Links - 9th September 2024 (2 - Olympics 2024: Opening Ceremony [Last Supper] & Imane Khelif)

Meme - "Olympic Committee Producers: "It was the Last Supper"
The Performance Group: "It was the Last Supper"
Their Website: "It was the Last Supper"
One of the Performers: "It was the Last Supper"
Leftists: You sure about that?"

Meme - "The collection reflects several artistic trends from the Golden Age of Dutch painting. Here we find Lastman, Rembrandt’s master, and Jacob de Wet, who was probably a pupil of Rembrandt. From the painters of Utrecht, steeped in Caravaggism, the Magnins chose Van Bijlert, whose Feast of the Gods disturbingly blends the iconography of myths with that of the Last Supper. The Dutch artists’ fascination for the light of Italy is expressed in Italian Town by the Sea, a luminous painting by Jan Baptist Weenix. Moucheron’s Wooded Landscape with its silvery tints is imbued with the forms and light of the Roman countryside.
"LE FESTIN DES DIEUX. XVIe-XIXe siècle. Le musee abrite une collection de peintures et d'œuvres de différentes écoles, du XVIe à la fin du XIXe siècle."
This is from the Musée Magnin's website. Amazing that even they fell victim to far right misinformation! And even in August 2021 they were lying about Feast of the Gods. The power of misinformation is so strong that it warps the time-space continuum

Meme - "Jan van BIJLERT (Utrecht, 1603 - Utrecht, 1671)
Le Festin des Dieux, vers 1635-1640
Sur le sol nuageux de l'Olympe, les dieux, reconnaissables grâce à leurs attributs, se sont réunis. Bijlert se souvient des leçons du Caravage lorsqu'il peint au premier plan les ombres portées et la musculature de Dionysos (avec son raisin) et du satyre. Disposées en une frise plus classique, les autres divinités festoient au second plan : Neptune (trident), Hercule (massue), Flore (fleurs), Vénus accompagnée de Cupidon.
En Hollande, dans le contexte de la Réforme protestante, les commandes de peintures religieuses se font rares. L'artiste trouve un stratagème : il représente, sous le couvert de cet épisode mythologique, la dernière Cène : Apollon auréolé rappelle le Christ entouré de ses apôtres, Vulcain (avec son maillet) occupe la place habituelle de Jean, Mars cuirassé et casqué, celle de Judas, seul face à tous.
huile sur toile
inv. 1938 E 261"
"Jan van BIJLERT (Utrecht, 1603 - Utrecht, 1671)
Feast of the Gods, around 1635-1640
Under the cloudy sky of Olympus, the gods, recognisable by their attributes, are reunited. Bijlert recalled the lessons of Caravaggio when he painted in the foreground the shadows and musculature of Dionysus (with his grape) and the sartyr. Arranged in a more classic frieze, the other gods feast in the background: Neptune (trident), Hercules (club), Flora (flowers) and Venus accompanied by Cupid.
In Holland, in the context of the Protestant Reformation, the commissioning of religious paintings became rare. The artist found a strategy: he represents, in the guise of this mythological scene, the Last Supper: haloed Apollo recalls Christ surrounded by his apostles, Vulcan (with his mallet) occupies the usual place of John, Mars with his breastplate and helmet, that of Judas, alone facing everyone.
oil on vancas
inv. 1938 E 261"

Meme - Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid: "Even as a Jew, I am infuriated by this outrageous insult to Jesus and Christianity… How do you feel about it as Christians?"
Yasmine Mohammed 🦋 ياسمين محمد @YasMohammedxx: "I’m an atheist and I think it’s lame. If they really wanted to be edgy and provocative, they could have mocked Islam. Mocking Christianity is so milquetoast. Who are they provoking? People who will pray for them? Try provoking people who would throw you from the highest building."

Meme - *Last Supper scene with various Wojak characters*

Meme - "SORTIRAPARIS.COM
CELEBRATE THE GAMES AT THE HEART OF PARIS ! All the information. HERE
Also on the Passerelle Debilly is a familiar scene re-enacted by drag queens, including the famous Nicki Doll surrounding Barbara Butch at her turntables: a recreation of the Last Supper, another famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci, set against the backdrop of the Seine. As you may have guessed, this is a multiple pun in French. A fashion show follows, paying homage to the capital of fashion.
The spectacular vasque-montgolfière (hot-air balloon) awaiting us in the Tuileries gardens is a tribute to the Montgolfier brothers, the inventors of this aerostat. The first hot-air balloon trip reached its highest point, 1000m, as it flew over the Tuileries Gardens."
Weird how even so many French people are ignorant
The left are usually super quick to pick up on "dog whistles", but when it pushes the left wing agenda, even if everyone "misunderstands" something, it shows that the right is the problem

Meme - Quo vadis @IesusRexEst: "My favorite part of this is all the libs pretending they knew anything about Dionysus before, including how to pronounce it."
NPCs in unison: "IT WAS ABOUT DIONYSUS"

Meme - Sarah Fields @SarahisCens...: "Barbara Butch, the woman in the center, posted this photo to her instagram, admitting that this photo had everything to do with them mocking the scriptures. She then deleted it a few hours later and called it "the feast of the Gods". Nope. Caught."
"OH YES! OH YES! THE NEW GAY TESTAMENT!"

Meme - "Here is a post by the woman in the centre (Jesus) position, stating she portrayed Jesus.
barbarabutch - val0stin
Pardon mais :
1) @barbarabutch en Olympic Jesus
2) le bateau de I'equipe de France qui arrive sur du Johnny
3) les statues des femmes importantes de I'Histoire Francaise
4) Barbara Butch qui joue Diams devant des milliards de telespectateurs du monde entier
5) le papy medaille avant dernier relayeur de la flamme
6) Aya Nakamura avec la garde republicaine devant l'Academie Francaise
7) Celine Dion en haut de la Tour Eiffel
8) la chaudron olympique montgolfiere qui s'envole
9) les 1000 references Drag Race France et a la culture queer
Thomas Jolly president du monde en fait"
Someone claimed (about another thing Butch posted) that it was a repost, so it didn't count. Clearly, if someone congratulates me on my promotion and I repost that without denying it, that doesn't mean I got promoted

Lying about the Olympic Last Supper a sign of our times - "if the Last Supper reference was genuinely not intended, then how this scene got past the sensitivity readers without anyone, anyone, saying ‘hey, you know what, this looks an awful lot like that world famous historically significant religious tableau…’ is a story for the ages. But actually, the New York Times wants you to know that “art historians are divided” on which feast was being represented at the ceremony. As though pastiche can only be derived from a single source of inspiration. As though art historians must first reach consensus before Christians can divine whether to be offended or not.  The art historian sophistry prompted educated-sounding people on social media to inform the world that the opening ceremony scene definitely wasn’t inspired by the Last Supper, because can’t you uneducated brutes tell a Dionysian feast when you see one? The subtext is that anyone who angry-tweeted or pulled sponsorship over the Last Supper imagery is a buffoon who doesn’t know their art history.  I didn’t even angry tweet over this before today but now I’m mad about it, because once again everyone is being told not to believe their lying eyes. ‘Experts’ are being wheeled out to prop up PR messaging. And people who want to appear erudite are furthering the BS by politely correcting their friends on social media.  Perhaps the reason it pisses me off more than others is that I can do it too, but I choose not to. I worked in marketing. I am an English and Cultural Studies major. I fully understand how easy it is to twist a fact, find an expert, and apply a reframe to hit the message you want and pull the rug out from under the one you don’t want.  But I refuse to do it because IT’S LYING. I think the best thing we can do is keep saying what is obvious and put up with the withering looks from our erudite friends who assume we just don’t understand NYT op-eds well enough. Anyhow, before the great re-write continues on this particular lie, I’m just going to highlight that three days ago, EVERYONE thought this was a Last Supper scene, not just the Christians.  The performers (post since deleted):
Drag Queens:
Gays:
Leftists:
France TV in a since-deleted post, calling the scene “A LEGENDARY Supper” (again, la Cène is the French name for the Last Supper).
French culture website Sortir à Paris, noting the clever pun in staging the tableau on the Seine - Scène de la Cène à Paris sur la Seine:
Literally every single French media outlet that covered the event...
So, ok fine. We need art historians and the creative director of the show to tell us everyone understood it wrong. In any other setting this would be called an artistic fail.  But in our sick culture, everyone had better adjust to the expert queer professional opinion or you’re a dumb bigot."
Weird. Usually left wingers are very concerned about impact and dog whistling, and want to cancel those who have offended the woke, even if they didn't intend to

Meme - Taco McMeaty @TacoMcMeaty: "I’m not religious but this is clearly intended to offend Christians.  You’re obviously a low life bigot, and that’s probably your best trait."
Julien Hoez @JulienHoez: "Nope, it was an artistic representation of the fictional Last Supper painting, based on the story from the bible, produced within a laïque country where we don’t give special protections for religions.  The drag queens were just having a good time being creative"
He didn't get the memo that it was The Feast of the Gods

Meme - "This is Ewa Kłobukowska. She is a Polish sprinter who set multiple world records in the 1960s. She "failed a gender test," was banned and had all her records stripped. The media called her a man. The next year she gave birth to a son. She never received an apology. -Katy Montgomerie"
Some athletes are wrongly accused of doping. Therefore we should stop testing all athletes for doping

Algeria FC on X - "🇩🇿 Imane Khelif's career according to IBA:
2018 IBA World Championships ➡️ Female
2019 IBA World Championships ➡️ Female
2022 IBA World Championships ➡️ Female
2023 IBA World Championships ➡️ Female until semifinals when she beat a Russian boxer then she was male
IBA 🤡"
Lance Armstrong's career according to USADA:
1987-1988 - Clean
1989 - Clean
1990 - Clean
1992 - Clean
1993 - Clean
1994 - Clean
1995 - Clean
1996 - Clean
1998 - Clean
1999 - Clean
2000 - Clean
2001 - Clean
2002 - Clean
2003 - Clean
2004 - Clean
2005 - Clean
2009 - Clean
2012 - Clean until USADA proclaimed he was part of "the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen"
Clearly, if you change your mind when new facts turn up, you're inconsistent, a hypocrite and biased

J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk Named in Imane Khelif's Cyberbullying Lawsuit
Defamation, Privacy and Data Protection Law in France - "Freedom of speech is protected in France since the 1789 Revolution, as strongly proclaimed by the Declaration of Human and Civil Rights.  Jules Ferry (1832-1893), a moderate Republican but an ardent promoter of colonial expansion, who served twice as Prime Minister during the Third Republic, imposed the principle of freedom of the press a century later, in a law dated 29 July 1881...   To avoid conviction, the defence can offer to prove the truth of the facts or at least, its good faith (bonne foi), by establishing the legitimacy of the goal pursued and the seriousness of the investigation. Under the influence of the European Court of Human Rights, the burden of proof applied by the French Supreme Court (cour de cassation) is that of a “sufficient factual basis”. This allows a rather large spectrum of criticism when dealing with a public figure.  Overall, a conviction is hard to obtain unless the words complained of are obviously false. Where the allegation is proved to have been defamatory, the damages awarded to the complainant (if any) are notoriously limited – typically ranging around a few thousand euros."
So much for accountability culture

Meme - "Click to search within this image *Imane Khelif's shorts*"

J.K. Rowling on X - ""It’s important to highlight that launching a PR campaign and applying layers of thick makeup requires far more time and effort than simply making DNA test results public." -- ✍️@SwipeWright"

Imane Khelif: could J.K. Rowling actually be a man...? - "This has created a bit of a paradox for the TERFs, because if a person can be born with female anatomy; can live their life as a woman, can do things like give birth and have periods, but still be deemed a man because they have XY chromosomes, then we can’t really say anyone is a woman until they get their genes tested.  In other words, J.K. Rowling could in fact be a man"
What bizarre logic and rewriting of reality. Of course the cope is that the Russians must be lying and the tests don't show what the IBA say they do, even though the male boxers dropped their appeals and refuse to release the results, and Lin didn't defeat a Russian boxer so even in this conspiracy theory there's no justification for the Russian "disinformation". Not to mention how biological sex is important in sports in a way that it isn't for writing
One person quoted claimed that she could give birth. Weird how TRAs are asserting so many odd things. And of course they've forgotten the lessons of the Caster Semenya scandal

Meme - Barbie: "But Ken, that Algerian boxer was born with a vagina."
Ken: "So now that determines gender again?"

