G20 'honey trap' warning: Fears Prime Minister's officials will be seduced by Chinese spies and have hotel rooms bugged - "Officials travelling with Mrs May have been issued with temporary mobile phones and email addresses in an attempt to evade Chinese state hackers. Security advisers are also warning staff not to keep gifts they receive and to be particularly wary of electronic devices, such as free computer memory sticks, mobile phone SIM cards or chargers which they are offered by their Chinese hosts. One Whitehall source said security chiefs had warned them that hotel rooms used during the summit were likely to be bugged. “We have been told that if you feel uncomfortable about people seeing you naked, you should get changed under your bedclothes,” the source said... During Mr Brown’s visit to China in 2008, one of the No 10 officials accompanying the then Prime Minister reportedly fell prey to a “beautiful” female Chinese spy. She went back to his hotel room, drugged him, stole his mobile phone and documents from his briefcase... The No 10 team was “accosted on one side by a beautiful posse of Chinese girls and on the other side by an equivalent group of Russian blondes”
Letter gets there by hand-drawn map - "Rebecca Cathrine Kaadu Ostenfeld was reportedly surprised when a letter was delivered to the horse farm where she lives with her husband and three children near Búðardalur in the west of Iceland. Instead of a postal address or a recipient's name, the sender had drawn a map of where they believed the farm to be, together with the following, in English: "Country: Iceland. City: Búðardalur. Name: A horse farm with an Icelandic/Danish couple and three kids and a lot of sheep!" The sender had also added a further clue to the intended recipient: "the Danish woman works in a supermarket in Búðardalur." The letter had been written and sent from the Icelandic capital Reykjavík by a tourist who had stayed at the farm but who obviously did not know the address. And, extraordinarily, it arrived at the right place"
A world without mosquitoes - "scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better. When it comes to the major disease vectors, "it's difficult to see what the downside would be to removal, except for collateral damage", says insect ecologist Steven Juliano, of Illinois State University in Normal. A world without mosquitoes would be "more secure for us", says medical entomologist Carlos Brisola Marcondes from the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil. "The elimination of Anopheles would be very significant for mankind"... Ultimately, there seem to be few things that mosquitoes do that other organisms can't do just as well — except perhaps for one. They are lethally efficient at sucking blood from one individual and mainlining it into another, providing an ideal route for the spread of pathogenic microbes."
Shoes speak louder than skills in London's City: Report - ""Opaque" dress codes practised by those from more formal backgrounds are being used to judge candidates, with brown shoes a fashion faux-pas that many from poorer backgrounds may not be aware of, said the study. "Managers often select candidates for client-facing jobs who fit the traditional image of an investment banker and display polish," it said. "For example, some senior investment bankers still deem it unacceptable for men to wear brown shoes with a business suit"... 'see that tie you're wearing? It's too loud. You can't wear that tie with the suit that you're wearing'"
Women aren't the only ones to be judged by what they wear
Why this radical activist is disillusioned by the toxic culture of the left - "I’m tired of watching people turn into pretentious assholes who think their activism makes them better than everyone else, even the oppressed and marginalised groups with whom they claim “allyship”... [The real oppressed] don't bother with policing their language and worrying about how their words might unintentionally perpetuate certain stereotypes. They are more concerned with their voices being heard. Yet I witness so many “activists” who ignore the realities of oppression despite saying that they care about those at the bottom of society. They think that being offended by something is equal to experiencing prison time or living on the streets. They talk about listening, being humble and not having preconceptions. Yet they ignore the lived experiences of those who don’t speak or think properly in the view of university-educated social justice warriors... I've witnessed incidents where people have lost their jobs because of mistakes they've made in the eyes of left-wing activists. I've seen relationships and friendships destroyed. I've known people who have been banned from participating in certain places, and become so alienated from “the community” that they are afraid to go out in public at all. This has caused serious mental distress to people I've worked alongside, and has even resulted in suicide. Social "justice" indeed. These incidents tend to happen over allegations that rest on each person's word. Yet only one party is allowed to tell their story, while the other one is told to sit down, shut up, and accept the potentially life-destroying consequences. And if anyone tries to step in or question how things are being done, they are immediately silenced and threatened with the same fate if they don't comply... As Noam Chomsky put it: “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” We have the right to challenge other people's speech, but what many people are seeing is the shutting off of dialogue entirely for the purpose of “safety”. What could possibly be safe about censorship? What could possibly be safe about a group of people who claim to be freedom fighters dictating who can speak and what can be said, based on whether or not we agree with them? Study any kind of history and you will find that censorship has never been on the right side of it. The world is not a safe place. It is extremely dangerous, flawed, full of bloodshed and corruption. By sheltering ourselves from its harshness we are doing nothing meaningful to change it"
European churches say growing flock of Muslim refugees are converting - "Johannes, another Iranian, left Tehran for Vienna. Born into a Muslim family, the 32-year-old – who was previously called Sadegh – began questioning the roots of Islam at university. “I found that the history of Islam was completely different from what we were taught at school. Maybe, I thought, it was a religion that began with violence? “A religion that began with violence cannot lead people to freedom and love. Jesus Christ said ‘those who use the sword will die by the sword’. This really changed my mind”... the Austrian bishops’ conference published new guidelines for priests, warning that some refugees may seek baptism in the hope of improving their chances of obtaining asylum... “We still try our best to serve people. Jesus Christ knew Judas was going to betray him but he still washed his feet. Thank God it is not my job to judge them.”"
Paris Attacks Highlight Jihadists’ Easy Path Between Europe and ISIS Territory - The New York Times - "One of the militants in the Paris attacks traveled to Syria from his hometown in France and back, officials said, even after his passport had been confiscated and he had been placed under judicial oversight. So did another, despite having been arrested eight times in petty crimes and having been listed as a national security risk in France. Even the man suspected of organizing the massacre on Friday, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a well-known figure in the Belgian jihadist scene, is believed to have traveled between Islamic State-controlled territory and Europe a number of times — including for an attack plot in Belgium in January... More British Muslims have joined the Islamic State — about 750 — than are currently enrolled in the British armed forces, according to Shiraz Maher, a senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London, who has been monitoring the social media accounts of Western jihadists over the past two years. The Islamic State, he said, “has mobilized the largest volunteer army of Sunni fighters in recent history”... Not all volunteer fighters returning from conflict become terrorists. Some academic research suggests that one in 10 do, while other sources say the ratio is as high as one in four. Either way, the end result is a terrorist threat expanding at a rate that alarms security experts... The biggest challenge, counterterrorism experts and officials said, was not so much identifying those who represent a potential threat, but knowing whom to put under the tightest surveillance. In France alone, about 3,000 people are considered potential threats, officials said."
Brutality of life in Saudi Arabia exposed: Woman who killed stepdaughter screams "I did not do it" as she is beheaded in street - "Saudi Arabia Uncovered aims to reveal the hidden reality inside one of the world's most secretive and strict Islamic regimes and questions Britain's relationship with the country. In one particularly shocking scene in ITV's Exposure documentary, a woman is pinned down at the side of a public road by four Saudi officers and executed after she has been convicted of killing her stepdaughter. The policeman pins her down and decapitates her with a sword after she screams, 'I did not do it'. In another beheading scene the executioner, dressed in white robes, raises the sword above his head and brings it down in just one sweep. So far this year the country has been executing people at a rate of one per day. In the Saudi capital of Riyadh, viewers are introduced to a large public space nicknamed Chop Chop Square because so many people are executed there. The drainage system is stained red from the blood spilt in the square... Women are considered to be second-class citizens and police beating women is the norm. In one scene a male supermarket customer violently pushes a woman to the floor for no reason and walks past her. Another gruesome scene shows five bodies hanging from a pole that is suspended between two cranes. It serves as a public reminder to those who might consider turning to crime. The gang of five robbers were publicly beheaded before their corpses were strung up in public for days. In Saudi Arabia, blasphemy is punishable by stoning or execution and theft by amputation. If anyone is found guilty of insulting Islam they face 10 years in prison or 1,000 lashes."
Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with Islam
What is the food than can really improve your eyesight? - "They found that boosting the diet with the three macular pigments - lutein, zeaxanthin and meso-zeaxanthin - led to significant improvements in the protection of the delicate macula, as well as improved eyesight."
Is love colour blind? Mixed race couples tackle challenges - "Indian Catholic Martin Silva, 41, proposed to Esther Low, 40, a Chinese Buddhist, after dating for three years. They are now planning for their wedding in 2017... While they have agreed on a church wedding, said Martin: “We haven’t decided on this gate crashing thing, this Chinese custom - the groom goes over and picks the wife up. I’ve believed all these years that seeing the bride before getting to church is like bad luck. So that is what we both are discussing. She really, really wants it.”
Chinese Catholics don't have a problem, apparently
Apostasy in Singapore, Reza Aslan's Moderate South East Asia, and Sally Kohn's Laughable Tweet (A Conversation) - "If you are born a Muslim in Singapore then you are put into the Muslim registry. We have a system called the Faraid which is about inheritance law. If your name is not in Faraid (which happens when you legally apostatize) then you can't do anything if a Muslim relative contests the will. Since you're not in the registry you don't exist, you're a persona non grata... Marriage, by the way, is not done through a civil court. It's done through the Muslim marriage registry. So Muslims get a separate registry called the Registry of Muslim Marriages. Imagine then if a Muslim couple doesn't want to believe anymore and decides to nullify their Muslim status, then their marriage also gets nullified and they have to go through another process to be registered as a married couple under the Registry of Marriages... a lot of people here decry Donald Trumps Muslim registry, but they are themselves part of a registry in Singapore... If I say to a Muslim, "in Islam, apostasy means death." Then they might say, "well that's offensive, you're taking the Quran out of context." I'm not taking it out of context! It's right there you can read it yourself! Quran 4:89... recently there is a rise in identity politics which has made it difficult for people who call themselves liberals to understand what they are fighting for. They talk about Muslims as if Muslims are one homogenous group -- and Muslims reformists are trying to get away from that mentality. They're trying to promote being able to practice Islam in their own ways. Promoting being able to apostatize and even criticize Islam. But as you know, a lot of these liberals think any criticism of Islam is Islamophobia... I've been called Islamophobic more than once. I've been told, "you just wanna be a white person on the inside." And I say, "Well, maybe I'm transracial. Maybe I'm white on the inside? Are you going to criticize me for that? Race is a social construct. I'm race fluid." (Laughter) Sometimes you just have run along with their logic to make them realize how ridiculous they are... When Muslims talk about modesty culture that's pretty much what they're talking about. It's the idea that if you cover up you're morally superior to someone that doesn't cover up. That to me is slut shaming. In the west, it would be called slut shaming. You look at a woman who is dressed "provocatively" and you call her a slut, to a Muslim mindset, provocative just means showing your hair. But when a Muslim does it it's not slut shaming? It's essentially the same thing."
