CHINA'S FUTURE | The Economist
"Put together China’s desire to re-establish itself (without being fully clear about what that might entail) and America’s determination not to let that desire disrupt its interests and those of its allies (without being clear about how to respond) and you have the sort of ill-defined rivalry that can be very dangerous indeed. Shi Yinhong, of Renmin University in Beijing, one of China’s most eminent foreign-policy commentators, says that, five years ago, he was sure that China could rise peacefully, as it says it wants to. Now, he says, he is not so sure...
The rhetoric of American foreign policy—and frequently its content, too—is shaped by claims to be the champion of democracy and liberty. The Communist Party is less committed to universal values. Alliances often grow out of shared values; if you don’t have them, friends are harder to find. Awe can be a respectable alternative to friendship, and China has begun to awe the world—but also to worry it...
In a wide range of fields, what China is against is a lot clearer than what it is for. It vetoed the interventions Western powers sought in Syria and Darfur and has taken no position on the Russian annexation of Crimea (despite having a dim view of any sort of centrifugalism at home). At the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen China made sure no deal emerged that would even suggest it might have to slow its industrial growth. There and elsewhere it showed itself ready to block but not ready to build. As a former senior official in the Bush administration says of Chinese engagement at the G20, “They love to show up, but we’re still waiting for their first idea.”...
They condemn Western interference in the internal affairs of developing nations, but exacerbate corruption and poor governance in countries where they have a growing stake of their own...
PUBLIC enthusiasm underlines the fact that China’s growing assertiveness is not purely a matter of relationships outside its borders. “Whenever I see a change in foreign policy, I always ask, ‘what’s going on domestically?’ ” says Joseph Fewsmith of Boston University. Mr Xi is purging rivals, clamping down on corruption and, many hope, pushing through tough economic and financial reforms; some foreign distraction might come in handy...
It is not just that seeking to placate the public at home with braggadocio overseas will make it harder still for China to garner allies and respect. There is a deeper problem. Many countries around the world admire, and would like to emulate, the undemocratic but effective way that China has managed its decades of growth. If China’s domestic politics look less stable, some of that admiration will wane. And even if things can be held together, for the time being, admiration for China does not translate into affection for it, or into a sense of common cause. Economically and militarily, China has come a long way towards regaining the centrality in Asia it enjoyed through much of history. Intellectually and morally, it has not. In the old days it held a “soft power” so strong, according to William Kirby of Harvard University, that “neighbours converted themselves” to it. Now, Mr Xi may know how to assert himself and how to be feared, at home and abroad. But without the ability to exert a greater power of attraction, too, such strength will always tend to destabilise."
L'origine de Bert
Showing posts with label my favourite periodical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label my favourite periodical. Show all posts
Monday, April 17, 2017
Monday, November 07, 2011
Observations - 7th November 2011
"The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men." - George Eliot
***
Talk of respecting heritage by ghettoising historical cultural artefacts in their country of discovery (note the distinction between this and their "home" country) is a cynical attempt to cash in politically and monetarily from said artefacts. For example, take Egyptian Mummies. If Respect was really the most important factor here, you wouldn't even be excavating them and their grave goods, much less putting them on display (and almost always charging an admission fee). This is in addition to the other issues of cultural continuity (what do modern-day Turks have in common with Christian Byzantines or Classical Athenians?), genetic continuity (the Ainu were driven out of most of Japan, so the modern Japanese connection to a Ainu "heritage" is tenuous at best) and more. What we are really "respecting" is contemporary delusions and pretensions about ancestry and cultural continuity.
When people say you should be more open-minded, they mean you should agree with them - and then they proceed to refuse to listen to you.
Saving the planet is great, but first you need to save yourself.
Imaginary pound wise, penny foolish - is still foolish.
21st century emails: calling someone to send him an email.
Amused that someone told me a lot of HR practitioners he spoke to don't think much of SMU graduates.
I have grudging respect for spammers who mark their emails as "low priority".
Wondering if those who bash stereotyping take medical screening seriously.
It's better to be evil than good. Do you know how hard white robes are to maintain?
Amused teachers are a significant percentage of drug OD patients
"Karl Marx, a man who was so convinced of his rightness, and so buried in his books in the British Library, that he failed to observe the world around him. He did not bother to visit a single British factory. He refused to exchange a word with the intellectual titans of the time, including Charles Darwin and George Eliot, both of whom lived just a few miles from his front door. He ignored overwhelming statistical evidence that the working class’s share of the nation’s wealth was increasing."
[On Occupy Whatever] "you dont like the gap between rich and poor, well go and get a job then you are not getting any richer by being on the dole. if you dont like the 1% then dont use their services, go and get an ethical job, bank with the Bendigo bank and not one of the four big banks, dont buy anything from the big mutlinationals, get rid of your car and get a bike. vote with your feet not some pointless camping exercise."
RT: @fakeyarratrams: #occupymelb lobby blocking trams in the city. Don't they realise the 1% don't catch trams? Stop delaying the 99% heading home. #YarraTrams
RT: EverywhereTrip: Steve Jobs probably did more to make people happy than most religions in the world
Maybe the bad reaction to the iPhone 4S was what finally did him in
[On Jobs's passing] "My 4 year old MacBook pro died this morning. It must have been his last horcrux : ("
RT @clarissejang: "You are what you eat"..."I need to eat a skinny person"
RT: @markleggett: As the dawn sun glistens on your sweaty body, you awaken in a bed filled with coarse hairs. You are either a werewolf or an Italian.
RT @TheeBuddha The most unforgettable evenings are the ones you can't remember the next morning.
RT @edchng if you replace "penis" with "power" in everything Freud says, he becomes Foucault
RT: @mrbrown: "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it is sometimes impossible to determine whether or not they are genuine." —Abraham Lincoln
"why do the dead deserve any special respect? If I did not respect someone when he was alive, I am certainly not going to respect him when he's dead."
***
Talk of respecting heritage by ghettoising historical cultural artefacts in their country of discovery (note the distinction between this and their "home" country) is a cynical attempt to cash in politically and monetarily from said artefacts. For example, take Egyptian Mummies. If Respect was really the most important factor here, you wouldn't even be excavating them and their grave goods, much less putting them on display (and almost always charging an admission fee). This is in addition to the other issues of cultural continuity (what do modern-day Turks have in common with Christian Byzantines or Classical Athenians?), genetic continuity (the Ainu were driven out of most of Japan, so the modern Japanese connection to a Ainu "heritage" is tenuous at best) and more. What we are really "respecting" is contemporary delusions and pretensions about ancestry and cultural continuity.
When people say you should be more open-minded, they mean you should agree with them - and then they proceed to refuse to listen to you.
Saving the planet is great, but first you need to save yourself.
Imaginary pound wise, penny foolish - is still foolish.
21st century emails: calling someone to send him an email.
Amused that someone told me a lot of HR practitioners he spoke to don't think much of SMU graduates.
I have grudging respect for spammers who mark their emails as "low priority".
Wondering if those who bash stereotyping take medical screening seriously.
It's better to be evil than good. Do you know how hard white robes are to maintain?
Amused teachers are a significant percentage of drug OD patients
"Karl Marx, a man who was so convinced of his rightness, and so buried in his books in the British Library, that he failed to observe the world around him. He did not bother to visit a single British factory. He refused to exchange a word with the intellectual titans of the time, including Charles Darwin and George Eliot, both of whom lived just a few miles from his front door. He ignored overwhelming statistical evidence that the working class’s share of the nation’s wealth was increasing."
[On Occupy Whatever] "you dont like the gap between rich and poor, well go and get a job then you are not getting any richer by being on the dole. if you dont like the 1% then dont use their services, go and get an ethical job, bank with the Bendigo bank and not one of the four big banks, dont buy anything from the big mutlinationals, get rid of your car and get a bike. vote with your feet not some pointless camping exercise."
RT: @fakeyarratrams: #occupymelb lobby blocking trams in the city. Don't they realise the 1% don't catch trams? Stop delaying the 99% heading home. #YarraTrams
RT: EverywhereTrip: Steve Jobs probably did more to make people happy than most religions in the world
Maybe the bad reaction to the iPhone 4S was what finally did him in
[On Jobs's passing] "My 4 year old MacBook pro died this morning. It must have been his last horcrux : ("
RT @clarissejang: "You are what you eat"..."I need to eat a skinny person"
RT: @markleggett: As the dawn sun glistens on your sweaty body, you awaken in a bed filled with coarse hairs. You are either a werewolf or an Italian.
RT @TheeBuddha The most unforgettable evenings are the ones you can't remember the next morning.
RT @edchng if you replace "penis" with "power" in everything Freud says, he becomes Foucault
RT: @mrbrown: "The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it is sometimes impossible to determine whether or not they are genuine." —Abraham Lincoln
"why do the dead deserve any special respect? If I did not respect someone when he was alive, I am certainly not going to respect him when he's dead."
Post ID: 6258494991425331135
Sunday, November 06, 2011
On Occupy Wall Street/ Black Women being Racist
Letters: On Guatemala, Myanmar, Occupy Wall Street, black women, investments, Cyprus, Iran | The Economist
"SIR - The people camping out in Zuccotti Park are not downtrodden workers or hard-pressed homeowners (who might actually have genuine gripes). Douglas Schoen, a pollster who worked for Bill Clinton, surveyed 200 protesters at the site. He found that half of them are politically active and nearly a third would engage in violence to achieve their aims. A large majority are bound together by a deep opposition to capitalism and want protectionist trade policies. A recent article in Mother Jones on the roots of Occupy Wall Street says “credit” is often given to Adbusters, a “Canadian anti-capitalist magazine”, for calling for America’s “Tahrir moment”.
Roger Kimball, in a forthcoming essay, lists the similarities between the Zuccotti Park crowd and the 1960s generation, Jerry Rubin’s “permanent adolescents”. Now, as then, we are witness to, “incoherent childlessness and pathetic exhibitionism” from activists.
These are the same old agitators pushing the same old agenda that they can never attain through the ballot box: destroy capitalism...
SIR - Your article about the rising number of black unmarried women in America illustrates society’s prevailing double standard regarding race. It informs us that “fewer than one in ten black women intermarries” with other races because it is their “greatest taboo”. We are told that some black women “find non-black men unattractive” and that others fear the children of such marriages might not be “black enough”, but that the most common reason for not intermarrying is that black women regard it “as tantamount to betraying the race”. One black woman explained that if she were to marry a man from another race it would be akin to turning in her “black heart”.
If The Economist had reported that racial intermarriage was white women’s greatest taboo, that some white women find non-white men unattractive, that others fear their children would not be white enough and that it was common for them to view intermarriage as a betrayal of their race, such views would be utterly condemned. If a white woman said that she would have to turn in her white heart to marry out of her race, she would be called a racist. But isn’t this double standard itself racist?"
Addendum: This is in response to:
Unmarried black women: Down or out | The Economist
"abuse is what you get for suggesting, as Mr Banks does, that black women—not only the “most unmarried” group in American society but also the one that least intermarries with other races—should look to white, Latino or Asian men as potential mates. After all, the alternative is often no marriage or relationship at all...
As [black] women rise into the middle class, the men stay in the lower class, becoming less compatible. Many black women respond by “marrying down, but not out,” as Mr Banks puts it. But that makes bad marriages. Two out of every three black marriages fail, about twice the rate of white marriages...
The most obvious solution, he discovered, also runs into the greatest taboo: intermarriage. This is ironic, because black men are statistically very open to marrying outside their race—more than one in five does. But fewer than one in ten black women intermarries. For some black women, a white husband brings bad memories of slavery and Jim Crow. Others have conditioned themselves to find non-black men unattractive (lacking “swag”, in the argot). Still others fear that men of other races find black women unattractive, or that their children might be “not black enough”. But by far the most common reason seems to be that black women still regard intermarriage as tantamount to betraying the race. “My black heart,” says one black woman as she contemplates marrying out, “I would need to turn it in.” “We know it's a struggle,” says another, “but we women got to stand by the black man. If we don't, who will?”"
"SIR - The people camping out in Zuccotti Park are not downtrodden workers or hard-pressed homeowners (who might actually have genuine gripes). Douglas Schoen, a pollster who worked for Bill Clinton, surveyed 200 protesters at the site. He found that half of them are politically active and nearly a third would engage in violence to achieve their aims. A large majority are bound together by a deep opposition to capitalism and want protectionist trade policies. A recent article in Mother Jones on the roots of Occupy Wall Street says “credit” is often given to Adbusters, a “Canadian anti-capitalist magazine”, for calling for America’s “Tahrir moment”.
Roger Kimball, in a forthcoming essay, lists the similarities between the Zuccotti Park crowd and the 1960s generation, Jerry Rubin’s “permanent adolescents”. Now, as then, we are witness to, “incoherent childlessness and pathetic exhibitionism” from activists.
These are the same old agitators pushing the same old agenda that they can never attain through the ballot box: destroy capitalism...
SIR - Your article about the rising number of black unmarried women in America illustrates society’s prevailing double standard regarding race. It informs us that “fewer than one in ten black women intermarries” with other races because it is their “greatest taboo”. We are told that some black women “find non-black men unattractive” and that others fear the children of such marriages might not be “black enough”, but that the most common reason for not intermarrying is that black women regard it “as tantamount to betraying the race”. One black woman explained that if she were to marry a man from another race it would be akin to turning in her “black heart”.
If The Economist had reported that racial intermarriage was white women’s greatest taboo, that some white women find non-white men unattractive, that others fear their children would not be white enough and that it was common for them to view intermarriage as a betrayal of their race, such views would be utterly condemned. If a white woman said that she would have to turn in her white heart to marry out of her race, she would be called a racist. But isn’t this double standard itself racist?"
Addendum: This is in response to:
Unmarried black women: Down or out | The Economist
"abuse is what you get for suggesting, as Mr Banks does, that black women—not only the “most unmarried” group in American society but also the one that least intermarries with other races—should look to white, Latino or Asian men as potential mates. After all, the alternative is often no marriage or relationship at all...
As [black] women rise into the middle class, the men stay in the lower class, becoming less compatible. Many black women respond by “marrying down, but not out,” as Mr Banks puts it. But that makes bad marriages. Two out of every three black marriages fail, about twice the rate of white marriages...
The most obvious solution, he discovered, also runs into the greatest taboo: intermarriage. This is ironic, because black men are statistically very open to marrying outside their race—more than one in five does. But fewer than one in ten black women intermarries. For some black women, a white husband brings bad memories of slavery and Jim Crow. Others have conditioned themselves to find non-black men unattractive (lacking “swag”, in the argot). Still others fear that men of other races find black women unattractive, or that their children might be “not black enough”. But by far the most common reason seems to be that black women still regard intermarriage as tantamount to betraying the race. “My black heart,” says one black woman as she contemplates marrying out, “I would need to turn it in.” “We know it's a struggle,” says another, “but we women got to stand by the black man. If we don't, who will?”"
