Links - 18th February 2023 (2 - Critical Race Theory)

Florida Rejects Dozens Of Math Books Containing ‘Critical Race Theory’ And Other ‘Indoctrinating Concepts’ - "41% of proposed K-12 mathematics books intended for use during the 2022-2023 public school year did not meet state academic standards due to their apparent inclusion of Critical Race Theory principles and other controversial approaches to education. “Reasons for rejecting textbooks included references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” Florida’s Department of Education said... “The highest number of books rejected were for grade levels K-5, where an alarming 71 percent were not appropriately aligned with Florida standards or included prohibited topics and unsolicited strategies,” Florida’s D.O.E. added.  “It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) said... While SEL has been around for decades, in recent years, many believe it has transformed into a vehicle for pushing many of the same principles of Critical Race Theory, such as the concept of equity, privilege, and systemic racism. According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social Emotional Learning, equity goes hand-in-hand with SEL"

Facebook - "Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t."
"“Democracy Dies in Darkness” isn’t a warning from the Washington Post. It’s their mission statement."
§ 1-240.1. Rights of parents - "A parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent's child."

I’m a Former Teacher. Here’s How Your Children Are Getting Indoctrinated by Leftist Ideology. - "Your children are being indoctrinated. The education system designed to teach them how to think critically has been weaponized by the radical left to push an anti-American agenda.   As someone who has worked in education for four years, I have seen firsthand how your children are being ensnared by the left and their teachers.  I worked with kids from ages 3 to 13 and saw the brainwashing that exists at all levels of education. The left uses a combination of propaganda and suppression to push kids into the ensnaring grip of socialism and anti-patriotism. First is the propaganda. Teachers will assign work instilling the idea that the pillars of Western civilization were evil, and their memories deserve to be thrown in the trash... “Well, how about Winston Churchill?” I recommended.  “Oh no, not him,” she replied. “He was a racist and didn’t think women should have rights. He wasn’t a good guy.”  I was floored. It clearly wasn’t something she came up with on her own. She was just regurgitating propaganda her teacher had taught her. All sense of nuance and critical thinking about the man who saved Europe from the Nazis was gone. Churchill committed “wrongthink,” so in the bin he goes.   Another way the left propagandizes is through the normalization of its views and positions as nonpolitical.   The Black Lives Matter organization is a prime example of this. Many of my colleagues wore Black Lives Matter pins and apparel to school in blatant violation of school rules forbidding political statements on clothing.  When I asked for a justification of the behavior, I was told it wasn’t political to support the group, it was a matter of human rights. The children would see these pins and clothes and connect radical leftist groups with basic human dignity. “How dare you question Black Lives Matter? I was taught this is a matter of human rights!”  But it isn’t just a matter of actively teaching that America and the West are evil. Suppression of “wrongthink” is equally as important to the brainwashing process. The lessons I was allowed to teach also were censored.  I was preparing a lesson on Thanksgiving involving Pilgrims and American Indians, with an activity centered on making paper teepees for arts and crafts. Cue the progressive panic.  Other teachers at the school were incensed that a non-Indian was “appropriating” Native American culture for an activity. Of course, these teachers weren’t Indians either, they just wanted to virtue signal.   The whole thing culminated in a hilarious incident where my colleagues tracked down the one teacher on staff who was one-sixty-fourths Native American and asked her if it was cultural appropriation. In her esteemed authority, it most certainly was. The school administrators pulled me aside and promptly nixed the project.  The suppression extends to American religious values as well. I would try to engage my students with folk stories from around the globe to teach them world history and other cultures.  Story time went on without a hitch until I decided to tell stories from the Bible. Other teachers began to complain I was preaching Christian values to the children and attempting to convert them.   Keep in mind, this wasn’t a problem when I was sharing stories from other ancient cultures throughout history. Stories about ancient India and China were fine and encouraged as “sharing unheard voices.” After sharing the story of the Tower of Babel, I was told to switch back to non-Christian stories or face consequences."

Meme - "IF CRITICAL RACE THEORY ISN'T BEING TAUGHT IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS
WHY IS THE MEDIA SO ALARMED PEOPLE ARE TRYING BAN IT FROM SCHOOLS?"
"This is not happening, and it's good that it is"

Meme - NPC: "Nobody is teaching your kids CRT in school"
Normal Person: "So you have no problem with us banning it then?"
NPC: *Blue Screen of Death*

Meme - TenaciousTCastroGill @TCastroGill: "On the left is me teaching CRT to sixth graders. Note the title, "Student Race and Equity Team," and the word wall behind us. On the right is me teaching CRT a la Dr. Crenshaw and lntersectionality right now. #lTeachCRT #TeachTheTruth"

San Diego teachers asked to attend 'white privilege' training - "A school district in San Diego held “white privilege” training for teachers in which they were told, “you are racist” and asked to commit to becoming “anti-racist” in the classroom"

Space Force Officer Relieved of Duty for Attacking Marxism - "Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier has been relieved of his duties pending an investigation after he appeared on a podcast and criticized the rise of Marxism in the United States military... In the book and podcast, Lohmeier questions critical race theory... Irresistible Revoltion has debuted in a strong position... The subject of a “woke” military has come up repeatedly in the first few months of the Biden administration. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the Navy to conduct a service-wide stand-down in February to address what the Biden administration deems “radicalism” within the ranks. The training to which the Navy subjected sailors during the stand-down was overtly political and partisan, according to sailors who spoke out against it... Having served on active duty in the Air Force myself, nothing about the first months of the Biden administration disturbs me more than the politicization of the military. It’s extremely dangerous and unnecessary, and very likely to lead to toxic divisions within the ranks and a far less effective military just when China and other threats are rising around the world. It may also create more division between the American people and the men and women in the military."
On Irresistible Revolution

Anti-Marxist Book by Ousted Space Force Commanding Officer Tops Charts, Sells Out on Amazon - "Lohmeier also told Hannity about the woke videos he was sent during his time in command that are all too familiar for anyone who's been subjected to critical race theory trainings or the teachings of the 1619 project in school or at work:  "There were videos being sent out to every base service member that we were asked to watch in preparation for our extremism down days and discussions on race in which we were taught that the country was evil, that it was founded in 1619 and not 1776, and that whites are inherently evil, and so I speak up against those things in my book." This situation comes after the CIA released a series of nonsensical recruitment videos, featuring in one, as Leah explained, "a 36-year-old Latina agent describes herself as an 'intersectional,' 'cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.'"... And in the intersectional woke olympics, the Army announced it would return to an Obama-era policy of "prioritizing climate change considerations" that was detrimental to America's military readiness and operational abilities."

Kenny Xu on Twitter - "If Critical Race Theory is supposed to yield racial reconciliation, why are so many people in every state speaking out on the harms to their children that teaching racial division has done to them? Curriculum that encourages division and hatred should not be taught to children."
Of course, the only possible answer is that they are racist

What Is #DisruptTexts? - "the #DisruptTexts movement does not conceive of education as the process, inter alia, of transmitting Western cultural heritage to the next generation. Why would they, when they perceive that heritage to be a dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime? Why should they give primacy to literature which interprets the world through the white gaze? “Let us be honest,” Germán admits, “the conversation really isn’t about universality, and this isn’t about being equipped to identify all possible cultural references. This is about an ingrained and internalized elevation of Shakespeare in a way that excludes other voices. This is about white supremacy and colonization.” To Kill a Mockingbird was voted “America’s Favorite Novel” in a PBS competition in 2018, but #DisruptTexts finds that Atticus Finch is a white savior, and an ineffectual one at that. And Lord of the Flies, a novel featuring “elite, upperclass, private school [students] who are white, cisgender, European males,” is condemned for what it implies about civilization and savagery. So #DisruptTexts has created reading guides which pair the classics with complementary YA literature by authors of color, an intelligent and appropriate remedy for the lack of diversity in the canon. However, the curated list is diverse in everything but theme—five of the eight books are about teenagers of various ethnicities struggling with their identity. One of the recommended reads is Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby... The leaders and followers of the #DisruptTexts movement hold the following truths to be self-evident:
It is a “professional responsibility to… develop students’ critical literacy skills to question the status quo.”
Teaching literacy is teaching kids “to discern where and how oppression exists in society, to articulate the oppression we witness or experience and argue for justice, and to strive for a more equitable world.” This “gets at the crux of why we read and write.”
We must “recognize the ways we are all complicit in perpetuating systemic oppression and consequently responsible for dismantling it.”
These truths are non-falsifiable because any objection (invariably described as an “attack”) is motivated by white supremacy.
And while the average parent may never have heard of #DisruptTexts, the movement has made a significant impact in public education... Randy Ribay, the YA author mentioned above, praised #DisruptTexts in his speech at a workshop for the National Council of Teachers of English, and recommended coaching students to use “three critical lenses—feminist, Marxist, and post-colonial.” (Marx was a racist who believed in the inferiority of non-whites. Presumably Ribay will not be including anti-Maoist works like The Aquariums of Pyongyang or Jung Chang’s Wild Swans on his #othervoices reading list.)... As a thought experiment, consider a teacher as enthused about Ayn Rand as Ribay is enthused about Marx; or a teacher who believes in promulgating the precepts of Scientology; or a teacher like the late Canadian white supremacist James Keegstra, who taught that the Holocaust is a myth. On what grounds could those teachers be denied the right to propagandize in the classroom if critical race theorists can? If only we could turn to the great thinkers and writers of the past to help us to grapple with these issues... As Julia Torres, another #DisruptTexts co-founder unironically announced, “We have to really consider how are we rewarding conformity and punishing resistance.”"
We are still told that it's a myth that teachers are trying to indoctrinate children

School teaching kindergarteners that ‘whites make it harder for black people’ locks down after being featured by Libs of TikTok - "You can always tell that someone’s been caught when they protect their Twitter account. St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas, protected its tweets after Libs of TikTok featured a kindergarten lesson plan talking about freedom. Are there some people that have more freedom? Well, sure. Black people have less and whites have more. Also, whites boss POC around. And that doesn’t even touch on the gender ideology."
Kindergarteners taught 'whites make it harder for black people' - "Tuition for kindergarteners at SAS costs a hefty $26,870 a year. Notably, the two daughters of President George W. Bush attended middle school at St. Andrews. Despite the steep price tag, parents are still struggling to maintain authority over what is being taught to their children... “Whites make it harder for black people,” read one line. “Whites boss POC [people of color] around,” another read. Children were also taught, “New York has more freedom to vote than Texas.” Keep in mind these children live in Texas. Here’s a photo of the lesson plan... The concerned parent said they also recently discovered that the book It Feels Good to Be Yourself was read to the kindergarten class. The book is about gender identity and non-binary people. A page from the book (shown below) reads, “What a baby’s body looks like when they’re born can be a clue to what the baby’s gender will be, but not always.” It also teaches that doctors “guess” what gender babies are, and sometimes they get it wrong. Parents voiced concern to the school about the lessons but were reportedly dismissed. One parent told Libs of TikTok, “When parents confront them like I did, they will first say it was an oversight, and if you keep asking too many questions, they will tell you that you're an extremist.” The parent continued, “When I asked my kindergartener how often they talked about topics like the one in the picture, he said it was every day.”  St. Andrew’s did not respond to our request for comment."

