Links - 15th December 2017 (3)

Living in Asia Ironically - Posts - "Assumed my son was Chinese and I've spent his whole life playing homage to his roots, he's Korean."

Here's Why Cersei And Bronn Will Never Be In A 'Game Of Thrones' Scene Together - "In real life, away from the dragons, wights and Kings Landing, Cersei (played by Lena Headley) and Bronn (Jerome Flynn) used to be an item - and things didn't really end well. In fact, they ended terribly. They don't speak, they can't stand being in the same room together, and some have even suggested it's in their contracts that the two shall never meet"

Texas Man Uses Massive Inflatable Dam to Save House - "Wagner drove all the way to Louisiana to pick up a product he found online, an Aqua Dam. With the help of a couple of friends, Wagner installed the Aqua Dam’s 400 feet of materials and waited for the water to come. As the water built up around his home, the dam held it all back. Now, while thousands of his neighbors will need to make repairs, rebuild and replace all their belongings, Wagner has saved everything."

Usborne apologises for puberty book that says breasts exist to make girls 'look grown-up and attractive' - "After a campaign led by parent group Let Books Be Books three years ago, Usborne announced that it would discontinue publishing gendered titles, such as its pink Girls’ Activity Book and blue Boys’ Activity Book.
Secondary sexual characteristics are an invention of Patriarchy
I wonder if sales will fall

Welcome to the New Eidolon! - "idolon is now a space for unapologetic progressive and inclusive approaches to Classics. Our goal is to model a Classics that is ethical, diverse, intersectional, and especially feminist... Making ideological diversity a primary objective is fundamentally incompatible with fighting against racism, sexism, and other forms of structural oppression, and we choose to prioritize the latter... Classics as a discipline has deep roots in fascism and reactionary politics and white supremacy, and those ideologies exert a powerful gravitational pull on the discipline’s practitioners. If we want to fight those forces, we need to actively work against them... In the past we only deleted comments that were openly bigoted or hateful. But from now on, we’ll be monitoring and moderating comments on Medium and Facebook much more heavily."
"Metastasis" comes from Greek after all
Comment on Twitter: "And here I thought the classics of were about universal questions/ideas and accumulated wisdom of the ages..."

LOL Video: Serial Carjacker Gets Dragged Down The Street As His Pants Fall Off

Just Another Fun Not Entirely What I Was Expecting Epic Gif Dump - Album on Imgur

Yes, Hollywood is racist against Chinese, says actor Chloe Bennet, who couldn’t find work as Chloe Wang - "Bennet, who stars in Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, said her original surname made Hollywood “uncomfortable”. Earlier this week the British actor Ed Skrein pulled out of his role in a forthcoming film reboot of Hellboy because the character he was playing has Asian heritage."
Ironically the Ed Skrein controversy provides clues as to why someone marketed as an ethnic Asian would not be desirable in a non-Asian role
Too bad Norma Jeane Mortenson couldn't blame racism for making her change her name, or other struggling actresses can't blame racism for their not getting work

Emily Ratajkowski's boobs stop people working with her - "'There's this thing that happens to me: "Oh, she's too sexy". It's like an anti-woman thing, people don't want to work with me because my boobs are too big,' she said.'What's wrong with boobs? They're a beautiful, feminine thing that needs to be celebrated. Like, who cares?' she continued. The aspiring actress touched on the scrutiny she is under for positioning herself as a feminist while flaunting her body in scantily clad and nude imagery."

People believe in evolution, just not for humans

Man gets three months in prison for liking a photo on Facebook - "The 32-year-old was found guilty Monday of supporting a terrorist group after he gave a “thumbs up” to a grotesque image of an ISIS fighter decapitating a woman"

Darkwood Creators Share Game on The Pirate Bay, For Those Who Can't Pay

Clementine Ford, Aquinas College: Feminist refuses boys’ questions, sparks walkout - "SOME schoolgirls staged a walkout on feminist Clementine Ford after she refused to take questions from male students at exclusive Aquinas College in Melbourne. The 35-year-old blogger and controversial, outspoken activist was slammed by parents after she blocked questions from year 10 schoolboys at the private secondary school... following the fallout from the talk, Ford “went nuts, she crucified the boys online and the school had to do a massive backpedal”... Ford took to Twitter to lambast her critics as “p*ssants” and “angry w*nks”... “I was not paid to deal with ongoing bulls**t and demands from small minded boys who cannot handle being shown their world view is limited”... Ford said she had received offensive messages from Aquinas students on her Twitter and Facebook accounts and complained she had been called a “c***”. However in a July 2013 tweet, Ford used the word freely, posting on Twitter: “Too many c***s on twitter today. C***y c*** c*** c********. #c***.” Following the May incident, Aquinas College sent a letter to parents saying it may in the future revise its program to hire Ford to address students."
This is what a feminist looks like

