Links - 6th September 2017 (1)

The title for my FYP is "Ex-Muslim Malays in... - Hariz Studynocure - "The title for my FYP is "Ex-Muslim Malays in Singapore: A Clash of Symbolic Realities as Double Deviants".
I'm looking for more Ex-Muslim Malays that are willing to share their stories and everyday experiences with me. They could even be Malays who are officially still Muslim but personally do not associate themselves with Islam.
If anyone has a friend who might be willing to be interviewed, please PM me. I would really appreciate the help"

Why Singapore Is a Terrorist Target - "Malay extremists viewed Singapore as an illegal creation. In this view, the city-state was historically part of Malay land but was transformed into a Chinese majority kafir entity through colonial machinations. Second, and related, Singapore is also believed to have been illegitimately occupied by infidels, especially the Chinese majority, which is seen to be anti-Malay and anti-Islam. Along the same lines, Singapore’s native population, the Malays, are alleged to be oppressed and marginalized by the numerical majority, especially through various government policies. Finally, Singapore is also believed to be hostile to Malay-Muslim interests at the regional and global level, especially through its close ties with the West, the United States, and even Israel, which are viewed by extremists as enemies of the Muslim world and Islam
SJWism has consequences, like encouraging terrorism

Singapore’s informative family feud - "On 15 April 2010, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was interviewed by Charlie Rose on American national television and declared without reservation that if anyone suggested that Singapore has a dynastic government – if there was any hint of nepotism – then he would sue them. That was then. Seven years and two months later, on 14 June 2017, his own brother and sister (Lee Hsien Yang and Lee Wei Ling) accused him of exactly that... It is rather amusing to see the Lees complaining about the abuse of power, the lack of ‘checks and balances to prevent the abuse of government’, and about the timidity of the Singapore press. They seem to be under the impression that this is a new development and that they are the first to notice... Perhaps the most startling and truly new development is the emergence of the importance of Lee Hsien Loong’s wife, Ho Ching. We already knew she was powerful as the CEO and director of Temasek Holdings, which is the holding company for the massive network of government-linked companies that dominate the Singapore economy. From the glimpse of the inside-family politics this episode has provided, it is now clear that she has power far beyond this role. There are 12 separate mentions of Ho Ching as a player in the public statement released by Lee Hsien Yang and Lee Wei Ling... Lee Hsien Loong has never been as revered as his father and the events of the last week are likely to have further damaged him. It would be different if his period as prime minister had been a litany of successes and achievements, but it has been far from a success. During the 13 years that Lee Hsien Loong has been prime minister, government in Singapore has been unambiguously ordinary"

Young, smart and want to save lives? Become a banker, says philosopher - "A high earner in the corporate world who is giving away large sums can create more social gain than if they did charity work, said Professor Peter Singer... Many people give to charities to which they feel a personal connection, but effective altruists are passionately unsentimental, seeking to send their cash where they think it will do the most objective good."

Crickhowell: Welsh town moves 'offshore' to avoid tax on local business - "When independent traders in a small Welsh town discovered the loopholes used by multinational giants to avoid paying UK tax, they didn’t just get mad. Now local businesses in Crickhowell are turning the tables on the likes of Google and Starbucks by employing the same accountancy practices used by the world’s biggest companies, to move their entire town “offshore”."

Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire - "if you speak English you are likely to save less for your old age, smoke more and get less exercise than if you speak a language like Mandarin, Yoruba or Malay... Speakers of languages which only use the present tense when dealing with the future are likely to save more money than those who speak languages which require the use a future tense, he argues... Linguist John McWhorter, of Columbia University, says any influence a language's structure has on the way its speakers see their world is extremely subtle."

What went wrong in Egypt? - "Has the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood been too ambitious and opportunistic? Have the youth been too naive to let go of their accomplishments and abandon the squares too early? Perhaps. What is clear is that decades of dictatorship and one-party rule don't just evaporate because the powers that be lost the first or second round to the people they long treated unworthy of government."

It was all just hype: China’s ‘straddling bus’ dream reaches end of the line with test site to be dismantled - "Sun Zhang, a transportation professor at Tongji University in Shanghai, had told the South China Morning Post that the straddling bus would encounter difficulty navigating turns, while motorists driving beneath it could face risks from limited road vision. “It can only run on wide and straight roads,” he said. “In big cities where roads are winding and jammed [with traffic], such roads are in short supply."

