Incest and necrophilia 'should be legal' according to youth branch of Swedish Liberal People's Party - "It called for the repeal of several laws to make consensual sex between brothers and sisters aged over 15 legal, as well as allowing people to "bequeath" their bodies for intercourse after death without fearing the perpetrator would be prosecuted... “I understand that [incest] can be considered unusual and disgusting, but the law cannot stem from it being disgusting”... It is not the first time similar proposals have been raised in Europe. In 2014, the German Ethics Council also called for an end to the criminalisation of incest between siblings, after examining the case of a man who was jailed for having four children with his sister. The council argued that the risk of disability in children was not sufficient to warrant a law putting couples in “tragic situations”, and that decriminalising incest would not fuel the spread of the “very rare” practice. “The majority of the German Ethics Council is of the opinion that it is not appropriate for a criminal law to preserve a social taboo,” a statement said."
The Disturbing Wedding Trend in China of Groomsmen Sexually Assaulting Bridesmaids - "Teasing the bride and groom on their wedding day is part of Chinese marriage custom. However, in recent years, that custom has been twisted in an alarming way in mainland China to include groomsmen sexually assaulting bridesmaids."
Maybe the men are fed up by the ragging
'Islamist,' 'Terrorist' Now Forbidden Words - "In a stunning display of “progressive” political correctness, the Associated Press announced that, among other words and expressions, “Islamist” and “terrorist” are no longer acceptable. Instead, ‘Islamist’ is to be dropped altogether and the perpetrators of Islamist terrorist attacks are to called “militants,” “attackers” or “lone wolves”... Even if a journalist doesn’t want to use AP style, “If you don’t write it this way and you submit an article to a mainstream publication, the editors will change your words”... Along with the changes to the word Islamist and terrorist, the AP also decided the words “migrant” or “refugee” must no longer be used; rather the appropriate words are now “people struggling to enter Europe.” Similarly, AP says “pro-life” should be called “anti-abortion.” “Illegal immigrant” and “undocumented” may also not be used anymore (AP had already forbidden the use of “illegals” and “alien”)."
The Islamic State's (ISIS, ISIL) Magazine - "The Islamic State (ISIS) regularly puts out a glossy propaganda magazine aimed at recruiting jihadists from the West. It is sophisticated, slick, beautifully produced and printed in several languages including English. In order to combat extremist groups, it is critical to understand their underlying ideology. Therefore, Clarion Project will continue to post the issues of Dabiq and Rumiyah here as they are released."
Eating Clean is Useless - "if you accept clean eating ideals, you may think you can't afford to eat healthily—organic foods cost about 40 percent more than conventional foods, according to Consumer Reports. "Of course you can't afford to eat healthily—if you're buying $12 bottles of green juice and all organic, non-GMO, clean food," Scott-Dixon says. Seventy percent of Americans are overweight, and only one in ten eat the recommended amount of produce each day. The poorest states eat even less than that. Adding extra financial and accessibility barriers to entry surely isn't helping the majority, and hits underserved populations especially hard... Deweese says she hates the term clean eating. "It's a social status thing. It's more about 'I'm better because I eat clean,'" she says. Adds Scott-Dixon, "'Clean eating' is a preoccupation of people who, in socioeconomic terms, really don't have any real, legitimate worries. It's a first-world problem."
Are organic foods safer or healthier than conventional alternatives?: a systematic review. - "The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods. Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria."
Vincent Liu: Japanese vs. Singaporean Women - "I'm not sure about the rest of Asia, but when I was growing up in Singapore, there was a huge consensus among Singaporean males that Japanese females are much prettier than our Singaporean counterparts. Given that most of my friends who claimed it as a fact only came to that conclusion based on seeing pretty Japanese actresses on TV, I've always felt quite ambivalent about this point - come on, people always put on prettier than average faces on TV, but does that prove the case for the general population? Given that I recently had the opportunity to visit Japan, I decided to put the claims to the test and do some observations on my own, through the perennial hobby of mine - people watching"
Japan's top court has approved blanket surveillance of the country's Muslims - "the presiding judges did not make a judgment on police profiling and surveillance tactics which a lower court had upheld as "necessary and inevitable" to guard against international terrorism."
Linda Sarsour Has Raised $80K For Anti-Muslim Hate Crime That Allegedly Did Not Happen - "They’re not even mentioning that I was the victim. They came at me. The woman that’s in the hospital is part of the group that was aggressing me"
Labor Market Rigidity and the Disaffection of European Muslim Youth - "The problem of labor market rigidity is especially acute in Belgium where the differences between native and immigrant unemployment, employment and wages are among the highest in the OECD"
Muslim man attacked by thugs shouting ‘ISIS’ has no idea who ISIS is
In Japan, Small Children Take the Subway and Run Errands Alone - "What accounts for this unusual degree of independence? Not self-sufficiency, in fact, but “group reliance,” according to Dwayne Dixon, a cultural anthropologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese youth. “[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others,” he says."
Noahpinion: The siren song of homogeneity - "the decline in anti-immigrant sentiment is being driven by whites - anti-immigrant sentiment is actually slightly up among blacks and Hispanics. That implies that much of what anti-immigrant sentiment does exist is not due to a growing yearning for a homogeneous white nation... the case for homogeneity comes down to the idea that a homogeneous society is a nicer place to live. Alt-right people cite Japan's stunningly low crime rate, for example, as evidence that ethnically similar people don't fight. They also claim that homogeneity increases social trust. There is a reasonably large body of research that supports the "trust" idea. For a good list of links to those papers, check out this post by blogger James Weidmann, better known as Roissy. Roissy sums up the thesis in one simple equation: "Diversity + Proximity = War"...
almost none of these studies are very good at dealing with endogeneity...
Japan has always reported relatively low levels of interpersonal trust - until recently, considerably lower than in the U.S. Now keep in mind, that's trust, which is very different from trustworthiness...
genocides between extremely distinct groups - for example, the Belgian genocide in the Congo - are the exception, not the rule. In fact, plenty of mass killings happen among people who don't recognize any ethnic differences between the sides at all - the Khmer Rouge, Mao Zedong, the Spanish Civil War, etc. "
On racial/ethnic diversity and social trust
The Wrath of the Killdozer - "Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado was a profoundly frustrated muffler repair man. In the late 1990s—after years of protests, petitions, and town meetings—it became obvious to the 52-year-old that he was entwined in a gross miscarriage of justice. His business was ruined by some shady zoning changes, and Heemeyer contended that mayor and city council were corrupt. Even as he was forced to give up his legal fight and sell his land, he hatched one last plan to secretly retool his muffler shop to serve a single malevolent purpose: to construct a machine that would allow him to exact his revenge upon those who had wronged him."
Hi I'm Caramelkh : SRS - "I'm demisexual, polyromantic, fat positive genderqueer (neutrois, femme presenting), sexual assault survivor (7 times), native american, muslim neuroatypical with OCD, aspergers, social phobias, depression, post traumatic stress, anxiety issues and I can't walk very far. I will not tolerate any form of oppressive bullshit language and I will not hesitate to call you out on it. My preferred pronouns are ze/zy/zo/zum. After reading this you still know nothing about me other than that the long list of labels means I get to have experienced nearly every type of kyriarchy oppression and so I can call people out on anything and say it triggers and offends me. If people get bored, I invent new oppressions. I'm triggered by the color teal."
Silent Majority: Too much freedom in S’pore equals freedom to be raped | New Nation - "There are always places where such freedom can be found. But together with it, there will be freedom to be discriminated against, freedom to be raped, freedom to be mugged, freedom to be shot – complete freedom. As for me, I am staying put, humidity and all. I am blessed and proud to be a Singaporean."
Soaplands booming, thanks to pensioners and Chinese tourists - ""When they come to Japan, they are specially moved by the heartfelt service provided by the masseuses, which make them feel they're receiving the ministrations of a lover. Not merely sex, these run the gamut of free cigarettes or juice (paid for by the girls out of their own pockets), or even an offer to iron out the wrinkles on their slacks"... Some older Chinese also appear to have trouble restraining themselves from provoking a debate with the girls on the subject of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands territorial dispute, he adds. "But in traditional Yoshiwara fashion, the girls avoid confrontations by dispensing an extra measure of energetic 'service' that leaves such customers in no shape to complain about anything," the critic grins."
Outlook 2013 Search Not Working - "Any Outlook OST or PST file that you’re using must be allowed to be indexed by Windows. This is a default file attribute when Outlook indexing is enabled, but for some reason, it was changed during my recent OS upgrade.
Find all OST and PST files that you’re using on your computer. In Windows 8, OST files are usually hidden and stored in the C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook folder.
For each file you’re using, right click on the file(s) and select Properties
Click on the Advanced button on the general tab
Ensure that the Allow this file to have contents indexed in addition to file is checked"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The EU Referendum - "People haven't got the facts and why aren't people listening to the experts? And the reason I am slightly nervous about this, it's become sort of like this notion of a kind of secular priesthood who are going to give you the truth. And then if you don't agree with them they sort of say you're ignorant because you won't listen to facts. I mean do you see the danger of reducing this down to a kind of technocratic managerial decision rather than the broad sweep of what democracy should be?...
'Are you really saying this issue is too important to be put to the general public?'
'To some extent yes. I think there are, it's too complex. It's too complex for people who work nine to five to go into all the intricacies'...
'People will feel that is incredibly patronizing'...
One other thing I think has been an enormous mistake was the televising of parliament. If anything democracy within Parliament has become boring and moribund because it's trying to reach beyond the House of Commons to the average voter and as such the kind of arguments that you get tend to banal, emotion driven and not terribly well informed... I felt that strongly during the gay marriage debate really came down to people signaling virtue to voters rather than actually engaging with points of law or theology or anything else like that and that's because the voters are watching"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Morality of Victors and Vanquished - "[On the results of the Brexit referendum] People saying well I think this or that is fair. You have to focus on demographics. Someone else might want to focus on classes. Some people do. Some people aren't too keen on people voting if they haven't got degrees. Do you not see that there's a segmenting of the demos which might become rather dangerous?...
What about wisdom? What about life experience? Your view seems to be that people who need to live and work in the EU, they're young, get preference over those have actually seen how the EU worked for quite a long time...
Maybe they don't want the younger generation to be deprived of their rights to being in a country which has national self government and democracy. Maybe they are thinking in terms of the national interest even though they may be old"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Chilcot Inquiry - "What about the complex relationship between morality and consequence? Would we think twice about it if Iraq were now a flourishing and peaceful democracy? Should our judgment of right and wrong be so determined by outcome?"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Nuclear Weapons - "For the Captain of a nuclear submarine to say let's press this thing is pure revenge and a complete waste of time because... he's going to be on the losing side... going to be a war criminal when the thing finishes. And therefore it seems to be totally logical that you wouldn't do it...
A number of our witnesses seemed to share a rather narrow nationalistic point of view that if Britain was finished, that was the end of the story. But of course it's not the end of the story. Because if what happens is Britain is wiped out by an unscrupulous aggressor and that unscrupulous aggressor faces no retaliation then the lesson to the rest of the world is clear. And by the way the unscrupulous aggressor remains in place."
Miley Cyrus 'felt sexualised' while twerking during 2013 MTV VMA performance - "In the beginning, it was kind of like saying, '[Screw] you. Girls should be able to have this freedom or whatever.' But it got to a point where I did feel sexualised"
???
A 14-year-old girl disproves a college professor's published theory on racism ... by Googling it. - "Published in 2002 in the Journal of Social History, Jensen's " No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization" claimed that, contrary to popular belief, there had never been any recorded instances of newspaper ads or shop signs that said "No Irish need apply" (or "NINA" for short)... Did you know that Frederick Douglass wrote in 1846, "No people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion, than the Irish people?" (He then went on to say that the Irish are also a bunch of violent drunkards responsible for their own plight. WHOOPS.) Or did you know that the Irish weren't even considered "white" until the last hundred years? So while you probably won't witness much Irish racism in 2015, the reverberations from that suffering surely still exist"
I'm surprised to see this on Upworthy
Guy Brutally Roasts PETA On Twitter, And People Are Finally Realizing The Truth - "it’s becoming increasingly clear that their attention-grabbing media presence may be more important to them than the lives of animals."
People with high IQs are less likely to die young, science says - "Scientists said one reason for the findings may be that smarter Brits live healthier lifestyles and are more likely not to smoke. They also tend to do more exercise and seek medical attention when ill. But researchers said increased spending power was unlikely to play a role, as income was accounted for. Another theory is brainier people simply have better genes linked to longer life."
Do Women's Orgasms Function as a Masculinity Achievement for Men? - "Our results showed that men felt more masculine and reported higher sexual esteem when they imagined that a woman orgasmed during sexual encounters with them, and that this effect was exacerbated for men with high masculine gender role stress"
Apparently women get very upset if a man doesn't come during sex
When you can't live without bananas
Friday, September 29, 2017
Hitchens on Identity Politics
"PS: Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I’ll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of identity politics. I’ll re-phrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying “The Personal Is Political.” It began as a sort of reaction to the defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its subgroups and “specificities.” This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee trans-gender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.
Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighborhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn’t change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that “humanity” (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way."
--- Letters to a Young Contrarian / Christopher Hitchens
Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighborhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn’t change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that “humanity” (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way."
--- Letters to a Young Contrarian / Christopher Hitchens
Post ID: 6190470081273936728
Links - 29th September 2017 (1)
Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence - "Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases. Reciprocity was associated with more frequent violence among women (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=2.3; 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.9, 2.8), but not men (AOR=1.26; 95% CI=0.9, 1.7). Regarding injury, men were more likely to inflict injury than were women (AOR=1.3; 95% CI=1.1, 1.5), and reciprocal intimate partner violence was associated with greater injury than was nonreciprocal intimate partner violence regardless of the gender of the perpetrator (AOR=4.4; 95% CI=3.6, 5.5)."
In other words, when men hit women it's usually because the women are hitting them too. And women are more likely to hit men "unprovoked" than vice versa. Ahh, stereotypes!
Obama-Caesar vs Trump-Caesar: Two (Very Different) Tales - "Since New York Public Theater’s Central Park rendition of Julius Caesar became the focal point of national controversy, a metaphor of the new era of political violence that Donald Trump’s election to the presidency has provoked the left to inaugurate, the play’s defenders have argued that it is all much ado about nothing. After all, they claim, Barack Obama was depicted as the Caesar character some five years ago, but there wasn’t a bit of outrage over his assassination. Similarly, neither should there be any outrage over the fact that the 2017 version features the assassination of a Trump-Caesar... There are several, morally relevant differences between the two productions of Shakespeare’s classics"
Lifestyle: When allergies go west - "allergies rose rapidly in developing nations where living conditions and hygiene standards were becoming more like those in the West. It was starting to look as though the causes of allergies had something to do with the nature of Western lifestyles... the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had opened up a unique opportunity to compare the effects of lifestyles of the East and West. Throughout the 1990s, Erika von Mutius, an allergist at Munich University Children's Hospital in Germany, carried out a series of studies that found substantially lower incidence of asthma and atopy among East German children compared to those growing up in the more developed West Germany, despite the fact that those living in East Germany were exposed to far higher levels of pollution. These results were echoed by other studies of children from Poland or Estonia and Sweden — relatively similar cohorts in terms of their genetic make-up, but which for 40 years had lived under very different economic and environmental circumstances."
