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Tuesday, November 12, 2019

Links - 12th November 2019 (1)

Oriental Emporium: The End of an Era - "with increasing competition, the brand did not survive the times, forcing Emporium to shutter the doors of all its department stores on 22 July 1999 without prior notice – more than 30 years after the first Oriental Emporium opened in Raffles Place in 1966"

Cardi B feuds with ZN8ation, crew of rapping 10-year-olds - "they posted a “diss track” directed at Cardi two weeks ago, featuring not-safe-for-nap-time lyrics such as “You belong in a zoo” and “They could fix your teeth, but they couldn’t fix your face.”It also, somewhat implausibly, calls the rap superstar “washed up,” and they chant, “I don’t know what’s faker: your life or your butt.”In the video, one of the kids — who go by the rap names Hollywood, Slim Z, Bonez McKoy and Mr. Great — dances around with a pillow shoved down his pants as a fake, oversize bottom."

Fraudsters deepfake CEO's voice to trick manager into transferring $243,000
Meanwhile some people criticised Jordan Peterson for threatening the deepfake company doing deepfakes of him as being against freedom of speech

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe has died. He leaves behind a complicated legacy. - "One statistic sums up what Robert Mugabe did for his people: At independence in 1980, the average life expectancy for a Zimbabwean was about 60 years old; by 2006, that had dropped to 37 for men and 34 for women, the shortest in the world... For Zimbabweans who were not part of the ruling elite, the long national nightmare was just beginning. As white farmers were driven from their lands, political opponents were jailed or murdered and the media was cowed.Mugabe presided over the complete and total collapse of a nation. Starvation, disease, and brutality were the legacies of Mugabe’s one-man rule. The country’s currency collapsed and was jettisoned. Hospitals ran out of medicine... despite it all, Mugabe was feted in Africa’s halls of power. He was elected president of the Southern Africa Development Community, chairman of the African Union, and, in the ultimate hypocrisy, named as a World Health Organization “goodwill ambassador.” To most fellow African heads of state, he was a revolutionary who drove the last vestiges of colonialism from the continent. Nothing else, it seemed, mattered. Ultimately, the man who said, “Only God, who appointed me, will remove me,” was forced out by the military in 2017 — not because he was a vicious dictator, but because, as the ailing and infirm leader ceded day-to-day power to his ambitious young wife, she had alienated his cronies... for ordinary Zimbabweans, little changed. Mugabe was replaced by Emmerson Mnangagwa, a fellow revolutionary forged in Mugabe’s image. Today, millions are again on the brink of starvation. The economy is once again in free fall: Inflation is running at 175 percent; fuel prices have increased almost 500 percent since the beginning of the year; there are widespread shortages of electricity and water; and the national cell phone company is about to collapse. The army has been sent in to deal with those who protest, leaving more than a dozen dead."
Damn colonialism!

Opinion | Four Things That Are Not White Nationalism - The New York Times - "the American right in the Trump era faces a liberalism that’s eager to discover and condemn racism where it does not actually exist. Positions that any de-Trumpified conservatism would necessarily hold are conflated with white nationalism, figures who opposed Donald Trump are hammered as enablers of racism, and progressives indulge a political fantasy in which the racist infiltration of the mainstream right is an opportunity to delegitimize conservatism entirely... there’s a strain in progressive commentary right now that assumes that to try to understand the appeal of toxic ideas is to justify and elevate them, and that if you can establish a six-degrees link between a normal conservative and a YouTube racist, then the conservative must be just a gateway drug... it does liberals and the left no favors, now or for a post-Trump future, to imagine that accusations of white nationalism can somehow quarantine conservative ideas that are both not actually racist and also, in many cases, true"

Why evangelicals will stand by Trump in 2020 - The Washington Post - "Theories about Trump’s connection with evangelical voters have long been dubiously elegant. The simplest, and perhaps most comfortable for Trump’s bewildered and furious opposition, is that evangelicals are and always were hypocrites, demanding moral rectitude from their enemies that they don’t expect from their friends. Others held that evangelicals must simply be ignorant, taken in by a campaign narrative that attempted to depict Trump as privately devoted to Christ, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Some argued that evangelicals just wanted an invincible champion to fight the culture wars, even if he didn’t share their vision of the good life. And then there was the transactional theory: Their votes were just about the Supreme Court... Jeffress has a clear sense of how Trump fits into evangelicals’ political history. In particular, he felt that Trump couldn’t have come at any other time: that his success among evangelicals had, in large part, to do with the well-documented failure of evangelical politics to bring about change in the past 50 years... Trump found an evangelical base still prepared to vote Republican, though soured by the failures of past leaders who had made much of their own personal virtue without accomplishing anything for their voters. Cynicism had set in, at least in Jeffress’s account, and Trump was especially well situated to speak to jaded disappointment... roughly 50 percent of Americans believe evangelicals face some or a lot of discrimination, including about a third of Democrat-leaning respondents... I would no longer underestimate the possibility that evangelicals will turn out in stronger numbers for a second Trump term than they did in 2016, partly to ensure another Supreme Court pick and partly because the backlash against them has cemented so much of what they already suspected about liberals’ attitudes."

