Disney's Female Characters

A post on reddit that's been removed (naturally):

After seeing Mulan 2020, I'm noticing a pattern regarding Disney's female characters and it isn't good. : movies

"I saw Mulan yesterday and I was very disappointed with the character of Mulan. The movie wasn't all bad but I didn't like what they did to her character. It's the same as they did with Rey in Star Wars and I'm starting to see a pattern.

The problem with Rey in Star Wars is that she is unrelatable. And it's because she never needs any help. If you look at Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movies, he is the hero of the story but he's still human. In the first movie he needs Obi-wan's help in the desert and in the cantina, he needs Han's help during the Trench run. In the second he needs Han's help in the snow. He stops his training to help his friends, gets his ass kicked by Vader and in the end he is the one in need of saving by force calling Leia. Then finally in the third movie he is a fully fledged Jedi and he conquers evil. It feels earned. And that's why he is such a good character. He starts from nothing and is therefore relatable and it makes us root for him.

Contrast that to Rey who is a capable fighter from the start, can fly a 2 man ship solo and can't be beaten by Kylo in the first movie. In the second she doesn't actually need Luke's training and again Kylo can't defeat her. By the third movie she is confirmed to be the best pilot in the resistance, can heal people, bring people back to life etc etc. It just doesn't feel earned. Somewhere along the way they forgot to make her human. And it weakens a potentially great character.

Now we get to Mulan and I see the same thing. The new movie opens with her doing martial arts training and within minutes she does this slow mo supermove like she's in the matrix. She's a badass from the start, joins the army and she even has to hide her badassery. It isn't relatable. In the original Mulan she is just an ordinary girl. It isn't about her being a great fighter or whatever. She becomes a hero through wits and character. She joins the army even though she sucks at fighting. That is character. When she fires that cannon to the snowy top that isn't being an extraordinary fighter, it's using her wits. Then she finds out the huns are still alive and she warns everyone but no one believes her. But she still persists. And in the end when she's fighting the bad guy (forgot his name) on the roof, she's mostly running away. She isn't doing jedi leaps and keanu reeves moves. Any girl could be Mulan from the original. Even aside from all the girl in a men's world stuff she's relatable and that's why it's such a strong character. But the new one not so much. Nobody can be her. Nobody can do what she does.

I don't know what this is. Is it bad writing? Is it a hidden political agenda? Starting weak and then overcoming a powerful obstacle is a very basic thing in writing. It makes us invested in characters. You would assume the writers at Disney get this but they apparently don't. Or maybe they are not allowed to I don't know. But I really hope this doesn't become a trend with Disney movies because it makes their movies and characters weaker instead of stronger."

 

Ditto for Captain Marvel

This matches how masculinity is performative but femininity is innate

Someone: Hero's journey is for male protagonists

Feminist protagonists are already heroines, the problem is the world hasn't recognised them yet

So plots involving feminist protagonists usually revolve around the ignorant unwashed masses slowly coming to be enlightened by one-sided progressive dogma and stop repressing the feminist protagonist so she can achieve her full potential

The problem is innate value stories often aren't compelling because by definition the value is unearned

Especially if they try to shove it into traditionally male stories

Links - 8th September 2020 (2)

Noah Efron - "I have been nominated to post 180 Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform tablets that profoundly influenced me, at any point in my life. One each day, for 180 days. I was instructed to post each tablet without explanation."

Bzigo uses AI and a laser pointer to detect mosquitoes in your home - "Bzigo wants to make it easier for you to zap mosquitoes in your home. The U.S. and Israel-based startup combines artificial intelligence with a laser pointer and camera to autonomously track any mosquito inside your home... In the future, Bzigo plans to create anti-mosquito technology in the form of micro-drones that will eliminate mosquitoes autonomously and return to the base for recharging after carrying out their mission."