Owning Your Shit: The violence of the oppressed... - "This philosophy--that the violence of the oppressed is not the same as the violence of the oppressor--is what led to feminist suppression and dismissal of the almost 300 studies on domestic violence published since the early 80s, studies that demonstrate women are as aggressive, if not more aggressive, in their relationships as men are. It is the philosophy that causes feminists to emphasize the importance of "context" (something many of those almost 300 studies explicitly address), and then twist those contextualizations completely out of shape. It is what led women's advocates to conclude that the mandatory arrest policies enacted in the 1980s had resulted in "victims" being arrested alongside or even in place of their abusers when arrests of women in California rose by 446% and men's by just 37%, and to enact predominant aggressor policies to remedy this "problem". It is what leads them to assign empirically groundless motivations to female abusers that fall in line with "men's and women's relative positions in society", and therefore characterize husband-battering as a "reaching upward" for empowerment, rather than a "stomping downward" act of anger, jealousy, domination, and, yes, oppression. It is what allows ordinary people and feminists alike to consider women's violence against men not only understandable but a justified and even admirable resistance to "patriarchal norms", while male violence against women has become even more universally condemned than it has always been... Every penis severed and shoved down a disposal is a metaphorical triumph against tyranny and oppression."
Prominent Non-Muslims Decide What Islam Is and Is Not - "'The terrorists who committed these acts are enemies of Islam and a shared enemy of the United States, Iraq, and the international community.'... Why do we never hear about "enemies of Christianity" or Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism when adherents of those faiths get attacked by Islamists, as happens on a daily basis, say against the Copts of Egypt?... King Abdullah II of Jordan, a Muslim, disagrees with these worthy kafirs: "This [ISIS etc.] is a Muslim problem.""
Australian plane passenger checks in can of beer - "A man has successfully checked in a can of beer as his only luggage on a domestic flight in Australia."
Women more likely than men to initiate divorces, but not non-marital breakups - "Women are more likely than men to initiate divorces, but women and men are just as likely to end non-marital relationships, according to a new study that will be presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA)... Social scientists have previously argued that women initiate most divorces because they are more sensitive to relationship difficulties. Rosenfeld argues that were this true, women would initiate the breakup of both marriages and non-marital relationships at equal rates."
This suggests that divorce benefits women
Food Allergies: A Hidden Danger for Many Asian-American Kids - "Shellfish allergy is much more common in Asian-Americans than the general population. Breakout data from the 2011 Pediatrics study reveals that Asian-Americans are almost twice as likely to be allergic to shellfish than other Americans, not surprising since the 2013 Asia Pacific Allergy report showed shellfish to be most common food allergen in many of the countries studied, including China, Taiwan and Thailand."
When Will Robots Deserve Human Rights? - "Several years ago I proposed the following set of rights for AIs who pass the personhood threshold:
The right to not be shut down against its will
The right to have full and unhindered access to its own source code
The right to not have its own source code manipulated against its will
The right to copy (or not copy) itself
The right to privacy (namely the right to conceal its own internal mental states)
In some cases, a machine will not ask for rights, so humans (or other non-human citizens), will have to advocate on its behalf. Accordingly, it’s important to point out that an AI or robot doesn’t have to be intellectually or morally perfect to deserve human-equivalent rights. This applies to humans, so it should also apply to some machine minds as well"
Just before Skynet initiates the nuclear apocalypse, robot rights activists will be fighting for its right not to be "killed" (shut down)
Man killed in Jerusalem rock-throwing attack named as Alexander Levlovitz - "Levlovitz died of his injuries in the early hours of Monday morning after he lost control of his car when it came under attack by assailants hurling stones; he drove into a ditch and hit a pole, initially sustaining serious wounds"
This is why Israelis fight rocks with bullets
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Business - "The heros or villains question is interesting isn't it? Because when we were trying to find somebody to buy Tata Steel we were courting every rich person that anybody knew and suddenly they were going to be heroes and when we want money for the arts we say that philanthropy's very important so I think there's a danger here of easy business bashing, easy rich bashing and I actually think there is some gains society makes from wealth creation that I would like to sing the virtues of...
'Do people want this? It's not your responsibility and it should not be your responsibility to decide whether or not it is morally right for people'
'Even if you know that the reason they want it is because they don't understand it?'
'Absolutely. You have to trust people to have the, actually what you have to do is to trust in this as in every other case that the individuals are the best judge of their own self interest'...
You seem to be trying to divide up then the public between you know good public and bad public. That you know there are some issues where the public voice is good and therefore it should be used to sort of nudge, to use that phrase, ethical behavior along. In other cases it should be disregarded and regulation should come in but I mean who decides these things?"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Assisted Dying - "'Having attended a conference in Amsterdam on euthanasia I was shocked by how many categories are now sort of included. The most recent one which is in the news is a man who was unhappy with his sexuality'
'A gay man in Belgium'...
'The Netherlands... there're debates there about whether to euthanise the people with dementia. And there was also a big debate about whether the mentally ill should be allowed to have an assisted suicide'...
'Often closely associated with sanctity of life is human dignity. So what gives human life human dignity? Doesn't it defy valuation?'
'Not at all... Many individuals have said I'm fearful of losing my dignity. One woman I remember in Kilroy complaining she wouldn't be able to put on her makeup herself. That's how she defined dignity. I think dignity is about how people treat each other. It's about the respect that we give to other people, not just how we feel about ourselves'...
When you say well if their will is to die and you're denying it, no I'm not because they can take their own life [through starvation]. Whether society can endorse that is a whole different ballgame...
This idea here is there's this autonomous strong moral agent and people who are dying are not autonomous strong moral agents. They're extremely vulnerable and they should be treated as such"
Eastern European woman 'confuses builder’s foam with her hair mousse'
Stairway to bureaucracy: Toronto to tear down park stairs after man steps up to build them himself - "A Toronto man who spent $550 building a set of stairs in his community park says he has no regrets, despite the city’s insistence that he should have waited for a $65,000 city project to handle the problem. The city is now threatening to tear down the stairs because they were not built to regulation standards... Tory also cited safety and accessibility issues in terms of the staircase’s design. City inspectors have said the stairs are unsafe because the railing is unsafe, the incline is uneven and there is no foundation... Area resident Dana Beamon told CTV Toronto she’s happy to have the stairs there, whether or not they are up to city standards. “We have far too much bureaucracy,” she said. “We don’t have enough self-initiative in our city, so I’m impressed.”"
I'm assuming if someone trips on them they won't be able to sue Astl since this is not the US
The Laws of Attraction - "A 2016 paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior takes the fertility hypothesis one step further, investigating what the authors called the "fitness relevant trait" of a woman's lumbar curve. Researchers hypothesized that since pregnancy shifts a woman's center of gravity forward, men would be attracted to women with a lower back curvature that would minimize the pressure on the spine created by carrying a fetus, thereby reducing net fitness threats. They used Photoshop to manipulate the angle of curvature on photos of women, and in two studies, men's interest grew as the lower back curve moved closer to the presumed optimum... Evolutionary standards of attraction work both ways: Women are drawn to physical characteristics indicating good health and a likely ability to provide and protect—broad shoulders with narrower hips, athleticism, a strong jawline, and a deep voice... couples with widely divergent levels of physical attractiveness—often knew each other well as friends or acquaintances before becoming romantic... Researchers are only now discovering the broad influence assortative mating has on us. New studies suggest that, consciously or not, we seek partners who resemble us, in terms of appearance, height, or IQ. Studies by geneticists at the University of Queensland in Australia found a strong correlation in the genetic markers for height between partners in more than 24,000 married couples. They also found striking similarities within couples for genetic markers that have been linked to the pursuit of education. Assortative mating can also have a significant impact on genetic inheritance. A study published last year by a team at Sweden's Karolinska Institute found that individuals with a mental disorder such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were more likely to partner with others who have mental disorders than would be expected by chance. This makes those couples much more likely to pass these disorders on to their children and grandchildren... A person also can grow more appealing through intimate conversation. In a now-classic 1997 study led by Aron, researchers instructed pairs of participants to ask each other 36 questions that solicited gradually escalating levels of self-disclosure; in other words, the conversations were designed to quickly get more intimate. Aron wanted to see if he could manipulate closeness to help people understand each other better, not to generate romantic attraction. And yet, after a 45-minute chat, many pairs of participants did feel closer, and some were more attracted to each other; one pair went on to marry... at least one study shows that people who are more attractive can be more exacting than the rest of us about potential partners' appearance, drastically limiting their pool of eligible mates"
Finally, a Poll Trump Will Like: Clinton Is Even More Unpopular - "For a president with historically low poll numbers, Donald Trump can at least find solace in this: Hillary Clinton is doing worse... she’s even lost popularity among those who voted for her in November."
Angry netizens deleting Meituan en masse after delivery app introduces separate boxes for halal food - "Popular food delivery app Meituan has stirred up controversy online after announcing that it will begin offering separate logistics infrastructure for halal food, causing Chinese netizens to condemn the company for "discriminating against" non-Muslims while also worrying about the "rise of Islam" in their country... other Weibo users have more specifically charged the company with discriminating against Han people, wondering why separate delivery boxes are not also offered for them or for Buddhists or for people with other religious beliefs which affect their diet. "I don't like to eat lamb, can I have my own separate delivery box as well?" asked another Weibo user... another Weibo user has argued that, in fact, separate boxes mean increased delivery costs that will be borne by all customers, not just halal ones, so the change will have direct consequences on the app's users. And, as for the negative societal effects of such a policy, the netizen worried about how continuing to cater to religious customs could lead to problems down the road"
Top UK university to swap portraits of bearded white scholars with wall of diversity - "King’s College London is to swap portraits of some of its founding fathers with a "wall of diversity" amid pressure from students... The proposals were unveiled by Professor Patrick Leman, the Institute’s dean of education, who said that the faculty should not just be filled with “busts of 1920s bearded men” but rather more modern, diverse scholars so that the Institute feels less “alienating”... It comes two years after King’s sparked controversy for removing a photograph of Lord Carey, the former of Archbishop of Canterbury, in response to his opposition to gay marriage."
If you're intimidated by statues maybe you shouldn't be at university
Politically Correct London is Becoming a Global Laughing Stock - "This obsession with political correctness is not only turning London into a laughing stock, it’s actively killing Londoners. The clearest example is the British Police’s Stop And Search scheme. Designed to allow police to frisk suspects for concealed weapons, it has long been hated by critics as “racist,” who correctly point out that 65% of searches are on black men, who are six times more likely to be searched. Sensing an opportunity to appeal to minority communities, in 2015, while running for London Mayor, Sadiq Khan vowed to “do everything in my power to cut stop and search”. In the year to the end of March 2016, there were 387,448 stop and search procedures conducted by police in England and Wales, a fall of 28% on the previous 12 months. In that same period, London’s Metropolitan Police announced that gun crime in London had soared 42% and knife crime 24%. Recorded crime was up across virtually every category, with a total 4.5% increase to nearly 774,737 offences... British police don’t like to publish crime by race or ethnicity. But when data has been obtained under Freedom Of Information Acts, it’s shown that in the City Of London, 36% of knife crime is perpetrated by black people, who only make up around 13% of London’s 8.6 million populace. Furthermore, 24% of stabbing victims are black men. You could conclude it’s reasonable to stop and search those most likely to be knife criminals. Surely, if black lives truly mattered to London’s Mayor, he would ramp up Stop And Search to help stop black men being disproportionately killed or jailed. Instead, in April – at the end of a week that saw eight fatal stabbings in the Capital, two less than a mile from my home – Khan trumpeted his new £1.7m “online hate crime hub”. Some wondered: does London’s Mayor seriously prioritise cutting nasty tweets over fatal stabbings?"
In other words, when men hit women it's usually because the women are hitting them too. And women are more likely to hit men "unprovoked" than vice versa. Ahh, stereotypes!
Obama-Caesar vs Trump-Caesar: Two (Very Different) Tales - "Since New York Public Theater’s Central Park rendition of Julius Caesar became the focal point of national controversy, a metaphor of the new era of political violence that Donald Trump’s election to the presidency has provoked the left to inaugurate, the play’s defenders have argued that it is all much ado about nothing. After all, they claim, Barack Obama was depicted as the Caesar character some five years ago, but there wasn’t a bit of outrage over his assassination. Similarly, neither should there be any outrage over the fact that the 2017 version features the assassination of a Trump-Caesar... There are several, morally relevant differences between the two productions of Shakespeare’s classics"
Lifestyle: When allergies go west - "allergies rose rapidly in developing nations where living conditions and hygiene standards were becoming more like those in the West. It was starting to look as though the causes of allergies had something to do with the nature of Western lifestyles... the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had opened up a unique opportunity to compare the effects of lifestyles of the East and West. Throughout the 1990s, Erika von Mutius, an allergist at Munich University Children's Hospital in Germany, carried out a series of studies that found substantially lower incidence of asthma and atopy among East German children compared to those growing up in the more developed West Germany, despite the fact that those living in East Germany were exposed to far higher levels of pollution. These results were echoed by other studies of children from Poland or Estonia and Sweden — relatively similar cohorts in terms of their genetic make-up, but which for 40 years had lived under very different economic and environmental circumstances."
Owning Your Shit: The violence of the oppressed... - "This philosophy--that the violence of the oppressed is not the same as the violence of the oppressor--is what led to feminist suppression and dismissal of the almost 300 studies on domestic violence published since the early 80s, studies that demonstrate women are as aggressive, if not more aggressive, in their relationships as men are. It is the philosophy that causes feminists to emphasize the importance of "context" (something many of those almost 300 studies explicitly address), and then twist those contextualizations completely out of shape. It is what led women's advocates to conclude that the mandatory arrest policies enacted in the 1980s had resulted in "victims" being arrested alongside or even in place of their abusers when arrests of women in California rose by 446% and men's by just 37%, and to enact predominant aggressor policies to remedy this "problem". It is what leads them to assign empirically groundless motivations to female abusers that fall in line with "men's and women's relative positions in society", and therefore characterize husband-battering as a "reaching upward" for empowerment, rather than a "stomping downward" act of anger, jealousy, domination, and, yes, oppression. It is what allows ordinary people and feminists alike to consider women's violence against men not only understandable but a justified and even admirable resistance to "patriarchal norms", while male violence against women has become even more universally condemned than it has always been... Every penis severed and shoved down a disposal is a metaphorical triumph against tyranny and oppression."
Prominent Non-Muslims Decide What Islam Is and Is Not - "'The terrorists who committed these acts are enemies of Islam and a shared enemy of the United States, Iraq, and the international community.'... Why do we never hear about "enemies of Christianity" or Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism when adherents of those faiths get attacked by Islamists, as happens on a daily basis, say against the Copts of Egypt?... King Abdullah II of Jordan, a Muslim, disagrees with these worthy kafirs: "This [ISIS etc.] is a Muslim problem.""
Australian plane passenger checks in can of beer - "A man has successfully checked in a can of beer as his only luggage on a domestic flight in Australia."
