Links - 26th April 2014

Barbarians at the Campus Gates - "student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone, and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object. Although there were professors and administrators in the room — including the college president — apparently nobody had the guts to put a stop to these storm-trooper tactics. Nor is it likely that there will be any punishment of those who put their own desires above the rights of others... Back in the 1960s, the University of Chicago was a rare exception. As Professor George J. Stigler, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, put it in his memoirs, “our faculty united behind the expulsion of a large number of young barbarians”... Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other “studies” was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these “studies” are about propaganda rather than serious education. Academic campuses have become among the least free places in America. “Speech codes,” vaguely worded but zealously applied to those who dare to say anything that is not politically correct, have become the norm. Few professors would dare to publish research or teach a course debunking the claims made in various ethnic, gender, or other “studies” courses. Why did all this happen? Partly because of the lure of the path of least resistance, especially to academic administrators and faculty. But there was no such widespread surrender to every noisy and belligerent group of student activists prior to the 1960s. Moreover, the example of the University of Chicago showed that surrender was not inevitable. The cost of resistance to the campus barbarians may not have been the only factor. Resistance requires a sense that there is something worth defending. But decades of dumbed-down education have produced people with no sense of the importance of a moral framework within which freedom and civil discourse can flourish"

America’s future racial makeup: Will today’s Hispanics be tomorrow’s whites? - "Trayvon Martin was black, but is Zimmerman white? For Martin’s sympathizers, the answer was yes. For Zimmerman’s, the answers ranged from “it doesn’t matter” to he “is actually a Hispanic nonracist person who acted in self-defense”... while we see the 19th century as a world of blacks and whites, that wasn’t true for Americans at the time. They saw their United States as diverse as we see ours—a hodgepodge of races and ethnicities, with blacks as the insoluble element. The difference was their construction of race, which placed various Europeans on a convoluted hierarchy of racial difference."

Some dude on Craigslist wants you to sit in a bathtub of ramen noodles - "Every talented chef holds fast to two pieces of conventional wisdom: A watched pot never boils, and noodle soup tastes better when a woman’s been soaking in it."

This website will write your filthy Craigslist hookup ad for you

Cheating Survey Finds That People Cheat With People Less Attractive Than Their Spouses - "Interestingly, male respondents said they consider their significant others superior to their affair partners in other ways as well. Only 30 percent of men cheated with women younger than their current partners, and only a quarter of the men found their mistresses more interesting or more in shape than their partners. So why cheat at all? Men admitted that they found their mistresses to be more passionate, better listeners and more caring than their significant others. Over half of the female respondents also found their significant others to be more attractive than their affair partners, but 50 percent said their lovers were in better shape. Similar to the male respondents, women reported that their affair partners listen better and are more passionate than their man at home. And a whopping 89.6 percent of the women indicated that the man they're cheating with makes them feel more appreciated than their significant other."

Kill The White People from NiNo - "Eddie Murphy at his best, old school"

Manufacturing Female Victimhood and Marginalizing Vulnerable Men - "Toxic victim-consciousness is the process by which women are made into class “acted upon” by emphasizing a disproportionate victimhood where none actually exists or isn’t proven. In “Women Do Not Benefit: The Science“, I outlined how toxic victimhood limits women and socializes them to undermine their own achievements. Toxic victimhood promotes the perception that women are “acted upon” rather than actors. When a society is promoting toxic victimhood, there is no need to limit women overtly through legal, financial or social restrictions. Instead women will limit themselves through their own mental foot-binding. Here I will look at a recent and very successful effort to manufacture toxic female victimhood whole-cloth, the CDC’s 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. The much publicized figure on rape from this survey is that 1 in 5 women versus 1 in 71 men are victims of rape in their lifetime. (If the rate men are raped is reported on at all)... The first thing to note is that the NIPSVS decided that men being forced to have sex with women isn’t rape... If the act of forced envelopment is correctly classified as rape—namely a woman forcing a man to have sex using her vagina, the vagina being one of the two most commonly used instruments of sex—then you get an equal risk of rape between men and women in the last twelve months... Comparing the lifetime rate of sexual abuse for men and women is misleading in determining their relative risk of sexual violence, simply because men disclose childhood sexual abuse four times less often than women... In a study on the effects of retention interval and gender on the perception of violence, Ahola et al. (2009) found that eyewitnesses rated female perpetrators less violent than male when reporting after an interval of one to three weeks as opposed to ten minutes. Ahola et al. (2009) proposed that over time eyewitnesses reinterpreted the behavior of perpetrators in order to conform to gender stereotypes regarding violence... That works out to about 40% of rapists being female and 60% being male. A far cry from 95+% of rapists being male"

