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[Sheb]

It'd be interesting to have longer period for this kind of stuff to see in which direction opinion are changing. I mean if we take the US general public, there was still 40% percent of the people thinking gay sex should be illegal as recently as 2009. (You do have to go back to 1988 to have a majority opposing legal gay sex though).

As for British Muslim, when you consider the opinion on the countries they or their ancestors came from, they're amazingly liberal, which to me hint that it's a successful exemple of liberal value spreading. Sure, you could argue that Brits be better off not touching the icky less liberal people and adopting a fortress mentality, but I'd argue that in the long run, we're all better off if these ideals spread, and immigration is a nice way because immigrants serves as bridges between culture: a British Muslims of south asian decent is in a better position to make the case for tolerance of homosexuality to a Pakistani than a white CoE Brits.

Of course, my position rests on the underlying belief that liberal ideas will eventually triumph in a free market of ideas. If you don't think so and see conservatism as the winning side (like LW seems to for exemple, although his posts do tend to be cryptics), then protectionism make sense (Assuming we all agree that promoting liberal ideas on stuff like homosexuality is a good thing of course).

[Helgoland]

Yeah, that's what I meant by saying I believe in the strength of our culture and our ideology: We will win. We will convince them. It may take some time, but in the end they'll be as liberal as anyone else.

[Sheb]

BTW, since you don't answer my FB message Helgo, how about that beer Quinzaine thing. It's from 26/02 to 12/03. Think you could organize a visit, we could hit Ghent too.

[TempAcc]

tfw "the guardian is biased! Here's a huffpost article covering the matter"

lel

[Starver]

Oh yes, the Guardian and their well-known biases against Muslims, minorities in general, and the left. They're a right Tory mouthpiece.

They were reporting a publicised study, before said study had been found wanting.  I went looking for post-report reports that had had time to do a bit of thinking, not just "this study says" (then either "we told you!" or "which is disappointing")

Nothing in either of the links you've provided shows the survey to be non-credible.

It calls into question the credibility, for which I used the terms I did as opposed to "it's a total lie", but the Independent's piece on the Sun's spin deserved the stronger interpretation.  Again, I considered fully the words to be used there, but can't help if your reading of my words doesn't mesh properly with my writing of them.  I tried my best.


Anyway, your reply popped up as I was about to make an open reply to Sheb on the "we get the liberal ones" (i.e. unforced first-gen immigrants are 'better' than we'd expect, give or take some culture-shock).   Looking at the 'homegrown' immigrant militants, they're very rarely those original immigrants, the pattern seems to be that nth-generation (third or fourth, seems typical) immigrant offspring seem to be the ones that get into the radicalisation-trap, quite possibly convinced by third-parties still based in the 'motherlands' (via social media, these days) or here only because forcibly expelled as troublesome even to the original homeland (perhaps just the wrong side of that place's particular sectarianism). These young, local 'reconverts', like most people who pursue a (brand, type, intensity of) belief rather than are merely socially of that kind are often much more fervent, and may even see themselves as necessarily 'saving' their more relaxed and assimilated elders, whose more casual (or even profunctory) observance gets seen as akin to apostacy.

It's just a reworking of the "child tends to rebel against the parent" dance.  Businesslike parents beget playboy kids (and vice-versa), socialist parents often have (at least temporarily) conservative kids, etc.  Not all the time, but when it happens notably, it stands out.  And then you get the 7/7 bombers, at the extreme.

(Another reason why the Trump travel ban disproportionally stops entirely the wrong people. The troublemakers in the US and the UK, post 9/11, were almost all not people who could have been blocked from entering the country, because they were in the country already (may never have left it!) and were the handful of individuals amongst thousands or millions of similar but blameless identically-profiled citizens who got their buttons pushed somehow to do something.  And they get the publicity, and either opprobrium or honour, depending upon the nature of the audience, their uncorrupted peers suffering for it, either way.


(@tempacc, not only did I not say that, but any bias that existed is more Channel 4's programme makers (not even C4!) who commissioned the flawed polling methods.

[Starver]

The problems were better highlighted in a radio programme that I can't immediately point you at, but were partly that in the attempt to get information specifically from Muslims, their very small sampling efforts were concentrating upon residents of areas in which Muslims were concentrated in virtually ghettoised conditions, emphasising any lack of social assimilation and sidelining those that do not consider themselves tied to the traditionalist side of their culture.

Like how areas with low 'immigrant' populations are far more anti-immigrant than those (though similarly British WASPs, themselves) that live and coexist with a thriving multicultural community around them.  The London borough of Havering (randomly chosen from likely places, for the purposes of this post, not having time to scour for "the best example") seems to have around 85% explicitly white British Isles population, "other white" at 3%,whilst black and Indian populations, together, add up to around 6%, with the difference in small mish-mashes are in sub-percentile quantities.  Lambeth (from the same source, chosen similarly cadually) is 40+% WBI, 15ish% "other white", 25+% B&I, and the larger remainder the mish-mash of various others.  And when you then look at not only the total polling of each area, but even specifically the same major demographic of British/Irish Whites, they exhibit totally different opinion spectra...


