Chinese birth tourism in Canada isn’t a loophole, grey area or oversight. It’s 100 per cent legal - "Canada’s immigration authorities are well aware of the phenomenon of birth tourism, which has led to more than two dozen private “baby houses” being set up in British Columbia’s lower mainland to accommodate pregnant mainland Chinese travellers. Infants with non-resident mothers made up 22.1 per cent (474 babies) out of all newborns in the 2017/2018 financial year at Richmond Hospital, where the practice is soaring... If Chinese authorities were alerted when an infant born to a birth tourist was headed their way, the parents would be forced to decide whether the “insurance” of holding a Canadian passport was worth the immense inconvenience for their child to grow up in China as a foreigner. “Then the choice is, alright, my baby is Canadian. The baby needs a visa, as a foreigner, to remain in China, and they will not receive free education, free medical care,” said Kurland. Canadian citizenship would be promptly renounced, and tipping off Chinese authorities in such a way would stop birth tourism dead, he said... "Only 34 countries grant the automatic acquisition of citizenship through birthplace regardless of parents’ nationality or status."... No European countries, said the submission, grant unqualified automatic citizenship by birth, “they have no obligation to do so”, and “nothing in international law requires Canada to bestow citizenship on the basis of birth”."
Senior Met Police officer could face the sack for using 'racist' 'whiter than white' phrase - "the detective superintendent addressed colleagues about the need to be faultless and above reproach in carrying out inquiries, saying that they needed to be “whiter than white”... A “good egg” is also thought to be discouraged in police ranks because it is deemed to be too closely associated with “egg and spoon”, rhyming slang for a highly offensive racist term"
The English language is racist
Poh Kok Ing - "My reply to someone who says gays do not face discrimination in Singapore - As a gay person, there are certain things I can’t do in Singapore.
1. Get married...
2. Buy a flat from HDB as a couple...
3. Have a child (in my case, adopt one)."
It's interesting that this round of the 377A circus, many homophiles are upfront about admitting that they are not going to stop at repealing 377A - so it's not just about the Freedom to Love, but the Freedom to get HDB Subsidies
LGBT Activists Target Singapore Schools To Support “Repeal S377A” Petition
Will Repealing Section 377A End "Online Assaults, Vitriol and Abuse Against the LGBTQ Community"? - "Implicit in this reasoning is that Section 377A causes or is responsible for "online assaults, vitriol and abuse against the LGBTQ community", and therefore repeal of Section 377A would put an end to all these. I genuinely wonder if anyone who supports the repeal of Section 377A, including Ong himself, actually believes this. If this is correct, then we would expect that, if Section 377A is repealed, there would be no push for "hate speech" laws or any other laws or measures prohibiting or restricting "online assaults, vitriol and abuse against the LGBTQ community", because these would be plainly unnecessary. We would also expect, in the event of repeal, a complete cessation of complaints from people who identify as LGBTQ of any form of "online assaults, vitriol and abuse" because these would no longer happen, if Section 377A is repealed... Section 377A neither legitimises "online assaults, vitriol and abuse" against persons who identify as LGBTQ, nor would the repeal of Section 377A put an end to such "online assaults, vitriol and abuse". Indeed, even with Section 377A on the books, a man was convicted and fined in November 2016 for asking for "permission to open fire" on the LGBT community in an online post."
Raheem Kassam on Twitter - "Oooh, "Trump *Nearly* Tweeted Us Into War" says CNN headline.
Meanwhile, every other President/Prime Minister for decades has marched us into perpetual, pointless wars costing lives, money, and stability.
We're not stupid, you sleazy fucks."
Combatting Cryptocurrency Mining - "A colleague bought some LED, Wi-Fi-enabled light bulbs that allowed him to control when and where the lights came on in his house through his mobile phone. A user of Senrio Insight at home, he noticed a significant increase in outbound connections to an Internet address in China.* His light bulbs. Turns out the small computer chips in the light bulbs he bought had bitcoin mining code on them, as well as the promised functionality of being able to adjust brightness. To reiterate: someone at a factory in China figured out how to get people around the world to make him rich by screwing in a lightbulb."
National anthem protest: 9yo refuses to stand because anthem is for 'white people of Australia' - "Teachers at a Brisbane primary school have disciplined a nine-year-old girl for refusing to stand for the national anthem during assembly. Primary school student Harper Nielsen was given a lunch time detention on Friday for peacefully protesting against the song she said is "wrong"... Associate Professor Nielsen said despite meeting with the school to discuss the issues, they claimed the school rules would not allow his daughter to continue to protest. "They have said that she has to stand or she has to leave the assembly area""
Apparently the school is racist for not providing her a venue to grandstand
Rare old photos of S’pore capture 1960s life, including sale of exotic meats - "Back when wildlife was in abundance, exotic creatures such as the pangolin and tapirs were commonly spotted in the market. Pangolins, which are endangered today, were (and still are) prized for their scales and meat."
Chinatown’s Sago Lane was once a street of death houses, they were a necessary part of life in the past - "Chinese superstition dictates that death must never occur in a house or it would bring bad luck to its inhabitants."
The Left Can’t Meme So They’ve Just Decided To Ban Memes Instead - "Following studies that proved the political right was more successful at creating and spreading memes than the left, Facebook has announced it is developing a new AI algorithm that can detect and ban “offensive” memes... A study undertaken by researchers at University College London found that the most effective memes largely originated in two places – the subreddit r/the_donald – a forum devoted to boosting President Donald Trump, and 4chan’s politically incorrect /pol forum... In addition to Facebook developing artificial intelligence to detect and censor “offensive” memes, the European Union just voted in favor of Article 13, which would require websites to automatically filter uploaded material for copyright violations, which would lead to transformative memes being blocked."
Do White Law Enforcement Officers Target Minority Suspects? - "although minority suspects are disproportionately killed by police, white officers appear to be no more likely to use lethal force against minorities than nonwhite officers."
Maybe the explanation is that nonwhite police officers have internalised racism
Where was Philando Castile's gun? Yanez jury hears 4th account - "St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez had no option but to shoot Philando Castile when Castile ignored the officer’s commands and reached for his handgun during a traffic stop last summer, an expert witness testified Thursday for the defense... when Castile told him he had a firearm, Yanez reacted within the bounds of his training when he told him not to reach for “it.” “It” meaning the gun, Dutton said. But Castile did not comply and continued going for the handgun later found in his right pocket, Dutton said, putting Yanez in imminent danger of bodily harm or death if he failed to react quickly. Under those circumstances, Yanez was left with no other choice but to draw his firearm and shoot, Dutton testified... Yanez used “due caution” to avoid injury to the two passengers in the car — Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her 4-year-old daughter — when he stepped to the left of the vehicle and pointed his gun downward before firing... The instructor at the gun range in Ramsey where Castile took his permit-to-carry safety class also testified Thursday. James Diehl said he teaches studentsthat, when they’re pulled over by police, first to tell officers they have a permit to carry. Then they should say they have a firearm on them, Diehl said. He said he also tells them to follow all police commands while keeping their hands visible."
Roxanne Pallett: the making of a victim - "Celebrity Big Brother has provided a rare insight into the nature of victimhood... She entered into a role which overtook her, because it was such a compelling, powerful role. Today’s cultural script, in which to be the victim accords you an unprecedented moral authority, has real social power. In what actually makes for remarkable footage, you can almost see Pallett warming to the role of abused woman... It showed how victimhood is, in part, an imagined condition, something one can either cultivate, as the script encourages us to, or resist. Pallett clearly relished the role, as indeed many others do. And this proved to be her undoing. Because if it wasn’t for the harsh truth of the camera’s eye, she might have been able to sustain this self-image. And keep hold of her alleged £750,000 appearance fee."
Report: Las Vegas professor shot himself in arm to protest Trump - "A longtime College of Southern Nevada sociology professor is facing felony gun charges in connection with an on-campus shooting on the second day of classes."
Bronx teacher who performed oral sex on 14-year-old gets 10 years probation, avoids jail, keeps teaching certificate - "A Bronx high school teacher who admitted to performing oral sex on her 14-year-old student won’t face jail time — and she might even return to the classroom."
Male privilege!
School staff member, 25, who had sex with schoolboys ‘took part with enthusiasm and excitement’ - "A former female staffer at an elite boarding school has been slapped with an 'extraordinarily lenient' suspended sentence after having sex with five male students during her tenure."
No enthusiasm for enthusiastic consent reforms | The Spectator Australia - "The key legal issue is that enthusiastic consent laws undermine due process and the presumption of innocence. When we require consent to be affirmatively established we are starting from the presumption that there is no consent, meaning that all sexual intercourse is unlawful until proven otherwise. This is contrary to the fundamental legal precept that individuals are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty... A ‘yes means yes’ standard makes it disturbingly easy for an individual to re-evaluate a regretted sexual encounter and to retrospectively withdraw consent, with some advocates in the USA going so far as to claim that ‘regret equals rape’."
Judge upholds accused student's gender-bias claim - "She also attended a presentation by W&L's Title IX officer Lauren Kozak. Kozak claimed that "regret equals rape," and introduced the concept as a new idea people were now supporting. Once Jane learned that John had been accepted into the study abroad program, she filed a sexual assault claim, now eight months after the encounter. Kozak conducted the investigation. John alleges in his lawsuit that he was given six hours notice to meet with the investigators but was not told why. When John met with Kozak and learned of the allegations against him, he was not shown a copy of Jane's complaint. John was denied legal representation, and when he tried to postpone a meeting with Kozak, she allegedly told him: "That's fine. We'll just submit the investigation report without your side of the story.""
The quickening: The momentous pregnancy event that became a relic. - "For thousands of years, the quickening was arguably the most significant turning point in the average woman’s pregnancy. It had both philosophical and practical significance for women, and for centuries it also marked the legal and moral dividing line for when an abortion could be performed. Today, the quickening is noticed in passing, if at all. But it’s worth remembering this now-antiquated milestone, and celebrating it for what it can still mean... British common law, eventually imported to Colonial America, outlawed abortion only if it took place after the quickening. Likewise, a pregnant woman could not be executed post-quickening... The Catholic Church, which had long treated pre-quickening abortion as the destruction of only potential human life, finally forbade abortion at any stage in 1869... The quickening, by contrast, is unabashedly subjective. It isn’t the fetus’ first movement, but rather the mother’s perception of it"
The Top Five Ways Obama Attacked the Free Press - "Obama’s war with the media wasn’t limited to Fox News. Obama’s treatment of the media as a whole was so bad that New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan criticized the Obama administration in 2013 for its “unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press.” David E. Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, said of the Obama administration in 2013, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” According to a report on press freedoms by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists, “In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press.”...
5. Manipulating media coverage
4. Proposed government monitors in newsrooms
3. Threatening journalists for negative coverage
2. Spying on the media
1. Trying to jail journalists and whistleblowers
For all of Donald Trump’s mean words and use of the term “fake news,” I think we can all agree that such things aren’t nearly as bad as threatening and spying on journalists, right?... The Obama administration used the Espionage Act six times in eight years to go after government sources, more than double the number of all previous administrations combined. Risen would later describe the Obama administration as “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation.” Leonard Downie Jr., the former executive director of the Washington Post, said “the administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”"
Friday, October 12, 2018
Non-Economic Factors in the Economic Retardation of the Rural Malays (2/4)
"All that it is intended to imply by citing these examples is that the Malays' resistance to change has been one of the reasons for their failure to seize the opportunities that have in fact existed, but it is one frequently overlooked in the studies of the rural Malays' economic retardation. It does not seem to be enough to say that the Malays will accept a change 'if they are convinced it will improve their level of living, or way of life', because such would imply that they are materialistically minded and moved solely by the quest for higher incomes and profits. They are not. It is certainly true to say that they have to be convinced that a change or innovation is likely to prove advantageous to them, but it seems that the innovation must also possess another quality, namely, that it must not conflict too dramatically with what has gone before. Change, if it is to be acceptable to the Malays, must not upset their normal daily routine nor conflict with their beliefs, a routine and a set of beliefs that have not basically changed for decades, or even centuries.
This tendency among the Malays to resist economic change seems to be part of a general tendency to resist change as such, or at least to absorb the new providing only that the old can also be accommodated. This is in no way irrational, for it is the logical outcome of certain views and attitudes held by the Malays. However, in this context, there are two main features to be taken into account. First, the rural Malays are reluctant to give up the past, and secondly, they fear or dislike the unfamiliar.
On the first, R. J. Wilkinson has written: 'The Malay cares nothing for consistency; he does not exchange old customs for new; he keeps both the old and the new. He is indeed afraid to give up the old .... The Malay is afraid to give up an ancient practice because he fears the vengeance of some old lawgiver may reach out over the intervening centuries and strike down the impious being who dares to alter what past ages have approved.' Although this was originally written sixty years ago, since which time Malay attitudes and customs have become rather more amenable to change, in essence it still remains true.
This is seen clearly in some of the rural Malays' religious beliefs and in their deep regard for adat or custom. Islam is an intolerant religion. It will not accept more than one God nor any idols. It demands absolute attention and the dismissal of all alien beliefs. But the rural Malay is unable to conform to such rigidity, even though he would never regard himself as a lax Muslim because of it. Nor do many Malays realize the conflict between what the Koran preaches and what they sometimes practise...
Sufi mysticism was not so much a natural progression of Islam as a natural progression of South-east Asian religious beliefs...
The Malay, it seems, cannot bear to live in an environment where the the (sic) unexplained occurs, or at least where he comes into contact with it. He desires, or needs, to see a reason for everything that happens around him, though the explanations he accepts of certain phenomena are not in fact the result of scientific reasoning but rather of rationalization.
The influence of the spirits on his everyday life illustrates this. The Malay has come to terms with his spirits, and explains the weird, the unexpected, the unusual and the otherwise inexplicable as being the work of one or more of them. He has developed a system of placating them, and the bomoh and pawang, or shamans, are greatly respected and regarded as being indispensable members of rural Malay society...
In common with agriculturists in many other underdeveloped countries, the rural Malays see the forces which shape their world as being capricious and arbitrary, as being the work of some power greater than themselves, over which they have no control. Viewed in Malay terms, such helplessness necessarily causes them to question whether they have any control over their own destiny, and makes it difficult for them to accept that by changing their techniques they can affect their destiny. Moreover, it encourages them to cling to their own explanations of everyday occurrences because these represent the Malays' only understanding of such events. And finally it induces them to seek refuge in their own traditional practices since these have become the only well-tried and well-understood ways, within the Malays' experience, of working in harmony with their environment"
--- Non-Economic Factors in the Economic Retardation of the Rural Malays / Brien K. Parkinson (in Modern Asian Studies, 1967)
This tendency among the Malays to resist economic change seems to be part of a general tendency to resist change as such, or at least to absorb the new providing only that the old can also be accommodated. This is in no way irrational, for it is the logical outcome of certain views and attitudes held by the Malays. However, in this context, there are two main features to be taken into account. First, the rural Malays are reluctant to give up the past, and secondly, they fear or dislike the unfamiliar.
