Orthodox Jews regard abortion as killing (though not as bad as killing the born).
Conservative rabbi: “There is nothing more Jewish than abortion.”
REPORT: During his show May 26, Conan O’Brien invited actress and recent Judiaism convert Natasha Leggero onto his show. Leggero praised her new religion for treating abortion as “cool” enough to have on “every Jewish holiday.” After all, she reasoned, it’s good to have a back-up to fall on, just like AAA for cars.
Besides performing as a stand-up comedian, the 42-year-old created and stars in Comedy Central’s Another Period and has acted in films including Let’s Be Cops, Neighbors and He’s Just Not That Into You.
After discussing her recent marriage, Leggero informed Conan that she had recently converted to Judaism by taking 19 four-hour courses.
Raised Catholic, Leggero slammed her former Catholic school run by “mean” nuns.
“[M]aybe they hate women, because nuns were so mean to me,” she said before slyly inserting, “and of course, the priests are like so nice to the boys.”
She found Judaism, on the other hand, a “beautiful religion.”
“You get to have a weekly Shabbat,” she gushed, “which is just like a party every Friday.”
In the middle of her appearance, Leggero revealed just why she was such a fan of Judaism: abortion.
“You’re part of this beautiful religion seeped in culture,” she gushed about her new religion, before adding, “Abortions are cool.”
As the audience laughed, Conan disagreed.
“I don’t think they go around saying ‘abortions are cool,’” he said. “Not like the Fonz” (a famously “cool” character from Happy Days).
His sidekick, Andy Richter, prompted even more laughter by commenting, “That’s on the PSA, ‘Judaism: Abortion is cool.’”
Trying to regain control of the abortion conversation, Conan again started to say no one called abortion “cool,” when Leggero interrupted, “No, they do!”
“I mean, you could get an abortion on every Jewish holiday and it would be okay,” she hyped.
But when Leggero likened abortion to a contract with a towing company, the audience changed its tune towards her.
“I’m not saying I am going to get an abortion but, you know, it’s just nice to – it’s like AAA. Like, you’re not going to use all those tows, but – no, it’s just nice to know –” she stumbled as some in the audience booed. Video below.
he cheers and applause returned when Conan said, “I just was given a signal; the Jews don’t want you anymore.”
“Don’t clap that,” she retorted. “My rabbi would be very upset by that. No, I love Judaism.”
She switched back to her bashing of Catholicism, the religion where “they believe that even if you are raped, you should not get an abortion.”
“Right?” she checked. “This is my comedy act.”
Changing topics (somewhat), Leggero told Conan that she confessed to a priest in Rome that she was converting. He was “cool” about it, she said, and asked her to still attend to church once a year.
Conan concluded, “I don’t know what religion you’re going to be in a year, but it will not be either Jewish or Catholic.”
Leggero has long made abortion a topic of her career. In 2013, she asked in a Facebook post, “What are the most popular abortion names?” while in 2014 she tweeted that she would “no longer perform in states where abortion isn’t legal.”
During Comedy Central’s 2015 Roast of Justin Bieber Leggero laughed about Bieber’s (non-existent) close call with abortion as he sat next to her.
“Justin was born to a teenage single mom. No wonder he’s got moves. He was in the womb dodging a coat hanger,” she said.
Posted inAbortion|Comments Off on Jewish Actress Natasha Leggero: Great Thing About Judaism is “Abortions are Cool”
Steve Sailer writes: I hear a lot about how Trump will crush Hillary in their debates. But is there much evidence that Trump is a strong debater? He mostly seemed to scrape by in the GOP debates, and then flourish the rest of the week when he was alone on stage or in interviews.
Trump’s kind of thinking-out-loud isn’t well-suited to debates. A lot of people like how Trump takes them through his thought processes. It’s kind of a democratic way of leading — the campaign staff doesn’t have his researchers feed focus groups findings to his speechwriters. Instead, he just gets up there and starts talking about what’s on people’s minds — for example, note Trump thinking out loud, and pretty successfully, about that poor gorilla. And the audience can hear him trying out ideas and work his way through them in real time.