The trouble is that it's easier to go "we need to talk to a Muslim, try this (Bradford/whatever) phone number and see if the person who answers is one of them!" to get your 1000 person 'sample'¹ than to dial nationwide (within and outside the concentrated populations, proportionately) and get so many misses as you find that the farmhouse in Auchtermuchty doesn't have anyone you want to talk to in it, nor that holiday cottage in St Ives, or the places in Llangollen, Matlock, Edmundbyers, Keswick, Brigg, Goole, Bath, Malvern, etc, etc, etc (you're not allowed to ask if they know of any neighbours that you can call who are Islamic...).

Thus you aim at area codes (and sub-area grouped phone pre-fixes) that correspond to an area that is positively culturally islamic, and get (in your 0.03ish% of your 'target' supersample) a lean towards an atypical viewpoint.




And that's before you cherry-pick.  You ask them "do you like this, do you not like that, do you have strong or weak opinions about the other", and many other questions.  Having already briefly talked about the p-value (down there in the footnote), the more likely you'll find a question answered in a way you'd "like" to report, while ignoring the rest.  Say that perhaps 97% of Muslims do not support suicide bombing (do 3%, worryingly, support it, or is that 2.5% "I don't want to answer that", like they did every question since they got bored, and 0.5% more like "hey, if it's against someone who is trying to kill my family, of course..."?  The details matter...), but that's not a good figure to release.  Go for the blip! Forget the neutral (or anti-blip) results! Sensationalise!

So take such weak/deliberate studies with a pinch of salt.  (Not that I can work out how to do a better one, but it's likely worse than useless.)


But, if you want the Grauniad a second time: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/15/channel-4-islamophobic-bandwagon-british-muslims


Deep behind this story, there exist those lies, those damned lies, but mostly those very selectively used (and obtained!) statistics.


¹ Out of about 2.7 million actual British Muslims...  What's the p-value for that?  Yeah, that's another point of contention.

[Starver]

I am giving a general overview to the whole range of acknowledged problems.

The selection bias exists in the face-to-face version of polling, too.  Head into "the Islamic Quarter" and talk to anyone who looks and dresses islamic, and for good measure, do this on a Friday afternoon, near the place that's got all the traffic!) and you're getting more and more 'deep' into a 'confirmed' culture, not a proper broad spread.

I've no idea how many people just refused to answer sensibly after the fifteenth stupid question (thus never said that they wouldn't perform an honour killing on a relative) or how many misheard "do you observe Shariah Law?" as "do you watch LA Law?", and I'm fairly confident no-one does, because there'd be no easy way to encode those issues into "Yes/Maybe/No/Does Not Answer" or a sequence of          symbols.

These are just problems that you should be aware of if you ever see a study of such microtargetted (and wildly unfocussed) nature being presented as 'proof' of a some single sensational fact.

See also: http://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800   (It really is worth reading, amd then we can argue about chocolate!  I like Bourneville dark chocolate!)

[redwallzyl]

Do elaborate. I suspect what you mean is a much more detached mode of engaging one's history and culture* that what I'm suggesting.

*Maybe it would be a good idea to establish the word 'context' for this sort of thing.

-snip-

If you want something that explains this better than i ever could, read this book. its not to long and fairly cheap. its main focus is the causes of global inequality and anthropological perspectives of the causes.

[Dorsidwarf]

Junckers says we will have to "pay a hefty bill" while addressing the EU Parliament



Thoughts? Bravado, reality or reassuring the other euros?

[smjjames]

I suppose it's like you have to disconnect 10,000 threads (or wires or whatever) and you have to deal with them one at a time.

not sure what the bill is supposed to entail, other than covering prior commitments.

[Starver]

We doubtless will. There are EU things for which the UK has committed to but remains deferred upon a rolling basis.  If it doesn't mean paying more, up-front, as part of the divorce settlement, it'll mean getting less of the final rebate back than traditionally expected.

(I don't think that the recent GNI levy increase business will still be 'held over, without interest' by the time of the separation, but it's things like this that complicate matters.)

((Ninjaed))

[smjjames]

((Ninjaed))

Not really, I was just stating what was said in the article, and I don't know the details on the commitments

[Sheb]

The Economists got details. The payment is made up mostly of committment to existing programs, payment to programs that are part of the current EU budget (that Britain agreed on) but will be executed after Brexist as well as pension liabilities for european functionaries.

Overall, it's not terrible news for Britain, because the status of these payments give it some extra leverage for the rest of the negotiations.

[Starver]

You said "covering prior commitments", which was in three words what I took a whole lot more to say.  I say you're a ninja. 

(((And Sheb's now wandered in with Facts.)))

[muldrake]

Overall, it's not terrible news for Britain, because the status of these payments give it some extra leverage for the rest of the negotiations.

True.  Because tough talk or not, the proper response to any utterly unreasonable demands from the EU at this point are something on the order of "you and what army?"

ETA:  I put that in a rather American way, though.  I think May put it more eloquently, that making extreme and unreasonable demands would be "a calamitous act of self-harm."