COVID-19—Related Assault on Asians: Economic Hardship in the United States and India Predicts Diminished Support for Victim Compensation and Assailant Punishment

Background: There has been an alarming increase in discrimination and violence towards Asians during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic amid reports that the virus was first detected in China. In an incident involving a COVID-19-related physical assault, this study examined whether economic hardship experienced by participants during the pandemic and the race of the victim (Chinese, White) would influence support to compensate a victim and punish the assailant. The study also explored whether the perception that the victim experienced emotional and physical suffering due to the assault would mediate the relationships. Method: Participants in India and the United States reported on their own economic hardship due to the pandemic. They then read about an incident in which an innocent person suffered a COVID-19-related physical and verbal attack, and indicated if they would support punishing the assailant and financially compensating the victim. Results: When the victim was Chinese, participants experiencing a high degree of COVID-19 economic hardship were less likely to support financially compensating the victim or punishing the assailant compared to when the victim was White. Furthermore, when the victim was Chinese, the negative associations between economic hardship and financially compensating the victim and punishing the assailant were mediated by reduced recognition that the victim suffered emotional trauma and pain as a result of the attack. Conclusions: COVID-19-driven economic hardship experienced by participants predicted an array of reactions that reflected reduced recognition of the civil and human rights of a victim of a COVID-19-related assault. These findings have significant implications for mental health, public health, and the justice system, and underscore the pressing need for prompt action to mitigate economic hardship and to address racism and discrimination.

The Apocalyptic Hijab: Emirati Mediations of Pious Fashion and Conflict Talk

This article examines Emirati public discourse on, and imagination of, gendered pious fashion and conflict talk as animated in the sitcom Shaabiat Al-Cartoon (SAC) and other connected cultural expressions. Through a multimodal analysis, it contributes to discussions of the politics of piety by analyzing the strategic illustration of the UAE’s female fashion sense and use of the linguistic features that move verbal dueling to verbal attack. In this prefabricated orality, the article outlines linguistic forms in mediating gendered conflict talk and animating pious fashion. The paper further argues that a multimodal social semiotic performance that is based on language and apparel can produce powerful effects on the co-production of gendered identities. Additionally, it demonstrates through this analysis how the producers of an episode of SAC, through the use of semiotic cues, attempt to reflect and shape Emirati sociocultural values and idioms on pious gendered clothing and perceptions of religiosity and modernity.

APOCALYPTIC HOMOPHOBIA: FREEDOM OF RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION, HATE SPEECH, AND THE PENTECOSTAL DISCOURSE ON SAME-SEX RELATIONS IN AFRICA

In many African societies, gender roles and sexuality are intensely scrutinized, policed, and often enforced. Frequently, this situation results in perceived deviations being characterized in very strong terms. Many Africans across religious and denominational boundaries seem united in their opposition and criticism of same-sex relationships. In the twenty-first century, criminalization of same-sex relationships has witnessed an uptick across the continent. In Nigeria, same-sex union was criminalized in 2014, an act that witnessed massive support from Protestant, especially Pentecostal, Christian communities. Prominent Pentecostal leaders spearheaded the campaign in support and defense of the anti-gay laws in the country. Reasoned opposition to a practice based on religious faith, doctrine, and scriptural prescriptions is an integral aspect of the protection for the practice of religion. However, there is a palpable tension in the debates around rights to free sexual expression as a fundamental element of legally protected human rights and the equally constitutionally embedded right to religious practice, expression, and exercise. At what point, therefore, does the respect for the free exercise of religion and religious expression come into conflict with the respect for, and protection of, minority rights such as claimed rights to sexual expression such as many LGBTQI persons are increasingly contesting? Framed differently, is the verbal and non-verbal promotion of hatred, violence, indignity, and insult or giving offence to a segment of the population based on sexual orientation a part of free religious expression? How do the Pentecostal arguments against same-sex relations in Nigeria approximate to hate speech, defined as a verbal attack on a person or group of persons based on their attributes such as gender and sexual orientation, religion, or ethnicity? To analyze these and related issues, this essay examines the arguments used by the leader of the largest Pentecostal organization in Nigeria—and by far, the most important Pentecostal voice in the country—in the wake of the legal prohibition of homosexuality in Nigeria in 2014.

Grzeczność i agresja językowa w komentarzach internautów

Politeness and linguistic aggression in internet users’ comments Summary The presented considerations concern various forms of polite and aggressive linguistic behavior that collide in the comments of Internet users. Politeness manifests itself in various forms, following the patterns of traditional linguistic etiquette or modified by Internet users. Aggression is a form of verbal attack in which all linguistic means are used to discredit a given person. Both of these linguistic behaviors, especially in Internet comments,will change their faces and therefore it is worth observing and analyzing them.

