboratory conditions and real-world circumstances, that people can be manipulated into doing terrible things, and while there are some people who will say, “No, I won’t do that,” they tend to be a minority.

Again, I think the banal answer is that we’re swayed by social circumstances in ways that might be good or bad. You and I would be completely different people if we lived in a maximum security prison, because we’d have to adapt. There are powerful individual differences that matter, though. People can transcend their conditions, but it’s rarer than we’d like to believe.

“White supremacists know about the humanity of Jews and black people and whoever else they’re discriminating against — and it terrifies them.”

Sean Illing

I ask because I used to study totalitarian ideologies as a political theorist, and I spent a lot of time thinking about Nazi Germany and how an entire society could be led into a moral abyss like that. People look at that moment of insanity and say to themselves, “I could never have participated in that.” But I don’t think it’s that simple at all. I think almost any of us could have participated in that, and that’s an ugly truth.

Paul Bloom

I think you’re right. We have this horrible tendency to overestimate the extent to which we’re the moral standouts, we’re the brave ones. This has some nasty social consequences. There was a great article that came out in the Washington Post last week about people who say, “I’m confused about the people who have been sexually assaulted, because if it happened to me, I would say no way, and I would put the person in their place, and I would speak out.”

This attitude is oftentimes scorn towards people who get harassed. They’re somehow morally weak, or maybe they’re just not telling the truth.

It turns out that one of my colleagues, Marianne LaFrance, did a study a while ago in which they asked a group of people, “How would you feel if you had a job interview and someone asked you these really sexist, ugly questions?”

Just about everybody says, “I would walk out. I would give the person hell,” and so on. Then they did it. They did fake interviews where people thought they were being interviewed, and people asked the sexist, ugly questions, and all of the women were just silent.

The point is that we don’t behave in stressful situations the way we think we would or the way we would like to. So yeah, if you and I were in Nazi Germany, we’d like to think we’d be the righteous ones, we’d be the heroes. But we might just be regular old Nazis.

Sean Illing

If your thesis is right, then it’s foolish to think we can get rid of cruelty if only we got rid of those noxious ideologies that justify it. In the end, it’s about us, not our ideas.

Paul Bloom

I think there are all sorts of ways we can become better people, and I think we are becoming better people. But if I’m right, there’s nothing simple about this. Acknowledging other people’s humanity won’t solve our problems.

Ultimately, we need better ideas, better ideologies. We need a culture less obsessed with power and honor and more concerned with mindfulness and dignity. That’s the best we can do to quell our appetites for dominance and punishment. Am I optimistic that we can do this? Yeah, I am. But it won’t be easy.

Original Source -> Why humans are cruel

via The Conservative Brief

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Required Reading

Kengo Kuma & Associates has unveiled their eco-friendly (and plant-covered) design for a hotel on the left bank of Paris’ river Seine. (via Dezeen)

A story about Louis I. Kahn’s renowned Salk Institute (often considered one of his masterpieces):

The Salk has been responsible for major breakthroughs in neurobiology, genome mapping, and stem cell research. Elements of the design, such as the way natural light illuminates the underground labs through a series of courtyards and the open plan that requires members from different departments to circulate among study towers, have been cited by the Salk’s scientists as influential to their research.

But as the building neared the half-century mark, it was clear that certain aspects needed a more interventionist approach. “A lot of decisions weren’t made right away because Salk had run out of money to complete the project, so parts were unfinished for a long time,” says Ball. With scientists eager to move into their labs, some details of the design, like Kahn’s recommendation to add window flashings, were never implemented, leaving Ball’s team to contend with decades of leaks and water damage.

