Links - 16th April 2019 (2)

The true history of The Favourite - History Extra - "It was so hard to think an audience was going to buy this idea about female political power before the suffrage because we're so wedded to the notion that women in politics is a modern innovation, that there's been a long struggle to get the vote and that women had no place in politics until you know, the modern End of History. And so to suddenly introduce the idea that women at the heart of politics early throws the audience in terms of what they're expecting from the past. And so I think The Favourite has done us a huge service in saying these women are politically powerful, they’re independent and strong...
I felt at certain points, the film was so self conscious in its desire to meet the qualifications of a Bechtel test that they over played the hand and I think, to the point where you get an anti feminist’s picture of what, you know, a feminist or a woman is. Which is, you know, you know, a powerful woman is a woman who is a lesbian, eschews male physical interaction, is is, you know, strides around in men's clothes, is violent, you know, is not soft and approachable and feminine. And I think, I think, you know, as I say, I think they sort of overplayed their hand."

A global history of philosophy - History Extra - "In the English speaking world, actually, there hasn't been that much interest in history of philosophy. We've tended to study philosophy very ahistorically which I think has been a great mistake. So you know, the the cliche about this, which is partly true, is that people read Plato as though he'd written a paper for the journal Mind, the contemporary thing. And people don't think they would have to understand anything about the Athens of the time and how it was different. And when he starts talking about, you know, demons and gods, people just say, well, we'll just put that to one side, that's just him being poetic. So one of the reasons why there hasn't been a lot of it is that philosophers themselves have not been sufficiently interested in the historical dimension of the subject... philosophy itself has become defined in a very narrow way. So on the continent, you know, philosophy is part of political and social thought. And so people in British universities are put in sociology departments. In their European countries, they’re put in philosophy departments. So we've almost like deliberately narrowed the scope of philosophy. And this is quite contemporary, it's very recent, I've been recently doing a lot of work on Hume and David Hume, 18th century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, he wrote his philosophical works which you study now. He also wrote essays. And he also wrote history. And these essays and histories are generally ignored. And they're seen by a lot of people as like him losing his focus on his philosophical work. But at the time, he was a man of letters, as they called it. A man of letters, it wasn't narrow philosophy. It was philosophy, politics, history, and he saw history is as part of his philosophical project, because he was trying to understand human nature in a more empirical, experimental way. And for him, history is like a series of experiments, if you like, in how humans behave in different situations"

Avocado hand: why the fruit has become a health hazard - "the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons wants safety-warning labels placed on avocados. “There is minimal understanding of how to handle them,” the honorary secretary of Bapras, Simon Eccles, told the Times. “Perhaps we could have a cartoon picture of an avocado with a knife, and a big red cross going through it?”... Eccles says he treats four people a week for avocado hand. Meryl Streep was afflicted in 2012, and many sufferers complain that the worst aspect is the stigma."

Benjamin Johnson's answer to Is Kylo Ren a better character than Darth Vader? - Quora - "Kylo Ren doesn't have agency; none of the First Order leaders have it, for that matter, but Kylo Ren is particularly bad. Kylo Ren apologists try to excuse his defeat by Rey with the excuse that he'd just been shot by Chewie. But really, that just makes Kylo Ren look even more pathetic. Because that would not have slown down Vader at all; Vader would have deflected and/or absorbed the blast and then proceeded to slaughter both Rey AND Chewie. That Kylo Ren couldn't do that despite being Vader's grandson makes him a very pathetic character...
Kylo Ren has about as much depth as a puddle. We're never given any reason why he turned to the Dark Side, or why he joined the First Order, he's just an emo punk who thinks that being evil is “edgy”. He fanboys his grandfather but doesn't really understand him; Vader would see him as a massive disappointment. The irony is that the character Kylo Ren was based on, Darth Caedus, was actually a well developed character."

Twitter 'suspends' Rachael Swindon's anti-Tory account - "A prominent left wing activist has had her Twitter account suspended.The Rachael_Swindon account, which is run by 43-year-old mum from Swindon Rachael Cousins, is prolific - tweeting around 40 times a day with more than 60,000 followers.It has a large number of high profile supporters - including singer Lily Allen.But the account had been criticised for some of its more vitriolic comments and previous remarks about the Rothschild family, a widely-recognised anti-Semitic trope... As soon as followers found out about the suspension, supporters quickly rallied around the account using the hashtag #freetheswindon1 to call for its reinstatement."
Raheem Kassam on Twitter - "Oh look. Twitter has started to ban hard left people, too. And suddenly the left is going to start caring about free speech."