Workers start hating their jobs at age 35: Survey - "It’s also possible younger people have lower expectations, higher hopes, and they’re not yet burned out. Ms Bodnyk was thrilled just to have a job when she first started her career. “Once you get a little more stable and settled in, you then look around and ask whether you actually enjoy it,” she said."

Don't be racist, be like Mario!

Proof that you should get a life - "Reducing hours, say, from 55 to 50 hours a week, would have had only small effects on output. The results are even starker when we are talking about very long working hours. Output at 70 hours of work differed little from output at 56 hours. That extra 14 hours was a waste of time. The crucial point that emerges from Mr Percavel's analysis is that reductions in working hours do not always result in higher output per hour (which is what our initial correlation seemed to suggest). Rather, the initial level of working hours has to be so high... The HMWC also reckoned that the absence of a rest day (like Sunday) damaged hourly output."

Getting There | Tell Me Something I Don't Know - "When you are a female in a big city you tend to be quote unquote targeted by err gentleman who like to expose themselves to you. My tactic for dealing with any sort of man who is trying to be aggressive towards me is to try to out crazy them. Or to scream as loudly as I can. Or make fun of their penis...
One of the dangers of a nap is what we call sleep inertia and so this actually helps counteract the sleep inertia which is the grogginess that you feel upon waking... if you have a cup of coffee right before you take your nap then you'll wake up feeling more fresh because the caffeine specifically targets the sleep inertia or that grogginess where you wake up and you actually want to fall back asleep and your judgment and decision making is impaired...
You are a terrible judge of your own sleepiness level. So studies of anesthesia residents actually show that fifty percent of the time they actually fell asleep on the job they reported being awake...
'In ten seconds or less let's say, describe a day in the life of an improv comedian'
'Working your job that you hate and then doing shows for free'"

Jordan: Nahed Hattar shot dead ahead of cartoon trial - "A gunman has shot dead prominent Jordanian writer Nahed Hattar outside a court where he was facing charges for sharing a cartoon deemed offensive to Islam"

Your revolution was dumb and it filled us with refugees: A Canadian take on the American Revolutionary War - "Roughly 60 independent countries around the world were once counted as British colonies or mandates. Of those, only the United States and the Republic of Ireland gained their independence as a direct result of political violence. Compare that to Spain, which violently resisted the departure of almost every one of its overseas colonies"

Dear Prudence: My girlfriend won’t donate to Harvey victims because some of them voted for Trump. - "I come from the Houston area and have been heartbroken about the damage and scenes from Harvey. I decided to donate $250 and asked my girlfriend if she would match it. She agreed, and then when I asked if she had given to the Red Cross or someone else, I learned that she donated to the Humane Society. I know she’s absolutely nuts about animals, especially our own dogs, but to give to animals when people are in trouble seems heartless to me. She’s much more politically active than I am, and I finally asked if she did that to avoid the possibility of giving money to someone who voted for Trump, and she admitted that was one of the reasons. I think that’s awful, and we’ve been fighting about it ever since. She thinks as a gay woman I should see her side, but I just can’t."
What if you avoid helping Muslims to avoid the possibility of helping someone who aided terrorism?

Penn State asks students to report microaggressions to administrators

Public university spends $16K on campaign to warn students to watch what they say - "Dozens of posters plastered across the University of Michigan caution students not to say things that might hurt others’ feelings, part of a new “Inclusive Language Campaign” at the state’s flagship public university... Words declared unacceptable through the campaign include “crazy,” “insane,” “retarded,” “gay,” “tranny,” “gypped,” “illegal alien,” “fag,” “ghetto” and “raghead.” Phrases such as “I want to die” and “that test raped me” are also verboten."

