Links - 23rd November 2017 (1)

Chinese restaurant offers bra size discounts - "The company's adverts showed a line-up of cartoon women in their underwear with the slogan "The whole city is looking for BREASTS". It listed discounts for women depending on their cup size, with greater offers available to women with bigger busts... The posters first appeared on 1 August and have since been removed, but Trendy Shrimp general manager Lan Shenggang defended their sales strategy. "Once the promotion started, customer numbers rose by about 20%," he said, adding that "some of the girls we met were very proud - they had nothing to hide"... This is not the first time that a restaurant in China has offered discounts based on appearance. In January 2015, a restaurant in Henan rewarded diners it deemed "good-looking", a month after an eatery in Chongqing gave discounted food to overweight men and thin women"

Some women adopt sexist worldview 'because they want to be looked after' - ""One possible explanation for why women endorse an ideology that obligates men to cherish and protect them—i.e. benevolent sexism—is because they believe that the social hierarchy is natural and good. "They endorse what we call a 'social dominance orientation' and perceive that women's lower-status position in the social hierarchy is legitimate.""
Article: Negotiating the hierarchy: Social dominance orientation among women is associated with the endorsement of benevolent sexism

My Dad Invented the Extra Value Meal - "Before, if someone wanted to order a Coke, fries, and a cheeseburger, they had to order from several different parts of the menu; he made it much easier to order these items in sets. His workers were able to put in people's orders more quickly. He told Coca-Cola that if an image of a Coke was on the board, people would just order a Coke, because it looked like that was the meal you were 'supposed to have.' And he numbered the meals one through six, so customers could order by number instead of piecemeal."

Pornhub and YouPorn adult websites blocked in Russia, as authorities tell citizens to ‘meet people in real life’

Memo to a Google Engineer - WSJ - "Inconveniently, Mr. Damore also points to the discriminatory nature of Google “programs, mentoring and classes only for people with a certain gender or race.” Inconveniently, he notes the intrinsic unfairness of treating trait-based disparities as gender-based. Example: Studies suggest women, on average, may be more anxious and more concerned about work-life balance than men, but plenty of men share these traits too. Where are the programs to help these men advance in a culture that naturally tends to reward those who are single-mindedly focused on their jobs?... Mr. Damore is an embarrassment to the company’s strategy of appeasing the diversity furies with tokenism, perfectly acceptable to Google’s critics as long as it affirms their insistence that any and all disparities arise from discrimination and victimization. Its critics don’t really care about outcomes. They care about Google endorsing their ideological and political fixations. For all the world, this controversy is a dead ringer for the political correctness (before the term was commonplace) that descended on E.O. Wilson with his 1975 book “Sociobiology,” which made the now-undisputed claim that many human behavioral traits are shaped by evolution and passed along genetically... He was physically attacked at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, later writing, with excessive optimism, that it was the only case in America of a scientist being physically assaulted for “the expression of an idea.” Here’s where we don’t blame Google, though, for living in the world. Companies do lots of things in the service of “community relations” that amount to payola for critics. Yes, it’s an uncomfortable position for a company that prides itself on scientific rationality to be found practicing deliberate irrationality to placate politically motivated activists. But unless business gets more help from the larger culture, what can you expect? The Harvard of his day bravely stood by Mr. Wilson, though it’s debatable whether it would today. It even (if quietly) congratulated itself in 2000 for rereleasing what it called a “classic work” whose controversial nature “reverberates to the present day.” If you can’t expect universities any longer to be brave in defense of reason, how can you ask a company whose stock is traded in the public market and whose relations with politicians and regulators are crucial to its ability to adapt and grow? But at least Mr. Damore is likely to get a nice settlement."

