Trans activists fail to block research suggesting gender dysphoria is 'contagious' - "An Ivy League academic has had research republished suggesting gender dysphoria is spreading among children in a victory over transgender activists who campaigned for the study to be pulled.In a triumph for free speech, Brown University acknowledged on its website the republication of the controversial peer-reviewed paper, which hypothesised that teenagers who came out as transgender were more likely to have friends who were transitioning and were influenced by YouTube videos and social media.The research concluded "social and peer contagion" was a plausible explanation for "cluster outbreaks" and a high number of cases where the majority of children in a friendship group became "transgender-identified"... The report’s author Dr Lisa Littman of Brown University’s School of Public Health told the Telegraph: "It is a reframing of the presentation to clarify this was an observational study of parental reports to avoid any misinterpretation of ROGD as a clinical diagnosis but the findings remain the same. I am delighted my work has withstood this extensive peer review process... In Dr Littman's study, 87 per cent of the parents reported that, along with the sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, their child either had an increase in their social media/internet use, belonged to a friend group in which one or multiple friends became transgender-identified during a similar time frame, or both.In 37 per cent of cases described, parents said the 'majority' of their child's friendship groups were transgender identifying. Sixty three per cent reported at least one mental health or neuro-developmental disorder in their child. Forty one per cent said their children had expressed non-heterosexual orientations before identifying as trans"
'Trans'-forming Children: Indoctrinating for Transgenderism - "The latest ruse to lure children to accept this “lifestyle” as normal is the effort to place “drag queens” into classrooms and public libraries – offering a “story time” when males who wish to appear female read selected stories to children, engaging them in order to convince them they can change who they are. “Dressing up in costumes is fun,” they tell the children. A national organization has even been created to aid and promote the effort to condition our children: Drag Queen Story Hour, or DQSH."
Apparently the 'gay agenda' was a myth. But then the definition of 'tolerance' keeps getting broadened
Houston Public Library Allows Child Sex Offender To Read At ‘Drag Queen Storytime’ - "In a development that's raising even more alarms among concerned community members about the controversial "Drag Queen Storytime" programs that have become increasingly widespread in public libraries, the Houston Public Library was forced to admit last week that they allowed a registered child sex offender to participate in its drag queen reading program for children... Alberto Garza, 32, who goes by the drag name "Tatiana Mala Nina," was convicted in 2008 of assaulting an 8-year-old boy, yet he was allowed to read to children dressed in drag"
Addendum: Aka "Albert Garza"
Second drag queen exposed as registered sex offender, library disputes participation - "It's not the first time that Drag Queen Story Time has caused controversy and public outcry. For the second time, one of the participants has been exposed as a registered sex offender.William Travis Dees was arrested as a juvenile for indecency with a child. He is a member of Space City Sisters, a drag queen organization that participates in Drag Queen Story Hour in the Houston Public Library system... "We knew it," said protester Tex Christopher. "Seek and you shall find. The problem with the city is, they're not seeking. This group is satanic, they call themselves Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.""
Given how few drag queens there are in the first place, this is suggestive
Law firm ordered to compensate transgender client after ‘using her birth name’ - "A law firm has been ordered to compensate a transgender client after it referred to her by her birth name.The law firm is understood to have misnamed the client “throughout a long letter” assessing the strength of a claim, according to a decision by the Legal Ombudsman. The finding came despite it acknowledging that “the firm had asked her how she wished to be addressed and there was nothing to show she had responded to this”."
Maybe the solution is not to serve transgender people
Comment: "Don’t you just love how the transfolk see actual physical violence against real women as a legitimate response to the perceived metaphorical violence of not being recognised as something that they “feel”. You couldn’t make this stuff up."
Grade 8 school book promotes trans ideology, rejects biology - "Grade 8 students in classrooms across Nova Scotia are being taught about transgender issues using a school book that is littered with unscientific propaganda...
'Many points discussed in the book are scientifically inaccurate; for example, the claim that there are more than two genders, and that there are no differences between women who were born women and transgender women.Educational materials should not be shaming children and calling them “transphobic” for believing otherwise. Many of these issues, including whether trans girls should be allowed to compete in girls-only sports competitions, are complex and have yet to reach a consensus, even among adults, like myself, who are in favour of transgender rights.'"
According to the book Transphobia: deal with it and become a gender transcender, if you think people should pay for their own sex change surgeries, you are transphobic
Allie Beth Stuckey on Twitter - "I’m ready for feminists to reach the level of woke that realizes that biological men who identify as women will beat us at everything and that therefore transgenderism is just a new age form of the “patriarchy”"
Transgender Woman Files Human Rights Complaints Against 16 Women For Refusing To Wax His Male Genitalia - "Sixteen Canadian women have had human rights complaints filed against them by a male-to-female transgender individual for alleged "gender identity" discrimination after they refused to wax his male genitalia... The female estheticians in question only serve women and do not offer so-called "Manzilians" — the male equivalent to a Brazilian wax. "The procedure for providing a man with a 'Manzilian' is quite different, using a different kind of wax and a different technique," noted the lawyer. Shelah Poyer, one of the women Carpay is defending against JY pro bono, is a single mother who works out of her home. According to the lawyer, JY said he was willing to withdraw his complaint against Poyer for $2,500. "If JY is demanding similar sums from the other 14 women, he stands to receive as much as $35,000 for dropping his human rights complaints"... The complaint against Poyer, however, was withdrawn without so much as a hearing after Carpay informed JY in September that he'd be challenging the complaint... "One of the women represented by the Justice Centre had approached, and had been turned down by 26 different lawyers and law firms. All of which cited lack of expertise in human rights proceedings, or fear of offending the transgender lobby, or both... the Tribunal has refused to inform the 14 other women that theJustice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms would be willing to represent them against the complaint free of charge"
When one person’s right is another’s obligation - A Brazilian in Canada - "The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a non-profit libertarian group, offered to represent Ms Poyer. It argued that waxing male genitalia requires different training and equipment, which she does not possess, and said that, as a woman, she too has protected rights to privacy and safety. They sought to remove the anonymity order, granted to avoid “outing” JY as transgender. JY had mentioned using a women’s gym, and the lawyers presented evidence to the tribunal that JY had also talked about being a trans woman online—in posts asking for advice on how to approach a naked ten-year-old girl to ask for a tampon, and whether it is appropriate to show a young girl how to use it. JY denied writing the posts, said the account had been hacked, and withdrew the case. Over a dozen cases brought by JY against other women who offer Brazilian-waxing services continue.Canadian law is still unclear. Is a woman willing to perform intimate services involving nudity for women obliged to perform the same services for any male who claims to be a woman?"
2016: Bake the cake
2018: Wax her penis
And, we're told, the slippery slope is a lie
Addendum: Not to mention: Suck the dick, bigot
Trans activists hate these two powerful women - "[Meghan] Murphy has launched a lawsuit against Twitter, which permanently banned her because she “misgendered” a trans activist male-to-female provocateur, who has identified on social media as both male and female. The transwoman’s outlandish aggression against waxologists who refused to wax “her” genitals gained notoriety and intervention in a resulting Human Rights Tribunal case by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (on whose board I sit), which prompted the mischief-maker to withdraw his complaint... Many critics have pointed out that there is no consistency in Twitter’s standards for what is or is not offensive. The social-media giant’s extraordinary sensitivity to the demands of trans activists is at painful variance with, say, their indifference to, or dilatory response to actual hate speech. Twitter did not, for one instance of many, take any action against Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan for his use on Twitter of the word “termites” as applied to Jews. Murphy’s lawsuit alleges that Twitter “covertly made sweeping changes to its Hateful Conduct Policy sometime in late October 2018, banning, for the first time ‘misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.’ This new policy banned expression of a political belief and perspective held by a majority (54 per cent, according to a 2017 Pew Research poll) of the American public... [Julia] Beck’s troubles began after university, she writes, when she was “ostracized from more social circles than my rapist (in a telephone interview, Beck confirmed that she is a rape survivor).” She raised hackles when she asked, “Why is a man named ‘Woman of the Year’?” (referring to Glamour Magazine’s award to Caitlin Jenner).She lost a good friend because she refused to call herself “cisgender” (as I do. I don’t announce myself as “hearing” or “average-heighted” either.) It was a great relief, she wrote, to meet other women asking the same questions at potluck dinners, including, “Why are all the lesbians transitioning?”... Pipitone expressed concern with Beck’s committee leadership, claiming lesbianism and transgenderism were “incongruent political forces.”He then accused Beck of crashing “our parades.” Having already admitted that lesbianism and transgenderism cannot co-exist in political harmony, he was affirming that Pride is now a vehicle for the Trans movement. It would seem that LGBT is the victim of a coup—and not a bloodless one either... How many medal-snatching male athletes on podiums will it take before female athletes reclaim their rightful competitive estate? (If transwomen claims that their male biology did not give them an advantage were valid, would we not also see transmen athletes in speed or strength-based sports on podiums?)... Beck told me that she sees the fussily feminine presentation of many transwomen as a gendered expression of “blackface,” which she explicitly calls “womanface.”... apart from vulnerable children, women are the principal victims in a zero sum cultural game: the pace and reach of trans rights is directly proportionate to the pace and reach of the erasure of women as a distinct sex with immutable characteristics."
Saturday, May 11, 2019
Pheromones
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Pheromones
"Pheromones can certainly evolve. They're used in pest control… one of the strange things is that the first New York State entomologist in the 1880s anticipated that pheromones would be powerful. So he watched male moths flying into his window, and people were gathering on the sidewalk and he hypothesised in the 1880s that if only we could synthesize these molecules, we could perhaps use their power to control insect pests, which were a big thing in North America.
Fast forward to the first pheromones being identified in Germany. Rapidly, people started identifying the molecules and trying them out in the field. And if you release enough of these synthetic pheromones, the males can't find the females. They don't fertilize the females. Without fertile eggs, no caterpillars, crops protected and most of the apples we buy today have had some pheromone protection... that's manipulated evolution and what we might expect if pheromones work like pesticides, that we get resistance, and so far, we haven't had any resistance... because they don't affect predators, we leave intact the spiders and predatory beetles, so you can have organic farming that works really well...
Darcin is named after Jane Austen's romantic hero, Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. And it was really inspired by the first line of the book, which I'm sure you know. It's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Of course, a good fortune isn't particularly important to a female mouse. But it does appear that a single male mouse in possession of Darcin must be in want of a mate...
The giant hornet is very, very armored animal and the honey bee stings just can't penetrate it. But the honeybees form a dense ball of maybe 500 worker bees around the hornets. And they raise their temperature. And they literally cook the Hornet to death because the honey bees can sustain and stand a higher temperature than the Hornet. But the point is the honey bees get warning of the Hornets by eavesdropping on the Hornet’s own communication to its nest mates. And there are a few other cases where that happens where the pheremone of a predator is detected by the prey who then can mount a Special Defense...
Our sense of smell is very good, we're very good smellers. The problem is, there's a lot of bad science concerning human pheromones. I'm persuaded we probably do have them. But if you search for pheromones on the internet, you'll get lots of sites offering you pheromones for sale. They tend to be some steroids molecules, they’re basically made up. The same group, though that has been working on rabbit pheromones in France is also working on a possible human pheromone. So the sex hormones, we probably might have them but none properly identified.
But this group in France is looking at something different. And this is a potential memory pheromone. And it looks as though baby humans, human babies respond to secretions from the nipple around the nipple of lactating mothers, these Montgomery or areola glands, there're little bumps around the nipple, and it looks as though secretion from any mother will cause any baby to respond. And that I think, maybe the first human pheromone to be identified. The things on the internet, they could have a placebo effect, but they're not real...
One of the things that I really notice the difference in the human literature, I think there are two things. First, that many people working with human pheromones have a very different definition of pheromones to those of us who work with animals. And I think this idea of a pheromone that stimulates a very specific response is a really good one. Because actually, we can see this time and time again, in animals.
Whereas a lot of people working with human pheromones would accept any kind of response, even if it's a learned response, if it's just something that arises through cultural responses. And I think the thing we particularly have to look for in humans are those situations where it's a really reliable response, because when you see responses to the purported pheromones that have been tested, you know, some, some people respond to it. Some people don't. Well, actually, if we test any of these pheromones on my mice, I can guarantee you, they will respond. And I think that's the whole point about pheromones. It's a reliable response"
"Pheromones can certainly evolve. They're used in pest control… one of the strange things is that the first New York State entomologist in the 1880s anticipated that pheromones would be powerful. So he watched male moths flying into his window, and people were gathering on the sidewalk and he hypothesised in the 1880s that if only we could synthesize these molecules, we could perhaps use their power to control insect pests, which were a big thing in North America.
Fast forward to the first pheromones being identified in Germany. Rapidly, people started identifying the molecules and trying them out in the field. And if you release enough of these synthetic pheromones, the males can't find the females. They don't fertilize the females. Without fertile eggs, no caterpillars, crops protected and most of the apples we buy today have had some pheromone protection... that's manipulated evolution and what we might expect if pheromones work like pesticides, that we get resistance, and so far, we haven't had any resistance... because they don't affect predators, we leave intact the spiders and predatory beetles, so you can have organic farming that works really well...
Darcin is named after Jane Austen's romantic hero, Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. And it was really inspired by the first line of the book, which I'm sure you know. It's a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Of course, a good fortune isn't particularly important to a female mouse. But it does appear that a single male mouse in possession of Darcin must be in want of a mate...
The giant hornet is very, very armored animal and the honey bee stings just can't penetrate it. But the honeybees form a dense ball of maybe 500 worker bees around the hornets. And they raise their temperature. And they literally cook the Hornet to death because the honey bees can sustain and stand a higher temperature than the Hornet. But the point is the honey bees get warning of the Hornets by eavesdropping on the Hornet’s own communication to its nest mates. And there are a few other cases where that happens where the pheremone of a predator is detected by the prey who then can mount a Special Defense...
Our sense of smell is very good, we're very good smellers. The problem is, there's a lot of bad science concerning human pheromones. I'm persuaded we probably do have them. But if you search for pheromones on the internet, you'll get lots of sites offering you pheromones for sale. They tend to be some steroids molecules, they’re basically made up. The same group, though that has been working on rabbit pheromones in France is also working on a possible human pheromone. So the sex hormones, we probably might have them but none properly identified.
But this group in France is looking at something different. And this is a potential memory pheromone. And it looks as though baby humans, human babies respond to secretions from the nipple around the nipple of lactating mothers, these Montgomery or areola glands, there're little bumps around the nipple, and it looks as though secretion from any mother will cause any baby to respond. And that I think, maybe the first human pheromone to be identified. The things on the internet, they could have a placebo effect, but they're not real...
One of the things that I really notice the difference in the human literature, I think there are two things. First, that many people working with human pheromones have a very different definition of pheromones to those of us who work with animals. And I think this idea of a pheromone that stimulates a very specific response is a really good one. Because actually, we can see this time and time again, in animals.
Whereas a lot of people working with human pheromones would accept any kind of response, even if it's a learned response, if it's just something that arises through cultural responses. And I think the thing we particularly have to look for in humans are those situations where it's a really reliable response, because when you see responses to the purported pheromones that have been tested, you know, some, some people respond to it. Some people don't. Well, actually, if we test any of these pheromones on my mice, I can guarantee you, they will respond. And I think that's the whole point about pheromones. It's a reliable response"
Links - 11th May 2019 (2)
Funny Sex, Taiwan's first sex-themed restaurant – everything you need to know - "The phrase style over substance could have been coined for Funny Sex. In Fullerton’s estimation, the food was ‘poor to average’.He added: ‘I swear that all these theme restaurants get their food from the same place. And not a very good place.’"
