Friday, August 28, 2020

Links - 28th August 2020 (1)

To perform a political purity test : therewasanattempt - "Brian Schatz, @brianschatz
We are seeing preventable mass deaths in the United States.
Shaun King, @shaunking
Do you support Medicare For All right now?
Brian Schatz, @brianschatz
I don't know why you are tweeting this like some sort of gotcha but I am a cosponsor of the bill."
Talcum X self-own

Govind - Posts - "Would you let your girl wear these shorts out of the house?"

Anti-Civilization - Posts - "Lockdown in Malaysia. 30 days without aircon in department store Metrojaya."

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar - Posts - "Just so I am clear, the government of Iraq is rated one of the top 10 corrupted countries in the WORLD according to the transparency index.There is a global pandemic, health care, and public services are nonexistent and many of the youth are hopeless and unemployedWhat they are busy with?Condemning the European Union for raising the LGBT FLAG in the diplomatic zone inside the country.Give me a freaking break"
Islamophobia!

Alison Roman and the Exhausting Prevalence of Ethnic Erasure in Popular Food Culture - "Non-white voices. POC voices who saw Alison Roman using ingredients like cardamom and harissa, kimchi and turmeric, labneh and tahini, and wondered why Roman acted as if those components didn’t come with certain cultural traditions attached. Wondered why she didn’t seem to mention those cultural traditions very often. Wondered why she would list a Middle Eastern grocery store founded by a Lebanese family as her favorite grocery store, but not follow that up with something like, “Shopping there has really expanded my cadre of spices and my understanding of the world.” Why so mum on the cultures she’s mimicking on her path to overwhelming success? ... Roman made herself a curry and refused to acknowledge that she had made a curry, and this is colonialism as cuisine... Roman’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of the dish she made is immensely aggravating. To Jezebel, she denied the cultural influences at play in the dish she made, and in doing so, made herself seem at best amateurish and at worst, well, sort of racist"
White people aren't allowed to cook ethnic food

Hull mum disgusted as 11-year-old set 'hardcore porn' homework - "A Hull mum is "fuming" over her 11-year-old daughter's school work which asked children to define hardcore pornography - among other "inappropriate" topics.Children in Years 7, 8 and 9 at Archbishop Sentamu Academy in east Hull were set the work in their Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE) class as part of their home learning.Teachers have asked the 11 to 14-year-olds to "define" pornography, soft pornography, hardcore pornography and transsexual pornography, as well as female genital mutilation, wet dreams, trafficking, male circumcision, breast ironing and more.They were also asked questions about alcohol, drugs and smoking... Mrs Taylor, a mum of three from east Hull said if her daughter had searched these phrases online in order to define them, the results would have "destroyed her mind" and "scarred her for life"... "She was only in primary school last year living her best life, now she is being asked to search for hardcore pornography."She’s 11, she should be doing stranger danger, and don’t share your info online, but genital mutilation is another thing. It was asking about male circumcision, breast ironing...I don’t even know what that is myself... "Now it's making me think what they are learning about at school that we don’t know about. We only know about this because they're home learning."... "They have been told to use Google and she would have searched it. I did Google hardcore porn and some of the images that came up was quite disturbing."I don’t think she would have coped well with it if she had seen it... "The PSHE materials that we share with students are produced in line with government guidance, the PSHE Association Programmes of Study and the Sex Education Forum’s definition of Sex Education. They also cover the Equality Act of 2010."
Is the sexualisation of children still a paranoid far right conservative conspiracy theory?
Presumably this is proof that parents shouldn't be allowed to withdraw their kids from sex education
They were also asked to define possession, intent to supply, supply and trafficking (presumably of drugs)

I'm not prudish or nothing, but something about... - Candy Assata Smash
Sensual pole dance performance for children

