Links - 14th August 2021 (3)

WATCH: Tucker Carlson slams hypocrite Eric Swalwell - "Eric Swalwell, who has a seat on the House Intelligence Committee and currently represents California's 15th congressional district, is alleged to have had sexual relations with a Chinese intelligence operative, named Christine Fang... Swalwell, who has recurrently accused President Donald Trump of having been involved with Russian interference in United States government, has found himself the center of another scandal involving a hostile foreign power... The Chinese operative, Christine Fang, allegedly targeted prominent politicians in the California region as a part of a "honeytrap" scheme—enticing high-profile targets with the offer of sexual favors... The irony is that Swalwell was one of those who accused General Michael Flynn of having been entrapped in a "honeypot" scheme regarding an alleged Russian agent. Flynn has been exonerated, and the alleged "honeypot," a graduate student in England at the time, has maintained her innocence from the very start."

Caleb Hull (I'm With the CCP Don't Ban Me) on Twitter - "Chinese spies while the entire Democrat Party freaks out over Russian memes"

Ari Fleischer on Twitter - "Bias is often found in stories the press does NOT cover. Another day another lack of the NYT telling its readers about a D Congressman, who sits on the Intelligence Committee, who briefly ran for POTUS, who was caught in a prior relationship w a Chinese spy. But it’s not news"

NYT has not covered the Swalwell Chinese spy honeytrap scandal a single time - "Why is this not "fit to print"?  One reason: Swalwell's a Democrat. Period, end of story."

Chinese spies specifically focus on US politicians like Eric Swalwell: experts - "xperts familiar with Chinese espionage say that the case of Chinese spy Christine Fang is far from being isolated. In fact, that is the common MO of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)... Once a victim is compromised, generally more and more sensitive information is forthcoming in exchange for the silence of the CCP on his or her wrongdoings. Sometimes even girls who are still minors are used for this purpose. "

School Board Won’t Reverse Fourth-Grader’s Suspension for BB Gun Incident During Virtual School - "he allowed a BB gun to briefly appear on his screen during virtual Zoom school"

The Hotdog Laserhouse - "Kaiserneko of Team Four Star once met Jeff Goode, the creator of Jake Long. According to the conversation they had, Disney specifically prepares their creators for the possibility of pornography being drawn of their characters...
'Disney has this weird rule in their artist contracts- everything you create while in their employ is THEIRS. Even in the off time. Its one of the reasons they are reviled in the industry. But the rule was set in place to basically steal good ideas from their staff or force them to ONLY work on Disney ip’s while employed.The jokes on them though. They didn’t count on most artists being giant perverts (this story is also why i laugh when people tell me drawing smut will ‘ruin your art career’)So! Disney being bastards ended up earning them smut of everything they’ve ever created.  And also per their policies they had to keep it. Every artist knew about the smut vault and our buddy here had photocopied a chunk of it. Yes… 2-3 feet of smut was just a chunk of it.'"

Impossible Burger vs. beef: Which is better for the environment? - "There's currently no black-and-white answer to this question, and based on research articles and interviews with experts, it seems like there might not be a real answer for a while."What's better for the environment is such a loaded question because 'environment' doesn't just mean climate change," Dr. Frank Mitloehner, an environmental expert and professor in the Department of Animal Science at the University of California, Davis told CNET. He points out that we also have to think about the impact on air and water quality when evaluating whether plant-based or animal meat is better for the environment.Considering all of the factors, Mitloehner says there's just no simple way to determine whether plant-based foods or animal-sourced foods are objectively better for the environment... One study even suggests that lab-grown meat could actually be worse for the environment over time... every food -- whether sourced from animals or plants -- has a unique impact on the environment, Mitloehner says."If we compare gallon to gallon the consumption of real milk from a cow and almond milk, then the real milk will have a carbon footprint 10 times higher than the almond milk," Mitloehner says. "But the almond milk has 17 times the water footprint -- you need 17 times more water to make the equivalent amount of almond [milk] to real milk."... Mitloehner's biggest piece of advice is to simply plan your meals properly to avoid waste, regardless of whether you eat animal products or not... About 20% of all animal-sourced foods are wasted and about 50% of all plant foods are wasted"

Barbershop owner sues Colorado governor over COVID-19 relief earmarked for minority-owned businesses - "The white owner of a Colorado Springs barbershop sued Gov. Jared Polis on Tuesday over newly-passed coronavirus relief designated for minority-owned small businesses, claiming the relief is unconstitutional.Etienne Hardre, owner of Locals Barbershop, claimed in the lawsuit — which also names the state’s Minority Business Office and its director as defendants — that the $4 million in aid earmarked for businesses that are at least 51% minority-owned is unconstitutional because access to the aid is based entirely on race, and the state failed to show how the aid remedies discrimination or racism. “The Supreme Court has held that if you are going to do race-conscious measures, you are required to specify the past or present discrimination you are remedying,” attorney Michael Kuhn said. “And societal, so-called systemic racism isn’t sufficient.”"
White privilege is getting excluded from programs due to your race

He Designed A Smartwatch App To Help Stop His Dad's PTSD Nightmares - "he put together a team to program a smartwatch to detect the onset of night terrors based on the wearer's heart rate and movement. The idea, Tyler says, was to use technology to imitate something service dogs were already doing — recognizing a traumatic nightmare and then nudging or licking the person to disrupt the bad dream. He thought the smartwatch could do this with a gentle vibration.The tricky part was to provide "just enough stimulus to pull them out of the deep REM cycle and allow the sleep to continue unaffected"... More people will soon be able to benefit from Tyler's invention. An investor purchased the rights to the app and started a company called NightWare.Last month, the Food and Drug Administration approved the app, which works with an Apple Watch, to treat PTSD-related nightmare disorders. It will soon be available by prescription through the VA."

Vice TV host asks Jake Paul 'Was it racist to knock a black man out?' - "Vice TV's Cari Champion and sports commentator Jemele Hill asked YouTuber Jake Paul it it was racist to knock out NBA star Nate Robinson, who is a black man, in their viral boxing match... Reporters Champion and Hill interviewed Paul on Vice TV in a video released December 3rd, pressing the young YouTuber on the racial implications of his knockout victory against the ex-basketball player."
If you refuse to fight a black man, you're racist too. So the only solution is to agree to "fight" him but throw the match

Thread by @QueerlyAutistic on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Honestly, I never even watched Game of Thrones, but I could happily read a thousands books analysing how quickly it just fucking vanished from the cultural zeitgeist after being such a fundamental part of it for a decade, because that shit is SO fascinating to me.
Like, there's 'fucking up the ending' and then there's 'systematically destroying something that was a fundamental part of contemporary popular culture to the point where it ceased to be in any way relevant to popular culture at all'.
I could watch years worth of video essays and read thousands and thousands of papers just exploring how it happened because it only ended a year and a bit ago but it's like GOT never existed in popular culture at all.
'The Art Of Fucking Up More Catastrophically Than Anyone Could Ever Imagine' - I would buy it."

St. Anthony residents receive anonymous letter, shaming them for their Christmas displays - ""We kind of decided because of the letter that it was just finally time to put up our lights," said St. Anthony Village resident Rachel Blodgett.At least four of her neighbors received an anonymous letter shaming them for the Christmas decorations.In the letter, the anonymous sender addresses the Christmas light displays in each yard, stating in part: "The idea of twinkling, colorful lights are a reminder of divisions in our society and systemic biases against neighbors who don't celebrate Christmas, or who can't afford to, during these unprecedented times.""
Harrison Bergeron when?

Ami, the tiny cube on wheels that French 14-year-olds can drive - "Citroën’s ‘urban mobility object’ is classed as a light quadricyle and can be driven without a full licence... It can be recharged from a standard home socket in three hours and, in its basic grey-and-orange edition, costs €6,000 (£5,550) to buy outright, or, with €100 down, €78 a month – roughly what most Parisians pay for an all-zone metro and suburban rail pass... There’s a rudimentary heater, and if the idea of letting a 14-year-old loose on it seems unnerving, Krygier points out that unlike with a scooter – the most likely alternative for many of the Ami’s younger potential customers – you get the stability of four wheels on a proper chassis, and are safely enclosed in a solid tubular steel frame.The Ami hits 45km/h pretty quickly and can go no faster, but in habitually gridlocked Paris – where speed limits vary from 20km/h to a theoretical 50km/h – that is neither necessary nor, most of the time, even possible (the Ami is not allowed on expressways). The brakes are reassuringly efficient, and a standard parking bay fits two Amis."

Meme - "Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe tells white farmers 'to go'"
"Mugabe is asking back the white farmers he chased away"
"Zimbabwe Begs White Farmers To Return As Country Plunges Into Famine"
"Zimbabwe to start paying white farmers compensation after April"

Unmarried Ontario couple had no children and no house but man must still pay support, appeal court rules - "A wealthy businessman will have to pay more than $50,000 a month in spousal support for 10 years to a woman with whom he had a long-term romantic relationship even though they kept separate homes and had no children together... Under Ontario law, an unmarried couple are considered common-law spouses if they have cohabited — lived together in a conjugal relationship — continuously for at least three years. But that doesn’t necessarily mean living in the same home... he insisted she sign a marriage contract and came up with several drafts. She refused. Throughout their relationship, the two kept separate bank accounts and never owned property in common"
Since women go for richer men...