Michelle Tandler on Twitter - "Good morning, Sunflowers! … Let’s keep talking about freedom. Are there some people that have more freedom? Let’s share our thoughts.
1. New York has more freedom to vote than Texas.
2. Black people have less and white (people) have more.
3. $ - [up] money means more freedom
4. Whites make it harder for black people.
5. Whtes boss POC around. Threatening body language"
6. Disabled could get hurt; ramps? cannot enter buildings
7. You have to fight in a war
P.S. Tomorrow is Pajama Day
<3 Love, Ms Praxis and Ms Shafa"
"All my liberal friends say CRT "isn't being taught" in the classroom. I'd love to hear their thoughts on this Kindergarten's welcome note."
I still see liberals claiming CRT isn't being taught in schools and conservatives are just upset kids are learning history about slavery and the reality of racism
Of course Libs of TikTok is in the wrong for posting this. Presumably because it is "out of context"

AT&T's Racial Reeducation Program - "AT&T Corporation has created a racial reeducation program that promotes the idea that “American racism is a uniquely white trait” and boosts left-wing causes such as “reparations,” “defund police,” and “trans activism.”   I have obtained a cache of internal documents about the company’s initiative, called Listen Understand Act, which is based on the core principles of critical race theory, including “intersectionality,” “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility.” CEO John Stankey launched the program last year and, subsequently, has told employees that private corporations such as AT&T have an “obligation to engage on this issue of racial injustice” and push for “systemic reforms in police departments across the country.”   According to a senior employee, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, managers at AT&T are now assessed annually on diversity issues, with mandatory participation in programs such as discussion groups, book clubs, mentorship programs, and race reeducation exercises. White employees, the source said, are tacitly expected to confess their complicity in “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” or they will be penalized in their performance reviews. As part of the overall initiative, employees are asked to sign a loyalty pledge to “keep pushing for change,” with suggested “intentions” such as “reading more about systemic racism” and “challenging others’ language that is hateful.” “If you don’t do it,” the senior employee says, “you’re [considered] a racist.” AT&T did not respond when asked for comment."

Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on Twitter - "SCOOP: Google has launched an "antiracism" initiative claiming that America is a "system of white supremacy" and that all Americans are "raised to be racist"—including Ben Shapiro, who is depicted as a layer of the "white supremacy pyramid," culminating in "genocide." Thread.🧵... Denial of racism is proof that a person is racist. "For me, the heartbeat of racism is denial and the sound of that denial is 'I'm not racist,'" Kendi told Google employees. "It's a critically important step for Americans to no longer be in denial about their own racism." In another video, guest lecturer Nikole Hannah-Jones claimed that she created the 1619 Project to verify her "lifelong theory" that everything in the modern-day United States can be traced back to slavery: "If you name anything in America, I can relate it back to slavery.""

Meme - Student: "You said we were going to learn division today"
Teacher: "We are. *Critical Race Theory*"

Facebook - "As you can probably imagine, the massive rebranding of Critical Race Theory is about to begin in schools, etc., now that people know what it is and don't like it. (Next step will be to rebrand and criticize CRT itself while still doing CRT.) Gotta keep your eyes open. If they are teaching about racial privilege, they're teaching CRT. If they are teaching about racial equity or racial justice (outside of narrow, historical uses), they are teaching CRT. Words like "voices," "decolonize," "transformative," "diverse," etc. are giveaways. Currently, essentially everything related to "inclusion" is treated under a Critical Social Justice (thus, when racial, Critical Race Theory) lens. There are various ways for them to downplay this, like saying "whiteness" isn't really part of CRT, or CRT is just about law. The truth about Critical Theories in general is that they are abusers of language and manipulators. They will gladly say "Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT)" isn't "Critical Race Theory (CRT)" so "you don't even know what's happening." They probably arranged that on purpose. We talk a lot about the virtues and skills needed to combat Critical Race Theory and Critical Theories more generally, and I only rarely mention discernment. Discernment requires knowledge and wisdom, so you must get informed and pay attention. If it feels wrong, dig. This, though, is why it's so important to combat Critical Social Justice Theory at the level of what it DOES, not by its name. To these liars and manipulators, the names are all disposable. You have to stop their stereotyping, scapegoating, discrimination, segregation, etc. Regarding Queer Theory, they're probably less apt to rebrand and more apt to accuse you of encouraging childhood suicides if you don't give them their way. You have to stand firm and ban inappropriate sexualization, unscientific characterizations, etc. Then it gets ugly."

Meme - "This is Critical Race Theory in a single image.
DIVERSITY
INTERSECTIONALITY
MINORITIES
EQUALITY/EQUITY
PEOPLE OF COLOR
SAFE SPACE
WHITE PRIVILEGE
CAPITIALISM
RACISM
*ALL WHITE PEOPLE ARE RACIST
PAYPAL ME/ASHLEIGHTHELION
ashleyshackelford.com"
Ashley Shackelford

Meme - "Segregation was one of the ugliest points in American history. I'm so glad we now live in a time where all races live together with constant racial hostility and grievance, that I work everyday to make worst so no one knows peace."

Meme - "How to Lie without Lying: Critical Race Theory & the Motte-&-Bailey technique
"Parents, this year we'll be teaching your children about America's history of racism & slavery."
- "Excellent. The children need to know our nation's history, both good and bad."
"We'll be teaching Critical Race Theory, Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an AntiRacist."
- "Hold on. I've read those books. They teach that all white people are racist, Blacks cannot be racist, Racism is everywhere, all Blacks are victims, all whites are oppressors, Black conservatives are dupes, successful Blacks 'enact Whiteness', Asians are successful because they 'enact Whiteness', that being on time and working hard are 'Whiteness', that all group differences are caused by current racism, that any disagreement with their ideas is proof of your racism, and that we must completely restructure society. No! I don't want that ugly, divisive cult-like ideology taught to my child."
"So you're against teaching about slavery."
- "No. I'm against teaching Critical Race Theory."
"So you're against teaching about racism."
- "No. am FOR teaching about slavery and racism. I'm AGAINST teaching Critical Race Theory."
"So you're against teaching about slavery & racism."
- "No. I'm against teaching Critical Race Theory."
"So you're saying racism doesn't exist."
- "No. I'm against teaching Critical Race Theory."
"I understand. You're against teaching about racism & slavery."
How the manipulation works...
The Motte = Teaching about history
The Bailey = Critical Race Theory
1. Establish the Motte.
2. Attack from the Bailey.
3. Wait for the counterattack.
4. Retreat to the Motte.
5. Defend from the Motte"

James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "Critical Race Theory is an even crazier conspiracy theory than QAnon, which was a really crazy one. The first assumption of Critical Race Theory is that the ordinary state of affairs in society is racism, that it's a defining characteristic of everything even though nobody knows it until a Critical Race Theorist points it out. The second assumption of Critical Race Theory is that benefiting from this invisible racism is so seductive that the people who benefit from it without even knowing it have no interest in fighting it even though they think they are fighting it. On this second assumption, by thinking you're against racism, you actually become even more racist, according to Critical Race Theory... every act against racism maintains it, strengthens it, and hides it better while benefitting the person fighting it, all without them even knowing it. Critical Race Theory also forwards an idea called "the racial contract." A landmark CRT book from the 90s outlines this idea. Apparently, all white (and "white-adjacent") people have a social "contract" nobody ever mentions or knows about to keep black people down. Really. In Critical Race Theory, everybody but the Critical Race Theorists are the conspirators, without even knowing it or ever talking about it. Everybody but them! Without knowing it! That's how crazy a conspiracy Critical Race Theory is. So, if you want to ban accounts for promoting absolutely batshit insane conspiracy theories that promote and incite violence, property damage, and that foment revolution against the United States, maybe a bit more consistency is needed. Critical Race Theorists need to go. Unlike QAnon, of course, Critical Race Theory is currently being taught in all of our schools, all of our universities, most of our corporations, in our government, and just about everywhere else. Something to think about. Btw, while QAnon might be believed by lots of white supremacists, it isn't white supremacist. Critical Race Theory is both racist and white supremacist, in that it also assumes black people cannot succeed in the existing system and need it needed for them. If that matters to you."
Too bad he got zucced. Possibly because of his good work on this subject

Fundraiser by Harvey C Catherine : Suspended for Objecting to Critical Race Theory - "I work as a secondary school teacher in Ontario, Canada, in a publicly funded board.  In a union meeting Friday, April 9, I raised objections to the critical race theory indoctrination happening in my education workplace."

Here Are The Thousands Of Teachers Who Say They’re Willing To Violate Law To Keep Pushing CRT - "Thousands of teachers have pledged to continue teaching based on critical race theory even if state laws ban it — contradicting those who claim nothing like that has ever been taught in schools.  The Zinn Education Project, named after the anti-American and factually challenged historian Howard Zinn, has collected signatures from more than 4,200 teachers who “Pledge to Teach the Truth: Despite New State Bills Against It.”... Teachers and education officials have increasingly expressed scorn at the desires of parents who entrust their kids to them, telling themselves they have a moral obligation to belabor a sense of pervasive oppression to impressionable young people."

