Links - 20th August 2018 (1)

Singapore may have gained over $700m in exposure as host of Trump-Kim summit: Analyst Meltwater

Opinion | How to Lose the Midterms and Re-elect Trump - The New York Times - "“When they go low, we go high,” said another first lady, Michelle Obama, at the Democratic National Convention in 2016. It’s a fine set of marching orders, disobeyed ever since. It was definitely ignored by those of you in the Manhattan theater where the Tony Awards were held on Sunday. You answered De Niro’s expletives with a standing ovation."

EU: Erasmus gives Europe opportunity, love and babies - "One in three Erasmus students hooked up with people from other countries - three times the rate of those who stayed in their native lands for university

EU's Erasmus study abroad programme is 'responsible for 1m babies' - "A study published by the European Commission this week suggests that more than a quarter of those who take part in its long-running Erasmus scheme meet their long-term partner while studying abroad – and that more than one million babies may have been produced as a result... A third of ex-Erasmus students had a partner of a different nationality, compared with 13 per cent of those who stayed at home during their studies... “I call it a sexual revolution: a young Catalan man meets a Flemish girl – they fall in love, they get married and they become European, as do their children. The Erasmus idea should be compulsory – not just for students, but also for taxi drivers, plumbers and other workers. By this, I mean they need to spend time in other countries within the European Union; they should integrate.”... Around 40 per cent of students went on to live and work abroad. Studying abroad also improved the job prospects of young people, it found. Researchers said that while one in five young people in Europe are currently jobless, 64 per cent of the businesses questioned said international experience would make a candidate more employable."

European Commission - PRESS RELEASES - Press release - Erasmus Impact Study confirms EU student exchange scheme boosts employability and job mobility - "92% of employers are looking for personality traits boosted by the programme such as tolerance, confidence, problem-solving skills, curiosity, knowing one's strengths/weaknesses, and decisiveness when making a recruitment decision. Tests before and after exchange periods abroad reveal that Erasmus students show higher values for these personality traits, even before their exchange starts; by the time they come back, the difference in these values increases by 42% on average, compared with other students."

After about a month of complaining to HR with other female coworkers, we finally got this creepy coworker of ours unceremoniously fired! I feel like we scored one for all STEM girls in the house! : TrollXChromosomes - "dude is totally socially-awkward, never talks to anyone, never smiles, when you tell him to cheer up he gets angry and gives you these silly "death stares"... This is more job-related, but he seems to be extra mean in code reviews (for those who don't know about programming, it's when a programmer "reviews" the code another programmer wrote) when the reviewee is a woman. He only talks to male coworkers, although not much, but female coworkers, he shuns. Answers in monosylabes, cuts the conversation short and in a couple of times he's been very rude when doing that."
Man telling woman to smile = misogynist
Woman telling man to smile = he is a misogynist

Social Justice is Popular. But the Rule of Law is Sacrosanct - "I tried to remind people why due-process safeguards exist within our system. The presumption of innocence and the requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal cases—these safeguards are there to protect all of us from the mob and from the state. And on most days, those safeguards don’t protect men such as Gerald Stanley. On most days, they protect disadvantaged black or indigenous men such as Raymond Crump Jr.—because those are the people who are most likely to end up on the wrong side of a prosecution... In life, you have to be careful what you wish for. If you decide that social justice trumps the rule of law, you may be horrified to see how that principle is applied by those whose views you find to be regressive. Due process knows no colour. It knows no gender. It knows no hash tags. That is what makes due process, and the rule of law more generally, so essential to a free society... the impetus toward social justice can damage the rule of law by inciting an attitude of tribalism. If society is depicted as a pastiche of warring groups, in which powerful groups systematically exploit the disadvantaged, then this will encourage everyone to circle the wagons around their own tribe—and even to circumvent the rule of law on behalf of their own tribe if they can get away with it... During my careers as a scientist, a lawyer and a journalist, I have learned to never “just believe” anyone. I have seen great people lie, and bad people tell hard truths. What I believe in is process. As a scientist, I relied on the scientific method and peer review. As a lawyer, I relied on such tools as discovery and cross-examination. As a journalist, I try to interview both sides and let them challenge each other. That is how truth emerges: By clear-eyed scrutiny and by open debate, not blinkered loyalty to one narrative, even if that narrative is coded in the appealing language of social justice"

The Democratic Party’s 2018 View of Identity Politics Is Confusing, and Thus Appears Cynical and Opportunistic - "Clinton supporters constantly accused Obama supporters of being driven by misogyny for opposing the first female president (a charge voiced by Clinton herself), while Obama supporters routinely depicted the Clintons and their supporters as racist due to the nature of their opposition to the first African-American president. The term “Bernie bros,” which became so widespread as a term of recrimination against Sanders supporters in 2016, was actually conceptually invented in 2008 to malign Obama supporters... all of these stalwart, bedrock imperatives of identity politics seem strangely absent from the 2018 election cycle. These professed beliefs, in fact, seem to have vanished from Democratic Party politics almost entirely."

