Links - 6th September 217 (2)

China's bike-sharing firm Wukong Bike closes after 90% of its bicycles go missing - "A bicycle-sharing company in China, Wukong Bike, has become the first to shut down after 90 per cent of its bicycles went missing, just five months after it started operations."
Ahh "stereotypes"! You can't pretend people everywhere are like the Japanese.

Top 10 riddles of private-hire operators - "How is something that is bleeding so much still alive? Since Uber started in 2011 and Grab in 2012, both companies have been burning money like it is going out of fashion."

Multiculturalism and the state - "Even in less extreme situations short of violence, if the state eschews all but a procedural role, the fact that not all concepts of the "Good" are reconcilable, in practice leads to endless contentions between claims to the right to pursue contradictory notions of the "Good". If all concepts of the "good life" are regarded as equally valid, by what standard are claims to be adjudicated when they contradict each other?"

The skills delusion - "New jobs can always be created as we automate away many existing jobs, but the new jobs often pay less. Projections by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) for job creation over the next 10 years illustrate the pattern. Of the top 10 occupational categories that account for 29 per cent of all forecast job creation, only two - registered nurses and operational managers - pay more, on average, than US median earnings, while most of the other eight pay far less... However many people are able to code, only a very small number will ever be employed for their coding skills. And even if someone in a low-skill job is equipped to perform a high-skilled one at least adequately, that job may still go to an employee with yet higher skills, and the pay differential may still be great: in many jobs, relative skill ranking may matter more than absolute capability."

Latitude allowed in Islam for the bigger picture - "I am aggrieved that the issue of Singapore Muslims in the navy has been reduced to the lack of halal-certified kitchens on Singapore naval ships ("'Define better what secularism means'"; Tuesday). But if this is a red herring, the Muslim community has itself to blame if it keeps harping on halal kitchens on warships. It is time Muslims reminded themselves that Islamically acceptable meals need not come from halal kitchens complete with a halal logo - all of which will not be available in battle conditions, anyway... It would not be the first time we sort out our religious requirement for the nation's overall interest. Among others, we abandoned the unpredictable moon-sighting method for astronomical calculations in determining Hari Raya in the 1970s and revised our views towards organ transplantation in the 1980s."

Heterosexual couple lose high court civil partnership case - "The pair, who have been in a relationship since November 2010 and have an eight-month-old baby, said they were determined to secure legal recognition of their relationship through a civil partnership. They reject marriage on the grounds that it is a “patriarchal” institution. The Civil Partnership Act 2004 stipulates that only same-sex couples are eligible. Steinfeld and Keidan maintain that the government’s position on civil partnerships is “incompatible with equality law""
Given that in the UK gay marriage wasn't rammed through by the courts, at least there's consistency here

I read only non-white authors for 12 months. What I learned surprised me | Sunili Govinnage - "“ethnic” writers don’t just write “ethnic” books about “ethnic” things. As Ben Okri argues, black writers are often “expected to write about certain things, and if they don’t they are seen as irrelevant”. What this means is that if diverse books are only valued because they can be categorised as being different per se, they are still othered. Even if writers from diverse backgrounds might do commercially well and be critically acclaimed, they face the risk of being stereotyped for their work. Valuing a writer only for their diversity, but not their humanity or talent – that’s tokenism"