But all that requires a leisurely pace, which is not found in Presidential debates.
COMMENTS:
* Don’t go wobbly Steve.
Trump has won every battle to this point, so lets remain optimistic. He doesn’t even need to win on the debates, he just needs to have Hilary look old and tired onstage and have America listen to her shrill Midwest nasal dental drill of a voice.
I think all the debates, campaign stops, TV ads etc. are irrelevant at this point. Everyone on our side had seen what the establishment has in store for us if they win. This election is really about these issues, not the frippery surrounding it.
* I think that you are asking this question from your own perspective, Steve, as a former debater. How the average American swing voter views who won a so-called debate is a very different thing from how someone like you would judge it, according to the principles that you were trained in, back in the day. I believe that the unwashed masses, on the Internet, viewed Trump to have won almost all of the Republican debates, even though journalists and political pundits almost always thought otherwise. Scott Adams, the “Dilbert” creator and persuasion expert, believes that Trump has been playing on a whole different level from all of his competitors.
* All the liberals at my job think Hillary is a great debater and will demolish Trump in debates, nipping his fascist campaign for fascist walls in the fascist bud.
I don’t have any idea how it will fall out. Certainly, presidential debates are not high quality. They are a far cry from the Oxford Union, IQ2, or such. Borderline ridiculous.
My guess is that Trump can’t get up to speed on the issues fast enough because he isn’t interested enough. On the other hand, Clinton is likely to be unable to capitalize on this due to the fact that she’s relatively weak, interpersonally and intellectually. Her goal, whether she knows it or not, has to be to not turn off the entire electorate. So, as long as Trump can deflate/deflect the gotcha questions they will throw at him, it will be a wash.
* It’s really all about the zingers and quips. Trump treated the debates as competitive roasts only there to judge who got the best zingers in- which he was totally right about. It wasn’t a traditional collegiate or H.S. debate with rules—it was more akin to that black National Debate team’s “debates.” And this will be, too.
Trump gets that decorum and stuffy old rules are out. It’s not a win-on-points thing. Because this is a street fight. This is TV in primetime. This is his wheelhouse.
The audience will be salivating for him to do it to Crooked Hillary—even her supporters will be hyperventilating looking for his quips. Hillary obviously thinks he will do it to her–and she’s probably ( and stupidly) either lining up her own “zingers” (which will fall flat—like Rubio’s did), or else going to play the “Trump is a mean mean bully card” (also will fail—in one of her first debates when she first ran for Senate in NY, the token Republican dude came over and got in her personal space, and her campaign said it was something about “male domination” and it fell flat as an attack).
Look, his opening lines are potentially mic-dropping in its hilarity and its truth:
“See this woman over here? I paid her to come to my son’s wedding. And she came. She does what her paymasters tell her. Me? I can’t be bought. I’m worth billions; she’s worth whatever access you buy with her. You can have a crooked, bought candidate, or you can have a guy who can’t be bought, and who wins. And America loves a winner.”
BOOM.
P.S. it’s also gonna be great when he interrupts her and talks over her. She’s got a rep as a person who gets very angry when she gets ambushed or has to go off script. She’s used to total deference from her staff. Trump is probably planning on interrupting her at key moments to set her off. She’ll either get visibly angry–at which case he’ll harp on her temperament–or do some fake laughing bit to cover her anger, which will be endlessly mocked by Trump’s guys. And if she’s drinking before the debate—as she is a rumored heavy drinker…..
* Hillary has time, money, and experts to think about how to get under Trump’s skin.
* The same “experts” who brought us “Dangerous Donald”?
* Really? This is the insight from a former cog in the wheel of a marketing business. Trump probably laughs at this kind of peon perspective. He laughs at little men. Trump has spent his life locking horns with fellow titans and the aggressive cognitive elites of NYC. I’m sure he will do very well against Hillary. In fact, I think it’ll be a live demonstration on how to systematically dismantle a political opponent.