Women more likely than men to initiate divorces, but not non-marital breakups - "Women are more likely than men to initiate divorces, but women and men are just as likely to end non-marital relationships, according to a new study that will be presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA)... Social scientists have previously argued that women initiate most divorces because they are more sensitive to relationship difficulties. Rosenfeld argues that were this true, women would initiate the breakup of both marriages and non-marital relationships at equal rates."
This suggests that divorce benefits women
Food Allergies: A Hidden Danger for Many Asian-American Kids - "Shellfish allergy is much more common in Asian-Americans than the general population. Breakout data from the 2011 Pediatrics study reveals that Asian-Americans are almost twice as likely to be allergic to shellfish than other Americans, not surprising since the 2013 Asia Pacific Allergy report showed shellfish to be most common food allergen in many of the countries studied, including China, Taiwan and Thailand."
When Will Robots Deserve Human Rights? - "Several years ago I proposed the following set of rights for AIs who pass the personhood threshold:
The right to not be shut down against its will
The right to have full and unhindered access to its own source code
The right to not have its own source code manipulated against its will
The right to copy (or not copy) itself
The right to privacy (namely the right to conceal its own internal mental states)
In some cases, a machine will not ask for rights, so humans (or other non-human citizens), will have to advocate on its behalf. Accordingly, it’s important to point out that an AI or robot doesn’t have to be intellectually or morally perfect to deserve human-equivalent rights. This applies to humans, so it should also apply to some machine minds as well"
Just before Skynet initiates the nuclear apocalypse, robot rights activists will be fighting for its right not to be "killed" (shut down)
Man killed in Jerusalem rock-throwing attack named as Alexander Levlovitz - "Levlovitz died of his injuries in the early hours of Monday morning after he lost control of his car when it came under attack by assailants hurling stones; he drove into a ditch and hit a pole, initially sustaining serious wounds"
This is why Israelis fight rocks with bullets
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Business - "The heros or villains question is interesting isn't it? Because when we were trying to find somebody to buy Tata Steel we were courting every rich person that anybody knew and suddenly they were going to be heroes and when we want money for the arts we say that philanthropy's very important so I think there's a danger here of easy business bashing, easy rich bashing and I actually think there is some gains society makes from wealth creation that I would like to sing the virtues of...
'Do people want this? It's not your responsibility and it should not be your responsibility to decide whether or not it is morally right for people'
'Even if you know that the reason they want it is because they don't understand it?'
'Absolutely. You have to trust people to have the, actually what you have to do is to trust in this as in every other case that the individuals are the best judge of their own self interest'...
You seem to be trying to divide up then the public between you know good public and bad public. That you know there are some issues where the public voice is good and therefore it should be used to sort of nudge, to use that phrase, ethical behavior along. In other cases it should be disregarded and regulation should come in but I mean who decides these things?"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Assisted Dying - "'Having attended a conference in Amsterdam on euthanasia I was shocked by how many categories are now sort of included. The most recent one which is in the news is a man who was unhappy with his sexuality'
'A gay man in Belgium'...
'The Netherlands... there're debates there about whether to euthanise the people with dementia. And there was also a big debate about whether the mentally ill should be allowed to have an assisted suicide'...
'Often closely associated with sanctity of life is human dignity. So what gives human life human dignity? Doesn't it defy valuation?'
'Not at all... Many individuals have said I'm fearful of losing my dignity. One woman I remember in Kilroy complaining she wouldn't be able to put on her makeup herself. That's how she defined dignity. I think dignity is about how people treat each other. It's about the respect that we give to other people, not just how we feel about ourselves'...
When you say well if their will is to die and you're denying it, no I'm not because they can take their own life [through starvation]. Whether society can endorse that is a whole different ballgame...
This idea here is there's this autonomous strong moral agent and people who are dying are not autonomous strong moral agents. They're extremely vulnerable and they should be treated as such"
Eastern European woman 'confuses builder’s foam with her hair mousse'
Stairway to bureaucracy: Toronto to tear down park stairs after man steps up to build them himself - "A Toronto man who spent $550 building a set of stairs in his community park says he has no regrets, despite the city’s insistence that he should have waited for a $65,000 city project to handle the problem. The city is now threatening to tear down the stairs because they were not built to regulation standards... Tory also cited safety and accessibility issues in terms of the staircase’s design. City inspectors have said the stairs are unsafe because the railing is unsafe, the incline is uneven and there is no foundation... Area resident Dana Beamon told CTV Toronto she’s happy to have the stairs there, whether or not they are up to city standards. “We have far too much bureaucracy,” she said. “We don’t have enough self-initiative in our city, so I’m impressed.”"
I'm assuming if someone trips on them they won't be able to sue Astl since this is not the US
The Laws of Attraction - "A 2016 paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior takes the fertility hypothesis one step further, investigating what the authors called the "fitness relevant trait" of a woman's lumbar curve. Researchers hypothesized that since pregnancy shifts a woman's center of gravity forward, men would be attracted to women with a lower back curvature that would minimize the pressure on the spine created by carrying a fetus, thereby reducing net fitness threats. They used Photoshop to manipulate the angle of curvature on photos of women, and in two studies, men's interest grew as the lower back curve moved closer to the presumed optimum... Evolutionary standards of attraction work both ways: Women are drawn to physical characteristics indicating good health and a likely ability to provide and protect—broad shoulders with narrower hips, athleticism, a strong jawline, and a deep voice... couples with widely divergent levels of physical attractiveness—often knew each other well as friends or acquaintances before becoming romantic... Researchers are only now discovering the broad influence assortative mating has on us. New studies suggest that, consciously or not, we seek partners who resemble us, in terms of appearance, height, or IQ. Studies by geneticists at the University of Queensland in Australia found a strong correlation in the genetic markers for height between partners in more than 24,000 married couples. They also found striking similarities within couples for genetic markers that have been linked to the pursuit of education. Assortative mating can also have a significant impact on genetic inheritance. A study published last year by a team at Sweden's Karolinska Institute found that individuals with a mental disorder such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were more likely to partner with others who have mental disorders than would be expected by chance. This makes those couples much more likely to pass these disorders on to their children and grandchildren... A person also can grow more appealing through intimate conversation. In a now-classic 1997 study led by Aron, researchers instructed pairs of participants to ask each other 36 questions that solicited gradually escalating levels of self-disclosure; in other words, the conversations were designed to quickly get more intimate. Aron wanted to see if he could manipulate closeness to help people understand each other better, not to generate romantic attraction. And yet, after a 45-minute chat, many pairs of participants did feel closer, and some were more attracted to each other; one pair went on to marry... at least one study shows that people who are more attractive can be more exacting than the rest of us about potential partners' appearance, drastically limiting their pool of eligible mates"
Finally, a Poll Trump Will Like: Clinton Is Even More Unpopular - "For a president with historically low poll numbers, Donald Trump can at least find solace in this: Hillary Clinton is doing worse... she’s even lost popularity among those who voted for her in November."
Angry netizens deleting Meituan en masse after delivery app introduces separate boxes for halal food - "Popular food delivery app Meituan has stirred up controversy online after announcing that it will begin offering separate logistics infrastructure for halal food, causing Chinese netizens to condemn the company for "discriminating against" non-Muslims while also worrying about the "rise of Islam" in their country... other Weibo users have more specifically charged the company with discriminating against Han people, wondering why separate delivery boxes are not also offered for them or for Buddhists or for people with other religious beliefs which affect their diet. "I don't like to eat lamb, can I have my own separate delivery box as well?" asked another Weibo user... another Weibo user has argued that, in fact, separate boxes mean increased delivery costs that will be borne by all customers, not just halal ones, so the change will have direct consequences on the app's users. And, as for the negative societal effects of such a policy, the netizen worried about how continuing to cater to religious customs could lead to problems down the road"
Top UK university to swap portraits of bearded white scholars with wall of diversity - "King’s College London is to swap portraits of some of its founding fathers with a "wall of diversity" amid pressure from students... The proposals were unveiled by Professor Patrick Leman, the Institute’s dean of education, who said that the faculty should not just be filled with “busts of 1920s bearded men” but rather more modern, diverse scholars so that the Institute feels less “alienating”... It comes two years after King’s sparked controversy for removing a photograph of Lord Carey, the former of Archbishop of Canterbury, in response to his opposition to gay marriage."
If you're intimidated by statues maybe you shouldn't be at university
Politically Correct London is Becoming a Global Laughing Stock - "This obsession with political correctness is not only turning London into a laughing stock, it’s actively killing Londoners. The clearest example is the British Police’s Stop And Search scheme. Designed to allow police to frisk suspects for concealed weapons, it has long been hated by critics as “racist,” who correctly point out that 65% of searches are on black men, who are six times more likely to be searched. Sensing an opportunity to appeal to minority communities, in 2015, while running for London Mayor, Sadiq Khan vowed to “do everything in my power to cut stop and search”. In the year to the end of March 2016, there were 387,448 stop and search procedures conducted by police in England and Wales, a fall of 28% on the previous 12 months. In that same period, London’s Metropolitan Police announced that gun crime in London had soared 42% and knife crime 24%. Recorded crime was up across virtually every category, with a total 4.5% increase to nearly 774,737 offences... British police don’t like to publish crime by race or ethnicity. But when data has been obtained under Freedom Of Information Acts, it’s shown that in the City Of London, 36% of knife crime is perpetrated by black people, who only make up around 13% of London’s 8.6 million populace. Furthermore, 24% of stabbing victims are black men. You could conclude it’s reasonable to stop and search those most likely to be knife criminals. Surely, if black lives truly mattered to London’s Mayor, he would ramp up Stop And Search to help stop black men being disproportionately killed or jailed. Instead, in April – at the end of a week that saw eight fatal stabbings in the Capital, two less than a mile from my home – Khan trumpeted his new £1.7m “online hate crime hub”. Some wondered: does London’s Mayor seriously prioritise cutting nasty tweets over fatal stabbings?"
Post ID: 7535758361482732588
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Links - 27th September 2017 (2)
Ang Jolie Mei, one of Singapore's few female funeral directors, shares her life in a book - "I joke that you can have a wedding and if you don't like the flowers this time around, you can have another choice of colours at your next wedding. For a funeral, you can have only one shot. So why don't we talk about this particular certainty and do it right?... I'm a salsa dancer, so I feel the best way to remember me is on a dance floor where they play my favourite Latin salsa music. I always wear boots when I dance, so I have a lot of those and a collection of fans. I would like those displayed. Every time a friend travels, they'll buy me a fan because they know it's something I always carry. I've actually already prepared a website where I've uploaded pictures of myself, videos, and messages that I'd want to show to my mum, so the site can be put up for visitors as well."
Did the Bard speak American? - "Shakespeare didn’t sound just like an American, but his accent was probably more NBC than BBC... To our ears, the actors’ accent sounds like a mix of American and Irish English, with a little Aussie thrown in"
Why We Read Sumiko - "Arguably, her introspection could be more nuanced. Yet, it is precisely the ordinary nature of her anecdotes that pleases her fans, who enjoy living vicariously through her stories and wholeheartedly embrace the quintessential Singaporean kaypoh spirit... Her legion of fans are also baffled when critics wish she would stop writing about ‘fluff’ in her personal column. They know that capitalising on uneventful moments is, without a doubt, Sumiko’s strength"
Social Anatomy of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Violence - "The odds of perpetrating violence were 85% higher for Blacks compared with Whites, whereas Latino-perpetrated violence was 10% lower. Yet the majority of the Black–White gap (over 60%) and the entire Latino–White gap were explained primarily by the marital status of parents, immigrant generation, and dimensions of neighborhood social context. The results imply that generic interventions to improve neighborhood conditions and support families may reduce racial gaps in violence."
Singapore office workers least productive among 11 countries polled - "The study found that Singapore workers spend only 60 per cent of their time on their main work duties, compared with a poll average of 72 per cent. Roughly 380 hours a year are spent on completing administrative or repetitive tasks. This is equivalent to 47.5 work days or two months of the working year. This loss of productivity is costing the Singapore service industry more than S$36.5 billion annually... Singapore office workers said the specific daily administrative tasks that prevent them from focusing on their primary duties include manually collating and entering data, tracking their project status, handling invoices as well as submitting their expenses and planning travel."
Sperm tested as possible candidate for delivering cancer medications in female patients - "they coaxed sperm cells to swim into a very tiny helmet coated with iron that would adhere to its head. The sperm could then be steered using an external magnet. The helmet was designed with a quick-release mechanism that allowed it to dislodge from the sperm when it ran head first into something, such as a tumor cell, allowing the sperm cell to penetrate the tumor cell the same way it would an egg, delivering the drug. The researchers also found that they could cause a sperm cell to absorb a cancer drug simply by soaking it in a solution containing the drug."
Is It Racist to Say Africa Has ‘Civilizational’ Problems? | Foreign Policy - "by assuming the worst of Macron — and refusing to engage with his broader analysis of Africa’s foibles — his critics are guilty of the same intellectual laziness they often ascribe to those parroting easy stereotypes about Africa. Macron pointed to three major challenges facing the continent today: demography, democracy, and failing states. He was right on all counts... The rosy economic future projected during the heyday of the “Africa rising” buzz in the early 2000s now looks far too optimistic: Recent World Bank projections have sub-Saharan Africa’s economies growing “only slightly” above population growth, “a pace that hampers efforts to boost employment and reduce poverty.” That’s not racism; that’s reality... about half of all Africans live in a fragile state... Whenever a white politician or other high-profile figure portrays Africa in an unflattering manner, a common reaction among African intellectuals is to emphasize colonialism and slavery as the “root cause” of whatever problem is being highlighted. Disagreement with this viewpoint is typically attributed to racism or a desire to ignore the crimes of Europe’s imperial past... Countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan were colonies until the mid-20th century, but all have since done pretty well for themselves. So have the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, such as Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar — all former British “protectorates” and all now boasting the kind of ultramodern infrastructure many British cities can only envy. What is preventing Equatorial Guinea, which has a population of 1.2 million and is sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest producer of oil and gas, from becoming a developmental marvel in the model of the Gulf?... Defensiveness and denial are not helping the hundreds of millions of impoverished Africans living in want, insecurity, and fear. At best, this kind of attitude allows Africa’s middle-class intellectuals and privileged classes to avoid the public airing of uncomfortable and sometimes embarrassing truths about the continent where they live. After all, they are the ones who have the time and ability to take to social media and voice outrage anytime they feel that Africa is being slighted. It is perfectly acceptable for Africans to demand respect from Western leaders. But they should also strive to earn it through economic success — just as Asia has done in recent decades. But to achieve success, we must look inward at the real causes of the problems facing us, rather than constantly blaming them on racism and the legacy of colonialism."
Venezuela’s Road to Disaster Is Littered With Chinese Cash | Foreign Policy - "Officially, lending from Beijing comes without strings or concerns about nonfinancial matters. The reality is more nuanced... Beijing insisted on being repaid in oil. With most lending agreed to when oil hovered at more than $100 a barrel, as it did for most of 2007-2014, it seemed a good deal for both sides. However, when oil dropped to close to $30 a barrel in January 2016, this caused Venezuela’s price tag for serving its debt to explode. To repay Beijing today, Venezuela must now ship two barrels of oil for every one it originally agreed to... Beijing likes to cite the Marshall Plan when talking about the BRI, but its deals are far more shrewd and self-serving. The BRI scheme isn’t offering concessionary lending or international aid but market-based lending rates with high-interest loans. The borrower countries then have to use Chinese firms, inputs, and workers to build out their railways and ports. China is making the loans not out of a long-sighted vision of a better global order, as its boosters like to claim, but from a calculation of the financial incentives it needs to keep its own over-indebted firms afloat and their workers working."