Oral sex is associated with reduced incidence of recurrent miscarriage - "A possible way of immunomodulation of the maternal immune system before pregnancy would be exposure to paternal antigens via seminal fluid to oral mucosa... this study suggests a possible protective role of oral sex in the occurrence of recurrent miscarriage in a proportion of the cases"
Austin Petersen Banned from Facebook. AGAIN. - "Austin Petersen tweeted out that both his personal and public Facebook pages were put on a 3-day ban due to “graphic violence.” What is Facebook referring to you may ask? Well, on Austin’s personal page, he made a comment referring to some shooting and the government getting their gun-grabbing hands all around said tragedy. Austin simply said “Never let a crisis go to waste.”... I think at this point it’s kind of obvious that Facebook and Twitter are okay with censoring anyone to the right of Mao, from Jordan Peterson to the new pro-life movie Unplanned."
Son of Spengler on Twitter - "Star Wars Actors Mark Hamill and Natalie Portman Will Boycott Georgia If It Bans Abortion"
"Star Wars was filmed in Tunisia, where homosexuality can be punishable by 3 years in prison and abortion is illegal after the first trimester"
Predictions about Net Neutrality's Repeal Did Not Come to Pass - "In 2015, the Obama administration implemented an arcane rule that prohibited Internet service providers from charging consumers more for access to certain content providers or providing preferential access to some websites over others: “Net Neutrality.” In 2018, the Federal Communications Commission under Chairman Ajit Pai reversed that rule. Judging from the response, you would think he committed a war crime.Egged on by entertainers like HBO’s John Oliver, who organized opposition to Net Neutrality’s repeal through his the provocatively named website “GoFCCYourself,” Internet users bombarded the regulatory agency and its chairman with threats and racial agitation. Pai was called a “dirty, sneaky Indian” and warned not to offend those with the “power to murder Ajit Pai and his family.”... One year after the FCC vote and six months after Net Neutrality’s repeal took effect, we can begin to assess the damage this Trump administration policy has done to the Internet. Though it may surprise Net Neutrality’s most vigorous defenders, the new status quo isn’t half bad. “Broadband download speeds in the U.S. rose 35.8 percent and upload speeds are up 22 percent from last year”... The fact is that Obama-era regulations forced ISPs to pare back capital expenditures that would have previously been dedicated to wireline and wireless technology to meet new compliance and legal costs (a decline in investments of 12 and 8 percent, respectively). Today, USTelecom reports that broadband investment is back on the rise"
Somehow death threats are okay for liberal causes
Somehow, big internet companies out of the goodness of their hearts pushed for net neutrality. How noble
One Year Ago Today, the FCC Killed the Internet - "Everything you love about the internet will be ruined, we were told. "The illegal music you downloaded on Napster or Kazaa. The legal music you've streamed on Spotify. The countless hours of pornography you've watched. The movies and TV shows you've binged on Netflix and Amazon and Hulu. The dating site that helped you find the person you're now married to. All of these things are thanks to net neutrality." Except all those things existed before net neutrality was implemented in 2015 and—shocker!—it all still exists today (well not Kazaa, but no one misses Kazaa)... The net neutrality fear-mongering is worth remembering because of how widespread, mainstream, and self-assured it was. The front page of CNN.com called the FCC's vote "The end of the internet as we know it," but I just checked and CNN.com is still there, somehow. The same is true of The New York Times' website, where you can still find an op-ed declaring that repealing net neutrality would be the "final pillow in [the internet's] face."... net neutrality was always, as FCC chairman Ajit Pai told Reason pre-repeal, "a solution that won't work to a problem that doesn't exist.""
Princess Awesome designers launch gender-neutral clothes for boys - "Princess Awesome, the children’s clothing company that revolutionised gender-neutral clothing for girls, has turned its attention to boys"
SPOING!
Maids in America: The Decline of Domestic Help - "Today’s arrangement is a historical anomaly. Consider the genteel poverty of protagonists in novels by chroniclers of class such as Edith Wharton, Louisa May Alcott, and Jane Austen. Regardless of their reduced circumstances, these characters would have been shocked by the idea that they should be responsible for sweeping, let alone mopping, their own floors. In perhaps literature’s most extreme example, even the eternally optimistic but penniless Micawber family from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield can’t imagine giving up its servant.This situation remained the status quo for so long because it relied on a cheap and abundant supply of labor from unskilled workers... according to the 1870 census, “52 percent of employed women worked in ‘domestic and personal service.’”
Microsoft Excel Can Now Turn Pictures of Tables Into Actual, Editable Tables
Machine learning is making pesto even more delicious - "The research showed, counterintuitively, that exposing plants to light 24 hours a day generated the best taste."
Why Nestle is one of the most hated companies in the world - "Mars and other big companies have indeed had their share of scandals (sometimes the same ones as Nestle), but not nearly on the same scale. Nestle has shown, time and time again, that they have few ethics and little interest in a real social responsibility. From promoting their formula to uneducated African mothers to lying about production dates, to using water without a permit to dealing with ruthless dictators, they have often gone the extra mile to make an extra profit – even when the extra mile meant hurting people, directly or indirectly."
'Trumpism' is not enough of a mass movement to be fascism, visiting professor says - "“’Trumpism,’ whatever that turns out to be, is not even an emergent form of fascist rule,” Riley said. “I’m going to suggest instead that this is a form of what I’m going to call neo-Bonapartist patrimonialism.”Neo-Bonapartist patrimonialism is Trump’s direct relationship — “unmediated by thought” — with his supporters. The relationship demands loyalty to his personal power, Riley said, but Trumpism is different from fascism... Because fascist regimes are focused on accumulating land and “overturning the international order,” Trump’s approach to international relations are not fascist, Riley said. Trump is focused more on conserving the U.S.’ current land and power and stays relatively uninvolved in international politics, unlike other, more traditional fascist leaders"
Raptorific - Evidence against the argument that Superman’s disguise wouldn’t fool anyone: - "Dolly Parton once lost a Dolly Parton look alike contest to a fucking drag queen.
Charlie Chaplin once failed to even place at a Charlie Chaplin impersonator contest.
Hugh Jackman went to comic con as Wolverine, only 2 people noticed him and one told him he was too tall.
Christopher Reeve use to go to a restaurant in costume when filming Superman. When he went in the Superman costume he was mobbed by people all the time. When he went in the Clark Kent costume no one realized he was Christopher Reeve.
One time my dad changed his facial hair between semesters and one of his professors saw his last name and asked if he was related to himself, believing him to be an entirely new person"
Mo Brooks: Illegal Alien-Flooded States Diluting Votes of Middle America - "After the 2010 Census, illegal aliens were counted for reapportioning Congressional districts and electoral college votes. Hence, states that had fewer illegal aliens saw a shift of their political power to states that had more illegal aliens."
No wonder liberals support illegal immigration and open borders
Chain Migration Expected to Add 8M Potential Foreign-Born Voters to U.S. Electorate over Next Two Decades - "Research by University of Maryland, College Park political scientist James Gimpel has found in recent years that more immigrants to the U.S. inevitably means more Democrat voters and thus, increasing electoral victories for the Democratic Party.
In 2014, Gimpel’s research concluded with three major findings:
Immigrants, particularly Hispanics and Asians, have policy preferences when it comes to the size and scope of government that are more closely aligned with progressives than with conservatives. As a result, survey data show a two-to-one party identification with Democrats over Republicans.
By increasing income inequality and adding to the low-income population (e.g. immigrants and their minor children account for one-fourth of those in poverty and one-third of the uninsured) immigration likely makes all voters more supportive of redistributive policies championed by Democrats to support disadvantaged populations."
Students push UC to expand terms of ethnic identification - "The UCLA students said having their own ethnic designation goes beyond self-identity and has real implications for the larger Arab and Middle Eastern communities.The "white" label can hurt them with universities and companies that use the information to promote diversity, they say, and can result in the gathering of little or no statistical data on important issues, such as health trends in the community... there has been a push to establish a separate category as the general population has grown more diverse and because of the possible benefits it could bring."Back then, to get rights you needed to be white," said Yasi Chehroudi, president of the Iranian Student Group, which is helping spearhead the University of California campaign. "Now it helps to be yourself."... while Arab Americans suffer from stereotyping, they tend to be more educated and affluent than the average American. The report questioned whether they should be placed in a minority category, which could increase their chances for benefits aimed at the socially and economically disadvantaged"
Why don't they want White Privilege?
Regulations cost single-family home buyers in Canada’s hottest markets an extra $229,000 on average, C.D. Howe finds - "Buyers in Canada’s most overheated real estate markets paid an average of $229,000 extra per home between 2007 and 2016 because of regulations making it difficult for builders to construct more single-family houses"
Oral sex is associated with reduced incidence of recurrent miscarriage - "A possible way of immunomodulation of the maternal immune system before pregnancy would be exposure to paternal antigens via seminal fluid to oral mucosa... this study suggests a possible protective role of oral sex in the occurrence of recurrent miscarriage in a proportion of the cases"
Austin Petersen Banned from Facebook. AGAIN. - "Austin Petersen tweeted out that both his personal and public Facebook pages were put on a 3-day ban due to “graphic violence.” What is Facebook referring to you may ask? Well, on Austin’s personal page, he made a comment referring to some shooting and the government getting their gun-grabbing hands all around said tragedy. Austin simply said “Never let a crisis go to waste.”... I think at this point it’s kind of obvious that Facebook and Twitter are okay with censoring anyone to the right of Mao, from Jordan Peterson to the new pro-life movie Unplanned."
Son of Spengler on Twitter - "Star Wars Actors Mark Hamill and Natalie Portman Will Boycott Georgia If It Bans Abortion"
"Star Wars was filmed in Tunisia, where homosexuality can be punishable by 3 years in prison and abortion is illegal after the first trimester"
Predictions about Net Neutrality's Repeal Did Not Come to Pass - "In 2015, the Obama administration implemented an arcane rule that prohibited Internet service providers from charging consumers more for access to certain content providers or providing preferential access to some websites over others: “Net Neutrality.” In 2018, the Federal Communications Commission under Chairman Ajit Pai reversed that rule. Judging from the response, you would think he committed a war crime.Egged on by entertainers like HBO’s John Oliver, who organized opposition to Net Neutrality’s repeal through his the provocatively named website “GoFCCYourself,” Internet users bombarded the regulatory agency and its chairman with threats and racial agitation. Pai was called a “dirty, sneaky Indian” and warned not to offend those with the “power to murder Ajit Pai and his family.”... One year after the FCC vote and six months after Net Neutrality’s repeal took effect, we can begin to assess the damage this Trump administration policy has done to the Internet. Though it may surprise Net Neutrality’s most vigorous defenders, the new status quo isn’t half bad. “Broadband download speeds in the U.S. rose 35.8 percent and upload speeds are up 22 percent from last year”... The fact is that Obama-era regulations forced ISPs to pare back capital expenditures that would have previously been dedicated to wireline and wireless technology to meet new compliance and legal costs (a decline in investments of 12 and 8 percent, respectively). Today, USTelecom reports that broadband investment is back on the rise"
Somehow death threats are okay for liberal causes
Somehow, big internet companies out of the goodness of their hearts pushed for net neutrality. How noble
One Year Ago Today, the FCC Killed the Internet - "Everything you love about the internet will be ruined, we were told. "The illegal music you downloaded on Napster or Kazaa. The legal music you've streamed on Spotify. The countless hours of pornography you've watched. The movies and TV shows you've binged on Netflix and Amazon and Hulu. The dating site that helped you find the person you're now married to. All of these things are thanks to net neutrality." Except all those things existed before net neutrality was implemented in 2015 and—shocker!—it all still exists today (well not Kazaa, but no one misses Kazaa)... The net neutrality fear-mongering is worth remembering because of how widespread, mainstream, and self-assured it was. The front page of CNN.com called the FCC's vote "The end of the internet as we know it," but I just checked and CNN.com is still there, somehow. The same is true of The New York Times' website, where you can still find an op-ed declaring that repealing net neutrality would be the "final pillow in [the internet's] face."... net neutrality was always, as FCC chairman Ajit Pai told Reason pre-repeal, "a solution that won't work to a problem that doesn't exist.""
Princess Awesome designers launch gender-neutral clothes for boys - "Princess Awesome, the children’s clothing company that revolutionised gender-neutral clothing for girls, has turned its attention to boys"
SPOING!
Maids in America: The Decline of Domestic Help - "Today’s arrangement is a historical anomaly. Consider the genteel poverty of protagonists in novels by chroniclers of class such as Edith Wharton, Louisa May Alcott, and Jane Austen. Regardless of their reduced circumstances, these characters would have been shocked by the idea that they should be responsible for sweeping, let alone mopping, their own floors. In perhaps literature’s most extreme example, even the eternally optimistic but penniless Micawber family from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield can’t imagine giving up its servant.This situation remained the status quo for so long because it relied on a cheap and abundant supply of labor from unskilled workers... according to the 1870 census, “52 percent of employed women worked in ‘domestic and personal service.’”
Microsoft Excel Can Now Turn Pictures of Tables Into Actual, Editable Tables
Machine learning is making pesto even more delicious - "The research showed, counterintuitively, that exposing plants to light 24 hours a day generated the best taste."
Why Nestle is one of the most hated companies in the world - "Mars and other big companies have indeed had their share of scandals (sometimes the same ones as Nestle), but not nearly on the same scale. Nestle has shown, time and time again, that they have few ethics and little interest in a real social responsibility. From promoting their formula to uneducated African mothers to lying about production dates, to using water without a permit to dealing with ruthless dictators, they have often gone the extra mile to make an extra profit – even when the extra mile meant hurting people, directly or indirectly."
'Trumpism' is not enough of a mass movement to be fascism, visiting professor says - "“’Trumpism,’ whatever that turns out to be, is not even an emergent form of fascist rule,” Riley said. “I’m going to suggest instead that this is a form of what I’m going to call neo-Bonapartist patrimonialism.”Neo-Bonapartist patrimonialism is Trump’s direct relationship — “unmediated by thought” — with his supporters. The relationship demands loyalty to his personal power, Riley said, but Trumpism is different from fascism... Because fascist regimes are focused on accumulating land and “overturning the international order,” Trump’s approach to international relations are not fascist, Riley said. Trump is focused more on conserving the U.S.’ current land and power and stays relatively uninvolved in international politics, unlike other, more traditional fascist leaders"
Raptorific - Evidence against the argument that Superman’s disguise wouldn’t fool anyone: - "Dolly Parton once lost a Dolly Parton look alike contest to a fucking drag queen.
Charlie Chaplin once failed to even place at a Charlie Chaplin impersonator contest.
Hugh Jackman went to comic con as Wolverine, only 2 people noticed him and one told him he was too tall.
Christopher Reeve use to go to a restaurant in costume when filming Superman. When he went in the Superman costume he was mobbed by people all the time. When he went in the Clark Kent costume no one realized he was Christopher Reeve.
One time my dad changed his facial hair between semesters and one of his professors saw his last name and asked if he was related to himself, believing him to be an entirely new person"
Mo Brooks: Illegal Alien-Flooded States Diluting Votes of Middle America - "After the 2010 Census, illegal aliens were counted for reapportioning Congressional districts and electoral college votes. Hence, states that had fewer illegal aliens saw a shift of their political power to states that had more illegal aliens."
No wonder liberals support illegal immigration and open borders
Chain Migration Expected to Add 8M Potential Foreign-Born Voters to U.S. Electorate over Next Two Decades - "Research by University of Maryland, College Park political scientist James Gimpel has found in recent years that more immigrants to the U.S. inevitably means more Democrat voters and thus, increasing electoral victories for the Democratic Party.