“Unapproved curriculum” surrounding racial inequality prompts Knox County Schools teacher investigation - "Complaints from parents led to an investigation of an art teacher from Sterchi Elementary School, in Knoxville, Tennessee, who taught a lesson to 4th and 5th graders on racial inequality... "This book is not approved for use in our curriculum and I have asked our Human Resources Department to investigate the matter.”  The fictitious book in question is called “Something Happened in Our Town.” It talks about a Black man who was killed by police and how parents can talk to their kids about his death, racism, and race inequality... “It was very misleading. A lot of misinformation in that and to be teaching 10 and 11-year-old children were just really a huge red flag for us as parents. We felt like things were, you know, stereotypes and generalizations about people. And just all over, you know, all around blanket statements,” said the parent.  There is a line in the book which reads “Cops stick up for each other. They don’t like Black men.” This line particularly troubled her daughter because her uncle is a police officer. “She just kept saying that, you know, Uncle So-and-so is one of the nicest people she knows. And so we had to reiterate to her that yes, you know, there are a lot of nice cops out there, you know, and a lot of nice, everybody out there, and there’s bad everybody out there”... “She should be able to teach art. But when you bring in, you know, your own political views or political ideologies, that, you know, I definitely think that’s a no, no,” said the parent."
When you infuse racism into all subjects under the guise of "teaching accurate history"

Georgia’s 'Math Equity' Program Includes CRT-Aligned Curriculum to Remove 'Bias' from Classroom - "A "math equity" program in Georgia includes a curriculum aligned with Marxism-rooted Critical Race Theory (CRT), according to reports.  Georgia’s Department of Education reportedly told educators that they must push the radical ideology onto students while teaching mathematics.  During "math equity" summits in 2019 and 2020, the education department instructed teachers in the state that they must use the CRT-aligned curriculum to remove "bias" from the classroom.  Educators were told to stop grouping students by ability and prioritize their work as teachers around equity."

Critical Race Theory's Jewish Problem - "People need to understand that the new growth of anti-Semitism that Weiss asks us to stop being shocked at seeing is, if not a deliberate feature, a reliable consequence of the ideology of Critical Social Justice when put into practice. Because of the way Critical Social Justice views the world, it generates certain unavoidable and irreconcilable contradictions where Jews are concerned, and lacking the means to resolve them, it finds itself faced with what some are rightly naming a Jewish question that leads to it having a Jewish problem. As few, if any, clear explanations for this worrying trend currently exist, this essay aims to provide one in thorough detail. Because it looks like liberalism on the surface and yet is openly anti-liberal under the hood, Critical Social Justice is often completely misunderstood by those who have not undertaken the rather unpleasant task of studying it in detail. Critical Social Justice, however, is an ideology that, at the present moment, desperately needs to be understood, not just in its terms but in its totality, including the extremely unpleasant, if not genuinely horrifyingly anti-Semitic, place this new ideology generates for the Jews. Where this ideology’s Jewish problem is concerned, the chief lines of thought contributing to it are the now (in)famous Critical Race Theory and its evil twin sister ideology bearing a lesser-known name called Postcolonial Theory (sometimes, “postcolonialism”). Neither of these sub-Theories has a positive view of the Jews or Jewry, to say nothing of its hostility to the existence and concept of a physical state of Israel. Indeed, anti-Semitic contempt would fall short of the mark by a fair distance...   The Theories of Critical Social Justice, or whatever else we end up calling this ideology, think about the world in exactly one way: in terms of how they conceive of power. They think of power first and foremost in a peculiar but identifiably Marxian way. There is some oppressor, which is a group and not an individual, and there are the groups that are oppressed by it. These are in conflict—zero-sum conflict similar to how Marx envisioned the bourgeoisie and proletariat—for the opportunities, resources, and spoils of society, access to which is referred to not as “equality” but as “privilege.” The groups, today, see the dividing lines of power through a lens to culture that has been boiled down to the meanest of descriptions: identity, like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and all the rest of these soul-crushingly exhausting terms we can’t get away from these days. Here’s where Weiss’s neo-Marxism and identity politics come into the picture... It’s Marx’s idea of societal conflict reinterpreted through the postmodernism Weiss identified. When these are combined with the neo-Marxism and identity politics (and a rather Rousseauian and pop-psychological take on the originally Christian idea of “social justice”), we end up with most of the ingredients in her rightly named ideological admixture. Critical Race Theory and postcolonialism are, more or less, species within the broader Critical Social Justice order...   This worldview has a consequence: “victimhood,” defined as above and only as above, becomes high currency that will be vied for. Intersectionality, now arguably 43 years old (and certainly at least 31), is the set of ideas and practices, for as a practice it is defined, that grades claims of victimhood according to an outline laid down formally in 1990 rather ominously (or histrionically) called The Matrix of Domination. It is in this place that Critical Social Justice’s Jewish problem exists, because Jews present an intolerable paradox to the Theory... Under Critical Race Theory, many Jews are Theorized as having been granted and to some degree embraced—as a matter of effectively indisputable fact if not explicitly in both cases—the status of “whiteness” in contemporary American (and sometimes European) society. This would imply that under Critical Race Theory, Jews have an intolerable privilege they need to check...   Placing aside the obvious complication that not all Jews are white by any reasonable definition (which therefore may not have anything to do with Critical Race Theory’s definitions), there’s a huge problem with this formulation that every Jewish reader of this essay will immediately realize. Jews have quite the incredible history of incredible oppression, including imperial destruction, diaspora, enslavement, and a literal genocide in the Holocaust...   The uniquely Jewish combination of a long history of terrible oppression of a people that isn’t just (at least partly) fair-skinned but also highly successful in what the Theorists would deem a “white” milieu is, in fact, completely intolerable to Critical Race Theory. The Theory distrusts Jewish success as such and, as with everything it analyzes, believes it must have something to do with having been granted access to the privileges of whiteness—illegitimately, by betrayal, and at the expense of blacks."

Gladiators: everything you wanted to know

Gladiators: everything you wanted to know - History Extra podcast | Acast

"‘Did others ancient civilizations have their own form of gladiators?’

‘Sure. In fact, I would be hard pressed to think of a civilization that didn't have significant combat, sort of single combats between important individuals that other people gathered around to watch, that would have some sort of meaning or impact or significance in the moment. You might think about duels between heroes in epic. But that sort of activity is something that's find basically everywhere, though, not under the name of gladiators, necessarily...

It's never just entertainment. Let me put it that way. You know, we have a much more casual notion of entertainment, we have entertainment on demand when I'm standing in line somewhere, when I'm bored, whatever. I have vast arrays of spectacle literally in the palm of my hand, and they did not. So entertainment has a different meaning for them. Especially mass entertainments that the Romans start to come up with are special and rare and different from one's daily experiences. In these purpose built venues that blocked out the rest of the world, they literally become this new universe filled with meaning, with lessons about Rome's power with lessons about the Emperor, the generals’ generosity, and his command of nature. “He makes myths come true, and we have seen it with our own eyes. These fragrant mists drift down on us, they refresh our senses, they cool us. Silken sheets manned by sailors shade us from the sun, and transform our perceptions with colors.” And we're showered with cakes and fruits and exotic nuts from district gardens. And fighters in front of us demonstrate that even people from faraway who are unfamiliar with the city and its stories, who might be low born, who might be untaught. Even they have the capacity for bravery, and resilience that we can be inspired by. And we respect their efforts and we cheer their names, and the sponsor heeds us and our responses and our wishes. So it's it's not just entertainment at all...

Thumbs were turned, and that's literally what the Latin means… but we don't actually have images of how they were turned… Maybe one in five bouts ended in a death… for everyone who's actually entering the arena, it's a one in 10 chance of dying, but we don't know how that death actually takes place. are they dying fighting? Is it a weapons sort of thing? Or are they fighting to some person, submitting, asking to be released, being ordered to die? We're not quite sure. But if you think about it in an economic basis, you know, this is this is an investment that people are making to contract with these particular performers. And no doubt built into the contract are special fees if they actually lose one of those performances during the show that have to be paid. And so there's a certain kind of incentive to a number of different people to not encourage the death thing. It's also clear that in some particular shows, where the Emperor states that these will be cine missio [sp?] combats, that there will be no release for the the non winner, that the response from the audience is not a positive one. This is a judgment, apparently on the Emperor. And the stories that are told about this indicate that this is received pretty negatively, is the mark of a bad Emperor. 

Plus, as I said, it's not cost effective. It's a waste of resources. And these are resources with faces, who have the opportunity to make connections with the crowds. And the Roman crowds don't seem to like that. It's interesting too, that in other contexts, they don't like the mass slaughter of animals either. This, this upsets them. It's off putting and they start to turn against the sponsor of the individual shows. So they like it when people have the opportunity to use the resources to take advantage of chance, of their skill set, of their charm, seizing their moments, fate and Fortuna on their side. These are meaningful things to the spectators, they're meaningful in their daily lives. And if someone *has* to die, that diminishes those factors. It's a bad message...

We know of a number of gladiators who actually retired… Some of them retired with special honor, they had a sort of ceremonial handing over of the wooden sword, the ludes [sp?], granted their freedom from the the ludes... some people were sentenced to the gladiatorial school to as a criminal penalty. And this was apparently available for them as well...

Everyone who became a gladiator surrendered a certain amount of social standing. Gladiators, by law were, infamous. And what I mean by that is that they lost certain things legally in Rome. So, by Roman law, gladiators, did not have access to certain kinds of political power. They did not have certain kinds of, of social mobility. By Roman law, they were not to marry, someone of elite standing. They had sort of the same social stigma, as actors and as prostitutes, because gladiators like them, used their bodies to give pleasure to many people. And they were submitting to the will and to the desires of the crowds. They also as gladiators had to take an oath, to submit to the discipline of being a gladiator. That meant as part of their training, they would regularly be beaten, they surrendered physical autonomy, they did not control their own bodies. And that was something that slaves had to submit to. So by becoming a gladiator, you put yourself physically in the same position, the same status as someone who was enslaved. That's something that was seen as absolutely horrific by those who were elites who assumed that, of course, they are always going to be in charge of their bodies, they will never have this kind of problem. And by elites, I of course, mean elite males in particular’...

‘What was the daily life of a gladiator actually, like? I think we tend to think about fights and rather than how they lived their life day to day’

‘For most gladiators, shows are fairly infrequent, nowhere near a daily or even a weekly schedule of actual performances. But clearly, they did train, they kept in shape. They were thoughtful about diet and conditioning. They are sort of famous for their their consumption of barley, sometimes called the barley men, that may be some form of carb loading for shows. They paid attention to temperatures, should they be drinking water, should they be drinking wine, they did commit to this kind of thing. They did get damaged, too...

The knowledge that you might end up fatally wounding or even outright killing someone that you associate with on a daily basis, someone that you feel connected to… you can prepare for that by practicing not just movements, choreograph steps that show off your weapons skills, but also potentially minimize the risk involved. There are different kinds of targets on the body, of course, that are going to be less dangerous to someone that you actually care about. On the other hand, living in close quarters, doesn't necessarily ensure that you feel affection for all the members of your troops...