Stuart Jeffries on the revival of the exclamation mark - "why did Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! get its enviable name? The Commission de Toponymie de Québec says that Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! is so named because in olden times "le haha" in French meant an impasse, and that there was just such an unexpected obstacle blocking a waterway near the site of the future town. Eighteenth- and 19th-century canoeists paddling down the local river came across such a haha, then had to get out of their canoes and take a vexing 80km detour. Hence the town's name... In the ninth book of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, Eric, one of the characters insists that "Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind"... Carol Waseleski's unexpectedly diverting paper, Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication, found that women used more exclamation marks than men. But why was this? Are women more excitable? Some theorists (notably D Rubin and K Greene in their paper Gender-Typical Style in Written Language) had argued that the exclamation mark was often a sign of excitability, and that "a high frequency of exclamation points can be regarded as sort of an orthographic intensifier signalling 'I really mean this!'" They also argued that this might convey the writer's lack of stature; that, in fact, a confident person (read: man) could "affirm their views by simply asserting them"... Waseleski found otherwise. She concluded that exclamation marks were not just marks of excitability but of friendliness, and suggested that one reason women use them more than men is because they were, as a gender, less likely to be socially inept, funless egotists - which isn't quite how she put it... George Orwell once purged A Clergyman's Daughter of the semi-colons, arguing they were unnecessary."
L'origine de Bert
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Links - 21st September 2016
What Science Says--and Doesn't--about Spanking - "Ferguson did try to control for the effects of preexisting child behavior in a 2013 meta-analysis he published of the longitudinal studies on this issue; when he did, “spanking’s effects became trivial,” he says. As a further demonstration of the importance of careful statistical controls, Robert Larzelere, a psychologist at Oklahoma State University, and his colleagues reported in a 2010 study that grounding and psychotherapy are linked just as strongly to bad behavior as spanking is but that all the associations disappear with the use of careful statistical controls. It makes sense that disciplinary tactics used as responses to bad behavior will be associated with such behavior, Larzelere says, unless care is taken to control for children’s preexisting characteristics and temperaments."
Ana Kasparian's Disgraceful Fat Shaming Hypocrisy - "Young Turks host champions body positivity while angrily calling Alex Jones a "fat fuck... Just like how leftists will whine all day long about Donald Trump’s supposed sexism and racism – while themselves engaging in rampant misogyny and bigotry against Melania Trump for being a “dumb bitch” who can’t speak English properly – Kasparian was perfectly content to abandon her body positivity message to attack Jones over his weight."
A Cute Internet Star Flirts. All He Wants Is Your Password. - The New York Times - "#HackedByJohnson is the ultimate submission: He’s inside her account, posting as her. This new wave of fan interaction nods to the importance of online security, then asks fans to break the rules. Mr. Johnson accompanied his call for passwords with the disclaimer, “only me tho, don’t ever give out ur passwords to strangers.”"
From Deviance to Normalcy: Women as Sexual Aggressors - "Larimer, Lydum, Anderson, and Turner (1999), reported that rates for their measures of receiving (men = 21%, women = 28%) or instigating (men = 10%, women = 5%) sexual coercion were not statistically different for college men and women, but that women were less likely to use physical force as a tactic to obtain sexual contact (men = 5%, women = 1%)... Anderson (1998, 1996), presented self-reported prevalence rates for women's sexual coercion of between 25% and 40% and for physically forced sexual contact between 1.6% and 7.1%. Of perhaps greater significance was the women's self-reports of engaging in a classic date-rape scenario - taking advantage of someone who was under the influence of alcohol or drugs. When asked about initiating sexual contact with a man when his judgment was impaired by drugs or alcohol, between 32% and 51% of the women said that they had. Further, between 5% and 15% of women reported giving a man alcohol or drugs in an attempt to have sexual contact with him... the use of pressure tactics or force by a woman could be seen as a method of foreplay and not aggression... coercers could be distinguished from other college women in that they were more likely; 1) to view traditional women's roles as being constricting, 2) to believe that forcing sex at times is acceptable, 3) to acknowledge that it is acceptable for women to have and act on sexual thoughts and desires, and 4) to admit their lust and desire for power in sexual encounters... Anderson and Aymani (1993) stated that males reported being recipients of female aggression more than females admitted to being aggressors... men reported significantly more events of adult women initiating sexual contact with them while they were minors (OR=10.9), by getting them drunk or high (OR=3.7), and by threatening to end their relationship (OR=6.3) than women reported... women from the South reported less overall aggression (34.1% vs. 46.2%), sexual abuse (7.3% vs. 21.1%), and physically forced sex (1.6% vs. 7.1%) but not less sexual coercion (all differences were significant at p < .001) Most of the coercers' views sound like feminists'; since the South presumably has more traditional gender roles, this suggests that traditional gender roles aren't all bad
From Gay World to Pop Yeh Yeh: When Geylang rocked the ‘60s - Channel NewsAsia - "By most accounts, Pop Yeh Yeh eventually fizzled out in 1971. But it wasn’t the only music movement that had to adjust to the changes in that decade. The Government had increasingly been casting a critical eye on afternoon tea dances, at which youths were rockin’ and rollin’ across the island, due to gangster-related violence and drugs. And in 1972, there was a stabbing incident at the Boiler Room nightclub at Mandarin Hotel, which led to the authorities imposing a total ban on live music in clubs, said Mr Pereira. “Gangsterism, the increasing drug addiction problem — it was all associated with the nightlife scene. (The ban) lasted for about five years, and by the time it was lifted, it was a bit late. The live music scene had totally weakened. A lot of the working bands went elsewhere, where they could find work, or stopped playing completely,” he said."
So the government dealt a fatal blow to the local music scene. No surprises there
Here’s how the internet reacted after the Normandy church attack - "Some highlighted how this puts many of France’s Muslims at risk for discrimination.
The real victims of #Normandy are France's Muslims, who are at greater risk of Islamophobia than ever before!
— Dr. H. Heretic, PhD (@hateful_heretic) July 26, 2016
And, of course, others advised caution.
Another day, another terrorist attack committed by Muslims. But these attacks have got *nothing* to do with Islam. #Normandy #Normandie
— (((Jim Bryant))) (@jamesbryantrec) July 26, 2016
Let's not jump to conclusions. We know nothing about the background or beliefs of the trucks responsible for workplace violence in #Normandy
— Allum Bokhari (@LibertarianBlue) July 26, 2016"
Some people don't understand irony (or this is Poe's Law)
Bill Clinton’s front page photos on Hillary's nomination are about news constraints not sexism. - "There are a few interpretations of the popular editorial choice to illustrate the story of Hillary Clinton’s momentous achievement with a photo of Bill. One is that papers were trying to get at both of the evening’s major events: Hillary’s nomination and Bill’s speech. Another is that there simply were no photos of Hillary from Tuesday night; she only appeared in a video near the end of the proceedings and won’t speak live at the convention until Thursday. Or, as some suggested on Twitter Wednesday morning, it’s straight-up misogyny... Some outlets used a photo of Hillary speaking on the video screen, an unpleasant image with whiffs of Orwell. An argument could be made that those pictures reek of sexism as well, since it plays into the Republican caricature of Hillary as a heartless megalomaniac with ambitions of world domination."
Leibel A. Mangel - "A Palestinian man yells at IDF soldiers, demanding they kill his child so it can be captured on video. The soldier instead shakes the young child's hand. The father then tells his child to throw rocks at the soldiers.. "There will be peace when they LOVE their children more than they HATE ours"
On Becoming Anti-Bernie - "Sanders was less interested in actually accomplishing anything than he was in staging protests where he could claim some kind of moral high ground, not interested in getting in the weeds and doing anything to actually achieve his goals within the Congress he worked in. This research put Sanders’ supposedly pristine progressive agenda in perspective: it is very easy to maintain that agenda if you never make the hard choices necessary to get things done. Classic protester — yet handily collecting his $200,000 pay check and his lifetime of benefits while doing little to enact actual progressive policies to improve people’s lives. I did more research than the above, but the two overarching themes I just described (magical thinking and ideological purity over practicality) seem tied together in terms of what Sanders has to offer the country with respect to governance... the Sanders campaign has also awakened a dormant left-wing Tea Party that I didn’t believe existed, but that lives in a fever swamp of conspiracy-thinking and epistemic closure and rejection of fact and binary, “us v. them” thinking. And that terrifies me"
Could Pokemon Go save the economy? - "Sokcho has capitalized on the gold rush, as tour buses now carry Pokemon pilgrims several hours to Sokcho. They're not there for the beaches or the boating. They're there to play Pokemon Go... Pokemon Go's developers used a grid to block the country, but geometric shapes cannot perfectly cover the natural contours of coastline. The result is a small area in South Korea where people can play Pokemon Go"
Frequent password changes are the enemy of security, FTC technologist says - "Over the past few years, organizations including the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US and UK government agency CESG have also concluded that mandated password changes are often ineffective or counterproductive"
Six Reasons ISIS Hates The West, According To Report - "“The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam”. Though the Mirror breaks the ISIS diatribe against the West down to six simple points, it actually goes into far greater specifics such as bashing western thinkers like Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx, ranting against coffee drinkers, and criticizing western women, whom they argue should be docile and submissive according to the Sunday Express. Independent western women, according to the ISIS article “work like man, rule like man, and have intercourse like an animal, without being conscious of her Lord watching both her and her heinous partner in crime.”"
ISIS admits that it really does hate our freedoms and admits that Western foreign policy is not their primary motivator. Not that this will convince liberals
Medical benefits of flossing unproven
Chinese-American woman crowned Miss Michigan, netizens think she's ugly: Shanghaiist - ""She's ugly AND she isn't Chinese," @y块木头 wrote.
"Is this competition for picking the ugliest person?" @乄冰糖 wrote.
"She's 23?! Why does she look like she's 43?" @Joan516 wrote.
"She's ruining the reputation of Chinese people," @小花仙002 wrote.
"This is probably the American standard of beauty. She looks exactly like Mulan in Disney," @久未闻君 wrote."
Portland Doughnut Shop Attacked by Vegans for Discrimination - "As a small, locally owned business we feel that voluntary lifestyle, non-medical, and non-religious dietary restrictions could seriously compromise our ability to make crucial decisions to assure food quality and safety. It's not discrimination, it's common sense"
Actually why should medical/religious reasons exempt you from having to be able to do your job?
Drinking three cups of coffee a day 'shrinks women's breasts' - "there was a clear link between drinking coffee and smaller breasts as around half of all women possess a gene that has been shown to link breast size to coffee intake."
Singaporean man with breast implants removes them - "He was so desperate to remove his C-cup breast implants that he worked two jobs and slept just three hours a night to raise the $7,000 needed for the procedure. In April 2013, Mr Kurt Tay, then a 27-year-old security guard, made headlines when he got breast implants because he needed to "boost his confidence". At the time, he said that after a string of failed attempts to date women, he wanted the breasts "to feel better". Mr Tay also claimed then that he was not a transsexual. Eight months after getting his implants, he married Madam Kim Ngan, a 29-year-old Vietnamese national... Back in 2013, he had said: "Whenever I saw women on the train, I'd feel very miserable that I didn't have breasts like them. "It was like suddenly all I wanted was to have breasts. Until today, I can't explain what came over me. "I was depressed after losing money at the casino and my online escort business failed"... He now aspires to be a World Wrestling Entertainment star."
