Not an urban legend!
We Believe in Nihilism - Posts - "Authoritarian left: Die in gulag
Authoritarian right: Die in gas chamber
Libertarian left: Die in riot
Libertarian right: Die in bitcoin-funded deepweb assassination"
Elliott Hulse - "I get this question all the time. “Elliott, what are some red flags I should look out for in a woman?” While the actions and being of the man also play a HUGE role in how wifeable a woman is. Red flags can serve as indicators of the future behavior of a woman.
Some typical red flags include:
Having Daddy Issues
Drug/drinking problems
Weird piercings
But I would tack on:
Compulsive social media use
Regularly uses dating apps
Has more guy friends than girl friends
Can't keep a job
Gets a sense of pride from being “crazy”
And a bunch more.
I'm usually reluctant to share my list of red flags because:
1.I've been with the same woman since I was 14
2.Most men will ignore red flags anyway.
They're slaves to pleasure.
If a man meets a woman who's covered in red flags, but will open her legs for him, he'll excitedly jump in like a kid throwing himself down a water slide."
iris on Twitter - "when i feel bad about my social skills i remind myself how one time rachmaninoff decided he was gonna be pals with stravinsky (who'd casually mentioned he liked honey) so he showed up at his house in the middle of the night with an enormous jar of honey and no explanation"
Oxford students vote to ban 'ableist, classist and misogynist' reading lists as academics hit out - "Oxford University's student union have voted to ban 'ableist, classist and misogynist' readings lists, leading to academics hitting out at the body.Students from the prestigious university voted to prohibit reading lists containing the aforementioned themes, claiming that they should not be made to engage with any 'harmful material'.A policy adopted by the student union went on to state that students should not be required to take part in lectures, tutorials or seminars or undertake exams that involve 'hate speech'. As first reported by The Telegraph, the student union also requested for the university to produce guidelines to faculties asking them to consider any material they include on reading lists 'amounts to hate speech'.The policy, titled Protection of Transgender, Non-binary, Disabled, Working Class and Women Students from Hatred in University Contexts', was put forward by Alex Illsley, co-chairman of Oxford's LGBTQ+ campaign. Oxford University's current guidelines protect all free speech that falls within the realms of the law. Mr Illsley has argued that readings lists contain 'ableist, transphobic, classist and misogynistic content' however.
The value of an Oxford degree keeps plummeting
Western Art History: 500 Years of Women Ignoring Men
Another Sister : WOMEN OF THE KLAN: Racism and Gender in the 1920s, By Kathleen M. Blee ( University of California Press : $24.95; 236 pp.) - Los Angeles Times - "I used to have a comforting image of the Ku Klux Klan as an assemblage of social misfits and genetically inbred white trash. No more. Thanks to Kathleen M. Blee’s superb scholarship in “Women of the Klan,” I must now live with the fact that the Klan contained “all the better people”: businessmen, physicians, judges, social workers--even Quakers, political reformers and (this is the truly discomforting part) feminists. In fact, during the 1920s, the period of Blee’s research, the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan considered itself, with some justice, to be a major advocate of women’s rights and interests--white, Protestant women’s rights, that is.Reading of the Klan’s feminism is like discovering evidence that a beloved grandmother had a secret life as a bloodsucking ghoul. Feminism is, after all, supposed to be founded on moral principle. But so, we learn, was the Klan. In addition to its familiar ideals of white supremacy, anti-Semitism and so forth, the Ku Klux Klan of the ‘20s stood for “Americanism,” temperance, child-welfare measures, quality public education, good citizenship, morality and militant Christianity."
Judge dismisses unequal pay claim by USWNT in lawsuit - Los Angeles Times - "In the lawsuit, brought by reigning world player of the year Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan and 26 others, lawyers claimed the women were not paid equally under their collective bargaining agreement in comparison to what men’s national team players received and asked for more than $66 million in damages and back pay.But U.S. District Court Judge R. Gary Klausner, in a 32-page opinion, rejected that argument saying the women declined a CBA similar to the men’s team in favor of one that offered a base salary and benefits. “The history of negotiations between the parties demonstrates that the WNT rejected an offer to be paid under the same pay-to-play structure as the MNT, and the WNT was willing to forgo higher bonuses for benefits, such as greater base compensation and the guarantee of a higher number of contracted players”... The players filed suit against their federation 13 months ago, arguing they earned less than players on the U.S. men’s team for performing the same work. U.S. Soccer countered by citing the labor agreement the women signed with the federation in 2017, one which pays the women an annual salary and other guaranteed benefit such as health care and family leave that members of the men team do not receive... The federation also offers women players health insurance as well as maternity and adoption leave. Male players are paid by U.S. Soccer only if they make the 18-man roster for an international game."
Presumably it's misogyny to expect women to honour contracts they sign
As usual feminism is obsessed with the top end, and ignores inequalities at the bottom
When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake - "Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."... you can see him marveling at the produce section, the fresh fish market, and the checkout counter. He looked especially excited about frozen pudding pops... "Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev," he said. When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn't believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him. Little did he know there countless stores just like it all over the country, some with even more things than the Randall's he visited.The fact that stores like these were on nearly every street corner in America amazed him. They even offered him free cheese samples... he was despondent. He couldn't stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia."
