Mossad 'likely' behind Salman Rushdie stabbing, claims Denver professor - "The stabbing of novelist Salman Rushdie last week may have been orchestrated by the Mossad, suggested Nader Hashemi, Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver... Hashemi went on to suggest that Israel's motive for carrying out a false flag operation would be to galvanize opposition to the ongoing efforts of world powers to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement."Damn Jews!
Salman Rushdie suspect charged with second-degree attempted murder and assault - "Following the attack, questions were raised about the security precautions -- or lack thereof -- at the host institution, which sits in a rural lake resort about 70 miles south of Buffalo, New York. The institution's leadership had rejected recommendations for basic security measures, including bag checks and metal detectors, fearing that would create a divide between speakers and the audience, according to two sources who spoke with CNN. The leadership also feared that it would change the culture at the institution... There were no security searches or metal detectors at the event, a person who witnessed the attack told CNN. The witness is not being identified because they expressed concerns for their personal safety."
Meanwhile, most of the Muslims online commenting are cheering the attack. The best comment (on an Al Jazeera article on the attacker) was: "It is clearly US stupid conspiracy and secret strategical dirty politics and try to increase hate crimes against Muslim community"
(16) Facebook - "I've read The Satanic Verses (TSV). Frankly, I was offended that its literary merits were not as how they were made out to be. In fact, the book itself was a jumbled narrative. It's also a boring piece of work and unlike the kind of jolt I felt when I read Kipandjikusmin's 1968 'Langit Makin Mendung' (The Sky is Getting Cloudy). Surprisingly, the controversial bit was similar to Rushdie's 1988's TSV. Instead of Archangel Gabriel, Kusmin's story had the Prophet himself descending from the sky on the mythical winged creature, buraq; only to crash onto a Russian spacecraft on its descent. He tumbled down to the land of Indonesia, whose people - his ummah - were in an abject state beyond redemption. Before TSV, Indonesian society had debated on the question of freedom of expression, censorship and boundaries in literary works. Much of the reaction towards Rushdie's TSV was due to him resurfacing the incident of the 'Satanic verses' in Muslim tradition, hence invoking the centuries-old accusation that Prophet Muhammad was (at least once in his lifetime), deceived by Satan. But as Shahab Ahmed's extensive study had shown, this was generally not rejected by early Muslims of the first two centuries of Islam. Hence, it was later Muslim scholars who had entirely rejected the incident as fabricated or untrue. Ahmed had intended his work to demonstrate how truth is constructed within the Islamic tradition. More pointedly, he wanted to uncover how orthodoxy is formed. (I urge you to read his brilliant book, 'What is Islam' to understand his approach.)"
Facebook - "“Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people. I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it. To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.” ― Salman Rushdie"
That was the 20th century. In the 21st century: "A slur is a knife—if you’re the one holding the handle, you don’t get to decide how sharp it is—this is the sole and sovereign right of the person at its tip."
Ironic that Alfian Sa'at then went on about "these things become less and less about the text itself, but the way it then gets distorted (a theme, ironically, explored in the novel itself), and the way the author gets tarred and demonised)". So much for prioritising "minority" feelings
Keywords: dagger pointed at heart, knife pointed at heart
Meme - "Why did you kill him?
He didn't believe my religion is peaceful"
Auron MacIntyre on Twitter - "The Left: 'Sure, we believe in free speech. But if minorities are offended by your speech, it's hate speech, & there will be consequences' *Salman Rushdie speaks, offends minority, gets stabbed 10 times* The Left: 'Sure, we believe in free speech. But....'"
"Free speech was valuable to the left when it served as a mechanism to undermine the stability of the west and gain entry into its institutions Once they became the dominant force in those institutions they understood the need to pull the ladder up behind them"
Meme - Engr.Rehan M. Sabir (PMLN) @Reha...: "After the attack of Salman Rushdie Insha' Allah the next number is @geertwilderspvv. Any one from the world gave the head of @geertwilderspwy I will give 20 $ million. I want @geertwilderspvv head. We want head. All Muslims want head."
