Senator Maria Can'twell - who has been in the Senate for what, two decades?- had this to say, “We can no longer sweep these statistics under the rug....”
Shame on you.

Never mind the fact that sea lion populations have recovered and they now pose a threat to the fragile supply of salmon we so enjoy. I think some population control for those nuisances should be the least of our concerns.

"Just not apparently free to buy flowers if the florist is a bigot....."
Now Michael, you hysterical little bitch;
Arlene's Flowers had been cordially selling flowers to Freed and Ingersol for a decade.
She declined, however, to design the florals for a ceremony that offended her personal beliefs.
(surely you fragile uber-offendable Leftists snowflakes can relate...)
The florist did, however, helpfully suggest other florists who could help them.

The couple went ahead with their wedding, but they had it at home with 11 guests and flowers from another florist, instead of the larger event they had envisioned.....SOB!......

That's Silicon Valley for you. They talk like hippies, but act like the Mansons.

MI-SS-ISS-IPPI update: Incredibly, Mike Espy, the Democratic candidate, has won enough votes that he’s forced the Republican incumbent into a runoff election scheduled for November 27.

The Republican just set off a political firestorm with a lynching joke—Espy is black—and Alabama has shown us that we can win this if enough people get out and vote, so please consider donating to Espy’s campaign and GOTV drive—even $5 helps if we all donate—por favor y mil gracias!

https://espyforsenate.com

6
It's not like that at all.
Perhaps the Supreme Court will explain it to you.

Not only has hate crime doubled in Seattle,
the state has the second highest rate of all the states, behind only Kentucky.
Vermont hate crimes are up 50% in the same period.
and WashingtonDC reports the highest per capita hate crime rate.
The bluer the jurisdiction, the more the hate crimes.
In other news, Eric Holder doubles down on '...we kick them' remark.

@ 5,

Yeah, I wish someone would ask Zuckerberg and Sandberg WTF is wrong with them that they’ve cozied up to white supremacists and anti-Semites, ugh. Or why everytime someone peeks under the FB hood, more Russian trolls come slithering out.

8 We would rather have you White-splain it to us, please.

@ KKKim,

Hunnie, you are a hate crime. You might as well own it.

Please don't feed the militantly ignorant trolls. They're suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, poor things. If we ignore them, they'll dry up and blow away.

I'm sure that Donald Trump constantly screaming about "globalists" while defending "good people on both sides" and an uptick in hate crimes has no relation. None.

@14: Eh. He'll get banned - AGAIN - and come back with another easily-identified account in a matter of hours. Ruffling feathers is the only joy life affords him.

If anyone actually bothers to read about the "rise in hate crimes" story in any depth, the methodology for not only collecting, but reporting, the data has changed considerably this year, with more (varied) agencies reporting data. It does not prove that the number of hate crimes themselves are "spiking", but it does show that we are getting more reports of hate crimes than we used to.

Reason magazine ran a really good piece on this earlier in the week. I suggest reading it.

15
That hypothesis isn't smart at all.

One:
These statistics are utterly meaningless in determining how many 'hate crimes' occur.
Utterly. Entirely. Meaning-less.
Their chief purpose is to scare credulous quivering Leftists into donating to SPLC.

Two:
If you choose to give any credibility whatsoever to these numbers note that Washington state alone reported more hate crimes than all these former Confederate states from Texas stretching thru Louisiana Arkansas Mississippi Alabama Georgia SCarolina to NCarolina combined.

Congratulations.

18

No, it's not that at all.

We look forward to obeying the law of the land, as passed by the elected legislature, with the court answering questions about constitutionality as they arise.
We look forward to enacting laws our country needs by electing representatives who reflect and respect our beliefs and desires.
It's called democracy.
Spread the word.

For fucks sake, it doesn't particularly matter what the Arlene's Flower's case is like at the moment, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Colorado Cake Case was narrow and turned on the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s supposedly ‘clear and impermissible hostility’ toward the religious beliefs of the business owner.

So, unless if Kristen Waggoner of Alliance Defending Freedom, who’s representing Stutzman, can show that Washington’s government was openly hostile, this is just another chance for bigots to claim martyrdom, and a good excuse to kick the can down the road a bit further.

https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/article221666415.html

In my humble opinion, both the AM and PM versions of SLOG are written as if it's a high school newspaper, laden with inside jokes and immature language. Really hard to get through without cringing or shaking my head in disappointment. The best reading is the comments section by far.

