Links - 12th November 2018

Police force unveils a new less revealing uniform for female Muslim officers - "West Yorkshire Police hopes that the looser fit will result in more ethnic minority recruits. Many forces already allow female officers to wear the hijab, or headscarf, but the new uniform is believed to be a UK first."
I thought the point of a uniform was for everyone to wear the same thing

Extremism Advances in the Largest Muslim Country - WSJ - "Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, has long stood as a role model for religious pluralism. That’s changing. Political Islam and violent extremism have been taking root in society and may soon do so in the government. President Joko Widodo’s choice of Ma’ruf Amin, a 75-year-old cleric, as his running mate in next year’s election marks an ugly turn for Indonesian politics... a foreign scholar who has lived in Indonesia for more than half a century told me of a Muslim man who asked his 12-year-old son what he had learned at school one day. “We learned about kafir”—infidels—his son replied. When the father asked what they had learned, the boy replied: “We learned that they must be killed.”"
It is interesting how in Turkey and Indonesia, countries championed as examples of moderate Islam supporting democracy, democracy was only ensured by the army and/or a dictator

Wearable Health Monitors: Do They Work? - WSJ

When wives beat their husbands, no one wants to believe it - "Partner violence by women is one of the most contentious subjects in social science. The first large-scale study of domestic abuse, the 1975 National Family Violence Survey conducted by the late University of New Hampshire sociologist Murray Straus and his colleague Richard Gelles (now at the University of Pennsylvania), found that similar numbers of women and men admitted to assaulting a spouse or partner in the previous 12 months. The researchers were skeptical initially, assuming most female violence had to be in self-defense, though in many cases the wife was the self-reported sole perpetrator. Later surveys showed that in mutually violent relationships, women were as likely as men to be the aggressors. These findings have been confirmed in more than 200 studies... two major federally backed surveys using different methods — the 2000 National Violence Against Women Survey by the National Institute of Justice and the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey by the Centers for Disease Control — found that about 40% of those reporting serious assaults by current or former partners in the past year were men, and most of their attackers were women. Female-on-male violence is often assumed to be harmless, given sex differences in size and strength. Yet women may use weapons — including knives, glass, boiling water and various household objects — while men may be held back from defending themselves by cultural taboos against harming woman... Discussions of female-on-male abuse have been met with extreme hostility from feminist academics, activists and commentators. Scholars studying the subject have been attacked as apologists for misogyny. Battered women's advocates tend to explain away female violence as almost entirely defensive, despite evidence to the contrary. One reason for this attitude is solidarity with women as victims; another is the dogmatic view that battering is an expression of patriarchal power."
Of course, we are still told that feminism is pro-men

Hawkers at new Pasir Ris centre upset over cashless payment system - "Some stallholders told The New Paper, on condition of anonymity, that NTUC Foodfare disbursed takings from cashless transactions to them only after five months. They also complained of tables not being cleared by the cleaning contractors, and of crockery being damaged by the dishwashers... A stallholder said that about five stalls had closed since its opening in January because of poor business."

When Censorship Is Crowdsourced - "the gravest threats to free speech in democratic countries now have little or nothing to do with government action (which is what Constitutions serve to restrain). And with few exceptions, public officials now sit as bystanders to the fight over who can say what... Taken together, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian and Google’s founding duo of Larry Page and Sergey Brin have far more impact on what we see and hear than any government. If you are, like me, a middle-aged person who has been concerned about protecting free speech since your college days, these developments will have a profoundly disorienting effect. When I was a university student in the early 1990s, it always was assumed that the primary threat to free speech was government — especially government in the Big Brother form that George Orwell had taught us to expect and fear... The very writers, publishers, poets, musicians, comedians, media producers and artists who once worried about being muzzled by the government are now self-organizing on social media (Twitter, especially) to censor each other... I described the bizarre saga of novelist Angie Abdou, who was repeatedly forced to submit her novel to various indigenous authorities before publication (and even then was hounded and attacked because she had dared to voice a young First Nations character)... In what world do poets have to ask permission to create verse about others?... One thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four that does still ring true about the current age of crowdsourced censorship is the reverse classism at work. In Orwell’s Oceania, the intellectual class is scrutinized relentlessly for the slightest deviation in thought or speech, while “proles” are free to wallow in astrology, smut and sentimental storytelling... the fact that government has no direct role in this new kind of censorship does not mean that public policy can’t be part of the solution. For while it’s true that government isn’t directly engineering these newly emergent forms of crowdsourced speech suppression, the current public funding model can indirectly encourage them... In another age, these people might have blamed the government for this. In 2018, on the other hand, they can only blame themselves."

