Links - 1st March 2020 (3)

ZUBY: on Twitter - "It's annoying when people use their skin colour, sex, or sexuality to shield themselves from all forms of criticism. Most people aren't racist, sexist, or homophobic. They might just disagree with you or think you're a moron. Do you want equality or special treatment? Decide."

Samantha Quek on Twitter - "$43M in cash found in empty Nigerian apartment"
"I bet the owner tried for years to share it, but no one ever replied to his emails..."

A possum broke into an Australian bakery and ate so many pastries it couldn't move. This is how they found him. : funny

Joey Kerr on Twitte - "Every post we make, we work hard to ensure if we list both genders, we list the female one first. Try for a day to do that in speaking or writing. We bet you'll default to the masculine first.   Takes effort.   #genderequality #genderdisparity #womenfirst #tryit #weareallequal"
"I wish I had this much free time"
""Ladies and Gentlemen.. the boat is currently sinking - please make your way to the liferafts, women and children first.""

California still most populous, but stalls at 39.9 million - "More people are leaving California than moving in, evidence of the toll the state’s housing crisis is taking as the world’s fifth largest economy inches toward 40 million people.An estimate released Friday by the California Department of Finance put the California’s population at 39.96 million, just shy of the 40 million milestone demographers had predicted the state would have passed by now... Meanwhile, California’s homeless population has continued to swell, jumping 16.7% in January... there are more adults in Nevada that were born in California than native Nevadans."

'Collapse OS' Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse - "The operating system is designed to work with ubiquitous, easy-to-scavenge components in a future where consumer electronics are a thing of the past."

Maybe Black men protect white women because we see ourselves in them - "In his book, White Girls, Hilton Als describes, at length, the ways queerness, white womanhood and Black identity converge. The book is, partially, about the obsession we have with white womanhood—the performance of white womanhood. Als creates an argument centered around white womanhood as something to achieve, especially by Black queer men, in his experience—but certainly by any one of us."
???

Gaia on Twitter - "If you are a 'Straight White Male', you can instantly reverse your position in the Intersectional Oppression Hierarchy™ by self-identifying as a 'Transgender Woman of Colour'.  The people who were gunning for you will immediately start fighting for you...   Jedi level sorcery."
"My fiancé was told he was ‘mansplaining’ once so he told the activist he identifies as a woman. She had to apologize in front of all her friends to a big, bearded man. These people are entertaining."

Meme - "You're white! Everything's your fault!"
"You're a westerner! Everything's your fault!"
"You're a man! Everything's your fault"
"Hi friendo. It's not your fault. You did everything they ever told you to do. And it wasn't enough. Tt will never be enough for these people. Would you like to Know more?"
"White western men are joining the far right and we have absolutely no idea why. Jess Phillips"

‘Precious Thots’ gift store in S’pore renamed to ‘Precious Thoughts’ - "The store first opened its doors in 1996.It is unclear if the rebrand was due to the modern vernacular “thots”, short for “That Ho Over There”, gaining wider usage. According to Dictionary.com thot is used as a synonym for vulgar slurs like sl*t”.Nobody in the 90s could’ve predicted that Internet culture would ruin the meaning of “thots” 20 years later."

Pierce Brosnan does a U-turn on Trump and thanks him for the US economy - "The 007 star once suggested he might leave the US after Trump was elected. However, asked about the issue in an interview with The Hill’s ‘In the Know’ section, he said: “I think what he’s done for the economy is very good.”“People are working again, and that’s a step in the right direction,” he added. “This country is part of my life. I’m an American citizen. I love America and America’s been very good to me. And I want to see happiness come back into our society.”"

Sargon of Akkad - Posts - "i will defend indigenous people using animal products however the fuck they want until i die. they hunt and farm and use every part of any animal all while giving thanks and gratitude. they’ve had so much taken from them, vegans going after indigenous people can fuck off."
"The commie feminists are going after the vegans, get your popcorn folks!"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Fall of the Berlin Wall - "Three decades those democracies are divided and uncertain. Populism is on the march. An authoritarian Russia meddles. China is more totalitarian, not less. The Arab Spring ended in violence not democracy. Global measures of civil liberties government function and political pluralism have been sliding for more than a decade. What went wrong? Was it a moral failure of the West not to capitalize on its advantage? Was it hubris to think our way of life and our values were so obviously superior that everybody else would rush to adopt them? Do we still think the world would be a better place if reshaped in our image? If we failed then, can we succeed now? And what would success look like that?...
Demaester [sp?] the anti-Enlightenment French philosopher says I have never met this universal human being. I've met a Frenchman, I've met a German, I've met a Pole. But I've never met this Rousseauesque universal human being. And I think that's a very good point. When Matthew talks about the demands for more and more and more things, the problem with liberal democracy is it necessarily places limits on all those demands, and it also tries to place limits on human nature. Because the moment that those wants, those desires or those natures push liberal democracy too far, it has to push back. And in recent years, as we reach this particular stage of liberal democracy, we began to see the limits more and more of what in the world liberal democracy will not tolerate. There are forms of speech it won't tolerate. There are kinds of economic reforms it won't tolerate. So it is starting to look a lot like the thing it was supposed to supposed to replace. It started to look a lot more authoritarian"