'Star Wars': Rey's Instant Bread Wasn't CGI -- It Was Totally Real
Composers' Datebook for Tuesday, August 2 - "Over the centuries, at least 65 operas have been written on the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice. In fact, two of the very first operas every written concern this mythological tale— one was by Jacopo Peri performed in 1600 and another by Claudio Monteverdi from 1607."
Apple is replacing the pistol emoji with a squirt gun
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Euclid's Elements - "This is part of, something that people may not appreciate it: mathematics actually works on the emotions. You're telling a story. Euclid's Elements is full of story-telling. It's taking people from things, a place where they kind of understand and are happy, to a new place. And this for me is the transformative moment. I think this is worthy of being compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey. This is journeys that are being made, but in the mind of the reader and the listener, to anyone reading these proofs... Euclid had a student who said to him: what's the point of all this? How am I going to profit from this? Euclid said to his servant: give this student a coin. Now you have profited from this and let's move on... This is mathematics for its own sake. It is useful but I think in the Elements you're seeing the joy of understanding and proving universal truths"
Ana Kasparian's Disgraceful Fat Shaming Hypocrisy - "Young Turks host champions body positivity while angrily calling Alex Jones a "fat fuck... Just like how leftists will whine all day long about Donald Trump’s supposed sexism and racism – while themselves engaging in rampant misogyny and bigotry against Melania Trump for being a “dumb bitch” who can’t speak English properly – Kasparian was perfectly content to abandon her body positivity message to attack Jones over his weight."
A Cute Internet Star Flirts. All He Wants Is Your Password. - The New York Times - "#HackedByJohnson is the ultimate submission: He’s inside her account, posting as her. This new wave of fan interaction nods to the importance of online security, then asks fans to break the rules. Mr. Johnson accompanied his call for passwords with the disclaimer, “only me tho, don’t ever give out ur passwords to strangers.”"
From Deviance to Normalcy: Women as Sexual Aggressors - "Larimer, Lydum, Anderson, and Turner (1999), reported that rates for their measures of receiving (men = 21%, women = 28%) or instigating (men = 10%, women = 5%) sexual coercion were not statistically different for college men and women, but that women were less likely to use physical force as a tactic to obtain sexual contact (men = 5%, women = 1%)... Anderson (1998, 1996), presented self-reported prevalence rates for women's sexual coercion of between 25% and 40% and for physically forced sexual contact between 1.6% and 7.1%. Of perhaps greater significance was the women's self-reports of engaging in a classic date-rape scenario - taking advantage of someone who was under the influence of alcohol or drugs. When asked about initiating sexual contact with a man when his judgment was impaired by drugs or alcohol, between 32% and 51% of the women said that they had. Further, between 5% and 15% of women reported giving a man alcohol or drugs in an attempt to have sexual contact with him... the use of pressure tactics or force by a woman could be seen as a method of foreplay and not aggression... coercers could be distinguished from other college women in that they were more likely; 1) to view traditional women's roles as being constricting, 2) to believe that forcing sex at times is acceptable, 3) to acknowledge that it is acceptable for women to have and act on sexual thoughts and desires, and 4) to admit their lust and desire for power in sexual encounters... Anderson and Aymani (1993) stated that males reported being recipients of female aggression more than females admitted to being aggressors... men reported significantly more events of adult women initiating sexual contact with them while they were minors (OR=10.9), by getting them drunk or high (OR=3.7), and by threatening to end their relationship (OR=6.3) than women reported... women from the South reported less overall aggression (34.1% vs. 46.2%), sexual abuse (7.3% vs. 21.1%), and physically forced sex (1.6% vs. 7.1%) but not less sexual coercion (all differences were significant at p < .001) Most of the coercers' views sound like feminists'; since the South presumably has more traditional gender roles, this suggests that traditional gender roles aren't all bad
From Gay World to Pop Yeh Yeh: When Geylang rocked the ‘60s - Channel NewsAsia - "By most accounts, Pop Yeh Yeh eventually fizzled out in 1971. But it wasn’t the only music movement that had to adjust to the changes in that decade. The Government had increasingly been casting a critical eye on afternoon tea dances, at which youths were rockin’ and rollin’ across the island, due to gangster-related violence and drugs. And in 1972, there was a stabbing incident at the Boiler Room nightclub at Mandarin Hotel, which led to the authorities imposing a total ban on live music in clubs, said Mr Pereira. “Gangsterism, the increasing drug addiction problem — it was all associated with the nightlife scene. (The ban) lasted for about five years, and by the time it was lifted, it was a bit late. The live music scene had totally weakened. A lot of the working bands went elsewhere, where they could find work, or stopped playing completely,” he said."
So the government dealt a fatal blow to the local music scene. No surprises there
Here’s how the internet reacted after the Normandy church attack - "Some highlighted how this puts many of France’s Muslims at risk for discrimination.
The real victims of #Normandy are France's Muslims, who are at greater risk of Islamophobia than ever before!
— Dr. H. Heretic, PhD (@hateful_heretic) July 26, 2016
And, of course, others advised caution.
Another day, another terrorist attack committed by Muslims. But these attacks have got *nothing* to do with Islam. #Normandy #Normandie
— (((Jim Bryant))) (@jamesbryantrec) July 26, 2016
Let's not jump to conclusions. We know nothing about the background or beliefs of the trucks responsible for workplace violence in #Normandy
— Allum Bokhari (@LibertarianBlue) July 26, 2016"
Some people don't understand irony (or this is Poe's Law)
Bill Clinton’s front page photos on Hillary's nomination are about news constraints not sexism. - "There are a few interpretations of the popular editorial choice to illustrate the story of Hillary Clinton’s momentous achievement with a photo of Bill. One is that papers were trying to get at both of the evening’s major events: Hillary’s nomination and Bill’s speech. Another is that there simply were no photos of Hillary from Tuesday night; she only appeared in a video near the end of the proceedings and won’t speak live at the convention until Thursday. Or, as some suggested on Twitter Wednesday morning, it’s straight-up misogyny... Some outlets used a photo of Hillary speaking on the video screen, an unpleasant image with whiffs of Orwell. An argument could be made that those pictures reek of sexism as well, since it plays into the Republican caricature of Hillary as a heartless megalomaniac with ambitions of world domination."
Leibel A. Mangel - "A Palestinian man yells at IDF soldiers, demanding they kill his child so it can be captured on video. The soldier instead shakes the young child's hand. The father then tells his child to throw rocks at the soldiers.. "There will be peace when they LOVE their children more than they HATE ours"
On Becoming Anti-Bernie - "Sanders was less interested in actually accomplishing anything than he was in staging protests where he could claim some kind of moral high ground, not interested in getting in the weeds and doing anything to actually achieve his goals within the Congress he worked in. This research put Sanders’ supposedly pristine progressive agenda in perspective: it is very easy to maintain that agenda if you never make the hard choices necessary to get things done. Classic protester — yet handily collecting his $200,000 pay check and his lifetime of benefits while doing little to enact actual progressive policies to improve people’s lives. I did more research than the above, but the two overarching themes I just described (magical thinking and ideological purity over practicality) seem tied together in terms of what Sanders has to offer the country with respect to governance... the Sanders campaign has also awakened a dormant left-wing Tea Party that I didn’t believe existed, but that lives in a fever swamp of conspiracy-thinking and epistemic closure and rejection of fact and binary, “us v. them” thinking. And that terrifies me"
Could Pokemon Go save the economy? - "Sokcho has capitalized on the gold rush, as tour buses now carry Pokemon pilgrims several hours to Sokcho. They're not there for the beaches or the boating. They're there to play Pokemon Go... Pokemon Go's developers used a grid to block the country, but geometric shapes cannot perfectly cover the natural contours of coastline. The result is a small area in South Korea where people can play Pokemon Go"
Frequent password changes are the enemy of security, FTC technologist says - "Over the past few years, organizations including the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US and UK government agency CESG have also concluded that mandated password changes are often ineffective or counterproductive"
Six Reasons ISIS Hates The West, According To Report - "“The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam”. Though the Mirror breaks the ISIS diatribe against the West down to six simple points, it actually goes into far greater specifics such as bashing western thinkers like Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx, ranting against coffee drinkers, and criticizing western women, whom they argue should be docile and submissive according to the Sunday Express. Independent western women, according to the ISIS article “work like man, rule like man, and have intercourse like an animal, without being conscious of her Lord watching both her and her heinous partner in crime.”"
ISIS admits that it really does hate our freedoms and admits that Western foreign policy is not their primary motivator. Not that this will convince liberals
Medical benefits of flossing unproven
Chinese-American woman crowned Miss Michigan, netizens think she's ugly: Shanghaiist - ""She's ugly AND she isn't Chinese," @y块木头 wrote.
"Is this competition for picking the ugliest person?" @乄冰糖 wrote.
"She's 23?! Why does she look like she's 43?" @Joan516 wrote.
"She's ruining the reputation of Chinese people," @小花仙002 wrote.
"This is probably the American standard of beauty. She looks exactly like Mulan in Disney," @久未闻君 wrote."
Portland Doughnut Shop Attacked by Vegans for Discrimination - "As a small, locally owned business we feel that voluntary lifestyle, non-medical, and non-religious dietary restrictions could seriously compromise our ability to make crucial decisions to assure food quality and safety. It's not discrimination, it's common sense"
Actually why should medical/religious reasons exempt you from having to be able to do your job?
Drinking three cups of coffee a day 'shrinks women's breasts' - "there was a clear link between drinking coffee and smaller breasts as around half of all women possess a gene that has been shown to link breast size to coffee intake."
Singaporean man with breast implants removes them - "He was so desperate to remove his C-cup breast implants that he worked two jobs and slept just three hours a night to raise the $7,000 needed for the procedure. In April 2013, Mr Kurt Tay, then a 27-year-old security guard, made headlines when he got breast implants because he needed to "boost his confidence". At the time, he said that after a string of failed attempts to date women, he wanted the breasts "to feel better". Mr Tay also claimed then that he was not a transsexual. Eight months after getting his implants, he married Madam Kim Ngan, a 29-year-old Vietnamese national... Back in 2013, he had said: "Whenever I saw women on the train, I'd feel very miserable that I didn't have breasts like them. "It was like suddenly all I wanted was to have breasts. Until today, I can't explain what came over me. "I was depressed after losing money at the casino and my online escort business failed"... He now aspires to be a World Wrestling Entertainment star."
'Star Wars': Rey's Instant Bread Wasn't CGI -- It Was Totally Real
Composers' Datebook for Tuesday, August 2 - "Over the centuries, at least 65 operas have been written on the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice. In fact, two of the very first operas every written concern this mythological tale— one was by Jacopo Peri performed in 1600 and another by Claudio Monteverdi from 1607."