In 2014, Gimpel’s research concluded with three major findings:
Immigrants, particularly Hispanics and Asians, have policy preferences when it comes to the size and scope of government that are more closely aligned with progressives than with conservatives. As a result, survey data show a two-to-one party identification with Democrats over Republicans.
By increasing income inequality and adding to the low-income population (e.g. immigrants and their minor children account for one-fourth of those in poverty and one-third of the uninsured) immigration likely makes all voters more supportive of redistributive policies championed by Democrats to support disadvantaged populations."
Students push UC to expand terms of ethnic identification - "The UCLA students said having their own ethnic designation goes beyond self-identity and has real implications for the larger Arab and Middle Eastern communities.The "white" label can hurt them with universities and companies that use the information to promote diversity, they say, and can result in the gathering of little or no statistical data on important issues, such as health trends in the community... there has been a push to establish a separate category as the general population has grown more diverse and because of the possible benefits it could bring."Back then, to get rights you needed to be white," said Yasi Chehroudi, president of the Iranian Student Group, which is helping spearhead the University of California campaign. "Now it helps to be yourself."... while Arab Americans suffer from stereotyping, they tend to be more educated and affluent than the average American. The report questioned whether they should be placed in a minority category, which could increase their chances for benefits aimed at the socially and economically disadvantaged"
Why don't they want White Privilege?
Regulations cost single-family home buyers in Canada’s hottest markets an extra $229,000 on average, C.D. Howe finds - "Buyers in Canada’s most overheated real estate markets paid an average of $229,000 extra per home between 2007 and 2016 because of regulations making it difficult for builders to construct more single-family houses"
Why Game of Thrones has become Bad
For some reason this got removed from r/asoiaf, but luckily it's been mirrored at r/unpopularopinion:
Game of Thrones is rapidly declining in quality
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were hired to adapt a book, not to write its conclusion - They are skilled at adapting book content for television, as is clearly evident from seasons 1-4, but once they ran out of content, they had no choice but to write their own with only breadcrumbs left by GRRM. We can see that their writing is below average to say the least.
The show was greenlit with the expectation that it will not surpass the books - When the show started filming in 2009, we were just two years away from ADWD, and the first season aired in the same year. No one in their right mind would have guessed that the book writing progress would slow down considerably. The show was supposed to slowly sail through books (which it had done). TWOW and ADOS would be obviously released before the show ran out of content.
HBO management had a say in the show's production - Some characters, namely Bronn, were included more in the show because HBO saw Q ratings for the character and forced the production to include the character more. I think it wouldn't be far-fetched to assume that HBO marketing had their hand in many more writing decisions. Maybe most of them were minor, but who knows at this point.
GRRM wrote himself into a corner - with a story this expansive and large, it's no surprise he is having trouble bringing all these characters and their standalone story arcs to a satisfying conclusion. What could be considered the hardest part of any story, the ending was left to DnD, who, as we can see, aren't great at writing stories, let alone write the conclusion to A Song of Ice and Fire.
The show's target audience changed and influenced the direction of the show - This show is arguably one of the most popular shows of all time and the most trending thing on TV right now. Back in Season 1, a majority of the audience were people who were either: a) ASOIAF fans or b) fans of fantasy. Since then, the epic battle scenes, subverted expectations and tits on TV brought in a large audience that didn't care much for worldbuilding, lore or the name of the Lord of Storm's End. They cared about TITS, chopping off heads, dragons breathing fire and suspense. What has once been just one element of the story became its sole component - most of S7 and S8 is insane CGI scenes, explosions, battle sequences and edge-of-the-seat action. Slower episodes like 1 and 2 have garnered a mixed response from the more casual side of the fanbase. This can be most clearly seen when comparing IMDB episode ratings, newspaper critic reviews, as well as from the general fan response on social media.
D&D shot themselves in the foot when they decided to end with Season 8 - HBO themselves offered D&D funding for more standard-length seasons, but D&D declined because they cannot conjure meaningful storytelling for 10-20 more episodes. What we can see now is a concoction of GRRM's breadcrumbs and piss-poor D&D storytelling adhesive that tries to hold those crumbs together. Not a very good duo.
The original version, IIRC, was longer and included points on how D&D were good at writing small scenes within the context of the existing material (e.g. Arya and Tywin).
Related:
Game of Thrones is all payoffs now, with little storytelling - "As the storytelling speeds toward the show’s conclusion, it increasingly doesn’t tell stories. It sets stories up and pays them off, and hopes that you don’t notice it didn’t do anything in between. In the summer of 2016, I lamented something I noticed taking over blockbuster filmmaking: the loss of the second act. The second act is, broadly speaking, the middle of the story, and in classical Hollywood screenwriting, it was usually most of the story. After a setup of 15-30 minutes, it would encompass the next hour or so, before the story would wrap up over the final 15-30 minutes. The second act is important because it features the character and plot development that got the story from point A to point B. It is about the journey, in other words."
Game of Thrones is rapidly declining in quality
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were hired to adapt a book, not to write its conclusion - They are skilled at adapting book content for television, as is clearly evident from seasons 1-4, but once they ran out of content, they had no choice but to write their own with only breadcrumbs left by GRRM. We can see that their writing is below average to say the least.
The show was greenlit with the expectation that it will not surpass the books - When the show started filming in 2009, we were just two years away from ADWD, and the first season aired in the same year. No one in their right mind would have guessed that the book writing progress would slow down considerably. The show was supposed to slowly sail through books (which it had done). TWOW and ADOS would be obviously released before the show ran out of content.
HBO management had a say in the show's production - Some characters, namely Bronn, were included more in the show because HBO saw Q ratings for the character and forced the production to include the character more. I think it wouldn't be far-fetched to assume that HBO marketing had their hand in many more writing decisions. Maybe most of them were minor, but who knows at this point.
GRRM wrote himself into a corner - with a story this expansive and large, it's no surprise he is having trouble bringing all these characters and their standalone story arcs to a satisfying conclusion. What could be considered the hardest part of any story, the ending was left to DnD, who, as we can see, aren't great at writing stories, let alone write the conclusion to A Song of Ice and Fire.
The show's target audience changed and influenced the direction of the show - This show is arguably one of the most popular shows of all time and the most trending thing on TV right now. Back in Season 1, a majority of the audience were people who were either: a) ASOIAF fans or b) fans of fantasy. Since then, the epic battle scenes, subverted expectations and tits on TV brought in a large audience that didn't care much for worldbuilding, lore or the name of the Lord of Storm's End. They cared about TITS, chopping off heads, dragons breathing fire and suspense. What has once been just one element of the story became its sole component - most of S7 and S8 is insane CGI scenes, explosions, battle sequences and edge-of-the-seat action. Slower episodes like 1 and 2 have garnered a mixed response from the more casual side of the fanbase. This can be most clearly seen when comparing IMDB episode ratings, newspaper critic reviews, as well as from the general fan response on social media.
D&D shot themselves in the foot when they decided to end with Season 8 - HBO themselves offered D&D funding for more standard-length seasons, but D&D declined because they cannot conjure meaningful storytelling for 10-20 more episodes. What we can see now is a concoction of GRRM's breadcrumbs and piss-poor D&D storytelling adhesive that tries to hold those crumbs together. Not a very good duo.
The original version, IIRC, was longer and included points on how D&D were good at writing small scenes within the context of the existing material (e.g. Arya and Tywin).
Related:
Game of Thrones is all payoffs now, with little storytelling - "As the storytelling speeds toward the show’s conclusion, it increasingly doesn’t tell stories. It sets stories up and pays them off, and hopes that you don’t notice it didn’t do anything in between. In the summer of 2016, I lamented something I noticed taking over blockbuster filmmaking: the loss of the second act. The second act is, broadly speaking, the middle of the story, and in classical Hollywood screenwriting, it was usually most of the story. After a setup of 15-30 minutes, it would encompass the next hour or so, before the story would wrap up over the final 15-30 minutes. The second act is important because it features the character and plot development that got the story from point A to point B. It is about the journey, in other words."
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"
Friday, May 10, 2019
Links - 10th May 2019 (Trans Mania)
Transgender runners finish one-two in Connecticut high school champs - "Setting a girls' state indoor record, Miller finished the sprint in 6.95 seconds and Yearwood finished in 7.01 seconds. The third-place competitor, who is not transgender, finished in 7.23 seconds... Post-pubescent transgender girls must have completed sex-reassignment surgery and 'a sufficient amount of time must have passed' after the operation or hormone therapy 'to minimize gender-related competitive advantages. Transgender girls who are not taking hormone treatments related to gender transition may not compete in female competitions"
So much for not giving kids hormones'
Girls Are So Terrified of Trans Restrooms That They're Skipping School - "Girls are skipping school to avoid using unisex restrooms, for fear of being sexually harassed and “period shamed.”That’s according to accounts of Welsh parents that were recently collected by Lleisiau Merched Cymru-Women’s Voices Wales. The local women’s group asked families to report their experiences with Wales’ growing use of unisex restrooms, which is motivated by a desire to combat bullying of transgender and other gender non-conforming students... the issue is not limited to girls. A parent of one middle-school boy said that he finds the unisex toilets uncomfortable and “tries to never use them.”"
'Radical Feminist' Lesbian Warns Conservatives Not to Believe Trans Women: They’re All Men - ""This is a men’s rights movement — this is really a men’s rights movement"... Also on the panel was Julia Beck, a lesbian and long-time LGBTQ activist. Beck was involved with Baltimore’s LGBTQ Commission last year, pursuing an “unapologetically” pro-women agenda. That put her on a collision course with transgender activists, who eventually had her pushed her off the commission.“I got kicked off the Baltimore mayor’s LGBTQ commission — as the only lesbian — simply for stating biological facts. I was found guilty of ‘violence.’ My crime? Using male pronouns to talk about a convicted male rapist who identifies as transgender and prefers female pronouns”... Beck was alluding to the case of Karen White, a British transgender woman who, after being jailed in a women’s prison, went on to sexually assault other female inmates.“Oh no, it is far more criminal for me to call a male rapist ‘he’ than it is for him to rape”... “Everything is about the ‘T’ now, entirely eclipsing the ‘L,’ ‘G,’ and ‘B,'” she said. “The ‘T’ is diametrically opposed to the first three letters in the acronym, and especially to the ‘L.'”"
Anger over women’s business honour for cross-dressing banker | News | The Times - "A male Credit Suisse director who sometimes goes to work in a wig and dress has prompted outrage by accepting a place on a list of the Top 100 Women in Business.Philip Bunce, who is married with two grow-up children, typically spends half his time as Philip and half as his female alter ego, Pippa. He says he is “gender fluid” and “non-binary.”... The hourly median pay of Credit Suisse’s female employees was 28.9 per cent less than that of male staff in the year to April 2017. Its gender pay gap is wider when it comes to bonuses, with men paid 56 per cent more than women. Neither Mr Bunce nor the bank would reveal the rate he was paid while working as Pippa... Kristina Harrison, an LGBT activist who was born male but transitioned 20 years said ago, she would never accept a place on an all-women shortlist as it was “insulting” to women who faced different challenges. “Being a woman is not a costume you can put on, on some days and not on others. The idea that you can become a woman by donning a wig and a dress is deeply sexist.”"
Transphobia!
Europe's first trans women's jail to open in South London - "A unit housing only trans inmates will open this week at Downview prison near Sutton, south London, in a building that had previously been named after Josephine Butler, a Victorian feminist... A number of prison doctors and governors claim some sex criminals transition to get access to women. However, the new trans wing will be located in a separate building within the prison perimeter, with an inner fence dividing it from the rest of the jail... While a few American big-city jails have transgender wings, it is believed that Downview’s could be the first in Europe."
So trans women aren't women?
Britain's first transgender hate crime trial is halted after one day - "Britain's first transgender hate crime prosecution has been halted by a judge who declared: ‘There is no case and never was a case.’Miranda Yardley, 51, was put ‘through ten months of hell’ after being accused of harassing a transgender activist on Twitter.But District Judge John Woollard dismissed the case after a one-day hearing, saying there was simply no evidence... Barrister Amanda Jones, who has represented clients accused of ‘anti trans’ comments, said: ‘The police and the CPS routinely ignore rape threats, death threats and abusive material targeted at women online.The entire criminal justice system is falling apart from underfunding and this case appears to have been a complete waste of public funds.’"
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Criticized for Boasting About 'Misgendering' Ban - "Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was criticized this week after he boasted about Twitter’s “misgendering” ban while simultaneously claiming that users are not suspended for their political views... The Defend Assange Campaign, an account “run by the legal campaign to free Julian Assange,” replied, “It’s much worse than that. It engages in serious global cultural imperialism, demanding that distant and delicately balanced cultures follow its provincial cultural standards — without regard as to the effect.” They added that “there’s not even consensus in the U.S. about the cultural norms of ‘misgendering’ those who claim to be transgendered. To expect Pakistani’s or Poles, or in fact anyone in 192 other countries, to follow the latest SF provincial fad in speech censorship codes is imperious.”"
Twitch: Female gamer banned for saying there are only 2 genders - "A popular online gamer who regularly broadcasts on streaming platform Twitch claims she has been permanently banned from the platform for stating her “beliefs” that “there are only two genders”.HelenaLive says her partnership with the video game streaming platform — owned by Amazon — was terminated and her account shut down after her comments were deemed “offensive toward the transgender community”... “I specifically said, it’s okay if a man wants to be a woman, and a woman wants to be a man, you cannot be anything in between,” she said in a YouTube video explaining the ban."
Regret Isn’t Rare: The Dangerous Lie of Sex Change Surgery’s Success - "Twelve years ago, The Guardian reported that a review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transgender patients by the University of Birmingham Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility found “no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective . . . Research from the US and Holland suggests that up to a fifth of patients regret changing sex.”Shortly after undergoing sex change surgery, most people report feeling better. Over time, however, the initial euphoria wears off. The distress returns, but this time it is exacerbated by having a body that is irrevocably molded to look like the opposite gender... When this man’s childhood trauma was treated appropriately, his transgender feelings waned. But sadly, he lost ten years of his life and the ability to father biological children... Dr. Charles Ihlenfeld. In 1979, Dr. Ihlenfeld warned his colleagues about unsuccessful outcomes. Based on six years of experience treating over 500 people with cross-gender hormones, Dr. Ihlenfeld sounded a warning on gender transition. He found that there was simply too much unhappiness among patients after changing genders, and that too many people who had sex change surgery later took their own lives. In his medical opinion, 80 percent of those who want a sex change should not do it. And for the remaining 20 percent, he found that that the sex change would only provide a temporary reprieve, not a lifelong solution... People with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria are encouraged to undergo sex transition as treatment. But according to studies, over half of this population is likely to have one or more coexisting psychiatric disorders, such as depression, phobias, and adjustment disorders, which influence the outcomes, as we saw in the letter earlier. The coexisting psychiatric disorders should be treated first before undergoing irreversible, life-changing sex change surgeries... Individuals with gender dysphoria are discouraged from seeking treatment for their depression, phobias, and adjustment disorders. Instead, it is assumed that their psychiatric difficulties are due to their “not being true to themselves,” and they are fast-tracked to transition... I will readily admit that I have skin in the game on this topic"
Skin in the game, which Taleb loves so much, is basically conflict of interest
Can biological males be lesbians? - "Though precise statistics are unavailable, many transwomen are exclusively female-attracted. Prior to transition, they’re what we would ordinarily call heterosexual, or straight: males stably attracted to the opposite biological sex. When transition occurs, this pattern of attraction usually persists. But, for some, it’s unacceptable to now think of themselves as straight - for this carries with it a lingering connotation of manhood, now rejected. Hence some transwomen self-identify as lesbians. They do so even where their transition is only social, and not medical - which is most of the time. The rest of us are now urged to accept the phenomenon of a ‘lesbian with a penis’, or even a ‘girldick’... if males with penises can be lesbians, then what counts as consent? A transwoman with a penis who failed to disclose her status as such to a new lesbian sexual partner might normally be thought of as raping her, since informed consent was in effect absent. Yet if transwomen are to be thought of as lesbians too, the case for rape by deception is much harder to make"
Homophobia and the Modern Trans Movement - "All my life, I have fought for gender equality, and gender instability—for the right of boys to act like girls and girls to act like boys. And until very recently, I fought to achieve these goals in solidarity with the trans movement. But now I’m beginning to wonder if the trans movement has any use for me—or for any gay man or woman who dissents from that movement’s increasingly radicalized demands of society and of children’s bodies... The political movements around sexuality and gender that rocked the 1960s—including sexual liberation and gay liberation—were primarily understood as being aimed at adults, in part because sexuality was central to these causes. In their focus on children, by contrast, Trans activists emphasize the conceit that gender has nothing to do with sex or sexuality, and so talking about one’s trans identity is perfectly innocent... It is interesting that in some countries—some of the most sexually conservative places on earth, as it happens—it is illegal to be gay or lesbian, but perfectly legal to be trans... I have issues with my mother. Don’t we all? I have called her names—to her face and in print. I will not repeat them here. But I want to publicly forgive her, now, for whatever I have accused her of, because she had the kindness and grace to respect my budding sexuality as I then perceived it. And she had enough respect for me to say, “You’re just too young” when I wondered what lay in store for my future. If only we all had the courage to say these same words to our own children."
