One man's View / "It’s not my job to educate you."
"Is a load of crap. It’s a cop out of the highest order. When you choose to represent a movement, you become an educator for that movement. It’s the reason I have been tagging my posts in both directions. I’m trying to call out hypocrisy on all sides. I see statements like these coming from all directions. LBGT(etc)s, MRAs, Feminists, even Equalists. They are all in the wrong when they say this.
If someone asks you to prove your stance, “Look it up yourself” or “It’s not my job to educate you” are not even remotely valid responses. At he very best a statement like that makes you look like you have no idea what you are talking about. As though you are only repeating talking points without actually understanding any of the data that backs it up. At worst it shows your contempt for everyone who questions you, and paints a picture that anyone who doesn’t immediately parrot your assertions is somehow beneath your notice. You know, that they are less than equal to you.
It is absolutely your job to educate people on your issues. It is not their job to know intrinsically what your life experiences are, or seek out the history of whatever group you think they should be educated on. Going a step further, if you run into someone completely ignorant of your movement, you are more culpable than they are. It means you have not been effective spreading your message. If you run into someone who doesn’t know about your movement, the proper lexicon, or even that you face an inequality, it’s your fault, not theirs."
*
This is Kale Privilege — On "It's Not My Job to Educate You"This is Kale Privilege — On "It's Not My Job to Educate You"
"If you’ve ever had an argument with a social justice warrior, he/she/zhe/zippitydoodah will probably tell you that you’ve said something “problematic” but refuses to tell you why because “it’s not my job to educate you.”
In a sense, that’s true. It’s certainly not a Tumblr SJW’s job to educate anyone (at least I hope to God these people aren’t in charge of teaching anyone) but it’s a bit of a cop-out—a way of winning an argument without ever having to prove your point.
But of course, logic is the all-time last priority for an SJW. If logic was ever actually implemented in their arguments, the more radical SJWs (you know, the ones who say things like “kill all white men”) would all just stop blogging.
It would make sense if the SJW argument was something normal and common knowledge, like “Racism is bad!” or “Many people harbor prejudices without knowing it!” But often, the things they are being asked to prove are so absurd and radical that, yeah, nobody is going to take their word for it without some evidence. And because most of their opinions are based solely on their feelings and not on actual facts, they respond with “it’s not my job to educate you.”
Now, in the SJW’s defense, they do receive lots of anonymous “asks” probably asking the same questions over and over again. I’m sure this gets tiring, but I wonder why it’s even necessary to respond. Surely, you can just ignore asks that you don’t like, or don’t think are worth answering?
And let’s not forget that running a blog full of your radical opinions means that OF COURSE people are going to be confused and ask questions. If I started a blog about how astrology is the best way to find a mate (I don’t really think this, as I’m not a moron, but for argument’s sake, let’s say I made this blog), I would kind of expect to get lots of questions like “Really? How do you know that astrology means anything?” While it wouldn’t be my *job* to educate these people, it would be kind of lame of me to rattle on and on about an absurd viewpoint and then not even bother to answer questions about it.
Of course, SJWs do have some reasonable viewpoints; it’s just that they take it too far. For example, none of them have ever been able to explain why it’s OK or accepted to change the definition of dictionary words (such as sexism or racism) to exclude certain sexes and races. If you ask them why racism now only applies to systemic, and not individual racism, they won’t explain why it’s possible to change the dictionary to your liking (because, well, shit, it isn’t) but instead they’ll say either that it’s not their job to educate you, you’re a racist, or some gif of a My Little Pony calling you a cracker.
The whole point of arguing is being able to back up your opinion with sources or at least well thought-out reasons why you feel the way you do. If you’re unable to do this (yes, it’s “not your job” but this is the whole point of arguing) then it’s not an argument at all.
Think about it- if someone told you that it was offensive to say the word “peach” but refused to tell you why, would you actually stop saying it? My guess is, you’d write that person off as a maniac unless they told you why that word was so terrible. How can you expect people to go along with your nonsense if you can’t even explain it?
When someone responds to your question with something inexplicable, ad hominem or otherwise childish, you pretty much know you’ve caught them in a bind. So when you hear “it’s not my job to educate you,” you’re actually hearing that you’ve won, about 85% of the time (source: me, and it’s not my job to educate you about how I figured out this number.)"
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Just Smith. / Your Job is to Educate. Stop Denying it.
"If you have spent any time arguing with SJ activist bloggers, you may have seen one of the following lines;
“Educate yourself.”
“It’s not my job to educate you.”
“Just Google it.”
“I don’t have the spoons to explain it to you.”
Now do you know how I know that an SJ activist blogger is in it just to feel morally superior to others and to good about themselves and really doesn’t give a shit about SJ causes? Because they break out the aforementioned lines.
Now what does an activist do? “Well duh, ChromatophobicCuttlefish, they raise awareness!” You may answer. Well how do you raise awareness? “By educating people about social justice causes!” And there’s the ticket.
Education is a massive part of activism. The onus is not on the average joe to go look up everything YOUR movement is about, it’s your responsibility to know what the fuck you’re talking about, not the person you are talking to. If the potential ally already knew what the hell you were talking about, then most likely s/he would’ve considered your position by now.
Education is the thing that could bring someone to your side of thinking, shrieking at someone like a hyperactive howler monkey about how it’s not your job to raise awareness (which is interchangeable with “educate”) is a surefire way to scare off potential allies and goes against the entire act of activism.
Let’s take a scenario that happened here at my pissant liberal arts college. Some students were gathering signatures to change where the college invests so it wouldn’t fund companies that fund the Israeli Palestine conflict. I fell asleep during world history, so I know fuck all about the conflict. I asked the people who came by my door to tell me about the conflict, what they’re proposing to change, and how it would affect the college. They were more than happy to tell me all about the conflict, handed me a pamphlet that detailed their proposal and history of the companies they wanted to stop investing in. Remember; their goal is to make me aware of the problem and get my signature.
Imagine if they showed up at my door and just rattled off a bunch of SJ lingo. And when I asked them what they’re talking about they just go “Look, not my job to educate you, just go open a history book or Google it or something. Sign the petition.” If you were in my shoes, would you want to sign? Hell no. Because they look like they have no idea what they are crusading for. Which is the exact impression SJ bloggers give when they break out the defensive “go educate yourself” or “it’s not my job to educate you.”
If you are passionate about a cause, you know about the cause forwards, backwards, inside-out, and sideways. If someone asks, you’ll be happy to talk about it. That’s passion and activism. Moral superiority is refusing to raise awareness just to feel good about the fact you stomped some unknowing person’s face in by calling them a bigot for not knowing what you could’ve just fucking told them. It’s the equivalent to holding a child’s toy just out of their reach and watching them flail around to grab it.
You’re an activist. Be active."
"if you’re going to jump in and attack people, calling yourself an activist, then you’ve made a choice. You’ve made that choice, as a free person, and now you’re bound by the responsibilities involved. To start, you have the responsibility not to be a douche to that person. You can’t just come in and start harassing them without an explanation. That’s not even relevant to activism: this is just being a good human being. But if you’re an activist, you’re bound further. Shouting at somebody and calling them names is not going to raise awareness; or if it does, the awareness will be of the bad ‘oh look more stereotypical feminazis’ kind. You’ve got an opportunity to spread your movement, but you’re also now in danger of damaging your movement if you handle this poorly. You’ve taken the label, you’ve chosen to jump in on this person and be an activist, and so you do have an obligation now to be an activist! If you don’t want to, then fine. If you don’t have the spoons, then fine. If you’re going to get triggered and can’t be expected to act reasonably, fine. Just don’t call yourself an activist. It’s not my responsibility to teach children about geography, but if I make the choice to call myself a geography teacher and enter a classroom full of children, then I have created that responsibility for myself. I wouldn’t normally owe them anything, but now I do."
L'origine de Bert
Friday, March 13, 2015
Star Wars promotes gay lifestyle / Sex in literature
Star Wars promotes gay lifestyle
When it comes to pushing the gay agenda, is there such a thing as overdoing it? It's one thing to have literature or serious dramas with gay characters – after all, sexuality is often a part of stories about people's lives.
But what about action stories and action films? Do you really need to know if Indiana Jones had a thing for his assistant Short Round? Are there Klingon same-sex couples? Did Godzilla have a thing for King Kong? In these kinds of stories, talking about sexual preferences isn't really relevant.
But Disney, which now owns Lucasfilms, feels differently. The people at Disney have created the first "official" gay character
How does someone just "happen to be a lesbian"? And what does "capable but flawed" mean? Moff Mors is good at exterminating rebels but sort of awkward at kissing other girls? Or is she a flawed Imperial who is a good lesbian, not very good at stomping out rebellion but good at keeping her partner satisfied?
Normally, when I read a Star Wars novel, I don't need to know these things. No previous Star Wars novels have talked about the sexuality of Imperial officers. But since Star wars is bringing this up now, I guess we need to know.
Perhaps they will also reveal whether Jawas are polygamous, and whether Sand People are into bondage. And do robots, who technically have no gender, have compatible USB slots? And when the Emperor "seduced" Anakin Skywalker, was it really only a metaphorical seduction?
This isn't the first foray of Star Wars into sexuality. In the online computer game "Star Wars: The Old Republic," you can play a Jedi or a Sith and fight storm troopers or rebels or pilot spaceships or...go to the planet "Makeb" and pursue a virtual same-sex relationship with another character. What does that have to do with anything else in the game?
You see, this is the part I don't understand: taking films and books and games meant for kids that have nothing to do with sexuality and injecting this kind of stuff in them. I wish this political correctness would draw the line somewhere. You may think I'm joking, but I'll bet 10 years from now they will have gay cornflakes and gay pencils and gay toothpaste and gay corned beef sandwiches and sexual orientation tied into every little thing in your everyday life.
There aren't any complaints that 50 Shades of Grey promotes the "BDSM Lifestyle", but then that is rather the point of the book, isn't it? Not so young adult fiction.
This is similar to how George R.R. Martin is also accused of "gratuitous" sex (i.e. unnecessary sex).
One of points of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award is that if you can't do sex well (broadly defined), you shouldn't do it at all:
To wit, it is not the description of sex that is mocked, but the bad and/or unnecessary inclusion of it.
Bleak encounters - FT.com
"Auberon Waugh, Literary Review’s former editor, founded the prize with crusading purpose. He was genuinely convinced that publishers were encouraging novelists to include sex scenes solely in order to increase sales. The award’s remit was “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”. But it is rather hard to convey the redundancy of a passage to an audience that has not read the entire novel, and so the prize has evolved to acknowledge the absurd, the implausible, the overwritten and the unwittingly comical.
Last year’s winner, Rowan Somerville, managed to tick all the boxes in a single sentence from The Shape of Her: “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.” Tom Wolfe was victorious in 2004 for trying to make the word “otorhinolaryngological” intimate, as well as for this bizarre evocation in I Am Charlotte Simmons: “Moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers.” In 1998, one of the characters in Sebastian Faulks’s Charlotte Gray made love in fear of his life: “This is so wonderful I feel I might disintegrate, I might break into a million fragments.” Faulks didn’t see the funny side of things, so runner-up Alan Titchmarsh received the prize that year instead."
When it comes to pushing the gay agenda, is there such a thing as overdoing it? It's one thing to have literature or serious dramas with gay characters – after all, sexuality is often a part of stories about people's lives.
But what about action stories and action films? Do you really need to know if Indiana Jones had a thing for his assistant Short Round? Are there Klingon same-sex couples? Did Godzilla have a thing for King Kong? In these kinds of stories, talking about sexual preferences isn't really relevant.
But Disney, which now owns Lucasfilms, feels differently. The people at Disney have created the first "official" gay character
... the upcoming novel “Lords of the Sith” will feature a capable but flawed Imperial official named Moff Mors who “also happens to be a lesbian.”
How does someone just "happen to be a lesbian"? And what does "capable but flawed" mean? Moff Mors is good at exterminating rebels but sort of awkward at kissing other girls? Or is she a flawed Imperial who is a good lesbian, not very good at stomping out rebellion but good at keeping her partner satisfied?
Normally, when I read a Star Wars novel, I don't need to know these things. No previous Star Wars novels have talked about the sexuality of Imperial officers. But since Star wars is bringing this up now, I guess we need to know.
Perhaps they will also reveal whether Jawas are polygamous, and whether Sand People are into bondage. And do robots, who technically have no gender, have compatible USB slots? And when the Emperor "seduced" Anakin Skywalker, was it really only a metaphorical seduction?
This isn't the first foray of Star Wars into sexuality. In the online computer game "Star Wars: The Old Republic," you can play a Jedi or a Sith and fight storm troopers or rebels or pilot spaceships or...go to the planet "Makeb" and pursue a virtual same-sex relationship with another character. What does that have to do with anything else in the game?
You see, this is the part I don't understand: taking films and books and games meant for kids that have nothing to do with sexuality and injecting this kind of stuff in them. I wish this political correctness would draw the line somewhere. You may think I'm joking, but I'll bet 10 years from now they will have gay cornflakes and gay pencils and gay toothpaste and gay corned beef sandwiches and sexual orientation tied into every little thing in your everyday life.
There aren't any complaints that 50 Shades of Grey promotes the "BDSM Lifestyle", but then that is rather the point of the book, isn't it? Not so young adult fiction.
This is similar to how George R.R. Martin is also accused of "gratuitous" sex (i.e. unnecessary sex).
One of points of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award is that if you can't do sex well (broadly defined), you shouldn't do it at all:
The purpose of the prize is to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them. The prize is not intended to cover pornographic or expressly erotic literature.
To wit, it is not the description of sex that is mocked, but the bad and/or unnecessary inclusion of it.
Bleak encounters - FT.com
"Auberon Waugh, Literary Review’s former editor, founded the prize with crusading purpose. He was genuinely convinced that publishers were encouraging novelists to include sex scenes solely in order to increase sales. The award’s remit was “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”. But it is rather hard to convey the redundancy of a passage to an audience that has not read the entire novel, and so the prize has evolved to acknowledge the absurd, the implausible, the overwritten and the unwittingly comical.
Last year’s winner, Rowan Somerville, managed to tick all the boxes in a single sentence from The Shape of Her: “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.” Tom Wolfe was victorious in 2004 for trying to make the word “otorhinolaryngological” intimate, as well as for this bizarre evocation in I Am Charlotte Simmons: “Moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers.” In 1998, one of the characters in Sebastian Faulks’s Charlotte Gray made love in fear of his life: “This is so wonderful I feel I might disintegrate, I might break into a million fragments.” Faulks didn’t see the funny side of things, so runner-up Alan Titchmarsh received the prize that year instead."
Post ID: 3097326332818974489
"Chinese must speak Chinese" / The Centrality of China to Chineseness
"Mother always felt exceedingly guilty about our language deficiency and tried to make us study Chinese, that is Mandarin, the national dialect... [But] I suppose that when I was young there was no motivation to study Chinese...
‘But China was once the greatest and most cultured nation in the world! Weren’t you proud to be Chinese? Wasn’t that reason enough to study Chinese?’ Many people felt this way but unfortunately we just didn’t feel very Chinese! Today we are described by one English writer as belonging to ‘the sad band of English-educated who cannot speak their own language’. This seems rather unfair to me. Must we know the language of our forefathers when we have lived in another country (Malaysia) for many years? Are the descendants of German, Norwegian and Swedish emigrants to the USA, for instance, expected to know German or Norwegian or Swedish? Are the descendants of Italian and Greek emigrants to Australia expected to study Italian and Greek? Of course not, and yet overseas Chinese are always expected to know Chinese or else they are despised not only by their fellow Chinese but also by non- Chinese! Perhaps this is due to the great esteem with which Chinese history, language and culture are universally regarded. But the European emigrants to the USA and Australia also have a not insignificant history, language and culture, and they are not criticized when they become English speaking."
