Charlie Hebdo publishes cartoon of Barcelona attack criticised for portraying Islam as inherently violent - "In an editorial inside the magazine, Charlie Hebdo's editor Laurent Sourisseau known as "Riss" explained his editorial choice by saying experts and policy-makers are avoiding asking hard questions out of concern for moderate Muslims. "The debates and questions about the role of religion and in particular the role of Islam in these attacks have completely disappeared," he wrote"
Apparently a cartoon about terrorism is more offensive than the terrorism itself
In India, caste system ensures you are what you eat - ""You grow up learning you cannot relish your food or eat it as though you were enjoying it. That was regarded as crude. Everything we did had to be ultra-refined, so we ate as though we were doing penance, with no enjoyment," she says. Mehra ran from this ethereal atmosphere into the arms of a man from Punjab, a community famous for its Dionysian love of excess, including that of food with big, bold, rustic flavours - but that is another story. As so many of the recent high-caste vegetarian cookbooks will tell you, meat is repugnant to Saraswat and Iyengar Brahmins. A common assumption outside India is that all Hindus are vegetarians. Many Hindus are indeed vegetarian but many, including Brahmins, eat meat. In fact, for the warrior castes, meat was an important part of their diet, vital in building the physical strength needed for battle. It is the belief of one high-ranking caste, the Kayastha, that vegetarianism is for rabbits. A meal without at least one mutton dish is a disaster for Kayasthas... When an upper-caste person gives food to someone of a lower caste, it is always dropped, rather than placed, in their hands, to avoid any contamination... For centuries, the time-honoured technique for sparking a Hindu-Muslim riot has been to throw a pig's head into a mosque or dump a dead cow outside a Hindu temple. Even today, food habits are used as a tool of social exclusion. Rich, upper-caste Hindu landlords in Mumbai housing complexes use vegetarianism to keep out lower-caste tenants (and Muslims, too, of course) by specifying that flats can only be let to vegetarians... British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, when he visited India in 2010 for a television series, travelled to meet members of the Dhuruva tribe, in Chhattisgarh, to see how they make a red ant chutney (he liked it), but you're unlikely to ever catch an Indian food writer or chef showing an interest in the traditions of the poor and marginalised... The day Indian publishers start commissioning Dalit cookery books will mark a victory for the country's culinary inclusiveness. The day someone opens a Dalit restaurant that upper-caste Indians go to will signal the vanquishing of an ancient bigotry."
Game of Thrones: the best show on TV just became the silliest - "Characters used to act, and plot used to unfurl, in ways that felt real; that’s what gave this geeky genre series about dragons and magic its global crossover appeal. Now? We know Jon will be part of the larger battle to come, so we knew he hadn’t drowned. The Night’s King needed a dragon, so the plot gave us a half-baked reason – Dany coming to a profoundly unlikely rescue – for him to get one. Sansa sends Brienne away because the plot requires her to be unprotected, nothing more. Characters aren’t so much pieces being moved on a board than the board is being moved under them, credulity be damned. In a show full of dragons and magic, it’s strange that the humans are starting to feel fake"
But it's fiction so you can write anything!
UK Pakistani views on the adverse health risks associated with consanguineous marriages - "participants had a limited and varied understanding of genetic risk and indicated a lack of discussion within the community regarding genetic risk. They also opposed evidence that may link consanguineous marriages with infant mortality, stillbirth or genetic disorders that led to disability. The participants stressed the need for culturally sensitive and locally constructed services for information on genetic risk and services"
Is it racist and Islamophobic to tell people that cousin marriage can lead to genetic defects?
Pope says migrants' rights should override national security concerns - ""The principle of the centrality of the human person ... obliges us to always prioritise personal safety over national security"... He called for "alternative solutions to detention" for illegal immigrants
Apparently some human persons are more central than others
OOPS: Antifa Beats The Hell Out Of Fellow Protester They Mistake For A 'Nazi' - "some of the brilliant folks comprising the hard leftist group Antifa accidently beat the hell out of a fellow Antifa protester whom the morons mistook for a "neo-Nazi" (which basically means anyone right-wing or classically liberal)."
Jake Tapper: Antifa protesters have attacked several journalists - "Here’s a portion of Antifa’s excuse for their violence. I’m going to quote it at length because it is so pathetic that reading it will give you an idea of the idiocy we are dealing with here. This is the excuse of 6th grader caught red handed by the principal:
This man ran at a crowd that was holding space for our murdered comrade with just his iPhone. Due to the intensity and context of this time people are very scared of white men running full speed at them with iPhones as this is the exact behavior of a white supremacist trying to out identity of people of color and anti fascists in order to invoke fear. Additionally, they also use press footage constantly to do this...
As Tapper noted above, the station says the explanation is full of lies."
WATCH: BLM Member Confronts Antifa Members Over Masks. So An Antifa Guy Punches Him.
After Charlottesville, a Hitler supporter's haunting warning —'Then they came for me' — is everywhere. - The Washington Post - "Niemöller supported Adolf Hitler and Jewish hatred — until he was sent to a concentration camp... Niemöller’s sermons reflected his strong nationalist sentiment. He felt that reparations, democracy and foreign influence had led to damaging social fragmentation and an overemphasis on the individual in German society. Niemöller believed that Germany needed a strong leader to promote national unity and honor... In examining interviews, speech transcripts and other documents, University of California at Santa Barbara history professor Harold Marcuse concluded that Niemöller didn’t quite say things as he’s been quoted. The persecuted groups he cited sometimes changed for his audience. So did the order in which he listed them."
6 Secrets Men Never Tell - "Now and then, men just want to have some time for themselves to enjoy moments of peace and quiet."
The 11 nations of the United States - "Yankeedom
New Netherland
The Midlands
Tidewater
Greater Appalachia
Deep South
El Norte
The Left Coast
The Far West
New France
First Nation"
Disable Your Laptop's Touchpad While You Type, Windows 7 Edition - "unlike TouchFreeze, TouchpadPal is compatible with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7."
Man accidentally hires son’s girlfriend as escort - "The 70-year-old, from Treviso, couldn't believe his eyes when his future daughter-in-law knocked on his door. The South American woman had told everyone, including the 40-year-old son, that she was a waitress. Red-faced, they decided not to seal the deal. The father, deciding that honesty was the best policy, then told his son the truth. But it sparked a bitter fight between the pair."
Detroit Player Injures Himself with Celebratory Hip Thrust
Computer geeks as loners? Data says otherwise - "Sixty-two percent of tech workers are married, according to 2012 American Community Survey (ACS) data analyzed by Computerworld. The rate for the entire population? 51%, a Pew Research Center analysis of 2010 Census data says. Tech workers' marital status is on par with other white-collar professions, including finance (62%), law (62%), medicine (61%) and education, the Computerworld ACS analysis found -- perhaps as much due to age or income as career."
S’pore govt agencies may use ‘sarcasm detectors’ for social media monitoring - "the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) has developed an artificial intelligence system that can swiftly search through online content, detect if the netizens’ comments are sarcastic, and make more accurate analysis on their true sentiments. This is to analyse what citizens truly think about the government."
Do not boil your underwear in hotel kettles, warns expert - "Highlighted by Gizmido, who spotted someone asking on Twitter, “Real question: does anyone I know clean their underwear in a kettle while travelling?” evidence of people using hotel kettles to boil their unmentionables has, worryingly, also been spotted on Chinese microblogging site Weibo."
That it's found on Weibo tells you what you need to know
Scientists Take Over Computer by Encoding Malware in DNA - "they converted a piece of malware into physical DNA strands. When those strands were sequenced, the malware launched and compromised the computer that was analyzing the sequences, allowing the team to take control of it... programs for analyzing DNA have “relatively relaxed security standards.” There are rumors, he says, that one big research institution was hit by ransomware, because they used the default admin passwords on their sequencing machines."
Don’t expect police to come out after a crime if you’re healthy, middle-aged and speak good English - "Deputy commissioner Craig Mackey said the “absolutely feasible” change would see the Met assessing the level of risk faced by a caller when deciding whether to send officers for a “face to face service”... Healthy middle-aged men such as himself might miss out. Mr Mackey said burglary victims would “probably always get a service” but that “vehicle crime, those sorts of things” were among the types of offence where police might not attend unless the person affected was vulnerable."
Keywords: Crime victims who don’t speak English may soon ‘be prioritised by police’, which victims got face-to-face visits would depend on how “vulnerable” they were
Malaysia got 8 out of 11 flags wrong in a medal tally broadcast on TV during the SEA Games
Malaysia Boleh
M’sia has finally done it, they’ve gotten their own flag wrong for SEA Games broadcast - "Keith for some reason was competing under KUL, instead of MAL, for Malaysia. Maybe that was for Kuala Lumpur?"
Violence breaks out at Berkeley protest - "Thousands of demonstrators, carrying signs with slogans like “Stand Against Hate,” descended on Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Park on Sunday for what many hoped would be a peaceful march against bigotry and President Trump. But it was soon punctuated by tear gas and a scattering of violent skirmishes. Some anti-fascist protesters, wearing black and with their faces covered, chased or beat Trump supporters and organizers who had scheduled and then canceled the “anti-Marxist” rally, citing concerns over safety... Some in Berkeley worried that Sunday’s chaos, captured on video and quickly disseminated through social media, would provide unwanted ammunition to Trump and his supporters. “We can’t keep producing this audio-visual propaganda,” said Andrew Noruk, a counter-protester who denounced the fights. “It is recruiting for the right”... Anti-fascist protesters also beat one person wearing an American flag. Some threatened to break the cameras of anyone who filmed them, including journalists. Others set off purple smoke bombs.
Apparently it's not hateful to hate "hate". Amusingly, on Robert Reich's Facebook some people were claiming that the violence was because of paid Trump supporters. Of course even more were defending antifa or violence (when directed at "Nazis")
Study: Social justice activism is 'rife' with 'oppression' - "While some individuals “may find social support and decreased isolation through engagement with established activist groups,” they caution that “activism is not universally helpful,” particularly for those with “multiple oppressed identities,” who “may experience invalidation, tokenism, and marginalization within activist communities.” Many of the activists interviewed for Morrow’s study, all of whom were referred to by pseudonyms in the article, confirmed that they have faced oppression in the field... At least half of those surveyed “spoke to the struggle to choose to engage or not in activism” out of a fear of being disliked by other activists... One transgender activist, Bri, said that she felt tokenized by her peers, discouraged that she’s only called upon to speak when people “need a trans person’s voice for whatever.”"
This is further evidence that liberals aren't tolerant and don't practise what they preach. And/or that claims of oppression should not always be taken at face value
U.S. duped by ‘monumental’ lie about Charlottesville - "Here’s the irony: Robert E. Lee was the most decorated soldier in the U.S. Army. He was a man of unimpeachable integrity. Lincoln offered him command of the Union Army, but Lee refused only because his loyalty was to Virginia. Lee opposed both secession and slavery. And yet to the historically illiterate left, a man who opposed both slavery and secession has come to symbolize both slavery and secession... let’s look at former West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, who was a deeply important figure in the modern Democratic Party. Seemingly half of West Virginia is named after Robert Byrd! And yet this was a man who was not only associated with racism, but was a leader in his state’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. This is from the modern era – yet no one is calling for his name to be taken down from street signs, buildings named after him to be altered or his memory damned by the state of West Virginia. “The bottom line is when a figure is in the Democratic Party, regardless of how racist he or she was, no one in the media draws attention to the history involved. Someone like Lee can’t even be mentioned in the same breath as Byrd”... Democrats who are almost universally celebrated by modern progressives also have a deeply troubling history, according to D’Souza. Noted progressive Woodrow Wilson, for example, prominently championed the racist film, “The Birth Of A Nation,” sparking a modern day revival of the Ku Klux Klan."
ESPN pulls announcer Robert Lee from University of Virginia football game - "ESPN confirmed Tuesday night that it had decided to pull an announcer from calling a University of Virginia football game because his name is Robert Lee. This Robert Lee is Asian."
Yet, saying that Barack Hussein Obama's middle name was worrying was considered racist
HERE IT IS: 30 Years of Trump FIGHTING RACISM That the Media Doesn’t Want You to See (Video) - "Watch Donald Trump disavow David Duke, the KKK and all racists, over and over again, dating back 17 years, while the liberal media keeps denying he did, and insists he must be a racist himself."
Friday, December 08, 2017
The Warlock Hunt
The Warlock Hunt
"This article circulated from publication to publication, like old-fashioned samizdat, and was rejected repeatedly with a sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I agree with you. But no.” Friends have urged me not to publish it under my own name, vividly describing the mob that will tear me from limb to limb and leave the dingoes to pick over my flesh. It says something, doesn’t it, that I’ve been more hesitant to speak about this than I’ve been of getting on the wrong side of the mafia, al-Qaeda, or the Kremlin?
But speak I must. It now takes only one accusation to destroy a man’s life. Just one for him to be tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion, overnight costing him his livelihood and social respectability...
One after another prominent voice, many of them political voices, have been silenced by sexual harassment charges. Not one of these cases has yet been adjudicated in a court of law. Leon Wiesenthal, David Corn, Mark Halperin, Michael Oreskes, Al Franken, Ken Baker, Rick Najera, Andy Signore, Jeff Hoover, Matt Lauer, even Garrison Keillor—all have received the professional death sentence... Some have been accused of offenses that aren’t offensive, or offenses that are only mildly so—and do not warrant total professional and personal destruction.
The things men and women naturally do—flirt, play, lewdly joke, desire, seduce, tease—now become harassment... The onus to understand the interaction and its emotional subtleties falls entirely on him. But why? Perhaps she should have understood his behavior to be harmless—clumsy, sweet but misdirected, maladroit, or tacky—but lacking in malice sufficient to cost him such arduous punishment?...
Over the course of my academic and professional career, many men who in some way held a position of power over me have made lewd jokes in my presence, or reminisced drunkenly of past lovers, or confessed sexual fantasies. They have hugged me, flirted with me, on occasion propositioned me. For the most part, this male attention has amused me and given me reason to look forward to otherwise dreary days at work. I dread the day I lose my power over men, which I have used to coax them to confide to me on the record secrets they would never have vouchsafed to a male journalist. I did not feel “demeaned” by the realization that some men esteemed my cleavage more than my talent; I felt damned lucky to have enough talent to exploit my cleavage...
Revolutions against real injustice have a tendency, however, to descend into paroxysms of vengeance that descend upon guilty and innocent alike. We’re getting too close. Hysteria is in the air. The over-broad definition of “sexual harassment” is a well-known warning sign. The over-broad language of the Law of Suspects portended the descent of the French Revolution into the Terror. This revolution risks going the way revolutions so often do, and the consequences will not just be awful for men. They will be awful for women...
Kissing a woman is an early stage of courtship. It is one way that men ask the question, “Would you like more?” Courtship is not a phenomenon so minor to our behavioral repertoire that we can readily expunge it from the workplace. It is central to human life. Men and women are attracted to each other; the human race could not perpetuate itself otherwise; and anyone who imagines they will cease to be attracted to each other—or act as if they were not—in the workplace, or any other place, is delusional. Anyone who imagines it is easy for a man to figure out whether a woman might like to be kissed is insane. The difficulty of ascertaining whether one’s passions are reciprocated is the theme of 90 percent of human literature and every romantic comedy or pop song ever written...
The comedians, by their own account, screamed and laughed—and only later revealed they were “outraged.” They say that they shrieked with laughter because they were traumatized. But if you can’t understand why someone like Louis CK might have genuinely understood their laughter as “consent,” your emotional acumen is deficient...
They’re literally going to airbrush Spacey out of All The Money, like water commissar Nikolai Yezhov in that photo of the Moscow Canal. Comrade Spacey has been vaporized. He’s an unperson. Long live Comrade Ogilvy. Isn’t anyone a bit spooked by this?...
