Links - 24th October 2017 (2)

This sadistic Japanese fitness game insults girls into working out - "A Japanese romance-slash-fitness game, of course, in which a vaguely hunky manga character berates you into working out. The game is called Burn Your Fat With Me! For Girls, and I discovered it last month in the Apple Store after playing other types of otome, or romantic adventure games geared primarily toward teen girls."

What’s the matter with a little brother/sister action? - "The scenario of course is designed to ward off the most common moral objections to incest, and in doing so demonstrate that much of moral reasoning is a post-hoc affair-a way of justifying judgments that you've already reached though an emotional gut response to a situation. Although we like to think of ourselves as arriving at our moral judgments after painstaking rational deliberation, or at least some kind of deliberation anyhow, Haidt's model-the "social intuititionist model"-sees the process as just the reverse. We judge and then we reason. Reason is the press secretary of the emotions, as Haidt is fond of saying, the ex post facto spin doctor of beliefs we've arrived at through a largely intuitive process... we must recognize even the people we consider to be the epitome of pure evil-the Islamic fundamentalists who engineered 9/11 for example-are motivated by moral goals, however distorted we find them to be"

No football in void decks: Singapore’s irresistible urge to police empty spaces - "Architect professor Jason Pomeroy argues that by assigning specific activities to public spaces and restricting others (such as by banning running, smoking, ball games and speaking loudly), the state has turned void decks into sterile spaces which end up being underutilised."

New DOJ Statistics on Race and Violent Crime - "Some observers argue that what causes the overwhelming preponderance of black-on-white over white-on-black violence is “chance of encounter,” due to the fact that there are five times as many whites as blacks in the American population. However, there are only about 30 percent more Hispanics than blacks, yet black-on-Hispanic violence is almost as lopsided as black-on-white violence. This suggests blacks may be deliberately targeting both whites and Hispanics. Using figures for the 2013 racial mix of the population–62.2 percent white, 17.1 percent Hispanic, 13.2 percent black–we can calculate the average likelihood of a person of each race attacking the other. A black is 27 times more likely to attack a white and 8 times more likely to attack a Hispanic than the other way around. A Hispanic is eight times more likely to attack a white than vice versa."

The secret lives of international students - "For many of the 500,000 foreign students in Australia, our liberal, more tolerant society offers them a golden chance to open up and enjoy their youth."

Why Germans Work Fewer Hours But Produce More: A Study in Culture - "In German business culture, when an employee is at work, they should not be doing anything other than their work. Facebook, office gossip with co-workers, trolling Reddit for hours, and pulling up a fake spreadsheet when your boss walks by are socially unacceptable behaviors. Obviously, in the United States these behaviors are frowned up on by management. But in Germany, there is zero tolerance among peers for such frivolous activities."

Academic Torrents - "We've designed a distributed system for sharing enormous datasets - for researchers, by researchers. The result is a scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant repository for data, with blazing fast download speeds"

Footage reveals one of the most common Roma scams tourists fall for in Paris - "The 26-point strategy (see box above) is focusing on Eastern European gangs, who were believed to be responsible for much of the thefts from tourists."
Racial profiling!

While I'm personally disappointed by President... - Jennifer Taryn Walters - " The military is not for everyone, if we can disqualify you over the cost and risks associated with mere asthma... why should we take on people with far greater health concerns. There are other ways you can serve your country. My biggest disappointment in the whole ordeal is how the trans community were desperately riding the coat tails of the gay and lesbian community. The LG community has fought a different battle for a longer time, we as transgender people have to fight our own battles and not just say "well you let the the gays do this" or "I should be lumped into their category". Being gay is a sexual orientation, being transgender is a medical condition that comes with is own set of obstacles. We cannot assume to be treated the exact same as people radically different from us. The trans community has pushed and pushed and pushed its ever changing motives and agendas to lengths that have not been seen before in a social movement. If you're upset that you can't serve now, I suggest you look inside your own community and blame the people who slandered "straight" men who don't like penises as transphobic. I also suggest that you look to the people who have basically stollen money from tax payers over hurt feelings. I don't want my military going broke over lawsuits that some grunt called a transwoman the wrong gender or that someone overheard the word "tranny" in a group of returning soldiers. This community has no right to blame anyone but ourselves on my humble opinion."