Spirit passenger removed from plane after bizarre tirade - "A passenger was removed from a Spirit flight for being a royal pain — after claiming she is a queen from California during a tirade about white privilege and a trip to the toilet... “Don’t push me,” she says. “Did you see what she did? She put her hands at me. She wants me to go to jail, y’all. See how she’s antagonizing me?”The woman, whose mask hangs below her chin, then tells the crew member that she has “white privilege.”“It’s over with — it’s 2020. Wake up, you got a mask on. So you’re under the government, too. You’re confined and you don’t have white privilege anymore,” she says.“I’m a queen … California,” she continues. “She was from a black queen.”The woman then directs her ire at a fellow passenger, who tells her to just go to the bathroom.“You go to the bathroom!” she responds. “You shut up and stay in your lane! You got nothing to do with this, little girl. I’m not talking to you. Listen to your mama.”She then turns back to the flight attendant.“You don’t run America. You run yourself,” she says."

Can Putting a Frog in Milk Keep It Fresh? - "Of the 76 peptides identified in secretions of common frogs (Rana temporaria), many have antibacterial properties... Preserving food in the pre-refrigeration era was tough. Cellars and salting helped, but even in Russia’s cold climate, fresh milk proved tricky. The longer milk stays unrefrigerated, the more bacteria will grow, making milk sour and sometimes dangerous to drink.

Professional Privilege Checkers Inc. - Posts | Facebook - "Remember in 2015 when we said gay marriage is a slippery slope and now we have pedophilia on Netflix? Better yet remember when we said in the 60s that artificial birth control would be a slippery slope and now we live in the most sexually degenerate society of all time?"

Meme - "I'm a graduate in Medieval Studies, and when I try to explain some myths about it, people look at me as if I was insane. The Enlightenment propaganda is so strong, that telling the truth about Medieval era sounds like a crazy right- wing conspiracy theory.
And this is a serious problem. Many school textbooks, media, etc. promote most of these myths, which are inherently biased and dangerous, because they distort the truth.
The Enlightenment historiography is still the most successful propaganda ever made; it refused to die, because the [anti- Christian] sentiment which these thinkers had promoted seems to be popular ever since.
Demonizing the Other is the best way to begin a fight, because it gives you the feeling of the moral superiority. In our case, this has been done by distorting and misinterpreting historical facts, and inventing myths and false villains and heroes.
This genius propaganda has affected and influenced most of us, therefore it's not surprising how our imagination has been constructed. For example, when we think or talk about [the] historical horrors, the vast majority will think of the those 'dark' Middle Ages.
lronically, we rarely realize that the most morbid and inhumane crimes were committed during the Enlightenment and Modern era. Concentration camps, gulag, genocides, eugenics, racism, reign of terror, totalitarianism, etc. The aforementioned catastrophes are a result of the ideology which promoted the cult of progress, reason and science, which ended becoming the cult of irrationality, regress and crimes.
But of course, rarely will we hear that being denounced, because we still live in that era, where one of the most criminal and bloody act of history [the French Revolution] is presented as 'glorious' and 'good'.
The Enlightenment way of thinking may have 'freed' people of believing in God, but at the very moment when this philosophy rose, ideologies were born.
So, today, many don't believe in religion because they consider it dogmatic, but unconsciously and dogmatically believe in this ideology: Enlightenment.
Full post on my blog... Reading suggestions: The Civilization of the Middle Ages - Norman Cantor Religion and the Rise of Western Culture & Understanding Europe -Christopher Dawson Medieval civilization - Jacques Le Goff The Birth of Europe - Roberto S. Lopez God's Philosophers by @DrJamesHannam"

The History Of Japan: Everything You Wanted To Know

The History Of Japan: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"‘What do we know about very early Japanese civilization and how old? How old is it?’

‘So we think there have been people living in Japan on the Japanese islands probably for about 30,000 years, maybe 35,000 years, you can dig up edge ground axes and all this kind of thing. So we're fairly sure they've been there for a while. But the first written records for Japan to actually find out in detail what was going on. We don't really have those until the early centuries AD. So Chinese visitors came across and had a look of what was going on there. They discovered these, sort of a series of small chiefdoms dotted around the archipelago. So there's no place yet that would understand itself as being Japan, just these different chiefdoms. 

And the first known and named person in Japanese history is a shaman Queen called Himiko who was in power, she came to power almost as a teenager in her early 20s, in about 190 AD. And she was a combination of a shaman and a military ruler. And so the picture we get from the Chinese observers talking about her kingdom, they call her, they sort of saw her as ruling by magic and sorcery as well as force of arms. So you get a sense of a community, which is ruled by her from behind palisades guarded, no one ever really sees her, communing with the gods for the good of the realm. Her brother, we think, does much of the sort of day to day work of ruling the realm. And it's a fairly hierarchical place, as well. I know people think about Japan now as a fairly hierarchical society. The earliest suggestion we have is of a fairly hierarchical place based around people's wealth and status, based in turn around the amount of rice wealth they control, precious metals, like brass from which you make bells and mirrors and swords and these sorts of things. So yes, status society, controlled by a mixture of her shamanic power, and also the force of her warriors’ arms, but even then, that's really only one out of perhaps 100 or so chiefdoms, although hers, we think is the most powerful, and it's certainly the one that we know the most about from this early period.’...

‘What contribution did ancient Japan make to global culture?’

‘It's a good question. Partly because people would have trouble agreeing on what would be a Japanese contribution versus a Chinese contribution. So from around the five hundreds AD, you have this heavy sustained contact with China. So a lot of what we think about as being Japanese has origins in China. So Japanese Buddhism comes from China via Korea, a lot of its temple architecture, rice, we talked about other elements of its cuisine. The kimono also has its origins in Chinese style court dress. So the point at which you can say there's a real definitive Japanese contribution, I might, I might highlight two things, I suppose.

One would be going right the way back that Japan produces some of the world's oldest pottery. So the very early period, we call it Jomon, which we date from roughly 14,500 BCE, all the way through to 500 AD. So it's a huge long period. But that period is defined in part by the discovery of what they call rope patterned pottery, so quite simple clay pots with a rope pattern around them. That's what Jomon means. For a while we thought that was the world's oldest pottery, so a lot of Japanese would point to that as being a big early contribution. Unfortunately for Japan, they found some in China, which is about 20,000 years, BC, so a little bit older. But still some of that old pottery in Japan, I think, is really important. And even now, there are styles of pottery in Japan, Bizenyaki [sp?] is one example, which really emphasize not a polished result, but a kind of beautifully rustic aesthetic to it. So that sort of pottery, that kind of ceramic, I think, is a really early Japanese contribution.

If I had to name another early one, it would probably be what a lot of your readers and listeners would know as Shinto. The Shinto religion, the way of the gods. It's not really called Shinto until you know, towards the modern era. But this sense of human life taking place amidst these flows of energy that go right through nature, through the natural world, the earth, vegetation, other animals, being part of a flow of energy. So Queen Himiko who we spoke about, one of her big roles, we think, was to call down some of the gods into particular features of the landscape, a tree, a waterfall stream, and worship them, there in natural form. So what used to be called kind of animism, the sense of nature being pervaded by the divine... So if you wanted two examples from ancient Japan, I'd say probably those two: that natural rustic aesthetic for its ceramics, and then that sense of the world being inhabited by the divine...

Buddhism comes into Japan, we think, around 550AD. So it's been around for 1000 years by that point in Asia, and it passes through China, through the Korean Peninsula and makes its way into Japan... people are quite skeptical early on. it's thought, it's treated as a migrant religion. And there's a worry that the gods we've been speaking about, the ones that have, you know, what we now call Shinto that they might be offended by this interloper. And early on Japan goes through a couple of natural disasters, at which point people blame Buddhism, they say the native Gods clearly are offended. And so they throw Buddha statues into a canal, they burn down a temple. So it takes a while to get going after 550. But you could say probably by around 900, or 1000, it's becoming the dominant institutional form of religion in Japan.’...

‘Why did the West not colonized Japan for so long, whereas others such as China couldn't resist?’

‘Much of the reason I would argue is that Japan wasn't of all that much interest to people in the West. India was thought to be far richer. There were lots of legends about the wealth of India. The same is true of China’...

‘It's funny. In Japan, if you go all the way back to, what, 700s through to the middle of the 1100s, you've got a period of imperial rule. After that the Emperors are more or less the puppets of powerful aristocratic families and later of the shoguns. And then after 1868, the Emperor sort of reappears. The Meiji Emperor, just a teenager when he comes to power, as I say, taken as a figurehead by these new rulers in Japan. But the Emperor doesn't have a great degree of power. The new leaders are very smart about setting the Emperor up as divine or reminding people of his divinity, as someone to be respected, as someone whose authority is absolute, the Japanese Constitution, the modern constitution from 1889 until Second World War basically says people's rights are a gift from the Emperor, and he will take them back if they turn out to have abused them. So very clever use gets made of the Emperor as a figurehead and a symbol. But the degree to which he has any actual power is is pretty debatable.’...

‘And the theme of conflict continued into the 1930s for Japan, didn't it?’