Apple is replacing the pistol emoji with a squirt gun
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Euclid's Elements - "This is part of, something that people may not appreciate it: mathematics actually works on the emotions. You're telling a story. Euclid's Elements is full of story-telling. It's taking people from things, a place where they kind of understand and are happy, to a new place. And this for me is the transformative moment. I think this is worthy of being compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey. This is journeys that are being made, but in the mind of the reader and the listener, to anyone reading these proofs... Euclid had a student who said to him: what's the point of all this? How am I going to profit from this? Euclid said to his servant: give this student a coin. Now you have profited from this and let's move on... This is mathematics for its own sake. It is useful but I think in the Elements you're seeing the joy of understanding and proving universal truths"
Post ID: 3144299193210939768
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Links - 20th September 2016
Modern feminism has got it wrong about men - Telegraph - "cultural "feminist" changes, the types that insist lads mags, Page 3 and wolf-whistling are automatically offensive and should therefore be scrapped from the public consciousness... at their crux is the notion that men are either genetically or socially conditioned to be evil. This explains why relatively harmless acts - an admiring glance, a whistle, a propensity for lads mags - are imbued with such weighty significance, often lazily labelled as "rapey". If a man looks at me, I infer he's doing it for the exact same reason a woman would - because he finds me interesting to look at. If a man whistles at me, I take it as the compliment I believe it was intended to be. If I see a man looking at a female glamour model, I suppose nothing more than he is looking at her because a naked woman is pretty much universally aesthetically pleasing... I'm horrified with the regularity and ease with which the word "misogynist" is flung about online. Recently, I wrote an article for a feminist publication on the importance of prioritisation and pragmatism in social progression and suggesting these were often sadly absent from feminist campaigning. During the subsequent inevitable Twitter storm (during which "feminists" threatened to "rip me apart", called me a "piece of s---" and a "brainless bimbo" in an incredibly sisterly fashion) a male tweeter calmly pointed out several historical instances where negotiation had resulted in progression. As a result, he was publicly called a "pendantic misogynist" by the mob. A pedant he might have been, but it's worth noting the official definition of misogynist as "someone who hates women" rather than "anyone who dares question the popular feminist status quo". In the same article, I dared to suggest that we should take into account men's feelings and viewpoints on key feminist issues. "Men have had their voices heard for FAR TOO LONG! IT'S OUR TURN!" came the online battle cry, as though even garnering some male opinions would be a threat to womankind's empowerment, so toxic and self-serving they would inevitably be. The Everyday Sexism movement is a fantastic idea - an opportunity for an open debate on the ways in which genders mindlessly form prejudices against each other. So why have its followers largely excluded men from the conversation? "You can't be sexist towards men!" was a university student's response to this question at another debate I attended (she was studying feminism, by the way). Which is a bit like saying black people can't be racist... Today's feminism teaches British women to see themselves as victims and victims cannot exist without a villain, in this instance – men. In order for this thesis to have any kind of logic, feminists have made sweeping, inaccurate judgments about an entire demographic, based on nothing more than their gender. Ironically, the exact practice they claim to be fighting"
Protesters threaten violence and death against International Men’s Issues Conference in Detroit at Doubletree, Hilton - "this is apparently too much for those who oppose the idea of a men’s human rights movement. Organization against the conference for a planned protest on June 7 appeared on Facebook, where threats of violence were made by anti-MHRA commenters were allowed to remain but comments by men’s advocates requesting an open dialog were repeatedly deleted. In the characteristic Orwellian nature of those who oppose men’s issues, the administration of the group rationalized this by claiming that they need to “make a safe space”... This is not the first time that this sort of thing has happened. When Karen Straughan was due to speak at Ryerson University the administration fined the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE, the group sponsoring her) a $1600 “security fee” due to the history of violence and criminal behavior on the part of Feminists and their allies at their previous protests of academic events. Some may be discouraged by the violent tendencies of these people. I would heart. These people are putting their values (or lack thereof) on display for the world to see. They are not organizing to attend the event, listen to what is being said, and ask incisive questions. On the contrary, the only thing they are interested in is shutting down the event. They are destroying their credibility before the world... During the 2006 Duke lacrosse false rape case, Feminists and their friends paraded around a banner reading “castrate,” an open call for sexual violence against the three young men who were falsely accused of rape. Again, in their typical Orwellian fashion, they rationalized their call to violence by saying they were “opposing sexual violence.” Of which there was none... In pursuit of a sexual misconduct policy which defined rape so broadly beyond its legal definition that it essentially eviscerated due process, the Feminist group “Radical Womyn of Antioch” threatened Antioch College with violence if they failed to adopt the policy they proposed"
No true feminist...
Millions of bees die after Zika spraying in South Carolina
Some people were valling for mosquito genocide
Native Americans migrated to the New World in three waves, Harvard-led DNA analysis shows - "An exhaustive study of DNA taken from dozens of Native American groups that span from Canada to the tip of South America is helping to settle a question that has long divided scientists: When people arrived in the Americas more than 15,000 years ago, the Harvard-led research shows, they came in successive waves, not all at once"
The Native Americans who were in the Americas in 1492 were themselves invaders and immigrants
The Most Violent Era In America Was Before Europeans Arrived - "the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions dead in wars and, in the case of Germany, China, Russia and other dictatorships, genocide, was not the most violent - on a per-capita basis that honor may belong to the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado and the Pueblo Indians. Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms."
A new exposé of Mother Teresa shows that she—and the Vatican—were even worse than we thought - "Lest you think this is atheist hype, the summary below is from an official press release by the Université de Montréal... the three researchers collected 502 documents on the life and work of Mother Teresa. After eliminating 195 duplicates, they consulted 287 documents to conduct their analysis, representing 96% of the literature on the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity (OMC). Facts debunk the myth of Mother Teresa...
1. The woman was in love with suffering and simply didn’t take care of her charges, many of whom fruitlessly sought medical care.
2. She was tightfisted about helping others, seequestered money donated for her work, and took money from dictators.
3. She was deliberately promoted by BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (a fellow anti-abortionist), and her beatification was based on phony miracles...
I ran into Mother Teresa once: we were flying on the same plane, and as I disembarked from the coach section, she appeared right in front of me as she exited from the first-class section. Not even wondering why a woman who professed humility was flying first class, I was elated and gobsmacked, feeling quite fortunate to have run into her. But I had bought into the myth, and that was well before the pushback began."
Criticism of Mother Teresa: Too little and too late - "“Mother Teresa lied by exaggerating the figures of persons she was feeding daily in her acceptance speech while receiving the Nobel Prize in 1979. The ambulances donated by a Calcutta businessman were, in fact, used by her nuns as taxis to ferry around in Calcutta. Her nuns refused to pick up dying persons within even 200 meters of the compassion house. (Chatterjee has recorded his telephone conversations with the nuns and reproduced them verbatim in the book). But Mother Teresa continued to tell her Western audiences that her mission routinely picked up abandoned babies and the dying and dead bodies from Calcutta’s pavements... It’s disturbing to me that patients who could have been cured, including children, were allowed to die. Certainly Mother Teresa could have had a doctor look them over and do some triage. The fact is that she just didn’t care, for she thought she was winning souls for the Christian God.”
Mother Theresa's Masochism: Does Religion Demand Suffering to Keep People Passive? - "The team of academics from the Universities of Montreal and Ottawa set out to do research on altruism. In the process, they reviewed over 500 documents about Mother Teresa’s life and compiled an array of disturbing details about the soon-to-be saint, including dubious political connections and questionable management of funds—and, in particular, an attitude toward suffering that could give pause to even her biggest fans... By even her own words, Mother Teresa’s view of suffering made no distinction between avoidable and unavoidable suffering, and instead cultivated passive acceptance of both. As she put it, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.” Or consider thisanecdote from her life: One day I met a lady who was dying of cancer in a most terrible condition. And I told her, I say, "You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus — a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you." And she joined her hands together and said, "Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me”... Miami resident Hemley Gonzalez was so shocked by his volunteer experience that he has founded an accountable charity to provide better care... Because of her opposition to contraception and her seeming disinterest in modern medicine, some have called Mother Teresa a friend of poverty rather than a friend of the poor."
A Critic’s Lonely Quest: Revealing the Whole Truth About Mother Teresa - The New York Times - "Dr. Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in homes run by Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, with children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin. He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another... In over a hundred interviews, Dr. Chatterjee heard volunteers describe how workers with limited medical training administered 10- to 20-year-old medicines to patients, and blankets stained with feces were washed in the same sink used to clean dishes... Dr. Chatterjee agreed that after Mother Teresa’s death in 1997, homes run by the Missionaries of Charity began taking their hygiene practices more seriously. The reuse of needles, he said, was eliminated."
Pointing Fingers At Mother Teresa's Heirs - "The donation issue first came up in the early 1990s when it was revealed that Charles Keating, an American banker known for the infamous “saving and loan scandal,” had donated up to $1.25 million to Missionaries of Charity. Amidst calls to return the money, Mother Teresa controversially chose to remain silent, an incident that is still sited by her critics who demand transparency. In early 2000, Susan Shields, a former Missionaries sister who left the organization “unhappy”, created a furor by saying she herself had “written receipts of $50,000″ in donation but there was no sign of the “flood of money.” Forbes India talked to a volunteer in the Los Angeles office of Missionaries of Charity who admitted that “even when bread was over at the soup kitchens, none was bought unless donated.” A report in German magazine Stern, revealed that in 1991 only seven percent of the donation received at Missionaries of Charity was used for charity"
Après Orsay, le musée Guimet évacué après une performance de Deborah de Robertis - "Soudain, un râle de plaisir brise le silence feutré du musée. Une femme s’est assise devant un mur de photographies. Nue, vêtue d’un seul kimono transparent. Elle laisse entrevoir entre ses cuisses écartées une pastèque qu’elle dévore goulûment en en faisant couler le jus sur sa poitrine."
Men need nights out with the lads, scientists say - Telegraph - "male bonding is more likely to lower a man's stress levels than a night out with his partner, or time spent with the family... stress-related illnesses only seemed to occur among females or couples"
Racial identity tied to happiness, study finds - "African American people who identify more strongly with their racial identity are generally happier... it may be fueled by a sense of belongingness -- that is, blacks with a strong sense of racial identity may feel more connected to their racial group, which in turn makes them happy. This sense of belongingness is especially important for happiness in women, Yap said. "For men, the potential factors relating identity to happiness is still an open question," he said."