Lou on Twitter - "Interior design is my passion *Woman suspended from ceiling on lights, woman as furniture*"

@rezagt500eleanor - 🤣🤣🤣🤣 - "If your girlfriend visits you during lockdown. Don't marry her. If the government can't control her, what chance do you have?"

Meme - "DUCKFACE Started From Something"

A New Radical Centrism on Twitter - "Perhaps after reading the NYT's attack on white people who jog yesterday, you're considering a form of exercise that's less racistly racist. Why not take up hiking? It gets you outside, gets the heart rate goi... Wait, what's this?"
Daniel Povey on Twitter - "It's strange to me how white people don't see that it's odd that they are writing articles about the "unbearable whiteness of hiking", like being white is a crime. I can't find a historical parallel of an apparently dominant group being so eager to apologize for itself."
Related comments: "Better living through healthful pursuits is racist, clearly." "Being health conscious is, in and of itself, deeply racist."
"There have also been several articles since the great Awokening about how rock climbing, indoor and outdoor, is racist"

Meme - "Chloe, 19 Picture this. You log onto tinder, see a decent girl, a at best. Unsure whether to swipe right but you read her bio. You like it, it's captivating. Fuck it, you swipe right. BOOM. You match. You start Conversations are engaging. She listens, she cares, she's genuine. You bring her home for the holidays, your family love her. A couple years pass and you get married You found the love of your life on this app Cool story?
It's not going to happen, but I'll do anal"

Man blind for 20 years 'regains sight' after being hit by car at zebra crossing - "Janusz Goraj was able to see properly two weeks after the traffic accident after suffering from an allergic reaction that damaged the retina in his right eye while his other eye only registered shapes and light... Goraj, from the city of Gorzow Wielkopolski, suffered from an allergic reaction that damaged the retina in his right eye while his other eye only registered shapes and light."

I almost died! I found my mom's new "USB hub" sitting on her desk. *picture*

Wife told her husband she was attending a party at her boss's place. Husband asks her to send a picture of the food, she did. NSFW : HolUp

Cory Clark on Twitter - "People with higher cognitive ability are more supportive of free speech, more opposed to censorship, and more in favor of allowing individuals to teach from various social groups/ideologies, a pattern which has been consistent since at least the mid 1970s"
"And those with doctorates in Gender Studies and the like? In theory they're very educated but they tend to promote cancel culture and deplatforming."
"I feel confident that having a doctorate in gender studies does not correlate with “higher cognitive ability” in any way, shape, form, or fashion."
"One mechanism seems to be though intellectual humility (their rationale below) - they find that intellectual humility mediates the link between cog ability and support for free speech in their Study 3."

Remz Tolentino - "me: they probably use green screens for news programs
mbc news: bitch, u thought
pcr: Nguyen Viet Trung"

