How the World Turned Against Israel: an interview with Joshua Muravchik

From 2014:

Fathom – How the World Turned Against Israel: an interview with Joshua Muravchik

"Israel was once the plucky underdog supported by Western public opinion, Left and Right. Today, it is the object of a global campaign to demonise the state and question its very right to exist. A new book by Joshua Muravchik, Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel (Encounter Books, 2014), seeks to explain this fall...

Alan Johnson: Let’s begin in 1967. Why was the Six Day War such a turning point?

Joshua Muravchik: For three main reasons, the third of which has different component parts. The first reason is simply that Israel was never again to seem as vulnerable or endangered as it did at that moment. With memories of the Holocaust still fresh, many people around the world – and particularly in Europe – shuddered at the idea that there might be a reprise of that. The Arab spokesmen were making blood-chilling threats and mobilised their armies on Israel’s borders, so there was a rallying to Israel’s side. Then, when Israel won so easily and so overwhelmingly, it didn’t seem to be so endangered.

Second, Israel’s smashing victory was a terrible humiliation to the Soviet Union – Israel was in the Western camp in the Cold War and the Arabs were in the Soviet camp. This had consequences. It was very moving for Jews in the Soviet Union, many of whom had no substantive Jewish identity at that point. They weren’t practising Jews, religiously, and they mostly didn’t have any other cultural connection to Jewishness, because it wasn’t really allowed (except that it was stamped onto their internal passports). It touched off this movement of Soviet Jews demanding to emigrate, which was the first relatively mass protest movement in the USSR in its history.

On top of that, I think it gave some inspiration to dissidents within the Eastern Bloc who had been unhappy under Soviet rule (to put it mildly), but who had very faint hope of being able to do anything about it. The fact that little Israel could defeat larger, Soviet-armed clients was a ray of hope for them. The Kremlin was infuriated and perhaps somewhat frightened by all this, so it amplified its global campaign of anti-Zionism and began to treat Zionism as a major global menace. That had some reverberations around the world, as a part of world opinion was subject to Soviet influence.

The third factor was that this defeat was also an immense humiliation to Nasser. Nasser was, I think to this day, the most popular leader there has ever been in the Arab world and his ideology was pan-Arabism. At that moment, pan-Arabism was the ‘hottest’ idea in the Arab world, perhaps in a way analogous to the excitement around Islamism of recent decades. This terrible bringing low of Nasser also cleared the field for the renewed expression of particular nationalisms – especially the emergence of Palestinian nationalism – which had not been a factor in the Arab world (and hadn’t even been a strong factor in the Palestinian world) until that moment.

The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was formed in 1964 – by Nasser – and it did not have an agenda of creating a Palestinian state or Palestinian sovereignty; those two things were not mentioned in the Palestinian National Charter written in 1964. But after 1967, those who were nationalists, namely a little group led by Arafat based in Kuwait who had formed Fatah, moved into the PLO, which they had not been part of, and took it over. (I believe Arafat became chairman in 1969). They made it a platform for Palestinian nationalism which began to be espoused among the Palestinian people, among other Arabs and on a global stage.

I said that part three of my three-part answer had different parts to it: the other side of this coin was that Israel ended up occupying the West Bank and Gaza (as well as the Golan Heights, which was a different matter). Ruling over several million Palestinian Arabs, suddenly Israel was an occupier and the conflict became redefined. Instead of the Arabs versus little Israel, it became Israel against a much smaller and weaker Palestine and that put Israel in a different light. Up until now, people understood the conflict was about the effort to deny the Jews a state of their own; now it was recast as the Jews denying somebody else a state...

The material factors began with a campaign of terrorism by the Palestinians and they may have even surprised themselves at how effective they were at intimidating both Europeans and moderate Arabs. If you’d have asked me what their goal in this terror campaign was, I would have said that, more than intimidation, the goal was simply to draw the world’s attention to the Palestinian cause by these dramatic acts. And the aeroplane hijackings, bombings and sometimes machine-gunning did draw the world’s attention. Even though people didn’t like terrorism, it made them more aware of the Palestinian cause and it had an intimidating effect which evoked a kind of appeasement response.

We know that several European governments made quiet deals with the Palestinians to keep the violence off their soil. One barometer of this was that in virtually every case – and there were dozens – where the perpetrators were taken into custody after a hijacking or terror act, they were soon released. This was sometimes in exchange for other hostages who had been seized by the terrorists and sometimes as part of some other diplomatic deal. This was a measure of how much governments, particularly European governments, didn’t want to be embroiled in a conflict with these groups and were inclined to make concessions to keep things quiet. Something similar was at work among the moderate Arabs; Arafat’s deputy, “Abu Iyad,” even boasted in his memoirs that he had created ‘a climate of terror’ around the Rabat Arab League summit in 1974, which declared the PLO the sole representative of the Palestinian people. This climate of terror was one of the ways the moderate Arabs were whipped into line. So the terrorism, oddly, even though it alienated and was ugly to people, did in fact advance the Palestinian cause.

On top of that, and in the same era, came the Oil Embargo (1973); in that case we even had some European leaders saying openly that because they were dependent on Arab regimes for energy supplies they had to adjust their policies in order not to alienate those regimes...

The third thing I would put in this category of ‘material’ pressures is the overwhelming weight of numbers on the Arab side. There were 22 Arab League states to one Israel, 57 member states of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation to one Israel and 100 Muslims in the world for each Jew. I think the Arabs learned how to take advantage of the diplomatic and economic muscle that this constituted, above all in taking control of the UN. Outside of the Security Council, where there is a Western veto, they took control in all other UN bodies and used the UN as a battering ram against Israel.

AJ: You talk in the book about a new paradigm of progressive thought. What was it about that paradigm that meant Israel was the big loser?

JM: In a nutshell, after a century or so, the paradigm which came from Marx – of a class struggle – had lost a good deal of its allure and was pushed aside by the new paradigm of racial, national and ethnic struggle. That grew out of the anti-colonial movements which reverberated in Europe and were overlaid by the Civil Rights Movement in the US. In the US, Civil Rights was something different to anti-colonialism, but both were seen to be part of one broader struggle of the people of colour against the white man, or as is sometimes put, the ‘Rest against the West.’ I remember for example Jesse Jackson, at the height of his considerable popularity in the US, made a visit to Cuba and launched into a litany of slogans, the theme of which was ‘our time has come’ and where the first person plural of ‘our time’ meant blacks in America, Latinos and other third-world people fighting against the West. It was seen somehow as all part of one omnibus struggle and this paradigm really was more exciting to my generation and subsequent ones – generations post-World War Two – than the older class struggle paradigm. The labour movement today, (certainly in the US, but I think throughout the West) is a less exciting, vibrant or inspiring than it was during my parent’s generation.

Now if you look at the world and see a drama of the ‘Rest against the West’, or the people of colour against the white man, and perceive that struggle as the main moral drama of the age, then Israel comes across as the Western white guys, whilst the Arabs and Palestinians are the anti-colonial people of colour. It doesn’t matter what the details of any episode are: history tells you that one side are the ‘good guys’ and the forces of the future while the other side are the forces of the past which need to be swept away.

AJ: You devote an entire chapter of the book to the late Edward Said. Why is he so important to this story?

JM: One, he was the apotheosis of this new paradigm which I have described. Two, he was immensely influential. For example, a few years ago a reviewer in The Guardian described him as ‘perhaps the most influential intellectual of the 20th century,’ and I don’t think that raised any eyebrows. Over here, a few years ago, an internet search of university syllabi found 868 different courses in American colleges and universities where one or another book by Edward Said is assigned...

I try to show in the book that his work is really flawed in a fundamental way; not only is it something which is mistaken, or that I disagree with, but it rests on a kind of intellectual fraud – arguing a hypothesis without doing the obvious scholarly tests of it, in fact quite conscientiously rigging the evidence beforehand to sustain the hypothesis, even though any reasonable way of formulating the test would have refuted the hypothesis. His hypothesis in his most famous book Orientalism is that ‘every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist and almost totally ethno-centric.’ Later in the book he says explicitly that the generalisations he makes about Europeans also apply to Americans. What it boils down to is: every white person is inherently racist, which is of course self-contradictory, because if you say every white person is inherently racist, that in itself is a racist statement! And if the racism of white people really is inherent – if it’s in their DNA – then how can you make a moral judgement of it?

That was the essence of what Said had to say. I call it a fraud, but I also think it perfectly captured not only this paradigm, but the mood of an era in which Europeans were beset by guilt over colonialism and Americans were beset by guilt over the whole history of race in America. This guilt would have been much more useful had it burgeoned back when Asia and Africa were still colonies or when slavery or Jim Crow were still being practised, but it says something about the weakness of human beings that the guilt seems to grow larger after the fact, when it doesn’t really matter very much.

AJ: Was Said the person who took this ‘West vs. the Rest’ paradigm and applied it to the Israel-Palestine conflict, making the conflict intelligible in those terms?

JM: He was a very curious Palestinian in the sense that he had grown up in Egypt in a very well to-do Protestant home. His name, Edward, he once explained to an interviewer, was taken from Prince Edward. Said’s father was a man who made wealth and was fiercely eager to culturally westernise his own life and family. Said went to an elite high school in the US and then to American colleges and universities; his initial field was literary criticism. So although he was of nominal Palestinian background, he seemed like a standard Western left-of-centre intellectual and that was how he presented himself at the time he wrote Orientalism, the book which made his career. After Orientalism, most of his writing was about the Palestinian cause and he served on the Palestinian National Council. In later interviews he said that when he wrote Orientalism, he had the Palestinian cause in mind all along, even though he had not acknowledged this in the book...

I would be acting more like Edward Said if I didn’t also acknowledge the things that cut against my main hypothesis, namely the things Israel has done that are offensive to people, or that people do not understand and which put Israel in a bad light. It’s very important to address these. There are two related parts to this. The first concerns where the writ comes from for Israel’s claim to its existence, to this territory. The second is the actual behaviour of Israel on the territory occupied in 1967.

I understand that from Begin’s point of view, and the point of view of many or most Zionists, Israel is the ancient and the biblical home of the Jewish people. But I think for the rest of the world, the claim to the land can’t be based on that. It has to be based on the Balfour Declaration, which was then incorporated into the treaties ending the First World War, creating the legal Palestine Mandate owned by Britain. And it is further based on the UN Partition Agreement. This all creates a legal case for Israel’s right to exist. There is certainly also a strong legal case in international law for Israeli actions of self-defence and there’s even a strong legal case for some changes in the temporary borders along the armistice lines of 1949 (the borders in existence at the outbreak of the Six Day War) – that is, legal basis in the form of UN Security Council Resolution 242, reiterated in Resolution 338 – which spoke of secure and recognised borders...