Dutch MP Geert Wilders gets death threat from Pakistani politician - "Twitter has suspended the account of a Pakistani man who announced a bounty of 20 million USD for anybody who beheads Dutch Lawmaker Geert Wilders, referring to the attack on author Salman Rushdie in New York. Rehan M Sabir made threat calls announcing the bounty for beheading Geert Wilders. His Twitter profile, which has now been suspended, mentions that he is a leader of the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), the ruling party in Pakistan... The threat against Geert Wilders is comparable to the one made to Salman Rushdie by Islamists all around the world. Notably, Wilders has consistently backed former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesman Nupur Sharma when she got death threats from Islamists for comments she made about the Islamic prophet. Wilders has been speaking constantly against Islamic fanaticism across the globe."
J.K. Rowling on Twitter - ".@TwitterSupport These are your guidelines, right? "Violence: You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people. We also prohibit the glorification of violence... "Terrorism/violent extremism: You may not threaten or promote terrorism...""
U.K. Police Investigate Online Threat to J.K. Rowling - The New York Times - "The authorities in the United Kingdom said on Sunday that they were investigating an online threat against the author J.K. Rowling after she offered support on social media to Salman Rushdie, the novelist who was attacked last week at an event in western New York. Hours after the attack on Mr. Rushdie, who was stabbed roughly 10 times as he prepared to speak at the Chautauqua Institution, Ms. Rowling tweeted her condolences. She first wrote on Twitter, “Horrifying news,” then added: “Feeling very sick right now. Let him be OK.” In response, a user with the handle @MeerAsifAziz1 replied: “Don’t worry you are next.”... Ms. Rowling, 57, who wrote the award-winning “Harry Potter” books, assailed Twitter for allowing the social media account that lodged the threat to remain active."
Meme - "Vehicle type: motorcycle
Gender: unclear
Age: child
Hairstyle: head is covered
Helmet: none
Bag/luggage: unclear
Clothing: long sleeve
Clothing color: black
Number of passenger: 1
Vehicle color: black
*Cat*"
Translation from the Mandarin
AI is going to make everyone unemployed. Long live artificial intelligence!
Meme - "Barber: what you want bro
her: you know that precambrian-era sedimentation of precipitated iron oxide
barber: say no more fam"
Meme - ">Australia had a rabbit plague in the mid 1800s
>They tried a variety of methods to get rid of them
>Eventually they got desperate, and switched to the unconventional
>They made fake rabbits that were more attractive than the real rabbits
>The ones attracted to the fake rabbits didn't breed and the population was thus reduced
>Tfw they're doing it with people now
>Tfw I figured out why Anime girls exist
The scary part is from what I've seen, it's working."
My ex cheated on me, so I posed as a recruiter and put him through a month-long job interview then had the last laugh - "When my ex cheated on me so I posed as a LinkedIn recruiter and made him go thru a month long interview process and then sent him a rejection letter about how he’s not s***"
The One Parenting Decision That Really Matters - The Atlantic - "the family a kid was raised in had surprisingly little impact on how that kid ended up. Unrelated children adopted into the same home ended up only a little more similar than unrelated children who were raised separately. The effects of nature on a child’s future income were some 2.5 times larger than the effects of nurture... parents have only small effects on their children’s health, life expectancy, education, and religiosity (though studies have found that they have moderate effects on drug and alcohol use and sexual behavior, particularly during the teenage years, as well as how kids feel about their parents)... One of the largest randomized controlled trials on breastfeeding found that it had no significant long-term effect on a variety of outcomes. A careful study of television use among preschoolers found that TV had no long-term effects on child test scores. A randomized trial suggests that teaching kids cognitively demanding games, such as chess, doesn’t make them smarter in the long term. A meta-analysis of bilingualism found that it has only small effects on a child’s cognitive performance, and that even these may be due to a bias in favor of publishing positive study results... Three of the biggest predictors that a neighborhood will increase a child’s success are the percent of households in which there are two parents, the percent of residents who are college graduates, and the percent of residents who return their census forms. These are neighborhoods, in other words, with many role models: adults who are smart, accomplished, engaged in their community, and committed to stable family lives. There is more evidence for just how powerful role models can be. A different study that Chetty co-authored found that girls who move to areas with lots of female patent holders in a specific field are far more likely to grow up to earn patents in that same field. And another study found that Black boys who grow up on blocks with many Black fathers around, even if that doesn’t include their own father, end up with much better life outcomes."