Aruna D’Souza writes that the recent opening at MASS MoCA was notable for a few unfortunate reasons:

But it’s not that black artists and black art weren’t visible at the opening: there was a parade featuring dancers in Nick Cave’s Sound Suits, choreographed by Sandra Burton. Holley and DeDeaux gave a gallery talk, and the singer Helga Davis performed in the galleries as members milled around. And, to the delight of the overwhelmingly white crowd, the Brooklyn United Marching Band, an African American children’s group, gave an excellent, rollicking performance of Beyoncé hits. They were bussed in for the event, and bussed out after; as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, there was no particular logic to their inclusion in the program.

Donna Zuckerberg (yes, Mark’s sister) asks “How Should We Support Scholars Who Are Getting Harassed Online?” She writes about the recent backlash to Sarah Bond’s article on Hyperallergic and her own experience with online harassment:

Furthermore — and I know that this might be controversial — if you know that a scholar is receiving abuse for an argument, and you want to critique that argument in good faith, I believe that the onus is on you to start off your critique by denouncing the abuse and differentiating your approach from that of the harassers. And if the bullied scholar responds to your critique in a way that you feel is unnecessarily defensive or thin-skinned, remember what they’re going through and give them more latitude than you usually would. If you aren’t prepared to take that approach, reconsider your motives for issuing that critique at that particular moment.

Some, no doubt, are thinking to themselves that Bond and I brought this on ourselves by writing about Classics and white supremacy. They are wrong. Nobody ever brings harassment or death and rape threats on themselves. Furthermore — and this is a crucial point — Bond did not argue what the far right is claiming she argued. (I likewise did not argue that classicists shouldn’t study canonical authors, although that argument is misattributed to me constantly.) She pointed out that groups such as Identity Evropa are using images of classical statuary, especially the Apollo Belvedere, in a way that recalls Nazi aesthetics. I’m not sure how any classicist can look at that poster and not feel horrified at its implications for our field, but that’s a topic for another day.

Is the museum an “inherently colonial institution”? Alicia Eler of the Minneapolis Star Tribune asked a number of people (I have a small cameo):

Connie Butler, chief curator, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles: “While the issue of the ownership of history and trauma is one we are seeing on many fronts, I believe there are issues here that are very particular to this case and to Native American history in this country. So while some may worry that museums will bow to community pressures of all kinds, I think that this is an instance where clearly the trauma being recalled and relived on the part of native people warranted the serious consideration that the Walker gave it. I think we can all learn from this. The issue that still remains to be worked through, and makes the reception of the work part of its history and impact, is the transference of the intellectual property back to the Dakota people. This will become part of a living archive of the work.”

Important journalism about a Congolese village where dozens of girls under the age of 11 were raped:

Denise was, by some counts, the 39th child to be raped in the village of Kavumu, since the first was reported on 3 June 2013. Each time, men in groups had kidnapped a girl of between 18 months and 11 years old from her bed, raped her, and either returned her to her home or left her in a nearby field, which is farmed by demobilised soldiers. At least two girls have died from their injuries.

Although rape has been used as a weapon of war in this part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for 20 years, these attacks on children are new – in terms of the repeated patterns, the symbolism and the youth of the victims. At first, the cases didn’t appear to be related. But over time, as each abduction resembled the last in certain significant details – the way men entered the houses; the way the girls were taken, violated and returned or left in the same field; and the fact that none of the families woke up as men stole their children – investigators began to suspect that there was an organised ring behind the attacks.

Because the girls are so little, their organs are often irreparably damaged. Panzi hospital’s founder and medical director, Dr Denis Mukwege, said that he and his staff frequently weep while operating on the girls. Another doctor said the brutality of the rapes made her faint for the first time in her life. “When I treat a child with all her bladder and abdomen destroyed, I think, This is really not something I want to do with my life,” Mukwege told me. We were sitting at a long, plastic-covered table in a conference room at Panzi in January. He looked exhausted. “You are thinking about how you are just repairing and instead you should be preventing this.”