On the first, R. J. Wilkinson has written: 'The Malay cares nothing for consistency; he does not exchange old customs for new; he keeps both the old and the new. He is indeed afraid to give up the old .... The Malay is afraid to give up an ancient practice because he fears the vengeance of some old lawgiver may reach out over the intervening centuries and strike down the impious being who dares to alter what past ages have approved.' Although this was originally written sixty years ago, since which time Malay attitudes and customs have become rather more amenable to change, in essence it still remains true.
This is seen clearly in some of the rural Malays' religious beliefs and in their deep regard for adat or custom. Islam is an intolerant religion. It will not accept more than one God nor any idols. It demands absolute attention and the dismissal of all alien beliefs. But the rural Malay is unable to conform to such rigidity, even though he would never regard himself as a lax Muslim because of it. Nor do many Malays realize the conflict between what the Koran preaches and what they sometimes practise...
Sufi mysticism was not so much a natural progression of Islam as a natural progression of South-east Asian religious beliefs...
The Malay, it seems, cannot bear to live in an environment where the the (sic) unexplained occurs, or at least where he comes into contact with it. He desires, or needs, to see a reason for everything that happens around him, though the explanations he accepts of certain phenomena are not in fact the result of scientific reasoning but rather of rationalization.
The influence of the spirits on his everyday life illustrates this. The Malay has come to terms with his spirits, and explains the weird, the unexpected, the unusual and the otherwise inexplicable as being the work of one or more of them. He has developed a system of placating them, and the bomoh and pawang, or shamans, are greatly respected and regarded as being indispensable members of rural Malay society...
In common with agriculturists in many other underdeveloped countries, the rural Malays see the forces which shape their world as being capricious and arbitrary, as being the work of some power greater than themselves, over which they have no control. Viewed in Malay terms, such helplessness necessarily causes them to question whether they have any control over their own destiny, and makes it difficult for them to accept that by changing their techniques they can affect their destiny. Moreover, it encourages them to cling to their own explanations of everyday occurrences because these represent the Malays' only understanding of such events. And finally it induces them to seek refuge in their own traditional practices since these have become the only well-tried and well-understood ways, within the Malays' experience, of working in harmony with their environment"
--- Non-Economic Factors in the Economic Retardation of the Rural Malays / Brien K. Parkinson (in Modern Asian Studies, 1967)
Links - 12th October 2018 (1)
The secret life-hack - why you should quit feminism - "I was calling myself a feminist even before college, but I was a reasonably mild creature, a watered down version of the howling banshee I became once I passed through the gender studies machine... I was neck deep in the literature and getting angrier by the day. I started looking for the patriarchy, and, like the lesser evils of Crocs and man-buns, it was EVERYWHERE... I spent about 5 years during university and then my masters in the grip of a heavy dose of feminist ideology. The kind of feminism that you could only find in Ms. Magazine back then, but is now everywhere in the form of the constant background noise of gender studies outrage of the "I am woman, hear me whine" variety. The whole world has turned into me at 18... I've now been feminism-free for 5 years and loving every minute of it. It's done wonders for my mental health, my relationships, my understanding of the world. Not even kicking both alcohol and smoking can come close to the catharsis of moulting a crippling ideology...
1. Feminism robs you of your #1 tool for self-development... If you’re condemned to victimhood through conspiratorial forces, your agency is an illusion. You're not your own master, you're at the mercy of circumstances outside of your control. Feminism doesn't offer life skills - it provides an infinite list of grievances and calls for control and protection... Taking responsibility is a hard thing to do. It's hard to face up to the fact that some of your problems are your own fault...
2. Feminism makes sex, relationships & talking to men a pain...
3. Maybe we don't want it "all"... have you ever given a bit of thought to what it takes to become and stay a Fortune 500 CEO? Why anyone but the most driven and work-obsessed of people might want to get there and have the stamina to stay there? What sacrifices it might bring? Have you thought about the infinity of things you can't do because you're too busy doing the endless things it takes to be a magnate? I think many a woman has thought carefully about it, and she's said: "Good luck, Sheryl Sandberg, I'm leaning out."...
4. You can find a better tribe...
5. Feminism is hypocritical... It's less about the welfare of women, it's more about sticking it to the man - exclusively the western man, of course, bringer of sorrows, lord of oppression...
6. Feminism has been lying to you"
I'm a female banker. My male colleagues are making me infertile - "In the past few years several of my male colleagues have started families. They all take paternity leave (usually for around a month, sometimes for longer) and when they come back they often expect to work a bit less. As a case in point, I was recently asked to take on extra project by a colleague who's a new father - he said he needs to spend time with his baby and can't work as much as I do. I'm stuck in a vicious cycle. The more that my male colleagues have children, the more that I am expected to cover for them and the harder it becomes for me to conceive. You can see why I'm annoyed."
Funny, I thought we were supposed to encourage men taking paternity leave and caring for kids
Comments: "Sooooo,when women get children it's not up to their male colleagues to pick up the slack...."
China Eastern Airlines flight attendant loses job after boyfriend proposes to her during flight - "the company fired the flight attendant on grounds that she had neglected passenger safety. The company stated that the mid-flight proposal had caused a disturbance and was an irresponsible act which jeopardised the security of passengers."
Telling stories, having fun. — realvivianjames: judgingeternity: mantis-cat: ... - "Show creator: so here’s a witty, smart, well-thought character, with a rich background, complex past, and (s)he has lots of interesting quirks and skills…
Tumblr: YEAH, OKAY, BUT IS (S)HE TRANS? HOMOSEXUAL? POC?
Show creator: why does it ma~
Tumblr: BOOOOOOORING!!!!
Show creator: actually yes
Tumblr: this is their only defining characteristic and this show is now only for people represented by that quality if they also agree with me on every subject
Show creator: And they have some flaws/ or they’re a villain
Tumblr: This show is a homophobic, transphobic, racist, misogynistic pile of crap and all it’s fans are crap too.
Tumblr: *harasses and sends death threats to people over the show*
Show Creator: This is not why I made this show, I wanted to be inclusive and subversive but also make people happy, and this isn’t good, please stop it.
Tumblr: OMG So you like child porn and hate gay people!?!?!?!?!?!?!
The fact that every single one of these has happened exactly like this is really depressing."
Eb the Intolerant on Twitter - "Ableist language of the day: "cr*ppling debt"
Y'all. We don't use the c-word like that. That word is a reclaimed slur in Disabled community. It's not a word you just toss on bad things bc it's there.
OK alternatives: "enormous debt" "unaffordable debt" "huge fuck-off debt""
@BajanMbaku: "Enormous debt is fat shaming"
How Twitter poisoned politics - "Wes Streeting, a Labour MP and prolific user of the site, recently announced that he was scaling down his use. “When I joined Twitter in my mid-twenties, I enjoyed it as a platform for debating ideas, live-tweeting during X Factor and sharing what I was up to,” Streeting wrote. “Unfortunately, Twitter has increasingly become an angry swamp to the extent that its utility is outweighed by the negativity.” I hear this judgment more and more... Conformity to tribal ethics is rewarded with retweets and approving replies; contrary opinion can be treated as heresy. And so everyone bids everyone else up in a currency of implacability and indignation."
Online Abuse of UK MPs in 2015 and 2017: Perpetrators, Targets, and Topics - "in both absolute and proportional terms, abuse increased substantially in 2017 compared with 2015. Abusive replies are somewhat less directed at women and those not in the currently governing party. Those who send the abuse may be issue-focused, or they may repeatedly target an individual. In the latter category, accounts are more likely to be throwaway. Those sending abuse have a wide range of topical triggers, including borders and terrorism."
Once again, contrary to feminist misinformation, women actually get less online abuse
Apple's bigger iPhone XS is getting slammed for being 'sexist' - "When Apple released its iPhone XS line, with screens that range from 5.8 inches to 6.5 inches, they became the company’s largest phones yet. But the big screens have triggered a backlash from women who say the device is too large for the average female hand... Another annoyance for iPhone-loving ladies? Apple’s phones are too large for women’s pockets. An August 2018 survey by culture website The Pudding took a look at the 20 most popular denim brands in the United States and found that 60 percent of women’s jeans can’t fit an iPhone X, which is 5.8 inches."
You know feminism is no longer needed when it complains about iPhone sizes
Toronto sex-ed guide for Muslims: “Homosexuals are cursed by Allah”, LGBTQ “not permissible” - "Children are encouraged to avoid shows, cartoons, movies, and advertisements that allude, even subtly, to mixed gender relationships"
The general case: why Singapore’s security obsession is incompatible with meritocracy - "Thailand provides another learning point. In this case, it proves that even with a conscript army, military generals can mount coups... the Singapore government boasts that the guiding principle is meritocracy. Putting aside the roiling debate about how ‘meritocracy’ in practice is often less egalitarian and perhaps even less efficient than it sounds, it’s nonetheless an ideal worth holding on to as a guiding star. However, when there are pressures to find jobs for surplus-to-requirement generals, it is hard to see how the posts they eventually occupy have really been filled through a meritocratic process... How are these organisations where key positions are filled more out of a need to give a general a job than through openly-competitive recruitment, going to attract the best talent? Best talent (surprise!) tend to be really smart people who want space and leeway to operate. Would they wonder if the organisational culture of the place is one that values obedience and conformity rather than out-of-the-box thinking, experimentation and disruption? Would they wonder whether their own chances of promotion within the organisation would always be secondary to the need to keep the newly civilianised military guy happy?"
Vacationers Happier, but Most not Happier After a Holiday - "Vacationers reported a higher degree of pre-trip happiness, compared to non-vacationers, possibly because they are anticipating their holiday. Only a very relaxed holiday trip boosts vacationers’ happiness further after return. Generally, there is no difference between vacationers’ and non-vacationers’ post-trip happiness"
Bras Basah Campus (1823-1972) | RAMpage - "The area around Bras Basah was known as the School Zone because of the high concentration of schools in the area: RI, St Joseph’s Institution (SJI), Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ), Catholic High School, St Anthony’s Boys’ School, St Anthony’s Convent, St Andrew’s School and Anglo-Chinese School. There was much rivalry amongst students in these schools. Nonetheless, friendships were also forged, especially with the girls from CHIJ."
Is Newscaster Hair Going Extinct? - "Wear your hair down, in a smooth style that hits at the collarbone or above. Updos and complicated styles are a no, as are drastic color changes. Youthful appearance is key (better dye those grays away!). A bit of wave is okay (and increasingly popular at some stations), but ringlets and kinky curls are not. It's not just perception, either. Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, analyzed more than 400 publicity images for local broadcast journalists and found that 95.8 percent of female anchors and reporters had smooth hair. About two-thirds had short or medium-length cuts. Nearly half of the women were blond. Zero had gray hair. Just one black woman in the UT study sample wore her natural curls."
Many Singaporeans Think the PR/Comms Industry is Fluff. It is Also Full of Women. Coincidence? - "creative industries are generally seen as a more liberal alternative to the corporate grind. Many employees choose this work out of “passion”. Therefore, “performing passion for a wage” feels offensive, especially when PR/comms work is fundamentally regarded as the direct opposite of the ‘authentic’, ‘proper’ and ‘legitimate’ field of journalism... she and her friends always joke about how men are “awful at communication”"
German triathlete banned from all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant for eating too much - "As an Ironman triathlete, Jaroslav Bobrowski is used to eating generous portions to gain enough energy for his athletic pursuits. Yet one restaurant in Bavaria found his diet bad for their business. In a visit last weekend to the all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant Running Sushi in Landshut, Bavaria, former bodybuilder Bobrowski, 30, ate close to 100 plates of sushi, sending the restaurant into a state of alarm."
Old Testament Law and The Charge of Inconsistency - "let’s be clear that it’s not only the Old Testament that has proscriptions about homosexuality. The New Testament has plenty to say about it as well. Even Jesus, in his discussion of divorce in Matthew 19:3-12, says that the original design of God was for one man and one woman to be united as one flesh, and failing that, (v. 12) persons should abstain from marriage and from sex... The New Testament gives us further guidance about how to read the Old Testament. Paul makes it clear in places like Romans 13:8ff that the apostles understood the Old Testament moral law to still be binding on us. In short, the coming of Christ changed how we worship but not how we live. The moral law is an outline of God’s own character—his integrity, love, and faithfulness. And so all the Old Testament says about loving our neighbor, caring for the poor, generosity with our possessions, social relationships, and commitment to our family is still in force. The New Testament continues to forbid killing or committing adultery, and all the sex ethic of the Old Testament is re-stated throughout the New Testament (Matthew 5:27-30; 1 Corinthians 6:9-20; 1 Timothy 1:8-11.) If the New Testament has reaffirmed a commandment, then it is still in force for us today. Further, the New Testament explains another change between the Testaments. Sins continue to be sins—but the penalties change. In the Old Testament things like adultery or incest were punishable with civil sanctions like execution"
Why is it that so many leading Brexiteers studied history? | The Spectator - "After claiming that Ancient Rome was ‘destroyed’ by immigration, Banks was called out by classicist Mary Beard, to which he retorted: ‘I studied Roman history extensively — you don’t have a monopoly on history!’... Whereas the Declaration of Independence is gospel in America, in the UK only a history graduate like Jacob Rees-Mogg could describe the White Paper agreed at Chequers as ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’. The pollsters at Vote Leave decided that ‘Take Back Control’ was the most effective slogan, but what it communicates is the doctrine which the History Boys continue to espouse: parliamentary sovereignty. If you know your British history, then you’ll known that this is not an abstract idea but something which parliamentarians have wrestled for since, well, not long after Le Goulet... The old ruling class — politicians such as Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan and Boris — studied the classics. The new ruling class — the ‘experts’ — have studied vocational degrees like law and PPE. Whereas our rulers were once versed in the past, they are now versed in technocracy"
1. Feminism robs you of your #1 tool for self-development... If you’re condemned to victimhood through conspiratorial forces, your agency is an illusion. You're not your own master, you're at the mercy of circumstances outside of your control. Feminism doesn't offer life skills - it provides an infinite list of grievances and calls for control and protection... Taking responsibility is a hard thing to do. It's hard to face up to the fact that some of your problems are your own fault...
2. Feminism makes sex, relationships & talking to men a pain...
3. Maybe we don't want it "all"... have you ever given a bit of thought to what it takes to become and stay a Fortune 500 CEO? Why anyone but the most driven and work-obsessed of people might want to get there and have the stamina to stay there? What sacrifices it might bring? Have you thought about the infinity of things you can't do because you're too busy doing the endless things it takes to be a magnate? I think many a woman has thought carefully about it, and she's said: "Good luck, Sheryl Sandberg, I'm leaning out."...
4. You can find a better tribe...
5. Feminism is hypocritical... It's less about the welfare of women, it's more about sticking it to the man - exclusively the western man, of course, bringer of sorrows, lord of oppression...
6. Feminism has been lying to you"
I'm a female banker. My male colleagues are making me infertile - "In the past few years several of my male colleagues have started families. They all take paternity leave (usually for around a month, sometimes for longer) and when they come back they often expect to work a bit less. As a case in point, I was recently asked to take on extra project by a colleague who's a new father - he said he needs to spend time with his baby and can't work as much as I do. I'm stuck in a vicious cycle. The more that my male colleagues have children, the more that I am expected to cover for them and the harder it becomes for me to conceive. You can see why I'm annoyed."