Post ID: 2611525765407505266
Monday, January 17, 2011
Links - 17th January 2011
"I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is." - Charles Lamb
***
Ban sought on Lunar delicacy - "Not only does black moss contain no nutritional value, it has been found to contain a toxic amino acid linked to degenerative diseases affecting the normal functions of nerve cells, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and dementia... cultivating the black hair- like alga plant is also detrimental to the environment. Cultivation of 50 grams of black moss would intensify desertification of two standard-size swimming pools... [It] was consumed mainly by tailors, hairstylists and workers at construction sites and factories making cotton products during the 1940s and 1950s. "Black moss is indigestible, so these people ate it to weed out the dust and other small particles stirred up by fans and which they had swallowed, as Hong Kong did not have air-conditioning at the time"... Chan suggested people could switch to lettuce instead as it is pronounced as sang choy in Cantonese, which means "creating prosperity""
Huat ah! And apparently most Fatt Choy is fake
Alleged rapist says woman agreed to sex at his flat - "Ong stated that when he met the woman and her friend for the first time at Zouk, she was quite high. He said they were together most of the time that evening. While drinking, he said she pulled him to the dance floor and the sexy way in which she danced, made it seem she was trying to seduce him. After the club closed, they left in a taxi for home. They started kissing and when he asked if she wanted to go to his place, she agreed, he said. But when they were at his flat, she started to cry, saying she was scared and wanted to go home"
Study: Women's tears a turnoff for men - ""It's hard to get men to volunteer to cry" in a lab... When they sniffed actual tears, they found the women less sexually attractive than when they sniffed saline"
WTF: Underwear With A Built-In Penis
The Most Sadistic Bras Out There (NSFW)
British Newspapers Make Things Up - "By the American standards, all British newspapers are tabloids because they don’t distinguish between what is true and what they make up... even the British government admits, in an official government publication, that British newspapers make things up and report them as facts... not only do British journalists make things up, but what they make up doesn’t even make sense"
It’s Only “Good Science” if the Message is Politically Correct - "The reason, she argues, that women might be better with language could either be “that this [difference] is linked to brain structure” or that “it has an evolutionary explanation,” an “or” which obviously confuses levels of explanation... Bunting thinks that evolutionary psychologists require that sex differences be “hardwired,” developing independent of all aspects of development... this seems to be saying that if a dimension can’t capture all behavioral variation, you might as well ignore it. Infants and the old folks like mushed peas; should we ignore people’s age when trying to predict what they’ll get up to?... “Good science will challenge the tendency to stereotype.” It’s hard to know what, precisely, this is supposed to mean... stereotype threat increased gaps in performance between groups [but] removing it did not eliminate it, suggesting that these gaps have other antecedents"
Small differences can become magnified via a process similar to Fisher's runaway selection à la Malcolm Gladwell and January sportsmen
It opened Pandora's box - "Singapore has a double standard regarding medical practice. For practitioners of Western medicine, mistakes such as omission of a test, missed diagnosis, failure to inform the patient of possible treatment complications and well-intentioned misjudgment would land doctors in legal trouble. But TCM practitioners seem to enjoy an exemption from such obligations... China has its reasons for promoting TCM. We appear to have followed suit for reasons of affordability, medical tourism and the muddled belief that freely allowing all schools and methods of medical practice will lead to progress and innovations... if TCM follows a scientific path, it will eventually become Western medicine as we know it"
Spice Hunting: What's The Deal With Saffron?
Interview w/ Judd Lynn - "This may surprise most of you, but the fact is that the production staff doesn’t really care much about the story. They care about which actors work, which locations, which props and picture cars, how much it will cost, how to schedule it, etc. Why the Black Ranger fights with the Green Ranger is out of their control and therefore doesn’t matter... A writer who hits a deadline come hell or high water, is good. A writer who hits a deadline come hell or high water AND writes a great episode, is gold... That is why I became an invaluable part of the Power Rangers creative team, because I could write a do-able story, within our budget and schedule, between sunset and sunrise if need be. And I did it over and over again, usually with a pretty good attitude... When I watch the show, the thing that stands out to me as the biggest flaw is the lack of strong characters... The Japanese were always much better than we were"
Kant on Killing Bastards, on Masturbation, on Wives and Servants, on Organ Donation, Homosexuality, and Tyrants - "From our cultural distance, it is evident that Kant's arguments against masturbation, for the return of wives to abusive husbands, etc., are gobbledy-gook. This should make us suspicious that there might be other parts of Kant, too, that are gobbledy-gook, for example, the stuff that transparently reads like gobbledy-gook, such as the transcendental deduction, and such as his claims that his various obviously non-equivalent formulations of the fundamental principle of morality are in fact "so many formulations of precisely the same law" (Groundwork, 4:436, Zweig trans.). I read Kant as a master at promising philosophers what they want and then thowing up a haze of words with glimmers enough of hope that readers can convince themselves that there is something profound underneath"
Top 5 Misconceptions about Dungeons & Dragons - "If you honestly think that saying "I cast Fireball" has any connection with the real life practices of witchcraft and occult ritual, then I don't think the D&D player is the person we should be worrying about here... The first few versions of the game were given a lot of hate by Christian groups for listing Demons among the monsters you can fight in the game... I bet if you go to your local library, you will find countless books containing the word Demon, including the Holy Bible that Christianity founds itself upon. Let that one sink in a moment; It's a biggie"
Immigrants' sex secrets will stay in bedroom - "People wanting their partners to gain New Zealand residency will no longer be asked for "evidence" of their sexual relationship... the Immigration Service is coy over the delicate details, including what evidence it has sought... "We have removed reference to sexual relationships from the policy after feedback from migrants and due to issues around people providing, and our staff assessing, the information... It was originally included "because some migrants were not interpreting partnership as it was intended. For example, flatmates did not meet the definition of a partner". What about the evidence though, the Herald asked? Was it true, as a source said, people had sent in photos of themselves sitting up in bed together? Were people, as another suggested, asked to describe their partners' underwear?"
This is dated 2005 but in 2008 or 2009 I still saw the policy stated
Turkish academics sacked over porn dissertation project - "He wanted to make a pornographic film, he said, but also to reveal how synthetic the sexual scenes in it were. They told him the project needed to make a stronger intellectual point. Evidently he did not succeed - his film was marked a fail... As well as the firing of the three academics - who are now being investigated by the police - the entire Communications Faculty has been shut down. Mr Ozgun, and the former student who starred in his film, have gone into hiding... Bilgi has a reputation as one of the most liberal universities in Turkey... guests attending new exhibitions at three art galleries in central Istanbul were attacked by local residents enraged by the sight of them drinking alcohol on the street outside... A publisher who translated erotic European literature was also put on trial last year, but eventually acquitted"
Mild Islamism strikes back
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior - "Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting... almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way... Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage)... Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything... "Children don't choose their parents," [my husband] once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids"... All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that"
One comment: "your follow up piece should be on your research of why Asian-American females have one of the highest suicide rates in the U.S. -- Feel free to ask my mom how raising a perfect straight A, Harvard MBA daughter worked out when my sister hit 30 and committed suicide after hiding her depression for 2 years."
America and the Middle East: Great sacrifices, small rewards | The Economist - "The Persian Gulf nowadays supplies barely 10% of America’s oil. Its value is far less than what the Pentagon spends on American fleets and bases in the region, even excluding the costs of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. America projects that over the next 25 years its dependence on Gulf energy will fall. Hence its armed muscle is, in effect, protecting the world from a Middle Eastern oil shock. That benefits America—because its consumers pay a world price for their oil. But it also benefits emerging rivals such as China and India, which shoulder none of the burden of serving as the world’s policeman"
***
Ban sought on Lunar delicacy - "Not only does black moss contain no nutritional value, it has been found to contain a toxic amino acid linked to degenerative diseases affecting the normal functions of nerve cells, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and dementia... cultivating the black hair- like alga plant is also detrimental to the environment. Cultivation of 50 grams of black moss would intensify desertification of two standard-size swimming pools... [It] was consumed mainly by tailors, hairstylists and workers at construction sites and factories making cotton products during the 1940s and 1950s. "Black moss is indigestible, so these people ate it to weed out the dust and other small particles stirred up by fans and which they had swallowed, as Hong Kong did not have air-conditioning at the time"... Chan suggested people could switch to lettuce instead as it is pronounced as sang choy in Cantonese, which means "creating prosperity""
Huat ah! And apparently most Fatt Choy is fake
Alleged rapist says woman agreed to sex at his flat - "Ong stated that when he met the woman and her friend for the first time at Zouk, she was quite high. He said they were together most of the time that evening. While drinking, he said she pulled him to the dance floor and the sexy way in which she danced, made it seem she was trying to seduce him. After the club closed, they left in a taxi for home. They started kissing and when he asked if she wanted to go to his place, she agreed, he said. But when they were at his flat, she started to cry, saying she was scared and wanted to go home"
Study: Women's tears a turnoff for men - ""It's hard to get men to volunteer to cry" in a lab... When they sniffed actual tears, they found the women less sexually attractive than when they sniffed saline"
WTF: Underwear With A Built-In Penis
The Most Sadistic Bras Out There (NSFW)
British Newspapers Make Things Up - "By the American standards, all British newspapers are tabloids because they don’t distinguish between what is true and what they make up... even the British government admits, in an official government publication, that British newspapers make things up and report them as facts... not only do British journalists make things up, but what they make up doesn’t even make sense"
It’s Only “Good Science” if the Message is Politically Correct - "The reason, she argues, that women might be better with language could either be “that this [difference] is linked to brain structure” or that “it has an evolutionary explanation,” an “or” which obviously confuses levels of explanation... Bunting thinks that evolutionary psychologists require that sex differences be “hardwired,” developing independent of all aspects of development... this seems to be saying that if a dimension can’t capture all behavioral variation, you might as well ignore it. Infants and the old folks like mushed peas; should we ignore people’s age when trying to predict what they’ll get up to?... “Good science will challenge the tendency to stereotype.” It’s hard to know what, precisely, this is supposed to mean... stereotype threat increased gaps in performance between groups [but] removing it did not eliminate it, suggesting that these gaps have other antecedents"
Small differences can become magnified via a process similar to Fisher's runaway selection à la Malcolm Gladwell and January sportsmen
It opened Pandora's box - "Singapore has a double standard regarding medical practice. For practitioners of Western medicine, mistakes such as omission of a test, missed diagnosis, failure to inform the patient of possible treatment complications and well-intentioned misjudgment would land doctors in legal trouble. But TCM practitioners seem to enjoy an exemption from such obligations... China has its reasons for promoting TCM. We appear to have followed suit for reasons of affordability, medical tourism and the muddled belief that freely allowing all schools and methods of medical practice will lead to progress and innovations... if TCM follows a scientific path, it will eventually become Western medicine as we know it"
Spice Hunting: What's The Deal With Saffron?
Interview w/ Judd Lynn - "This may surprise most of you, but the fact is that the production staff doesn’t really care much about the story. They care about which actors work, which locations, which props and picture cars, how much it will cost, how to schedule it, etc. Why the Black Ranger fights with the Green Ranger is out of their control and therefore doesn’t matter... A writer who hits a deadline come hell or high water, is good. A writer who hits a deadline come hell or high water AND writes a great episode, is gold... That is why I became an invaluable part of the Power Rangers creative team, because I could write a do-able story, within our budget and schedule, between sunset and sunrise if need be. And I did it over and over again, usually with a pretty good attitude... When I watch the show, the thing that stands out to me as the biggest flaw is the lack of strong characters... The Japanese were always much better than we were"
Kant on Killing Bastards, on Masturbation, on Wives and Servants, on Organ Donation, Homosexuality, and Tyrants - "From our cultural distance, it is evident that Kant's arguments against masturbation, for the return of wives to abusive husbands, etc., are gobbledy-gook. This should make us suspicious that there might be other parts of Kant, too, that are gobbledy-gook, for example, the stuff that transparently reads like gobbledy-gook, such as the transcendental deduction, and such as his claims that his various obviously non-equivalent formulations of the fundamental principle of morality are in fact "so many formulations of precisely the same law" (Groundwork, 4:436, Zweig trans.). I read Kant as a master at promising philosophers what they want and then thowing up a haze of words with glimmers enough of hope that readers can convince themselves that there is something profound underneath"
Top 5 Misconceptions about Dungeons & Dragons - "If you honestly think that saying "I cast Fireball" has any connection with the real life practices of witchcraft and occult ritual, then I don't think the D&D player is the person we should be worrying about here... The first few versions of the game were given a lot of hate by Christian groups for listing Demons among the monsters you can fight in the game... I bet if you go to your local library, you will find countless books containing the word Demon, including the Holy Bible that Christianity founds itself upon. Let that one sink in a moment; It's a biggie"
Immigrants' sex secrets will stay in bedroom - "People wanting their partners to gain New Zealand residency will no longer be asked for "evidence" of their sexual relationship... the Immigration Service is coy over the delicate details, including what evidence it has sought... "We have removed reference to sexual relationships from the policy after feedback from migrants and due to issues around people providing, and our staff assessing, the information... It was originally included "because some migrants were not interpreting partnership as it was intended. For example, flatmates did not meet the definition of a partner". What about the evidence though, the Herald asked? Was it true, as a source said, people had sent in photos of themselves sitting up in bed together? Were people, as another suggested, asked to describe their partners' underwear?"
This is dated 2005 but in 2008 or 2009 I still saw the policy stated
Turkish academics sacked over porn dissertation project - "He wanted to make a pornographic film, he said, but also to reveal how synthetic the sexual scenes in it were. They told him the project needed to make a stronger intellectual point. Evidently he did not succeed - his film was marked a fail... As well as the firing of the three academics - who are now being investigated by the police - the entire Communications Faculty has been shut down. Mr Ozgun, and the former student who starred in his film, have gone into hiding... Bilgi has a reputation as one of the most liberal universities in Turkey... guests attending new exhibitions at three art galleries in central Istanbul were attacked by local residents enraged by the sight of them drinking alcohol on the street outside... A publisher who translated erotic European literature was also put on trial last year, but eventually acquitted"
Mild Islamism strikes back
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior - "Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting... almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way... Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage)... Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything... "Children don't choose their parents," [my husband] once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids"... All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that"
One comment: "your follow up piece should be on your research of why Asian-American females have one of the highest suicide rates in the U.S. -- Feel free to ask my mom how raising a perfect straight A, Harvard MBA daughter worked out when my sister hit 30 and committed suicide after hiding her depression for 2 years."
America and the Middle East: Great sacrifices, small rewards | The Economist - "The Persian Gulf nowadays supplies barely 10% of America’s oil. Its value is far less than what the Pentagon spends on American fleets and bases in the region, even excluding the costs of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. America projects that over the next 25 years its dependence on Gulf energy will fall. Hence its armed muscle is, in effect, protecting the world from a Middle Eastern oil shock. That benefits America—because its consumers pay a world price for their oil. But it also benefits emerging rivals such as China and India, which shoulder none of the burden of serving as the world’s policeman"
Post ID: 2078383990959377277
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Links - 6th January 2011
"My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to 99 cents a can. That's almost $7.00 in dog money." - Joe Weinstein
***
I Love Charts - "By people who love charts for people who love charts"
The Daily Patdown - "Your daily dose of security theater."