I don't care about your "Preferred pronouns" - Age Of Shitlords - "Basically, every time special snowflakes invent a new gender, the next logical step is find an appropriate pronoun for it. So as the total number of genders increase, we can expect to see more pronouns in the future. Refusal to use someone’s preferred pronoun will get you labeled a “bigot” or “Misgendering asshole” on the Internet. And that’s cool and all, but it doesn’t end there. Like most rhetoric that Tumblr comes up with, being the narcissists that they are, they don’t feel accomplished unless they get to force their ideas on everyone else... a teacher in Oregon was given a $60,000 payout after she alleged that her coworkers had abused her by referring to her using inappropriate pronouns. Tumblr isn’t just infecting the real world, they have already taken it over, and are now making it dance to their beat. What these people fail to realize it that a pronoun isn’t a fashion accessory like a shoe or handbag, that you can just pick up when you want and throw away when you no longer need them. In Grammar, Pronouns are words used in place of names(Nouns). The primary purpose of pronouns is to help avoid repetition, and to make sentences easier to construct and understand. That’s it. Pronouns only exist to make it easier for us to communicate with one another... Pronouns were meant to make life easier, not to make it more complicated. Having to ask people for their preferred pronoun defeats the entire purpose of having pronouns in the first place"
Protesters threaten violence and death against International Men’s Issues Conference in Detroit at Doubletree, Hilton - "this is apparently too much for those who oppose the idea of a men’s human rights movement. Organization against the conference for a planned protest on June 7 appeared on Facebook, where threats of violence were made by anti-MHRA commenters were allowed to remain but comments by men’s advocates requesting an open dialog were repeatedly deleted. In the characteristic Orwellian nature of those who oppose men’s issues, the administration of the group rationalized this by claiming that they need to “make a safe space”... This is not the first time that this sort of thing has happened. When Karen Straughan was due to speak at Ryerson University the administration fined the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE, the group sponsoring her) a $1600 “security fee” due to the history of violence and criminal behavior on the part of Feminists and their allies at their previous protests of academic events. Some may be discouraged by the violent tendencies of these people. I would heart. These people are putting their values (or lack thereof) on display for the world to see. They are not organizing to attend the event, listen to what is being said, and ask incisive questions. On the contrary, the only thing they are interested in is shutting down the event. They are destroying their credibility before the world... During the 2006 Duke lacrosse false rape case, Feminists and their friends paraded around a banner reading “castrate,” an open call for sexual violence against the three young men who were falsely accused of rape. Again, in their typical Orwellian fashion, they rationalized their call to violence by saying they were “opposing sexual violence.” Of which there was none... In pursuit of a sexual misconduct policy which defined rape so broadly beyond its legal definition that it essentially eviscerated due process, the Feminist group “Radical Womyn of Antioch” threatened Antioch College with violence if they failed to adopt the policy they proposed"
No true feminist...
Millions of bees die after Zika spraying in South Carolina
Some people were valling for mosquito genocide
Native Americans migrated to the New World in three waves, Harvard-led DNA analysis shows - "An exhaustive study of DNA taken from dozens of Native American groups that span from Canada to the tip of South America is helping to settle a question that has long divided scientists: When people arrived in the Americas more than 15,000 years ago, the Harvard-led research shows, they came in successive waves, not all at once"
The Native Americans who were in the Americas in 1492 were themselves invaders and immigrants
The Most Violent Era In America Was Before Europeans Arrived - "the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions dead in wars and, in the case of Germany, China, Russia and other dictatorships, genocide, was not the most violent - on a per-capita basis that honor may belong to the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado and the Pueblo Indians. Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms."
A new exposé of Mother Teresa shows that she—and the Vatican—were even worse than we thought - "Lest you think this is atheist hype, the summary below is from an official press release by the Université de Montréal... the three researchers collected 502 documents on the life and work of Mother Teresa. After eliminating 195 duplicates, they consulted 287 documents to conduct their analysis, representing 96% of the literature on the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity (OMC). Facts debunk the myth of Mother Teresa...
1. The woman was in love with suffering and simply didn’t take care of her charges, many of whom fruitlessly sought medical care.
2. She was tightfisted about helping others, seequestered money donated for her work, and took money from dictators.
3. She was deliberately promoted by BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (a fellow anti-abortionist), and her beatification was based on phony miracles...
I ran into Mother Teresa once: we were flying on the same plane, and as I disembarked from the coach section, she appeared right in front of me as she exited from the first-class section. Not even wondering why a woman who professed humility was flying first class, I was elated and gobsmacked, feeling quite fortunate to have run into her. But I had bought into the myth, and that was well before the pushback began."
Criticism of Mother Teresa: Too little and too late - "“Mother Teresa lied by exaggerating the figures of persons she was feeding daily in her acceptance speech while receiving the Nobel Prize in 1979. The ambulances donated by a Calcutta businessman were, in fact, used by her nuns as taxis to ferry around in Calcutta. Her nuns refused to pick up dying persons within even 200 meters of the compassion house. (Chatterjee has recorded his telephone conversations with the nuns and reproduced them verbatim in the book). But Mother Teresa continued to tell her Western audiences that her mission routinely picked up abandoned babies and the dying and dead bodies from Calcutta’s pavements... It’s disturbing to me that patients who could have been cured, including children, were allowed to die. Certainly Mother Teresa could have had a doctor look them over and do some triage. The fact is that she just didn’t care, for she thought she was winning souls for the Christian God.”
Mother Theresa's Masochism: Does Religion Demand Suffering to Keep People Passive? - "The team of academics from the Universities of Montreal and Ottawa set out to do research on altruism. In the process, they reviewed over 500 documents about Mother Teresa’s life and compiled an array of disturbing details about the soon-to-be saint, including dubious political connections and questionable management of funds—and, in particular, an attitude toward suffering that could give pause to even her biggest fans... By even her own words, Mother Teresa’s view of suffering made no distinction between avoidable and unavoidable suffering, and instead cultivated passive acceptance of both. As she put it, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.” Or consider thisanecdote from her life: One day I met a lady who was dying of cancer in a most terrible condition. And I told her, I say, "You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus — a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you." And she joined her hands together and said, "Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me”... Miami resident Hemley Gonzalez was so shocked by his volunteer experience that he has founded an accountable charity to provide better care... Because of her opposition to contraception and her seeming disinterest in modern medicine, some have called Mother Teresa a friend of poverty rather than a friend of the poor."
A Critic’s Lonely Quest: Revealing the Whole Truth About Mother Teresa - The New York Times - "Dr. Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in homes run by Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, with children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin. He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another... In over a hundred interviews, Dr. Chatterjee heard volunteers describe how workers with limited medical training administered 10- to 20-year-old medicines to patients, and blankets stained with feces were washed in the same sink used to clean dishes... Dr. Chatterjee agreed that after Mother Teresa’s death in 1997, homes run by the Missionaries of Charity began taking their hygiene practices more seriously. The reuse of needles, he said, was eliminated."
Pointing Fingers At Mother Teresa's Heirs - "The donation issue first came up in the early 1990s when it was revealed that Charles Keating, an American banker known for the infamous “saving and loan scandal,” had donated up to $1.25 million to Missionaries of Charity. Amidst calls to return the money, Mother Teresa controversially chose to remain silent, an incident that is still sited by her critics who demand transparency. In early 2000, Susan Shields, a former Missionaries sister who left the organization “unhappy”, created a furor by saying she herself had “written receipts of $50,000″ in donation but there was no sign of the “flood of money.” Forbes India talked to a volunteer in the Los Angeles office of Missionaries of Charity who admitted that “even when bread was over at the soup kitchens, none was bought unless donated.” A report in German magazine Stern, revealed that in 1991 only seven percent of the donation received at Missionaries of Charity was used for charity"
Après Orsay, le musée Guimet évacué après une performance de Deborah de Robertis - "Soudain, un râle de plaisir brise le silence feutré du musée. Une femme s’est assise devant un mur de photographies. Nue, vêtue d’un seul kimono transparent. Elle laisse entrevoir entre ses cuisses écartées une pastèque qu’elle dévore goulûment en en faisant couler le jus sur sa poitrine."
Men need nights out with the lads, scientists say - Telegraph - "male bonding is more likely to lower a man's stress levels than a night out with his partner, or time spent with the family... stress-related illnesses only seemed to occur among females or couples"
Racial identity tied to happiness, study finds - "African American people who identify more strongly with their racial identity are generally happier... it may be fueled by a sense of belongingness -- that is, blacks with a strong sense of racial identity may feel more connected to their racial group, which in turn makes them happy. This sense of belongingness is especially important for happiness in women, Yap said. "For men, the potential factors relating identity to happiness is still an open question," he said."
I don't care about your "Preferred pronouns" - Age Of Shitlords - "Basically, every time special snowflakes invent a new gender, the next logical step is find an appropriate pronoun for it. So as the total number of genders increase, we can expect to see more pronouns in the future. Refusal to use someone’s preferred pronoun will get you labeled a “bigot” or “Misgendering asshole” on the Internet. And that’s cool and all, but it doesn’t end there. Like most rhetoric that Tumblr comes up with, being the narcissists that they are, they don’t feel accomplished unless they get to force their ideas on everyone else... a teacher in Oregon was given a $60,000 payout after she alleged that her coworkers had abused her by referring to her using inappropriate pronouns. Tumblr isn’t just infecting the real world, they have already taken it over, and are now making it dance to their beat. What these people fail to realize it that a pronoun isn’t a fashion accessory like a shoe or handbag, that you can just pick up when you want and throw away when you no longer need them. In Grammar, Pronouns are words used in place of names(Nouns). The primary purpose of pronouns is to help avoid repetition, and to make sentences easier to construct and understand. That’s it. Pronouns only exist to make it easier for us to communicate with one another... Pronouns were meant to make life easier, not to make it more complicated. Having to ask people for their preferred pronoun defeats the entire purpose of having pronouns in the first place"
Post ID: 755140658168921948
Monday, September 19, 2016
Links - 19th September 2016
Special Snowflake has Meltdown After Dad Tightens Purse Strings - "The genderfluid panqueer-demiromantic being in question, let’s call her “Sarah”, is a 21 year old spoiled girl from Kansas who worked for her father’s company, lived in a house that he owned rent-free, received free health insurance, free phone, free Internet access, free car insurance and presumably a free car. He also allowed his daughter to let three of her dumbass tumblrite friends move in with her into the house that he owns. Cut to the 4th of July. Sarah and her communist loving, capitalism hating friends decided that the best way to celebrate would be to burn a flag and use it to attention whore on Facebook. “Pete’, her father, being a military veteran had some things to say about this but still believed in her freedom to burn the flag if she pleased. Her father only wanted to engage in a debate with his retard daughter and her special snowflake squad but instead found himself blocked on Facebook. She cited her reason for this being that she had freedom of speech and her Facebook page was not a democracy. This was, in his words “the last straw”... He fired her. Evicted her. Cut her off financially. Cut off her phone... Cut off from the cow’s teet, Sarah was forced to find a way to become self sufficient. Naturally she did what all snowflakes did when confronted with adversity and started a gofundme... the snowflake brigade is actually attempting to get him fired from his job"
Addendum: See: Leah Albee | Kiwi Farms
How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk? - "But is there any medical reason to embrace this number? Not really. That’s because the 10,000-steps-a-day recommendation has nothing to do with sedentary, fast-food-drenched circa-2015 America. Rather, the recommendation first popped up in a very different food and environment: 1960s Japan. “It basically started around the Tokyo Olympics” in 1964, said Catrine Tudor-Locke, a professor who studies walking behavior at LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Center. “A company over there created a man-po-kei, a pedometer. And man stands for ‘10,000,’ po stands for ‘step,’ and kei stands for ‘meter’ or ‘gauge.’” Ten thousand, it turns out, “is a very auspicious number” in Japanese culture, said Theodore Bestor, a Harvard researcher of Japanese society and culture, in an email. “That is, it seems likely to me that the 10,000 steps goal was subsidiary to having a good-sounding name for marketing purposes”... From a public-health perspective, she said, a more pressing, realistic goal is “to get people away from taking less than 5,000” steps a day."
School Bans Clapping. Students May Silently Wriggle Instead. - "Elanora Heights, a public school in Sydney, Australia, has banned clapping out of "respect" for noise-sensitive students. Instead, kids can "conduct a silent cheer.""
