Links - 13th December 2019 (2)

Is the dictionary sexist? Petition calls for Oxford English Dictionary to remove sexist terms for women - "A petition that now has nearly 30,000 signatures and counting on Change.org was started by a simple online search.Maria Beatrice Giovanardi, a London-based communications and marketing expert, typed the word “woman” into a search engine earlier this summer while looking up information on women’s earnings.She said she was bombarded with results for synonymous of woman that included words like bitch, piece, bit, mare, baggage, wench, petticoat, frail and biddy...  One woman, who identifies herself as a feminist and a linguist, took to Twitter to explain why she didn't sign the petition."Lobbying dictionaries to make their definitions fit your political preferences is misguided""
We're well on our way to Newspeak

There's Only One Reason to Remake 'The Princess Bride' | The Mary Sue - "The Only Reason to Remake The Princess Bride Would Be to Gender-Swap and Diversify It"
Art for art's sake is now art for politics's sake

chels on Twitter - "California’s what happens when rights are respected. When work is rewarded. When nature’s protected. When diversity is celebrated and free markets are fair markets.We are nothing less than the progressive answer to a transgressive President. #CADEM19"
"People are literally shitting in the streets, Gavin."
"And working people are fleeing in droves .... good job California"

Wearing high heels as female mating strategy - "Females use various behavioural tactics in order to attract the attention of a desirable mate. Wearing high heels enhances female physical attractiveness for the opposite sex, thus their use seems to be a powerful sexual signal. We investigated female preferences for high heels both in everyday life as well as in a hypothetical mating scenario. Slovak females reported a low frequency of wearing high heels (45% once per month, 38% never) in everyday life. Females with a lower body height and high self-perceived attractiveness reported more frequent use of high heels than others. Sociosexuality and involvement in a romantic relationship did not predict the wearing of high heels. When females imagined an interaction with an attractive male, preferences for high heels steeply increased compared with a scenario with an unattractive male. Females with a low body height use high heels in all probability to visually elongate their leg length in order to increase their physical attractiveness. High heels seem to be a form of sexual signalling by females in intersexual interactions."
So much for women doing it 'for themselves'

Cursed Baizuo Opinions - Posts - "Im literally right here #BiVisibilityDay"
"Can you please get your fursona out of this tag? Bi Visibility Day is about attraction to multiple genders, not your beastiality."
"I don't want to argue about this confused drama about me into bestiality, because im not. Im just posting about me being a open visible bisexual person. So can we please not continue with this, its not necessary."
"You're a furry. That, by definition, makes you into beastiality. That's what being a furry is. If it upsets you, you can always block me. Justk now that you are still being insanely disrespectful to the LGBT+ community by trying to associate them with furries."
"Being a furry by definiton doesnt make someone into bestiality? What?
It just means you find anthropomorphic animal characters interesting, why you taking it to that route?"
The furries just need to brand being one a gender and they can be included. So much for inclusivity
She changed or wiped her Twitter, but some of this was from https://twitter.com/Black_Zork/status/1176243935775219712

The Cup Noodle Industrial Complex - "In Japan, you can eat a different flavor of instant noodles every day of the year."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "A few days ago, a 24-year-old college football fan held up a sign on TV asking for beer money. When the donations exceeded $600 he announced that the money would be donated to a children’s hospital. This news went viral and the amount donated quickly rose to over $1,000,000. A beer company said they would donate a year’s supply of beer to the fan with his face printed on the cans.
All the the love and goodwill in the story disappeared when a reporter decided to dig into the man’s twitter history as a teenager and found some Tosh.0 quotes that were very politically incorrect. After the story was published the beer company, in a portrait of courage, canceled their beer gift.
The internet responded by digging into the reporter’s twitter history and found far worse tweets filled with racist and homophobic statements. Cancel culture hitting back at cancel culture."