The late Christopher Hitchens on Hillary Clinton:
“Everything about this campaign, and everything about this candidate, was rotten from the very start. Mrs. Clinton has the most unappetizing combination of qualities to be met in many days’ march: she is a tyrant and a bully when she can dare to be, and an ingratiating populist when that will serve. She will sometimes appear in the guise of a ‘strong woman’ and sometimes in the softer garb of a winsome and vulnerable female. She is entirely un-self-critical and quite devoid of reflective capacity, and has never found that any of her numerous misfortunes or embarrassments are her own fault, because the fault invariably lies with others. And, speaking of where things lie, she can in a close contest keep up with her husband for mendacity. Like him, she is not just a liar but a lie; a phony construct of shreds and patches and hysterical, self-pitying, demagogic improvisations.” (No One Left to Lie To, p. 123)
* Ted Cruz is probably the best debater of them all, didn’t effect much. As with W people judge a debate on more than academic and policy point scoring, that said Trump could do with preparing and have some of the policy details nailed down, even if he intends his Presidency to be one of delegation.
* 1) You’re quite correct and Cruz was underwhelming but it is still true that Trump is not a great debater. Trump succeed at debates because he is ideologically different and can stress the big picture points. If you think the Iraq war a big mistake then Trump’s inelegant ramblings on it are great since the other candidates are on the opposite side. So Trump’s ability to win debates is due to his positions being far closer to the voters broadly speaking. The second reason he won debates is that Republican base knows he is on their side and therefore instinctively side with him over all the others including the media. If Trump can highlight the big issues where he differs drastically from Hillary then he should be good.
2) “As with W people judge a debate on more than academic and policy point scoring”
True but having a minimum of policy acquittance assures voters that a candidate is “capable enough”. Trump can’t meet those standards based on what we have seen. On details he is very sketchy. From what I recall he got the nuclear trident question wrong on two occasions despite being publicly humiliated the first time on tv. The question isn’t super important per se but the fact that he didn’t swallow his pride and read up on it, to avoid the same embarrassment, is. This is by far his biggest weakness and shouldn’t be hard to correct yet he is astoundingly lazy,intellectually speaking, so who knows.
3) Trump was smart to avoid a 1 v 1 debate with Cruz because it would have inevitably exposed him on the details. He won’t escape this fate against Clinton and nor will be able to run down the clock as much. So be prepared for some embarrassing moments. Furthermore, the sort of people who follow Trump through thick and thin are already mostly on his side. The rest of country won’t be as loyal. And nor will be able to use his wit as much as the 1 v 1 debates are more formal and less open to retorts.
Trump’s advantage?
1) As so many times already Trump’s strength is the ability to fight the match according to his rules. If Hillary tries to come up with smart lines zinging Trump she will be devastated by him. Because he is good at that and she is not quick on her feet. And when faced up against awkward lines and questions she retreats to a snarly and snarky attitude which is a put-off. She does this at debates and with interviewers.
2)One of his best cards was to stake out a position that is broadly popular but non-establishment, which forces other candidates to look weak or me-too(like Cruz on immigration). So he should always make clear that Hillary won’t say “islamic extremism” and goad her into it for example. Force her to triangulate between his position and Obama’s on one big issue after another. Before and/or after each debate I would hold a (re)statement on some big issue which would shape the newscycle on the media and on her. She hates speaking to the press so he should force her to and if not she cedes the landscape to him.
* Steve, you’ve been losing so long that you’ve forgotten how to win. You’ve got to get used to winning again.
* She’s also got a morally confused, devious and paranoid homosexual (David Brock), Muslim lesbian lady-in-waiting (Huma Weiner) and hordes of brainwashed feminists all across the fruited plain.