‘Yes, absolutely. Some people would say perhaps the change point comes in the 1920s. You have a generation of political leaders and military leaders from this tumultuous period I've talked about from the late 1860s onwards, who are remembered now as being founding fathers, great people, visionary, but also quite, perhaps quite realistic and mature in their vision of where Japan or to place limitations on itself as a world power. A lot of those guys start to die off in the 1910s and early 1920s. And you get a generation coming through who've never really known vulnerability, for Japan. And the view they increasingly start to take, and you really see it among young officers in the military in particular is, Japan isn't being given the respect it deserves. 

So a couple of really quick examples. Japanese diplomats try to get a racial equality clause built into the Treaty of Versailles. European countries, Westerners generally, block them. The United States immigration policy is clearly a racist policy against so called yellow peril, the Chinese and also the Japanese. They do deals on naval ratios with the British and the Americans, the Japanese see themselves as losing out in that. This all contributes to a sense that Japan's diplomats are spineless, politicians are a little bit useless. And in order for Japan to protect itself in the world, really, it needs to have a strong military, and it needs to secure itself on the Asian mainland… this younger generation think that we need to secure ourselves more on the Asian mainland, otherwise, we're going to be overrun, because they think they're kind of being hemmed in… there is a sort of encirclement theory that some in the Japanese military would say, we are done for as a country, if we don't assert ourselves’"

Links - 14th August 2021 (2)

Canada Post suspends employees who refused to deliver the Epoch Times - "Two Canada Post carriers were reportedly suspended after refusing to deliver the Epoch Times because they politically disagreed with their editorial stance... they felt the Epoch Times' negative coverage of the Chinese government encouraged hate and xenophobia towards Asians, prompting them to refuse to deliver the paper... The paper was founded by Chinese Americans, and is focused editorially on covering the censorship and human rights violations committed by the Chinese government as well as the nefarious agenda of the Chines Communist Party... "If the delivery of mail is up to the individual carrier to decide based on his/her impression of ‘hatred’, no one can trust the post office any more... We are a media started by Asian immigrants. There is no way we would publish content that is anti-Asian. Please read our content more carefully. To a media that’s leaning left, we may seem on the right. We believe we are neutral and independent. We disagree with your label""
Considering that the Epoch Times itself is run by Chinese people, this is ironic
Conflating criticism of the CCP with anti-Asian hate speech is a sneaky rhetorical trick
The left only likes minority immigrants when they toe the line

How Britain stole $45 trillion from India - "New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik... Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938... Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way – mostly with silver – as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them... On top of this, the British were able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for much more than they “bought” them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100 percent of the original value of the goods but also the markup... anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would do so using special Council Bills – a unique paper currency issued only by the British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then use the bills to pay Indian producers... If India had been able to invest its own tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings in development – as Japan did – there’s no telling how history might have turned out differently. India could very well have become an economic powerhouse. Centuries of poverty and suffering could have been prevented... during the entire 200-year history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income"
Amazing voodoo logic. Even if you think taxation is theft, the British would not be no different from all other governments
This sort of anti-trade mentality is why merchants were despised in Ancient China and suggests that shops are all "stealing" from us since they're middle men. Clearly the solution is to loot the local department store to prevent their "theft"
It seems they believe fiat money is immoral and we should return to the gold standard

World history by per capita GDP - "Angus Maddison, the famed British economic historian who passed away earlier this year, is best known for his estimates of world gross domestic product (GDP) that go back all the way to the year 1 AD... the growth of India’s GDP between 1500 and 1600 was 22.7%, between 1600 and 1700 it was 22.2% and between 1700 and 1820 it logged 21%. So it’s not as if there was any huge decline in the rate of growth. Of course, that doesn’t preclude the possibility that Indian growth, too, may have taken off if the country was not under the thumb of the British. But China continued to be an independent country, albeit one much plagued by the Western powers, and its rate of growth too during the period was nothing to be proud of. What the data seem to be saying is that the coming of the British did not, at least in the first 100 years of colonial rule, make much of a difference to the growth rate of the Indian economy... In 1 AD, India’s GDP per capita was $450, as was China’s. But Italy under the Roman Empire had a per capita income of $809. In 1000 AD, India’s per capita income was $450 and China’s $466. But the average of the West Asian countries, such as Turkey and Iraq, was much higher at $621. In terms of general prosperity, therefore, it was the Arab world that was doing well a millennium ago. The Caliphate in Baghdad was a centre of power at the time and both science and culture flourished. By 1500, though, new centres of prosperity had emerged. India’s per capita income was $550 and China’s $600 in 1500. The Arab world had declined. But standards of living in Western Europe at that time had already gone far ahead... 1600 was the year the East India Company was founded. In contrast, India’s per capita income continued to be $550, while China’s was $600. Note that even Ireland, one of the poorest of Western Europe’s countries, had a per capita income of $615, higher than India’s and China’s. In short, the per capita GDP numbers mirror the changes in power, prosperity and cultural and scientific achievement."
I guess the British were to blame for India's lack of economic development before the East India Company ever arrived

Charles Venable Resigns as Head of Indianapolis Museum of Art - The New York Times - "the museum was seeking a director who would work not only to attract a more diverse audience but to maintain its “traditional, core, white art audience.” A group of 85 Newfields employees and members of the board of governors released a public letter on Tuesday calling for Venable’s resignation. More than 1,900 artists, local arts leaders and former employees of the museum also issued an open letter over the weekend calling for his removal. They asked the museum’s major funders to pause financial support until reforms, including a more diverse board and curatorial staff, could be implemented... it was meant to indicate that the museum would not abandon its existing audience as it moved toward greater diversity, equity and inclusion... the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has had to reckon with what employees called structural inequities. Gary Garrels, formerly its top curator, resigned in July amid staff anger, after he used the term “reverse discrimination” in an all-staff Zoom call."
Clear proof that the explicit goal of anti-racism is to alienate and marginalise white people, and destroy institutions

York University academics see the evil of racism in three wise monkeys | News | The Times - "The three wise monkeys have been a cultural trope throughout the world for centuries as a symbol of seeing, hearing and speaking no evil.Academics at the University of York have decided that they could be seen as an oppressive racial stereotype, and pulled an image of the animals from their website to avoid offence... Scholars who have studied Japanese culture expressed surprise that anyone could take offence at the image, which became popular in Japan in the 17th century before spreading to the West. The animals are associated with the Tendai school of Buddhism, in which they are seen as helpers for divine figures. Tim Clark, who retired as curator of the British Museum’s Japanese collections in 2019, said that he had “no idea” why they might be deemed controversial... A spokeswoman for the University of York said that the organisers of the online conference, entitled Sensorial Fixations: Orality, Aurality, Opticality and Hapticity, were worried about a possible insult to ethnic minorities.“The Japanese symbol of the three wise monkeys was used to represent a postgraduate conference about the sensory experiences of the body, and it also appeared on a document that asked for submission of research papers to the conference on a range of areas, one of which included papers that represented black, indigenous and people of colour,” she said.“It was considered . . . that a monkey, which has been used in a derogatory way in the past, could cause offence in this context, despite this not being the intention of the organisers, so the image was removed.” The highest profile case of the three wise monkeys being labelled as racist began in 2007, when four activists in the union Unison used the image to criticise leaders who were turning a blind eye to their concerns. The leaders responded by saying that the image was intended as a racial slur against one of them, who was black.The activists were vindicated in 2013 when an employment tribunal awarded them £49,000 after ruling that no reasonable person would interpret their use of the monkeys as racist. Lord Moore of Etchingham, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, highlighted the academics’ decision in his column in the Spectator magazine.“One of the difficulties about being woke is that you develop a sort of hypersensitivity to particular phrases and images, which ultimately makes it almost impossible to say or do anything because you are concerned that someone may take offence,” he said.“You accept the premise that you could easily be guilty of doing wrong — they use the phrase ‘our privileges’. They say at the end: ‘We continue to strive to learn and we are deeply sorry.’ It’s almost as if they have inflicted upon themselves a show trial in which they do a stammering confession.“A lot of the time is spent blaming other people but it also comprises shaming yourself — abasing yourself because you have committed an inadvertent blasphemy. It’s very like a pseudo-religion. It’s people constantly saying: ‘We have sinned’.”"
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again!

Tories in a culture war of their own over the meaning of ‘woke’ | News | The Times - "Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the House of Commons, told MPs this morning that the “woke brigade” had “done the nation a service” in highlighting Britain's “proud” history by objecting to controversial monuments last summer.Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, wrote last weekend that the government would crack down on “woke worthies and town hall militants” who attempted to remove or rename public art with links to the slave trade."

Vada Pav: The ‘Indian burger’ McDonald’s can’t master

Nearly 50 years since its invention, the story of the vada pav hits the big screen at Jio MAMI - "A potato vada wedged between two pieces of bread is the favourite on-the-go snack for many Mumbaikars, yet, few know about Ashok Vaidya, the man who is credited with coming up with the idea for the snack at his stall outside Dadar railway station in 1966. Now, a new short documentary tracing his legacy has been selected for the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival."