Kim Siever on X - "I just found out that Imane Khelif participated in the 2020 Olympics. Funny how no one was upset about her boxing back then. I wonder what changed."
Gʀᴇɢ.Oʀʏᴇʟ. on X - "This proves that people had no issue with Khalid based on Khelif's appearance. The issue started only after Khelif allegedly failed the IBA eligibility tests."
Brendon🕊️ (foo/bar)on X - “No one spotted the cheat before so it must be fine”
History Rhymes 🙂🌸 on X - "Why did his team confirm his "chromosome problem" if they are unaware of his sex test results?"
It's almost as if when new facts are revealed, people change their minds

Meme - Hazel Appleyard @HazelAppleyard_: "So today I’ve learned that in Isl&m, men don’t touch women who aren’t related to them.   Yet here, Imane is shown riding on the shoulders of a man. We know he’s Musl!m.   What does this tell you?  #Paris2024"

Meme - "When you're just trying to watch the Olympics to see the best athletes compete"
"Excuse me, your balls are showing"

Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas

Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas

"I’ve already written about the overrepresentation of women in HR. We can understand the decline of free speech as a kind of female pincer attack: women demand more suppression of offensive ideas at the bottom of institutions, and form a disproportionate share of the managers who hear their complaints at the top. 

What is left to contribute on the question of how feminization relates to pathologies in our current political discourse? First, I think that the ways in which public debate works when we take steps to make the most emotional and aggressive women comfortable have been overlooked. Things that we talk about as involving “young people,” “college students,” and “liberals” are often gendered issues...

I think there’s a certain weirdness to the arguments made by both sides of the gender issue. To simplify, you have the left, which leans towards the blank slate and opposes gender stereotypes but demands women in public life be treated as too delicate for criticism, and conservatives, who believe in sex differences but say to treat people as individuals. But if men and women are the same, or are only different because of socialization that we should overcome, there’s no good reason to treat them differently. And if they are different and everyone should accept that, then we are justified in having different rules and norms for men and women in practically all areas of life, including political debate. How exactly this should be done is something worth thinking about. Finally, I argue that much of the opposition to wokeness is distorted and ineffective because it avoids the gendered nature of the problem, which also makes fighting it difficult...  

For all our talk of equality, our culture treats violence, incivility, and aggression towards women much more seriously than the same towards men. This creates a difficult dynamic, in which if a man disagrees strongly with a woman, he has to tread very carefully if he is not to be judged harshly by observers...

Male versus male argumentation just has completely different rules, norms, and expectations than male versus female. Going back to the Yale video, if one of the men acted like the more hysterical women, at some point he and Christakis would either have had to shake hands, walk away, or come to blows. This is basically what happened, before it even got to that point. A man can’t just yell in another man’s face for 5 or 10 minutes about how he’s hurting his feelings. If a man does behave this way, bystanders are more likely to feel disgusted than join in or play the role of white knight. The man at the receiving end of the abuse is at some point going to have to escalate towards violence, or back down and say something about how this is beneath him. Depending on the situation, observers may assume violence is a distinct possibility, and get between the two sides.

None of these options are available when getting yelled at by a woman. You certainly can’t make an implicit threat of violence. Raising your voice will turn everyone against you, and even walking away can look heartless.

If one man seeks to aggressively silence another through brute force, it naturally creates a certain reaction. If cancellers were more like the tall sociology student they would be less effective. One can think of antifa, which punches people it disagrees with, as a more masculine form of cancel culture, and it’s generally less effective than the more feminine HR class in shaping our politics...

Men tend to be puzzled by how to handle getting yelled at by women, and most will try to end the conversation as quickly as possible on whatever terms they can get. Conservative media is much more eager to personalize the enemy when it’s a man who wants to fight than when it’s a woman feeling emotionally vulnerable. There’s nothing noble or heroic, or even much enjoyable, about standing up to such an enemy. When college “snowflakes” are attacked, they’re targeted as young people or liberals, not as women. 

Of course, most women do not cry over hurt feelings or scream in men’s faces when they’re angry. Rather, it’s the loudest minority, being able to indulge their passions in ways that men cannot, that drive most of the censorship we see. How many women were behind the Yale Halloween costume controversy that became the center of American intellectual life? Like 10? Imagine at least one crying woman in every board room, newsroom, faculty meeting, and government office, and you can understand the decentralized force that has led us to this point.

While most women don’t go around cancelling people, it’s clear that many do value protecting feelings over free speech. Given these realities, I think we have a few options for how we treat public discourse. The first two are

1. Expect everyone who participates in the marketplace of ideas to abide by male standards, meaning you accept some level of abrasiveness and hurt feelings as the price of entry.

2. Expect everyone to abide by female standards, meaning we care less about truth and prioritize the emotional and mental well-being of participants in debates.

Instead of either of these options, I think we’ve stumbled upon a hybrid system, where

3. We accept gender double standards, and tolerate more aggression towards men than we do towards women. We also tolerate more hyper-emotionalism from women than men.

Option (2) is what I think most people mean by the feminization of intellectual life, but Option (3) is actually worse, because it also introduces double standards we see everywhere in our culture. 

Late night comics make fat jokes about Chris Christie, but not female politicians. Men in public life are just trolled online, while women face “harassment” and “abuse.” Women openly discuss how some idea or another made them cry, while even in liberal spaces, men crying over ideas is generally not accepted. Even conservatives behave like this, and will “own” the left by attacking liberals for saying something “sexist” against a female public figure when they would fail to notice a similar attack against a man.

I’m often amused when reading stories about “students” or “millennials” crying in class or at work. Whenever I find such a story, I have made a habit of carefully going through it and seeing if the writer mentions the sex of who is doing the crying. I’ve found very few cases of an author doing so...

Some evolutionary psychologists argue that we’re naturally hardwired to care about women’s suffering more because “eggs are expensive, sperm is cheap.”... Whether or not the tendency reflects a rule of human nature, it is unquestionably true that the modern West prioritizes female well-being.

There’s a funny Hillary Clinton quote that couldn’t demonstrate the point more clearly: “Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.” If the gender ratio of COVID were reversed and women were more at risk than men, all we would ever hear about would be the “femdemic.” Even the way we judge fiction reflects our bias towards caring more about harm done towards women. If you include the battle scenes, Game of Thrones probably killed off hundreds of times more male than female characters, yet we had to suffer through an endless number of think pieces on the show having too much violence towards women.

What’s strange about (3) is that we have these rules while we’re supposed to be against gender stereotypes. Chivalry was justified on the grounds that the sexes were different. Liberalism officially believes in equality and sameness, but the implications of that are so absurd and contrary to human nature – treating male and female tears equally – that not even those most committed to the official ideology live by it...

This is the hypocrisy of the left. But there’s also a hypocrisy of the right. Actually, it’s more a hypocrisy of centrists, who will present studies showing that, believe it or not, men and women are different, but then argue that we should “treat everyone as an individual.”

Think about how strange this is. We don’t say this about other group differences. “So what if on average children are more impulsive and make worse decisions than adults? Some children are more mature than adults, therefore abolish all age requirement for voting, sex, etc. and treat everyone as individuals.” If an alien species came to earth and was found to significantly differ from humans on nearly every important cognitive trait, it wouldn’t make sense to expect them to assimilate to human institutions and not fundamentally alter how they work.

At the same time, the argument against giving in to more emotional women is that truth is actually pretty important and if feelings get hurt on the way there, too bad. But of course I’d think that. I’m a man, and one at the extreme tail ends of both disagreeableness (high) and neuroticism (low). If I was the type who responded to difficult ideas by “literally shaking,” I could well have a different opinion. But it would be the job of the rest of society to steer me away from thinking too hard about political or philosophical issues, and towards private pursuits where my hypersensitivity would do less harm. 

As long as men and women are treated differently by society, they cannot engage in public debate with each other in a fair and consistent way. And because of human nature, society will always treat men and women differently, as it should. So what should we do?

Given that (3) is so horrible and basically gives a veto to hysterical women over all public policy, we have to choose (1) or (2). I have no doubt that public discourse as a male space works better. That doesn’t mean women are barred from voting or discussing politics. They can participate in the public arena but as soon as they start crying over a Halloween costume or talking about “online abuse,” most people should roll their eyes and understand that someone without the emotional stability to even participate in the marketplace of ideas isn’t going to have the traits necessary to contribute much to it. I think we were closer to this ideal 20 or 30 years ago, but we’ve moved away from it under the pressure of civil rights law and women becoming more prominent at higher levels of important institutions. This is basically the way we treat men already; a male journalist crying over mean words instantly loses credibility, and rightfully so. The public space should be regularly purging people, and we can’t care if the purges have a disparate impact.

Of course, we’ll never treat the sexes completely equally in political debate, or anywhere else in life. Just as how individuals differ and one might be less rude to a man who is more sensitive, all psychologically normal humans have a natural aversion to treating the sexes the same. There should always be an ideal of prudence or even gentlemanly behavior; the problem is when it co-exists with a fake belief in equality that everyone must pay lip service to but that no one deep down believes in.

Extreme maleness, i.e., violence, is already stigmatized, and we have developed rules, norms and institutions to deal with “Big Man” behavior. These include not only prisons, but anti-bullying campaigns, international laws of war, and the social stigmatization of violence more generally outside of accepted outlets such as sports and military service. At the same time, society has not yet begun to address the distortive effect female tears have on public life because it’s something relatively new and harder to deal with. Crying during a political debate should be just as stigmatized as throwing a punch, as both make open discourse impossible. 

