Links - 11th May 2019 (1)

Why I Won’t Hate Racist White Boys - "I wish I had said something that night. I wish that I had jumped off the top bunk, flipped on the light, and looked into each of their eyes to let them know the true weight of their words, but I can’t go back in time. No, when I think back to that moment, what I’m most proud of is that I didn’t allow myself to hate, because it would have undoubtedly spread throughout my body like cancer, destroying the best parts of me. And right now, as I write this, I can say I am no longer tired. In fact, I am more awake than ever."

Stop Penalizing Boys for Not Being Able to Sit Still - "boys are kept back in schools at twice the rate of girls. Boys get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls. Boys are diagnosed with learning disorders and attention problems at nearly four times the rate of girls. They do less homework and get a greater proportion of the low grades. Boys are more likely to drop out of school, and make up only 43 percent of college students. Furthermore, boys are nearly three times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Considering 11 percent of U.S. children—6.4 million in all—have been diagnosed with a ADHD, that's a lot of boys bouncing around U.S. classrooms... The most effective lessons included more than one of these elements:
Lessons that result in an end product—a booklet, a catapult, a poem, or a comic strip, for example.
Lessons that are structured as competitive games.
Lessons requiring motor activity.
Lessons requiring boys to assume responsibility for the learning of others.
Lessons that require boys to address open questions or unsolved problems.
Lessons that require a combination of competition and teamwork.
Lessons that focus on independent, personal discovery and realization.
Lessons that introduce drama in the form of novelty or surprise...
"To provide rights and opportunities to girls is important; to call for the diminution of males, to decry their 'toxicity' as [Richard Hawley] has put it so poignantly, has not served boys and girls—or men and women—well ... May we all find ways of understanding even better this complex 'piece of work' called man.""
Strange, you'd think the feminists would be on this given they claim feminism helps/is for men too

How Our Commitment to Feminism in Advertising Is Stifling Boys - ""Mommy, can only girls be legendary?"My three-year-old son, glued to the Disney Channel's DuckTales, had spotted a commercial break with a group of young female stars dancing around a school campus, singing about how “you can be legendary." ... I had been so consumed with female empowerment in the fight for gender equality that I had overlooked my son. At just three years old, he was already picking up on the saturation of the media’s “girl power” messaging, and was now confused about his own role in the world.After all, how can we advocate for inclusion if we’re not considering their portrayal in the media too? Are advertisements and corporate brands actually encouraging equality, or perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes when it comes to boys?"

Boys Dressed as Girls Who Became Serial Killers - "It seems logical that if your mother does not accept who you are in your most fundamental form, this attitude would have a negative impact... Regardless of the general effect of dressing boys like girls, it does seem clear that for at least three of these offenders, their mothers' decisions to treat them as girls did influence their development into violent predators with specific paraphilia – at least, as they tell it."
Luckily this came out in 2016. But maybe we will see interesting results in a decade, given how much gender bending we see with kids nowadays

State run Swedish kindergarten forces boys to wear a dress - "The children are not to be called “he” or “she”, they must all be called “hen”, a gender neutral pronoun with boys being forced to dress like girls... even the books in the kindergarten are reviewed and all gender references changed to the “correct” terms to the current “genus theory”.Popular children’s books such as Emil and Pippi have been discarded and replaced with children’s books on trans and homosexuality. Group discussions with children as young as one and two talk about boys falling in love with boys and girls falling in love with girls. At times the children are asked about whom they are in love... it is not even permissible to tell a child with new clothes that they look nice nor are they allowed to tell a child that they are cute. Word such as “boy”, “girl”, “mum” and “dad” are forbidden. Only gender-neutral terms are allowed."

The Last Minority - "Passing on the Right is based on 153 interviews with conservative professors in humanities and social sciences departments—literature, history, sociology, philosophy, political science, and economics. The authors excluded the “studies” fields—gender studies, Middle Eastern studies, race and ethnic studies, and so on—disciplines dominated by “activist-scholars” that they identify as “no-go zones,” not just for conservatives, but for mainstream liberals as well.Nonetheless, right-of-center professors were hard to find. “The percentage of self-identified conservatives” they write in the introduction, “ranges between 5% and 17% in the social sciences and between 4% and 8% in the humanities.” Those conservatives that they could find were heavily concentrated in economics and political science departments, and were particularly scarce at elite institutions. “We identified only two conservatives at Princeton and two at Yale,” they explain at the website Heterodox Academy. “We found a single conservative at Dartmouth, and one at Brown as well. At Cornell we identified no conservatives in the fields we examined. We also identified no conservatives at Columbia.”... Despite (or perhaps because of) its almost religious reverence for racial and sexual diversity, the academy has allowed political diversity in certain quarters to wither to the point of vanishing... The reason that political homogeneity matters in the academy—indeed, the reason that it arguably matters more there than in other professions—goes back to the Enlightenment tradition that birthed the very disciplines under discussion in this book. In his 1993 work, Kindly Inquisitors, Jonathan Rauch argued that the most important legacy of the Enlightenment is the invention of what he calls “liberal science”—the idea that knowledge can only be created through a competitive and decentralized process in which ideas and theories are continuously challenged, falsified, and refined. An academic class in thrall to a political orthodoxy will naturally be less likely to challenge ideas that fall within this orthodoxy, and more likely to reject, wholesale, ideas that fall outside it. That’s why one of the most disturbing sections of the book was the story of the American Sociological Association’s decision, made under intense political pressure, to effectively bury the research of Mark Regnerus, a sociologist who suggested that children raised by gay parents experienced worse outcomes along some dimensions than children raised by straight parents... (Of course, some academics argue that the range of political views represented in the academy is already plenty broad—after all, in some departments, standard liberals are regularly challenged by a strong Marxist contingent)... conservatism, at its best, is not just a set of substantive positions—that it’s also a disposition favoring personal responsibility over grievance politics, and incremental reform over revolutionary upheaval."