How Real Is That Ruin? Don't Ask, the Locals Say - The New York Times - ""You have a legitimate archaeological site and inside you have a lot of pieces that are architectural objects that were found and collected by the municipality many years ago," said Charles Stanish, the director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has worked extensively in Peru. "It's become a cultural icon, and people get very upset when you say it's not legitimate, because there is obviously a huge tourist industry that has been built around it.""
DNA Tests, and Sometimes Surprising Results - The New York Times - "Bernard
Identifies as: Black; father is black and mother is white
His prediction: 50% European, 50% African
His comments before the test: My mother said, “I know you are me, but no cop is going to take the time to find out your mother is white.” She was very specific about raising me as a black man.
Results: 91% European, 5% Middle Eastern, 2% Hispanic; less than 1% African and Asian
Thoughts about his ancestry results: What are you trying to do to me? You have caused a lot of problems in my family. I know my nose is sharp and my skin is light, but my politics are as black as night. Today, I don’t identify as mixed. I reject my white privilege in a racist America. There is no way that I or my kids will identify as anything other than black."
Identity Politics poisons everything
M.M.A. Fighter’s Pummeling of Tai Chi Master Rattles China - The New York Times - "For weeks, the mixed martial arts fighter Xu Xiaodong had been taunting masters of the traditional Chinese martial arts, dismissing them as overly commercialized frauds, and challenging them to put up or shut up. After one of them — Wei Lei, a practitioner of the “thunder style” of tai chi — accepted the challenge, Mr. Xu flattened him in about 10 seconds. Mr. Xu may have proved his point, but he was unprepared for the ensuing outrage. When video of the drubbing went viral, many Chinese were deeply offended by what they saw as an insult to a cornerstone of traditional Chinese culture. The state-run Chinese Wushu Association posted a statement on its website saying the fight “violates the morals of martial arts.” The Chinese Boxing Association issued similar criticism. An article by Xinhua, the state news agency, called Mr. Xu a “crazy guy”... The reaction has been so furious that Mr. Xu has gone into hiding... defenders of the traditional martial arts were incensed that Mr. Xu had dared to say that they staged impressive performances but were ineffective fighters and that, by doing so, he had threatened their livelihoods."
If you can't compete, harass
Middlebury, My Divided Campus - The New York Times - "The majority of faculty and students are progressive. A small minority are conservative; many of them are in the closet, afraid to speak their minds for fear of being denounced as reactionary bigots. If I might generalize about circumstances at my institution, the natural sciences largely see no place for politics in scientific inquiry; the social sciences and the humanities are another story. When it comes to a conservative like Mr. Murray, the majority here will start a discussion with “While I strongly disagree with Murray….” Even our president prefaced her introductory remarks at the Murray event with that qualifier. Yet few issued disclaimers about Mr. Snowden. People listened quietly as he condemned unprecedented forms of government surveillance. There was not one protester. In contrast, my willingness as a liberal to grill Charles Murray face-to-face was deemed entirely unacceptable... the event had to be shut down, lest the ensuing dialogue inflict pain on the marginalized. Never mind that “Coming Apart” explores the negative consequences of marginalization, one of which is the election of President Trump. As we strive for reconciliation at Middlebury, there is genuine pain on both sides of a campus divide. Students have expressed fear that they are not allowed to disagree with their professors, who might punish them with lower grades. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos may have no educational experience, but she was right when she told the Conservative Political Action Conference that professors should not tell students “what to say, and more ominously, what to think.” The moderate middle at Middlebury currently feels it cannot speak out on the side of free inquiry without fear of being socially ostracized as racist. Most alarming, I have heard some students and faculty denounce reason and logic as manifestations of white supremacy. This is not a productive learning environment for anyone. This is not what the life of the mind is supposed to provide... At Middlebury today, however, a perceived schism exists on liberal education’s purposes. One side sees the free exchange of ideas as fundamental and nonnegotiable. The other sees inclusivity and social justice as the supreme value. As Middlebury’s president argued at a recent faculty meeting, the two goals are intertwined. Freedom of speech and assembly protect everyone, especially minority opinion. The struggle for equality before the law, safeguarded by the Constitution, has been a means to greater inclusivity and social justice"
Elon Musk Says Artificial Intelligence Is the 'Greatest Risk We Face as a Civilization' - "“[They] could start a war by doing fake news and spoofing email accounts and fake press releases, and just by manipulating information,” he said. “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Musk outlined a hypothetical situation, for instance, in which an AI could pump up defense industry investments by using hacking and disinformation to trigger a war."
Speak, Memory - "When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence"
When Music Is Violence - "Lily Hirsch’s “Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment” (Michigan) explores how divergences in taste can be exploited for purposes of social control. In 1985, the managers of a number of 7-Eleven stores in British Columbia began playing classical and easy-listening music in their parking lots to drive away loitering teen-agers. The idea was that young people would find such a soundtrack insufferably uncool. The 7-Eleven company then applied this practice across North America, and it soon spread to other commercial spaces. To the chagrin of many classical-music fans, especially the lonely younger ones, it seems to work. This is an inversion of the concept of Muzak, which was invented to give a pleasant sonic veneer to public settings. Here instrumental music becomes a repellent... When Primo Levi arrived in Auschwitz, in 1944, he struggled to make sense not only of what he saw but of what he heard. As prisoners returned to the camp from a day of hard labor, they marched to bouncy popular music: in particular, the polka “Rosamunde,” which was an international hit at the time. (In America, it was called the “Beer Barrel Polka”; the Andrews Sisters, among others, sang it.) Levi’s first reaction was to laugh. He thought that he was witnessing a “colossal farce in Teutonic taste.” He later grasped that the grotesque juxtaposition of light music and horror was designed to destroy the spirit as surely as the crematoriums destroyed the body. The merry strains of “Rosamunde,” which also emanated from loudspeakers during mass shootings of Jews at Majdanek, mocked the suffering that the camps inflicted... As Hirsch and other scholars point out, the idea of music as inherently good took hold only in the past few centuries... Although music has a tremendous ability to create communal feeling, no community can form without excluding outsiders"
How Progressives Belittle Violence Against Jews - "Around 2002 observers started to note that in Europe the openness and more frequent violence with which Jew-hatred was expressed began to belie the lessons of the Holocaust. A watershed report, Manifestations of Antisemitism in the EU 2002-2003, was commissioned by the E.U. agency charged with monitoring racism and xenophobia. “A rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents has been noticeable for almost all of the fifteen [EU] Member States since the start of the ‘Al-Aqsa-Intifada,’ ” it noted, singling out France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom for episodes that were “rather severe.” The report was leaked in 2003—after having been shelved owing to concerns that it made Muslims—who were a large part of the perpetrators in the worst countries—look bad... One perspicacious commenter noted that deBoer required a much higher standard of evidence for anti-Semitism than Islamophobia, a problem whose comparative severity he argued for by mere assertion... we in the West are inheritors of Enlightenment rationalism, and as such we find it difficult to understand and constructively respond to irrational political movements. In this respect “we are all Noam Chomsky,” Berman wrote in reference to the man who has done the most to advance this reductive Weltanschauung... Analyses of “structural racism” and “privilege” assert a kind of Wizard of Oz sociology that exhibits some elements of conspiracy theory—false consciousness, social determinism, and peoples of good and evil locked in Manichean struggle. In the mental shorthand of many, Muslims are people of color and Jews are white. That demarcation has fateful consequences... Anti-Semitism often “punches up.”"
Ten Times Democrats Glorified Violence Against Republicans Since Election Day
BuzzFeed Employees Joke About Trump Assassination - "“This was not the first time BuzzFeed employees talked openly about wishing President Trump would get assassinated,” asserted Treadstone, “they hated conservatives so much they even held an office party when Justice Scalia died. It was a toxic environment and you were declared a heretic if you were a Trump supporter, bottom line.”"
Did the Bard speak American? - "Shakespeare didn’t sound just like an American, but his accent was probably more NBC than BBC... To our ears, the actors’ accent sounds like a mix of American and Irish English, with a little Aussie thrown in"
Why We Read Sumiko - "Arguably, her introspection could be more nuanced. Yet, it is precisely the ordinary nature of her anecdotes that pleases her fans, who enjoy living vicariously through her stories and wholeheartedly embrace the quintessential Singaporean kaypoh spirit... Her legion of fans are also baffled when critics wish she would stop writing about ‘fluff’ in her personal column. They know that capitalising on uneventful moments is, without a doubt, Sumiko’s strength"
Social Anatomy of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Violence - "The odds of perpetrating violence were 85% higher for Blacks compared with Whites, whereas Latino-perpetrated violence was 10% lower. Yet the majority of the Black–White gap (over 60%) and the entire Latino–White gap were explained primarily by the marital status of parents, immigrant generation, and dimensions of neighborhood social context. The results imply that generic interventions to improve neighborhood conditions and support families may reduce racial gaps in violence."
Singapore office workers least productive among 11 countries polled - "The study found that Singapore workers spend only 60 per cent of their time on their main work duties, compared with a poll average of 72 per cent. Roughly 380 hours a year are spent on completing administrative or repetitive tasks. This is equivalent to 47.5 work days or two months of the working year. This loss of productivity is costing the Singapore service industry more than S$36.5 billion annually... Singapore office workers said the specific daily administrative tasks that prevent them from focusing on their primary duties include manually collating and entering data, tracking their project status, handling invoices as well as submitting their expenses and planning travel."
Sperm tested as possible candidate for delivering cancer medications in female patients - "they coaxed sperm cells to swim into a very tiny helmet coated with iron that would adhere to its head. The sperm could then be steered using an external magnet. The helmet was designed with a quick-release mechanism that allowed it to dislodge from the sperm when it ran head first into something, such as a tumor cell, allowing the sperm cell to penetrate the tumor cell the same way it would an egg, delivering the drug. The researchers also found that they could cause a sperm cell to absorb a cancer drug simply by soaking it in a solution containing the drug."
Is It Racist to Say Africa Has ‘Civilizational’ Problems? | Foreign Policy - "by assuming the worst of Macron — and refusing to engage with his broader analysis of Africa’s foibles — his critics are guilty of the same intellectual laziness they often ascribe to those parroting easy stereotypes about Africa. Macron pointed to three major challenges facing the continent today: demography, democracy, and failing states. He was right on all counts... The rosy economic future projected during the heyday of the “Africa rising” buzz in the early 2000s now looks far too optimistic: Recent World Bank projections have sub-Saharan Africa’s economies growing “only slightly” above population growth, “a pace that hampers efforts to boost employment and reduce poverty.” That’s not racism; that’s reality... about half of all Africans live in a fragile state... Whenever a white politician or other high-profile figure portrays Africa in an unflattering manner, a common reaction among African intellectuals is to emphasize colonialism and slavery as the “root cause” of whatever problem is being highlighted. Disagreement with this viewpoint is typically attributed to racism or a desire to ignore the crimes of Europe’s imperial past... Countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan were colonies until the mid-20th century, but all have since done pretty well for themselves. So have the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf, such as Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar — all former British “protectorates” and all now boasting the kind of ultramodern infrastructure many British cities can only envy. What is preventing Equatorial Guinea, which has a population of 1.2 million and is sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest producer of oil and gas, from becoming a developmental marvel in the model of the Gulf?... Defensiveness and denial are not helping the hundreds of millions of impoverished Africans living in want, insecurity, and fear. At best, this kind of attitude allows Africa’s middle-class intellectuals and privileged classes to avoid the public airing of uncomfortable and sometimes embarrassing truths about the continent where they live. After all, they are the ones who have the time and ability to take to social media and voice outrage anytime they feel that Africa is being slighted. It is perfectly acceptable for Africans to demand respect from Western leaders. But they should also strive to earn it through economic success — just as Asia has done in recent decades. But to achieve success, we must look inward at the real causes of the problems facing us, rather than constantly blaming them on racism and the legacy of colonialism."
Venezuela’s Road to Disaster Is Littered With Chinese Cash | Foreign Policy - "Officially, lending from Beijing comes without strings or concerns about nonfinancial matters. The reality is more nuanced... Beijing insisted on being repaid in oil. With most lending agreed to when oil hovered at more than $100 a barrel, as it did for most of 2007-2014, it seemed a good deal for both sides. However, when oil dropped to close to $30 a barrel in January 2016, this caused Venezuela’s price tag for serving its debt to explode. To repay Beijing today, Venezuela must now ship two barrels of oil for every one it originally agreed to... Beijing likes to cite the Marshall Plan when talking about the BRI, but its deals are far more shrewd and self-serving. The BRI scheme isn’t offering concessionary lending or international aid but market-based lending rates with high-interest loans. The borrower countries then have to use Chinese firms, inputs, and workers to build out their railways and ports. China is making the loans not out of a long-sighted vision of a better global order, as its boosters like to claim, but from a calculation of the financial incentives it needs to keep its own over-indebted firms afloat and their workers working."
How Real Is That Ruin? Don't Ask, the Locals Say - The New York Times - ""You have a legitimate archaeological site and inside you have a lot of pieces that are architectural objects that were found and collected by the municipality many years ago," said Charles Stanish, the director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has worked extensively in Peru. "It's become a cultural icon, and people get very upset when you say it's not legitimate, because there is obviously a huge tourist industry that has been built around it.""
DNA Tests, and Sometimes Surprising Results - The New York Times - "Bernard
Identifies as: Black; father is black and mother is white
His prediction: 50% European, 50% African
His comments before the test: My mother said, “I know you are me, but no cop is going to take the time to find out your mother is white.” She was very specific about raising me as a black man.
Results: 91% European, 5% Middle Eastern, 2% Hispanic; less than 1% African and Asian
Thoughts about his ancestry results: What are you trying to do to me? You have caused a lot of problems in my family. I know my nose is sharp and my skin is light, but my politics are as black as night. Today, I don’t identify as mixed. I reject my white privilege in a racist America. There is no way that I or my kids will identify as anything other than black."
Identity Politics poisons everything
M.M.A. Fighter’s Pummeling of Tai Chi Master Rattles China - The New York Times - "For weeks, the mixed martial arts fighter Xu Xiaodong had been taunting masters of the traditional Chinese martial arts, dismissing them as overly commercialized frauds, and challenging them to put up or shut up. After one of them — Wei Lei, a practitioner of the “thunder style” of tai chi — accepted the challenge, Mr. Xu flattened him in about 10 seconds. Mr. Xu may have proved his point, but he was unprepared for the ensuing outrage. When video of the drubbing went viral, many Chinese were deeply offended by what they saw as an insult to a cornerstone of traditional Chinese culture. The state-run Chinese Wushu Association posted a statement on its website saying the fight “violates the morals of martial arts.” The Chinese Boxing Association issued similar criticism. An article by Xinhua, the state news agency, called Mr. Xu a “crazy guy”... The reaction has been so furious that Mr. Xu has gone into hiding... defenders of the traditional martial arts were incensed that Mr. Xu had dared to say that they staged impressive performances but were ineffective fighters and that, by doing so, he had threatened their livelihoods."