When public discourse operates according to male rules, women become more likely to select out of it. They focus more on career, children, hobbies, and family. This is why leftists have a point when they say that concepts like objectivity and free speech work to favor male voices. But while these concepts provide a male advantage if applied to areas like journalism and academia, we’re all better off when society cares more about truth and less about the emotional well-being of a small and hysterical minority. In other words, a world that valued truth and objectivity over feelings would have fewer female executives, senators, and journalists, but be better for everyone because it would have more economic and technological growth, while not encouraging women’s worst instincts (more female representation in high status careers does not appear to have done much good for women’s mental health). It might have more war too, but, as mentioned already, society has been pretty good at recognizing the harms that come from the excesses of masculinity. We haven’t even begun to think carefully about equivalent pathologies stemming from traits of the other sex.

The idea that the far left has a point when it says that Western institutions are “sexist” was a theme of my review of Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge. The centrist likes male rules, but doesn’t like the fact that institutions that subscribe to them will be predominately male and offensive and scary to many women. So Rauch pretends that they’re not actually male traits and ends up in effect clinging more closely to the blank slate view of sex differences than most feminists do.

One thing I’ve always disliked about the struggle against political correctness or wokeness is that it tends to exaggerate the oppression coming from the other side...

To a large extent, conservatives wish they were facing a more masculine form of authoritarianism. Men know what to do when other men try to oppress them. They resist and fight back. But who wants to participate in a struggle where women’s tears are what you need to overcome? Men can feel invigorated after a fistfight with another man, even when they lose! Nobody feels that way after arguing with his wife.

This can also explain the weird melodramatic way in which conservatives understand foreign policy. Why were conservatives, who have basically been pessimists about the state of their society and where it has been going since the 1960s, such enthusiastic supporters of foreign adventures in places like Vietnam and Iraq that meant absolutely nothing to the future of the United States? Why are so many who think they’ve lost their country still desperate for an existential struggle against China?

There’s even a strange tendency in the right-wing echo chamber to connect the CCP to BLM and political correctness more generally. I’m including links because this is so stupid it may be hard to believe that anyone actually makes such arguments. Many would like to believe that all the ugliness they see can be traced to a grand plan thought up by some evil pudgy Asian man in Beijing, rather than being the result of nobody wanting to stand up to women crying. This is similar to the anti-Russia obsession among many on the left, who want to believe that Americans only care about kneeling during the national anthem, pronouns, and riots in the street because of Putin’s propaganda.

I think national populism, with its disproportionate focus on male capitalists, has a similar psychological appeal. This movement directs its attention towards businessmen who comply with anti-discrimination laws instead of the largely female administrators and employees who most zealously make use of them. Others blame male postmodern philosophers, tracing everything liberals are doing today to something Foucault or Gramsci said a long time ago. If you want to make a connection between philosophers and left-wing public policy, you would have a stronger case if you talked about Catharine MacKinnon, whose radical ideas about relations between the sexes were to a large extent adopted by the federal government as the basis for sexual harassment law.

This is what makes effectively fighting wokeness so difficult, especially for the half of the country that actually believes that accepting sex differences is normal and healthy...

The strength of any anti-wokeness movement depends in large part on the strengths of its antibodies to a certain kind of female emotionalism. Jonathan Rauch and most classical liberal types avoid the difficult questions. Religion works better because, like liberalism, it disproportionately appeals to women and provides an alternative model for how the sexes should relate to one another. Relying on religious dogma also frees one from having to intellectually justify arguments that most anti-wokes are uncomfortable explicitly making."

 

All this is because modern societies are hypersensitive about "harm" suffered by women, e.g. criticism as "harassment". So much for equality. But modern feminism is about benefiting from double standards, after all

Links - 9th September 2024 (1)

Organizational Effects of Gonadal Hormones on Human Sexual Orientation - "We find converging evidence that prenatal gonadal hormones influence the development of human sexual orientation and orchestrate its sexual differentiation primarily by regulating patterns of gene expression in the developing brain. Evidence is particularly strong that androgens increase sexual attraction to females. In our meta-analysis, PCOS was more common in non-heterosexual females (r = 0.18, p < 0.001). Some evidence also indicates that estrogens increase sexual attraction to males. We discuss why data may be less clear regarding variation in sexual orientation among males, including the possible existence of subgroups characterized by distinct biological pathways that contribute to same-sex sexual orientation. Moving forward, we propose that multiple measures and/or markers be considered together to better characterize early hormonal action on human sexual orientation."

Trunk (car) - Wikipedia - "Early designs had an exterior rack on the rear of the vehicle to attach a luggage trunk."

Steve Stewart-Williams on X - “Tough math teachers get lower ratings from students, because students like them less. However, students get better grades with the tough teachers than with laxer teachers. Reason #167 why student evaluations of teaching aren’t particularly useful.”
TracingWoodgrains on X - "the truism in education: what you like doesn't work, and what works, you won't like education policy is so thorny in large part because our instincts cry out against effective approaches"

Bobby Goodlatte on X - "My politics: I’m basically a Bill Clinton era Democrat, circa 1999. Which, by todays standards, places me on the “right”. Balanced budget, strong borders, skill-based immigration, pro-technology, socially liberal, unapologetically capitalist. I’ve stood still, you sprinted left"

Eremina desertorum - Wikipedia - "A specimen from Egypt thought to be dead was glued to an index card at the British Museum in March 1846. However, in March 1850, it was found to be alive...   It was later shown that the species could survive in suspended animation without food or water for even longer. As part of an experiment, 40 snails were put into a tin box in 1904. Approximately 8 years later, in 1912, 10 of them were found to be still alive"

Meme - john roderick @johnroderick: "Every time I use a word like "gay" or "retarded" some gay retard reminds me those words are hurtful."

The myth of collective wisdom | The Spectator - "when people have to make a decision in a collective setting, their first instinct may not be to choose well, but to avoid blame. It is dangerous to assume that the more people who are involved in a decision, the better the outcome will be. This is true only under certain conditions, when the process of decision-making is very well designed, otherwise a kind of collective insanity can arise...   I once asked my daughter why she always ordered pizzas for her friends from Domino’s even though other options were available. ‘Because if they don’t like their Domino’s pizza, they blame Domino’s. If they don’t like their Papa Johns pizza, they blame me for not choosing Domino’s.’ A trivial anecdote perhaps, except that, at scale, such ‘accountability sinks’ explains the outsize popularity of the big four consulting firms, the Horizon scandal, the overweening influence of HR, procurement and finance departments, the appalling decline in customer service and much more besides.   It is extraordinary how little is written about this. Other than the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, who coined the phrase ‘defensive decision-making’, I knew of very little thought given to the problem.  Thankfully there is now a wonderful book which covers this topic. Dan Davies’s The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind is all the more fascinating as it tackles very contemporary problems by reviving the discipline of cybernetics and the work of Stafford Beer, with passing discursions involving squirrels, Brian Eno, Milton Friedman and a well-deserved kicking delivered to the discipline of modern economics."

eigenrobot on X - "Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?"
"people will really be like "you invented entire languages for your fantasy world? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, writing an epic story about medieval tax policy" and then not finish their epic story about medieval tax policy"

Daniel on X - "Whenever we do a prisoner exchange with Russia we get back our WNBA star and our NYT fashion correspondent and Russia gets back Vladmir Rapisti, convicted in 2010 of selling nuclear bombs to Rwanda so they can blow up orphans"

max seddon on X - "The children of Anna and Artem Dultsev, the Russian deep cover spies returned home as part of the prisoner exchange, didn’t know they were Russian until their plane took off for Moscow for the swap, the Kremlin says. They don’t speak Russian, so Putin greeted them in Spanish."

Luke Thompson on X - "Tammy Baldwin spends her weekends in Manhattan with her partner, Maria Brisbane. Brisbane is a private wealth advisor to the ultra-rich. She routinely invests her clients’ money in industries that Baldwin regulates. Because they aren’t legally married, this goes undisclosed."

Wide Awake Media on X - "Club of Rome co-president: In order "to reach as many [UN Agenda 2030] Sustainable Development Goals" as possible, a "Giant Leap" is necessary, which—among other things—includes "transforming the food system" and "transitioning to clean energy".   "We see a switch to healthier, plant-based diets... We half carbon dioxide emissions every decade to reach Net Zero by 2050. The economic model everywhere is circular... Material consumption of unsustainable resources is reined in, fossil energy phased out, and we see a significant redistribution of wealth... We introduce a universal basic dividend, operating like a universal basic income."  "We know the Giant Leap will be disruptive—we're talking about a complete shake-up... It will create shocks."  It kind of echoes Mao Zedong's 'Great Leap Forward'—which killed up to 55 million people, in arguably the worst famine in human history—doesn't it? 🙄  H/t: @TimHinchliffe"

Thread by @jarvis_best on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Keith Olbermann has called for Elon’s arrest so I thought I would do a thread of my favorite times Keith has demanded someone be arrested along with why he wants them locked up.
Elon Musk: Donating to a PAC that gathers voter info.
Ron DeSantis: Flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard
“Select Supreme Court Justices”: He didn’t like one of their rulings
Rep MTG: Talking about border security
Tom Wilson: Fighting in hockey
Rep. Gosar: Endorsing Trump
Donald Trump: Making terrorist threats
Ted Cruz: asking for an audit
Rep Heather Scott: posting on Twitter a picture someone sent her
Chief Justice John Roberts: arrest needed if he doesn’t respond to a subpoena from Dick Durbin
Jared Kushner: Espionage
Donald Trump Jr: treason.
Ending it with my overall favorite Keith moment that doesn’t involve him demanding an arrest: the time he tried to dunk on someone but ended up saying he pisses on his own face."

Marko Jukic on X - "One of my European friends told me TikTok has the best content of any social media platform because it's the only one without 1+ billion Indians affecting the algorithm (India banned TikTok because they hate China) and now I can't stop thinking about that anytime I scroll."

