"Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.." - William F. Buckley, Jr.
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China's 'Leftover Ladies' Are Anything But - "an estimated 7 percent of college-educated women in Shanghai remain single at age 45... Refuting stereotypes of docility, today’s Chinese professional women say they are even more ambitious at work than their American counterparts. Seventy-six percent of Chinese women surveyed in 2011 by the New York-based Center for Talent Innovation said they “aspire to top jobs,” vs. 52 percent of Americans. Chinese women employed by multinational companies frequently work more than 70 hours a week. One hurdle in finding a spouse is China’s long-standing tradition of hypergamy—or women marrying up, in terms of income and status. The older and more accomplished a Chinese woman is, the narrower her potential dating pool... Even with millions more men than women overall in China... [27 percent] percent of urban Chinese women in their late 20s [are single]... Unmarried women in their late 20s or older are often referred to in newspaper reports and sitcoms as sheng nu, or “leftover ladies,” a term that misleadingly implies these women have failed to meet men’s standards, as opposed to having higher standards of their own... the percentage of young women in Beijing who were sexually experienced before their weddings in 1989 was just 15 percent. Today it is between 60 percent and 70 percen"
Happpily, this doesn't blame the men
If you look like me, I'll talk to you: a preliminary study of ethnic identity and inter‐ethnic interaction among women in Singapore - "intra‐ethnic spontaneous interaction is more likely to occur among women who display a strong national identity. Moreover, younger women, who were exposed during their school years to the government's recent drive to nurture ethnic and cultural differences, are less open to inter‐ethnic interaction than are women in their 30s and older, who grew up when the government drive was towards creating one common national identity for the people of Singapore"
Suppression as a Stereotype Control Strategy - "Recent research reveals that efforts to suppress stereotypic thoughts can backfire and produce a rebound effect, such that stereotypic thinking increases to a level that is even greater than if no attempt at stereotype control was initially exercised"
An obsession with suppressing/eliminating stereotypes is counter-productive - the stereotype rebound effect
Sinkie girl on Channel 8 dating show - "Qyf Do u mind your bf career minded?
GCP: I don't mind,i like men who earn lots of money,then i have security,if men no money,relationship good also useless
Sinkle men1:A relationship what did u look at best?
GCP:Must be passionate,no need to say love me,must have stable income,should earn at least 6k per mth,i think this expectations is not high
All 3 sinkle men look stunned"
Clip from Love In Progress 爱。进行中 Ep 5
Japanese Noodle Bath - YouTube
RWS' dolphin Wen Wen died from acute bacteria infection
Luckily it was in captivity and had the chance of getting medical attention
SBS driver faces disciplinary action for verbal abuse - "Public relations consultant Leona Lo posted on her blog that she was walking from Bedok Temporary Interchange to the MRT station when a bus driver shouted “Ah Kua” and mimicked her gait, while other SBS employees hooted and clapped."
Best comment: "“Ah Kua” is a hokkien derogatory term used for transgenders and trans-sexuals." That's what the article above trying to tell us. But it is incorrect to say that hokkien word for transgender is derogatory as that is the only single, less hurtful, hokkien vocab that people here understood for transgenders. It only becomes derogatory when an adjective like "chao" (smelly) Ah Kua is added to it. It is even more demeaning when people refer to them as "pian tai", literally meaning abnormal sexually in a disgusting way. So, people should not take the word "Ah Kua" in hokkien out of context, unless you can show us another hokkien word that describe transgenders in a more respectful manner in your own mannerism.
But having said that, i do not approved of the bus captain's doing the Ah Kua gait. That is, so disrespectful. Hope my explanations go some way to putting things in perspective."
Gayness mandatory in schools: Gay victims of prejudice to become new McCarthyites - "Here’s a question shortly coming to an examination paper near you. What have mathematics, geography or science to do with homosexuality? Nothing at all, you say? Zero marks for you, then... many gay people are themselves uneasy or even appalled by this increasingly oppressive use of their cause. Privately, many will say that all they ever want is to live free from discrimination and not to provoke discrimination against others. After the case of Christian street preacher Dale McAlpine, the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell spoke out in support of the rights of people to express their views against homosexuality... the obsession with equality has now reached ludicrous, as well as oppressive, proportions. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has paid £100,000 for a report into how efforts to boost Britain’s coastal fish stocks would affect minority communities including the Chinese, homosexuals and Welsh speakers. And the Department for Transport issued a study looking at harassment and discrimination on ships and hovercraft against a range of groups, including transsexuals."