In the Colorado case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court had concerns about the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s anti-religious bias and sent it back to that state for a second look.

Washington State AG Ferguson has acted similarly to the Colorado commission by disparaging Stutzman’s beliefs and punishing her by suing her personally.

If all white Americans were liberal progressives, would there still be a concern about lack of diversity?

22

now now...
Don't be a buttsore bitch just because you posted a dumb hypothesis.
Try to pick yourself up and push on.

The two facts are not incompatible;
the fact that the 'statistics' are meaningless horseshit does not negate the fact that The Left loves to wallow in them, and those who choose to wallow in them must also accept the fact that these meaningless horseshit numbers show higher rates of hate crime in Leftist locations.

@24 THANK GOD you're here to let The Stranger know that their editorial aesthetic isn't your cup of tea. Duly noted!

Luckily it doesn't seem to prevent you from coming back, reading, and usually commenting on the daily.

If you think the hate-crime stats are either "eye-opening" or "exaggerated" then you haven't been getting out much in Seattle for the past, oh, 30-40 years or so.

We've had a constant influx of:

One: Children of white southern migrants to the rural PNW. The kids move into the city because the tattoo parlors are better and there's something to do at night that doesn't involve livestock, but they never quite ditch the old home-town bigotry, and

Two: The subtype of bullied nerd who's found solace in the sort of libertarianism that tells him that he's genetically superior to the stupids.

The former are fairly social and tend to be aware enough to avoid talking about their bigotry most of the time, the latter tend to get really defensive and insist Science forces them to be racist, but also don't socialize much.

But if you go to enough parties or events outside your usual cocoon, boy howdy do you ever find a lot of these fuckers in this town.

30
Don't scratch!
It only makes the buttsore worse...

@33

You know, I never thought about it that way, but you're kinda right, there: The southern resident killer whales are dying out essentially because they're Conservatives.

@Blip

The States with the highest Hate Crime Rate per 100,000 Residents=
1. D.C.
2. Kentucky
3. Washington
4. Massachusetts
5. New Jersey

Lowest=
1. Mississippi
2. Nevada
3. Arkansas
4. Georgia
5. Alabama

That kinda throws out your "smarter hypothesis"

https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/tables/table-12.xls

I know this is the Stranger, but what is the deal with the sea lion photo (wrong species)?

@38

The Stranger fired all of its photographers years ago, and now when they need a photo they just have interns type a search term into Getty Images and pick whichever appeals to them on the first page of results.

This routinely makes the reporters look like idiots who don't know the first thing about the subjects they're reporting on (aerial photos that don't show the part of town the post is about, photos of the wrong mountain, etc) but checking stuff like that would take time, and time is money, and money is something that belongs in the pockets of Business Owners, not in the pay envelopes of utterly replaceable internet content-assemblers.

@33: I want someone to teach the resident orcas what a juicy snack sea lions can be.

@36, et al. Please also see https://ucr.fbi.gov/ucr-statistics-their-proper-use, for why this data is not suitable for making that type of (let's call it...) analysis.

@29, Please note especially that these are reported rates.

...and everyone else, please don't miss the implications of points like the ones below when considering why numbers vary between jurisdictions:
• Effective strength of law enforcement agencies.
• Administrative and investigative emphases on law enforcement.
• Policies of other components of the criminal justice system (i.e., prosecutorial, judicial,
correctional, and probational).
• Citizens’ attitudes toward crime.
• Crime reporting practices of the citizenry.

@41

After all those disclaimers and other CYA boilerplate, the stats provided are still an entirely reasonable starting point for comparison, and will remain better than anything else available until somebody digs in and does the hard work of accurately correcting for any of the factors you've mentioned.

And something tells me that this future somebody won't come from the cohort of internet statistics-scolds who show up only when raw data appears initially to break against their personal beliefs in some way or other.

@42 I was going to say you could apply those disclaimers to any crime statistic.

I would dig into the data more, but I really only care about Washington State and they don't have everything broken out by States. Also I'm curious if the FBI statistics include Political Ideology as a hate crime in Seattle since it is defined as such by the City of Seattle. That would explain the uptick in hate crime.

I read that Vice article. It was a big meh.

