Links - 10th June 2015

Women tortured man by burning hair tongs and lighter on to his genitals - "Earles, of Scarborough, was spared a jail sentence because she had spent five months on remand and was 'clearly a troubled woman with a history of psychological difficulties'. She was given a two-year community order with supervision, ordered to attend the Women's Community Project in Scarborough for a 20-day course, and made to pay a £60 victim surcharge. Teale, of Malton, was jailed for 12 months for actual bodily harm, burglary and the handling offence. Lilley, of Scarborough, was given a two-year community order with supervision and 100 hours' unpaid work. White was also given a two-year community punishment and ordered to take part in a 16-day course at the Women's Community Project."
If it'd been 3 men assaulting a woman...

Florida church loses tax-exempt status over raunchy ‘wet-n-wild’ spring break ‘twerking’ parties - "Club Amnesia’s since-deleted Facebook page advertised raves, pajama and lingerie “slumber” parties, and “anything but clothes” paint parties."

Parkinson's law of triviality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "Parkinson's law of triviality, also known as bikeshedding, bike-shed effect, or the bicycle-shed example, is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson observed and illustrated that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant spent the majority of its time with pointless discussions on relatively trivial and unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike-shed, while neglecting the less-trivial proposed design of the nuclear power plant itself, which is far more important but also a far more difficult and complex task to criticise constructively."

10 signs that you’ve become an auntie - "8. You have more handbags instead of schoolbags
Nike becomes Coach. Adidas becomes LV."

Slow jogging or fast running? Tortoise outlives hare in new sports study

Finally: A Wearable That Lets You Charge Your Gadgets by Jerking Off

Russian man has testicles STOLEN after he's drugged by woman working for organ traffickers

Michigan woman fatally shoots self while adjusting bra holster - "A 55-year-old town official from Michigan died after shooting herself in the eye while attempting to adjust her bra holster"

Singapore Botanic Gardens recommended for World Heritage Site inscription by panel - "If the Botanic Gardens is successfully inscribed, it will join two other Unesco-listed gardens: The 1759 Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England, and the 1545 Orto botanico di Padova in Padua, Italay (sic)... He noted that the Gardens is already favoured among locals and visitors, but added: "Just like any Unesco site, tourists would deliberately include the Gardens as part of their itinerary and it will become another avenue to promote Singapore if the bid is successful.""
It is obvious what the least impressive of the 3 is

Man gets six years' corrective training for serial theft and wearing only g-string in public - "A man who went on a six-month crime spree which included theft and appearing nude in public was sentenced to six years' corrective training on Thursday. In one incident last September, Loh Tzu Chye, 35, was spotted running towards Block 333 Kreta Ayer Road at 1.45am, wearing only an orange G-string, a type of underwear which exposes the buttocks. Under the law, appearing nude includes being dressed in a way which offends public decency or order."
In Singapore nude isn't nude
If I'm offended by women in bikini tops and hot shorts can I make a police report?

Squatch Says — They were really going for authenticity with these... - "They were really going for authenticity with these posters weren’t they?"

“Deflowering” services for virgin women are now a thing in Japan, apparently - "He claims to have “helped” over 200 women lose their virginity, describing himself as the “Virgin Master” whose services are “100% guaranteed pain-free”."

What's on Captain America's To-Do List Across the Globe? - "While the first five items are exclusive to individual territories, the last five items on Cap's to-do list are the same in every country. They are "Thai Food," "Star Wars/Trek," "Nirvana (band)," "Rocky (Rocky II?)," and the current addition, "Troubleman (soundtrack)." See, we're not all that different after all."

General Sisi and the death of democracy - "Egypt is one issue on which the human-rights industry - all those observers, international lawyers and NGOs who normally love telling anyone who will listen how outraged they are by foreign tyrants - are at worst silent and at best sheepishly critical... Last August, following Sisi’s military coup against Morsi, Islamists who had voted for Morsi took to the streets to demand his reinstatement. They were massacred in their hundreds. It is estimated that at least 1,000 were killed, ‘probably more than the number killed in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square’... A writer for the New York Times said the election of Morsi in 2012 showed that the Egyptian masses ‘lack the mental equipment to govern’. A writer for the UK Daily Mail said Morsi’s victory confirmed that ‘elections merely empower tyrannical regimes’. A columnist for USA Today said it would be better to have ‘a return to dynastic rule in Egypt’ than to have one unpredictable election after another"

China’s poor treated to fake rice made from plastic: report

42 Principles Of God Maat 2000 Years Before Ten Commandments - "Moses was, assuming he existed, an Egyptian. He supposedly grew up believing he was not Hebrew and was taught about, and believed in, the Egyptian Gods and Goddesses. It can be concluded, then, that Moses must have known about Maat and the 42 Principles."

