Links - 16th July 2018 (2)

Reservations soar at Toronto restaurant after vegan protest - "What started as a simple protest in downtown Toronto is becoming an international news story this week as more and more people learn of the chef who cut up a deer leg in front of some angry vegans... the vast majority of readers have been praising his peaceful, yet impactful method of fighting back against a group of animal rights activists who'd been haranguing Antler's customers for months."

Exit scammers run off with $660 million in ICO earnings - "Again we find that the current, unregulated, ICO market is the most interesting system for parting fools from their money in recent history."

Man accused of Da Vinci apartment arson was angry about police killings of African Americans, witnesses say - "The man charged with burning down the Da Vinci apartment complex and causing $100 million in damages, bragged about the fire at a hotel party a week later and was angry at high-profile police killings of African Americans... The testimony came during a preliminary hearing in the arson case against Dawud Abdulwali, who is accused of starting a fire on Dec. 7, 2014, that charred the unfinished, seven-story complex along the 110 Freeway in downtown L.A."
Black Li(v)es Matter

Other states are taking note of Utah's free-range parenting law - "Senate Bill 65, Child Neglect Amendments changes the definition of neglect, so a parent can't be arrested for letting a child do things like play at a park, or walk or ride a bike to school."

Free-range parenting laws could catch on around U.S. - "Parents have been investigated by child-welfare authorities in several high-profile cases, including a Maryland couple who allowed their 10- and 6-year-old children to walk home alone from a park in 2015... “When I was a child, you let your dogs and your children out after breakfast and … they had to be home for dinner,” he said. “I felt I gained a lot more from just playing on the street than my children did from being in organized sports activities.”"

Here’s what you should know about Inuka’s living conditions before being triggered - "Male polar bears live to 15 — 18 years in the wild, and around 25 years in captivity. At 27 years old, Inuka has exceeded his lifespan and would be in his 70s if he were human... He enjoys basking in the sun, despite having access to his air-conditioned ice cave."

Singapore to test facial recognition on lampposts, stoking privacy fears - "Wilson, the security lecturer at Murdoch University, said that unlike cities like London or New York, Singapore did not have a high crime or terror-threat level that justified such surveillance capabilities. In its 2018 risk map published this week, AON, a professional services company, ranked the terror threat in Singapore as "low". The government says, however, that the country faces threats from both home-grown militants and foreign terrorists"
We were told CCTVs in MRT stations were to prevent terrorism, but they seem used mainly to catch people eating or drinking

Linda Sarsour’s Awkward Defensiveness Over Saudi Oppression That The Left Seems To Ignore. - "She’s basically saying “women not having the right to drive in Saudi Arabia shouldn’t be a big deal because they get 10 weeks paid maternity leave.”... She is completely dishonest about the facts. She appeals to followers by showing women in high positions, and that somehow alleviates the problems of the average woman. It’s similar to saying “racism doesn’t exist in the United States because Barack Obama was president.” In some of these countries there is honor violence, and even sharia courts that punishes rape victims. But of course, they have women leaders, therefore “no sexism.”"

David Buckel, prominent New York LGBT lawyer, dies after setting himself on fire - "A prominent gay rights lawyer and environmental advocate has burned himself to death in New York on Saturday, reportedly using fossil fuel in a protest against ecological destruction."
This is a new height of commitment

Murat Morrison's answer to What is the most mean thing you've ever done? - Quora
Comment: "Something I have learned about beautiful women is that the self-destructive ones can make you think it's _your_ fault for not giving them enough attention, caring enough, or whatever else... when when you're giving 125% of what you have to give. I think it's because messed-up, attractive women (and possibly the same kind of men) exploit neoteny and thus hit parental circuitry."

The postwar world - History Extra - "[On World War II] All the archetypes that came out of the war are very black and white. You've got your hero, your victim, you've got the monsters who did all these terrible things and any nuance between them is very badly received by people. They don't want to think. I actually, some of these monsters might not have been complete monsters. They might've done some good things too. And some of these victims might not have been such innocent victims after all. We don't like those sort of nuances. We like to have things clear and black and white."