Funny, I thought we were supposed to encourage men taking paternity leave and caring for kids
Comments: "Sooooo,when women get children it's not up to their male colleagues to pick up the slack...."
China Eastern Airlines flight attendant loses job after boyfriend proposes to her during flight - "the company fired the flight attendant on grounds that she had neglected passenger safety. The company stated that the mid-flight proposal had caused a disturbance and was an irresponsible act which jeopardised the security of passengers."
Telling stories, having fun. — realvivianjames: judgingeternity: mantis-cat: ... - "Show creator: so here’s a witty, smart, well-thought character, with a rich background, complex past, and (s)he has lots of interesting quirks and skills…
Tumblr: YEAH, OKAY, BUT IS (S)HE TRANS? HOMOSEXUAL? POC?
Show creator: why does it ma~
Tumblr: BOOOOOOORING!!!!
Show creator: actually yes
Tumblr: this is their only defining characteristic and this show is now only for people represented by that quality if they also agree with me on every subject
Show creator: And they have some flaws/ or they’re a villain
Tumblr: This show is a homophobic, transphobic, racist, misogynistic pile of crap and all it’s fans are crap too.
Tumblr: *harasses and sends death threats to people over the show*
Show Creator: This is not why I made this show, I wanted to be inclusive and subversive but also make people happy, and this isn’t good, please stop it.
Tumblr: OMG So you like child porn and hate gay people!?!?!?!?!?!?!
The fact that every single one of these has happened exactly like this is really depressing."
Eb the Intolerant on Twitter - "Ableist language of the day: "cr*ppling debt"
Y'all. We don't use the c-word like that. That word is a reclaimed slur in Disabled community. It's not a word you just toss on bad things bc it's there.
OK alternatives: "enormous debt" "unaffordable debt" "huge fuck-off debt""
@BajanMbaku: "Enormous debt is fat shaming"
How Twitter poisoned politics - "Wes Streeting, a Labour MP and prolific user of the site, recently announced that he was scaling down his use. “When I joined Twitter in my mid-twenties, I enjoyed it as a platform for debating ideas, live-tweeting during X Factor and sharing what I was up to,” Streeting wrote. “Unfortunately, Twitter has increasingly become an angry swamp to the extent that its utility is outweighed by the negativity.” I hear this judgment more and more... Conformity to tribal ethics is rewarded with retweets and approving replies; contrary opinion can be treated as heresy. And so everyone bids everyone else up in a currency of implacability and indignation."
Online Abuse of UK MPs in 2015 and 2017: Perpetrators, Targets, and Topics - "in both absolute and proportional terms, abuse increased substantially in 2017 compared with 2015. Abusive replies are somewhat less directed at women and those not in the currently governing party. Those who send the abuse may be issue-focused, or they may repeatedly target an individual. In the latter category, accounts are more likely to be throwaway. Those sending abuse have a wide range of topical triggers, including borders and terrorism."
Once again, contrary to feminist misinformation, women actually get less online abuse
Apple's bigger iPhone XS is getting slammed for being 'sexist' - "When Apple released its iPhone XS line, with screens that range from 5.8 inches to 6.5 inches, they became the company’s largest phones yet. But the big screens have triggered a backlash from women who say the device is too large for the average female hand... Another annoyance for iPhone-loving ladies? Apple’s phones are too large for women’s pockets. An August 2018 survey by culture website The Pudding took a look at the 20 most popular denim brands in the United States and found that 60 percent of women’s jeans can’t fit an iPhone X, which is 5.8 inches."
You know feminism is no longer needed when it complains about iPhone sizes
Toronto sex-ed guide for Muslims: “Homosexuals are cursed by Allah”, LGBTQ “not permissible” - "Children are encouraged to avoid shows, cartoons, movies, and advertisements that allude, even subtly, to mixed gender relationships"
The general case: why Singapore’s security obsession is incompatible with meritocracy - "Thailand provides another learning point. In this case, it proves that even with a conscript army, military generals can mount coups... the Singapore government boasts that the guiding principle is meritocracy. Putting aside the roiling debate about how ‘meritocracy’ in practice is often less egalitarian and perhaps even less efficient than it sounds, it’s nonetheless an ideal worth holding on to as a guiding star. However, when there are pressures to find jobs for surplus-to-requirement generals, it is hard to see how the posts they eventually occupy have really been filled through a meritocratic process... How are these organisations where key positions are filled more out of a need to give a general a job than through openly-competitive recruitment, going to attract the best talent? Best talent (surprise!) tend to be really smart people who want space and leeway to operate. Would they wonder if the organisational culture of the place is one that values obedience and conformity rather than out-of-the-box thinking, experimentation and disruption? Would they wonder whether their own chances of promotion within the organisation would always be secondary to the need to keep the newly civilianised military guy happy?"
Vacationers Happier, but Most not Happier After a Holiday - "Vacationers reported a higher degree of pre-trip happiness, compared to non-vacationers, possibly because they are anticipating their holiday. Only a very relaxed holiday trip boosts vacationers’ happiness further after return. Generally, there is no difference between vacationers’ and non-vacationers’ post-trip happiness"
Bras Basah Campus (1823-1972) | RAMpage - "The area around Bras Basah was known as the School Zone because of the high concentration of schools in the area: RI, St Joseph’s Institution (SJI), Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ), Catholic High School, St Anthony’s Boys’ School, St Anthony’s Convent, St Andrew’s School and Anglo-Chinese School. There was much rivalry amongst students in these schools. Nonetheless, friendships were also forged, especially with the girls from CHIJ."
Is Newscaster Hair Going Extinct? - "Wear your hair down, in a smooth style that hits at the collarbone or above. Updos and complicated styles are a no, as are drastic color changes. Youthful appearance is key (better dye those grays away!). A bit of wave is okay (and increasingly popular at some stations), but ringlets and kinky curls are not. It's not just perception, either. Researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, analyzed more than 400 publicity images for local broadcast journalists and found that 95.8 percent of female anchors and reporters had smooth hair. About two-thirds had short or medium-length cuts. Nearly half of the women were blond. Zero had gray hair. Just one black woman in the UT study sample wore her natural curls."
Many Singaporeans Think the PR/Comms Industry is Fluff. It is Also Full of Women. Coincidence? - "creative industries are generally seen as a more liberal alternative to the corporate grind. Many employees choose this work out of “passion”. Therefore, “performing passion for a wage” feels offensive, especially when PR/comms work is fundamentally regarded as the direct opposite of the ‘authentic’, ‘proper’ and ‘legitimate’ field of journalism... she and her friends always joke about how men are “awful at communication”"
German triathlete banned from all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant for eating too much - "As an Ironman triathlete, Jaroslav Bobrowski is used to eating generous portions to gain enough energy for his athletic pursuits. Yet one restaurant in Bavaria found his diet bad for their business. In a visit last weekend to the all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant Running Sushi in Landshut, Bavaria, former bodybuilder Bobrowski, 30, ate close to 100 plates of sushi, sending the restaurant into a state of alarm."
Old Testament Law and The Charge of Inconsistency - "let’s be clear that it’s not only the Old Testament that has proscriptions about homosexuality. The New Testament has plenty to say about it as well. Even Jesus, in his discussion of divorce in Matthew 19:3-12, says that the original design of God was for one man and one woman to be united as one flesh, and failing that, (v. 12) persons should abstain from marriage and from sex... The New Testament gives us further guidance about how to read the Old Testament. Paul makes it clear in places like Romans 13:8ff that the apostles understood the Old Testament moral law to still be binding on us. In short, the coming of Christ changed how we worship but not how we live. The moral law is an outline of God’s own character—his integrity, love, and faithfulness. And so all the Old Testament says about loving our neighbor, caring for the poor, generosity with our possessions, social relationships, and commitment to our family is still in force. The New Testament continues to forbid killing or committing adultery, and all the sex ethic of the Old Testament is re-stated throughout the New Testament (Matthew 5:27-30; 1 Corinthians 6:9-20; 1 Timothy 1:8-11.) If the New Testament has reaffirmed a commandment, then it is still in force for us today. Further, the New Testament explains another change between the Testaments. Sins continue to be sins—but the penalties change. In the Old Testament things like adultery or incest were punishable with civil sanctions like execution"
Why is it that so many leading Brexiteers studied history? | The Spectator - "After claiming that Ancient Rome was ‘destroyed’ by immigration, Banks was called out by classicist Mary Beard, to which he retorted: ‘I studied Roman history extensively — you don’t have a monopoly on history!’... Whereas the Declaration of Independence is gospel in America, in the UK only a history graduate like Jacob Rees-Mogg could describe the White Paper agreed at Chequers as ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’. The pollsters at Vote Leave decided that ‘Take Back Control’ was the most effective slogan, but what it communicates is the doctrine which the History Boys continue to espouse: parliamentary sovereignty. If you know your British history, then you’ll known that this is not an abstract idea but something which parliamentarians have wrestled for since, well, not long after Le Goulet... The old ruling class — politicians such as Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan and Boris — studied the classics. The new ruling class — the ‘experts’ — have studied vocational degrees like law and PPE. Whereas our rulers were once versed in the past, they are now versed in technocracy"
Thursday, October 11, 2018
Links - 11th October 2018
Politicians are threatening our right to have private discussions - we must not let them ban secret social media groups - "A cross-party group of MPs, led by Labour’s Lucy Powell, are today leading the latest in a long line of attempts to clamp down on internet freedom. Their calls to outlaw secret forums on social media and make large social media companies legally liable for content published on their services are as nonsensical as they are authoritarian... It should be staggering that this attack on free association comes from a Labour MP. Does she not know the history of her own party, the history of workers’ rights? That combination and private association were prohibited and criminal? Do Tories not remember that companies could be seen as conspiracies just a century and a half ago?"
Crypto’s 80% Plunge Is Now Worse Than Stocks' Dot-Com Crash
Amsterdam stabbing suspect believes Islam is insulted in the Netherlands: prosecutors - "An Afghan asylum-seeker accused of stabbing two Americans in Amsterdam believes that Islam is insulted in the Netherlands, Dutch prosecutors said Monday, giving the first indication of why they think a “terrorist motive” was behind the attack... “From the suspect’s statements so far, it is clear the man had a terrorist motive … and that he traveled to the Netherlands for that reason”... Wilders reacted with a tweet, writing: “Muslim terrorists hate our way of life and our freedoms. They answer criticism of Islam with violence.”"
The truth about the ‘senior academics’ defending Corbyn | Coffee House - "Scanning the list I cannot recognise one name. Well, I think, perhaps they are not in fields I am acquainted with. Yet it is not just that. Many of them are from institutions that I have never heard of. A number are from institutions that almost nobody not actually on the payrolls of these universities could have heard of. Not one of these ‘senior academics’ is at Oxford or Cambridge. Only two signatories are even from one of the UK’s top 10 universities, one of whom, ‘Bart Cammaerts’, is listed as being from the London School of Economics. I see from looking at the LSE’s website that this ‘Senior academic’ is in fact an associate professor in the ‘department of media and communications’ who is currently taking a sabbatical away from the rigorous demands of that role. A whole glut of the signatories come from Goldsmiths, University of London – a college famous for making its graduates unemployable... Of course it is understandable that these people might be die-hard supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. And it might even be understandable that they should wish to excuse the anti-Semitism that Corbyn has encouraged in the Labour party. But why would the Guardian choose to misrepresent their status? In an era in which we are all so exercised about the propagation of ‘fake news’, why should the left’s in-house paper describe someone in Bournemouth who writes about ‘One Direction’ as a ‘senior academic’. One wonders."
Half-sword - Wikipedia - "Half-sword, in 14th- to 16th-century fencing with longswords, refers to the technique of gripping the central part of the sword blade with the left hand in order to execute more forceful thrusts against armoured and unarmoured opponents"
US Open 2018 Women's Final Incident MEGATHREAD : tennis - "It's funny, this whole Serena incident has given me as a left wing liberal guy a good insight and even sympathy toward what some conservative folks must go through trying to have discussions and respectful disagreements with many folks on my side of the aisle. I just got finished getting covered in rhetorical piss and shit by several women in a Facebook discussion about this subject. Despite the fact that they knew nothing about the rules of tennis or how code violations worked, and despite me patiently and gently trying to explain those rules and why Serena wasn't unfairly persecuted, I got labeled a "mansplainer" by them and denigrated as not able to have a valid opinion on the subject because I was neither a woman, nor black, so I basically needed to just shut the hell up."
US Open Serena Williams umpire: USTA boss Katrina Adams sorry to Carlos Ramos - "US Tennis association chief executive Katrina Adams has been overheard apologising to controversial umpire Carlos Ramos just days after she declared chair umpires have “double standards” when dealing with men’s and women’s matches... Adams came under fire in some circles for inflaming the sensitive situation when she released a statement hours after the final supporting Serena’s protest, labelling Serena a “true champion” who “showed a great deal of class and sportsmanship”. She also moved to excuse Williams’ behaviour during an interview with ESPN the following day when she suggested Williams would not have expected her outburst towards Ramos to have been captured on live TV... Adams was reportedly heard apologising to Ramos at the Davis Cup event, according to Associated Press journalist Andrew Dampf. It constitutes a huge backflip from the USTA, which has been Williams’ biggest supporter... some umpires are considering refusing to officiate matches involving Williams in the wake of her attack on Ramos. Ramos, 47, was “thrown to the wolves for simply doing his job and was not willing to be abused for it,” one anonymous umpire told the English paper. Australian former umpire Richard Ings also reported feelings of unrest. “The umpiring fraternity is thoroughly disturbed at being abandoned by the WTA,” Ings told ESPN.com. “They are all fearful that they could be the next Ramos. They feel that no one has their back when they have to make unpopular calls.”"
Must be that internalised misogyny
Cartoon Movement - How to draw Serena Williams - "Whiter skin just to play it safe...
Do not show her in an angry mood - it would be an ugly racial stereotype...
Not too muscular. That would suggest that black women are less feminine which is not acceptable!...
Ok, it doesn't look like Serena anymore but at least it's not racist"
Are Women Penalized More Than Men in Tennis? Data Says No - The New York Times - "Each situation should be evaluated on its own merits, but according to data compiled by officials at Grand Slam tournaments for the past 20 years, men are penalized more often for verbal abuse. Those figures, obtained by The New York Times, show that from 1998 to 2018 at the four Grand Slam events, men have been fined for misbehavior with much more frequency than women with one significant exception: coaching violations... men appear to be fined proportionally more often than women for a variety of offenses"
Why Sweden’s populist moment matters - "As is the case with almost all elections these days, the elite-dominated media class raised concerns about fake news and Russian trolling. Sweden’s state-run SVT channel made no attempt to hide its hostility towards the Sweden Democrats, taking the unprecedented step of rebuking Akesson after a televised leaders’ debate. Akesson’s crime was to argue that the reason many immigrants cannot find a job is because ‘they are not Swedes’, and have not succeeded in fitting into Sweden. He then called for more opportunities for immigrants both to assimilate into the Swedish way of life and to integrate into the labour market... during the election campaign, Gustav Fridolin, co-leader of the Green Party in coalition Social Democrats, promised that, if re-elected, he would ‘reform’ the preschool curriculum to promote gender neutrality. In particular, Fridolin pledged to stop boys behaving like boys. His distrust of boys is justified on the grounds that there is a connection between the naughty behaviour of boys in preschools and ‘men’s behaviour at their workplaces’.