Opinion | Do Kids Really Need to Learn to Code? - The New York Times - "WhiteHat Jr., which operates in India and the United States, mounted an advertising blitzkrieg in India telling parents that our children need to learn coding from the age of 4, 5 or 6 — or they will fall behind in life. Indian celebrities promoted the brand and spread the fear of losing out among families.WhiteHat Jr. was forced to take down five of its advertisements after the Advertising Standards Council of India, a self-regulatory body, found them in potential violation of its code... Unemployment has remained a great concern in India over time, and parents forced their children, irrespective of their aptitudes, to become doctors or engineers or to get management degrees because of the fear that if their children did not join any of those professions, they were certain to be failures... Tens of thousands of those engineers and doctors have no jobs now. Hundreds of engineering colleges are shutting down in India. Substandard private colleges in small towns and villages mushroomed to meet the demand and produced a generation of unskilled, unemployable engineers and doctors... Relentless advertising campaigns are telling Indian parents that coding is critical because making children code will develop their cognitive skills. Storytelling does all that too. And singing songs."

Want Smarter Kids? Teach Music, Not Coding, According to MIT - "there's not much, if any, connection between coding and today's point-and-click environment. Almost nobody in business, for example, requires much programming skill beyond, say, creating a spreadsheet. Furthermore, the basic coding skills taught in K-12 bears no resemblance to how professional programmers produce code. The "teach kids to code" movement therefore justifies such instruction because it supposedly improves math and language skills.However, that appears not to be the case, according to a December 2020 study conducted at MIT, which found that: "Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing. It's not the same as language, and it's not the same as math and logic." By contrast, what actually does increase other skills and brain power is teaching kids to play a musical instrument, according to a January 2021 study conducted at the University of Zürich and published in The Journal of Neuroscience."

Olympics branded a 'mockery' after inclusion of breakdancing for Paris Games - "squash had been overlooked yet again... Before breakdancing, officially named “breaking” beat it, squash has lost out to sports including skateboarding, sport climbing, BMX, surfing, golf and wushu, which the IOC permitted to run in parallel to the official games in Beijing in 2008... “It’s sort of making a mockery of what the Olympics is,” Martin said. “When you look at what it all used to stand for, the Olympics, it definitely fits in the category. What does the Olympics stands for these days, I don’t really know."

Cornell Offers Race-Based Exemption From Mandatory Flu Shot Policy for Students Who Identify As “Black, Indigenous, Or A Person Of Color” Racist policies strike again. And then if minorities suffer more, that can be blamed on "racism"

Kate Manne on Twitter - "Many forms of privilege we discuss are material: wealth, health, resources, freedoms, support. But there's also such a thing as *moral* privilege--the presumption that you're a good person, doing good in the world, not harm, even when the opposite is the case. Such is whiteness. This is especially true of white men. But white women are hardly immune to it. And it makes white women all too liable to be complicit, as they try to be one of the "good ones," i.e., not guilty, by the lights of white supremacist patriarchy."
From a Cornell professor
Original Sin in wokeness can never be cleansed

The purpose of the Special Olympics (and Trans Mania)

I've previously linked Arnold Schwarzenegger's disgraceful attack on a "troll" who questioned the Special Olympics, which was the textbook definition of an ad hominem attack and yet was widely applauded.

Although teleology may be thought of as "stupid" and "evil", examining the issue of the Special Olympics can clarify the issue of competitive divisions in sports.

Whether the Special Olympics is justified comes down to what you think the spirit and purpose of the Olympics and, more broadly, sports is.

The original motto of the Olympics was "Faster, Higher, Stronger". It should be uncontroversial to say that this is true for sports in general.

They are about celebrating and rewarding the peak of human achievement.

Yet, the Special Olympics are restricted to a subset of people who, almost by definition, are not going to be able to achieve as much as others.

Of course, you could say that the Special Olympics celebrate the participants' indomitable spirit, or how hard they try.

Yet, in sports, the criterion for winning is your performance, not how hard you try. If I am a cancer patient who runs the 100m as hard as I can and do it in 30 seconds, someone in perfect health who does it in 29 seconds while barely breaking a sweat is going to beat me despite trying much less hard and not facing the same obstacles as me.

Of course, one could say that we already have divisions in sports today. The biggest of these is sex - men and women compete in different divisions, because we recognise that they have different capabilities and so it would be unfair for women to have to compete with men. Similarly, some sports like weightlifting have weight categories so someone who is 90kg won't stomp on someone who is 50kg.

But then, not all categories are accepted as legitimate. We don't have sports events restricted to people from poor countries, the obese or people who have limited training/experience. And immutable characteristics cannot be the defining criterion deciding category legitimacy, since people largely don't choose to come from poor countries.

Furthermore, one could extend this logic even within the Special Olympics itself. According to the Special Olympics, if your IQ is below 70-75 you could qualify. Is it "fair", though, for someone with an IQ of 69 to be competing with someone with an IQ of 50?

Whatever it is, one could indeed make a case for why the Special Olympics are valuable based on factors other than pure human performance. But sadly I see no one trying to do that. Instead everyone is just taking for granted that the "troll" is "stupid" and/or "evil" and is just jumping on the bandwagon to bash him.

This whole discussion also has contemporary relevance with the issue of trans women in women's sports, and the unfortunate side effect of some intersex women being excluded since testosterone level is now being used as a way to qualify participants (to try to mitigate the risk of unfairness to cis women).

Perhaps a normal athlete should try to identify as intellectually disabled and then compete in the Special Olympics. He would surely have a high chance of winning more medals.

Links - 14th August 2021 (1 - Sarah Tiong)

MasterChef Australia’s Sarah Tiong Calls Out Triple M Host’s ‘Racist’ Greeting: ‘Check Yourself And Do Better’- "“MasterChef Australia: Back To Win” contestant Sarah Tiong has called out a “racist” encounter she faced from a Triple M host on Wednesday.Tiong told her Instagram followers that Triple M Sunraysia greeted her by trying to speak Chinese during a phone interview.“Ni hao ma,” they said before speaking Cantonese “oh wait, would it be ‘lei ho ma?’ Anyway.”The recently evicted MasterChef star said she doesn’t think the greeting went to air but she terminated the interview right away.“I felt uncomfortable and shocked. The call was immediately ended”... Sarah said the host’s mere presumption that she may speak or want to speak Mandarin or Cantonese and then flippantly dismissing the ability to distinguish the two languages is racist... “MasterChef Australia’s: Back To Win” host Melissa Leong backed Sarah and reminded Australians that this sort of behaviour is a daily battle for many people of colour in this country.“It is not funny or clever,” Melissa said.“It just illustrates how deep rooted racial toxicity is in this country, and anyone with a voice in media should know better.”"
When victimhood is currency, greeting someone is offensive
She's played up her heritage before so for her to turn around and cry racism here is ridiculous. Probably wants to get publicity after being kicked out
Use of the word "toxic" is a good sign you're toxic

Malaysian Chef Sarah Tiong & her MasterChef Experience - "Does your Malaysian background give you an advantage in this competition? It definitely did, because Malaysian cuisine is all about combining different flavours, cultures, and history of food. For me to have been exposed to that and be kind of a part of that is quite inspiring, it really gives me a creative edge, and I got a good understanding of flavours from that."

Sarah Tiong on Instagram - "It's understanding the culture of my family and where they came from"

Sarah Tiong • Food • Family • Love - "Mum comes from a small village in East Malaysia. She came to Sydney, Australia in her late teenage years. Like most immigrants, she came with nothing but her strength of character."

Entertainment: Sarah on Her MasterChef Experience: "I'm Hoping to Find a Little More Belief in Myself" - "My family's from East Malaysia, and they grew up in a very small village, so it plays a huge role in the kind of food that I've grown up with. My mum's talent for cooking and her passion for having a wide appetite for all types of cuisines plays a huge role in what I do on-screen, as well as how I cook at home. So it's really important for me to bring in my Malaysian heritage, and bring in the types of techniques as well that I know from home-cooking"
So much for the importance of her Malaysian heritage

OnHand Agrarian - Posts | Facebook - "some entitled little Ah Tiong girl living in Australia has accused a radio show host of being racist when he tried to greet her in mandarin and cantonese. Putting aside the fact that her name is literally Sarah 中(Tiong), there is nothing wrong with being greeted in a language people think you speak.I’m often mistaken for Malay, Filipino, Thai, Burmese and if I stay indoors long enough, Chinese. And people often greet me in those languages when they mistakenly assume I’m of that race. But I’m Peranakan and my surname is 林(Lim). Is it insulting? No! Someone took the effort to notice my features and mannerisms and then went out of their way to acknowledge what they thought was my culture. That is the exact opposite of racism!No, what REALLY bugs me, as a farmer who very proudly grows heritage foods from the ASEAN region, is that this person, who’s so upset at being greeted in mandarin, is happily cashing in on her pigmentation to push her pig agenda! Just take a look at her engagements over the years and the way she markets herself.Would it be racist if someone gave her chopsticks? A chinese chef’s knife? A packet of bak kut teh spices? Invited her to a Kim chi tasting event? Evidently not.So if you’re going to cry “racist” at someone greeting you in a chinese language, cry racist at everyone else who’s asked to be the token chinese (and Korean) person at a chinese “inspired” event.Condolences to Triple M Sydney 104.9for what this hypocrite did. Don’t let this hypocrite stop you from using different languages. There is plenty of actual racism in the world. Let’s build more bridges."

MasterChef Australia - Posts | Facebook - "We're really going to miss Sarah Tiong's incredible positivity in the MasterChef kitchen 🧡 Watch her full exit interview"
So much for positivity

MasterChef viewers think Sarah Tiong flipped off her co-stars as she left the show

Links - 12th August 2021 (2)

Alec Baldwin's wife Hilaria gets exposed for faking Spanish accent, blames media. - "Below is a video of Hilaria on Good Morning America speaking with a Spanish accent… and pretending to not know how to pronounce "cucumber" in English."