We just can’t hold people like Louis CK and Leon Wieseltier to the same standards of probity and decorum we would—in a highly imaginary alternate universe—hold the President or a Senator from Alabama. Americans love these people precisely because they’re outrageous, lewd, and willing publicly to violate sexual and social norms...
For that matter, isn’t anyone else a bit spooked by the ritual tenor of the confessions that always follow? The most profound mystery of the Moscow Trials was the eagerness of the victims to confess...
They are all confessing in the same dazed, rote, mechanical way...
For God’s sake, why are these men all humiliating themselves? It’s not like confessing will bring forgiveness. They must all know, like Bukharin, that no matter what they say, the ritual of confession will be followed by the ritual of liquidation. If they said, “You’ve all lost your fucking minds, stop sniffing my underwear and leave me the fuck alone,” they’d meet exactly the same fate. Why didn’t Bukharin say, “To hell with you. You may kill me, but you will not make me grovel?” I used to wonder, but now I see. Am I the only one who finds these canned, rote, mechanical, brainwashed apologies deeply creepy? Isn’t anyone else put in mind of the Cultural Revolution’s Struggle Sessions, where the accused were dragged before crowds to condemn themselves and plead for forgiveness? This very form of ritual public humiliation, aimed at eliminating all traces of reactionary thinking, now awaits anyone accused of providing an unwanted backrub.
We are a culture historically disposed to moral panics and sexual hysterias. Not long ago we firmly convinced ourselves that our children were being ritually raped by Satanists. In recent years, especially, we have become prone to replacing complex thought with shallow slogans. We live in times of extremism, and black-and-white thinking. We should have the self-awareness to suspect that the events of recent weeks may not be an aspect of our growing enlightenment, but rather our growing enamorment with extremism.
We should certainly realize by now that a moral panic mixed with an internet mob is a menace. When the mob descends on a target of prominence, it’s as good as a death sentence, socially and professionally. None of us lead lives so faultless that we cannot be targeted this way. “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”...
Given the events of recent weeks, we can be certain of this: From now on, men with any instinct for self-preservation will cease to speak of anything personal, anything sexual, in our presence. They will make no bawdy jokes when we are listening. They will adopt in our presence great deference to our exquisite sensitivity and frailty. Many women seem positively joyful at this prospect. The Revolution has at last been achieved! But how could this be the world we want? Isn’t this the world we escaped?
Who could blame a man who does not enjoy the company of women under these circumstances, who would just rather not have women in the workplace at all? This is a world in which the Mike Pence rule—“Never be alone with a woman”—seems eminently sensible. Such a world is not good for women, however—as many women were quick to point out when we learned of the Mike Pence rule. Our success and advancement relies upon the personal and informal relationships we have with our colleagues and supervisors. But who, in this climate, could blame a venerable Oxford don for refusing to take the risk of teaching a young woman, one-on-one, with no witnesses? Mine was the first generation of women allowed the privilege of unchaperoned tutorials with Balliol’s dons. Will mine also be the last? Like so many revolutions, the sexual revolution risks coming full circle, returning us right where we started—fainting at bawdy jokes, demanding the return of ancient standards of chivalry, so delicate and virginal that a man’s hand on our knee causes us trauma. Women have long been victims, but now we are in so many respects victims no longer. We have more status, prestige, power, and personal freedom than ever before. Why would we want to speak and act as though we were overwhelmingly victims, as we actually used to be?
Women, I’m begging you: Think this through. We are fostering a climate in which men legitimately fear us, where their entire professional and personal lives can be casually destroyed by “secret lists” compiled by accusers they cannot confront, by rumors on the internet, by thrilled, breathless reporting denouncing one after another of them as a pig, often based only on the allegation that they did something all-too-human and none-too-criminal like making a lewd joke. Why would we even want men to be subject to such strenuous, arduous taboos against the display of their sexuality? These taboos, note carefully, resemble in non-trivial ways those that have long oppressed women. In a world with such arduous taboos about male purity and chastity, surely, it is rational for men to have as little to do with women as possible. What’s in this for us?...
Let us put this in the crudest of Freudian terms. Women have castrated men en masse. Perhaps this panic is happening now because our emotions about this achievement are ambivalent. Perhaps our ambivalence is so taboo that we cannot admit it to ourselves, no less discuss it rationally. Is it possible that we are acting out a desire that has surfaced from the hadopelagic zone of our collective unconscious—a longing to have the old brutes back? That is what Freud would suggest: We are imagining brutes all around us as a form of wish-fulfillment, a tidy achievement that simultaneously allows us to express our ambivalence by shrieking at them in horror."
No wonder we have MGTOW.
Of course, feminists expect men to take on all of the risk themselves.
"This article circulated from publication to publication, like old-fashioned samizdat, and was rejected repeatedly with a sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I agree with you. But no.” Friends have urged me not to publish it under my own name, vividly describing the mob that will tear me from limb to limb and leave the dingoes to pick over my flesh. It says something, doesn’t it, that I’ve been more hesitant to speak about this than I’ve been of getting on the wrong side of the mafia, al-Qaeda, or the Kremlin?
But speak I must. It now takes only one accusation to destroy a man’s life. Just one for him to be tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion, overnight costing him his livelihood and social respectability...
One after another prominent voice, many of them political voices, have been silenced by sexual harassment charges. Not one of these cases has yet been adjudicated in a court of law. Leon Wiesenthal, David Corn, Mark Halperin, Michael Oreskes, Al Franken, Ken Baker, Rick Najera, Andy Signore, Jeff Hoover, Matt Lauer, even Garrison Keillor—all have received the professional death sentence... Some have been accused of offenses that aren’t offensive, or offenses that are only mildly so—and do not warrant total professional and personal destruction.
The things men and women naturally do—flirt, play, lewdly joke, desire, seduce, tease—now become harassment... The onus to understand the interaction and its emotional subtleties falls entirely on him. But why? Perhaps she should have understood his behavior to be harmless—clumsy, sweet but misdirected, maladroit, or tacky—but lacking in malice sufficient to cost him such arduous punishment?...
Over the course of my academic and professional career, many men who in some way held a position of power over me have made lewd jokes in my presence, or reminisced drunkenly of past lovers, or confessed sexual fantasies. They have hugged me, flirted with me, on occasion propositioned me. For the most part, this male attention has amused me and given me reason to look forward to otherwise dreary days at work. I dread the day I lose my power over men, which I have used to coax them to confide to me on the record secrets they would never have vouchsafed to a male journalist. I did not feel “demeaned” by the realization that some men esteemed my cleavage more than my talent; I felt damned lucky to have enough talent to exploit my cleavage...
Revolutions against real injustice have a tendency, however, to descend into paroxysms of vengeance that descend upon guilty and innocent alike. We’re getting too close. Hysteria is in the air. The over-broad definition of “sexual harassment” is a well-known warning sign. The over-broad language of the Law of Suspects portended the descent of the French Revolution into the Terror. This revolution risks going the way revolutions so often do, and the consequences will not just be awful for men. They will be awful for women...
Kissing a woman is an early stage of courtship. It is one way that men ask the question, “Would you like more?” Courtship is not a phenomenon so minor to our behavioral repertoire that we can readily expunge it from the workplace. It is central to human life. Men and women are attracted to each other; the human race could not perpetuate itself otherwise; and anyone who imagines they will cease to be attracted to each other—or act as if they were not—in the workplace, or any other place, is delusional. Anyone who imagines it is easy for a man to figure out whether a woman might like to be kissed is insane. The difficulty of ascertaining whether one’s passions are reciprocated is the theme of 90 percent of human literature and every romantic comedy or pop song ever written...
The comedians, by their own account, screamed and laughed—and only later revealed they were “outraged.” They say that they shrieked with laughter because they were traumatized. But if you can’t understand why someone like Louis CK might have genuinely understood their laughter as “consent,” your emotional acumen is deficient...
They’re literally going to airbrush Spacey out of All The Money, like water commissar Nikolai Yezhov in that photo of the Moscow Canal. Comrade Spacey has been vaporized. He’s an unperson. Long live Comrade Ogilvy. Isn’t anyone a bit spooked by this?...
We just can’t hold people like Louis CK and Leon Wieseltier to the same standards of probity and decorum we would—in a highly imaginary alternate universe—hold the President or a Senator from Alabama. Americans love these people precisely because they’re outrageous, lewd, and willing publicly to violate sexual and social norms...
For that matter, isn’t anyone else a bit spooked by the ritual tenor of the confessions that always follow? The most profound mystery of the Moscow Trials was the eagerness of the victims to confess...
They are all confessing in the same dazed, rote, mechanical way...
For God’s sake, why are these men all humiliating themselves? It’s not like confessing will bring forgiveness. They must all know, like Bukharin, that no matter what they say, the ritual of confession will be followed by the ritual of liquidation. If they said, “You’ve all lost your fucking minds, stop sniffing my underwear and leave me the fuck alone,” they’d meet exactly the same fate. Why didn’t Bukharin say, “To hell with you. You may kill me, but you will not make me grovel?” I used to wonder, but now I see. Am I the only one who finds these canned, rote, mechanical, brainwashed apologies deeply creepy? Isn’t anyone else put in mind of the Cultural Revolution’s Struggle Sessions, where the accused were dragged before crowds to condemn themselves and plead for forgiveness? This very form of ritual public humiliation, aimed at eliminating all traces of reactionary thinking, now awaits anyone accused of providing an unwanted backrub.
We are a culture historically disposed to moral panics and sexual hysterias. Not long ago we firmly convinced ourselves that our children were being ritually raped by Satanists. In recent years, especially, we have become prone to replacing complex thought with shallow slogans. We live in times of extremism, and black-and-white thinking. We should have the self-awareness to suspect that the events of recent weeks may not be an aspect of our growing enlightenment, but rather our growing enamorment with extremism.
We should certainly realize by now that a moral panic mixed with an internet mob is a menace. When the mob descends on a target of prominence, it’s as good as a death sentence, socially and professionally. None of us lead lives so faultless that we cannot be targeted this way. “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”...
Given the events of recent weeks, we can be certain of this: From now on, men with any instinct for self-preservation will cease to speak of anything personal, anything sexual, in our presence. They will make no bawdy jokes when we are listening. They will adopt in our presence great deference to our exquisite sensitivity and frailty. Many women seem positively joyful at this prospect. The Revolution has at last been achieved! But how could this be the world we want? Isn’t this the world we escaped?
Who could blame a man who does not enjoy the company of women under these circumstances, who would just rather not have women in the workplace at all? This is a world in which the Mike Pence rule—“Never be alone with a woman”—seems eminently sensible. Such a world is not good for women, however—as many women were quick to point out when we learned of the Mike Pence rule. Our success and advancement relies upon the personal and informal relationships we have with our colleagues and supervisors. But who, in this climate, could blame a venerable Oxford don for refusing to take the risk of teaching a young woman, one-on-one, with no witnesses? Mine was the first generation of women allowed the privilege of unchaperoned tutorials with Balliol’s dons. Will mine also be the last? Like so many revolutions, the sexual revolution risks coming full circle, returning us right where we started—fainting at bawdy jokes, demanding the return of ancient standards of chivalry, so delicate and virginal that a man’s hand on our knee causes us trauma. Women have long been victims, but now we are in so many respects victims no longer. We have more status, prestige, power, and personal freedom than ever before. Why would we want to speak and act as though we were overwhelmingly victims, as we actually used to be?
Women, I’m begging you: Think this through. We are fostering a climate in which men legitimately fear us, where their entire professional and personal lives can be casually destroyed by “secret lists” compiled by accusers they cannot confront, by rumors on the internet, by thrilled, breathless reporting denouncing one after another of them as a pig, often based only on the allegation that they did something all-too-human and none-too-criminal like making a lewd joke. Why would we even want men to be subject to such strenuous, arduous taboos against the display of their sexuality? These taboos, note carefully, resemble in non-trivial ways those that have long oppressed women. In a world with such arduous taboos about male purity and chastity, surely, it is rational for men to have as little to do with women as possible. What’s in this for us?...
Let us put this in the crudest of Freudian terms. Women have castrated men en masse. Perhaps this panic is happening now because our emotions about this achievement are ambivalent. Perhaps our ambivalence is so taboo that we cannot admit it to ourselves, no less discuss it rationally. Is it possible that we are acting out a desire that has surfaced from the hadopelagic zone of our collective unconscious—a longing to have the old brutes back? That is what Freud would suggest: We are imagining brutes all around us as a form of wish-fulfillment, a tidy achievement that simultaneously allows us to express our ambivalence by shrieking at them in horror."
No wonder we have MGTOW.
Of course, feminists expect men to take on all of the risk themselves.
Links - 8th December 2017 (1)
A Baker’s First Amendment Rights - NYTimes.com - "in classic “compelled speech” rulings, the Supreme Court has protected the right not to be forced to say, do or create anything expressing a message one rejects. Most famously, in West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), it barred a state from denying Jehovah’s Witnesses the right to attend public schools if they refused to salute the flag. In Wooley v. Maynard (1977), the court prevented New Hampshire from denying people the right to drive if they refused to display on license plates the state’s libertarian-flavored motto “live free or die.” On Tuesday, the court will consider whether Colorado may deny Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, the right to sell custom wedding cakes because he cannot in conscience create them for same-sex weddings. Mr. Phillips, who has run his bakery since 1993, sells off-the-shelf items to anyone, no questions asked. But he cannot deploy his artistic skills to create cakes celebrating themes that violate his religious and moral convictions. Thus he does not design cakes for divorce parties, lewd bachelor parties, Halloween parties or same-sex weddings... At some level, Colorado itself gets it. Three times the state has declined to force pro-gay bakers to provide a Christian patron with a cake they could not in conscience create given their own convictions on sexuality and marriage"
Car ploughs through trans lives matter protest in St Louis - "People were gathered to honor the life of Herring, a 30-year-old black transgender woman, who was shot dead by St. Louis police on Tuesday. Herring was killed by a police after she allegedly stabbed an officer and a neighbor with a large kitchen knife... Police spokeswoman Schron Jackson told the Riverfront Times: 'Tonight, a group of protesters marched from the Transgender Memorial to the intersection of Manchester and Sarah were they blocked traffic in all directions. 'A vehicle approached, stopped, honked its horn and attempted to drive around the protesters. 'The protesters surrounded the vehicle and began striking it with their hands and a flag pole. Several protesters also kicked and jumped on top of the vehicle.' She said the driver of the vehicle - a white male - then drove away when two women and a man 'fell from the vehicle'"
If you're black and attack the police and get shot dead, you're the victim
If you're a white man and people attack your vehicle and you drive off, you're a villain
Urinetown | Tell Me Something I Don't Know - "[American Sign Language]'s a totally separate language from English... ASL has dialects so it has a black dialect and even has a Philadelphia dialect... New Yorkers are notorious for being fast talkers while Ohioans are more calm and relaxed. New Yorkers also curse more in sign and people in the Southern United States tend to touch their lower face and chest a lot when they sign which has become a distinctive regional accent. Lastly and most importantly just like American English speakers feel about Australians for example, people with certain foreign accents or dialects in sign are considered more attractive"
Driverless cars and trucks don’t mean mass unemployment—they mean new kinds of jobs | Cathy Engelbert | Pulse | LinkedIn - "As demographic trends collide with new types of mobility, we could easily imagine that aging Baby Boomers will need aides to travel with them to medical appointments and run errands—even if “driving” is not part of their job description. Travel and leisure will likely continue to grow. In general, there will likely be an expanding market around mobility management services that could offer incremental job growth. There will be new businesses that will digitally enable the planning and consumption of passenger and goods movement to be more efficient, enjoyable, productive, safer, cleaner, and cheaper. That could mean everything from maintaining vehicle fleets to remote monitoring. These are in adjacent spaces... consider one possible future that could occur soon, where autonomous trucks travel highways with a human “monitor” in the cab who can assist with particularly challenging driving like navigating city centers and ensure goods are delivered safely. Since the vehicles can operate for much longer periods without stopping, fewer total drivers would be needed, helping to alleviate the shortage. The jobs that remain could be less fatiguing and require shorter stints away from home (again, because the truck can operate almost constantly)."