* He should just work on insults and one liners. He a master troll and he really needs to keep offending. If he can make Hillary cry preferably during a debate, that would be the best thing. On the other hand if his people think he hasn’t got their back or that he’s going to back down and apologize, he’s done. Trump isn’t a great debater and his policy flubs are embarrassing, but that doesn’t make any difference. This is the first election where whites will be voting in their interests as something like a bloc group. They are now effectively just another minority. They don’t have the vocabulary or the courage to make that explicit, but they know that Hillary and a continuation of Republican/Democrat policy positions are poison to them. When one candidate is advocating WW3 abroad and demographic displacement/voluntary self abnegation and impoverishment at home, it’s easy to ignore wonk stuff and vote for the guy who’s counter signalling against that.
It helps a lot that Hillary is a very weak candidate with negative charisma and no real appeal to anyone. I won’t be surprised if they pull the nomination out from her again like they did 8 years ago. Her shtick is that it’s her turn. That didn’t work 20 years ago for Dole or 8 years ago for her against Obama, and it’s weak sauce now.
* This team won the college debate championship. Trump should emulate their style for laughs.
Published on May 5, 2014: “Real footage of the skilled debaters of the winning 2014 Cross Examination Debate Association’s National Championship team.”
* BTW, if anyone is going to get under anyone’s skin, it’s Trump that’s going to get under Hillary’s skin, and not in any debate. I can easily see Trump saying something that starts a huge Caucasian chimpout between Bill and Hillary that gets massively personal and in public view.
* Trump’s is a wild card because he cannot be predicted to act like a typical beta who would normally be deferential to a woman. His alpha nature does not allow him to take shit from women any more than he does men. That means he will not only return fire whenever he chooses but he will aim it where it hurts most; whether it be her husband’s affairs, Syria, or her shoes. Clinton will have to be prepared to defend everywhere. And you know what they say about she who defends everywhere…?
* The Presidential debate between Hillary and Trump is likely to be like nothing we’ve ever seen.
On the downside for Trump, I don’t expect that he will be particularly conversant on the issues, and will likely somewhat embarrass himself with false or obviously wrong answers on a number of questions. On the other hand, he’ll probably be distinctly better prepared for these debates than he was for the Republican debates. He’s been hanging around the political scene as a candidate for far longer than he ever has before, and, because he now has a shot of winning it all, will finally have a decent reason to pay some genuine attention to the issues. I’d expect him to improve quite a bit more than might Hillary — who presumably will hardly improve at all — because he started from such a low baseline of knowledge.
But that’s perhaps the least important dimension of the debate. Far more important will be two other aspects: the positions each will take, and the utter willingness of Trump to “go there” to press his points.
The primary goal the debates can achieve for Trump is to put to rest the idea in the minds of the public that he represents an extreme right wing ideologue. The elite with which we have been blessed has spent endless words and money so depicting him, and it is the major concern of most of the public on the fence as to whether to vote for him.
Hillary has been horrible, truly and almost unbelievably horrible, as Secretary of State. Everything she has done that wasn’t entirely routine turned into chaos or a fiasco. Her intrusion into Libya was a destructive disaster for American interests from Benghazi through the so-called “refugee crisis” to which it contributed. Her positions on Syria and Russia and ISIS were again nothing but disasters, supporting “rebels” who should have been treated as enemies, treating Russia as an enemy when on this issue it should have been an ally, and again creating the so-called “refugee crisis”. And Hilllary, going further back, notoriously supported the Iraq War, which again engendered nothing but chaos.
What Trump can do with this, and likely will do with it, is to turn the tables on the “progressive”, and make it clear that it is she, not he, who pursues reckless, and perversely stupid, military adventures. This will resonate with an American public disgusted with the waste of blood and treasure in the ME and with its ultimate product: “refugees” no one in their right mind wants to deal with.
And Trump can make it clear that he is also not a standard issue Republican who wants to take away entitlements, or undermine many of the social values most Americans have come to accept. And he can, again, turn the tables on the “progressive” by making it clear he will go to bat for the American workers, and will cut out the “globalist” view that Hillary has long supported.