As A Minority, I’m Far More Fearful Of Being Accosted by Antifa/BLM Thugs Than White Supremacists - "Though I zealously support President Donald Trump and his mission to “Make America Great Again,” I neither own a MAGA hat nor intend to ever wear one publicly because of the fear I feel over potentially being harassed, attacked or even beaten for my political beliefs by radical leftists associated with Antifa or BLM. Yet in regard to strolling through town as a brown-skinned immigrant turned citizen, I feel zero trepidation whatsoever, due in no small part to the fact that the white supremacist bogeyman touted daily by the leftist media represent a meager 0.003 percent of the population. The truth is that these real-life Nazis are practically nonexistent in contemporary society, whereas the mindless zombies who swallow the leftist media’s lies exist in greater quantities than lawn grass. They’re everywhere, and they have zero tolerance for differing views. Case in point: When a black student from Ithacha College attended a vigil Sunday in Syracuse, New York, for the victim of the Charlottesville attack, he wore a hat with the conservative youth organization Young America’s Foundation’s logo emblazoned on it. And for that, leftists attacked him... as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, Yair, noted Tuesday on Facebook, the white supremacists who hate the Jewish people “belong in the past” and are “dying out,” whereas the Antifa and BLM thugs who also hate the Jewish people continue to grow “stronger and stronger” and become more “super dominant American universities and public life.”... That’s right, folks, the man elected by the denizens of the world’s only Jewish state to serve as their prime minister is a Nazi sympathizer, if not a Nazi himself. So is black student Caleb Slater. And so am I."

Bourgeois Values Scandal Tars Law Prof Amy Wax with Racism Charge - "Were you planning to instruct your child about the value of hard work and civility? Not so fast! According to a current uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, advocacy of such bourgeois virtues is “hate speech.” The controversy, sparked by an op-ed written by two law professors, illustrates the rapidly shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on college campuses and the use of racial victimology to police those boundaries... The fuse was lit. The rules of the game were the following: Ignore what Wax and Alexander had actually said; avoid providing any counterevidence; and play the race card to the hilt as a substitute for engaging with their arguments... As the Daily Pennsylvanian itself acknowledged, Wax had emphasized to them that she was not implying the superiority of whites. “Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” she had said. “The irony is: Bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.” No matter. Time to roll out the racial victimology... The idea that privileged graduate students at Penn, one of the most tolerant, racially sensitive environments in human history, experience everyday “hate” is delusional. The adults on campus so fervently seek the presence of underrepresented minority undergraduates and graduate students that they use racial preferences to admit many of them... Unanswered question: Were Wax and Alexander wrong that the virtues of self-restraint, deferred gratification, and future orientation are key for economic and personal progress, and that an anti-achievement, anti-authority culture of drug use and a detachment from the work force is inimical to advancement? GET-UP had nothing to say about those key matters... Typical of the associational chain used by campus leftists, the IDEAL Open Letter equates rational argumentation with “hate speech,” and “hate speech” with “discriminatory acts.” Without consequences for these “discriminatory acts,” U. Penn.’s “vulnerable students” will continue to be “harmed,” “dehumanized,” and “compromised” in their ability to get an education. If a student’s ability to pursue his education can be “compromised” by a single op-ed, perhaps he is not ready for advanced studies... As for Wax’s observation that migration overwhelmingly flows to countries that have historically embraced bourgeois values, not one of the critics has provided any counter-examples... The op-ed’s primary sin was to talk about behavior. The founding idea of contemporary progressivism is that structural and individual racism lies behind socioeconomic inequalities. Discussing bad behavioral choices and maladaptive culture is out of bounds and will be punished mercilessly by slinging at the offender the usual fusillade of “isms” (to be supplemented, post-Charlottesville, with frequent mentions of “white supremacy”). The fact that underclass behaviors are increasingly common among lower-class whites, and not at all limited to poor blacks and Hispanics, might have made it possible to address personal responsibility. That does not appear to be the case. What if the progressive analysis of inequality is wrong, however, and a cultural analysis is closest to the truth? If confronting the need to change behavior is punishable “hate speech,” then it is hard to see how the country can resolve its social problems."

Students See LGBT Flag, Give Libs Taste of Their Own Medicine - "Nearly 2,000 supporters on Change.org have signed a petition calling for the removal of a rainbow pride flag from a high school classroom. They’re comparing it to having a Confederate flag on display... “subjecting or explicitly exposing students from diverse political backgrounds to political views differing from theirs can make students uncomfortable and distract them.” Does that sound like a familiar argument?"