Some Absolute Toad From The Des Moines Register Digs Up Tweets From Carson King (The Iowa State Kid Who Raised $1 Million+ For The Children's Hospital) And Plans To Expose Him - Internet Beats Him To The Punch With His Own Tweets Of Homophobia and N-Words
On Aaron Calvin

Jesse Singal on Twitter - "A young Des Moines Register reporter retweeted Osita Nwanevu's article about how cancel culture isn't real and shortly thereafter got fired for offensive tweets he did like 8 years ago"

Addendum:
Carson King has created a blueprint for resisting cancel culture - "In the end, normal people of all ideological persuasions bullied the bullies right back.First, we found and amplified the racist tweets by Aaron Calvin, the reporter attempting to "cancel" King. Then we spammed the hell out of the Register's Twitter account. The original statement explaining why they published the article in the first place has under 400 retweets and over 7,000 comments — well done, angry folks.But we didn't stop there. The fun went on as people rejected Register's attempt to go back to business as usual. Its tweet featuring an objective news piece about President Trump received one retweet and 145 replies — from us. Another, about fall dining events in Des Moines, got two retweets and 261 replies from us. A tweet about a new Wells Fargo CEO has 49 replies from us and no retweets. We did the same to Anheuser-Busch, which chickened out and dumped King in the wake of the Register's ever-so-dogged reporting on his activities as a high school sophomore. As a result, the company deleted every single one of its tweets about King. And still, Iowa Oktoberfest pulled Busch Light from their brews as a punishment."

What 'cancel culture' and its critics get wrong - "critics of cancel culture are reacting to its partisan character. I'm using the term partisan in the precise sense, to mean an expression of the views of "a part" of the political community, as opposed to the views of the whole. The kind of cancelation I described above — about Nazis, Stalinists, violent racists, child molesters, and practitioners of incest and cannibalism — is affirmed, once again, by nearly everyone on nearly every side of every dispute that divides us as a society. It is transpartisan, an expression of the convictions of almost everyone. It is, for the most part, beyond dispute.But today's "cancel culture" isn't like that. On the contrary, it's precisely the lack of an overwhelming consensus in favor of ruling morally out of bounds certain views and actions — especially about race, gender, and sexual orientation — that provokes the activists to demand that transgressors against these nascent norms be cast out. The activists have leapt ahead of public opinion, in other words, and are attempting to shape it using tactics derived from street politics and amplified by social media. This gets the normal cultural mechanism backwards... A small number of online progressives have appointed themselves a moral vanguard, upholding and attempting to enforce, through the methods of a digital mob, a form of puritanical egalitarianism that is affirmed only by a few... It's this dynamic — a small minority of ideological activists ganging up on an individual, attempting to compel media companies, book publishers, television shows, movie studios, and corporations into casting the individual into outer darkness — that has prompted columnist Peggy Noonan and others to liken cancel culture to the totalitarianism of China's cultural revolution... Will it work? We have reason to doubt it — and even to suspect that the moral browbeating is contributing to the very political backlash the activists are reacting against. To see this, it's instructive to turn to the political realm. Unlike authors and entertainers, who are dependent on niche audiences and the support of powerful business interests that can be swayed by the fear of bad publicity, politicians respond to public opinion more broadly and directly. And there we can see the real limits of the push to cancel moral transgressors. For one thing, Donald Trump is in the White House, having run a campaign fueled in part by fury at the moral finger-wagging of "political correctness." For another, Democrat Ralph Northam is still governor of Virginia seven months after a photo purporting to show him wearing blackface in his medical school yearbook was made public. Polls at the time the story broke revealed that white voters were more likely than blacks to favor him resigning over the controversy — showing, perhaps, that views on the episode were more conflicted than activists would allow"

Phul Nelson - "We can't blame every Islamic person for what happened on 9/11"
"Yep. Can't keep blaming slavery and racism on every white person either..."
Not to mention 9/11 was only 18 years ago - but slavery...

Sex education lessons in UK schools advise kids aged 6 about 'touching private parts' - "Parents have slammed lessons on “self-stimulation” which encourages children aged between six and ten to touch their "private parts" in bed and the shower. More than 240 primary schools in the UK have introduced lessons as part of the All About Me sex education programme for kids aged six to ten... “They are calling it self-touching and they won’t use the term masturbation, but when you read it that’s exactly what they’re talking about."Conservative MP David Davies also slammed the programme.He said: “These classes go way beyond the guidance the Government is producing and are effectively sexualising very young children.""
Once again, sex education is sex instruction. Meanwhile some activists want to remove the ability of parents to opt out