Christian parents lose custody of daughter after refusing to support her ‘transition’ to male - "Ohio government authorities forced parents to give up legal custody of their daughter after the mother and father said they opposed the girl’s decision to identify as a ‘boy’ and transition to being 'male.'... Brinkman reasoned that the girl’s medically-affirmed depression, anxiety, and dysphoria indicate that she is in no position to make decisions which would result in permanent physiological changes"
Inside The Online Community Facilitating The Gender Transitions Of 5-Year-Olds - "4thWaveNow was started by a mom, who describes herself as “left-leaning,” after her teenage daughter “suddenly announced she was a ‘trans man’ after a few weeks of total immersion in YouTube transition vlogs and other trans-oriented social media.”"
Dog scared of men - and my trans wife : asktransgender - "My wife and I have had our dog for 4 years. For 2.5 of those years, my wife still identified as male. Our dog has always been a little bit scared of men, and strongly preferred affection from women. My wife has been on HRT for 5 months now. This morning she was very depressed and crying. She said she was upset over several things, but one of the things she mentioned was the dog being afraid of her. We know the dog is afraid of men, so the dog being scared of my wife is invalidating.
We adore our dog and rehoming her is not an option we will consider. What makes a dog identify my wife as "male"? Is it a scent thing? Will that change as her hormones stabilize? Has anyone else gone through this? How did you make it better? Thank you for your advice in advance."
Dogs are transphobic!
As trans athletes win state titles, parents petition to ban them - "The people now pushing to ban trans athletes from participating as their gender in high school sports are literally risking the lives of trans youth. 80% of trans people have thought about taking their own lives, and 40% of them have actually tried. That’s a risk I am not willing to take... If running some races and winning a couple ribbons keeps trans youth alive, I’m all in."
Blackmail by another name
Canada’s oldest rape crisis centre stripped of city funding for refusing to accept trans women - "Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, Canada’s oldest rape crisis centre, has been stripped of city funding after refusing to rescind its policy of only serving female-born women.In a statement, the organization said they were the victim of “discrimination against women in the name of inclusion” and accused Vancouver City Council of trying to “coerce us to change our position.”... Vancouver Rape Relief has said that while they believe trans women need support and protection from violence, their “lived experience” is fundamentally different from a female-born woman.“We do not have the experience to offer services to people without the same life experience … this is not our work,” Vancouver Rape Relief representative Hilla Kerner told a City a Vancouver committee last week.In denying service to trans women, Kerner said their group was no different than other city-supported organizations who reserve their services towards a particular demographic group, be it immigrants, Chinese-speakers or native youth.“Because we are an oppressed group who fights for equality we have a right to decide who are membership is and who we serve,” she said. Men are strictly banned from spaces operated by Vancouver Rape Relief, and the organization has previously argued that their clients, all of whom are recovering from male violence, do not feel comfortable while in the presence of someone who used to live as a man. “Even deep voices, male insignia like baseball caps and boots can make women nervous”... In 2017, the agency even spoke against a federal measure to recognize “gender expression” and “gender identity” as protected human rights, saying it could be used to “undermine the rights of women.”"
So much for not giving kids hormones'
Girls Are So Terrified of Trans Restrooms That They're Skipping School - "Girls are skipping school to avoid using unisex restrooms, for fear of being sexually harassed and “period shamed.”That’s according to accounts of Welsh parents that were recently collected by Lleisiau Merched Cymru-Women’s Voices Wales. The local women’s group asked families to report their experiences with Wales’ growing use of unisex restrooms, which is motivated by a desire to combat bullying of transgender and other gender non-conforming students... the issue is not limited to girls. A parent of one middle-school boy said that he finds the unisex toilets uncomfortable and “tries to never use them.”"
'Radical Feminist' Lesbian Warns Conservatives Not to Believe Trans Women: They’re All Men - ""This is a men’s rights movement — this is really a men’s rights movement"... Also on the panel was Julia Beck, a lesbian and long-time LGBTQ activist. Beck was involved with Baltimore’s LGBTQ Commission last year, pursuing an “unapologetically” pro-women agenda. That put her on a collision course with transgender activists, who eventually had her pushed her off the commission.“I got kicked off the Baltimore mayor’s LGBTQ commission — as the only lesbian — simply for stating biological facts. I was found guilty of ‘violence.’ My crime? Using male pronouns to talk about a convicted male rapist who identifies as transgender and prefers female pronouns”... Beck was alluding to the case of Karen White, a British transgender woman who, after being jailed in a women’s prison, went on to sexually assault other female inmates.“Oh no, it is far more criminal for me to call a male rapist ‘he’ than it is for him to rape”... “Everything is about the ‘T’ now, entirely eclipsing the ‘L,’ ‘G,’ and ‘B,'” she said. “The ‘T’ is diametrically opposed to the first three letters in the acronym, and especially to the ‘L.'”"
Anger over women’s business honour for cross-dressing banker | News | The Times - "A male Credit Suisse director who sometimes goes to work in a wig and dress has prompted outrage by accepting a place on a list of the Top 100 Women in Business.Philip Bunce, who is married with two grow-up children, typically spends half his time as Philip and half as his female alter ego, Pippa. He says he is “gender fluid” and “non-binary.”... The hourly median pay of Credit Suisse’s female employees was 28.9 per cent less than that of male staff in the year to April 2017. Its gender pay gap is wider when it comes to bonuses, with men paid 56 per cent more than women. Neither Mr Bunce nor the bank would reveal the rate he was paid while working as Pippa... Kristina Harrison, an LGBT activist who was born male but transitioned 20 years said ago, she would never accept a place on an all-women shortlist as it was “insulting” to women who faced different challenges. “Being a woman is not a costume you can put on, on some days and not on others. The idea that you can become a woman by donning a wig and a dress is deeply sexist.”"
Transphobia!
Europe's first trans women's jail to open in South London - "A unit housing only trans inmates will open this week at Downview prison near Sutton, south London, in a building that had previously been named after Josephine Butler, a Victorian feminist... A number of prison doctors and governors claim some sex criminals transition to get access to women. However, the new trans wing will be located in a separate building within the prison perimeter, with an inner fence dividing it from the rest of the jail... While a few American big-city jails have transgender wings, it is believed that Downview’s could be the first in Europe."
So trans women aren't women?
Britain's first transgender hate crime trial is halted after one day - "Britain's first transgender hate crime prosecution has been halted by a judge who declared: ‘There is no case and never was a case.’Miranda Yardley, 51, was put ‘through ten months of hell’ after being accused of harassing a transgender activist on Twitter.But District Judge John Woollard dismissed the case after a one-day hearing, saying there was simply no evidence... Barrister Amanda Jones, who has represented clients accused of ‘anti trans’ comments, said: ‘The police and the CPS routinely ignore rape threats, death threats and abusive material targeted at women online.The entire criminal justice system is falling apart from underfunding and this case appears to have been a complete waste of public funds.’"
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Criticized for Boasting About 'Misgendering' Ban - "Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was criticized this week after he boasted about Twitter’s “misgendering” ban while simultaneously claiming that users are not suspended for their political views... The Defend Assange Campaign, an account “run by the legal campaign to free Julian Assange,” replied, “It’s much worse than that. It engages in serious global cultural imperialism, demanding that distant and delicately balanced cultures follow its provincial cultural standards — without regard as to the effect.” They added that “there’s not even consensus in the U.S. about the cultural norms of ‘misgendering’ those who claim to be transgendered. To expect Pakistani’s or Poles, or in fact anyone in 192 other countries, to follow the latest SF provincial fad in speech censorship codes is imperious.”"
Twitch: Female gamer banned for saying there are only 2 genders - "A popular online gamer who regularly broadcasts on streaming platform Twitch claims she has been permanently banned from the platform for stating her “beliefs” that “there are only two genders”.HelenaLive says her partnership with the video game streaming platform — owned by Amazon — was terminated and her account shut down after her comments were deemed “offensive toward the transgender community”... “I specifically said, it’s okay if a man wants to be a woman, and a woman wants to be a man, you cannot be anything in between,” she said in a YouTube video explaining the ban."
Regret Isn’t Rare: The Dangerous Lie of Sex Change Surgery’s Success - "Twelve years ago, The Guardian reported that a review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transgender patients by the University of Birmingham Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility found “no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective . . . Research from the US and Holland suggests that up to a fifth of patients regret changing sex.”Shortly after undergoing sex change surgery, most people report feeling better. Over time, however, the initial euphoria wears off. The distress returns, but this time it is exacerbated by having a body that is irrevocably molded to look like the opposite gender... When this man’s childhood trauma was treated appropriately, his transgender feelings waned. But sadly, he lost ten years of his life and the ability to father biological children... Dr. Charles Ihlenfeld. In 1979, Dr. Ihlenfeld warned his colleagues about unsuccessful outcomes. Based on six years of experience treating over 500 people with cross-gender hormones, Dr. Ihlenfeld sounded a warning on gender transition. He found that there was simply too much unhappiness among patients after changing genders, and that too many people who had sex change surgery later took their own lives. In his medical opinion, 80 percent of those who want a sex change should not do it. And for the remaining 20 percent, he found that that the sex change would only provide a temporary reprieve, not a lifelong solution... People with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria are encouraged to undergo sex transition as treatment. But according to studies, over half of this population is likely to have one or more coexisting psychiatric disorders, such as depression, phobias, and adjustment disorders, which influence the outcomes, as we saw in the letter earlier. The coexisting psychiatric disorders should be treated first before undergoing irreversible, life-changing sex change surgeries... Individuals with gender dysphoria are discouraged from seeking treatment for their depression, phobias, and adjustment disorders. Instead, it is assumed that their psychiatric difficulties are due to their “not being true to themselves,” and they are fast-tracked to transition... I will readily admit that I have skin in the game on this topic"
Skin in the game, which Taleb loves so much, is basically conflict of interest
Can biological males be lesbians? - "Though precise statistics are unavailable, many transwomen are exclusively female-attracted. Prior to transition, they’re what we would ordinarily call heterosexual, or straight: males stably attracted to the opposite biological sex. When transition occurs, this pattern of attraction usually persists. But, for some, it’s unacceptable to now think of themselves as straight - for this carries with it a lingering connotation of manhood, now rejected. Hence some transwomen self-identify as lesbians. They do so even where their transition is only social, and not medical - which is most of the time. The rest of us are now urged to accept the phenomenon of a ‘lesbian with a penis’, or even a ‘girldick’... if males with penises can be lesbians, then what counts as consent? A transwoman with a penis who failed to disclose her status as such to a new lesbian sexual partner might normally be thought of as raping her, since informed consent was in effect absent. Yet if transwomen are to be thought of as lesbians too, the case for rape by deception is much harder to make"
Homophobia and the Modern Trans Movement - "All my life, I have fought for gender equality, and gender instability—for the right of boys to act like girls and girls to act like boys. And until very recently, I fought to achieve these goals in solidarity with the trans movement. But now I’m beginning to wonder if the trans movement has any use for me—or for any gay man or woman who dissents from that movement’s increasingly radicalized demands of society and of children’s bodies... The political movements around sexuality and gender that rocked the 1960s—including sexual liberation and gay liberation—were primarily understood as being aimed at adults, in part because sexuality was central to these causes. In their focus on children, by contrast, Trans activists emphasize the conceit that gender has nothing to do with sex or sexuality, and so talking about one’s trans identity is perfectly innocent... It is interesting that in some countries—some of the most sexually conservative places on earth, as it happens—it is illegal to be gay or lesbian, but perfectly legal to be trans... I have issues with my mother. Don’t we all? I have called her names—to her face and in print. I will not repeat them here. But I want to publicly forgive her, now, for whatever I have accused her of, because she had the kindness and grace to respect my budding sexuality as I then perceived it. And she had enough respect for me to say, “You’re just too young” when I wondered what lay in store for my future. If only we all had the courage to say these same words to our own children."
Christian parents lose custody of daughter after refusing to support her ‘transition’ to male - "Ohio government authorities forced parents to give up legal custody of their daughter after the mother and father said they opposed the girl’s decision to identify as a ‘boy’ and transition to being 'male.'... Brinkman reasoned that the girl’s medically-affirmed depression, anxiety, and dysphoria indicate that she is in no position to make decisions which would result in permanent physiological changes"
Inside The Online Community Facilitating The Gender Transitions Of 5-Year-Olds - "4thWaveNow was started by a mom, who describes herself as “left-leaning,” after her teenage daughter “suddenly announced she was a ‘trans man’ after a few weeks of total immersion in YouTube transition vlogs and other trans-oriented social media.”"
Dog scared of men - and my trans wife : asktransgender - "My wife and I have had our dog for 4 years. For 2.5 of those years, my wife still identified as male. Our dog has always been a little bit scared of men, and strongly preferred affection from women. My wife has been on HRT for 5 months now. This morning she was very depressed and crying. She said she was upset over several things, but one of the things she mentioned was the dog being afraid of her. We know the dog is afraid of men, so the dog being scared of my wife is invalidating.
We adore our dog and rehoming her is not an option we will consider. What makes a dog identify my wife as "male"? Is it a scent thing? Will that change as her hormones stabilize? Has anyone else gone through this? How did you make it better? Thank you for your advice in advance."
Dogs are transphobic!
As trans athletes win state titles, parents petition to ban them - "The people now pushing to ban trans athletes from participating as their gender in high school sports are literally risking the lives of trans youth. 80% of trans people have thought about taking their own lives, and 40% of them have actually tried. That’s a risk I am not willing to take... If running some races and winning a couple ribbons keeps trans youth alive, I’m all in."