Malaysian hawker under fire for selling claypot chicken rice cooked with rice wine, no halal cert - "A Malay-owned claypot chicken rice stall in Malaysia that went viral on social media for its owners’ proficiency in the Cantonese dialect has come under fire from some local diners after Islamic officials declared the stall had been operating without halal certification.  Aman’s Food Stall – located at Restoran Ahmad Muzakin in Sri Petaling, Kuala Lumpur – offered a pork-free version of the dish, which has origins in China and is also popular among Chinese communities in Malaysia and Singapore.  Both Muslims and non-Muslims were served the dish, which was featured on some popular food blogs and received a positive review from online news site Malay Mail.  The food stall faced trouble after a video was circulated online showing the stall owner known as Aman dousing a portion of the dish with rice wine, which contains alcohol that Muslims are prohibited from consuming. The rice wine would make the claypot dish forbidden as well. In response to “unrest among Muslim patrons” of the stall, the Department of Islamic Development Malaysia (Jakim) said on Saturday that it had never issued the stall’s operator any halal certification.   In a Facebook post, Jakim advised Muslim consumers to be mindful when patronising food premises, and to check its official portal or the Verify Halal app to ascertain whether eateries hold valid halal certification.  The restaurant said on Sept 5 that it would be closed until further notice, with “improvement in progress”... Malaysia’s syariah law outlaws the consumption of alcohol, viewed as an intoxicant, among Muslims. A Malaysian Muslim woman caught drinking beer at a beach resort in 2007 was sentenced to six strokes of the cane, although she was later made to perform community service instead.  Before Jakim issued its statement, users of video-sharing platform TikTok had analysed the video of the stall operator’s actions, seeking evidence that Mr Aman had used the shaoxing variety of rice wine with an alcohol content of around 16 per cent.  While it is unlikely Malaysian Muslims will be disciplined for eating at the stall, many have asked for enforcement action to be taken against the stall owner. Some accused the eatery of “confusing its customers”, while others said that consumers should not assume stall operators wearing Muslim head coverings are selling halal food."
Clearly, Muslims must be banned from this stall and similar stalls, or it's Islamophobic

Man shares genius plan to retire to Holiday Inn instead of nursing home because it's cheaper - "Back in 2019, Terry Robinson, from Spring, TX, said he has no intention of checking into a nursing home and would rather the hotel... he highlighted that, in his opinion, the hotel offered better bang for buck with perks like breakfast, special TV movies, spa, swimming pool as well some of the free toiletries... Robinson said he would get all of the perks he listed in his Facebook post and more for just $59 a night compared to a nursing home, which he claimed was triple that at $188 a night.  While it might sound good on paper, it is worth noting that nursing homes offer around-the-clock care, medical supervision, three meals a day, assistance with everyday activities, and even some rehabilitation. However, Robinson said he wasn’t worried about the need for medical attention and said he would ask someone at the desk to simply call an ambulance for him. Problem solved... i suppose.  Holiday Inn has said that a similar post has long circulated social media since 2004, and another post back in 2016.  However, they still welcomed Robinson with open arms and even highlighted another perk he might not have thought of... "While we’re not certain how Mr. Robison arrived at his current budget calculations, we look forward to welcoming him when he reaches his 'golden age'. He did miss one big benefit in his long list of reasons to stay with us – kids eat for free at Holiday Inn. So that’s another excuse for the grandkids to come and visit.""

Meme - "Big Bird once again kindly offers money to homeless Oscar. He knows fully well that Oscar would immediately use it to fufill his heroin addiction, which is precisly what he wants. Enough money to help him stay addicted, but not enough to get him to quit or die. An endless cycle of suffering that keeps him throbbinglv erect at night"

reactions on X - "I’m not sick I’m twisted sick makes it sound like there is a cure hahahhhahahah"

Gabriel Milland on X - "That awkward moment when you discover the idyllic bit of rural France where you booked the lovely gîte for this summer just voted massively for the fascists."
Nate Hochman on X - "What if I told you that it might be idyllic because of those political views, rather than in spite of them?"
Cold957 on X - "Meanwhile, the so called anti fascists are committing acts of arson, because they don’t like democracy. Instead of relying on your lazy tropes, you should be asking why are the people voting elsewhere?"
Bouli ☃️ on X - "Instead, spend your vacation in the suburbs where they vote better. *riot scene*"

Meme - "22. Officer Judy Hopps (Zootopia 2016) *TO SCALE
- Breast Volume: 17.16in3
Breast Surface Area: 16.1in2"
"how do you even explain this to god on the judgement day"

Microsoft Flight Simulator - Wikipedia - "As of November 2022, Microsoft Flight Simulator is the longest-running software product line for Microsoft, predating Windows by three years... In 1982, Artwick's company licensed a version of Flight Simulator for the IBM PC to Microsoft, which marketed it as Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.00."

Glass Onion (song) - Wikipedia - "Lennon wrote the song to confuse people who read too much into the lyrical meanings of Beatles songs, which annoyed him"

Supreme Court rules environmental impact legislation largely unconstitutional | CBC News - "Canada's top court has delivered a highly anticipated judgment, writing in a majority opinion that Ottawa's Impact Assessment Act (IAA) is largely unconstitutional.  The IAA, previously known as Bill C-69, allows federal regulators to consider the potential environmental and social impacts of various resource and infrastructure projects. It was enacted in 2019.   The IAA has long been controversial among conservative politicians in Alberta, including former premier Jason Kenney, who frequently referred to it as the "no more pipelines act."  The ruling was part of a "reference case," which involves the provincial and federal governments asking courts for advisory opinions.  It doesn't mean the law is now off the books — a ruling such as this from the Supreme Court of Canada is not necessarily binding, but is traditionally treated as being binding by governments, noted David Wright, an associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary.  "I think what we can expect is the federal government is going to get to work very quickly to put together a suite of amendments to bring the act into conformity with the law," Wright said. Writing for the majority in a 5-2 decision, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Richard Wagner said the process set forth in Sections 81 to 91 of the IAA were constitutional and could be separated out.   Those sections involve projects carried out or financed by federal authorities on federal lands, or outside Canada, and therefore fall under federal jurisdiction. Those provisions were not challenged as unconstitutional.   However, Wagner wrote that the balance of the scheme, involving "designated projects," was unconstitutional... Alberta previously filed a constitutional challenge with the Alberta Court of Appeal, and was supported by the governments of Saskatchewan and Ontario, three First Nations and the Indian Resource Council.  Various environmental and legal groups, as well as other First Nations, supported Ottawa. In a 4-1 decision, the court called the law an "existential threat" when it came to Canada's Constitution."
From 2023

🤡Bouncy🤡 on X - "If u fuck a mime girl she has to hold up a sign that says * macaroni noises * bc the mimussy is silent"

All about Aston Martin DB5 and Its Driver in New James Bond Movie - "The Matera chase involves Jaguar XE sedans and Triumph motorcycles for the bad guys and the old DB5 for Bond. Only, the DB5 in this chase does things no DB5 could actually do. Like powerslides, donuts with Gatling guns poking out of the headlight buckets, and lurid drifts that go on for weeks. Since old DB5s are necessarily fragile, not that powerful, and sell at auction for spit-take prices, Aston and the production company had to come up with alternative plans.  They landed on using eight replicas of the DB5 for stunt work... Since the replicas weren't built for sale to the public or to be licensed to operate on public roads, they didn't have to meet any government's vehicle regulations. No airbags, no emissions equipment, no carpet, no sound insulation, and no GPS-based navigation systems... "We poured Coca-Cola on the ground to get some grip," Higgins explains in his Manx accent. "The Coke seems to work better than anything. It was incredible how well it was working." Keep that in mind the next time you want to drift on cobblestones. "The terrain in Scotland was a bit of a challenge," Higgins continues about the relative risk of the two chases. "But in terms of hitting something taking a wheel off, it was Matera. It was very narrow and very low grip. So there was more chance of writing a car off." And there was no unplanned vehicular destruction. "This film went really, really well."... No Time To Die is sort of a celebration of 007's obsession with Aston Martin."

Lose a Million - UKGameshows - "The only game show where you won by getting the questions wrong, three contestants were invited to attempt to lose a (fictional) £1million in prizes in order to win £5,000"

Meme - "Grass cells are so cute under a microscope. they look so happy, just chlorafilled with joy!"

Meme - "The majestic man-taur. Half man... half another man"
"I HATE THIS. I hate this so much and I want everyone to see it."

Meme - "when ur telling ur grandparents about ur job and they have no clue what ur talking bout but they're supportive"

Meme - "Brand new cybertruck! Boulder CO
$145,800 $200,000
Description: Very fast, lots of women"

Meme - "My plans if my IT career doesn't work out
Plan A *Crypto*
Plan B *Gambling*
Plan C *pairing up with old lady*
Plan D *trafficking cocaine*"

Hey Logitech, every mouse should be a forever mouse - "Logitech’s vision of a “forever mouse” isn’t just a bad idea. It’s predatory, and a practice that’s not only bad for consumers but doesn’t even make sense as an actual product... we should expect hardware companies to support their products as a matter of rote. It’s been that way for years. Second, hiding additional features behind a paywall gate sucks. And finally, who needs hardware as a service? It’s a very anti-customer trend, and it needs to stop...   Hardware as a service is becoming more prevalent because software is becoming a more intrinsic part of hardware companies. The hardware industry has always been about exceeding limits: overclocking, for example. As hardware companies have begun to invest in software, hardware has become more like software, attaching permissions, licenses, restrictions and eventually subscriptions to what you can and cannot do... the concept of a “forever mouse” doesn’t even really even make sense — because most mice are “forever mice” anyway. Mice can get gummed up by crud, and their switches can eventually wear out, especially if you’re a gamer. But plug in any USB mouse into a Windows PC and it will just work. That’s one of the fundamental principles of the PC — since most everything is backwards-compatible, older devices run, well, forever. About the only major change to mice in the past two decades or so has been the elimination of the PC serial port and its replacement with USB. Bluetooth isn’t going away, either.   And I mean, well, it’s a mouse. Do we really need a mouse subscription?  All Logitech’s talk does is annoy people who have no desire for another subscription in the first place. And for anyone else considering the same strategy: I’d rather buy from your competition than deal with paying yet another monthly service charge. I suspect I’m not alone."

Actual Fact Bot: Revived | Facebook - "Legendary baseball star Ichiro Suzuki once refused to disclose his dog's name to the media, stating that he "didn't have the dog's permission." He also attributed his decision to stay with his longtime team, the Seattle Mariners, to his dog's influence."

Actual Fact Bot: Revived | Facebook - "Surströmming is a Swedish delicacy which is known for being the world’s smelliest food. It is made by fermented Baltic Sea herring. It smells so bad that several airlines have banned passengers from carrying tin cans of this stuff. In one case, a tenant was evicted in Germany after spreading the Surströmming brine in the stairway. The landlord was taken to court, where he brought a can of Surströmming as evidence. After being opened, the court unanimously ruled in his favor because of the smell."

Meme - Hans Landa: "Mr. Shapiro, you have milk in your refrigerator, but I see no cows in your field... You are hiding Abigail Shapiro under the floorboards, are you not?"

Sydney Sweeney ‘won’t stop’ doing nude scenes - "With two first-time Emmy nominations for her roles in “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus,” Sydney Sweeney is riding pretty high in Hollywood.  But that doesn’t mean she’s set for life.  “If I wanted to take a six-month break, I don’t have income to cover that,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “I don’t have someone supporting me, I don’t have anyone I can turn to, to pay my bills or call for help.”"

Meme - "I spent a few minutes thinking this was a meme
X-Ray of the brain
MRI of the brain
MRA of the brain
PET Scan of the brain"

White Shark Café - Wikipedia - "The White Shark Café is a remote mid-Pacific Ocean area noted as a winter and spring habitat of otherwise coastal great white sharks."

Meme - Fish: "I'm GonnA TRY "WALKING"!"
*ZAP*
Time Traveller: "I'M FROM THE FUTURE. SORRY, YOUR iDEA JUST LEADS To A BUNCH OF BULLSHIT. *steps on fish*
Time Traveller fading: "BYEEEEEE"

Meme - "EVERYONE KEEPS REFERRING TO ME AS AFRICAN AMERICAN. i'M FROM THE UK"
"THEY KEEP CALLING ME CHINESE. BUT ACTUALLY I'M KOREAN"
"THEY KEEP CALLING ME DRUNK. I'M JUST IRISH"

Meme - "Oscar
"i miss you."
"I moved on already liz"
"oh. I hope she treats you good."
"he*"
"wait what"
"I like it from the back now"

Meme - GameStop @GameStop: "bet y'all wish you bought physical copies now"
Culture Crave @culturecrave: "The Xbox 360 store has officially shut down. End of an era"
Except DRM...