Getty curators David Saunders (Antiquities, Villa) and Bryan C. Keene (Manuscripts, Center) discuss male relationships in ancient Athens by examining three red-figure vases at the Getty Villa:

An immigration lawyer reviews a movie featuring Paddington, the beloved migrant bear, and ponders the plight of refugees and whether the bear would actually be allowed in today’s UK:

Paddington stows away and deliberately avoids the immigration authorities on arrival. He is in formal legal terms an illegal entrant and as such commits a criminal offence under section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971. It is an offence punishable by up to six months in prison. If or when detected by the authorities it is more likely he would simply be removed back to Peru than that he would be prosecuted, though. To avoid that fate he would need to make out a legal basis to stay.

Incidentally, for offering a home to Paddington — or harbouring him, as the Home Office would have it — Mr and Mrs Brown could potentially face prosecution under section 25 of the Immigration Act 1971, entitled “Assisting unlawful immigration to member State”. The maximum sentence is 14 years.

The Santa Fe Art Colony Tenant Association in Los Angeles, which is one of the oldest continuing art colonies in the city, is being threatened by rising rents. In March, the owners gave the residents sixth-month notice that rents will increase as much 80 percent and in some cases will double. KCRW reports:

Artists began moving to the downtown area in the 1970s to escape rising rents and dwindling studio space on the Westside. They built illegal lofts in abandoned warehouses and lived together in gritty, blighted neighborhoods that weren’t zoned for occupancy. To address the zoning and safety issues, the city created an Artist-in-Residence program in 1981, allowing artists to live in converted commercial properties and form the neighborhood that would become the Arts District.

In 1986, the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA) entered in a 30-year partnership with the owners of a defunct terrycloth-robe factory on Santa Fe Avenue to provide low-interest loans to retrofit the buildings and create rent-restricted artist lofts. The Santa Fe Art Colony was born and quickly became a fixture of LA’s art scene. Previous tenants included renowned artist like Kim Abeles and Sam Durant.

After receiving a one year extension from the city in September 2016, the agreement is now set to expire for the colony’s residents. Tidwell and the tenant association have asked city officials including City Councilmember José Huizar to help find a way to stave off the rent increase.

The story of a Lower East Side mural that was painted over after 40 years in the neighborhood:

The gentrification of the Jewish Lower East Side has made headlines for decades and is often the subject of nostalgic anguish, with people recalling the way things were and telling stories of their grandparents who grew up there. Over time, many second- or third-generation Jews moved to Brooklyn or the suburbs. Dress shops closed, scribe masters relocated, yarmulke stores and kosher shops shuttered, family businesses faded, and the synagogues once dotting the neighborhood were decimated or flipped. By 2002, the New York Times declared this “primal homeland for American immigrant Jews has lost so much of its cultural texture and so many of its living touchstones that it may be time finally to pronounce it dead.” In 2008, the Lower East Side made the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Places, a roundup of areas or venues threatened by neglect. 

Throughout all this, the Jewish Heritage Mural remained one of the few staying relics of the Lower East Side. It brightened up a drab section of East Broadway. It taught travelers a vital history. It was a source of pride. Many admired its endurance to withstand gentrification, but given the transient nature of murals, were not surprised by its eventual fate.   

A unpublished piece by Hannah Arendt was released to the public this week and it includes “thoughts on poverty, misery, and the great revolutions of history.” It’s an excellent read that is relevant to today:

All these revolutions, no matter how violently anti-Western their rhetoric may be, stand under the sign of traditional Western revolutions. The current state of affairs was preceded by the series of revolutions after the First World War in Europe itself. Since then, and more markedly after the Second World War, nothing seems more certain than that a revolutionary change of the form of government, in distinction to an alteration of administration, will follow defeat in a war between the remaining powers—short, that is, of total annihilation. But it is important to note that even before technological developments made wars between the great powers literally a life and death struggle, hence self-defeating, politically speaking wars had already become a matter of life and death. This was by no means a matter of course, but signifies that the protagonists of national wars had begun to act as though they were involved in civil wars. And the small wars of the last 20 years—Korea, Algeria, Vietnam—have clearly been civil wars, in which the great powers became involved, either because revolution threatened their rule or had created a dangerous power vacuum. In these instances it was no longer war that precipitated revolution; the initiative shifted from war to revolution, which in some cases, but by no means all, was followed by military intervention. It is as if we were suddenly back in the 18th century, when the American Revolution was followed by a war against England, and the French Revolution by a war against the allied royal powers of  Europe.