Blackmail by another name
Canada’s oldest rape crisis centre stripped of city funding for refusing to accept trans women - "Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, Canada’s oldest rape crisis centre, has been stripped of city funding after refusing to rescind its policy of only serving female-born women.In a statement, the organization said they were the victim of “discrimination against women in the name of inclusion” and accused Vancouver City Council of trying to “coerce us to change our position.”... Vancouver Rape Relief has said that while they believe trans women need support and protection from violence, their “lived experience” is fundamentally different from a female-born woman.“We do not have the experience to offer services to people without the same life experience … this is not our work,” Vancouver Rape Relief representative Hilla Kerner told a City a Vancouver committee last week.In denying service to trans women, Kerner said their group was no different than other city-supported organizations who reserve their services towards a particular demographic group, be it immigrants, Chinese-speakers or native youth.“Because we are an oppressed group who fights for equality we have a right to decide who are membership is and who we serve,” she said. Men are strictly banned from spaces operated by Vancouver Rape Relief, and the organization has previously argued that their clients, all of whom are recovering from male violence, do not feel comfortable while in the presence of someone who used to live as a man. “Even deep voices, male insignia like baseball caps and boots can make women nervous”... In 2017, the agency even spoke against a federal measure to recognize “gender expression” and “gender identity” as protected human rights, saying it could be used to “undermine the rights of women.”"
Thursday, May 09, 2019
Links - 9th May 2019 (2) (Male [Female] Privilege)
NHS worker downloaded images of children being sexually tortured - but walks free because she 'did it for sex chat with a man' - "she admitted she had downloaded and sent them willingly and now admits to getting some sexual gratification from the sending of them."
Andrea Giesbrecht wins sentence appeal, free to go, lawyer says - "Andrea Giesbrecht, found guilty of disposing of six infants' remains in a Winnipeg U-Haul storage locker, will return home shortly after she won an appeal reducing her prison sentence.Giesbrecht was ordered released on Tuesday, her lawyer Greg Brodsky said, after a panel of Manitoba judges reduced her original 8½-year sentence to three years... the original sentence was, to his knowledge, the longest ever in Canada for an offender convicted of Giesbrecht's charges alone. The charge itself is rarely prosecuted"
I thought lying should increase the sentence
Struggling since I started passing as a man : MensRights - "I’m a very quiet, thoughtful and sort of emotionally sensitive trans guy who has been struggling since I started passing as a man.
-I always was scared to talk to people for fear of coming off as “creepy” or weird or predatory before I started passing, but now it’s doubled.
I’m horrified of being this image I see in my head of this autistic guy who tries to talk to people even though no one likes him... as a girl, I took for granted that people would still think I’m ok or not creepy no matter what I do.
-I’m very egalitarian and don’t like the idea of “men having to pursue women” or men having to be more dominant, but am struggling realizing ill literally be forever alone if I don’t do these things.
-I feel like men only “make it” in the world if they’re talented in some way, where if I stayed as a girl I wouldn’t have to worry whether I did nothing because I would still be liked and appreciated.
I don’t regret starting testosterone at all because i feel way less dysphoric about how I look now, but at the same time, I have horrible social anxiety and it’s just 5000x harder to live as a guy with social anxiety. Fuck."
Male privilege was too much for him!
Sociology Professor Offended by “Men Working” Sign Gets Owned on Twitter - "From the luxury of her air-conditioned vehicle, Washington University in St. Louis assistant professor of sociology Caitlyn Collins was triggered as she passed a road sign that said “men working,” tweeting a photo of it next to her own salty face... Collins then suggested that the sign itself was the cause of there being no women in the work crew (naturally, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that women wouldn’t normally choose the profession of operating a pneumatic drill and laying concrete).“This thread will be great teaching material,” added Collins... The tweet got ratioed and the responses were brutal, with one Twitter user accusing Collins of “harassing the working class”... 'The only woman I see isn’t working so sign is accurate'"
Logan man dies from beating after being accused of sexual assault on a CVTD bus - "62-year-old Michael Fife of Logan died after being struck shortly after being accused of a sexual assault aboard a Cache Valley Transit District bus... A 16-year-old girl called her 17-year-old brother and told him the man had sexually assaulted her.Minutes later, the brother met Fife as he exited the bus near 300 South 100 West in Logan.He assaulted Fife who fell to the ground and suffered head injuries when he hit the sidewalk... While Fife lay unconscious on the sidewalk, the suspect fled on foot.Fife was taken to McKay-Dee hospital where he died of his injuries on April 27.Investigators reviewed surveillance video from the CVTD bus.It showed Fife walking past the girl, but no sexual assault took place"
Believe women! Vigilante justice is needed where the corrupt criminal justice system fails and lets perverts off!
Substitute teacher Heidi Verrett avoids jail in teen sex case - "A former substitute teacher in Louisiana who pleaded guilty to having sex with three boys will be spared jail time, thanks to a plea deal.Heidi M. Verrett, 34, pleaded guilty on March 22 to three misdemeanor counts of carnal knowledge of a juvenile and one count of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile after her 2016 arrest on charges of having sex with three 15- and 16-year-old boys at her home"
Male privilege!
Man in Hong Kong walks free after daughter admits making up rape allegations against him - "A man accused of repeatedly molesting and raping his teenage daughter walked free from a Hong Kong court on Wednesday (Jan 23), two days after the girl admitted making up the allegations to frame him.The 15-year-old told Hong Kong’s High Court she had lied out of anger over the father’s favouritism towards her brother, going as far as faking medical evidence. The man had spent 15 months in jail... A medical examination immediately after the most recent alleged attack found traces of his semen in the then 14-year-old’s genitals... She told the jury she had fabricated incidents to frame her father, 42, because he always favoured her younger brother over her.She had inserted the semen into her genitals herself, having found it on a used tissue... Before freeing him, Justice Pang asked prosecutors to look into whether a protection order would be needed for the girl, whom she noted appeared not to have a “harmonious” relationship with her family.
Asia Argento reveals she would not go public with Harvey Weinstein claims, says Jimmy Bennett a liar - "The actress, 43, was a guest on the popular Italian talk show Live-Non è la d’Urso last week, where she spoke about the man she accused of rape as well as the young man accusing her of rape... She also explained once again why she continued to spend time with Weinstein after the alleged sexual assault at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.'I was trying to normalize the situation. This is why I kept hanging out with Harvey after what he did to me and why I accused him after 20 years,' said Argento... Argento was later accused of rape as well by actor Jimmy Bennett, and it was revealed that her late boyfriend Anthony Bourdain provided the money needed to silence the young man.'It was a mistake like many in my life, but I would not want to go back to this because I have already told my truth about it. I hope and believe that he will one day say it too,' said Argento.'I met Jimmy as a child and he didn't have the career he expected. Hollywood is a terrible place that engulfs the souls of actors, especially child actors.'She later added: 'I do not resent him, even though his accusations are one of the things that most ruined my life this year.' Argento had initially denied Bennett's claim that she raped him and then changed her to story to state that he was the aggressor.An investigation into the matter never yielded an arrest though, despite the fact that Bennet was 17 at the time and Argento 37, meaning that she could be charged with statutory rape in the state of California.
When a woman rapes a minor, she is the victim
Women's accusations must be believed, accusations against women are lies
Daycare provider who hanged toddler sentenced in Minneapolis - "Nataliia Karia received 10 years probation on Monday for hanging a toddler in her daycare and running over two men with her minivan, before attempting suicide. She had faced 13 years in prison. All of the victims of the November 2016 incident survived their injuries."
Jodi Arias: 'No Jury Will Convict Me' In Murder Of Ex-Boyfriend (GRAPHIC PHOTOS) - "“I understand all the evidence is really compelling,” Arias said in the interview... Arias had lied about her place of employment, which sullied her explanation of how she had injured her fingers around the time Alexander was murdered."
It is not just women who are the victims of spousal violence - "According to a large-scale Statistics Canada study in 2005, the likelihood of a man being the victim of violent abuse by his female partner is almost the same as it is for a woman... if you look simply at cases that are reported to police, the victim profile changes significantly.In 83 per cent of these cases, women are the victims, according to a different Statistics Canada survey.There may be a simple reason for this. "Men are less likely to report domestic violence to police than women are, and police are less likely to take male complaints seriously," says Don Dutton, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.As a result, he says, we end up with a reporting system on the subject in which "men are selected out" and then "government agencies say 'look, it is only women who are the victims,' which of course is a self-fulfilling prophesy."... For Erin Pizzey who founded the world's first shelter for battered women in the U.K back in 1971, the reality of female violence against men did not have to wait for the statisticians to sort out and analyze the research."Of the first 100 women who came into my refuge, 62 were as violent or more violent than the men that they were leaving," she says. "This was not a gender issue."... men are often confronted with higher standards of proof when they make a complaint.All three of the institutions that Hines studied — assault hotlines, domestic violence agencies and police — "blatantly told the men that it was somehow their fault and that they must have been the real batterer," she says. "As a matter of fact, when the men called the police on their female partners they were just as likely to be arrested as she was."... several provinces offer support to men who are victims of female abuse. But these services have largely been baby steps.What seems to be holding them back is our society's lingering assumptions about male superiority and, what you might call, chivalry, which remain the single biggest obstacles to resolving domestic violence."Men have an extraordinary fear of supporting each other or alienating women," says Pizzey. "The reason why men will not see women for what they are — human like everyone else — is the male need to put women on the pedestal.""
California mom, 41, avoids jail for having sex with her teenage daughters' boyfriends - "A California mom who had sex with both of her teenage daughters' boyfriends after plying them with alcohol and cigars will avoid a jail term.Coral Lytle, 41, seduced both boys, aged 14 and 15, in the fall of 2017, driving the 15 miles from Tulare to Visalia for the illicit liaisons."
'Drunk' female trooper in 3am sex assault on male Windsor Castle guard is let off with a reprimand - "Trooper Corrie-Alice Holmes, 25, a private in the prestigious Household Cavalry, molested her shocked comrade after returning to the regiment’s base in the early hours following a drunken night out... furious colleagues of the male soldier, who cannot be named for legal reasons, accused top brass of leniency because the offender was a woman and the victim was a man. They claimed that if a male soldier assaulted a woman in the same way, they would be sent immediately to military prison and booted out of the Army. Last year, a private who groped a female officer in a nightclub when both of them were drunk was jailed for nine months by a military court and dismissed. The outrage comes after defence bosses lifted a historic ban preventing female soldiers serving in combat units... ‘Senior personnel had told him the case would follow him through his career – he’d be the guy who complained about a woman making a very physical pass at him.’Evidence suggests there is a major discrepancy between sentences given to male and female soldiers for sexual assaults. In November 2017, a male private who sexually assaulted a female officer was jailed for nine months then booted out. A military court heard he touched her breasts, which he insisted was an accident."
Judge tells banned drink-driver who caused massive crash: 'I'd have jailed you if you were a man' - "A judge told a banned drink-driver who smashed into three other vehicles that she would have been jailed if she were a man.Judge Sarah Buckingham said "alcoholic" Victoria Parry would have been "straight down the stairs" to prison had her sex been different.The 30-year-old, who already had two previous convictions for drink-driving was dragged from her Fiat Stilo after the car caught fire following the pile-up on the A46 last May."
Feminists: *crickets* / "We shouldn't send women to prison as that's sexist"
If we shouldn't send women to prison because that will hurt their dependents, we should pay men more because they are more likely to be the breadwinners and women go for richer men
Phenomenalact - Posts - "Katie Lomas got drunk at age 20, then drove with no insurance, and without ever passing a driver's test. She ran over her ex, leaving him with a punctured lung, fractures to the ribs, ligament damage, and brain damage. The following picture was taken as she left the courtroom with no jail sentence. The judge stated, "I take note of the fact that you have been suffering for the past months waiting for this to happen and I do not think you are someone who is going to go out and commit a criminal offence." One year later, Katie and her sister got into a drunken fight with a woman at a bar. This resulted in another pass, and another smug exit."
Female sex offenders protected by the criminal justice system - "Female sex offenders receive lighter sentences for the same crimes than males says a study recently published in Feminist Criminology, a SAGE journal and the official journal of the Division on Women and Crime of the American Society of Criminology.Embry and Lyons looked at the sentences that male and female sex offenders received for specific sex offenses and found that even after the implementation of sentencing guidelines to ensure equality in sentencing, on average male sentences were between 6% and 31% longer than female sentences for the same or similar crimes... The researchers explained this disparity by discussing the American idea that "women are weaker and, therefore, must be protected at all times regardless of their status as victims or offenders.""
Women and Men Policymakers: Does the Judge's Gender Affect the Sentencing of Criminal Defendants? - "Women judges are somewhat harsher (i.e., more likely to incarcerate and impose longer sentences), and they slant toward a more contextualized style in weighing the effects of defendant characteristics and prior record on sentencing outcomes. Notably, they are particularly harsh toward repeat black offenders."
This suggests that if you want a gentler, less racist justice system you should have fewer women judges
Why we need to change the attitude that ‘men are the criminals, women are the victims’ - "Justice Secretary David Gauke MP announced community services supporting vulnerable women have been awarded £1.6 million funding as part of the government’s commitment to reduce the number of women entering the criminal justice system. Further, the government has committed to investing £5 million over two years in community provision for women in the justice system & those at risk of offending and an initial allocation saw £3.3 million awarded to 12 organisations providing a range of specialist support. The funding follows the publication of the government’s Female Offender Strategy in June last year. As it stands, no such strategy exists for male offenders save for the announcement further prisons are to be built. The current UK prison population is not a diverse mix of men and women; for every 1 woman in prison there are approximately 22 men and this has been the case for over the past decade... why are so many more men in prison and why are government strategies being employed to lower the female prison population but not the male? Well, it’s to do with gamma bias, the cognitive distortion that impacts our perception of gender.In terms of crime, when if a criminal is male the fact of their gender typically is magnified, and if a criminal is a women the fact of their gender typically is minimised. Conversely, when a person is a victim of crime this pattern is typically reversed. In short, men are typically seen as perpetrators and women as victims... 65% of the men she worked with had suffered some form of childhood abuse which, if it had been caught sooner by the system, could have resulted in these men being directed away from incarceration and towards the help they need... A review in Lancet Psychiatry suggests that bumps to the head from accidents, road traffic collisions, assaults/violence, etc – things guys suffer from more than women – can lead to neural injuries which affect how the brain operates, and may increase the risk of violent offending"
On gender bias against men by the criminal justice system, which seems to be especially bad in the UK (since differential treatment is explicitly recommended, since somehow it will ensure equality despite men already being disadvantaged under de jure equal treatment)
The supposed evidence that offending rates by gender are the same seems to be a misinterpretation but otherwise the argument holds
The forgotten sex: why is men's health ignored by policy makers? - "There is not a single country where men outlive women. In both the UK and globally, there is currently a four-year difference in life expectancy between the sexes... Men’s health is notable by its absence in most global and national health policies and funding programmes. An analysis of the World Bank’s gender and global health programme showed that it paid scant attention to men’s health issues.Only three countries – Australia, Brazil and Ireland – have introduced national men’s health policies. Iran is thought to be preparing a policy but news from the health ministry in Tehran is sketchy. In the UK, despite equality legislation requiring action to address sex and gender inequalities, research by the Men’s Health Forum and the Centre for Public Scrutiny found that men’s issues were not properly addressed in local strategic health plans.But the stars may now be aligning more favourably for a new and more systematic approach to men’s health. One game-changer is the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for health. These focus on reducing premature mortality from non- communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, all of which affect men disproportionately... WHO is now realising that the SDG targets simply cannot be met unless greater account is taken of men."
Opposing gynocentrism means you're sexist
Andrea Giesbrecht wins sentence appeal, free to go, lawyer says - "Andrea Giesbrecht, found guilty of disposing of six infants' remains in a Winnipeg U-Haul storage locker, will return home shortly after she won an appeal reducing her prison sentence.Giesbrecht was ordered released on Tuesday, her lawyer Greg Brodsky said, after a panel of Manitoba judges reduced her original 8½-year sentence to three years... the original sentence was, to his knowledge, the longest ever in Canada for an offender convicted of Giesbrecht's charges alone. The charge itself is rarely prosecuted"
I thought lying should increase the sentence
Struggling since I started passing as a man : MensRights - "I’m a very quiet, thoughtful and sort of emotionally sensitive trans guy who has been struggling since I started passing as a man.