Children's pole dancing classes defended as 'not sexual' - "Pole dancing classes for children have been defended by a sports governing body following claims that it sexualises youngsters.The Pole Intentions classes in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire were criticised after three girls did a demonstration on ITV's This Morning.But instructor Zoe Hardy said they were about sport, and not sexual.The International Pole Sports Federation has said classes like this help train future athletes... Psychologist Kerry Nixon is among people to have criticised the classes."Pole dancing is inextricably linked to sexuality," she said."The whole notion of pole dancing historically goes hand in hand with a sexual aspect of dance so therefore it is linked and we can't get away from that."... Pole dancing only became associated with strip clubs in the 20th century, according to the International Pole Dance Fitness AssociationChinese acrobats have performed displays known as Chinese Pole since before the 12th century"
The swastika only became associated with the Nazis in the 1930s, but good luck justifying your use of it that way

jais on Twitter - "one of my ex’s just randomly sent me $200 for “the trauma he caused me”. this is the only form of apology i will be excepting from now on"

Meme - "Did you know when squirrels land on the ground, they look like superheroes"

Detroit-area traffic stop arrest to be reviewed by police - "The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan has released dashcam video of an April 2016 traffic stop showing a white police officer smashing a black driver's car window and dragging him out of the vehicle by force... Taylor Police Chief Mary Sclabassi told MLive.com that her department will conduct a 'thorough and diligent investigation' into the arrest of the driver in the dashboard camera footage, identified as 26-year-old Calvin Jones. According to ACLU, on April 6, 2016, Taylor officers pulled over Jones after he allegedly ran a stop sign while traveling in his silver Kia Forte with his wife and her underage brother in the area of Park Village Boulevard in Taylor.The video from the traffic stop, which was shared on YouTube this week, shows a white officer walking up to the driver's side of the vehicle and asking Jones to provide identification.Jones asks the officer to tell him 'what's going on,' to which the cop replies, 'I'd be happy to tell you once I see some information.'Jones declines and an argument ensues, with the driver repeatedly saying he won't provide his ID until the officer tells him the reason for the traffic stop, and the cop warning the motorist that failing to provide identification is an arrestable offense... The ACLU lawyer acknowledged that the Taylor police officer was correct about Jones’ obligation to produce identification"
The phenomenon of trying to piss the police off by being aggressive/aggroing them and breaking the law, and then acting like a victim when they enforce the law seems uniquely American
In 3 years I've seen no updates so it's quite clear the police were in the right
Also advertised as "WARNING: This is what happens if you refuse to show your ID to a cop!"

Marianne Williamson on Twitter - " Love IS the answer, and that is as relevant to public policy as to personal behavior. #bigtruth"
"Love didn't win the Battle of Stalingrad but I get the sentiment."
"Actually, yes it did."

Sophia (Meme Queen) Narwitz on Twitter - "The bitch who kicked off a hate mob and is getting a girl canceled all because she followed Blaire White, Shoe0nHead, and ArmouredSkeptic, is now bragging about the donations she's getting from simps. Reminder, cancel culture is rarely about morals, it's a clout chasing grift."

ᴀɴɢᴀᴅ on Twitter - "This is how twitter works:
Me: "I prefer Mangoes to Oranges."
Random stranger: "So basically what you're saying is that you hate Oranges. You also failed to mention pineapples, bananas and grapefruits. EDUCATE YOURSELF!"

Travon Taylor - "If you ain’t on this level of love leave me alone 🤷🏾‍♂️ *fucking on the arch of a bridge*"

Meme - "Zimbabwe's president tells white farmers they "should go" - 14
Mugabe is asking back the white farmers he chased away - 15
Zimbabwe pleads for $1.5bn in food aid to prevent mass starvation - 2016
#Zimbabwe Begs White Farmers To Return As Country Plunges Into Famine  - 2017
Zimbabwe 'doomed without whites', says outgoing Zanu-PF MP - 2018
Zimbabwe to start paying white farmers compensation after April - 2019"
When you hate "whiteness"