Did you know there are war re-enactors in the US that dress up as Nazis to take part in WWII battles? Well, Zoë Berry reports from Pennsylvania:

I didn’t come to the vendor area at the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum’s World War II re-enactment weekend for the Nazi memorabilia. I came to see why thousands of people flock to an active airfield in Reading, Pennsylvania once a year to either re-live, or watch other people re-live, life across a world in chaos in 1943. I left 36 hours later having heard a lot of reasons: to honor veteran relatives, to honor veterans generally, to preserve history, to escape reality.

No one, except a few WWII fighters and an Auschwitz survivor, was there to remember the Holocaust. And no one gave a second thought to donning a German uniform, even though public displays of Nazism have been on the rise in the U.S. since right around last November 8.

One couple asked the internet to help them photoshop some shirtless guy out of their lovely pic and then the internet responded and made them a meme. Here are some of the images:

The rest are here.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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In A Trump Era World, Silicon Valley Has Shifted Its Goal Posts

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“Had a moment of nostalgia today about when we were just fighting to keep racists from giving talks at programming [conferences] and then got real sad,” Leigh Honeywell tweeted on November 29.

A few weeks after that, Honeywell — a security response manager at Slack — Ka-Ping Yee, Valerie Aurora and others organized the Never Again Pledge, a public oath from workers in the technology industry to refuse to participate in the use of tech for racial and religious targeting.

“We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out,” the pledge reads. “We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust, contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others. We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War.”

In the wake of of Trump’s ascendency to the White House, activists within the technology industry are reassessing their priorities. Movements that once focused on proportional representation of marginalized demographic groups in the industry are shifting energies away from diversity work in favor of staving off future complicity in genocide.

Danilo Campos, Technical Director for Social Impact at Github, almost wistfully recalls how, prior to the election, he had been planning on making a fun video about workplace inclusivity and Star Trek, based on a wildly popular talk he had given at a javascript meet-up.

“The year got busy and I didn’t get around to it, and now it just feels so back-burnered, because the stuff we’ve got to worry about runs so much deeper than inclusion now,” said Campos. “We have a president-elect who campaigned on mass deportations and a Muslim registry. And these are all things you could apply technology to.”

In recent years, the movement to diversify tech seemed to make huge strides forward, as tech workers and venture capitalists alike began to speak more openly about discrimination in the industry. Perhaps no clearer sign of the changing cultural tide was the sudden explosion in interest in the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), a major tech conference by and for women. GHC had been held annually since 1994, but in 2011 it moved to a convention center due to a spike in attendance.

Around the time, people began to reexamine inclusivity in all aspects of the industry: Black Girls Code (founded 2011) seeks to teach programming skills to black girls aged 7 to 17. Code2040 (founded 2012) runs programs to help black and Latinx software engineering students land internships and jobs in the tech industry. The Ada Initiative (founded 2011 by Mary Gardiner and Valeria Aurora, one of the co-organizers of the Never Again Pledge), as part of its mission to support women in open technology, developed anti-harassment codes of conduct for conferences, and lobbied conferences to adopt them.

Today, codes of conduct with anti-harassment provisions are common in the tech industry. Workshops and unconferences organized by the Ada Initiative led to a flowering of other projects, including the San Francisco women’s hackerspace Double Union.

Under Double Union’s auspices, Leigh Honeywell created OpenDiversityData.org, a site that tracks which tech companies have published their internal diversity statistics and which ones have not, as a mode of pressuring the latter to release that information.

