Links - 26th March 2020 (2)

Salon writer loses her mind, calls Hallmark movies fascist - The Post Millennial - "Hating on Hallmark has become an annual right of passage for progressive journalists, and Amanda Marcotte’s Salon piece “Hallmark movies are fascist propaganda” absolutely does not disappoint. Instead of taking the usual tack of calling it basic and boring, Marcotte deems it discriminatorily heteronormative, and authoritarian."

Meme - "You being ashamed to send your tit pic is misogynistic. If you were really a feminist. you would be comfortable showing us your body. Breasts are not sexual body parts. They're something everyone has. Don't let your internal misogyny stop you from sending nudes. Boobs are boobs and you need to learn a thing or two about feminism."
"fuckboys are evolving"

Amanda Ellen Gibbs - "Aldi, a discount grocery chain, is on an aggressive growth spurt in the United States, pressurising Walmart on low food prices"
"Its almost as though capitalism creates incentive among competitors to lower prices for consumers, or lose business to the guy who does!Opposing chains like Walmart and wanting them banned from neighborhoods seems...classist. Low income people should not be forced to spend more on goods because rich people don't want a Walmart in their town.The same "not in my backyard" mentality happens with affordable housing.You get rich people in NDP strongholds like my own, The Beaches, who claim to support more housing for new immigrants & lowering housing costs for all -- yet they are the first to oppose any loosening up on rent control, vocally oppose every high-rise development in our neighborhood, & think zoning should remain for single family homes only.If you can afford to spend more & shop local, awesome, you should voluntarily do it!What you should not do, is try to take away choice for others who don't have the same financial luxury as you. Competition lowers cost, period.Is it ruthless? Sometimes it can seem that way, corporations certainly don't have the charm of independent stores. It also makes life more affordable for all."

J Hus accuses Europeans of ‘forcing LGBT onto’ Africa and ‘weaponising’ homosexuality - "J Hus has accused Europeans of “forcing LGBT onto” Africa and “weaponising” homosexuality in a series of tweets about colonisation.The rapper began tweeting about Europe’s colonisation of Africa on Monday, writing: “STOP FORCING LGBT ONTO US. Live your life I don’t care but don’t force it onto me especially when you don’t wanna recognise these black struggle [sic].”... “They try force Ghana to include LGBT into their education when its not their culture. You can’t tell me they don’t try force it on us.”"
The liberal excuse is that Africans don't really know what they're talking about because they were made homophobic by European colonisation. But then one could say Europeans aren't really to blame either because they were indoctrinated into it by Christianity, which was a Jewish religion

Princess Anne attacks 'risky' health and safety culture - "The Princess Royal has said the
introduction of health and safety rules in sport could actually put more children at risk of harm.  In an interview with The Telegraph, the Princess tells of her concern that children no longer have the “skills” to choose for themselves what is safe because “health and safety” has decided for them, making some activities more dangerous as a result. She also speaks of feeling “cross” that areas of Britain are being condemned as “disadvantaged” to enable charities to obtain funding... “If you don’t allow children to assess their own risk-taking abilities, they never really learn, so they then go off and do things, which inherently they’re not good enough to do, but somebody has said health and safety says this is OK, and they’ve got no way of judging on their own whether or not they’ve got the skills to do it,” the Princess adds.  In her role as patron of the Scottish Rugby Union, she discloses that she once protested over the introduction of padding in rugby shirts to offer more protection against shoulder injuries.  “I did say to Scottish rugby’s doctor, please don’t do that because it’ll only make them hit each other harder,” she says. “They stopped it … because the injury rate had gone up so high.”"