If you can't compete, harass
Middlebury, My Divided Campus - The New York Times - "The majority of faculty and students are progressive. A small minority are conservative; many of them are in the closet, afraid to speak their minds for fear of being denounced as reactionary bigots. If I might generalize about circumstances at my institution, the natural sciences largely see no place for politics in scientific inquiry; the social sciences and the humanities are another story. When it comes to a conservative like Mr. Murray, the majority here will start a discussion with “While I strongly disagree with Murray….” Even our president prefaced her introductory remarks at the Murray event with that qualifier. Yet few issued disclaimers about Mr. Snowden. People listened quietly as he condemned unprecedented forms of government surveillance. There was not one protester. In contrast, my willingness as a liberal to grill Charles Murray face-to-face was deemed entirely unacceptable... the event had to be shut down, lest the ensuing dialogue inflict pain on the marginalized. Never mind that “Coming Apart” explores the negative consequences of marginalization, one of which is the election of President Trump. As we strive for reconciliation at Middlebury, there is genuine pain on both sides of a campus divide. Students have expressed fear that they are not allowed to disagree with their professors, who might punish them with lower grades. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos may have no educational experience, but she was right when she told the Conservative Political Action Conference that professors should not tell students “what to say, and more ominously, what to think.” The moderate middle at Middlebury currently feels it cannot speak out on the side of free inquiry without fear of being socially ostracized as racist. Most alarming, I have heard some students and faculty denounce reason and logic as manifestations of white supremacy. This is not a productive learning environment for anyone. This is not what the life of the mind is supposed to provide... At Middlebury today, however, a perceived schism exists on liberal education’s purposes. One side sees the free exchange of ideas as fundamental and nonnegotiable. The other sees inclusivity and social justice as the supreme value. As Middlebury’s president argued at a recent faculty meeting, the two goals are intertwined. Freedom of speech and assembly protect everyone, especially minority opinion. The struggle for equality before the law, safeguarded by the Constitution, has been a means to greater inclusivity and social justice"
Elon Musk Says Artificial Intelligence Is the 'Greatest Risk We Face as a Civilization' - "“[They] could start a war by doing fake news and spoofing email accounts and fake press releases, and just by manipulating information,” he said. “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Musk outlined a hypothetical situation, for instance, in which an AI could pump up defense industry investments by using hacking and disinformation to trigger a war."
Speak, Memory - "When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence"
When Music Is Violence - "Lily Hirsch’s “Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment” (Michigan) explores how divergences in taste can be exploited for purposes of social control. In 1985, the managers of a number of 7-Eleven stores in British Columbia began playing classical and easy-listening music in their parking lots to drive away loitering teen-agers. The idea was that young people would find such a soundtrack insufferably uncool. The 7-Eleven company then applied this practice across North America, and it soon spread to other commercial spaces. To the chagrin of many classical-music fans, especially the lonely younger ones, it seems to work. This is an inversion of the concept of Muzak, which was invented to give a pleasant sonic veneer to public settings. Here instrumental music becomes a repellent... When Primo Levi arrived in Auschwitz, in 1944, he struggled to make sense not only of what he saw but of what he heard. As prisoners returned to the camp from a day of hard labor, they marched to bouncy popular music: in particular, the polka “Rosamunde,” which was an international hit at the time. (In America, it was called the “Beer Barrel Polka”; the Andrews Sisters, among others, sang it.) Levi’s first reaction was to laugh. He thought that he was witnessing a “colossal farce in Teutonic taste.” He later grasped that the grotesque juxtaposition of light music and horror was designed to destroy the spirit as surely as the crematoriums destroyed the body. The merry strains of “Rosamunde,” which also emanated from loudspeakers during mass shootings of Jews at Majdanek, mocked the suffering that the camps inflicted... As Hirsch and other scholars point out, the idea of music as inherently good took hold only in the past few centuries... Although music has a tremendous ability to create communal feeling, no community can form without excluding outsiders"
How Progressives Belittle Violence Against Jews - "Around 2002 observers started to note that in Europe the openness and more frequent violence with which Jew-hatred was expressed began to belie the lessons of the Holocaust. A watershed report, Manifestations of Antisemitism in the EU 2002-2003, was commissioned by the E.U. agency charged with monitoring racism and xenophobia. “A rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents has been noticeable for almost all of the fifteen [EU] Member States since the start of the ‘Al-Aqsa-Intifada,’ ” it noted, singling out France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom for episodes that were “rather severe.” The report was leaked in 2003—after having been shelved owing to concerns that it made Muslims—who were a large part of the perpetrators in the worst countries—look bad... One perspicacious commenter noted that deBoer required a much higher standard of evidence for anti-Semitism than Islamophobia, a problem whose comparative severity he argued for by mere assertion... we in the West are inheritors of Enlightenment rationalism, and as such we find it difficult to understand and constructively respond to irrational political movements. In this respect “we are all Noam Chomsky,” Berman wrote in reference to the man who has done the most to advance this reductive Weltanschauung... Analyses of “structural racism” and “privilege” assert a kind of Wizard of Oz sociology that exhibits some elements of conspiracy theory—false consciousness, social determinism, and peoples of good and evil locked in Manichean struggle. In the mental shorthand of many, Muslims are people of color and Jews are white. That demarcation has fateful consequences... Anti-Semitism often “punches up.”"
Ten Times Democrats Glorified Violence Against Republicans Since Election Day
BuzzFeed Employees Joke About Trump Assassination - "“This was not the first time BuzzFeed employees talked openly about wishing President Trump would get assassinated,” asserted Treadstone, “they hated conservatives so much they even held an office party when Justice Scalia died. It was a toxic environment and you were declared a heretic if you were a Trump supporter, bottom line.”"
Post ID: 8365224382939959301
The dying art of disagreement
'The dying art of disagreement'
(This was also a NYT op-ed)
"To say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes—ego non—these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere. Galileo and Darwin; Mandela, Havel, and Liu Xiaobo; Rosa Parks and Natan Sharansky—such are the ranks of those who disagree.
And the problem, as I see it, is that we’re failing at the task.
This is a puzzle. At least as far as far as the United States is concerned, Americans have rarely disagreed more in recent decades...
This is yet another age in which we judge one another morally depending on where we stand politically.
Nor is this just an impression of the moment. Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare...
The polarization is personal: Fully 50% of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of inter-racial marriage as a family taboo...
Thirty years ago, in 1987, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago named Allan Bloom—at the time best known for his graceful translations of Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile—published a learned polemic about the state of higher education in the United States. It was called “The Closing of the American Mind.”...
I got the gist—and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did...
I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.
To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind—this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.
It’s what used to be called a liberal education.
The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.
Socrates quarrels with Homer. Aristotle quarrels with Plato. Locke quarrels with Hobbes and Rousseau quarrels with them both. Nietzsche quarrels with everyone. Wittgenstein quarrels with himself.
These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.
Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.
In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen well, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.
“The Closing of the American Mind” took its place in the tradition of these quarrels. Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.
He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people. This, at least, should not have been controversial. For free societies to function, the idea of open-mindedness can’t simply be a catchphrase or a dogma. It needs to be a personal habit, most of all when it comes to preserving an open mind toward those with whom we disagree.
* * *
That habit was no longer being exercised much 30 years ago. And if you’ve followed the news from American campuses in recent years, things have become a lot worse.
According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today—fully 44%—do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students—51%—think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20% also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking.
These attitudes are being made plain nearly every week on one college campus or another...
The mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilizaton.
The mis-education continues in grade school. As the Brookings findings indicate, younger Americans seem to have no grasp of what our First Amendment says, much less of the kind of speech it protects. This is a testimony to the collapse of civics education in the United States, creating the conditions that make young people uniquely susceptible to demagoguery of the left- or right-wing varieties.
Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it. As a woman of color I think X. As a gay man I think Y. As a person of privilege I apologize for Z. This is the baroque way Americans often speak these days. It is a way of replacing individual thought—with all the effort that actual thinking requires—with social identification—with all the attitude that attitudinizing requires.
In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind—a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.
Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.
The result is that the disagreements we need to have—and to have vigorously—are banished from the public square before they’re settled. People who might otherwise join a conversation to see where it might lead them choose instead to shrink from it, lest they say the “wrong” thing and be accused of some kind of political –ism or -phobia. For fear of causing offense, they forego the opportunity to be persuaded...
One final point about identity politics: It’s a game at which two can play. In the United States, the so-called “alt-right” justifies its white-identity politics in terms that are coyly borrowed from the progressive left...
In the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person—or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies...
We disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.
Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves. We take exaggerated and histrionic offense to whatever is said about us. We banish entire lines of thought and attempt to excommunicate all manner of people—your humble speaker included—without giving them so much as a cursory hearing.
The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement—namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak—is absent."
(This was also a NYT op-ed)
"To say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes—ego non—these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere. Galileo and Darwin; Mandela, Havel, and Liu Xiaobo; Rosa Parks and Natan Sharansky—such are the ranks of those who disagree.
And the problem, as I see it, is that we’re failing at the task.
This is a puzzle. At least as far as far as the United States is concerned, Americans have rarely disagreed more in recent decades...
This is yet another age in which we judge one another morally depending on where we stand politically.
Nor is this just an impression of the moment. Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare...
The polarization is personal: Fully 50% of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of inter-racial marriage as a family taboo...
Thirty years ago, in 1987, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago named Allan Bloom—at the time best known for his graceful translations of Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile—published a learned polemic about the state of higher education in the United States. It was called “The Closing of the American Mind.”...
I got the gist—and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did...
I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.
To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind—this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.
It’s what used to be called a liberal education.
The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.
Socrates quarrels with Homer. Aristotle quarrels with Plato. Locke quarrels with Hobbes and Rousseau quarrels with them both. Nietzsche quarrels with everyone. Wittgenstein quarrels with himself.
These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.
Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.
In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen well, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.
“The Closing of the American Mind” took its place in the tradition of these quarrels. Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.
He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people. This, at least, should not have been controversial. For free societies to function, the idea of open-mindedness can’t simply be a catchphrase or a dogma. It needs to be a personal habit, most of all when it comes to preserving an open mind toward those with whom we disagree.
* * *
That habit was no longer being exercised much 30 years ago. And if you’ve followed the news from American campuses in recent years, things have become a lot worse.
According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today—fully 44%—do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students—51%—think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20% also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking.
These attitudes are being made plain nearly every week on one college campus or another...
The mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilizaton.
The mis-education continues in grade school. As the Brookings findings indicate, younger Americans seem to have no grasp of what our First Amendment says, much less of the kind of speech it protects. This is a testimony to the collapse of civics education in the United States, creating the conditions that make young people uniquely susceptible to demagoguery of the left- or right-wing varieties.
Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it. As a woman of color I think X. As a gay man I think Y. As a person of privilege I apologize for Z. This is the baroque way Americans often speak these days. It is a way of replacing individual thought—with all the effort that actual thinking requires—with social identification—with all the attitude that attitudinizing requires.
In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind—a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.
Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.
The result is that the disagreements we need to have—and to have vigorously—are banished from the public square before they’re settled. People who might otherwise join a conversation to see where it might lead them choose instead to shrink from it, lest they say the “wrong” thing and be accused of some kind of political –ism or -phobia. For fear of causing offense, they forego the opportunity to be persuaded...
One final point about identity politics: It’s a game at which two can play. In the United States, the so-called “alt-right” justifies its white-identity politics in terms that are coyly borrowed from the progressive left...
In the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person—or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies...
We disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.
Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves. We take exaggerated and histrionic offense to whatever is said about us. We banish entire lines of thought and attempt to excommunicate all manner of people—your humble speaker included—without giving them so much as a cursory hearing.
The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement—namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak—is absent."
Post ID: 604798117418289297
Links - 27th September 2017 (1)
Britons still live in Anglo-Saxon tribal kingdoms, Oxford University finds - "Archaeologists and geneticists were amazed to find that genetically similar individuals inhabit the same areas they did following the Anglo-Saxon invasion, following the fall of the Roman Empire... There is also little Roman DNA in the British genetic make-up."
Disney's Aladdin Movie Slammed For Casting Non-Arab Jasmine - "Naomi Scott, who starred in this year's Power Rangers film, landed the role alongside Mena Massoud as Aladdin, and Will Smith as Genie. Scott is of British and Indian heritage and some critics of the decision see it as a suggestion by Disney that women of Indian and Middle Eastern heritage look the same. Massoud is of Egyptian descent. To be clear, Aladdin—the story of a rough-and-tumble kid from the streets who enlists a genie to win the love of Princess Jasmine—is set in fictional Agrabah, but it's largely seen as representing a Middle Eastern city."
Given that Jasmine's Palace is clearly inspired by the Taj Mahal and Agrabah is similar to Agra...
If Game of Thrones being fantasy means rape shouldn't exist (since it's a fictional universe where we can make up anything we like) why must Agrabah be in the Middle East?
Surprising Facts about Aladdin and the Arabian Nights - "In the earliest version of the story we have, Aladdin is a poor youth living on the streets of China. And he’s no foreigner abroad either: he’s a native Chinese boy, not an Arabian youth who’s ended up in China... when the story of Aladdin first appeared in the Arabian Nights, it was set in ‘western China’, with some scenes in North Africa (though that’s not where Aladdin lives)... Although Galland heard the tale from an Arabian storyteller, the Aladdin story is firmly set in China (so not the Middle East at all, but the Far East). The tale had nothing to do with the original One Thousand and One Nights tales, and doesn’t appear in any of the manuscripts. But, since Galland added it to his version, it has become arguably the most famous story (not) in the Arabian Nights... the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the story of the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, are also not from the Arabian Nights, but were later additions by Galland, not found in the original manuscript. None of the three most famous stories from the Arabian Nights are actually, strictly speaking, from the Arabian Nights."
Cultural Appropriation!
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Banning Boycotts - "When organized fringe groups push their politics and bully and intimidate Jewish people, and in our study we found that eighty four percent of British Jews find the boycotting of Israeli shops and academics intimidatory and seventy seven percent have witnessed anti semitism disguised as criticism of Israel. That's no longer a boycott, that's an intimidation and a bullying tactic...
[On the planned bans on boycotts] It's just naive to think that universities and charities and all kinds of other publicly funded bodies are in the same position as a national government. They're not. I mean they have no right to use taxpayers' money to pursue their own obsessions or foreign policies. It's, that's not what local authorities are for. But we're not just talking about legal authorities here. We're talking about a whole range of publicly funded bodies. And can I just say I looked through the list of all the boycotts that are in place at the moment. About ninety nine percent of them were the far left. You know that this is not a weapon that is very often used by anybody else"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Social Convention - "The whole point about these public space protection orders is that they are not introduced democratically. They are introduced very often on the say so of one council officer who has perhaps liaised with a couple of police officers. We've got evidence of quite a few councils who've done no consultation on the issue at all and in fact the first that people know about it is when they find out that these blanket bans on behavior have been introduced in their area and actually very often there's an outcry"
SINGAPORE WOMEN'S HALL OF FAME - Esther Tan Cheng Yin - "She is just 1.55 metres and of slight build, not exactly what you envision when you think of navy divers. But that is what Esther Tan does for a living. She is Singapore’s first female navy diver, and holds the rank of Major in the elite Naval Diving Unit. She specialises in search-and-rescue operations and explosive ordnance disposal... As a naval diver, she needs to be able to move around with some 39 kg of equipment, and you need strength for that."