Spanish airline is fined for making female applicants take a pregnancy test - "Iberia is Spain's national flag carrier. Its pregnancy test requirement for cabin crew jobs-- and the reason the airline cited for it -- was widely derided as sexist. The airline said the tests were administered to protect women from potential risks to their pregnancy"
If this were the US someone might sue because she had a miscarriage
James Cameron Thinks Wonder Woman Was a 'Step Backward' For Woman in Film - "Basically, Cameron is saying that because he feels Gal Gadot is prettier than Linda Hamilton, and because Wonder Woman is a superhero instead of a real person, Wonder Woman is somehow less impactful because regular women can’t relate to her as much. That seems incredibly misguided and sexist. (Does an average man have to watch movies starring overweight bald guys to relate to them better, or can he watch movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger?) Looks or ability should have nothing to do with it. Wonder Woman was a massive hit movie starring and directed by a woman, something that has rarely been allowed in Hollywood. It broke a mold and it’s a good thing. Period."
I can see a female feminist saying the exact same thing as James Cameron and getting applauded for it by Gizmodo
Why Is the Southern Poverty Law Center Targeting Liberals? - The New York Times - "Since the violence in Charlottesville 10 days ago, when white supremacists left one young woman dead and 19 others injured, the Southern Poverty Law Center has hit the jackpot. The Alabama-based nonprofit is set to receive millions of dollars in donations from some of the nation’s deepest of pockets. Apple pledged $1 million. JP Morgan Chase & Co.: half a million. George and Amal Clooney even got in on the action, promising to donate another $1 million... the S.P.L.C. is an organization that has lost its way, smearing people who are fighting for liberty and turning a blind eye to an ideology and political movement that has much in common with Nazism... Islamic extremism — a movement that aims to impose a caliphate and Sharia law by violent means — is as toxic as white supremacy. In the past two decades, it has certainly been responsible for many more deaths... the S.P.L.C. has nothing to say about Islamic extremists; only about their opponents... Cui bono? That question is nearly always the right one to ask of organizations like the S.P.L.C. Who really benefits from their activities? Repeatedly, and for more than a decade, journalists at publications ranging from Harper’s to Politico to The Nation to The Weekly Standard have pointed out that the center’s founders seem more interested in profiting off the anxieties and white guilt of Northern liberals than in upholding the civil rights of poor Southerners, or anyone else. There’s a less cynical explanation, though, which is that liberals are deeply and increasingly uncomfortable with calling out Islamic extremism for fear of being smeared as “Islamophobic,” or worse... Muslims today cannot freely debate the role of their religion in most Muslim-majority countries, where the charges of heresy or apostasy can mean a death sentence or a lynch mob. Here in the West, too, free discussion of Islam is getting harder not least because Islamic organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations pounce on any criticism of Islam, branding it “hate speech,” the modern word for heresy."
Comment: "There is another more basic reason to donate somewhere other than Southern Poverty Law Center: their $328,395,092 reserve. That's right. You can check their tax return out online. Last year they raised $58 million and only spent $45 million. For many years they have raised vastly more money than they can use effectively, which is why they have $328 million in assets and growing."
Confessions of a Singaporean male stripper - "While I do encourage clients to let me know if they have any special requests prior to my performance, I rarely receive them. But, of the few requests I have received recently, the most popular has to be role-playing as Song Joong-Ki’s character from that popular Korean drama series “Descendants of the Sun”. I’ve played that character at least 10 times since the series ended... I’ve met clients who try to take things further. I’m okay with that – I always give them an after-show option – but I do this solely in my personal capacity and not as someone representing my agency. If a client wants to have more “add-ons” besides the 30-minute stripping performance, then they can choose them. These “add-ons” refer to after show drinks... Many people think that having a good body is the most important requirement, but I don’t agree. Yes, you do need to have a decent body but to be a good stripper, you need to be good at entertaining. You need to know what makes people tick and how to entertain them."
Scientists train 'sniffer' wasps as mine hunters - "The scientists say that the wasps they are using - from the southern states of America - can perform to far higher standards than any sniffer dog and take as little as an hour to train."
Swedish Museum Accelerates Their Cultural Collapse By Turning Viking Artifacts Into Scrap Metal - "Following the revelations of one of its angry archaeologists, it emerges that the curators of Stockholms Länsmuseum have been ordering the systematic destruction of newly found artifacts from the Iron Age and the Viking period under the guise that it would be too burdensome to process. Coins, arrow heads, ritual amulets, weapons, jewellery and weights that were kept in the past are now directly dumped into metal recycling bins upon discovery instead of being treasured and displayed... This was kept secret until this week’s declarations by Johan Runer, archaeologist at the said museum. He tried to raise the alarm before but only met indifference from the Liberal Swedish Media. According to Runer, this has been going on since at least 2016 as he recalls the example of an entire human settlement from the Bronze and Iron Age that discretely got levelled to allow road works for Sweden’s E6 motorway to progress."
White people, here are 10 requests from a Black Lives Matter leader - "3. If you are a developer or realty owner of multi-family housing, build a sustainable complex in a black or brown blighted neighborhood and let black and brown people live in it for free.
4. White people, if you can afford to downsize, give up the home you own to a black or brown family. Preferably a family from generational poverty.
6. White people, re-budget your monthly so you can donate to black funds for land purchasing.
7. White people, especially white women (because this is yaw specialty — Nosey Jenny and Meddling Kathy), get a racist fired. Yaw know what the fuck they be saying. You are complicit when you ignore them. Get your boss fired cause they racist too.
9. OK, backing up No. 8, if any white person at your work, or as you enter in spaces and you overhear a white person praising the actions from yesterday, first, get a pic. Get their name and more info. Hell, find out where they work — Get Them Fired. But certainly address them, and, if you need to, you got hands: use them."
The New Civil Rights Movement is about firing people, beating them up and giving money to people you don't know
BLM Protesters Disrupt Montreal Pride During Moment of Silence For AIDS and Hate Crime Victims - "During a moment of silence at Montreal’s LGBT Pride parade on Sunday last Sunday to remember those in the LGBT community that have died of HIV/AIDS, hate crimes, 30 members of Black Lives Matter Montreal stormed onto the streets exploding smoke bombs and shouting “Black Lives Matter” and demanding more inclusion of QPOC and representation disrupting the solemn moment angering the pride parade spectators... One of the BLM protesters named “Brian” said they chose that exact moment “To make our voices heard we chose to do this during the moment of silence,” and added that “It wasn’t disrespectful because the moment was meant to commemorate the people who died [of AIDS or homophobic and transphobic laws], and most of them are trans women of color so we reclaimed that moment.”"
It’s much safer to back into parking spaces. Why don’t we do it? - "In a parking lot, the AAA thinks we should back in, recommending that “drivers reverse into parking spaces whenever possible, except where prohibited by law or parking lot restrictions.”... a 2010 study by Claudia C. Wolf and colleagues at Germany's Ruhr University-Bochum bore out the stereotype. The researchers took male and female drivers of varying experience levels to a parking garage and asked them to front a car into a space, back a car in, and parallel park backing up. The men parked significantly faster... As for accuracy (measured by the distance to neighboring cars), men were slightly better in all three maneuvers, with only parallel parking showing a statistically significant superiority... there is a difference between men and women — and more generally, within the overall population — on the skills that go into parking, especially parking while backing up. The most important such skill is what psychologists “mental rotation,” or the ability to imagine objects in other than their actual position. (You can test your own mental rotation skills here.) For reasons that are still widely debated, men are on the whole better mental rotators than women."
Predicting Productivity Gains from Parking Behavior by Shaomin Li - "I propose to use parking behavior as a direct measure of delayed gratification, a cultural trait recognized by psychologists and economists as contributing to people’s economic success. Specifically, I argue that people who park their cars back-in as opposed to head-in embody a culture of delayed gratification. Backing into a parking space requires more time and effort, but it will enable the driver to exit more easily, safely, and quickly in the future. The feasibility of collecting parking behavior data across countries provides a new and viable way to overcome the limitation of relying on attitudinal or experimental data to measure the culture and behaviors of delayed gratification."
The PISA fallacy in Singapore: insights from the NIE - "Director General of the Ministry of Education, Mr Wong Siew Hoong, projected graphs depicting Singapore’s stellar PISA results. He then juxtaposed these to OECD data on student wellbeing, and also of innovation in the economy, revealing Singapore in the lowest quartile. His conclusion was stark: “we’ve been winning the wrong race”. Wong Siew attributed Singapore’s PISA success to standardised test drilling and a culture of compliance, only to retort: “we’re building compliant students just as the jobs that value compliance are beginning to disappear”."
The MOE says he did not make these comments, but instead something else, which is quite different
ACLU hammered for tweeting 'white supremacist' photo - "The American Civil Liberties Union is apologizing after tweeting a controversial photo of a white baby holding an American flag. On Wednesday afternoon, the group posted the photo of the toddler wearing a 'Free Speech' onesie along with the caption: 'This is the future that ACLU members want'. The free-speech organization was blasted by social media users who accused the post of being racially insensitive and even likened it to pro-Nazi commentary."
Supporting free speech, being white and wanting the best for your country = white supremacist. So I guess liberals are right that white supremacy is really strong
Charles Barkley Is a Great Example of a Black White Supremacist - "What we as black people need to do, we need to worry about getting our education. We need to stop killing each other. We need to try to find a way to have more economic opportunity and things like that. Those things are important and significant."
The bar for being a white supremacist drops lower every day
Car ploughs through trans lives matter protest in St Louis - "People were gathered to honor the life of Herring, a 30-year-old black transgender woman, who was shot dead by St. Louis police on Tuesday. Herring was killed by a police after she allegedly stabbed an officer and a neighbor with a large kitchen knife... Police spokeswoman Schron Jackson told the Riverfront Times: 'Tonight, a group of protesters marched from the Transgender Memorial to the intersection of Manchester and Sarah were they blocked traffic in all directions. 'A vehicle approached, stopped, honked its horn and attempted to drive around the protesters. 'The protesters surrounded the vehicle and began striking it with their hands and a flag pole. Several protesters also kicked and jumped on top of the vehicle.' She said the driver of the vehicle - a white male - then drove away when two women and a man 'fell from the vehicle'"
If you're black and attack the police and get shot dead, you're the victim
If you're a white man and people attack your vehicle and you drive off, you're a villain
Urinetown | Tell Me Something I Don't Know - "[American Sign Language]'s a totally separate language from English... ASL has dialects so it has a black dialect and even has a Philadelphia dialect... New Yorkers are notorious for being fast talkers while Ohioans are more calm and relaxed. New Yorkers also curse more in sign and people in the Southern United States tend to touch their lower face and chest a lot when they sign which has become a distinctive regional accent. Lastly and most importantly just like American English speakers feel about Australians for example, people with certain foreign accents or dialects in sign are considered more attractive"
Driverless cars and trucks don’t mean mass unemployment—they mean new kinds of jobs | Cathy Engelbert | Pulse | LinkedIn - "As demographic trends collide with new types of mobility, we could easily imagine that aging Baby Boomers will need aides to travel with them to medical appointments and run errands—even if “driving” is not part of their job description. Travel and leisure will likely continue to grow. In general, there will likely be an expanding market around mobility management services that could offer incremental job growth. There will be new businesses that will digitally enable the planning and consumption of passenger and goods movement to be more efficient, enjoyable, productive, safer, cleaner, and cheaper. That could mean everything from maintaining vehicle fleets to remote monitoring. These are in adjacent spaces... consider one possible future that could occur soon, where autonomous trucks travel highways with a human “monitor” in the cab who can assist with particularly challenging driving like navigating city centers and ensure goods are delivered safely. Since the vehicles can operate for much longer periods without stopping, fewer total drivers would be needed, helping to alleviate the shortage. The jobs that remain could be less fatiguing and require shorter stints away from home (again, because the truck can operate almost constantly)."
Spanish airline is fined for making female applicants take a pregnancy test - "Iberia is Spain's national flag carrier. Its pregnancy test requirement for cabin crew jobs-- and the reason the airline cited for it -- was widely derided as sexist. The airline said the tests were administered to protect women from potential risks to their pregnancy"
If this were the US someone might sue because she had a miscarriage
James Cameron Thinks Wonder Woman Was a 'Step Backward' For Woman in Film - "Basically, Cameron is saying that because he feels Gal Gadot is prettier than Linda Hamilton, and because Wonder Woman is a superhero instead of a real person, Wonder Woman is somehow less impactful because regular women can’t relate to her as much. That seems incredibly misguided and sexist. (Does an average man have to watch movies starring overweight bald guys to relate to them better, or can he watch movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger?) Looks or ability should have nothing to do with it. Wonder Woman was a massive hit movie starring and directed by a woman, something that has rarely been allowed in Hollywood. It broke a mold and it’s a good thing. Period."
I can see a female feminist saying the exact same thing as James Cameron and getting applauded for it by Gizmodo
Why Is the Southern Poverty Law Center Targeting Liberals? - The New York Times - "Since the violence in Charlottesville 10 days ago, when white supremacists left one young woman dead and 19 others injured, the Southern Poverty Law Center has hit the jackpot. The Alabama-based nonprofit is set to receive millions of dollars in donations from some of the nation’s deepest of pockets. Apple pledged $1 million. JP Morgan Chase & Co.: half a million. George and Amal Clooney even got in on the action, promising to donate another $1 million... the S.P.L.C. is an organization that has lost its way, smearing people who are fighting for liberty and turning a blind eye to an ideology and political movement that has much in common with Nazism... Islamic extremism — a movement that aims to impose a caliphate and Sharia law by violent means — is as toxic as white supremacy. In the past two decades, it has certainly been responsible for many more deaths... the S.P.L.C. has nothing to say about Islamic extremists; only about their opponents... Cui bono? That question is nearly always the right one to ask of organizations like the S.P.L.C. Who really benefits from their activities? Repeatedly, and for more than a decade, journalists at publications ranging from Harper’s to Politico to The Nation to The Weekly Standard have pointed out that the center’s founders seem more interested in profiting off the anxieties and white guilt of Northern liberals than in upholding the civil rights of poor Southerners, or anyone else. There’s a less cynical explanation, though, which is that liberals are deeply and increasingly uncomfortable with calling out Islamic extremism for fear of being smeared as “Islamophobic,” or worse... Muslims today cannot freely debate the role of their religion in most Muslim-majority countries, where the charges of heresy or apostasy can mean a death sentence or a lynch mob. Here in the West, too, free discussion of Islam is getting harder not least because Islamic organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations pounce on any criticism of Islam, branding it “hate speech,” the modern word for heresy."
Comment: "There is another more basic reason to donate somewhere other than Southern Poverty Law Center: their $328,395,092 reserve. That's right. You can check their tax return out online. Last year they raised $58 million and only spent $45 million. For many years they have raised vastly more money than they can use effectively, which is why they have $328 million in assets and growing."
Confessions of a Singaporean male stripper - "While I do encourage clients to let me know if they have any special requests prior to my performance, I rarely receive them. But, of the few requests I have received recently, the most popular has to be role-playing as Song Joong-Ki’s character from that popular Korean drama series “Descendants of the Sun”. I’ve played that character at least 10 times since the series ended... I’ve met clients who try to take things further. I’m okay with that – I always give them an after-show option – but I do this solely in my personal capacity and not as someone representing my agency. If a client wants to have more “add-ons” besides the 30-minute stripping performance, then they can choose them. These “add-ons” refer to after show drinks... Many people think that having a good body is the most important requirement, but I don’t agree. Yes, you do need to have a decent body but to be a good stripper, you need to be good at entertaining. You need to know what makes people tick and how to entertain them."
Scientists train 'sniffer' wasps as mine hunters - "The scientists say that the wasps they are using - from the southern states of America - can perform to far higher standards than any sniffer dog and take as little as an hour to train."