As for Facebook, maybe it is finally time to delete. Been planning on it for a long time. Just need to download my photos...I'll see you in social networking again when something better comes out.

@42 How often do I have to comment before my point is valid? Where does that fall in comparison to your ability to determine my personal beliefs?

I actually agree that the UCR data set is "an entirely reasonable starting point for comparison", I just dispute that it was being used as such. I think that #29 was supposed to be a stunning coup du grâce, and #36 mischaracterized or improperly contextualized the linked information.

@43 Political ideology would not appear to be included. https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/hate-crime

37
Nobody did that.
The first law of holes is "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging"....

These 'hate crime' statistics are useless; even as a starting point.
They reflect how hysterical the local population is about 'hate crimes';
and how much pressure society puts on the police to categorize crimes as such.
Inasmuch as the whole concept of 'hate crimes' is nebulous and undefinable and unmeasurable it is a fool's errand; the entire point is to frighten Leftists.

In Mississippi only 600,000 residents in the state live in a jurisdiction that reports to the FBI, and the entire state only reported 1 (one) "hate crime"
In Alabama less than 3 million live in a reporting jurisdiction, less than one percent of jurisdictions reported a "hate crime" for a state total of 9.
In Washington state over a third of the reporting jurisdictions (72 of 243) reported 510 "hate crimes"
(some of which were probably orange Buddhist swastikas painted on telephone poles....)

These statistics are utterly and totally useless.

These "Hate Crime" statistics belong in the same trash heap as the SPLC ever lengthening list of CERTIFIED Hate Groups. The list will only ever get longer because SPLC has monetized terrifying credulous bedwetting Leftists. (during Obama's terms they SPLC breathlessly reported in its publication second graders on an Idaho school bus chanting slogans critical of Obama....)

@32

Oh yeah, I forgot:

Three: there's a weird angry-pedant line of "Lynching isn't a hate crime, it's just like any other kind of murder" type racism kicking around out there, too. Like if a guy goes into a church that just happens to have a mostly black congregation and plants a bomb or starts a fire or opens up with as many guns as he can hold at once, which totally doesn't happen anymore these days anyway, well, how can you call that a hate crime, what does that even mean, it's just someone mentally unstable having a bad day.

These seem more likely to just be Russian IRA working stiffs, because unlike the other two archetypes, nobody has ever burped up anything like that near me outside of the internet, no matter how drunk.

@47, 48 One might find it odd that your complaints came soon after links including a FAQ with the UCR Program's definition of " 'hate crimes' " and a guide named "ucr-statistics-their-proper-use" about, oddly enough, the proper use of their statistics.

One might then assume that while there could be an interesting discussion to be had about issues surrounding the SPLC and their "hate group" designation, it would not be because of your (let's call them...) contributions.

https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/northwest/idaho/article209568694.html

As for the SPLC, they seem pretty upfront about their methodology: https://www.splcenter.org/20171004/frequently-asked-questions-about-hate-groups
"The Southern Poverty Law Center defines a hate group as an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics."

50
CNN found it 'odd' that so many highly publicized "hate crimes" didn't make the FBI list.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/14/opinions/fbi-hate-crimes-data-whats-missing-berry-wiggins/index.html

Of course, considering Matthew Shephard was murdered in a drug deal gone bad and Michael Brown was killed in self defense by the police officer he was assaulting CNN should be aware more than anyone else that "hate crimes" are often activist manufactured media events.

50
Oh yes; if the SPLC says they are upfront, we are sure they must be...
And it is very convenient for credulous Leftists that the same organization that tells them how many hate groups there are can take their money (hundreds of millions...) to fight the hate groups they certified. Alas, when next year even more hate groups have popped up they can come back for more money....
SPLC is the Left's version of TV preachers reaching out to credulous afraid not-to-bright folks promising to heal them if they send a check.
Why; it wouldn't surprise us at all if SPLC gets into the Climate Change scam;
terrifying Leftists about the weather, collecting their donations to "address" the problem.
A one-stop Leftist flip flam for the suckers.

@50 SPLC has been kind of sketch as of late. They put Maajid Nawaz on an anti-Muslim watch-list while he was on the British terrorist watch-list.

50
And if you find ANY credibility what.so.ever in a system that reports one "hate crime" in Mississippi and over 500 in Washington then by all means you need to contact the SPLC;
you are just the kind of sucker they thrive on.