Dalai Lama: 'Europe Belongs to Europeans', Refugees Should Return and Rebuild Homelands - "The Dalai Lama has told a press conference in Sweden that “Europe belongs to the Europeans”, asserting that refugees should be repatriated so they can rebuild their homelands... Visiting the country to celebrate the 80th anniversary of its international anti-poverty efforts, the Dalai Lama made the comments on Wednesday, three days after Sweden’s general election in which the Sweden Democrats — a party reviled in both local and international media for its opposition to mass migration — gained a record share of the vote. It is not the first time the Buddhist icon, who is revered by millions of followers around the world, has commented on migration politics in Europe, having previously emphasised the importance of maintaining the continent as a homeland for its native peoples “from a moral point of view too”. Speaking to Germany’s Frankfurter Allegemier Zeitung newspaper in 2016, the Dalai Lama said refugees “should be admitted only temporarily”, stating he believed that “too many” were in Europe, and adding: “Germany in particular, cannot become an Arab country, Germany is Germany.”"
New alt-right leader
Sorry, the United Kingdom Does Not Owe India Reparations - "History, is among other things, the story of the rise and fall of states and empires. And by their nature, politics and state-building always help and hurt certain groups. In an empire or after conquest by an empire, there are always privileged elites, collaborators, people whose lives don’t change at all, and groups that have the worst of it. This is a phenomenon not limited to colonialism and European imperialism, which is why I strongly disagree with the narrative that tries to cast Western imperialism as a uniquely immoral, when in fact all imperial projects, including the Mongols, the Arabs, and other Western empires were a mixed bag. The only substantive difference between Western imperialism and what came prior to it is the fact that Western colonialism occurred in tandem with the industrial, scientific, and political revolutions, all of which eventually shook up non-Western societies in unprecedented ways relative to their tradition arrangements. And while this proved quite shocking to many societies, it was relatively more peaceful and less rapacious than some of the actions of previous empires that literally pillaged and leveled cities and literally enslaved whole populations... Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India 17 times, each time demolishing Hindu temples and carting away gold and jewels while the British, more archaeologically oriented, actually renovated long decaying temples... Iran and Iraq widely blame the Mongol conquests for destroying the irrigation systems that sustained them and their golden age, damage far exceeding European interference in those countries, but nobody seems to ask for reparations. Of course, Mongolia is not wealthy. Are reparations only a way of guilting rich nations into giving away more money, though they give generous aid as is? Countries that have successfully developed or are developing are doing so because of good economic policies and political discipline and not infusions of money. I am all for reparations given to individuals and countries for specific events and incidents when there is a clear wrong, like the British shooting of innocent civilians during the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in Amritsar. But it is virtually impossible to translate this tangible and definable definition of reparations to loosely-defined macro-historical phenomenon like imperial rule by one group over another. The list of demands would go on and on so as to have no meaning; virtually everyone could demand reparations from anyone else, even Britain could ask the denizens of Normandy for something... Indians in many ways were beneficiaries of the British imperial system as well as its victims... Finally, there is the matter of the Koh-i-Noor (it means mountain of light in Persian) diamond, a British crown jewel acquired from India that every Indian politician would like returned... The British acquired it from Lahore (now in Pakistan) after the conquest of the Sikh Empire. Pakistan and India are both successor states of British India. The diamond itself was never really the property of the Indian state, but always a prize fought for by conquerors. Virtually every possessor of the diamond seized it from its previous owner... More Indian crown jewels are in fact locked in a vault in the Central Bank of Iran in Tehran where the National Jewelry Museum is located than in Great Britain (and they were seized by force too) but it is odd to hear no calls for their return in India"
Number of white people arrested for terror offences outstrip any other single ethnic group, new figures show - "White suspects accounted for 38 per cent of terror-related arrests, followed by those of Asian appearance on 37 per cent and black suspects on 9 per cent."
Asians make up 4.9% of the UK population
Apparently all white suspects have the same far-right ideology. And since white people are the majority of those shot by US police, this means Black Lives Matter is lying
Hillary Clinton endorses Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon in New York primary - "Stuck in an edgy, unexpected primary fight with actress Cynthia Nixon, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo welcomed the cavalry Wednesday as the state Democratic convention kicked off at Hofstra University on Long Island"
"'There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."
Crypto’s 80% Plunge Is Now Worse Than Stocks' Dot-Com Crash
Amsterdam stabbing suspect believes Islam is insulted in the Netherlands: prosecutors - "An Afghan asylum-seeker accused of stabbing two Americans in Amsterdam believes that Islam is insulted in the Netherlands, Dutch prosecutors said Monday, giving the first indication of why they think a “terrorist motive” was behind the attack... “From the suspect’s statements so far, it is clear the man had a terrorist motive … and that he traveled to the Netherlands for that reason”... Wilders reacted with a tweet, writing: “Muslim terrorists hate our way of life and our freedoms. They answer criticism of Islam with violence.”"
The truth about the ‘senior academics’ defending Corbyn | Coffee House - "Scanning the list I cannot recognise one name. Well, I think, perhaps they are not in fields I am acquainted with. Yet it is not just that. Many of them are from institutions that I have never heard of. A number are from institutions that almost nobody not actually on the payrolls of these universities could have heard of. Not one of these ‘senior academics’ is at Oxford or Cambridge. Only two signatories are even from one of the UK’s top 10 universities, one of whom, ‘Bart Cammaerts’, is listed as being from the London School of Economics. I see from looking at the LSE’s website that this ‘Senior academic’ is in fact an associate professor in the ‘department of media and communications’ who is currently taking a sabbatical away from the rigorous demands of that role. A whole glut of the signatories come from Goldsmiths, University of London – a college famous for making its graduates unemployable... Of course it is understandable that these people might be die-hard supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. And it might even be understandable that they should wish to excuse the anti-Semitism that Corbyn has encouraged in the Labour party. But why would the Guardian choose to misrepresent their status? In an era in which we are all so exercised about the propagation of ‘fake news’, why should the left’s in-house paper describe someone in Bournemouth who writes about ‘One Direction’ as a ‘senior academic’. One wonders."
Half-sword - Wikipedia - "Half-sword, in 14th- to 16th-century fencing with longswords, refers to the technique of gripping the central part of the sword blade with the left hand in order to execute more forceful thrusts against armoured and unarmoured opponents"
US Open 2018 Women's Final Incident MEGATHREAD : tennis - "It's funny, this whole Serena incident has given me as a left wing liberal guy a good insight and even sympathy toward what some conservative folks must go through trying to have discussions and respectful disagreements with many folks on my side of the aisle. I just got finished getting covered in rhetorical piss and shit by several women in a Facebook discussion about this subject. Despite the fact that they knew nothing about the rules of tennis or how code violations worked, and despite me patiently and gently trying to explain those rules and why Serena wasn't unfairly persecuted, I got labeled a "mansplainer" by them and denigrated as not able to have a valid opinion on the subject because I was neither a woman, nor black, so I basically needed to just shut the hell up."
US Open Serena Williams umpire: USTA boss Katrina Adams sorry to Carlos Ramos - "US Tennis association chief executive Katrina Adams has been overheard apologising to controversial umpire Carlos Ramos just days after she declared chair umpires have “double standards” when dealing with men’s and women’s matches... Adams came under fire in some circles for inflaming the sensitive situation when she released a statement hours after the final supporting Serena’s protest, labelling Serena a “true champion” who “showed a great deal of class and sportsmanship”. She also moved to excuse Williams’ behaviour during an interview with ESPN the following day when she suggested Williams would not have expected her outburst towards Ramos to have been captured on live TV... Adams was reportedly heard apologising to Ramos at the Davis Cup event, according to Associated Press journalist Andrew Dampf. It constitutes a huge backflip from the USTA, which has been Williams’ biggest supporter... some umpires are considering refusing to officiate matches involving Williams in the wake of her attack on Ramos. Ramos, 47, was “thrown to the wolves for simply doing his job and was not willing to be abused for it,” one anonymous umpire told the English paper. Australian former umpire Richard Ings also reported feelings of unrest. “The umpiring fraternity is thoroughly disturbed at being abandoned by the WTA,” Ings told ESPN.com. “They are all fearful that they could be the next Ramos. They feel that no one has their back when they have to make unpopular calls.”"
Must be that internalised misogyny
Cartoon Movement - How to draw Serena Williams - "Whiter skin just to play it safe...
Do not show her in an angry mood - it would be an ugly racial stereotype...
Not too muscular. That would suggest that black women are less feminine which is not acceptable!...
Ok, it doesn't look like Serena anymore but at least it's not racist"
Are Women Penalized More Than Men in Tennis? Data Says No - The New York Times - "Each situation should be evaluated on its own merits, but according to data compiled by officials at Grand Slam tournaments for the past 20 years, men are penalized more often for verbal abuse. Those figures, obtained by The New York Times, show that from 1998 to 2018 at the four Grand Slam events, men have been fined for misbehavior with much more frequency than women with one significant exception: coaching violations... men appear to be fined proportionally more often than women for a variety of offenses"
Why Sweden’s populist moment matters - "As is the case with almost all elections these days, the elite-dominated media class raised concerns about fake news and Russian trolling. Sweden’s state-run SVT channel made no attempt to hide its hostility towards the Sweden Democrats, taking the unprecedented step of rebuking Akesson after a televised leaders’ debate. Akesson’s crime was to argue that the reason many immigrants cannot find a job is because ‘they are not Swedes’, and have not succeeded in fitting into Sweden. He then called for more opportunities for immigrants both to assimilate into the Swedish way of life and to integrate into the labour market... during the election campaign, Gustav Fridolin, co-leader of the Green Party in coalition Social Democrats, promised that, if re-elected, he would ‘reform’ the preschool curriculum to promote gender neutrality. In particular, Fridolin pledged to stop boys behaving like boys. His distrust of boys is justified on the grounds that there is a connection between the naughty behaviour of boys in preschools and ‘men’s behaviour at their workplaces’.
Dalai Lama: 'Europe Belongs to Europeans', Refugees Should Return and Rebuild Homelands - "The Dalai Lama has told a press conference in Sweden that “Europe belongs to the Europeans”, asserting that refugees should be repatriated so they can rebuild their homelands... Visiting the country to celebrate the 80th anniversary of its international anti-poverty efforts, the Dalai Lama made the comments on Wednesday, three days after Sweden’s general election in which the Sweden Democrats — a party reviled in both local and international media for its opposition to mass migration — gained a record share of the vote. It is not the first time the Buddhist icon, who is revered by millions of followers around the world, has commented on migration politics in Europe, having previously emphasised the importance of maintaining the continent as a homeland for its native peoples “from a moral point of view too”. Speaking to Germany’s Frankfurter Allegemier Zeitung newspaper in 2016, the Dalai Lama said refugees “should be admitted only temporarily”, stating he believed that “too many” were in Europe, and adding: “Germany in particular, cannot become an Arab country, Germany is Germany.”"
New alt-right leader
Sorry, the United Kingdom Does Not Owe India Reparations - "History, is among other things, the story of the rise and fall of states and empires. And by their nature, politics and state-building always help and hurt certain groups. In an empire or after conquest by an empire, there are always privileged elites, collaborators, people whose lives don’t change at all, and groups that have the worst of it. This is a phenomenon not limited to colonialism and European imperialism, which is why I strongly disagree with the narrative that tries to cast Western imperialism as a uniquely immoral, when in fact all imperial projects, including the Mongols, the Arabs, and other Western empires were a mixed bag. The only substantive difference between Western imperialism and what came prior to it is the fact that Western colonialism occurred in tandem with the industrial, scientific, and political revolutions, all of which eventually shook up non-Western societies in unprecedented ways relative to their tradition arrangements. And while this proved quite shocking to many societies, it was relatively more peaceful and less rapacious than some of the actions of previous empires that literally pillaged and leveled cities and literally enslaved whole populations... Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India 17 times, each time demolishing Hindu temples and carting away gold and jewels while the British, more archaeologically oriented, actually renovated long decaying temples... Iran and Iraq widely blame the Mongol conquests for destroying the irrigation systems that sustained them and their golden age, damage far exceeding European interference in those countries, but nobody seems to ask for reparations. Of course, Mongolia is not wealthy. Are reparations only a way of guilting rich nations into giving away more money, though they give generous aid as is? Countries that have successfully developed or are developing are doing so because of good economic policies and political discipline and not infusions of money. I am all for reparations given to individuals and countries for specific events and incidents when there is a clear wrong, like the British shooting of innocent civilians during the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in Amritsar. But it is virtually impossible to translate this tangible and definable definition of reparations to loosely-defined macro-historical phenomenon like imperial rule by one group over another. The list of demands would go on and on so as to have no meaning; virtually everyone could demand reparations from anyone else, even Britain could ask the denizens of Normandy for something... Indians in many ways were beneficiaries of the British imperial system as well as its victims... Finally, there is the matter of the Koh-i-Noor (it means mountain of light in Persian) diamond, a British crown jewel acquired from India that every Indian politician would like returned... The British acquired it from Lahore (now in Pakistan) after the conquest of the Sikh Empire. Pakistan and India are both successor states of British India. The diamond itself was never really the property of the Indian state, but always a prize fought for by conquerors. Virtually every possessor of the diamond seized it from its previous owner... More Indian crown jewels are in fact locked in a vault in the Central Bank of Iran in Tehran where the National Jewelry Museum is located than in Great Britain (and they were seized by force too) but it is odd to hear no calls for their return in India"
Number of white people arrested for terror offences outstrip any other single ethnic group, new figures show - "White suspects accounted for 38 per cent of terror-related arrests, followed by those of Asian appearance on 37 per cent and black suspects on 9 per cent."
Asians make up 4.9% of the UK population
Apparently all white suspects have the same far-right ideology. And since white people are the majority of those shot by US police, this means Black Lives Matter is lying
Hillary Clinton endorses Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon in New York primary - "Stuck in an edgy, unexpected primary fight with actress Cynthia Nixon, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo welcomed the cavalry Wednesday as the state Democratic convention kicked off at Hofstra University on Long Island"
"'There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."
Tuesday, October 09, 2018
Links - 9th October 2018
High School English Students Forced to Learn Gender-Bending Pronouns and Anti-White Propaganda - "A student posted an assignment to social media, handed out by teacher Emily Thomson of Kennedy High's English department, that detailed "power and privilege" in America which, according to the assignment, names "U.S. born," "white people," "Christians," "middle, owning class," "heterosexuals," "men," and "veterans" as the oppressors of non-white humankind. How this is not a violation of the school's policy against discrimination based on race, creed, and sexuality is baffling... The white "agent" at the top of the image is guilty of discriminating against blacks, oppressing gays, marginalizing Asians, exploiting women and disenfranchising SJWs with pink hair."