-I always was scared to talk to people for fear of coming off as “creepy” or weird or predatory before I started passing, but now it’s doubled.
I’m horrified of being this image I see in my head of this autistic guy who tries to talk to people even though no one likes him... as a girl, I took for granted that people would still think I’m ok or not creepy no matter what I do.
-I’m very egalitarian and don’t like the idea of “men having to pursue women” or men having to be more dominant, but am struggling realizing ill literally be forever alone if I don’t do these things.
-I feel like men only “make it” in the world if they’re talented in some way, where if I stayed as a girl I wouldn’t have to worry whether I did nothing because I would still be liked and appreciated.
I don’t regret starting testosterone at all because i feel way less dysphoric about how I look now, but at the same time, I have horrible social anxiety and it’s just 5000x harder to live as a guy with social anxiety. Fuck."
Male privilege was too much for him!
Sociology Professor Offended by “Men Working” Sign Gets Owned on Twitter - "From the luxury of her air-conditioned vehicle, Washington University in St. Louis assistant professor of sociology Caitlyn Collins was triggered as she passed a road sign that said “men working,” tweeting a photo of it next to her own salty face... Collins then suggested that the sign itself was the cause of there being no women in the work crew (naturally, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that women wouldn’t normally choose the profession of operating a pneumatic drill and laying concrete).“This thread will be great teaching material,” added Collins... The tweet got ratioed and the responses were brutal, with one Twitter user accusing Collins of “harassing the working class”... 'The only woman I see isn’t working so sign is accurate'"
Logan man dies from beating after being accused of sexual assault on a CVTD bus - "62-year-old Michael Fife of Logan died after being struck shortly after being accused of a sexual assault aboard a Cache Valley Transit District bus... A 16-year-old girl called her 17-year-old brother and told him the man had sexually assaulted her.Minutes later, the brother met Fife as he exited the bus near 300 South 100 West in Logan.He assaulted Fife who fell to the ground and suffered head injuries when he hit the sidewalk... While Fife lay unconscious on the sidewalk, the suspect fled on foot.Fife was taken to McKay-Dee hospital where he died of his injuries on April 27.Investigators reviewed surveillance video from the CVTD bus.It showed Fife walking past the girl, but no sexual assault took place"
Believe women! Vigilante justice is needed where the corrupt criminal justice system fails and lets perverts off!
Substitute teacher Heidi Verrett avoids jail in teen sex case - "A former substitute teacher in Louisiana who pleaded guilty to having sex with three boys will be spared jail time, thanks to a plea deal.Heidi M. Verrett, 34, pleaded guilty on March 22 to three misdemeanor counts of carnal knowledge of a juvenile and one count of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile after her 2016 arrest on charges of having sex with three 15- and 16-year-old boys at her home"
Male privilege!
Man in Hong Kong walks free after daughter admits making up rape allegations against him - "A man accused of repeatedly molesting and raping his teenage daughter walked free from a Hong Kong court on Wednesday (Jan 23), two days after the girl admitted making up the allegations to frame him.The 15-year-old told Hong Kong’s High Court she had lied out of anger over the father’s favouritism towards her brother, going as far as faking medical evidence. The man had spent 15 months in jail... A medical examination immediately after the most recent alleged attack found traces of his semen in the then 14-year-old’s genitals... She told the jury she had fabricated incidents to frame her father, 42, because he always favoured her younger brother over her.She had inserted the semen into her genitals herself, having found it on a used tissue... Before freeing him, Justice Pang asked prosecutors to look into whether a protection order would be needed for the girl, whom she noted appeared not to have a “harmonious” relationship with her family.
Asia Argento reveals she would not go public with Harvey Weinstein claims, says Jimmy Bennett a liar - "The actress, 43, was a guest on the popular Italian talk show Live-Non è la d’Urso last week, where she spoke about the man she accused of rape as well as the young man accusing her of rape... She also explained once again why she continued to spend time with Weinstein after the alleged sexual assault at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.'I was trying to normalize the situation. This is why I kept hanging out with Harvey after what he did to me and why I accused him after 20 years,' said Argento... Argento was later accused of rape as well by actor Jimmy Bennett, and it was revealed that her late boyfriend Anthony Bourdain provided the money needed to silence the young man.'It was a mistake like many in my life, but I would not want to go back to this because I have already told my truth about it. I hope and believe that he will one day say it too,' said Argento.'I met Jimmy as a child and he didn't have the career he expected. Hollywood is a terrible place that engulfs the souls of actors, especially child actors.'She later added: 'I do not resent him, even though his accusations are one of the things that most ruined my life this year.' Argento had initially denied Bennett's claim that she raped him and then changed her to story to state that he was the aggressor.An investigation into the matter never yielded an arrest though, despite the fact that Bennet was 17 at the time and Argento 37, meaning that she could be charged with statutory rape in the state of California.
When a woman rapes a minor, she is the victim
Women's accusations must be believed, accusations against women are lies
Daycare provider who hanged toddler sentenced in Minneapolis - "Nataliia Karia received 10 years probation on Monday for hanging a toddler in her daycare and running over two men with her minivan, before attempting suicide. She had faced 13 years in prison. All of the victims of the November 2016 incident survived their injuries."
Jodi Arias: 'No Jury Will Convict Me' In Murder Of Ex-Boyfriend (GRAPHIC PHOTOS) - "“I understand all the evidence is really compelling,” Arias said in the interview... Arias had lied about her place of employment, which sullied her explanation of how she had injured her fingers around the time Alexander was murdered."
It is not just women who are the victims of spousal violence - "According to a large-scale Statistics Canada study in 2005, the likelihood of a man being the victim of violent abuse by his female partner is almost the same as it is for a woman... if you look simply at cases that are reported to police, the victim profile changes significantly.In 83 per cent of these cases, women are the victims, according to a different Statistics Canada survey.There may be a simple reason for this. "Men are less likely to report domestic violence to police than women are, and police are less likely to take male complaints seriously," says Don Dutton, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.As a result, he says, we end up with a reporting system on the subject in which "men are selected out" and then "government agencies say 'look, it is only women who are the victims,' which of course is a self-fulfilling prophesy."... For Erin Pizzey who founded the world's first shelter for battered women in the U.K back in 1971, the reality of female violence against men did not have to wait for the statisticians to sort out and analyze the research."Of the first 100 women who came into my refuge, 62 were as violent or more violent than the men that they were leaving," she says. "This was not a gender issue."... men are often confronted with higher standards of proof when they make a complaint.All three of the institutions that Hines studied — assault hotlines, domestic violence agencies and police — "blatantly told the men that it was somehow their fault and that they must have been the real batterer," she says. "As a matter of fact, when the men called the police on their female partners they were just as likely to be arrested as she was."... several provinces offer support to men who are victims of female abuse. But these services have largely been baby steps.What seems to be holding them back is our society's lingering assumptions about male superiority and, what you might call, chivalry, which remain the single biggest obstacles to resolving domestic violence."Men have an extraordinary fear of supporting each other or alienating women," says Pizzey. "The reason why men will not see women for what they are — human like everyone else — is the male need to put women on the pedestal.""
California mom, 41, avoids jail for having sex with her teenage daughters' boyfriends - "A California mom who had sex with both of her teenage daughters' boyfriends after plying them with alcohol and cigars will avoid a jail term.Coral Lytle, 41, seduced both boys, aged 14 and 15, in the fall of 2017, driving the 15 miles from Tulare to Visalia for the illicit liaisons."
'Drunk' female trooper in 3am sex assault on male Windsor Castle guard is let off with a reprimand - "Trooper Corrie-Alice Holmes, 25, a private in the prestigious Household Cavalry, molested her shocked comrade after returning to the regiment’s base in the early hours following a drunken night out... furious colleagues of the male soldier, who cannot be named for legal reasons, accused top brass of leniency because the offender was a woman and the victim was a man. They claimed that if a male soldier assaulted a woman in the same way, they would be sent immediately to military prison and booted out of the Army. Last year, a private who groped a female officer in a nightclub when both of them were drunk was jailed for nine months by a military court and dismissed. The outrage comes after defence bosses lifted a historic ban preventing female soldiers serving in combat units... ‘Senior personnel had told him the case would follow him through his career – he’d be the guy who complained about a woman making a very physical pass at him.’Evidence suggests there is a major discrepancy between sentences given to male and female soldiers for sexual assaults. In November 2017, a male private who sexually assaulted a female officer was jailed for nine months then booted out. A military court heard he touched her breasts, which he insisted was an accident."
Judge tells banned drink-driver who caused massive crash: 'I'd have jailed you if you were a man' - "A judge told a banned drink-driver who smashed into three other vehicles that she would have been jailed if she were a man.Judge Sarah Buckingham said "alcoholic" Victoria Parry would have been "straight down the stairs" to prison had her sex been different.The 30-year-old, who already had two previous convictions for drink-driving was dragged from her Fiat Stilo after the car caught fire following the pile-up on the A46 last May."
Feminists: *crickets* / "We shouldn't send women to prison as that's sexist"
If we shouldn't send women to prison because that will hurt their dependents, we should pay men more because they are more likely to be the breadwinners and women go for richer men
Phenomenalact - Posts - "Katie Lomas got drunk at age 20, then drove with no insurance, and without ever passing a driver's test. She ran over her ex, leaving him with a punctured lung, fractures to the ribs, ligament damage, and brain damage. The following picture was taken as she left the courtroom with no jail sentence. The judge stated, "I take note of the fact that you have been suffering for the past months waiting for this to happen and I do not think you are someone who is going to go out and commit a criminal offence." One year later, Katie and her sister got into a drunken fight with a woman at a bar. This resulted in another pass, and another smug exit."
Female sex offenders protected by the criminal justice system - "Female sex offenders receive lighter sentences for the same crimes than males says a study recently published in Feminist Criminology, a SAGE journal and the official journal of the Division on Women and Crime of the American Society of Criminology.Embry and Lyons looked at the sentences that male and female sex offenders received for specific sex offenses and found that even after the implementation of sentencing guidelines to ensure equality in sentencing, on average male sentences were between 6% and 31% longer than female sentences for the same or similar crimes... The researchers explained this disparity by discussing the American idea that "women are weaker and, therefore, must be protected at all times regardless of their status as victims or offenders.""
Women and Men Policymakers: Does the Judge's Gender Affect the Sentencing of Criminal Defendants? - "Women judges are somewhat harsher (i.e., more likely to incarcerate and impose longer sentences), and they slant toward a more contextualized style in weighing the effects of defendant characteristics and prior record on sentencing outcomes. Notably, they are particularly harsh toward repeat black offenders."
This suggests that if you want a gentler, less racist justice system you should have fewer women judges
Why we need to change the attitude that ‘men are the criminals, women are the victims’ - "Justice Secretary David Gauke MP announced community services supporting vulnerable women have been awarded £1.6 million funding as part of the government’s commitment to reduce the number of women entering the criminal justice system. Further, the government has committed to investing £5 million over two years in community provision for women in the justice system & those at risk of offending and an initial allocation saw £3.3 million awarded to 12 organisations providing a range of specialist support. The funding follows the publication of the government’s Female Offender Strategy in June last year. As it stands, no such strategy exists for male offenders save for the announcement further prisons are to be built. The current UK prison population is not a diverse mix of men and women; for every 1 woman in prison there are approximately 22 men and this has been the case for over the past decade... why are so many more men in prison and why are government strategies being employed to lower the female prison population but not the male? Well, it’s to do with gamma bias, the cognitive distortion that impacts our perception of gender.In terms of crime, when if a criminal is male the fact of their gender typically is magnified, and if a criminal is a women the fact of their gender typically is minimised. Conversely, when a person is a victim of crime this pattern is typically reversed. In short, men are typically seen as perpetrators and women as victims... 65% of the men she worked with had suffered some form of childhood abuse which, if it had been caught sooner by the system, could have resulted in these men being directed away from incarceration and towards the help they need... A review in Lancet Psychiatry suggests that bumps to the head from accidents, road traffic collisions, assaults/violence, etc – things guys suffer from more than women – can lead to neural injuries which affect how the brain operates, and may increase the risk of violent offending"
On gender bias against men by the criminal justice system, which seems to be especially bad in the UK (since differential treatment is explicitly recommended, since somehow it will ensure equality despite men already being disadvantaged under de jure equal treatment)
The supposed evidence that offending rates by gender are the same seems to be a misinterpretation but otherwise the argument holds
The forgotten sex: why is men's health ignored by policy makers? - "There is not a single country where men outlive women. In both the UK and globally, there is currently a four-year difference in life expectancy between the sexes... Men’s health is notable by its absence in most global and national health policies and funding programmes. An analysis of the World Bank’s gender and global health programme showed that it paid scant attention to men’s health issues.Only three countries – Australia, Brazil and Ireland – have introduced national men’s health policies. Iran is thought to be preparing a policy but news from the health ministry in Tehran is sketchy. In the UK, despite equality legislation requiring action to address sex and gender inequalities, research by the Men’s Health Forum and the Centre for Public Scrutiny found that men’s issues were not properly addressed in local strategic health plans.But the stars may now be aligning more favourably for a new and more systematic approach to men’s health. One game-changer is the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for health. These focus on reducing premature mortality from non- communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, all of which affect men disproportionately... WHO is now realising that the SDG targets simply cannot be met unless greater account is taken of men."
Opposing gynocentrism means you're sexist
How to deal with a progressive bully
"As C.S. Lewis rightly observes in God in the Dock (1971): “Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
or many people, myself included, the first step in dealing with a progressive bully is to recognize that they exist. Just because someone’s committed to social justice doesn’t mean they’re socially just. Notorious bullies have been known to lead anti-bullying campaigns. I recently had to part ways with an old friend over this very issue. He was always a bit of a bully, even when we were kids. But his engagement with online progressive politics has brought those tendencies out like never before. He’s become an abusive asshole who thinks the fact that he’s right gives him the right to be nasty and disrespectful.
He’s alienated at least a dozen old friends and family members, and he’s clearly unhappy, maybe even depressed. Yet he keeps on this miserable path, in part, because he has a cloud of online sycophants who Facebook-like every stupid thing he says: the meaner the better. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that none of these people are real friends. He’s never met these people and they have no intention of meeting him. When he was in the hospital last year, none of them came to visit him. It was his real friends, the ones he keeps alienating with his zealotry, who came to see him.
I’ve learned some valuable lessons from my fraught interactions with this angry little man, and others of his stamp, lessons which may prove useful to you: namely, beware of kafkatrapping, avoid orgies of self-flagellation, prepare for charges of gaslighting and mansplaining, prepare to be told that you need to check your privilege, and know what kind of person you’re dealing with...
Progressive bullies seem to delight in kafkatrapping, as it’s their preferred strategy of attack in Social Media Land. So you should be prepared for it. Just as schoolyard bullies tell you to move your hands out of the way so they can punch you in the face, progressive bullies hurl abuse at you and then accuse you of “white fragility” if you refuse to passively accept it. The irony of an utterly offensive person telling the person they’re offending to stop being so defensive never seems to occur to them... the kafkatrapper’s circular argument is more or less absurd. Just as a net that catches the whole sea isn’t much of a net, an argument that explains everything isn’t much of an argument...
Progressive bullies will want you to cower and debase yourself in their presence. Do not comply with this demand... As Omar puts in The Wire: “If you act like a little bitch, people gonna treat you like a little bitch.”...