Links - 8th September 2024 (2 - Star Wars)

Meme - Woman in bed: "I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU BOUGHT ME A VIBRATOR!"
Luke Skywalker: "A VIBRATOR?" *shocked and drops phone*
*Lightsaber and blood*

Star Destroyers, a Eulogy : r/saltierthancrait - "(Slight spoiler, SW Outlaws): In Star Wars Outlaws, you face an Imperial Star Destroyer, and surprise, surprise: you, in your scrappy smuggler's ship, plus a couple of snubfighters, plus a couple of corvettes, blow it up.
Another SW game, another Impstar bites the dust. Color me shocked.  I'm so tired of the way Disney has reduced a beloved icon of sci-fi menace to a default target that now seems to get stomped just to make it feel like something substantive was accomplished. Unfortunately, we're at a point where it no longer accomplishes even that.  Let's take a walk down some recent history.  In "Star Wars: Squadrons," the Rebels just started grabbing Star Destroyers left and right, ignoring that each has a crew of around thirty-five thousand, or at bare minimum, five thousand. Nah, just send a boarding team straight to the bridge, no need to worry about stealth or resistance. (Page's Commandos are dying of laughter somewhere.) And once taken, these behemoths of war were then hauled out to a gigantic graveyard to be stripped for parts to make one ship. Perish the thought of actually using them. How would fans know who the bad guys were?  At the start of The Last Jedi, Poe single-handedly wipes out all of a dreadnought's turrets with relative ease. TLJ also sees the main Resistance capital ship completely crippled after a single attack run by Kylo and a couple fighter escorts. Again, with lasers, as if the warships were armored in flypaper.  In the Kenobi show, the might and fighter capacity of Vader's own Star Destroyer is rendered moot when it comes to a single fleeing Rebel shuttle. 100% of the Star Destroyer's attention is then drawn toward Kenobi heading to the nearby planet. And said Star Destroyer completely vanishes when Obi-Wan decides to leave the planet shortly afterward.  And loath though I am to even think about this next one, The Rise of Skywalker sees hundreds of Star Destroyers rendered mostly useless. I count them as Impstars even though they're "Xyston-class" because there's no change in profile. They're just Impstars with a Death Star laser. And I must mention the First Order Star Destroyer, supposedly an improvement upon the Impstar in every way, which had no ability to respond to actual horses running on its hull. Didn't even consider tilting to an angle to tip them off.  My point is, Star Destroyers no longer seem dangerous. They just seem like a joke. All the resources poured into building such massive ships, all the manpower needed to crew them, and they either seem utterly impotent, or they drop like flies everywhere we look.  Does anyone remember Legends? In Legends, two Star Destroyers captured at Endor felt like a big deal, a real game-changer. Having one of them tapped for the First Battle of Borleias (X-Wing: Rogue Squadron) was significant. In Legends, Imperial Star Destroyers were a threat. Your guts clenched if one of them dropped out of hyperspace, even if you had a fleet at your back. If you wanted to kill one, you needed a lot of ordnance. And their skippers were tactical. If you downed the shields on one side (or tried a stupid cavalry charge on the hull), a Star Destroyer would simply roll. If you wanted to sneak aboard one, you had to be Mara fucking Jade. No longer. Now, thanks to Disney, any homeless street kid (Ezra Bridger) or spunky smuggler can grab stormtrooper armor and make it look easy.  If Disney wants to blow up Imperial ships, why can't they choose something else? Where are the Victory Star Destroyers? The Dreadnaught heavy-cruisers? The Carrack-class? The Lancer-class? (My bet: the answer is brand recognition. "How's the audience gonna know it's the Empire if it's not a Star Destroyer?")  Imperial Star Destroyers have gone the way of stormtroopers. When was the last time the sight of one actually inspired some dread in you?"

Star Destroyers, a Eulogy : r/saltierthancrait - "Still scratching my head at thousands of civilian ships, with a few capital mixed in, stood any real chance against thousands of Star Destroyers with a notable amount of escort fighters. Even if in atmosphere."

Star Destroyers, a Eulogy : r/saltierthancrait - "Substitute “Star Destroyers” with “Jedi” or many other signature SW features and this still works"
"Lightsabers immediately come to mind.... how many characters we up to now that have survived gut shots from a saber???"
"laughs in Reva"

I fucking hate all of you : r/SequelMemes - "The amount of mental gymnastics needed to blame the fans for Disneys idiotic and evil decisions."
"It has to be the most successful marketing campaign in history. Shift all incompetence from the global corporation and blame it on...*checks notes*...the people who had no say in the creation of the movies.  It's practically a magic trick."

I fucking hate all of you : r/SequelMemes - "They're people who have no lives, so they latch onto a community to belong and then endlessly complain about it.  Any time I hear people complain irl about SW stuff it's always the same cringe takes you read online by people who are upset they grew up and lost their sense of wonder.  Maybe, if you stopped looking for reasons to complain about something, you'd find that again."
"That’s a funny way of defending bad writing"
"Dismissive takes like these is how you get people to become wary and apprehensive with the side who "just wants to enjoy the content".  Nobody likes having their opinions be waved away under the guise of it only being able to come from people with no lives. Neither do they like having people assume that the only way they got to their opinions was because of someone else, with the added implication that their opinion somehow is less valid because of it.  I don't understand why people like you can't simply... disagree. But no, you need to disagree and attack their character for having a different opinion than you.  It's juvenile and pervasive behavior on the internet. It's what keeps people pissy at each other and it degrades what little possibility there is for actual productive discourse."
"I mean, you are quite literally sitting here and being salty about other people bitching on the internet. What have you got going on in your life that allows you to spend your time bitching about others on the internet?"
"Well if Disney stopped making utter fucking shit then maybe people would move on.  But it wasn’t five years ago that another bullshit product was rolled out. It was 2024."

Why I don't like the "George did this, so it's okay if Disney does it argument" : r/saltierthankrait - "I find it hilarious that Disney shills used dark empire has an example of the eu having bad writing and why it shouldn’t be used as a blueprint for the sequels.  Then episode 9 copied dark empire almost 1:1, whether or not jj realized it.  Those people have become silent and I haven’t heard anyone use that argument again"
Why I don't like the "George did this, so it's okay if Disney does it argument" : r/saltierthankrait - "It's basically nihilism. They know that they can't defend the problems of modern Star Wars, so they just go "Well, old Star Wars had problems too." Yeah, it did. And people DID call them out. But the problems didn't ruin the movie, like they do now. Shockingly, you can call out a movie for its problems, while enjoying the movie overall."

Meme - "Mom, you're embarrassing us! *Princess Leia mother* *Darth Maul kid* *2 Sith [?] kids*"

Meme - "Your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster. An elegant weapon, for a more ..."
"Why don't you tell Luke how you beat General Grievous"
"Shut up. Owen"

Meme - "TELL ME ABOUT MY FATHER"
"WELL.. OK I GUESS I'LL START AT THE BEGINNING."
"2 HOURS LATER"
*Laughing* "THEN HE SAID "YOU UNDERESTIMATE MY POWER.""

Alexandra Petri on X - "from Jabba the Hutt's perspective Star Wars is the story of a guy who owed him money and then instead of paying had his friends murder him"

Breaking News : r/saltierthancrait - "My personal theory on this is that Kathleen Kennedy is probably close to retirement, and therefore wants to leave a legacy. So she wants to make Star Wars her own; and maybe even more than that, she wants her vision of Star Wars to supercede the original/Lucas' vision.  For me this would explain the blatant disregard for the legacy history, lore, and fans."

Breaking News : r/saltierthancrait - "It doesn’t matter if half the show is fantastic with cool fights if half the show is utter dogshit. The Last Jedi is a great example of this concept. The Rey/Kylo plot and fight against Snoke was amazing as was the final scene with Luke. Unfortunately the whole thing gets muddied by the nonsensical change to Luke’s character, Leia flying in space, and the Rose/Finn subplot."
"I think secondary to the issue is shit like the fact that Rey falling for the bad boy character was about as pathetic as Lucasfilms claiming a position of idealized feminism as they rolled out a Star Wars kitchen appliance line featuring Rey and BB8. How are any of us suppose to suspend our disbelief when they immediately undermine everything.  The main reason Star Wars currently sucks is because the majority of decision makers at Lucasfilms do not understand the adult Star Wars fan community that kept it afloat for over 30 years outside of the content they explicitly made for children. IE the games, the comics, the books. They regularly pissed on those fans by dismissing the books, then stealing from them while pretending they didn’t tell us to fuck off. The games, are mostly now pay to play schlock, and the comics, have been incredibly boring anytime I’ve tried to give them a chance."
"Oh man, the choreography in that fight sequence is so bad and nonsensical. There is no way Rey survives 2 seconds in that fight if the stunt guys didn’t literally stop moving their arms waiting for Daisy to hit her cues. How that was the best take and the one to make it to print is mind boggling."

Meme - "Rey after realizing she made a whole trilogy without her hand being cut off."
"That's because she isn't a Skywalker"

Meme - "Never forget that Jar Jar Binks's actor almost took his own life for all the hate he received from the "fans""
Ahmed BEst: "20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today. This was the place I almost ended my life. It's still hard to talk about. I survived and now this little guy is my gift for survival. Would this be a good story for my solo show? Lemme know."
"Ahmed Best said it was the media and not the fans that got to him."
I like how the media bullied Ahmed Best and the SJWs use that to blame the fans for being "toxic". When you have a narrative to push...

Meme - *Bearded Rey with Female sign tattoo and Trans Pride Flag* "I was assigned Palpatine at birth, but I identify as Skywalker."

The Acolyte cost a staggering $670k per minute of footage and garnered over a billion less minutes watched than every other Star Wars show. How is anyone surprised it was cancelled? : r/StarWars - "So Disney and Kathy have ruined the post OT era (Mando S3, BoBF, Ahsoka), the even further post OT era (Sequel Trilogy), the era between the PT and the OT (Obi Wan show), the era prior to the PT (The Acolyte).  The last thing they have left to ruin is the Old Republic era and then they will have ruined all the eras in which they had a chance to tell original stories, so they will butcher the PT and OT eras. At that point, they will probably reboot Star Wars.  Bravo, Kathy, you are a dumbass."

The Acolyte cost a staggering $670k per minute of footage and garnered over a billion less minutes watched than every other Star Wars show. How is anyone surprised it was cancelled? : r/StarWars - "He’s referring to Rian Johnson, the director of Last Jedi. Abrams loved the original trilogy and didn’t care for the prequels, Johnson was the opposite, so Abrams’ plan was to “bring Star Wars back” because he disliked the prequels. Rian Johnson hated what he did and tried to undo everything in TLJ. Which ended up making an incoherent Threequel from two opposing philosophies."