"Artists" Explain Why They Put White Men in MAGA Hats on Leashes and 'Walked' Them on Donald Trump's Star in Hollywood ...Update - ""The project, entitled ‘Hate Breed’, speaks to race relations in America, specifically the patience exhibited by those most affected by racism and bigotry and their willingness, despite having the greatest right to anger, to walk their attackers down a path to empathy"... The men wore dog collars with tags that each had the name of a “racist white man.”... This “art” comes at a time when assaults on Trump supporters appears to be on the rise... None of these incidents have received mainstream media coverage."
"Anti-racism"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Children and the Internet - "There was an online survey, which indicates that teenage pregnancies gone down, because apparently lots of teenagers spending all this time kind of virtually getting sexually titillated, rather than doing the real thing...
Parents are now more worried about cyberbullying than face to face bullying, but, you know, we do studies here at Oxford, and we find, you know, surveying hundreds of thousands of young people that face to face bullying is more than eight times more common than cyberbullying. And 90% of those who are cyber bullied are also bullied face to face. So, you know, if we focus on these kinds of things about the internet, because they're flashy, and we really kind of get wrapped up in our concerns on these kinds of fears can distract us from from meaningful interventions"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Climate Change - "What is our moral responsibility? To the planet, to future generations, to the poor people of the world who badly want what we have? Might we be putting the theoretical interests of rich people's great grandchildren above the immediate needs of third world children today?... Some of what environmentalists demand of us is too much and could actually make life not worth living. And what I would like to explore is where they get their sense of moral and political authority from to ask us to do these things"

The Screen - Posts - "So I was in the ladies room in McDonald's today when this male employee just comes in and starts cleaning. I flushed to toilet and he still didn't leave. It made me super uncomfortable. Am I over reacting or is that messed up. I am a transgender female and use the ladies room where I feel safer and this totally defeats the purpose"
"Is this hypocrisy?"

FandomWire - Posts
The degeneration of Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique

Oxford Men's Rights Action - Posts - "**** New Gillette Deodorant Ad 'Every Hero Sweats' ***
Gillette obviously felt the heat after watching their profits drop through the floor, as a direct result of their last male-hating ad"

The Circle of Diversity - "We Demand to Be Included in Your Space to Make It More 'Diverse' and 'Inclusive'"
"We Demand You Change This Space to Our Liking and Ban Stuff That Offends Us"
"We Demand You Be Kicked Out of This Space We 'Created' Since You Offended Us"
"Lol if You Hate Us Why Not Just Make Your Own Space"

Facebook Pulls Tommy Robinson's Instagram Account - But Not Before Allowing Him A Parting Shot - "The move to remove him from Facebook and Instagram comes too late, according to shadow culture secretary Tom Watson."For far too long the hate-spilling, anti-Islamic tirades of violent thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, have been given a platform on Facebook. The social media giant has even allowed this puppet of the global fascist movement to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds through its charity-giving Donate button," he says."I welcome Facebook's decision to remove Tommy Robinson pages under their 'Organised Hate' policy. But for far too long this violent thug's hate-spewing, anti-Islamist tirades were given a platform by Facebook. Today's decision comes far too late.""
Labour comes out in support of Islamists

Meme - "I HATE WHITE PEOPLE" "I HATE STRAIGHT PEOPLE" "I HATE MEN"
"I disagree with the hateful things you are saying, however I believe you should be free to express those views"
"That's offensive!!" "That's hate speech! You're under arrest!!"

Paul Tambyah says a POSB branch manager was afraid to take a picture with him in case he gets “marked”

Ravi Philemon - I don't blame the bank manager.Dr Paul Tambyah is... - "I don't blame the bank manager.Dr Paul Tambyah is an exception. I had to resign from a well-paid job to contest the last general election. After the election, I applied for a few jobs, and was shortlisted for a number of them, but was eventually not selected because of my political affiliations... The chairman of another NGO which had shortlisted me in a similar manner was more straight-forward. He said, "you are eminently qualified for the position, but we cannot offer the position to you because of your politics."After this interview I felt like I had committed a 'crime' by contesting the election as an opposition candidate.So in Singapore, there is an opportunity-cost in being affiliated to the opposition. Worse, if you put yourself out there as a candidate for an opposition party."

subtle asian traits
Combined squat/sitting toilet

Kosoko Jackson’s A Place for Wolves book scandal suggests YA Twitter is getting uglier. - "Until recently, Kosoko Jackson was considered an expert in the trapdoors of identity-related rhetoric. Jackson worked as a “sensitivity reader” for major publishers of YA fiction, a job that entails reading manuscripts and flagging them for problematic content. His own debut novel, A Place for Wolves, was promoted as an “#ownvoices” book, a hashtag attached approvingly to books in which the author shares a particular marginalized identity with his subject. (Jackson is black and queer.) He believed that, for example, women shouldn’t “profit” from writing gay men’s stories, as he tweeted last year. And he was part of a small and informal but intense online community that scolded writers who ran afoul of these values in their work or online. Now, Jackson has been demonized by the community he once helped police... Both Jackson and Zhang are people of color who now see their careers hobbled in an industry that claims to be laser-focused on diversity... we’ve gotten an increasingly toxic online culture around YA literature, with evermore-baroque standards for who can write about whom under what circumstances. From the outside, this is starting to look like a conversation focused less on literature than obedience... a 2012 study found that 55 percent of YA readers are adults, a percentage I suspect has risen since then. (I lamented this trend back in 2014 in an essay that made me an enemy of YA Twitter along a different fault line.) This is a conversation among adults about books that are written by adults and largely read by adults, shredding each other’s reputations under the guise of protecting the children."
Aka pandering to SJWs - a losing strategy since offence can and will always be found (since that is the point)