Links - 2nd September 2018 (1)

Boys wear skirts to school - in protest at ban on shorts - "TEENAGE boys marched into school wearing skirts after their request to wear shorts during the hot weather was refused... one of the boys was told off because his skirt was too short"

Protesters Assault Trump Supporters With Eggs, Bottles, Punches After Rally - "Lan Hoang said anti-Trump protesters stole his "Make America Great Again" hat off of his head and set it on fire as he was leaving the rally. The 24-year-old said he saw "a lot" of Trump supporters get attacked on the walk back to his car after the rally."
Maybe this is what people mean when they say Trump incites violence

Anti-child abuse advocate arrested for trying to have sex with kids - "The head of a charity that campaigns against sexual violence has been arrested in New York for child pornography and allegedly trying to meet with children as young as two for sex. Joel Davis, 22, is accused of trying to set up sexual encounters between himself and young children, as well as soliciting an undercover FBI agent to send sexually explicit videos of minors... Davis is the chairman of the International Campaign to Stop Rape and Gender Violence in Conflict - an organization devoted to ending sexual violence"

Ocean's 8 stars blame dominance of male critics for film's mixed reviews - "a number of journalists have taken issue with the sentiment that someone’s gender and ethnic background dictates your response to art. Variety’s Guy Lodge, who also writes for the Guardian and Observer, pointed out that a number of female critics – including Time’s Stephanie Zacharek and Vulture’s Emily Yoshida and – have concurred with the general lukewarm response to Ocean’s 8."
Or maybe it just sucks

The Trouble With Hollywood’s Gender Flips - The New York Times - "as Debbie mounts her own fantastical heist — lifting $150 million worth of Cartier diamonds off a celebrity neck at the Met Gala — she keeps one eye on her brother’s tomb, half-expecting him to crawl out. We spend the film anticipating his appearance, too. Even when Debbie is on screen, Danny is in the back of our minds. And even when a Hollywood franchise is retooled around women, it still revolves around men — the story lines they wrote, the characters they created, the worlds they built... The gender-swapped comedy satisfies a couple of-the-moment entertainment industry imperatives: It allows Hollywood to reanimate lucrative old properties (“Ocean’s Eleven” was, of course, itself a remake), while recasting them with diverse casts and woke politics. That’s resulted in a boom in comedic parts for women, but they come with baggage. These reboots require women to relive men’s stories instead of fashioning their own. And they’re subtly expected to fix these old films, to neutralize their sexism and infuse them with feminism, to rebuild them into good movies with good politics, too. They have to do everything the men did, except backwards and with ideals... when the women of “Ghostbusters” gently sexually harass their ditsy hunk of a receptionist (Chris Hemsworth in glasses), it lacks the malicious edge of Bill Murray effectively stalking Sigourney Weaver under the guise of busting her ghost. Because real women are physically and socially vulnerable to men, granting sexual power to them on film feels harmless and a little cute... Though these remakes are often referred to as “all female,” they typically retain men in a key role: that of the antagonist. (Well, two: For some reason, men get to direct all of these movies, too.)... Though these remakes are often referred to as “all female,” they typically retain men in a key role: that of the antagonist. (Well, two: For some reason, men get to direct all of these movies, too.)... There is a slight moral miscalculation here: that in order for a film to be considered feminist, it has to show women fighting men, and not each other. But life pits women against one another, and eliding that is just as ridiculous as staging all intra-female conflicts in kiddie pools full of Jell-O — it ignores what women are actually like... So far, many of these female reboots have drummed up female support that matches or exceeds the passion of their male detractors. It can feel as if it’s a kind of feminist imperative to buy a ticket. But as the novelty fades, these movies will begin to be assessed not on their politics, but on their merits. The men of “Oceans Eleven” got to do one thing the women of “Ocean’s 8” do not: star in a good movie"
A (female) feminist criticism of a fashionable feminist practice, at the same time making apparent feminist double standards. She also thinks Ocean's Eight sucked

Opinion | Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web - The New York Times - "Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.” I was meeting with Sam Harris, a neuroscientist; Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and managing director of Thiel Capital; the commentator and comedian Dave Rubin; and their spouses in a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about how they were turned into heretics. A decade ago, they argued, when Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” none of these observations would have been considered taboo... they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere... After his talk, in which he disparaged the Taliban, a biologist who would go on to serve on President Barack Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues approached him. “I remember she said: ‘That’s just your opinion. How can you say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong?’ But to me it’s just obvious that forcing women to live their lives inside bags is wrong. I gave her another example: What if we found a culture that was ritually blinding every third child? And she actually said, ‘It would depend on why they were doing it.’” His jaw, he said, “actually fell open.”... Other figures in the I.D.W., like Claire Lehmann, the founder and editor of the online magazine Quillette, and Debra Soh, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, self-deported from the academic track, sensing that the spectrum of acceptable perspectives and even areas of research was narrowing. Dr. Soh said that she started “waking up” in the last two years of her doctorate program. “It was clear that the environment was inhospitable to conducting research,” she said. “If you produce findings that the public doesn’t like, you can lose your job.” When she wrote an op-ed in 2015 titled “Why Transgender Kids Should Wait to Transition,” citing research that found that a majority of gender dysphoric children outgrow their dysphoria, she said her colleagues warned her, “Even if you stay in academia and express this view, tenure won’t protect you.”... Mr. Peterson has endured no small amount of online hatred and some real-life physical threats: In March, during a lecture at Queen’s University in Ontario, a woman showed up with a garrote... “Some say the I.D.W. is dangerous,” Ms. Heying said. “But the only way you can construe a group of intellectuals talking to each other as dangerous is if you are scared of what they might discover.”"
The moral arc of the universe has gone into overdrive in a decade
More examples of relativists, who supposedly don't exist