Bangable Dudes in History - "Dead man porn for your still-beating heart"
About : English / General Paper / IB TOK Tuition - "I write my own curriculum* that covers basics from stringing a coherent sentence, to eventually writing cogent essays. It comprises the skills I learnt at Harvard, students' learning experiences, and current recommendations from industry players. With some tweaking, it can be applied to all levels of learning... A firm grasp of English is a corollary to critical writing and both are not mutually exclusive...
Work Experience: Taught a Boston inner-city teenager English.
Vetted written, academic work of Harvard roommate.
Nominated for the President of the Republic of Singapore Social Service Award
Referee: Professor Mary C. Brinton"
Ad for this: "Harvard Honors Grad Tutor
Harvard University honors graduate offering English / GP & IB tuition."
This is quite sad.
YouTube - Funny Sexy Japanese Upskirt Game Show
Damn Japs
The World's Best Country for Women - "Swedish men rarely offer to pay, nor do they perform any other conventional courtesies, such as holding a door open or helping a woman visibly struggling under the load of a heavy bag. "Naturally, we can't complain"... With gender equality comes further dating awkwardness: By American standards, Swedish men are painfully slow to make the first romantic move. "Men treat women like friends," Anna-Maria says. "They rarely chat you up, unless they're drunk." Instead, Anna-Maria often does the asking herself. "Sure, I'd like to be chased, but men have grown lazy in Sweden. So I take the initiative. Though I have to say, it detracts from the sexual intrigue"... the world's first "female-friendly car"... is packed with woman-specific features: seats that auto-adjust to a female body shape, a special groove in the headrest for ponytails, and a high-heel rest near the foot pedals... While the [Feminist] party was initially touted as "the way for women's future," its support plummeted after its convention several months ago, during which members sang a rowdy song about "chopping men to bits"... Japanese women live longer, American women earn higher salaries, Greek women have lower rates of breast cancer, and according to one poll, Italian men are better kissers"
Who Gives A Tweet? - "Ever wondered what people think about your tweets? Get feedback from followers and the Internet!"
10 Things You Should Never Say to Your Boyfriend - Love + Sex on Shine - ""Do You Think She's Pretty?"
When you ask a question like this, your boyfriend knows he can’t win."
The advice here is so good, it must've been written by a guy
Audiophile Deathmatch: Monster Cables vs. a Coat Hanger - "Not only "after 5 tests, none [of the audiophiles] could determine which was the Monster 1000 cable or the coat hanger wire," but no one knew a coat hanger was used in the first place"
Woody - Imgur - NSFW disturbing images of Woody from Toy Story
Elif Shafak: The politics of fiction | Video on TED.com - "The "representative foreigner." In our classroom, there were children from all nationalities. Yet, this diversity did not necessarily lead to a cosmopolitan, egalitarian classroom democracy. Instead, it generated an atmosphere in which each child was seen, not as an individual on his own, but as the representative of something larger... He wanted to see the manifestation of my identity. He was looking for a Turkish woman in the book because I happened to be one... If you're a woman writer from the Muslim world, like me, then you are expected to write the stories of Muslim women and, preferably, the unhappy stories of unhappy Muslim women... When identity politics tries to put labels on us, it is our freedom of imagination that is in danger... [There is a] tendency to see a story as more than a story... I want to love and celebrate fiction for what it is, not as a means to an end... in creative writing courses today, the very first thing we teach students is write what you know? Perhaps that's not the right way to start at all... We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next"
English in Switzerland - "One is tempted to establish a correlation between the relative openness towards English and the minority/majority status of the territorial language: the larger the language territory is and the more speakers of the national Swiss language it has, the more open it is to allow English in. And the smaller the territory is, the less likey it is that English will be used... Swiss people, on the whole, cannot be considered truly multilingual, often they are not even functionally bilingual"
YouTube - The woman language translator - "The Manslater even works with men!... "Hey, mind if I catch a movie with guys?" "You are a lovely, wonderful woman who meets all of my needs, and even though I will miss you, this night I wish to see Death Cop 9 with my bros"
Addendum: Curiously, this was "Created for the Relationship Rehab series at http://centralchristian.com."
Biblical scholar's date for rapture: May 21, 2011 - "Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012. "That date has not one stitch of biblical authority... It's like a fairy tale." The real date for the end of times, he says, is in 2011... This is not the first time Camping has made a bold prediction about Judgment Day... "We are now translated into 48 languages and have been transmitting into China on an AM station without getting jammed once," Camping said. "How can that happen without God's mercy?""
Let's see what his new excuse will be in May
Remembering the Boxer Uprising: A righteous fist | The Economist - "Debate still rages over what to make of the Boxer Uprising and how it relates to Chinese nationalism today. In 2006 a liberal weekly newspaper supplement, Freezing Point, was briefly closed down and its editor fired for publishing an article that said the portrayal of Boxer history in Chinese textbooks was poisoning the minds of young people. A journalist for History, a Beijing magazine, compares the empress-dowager Cixi’s manipulation of the Boxers with Hitler’s of German nationalists. China, he says, is in danger of breeding a similar mentality of vengeful nationalism unless it gets its history straight... Because both killers and victims in Zhujiahe were Chinese, communist histories gloss over the massacre. Wei County’s museum offers a rare mention of the event as if it were one of a series of Boxer victories"
YouTube - Pole Art - First pole dance video - pole art practice (Original)
Pachelbel's Canon is a strange song to pole dance to
YouTube - Cami Secret. Custom Cleavage. - "You love that low-cut top for going out at night, but in the office it's just not right. You've tried safety pins, but they leave holes and just look wrong, and with a camisole you end up tugging and adjusting all-day long"
6 of these for $10 is very cheap. But I suspect shipping & handling is steep
The science vs. creationism debate exemplified on a facebook page - "dont ever comment on my status telling me that i am wrong everrrr again. I didnt ask you did i? Answer: NO"
Margaret Thatcher 'death' website condemned as vulgar - "is Thatcher dead yet?, gives a simple progress report on the deteriorating health of the 85-year-old. Guests are currently told 'NOT YET' in large capital letters. A smaller message underneath adds: 'Can't be long though... she's still in hospital'... Visitors are also directed to a playlist on music streaming website Spotify and told to 'enjoy' songs such as Margaret On The Guillotine by Morrissey 'in the meantime'. The playlist features songs such as Stand Down Margaret by The Beat and Thatcher F***** the Kids by Frank Turner. Other songs include Margaret Thatcher, We Still Hate You by Terry Edwards and the Scapegoats and The Day That Thatcher Dies by Hefner... 'The reaction has been mainly positive - there is ten times more negativity towards Margaret Thatcher than towards the website... There are a lot of songs that criticise Thatcher but we couldn't find any for the playlist that praise her'"
The War Against English Language Invasion | - "[France's] Toubon Law... ludicrously wanted any use of the words ‘cheeseburger’ and ‘airbag’ to be punished with a six month prison sentence... the Chinese are also introducing legislation to stem the flow of ‘Chinglish’ across China... A retired school teacher... had gone to catch a train at a station in Bavaria and became incensed at the ‘Kiss&Ride’ zone outside the entrance whereby car drivers could drop off and pick up passengers without having to park... My favourite change is to the bicycle rental facility which has gone from being called ‘Call-A-Bike’ to the much more user-friendly ‘das Mietrad-Angebot der Deutschen Bahn’. Rumour has it that the parliamentarian who took up the complaint (Ernst Hinsken) was very keen to champion the cause because a newspaper had run a recent headline stating ‘Hinsken for Kiss & Ride’. He was apparently concerned that Germans who had only a faint grasp of English might think he was advocating a drive-by red light district... Even in English speaking nations, there are many examples of restrictions being put in place to stop English words creeping into the English language"
***
I Love Charts - "By people who love charts for people who love charts"
The Daily Patdown - "Your daily dose of security theater."
Bangable Dudes in History - "Dead man porn for your still-beating heart"
About : English / General Paper / IB TOK Tuition - "I write my own curriculum* that covers basics from stringing a coherent sentence, to eventually writing cogent essays. It comprises the skills I learnt at Harvard, students' learning experiences, and current recommendations from industry players. With some tweaking, it can be applied to all levels of learning... A firm grasp of English is a corollary to critical writing and both are not mutually exclusive...
Work Experience: Taught a Boston inner-city teenager English.
Vetted written, academic work of Harvard roommate.
Nominated for the President of the Republic of Singapore Social Service Award
Referee: Professor Mary C. Brinton"
Ad for this: "Harvard Honors Grad Tutor
Harvard University honors graduate offering English / GP & IB tuition."
This is quite sad.
YouTube - Funny Sexy Japanese Upskirt Game Show
Damn Japs
The World's Best Country for Women - "Swedish men rarely offer to pay, nor do they perform any other conventional courtesies, such as holding a door open or helping a woman visibly struggling under the load of a heavy bag. "Naturally, we can't complain"... With gender equality comes further dating awkwardness: By American standards, Swedish men are painfully slow to make the first romantic move. "Men treat women like friends," Anna-Maria says. "They rarely chat you up, unless they're drunk." Instead, Anna-Maria often does the asking herself. "Sure, I'd like to be chased, but men have grown lazy in Sweden. So I take the initiative. Though I have to say, it detracts from the sexual intrigue"... the world's first "female-friendly car"... is packed with woman-specific features: seats that auto-adjust to a female body shape, a special groove in the headrest for ponytails, and a high-heel rest near the foot pedals... While the [Feminist] party was initially touted as "the way for women's future," its support plummeted after its convention several months ago, during which members sang a rowdy song about "chopping men to bits"... Japanese women live longer, American women earn higher salaries, Greek women have lower rates of breast cancer, and according to one poll, Italian men are better kissers"
Who Gives A Tweet? - "Ever wondered what people think about your tweets? Get feedback from followers and the Internet!"
10 Things You Should Never Say to Your Boyfriend - Love + Sex on Shine - ""Do You Think She's Pretty?"
When you ask a question like this, your boyfriend knows he can’t win."
The advice here is so good, it must've been written by a guy
Audiophile Deathmatch: Monster Cables vs. a Coat Hanger - "Not only "after 5 tests, none [of the audiophiles] could determine which was the Monster 1000 cable or the coat hanger wire," but no one knew a coat hanger was used in the first place"
Woody - Imgur - NSFW disturbing images of Woody from Toy Story
Elif Shafak: The politics of fiction | Video on TED.com - "The "representative foreigner." In our classroom, there were children from all nationalities. Yet, this diversity did not necessarily lead to a cosmopolitan, egalitarian classroom democracy. Instead, it generated an atmosphere in which each child was seen, not as an individual on his own, but as the representative of something larger... He wanted to see the manifestation of my identity. He was looking for a Turkish woman in the book because I happened to be one... If you're a woman writer from the Muslim world, like me, then you are expected to write the stories of Muslim women and, preferably, the unhappy stories of unhappy Muslim women... When identity politics tries to put labels on us, it is our freedom of imagination that is in danger... [There is a] tendency to see a story as more than a story... I want to love and celebrate fiction for what it is, not as a means to an end... in creative writing courses today, the very first thing we teach students is write what you know? Perhaps that's not the right way to start at all... We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next"
English in Switzerland - "One is tempted to establish a correlation between the relative openness towards English and the minority/majority status of the territorial language: the larger the language territory is and the more speakers of the national Swiss language it has, the more open it is to allow English in. And the smaller the territory is, the less likey it is that English will be used... Swiss people, on the whole, cannot be considered truly multilingual, often they are not even functionally bilingual"
YouTube - The woman language translator - "The Manslater even works with men!... "Hey, mind if I catch a movie with guys?" "You are a lovely, wonderful woman who meets all of my needs, and even though I will miss you, this night I wish to see Death Cop 9 with my bros"
Addendum: Curiously, this was "Created for the Relationship Rehab series at http://centralchristian.com."
Biblical scholar's date for rapture: May 21, 2011 - "Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012. "That date has not one stitch of biblical authority... It's like a fairy tale." The real date for the end of times, he says, is in 2011... This is not the first time Camping has made a bold prediction about Judgment Day... "We are now translated into 48 languages and have been transmitting into China on an AM station without getting jammed once," Camping said. "How can that happen without God's mercy?""
Let's see what his new excuse will be in May
Remembering the Boxer Uprising: A righteous fist | The Economist - "Debate still rages over what to make of the Boxer Uprising and how it relates to Chinese nationalism today. In 2006 a liberal weekly newspaper supplement, Freezing Point, was briefly closed down and its editor fired for publishing an article that said the portrayal of Boxer history in Chinese textbooks was poisoning the minds of young people. A journalist for History, a Beijing magazine, compares the empress-dowager Cixi’s manipulation of the Boxers with Hitler’s of German nationalists. China, he says, is in danger of breeding a similar mentality of vengeful nationalism unless it gets its history straight... Because both killers and victims in Zhujiahe were Chinese, communist histories gloss over the massacre. Wei County’s museum offers a rare mention of the event as if it were one of a series of Boxer victories"
YouTube - Pole Art - First pole dance video - pole art practice (Original)
Pachelbel's Canon is a strange song to pole dance to
YouTube - Cami Secret. Custom Cleavage. - "You love that low-cut top for going out at night, but in the office it's just not right. You've tried safety pins, but they leave holes and just look wrong, and with a camisole you end up tugging and adjusting all-day long"
6 of these for $10 is very cheap. But I suspect shipping & handling is steep
The science vs. creationism debate exemplified on a facebook page - "dont ever comment on my status telling me that i am wrong everrrr again. I didnt ask you did i? Answer: NO"
Margaret Thatcher 'death' website condemned as vulgar - "is Thatcher dead yet?, gives a simple progress report on the deteriorating health of the 85-year-old. Guests are currently told 'NOT YET' in large capital letters. A smaller message underneath adds: 'Can't be long though... she's still in hospital'... Visitors are also directed to a playlist on music streaming website Spotify and told to 'enjoy' songs such as Margaret On The Guillotine by Morrissey 'in the meantime'. The playlist features songs such as Stand Down Margaret by The Beat and Thatcher F***** the Kids by Frank Turner. Other songs include Margaret Thatcher, We Still Hate You by Terry Edwards and the Scapegoats and The Day That Thatcher Dies by Hefner... 'The reaction has been mainly positive - there is ten times more negativity towards Margaret Thatcher than towards the website... There are a lot of songs that criticise Thatcher but we couldn't find any for the playlist that praise her'"
The War Against English Language Invasion | - "[France's] Toubon Law... ludicrously wanted any use of the words ‘cheeseburger’ and ‘airbag’ to be punished with a six month prison sentence... the Chinese are also introducing legislation to stem the flow of ‘Chinglish’ across China... A retired school teacher... had gone to catch a train at a station in Bavaria and became incensed at the ‘Kiss&Ride’ zone outside the entrance whereby car drivers could drop off and pick up passengers without having to park... My favourite change is to the bicycle rental facility which has gone from being called ‘Call-A-Bike’ to the much more user-friendly ‘das Mietrad-Angebot der Deutschen Bahn’. Rumour has it that the parliamentarian who took up the complaint (Ernst Hinsken) was very keen to champion the cause because a newspaper had run a recent headline stating ‘Hinsken for Kiss & Ride’. He was apparently concerned that Germans who had only a faint grasp of English might think he was advocating a drive-by red light district... Even in English speaking nations, there are many examples of restrictions being put in place to stop English words creeping into the English language"
Post ID: 922629007035328950
Friday, December 24, 2010
Links - 24th December 2010
"Are you going to come quietly, or do I have to use earplugs?" - Spike Milligan
***
Economics focus: Vote for agony | The Economist - "[For] incumbent governments that faced elections either during the period of fiscal tightening or within two years of its having come to a close... Tightening governments seem to have a survival rate no worse than the average... coalitions tightened the national belt in 9.9% of the years they were in office—about the same as single-party governments, which did so in 10.1% of years"
So much for that canard, beloved of the "Democracy is Bad" school
fashin: Vogue on Vogue on Vogue etc. - "DID YOU KNOW that every Vogue cover for 2010 piled one on top of the other formsan angry, fire-y blob with a head of dark, short hair the Virgin Mary?"