Het persoonlijke in Thorbeckes Tweede Kamer

Remarks about the person in Thorbecke’s Second ChamberThere is always a risk in parliamentary politics that objective debate will change into personal debate and conflict. On the one hand, orators can choose to launch a personal verbal attack to their opponents. On the other hand, opponents can interpret verbal arguments as a personal attack, even if these words were not meant that way. In the most extreme cases personal honour is damaged and needs to be repaired through other means, including a physical duel. Compared to other young parliaments, the nineteenth century Dutch ‘Second Chamber’ (Tweede Kamer) had a quiet and calm reputation. How did Dutch Members of Parliament handle their emotions in confrontations that risked to become personal? How did the most influential politician, J.R. Thorbecke, deal with these confrontations? Which rules and rituals were at the disposal of MPs to protect themselves against personal politics? And what could contemporary parliamentary debate learn from these Dutch nineteenth-century examples? To find asnwers to these questions, this article explores personal politics in Thorbecke’s Second Chamber.

Nigeria’s 2019 electioneering discourse

The paper interrogates the various discourse strategies adopted by the electorate on social media (SM) to delegitimize political opponents and engender rivalry in the build-up to the February 2019 presidential elections in Nigeria. A total of forty-two (42) Facebook (FB) posts on Nigerian political discourse were purposively selected between November 2018 and January 2019, and subjected to pragmatic and evaluative analysis, adopting Mey’s (2001) pragmatic acts theory and Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory.From our analysis, fourteen (14) different delegitimization strategies were found to have been utilized by the writers to achieve the pragmatic acts of discrediting political opponents as unworthy of being voted into powers, while concurrently persuading the electorate to support their side instead. These strategies include the following categories: facts and evidence, issue-based rhetorical question, frank issue-based opinion, contrastive engagement, and dysphemism. Others are implicit antithesis, direct verbal attack, allegations, irony, demonization, self-indictment, lexical gymnastics, sarcasm, and prophetism. The findings show overt and covert persuasive strategies and interactivity towards the pragmatic act of delegitimizing political opponents, showing words as the real weapons on the battlefield of politics. The analysis further reveals that people tend to support a SM post not necessarily because it is true, but because it supports the chances of their candidate or hurts the opposing side. Thus a platform has been provided for implicit and explicit political stance taking, which may be difficult outside SM due to certain insecurity and face threats. SM has become a site for a running, fierce, and open political discourse, the new voice for the voiceless, as well as for issue-based campaigns in Nigeria. It may well become a space where general elections are won and lost even before a vote is cast.

Disagreement among Arabic speakers in faceless computer-mediated communication

This study provides a pragmatic taxonomy of asynchronous computer-mediated expressions of disagreement by Arabic speakers. It draws on a specialized corpus of approximately fifty thousand words in the form of naturally occurring comments/posts compiled over a period of ninety days from 19 Arabic Facebook Pages and Groups in three topic areas: (i) religion, (ii) politics and (iii) society. Following Relational Work (Locher and Watts 2005, 2008), I propose ten discursive strategies as underlying patterns of the pragmatic realization of disagreement among Arabic speakers. These include IRRELEVANCY CLAIM, CONTRADICTION, COUNTERCLAIM, CHALLENGE, EXCLAMATION, VERBAL IRONY, ARGUMENT AVOIDANCE, MILD SCOLDING, SUPPLICATION, and VERBAL ATTACK. With the exclusion of some examples, I argue that most of these strategies are neither polite nor impolite, but rather appropriate (i. e., politic) in the context of disagreement. I also provide evidence that sociocultural and religious norms have impacts on SUPPLICATION and MILD SCOLDING.

Trump's Strategies in the First Presidential Debate: A Critical Discourse Analysis