William Hawkyns - Regarding Trump's ban on Transgenders serving in... - " It took three years of regular seizures, pharmaceutical trials, and heartbreak, but at some point I realized that my condition was not only a hazard to my health, but a threat to those with whom I served. I couldn't train regularly, I couldn't handle a firearm on the range, and I wasn't able to even drive, thereby hindering my ability to participate in a number of operations, to include the deployments I was so desperately seeking... I say this because Trump's decision today regarding the transgendered community is absolutely the correct one. The medical requirements for those who have yet to transition is tremendous, and the time away from crucial training events is something that could cost young men and women their lives on the battlefield."
Comment elsewhere: ""The prevalence of suicide attempts... is 41 percent, which vastly exceeds the 4.6 percent of the overall U.S. population who report a lifetime suicide attempt... "
A suicidal person out of the military is unlikely to cause other deaths. In the military? You want a suicidal person piloting a plane? Driving a truck filled with explosives? Even if they don't directly kill others, a military suicide can mean a man down when combat starts, which gets others killed."

I Was Once Transgender. Why I Think Trump Made the Right Decision for the Military. - "Through my website, sexchangeregret.com, I hear from people who experienced firsthand how damaging and unnecessary reassignment surgeries were. For them, the sex change failed to resolve the emotional and psychological disorders that drove the desire to change gender. Many write after living the transgender life for years. They write to ask for advice on how to reverse the original surgical change and restore their lives to the original birth gender like I did, a process called detransition. Some service members will come to regret having undergone the surgery and will want to detransition. Where will the military be then? Will the military pay for the sex change reversal procedure, too? Failed “sex change surgeries” are not uncommon and will drive up the cost to care for the military transgender population above the projected $3-4 billion 10-year cost. Beyond the financial cost, there’s the question of the service member’s military readiness during their transition or detransition, as the process often comes with a great deal of anxiety and emotional instability."

The Pentagon spends 5 times more on Viagra than transgender services
This is like saying that since the absolute number of transsexuals who try to kill themselves (commit suicide) is low, it's not a problem
This is also ignoring how people respond to incentives

Transgender Suicide Rate Isn’t Due To Discrimination - "The Centers for Disease Control’s numbers on suicide indicate that the highest rates of suicide over the past 15 years or so belong to…white people. In contrast, in most of the years surveyed black people had the lowest suicide rate among all ethnicities. White suicide actually rose in the period 2000-2014. If discrimination were truly a motivating factor for suicide, you would expect the black suicide rate to be a good deal higher than it is, if not higher outright than the white rate: blacks report overwhelmingly higher rates of perceived racial discrimination than whites, and it is reasonable to assume that actual instances of discrimination against blacks are a good deal higher than those against whites. Yet the suicide rate of the former remains stubbornly lower than that of the latter... discrimination is almost certainly a nondeterminate factor in general suicide rates. Mental illness, on the other hand, is very clearly a motivating factor in a great many suicides: the rate of successful suicide is extremely correlative with conditions of mental illness. Since transgenderism is a deleterious psychological affliction, it is wholly unsurprising to find higher rates of suicide among that class of people."

AR Devine: An Alt-Liberal Perspective: Sex changes: Why we shouldn't alter the traditional meaning of gender - "The vast majority of non-conforming gender identities have surfaced and proliferated in the past few decades in western societies largely amongst those with a liberal arts University education. This trend occurred at a time when post-modernist theories that promote a cornucopia of gender identities have been in the ascendancy in academia. It is not the traditional definition of gender that is a social construct, but rather the emergence of a multiplicity of gender identities... Blaire White, a transsexual woman and popular Youtube commentator, states that most non-conforming gender identities are not in fact transgendered. She argues that non-conforming gender identities, such as non-binary, are only found amongst feminists and those on the left, whereas people who experience gender dysphoria and wish to live as the opposite sex can be found across the political spectrum... If we allow individuals' subjective feelings to become a basis for legal definitions of identity then people who identify as transspecies or otherkin have as much a right to have their identities acknowledged as a non-binary or genderfluid individual. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that one day you will go to work and Pete from accounts will be dressed in a badger outfit and demanding that his identity as a badger be respected and if you point out that he is in fact a bloke you may well be sacked for a 'hate crime.' Once upon a time, the men in white jackets would have come for Pete, but soon the boys in blue may come for you."