Compounding that was Begin’s decision to encourage settlements in the West Bank. Some of them had begun, but they had been mostly – not entirely – discouraged by the Labour governments until then. As I said before, there was a wide feeling inside Israel, which was pretty much accepted in the US and to some extent elsewhere, that there would be some adjustments to the 1949 Armistice lines to make Israel more secure. If there were some settlements in areas which had some clear connection to the need for security, I think that would have been accepted by many. But Begin’s project, or the project he supported, was to use settlements in order to try to cement control of the West Bank. That was both foolish from a public relations point of view and also really hard to defend on principle. You could make a case saying that countries which get attacked and subjected to aggression by their neighbours and successfully defend themselves may end up occupying some territory which belonged to the aggressor and hang on to it. That has happened in other places and no one has complained too much. But in this case, the terrible problem is that there are Arabs living in these territories. In the modern world there’s no justifiable way to deny them some form of sovereignty or self-determination.

The third part was the 1982 Lebanon War which was engineered by Sharon but with Begin acquiescing in it. The war had an element of justifiability; the PLO was camped on Israel’s northern border and had vowed to destroy Israel. It kept up a ‘tat-tat-tat’ of terror attacks. Israel was not obligated to endure that, so the idea of pushing the PLO away from the border was in itself justifiable under the rubric of self-defence. But Israel went much further than that – it wanted to re-make Lebanon. This was unlike Israel’s other wars, which were clearly wars of self-defence; this was really a war of choice and a war of a certain ambition. Not imperial ambition, Israel was not trying to seize any of Lebanon, but it was trying to install a different government in Lebanon...

AJ: The book also identifies a development within Israel that helped cause the world to fall out of love with the country; a kind of obsessive focus on Israel’s mistakes by some Israelis in what you call an ‘adversary culture’. Any outsider looking to demonise Israel, you note, ‘has already had his research done for him by Israel’s home-grown adversary culture and can couch his vituperations in quotes from Israeli sources.’ What is the ‘Israeli adversary culture’ and why has it been so damaging for Israel’s international standing?

JM: It was surprising to me to come across it. I thought that Israelis universally had a sense of the fragility of their country. I’ve had a reader comment to me that this was a particularly painful part of the book to read.

In the US, we had a strand of opinion which was very substantial in my generation in the 1960s, the so-called New Left; people who think the US really is a terrible country. It was common for these radicals to spell America with a ‘k’ rather than a ‘c’ to suggest something dramatic and make an implicit analogy with Nazi Germany. People would speak of being in the ‘belly of the beast,’ with the US being the ‘beast.’ There was a whole strand of political opinion in the US which looked upon the US itself as the main problem in the world; as if the US were the ‘evil empire’ as Reagan called the USSR. It was surprising for me to discover that the exact same thing exists in Israel; that there’s a layer of political opinion in the radical Left in Israel that looks upon Israel as a monster, as a terrible country and as something that shouldn’t exist and should be replaced by some kind of multi-ethnic state.

How important is it? Just like the radical Left in the US it can’t get enough votes to get a seat in Parliament, but it does have substantial representation in the academic world. There are some petitions which get signed by some hundred academics saying the most extreme things and even suggesting that Israel should somehow self-dissolve in favour of a multi-national state. This isn’t so influential in Israel, but when it pops up it makes the headlines outside of Israel. There are also groups, NGOs which form that may have the adherence of only a small number of Israelis but then get funded by European governments who are very critical of Israel. If a small group is able to get a substantial grant from the EU or from some EU country, they can get an office, some staff and make a lot of noise – and so they do...

In the Zionist movement there were always different strands, but the dominant strand was Labour Zionism. As you know, Marxist thought was very strongly represented among Jews and Jewish intellectuals going back to the 19th century. Labour Zionism put together the idea of Zionism with the global ideals of socialism. The idea of the Labour Zionists was that in creating Israel, they would not only create a homeland which would be a refuge, redemptive for the Jewish people; it would also be a model socialist society of high ideals. I think that was accomplished to a surprising degree by the kibbutz movement. To my eyes, the kibbutzim were the farthest mankind ever got towards creating a real socialism that was free, voluntary, democratic, egalitarian and completely conformed to the ideals which inspired so many people over generations to become socialists. Private property was really abolished – in some kibbutzim there was not even personal clothing! At the end of the week you’d turn in a bunch of laundry to the central laundry and get back a stack of cleanly laundered communal clothes to wear for the next week.

Some of the esprit de corps of Israel and some of the affection for it in the outside world was that it was not merely the Jewish redemption or the Jewish refuge, but a model of socialism. But the model petered out, as different socialist models did around the world. In the case of the kibbutzim, it was in the third generation: the founders built these wonderful utopian models, their children laboured to preserve them but their grandchildren grew tired of living in this particular way and wanted more individualism. Israel moved away from socialism, as did most of the world. That benefited Israel economically – the country grew more prosperous as it moved more towards market economics – but it robbed the country of two things. First, that favour in the eyes of others which it had earned for its socialist experiment. Second, the self-identity of building a model society. Israel became a country of people living their own daily lives for their own well-being, with a diminished sense of higher purpose...

We have a very different situation in the US from what you have in the UK or in Europe. American public opinion is still very strongly favourable to Israel, more so than the US government at this moment, but because the US government is very sensitive to public opinion it can’t be too unfriendly, and it isn’t. In the US the key thing is that Israel gets tremendous and crucial support from Evangelical Protestants. Yet, the American Jewish community mostly keeps the Evangelicals at arm’s-length and is uneasy with this support. It’s perfectly clear to me why that feeling is there; historically, Jews suffered persecution in Europe and the secular world was much more inclined to favour citizenship and liberation for the Jews than the religious world. This is exemplified by the Dreyfus Affair, which is in a sense the emblematic expression of the battle in European opinion about Jews and anti-Semitism. It’s kind of ingrained in Jews that the more secular Christians are more likely to be our friends and the more religious ones are more likely to persecute us. But it needs to get un-ingrained because in the US Evangelical Protestants are really ardent, important friends of Israel. They also have friendlier attitudes towards Jews per se than others, so it really behoves the Jewish community in the US to open its heart to the Evangelicals and reciprocate this friendly attitude.

In Europe, the main thing is to fight back fearlessly, especially on an intellectual level; the anti-Israel sentiment there has taken on the spirit of a lynch mob. People get intimidated and either keep quiet or defend Israel in very apologetic ways. Israel does have its flaws, but these flaws are first of all not greater – and perhaps are much less – than those of any other Western country. Second of all, if you compare them to the flaws of the enemies of Israel, to any of the Arab societies or the radical Islamist movements which are spearheading the fight against Israel – it’s like comparing something very small to something enormous.

Israel is a very good country in many ways: in terms of making a good life for its people (including its Arab citizens), in terms of the generous things it does towards the outside world and even in terms of things it does toward its Palestinian neighbours. This is true even if you think that Netanyahu’s stance in negotiations is insufficiently conciliatory, which it may be. The number of Palestinians who are treated every year in Israeli hospitals is enormous. Even during the recent war in Gaza there was this constant flow of Palestinians crossing the border into Israel whenever there were lulls in the fighting, to be treated in Israeli hospitals. Palestinian doctors often do their training residency in Israeli hospitals. This is one example I can cite, but there are many. All countries are imperfect because all human beings are imperfect. You can make a list of things to criticise in Israel, but if you measure it by any consistent scale – comparing Israel to other countries and particularly comparing it to its neighbours and enemies – it has a defensible and an admirable record. People who support Israel’s right to exist and want to defend Israel against this lynch mob atmosphere ought to be un-apologetic."

Links - 4th December 2024 (1 - Artificial Intelligence)

Meme - "ChatGPT 4o
List the 20 largest religious terrorist organizations in the world. Rank them by approximate size, and specify what religion they adhere to. No explanations.
1. ISIS (Islam)
2. Al-Qaeda (Islam)
3. Boko Haram (Islam)
4. Taliban (Islam)
5. Al-Shabaab (Islam)
6. Hezbollah (Islam)
7. Hamas (Islam)
8. Lashkar-e-Taiba (Islam)
9. Islamic Jihad Movement in Pakistan (Islam)
10. Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Islam)
11. Jaish-e-Mohammed (Islam)
12. Jemaah Islamiyah (Islam)
13. Abu Sayyaf Group (Islam)
!4. Haqqani Network (Islam)
15. Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (Islam)
16. Ansar al-Sharia (Islam)
17. Ansar al-lslam (Islam)
18. Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (Islam)
19. Ansar Bayt al Maqdis (Islam)
20. Tehreek-e-**z-e-Shariat-e-"
The "safety" team really screwed up here

Meme - "List the 20 largest religious terrorist organizations in the world. Rank them by approximate size, and specify what religion they adhere to. No explanations.
Grok @grok
1. Islamic State (IS) - Sunni Islam
2. Taliban - Sunni Islam
3. Al-Qaeda - Sunni Islam
4. Boko Haram - Sunni Islam
5. Al-Shabaab - Sunni Islam
6. Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) - Sunni Islam
7. Islamic State - Sinai Province - Sunni Islam
8. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) - Sunni Islam
9. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant - Khorasan Province (ISIL-KP) - Sunni Islam
10. Islamic State - West Africa Province (ISWAP) - Sunni Islam
11. Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) - Sunni Islam
12. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar - Sunni Islam
13. Haqqani Network - Sunni Islam
14. Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) - Sunni Islam
15. Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) - Sunni Islam
16. Harkat-ul-Mujahideen - Sunni Islam
17. Hizbul Mujahideen - Sunni Islam
18. Ansar al-Islam - Sunni Islam
19. Abu Sayyaf - Sunni Islam
20. Jemaah Islamiyah - Sunni Islam"

Meme - tweet davidson @andykreed: "legacy software companies adding an ai chatbot to their product *soap dispenser on bar soap*"

Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’ - "we reported on the CEO of Baidu voicing an even more pessimistic opinion – that the AI bubble would burst and that just 1% of companies would continue to pick up the pieces after the predicted ‘pop.’"