'Gay gene' ruled out as huge study shows environment is major factor in homosexuality - "Genes play just a small role in whether a person is gay, scientists have found, after discovering that environment has a far bigger impact on homosexuality... They found that genes are responsible for between eight to 25 per cent of the probability of a person being gay, meaning at least three quarters is down to environment.  Scientists said it worked in a similar way to height, in which genes are partly responsible, but other factors - such as nutrition - also play a major role, adding or knocking off inches.   In this case, environment could mean anything from being exposed to certain conditions in the womb, to differences in upbringing or education... Commenting on the research, Dr Melinda Mills, of Nuffield Professor of Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, said: “There is an inclination to reduce sexuality to genetic determinism or to resent this reduction.  “Attributing same-sex orientation to genetics could enhance civil rights or reduce stigma. Conversely, there are fears it provides a tool for intervention or “cure.” "

im cutie on Twitter - "men: female comedians are not funny
sheep: female comedians are funny, you're just sexist
female comedians: vagina vagina vagina big and small vagina fart from vagina haha vagina i have a vagina political vagina got here because of my vagina my loose vagina *makes stupid face*"

A brief history of Quiznos’ collapse - "Between 2007 and 2017, Quiznos shrunk from 4,700 U.S. locations to fewer than 400. We can find no other example of a chain that had grown to that size that has shrunk that much in such a short period of time... Quiznos had a bad business model, a tough competitor, a devastating recession and a leveraged buyout"

The Alternative Left: Right Wing Students: A School Counselor's Rant - "'I work as a counselor at a school where there's a lot of 4chan-esque right wing boys who are coming up. The previous generation a year or two ago wasn't too bad, but this generation coming up now is much more right wing.My question is: how the f**k do I deal with this sh!t?  How am I supposed to honestly give counsel to a kid with a pepe shirt on? How do I talk to these kids who literally come to me and rant about affirmative action? 2 years ago these types barely even existed and now they're everywhere, not only men but women too.  They literally cannot control their right wing beliefs, they talk about it constantly, everywhere. They can't have a discussion about f**king math without bringing up how women hate math and science and that is why they are unsuccessful. They can't talk about english classes without talking about how colleges are wiping away white authors because of cultural Marxism. A kid came to me and ranted that his history classes 'blamed white people too much' for tragedies in the past and that it made him feel uncomfortable.I know my job is that people can come to me with whatever possible problems they want, no matter how controversial. But this is getting f**king out of hand. How do I do this?'...
"A kid came to me and ranted that his history classes 'blamed white people too much' for tragedies in the past and that it made him feel uncomfortable." Again, they learn by example. If blacks and women could go up to guidance counselors and actually blame white people for the tragedies of the past and that it made them uncomfortable, then should it surprise us that white students would eventually turn this on its head and otherwise do the same thing?... Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  It's really that simple. My only question to our guidance counselor is: what the f**k did you think was going to happen? Are you honestly so naive and stupid as to believe that the white males you demonized for a lot longer than 4 years now would be content to simply hang their heads in shamed obedience and let the postmodern critical theory establishment horde the deconstructionist and identity politics goodies all to themselves?"
Ironically, liberals like to say that if you can't do your job, you should quit - when it comes to medical personnel who don't want to perform abortions, since they consider this "healthcare"

Trump held private meetings with Navy SEALs to discuss Afghanistan war - ""I don't want any generals in here. I don't want any officers," Trump added, according to Bergen's book, which was sourced from dozens of interviews with current and former White House officials and military officers. "I just want enlisted guys."... Enlisted service members are typically viewed as the lifeline of the military — they are the men and women who conduct the specific tasks given to them by their officers, whose primary purpose is to lead. Compared with their commissioned counterparts, enlisted troops are also unencumbered by the day-to-day politics of the military and may have given an unfiltered assessment of the war in talks with their commander in chief... Trump was said to have met with senior US military officials in the Situation Room at the White House. In the meeting, Trump said the US service members he spoke with knew "a lot more than you generals," and added that "we're losing" in Afghanistan.  Trump also compared the senior military leaders to a consultant for a Manhattan restaurant from the late 1980s. Instead of heeding the advice of the consultant, who merely suggested expanding a kitchen for renovations, Trump reportedly argued it would have been more prudent, and cheaper, to solicit the advice of waiters from a restaurant."
Presumably he just wanted to talk to the "white supremacists"