--- On learning Chinese in Rainbow Round My Shoulder / Ruth Ho
"If the ‘Indonesian Chinese’ can be described as a distinctive ‘people’ - one which, as I have sketched above, has its historical birth in colonial Dutch East Indies —- then they in turn have become diasporized, especially after the military coup in 1965. While my parents, among many thousands, chose the relative wealth and comfort of a life in the Netherlands (‘for the sake of the education of the children’), I was recently informed by an aunt that I have some distant relatives in Brazil, where some two hundred Indonesian Chinese Families live in Sao Paulo. There is also a large Indonesian Chinese community in Hong Kong, many of whom ended up there after a brief ‘return’ to ‘the homeland‘, Mao’s China, where they found, just like my grandfather earlier in the century, that their very ‘Chineseness’ was cast in doubt: the mainlanders did not consider them Chinese at all (Godley and Coppel 1990). Nevertheless, this Chineseness has never ceased to be a major identity preoccupation in this unlikely diaspora...
But this symbolic orientation toward the ‘homeland’ tends to complicate the problem of identity, as ‘China’ is presented as the cultural / geographical core in relation to which the westernized overseas Chinese is forced to take up a humble position, even a position of shame and inadequacy over her own ‘impurity’. In this situation the overseas Chinese is in a no-win situation: she is either ‘too Chinese’ or ‘not Chinese enough’. As Chow (1991: 28/9) has observed, ‘Chinese from the mainland are [often felt to be] more “authentic” than those who are from, say, Taiwan or Hong Kong, because the latter have been “Westernized".’ But the problem is exacerbated for more remote members of the Chinese diaspora, say, for the Indonesian peranakan Chinese or for second-generation Chinese Americans, whose ‘Chineseness’ is even more diluted and impure.
OF course, this double-bind problem is not unique to migrants of Chinese descent. In a sense, it enters into the experience of all diasporie peoples living in the West. What is particular to the Chinese diaspora, however, is the extraordinarily strong originary pull of the ‘homeland’ as a result of the prominent place of ‘China’ in the Western imagination. The West’s fascination with China as a great, ‘other’ civilization began with Marco Polo and remains to this day (see e.g. MacKerras 1991). In the Western imagination China cannot be an ordinary country, as a consequence, everything happening in that country is invested with more than ‘normal’ significance, as testified by the intense and extreme dramatization of events such as the ‘Tiananmen massacre’ and the ‘Hong Kong handover’ in the Western media (Chow 1993; 1998a). There is, in other words, an excess of meaningfulness accorded to ‘China’; ‘China’ has often been useful for Westem thinkers as a symbol, negative or positive, for that which the West was not. As Zhang Longxi (1988: 127) has noted, even Jacques Derrida, the great debunker of binary oppositions, was seduced into treating the non—phonetic character of the Chinese language as ‘testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside of all logocentrism‘, that is, as the sign of a culture totally different from what he conceives as Western culture. Worse still, this powerful othering is mirrored by an equally strong and persistent tendency within Chinese culture itself to consider itselfas central to the world, what Song Xianlin and Gary Sigley (2000) call China's ‘Middle Kingdom mentality’, exemplified by the age-old Chinese habit to designate all non-Chinese as ‘barbarians’, ‘foreign devils’ or ‘ghosts’. This is a form of self-Orientalization expressed in the famous inward-looking aloofness of Chinese culture criticized, within China itself, in the controversial television series River Elegy, and which I also sensed in Lan-lan’s ultimate insistence, through a paradoxical, assertive defensiveness in relation to the West, on China’s pure otherness.
In the interlocking of this mutual discursive exclusionism overseas Chinese people often find themselves inevitably entangled in China's elevated status as privileged Other to the West, depriving them of an autonomous space to determine their own trajectories for constructing cultural identity. I recognize Rey Chow’s (1991) observation that there is, among many Chinese people, an ‘obsession with China’. What connects the diaspora with the ‘homeland’ is ultimately an emotional, almost visceral attachment. The relationship is, to use Amitav Ghosh’s (1989) term, an epic one. it is precisely this epic relationship which invests the homeland myth with its power: it is this epic relationship to ‘China’, for example, which made millions of overseas Chinese all over the world feel so inescapably and ‘irrationally’ sick and nauseous when the tanks crushed the students’ movement at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, as if they felt the humiliation on their own bodies, despite the fact that many, if not most of them would never think of actually ‘returning’ to this distant ‘motherland’. The desires, fantasies and sentimentalities that go into this ‘obsession with China’, says Chow (1991: 25), should be seen at least in part as ‘a response to the solicitous calls, dispersed internationally in multiple ways, to such a [collective, “Chinese”] identity’. In other words, the subjective processes of diasporic ethnic identification are often externally instigated, articulating and confirming a position of subordination in relation to Western hegemony...
It is by recognizing the irreducible productivity of the syncretic practices of diaspora cultures that ‘not speaking Chinese‘ will stop being a problem for overseas Chinese people. ‘China; the mythic homeland, will then stop being the absolute norm for ‘Chineseness’ against which all other Chinese cultures of the diaspora are measured. Instead, Chineseness becomes an open signifier, which acquires its peculiar form and content in dialectical junction with the diverse local conditions in which ethnic Chinese people, wherever they are, construct new, hybrid identities and communities. Nowhere is this more vigorously evident than in everyday popular culture. Thus, we have the fortune cookie, a uniquely Chinese-American invention quite unknown elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora, or, for that matter, in China itself. In Malaysia one of the culinary attractions is nonya food, a cuisine developed by the peranakan Chinese out of their encounter with local, Malay spices and ingredients. Some time ago I was at a Caribbean parry in Amsterdam full of immigrants from the Dutch West Indies; to my surprise the best salsa dancer of the party was a young man of Chinese descent who grew up in Surinam. There I was, facing up to my previiously held prejudice that a Chinese can never become a Latino!"
--- On Not Speaking Chinese: Diasporic identifications and postmodern ethnicity / Ien Ang
Language And Identity
""Linking identity and language so tightly has its problems. One can feel proud of being Chinese, while not having full mastery of the language. If I may cite a personal example, I studied in Malaysia until my O levels and came to Singapore for A levels. In Malaysia, the language of instruction was Malay. Of course, the easiest subject for me was Malay. I got a distinction for my A levels. But it does not follow that because I got a distinction, I am more Malay than say, a Malay who got a credit or who got an F in Malay."
MISS IRENE NG (Tampines GRC), speaking in English.
Straits Times...
It says alot about the level of Chinese proficency in Singapore when nine out of ten people in your office didn't recognize the difference between the characters 论 ("debate") and 轮 ("wheel") until the client (from Indonesia) pointed it out to us. (The tenth person, by the way, was a Malay.) Dennis Bloodworth had commented in his book rather scathingly about "the sad band of English-educated who cannot speak their own language and who, in terminal cases, not only know nothing of their own history, but would rather eat bangers and mash and raspberry jelly than a curry or Cantonese rice." (Ouch. And by an ang moh too. Double ouch.)...
As a kid, I never learnt the dialect generations had spoken before me. On the other side, my grandparents never learnt to be comfortable with Mandarin, the common tongue lauded by the government to unite the segmented Chinese all babbling Cantonese, Hakka and Teochew at each other. It worked, but it also caused a great divide between one generation and the next. At family gatherings, I blinked blankly at any conversation attempt by my grandparents in Teochew even if it is something as simple as a query on my studies. It can't even be said that we drifted apart, my grandparents and I. We never connected in the first place."
‘But China was once the greatest and most cultured nation in the world! Weren’t you proud to be Chinese? Wasn’t that reason enough to study Chinese?’ Many people felt this way but unfortunately we just didn’t feel very Chinese! Today we are described by one English writer as belonging to ‘the sad band of English-educated who cannot speak their own language’. This seems rather unfair to me. Must we know the language of our forefathers when we have lived in another country (Malaysia) for many years? Are the descendants of German, Norwegian and Swedish emigrants to the USA, for instance, expected to know German or Norwegian or Swedish? Are the descendants of Italian and Greek emigrants to Australia expected to study Italian and Greek? Of course not, and yet overseas Chinese are always expected to know Chinese or else they are despised not only by their fellow Chinese but also by non- Chinese! Perhaps this is due to the great esteem with which Chinese history, language and culture are universally regarded. But the European emigrants to the USA and Australia also have a not insignificant history, language and culture, and they are not criticized when they become English speaking."
--- On learning Chinese in Rainbow Round My Shoulder / Ruth Ho
"If the ‘Indonesian Chinese’ can be described as a distinctive ‘people’ - one which, as I have sketched above, has its historical birth in colonial Dutch East Indies —- then they in turn have become diasporized, especially after the military coup in 1965. While my parents, among many thousands, chose the relative wealth and comfort of a life in the Netherlands (‘for the sake of the education of the children’), I was recently informed by an aunt that I have some distant relatives in Brazil, where some two hundred Indonesian Chinese Families live in Sao Paulo. There is also a large Indonesian Chinese community in Hong Kong, many of whom ended up there after a brief ‘return’ to ‘the homeland‘, Mao’s China, where they found, just like my grandfather earlier in the century, that their very ‘Chineseness’ was cast in doubt: the mainlanders did not consider them Chinese at all (Godley and Coppel 1990). Nevertheless, this Chineseness has never ceased to be a major identity preoccupation in this unlikely diaspora...
But this symbolic orientation toward the ‘homeland’ tends to complicate the problem of identity, as ‘China’ is presented as the cultural / geographical core in relation to which the westernized overseas Chinese is forced to take up a humble position, even a position of shame and inadequacy over her own ‘impurity’. In this situation the overseas Chinese is in a no-win situation: she is either ‘too Chinese’ or ‘not Chinese enough’. As Chow (1991: 28/9) has observed, ‘Chinese from the mainland are [often felt to be] more “authentic” than those who are from, say, Taiwan or Hong Kong, because the latter have been “Westernized".’ But the problem is exacerbated for more remote members of the Chinese diaspora, say, for the Indonesian peranakan Chinese or for second-generation Chinese Americans, whose ‘Chineseness’ is even more diluted and impure.
OF course, this double-bind problem is not unique to migrants of Chinese descent. In a sense, it enters into the experience of all diasporie peoples living in the West. What is particular to the Chinese diaspora, however, is the extraordinarily strong originary pull of the ‘homeland’ as a result of the prominent place of ‘China’ in the Western imagination. The West’s fascination with China as a great, ‘other’ civilization began with Marco Polo and remains to this day (see e.g. MacKerras 1991). In the Western imagination China cannot be an ordinary country, as a consequence, everything happening in that country is invested with more than ‘normal’ significance, as testified by the intense and extreme dramatization of events such as the ‘Tiananmen massacre’ and the ‘Hong Kong handover’ in the Western media (Chow 1993; 1998a). There is, in other words, an excess of meaningfulness accorded to ‘China’; ‘China’ has often been useful for Westem thinkers as a symbol, negative or positive, for that which the West was not. As Zhang Longxi (1988: 127) has noted, even Jacques Derrida, the great debunker of binary oppositions, was seduced into treating the non—phonetic character of the Chinese language as ‘testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside of all logocentrism‘, that is, as the sign of a culture totally different from what he conceives as Western culture. Worse still, this powerful othering is mirrored by an equally strong and persistent tendency within Chinese culture itself to consider itselfas central to the world, what Song Xianlin and Gary Sigley (2000) call China's ‘Middle Kingdom mentality’, exemplified by the age-old Chinese habit to designate all non-Chinese as ‘barbarians’, ‘foreign devils’ or ‘ghosts’. This is a form of self-Orientalization expressed in the famous inward-looking aloofness of Chinese culture criticized, within China itself, in the controversial television series River Elegy, and which I also sensed in Lan-lan’s ultimate insistence, through a paradoxical, assertive defensiveness in relation to the West, on China’s pure otherness.
In the interlocking of this mutual discursive exclusionism overseas Chinese people often find themselves inevitably entangled in China's elevated status as privileged Other to the West, depriving them of an autonomous space to determine their own trajectories for constructing cultural identity. I recognize Rey Chow’s (1991) observation that there is, among many Chinese people, an ‘obsession with China’. What connects the diaspora with the ‘homeland’ is ultimately an emotional, almost visceral attachment. The relationship is, to use Amitav Ghosh’s (1989) term, an epic one. it is precisely this epic relationship which invests the homeland myth with its power: it is this epic relationship to ‘China’, for example, which made millions of overseas Chinese all over the world feel so inescapably and ‘irrationally’ sick and nauseous when the tanks crushed the students’ movement at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, as if they felt the humiliation on their own bodies, despite the fact that many, if not most of them would never think of actually ‘returning’ to this distant ‘motherland’. The desires, fantasies and sentimentalities that go into this ‘obsession with China’, says Chow (1991: 25), should be seen at least in part as ‘a response to the solicitous calls, dispersed internationally in multiple ways, to such a [collective, “Chinese”] identity’. In other words, the subjective processes of diasporic ethnic identification are often externally instigated, articulating and confirming a position of subordination in relation to Western hegemony...
It is by recognizing the irreducible productivity of the syncretic practices of diaspora cultures that ‘not speaking Chinese‘ will stop being a problem for overseas Chinese people. ‘China; the mythic homeland, will then stop being the absolute norm for ‘Chineseness’ against which all other Chinese cultures of the diaspora are measured. Instead, Chineseness becomes an open signifier, which acquires its peculiar form and content in dialectical junction with the diverse local conditions in which ethnic Chinese people, wherever they are, construct new, hybrid identities and communities. Nowhere is this more vigorously evident than in everyday popular culture. Thus, we have the fortune cookie, a uniquely Chinese-American invention quite unknown elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora, or, for that matter, in China itself. In Malaysia one of the culinary attractions is nonya food, a cuisine developed by the peranakan Chinese out of their encounter with local, Malay spices and ingredients. Some time ago I was at a Caribbean parry in Amsterdam full of immigrants from the Dutch West Indies; to my surprise the best salsa dancer of the party was a young man of Chinese descent who grew up in Surinam. There I was, facing up to my previiously held prejudice that a Chinese can never become a Latino!"
--- On Not Speaking Chinese: Diasporic identifications and postmodern ethnicity / Ien Ang
Language And Identity
""Linking identity and language so tightly has its problems. One can feel proud of being Chinese, while not having full mastery of the language. If I may cite a personal example, I studied in Malaysia until my O levels and came to Singapore for A levels. In Malaysia, the language of instruction was Malay. Of course, the easiest subject for me was Malay. I got a distinction for my A levels. But it does not follow that because I got a distinction, I am more Malay than say, a Malay who got a credit or who got an F in Malay."
MISS IRENE NG (Tampines GRC), speaking in English.
Straits Times...
It says alot about the level of Chinese proficency in Singapore when nine out of ten people in your office didn't recognize the difference between the characters 论 ("debate") and 轮 ("wheel") until the client (from Indonesia) pointed it out to us. (The tenth person, by the way, was a Malay.) Dennis Bloodworth had commented in his book rather scathingly about "the sad band of English-educated who cannot speak their own language and who, in terminal cases, not only know nothing of their own history, but would rather eat bangers and mash and raspberry jelly than a curry or Cantonese rice." (Ouch. And by an ang moh too. Double ouch.)...