Hongbao headache - "He collected a profit of 90,000 yuan (S$18,599)... Speaking before the dinner, he told LifeStyle: 'I'm confident that my relatives and close friends will at least match the $83.80 price per head at the dinner.' Afterwards, he said he had made a profit of $3,124"
This is damn sad
When Tested, Drivers Will Defend Parking Space - ""Most people think they leave faster, but in reality, they take more time to leave when another car waits near their space," said Penn State researcher Barry Ruback, professor of sociology and crime, law and justice. "And if the other driver honks the horn, people will really slow down their departure just to occupy the parking space a little longer... Like our ancestors, we humans still defend territories, but we do so even when they are temporary public areas"... This research is similar to earlier research by Ruback on territorial behavior and public telephones, and in public areas such as libraries"
Perfect pitch? - "In the past, things were very confused – flutes made in different countries were all slightly different lengths – which meant that a German flute player couldn’t play along with an English one unless he bought an English flute... After a lot of expert discussion, they decided on the notes we use today at a meeting in London in 1939... The note we know as ‘A’ would have been called a ‘slightly out of tune B flat’ by Mozart (we know this because we have the tuning fork Mozart used). So when we listen to Mozart’s music nowadays, we are hearing it all about a semitone higher than he would have intended – a fact which is guaranteed to annoy some musical pedants. Some of his most difficult, high-reaching songs would actually be much easier to sing if we lowered them in pitch by a semitone, which is closer to how Mozart intended them to sound. On the other hand, this would involve writing out all the music again in a lower key, which would irritate an entirely different set of pedants"
How English evolved into a global language - "A German scientist... said that he knew of scientific conferences taking place in Germany, where all the people attending were German and yet the conference was conducted in English... I was watching an Austrian pop music channel recently and the comments and ads were in an Anglo-German Creole whose core was German, but which was full of "go to it", "cool", "be there" and the like"
One comment: "The reason English dominates is because, regardless of how you mangle it, it can still be understood. Also most native English speakers are such sloppy users of their own language that they don't care if it is mangled."
Another: "My German grammar schooling coincided with the 60s... as nothing else significant (except Scotch) came from the UK"
Qur'an etched in Saddam Hussein's blood poses dilemma for Iraq leaders
Singapore is ‘happiest place in Asia’ - "You said Gallup, the World Values Survey and the World Database on Happiness are the three most authoritative and authentic happiness indices and that all three pointed to Singapore as the happiest place in Asia. Your latter statement unfortunately, is not true... since the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is ranked higher than Singapore in three of the four indices, the title of the happiest place in Asia should belong to UAE, not Singapore"
Polemics aside this is a good exposé
U.S. teenager cries tears of blood: Calvino Inman hopes doctors can explain medical mystery
In earlier times, this would be regarded as a religious miracle/mystery
STOMP - Singapore Seen - Man screams vulgarities at GF at Parkway, but no one helps her - "STOMPer KrystynnSG says this man was shouting so loudly at his girlfriend from a stairwell, that she could hear him from a nearby cafe. She is disappointed that none of the men present bothered to intervene... "He stands at about 5 feet 2 inches tall, a definite shorty if I (in my 5 ft 7 inches frame) were to stand next to him!""
More screwed up gender relations
Young female chimpanzees treat sticks as dolls: Growing evidence of biological basis for gender-specific play in humans - "Doll play among humans could have its origins in object-carrying by earlier apes, they say, suggesting that toy selection is probably not due entirely to socialization... "In humans, there are robust sex differences in children's toy play, and these are remarkably similar across cultures"... this may be a lovely case of biological and social influences being intertwined"
Ironic feminist excuses I've seen: "How can we be sure the chimps’ differences in play are genetic and not socialisation?... They’re monkeys; how do they know what a truck is? And why would they share any human ideas of what’s a boy toy and what’s a girl toy?"
"the nature-vs-nurture argument, in the versus sense, is outdated and incorrect. The actual way these things work is much more complicated and interactive... the lack of stick playing in other chimpanzee communities would, in fact, rule against nature"
Why Do We Demonize Men Who Are Honest About Their Sexual Needs? - "The pressure put on men to be initiators, yet avoid seeming creepy or aggressive leads to an unpleasant double bind. After all, the same gross cultural pressures that make women into objects force men into instigators; how many women do you know who proposed to their husbands?... unlike men -- "I can be explicit and overt about my sexuality without being viewed as a creep"... the pervasive tropes around male sexuality [are] that it's inherently aggressive, toxic and unwanted... "The only way for a guy to guarantee that he won’t be called 'creepy' is to suppress entirely his sexuality, just like a woman can escape being called a slut by suppressing hers"... Calls to censor porn, for example, are influenced [also] by feelings that mainstream porn expresses an unacceptable form of male sexuality"
More from Feminist Critics: "Sometime, I would love to dress some female feminists up in convincing drag and take them out to hit on women. Judging by Vincent’s experience, the results would be a big wake-up call"
***
Economics focus: Vote for agony | The Economist - "[For] incumbent governments that faced elections either during the period of fiscal tightening or within two years of its having come to a close... Tightening governments seem to have a survival rate no worse than the average... coalitions tightened the national belt in 9.9% of the years they were in office—about the same as single-party governments, which did so in 10.1% of years"
So much for that canard, beloved of the "Democracy is Bad" school
fashin: Vogue on Vogue on Vogue etc. - "DID YOU KNOW that every Vogue cover for 2010 piled one on top of the other forms
Hongbao headache - "He collected a profit of 90,000 yuan (S$18,599)... Speaking before the dinner, he told LifeStyle: 'I'm confident that my relatives and close friends will at least match the $83.80 price per head at the dinner.' Afterwards, he said he had made a profit of $3,124"
This is damn sad
When Tested, Drivers Will Defend Parking Space - ""Most people think they leave faster, but in reality, they take more time to leave when another car waits near their space," said Penn State researcher Barry Ruback, professor of sociology and crime, law and justice. "And if the other driver honks the horn, people will really slow down their departure just to occupy the parking space a little longer... Like our ancestors, we humans still defend territories, but we do so even when they are temporary public areas"... This research is similar to earlier research by Ruback on territorial behavior and public telephones, and in public areas such as libraries"
Perfect pitch? - "In the past, things were very confused – flutes made in different countries were all slightly different lengths – which meant that a German flute player couldn’t play along with an English one unless he bought an English flute... After a lot of expert discussion, they decided on the notes we use today at a meeting in London in 1939... The note we know as ‘A’ would have been called a ‘slightly out of tune B flat’ by Mozart (we know this because we have the tuning fork Mozart used). So when we listen to Mozart’s music nowadays, we are hearing it all about a semitone higher than he would have intended – a fact which is guaranteed to annoy some musical pedants. Some of his most difficult, high-reaching songs would actually be much easier to sing if we lowered them in pitch by a semitone, which is closer to how Mozart intended them to sound. On the other hand, this would involve writing out all the music again in a lower key, which would irritate an entirely different set of pedants"
How English evolved into a global language - "A German scientist... said that he knew of scientific conferences taking place in Germany, where all the people attending were German and yet the conference was conducted in English... I was watching an Austrian pop music channel recently and the comments and ads were in an Anglo-German Creole whose core was German, but which was full of "go to it", "cool", "be there" and the like"
One comment: "The reason English dominates is because, regardless of how you mangle it, it can still be understood. Also most native English speakers are such sloppy users of their own language that they don't care if it is mangled."
Another: "My German grammar schooling coincided with the 60s... as nothing else significant (except Scotch) came from the UK"
Qur'an etched in Saddam Hussein's blood poses dilemma for Iraq leaders
Singapore is ‘happiest place in Asia’ - "You said Gallup, the World Values Survey and the World Database on Happiness are the three most authoritative and authentic happiness indices and that all three pointed to Singapore as the happiest place in Asia. Your latter statement unfortunately, is not true... since the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is ranked higher than Singapore in three of the four indices, the title of the happiest place in Asia should belong to UAE, not Singapore"
Polemics aside this is a good exposé
U.S. teenager cries tears of blood: Calvino Inman hopes doctors can explain medical mystery
In earlier times, this would be regarded as a religious miracle/mystery
STOMP - Singapore Seen - Man screams vulgarities at GF at Parkway, but no one helps her - "STOMPer KrystynnSG says this man was shouting so loudly at his girlfriend from a stairwell, that she could hear him from a nearby cafe. She is disappointed that none of the men present bothered to intervene... "He stands at about 5 feet 2 inches tall, a definite shorty if I (in my 5 ft 7 inches frame) were to stand next to him!""
More screwed up gender relations
Young female chimpanzees treat sticks as dolls: Growing evidence of biological basis for gender-specific play in humans - "Doll play among humans could have its origins in object-carrying by earlier apes, they say, suggesting that toy selection is probably not due entirely to socialization... "In humans, there are robust sex differences in children's toy play, and these are remarkably similar across cultures"... this may be a lovely case of biological and social influences being intertwined"
Ironic feminist excuses I've seen: "How can we be sure the chimps’ differences in play are genetic and not socialisation?... They’re monkeys; how do they know what a truck is? And why would they share any human ideas of what’s a boy toy and what’s a girl toy?"
"the nature-vs-nurture argument, in the versus sense, is outdated and incorrect. The actual way these things work is much more complicated and interactive... the lack of stick playing in other chimpanzee communities would, in fact, rule against nature"
Why Do We Demonize Men Who Are Honest About Their Sexual Needs? - "The pressure put on men to be initiators, yet avoid seeming creepy or aggressive leads to an unpleasant double bind. After all, the same gross cultural pressures that make women into objects force men into instigators; how many women do you know who proposed to their husbands?... unlike men -- "I can be explicit and overt about my sexuality without being viewed as a creep"... the pervasive tropes around male sexuality [are] that it's inherently aggressive, toxic and unwanted... "The only way for a guy to guarantee that he won’t be called 'creepy' is to suppress entirely his sexuality, just like a woman can escape being called a slut by suppressing hers"... Calls to censor porn, for example, are influenced [also] by feelings that mainstream porn expresses an unacceptable form of male sexuality"
More from Feminist Critics: "Sometime, I would love to dress some female feminists up in convincing drag and take them out to hit on women. Judging by Vincent’s experience, the results would be a big wake-up call"
Post ID: 6537025679451269290
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Links - 18th December 2010
"How to Raise your I.Q. by Eating Gifted Children" - Lewis B. Frumkes
***
YouTube - Best Action Scene Of ALL TIME - "The sliding horse at 2:05 is classic along with the jeep that goes flying for no reason. The sound is just too much. The stunts would never be done in Hollywood-it looks like a few people and animals were paralyzed at the very least."
La Senza presents The Cup Size Choir
Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism - "His stunning prophecies have earned him a reputation as a tech visionary, but many of them don't look so good on close inspection"
4 Fruits We’re Dying to Try - 2 of them are mangosteen and rambutan!
Kuriositas: Jabuticaba – The Tree that Fruits on its Trunk - "Otherwise known as the Brazilian Grape Tree, this plant is native to South America, notably Paraguay, Argentina and (obviously from its name) mostly from Brazil. The fruit, a succulent looking purple color can be plucked and eaten straight from the tree... The flowers themselves appear on the tree at most twice a year – naturally. They look like some strange alien creature that has deposited itself on the trunk and branches"
Actually it looks quite freaky
Preserving Singapore’s past: A losing battle? « - "Renowned architect Johannes Widodo describes the former Cathay Building as a prime example of the triumph of money over heritage. Inaugurated in 1939, The Cathay Building was a groundbreaking edifice, the first skyscraper in Singapore and at that time the tallest building in Southeast Asia. The Cathay was also the first public building in Singapore to be air-conditioned. The front facade of the building was gazetted as a national monument in 2003. The new complex features an avant garde glass façade which incorporates the original art-deco facade of the old Cathay Building. But, says Mr. Widodo,“at night you can’t even recognize that piece of wall because it is swallowed by the glowing lights from the big glass box on top of it.” He goes on to ask: “If a National Heritage can be turned into something like that, how about the other heritages?”"
I never noticed the Art Deco facade
However I am proud of Mesut Özil . . . - "I watched the Euro 2012 qualifying game between Germany Vs Turkey in horror... Mesut Özil one of four son’s of Mustafa Özil, a man originally from the Turkish city of Zonguldak who moved over to Germany in the 70’s... [They] booed Mesut Özil both after he scored and every time he got the ball to his feet. And those people who booed Özil were German Turks and not travelers from Turkey"
In Europe, sharp criticism of US reaction to WikiLeaks - "Renaud Girard, a respected reporter for the center-right Le Figaro, said he was impressed by the generally high quality of the American diplomatic corps. “What is most fascinating is that we see no cynicism in US diplomacy,’’ he said. “They really believe in human rights in Africa and China and Russia and Asia. They really believe in democracy and human rights. People accuse the Americans of double standards all the time. But it’s not true here. If anything, the diplomats are almost naive.’’"
Honey traps: Do spies use sex to extract secrets? - "When the KGB tried to blackmail Indonesian President Achmed Sukarno with videotapes of the president having sex with Russian women disguised as flight attendants, Sukarno wasn't upset. He was pleased. He even asked for more copies of the video to show back in his country"
Mossad's Seductive 'Honey Trap' Is Kosher, Rabbi Finds - "Rabbi Ari Shvat, an expert on Jewish law and modern politics, says Israeli women can sleep with the enemy in the interests of national security. The scholar has found that it is not a breach of Jewish law for a woman to seduce terrorists and other dangerous enemies in order to gain vital intelligence to save lives... Shvat says it is preferable for a woman setting a honey trap to be single. If she is married, he suggests a technical solution: getting a quickie divorce from her husband before each mission and then re-marrying afterward. Otherwise, she is guilty of adultery, no matter how vital the asset... Shvat is not the first rabbi to consider spy seduction. Ancient Jewish sages argued in the Talmud more than 1,000 years ago that it was praiseworthy to have sex with a non-Jew in the pursuit of vital national interests"
Best of Russia --- KGB - "Her English husband was also a Soviet spy. The Russians require espionage activity from both partners in their married spies. She seduced and recruited several British officials for the highly successful "Lucy" spy ring. Sonia was eventually brought down via an affair with another Soviet spy, a practice strongly prohibited in the spy world (sex is only allowed with the enemy)."