I think there are many voters who haven’t yet realized where Trump actually stands, because they have been swamped with cries of “Fascist” and “Hitler” and depictions of Trump as being way off on the extreme right — so much further than any previous Republican candidate. Of course, Hilllary’s supporters in the media will try to argue that Hitler was also “liberal” on certain social issues — but I think that’s far too subtle a point to resonate with the public. Besides which, didn’t Hitler engage in all kinds of reckless, destructive military adventures? Isn’t that a good part of his being Hitler?
So Trump has a yuge opportunity here. I’m sure he’ll jump on it, and in his genuinely unique style.
“Going there” has its upsides and its downsides, but in this context I think on balance it will be the upside that prevails. Trump will never blanch from making his points against Hillary in a way that can’t be ignored, or misunderstood. He will be believed because he will be recognized for speaking his mind, even when he might be better off on a given occasion NOT speaking his mind. A Kinsleyan “gaffe” will become a Trumpian “breath of fresh air”. I do think that at the end of this process many in the public will come to see Trump — maybe even politics — with new eyes.
The question always remains as to whether the public is ready for so much change in policy, outlook, and style in a President. But the current polls look pretty encouraging.
* Trump will have Hillary stuttering just like he has Obama stuttering. She will probably run to the bathroom.
* For Trump to win he needs to make this about immigration, or more broadly the incredibly shitty future that the establishment–people like Hillary–have in store for American citizens as they strip our citizenship of meaning.
– Jobs \ unemployment — particularly hitting America’s low skilled (minority)
– Reduced wages
– The coming robot revolution — mass unemployment
– Skyrocketing welfare
– Reduced prosperity
– Crappier schools
– Bilingualism
– Expensive housing … especially to find it in neighborhoods with “good schools”
– Section 8
– Bilingualism
– Loss of social cohesion, balkanization
– Terrorism
– Crowding sprawl traffic
– Environment degradation, loss of open space
– 500 million people around the world would like to come here.
– Total US population?–ask Hillary to pick a number 500,000,000? 1 billion. Where does “immigration” end? Packed in like India or China?
Posted inDonald Trump|Comments Off on Is Trump A Strong Debater?
Link: Other parents told The Chronicle they don’t want their children to be around students who wear “saggy pants” or who “curse on Muni” or who may be “rotten apples.” A few said they can see big differences between public school students and private school students just by watching them walk in and out of their respective schools.
Ann Coulter writes: With the California primary fast approaching, the media are rolling out their favorite fairy tale about how Republican Pete Wilson’s support for Proposition 187 in 1994 was a historic, game-changing error for the GOP, driving Hispanics from the party for good!
I–along with other people capable of reading election returns–have written about this forever. I did most recently in “Adios, America,” in a chapter titled, “I Wrote This Chapter After Noticing How Stupid Rich People Are,” inspired by a dinner party I went to in Palm Beach, Florida, the day after I’d already turned in my book.
I’m writing an emergency book on Trump right now, due today, and liberals won’t stop lying about Prop 187–so for this week’s column, I’m telling the real story of that initiative, again. Maybe the 700th time is the charm!
In the lead-up to the election, the media freely dispensed advice to Wilson, nearly identical to the advice they’re giving Donald Trump today.
Proposition 187, was, in the words of The New York Times, a “nativist abomination,” “xenophobic,” and a “platform of bigotry, racism and scapegoating.” Republicans faced an epic loss unless they repudiated Prop 187 and leapt on the Hispandering bandwagon–and pronto.
Unaware that the Times’ political advice was a gag, Wilson’s Democratic opponent, Kathleen Brown, was convinced opposition to Proposition 187 would propel her to victory. She campaigned against the proposition, urging voters to “send a message that says we understand that in diversity is our strength!”
Pete “Prop 187” Wilson won the election with 55 percent of the vote. That included 21 percent of the black vote–nearly three times the 8 percent average for Republicans in House races nationwide the same year.