US sanctions must be why the USSR was such a bad place to live in
Breaking the occupation spell - "an increasingly prevalent belief that the original spelling with the letter C was switched to Korea by the Japanese at the start of their 1910-45 occupation of the peninsula, so that their colonial subjects would not precede them in the English alphabetical hierarchy... "Scholars who have studied this more deeply than I believe it was part of the legacy of Japanese imperialists to eradicate our culture"... Those opposed have suggested sarcastically that Korea pick a new name that begins with the letter A and thus advance in the alphabetical ranks. Or, conversely, they suggest that a rival country change its name to "Zapan." "Has it ever occurred to Koreans that they've been duped by an urban legend?" wrote one critic on an English-language site. "That Japan would change the spelling so that it comes after in English is laughable. This seems like an invented story by some who have too much time on their hands.""
Commentary: COVID-19 reveals how low-tech Japan actually is - and has chosen to be - "In most countries, gamers seeking to crack the secrets of a new release on Nintendo’s WiFi-enabled, state-of-the-art portable console, would head straight to the internet.Japan – the country that pioneered the machine – mass-orders a book on which you could break a toe.An isolated example?No, not in a country where large parts of the public and private sectors still insist upon formal communications by fax, where a politician can become the government’s deputy head of cyber security without ever having used a computer in his professional life and where the banking system is only now grudgingly prodding its customers towards internet transactions... Despite the availability of the world’s most sophisticated digital tools, Japanese broadcasters prefer to contextualise current affairs using whiteboards, cardboard models, sponge-tipped pointing sticks and other weapons from the primary-school arsenal... In early March, as part of a survey, Japanese IT research group ITR asked the country’s corporations if they had systems that would allow staff to work remotely. 28 per cent said that they did; 27 per cent said they were thinking about it; while the remaining 45 per cent either weren’t even considering it or didn’t know... most official documents still require the physical stamp of a personal or company seal – the latter of which must mostly remain in the office."
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Isolation - "‘People are in touch, by voice and by video phone. So does isolation mean not being in touch? Or does it actually mean not seeing people in the flesh?’...
‘We are so hyper connected virtually. But I think this time will be really interesting. And because most of us substitute virtual life for real life and I think now we're going to be deprived of interpersonal contact in, you know, seeing a person in the flesh, and I think that's going to really hit us. How important, how precious it is to see people and I already get that from some of my clients. How different it is being in the room with them. Than speaking with them over Skype, you know, I'm not picking up the same level of detail into how they're feeling, you know, just by being able to see the way they walk into the room. And the little sign that you can't quite pick up via Skype’"
BBC Radio Ulster - Everyday Ethics, Welfare State and Witch Burning - "‘Why did the [witch] trials happen during that time? Well, two American economists have come up with a new theory. And it all relates to the battle within Christianity following the reformation of 1517’...
‘It's quite interesting, actually, between 900 and about 1400. The church actually denied that witchcraft existed entirely. It wasn't until 1398 that the University of Paris announced that officially witchcraft existed. And it wasn't until about almost a century after that, I think about 1484, 1485 that the pope officially authorized violence against witches. So it was a quite late development, this idea of witchcraft, accepting it within the church, seeing it as a problem, and prior to that, they, they had this essentially reverse attitude… this surge of witch trial activity reflects competition between the Catholic and Protestant churches, which of course, only emerges after 1517 when the Protestant Reformation occurs, which for the first time essentially gave religious consumers in Christendom, a choice of religion, the choice of churches. And what we think was happening was that in an effort essentially to woo religious consumers, what the Catholic Church and the Protestant church did was to vigorously prosecute witches as a way of essentially showing to religious consumers that they were the superior church. They were the superior religious brand. So it was a kind of form of advertising to attract religious consumers to their confession in the face of competition of the other… I guess you might say that in the end, they both won out. Because what happened was that in 1648, there was an important multinational treaty called the Peace of Westphalia, the purpose of which was to essentially bring an end to a variety of Catholic-Protestant religious warfare conflicts that have been raging over the course of the previous decades. In the face of this competition, which I referred a moment ago, and what that treaty did was established permanent territorial confessional monopolies for either the Catholic church or a Protestant church, within particular geographic regions of Europe. And so what that did was basically carved out little areas where Protestants or Catholics, or vice versa, were protected from competition from the the opposing rival church. So, in the end, they both kind of were able to have their own market spaces protected from competition from the other… the overwhelming majority of witch trials in early modern Europe occurred in those parts of Europe where religious market contestation, or competition between Catholics and Protestants was the most intense. Think about places for instance, such as Germany, which was of course ground zero for the Reformation. In Germany alone, nearly 40% of all prosecutions for witchcraft for the entire age of the great age of European witch trials occurred. Another 30, approximately 30%, let's say occurred in Switzerland, which was, of course, sort of second most important country for the Protestant Reformation. In these sorts of places, there was tremendous back and forth conflict between Protestants and Catholics and consistent with our theory, consequently, a tremendous amount of witch trial activity. If you contrast that, with countries that remained more or less, religiously homogenous, even after the reformation, places where Protestantism never gained an important foothold, such as Spain, for example, or Italy, or in fact, Ireland. In those places, what you find is very, very little witch trial activity. You know, collectively, those sorts of countries account for maybe five or 6% of all, of all witch trial activity during the Great age. So the geographic and temporal patterns that one would expect, according to our theory are in fact observed in the data.'"