The history of today - History Extra - "We can only give you so much wisdom about the present, because the whole point about history is that it needs some distance from the moment in order to put it in context. And so what we're doing is suggesting, that with distance, you can perhaps have a clarity and you can perhaps ask different questions...
The temperance movements, particularly in America, where women went after men because of what too much drinking did to them. Now, essentially, they weren't saying, we want to be equal to you. Essentially they were saying, your behavior when you drink means that there's domestic violence. It means that you don't bring money into the home, we need you back being responsible men. And in order to get you back, we will launch, and it was a nationwide movement that caught the imagination of a new newspaper press, so that's a new technology at the moment. And when women went marching on the streets and did things like when up to saloon keepers and said, if you close this saloon, we promise you that all the women in this town will buy fish from you if you become a fish monger instead. So you were looking at this moment where women had fantastic power and yes, it wasn't power, which we would see today as making women equal. So it wasn't revolution, but their methods were quite revolutionary. And underneath you could see it was women starting to feel their power, and indeed, the temperance movement does develop into the early suffragette movement."
So much for history teaching us that Trump is Hitler

Opposing the Nazis - History Extra - "The German public's overwhelming approval of what the Nazis wanted and the Nazi 25 point program. And in one case he wrote that they are intoxicated by the successes in Poland. And what bothered him so much was that not only were they constantly rejoicing about things like that, but while they were rejoicing, they paid no heed at all to the tales of atrocities... the tales of atrocities of the worst kind that were buzzing in the air. In other words, just two weeks into the war, and when Hitler invaded Poland, two weeks into that war, the people were intoxicated and totally ignoring what was happening, what the German army was doing, what the SS... were doing, what was happening to the civilians, to the ordinary people in Poland"

A quick history of France - History Extra - "[Napoleon] crowned himself Emperor. Kings of course had a bad name by then. The last king. had been guillotined only 10 years before, and so Kings were unpopular, but Emperors were like Roman Emperors. They were different. They were good things, kings were bad things but emperors were god things"

Christoph on Twitter - "“How women use strategic tears to avoid accountability” - disgusting alt-right misogyny
“How WHITE women use strategic tears to avoid accountability” - woke left wing intersectionality, yass queen slay!!!"
Comments: " isn't an example of "white woman tears," it's someone asking a perfectly reasonable question."
"I love how the Left keeps alienating more groups with their selective racism and sexism, also known als 'intersectionality'. Join usssss, white womennn... they hatessss you! Take that red pill!"

How white women use strategic tears to avoid accountability | Ruby Hamad - "One of the panellists, Winnie Dunn, in answering a question about the harm caused by good intentions, had used the words “white people” and “shit” in the same sentence. This raised the ire of a self-identified white woman in the audience who interrogated the panellists as to “what they think they have to gain” by insulting people who “want to read their stories.” In other words, the woman saw a personal attack where there wasn’t one... “We talk about toxic masculinity,” Ajayi warns, “but there is (also) toxicity in wielding femininity in this way.”... their tearful displays are a form of emotional and psychological violence that reinforce the very system of white dominance that many white women claim to oppose."
"saw a personal attack where there wasn’t one" is a great indictment of grievance politics
The definition of violence keeps expanding
The Guardian probably turned off comments on its articles because they were tired of people trying to keep them honest. Pity - the comments were usually the best bit