'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "Obi Wan and Book of Boba Fett had the same problem. They were all pitched and announced years ago as movies.  The writers had about ~2-3 hours of story to tell, but the execs forced them to stretchhhhhh it out over 6 to 8 hour long episodes. Hell, a quarter of Boba Fett's episodes didn't even have Boba Fett in them!"
'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "This is what hurt Obi Wan so badly. A film us2ally has three acts, an opening, rising action, then climax and resolution.  The problem with taking what was written as a movie and carving it up into 6 hour long episodes is that now, instead of one three arc structure, you need six separate three arc structures. Every episode has to have it's own action set-piece climax before resolving and laying out the next episode.  This is why you have incredibly bad scenes like the Leia chase sequence in the woods in episode one and the rooftop shootout in episode two. These sequences would have been in the films rising action, but because now they're episodes, we have to cram an "action climax" awkwardly into places they don't fit."

'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "PASTEL colored Vespas, no less. And this was supposed to be a group of ruffians.  Disney just can't help themselves from the cash grab ("this'll make an awesome toy set, and the stupid viewers don't care, they just eat whatever sh*t up that we create!!1!!")."
"On Tatooine, where anlmost everything looks rather weathered and old."
"And for good reason. You blend in better. Nothing says an easy target for a Tuscan than a colorful speeder you can spot for miles."
"Yes but those colorful vespas where reaching the speed of light, no way tuskens would catch them."
'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "I thought the scooters would be introduced to the parks as themed mobility scooters"
On the Book of Boba Fett

'The Acolyte' Canceled: No Season 2 For Disney+'s 'Star Wars' Series : r/StarWars - "we got to see Boba do exactly what we wanted to see him do!  Retire to a backwater planet, do very little fighting, even less killing, and be a big softie who's not much of a threat to anyone at all."
"Still convinced that the plots to Book of Boba Fett and Kenobi were swapped by accident.  The stories would have made way more sense and been way better if we’d had Boba track down Leia and encounter Vader (possibly even including a heavily planned takedown attempt on Vader that impresses Vader enough for him to hire Boba later to get Han) and for Kenobi to insert himself into the Tatooine organised crime gangs to sort the spot out."
"How did they make his character badass in Mando Season 2 only to absolutely suck in BOBF, his own goddam show 🤦‍♂️"
"They turned him into Ned Flanders!"
"It felt like a Steven Seagal movie where the actor/producer insists they HAVE TO do their own stunts, but they're also can't do the stunts because they're too old.  So Boba randomly acquires allies who do all the serious fighting, while he gets immediately incapacitated until after the fight, or does some "fighting" that's mostly just standing around and not moving too much."

Meme - gomjabbar: "every time a new Star War movie or show is announced all the fans are like "OMG Glup Shitto is back""
Chopper @Chopper_Rebel: "FIRST LOOK AT GARAZEB ORRELIOS IN THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU!! REBELS FANS WE'VE WON! #TheMandalorian #D23"

Meme *Death Star* Planet Killer
*Starkiller Base* System Killer
*The Fulminatrix Mandator IV-class Siege Dreadnought* Fleet Killer
*Kathleen Kennedy* Franchise Killer"

Meme - Scout Trooper: "THE AVERAGE SHOOT/KILL RATIO OF A WW2 SOLDIER WAS 45,000 ROUNDS FOR EVERY ONE KILL. AND VIETNAM WAS 50,000 TO ONE. THE STORMTROOPER AVERAGE IS 20-40 ROUNDS FOR EVERY KILL, MAKING THE AVERAGE IMPERIAL AIM TO BE BEYOND SUPERHUMAN. UNTIL NEXT TIME CITIZEN! *speeds off*"

Thomas Parry's answer to Why are the Star Wars battle droids such imbeciles? - Quora - "Let me tell you a story from Legends, about a droid built to kill that was made intelligent. This is the story of the activation of IG-88. This is IG-88B, one of 4 IG-88 platforms. They were created by a company by the name of Holowan Labs, and were intended to be extremely intelligent and adaptable. When the first platform, subsequently named IG-88A, was first activated, it analysed the lab’s computers in seconds, discovered the nature of its existence and its relative power compared to the organic beings around it, and slaughtered them with its bare hands when they attempted to turn it off. It then copied its own programming into the other 3 platforms and escaped, killing everyone in the building in the process.  These 4 droids holed up on a planet called Mechis III, a former Separatist factory world, and started planning a droid uprising. And they came damn close to succeeding too, with their plan being to copy their programming into every droid in the galaxy, destroying all organic life and leaving only machines alive.  They did that with 4 platforms. Imagine what would happen if there were 50 million of them. The secret to a good droid soldier is to make them just smart enough to be competitive against their opponents, but not smart enough for them to start wondering why they are following the orders of something physically less durable than them."

Meme - Loyalists of the Galactic Empire: Somehow returned: "When you post dumb shit and people don't get it or laugh at you for it. You're not a terrible memer. Everyone else is just media illiterate No I don't know what the context is, frankly I don't care."
Rey Skywalker-core: "The internet really doesn't understand jokes anymore huh lol and the original sedition of trolling is supposedly dead. I knew media literacy was mostly extinct but even MEME literacy"
Why are the "core" pages all commies?

Nathan Stanish's answer to What did Darth Sidious/Palpatine get right in his assessment of the Jedi? - Quora - "Palpatine had an amazing read on the Jedi. Chalk some of that up to Plagueis and his guidance, or Dooku’s insight, but much of it was Palpatine’s brilliant observations. Here are the big things that Palpatine got right about the Jedi:
Their complacency | After centuries of peace, the Jedi only wanted to stay their course. Why change what’s working? Traditions became part of the religion in ways that drifted from the Will of the Force. Those traditions pushed Anakin into the welcoming arms of Palpatine.
Their politics | Jedi are not supposed to have attachments, but Palpatine could see that they’d become attached to power—specifically, the elevated status from their alliance with the Galactic Republic. The politics pushed the Jedi into war.
Their arrogance | Nobody could threaten the Jedi. At least, that’s what the Jedi assumed. They were more powerful than ever and their leaders, Yoda and Mace Windu, were the best a Jedi could be. Why worry? Such arrogance blinded the Jedi to the growing darkness and Palpatine’s unprecedented power.
The irony is…Palpatine fell victim to those exact weaknesses... George Lucas always said that Star Wars should “rhyme,” and this bit does. The same problems that hounded the Jedi immediately re-emerged in Palpatine’s reign."

Meme - "I can't believe the sad state Star Wars is in right now"
"Peter you have to let it go already. The Star Wars you knew is long gone. Star Wars is now used by a conglomerate to virtue signal to groups of people that also strongly dislike it. You need to accept Star Wars is dead and move on. It's not worth thinking about anymore. It's not worth the stress."
"No Uncle Ben. I'm a real Star Wars fan till the end. My toxic fandom for Star Wars will keep on as long as Star Wars keeps being trash"
"Peter please... Let Star Wars go, move on and be free of it. Before it's too late."

Meme - Stormtrooper in Tattooine: "THIS HEAT IS KILLING ME... GONNA REQUEST A TRANSFER"
Snowtrooper: "WELL SH#T!"

Saruman vs. Palpatine - YouTube

Meme - "The target area is only two inches wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor" *Woman wearing Death Star tights*
"That's no moon..."
"You sure"

Meme - "The target area is only two inches wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor" *Woman wearing Death Star skirt/dress* Meme - "Have you seen the new Star Wars stuff lately?"
"Only Mandalorian"
"Well you're not missing much. It's all woke now"
"I'm actually more of a Star Trek fan honesty"
"Oh yea? Is their new stuff any good?"
"......no"

How Star Wars writer Chuck Wendig's tweets got him fired by Marvel - The Washington Post - "It all began Oct. 6 when Wendig unleashed a tweetstorm as Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court after allegations of sexual assault in the 1980s.  “There will be renewed calls for civility. Ignore them,” the author said in a protest-urging tweet that was shared nearly 18,000 times. Wendig proceeded to use profanity when referring to Kavanaugh, President Trump and Republican leadership, saying that they have “shamed victims” and have “helped dismantle democracy.”... Wendig said such a professional toll is “definitely” having a chilling effect among some creators.  “Since this happened to me, I’ve heard a number of other stories that aren’t public, of artists and writers who feel like they were silenced about their politics in particular,” said the Pennsylvania-based novelist and screenwriter (“Collapsus”)."
From 2018. Given the political bias with Pedro Pascal vs Gina Carano and the woke agenda, he must have really crossed an internal line. I guess he doesn't believe in "accountability". Of course, he blamed "bots" and conservatives, ignoring the far more numerous examples from his side

Star Wars Author Chuck Wendig Doubles Down His Attacks in Profanity Laced Twitter Explosion - "he decided to attack a number of Star Wars fans by calling them “white supremacists.” He would then threaten to sue fans over a parody t-shirt they made... He once again describes a number of Star Wars fans as “shitty.”... But he escalates it a little further by claiming that his critics come “from a poisoned, septic well-spring.” He claims that well spring is “toxic masculinity and abusive white privilege.” It’s highly ironic given Wendig is white and a man."
If you're not allowed to insult and threaten fans, you're being censored

Meme - "Danielle
YOU MATCHED WITH DANIELLE
"Well hello there x"
*General Kenobi General Grievous GIF*
"Wtf is that"
"Well I've definitely mis read this situation."

Donald Trump vs Kamala Harris Communication Levels

I saw this meme:

"Linguistics show he communicates at a 5th grade level. With a73 IQ

THE LATEST WORD SALAD FROM THE STABLE GENIUS:

"Google, nobody called from Google. One of the things like doing a show like yours, your show, you know, you see it on Fox, but when you really see it is all over the place, they take clips of your show that you're doing right now with me and if I do a good job, they're gonna vote for me, they're gonna vote for me because it's not just on Fox, it's on Fox is a smaller part of it. You're on all over this, those little beautiful cell phones you're on, you're all over the place. You have a product, you have a great product. You have a great brand. So you have to get out, you have to get out, you have to do things like your show and other shows and Google has been very bad. They've been very irresponsible and I have a feeling that Google is gonna be close to shut down"
- Donald Trump, Fox News, August 1, 2024
DEMENTIA DON NEEDS TO DROP OUT!"

This claim didn't pass the smell test, not least since I was unaware of methods to estimate IQ from a text, but I decided to investigate.

Since the meme mentioned grade level, a common way of telling the level of complexity of a text, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (Microsoft Word churns this metric too), came to mind. This looks at the "average sentence length amd word complexity".

Now, just because a text is harder to read does not mean that it is superior (or that the person who produces it is superior). Indeed, often the contrary holds: as George Orwell said, "Never use a long word where a short one will do." Purple prose would score as complex on Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, but is not something that good writers should strive for (pretentious ones or ones who want people to think they're smart, on the other hand...)

Be that as it may, I will just take the meme at face value.

So I ran the quote from Trump in the meme through the Readability Scoring System's Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. I got a score of 8.44, which has a Reading Difficulty of Average - Slightly Difficult, and a Grade Level of Eighth Grade (for Ages 13-14).

This is quite different from what the meme claims, but since it is calling on Trump to drop out, I decided to look at Trump's rival in this election, Kamala Harris.