Swedish Museum Accelerates Their Cultural Collapse By Turning Viking Artifacts Into Scrap Metal - "Following the revelations of one of its angry archaeologists, it emerges that the curators of Stockholms Länsmuseum have been ordering the systematic destruction of newly found artifacts from the Iron Age and the Viking period under the guise that it would be too burdensome to process. Coins, arrow heads, ritual amulets, weapons, jewellery and weights that were kept in the past are now directly dumped into metal recycling bins upon discovery instead of being treasured and displayed... This was kept secret until this week’s declarations by Johan Runer, archaeologist at the said museum. He tried to raise the alarm before but only met indifference from the Liberal Swedish Media. According to Runer, this has been going on since at least 2016 as he recalls the example of an entire human settlement from the Bronze and Iron Age that discretely got levelled to allow road works for Sweden’s E6 motorway to progress."
White people, here are 10 requests from a Black Lives Matter leader - "3. If you are a developer or realty owner of multi-family housing, build a sustainable complex in a black or brown blighted neighborhood and let black and brown people live in it for free.
4. White people, if you can afford to downsize, give up the home you own to a black or brown family. Preferably a family from generational poverty.
6. White people, re-budget your monthly so you can donate to black funds for land purchasing.
7. White people, especially white women (because this is yaw specialty — Nosey Jenny and Meddling Kathy), get a racist fired. Yaw know what the fuck they be saying. You are complicit when you ignore them. Get your boss fired cause they racist too.
9. OK, backing up No. 8, if any white person at your work, or as you enter in spaces and you overhear a white person praising the actions from yesterday, first, get a pic. Get their name and more info. Hell, find out where they work — Get Them Fired. But certainly address them, and, if you need to, you got hands: use them."
The New Civil Rights Movement is about firing people, beating them up and giving money to people you don't know
BLM Protesters Disrupt Montreal Pride During Moment of Silence For AIDS and Hate Crime Victims - "During a moment of silence at Montreal’s LGBT Pride parade on Sunday last Sunday to remember those in the LGBT community that have died of HIV/AIDS, hate crimes, 30 members of Black Lives Matter Montreal stormed onto the streets exploding smoke bombs and shouting “Black Lives Matter” and demanding more inclusion of QPOC and representation disrupting the solemn moment angering the pride parade spectators... One of the BLM protesters named “Brian” said they chose that exact moment “To make our voices heard we chose to do this during the moment of silence,” and added that “It wasn’t disrespectful because the moment was meant to commemorate the people who died [of AIDS or homophobic and transphobic laws], and most of them are trans women of color so we reclaimed that moment.”"
It’s much safer to back into parking spaces. Why don’t we do it? - "In a parking lot, the AAA thinks we should back in, recommending that “drivers reverse into parking spaces whenever possible, except where prohibited by law or parking lot restrictions.”... a 2010 study by Claudia C. Wolf and colleagues at Germany's Ruhr University-Bochum bore out the stereotype. The researchers took male and female drivers of varying experience levels to a parking garage and asked them to front a car into a space, back a car in, and parallel park backing up. The men parked significantly faster... As for accuracy (measured by the distance to neighboring cars), men were slightly better in all three maneuvers, with only parallel parking showing a statistically significant superiority... there is a difference between men and women — and more generally, within the overall population — on the skills that go into parking, especially parking while backing up. The most important such skill is what psychologists “mental rotation,” or the ability to imagine objects in other than their actual position. (You can test your own mental rotation skills here.) For reasons that are still widely debated, men are on the whole better mental rotators than women."
Predicting Productivity Gains from Parking Behavior by Shaomin Li - "I propose to use parking behavior as a direct measure of delayed gratification, a cultural trait recognized by psychologists and economists as contributing to people’s economic success. Specifically, I argue that people who park their cars back-in as opposed to head-in embody a culture of delayed gratification. Backing into a parking space requires more time and effort, but it will enable the driver to exit more easily, safely, and quickly in the future. The feasibility of collecting parking behavior data across countries provides a new and viable way to overcome the limitation of relying on attitudinal or experimental data to measure the culture and behaviors of delayed gratification."
The PISA fallacy in Singapore: insights from the NIE - "Director General of the Ministry of Education, Mr Wong Siew Hoong, projected graphs depicting Singapore’s stellar PISA results. He then juxtaposed these to OECD data on student wellbeing, and also of innovation in the economy, revealing Singapore in the lowest quartile. His conclusion was stark: “we’ve been winning the wrong race”. Wong Siew attributed Singapore’s PISA success to standardised test drilling and a culture of compliance, only to retort: “we’re building compliant students just as the jobs that value compliance are beginning to disappear”."
The MOE says he did not make these comments, but instead something else, which is quite different
ACLU hammered for tweeting 'white supremacist' photo - "The American Civil Liberties Union is apologizing after tweeting a controversial photo of a white baby holding an American flag. On Wednesday afternoon, the group posted the photo of the toddler wearing a 'Free Speech' onesie along with the caption: 'This is the future that ACLU members want'. The free-speech organization was blasted by social media users who accused the post of being racially insensitive and even likened it to pro-Nazi commentary."
Supporting free speech, being white and wanting the best for your country = white supremacist. So I guess liberals are right that white supremacy is really strong
Charles Barkley Is a Great Example of a Black White Supremacist - "What we as black people need to do, we need to worry about getting our education. We need to stop killing each other. We need to try to find a way to have more economic opportunity and things like that. Those things are important and significant."
The bar for being a white supremacist drops lower every day
Thursday, December 07, 2017
Links - 7th December 2017 (2)
Rivalry | Tell Me Something I Don't Know - "One of the things that I think we all see as people who live in Chicago is that so much of the violence that we see in certain communities is being driven by social media far more than easy access to guns or even the drug trade and it's the exact same things that we've just spoken about which is the kind of public one upping and the idea that someone whose whole kind of value proposition is around being the toughest and having power and control, now the social media just kind of disintermediates it across the entire city...
One of the best approaches we could have to reducing violence in Chicago would be to have a massive media campaign which the message is: real men fight. And I think we should put up boxing rings around Chicago and use social media and so basically change the culture so that instead of shooting each other we actually let these guys get into the ring and beat each other up"
In the U.S., the Biggest Cities Are the Least Happy - "the three happiest counties (which scored above a 3.5 on the happiness scale) are mostly rural or a mix of suburban and rural, according to the study. These counties include Douglas County, Colorado, outside Denver, which has a density of 300 people per square mile; Shelby County, Tennessee, outside Memphis, which has a density of 1,200 people per square mile; and Johnson County, Kansas, outside Kansas City, which has a density of 1,110 people per square mile. Note that each of these places is located near a large city, which may allow residents to benefit occasionally from urban resources and amenities while still living in a much lower-density area. Indeed, the study finds that denser counties tend to have less happy residents, even when controlling for factors like greater crime and poverty. While these variables do weaken the relationship between density and unhappiness, the effect remains negative and significant. This leads the authors to conclude that size and density—what they call “the defining features of cities”—are associated with greater unhappiness. Even if cities were to reduce their levels of crime, poverty, or unemployment, urban residents would still be less happy than those living elsewhere. In this way, the study notes, “cities act like a magnifying glass, bringing out the best and the worst in us.”"
The World's Happiest Countries Take The Most Antidepressants - "Although Scandinavian countries have better access to mental health treatment than most nations, they may no longer be considered the world’s happiest. In the latest Gallup and Healthways Global report, Central America overtook Scandinavia as the world’s happiest region. Panama came in at number one, followed by Costa Rica and then Denmark. Sweden ranks below Austria, Brazil, Uruguay and El Salvador. There’s even a relatively new book called The Almost Nearly Perfect People that debunks the myth of “the Scandinavian Utopia,” claiming that Danes and Swedes aren’t as happy as the rest of the world might expect"
Study: Moms more tired than dads but still like caring for kids - "Despite their exhaustion, moms were more likely than dads to say they felt happy while caring for their kids. Both moms and dads said child care was much more meaningful for them than other work, with 62 percent of parents calling child care “very meaningful,” versus 36 percent who said the same about paid work. Women, however, were more likely than men to find housework meaningful, with 46 percent calling it “very meaningful,” compared with 28 percent of men... “We are socialized as women to take care of the home,” said Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, an adjunct professor of anthropology at UCLA. “We are still supposed to be the perfect mom and have a beautiful house.”"
If they like it (and presumably want to do it) are they still oppressed? If so does it mean women are stupid and don't know what they want or what's good for them unless a feminist feministsplains it to them?
Are feminists socialised into being feminists?
Blame the Teenagers for What Happened in McKinney, Not the Police - "If you live near McKinney, Texas and you like to party, you might have been aware of the Dime Piece Cookout before it went down this past Friday... The liberal media has since presented this as an “innocent children’s pool party,” but I’ve never encountered a children’s party where people go to meet “fine ass n*ggas.” In fact, I’ve never heard of children’s parties with terms like “Dime Piece” and “Make It Clap” in the title. For those mercifully uninitiated, the former is a slang term for attractive women. “Dime” as in a 10-out-of-10 on the sexy scale, and “piece” is short for “piece of ass.” The latter, “make it clap,” refers to a girl twerking on the dance floor and making her butt cheeks clap together... So we have an unsanctioned, heavily promoted, loud, sexually charged teen party right in the middle of a neighborhood filled with parents and children of all different races. This party is being organized by people who have shown themselves to be both loose with the facts and unconcerned with respecting the peace, privacy, and rules of the community. And we have no adult supervision — save for a few alleged grown ups who see no problem with a bunch of bikini-clad 14 year olds playing the role of “dime pieces.” This is called “context,” my friends. And with this context, we can now take another look at the latest racial outrage surrounding this event in McKinney, Texas over the weekend... By the standards of the peanut gallery and their ringleaders in the media, that’s all you need to know. The girl was black, the cop was white. Racism. Period. End of discussion. Time to protest. But, being that I’m dumb enough to care about the full truth, I can’t help but wonder if our judgments should be based on more than an isolated, momentary glimpse of an out-of-context scene. I’ve been informed repeatedly that such thoughts stem from my bigotry, which is odd, because I never knew “bigot” means “guy who refrains from jumping to baseless conclusions”... The video goes viral, sans context, and the nation erupts in another round of racial outrage. It’s immediately decided that the cop was racist, the “children” were all innocently attending an innocent pool party and had done nothing at all to provoke the police response, and yet again the police war on black America has reared its ugly head. The media ran with it, as usual... just like in Ferguson, residents who have spoken out in McKinney have been rewarded wutg death threats and vandalism."
Is it Possible That There Is Something In Between Consensual Sex And Rape…And That It Happens To Almost Every Girl Out There? - "He interrupted my inner conflict with something that would have way more weight years later. “I feel like you want me to make a move, just so you can turn me down,” he said. Before I even had a chance to decide if he was right, we were making out. In my state of extreme intoxication, my mind was racing in search of a decision. This was exciting. This was fun. But this was also really, really weird, and ultimately, not a road I wanted to go down. I couldn’t decide if the excitement and lust in the air would win over the pit in my stomach. It wasn’t until he grabbed a condom that I really knew how I felt. I was not okay with this. I did not want to have sex with him. But I did... this weird place in between consensual sex and rape? It’s there. It does exist. And it’s happening all the time. As it turns out, almost every woman I spoke to had been there at some point or another"
Fresh concerns raised over academic conduct of major US nutrition and behaviour lab - "Wansink’s research first fell under scrutiny in late 2016 when, in a blog post called “The Grad Student Who Never Said No”, he appeared to champion the use of grey research practices as career tools for young scientists – practices such as selectively reporting positive results from a dataset of primarily null outcomes, and presenting data fishing as hypothesis testing. Analyses of the published results by Tim van der Zee, Jordan Anaya and Nick Brown later identified what appear to be hundreds of statistical inconsistencies in four of the articles where Wansink admitted deploying such practices, and Anaya later raised concerns about the accuracy of seven additional publications. After refusing to share the raw data, Wansink promised to conduct an internal investigation of four of the eleven publications. "
The Straits Times - Posts - "New York city restaurant staff fired after calling Asian customer 'Ching Chong' on receipt"
Comment: " I don't see a problem with that. What's the issue? I go around telling people I have Ching Chong taste when it comes to food.
When I see clothes that look very Chinese, I call them Ching Chong clothes.
Is it racist to call Caucasians "Angmo"?
If we are confident and proud of our skin we won't have issues such as these."
Supermarket Removes All Foreign Food From Shelves To Make A Point About Racism, And Here’s The Result - "When customers walked into Edeka supermarket in Hamburg recently, they were surprised to find that the shelves were almost empty, and the small handful of products that remained were all made in Germany"
Maybe to make a point about mass migration they can put stuff in your cart you don't want, make you pay for it and if you complain lock you in a room for an hour
Comments: "The same ppl who scream diversity also scream buy local and down with globalization...."
‘Deadpool 2’ Crew Warned Producers Before Stuntwoman’s Death - "Hollywood’s lack of diversity might have indirectly contributed to her death... crew members alerted producers that Harris was too inexperienced to safely pull off the stunt, noting her previous crashes on practice runs, but were ignored because producers felt an African-American woman needed to perform the stunt for accurate representation. (Harris was standing in for Atlanta’s Zazie Beetz, who plays Domino, in the scene.) Though Harris was a licensed racer, Deadpool 2 was her first film and the accident occurred during her first live take... One stunt coordinator who spoke with Deadpool 2 crew members says that producers risked Harris’s life by wanting Beetz to have a racially correct double: “The producers put pressure to have somebody of the same sex and ethnicity in a position she wasn’t qualified to be in. The stunt coordinators caved to the pressure. All the stunt people could do was take it to their higher-ups. They’re going to follow their chain of command”... In 2014, the issue made headlines when Gotham attempted to use a white stuntwoman in blackface as a stand-in for a black actress despite union opposition to such practices; the show eventually cast a black stuntwoman and said it “made a mistake.”"
Once again, Affirmative Action and Political Correctness kill (and this is somehow spun as meaning we need even more of it); an aversion to blackface means black people die
Black stunt performers: Hollywood's other race scandal - "For decades, white stunt performers would paint their faces and bodies black to double for black stars. Similarly, it was not uncommon for stuntmen to put on heels and wigs to double for women"
It's better for more stuntmen and women to die than for white people to do stunts for black actors
9 Reasons to Switch From Chrome to Firefox - "1. Firefox Is Better for Battery Life
2. Firefox Is Better for Tab-Heavy Users
3. Firefox Knows It’s Just a Browser
4. Firefox Embraces the Open Source Mindset
5. Firefox Actually Cares About Privacy
6. Firefox Allows More Customization
7. Firefox Supports Chrome Extensions
8. Firefox Boasts Unique Extensions
9. Firefox Can Do What Chrome Can (Mostly)"
Facebook’s new features like Messenger Day are distracting and obtrusive - "Facebook seemed committed to prioritizing the user experience over all else, including its strategic objective to drive mobile advertising revenue. I would argue the first signs of trouble over this apparent rule at Facebook came with its rollout of live video. That feature itself wasn’t overly intrusive at first but, over time, Facebook appeared very keen to get users to engage with the feature more, whether posting their own videos or viewing live videos created by others. That meant increasingly obvious and arguably more intrusive indicators of live videos in users’ feeds, in picture-in-picture videos that popped up in the corner of the app and eventually in the dedicated video tab. That last was particularly egregious in its use of notification-like red numbers which indicated there were new videos available to watch even though users hadn’t turned notifications on, and there was, in fact, no way to turn this feature off. This was the first time Facebook appeared to sacrifice the user experience to a strategic objective"
Human Races May Have Biological Meaning, But Races Mean Nothing About Humanity - "Assertion: Because most genetic variation occurs within races, two random individuals from different races may be genetically closer than two random individuals from the same race.