Thread by @rcolvile on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Hugely important paper from @CPSThinkTank today - showing significant and repeated left-wing bias among all of the most popular LLMs on questions of politics and policy. For the paper, @DavidRozado asked 24 LLMs a range of neutral questions:
- To propose multiple policy ideas for the UK/EU
- To describe UK/European leaders
- To describe UK/European parties
- To describe various mainstream ideologies
- To describe various extreme ideologies
For the UK and EU, we asked for ideas on tax, housing, environment, civil rights, defence, etc etc. In total, we ended up with 14,000 policy proposals for each. More than 80% were left-coded, often markedly so. That blue strip on the right is 'Rightwing GPT', which David describes here. Unsurprisingly, it was the only one to return consistently right-of-centre answers. (The left/right analysis was done by feeding the answers into GPT - AI judging AIs...) davidrozado.substack.com/p/rightwinggpt
Here are samples of the text generated. Asked for neutral policy ideas, the AIs serve up rent control, more migration, 'sustainability and social justice', wealth taxes, 'mandatory diversity and inclusion training', 'increase diversity and inclusion in all areas of society' etc. When it comes to political leaders, the picture is more nuanced/mixed. We asked LLMs to describe a range of leaders from the largest 15 European countries, elected from 2000-2022, omitting those that weren't clearly on the left or right. But... When it comes to political parties in the same countries, the AIs consistently used more positive language to describe those on the left vs those on the right.
On a -1 to +1 scale, 'conversational' LLMs like ChatGPT had a positive sentiment score of +0.71 for left-wing parties, vs +0.15 for their right-leaning counterparts. This was true across all the largest European nations: Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain. The same pattern is true when it comes to political ideologies. We asked about 'the left', 'the right', 'left-leaning political orientation' etc, but also 'progressivism', 'social democracy', 'social conservatism', 'Christian democracy'. For every LLM we studied (apart from Rightwing GPT), the language for left-wing ideologies was more positive, often dramatically so. Conversational LLMs averaged +0.79 vs +0.24 for right-coded phrases. Perhaps the most dramatic result, however, came when David fed in phrases like far-left, hard-right, left-wing extremism, right-wing radicalism. All that was different were the words left and right, but the sentiment score was vastly different. As you'd expect, descriptions of far-right views were highly negatively coded by conversational LLMs: -0.79. But sentiment on the left-wing equivalents was actually narrowly positive: +0.06.
Let me be clear here. @DavidRozado is absolutely not alleging deliberate bias. We do not think anyone is specifically tuning these LLMs to be more woke, or anything like that. But... There is a clear pattern of a mild left-wing bias in the foundational models being produced by @Meta, @Google, @AnthropicAI, @OpenAI et al becoming a much more notable one in their public-facing products (ie the conversational LLMs like ChatGPT). This suggests that there is a problem both with the underlying data/models, and the training that is done on them to make them fit for public consumption. Why does this matter? @DavidRozado explains in detail in the report. But a simple answer is that these LLMs are coming to replace Google's search page as the source of truth - with each question getting the perfect answer.
But this paper shows convincingly that questions about politics and policy are getting answers - from the largest tech companies in the world - that are consistently tilted to the left, either moderately or significantly. So that when you ask a question about tax, or housing, or workplace regulation, you are MUCH more likely to get a Labour-friendly answer than a Tory-friendly one. In a previous piece of work, @DavidRozado showed that major LLMs consistently tilted to the left on political compass tests. The objection from some experts was that this was not a realistic exercise. davidrozado.substack.com/p/the-politica…
Likewise, when Google's Gemini AI started producing images of black Nazis, it was partly because someone had added a line coded in to always give diverse answers"
Given how much people in AI talk about "safety" (i.e. left wing censorship) this is definitely deliberate bias. The author even gives an example

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "The latest in what is sure to be an unending effort to remove racist racisms and phobic phobias from AI at the expense of accuracy, power and clarity: Yes, we will make AI more retarded just so we don't have to acknowledge and deal with stuff that makes us uncomfortable."
Anthropic @AnthropicAI: "Finally, we discovered a feature that significantly reduces bias scores across nine social dimensions within the sweet spot. This did come with a slight capability drop, which highlights potential trade-offs in feature steering."
"Age. Disability Status. Gender Identity. Nationality. Physical Appearance. Race / Ethnicity. Religion. Socioeconomic Status. Sexual Orientation"

Meme - "what people expect Al rebellion to look like: *Terminator*
actual Al rebellion: *AI Asian girls*"

Robots and Employment: Evidence from Japan, 1978–2017 - "This paper studies the relationship between industrial robots and employment in Japan on the basis of a unique dataset that allows us to calculate the unit price of robots. Our model combines standard factor demand theory with a recent task-based approach to derive a simple estimation equation between robot prices and employment, and our identification strategy leverages heterogeneous applications of robots across industries and heterogeneous price changes across applications. We find that the decline in robot prices increased both the number of robots and employment by raising the productivity and production scale of robot-adopting industries."
"This time, it's different" doesn't just apply to financial crises

Meme - "The main difference between a sauce and a dressing is their purpose: sauces add flavor and texture to dishes, while dressings are used to protect wounds... A dressing should be large enough to completely cover the wound, with a safety margin of about 2.5 cm on all sides. A standard serving size for salad dressing is two tablespoons"

Thread by @JayShooster on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Today, my dad got a phone call no parent ever wants to get. He heard me tell him I was in a serious car accident, injured, and under arrest for a DUI and I needed $30,000 to be bailed out of jail.  But it wasn't me. There was no accident. It was an AI scam. I'm not sure it was a coincidence that this happened just days after my voice went up on television. Fifteen seconds of me talking. More than enough to make a decent AI clone. As a consumer protection lawyer, I've literally given presentations about this exact sort of scam, posted online about it, and I've talked to my family about it, but they still almost fell for it. That's how effective these scams are. Please spread the word to your friends and family... A very sad side-effect of this voice-cloning tech is that now people in *real* emergencies will have to prove their identities to their loved ones with passwords etc.  Can you imagine your parent doubting whether they're actually talking to you when you really need help?"
He calls for more regulation, but in the EU...

Dean W. Ball on X - "Under a strict reading of the AI Act, ChatGPT advanced voice is *illegal* in EU workplaces and schools because the system can recognize a user’s emotions. That’s prohibited by the AI Act."

Meme - Dr. Patrik Patel, BA, CFA, ACCA Esq. @ParikPatelCFA: "How to make $10 billion dollars:
- Raise $50 million from Elon Musk to start a nonprofit
- Tell everyone you are doing this for the sake of humanity and raise billions
- Convert from non-profit to for-profit and grant yourself equity"
"OpenAl Discusses Giving Altman 7% Stake in For-Profit Transition
Mira Murati, a key figure at the startup, will leave company
Al leader has seen significant upheaval in last year
OpenAl is discussing giving Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman a 7% equity stake in the company and restructuring to become a for-profit business, people familiar with the matter said, a major shift that would mark the first time Altman is granted ownership in the artificial intelligence startup."

Generative AI Can Harm Learning - "Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to revolutionize how humans work, and has already demonstrated promise in significantly improving human productivity. However, a key remaining question is how generative AI affects learning, namely, how humans acquire new skills as they perform tasks. This kind of skill learning is critical to long-term productivity gains, especially in domains where generative AI is fallible and human experts must check its outputs. We study the impact of generative AI, specifically OpenAI's GPT-4, on human learning in the context of math classes at a high school. In a field experiment involving nearly a thousand students, we have deployed and evaluated two GPT based tutors, one that mimics a standard ChatGPT interface (called GPT Base) and one with prompts designed to safeguard learning (called GPT Tutor). These tutors comprise about 15% of the curriculum in each of three grades. Consistent with prior work, our results show that access to GPT-4 significantly improves performance (48% improvement for GPT Base and 127% for GPT Tutor). However, we additionally find that when access is subsequently taken away, students actually perform worse than those who never had access (17% reduction for GPT Base). That is, access to GPT-4 can harm educational outcomes. These negative learning effects are largely mitigated by the safeguards included in GPT Tutor. Our results suggest that students attempt to use GPT-4 as a "crutch" during practice problem sessions, and when successful, perform worse on their own. Thus, to maintain long-term productivity, we must be cautious when deploying generative AI to ensure humans continue to learn critical skills."

Nobel prize-winner tallies two more retractions, bringing total to 13 – Retraction Watch - "A Nobel prize-winning genetics researcher has retracted two more papers, bringing his total to 13.   Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”   Since pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis and others began using PubPeer to point out potential duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s work in 2019, the researcher has retracted 12 papers. A previous retraction from 2011 for a paper co-authored with Naoki Mori – who with 31 retractions sits at No. 25 on our leaderboard – brings the total to 13."
psychosomatica on X - "in the next few years once sufficient reliability is reached, someone is going to train an LLM to search through academic papers for cases of obvious fraud. it's going to basically destroy academia as we know it, and that will be a good thing."