Vigilante paedophile hunters ruining lives with internet stings - "The Daemon Hunter vigilante who targeted Peter in Staffordshire used the slogan "Public against paedos". He pretended to be interested in his target on an adult dating site and they arranged to meet in a branch of Costa coffee. Peter thought he was meeting an 18-year-old, and insists he is not a paedophile or child groomer. Only when he was waiting in the cafe did a text come through saying "she" was 15 and that he immediately got up and left. It was then that Daemon Hunter accosted him in the street, accused him of trying to meet a 15-year-old for sex, and chased him through town filming him. Peter told the Guardian: "He said: 'I think we need to talk because you're a fucking paedophile.' I said: 'What do you mean mate? She's 18, that's what I was told. I've just had a text message up there saying she's 15 and that's why I've walked away.' Next thing I know he got his phone up filming me, calling me a paedophile, asking her age. I was shocked. He started shouting I was a paedophile in the middle of town. I thought 'I am going to get a kicking here' so I just legged it." Within hours, the vigilante uploaded footage of the sting on to the internet along with Peter's mobile number. That night his phone was jammed with abusive texts and voicemails, which he said included death threats. So he fled north in his car, only returning when he thought the worst was over. Later, he said his house was hit with bricks and that his wife tried to kill herself with an overdose of pills. He was so scared he was reduced to hiding in a cupboard when the doorbell rang. Staffordshire police reviewed the evidence and concluded there was no case for any prosecution, but the damage was done. More than 5,000 people viewed the film and Peter has now moved to the other side of the country, cut off from family, friends and work... Police say some hunters have exposed people whose potential child grooming behaviour was previously unknown, but that in the majority of cases examined the targets do not reflect any sexual interest in children. Stinson Hunter has even admitted as much."Guys that I catch generally aren't paedophiles," he told supporters in an online broadcast in August. "A massive percent of them are guys that have been lonely and someone has paid them attention and they've jumped on it.""
More damage from the fetish of "protecting" "children"

Nobel judge fears for the future of western literature - "Western literature is being impoverished by financial support for writers and by creative writing programmes, according to a series of blistering comments from Swedish Academy member Horace Engdahl, speaking shortly before the winner of the Nobel prize for literature is awarded. In an interview with French paper La Croix, Engdahl said that the “professionalisation” of the job of the writer, via grants and financial support, was having a negative effect on literature. “Even though I understand the temptation, I think it cuts writers off from society, and creates an unhealthy link with institutions,” he told La Croix. “Previously, writers would work as taxi drivers, clerks, secretaries and waiters to make a living. Samuel Beckett and many others lived like this. It was hard - but they fed themselves, from a literary perspective.”"

Medieval manuscripts and the First World War | Podcast | History Extra - "We don't make people wear gloves. Clean hands I think are important. You've got much more control with your fingers. Turn the edges of the pages, don't put your finger on the illumination, I mean it could damage it. Be careful but with gloves you have less control. You're using pencil rather than ink and if you are writing with pencil with gloves the lead tends to come off on the end of the glove because of its material and it can happen then that, that a lead stained gloved finger turning a page can actually damage it more than a clean hand on the edge of it...
One of the problems with studying any work of art from reproductions, not from the original, is you often have no idea how big it is and that applies to everything from paint- I mean if you study art history entirely from art books you tend to think they're very small or or from slide lectures they may be enormous. But that sense of scale and the size of a book, most medieval books are restricted by the size of medieval animals because they're mostly made of animal skin so it is very rare to get a book bigger than a large sheep"

Kamikaze pilots and Captain John Smith | Podcast | History Extra - "The point of the kamikaze attacks was basically that American radar was thought to be so good that attacks, conventional attacks from the air wouldn't really work because the aircraft, the Japanese aircraft would be shot down long before they got to their targets. Instead with the kamikaze attack if you can skim the water at quite a low level, you can avoid american radar almost up until the last minute. This basically was the plan. You can both take out as many American vessels as possible but you can also send a message. Message being basically that the cost in American lives of trying to take the Japanese home islands would be unthinkable...
A the beginning these were supposed to be volunteer missions and what was quite striking is that the rate of volunteering was very very high. But by the end I think something like only two out of three pilots would actually have volunteered. The rest would basically have been have been forced into it. And it's interesting, one of the things that the pilots would be given before they go on their plans was a decent size flask of wine... for a few of them they were drunk in their bases, drunk when they were on their planes...
There is a lot of, a lot of very good poetry. There's also a lot of very bad poetry, of the sort that adolescents and people in their young 20s anywhere in the world might write because they are going between having a kind of grand vision of world history all neatly worked out with their place in it one minute, to the next moment thinking actually I have no idea what this is all for and I just find myself literally shaking in sheer panic...
Which century saw the most change, and why does it matter? Most people would say the twentieth century. Why? Atomic bombs, airplanes, computers, space travel and mobile phones. You would not believe how many people have told me that mobile phones have ben the bigest changes in their lifetimes. However, what about law and order? It was in the sixteenth century that the murder rate started to fall from levels that would compare with the Wild West on a bad day. And how about medicine? In sixteen hundred if you were seriously you sent for a priest. One hundred years later you sent for a doctor and hoped that your fellow man, not God, would save you"