The image above, from a 2009 paper, is one of the clearest refutations of such assertions. An evolutionary chart, or phylogeny, of human population is not difficult to construct. Multiple different genetic methodologies have converged upon the same general pattern of Africans differentiating from non-Africans, and West Eurasians differentiating from East Eurasians, and so forth...
Assertion: “We are all Africans”...
It looks as if modern human populations are a synthesis of a dominant “Out of Africa” lineage, flavored with assorted other populations, until recently known as “archaic modern humans.” The most famous of these were Neanderthals, but it looks as if they may just be the first in a long list of other ancestors humans interbred with...
Assertion: Because modern humans are a young species, there has not been enough time for major differences to emerge between populations.
This is false. 5 to 10 thousand years ago a set of strangely mutated humans arose. They continued to be able to digest lactose sugar as adults, in contravention of the mammalian norm. In fact, humans are the only mammals where many adults continue to be able to consume milk sugar as adults. The rapidity of this shift has been incredible. 5,000 years ago almost everyone in Scandinavia was lactose intolerant. Today, very few are."
China’s memory manipulators - "a country that has so completely obliterated and then recreated its past – can it be trusted?... efforts to commemorate the past are often misleading or so fragmentary as to be meaningless. Almost all plaques at historical sites, for example, tell either partial histories or outright lies. A few steps east of the Foreign Ministry, for example, is the Temple of the East Peak. Out front is a stone marker, which states that since 1961 it has been a nationally protected monument. A second plaque on the wall gives a few more details, explaining how the temple was built in the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) and is a key Taoist temple. In reality, the temple was completely gutted in the Cultural Revolution, its statues burned or carted off to warehouses, where they were to be destroyed. Of the roughly 50 statues now in the temple, all but five are new. These five older statues belonged to another temple, Sanguanmiao (Three Officials Temple). After the Mao era ended in the late 1970s and temples reopened, the East Peak Temple’s statues could not be located so it was given the statues from the Three Officials Temple, which remains occupied by a government office. Visitors also learn nothing about how the temple’s area was greatly reduced during the Cultural Revolution because it was occupied by military and public security agencies... Of course, the plaques explain none of this. Instead, one gets the impression that the temple is as it always was – an 800-year-old relic of China’s great past"
So, There's Actually A Reason Your Favorite Cartoon Characters Are All Yellow - "yellow characters go well with the commonly used blue background, are associated with happiness and energy, draw attention, and can be seen by people who are colorblind!"
European Union - Polish PM Szydło urges EU to 'wake up' over terrorism - "In an outspoken attack on her fellow leaders the Warsaw chief accused EU member states of “lethargy” after yet another European city - this time Barcelona - was rocked by an Islamist attack. Ms Szydło, who is currently fighting eurocrats over the imposition of refugee quotas, also controversially drew a link between Angela Merkel’s open door migration policy and recent terrorist atrocities... Ms Szydło, who has repeatedly clashed with Brussels over immigration and the rule of law, said EU chiefs “must not be afraid to talk about terrorism” and should “finally replace political correctness with common sense.” She said: "There is no price at which the safety of the Polish people could be sold, so the most important thing for me today is to have partners in Europe, among the European elites, to talk about what should be done to combat terrorism.” And she said that Eastern European nations, who together form the Visegrad grouping, have worked together behind the scenes to create their own counter-terrorism strategy. Ms Szydło did not elaborate further on the strategy they have devised, but all four countries have effectively closed their borders to refugees by refusing to participate in the EU’s migrant quota scheme... In Finland, teenager Mechkah stabbed two women to death with a knife and injured eight more after going on the rampage in the city of Turku, in what was Finland’s first Islamist terror attack. According to the German interior ministry the youngster passed through Germany in late 2015 and early 2016, at the height of the migration crisis when Mrs Merkel opened the country’s borders to people seeking refuge"
Suspect In Finland Stabbing Rampage Identified As 18-Year-Old Moroccan - "Finland recently rejected his application for asylum, according to the public broadcaster YLE... "It is very difficult to get asylum if you come from Morocco. Maybe because there are no big reasons to have it granted.""
The moral of the story seems to be that you need to grant everybody asylum so they don't stab everyone
Trudeau's Anti-Trump Virtue Signaling Creates Illegal Immigration Crisis For Canada
Quebec City Protesters Clash With Police Outside Far-Right Event - "The Quebec group La Meute, which is associated with the far right, called for a rally Sunday to protest the federal and provincial government's handling of the border crossers, but ended up having its members pinned inside a garage while counter-protesters demonstrated outside. Once the counter-protesters turned violent, the Quebec City police declared the protest illegal. Clashes ensued and at least one protester was arrested as officers tried to block access to the building where some of the La Meute protesters had taken refuge... "You're all over the Internet," one masked demonstrator told a woman supporting La Meute. "Everyone knows that you're a f***ing Nazi." The Quebec events were largely spurred by the unprecedented number of people walking across the border to seek asylum."
Apparently believing that illegal immigration should be stopped makes you a f***ing Nazi, and you should intimidate people who think so with violence
One of the best approaches we could have to reducing violence in Chicago would be to have a massive media campaign which the message is: real men fight. And I think we should put up boxing rings around Chicago and use social media and so basically change the culture so that instead of shooting each other we actually let these guys get into the ring and beat each other up"
In the U.S., the Biggest Cities Are the Least Happy - "the three happiest counties (which scored above a 3.5 on the happiness scale) are mostly rural or a mix of suburban and rural, according to the study. These counties include Douglas County, Colorado, outside Denver, which has a density of 300 people per square mile; Shelby County, Tennessee, outside Memphis, which has a density of 1,200 people per square mile; and Johnson County, Kansas, outside Kansas City, which has a density of 1,110 people per square mile. Note that each of these places is located near a large city, which may allow residents to benefit occasionally from urban resources and amenities while still living in a much lower-density area. Indeed, the study finds that denser counties tend to have less happy residents, even when controlling for factors like greater crime and poverty. While these variables do weaken the relationship between density and unhappiness, the effect remains negative and significant. This leads the authors to conclude that size and density—what they call “the defining features of cities”—are associated with greater unhappiness. Even if cities were to reduce their levels of crime, poverty, or unemployment, urban residents would still be less happy than those living elsewhere. In this way, the study notes, “cities act like a magnifying glass, bringing out the best and the worst in us.”"
The World's Happiest Countries Take The Most Antidepressants - "Although Scandinavian countries have better access to mental health treatment than most nations, they may no longer be considered the world’s happiest. In the latest Gallup and Healthways Global report, Central America overtook Scandinavia as the world’s happiest region. Panama came in at number one, followed by Costa Rica and then Denmark. Sweden ranks below Austria, Brazil, Uruguay and El Salvador. There’s even a relatively new book called The Almost Nearly Perfect People that debunks the myth of “the Scandinavian Utopia,” claiming that Danes and Swedes aren’t as happy as the rest of the world might expect"
Study: Moms more tired than dads but still like caring for kids - "Despite their exhaustion, moms were more likely than dads to say they felt happy while caring for their kids. Both moms and dads said child care was much more meaningful for them than other work, with 62 percent of parents calling child care “very meaningful,” versus 36 percent who said the same about paid work. Women, however, were more likely than men to find housework meaningful, with 46 percent calling it “very meaningful,” compared with 28 percent of men... “We are socialized as women to take care of the home,” said Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, an adjunct professor of anthropology at UCLA. “We are still supposed to be the perfect mom and have a beautiful house.”"
If they like it (and presumably want to do it) are they still oppressed? If so does it mean women are stupid and don't know what they want or what's good for them unless a feminist feministsplains it to them?
Are feminists socialised into being feminists?
Blame the Teenagers for What Happened in McKinney, Not the Police - "If you live near McKinney, Texas and you like to party, you might have been aware of the Dime Piece Cookout before it went down this past Friday... The liberal media has since presented this as an “innocent children’s pool party,” but I’ve never encountered a children’s party where people go to meet “fine ass n*ggas.” In fact, I’ve never heard of children’s parties with terms like “Dime Piece” and “Make It Clap” in the title. For those mercifully uninitiated, the former is a slang term for attractive women. “Dime” as in a 10-out-of-10 on the sexy scale, and “piece” is short for “piece of ass.” The latter, “make it clap,” refers to a girl twerking on the dance floor and making her butt cheeks clap together... So we have an unsanctioned, heavily promoted, loud, sexually charged teen party right in the middle of a neighborhood filled with parents and children of all different races. This party is being organized by people who have shown themselves to be both loose with the facts and unconcerned with respecting the peace, privacy, and rules of the community. And we have no adult supervision — save for a few alleged grown ups who see no problem with a bunch of bikini-clad 14 year olds playing the role of “dime pieces.” This is called “context,” my friends. And with this context, we can now take another look at the latest racial outrage surrounding this event in McKinney, Texas over the weekend... By the standards of the peanut gallery and their ringleaders in the media, that’s all you need to know. The girl was black, the cop was white. Racism. Period. End of discussion. Time to protest. But, being that I’m dumb enough to care about the full truth, I can’t help but wonder if our judgments should be based on more than an isolated, momentary glimpse of an out-of-context scene. I’ve been informed repeatedly that such thoughts stem from my bigotry, which is odd, because I never knew “bigot” means “guy who refrains from jumping to baseless conclusions”... The video goes viral, sans context, and the nation erupts in another round of racial outrage. It’s immediately decided that the cop was racist, the “children” were all innocently attending an innocent pool party and had done nothing at all to provoke the police response, and yet again the police war on black America has reared its ugly head. The media ran with it, as usual... just like in Ferguson, residents who have spoken out in McKinney have been rewarded wutg death threats and vandalism."
Is it Possible That There Is Something In Between Consensual Sex And Rape…And That It Happens To Almost Every Girl Out There? - "He interrupted my inner conflict with something that would have way more weight years later. “I feel like you want me to make a move, just so you can turn me down,” he said. Before I even had a chance to decide if he was right, we were making out. In my state of extreme intoxication, my mind was racing in search of a decision. This was exciting. This was fun. But this was also really, really weird, and ultimately, not a road I wanted to go down. I couldn’t decide if the excitement and lust in the air would win over the pit in my stomach. It wasn’t until he grabbed a condom that I really knew how I felt. I was not okay with this. I did not want to have sex with him. But I did... this weird place in between consensual sex and rape? It’s there. It does exist. And it’s happening all the time. As it turns out, almost every woman I spoke to had been there at some point or another"
Fresh concerns raised over academic conduct of major US nutrition and behaviour lab - "Wansink’s research first fell under scrutiny in late 2016 when, in a blog post called “The Grad Student Who Never Said No”, he appeared to champion the use of grey research practices as career tools for young scientists – practices such as selectively reporting positive results from a dataset of primarily null outcomes, and presenting data fishing as hypothesis testing. Analyses of the published results by Tim van der Zee, Jordan Anaya and Nick Brown later identified what appear to be hundreds of statistical inconsistencies in four of the articles where Wansink admitted deploying such practices, and Anaya later raised concerns about the accuracy of seven additional publications. After refusing to share the raw data, Wansink promised to conduct an internal investigation of four of the eleven publications. "
The Straits Times - Posts - "New York city restaurant staff fired after calling Asian customer 'Ching Chong' on receipt"
Comment: " I don't see a problem with that. What's the issue? I go around telling people I have Ching Chong taste when it comes to food.
When I see clothes that look very Chinese, I call them Ching Chong clothes.
Is it racist to call Caucasians "Angmo"?
If we are confident and proud of our skin we won't have issues such as these."
Supermarket Removes All Foreign Food From Shelves To Make A Point About Racism, And Here’s The Result - "When customers walked into Edeka supermarket in Hamburg recently, they were surprised to find that the shelves were almost empty, and the small handful of products that remained were all made in Germany"
Maybe to make a point about mass migration they can put stuff in your cart you don't want, make you pay for it and if you complain lock you in a room for an hour
Comments: "The same ppl who scream diversity also scream buy local and down with globalization...."
‘Deadpool 2’ Crew Warned Producers Before Stuntwoman’s Death - "Hollywood’s lack of diversity might have indirectly contributed to her death... crew members alerted producers that Harris was too inexperienced to safely pull off the stunt, noting her previous crashes on practice runs, but were ignored because producers felt an African-American woman needed to perform the stunt for accurate representation. (Harris was standing in for Atlanta’s Zazie Beetz, who plays Domino, in the scene.) Though Harris was a licensed racer, Deadpool 2 was her first film and the accident occurred during her first live take... One stunt coordinator who spoke with Deadpool 2 crew members says that producers risked Harris’s life by wanting Beetz to have a racially correct double: “The producers put pressure to have somebody of the same sex and ethnicity in a position she wasn’t qualified to be in. The stunt coordinators caved to the pressure. All the stunt people could do was take it to their higher-ups. They’re going to follow their chain of command”... In 2014, the issue made headlines when Gotham attempted to use a white stuntwoman in blackface as a stand-in for a black actress despite union opposition to such practices; the show eventually cast a black stuntwoman and said it “made a mistake.”"
Once again, Affirmative Action and Political Correctness kill (and this is somehow spun as meaning we need even more of it); an aversion to blackface means black people die
Black stunt performers: Hollywood's other race scandal - "For decades, white stunt performers would paint their faces and bodies black to double for black stars. Similarly, it was not uncommon for stuntmen to put on heels and wigs to double for women"
It's better for more stuntmen and women to die than for white people to do stunts for black actors
9 Reasons to Switch From Chrome to Firefox - "1. Firefox Is Better for Battery Life
2. Firefox Is Better for Tab-Heavy Users
3. Firefox Knows It’s Just a Browser
4. Firefox Embraces the Open Source Mindset
5. Firefox Actually Cares About Privacy
6. Firefox Allows More Customization
7. Firefox Supports Chrome Extensions
8. Firefox Boasts Unique Extensions
9. Firefox Can Do What Chrome Can (Mostly)"
Facebook’s new features like Messenger Day are distracting and obtrusive - "Facebook seemed committed to prioritizing the user experience over all else, including its strategic objective to drive mobile advertising revenue. I would argue the first signs of trouble over this apparent rule at Facebook came with its rollout of live video. That feature itself wasn’t overly intrusive at first but, over time, Facebook appeared very keen to get users to engage with the feature more, whether posting their own videos or viewing live videos created by others. That meant increasingly obvious and arguably more intrusive indicators of live videos in users’ feeds, in picture-in-picture videos that popped up in the corner of the app and eventually in the dedicated video tab. That last was particularly egregious in its use of notification-like red numbers which indicated there were new videos available to watch even though users hadn’t turned notifications on, and there was, in fact, no way to turn this feature off. This was the first time Facebook appeared to sacrifice the user experience to a strategic objective"
Human Races May Have Biological Meaning, But Races Mean Nothing About Humanity - "Assertion: Because most genetic variation occurs within races, two random individuals from different races may be genetically closer than two random individuals from the same race.
The image above, from a 2009 paper, is one of the clearest refutations of such assertions. An evolutionary chart, or phylogeny, of human population is not difficult to construct. Multiple different genetic methodologies have converged upon the same general pattern of Africans differentiating from non-Africans, and West Eurasians differentiating from East Eurasians, and so forth...
Assertion: “We are all Africans”...
It looks as if modern human populations are a synthesis of a dominant “Out of Africa” lineage, flavored with assorted other populations, until recently known as “archaic modern humans.” The most famous of these were Neanderthals, but it looks as if they may just be the first in a long list of other ancestors humans interbred with...
Assertion: Because modern humans are a young species, there has not been enough time for major differences to emerge between populations.
This is false. 5 to 10 thousand years ago a set of strangely mutated humans arose. They continued to be able to digest lactose sugar as adults, in contravention of the mammalian norm. In fact, humans are the only mammals where many adults continue to be able to consume milk sugar as adults. The rapidity of this shift has been incredible. 5,000 years ago almost everyone in Scandinavia was lactose intolerant. Today, very few are."