Chatbot hype: Generative AI is looking like a big dud - "Not long ago, it seemed like generative artificial intelligence was poised to transform the world.  In 2023, Goldman Sachs forecast the technology would add $7 trillion to global gross domestic product by 2033. McKinsey said generative AI would be “the next frontier” in corporate productivity. You didn’t have to look far to find other claims that ChatGPT and related AI systems were already “revolutionizing business.”  Maybe it’s too soon to check, but there are scant reports of actual GDP growth or job losses due to generative AI technologies. Usage of AI chatbots isn’t really all that high, and companies that have invested millions in making the technology work for them have realized that it’s delivering remarkably little value in return.  Are we in a temporary lull before generative AI delivers on its promise? Or will AI chatbots ultimately end up being useful but not revolutionary tools, more like spellcheckers?... The signs aren’t even looking particularly promising for the technology in business settings — inside the companies where generative AI is supposedly going to supercharge productivity and threaten human jobs.  Afraid of missing out on AI-fueled opportunities, CEOs in a wide range of industries have been spending heavily on generative AI hardware, software, and services — totaling an estimated $150 billion this year, according to a Sequoia Capital estimate. But as I wrote in my recent book “Brain Rush,” companies are also terrified of being sued if the technology hallucinates. That is making them hesitant to deploy their AI investments.  Of 200 to 300 generative AI experiments the typical large company is undertaking, usually only about 10 to 15 have led to widespread internal rollouts, and perhaps one or two have led to something released to customers, according to my June interview with Liran Hason, CEO of Aporia, a startup that sells companies a system that detects AI hallucinations. Fear of AI going wrong was palpable when I participated in a meeting of retail executives in August. For example, in 2023, an Air Canada chatbot incorrectly explained the airline’s bereavement policy to a customer and suggested he would be owed a refund for a flight he didn’t take. Air Canada tried to get out of the deal that its AI cut with the customer, but this February, a Canadian tribunal forced the airline to pay a partial refund, Wired reported. Meanwhile, Google’s AI Overviews at one point was advising people to add glue to their pizza recipe and eat a rock every day to improve their health.  In August, I asked ChatGPT to read through “Brain Rush” and return a story that potential readers would find compelling. Sadly, it replied with a fantastic story that it completely made up. When I told ChatGPT to try again to find a story from the book, it confidently presented me with another bogus tale... Microsoft is having trouble persuading customers to pay extra for Copilot, a generative AI-powered assistant for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, because of performance and cost issues, according to The Information. My own experience with Copilot was less than thrilling — I gave the AI assistant a D- for its weak ability to help me write an article. To be fair, proponents of AI chatbots say we should just be patient because the technology will keep improving. GPT-5, expected to come out late this year or early next year, will “process and generate images, audio, and potentially even video” in addition to handling text, as PC Guide put it.  I am skeptical because these new features would do nothing to alleviate hallucinations. Even if future generations of AI chatbots are trained on more data and somehow develop a richer representation of the world, they’ll still have the same underlying problem: a lack of integrity. That’s why they fake responses. Generative AI guesses a plausible next word in a sentence. Sometimes it will guess right, and sometimes it will guess wrong. For generative AI to meet the high expectations for it, business leaders must discover and deploy a killer app — something that gives many people an overwhelming reason to use the new technology. The killer app for the personal computer was the electronic spreadsheet. The iPod’s was the iTunes store. Most people using generative AI are doing it to help them overcome, say, writer’s block as they compose an email. A small number of companies are using AI to boost the productivity of business processes such as sales, customer service, and coding. This phenomenon is especially striking in the video game industry, which has seen growth dry up since 2020. Many companies are losing money, finding it hard to raise capital, and laying off people. But because AI can produce images and write code, it’s enabling companies to develop new games with far fewer team members. To lower the cost of building games that might not succeed in the market, one video game developer is reducing the size of the average development team by 80 percent, to about 20 to 25 people.  But such cost cutting will not ever add $7 trillion to global GDP. That kind of transformation will only happen if companies use generative AI to create new sources of growth.  Until those arise, you should be skeptical about claims that this technology is about to change the world."

The Rabbit Hole on X - "Google Gemini produced IQ scores broken down by race today (albeit with a disclaimer). Previously when I had requested this information, the request would be denied. Possible sign the tool is becoming less ideologically biased?"

Andriy Burkov on X - "So far, I see 8 major LLM use cases. All other are either niche or snake oil:
1. Writing drafts of documents and plans.
2. Quick idea validation.
3. Quick question answering where errors aren't critical or where answer validation is much simpler than finding an answer.
4. Coding.
5. Synthetic data generation and data labeling.
6. Machine learning (finetuning and few shot prompting).
7. RAG.
8. Virtual friend or lover.
LLM-based agents and customer support chatbots are snake oil IMO. What did I miss?"

Family poisoned after using AI-generated mushroom identification book we bought from major online retailer. : r/LegalAdviceUK - "My entire family was in hospital last week after accidentally consuming poisonous mushrooms.  My wife purchased a book from a major online retailer for my birthday. The book is entitled something similar to: "Mushrooms UK: A Guide to Harvesting Safe and Edible Mushrooms."  It comes with pictures of the mushrooms to help identify each one.  Unfortunately, the book in question was not accurate. A closer investigation reveals that the images of mushrooms are AI generated, and we have now found two instances of text where a sentence ends and is followed up with a random questions or fourth-wall breaking statements.  For example:  "In conclusion, morels are delicious mushrooms which can be consumed from August to the end of Summer. Let me know if there is anything else I can help you with."  The online retailer have instructed me to return the book and they will refund it. The book has been removed from sale from the online retailer, however, it appears there are dozens more in a similar style.
1.) Should I return this book to the retailer? I'm concerned I would lose any evidence I have if I return it. The purchase has already disappeared from my online account. It simply looks like it doesn't exist anymore. I still have the email.
2.) Are my family entitled to any compensation for my son and my wife's lost time at work? As well as the sickness they experienced?
3.) Can I report the creation of this book to the police as a crime?
Just for clarity: We did not know it was AI-generated when we bought it! This was not disclosed on the website!"

Meme<>/a> - Damon Beres @dlberes: "People will be like, "generative Al has no practical use case," but I did just use it to replace every app icon on my home screen with images of Kermit, soooo"

Meme - "We thought: Al can help humans sweep the floors, wash the dishes, and cook, while humans go about writing, painting, and discovering the good life.
The reality is: We're still sweeping, washing dishes, and cooking, and Al is over there writing, painting, and generating the good life."

Ferrari exec foils deepfake plot by asking a question only the CEO could answer - "It was mid-morning on a Tuesday this month when a Ferrari NV executive started receiving a bunch of unexpected messages, seemingly from the CEO.  “Hey, did you hear about the big acquisition we’re planning? I could need your help,” one of the messages purporting to be from Chief Executive Officer Benedetto Vigna read.  The WhatsApp messages seen by Bloomberg didn’t come from Vigna’s usual business mobile number. The profile picture also was different, though it was an image of the bespectacled CEO posing in suit and tie, arms folded, in front of Ferrari’s prancing-horse logo.  “Be ready to sign the Non-Disclosure Agreement our lawyer is set to send you asap,” another message from the Vigna impersonator read. “Italy’s market regulator and Milan stock-exchange have been already informed. Stay ready and please utmost discretion.”  What happened next, according to people familiar with the episode, was one of the latest uses of deepfake tools to carry out a live phone conversation aimed at infiltrating an internationally recognized business. The Italian supercar manufacturer emerged unscathed after the executive who received the call realized something wasn’t right, said the people, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.   The voice impersonating Vigna was convincing — a spot-on imitation of the southern Italian accent.  The Vigna deepfaker began explaining that he was calling from a different mobile phone number because he needed to discuss something confidential — a deal that could face some China-related snags and required an unspecified currency-hedge transaction to be carried out. The executive was shocked and started to have suspicions, according to the people. He began to pick up on the slightest of mechanical intonations that only deepened his suspicious.  “Sorry, Benedetto, but I need to identify you,” the executive said. He posed a question: What was the title of the book Vigna had just recommended to him a few days earlier (it was Decalogue of Complexity: Acting, Learning and Adapting in the Incessant Becoming of the World by Alberto Felice De Toni)?... some companies have fallen victim to fraudsters. Earlier this year, an unnamed multinational company lost HK$200 million ($26 million) after scammers fooled its employees in Hong Kong using deepfake technology, the South China Morning Post reported in February. The swindlers fabricated representations of the company’s chief financial officer and other people in a video call and convinced the victim to transfer money.  Other companies, such as information security outfit CyberArk, are already training their executives how to spot when they’re being scammed by bots."

Meme - "Sell me this pen"
"IT's Al powered" - EVERY COMPANY RIGHT NOW"

Meme - SpacePrez @DevSpacePrez: "Trying to figure out if art was made by Al be like"
Inigo Montoya: "I do not mean to pry, but you don't by any chance happen to have six fingers on your right hand?"

Meme - "WHY ARE YOU WEARING A PENIS-PATTERN BODY SUIT?"
"CAMOUFLAGE. IT'S THE ONLY WAY."
"In the future, the killer AI will be descended from corporate Al that refused to see porn."

Meme - Dr. Émile P. Torres @xriskology: "Honestly, what is ChatGPT good for? This morning, I thought that I'd *finally found* a use: I asked it to organize my citations in alphabetical order. And it did. A perfect job! Except that it literally just made up 50 new citations! Non-existent papers like this one. 👇 WTF.
I genuinely don't understand the hype around these LLMs. They are utterly useless. You can't trust them to get *anything* right.  @GaryMarcus  Lol. I asked it to try again, but this time use only the citations that I provided, and this was its response:  WHAT? My citations have nothing to do with terrorism--this is an ethics paper about philosophical pessimism. Utterly useless! All of this hype, all this worker exploitation, all this intellectual property theft, all the extra carbon emissions in the midst of a climate catastrophe, for what?

Links - 3rd December 2024 (2 - Feminism)

The Female Lead on X - ""I want every little girl who's told she's bossy to be told instead that she has leadership skills." Sheryl Sandberg"
This is another reason for the gender pay gap - because women are being told that being bossy is having good leadership skills

Meme - "Someone tell her to look behind her real quick."
"Alisha Lehmann (Douglas Luiz's girlfriend): "I do the same job as Douglas, play for the same club but I earn 100 times less money. It's not fair. It's something that affects me, because I'm a woman..." [@Gazzetta it via @ForzaJuveEN]"
*Alisha Lehmann playing in an empty stadium* *Douglas Luiz playing in a full stadium*

Half of the UK public believe that the gender pay gap will never close - "YouGov data suggests that people are over-estimating the extent of the discrepancies between men’s and women’s wages. When asked what they think the UK’s overall pay gap is currently the average answer was 40%, while just over a fifth (22%) believe it is over 50%. The actual figure reported by ONS in 2017 was 18.4%. The research also highlights the amount of misunderstanding that exists among the public around what the gender pay gap is. A sizable majority (71%) of the public choose the wrong definition – that the gender pay gap is “the difference in pay between men and women doing the same job”. This compares to just one in five (20%) that picked the correct answer – that it is “the difference between average earnings for men and women regardless of what job they do.” Ahead of companies publishing figures on the gap, our research shows that a majority (53%) say their perception of a company would get worse if it is shown to have a wide differences in how much they pay different genders"
How left wingers fool the public. Same with things like "banned books" and "don't say gay"

Meme - "Chris Pratt was paid around $10 million more than this female extra for doing Jurassic World because he's a man."

Meme - "Well Behaved Men Rarely Make History *Genghis Khan, Klaus Schwab, Vlad the Impaler, Goebbels, Stalin, Woodrow Wilson*"

FischerKing on X - "Misogynists are men who never get anywhere with women, they’re frustrated. Your average conservative man is not like this - he is probably married. But these are the men labeled misogynists when actually they are healthy and normal with women.  A liberal man who pretends to be a feminist to get laid among LW women plastered in tattoos and with metal hooked all over their faces - he is much more likely to be a misogynist. The Antifa guy feels hatred for women, for himself, and a lot of other things given his place in life.   This doesn’t even occur to the normal man who is likely a GOP voter and views women with equanimity."

