Links - 5th December 2017 (1)

REPORT: Passengers on Delta Flight Disputing Adam Saleh’s Story About Phone Call - "Someone else on the same Delta flight as YouTube prankster/hoaxer Adam Saleh told a reporter Wednesday that those on the plane say he did not make a phone call to his mother, supposedly the reason Saleh was booted from the flight. Saleh’s video of the incident went viral Wednesday, along with his claim that he was kicked out “because I spoke Arabic to my mom on the phone.”... Delta has issued a follow-up statement obtained by Mediaite’s sister site LawNewz finding that Saleh was being disruptive:
Based on the information collected to date, it appears the customers who were removed sought to disrupt the cabin with provocative behavior, including shouting. This type of conduct is not welcome on any Delta flight."

Adam Saleh In Viral Delta Video History of Faking Anti-Muslim Incidents - "The Muslim-American man who posted a video of himself being kicked off a Delta flight — allegedly for speaking to his mother in Arabic on the phone — also has a history of creating hoax videos purporting to detail anti-Muslim discrimination."

The Company Behind The Viral 'Organic Effect' Video Is Getting Sued For Misleading The Public - "Melanie Mallon delves into what she calls “Organic Cherry Picking.” She explains that the hyped results of the poorly-designed experiment showed exactly what we’d expect when dropping conventionally grown food: the level of pesticides used in conventional farming practically disappeared from the family's urine. But the kicker? Most people don’t realize that organic agriculture uses pesticides too, albeit different ones. And the experiment didn’t test for pesticides used in organic agriculture"

Friendzone triple-kill!

Rebels of Google: Senior Vice President Led BLM Chant on Google Stage - "“Most memorably, there was an open meeting in Charlie’s (the largest meeting space on campus) where people could deal with their grief at Trump’s election. It was either Ruth Porat (the CFO) or Eileen Naughton (the head of HR) who actually shed tears on stage; my memory was that it was Ruth. At some point in the meeting, she asked everyone to hug the person next to them”... “Since the town hall meeting was canceled because of people’s fear of ‘doxing,’ here’s a quote from Eric Schmidt, ‘if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.'” “All those people said hateful, vicious, threatening things to Damore, and now they’re upset that they’ve become public. Maybe they shouldn’t have said them?”"

Google Wars: You're Next - "Google is facing trial in November for an earlier complaint to the National Labor Relations Board.
(F)or interfering with employees’ legal right to discuss “workplace diversity and social justice initiatives.” The complaint alleges that Senior Vice President Urs Holzle and numerous managers in his organization actively stoked up witch hunts in 2015 and 2016 intended to muzzle low-level employees who raised concerns about the company’s practices. "

Rebels of Google: 'Imagine Your Google Account Frozen on Purpose' - "According to Beckett, Google already employs technology to scan its users’ email accounts for unwelcome content. “Google already has a policy of proactively scanning user data (Drive and Gmail) for illegal pornography, by matching files and attachments against a database of known image hashes” says Beckett. “The only thing stopping them from scanning user data for other things, like pirated music and movies, is that someone in charge of that policy has decided illegal porn is harmful enough to justify snooping on users’ data, and piracy isn’t. But that’s just one person’s opinion.”... “Someone set up a mailing list called “freespeech” to discuss the problem that would later be called the “ideological echo chamber.” Immediately, it became the butt of jokes, the same lazy “hurr hurr freeze peach” snickering you’d expect from true believers on Twitter.” “But one person, Burcu Dogan, decided to go further and flood the group with spam. After her posts were deleted and she was banned, she made up a story about how the group “promotes hate speech and violence against people” and demanded that Google investigate who was running it.” “Outside that group, Burcu wrote posts describing the people who spoke up against arbitrary firings as “men debating about false accusations and their legal implications” who were consumed by “daily masturbation about your manly problems… This is how your brain works … I don’t feel safe at Google anymore.” Within months, the owners of that group were fired or forced out"