Goldsmiths student group mounts extraordinary defence of GULAG camps - "A student union group has been roundly condemned after mounting an extraordinary defence of Stalin's notorious gulags... hard-left activists at Goldsmiths university tweeted a defence of the gulags - claiming they helped rehabilitate workers and were nicer than Western prisons. They claimed that inmates were actually treated well and allowed to join theatre groups and write for prison newspapers. Historians voiced their astonishment at the ludicrous defence, while relatives of those killed in gulags accused the student group of trying to rewrite history... A study of Soviet data found that 1,053,829 people died in the worker camps from 1934 until 1953... The Goldsmiths account later deleted the tweets after being met with the fierce backlash. A spokesman for Goldsmiths, University of London said: 'Goldsmiths has a diverse and inclusive community with many people caring deeply about trans rights... The student group is based at Goldsmiths university - whose student unions have garnered a reputation of pursuing wacky and controversial left-wing policies"
Ed Jordan on Twitter - "As a leftist who makes gulag jokes semi-frequently, it is ridiculous to seriously claim that gulags were not instruments of censorship and repression of of dissent used by a brutal authoritarian dictatorship. Seriously defending them is as fucked up as Holocaust denial.
Also I'm not sure why an LGBTQ+ society is attempting to defend a regime under which homosexuality was illegal, but there you go I guess."
On Goldsmiths and the Gulag
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The morality of parental rights - "'They've raised all the resources necessary to provide the treatment. So I quite agree that in some circumstances, opportunity cost as the economists call it or injustice in terms of preventing other people from having useful treatments would indeed stop the state or the National Health Service from providing very low probability benefit treatments at great expense.'
'So the problem with that moral system is that rich parents can keep their children alive, but poor parents can't'"
Apparently it's better to force the kids of rich parents die than to let them pay for their own treatment
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Veganism and Animal Rights - "I actually think that chlorinated chicken or factory farmed chicken being available to more and more people as a wonderful step forward for humanity. And we should stop worrying about that. I suppose as a humanist, I think animals are useless unless humans can make use of them. And if anything, what I'm worried about is in enthusiasm for animal rights because we've lost faith in an intellectual commitment of the exceptionalism of humans, I am a humanist and animals are beneath us...
‘The idea that you can't have rights without responsibilities is a very strange one, because you just gotta think of the classes of human beings: you have young children, babies, people with moderate, severe brain damage and so on, who also have no responsibilities. But if you wanted to infer from that that they have no rights I think that would be a very strange inference.’...
‘Animals as a species though are not capable of taking responsibility for their own actions.’...
‘What I find disturbing is that you can't distinguish between, say for example, somebody with a mental incapacity, a human being, my mother with dementia, because she has limited capacity and you can't see a moral distinction between her and a chimp that throws a brick, that's what I'm saying, I think she's more than an animal’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, The perfect cuppa - "In the hierarchy of liquids to be drunk wine has this, is at the top of the list. You know that because there's an actual different menu at a restaurant for wines, as if to say, "Oh this is the most sophisticated liquid in your life”, which is not true. A cup of tea, actually, is just as sophisticated as a bottle of wine… you really have got to get the temperature right, because if you don't have the right water at the right temperature, you will not get the thousands, and I mean it's thousands of flavour molecules in a cup of tea. If you're having one now, you are drinking the most sophisticated liquid on the planet… if you’re drinking black tea, [the water must be] on the boil, because designed to get those flavours out at 100 degrees, but if you're drinking green tea, then you want off the boil, you want 72 degrees."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Perils of journalism - "[On Syria] Documents, and photographs smuggled out. People risked their lives to bring out things like meeting minutes from the Office of the President, that clearly showed a primary aspect of their war strategy was to eliminate the journalists...
We had a contact in Lebanese intelligence, who said quite clearly that they picked up Syrian radio signals, said any journalist found in the region of Hams had to be executed and had the bodies thrown onto the battlefield… someone said to me, ‘You're in more trouble if you’re caught with a camera than a rifle in Homs’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tony Blair on Jeremy Corbyn - "Some labour MPs wonder whether it's time to sit as independents, others ponder in private about creating a new party"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Friday's business with Rob Young - "The US does have some justification to say that the terms of trade aren’t fair. When China was submitted to the WTO it was a very different economy to what it is today. The G7 as they were then wanted China in the family of trading nations, they wanted them in, they gave them preferential treatment. China doesn't need preferential treatment today, to give you an example, if a western company wants to do business in China today it has to partner up with a local company, it has to hand over its IP, it can't bid for Chinese companies, whereas for a Chinese company coming out to the US or western Europe, the terms of the trades are very different. And that's why Donald Trump was elected."
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The Invisible Ingredient - "‘For the bulk of our customers, half an hour is the time they commit to their evening meal. Fifteen is preparing the item and 15 minutes is eating it’...
‘Before, it didn't matter how long it took to make a little vine leave or a little stuffing everything. In the Middle East, well in Egypt, at any rate, you honored your guests by taking a lot of time. But now I don't feel that at all. And I want to take short cuts. I want to go out, I want to see friends and I know that my children are all working and they all don't want to do things that take four hours’...
People do dedicate less time to cooking when they used to. British households spend around half as much time preparing an evening meal than they did in the 1980s and the average person has a repertoire of just four recipes. In the US it's a similar picture according to its Department of Agriculture. Households spend, on average, just thirty-seven minutes per day on food preparation and clear up. A household’s main cook saves over a week of solid preparation time every year by using pre-prepared food.… In Britain in the late 1970s, frozen food once a status symbol, had begun to be seen as unhealthy and a bit down market"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Rethinking the Celebrity Chef - "A study in the UK by the market research firm YouGov showed people say their eating habits are influenced more by cookery programs and the personalities on them than by government Healthy Eating campaigns. Just forty years ago, though most great chefs were hidden away in the kitchen. Some may have been famous but only for their food...
If you look at two of the most famous chefs of the past 200 years, Carême, a French chef of the early nineteenth century, and Escoffier of the early 20th century, they were famous enough that people brought their cook books, sauces were named after them, they were regarded as defining French cuisine. But again, nobody asked their opinions about general things and they were regarded as master craftsmen. And not as artists. So really, the change comes in the 70s and the 80s... Many celebrity chefs now, they're more celebrities than chefs...
The Nouvelle movement, brought about a much more personalized cuisine where chefs started to compose their own dishes. This was the beginning of what's now known as a signature dishes and they became known for the same reason writers or musicians or filmmakers become."
UPDATE 3-South Africa in recession for first time since 2009; rand slumps
I'm sure this has nothing to do with what they're doing to white farmers
'Violating Freedom': CA Lawmakers Vote Again to Stop Churches from Helping Gays - "Hundreds of pastors across the state have traveled to Sacramento this year to oppose the bill, fearing that it will shut down church conferences on sexuality, ban Christian books on sex and any paid counseling for those seeking to change their orientation."
If you don't support gay marriage, don't get a gay marriage. If you don't agree with what some Christians say on homosexuality, silence them
Man Wrongfully Sentenced to 50 Years in Prison Goes Free After Dog He Supposedly Killed Is Found Alive and Well - "A dog may have spared a Salem, Oregon, man from a 50-year prison sentence for sexual abuse of a minor. The fact that the dog is still alive contradicts key testimony used to convict the defendant, who had already been released from prison and is no longer facing a possible retrial. In this very strange and slightly confusing tale, plumber Joshua Horner was convicted in 2017 of abusing a minor who testified that Horner had threatened to shoot her animals if she ever squealed on him to the cops. To prove he was in earnest, she said, he shot her dog... even the jury that convicted Horner was not unanimous. How is that legal? It turns out Oregon is one of two states where jury decisions need not be unanimous—even when the outcome will result in a person spending 50 years in a cage."
Indian woman divorce husband because dem no get toilet - BBC News Pidgin - "One woman for India don get permission from court to divorce her husband because im no gree build toilet for dem house. The woman wey dey for her 20's don dey married to her husband for five years, but na for inside bush she dey poopoo."
This Delhi man was called a ‘pervert’ in viral post 3 years ago — and he’s still stuck there - "Three years after he was labelled a ‘pervert’ because of an alleged incident of molestation on a Delhi road, Saravjeet Singh, 28, is struggling to keep a job, has to appear at a police station every time he needs to leave the city and is yet to get a passport... Arguments in the case against him are yet to begin as the complainant, former St Stephen’s student Jasleen Kaur, has not attended even a single hearing in the matter. There have been 13 hearings so far."
12-year-old boy who transitioned to female changes his mind two years later - "At just 12-years-old, Patrick Mitchell, begged with his mother to begin taking oestrogen hormones after doctors diagnosed him with gender dysphoria... After heeding advice from professionals who suggested that it was right choice, his mother was fully supportive and Mitchell began to transition... Now, in a bid to revert back to his original body, he has stopped taking his medication and is about to have an operation to remove excess breast tissue in what will be the final stage of his transition."
Annual air pollution caused by the Hungry Ghost Festival - "the change in the chemical composition of the rainwater and PM2.5 (PM ≤ 2.5 μm) atmospheric samples could be correlated directly with burning events during this festival, with many elements increasing between 18% and 60% during August and September compared to the yearly mean concentrations"
Mona Lisa: Physician Diagnosis Solves Mystery of Enigmatic Smile - "each of the physical abnormalities he spotted on the “Mona Lisa” has a known medical correlate. The bump next to her eye, for example, is likely a xanthalesma, a yellowish cholesterol deposit under the skin, usually near the eye. Similarly, the bulge on her hand is probably a type of fatty benign tumor known as a lipoma or a xanthoma, if it’s rich in cholesterol. The bulge on her neck, meanwhile, could be the beginnings of a goiter, an abnormal enlargement of the thyroid gland. “It’s not an aquiline neck,” says Mehra. “You don’t actually see the trachea.” “So, I’m basically looking at a receding hairline, loss of eyebrows, a swelling in the neck, coarse, thin hair,” he says. Then there’s the xanthalesma and the lipoma or xanthoma. “And I’m looking at a slightly edematous, swollen woman with no hair throughout. That, to me is a classic picture of clinical hypothyroidism, or an underactive thyroid gland.”"
Doctors said the coma patients would never wake. AI said they would - and they did - "At least seven patients in Beijing who doctors said had “no hope” of regaining consciousness were re-evaluated by an artificial intelligence system that predicted they would awaken within a year... but the machine also made some mistakes"
Novelist, 68, arrested for 'fatally shooting husband' blogged about 'How to Murder Your Husband' - "Nancy Crampton Brophy, 68, was arrested last week for the June 2 murder of Daniel Brophy."
How to Determine the Minimum Size Needed for a Statistical Sample - "Suppose you are getting ready to do your own survey to estimate a population mean; wouldn’t it be nice to see ahead of time what sample size you need to get the margin of error you want? Thinking ahead will save you money and time and it will give you results you can live with in terms of the margin of error — you won’t have any surprises later."
Goldsmiths student group mounts extraordinary defence of GULAG camps - "A student union group has been roundly condemned after mounting an extraordinary defence of Stalin's notorious gulags... hard-left activists at Goldsmiths university tweeted a defence of the gulags - claiming they helped rehabilitate workers and were nicer than Western prisons. They claimed that inmates were actually treated well and allowed to join theatre groups and write for prison newspapers. Historians voiced their astonishment at the ludicrous defence, while relatives of those killed in gulags accused the student group of trying to rewrite history... A study of Soviet data found that 1,053,829 people died in the worker camps from 1934 until 1953... The Goldsmiths account later deleted the tweets after being met with the fierce backlash. A spokesman for Goldsmiths, University of London said: 'Goldsmiths has a diverse and inclusive community with many people caring deeply about trans rights... The student group is based at Goldsmiths university - whose student unions have garnered a reputation of pursuing wacky and controversial left-wing policies"
Ed Jordan on Twitter - "As a leftist who makes gulag jokes semi-frequently, it is ridiculous to seriously claim that gulags were not instruments of censorship and repression of of dissent used by a brutal authoritarian dictatorship. Seriously defending them is as fucked up as Holocaust denial.
Also I'm not sure why an LGBTQ+ society is attempting to defend a regime under which homosexuality was illegal, but there you go I guess."
On Goldsmiths and the Gulag
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The morality of parental rights - "'They've raised all the resources necessary to provide the treatment. So I quite agree that in some circumstances, opportunity cost as the economists call it or injustice in terms of preventing other people from having useful treatments would indeed stop the state or the National Health Service from providing very low probability benefit treatments at great expense.'
'So the problem with that moral system is that rich parents can keep their children alive, but poor parents can't'"
Apparently it's better to force the kids of rich parents die than to let them pay for their own treatment
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Veganism and Animal Rights - "I actually think that chlorinated chicken or factory farmed chicken being available to more and more people as a wonderful step forward for humanity. And we should stop worrying about that. I suppose as a humanist, I think animals are useless unless humans can make use of them. And if anything, what I'm worried about is in enthusiasm for animal rights because we've lost faith in an intellectual commitment of the exceptionalism of humans, I am a humanist and animals are beneath us...
‘The idea that you can't have rights without responsibilities is a very strange one, because you just gotta think of the classes of human beings: you have young children, babies, people with moderate, severe brain damage and so on, who also have no responsibilities. But if you wanted to infer from that that they have no rights I think that would be a very strange inference.’...
‘Animals as a species though are not capable of taking responsibility for their own actions.’...
‘What I find disturbing is that you can't distinguish between, say for example, somebody with a mental incapacity, a human being, my mother with dementia, because she has limited capacity and you can't see a moral distinction between her and a chimp that throws a brick, that's what I'm saying, I think she's more than an animal’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, The perfect cuppa - "In the hierarchy of liquids to be drunk wine has this, is at the top of the list. You know that because there's an actual different menu at a restaurant for wines, as if to say, "Oh this is the most sophisticated liquid in your life”, which is not true. A cup of tea, actually, is just as sophisticated as a bottle of wine… you really have got to get the temperature right, because if you don't have the right water at the right temperature, you will not get the thousands, and I mean it's thousands of flavour molecules in a cup of tea. If you're having one now, you are drinking the most sophisticated liquid on the planet… if you’re drinking black tea, [the water must be] on the boil, because designed to get those flavours out at 100 degrees, but if you're drinking green tea, then you want off the boil, you want 72 degrees."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Perils of journalism - "[On Syria] Documents, and photographs smuggled out. People risked their lives to bring out things like meeting minutes from the Office of the President, that clearly showed a primary aspect of their war strategy was to eliminate the journalists...
We had a contact in Lebanese intelligence, who said quite clearly that they picked up Syrian radio signals, said any journalist found in the region of Hams had to be executed and had the bodies thrown onto the battlefield… someone said to me, ‘You're in more trouble if you’re caught with a camera than a rifle in Homs’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tony Blair on Jeremy Corbyn - "Some labour MPs wonder whether it's time to sit as independents, others ponder in private about creating a new party"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Friday's business with Rob Young - "The US does have some justification to say that the terms of trade aren’t fair. When China was submitted to the WTO it was a very different economy to what it is today. The G7 as they were then wanted China in the family of trading nations, they wanted them in, they gave them preferential treatment. China doesn't need preferential treatment today, to give you an example, if a western company wants to do business in China today it has to partner up with a local company, it has to hand over its IP, it can't bid for Chinese companies, whereas for a Chinese company coming out to the US or western Europe, the terms of the trades are very different. And that's why Donald Trump was elected."