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Loss - "‘Let's imagine a workplace where workers enjoyed a well paid job for life, one where they could start their day with a pint of stout and a smoke and enjoy free meals in silver service canteens and restaurants. Imagine working in a building designed by an internationally renowned architect, spending your break exploring acres of parkland planted with hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs and spending your evenings with a company theatre group or playing one of 30 sports. Imagine a place where the end of a working life you could enjoy a company pension without having to pay a penny. And that is the precise imaginative exercise recommended by Tim Strangelman, the author of voices of Guinness an oral history of West London's Park Royal Brewery. And it's an imaginative exercise with its roots firmly in reality, for it is no more or less than an accurate account of the working conditions enjoyed by employees at that West London Guinness brewery, from the 1930s to the 1980s’...
'In some ways you don't realize what you've lost until you've lost it. And I think many of the oral histories I undertook, they really uncover a sort of sense of people remembering a more gentler, more benign form of capitalism.'...
‘Right from the get go after the war, they're attempting to build what they call industrial citizenship amongst their workforce or Guinness citizenship. And they realized that people coming back into the brewery after the Second World War through the army and then national service being demobbed and what have you, they have to kind of reintegrate. So it's almost as if they're kind of sociologists, almost. They understand that you need to build the social. So they do this through various things, through clubs and societies, gardening clubs, sports was a huge thing there. There was something like 30 or 40 sports practiced at Park Royal, there was two theatre groups. It was actually trying to allow them to be the best versions of themselves. What they were trying to do is expand people's horizons. All the workers got three course meal every day if they wanted it, daily beer allowance… at least a couple of pints and it was a stronger, stronger brew… Guiness were very unusual because they recognized trade unions before all the other major London brewers did and in fact, Guinness was heavily criticized by the other brewers certainly in London for being so pro trade union. And again, it was a reflection of a kind of a very advanced paternalism’...
‘Despite all I have achieved and gained and all that I have in my life, recovery from anorexia still feels like living with a hole inside of me. A sense that something is missing. It also involves living with a significant sense of loss and an awareness of no longer having the things that anorexia once provided. My eating disorder was a private, cotton wool padded world of my own creation, where I felt strangely safe, secure, untouchable.’
‘I've never sort of thought about anorexia in those terms. But I mean, here is someone saying that the disappearance of anorexia left them feeling empty, there was something that had disappeared suddenly, which had been permanent and solid and reliable and known.’
‘Yes, and this is very much tied up with self identity because I mean, conditions like that and other people talked in similar ways about careers that were very important to their self identity, having to give something up or to surrender. It can leave you with a feeling of loss as if something has been taken out of the core of you. You've lost something really vital to your sense of self definition.’"

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Mixed-race families - "‘The mixed race population this country is growing. It's quite amazing. I mean, I read that round about 50% of black Caribbean men have partners, have white partners. The figure is just under a third for black women. It's, it's really striking quite how unremarkable mixed unions are now. And there's been quite a bit of psychological research looking at the identity of mixed race people who, for example, one parent who's white, another who's black, but you're interested in what happens when mixed race people have children of their own’…
‘Up to this point, all the research has been about mixed people who are children or adolescents, some in young adulthood, but they hadn't then looked at generational change. And this is a really important issue because we want to know to what extent, to the extent that most mixed race people, not just black white people in Britain, but other types of mixed race people partner with other white Britons. What happens for the generation down? Is it important to them to, that they transmit a minority ancestry? What does that one generational remove mean?… a lot of theories and categories and understandings about race are premised on this idea of, of, you know, not just being a single race, but also notions of intermarriage are premised upon the idea of some, you know, two distinct races. Coming together then to to form someone who's a mixed person. But all of those kinds of ideas and concepts start to break down I think when you look a further generation down, we don't have the conventions'...
‘Most of the people in this study, identified their children as mixed, including people whose children looked white.’"
So much for passing privilege

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Populism - "‘There's the nasty populist *Trump clip* Or, there's the Glastonbury hero *music festival clip?*’..."
‘You prefer to use the term populist rather than populism to characterize the contemporary political moment. An adjective rather than a verb. Why?’
‘It seems more useful because it draws attention to a certain style rather than a particular ideology. So populism is not an ideology anyone fights or dies for in the way that we have seen for socialism, communism, capitalism, and so on. It seems to be more a style of doing politics, which can be adopted by anyone anywhere on the political spectrum… we have to be mindful of the fact that there is a distinction between being populist and being popular, so you can be a perfectly institutional politician who respects institutions, comes through the ranks, gains power through democratic methods, and is immensely popular. Blair just after the 97 victory would be a good example, who's not a populist'"