34 Ridiculous Chinese Character Tattoos Translated

Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate - "A BuzzFeed News analysis found that three big right-wing Facebook pages published false or misleading information 38% of the time during the period analyzed, and three large left-wing pages did so in nearly 20% of posts"

Buzzfeed and its readers finally realize that they are easy to troll - "In the past year alone, Internet trolls have convinced the mainstream media that Pepe the frog is racist, that drinking milk is a white supremacist trademark, and just recently, that the OK sign is a far right hate symbol. It seems like that last one was the final nail in the coffin, and Buzzfeed has had enough."

Women Reveal What They Do To Show Men That They're Interested

Nobel secretary regrets Obama peace prize - "In an amusing anecdote, Mr Lundestad relates how he found Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who won the award in 1994, watching an episode of the Tom and Jerry cartoon in his hotel with other Palestine Liberation Organisation members. "It was made very clear that they intended to watch until the end," he said."

Just your average day on public transport : StarWars

It's time to stop using the word 'Asians' - "Obviously Sikhs and Hindus and other "Asian" non-Muslims, including Jains, Zoroastrians, Christians and Buddhists, don’t want to be associated with sexual grooming of vulnerable white girls. The vast majority of Muslims don’t want to either. The girls targeted in Rochdale, Derby and now in Luton are all non-Muslim. This is nothing new for British Hindus and Sikhs, who have complained about targeting of their girls for decades; Indians refer to the practice as "love-jihad"... commentators are unwilling to label the perpetrators "Muslim", opting instead to hide behind the fudge of "Asian". Lessons can be learned from Britain's own colonial history. The Empire's attitudes towards natives may have been problematic from a modern perspective, but it was careful to distinguish between the different inhabitants of the subcontinent... it is simple cowardice to pretend that grooming is not a problem for the Muslim community, but Asians in general"

Hundreds of British mums 'breast-ironing' their daughters using red-hot rocks, hammers and spatulas - "It is thought more than 1,000 women across the UK have been subjected to the barbaric ritual. The sickening act is commonplace in parts of Africa, but those at the ­frontline of child protection say it is also happening in African communities in the UK... The idea is that by removing their breast tissue, youngsters will be less sexually attractive and less likely to become pregnant at a young age, ­preventing them bringing shame on their families. Sadly it is mostly carried out by the girls’ own mothers, who believe it is in their best interests."

National Arts Council faces online backlash for congratulating Sonny Liew for Eisner awards - "Liew made a nuanced call for more dialogue between the authorities and the arts community. Otherwise, he said, "it would be too easy to form antagonistic tribes caught up in conflicts no one actually wants to be in, instead of having everyone work together to nurture artists and the arts here in Singapore"... "The NAC is clearly not some monolithic all-powerful organisation, but rather one made up of many disparate individuals, many of whom are trying to do their best, as part of a relatively small branch of the government, acting under the constraints of ministers and ministries. "And even higher up in the food chain, I think it is often the system that determines outcomes, whatever the actual intentions of individuals within it."... [The NAC] would like to encourage people to celebrate Liew's achievement by attending his theatrical venture Becoming Graphic next month at the Singapore International Festival of Arts, which is commissioned by the council."
If the NAC were so evil, why did they commission a work from him?

Iranian TV host who promotes Islamic dress code sparks backlash for drinking beer without hijab - "An Iranian state television presenter has sparked outrage after footage emerged of her drinking beer without wearing a hijab while on holiday in Switzerland... Azadeh Namdari, who is also a presenter and actress, has actively endorsed wearing the hijab... Ms Namdari said she had been sitting alongside members of her family and "maharem" - close relatives who a woman is not required to wear a hijab among – in a park. She claimed her scarf had fallen abruptly and the clip was immediately recorded by a random person. She did not mention the bottles of beer in the video or seek to explain them."

Iranian women cut their hair off and dress as men to avoid morality police

‘Allergic’ diners driving chefs crazy with picky demands - "“You have these people who come in on a first date and they say ‘I’m allergic to onions’ because they just don’t want to have onion breath,” Friesen said. “And we say ‘well, it’s an Asian restaurant, you know there are onions in pretty much everything’ ... or eschalots or onion powder or whatever. And then they say ‘oh OK it’s fine. I’ll just eat everything’. So clearly it’s not an allergy at all... Maria Said, of Allergy & Anaphylaxis Australia, says the huge spike in customised cooking has led to a watered-down kitchen culture where cooks can become complacent to genuine, life-threatening allergies."