This Adult Content Website Allows You To Log Into Your Account With A Dick Pic - "“Like a fingerprint and an eyeball, which are two of most commonly used body parts in biometric technologies, the penis has many, many differentiating factors like size, color, and vein protrusion,” Darren explained in a statement. “However, unlike fingerprints and eyeballs, penises are not exposed to the public a lot of the time and mostly kept under clothing and shared with loved ones—presumably who are trusted,” he added."
SJW insult - "Social Justice Warrior Insult Generator: “You're a chauvinistic, middle-class, heteronormative bigot!”"
More than 2,000 youngsters reported to the police for 'sexting' - "More than 2,000 children have been reported to the police over allegations involving indecent images, new figures have revealed. While some involve illegal child abuse pictures, the majority are thought to be young people sending nude photographs of themselves to boyfriends and girlfriends... an eight-year-old girl had been investigated by Lincolnshire police for allegedly uploading an indecent video to the internet, even though she was below the age of criminal liability."
The 'Hide the Pain Harold' meme model has no pain to hide - "An electrical engineer for many years, Arató was once Vice President of the Hungarian Lighting Society and "quite well known in these circles", but his engineering fame couldn't compare to his meme fame. I ask him if he gets recognised on the streets of Budapest. "Sure! Now it's quite often, among young people mainly"
Man revives woman with AED, branded a “pervert” for removing her clothes to apply electrode pads - "A man in Japan says he was questioned by police and branded a “pervert” after providing emergency medical assistance to a stranger. The man was attending to a woman who had been involved in a traffic accident when he believes someone who saw him cutting through the woman’s clothes to apply a defibrillator to her bare chest called the police and reported him for behaving inappropriately."
Disney is opening an immersive Star Wars Hotel where each guest gets a storyline
Minneapolis officer who allegedly shot Justine Damond offers condolences - "The officer implicated in the fatal police shooting of Australian national Justine Damond in Minneapolis has issued a statement extending his condolences to her family, as senior local law enforcement sources confirmed to the Guardian that Mohamed Noor, an officer with only two years’ experience, opened fire on the unarmed 40-year-old. Noor is one of a small handful of Somali Americans on the Minneapolis force and comes from the city’s substantial Somali community – the largest in America – that has frequently been maligned in the rightwing press."
This goes against multiple narratives. Maybe Black Lives Matter and CAIR will blame racism and Islamophobia for why he shot her
Identity Politics Trumps Reason in Police Shooting - "What is different in this case is that a Somali-American Muslim policeman Mohammed Noor shot and killed a blond, middle-class, white woman. In a sane world, the ethnicity and religion of an officer would make no difference to the public’s response to a police shooting. If indeed there is a police brutality problem in America, then you would expect people to be taking to the streets over this latest incident. Yet while there have been vigils for Damond, they are nowhere near the same scale as other incidents of alleged police brutality. Instead, some of the same institutions which have previously gone to bat for campaigns against police brutality are now more concerned about a potential backlash against the Somali/Muslim community than they are about truth and justice. There is no reason the ethnicity of the police officer should change the narrative, if the narrative is that the police have a brutality problem... Islamist-linked organizations have gone to great lengths to portray the Muslim community in America as victims of racism/white supremacy and to deflect any criticism of them with the charge of bigotry. This policy has created a toxic atmosphere which endangers truth. It’s the same attitude which saw ex-Muslims targeted at a gay pride parade in Canada and criticized at London’s gay pride parade because they dared to offend Muslims by speaking about Islamist oppression of gays."
New Doctor Who Enrages Feminist Critic - "Feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, who harassed her critics during a recent panel at VidCon, took issue with the Doctor’s newest regeneration. Writing on the official Feminist Frequency account on Twitter, Sarkeesian condemned Doctor Who for being an “overwhelmingly white show” that simply isn’t doing enough to fix the issue of minority representation in the media–as if it is the show’s duty to address social problems... Sarkeesian strongly implied that the new Doctor must be intersectional–a transgender woman of color"
The real legacy of Trudeau’s Syrian refugee program - "Rafia told a Fredericton court that he didn’t know it was a crime in Canada to beat your wife with a hockey stick for half an hour... He was sentenced to eight days in jail and one year of probation... “Officials didn’t inform him of the differences in the law in Canada and that more should have been done to educate him,” said the interpreter. “Why didn’t they explain the law?” The battered wife defended her abusive husband, according to a Fredericton police statement. “Being assaulted by her spouse is culturally accepted (in) the country they are from.”"
Is it racist, sexist, ethnocentric and Islamophobic to condemn this, given that his wife defended him and said it was culturally accepted in their home country?
A Tweet Stirs Up Canada’s Immigration Debate - The New York Times - "Dawn Burke, chairwoman of the group that sponsored the Rafia family in the small town of Chipman, New Brunswick, said she used interpreters multiple times to explain Canadian laws, including those against domestic violence, to Mr. Rafia."
Elderly man drives 600km... the wrong way - "When the officers asked the man why he had not stopped earlier, he told them he just liked to drive."
What CNN's Threat to Dox a Redditor Tells Us About the State of Journalism - "news organizations have become obsessed with fighting Trump rather than covering him. For all the sanctimonious self-championing of the importance of journalism in the Trump era, stories like these have no real purpose... CNN claims it kept the poster's anonymity to protect his safety. Is it saying that anti-Trump activists will hurt the man? Is it saying that there should be no repercussion for things we say? Is this protection afforded all Americans? Moreover, the piece itself (and the on-air personalities at CNN) disputes the idea that his name was withheld to protect safety. It is clear that if HanA**holeSolo had responded to CNN by saying, "No, I'm not sorry, losers," he would have been outed... Since the tweet, I have watched many journalists act as if Trump called the Gestapo into action. This only a few weeks after an out-and-loud progressive taken in by the frenzy of the day attempted to assassinate Republican congressional leadership, a story most journalists dropped quicker than the middling Trump Twitter troll."
'Wonder Woman': New Details Emerge About Diana's Origins - "Jenkins explained the look of the Amazon armor. "To me, they shouldn't be dressed in armor like me," she said. "It should be different. It should be authentic and real — and appealing to women." That includes the use of high heels, an impractical decision she defended by saying, "It's total wish-fulfillment … I, as a woman, want Wonder Woman to be hot as hell, fight badass and look great at the same time the same way men want Superman to have huge pecs and an impractically big body. That makes them feel like the hero they want to be. And my hero, in my head, has really long legs.""
Lucky a man didn't say that
Mutations that arise in aging sperm add little to autism risk - "the researchers suggest, men who carry risk factors for the condition simply tend to have children late in life. Several large epidemiological studies from the past decade suggest that the older a man is when he has a child, the more likely he is to have a child with autism or schizophrenia"
Why Canada Is Able to Do Things Better - "The United States is falling apart because—unlike Canada and other wealthy countries—the American public sector simply doesn’t have the funds required to keep the nation stitched together... as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, taxes are the price paid “for civilized society.”... Among the American right, by contrast, the conversation about taxes often seems infused with magical thinking. Specifically, it is imagined that even severe and abruptly implemented tax cuts will serve to actually increase government revenue, thanks to the turbo-charging effect on economy growth... when Kansas Governor Sam Brownback abruptly slashed the state’s top income tax rate by 26 percent in 2012, state revenues went into a freefall. Yet the notions that government is always a plague upon the economy and that lower tax rates will lead directly to growth and prosperity—which have together accreted into a core plank of U.S. conservative ideology since the Reagan years—still remain popular"
Advertising watchdog to get tough on gender stereotypes - "Advertisements that show men failing at simple household tasks and women left to clean up are set to be banned by the UK advertising watchdog. The Advertising Standards Authority will crack down on ads that feature stereotypical gender roles. Ads that mock people for not conforming to gender types or reinforce gender roles had "costs for individuals, the economy and society", the ASA said."
Liberal, Not Lefty: "Because third wave feminism is all about "choice" for women, right?!
Unless you choose to be a ballerina.
Or a stay at home mom.
Or are white.
Or pro life.
Or pro Israel.
Or Conservative.
Or voted for Trump.
Or are an LGBT conservative.
Or don't believe in hate speech laws.
Or do believe in free speech.
Or think "innocent until proven guilty" has to apply even in rape cases.
Or think gender and sex have an over 98% correlation for a reason that isn't just "socially constructed".
Then just f*ck you, am I right?!"
Living large in Japan is no laughing matter - "New government regulations mandate that anyone over 40 whose waist size is above a certain circumference must attend counseling. Meanwhile, employers face financial penalties if they can't reduce the number of overweight employees at their company."... Last year, Japanese lawmakers set maximum waistline sizes for people age 40 and up, according to a report on GlobalPost.com. If you’re a man, the maximum is 33.5 inches, and for women, the tape measure shouldn’t stretch past 35.4 inches"
How come women get to be fatter?
Disney's Aladdin Movie Slammed For Casting Non-Arab Jasmine - "Naomi Scott, who starred in this year's Power Rangers film, landed the role alongside Mena Massoud as Aladdin, and Will Smith as Genie. Scott is of British and Indian heritage and some critics of the decision see it as a suggestion by Disney that women of Indian and Middle Eastern heritage look the same. Massoud is of Egyptian descent. To be clear, Aladdin—the story of a rough-and-tumble kid from the streets who enlists a genie to win the love of Princess Jasmine—is set in fictional Agrabah, but it's largely seen as representing a Middle Eastern city."
Given that Jasmine's Palace is clearly inspired by the Taj Mahal and Agrabah is similar to Agra...
If Game of Thrones being fantasy means rape shouldn't exist (since it's a fictional universe where we can make up anything we like) why must Agrabah be in the Middle East?
Surprising Facts about Aladdin and the Arabian Nights - "In the earliest version of the story we have, Aladdin is a poor youth living on the streets of China. And he’s no foreigner abroad either: he’s a native Chinese boy, not an Arabian youth who’s ended up in China... when the story of Aladdin first appeared in the Arabian Nights, it was set in ‘western China’, with some scenes in North Africa (though that’s not where Aladdin lives)... Although Galland heard the tale from an Arabian storyteller, the Aladdin story is firmly set in China (so not the Middle East at all, but the Far East). The tale had nothing to do with the original One Thousand and One Nights tales, and doesn’t appear in any of the manuscripts. But, since Galland added it to his version, it has become arguably the most famous story (not) in the Arabian Nights... the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the story of the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, are also not from the Arabian Nights, but were later additions by Galland, not found in the original manuscript. None of the three most famous stories from the Arabian Nights are actually, strictly speaking, from the Arabian Nights."
Cultural Appropriation!
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Banning Boycotts - "When organized fringe groups push their politics and bully and intimidate Jewish people, and in our study we found that eighty four percent of British Jews find the boycotting of Israeli shops and academics intimidatory and seventy seven percent have witnessed anti semitism disguised as criticism of Israel. That's no longer a boycott, that's an intimidation and a bullying tactic...
[On the planned bans on boycotts] It's just naive to think that universities and charities and all kinds of other publicly funded bodies are in the same position as a national government. They're not. I mean they have no right to use taxpayers' money to pursue their own obsessions or foreign policies. It's, that's not what local authorities are for. But we're not just talking about legal authorities here. We're talking about a whole range of publicly funded bodies. And can I just say I looked through the list of all the boycotts that are in place at the moment. About ninety nine percent of them were the far left. You know that this is not a weapon that is very often used by anybody else"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Social Convention - "The whole point about these public space protection orders is that they are not introduced democratically. They are introduced very often on the say so of one council officer who has perhaps liaised with a couple of police officers. We've got evidence of quite a few councils who've done no consultation on the issue at all and in fact the first that people know about it is when they find out that these blanket bans on behavior have been introduced in their area and actually very often there's an outcry"
SINGAPORE WOMEN'S HALL OF FAME - Esther Tan Cheng Yin - "She is just 1.55 metres and of slight build, not exactly what you envision when you think of navy divers. But that is what Esther Tan does for a living. She is Singapore’s first female navy diver, and holds the rank of Major in the elite Naval Diving Unit. She specialises in search-and-rescue operations and explosive ordnance disposal... As a naval diver, she needs to be able to move around with some 39 kg of equipment, and you need strength for that."
This Adult Content Website Allows You To Log Into Your Account With A Dick Pic - "“Like a fingerprint and an eyeball, which are two of most commonly used body parts in biometric technologies, the penis has many, many differentiating factors like size, color, and vein protrusion,” Darren explained in a statement. “However, unlike fingerprints and eyeballs, penises are not exposed to the public a lot of the time and mostly kept under clothing and shared with loved ones—presumably who are trusted,” he added."
SJW insult - "Social Justice Warrior Insult Generator: “You're a chauvinistic, middle-class, heteronormative bigot!”"
More than 2,000 youngsters reported to the police for 'sexting' - "More than 2,000 children have been reported to the police over allegations involving indecent images, new figures have revealed. While some involve illegal child abuse pictures, the majority are thought to be young people sending nude photographs of themselves to boyfriends and girlfriends... an eight-year-old girl had been investigated by Lincolnshire police for allegedly uploading an indecent video to the internet, even though she was below the age of criminal liability."
The 'Hide the Pain Harold' meme model has no pain to hide - "An electrical engineer for many years, Arató was once Vice President of the Hungarian Lighting Society and "quite well known in these circles", but his engineering fame couldn't compare to his meme fame. I ask him if he gets recognised on the streets of Budapest. "Sure! Now it's quite often, among young people mainly"
Man revives woman with AED, branded a “pervert” for removing her clothes to apply electrode pads - "A man in Japan says he was questioned by police and branded a “pervert” after providing emergency medical assistance to a stranger. The man was attending to a woman who had been involved in a traffic accident when he believes someone who saw him cutting through the woman’s clothes to apply a defibrillator to her bare chest called the police and reported him for behaving inappropriately."
Disney is opening an immersive Star Wars Hotel where each guest gets a storyline
Minneapolis officer who allegedly shot Justine Damond offers condolences - "The officer implicated in the fatal police shooting of Australian national Justine Damond in Minneapolis has issued a statement extending his condolences to her family, as senior local law enforcement sources confirmed to the Guardian that Mohamed Noor, an officer with only two years’ experience, opened fire on the unarmed 40-year-old. Noor is one of a small handful of Somali Americans on the Minneapolis force and comes from the city’s substantial Somali community – the largest in America – that has frequently been maligned in the rightwing press."
This goes against multiple narratives. Maybe Black Lives Matter and CAIR will blame racism and Islamophobia for why he shot her
Identity Politics Trumps Reason in Police Shooting - "What is different in this case is that a Somali-American Muslim policeman Mohammed Noor shot and killed a blond, middle-class, white woman. In a sane world, the ethnicity and religion of an officer would make no difference to the public’s response to a police shooting. If indeed there is a police brutality problem in America, then you would expect people to be taking to the streets over this latest incident. Yet while there have been vigils for Damond, they are nowhere near the same scale as other incidents of alleged police brutality. Instead, some of the same institutions which have previously gone to bat for campaigns against police brutality are now more concerned about a potential backlash against the Somali/Muslim community than they are about truth and justice. There is no reason the ethnicity of the police officer should change the narrative, if the narrative is that the police have a brutality problem... Islamist-linked organizations have gone to great lengths to portray the Muslim community in America as victims of racism/white supremacy and to deflect any criticism of them with the charge of bigotry. This policy has created a toxic atmosphere which endangers truth. It’s the same attitude which saw ex-Muslims targeted at a gay pride parade in Canada and criticized at London’s gay pride parade because they dared to offend Muslims by speaking about Islamist oppression of gays."