Alec Baldwin makes fun of immigrant for calling Hilaria out on accent - "Alec Baldwin mocked a Venezuelan immigrant who called his wife's hypocrisy and fake accent out on Twitter."

Facebook - "The unique thing about America is that no other nation in history is so thoroughly despised by its own elite class."
There's also the UK and Germany

Teaching a 2-year-old to be anti-racist - "My 2-Year-Old Doesn’t Seem to Care About Being Anti-Racist. Have we screwed up somehow?"
The same people complain about religion as child indoctrination and child abuse

Shitlords United - Posts | Facebook - "What if I believe I'm invalid as s person because I am not lgbt+ or poc?"
"Please do not blame minority communities for your suicidal thoughts. When you talk like this, you come across as trying to pass off your privilege as the fault of the oppressed."
"This is the effect wokeism has on vulnerable people.First screenshot: Blue is an autistic white man who has attempted suicide due to being taught he is a monster due to his skin color. Later in the thread, he filmed himself in some kind of meltdown over it, hitting himself in the head. He believes he doesn’t deserve to live.The second screenshot is how an admin responded.When someone is constantly told that they are inherently harmful and oppressive and complicit in horrible things for simply being born, it can warp one’s self-worth. Throw autism into the mix and you’ve got this situation. I truly hope he gets help and reverses the brainwashing."

National child abuse inquiry refused to probe sex-grooming scandals over fears of looking racist - "The national inquiry into child abuse was 'scared of being called racist' and refused to investigate some of Britain's most notorious sex-grooming scandals... Key witnesses were also barred from giving evidence"

Why do liberals have such low expectations for black people like me, asks BIM AFOLAMI MP - "I found myself described as a 'black boy' who, because I went to Oxford (a 'posh uni'), and 'live in an expensive village', was somebody whose 'life bears no bloody resemblance to black kids growing up in the inner city'.My comments on racial issues were dismissed because I lack the 'self-awareness to see he is being used'. I am described as 'a traitor to his race and to his colour' because I am a Conservative MP.You might think that this patronising and racist nonsense might had been written by the English Defence League, or perhaps by fragments of the hard Left. Yet these comments came from a local Liberal Democrat activist in my constituency. According to Facebook, her post was seen by at least half a dozen current or former Lib Dem councillors and candidates in the area, including their Hitchin and Harpenden parliamentary spokesman. None of them objected or criticised what she had to say.And since then, she has been described by the Lib Dem party's parliamentary spokesman as someone who finds 'racism utterly abhorrent in all its forms'. Hmmm.Politicians such as myself have thick skins and we take the rough with the smooth. However, others not in the public eye must also deal with this patronising nonsense disguised as liberalism. Are black men not supposed to be allowed to attend top schools, live in nice villages, or support whatever political party they wish? Or is the only way of being authentically black to live in the 'inner city'?It is such regressive attitudes, notably prevalent among sections of the 'progressive' Left, which is one of the principal racist barriers holding back so many black people in this country. The sad truth is that black people will not be able to fully thrive until conceited liberals of this sort stop trying to keep us in 'our place'... Many on the Left proclaim racial equality in public and virtue-signal for Black Lives Matter, yet actually do not seem to want individual black people to have the right to choose their own destiny.And, of course, when minorities do talk about their experience of racism, they must ensure it fits the agenda of this band of anti-racists. During the summer, we had the shameless spectacle of 32 Labour MPs dismissing Home Secretary Priti Patel's experience of racism as 'gaslighting' – discounting her evidence as manipulative and dishonest. When people of colour do not toe the line the Left wants them to take, they face racist condemnation...  you have politicians such as Lib Dem MP Wera Hobhouse effectively telling people from minority backgrounds they will only be able to enter Parliament if we have all-BAME shortlists.Quotas and shortlists say to young people of colour that they cannot succeed unless white candidates are taken out of the way. They allow everybody else to look at successful BAME politicians and say: 'You are only there because of your race.'"
As Biden said, 'Poor Kids Are Just as Bright' as White Kids

Meme - "Some parents are proud of their boys for wearing makeup and girls clothes because they're "expressing themselves". My son wore this shirt to school. He was told to take it off or get a suspension. I'm proud of my boy for standing his ground and serving his suspension."
"Don't ***k with me *snake*"

Toilet only for disabled elderly pregnant children : CrappyDesign

Family Reheats Last Meal Cooked By Mum Before Death, Reminds Us To Cherish Our Loved Ones - "When our loved ones pass away, it’s only natural for us to hold on to things that remind us of them.For one family in Japan who lost their mum, that ‘item’ was a meal she had cooked before suffering a fatal stroke. After her passing, the family decided to place the meal in the freezer to preserve it. In 2018, 5 years after her passing, the family decided to reheat the meal she cooked prior to her demise... The food was sent to a lab to certify it was indeed safe for consumption. Fortunately, it was — provided the meat was cooked above 100°C and eaten in small portions. A chef was subsequently engaged to ‘restore’ the food while preserving its original flavours. Given the long period that had passed, the dish was rock-solid when removed from the freezer. But with the chef’s skills, the food was successfully ‘revived’ and presented like a restaurant-quality dish, with green garnish on the side."

Gad Saad - Posts | Facebook - "Transcript of my latest SAAD TRUTH clip.
Critical thinking in 2020:
You question the idea that men can menstruate: Transphobe.
You question the idea that open borders are a good idea: Racist.
You question the idea of defunding the police: Racist.
You question the idea that women could have nine-inch penises: Transphobe.
You question the idea that there are no evolved sex differences between the sexes: Sexist & transphobe.
You question the idea that all religions are equally violent: Islamophobe.
You question the idea that all cultures are equal: Racist.
You question the idea that all Trump voters are racist: Racist.
You question the idea that the world will end next Tuesday because of climate change: Science-denier and possibly White nationalist.
You question the idea that the lockdown is necessary but mass protests do not spread the COVID virus: Racist and science-denier.
You question the idea of equality of outcomes: White supremacist.
You question the DIE religion (diversity, equity, and inclusion): White nationalist.
[In today's free society, we tell you what to think.  Failure to abide implies that you are a sexist, racist, transphobic, Islamophobic, white supremacist science-denier.  Don't be that person.  Obey.]"

Swiss police investigate boy, 8, over toy banknotes - "Swiss police have investigated an eight-year-old boy after he allegedly asked whether he could use a toy banknote in a village shop.The fake euro note was Chinese joss paper “spirit money” – used as symbolic burnt offerings at funerals to ensure the dead have a happy afterlife... The unnamed boy was not charged with any offence but his name will reportedly be on police records until May 2032... Even though the note was clearly identified as pretend money, shop staff felt obliged to call the police. “It is our policy; we were instructed to do so by the headquarters in Winterthur”... The brothers had mug shots taken, said the BaZ.And their house was searched for further toy money: three 50-euro notes, two 20-euro notes, five 10-euro notes and three five-euro notes were seized on the grounds of preventing crime"

Philosopher Kings in Blue? - "While once upon a time (say two centuries ago) the U.S. system looked more like a minimal state, today it looks more like a police state. Maybe not as bad a police state as the old Soviet Union, but still, a police state. This transformation is detailed in William Stuntz’ excellent book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Some key changes:
    We’ve added a lot more laws, so many that we don’t understand most, and regularly violate many.
    We’ve cut the use of juries and also many legal defenses, which previously helped evade guilty verdicts.
    Rise of big cities means county-set laws are set by folks different from those suffer, cause most crime.
    States, who set prison budgets but don’t control conviction rates, greatly increased prison budgets.
    Legal trial complexity & cost has risen greatly, and is now beyond what most can afford.
    Plea bargaining is now allowed, which strongly pushes people to plead guilty, even when they aren’t.
    The new doctrine of qualified immunity protects government officials from many lawsuits.
    Most complaints about police have long been investigated by the same agency that employs them.
    The rise in civil servant unions, especially police unions.
    Surveillance, tracking, and info collection has in many ways become much cheaper.
(Some of these changes resulted from courts seeking to encourage big moral movements, such as those against slavery, alcohol, drugs, prostitution, polygamy, and gambling.)
The net effect of all this is that police can, if they so choose, target most anyone for punishment. That is, for most any target, police can relatively cheaply find a rule the target violated, pressure others to testify against the target, and then finally pressure the target to plead guilty. And police collectively have a lot of discretion in how they use this power. (The rich and politically well-connected may of course be able to discourage such use of power against themselves)... This is the context in which I’d like you to consider current complaints about police mistreatment of detainees. Police must make difficult and context-dependent tradeoffs between how carefully to avoid hurting detainees, and how aggressively to discourage them from defiance or escape."

come for the monsters, stay for the cannibalism - "The least realistic thing about the Lord of the Rings is that a team got together for a group project, decided everything in one meeting, and their plan worked."
"The group abandoned the original plan halfway up Caradhras, split up several times, some group members started looking into different projects, found new partners and ended up doing something else, the original plan was abandoned early on, and the project was salvaged at the last moment by the one group member that didn’t get sidetracked. Sounds like a pretty astute description of teamwork to me"

Kendall Jenner faces accusations of cultural appropriation after announcing tequila brand - "Kendall Jenner is being accused of cultural appropriation and “exploiting Mexican culture” after she unveiled her new tequila brand, 818 Tequila."
Only Mexicans are allowed to sell tequila Lottie אדירה on Twitter - "Racists are mad about a Queen of England being portrayed by a beautiful, talented Black actor in a historical drama. Why is whiteness so fragile?"
"You're good with a black actor playing Anne Frank, right? How about a remake of Schindler's List that features exclusively black actors?"
"Why don't you just go ahead and write "I hate Jews" instead, it's a lot quicker"
But since liberals consider Jews to be white, this makes perfet sense

Guy Debord Funk❍ pøP ️⃤ on Twitter - "Instead of critically examining the way categories are constructed historically, seeking to abolish them-- intersectionality is a heuristic that reifies, conflates difference all along a flat plane, where you are to be quantified, measured, & indexed by worth of your standpoint.
Blackness isn't even existent here, it's physical melanin measured in relation to whiteness and everyone in between black and whiteness is just "different shades"
Sorry gay men, the asexuals have pushed you aside...
This ideology is not a tool to help understand how various forms of oppression "intersect" but actually seeks to make them collide at an intersection rather than moving forward together."