Stop Blaming Colonial Borders for the Middle East's Problems - "The idea that better borders, drawn with careful attention to the region’s ethnic and religious diversity, would have spared the Middle East a century’s worth of violence is especially provocative at a moment when Western powers weigh the merits of intervention in the region. Unfortunately, this critique overstates how arbitrary today’s Middle East borders really are, overlooks how arbitrary every other border in the world is, implies that better borders were possible, and ignores the cynical imperial practices that actually did sow conflict in the region. A quick tour of present-day borders reveals a few key similarities with the local Ottoman boundaries in place before the French and British arrived. The three separate provinces -- Mosul, Baghdad and Basra -- that were joined to make Iraq, for example, were often treated as a coherent economic and military area by the Ottoman government. And of course, the region’s geographic unity going back to the origins of human civilization, had long been recognized in the term “Mesopotamia.” Meanwhile, the fact that Iraq’s eastern border with Iran followed a line set by the 16th-century conquests of Suleiman the Magnificent didn’t prevent the countries from fighting a decade-long conflict over it that killed ten times more people than all the Arab-Israeli wars combined... The only country in the area for which no ancient borders existed was Jordan -- it was formed in 1922 from some not-too-desirable bits of arid land as something for Britain’s ally, Abdullah, to be king of. Like most kings, he would have liked something bigger, and yet under his family’s rule Jordan has been spared much of the turmoil endured by its less “artificial” neighbors... At best, creating more countries would have just meant more borders to fight over, while fewer large countries would have turned regular wars into civil ones... Most appealing, perhaps, is the idea that things might have gone smoother if the Europeans had just left the region’s inhabitants to sort things out themselves. This is what happened in the Balkans, where local leaders drew their own borders, and the fighting lasted up through the 1990s... no commission, no matter the good intentions, could have been expected to find the magic line that got all the Sunnis on one side, the Shiites on the other, and the oil right in the middle."

Muslim 'peace march' held in Germany but turnout disappoints - "The dpa news agency reported that a few hundred people gathered for the demonstration Saturday, with placards such as "Together against terror" and "Hatred makes the earth hell," and the crowd later grew to over 1,000. The organizers had expected several thousand protesters. The country's biggest Islamic association had refused to take part in the march. The Turkish-Islamic Union argued it would send the wrong signal by suggesting that international terrorism is mainly a Muslim problem. It also said Muslims observing the Ramadan fast couldn't be expected to march for hours in summer temperatures. That stance drew criticism from the government, which welcomed the march."

Muslim peace march: Hundreds take to Cologne streets to protest Islamist terrorism - "The country's biggest Islamic association had refused to take part in the march, which was led by groups representing the Ahmadi sect."
If most Muslims don't consider Ahmadis Muslims does it make sense to call them that?

Game of Thrones: Inside the World’s Most Popular Show - "Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the Danish actor who plays Jaime, is a bit less excited to discuss the subject. “I’ve never really gone too deep into the whole sister-brother thing because I can’t use that information. I have to look at her as the woman he loves and desires. Lena’s a very good actress, and that’s kind of what carries the whole thing.” He adds, “I have two older sisters. I do not want to go there. It’s just too weird”... with just 13 episodes left, everything is possible—alliance, demise or coronation. “Every season I go to the last page of the last episode and go backward,” says Dinklage. “I don’t do that with books, but I can’t crack open page one of Episode 1 not knowing if I’m dead or not”... In preparation for Season 7, Benioff and Weiss have gotten more possessive. That has further fueled fans’ curiosity even as it has created security challenges. In the run-up to Season 6, paparazzi shots of Harington—and his distinctive in-character hairdo—in Belfast tipped the Internet off that Jon Snow wasn’t, in fact, as dead as he’d seemed the season before. “Look at how difficult it is to protect information in this age,” says Benioff. “The CIA can’t do it. The NSA can’t do it. What chance do we have?”"

Battlestar Galactica's Ronald D. Moore Admits the Cylons Never Had a Plan at All - "As fans of Battlestar Galactica will recall, every episode began with a short synopsis: “The Cylons were created by man. The rebelled. They evolved. There are many copies. And they have a plan.” But... did they? Or was that just a big tease? Turns out it’s the latter, and now we know why: because an executive producer thought it sounded cool."

The Trouble With How Liberals Talk About Terrorism - "falling objects are not equivalent to three men ramming and hacking people to death on London Bridge. Terrorists attack not just individuals but society, which makes mortality rates a poor measure of the danger terrorism poses. Falling objects “attack” neither... Franklin Roosevelt famously told Americans during the Great Depression that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” Less famous is how he contextualized that message. He listed the country’s many “dark realities”—the government deprived of revenue, families stripped of their savings, the unemployed facing the “grim problem of existence,” and so on. The good news, Roosevelt said, was that these were merely “material things,” and they could be regained. Before fear could be feared, it had to be reckoned with... Obama’s stance on terrorism also contained a contradiction. He argued that the terrorist threat was much less severe than other challenges such as climate change and gun violence. But he didn’t scale back his counterterrorism policies to reflect that assessment"