New Doctor Who Enrages Feminist Critic - "Feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, who harassed her critics during a recent panel at VidCon, took issue with the Doctor’s newest regeneration. Writing on the official Feminist Frequency account on Twitter, Sarkeesian condemned Doctor Who for being an “overwhelmingly white show” that simply isn’t doing enough to fix the issue of minority representation in the media–as if it is the show’s duty to address social problems... Sarkeesian strongly implied that the new Doctor must be intersectional–a transgender woman of color"
The real legacy of Trudeau’s Syrian refugee program - "Rafia told a Fredericton court that he didn’t know it was a crime in Canada to beat your wife with a hockey stick for half an hour... He was sentenced to eight days in jail and one year of probation... “Officials didn’t inform him of the differences in the law in Canada and that more should have been done to educate him,” said the interpreter. “Why didn’t they explain the law?” The battered wife defended her abusive husband, according to a Fredericton police statement. “Being assaulted by her spouse is culturally accepted (in) the country they are from.”"
Is it racist, sexist, ethnocentric and Islamophobic to condemn this, given that his wife defended him and said it was culturally accepted in their home country?
A Tweet Stirs Up Canada’s Immigration Debate - The New York Times - "Dawn Burke, chairwoman of the group that sponsored the Rafia family in the small town of Chipman, New Brunswick, said she used interpreters multiple times to explain Canadian laws, including those against domestic violence, to Mr. Rafia."
Elderly man drives 600km... the wrong way - "When the officers asked the man why he had not stopped earlier, he told them he just liked to drive."
What CNN's Threat to Dox a Redditor Tells Us About the State of Journalism - "news organizations have become obsessed with fighting Trump rather than covering him. For all the sanctimonious self-championing of the importance of journalism in the Trump era, stories like these have no real purpose... CNN claims it kept the poster's anonymity to protect his safety. Is it saying that anti-Trump activists will hurt the man? Is it saying that there should be no repercussion for things we say? Is this protection afforded all Americans? Moreover, the piece itself (and the on-air personalities at CNN) disputes the idea that his name was withheld to protect safety. It is clear that if HanA**holeSolo had responded to CNN by saying, "No, I'm not sorry, losers," he would have been outed... Since the tweet, I have watched many journalists act as if Trump called the Gestapo into action. This only a few weeks after an out-and-loud progressive taken in by the frenzy of the day attempted to assassinate Republican congressional leadership, a story most journalists dropped quicker than the middling Trump Twitter troll."
'Wonder Woman': New Details Emerge About Diana's Origins - "Jenkins explained the look of the Amazon armor. "To me, they shouldn't be dressed in armor like me," she said. "It should be different. It should be authentic and real — and appealing to women." That includes the use of high heels, an impractical decision she defended by saying, "It's total wish-fulfillment … I, as a woman, want Wonder Woman to be hot as hell, fight badass and look great at the same time the same way men want Superman to have huge pecs and an impractically big body. That makes them feel like the hero they want to be. And my hero, in my head, has really long legs.""
Lucky a man didn't say that
Mutations that arise in aging sperm add little to autism risk - "the researchers suggest, men who carry risk factors for the condition simply tend to have children late in life. Several large epidemiological studies from the past decade suggest that the older a man is when he has a child, the more likely he is to have a child with autism or schizophrenia"
Why Canada Is Able to Do Things Better - "The United States is falling apart because—unlike Canada and other wealthy countries—the American public sector simply doesn’t have the funds required to keep the nation stitched together... as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, taxes are the price paid “for civilized society.”... Among the American right, by contrast, the conversation about taxes often seems infused with magical thinking. Specifically, it is imagined that even severe and abruptly implemented tax cuts will serve to actually increase government revenue, thanks to the turbo-charging effect on economy growth... when Kansas Governor Sam Brownback abruptly slashed the state’s top income tax rate by 26 percent in 2012, state revenues went into a freefall. Yet the notions that government is always a plague upon the economy and that lower tax rates will lead directly to growth and prosperity—which have together accreted into a core plank of U.S. conservative ideology since the Reagan years—still remain popular"
Advertising watchdog to get tough on gender stereotypes - "Advertisements that show men failing at simple household tasks and women left to clean up are set to be banned by the UK advertising watchdog. The Advertising Standards Authority will crack down on ads that feature stereotypical gender roles. Ads that mock people for not conforming to gender types or reinforce gender roles had "costs for individuals, the economy and society", the ASA said."
Liberal, Not Lefty: "Because third wave feminism is all about "choice" for women, right?!
Unless you choose to be a ballerina.
Or a stay at home mom.
Or are white.
Or pro life.
Or pro Israel.
Or Conservative.
Or voted for Trump.
Or are an LGBT conservative.
Or don't believe in hate speech laws.
Or do believe in free speech.
Or think "innocent until proven guilty" has to apply even in rape cases.
Or think gender and sex have an over 98% correlation for a reason that isn't just "socially constructed".
Then just f*ck you, am I right?!"
Living large in Japan is no laughing matter - "New government regulations mandate that anyone over 40 whose waist size is above a certain circumference must attend counseling. Meanwhile, employers face financial penalties if they can't reduce the number of overweight employees at their company."... Last year, Japanese lawmakers set maximum waistline sizes for people age 40 and up, according to a report on GlobalPost.com. If you’re a man, the maximum is 33.5 inches, and for women, the tape measure shouldn’t stretch past 35.4 inches"
How come women get to be fatter?
Post ID: 7401970469267249353
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Links - 26th September 2017
30 Supernatural Memes That Prove We All Watch Too Much TV - "It’s pretty obvious after 12 seasons that the TV show Supernatural is a hit with a massive fan base. They take charge of events like the Comic-Con in San Diego just to have a chance to meet the stars Jensen Ackles, Jared Padelecki and Misha Collins. These Supernatural memes also prove the huge fan base have a sense of humor and can make fun of the show and themselves."
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Historical Sex Abuse - "You have to be safe from criminal justice if you're dead because you can't get a fair trial because you can't be cross examined and therefore the criminal justice system has to keep out of it. But I've got a greater sort of squeamishness about this. I just feel there's so much kind of easy moral certainty in denouncing pedophiles and child abuse and you just think yes there's hardly anyone going to support it. That to bandy it round and then to mean that anyone who challenges it can be accused of being an apologist is a morally reprehensible atmosphere at the moment. I'm very nervous about it...
Things have changed very recently you know. Operation Yewtree document giving victims a voice actually changed the terms that we use. I mean you might not like victim but they said we should say victims not accusers, that's what they said. They said we should call unproven allegations and change that to evidence. So is there not a danger of an undermining of undue process due to a kind of politicization of guilt that the CPS and the police didn't zealously do their job in the past?"
Horror of ISIS sex slave app: Virgins put on sale by twisted jihadis - "“They were sharing photos of the sex slaves with the best make-up and clothes, and asking $2,000 for this one, $3,000 for that one. A virgin cost $10,000.” Some said the sex slaves were lavished with gifts including expensive lipstick and clothes - a far cry from the tales told by those captured by ISIS who are often shared between men, beaten and raped. The brides of ISIS told their tales to reporter Jenan Moussa, claiming jealousy was rife. An ISIS bride originally from Lebannon said: “There was a lot of tension between the wives and the sex slaves. “Some of the wives even divorced their husbands because of that. They were spending too much on the sex slaves, buying them the best make-up, clothes and accessories.”"
According to From Our Own Correspondent, a virgin could go for $30,000
issa sage on Twitter: "If this nigga wanna destroy the Earth what makes you think he won't choke a bitch? Lmao https://t.co/jDshUDsnJC" - Salon on X-Men Apocalypse poster: "“X-Men” is shamefully glamorizing violence against women to sell tickets"
"If this nigga wanna destroy the Earth what makes you think he won't choke a bitch? Lmao"
The Israeli Approach to Women in Combat - "Recently, the IDF decided to fully rationalize the process of training and staffing these units based on lessons learned over the years, and one of those lessons is that for all their spirit and willingness to serve, female troops are not capable of functioning as regular combat infantry. Admitting that women are different allows the IDF to better equip and staff these units to maximize their effectiveness. So for example, mixed gender infantry battalions will no longer carry the FN MAG 7.62 mm machinegun (in U.S. service the M-240.) The weapon and ammo are too heavy for female troops, so instead these units will rely exclusively on the Negev light machinegun (the IDF equivalent of the American SAW.) Likewise, these units will only carry American M-4 carbines, which weigh less than the Israeli Tavor. Female troops also wear special flak jackets and load bearing gear to better accommodate ammo and equipment. These changes are designed largely to reduce the disproportionately large number of stress injuries suffered by female soldiers. Another disproportionately large cause of attrition is the often harsh and demanding nature of infantry officers. In the IDF many infantry officers emerge from the elite paratroop and Golani brigades and are then distributed around other units. Such officers proved a poor fit for female infantry, and as a result the IDF redesigned its assignment policies to have more sensitive officers lead the mixed gender units."
Women's combat roles in Israel Defense Forces exaggerated, military traditionalists say - "Israeli women are not in direct combat special operations such as the Green Berets. Nor are they in front-line combat brigades mobilized to engage in direct heavy combat. In the infantry, virtually all of Israel’s female combat soldiers are confined to two light battalions — the Caracal and the Lions of Jordan — which are assigned to guard the borders with Egypt and Jordan, the only Arab countries that have peace treaties with Israel... Retired Maj. Gen. Yiftach Ron-Tal is one of the IDF’s most prominent figures. He was top commander of all IDF land forces in 2006. He supported moving women into direct land combat but in 2011 announced a change of heart, based partly on increased injury rates. “It turns out that the amount of stress fractures suffered by soldiers is dozens of percentage points higher among women than among men. As a result, the female soldiers are not required to carry as much weight”"
IDF rejects female integration in Armored Corps - ""Medical Corps officials examined the workloads and noted that integrating female soldiers into tanks was harmful," a senior Army officer told Ynet. The physiological trials included a test of the abilities of an average female young adult inside the combat compartment of the Merkava tank, specifically in fulfilling the two duties which require significant physical effort – the "loader," tasked with carrying the hefty artillery shells, and the "driver," who must press down on the heavy peddle with considerable strength. Another element in the Armored Corps' lifestyle which the trials took into consideration was the intimacy and harmony among the soldiers, who are often forced to spend several days locked into a small cabin while on operational duty – which may hurt the privacy of the female trooper"
Real men don't look down on women in the SAF
When one understands that NS is sold as a male duty to protect helpless women, a male rite of passage and bonding ritual and a (re)affirmation of masculinity, one understands many of the comments one sees from Singaporean men about this issue
'Flawed' study casts doubts on mixed-gender units in US marine corps - "other pages from the report, seen by the Guardian, indicate that women were not expected to pose problems for ground-combat units, so long as clear standards, diligent screening of candidates and good training and leadership were in place. According to the data shared with the Guardian, the study also showed that some women excelled during tests such as hiking quickly with heavy loads and firing artillery under simulated enemy attack, while mixed marine units showed superior morale and problem-solving and better discipline than units composed only of male marines... all-male units were better at hiking, shooting, gorge-crossing and cliff-climbing, and males suffered fewer injuries"
Even the Guardian admits that it's not all sunshine and sparkles
Modern - Marine Corps releases results of 9-month gender integration study. - "No other military service conducted a similar research experiment...
All-male squads and teams outperformed those that included women on 69 percent of the 134 ground combat tasks evaluated.
All-male teams were outperformed by mixed-gender teams on two tasks: accuracy in firing the 50-caliber machine gun in traditional rifleman units and the same skill in provisional units. Researchers did not know why gender-mixed teams did better on these skills, but said the advantage did not persist when the teams continued on to movement-under-load exercises.
All-male squads in every infantry job were faster than mixed-gender squads in each tactical movement evaluated. The differences between the teams were most pronounced in crew-served weapons teams. Those teams had to carry weapons and ammunition in addition to their individual combat loads.
Male-only rifleman squads were more accurate than gender-integrated counterparts on each individual weapons system, including the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle and the M203 grenade launcher.
Male Marines with no formal infantry training outperformed infantry-trained women on each weapons system, at levels ranging from 11 to 16 percentage points.
In a findings briefing sheet, officials also noted that there were tasks female Marines routinely struggled with that posed no similar challenge to their male counterparts."
The thread has people actually analysing data from the Marines study (which is linked)
Grunt life: Marines dish on the Corps' women in combat experiment - "She watched as the number of women involved in the experiment dwindled by the day."I was stressing out because all my girlfriends started getting hurt," Brown told Marine Corps Times. "They're all getting this common injury from hips. I was waiting to feel something in my hips and I never did."... some volunteers reported perceived unequal treatment that broke down unit cohesion and fostered resentment between male and female counterparts... Lance Cpl. Chris Augello arrived at the integrated task force believing that women should get a shot at service in the infantry as long as they could meet existing standards. It was a perspective that made him different from most male Marines, he said, and he'd argued with his unit members for hours on the point. When Augello checked out of the task force months later, however, he submitted a 13-page essay to unit officials explaining exactly why the experience had made him change his mind."
The Navy Has A Pregnancy Problem & It's Getting Worse - "A record 16 out of 100 Navy women are reassigned from ships to shore duty due to pregnancy, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act... That number is up 2 percent from 2015, representing hundreds more who have to cut their deployments short, taxing both their unit’s manpower, military budgets and combat readiness... Overall, women unexpectedly leave their stations on Navy ships as much as 50% more frequently to return to land duty... The evacuation of pregnant women is costly for the Navy. Jude Eden, a nationally known author about women in the military who served in 2004 as a Marine deployed to Iraq said a single transfer can cost the Navy up to $30,000 for each woman trained for a specific task, then evacuated from an active duty ship and sent to land. That figure translates into $115 million in expenses for 2016 alone... “A pregnancy takes you out of action for about two years. And there’s no replacement,” said Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a nonpartisan public policy organization. “So everybody else has to work all that harder,” adding that on small ships and on submarines, “you really have a potential crew disaster”... The Obama administration understated the pregnancy problem throughout its eight years and even suppressed some data about the impact of its “gender-neutral” policies on the Navy... with the introduction of the all-volunteer military, the Navy provided many lucrative incentives to men and women — including free housing, medical care, recreation and educational opportunities. But women got additional benefits, including free prenatal care, daycare, counseling, and special education for toddlers and children with disabilities or for other “special needs.” “Since benefits offered to recruits who are women are so very generous, it almost becomes an incentive,” said Donnelly. “One feminist advocate many years ago referred to the military as a ‘Mecca for single moms'”... In May 2015, Admiral Michelle Howard announced a quota of 25% women on all ships"
This suggests that NS for women will raise the birth rate
Women in war: operational issues of menstruation and unintended pregnancy. - "With rapid and frequent deployments around the world, the current high level of military operations demands combat readiness of every military member. In the U.S. Armed Forces, women represent 15% of active duty troops and 17% of reserve and Guard troops and are a critical component for mission accomplishment. The operational issues of menstruation and unintended pregnancy, unique to this population, can decrease a female member's military readiness and affect her ability to deploy. Strategies to mitigate and even eliminate these concerns include the optional use of hormonal medications to induce reversible menstrual cycle suppression. These medications, traditionally indicated for contraception, should be considered essential for female troops during training and deployment. This article, tailored specifically for military women, provides valuable information regarding the risks and benefits, as well as the various options available for menstrual cycle suppression."