Former Google Employee: 'There Are Efforts to Demote Anything Non-PC from Search Results' - "Emmett recalls one case in which a Google employee was actually punched for making a post that offended someone. Far from helping the Google employees who face left-wing harassment, Emmett alleges that the company’s Human Resources department assists them... Emmett confirms that racist and sexist incidents against white or male employees at Google are not taken seriously. “I remember Colm Buckley (of #GoogleManifesto infamy) dismissing a well-written post by a colleague of mine, with the single sentence “Isn’t it nice to be white.” I also remember him being condescending to an employee who posted an innocuous message of skepticism about social justice. I should note that the employee Colm condescended to was eventually forced out of the company. ” “I remember Peter Goett entirely unironically posting a reply to a list with over 10,000 Googlers: “congratulations on your white penis.” To my understanding, had someone posted “black vagina”, that person would have been summarily fired. Also to my understanding, Goett appears to have received no punishment.”"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Social Integration - "I don't think we wake up in the morning and go: ah, I really want to hate some people today. That's what I long to do. People have genuine fears and concerns for understandable reasons and actually it's important we understand those...
I really am a bit tired of being told that half the country is wrong when those people saying it don't know anyone who's in that half of the country. I think you can't judge people if you know, don't know any of those people...
'[The book] Sleepwalking to Segregation? has a question mark at the end of it. Why?'
'Because all the evidence is that the movement of people within Britain is not towards segregation but away from it. That there's not white flight but brown flight and black flight as well'"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, A world without Down's syndrome? - "Removing the imperfect from society does compromise our essential humanity...
'If we could edit out that twenty first chromosome and cure Down's Syndrome would you?'
'No, because lots of disabled people live very good happy lives, ok? And therefore do we want a society that is just without people of any particular characteristics? The extension would be: do we want society with people with particular characteristics, like do we want a society just full of accountants?... Disabled people don't suffer from having an impairment. They suffer from the discrimination, the oppression that disabled people face from society as a whole'...
There's a danger here of kind of over romanticizing what is an impairment because happy though those young people were and singing and joyous, they were not able to go beyond a certain intellectual state. And I think that to sort of characterize those of us who would like for people to not be born with Down's Syndrome because we think that, we think that we would like to cure, rather the phrase, I would like to cure it, yes. But that's because I want to give people opportunities. That doesn't mean to say that I want everybody to have blonde hair, blue eyes...
A lot of Down's children you know do have a great deal of very very serious illness. It's not an illness in itself but they do have a lot of disabilities which can cause a great deal of pain and hardship to themselves and to their families...
'I think that Alzheimer's brings a great deal of diversity. Let's have a bit of cerebral palsy while we're at it'
'That's ridiculous'
'Those people who are arguing for screening so that people can decide whether they continue with their pregnancy or not or not are not trying to eradicate all difference from the world. I also think that those medical practitioners and doctors and scientists who are trying to find cures to the disabilities that society faces and individuals faces are heroic and the idea that they're kind of going against the the identity politics of the new disabled activist community and their advocates, I think it's politically vile and demoral'...
'We don't see disease. We see a different sort of person'"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, US Presidential Election - "This seems to me to be part of the American problem which is I offer you overwhelming statistical evidence, you offer me anecdotes about heroic individuals. Isn't the gap between the myth of equality, equal opportunities in America and the reality of stark inequality and miserable social mobility precisely the reason why your country is so full of people who are so angry?...
[A priest:] 'When the Pope says a person who thinks in terms of building walls and not building bridges is not a Christian-' 'Well i don't think the Pope should really be in the position to start judging personal, to people personally. He has a right to set out dogma and doctrine as far as the Catholic Church is concerned but judge not lest ye be judged... render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's'
'Just stop. Stop, this is cliches'...
'I'm giving you your own gospel. How can you say I'm giving you cliches?'...
I was at a synagogue about ten years ago and there was a big discussion of Israel and Palestine and the leader of the discussion said well right now the Americans are thinking about what country next to attack and I said sorry they're sitting around wondering who is going to be in the Superbowl...
What Trump in a way represents is that Hillary Clinton has a sense of entitlement. Part of the dynasty that assumes that she can walk into the Presidency... it's not just that you can be poor and be President but there is also a part of that which is an aspiration"

Lowcostcosplay - Posts - "lonely man and his starwar"
Looks like Thai people are allowed to do blackface. Sadly Singaporeans aren't
Comments from Uncle Toms and ot: "I'm black and I laughed hard like a retard. xD It's not racist.
Blackface no longer exists (or only herswith a racist minority but... who cares about this kind of people ? Leave them die alone.)
And lowcostcosplay is not this kind of guys... Different times, different mores.
Stop living in a past that you didn't even come across !"
"The concept of blackface hardly exist outside the US, I learned about it quite recently. And it's stupid that something like that is considered racist."
"It'd be more racist to avoid doing this based upon that he's black?"
"People who cry "racist" at everything are generally those with a huge inferiority complex. Basically this whole whining is gonna make him think twice about cosplaying any black character ever again. Then you better not be all over her like "Ahhh, he doesn't cosplay black characters, he's racist!""
"When this guy threw white powder all over his face, no one ever insulted him 'Whiteface'."
" That's Riceist"
" i'd make a comment about "blackface," but he's also done blueface, yellowface, purpleface, etc"
"Blackface historically a fun good guy in thai traditional tale and play. Not historically discriminate as in United States. If you ask for respect. Please not disrespect other culture."
"You know that the guy has a dark skin-tone as well? So is it a poc making blackface? Is it a blackface on a black-face? Blackfacinception
?___?"
"Lol I like it and I'm black. People need to know what black face truly is. He didn't draw pink big ass lips nose etc his brown and not tar black."
"Eddy Murphy did a chinese guy and no one said nothing"
"Asians in asia dont actually follow with western's idea of racism. Shoving such thing into our throat is also not okay."