As a kid, I never learnt the dialect generations had spoken before me. On the other side, my grandparents never learnt to be comfortable with Mandarin, the common tongue lauded by the government to unite the segmented Chinese all babbling Cantonese, Hakka and Teochew at each other. It worked, but it also caused a great divide between one generation and the next. At family gatherings, I blinked blankly at any conversation attempt by my grandparents in Teochew even if it is something as simple as a query on my studies. It can't even be said that we drifted apart, my grandparents and I. We never connected in the first place."
Post ID: 2423240081015654042
Thursday, March 12, 2015
Aesthetic values vs Aesthetics
"He could assure Eustace that Bologna was living up to her ancient reputation. They were doing the most exciting work in crystallography; and in his latest lectures on Aesthetics, Bonomelli was using all the resources of modern psycho-physiology and the mathematics of many directions. Nothing quite like Bonomelli's Aesthetics had ever been seen before.
Eustace wiped his mouth and drank some Chianti.
'I wish one could say the same thing of contemporary Italian art,' he remarked, as he refilled his glass from the big-bellied flask in its swinging cradle.
Yes, the other admitted judicially, it was quite true that easel paintings didn't amount to much in modern Italy. But he had seen the most remarkable specimens of socialized and civic art. Classico-functional post offices, giant football stadiums, heroic murals. And, after all, that was going to be the art of the future.
'God,' said Eustace, 'I hope I shan't live to see it!'
Paul De Vries signed to the waiter to remove his almost untouched plate of lasagne, hungrily lighted a cigarette and continued:
'You're a specimen, if I may say so, of Individualistic Man. But Individualistic Man is rapidly giving place to Social Man.'
'I knew it,' said Eustace. 'Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.'
The young man protested. He wasn't talking about regimentation, but integration. And in a properly integrated society a new kind of cultural field would arise, with new kinds of aesthetic values coming into existence within it.
'Aesthetic values!' Eustace repeated impatiently. 'That's the sort of phrase that fills me with the profoundest mistrust.'
'What makes you say that?'
Eustace answered with another question.
'What's the colour of your wallpaper in your bedroom at the hotel?' he asked.
'The colour of the wallpaper?' the young man echoed in a tone of astonishment. 'I haven't the faintest idea.'
'No, I thought not,' said Eustace. 'And that's why I mistrust aesthetic values so much.'"
--- Time Must Have A Stop / Aldous Huxley
Eustace wiped his mouth and drank some Chianti.
'I wish one could say the same thing of contemporary Italian art,' he remarked, as he refilled his glass from the big-bellied flask in its swinging cradle.
Yes, the other admitted judicially, it was quite true that easel paintings didn't amount to much in modern Italy. But he had seen the most remarkable specimens of socialized and civic art. Classico-functional post offices, giant football stadiums, heroic murals. And, after all, that was going to be the art of the future.
'God,' said Eustace, 'I hope I shan't live to see it!'
Paul De Vries signed to the waiter to remove his almost untouched plate of lasagne, hungrily lighted a cigarette and continued:
'You're a specimen, if I may say so, of Individualistic Man. But Individualistic Man is rapidly giving place to Social Man.'
'I knew it,' said Eustace. 'Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.'
The young man protested. He wasn't talking about regimentation, but integration. And in a properly integrated society a new kind of cultural field would arise, with new kinds of aesthetic values coming into existence within it.
'Aesthetic values!' Eustace repeated impatiently. 'That's the sort of phrase that fills me with the profoundest mistrust.'
'What makes you say that?'
Eustace answered with another question.
'What's the colour of your wallpaper in your bedroom at the hotel?' he asked.
'The colour of the wallpaper?' the young man echoed in a tone of astonishment. 'I haven't the faintest idea.'
'No, I thought not,' said Eustace. 'And that's why I mistrust aesthetic values so much.'"
--- Time Must Have A Stop / Aldous Huxley
Post ID: 5561795949086383049
Links - 12th March 2015
Steve Jobs Still Wins Plenty of Patents - "Jobs’s many patents “don’t make him one of the greatest American inventors in history,” says Florian Mueller, a programmer and patent consultant in Germany who has closely followed litigation around the iPhone. He notes that many of Jobs’s patents are on designs—like the look and feel of the iPhone—not on more substantial technical advances... One criticism is that on his patents, Jobs’s name often appears alongside a score of others, meaning these inventions or designs weren’t entirely of Jobs’s making. Instead, Jobs shared credit for what Apple’s more than 80,000 employees did, something Kane argues “fed into his legend as a one-in-a-lifetime visionary.”
Understanding Groupthink - "The assumption by many is that working as a group is superior to working individually, perhaps because groups have a larger information pool to work with. However, this line of thinking doesn’t square with research data, according to Assistant Professor Grace Park Guihyun from the Singapore Management University (SMU) School of Social Sciences. “Research on group performance and productivity has shown that groups often fail to utilise such potential benefits, and end up performing at a sub-optimal level,” she says... simply listening to different opinions—regardless of the popularity of said opinions—and talking through decisions, can be a great boon to group efficiency. Indeed, previous research has found that even listening to minority opinions which are completely wrong can be beneficial. “In my study, it seemed that whenever the group majority took time to listen to the minority, they made stronger decisions collectively,” she says. “Acknowledging different opinions forces a group to think and talk through its decisions, thus achieving better understanding. By developing a more holistic perspective on the matter, the group is better equipped to make a decision.”
Diversity of opinion - not just shallow measures of diversity - is important. And quashing dissenting voices is bad
A letter to … the girl who accused me of rape when I was 15 - "I moved away from home and keep minimal ties with my old life, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget what you did. I don’t know why you told your friend that I had raped you – maybe because you didn’t want to admit you’d had sex so casually or maybe because you were scared. But I will never be able to forgive you for what you did to me. You damaged my perception of women entirely and the only relationship I have since been able to sustain is with a man I can trust."
The Muppets Turn The Tables With The Corpse-Filled Human Show
How many of your health supplements are actually snake oil?
European 'No-Go' Zones: Fact or Fiction? - "The Socialist mayor of Amiens, Gilles Demailly, has referred to the Fafet-Brossolette district of the city as a "no-go zone" where "you can no longer order a pizza or get a doctor to come to the house." Europe 1, one of the leading broadcasters in France, has referred to Marseille as a "no-go zone" after the government was forced to deploy riot police, known as CRS, to confront warring Muslim gangs in the city. The French Interior Ministry said it was trying to "reconquer" 184 square kilometers (71 square miles) of Marseille that have come under the control of Muslim gangs. The French newspaper Le Figaro has referred to downtown Perpignan as a "veritable no-go zone" where "aggression, antisocial behavior, drug trafficking, Muslim communalism, racial tensions and tribal violence" are forcing non-Muslims to move out. Le Figaro also reported that the Les Izards district of Toulouse was a no-go zone, where Arab drug trafficking gangs rule the streets in a climate of fear."
Kim Kardashian 'offered $1m' to spend night with Saudi prince - Telegraph
Kim Kardashian satirizes herself in T-Mobile's Super Bowl ad
Korean Air cabin crew chief forced to kneel in nut rage incident - "The head of cabin crew who was kicked off a Korean Air Lines flight after a company executive raged over the way she was served macadamia nuts said he was insulted and forced to kneel down to apologize to the executive."
Why Broadway Hates Stephen Sondheim - "His melodies, borrowing more from serious modern music than from the pop idiom, were meant to challenge the ear, not soothe it. Producers begged him to write some "humma-mamumma-mamum-mable melodies" (his derisive phrase from a number in Merrily We Roll Along), but he'd throw in a catchy tune or sentimental ballad only at gunpoint. When they do appear, it's usually toward the end of a show — "Our Time" from Merrily, "Sunday" from Sunday in the Park, "Children Will Listen" from Into the Woods — and, if you're in the audience, you can feel the people around you relax in gratitude on hearing simple, lovely tunes in a major key. After the daunting homework of the rest of the score, these songs are the reward: musical sherbet"
Why I dislike Sondheim: The harmonic progressions don't get resolved, the syncopation is weird, the tunes are not melodious (off-melodious rather than dissonant), the counterpoint doesn't blend well, the music is repetitive
Here Comes Baby, There Goes the Marriage - WSJ - "About two-thirds of couples see the quality of their relationship drop within three years of the birth of a child, according to data from the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle, a nonprofit organization focused on strengthening families. Conflict increases and, with little time for adult conversation and sex, emotional distance can develop... expectant couples and new parents who participated in 24 weekly group counseling meetings experienced a much smaller decline in marital satisfaction over about five years compared with parents who didn't have the counseling. The rate of divorce, however, was the same for both. The study followed 66 couples with children and 13 childless couples. (Those without kids didn't see a decline in marriage satisfaction.)"
Berkeley students outraged course reading includes Plato, Aristotle but nothing from transgenders - "Two students at the University of California, Berkeley are calling for students to “Occupy the syllabus,” or consider dropping a course if it only includes the works of white men as class material. Students Rodrigo Kazuo and Margaret “Meg” Perret wrote an op-ed in The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper, titled “Occupy the syllabus” where they called for a student-wide occupation of all social science and humanities classes after they found their upper-division course on classical social theory lacked the works of women, trans people, and people of color... “[T]he classroom environment felt so hostile to women, people of color, queer folks and other marginalized subjects that it was difficult for us to focus on the course material.” wrote the students. “Sometimes, we were so uncomfortable that we had to leave the classroom in the middle of lecture.” The students referenced an incident in the classroom where the professor was discussing how men and women are distinct from one another because women have the ability to give birth while men do not. The discussion is said to have turned highly offensive when the professor made no mention of trans people. When one student asked where trans fit into the lesson, the students claim the professor dismissed them as the “exception” to the lesson, which they deemed “unacceptable”... “[I]f you have taken classes in the social sciences and humanities, we challenge you: Count the readings authored by white males and those authored by the majority of humanity,” wrote the students. “Then ask yourself: Are your identities and the identities of people you love reflected on these syllabi? Whose perspectives and life experiences are excluded? Is it really worth it to accumulate debt for such an epistemically poor education?”... When Campus Reform asked the students if they would drop a course that didn’t comply with the standards they present with their article, Perret responded, “I’ve dropped classes because of their inadequate treatment of feminist and other critical perspectives. In fact, I dropped a class about sexual politics this semester because the syllabus was majority white men.”"
We should put all these people in airplanes designed and manned by transgendered people whose only qualification is being transgendered
What the Swedish Model Gets Wrong About Prostitution - "Today, we’re seeing a global shift in prostitution attitudes that looks startlingly like the one in Victorian England... The Swedish model (also adopted by Iceland and Norway and under consideration in France, Canada and the UK) may seem like a step in the right direction—a progressive step, a feminist step. But it’s not. Conceptually, the system strips women of agency and autonomy. Under the Swedish model, men “are defined as morally superior to the woman,” notes author and former sex worker Maggie McNeill in an essay for the Cato Institute. “He is criminally culpable for his decisions, but she is not.” Adult women are legally unable to give consent, “just as an adolescent girl is in the crime of statutory rape.”"
Another Bad Argument For The Swedish Model For Prostitution - "They’re not actually counting either the amount nor the change in human trafficking into the sex trade. They’re counting the increase in illegal immigration to take part in the sex trade: something very different. We cannot therefore take this paper as being proof that the legality of prostitution increases human trafficking. Simply because that’s not what they’re measuring in this paper."
Practical travel information on Money and costs in Indonesia - Lonely Planet Travel Information - "Moneychangers in Bali offer some of the best rates in Indonesia if you don’t get short-changed or charged commission. Signboard rates are often a fabrication, and after signing your travellers cheque you may find that a 10% (or higher) commission applies. Be sure to double-check the conversion rate and be aware that some dubious operators even rig their calculators. Always count your rupiah before you hand over your travellers cheques or foreign currency. Several readers’ letters have warned of being short-changed through sleight of hand, particularly in Kuta. A way to avoid this is to count the rupiah in front of the moneychanger. When you are satisfied you have received the correct amount, hand over your currency or travellers cheques. If there are any problems during the transaction, leave with your cash and try another moneychanger. While the chances of getting short-changed at a bank are perhaps 50 to one, at a Kuta moneychanger the odds are more like 50-50"
Ahh! Asia!
Understanding Groupthink - "The assumption by many is that working as a group is superior to working individually, perhaps because groups have a larger information pool to work with. However, this line of thinking doesn’t square with research data, according to Assistant Professor Grace Park Guihyun from the Singapore Management University (SMU) School of Social Sciences. “Research on group performance and productivity has shown that groups often fail to utilise such potential benefits, and end up performing at a sub-optimal level,” she says... simply listening to different opinions—regardless of the popularity of said opinions—and talking through decisions, can be a great boon to group efficiency. Indeed, previous research has found that even listening to minority opinions which are completely wrong can be beneficial. “In my study, it seemed that whenever the group majority took time to listen to the minority, they made stronger decisions collectively,” she says. “Acknowledging different opinions forces a group to think and talk through its decisions, thus achieving better understanding. By developing a more holistic perspective on the matter, the group is better equipped to make a decision.”
Diversity of opinion - not just shallow measures of diversity - is important. And quashing dissenting voices is bad
A letter to … the girl who accused me of rape when I was 15 - "I moved away from home and keep minimal ties with my old life, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget what you did. I don’t know why you told your friend that I had raped you – maybe because you didn’t want to admit you’d had sex so casually or maybe because you were scared. But I will never be able to forgive you for what you did to me. You damaged my perception of women entirely and the only relationship I have since been able to sustain is with a man I can trust."
The Muppets Turn The Tables With The Corpse-Filled Human Show
How many of your health supplements are actually snake oil?
European 'No-Go' Zones: Fact or Fiction? - "The Socialist mayor of Amiens, Gilles Demailly, has referred to the Fafet-Brossolette district of the city as a "no-go zone" where "you can no longer order a pizza or get a doctor to come to the house." Europe 1, one of the leading broadcasters in France, has referred to Marseille as a "no-go zone" after the government was forced to deploy riot police, known as CRS, to confront warring Muslim gangs in the city. The French Interior Ministry said it was trying to "reconquer" 184 square kilometers (71 square miles) of Marseille that have come under the control of Muslim gangs. The French newspaper Le Figaro has referred to downtown Perpignan as a "veritable no-go zone" where "aggression, antisocial behavior, drug trafficking, Muslim communalism, racial tensions and tribal violence" are forcing non-Muslims to move out. Le Figaro also reported that the Les Izards district of Toulouse was a no-go zone, where Arab drug trafficking gangs rule the streets in a climate of fear."
Kim Kardashian 'offered $1m' to spend night with Saudi prince - Telegraph
Kim Kardashian satirizes herself in T-Mobile's Super Bowl ad
Korean Air cabin crew chief forced to kneel in nut rage incident - "The head of cabin crew who was kicked off a Korean Air Lines flight after a company executive raged over the way she was served macadamia nuts said he was insulted and forced to kneel down to apologize to the executive."
Why Broadway Hates Stephen Sondheim - "His melodies, borrowing more from serious modern music than from the pop idiom, were meant to challenge the ear, not soothe it. Producers begged him to write some "humma-mamumma-mamum-mable melodies" (his derisive phrase from a number in Merrily We Roll Along), but he'd throw in a catchy tune or sentimental ballad only at gunpoint. When they do appear, it's usually toward the end of a show — "Our Time" from Merrily, "Sunday" from Sunday in the Park, "Children Will Listen" from Into the Woods — and, if you're in the audience, you can feel the people around you relax in gratitude on hearing simple, lovely tunes in a major key. After the daunting homework of the rest of the score, these songs are the reward: musical sherbet"
Why I dislike Sondheim: The harmonic progressions don't get resolved, the syncopation is weird, the tunes are not melodious (off-melodious rather than dissonant), the counterpoint doesn't blend well, the music is repetitive
Here Comes Baby, There Goes the Marriage - WSJ - "About two-thirds of couples see the quality of their relationship drop within three years of the birth of a child, according to data from the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle, a nonprofit organization focused on strengthening families. Conflict increases and, with little time for adult conversation and sex, emotional distance can develop... expectant couples and new parents who participated in 24 weekly group counseling meetings experienced a much smaller decline in marital satisfaction over about five years compared with parents who didn't have the counseling. The rate of divorce, however, was the same for both. The study followed 66 couples with children and 13 childless couples. (Those without kids didn't see a decline in marriage satisfaction.)"