Feminists would say forcing women to regulate their menstrual cycles and fertility is an invasion of privacy
Rich women like rich men, and rich men like slender women - "Men with higher incomes showed stronger preferences for women with slender bodies, while women with higher incomes preferred men who had a steady income or made similar money, according to a new survey of 28,000 heterosexual men and women aged between 18 and 75... Women felt it was more important that their partner made at least as much money as they did (46% versus 24% of men) and had a successful career (61% versus 33% of men), while men favored a slender body (80% versus 58% of women). And men with more education also had stronger preferences for female partners who were “good looking” and slender, whereas this was not a concern for women. Some 95% of men with an advanced degree said it was “essential” that their partner was “good looking” versus 77% of those with a high school education or less, and 84% of those men said it was essential that their partner was slender versus just 12% of those with a high school education or less... “I don’t think this is superficial at all,” says Jacqueline Whitmore, the founder of The Protocol School of Palm Beach. “Speaking as a woman, most women of a certain age want security, but we also want someone who doesn’t look, act and dress like a troll. A woman must uphold her standards”... The study may help people understand why the advertising industry (and society) puts so much emphasis on women being thin, “part of which is driven by pressure to attract a partner,” Frederick says. And it may also throw light on why men strive so aggressively for higher income and assertively negotiate for raises... Older people care less about physical attraction, professional success or the potential to make a lot of money, the study found
Women like rich men. Rich women like even richer men
This shows one downside of eliminating the raw gender pay gap
Evolutionary theory explains all of this perfectly - including why older people don't care as much about these things
A man who said men had to uphold their standards would be slammed as a misogynist
What do men and women want in a partner? Are educated partners always more desirable? - "Results consistently demonstrated that male participants preferred women with lower SES. Female participants, in contrast, preferred men with higher SES. These sex differences were more pronounced when a long-term romantic relationship rather than a one-night stand was being considered. In addition, men’s lower reported likelihood of romantic contact with a woman with high SES was due to her high educational level rather than her high income. Mediational analyses showed that men perceived a potential partner with high educational level as less likeable and less faithful, and thus reported less likelihood of romantic contact."
Age and Gender Differences in Mate Selection Criteria for Various Involvement Levels - "The present study investigated mate preferences for five different levels of relationship involvement—marriage, serious relationship, falling in love, casual sex, and sexual fantasies–among individuals of 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 years of age. Consistent with an evolutionary perspective, men preferred mates who were higher in physical attractiveness than themselves, whereas women preferred mates who were higher in income, education, self–confidence, intelligence, dominance, and social position than themselves"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Historical Sex Abuse - "You have to be safe from criminal justice if you're dead because you can't get a fair trial because you can't be cross examined and therefore the criminal justice system has to keep out of it. But I've got a greater sort of squeamishness about this. I just feel there's so much kind of easy moral certainty in denouncing pedophiles and child abuse and you just think yes there's hardly anyone going to support it. That to bandy it round and then to mean that anyone who challenges it can be accused of being an apologist is a morally reprehensible atmosphere at the moment. I'm very nervous about it...
Things have changed very recently you know. Operation Yewtree document giving victims a voice actually changed the terms that we use. I mean you might not like victim but they said we should say victims not accusers, that's what they said. They said we should call unproven allegations and change that to evidence. So is there not a danger of an undermining of undue process due to a kind of politicization of guilt that the CPS and the police didn't zealously do their job in the past?"
Horror of ISIS sex slave app: Virgins put on sale by twisted jihadis - "“They were sharing photos of the sex slaves with the best make-up and clothes, and asking $2,000 for this one, $3,000 for that one. A virgin cost $10,000.” Some said the sex slaves were lavished with gifts including expensive lipstick and clothes - a far cry from the tales told by those captured by ISIS who are often shared between men, beaten and raped. The brides of ISIS told their tales to reporter Jenan Moussa, claiming jealousy was rife. An ISIS bride originally from Lebannon said: “There was a lot of tension between the wives and the sex slaves. “Some of the wives even divorced their husbands because of that. They were spending too much on the sex slaves, buying them the best make-up, clothes and accessories.”"
According to From Our Own Correspondent, a virgin could go for $30,000
issa sage on Twitter: "If this nigga wanna destroy the Earth what makes you think he won't choke a bitch? Lmao https://t.co/jDshUDsnJC" - Salon on X-Men Apocalypse poster: "“X-Men” is shamefully glamorizing violence against women to sell tickets"
"If this nigga wanna destroy the Earth what makes you think he won't choke a bitch? Lmao"
The Israeli Approach to Women in Combat - "Recently, the IDF decided to fully rationalize the process of training and staffing these units based on lessons learned over the years, and one of those lessons is that for all their spirit and willingness to serve, female troops are not capable of functioning as regular combat infantry. Admitting that women are different allows the IDF to better equip and staff these units to maximize their effectiveness. So for example, mixed gender infantry battalions will no longer carry the FN MAG 7.62 mm machinegun (in U.S. service the M-240.) The weapon and ammo are too heavy for female troops, so instead these units will rely exclusively on the Negev light machinegun (the IDF equivalent of the American SAW.) Likewise, these units will only carry American M-4 carbines, which weigh less than the Israeli Tavor. Female troops also wear special flak jackets and load bearing gear to better accommodate ammo and equipment. These changes are designed largely to reduce the disproportionately large number of stress injuries suffered by female soldiers. Another disproportionately large cause of attrition is the often harsh and demanding nature of infantry officers. In the IDF many infantry officers emerge from the elite paratroop and Golani brigades and are then distributed around other units. Such officers proved a poor fit for female infantry, and as a result the IDF redesigned its assignment policies to have more sensitive officers lead the mixed gender units."
Women's combat roles in Israel Defense Forces exaggerated, military traditionalists say - "Israeli women are not in direct combat special operations such as the Green Berets. Nor are they in front-line combat brigades mobilized to engage in direct heavy combat. In the infantry, virtually all of Israel’s female combat soldiers are confined to two light battalions — the Caracal and the Lions of Jordan — which are assigned to guard the borders with Egypt and Jordan, the only Arab countries that have peace treaties with Israel... Retired Maj. Gen. Yiftach Ron-Tal is one of the IDF’s most prominent figures. He was top commander of all IDF land forces in 2006. He supported moving women into direct land combat but in 2011 announced a change of heart, based partly on increased injury rates. “It turns out that the amount of stress fractures suffered by soldiers is dozens of percentage points higher among women than among men. As a result, the female soldiers are not required to carry as much weight”"
IDF rejects female integration in Armored Corps - ""Medical Corps officials examined the workloads and noted that integrating female soldiers into tanks was harmful," a senior Army officer told Ynet. The physiological trials included a test of the abilities of an average female young adult inside the combat compartment of the Merkava tank, specifically in fulfilling the two duties which require significant physical effort – the "loader," tasked with carrying the hefty artillery shells, and the "driver," who must press down on the heavy peddle with considerable strength. Another element in the Armored Corps' lifestyle which the trials took into consideration was the intimacy and harmony among the soldiers, who are often forced to spend several days locked into a small cabin while on operational duty – which may hurt the privacy of the female trooper"
Real men don't look down on women in the SAF
When one understands that NS is sold as a male duty to protect helpless women, a male rite of passage and bonding ritual and a (re)affirmation of masculinity, one understands many of the comments one sees from Singaporean men about this issue
'Flawed' study casts doubts on mixed-gender units in US marine corps - "other pages from the report, seen by the Guardian, indicate that women were not expected to pose problems for ground-combat units, so long as clear standards, diligent screening of candidates and good training and leadership were in place. According to the data shared with the Guardian, the study also showed that some women excelled during tests such as hiking quickly with heavy loads and firing artillery under simulated enemy attack, while mixed marine units showed superior morale and problem-solving and better discipline than units composed only of male marines... all-male units were better at hiking, shooting, gorge-crossing and cliff-climbing, and males suffered fewer injuries"
Even the Guardian admits that it's not all sunshine and sparkles
Modern - Marine Corps releases results of 9-month gender integration study. - "No other military service conducted a similar research experiment...
All-male squads and teams outperformed those that included women on 69 percent of the 134 ground combat tasks evaluated.
All-male teams were outperformed by mixed-gender teams on two tasks: accuracy in firing the 50-caliber machine gun in traditional rifleman units and the same skill in provisional units. Researchers did not know why gender-mixed teams did better on these skills, but said the advantage did not persist when the teams continued on to movement-under-load exercises.
All-male squads in every infantry job were faster than mixed-gender squads in each tactical movement evaluated. The differences between the teams were most pronounced in crew-served weapons teams. Those teams had to carry weapons and ammunition in addition to their individual combat loads.
Male-only rifleman squads were more accurate than gender-integrated counterparts on each individual weapons system, including the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle and the M203 grenade launcher.
Male Marines with no formal infantry training outperformed infantry-trained women on each weapons system, at levels ranging from 11 to 16 percentage points.
In a findings briefing sheet, officials also noted that there were tasks female Marines routinely struggled with that posed no similar challenge to their male counterparts."
The thread has people actually analysing data from the Marines study (which is linked)
Grunt life: Marines dish on the Corps' women in combat experiment - "She watched as the number of women involved in the experiment dwindled by the day."I was stressing out because all my girlfriends started getting hurt," Brown told Marine Corps Times. "They're all getting this common injury from hips. I was waiting to feel something in my hips and I never did."... some volunteers reported perceived unequal treatment that broke down unit cohesion and fostered resentment between male and female counterparts... Lance Cpl. Chris Augello arrived at the integrated task force believing that women should get a shot at service in the infantry as long as they could meet existing standards. It was a perspective that made him different from most male Marines, he said, and he'd argued with his unit members for hours on the point. When Augello checked out of the task force months later, however, he submitted a 13-page essay to unit officials explaining exactly why the experience had made him change his mind."
The Navy Has A Pregnancy Problem & It's Getting Worse - "A record 16 out of 100 Navy women are reassigned from ships to shore duty due to pregnancy, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act... That number is up 2 percent from 2015, representing hundreds more who have to cut their deployments short, taxing both their unit’s manpower, military budgets and combat readiness... Overall, women unexpectedly leave their stations on Navy ships as much as 50% more frequently to return to land duty... The evacuation of pregnant women is costly for the Navy. Jude Eden, a nationally known author about women in the military who served in 2004 as a Marine deployed to Iraq said a single transfer can cost the Navy up to $30,000 for each woman trained for a specific task, then evacuated from an active duty ship and sent to land. That figure translates into $115 million in expenses for 2016 alone... “A pregnancy takes you out of action for about two years. And there’s no replacement,” said Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a nonpartisan public policy organization. “So everybody else has to work all that harder,” adding that on small ships and on submarines, “you really have a potential crew disaster”... The Obama administration understated the pregnancy problem throughout its eight years and even suppressed some data about the impact of its “gender-neutral” policies on the Navy... with the introduction of the all-volunteer military, the Navy provided many lucrative incentives to men and women — including free housing, medical care, recreation and educational opportunities. But women got additional benefits, including free prenatal care, daycare, counseling, and special education for toddlers and children with disabilities or for other “special needs.” “Since benefits offered to recruits who are women are so very generous, it almost becomes an incentive,” said Donnelly. “One feminist advocate many years ago referred to the military as a ‘Mecca for single moms'”... In May 2015, Admiral Michelle Howard announced a quota of 25% women on all ships"
This suggests that NS for women will raise the birth rate
Women in war: operational issues of menstruation and unintended pregnancy. - "With rapid and frequent deployments around the world, the current high level of military operations demands combat readiness of every military member. In the U.S. Armed Forces, women represent 15% of active duty troops and 17% of reserve and Guard troops and are a critical component for mission accomplishment. The operational issues of menstruation and unintended pregnancy, unique to this population, can decrease a female member's military readiness and affect her ability to deploy. Strategies to mitigate and even eliminate these concerns include the optional use of hormonal medications to induce reversible menstrual cycle suppression. These medications, traditionally indicated for contraception, should be considered essential for female troops during training and deployment. This article, tailored specifically for military women, provides valuable information regarding the risks and benefits, as well as the various options available for menstrual cycle suppression."
Feminists would say forcing women to regulate their menstrual cycles and fertility is an invasion of privacy
Rich women like rich men, and rich men like slender women - "Men with higher incomes showed stronger preferences for women with slender bodies, while women with higher incomes preferred men who had a steady income or made similar money, according to a new survey of 28,000 heterosexual men and women aged between 18 and 75... Women felt it was more important that their partner made at least as much money as they did (46% versus 24% of men) and had a successful career (61% versus 33% of men), while men favored a slender body (80% versus 58% of women). And men with more education also had stronger preferences for female partners who were “good looking” and slender, whereas this was not a concern for women. Some 95% of men with an advanced degree said it was “essential” that their partner was “good looking” versus 77% of those with a high school education or less, and 84% of those men said it was essential that their partner was slender versus just 12% of those with a high school education or less... “I don’t think this is superficial at all,” says Jacqueline Whitmore, the founder of The Protocol School of Palm Beach. “Speaking as a woman, most women of a certain age want security, but we also want someone who doesn’t look, act and dress like a troll. A woman must uphold her standards”... The study may help people understand why the advertising industry (and society) puts so much emphasis on women being thin, “part of which is driven by pressure to attract a partner,” Frederick says. And it may also throw light on why men strive so aggressively for higher income and assertively negotiate for raises... Older people care less about physical attraction, professional success or the potential to make a lot of money, the study found
Women like rich men. Rich women like even richer men
This shows one downside of eliminating the raw gender pay gap
Evolutionary theory explains all of this perfectly - including why older people don't care as much about these things
A man who said men had to uphold their standards would be slammed as a misogynist
What do men and women want in a partner? Are educated partners always more desirable? - "Results consistently demonstrated that male participants preferred women with lower SES. Female participants, in contrast, preferred men with higher SES. These sex differences were more pronounced when a long-term romantic relationship rather than a one-night stand was being considered. In addition, men’s lower reported likelihood of romantic contact with a woman with high SES was due to her high educational level rather than her high income. Mediational analyses showed that men perceived a potential partner with high educational level as less likeable and less faithful, and thus reported less likelihood of romantic contact."
Age and Gender Differences in Mate Selection Criteria for Various Involvement Levels - "The present study investigated mate preferences for five different levels of relationship involvement—marriage, serious relationship, falling in love, casual sex, and sexual fantasies–among individuals of 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 years of age. Consistent with an evolutionary perspective, men preferred mates who were higher in physical attractiveness than themselves, whereas women preferred mates who were higher in income, education, self–confidence, intelligence, dominance, and social position than themselves"
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