If you stand up to a progressive bully, you’ll eventually be accused of gaslighting... the circular reasoning employed by those who habitually accuse others of gaslighting makes it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Accusing someone of gaslighting is like accusing someone of witchcraft. There’s no way for the accuser to be wrong. If the accused denies it, or attempts to defend themselves in any way, this is proof that they are guilty...
If you’re a dude, and you dare to stand up to a progressive bully, you’ll eventually be accused of mansplaining... “There is no problem with the idea of mansplaining but it requires an argument. You can’t just drop it and walk away from it like a fart in an elevator.” Dropping the mansplaining bomb in Social Media Land has become sort of like saying: “Hmm, that sounds just like something Hitler would say.” Those who wield this weapon no longer feel the need to justify their claims. What they want, what they’ve come to expect, is automatic deference. Calling people out for mansplaining has become little more than a progressive bullying technique, yet another convenient way to silence critics and shut down debate...
Check Your Privilege: This expression was once uttered in the spirit of John 8:7, wherein Jesus famously tells a group of men who are about to stone a woman to death: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” But it’s now uttered in precisely the kind of sanctimonious spirit Jesus despised: the self-righteous spirit of the Pharisees, who love to perform their good works “on the street corners to be seen by others.” These days, the person who says “check your privilege” is in all likelihood little more than a progressive bully who’s trying to silence you...
Rhetorical gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by unilaterally redefining the borders of a word’s meaning. Here’s how it’s done: (i) Begin with a word, phrase, or concept like “racism” or “hate speech” that (a) has a commonly understood meaning, and (b) is commonly understood to be good or evil. (ii) Sneak in a weird, atypical definition (e.g., racism is only racism when certain people do it, hate speech is only hate speech when it’s about certain people, etc.). (iii) Now claim that anyone who is against this thing that is commonly understood to be evil, or for this thing that is commonly understood to be good, must agree with your policy proposal, analysis, etc. It’s a clever hustle. Beware of it. [Ed: Aka Bait and Switch]...
If you want to know who’s going to be a tyrant in power, pay attention to who walks and talks like a tyrant out of power. If you want to know how a freedom fighter’s going to rule tomorrow, pay attention to how they deal with people who disagree with them today. As Maya Angelou wisely cautions: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Progressive bullies keep showing us who they really are. We need to listen to them. We need to believe them the first time. And we need to beware of them."
Ironically Angelou's quote rules out the possibility of change/growth, or simply of you being wrong.
or many people, myself included, the first step in dealing with a progressive bully is to recognize that they exist. Just because someone’s committed to social justice doesn’t mean they’re socially just. Notorious bullies have been known to lead anti-bullying campaigns. I recently had to part ways with an old friend over this very issue. He was always a bit of a bully, even when we were kids. But his engagement with online progressive politics has brought those tendencies out like never before. He’s become an abusive asshole who thinks the fact that he’s right gives him the right to be nasty and disrespectful.
He’s alienated at least a dozen old friends and family members, and he’s clearly unhappy, maybe even depressed. Yet he keeps on this miserable path, in part, because he has a cloud of online sycophants who Facebook-like every stupid thing he says: the meaner the better. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that none of these people are real friends. He’s never met these people and they have no intention of meeting him. When he was in the hospital last year, none of them came to visit him. It was his real friends, the ones he keeps alienating with his zealotry, who came to see him.
I’ve learned some valuable lessons from my fraught interactions with this angry little man, and others of his stamp, lessons which may prove useful to you: namely, beware of kafkatrapping, avoid orgies of self-flagellation, prepare for charges of gaslighting and mansplaining, prepare to be told that you need to check your privilege, and know what kind of person you’re dealing with...
Progressive bullies seem to delight in kafkatrapping, as it’s their preferred strategy of attack in Social Media Land. So you should be prepared for it. Just as schoolyard bullies tell you to move your hands out of the way so they can punch you in the face, progressive bullies hurl abuse at you and then accuse you of “white fragility” if you refuse to passively accept it. The irony of an utterly offensive person telling the person they’re offending to stop being so defensive never seems to occur to them... the kafkatrapper’s circular argument is more or less absurd. Just as a net that catches the whole sea isn’t much of a net, an argument that explains everything isn’t much of an argument...
Progressive bullies will want you to cower and debase yourself in their presence. Do not comply with this demand... As Omar puts in The Wire: “If you act like a little bitch, people gonna treat you like a little bitch.”...
If you stand up to a progressive bully, you’ll eventually be accused of gaslighting... the circular reasoning employed by those who habitually accuse others of gaslighting makes it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Accusing someone of gaslighting is like accusing someone of witchcraft. There’s no way for the accuser to be wrong. If the accused denies it, or attempts to defend themselves in any way, this is proof that they are guilty...
If you’re a dude, and you dare to stand up to a progressive bully, you’ll eventually be accused of mansplaining... “There is no problem with the idea of mansplaining but it requires an argument. You can’t just drop it and walk away from it like a fart in an elevator.” Dropping the mansplaining bomb in Social Media Land has become sort of like saying: “Hmm, that sounds just like something Hitler would say.” Those who wield this weapon no longer feel the need to justify their claims. What they want, what they’ve come to expect, is automatic deference. Calling people out for mansplaining has become little more than a progressive bullying technique, yet another convenient way to silence critics and shut down debate...
Check Your Privilege: This expression was once uttered in the spirit of John 8:7, wherein Jesus famously tells a group of men who are about to stone a woman to death: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” But it’s now uttered in precisely the kind of sanctimonious spirit Jesus despised: the self-righteous spirit of the Pharisees, who love to perform their good works “on the street corners to be seen by others.” These days, the person who says “check your privilege” is in all likelihood little more than a progressive bully who’s trying to silence you...
Rhetorical gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by unilaterally redefining the borders of a word’s meaning. Here’s how it’s done: (i) Begin with a word, phrase, or concept like “racism” or “hate speech” that (a) has a commonly understood meaning, and (b) is commonly understood to be good or evil. (ii) Sneak in a weird, atypical definition (e.g., racism is only racism when certain people do it, hate speech is only hate speech when it’s about certain people, etc.). (iii) Now claim that anyone who is against this thing that is commonly understood to be evil, or for this thing that is commonly understood to be good, must agree with your policy proposal, analysis, etc. It’s a clever hustle. Beware of it. [Ed: Aka Bait and Switch]...
If you want to know who’s going to be a tyrant in power, pay attention to who walks and talks like a tyrant out of power. If you want to know how a freedom fighter’s going to rule tomorrow, pay attention to how they deal with people who disagree with them today. As Maya Angelou wisely cautions: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Progressive bullies keep showing us who they really are. We need to listen to them. We need to believe them the first time. And we need to beware of them."
Ironically Angelou's quote rules out the possibility of change/growth, or simply of you being wrong.
Links - 9th May 2019 (1)
Visit the Wrong Website, and the FBI Could End Up in Your Computer - "Security experts call it a “drive-by download”: a hacker infiltrates a high-traffic website and then subverts it to deliver malware to every single visitor. It’s one of the most powerful tools in the black hat arsenal, capable of delivering thousands of fresh victims into a hackers’ clutches within minutes... “It was really impressive how quickly they took this vulnerability in Firefox and extrapolated it to the Tor browser and planted it on a hidden service,” says Andrew Lewman, executive director of the nonprofit Tor Project, which maintains the code.The Freedom Hosting drive-by has had a lasting impact on the Tor Project, which is now working to engineer a safe, private way for Tor users to automatically install the latest security patches as soon as they’re available"
Mumbai Man's Second Wife Kills Third Wife With Help Of First Wife’s Daughter & Her Boyfriend - "In a twisted tale of events, a family in Mumbai bonded over a murder. A 32-year-old Nalasopara woman allegedly killed her husband’s third and latest wife with the help of her two minor stepdaughters. The body of Yogita Devre, 35, was found in a secluded spot in Nalasopara on March 1.The perpetrator, identified as Parvati Mane, has been arrested by the police. She is the second wife of Sushil Mishra, 45, a contract labourer"
People Are Sharing Pics Of Boyfriends “Forced” To Take Perfect Pictures Of Their Girlfriends (New Pics)
Asian Guys Like Stupid Girls - "my final understanding of the conversation was that stupid=cute. Chinese women seemed happy or completely fine with the fact that their boyfriends called them stupid. “Well I wouldn’t be happy to be called 笨笨的,” I interjected. “It’s kind of insulting in the USA.” He went on his long ramble about how China and the USA are different, but the point remained the same: As a woman in China, being called stupid was not only normal, it was a compliment, and it was something to strive for...
Mannerly, obedient, cute, giggly—she is the epitome of what every Japanese man wants.So, I asked the dudes yesterday, “Have you met K’s girlfriend?”“Yeah, she’s really polite,” said one. “Very cute.”“What do you think, TK?” K said to friend no.2.“ちょっと天然かな”That’s Japanese for:“Kind of an airhead.”...
My conclusion just adds to the evidence as to why western women just don’t get Asian men very often. Us American are straightforward and loud and we don’t (well, most of us) wear cute floral pattern dresses with hair bands decorated in butterflies and rainbows while giggling at every single thing. Compared to a Japanese woman, us westerners are rough, tough, mean, loud, bossy and annoying. I mean, why date a woman who’s going to argue with you about Chinese and Japanese governmental policies when you could just have someone that smiles, laughs and brightens your day with her clothing–all without challenging your ideals? I kind of see the appeal. Maybe."
How to Get An Asian Boyfriend in China and Japan - "“Forget it,” my senpai, the veteran English teachers in the area, told me. “Japanese men aren’t interested in foreigners. Especially ones that have black hair, like you. Japanese men want exotic. They want blondes.” “We’ve been here five years and have yet to go on a date,” the other teacher said, the cynicism thick in her voice. “Japanese women love white guys, but the same can’t be said about the Japanese men.”... don’t wait for a man to come by and buy you a drink. In the west it’s normal for men to approach women they don’t know for a date, but in Asia this is still very much a foreign concept... My best pick up line in Japan was literally “hello.” If I was sitting at a bar and a cute Japanese guy was next to me, I’d smile and say “hello.” These simple greetings of hello led to fun conversation, phone numbers, and a few dates (one of these encounters is still my friend—we’ve been talking now for 5 years!).Don’t wait for love to come to you in Asia. Asian men are probably interested in you, but the combination of being shy and the taboo around asking out a stranger probably make it difficult for him to get the guts to talk to you. A little hello never hurt anyone... While many Japanese and Chinese people speak English rather well nowadays, it’s still very crucial to speak their language. In Japan, many of the men I went on dates with were thoroughly interested in me because I spoke Japanese—and spoke it well. More than that, I think they were touched that someone from afar was so interested in their country and culture... Step 3: Don’t Find Love in a Club (or anywhere where you’re quite drunk)"
Mike Cernovich on Twitter - "She led him to the dance floor. They made out. They walked back to his apartment. Five minutes later they left. No DNA evidence showing sex. 12 years in prison."
CO09125 | Relevance of the Singapore Armed Forces: A Journey into Singaporeaness - "A refrain from a popular military cadence of the 1980s went: ‘down by the river, took a little walk, ran into some communists, had a little talk’. A post- September 11 SAF Serviceman would be familiar with the tune – except that terrorists rather than communists are now the featured enemies of the state... Jean-Jacques Rousseau once asked: “How can they love it, if their native land means no more to them than it does to foreigners, and if what it does for them is only what cannot be refused to anyone?” Perceptions of ‘NS for Singaporeans, jobs for foreigners’ is a well-articulated concern of Generation Y Singaporeans on youtube, online blogs and social networking sites... The conscription of female citizens alongside their male counterparts and the recruitment of non-citizens as career soldiers are issues that cannot be dismissed lightly in the near future.The United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Spain and France are well-known examples of countries that actively recruit non-citizens as professional soldiers."
University of Kansas to offer course on 'Angry White Male' - "Estes wrote on Twitter Wednesday that the course “divides the student population” and lamented that the university did not offer a class to “unite people and empower women.”"
If it were about any other group...
Britain isn't a European country, but our politicians are desperate to make it one - "I’ve never felt European. We are a more globally minded people, more likely to emigrate to other English-speaking countries than to France or Spain, and our history would seem to have set us on a different course to those nations that haven’t got over defeat or devastation during the 20th century.This isn’t an old-fashioned view: one argument for why so many ethnic minority voters backed Brexit, for example, is that they happily feel part of an evolving and open-minded British, or English, identity, rather than a European one."
Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand - "With so many shutdowns, tracking Google's bodycount has become a competitive industry on the Internet. Over on Wikipedia, the list of discontinued Google products and services is starting to approach the size of the active products and services listed. There are entire sites dedicated to discontinued Google products, like killedbygoogle.com, The Google Cemetery, and didgoogleshutdown.com... The amount of people I see still bringing up Google Reader's shutdown is incredible—having a frequently used Web service snatched away from you sticks with people. If people lose confidence in Google's ability to host a stable lineup of services, more and more users will move out of the Google ecosystem. Then, like we're already seeing with Stadia, the company would face an uphill battle to get people to use its new products."
Are men boring? - "Typical male strengths – focus, dedication, self-belief – might thrust men up the ladder at work, and lead them to do most of the talking in certain contexts – in meetings, in parliament, in the law courts, in tutorials, in panel discussions on the television: contexts in which conversation has a purpose. But the same qualities are more likely to transmute into weaknesses – tunnel vision, limited interests, self-absorption – in social situations, where talking is just an end in itself... Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, imagined in her book “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation” (1990) a simple scenario of a man and a woman driving along in a car. The woman says, “Would you like to stop for a coffee?” The man says, “No”, and the woman seethes for the rest of the journey because she would have quite liked to stop for a coffee. In her mind, her enquiry was the opening to a negotiation. In his, it was a question requiring a simple yes or no... "For males”, she writes, “conversation is the way you negotiate your status in the group and keep people from pushing you around; you use talk to preserve your independence. Females, on the other hand, use conversation to negotiate closeness and intimacy.”... Men have a wider bell curve. Therefore one can say there are more interesting men, and more boring men. Women are averagely boring, but when men are boring they are spectacularly boring.”
Another way to explain the gender pay gap and other gender differences
Melania Trump’s nude modelling pictures surface - "When asked about the photos, Trump told The New York Post: “Melania was one of the most successful models and she did many photo shoots, including for covers and major magazines. This was a picture taken for a European magazine prior to my knowing Melania. In Europe, pictures like this are very fashionable and common.”"
'They All Look Alike': The Other-Race Effect - "we humans are notoriously poor at distinguishing between the members of races different from our own.The Other-Race Effect, as this psychological shortcoming is called, has been studied for decades... "Studies have found that racial attitudes don’t predict performance in cross-race identification tasks; prejudiced and non-prejudiced people are equally likely to fall victim to the other-race effect""
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Friendship - "Shadow Chancellor John McDonald... was pretty firm about it. Under no circumstances he said this week, could ever be friends with a Tory. The Conservatives hit their disappointment well, but there was some nostalgia for the day when even politicians could manage to like those with whom they disagreed. And much more serious concern about what many see as a new intolerance in our public discourse, an increasing tendency to regard those with a different point of view as not just wrong, but ill-intentioned, even downright evil. Brexit is the obvious example where even family members on opposing sides aren't talking to each other. The transgender kerfuffle is another, with activists refusing to be in the same Radio Four studio this week with even moderate opponents, so toxic do they regard the views of those who don't think the way they do...
I agree with Socrates when he says, be slow to fall into friendship. But when you’re in continue firm and constant...
