Links - 8th July 2018

Public Order Act 1986 - "29B Use of words or behaviour or display of written material (1) A person who uses threatening words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, is guilty of an offence if he intends thereby to stir up religious hatred or hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation... 29J Protection of freedom of expression Nothing in this Part shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents, or of any other belief system or the beliefs or practices of its adherents, or proselytising or urging adherents of a different religion or belief system to cease practising their religion or belief system. 9JA Protection of freedom of expression (sexual orientation) (1) In this Part, for the avoidance of doubt, the discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices or the urging of persons to refrain from or modify such conduct or practices shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred. (2) In this Part, for the avoidance of doubt, any discussion or criticism of marriage which concerns the sex of the parties to marriage shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred."
Meanwhile in Singapore...

Libertarian Comedian Owen Benjamin Permanently Suspended from Twitter - "Last year, the University of Connecticut canceled an event featuring the comedian after he criticized giving hormone replacement treatment to children."

Norway Kills More Whales than Japan and Iceland: Report

IV 'Normal Saline': A Medical Habit - "ICU patients given chloride-rich fluids had nearly double the rate of kidney injury compared with those given balanced fluids. In 2013 a study showed increased mortality and longer hospital stays among surgical patients receiving normal saline. And the following year, researchers at Duke found that sepsis patients had a 3 percent increase in mortality when treated with saline rather than balanced fluids."

Boy, 11, stole Ofo bike in China & got killed by a bus, family suing Ofo for S$1.6mil

The Refrigerator Mother - "From the 1950s to about the 1980s, there was a widespread view that autism was a purely psychological condition"

Report: Stan Lee's Stolen Blood Was Used to Sign Marvel Comics Sold in Las Vegas

Google's flu fail shows the problem with big data - "Flu Trends could only measure what people search for; it didn’t analyse why they were searching for those words. By removing human input, and letting the raw data do the work, the model had to make its predictions using only search queries from the previous handful of years"

China’s Stability Myth Is Dead – Foreign Policy - "For all the erosion of norms under Trump, he seems unlikely, despite the fears of some, to fundamentally change the way the United States is governed. Xi, meanwhile, appears to have entirely transformed Chinese politics from collective autocracy to what’s looking increasingly like one-man rule... A country that once seemed to be clumsily lurching toward new freedoms has regressed sharply into full-blown dictatorship — of a kind that’s likely to lead to dangerous and unfixable mistakes... For the last two decades, defenders of China have pointed to collective leadership and the smooth succession from one leader to another as signs that the country had solved the problem that bedeviled other autocracies such as the Soviet Union... There will be a certain grim amusement in watching intellectual apparatchiks scuttle to explain how their previous arguments in favor of collective rule have been superseded by the needs of the times and that strongman rule is now the only answer... One of the surest signs of the change has been the intensity of propaganda in service of Xi in the last two years. This contrasts with the lackluster treatment of Hu, his predecessor, who was praised only pro forma... The end of collective leadership at the top, meanwhile, has been mirrored by the destruction of channels of dissent and disagreement throughout the country... the destruction of platforms for open discussion has been matched with an equal but much harder to discern crushing of channels for dissent inside the party and government"

China's Constitutional Crisis - "Renmin University law professor Yang Xiaoqing wrote in the Party journal Red Flag that constitutionalism is “not suitable for socialist countries” because the system “belongs to capitalism and bourgeois dictatorships.” A Global Times editorial went further to say that constitutionalism was “a new way to force China to adopt Western political systems.” Internet users responded en masse to the editorials, prompting Sino Weibo to delete three-quarters of the nearly six million posts"