What Really Drives Populism? A Conversation with Dr. Frank Mols - "wealth and affluence are typically associated with heightened anxiety, sense of entitlement, fear of falling, and a host of other pernicious effects of being more affluence... in a meritocracy, poverty is equated with ‘personal failure’, and this explains that people in meritocracy are more prone to become anxious and stressed (fear of falling). In a society where social class is fixed (e.g. India, or Victorian England) this stress is absent because a person’s fortunes are predetermined by birth, and hence ultimately not their responsibility or failure."

Dank Learning: Generating Memes Using Deep Neural Networks

Justin Trudeau Is Running a Milk Racket – Foreign Policy - "You may be tempted to raise an eyebrow when I tell you that the protectionist racket in milk, cheese, eggs, and poultry has become the third rail of Canadian politics. But it should be noted that many otherwise free-trading nations go weird when it comes to food. Japanese rice tariffs have been as high as 1,000 percent. To protect its meat industry, France has passed a law banning the use of labels such as “soy sausage” or “mushroom burger” on vegetarian products. And in the United States, Big Sugar cynically props up a nakedly protectionist law that guarantees a minimum price that’s a quantum leap beyond the amount customers would pay on the global market... “There is an entire country full of consumers — taxpayers and voters — who are paying one and a half to three times more for their milk, other dairy products, chicken and eggs than they should be — amounting to more than $200 more a year per average family"... It isn’t the usual fake news from Trump when he tweets that “Canada charges the U.S. a 270% tariff on Dairy Products!” He’s being only slightly imprecise here: The actual breakdown is 270 percent on milk, 245 percent on cheese, and 298 percent on butter. And, as Hall Findlay has argued, the losers aren’t just foreign exporters but also Canadian consumers."

The World Wants You to Think Like a Realist – Foreign Policy - "Thinking like a realist also helps you understand why states with radically different political systems often act in surprisingly similar ways. To take an obvious example, the United States and Soviet Union could not have been more different in terms of their domestic orders, but their international behavior was much the same... if you think like a realist, you’re likely to be skeptical about the ambitious schemes that idealists keep dreaming up to bring an end to conflict, injustice, inequality, and other bad things. Striving to build a safer and more peaceful world is admirable, but realism reminds us that the ambitious efforts to remake world politics always create unintended consequences and rarely deliver the promised results... you are more likely to act with a degree of prudence, and you’ll be less likely to see opponents as purely evil (or see one’s own country as wholly virtuous) and less likely to embark on open-ended moral crusades. Ironically, if more people thought like realists, the prospects for peace would go up."

【徳島製粉】 金ちゃん ぶっかけうどんCM全集 【全5種】 - YouTube
Bukkake Udon

Mini Power Pork Patty With Epic Meal Time - YouTube

How To Cook Perfect Eggs Every Time - YouTube

Ad of the Day: This Remarkable Makeup Ad With High School Girls Has One Hell of a Twist - "The spot, titled "High School Girl?" and created by Watts of Tokyo, opens with a professor opening the door to her classroom. As a soft female vocalist begins to sing over a loungy beat, we pan slowly across the faces of the girls in the room, who seem ordinary enough: One holds a guitar, another drinks from a bottle of water. At the end of the room, a last girl gives us a knowing look and gazes back down at her book."

The Emerging Fetish of Laying Alien Eggs Inside Yourself - "Recently, while on the internet looking at weird sex things, I came upon the gushing testimony of a young woman who had just discovered Primal Hardwere's patented Ovipositor; one of the most unusual and confronting sex toys I've ever heard of. The Ovipositor is basically a big dildo that lays goopy eggs molded from gelatin in the body cavity of your choice. Fans of the Ovipositor say that the sensation of mushy extraterrestrial ovum slopping back out of them is a real treat."