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The Invisible Ingredient - "‘For the bulk of our customers, half an hour is the time they commit to their evening meal. Fifteen is preparing the item and 15 minutes is eating it’...
‘Before, it didn't matter how long it took to make a little vine leave or a little stuffing everything. In the Middle East, well in Egypt, at any rate, you honored your guests by taking a lot of time. But now I don't feel that at all. And I want to take short cuts. I want to go out, I want to see friends and I know that my children are all working and they all don't want to do things that take four hours’...
People do dedicate less time to cooking when they used to. British households spend around half as much time preparing an evening meal than they did in the 1980s and the average person has a repertoire of just four recipes. In the US it's a similar picture according to its Department of Agriculture. Households spend, on average, just thirty-seven minutes per day on food preparation and clear up. A household’s main cook saves over a week of solid preparation time every year by using pre-prepared food.… In Britain in the late 1970s, frozen food once a status symbol, had begun to be seen as unhealthy and a bit down market"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Rethinking the Celebrity Chef - "A study in the UK by the market research firm YouGov showed people say their eating habits are influenced more by cookery programs and the personalities on them than by government Healthy Eating campaigns. Just forty years ago, though most great chefs were hidden away in the kitchen. Some may have been famous but only for their food...
If you look at two of the most famous chefs of the past 200 years, Carême, a French chef of the early nineteenth century, and Escoffier of the early 20th century, they were famous enough that people brought their cook books, sauces were named after them, they were regarded as defining French cuisine. But again, nobody asked their opinions about general things and they were regarded as master craftsmen. And not as artists. So really, the change comes in the 70s and the 80s... Many celebrity chefs now, they're more celebrities than chefs...
The Nouvelle movement, brought about a much more personalized cuisine where chefs started to compose their own dishes. This was the beginning of what's now known as a signature dishes and they became known for the same reason writers or musicians or filmmakers become."
UPDATE 3-South Africa in recession for first time since 2009; rand slumps
I'm sure this has nothing to do with what they're doing to white farmers
'Violating Freedom': CA Lawmakers Vote Again to Stop Churches from Helping Gays - "Hundreds of pastors across the state have traveled to Sacramento this year to oppose the bill, fearing that it will shut down church conferences on sexuality, ban Christian books on sex and any paid counseling for those seeking to change their orientation."
If you don't support gay marriage, don't get a gay marriage. If you don't agree with what some Christians say on homosexuality, silence them
Man Wrongfully Sentenced to 50 Years in Prison Goes Free After Dog He Supposedly Killed Is Found Alive and Well - "A dog may have spared a Salem, Oregon, man from a 50-year prison sentence for sexual abuse of a minor. The fact that the dog is still alive contradicts key testimony used to convict the defendant, who had already been released from prison and is no longer facing a possible retrial. In this very strange and slightly confusing tale, plumber Joshua Horner was convicted in 2017 of abusing a minor who testified that Horner had threatened to shoot her animals if she ever squealed on him to the cops. To prove he was in earnest, she said, he shot her dog... even the jury that convicted Horner was not unanimous. How is that legal? It turns out Oregon is one of two states where jury decisions need not be unanimous—even when the outcome will result in a person spending 50 years in a cage."
Indian woman divorce husband because dem no get toilet - BBC News Pidgin - "One woman for India don get permission from court to divorce her husband because im no gree build toilet for dem house. The woman wey dey for her 20's don dey married to her husband for five years, but na for inside bush she dey poopoo."
This Delhi man was called a ‘pervert’ in viral post 3 years ago — and he’s still stuck there - "Three years after he was labelled a ‘pervert’ because of an alleged incident of molestation on a Delhi road, Saravjeet Singh, 28, is struggling to keep a job, has to appear at a police station every time he needs to leave the city and is yet to get a passport... Arguments in the case against him are yet to begin as the complainant, former St Stephen’s student Jasleen Kaur, has not attended even a single hearing in the matter. There have been 13 hearings so far."
12-year-old boy who transitioned to female changes his mind two years later - "At just 12-years-old, Patrick Mitchell, begged with his mother to begin taking oestrogen hormones after doctors diagnosed him with gender dysphoria... After heeding advice from professionals who suggested that it was right choice, his mother was fully supportive and Mitchell began to transition... Now, in a bid to revert back to his original body, he has stopped taking his medication and is about to have an operation to remove excess breast tissue in what will be the final stage of his transition."
Annual air pollution caused by the Hungry Ghost Festival - "the change in the chemical composition of the rainwater and PM2.5 (PM ≤ 2.5 μm) atmospheric samples could be correlated directly with burning events during this festival, with many elements increasing between 18% and 60% during August and September compared to the yearly mean concentrations"
Mona Lisa: Physician Diagnosis Solves Mystery of Enigmatic Smile - "each of the physical abnormalities he spotted on the “Mona Lisa” has a known medical correlate. The bump next to her eye, for example, is likely a xanthalesma, a yellowish cholesterol deposit under the skin, usually near the eye. Similarly, the bulge on her hand is probably a type of fatty benign tumor known as a lipoma or a xanthoma, if it’s rich in cholesterol. The bulge on her neck, meanwhile, could be the beginnings of a goiter, an abnormal enlargement of the thyroid gland. “It’s not an aquiline neck,” says Mehra. “You don’t actually see the trachea.” “So, I’m basically looking at a receding hairline, loss of eyebrows, a swelling in the neck, coarse, thin hair,” he says. Then there’s the xanthalesma and the lipoma or xanthoma. “And I’m looking at a slightly edematous, swollen woman with no hair throughout. That, to me is a classic picture of clinical hypothyroidism, or an underactive thyroid gland.”"
Doctors said the coma patients would never wake. AI said they would - and they did - "At least seven patients in Beijing who doctors said had “no hope” of regaining consciousness were re-evaluated by an artificial intelligence system that predicted they would awaken within a year... but the machine also made some mistakes"
Novelist, 68, arrested for 'fatally shooting husband' blogged about 'How to Murder Your Husband' - "Nancy Crampton Brophy, 68, was arrested last week for the June 2 murder of Daniel Brophy."
How to Determine the Minimum Size Needed for a Statistical Sample - "Suppose you are getting ready to do your own survey to estimate a population mean; wouldn’t it be nice to see ahead of time what sample size you need to get the margin of error you want? Thinking ahead will save you money and time and it will give you results you can live with in terms of the margin of error — you won’t have any surprises later."
The Objectification of Women
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Objectification of Women
"You’d have thought Formula One racing had little in common with Greek mythology, but they have both fallen victim to the latest wave of feminist susceptibility that Some sritics are calling a new Puritanism. The casualties at Formula One are the so-called Grid Girls, the pretty but peripheral scantily clad lovelies who prance around the pits. They like their sisters, the walk-on girls who escort dart players onto the stage at televised championships are being done away with, well, no longer employed because they are seen as objectifying women. Reducing them to objects of sexual desire.
The feminists were less successful, one’s tempted to say got their knickers in a twist with Greek mythology. The famous Pre-Raphaelite painting Waterhouse’s Hylas And The Nymphs was removed from display at Manchester Art Gallery for a week, but it was reinstated after a public outcry. The picture shows the Argonaut Hylas being serenaded by some damply lubricious nymphs.
The story of course is that they fancied him because of his astonishing beauty despite him being Hercules’ gay toy boy. They took him off, turned him straight, and he was never seen again. A story actually of female empowerment in which it was the male that was objectified, which just goes to show how tricky this all is...
‘So apparently Free the Nipple campaign and showing your breasts in support of breast cancer - that's acceptable. Take your top off and appear in Page Three. Then this is deplorable. Empowering apparently if you get dressed up as #metoo women in beautiful designer black dresses on award ceremony, and terrible if you get dressed up beautifully and you’re on the F1 circuit. Utterly snobbish double standards get on my nerves in this discussion’...
'Objectification is a process that we all engage in. In order to have sexual relationships with each other, we’re sexual beings. We objectify our partners. They become an object of desire… I don't believe, when I go to work [as a stripper], that I'm automatically turned into just an object like a temptation or thing. I get spoken to, people engage in conversation, we talk about our lives, we talk about, customers will ask me who I am, but essentially what do I stand for, what do I believe? So that's in lots of ways.
One, I'm a stripper, a lot of what I go through is quite humanizing in lots of ways. I mean, I've done the job for ten years... I really don't feel trapped by the male gaze. I feel more trapped by the male gaze when I'm in the street in somewhere like Rome, or Paris where the sexual harassment that goes on while I'm just walking, doing, going about my business, certainly not inviting it, certainly not consenting to being objectified...
In some ways being objectified can be empowering... the dichotomy of if something is just empowering or subjugating, it's kind of, a bit misleading.'...
‘I very much agree with the French eminent women’s letter, hundred eminent women's letter that said, ‘This is an Anglo-Saxon Puritan reaction and it's a load of nonsense, really’...
‘People who have what I call erotic capital, who are attractive and know they’re attractive and know how to use it, make money out of it in perfectly legitimate ways. Just as people who have brains or qualifications or a skill with making money on oil markets make money from their activities.
We admire people who make millions out of insurance or something, which is not particularly admirable. Very often, it to people's disadvantage, but we criticize anyone who makes money out of, monetizes their erotic capital. Erotic capital actually has value. In rich societies, and we're getting richer all the time, in rich societies individuals and people and societies will spend more on luxury. Beauty is a luxury...
I don't find concepts like commodification and objectification useful… I don't think they're useful concepts. They don't actually tell you something that you need to know and didn't know. And I think they've been hugely over-used by people just to say, try and pretend that they're an intellectual, and they don't like something, so they use big words as if that makes what they're saying important or valuable or clever... In relation to people who are attractive, we admire them.
So when, for example, in June 2009, David Beckham was modeling Armani underpants and there was this massive poster that was hung from the top of Selfridges building, six stories high photo of a naked David Beckham in Armani underpants. There was a complete frenzy in the street of young women who came to see it, and apparently, some of then fainted with delight at this picture and David Beckham is making millions or did make at the time millions from what I would call modeling and was a politely called sponsorship for whatever. And I read that he had made a lot more from modeling than he made from his career as an athlete. No one objects to that…
‘Puritanism is a noble moral tradition, founded the United States of America, gave us democracy. What on earth is wrong with Puritanism?’
‘It is anti-sex, anti-luxury, anti-beauty-’...
‘What’s wrong with modesty? Modesty is an important moral category’...
‘We're in the 21th century by the way.’...
‘You keep using the word value, which I fully understand, but isn't it the case that what you're describing, could be used, could be described as a form of sexual teasing or enticement?
For example, there are, many of the actresses who've been going around saying #metoo, in objecting to the misuse of sexual misbehavior, themselves dress in scanty clothing, in sexually provocative ways. Isn’t the point that it's not objectification, it's merely sexualized behavior which you might say is very licentious and bad and degrading? But that's different from objectification.’
‘I think it's really difficult to tease apart the individual choice and behaviors from the societal level impacts and pressures. We don't exist in a vacuum. And women are disproportionately expected to commodify their bodies. And so I think it's really difficult to see some of those things as individual choice. I think we can't necessarily think that women are actually truly free to have those individual choices when they're still living in a society that is claiming ownership over their bodies’
‘Or is it the women claim that they have choice, unless you know better than them? I think maybe we should take their word seriously’...
'A lot of young women I meet when I talk in schools and universities, seem so caught up in this objectified world, in imagining that seeing these images are destroying their life forever, that they've almost become frightened of the female body, or showing it… the outcome of this could only possibly be until we get equality that what we should advise young women to do is to dress up in the burka or all the nuns’ habit to be religiously equal. But you know if objectification in the male gaze is so damaging maybe women should go back to the Victorian parlor and hide away.'...
'The contemporary debate that is going on at the moment basically says those women are dressing sexually and they are objectified victims. I am dressing beautifully sexually, because I'm a liberated feminist and it drives me mad. There’s a double standard'...
‘There is all the difference in the world it has to be said between middle class people feeling empowered about doing this and people who are trafficked and it shows that actually the big difference is a difference in power’
‘What you don't approve of, that’s the only difference’
‘Giles, complete hypocrisy. All these people prancing around the catwalk half undressed. saying #Metoo, please’
Ironically the modesty argument came from Giles Fraser, who would be upset about modesty and puritanism if they were used by white Christian men to tell women what they should wear
Women don't know their own minds, unless they have feminist views
"You’d have thought Formula One racing had little in common with Greek mythology, but they have both fallen victim to the latest wave of feminist susceptibility that Some sritics are calling a new Puritanism. The casualties at Formula One are the so-called Grid Girls, the pretty but peripheral scantily clad lovelies who prance around the pits. They like their sisters, the walk-on girls who escort dart players onto the stage at televised championships are being done away with, well, no longer employed because they are seen as objectifying women. Reducing them to objects of sexual desire.
The feminists were less successful, one’s tempted to say got their knickers in a twist with Greek mythology. The famous Pre-Raphaelite painting Waterhouse’s Hylas And The Nymphs was removed from display at Manchester Art Gallery for a week, but it was reinstated after a public outcry. The picture shows the Argonaut Hylas being serenaded by some damply lubricious nymphs.
The story of course is that they fancied him because of his astonishing beauty despite him being Hercules’ gay toy boy. They took him off, turned him straight, and he was never seen again. A story actually of female empowerment in which it was the male that was objectified, which just goes to show how tricky this all is...
‘So apparently Free the Nipple campaign and showing your breasts in support of breast cancer - that's acceptable. Take your top off and appear in Page Three. Then this is deplorable. Empowering apparently if you get dressed up as #metoo women in beautiful designer black dresses on award ceremony, and terrible if you get dressed up beautifully and you’re on the F1 circuit. Utterly snobbish double standards get on my nerves in this discussion’...
'Objectification is a process that we all engage in. In order to have sexual relationships with each other, we’re sexual beings. We objectify our partners. They become an object of desire… I don't believe, when I go to work [as a stripper], that I'm automatically turned into just an object like a temptation or thing. I get spoken to, people engage in conversation, we talk about our lives, we talk about, customers will ask me who I am, but essentially what do I stand for, what do I believe? So that's in lots of ways.
One, I'm a stripper, a lot of what I go through is quite humanizing in lots of ways. I mean, I've done the job for ten years... I really don't feel trapped by the male gaze. I feel more trapped by the male gaze when I'm in the street in somewhere like Rome, or Paris where the sexual harassment that goes on while I'm just walking, doing, going about my business, certainly not inviting it, certainly not consenting to being objectified...
In some ways being objectified can be empowering... the dichotomy of if something is just empowering or subjugating, it's kind of, a bit misleading.'...
‘I very much agree with the French eminent women’s letter, hundred eminent women's letter that said, ‘This is an Anglo-Saxon Puritan reaction and it's a load of nonsense, really’...
‘People who have what I call erotic capital, who are attractive and know they’re attractive and know how to use it, make money out of it in perfectly legitimate ways. Just as people who have brains or qualifications or a skill with making money on oil markets make money from their activities.