A Rotherham abuse survivor speaks out - "On one occasion, her mother showed Sarah’s mobile phone to the police and pointed at the telephone numbers for 177 adult Asian men, but the police claimed that the Data Protection Act prevented them from investigating. The police told Maggie that Sarah’s behaviour was a “lifestyle choice” and, although they stopped the cars she was being trafficked in on several occasions, they would chat with Sarah’s attackers and showed no concern for a child travelling alone with several grown men. Sarah called the police herself only once - to report a particularly brutal rape - but the officer laughed and refused to investigate... She’s similarly disgusted by her two social workers, who used to moan about their caseload and treated both Sarah and her mother with disdain... When Sarah was briefly moved to a care home, the staff there were fully aware of the abuse but would ask, “Who are you sleeping with tonight, Sarah?,” as though paedophilic rape was an acceptable norm. When Sarah was driven home by her abusers, the staff would sometimes use care home funds to pay the taxi fare... her younger sister Laura [Wilson] was murdered, becoming Britain’s first white victim of an honour killing."

Niche Gamer - Posts - "Being this mad that the new hot, trending video game doesn't line up to your personal politics and go after the people that you wanted it to"
Gaming "journalists" being upset Far Cry 5 isn't progressive

Hijab ban attempt is 'racism dressed up as liberalism', teachers' conference told - "Efforts to bar girls from wearing the hijab at primary schools were “naked racism dressed up as liberalism”, a teachers’ union conference heard as it unanimously backed a motion attacking official support for the ban... Spielman said Ofsted school inspectors could ask young girls why they wore the hijab, when wearing it “could be interpreted as sexualisation” of girls as young as four or five. Most Islamic teaching requires headdress for girls only at the onset of puberty."

I agree the hijab should be banned for very young girls in primary schools – it's not Islamophobic to say that - "Anyone who has ever cared for a very young child knows they are faddy little things. One day they want to wear a hijab, the next they want to wear a Batman outfit. If they are wearing either of those things every single day from the age of four, we must consider that their families are putting pressure on them – which is wrong in either case. Of course a child might want to wear a hijab to “be like Mummy”. But if we are to allow little girls to copy their mothers’ “look” in school, then I imagine lots will turn up wearing contouring make-up, in heels and, in my daughter’s case, with bed-head and red lippy. We don’t allow it, because it would put a barrier around our child and it’s divisive."

Give Your Money To Women: The End Game of Capitalism by Lauren Chief Elk-Young Bear & Yeoshin Lourdes & Bardot Smith - "#GiveYourMoneyToWomen trended on Twitter, the brainchild of analyst and dominatrix Bardot Smith; private consultant and dominatrix Yeoshin Lourdes; and domestic violence educator and prison abolitionist Lauren Chief Elk-Young Bear. A convergence of women of color feminists, sex workers, internet entrepreneurs, financial analysts and anti-violence advocates, #GiveYourMoneyToWomen is more than a hashtag: it’s a theory and practical framework of gender justice"
At first I thought this was a parody of feminism

Museum slammed after hiring white curator for African art exhibit - "The Brooklyn Museum has sparked outrage in the black community after tapping a white woman to curate its vast African art collection. On Monday the museum appointed Kristen Windmuller-Luna, 31, who has a Ph.D. in African art history from Princeton University, lectures in Columbia University’s department of art history and archaeology, and once worked as an educator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was “responsible for adult and college gallery tours in the African galleries.”"
Maybe being black gives you knowledge about African art

Museum Appoints White Woman As African Art Curator, Sparks Outrage - "A 2015 report on the demographic makeup of art museum staff by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation found that just four percent of art curators, conservators, educators and senior museum staff are African-American... "The outrage around Brooklyn revolves around public misconceptions—[...] that African art scholars and curators are largely people of color," Steven Nelson, an African and African American art history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Newsweek. "Yet the field of African art history in the U.S. is largely white and female. I am one of a small handful of African Americans who specialize in African art history.""
Maybe non-black people should exit the field, then it can collapse
Comments: "I'd be willing to bet that those who are outraged at this would consider a black Jesus or Santa Claus as great progressive step forward...hypocrites."
"Same difference, just as in the Black panther film. The problem is that she was the only qualified candidate in the entire field, really! Moreover, a black Jesus or a black Santa Klaus don't count . . . because fictional." "Black Panther is fictional too unless you really believe their is some place called Wakanda somewhere in Africa."
"Turn this question into should a black woman be curator or a museum for European history?"
"Ok, let's try to get it right. Perhaps the curator should be a person of color from Africa itself."
There is this interesting mentality that you don't need to get the best person for the job - only someone good enough