Wilson’s 1994 victory on the back of Proposition 187 also happens to be the biggest margin for any Republican running statewide in California in the last 30 years, except for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who won his 2006 re-election by one point more (after effectively becoming a Democrat).
Proposition 187 was even more popular than Wilson, winning 59 percent to 41 percent. It was supported by a majority of white voters, a majority of black voters, a majority of Asian voters–and a third of Hispanic voters, i.e., more of the Hispanic vote than Mitt Romney got.
Proposition 187 was twice as popular with Hispanic voters in California as George H.W. Bush had been two years earlier. In 1992, Bill Clinton won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in California to Bush’s 14 percent. Texas Hispanics chose Clinton over Bush by nearly the identical percentage, 70 percent to 15 percent.
In 1992, Proposition 187 wasn’t even a twinkle in California’s eye. Hispanics had no idea they were supposed to hate Republicans yet. Nonetheless, they voted in a landslide for the Democratic presidential candidate, and also for two Democrats running for the U.S. Senate that year.
The reason California can’t elect a Republican statewide isn’t that Hispanics got even madder at Republicans since Proposition 187. It’s that they’re a much larger part of the electorate, thanks to: (1) Reagan’s amnesty; and (2) the ACLU running to a Jimmy Carter-appointed judge to get Proposition 187 overturned.
The combination of amnestied illegals and their kids, and illegal aliens coming for the free government services and their kids, has resulted in a state where whites are only about 40 percent of the population and 60 percent of the electorate.
That’s the number of lives lost to gun violence this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that compiles real-time information on shootings in the United States.
The 5,484 dead from gun violence excludes suicides by gun, which are nearly double the number of gun homicides in any given year.
The 5,484 gun deaths work out to about 36 every day in 2016. They include the 132 people killed over the Memorial Day weekend. That may seem like a lot of carnage for a long weekend, but it’s considerably fewer deaths than the 182 over the Labor Day weekend last fall.
Although the shootings in public places draw the most media attention — like the murder-suicide at the University of California at Los Angeles this week — the Gun Violence Archive’s numbers are a reminder that most gun homicides take place out of the public eye, barely noticed, a simple fact of life in a country with one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world.
Much of the daily drumbeat of gun violence involves drug gangs and turf battles in poor city neighborhoods — Chicago is the current poster child for those shootings, with 69 of them over Memorial Day weekend. But average Americans nationwide routinely shoot and kill each other over the most petty of disagreements, including:
These incidents all happened in May. They were initially compiled, among many other incidents, by Parents Against Gun Violence, an advocacy group lobbying for gun safety.
It’s often said that an armed society is a polite society. But it’s striking how some of us use guns to shoot and kill over trifles, issues that potentially could be resolved by being a little more polite.
Posted inBlacks, Crime|Comments Off on WP: The surprisingly petty things that people shot each over last month
Especially striking are the ways in which Abedin’s own marriage follows the patterns of her boss’s, raising many of the same questions. Was it love or ambition that made her stay with a self-destructive politician who betrayed her again and again? Is her torment a testament to her character, or evidence that something is lacking in her judgment?
…The timing of the film’s release is hardly ideal, coming at a moment when Clinton appears poised to become the first woman to win a major party’s presidential nomination. Abedin comes off as the oldest stereotype in politics: the suffering, ornamental spouse…
Off-screen, however, Abedin has become a key figure in many of the controversies that have swirled around Clinton.
She has been interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in connection with its probe into Clinton’s use of a private email account. Questions have also been raised about the fact that, during the last six months of Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, Abedin was drawing paychecks simultaneously from the government, a private consulting firm with close ties to the Clintons, the Clinton Foundation and the secretary’s personal office…
She was a George Washington University student at the time, the Michigan-born daughter of a Pakistani mother and Indian father, both academics. A practicing Muslim, she had spent much of her childhood in Saudi Arabia…
Only touched upon are the implications of what she is doing on his behalf. Abedin worked the contacts she had made through the Clintons and leveraged the expectations of the role she would have in a future Clinton administration.