Berkeley students outraged course reading includes Plato, Aristotle but nothing from transgenders - "Two students at the University of California, Berkeley are calling for students to “Occupy the syllabus,” or consider dropping a course if it only includes the works of white men as class material. Students Rodrigo Kazuo and Margaret “Meg” Perret wrote an op-ed in The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper, titled “Occupy the syllabus” where they called for a student-wide occupation of all social science and humanities classes after they found their upper-division course on classical social theory lacked the works of women, trans people, and people of color... “[T]he classroom environment felt so hostile to women, people of color, queer folks and other marginalized subjects that it was difficult for us to focus on the course material.” wrote the students. “Sometimes, we were so uncomfortable that we had to leave the classroom in the middle of lecture.” The students referenced an incident in the classroom where the professor was discussing how men and women are distinct from one another because women have the ability to give birth while men do not. The discussion is said to have turned highly offensive when the professor made no mention of trans people. When one student asked where trans fit into the lesson, the students claim the professor dismissed them as the “exception” to the lesson, which they deemed “unacceptable”... “[I]f you have taken classes in the social sciences and humanities, we challenge you: Count the readings authored by white males and those authored by the majority of humanity,” wrote the students. “Then ask yourself: Are your identities and the identities of people you love reflected on these syllabi? Whose perspectives and life experiences are excluded? Is it really worth it to accumulate debt for such an epistemically poor education?”... When Campus Reform asked the students if they would drop a course that didn’t comply with the standards they present with their article, Perret responded, “I’ve dropped classes because of their inadequate treatment of feminist and other critical perspectives. In fact, I dropped a class about sexual politics this semester because the syllabus was majority white men.”"
We should put all these people in airplanes designed and manned by transgendered people whose only qualification is being transgendered
What the Swedish Model Gets Wrong About Prostitution - "Today, we’re seeing a global shift in prostitution attitudes that looks startlingly like the one in Victorian England... The Swedish model (also adopted by Iceland and Norway and under consideration in France, Canada and the UK) may seem like a step in the right direction—a progressive step, a feminist step. But it’s not. Conceptually, the system strips women of agency and autonomy. Under the Swedish model, men “are defined as morally superior to the woman,” notes author and former sex worker Maggie McNeill in an essay for the Cato Institute. “He is criminally culpable for his decisions, but she is not.” Adult women are legally unable to give consent, “just as an adolescent girl is in the crime of statutory rape.”"
Another Bad Argument For The Swedish Model For Prostitution - "They’re not actually counting either the amount nor the change in human trafficking into the sex trade. They’re counting the increase in illegal immigration to take part in the sex trade: something very different. We cannot therefore take this paper as being proof that the legality of prostitution increases human trafficking. Simply because that’s not what they’re measuring in this paper."
Practical travel information on Money and costs in Indonesia - Lonely Planet Travel Information - "Moneychangers in Bali offer some of the best rates in Indonesia if you don’t get short-changed or charged commission. Signboard rates are often a fabrication, and after signing your travellers cheque you may find that a 10% (or higher) commission applies. Be sure to double-check the conversion rate and be aware that some dubious operators even rig their calculators. Always count your rupiah before you hand over your travellers cheques or foreign currency. Several readers’ letters have warned of being short-changed through sleight of hand, particularly in Kuta. A way to avoid this is to count the rupiah in front of the moneychanger. When you are satisfied you have received the correct amount, hand over your currency or travellers cheques. If there are any problems during the transaction, leave with your cash and try another moneychanger. While the chances of getting short-changed at a bank are perhaps 50 to one, at a Kuta moneychanger the odds are more like 50-50"
Ahh! Asia!
Post ID: 8977265511523652411
Jonathan Haidt on Social Conservatives, New Atheists and Civility in Politics
Interview: Jonathan Haidt on Social Conservatives, New Atheists and Civility in Politics
"Well, it is true that I first got into this whole line of research because I was a liberal back then and I was shocked at how poorly the Democrats framed moral argument. So it is true that I first started studying political psychology with an eye towards helping the Democrats. But over time, I came to see that many conservative ideas are actually correct from a sociological perspective. It was in writing that chapter that made me finally realize that I was no longer a liberal. I handed that chapter to my wife to proofread, she's my first editor, I said to her, "Jane, I don't think I can call myself a liberal anymore."
It is true that I think Democrats can benefit from reading that chapter because it is about where they are most clueless. But my goal in the chapter isn't to help the Democrats. It's to help people on the left to understand what they're missing because the left fails to understand the right much more than vice versa...
My view is that left and right are like yin and yang. There's a quote I have in chapter 12 from John Stuart Mill, but this is really my credo: "A party of order or stability and a party of progress or reform are both necessary elements for a healthy state of political life."
The big breakthrough for me was, once I stopped disliking conservatives and could actually see what they were right about, they showed me a lot of things that liberals were wrong about. But at the same time, I think there are some things that liberals are right about that conservatives have trouble seeing.
Social reality is so complicated that, once you join one team or the other, you become specialized in detecting certain patterns, but you become blind to other patterns...
The left needs to fundamentally rethink what it stands for and recognize that the right is correct about many aspects of the way society works...
I think conservatives have a more correct view of human nature than do liberals. But, as I also say, I'm praising conservative intellectuals, not the Republican Party...
[Obama] clearly does understand the conservative foundations. He is extremely perceptive, in part from his experiences living in Indonesia and traveling. He understands moral diversity. He understands religion and conservatives. So he was able to speak a broader moral language when he was in campaign mode, but once he got into the White House he seemed focused on "inside-the-beltway" politics and his moral discourse seems to have been more standard, social justice liberal. So I think his appeal to the middle and some portions of the right has weakened. He has not made the case that strongly...
One of the great challenges in modern life is getting men to support women and children, and secular society does a disastrous job of that.
Social conservatives are very focused on strengthening the family and I think they are right to do so. One of the worst blind spots of the left has been its reluctance to say that marriage matters for children. The left has been afraid of alienating African-Americans and feminists and therefore was afraid to say that fathers matter. They really, really do matter. Charles Murray has been one of the voices of reason on this. Sociologists are now beginning to come around to see the importance of marriage and fatherhood...
If you are an atheist who treats science as sacred and you call yourself an apostle of science, then you are replicating many of the thinking patterns that you accuse religious people of having, namely, closed-mindedness, blindness to evidence, black and white thinking and attributing the worst motives to your enemies. I think all of these are clearly visible in the writings of the New Atheists...
Polarization is not bad in itself, but when it reaches very high levels, we demonize each other, we demonize the other side and compromise becomes impossible. We leave a lot of money on the table, as it were."
"Well, it is true that I first got into this whole line of research because I was a liberal back then and I was shocked at how poorly the Democrats framed moral argument. So it is true that I first started studying political psychology with an eye towards helping the Democrats. But over time, I came to see that many conservative ideas are actually correct from a sociological perspective. It was in writing that chapter that made me finally realize that I was no longer a liberal. I handed that chapter to my wife to proofread, she's my first editor, I said to her, "Jane, I don't think I can call myself a liberal anymore."
It is true that I think Democrats can benefit from reading that chapter because it is about where they are most clueless. But my goal in the chapter isn't to help the Democrats. It's to help people on the left to understand what they're missing because the left fails to understand the right much more than vice versa...
My view is that left and right are like yin and yang. There's a quote I have in chapter 12 from John Stuart Mill, but this is really my credo: "A party of order or stability and a party of progress or reform are both necessary elements for a healthy state of political life."
The big breakthrough for me was, once I stopped disliking conservatives and could actually see what they were right about, they showed me a lot of things that liberals were wrong about. But at the same time, I think there are some things that liberals are right about that conservatives have trouble seeing.
Social reality is so complicated that, once you join one team or the other, you become specialized in detecting certain patterns, but you become blind to other patterns...
The left needs to fundamentally rethink what it stands for and recognize that the right is correct about many aspects of the way society works...
I think conservatives have a more correct view of human nature than do liberals. But, as I also say, I'm praising conservative intellectuals, not the Republican Party...
[Obama] clearly does understand the conservative foundations. He is extremely perceptive, in part from his experiences living in Indonesia and traveling. He understands moral diversity. He understands religion and conservatives. So he was able to speak a broader moral language when he was in campaign mode, but once he got into the White House he seemed focused on "inside-the-beltway" politics and his moral discourse seems to have been more standard, social justice liberal. So I think his appeal to the middle and some portions of the right has weakened. He has not made the case that strongly...
One of the great challenges in modern life is getting men to support women and children, and secular society does a disastrous job of that.
Social conservatives are very focused on strengthening the family and I think they are right to do so. One of the worst blind spots of the left has been its reluctance to say that marriage matters for children. The left has been afraid of alienating African-Americans and feminists and therefore was afraid to say that fathers matter. They really, really do matter. Charles Murray has been one of the voices of reason on this. Sociologists are now beginning to come around to see the importance of marriage and fatherhood...
If you are an atheist who treats science as sacred and you call yourself an apostle of science, then you are replicating many of the thinking patterns that you accuse religious people of having, namely, closed-mindedness, blindness to evidence, black and white thinking and attributing the worst motives to your enemies. I think all of these are clearly visible in the writings of the New Atheists...
Polarization is not bad in itself, but when it reaches very high levels, we demonize each other, we demonize the other side and compromise becomes impossible. We leave a lot of money on the table, as it were."
Post ID: 6010498476449379473
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Links - 11th March 2015
15 minutes to tell if you’ll end in divorce - "“We discovered that when a couple has their first baby, 67 percent experience a tragic decline in their relationship happiness and an increase in hostility between the baby’s parents in the first three years of the baby’s life,” he said... Part of the Gottmans’ theory is that there are four major emotional reactions that are destructive to a marriage: Defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Among these four, they consider contempt the most damaging of them all."
5 Ridiculously Expensive Restaurant Menu Items - "230 Fifth's $2,300 hot dog
The famous rooftop lounge in Manhattan offers customers a super expensive hot dog that has thousands of dollars on your typical ballpark frank. This foot-long marvel is made from marbled Wagyu beef that takes 60 days to dry. It's smothered with white truffle butter, French imported mustard, and saffron ketchup, then covered in champagne cooked onions, homemade sauerkraut, and (what else?) caviar. Then just sprinkle on some gold leaf. Fortunately, those who buy this expensive wiener won't just be stuffing their wealthy faces with decadent food. They will also be making a sizable charitable donation to a local food bank with their purchase."
Power 98FM - Timeline Photos - "Hokkien for Dummies"
Why Do Facebook Users… Add Friends? Remove Friends? [INFOGRAPHIC] | Infographic List
Interview with Margaret Loesch, President of Fox Kids (1990-1997) - "I had been in children’s television since 1975. So by the time I got to Fox, and even at Marvel, I had seen a lot of kid’s shows and observed. I had been a part of some that worked and some that didn’t work. What I saw in X-Men was some of the same qualities that I saw in Spider-Man that nobody was dealing with and that is teenage angst: characters that were real yet worked in a fantasy situation, but their emotions were real. So with X-Men, I felt that the idea of a group of young people that were disenfranchised and had these real emotions and special powers that everybody would love to have except their powers were both a blessing and a curse. I felt that that human drama and tapping into the teenage 20-something angst was something I had never seen before in kids television…and I had seen a lot of stuff. That’s what excited me about X-Men. Interestingly enough, that’s also what excited me about Power Rangers, though slightly differently. With Power Rangers I felt what a hoot…what teenager wouldn’t want to have special powers and be able to transform themselves into superheroes to save the day and fight the enemy? Essentially with X-Men it was all about that angst and with Power Rangers it was about empowerment with teenagers. These are two themes I had never seen dealt with much in kid’s programming and I felt that the only way to make our network a hit was to try things that hadn’t been done before, or hadn’t been done in a long time. It wasn’t any great talent or any great gut that I had, it was my experience at seeing the same show done over and over again in so many different ways. I thought how I could excite kids with something they could identify with but was also fresh and different to them. "
Stumbling and Mumbling: The demand for quacks - "He studies not homeopathy but US patent medicines in the 19th century. Despite being practically useless, these enjoyed spectacular long-run growth - Professor Troesken estimates that spending on them grew 22 times faster than US GDP between 1810 and 1939. Why? The answer, he says, is that demand for them was inelastic with respect to failure - people kept buying them even though they didn’t work. This was because the medicines offered enormous consumer surplus; the products were cheap, but the benefits they offered were huge; there’s an analogy here with Pascal’s wager... What’s more, there were several things that stopped consumers learning that the entire industry was useless:
1. Many of the products contained morphine or alcohol, so even though the medicine didn’t make the patient better, it made him feel better for a while. In this regard, patent medicines were superior to homeopathy - and possibly better than at least cheap placebos.
2. Consumers of failed products didn’t tell others of their bad experience. Few people told their colleagues that their Nobby Stiles were as bad as ever.
3. There were countless new products coming onto the market, so someone who had tried many medicines could hope that the new one would finally do the trick. This is, however, not the whole story; several patent medicines had a long product life.
4. Companies spent a fortune on advertising"
Students Think They Can Multitask. Here's Proof They Can't
Answer to Why are women so negative about the "picking up women" school of thought? - Quora - "Negging is not about criticizing, or insulting, or lowering a girl's self-esteem. It's teasing, it's banter. It's what most people do with their friends on a daily basis and what makes conversations fun and interesting. The problem with most guys who hit on girls is that they completely dispose of the way they normally communicate with other people and start agreeing with everything women say in an effort to please them. They supplicate to them, which makes the interaction not only ingenuine, but extremely uncomfortable. The idea behind negging is really just saying that it's OK to poke and prod in a fun, playful way... the reason women are so negative about the pickup community is because media and society propagate false assumptions and incorrect beliefs about what it's all about. Women hate pickup because most of them don't really understand it. The seduction/pickup community is, at it's core, just a self-improvement community. And at the heart of every self-improvement system lies the question, what does it mean to be better? "
What It’s Like to Have a Micropenis - "My predictable physical ideal is a skinny, small-breasted, narrow-hipped, boyish, probably dark-haired, intellectually dominant woman who will not be bothered with makeup and such and will tell me exactly what she wants me to do and will get quite annoyed if I fail. I have never actually had a relationship with such a woman... I can tell just by the way people walk and the way they look and the way they relate to other people that they have a big penis. You go into a meeting and the guys are swaggering around with their legs akimbo as if they’ve been riding a horse because they’ve got such an enormous package they can’t really walk straight and it’s just crazy"
What the perfect breast looks like, according to men and women - "British doctors surveyed 1,315 people (men, women, and plastic surgeons), asking them to look at photos of different breasts and pick the proportions they liked best. The winning ratio across all three groups: 45:55, as in 45 percent of breast tissue falls above the nipple line and 55 percent below. Turns out, this is a “natural” shape—similar to the Venus de Milo—and nothing like the orb-like, fake boobs of yore."