Your role at your school's Christmas play is linked to your salary - "children who played an ox in their school nativity went on to earn the highest salaries later in life, with adults who played the part landing an average salary of £43,000 ($55,370)... those who had played Angel Gabriel in their school pageant were the second-highest earners, with an average income of £40,000. Playing the role of Mary or Joseph correlated to an average annual income of £39,000 and £38,000 respectively, the data showed. At the other end of the scale, kids who played a sheep or lamb in the school nativity made less than half of the former oxen’s average income in later years, earning an average £20,000... Children who played Mary were most likely to grow up to work in the retail industry, while those who landed the part of Joseph were most likely to go on to a career in finance or banking. Most of those who had played Angel Gabriel in their school nativity worked in marketing, while playing an ox was linked to working in advertising. Lambs and angels were most likely to pursue a career in health care"
Meme - "Never judge a book by its cover : Superior Judge Shannon Frison of Massachusetts Boston *tattoos*
'I'm a superior judge, you can't arrest me,' Massachusetts Judge Shannon Frison yells during her domestic assault arrest, police reports say"
Meme - "Neo-Gastonism
An inherently right wing three point political ideology based on the tenants practiced by Gaston in The Beauty and the Beast.
1) Women Can't Read
2) We eat a lot of eggs
3) We beat the shit out of furries"
TikTok Content Moderator Sues, Says She Has PTSD From Job - "TikTok is preventing a content moderator from working after she sued the company, alleging it did not provide a safe workplace and that her work gave her post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), her lawyer said. Candie Frazier's class-action lawsuit, was first reported by The Verge, accuses TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, of injuring content moderators by having them engage in an abnormally dangerous activity... Frazier's lawyer, Steve Williams, alleged to Insider that TikTok disciplined her "in retaliation" by prohibiting her from working one day after she filed the lawsuit"
Sounds like she couldn't make up her mind about working
Facebook Content Moderator (Skank) Suing the Zuck Because She Got PTSD From Posts - "If content moderation inevitably involves looking at “disturbing content,” then what exactly is Facebook supposed to do? Get a second team of moderators to check stuff first, to make sure it’s not too disturbing for the snowflake moderators? Lol. Won’t that team get the PTSD, then?
'Selena Scola was a content moderator at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California headquarters from June 2017 through March of this year, according to the lawsuit. She worked for a contractor called Pro Unlimited, Inc., which helps Facebook delete content that violates its Community Standards'...
I have a modest proposal. If Facebook wants a content moderation team which is proven to be totally impervious to all forms of disturbing imagery, as well as a constitutional incapacity to be offended by things they see on the internet, they need to hire /pol/acks as mods – exclusively. /pol/ is known as a cesspit of rogue heroism, where only the most hardened internet veterans dare lurk. You can be sure that by hiring these people, you ensure they will never sue you for getting digital PTSD for whatever milquetoast crap they’ll find of Facebook. Unless it’s like, super lulzy to do so. In any case, it’s clear that these snowflake skanks are not up to the job. Or… any job."