Why Are There No New Major Religions? - "“Often cults are seen as aberrations, or a psychological phenomenon. Psychologists would see cult leaders as having delusions of grandeur. But I see them as something different—as baby religions,” said Susan Palmer, a sociologist and scholar of new religions at Concordia University in Montreal. “I think people are unaware how many of them there are, how constant they are.”... Followers of Millah Abraham believe that the near-constant wars in the Middle East are just one indication that Islam has fallen and it is Mushaddeq’s turn to continue the eternal cycle and establish the next iteration of Abrahamic faith. In the same way that Judaism was succeeded by Christianity, and Christianity by Islam, Islam is to be succeeded by Millah Abraham... State persecution, aided by religious authorities, is in fact a major reason why new faiths fail in parts of the world where government polices religious doctrine... “We’re capable of accepting Muhammad’s claims of hearing God and Jesus’s claims of being the son of God, because it happened 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. The mist of time lends its authenticity. If someone today says these things, we’ll say he used to be a vacuum salesman or something.” But the religion scholars I spoke with said that perhaps the biggest reason that new faiths like Scientology, Raëlism or Millah Abraham have failed to take off is the lack of state sponsorship... There are so many religions on offer in most countries that it’s hard for any new religion to gain a critical mass... Mayer’s analysis uses the metaphor of the market, treating new religions as products that have to distinguish themselves from their competition in order to gain adherents. Early Christianity, for example, distinguished itself from many pagan beliefs with its intense focus on the afterlife, and the possibility of eternal salvation and heaven... most of the dynamism is happening within existing faith traditions, as religious entrepreneurs within established traditions adapt their faiths to the needs of 21st-century parishioners"

BBC Radio 4 - Our Man in the Middle East, Part 11: A Strike to the Heart - "At the end of 1948... A ship docked in New York. Down the gangplank came an Egyptian intellectual called Sayyid Qutb. He'd come to study and hated what he found. Qutb spent time in Greeley Colorado. It was a university town founded on temperance, without bars and liquor stores but Qutb saw moral degradation everywhere. America, he concluded, was a moral wasteland. He was appalled when he saw a minister putting on records including this one by Esther Williams at a Sunday student dance in a church hall in Greeley. Qutb didn't just hate American music. He called Americans a reckless deluded herd that only knows lust and money... 'The dance floor was replete with tapping feet, naked legs, arms wrapped around waists. Lips pressed to lips and chests pressed to chests.'... For Qutb, America was a secular, brutish, degenerate society and the women were out of control. 'The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.' Qutb was convinced he was right and back home in Egypt put the finishing touches to answers that he believed would eliminate everything in the way of the sovereign rule of God. Jihad was to become an everlasting war. Qutb was handed by the Egyptian regime in nineteen sixty six. But since then his death and his ideas have inspired radical, violent islamists"
Muslims were being radicalised by American foreign policy before America invaded the Middle East!
Addendum: "Baby, It's Cold Outside" and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism - "Qutb returned to Egypt a radically changed man. In what he saw as the spiritual wasteland of America, he re-created himself as a militant Muslim, and he came back to Egypt with the vision of an Islam that would throw off the vulgar influences of the West. Islamic society had to be purified, and the only mechanism powerful enough to cleanse it was the ancient and bloody instrument of jihad."