Los Maracuchos - "How is it that the world’s fifth largest oil exporter has come to this? How is it that 70 percent of its population lives in ranchos—the slums and shantytowns? How is it that the streets here are not paved with gold? Who is to blame for all this? At the root of Venezuela’s woes is its class conflict, the gap between rich and poor. .. we won’t invite Jimmy Carter and, even though it is completely unprecedented, we will assume there is no corruption. Repeat the following: “I [insert your name] will turn Venezuela’s oil wealth into riches for all Venezuelans, including you [point finger]. I will SOW THE OIL so that you can fly to Miami to shop. The government of [insert existing president’s name] is corrupt. He [it’s always a “he”] is stealing the oil money for himself and his cronies.” That’s it! Just say it over and over again and spend a little bit more money than your competitor and you’ll win. Decade after decade—for almost a century now—Venezuelans have fallen for this... what you have is perhaps the best educated, best connected, best electrified, moderately well medicated poor in the world with attorneys, engineers and nurses living among them... When offered subsidized housing, most Venezuelans will say thanks but no thanks. Living with no rent and no utilities is much better than being on the grid and paying more, even if it means more security. Hence, Venezuelans use their college-level reasoning skills to conclude that free is better than cheap... Venezuelans are still, to this day, so desperate to believe this Arthurian Legend, to believe that they will someday enjoy fabulous oil wealth, that they have finally surrendered their democracy in pursuit of the delusion, allowing Chávez to change and rechange the constitution, pack the Supreme Court and Election Council with his cronies, make laws by decree, place gag rules on the media, and otherwise systematically undermine Venezuela’s democratic institutions. All in the name of a fantasy that can never come true... As a student of Latin American history I have, for many years, excused this country’s fate as something beyond the control of most, if not all, Venezuelans; that the continuing social decay was the work of macroeconomic forces, oil prices, Structural Adjustment Programs, even meddling from the CIA and the State Department. Yet, the more I learn, the more I see that the history of Venezuela is not the history of its neighbors, not the history of coups and puppet governments, of flagrant economic imperialism and exploitation. There was no Pinochet here, no Batista, no Trujillo. The history of Venezuela is the history of Venezuelans cheating, defrauding, and robbing other Venezuelans and then trying to blame someone else for their crimes."

City utility drops 'Duck Dynasty' contest over LGBT fears - "Tolerance and diversity does not include men who wear camouflage or beards, according to Michigan’s largest municipally-owned utility. The Lansing Board of Water & Light has decided to cancel an upcoming "Duck Dynasty" look-alike contest off because the contest might offend people, a spokesman for the utility told me. “The decision was made in light of controversial remarks by a Duck Dynasty cast member against the LGBT community,” the public utility said in a statement. “The BWL is committed to diversity and respect community differences, and we regret if the contest offended anyone”... Serkaian told me there were concerns about "Duck Dynasty" patriarch Phil Robertson’s comments about homosexuality... You would think that BWL had been overwhelmed with a deluge of customers furious about the "Duck Dynasty" contest – but that’s not the case at all. In fact – only one complaint was lodged"

Video: Miley Cyrus 'Wrecking Ball' Chatroulette parody goes viral

OECD Better Life Index - "On average, people across selected OECD countries, spend 4 minutes per day in volunteer activities. People in New-Zealand, Ireland and the United States spend more than twice that time volunteering. In several countries, however, people spend hardly any time volunteering. This is the case in Hungary, Korea, Poland, Slovenia, France, Estonia, Spain and Mexico. Would you help a stranger? Around 48% of people across OECD countries say they have helped a stranger in the last month. OECD countries with a large share of respondents reporting to have helped a stranger also tend to have high levels of volunteering. More than 65% of people in Australia, New-Zealand and the United States reported helping a stranger in the last month"

Can a Parachute Save Your Life? Not According to Science. - "A double blind, randomized, placebo controlled crossover trial of the parachute means that the "advocates of evidence based medicine" would be put on a plane, given packs, and made to hurl themselves toward the ground. Neither the givers or the receivers of the packs would know which ones held parachutes, and which held "placebos." This is satirizing the view of people who feel observational studies - studies in which everyone is treated with the experimental medicine and the response of the entire group is evaluated - aren't clear enough or rigorous enough to prove that a drug works. True, these studies sometimes lack the clarity of a perfect randomized double-blind study, but as we see with the parachute, sometimes the results are pretty clear anyway. And in a life-or-death situation, no one wants to take the chance on a placebo. In other words, the "advocates of evidence based medicine" are being "challenged" with a little sarcasm."