BBC World Service - The World This Week, China's new emperor? - "One of the main reasons is that he's made so many enemies within the Communist Party that for him to ever give up power would be potentially dangerous for him. The anti-corruption drive here, according to the Communist Party's own figures 1.5 million people have been punished in this. Now imagine they've all got relatives. They might not all be in jail but they might all be potentially angry at Xi Jinping"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, China to 'Fight Back' against US Trade Tariffs - "She was not perfect. She had her flaws. She was convicted of fraud and being an accessory to kidnapping. Any fair-minded person cannot reflect on Mrs Madikizela-Mandela's life without mentioning 14 year old Stompie Seipei. Even though she never ordered his killing, he died at the hands of a scandal-prone Mandela United Football Club bodyguard and driver after being falsely accused of being an apartheid spy. Her support for "necklacing"
putting a tyre around suspected traitors' necks, dousing them with petrol and setting them alight also put her in direct conflict with her comrades"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Trump and Kim eye early nuclear talks - "So many North Koreans over the years from that class have seen the outside world, have travelled outside North Korea and have developed a taste for some of those creature comforts that we are accustomed to. When I was the bureau chief of a news operation in Pyongyang, I flew twice a month in and out of Pyongyang and my flights were packed with North Koreans. So that meant that there was a pointevil [sp?] of North Koreans every day going to Beijing and seeing what life was like outside their country. If the leader of North Korea wants to keep that class happy he also has to find a way to give them the life that they are accustomed to outside the country"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Russia cuts military spending - "This is a military force that people used to run away from. There is conscription in Russia and I remember in the old days of the Chechen War it was the last thing in the world that a young Russian man or his mother wanted was to end up conscripted into the Russian army. The pay was terrible, the conditions were disastrous and there were very dangerous wars that Russia was involved in. These days it's a matter of national pride. Young boys, generally speaking, and broadly speaking want to join the Russian army. They get paid much better, the conditions are much better and there's far less brutality within the Russian military itself and I think that is in a way symbolic of a kind of change in the psyche here in Russia over the years that Vladimir Putin has been in power"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Facebook data breach scientist says he is being 'scapegoated' - "Honestly we thought we were acting perfectly appropriately. We thought we were doing something that was really normal and we were assured by Cambridge Analytica that everything was perfectly legal and within the limits of the terms of service"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, London knife attacks - "When we looked at our first paper back in the 80s we looked at interpersonal injury - knives and gun injuries as being relatively uncommon, sort of niche injury, and now it's our core work. About a quarter of what we see in our practice is knife and gun injury and it’s now we’re doing major life saving cases on a daily basis...
Your practice has gone from relaxed to a war zone in recent years...
We're now doing major interventions on younger and younger people who require operations which we only used to describe in years gone by… we routinely have children under our care. 13, 14, 15 year olds… knife and gun wounds... children in school uniforms...
I think we've seen a normalization in attitudes towards violence globally and also a willingness for people in general to take offence about pretty much everything... things escalate on social media over literally nothing, which used to be previously ignored. People now, when pressed with conflict, react in a much more explosive manner... you get the society you deserve if you ignore violence... so we're all responsible"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Syria 'chemical attack' - "Independent sources were just saying in the case of the Douma attack two MIL MI-8 helicopters was seen taking off from Tamara airbase and that's one of the possible places that's going to come in for a missile strike. They were then seen over Douma dropping canisters and there is form here... Khan Shaykhun. No one apart from Russia and Syria disputes that that was the Syrian government that did that...
President Putin has a world view where he feels that the world is trying to bring him down, trying to get at him. Of course many of this is prompted by his own actions and Salisbury is an example"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Labour warns against Syria strikes - "'You would be sitting around a war cabinet table. You recommend that the UN should investigate and officials say to you: that's a very interesting idea, Minister, but Russia has vetoed the investigation 6 times and they will do it again. So what now?'...
'We would press on trying to bring people to the table. We believe that more bombing is not the answer to the crisis in Syria'
'But at the beginning you see you answered the question: should dictators pay a price for dropping chemical gas on children. Yes you said. But you would call for something that's never happened and you just admitted probably wouldn't happen now... what price would Assad pay for dropping gas on children?'
'There is a response which falls short of more bombing. We believe there needs to be coordinated international drive to achieve a ceasefire. And a negotiated political settlement. That's what has to happen'
'The leaders recognized by the United Nations... in all Western capitals. He said those doesn't work. Assad has ignored calls, the Russians have ignored calls for formal talks'...
'That is to give up all hope. We can't afford to give up on the people in Syria'"
Labour's fantasy foreign policy

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Syria: 'There's terror on both sides' - "'When you met the Grand Mufti, did you bring up with him Amnesty International's accusation - very firmly sourced accusation - that he signs the death warrants for people who are hanged in large numbers in prison in Damascus?'
'No we didn't... we had other things to discuss... the missile attack. That was in our view and particularly reinforced by being there. It was illegal, it was unethical and it was dangerous... there was no mandate'
'So for you the missile attack was more important than the mass murder of people in prisons, signed off by the Grand Mufti in Damascus'...
'We're there to listen to the people and the people's concerned at that time was the missile attack by US, UK and France'...
'What you have done by giving this propaganda coup to Assad and his people is ignore the terror on one side'"
Brown lives only matter when white people are killing them