HuffPost Spikes Article Demanding Execution of Trump and His Collaborators - "The Huffington Post -- home of some notably hateful rants, like the ex-Washington Post writer who said unlike George W. Bush, "You could argue that even the world’s worst fascist dictators at least meant well" -- has a line contributors can cross. On Sunday night, it was the notion of executing President Trump for treason...and a cast of accessories including Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, the Vice President, the Senate Majority Leader, and the Speaker of the House! The unhinged HuffPost contributor was Jason Fuller, who proclaims he opposes "extremism" in politics... Proclaiming war on ISIS? Also treasonous"

No link found between movie, video game violence and societal violence - "Since the 1920s, scholars and politicians have blamed violence in movies and other media as a contributing factor to rising violence in society... Previous studies have focused on laboratory experiments and aggression as a response to movie and videogame violence, but this does not match well with real-life exposure. Other studies have indicated that, in the short term, the release of violent movies or video games is associated with declines in societal violence. However, no one has examined these trends long-term. Some scholars have argued that movies are becoming more violent, but none have examined whether this phenomenon is a concern for society. This study is the first to suggest that movie violence and video game violence consumption probably are increasing over time, but that there is little evidence that this has caused a problem for society. "Society has a limited amount of resources and attention to devote to the problem of reducing crime. There is a risk that identifying the wrong problem, such as media violence, may distract society from more pressing concerns such as poverty, education and vocational disparities and mental health," Ferguson said. "This research may help society focus on issues that really matter and avoid devoting unnecessary resources to the pursuit of moral agendas with little practical value.""

Gentrification? It's the consumers' fault, says hotelier Loh Lik Peng - "Restaurants are not entirely creative endeavours. They are creative endeavours to some extent, but they are also businesses. Somebody’s got to come in and eat your food. If they don't, you have to pay the bills or close down. A lot of chefs are self-absorbed about things they want to eat, or their creativity and that's usually a mistake, because unless your creativity is at such a level that people are saying: I am going to buy into your creativity, you fail as a business. I make sure I give them the right incentives to do it right, whether it's equity stakes, or profit-sharing... A lot of the gentrification was driven by rents, so the businesses that can afford the rents tend to be more high-end lifestyle businesses rather than traditional businesses, largely because consumers don’t want to pay above a certain amount for traditional products and services... The reality is that the vast majority of Singaporeans are not willing to pay more than S$2-S$3 for their mee pok, not willing to pay more than S$1.20 for their kopi-o. So these people are being pushed out. People will happily pay S$4 for their cappuccino. So the guys setting up their cappuccino stores are going to make much more money than the guys who do the traditional kopitiams... there is a nostalgia for what they see as the old Singapore but that doesn't necessarily translate into people changing their habits"

Gunfire in crowded Ohio nightclub kills one, wounds 15 - "Police did not have a good description of the suspects, in part because witnesses were reluctant to cooperate"
Snitch culture means that Lives Don't Matter when they're killed by thugs

Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset - "In 2013, Hinshaw launched a new company COBOL Cowboys, which connects companies to programmers like himself. His wife Eileen came up with the name in a reference to "Space Cowboys," a 2000 movie about a group of retired Air Force pilots called in for a trouble-shooting mission in space. The company's slogan? "Not our first rodeo"... Experienced COBOL programmers can earn more than US$100 an hour when they get called in to patch up glitches, rewrite coding manuals or make new systems work with old. For their customers such expenses pale in comparison with what it would cost to replace the old systems altogether, not to mention the risks involved... One COBOL programmer, now in his 60s, said his bank laid him off in mid-2012 as it turned to younger, less expensive employees trained in new languages. In 2014, the programmer, who declined to be named to avoid jeopardizing current professional relationships, was brought in as a contractor to the same bank to fix issues management had not anticipated."

California student forced to pee in bucket gets US$1.25m - "A former high school student in California has been awarded US$1.25 million for having been forced to urinate in a bucket after being denied a bathroom break... the unidentified teen, who was 14 at the time of the incident, was not allowed to use the bathroom by a teacher during class because of strict school policies.

Member of racist Boulder Facebook group speaks out after expulsion - "One student involved in the group committed suicide, helping to spark the investigation. In Boulder Police Department's police report, officers said the student took his life to commit support to the Nazi-inspired movement. Students close to the group, however, say the student took his life because of the passing of his father, not the Facebook Messenger group... "Instead of talking to any of the kids about it, they just made ridiculous assumptions that, 'Oh, we're an ethnic neo-Nazi group here in Boulder, Colorado, planning to take action upon ourselves to hurt those of ethnic origins'""

Most adults overeat, many gain weight after starting work - "This is especially so among men, who typically put on 4kg within the first decade of starting work, new data from the Health Promotion Board (HPB) shows."