REPORT: Disney Considers Firing Kathleen Kennedy For Ruining 'Star Wars' - "Bob Iger recently held a secret meeting with Disney top brass, including the head of Pixar and Marvel, on ways to fix the broken franchise, which began its death spiral with "The Last Jedi" and then was pronounced mostly dead with the box-office failure that is this summer's "Solo: A Star Wars Story." It's an open and shut case: "Star Wars" fans reject the direction that Kathleen Kennedy has taken the franchise, and they should, considering that the veteran producer once infamously said she felt no responsibility to "cater" to the predominantly male fanbase that has carried the space opera through both light and darkness throughout the decades. Not that "Star Wars" should not evolve with the times and avoid refreshing creative choices. The problem is that Kennedy destroyed the "Star Wars" legacy and put a half-baked, heartless carbon-copy in its wake. The whole franchise feels less like a creative labor of love and more like a cheap cash grab that cons the public into buying tickets based on brand recognition alone, all the while pushing messages about feminism and capitalist greed. Nobody likes it and feminists are too few and far between. So now Disney has a dead horse on its hands and has no idea what to do with it. The simple solution — cleaning house by firing Kennedy — will not be easy. According to Grace Randolph, insiders say that if Iger just up and fires her, nobody in Hollywood has the cajones to take the reins as she would leave behind a house of loyalists who will have the daggers out for whoever fills her shoes"

France: Butchers demand protection from vegans - "French butchers have written to the government asking for protection against militant vegans, accusing them of trying to shut down the country's traditional meat-eating culture. Shops have been stoned or defaced with anti-meat graffiti and stickers, the French Federation of Butchers says. Over the last few months, 15 shops were splashed with fake blood."

Woman arrested for deadly shooting in Hong Kong was ‘weird’, neighbours in her Tseung Kwan O estate say - "Tsim is known to have worked as a bodyguard in mainland China. The demand for female bodyguards north of the border has grown in the past decade as wealthy businesspeople prefer hiring women to protect their families, according to Chen Tong, the founder and manager of Zhongzhou Tewei, a Shenzhen-based private security firm, who talked to the Post early last year. Chen said female bodyguards could earn, on average, 40 per cent more than their male colleagues"
Gender pay gap!

200 migrants in south German town prevent deportation of man - "A police operation took place in Baden-Württemberg after about 200 migrants used force to prevent the deportation of a *Togolese man on Monday. The 23-year-old man was to be deported from where he was staying, a refugee accommodation in the small town of Ellwangen. But the police decided to withdraw after some 200 migrants attempted to prevent the detention, with some of them threatening violence. The three patrols cars saw themselves as outnumbered."

German Schools with high migrant populations face surge in violence - "An increasing number of violent attacks, lack of integration and cultural differences are leading to a chronic breakdown of discipline in some German schools, a leading teachers' representative has said. Heinz-Peter Meidinger, President of the German Teachers' Association, said that there was now an urgent need for security guards at schools with migrant populations of 70 per cent and more... More than a million people from across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East entered Germany three years ago after Mrs Merkel opened her country's doors to refugees... He said that many of the attacks were carried put by teenagers from Arab and north African countries whose view of women is 'incompatible with ours' and that knives and CS gas were increasingly being found on school premises."

A Christian Girl Beaten Up By Muslim Classmates Should Wear a Hijab to Defend Herself, German Headmaster Says - "the mother a student from Frankfurt am Main in central Germany told a harrowing story. After her daughter struggled with bullying in school from Muslim girls, the headmaster suggested a simple change — just adopt the Muslim practice of wearing a face-veil or "hijab.""

Israeli says he was assaulted in Berlin for listening to Hebrew song - "A Israeli teen and two of his friends were attacked at a Berlin railway station by a group of Arab men who became enraged when they heard a Hebrew song playing on the Israeli’s cellphone"

Mum’s men used us for under-age sex, say Dorothy Hewett’s daughters - "When Dorothy Hewett died in 2002, glowing obituaries ­described the playwright, poet and mother of six as a “warm and ­formidable” friend and an ­“untamed earth mother’’. Hewett’s adult daughters, ­Rozanna Lilley and Kate Lilley, have some jarringly different memories — especially when it comes to the radical sexual mores of the 1970s bohemian arts scene in which their mother was ­immersed... The younger Lilley daughter had previously appeared naked in a feature film. At 13, she performed nude and in a sex scene in the “schlock’’, pseudo-feminist movie, Journey Among Women, which her mother co-wrote... Photographer Juno Gemes, who was a friend of Hewett, insisted that she was “a glorious feminist’’. She wanted her daughters to have access to the highest echelons of the literary world. “I am really shocked that they’re casting their mother like this … I think she would be devastated by these allegations,” Gemes said."
Listen and believe - unless the accused is a feminist

Asian Women Need To Stop Dating White Men | Thought Catalog
Previously published