All the candidates who will lose the GOP primary are set to gather on Wednesday. Their aim is to showcase their aptitude at praising Donald Trump, while simultaneously asserting that they are a better choice than him. (The exception is the reformed Trump bootlicker, Chris Christie.) — Read the rest
The military takeover in Niger has upended years of Western counterterrorism efforts in West Africa and now poses wrenching new challenges for the Biden administration’s fight against Islamic militants on the continent.
Miriam Lindner in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology:
Mass shooters, violent extremists, and terrorists, who are overwhelmingly male, exhibit misogynistic attitudes and a history of violence against women. Over the past few years, incels (“involuntary celibates”) have gathered in online communities to discuss their frustration with sexual/romantic rejection, espouse male supremacist attitudes, and justify violence against women and men who are more popular with women. Despite the link between misogyny and mass violence, and the recent emergence of online misogynistic extremism, theories and empirical research on misogynistic extremism remain scarce. This article fills this gap.
More here.
Propublica's 2020 Presidential Candidate Summaries breaks down the 2020 candidates' fundraising, Trump's massive war-chest and Bernie's pack-leading raise and his continued success with small-money donations.
Boston’s veteran tough guy will receive many suitors after a career year.
Marcus Morris Sr. had a tremendous season for the Boston Celtics last year. Although his production dipped a bit after the All-Star break, he was a bright spot in a lost season. When the Celtics were 10-10, he was inserted into the starting lineup with Marcus Smart to help patch things, and it worked. On the last day of the season, Morris Sr. was one of the very short list of Celtics who played with any sort of fire.
Naturally, since all of this happened in a contract year, Morris will doubtless find a handful of suitors in free agency this summer. Shams Charania of The Athletic reported today that this is the case. For teams like the L.A. Clippers and the Sacramento Kings who either made the playoffs or were right on the cusp of making the playoffs, Morris would be an excellent addition to the lineup. He provides solid defense, pinch scoring and attitude. For younger teams making a playoff push, he’s an ideal veteran addition.
And then there are teams like the Chicago Bulls and the New York Knicks who have rumored interest. I . . . have no idea what to do with that concept. The Bulls are certainly not on the cusp of reaching the playoffs barring a drastic change in free agency or by trade, and the Knicks have bigger fish to shoot for before settling on Morris Sr.
Then there’s the L.A. Lakers. It’s tough to project how they’ll perform next year, but they could more or less use a Marcus Morris Sr. If they find another star to pair with LeBron James, Morris Sr. could provide a solid scoring punch without needing to be paid an absurd amount of money.
Of course, Marcus Morris Sr. has stated his love for playing for the Celtics. After Boston sorts through a lot of their bigger decisions (Kyrie Irving, Al Horford, Anthony Davis, etc.), I’m sure they’ll be looking to get Morris Sr. back on a reasonable deal. When everything is going well, Morris plays within his role and is a great two-way rotation player. Boston would just have to hope that everything goes well next season.
Marcus Morris Sr. averaged 13.9 points, 6.1 rebounds and 1.5 assists last season while playing as both a starter and a bench player. He’s just one more domino that the Celtics need to take care of as the NBA Draft and free agency approach at the end of this month. It should be an exciting few days, so stay tuned.
Public shaming is an old form of punishment—The Scarlet Letter was about public humiliation, and in early American colonies, people were regularly punished for transgressions by being put in stocks in the town square—but, as you probably know, it's gone digital. Thanks to social media, anyone who makes a mistake, misstep, or who genuinely fucks up can (and often will) be inundated with waves of criticism every time they look at their phones. Sometimes it's even deserved.
Oliver, for instance, cites Tucker Carlson, whose 11-year-old offensive statements about Iraqis, as well as women, on the shock jock radio show Bubba the Love Sponge were recently unearthed by liberal media watchdog Media Matters (where staffers apparently listened to over 100 hours of Carlson on tape). Within hours of Media Matters breaking this 11-year-old story, #BoycottTucker and #FireTucker were trending on Twitter.
Had this happened to a liberal media figure, I imagine an apology, if not firing and/or resignation, would have been immediately forthcoming, but Carlson wasn't just unapologetic. He immediately aired a segment on his show about anti-Semitic and transphobic jokes written by Media Matters president Angelo Carusone on a blog he kept in the early 2000s. The subsequent shaming of Carusone, most of which came from the right, seems to have had little impact on his career. After Carusone explained on CNN that the blog posts were jokes, the story basically died, and the same is true of Carlson as well. He wasn't fired, he wasn't suspended, and few advertisers ultimately dropped him. (One might assume that the advertisers of Fox News know exactly what they are getting.)
Carlson’s public shaming may have made the public shamers feel good—it's fun to join a pile-on, after all—but in terms of accomplishing anything, the whole episode did approximately nothing. That, frequently, is how these things go, especially when the criticism comes from people who are already opposed to the person being shamed for some previous thing they did. Shaming really stings when it comes from your own side; when it comes from your enemies, the hurt (and the result) tends not to stick.