How common were female gladiators. This is a hot question that is much contested by scholars, were female gladiators anomalies, or those are relatively skimpy evidence represent the tip of the iceberg... All kinds of women who do all kinds of things are pretty much absent from our ancient sources of information. And it's not because there are genuinely only 20 women who exist in the empire. And they're all staying quietly in one room. Right? So we know about the absences in the sources. We know about their silences. Sources do have women with weapons that appear as participants in spectacles. Sometimes the description surrounding this suggests that this is shocking, and outrageous. But usually that shock and outrage is directed against the sponsor, usually an emperor. And it's usually an emperor who's making other kinds of bad decisions about spectacle, and about power in general. 

Sometimes we have women with weapons who are described and sometimes even named in large shows as part of the lavish provisioning of engagement and entertainment and performers and so forth. And when they're noted, you know, they're they're described sometimes they're, you know, described in more detail, but they're not singled out as something that's utterly unique and bizarre, right, but actually just part of a very expanded very detailed, very expensive show. We have a few commemorations of historical female gladiators. We have an inscription from Ostia that talks about women with swords, they were in a show. Woo! They're exciting. Probably the best piece of of information is the relief from Halicarnassus that's in the British Museum... It comes from the second century C, second century AD, and it has two women facing off against each other. They have their swords pointing towards each other. They have weaponry on, they have shields, they're stepping forward in a kind of dynamic pose. It's a face off between these two women. And they're in so called heavy armature, they're carrying significant weight in weapons and protection. And bear in mind that shields are weapons as well. Their names are there underneath them, Amazon and Achillia, great names. There's an inscription written above them that indicates that both of them were granted misia, both of them were granted release to fight another day, there was no death. So it's a recognition of their fighting skills, their determination, the effort that they're putting forward in this. Neither is yielding, neither is submitting and that's indicated as well of course by their posture. And those names, those names are great. Amazon, of course, a reference to the ancient, imagined female dominated society famed for their war skills and their interactions with heroes of yesteryear, heroes like Achilles and one of them is of course, named Achillia. So Achilles was famous for fighting Amazons too’"

Links - 18th February 2023 (1 - Elon Musk & Twitter: The Twitter Files)

Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY... Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth... a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts... Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content... It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation... “Anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place making decisions for others or working for the feds,” said @ClaireFosterPHD, when told about the flagging... When told of the FBI flagging, @lexitollah replied: “My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?” “I can't believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. That's crazy,” said @Tiberius444... The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were “impediments” to the sharing of classified information “with industry.” The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.” This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to “no impediments” to classified information?... The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state... what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless"
One liberal (who claimed that the Twitter files were "just a campaign to give right wing journalists their 15 seconds of twitter fame") first claimed that those disagreeing couldn't "produce a single tweet proving their narratives", then when I provided one to see what his cope would be, claimed that it was "all tweet, no proof". I then linked to a screenshot of an email from the FBI asking Twitter to take down content. He took a while, but his cope to that was that it was nothing new

ACLU on Twitter - "Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation"
"The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere. Our government can’t use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights."
Damn Right Wing ACLU!
This liberal's amazing cope was that "the intercept does republican propaganda from a supposed leftist point of view". So I classified it as a Poe and decided to stop baiting the troll

Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Mainstream outlets try to grind every news story into grade D partisan hamburger and Twitter Files coverage is no exception. The Washington Post even called me a “conservative journalist” for a few minutes... Twitter did have a clear political monoculture. I ran searches for both “RNC” and “DNC,” cross-referenced against senior executives. “RNC” turned up pages about Republicans suing the company. “DNC” returned mountains of insistent moderation demands.  Some of the latter were quite funny and revealing. In multiple instances Twitter initially decided not to remove videos lampooning Joe Biden because they were obvious parodies “unlikely to cause offline harm or generate confusion.”...  Usually Twitter was responding to complaints from one very voluble DNC staffer and still applied warning labels to such content. In one case, they refused to do either. “Because the video is an unaltered excerpt of the Vice President's speech, our teams consider it to be out of context, but not deceptive,” Twitter told the staffer, who fumed, "These rules need revision." In the process, they sent a graph of their bizarre moderation flow chart, which among other things showed they can still apply labels to non-deceptive material. This seemed more interesting than the fate of a Biden coughing mashup. If this kind of mechanized speech control can be used one way today, it can be used in another tomorrow, especially if unseen enforcment officials are pushing on the levers."

Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In July of 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan tells Twitter executive Yoel Roth to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), the inter-agency group that deals with cyber threats. The questionnaire authors seem displeased with Twitter for implying, in a July 20th “DHS/ODNI/FBI/Industry briefing,” that “you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.” One would think that would be good news. The agencies seemed to feel otherwise... some of the “bibliography” materials cited by the FITF are sourced to intelligence officials, who in turn cited the public sources. The FBI responded to Friday’s report by saying it “regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.” That may be true, but we haven’t seen that in the documents to date. Instead, we’ve mostly seen requests for moderation involving low-follower accounts belonging to ordinary Americans – and Billy Baldwin"

Thread by @ShellenbergerMD on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "TWITTER FILES: PART 7  The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop... In Twitter Files #6, we saw the FBI relentlessly seek to exercise influence over Twitter, including over its content, its users, and its data. In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published... FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter. The next day, October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate. And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans... @mtaibbi described the debate inside Twitter over its decision to censor a wholly accurate article.  Since then, we have discovered new info that points to an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms. First, it's important to understand that Hunter Biden earned *tens of millions* of dollars in contracts with foreign businesses, including ones linked to China's government, for which Hunter offered no real work... And yet, during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian “hack and leak” operation... They did the same to Facebook, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg... Were the FBI warnings of a Russian hack-and-leak operation relating to Hunter Biden based on *any* new intel?  No, they weren't  “Through our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016,” admitted FBI agent Elvis Chan... Indeed, Twitter executives *repeatedly* reported very little Russian activity... In fact, Twitter debunked false claims by journalists of foreign influence on its platform... After FBI asks about a WaPo story on alleged foreign influence in a pro-Trump tweet, Twitter's Roth says, "The article makes a lot of insinuations... but we saw no evidence that that was the case here (and in fact, a lot of strong evidence pointing in the other direction).” It's not the first time that Twitter's Roth has pushed back against the FBI. In January 2020, Roth resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside of the normal search warrant process... Time and again, FBI asks Twitter for evidence of foreign influence & Twitter responds that they aren’t finding anything worth reporting... Despite Twitter’s pushback, the FBI repeatedly requests information from Twitter that Twitter has already made clear it will not share outside of normal legal channels. Then, in July 2020, the FBI’s Elvis Chan arranges for temporary Top Secret security clearances for Twitter executives so that the FBI can share information about threats to the upcoming elections... Yoel Roth told @karaswisher that he had been primed to think about the Russian hacking group APT28 before news of the Hunter Biden laptop came out.  When it did, Roth said, "It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leap campaign alarm bells."... FBI’s Chan asks Twitter: does anyone there have top secret clearance?  When someone mentions Jim Baker, Chan responds, "I don't know how I forgot him" — an odd claim, given Chan's job is to monitor Twitter, not to mention that they worked together at the FBI. Who is Jim Baker? He's former general counsel of the FBI (2014-18) & one of the most powerful men in the U.S. intel community.  Baker has moved in and out of government for 30 years, serving stints at CNN, Bridgewater (a $140 billion asset management firm) and Brookings. As general counsel of the FBI, Baker played a central role in making the case internally for an investigation of Donald Trump. Baker wasn't the only senior FBI exec. involved in the Trump investigation to go to Twitter.  Dawn Burton, the former dep. chief of staff to FBI head James Comey, who initiated the investigation of Trump, joined Twitter in 2019 as director of strategy. As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — "Bu alumni" — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals... Chan & Roth had set up an encrypted messaging network so employees from FBI & Twitter could communicate.  They also agree to create a “virtual war room” for “all the [Internet] industry plus FBI and ODNI” [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]... Baker repeatedly insists that the Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both, and a violation of Twitter policy... it's inconceivable Baker believed the Hunter Biden emails were either fake or hacked. The @nypost had included a picture of the receipt signed by Hunter Biden, and an FBI subpoena showed that the agency had taken possession of the laptop in December 2019. As for the FBI, it likely would have taken a few *hours* for it to confirm that the laptop had belonged to Hunter Biden. Indeed, it only took a few days for journalist @peterschweizer to prove it... There is evidence that FBI agents have warned elected officials of foreign influence with the primary goal of leaking the information to the news media. This is a political dirty trick used to create the perception of impropriety.   In 2020, the FBI gave a briefing to Senator Grassley and Johnson, claiming evidence of “Russian interference” into their investigation of Hunter Biden.  The briefing angered the Senators, who say it was done to discredit their investigation... Notably, then-FBI General Counsel Jim Baker was investigated *twice,* in 2017 and 2019, for leaking information to the news media...  In the end, the FBI's influence campaign aimed at executives at news media, Twitter, & other social media companies worked: they censored & discredited the Hunter Biden laptop story.  By Dec. 2020, Baker and his colleagues even sent a note of thanks to the FBI for its work. The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time... And the pressure from the FBI on social media platforms continues  In Aug 2022, Twitter execs prepared for a meeting with the FBI, whose goal was “to convince us to produce on more FBI EDRs" EDRs are an “emergency disclosure request,” a warrantless search."

Thread by @lhfang on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "TWITTER FILES PART 8.  *How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign*.  Despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks, Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the U.S. military’s influence operations... Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used covert identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around 2 years or more. Some remain active... many emails from throughout 2020 show that high-level Twitter executives were well aware of DoD’s vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda and did not suspend the accounts...  The conduct with the U.S. military’s covert network stands in stark contrast with how Twitter has boasted about rapidly identifying and taking down covert accounts tied to state-backed influence operations, including Thailand, Russia, Venezuela, and others since 2016."

Lee Fang - Wikipedia - "Fang has been described as a "liberal" by The New York Times, and as both "liberal" and "progressive" by Salon. Liberal commentator Jonathan Chait described Fang as "left-wing" and wrote "Like many Bernie Sanders supporters, Fang often lacerates mainstream liberals both for insufficient populist zeal and, on occasion, for excessive focus on identity at the expense of class. His views on economics put him well to the left of the Democratic Party, while his views on race and gender would sit comfortably in the middle of it, and often put him at odds with fellow leftists."
I saw someone claiming the Twitter Files were all released by "conservative journalists". Remember, kids, you're only a liberal till you do something they disapprove of!

Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: The Twitter Files TWITTER AND "OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES". After weeks of “Twitter Files” reports detailing close coordination between the FBI and Twitter in moderating social media content, the Bureau issued a statement Wednesday. It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.” They must think us unambitious, if our “sole aim” is to discredit the FBI. After all, a whole range of government agencies discredit themselves in the #TwitterFiles. Why stop with one? The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA... Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track. Is today the DOD, and tomorrow the FBI? Is it the weekly call, or the monthly meeting? It was dizzying... The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm. These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others. Industry players also held regular meetings without government... Despite its official remit being “Foreign Influence,” the FITF and the SF FBI office became conduit for mountains of domestic moderation requests, from state governments, even local police... Many requests arrived via Teleporter, a one-way platform in which many communications were timed to vanish... There were so many government requests, Twitter employees had to improvise a system for prioritizing/triaging them... Even ex-FBI lawyer Jim Baker agreed: “Odd that they are searching for violations of our policies.” The New York FBI office even sent requests for the “user IDs and handles” of a long list of accounts named in a Daily Beast article. Senior executives say they are “supportive” and “completely comfortable” doing so... The #TwitterFiles show execs under constant pressure to validate theories of foreign influence – and unable to find evidence for key assertions... “more aggressive” “government partners” had closed Twitter’s “window” of independence. “Other Government Agencies” ended up sharing intelligence through the FBI and FITF not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Clouldfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia... Should the government be allowed to try to prevent Americans (and others) from seeing pro-Maduro or anti-Ukrainian accounts? Often intel reports are just long lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos guilty of “anti-Ukraine narratives”"

Thread by @davidzweig on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE
– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*...
The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19. Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @TheFP showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes... In the summer of 2021, president Biden said social media companies were “killing people” for allowing vaccine misinformation. Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month. Berenson sued (and then settled with) Twitter. In the legal process Twitter was compelled to release certain internal communications, which showed direct White House pressure on the company to take action on Berenson... Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was “very angry” that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts... Twitter did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing... Inevitably, dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information.
Exhibit A: Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, tweeted views at odds with US public health authorities and the American left, the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter... Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one which also happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines... A tweet by @KelleyKga, a self-proclaimed public health fact checker, with 18K followers, was flagged as “Misleading,” and replies and likes disabled, even though it displayed the CDC’s *own data.*... Tellingly, the tweet by @KelleyKga that was labeled “Misleading” was a reply to a tweet that contained actual misinformation.  Covid has never been the leading cause of death from disease in children. Yet that tweet remains on the platform, and without a “misleading” label... This tweet was labeled “Misleading,” even though the owner of this account, @_euzebiusz_, a physician, was referring to the results of a published study. Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island physician, was permanently suspended from Twitter after receiving multiple strikes for misinformation. One of his strikes was for a tweet referring to the results from a peer reviewed study on mRNA vaccines. A review of Twitter log files revealed that an internal audit, conducted after Bostom’s attorney contacted Twitter, found that only 1 of Bostom’s 5 violations were valid. The one Bostom tweet found to still be in violation cited data that was legitimate but inconvenient to the public health establishment’s narrative about the risks of flu versus Covid in children. That this tweet was not only flagged by a bot, but its violation manually affirmed by a staff member is telling of both the algorithmic and human bias at play. Bostom’s account was suspended for months and was finally restored on Christmas Day... In a surreal exchange, Jim Baker, at the time Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, asks why telling people to not be afraid wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policy... Remember @KelleyKga with the CDC data tweet? Twitter’s response to her is clarifying: “we will prioritize review and labeling of content that could lead to increased exposure or transmission.” Twitter made a decision, via the political leanings of senior staff, and govt pressure, that the public health authorities’ approach to the pandemic – prioritizing mitigation over other concerns – was “The Science”"
Liberals claim that the government flagging content they claim is against Twitter's terms of service and trying to pressure Twitter to take it down is not censorship (apparently the Biden team were very angry that Twitter wasn't following its terms of service - maybe that is proof of bad faith censorship, so they aren't protected by Section 230 anymore). Presumably the cope here is that taking down "misinformation" is just Twitter's rules. Too bad that means US government data is "misinformation" too.

Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In... The “Russia Task Force” started mainly with data shared from counterparts at Facebook, centered around accounts supposedly tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). But the search for Russian perfidy was a dud... Twitter’s search finding “only 2” significant accounts, “one of which is Russia Today,” was based on the same data that later inspired panic headlines like “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone”... This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement. Twitter soon settled on its future posture.  In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.”  Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”"
Clearly there's nothing wrong with letting the US intelligence community influence moderation, and this is not censorship

Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: The Twitter Files Twitter and the FBI “Belly Button” By 2020, Twitter was struggling with the problem of public and private agencies bypassing them and going straight to the media with lists of suspect accounts... When the State Department/GEC – remember this was 2020, during the Trump administration – wanted to publicize a list of 5,500 accounts it claimed would “amplify Chinese propaganda and disinformation” about COVID, Twitter analysts were beside themselves. The GEC report appeared based on DHS data circulated earlier that week, and included accounts that followed “two or more” Chinese diplomatic accounts. They reportedly ended up with a list “nearly 250,000” names long, and included Canadian officials and a CNN account. Roth saw GEC’s move as an attempt by the GEC to use intel from other agencies to “insert themselves” into the content moderation club that included Twitter, Facebook, the FBI, DHS, and others... After spending years rolling over for Democratic Party requests for “action” on “Russia-linked” accounts, Twitter was suddenly playing tough. Why? Because, as Roth put it, it would pose “major risks” to bring the GEC in, “especially as the election heats up.” ... Twitter was taking requests from every conceivable government body, beginning with the Senate Intel Committee (SSCI), which seemed to need reassurance Twitter was taking FBI direction. Execs rushed to tell “Team SSCI” they zapped five accounts on an FBI tip. Requests arrived and were escalated from all over: from Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, from the FBI and DHS, and more. They also received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn’t like to be banned. Here, the office for Democrat and House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff asks Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry... Remember the 2017 “internal guidance” in which Twitter decided to remove any user “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as a state-sponsored entity committing cyber operations? By 2020 such identifications came in bulk... They were even warned about publicity surrounding a book by former Ukraine prosecutor Viktor Shokhin, who alleged “corruption by the U.S. government” – specifically by Joe Biden. By the weeks before the election in 2020, Twitter was so confused by the various streams of incoming requests, staffers had to ask the FBI which was which... Twitter was paid $3,415,323, essentially for being an overwhelmed subcontractor."
When you know the power of controlling the narrative
Clearly, even though Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety said they were having "conversations" with state agencies, Facebook, Google and Twitter opposed "offensive IO [information operations] to promote American interests", many parts of government sent requests to Twitter and Twitter was even explicitly asked to ban someone, there was no outsourced censorship
Of course, there's nothing wrong with removing state-sponsored operations while exempting US state-sponsored operations

Thread by @AlexBerenson on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "how @ScottGottliebMD - a top Pfizer board member - used the same Twitter lobbyist as the White House to suppress debate on Covid vaccines, INCLUDING FROM A FELLOW HEAD OF @US_FDA!... Gottlieb told Todd O'Boyle - a senior manager in Twitter's public policy department - that a tweet from @DrGiroir claiming CORRECTLY that natural immunity was superior to vaccine immunity was "corrosive" and might "go viral." Twitter put a misleading tag on the tweet, preventing it from being shared. Gottlieb then went after a tweet about Covid's low risk to kids from @justin_hart. Pfizer would soon win the okay for its mRNA shots for children, so keeping parents scared was crucial... In October 2022, claimed on Twitter and CNBC that he was not trying to suppress debate on mRNA jabs. These files prove that Gottlieb - board member at a company that has made $70 billion on the shots - did just that."
Corruption is good when the Science tells you to do it

Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: Twitter Files #14 THE RUSSIAGATE LIES One: The Fake Tale of Russian Bots and the #ReleaseTheMemo Hashtag. At a crucial moment in a years-long furor, Democrats denounced a report about flaws in the Trump-Russia investigation, saying it was boosted by Russian “bots” and “trolls.” Twitter officials were aghast, finding no evidence of Russian influence... Republican Devin Nunes submitted a classified memo to the House Intel Committee detailing abuses by the FBI in obtaining FISA surveillance authority against Trump-connected figures, including the crucial role played by the infamous “Steele Dossier”. The Nunes assertions would virtually all be verified in a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in December 2019. Nonetheless, national media in January and early February of 2018 denounced the Nunes report in oddly identical language, calling it a “joke”... Feinstein/Schiff said the Nunes memo "distorts" classified information, but note they didn't call it incorrect... Feinstein, Schiff, Blumenthal, and media members all pointed to the same source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard created by former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts, under the auspices of the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). The dashboard, which featured a crude picture of Vladimir Putin deviously blowing evil red Twitter birds into the atmosphere, was vague in how it reached its conclusions... Execs eventually grew frustrated over what they saw as a circular process – presented with claims of Russian activity, even when denied, led to more claims... Eventually Twitter staff realize “Blumenthal isn’t looking for real and nuanced solutions” but “just wants to get credit for pushing us further.” Ultimately senior executives talked about “feeding congressional trolls” and compared their situation to the children’s book, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”... Despite universal internal conviction that there were no Russians in the story, Twitter went on to follow a slavish pattern of not challenging Russia claims on the record... Russians weren’t just blamed for #ReleaseTheMemo but #SchumerShutdown, #ParklandShooting, even #GunControlNow – to “widen the divide,” according to the New York Times. Re #SchumerShutdown and #ReleaseTheMemo, the internal guidance was, “Both hashtags appear to be organically trending.” NBC, Politico, AP, Times, Business Insider, and other media outlets who played up the “Russian bots” story – even Rolling Stone – all declined to comment for this story. The staffs of Feinstein, Schiff, and Blumenthal also declined comment... This #ReleaseTheMemo episode is just one of many in the #TwitterFiles. The Russiagate scandal was built on the craven dishonesty of politicians and reporters, who for years ignored the absence of data to fictional scare headlines."