The New Sex Scorecard - "Everyone gains from the new imperative to explore sex differences. When we know why depression favors women two to one, or why the symptoms of heart disease literally hit women in the gut, it will change our understanding of how our bodies and our minds work... The more testosterone the children had been exposed to in the womb, the less able they were to make eye contact at 1 year of age. "Who would have thought that a behavior like eye contact, which is so intrinsically social, could be in part shaped by a biological factor?" he asks. What's more, the testosterone level during fetal life also influenced language skills... The female preponderance in depression is virtually universal. And it's specific to unipolar depression. Males and females suffer equally from bipolar, or manic, depression. However, once depression occurs, the clinical course is identical in men and women. The gender difference in susceptibility to depression emerges at 13. Before that age, boys, if anything, are a bit more likely than girls to be depressed. The gender difference seems to wind down four decades later, making depression mostly a disorder of women in the child-bearing years"
digital ninja on Vimeo - "I am a digital strategic googler/ninja"
"What the fuck does that mean"
"If you don't know then you are too traditional to understand"
"Well, what do you do on a typical day?"
"I blog. And I tweet"
"Fuck you..."
"Do you do any actual work?"
"Yes I have a tumbler"
"You are shitting me."
"Sometimes I post pictures of things that inspire me and share links to other blogs"
Accuracy in names: Sixty years of Orwellian spin | The Economist - "IN CASE anyone didn't understand that Fox News routinely hews to the messaging guidelines drawn up by Republican political strategists, we have evidence from a leaked email that Fox News's Washington bureau chief instructed his staff to hew to a messaging guideline drawn up by Republican political strategists, by referring to the health-insurance reform public option as a "government option" or "government plan"... There's nothing wrong with having an agenda, as long as you're willing to own up to it. That's the problem with Fox News: they won't own up to their agenda, and it's ridiculous... the Department of War... became the Department of Defence. This was right about the time "1984" was being published... Anyone who's confident that fighting a war is a good idea should have the guts to call it by its proper name"
Shipping Company Reviews – Best Package Shipping Company - Popular Mechanics - "We mailed a bunch of sensors on an epic journey to find out which shipping company is the most careful with your packages. Here's what we found... the USPS has the gentlest touch, with a per-trip average of 0.5 acceleration spikes over 6 g's. FedEx and UPS logged an average of three and two big drops per trip, respectively (see graph, next page). Given those results, we were a little surprised to find that the USPS flipped over its Express Mail packages an awful lot, averaging 12.5 position changes per trip. Meanwhile, FedEx averaged seven position changes, and UPS had an average of four"
Economics focus: The joyless or the jobless | The Economist - "There is nothing like a drop in GDP to remind everyone how much this much-maligned metric matters... the relationship between income and well-being remains fairly steady, from the poorest countries to the richest [if one uses a logarithmic scale, which measures percentage changes]... Ravi Kanbur of Cornell University points out that happiness is not always a good guide to policy. He retells the story of a Brahmin in colonial India who informed a Benthamite official: “I am ten times as capable of happiness as that untouchable over there”... ask people what they would actually choose, as opposed to what would make them happy, and their answers can sometimes surprise: 17% of those who say they would be happier sleeping for longer and earning less also say they would still choose the higher-paying job"
***
YouTube - Best Action Scene Of ALL TIME - "The sliding horse at 2:05 is classic along with the jeep that goes flying for no reason. The sound is just too much. The stunts would never be done in Hollywood-it looks like a few people and animals were paralyzed at the very least."
La Senza presents The Cup Size Choir
Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism - "His stunning prophecies have earned him a reputation as a tech visionary, but many of them don't look so good on close inspection"
4 Fruits We’re Dying to Try - 2 of them are mangosteen and rambutan!
Kuriositas: Jabuticaba – The Tree that Fruits on its Trunk - "Otherwise known as the Brazilian Grape Tree, this plant is native to South America, notably Paraguay, Argentina and (obviously from its name) mostly from Brazil. The fruit, a succulent looking purple color can be plucked and eaten straight from the tree... The flowers themselves appear on the tree at most twice a year – naturally. They look like some strange alien creature that has deposited itself on the trunk and branches"
Actually it looks quite freaky
Preserving Singapore’s past: A losing battle? « - "Renowned architect Johannes Widodo describes the former Cathay Building as a prime example of the triumph of money over heritage. Inaugurated in 1939, The Cathay Building was a groundbreaking edifice, the first skyscraper in Singapore and at that time the tallest building in Southeast Asia. The Cathay was also the first public building in Singapore to be air-conditioned. The front facade of the building was gazetted as a national monument in 2003. The new complex features an avant garde glass façade which incorporates the original art-deco facade of the old Cathay Building. But, says Mr. Widodo,“at night you can’t even recognize that piece of wall because it is swallowed by the glowing lights from the big glass box on top of it.” He goes on to ask: “If a National Heritage can be turned into something like that, how about the other heritages?”"
I never noticed the Art Deco facade
However I am proud of Mesut Özil . . . - "I watched the Euro 2012 qualifying game between Germany Vs Turkey in horror... Mesut Özil one of four son’s of Mustafa Özil, a man originally from the Turkish city of Zonguldak who moved over to Germany in the 70’s... [They] booed Mesut Özil both after he scored and every time he got the ball to his feet. And those people who booed Özil were German Turks and not travelers from Turkey"
In Europe, sharp criticism of US reaction to WikiLeaks - "Renaud Girard, a respected reporter for the center-right Le Figaro, said he was impressed by the generally high quality of the American diplomatic corps. “What is most fascinating is that we see no cynicism in US diplomacy,’’ he said. “They really believe in human rights in Africa and China and Russia and Asia. They really believe in democracy and human rights. People accuse the Americans of double standards all the time. But it’s not true here. If anything, the diplomats are almost naive.’’"
Honey traps: Do spies use sex to extract secrets? - "When the KGB tried to blackmail Indonesian President Achmed Sukarno with videotapes of the president having sex with Russian women disguised as flight attendants, Sukarno wasn't upset. He was pleased. He even asked for more copies of the video to show back in his country"
Mossad's Seductive 'Honey Trap' Is Kosher, Rabbi Finds - "Rabbi Ari Shvat, an expert on Jewish law and modern politics, says Israeli women can sleep with the enemy in the interests of national security. The scholar has found that it is not a breach of Jewish law for a woman to seduce terrorists and other dangerous enemies in order to gain vital intelligence to save lives... Shvat says it is preferable for a woman setting a honey trap to be single. If she is married, he suggests a technical solution: getting a quickie divorce from her husband before each mission and then re-marrying afterward. Otherwise, she is guilty of adultery, no matter how vital the asset... Shvat is not the first rabbi to consider spy seduction. Ancient Jewish sages argued in the Talmud more than 1,000 years ago that it was praiseworthy to have sex with a non-Jew in the pursuit of vital national interests"
Best of Russia --- KGB - "Her English husband was also a Soviet spy. The Russians require espionage activity from both partners in their married spies. She seduced and recruited several British officials for the highly successful "Lucy" spy ring. Sonia was eventually brought down via an affair with another Soviet spy, a practice strongly prohibited in the spy world (sex is only allowed with the enemy)."
The New Sex Scorecard - "Everyone gains from the new imperative to explore sex differences. When we know why depression favors women two to one, or why the symptoms of heart disease literally hit women in the gut, it will change our understanding of how our bodies and our minds work... The more testosterone the children had been exposed to in the womb, the less able they were to make eye contact at 1 year of age. "Who would have thought that a behavior like eye contact, which is so intrinsically social, could be in part shaped by a biological factor?" he asks. What's more, the testosterone level during fetal life also influenced language skills... The female preponderance in depression is virtually universal. And it's specific to unipolar depression. Males and females suffer equally from bipolar, or manic, depression. However, once depression occurs, the clinical course is identical in men and women. The gender difference in susceptibility to depression emerges at 13. Before that age, boys, if anything, are a bit more likely than girls to be depressed. The gender difference seems to wind down four decades later, making depression mostly a disorder of women in the child-bearing years"
digital ninja on Vimeo - "I am a digital strategic googler/ninja"
"What the fuck does that mean"
"If you don't know then you are too traditional to understand"
"Well, what do you do on a typical day?"
"I blog. And I tweet"
"Fuck you..."
"Do you do any actual work?"
"Yes I have a tumbler"
"You are shitting me."
"Sometimes I post pictures of things that inspire me and share links to other blogs"
Accuracy in names: Sixty years of Orwellian spin | The Economist - "IN CASE anyone didn't understand that Fox News routinely hews to the messaging guidelines drawn up by Republican political strategists, we have evidence from a leaked email that Fox News's Washington bureau chief instructed his staff to hew to a messaging guideline drawn up by Republican political strategists, by referring to the health-insurance reform public option as a "government option" or "government plan"... There's nothing wrong with having an agenda, as long as you're willing to own up to it. That's the problem with Fox News: they won't own up to their agenda, and it's ridiculous... the Department of War... became the Department of Defence. This was right about the time "1984" was being published... Anyone who's confident that fighting a war is a good idea should have the guts to call it by its proper name"
Shipping Company Reviews – Best Package Shipping Company - Popular Mechanics - "We mailed a bunch of sensors on an epic journey to find out which shipping company is the most careful with your packages. Here's what we found... the USPS has the gentlest touch, with a per-trip average of 0.5 acceleration spikes over 6 g's. FedEx and UPS logged an average of three and two big drops per trip, respectively (see graph, next page). Given those results, we were a little surprised to find that the USPS flipped over its Express Mail packages an awful lot, averaging 12.5 position changes per trip. Meanwhile, FedEx averaged seven position changes, and UPS had an average of four"
Economics focus: The joyless or the jobless | The Economist - "There is nothing like a drop in GDP to remind everyone how much this much-maligned metric matters... the relationship between income and well-being remains fairly steady, from the poorest countries to the richest [if one uses a logarithmic scale, which measures percentage changes]... Ravi Kanbur of Cornell University points out that happiness is not always a good guide to policy. He retells the story of a Brahmin in colonial India who informed a Benthamite official: “I am ten times as capable of happiness as that untouchable over there”... ask people what they would actually choose, as opposed to what would make them happy, and their answers can sometimes surprise: 17% of those who say they would be happier sleeping for longer and earning less also say they would still choose the higher-paying job"
Post ID: 6214489793059272507
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Spam FAIL
SIR – How right you were to think that spammers are becoming ever more creative (“Confidence game”, November 20th). Only last week I received an e-mail from the “Nigerian Space Agency” asking me for assistance in connection with the rescue of a Nigerian astronaut stranded on the Soviet Salyut 6 space station, where he has apparently been stuck since a secret space flight took him there in 1989, never to return after the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union. Ian Fleming would have been impressed.
Julius Hugelshofer
Paris
Julius Hugelshofer
Paris
Post ID: 3658708269524116259
Monday, September 27, 2010
Sarcastic book reviews are even better heard than read
"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little." - George Carlin
***
Understanding the universe: Order of creation | The Economist
(on The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow)
"“A Brief History of Time”... was renowned for being bought by everyone and understood by few. Twenty-two years later... once more we are told that we are on the brink of understanding everything.
The authors may be in this enviable state of enlightenment, but most readers will not have a clue what they are on about... The problem is not that the book is technically rigorous... but because whenever the going threatens to get tough, the authors retreat into hand-waving, and move briskly on to the next awe-inspiring notion. Anyone who can follow their closing paragraphs on the relation between negative gravitational energy and the creation of the universe probably knows it all already. This is physics by sound-bite...
The book is peppered with quips, presumably to remind the reader that he is not studying for an exam but is supposed to be having fun. These attempted jokes usually fuse the weighty with the quotidian, in the manner of Woody Allen, only without the laughs. (“While perhaps offering great tanning opportunities, any solar system with multiple suns would probably never allow life to develop”)...
Given what the authors have to say about Aristotle, one can only hope that they are more reliable about what happened billions of years ago at the birth of the universe than they are about what happened in Greece in the fourth century BC. Their account appears to be based on unreliable popularisations, and they cannot even get right the number of elements in Aristotle’s universe (it is five, not four)...
The authors rather fancy themselves as philosophers, though they would presumably balk at the description, since they confidently assert on their first page that “philosophy is dead”...
It is hard to evaluate their case against recent philosophy, because [there is] only [one] subsequent mention of it, after the announcement of its death... Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow regard a philosophical problem as something you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you have run out of Sudoku puzzles...
Once upon a time it was the province of philosophy to propose ambitious and outlandish theories in advance of any concrete evidence for them. Perhaps science, as Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow practice it in their airier moments, has indeed changed places with philosophy, though probably not quite in the way that they think."
***
Understanding the universe: Order of creation | The Economist
(on The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow)
"“A Brief History of Time”... was renowned for being bought by everyone and understood by few. Twenty-two years later... once more we are told that we are on the brink of understanding everything.
The authors may be in this enviable state of enlightenment, but most readers will not have a clue what they are on about... The problem is not that the book is technically rigorous... but because whenever the going threatens to get tough, the authors retreat into hand-waving, and move briskly on to the next awe-inspiring notion. Anyone who can follow their closing paragraphs on the relation between negative gravitational energy and the creation of the universe probably knows it all already. This is physics by sound-bite...
The book is peppered with quips, presumably to remind the reader that he is not studying for an exam but is supposed to be having fun. These attempted jokes usually fuse the weighty with the quotidian, in the manner of Woody Allen, only without the laughs. (“While perhaps offering great tanning opportunities, any solar system with multiple suns would probably never allow life to develop”)...
Given what the authors have to say about Aristotle, one can only hope that they are more reliable about what happened billions of years ago at the birth of the universe than they are about what happened in Greece in the fourth century BC. Their account appears to be based on unreliable popularisations, and they cannot even get right the number of elements in Aristotle’s universe (it is five, not four)...
The authors rather fancy themselves as philosophers, though they would presumably balk at the description, since they confidently assert on their first page that “philosophy is dead”...
It is hard to evaluate their case against recent philosophy, because [there is] only [one] subsequent mention of it, after the announcement of its death... Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow regard a philosophical problem as something you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you have run out of Sudoku puzzles...
Once upon a time it was the province of philosophy to propose ambitious and outlandish theories in advance of any concrete evidence for them. Perhaps science, as Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow practice it in their airier moments, has indeed changed places with philosophy, though probably not quite in the way that they think."