Facebook moderators break their NDAs to expose desperate working conditions
Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism - "Human ethnocentrism—the tendency to view one's group as centrally important and superior to other groups—creates intergroup bias that fuels prejudice, xenophobia, and intergroup violence. Grounded in the idea that ethnocentrism also facilitates within-group trust, cooperation, and coordination, we conjecture that ethnocentrism may be modulated by brain oxytocin, a peptide shown to promote cooperation among in-group members. In double-blind, placebo-controlled designs, males self-administered oxytocin or placebo and privately performed computer-guided tasks to gauge different manifestations of ethnocentric in-group favoritism as well as out-group derogation. Experiments 1 and 2 used the Implicit Association Test to assess in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. Experiment 3 used the infrahumanization task to assess the extent to which humans ascribe secondary, uniquely human emotions to their in-group and to an out-group. Experiments 4 and 5 confronted participants with the option to save the life of a larger collective by sacrificing one individual, nominated as in-group or as out-group. Results show that oxytocin creates intergroup bias because oxytocin motivates in-group favoritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group derogation. These findings call into question the view of oxytocin as an indiscriminate “love drug” or “cuddle chemical” and suggest that oxytocin has a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence."
Kathleen Dehmlow obituary: Children strike back at absentee mother in scathing obituary - The Washington Post - "“In 1962 she became pregnant by her husband’s brother Lyle Dehmlow and moved to California,” the obituary reads, spiraling. “She abandoned her children, Gina and Jay who were then raised by her parents in Clements, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Schunk.” By the fifth paragraph, it is clear what her children feel about their mother — and her chances in the hereafter: “She passed away on May 31, 2018 in Springfield and will now face judgement. She will not be missed by Gina and Jay, and they understand that this world is a better place without her.”... It’s not unheard of for aggrieved family members to use the last words written about a person to get the last word, said Susan Soper, an expert on obituaries and the creator of a workbook that helps people write their own. Others have used obituaries to shed light on the damaging addictions that consumed their loved ones. The motivations of family members can be as simple as they are powerful: catharsis, bitterness, anger.... Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick’s daughter outlined many of her mother’s sins in a 2013 death notice. “Marianne Theresa Johnson-Reddick born Jan 4, 1935 and died alone on Sept. 30, 2013,” the obituary read. “She is survived by her 6 of 8 children whom she spent her lifetime torturing in every way possible … Everyone she met, adult or child was tortured by her cruelty and exposure to violence, criminal activity, vulgarity, and hatred of the gentle or kind human spirit.” Perhaps even more scathing than the words in the newspaper was the essay Katherine Reddick wrote in XO Jane, explaining why she wrote it. According to her daughter, Johnson-Reddick beat her children during hours-long tantrums, routinely hurled whatever was in reach at them, and also encouraged them to steal from neighbors, beat each other and sleep silently on the kitchen floor while she worked as an escort. On weekend nights, she would go out on the town, drugging the younger children so they wouldn’t cause trouble and forcing the older ones to subsist on dog food. Reddick, said the obituary “expressed authentic and heartfelt reflections about a woman who never resembled a mother… “For myself, it took her death to no longer fear her sudden and unexpected rants of abuse,” she wrote. “Even though I am older, happier and much gentler, I’ve never felt a greater sense of peace or relief than the day my brother called me singing ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead.’ ”... “Leslie’s hobbies included being abusive to his family, expediting trips to heaven for the beloved family pets and fishing … With Leslie’s passing he will be missed only for what he never did; being a loving husband, father and good friend.”... in 2012, Val Patterson, a scientist from Salt Lake City admitted in his mostly lighthearted obituary that he didn’t have a doctorate in engineering — and that he hadn’t even graduated from college: “What happened was that the day I went to pay off my college student loan at the U of U, the girl working there put my receipt into the wrong stack, and two weeks later, a PhD diploma came in the mail. I didn’t even graduate, I only had about 3 years of college credit. In fact, I never did even learn what the letters “PhD” even stood for. For all of the Electronic Engineers I have worked with, I’m sorry, but you have to admit my designs always worked very well, and were well engineered, and I always made you laugh at work.”"
Why Liberals Are More Intelligent Than Conservatives
Since liberals tell us that IQ tests don't measure intelligence, only how good you are at taking IQ tests, it's good to know that this research is meaningless
What Does 'American' Actually Mean? - The Atlantic - "In Latin America, "American" means anyone from the American continent. U.S. citizens claiming the word are considered gauche or imperialist... Brazil, fascinatingly enough, is the exception to the broader Latin American rule, though the country has always remained largely independent of the Spanish-influenced narrative the majority of Latin America shares. Brazilians, like Canadians, actually do use "American"--in Portuguese, "americano/a"--to refer to those from the U.S."
