Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
In the category of: Some of this, you won’t be able to un-read.
Psychologists surveyed hundreds of alt-right supporters. The results are unsettling.
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 organizations 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.
In the category of: One very controversial woman.
OMAROSA JUST DECLARED WAR ON DONALD TRUMP
“I was complicit with this White House deceiving this nation,” she said on Meet the Press, where she played a recording of her own firing.
Omarosa Manigault-Newman pulled no punches on Sunday’s Meet the Press. “[I] heard for two years that it existed,” she said of an alleged tape in which Donald Trump uses the n-word while taping The Apprentice.“And once I heard it for myself, it was confirmed, what I feared the most: that Donald Trump is a con and has been masquerading as someone who is actually open to engaging with diverse communities.” She added, “But when he talks that way, the way he did on this tape, it confirmed that he is truly a racist.”
Since leaving the White House, Newman has strategically dropped a series of ominous hints about her time there. But on Sunday, in conversation with NBC’s Chuck Todd preceding the publication of her tell-all book, Unhinged: An Insider Account of the Trump White House, Newman opened the floodgates, declaring all-out war on the administration that ousted her. “It is hindsight. But I will say this to you, I was complicit with this White House deceiving this nation,” she told Todd. “They continue to deceive this nation by how mentally declined he is, how difficult it is for him to process complex information. How he is not engaged in some of the most important decisions that impacts our country. I was complicit, and for that I regret.”
In the category of: A political protest of a whole other kind.
After 17 Days And 1,000 Miles, A Mother Orca’s ‘Tour Of Grief’ Is Over
Not a single orca born in the past three years has been known to survive, according to the Center for Whale Research. That’s why the fact that Tahlequah recently gave birth was so exciting, if only for a brief moment. Her calf died just 30 minutes after it was first spotted by a whale watch operator on July 24.
The Center for Whale Research keeps track of every single known orca (known more formally as the Southern Resident killer whale), and as of December 2017, the population contains just 76 whales. According to NPR’s Dwyer, the population of Southern Resident killer whales has decreased by about a quarter in the past 20 years, largely because their food source, the Chinook salmon, has also seen a dramatic population decline.
Jenny Atkinson, executive director of The Whale Museum, told Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson that Tahlequah’s grieving period was unusually long. Typically, Atkinson said, researchers have seen mothers carry stillborn calves for “a day or so.” But Tahlequah’s baby was not stillborn. “She carried this for 17 months before it was born,” Atkinson said. “And we know that it swam by her side … so there is a part of me that believes that the grief could be much deeper, because they had bonded.”
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