Post ID: 7250915988453382265
Monday, August 16, 2010
Opposing unwise juxtaposition of sites of tragedy and symbols of their causes, and bigotry
"Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week." - George Bernard Shaw
***
I wonder how many of the people supporting the 9/11 mosque (some of whom condemn those who are against it as bigots) were upset (or would have been upset) at another similar instance not too long ago.
The year was 2003, and the place was Germany.
Berlin was constructing a Holocaust Memorial (the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe"), and Degussa was a company producing Protectosil - an anti-graffiti coating for the memorial. The nub of the issue was that a subsidiary of Degussa - Degesch - had produced a deadly chemical, Zyklon-B, in the 1940s: a chemical which had been used in the gas chambers (to kill people).
Most Jewish organisations were against Degussa's involvement in the Holocaust memorial. One Jewish critic even called the memorial a "pig sty". Presumably they were (are) bigots - except that in this case, there is no (perceived) powerless minority involved, so that accusation cannot be made.
Of course, people would say that this case was different, since there was direct involvement by Degussa, whereas the ones behind the 9/11 mosque are not the 9/11 hijackers. However, one has to consider several issues.
For one, the Degussa scandal broke almost 60 years after the end of World War II (and the end of the Holocaust), whereas it's only been 9 years since 9/11. It is certain that in 51 years time, this would not be so much of an issue (and that 51 years ago, there would've been even more controversy about Degussa if it'd similarly been involved in such a memorial).
We also have to consider that although companies are legal persons, this is just a convenient legal fiction (or perhaps conceit) to enable the path of commerce to flow more smoothly. Furthermore, there have been mergers and restructurings over the years. This is not to mention that Degesch was a subsidiary of Degussa, which further reduces the link between Degesch and the modern Degussa, part of the modern Evonik Industries. There is thus no direct connection between the two, just as there is no direct connection between the 9/11 hijackers (and other jihadists) and the putative mosque.
People are also wont to pose this as a freedom of religion issue - but even opponents of the mosque acknowledge that those who want to build it have a right to do so; they are just opposed to it.
Freedom of religion, a cherished American value, does not mean that other people have no right to protest what you are doing. Which naturally is another cherished American value - freedom of speech.
Of course, one could argue that protest is a form of opposition and thus restriction (there are seriously people who argue this - albeit only when [perceived] powerless minorities are being 'oppressed'), but this would lead us to the absurd conclusion that only those who speak first have the right to air their minds - and those who come late to the party must shut up (at least if they're not a member of a [perceived] powerless minority).
Which incidentally recalls a famous Singaporean logical fallacy - that expressing an opinion is a violation of other people's rights - among which primarily (presumably) the freedom of conscience/thought:
"Obviously there are some people who still think differently. That is their mindset and I have no business trying to change theirs as long as they don't change mine."
(Making the case for the Death penalty)
Addendum:
Also, see this letter:
"SIR – Lexington (August 7th) was correct about the planned building of a mosque near to the Ground Zero site from a legal standpoint: any attempt to stop its construction would be defeated in the courts, but his conclusions are wrong. The issue is not one of law or even morality, but of raw emotion. It is similar to an incident in the 1990s when the Catholic church in Poland wished to build a Carmelite convent near the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Jewish community objected to it because they felt that building a convent near where so many of their friends and relations had died was an act of incredible insensitivity. The matter was brought to Pope John Paul II who withdrew the plans as he did not want its presence to be a source of pain for the Jewish people. How decent of him. How sensitive to the feelings of others.
Those who wish to erect the Cordoba House mosque could learn from the pope’s decision and tell the people of New York that, after reflection, they realise that building a community centre will not foster understanding but is likely to have the opposite effect, and they do not wish it to be the cause of any further anguish to those who lost loved ones at that place on that terrible day.
Derek E. Barrett
Long Beach, New York"
***
I wonder how many of the people supporting the 9/11 mosque (some of whom condemn those who are against it as bigots) were upset (or would have been upset) at another similar instance not too long ago.
The year was 2003, and the place was Germany.
Berlin was constructing a Holocaust Memorial (the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe"), and Degussa was a company producing Protectosil - an anti-graffiti coating for the memorial. The nub of the issue was that a subsidiary of Degussa - Degesch - had produced a deadly chemical, Zyklon-B, in the 1940s: a chemical which had been used in the gas chambers (to kill people).
Most Jewish organisations were against Degussa's involvement in the Holocaust memorial. One Jewish critic even called the memorial a "pig sty". Presumably they were (are) bigots - except that in this case, there is no (perceived) powerless minority involved, so that accusation cannot be made.
Of course, people would say that this case was different, since there was direct involvement by Degussa, whereas the ones behind the 9/11 mosque are not the 9/11 hijackers. However, one has to consider several issues.
For one, the Degussa scandal broke almost 60 years after the end of World War II (and the end of the Holocaust), whereas it's only been 9 years since 9/11. It is certain that in 51 years time, this would not be so much of an issue (and that 51 years ago, there would've been even more controversy about Degussa if it'd similarly been involved in such a memorial).
We also have to consider that although companies are legal persons, this is just a convenient legal fiction (or perhaps conceit) to enable the path of commerce to flow more smoothly. Furthermore, there have been mergers and restructurings over the years. This is not to mention that Degesch was a subsidiary of Degussa, which further reduces the link between Degesch and the modern Degussa, part of the modern Evonik Industries. There is thus no direct connection between the two, just as there is no direct connection between the 9/11 hijackers (and other jihadists) and the putative mosque.
People are also wont to pose this as a freedom of religion issue - but even opponents of the mosque acknowledge that those who want to build it have a right to do so; they are just opposed to it.
Freedom of religion, a cherished American value, does not mean that other people have no right to protest what you are doing. Which naturally is another cherished American value - freedom of speech.
Of course, one could argue that protest is a form of opposition and thus restriction (there are seriously people who argue this - albeit only when [perceived] powerless minorities are being 'oppressed'), but this would lead us to the absurd conclusion that only those who speak first have the right to air their minds - and those who come late to the party must shut up (at least if they're not a member of a [perceived] powerless minority).
Which incidentally recalls a famous Singaporean logical fallacy - that expressing an opinion is a violation of other people's rights - among which primarily (presumably) the freedom of conscience/thought:
"Obviously there are some people who still think differently. That is their mindset and I have no business trying to change theirs as long as they don't change mine."
(Making the case for the Death penalty)
Addendum:
Also, see this letter:
"SIR – Lexington (August 7th) was correct about the planned building of a mosque near to the Ground Zero site from a legal standpoint: any attempt to stop its construction would be defeated in the courts, but his conclusions are wrong. The issue is not one of law or even morality, but of raw emotion. It is similar to an incident in the 1990s when the Catholic church in Poland wished to build a Carmelite convent near the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Jewish community objected to it because they felt that building a convent near where so many of their friends and relations had died was an act of incredible insensitivity. The matter was brought to Pope John Paul II who withdrew the plans as he did not want its presence to be a source of pain for the Jewish people. How decent of him. How sensitive to the feelings of others.
Those who wish to erect the Cordoba House mosque could learn from the pope’s decision and tell the people of New York that, after reflection, they realise that building a community centre will not foster understanding but is likely to have the opposite effect, and they do not wish it to be the cause of any further anguish to those who lost loved ones at that place on that terrible day.
Derek E. Barrett
Long Beach, New York"
Post ID: 3453746774323035182
Monday, July 05, 2010
Really? I thought it was called a "scholarship"
"The idea of people bonding themselves to a foreign employer in return for the costs of getting to their place of work, and then repaying the debt through labour, has been tried before. In the 19th century it was called indentured servitude"
Post ID: 7888503479161919636
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Feminism in the 80s and 90s / The evolution of humour, and offence
"If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me." - Alice Roosevelt Longworth
***
While replying to a tweet of @msvindicta, I dug up 2 articles from 1997 which make you wonder what (if anything) has changed in 13 years:
Wimmin are from Mars, women are from Venus
"In Britain and continental Europe cracks began to appear in the feminist movement. Scandinavian feminists argued about whether a quota for women in parliament was an innovation or an insult; in Britain, feminists had similar worries about women’s-only book prizes. But it is in the United States, where feminists took their ideas to the most absurd limits, that the movement is most deeply divided. So this article will concentrate on the fierce, indeed bitchy, arguments in America about the future of feminism.
The turning point in America was the defeat in 1982 of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have made equality of the sexes a constitutional principle. The fight for the ERA had had the effect of keeping the women’s movement together, and when it faltered, splits developed. At a conference on the politics of sexuality at Barnard College in New York a week before the ERA finally died, for instance, things turned ugly when feminists who saw heterosexuality as a form of collusion with the “patriarchy” (in this view, clitoral orgasm is the only authentic expression of “gynocentric sexuality”) had a well-publicised fight with those who did not see orgasm as a political issue.
It was the shape of things to come. In the 1980s feminism became preoccupied with “identity politics”. This meant a woman identifying herself according to certain categories—straight, lesbian, sado-masochist, Marxist, disabled, fat, and so on—as if such labels were sufficient to define a person’s identity, social role and rights. In a not untypical example of the genre, Gloria Anzaldua is described in a collection of essays as “a Chicana tejana dyke-feminist poet, fiction writer, teacher and culture theorist.” Well, fine, but what is this supposed to tell us about Ms Anzaldua?
Big difference
The most intellectually audacious of the feminist “isms” is “difference feminism”, which argues that women have a different, and better, way of thinking, acting and being than men. Difference feminists reckon that women are equal to men (thus the relative shortage of female physicists and auditors is held to be evidence of sexism) except when they are superior (thus the relative shortage of female muggers).
Moreover, according to the difference feminists, men are much worse than is generally recognised. Rape, they say, is the central metaphor for male-female relations and men’s relationship with society, while pornography is a social weapon to subordinate women. Such reasoning led the National Organisation for Women (NOW), America’s largest women’s group, to proclaim in 1992 that American society regarded sexual assault as a cultural norm...
An unwittingly humorous account of the establishment of Rag, a feminist journal at Harvard, reported that the founders “proposed a method of consensus for decision-making and suggested that the positions of facilitator, time keeper and vibes watcher (whose job it was to monitor the tension in the room and notice if people were being silenced) should rotate on a voluntary basis.” In a result that could surprise only an Ivy League-educated radical feminist, this proved an unworkable basis on which to run a publication. Rag was shortly to close.
American women notched up many achievements in the 1980s... A reader would hardly know that from feminist literature, which came to be defined by its excesses. The movement’s least appealing adherents grabbed the most attention, and the feminist establishment—institutions like the National Women’s Studies Association, NOW, Ms magazine, the Fund for a Feminist Majority and various state-funded commissions—failed to restrain them. Supposedly serious feminists argued, to audiences which did not snigger, that Newton’s “Principles of Mechanics” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony were rape fantasies.
As feminism became associated with humourlessness and hairy legs, the term became a pejorative one. By the early 1990s only a third of college women called themselves feminists—and this at a time when there were more than 600 women’s studies programmes on American campuses. While feminist scholars were producing strikingly creative work in history, medicine, Bible studies and other fields, many women’s studies programmes were explicitly ideological and intellectually vapid.
One syllabus explained a course in feminist theory this way: “We will begin with feminist challenges to the inadequacy of Eurocentric male epistemologies, analytic categories and the masculinist world views which have structured the public world We will initiate our inquiry by demystifying malestream (this is not a misspelling) ‘theory’, ‘reason’, and ‘science’.”
The backlash against backlash
Many feminists attributed the failure of so many women to embrace feminism to base ingratitude or to “backlash”. This is the idea broached in 1991 by Susan Faludi, a favourite theorist of the feminist establishment, that a host of American industries, from lingerie-makers to television producers, were trying to undermine women’s rights. Though the evidence for the backlash hypothesis is dubious—women, remember, had advanced on all fronts—the idea has become a shorthand way for the feminist establishment to dismiss criticism. Anyone who dares to challenge the reality of backlash is accused of participating in it.
In fact, a real backlash is under way, not so much against feminism as against its excesses. The challengers call themselves power feminists, equity feminists or liberal feminists. They are often young, sassy and successful. Ms Faludi dismissively calls them “pod feminists”, suggesting that, like alien pods in a science-fiction film, they are evil invaders of the women’s movement...
Wouldn’t the women’s movement be strengthened if it didn’t shut out the 37% of women who voted for the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole?
In the past, the answer from the feminist establishment has been no. Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms, once referred to Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a moderate conservative, as a “female impersonator”. Women’s studies departments tend to be Republican-free. This ideological intolerance, say the pods, is a large part of the reason why many women who are sympathetic to feminism are nevertheless unwilling to describe themselves as feminists. The point of feminism, they argue, should not be to impose a set of policy preferences but to broaden the choices that women are able to make. Too bad if some of these choices—to read pornography, for example, or to enter the Miss America pageant—may not meet with NOW’s approval...
Finally, the pods take issue with what they see as the importance of victimhood in much feminist thinking. Emphasising victimisation, they say, makes women appear permanently inferior. For example, broadening the definition of date rape to include any sex act which the woman later regrets—a definition of which many feminists approve—means that the man becomes responsible for determining whether his lover means “no” even if she is apparently enthusiastic at the time. The implication is that women are not capable of making a sexual choice, communicating it and accepting the consequences—hardly an assertion of equality"
LAUGHING MATTERS: You think that’s funny?
"In general, the less democratic the government, the less developed its leaders’ sense of humour. In North Korea, for example, any kind of satire is banned because everything is perfect in the people’s paradise, so there is nothing to mock. The only person allowed to make jokes is the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, who is, according to officials, “a priceless master of witty remarks”. A news release provides a taste of his wit: “To expect victory in the revolution without the leader is as good as to expect a flower to bloom without the sun.” Another of his Wildean rib-ticklers: “Trust produces loyal subjects but doubt produces traitors.” In a way, perhaps that is funny...
Political correctness is a subtler matter. In most rich countries there is a feeling that it has limited the range of permissible gags. Up to a point, this is true. Stanford University—in, note well, California, the world’s capital of unconscious self-parody—shut down a comedy website for containing too many sexist and racist jokes. The editors of “Kamui Gaiden”, a Japanese comic book for adults set in the 19th century, insisted that the gruff samurai hero refer to a blind person as “me no fujiyu na hito” (visually inconvenienced).
All around the world, jokes that might upset oppressed minorities are being told less often, and in less public places. But this is not necessarily because comedians are afraid of the PC police. The real reason for the change in jokesters’ targets, according to William Cook, a comedy writer, is that audiences’ tastes have changed. Punters are bored of stale anti-immigrant gags. The most popular jokes these days tend to lampoon the strong, rather than the weak...
The legal profession has always attracted its share of derision, but the level of hostile humour has increased noticeably since racist jokes went out of fashion. The sorts of jokes which, in less enlightened times, were directed at ethnic groups are now more commonly aimed at lawyers, particularly in America...