What's Behind The Decline In Crime? - "It wasn’t until the late ‘90s and early ‘00s—just as Millennials entered the scene— that crime rates began their sharp descent. Unlike Boomers and Xers, Millennials were increasingly looked after, sheltered, and advised to not take risks. As they moved up the age ladder, this generation brought about declines in risky behaviors—including rates of school fighting, teenage pregnancy, smoking, drunk driving, and so on. (See the extensive CDC database on the decline in so-called “youth risk behaviors.”) Of these trends, crime was just one element."
Girl fighting for life after mum and three daughters knifed in French holiday resort for being 'scantily dressed' - "The 37-year-old man has been identified by French media as Mohamed Boufarkouch, who was born in Morocco."
The secret of anti-terror architecture: Your city is probably safer than you realize - "bollards today can also take all kinds of shapes, and they’re everywhere—streets, airports, government buildings, highways and side streets. Part of the US visual landscape for decades, most of us don’t even realize they’re there for our safety."
German machete attack: Syrian refugee kills woman and injures two others in city of Reutlingen - "A woman has been killed and two others have been injured after they were attacked by a Syrian refugee with a machete near Stuttgart in Germany... It comes as Germany is on edge following two attacks in the past week. A teenager went on a rampage in a Munich mall on Friday evening, killing nine, and an Afghan teenager attacked train passengers with an axe in Bavaria, wounding five, before being shot dead by police last week"
The Latest: Merkel confident Germany can integrate refugees - "Chancellor Angela Merkel says she remains confident Germany can integrate the large number of refugees who are arriving, and is arguing that many won't stay forever. Germany has been the main destination of Syrians and others seeking protection in Europe. Merkel said at a town hall event in Nuremberg Monday that "there are very, very many, but there are 80 million of us." She said "we can and will manage this integration" if Germany makes an effort from the beginning to integrate the newcomers."
Second German woman evicted from her home to make way for refugees - "A woman in Germany is being evicted from her home of 23 years to make way for asylum-seekers, in the second such case to emerge. Gabrielle Keller has been given until the end of the year to leave her flat in the small southern town of Eschbach, near the border with France. The flat belongs to the local municipality, which says it is needed to house refugees... The town of just 2,400 people is under pressure to find space for refugees, and Ms Keller’s flat is one of only two owned by the local municipality. It is not social housing and Ms Keller is a rent-paying tenant."
Angela Merkel accused of having blood on her hands over migrant policy after Munich - " "Once these people have German passports they can travel to all the other countries in the EU so Merkel has not only created a problem for Germany but for other EU countries too - and it's impossible to put the cork back in the bottle. "Mrs Merkel, meanwhile, appears to be in hiding. "Even though the German authorities are still insisting that this is nothing to do with terrorism, we have someone who has come into Germany from Syria and killed innocent people, continuing this summer of slaughter. "As I see it, her and her ministers and advisors as well as the dangerous idiots in the European Commission have put people's lives at risk and in some terrible cases, cost lives"... Earlier this week Germany’s interior minister warned of the “serious” threat from lone wolf attacks in the country and across Europe, telling the public to expect further attacks. The stark assessment of Germany’s security situation follows a warning from the French Prime Minster that his country should "learn to live with the threat” from Islamist extremists. Speaking in Berlin, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said the Afghan refugee who attacked train passengers with an axe in the southern state of Bavaria was now thought be from Pakistan. Responding to the incident the senior German cabinet minster said similar attacks were highly likely. Alan Mendoza, executive director of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), said the German train attack "illustrates the reality that some ISIS sympathisers will have slipped through European borders". The London-based think tank said around two per cent of Germany's population arrived last year, making it "impossible in practice for European security services to screen new arrivals with thoroughness sufficient to preclude the possibility of attacks”."
How Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American President - "Close your eyes and imagine that a hacking group backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin broke into the email system of a major U.S. political party. The group stole thousands of sensitive messages and then published them through an obliging third party in a way that was strategically timed to influence the United States presidential election. Now open your eyes, because that’s what just happened."
Family argument in wildlife park leaves woman dead after she leaves car and gets eaten by tiger
Obviously, Sports Do Not Build Character | Acton Institute - "The Benedict-Crosset Study of sexual assaults at thirty major Division I universities reports that one in three college sexual assaults are committed by athletes. The three-year study demonstrates that while male student-athletes comprise 3.3 percent of the college population, they represent 19 percent of sexual assault perpetrators and 35 percent of domestic violence perpetrators"
SlutWalk Singapore 2012: 5 Ridiculous Myths Everyone Believes About Rape (That Are Total B.S.) | SlutWalk Singapore - "Take a good look at Cecilia Sue’s case. Clearly, she wanted it. Why didn’t she bite off his dick?
Why it’s bullshit:
When you make comments like these, you are hurting the people around you."
Gviven what happened with the Cecilia Sue case, this is telling as a rape myth myth
Behavioral genetics, one of the fastest growing fields in science, still makes a lot of people very uncomfortable - "Think of someone whose political ideology leads them to ignore and groundlessly reject science. Typically, this often describes those on the right of the political spectrum, where climate change, women’s reproductive health, and even evolution are routinely dismissed. But a massive and fast growing field in science—behavioral genetics—has a huge body of conclusive evidence that, at first reading, seems at odds with left-wing ideology. This week, Robert Plomin, professor of behavioral genetics at King’s College London, published a paper showing that a child’s educational success can be predicted by their genes. Genetic data from 20,000 DNA variants across several genes collectively account for 10% of the differences in children’s educational achievement age 16... Meta-analysis of 61 twin studies shows that genetic variation accounts for 66% of educational achievement at primary school level... the research suggests that about 50% of individual differences in personality are affected by genetic variation... the belief that anyone can be anything they choose—that you could take a child and train them towards literally any goal with success is, says Segal, “such an old-fashioned notion, with absolutely no backing whatsoever”... there’s been a strong educational emphasis on grit and perseverance—but genetics research shows that this personality trait only predicts 5% of why individuals differ. So over-emphasizing it will have moderately little effect and, in making children feel they’re not trying hard enough, might well make many miserable... just because educational achievement is genetically influenced, that doesn’t mean it’s determined by genetics. Selzam gives a comparable example of someone who’s genetically at risk of dyslexia. If that child is treated like everyone else then, chances are, they will go on to develop the disorder. But if you identify that they’re at genetic risk then, through tutoring and one-on-one support, it’s possible to counter that genetic disposition through “environmental engineering.”"
The Sugarcoated Language Of White Fragility - "Suggesting that a White person's viewpoint comes from a racialized frame of reference - Challenge to objectivity
Receiving feedback that one's behavior had a racist impact - Challenge to White racial innocence
Suggesting that group membership is significant - Challenge to individualism...
Terms like “inclusion” and “white privilege” are designed to sneak past the racial stress triggers of White Fragility. They center Whiteness in a way that makes White people comfortable, while deflecting from the stressful realities of the racist harm that Whiteness causes. Imagine how many racial stress trigger alarm bells would go off if we were using words like “discrimination awareness” and “white undeserved advantages” instead. "
What would happen if you substituted another word for "white"?
Given the euphemism treadmill, in no time the new "harsh" words would be considered "sugarcoated" too
How Does Top Talent Respond to Higher Tax Rates? - "In debates about taxes, some scoff at the idea that people actually respond to higher rates by changing their behaviour. This is despite the mountains of economic research showing higher marginal tax rates reduce the incentives for individuals to work hard, expand their skills, invest, and engage in entrepreneurial activities. Others are also reluctant to accept that tax rates can influence people’s decisions about where to work and live. On this front, the evidence might be surprising."
‘You Need to Leave’: Taco Bell Employee Stuns Sheriff’s Deputies With Refusal of Service - "The deputies took their meal hour Saturday evening at a Taco Bell in Phenix City, Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones told the outlet, where an employee working the register told them they would not be served because they were law enforcement... Jones added that the deputies left the restaurant, but on their way out, they overheard another customer commending the cashier, reportedly saying she would have left if the officers had been served."
The hate of Black Lives Matters has many consequences
I'm sure many people who condemn Kim Davis would support this Taco Bell employee
Trade and Tribulation - The New York Times - "Mr. Sanders is demagoguing the issue, for example with a Twitter post linking the decline of Detroit, which began in the 1960s and has had very little to do with trade liberalization, to “Hillary Clinton’s free-trade policies.”"
Perhaps Trump gets called a demagogue but not Bernie because the latter failed
Addendum: See: Leah Albee | Kiwi Farms
How Many Steps a Day Should You Really Walk? - "But is there any medical reason to embrace this number? Not really. That’s because the 10,000-steps-a-day recommendation has nothing to do with sedentary, fast-food-drenched circa-2015 America. Rather, the recommendation first popped up in a very different food and environment: 1960s Japan. “It basically started around the Tokyo Olympics” in 1964, said Catrine Tudor-Locke, a professor who studies walking behavior at LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Center. “A company over there created a man-po-kei, a pedometer. And man stands for ‘10,000,’ po stands for ‘step,’ and kei stands for ‘meter’ or ‘gauge.’” Ten thousand, it turns out, “is a very auspicious number” in Japanese culture, said Theodore Bestor, a Harvard researcher of Japanese society and culture, in an email. “That is, it seems likely to me that the 10,000 steps goal was subsidiary to having a good-sounding name for marketing purposes”... From a public-health perspective, she said, a more pressing, realistic goal is “to get people away from taking less than 5,000” steps a day."
School Bans Clapping. Students May Silently Wriggle Instead. - "Elanora Heights, a public school in Sydney, Australia, has banned clapping out of "respect" for noise-sensitive students. Instead, kids can "conduct a silent cheer.""
What's Behind The Decline In Crime? - "It wasn’t until the late ‘90s and early ‘00s—just as Millennials entered the scene— that crime rates began their sharp descent. Unlike Boomers and Xers, Millennials were increasingly looked after, sheltered, and advised to not take risks. As they moved up the age ladder, this generation brought about declines in risky behaviors—including rates of school fighting, teenage pregnancy, smoking, drunk driving, and so on. (See the extensive CDC database on the decline in so-called “youth risk behaviors.”) Of these trends, crime was just one element."
Girl fighting for life after mum and three daughters knifed in French holiday resort for being 'scantily dressed' - "The 37-year-old man has been identified by French media as Mohamed Boufarkouch, who was born in Morocco."
The secret of anti-terror architecture: Your city is probably safer than you realize - "bollards today can also take all kinds of shapes, and they’re everywhere—streets, airports, government buildings, highways and side streets. Part of the US visual landscape for decades, most of us don’t even realize they’re there for our safety."
German machete attack: Syrian refugee kills woman and injures two others in city of Reutlingen - "A woman has been killed and two others have been injured after they were attacked by a Syrian refugee with a machete near Stuttgart in Germany... It comes as Germany is on edge following two attacks in the past week. A teenager went on a rampage in a Munich mall on Friday evening, killing nine, and an Afghan teenager attacked train passengers with an axe in Bavaria, wounding five, before being shot dead by police last week"
The Latest: Merkel confident Germany can integrate refugees - "Chancellor Angela Merkel says she remains confident Germany can integrate the large number of refugees who are arriving, and is arguing that many won't stay forever. Germany has been the main destination of Syrians and others seeking protection in Europe. Merkel said at a town hall event in Nuremberg Monday that "there are very, very many, but there are 80 million of us." She said "we can and will manage this integration" if Germany makes an effort from the beginning to integrate the newcomers."