If leftwingers like me are condemned as rightwing, then what’s left? - "The more politics becomes about identity, the less it becomes about the back and forth of rational argument... My stance on these issues makes some people in my “tribe” very angry. It is the anger of the pure believer towards the apostate... that’s what the mainstream left specialises in: generating shame. This shame comes from the phenomenon of what I call assumption creep – the assumption that if you believe one thing you probably believe another thing, which you are hiding. If you believe women behave differently in the real world from men, whether for cultural or biological reasons, you also (secretly) believe women are more suited for domestic life than careers."

Hating the Daily Mail is a substitute for doing good - "It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are. If you were frank and said, ‘I care about the environment more than most people do’ or ‘I care about the poor more than others’, your vanity and self-aggrandisement would be obvious, as it is with Whole Foods. Anger and outrage disguise your boastfulness. One of the occasions when expressions of hate are not used is when people say they are passionate believers in the NHS. Note the use of the word ‘belief’. This is to shift the issue away from evidence about which healthcare system results in the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. The speaker does not want to get into facts or evidence. He or she wishes to demonstrate kindness — the desire that all people, notably the poor, should have access to ‘the best’ healthcare. The virtue lies in the wish. But hatred waits in reserve even with the NHS. ‘The Tories want to privatise the NHS!’ you assert angrily. Gosh, you must be virtuous to be so cross!... No one actually has to do anything. Virtue comes from mere words or even from silently held beliefs. There was a time in the distant past when people thought you could only be virtuous by doing things: by helping the blind man across the road; looking after your elderly parents instead of dumping them in a home; staying in a not-wholly-perfect marriage for the sake of the children. These things involve effort and self-sacrifice. That sounds hard! Much more convenient to achieve virtue by expressing hatred of those who think the health service could be improved by introducing competition. In the jargon of economics, the assertion of moral superiority is a ‘positional good’ — a way of differentiating yourself from others... Twitter lends itself very well to virtue signalling, since it is much easier to express anger and scorn in 140 characters than to make a reasoned argument"
Addendum: This is now called "The awful rise of ‘virtue signalling’"
Additional extracts: "as Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs has observed, one difficulty about positional goods is that others may encroach on your ‘position’. If George Osborne says he wants a higher minimum wage, then to keep your ‘positional good’ as a person who cares more about the low-paid than others, you have to demand a higher minimum wage. So there is a bidding war. If he wants £7, you want £8. If he wants £8, then you up the stakes to £8.50 or — to hell with it! — £10! You will not be outbid when it comes to your kindness... Mild forms of virtue bidding wars have entered daily life. People now sometimes say to each other, ‘Have a great evening!’ These people are effortlessly showing themselves more generous and warm-hearted than those who only wish us a ‘good’ evening. I recently got an email wishing me a ‘fantastic’ evening. What next? ‘Ecstatic’? ‘Orgasmic’? There was a time when Britain had a form of Christianity in which pride was considered a sin. Maybe that is part of why some of us find all this virtue signalling obnoxious"

David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' - "I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered. Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh. And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live. And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well."

Matt Ruins Feminisms Shit (Silicon Valley Dialogue That DemonstratesThe Fallacy Of Affirmative Action) - "Richard: “Okay just to be clear, our top priority is to hire the most qualified person available right?”
Jared: “Of Course.”
Dinesh: “But it would be better if that someone was a woman…even though the woman part of that statement is irrelevant?”
Jared: “Exactly, it’s like we’re the Beatles and now we just need Yoko.”
Dinesh: “That’s the worst example you could have used.”
(later)
Jared: “We want to hire the best people, who happen to be women. Regardless of whether or not they are women, that part is irrelevant.”"