Certain Californian lawyers have tried to have jokes like these restricted as hate speech, and they have a point. Most lawyers—well, some—are splendid people, so it is perhaps unfair to suggest that scientists have decided to experiment on lawyers instead of rats because there are some things even a rat won’t do.
Jokes at the expense of women, notably mothers-in-law, were not so long ago a staple, but today ridiculing men is far safer...
Tell such a joke about women, and you will instantly become a pariah. This is not fair. On the other hand, men do less than half of the work in the world, own 90% of the property, and can wear the same suit every day, which is not fair either.
What to do about jokes at the expense of the stupid? Many avenues have been blocked off by sensitivity. The sorts of jokes that the English used to tell about the Irish, the Americans about the Poles, the Ibos about the Hausas and the Tajiks about the Uzbeks, are now often told about blonds (or, more usually, blondes)...
This anti-blond humour may limp along for a few years more. But no doubt someone, somewhere, is already forming a group with a name like People Opposed to the Oppression of Persons with Hair of European-Aryan Descent...
In the Middle East, where the words “peace process” will reliably raise a wry laugh, the hopeless illogic of the two sides is ever a source of black humour:
Like many jokes, that one contains more truth than one would wish. The travails of the Sesame Street gang suggest that organising even light entertainment in this fraught part of the world is not easy. Producers of the beloved American children’s programme were planning to launch an Israeli version that would promote mutual understanding between young Palestinians and Jews. The idea was to have Palestinian and Jewish “muppet” puppets appear in the same show, chatting amiably using a limited vocabulary of words that sound similar in Hebrew and Arabic.
Alas, the Palestinian muppeteers did not want their muppets to live on the same street as the Jewish muppets. Americans tried to act as mediators. If Jewish and Palestinian muppets could not live on the same street, should there not at least be a park where they could play together, they suggested? The Palestinians asked: “Who owns the park, Jews or Arabs?”"
***
While replying to a tweet of @msvindicta, I dug up 2 articles from 1997 which make you wonder what (if anything) has changed in 13 years:
Wimmin are from Mars, women are from Venus
"In Britain and continental Europe cracks began to appear in the feminist movement. Scandinavian feminists argued about whether a quota for women in parliament was an innovation or an insult; in Britain, feminists had similar worries about women’s-only book prizes. But it is in the United States, where feminists took their ideas to the most absurd limits, that the movement is most deeply divided. So this article will concentrate on the fierce, indeed bitchy, arguments in America about the future of feminism.
The turning point in America was the defeat in 1982 of the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have made equality of the sexes a constitutional principle. The fight for the ERA had had the effect of keeping the women’s movement together, and when it faltered, splits developed. At a conference on the politics of sexuality at Barnard College in New York a week before the ERA finally died, for instance, things turned ugly when feminists who saw heterosexuality as a form of collusion with the “patriarchy” (in this view, clitoral orgasm is the only authentic expression of “gynocentric sexuality”) had a well-publicised fight with those who did not see orgasm as a political issue.
It was the shape of things to come. In the 1980s feminism became preoccupied with “identity politics”. This meant a woman identifying herself according to certain categories—straight, lesbian, sado-masochist, Marxist, disabled, fat, and so on—as if such labels were sufficient to define a person’s identity, social role and rights. In a not untypical example of the genre, Gloria Anzaldua is described in a collection of essays as “a Chicana tejana dyke-feminist poet, fiction writer, teacher and culture theorist.” Well, fine, but what is this supposed to tell us about Ms Anzaldua?
Big difference
The most intellectually audacious of the feminist “isms” is “difference feminism”, which argues that women have a different, and better, way of thinking, acting and being than men. Difference feminists reckon that women are equal to men (thus the relative shortage of female physicists and auditors is held to be evidence of sexism) except when they are superior (thus the relative shortage of female muggers).
Moreover, according to the difference feminists, men are much worse than is generally recognised. Rape, they say, is the central metaphor for male-female relations and men’s relationship with society, while pornography is a social weapon to subordinate women. Such reasoning led the National Organisation for Women (NOW), America’s largest women’s group, to proclaim in 1992 that American society regarded sexual assault as a cultural norm...
An unwittingly humorous account of the establishment of Rag, a feminist journal at Harvard, reported that the founders “proposed a method of consensus for decision-making and suggested that the positions of facilitator, time keeper and vibes watcher (whose job it was to monitor the tension in the room and notice if people were being silenced) should rotate on a voluntary basis.” In a result that could surprise only an Ivy League-educated radical feminist, this proved an unworkable basis on which to run a publication. Rag was shortly to close.
American women notched up many achievements in the 1980s... A reader would hardly know that from feminist literature, which came to be defined by its excesses. The movement’s least appealing adherents grabbed the most attention, and the feminist establishment—institutions like the National Women’s Studies Association, NOW, Ms magazine, the Fund for a Feminist Majority and various state-funded commissions—failed to restrain them. Supposedly serious feminists argued, to audiences which did not snigger, that Newton’s “Principles of Mechanics” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony were rape fantasies.
As feminism became associated with humourlessness and hairy legs, the term became a pejorative one. By the early 1990s only a third of college women called themselves feminists—and this at a time when there were more than 600 women’s studies programmes on American campuses. While feminist scholars were producing strikingly creative work in history, medicine, Bible studies and other fields, many women’s studies programmes were explicitly ideological and intellectually vapid.
One syllabus explained a course in feminist theory this way: “We will begin with feminist challenges to the inadequacy of Eurocentric male epistemologies, analytic categories and the masculinist world views which have structured the public world We will initiate our inquiry by demystifying malestream (this is not a misspelling) ‘theory’, ‘reason’, and ‘science’.”
The backlash against backlash
Many feminists attributed the failure of so many women to embrace feminism to base ingratitude or to “backlash”. This is the idea broached in 1991 by Susan Faludi, a favourite theorist of the feminist establishment, that a host of American industries, from lingerie-makers to television producers, were trying to undermine women’s rights. Though the evidence for the backlash hypothesis is dubious—women, remember, had advanced on all fronts—the idea has become a shorthand way for the feminist establishment to dismiss criticism. Anyone who dares to challenge the reality of backlash is accused of participating in it.
In fact, a real backlash is under way, not so much against feminism as against its excesses. The challengers call themselves power feminists, equity feminists or liberal feminists. They are often young, sassy and successful. Ms Faludi dismissively calls them “pod feminists”, suggesting that, like alien pods in a science-fiction film, they are evil invaders of the women’s movement...
Wouldn’t the women’s movement be strengthened if it didn’t shut out the 37% of women who voted for the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole?
In the past, the answer from the feminist establishment has been no. Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms, once referred to Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a moderate conservative, as a “female impersonator”. Women’s studies departments tend to be Republican-free. This ideological intolerance, say the pods, is a large part of the reason why many women who are sympathetic to feminism are nevertheless unwilling to describe themselves as feminists. The point of feminism, they argue, should not be to impose a set of policy preferences but to broaden the choices that women are able to make. Too bad if some of these choices—to read pornography, for example, or to enter the Miss America pageant—may not meet with NOW’s approval...
Finally, the pods take issue with what they see as the importance of victimhood in much feminist thinking. Emphasising victimisation, they say, makes women appear permanently inferior. For example, broadening the definition of date rape to include any sex act which the woman later regrets—a definition of which many feminists approve—means that the man becomes responsible for determining whether his lover means “no” even if she is apparently enthusiastic at the time. The implication is that women are not capable of making a sexual choice, communicating it and accepting the consequences—hardly an assertion of equality"
LAUGHING MATTERS: You think that’s funny?
"In general, the less democratic the government, the less developed its leaders’ sense of humour. In North Korea, for example, any kind of satire is banned because everything is perfect in the people’s paradise, so there is nothing to mock. The only person allowed to make jokes is the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, who is, according to officials, “a priceless master of witty remarks”. A news release provides a taste of his wit: “To expect victory in the revolution without the leader is as good as to expect a flower to bloom without the sun.” Another of his Wildean rib-ticklers: “Trust produces loyal subjects but doubt produces traitors.” In a way, perhaps that is funny...
Political correctness is a subtler matter. In most rich countries there is a feeling that it has limited the range of permissible gags. Up to a point, this is true. Stanford University—in, note well, California, the world’s capital of unconscious self-parody—shut down a comedy website for containing too many sexist and racist jokes. The editors of “Kamui Gaiden”, a Japanese comic book for adults set in the 19th century, insisted that the gruff samurai hero refer to a blind person as “me no fujiyu na hito” (visually inconvenienced).
All around the world, jokes that might upset oppressed minorities are being told less often, and in less public places. But this is not necessarily because comedians are afraid of the PC police. The real reason for the change in jokesters’ targets, according to William Cook, a comedy writer, is that audiences’ tastes have changed. Punters are bored of stale anti-immigrant gags. The most popular jokes these days tend to lampoon the strong, rather than the weak...
The legal profession has always attracted its share of derision, but the level of hostile humour has increased noticeably since racist jokes went out of fashion. The sorts of jokes which, in less enlightened times, were directed at ethnic groups are now more commonly aimed at lawyers, particularly in America...
Certain Californian lawyers have tried to have jokes like these restricted as hate speech, and they have a point. Most lawyers—well, some—are splendid people, so it is perhaps unfair to suggest that scientists have decided to experiment on lawyers instead of rats because there are some things even a rat won’t do.
Jokes at the expense of women, notably mothers-in-law, were not so long ago a staple, but today ridiculing men is far safer...
Tell such a joke about women, and you will instantly become a pariah. This is not fair. On the other hand, men do less than half of the work in the world, own 90% of the property, and can wear the same suit every day, which is not fair either.
What to do about jokes at the expense of the stupid? Many avenues have been blocked off by sensitivity. The sorts of jokes that the English used to tell about the Irish, the Americans about the Poles, the Ibos about the Hausas and the Tajiks about the Uzbeks, are now often told about blonds (or, more usually, blondes)...
This anti-blond humour may limp along for a few years more. But no doubt someone, somewhere, is already forming a group with a name like People Opposed to the Oppression of Persons with Hair of European-Aryan Descent...
In the Middle East, where the words “peace process” will reliably raise a wry laugh, the hopeless illogic of the two sides is ever a source of black humour:
A scorpion wanted to cross a river, but could not swim. So he asked a frog to ferry him across on his back. “Certainly not,” said the frog, “If I take you on my back, you’ll sting me.” “No I won’t,” said the scorpion, “because if I do, we’ll both drown.” The frog saw the logic in this, so he let the scorpion hop on, and struck out across the water. Half way across, he felt a terrible pain. The scorpion had stung him. As the two of them sank below the ripples, the frog asked the scorpion: “Why on earth did you do that?” Replied the drowning scorpion, “Because this is the Middle East.”
Like many jokes, that one contains more truth than one would wish. The travails of the Sesame Street gang suggest that organising even light entertainment in this fraught part of the world is not easy. Producers of the beloved American children’s programme were planning to launch an Israeli version that would promote mutual understanding between young Palestinians and Jews. The idea was to have Palestinian and Jewish “muppet” puppets appear in the same show, chatting amiably using a limited vocabulary of words that sound similar in Hebrew and Arabic.
Alas, the Palestinian muppeteers did not want their muppets to live on the same street as the Jewish muppets. Americans tried to act as mediators. If Jewish and Palestinian muppets could not live on the same street, should there not at least be a park where they could play together, they suggested? The Palestinians asked: “Who owns the park, Jews or Arabs?”"
Post ID: 9007808455727871884
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Thamus would approve
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." - Thomas Jefferson
***
A special report on television: An interactive future | The Economist
"NOT so long ago television was scary. It was held to turn children into imbeciles, make men violent and corrupt political discourse. Books tried to alert people to the menace in their living rooms: the best of them was Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, published in 1985. Musicians vilified TV in songs like “She Watch Channel Zero” and “Television, the Drug of the Nation”.
These days newspapers are filled with tales of Facebook stalkers, Craigslist killers, cyber-bullying, sexting and screen addiction. E-mail, blogs and YouTube, not television, are held responsible for the degradation of politics (though American liberals make an exception for the Fox News Channel). As the internet grabs attention, television has become more pitied than feared. A Google search on the phrase “threat from television” turns up some 500 results, many of them historical. “Threat to television” generates eight times as many."
From a review of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business:
"In giving credence only to those studies which bolster his argument and dismissing all others, Postman proves nothing other than that television does have some effect on viewers, which he considers negative... Postman provides little in the way of real-world evidence that television has damaged America’s body politic... Anyone choosing to utilize one of the virtues Postman attributes to books might well pause to consider the place of television in social movements of the late twentieth century"
"[Max] Nordau... considered the vast increase in numbers of degenerates in his day to have arisen from the tempo of 19th century living... The telegraph, a surfeit of newspapers, mass literacy... left much of humanity fatigued and exhausted. For Nordau, life was too frenzied to be appreciated, and the overstimulation of the senses was producing mass degeneracy"
--- The unfit: a history of a bad idea / Elof Axel Carlson
"Edward Bulwer-Lytton... argues that diffusing knowledge inevitably dilutes it. Noting “the profusion of amusing, familiar, and superficial writings” in the early thirties, Bulwer-Lytton adds: "People complain of it, as if it were a proof of degeneracy in the knowledge of authors—it is a proof of the increased number of readers” (294). While the growth of the reading public is a sure sign of “the progress to perfection” (223), that growth nevertheless causes a decline in the general profundity and literary greatness of the culture of any nation in which it occurs. “Thus, if we look abroad, in France, where the reading public is less numerous than in England, a more elevated and refining tone is more fashionable in literature; and in America, where it is infinitely larger, the tone of literature is infinitely more superficial” (294). The nation fortunate enough to achieve mass literacy on its route to social perfection will simultaneously witness the decline and perhaps extinction of cultural excellence and creativity. In his chapter surveying the state of education in England, Bulwer-Lytton admonishes: "As you diffuse the stream, guard well the fountains” (165)."
--- The reading lesson: the threat of mass literacy in nineteenth-century British fiction / Patrick Brantlinger
Addendum: Keywords - phaedrus
***
A special report on television: An interactive future | The Economist
"NOT so long ago television was scary. It was held to turn children into imbeciles, make men violent and corrupt political discourse. Books tried to alert people to the menace in their living rooms: the best of them was Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, published in 1985. Musicians vilified TV in songs like “She Watch Channel Zero” and “Television, the Drug of the Nation”.
These days newspapers are filled with tales of Facebook stalkers, Craigslist killers, cyber-bullying, sexting and screen addiction. E-mail, blogs and YouTube, not television, are held responsible for the degradation of politics (though American liberals make an exception for the Fox News Channel). As the internet grabs attention, television has become more pitied than feared. A Google search on the phrase “threat from television” turns up some 500 results, many of them historical. “Threat to television” generates eight times as many."
