Genealogy of the Concept of Hate Crime : The Cultural Implications of Legal Innovation and Social Change

The term hate crime is new to legislative and public discourse, as well as legal and social science scholarship. A decade after the concept of a hate crime was introduced in Congress, the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA), to punish criminal actors who target victims because of their characteristics (race, color ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, gender, gender identity, or disability). Using relevant archival sources, this project uses genealogical qualitative methods to examine the interplay of cultural elements manifested in this provocative term, which reflect dominance and subjugation among social groups (In- and Out-Groups) going back to the earliest settlements on American soil—and long before the term hate crime had emerged. The lens through which this historical progression is interpreted emphasizes hate crime as a signifier—a conceptual red flag—that alerts us to the way that seemingly disparate themes in American cultural development have coalesced in new conceptualizations of Others, Self, and the social process of Othering. The historical, cultural, and legislative antecedents that preceded the HCPA suggest a modern crisis in the way that certain cultural touchstones related to identity are conceptualized, experienced, and deployed. This project seeks to illuminate subtle changes in the meanings attributed to relevant historical events and certain social dynamics to explain their contemporary ramifications for individuals and society, using the concept of hate crime as an organizing principle. Broadly speaking, the project asks: What does the emergence of the concept of hate crimes tell us about larger cultural trends, and what does it suggest about future trends? The question to be answered is how the concept of hate crime emerged over time in order to explain the cultural significance of why it emerged at all. The main theses of this dissertation is that a hypermodern understanding of agency is necessary to reconcile the inversions of meaning in cultural knowledges, without which the concept of hate crime would not have emerged. Thus, this dissertation concludes that the concept of hate crime tracks with the changes in conceptualizations of identity over time. A close examination and analysis of the term reveal an archaeology of social constructions, false logic, flawed (but commercially convenient) assumptions, and compromises on humanity that go to the very core of the American identity

Specifying Byrd's Box Model with a Continuation Semantics

AbstractWe give a formal specification of Byrd's box model. This specification is based on a on a Prolog operational semantics with continuations. We also show how this specification can be executed by a direct translation into λProlog, leading to a Prolog interpreter that produces execution traces. This interpreter can be used both to experiment various trace models to validate them. We have hence a formal framework to specify and prototype trace models

Foreign Policy Evaluation and the Utility of Intervention

This dissertation identifies and explains the factors contributing to the presence and severity of U.S. foreign-policy blunders, or gross errors in strategic judgment resulting in significant harm to the national interest, since the Second World War. It hypothesizes that the grand strategy of preponderance and the overestimation of military power to transform the politics of other states have precipitated U.S. foreign-policy blunders since 1945. Examining the Vietnam War and Iraq War as case studies, it focuses on underlying conditions in the American national identity and the problematic foreign policy decision-making (FPDM) that corresponds to this bifurcated hypothesis, termed the overestimation/preponderance theoretical model (OPM). Four indicators operationalize the OPM: (1) how U.S. foreign policymakers estimated the capacity of military power to transform the political dynamics of the target state through intervention; (2) and (3) how U.S. actors and institutions affected the capacity of the partner state and hostile state and nonstate actors; and (4) how the foreign policy was justified and rationalized within the leadership of government and to the general public as it encountered disconfirming information. In each case, the grand strategy of preponderance instituted a bounded rationality of mission in the FPDM stage and the operationalization stage that precluded the inclusion of an unfavorable outcome. In each case, U.S. foreign policymakers greatly overestimated the capacity of the partner state to establish security and legitimacy and underestimated the capacity of hostile actors to mobilize and threaten the partner state. However, these preference-confirmation biases diametrically contradicted the assessment that victory would be easy to achieve; U.S. foreign policymakers promulgated this corresponding overestimation/underestimation even while inflating the threat far beyond what the actual threat to the national-security element of the national interest represented. The subsequent implementing of this inverted calculation created a national-security national interest where none was extant, then significantly harmed that new interest via intervention. This tactical application of the grand strategy of preponderance facilitated the strategic-tactical gap in U.S. foreign policy by creating monsters in order to have monsters to slay, consistent with the ideological tradition of the imperative of crusade in the modern history of American foreign relations

The ciao system

Abstract is not available

The ciao system

Abstract is not available

The Music Sound

A guide for music: compositions, events, forms, genres, groups, history, industry, instruments, language, live music, musicians, songs, musicology, techniques, terminology , theory, music video. Music is a human activity which involves structured and audible sounds, which is used for artistic or aesthetic, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The traditional or classical European aspects of music often listed are those elements given primacy in European-influenced classical music: melody, harmony, rhythm, tone color/timbre, and form. A more comprehensive list is given by stating the aspects of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Common terms used to discuss particular pieces include melody, which is a succession of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord, which is a simultaneity of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord progression, which is a succession of chords (simultaneity succession); harmony, which is the relationship between two or more pitches; counterpoint, which is the simultaneity and organization of different melodies; and rhythm, which is the organization of the durational aspects of music