Eli Lake on Twitter - "Why aren’t more Democrats outraged and ashamed by a member who uses his position to advocate the censorship and shadowbanning of his political opponents? It’s unAmerican. Adam Schiff disgraces his party. No one in Hollywood who believes in free speech should support this guy."
Naturally, many liberals in the replies are mocking him. They're not even trying to hide it anymore

Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Staff of House Democrat @AdamSchiff wrote to Twitter quite often, asking that tweets be taken down. This important use of taxpayer resources involved an ask about a “Peter Douche” parody photo of Joe Biden. The DNC made the same request
Clearly government figures asking Twitter to censor tweets is not a problem, even when it's parody

Thread by @lhfang on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "New piece from the TWITTER FILES. How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy.  The push included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries... The potential "fake accounts" that Twitter monitored for protesting Pfizer? These were real people. Here's one the Twitter team flagged for potential terms of use violations. I talked to Terry, a 74 year old retired bricklayer in the UK on the phone... In a separate push, Pfizer & Moderna's lobbying group, BIO, fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects, which worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid "misinformation."... Many of the tweets the BIO-funded campaign focused on were truly unhinged misinfo, like claims that vaccines include microchips. But others Stronger lobbied Twitter on were more of a grey area, like vaccine passports & vaccine mandates, policies that coerce vaccination... Notably, this massive push to censor and label covid misinfo never applied to drug companies. When big pharma wildly exaggerated the risks of creating low-cost generic covid vaccines, Stronger did nothing. The rules applied only to critics of industry."
If you question Pfizer, you are denying The Science and must be deplatformed

Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: Twitter Files #15 MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD. "I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.” "Falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.” “Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.” These are quotes by Twitter executives about Hamilton 68, a digital “dashboard” that claimed to track Russian influence and was the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years. The “dashboard” was headed by former FBI counterintelligence official (and current MSNBC contributor) Clint Watts, and funded by a neoliberal think tank, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). The ASD advisory council includes neoconservative writer Bill Kristol, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, ex-Hillary for America chief John Podesta, and former heads or deputy heads of the CIA, NSA, and the Department of Homeland Security. News outlets for years cited Watts and Hamilton 68 when claiming Russian bots were “amplifying” an endless parade of social media causes – against strikes in Syria, in support of Fox host Laura Ingraham, the campaigns of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Hamilton 68 was the source for stories claiming Russian bots pushed terms like “deep state” or hashtags like #FireMcMaster, #SchumerShutdown, #WalkAway, #ReleaseTheMemo, #AlabamaSenateRace, and #ParklandShooting, among many others... Hamilton 68 never released the list, claiming "the Russians will simply shut [the accounts] down." All those reporters and TV personalities making claims about “Russian bots” never really knew what they were describing. Twitter executives were in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s list, reverse-engineering it from the site’s requests for Twitter data.  Concerned about the deluge of Hamilton-based news stories, they did so – and what they found shocked them... the Hamilton 68 barely had any Russians. In fact, apart from a few RT accounts, it’s mostly full of ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British. It was a scam. Instead of tracking how “Russia” influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming... there were internal concerns about taking on the politically connected Alliance for Securing Democracy... So the “legitimate people,” as one Twitter exec called them, never found out they’d been used as fodder for mountains of news stories about “Russian influence.” Because the #TwitterFiles contain the list, they’ve begun finding out. “I’m shocked,” says Sonia Monsour, who as a child lived through civil war in Lebanon. “Supposedly in a free world, we are being watched at many levels, by what we say online.”  “I’ve written a book about the U.S. Constitution,” says Chicago-based lawyer Dave Shestokas. “How I made a list like this is incredible to me.” “When I was growing up, my father told me about the McCarthyite blacklist,” says Oregon native Jacob Levich. “As a child it would never have occurred to me that this would come back, in force and broadly, in a way… designed to undermine rights we hold dear.”... What makes this an important story is the sheer scale of the news footprint left by Hamilton 68’s digital McCarthyism. The quantity of headlines and TV segments dwarfs the impact of individual fabulists like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass. Hamilton 68 was used as a source to assert Russian influence in an astonishing array of news stories: support for Brett Kavanaugh or the Devin Nunes memo, the Parkland shooting, manipulation of black voters, “attacks” on the Mueller investigation… These stories raised fears in the population, and most insidious of all, were used to smear people like Tulsi Gabbard as foreign “assets,” and drum up sympathy for political causes like Joe Biden’s campaign by describing critics as Russian-aligned. Incredibly, and ironically, these stories were also frequently used as evidence of the spread of “fake news” on sites like Twitter. It was a lie. The illusion of Russian support was created by tracking people like Joe Lauria, Sonia Monsour, and Dave Shestokas. Virtually every major American news organization cited these fake tales— even fact-checking sites like Snopes and Politifact... even Roth, like most Twitter execs an ardent Democratic partisan, saw that the Hamilton scheme would lead people “to assert that any right-leaning content is propagated by Russian bots.” At least two other research institutions that used similar methodologies – and were cited as sources in news stories – were also criticized in Twitter email correspondence. MSNBC, Watts, the Washington Post, Politico, Mother Jones (which did at least 14 Hamilton 68 stories), the Alliance for Securing Democracy, and the offices of politicians like Dianne Feinstein all refused comment... This was an academic scandal as well, as Harvard, Princeton, Temple, NYU, GWU, and other universities promoted Hamilton 68 as a source. Perhaps most embarrassingly, elected officials promoted the site, and invited Hamilton “experts” to testify. Dianne Feinstein, James Lankford, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and Mark Warner were among the offenders. The mix of digital McCarthyism and fraud did great damage to American politics and culture. News outlets that don't disavow these stories, or still pay Hamilton vets as analysts, shouldn't be trusted. Every subscriber to those outlets to write to editors about the issue."

Thread by @robbysoave on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: THE FACEBOOK FILES. Twitter is not the only social media site to face pressure to censor content. I obtained emails showing that the CDC had significant influence over covid moderation at Facebook and Instagram... CDC officials began routinely vetting claims about COVID-19 vaccines that had appeared on Facebook. The platform left it up to the federal government to determine which assertions were accurate... By July 2021, the CDC wasn't just evaluating which claims it thought were false, but whether they could "cause harm."... The CDC was not the only arm of the federal government engaged in this work, of course: White House staffers castigated Meta for not deplatforming alleged misinformation fast enough. President Joe Biden himself accused Facebook of "killing people" in July 2021." "What's at stake is the future of free speech in the technological age," @JeninYounesEsq, an attorney for @NCLAlegal, tells me. "We've never had a situation where the federal government at very high levels is coordinating or coercing social media to do its bidding..." The New Civil Liberties Alliance is helping the state of Missouri sue the government over its campaign to pressure social media companies to silence dissent... There is a word for government officials using the threat of punishment to extort desired behaviors from private actors. That word is: jawboning"
One cope about the Twitter FIles was that the government flagging items for Twitter to review was not censorship. Presumably Facebook asking the CDC to approve content is not censorship either

Links - 17th February 2023 (2 - Feminism)

Teenage boys' academic ambition may explain gender pay gap, study says - "The gender pay gap may be partly explained by teenage boys having more ambitious aims to attend prestigious universities than girls, even if they have the same academic results, according to research.  The study of school pupils in England conducted by academics at University College London’s institute of education found “clear evidence” boys already had more advanced plans for higher education than girls at the age of 15, with more boys aiming to apply to Oxford, Cambridge or other more selective universities, regardless of background or school attended. The researchers also found that academically driven pupils with the most ambitious plans for university gained higher grades in GCSE exams than pupils with similar backgrounds who had less precise or no plans... The research team found a similar pattern among pupils who were immigrants or the children of immigrants, who were more likely to aim for selective universities than their classmates"

Feminism Is a "Battle of the Sexes." Women Need Something Different. - "Feminism was defined not by improving the quality of life of women and therefore families, but by climbing hurdles and amassing “victories.”...   1992 was hailed as the “Year of the Woman,” with more women elected to political office than at any other time in history to that date. And what did we do with all this newfound equity and power? We began our pursuit—one that continues to haunt us—of “having it all,” a phrase popularized by Helen Gurley Brown, the former editor of Cosmopolitan. By the ’90s, we could “do it all”: have the careers of men, be riot grrrls, get elected to office, but still be feminine enough to play by the rules and marry the guy of our dreams and have kids (just a little later!)... Feminism, by this point, had traded in its quest for “liberation of women” to fully pursue parity with men, all while attempting to remain appealing to them. In short, both professionally and privately, we were chasing victories defined on male terms. (Little defines this era so clearly as feminists confidently siding with Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair.)... each decade finds us led by a feminism that has abandoned ameliorating the struggles of our collective lives as women in lieu of chasing individual wins on playing fields drawn up by men. Many women are exhausted from the repetitive act of “battling” for a right to equity, proving that we can still “win” against all odds... in certain circles Barrett is considered a feminist icon... In this new feminism, sexual equality is found not in imitating men’s capacity to walk away from an unexpected pregnancy through abortion, but rather in asking men to meet women at a high standard of mutual responsibility, reciprocity and care.”... Barrett’s position on reproductive rights aside, we all must admit: On paper, she is a poster child for feminist victory. She has managed to balance a husband, a family, and a top-notch career not bound by any ceiling, glass or otherwise. Much like another “feminist icon” I’ve been thinking about lately: Kim Kardashian.  Whatever your feelings about her, Kardashian is another woman who has seemingly won the elusive prize that patriarchal feminism has been dangling in front of us: having it all. She runs a billion-dollar business and has beautiful children and a love life, all of it created while being sex-positive and designing shapewear that she claims celebrates and highlights curves. And yet, this woman with absolutely nothing to prove to anyone recently boasted about starving herself for three weeks to fit into the dress of another, more retrograde female icon."

Meme - "Male Privilege
In Switzerland, military service (conscription) is compulsory for all Swiss men, but not women. If a man is not fit for military service, he is required to pay 3% extra tax until the age of 30. This is known as "military exemption tax". Naturally, women are also exempt from paying this tax. In 2014 the Swiss voted on whether or not to keep conscription for men. This means women were able to vote on whether or not military service is compulsory for men. Despite not having to participate in conscription themselves, the majority of women voted to keep conscription compulsory for men."