BBC Radio Ulster - Everyday Ethics, Male Role Models and Ani Rinchen Khandro - "‘Do you believe there is a real issue here, why men decided against working with children, taking up these roles?’
‘Yeah, and I suppose already, that's why we organized the conference with the theme, celebrating boys, fathers and men in early childhood. Our organization represents over at 10,000 staff working in the early childhood sector. 30,000 parents, and invariably and as Nick said the percentage has remained at one to 2% for the last 10 years despite the fact that in other European countries, under their early childhood workforce development strategy, they've set targets. Norway, for example, now has 10% of men working in the early childhood field. And as Nick said, you know, the importance of this is having males as well as female role models for young children, and especially for boys who learn in a very different way from girls. And the evidence is suggesting that the feminization of the early childhood workforce is missing out on capturing the way young boys learn. Now we see this right into primary school as well. A lack of focus on whole body learning, kinesthetic movement, outdoor play. And, you know, some of the research, and I think we need more research on this issue, is suggesting that's why we're seeing boys not developing in the same way as young girls in the early years and in primary school.’...
‘Nowadays, it's not just that you need role models in schools, but a lot of the young children starting school, unfortunately, now, are not coming from a two parent family. And when that happens more often than not, there is not a male in the household. So these young boys are starting school and they've no experience of a positive male in their lives. And, and, at least, I mean, a teacher can't compensate for a parent but at least if you've got male, oh, a good mix of male and female teachers, they're saying that very positive behavior that they can model in the school and in the sports field. And, indeed, our schools now provide more social activities are seeing it in a social way as well.’...
‘Places like New Zealand have flipped the renumeration to ensure that those who work with young children are paid the most. And those who, who work at the university level in education are paid the least. And being, doing something structurally like that, you begin to create a workforce, an environment that is suitable for both men and women’"
No wonder New Zealand universities aren't that well regarded worldwide

A Genetically Informed Study of the Association Between Harsh Punishment and Offspring Behavioral Problems - "Conclusions about the effects of harsh parenting on children have been limited by research designs that cannot control for genetic or shared environmental confounds. The present study used a sample of children of twins and a hierarchical linear modeling statistical approach to analyze the consequences of varying levels of punishment while controlling for many confounding influences. The sample of 887 twin pairs and 2,554 children came from the Australian Twin Registry. Although corporal punishment per se did not have significant associations with negative childhood outcomes, harsher forms of physical punishment did appear to have specific and significant effects. The observed association between harsh physical punishment and negative outcomes in children survived a relatively rigorous test of its causal status, thereby increasing the authors’ conviction that harsh physical punishment is a serious risk factor for children."
Some anti-spanking guy (besides misrepresenting the literature I pointed to to debunk his claims) claimed that most cases of spanking were severe, so spanking was bad. But this study (besides replicating the other studies on spanking per se having no ill effects, found that of those who received punishment, 2/3 received mild punishment and 1/3 harsh. So the majority of spanking in the sample was not severe

On ascribing secular motivations to Muslims motivated by religion

"For the medieval Muslim, the significance of heresy was religious: it was related, that is to say, to differences of belief, opinion, or practice concerning divinity, revelation, prophecy, and matters deriving from these. These matters, in Islam, extended to include the whole range of public and political life, and any further explanation, beyond the religious one, was unnecessary, even absurd, for what could be added to the greatest and most important of all the issues confronting mankind? The grounds and terms of argument between opposing religious factions were almost invariably theological. That is not to say that Muslim polemicists always accepted the good faith of their opponents. Very often they accuse those whose doctrines they dislike of pursuing ulterior motives—but usually these ulterior motives are themselves religious. The commonest of them is the recurring theme of a plot to undermine Islam from within in favor of some other faith. This is usually connected with some more or less fabulous figure, of superlative malignity and perversity, who functions as a diabolus ex machina, to explain dissension and heresy in the community. This is in part due to the general tendency of Islamic historical tradition to attribute to the limitless cunning and multifarious activity of an individual the results of a long development of thought and action; in part also to the tactic, familiar in other times and places, of discrediting critics within the community by associating them with enemies outside the community...