Right-wing authoritarians aren't very funny: RWA, personality, and creative humor production
This study didn't bother to see whether it was due to being right wing, authoritarian or something else. For all we know, left wing libertarians aren't funny either

Paul Embery on Twitter - "I'm as 'political' as they come. But when you try to politicise every occasion and event - football matches, New Year fireworks, BBC sitcoms - with the same messages, you will test the patience of the people you are trying to win over. People don't like protracted moral lectures."

Elizabeth Olsen isn't happy her boobs are on show in Avengers costume - "'you look at where it started in the comic books and it was a leotard and a headband so…oh, it’s horrible, it’s so horrible,’ she added. ‘So at least they know that’s not cool. But then they made Wonder Woman, you know? And that’s what she’s in."
Ironically she insisted on the original costume being in Wandavision

On Lee Kuan Yew's Crocodile Tears (Redux)

Toh Chin Chye:

"He was crying. I don’t understand him at all. On one hand, he worked so hard for merger. Having gotten the cupful, he shattered it. And then cried over it.

He held two successive press conferences, and in which both he cried. On the third morning I went to work, and saw the press boys again. I asked Lee Wei Ching, his press secretary, “Why are they hanging around here?” Another press conference! I told Lee Wei Ching, “You ought to tell the Prime Minister to go to Changi and take a rest. Call the press conference off! Another crying bout, and the people of Singapore will think the government is on its knees."

 

British declassified document:

""He emphasised seriousness of the occasion and threatened "punitive" measures against any newspaper which printed pictures of him smiling."

Goh Keng Swee:

           Melanie Chew: When did you feel that Malaysia was going to break up? Was it a surprise to                   you?

Dr Goh: Now I am going to let you into what has been a state secret up to now. This is a file, which I call Albatross.

In the early days there were a lot of discussions about changing the terms of Malaysia by the Prime Minister, Rajaratnam, and Toh Chin Chye. It got nowhere. They discussed all types of projects. Was Singapore to be part of Malaysia, but with special powers, or with no connection with Malaysia?

Now on the 20th of July 1965, I met Tun Razak and Dr Ismail. Now this is the 20th July 1965. I persuaded him that the only way out was for Singapore to secede, completely.

(reading) “It should be done quickly, and before we get more involved in the Solidarity Convention.” As you know, Rajaratnam and Toh Chin Chye were involved in the Solidarity Convention. “Malaysia for the Malaysians,” that was the cry, right?

Melanie Chew: This Solidarity Convention, you felt, would be very dangerous?

Dr Goh: No, not dangerous. I said, “You want to get Singapore out, and it must be done very quickly. And very quietly, and presented as a fait accompli.”

It must be kept away from the British. The British had their own policy. They wanted us to be inside Malaysia. And, they would have never agreed to Singapore leaving Malaysia. Now, the details, I won’t discuss with you.

          Melanie Chew: How did Tun Razak and Dr Ismail react?

           Dr Goh: Oh, they themselves were in agreement with the idea [of Dr Goh’s proposal to get                   Singapore out quickly]. In fact, they had themselves come to the conclusion that Singapore must            get out. The question was, how to get Singapore out?...

           Melanie Chew: What was his view? Did he himself want Singapore out?

           Dr Goh: I had better not say.

           Melanie Chew: So the secession of Singapore was well planned by you and Tun Razak! It was                not foisted on Singapore!

            Dr Goh: No, it was not.

            (There followed a long silence during which he slowly leafed through the secret file, Albatross.             Then he shut the file, and resumed his narrative.)

            --- Leaders Of Singapore / Melanie Chew

Addendum: Also, via Secret documents reveal extent of negotiations for Separation: Lee and friends were "excited" about independence, looked at it as "an escape" and called it "most attractive", and looked forward to "political stability with economic expansion, and autonomy in Singapore without interference from KL" - all this a few (?) months before independence. Since Singapore's independence from Malaysia had been discussed for over half a year, it being presented as sudden and a fait accompli just testifies to the success of the PR campaign.

All these add on to Tunku Abdul Rahman's account ("I don't know why Mr Lee acted like that . . . He was quite pleased about it"), which corroborates the claim that the crying was staged.

Addendum: Related - Toh Chin Chye - "He was crying. I don't understand him at all."

Links - 12th August 2021 (1)

Introduction - The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy - by Daniel Pipes - "Just a few minutes' political chat with a sophisticated Middle Easterner makes it clear how much he interprets great public issues through the prism of conspiracy theories. Whereas Westerners see a Syrian government long in conflict with Israel, he perceives Damascus as having surreptitiously worked hand in glove with the Jewish state since the 1960s. In his view, the Western powers built up Saddam Husayn, connived with him to put on Desert Storm, and provided him with the weapons to stay in power after his defeat. Ruhollah Khomeini may have appeared vitriolically anti-Western, but Middle Eastern interlocutors claim this ayatollah faithfully served his British (or American) masters right up to his death. And so forth.However wrong-headed they may be, these views have great consequence. Indeed, whoever hopes to understand the Middle East must recognize the distorting lens of conspiracy theories, understand them, make allowance for them, and perhaps even plan around them. Conspiracism provides a key to understanding the political culture of the Middle East. It spawns its own discourse, complete in itself and virtually immune to rational argument. It suffuses life, from the most private family conversations to the highest and most public levels of politics. It helps explain much of what would otherwise seem illogical or implausible, including the region's record of political extremism and volatility, its culture of violence, and its poor record of modernization. The conspiratorial mentality also extends beyond the region, skewing both the way outsiders see the Middle East and spurring conspiracism in other parts of the world. In sum, conspiracism constitutes one of the region's most distinctive political features. Ignore this phenomenon, "almost universal in the Middle East," and some of the most important features of the Arab and Iranian bodies politic remain elusive. Analyzing the region without taking the hidden hand into account is comparable to studying the American economy without Wall Street or Soviet politics without Marxism-Leninism... Part IV asks why conspiracy theories have proliferated in the Middle East. Noting the virtual absence of conspiracy theories in the region during premodern times, I conclude that they represent a modern phenomenon and have flourished only in the twentieth century. They spread due to four main causes: the worldly decline of Muslims, the influence of European thought, the plethora of actual conspiracies, and the specific nature of Middle Eastern politics, especially its pan-movements and its autocracy... Oddly, Westerners tend to study their own attitudes toward the Middle East much more than the reverse. Bernard Lewis, the renowned historian, observes that "Far less attention has been given to the origins and development of Middle Eastern attitudes toward the West, though these are of at least equal importance in determining relations between the two. In the absence of the rather Western habits of self-analysis and self-criticism, they may even be of greater importance."... Westerners often dismiss what Arabs and Iranians say and write, implying that they indulge in rhetoric for its own sake. Saddam Husayn's speech on 17 July 1990 threatening force against Kuwait, for example, prompted Don Kerr of the International Institute for Strategic Studies to declare that "Arabic rhetoric always is colorful, so it's natural in the region for people to discount what they are hearing"; just two weeks later, Saddam's forces invaded Kuwait. Dismissing what Middle Easterners say constitutes a shameless caricature, an act suggesting little imagination and much ethnocentrism. Middle Easterners do not just bandy words about; far more often, these bespeak sincere beliefs."
Given that Muslims outside the Middle East love conspiracy theories too...

Titania McGrath on Twitter - "So far today I’ve got a woman fired for claiming that sex is binary, shouted abuse at an old man collecting money for the British Legion, dog-piled people on Twitter for disagreeing with me and burned some books by Dr Seuss. It’s SO exhausting being on the right side of history."

Democrats Demand Stimulus Bill Include Reparations For Transgender Native Americans Affected By Climate Change | The Babylon Bee - "Democratic lawmakers are blocking the stimulus bill proposed in Congress, slamming their Republican colleagues for refusing to include reparations for transgender Native Americans affected by climate change."

OccupyDemocratsLogic on Twitter - Stephen King on Kayleigh McEnany: "Enjoy your next job as a cocktail waitress in Tampa."
"The people who feign revulsion at jokes about AOC being a bartender...."

