Liberals’ election promises set to include cutting cell phone and internet bills - "The ruling Liberals will promise to help cut cell phone and internet bills in the upcoming election campaign amid widespread complaints about the cost of wireless communications, party sources said.One option being studied is a cap on bills, the sources said, while another is to oblige major providers to offer wholesale access to Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), which are smaller outfits without their own infrastructure.The Liberals, tied in the polls with the opposition Conservatives ahead of the Oct. 21 vote, want to tackle bills they say are much higher than in other industrialized nations... The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) — which regulates the industry — said wireless costs account for almost 9 per cent of the household income of the bottom 20 per cent of Canadians... while prices were gradually falling, Canadian monthly plans with two gigabytes of data still cost $75.44.The equivalent price in the United States was $61.26 while in Rome it was just $21.11. In Australia, like Canada a vast underpopulated country, the figure was $24.70... The CRTC said earlier this year it was looking into whether it should order the major players to offer more access to the MNVOs, which complain they are effectively being shut out."
Kathy Zhu on Twitter - "Miss World America's State/National/Chief Director accused me of being racist, Islamaphobic, and insensitive. They stripped me of my Miss Michigan title due to my refusal to try on a hijab in 2018, my tweet about black on black gun violence, and "insensitive" statistical tweets."
Hate facts!
Presumably if you try to force a hijab-wearing Muslim woman to try on a bikini, that's a hate crime
The battle of Trafalgar - History Extra - "'Who was in command at the battle of Trafalgar?'
'Nelson'
'No. He died an hour into the battle. Battle was very long, it did last for hours. And the person in charge was Collingwood. Because Nelson is dead. It's a really really important point and I don't think anyone notices that'"
Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 175 - Chris Blattman on "Do sweatshops reduce poverty?" - "'Maybe this makes Ethiopia a bit different from other places. It has this Marxist history, and so a lot of people have ... There's a certain social consciousness that pervades a lot of things. And I do remember one factory manager, not the owner but the floor manager, saying, "This is such an important study. Our factories really exploit people and I think it's really important to see that."... What we found was, first of all: these young women and the young men, they had pretty decent employment opportunities outside the firm. A year later we went back and for the most part, if they hadn't worked in the factory or if they had quit the factory, they were finding 30 or 35 hours of work a week doing other things. Working in the informal sector or doing casual labor, working in construction, working on their own farm. You could say their employment prospects outside the firm were much better than it appeared in the months before they were applying for the job... these informal opportunities in farming and what not, as miserable as the wages were and as uncertain as they were in some ways, they were much higher than the factory was paying. And so if you stayed with the factory your income was essentially identical. You had a lower wage but more and steadier hours, at least from a week to week basis; and your option outside of the factory was a higher wage with lower and less steady hours, but over the course of a month most people were getting the hours they needed. Over the horizon of a month or a few months your income was the same in both options. So unless you really hated month to month or week to week volatility, then it's not clear there was any real income advantage to one over the other.'...
'We also found a rather puzzling but rather worrisome increase in health problems amongst those who were offered the job.Here's an important detail before I get into that. Most people quit the job. They started the job — they often didn't have any factory experience, and something like 10% didn't show up or quit the first day, and then within a couple of weeks, some-thing like a third had quit. By the end of the year, only about a third of the people who were offered the job were not only in the job, but still in the industrial sector any-where.So two thirds of the people offered this job not only quit the job but quit the whole sector and didn't try to get a job in another industrial firm. Meanwhile [some] out of the control group managed to try out one of these jobs, and also for the most part quit"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Policing of Humour - "The thing that sort of annoys me at the moment is the hypocrisy on the comedy circuit. This thing is going you can make fun of anybody and anything. It's not true. You can make fun of anything as long as it doesn't affect you personally. And there's a lot of that. Most comedians happily will make fun of the Tory party at the moment, for example, which is absolutely fine. I do the same thing. But then as I've done myself made fun in any way of Jeremy Corbyn, picked up on anti semitism, I immediately get attacked from fellow comedians and have lost friendships over it...
‘Phillip Morrow, who's an independent comedy TV producer, now based in Belfast… you're presently in a community that's been bitterly divided. Divisions which have been deadly, does comedy have to be careful in contexts like that?’...
‘I think it's almost the reverse... They talk about a gallows sense of humor. But at the the height of the Troubles, I think we told the most vicious jokes that you could, that you can ever imagine. And everyone laughed almost as a release, that you could say something so horrific, it was seen as funny. And in fact, moving into sort of professional television, I've had to kind of, you know, slightly cam down those instincts.’...
‘So you're saying that in that situation, humor across this divided community, had a kind of healing or cathartic function? Are you saying that?’
‘Well, I think sometimes and some, you know, it's so often about intention, it's often very hard to, to find a dividing line. We would tell harsh jokes to each other almost, this is the kind of joke people are telling and laugh at the horror of it. And it's, it's quite subtle, but we weren't necessarily sharing the perceived values in that joke. You know, so jokes about Protestants and Catholics were told, and by the way, we told both sets of jokes to each other, and sang each other's rebel songs and everything else... There are some comedy clubs that people seek out because comedians deliberately try and say things that are designed to make your jaw fall wide open. There's, there's almost a pleasure of release, of breaking taboos and saying the unsayable’...