Exploding Excrement Topples Building In China, Injuring 15 - "In another excrement-related incident, a man and his mother both died trying to retrieve his wife's new mobile phone -- worth 2,000 yuan ($320) -- from a toilet septic tank, reports said in May. The man jumped in to try to locate the phone but was overcome by fumes and passed out"
Officer testified he was punched twice - "US police officer Darren Wilson said he felt he was authorised to use force against Michael Brown after the teenager punched him twice in the face... Wilson said he went for his gun because he thought that a third punch from Brown could have 'knocked me out or worse'... One unidentified male witness who was working at a location near the shooting provided an account that aligned closely with Wilson's."
Israeli gay party promoter slammed for ISIS-themed party - "As the new Islamic State gains traction in the Middle East, we at Drek have decided to give in to Sharia law and cheer the stubborn Daesh"
Board games' golden age: sociable, brilliant and driven by the internet
Student: Men who have been raped still have more privilege than women - "Polick-Kirkpatrick alleged in her piece that when men participate in “feminist conversations about sexual violence,” women feel uncomfortable as men are “taking up much-needed space in their community” as, according to the student, women are most often the victims and men are most often the perpetrators. “When men want a space in this feminist conversation, it indicates the already prevalent patriarchal desire to control how oppressed groups fight their own battles,” Polick-Kirkpatrick wrote. “When one comes forward to report and discuss the atrocities they have experienced, this should not mean they take up the space of others in the same conversation, even within the feminist community.”"
Uber Quietly Removed Blog Posts Examining Link Between Prostitution And Rides - "mashing up with the San Francisco Crimespotting map, the team made a few determinations: “Areas of San Francisco with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary also have the most Uber rides. Be safe, Uberites!” Then, the post goes off on a bit of tangent, as the authors get curious about the prostitution stats. They notice that prostitution arrests in both San Francisco and Oakland seem to spike the second Wednesday of each month. Why? “Someone pointed out to me that Social Security and welfare checks arrive on the second, third, and fourth Wednesdays of each month,” the team writes. “Oh man. Now we’re into dangerous, politically-charged territory”... “The company examined its rider data, sorting it for anyone who took an Uber between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night. Then it looked at how many of those same people took another ride about four to six hours later – from at or near the previous nights’ drop-off point. Yes, Uber can and does track one-night stands. Consider it the Uber equivalent of the walk of shame.”"
5 Ridiculously Expensive Restaurant Menu Items - "230 Fifth's $2,300 hot dog
The famous rooftop lounge in Manhattan offers customers a super expensive hot dog that has thousands of dollars on your typical ballpark frank. This foot-long marvel is made from marbled Wagyu beef that takes 60 days to dry. It's smothered with white truffle butter, French imported mustard, and saffron ketchup, then covered in champagne cooked onions, homemade sauerkraut, and (what else?) caviar. Then just sprinkle on some gold leaf. Fortunately, those who buy this expensive wiener won't just be stuffing their wealthy faces with decadent food. They will also be making a sizable charitable donation to a local food bank with their purchase."
Power 98FM - Timeline Photos - "Hokkien for Dummies"
Why Do Facebook Users… Add Friends? Remove Friends? [INFOGRAPHIC] | Infographic List
Interview with Margaret Loesch, President of Fox Kids (1990-1997) - "I had been in children’s television since 1975. So by the time I got to Fox, and even at Marvel, I had seen a lot of kid’s shows and observed. I had been a part of some that worked and some that didn’t work. What I saw in X-Men was some of the same qualities that I saw in Spider-Man that nobody was dealing with and that is teenage angst: characters that were real yet worked in a fantasy situation, but their emotions were real. So with X-Men, I felt that the idea of a group of young people that were disenfranchised and had these real emotions and special powers that everybody would love to have except their powers were both a blessing and a curse. I felt that that human drama and tapping into the teenage 20-something angst was something I had never seen before in kids television…and I had seen a lot of stuff. That’s what excited me about X-Men. Interestingly enough, that’s also what excited me about Power Rangers, though slightly differently. With Power Rangers I felt what a hoot…what teenager wouldn’t want to have special powers and be able to transform themselves into superheroes to save the day and fight the enemy? Essentially with X-Men it was all about that angst and with Power Rangers it was about empowerment with teenagers. These are two themes I had never seen dealt with much in kid’s programming and I felt that the only way to make our network a hit was to try things that hadn’t been done before, or hadn’t been done in a long time. It wasn’t any great talent or any great gut that I had, it was my experience at seeing the same show done over and over again in so many different ways. I thought how I could excite kids with something they could identify with but was also fresh and different to them. "
Stumbling and Mumbling: The demand for quacks - "He studies not homeopathy but US patent medicines in the 19th century. Despite being practically useless, these enjoyed spectacular long-run growth - Professor Troesken estimates that spending on them grew 22 times faster than US GDP between 1810 and 1939. Why? The answer, he says, is that demand for them was inelastic with respect to failure - people kept buying them even though they didn’t work. This was because the medicines offered enormous consumer surplus; the products were cheap, but the benefits they offered were huge; there’s an analogy here with Pascal’s wager... What’s more, there were several things that stopped consumers learning that the entire industry was useless:
1. Many of the products contained morphine or alcohol, so even though the medicine didn’t make the patient better, it made him feel better for a while. In this regard, patent medicines were superior to homeopathy - and possibly better than at least cheap placebos.
2. Consumers of failed products didn’t tell others of their bad experience. Few people told their colleagues that their Nobby Stiles were as bad as ever.
3. There were countless new products coming onto the market, so someone who had tried many medicines could hope that the new one would finally do the trick. This is, however, not the whole story; several patent medicines had a long product life.
4. Companies spent a fortune on advertising"
Students Think They Can Multitask. Here's Proof They Can't
Answer to Why are women so negative about the "picking up women" school of thought? - Quora - "Negging is not about criticizing, or insulting, or lowering a girl's self-esteem. It's teasing, it's banter. It's what most people do with their friends on a daily basis and what makes conversations fun and interesting. The problem with most guys who hit on girls is that they completely dispose of the way they normally communicate with other people and start agreeing with everything women say in an effort to please them. They supplicate to them, which makes the interaction not only ingenuine, but extremely uncomfortable. The idea behind negging is really just saying that it's OK to poke and prod in a fun, playful way... the reason women are so negative about the pickup community is because media and society propagate false assumptions and incorrect beliefs about what it's all about. Women hate pickup because most of them don't really understand it. The seduction/pickup community is, at it's core, just a self-improvement community. And at the heart of every self-improvement system lies the question, what does it mean to be better? "
What It’s Like to Have a Micropenis - "My predictable physical ideal is a skinny, small-breasted, narrow-hipped, boyish, probably dark-haired, intellectually dominant woman who will not be bothered with makeup and such and will tell me exactly what she wants me to do and will get quite annoyed if I fail. I have never actually had a relationship with such a woman... I can tell just by the way people walk and the way they look and the way they relate to other people that they have a big penis. You go into a meeting and the guys are swaggering around with their legs akimbo as if they’ve been riding a horse because they’ve got such an enormous package they can’t really walk straight and it’s just crazy"
What the perfect breast looks like, according to men and women - "British doctors surveyed 1,315 people (men, women, and plastic surgeons), asking them to look at photos of different breasts and pick the proportions they liked best. The winning ratio across all three groups: 45:55, as in 45 percent of breast tissue falls above the nipple line and 55 percent below. Turns out, this is a “natural” shape—similar to the Venus de Milo—and nothing like the orb-like, fake boobs of yore."
Exploding Excrement Topples Building In China, Injuring 15 - "In another excrement-related incident, a man and his mother both died trying to retrieve his wife's new mobile phone -- worth 2,000 yuan ($320) -- from a toilet septic tank, reports said in May. The man jumped in to try to locate the phone but was overcome by fumes and passed out"
Officer testified he was punched twice - "US police officer Darren Wilson said he felt he was authorised to use force against Michael Brown after the teenager punched him twice in the face... Wilson said he went for his gun because he thought that a third punch from Brown could have 'knocked me out or worse'... One unidentified male witness who was working at a location near the shooting provided an account that aligned closely with Wilson's."
Israeli gay party promoter slammed for ISIS-themed party - "As the new Islamic State gains traction in the Middle East, we at Drek have decided to give in to Sharia law and cheer the stubborn Daesh"
Board games' golden age: sociable, brilliant and driven by the internet
Student: Men who have been raped still have more privilege than women - "Polick-Kirkpatrick alleged in her piece that when men participate in “feminist conversations about sexual violence,” women feel uncomfortable as men are “taking up much-needed space in their community” as, according to the student, women are most often the victims and men are most often the perpetrators. “When men want a space in this feminist conversation, it indicates the already prevalent patriarchal desire to control how oppressed groups fight their own battles,” Polick-Kirkpatrick wrote. “When one comes forward to report and discuss the atrocities they have experienced, this should not mean they take up the space of others in the same conversation, even within the feminist community.”"
Uber Quietly Removed Blog Posts Examining Link Between Prostitution And Rides - "mashing up with the San Francisco Crimespotting map, the team made a few determinations: “Areas of San Francisco with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary also have the most Uber rides. Be safe, Uberites!” Then, the post goes off on a bit of tangent, as the authors get curious about the prostitution stats. They notice that prostitution arrests in both San Francisco and Oakland seem to spike the second Wednesday of each month. Why? “Someone pointed out to me that Social Security and welfare checks arrive on the second, third, and fourth Wednesdays of each month,” the team writes. “Oh man. Now we’re into dangerous, politically-charged territory”... “The company examined its rider data, sorting it for anyone who took an Uber between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night. Then it looked at how many of those same people took another ride about four to six hours later – from at or near the previous nights’ drop-off point. Yes, Uber can and does track one-night stands. Consider it the Uber equivalent of the walk of shame.”"
Post ID: 8736157249434117880
People respond to incentives - even single mothers
A lot of criticism is leveled at Singapore for privileging married mothers with more benefits than single mothers (as a side note, mothers get more benefits than fathers - but that's another question).
Yet, people respond to incentives - even for such major life decisions such as marriage or the decision to have a child.
Since there is a ton of evidence that children of single parents do worse on a variety of measures than children with two, it is a reasonable (even prudent) public policy objective to promote the bearing of children in a two-parent family.
There isn't a lot of research on the topic, but here is what I've found:
The Impact of Welfare Benefits on the Conjugal Status of Single Mothers in Canada: Estimates from a Hazard Model
"This paper focuses on the determinants of the likelihood of a remarriage (marriage) for female heads with children... The empirical analysis is carried out using a pro- portional hazards model which permits the estimation of the effects of various covariates on the hazard of exiting single parenthood. The most striking result is the strong effect of provincial welfare benefits on conjugal union formation"
Marriage and Economic Incentives: Evidence from a Welfare Experiment
"Can economic incentives be used to affect marriage behavior and slow the growth of single-parent families? This paper provides new evidence on the effects of welfare benefit levels on the marital decisions of poor women. Exogenous variation in welfare benefit incentives arises from a randomized experiment carried out in California that allows me to measure responses beyond simple year-to-year changes in benefit levels. I find that a regime of lower benefits and stronger work incentives encourages married aid recipients to stay married, but has little effect on the probability that single-parent aid recipients marry. The effects on married recipients become larger over time, suggesting that long-run effects may exist."
Welfare and the Family: The Canadian Experience
"This article exploits the variation in payments and uses microdata to estimate the effect of changes in welfare benefits on welfare participation, single parenthood, births out of wedlock, divorce, and labor force participation among low—income women. In Canada, it would appear that welfare benefits influence these decisions"
The effect of economic stability on family stability among welfare recipients
"This paper explores the hypothesis that husband’s unemployment increases union dissolution among welfare recipients. The analysis uses data from California’s Link-Up demonstration project. A discrete-time event-history methodology was employed to examine family instability. The findings show that husband’s unemployment and the family’s long-term welfare dependency lead to breakup, net of race, age, and number of children"
The Effect of Welfare on Marriage and Fertility: What Do We Know and What Do We Need to Know?
"The recent literature on the effects of welfare on marriage and fertility includes studies employing a wide variety of methodologies and data sets and covering different time periods. A majority of the studies show that welfare has a significantly negative effect on marriage or positive effect on fertility rather than none at all, and thus the current consensus is that the welfare system probably has some effect on these demographic outcomes"
Addendum:
The Effects of In-Work Benefit Reform in Britain on Couples: Theory and Evidence
"This paper examines the effects of theWorking Families’ Tax Credit (WFTC) on couples in Britain. We develop a simple model of household decisions which explicitly accounts for the role played by the tax and benefit system. Its main implications are then tested using panel data from the British Household Panel Survey collected between 1991 and 2002. Overall, the financial incentives of the reform had negligible effects on a wide range of married mothers’ decisions, such as eligible (working at least 16 hours per week) and full-time employment (working at least 30 hours per week), employment transitions, childcare use, and divorce rates. Women’s responses, however, were highly heterogeneous, depending on their partners’ labour supply and earnings. Mothers married to low- income men showed larger responses in employment, especially if they had younger children. They were more likely to remain in the labour force and had higher rates at which they entered it. While more likely to receive the tax credit, they also experienced a greater risk of divorce. We find virtually no effect for women with higher-income husbands. Likewise, there are no statistically significant responses among married men."
Summarised by Alasdair Palmer:
"the introduction of the Working Families Tax Credit has increased the divorce or separation rate by a staggering 160 per cent among women married to or living with a partner who either does not work, or who earns very little because he works part-time"
Yet, people respond to incentives - even for such major life decisions such as marriage or the decision to have a child.
Since there is a ton of evidence that children of single parents do worse on a variety of measures than children with two, it is a reasonable (even prudent) public policy objective to promote the bearing of children in a two-parent family.
There isn't a lot of research on the topic, but here is what I've found:
The Impact of Welfare Benefits on the Conjugal Status of Single Mothers in Canada: Estimates from a Hazard Model
"This paper focuses on the determinants of the likelihood of a remarriage (marriage) for female heads with children... The empirical analysis is carried out using a pro- portional hazards model which permits the estimation of the effects of various covariates on the hazard of exiting single parenthood. The most striking result is the strong effect of provincial welfare benefits on conjugal union formation"
Marriage and Economic Incentives: Evidence from a Welfare Experiment
"Can economic incentives be used to affect marriage behavior and slow the growth of single-parent families? This paper provides new evidence on the effects of welfare benefit levels on the marital decisions of poor women. Exogenous variation in welfare benefit incentives arises from a randomized experiment carried out in California that allows me to measure responses beyond simple year-to-year changes in benefit levels. I find that a regime of lower benefits and stronger work incentives encourages married aid recipients to stay married, but has little effect on the probability that single-parent aid recipients marry. The effects on married recipients become larger over time, suggesting that long-run effects may exist."
Welfare and the Family: The Canadian Experience
"This article exploits the variation in payments and uses microdata to estimate the effect of changes in welfare benefits on welfare participation, single parenthood, births out of wedlock, divorce, and labor force participation among low—income women. In Canada, it would appear that welfare benefits influence these decisions"
The effect of economic stability on family stability among welfare recipients
"This paper explores the hypothesis that husband’s unemployment increases union dissolution among welfare recipients. The analysis uses data from California’s Link-Up demonstration project. A discrete-time event-history methodology was employed to examine family instability. The findings show that husband’s unemployment and the family’s long-term welfare dependency lead to breakup, net of race, age, and number of children"
The Effect of Welfare on Marriage and Fertility: What Do We Know and What Do We Need to Know?