A free-speech rally, minus the free speech - "If one line captured the essence of Saturday’s Boston Common rally and counterprotest, it was a quote halfway through Mark Arsenault’s Page 1 story in the Globe:
“‘Excuse me,’ one man in the counterprotest innocently asked a Globe reporter. ‘Where are the white supremacists?’”
That was the day in a nutshell. Participants in the “Boston Free Speech Rally” had been demonized as a troupe of neo-Nazis prepared to reprise the horror that had erupted in Charlottesville. They turned out to be a couple dozen courteous people linked by little more than a commitment to — surprise! — free speech... A massive counterprotest, 40,000 strong, showed up to denounce a nonexistent cohort of racists. Boston deployed hundreds of police officers, who did an admirable job of maintaining order. Some of the counterprotesters screamed, cursed, or acted like thugs — at one point the Boston Police Department warned protesters “to refrain from throwing urine, bottles, and other harmful projectiles”... The speakers on the Common bandstand were kept from being heard. They were blocked off with a 225-foot buffer zone, segregated beyond earshot. Police barred anyone from approaching to hear what the rally speakers had to say. Reporters were excluded, too. Result? The free-speech rally took place in a virtual cone of silence. Participants “spoke essentially to themselves for about 50 minutes”... Even some of the rally’s own would-be attendees were kept from the bandstand. Yet when Police Commissioner Bill Evans was asked at a press conference Saturday afternoon whether it was right to treat them that way, he was unapologetic. “You know what,” he said, “if they didn’t get in, that’s a good thing, because their message isn’t what we want to hear.”... All they were guilty of was attempting to defend the importance of free speech. For that, they were unjustly smeared as Nazis and their own freedom of speech was mauled."

Thailand ranked most adulterous country in the world - "Thailand is the most adulterous country in the world, according a ranking from Statista, which found that 56% of married adults in the ‘Land of Smiles’ admitted to having an affair. Thailand appears top be an anomaly among Asian nations – the other nine countries in the top 10-most-adulterous list are in Europe, ranging from Denmark in 2nd, where 46% of people cheat, to Finland and the UK in joint 9th, where 36% of people cheat"

A Shortsighted Attack on Free Speech - "Under a legal regime where hate speech was not considered free speech, Trump and Sessions could likely punish words used by members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Do you think he’d police their speech more or less vigorously than white supremacists?"

The far right is losing its ability to speak freely online. Should the left defend it? - "“This is a really terrible time to be a free speech advocate,” said Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It’s a ‘First they came for the … situation,” she said, referring to the famous Martin Niemöller poem about the classes of people targeted by Nazis, “only in reverse”... the fate of the Daily Stormer – as vile a publication as it is – may be a warning to Americans that the first amendment is increasingly irrelevant. “Historically, the place you went to exercise your speech rights was the public square. Now the equivalent is Twitter and YouTube and Facebook,” said Daphne Keller of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. “In a practical matter, how much you can speak is not in the hands of the constitution but in the hands of these private companies.” The idea of social media platforms as the “modern public square” was recently endorsed by the US supreme court, which ruled unanimously that barring sex offenders from Facebook and Twitter violated their first amendment rights. And yet, this digital version of the public square is more closely analogous to “privately owned public spaces” – a very American type of park whose legal particularities became widely known in 2011 when the Occupy Wall Street movement set up camp in one such space... American technology companies that were once imbued with the ethos of Twitter’s famous sobriquet – “the free speech wing of the free speech party” – have changed the rules, or at least decided to start selectively enforcing rules that are technologically unfeasible to apply across the board... “If you think of the 10 companies that have the infrastructure to really survive on the crazy dangerous internet that is out there, a huge percentage of them are advertising-driven companies,” said Prince. “They will by their very nature have a much more filtered, cleaned up version of the internet because that is where their economic incentives are”... If the left does abandon its free speech principles, it may come to regret it. “I’m really surprised to see liberals talk about what speech needs to be taken down, and not take that conversation a step further and talk about who is actually doing the censoring,” York said, questioning whether we should trust either the government or “unelected white Silicon Valley dudes” to make such decisions. Or as Keller says: “We should not expect the new speech gatekeepers to be benign forever, or to enforce rules that we agree with forever.”"