I Don’t Care if Asians in Asia Aren’t Offended by Offensive Asian Portrayals in Hollywood Movies [Ed: This is now down, but is mirrored by Project Am I Right and Balderdash: Asian Americans Asiansplaining to Asians] - "I don’t give a fuck if Asians in Asia aren’t offended by offensive Asian portrayals in Hollywood movies. I support my brothers and sisters back in the motherland as much as anyone, but when it comes to this issue, their opinions don’t matter."
Apparently only (certain) Americans get to have opinions on Hollywood movies - even though they are screened all over the world
Comments: "You claim it is important for you to see yourselves in media, but your parents could not even be bothered to teach you the language of the media that would show you just that, and you do not care to learn it either. You are like white americans who think they are german or irish, but know nothing of such countries. Like are just like those white americans. Rootless, desperately seeking a connection to the land beneath your feet even as you sit on a continent to which you are an alien."
"Like always it comes down to Americans thinking that the planet revolves around them."
"All of this is pretty much you being butthurt and triggered because you haven’t been noticed by Hollywood senpai, boo…fucking…hoo."

Latest Matter - "Mtchew.........I don't know what to say"

Police Scotland mocked over Twitter advice - "some questioned whether monitoring social media was the best use of police resources"

There’s been a Tweet but, worry not, DCI Taggart is on the case | Coffee House - "Whatever next? The monitoring of conversations in public houses? Why not? Twitter and Facebook, after all, are merely digital, virtual, gathering places."

Rabbi: Genetically cloned pig meat is kosher, even with milk - OMG - "In the interview ahead of a Bar Ilan University symposium titled “Science and Halacha” featuring a talk by Cherlow, he advocated rabbinic approval of cloned meat “so that people would not starve, to prevent pollution, and to avoid the suffering of animals.” When the “cell of a pig is used and its genetic material is utilized in the production of food, the cell in fact loses its original identity and therefore cannot be defined as forbidden for consumption,” Cherlow said. “It wouldn’t even be meat, so you can consume it with dairy.”"

What's in your chicken sandwich? DNA test shows Subway sandwiches could contain just 50% chicken - "Restructured products are essentially smaller pieces of meat or ground meat, bound together with other ingredients to make them last longer, taste better and, as Bohrer puts it, "add value" — restaurant speak for cheaper."

Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace: The Saudi businessman who recruited mujahedin now uses them for large-scale building projects in Sudan. Robert Fisk met him in Almatig - "Outside Sudan, Mr Bin Laden is not regarded with quite such high esteem. The Egyptian press claims he brought hundreds of former Arab fighters back to Sudan from Afghanistan, while the Western embassy circuit in Khartoum has suggested that some of the 'Afghans' whom this Saudi entrepreneur flew to Sudan are now busy training for further jihad wars in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. Mr Bin Laden is well aware of this. 'The rubbish of the media and the embassies,' he calls it. 'I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist. If I had training camps here in Sudan, I couldn't possibly do this job.'"
From 1993

UK Labour Party plunged into crisis over anti-Semitism - "Scores of party members have been suspended, expelled or forced to resign for making anti-Semitic statements since Corbyn became party leader in 2015, but he and his far-left supporters have been accused of a "complacent" approach to the problem."

Commentary: Is free parking really the answer to teachers’ woes? - "Many of us acknowledge that teaching is a noble profession, but is free parking really the way to recognise this? It seems like nothing but a “consolation prize”, and perhaps the wrong battle to be fighting as it hardly addresses the numerous issues that teachers face on a daily basis. Aside from addressing the day-to-day rigours of the job, we should also have an honest conversation about what would be a fitting manner of rewarding our teachers in terms of privileges."