What Do Nancy Pelosi, Taylor Swift, and Serena Williams Have in Common? (Ep. 385) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "girls and women’s organizations get less than 10 percent of every philanthropic dollar...
DUBNER: So I know your membership has declined somewhat, but the Boy Scouts membership has fallen much faster than yours. Do you have any thoughts as to why that is? Do you think the Girl Scouts are more valuable to the modern American girl than the Boy Scouts are to the modern American boy?
ACEVEDO: I really can’t make judgments on their organization. But what I can say about Girl Scouts is we really are focused on that girl-only experience. And to create a program that works for them, that is designed around the way girls learn and lead. And that’s really what we’re experts in...
DUBNER: So I’m guessing that the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. will not ever accept boys.
ACEVEDO: Just like any good business, you focus on what you do well and what we are are experts in how girls learn and lead.
DUBNER: I’m curious to know about the Girl Scouts’ policy, I guess, on policy. I can think of a number of issues that are in the news today, that a female organization would have a particular take on, whether it’s immigration, whether it’s abortion, and so on. What is the official position on politics and policy, and the endorsement of candidates and things like that?...
ACEVEDO: What we did do is we realized what people want is change, especially change in policies and in politics and we said, “Well, let’s make sure that girls understand how you do that in a democracy, regardless of what it is.” So we’re teaching girls how to create the change they want to see in the world, the positive change they want to see, but we’re not telling them what that is.
DUBNER: So let’s say I’m a Girl Scout troop, and I decide that, for instance, Elizabeth Warren, I think is a great presidential candidate. And I want to participate and help in campaign events for Elizabeth Warren and I want all of our girls to go in their Scout uniforms. Allowed or no?
ACEVEDO: So what we encourage people is to— we really encourage you to get out the vote. We encourage you to encourage people to go out and vote. But as a Girl Scout, endorsed as a Girl Scout, that’s not what our organization is about.
DUBNER: It seems as though the line between what’s political and what’s not political is much, much blurrier these days than it used to be. And I’m just curious whether that line is a little bit harder to navigate for the Girl Scouts than it might have been 20, 30, 50 years ago.
ACEVEDO: You know, there are always people trying to push us one way or the other. It’s interesting. I can be in one part of the country and say our message, exactly, and people will say “Oh my God, you are from New York. You are so liberal.” I can then take that exact same message, go to another part of country, and, “Oh my God. You guys are just so conservative. Get with the times, Girl Scouts.”
This is quite funny - since there are very few boys and men's organizations, this is evidence (once again) of female privilege since they get served both by female-only and unisex organisations (unless we believe the feminist claim that if an organisation is not devoted to girls and women, it doesn't serve them and this is evidence of sexism)
Are the Girl Scouts sexist since they don't allow boys, are sueing the Boy Scouts for being inclusive, think Girls are different from Boys and advocate some level of segregation?
Looks like they are on the Wrong Side of History because they don't support Progressive causes

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Hybrids - "From the flower’s point of view, orchid’s point of view, a bee is a flying penis, okay. Brings in pollen from somewhere else. And what the orchid wants in inverted commas is for its pollinator to be hungry, and to be faithful, and to be active. And of course, the pollinator wants exactly the opposite. He wants to be lazy, well fed and promiscuous. So there's this complicated arms race that goes on, and you get lots of species as a result, but in fact, that means that the barriers between the orchids are really held in the minds of the pollinators. And the same is true in many birds for example. You can hybridize the ducks, mallards and pintails easily, but they don't hybridize in the world in the wild, because to use the technical language, they don't fancy each other. So an awful lot of difference is actually very subtle and held within behavior. More of it is, some of it is held within genes. Some of it is very held very firmly within genes. But it's noticeable when you have big disturbances of a habitat that happened, for example, 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, when things began to dry up, different grasses began to hybridize and they made the bread wheats okay...
Botanists never really kind of liked the biological species concept. We never, botanists never, when it first came out in the 1960s and 70s, many botanists wrote papers saying this doesn't work in plants, because we've known for a long time that plants cross with each other relatively easily. And I think what people are finding now, especially with genomics, is that actually this is true in animals as well. Is there's quite a lot of crossing and gene exchange, which is another way of saying hybridization. There's a lot of gene exchange, which we just didn't see before...
[On hybrid vigor] it even seems to apply to a degree in humans. If you do large surveys now, using, using the *something* the census we have with people in regard to people's health and that kind of stuff. If you look at the the marriages that are registered over the centuries, until about 1870 in Britain, the main difference between marriage, the birthplace of marriage partners was about 10 kilometers, okay? By about 1970 it’d been about 100 kilometers or so. I have not been able to find the figures for 2019 or 2020, but my guess looking at my students who come from all over the world, it's probably two or 300 kilometres. And what you find is, if you measure the height of individuals who come from parents who were married 10 kilometers apart, as well as those 100 kilometers apart, the ones who are further apart are taller and slightly more intelligent on IQ steps, IQ tests than those who come from close inbred populations…
‘I think that's a really good example of showing that hybridization is something that doesn't just happen between species. It happens between individuals and between, you know, different populations, within a species, between species, between genera’...
‘One of the reasons Darwin studied this… He was very concerned because he had married his cousin... But Darwin had 10 children... later down, later in the Darwin generations, his grandchildren, his children, had fewer children, have fewer of their own offspring than average, perhaps because these different groups of genes were indeed beginning to get mixed up and exposing this hidden damage.’"