Rebels of Google: Senior Management 'On The Verge Of Tears' After Trump Win - "He describes senior managers at Google being on the “verge of tears” following Trump’s election win, “cult-like” diversity training sessions, and an autistic employee who was fired after questioning the idea of gender as a spectrum... “On an internal list, there were people from certain minority groups presenting poor arguments demanding to be listened to because of their victimization.” “A coworker asked if any of them had been personally victimized, and if not, why they should receive special treatment. A few days later I found out he’d received a complaint from HR (they took it seriously).” According to Gordon, things took a turn for the worse when the Black Lives Matter ideology started to spread through the corporate culture. “One thing that’s unusual about Google is that it is fine to harshly and even unprofessionally criticize managers and other teams. Before we became politicized, this seemed liberating. Then, when Black Lives Matter hysteria hit its peak, sometime in 2015, it became taboo to criticize identity politics, and later on, it became very dangerous to criticize any member of a minority group at all (even if the criticism had nothing to do with their identity).” “The worst part isn’t the ‘diversity.'” says Gordon “It’s the “inclusion” – the banner under which they justify dangerous pseudosciences like unconscious bias and microaggressions, and try to make them company policy.” Ideological conformity at Google, says Gordon, is “far worse” than James Damore’s viewpoint diversity memo indicates. “Google is run like a religious cult. Conform and carry out the rituals, and you’ll be rewarded and praised; ask any uncomfortable questions or offend the wrong people, and the threats and public shaming will be swift and ruthless. The religion in this case is a kind of intersectional feminism, its central tenets are Diversity and Inclusion, its demonic enemy is Bias, and its purifying rituals include humiliating forms of “training” that resemble Maoist struggle sessions.” “This might sound crazy to a lot of your readers, but college students should understand, since it’s a similar culture”... "There are some very high-level people who consider the progressive agenda to be more important than the success and mental health of their teams.”"

As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People - "As a woman working in the brotastic atmosphere of IT, I ultimately came to a conclusion similar to his. So I sympathize with him. Let me explain... Finance back then was heavily male, as it is now. And technology, the same. At the intersection of the two … well, I can count on one hand all the women I worked with directly during almost four years of consulting. It was very male-centric. I heard about client outings, involving strippers, to which I was obviously not invited. And the sexual harassment (entirely from clients, not colleagues), could be spectacular. Which has nothing to do with why I left. This will make me sound a bit dim, but at the time, it never occurred to me that being a female in this bro ecosystem might impinge my ultimate career prospects. Nor did I miss having women in the room. I liked working with the bros just fine. And the sexual harassment, while annoying, was just that: annoying. I cannot recall that it ever affected my work, nor that I lost any sleep over it... Thinking back to those women I knew in IT, I can't imagine any of them would have spent a weekend building a fiber-channel network in her basement... I find it hard to blame it on current sexism. No one told that guy to go home and build a fiber-channel network in his basement; no one told me I couldn’t. It’s just that I would never in a million years have chosen to waste a weekend that way... If there were guys at Google wondering whether the women around them really deserved their jobs, did anyone wake up the morning after Damore's firing with the revelation: “Good God, how could I have been so blind?” No, I suspect those guys are now thinking: “You see? Women can’t handle math or logic.” The mob reaction did prove that women indeed have some power in tech. But the power to fire people is not why most people get into engineering. Good engineers want to make things. The conversation around Damore's memo hasn't made the world a better place, as they say in Silicon Valley. It has just made a lot of people angry."
If he should've been fired because women won't feel comfortable working under or with him, what about SJW employees? Will straight cis white men (who make up the majority or at least plurality of their workforce) feel comfortable working with people who keep mocking them for being privileged, racist etc?

Google Misfires on Diversity - "There are many supposed reasons that women are underrepresented in technology, some valid, some not. Foreclosing discussion of the matter -- even ineptly phrased discussion -- will hardly help. To the contrary, it threatens to diminish the very concept of diversity. It feeds the debilitating culture of grievance-airing and offense-taking that increasingly defines civic debate and substitutes for reasoned argument. It impinges on free speech. And it's exhausting. More to the point, it can obscure real problems"
"Men and women are the same, if you think otherwise you are a sexist bigot Diversity is good because women bring something different to the table. If you think otherwise you are a sexist bigot"

Google 'european people history' and look at images : milliondollarextreme - "really makes you think"

How Could You Represent Someone Like Milo Yiannopoulos? | American Civil Liberties Union - "we’re not representing Mr. Yiannopoulos just out of an abstract principle. We’re also representing him because free speech is crucial to progress in civil rights movements"
Given how robust free speech protections in the US are, from a freedom of speech point of view there is merit in increasing the size of the government