China’s memory manipulators - "a country that has so completely obliterated and then recreated its past – can it be trusted?... efforts to commemorate the past are often misleading or so fragmentary as to be meaningless. Almost all plaques at historical sites, for example, tell either partial histories or outright lies. A few steps east of the Foreign Ministry, for example, is the Temple of the East Peak. Out front is a stone marker, which states that since 1961 it has been a nationally protected monument. A second plaque on the wall gives a few more details, explaining how the temple was built in the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) and is a key Taoist temple. In reality, the temple was completely gutted in the Cultural Revolution, its statues burned or carted off to warehouses, where they were to be destroyed. Of the roughly 50 statues now in the temple, all but five are new. These five older statues belonged to another temple, Sanguanmiao (Three Officials Temple). After the Mao era ended in the late 1970s and temples reopened, the East Peak Temple’s statues could not be located so it was given the statues from the Three Officials Temple, which remains occupied by a government office. Visitors also learn nothing about how the temple’s area was greatly reduced during the Cultural Revolution because it was occupied by military and public security agencies... Of course, the plaques explain none of this. Instead, one gets the impression that the temple is as it always was – an 800-year-old relic of China’s great past"
So, There's Actually A Reason Your Favorite Cartoon Characters Are All Yellow - "yellow characters go well with the commonly used blue background, are associated with happiness and energy, draw attention, and can be seen by people who are colorblind!"
European Union - Polish PM Szydło urges EU to 'wake up' over terrorism - "In an outspoken attack on her fellow leaders the Warsaw chief accused EU member states of “lethargy” after yet another European city - this time Barcelona - was rocked by an Islamist attack. Ms Szydło, who is currently fighting eurocrats over the imposition of refugee quotas, also controversially drew a link between Angela Merkel’s open door migration policy and recent terrorist atrocities... Ms Szydło, who has repeatedly clashed with Brussels over immigration and the rule of law, said EU chiefs “must not be afraid to talk about terrorism” and should “finally replace political correctness with common sense.” She said: "There is no price at which the safety of the Polish people could be sold, so the most important thing for me today is to have partners in Europe, among the European elites, to talk about what should be done to combat terrorism.” And she said that Eastern European nations, who together form the Visegrad grouping, have worked together behind the scenes to create their own counter-terrorism strategy. Ms Szydło did not elaborate further on the strategy they have devised, but all four countries have effectively closed their borders to refugees by refusing to participate in the EU’s migrant quota scheme... In Finland, teenager Mechkah stabbed two women to death with a knife and injured eight more after going on the rampage in the city of Turku, in what was Finland’s first Islamist terror attack. According to the German interior ministry the youngster passed through Germany in late 2015 and early 2016, at the height of the migration crisis when Mrs Merkel opened the country’s borders to people seeking refuge"
Suspect In Finland Stabbing Rampage Identified As 18-Year-Old Moroccan - "Finland recently rejected his application for asylum, according to the public broadcaster YLE... "It is very difficult to get asylum if you come from Morocco. Maybe because there are no big reasons to have it granted.""
The moral of the story seems to be that you need to grant everybody asylum so they don't stab everyone
Trudeau's Anti-Trump Virtue Signaling Creates Illegal Immigration Crisis For Canada
Quebec City Protesters Clash With Police Outside Far-Right Event - "The Quebec group La Meute, which is associated with the far right, called for a rally Sunday to protest the federal and provincial government's handling of the border crossers, but ended up having its members pinned inside a garage while counter-protesters demonstrated outside. Once the counter-protesters turned violent, the Quebec City police declared the protest illegal. Clashes ensued and at least one protester was arrested as officers tried to block access to the building where some of the La Meute protesters had taken refuge... "You're all over the Internet," one masked demonstrator told a woman supporting La Meute. "Everyone knows that you're a f***ing Nazi." The Quebec events were largely spurred by the unprecedented number of people walking across the border to seek asylum."
Apparently believing that illegal immigration should be stopped makes you a f***ing Nazi, and you should intimidate people who think so with violence
Links - #metoo
We’re at risk of turning #metoo into rush to blame all men - "The panic has even struck the Girl Scouts, who warned parents that their daughters don't "owe anyone a hug" this holiday season. Parents who insist a little girl give grandma or grandpa a hug for a present can set her up to believe "she 'owes' another person physical affection because they bought her something."... Most of the sensational harassment cases in the media involved high-profile men working in unusual environments with little or no accountability. That suggests they are atypical... A recent Newsweek/Wall Street Journal poll found that 48% of American women had been sexually harassed at work... Except upon closer scrutiny, the Newsweek/WSJ poll showed nothing of the kind. It defined "harassment" very broadly. And women were asked if they had ever received "unwelcome sexual advances" at any point in their working lives. It did not distinguish between minor incidents and more serious cases of actionable harassment. And no time limit was given. The General Social Survey is one of the most trusted sources of data in the social sciences. In 2014, a random sample of Americans was asked a straightforward question: "In the last 12 months, were you sexually harassed by anyone while you were on the job?" To that question, only 3.6% of women said yes. That is down from 6.1% in 2002. These results do not suggest an epidemic. Nor even a trendline moving in the wrong direction... Sex panics are mass movements that arise in response to perceived moral threats to society - threats that are vaguely defined and wildly exaggerated... Soon after the Weinstein scandal broke, an anonymously sourced "S---y Media Men" list began circulating on social media. The blacklist accuses more than 70 male journalists of sexual harassment. But the charges range from "weird lunches" to rape. The informants collapse important distinctions between criminal predation and unwelcome flirtation. The men couldn't defend themselves - and anyone who tries can be accused of not believing victims, even anonymous ones... prominent feminist Jill Filipovic dismissed the scrutiny as "backlash." Writer Roxane Gay disparaged "all the hand-wringing about …the ethics of anonymous disclosure." As she explained in the New York Times, American women live in a state of siege. She suggested all men confess to "how they have hurt women in ways great and small"... Goldberg's reason for wanting Franken to resign is chilling. She claimed to need to see him fall because, otherwise, "the current movement toward unprecedented accountability for sexual harassers will probably start to peter out." In other words, it doesn't matter if he's guilty: The revolution could stall without more decapitations... Vice President Mike Pence has a rule: He never eats alone with a woman other than his wife. It was widely mocked as prissy just a few months ago. But now, in the aftermath of the scandals, some think it might be a good way to protect women... Unfortunately, a new puritanism seems to be ascendant. Timothy Noah of Politico suggests we could limit sexual harassment by making meetings with anyone behind closed doors a fireable offense... Federal laws against sexual harassment were enacted to protect workers from pervasive, severe bullying, coercion or extortion — not from normal human interactions."
One-Third of Office Romances End in Marriage - "Despite being considered taboo in most organizations, nearly 20 percent of those surveyed admitted to dating their direct supervisor, while 28 percent said they have dated someone higher up in the company's hierarchy."
Where is the line between office flirtation and sexual harassment? - "When I was 23 years old, my boss would look down the gap at the waistband of my jeans when he walked past my desk. I was an entry-level fact-checker at my first magazine job, and he was an older and more powerful editor. My career, at the time, was in his hands. Once, when we had finished working on a story together, he suggested we get a drink to celebrate. It was a Friday night, and I remember feeling extremely nervous as we sat across from each other in a dark bar. He was flirting with me, I could tell. The next weekend, he asked me out again. A few days later, he kissed me on the steps of the West 4th subway station without first getting my consent. We’ve now been happily married for 14 years and have three children... If I had not been interested in my husband’s advances, would that have been harassment? Was it harassment anyway, since he was my boss? Today, many people seem to think the answer is yes... I’ve felt a rift with many of the younger women I know, who claim to understand exactly where to draw the line between legitimate behavior and abuse and seem to view harassment as any interaction with a man that has made them uncomfortable... Attempts by men to express confusion about where the lines are have largely been met with derision... A friend of mine told me about a recent date he went on with a woman he met online. After dinner, he asked her if she wanted to go back to his place. She declined. They went on several more dates, though, and eventually she told him that the reason she didn’t go back to his apartment that first night was that he didn’t ask forcefully enough. That same friend told me of a memorable line he’s seen in several Tinder profiles: “likes to be chased.” I laughed, because who doesn’t? But what my friend saw in this current moment were mixed messages: It’s good to be aggressive if your date is interested, but read the room wrong and you are done. It feels great to be chased when you are attracted to the person doing the chasing. Otherwise, the chaser might be seen as a predator. Some people see this confusion as a small price to pay. Better to—as Gessen characterized this line of thinking—“have ten times less sex than to risk having a nonconsensual sexual experience.” But this calculation doesn’t just protect women from abuse; it protects us from experiences that I’m not sure I’d relish giving up... a world where interested parties fear crossing this new boundary we seem to be edging toward, where any power differential or wrong move is seen as predation, robs women of the ability to consent as well... the difference between John being my husband and my harasser cannot just be that it worked out. The difference between actions that can get you married and actions that can get you fired can’t simply be whether or not the person you are interested in is interested back"
Another example of how feminism hurts women
When Does a Watershed Become a Sex Panic? - "I am also queer, and I panic when I sniff sex panic. Over the last three decades, as American society has apparently accepted more open expression of different kinds of sexuality, it has also invented new ways and reasons to police sex. David Halperin, a historian and gender theorist at the University of Michigan, has called this “the war on sex”... campuses had begun instituting rules of “affirmative consent.” Halperin reminds his readers that when Antioch College introduced this standard—which requires explicit verbal affirmation of the desire to take every sexual step—it was “widely ridiculed.” That was in 1991. Now, the principle of affirmative consent has not only been adopted by countless colleges but has become the law for colleges in New York and California... the policing of sex seems to assume that it’s better to have ten times less sex than to risk having a nonconsensual sexual experience. The problem is not just that this reduces the amount of sex people are likely to be having; it also serves to blur the boundaries between rape, nonviolent sexual coercion, and bad, fumbling, drunken sex. The effect is both to criminalize bad sex and trivialize rape."
The myth of the sexual-violence spectrum - "Bex Bailey, a 25-year-old former member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, says she was raped at a Labour Party event in 2011. She said she had been told to cover it up by her Labour colleagues, and that it could harm her career if she reported it. Suddenly, everything else seemed trivial. The talk of a journalist’s knee being touched in 2002 (an allegation which, as I type, has just toppled Michael Fallon from his position as defence secretary) and the ‘unwanted advances’, in other words bad flirting – all of this suddenly appeared trivial next to the allegation made by Bailey. It felt strange to talk about what she was alleging in the same breath as everything else. And so it should. There is no ‘spectrum’ of sexual violence in the way people are now talking about it... as more and more accusations have been made, Bailey’s allegation has been lost in a sea of trivialities. This climate makes trying these more serious allegations very difficult... The most worrying element of this is its impact on young people. In a recent survey conducted by YouGov, 28 per cent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 said they believed that winking is a form of sexual harassment"
Study: A LOT Of Young People Think Compliments, Drink Invites Are Forms Of 'Sexual Harassment' - "over 1/3 of those polled ranging in age from 18-30 (male and female) said a man "commenting on attractiveness" would "always" or "usually" be a form of sexual harassment. When it came to asking a woman out for a drink, about one in four young males and about 12.5% of young females said it would "always" or "usually" be a form of sexual harassment. For reference, those polled in Sweden, Germany, and the U.K., all polled around 0% for this particular hypothetical."
Over-friendly, or sexual harassment? It depends partly on whom you ask - Daily chart - "Swedish men, for example, seem to feel entitled to make sexual jokes around women: only a quarter of them said such behaviour would be harassment. In contrast, three-quarters of American men expressed that opinion. Similarly, a quarter of French women under 30 believe that even asking to go for a drink is harassment, whereas almost none of their counterparts in Britain and Germany share that view."
Sarah Vine on the 'hysterical Westminster witch hunt' - "Allegations are rather vague and vary wildly, from being ‘handsy’ at parties to ‘impregnating’ a woman. Leadsom, by contrast, was unequivocal. ‘If people are made to feel uncomfortable, then that is not correct,’ she told the House. ‘In terms of the consequences for the perpetrators, I think I have also been perfectly clear: in the case of staff, they could forfeit their jobs; in the case of Members of Parliament, they could have the whip withdrawn and they could be fired from ministerial office.’ Watching her grim expression and hearing her speak, I was reminded of that line in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible: ‘We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!’... If someone is upset and an MP puts a reassuring arm around her shoulder, is that inappropriate? If they make a clumsy joke, is that an ‘unwanted advance’? Knowing MPs as I do, many of them are so socially inept, they make asking for a cup of coffee sound deeply suspicious. But just because someone is a bit odd, does that make them a pervert? No. Or perhaps that depends on your point of view. Because there is a strong cultural and generational element to this, too. Most of the accused are over 40; most of the accusers are in their 20s. In other words, it’s the revenge of the millennials, many of whom will have had their senses of humour surgically removed at university. Theirs is a generation that seems permanently aggrieved, in a perpetual state of disgust at anyone over the age of 30... Anne Robinson put her finger on the button when she pointed out that in the Seventies, pioneering young feminists such as herself had a more robust attitude to men behaving badly than the ‘fragile’ women of today... The sensible and sane way to deal with unwanted sexual advances is to adopt the Julia Hartley-Brewer model in respect of having her knee importuned by then MP, now defence secretary, Michael Fallon: firmly decline — and threaten to punch his lights out if he does it again. By the way, this incident took place 15 years ago — 15! — and Julia, now a radio broadcaster, has said until she’s blue in the face that she wasn’t ‘remotely distressed or upset’. But the problem with the current generation of young women is that they have somehow got it into their heads that they don’t have to stick up for themselves, or take responsibility for their own safety... Common sense and the intelligent rules of human behaviour have been replaced by a childish desire to push boundaries and a touchy, uppity tendency to take offence at the slightest thing. Thus you have women waving their breasts around in public in so-called ‘free the nipple’ protests — and then complaining when men are caught ogling them. ‘Slut-walks’, in which girls dress as provocatively as they can before parading in public, are espoused as expressions of female empowerment, when actually they’re just banal and offensive. Like that stupid ‘Metoo’ hashtag that started trending after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, these are not real expressions of emancipation: they are empty, attention-seeking gestures... the real problem: social media. A place where those who can’t find success in the real world find safety in anonymity, and where mediocrity feeds the hunger of the mob to tear down those who dare to rise above the norm as a way of assuaging their own inadequacies. George Orwell was almost right. It is not Big Brother who threatens our freedoms in the 21st century, but his nastier internet-age sibling, Little Brother: hundreds, thousands, millions of shrill individuals, one toxic groupthink, whipping each other into a self-righteous frenzy of hate before descending like locusts, stripping their victims to the bone and leaving destruction in their wake."
Sexual freedom is turning into sexual fear as a counter-revolution shifts our attitude towards sex - "The Crown actress, Claire Foy, was forced to issue a statement saying she had not been offended after angry Twitter users pointed out that actor Adam Sandler had touched her knee — twice — during their appearance on The Graham Norton Show... Foremost propeller of this is a form of modern feminism which is, in fact, barely disguised contempt for men. In an essay, sociology professor Lisa Wade argues: “We need to attack masculinity directly. I don’t mean that we should recuperate masculinity — that is, press men to identify with a kinder, gentler version of it — I mean that we should reject the idea that men have a psychic need to distinguish themselves from women to feel good about themselves.” Other women writers have taken it upon themselves to issue instructions for men on how to behave. This “feminism” isn’t producing guides for helping men. It is producing manifestos for torturing them... Attractive people attract attention and not all find this a disadvantage. Unless we decide that only a super-class of beautiful people are allowed to seek sex, we should accept that people in the lower to middling ranges of attractiveness should be allowed the odd punt too."
