I am gonna be quick since I wanna get some Monster Hunter in tonight, but wanted to respond. :)
First things first, lol, no worries. People are different, grow up different places, go through different shit. I don't tend to assume anyone is defined (even like 5%) by just their political views on a couple of issues, even if they are important issues. :D Hell, I'm coming to LA next week for work, and if you want to grab dinner and shoot the shit some more, I'm totally game. :)
Also, So Cal - Asian ERA, I AM IN YOU NEXT WEEK. Time for me to see all these fucking dishes you have been taunting us with for years. :D
I guess I'm not differentiating between inter-ethnic conflict that leads to racist beliefs and racism? As for the excuses, next time I hear one from someone locally I'll remember to keep note, lol.
Ah - the tools I've been exposed to tend to be trying to co-opt existing language and make it more general and ultimately useless. Situations where people want to use the most extreme version of something as a definition for all behavior in that spectrum in a way to provoke moral shame and moral superiority. I've seen a lot of p-hacking with studies and comments by authors that indicate they believe they have a moral obligation to prove certain connections, which leads to correlation / causation fallacies that perpetuate. (In what the missus showed me, it tended to revolve around gender type stuff since that was closer to her area of expertise).
So, I guess the big difference to me is two-fold
A) I do not believe "coverage" of something means it is happening more often. (See: School shootings, crime in the US, etc). Considering what the coverage priorities of the media was during the 2016 election, I'm going to propose that what gets coverage is simply what drives more outrage / more views, and has nothing to do with the seriousness or increase in hate crimes. In fact, I believe hate crimes have been on the consistent long-term decline since statistics were started to be taken in 1996. (
https://ucr.fbi.gov/ucr-publications#Hate).
(I'll pull the numbers from the PDF at a later point, Monster Hunter calllllllsss)
B) Having grown up in the areas where it is being "newly legitimized", I have issue with people thinking that only in the last like 5 years has it been legitimized. It was legitimized to a much higher degree when I was growing up than it is now. It is only finally now that anyone has decided they should pay attention to this.
There's no "legitimization" going on, it's always been there. But the internet and social media have revealed it to everyone who didn't live in those areas. (Note that all the times it talks about an "increase" in actual belief as opposed to an increase in coverage, no one seems to have data going back more than like 4 years about those questions.) Add on top of it that the ability to reach people via the internet is now a thing and is only a recent thing, people are confusing with "seeing it for the first time" with "it's new".
And I think that's where the fundamental difference lies. I think for the first time, a lot of folks who grew up in serious bubbles are finally being exposed to what has always been there. I remember an anecdote that the year Columbine happened, was the year with the least amount of students killed in school shootings at the time. (
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/there-is-no-epidemic-of-mass-school-shootings.html). But it is new and scary and crazy to everyone who never knew what was going on.
Ok, back to food pictures y'all. :)