We admire people who make millions out of insurance or something, which is not particularly admirable. Very often, it to people's disadvantage, but we criticize anyone who makes money out of, monetizes their erotic capital. Erotic capital actually has value. In rich societies, and we're getting richer all the time, in rich societies individuals and people and societies will spend more on luxury. Beauty is a luxury...
I don't find concepts like commodification and objectification useful… I don't think they're useful concepts. They don't actually tell you something that you need to know and didn't know. And I think they've been hugely over-used by people just to say, try and pretend that they're an intellectual, and they don't like something, so they use big words as if that makes what they're saying important or valuable or clever... In relation to people who are attractive, we admire them.
So when, for example, in June 2009, David Beckham was modeling Armani underpants and there was this massive poster that was hung from the top of Selfridges building, six stories high photo of a naked David Beckham in Armani underpants. There was a complete frenzy in the street of young women who came to see it, and apparently, some of then fainted with delight at this picture and David Beckham is making millions or did make at the time millions from what I would call modeling and was a politely called sponsorship for whatever. And I read that he had made a lot more from modeling than he made from his career as an athlete. No one objects to that…
‘Puritanism is a noble moral tradition, founded the United States of America, gave us democracy. What on earth is wrong with Puritanism?’
‘It is anti-sex, anti-luxury, anti-beauty-’...
‘What’s wrong with modesty? Modesty is an important moral category’...
‘We're in the 21th century by the way.’...
‘You keep using the word value, which I fully understand, but isn't it the case that what you're describing, could be used, could be described as a form of sexual teasing or enticement?
For example, there are, many of the actresses who've been going around saying #metoo, in objecting to the misuse of sexual misbehavior, themselves dress in scanty clothing, in sexually provocative ways. Isn’t the point that it's not objectification, it's merely sexualized behavior which you might say is very licentious and bad and degrading? But that's different from objectification.’
‘I think it's really difficult to tease apart the individual choice and behaviors from the societal level impacts and pressures. We don't exist in a vacuum. And women are disproportionately expected to commodify their bodies. And so I think it's really difficult to see some of those things as individual choice. I think we can't necessarily think that women are actually truly free to have those individual choices when they're still living in a society that is claiming ownership over their bodies’
‘Or is it the women claim that they have choice, unless you know better than them? I think maybe we should take their word seriously’...
'A lot of young women I meet when I talk in schools and universities, seem so caught up in this objectified world, in imagining that seeing these images are destroying their life forever, that they've almost become frightened of the female body, or showing it… the outcome of this could only possibly be until we get equality that what we should advise young women to do is to dress up in the burka or all the nuns’ habit to be religiously equal. But you know if objectification in the male gaze is so damaging maybe women should go back to the Victorian parlor and hide away.'...
'The contemporary debate that is going on at the moment basically says those women are dressing sexually and they are objectified victims. I am dressing beautifully sexually, because I'm a liberated feminist and it drives me mad. There’s a double standard'...
‘There is all the difference in the world it has to be said between middle class people feeling empowered about doing this and people who are trafficked and it shows that actually the big difference is a difference in power’
‘What you don't approve of, that’s the only difference’
‘Giles, complete hypocrisy. All these people prancing around the catwalk half undressed. saying #Metoo, please’
Ironically the modesty argument came from Giles Fraser, who would be upset about modesty and puritanism if they were used by white Christian men to tell women what they should wear
Women don't know their own minds, unless they have feminist views
Monday, October 08, 2018
Defining Gender
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Defining Gender
"I honestly think that you should be able to identify as anything you want and that’s, male, female, Marie Antoinette, black, white, whatever. What I worry about is a kind of tyranny that says then I have to and all public institutions have to acknowledge that and recognize it, which I think, identify what you want, but we don't have to change in relation to it. And I am nervous about a kind of walking on eggshells issue and a kind of fashion that's inciting the young to see this is the thing to do...
‘The Scottish government opposed it. That one shouldn't dispute the child's view. Now, you know children, growing up is a notoriously kind of confusing time. So when a child says, I am a robot or what have you, you don't just say Yes, you are… if a child self declares as in a different gender, do you challenge that? Is it okay to challenge that?’
‘You support it’
‘Why do you support that and not the other thing?... A young anorexic girl that I know would always say to me, ‘I'm fat. Look at me, I'm fat and I say no, you're not fat’, it’s objectively not true. So we shouldn't have to accept because a child declares that it’s true should we?’
‘No, but you support the child. It's almost a sort of Schrodinger’s support thing here. What you're actually doing is you're saying yes, we accept what you're telling us, we support you’...
‘I'm talking about a whole public institution’s now saying that things need to be reorganized around for example a child saying in a girls' school, I'm a boy, you must call me this name, and you must really re-organise around me’...
What I found was that the young women were saying that they had complex mental health problems and they felt that transition would alleviate them. So there was a lot of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, anxiety, very high rates of Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
Actually amongst people that go to gender clinics, research does show consistently that the rate of Autistic Spectrum Disorder is approximately six times higher than in the general population, and we don't know why. Again, we need more research.
The regretters, and the people who reversed their transition felt that it did not alleviate their problems, and that they saw their gender dysphoria as a reaction to their own histories of in some cases, sexual abuse, that the position of being a girl in society and that they hated their bodies, And so I was really taken aback because I hadn't realized that anything like that was happening on this scale...
Gender dysphoria - that is unhappiness with one's gender - is the only condition for which a doctor prescribes or performs surgery for which there is no test. It is diagnosed by a self-report from the patient...
As a clinician, I've been concerned with the medical treatment and surgeries that people have gone for. And so of course, somebody may say they’re anything they want to be, they have the right to do that, but we have a duty to do no harm. And so I found a book called Blood and Visions, which was published by a group of young women in the United States who had reversed their gender transitions and they were saying that they had felt they had been really harmed because when they went to the clinics - and this was in the States where the affirmation model of treatment is practiced widely in clinics - where in some cases the teenagers could get hormones on one or two half hour appointments and surgeries a few months later without parents’ permission, and they were saying that nobody had gone into their issues with more depth with them, on their underlying mental distress and their conflict hadn't been explored...
‘Why do you think that so many young progressive liberal minded youngsters, or teenagers, or young people are buying into the transgender doctrine as you put it?’
‘Well, it's become very, it's very popular now, and it's quite, I think it's become equated with an idea that, of progressivism, liberalism and that it actually allows people to be who they genuinely are. Would be all fine principles, which I agree with, but
I just don't think that transgender doctrine actually facilitates that. I think it's rather reactionary doctrine actually’...
'We must look at this issue within a social context. I don't think it was a case that 50 years ago, boy children was saying I'm really a girl. I think what happens is socially, we have narratives around gender and children, small children pick up what these narratives are and they, gender non-conforming children have lived throughout in many centuries. Language we use to describe it now...
It's the transgender doctrine which is constraining. What actually happens is a small child is told that there is something not quite right with its body, and it's actually got the brain. Or is really the other gender. And I think that that's very difficult for children, I think we're imposing. I think it's abusive actually, and I think we are imposing restrictions on children. We should be able to be as fluid and to be who we are without making that a problem of the male body or the female body...
If a child decides that it's an astronaut, one can play along with this. One doesn't have to moralise about it, but quite clearly the child is not an astronaut. One doesn't go along with the story. In fact it's incumbent upon adults who are responsible for the welfare, psychological and social and medical of children not to go along with this story'...
'You go into the realm of post-factual madness. You can change your birth certificate when you're a man to say that you were born a girl, even though you weren't born a girl.'"
"I honestly think that you should be able to identify as anything you want and that’s, male, female, Marie Antoinette, black, white, whatever. What I worry about is a kind of tyranny that says then I have to and all public institutions have to acknowledge that and recognize it, which I think, identify what you want, but we don't have to change in relation to it. And I am nervous about a kind of walking on eggshells issue and a kind of fashion that's inciting the young to see this is the thing to do...
‘The Scottish government opposed it. That one shouldn't dispute the child's view. Now, you know children, growing up is a notoriously kind of confusing time. So when a child says, I am a robot or what have you, you don't just say Yes, you are… if a child self declares as in a different gender, do you challenge that? Is it okay to challenge that?’
‘You support it’
‘Why do you support that and not the other thing?... A young anorexic girl that I know would always say to me, ‘I'm fat. Look at me, I'm fat and I say no, you're not fat’, it’s objectively not true. So we shouldn't have to accept because a child declares that it’s true should we?’
‘No, but you support the child. It's almost a sort of Schrodinger’s support thing here. What you're actually doing is you're saying yes, we accept what you're telling us, we support you’...
‘I'm talking about a whole public institution’s now saying that things need to be reorganized around for example a child saying in a girls' school, I'm a boy, you must call me this name, and you must really re-organise around me’...
What I found was that the young women were saying that they had complex mental health problems and they felt that transition would alleviate them. So there was a lot of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, anxiety, very high rates of Autistic Spectrum Disorder.
Actually amongst people that go to gender clinics, research does show consistently that the rate of Autistic Spectrum Disorder is approximately six times higher than in the general population, and we don't know why. Again, we need more research.
The regretters, and the people who reversed their transition felt that it did not alleviate their problems, and that they saw their gender dysphoria as a reaction to their own histories of in some cases, sexual abuse, that the position of being a girl in society and that they hated their bodies, And so I was really taken aback because I hadn't realized that anything like that was happening on this scale...
Gender dysphoria - that is unhappiness with one's gender - is the only condition for which a doctor prescribes or performs surgery for which there is no test. It is diagnosed by a self-report from the patient...
As a clinician, I've been concerned with the medical treatment and surgeries that people have gone for. And so of course, somebody may say they’re anything they want to be, they have the right to do that, but we have a duty to do no harm. And so I found a book called Blood and Visions, which was published by a group of young women in the United States who had reversed their gender transitions and they were saying that they had felt they had been really harmed because when they went to the clinics - and this was in the States where the affirmation model of treatment is practiced widely in clinics - where in some cases the teenagers could get hormones on one or two half hour appointments and surgeries a few months later without parents’ permission, and they were saying that nobody had gone into their issues with more depth with them, on their underlying mental distress and their conflict hadn't been explored...
‘Why do you think that so many young progressive liberal minded youngsters, or teenagers, or young people are buying into the transgender doctrine as you put it?’
‘Well, it's become very, it's very popular now, and it's quite, I think it's become equated with an idea that, of progressivism, liberalism and that it actually allows people to be who they genuinely are. Would be all fine principles, which I agree with, but
I just don't think that transgender doctrine actually facilitates that. I think it's rather reactionary doctrine actually’...
'We must look at this issue within a social context. I don't think it was a case that 50 years ago, boy children was saying I'm really a girl. I think what happens is socially, we have narratives around gender and children, small children pick up what these narratives are and they, gender non-conforming children have lived throughout in many centuries. Language we use to describe it now...
It's the transgender doctrine which is constraining. What actually happens is a small child is told that there is something not quite right with its body, and it's actually got the brain. Or is really the other gender. And I think that that's very difficult for children, I think we're imposing. I think it's abusive actually, and I think we are imposing restrictions on children. We should be able to be as fluid and to be who we are without making that a problem of the male body or the female body...
If a child decides that it's an astronaut, one can play along with this. One doesn't have to moralise about it, but quite clearly the child is not an astronaut. One doesn't go along with the story. In fact it's incumbent upon adults who are responsible for the welfare, psychological and social and medical of children not to go along with this story'...
'You go into the realm of post-factual madness. You can change your birth certificate when you're a man to say that you were born a girl, even though you weren't born a girl.'"
Links - 8th October 2018 (2)
Singapore has the world’s worst annual leave – and it could actually be shortening people’s lives - "while Singapore came out as the city with the world’s second highest life expectancy, researchers explained that it lost the top spot to Tokyo solely because of its poor annual leave numbers. The country came in dead last out of 89 cities for vacation leave, meaning people from every other city – including Hong Kong, New York and Seoul – had more vacation days on average. While statistics were generally taken from the UBS Global Cities Ranking 2018, a spokesman explained to Business Insider that Spotahome used Singapore’s state-mandated 7 days minimum annual leave as its data point"
Singapore has no minimum wage. Therefore Singaporean workers are paid $0
How a small dairy store from Ohio became one of the biggest names in the Japanese convenience store industry - "Japan, with its densely packed cities and increasing taste for modernization, was an ideal environment for the convenience store model. Lawson’s took off. Today, Lawson has over 14,000 stores in Japan. It’s the number three convenience store brand after 7-Eleven (~21,000 stores), and a homegrown rival called FamilyMart (~17,000 stores). For perspective, there are only around 10,000 7-Elevens in the United States and Canada combined... In Japan, convenience stores compete with restaurants and fast-food joints, said Michael Jacobs, a retail analyst at T. Rowe Price based in Tokyo, so the selection tends to be much better than your average American gas-and-go... Currently, the company has stores in China, Thailand, the Philippines, as well as two stores in Hawaii, which it established in 2012."
American Airlines Passengers Asked to Urinate in Plastic Bags - "The incident stemmed from a diaper that was flushed down one of the toilets, causing the problems. Passengers were forced to choose between bottles and bags and holding it for two hours prior to landing."
Almost Everything We Know About the Earliest Copies of the New Testament Is Wrong - "None of this is good news for those who, for religious reasons, want to use the existence of early manuscripts of the New Testament as evidence for the accuracy of scripture, the life of Jesus, or the status of the Bible in the first centuries of the Common Era. Anyone who previously thought that the manuscripts of the New Testament proved anything about the accuracy or authenticity of God’s message should read Nongbri’s book."
Why Does Donald Trump Want the Death Penalty for the New York Attack, But Not for Others? [Updated] | GQ - "An earlier version of this article used a headline noting that Trump had publicly called for the death penalty in the New York attack, but not the Las Vegas shooting in particular. That discrepancy is probably related to the fact that the Las Vegas shooter is dead. We regret the error."
Allen Lobo's answer to Are things actually bad in Venezuela or is that capitalist propaganda? - Quora - "The highest judge in the land is a convicted MURDERER. Not merely corrupt. Not even a thief, trafficker, crook or fraud. A convicted killer. Did that sink in and has it exploded yet?"
Of course, this is more capitalist propaganda!
Syrian refugee Ibrahim Ali is charged with murder of Vancouver schoolgirl Marrisa Shen, 13, a case that stunned Canada
Study: Male Scientists Publish More, Women Cited More - "During year 10, for example, 40 percent of the women published no articles at all, compared with about 20 percent of men. But even top producers reflected the trend: During year 17, the top 5 percent of women averaged 3.5 or more papers. The top 5 percent of men published five or more papers. Since men had more papers, men also had more overall citations. But women had more citations per paper. By the end of the 17 years, the average paper by a woman was cited 1.5 times more often than the average paper by a man."
Diminishing marginal output
Research shows four in five experts cited in online news are men - "After surveying more than 1,000 economists from 18 countries, the researchers found that female economists were far more likely than men to prefer government interventions over market solutions. They were also more likely to be in favour of increased environmental protection, to think that labour market policies were unequal, and were slightly more likely to disapprove of austerity"
Given that people also complain about how there's a lack of women in various fields, the finding that most experts quoted by the media are men is hardly surprising
Men cite themselves more than women do - "Men cite their own papers 56% more than women on average, according to an analysis of 1.5 million studies published between 1779 and 2011... academics working in ecology and evolution, sociology and molecular biology are the most likely to cite themselves, whereas historians and classical studies scholars are the least likely."