Some who are close to the Clintons were appalled.
“People like Huma, but they saw her trading on the Hillary card and resented it, but that didn’t mean they didn’t show up” for Weiner, one longtime Clinton friend and adviser had told the Washington Post at the time. “The chatter was, if you wanted to stay in Hillary’s good graces, you answer the call from Huma.”
Posted inHillary Clinton, Huma Abedin|Comments Off on What the documentary ‘Weiner’ tells us about Huma Abedin
Scientists have investigated this question for more than a century, and the answer is clear: the differences between people on intelligence tests are substantially the result of genetic differences…
Genes make a substantial difference, but they are not the whole story. They account for about half of all differences in intelligence among people, so half is not caused by genetic differences, which provides strong support for the importance of environmental factors. This estimate of 50 percent reflects the results of twin, adoption and DNA studies. From them, we know, for example, that later in life, children adopted away from their biological parents at birth are just as similar to their biological parents as are children reared by their biological parents. Similarly, we know that adoptive parents and their adopted children do not typically resemble one another in intelligence.
Researchers are now looking for the genes that contribute to intelligence. In the past few years we have learned that many, perhaps thousands, of genes of small effect are involved. Recent studies of hundreds of thousands of individuals have found genes that explain about 5 percent of the differences among people in intelligence. This is a good start, but it is still a long way from 50 percent.
Another particularly interesting recent finding is that the genetic influence on measured intelligence appears to increase over time, from about 20 percent in infancy to 40 percent in childhood to 60 percent in adulthood. One possible explanation may be that children seek experiences that correlate with, and so fully develop, their genetic propensities.
Posted inIQ|Comments Off on Is Intelligence Hereditary?
For roughly the thousandth time, the masters of social media in Silicon Valley are promising to do something about online hate speech. Bloomberg reports that an impressive-sounding group of tech giants — Facebook, Twitter,Google and Microsoft — have “pledged to tackle online hate speech in less than 24 hours as part of a joint commitment with the European Union to combat the use of social media by terrorists.”
This announcement comes with more pomp (the EU! combating terrorism!) than previous vows to start taking internet abuse seriously, but it’s wise not to get too excited about our supposed future internet featuring 50% less racist vitriol. Users of these services have been subject to innumerable promises to do better, and invariably people find that the internet continues to be the toxic waste dump that it was before the promised clean-up. Skepticism isn’t just warranted, but mandatory at this point.
And there have definitely been some marked improvements. It’s a harder to run a hate group on Facebook than it used to be, since it will often get reported and taken down. It used to be unheard of for Twitter to ban users, but now you’re seeing some of the most mean-spirited harassers losing their Twitter handles.
But these moves are doing very little to stem the overwhelming tide of bilious hatred pouring out on social media. As the Bloomberg story reports, a French Jewish youth group, UEJF, decided to monitor how well Twitter, Facebook, and Google were doing in response to complaints about hate speech on their social media platforms. What they found was disheartening.
“In the course of about six weeks in April and May, members of French anti-discrimination groups flagged unambiguous hate speech that they said promoted racism, homophobia or anti-Semitism,” the Bloomberg piece explains. “More than 90 percent of the posts pointed out to Twitter and YouTube remained online within 15 days on average following requests for removal, according to the study by UEJF, SOS Racisme and SOS Homophobie.”
There’s also a volume problem. Social media giants like Facebook already employ an army of overworked and underpaid moderators who toil endlessly to remove porn, violent images and other extreme content off their sites. Often these people work from foreign countries, like the Philippines. Just keeping people from seeing porn or photos of gruesome accidents is an unbelievable amount of work. Removing all the racism and sexism, which are in abundance and often context-dependent, would expand that workload exponentially.
Posted inAlt Right|Comments Off on The Internet’s bigot crisis: There’s a new push to curtail online bigotry, but the toxic sludge of hate is too enormous to erase
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