Without women the novel would die: discuss - "The idea that fiction is a female domain is taken for granted by most people involved in books. According to Nielsen Book Research, women outbuy men in all categories of novel except fantasy, science fiction and horror... Women are not only keener buyers of fiction – surveys show they account for 80% of sales in the UK, US and Canadian fiction markets – far more women than men are literary festivalgoers, library members, audio book readers, literary bloggers, and members of literary societies and evening classes. It is also for the most part women who teach children to read, both at school and at home; and women who form book clubs – often actively shutting out men... it is rare to find men expressing the way in which reading has impacted on their emotional, spiritual and sexual lives... William Thackeray called fiction “sweets” – to ensure a balanced diet, he also recommended “roast”, by which he meant nonfiction. It’s surprising how enduring these puritanical associations have proved; fiction is still seen as “a slippery slope to idle self-indulgence”, as Taylor has it. One of her correspondents wrote: “having an affair is dangerous, masturbation requires solitude and privacy. Reading a book offers both without anyone noticing.” Some readers are less restrained. Taylor’s book includes Pierre-Antoine Baudoin’s 1760 painting, La Lecture (The Reader), which depicts a young woman apparently masturbating with one hand while stroking the pages of a novel with the other."
Evidence that women are less interested in science fiction (Sci-Fi) than men

Opinion | Are We Really Monolingual? - The New York Times - "The widespread assumption is that few Americans speak more than one language, compared with citizens of other nations — and that we have little interest in learning to speak another. But is this true?Since 1980, the United States Census Bureau has asked: “Does this person speak a language other than English at home? What is this language? How well does this person speak English?” The bureau reports that as of 2009, about 20 percent of Americans speak a language other than English at home. This figure is often taken to indicate the number of bilingual speakers in the United States... There are countless Americans who speak languages other than English outside their homes: not just those of us who have learned other languages in school or through living abroad, but also employers who have learned enough Spanish to speak to their employees; workers in hospitals, clinics, courts and retail stores who have picked up parts of another language to make their jobs easier; soldiers back from Iraq or Afghanistan with some competency in Arabic, Pashto or Dari; third-generation kids studying their heritage language in informal schools on weekends; spouses and partners picking up the language of a loved one’s family; enthusiasts learning languages with computer software like Rosetta Stone. None of the above are identified as bilingual by the Census Bureau’s question... to better map American language abilities, the census should ask the same question that the European Commission asked in its survey in 2006: Can you have a conversation in a language besides your mother tongue? (The answer, incidentally, dented Europe’s reputation as highly multilingual: only 56 percent of the respondents, who tended to be younger and more educated, said they could.)... The celebrated multilingualism of not just Europe but also the rest of the world may be exaggerated. The hand-wringing about America’s supposed linguistic weakness is often accompanied by the claim that monolinguals make up a small worldwide minority. The Oxford linguist Suzanne Romaine has claimed that bilingualism and multilingualism “are a normal and unremarkable necessity of everyday life for the majority of the world’s population.”But the statistics tell a murkier story. Recently, the Stockholm University linguist Mikael Parkvall sought out data on global bilingualism and ran into problems. The reliable numbers that do exist cover only 15 percent of the world’s 190-odd countries, and less than one-third of the world’s population. In those countries, Mr. Parkvall calculated (in a study not yet published), the average number of languages spoken either natively or non-natively per person is 1.58. Piecing together the available data for the rest of the world as best he could, he estimated that 80 percent of people on the planet speak 1.69 languages — not high enough to conclude that the average person is bilingual."

Average number of languages spoken by the EU population - "Italians and Greeks, for instance, both speak an average of 1.8 languages, but the median is 1 for Italy and 2 for Greece. This is because the typical Italian speaks one language, but those who speak a second language speak in fact usually 3 or 4 languages overall (raising the average), whereas most Greeks speak 2 languages, but few of them speak 3 or 4."

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