"The recent literature on the effects of welfare on marriage and fertility includes studies employing a wide variety of methodologies and data sets and covering different time periods. A majority of the studies show that welfare has a significantly negative effect on marriage or positive effect on fertility rather than none at all, and thus the current consensus is that the welfare system probably has some effect on these demographic outcomes"
Addendum:
The Effects of In-Work Benefit Reform in Britain on Couples: Theory and Evidence
"This paper examines the effects of theWorking Families’ Tax Credit (WFTC) on couples in Britain. We develop a simple model of household decisions which explicitly accounts for the role played by the tax and benefit system. Its main implications are then tested using panel data from the British Household Panel Survey collected between 1991 and 2002. Overall, the financial incentives of the reform had negligible effects on a wide range of married mothers’ decisions, such as eligible (working at least 16 hours per week) and full-time employment (working at least 30 hours per week), employment transitions, childcare use, and divorce rates. Women’s responses, however, were highly heterogeneous, depending on their partners’ labour supply and earnings. Mothers married to low- income men showed larger responses in employment, especially if they had younger children. They were more likely to remain in the labour force and had higher rates at which they entered it. While more likely to receive the tax credit, they also experienced a greater risk of divorce. We find virtually no effect for women with higher-income husbands. Likewise, there are no statistically significant responses among married men."
Summarised by Alasdair Palmer:
"the introduction of the Working Families Tax Credit has increased the divorce or separation rate by a staggering 160 per cent among women married to or living with a partner who either does not work, or who earns very little because he works part-time"
Post ID: 9026437736292720594
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Links - 10th March 2015
Activists want 'feeling fat' emoji removed from Facebook - ""Feeling fat" currently appears as one of many preset options included in Facebook's dropdown list of status updates. Endangered Bodies, the group behind the initiative, wants the status and accompanying emoji removed because they believe it encourages body-shaming and "self-destructive thoughts". "When Facebook users set their status to 'feeling fat,' they are making fun of people who consider themselves to be overweight, which can include many people with eating disorders," according to the petition. "That is not OK. Fat is not a feeling. Fat is a natural part of our bodies, no matter their weight. And all bodies deserve to be respected and cared for," it read... "You can choose from over 100 feelings we offer based on people's input or create your own," a Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying by Mashable."
Nowadays activism is about censoring people
Articles: Capitalism's to Blame for Global Warming, Boko Haram, Syria... - "Not surprisingly, the UK's main “progressive” newspaper, The Guardian, has provided its readers with a thoroughly Marxist analysis of Boko Haram's recent kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian schoolgirls. Yes, revolutionary socialism may be almost dead in the UK; but Marxist theory is still alive and kicking. So why Marxist? Well this newspaper has blamed Boko Haram's actions on the economic and social problems supposedly caused by man-caused global warming in Nigeria. In other words, the Guardian doesn't blame Boko Haram for the actions of Boko Haram; it blames global warming. In fact I will argue that it ultimately blames Western capitalism. The Guardian's position isn't a surprise. This newspaper doesn't blame acts of terrorism on the terrorists who commit those acts either. (Unless the terrorist is white, right-wing and goes by the name of Anders Behring Breivik.) The Guardian, instead (depending on the article and the time of day) blames Islamic terrorism on: unemployment, the Iraq War, Islamophobia, racism, oil, the Danish cartoons, anti-Islamic films, the banning of the burkha, Westerners in Saudi Arabia, The Satanic Verses, Israel, 1967, the Balfour Declaration, autocratic Arab regimes (which are, of course, “propped up by the West”), the “far right”, “anti-terrorism legislation”..." Come to think of it, Noam Chomsky (much loved by Guardianistas) also blamed the Syrian war on global warming... According to Guardian journalists and nearly all other Leftists (not only self-described Marxists), Islam is but a mere “epiphenomenon of the socioeconomic conditions” which are hidden underneath (though, of course, they don't use those precise words)... The Marxist/International Socialist position on Islam (or on the actions of Muslims as Muslims) is both reductionist and essentialist: it's all about (Western) capitalism. In fact this position replicates the National Socialist (Nazi) theory that everything that's wrong with the world today is down to the Jews (or “Zionists”, as Jews are now known)."
PAS Youth: Sisters in Islam ‘insolent’, ‘extremists’ for contesting fatwa - "PAS Youth castigated Sisters in Islam (SIS) today for plans to challenge in the courts a fatwa, or religious edict, against liberalism and religious pluralism, labelling the Muslim women’s group as “insolent” and “extremist”. Defending Selangor’s Fatwa Council, the Islamist party’s wing also accused SIS of challenging the monarchy and the Federal Constitution, which it said puts Islam as the religion of the federation... Malaysia’s religious authorities have long derided liberalism and pluralism, with Friday sermons nationwide claiming a conspiracy by “enemies of Islam” to manipulate Muslims through ideas like secularism, socialism, feminism and positivism, in addition to the two"
‘Mango Casanova’ cons seven of RM300,000 - "Each woman is said to have fallen under the spell of the 53-year-old man after eating a ripe mango offered by him. Not only did he cheat the women, but he also slept with them after claiming that he had fallen in love, the daily reported. The man was also not choosy with his victims, who included an unmarried 25-year-old woman, single mothers in their 40s and 50s and even a 65-year-old grandmother. A divorcee who wanted to be known as Nita, 37, said she suspected that the man had used black magic on her as she blindly agreed to his demands."
TRIBUTE: Who exactly is Malaysia Airlines Captain Zaharie Shah of MH370? - "Besides aviation, he also has a YouTube channel that he has used to upload handy video guides. Here's a video of him teaching viewers how to save electricity by tuning their air conditioner. He truly has a good heart. Notice how he has the "pilot voice" even in his videos. He is also an avid chef, sharing different dishes for those around him just like a true Malaysian and Penangite"
There's something very naively and parochially Malaysian about this
Addendum: This was later taken down, probably in 2015, probably because in the end it looked like he did it
Backup link
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are drunk also think they are attractive - "Results showed that participants who thought they had consumed alcohol gave themselves more positive self-evaluations. However, ratings from independent judges showed that this boost in self-evaluation was unrelated to actual performance."
The Ladies of OkCupid
California teacher allegedly arranged beach trip for sex with students - "Lippert, a teacher at South Hills High School in West Covina, allegedly met up with a group of male students at the San Clemente beach in November, provided alcohol and had sex with one student. She is accused of then arranging an overnight trip there with students and Ghirelli, where the women allegedly had sex with students."
Singapore police defends handcuffing teens after picture goes viral - "The three boys arrested outside 112 Katong mall yesterday “were handcuffed for the safety of them and others”, said a police statement today... "The subjects were handcuffed for the safety of them and others as they had attempted to escape before Police arrival.""
Pes C9L9 - VAGSG Community
Table of PES status and what you can do
Blasphemy for Me, but Not for Thee - "the outpouring of support for free speech in the aftermath of the Paris attack coincides with, and partially obscures, the degradation of speech rights in the West. Commencement last year was marked by universities’ revoking of appearances by speakers Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for no other reason than that mobs disagreed with the speakers’ points of view. I do not recall liberals rallying behind Condi and Hirsi Ali then... To dissent from the politically correct and conventional and fashionable is to invite rebuke, disdain, expulsion from polite society, to court the label of Islamophobe or denier or bigot or cisnormative or misogynist or racist or carrier of privilege and irredeemable micro-aggressor. For the right to offend to have any meaning, however, it cannot be limited to theistic religions. You must have the right to offend secular humanists, too."
How To Cook Moist & Tender Chicken Breasts Every Time - "I learned this cooking method from an old edition of Joy of Cooking, which gives this method its special label:Cockaigne, reserved for only their personal favorite and best recipes"
Chinese Girlfriends: North vs South! - YouTube
Alleged upskirt video was for shopping trip, says accused - "Yuen had admitted to taking the upskirt video of the victim in the statement. He claims that it was part of his preparation for a shopping trip to Malaysia with a friend"
The Sexual Peak Myth - "older women HATE HATE HATE younger women. Sex is power. Younger women have held it in spades over their elders. Being that everyone desires to wrench power out of the hands of people who hold it, older women and those soon to be of that demographic have an incentive to glamorize the twilight years... The myth has sustained because it gives women hope as they venture into the twilight of their ability to be incubators of seed and the commensurate degradation of their looks. Sex is power, and attaching that power to women of ever-increasing ages allows women to hang on to it longer. Older women have declared war on younger women. Through wishful thinking they seek to destroy every benefit and short cut that younger, prettier women have even though they benefited from the same attitudes at an earlier point in their lives... When Madonna was younger, she was considered a slut. Her book Sex was considered raunchy and disgusting. Now that she’s old and in her “sexual prime” she is given a free pass to perform in sexually-suggestive ways. Her behavior today, while not as risque as that when she was younger, is lauded as empowering and even artistic."
Le juge de sexe masculin, une espèce de plus en plus rare - Rue89 - L'Obs - "Rue89 a minutieusement fait les comptes : sur les 153 admis au « premier » concours de l’Ecole nationale de magistrature (ENM), dont les résultats ont été rendus publics ce vendredi, seulement 20 étudiants sont des hommes. Soit un chiffre riquiqui : 13%. Encore moins que l’année passée."
I just love these weird korean comics. - Imgur
La pornographie va-t-elle devenir une nouvelle discipline universitaire ?
Irish nudist begs pardon for alarming French nuns - "“A little later on in the evening, he had put his clothes back on and actually returned to the priory. He came to the chapel and prayed for a while with us,” he said. “He told us that walking around naked makes him feel closer to nature, or something like that. He asked if he could stay with us last night, but we refused,” Brother Cornelius concluded."
Employment Agency Apologizes For Hooking Teen Up with Brothel Job - "The Colosseum is a so-called "wellness brothel," where other accommodations such as a swimming pool and sauna are typically offered to patrons."
Nowadays activism is about censoring people
Articles: Capitalism's to Blame for Global Warming, Boko Haram, Syria... - "Not surprisingly, the UK's main “progressive” newspaper, The Guardian, has provided its readers with a thoroughly Marxist analysis of Boko Haram's recent kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian schoolgirls. Yes, revolutionary socialism may be almost dead in the UK; but Marxist theory is still alive and kicking. So why Marxist? Well this newspaper has blamed Boko Haram's actions on the economic and social problems supposedly caused by man-caused global warming in Nigeria. In other words, the Guardian doesn't blame Boko Haram for the actions of Boko Haram; it blames global warming. In fact I will argue that it ultimately blames Western capitalism. The Guardian's position isn't a surprise. This newspaper doesn't blame acts of terrorism on the terrorists who commit those acts either. (Unless the terrorist is white, right-wing and goes by the name of Anders Behring Breivik.) The Guardian, instead (depending on the article and the time of day) blames Islamic terrorism on: unemployment, the Iraq War, Islamophobia, racism, oil, the Danish cartoons, anti-Islamic films, the banning of the burkha, Westerners in Saudi Arabia, The Satanic Verses, Israel, 1967, the Balfour Declaration, autocratic Arab regimes (which are, of course, “propped up by the West”), the “far right”, “anti-terrorism legislation”..." Come to think of it, Noam Chomsky (much loved by Guardianistas) also blamed the Syrian war on global warming... According to Guardian journalists and nearly all other Leftists (not only self-described Marxists), Islam is but a mere “epiphenomenon of the socioeconomic conditions” which are hidden underneath (though, of course, they don't use those precise words)... The Marxist/International Socialist position on Islam (or on the actions of Muslims as Muslims) is both reductionist and essentialist: it's all about (Western) capitalism. In fact this position replicates the National Socialist (Nazi) theory that everything that's wrong with the world today is down to the Jews (or “Zionists”, as Jews are now known)."
PAS Youth: Sisters in Islam ‘insolent’, ‘extremists’ for contesting fatwa - "PAS Youth castigated Sisters in Islam (SIS) today for plans to challenge in the courts a fatwa, or religious edict, against liberalism and religious pluralism, labelling the Muslim women’s group as “insolent” and “extremist”. Defending Selangor’s Fatwa Council, the Islamist party’s wing also accused SIS of challenging the monarchy and the Federal Constitution, which it said puts Islam as the religion of the federation... Malaysia’s religious authorities have long derided liberalism and pluralism, with Friday sermons nationwide claiming a conspiracy by “enemies of Islam” to manipulate Muslims through ideas like secularism, socialism, feminism and positivism, in addition to the two"
‘Mango Casanova’ cons seven of RM300,000 - "Each woman is said to have fallen under the spell of the 53-year-old man after eating a ripe mango offered by him. Not only did he cheat the women, but he also slept with them after claiming that he had fallen in love, the daily reported. The man was also not choosy with his victims, who included an unmarried 25-year-old woman, single mothers in their 40s and 50s and even a 65-year-old grandmother. A divorcee who wanted to be known as Nita, 37, said she suspected that the man had used black magic on her as she blindly agreed to his demands."
TRIBUTE: Who exactly is Malaysia Airlines Captain Zaharie Shah of MH370? - "Besides aviation, he also has a YouTube channel that he has used to upload handy video guides. Here's a video of him teaching viewers how to save electricity by tuning their air conditioner. He truly has a good heart. Notice how he has the "pilot voice" even in his videos. He is also an avid chef, sharing different dishes for those around him just like a true Malaysian and Penangite"
There's something very naively and parochially Malaysian about this
Addendum: This was later taken down, probably in 2015, probably because in the end it looked like he did it
Backup link
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are drunk also think they are attractive - "Results showed that participants who thought they had consumed alcohol gave themselves more positive self-evaluations. However, ratings from independent judges showed that this boost in self-evaluation was unrelated to actual performance."
The Ladies of OkCupid
California teacher allegedly arranged beach trip for sex with students - "Lippert, a teacher at South Hills High School in West Covina, allegedly met up with a group of male students at the San Clemente beach in November, provided alcohol and had sex with one student. She is accused of then arranging an overnight trip there with students and Ghirelli, where the women allegedly had sex with students."
Singapore police defends handcuffing teens after picture goes viral - "The three boys arrested outside 112 Katong mall yesterday “were handcuffed for the safety of them and others”, said a police statement today... "The subjects were handcuffed for the safety of them and others as they had attempted to escape before Police arrival.""
Pes C9L9 - VAGSG Community
Table of PES status and what you can do
Blasphemy for Me, but Not for Thee - "the outpouring of support for free speech in the aftermath of the Paris attack coincides with, and partially obscures, the degradation of speech rights in the West. Commencement last year was marked by universities’ revoking of appearances by speakers Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for no other reason than that mobs disagreed with the speakers’ points of view. I do not recall liberals rallying behind Condi and Hirsi Ali then... To dissent from the politically correct and conventional and fashionable is to invite rebuke, disdain, expulsion from polite society, to court the label of Islamophobe or denier or bigot or cisnormative or misogynist or racist or carrier of privilege and irredeemable micro-aggressor. For the right to offend to have any meaning, however, it cannot be limited to theistic religions. You must have the right to offend secular humanists, too."
How To Cook Moist & Tender Chicken Breasts Every Time - "I learned this cooking method from an old edition of Joy of Cooking, which gives this method its special label:Cockaigne, reserved for only their personal favorite and best recipes"
Chinese Girlfriends: North vs South! - YouTube
Alleged upskirt video was for shopping trip, says accused - "Yuen had admitted to taking the upskirt video of the victim in the statement. He claims that it was part of his preparation for a shopping trip to Malaysia with a friend"
The Sexual Peak Myth - "older women HATE HATE HATE younger women. Sex is power. Younger women have held it in spades over their elders. Being that everyone desires to wrench power out of the hands of people who hold it, older women and those soon to be of that demographic have an incentive to glamorize the twilight years... The myth has sustained because it gives women hope as they venture into the twilight of their ability to be incubators of seed and the commensurate degradation of their looks. Sex is power, and attaching that power to women of ever-increasing ages allows women to hang on to it longer. Older women have declared war on younger women. Through wishful thinking they seek to destroy every benefit and short cut that younger, prettier women have even though they benefited from the same attitudes at an earlier point in their lives... When Madonna was younger, she was considered a slut. Her book Sex was considered raunchy and disgusting. Now that she’s old and in her “sexual prime” she is given a free pass to perform in sexually-suggestive ways. Her behavior today, while not as risque as that when she was younger, is lauded as empowering and even artistic."