The Sound of Silence - "There's a lot of concern about "fake news" lately. That is a real problem, but there's also the opposite problem: true things that aren't being said. Some of the most useful things I've learned about startups over the years are also things I'd never share publicly. Not because the ideas are necessarily controversial in their own right, but because anyone could twist them to seem controversial if they were sufficiently motivated to. And when that happens I immediately regret having said anything. It's a massive distraction. I have two young kids, and I have hundreds of startups to keep track of. I don't have time to fight with people who are trying to misunderstand me... the most successful people in an industry tend to have some of the most valuable insights about it. So you lose a lot when they are silenced. And also, if they keep those insights to themselves, it makes the powerful more powerful. It means useful information remains amongst insiders"

Facing pushback, Ryerson University cancels panel discussion on campus free speech - "Ryerson University has canceled a panel discussion called “The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campuses” following pushback from activists who said the event was giving a platform to fascists... “Transphobia is violence, Islamophobia is violence. Violence is contextual,” she said. “We can’t be complicit in this”... he has increased sympathy for a safety argument, he said, given the “inflamed rhetoric” the protesters used. “I think there’s no excuse for what they’re doing, with the Nazi symbolism. It’s very, very dangerous to engage in that kind of casual vilification”"
Brilliant. Inflame a situation and then you can get it shut down due to safety issues

Dear Leftists, There Are No Nazis Under Your Bed - "I’ve heard the rally by Unite the Right (a misnomer, and yes, we’ll get to it later) comprised around a hundred people. Sources trying to make us really scared have increased that to four hundred, but I am sure they’re also including the self-named Antifa. So a hundred, maybe four hundred, in the South, in what you guys consider (ignorantly) to be the bastion of racism/sexism/other isms that might occur to you. … Out of a nation of three hundred million... you can’t name a belief stupid enough that it doesn’t have at least four hundred adherents somewhere in the USA. And this doesn’t mean that we’re particularly crazy or stupid, no. It just means that in a nation of three hundred million, you’re going to find a lot of crazy, off beat, and strange people. However you, dear leftists, have decided that this “show of force” by four hundred people who, btw, were completely outnumbered and also incidentally beaten and otherwise attacked by “Antifa” (who must have named itself by opposites, since wearing masks and beating people in the street is the game of the fascists, not the anti-fascists) means that we live in a “White Supremacy” and that anyone saying it ain’t so is a “neo-Nazi”... you convinced yourself that a fairly crass man, who has been in the spotlight his whole life and about whom the worst complaint that could be made vis a vis treatment of women was that he once made some nebulous remark about “grabbing women by the pussy,” is “a serial rapist.” You convinced yourself that Donald Trump, the first man to hold a rainbow flag on stage, at a rally, is homophobic. You convinced yourself that wanting to end illegal immigration is racism."

Google Fired James Damore, But All 25 Finalists In Its Code Jam Coding Competition Are Men - "If only one woman made it through Google’s rigorous coding competition over 14 long years, it would lend credence to James Damore’s viral memo in which he’d said that men end up occupying higher positions in engineering and technology through a combination of innate ability and interest in the subject... Google’s Code Jam doesn’t take into account the contestants’ race, gender, political affiliation, or social status — contestants are judged by automated machines which check if their code works or not"

Google's Diversity Controversy Mocked in Street Art Near Office - "In some posters, Apple's tagline "Think Different" is alongside Google's logo with the text "Not So Much." In other posters, it's alleged that thinking different gets you hired at Apple but fired at Google."

Visit the Wrong Website, and the FBI Could End Up in Your Computer - "The FBI’s use of malware is not new. The bureau calls the method an NIT, for “network investigative technique,” and the FBI has been using it since at least 2002 in cases ranging from computer hacking to bomb threats, child porn to extortion. Depending on the deployment, an NIT can be a bulky full-featured backdoor program that gives the government access to your files, location, web history and webcam for a month at a time, or a slim, fleeting wisp of code that sends the FBI your computer’s name and address, and then evaporates."

Vandals On the Island of Crete Set Church on Fire, Write "Allah is Great"