Most beautiful universities

European Union Is Reconsidering Daylight Savings Time - "Daylight savings time could soon be a thing of the past in the European Union (EU). An international survey found a large majority of EU citizens are in favor of nixing the bi-annual ritual meant to take advantage of daylight as the seasons change... Studies on the health implications of changing the time each year are mainly inconclusive and have found both positive and negative effects. Further, technological advances such as artificial lighting and automated systems have made the agricultural benefits of daylight savings time obsolete."

Brit 'prostitute' Sarah McGill deported from US for hotel room sex with virgin 14-year-old boy who paid her £340 - "A BRITISH woman has been ordered to leave the US immediately after sleeping with a 14-year-old virgin boy in a Florida hotel room. Sarah McGill, 28, is to be deported after being found guilty of lewd or lascivious battery - known as statutory rape in the UK."
If the genders were reversed...

Kopitiam requests KFC customers to stop taking its straws from Bukit Panjang outlet
It is easy to "save the earth" when others pay the cost

Joseph Wright: And then there was light - " Wright infuses subject pictures such as The Blacksmith's Shop with a sense of the miraculous that we usually associate with traditional representations of the Supper at Emmaus or the Nativity, treating the light from the forge as a manifestation of the unfathomable in just the way that Bellini or Caravaggio used miraculous light in their sacred paintings. But, in doing so, Wright implies that these are miracles not of faith but of beauty or technology. The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone Discovers Phosphorus perfectly illustrates the way Wright subtly replaced a Christian vocabulary for expressing wonder with a new reverence for reason and scientific inquiry. For he shows the alchemist kneeling in virtual adoration before the glowing vial of phosphorus in a pose that is traditionally used to depict St Andrew adoring his own cross. This is a miracle that science, not God, has effected."

Tucker Carlson Channels Bernie Sanders to Blast Jeff Bezos and Amazon - "“A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid, they qualify for federal welfare benefits,” said the Fox News titan. “Jeff Bezos isn’t paying his workers enough to eat, so you made up the difference in your tax dollars.”"
If it's on Fox News, it's wrong. Therefore Amazon workers are overpaid

DW Stories - "Roma girls in Bulgaria don't go on dates to find a husband, they are sold to the highest bidder at a controversial 'bride market'."

Black Feminist Vegan Is In Hot Water For Her Recent Comments - "Author Aph Ko is in hot water for some of the statements she’s made in regards to race and oppression. She’s basically come out and called blacks that fight against oppression, and ignore the rights of animals by choosing to still consume meat, are hypocrites and are siding with the ideology of White Supremacy... 'If black people don’t take animal oppression seriously, we’re siding with white supremacy'"
30 years ago, your feminism didn't need to be intersectional or trans-inclusive. But the moral arc of the universe has moved on
If one understands modern liberalism as a game of one-uping where one has to continually find new oppressions as old ones are resolved (a variant of the slippery slope), this is no longer confusing

Black vegans rock! - "I was bothered by the fact that social justice activists who were so committed to overturning oppression, couldn’t even factor in animal oppression, or even consider not eating meat. It was scary to realise people were so brainwashed that they couldn’t stop. As activists, we should be on a constant quest to learn about oppression."

Commentary: A nightmare scenario, Ang Mo Kio emptying out in 20 years - "The large-scale planned redevelopment of older HDB estates, whether through the Voluntary Early Redevelopment Scheme (VERS) or otherwise, is important to prevent a sudden shock to public housing prices, when the removal of a large number of old housing flats from the public housing market creates a huge supply shortage."