Is school biased against boys? - "The materials used, methods of teaching and the restrictions of the National Curriculum all favour the way girls learn. As a result, our boys are failing in alarming numbers... Texts stipulated by the National Curriculum are seen as geared more towards girls than boys. Research has shown that in classes where boys were taught English from non-fiction texts rather than classical novels, boys achieved better results. The change from an exam-based educational system to a continuously assessed one is also seen to benefit girls who are generally more organised, have better perseverance skills, and are less easily discouraged than boys."
One in 66 Britons is gay or bisexual - NOT one in ten, as previously thought - "The Office of National Statistics survey found that 1.5 per cent of men say they are gay, 0.7 per cent of women say they are lesbian, and 0.4 per cent of people identify themselves as bisexual"
Mark Regnerus and the Role of Faith in Academics - NYTimes.com - "In June, a sociologist named Mark Regnerus published a paper arguing that young adults with a parent who had had a same-sex relationship fared worse than those raised by biological parents without histories of same-sex relationships. He found, for example, that if your mother had a lesbian relationship, you were more likely to have been on welfare, to be unemployed, even to have been molested. Those with gay fathers did not suffer quite as badly... Dr. Regnerus, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, was immediately called a fraud, a charlatan, a shill for the religious right. Two hundred scholars signed a letter attacking his paper and the journal, Social Science Research, that published it... the University of Texas conducted an inquiry [and] found “no evidence” of scientific misconduct in Dr. Regnerus’s study... Dr. Regnerus has a long history as an outspoken Christian who once said his faith and his scholarship were intertwined. So it is fair to ask what he meant... Is there a Christian way to crunch numbers? “The answer, in my personal opinion, is no,” said Mark Chaves, a sociologist of religion at Duke Divinity School. But, he added, religious concerns “can very profoundly shape the kinds of questions we ask, and what we’re interested in, what we think is important and so on.” So while “in the narrowest sense it doesn’t affect his computations,” Dr. Regnerus’s Christian faith may have drawn him to questions about same-sex relationships and family structure. And a religious worldview, like any worldview, can dispose a researcher toward certain mistakes in thinking"
People only ask about the role of ideology when they don't like the findings (i.e. not scholar-activists).
Same-sex parenting and children’s outcomes: A closer examination of the American psychological association’s brief on lesbian and gay parenting - "In 2005, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued an official brief on lesbian and gay parenting. This brief included the assertion: ‘‘Not a single study has found children
of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents’’ (p. 15). The present article closely examines this assertion and the 59 published studies cited by the APA to support it. Seven central questions address: (1) homogeneous sampling, (2) absence of comparison groups, (3) comparison group characteristics, (4) contradictory data, (5) the limited scope of children’s outcomes studied, (6) paucity of long-term outcome data, and (7) lack of APA-urged statistical power. The conclusion is that strong assertions, including those made by the APA, were not empirically warranted. Recommendations for future research are offered."
People only pick on methodology when they don't like the findings (e.g. Regnerus's study)
Gay parents: are they really no different? - "the conventional wisdom has been that there are “no differences” of note in the child outcomes of gay and lesbian parents... Ten years later, the discourse has actually shifted further still, suggesting that same-sex parents now appear to be more competent than heterosexual ones... The rapid pace at which the overall academic discourse surrounding gay and lesbian parents’ comparative competence has swung—from the wide acknowledgement of challenges to “no differences” to more capable than mom and pop families—is notable, and frankly a bit suspect. Scientific truths are seldom reversed in a decade. By comparison, studies of adoption—a common method by which many same-sex couples (but even more heterosexual ones) become parents—have repeatedly and consistently revealed important and wide-ranging differences... the scholarly community has often been treated to small, nonrandom “convenience” studies of mostly white, well-educated lesbian parents, including plenty of data-collection efforts in which participants knew that they were contributing to important studies with potentially substantial political consequences, elevating the probability of something akin to the “Hawthorne Effect.” This is hardly an optimal environment for collecting unbiased data (and to their credit, many of the researchers admitted these challenges)"
Gay Parenting Does Affect Children Differently, Study Finds -- Authors Believe Gay Parents Have "Some Advantages" - "Teen-age and young adult girls raised by lesbian mothers appear to be more sexually adventurous and less chaste than girls raised by heterosexual mothers. Sons, on the other hand, were somewhat less sexually adventurous and more chaste than boys raised by heterosexuals."