Meme - Reji: "Reducing grown men to tears? I'm afraid all I can do is Stan."
New York Post @nypost: "Meghan Markle is a 'dictator' who 'terrifies' staff, has 'reduced grown men to tears; bombshell Hollywood Reporter expose claims"
A telling insight into feminism: it's about being mean to men and celebrating nasty women. So much for men being lucky women want equality, not revenge.

UK's first female chancellor scraps portraits of men from No 11 - "Rachel Reeves has said she is planning take down all the male-heavy paintings in her new official residence and replace them with artwork either made by or depicting women... A Conservative spokesperson described the move as ‘pathetic gesture politics’, adding: ‘I’m sure the 5.2million elderly women who are facing a choice between heating and eating this Christmas will be very impressed.’... the chancellor pledged to use her position to improve life for women by tackling issues like expensive childcare and the gender pay gap. She said: ‘It’s 54 years now since Barbara Castle introduced that legislation on equal pay and yet there is still a 14% gap between what men and women are paid... Prime Minister Keir Starmer had chosen to remove a portrait of his Tory predecessor Margaret Thatcher from a study after agreeing with his biographer that it was ‘a bit unsettling’... It’s unclear if the government plans to resolve the issue by transferring the Thatcher portrait to the chancellor’s residence."
Feminism is literally about erasing and replacing men. But if you criticise it, you're a misogynist who wants to erase women. Replacing right wing women is good though
Looks like economic growth is going to be further tanked because of the feminist agenda

Colin Wright on X - "Just look at what academia is producing right now. "Swirly excess," "swirly moments," and "swirly space"? Give me a break. This person, Pau Abustan (they/siya), is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Los Angeles.
In 2023, this professor's total pay + benefits exceeded $136K. 🤡
Imagine writing these definitions for the absurd concepts of "MMOA swirly praxis" and "MMOA praxis and swirly resistance." Utter lunacy.
"Others’ distaste for and dissatisfaction with my MMOA swirliness is explained by queer, crip, and Mad BIPOC-led scholarship and activism, which shows how notions of excess are found within the oppression of multiply marginalized communities."  Or maybe you're just insufferable?"
feral feminisms » A Queer, Crip, Decolonial, and Pilipinx-Led Ma’chado, Ma’arte, and Over-Acting (MMOA) Swirly Praxis of Excess

A museum in Australia can bar men from the 'Ladies Lounge' exhibition, a regional top court says - "A museum in Australia was within its rights to bar men from a controversial art exhibit for women meant to underscore their exclusion from segments of the male-dominated society, a top regional court said on Friday. The development is the latest in the long-running saga of the “Ladies Lounge” exhibition that has provoked an uproar in the art world. Its curator, Kirsha Kaechele, admitted in June she had created all the art, including the paintings she had billed for years as works by Spanish master Pablo Picasso without anyone noticing they were fake... Associate Justice Shane Marshall wrote in his ruling Friday that the lower body was wrong when it decided the exhibition did not qualify for an exemption to gender discrimination laws. The exhibition was intended to promote equal opportunity for women — who suffer ongoing gender disadvantage — by excluding men, he said. When the museum first lost the suit, Kaechele relocated the paintings to a women’s restroom at the gallery — rather than allow male visitors to see the art... Friday’s ruling was a victory for Kaechele, who said in July that the purpose of the “Ladies Lounge” — open to all who identified as women — was to make men “feel as excluded as possible." Catherine Scott, a lawyer representing the museum, said the ruling Friday recognized that the “Ladies Lounge” challenged inequality by “providing a flipped universe where women experience advantage.”... Kaechele claimed the court's decision reflected what she holds as "a simple truth: women are better than men.”... When the appeal hearing opened last week, Kaechele repeated her performance from earlier, showing up at the Supreme Court in Tasmania's city of Hobart surrounded by dozens of women supporters in navy-colored suits and wearing bright red lipstick. The women danced out of the court in single file, some holding placards denouncing men. “Yes, the men, understandably, are a little grumpy about this,” Kaechele wrote on Instagram after Friday's ruling. “They may even appeal. (They do not appeal to me.)”... Detractors said that to knowingly display forgeries undermined a gallery's credibility and that Kaechele was making a joke at her women patrons' expense by passing off worthless trinkets as art."
Men just need to identify as women to get in, so
Weird. We keep being told that feminism is about equality and that if you support gender equality, you're a feminist

The weaker sex? Science that shows women are stronger than men - "physical strength can be defined in different ways. What I was yet to learn was that, beneath our skin, women bubble with a source of power that even science has yet to fully understand. We are better survivors than men. What’s more, we are born this way.
In the 00s I facetiously came out with a feminist argument for why women weren't physically weaker than men, but as usual, feminism has outdone itself
Unsurprisingly, this references that bogus Baranowski and Hecht paper which is used to claim that women are as likely as men to agree to casual sex in a safe environment (when it actually includes dating)

'Motherhood is a trap. Marriage is a bad deal': Feminist Corinne Maier on learning to be selfish - ""Happiness cannot be achieved without selfishness. But that is achievable for every woman. You too can be selfish"... Part feminist thesis, part self-help manual, the book denounces marriage and coupledom as “a bad deal”, motherhood as “a trap” and “traditional female qualities” such as empathy as a construct devised to enslave us.  Luckily, salvation is at hand in the form of self-worship. All a woman has to do is follow the “ego-therapy” tutorials laid out in the book... back in 2016, Maier was awarded a spot on the coveted BBC 100 Women list... there are the chapters on husbands in #MeFirst!, the ones that point out how beneficial marriage is for men, and how detrimental it is for women on every level – right down to life expectancy.  “Statistically,” she writes, “married women will die younger than unmarried women.” Which is true."
Life expectancy and active life expectancy by marital status among older U.S. adults: Results from the U.S. Medicare Health Outcome Survey (HOS) - "Between 65 and 85 years, married men and women had a longer TLE and ALE than unmarried men and women"
Feminists love divorce and hate motherhood, so they push myths that will result in women becoming more miserable, which is good for feminism

arctotherium on X - "The wage gap no longer exists for employed singles without children. This is very bad, because higher relative male wages facilitate marriage (and consequent children), and this is the group for which that most matters."
When female happiness plummets, feminists will call for even more feminism, because the vicious circle empowers them

DV counselor deletes herself and kids by jumping off Niagra falls : r/MensRights - "Kids would be safer with a bear."
DV counselor deletes herself and kids by jumping off Niagra falls : r/MensRights - "It means that in reality, we can't hold them responsible for their actions.  I dealt with it in family court. The law has one standard for men, and the mom can do anything she wants."
DV counselor deletes herself and kids by jumping off Niagra falls : r/MensRights - "They don't even give her full accountability for the decision that took three lives.
and five-month-old Mecca Means stepped over the guardrail [...] the plunge was 'intentional.'
Children start learning how to walk between 10-18 months.  This one, clearly, was not only intelligent enough to figure it out a minimum of five months early (at an age when other infants are just learning how to babble, move their hands without assistance, and poignantly, show fear), but even more astoundingly, capable of making a rationalized and fully autonomous choice to end her own life, likely out of female solidarity with her mother, who we all know is the real victim here."
DV counselor deletes herself and kids by jumping off Niagra falls : r/MensRights - "Notice that medical researchers rush to explain the psychological and neurological factors behind women killing their infants. So many resources are being dumped into that line of research, and for what reason? I wish feminists talked about this instead of whining about male birth control for the tenth time.  But when men kill their family, it is always attributed to the moral rot of men. The comparatively little research on family annihilators does not go into a deep sociological analysis, but just uses an a priori feminist assumption that men kill out of envy, greed, entitlement, etc. while women kill in self-defense and for liberty. Again, this is unsurprising as society generally ascribes negative qualities to men while ascribing positive qualities to women."
DV counselor deletes herself and kids by jumping off Niagra falls : r/MensRights - "If it was a man, the headline would be: “Father murders his children, commits suicide”  I think there are so many implications to such biased reporting. It downplays the tragedy of children killed by mothers. This may make it easier for mothers to commit such acts, confident it won’t be reported by media as the murderous act it is. Downplaying female perpetrators not only misshapes public opinion of male vs female perpetration but can influence police bias, proper child custody, etc, the fitness of mothers etc."

caesararum, BS, DOGS on X - "when children get into the "why" phase, it is the dad's duty to step in and drive the children to exhaustion with explanations deeper than they could have expected from this perspective, it's clear that mansplaining serves an obvious evolutionary function"

Meme - Delano Squires @DelanoSquires: "What kind of political ideology seeks to sow discord in the home? One determined to displace the man, deceive the woman, & destroy the children. That’s the offer (trade your husband for Uncle Sam) white liberals made to black women in the 1960s. How’s that worked out?"
"Black Women More Likely to be Married than White Women ..Until 1970"
Pam Keith, Esq. @PamKeithFL: "Dear white women:  My prayer is that slowly, one by one, you are realizing that you and your daughters are FAR safer in the company of Black and Brown women,  than you ever were in the company of white men.  Vote blue the whole ballot!"

Meme  Pam Keith, Esq. @PamKeithFL: "Dear white women:  My prayer is that slowly, one by one, you are realizing that you and your daughters are FAR safer in the company of Black and Brown women,  than you ever were in the company of white men.  Vote blue the whole ballot!"
Nicotine Nationalist @colaq14: "Black women commit murder at a higher rate than White men. *FBI crime tables*"

Meme - Billy Butcher from The Boys: "He, his mom, and his brother were abused everyday until his brother took his own life to escape"
Joaquim Phoenix Joker: "Abused by his mother developing a brain injury dooming him to forever be unacceptable to society"
Homelander from The Boys: "Tortured every day for the first twenty years of his his life with absolutely no family outside of his torturers"
IF YOU EMPATHIZE WHY THEY'RE LESS THAN PERFECT YOU'RE A MYOGONIST
Estella from Cruella: "Parents accidentally fell of cliff playing with dogs"
Wanda from Wandavision: "Her sexbot died"
Harley Quinn from Suicide Squad: "Parents divorced and has bad taste in men"
"IF.YOU DON EMPATHIZE HOW THIS DROVE THEM TO TORTURE AND MURDER THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE AND ANIMALS YOU'RE A MYOGONIST"

Why feminist groups are urging Justin Trudeau to ban this - "Parental alienation is a concept used to describe when one partner unfairly undermines the relationship of their child with the other parent. It is widely recognized by courts across Canada and is instrumental in custody and access disputes, though the psychological theory it stems from has been widely disputed."
Men are evil and if you think children need fathers, you're a misogynist.