America has no good military options to use in Afghanistan - "The reasons why such outside support is critical are all too clear. Afghan forces are not getting better at anything like the rate required. The police lack paramilitary capability, army retention rates are dropping, and the Afghan air force is still largely a hollow shell. Afghan forces have only defeated major Taliban attacks on population centers because the American air force has increased the number of manned and remotely piloted aircraft sorties that release munitions... there are no good military options. Slashing the total military and contractor personnel or security aid as part of any peace process creates a potential power vacuum that the Taliban can exploit, since there is no practical way to disarm an irregular force that does not maintain heavy weapons. It also means trusting the Taliban to become the major Afghan counterterrorism force. Staying the course militarily, however, means supporting the Afghan forces indefinitely with no clear path to lasting victory. Leaving the country without a concrete peace settlement also means the probable collapse of the government and a Taliban takeover.  The civil options for leaving or staying are no better. The World Bank governance indicators show that Afghanistan still has one of the worst and most corrupt governments on the globe. The World Justice Project rates it as having the fourth worst justice system of any country rated, and no one has suggested that the coming election will unify the country behind Afghan President Ashraf Ghani or any other political leader.  The economy is an explosively divisive force"

Nicholas Kristof on Twitter - "My own realization that we were over our heads in Afghanistan came when I interviewed farmers who pretended to set up Taliban camps that the US would then bomb. The farmers would collect the remnants of millions of dollars worth of bombs and sell them for $100 as scrap metal."

U.S. officials misled the public about the war in Afghanistan, confidential documents reveal - Washington Post - "A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable... U.S. officials tried to create — from scratch — a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law.  “Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government,” an unidentified former State Department official told government interviewers in 2015. “The timeframe for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn’t have.”  Meanwhile, the United States flooded the fragile country with far more aid than it could possibly absorb.  During the peak of the fighting, from 2009 to 2012, U.S. lawmakers and military commanders believed the more they spent on schools, bridges, canals and other civil-works projects, the faster security would improve. Aid workers told government interviewers it was a colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive... The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption... By allowing corruption to fester, U.S. officials told interviewers, they helped destroy the popular legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order... A U.S. military officer estimated that one-third of police recruits were “drug addicts or Taliban.” Yet another called them “stealing fools” who looted so much fuel from U.S. bases that they perpetually smelled of gasoline...   “We stated that our goal is to establish a ‘flourishing market economy,’ ” said Douglas Lute, the White House’s Afghan war czar from 2007 to 2013. “I thought we should have specified a flourishing drug trade — this is the only part of the market that’s working.”"
So much for "universal values" and dismissing those who think not all cultures are suited to democracy as racist

Chain sub sandwiches ranked from worst to best - "The thing about Subway is that it tastes exactly like Subway. It has that distinct smell of the bread, which you almost can't shake off your very clothes after a visit there. The meat here is not great quality, which is a major blow."

Harvard’s tenure decision exposes the battle for legitimizing ethnic studies - "Ethnic studies programs work by challenging the “Euro-American studies curricula” that has permeated universities since their inception. As such, the programs often cross over into other humanities fields like history, literature, gender, and sociology, allowing students to study the power and effects that white supremacy and colonization have had on various cultures and communities — and to ultimately better understand the social structures in place because of it... Perlow pointed out that ethnic studies departments aren’t being taken seriously because they have risen out of that same neglect. “Why would we expect the academy to be different when the academy itself has been a hotbed for racist, sexist theorizing, research, and practices since its inception, and especially elite institutions such as Harvard, which were quite literally made possible by slave labor?”"
Of course, by defining themselves in opposition to "whiteness" ethnic studies is just re-inscribing and reifying it - and magicking a justification for its own existence, of course
Ironically, the universities put up with or even encourage grievance studies - and then get whacked by them for it. It's a classic study in masochism and unintended (?) consequences