Sexual McCarthyism - "“There’s a strand of Western culture that requires some kind of demonized enemy,” says Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. “In the late ’40s and ’50s it was Communists, but today it’s operating in the realm of sexuality. We’re obviously in the middle of a Red scare about sex”... In France, with its tradition of sexual discretion–not to mention after-work (or cinq-à-sept) affairs–the American scandal seems, to say the least, surreal. “Because I love America, and because it is a model for democracy, I wish for the victory of Clinton,” says Jack Lang, the former French minister of culture and one of Europe’s most vocal champions of the United States. “Tyranny begins when one power, one church, one party introduces itself into the private life of its citizens.”"
From 1998
Ladies, You Haven’t Been Raped If Someone Catcalled At You - "Depending on the circumstances and my mood, I’ve found these advances anything from hilariously awkward to enraging. Either way, I mostly forgot them at maximum half an hour later, which is the appropriate reaction to minor incidents with unpleasant people... The #MeToo mob has gone from the serious allegations levelled against powerful men like Bill O’Reilly and Weinstein to women working themselves up into a righteous lather over a stolen kiss to celebrate the end of a bloody war, or a 97-year-old mentally slowing former president making jokes and patting rumps from his wheelchair. As Matt Walsh pointed out in The Daily Wire, let’s hope for their own sake these ladies never visit a nursing home, if George H. W. Bush’s tame antics produced such offense. But the slide from exposing the truly heinous into the minor leagues of “harassment” is all part of the plan for many on the Left... In this age of snowflakes, even speaking about traditional gender roles makes some woman somewhere feel unsafe, prompting gutless universities to issue unconstitutionally broad harassment policies that turn on the subjective feelings of the recipient... In our rush for universal female victimhood, we cheapen the experiences of real victims and create a more hostile environment for their #MeToo stories... The path our society has chosen to deal with this is forcing decent men who do not want to make women uncomfortable to retreat into treating women asexually, as interchangeable with men. We all lose if the wonderful dance between masculinity and femininity, even deployed completely innocently, is lost for all but the most unscrupulous among us."
From chaperones to modesty wear, a sexual reformation is underway | The Spectator - "Nell Minow, an American film critic, recently described how in 2010 she had interviewed the Friends actor David Schwimmer. When the noise in the restaurant grew too loud, he asked her whether she might like to move to a room upstairs with him, and if so, would she like a chaperone present. She praised him for this behaviour. ‘He understood what it is like to have to be constantly on the alert and he wanted to make sure I understood I was safe.’ When I read Minow’s story, my reaction was to think what a patronising arse Schwimmer must be. A woman journalist shouldn’t need a chaperone when she is doing her job. But, in the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein allegations, it has become clear that, for many women, safety is starting to trump liberty. We are moving towards a chaperone culture, in which women, delicate lambs that we are, must be protected at all times... There is political chatter about the possibility of ‘women-only carriages’ on trains. The orthodoxy of ‘safe spaces’ —which began as part of the women’s movement before becoming a university campus cliché — is starting to infiltrate public life... The #MeToo hashtag, which trended on social media in the days after the Weinstein story broke, revealed just how many women considered themselves victims of sexual abuse. But also, how alarmingly wide that definition ran. On my own Facebook feed, the experiences described stretched from rape to ‘feeling as if a man once looked through me’. The implicit message of all these confessional posts was clear: if it hasn’t happened to you yet, you’ve just been lucky. Or perhaps you are in denial. It’s as if a new feminist movement is advocating victimhood, rather than equality. And women who protest about this new reality are denounced as traitors to their sex... I heard a story recently about a woman who had been on a date with a man who was younger than her. After a few drinks, they ended up back at her house. The woman was keen to go to bed with him, but he refused because he was so worried about doing something that might later lead to recriminations. In the current climate, who can blame him? Professional life is becoming a nightmare. Young women feel uneasy about the lay of the land. What career can you choose that won’t involve creeps? And men in positions of authority will inevitably become more anxious about hiring women. It must just seem easier to hire other men, who are less likely to interpret a clumsy comment as sexual assault."
Panicking about Sexual Harassment Is Bad for Women - "A BBC survey carried out in the aftermath of publicity surrounding the Weinstein allegations suggests that half of British women have been sexually harassed at work. This is appalling. But more than a quarter of respondents said the harassment they had experienced was in the form of inappropriate jokes or “banter.” When harassment is defined this broadly it becomes utterly meaningless... In my book, Women Vs. Feminism: Why We All Need Liberating from the Gender Wars, I explore how feminism has changed over recent decades. I argue that feminism was once a bold campaign for women’s liberation that assumed strong and powerful women could compete with men as equals. Now, all too often, feminism claims the exact opposite. As the enthusiasm for women to join in with the #MeToo campaign shows, victimhood has become an attractive proposition today. Not only does it provide access to platforms, resources and power but it also, more importantly, leads to a moral beatification. Contemporary political culture reveres the victim and continually reinforces the authority of those who suffer. The victim is placed on a pedestal, a heroine, blameless. The only demand the victim makes of us is to believe her and in so doing affirm her identity as a victim. The assumption of blamelessness, however, is at best a hollow victory. To be blameless is to have lacked all ability to control your own destiny. The primary objective of feminism today seems to be securing recognition that all women, however successful, are victimized. This victim status sits easily alongside an assumption of equality: women are equal, indeed superior, to men because of the suffering they endure and the disadvantage they have overcome... For a previously unidentified problem to encompass so many people in such a short space of time is quite remarkable. Daphne Patai, author of Heterophobia is cynical about the processes that led women to attach this label to their experiences. She suggests the efforts, particularly virulent on university campuses, to uncover and name this newly discovered problem are best described as a “Sexual Harassment Industry.” Patai argues this industry offers women a “training in victimhood,” through which they “learn how to identify the injuries they suffer” and come to see themselves first as “victims” then as “survivors.” According to Patai, the sudden explosion in the number of sexual harassment victims suggests the offense is too broadly defined and the problem overstated... over the course of four decades, definitions of sexual harassment have become ever more expansive and are now incorporated into the law. But one problem is that the more broadly sexual harassment is defined the more subjective it becomes – what one woman experiences as unwelcome another might see as a compliment"
Confusing Sexual Harassment With Flirting Hurts Women - "On Medium, author and podcaster Coner Habib asserts, “If every woman who had a boundary violated called out every man who had done so, there would be few men left un-accused, and few women left unwounded.” (Presumably only women have boundaries and only men ever cross them.) On Twitter, prominent feminist writer Jessica Valenti has written that it’s good for men to be afraid. Moreover, the social media mockery of clueless men who can’t tell flirting from sexual harassment has often gone hand in hand with assertions that all workplace flirting is harassment—such as this viral tweet from singer/songwriter Marian Call. “dudes are you aware how happy women would be if strangers & coworkers never “flirted” with us again, like ever, this is the world we want,” she tweeted. Never mind that plenty of women flirt at work, or that romances thrive even in this age of dating apps. (Among under-35 respondents to an informal 2015 survey for the online magazine Mic, nearly 18 percent of those currently coupled had met their partner through work and fewer than 10 percent through online dating.)... “Don’t be a sexual predator or a sex pest” is self-evident. “Don’t make unwelcome invasions of personal space or sexual jokes” is more complicated -— especially in creative industries, from journalism to entertainment, where an informal work environment is often the norm and sex-themed conversation and humor may be part of the work itself. Is it sexual harassment for a TV producer/director to talk to Lena Dunham about her much-publicized onscreen nudity while mixing informally at a restaurant after a shoot, or to show her a still from his show that has nudity in it? Dunham and her producer Jenni Konner thought so... David Corn, the Washington Bureau chief for Mother Jones, is under investigation for past “inappropriate” touching—from hugs to pats on the arm, back, or shoulder—that seems to have been non-sexual and gender-neutral... Does this mean all uncomfortable interactions will be treated as entirely the man’s fault while female employees are presumed to have no agency? Does this mean that a woman who discusses intimate issues with a male friend at work can accuse him of harassment for making personal comments in those discussions? No wonder men are nervous... A manager at a wastewater treatment plant in Olympia, Washington was suspended for bringing a copy of Esquire magazine for his lunchtime reading, apparently offending a female co-worker with its racy lingerie ads. Another corporate manager was placed on probation for hugging a secretary who had just lost her mother—on a complaint from a co-worker who witnessed the hug. An insurance company manager was demoted with a big pay cut and transferred to a less desirable location after an office administrator unhappy about being denied a raise complained that he had given her humorously bawdy greeting cards—despite undisputed evidence that she had been at least as raunchy with him and other co-workers. A Miller Brewing Co. executive was fired for discussing a “Seinfeld” episode containing some risqué humor... Nearly twenty years ago, dissident feminist academic Daphne Patai wrote a thought-provoking book titled “Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Politics of Feminism.” Patai argued that while remedies against sexual assault and extortion are essential, it is better to tolerate “the petty annoyance of occasional misplaced sexual attentions” than to endure the repressive vigilance required to stamp out all unwanted or offensive workplace behaviors"
I was among the early supporters of #metoo, but this is starting to get ugly - "we are getting very close to witch-burning territory with the persistent revealing of names and the indignant justification that this has merited on social media. Once a witch is burnt there is little use in saying "whoops, we were wrong. Sorry about that.""
Monica Lewinsky Sets Internet On Fire, Says The One Thing That Will Shame Hillary Forever - "Hillary Clinton can’t win for trying. She tried to take the high, arrogant road and came out hard against the sexual predator and former mega Clinton campaign donor Harvey Weinstein.
No one bought her crocodile tears. She didn’t even give back all his cash – she said there is no one to give it to. The Clinton Foundation also is not going to give back the money and worse, it just came out that none other than Harvey Weinstein helped pay Bill Clinton’s legal bills when he was accused of sexual assault. But that didn’t stop Hillary from going all with her fake outrage... You were complicit in what Bill did to countless women, none more obvious than how you helped silence poor Monica."
#MeToo: 'Some contributors use it as a platform to pour scorn on all men' - "The truth is that the majority of both young men and women sexually objectify themselves to some degree in order to bolster their physical attractiveness to find a mate. In fact, many women are far worse objectifiers of women’s bodies than men. Pick up a few women’s gossip and celebrity magazines in any newsagent and observe the manner in which famous women’s bodily imperfections or weight fluctuations are commented on, often in very judgmental and disapproving tones. It is women who both compile and drive the demand for these magazines not men. Too much of the debate in the mainstream and social media around gender issues is dictated by a strain of feminism that views masculinity as inherently problematic"
#MeToo: the return of recovered memories - "this atmosphere in which to question the hunt for devils is to risk being suspected of being in concert with devils: the post-Weinstein climate, the search for sexual harassment everywhere, is not a measured, analytical moment, but rather has more in common with the ‘recovered memories’ episodes of the 1980s and 1990s when people came to be convinced that they had been abused, when many of them hadn’t been."
The #MeToo movement reveals feminism’s obsession with victimhood | Coffee House - "It also creates an impression that being a woman in the 21st century is a living hell. Not only is this false, it is destructive. In 2015, Girl Guiding UK found that seventy-five per cent of girls and young women said anxiety about potentially experiencing sexual harassment affects their lives in some way. A 2016 survey suggested that 41 per cent of young women expect to face discrimination at work. These young women had not faced harassment or discrimination: their anxiety was around what might, potentially, happen to them in the future. It may be the fear of sexual harassment, more than the reality, that is holding women back today."
Teaching women they are (or are going to be) victims has consequences
One-Third of Office Romances End in Marriage - "Despite being considered taboo in most organizations, nearly 20 percent of those surveyed admitted to dating their direct supervisor, while 28 percent said they have dated someone higher up in the company's hierarchy."
Where is the line between office flirtation and sexual harassment? - "When I was 23 years old, my boss would look down the gap at the waistband of my jeans when he walked past my desk. I was an entry-level fact-checker at my first magazine job, and he was an older and more powerful editor. My career, at the time, was in his hands. Once, when we had finished working on a story together, he suggested we get a drink to celebrate. It was a Friday night, and I remember feeling extremely nervous as we sat across from each other in a dark bar. He was flirting with me, I could tell. The next weekend, he asked me out again. A few days later, he kissed me on the steps of the West 4th subway station without first getting my consent. We’ve now been happily married for 14 years and have three children... If I had not been interested in my husband’s advances, would that have been harassment? Was it harassment anyway, since he was my boss? Today, many people seem to think the answer is yes... I’ve felt a rift with many of the younger women I know, who claim to understand exactly where to draw the line between legitimate behavior and abuse and seem to view harassment as any interaction with a man that has made them uncomfortable... Attempts by men to express confusion about where the lines are have largely been met with derision... A friend of mine told me about a recent date he went on with a woman he met online. After dinner, he asked her if she wanted to go back to his place. She declined. They went on several more dates, though, and eventually she told him that the reason she didn’t go back to his apartment that first night was that he didn’t ask forcefully enough. That same friend told me of a memorable line he’s seen in several Tinder profiles: “likes to be chased.” I laughed, because who doesn’t? But what my friend saw in this current moment were mixed messages: It’s good to be aggressive if your date is interested, but read the room wrong and you are done. It feels great to be chased when you are attracted to the person doing the chasing. Otherwise, the chaser might be seen as a predator. Some people see this confusion as a small price to pay. Better to—as Gessen characterized this line of thinking—“have ten times less sex than to risk having a nonconsensual sexual experience.” But this calculation doesn’t just protect women from abuse; it protects us from experiences that I’m not sure I’d relish giving up... a world where interested parties fear crossing this new boundary we seem to be edging toward, where any power differential or wrong move is seen as predation, robs women of the ability to consent as well... the difference between John being my husband and my harasser cannot just be that it worked out. The difference between actions that can get you married and actions that can get you fired can’t simply be whether or not the person you are interested in is interested back"
Another example of how feminism hurts women
When Does a Watershed Become a Sex Panic? - "I am also queer, and I panic when I sniff sex panic. Over the last three decades, as American society has apparently accepted more open expression of different kinds of sexuality, it has also invented new ways and reasons to police sex. David Halperin, a historian and gender theorist at the University of Michigan, has called this “the war on sex”... campuses had begun instituting rules of “affirmative consent.” Halperin reminds his readers that when Antioch College introduced this standard—which requires explicit verbal affirmation of the desire to take every sexual step—it was “widely ridiculed.” That was in 1991. Now, the principle of affirmative consent has not only been adopted by countless colleges but has become the law for colleges in New York and California... the policing of sex seems to assume that it’s better to have ten times less sex than to risk having a nonconsensual sexual experience. The problem is not just that this reduces the amount of sex people are likely to be having; it also serves to blur the boundaries between rape, nonviolent sexual coercion, and bad, fumbling, drunken sex. The effect is both to criminalize bad sex and trivialize rape."
The myth of the sexual-violence spectrum - "Bex Bailey, a 25-year-old former member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, says she was raped at a Labour Party event in 2011. She said she had been told to cover it up by her Labour colleagues, and that it could harm her career if she reported it. Suddenly, everything else seemed trivial. The talk of a journalist’s knee being touched in 2002 (an allegation which, as I type, has just toppled Michael Fallon from his position as defence secretary) and the ‘unwanted advances’, in other words bad flirting – all of this suddenly appeared trivial next to the allegation made by Bailey. It felt strange to talk about what she was alleging in the same breath as everything else. And so it should. There is no ‘spectrum’ of sexual violence in the way people are now talking about it... as more and more accusations have been made, Bailey’s allegation has been lost in a sea of trivialities. This climate makes trying these more serious allegations very difficult... The most worrying element of this is its impact on young people. In a recent survey conducted by YouGov, 28 per cent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 said they believed that winking is a form of sexual harassment"
Study: A LOT Of Young People Think Compliments, Drink Invites Are Forms Of 'Sexual Harassment' - "over 1/3 of those polled ranging in age from 18-30 (male and female) said a man "commenting on attractiveness" would "always" or "usually" be a form of sexual harassment. When it came to asking a woman out for a drink, about one in four young males and about 12.5% of young females said it would "always" or "usually" be a form of sexual harassment. For reference, those polled in Sweden, Germany, and the U.K., all polled around 0% for this particular hypothetical."