Newcastle sex ring: People care more about being called racist than preventing child abuse, says Rotherham's Labour MP - "People are more afraid to be called a racist than they are to be wrong about child sexual abuse, a Labour MP has claimed after 18 people were found guilty of involvement in a grooming network. Sarah Champion's remarks came after the individuals – predominately from Asian backgrounds - were convicted of or admitted offences in a series of trials related to child sexual exploitation in Newcastle. Ms Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham and shadow minister for women and equalities, also urged the Government to commission research into the crimes and said she “hadn’t slept” over criticism she could face over her comments. Speaking on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme, Ms Champion said there was a need to “acknowledge” that in all of the towns where similar cases have occurred “the majority of the perpetrators have been British Pakistani”... “If it was people from a particular town that were doing this crime across the country, if it people from a motorbike gang doing this, we would recognise that as an indicator and deal with it"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Eighteen convicted of abusing girls in Newcastle - "I genuinely think it's because of, people are more afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse. I know in Rotherham I've met front line social workers who when you know we're talking ten years ago now, when they were trying to report this crime were sent on race relations courses. They were told they were going to have disciplinary action if they didn't remove the fact that they were identifying the person as a Pakistani male. You know this is still going on in our towns now. I know it's still going on but we're still not addressing it... I would say from the cases that I've been involved with that the sort of senior managers are sort of tend to be on top of this. They go on the training course... the front line staff know exactly what's going on but it seems to be the middle management are more concerned about being seen as politically correct and doing the right thing than they are about addressing what is a very unpleasant crime... literally across the board so whether that's, the victims and survivors tend to prevent, present in say the NHS and GPs to social workers to children's services to the police forces and sadly we keep on getting examples. We get examples of brilliant people but we keep on getting examples of where these people are being turned away or where the race element isn't being addressed... we need to keep on referring to this because if we don't refer to it goes underground and then that's why we have this Islamophobic far right response to it because basically we are making it a race issue by not just seeing it as pedophiles who happen to have this background and dealing with why they are coming from that community"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Government launches immigration inquiry - "Trump won in America on immigration not because most people believed he would build a wall but he convinced people that he was serious about trying to cut the numbers of immigrants no matter how long it took"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Richard Dawkins: Don't vote with your gut! - "'Some people might suggest that actually your approach alienates those people who you might want to convince and makes others lose sympathy for your arguement'
'That's a very good point. I mean I don't actually deliberately provoke. I love truth and I love clarity and I think that sometimes clarity does come over as deliberately provocative. Actually it isn't. It's just attempting to be clear, straightforward"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Is there a civil war in the West Wing? - "The military is not a microcosm of civilian society. They are not there to reflect America. They are there to kill people and blow stuff up. They are not there to be socially engineered. We want people who are transgender to live happy lives but we want unit cohesion and we want combat effectiveness. There are leading studies from the medical establishment for example that state that the transgender community has a forty percent suicide attempt rate. That is a tragedy. We need to help those people. We don't need to try and force them into the hierarchical military environment where they are under the utmost pressure to kill or be killed and that is why the president is doing this out of the warmth of his consideration for this population"
Trans activist logic: trans people are so discriminated against that they have major issues and cannot function in society. Yet you should put them everywhere on the assumption that they can function as well as anyone else

Rees-Mogg fan ‘warned by police’ for posting content that is critical of Islam - "The officers themselves were polite and reasonable enough, however their message was somewhat chilling: it was insinuated that if I continued to post material which could be considered critical of Islam or offensive to the practices of Muslims, I could potentially be arrested for ‘hate crimes.’ Equally chilling was that I have no idea how they obtained my personal information and they weren’t willing to disclose this information during their visit."
This is in the UK

Minnesota Senate Wavering On Bill Targeting Female Genital Mutilation Because Immigrant Groups Oppose It - "The Minnesota Senate version of a bill passed by the Minnesota House that would punish parents who subjected their daughters to female genital mutilation (FGM) is stalling in the Senate because some members of Minnesota’s immigrant and refugee communities oppose it."

Minnesota retreats from ban on female genital mutilation - "Minnesota has imported more than 50,000 Somali refugees since 1990, most of them resettled by Catholic and Lutheran “charities” that get paid by the federal government on a “per head” basis for every refugee they bring to the state."

Chinese women make heart shapes with their breasts - "Some web users claimed that only buxom women could complete the challenge... Bizarre challenges involving different parts of body have always been popular among Chinese social media users."