Jeremy Corbyn would be a problem for security, says historian to MI5 - "One question is how far Corbyn would wish to be informed. It doesn’t seem a subject that engages his attention. There are some people in the shadow cabinet who have called for the closing-down of MI5"

Southeast Asia's Vengeful Man-Eating Spirit Is a Feminist Icon
Does this mean we can say feminism is about hating men?

How WhatsApp Destroyed A Village - "Five days after the event, the police had rounded up most of the suspects. Each admitted to attacking the five men — all nomads passing through Rainpada, a tribal hamlet 200 miles northeast of Mumbai — and each said they’d done so after watching shocking videos on WhatsApp warning of outsiders abducting children. The suspects are now awaiting their trial. “Our clients’ position is that they genuinely thought that the five people were child kidnappers because they had been seeing this kind of information on WhatsApp for months,” Akshay Sagar and Manoj Khairnar, two of the four state-assigned lawyers representing the 28 people accused, told BuzzFeed News. “They said that as long as their children are safe, they have no regrets.”... For Rashmi Sinha, the tech entrepreneur, the problem is that WhatsApp was designed and built in the US, but is now being deployed in different markets around the world, where social norms and online behaviors vary. In her view, the original product was developed “to remove all friction from sharing” without prompts to “contextualize or comment” on forwarded content, a dangerous precedent that — when put in an environment where people are less educated, less experienced about the web — can have dire consequences."

The Harsh Truth About Progressive Cities - "Madison, Minneapolis, Austin, Portland, San Francisco. These are America’s most progressive, forward-thinking, open-minded, and social-justice-focused cities. They also have the worst racial disparities in the nation and some of the worst racial segregation."

Weather Channel Reporter Filmed Being Overly-Dramatic As Men In Shorts Casually Stroll By
They can still blame Trump for attacking the media

Linux developers threaten to pull “kill switch” - "Activists from the feminist and LGBTQIA+ communities have been trying to force the Linux project to join the Contributor Covenant since at least 2015. The Contributor Covenant is an agreement to implement a special Code of Conduct (frequently CoC from now on) aimed at changing the predominantly white, straight, and male face of programming. CC’s Code of Conduct is controversial particularly because it allows anyone to be banned from contributing code for any reason, usually with no mechanism for oversight or accountability. On September 16 the pro-CoC side got their wish–Linux had officially committed to implementing and obeying the CC Code of Conduct–and they immediately set about using it to remove top Linux coders. Sage Sharp, who describes theyself as a “diversity & inclusion consultant, hufflepuff, non-binary agender trans masculine” and has 7k followers, cites GeekFeminismWiki and targets Google’s Theo Ts’o with accusations of being a rape apologist...
1. Insertion of the CoC into other projects has heralded witch hunts where good contributors are removed over trivial matters or even events that happened a long time ago–like Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor who was purged after it was discovered he had a sex fetish where women are submissive.
2. The lack of proper definitions for punishments, time frames, and even what constitutes abuse or harassment leaves the Code of Conduct wide open for abuse (see 1).
3. It gives the people charged with enforcement omnipotent and unaccountable power.
4. It could force acceptance of contributions that wouldn’t make the cut if made by cis white males.
5. CC’s Code of Conduct is purely about power.
6. “‘In all that time I never had to know or care whether my fellow contributors were white, black, male, female, straight, gay, or from the planet Mars, only whether their code was good’; namely, in a project that receives contributions from volunteers who are anonymous beyond a chosen handle, specious claims of exclusion and harassment crumble beneath the most haphazard scrutiny. Contributors reveal as much about their race, sex, and orientation as they want because no one cares about that tangential shit at the end of the day. If there really was some “straight white males only” mentality, the community would insist on determining whether a new contributor is “one of us” before accepting their code, but they don’t do that in the slightest. Thus, it’s patently clear there is no culture of exclusion, but rather a culture of total indifference to individual differences beyond coding ability. The rhetoric of diversity and inclusiveness is just a weapon being used to attack a community that is inherently opposed to identity politics, which is why they’re seen as such a threat to these SJW gestapo.”"
SJWism ruins everything

Cyclist who had five bikes stolen says thieves are looking for quick times on Strava to try and find high-end bikes – warns other users to check their privacy settings