The suspect told police ‘give me a lawyer dog.’ The court says he wasn’t asking for a lawyer. - The Washington Post - "when a suspect in an interrogation told detectives to “just give me a lawyer dog,” the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the suspect was, in fact, asking for a “lawyer dog,” and not invoking his constitutional right to counsel"
Speaking proper English is important

Democrats just purged white party staffers, and it's a bigger deal than anyone wants to admit - "There are two possible interpretations of this mass-purge at the DCCC. Either a few Democrats are making a racial issue out of a patronage question, once again knifing each other under the cover of intersectionality, or Democrats are genuinely angry that half the staff at the DCCC are white. As often happens with the Democratic Left, it is difficult to tell just where the insincerity ends and the fanaticism begins. But either interpretation implies that this is not a party fit to govern"

Gender-Related Book-Carrying Behavior: A Reexamination - "Observational studies of carrying behavior evidencing differences in the positions adopted by men and women for carrying books and described by Jenni and Jenni in 1976 have led authors to define the various carrying positions as either typically “male” or typically “female.” The present authors conducted five observational studies on carrying behavior in Geneva, Switzerland, over a 6-yr. period. In each sample, almost 50% of women adopted the same positions as men. These results show that it is necessary to question the gender-stereotypical nature of book-carrying positions and to consider gender differences in behavior from a more dynamic standpoint."
The fact that 50% didn't shows that there're book carrying positions that are (female-)gendered. This is a general pattern when it comes to gender norms - there is the unisex and the feminine

Media Literacy Council says satire & clickbait are fake news, S’poreans call MLC out for fake news - "Some of them also pointed out that the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation (POFMA) Bill only covers false statement of facts, and does not cover criticisms, opinions, satire and parody... in an interview he did with Michelle Chong’s Ah Lian personality, Minister for Home Affairs and Law K Shanmugam also specifically said that satire does not constitute fake news"

65 Clever Illustrations Inspired By Elements Of Pop Culture By Ben Chen

Take a Breath; America Is Still a Decent Country Filled With Decent People - "“You now have a president … talking about exterminating Latinos.”“Exterminating Latinos.” Keep in mind Trump got a higher percentage of the Hispanic vote than Mitt Romney did. It turns out that not all Latinos believe in open borders. A lot of them agree with Trump. And yet, the left is now telling you — and demanding that you believe — that anyone who supports Trump is a white supremacist and must be destroyed. They’re telling you that for political reasons. It’s election season, and they want more power. But there are other reasons, too.Ever wonder why rich people seem the most hysterical on the subject? Ever notice that it’s the highest-paid people on TV who are the most determined to convince you white supremacy is America’s biggest problem? Why is that? Simple: Every minute you spend angry about race is a minute you’re not thinking about class — which, of course, is the real divide in this country. Working-class people of all colors have a lot more in common with each other than they do with some overpaid MSNBC anchor. If you were allowed to think about that long enough, you might start to get unauthorized ideas about economics. That would be disruptive to a very lucrative status quo. So they whip you into a frenzy of racial fear so that it never enters your mind. It’s a diversion. Everyone else hates each other. They get to keep their money. Pretty tricky. Unfortunately, it’s destroying the country. This is the path to civil war."

Differences in fairness and trust between lean and corpulent men. - "In the ultimatum game, lean men made less fair decisions and offered 16% less money than corpulent men during euglycemia (P=0.042). During hypoglycemia, study participants of both weight groups accepted smaller amounts of money than during euglycemia (P=0.031), indicating that a lack of energy makes subjects to behave more like a Homo Economicus. In the trust game, lean men allocated twice as much money to lean than to corpulent trustees during hypoglycemia (P<0.001). Risk-seeking behavior did not differ between lean and corpulent men. Our data show that economic decision making is affected by both, the body weight of the participants and the body weight of their opponents, and that blood glucose concentrations should be taken into consideration when analyzing economic decision making. When relating these results to the working environment, the weight bias in economic decision making may be also relevant for employment disparities."
Annoyingly some of the reporting on this made it impossible to find the original paper - Metro quoted the Daily Mail (while omitting the quote from the conclusion), then some other sites quoted Metro

British Jewish Newspaper Buckles to Hamas - "The Jewish Chronicle (JC), Britain’s largest Jewish newspaper and one of the oldest Jewish papers in the world, published an apology and handed 50,000 pounds (more than $60,000) to Interpal, a British Muslim charity linked closely to Hamas, the murderous Palestinian terrorist organization in Gaza... The JC is not the first publication to end up paying money to Interpal to avoid a lawsuit. In June 2019, the Daily Mail and Mail Online gave the charity more than $145,000... So why did the JC reach a settlement with Interpal if both the newspaper’s allegations appear factually accurate? The answer lies in the unpleasantness of British libel law, which, to the delight of litigious extremists everywhere, bestows enormous benefits on the plaintiffs."

CNN's Chris Cuomo: 'Fake news' insult 'equivalent of the N-word for journalists'r - "CNN host Chris Cuomo said on Thursday that he believes hurling the "fake news" insult at journalists is similar to when people use racial slurs against minorities."I see being called 'fake news' as the equivalent of the N-word for journalists, the equivalent of calling an Italian any of the ugly words that people have for that ethnicity"... This is the second time in less than a week the left-wing Cuomo has been caught spreading fake news.A mere four days ago, after Sen. Ted Cruz had already recorded a 15-minute interview with the far-left CNN, Cuomo taunted the Republican senator for refusing to appear on CNN."
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