Erik Grzela on Twitter - "It's ironic how if you interrupt Harris, you are womanplasting but if you tell a harvard law graduate that her next job is a cocktail waitress ... you are toast of the left"

Love Jihad? Tanishq jewellery pulls down ad on Hindu-Muslim couple amid social media outrage - "Tanishq has reportedly pulled down a jewellery ad that celebrated an interfaith couple amid some on social media accusing the brand of promoting 'love jihad'.The 45-second ad showed a baby shower thrown for a Hindu bride by her Muslim in-laws... Love jihad is an islamophobic conspiracy theory that holds that Muslim men make women of other religions fall in love with them and later marry them to promote conversion"
If they want to promote inter-religious love, why not have a Hindu man and a Muslim woman?

BMW driver given speeding fine at 75 times standard rate after giving middle finger to camera - "The 26-year-old was caught doing 81 kilometres an hour in a 70 zone in Kulmbach, Bavaria.The normal punishment? A very manageable 20 euro fine ($32 AUD). However, a split-second decision to give the middle finger to the speed camera saw that fine thrown out the window.Oberfranken Police decided they wanted to remind the driver of the importance of good manners.So rather than the 20 euro fine, they suspended his licence for one month and slapped him with a 1500 euro fine ($2627 AUD) at the Kulmbach district court"

Kay Lee, trendsetter of hawkers selling recipes, now down to original store - "Kay Lee Roast Meat Joint has been long known for their roasted meats — fatty char siew, crispy roast pork and roast duck. However, that was not why they made the headlines in 2012.Instead, it was because the original owners, Ha Wai Kay and Betty Kong, wanted to sell their recipe and premises for $3.5 million. They made the front pages again in 2014, this time because they managed to find a buyer and sold their business for $4 million to electronics firm Aztech Group, whose chairman took just 10 minutes to seal the deal. At the point of the deal, it was reported that 10 Kay Lee restaurants would be rolled out over the next two years... This turn of events is unexpected given the plans Aztech had shared with The Straits Times about how it would properly plan everything from the operations and marketing to sales and procurement back in 2014. This included hiring food scientists, to learn and document Kay Lee's secret recipes, and experienced industry veteran Sam Ng, who has overseen Chinese restaurant operations in major Singapore hotels.Since making the acquisition of Kay Lee, Aztech Group has delisted from the Singapore Exchange in 2017.Former owners Ha and Kong were also convicted in 2016 and sentenced to four weeks' jail each for tax evasion. They were also fined $164,751.45 per person"

Child Murder by Mothers: A Critical Analysis of the Current State of Knowledge and a Research Agenda - "Among children under age 5 years in the United States who were murdered in the last quarter of the 20th century,61% were killed by their own parents: 30% were killed by their mothers, and 31% by their fathers "
Clearly this means that it's sexist to send women to prison, as feminists say since women are only ever victims

Child murder by mothers: patterns and prevention - "The term neonaticide was coined by Resnick to describe murder of an infant within the first 24 hours of life. Almost all neonaticides are committed by mothers... Infanticide laws often reduce the penalty for mothers who kill their children up to one year of age, based on the principle that a woman who commits infanticide does so because "the balance of her mind is disturbed by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effect of giving birth to the child". The British Infanticide Act of 1922 (amended in 1938) allows mothers to be charged with manslaughter rather than murder if they are suffering from a mental disturbance. The law was originally based on the outdated concept of lactational insanity, but the public's desire to excuse sympathetic women caused reluctance to alter the law after lactational insanity was discredited. Women convicted of infanticide often receive probation and referral to mental health treatment rather than incarceration... The majority of nations that have infanticide laws have followed the British precedent and decrease the penalty for mothers killing children under one year old... In practice, however, women convicted of infanticide in England sometimes do not have significant mental illness as technically required by the law . Opponents of infanticide laws point out that fathers are granted far less leniency. A father who is equally psychotically depressed as a mother, who kills his 10-month-old child in an altruistic psychotic belief with an associated suicide attempt, should not be treated differently than a similarly situated mother. Some feminists criticize the infanticide laws for "pathologizing childbirth". They believe that making this exception for women denies them the same capacity for self-governance attributed to men. Furthermore, it is illogical that a mother who in the throes of postpartum psychosis killed her newborn and her two-year-old should be charged with infanticide/manslaughter for the homicide of the newborn and murder for the homicide of the two-yearold. If the U.S. had an infanticide law, Andrea Yates would not have qualified, because in addition to her infant she killed her four older children. An acutely psychotic mother who killed her 13 month old child would not qualify for the infanticide law in England though a mother who battered her 11 month old child might."

WATCH: Bodycam footage shows there's more to the story of that Native American man who got tazed by park rangers - "Another example of why you shouldn't jump to conclusions when you see an out of context video clip. So you probably already saw this video of a Native American man screaming while being tazed by a park ranger.The story was that Darrell House and his sister were hiking off-trail at the Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico when they were accosted by this aggressive park ranger, who ends up ruthlessly tazing House... the bodycam footage came out, and it shows a whole different side of the story. You see the full context leading up to the confrontation. You see House resisting and being obnoxious for a full seven minutes, repeatedly ignoring the officer and trying to walk away, and being warned over and over again that he'd be tazed if he didn't comply.And you see the park ranger, who has been dragged through the mud on social media over this, being almost absurdly polite and kind from the start.He's literally begging the guy to just please comply before he escalates to using the tazer... In this case, the narrative was "all law enforcement officers are bad." And when you mix that in with the fact that this guy was Native American and visiting a historical Native American site, it just looked horrible.But when you consider how much unrest and idiocy has been spawned by narratives propped up by incomplete stories and out of context video clips, you'd think we'd have learned by now to be a little slower to speak until we have the full story."

Meme - "Flowerypowery 4 @littlecutejessy This can't be real. Is this a fucking joke? Most disgusting racist thing i've ever seen in my life"
"Montenegro"

Pachycephalosaurus: Jurassic World’s ‘racist’ dinosaur - "How can a dinosaur be racist? It’s due to their appearance in the blockbuster Jurassic World.
From what I’ve seen, the dinosaurs in Jurassic World are equal-opportunity devourers.
True, but early on in the film, after some pachycephalosauruses have escaped their sector, a character utters the line: “The pachys are out of containment.”
So what? It sounds as if she’s saying: “The Pakis are out of containment.”"
Why people don't trust the press anymore

James Lindsay, increasingly relevant on Twitter - "How Wokeness creates a national security threat.
US math ed: "And if we can have that kind of debate around history, certainly we can have it in math classrooms. Asking, When might 2+2 not equal 4 is a great exercise to have with learners. Understanding that, in most math classrooms, the western (white) world has been centered is important. Working to bring other perspectives from other cultures into all classrooms...equally important. 2+2=4 2+2=5 I can hold onto both those tensions and...surprise...still teach kids math."
Chinese math ed: *complicated shit*"

Loanshark in S'pore transfers S$200 to man who didn't ask for loan because business is not good - "A 62-year-old man in Singapore became a victim of loanshark harassment even though he had not taken out any loans. The man received a deposit of S$200 in his bank account from the loanshark, who claimed that it was a loan and told him to repay it on time... This happened after he sought a S$7,600 personal loan from a bank, which said that it would get back to him.The day after his visit to the bank, he received a call from the loanshark, who claimed to be a bank employee and asked for his personal details, including his bank account details, which he disclosed... He then returned the S$200 back to the sender, and even closed the bank account involved, hoping that this would be the end of the matter.However, this did not deter the loanshark, and the man soon became the target of loan solicitation.A photo by SMDN appears to show a WhatsApp conversation between the man and the loanshark, with the loanshark offering a S$500 loan at a "good good rate", and a claim that the offeror was being "scold very jialat" for having no customers.The offer was promptly rejected by the man, however, which drew a response of three crying emojis. The loanshark's pleading messages then saw a drastic change in tone.A photo of a gate splashed with red paint was circulated on Facebook, along with a message asking for the man to repay a loan within 24 hours.While the man was not named in the post, some of his personal information was included.The post was accompanied with a threat to set his house on fire if he did not comply, even though he had already transferred back the S$200 that was sent to him."

𝕷𝖎𝖘𝖆 𝕯𝖚𝕭𝖔𝖎𝖘 on Twitter - "when i got my first gyno exam as a teenager, the gynecologist asked me what I wanted to do for a career. I said I wanted to be an artist. Then while checking my cervix she said- “i wanted to be a muppeteer”."