Thanks to activism like hers, the release of diversity data rapidly became a widespread practice across Silicon Valley, with giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and more regularly publishing their EEO-1 reports (forms with gender and racial/ethnic data about employees legally required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from certain companies) for the public to view. The regular publication of EEO-1s became a way for companies set goalposts for themselves, and to vow to do better.

But the push for diversity has seen incremental progress. After Jack Dorsey returned as Twitter’s CEO, the company lost Leslie Miley, its only black engineering manager. By the end of the year, Janet Van Huysee, the company’s VP of diversity, was replaced by a white man.

Meanwhile, Apple, Facebook, and Google all claimed to be moving in the “right direction,” touting improvements such as women making up 21% of new hires, compared to a current population of 19%. Pinterest started out reaching for “ambitious” goals in 2015, then beat a swift retreat, having found that a 30% hiring rate for women engineers was “too aggressive.”

Diversity activism prior to the 2016 election focused heavily on the spread of information — data sets, programming skills, codes of conduct, workplace diversity training — and trusted that the arc of history was long but would bend towards equity.

It’s important for marginalized people to be represented in tech in this moment because of the danger that technology is about to be used to hurt their communities.

But the stakes are suddenly much higher. It’s perhaps no surprise that some of the key figures behind the post-2011 explosion of activism for diversity in tech are now leading the Never Again Pledge: The same problems that existed before November 9 still exist, only now they are magnified.

Perhaps nowhere is this better exemplified than in the fight to “keep racists from giving talks at programming conference” that Honeywell mentioned in her post-election tweet. In 2016, even as the election was playing out on a national stage, the programming community was convulsed with a debate over whether the functional programming conference LambdaConf should rescind its speaking invitation to neo-reactionary ideologue and computer scientist Curtis Yarvin, also known as Mencius Moldbug.

Citing his racist views (for example, he claims that white people have inherently higher IQs, and that some people are better suited for slavery), several speakers and sponsors withdrew from LambdaConf in protest. His supporters saw the attempt to no-platform him as an illegitimate attack on speech, where protesters viewed his talk as contributing to a hostile environment for already-marginalized groups in tech.

But under the new administration, the question of giving platforms to people like Yarvin becomes even thornier. “If the alt-right does have an intellectual forbear, it is … Curtis Yarvin,” James Kirchick wrote in May, in an article about “Trump’s terrifying online brigades.”

The problem of Yarvin is no longer just that he contributes to a hostile professional environment for women or people of color: It’s that his fringe beliefs have fueled a national political movement that is hostile to them in more tangible ways. Prior to November 9, activists merely sought to prevent Yarvin from speaking at conferences. After November 9, they now seek to stop the creation and use of technology in service of his beliefs.

In this way, the work being done in tech circles before November 9 is still relevant — maybe even more so. Campos sees continuing investment in diversity as essential. “What gets complicated is that in addition to all the education stuff, and making space for people, we now need to get active in a political sense that I don’t know was true in the past.” It’s important, he says, for marginalized people to be represented in tech in this moment, because of the danger that technology is about to be used to hurt their communities.

But the mood in Silicon Valley is sour. “I sense apprehension,” says Karla Monterroso, Vice President of Programs at Code2040. “Things feel very uncertain right now. And I don’t know that that is going to be any different than the way we’re going to experience things in the near term.”

For Monterroso, despite living in the deep blue bubble of Silicon Valley, the results of the election were hardly surprising. “There isn’t a woman or woman of color who hasn’t tweeted and has any kind of network presence who is really surprised about what has happened,” she said. “We felt it coming. There was hope, because that’s how you sustain change — hope in the face of the impossible. But the volume of toxicity that existed has existed.”

The Never Again Pledge closed to new signatures on December 21, citing the enormous effort in vetting signatories on an ongoing basis. But before that happened, 2,843 tech workers had signed on. One line, both chilling and powerful, reads: “Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again.”

Sarah Jeong is a journalist specializing in technology and legal issues.

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