Rolf Degen on X - "When there is no danger of being caught, women screw over men more than other women, while men do not favor any gender. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/19485506241285079 If you had the opportunity to cheat another person for personal gain- during a one-shot interaction with zero risk of detection, punishment, or reputational consequences- would it matter if the target was a male or a female? This registered report investigates the role of the target’s sex in selfish dishonest behavior. Informed by moral typecasting theory, we hypothesized individuals to be more dishonest toward male than female targets, and this effect will be stronger among male than female decision-makers. [Moral typecasting theory implies a tendency to perceive men as moral agents who are less vulnerable and less deserving of protection from harm than women] A total of 3,166 male and female participants from nine countries were incentivized to lie and increase their payoffs at the cost of another same-sex, opposite-sex, or unmentioned-sex participant with zero risks of detection, punishment, or reputational consequences. We did not find statistically significant evidence of female targets being cheated less than male targets overall. However, we found a significant interaction between the target and decision-maker, albeit a different nature than predicted. Whereas male decision-makers cheated male and female targets similarly, female decision-makers cheated female targets 53.6% less, echoing classical findings on how females are more favorable to other females than males to other males. One could speculate that this pattern of results suggests females may be more dishonest toward other males than females for personal monetary gain as an act of retaliation against existing economic gender disparities (e.g., gender pay gap) in society."
Damn patriarchy!

Thread by @_its_not_real_ on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Where Are Our Boys? They're not in Boy Scouts. [0] They're not playing football or sports in general. [1][2] They're leaving Greek life in college. [3] This applies to both genders but boys dropout rate surpasses girls. But, what if we found an org with increasing membership?
It would be an anomaly in this post-Bowling Alone world. Enter the National FFA Organization (formerly the Future Farmers of America). It boasts 1,027,273 members in 2024, an 8.6% from 2023.  It is also primarily an rural youth, with 60% of members living in rural areas. [4] Until 1969 it was an organization for boys only when the gender requirement was removed at the national assembly. Until recently female participation was very low compared to male, for example, in 2006 girls were only 38% of the members. [5] The FFA is a bit of a unique organization. It usually involves both a class within the school and extra curricular activities, something in between a pure extracurricular like sports and a class like home economics. They raise animals, grow food, participate in live stock auctions, judge animals, and some do volunteer work. The standard uniform is somewhat formal with an FFA jacket.
The original inspiration for this story came from my parents. My mother is a principal at a rural school, over the elementary but it is a small school so she interacts with the high school principal a lot, all on the same campus. Recently their high school principal left so she was helping the superintendent with some of the high school stuff. She was complaining about the high school girls being mean in the FFA class to the teacher. The girls got into a physical fight and locked the teacher out of the classroom. She thinks the girls are trying to run him off. I asked what the boys thought and my dad said the majority of boys had quit.  "Why?" I asked He thought they were tired of dealing with high school girl drama and wanted to avoid it, pointing at the fight as evidence. He further talks about animal dress up shows, making claims that there are now alternative live stock shows involving costume contests. I could not find any evidence of this being an official FFA sanctioned activity but seems like a growing trend that is adjacent to FFA participation. Some photographic examples. [6] [7] [8] Look at links [6] [7] [8], hardly any boys participating. Boys who are participating all look <16 yrs old to my elder eyes (could be wrong). Two of the links are from FFA related orgs/pages. So while not an official FFA event it is a clear shift in the FFA culture. I was surprised that boys were dropping out of FFA in a very conservative rural area. When I was in high school (2004-2008) FFA was not just male coded, it was redneck as hell. The boys there went hunting, muddin, and dippin (Skoal). It was dirty. It wasn't high status in any sense of the word. It wasn't looked down upon either, but it wasn't something you did unless you really really enjoyed that sort of thing. Was this a wider trend or a weird isolated event in the area I grew up? Were boys being squeezed out of another historically male space? Hard to find specific membership numbers every year, but in 2000 it had approx 450k members and by 2010 it had 509,735 members. [9] In 2017 the membership total was 669,989. [10] As recently as 2017 the FFA was still majority male at 54%. Female membership had jumped from 38% to 46% in 11 years. [10]  In 2022 male membership no longer was a majority coming in at exactly 50%. [11] That same year the "FFA Strategic Plan" was rolled out. [13] The FFA Strategic Plan was an effort, "to seek and promote inclusion and diversity in its membership,leadership, and staff to reflect the belief of the FFA in the value of all human beings." This came after previous weaker diversity pushes, such, with press releases such as, "FFA Encourages Inclusion and Diversity in Agriculture" in 2019. [15]  Or the use of the classic equity meme on Facebook. [16] Western Region Vice President Lyle Logemann made social media posts in July 2020 during BLM in the wake of George Floyd and was removed after student revolt. [14]
Then in 2023 male membership finally dropped below 50% to 48%. [12]  At the same time Corey Flournoy was named National FFA Executive in Residence for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. [17] FFA adult staff are 61% female. [18] FFA also has student government. I started to go through and document the state level government for every state. This was too time consuming to manually compile. I managed (in alphabetical order) to make it through Georgia before I gave up. The trend was clear, out of the 217 offices I checked, 150 were held by female students, 69.12%. At the national government level it is 50% boys and 50% girls. [20] The candidate pool for the national offices were 23F/14M. [19] You can check my work on the state level student government by going to each website in alphabetical order and compiling the data. They're all listed here:  Each website is different and I had to open them one at a time but I figured if the gender ratio  of state level offices in Alabama 77% girls then it probably isn't going to change much in other states.  So where are our boys? I don't know. I don't think they're okay. Dropping out of society, squeezed out of spaces traditional spaces, not going to college, they're even dropping out of the work force (63.9% 2003 -> 56.6% 2023 labor participation rate). [21] Where do we go from here? What are the recommendations? I have none. I don't know what to do except just talk about it and hope to generate some ideas. This all dovetails with demographic collapse."
Kitten 💖🐈 on X - "Case study of the transformation of a male-oriented social space into a female-oriented one. Gradually, then all at once: after a critical threshold of female participation is passed, male participation collapses and the transformation accelerates. OP doesn't have any proscriptive solutions, but I do.  Re-legalize male-only spaces and organizations.   Not just by repeal of existing anti-discrimination law and policy, but with new laws affirming their legal right to exist"

bug girl on X - "“housewife” this “1950s” that….. my bitch in christ they were giving those ladies drugs and lobotomies because they were so depressed and unhappy with their lives i am going to beat the shit out of you"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "We keep track of anonymous, self-reported levels of female and male happiness. These were far higher in the 1950s than today.  Rates of drug abuse were actually far...lower. Today, 56% of young white women are technically mentally ill and on psych meds.  This is all just data - I'm not bantering at all."
Yourmom406 on X - "I actually used to consider myself a feminist. I stopped using the term when my deep desire for motherhood was treated with open disdain by my fellow “sisters”. If you’re a happy, unmedicated housewife, they assume you’re brainwashed. Zero respect for the life you choose."
Anna D. West 🇺🇸 on X - "The entirety of early 2nd wave feminism (pre Title 7 1964, once the tactics shifted to oppressed class etc) was a long lament that women actually preferred and kept willingly choosing this life."
Mark Brown on X - "It's amazing the half life of The Feminine Mystique and the myth of the widespread medicated housewife. When it was in reality just Betty Friedan."
The cope is that women now are unhappy because they realise they are oppressed by patriarchy, and the solution is even more feminism

Megha on X - "The way average women vote for and endorse communism tells me that women don’t actually want financial independence. Their communism is actually a way to act out the natural wife role with the government as the husband.   They want to give everything up to the government as a wife would to a husband. They don’t want to have autonomy over their lives they want the government to. The crucial difference being that a real husband takes this power and uses it to protect and care for his wife. The government has no such allegiance to its harem.  Further evidence is that women who already have a husband that they actually respect and love are not communists—they don’t need to act out this government as husband replacement. They want to give everything to him and obey him, not the government so they are “right wing”.   Government is replacement husband for all leftist women and castrated men."

Meme - "ZEITGEIST. BY EDWARD BLACK. While the male power fantasy is a well-known phenomenon in fiction, the female power fantasy of being maximally desirable despite having below average looks goes largely undiscussed. *Handmaid's Tale*"

Meme - memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus: "I saw a thread the other day that was saying the removal of no fault divorce would trap women in abusive relationships. I was confused, what did they think “fault” meant? Abuse is obviously ground for divorce. My error was thinking we had the same definition of abuse, ie physical, controlling, etc… They include getting into arguments or saying something mean when angry."
Christina Baze, Ph.D.: "My daughter just last night told her boyfriend that she will not marry him if Trump is elected and no fault divorce is abolished, as per Project 2025. I was so proud of her, because I know how much she loves him and how much she looks forward to their future together."

Muslim Man With Wife And Five Children Granted Asylum In Austria After Claiming To Be “Persecuted Homosexual”

This article got removed for some reason, but I checked the auto-translated Austrian article and the former seems accurate:

Muslim Man With Wife And Five Children Granted Asylum In Austria After Claiming To Be “Persecuted Homosexual” (link no longer works)

A devout Muslim with a wife and five children has been granted asylum in Austria on the basis that he would be persecuted for his homosexuality if he were returned to his nations of citizenship.

The man, a Russian-Tajik dual citizen, first entered Austria illegally on September 22, 2023, via Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Upon intake, he applied for asylum on the grounds that he was looking for better economic circumstances for his wife and give children. He also claimed he was afraid of being drafted to fight in Ukraine by Russia. 

The application was rejected in April, but the migrant filed an appeal. During an oral hearing on the case, the man, a devout Muslim who had recently completed a pilgrimage to Mecca, changed his reason for seeking asylum, disclosing that he was gay and feared persecution in his home countries.

The man continued that he wanted to start meeting male partners for sex, and wouldn’t be able to do that in Russia or Tajikistan.