The Unfriend-Me Pledge - "I cannot let your “unfriend me now” post go unrebuked, for several reasons:
1. It is a childish cry for attention. We all put our opinions on social media. If there are Nazis, racists, pedophiles, devil-worshipers, vampires (or whatever else your sanctimonious post was denouncing) on your friends list, chances are you already know who they are. Instead of taking care of it yourself like an adult and directly unfriending them, you chose to show the world what a righteous human you are.
2. You’re actually helping bad ideas spread. I understand what you’re trying to do. By taking a stand against an obvious evil and refusing to allow it to get a hearing, you want to deprive bad ideas of legitimacy and prevent them from gaining influence. This is misguided. It will have the opposite effect. If you really want to stop the spread of false, dangerous, and evil ideas in yourself and others, you will want to make it as difficult as possible for people to avoid being confronted with their mistakes. Promoting a culture in which people refuse to listen (and respond) to viewpoints they find repugnant makes it that much easier for demagogues to build audiences that are sequestered from any criticism. It’s like fighting mold by shutting out the sunlight.
3. It is an advertisement of your own lack of curiosity and unwillingness to introspect about your beliefs. Meeting someone with values that are alien to our own way of thinking is an opportunity to learn how preposterous beliefs can seem plausible in the mind of another person. It’s worth knowing something about the mental habits that can lead a person to believe the world is flat. It is an opportunity to uncover one’s own ethical blind spots, by asking, “Am I engaged in any similar error? Does this type of mistake also apply to me in some other area?”
4. It is the death of nuance. “You’re either with me, or against me.” “Politics are personal.” “My freedom/humanity/right to X, etc. isn’t up for debate.” “Unfriend me.” These are rhetorical tactics easily wielded by either side of any contention to bully people into conformity."
Look mum, my new trick is SMASHING! Young brothers become YouTube hit with tablecloth stunt that goes badly wrong - "The stunt was risky enough when only the family's crockery was at stake. But no one - least of all the unwitting child stars of a YouTube hit - could have anticipated that a traditional tablecloth stunt could go so wrong. The incredible video, watched 1.3million times, shows how the trick caused a bookcase to fall on top of one of the participants... many viewers and bloggers claim that the stunt was staged. One commented on YouTube: 'Of course its fake, you can see blondie totally braces for the blow he knew it was coming... Some claim the film was stopped and a dummy replaced the blonde boy, with the cabinet held by ropes."
MoviePass relaunching with ad service that tracks your eyeballs - "Instead of allowing users to watch unlimited films for $10 a month — a business model that drew customers but failed to yield profits — the new MoviePass will offer a tiered service, with movies costing "credits" based on their popularity and screening time. Another twist: When the service relaunches this summer, subscribers will be able to earn credits by watching ads on their phone — provided they allow the software to track their eye movements to ensure they're watching the ads."
Top church official says gay sex within the Vatican has 'never been worse' - "reports emerged of Vatican officials breaking up an alleged orgy at the apartment of a senior cardinal. A ‘reliable senior member of the curia’ confirmed the reports of gay drug-fuelled orgies. Vatican police raided the apartment after neighbors complained of loud noise. But according to the National Catholic Register, this has been happening since the start of Pope Francis’s popeship in 2012... According to Christine de Marcellus Vollmer, a founding member of the Pontifical Academy for Life and president of the Latin American Alliance for the Family, ‘the smoke of Satan has infiltrated the Church’... Vollmer claims some Church leaders are ‘fostering heretical sexual behavior’ and have formed ‘a group of extremely powerful old Cardinals of the 1970’s generation of liberals.’"