Links - 10th August 2021 (2)

DNA discovery reveals relatives of ancient Egyptians - "Publishing its findings in Nature Communications, the study concluded that preserved remains found in Abusir-el Meleq, Middle Egypt, were closest genetic relatives of Neolithic and Bronze Age populations from the Near East, Anatolia and Eastern Mediterranean Europeans.Modern Egyptians, by comparison, share much more DNA with sub-Saharan populations."
Clearly, this means that any artefacts which have ever been found on the territory of modern day Egypt belong to it. If a Roman coin minted in Britain and owned by a Dalmatian merchant found in Egyptian waters because the Greek ship it was on happened to be shipwrecked there happened to be brought back to France by Napoleon's army, this is clearly stealing their heritage from the Egyptian people

Texas power outage: Why natural gas went down during the winter storm -  "It’s estimated that about 80% of the grid’s capacity, or 67 gigawatts, could be generated by natural gas, coal and some nuclear power. Only 7% of ERCOT’s forecasted winter capacity, or 6 gigawatts, was expected to come from various wind power sources across the state. Woodfin said Tuesday that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, mostly wind generation, are offline and that 30 gigawatts of thermal sources, which include gas, coal and nuclear energy, are offline."
This perfectly shows how unreliable renewable energy is. Despite being less than 10% of thermal energy's contribution to grid capacity, it is just over half of the thermal energy's generation that is offline

How much do state dinners cost, and are they worth the expense? - The Washington Post - "CBS News published the costs of President Obama’s first five state dinners, given from 2009 to 2011. On the low end was a 2011 dinner for South Korean president Lee Myung-Bak, which cost $203,053, according to CBS. News reports indicated there were about 200 guests, which put the per-head cost at about $1,000. The most expensive dinner reported by CBS was a 2009 event for the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. It cost $572,187, according to CBS. That was more than $1,700 per head"

Trump’s company billed the government at least $2.5 million. Here are the key charges. - The Washington Post - "When Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in April 2017, Trump hosted a formal dinner at the club — and, over dessert, told Xi that the United States had fired missiles into Syria, he said. Trump later said the dessert was: “The most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.”Trump’s club later charged the government more than $7,000 for the 30-person dinner, including charges for wine, floral arrangements and decorative potted palm trees. The bill appears to include Trump’s own meal."
Apparently saving the taxpayer money, possibly by losing money, is a bad thing.

Trump's trips versus Obama's: When vacations cost millions - "Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said... about Trump's travels so far? "It's a rather obvious use of taxpayer resources for seemingly unnecessary purposes."
Some people were bashing Judicial Watch and claiming they were right wing and had double standards. Oops

Trudeau’s pre-recession period marked by weak economic numbers - "Back in 2015, the Trudeau Liberals ran on—and in some ways, were elected on—a promise that their dramatic changes in fiscal and regulatory policies including higher government spending financed by borrowing and higher taxes and a more interventionist approach to regulating the economy would result in a stronger, more prosperous country. As noted in our new study, however, there’s now sufficient evidence that not only did Canada’s economy not improve but indeed our economic performance during the 2016 to 2019 period (prior to the COVID recession) is the weakest of the last five comparable periods."

Who Forgot to Invite Chun-Li to the Mortal Kombat? - "being the astute film critic that I am I immediately clocked a glaring error in the film. Where in all the realms is Chun-Li? If there is a battle for the fate of Earth then don’t we need all of the greatest warriors gathered, which would include Chun-Li and her spinning bird kick that can knock a man’s head clean off? Sounds like a pretty big plot hole to me that the ultimate street fight is supposed to be won by a ragtag team helmed by Sonya Blade, no offense to the Sonya stans...
Update, 4:39 p.m.: Jezebel has discovered the answer to our question about Chun Li’s erasure, and it is that Chun Li is not part of the Mortal Kombat megaverse. Wow!"
Addendum: "This is why we need mansplaining"

Kyle Mann, boop/bop/beep on Twitter - [On the above] "This is why we need mansplaining"
Mansplaining: when a man tells a woman she is wrong (or disagrees with her

Report: Mansplaining Down But Woman Confusion Up | The Babylon Bee - "In great news for everyone, studies have shown that a campaign against mansplaining has had great results, with mansplaining now at a historic low. In unrelated bad news, though, there’s been a marked increase in women being extremely confused."

Facebook - "Recent posts from #freefromhijab are currently hidden because the community has reported some content that may not meet Instagram's community  guidelines"
"Just leave us alone. You abuse us, insult us, attack us with acid, imprison us, and kill us for not wearing hijab. And we’re not even allowed to complain about that? We can’t even open our mouths to peacefully protest once a year online? We can’t celebrate the amazing women across the planet who defy your primitive and misogynistic rules? Leave. Us. Alone. #FreeFromHijab #NoHijabDay #HijabIsRapeCulture"
Islamophobia!

Meme - "Mexican Food Made by Americans: TACO BELL
American Food Made by Mexicans: *crazy burger*"

Thread by @patron_sailor on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "If we're talking about "decolonizing astrology" then we could start with the project of problematizing the heteronormative gender binary that pervades much of contemporary astrology — but I don't know if y'all are ready for it
There are unexamined colonialist ideas that are considered integral to so many astrologies that currently practiced. If you practice so-called evolutionary astrology, for instance, are you ready to unpack its legacy of 19th & 20th C. orientalism?
Bet it's a lot harder than we imagine. Decolonizing astrology won't be about whether we, as astrologers, have the right intentions signalled with the proper vocabulary. Rather: whether our astrologies contain & replicate oppressive structures, and if so, how to dismantle them.
Incidentally, I think it also requires us to be more reflexive in discourse about the plurality of astrologies, rather than speaking of a singular "astrology" without consideration for what that singularity elides and erases
As a parting shot I'll just say that if your astrology posits that sex is a signification of the 8th House then it's perpetuating some fucked-up repressive attitudes imported from the dominant culture — and if you care about liberation, maybe you should think about that"
Social Justice ruins everything. But since astrology is crap anyway...

The party of seatbelts and bike helmets wants to make it illegal to own a bulletproof vest

Facebook - "Logic, Empathy, Honesty:
The victory of the Liberal party in Australia has further proven a point that was first demonstrated by Trump and later by Brexit. When you demonize people on the right, call them racist and incite violence against them, you empower them. Not only this, but polls will consistently show the right wing parties lagging behind. The win is a surprise only to those on the left that haven't realized how useless these polls have become, because no one who believes they will be ostracized or, even attacked, for stating their political views, is going to go out of their way to tell pollsters their intention. The right wing is going to continue to lag behind in the polls but win-out in elections for as long as the left wing continues it's campaign of harassment, shame and incitement. If we are to restore a healthy, balanced democracy, we must learn to discuss things without name calling and intimidation."

This year belongs to the Quiet Australians - "Exit polling indicates Labor was the preferred party of the educated professional classes, but not for the workers, the people in whose name it is supposed to exist...   This year, bushfires have come to divide Australians. That climate change might increase the likelihood and severity of bushfires has the ring of truthiness to it and warrants investigation.  Yet at this stage it is little more than a hunch without a firm empirical foundation. It may remain so, given the challenge of finding a reliable historical measure.  Bushfire season used to bring Australia together, inspiring private donations for its victims. Today it has become a burning stake by which to identify witches.  The inane question ‘do you accept that bushfires are proof of climate change?’ has become the stock-standard gotcha question for politicians and even fire chiefs appearing on the ABC.  Morrison has become the prime suspect, hauled before this tainted jury as the man we must blame for the smouldering undergrowth and destroyed homes.  Morrison’s ‘inaction’ on climate change may be the stated charge, but like President Trump’s impeachment, we suspect his real crime is his refusal to tip his hat to his accusers’ wokish nonsense."

At Australian Ballot Boxes, the Left’s Empathy Deficit Came Home to Roost - "  Picture a dinner party where half the guests are university graduates with prestigious white-collar jobs, with the other half consisting of people who are trade workers, barmaids, cleaners and labourers. While one side of the table trades racy jokes and uninhibited banter, the other half tut-tuts this “problematic” discourse.  These two groups both represent traditional constituencies of mainstream centre-left parties—including the Labour Party in the UK, the Democrats in the United States, and the NDP in Canada. Yet they have increasingly divergent attitudes and interests—even if champagne socialists paper over these differences with airy slogans about allyship and solidarity.  Progressive politicians like to assume that, on election day at least, blue-collar workers and urban progressives will bridge their differences, and make common cause to support leftist economic policies. This assumption might once have been warranted. But it certainly isn’t now—in large part because the intellectuals, activists and media pundits who present the most visible face of modern leftism are the same people openly attacking the values and cultural tastes of working and middle-class voters. And thanks to social media (and the caustic news-media culture that social media has encouraged and normalized), these attacks are no longer confined to dinner-party titterings and university lecture halls. Brigid Delaney, a senior writer for Guardian Australia, responded to Saturday’s election result with a column about how Australia has shown itself to be “rotten.” One well-known Australian feminist and op-ed writer, Clementine Ford, has been fond of Tweeting sentiments such as “All men are scum and must die.” Former Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, who also has served as a high-profile newspaper columnist, argues that even many mainstream political positions—such as expressing concern about the Chinese government’s rising regional influence—are a smokescreen for racism.   In an interview conducted on Sunday morning, Deputy Labor leader Tanya Plibersek opined that if only her party had more time to explain to the various groups how much they’d all benefit from Labor’s plans, Australians would have realized how fortunate they’d be with a Labor government, and Shorten would’ve become Prime Minister. Such attitudes are patronizing, for they implicitly serve to place blame at the feet of voters, who apparently are too ignorant to know what’s good for them.  What the election actually shows us is that the so-called quiet Australians, whether they are tradies (to use the Australian term) in Penrith, retirees in Bundaberg, or small business owners in Newcastle, are tired of incessant scolding from their purported superiors. Condescension isn’t a good look for a political movement... the modern progressive left has lost touch with the fact that what ordinary people want from their government is a spirit of respect, dignity and hope for the future. While the fetish for hectoring and moral puritanism has become popular in rarefied corners of arts and academia, it is deeply off-putting to voters whose sense of self extends beyond cultish ideological tribalism... progressives seem to imagine that it can be dispelled, as if by a magic spell, simply by incanting the right hash tags or bleating mantras about anti-racism."