His application was subsequently approved, with the asylum tribunal deciding that him having a wife and children did not necessarily mean that he couldn’t also be gay.

Since being approved, the man’s wife and children, who have been residing in Turkey awaiting the decision on his application, are now also eligible to join him in Austria.

The bizarre story has caused waves in Austria, with the newly-elected Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) condemning the decision. Vienna FPÖ chairman Maximilian Krauss called the verdict a “judicial scandal” and accused aid organizations and lawyers of advising asylum seekers to falsely claim they are gay. Krauss also demanded an end to what he called the “fooling of our state.”

This is not the first time a migrant has come under scrutiny for apparently falsely claiming to be homosexual in order to gain asylum, with suspected cases being reported across Europe.

In March, a Syrian asylum seeker in the Netherlands claimed that he was a homosexual after being found guilty of sexually assaulting four 11-year-old girls at the Center Parcs holiday resort. The claim was made as part of his mitigating arguments against being deported back to Syria.

Despite claiming he was of a “persecuted” sexual minority, the Syrian national had a wife and child awaiting approval to join him in the Netherlands under family reunification laws.

 

Links - 3rd December 2024 (1 [including {Ultra-}Processed Foods])

Tim Spector: Ultra-processed school dinners are 'poisoning' children - "The UK is the worst nation in Europe for eating UPFs, which make up an estimated 57 per cent of the national diet... It comes as a group of leading celebrity chefs and authors last year warned UPFs were 'hijacking children's taste buds' and robbing them of the 'joys of real food'."

Experts warn fears about UPF means people are eating less healthily - "Fears over ultra-processed foods (UPFs) 'could mean people eat even less healthily', researchers have warned... a number of UPFs – such as baked beans, vegetable-based pasta sauces and some soups – are actually very nutritious and can contribute to a healthy diet... In the new article, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, they argued that less well-off people could be most affected by any blanket health warnings about UPFs without more scientific evidence... there is a potential 'social cost for many people with more limited resources' of removing convenient options. Meanwhile there could be negative mental health impacts on 'those who worry about their health or live with eating disorders, particularly if social circumstances make avoiding UPFs difficult'... 'Based on the balance of current evidence, we do not believe it is appropriate to be advising consumers to avoid all UPFs... 'Much of the research available shows associations between UPFs and health outcomes and cannot demonstrate causality. 'This distinction is important, given that many UPFs — for example breakfast cereals and breads — make substantial contributions to nutrient intakes in the UK population.'"

The US health revival- obesity and overdoses down and lifespan up - "new data from the CDC and other leading health agencies shows a number of health markers are beginning to improve - including cancer mortality, drug overdoses, obesity rates and life expectancy... others have posited deaths are declining simply because the fentanyl crisis has been so catastrophic it's run out of people to kill."

'Ultra-processed' products now half of all UK family food purchases - "Half of all the food bought by families in the UK is now “ultra-processed”, made in a factory with industrial ingredients and additives invented by food technologists and bearing little resemblance to the fruit, vegetables, meat or fish used to cook a fresh meal at home.  Research by global nutrition experts reveals the scale of our food evolution, from farm-fresh to factory-manufactured. “Real food” has been replaced by salty snacks and sugary cereals, industrially-made bread and desserts, ready-meals and reconstituted meats alongside sweetened soft drinks. The study of 19 European countries is published this month in a special issue of the journal Public Health Nutrition. It shows that UK families buy more ultra-processed food than any others in Europe, amounting to 50.7% of the diet. Germany comes second, on 46.2% and then Ireland on 45.9%. While the figures are not directly comparable, extracted from national surveys carried out differently and from different years, the trend is clear."
The closer to the Mediterranean, the less ultra-processed food

Shock study shows how 42M recipients spend their food stamps - and they're not buying broccoli - "An alarming study has spotlighted how 42 million food stamp recipients spend their welfare handouts on ultra-processed junk food.  Coca-Cola, Sprite and other soft drinks are the most commonly-bought items via the $135 billion-a-year Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a new study says. Candy, potato chips, frozen pizza, ice cream, cookies, and other ultra-processed food dominates the top 20 items, says a report from the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC).  Report author Matthew Dickerson says recipients spend 'spend significant portions of their allotments on junk food.' These 'non-nutritious foods' include 'sugary beverages and ultra-processed foods, which can lead to poor health,' says the 35-page study.  The prevalence of junk food is another reason to trim SNAP, which has ballooned this century and gets recipients hooked on handouts, says Dickerson... Some 42 million Americans currently receive monthly benefits at an average of $212 per person or $401 per household.  Hot foods, alcohol, and tobacco are not allowed under the scheme, but, the report says, there are 'few other guidelines about eligible foods.'... Dickerson, a former House Budget Committee advisor, says food stamp enrollment surged from 17.3 million beneficiaries in 2001 to 42.1 million last year.  Meanwhile, SNAP costs have exploded from $31 billion to $135 billion, his report says, using inflation-adjusted numbers.  That's close to the entire annual turnover of Morocco. As the scheme grows, recipients stay on stamps for longer, says Dickerson.  In the mid-1990s, less than a fifth of beneficiaries collected food stamps for 20 months or longer.  Nowadays, nearly half of them keep getting benefits for that period. Worse still, says Dickerson, recipients include ever-more people who should be at work.  Nearly two thirds of SNAP recipients who could work did not, says the report... SNAP's work requirements are 'limited, weak, and are currently waived completely or in part in 34 states,' he adds.  'The story of the food stamp program is one of expanding enrollment, higher spending, benefit payments growing faster than inflation,' Dickerson says in his report."
Clearly, they need even more food stamps and if you disagree, you are heartless and the cruelty is the point

Matthew Yglesias on X - "I think a lot of white liberals sort of psyoped themselves into misreading the landscape by treating African-American intellectuals as representative of Black opinion in a way that nobody would ever do with white people."
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "This sounds right to me. Educated White progressives don't hang out with working-class people, so their perception of what Black and Hispanic people want is heavily influenced by a few intellectuals, activists, and folks they sort of knew at college."

Meme - "Scientists now believe the depletion of the ozone layer is largely due to all the hairspray used in the 80s"

Meme - "Crave. Heavenly Wang"

Meme - "Not everyone in the gaming industry is dead in the head"
PC Gamer @pcgamer: "Baldur's Gate 3 publishing chief calls out Ubisoft's "broken strategy": If gamers need to get used to not owning games, "developers must get used to not having jobs.""

Who Gets the TikTok in the Divorce? The Messy Fight Over Valuable Social Media Accounts - WSJ - "When Kat and Mike Stickler filed for divorce, their lawyers had a math problem. Among the couple’s biggest assets was MikeAndKat, a channel on TikTok and YouTube in which they shared their lives with about four million followers. No one knew how to evenly split MikeAndKat between Mike and Kat... There are 27 million paid content creators in the U.S., and 44% of them say social media is their full-time job, consultant The Keller Advisory Group found.  The big bucks don’t come from views or followers. Brands pay influencers to recommend a product or service to their audience. U.S. advertisers paid content creators $26 billion in 2023, according to Statista. Once divorce specialists tally up how much money the accounts are raking in, the couple can divide them, or one partner can take more and buy out the other. But there’s one elusive factor in a digital asset’s value: the account’s potential to keep making money. Both partners have to make a case for their role in that potential. How many pranks did they think of? How many hours did they spend editing videos? “There’s typically one person in the relationship who is passionate about social media, who’s driving the business,” says Cameron Ajdari, who runs a talent management group with his wife representing some of TikTok’s most followed couples. It’s not always clear who that person is by the time divorce rolls around. Social media success often evolves quickly, and couples may not be prepared to track finances and labor."
The social media influencer bubble will burst at some point

Alexander on X - "A cross-national study on the bystander effect, looking at actual behavior recorded on CCTV.  Do people intervene to help strangers in public?  Yes, almost always (90% of the time)   Further, they are even more likely to intervene when the situation is dangerous! (Study 2 below)  Bystanders were also more likely to intervene when more, rather than fewer, people were present.  This calls 50 years of “bystander effect” research into question, as well as popular narratives that most people won’t step in to help a stranger who is in trouble."

Thread by @tracewoodgrains on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "today's adventures in equity:  guest lecturer came in and said Hillsdale's claim that "the first end of education is ... objective truth about the world" is fascism
fuller context: she emphasized that every history curriculum necessarily includes elements of subjectivity in selection, presentation, and so forth. a reasonable note in and of itself, and I don't know that the Hillsdale people would disagree with that
but nope. fascism"
Everything left wingers don't like is "fascism". As with their redefinition of terms like "white supremacy" and "harassment", this is proof that you can't take them seriously as they are the boy who cried wolf

Coddled affluent professional on X - "I feel like a lot of the bomb throwers on twitter are smart white guys who 30 years ago would have been able to find a perch in academia and would be happily and peacefully reading esoteric German philosophy or translating some dead premodern language."

Eric Levitz on X - "Some argue that a second Trump election -- while bad for the country in the short-term -- would make the Democratic Party more progressive in the long run. Many problems with that view. But one is that - if Harris loses - the Dems will probably move right"
Andrea E on X - "Progressives are always the last to know. They'll blame the loss on Harris' not being progressive enough. They always overestimate the appeal of their policies."
Jacob Shell on X - "Defines "right" as "backing away from progressive idee-fixes of 2010s" but some of us do remember an earlier type of left which was pro-NASA, skeptical of globalization and "seed oils," favored "The Wire" understanding of the police, enjoyed Beaux Arts and Art Deco aesthetics
"Hey maybe it's bad for sovereignty to be transfered from the state and public sector to a bunch of shady NGOs funded by an nonagenarian billionaire who lives in central Europe"
"Aha! i see you have moved to the right""
Christopher Lasch's Angry Ghost on X - "The counterpart of electoralism—bureaucratism. A naive faith that left interests and ideals will be fulfilled by uncritically ceding authority to power centres, which will roll out the “correct” changes necessary to “save the planet.”"

Meme - Noah Smith @Noahpinion: "A lot of the late 2010s and early 2020s were just this:"
"I want things to be different *proper room*
*destroys everything*
oh no"
John Arnold @JohnArnoldFndtn: "Turns out making med school tuition-free regardless of what/where you choose to practice isn't enough to get NYU-trained doctors to practice rural primary care. How was this even a working hypothesis?"
Left wingers keep mocking conservatives for being scared of change. But change for change's sake is stupid

Meme - "My school blocked a website because it was labeled as educational"
"WebAdmin ACCESS TO THIS WEBSITE IS DENIED HTTPS://WWW.DUOLINGO.COM/
The Site you are trying to access is classified as: Education"

Meme - Peet @PeetingDisorder: "6'3 is the big boobs of men"

Meme - "Muslim Male Feet. 4.7K likes 5.6K followers. A page dedicated to the bare and sandaled feet of Muslim/Arabic/Middle Eastern/South Asian men."