The Gender Citation Gap in International Relations - "women are systematically cited less than men after controlling for a large number of variables including year of publication, venue of publication, substantive focus, theoretical perspective, methodology, tenure status, and institutional affiliation"
Women In Academia Are Less Likely Than Men To Cooperate With Lower-Ranked Colleagues - "In society, there is a belief that women will be more cooperative than men. In academia, that is not the case, according to a paper in Current Biology. Instead, women in academia are less likely to cooperate than men. The findings are based on an analysis of the publication records of professors working at 50 North American universities.And the lack of cooperation is most evident in an area where women overwhelmingly dominate - psychology. "People are often upset to hear evidence of sex differences in behavior," says Joyce Benenson of Harvard University. "But the more we know, the more easily we can promote a fair society." Males cooperate more in nature also, such as we see among other primates"
I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories - "I would need to contact around 1.3 men to get one male quote, and around 1.6 women to get one female one... Finding diverse sources, and tracking them, takes time, but not that much time. I reckon it adds 15 minutes per piece, or an hour or so of effort over a week. That seems like a trifling amount, and the bare minimum that journalists should strive for... I’m not asking people for their opinions because of their gender; I’m asking because of their expertise. Every single person I contact is qualified to speak about the particular story that I’m writing; it’s just that now, half of those qualified people happen to be women."
This is one example of the liberal reasoning that you don't need the best qualified person for the job - just one adequately qualified (who ticks the right boxes)
Imam Tawhidi on Twitter - "When the ‘Far-Left’ label me “Far-Right”, I sit and wonder how they won’t let us assume someone’s gender, but will falsely assume someone’s political identity."
Twitter Suspends Benghazi Hero Kris Paronto for Pointing Out Obama Did Not Actually Kill Bin Laden - "Twitter cannot claim Paronto was suspended over the word “retard,” a quick search finds that word all over Twitter. What’s more, Paronto used the word within the context of the movie Tropic Thunder’s catchphrase, “Never go full retard.”"
Swedish Prime Minister: Priests Should Be Forced to Perform Same-Sex Weddings - "Stefan Löfven, a Social Democrat, compared priests who refuse to wed same-sex couples with midwives refusing to carry out abortions"
BREAKING: Newly Revealed Email Shows Google's Bias Against Trump In 2016 Election, Report Says - ""In her email, Murillo touts Google's multifaceted efforts to boost Hispanic in the election," Carlson said. "She knows that Latinos voted in record-breaking numbers, especially in states like Florida, Nevada, and Arizona." Carlson reported that Murillo said that Arizona was a "key state for us," and bragged that the company "used its power to ensure that millions of people saw certain hashtags and social media impressions with the goal of influencing their behavior during the election."... The revelation comes as pressure has mounted against the tech giant over its alleged bias against conservatives, and as Twitter and Facebook both face similar concerns from their users... a newly released study "found that 90 percent of political donations by Google, YouTube, and other subsidiaries of Alphabet have gone to Democrats.""
Sweden election 2018: 'DEATH THREATS and ATTACKS' reported at Swedish polling stations - "two members of the Sweden Democrats were attacked and verbally abused... attackers began screaming at her calling her a “whore” and a “racist” as she campaigned in Nynäshamn, 35 miles south of Stockholm."
Against the "far right", violence is apparently justified
Swedish Election 2018: ‘60% of RAPISTS born abroad’ – will crime stat tip election? - "The Mission Investigation programme, broadcast by SVT, said the total number of men convicted of rape or attempted rape in the last five years was 843. Of those 58 percent were born abroad - 197 were from the Middle East and North Africa, with 45 coming from Afghanistan, and the rest from South Africa and other non-European countries."
Suddenly, the Swedes are talking about their refugee problem - "The best thing about living in a city where two in five people have a foreign background – apart from cheap garages and tasty falafel – is enjoying the small talk with strangers that Swedes see as unnecessary. The Swedish Theory of Love, a documentary that came out last Friday, blames an epidemic of loneliness in the country on the radical welfare reforms enacted in the Seventies, through which the state intervened to free Swedes from economic dependence on each other. That has created a country where one in four people die in hospital without friends or relatives by their side, the film argues. It’s beautifully made, darkly comic and thoroughly depressing, and the film’s Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini has been predictably vilified. So much in Sweden seems designed to prevent human contact: the little machines that mean you never have to take change from a shop assistant’s hand; the number slips that spare you having to jostle next to anyone in a queue. Could the renowned welfare state be just another way of allowing people to be alone?"
Study: Hiring a Diversity Officer Doesn't Increase a University's Faculty Diversity - "Study author Steven Bradley, a professor of entrepreneurship at Baylor University, said that universities establish a chief diversity officer position in order to “signal” their commitment to diversity."
Bokhari: Twitter Aids Left-Wing Extremists While Banning Conservatives - "One example stood out: the verification process. Verification was initially intended to confirm the authenticity of an account. As Dorsey himself explained, it originated during a flu scare in 2009 to confirm that the CDC’s account was legitimate. But Twitter now uses verification as a signal to determine whose tweets should be given more visibility in shared areas of the site, like conversations, search results, and hashtags. As the company admitted earlier this year, it has also become seen as a stamp of endorsement from the platform... Democrats continue to call social media bias a “conspiracy theory,” but the examples of double standards continue to pile up."
Nolte: 'Star Trek' Actor Wil Wheaton Blacklisted on Social Media by Fellow SJWs - "the mob of tattletale hall monitors Wheaton helped empower had him blacklisted from Mastodon using the fascist online rules Wheaton helped normalize."
MPs raise banning smoking in one’s own HDB flat
This won't help the case that you own your flat
Saudi Arabia detains Egyptian who ate breakfast with female coworker - "The public prosecutor later issued a statement urging foreign residents to adhere to the kingdom's laws and respect its values and traditions."
Singapore has no minimum wage. Therefore Singaporean workers are paid $0
How a small dairy store from Ohio became one of the biggest names in the Japanese convenience store industry - "Japan, with its densely packed cities and increasing taste for modernization, was an ideal environment for the convenience store model. Lawson’s took off. Today, Lawson has over 14,000 stores in Japan. It’s the number three convenience store brand after 7-Eleven (~21,000 stores), and a homegrown rival called FamilyMart (~17,000 stores). For perspective, there are only around 10,000 7-Elevens in the United States and Canada combined... In Japan, convenience stores compete with restaurants and fast-food joints, said Michael Jacobs, a retail analyst at T. Rowe Price based in Tokyo, so the selection tends to be much better than your average American gas-and-go... Currently, the company has stores in China, Thailand, the Philippines, as well as two stores in Hawaii, which it established in 2012."
American Airlines Passengers Asked to Urinate in Plastic Bags - "The incident stemmed from a diaper that was flushed down one of the toilets, causing the problems. Passengers were forced to choose between bottles and bags and holding it for two hours prior to landing."
Almost Everything We Know About the Earliest Copies of the New Testament Is Wrong - "None of this is good news for those who, for religious reasons, want to use the existence of early manuscripts of the New Testament as evidence for the accuracy of scripture, the life of Jesus, or the status of the Bible in the first centuries of the Common Era. Anyone who previously thought that the manuscripts of the New Testament proved anything about the accuracy or authenticity of God’s message should read Nongbri’s book."
Why Does Donald Trump Want the Death Penalty for the New York Attack, But Not for Others? [Updated] | GQ - "An earlier version of this article used a headline noting that Trump had publicly called for the death penalty in the New York attack, but not the Las Vegas shooting in particular. That discrepancy is probably related to the fact that the Las Vegas shooter is dead. We regret the error."
Allen Lobo's answer to Are things actually bad in Venezuela or is that capitalist propaganda? - Quora - "The highest judge in the land is a convicted MURDERER. Not merely corrupt. Not even a thief, trafficker, crook or fraud. A convicted killer. Did that sink in and has it exploded yet?"
Of course, this is more capitalist propaganda!
Syrian refugee Ibrahim Ali is charged with murder of Vancouver schoolgirl Marrisa Shen, 13, a case that stunned Canada
Study: Male Scientists Publish More, Women Cited More - "During year 10, for example, 40 percent of the women published no articles at all, compared with about 20 percent of men. But even top producers reflected the trend: During year 17, the top 5 percent of women averaged 3.5 or more papers. The top 5 percent of men published five or more papers. Since men had more papers, men also had more overall citations. But women had more citations per paper. By the end of the 17 years, the average paper by a woman was cited 1.5 times more often than the average paper by a man."
Diminishing marginal output
Research shows four in five experts cited in online news are men - "After surveying more than 1,000 economists from 18 countries, the researchers found that female economists were far more likely than men to prefer government interventions over market solutions. They were also more likely to be in favour of increased environmental protection, to think that labour market policies were unequal, and were slightly more likely to disapprove of austerity"
Given that people also complain about how there's a lack of women in various fields, the finding that most experts quoted by the media are men is hardly surprising
Men cite themselves more than women do - "Men cite their own papers 56% more than women on average, according to an analysis of 1.5 million studies published between 1779 and 2011... academics working in ecology and evolution, sociology and molecular biology are the most likely to cite themselves, whereas historians and classical studies scholars are the least likely."
The Gender Citation Gap in International Relations - "women are systematically cited less than men after controlling for a large number of variables including year of publication, venue of publication, substantive focus, theoretical perspective, methodology, tenure status, and institutional affiliation"
Women In Academia Are Less Likely Than Men To Cooperate With Lower-Ranked Colleagues - "In society, there is a belief that women will be more cooperative than men. In academia, that is not the case, according to a paper in Current Biology. Instead, women in academia are less likely to cooperate than men. The findings are based on an analysis of the publication records of professors working at 50 North American universities.And the lack of cooperation is most evident in an area where women overwhelmingly dominate - psychology. "People are often upset to hear evidence of sex differences in behavior," says Joyce Benenson of Harvard University. "But the more we know, the more easily we can promote a fair society." Males cooperate more in nature also, such as we see among other primates"
I Spent Two Years Trying to Fix the Gender Imbalance in My Stories - "I would need to contact around 1.3 men to get one male quote, and around 1.6 women to get one female one... Finding diverse sources, and tracking them, takes time, but not that much time. I reckon it adds 15 minutes per piece, or an hour or so of effort over a week. That seems like a trifling amount, and the bare minimum that journalists should strive for... I’m not asking people for their opinions because of their gender; I’m asking because of their expertise. Every single person I contact is qualified to speak about the particular story that I’m writing; it’s just that now, half of those qualified people happen to be women."
This is one example of the liberal reasoning that you don't need the best qualified person for the job - just one adequately qualified (who ticks the right boxes)
Imam Tawhidi on Twitter - "When the ‘Far-Left’ label me “Far-Right”, I sit and wonder how they won’t let us assume someone’s gender, but will falsely assume someone’s political identity."
Twitter Suspends Benghazi Hero Kris Paronto for Pointing Out Obama Did Not Actually Kill Bin Laden - "Twitter cannot claim Paronto was suspended over the word “retard,” a quick search finds that word all over Twitter. What’s more, Paronto used the word within the context of the movie Tropic Thunder’s catchphrase, “Never go full retard.”"
Swedish Prime Minister: Priests Should Be Forced to Perform Same-Sex Weddings - "Stefan Löfven, a Social Democrat, compared priests who refuse to wed same-sex couples with midwives refusing to carry out abortions"
BREAKING: Newly Revealed Email Shows Google's Bias Against Trump In 2016 Election, Report Says - ""In her email, Murillo touts Google's multifaceted efforts to boost Hispanic in the election," Carlson said. "She knows that Latinos voted in record-breaking numbers, especially in states like Florida, Nevada, and Arizona." Carlson reported that Murillo said that Arizona was a "key state for us," and bragged that the company "used its power to ensure that millions of people saw certain hashtags and social media impressions with the goal of influencing their behavior during the election."... The revelation comes as pressure has mounted against the tech giant over its alleged bias against conservatives, and as Twitter and Facebook both face similar concerns from their users... a newly released study "found that 90 percent of political donations by Google, YouTube, and other subsidiaries of Alphabet have gone to Democrats.""
Sweden election 2018: 'DEATH THREATS and ATTACKS' reported at Swedish polling stations - "two members of the Sweden Democrats were attacked and verbally abused... attackers began screaming at her calling her a “whore” and a “racist” as she campaigned in Nynäshamn, 35 miles south of Stockholm."
Against the "far right", violence is apparently justified
Swedish Election 2018: ‘60% of RAPISTS born abroad’ – will crime stat tip election? - "The Mission Investigation programme, broadcast by SVT, said the total number of men convicted of rape or attempted rape in the last five years was 843. Of those 58 percent were born abroad - 197 were from the Middle East and North Africa, with 45 coming from Afghanistan, and the rest from South Africa and other non-European countries."
Suddenly, the Swedes are talking about their refugee problem - "The best thing about living in a city where two in five people have a foreign background – apart from cheap garages and tasty falafel – is enjoying the small talk with strangers that Swedes see as unnecessary. The Swedish Theory of Love, a documentary that came out last Friday, blames an epidemic of loneliness in the country on the radical welfare reforms enacted in the Seventies, through which the state intervened to free Swedes from economic dependence on each other. That has created a country where one in four people die in hospital without friends or relatives by their side, the film argues. It’s beautifully made, darkly comic and thoroughly depressing, and the film’s Italian-Swedish director Erik Gandini has been predictably vilified. So much in Sweden seems designed to prevent human contact: the little machines that mean you never have to take change from a shop assistant’s hand; the number slips that spare you having to jostle next to anyone in a queue. Could the renowned welfare state be just another way of allowing people to be alone?"
Study: Hiring a Diversity Officer Doesn't Increase a University's Faculty Diversity - "Study author Steven Bradley, a professor of entrepreneurship at Baylor University, said that universities establish a chief diversity officer position in order to “signal” their commitment to diversity."
Bokhari: Twitter Aids Left-Wing Extremists While Banning Conservatives - "One example stood out: the verification process. Verification was initially intended to confirm the authenticity of an account. As Dorsey himself explained, it originated during a flu scare in 2009 to confirm that the CDC’s account was legitimate. But Twitter now uses verification as a signal to determine whose tweets should be given more visibility in shared areas of the site, like conversations, search results, and hashtags. As the company admitted earlier this year, it has also become seen as a stamp of endorsement from the platform... Democrats continue to call social media bias a “conspiracy theory,” but the examples of double standards continue to pile up."
Nolte: 'Star Trek' Actor Wil Wheaton Blacklisted on Social Media by Fellow SJWs - "the mob of tattletale hall monitors Wheaton helped empower had him blacklisted from Mastodon using the fascist online rules Wheaton helped normalize."
MPs raise banning smoking in one’s own HDB flat
This won't help the case that you own your flat
Saudi Arabia detains Egyptian who ate breakfast with female coworker - "The public prosecutor later issued a statement urging foreign residents to adhere to the kingdom's laws and respect its values and traditions."