Links - 3rd February 2014

Adisa Nicholson's answer to Gender Differences: I have a feeling that women hold more power in society solely because of sex. Is this view correct? - Quora - "It's very easy to look at the politicians and CEOs and state how a vast majority of them are male, but what people overlook is that only a stark minority of the population are politicians and CEOs, whereas 50% of the population are women. The only reason why the politicians and CEOs are male is because they know that women are attracted to money and power, because women are hypergamous. Men don't automatically get laid for being good looking and having money, which is why they're entrepreneurial. Men know that to be accepted in society they have to produce something of value. Women don't have to be good at anything to impress men, because err they're a woman... Before we look at how our society enables a patriarchal society, we should first look at the entrepreneurial people who dream of being rich. When was the last time you heard of a female music producer, or a female writer, or a female illustrator, or a female running a startup? Now compare that to men. It's not that women are being discriminated against or that women can't do these things, but instead that they don't want to do these things. Feminists like to talk about the patriarchy ruling society, but they cannot come up with coherent evidence of women being institutionally discriminated against in a way that stops women from being notable for a Wikipedia article. Given any social situation, women have a great advantage because they have sexual leverage over men. Women underestimate this ability, and they take for granted how easy it is for them to make friends compared to a man. A woman can befriend 90% of the men she encounters, whereas a man cannot befriend 90% of the women he encounters. Some evolutionary psychologists and scientists believe that men do everything they do socially and more, in order to get laid... this is why most millionaires, criminals and creative geniuses are men, why conferences have such trouble finding good women speakers for its debates, and why middle-aged men tend to leave their wives for younger women. Research has shown that men once married have a decline in their creative output... Norah Vincent is a woman who dressed up as a man so she could gain an insight of what it would be like to live as a man. After her experience, she ended up in a psychiatric hospital because it was worse than being a woman. She then said afterwards that she couldn't feel happier being a woman... A third of men would marry someone they do not love, whereas a third of married women admit they have not found Mr Right"

SMU Confessions - #21929 - "I have an aunt who studied law in NUS back when she was a student. She's now a successful lawyer with nearly 25 years of working experience in the field. Initially she was a firm believer in feminism. She has even worked together with quite a few members of the various women's rights organizations in Singapore. She always thought championing women's rights was the key to equality. She had a brother. About ten years back, there was this incident where her brother's wife had an affair another man. And so they filed for divorce. Apparently, despite cheating on him, the court ruled that her brother should continue paying his ex-wife alimony. Her brother was a vice president in a bank then, and the alimony he had to pay was nearly 2k a month. PAYING 2k A MONTH TO AN EX-WIFE who cheated on you. Dafuq do you have to show such benevolence to someone who cheated on you. And this really pissed my entire family off. And we can thank the sexist provisions in the women's charter for that. According to my aunt, she felt as though she had utterly wasted the first half of her life being an advocate for women's rights, when those are the same rights that allowed for such sexist legal actions to be taken against her own brother. Since then, she has totally stopped being a believer in feminism... guys, just a sincere piece of advice - women aren't really afraid of you cheating on them after the both of you get married. They have their own women's charter to protect them. But when your wife cheats on you, you're really on your own. Which is why there is an increasing trend of singaporean men are simply dating and not marrying, or just marrying foreign wives."

Why Foreign Guys in Japan Get So Many Girls - "5. A boyfriend is cheaper than English classes"

Turkey democracy being rolled back, warns Gulen
The "mildly islamist" government strikes again

Turkish composer and pianist convicted of blasphemy on Twitter - "Artists and intellectuals have repeatedly been targeted in Turkey for voicing their opinions, and Say's case has renewed concerns about the Turkish government's stance towards freedom of expression. The composer has been a vocal critic of the ruling AK party and Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan and his government have been accused of wanting to dismantle Turkish secularism and of curbing freedom of expression. In a report published at the end of last month, Amnesty International called the lack of freedom of speech in Turkey one of the country's "most entrenched human rights problems""

'The Wolf of Wall Street': Women and Sexual Harassment in the 1980s - "Ask any woman who worked around finance in the movie's era what she thought about sexual harassment, and her answer will likely be a shrug: “We called it going to work.”"