The medieval European, who shared the fundamental assumptions of his Muslim contemporary, would have agreed with him in ascribing religious movements to religious causes and would have sought no further for an explanation. But when Europeans ceased to accord first place to religion in their thoughts, sentiments, interests, and loyalties, they also ceased to admit that other men, in other times and places, could have done so. To a rationalistic and materialistic generation, it was inconceivable that such great debates and mighty conflicts could have involved no more than “merely” religious issues. And so historians, once they had passed the stage of amused contempt, devised a series of explanations, setting forth what they described as the “real” or “ultimate” significance “underlying” religious movements and differences. The clashes and squabbles of the early churches, the great Schism, the Reformation, all were reinterpreted in terms of motives and interests reasonable by the standards of the day—and for the religious movements of Islam too explanations were found that tallied with the outlook and interests of the finders.

To the nineteenth century, obsessed with the problems of liberalism and nationality, only a struggle for national liberation could adequately explain the religious cleavage in Islam, the bitter controversies between doctrine and doctrine, the armed clash of sect with sect. The intuition of Gobineau and Renan, the insight of Dozy and Darmesteter helped to create a picture of Shi'ism as a liberal revival of the Persian national genius, as a resurgence of the Aryanism of Iran in generous revolt against the alien and committing Semitism of Arabian Islam...

 

Nevertheless this hypothesis is now generally abandoned. Wellhausen, Goldziher, Barthold and others have shown that the main centers of early Shi‘ism were among the mixed, predominantly Semitic-speaking population of southern Iraq; that Shi‘ism was first carried to Persia by the Arabs themselves and for long found some of its most enthusiastic supporters there among the Arab soldiers and settlers, and in such places as the Arab garrison city of Qum—even today one of the most vigorous centers of Shi‘ite religion in Persia. Though ethnic antagonisms played their part in these struggles—and the nineteenth-century scholars made a lasting contribution in discerning them—they were nor the sole or even the most potent factor. The accusations of the early polemicists are directed against the old Persian religion, not against the Persian nation—and the charges of Iranian dualist infiltration can be paralleled by similar tales of Jewish and Christian attempts to insinuate their own doctrines into Islam under the cover of Islamic heresy. It was in North Africa, Egypt, and Arabia that Shi‘ism won its earliest and mosr resounding political successes. Only two of the important independent dynasties of Muslim Persia professed the Shi‘ite religion...

 

The advance of knowledge and of understanding thus brought the abandonment of a theory which in any case had ceased wholly to satisfy. For the twentieth century, in the West at least, the problems of nationality and national liberation were no longer the main themes of the historic process. The expansion and contraction of societies, the clash of interests and classes, economic change and social upheaval, class war and cataclysm—these were the basic truths which the twentieth-century historian saw in the mirror of history. Kharijism, Shi‘ism, and the other movements in Islam were now interpreted in terms nor of national but of social categories, not of race but of class. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Russian progressive Barthold, the German conservative Becker, the Italian positivist Caetani, the French Catholic Massignon looked around them and achieved a new understanding of the revolutions of early Islam—both of those that succeeded and of those that failed...

 

It has been observed as a curiosity that the word “religion” does not occur in the Old Testament. This is not because the ancient Hebrews had no religion but because they did nor distinguish a separate part or compartment of their personal and public lives for which they might require this special term. Religion embraced the whole of life—man’s dealings with his fellow men, with society and with the state, as well as his dealings with God. Even the simple, basic acts of working and resting, eating, drinking, and procreation were sanctified as the fulfillment of a divine command and a divine purpose. Islam too has no words to distinguish between sacred and profane, spiritual and temporal, for it does not accept or even know the dichotomy that these pairs of antonyms express—the cleavage and clash of Church and State, of Pope and Emperor, of God and Caesar. The Islamic State is in theory and in the popular conception a theocracy, in which God is the sole source of both power and law and the sovereign His viceregent on earth. The faith was the official credo of constituted state and society, the cult the external and visible symbol of their identity and cohesion, and conformity to them, however perfunctory, the token and pledge of loyalty. Orthodoxy meant the acceptance of the existing order; heresy or apostasy, its criticism or rejection. The same sacred law, coming from the same source and administered through the same jurisdiction, embraced civil, criminal, and constitutional as well as ritual and doctrinal rules. The sovereign was the supreme embodiment of the Holy Law, maintained by it and maintaining it. Where Church and State are inextricably interwoven, so too are religion and politics, and religion provided the only possible expression, in public and social terms, of sustained opposition. Whenever a group of men sought to challenge and to change the existing order, they made their teachings a theology and their instrument a sect, as naturally and as inevitably as their modern western counterparts make ideologies and political parties."