This Group of Straight Men Is Swearing Off Women - "it's hard to listen to any concerns—valid or otherwise—coming from the "manosphere" when these groups employ such disrespectful and, at times, hateful rhetoric."
If MGTOW can be ignored because of disrespectful and hateful rhetoric, feminists can too

Why Are So Many Women Searching for Ultra-Violent Porn? - "A quarter of straight porn searches by women are for videos featuring violence against their own sex. Five percent of searches by women are for content portraying nonconsensual sex. While men still search for significantly more porn than women, search rates for these more extreme types of sexual content are at least twice as common among women than men... "If there is a genre of porn in which violence is perpetrated against a woman, my analysis of the data shows that it almost always appeals disproportionately to women," he writes... It isn't uncommon for women to have fantasies about coercive sex, as the findings of a study into women's rape fantasies from 2012 indicate. The team of researchers from the University of North Texas and University of Notre Dame played 355 young women an erotic rape fantasy – as opposed to a literal portrayal of sexual assault – over headphones to investigate how aroused they became... The researchers then investigated if the women's fantasies were indicative of "sexual blame avoidance", a hypothesis that women socialised by our slut-shaming culture chose forced sex themes to negate feelings of shame and guilt. The opposite was found to be true. Women who reported being less repressed about sex were more likely to have rape fantasies, more open to fantasy in general, more likely to have consensual fantasies and finally, they were found more likely to have high self-esteem... a study from 2011 found the women most likely to watch porn – especially the most extreme kinds – were those who had suffered sexual assaults and psychological violence at the hands of their families"

Sex, Stonings, and Back Street Abortions: The Truth Behind the Maldives 'Tropical Paradise' Image - "While a man gets a three month "probationary period" on marriage and can always divorce his wife simply by saying "I divorce you" three times, a woman has to go through the court system. All the same, there is no social stigma around divorce for women. I recall one recently married fisherman boasting that his new wife had been married six times; this, he explained with a sly wink, meant she was experienced. The figure was about average for a woman in her forties. Despite the emphasis on conservative appearance and the vicious social ostracism of anyone caught with their pants down, many Maldivians were surprisingly liberal in their views towards sex. Extramarital sex might have been a crime, but other people's wives and husbands were fair game... High promiscuity and high rates of unprotected sex (90 percent, according to one study), coupled with the threat of Sharia punishments and social ostracism, meant a culture of horrific covert abortions"

Number One In Poverty, California Isn't Our Most Progressive State -- It's Our Most Racist One - "If racism is more than just saying nasty things — if it is, as scholars like James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander and countless others have described, embedded into socioeconomic structures — then California isn’t just the least progressive state. It’s also the most racist... Environmentalism is used to justify de facto racial segregation in California’s housing. Environmental lawsuits are a major reason for longer delays and higher costs of new housing. “The core legal structure of CEQA,” notes housing attorney Jennifer Hernandez, “protects the existing characteristics of those neighborhoods and thus perpetuates land use practices founded in race and class discrimination.”"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Oxford University's diversity problem - "'Look, not at the number of black people in the community, but the number of black kids getting As, and the proportion Oxford takes is roughly the same as the proportion in our society of young people getting three As who are black.'
'That's not the comparator, Nick. Surely the comparator is why as a proportion, you have double the chance when you're white then when you apply, than when you're black then when you apply'...
'Often they do make offers to black students who proportionally are less likely to make the grade'"
Maybe A levels should be abolished and students should be funneled to each university to perfectly match population statistics

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Wedding fever? 'I'll be in bed!' - "Amongst women in general there is much more interest in the Royal story and in the wedding"
Stereotypes!

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Jilly Cooper's marriage tips - "To love and to cherish, really. Be kind to each other and sort of enjoy each other... sadness the other day. Little girl at school was asked her idea of romance and happiness and she said: daddy marrying mommy."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'Peace is like tango... it takes two' - "We left Gaza to the last soldier, the last settler. We evacuated synagogues, we evacuated graves of Israelis who died there... we expected it to turn into a Singapore or Hong Kong, of the Mediterranean and it didn't, because Hamas took over and manipulate"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Martha Kearney reports from Israel, Gaza and the West Bank - "'Is it fair to put all the blame of the international community? Don't the Palestinian people themselves need to accept some responsibility? I'm thinking in particular of the fact the political leadership is divided. It's divided between Fatah here in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza'
'I am sorry to say it's not the problem. Who's trying to market these thoughts or these ideas is not fair enough with the Palestinian people because in 1948 there was no Hamas and there was no Fatah'...
'You're pointing towards the fence which divides Gaza from Israel'...
'I wanted to go with them, my children'
'You're going to take children up there? But they could be facing live fire'
'The land wants blood'
'You need to spill blood to get your land back'
'Yes, our country needs blood'
External locus of control
"We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Trump: Korea talks in the balance - "'We had that extraordinary letter from President Trump, that three paragraphs explaining why this summit was cancelled. And then within 24 hours, suggestions that it could be back on. What has changed?'
'well, what's changed is one simple thing, which is an out of character, conciliatory statement from Pyongyang itself, where it talks about being willing to meet the US at any time in any format. It praises the President for his efforts to try to get this summit together. It's really something that you never really see from North Korea in that sense'
'Yeah, which suggests that President Trump's approach might have worked.'...
'Both sides benefit from a bit of an on off, quite frankly. It allows them to look like they are driving a hard bargain if you like.'"