Do Big Unions Buy Politicians? - "The public service unions negotiate on behalf of these workers for their wages, benefits, and working conditions. And who is the on other side of the table? Our elected representatives, the people in charge of spending the money we pay to government in taxes. Think about this for a moment and you will immediately realize that the goal of the public employee unions is to negotiate with union-friendly politicians. And the way to get friendly with a politician is to help him get elected. Which is exactly what the unions do. First, they have a lot of money. In many states, working for the government is a closed shop: that is, to work for the government you have to pay dues to the union. This guarantees these unions a large membership and a large pot of cash. Spreading this money around, especially in local elections, goes a long way. Second, unions provide union-friendly candidates, at no charge, with seasoned political activists to help run campaigns. These activists marshall other union members to put up campaign signs, work the phones, and gather up loyal voters on election day. This is a proven strategy. And candidates, especially in the big cities where there are a lot of public employees, know it. Courting union support is critical to victory... cities and states overpay their workers -- by a lot. Trash collection in Dallas, Texas, a state whose government workers are not unionized, costs $74 per ton. Trash collection in Chicago, whose government workers are unionized, costs $231 per ton. These kinds of inefficiencies exist everywhere public unions dominate. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg is the pension arrangements that provide public employees with retirement benefits that vastly exceed the retirement benefits in the private sector. Four cities in California -- Vallejo, Stockton, Mammoth Lakes and San Bernardino -- have declared bankruptcy largely because of the burden of paying public employee pensions. The same is true of Detroit, the nation's largest bankruptcy ever. And it's only getting worse. By 2030 the number of retired public workers will equal the number of working public workers. You can read more about this in my book Government against Itself, but suffice it to say this is not a pretty picture. All this spending on public service unions crowds out tax money for things we need -- such as better roads, services and schools. Finally, some courts and politicians have summoned the courage to make much needed reforms. But it's never easy, as we saw in Wisconson in when thousands of union protesters overran the state capitol for weeks. But reform is coming. It must. If it doesn't, cities like Detroit will be the rule, not the exception. So, the next time someone complains about Big Banks, Big Oil or Big Pharma, ask if they are equally concerned about Big Unions. They should be."
Political lobby groups are only bad when liberals disapprove of them
Author of Nikkei Asia article about KTV COVID-19 cluster fined for having obscene videos, photos
Interestingly, the Andy Wong Ming Jun case shows that in Singapore if you possess porn but not distribute it, you only get a fine. $10 per video/photo in this case. But so much for Singapore saying they don't go after people who just download porn: only those who distribute it
'Breakfast Food' Is a Lie - The Atlantic - "There’s no good reason you can’t eat a chicken-parmesan hoagie for breakfast. That’s what I decided last year when I woke up one morning, hungover and ravenous, craving the sandwich’s very specific combination of fried chicken cutlet, melted mozzarella, and tomato sauce. “Breakfast food,” as a category, suddenly felt like my middle school’s dress code: unnecessarily prim and preordained by people whose rules I should no longer heed... “Breakfast food” might be an arbitrary concept in America, but it’s a distinct one: cereal with milk, a cup of yogurt, eggs, muffins, fruit, oatmeal, juice. Maybe pancakes or waffles on the weekend, if you have some extra time. There are some regional variations, like bagels or biscuits, but the menu tends to be far more predictable than lunch or dinner. And although American breakfast isn’t nutritionally or philosophically cohesive, how the country goes about its morning meal isn’t a mistake. Modern breakfast in the United States tells the story of more than a century of cultural upheaval... “There’s no good reason why we should have so much sugar in the morning, or something cold.” In fact, the value of eating breakfast at all isn’t exactly settled science. Its role as the “most important meal of the day”? All marketing... “Food is a domain of habit,” Ray says, and that’s particularly true for the morning meal. “People are just waking up, and they need their caffeine-delivery system and they need their cereal and they don’t want too much thinking about it.” He has noticed American-style breakfasts spreading to places like India and China in much the same way they took over this country during the 20th century: as a mixture of convenience and class marker while labor forces modernize."
All countries have breakfast foods.