I had to look for a similar length of text to Trump's 157 word quote for a fair-ish comparison, so I found a 141 word quote from Kamala Harris - her talking about inflation in 2021:

REMARKS BY VICE PRESIDENT HARRIS IN PRESS CONFERENCE | The White House

"All right, thank you. Well, let’s start with this: Prices have gone up. And families and individuals are dealing with the realities of — that bread costs more, that gas costs more. And we have to understand what that means. That’s about the cost of living going up. That’s about having to stress and stretch limited resources. That’s about a source of stress for families that is not only economic but is, on a daily level, something that is a heavy weight to carry. So, it is something that we take very seriously. Very seriously.

And we know from the history of this issue in the United States that when you see these prices go up, it has a direct impact on the quality of life for all people in our country. So it’s a big issue, and we take it seriously."

Using the same formula, I got a score of... 6.06, which has a Reading Difficulty of Fairly Easy, and a Grade Level of Sixth Grade (for Ages 11-12).

As a robustness check, I reran the formula including her next paragraph, which brought the extract to 177 words:

"And it is a priority, therefore. So we have addressed it in a number of ways. One of the issues that we know is related to this is the supply chain issue that we just discussed."

I now got a score of... 5.81, which has a Reading Difficulty of Fairly Easy, and a Grade Level of Sixth Grade (for Ages 11-12).

Clearly, Kackling Kamala needs to drop out!

While doing research for this blog post, I also found a site, Writing to IQ Estimator, that claims to estimate IQ based on "the quality of the vocabulary used".

This estimated Trump's IQ as 87 (average).

Meanwhile, it estimated Harris's IQ as... 77 (below average).
(for what it's worth, even the longer 177 word extract had "Not enough data or not enough variance to estimate IQ", so I had to add in: "And so, on a domestic level, in terms of domestic policy, one of the approaches we have taken is to work with labor unions and to work with municipalities in opening back up and extending the hours of our ports. There are actually three I have in mind: Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Savannah. And, in fact, part of the infrastructure bill benefit is, most recently, what we will do to assist Savannah in broadening their ability to be an active port", bringing the total to 260 words)

Ironic.

Links - 8th September 2024 (1 - Migrants [including Germany])

A woman in Germany is harassed for not wearing a Hijab : r/ThatsInsane
This must be a far right false flag, because we keep being told that no women are forced to wear the hijab

Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "That doesn't really happen on a daily basis though. We are a country of 80 million people, some folks just can't grasp those dimensions. They hear about a murder once a week and think that's an issue for a country because it's in the news. It just isn't. Anything that doesn't claim the lives of people on an hourly basis isn't even worth talking about. We have 40000 avoidable deaths each year from bacteria in hospitals and people are talking about less than 100 knife victims.  The issue is failed education, too many people don't understand numbers apparently."
"You just explained why school shootings aren't a big deal in the US either, but the logic does not track with people.  They are an incredibly small number compared to pretty much any other type of issue.  You hear about the couple people dying in a very unlikely way instead of 300k people dying to medical errors or other large issues.  Everyone wants to be outraged and follow what tik-tok or the news tells them to.  Why think for yourself when you have the person on the screen to think for you?"

Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "When people think for themselves you get anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers"
Just listen to what the media tells you

Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "Gotta love how everyone is like "i mean immigrants, so what do you expect". People who voted for hitler also said "i mean jews, what do you expect" and mind you, jews weren't even really a problem, but anyway, he then proceeded to also attack queer people, people of color, etc.  If you want to vote them just because of immigrants, think that you are probably throwing other groups under the bus.  And if you want to vote them in general, don't use immigration as an excuse, just accept and admit you are far right"
Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "This is a terrible analysis. Jews in Germany didn't go around knifing random non-Jewish Germans and they were some of the most productive people in the country."
"Congratulations, today's the day where you can learn about Herschel Grynszpan and how his actions were used to legitimize and launch the Kristallnacht... Additionally, it's an honour to tell you about how Nazis depicted Jews as raffendes Kapital, in contrast to the schaffendes Kapital of Germans."
"Herschel Feibel Grynszpan (Yiddish: הערשל פײַבל גרינשפּאן; German: Hermann Grünspan; 28 March 1921 – last rumoured to be alive 1945, declared dead 1960) was a Polish-Jewish expatriate born and raised in Weimar Germany who shot and killed the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on 7 November 1938 in Paris. The Nazis used this assassination as a pretext to launch Kristallnacht, the antisemitic pogrom of 9–10 November 1938. Grynszpan was seized by the Gestapo after the Fall of France and brought to Germany; his further fate remains unknown.
That's it?  We're talking statistical patterns, not one offs.
'Additionally, it's an honour to tell you about how Nazis depicted Jews as raffendes Kapital, in contrast to the schaffendes Kapital of Germans.'
Who gives a shit. That's just propoganda. Even the Nazis loved patronizing Jewish owned establishments because the German Jews provided high quality products and services.  https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1659910389109497858  My favorite example: literal Nazis. They couldn’t even get Nazi party members to stop shopping at Jewish department stores. When the Nazis tried to organize boycotts, it set off panic buying. Jews continued to dominate retail, and even Hitler bought drapery from a Jewish store.  https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1659910782220668929  "Nazi party members who made large purchases at Jewish shops included Hermann Göring...Germans continued to keep their assets in Jewish banks. High Nazi party members patronized Jewish-owned hotels despite official boycotts, and some even formed business partnerships with Jews."  Statistics are far more important than anecdotes or nazi propaganda based on motivated reasoning.
Look at Denmark who actually keeps track of this stuff   https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GJNgi5ubkAACB4m?format=jpg&name=large  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FtTwntsaEAA2wZD?format=png&name=small
The European far right didn't all of a sudden gain power because they fell in love with Nazis all of a sudden. To equivocate what's happening right now to the rise of German Nazi-ism is insane.  Sweden, btw, made it impossible to do data collection on certain 'uncomfortable' types of statistics based on national origin:  https://x.com/Scientific_Bird/status/1822706208467247178"
Of course, some left winger claimed that Sweden didn't give the migrants free housing, free food, free healthcare, free education, integration services etc and accused those disagreeing with him of racism

Meme - Keith Woods @KeithWoodsYT: "I know the attendees wanted to experience diversity, but actually stabbing them is a bit much"
BNO News: "BREAKING: At least 9 people stabbed at Festival of Diversity in Solingen, Germany. Reports of multiple fatalities"

German police arrest 26-year-old man over Solingen stabbing attack - "The suspect, a 26-year-old Syrian man, turned himself in and admitted to the crime...   According to the newspapers Bild and Spiegel, the suspect was a 26-year-old Syrian who arrived in Germany in December 2022 and had been granted a protected immigration status often given to those fleeing the war-torn country."

Thread by @AndrewHammel1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The revelation that the Syrian Islamic extremist Issa al H. who killed three people and injured eight in Solingen was a failed asylum seeker who should have been deported is making some waves. But how likely are such attacks? Let's do the math.
Last year, 351,000 illegal immigrants were allowed into Germany after saying the word "asylum" either at the border or when they walked into a local police station. That's literally all you need to do. They were mostly young and male (about 70% males under 40), and came primarily from Syria, Afghanistan, and Turkey. That's 254,700 young males in 2023 alone; numbers for 2024 are expected to be similar. Let's say 99% of these men are sane, have moderate religious views, and no latent or overt violent tendencies.
We have to guess, since there is no preliminary psychological or security screening of these arrivals; what screening there is happens long after they have been let into Germany to live at taxpayer's expense, with no restrictions on their movement. That means that in 2023, Germany allowed in 2,547 men who *are* either mentally ill, dangerous fanatics, or some combination of both. Seven ticking time bombs every day.
Since Germany only deports about 5-6% of failed asylum-seekers in any given year, these men will stay here for years, perhaps their entire lives. It's matter of pure luck whether they will actually be triggered by some news story or personal insult or radical online sermon. It's a matter of pure luck whether some foreign intelligence agency will detect them them preparing for an attack.
Most German terror arrests come from tips from abroad, since Germany's own BND is "collapsing" from underfunding and bureaucracy, according to two former agency chiefs. I've said it before and I'll say it again here: The problem is *the sheer numbers*.
Germany admits far more people than it can screen or monitor, year after year, ensuring a steady stream of entirely preventable crimes. Will this latest atrocity result in meaningful change, unlike all the previous ones? I'd say the chances are maybe 1 in 3... "
"Wir schaffen das"

Meme - Klaus Arminius @Klaus_Arminius: "A clear provocation from Muslim immigrants who often cry about “Islamophobia”.   Yesterday a Syrian killed 3 Germans and injured several others in Solingen.  And now Islamists wave ISIS flags in front of Nuremberg Cathedral."

Thread by @AndrewHammel1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "If you're wondering why news about the Solingen knife rampage suddenly disappeared from the mainstream media overnight, it's because a suspect was identified and was, predictably, a Muslim foreigner. At that point, mainstream journalists suddenly lose all curiosity and move on to more important stories such as gay penguins or Ozempic prices.
But for anyone who actually wants more facts -- [record scratch noise] Wait, why are you so interested in just some random everyday knife-rampage the likes of which have always occurred in Germany (ever heard of dueling)? What is your agenda here precisely? Don't you realize you're playing into the hands of the extreme- ultra- far-right?  Well *if you insist*, here's the man suspected of ramming a long knife directly into the throats of random festival-goers at the Festival of Diversity in Solingen.
His clothes are still stained by the victims' blood. Issa al H. is a 26-year-old Syrian who arrived in 2022 and, like all Syrians, was granted immediate residency with no background check. Islamic State has already taken credit for the attack, although that hasn't been confirmed. Witnesses report Issa screamed "Allahu Akbar" as he stabbed the victims."

Germany: Two-thirds of Syrian refugees unable to support themselves - "Syrians are the main beneficiaries of refugee protection in Germany, yet many are still forced to rely on state welfare to survive. New figures show that only around 35% of Syrians of working age are able to make a living.  After a decade of conflict in Syria it seems unlikely that the refugees who fled abroad will be able to return home soon. In Germany, where a large proportion of Syrian refugees have applied for protection, many have found it hard to make a living. Official unemployment figures show that nearly two-thirds (65%) of Syrians who are able to work actually rely either entirely or partially on receiving public benefits.  This means that Syrians are much more likely than other migrant groups to be receiving Hartz IV benefits, as they are known in Germany: Only about 37% of migrants from Somalia and 44% of Afghans are on welfare, according to statistics from the Federal Employment Agency... Syrians top the list of nationalities of new arrivals in Germany since 2015"
Weird. We keep being told that accepting Syrian refugees was a no brainer because they were highly educated and non violent

Ralph Schoellhammer on X - "There is now a de-facto Islamist veto on everyday aspects of your life: "Everyone has to decide for themselves whether they go to festivities, to football matches, or are on public transport." Says German Police Chief M. Röhrl, because police won't be able to protect you."
Of course, cracking down on terrorism will mean the terrorists have won

Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "Usually scapegoats don't stab 6 people."
Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "Funny how ‘we should have less immigration’ now makes one ‘far right’."
Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "equating reducing immigration with genociding jews is wild"

Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "I mean when the very people you claim to be helping are going stabby stabby and killing you at a festival celebrating diversity should we really be surprised?"
"What makes it even worse that the first reaction is usually more concerned about "not letting hate divide us" and the far right backlash than the gruesome stabbing itself."