Sylvia Plath’s got this great line. She said, you know, if you've, if you've thrown up with somebody, you know, you’re sort of bonded forever...
‘In your blog, practical ethics you boasted of cutting off, unfriending, defriending, anybody who'd supported the Tories is in the 2015 election’...
'At the last election, say, there were some people who felt safe because they were Jewish, they felt uncomfortable voting for Jeremy Corbyn. Now you wouldn't dump someone because they made that kind of value judgment, that comes from personal experience, it can be a deeply moral position to take'...
Why do we talk about politics all the time? Why don't we, why don't the example, those been the examples, someone's going out and robbed a bank or someone's gonna, we haven't talked about, you know I've got a friend who robbed a bank. That's terrible..
I think the reason politics are so, one of the reasons it's so divisive and so huge now is it's the new religion. So as religion has fallen away politics has taken its place. It's filled that vacuum and all that, you know I'm a religious person but all that zealotry that you may have gotten- previously people say don't talk about religion and there is a good reason for that and... particularly in America it is absolutely the new religion"
People with high moral standards 'less likely' to be funny - "The results suggested that people with high moral standards were less likely to make jokes or laugh at other people’s jokes, subsequently making them less likeable... The team tested the theory that humour which relies on violating social boundaries can lead to tension in people who strongly adhere to those rules"
The Retirement Community Where Seniors Have Sex In Town's Main Mode Of Transport: Golf Carts - "Free, consensual, noncommittal sex with a new partner every night is an option"
Portland progressives see police as a greater threat than rising disorder. - "Portland police officer Jeff Niiya has been accused of “collusion with right-wing extremist” after exchanging text messages with Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer, a group of right-wing provocateurs who mostly demonstrate at leftist gatherings. It’s standard practice for police to communicate with leaders of fringe groups on the right and left, but Niiya’s texts appear to have been overly friendly.Portland progressives have seized the opportunity to tar the city’s entire police force as sympathetic with right-wing groups at the expense of liberals and leftists. City commissioner and liberal firebrand Jo Ann Hardesty released a statement claiming, without evidence, that “this story simply confirms that . . . there are members of the Portland police force who work in collusion with right-wing extremists.” Progressive activists massed outside City Hall days later, demanding the ouster of police chief Danielle Outlaw. Anti-police sentiment is pervasive in progressive-leaning cities across the United States. Advocates against “overpolicing” put pressure on cops to take a hands-off approach to public order. In response, law-enforcement agencies have scaled back the tactics and resources that combat crime and maintain stability... Portland today is much changed from the city that I grew up in. Signs of urban decay and degradation are everywhere. Streets are littered with trash, human feces, and drug needles. Transient camps and villages dot the city. Vagrants roam the streets and threaten pedestrians and businesses owners. A Portland resident calls the police every 15 minutes to report an incident involving a homeless person.Still, the city’s progressive politicians and activists would like residents to believe that law-enforcement officials pose a greater threat than public anarchy. Portland’s attitude toward law enforcement has become so negative, in fact, that neighboring Washington County will no longer offer coordination or support to the Portland Police Bureau... Fear of repercussion have caused some Portland police to avoid upholding order altogether. Footage captured members of the far-left Antifa protest group directing traffic and harassing commuters in October 2018. The video shows protestors stopping drivers from entering certain intersections, and chasing and bashing the vehicles of drivers who refused to obey their commands. Less than a block away, cops stood and watched the chaos unfold. Portland mayor Ted Wheeler praised them for not intervening. Local officers will also no longer be able to take part in federal counterterrorism efforts, thanks to the city council, which has nixed Portland’s partnership efforts with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Hardesty, who made leaving the JTTF a key campaign promise and who cast the deciding vote on exiting the agreement, justified her decision— despite strong opposition from Portland’s police chief, liberal mayor, and senior federal law enforcement officials—by defending Portland’s status as a sanctuary city for illegal aliens"
Mumbai Man's Second Wife Kills Third Wife With Help Of First Wife’s Daughter & Her Boyfriend - "In a twisted tale of events, a family in Mumbai bonded over a murder. A 32-year-old Nalasopara woman allegedly killed her husband’s third and latest wife with the help of her two minor stepdaughters. The body of Yogita Devre, 35, was found in a secluded spot in Nalasopara on March 1.The perpetrator, identified as Parvati Mane, has been arrested by the police. She is the second wife of Sushil Mishra, 45, a contract labourer"
People Are Sharing Pics Of Boyfriends “Forced” To Take Perfect Pictures Of Their Girlfriends (New Pics)
Asian Guys Like Stupid Girls - "my final understanding of the conversation was that stupid=cute. Chinese women seemed happy or completely fine with the fact that their boyfriends called them stupid. “Well I wouldn’t be happy to be called 笨笨的,” I interjected. “It’s kind of insulting in the USA.” He went on his long ramble about how China and the USA are different, but the point remained the same: As a woman in China, being called stupid was not only normal, it was a compliment, and it was something to strive for...
Mannerly, obedient, cute, giggly—she is the epitome of what every Japanese man wants.So, I asked the dudes yesterday, “Have you met K’s girlfriend?”“Yeah, she’s really polite,” said one. “Very cute.”“What do you think, TK?” K said to friend no.2.“ちょっと天然かな”That’s Japanese for:“Kind of an airhead.”...
My conclusion just adds to the evidence as to why western women just don’t get Asian men very often. Us American are straightforward and loud and we don’t (well, most of us) wear cute floral pattern dresses with hair bands decorated in butterflies and rainbows while giggling at every single thing. Compared to a Japanese woman, us westerners are rough, tough, mean, loud, bossy and annoying. I mean, why date a woman who’s going to argue with you about Chinese and Japanese governmental policies when you could just have someone that smiles, laughs and brightens your day with her clothing–all without challenging your ideals? I kind of see the appeal. Maybe."
How to Get An Asian Boyfriend in China and Japan - "“Forget it,” my senpai, the veteran English teachers in the area, told me. “Japanese men aren’t interested in foreigners. Especially ones that have black hair, like you. Japanese men want exotic. They want blondes.” “We’ve been here five years and have yet to go on a date,” the other teacher said, the cynicism thick in her voice. “Japanese women love white guys, but the same can’t be said about the Japanese men.”... don’t wait for a man to come by and buy you a drink. In the west it’s normal for men to approach women they don’t know for a date, but in Asia this is still very much a foreign concept... My best pick up line in Japan was literally “hello.” If I was sitting at a bar and a cute Japanese guy was next to me, I’d smile and say “hello.” These simple greetings of hello led to fun conversation, phone numbers, and a few dates (one of these encounters is still my friend—we’ve been talking now for 5 years!).Don’t wait for love to come to you in Asia. Asian men are probably interested in you, but the combination of being shy and the taboo around asking out a stranger probably make it difficult for him to get the guts to talk to you. A little hello never hurt anyone... While many Japanese and Chinese people speak English rather well nowadays, it’s still very crucial to speak their language. In Japan, many of the men I went on dates with were thoroughly interested in me because I spoke Japanese—and spoke it well. More than that, I think they were touched that someone from afar was so interested in their country and culture... Step 3: Don’t Find Love in a Club (or anywhere where you’re quite drunk)"
Mike Cernovich on Twitter - "She led him to the dance floor. They made out. They walked back to his apartment. Five minutes later they left. No DNA evidence showing sex. 12 years in prison."
CO09125 | Relevance of the Singapore Armed Forces: A Journey into Singaporeaness - "A refrain from a popular military cadence of the 1980s went: ‘down by the river, took a little walk, ran into some communists, had a little talk’. A post- September 11 SAF Serviceman would be familiar with the tune – except that terrorists rather than communists are now the featured enemies of the state... Jean-Jacques Rousseau once asked: “How can they love it, if their native land means no more to them than it does to foreigners, and if what it does for them is only what cannot be refused to anyone?” Perceptions of ‘NS for Singaporeans, jobs for foreigners’ is a well-articulated concern of Generation Y Singaporeans on youtube, online blogs and social networking sites... The conscription of female citizens alongside their male counterparts and the recruitment of non-citizens as career soldiers are issues that cannot be dismissed lightly in the near future.The United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Spain and France are well-known examples of countries that actively recruit non-citizens as professional soldiers."
University of Kansas to offer course on 'Angry White Male' - "Estes wrote on Twitter Wednesday that the course “divides the student population” and lamented that the university did not offer a class to “unite people and empower women.”"
If it were about any other group...
Britain isn't a European country, but our politicians are desperate to make it one - "I’ve never felt European. We are a more globally minded people, more likely to emigrate to other English-speaking countries than to France or Spain, and our history would seem to have set us on a different course to those nations that haven’t got over defeat or devastation during the 20th century.This isn’t an old-fashioned view: one argument for why so many ethnic minority voters backed Brexit, for example, is that they happily feel part of an evolving and open-minded British, or English, identity, rather than a European one."
Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand - "With so many shutdowns, tracking Google's bodycount has become a competitive industry on the Internet. Over on Wikipedia, the list of discontinued Google products and services is starting to approach the size of the active products and services listed. There are entire sites dedicated to discontinued Google products, like killedbygoogle.com, The Google Cemetery, and didgoogleshutdown.com... The amount of people I see still bringing up Google Reader's shutdown is incredible—having a frequently used Web service snatched away from you sticks with people. If people lose confidence in Google's ability to host a stable lineup of services, more and more users will move out of the Google ecosystem. Then, like we're already seeing with Stadia, the company would face an uphill battle to get people to use its new products."
Are men boring? - "Typical male strengths – focus, dedication, self-belief – might thrust men up the ladder at work, and lead them to do most of the talking in certain contexts – in meetings, in parliament, in the law courts, in tutorials, in panel discussions on the television: contexts in which conversation has a purpose. But the same qualities are more likely to transmute into weaknesses – tunnel vision, limited interests, self-absorption – in social situations, where talking is just an end in itself... Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, imagined in her book “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation” (1990) a simple scenario of a man and a woman driving along in a car. The woman says, “Would you like to stop for a coffee?” The man says, “No”, and the woman seethes for the rest of the journey because she would have quite liked to stop for a coffee. In her mind, her enquiry was the opening to a negotiation. In his, it was a question requiring a simple yes or no... "For males”, she writes, “conversation is the way you negotiate your status in the group and keep people from pushing you around; you use talk to preserve your independence. Females, on the other hand, use conversation to negotiate closeness and intimacy.”... Men have a wider bell curve. Therefore one can say there are more interesting men, and more boring men. Women are averagely boring, but when men are boring they are spectacularly boring.”
Another way to explain the gender pay gap and other gender differences
Melania Trump’s nude modelling pictures surface - "When asked about the photos, Trump told The New York Post: “Melania was one of the most successful models and she did many photo shoots, including for covers and major magazines. This was a picture taken for a European magazine prior to my knowing Melania. In Europe, pictures like this are very fashionable and common.”"
'They All Look Alike': The Other-Race Effect - "we humans are notoriously poor at distinguishing between the members of races different from our own.The Other-Race Effect, as this psychological shortcoming is called, has been studied for decades... "Studies have found that racial attitudes don’t predict performance in cross-race identification tasks; prejudiced and non-prejudiced people are equally likely to fall victim to the other-race effect""
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Friendship - "Shadow Chancellor John McDonald... was pretty firm about it. Under no circumstances he said this week, could ever be friends with a Tory. The Conservatives hit their disappointment well, but there was some nostalgia for the day when even politicians could manage to like those with whom they disagreed. And much more serious concern about what many see as a new intolerance in our public discourse, an increasing tendency to regard those with a different point of view as not just wrong, but ill-intentioned, even downright evil. Brexit is the obvious example where even family members on opposing sides aren't talking to each other. The transgender kerfuffle is another, with activists refusing to be in the same Radio Four studio this week with even moderate opponents, so toxic do they regard the views of those who don't think the way they do...
I agree with Socrates when he says, be slow to fall into friendship. But when you’re in continue firm and constant...
Sylvia Plath’s got this great line. She said, you know, if you've, if you've thrown up with somebody, you know, you’re sort of bonded forever...
‘In your blog, practical ethics you boasted of cutting off, unfriending, defriending, anybody who'd supported the Tories is in the 2015 election’...
'At the last election, say, there were some people who felt safe because they were Jewish, they felt uncomfortable voting for Jeremy Corbyn. Now you wouldn't dump someone because they made that kind of value judgment, that comes from personal experience, it can be a deeply moral position to take'...
Why do we talk about politics all the time? Why don't we, why don't the example, those been the examples, someone's going out and robbed a bank or someone's gonna, we haven't talked about, you know I've got a friend who robbed a bank. That's terrible..
I think the reason politics are so, one of the reasons it's so divisive and so huge now is it's the new religion. So as religion has fallen away politics has taken its place. It's filled that vacuum and all that, you know I'm a religious person but all that zealotry that you may have gotten- previously people say don't talk about religion and there is a good reason for that and... particularly in America it is absolutely the new religion"
People with high moral standards 'less likely' to be funny - "The results suggested that people with high moral standards were less likely to make jokes or laugh at other people’s jokes, subsequently making them less likeable... The team tested the theory that humour which relies on violating social boundaries can lead to tension in people who strongly adhere to those rules"
The Retirement Community Where Seniors Have Sex In Town's Main Mode Of Transport: Golf Carts - "Free, consensual, noncommittal sex with a new partner every night is an option"
Portland progressives see police as a greater threat than rising disorder. - "Portland police officer Jeff Niiya has been accused of “collusion with right-wing extremist” after exchanging text messages with Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer, a group of right-wing provocateurs who mostly demonstrate at leftist gatherings. It’s standard practice for police to communicate with leaders of fringe groups on the right and left, but Niiya’s texts appear to have been overly friendly.Portland progressives have seized the opportunity to tar the city’s entire police force as sympathetic with right-wing groups at the expense of liberals and leftists. City commissioner and liberal firebrand Jo Ann Hardesty released a statement claiming, without evidence, that “this story simply confirms that . . . there are members of the Portland police force who work in collusion with right-wing extremists.” Progressive activists massed outside City Hall days later, demanding the ouster of police chief Danielle Outlaw. Anti-police sentiment is pervasive in progressive-leaning cities across the United States. Advocates against “overpolicing” put pressure on cops to take a hands-off approach to public order. In response, law-enforcement agencies have scaled back the tactics and resources that combat crime and maintain stability... Portland today is much changed from the city that I grew up in. Signs of urban decay and degradation are everywhere. Streets are littered with trash, human feces, and drug needles. Transient camps and villages dot the city. Vagrants roam the streets and threaten pedestrians and businesses owners. A Portland resident calls the police every 15 minutes to report an incident involving a homeless person.Still, the city’s progressive politicians and activists would like residents to believe that law-enforcement officials pose a greater threat than public anarchy. Portland’s attitude toward law enforcement has become so negative, in fact, that neighboring Washington County will no longer offer coordination or support to the Portland Police Bureau... Fear of repercussion have caused some Portland police to avoid upholding order altogether. Footage captured members of the far-left Antifa protest group directing traffic and harassing commuters in October 2018. The video shows protestors stopping drivers from entering certain intersections, and chasing and bashing the vehicles of drivers who refused to obey their commands. Less than a block away, cops stood and watched the chaos unfold. Portland mayor Ted Wheeler praised them for not intervening. Local officers will also no longer be able to take part in federal counterterrorism efforts, thanks to the city council, which has nixed Portland’s partnership efforts with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Hardesty, who made leaving the JTTF a key campaign promise and who cast the deciding vote on exiting the agreement, justified her decision— despite strong opposition from Portland’s police chief, liberal mayor, and senior federal law enforcement officials—by defending Portland’s status as a sanctuary city for illegal aliens"