BBC Radio 4 - Our Man in the Middle East, Part 15: Missiles and the Ballot Box - "I was woken up by sustained gunfire. I thought it was a wedding - the hotel is next to a wedding hall and Palestinians have a nasty habit - when they have access to firearms - of celebrating by firing hundreds of rounds into the air... in the street men were in fighting positions - the two main factions Hamas and Fatah were having a shootout"

BBC Radio 4 - Our Man in the Middle East, Part 17: A Flash of Nail Varnish - "For a while in the 1990s the BBC was very keen to see its onscreen male correspondence wearing ties, even in Iran where it's against the dress code. So I was asked to have a tie in my pocket for Friday prayers in Tehran, to whip it up for the piece to camera. And then to hide it again. I refused. In the West we struggle to understand Iran. Best i thought not to parade our ignorance on television"

BBC Radio 4 - Our Man in the Middle East, Part 18: The Revolving Revolution - "The fervor swept up many in the West too, but their opponents were organizing and I'd known the Middle East long enough to be horribly aware of the trouble ahead. I felt like a party pooper. Since then it's gone very wrong for the revolutionaries. Not for the first time in history the passion of the streets was outdone by the organization of long established groups. In Egypt, the military and the Muslim Brotherhood. When new presidential elections were held in twenty twelve the revolutionaries didn't even have a candidate in the runoff"

BBC Radio 4 - Our Man in the Middle East, Part 19: Unfollow the Leader - "Before the fall of Gaddafi I got to know quite a few senior members of the regime as we queued alongside each other for the buffet at the Rixos hotel. They felt safe there because they didn't believe NATO would ever bomb western journalists, their fellow guests. The officials never really understood why the West had turned on them, since they had given MI6 and the CIA so much help against radical islamist killers. Look, one said to me. Democracy didn't happen overnight in Britain, did it. I had his full attention when I told him about the Peterloo massacre in eighteen nineteen when the Manchester and Salford yeomenry charged a huge crowd of people demanding the vote, slashing and killing with their sabers. There you are, he said. That's nothing more than we're doing. The regime people had one simple refrain - if you don't like us you'll hate what comes next. Remove Gaddafi they'd say and the country will fall apart and Al-Qaeda will take over. It wasn't inevitable but more or less it happened. Libya fell apart after Gadaffi was removed and it's still in pieces"

BBC Radio 4 - Our Man in the Middle East, Part 21: A Mini World War - "The onside world wrote off Bashar Al-Assad from the beginning. The Americans, the British and the French said he had to go once demonstrators were shot. The assumption was that he'd fall like the dictators who had been overthrown already in the Arab short spring before the onset of their long winter. But hat ignored his genuine support. Much of it came from his own Alawite sect and other minorities including the Christians, but critically he never lost all of the majority community, Sunni Muslims. In twenty fourteen he even won an election.
'Now for all the savage criticism of this election, it's important to remember that President Assad does have a genuine support'...
He would not have got to where he has been in this war without that kind of support. Assad's opponents rejected the result as a dishonest farce. But enough Syrians believed him when he said his fight was against religious extremists. The kind who'd never allow fun in the sun at the beach. It wasn't such a stark and simple choice. Most of the armed rebels were not secular, but some of them wanted a state only as religious as Turkey"

Ngee Ann Polytechnic makes police report over Tumblr blog targeting students - "Some girls from Ngee Ann Polytechnic (NP) who had posted on social media photos of themselves dressed in shorts, yoga pants, bikinis and dresses were horrified when they discovered that those images were reposted with lewd captions on micro-blogging platform Tumblr."
Maybe the girls all thought that if they had 1,000 likes from men on an alluring image of them, it meant 1,000 men liked their tops and wanted to know where to buy them