Claiming ‘genocide’, Sabah Christians urge PM to act against ‘political Islam’ - "The Perpaduan Anak Negeri (PAN) Sabah said that Bumiputera Christians in the East Malaysian state have been oppressed for the past 50 years by Muslim extremists from the peninsula who sought to attack their faith and ethnicity... A group of 27 villagers from the remote Pitas district deep in Sabah’s northern region were recently reported to have claimed they were duped into embracing Islam for RM100... PAN said that in 1979 under the then Berjaya government, some Murut Christians were promised land for converting to Islam, but upon conversion, the land was sold to others instead who later sued them for illegal occupation. The Christian group also said that the National Registration Department (JPN) reclassifies Christians with “bin” or “binti” in their names as Muslims in their identity card... “JPN will only correct such entries if the Christians so affected can prove to the Syariah High Court that they are not Muslims in the first place!” said PAN. In the so-called Project IC, which was investigated by a Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCI) probing Sabah’s massive illegal immigrant problem, Muslim foreigners were purportedly given citizenship in exchange for their votes in order to keep the ruling government in power."

Medieval penitential sex flowchart - "it’s the fornication that took up the lion’s share of these handbooks, and every conceivable act was detailed along with the (heavy) price it exacted in penance... Marriage is no cure either, because there are endless strictures against marital sex as well. If it’s not procreative, it’s fornication. If it’s done on a holy day, it’s fornication. You see above what happens if it’s oral: you get a life sentence of penance. The penitential writers saw marital sex as a concession, not as a right or even a gift from God. The pleasure it brought was inherently sinful, a gateway to lust, so sex within marriage should be carefully contained and scheduled to ensure the most possible procreation and the least possible pleasure. Married couples had to abstain regularly or the very state of their marriage would degenerate into an illegitimate and sinful union. Even the children born of sex during a period where the couple should have abstained — mainly based on the Church’s liturgical calendar and on the wife’s reproductive cycle — were to be considered bastards... it is is a flowchart Brundage compiled from many penitentials which helps the pious man figure out if he can have lawful intercourse"

The Sexual Healer - NYTimes.com - "Perhaps not since Dr. Ruth commandeered American airwaves in the 1980s has there been a public figure with so much of an audience for her work on human sexuality. But if Dr. Ruth was trying to talk explicitly about the mechanics of sex in a pre-Lewinsky, relatively tame media environment, Ms. Perel has captured attention in the era of the oversexed. Instead of offering more explicitness, she writes and talks about the aspects of sexuality that can’t be captured on a screen, the hidden, psychological states that do or do not set the mechanics in motion... “She’s an attractive person, so men will pay attention — sounds horrible, but true — but not over the top, in a way that would make women not feel safe.”"

Penalties for flouting MRT rules under review - "The Land Transport Authority is relooking at how it penalises commuters who flout MRT rules, after a student was fined $400 for using an electrical socket at a station to charge her mobile phone."

Facebook v academia: The gloves are off - "the research uses epidemiological models but was carried out by aeronautical engineers. It takes data from Google Trends about searches for Facebook, maps it against similar data for MySpace - and concludes that users will abandon today's leading social network just as they did with its forerunner... Mike Develin, a data scientist for the social network, published a note on Facebook mocking the Princeton team's "innovative use of Google search trends". He went on to use the same techniques to analyse the university's own prospects, concluding that a decline in searches over recent years "suggests that Princeton will have only half its current enrollment by 2018, and by 2021 it will have no students at all"."

Left-wing thugs have a free hand in Denmark - "For decades the violent far left has been able to operate with near impunity in Denmark because of its excellent political connections and influence in the established media. The men and women of violence call themselves “antiracists”, “antifascists” or “environmentalists”. In reality they are revolutionary communists bent on the eradication of capitalism, says Kim Møller, Denmark’s leading authority on extreme left organizations and activities."

Muslims in Singapore need to accommodate too: Zulkifli - ""I personally don't see anything wrong if you're more religious and want to bring your religion to school or work," he said. "But on one condition: that Muslims — I'm talking about Muslims who have decided to leave their homes in Muslim-dominated countries to Europe (for instance) — must make more effort to integrate into the societies that they choose to go to. "You cannot go to Europe and say, 'Look, you have to take me the way I am as I was back home'; you are in a way a guest in that country. And while you want them to receive you and respect your religion, which I clearly think they should, you must also make the effort to equally integrate."

Singapore government controls civil society too much: activists - "She raised the instance of how the government was trying to push through a bill for a law empowering police to strip-search people in Little India even before its appointed Committee of Inquiry has had the chance to share any findings it might have on possible causes of the 8 December riots. She lamented that the fact that no one spoke against it was testament to “the sad state of civil society in Singapore”... “What would really precipitate (lasting change in Singapore) is if the balance of power is a lot less skewed (in favour of the government),” said Siew, noting that power is currently concentrated within the government, which decides on the parameters of action and discussion on a host of issues."