The young and vibrant 243-year-old U.S. has long claimed its status as a world power. As stated by the U.S.'s Congressional Research Service (2019), the U.S. shoulders the responsibility of defending and promoting freedom, democracy, and universal values, which means that America, being an active internationalist global leader, a superpower, and a world policeman, has been maintaining the power of manipulating partially, if not most, the whole world. This attention gains more significance as Donald Trump aims to take center stage once more in the presidential campaign in 2020. The way Americans choose their presidents will affect the world situation in many respects. While it is noticeable that there is an anti-intellectual trend in presidential discourse (Lim, 2008), Trump's presidential linguistic style is highly distinctive in terms of its simplicity, anti-elitism, and collectivism (Oliver & Rahn, 2016). Realizing the importance of Donald Trump's linguistic presidential style, the attention that it drew, and the likelihood that Trump may reuse his approach in the 2020 presidential campaign, this study focuses on the first presidential debate's strategies of Donald Trump in 2016. The analysis of the debate's strategies is influenced by the works of Fairclough (1993), Halliday (1971) and Goffman (1967). The results of the study revealed that Trump combined four strategies of presidential debates, including (1) self-acclamation, (2) describing opposing candidates through the verbal attack, (3) self-rectification or image-enhancement through the defense against opposing candidates' blaming argument, and (4) extra-vocalization. Trump's presidential speech is a source of valuable knowledge that makes use of both typical candidates' traditional strategies with a more business-oriented approach. It is hoped that this study might be a valuable foundation on which researchers can rely to consider Trump's changes in linguistic style when he comes to the upcoming presidential campaigns in 2020.

Emotions as a sponucal component of using rough language

The article deals with the peculiarities of the correlation between using rough language and emotional sphere of personality. Theoretical background of our research is scientific principles of some scientists: V. Viluinas, O. Luria, O. Leontiev, V. Tatenko, K. Izard, L. Stavytska, A. Buss, and A. Baron. It has been discovered that emotions cause rough language directly and indirectly through in combination with biased position, destructive beliefs, aggressive intentions, and the desire of assert themselves. Such emotions as irritability, anger, abuse, hatred, aversion, disgust determine rough language directly.Negative emotions provoke a status of nervous-emotional tension, which is removed via rough language. The psychological mechanism of a correlation between negative emotions and rough language is considered. Rough language, which is using for the purpose of a verbal attack, is as a result of internalization of aggressive actions. It has been experimentally proved that students, who use rough language, are under the action of language stereotypes, can’t identify and respect others’ emotions, control their emotional condition, to act without bad language in acute conflict situations, and believe that such language activity is permissible at the present time.The data of our study shows that rough language, as an essential sign and symbol of individual maturation, becomes personal, purposeful in adolescence; negatively influences on the formation of the image of “I” as a subjective core of the personality, which complicates adaptation and socialization; causes revealing inhumane behavior styles; distorts the future life scenario of a growing personality. The perspectives of further researches concern discovering social and psychological factors of a phenomenon of school bullying, improving preventive and correctional practices in order to creating safe and comfortable educational environment.

Weight Stigma Goes Viral on the Internet: Systematic Assessment of YouTube Comments Attacking Overweight Men and Women (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Anonymous verbal attacks against overweight individuals on social media are common and widespread. These comments often use negative, misogynist, or derogatory words, which stigmatize the targeted individuals with obesity. These verbal attacks may cause depression in overweight individuals, which could subsequently promote unhealthy eating behavior (ie, binge eating) and further weight gain. To develop an intervention policy and strategies that tackle the anonymous, Web-based verbal attacks, a thorough understanding of the comments is necessary. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to examine how anonymous users verbally attack or defend overweight individuals in terms of 3 themes: (1) topic of verbal attack (ie, what aspects of overweight individuals are verbally attacked), (2) gender of commenters and targeted overweight individuals, and (3) intensity of derogation depending on the targeted gender (ie, the number of swear words used within comments). METHODS This study analyzed the content of YouTube comments that discuss overweight individuals or groups from 2 viral videos, titled “Fat Girl Tinder Date” and “Fat Guy Tinder Date.” The twin videos provide an avenue through which to analyze discussions of obesity as they organically occurred in a contemporary setting. We randomly sampled and analyzed 320 comments based on a coding instrument developed for this study. RESULTS First, there were twice as many comments verbally attacking overweight individuals (n=174) than comments defending them (n=89). Second, overweight women are attacked for their capacities (eg, laziness, maturity; 14/51, 28%), whereas overweight men are attacked for their heterosocial skills (eg, rudeness, annoyance; 24/29, 83%). Third, the majority of commenters who attacked overweight women are male (42/52, 81%). Fourth, attacking comments generated toward overweight women included more swear words (mean 0.44, SD 0.77) than those targeting men (mean 0.23, SD 0.48). CONCLUSIONS Our data elucidate a worrying situation of frequent disinhibited aggressive messages against overweight individuals online. Importantly, the patterns of verbal aggression differ depending on the gender of the targeted overweight individuals. Thus, gender-tailored intervention strategies that specifically tackle Internet users’ verbal aggression against overweight individuals need to be developed.