Thread by @RachelRRomeo - "I just had such an affirming experience. On my 8hr intl flight back from a conference, I sat next to a father/son. In broken English, the father began to apologize/warn me that his ~10 yr-old son had severe nonverbal autism, and that this would like be a difficult journey.
I told him not to worry, I was a speech-language pathologist with lots of experience with minimally verbal kiddos. Challenging behaviors began even before take off: screaming, hitting me, and grabbing for my things. The father repeatedly apologized, but did little else.
I asked him how his son preferred to communicate. He didn’t seem to understand. Perhaps this was a language barrier, but I think instead the child had very little experience with communication therapy. I put away the talk I was working on & asked if I could try. He nodded.
I tried to see if he was stimulable for a communication board. I started by pulling up some standard images for basic nouns on my computer but I could tell that screens really bothered him. So I summoned my god-awful drawing skills and tried to create a (very!) low-tech board.
And by god, it clicked. I made symbols for the things he was grabbing, for his favorite stuffed penguin, and for his dad. He took to it very quickly. I introduced way more symbols that I normally would, but hey, how often do we get an 8-hour session?!
By the end of the flight, he had made several requests, initiated several times, & his behaviors had reduced quite a bit. The father was astounded – clearly no one had ever tried an AAC approach with him. I gave him the paper & showed him how to use it, and he nearly cried.
This was the human desire for communication, pure and simple. To connect with another person and share a thought. Communication is a basic human right, and I was overjoyed to help someone find it. What a privilege and a gift."

Net zero: Alta. town grasps electrical holy grail - "A small Alberta town is the first in Canada and likely the first in North America to produce as much of its own electricity as required to run town operations.It’s called “net zero” as far as electricity is concerned and it has been achieved in Raymond, population about 4,000, by installing solar panels on nearly all town-owned buildings."
1) It's for "town operations" - not for the whole town
2) It says they're even on electrical costs. Not sure if this means that since the panels are on a lease model, the lease (net on credit for putting power into the grid) is as much as they'd have paid for non-solar energy anyway
3) More than 20% of it was paid for with a government grant
4) Maintenance is only covered for 15 years. Maintenance costs increase with age (and output decreases) so after 15 years they're almost certainly going to be in the red
5) Since they're projected to come out even in the first year, they're going to be in the red in subsequent years due to degradation

Illiteracy In Quebec Becoming A Massive Problem In The Province - "It ranks next-to-last in Canada in terms of literacy, despite the fact that school has been mandatory until age 16 since 1988. Approximately 53 per cent of the population do not reach the necessary threshold to function properly in a society that each year is becoming increasingly complex. And among that percentage, 19 per cent are unable to read and write... Over half of Quebecois have difficulty understanding the meaning of a 300-word article from the Journal de Montréal. Some are unable to read a doctor's prescription, or even understand the map of the metro in Montreal... it would be profitable to invest in education. According to economist Pierre Fortin, a one per cent increase in literacy country-wide would lead to a $32 billion increase in Canadians' total revenue. And this would hold true with each one per cent increase... Over time, even language's utilitarian qualities begin to fade. Nearly one-fifth of adults with a university degree have a poor grasp of basic grammar in French. "We give diplomas to lawyers, engineers, etc. You name it, professionals are making writing mistakes and sometimes it's hard to understand what they write""
Cue libertarian reeing because taxation is theft and all government spending is wasteful

How 1 shoe can ruin a family photo : funny

Thread by @SeamusBlackley - "I went to Boston’s MFA and @Harvard’s @peabodymuseum to attempt collecting 4,500 year old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery. Today, I baked with some of it... Here is a large batch of starter, carefully made from the Old Kingdom sample, added to water and some unfiltered olive oil. The idea is to make a dough with identical ingredients to what the yeast ate 4,500 years ago. The aroma of this yeast is unlike anything I’ve experienced... The scoring is the Hieroglyph representing the “T” sound (Gardiner X1) which is a loaf of bread. The aroma is AMAZING and NEW. It’s much sweeter and more rich than the sourdough we are used to. It’s a big difference... The crumb is light and airy, especially for a 100% ancient grain loaf. The aroma and flavor are incredible. I’m emotional. It’s really different, and you can easily tell even if you’re not a bread nerd."
We need heirloom yeast

Why the Soviets Sponsored a Doomed Expedition to a Hollow Earth Kingdom - "In December of 1923, two unlikely travelers arrived in Darjeeling, India intent on finding what could not possibly exist: Shambhala, a kingdom located inside a hollow earth. Along them trailed Soviet spies, Western occultists and Mongolian rebels, all serving their own agendas. Even with so many eyes on them, their expedition still managed to disappear from the face of the earth for months; when they finally emerged, they had a fascinating story to tell and even more secrets to hide."