--- The Significance of Heresy in Islam in Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East / Bernard Lewis (also published as  Some Observations on the Significance of Heresy in the History of Islam in Studia Islamica)

Links - 8th September 2020 (1)

Let's stop romanticising nature. So much of our life depends on defying it - "Cormorants are hunting fish in the now clear waters of Venice. Wild boars roam the avenues of Barcelona and wild goats the streets of Llandudno. Above Los Angeles are blue skies. From smogless Delhi, you can once more glimpse the Himalayas.“The Earth is healing, we are the virus,” runs the meme spreading fast across the internet. It’s a sentiment echoed by many policymakers, commentators and celebrities... Perhaps Ferguson needs reminding that “taking back control” has meant condemning hundreds of thousands of people to death, hundreds of thousands more to losing their livelihoods, and threatening, in the words of the UN World Food Programme’s David Beasley, “famines of biblical proportions”.We should remind ourselves, too, that what is now seen as unnatural and sinful was, not so long ago, celebrated as natural and authentic. Ever since the pandemic broke out in Wuhan, Chinese wet markets have been denounced as despicable and vile. Yet when Alan Levinovitz lived in China, “wandering through the open-air stalls felt liberating and authentic, a welcome change from sterile supermarkets where the chicken lies behind glass, plastic-wrapped by faceless corporations”. Here was “meat in its natural state: unrefrigerated, unprocessed, unpackaged, uncooked and sometimes unslaughtered”... Concepts of “nature” and of the “natural” have, Levinovitz shows, become synonyms for “God” and the “holy”. Humans are sinners not because we have disobeyed God but because we have violated nature, our teacher, in whose wisdom we must discover the moral rules by which we ought to live.Such a moral appeal to nature has long been the means of justifying particular human laws and structures. From interracial relationships to homosexuality, certain activities are deemed as transgressing natural boundaries and so to be forbidden. A ban on interracial marriage, as a Pennsylvania judge observed in 1865, was necessary to prevent the “corruption of races”... How nature is becomes seen as a template for what humans ought to do. And yet so much of human life – from the aspirin we take to alleviate pain to the fridge that helps prevent milk from souring – is a recognition that natural processes often work to our disadvantage, and the moral stance would be to keep them at bay. The romanticisation of the “natural” is, Levinovitz notes, rooted in privilege. Only those who enjoy a lifestyle sufficiently protected from the ravages of nature have the licence to romanticise it... After reading in the New Yorker about how much better was the “natural” parenting style of the Matsigenka, a Peruvian Amazonian tribe, Levinovitz travelled to Peru to see for himself. He was disappointed that they lived not in a “state of nature” but with solar panels and mobile phones. He asked a local whether he was “happy about having electricity”. “He looked at me with confusion,” Levinovitz recalls: “‘Yes,’ he said flatly, as if explaining something to a child. ‘Now we can see at night.’”"
"Nature is healing. We are the virus" is a great example of the misanthropy of environmentalism 

BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Universal Basic Income - "‘I've been a supporter of the principle for many, many years. I think it's no accident that it was one of the key demands of the women's liberation movement back in the early 70s, was an independent income. Because I think in a money based society, the condition of being economically dependent is is fundamentally demeaning. Whether you're a woman dependent on your husband's income, a disabled person, dependent on carers or or even an adult child dependent on your parents, because it can trap people in abusive relationships, but even in non abusive relationships, economic dependence makes, traps people into kind of relationships that are characterized by by guilt and by sense of obligation and by gratitude, and it means they’re not healthy relationships.’"  

 BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, Loneliness - "‘I was always fascinated by the fact that Jane Austen never describes any of her heroes as intelligent, the word doesn't appear’...
‘You argue that loneliness really only emerges as a term and perhaos almost a recognisable experience around 1800… prior to that, when it's used, it's used interchangeably with a rather lovely word, which is oneliness... all it means really is to be by oneself. So the Bible is full of accounts of Jesus being by himself and but doesn't necessarily have an associated emotional lack. And this shift towards the emergence of loneliness from around 1800 comes about because of different changes in society. Different ways of viewing the individual, industrialization, urbanization, a philosophy of the self, which is about the self as opposed to others, and the decline of religion'
‘And you also want to investigate, introduce the rise of the novel as well as as important to our understanding of loneliness’
‘Novels are fascinating. The difference between novels in the 18th century when they first came into being and novels in the 19th century and 18th century, something like Robinson Crusoe. There's not a single reference to loneliness. By the 19th century novels are full of lonely people. And that reflects those kinds of social changes… Wuthering Heights, where you have this desperate desire on the part of the heroine to find love, which is bundled up too in this sense of the self as not being complete without another, or Tess of the d'Urbervilles. And, and so Victorian fiction in particular tends to be full of women who are in search of the significant other and needing to find happiness and an absence of loneliness in the domestic.'"

Getting Pregnant While Pregnant: How Superfetation Works - "Grovenburg became pregnant twice, two weeks apart. Isn't that supposed to be impossible?Almost. There have been only 10 recorded cases of the phenomenon, dubbed superfetation. In Grovenburg's case, she became pregnant first with a girl (whom she has decided to name Jillian) and then two weeks later with a boy (Hudson). The babies have separate due dates — Jillian on Dec. 24, Hudson on Jan. 10"

Facebook Will Stop Labeling Fake News Because It Backfired, Made More Users Believe Hoaxes - "it will stop its short-lived practice of labeling misleading or false stories as "disputed," and will instead provide links to related articles that can give context or truth where needed. Facebook said its attempt to thwart fake news backfired, since the "disputed" label ended up making believers of fake news more defensive and more likely to insist on their version of the truth."

Woman finds out plant she's watered for 2 years is fake - "Caelie Wilkes shared the funny story on Facebook which has since gone viral. Wilkes said she found out the plant was fake while she was trying to move it into a new vase... The plant was originally a gift from the father of Wilkes' children, who also thought it was real"

Roger Scruton How Fake Subjects Like Women Studies Invaded Academia - "If you take a subject like women’s studies, now I know this is a controversial issue but perhaps it can be talked about freely in this room. You can’t talk about it freely in America on the whole. Anyway there – there is a subject, it’s very difficult to imagine and that you would succeed in that subject if you didn’t have either at the outset or certainly in the conclusion feminist opinions.And there is a – it’s a subject constructed around an ideology. It might be that this ideology is grounded in truth, who knows, but to question it is something which is essentially made impossible both by the curriculum and by the way of teaching it.And I think you’ll find that there quite a lot of subjects like that growing in our universities, in which conformity to an orthodoxy takes precedence over intellectual method... Maybe after all in the middle – in the middle ages maybe theology was like that, but the interesting thing about medieval theology is that it encouraged the intellectual method despite it’s requirement of Orthodoxy.We are now going through a time when truth itself seems to be increasingly marginalized from the – from academic scholarship... The most important figure here as you all know is Michel Foucault, who saw all his work as giving “une histoire de vérité” a history of truths. As though truths have a history, you know, something is either true or not true but nevertheless he wanted to rearrange the whole curriculum in such a way that when studying the thoughts of and writings of people of the past, we’re not really interested in the truth of what they say but in the power that speaks through it.That the only commodity, in the intellectual world is power, who has dominion over whom. And that way, of course you can turn any subject however impartial it seems and the outset into an instrument of ideological conflict by saying that you know, to date English studies has been an exercise of male power over the female gender."