Over-friendly, or sexual harassment? It depends partly on whom you ask - Daily chart - "Swedish men, for example, seem to feel entitled to make sexual jokes around women: only a quarter of them said such behaviour would be harassment. In contrast, three-quarters of American men expressed that opinion. Similarly, a quarter of French women under 30 believe that even asking to go for a drink is harassment, whereas almost none of their counterparts in Britain and Germany share that view."
Sarah Vine on the 'hysterical Westminster witch hunt' - "Allegations are rather vague and vary wildly, from being ‘handsy’ at parties to ‘impregnating’ a woman. Leadsom, by contrast, was unequivocal. ‘If people are made to feel uncomfortable, then that is not correct,’ she told the House. ‘In terms of the consequences for the perpetrators, I think I have also been perfectly clear: in the case of staff, they could forfeit their jobs; in the case of Members of Parliament, they could have the whip withdrawn and they could be fired from ministerial office.’ Watching her grim expression and hearing her speak, I was reminded of that line in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible: ‘We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!’... If someone is upset and an MP puts a reassuring arm around her shoulder, is that inappropriate? If they make a clumsy joke, is that an ‘unwanted advance’? Knowing MPs as I do, many of them are so socially inept, they make asking for a cup of coffee sound deeply suspicious. But just because someone is a bit odd, does that make them a pervert? No. Or perhaps that depends on your point of view. Because there is a strong cultural and generational element to this, too. Most of the accused are over 40; most of the accusers are in their 20s. In other words, it’s the revenge of the millennials, many of whom will have had their senses of humour surgically removed at university. Theirs is a generation that seems permanently aggrieved, in a perpetual state of disgust at anyone over the age of 30... Anne Robinson put her finger on the button when she pointed out that in the Seventies, pioneering young feminists such as herself had a more robust attitude to men behaving badly than the ‘fragile’ women of today... The sensible and sane way to deal with unwanted sexual advances is to adopt the Julia Hartley-Brewer model in respect of having her knee importuned by then MP, now defence secretary, Michael Fallon: firmly decline — and threaten to punch his lights out if he does it again. By the way, this incident took place 15 years ago — 15! — and Julia, now a radio broadcaster, has said until she’s blue in the face that she wasn’t ‘remotely distressed or upset’. But the problem with the current generation of young women is that they have somehow got it into their heads that they don’t have to stick up for themselves, or take responsibility for their own safety... Common sense and the intelligent rules of human behaviour have been replaced by a childish desire to push boundaries and a touchy, uppity tendency to take offence at the slightest thing. Thus you have women waving their breasts around in public in so-called ‘free the nipple’ protests — and then complaining when men are caught ogling them. ‘Slut-walks’, in which girls dress as provocatively as they can before parading in public, are espoused as expressions of female empowerment, when actually they’re just banal and offensive. Like that stupid ‘Metoo’ hashtag that started trending after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, these are not real expressions of emancipation: they are empty, attention-seeking gestures... the real problem: social media. A place where those who can’t find success in the real world find safety in anonymity, and where mediocrity feeds the hunger of the mob to tear down those who dare to rise above the norm as a way of assuaging their own inadequacies. George Orwell was almost right. It is not Big Brother who threatens our freedoms in the 21st century, but his nastier internet-age sibling, Little Brother: hundreds, thousands, millions of shrill individuals, one toxic groupthink, whipping each other into a self-righteous frenzy of hate before descending like locusts, stripping their victims to the bone and leaving destruction in their wake."
Sexual freedom is turning into sexual fear as a counter-revolution shifts our attitude towards sex - "The Crown actress, Claire Foy, was forced to issue a statement saying she had not been offended after angry Twitter users pointed out that actor Adam Sandler had touched her knee — twice — during their appearance on The Graham Norton Show... Foremost propeller of this is a form of modern feminism which is, in fact, barely disguised contempt for men. In an essay, sociology professor Lisa Wade argues: “We need to attack masculinity directly. I don’t mean that we should recuperate masculinity — that is, press men to identify with a kinder, gentler version of it — I mean that we should reject the idea that men have a psychic need to distinguish themselves from women to feel good about themselves.” Other women writers have taken it upon themselves to issue instructions for men on how to behave. This “feminism” isn’t producing guides for helping men. It is producing manifestos for torturing them... Attractive people attract attention and not all find this a disadvantage. Unless we decide that only a super-class of beautiful people are allowed to seek sex, we should accept that people in the lower to middling ranges of attractiveness should be allowed the odd punt too."
Sexual McCarthyism - "“There’s a strand of Western culture that requires some kind of demonized enemy,” says Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. “In the late ’40s and ’50s it was Communists, but today it’s operating in the realm of sexuality. We’re obviously in the middle of a Red scare about sex”... In France, with its tradition of sexual discretion–not to mention after-work (or cinq-à-sept) affairs–the American scandal seems, to say the least, surreal. “Because I love America, and because it is a model for democracy, I wish for the victory of Clinton,” says Jack Lang, the former French minister of culture and one of Europe’s most vocal champions of the United States. “Tyranny begins when one power, one church, one party introduces itself into the private life of its citizens.”"
From 1998
Ladies, You Haven’t Been Raped If Someone Catcalled At You - "Depending on the circumstances and my mood, I’ve found these advances anything from hilariously awkward to enraging. Either way, I mostly forgot them at maximum half an hour later, which is the appropriate reaction to minor incidents with unpleasant people... The #MeToo mob has gone from the serious allegations levelled against powerful men like Bill O’Reilly and Weinstein to women working themselves up into a righteous lather over a stolen kiss to celebrate the end of a bloody war, or a 97-year-old mentally slowing former president making jokes and patting rumps from his wheelchair. As Matt Walsh pointed out in The Daily Wire, let’s hope for their own sake these ladies never visit a nursing home, if George H. W. Bush’s tame antics produced such offense. But the slide from exposing the truly heinous into the minor leagues of “harassment” is all part of the plan for many on the Left... In this age of snowflakes, even speaking about traditional gender roles makes some woman somewhere feel unsafe, prompting gutless universities to issue unconstitutionally broad harassment policies that turn on the subjective feelings of the recipient... In our rush for universal female victimhood, we cheapen the experiences of real victims and create a more hostile environment for their #MeToo stories... The path our society has chosen to deal with this is forcing decent men who do not want to make women uncomfortable to retreat into treating women asexually, as interchangeable with men. We all lose if the wonderful dance between masculinity and femininity, even deployed completely innocently, is lost for all but the most unscrupulous among us."
From chaperones to modesty wear, a sexual reformation is underway | The Spectator - "Nell Minow, an American film critic, recently described how in 2010 she had interviewed the Friends actor David Schwimmer. When the noise in the restaurant grew too loud, he asked her whether she might like to move to a room upstairs with him, and if so, would she like a chaperone present. She praised him for this behaviour. ‘He understood what it is like to have to be constantly on the alert and he wanted to make sure I understood I was safe.’ When I read Minow’s story, my reaction was to think what a patronising arse Schwimmer must be. A woman journalist shouldn’t need a chaperone when she is doing her job. But, in the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein allegations, it has become clear that, for many women, safety is starting to trump liberty. We are moving towards a chaperone culture, in which women, delicate lambs that we are, must be protected at all times... There is political chatter about the possibility of ‘women-only carriages’ on trains. The orthodoxy of ‘safe spaces’ —which began as part of the women’s movement before becoming a university campus cliché — is starting to infiltrate public life... The #MeToo hashtag, which trended on social media in the days after the Weinstein story broke, revealed just how many women considered themselves victims of sexual abuse. But also, how alarmingly wide that definition ran. On my own Facebook feed, the experiences described stretched from rape to ‘feeling as if a man once looked through me’. The implicit message of all these confessional posts was clear: if it hasn’t happened to you yet, you’ve just been lucky. Or perhaps you are in denial. It’s as if a new feminist movement is advocating victimhood, rather than equality. And women who protest about this new reality are denounced as traitors to their sex... I heard a story recently about a woman who had been on a date with a man who was younger than her. After a few drinks, they ended up back at her house. The woman was keen to go to bed with him, but he refused because he was so worried about doing something that might later lead to recriminations. In the current climate, who can blame him? Professional life is becoming a nightmare. Young women feel uneasy about the lay of the land. What career can you choose that won’t involve creeps? And men in positions of authority will inevitably become more anxious about hiring women. It must just seem easier to hire other men, who are less likely to interpret a clumsy comment as sexual assault."
Panicking about Sexual Harassment Is Bad for Women - "A BBC survey carried out in the aftermath of publicity surrounding the Weinstein allegations suggests that half of British women have been sexually harassed at work. This is appalling. But more than a quarter of respondents said the harassment they had experienced was in the form of inappropriate jokes or “banter.” When harassment is defined this broadly it becomes utterly meaningless... In my book, Women Vs. Feminism: Why We All Need Liberating from the Gender Wars, I explore how feminism has changed over recent decades. I argue that feminism was once a bold campaign for women’s liberation that assumed strong and powerful women could compete with men as equals. Now, all too often, feminism claims the exact opposite. As the enthusiasm for women to join in with the #MeToo campaign shows, victimhood has become an attractive proposition today. Not only does it provide access to platforms, resources and power but it also, more importantly, leads to a moral beatification. Contemporary political culture reveres the victim and continually reinforces the authority of those who suffer. The victim is placed on a pedestal, a heroine, blameless. The only demand the victim makes of us is to believe her and in so doing affirm her identity as a victim. The assumption of blamelessness, however, is at best a hollow victory. To be blameless is to have lacked all ability to control your own destiny. The primary objective of feminism today seems to be securing recognition that all women, however successful, are victimized. This victim status sits easily alongside an assumption of equality: women are equal, indeed superior, to men because of the suffering they endure and the disadvantage they have overcome... For a previously unidentified problem to encompass so many people in such a short space of time is quite remarkable. Daphne Patai, author of Heterophobia is cynical about the processes that led women to attach this label to their experiences. She suggests the efforts, particularly virulent on university campuses, to uncover and name this newly discovered problem are best described as a “Sexual Harassment Industry.” Patai argues this industry offers women a “training in victimhood,” through which they “learn how to identify the injuries they suffer” and come to see themselves first as “victims” then as “survivors.” According to Patai, the sudden explosion in the number of sexual harassment victims suggests the offense is too broadly defined and the problem overstated... over the course of four decades, definitions of sexual harassment have become ever more expansive and are now incorporated into the law. But one problem is that the more broadly sexual harassment is defined the more subjective it becomes – what one woman experiences as unwelcome another might see as a compliment"
Confusing Sexual Harassment With Flirting Hurts Women - "On Medium, author and podcaster Coner Habib asserts, “If every woman who had a boundary violated called out every man who had done so, there would be few men left un-accused, and few women left unwounded.” (Presumably only women have boundaries and only men ever cross them.) On Twitter, prominent feminist writer Jessica Valenti has written that it’s good for men to be afraid. Moreover, the social media mockery of clueless men who can’t tell flirting from sexual harassment has often gone hand in hand with assertions that all workplace flirting is harassment—such as this viral tweet from singer/songwriter Marian Call. “dudes are you aware how happy women would be if strangers & coworkers never “flirted” with us again, like ever, this is the world we want,” she tweeted. Never mind that plenty of women flirt at work, or that romances thrive even in this age of dating apps. (Among under-35 respondents to an informal 2015 survey for the online magazine Mic, nearly 18 percent of those currently coupled had met their partner through work and fewer than 10 percent through online dating.)... “Don’t be a sexual predator or a sex pest” is self-evident. “Don’t make unwelcome invasions of personal space or sexual jokes” is more complicated -— especially in creative industries, from journalism to entertainment, where an informal work environment is often the norm and sex-themed conversation and humor may be part of the work itself. Is it sexual harassment for a TV producer/director to talk to Lena Dunham about her much-publicized onscreen nudity while mixing informally at a restaurant after a shoot, or to show her a still from his show that has nudity in it? Dunham and her producer Jenni Konner thought so... David Corn, the Washington Bureau chief for Mother Jones, is under investigation for past “inappropriate” touching—from hugs to pats on the arm, back, or shoulder—that seems to have been non-sexual and gender-neutral... Does this mean all uncomfortable interactions will be treated as entirely the man’s fault while female employees are presumed to have no agency? Does this mean that a woman who discusses intimate issues with a male friend at work can accuse him of harassment for making personal comments in those discussions? No wonder men are nervous... A manager at a wastewater treatment plant in Olympia, Washington was suspended for bringing a copy of Esquire magazine for his lunchtime reading, apparently offending a female co-worker with its racy lingerie ads. Another corporate manager was placed on probation for hugging a secretary who had just lost her mother—on a complaint from a co-worker who witnessed the hug. An insurance company manager was demoted with a big pay cut and transferred to a less desirable location after an office administrator unhappy about being denied a raise complained that he had given her humorously bawdy greeting cards—despite undisputed evidence that she had been at least as raunchy with him and other co-workers. A Miller Brewing Co. executive was fired for discussing a “Seinfeld” episode containing some risqué humor... Nearly twenty years ago, dissident feminist academic Daphne Patai wrote a thought-provoking book titled “Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Politics of Feminism.” Patai argued that while remedies against sexual assault and extortion are essential, it is better to tolerate “the petty annoyance of occasional misplaced sexual attentions” than to endure the repressive vigilance required to stamp out all unwanted or offensive workplace behaviors"
I was among the early supporters of #metoo, but this is starting to get ugly - "we are getting very close to witch-burning territory with the persistent revealing of names and the indignant justification that this has merited on social media. Once a witch is burnt there is little use in saying "whoops, we were wrong. Sorry about that.""
Monica Lewinsky Sets Internet On Fire, Says The One Thing That Will Shame Hillary Forever - "Hillary Clinton can’t win for trying. She tried to take the high, arrogant road and came out hard against the sexual predator and former mega Clinton campaign donor Harvey Weinstein.
No one bought her crocodile tears. She didn’t even give back all his cash – she said there is no one to give it to. The Clinton Foundation also is not going to give back the money and worse, it just came out that none other than Harvey Weinstein helped pay Bill Clinton’s legal bills when he was accused of sexual assault. But that didn’t stop Hillary from going all with her fake outrage... You were complicit in what Bill did to countless women, none more obvious than how you helped silence poor Monica."
#MeToo: 'Some contributors use it as a platform to pour scorn on all men' - "The truth is that the majority of both young men and women sexually objectify themselves to some degree in order to bolster their physical attractiveness to find a mate. In fact, many women are far worse objectifiers of women’s bodies than men. Pick up a few women’s gossip and celebrity magazines in any newsagent and observe the manner in which famous women’s bodily imperfections or weight fluctuations are commented on, often in very judgmental and disapproving tones. It is women who both compile and drive the demand for these magazines not men. Too much of the debate in the mainstream and social media around gender issues is dictated by a strain of feminism that views masculinity as inherently problematic"
#MeToo: the return of recovered memories - "this atmosphere in which to question the hunt for devils is to risk being suspected of being in concert with devils: the post-Weinstein climate, the search for sexual harassment everywhere, is not a measured, analytical moment, but rather has more in common with the ‘recovered memories’ episodes of the 1980s and 1990s when people came to be convinced that they had been abused, when many of them hadn’t been."
The #MeToo movement reveals feminism’s obsession with victimhood | Coffee House - "It also creates an impression that being a woman in the 21st century is a living hell. Not only is this false, it is destructive. In 2015, Girl Guiding UK found that seventy-five per cent of girls and young women said anxiety about potentially experiencing sexual harassment affects their lives in some way. A 2016 survey suggested that 41 per cent of young women expect to face discrimination at work. These young women had not faced harassment or discrimination: their anxiety was around what might, potentially, happen to them in the future. It may be the fear of sexual harassment, more than the reality, that is holding women back today."
Teaching women they are (or are going to be) victims has consequences