Le juge de sexe masculin, une espèce de plus en plus rare - Rue89 - L'Obs - "Rue89 a minutieusement fait les comptes : sur les 153 admis au « premier » concours de l’Ecole nationale de magistrature (ENM), dont les résultats ont été rendus publics ce vendredi, seulement 20 étudiants sont des hommes. Soit un chiffre riquiqui : 13%. Encore moins que l’année passée."
I just love these weird korean comics. - Imgur
La pornographie va-t-elle devenir une nouvelle discipline universitaire ?
Irish nudist begs pardon for alarming French nuns - "“A little later on in the evening, he had put his clothes back on and actually returned to the priory. He came to the chapel and prayed for a while with us,” he said. “He told us that walking around naked makes him feel closer to nature, or something like that. He asked if he could stay with us last night, but we refused,” Brother Cornelius concluded."
Employment Agency Apologizes For Hooking Teen Up with Brothel Job - "The Colosseum is a so-called "wellness brothel," where other accommodations such as a swimming pool and sauna are typically offered to patrons."
Post ID: 3380742458675097799
So promoting obesity to kids is a thing now
"'This is a children's book'
I asked her, "Why do you want to lose weight?"
"So I'll look prettier," she answered.
That's crazy. She wouldn't be prettier. She'd be thinner, that's all. And less cuddly, and less soft."
So a recognisably obese woman is told that she won't look prettier if she loses weight.
And also that she'd be less cuddly and soft if she were thinner.
In other words, it is better to be obese than non-obese.
Of course, some people claim that (childhood) eating disorders are a bigger problem than (childhood) obesity, and that discouraging obesity will cause an increase in eating disorders. This is a very problematic claim, because:
1) Obesity prevention actually *reduces* eating disorders
Does Obesity Prevention Cause Eating Disorders?
"There are data to suggest that our recent societal focus on obesity prevention has not led to a discernable increase in eating disordered behavior. Overall trends measured by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Youth Risk Behavior Survey indicate that there has been no significant change over time from 1995 to 2005 in the percentage of high school students who took laxatives, diet pills, powders, and liquids or vomited to lose weight or prevent weight gain. Although the prevalence rates are concerning (i.e., 4.5%-6% for vomiting and laxative use, 6.3%-9.2% for diet supplements), there is no evidence that increased media and professional discussions about childhood obesity have been associated with a concomitant increase in pathological findings.
Further data comes from the evaluation of Arkansas’ statewide multicomponent effort to reduce childhood obesity, which included BMI reports. Three-year follow-up data indicate that BMI has leveled off, and there has been no increase in youth reports of taking diet pills, exercising excessively, starting diets, or weight-based teasing. This suggests that large-scale policies can be implemented responsibly and successfully prevent a BMI increase without unintended consequences.
A handful of controlled trials have also addressed this issue. Schwartz and colleagues evaluated a school intervention implementing nutrition guidelines for snack sales in middle schools. Students were assessed for eating behaviors, desire to lose weight, and dieting behavior before and after intervention. Student nutrition at school improved in only the intervention schools, but body dissatisfaction in both conditions increased over time. Because the intervention and comparison schools did not differ, it is unlikely that the changes in food policy played a causal role in this increase...
Very strong evidence that eating disorder and obesity prevention can be done together comes from Austin and colleagues, who have demonstrated that broad-based obesity prevention programs can actually be helpful in efforts to decrease eating pathology. The Planet Health study was designed to promote nutrition and physical activity and decrease television viewing in 10 middle schools. The 5-2-1 Go! study aimed to promote nutrition and physical activity and decrease overweight in 13 middle schools.8 Both studies assessed disordered weight-control behaviors, such as dieting to lose weight, self-induced vomiting, laxative use, and taking diet pills. In both programs, girls in the intervention schools were less likely to engage in these behaviors at follow-up than were girls in the control schools...
Body dissatisfaction rates are high; one study found that 40% of 9- to 11-year-old girls are worried they are fat or will become fat. Although disturbing, the truth is that many of them may be right."
2) The health burden of obesity dwarfs that of eating disorders
For example, in Australia,
Eating Disorders in Australia
"Eating disorders are the 12th leading cause of mental health hospitalisation costs within Australia. The expense of treatment of an episode of Anorexia Nervosa has been reported to come second only to the cost of cardiac artery bypass surgery in the private hospital sector in Australia.
Bulimia Nervosa and Anorexia Nervosa are the 8th and 10th leading causes, respectively, of burden of disease and injury in females aged 15 to 24 in Australia. This is measured by disability-adjusted life years."
Burden of overweight and obesity (AIHW)
"High body mass was estimated to be responsible for 7.5% of the attributable burden of disease and was third in line behind tobacco and high blood pressure"
(High body mass was the third highest factor responsible for disability adjusted life years, and tobacco and high blood pressure had only slightly higher weights)
Addendum: Another example of glorifying obesity, which some people claim does not exist
Post ID: 2038424292063981654
Tea and Sexual Consent
This woman just explained consent with the most perfect metaphor : The Loop
"If you’re still struggling, just imagine instead of initiating sex, you’re making them a cup of tea.
You say, “Hey, would you like a cup of tea?” and they go, “OMG, f*ck yes, I would f*cking LOVE a cup of tea! Thank you!” Then you know they want a cup of tea.
If you say, “Hey, would you like a cup of tea?” and they um and ahh and say, “I’m not really sure…” then you can make them a cup of tea or not, but be aware that they might not drink it, and if they don’t drink it then — this is the important bit — don’t make them drink it. You can’t blame them for you going to the effort of making the tea on the off chance they wanted it; you just have to deal with them not drinking it. Just because you made it doesn’t mean you are entitled to watch them drink it.
If they say, “No, thank you,” then don’t make them tea. At all. Don’t make them tea, don’t make them drink tea, don’t get annoyed at them for not wanting tea. They just don’t want tea, okay?
They might say, “Yes, please, that’s kind of you,” and then when the tea arrives they actually don’t want the tea at all. Sure, that’s kind of annoying as you’ve gone to the effort of making the tea, but they remain under no obligation to drink the tea. They did want tea, now they don’t. Sometimes people change their mind in the time it takes to boil that kettle, brew the tea and add the milk. And it’s okay for people to change their mind, and you are still not entitled to watch them drink it even though you went to the trouble of making it."
Yet, if you ask someone if he wants a cup of tea and he says no and you don't insist (or at least ask again), that is considered rude in some cultures (and it is also considered rude to accept tea the first time):
"When living or travelling in India, or when visiting an Indian persons home you're always treated as an honoured guest. When you're offered a cup of tea it's polite to say 'No, please don't go to any trouble.' Even if you want a cup of tea you still say no. The person offering the cup of tea will insist and you still say no. You both know the host will bring you a cup of tea anyway. To say 'no' is to be polite in Indian culture. You actually know they will bring you a cup of tea regardless. To tell them you do not want them to go to any trouble is considered good manners"
- Julie & Kishore / Carol Jackson
Meanwhile, it can also be rude to decline tea that is offered (there is probably some relationship between these cultures):
"Deemed a symbol of good will in North Africa, mint tea plays a prominent role in welcoming houseguests, conducting business dealings, bargaining for carpets, woodcrafts, or souvenirs and relaxing with friends at a cafe. Also thought to aid in digestion, it is served at the beginning or end of every meal. Etiquette requires that each person consume three glasses before departing a home, shop, or cafe. To decline a glass is deemed rude. Whether due to its lack of expense, comforting taste, ritualized yet simple preparation, or mildly addictive properties, mint tea has captivated this region. One cannot walk through a busy square without seeing rich, steaming tea being sipped at sidewalk cafes or in storefronts."
- Entertaining from Ancient Rome to the Super Bowl: An Encyclopedia [2 volumes]: An Encyclopedia / Melitta Weiss Adamson, Francine Segan
"In the Afghan culture, when you enter someone’s house, you're offered chai tea, and you shouldn’t decline it. Unfortunately for me, I detest tea, and the mugs they use aren’t washed well as I can see lip marks from the previous person who drank from the cup (a real nightmare for someone with OCD). The first time I visited Rambo Three’s hut, he asked me if I wanted some tea, and I politely refused. He looked more disappointed than a Chicago Cubs fan in October, and so I asked, “Am I being rude because I did not accept your tea?” He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Yes.” Since then, I’ve not declined their tea or their dirty mugs, learning there’s no such thing as a "polite refusal” in Afghanistan."
- I am Danger; I am Prisoner / Danger Geist
Also if someone said "OMG, f*ck yes, I would f*cking LOVE a cup of tea! Thank you!", I'd consider that pretty rude.
Just imagine it in the local context:
"Want some Teh-C?"
"Chee bye. KNN. Fuck lah. Of course."
The metaphor of cultural imperialism can be extended into the realm of sexual relations, where the feminist culture of sexual consent is not the only one that is out there (or indeed, the only valid one).
Addendum: What happens if someone asks you to make him drink tea when he's passed out? Should you respect his wishes?
"If you’re still struggling, just imagine instead of initiating sex, you’re making them a cup of tea.
You say, “Hey, would you like a cup of tea?” and they go, “OMG, f*ck yes, I would f*cking LOVE a cup of tea! Thank you!” Then you know they want a cup of tea.
If you say, “Hey, would you like a cup of tea?” and they um and ahh and say, “I’m not really sure…” then you can make them a cup of tea or not, but be aware that they might not drink it, and if they don’t drink it then — this is the important bit — don’t make them drink it. You can’t blame them for you going to the effort of making the tea on the off chance they wanted it; you just have to deal with them not drinking it. Just because you made it doesn’t mean you are entitled to watch them drink it.
If they say, “No, thank you,” then don’t make them tea. At all. Don’t make them tea, don’t make them drink tea, don’t get annoyed at them for not wanting tea. They just don’t want tea, okay?
They might say, “Yes, please, that’s kind of you,” and then when the tea arrives they actually don’t want the tea at all. Sure, that’s kind of annoying as you’ve gone to the effort of making the tea, but they remain under no obligation to drink the tea. They did want tea, now they don’t. Sometimes people change their mind in the time it takes to boil that kettle, brew the tea and add the milk. And it’s okay for people to change their mind, and you are still not entitled to watch them drink it even though you went to the trouble of making it."
Yet, if you ask someone if he wants a cup of tea and he says no and you don't insist (or at least ask again), that is considered rude in some cultures (and it is also considered rude to accept tea the first time):
"When living or travelling in India, or when visiting an Indian persons home you're always treated as an honoured guest. When you're offered a cup of tea it's polite to say 'No, please don't go to any trouble.' Even if you want a cup of tea you still say no. The person offering the cup of tea will insist and you still say no. You both know the host will bring you a cup of tea anyway. To say 'no' is to be polite in Indian culture. You actually know they will bring you a cup of tea regardless. To tell them you do not want them to go to any trouble is considered good manners"
- Julie & Kishore / Carol Jackson
Meanwhile, it can also be rude to decline tea that is offered (there is probably some relationship between these cultures):
"Deemed a symbol of good will in North Africa, mint tea plays a prominent role in welcoming houseguests, conducting business dealings, bargaining for carpets, woodcrafts, or souvenirs and relaxing with friends at a cafe. Also thought to aid in digestion, it is served at the beginning or end of every meal. Etiquette requires that each person consume three glasses before departing a home, shop, or cafe. To decline a glass is deemed rude. Whether due to its lack of expense, comforting taste, ritualized yet simple preparation, or mildly addictive properties, mint tea has captivated this region. One cannot walk through a busy square without seeing rich, steaming tea being sipped at sidewalk cafes or in storefronts."
- Entertaining from Ancient Rome to the Super Bowl: An Encyclopedia [2 volumes]: An Encyclopedia / Melitta Weiss Adamson, Francine Segan
"In the Afghan culture, when you enter someone’s house, you're offered chai tea, and you shouldn’t decline it. Unfortunately for me, I detest tea, and the mugs they use aren’t washed well as I can see lip marks from the previous person who drank from the cup (a real nightmare for someone with OCD). The first time I visited Rambo Three’s hut, he asked me if I wanted some tea, and I politely refused. He looked more disappointed than a Chicago Cubs fan in October, and so I asked, “Am I being rude because I did not accept your tea?” He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Yes.” Since then, I’ve not declined their tea or their dirty mugs, learning there’s no such thing as a "polite refusal” in Afghanistan."
- I am Danger; I am Prisoner / Danger Geist
Also if someone said "OMG, f*ck yes, I would f*cking LOVE a cup of tea! Thank you!", I'd consider that pretty rude.
Just imagine it in the local context:
"Want some Teh-C?"
"Chee bye. KNN. Fuck lah. Of course."
The metaphor of cultural imperialism can be extended into the realm of sexual relations, where the feminist culture of sexual consent is not the only one that is out there (or indeed, the only valid one).
Addendum: What happens if someone asks you to make him drink tea when he's passed out? Should you respect his wishes?
Post ID: 7593295736417303991
Monday, March 09, 2015
Links - 9th March 2015
Quokkas Are The Selfie Masters We All Want A Picture With
Did Grey Seals Mutilate Two Harbour Porpoises? - "there’s something oddly poetic about the otherwise grisly story. Whales and dolphins evolved from deer-like hoofed animals while seals, as I said, are carnivores that have taken to the sea. A seal eating a porpoise is a modern marine episode in a longstanding conflict between a group of (mostly) predators and a group of (mostly) prey."
Exclusive: Corrupt Apple Store Employees Come Forward Across America - "Computers were traded for plastic surgery, iPhones were smashed like party favors, and employees outright stole from the back room for their own pleasure. It was a den of misuse and abuse, all under the gleaming white aegis of Apple Retail. The perfection is a myth... One former employee who had opened retail stores across North America and Asia claimed "The corruption within Apple goes straight to the top. That is why I left, I couldnt tolerate it anymore. Under Mr. Cook, Apple is fracturing from the inside out." But there's probably a less theatrical explanation here. Apple Stores mint their own gold. They sell some of the most desirable expensive products in the history of desirable expensive products, without the pressure of commission. The stuff sells itself—and websites like ours sure help—and that's why Apple has the most profitable retail operation per square foot in the entire country. The stores make more money than Tiffany, which literally sells giant diamonds."
Diagnosing the Home Alone burglars' injuries: A professional weighs in
Singapore the ‘least positive’ country in the world: survey - "According to a Gallup poll released on Wednesday – the same poll that ranked countries with the most and least emotions – residents of Singapore are the least likely to feel positive alongside war torn countries such as Iraq and Armenia."