From a review of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business:
"In giving credence only to those studies which bolster his argument and dismissing all others, Postman proves nothing other than that television does have some effect on viewers, which he considers negative... Postman provides little in the way of real-world evidence that television has damaged America’s body politic... Anyone choosing to utilize one of the virtues Postman attributes to books might well pause to consider the place of television in social movements of the late twentieth century"
"[Max] Nordau... considered the vast increase in numbers of degenerates in his day to have arisen from the tempo of 19th century living... The telegraph, a surfeit of newspapers, mass literacy... left much of humanity fatigued and exhausted. For Nordau, life was too frenzied to be appreciated, and the overstimulation of the senses was producing mass degeneracy"
--- The unfit: a history of a bad idea / Elof Axel Carlson
"Edward Bulwer-Lytton... argues that diffusing knowledge inevitably dilutes it. Noting “the profusion of amusing, familiar, and superficial writings” in the early thirties, Bulwer-Lytton adds: "People complain of it, as if it were a proof of degeneracy in the knowledge of authors—it is a proof of the increased number of readers” (294). While the growth of the reading public is a sure sign of “the progress to perfection” (223), that growth nevertheless causes a decline in the general profundity and literary greatness of the culture of any nation in which it occurs. “Thus, if we look abroad, in France, where the reading public is less numerous than in England, a more elevated and refining tone is more fashionable in literature; and in America, where it is infinitely larger, the tone of literature is infinitely more superficial” (294). The nation fortunate enough to achieve mass literacy on its route to social perfection will simultaneously witness the decline and perhaps extinction of cultural excellence and creativity. In his chapter surveying the state of education in England, Bulwer-Lytton admonishes: "As you diffuse the stream, guard well the fountains” (165)."
--- The reading lesson: the threat of mass literacy in nineteenth-century British fiction / Patrick Brantlinger
Addendum: Keywords - phaedrus
Post ID: 5108743282156322469
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Where do you find all these people?!
"A husband is like a fire, he goes out when unattended." - Evan Esar
***
"SIR – ... I have lived for all but 12 of my 58 years in the United States and somehow have never encountered any of the startling characters you manage to turn up to put front and centre in your articles about life here. Where do you find these people? Do you advertise for them in local newspapers? “Wanted: Very irritated voter, preferably reactionary, uses colourful language.” As for the BBC’s coverage, you’d think the whole of America was populated with Elvis impersonators from Las Vegas.
Maggie McGirr
Greenwich, Connecticut"
***
"SIR – ... I have lived for all but 12 of my 58 years in the United States and somehow have never encountered any of the startling characters you manage to turn up to put front and centre in your articles about life here. Where do you find these people? Do you advertise for them in local newspapers? “Wanted: Very irritated voter, preferably reactionary, uses colourful language.” As for the BBC’s coverage, you’d think the whole of America was populated with Elvis impersonators from Las Vegas.
Maggie McGirr
Greenwich, Connecticut"
Post ID: 9048200521603489575
Friday, March 19, 2010
Singapore: not the only Kafka-esque country in Southeast Asia
"When a large Thai brokerage polled fund managers about political risk factors in 2010, 42% of respondents chose what the brokerage describes as "a change that cannot be mentioned""
Post ID: 4328461665298274529
Monday, January 18, 2010
"The gods too are fond of a joke." - Aristotle
***
An ad in My Favourite Periodical I was amused by, and which answers the age-old question: how do you advertise a job you can't tell people about?
"Where else could you barter in a bazaar, expose a terrorist network and brief Whitehall?
Please do not discuss your application with anyone"
Not only is the tagline cute, the testimonial does not give a last name (hell, the first name is probably fake) or the current posting and the past postings are described in a suitably vague fashion.
The Singaporean equivalent will probably be: "Where else could you pakat in a pasar malam, pass on intelligence to Malaysia and break up Opposition protests?"
(Incidentally this was scanned using my Canon N656U scanner which is more than 9 years old and still working fine)
***
An ad in My Favourite Periodical I was amused by, and which answers the age-old question: how do you advertise a job you can't tell people about?
"Where else could you barter in a bazaar, expose a terrorist network and brief Whitehall?
Please do not discuss your application with anyone"
Not only is the tagline cute, the testimonial does not give a last name (hell, the first name is probably fake) or the current posting and the past postings are described in a suitably vague fashion.
The Singaporean equivalent will probably be: "Where else could you pakat in a pasar malam, pass on intelligence to Malaysia and break up Opposition protests?"
(Incidentally this was scanned using my Canon N656U scanner which is more than 9 years old and still working fine)
Post ID: 5940030651602214154
Thursday, January 14, 2010
"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater." - Gail Godwin
***
"SIR – I recently finished my required 45-hour “orientation class” (Orientierungskurs) and corresponding examination in Germany after a mandatory equivalent of 600 hours of German language lessons, just to stay in the country for three years. Apart from being told that the German flag contains the colour gold, “not yellow”, I had to endure rich-bashing and ridicule of the notion that anyone can become a millionaire. The result of this class has been a desire on my part to leave Germany, which was perhaps one of its goals.
Roxanna Nazari
Berlin"
***
"SIR – I recently finished my required 45-hour “orientation class” (Orientierungskurs) and corresponding examination in Germany after a mandatory equivalent of 600 hours of German language lessons, just to stay in the country for three years. Apart from being told that the German flag contains the colour gold, “not yellow”, I had to endure rich-bashing and ridicule of the notion that anyone can become a millionaire. The result of this class has been a desire on my part to leave Germany, which was perhaps one of its goals.
Roxanna Nazari
Berlin"
Post ID: 5118937978840031056
Sunday, January 10, 2010
On dirt:
"“In cleaning”, writes Mindy Lewis, editor of a recent collection of essays entitled “Dirt”, “we make sense of our lives, sort our messes, restore order to our psyches, work out our anger and frustration, rediscover the beauty in our lives, and express our love for (and resentment toward) others.” Cleaning away dirt, her contributors suggest, can be healing or oppressive, comforting or obsessive, or each of these at different times.
One essayist in “Dirt” describes how her neurotic desire to keep her house spick and span led to the break-up of her marriage: “For me, the act of cleaning house came to represent my endless pursuit of control, in a life where virtually none existed.” Another contributor explains how cleaning became an expression of self-worth. “The truth is, cleaning gives me a sense of purpose at times when it doesn’t seem like I have a role in this world,” she writes. “At home, there are always things to be dusted, sucked up, disposed of.”"
"“In cleaning”, writes Mindy Lewis, editor of a recent collection of essays entitled “Dirt”, “we make sense of our lives, sort our messes, restore order to our psyches, work out our anger and frustration, rediscover the beauty in our lives, and express our love for (and resentment toward) others.” Cleaning away dirt, her contributors suggest, can be healing or oppressive, comforting or obsessive, or each of these at different times.
One essayist in “Dirt” describes how her neurotic desire to keep her house spick and span led to the break-up of her marriage: “For me, the act of cleaning house came to represent my endless pursuit of control, in a life where virtually none existed.” Another contributor explains how cleaning became an expression of self-worth. “The truth is, cleaning gives me a sense of purpose at times when it doesn’t seem like I have a role in this world,” she writes. “At home, there are always things to be dusted, sucked up, disposed of.”"
Post ID: 518106162643892283
Friday, December 25, 2009
"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution." - Hannah Arendt
***
Eight questions for Jonathan Rauch | The Economist
"DIA: Since your book "Kindly Inquisitors" came out, free speech has taken quite a few more knocks, culminating in a recent non-binding resolution from a UN body banning "defamation of religion". Have things gotten worse since 1995? And are free-speech advocates right to fight back by, for example, publishing cartoons of Muhammad in Danish newspapers?
Mr Rauch: Things are worse and better, depending where you look. Since K.I., free speech has learned to fight back against political correctness on university campuses. FIRE, for example, has made university administrators worry about getting sued or shamed if they cave in to repressive demands. That represents an important shift in the power equation.
On the other hand, campaigns by Islamic extremists to shut down full and frank discussion of religion seem to have made headway in Europe...
Freedom of expression and freedom of religion are the two great bulwarks of modern liberalism, and neither is self-enforcing. As we have learned in American universities, political correctness and other kinds of campaigns to muzzle dissent on grounds of sensitivity are really about power, not compassion, and the only thing power respects is power...
DIA: In the past you've had some critical things to say about the blogosphere. Do you see blogging as an inferior form of journalism?
Mr Rauch: I only wish more bloggers would do journalism. Meaning: independently check (alleged) facts before publishing them. Ask people for comment before printing claims about them or attributing hearsay to them. Leave the house and find things out, preferably things that surprise and confound one's initial predispositions. Try to provide some balance. Understand that people can be hurt or even ruined by what writers write, so there is some real need for compassion and caution. Understand that an all-purpose snarky attitude is no substitute for the specialised knowledge that comes from working a beat.
Newsrooms teach these values. The blogosphere seems, too often anyway, to teach contempt for them.
Luckily, he's Jewish and gay, so he's more or less immune to criticism.
From reviews of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought:
"A compelling defense of free speech against its new enemies, who range from the mosques of Iran to the groves of American academe...
Rauch divides challengers to free speech into three camps: ``fundamentalists,'' who believe truth is obvious and not to be questioned; ``egalitarians,'' who think that the beliefs of all sincere people deserve equal respect; and ``humanitarians,'' who hold that one must never offend. But whether they are Moslems enraged at negative portrayals of Islam, creationists pressing to have their theory taught along with evolution, or minorities imposing university codes against ``hate speech,'' all these groups wish to revive the Inquisition notion that ``people who hold wrong and hurtful opinions should be punished for the good of society.''
Rauch's strength here lies in his relentless insistence that liberal science, though hurtful at times, is the best means of advancing knowledge and avoiding ``herdthink.''"
***
Eight questions for Jonathan Rauch | The Economist
"DIA: Since your book "Kindly Inquisitors" came out, free speech has taken quite a few more knocks, culminating in a recent non-binding resolution from a UN body banning "defamation of religion". Have things gotten worse since 1995? And are free-speech advocates right to fight back by, for example, publishing cartoons of Muhammad in Danish newspapers?
Mr Rauch: Things are worse and better, depending where you look. Since K.I., free speech has learned to fight back against political correctness on university campuses. FIRE, for example, has made university administrators worry about getting sued or shamed if they cave in to repressive demands. That represents an important shift in the power equation.
On the other hand, campaigns by Islamic extremists to shut down full and frank discussion of religion seem to have made headway in Europe...
Freedom of expression and freedom of religion are the two great bulwarks of modern liberalism, and neither is self-enforcing. As we have learned in American universities, political correctness and other kinds of campaigns to muzzle dissent on grounds of sensitivity are really about power, not compassion, and the only thing power respects is power...
DIA: In the past you've had some critical things to say about the blogosphere. Do you see blogging as an inferior form of journalism?
Mr Rauch: I only wish more bloggers would do journalism. Meaning: independently check (alleged) facts before publishing them. Ask people for comment before printing claims about them or attributing hearsay to them. Leave the house and find things out, preferably things that surprise and confound one's initial predispositions. Try to provide some balance. Understand that people can be hurt or even ruined by what writers write, so there is some real need for compassion and caution. Understand that an all-purpose snarky attitude is no substitute for the specialised knowledge that comes from working a beat.
Newsrooms teach these values. The blogosphere seems, too often anyway, to teach contempt for them.
Luckily, he's Jewish and gay, so he's more or less immune to criticism.
From reviews of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought:
"A compelling defense of free speech against its new enemies, who range from the mosques of Iran to the groves of American academe...
Rauch divides challengers to free speech into three camps: ``fundamentalists,'' who believe truth is obvious and not to be questioned; ``egalitarians,'' who think that the beliefs of all sincere people deserve equal respect; and ``humanitarians,'' who hold that one must never offend. But whether they are Moslems enraged at negative portrayals of Islam, creationists pressing to have their theory taught along with evolution, or minorities imposing university codes against ``hate speech,'' all these groups wish to revive the Inquisition notion that ``people who hold wrong and hurtful opinions should be punished for the good of society.''
Rauch's strength here lies in his relentless insistence that liberal science, though hurtful at times, is the best means of advancing knowledge and avoiding ``herdthink.''"
Post ID: 6730057622686170673
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
"J.F.K.--The Man and the Airport" - Unknown, Suggested book title
***
“Race” on Broadway: Toying with taboos | The Economist
"“Race is the most incendiary topic in our history,” says Jack Lawson, a jaded, white criminal lawyer (convincingly played by James Spader) and the latest Mametian hero. He and his partner, a black lawyer named Henry Brown (a formidable David Alan Grier), are considering whether to defend a wealthy, white man accused of raping a black woman. “Do you know what you can say? To a black man. On the subject of race?” Henry asks the potential client (Richard Thomas). “Nothing,” says the man. “That is correct,” Henry replies. In a lean 85 minutes, Mr Mamet maps the minefield of any conversation about race, and this play is not without casualties...
Mr Mamet replaces moral righteousness with something more real. The law is “not an exercise in metaphysics”, says Henry, “but an alley fight”. There are no facts of the case, Jack adds, but “two fictions, which the opposing teams each seek to impress upon the jury.” These are laugh lines of the grim sort...
Everyone, it seems, comes to the table with a different viewpoint, a different personal history, a different way to feel aggrieved.
This is a powerful play. At a time when many Americans long to believe that electing a black president cancels out a history of slavery, prejudice and entrenched inequality, Mr Mamet reminds the viewer of the insidious forms of racism that poison ordinary thoughts. Is the white man innocent or guilty? Is the black woman a lying whore or an abused victim? The biases latent in every character, black or white, drive home the improbability of racial reconciliation in America. Audiences are sure to leave this play feeling self-conscious. But as Mr Mamet makes clear, consciousness alone won’t save anyone."
***
“Race” on Broadway: Toying with taboos | The Economist
"“Race is the most incendiary topic in our history,” says Jack Lawson, a jaded, white criminal lawyer (convincingly played by James Spader) and the latest Mametian hero. He and his partner, a black lawyer named Henry Brown (a formidable David Alan Grier), are considering whether to defend a wealthy, white man accused of raping a black woman. “Do you know what you can say? To a black man. On the subject of race?” Henry asks the potential client (Richard Thomas). “Nothing,” says the man. “That is correct,” Henry replies. In a lean 85 minutes, Mr Mamet maps the minefield of any conversation about race, and this play is not without casualties...
Mr Mamet replaces moral righteousness with something more real. The law is “not an exercise in metaphysics”, says Henry, “but an alley fight”. There are no facts of the case, Jack adds, but “two fictions, which the opposing teams each seek to impress upon the jury.” These are laugh lines of the grim sort...
Everyone, it seems, comes to the table with a different viewpoint, a different personal history, a different way to feel aggrieved.
This is a powerful play. At a time when many Americans long to believe that electing a black president cancels out a history of slavery, prejudice and entrenched inequality, Mr Mamet reminds the viewer of the insidious forms of racism that poison ordinary thoughts. Is the white man innocent or guilty? Is the black woman a lying whore or an abused victim? The biases latent in every character, black or white, drive home the improbability of racial reconciliation in America. Audiences are sure to leave this play feeling self-conscious. But as Mr Mamet makes clear, consciousness alone won’t save anyone."
Post ID: 3040008994117324889
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