More Bad News for Feminists - "Motivated by status envy, which is a reflection of human nature’s difficult need for esteem, feminists have a perverse conception of history... As if they wanted to confirm the truth of female hysteria, feminists reduce human life to a silly binary: man, bad; woman, good. Or, man, oppressor; woman, oppressed. What gives the lie to this is women’s relations with other women. In recent months we have seen spectacles of group shaming and vicious gossip whereby women have sought to ruin men’s lives. What many people don’t know is that such phenomena stem from the very nature of women, and nobody knows this better than women themselves. In a study published last month in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Tania Reynolds, Roy Baumeister, and Jon Maner found that women, in their fierce intrasexual competition, use gossip and manipulation to “undermine the romantic and social appeal of same-sex romantic rivals who are perceived to be threatening.” That women would do so is supported by a 2009 study in the same journal, which found that women are more attracted to men who are taken. Just as many women are quite willing to falsely accuse men of sexual harassment and of sexual assault, so women employ their preternatural skill at deception against their fellow women... it’s precisely because they cannot afford to be straightforward like men that women are more resentful and vindictive than men... Allison Gabriel, assistant professor of management and organizations at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management, in her recent studies of men and women in the workplace, “found consistent evidence that women reported higher levels of incivility from other women than their male counterparts…. [Women] are ruder to each other than they are to men, or than men are to women.” And the more assertive the women were, the more rudeness they received from other women. Hence, while feminists are forever urging women to be “strong and independent,” women’s biggest obstacle in doing so is likely to be other women."

VIDEO: Women Clean Theater Vandalized by Feminists on International Women's Day - "Hard-working women having to tidy up after empowered protests... the Juarez theater in Guanajuato, Central Mexico, was trashed following the International Women’s Day protests, which gripped Latin America as millions of women demonstrated for equal rights and against ‘femicide.’...   Earlier this week, National File published an article containing a video where a feminist protester accidentally firebombed her fellow feminists when she aimed for riot police."

Meme - "Ghislaine Maxwell is guilty"
"I hate successful women"

Meme - "FORBES WOMEN
How The First Female CEO Of Revlon Is Driving The Iconic Brand To A Modern Makeover
Mar 25, 2022
Revlon files for bankruptcy
June 16, 2022"
Of course, she wasn't the main reason, but you can't laud women when things go well and claim they're not responsible when things go south

Jeanne Dielman: Film directed by woman picked as best ever - "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, directed by Chantal Akerman, has topped the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound poll.  It is the first time a work directed by a woman has reached the top ten. The poll, which runs every decade, has been criticised for a lack of diversity.  The winning spot was held for 40 years by Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. It was overtaken in 2012 by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.  Jeanne Dielman, released in 1975, is the story of a Belgian widow who turns to prostitution to make ends meet, but kills one of her clients. The film runs for almost three and a half hours. Though not as well-known outside the world of film criticism as previous winners, it has been lauded as a "masterpiece", and a ground-breaking piece of feminist film. Chantal Akerman, the Belgian director, died in 2015 aged 65.  Lillian Crawford, a film critic and writer who contributed to the poll, said the film was the "essential text" in feminist cinema... In 2012, Jeanne Dielman was one of just two films directed by women which made it on to the list, along with one by a black director - Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki."
I'm sure they suddenly realised after 47 years (10 of them where this work was already in the list) that this was the biggest work of genius ever

More than 130 feminist groups sign an open letter to Amber Heard - "More than 130 feminist leaders, including Gloria Steinem and Women's March Action, released an open letter in support of Amber Heard"
No true feminist puts sugar in her porridge
Feminism means a woman abusing a man is good

Beauty is not always in the eye of the beholder: the role of vision in the emergence of mate preferences - "Cross-cultural research has repeatedly demonstrated sex differences in the importance of different partner characteristics when choosing a mate. Men typically report higher preferences for younger, more physically attractive women, while women prefer men that are wealthier and of higher status. As the assessment of such partner characteristics often relies on visual cues, this raises the question whether visual experience is necessary for sex-specific mate preferences to develop. To shed more light onto the emergence of sex differences in mate choice, the current study assessed how preferences for attractiveness, resources, and personality factors differ between sighted and blind individuals using an online questionnaire. We further investigate the role of social factors and sensory cue selection in these sex differences. Our sample consisted of 94 sighted and blind participants with different ages of blindness-onset, 19 blind/28 sighted males, and 19 blind/28 sighted females. Results replicated well-documented findings in the sighted, with men placing more importance on physical attractiveness and women placing more importance on status and resources. However, while physical attractiveness was less important to blind men, blind women considered physical attractiveness as important as sighted women. The importance of a high status and likeable personality was not influenced by sightedness. Blind individuals considered auditory cues more important than visual cues, while sighted males showed the opposite pattern.  Further, relationship status and indirect, social influences were related to preferences. Overall, our findings shed light on the availability of visual information for the emergence of sex differences in mate preference."

Jennifer Lawrence claims no women were action movie stars before her
Ironic. Women are always breaking barriers - because we pretend that no women have done that before (we see this too in the marketing of SJW movies where they pretend that bad female-led action movies are facing sexist backlash because they are the first of their kind)

Thread by @datepsych on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The biggest status-enhancing and status-decreasing behaviors.  Evolutionary psychology of status and status sex differences.  Cross-cultural findings across 14 nations...   Sex differences in status-enhancing behavior are remarkably small. Basically what enhances status for men also seems to enhance status for women. If you go back to the first chart, it's basically a list of prosocial behavior for what is status enhancing and antisocial behavior for what is status diminishing... Here are the larger sex differences that occurred in the exploratory analysis. Note that most of these are still small and share the same direction: what increases the status of a man also increases a woman's status. An exception: having a younger mate was associated with higher male status, while having a younger mate was associated with lower status for women. A few more:  Having a higher status mate increases women's status.  Women's status is more damaged by having a poor mate.  Being a virgin lowers male status, but is beneficial to female status.  Sex before marriage lowers a woman's status; no effect on men... Drug use harms men's status, but less than it harms women's status.  Being able to drink more alcohol is a slight status boost for men, but harms women's status. Crying in front of your friends hurts male status more.
"Acting masculine" and "acting feminine" were the largest sex differentiated status cues for men and women.
Masc men = high status / fem men = low status
Fem women = high status / masc women = low status...
"Being healthy, having strong kin alliances, and embodying characteristics generally valuable across relationship domains—such as trustworthiness, willingness to share resources with others, and having a wide range of knowledge." Failing to retaliate to insults lowers male status. Consistent with Nisbett's observations of a violent honor culture within male groups."
So much for "Girls can wear jeans And cut their hair short Wear shirts and boots 'Cause it's OK to be a boy But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading 'Cause you think that being a girl is degrading" - this is proof that women don't gain status by being masculine (which is why Margaret Thatcher and Ho Ching are not the most popular role models for women). And of course the fact that this contradicts feminist complaints about oppressive gender norms is not remarked on

Meme - "Viols en pleine rue a Paris: où sont les féministes?"
Marianne Patenne: "Elles sont occupées a essayer de faire comprendre aux femmes que les régles ne sont pas un truc de femmes, que les femmes ont un pénis et qu'll faut réinventer tout le dico pour pas vexer 1% d‘ados aux cheveux roses. Le reste pas leur probléme"

Baba Yaga: The greatest 'wicked witch' of all? - "Cunning, clever, helpful as much as a hindrance, she could indeed be the most feminist character in folklore."
It's telling that an at least partly evil character is a feminist icon

Actress Margot Robbie improvised a kissing scene with her Babylon co-star Brad Pitt - "Australian actress Margot Robbie has revealed how she got to kiss Babylon co-star Brad Pitt – even though it was not in the script.  On an episode of entertainment news programme E! News this week, the 32-year-old shared that the kiss on the upcoming movie was improvised.  “That wasn’t in the script, but I thought, ‘When else am I gonna get the chance to kiss Brad Pitt? I’m just gonna go for it’,” she said of locking lips with the 58-year-old American actor, who was named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive not once, but twice, in 1995 and 2000."
Bragging about sexual assault is a weird flex

Meme - "Would love to discuss how we feel about the love story presented in Pixar's LAVA?? Bc it's always sort of bothered me but I've never mentioned it to anyone bc I KNOW people are just gonna tell me it's not that deep lol  The short of why it bothers: the lady volcano (Lele) is WAYYYY younger than the dude volcano (Uku.) Like at the start of the short he's on his last legs of life and she's just being born. Not only that but she grows up listening to him sing and falling in love with him based on that, but she doesn't actually know him nor does he have any idea she exists. When they finally meet she pretty much presents herself to him and she's like "hello older man I've idolized since I was a child I am in love with you" and he's just like yeah okay I'm about it -  idk I know this sounds sooooo silly but as someone who was groomed it makes me feel icky and bc he's so much older than her and she grew up listening to him sing, it feels like there's a power dynamic there. And since my research background is in media literacy and the way kids learn about the world from media (esp how young girls learn about sex and romance) it worries me to think a young girl could watch this and think that's normal and romantic?? Orrrrrr am I thinking WAY too deep about this??"

Meme - Women's Rights News: "It's one thing to allow American women to choose this service, but it's quite another to force it upon our daughters, sisters, and wives."
"US Army Wants to Push 18-Year-Old Girls To Register For Military Draft"
Women's rights are not about equality after all