Second German woman evicted from her home to make way for refugees - "A woman in Germany is being evicted from her home of 23 years to make way for asylum-seekers, in the second such case to emerge. Gabrielle Keller has been given until the end of the year to leave her flat in the small southern town of Eschbach, near the border with France. The flat belongs to the local municipality, which says it is needed to house refugees... The town of just 2,400 people is under pressure to find space for refugees, and Ms Keller’s flat is one of only two owned by the local municipality. It is not social housing and Ms Keller is a rent-paying tenant."
Angela Merkel accused of having blood on her hands over migrant policy after Munich - " "Once these people have German passports they can travel to all the other countries in the EU so Merkel has not only created a problem for Germany but for other EU countries too - and it's impossible to put the cork back in the bottle. "Mrs Merkel, meanwhile, appears to be in hiding. "Even though the German authorities are still insisting that this is nothing to do with terrorism, we have someone who has come into Germany from Syria and killed innocent people, continuing this summer of slaughter. "As I see it, her and her ministers and advisors as well as the dangerous idiots in the European Commission have put people's lives at risk and in some terrible cases, cost lives"... Earlier this week Germany’s interior minister warned of the “serious” threat from lone wolf attacks in the country and across Europe, telling the public to expect further attacks. The stark assessment of Germany’s security situation follows a warning from the French Prime Minster that his country should "learn to live with the threat” from Islamist extremists. Speaking in Berlin, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said the Afghan refugee who attacked train passengers with an axe in the southern state of Bavaria was now thought be from Pakistan. Responding to the incident the senior German cabinet minster said similar attacks were highly likely. Alan Mendoza, executive director of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), said the German train attack "illustrates the reality that some ISIS sympathisers will have slipped through European borders". The London-based think tank said around two per cent of Germany's population arrived last year, making it "impossible in practice for European security services to screen new arrivals with thoroughness sufficient to preclude the possibility of attacks”."
How Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American President - "Close your eyes and imagine that a hacking group backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin broke into the email system of a major U.S. political party. The group stole thousands of sensitive messages and then published them through an obliging third party in a way that was strategically timed to influence the United States presidential election. Now open your eyes, because that’s what just happened."
Family argument in wildlife park leaves woman dead after she leaves car and gets eaten by tiger
Obviously, Sports Do Not Build Character | Acton Institute - "The Benedict-Crosset Study of sexual assaults at thirty major Division I universities reports that one in three college sexual assaults are committed by athletes. The three-year study demonstrates that while male student-athletes comprise 3.3 percent of the college population, they represent 19 percent of sexual assault perpetrators and 35 percent of domestic violence perpetrators"
SlutWalk Singapore 2012: 5 Ridiculous Myths Everyone Believes About Rape (That Are Total B.S.) | SlutWalk Singapore - "Take a good look at Cecilia Sue’s case. Clearly, she wanted it. Why didn’t she bite off his dick?
Why it’s bullshit:
When you make comments like these, you are hurting the people around you."
Gviven what happened with the Cecilia Sue case, this is telling as a rape myth myth
Behavioral genetics, one of the fastest growing fields in science, still makes a lot of people very uncomfortable - "Think of someone whose political ideology leads them to ignore and groundlessly reject science. Typically, this often describes those on the right of the political spectrum, where climate change, women’s reproductive health, and even evolution are routinely dismissed. But a massive and fast growing field in science—behavioral genetics—has a huge body of conclusive evidence that, at first reading, seems at odds with left-wing ideology. This week, Robert Plomin, professor of behavioral genetics at King’s College London, published a paper showing that a child’s educational success can be predicted by their genes. Genetic data from 20,000 DNA variants across several genes collectively account for 10% of the differences in children’s educational achievement age 16... Meta-analysis of 61 twin studies shows that genetic variation accounts for 66% of educational achievement at primary school level... the research suggests that about 50% of individual differences in personality are affected by genetic variation... the belief that anyone can be anything they choose—that you could take a child and train them towards literally any goal with success is, says Segal, “such an old-fashioned notion, with absolutely no backing whatsoever”... there’s been a strong educational emphasis on grit and perseverance—but genetics research shows that this personality trait only predicts 5% of why individuals differ. So over-emphasizing it will have moderately little effect and, in making children feel they’re not trying hard enough, might well make many miserable... just because educational achievement is genetically influenced, that doesn’t mean it’s determined by genetics. Selzam gives a comparable example of someone who’s genetically at risk of dyslexia. If that child is treated like everyone else then, chances are, they will go on to develop the disorder. But if you identify that they’re at genetic risk then, through tutoring and one-on-one support, it’s possible to counter that genetic disposition through “environmental engineering.”"
The Sugarcoated Language Of White Fragility - "Suggesting that a White person's viewpoint comes from a racialized frame of reference - Challenge to objectivity
Receiving feedback that one's behavior had a racist impact - Challenge to White racial innocence
Suggesting that group membership is significant - Challenge to individualism...
Terms like “inclusion” and “white privilege” are designed to sneak past the racial stress triggers of White Fragility. They center Whiteness in a way that makes White people comfortable, while deflecting from the stressful realities of the racist harm that Whiteness causes. Imagine how many racial stress trigger alarm bells would go off if we were using words like “discrimination awareness” and “white undeserved advantages” instead. "
What would happen if you substituted another word for "white"?
Given the euphemism treadmill, in no time the new "harsh" words would be considered "sugarcoated" too
How Does Top Talent Respond to Higher Tax Rates? - "In debates about taxes, some scoff at the idea that people actually respond to higher rates by changing their behaviour. This is despite the mountains of economic research showing higher marginal tax rates reduce the incentives for individuals to work hard, expand their skills, invest, and engage in entrepreneurial activities. Others are also reluctant to accept that tax rates can influence people’s decisions about where to work and live. On this front, the evidence might be surprising."
‘You Need to Leave’: Taco Bell Employee Stuns Sheriff’s Deputies With Refusal of Service - "The deputies took their meal hour Saturday evening at a Taco Bell in Phenix City, Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones told the outlet, where an employee working the register told them they would not be served because they were law enforcement... Jones added that the deputies left the restaurant, but on their way out, they overheard another customer commending the cashier, reportedly saying she would have left if the officers had been served."
The hate of Black Lives Matters has many consequences
I'm sure many people who condemn Kim Davis would support this Taco Bell employee
Trade and Tribulation - The New York Times - "Mr. Sanders is demagoguing the issue, for example with a Twitter post linking the decline of Detroit, which began in the 1960s and has had very little to do with trade liberalization, to “Hillary Clinton’s free-trade policies.”"
Perhaps Trump gets called a demagogue but not Bernie because the latter failed
Post ID: 97876779015515310
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Links - 18th September 2016
The Suez crisis and the north of England | Podcast | History Extra - "Eisenhower... His mom was a very dyed in the wool pacifist. And he himself I think also, despite being a lifelong soldier, had very very strong inclinations towards pacifism. And that was partly of course because he'd seen war and it was awful and he'd seen the newly liberated concentration camps and all sorts of really terrible things in World War II. He had very very strong sense that he was not going to let that happen again...
When I read history at university I read modern history. And modern history at Oxford started in 412, probably still does"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Food on the Move: What We Want, When We Want It - "One of the examples... of food with a lot of food miles attached to it are the fresh vegetables flown out of countries like Kenya to the UK and certainly there's a lot of carbon emissions per calorie for those green beans but if anything one of the greater concerns in Kenya or at least in certain parts of the country may be the amount of water that's used to grow those green beans and therefore is not available for local people to drink. In the US we have some very arid, we have cities like Phoenix Arizona. Its in the middle of a desert. It's really environmentally better for food to be trucked in there than to be grown there. Food miles is not a very meaningful metric in a lot of ways
'Tamil-Korean Link is Age-Old' - "In all, he claimed, there were around 4,000 words in Korean and Tamil that had similar meaning, indicating the age-old connection between the two countries. It was the French missionaries in Korea who first noted the similarities between the two languages. Many of the names of ancient colonies of Southern Korea were the exact counterparts of Tamil words. Exhaustive as it is, linguistic similarities were not all. The Consul General pointed out that the way both people built their hutments were the same, so were some of the household utensils like ural (a heavy stone or wooden mortar) and ulakkai (long heavy wooden pestle). Experts say that agriculture, pottery, beads, textile, turtle boats, and many ancient industries and cultures in the two countries have stunning similarities. These similarities, they add, are not coincidences. Early Tamil people migrated to the Korean peninsula around the first century AD, noted N Kannan, Orissa Balu and Dr Nagarajan, all experts on the topic."
Michael Phelps Was The Flag Bearer In The Opening Ceremony, But That's Not Who Liberals REALLY Wanted... - "Michael Phelps was chosen by his teammates to be the flag bearer during the Opening Ceremony. Rightly so. He deserves it. He has what? 22 medals? But his accomplishments be damned. No matter how talented he is or how many medals he holds, at the end of the day, he’s still a white guy. That’s why liberals urged him to give up his position as flag bearer and hand it over to Ibtihaj Muhammad, a black Muslim woman who’s famous for wearing a hijab during fencing matches... She’s so much more qualified than Phelps. I mean, she’s a triple threat. She’s a woman. She’s black. She’s Muslim. And as an added bonus, she hates Donald Trump!... CNN even ran an op-ed by W. Kamau Bell, who urged Phelps to give up his position. He’s not deserving of it because America’s sick of “tall, successful, rich white guys hogging the spotlight trying to make America great … again.”"
Identity > achievement
The politicization of sport is okay if you're the one doing it
TLC's new program "I Am Jazz" - "It really bothered me when Jazz talked about how boys are "discriminating" against her...they flirt with her female friends, but not with her. She believes that the boys won't pay attention to her in the same way because they don't want others to think they're gay. So she wants attention from boys and calls it discrimination because so far none have been willing to flirt and show any kind of attraction to her. I realize that this is very complicated, but wouldn't the other boys have to be homosexual or bisexual to be in a romantic relationship with Jazz? She still has male anatomy even if she's taking estrogen and dresses as a female... she's hurt when most teen boys will not be attracted to a transgender girl? It seems like these boys are going to be presented as bullies/bad guys. The preview for the next episode shows Jazz and her friends at a bowling party. Jazz is upset because only one boy is there, and she puts him on the spot by asking if the other boys didn't come because she's transgender. She's clearly interested in boys and wants a boyfriend...it's sad to me that her parents, siblings, grandparents, and doctor are all behind the treatments, but what is supposed to happen to Jazz emotionally if she has such a limited choice of future mates? Or are we going in the direction of some kind of heterosexual "shaming" with this talk of discrimination? I can't blame any boy for not wanting to be part of this tv show!"
Is it discrimination if boys won't flirt with a transgender girl? Does this reflect entitlement, analogous to the "male entitlement" that feminists rage about?