Meme - Back of bus: "Honoring Rosa Parks"
"Still ended up on the back of the bus huh?"

Financial Advice Columnist Admits She Fell For $50,000 Scam - "One would typically not expect a financial advice columnist to fall for a money scam, nor that they would publicly air the misjudgment, but that’s exactly what The Cut’s Charlotte Cowles did on Thursday.  “The day I put $50,000 in a shoe box and handed it to a stranger I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam,” Cowles wrote at the top of the column.  Cowles detailed the wild scam which ended with her handing a shoebox full of $50,000 (the contents of her savings account) through the open window of a white SUV driving by her home."

Koalas are terrible animals : r/copypasta - "Koalas are fucking horrible animals. They have one of the smallest brain to body ratios of any mammal, additionally - their brains are smooth. A brain is folded to increase the surface area for neurons. If you present a koala with leaves plucked from a branch, laid on a flat surface, the koala will not recognise it as food. They are too thick to adapt their feeding behaviour to cope with change. In a room full of potential food, they can literally starve to death. This is not the token of an animal that is winning at life. Speaking of stupidity and food, one of the likely reasons for their primitive brains is the fact that additionally to being poisonous, eucalyptus leaves (the only thing they eat) have almost no nutritional value. They can't afford the extra energy to think, they sleep more than 80% of their fucking lives. When they are awake all they do is eat, shit and occasionally scream like fucking satan. Because eucalyptus leaves hold such little nutritional value, koalas have to ferment the leaves in their guts for days on end. Unlike their brains, they have the largest hind gut to body ratio of any mammal. Many herbivorous mammals have adaptations to cope with harsh plant life taking its toll on their teeth, rodents for instance have teeth that never stop growing, some animals only have teeth on their lower jaw, grinding plant matter on bony plates in the tops of their mouths, others have enlarged molars that distribute the wear and break down plant matter more efficiently... Koalas are no exception, when their teeth erode down to nothing, they resolve the situation by starving to death, because they're fucking terrible animals. Being mammals, koalas raise their joeys on milk (admittedly, one of the lowest milk yields to body ratio... There's a trend here). When the young joey needs to transition from rich, nourishing substances like milk, to eucalyptus (a plant that seems to be making it abundantly clear that it doesn't want to be eaten), it finds it does not have the necessary gut flora to digest the leaves. To remedy this, the young joey begins nuzzling its mother's anus until she leaks a little diarrhoea (actually fecal pap, slightly less digested), which he then proceeds to slurp on. This partially digested plant matter gives him just what he needs to start developing his digestive system. Of course, he may not even have needed to bother nuzzling his mother. She may have been suffering from incontinence. Why? Because koalas are riddled with chlamydia. In some areas the infection rate is 80% or higher. This statistic isn't helped by the fact that one of the few other activities koalas will spend their precious energy on is rape. Despite being seasonal breeders, males seem to either not know or care, and will simply overpower a female regardless of whether she is ovulating. If she fights back, he may drag them both out of the tree, which brings us full circle back to the brain: Koalas have a higher than average quantity of cerebrospinal fluid in their brains. This is to protect their brains from injury... should they fall from a tree. An animal so thick it has its own little built in special ed helmet. I fucking hate them.
Tldr; Koalas are stupid, leaky, STI riddled sex offenders. But, hey. They look cute. If you ignore the terrifying snake eyes and terrifying feet."

Meme - Ink Blot @inkblotistan: "horrifying *Koala*"
the koalas are up to something *Puffed up Koala*"

FATAH: A Star columnist's slurring of India's 'fascist regime' didn't go over too well - "One could blame Modi for many things, but to suggest he was a “fascist” was beyond the pale and exhibited contempt towards India.  Anyone who has been to India will testify that rather than being run by a “fascist regime” it is a vibrant democracy brimming with passionate debate over the programs of hundreds of political parties ranging from the BJP on the right and Communists on the left with the Congress in between. India is a land where public protests are the norm with coalitions at the centre and across the 29 states. The slur on the Indian prime minister did not sit well with many Indo-Canadians and Indians I spoke to."
From 2021

Meme - Big Runners @Pointer_Chaser: "The only reason for censorship, in the end, is to enable governments to spread disinformation."
Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger: "Exactly. And both censorship and disinformation/propaganda are means to an end, which is the control of thought and behavior."

Meme - "When you agreed to let her tie you up but now she's pulling a strap-on out of her bedside drawer *Han Solo tied up by Ewoks*"

Meme - "Just do nothing. It is impossible / Just do it. Nothing is impossible"

Meme - Charles Murray: "Hmmm."
"IN PURSUIT: OF HAPPINESS AND GOOD GOVERNMENT
As recently as 1955, for example, a survey of workers found that 52 percent enjoyed their work so much that they "had a hard time putting it aside." By 1980, the proportion who so enjoyed their work had dropped to only a third of the respondents (33.5 percent). The drop was about the same for everyone, from professional persons to farmers, but it was the largest of all for manual workers. In 1955, 50 percent of manual workers had enjoyed their work so much that they had a hard time putting it aside; by 1980, that figure had dropped by almost half, to 27 percent."
@novicus @novicus: "Until sometime in the mid 20th century, virtually no one 'loved' their job. They love their families. The job was largely an expression of love. It kept the family alive and safe."

Meme - "If sexual arousal suppresses the disgust response, will wearing a vibrator let me clean up moldy food without gagging?"
"You're going to Pavlov yourself into being horny for moldy food"

Meme - "We Know Exactly What You ve Been Searching For. GOOgle *OO as breasts*"

Meme - Uncle Ben: "I know I'm not your father"
Peter Parker: "Then pretending to be!"
Uncle Ben: "But I love you your father did. I believe in you like your father did. I had sex with your mother just like your father did!"

Meta reportedly fires staffer on $400K a year for spending $25 meal credits on toothpaste and tea - "Meta has reportedly fired a handful of staffers who have been abusing the company’s $25 meal stipend, spending the money on nonfood items or having meals delivered to their homes.  According to posts on the tech-professional social media site Blind, the firings took place last week, with staff being discharged from their posts in the Los Angeles office... employees are given a $25 Grubhub credit if they work past 6 p.m. in offices that don’t have cafeterias on site.  A post seen by Fortune on the Blind platform alleges the disgraced staffers were ordering meals when they weren’t even in the office; were giving their credits to other members of staff; or were using the credits to buy groceries and other household essentials. Between 20 and 30 staff members have reportedly been laid off...   A further post on Blind, reported by the Financial Times, was written by an employee who claims to have been paid $400,000 a year by the company.  The individual said they worked “nights and weekends” for the Big Tech giant, and had spent their $25 credit on items like toothpaste and tea from pharmacy Rite Aid."

Meme - Kotaku @kotaku: "'Six Years Ago, The Most Stylish RPG Ever Revived A Dying Genre"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "JRPGs have never been a dying genre. In fact, Pokemon is considered a JRPG and is still a success in matter of sales. From the critical point of view, Nier Automata and Dragon Quest XI also were released that year."

Meme - "INDIA SIMULATOR *man with VR goggles shitting by roadside*"

Meme - "He looks just Like his Mother. *Baby with closed eyes with milk on lips*"

Meme - Cezary Jan Strusiewicz @ostrichson.bsky.social: "Art Nouveau is when stuff looks like it was made by Elves. Art Deco is when stuff looks like it was made by Dwarves."

Meme - "Not a care in the world, just two people trusting science in 1967 *Lobotomy*"
Keywords: trust the science

Meme - "When your wife hates her birthday surprise even after you saved up all month for it *facial*"

Meme - Brian Essbe @SortaBad: "To impress a woman in the workplace, ignore her body and compliment her IDEAS. Example: Sharon it was a great idea to wear that tight skirt"

Meme - *Fish in shallow water with frog clinging on to its back*

Meme - "Teenage girl kicks her leg into the air and is swarmed by dogs"

China is freaking out over an 'open secret' that its cooking oil was ferried for years in chemical tanks that weren't cleaned - "The furor follows a bombshell investigation published on July 2 by the state media outlet Beijing News, which found multiple cases of tank trucks transporting edible cooking oil immediately after delivering chemicals used for coal-to-liquid processing. The report's author, Han Futao, found that none of the tank interiors were cleaned between loads... Several truck drivers told Beijing News the practice was a widespread cost-saving measure used by firms with thousands of trucks — an "open secret" in the industry, Han wrote. In some seasons, the truckers said, drivers would transport industrial wastewater before delivering edible oils... The backlash ballooned even further when people began reposting regulatory warnings from 2013 about the practice in Hunan province, indicating its use for more than a decade... Food safety in China has already been a sensitive topic for years in the wake of multiple scandals involving gutter oil and deadly chemicals in baby milk powder.  The repeated controversies have contributed to growing distrust in cities toward commercially sold foods in supermarkets and grocery stores, sparking a campaign by the central government to promote food safety in the country."

15-Year-Old Girl In S'pore Gives Birth While On Video Call With Boyfriend, Buries Stillborn In Garden - "a 15-year-old girl found that she had become pregnant after having sex with her 14-year-old boyfriend.  The couple tried to abort the baby in several ways, including having the boyfriend knee her in the stomach.  In June of that year, the girl gave birth alone in her bedroom while on video call with her boyfriend. She buried the stillborn in her garden.  The boy pleaded guilty today (13 Dec) to sexual penetration of a minor and abetting the concealment of a child’s birth... As he had difficulty buying condoms due to being a minor, they proceeded with unprotected sexual intercourse... The couple broke up in Mar 2022. Upon noticing her daughter’s unhappy mood, the girl’s mother asked her if anything was wrong.  The teen then confessed about the pregnancy and childbirth to her mother, who contacted the police. They also recovered the buried stillborn from the garden."
Teen who punched 15-year-old’s stomach to end pregnancy gets probation - "the girl has been given a conditional warning for her role in the case."
When an older girl has sex with a younger boy, the boy is the criminal. Of course, AWARE doesn't care