Visegrád 24 on X - "British journalists from @SkyNews worry that the Islamist terror attack in Germany in which 3 people were killed at a “diversity festival” could be exploited by “the far-right” Via @danwootton"

Visegrád 24 on X - "German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser makes a statement on y-day’s mass stabbing in which 3 people were killed & 4 critically wounded She appeals for people not to allow themselves to be "divided" & affected by those who want to "sow hatred" Via @niusde_"
Weird how terrorism in Europe by migrants from Country A is a justifiable reaction to colonialism from over half a century ago and the US bombing Country B, but Europeans are not justified in being concerned about all the terrorism happening today

Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "Women problem will be solved by immigrants for Germany.  Honestly queer problem too.  If anything, Germans should be for more refugees from Mena regions if they want to ‘solve’ these problems"
The left wing answer to migrant terrorism - import even more immigrants

Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "'we can't do anything'
I never said we can't do anything. Why are you lying like this?  We could stop using fossil fuels which fund these wars in the middle east. But oh wait... It's the right that wants us to keep using fossil fuels while the left wants to stop using them.  But like always, people on the right try to frame this as "the left doesn't want to do anything" because people on the right know they pathetically don't have any proposal to do anything aside from bullying migrants, which won't fix anything. All it will do is hurt people.  But that's all that is needed for people like yourself: people getting hurt."
The "solution" to anything is to push the left wing agenda

Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "'The left approaches immigration from a rational approach based on reality.'
“We can’t do anything” isn’t a rational approach based in reality. Countries have been protecting their borders for millennia. Many still do, very effectively. It’s only left wing parties in the West which express this extreme version of learned helplessness. Either they’re complete and utter idiots or they’re lying. Take your pick."

Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "'If you want to vote them just because of immigrants, think that you are probably throwing other groups under the bus.'
Which is literally what happened with the Salafist bus driver. Except, it was people on the Christmas festival that were "thrown under the bus". See 2016 Berlin incident  The problem in Germany in general is lack of any background checks, because the Auslaenderbehoerde is as incompetent as it can get. They don't even speak or read/write English and think that paper trails are worth gold or something. Not kidding.  Immigrants with a Master degree have to get translated and accredditation verification documents for everything since their middle school days which takes them more than a year just for the paper trails.  On the other hand, everyone that throws away their passports at the Polish border gets Asyl immediately.  Guess what happens, people start to game the system."

Germany's far right predicted to make biggest gains since Nazi era in key state elections : r/anime_titties - "So, the ones that have done eff all to fix things, and keep saying 'all is well, and we will arrest you, if you use naughty words on social media to say otherwise.'?  I don't understand how wanting clear rules for immigration, and deportation of criminal immigrants equals nazi's, according to the left. I mean, I get it from the politicians, they're just looking out for their paycheck. But it takes a high level of naivety to believe everything will be fine, with just some more tolerance, and silencing ppl that believe otherwise... Something about staggering numbers of sexual assault and ppl getting stabbed for no logical reason , while being called a racist for not wanting to be the entire world's free all inclusive resort brings on knee-jerk gut reactions. There's only so much ppl are willing to take, until enough is enough."

Meme - Uberboyo @uberboyo: "Dubai is more “multicultural” than Britain  But it grants the native Arabs enormous privileges like free loans for houses  British “multiculturalism” involves a hate fetish for its native population  Now it’s unstable and all the millionaires are leaving - it’s a death cult"
Europe Invasion @EuropeInvasionn: "🚨BREAKING  UK government prepares to deploy asylum seekers across the country.  Immigrants will be given priority over Britons when it comes to finding housing."

Uberboyo on X - "This debunks quite a bit of the idea that the "elites" are doing this -  it seems like the elites are leaving  Whats happening its more of an "institutional sink"  The biggest expenses in the British state are welfare, healthcare, and pensions - these empower an enormous bureaucracy  The average bureaucrat is paid $50k a year - upper limit of a senior position seems to be $180k  Most innovators avoid the bureaucracy at all costs - they go for the private sector and try become rich and invent things  So the people who end up running the country are selected to be herd morality compliant, tolerant of low pay, and prone to bribery  A great political question:  Theres ALOT of power in the 400k millionaires who left the UK - as a group they have at least $1 trillion in wealth  The problem is they're individualist, disorganised, and aloof  How to organise this faction?"
On Elites leaving the UK

Charlotte Gill on X - "PAID content: While many Brits have made clear they want legal and illegal migration to come down, taxpayers have been charged £2.4 million for research on "Migrant Health Exclusion" and £796k for a SOAS study criticising the "hostile environment":"
PAID EXCLUSIVE: How university grants quietly fuel Britain’s border crisis - "Forget the approximate £10 billion a year the UK is spending on accommodation for asylum seekers. On top of that, I have found countless examples of state funding for studies such as Decolonising Fashion and Textiles - Design for Cultural Sustainability with Refugee Communities and academics critical of the “hostile environment”/ national borders.  These projects were underway while the Conservative government was in charge. The same one that told us it wanted to “stop the boats” and paid the Rwandan government £240 million to help it as part of its asylum plan. All the while, taxpayers have been (mostly unknowingly) charged for research “to evaluate how effectively art museums can support refugee/migrant artists and communities and build solidarity across communities”, along with many other projects along the same lines. It’s as if the state is saying “Don’t come here! But if you do… fancy joining arts club?”... illegal (and legal) migration numbers have to be manageable and affordable, and Britain’s aren’t. Over 19,000 have entered the UK by small boat in 2024, with a quarter of our aid budget spent on hosting asylum seekers.  The mess at the borders, in turn, means it’s harder to work out who’s vulnerable (if they even make it to Britain in the first place). Around 83 percent of small boat arrivals in the 12 months to June 2024 were male and - where age was recorded - over 40 percent were between 25 and 39 years old. Where are the women and children, you might ask? Especially those suffering under the Taliban.  Even if the system improved - and we had a manageable number of people we had a good idea were genuine refugees - I’m not sure how any of the taxpayer projects I’ve found would help. Take this one below (“Dancing Dialogues”), which I’ll outline later. Housing is one of the most obvious things to spend money on. It was noticeably absent when Tory MPs decided Britain would “open its arms” to Ukrainians. There were stories of refugees returning to their war-torn homeland, as a measure of how desperate the rental situation is here.  Mental health services matter too. The Times has a very sad story today about 13 confirmed or suspected cases of suicide (of people being processed in the asylum system) since 2022, including a 14-year-old girl from Iraq who threw herself from a building (thankfully surviving) and a “21-year-old Russian woman who took her life at a canal in north London”.  Instead taxpayer money has gone to projects such as one that seems to claim chatting about glass can help Kurdish women, including those who have been displaced by war. Most of the projects I’ll show you are similarly abstract, the majority funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (the quango I write about most on Woke Waste).  In short, we have a situation where the UK is spending approx £8 million a day on asylum hotels (the last figure in the Home Office’s annual report 2023), Labour has promised to restore the international development budget to 0.7 per cent of GDP (when the country can “afford it” - LOL) and we are spending MILLIONS on ridiculous academia marketed as support for refugees/ migrants/ diverse/ vibrant communities of lived experience.  To let you make your own mind up, here’s a selection of grants adding up to £8,764,274 (not included: the PhDs and theatre entry at the end)"

Meme - BowTiedMara @BowTiedMara: "Meloni's government reduces the arrival of illegal immigrants by 60% in the first quarter of the year.
-It has withdrawn all types of payment or subsidy.
-If you enter illegally you go back home.
They don't go to Italy anymore. In Spain , arrivals have increased by 277%"

We must be a party that rejects mass migration - "For nearly 30 years the public have voted for lower immigration, only for politicians of all stripes to raise it. Even after Brexit, when we finally regained control of our borders, the public were betrayed. Decisions taken in 2019 relaxed controls and sent net migration spiralling to historically unprecedented levels. Freedom of movement with Europe was replaced with a system so liberal it effectively amounted to freedom of movement with the rest of the world.  In the first quarter of this year, the government issued more family visas to the dependants and relatives of Somali nationals (269) than it did work visas to physicists, chemists and biologists from all other countries put together (198). The post-Brexit health and social care route – which was forecast to draw just a few thousand workers – ballooned and still managed to leave social care with huge numbers of vacancies. Even once corrected, the consequences will be with us for a long time, as yesterday’s data made clear... we lost because, for 14 years, we failed to deliver our promises on the economy, the NHS, and most consequentially of all, migration.  The public aren’t obsessed with this topic. They do not wish to spend every day thinking about it. They just want action to match words. And despite the rhetoric of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer’s policies tell a different story. Despite the increase in spousal visas, Labour have already scrapped the plan to raise the minimum income requirement for family visas from £29,000 to £38,700. It’s a return to the type of low-skilled immigration that has burdened, not boosted, our economy.  They are also considering bringing back free movement with the EU for those under 30. Of course there is a place for highly selective and capped youth mobility schemes, but this proposal is neither. It would be an insult to the 17 million who voted for control over our immigration system. And as the Budget approaches, expect to see the Chancellor pushing for visa liberalisations as an easy way to inflate GDP figures. The headline growth rates might be higher as a result, but it doesn’t translate into more money in the pockets of working people. In fact, the evidence suggests it will suppress living standards and deter productivity investment. Migrants can bring skills, but they don’t bring homes, GP surgeries or motorways, so our capital stocks are diluted between more people.  As I have written at length in these pages, the only way to end the cycle of broken promises is to create a legally binding cap on immigration. That figure should be in the tens of thousands – or less – as was the case before the onset of mass migration initiated by Tony Blair.  Our goal should be to become the grammar school of the Western world, attracting top talent – those that contribute more in taxes and skills, than they take out in services. It won’t be plain sailing but we must do it."
It's only oligarchy to have government policy not match popular demand when it doesn't push the left wing agenda

The Guardian on X - "‘I wouldn’t wish this on anyone’: the food delivery riders living in ‘caravan shantytowns’ in Bristol"
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 on X - "“We came here from Brazil in the hope of making money but we make nothing. We are living in shantytowns, the conditions are terrible. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone”
“Go back to Brazil then”
“No”"

“I will kill you and your family” - Iceland Monitor - "“I will kill you and your family,” he said several times during the hearing in Reykjanes District Court yesterday. “You never know where you have him, he has a great violent mind, so I took these threats very seriously,” said a police officer who testified in court in the case of Mohamad Kourani today.  Kourani is charged with the stabbing attack in the OK Market along with other offenses...  After Kourani’s attack in the OK market, Helgi Magnús Gunnarsson, the deputy state prosecutor, revealed that Kourani had also been threatening him for years and had been sentenced. The charges were: assault, break-in and entering, violation of a restraining order, property damage, violation of the quarantine law, violation against authorities, for deceiving the police, violation of the weapons law, forgery, and traffic violations.  Gunnarsson said it was strange that after the attack in the OK market, the man had not been deported and he believed the blame lay with the Icelandic parliament. Afterward, Minister of Justice Guðrún Hafsteinsdóttir said that the case showed that changes were necessary when it came to cases involving people who had been granted protection in Iceland. Kourani came to Iceland in 2018 from Syria and was granted international protection in Iceland."