Male Strippers Stop an Armed Robbery With Their Bare Hands and Chests
Who Had Richer Parents, Doctors Or Artists? - "doctors, chief executives and police officers are doing much better than their parents in terms of income; designers, secretaries and waiters are doing worse"
Good guy with a gun myth: Guns increase the risk of homicide, accidents, suicide. - "for every 1 percent increase in gun ownership, there was a 1.1 percent increase in the firearm homicide rate and a 0.7 percent increase in the total homicide rate... the firearm ownership rate had no statistically significant impact on nonfirearm homicides, meaning there was no detectable substitution effect. That is, in the absence of guns, would-be criminals are not switching to knives or some other weapons to carry out homicide. These results are supported by a host of previous studies that illustrate that guns increase the rate of homicides. The evidence against firearm ownership becomes even stronger when suicides and accidents are included in the analysis—guns make both much more likely and more fatal... One might accept that firearms are dangerous and that they substantially elevate the risk of homicide, suicide, and fatal accidents, but still believe that policies regulating gun ownership are ineffective—criminals, after all, won’t follow them. However, another recent study from May of 2013 analyzed the impact of state firearm laws on firearm-related fatalities. It found that the most gun-restrictive states have significantly fewer firearm fatalities than the states with the least restrictive laws... Suppose a criminal has just broken into your house brandishing a firearm. You need to protect yourself and your family. Wouldn’t anyone feel safer owning a gun? This is the kind of narrative propagated by gun advocates in defense of firearm ownership. It preys on our fear. Yet, the annual per capita risk of death during a home invasion is 0.0000002, which, for all intents and purposes, is zero... Gun ownership doubled the risk of homicide and tripled the risk of suicide. This research is bolstered by a national survey that found that a gun in the home was far more likely to be used to threaten a family member or intimate partner than to be used in self-defense... despite the NRA’s mantra that there are millions of defensive gun uses every year, empirical data reveals that DGUs are actually extremely rare. Criminal uses of firearms far outnumber legal defensive uses. The evidence shows that there may be fewer than even 3,000 DGUs annually. In comparison, there are 30,000 gun deaths annually, and many more injuries and shattered lives. The costs of gun ownership unequivocally outweigh the benefits... FBI data reveal that about twice as many homicides result from arguments than from felonies, and gang violence is only a small contributor... the National Crime Victimization Survey found that people who used any weapon other than a gun for defense were less likely to be harmed than those who used a firearm"
When You Flip Through an IKEA Catalog, 75% of the 'Photography' You See is CGI
Flip-flopping politicians and judges: Survey of motivated reasoning and merits bias. - "we asked people whether President Bush acted rightly by using a loophole to make appointments in defiance of Senate opposition. Most Republicans said he did the right thing while most Democrats said he acted wrongly. We then put Obama’s name in for Bush with a different group of respondents and asked the same question. This time the vast majority of Republicans opposed the appointments while most Democrats said he did the right thing."
Iran's foreign minister summoned to parliament over walk with Kerry - "Speaking to reporters in Tehran last week, Zarif sought to justify the private walk with Kerry: "We had a serious earnest session and perhaps there was a need to pause a few minutes and resume in another form. These are quite normal in the world of diplomacy, especially since our hotel had no yard or garden and surrounding alleys were packed with curious journalists.""
Vandalism case: Teen guilty of theft, trespass - "Deputy Public Prosecutor Tang Shangjun told the court that Graaskov never took part in the spray-painting and backed out not because he realised his folly but because he knew he would miss the last bus home."
What sort of criminal needs to take the last bus home?!
Your behavior key to building a better society - "A tale goes like this: An old man lies on his back at a crossroads, waiting for someone whom he can blackmail. A young man walks up to him and says he is too poor for extortion. The old chap waves his hand, telling the young guy to leave him alone. Another man approaches the old man and says he is even poorer than the first and doesn't have enough money to even support himself. The old man gets up immediately and lets the young guy lie down in his place, saying, "your need to blackmail an upstart driving by in a fancy limousine is even greater than mine"... It seems the rationale is to use rampant abuse of power by officials to justify the misdeeds of ordinary people. In other words, people have no need to perform their duties as good citizens unless they have a government that is run by clean and honest officials."
Men who like spicier food are 'alpha males' with higher levels of testosterone, French report claims - Telegraph - "Scientists at the highly-respected University of Grenoble have published a report suggesting that regular consumption of chili peppers may raise levels of the hormone, which is believed to make men more adventurous, enterprising and sexually active... Unlike their British counterparts, relatively few have acquired a taste for hot curries. Many see chili as an assault on their taste buds that hinders enjoyment of the subtler, more delicate flavours of classic French cuisine."
Curry: why the British are moving on from Chicken Tikka Masala - Telegraph - "Curry made and adapted in Britain is now so good that it’s even becoming a major export. Ali relates an experience in Prague recently where he saw a Czech chef cooking curry with a Patak sauce, a brand founded in Britain. “Curry is served in five star hotels around the world,” he says, “and they’re not using recipes from India, they’re from [Britain].”"
Romantic red: red enhances men's attraction to women. - "In many nonhuman primates, the color red enhances males' attraction to females. In 5 experiments, the authors demonstrate a parallel effect in humans: Red, relative to other achromatic and chromatic colors, leads men to view women as more attractive and more sexually desirable. Men seem unaware of this red effect, and red does not influence women's perceptions of the attractiveness of other women, nor men's perceptions of women's overall likeability, kindness, or intelligence. The findings have clear practical implications for men and women in the mating game and, perhaps, for fashion consultants, product designers, and marketers. Furthermore, the findings document the value of extending research on signal coloration to humans and of considering color as something of a common language, both within and across species."
Has West's liberal left failed people of color? - "where one really feels that the left has lost track big time is in delineating racist speech and anti-Muslim prejudice from genuine criticism of ideologies like Islamism or fundamentalist Islam. This leads to inevitable silencing of voices of dissent, from Muslim community or otherwise. They sometimes end up stooping to such new lows that they even engage in implicit victim blaming, which is antithetical to the core values of progressive liberalism. And these very people ironically end up overlooking the diverse voices amongst people of color and just conveniently homogenize them instead. Makes one wonder if the whole thing smacks of a kind of elitist arrogance. The hypocrisy of some factions of left is so evident when they accuse the lack of attention to the horrendous atrocities committed Boko Haram by the western media. While western media is guilty of resorting to orientalist narratives and problematic portrayal of the ‘third world’, had the media publicized the atrocities committed by Boko Haram enough, would they have been spared of accusations of peddling Islamophobia?"
Vox got no threats for posting Charlie Hebdo cartoons, dozens for covering Islamophobia
If you take online threats seriously, you haven't been online long enough
Couple following their hearts in epic journey of love - "There are many ways to express love, but Ding Yizhou chose one that few would adopt: following a heart-shaped itinerary around China with his girlfriend, who uses a wheelchair."
Did Grey Seals Mutilate Two Harbour Porpoises? - "there’s something oddly poetic about the otherwise grisly story. Whales and dolphins evolved from deer-like hoofed animals while seals, as I said, are carnivores that have taken to the sea. A seal eating a porpoise is a modern marine episode in a longstanding conflict between a group of (mostly) predators and a group of (mostly) prey."
Exclusive: Corrupt Apple Store Employees Come Forward Across America - "Computers were traded for plastic surgery, iPhones were smashed like party favors, and employees outright stole from the back room for their own pleasure. It was a den of misuse and abuse, all under the gleaming white aegis of Apple Retail. The perfection is a myth... One former employee who had opened retail stores across North America and Asia claimed "The corruption within Apple goes straight to the top. That is why I left, I couldnt tolerate it anymore. Under Mr. Cook, Apple is fracturing from the inside out." But there's probably a less theatrical explanation here. Apple Stores mint their own gold. They sell some of the most desirable expensive products in the history of desirable expensive products, without the pressure of commission. The stuff sells itself—and websites like ours sure help—and that's why Apple has the most profitable retail operation per square foot in the entire country. The stores make more money than Tiffany, which literally sells giant diamonds."
Diagnosing the Home Alone burglars' injuries: A professional weighs in
Singapore the ‘least positive’ country in the world: survey - "According to a Gallup poll released on Wednesday – the same poll that ranked countries with the most and least emotions – residents of Singapore are the least likely to feel positive alongside war torn countries such as Iraq and Armenia."
Male Strippers Stop an Armed Robbery With Their Bare Hands and Chests
Who Had Richer Parents, Doctors Or Artists? - "doctors, chief executives and police officers are doing much better than their parents in terms of income; designers, secretaries and waiters are doing worse"
Good guy with a gun myth: Guns increase the risk of homicide, accidents, suicide. - "for every 1 percent increase in gun ownership, there was a 1.1 percent increase in the firearm homicide rate and a 0.7 percent increase in the total homicide rate... the firearm ownership rate had no statistically significant impact on nonfirearm homicides, meaning there was no detectable substitution effect. That is, in the absence of guns, would-be criminals are not switching to knives or some other weapons to carry out homicide. These results are supported by a host of previous studies that illustrate that guns increase the rate of homicides. The evidence against firearm ownership becomes even stronger when suicides and accidents are included in the analysis—guns make both much more likely and more fatal... One might accept that firearms are dangerous and that they substantially elevate the risk of homicide, suicide, and fatal accidents, but still believe that policies regulating gun ownership are ineffective—criminals, after all, won’t follow them. However, another recent study from May of 2013 analyzed the impact of state firearm laws on firearm-related fatalities. It found that the most gun-restrictive states have significantly fewer firearm fatalities than the states with the least restrictive laws... Suppose a criminal has just broken into your house brandishing a firearm. You need to protect yourself and your family. Wouldn’t anyone feel safer owning a gun? This is the kind of narrative propagated by gun advocates in defense of firearm ownership. It preys on our fear. Yet, the annual per capita risk of death during a home invasion is 0.0000002, which, for all intents and purposes, is zero... Gun ownership doubled the risk of homicide and tripled the risk of suicide. This research is bolstered by a national survey that found that a gun in the home was far more likely to be used to threaten a family member or intimate partner than to be used in self-defense... despite the NRA’s mantra that there are millions of defensive gun uses every year, empirical data reveals that DGUs are actually extremely rare. Criminal uses of firearms far outnumber legal defensive uses. The evidence shows that there may be fewer than even 3,000 DGUs annually. In comparison, there are 30,000 gun deaths annually, and many more injuries and shattered lives. The costs of gun ownership unequivocally outweigh the benefits... FBI data reveal that about twice as many homicides result from arguments than from felonies, and gang violence is only a small contributor... the National Crime Victimization Survey found that people who used any weapon other than a gun for defense were less likely to be harmed than those who used a firearm"
When You Flip Through an IKEA Catalog, 75% of the 'Photography' You See is CGI
Flip-flopping politicians and judges: Survey of motivated reasoning and merits bias. - "we asked people whether President Bush acted rightly by using a loophole to make appointments in defiance of Senate opposition. Most Republicans said he did the right thing while most Democrats said he acted wrongly. We then put Obama’s name in for Bush with a different group of respondents and asked the same question. This time the vast majority of Republicans opposed the appointments while most Democrats said he did the right thing."
Iran's foreign minister summoned to parliament over walk with Kerry - "Speaking to reporters in Tehran last week, Zarif sought to justify the private walk with Kerry: "We had a serious earnest session and perhaps there was a need to pause a few minutes and resume in another form. These are quite normal in the world of diplomacy, especially since our hotel had no yard or garden and surrounding alleys were packed with curious journalists.""
Vandalism case: Teen guilty of theft, trespass - "Deputy Public Prosecutor Tang Shangjun told the court that Graaskov never took part in the spray-painting and backed out not because he realised his folly but because he knew he would miss the last bus home."
What sort of criminal needs to take the last bus home?!
Your behavior key to building a better society - "A tale goes like this: An old man lies on his back at a crossroads, waiting for someone whom he can blackmail. A young man walks up to him and says he is too poor for extortion. The old chap waves his hand, telling the young guy to leave him alone. Another man approaches the old man and says he is even poorer than the first and doesn't have enough money to even support himself. The old man gets up immediately and lets the young guy lie down in his place, saying, "your need to blackmail an upstart driving by in a fancy limousine is even greater than mine"... It seems the rationale is to use rampant abuse of power by officials to justify the misdeeds of ordinary people. In other words, people have no need to perform their duties as good citizens unless they have a government that is run by clean and honest officials."
Men who like spicier food are 'alpha males' with higher levels of testosterone, French report claims - Telegraph - "Scientists at the highly-respected University of Grenoble have published a report suggesting that regular consumption of chili peppers may raise levels of the hormone, which is believed to make men more adventurous, enterprising and sexually active... Unlike their British counterparts, relatively few have acquired a taste for hot curries. Many see chili as an assault on their taste buds that hinders enjoyment of the subtler, more delicate flavours of classic French cuisine."
Curry: why the British are moving on from Chicken Tikka Masala - Telegraph - "Curry made and adapted in Britain is now so good that it’s even becoming a major export. Ali relates an experience in Prague recently where he saw a Czech chef cooking curry with a Patak sauce, a brand founded in Britain. “Curry is served in five star hotels around the world,” he says, “and they’re not using recipes from India, they’re from [Britain].”"
Romantic red: red enhances men's attraction to women. - "In many nonhuman primates, the color red enhances males' attraction to females. In 5 experiments, the authors demonstrate a parallel effect in humans: Red, relative to other achromatic and chromatic colors, leads men to view women as more attractive and more sexually desirable. Men seem unaware of this red effect, and red does not influence women's perceptions of the attractiveness of other women, nor men's perceptions of women's overall likeability, kindness, or intelligence. The findings have clear practical implications for men and women in the mating game and, perhaps, for fashion consultants, product designers, and marketers. Furthermore, the findings document the value of extending research on signal coloration to humans and of considering color as something of a common language, both within and across species."
Has West's liberal left failed people of color? - "where one really feels that the left has lost track big time is in delineating racist speech and anti-Muslim prejudice from genuine criticism of ideologies like Islamism or fundamentalist Islam. This leads to inevitable silencing of voices of dissent, from Muslim community or otherwise. They sometimes end up stooping to such new lows that they even engage in implicit victim blaming, which is antithetical to the core values of progressive liberalism. And these very people ironically end up overlooking the diverse voices amongst people of color and just conveniently homogenize them instead. Makes one wonder if the whole thing smacks of a kind of elitist arrogance. The hypocrisy of some factions of left is so evident when they accuse the lack of attention to the horrendous atrocities committed Boko Haram by the western media. While western media is guilty of resorting to orientalist narratives and problematic portrayal of the ‘third world’, had the media publicized the atrocities committed by Boko Haram enough, would they have been spared of accusations of peddling Islamophobia?"
Vox got no threats for posting Charlie Hebdo cartoons, dozens for covering Islamophobia
If you take online threats seriously, you haven't been online long enough
Couple following their hearts in epic journey of love - "There are many ways to express love, but Ding Yizhou chose one that few would adopt: following a heart-shaped itinerary around China with his girlfriend, who uses a wheelchair."
Post ID: 5015741790696843411
Sunday, March 08, 2015
Celebrating International Women's Day
ang geck geck priscilla (@anggeckgeck) • Instagram photos and videos:
"I believe being submissive to a man in front of his peers helps to build his confidence and pride , however, when a man veers in the wrong direction, a woman should know when to stand her ground and guide him back onto the right path. A strong woman helps a man make firm decisions if he can't make up his mind about things or can no longer decide, however, she shouldn't be too overpowering in a relationship. She needs to trust him and his capabilities and allow him to build his empire. She will always be the one who will give abundant love and respect to her man. As the saying goes, "There is a woman behind every successful man" and she is that woman.
#happyinternationwoman'sday #myownquote"
"I believe being submissive to a man in front of his peers helps to build his confidence and pride , however, when a man veers in the wrong direction, a woman should know when to stand her ground and guide him back onto the right path. A strong woman helps a man make firm decisions if he can't make up his mind about things or can no longer decide, however, she shouldn't be too overpowering in a relationship. She needs to trust him and his capabilities and allow him to build his empire. She will always be the one who will give abundant love and respect to her man. As the saying goes, "There is a woman behind every successful man" and she is that woman.
#happyinternationwoman'sday #myownquote"
Post ID: 7506203495411240012
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