Handjob Cabin Isn't a Real Movie, But We Wish It Were

Sexual Exploitation Was the Norm for 19th Century Ballerinas - "It’s not clear who Edgar Degas used as the model for the 1879 painting, L’Etoile, that depicts that tense moment. But it’s likely that she was a prostitute. Sex work was part of ballerinas’ realities during the 19th century, an era in which money, power and prostitution mingled in the glamorous and not-so-glamorous backstage world of the Paris Opera."

My grandma wanted some “creative” grad photos of my friend since we’re graduating at the same time. This was her least favorite : funny

I,Hypocrite - Posts - "Am I too stupid or is it actually saying that the concept of being straight is the normal is a white people thing"
"In what non-white majority countries do you see higher acceptance of lgbt? Africa? China? Maybe arab countries?"
"You've been permanently banned from participating in r/lgbt"
Minority rights are just a way to shit on white people
Comment: "Redditors defending people who would have them stoned without a 2nd thought. Truly amazing levels of cognitive dissonance."

‪Jimmy London - "You can walk into a room full of Muslims and ask whether Gay people should be executed for being Gay; a legitimate theological debate will ensue on why yes (sharia) & why no (reformist) ‪You could never ask a group of Gays if Muslims should be executed & expect 2 be taken seriously.‬ We just don’t have that hate in us. You would be condemned for even positioning the question & possibly ostracised. The Muslim debate on gay death can last HOURS. At some point the religious conservatives (pro death) will accuse the reformist (pro life) of perverting Islam & contorting the Faith, they will accuse them of not being Muslim. That accusation will never be levelled in the other direction. Because it is Sharia compliant, you can NEVER accuse someone of not being Muslim due to the belief that gays should be executed. Let the weight of that sink in. #notall"

Tony Hawk’s Twitter account is a goldmine of awkward interactions - "The legendary skateboarder is probably the most famous in his field to date. Hawk revolutionized the sport with his skateboarding video games, and he might be the only skateboarder any causal sports fan who doesn’t follow the sport can name.Or, at least he used to be... his Twitter account is full of awkward interactions he seemingly experiences every day."

I,Hypocrite - Posts - "92 out of the top 500 subreddits on reddit are controlled by just 4 people" "Sorry, this post has been removed by the moderators of r/interestingasfuck."

Being Classically Liberal - Posts - "Not a huge fan of Trump, but it's hilarious how the mainstream media has an overt vendetta against him and then they act like they are victims when he treats them like crap in response."

DADDY'S MAN CAVE - "*Man with T-shirt: "Fuck patriarchy" being handcuffed by policewoman*"

The Cringe Factory - Posts - "So this month for the first time my @OnlyFans bill was more than my rent. Ally achievement unlocked! #sexworkisrealwork #payforyourporn #feminist #onlyfans"
"Imagine endangering your finances to satisfy your porn addiction and then masquerading it as activism."

carol on Twitter - "my dad met my mom for a second, lost her number, remembered she was a nurse, and then called every hospital in the state to ask her out and I can’t even get a text back"

carol on Twitter - "Me: *Posts bikini pic on ig story*
Guy: hiiiiiiii
Me: not u"
carol on Twitter - "quarantine is really the perfect time to shoot your shot one of my friends just asked me out when this is all over I said no cuz he’s 5’8 but still"
carol on Twitter - "It could be worse, I could still be faking orgasms with my ex"

Lim Wen Jun - "The Singapore Story #hardtruths
"No, I don't have dreams. Dreams can never come true anyway."
Teo Zhixian - Year 1, Assumption Pathway School"