Still, Oliver argues that "when it's well-directed, a lot of good can come out of [public shaming]. If someone is caught doing something racist or a powerful person is behaving badly, it can increase accountability."
I agree with this, at least in theory. The threat of public shame is a powerful motivator to keep anti-social, non-normative behavior at a minimum. I've done it plenty myself, like when people send me especially vile emails, which I like to post on Twitter. I black out their email adresses but not always their names and the point of this exercise is to teach them a lesson (namely, don't send emails you wouldn't want posted on Twitter). It's generally the last time I hear from them.
But it's also true that stories that circulate on social media, or even in the news, are often based more on rumor, miscommunication, and bad-faith interpretations of human behavior than on fact.
Take, for example, an incident in Portland last fall, when a white woman dubbed "Crosswalk Cathy" was publicly shamed for allegedly calling the police on a black couple who parked their car in a crosswalk. Local media reported that the woman was likely motivated by racism, but it turned out that she (A) called parking enforcement, not the police, and (B) had no idea who was parked in the crosswalk, much less the car-owner's race. What looked, at first, like a racist incident could just as easily be seen as a responsible neighbor trying to make the streets safer for pedestrians, cyclists, and people in wheelchairs. But by the time more facts emerged, it was too late. Once the outrage machine warms up, it's nearly impossible to stop.
Oliver says that before he decides to public shame someone on his show, certain criteria must be met. The person, for instance, must be a public figure or someone with power. Both, I think, are good places to start, but I'm still not convinced that public shaming usually does more good than it does create damage. When one is publicly shamed, the end result is frequently internalizing that humiliation. People become anxious, depressed, and, on rare ocassions, even kill themselves. And it's not that hard to see why someone would choose such a drastic step: shame can quickly lead to shunning, which in some cultures is the gravest form of punishment.
There's valid reason that some anti-social behavior is stigmatized, but there's also a reason we don't put people in the stocks anymore. As Jon Ronson wrote in the fascinating—and prescient—book So You've Been Publicly Shamed, punishments based in public humiliation "didn't fizzle out because they were ineffective. They were stopped because they were far too brutal." And yet, for public shaming to make a dent in someone's behavior, the one being shamed needs to actually care about his critics' opinions. And by all appearances, Tucker Carlson doesn't give a shit what Media Matters or liberals on Twitter think about him. It's not his audience. Shame, I suspect, only works when it's coming from inside the building.
You’re reading an all-election edition of Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
We haven’t yet landed on the exact number that history will record, but Democrats last night won a majority in the House of Representatives’s 435 seats. As I write this Wednesday morning, CNN has given the Democrats 222 seats, while ABC News has given them 223. But in any case, it will be more than 218. There are about two dozen seats yet to be called. [ABC News]
Voters cast 44.7 million votes for Democratic Senate candidates and 32.9 million votes for Republican Senate candidates — in other words 57 percent of Senate votes went for Democrats. But given how states and cities and stuff work, and which of the former happened to be up for election this year, this gap translated into at least a two-seat gain for Republicans. Republicans will have a majority in the upper chamber, and are currently sitting on 51 senators with several races yet to be called. [The New York Times]
Democrats flipped at least seven governorships from red to blue last night: Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico and Wisconsin. No governorships flipped the other direction. [FiveThirtyEight]
Women won a record number of seats in the House — at least 90 as of this morning. That includes the first two Muslim women to ever serve in the chamber. Tennessee elected its first female senator and Massachusetts elected its first black congresswoman. Colorado elected the country’s first openly gay male governor. Kansas and New Mexico elected the U.S.’s first Native American congresswomen. Maine got its first woman governor. Iowa elected its first congresswoman. [Associated Press, CBS News]
Yesterday’ss elections will also have a meta-impact on future elections themselves. First, in Florida, voters passed Amendment 4, restoring voting rights to more than 1 million previously convicted felons. The measure needed 60 percent of the vote to pass and its passage could “shift Florida’s future political climate.” [ABC News]
And second, two amendments concerning the operation of elections in Colorado passed with about 71 percent of the vote each. Amendments Y and Z (it’s frankly refreshing to see a lettered system of amendments, isn’t it?) proposed independent commissions draw electoral districts for legislators there. The Colorado legislature itself currently draws the congressional districts. [Colorado Public Radio]
Love digits? Find even more in FiveThirtyEight’s new book of math and logic puzzles, “The Riddler.” It’s in stores now! I hope you dig it.
If you see a significant digit in the wild, please send it to @ollie.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may soon be kicked out of Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he has been holed up since 2012. Several reports claim Ecuador is getting ready to withdraw its asylum protection for Assange after six years amid pressure from the United States and the United Kingdom.
