Misogynistic manifestos, wolves not voting for the AfD, Meta is evil, and the hidden costs of “purity”: four links I liked

Karmvir Padda is a sociologist at the University of Waterloo. For her PhD research, she has analysed numerous manifestos written by men who perpetrated violent attacks motivated by their political or religious views. A large chunk of them rationalise violence that is explicitly directed against women.

Back in 2022, two colleagues published a research paper that triggered a media frenzy because they claimed that there was a positive causal effect of wolf attacks on voting for the radical right AfD in Germany. Some people found that hard to believe, many more shook their heads and moved on, but one person persisted and wrote the most beautiful refutation that I could imagine.

Incidentally, this article also does a great job explaining the promises and perils of spatial panel analysis (even if I have already forgotten most of the details).

Even before Zuckerberg began courting Trump, everybody knew that you cannot trust Meta, yet billions of us (including me) keep using their software and become, as the old saying goes, their product.

This article is interesting for a number of reasons. First, the technological chicanery is quite fascinating. If I understand this correctly (not a given), they are using spyware techniques to conceal breaches of data protection rules which they claim to comply with. Second, the regulation of digital products by the EU and the enforcement of these rules have become (geo-)politicised. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds. In other news, my ancient Samsung phone does not allow me to remove the Facebook app.

Speaking of Meta: Evangelicals are receiving a lot of international attention at the moment for obvious reasons. Much of the coverage rightly focuses on the damage that is done to women and women’s rights, whereas this excellent but disturbing article is interested in a somewhat neglected question: how does growing up in a high-control religious affect men?

But what is the link to Meta? Facebook inflicted a penalty on me when I shared the link, as the illustration violates Meta’s community standards. You couldn’t make this up.

Related posts:

Protest, Neo-Liberalism or Anti-Immigrant Sentiment: What Motivates the Voters of the Extreme Right in Western Europe? Islamophobia in Western Europe is linked to far right Attitudes, not religiosity: new research Deutsche Welle on the AfD’s role in the Bundestag