An emoji mocking a man's manhood spurs a reverse #metoo in South Korea - Los Angeles Times - "When the “pinching hand” emoji — depicting a thumb and index finger about an inch apart — first appeared in 2019, the internet happily went to work. “A new emoji to mock men,” Vice declared...  In South Korea, though, the image has been no laughing matter. In recent weeks, the hand, once used as a logo by a now-defunct radical feminist group, has become a point of contention in a charged battle over gender and anti-feminist backlash. “Men’s rights” groups have taken to searching for the image included in various posters and ad campaigns, in a McCarthyistic hunt for companies, organizations or their employees sympathetic to feminism, targeting them with boycotts or a barrage of complaints. It is a startling, some would say surreal, reversal of the #MeToo movement — men who for generations controlled society suddenly feeling affronted by women taking aim at their bodies. But for them, the sign is proof that hatred of men is pervasive in today’s South Korea and that radical feminism is out of control. And their campaigns have proved effective: Major corporations have disciplined or demoted employees for advertisements that used the pinching hand, government ministries and municipalities have apologized and revamped promotional material, museums have dismantled displays and celebrities have seen their careers threatened...  a rise in feminist activism here in recent years has been met with fierce resistance, particularly among men in their 20s who feel they are bearing the cost of correcting previous generations’ inequalities. They especially feel disadvantaged by the fact that all South Korean men, but not women, are required to serve in the military... While anti-feminism has been associated with alt-right movements elsewhere, in South Korea, suspicion of and antipathy toward feminism are gaining broad-based support. More than 65% of South Korean men in their 20s said they equated feminism with hatred of men, according to a 2018 survey by the Korean Women’s Development Institute, and 56.5% said they would break up with their girlfriend if she was a feminist. “Feminism is a mental illness” has become a common refrain in some street protests by “men’s rights” activists. One columnist wrote in 2015 that “mindless feminism” was “more dangerous than the Islamic State” militant group... The pinching hand entered the gender debate in South Korea in 2015, years before it became an emoji. That year, a group of South Korean women fed up with widespread misogyny on male-dominated online forums decided the best way to push back was to give as good as they got. They began referring to men by their genitals, as men had often done of women. They created male versions of online slang that was degrading to women, and reverted sexist idioms — “A woman’s voice should never go beyond the fence,” “Women and dried fish need a pounding once every three days” — against men. They ridiculed and belittled men based on their physical appearance, and often, the size of their appendage.  The group of women called itself “Megalia” and chose as its unabashed emblem the image of a pinching hand. The controversial online forum lasted barely a year before it disintegrated over internal disputes... In 2016, a voice actor for a video game was fired after she posted a photo of herself online in a T-shirt that read “Girls do not need a prince,” which was sold by an offshoot group of Megalia. In 2018, men and women came to blows at a pub in Seoul after an argument in which they yelled the insults popularized online at each other — the women shouting “6.9,” the average penis size of Korean men in centimeters, according to one 2003 study, and men retorting by calling them “Megal bitch.” In April, a branch of the convenience store chain GS25 faced criticism after a job posting specified that applicants should not be feminists, leading to an apology from the corporate headquarters. The next month, the chain ran a promotional campaign for camping goods, which included the pinching hand reaching for a small sausage... Ha Heon-gi, a former legislative aide and founder of the media consultancy New Communication Lab, said the men behind the effort were taking a page from the feminists’ book and using methods they’ve seen employed by women to object to misogynistic statements or practices and extract apologies or topple powerful men. “It’s tit for tat. You’ve taken issue with ridiculous things, so we do the same,” he said. “It’s a sense of political efficacy, that collective action works. Women got together in one voice and were listened to. Men didn’t have that experience and now they’re making their will known as consumers.”"

Meme - "Birds of Prey could have just been a solo Harley Quinn movie. Instead it's a faux-girl team movie that uses women of color as a forgettable backdrop to feed the white star's ego by pretending to support diverse women. It's the epitome of white feminism"

White feminist says she is 'confused' by black man driving BMW with NRA and Tea Party stickers - "A white feminist activist has been dubbed a 'racist' after tweeting that she was 'confused' to see a black man driving a BMW which had pro-NRA and Tea Party bumper stickers on it.   Kimberly Johnson, a Washington DC-based author and activist... said: 'Out on the road the other day I saw an affluent black man driving a BMW with two bumper-stickers.  'One was pro-NRA and the other one was a Tea Party sticker that read, "Don't tread on me." This left me very confused.'"

Elizabeth Holmes Plans To Accuse Ex-Boyfriend Of Abuse At Trial - "Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of blood-testing startup Theranos, plans to defend herself at her federal fraud trial starting next week by arguing that her ex-boyfriend, who was an executive at the company, emotionally and sexually abused her, impairing her state of mind at the time of the alleged crimes"

How ‘Lean In’ Feminism Created Elizabeth Holmes and the Toxic Ladyboss - "As one of the few female leaders in Silicon Valley (only 11 percent of all Silicon Valley executives are women, according to a 2014 report), Holmes’s gender worked to her advantage in terms of garnering media attention. As Alex Gibney, the director of The Inventor, told Time, “She’s looking at us and saying ‘Support me because I am a woman in male-dominated Silicon Valley and I’m doing something great for the world.’ And we want to say, ‘Yeah, we’re behind you. 100 percent.’” It also attracted the attention of venture capitalists and powerful older, wealthy white men, many of whom ended up joining Theranos’s board... After John Carreyrou’s bombshell Wall Street Journal exposes of Theranos were published, Holmes was prepared to use her gender as a strategic advantage to defend herself, just as she did during her rapid ascent. And like Amy Klobuchar after her, who angrily chalked up reports of her abusive behavior on the campaign trail to garden-variety sexism, Holmes hinted in interviews that she was being unfairly targeted because she was a woman"
Amazing. Instead of reflecting on the faults of feminism, they blame her for being white

Meme - "WE'RE NOT ASKING TO GET PAlD WHAT THE MEN GET PAID. WE'RE ASKING TO GET PAID THE SAME PERCENTAGE OF REVENUE SHARED.
Kelsey Plum on misconception of pay gap between WNBA and NBA
Josh Burden: "I saw someone do a video on this. If WNBA players got paid based on their leagues revenue it means all players would owe the league $800,000 each. Yea so good luck with that."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘At the 30% Club… We've said that we would like 30% women at the executive level of the FTSE 350 companies. And we've gone one step further. And on the diversity level, at board level, we've said we want at least one person of color on every FTSE 350 board. And because we're the 30% Club, we've put a gender lens on that, and said we'd like 50% of those seats to be women of color. So that's 175 board seats going to women of color’
‘But I was gonna say in a more general sense. Is it time for the 30% Club to become the 50% Club?’"
The 'myth' of the slippery slope strikes again

Meme - This Woman @organiccqueen: "Dad keeps on piling plates up and not washing them. I don't know who he thinks is going to wash them, does he not know that I'm a feminist?
Update: I'm now washing the dishes. He said I can be a feminist outside his house"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Women’s safety on the streets - "‘Of course, we're going to take action. But the point is, is that those actions can actually never reduce the amount of violence that we'll face because we're unsafe in our homes and we’re unsafe in public space. And on top of that, any actions that we take as Junior Martin pointed out on Twitter yesterday, are just so you know, if I don't take a certain route home is that so that the harasser harasses someone else, also, that the abuser abuses someone else, you know, by doing that, and by not putting the emphasis on the perpetrator and on, you know, really tackling that culture. And what we're doing is we're, we're not getting to the root of the problem, you know, instead, we are being forced to change our behavior.’...
‘It's very common for women to be stalked, attacked, and even killed by men known to them on the streets, violent ex male partners pursue women relentlessly. Often, they go to their places of work, they attack them in bars, where they're with their friends. And this is a really common situation. 87,000 women across the world in one year, according to UN figures were killed in a variety of circumstances by men. And this is why we call it femicide, because it's women being killed by men, because we are women. In other words, it's misogyny. And only men can stop this and why why do we not have more campaigns led by men to end men's violence, it's their problem. And that's why we've got feminism to tell men, this is something that is their responsibility and their problem’...
‘I suffered terrible, terrible misogyny at the hands of vicious and aggressive men, it's got absolutely nothing to do with anything I can do. I literally can't do it, I can't change the chromosomes in my body.’...
'It's up to men to stop other men from doing this. This is their problem, their issue'"
Feminists purposely misunderstand how incentives and human behavior work, because they don't want women to change their behavior (but only in certain contexts). By this logic, you shouldn't lock your house door because burglars will just move on to the next house
Of course, they just bash men. Wait till they remember the statistics on lesbian domestic violence
If men killing 87,000 women is femicide and misogyny, presumably men killing much more men each year is androcide and auto-misandry
Good luck if you look into the breakdown of the men who kill women
Feminists will get very upset if you point out that resistance to sexual assault works: "resistance reduced the probability of sexual contact", i.e. that women are not powerless and can reduce their victimisation

The Release of Brock Turner and "Boys Will Be Boys" - CBE International
"“Boys will be boys and she was asking for it”" by Arianny Cabrera
This feminist kept posting these 2 articles to justify her claim that people say "Boys will be boys" to justify rape, but nowhere in either article is this claim supported. Feminists have created a whole ecosystem of lies to support their delusions

Alexis Newman's answer to Why is the feminist movement so polarizing? - Quora - "Assuming you're referring to modern feminism, it's because it focuses on separation and comparison rather than the equality it should be promoting. It attempts to force women into a narrow mold of some unnatural concept of what a "real woman" is, leaving no room for more traditional life choices. In the cases in which women do choose to those more traditional roles; especially home-makers or stay-at-home-mothers, there's a large degree of scorn and even ridicule that modern feminism metes out to them. A "real" woman is a doctor, not a nurse... An underlying theme of female superiority shows up, here... And that theme has become the engine of modern feminism, really. It's not about equality. It hasn't been, for a long, long time. It's not about getting what men get. It's about getting what they get, plus. Add the bitterness toward men and maleness with the feeling of entitlement to what they have and more, and what you get is a gender superiority movement. It's really not very different from a racial superiority movement, at it's core. Another reason is because the tactics and general attitude of modern feminists are about as reasonable, friendly and approachable as a cactus dipped in mace with an air-raid siren strapped to the top. The word, "shrill" simply doesn't begin to do them justice. It seems most feminists simply aren't physically capable of maintaining a conversation for more than 2 minutes at any decibel level less than an average fire engine siren. The moment their ideolgy is challenged, the bullhorns come out (sometimes, literally) in an attempt to simply drown out reasoned dissent.  Plus, there's the old quote, "A feminist uses statistics like a fish uses a bicycle.""

Woman Perfectly Explains 'Not All Men' With One Powerful Analogy So They Can Finally Understand It
Demonising men is good. But comparing Syrian refugees to poisoned skittles is bad. Because men are evil but Syrian refugees are good.

Study Finds Gender Pay Gap Due to Life Choices - "A study by the taxation and public policy research institute, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), has found that women earn less than men in their twenties because they choose university degrees that lead to lower-paying jobs... the first emergence of the gender pay gap occurs immediately after graduation from university, with male graduates earning on average five percent more than female graduates at the age of 25... The types of degrees chosen by women were significant in the data, however, with a degree in economics boosting women’s pay 75 percent by age 30 in strike contrast to the 7.2 percent boost for those who attained a degree in the creative arts. Women were also found to be over-represented in the subjects associated with low financial returns, constituting nearly two-thirds of creative arts graduates and less than a third of economics graduates... The arrival of children was also noted as a reason for the widening of the wage gap, with women’s hourly wages decreasing to a third below men’s by the time the firstborn child is aged 12. Moreover, by the time the firstborn child is aged 20, women were found to have “on average been in paid work for four years less than men and have spent nine years less in paid work of more than 20 hours per week.”"
Of course, the feminist cope is that sexism is why they make these life choices