Why Didn't Mao Invade Taiwan? - "March 1, 1950, was a pivotal date in the history of cross-Strait relations. That evening, after a long interrogation session, Mao's spymaster in Taiwan cracked under pressure and defected. He became a ROC military officer and, in return, gained his girlfriend's freedom, a huge sum of gold, and a high-ranking position in the military. To earn his generous reward, Cai fingered General Wu Shi and Agent Zhu Fengzhi, and revealed the identities of his other collaborators, exposing every major communist officer on the island."
Addendum: "On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, and U.S. President Harry Truman swiftly decided to save South Korea’s friendly government, while also ordering the U.S. Seventh Fleet to prevent a possible Chinese invasion across the Taiwan Strait.  As a consequence, China's new government aborted the Taiwan invasion, and many of the forces that had been training for the mission were subsequently redeployed to the Sino-Korean border area. In October 1950, “Red” China intervened on the side of North Korea, sending a flood of troops equipped with jungle warfare kits into frigid battles against the United Nations forces led by the United States. This intervention resulted in what was to become two drawn-out and dangerous stalemates which still exist today: one on the Korean Peninsula, the other across the Taiwan Strait"

Taiwan's White Terror - "At the time of the Japanese surrender, many Taiwanese still regarded themselves as Chinese and welcomed mainland Nationalist rule as a return to the motherland. But soon they began to bitterly resent Nationalist rule, which was nearly as authoritarian as that of the Japanese colonial government — and nowhere near as honest and efficient. The "pigs," it was said, had replaced the "dogs."... Tokyo sought to transform Taiwan into a model colony, modernizing and expanding the island's infrastructure. This included the laying of thousands of miles of railway track. Literacy skyrocketed as Taiwanese children were enrolled in mandatory education through the eighth grade. Many went on to receive university education either at the Taihoku (Taipei) Imperial University or Japan's prestigious universities — usually in technical subjects that made them productive imperial assets. Many of these elite Taiwanese acculturated to Japanese values and appreciated the orderliness of Japanese rule. The Japanese built high-end department stores, frequented by both Taiwanese and the large Japanese expatriate community. While Japanese laws were harsh, they created a degree of order absent under the repressive Nationalist dictatorship that followed. Many elderly Taiwanese fondly recall a time when they could leave their homes unlocked without fear of being robbed... Nationalist troops had arrived from Fujian province, retaking Taipei and violently pacifying the countryside. For three days, anyone seen in the streets was shot. By April, the government had arrested all the leaders of the uprising and executed between 3,000 and 4,000 people. Historians put the toll of what came to be known as the "228 Incident" much higher. Many Taiwanese elite, the Japanese-trained intelligentsia, technocrats and teachers, around whom revolt could coalesce, were killed. This inaugurated four decades of what was later known as "White Terror," in which Taiwan became a national security state ruled in large part through fear and coercion... Today, even the grandchildren of the 2 million mainlanders who followed Generalissimo Chiang to Taiwan increasingly identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. It is an identity forged in the 228 Incident and in direct contradiction with the One China Policy... The Taiwanese see the Chinese government under President Xi Jinping cracking down on the mainland and in Hong Kong, despite the latter's supposed autonomy. Having fought for decades to free themselves from an extraneous and autocratic mainland regime, most Taiwanese have no desire to subject themselves to increased Chinese authority — or, in their minds, to the dark days of White Terror."
When foreign colonialism is better than the 'local' type

Taiwan Can Win a War With China – Foreign Policy - "Despite the vast discrepancy in size between the two countries, there’s a real possibility that Taiwan could fight off a Chinese attack—even without direct aid from the United States... The invasion will happen in April or October. Because of the challenges posed by the strait’s weather, a transport fleet can only make it across the strait in one of these two four-week windows. The scale of the invasion will be so large that strategic surprise will not be possible, especially given the extensive mutual penetration of each side by the other’s intelligence agencies... There are only 13 beaches on Taiwan’s western coast that the PLA could possibly land at. Each of these has already been prepared for a potential conflict. Long underground tunnels—complete with hardened, subterranean supply depots—crisscross the landing sites. The berm of each beach has been covered with razor-leaf plants. Chemical treatment plants are common in many beach towns—meaning that invaders must prepare for the clouds of toxic gas any indiscriminate saturation bombing on their part will release. This is how things stand in times of peace... in the 1990 to 1991 Gulf War, the 88,500 tons of ordnance dropped by the U.S.-led coalition did not destroy a single Iraqi road-mobile missile launcher. NATO’s 78-day campaign aimed at Serbian air defenses only managed to destroy three of Serbia’s 22 mobile-missile batteries. There is no reason to think that the Chinese Air Force will have a higher success rate when targeting Taiwan’s mobile artillery and missile defense... Costs favor the defense: It is much cheaper to build a ship-killing missile than it is to build a ship.But if this means that the Chinese army can counter U.S. force projection at a fraction of America’s costs, it also means that the democracies straddling the East Asian rim can deter Chinese aggression at a fraction of the PLA’s costs. In an era that favors defense, small nations like Taiwan do not need a PLA-sized military budget to keep the Chinese at bay."

Maestro Wu Artillery Shell Knives - "Fifty years ago, about four hundred thousand or more artillery shells blazed on the island of Kinmen from across the strait. Now, fifty years after, the smoke and sounds of the artillery shells are long gone. The people of Kinmen have, thereby, endured the decades of extensive warfare. The skillful hands of the craftsmen have transformed the artillery shells into the famous steel knives of Kinmen in a way that uses art to wash away the remains of historic events"