'I was recently at the Dave Chappelle show, actually… He makes jokes about literally everything. He was making jokes about transgenders, he was making jokes about even paedophilia. And the Michael Jackson case. The reason Dave Chappelle can do that is because he is basically always on the side of the vulnerable and punching upwards. Comedy is no good when it's punching down. When it's punching down. It is essentially functions as a lubricant for hate and then you have to assess it within the wider society in which we find ourselves in which racist incidents are on the rise'"
Since anti-Semitism is punching up, it must be a good thing
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Anonymity - "‘I favor anonymity for the accused up to the point of being charged as a journalist, I want transparency in the justice system. But there is a point at which naming names ruins the reputations of the innocent and therefore, is itself an injustice’...
‘If the accuser can remain anonymous, why can't the accused?’
‘Because this has to be a victim centered crime’...
My understanding of the law is it supposed to be blind. Justice is supposed to be blind. That's not the purpose of it. It's not to correct social ills in society although no one denies they are there... But what she's proposing in effect is taking a side. And of course, that's what the current setup does, by granting anonymity to those who make the accusation, but not to those who are accused against. It didn't seem to matter to her that an injustice was done to those who had been wrongly accused of something"
Moral of the story - make an accusation first: then you become the victim and are supreme
Larry Elder on Twitter - "Obama promoted the lie of "systemic" anti-black police discrimination against blacks. 2 cops in NY, 3 in Baton Rouge and 5 in Dallas were murdered, execution style, by black men motivated, per their posts on social media, by their belief in this lie. DID MEDIA BLAME OBAMA?"
Larry Elder on Twitter - "Dear @donlemon, Each year, there are 400K black-white interracial violent crimes—murder, attempted murder, rape, manslaughter, assault with a weapon. 85% are black perp/white victim. Blacks kill 2x as many whites as whites kill blacks. But, hey, let's talk "white nationalism.""
Viral Tweet: “White People Love Dogs so Much Because Deep Down They Miss Owning Slaves” - " Unpopular opinion: white people love dogs so much because deep down they miss owning slaves. They love the owner and master dynamic, desperate for something to control.
@ladypalerider
Well, there it is. The dumbest thing you’ll see all day. Poe’s Law has struck again."
Humanists’ contradictions revealed by school assembly case - "Lee and Lizanne Harris exercised their legal right to withdraw their children from school assemblies but now want the primarily Christian content ended.They are supported by Humanists UK, which wants to end Christian assemblies while also campaigning against a parental opt-out on sex and relationships education for children as young as five... “Humanists UK claims it wants to remove Christian content from assemblies so as not to ‘exclude’ anyone. At the same time it campaigns for mandatory LGBT content in sex education lessons, with no right of withdrawal, which will leave many feeling excluded... Legally, schools must conduct acts of collective worship “wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character”. This usually takes place as an assembly.For non-Christian children, there are provisions for other acts of collective worship, and the law has always allowed for parents and teachers to opt out.Humanists UK is campaigning to repeal the requirement, claiming that those who do not participate are ‘marginalised’."
"If I agree with it, I want to force everyone to go through it. If I disagree with it, I want to end it for everyone even if I already have the option to opt out"
Stefan Molyneux on Twitter - "So strange. Do you know that female lipstick simulates sexual arousal? Can you imagine a man showing up for a business meeting with a giant artificial boner straining at his pants? Yet lipstick is perfectly acceptable in the business world."
Of course, a lot of people have reading comprehension problems and think simulating arousal (in oneself) is the same as stimulating arousal (in the other sex), or worse, just dismiss him as a MRA/incel etc
600 men stand in for absent fathers at Texas school event - "Some 600 men showed up to support students with absent fathers at a Texas middle school's Breakfast with Dads event after just 50 volunteers were sought.This heartwarming act of kindness occurred last month at Billy Earl Dade Middle School in Dallas.The middle school has a population of nearly 900 students and about 90 per cent of those pupils come from low-income families.About 150 male students, ages 11 to 13, signed up for the Breakfast with Dads event, which was held on December 14, 2017, but Kristina Dove, the senior partner relations manager at Big Thought, a youth development nonprofit, wasn't sure if every student would have a father present during the program... mentors and fathers handed out ties to the students and helped them 'perfect their half-Windsor knot'."
Brooklyn woman charged with making her roommate’s dog perform sex act - "A Brooklyn woman was busted for forcing her roommate’s pooch to give her oral sex, police said Friday.Danielle Hui, 20, was charged Thursday after her roommate, Taylor Goldenberg, 24, told cops that she saw the horrific abuse unfold on a motion sensor nanny camera... When confronted with the recording, Hui admitted that her pants were off, but said she was wearing underwear and didn’t get any pleasure from the act, which she said was a bizarre accident."
Navy ditches touchscreens for knobs and dials after fatal crash - "A collision at sea that claimed the lives of 10 sailors has led to the Navy deciding to replace an unpopular touchscreen interface in some ships with more traditional mechanical controls. “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should,” a Navy official said of the outgoing technology... the complexity of the system led to one sailor thinking he was controlling the ship’s entire throttle, while only in fact controlling one side"