British Asian woman told she cannot sell chicken tikka masala at St George's Day event - Telegraph - "A spokesman said they had initially felt that chicken tikka masala would jar with the “olde worlde traditional English” theme featuring Morris dancers and dragons... “The theme of the St George’s Day event in 2015 was olde worlde traditional English with Morris Dancers and dragon fighting. Ms Rahman has raised some very interesting points about modern England and the Council will wish to reflect upon these issues when setting the theme for the St George’s Day in 2016 and onwards.”"
I wonder if they sold Coca Cola at the event
English 'too nervous' to celebrate St George's Day - Telegraph - "The think tank British Future believes the English are "too nervous" to celebrate St George's Day, after a poll found they were more likely to be able to correctly name the date of the US Independence Day and St Patrick’s Day than they are their own national saint’s day"
He withered away for 7 years. Doctors didn’t realize his passion was killing him. - "Tests conducted on the man’s bagpipes found a slew of fungi and yeast living inside the musical instrument. Inside the air bag was a mixture of Paecilomyces variotti, Fusarium oxysporum, Rhodotorula mucilaginosa, and Penicillium species. In a petri dish, they formed a psychedelic swirl of green, orange and red mold. There was pink yeast on the instrument’s mouthpiece as well as fungi on the neck, chanter, chanter reed, chanter reed protector, bass drome and tenor drome, researchers found. Even the bagpipe carrying case had mold inside... The study noted similar illnesses befalling saxophone and trombone players, although they were fortunate enough for their instruments to be identified as the cause before it was too late. According to the Guardian, however, it wasn’t the first time that bagpipes have been identified as a health hazard."
Survey sheds new light on faculty attitudes and experiences toward trigger warnings - "very few institutions have adopted formal trigger warning policies -- just 1 percent of respondents said they were required to use them. But about 8 percent said that students on their campuses have made efforts to initiate such policies, and 15 percent of respondents said students in their courses had asked for trigger warnings. Twelve percent said students complained about the absence of trigger warnings in their classes... A majority of respondents -- 62 percent -- said they believed trigger warnings have or will have a negative effect on academic freedom, and 45 percent think warnings have a negative effect on classroom dynamics... the American Association of University Professors last year in its statement on trigger warnings. "Some discomfort is inevitable in classrooms if the goal is to expose students to new ideas, have them question beliefs they have taken for granted, grapple with ethical problems they have never considered, and, more generally, expand their horizons so as to become informed and responsible democratic citizens," the statement says. "Trigger warnings suggest that classrooms should offer protection and comfort rather than an intellectually challenging education. They reduce students to vulnerable victims rather than full participants in the intellectual process of education. The effect is to stifle thought on the part of both teachers and students who fear to raise questions that might make others 'uncomfortable.'" Bertin said there was some anecdotal evidence to suggest that faculty members who identified themselves as junior or newer to the profession were more open to trigger warnings"
Why Your Granola Is Really a Dessert - The New York Times - "Commercial varieties of granola are often loaded with enough added sugar to rival a slice of chocolate cake. Homemade granola recipes are often no better, calling for ample amounts of refined sugar, maple syrup, honey and other sweeteners. Granola bars and cereals are widely marketed as wholesome and natural, or made with whole grains, which helps to give the products a health halo. But experts say they are junk foods in disguise. Even the federal government’s dietary guidelines label granola as a “grain-based dessert,” placing it in the same category as cookies, doughnuts and cake... Dr. Jackson’s original granula consisted of little more than graham flour, which was baked into brittle sheets, broken into little pieces and then baked again. It was more like an unsweetened early version of Grape Nuts than the granola of today. Dr. Jackson wanted an alternative to the more common breakfasts of that time, which were typically some combination of meat, bread and cheese, and griddlecakes fried in grease and doused with syrup, butter or jam"
We need to call American breakfast what it often is: dessert - "Crushed-up cookies in a bowl: That's how many cereals really should be viewed... Eggs, particularly when served with vegetables, are a dependable, nutrient-rich option. They're also satiating, thanks to their protein and fat. A less satiating breakfast is going to be low fat, low protein, and high sugar — like a low-fat muffin... And don't forget: Not everyone necessarily has to eat breakfast. That's a myth that was mostly cooked up by the makers of sugary desserts — I mean, breakfasts — outlined here."
Rail breakdowns: Where does the buck stop? - "Mr Kuek has inherited a company which has not been focused on its core business for nearly a decade in its pursuit of enhancing "shareholder value". Perhaps in not so many words, a Committee of Inquiry convened after two massive breakdowns in December 2011 indicated as much. The company underwent a hollowing out of its engineering expertise as executives disenchanted by the corporate emphasis on retail and rental left. And yet the way SMRT has turned out is not all the doing of the company itself and its board. The Land Transport Authority (LTA), as regulator, has a part to play, and perhaps even the Ministry of Transport. For instance, a plan to upgrade the MRT network's signalling system had been proposed as far back as the late 1990s, when former navy chief Kwek Siew Jin was heading SMRT. Yet, nothing was done until recently... multiple-line failures are extremely rare. And they are rare because rail systems are inherently robust. They have to be, as they move millions of people across billions of kilometres a year."
Is Sushi ‘Healthy’? What About Granola? Where Americans and Nutritionists Disagree - The New York Times - "The results suggest a surprising diversity of opinion, even among experts. Yes, some foods, like kale, apples and oatmeal, are considered “healthy” by nearly everyone. And some, like soda, french fries and chocolate chip cookies, are not. But in between, some foods appear to benefit from a positive public perception, while others befuddle the public and experts alike. (We’re looking at you, butter.) “Twenty years ago, I think we knew about 10 percent of what we need to know” about nutrition, said Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. “And now we know about 40 or 50 percent”... Where does this leave a well-meaning but occasionally confused shopper? Reassured, perhaps: Nutrition science is sometimes murky even to experts. Your overall diet probably matters a lot more than whether you follow rigid rules or eat just one “good” or “bad” food... We also asked our experts whether they considered their own diet healthful, and how they described it. Ninety-nine percent of nutritionists said their diet was very or somewhat healthy. The most popular special diet type was “Mediteranean”; 25 percent of our nutritionists picked it. But the most common answer, even for experts, was “no special rules or restrictions.”"
Feminism In Action: This Man Loves Women So Much He Lives In A Compound With 17 Of Them - "This isn’t your everyday compound—women run things here! Russell knows women are capable of so much more than traditionally female jobs, so he makes sure women are involved in every aspect of the compound. Whether it’s training with high-powered rifles on the firing range, scraping deer skins clean, or tattooing the date of the Cataclysm on the back of each member’s neck, Russell makes sure that if there’s work to be done, there’s a badass lady doing it. With such amazing, hardworking women around, he’s lucky to call them all his wives!"
The Benefits of Grunting During Tennis - "studies have shown that you do get extra oomph from a short, sharp yell, helping you exert more focused energy than you would without it. But there’s another advantage to letting out a belly groan with every shot: distraction! For highly skilled tennis players, hearing how a ball comes off a racket is useful information in processing a quick response. A grunt obscures that information, and it isn’t just the world’s best who get affected. According to a 2012 study from the University of Hawaii and the University of British Columbia, players are significantly worse at anticipating the ball’s direction and speed when a hitter grunts"
When I read history at university I read modern history. And modern history at Oxford started in 412, probably still does"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Food on the Move: What We Want, When We Want It - "One of the examples... of food with a lot of food miles attached to it are the fresh vegetables flown out of countries like Kenya to the UK and certainly there's a lot of carbon emissions per calorie for those green beans but if anything one of the greater concerns in Kenya or at least in certain parts of the country may be the amount of water that's used to grow those green beans and therefore is not available for local people to drink. In the US we have some very arid, we have cities like Phoenix Arizona. Its in the middle of a desert. It's really environmentally better for food to be trucked in there than to be grown there. Food miles is not a very meaningful metric in a lot of ways
'Tamil-Korean Link is Age-Old' - "In all, he claimed, there were around 4,000 words in Korean and Tamil that had similar meaning, indicating the age-old connection between the two countries. It was the French missionaries in Korea who first noted the similarities between the two languages. Many of the names of ancient colonies of Southern Korea were the exact counterparts of Tamil words. Exhaustive as it is, linguistic similarities were not all. The Consul General pointed out that the way both people built their hutments were the same, so were some of the household utensils like ural (a heavy stone or wooden mortar) and ulakkai (long heavy wooden pestle). Experts say that agriculture, pottery, beads, textile, turtle boats, and many ancient industries and cultures in the two countries have stunning similarities. These similarities, they add, are not coincidences. Early Tamil people migrated to the Korean peninsula around the first century AD, noted N Kannan, Orissa Balu and Dr Nagarajan, all experts on the topic."
Michael Phelps Was The Flag Bearer In The Opening Ceremony, But That's Not Who Liberals REALLY Wanted... - "Michael Phelps was chosen by his teammates to be the flag bearer during the Opening Ceremony. Rightly so. He deserves it. He has what? 22 medals? But his accomplishments be damned. No matter how talented he is or how many medals he holds, at the end of the day, he’s still a white guy. That’s why liberals urged him to give up his position as flag bearer and hand it over to Ibtihaj Muhammad, a black Muslim woman who’s famous for wearing a hijab during fencing matches... She’s so much more qualified than Phelps. I mean, she’s a triple threat. She’s a woman. She’s black. She’s Muslim. And as an added bonus, she hates Donald Trump!... CNN even ran an op-ed by W. Kamau Bell, who urged Phelps to give up his position. He’s not deserving of it because America’s sick of “tall, successful, rich white guys hogging the spotlight trying to make America great … again.”"
Identity > achievement
The politicization of sport is okay if you're the one doing it
TLC's new program "I Am Jazz" - "It really bothered me when Jazz talked about how boys are "discriminating" against her...they flirt with her female friends, but not with her. She believes that the boys won't pay attention to her in the same way because they don't want others to think they're gay. So she wants attention from boys and calls it discrimination because so far none have been willing to flirt and show any kind of attraction to her. I realize that this is very complicated, but wouldn't the other boys have to be homosexual or bisexual to be in a romantic relationship with Jazz? She still has male anatomy even if she's taking estrogen and dresses as a female... she's hurt when most teen boys will not be attracted to a transgender girl? It seems like these boys are going to be presented as bullies/bad guys. The preview for the next episode shows Jazz and her friends at a bowling party. Jazz is upset because only one boy is there, and she puts him on the spot by asking if the other boys didn't come because she's transgender. She's clearly interested in boys and wants a boyfriend...it's sad to me that her parents, siblings, grandparents, and doctor are all behind the treatments, but what is supposed to happen to Jazz emotionally if she has such a limited choice of future mates? Or are we going in the direction of some kind of heterosexual "shaming" with this talk of discrimination? I can't blame any boy for not wanting to be part of this tv show!"
Is it discrimination if boys won't flirt with a transgender girl? Does this reflect entitlement, analogous to the "male entitlement" that feminists rage about?
British Asian woman told she cannot sell chicken tikka masala at St George's Day event - Telegraph - "A spokesman said they had initially felt that chicken tikka masala would jar with the “olde worlde traditional English” theme featuring Morris dancers and dragons... “The theme of the St George’s Day event in 2015 was olde worlde traditional English with Morris Dancers and dragon fighting. Ms Rahman has raised some very interesting points about modern England and the Council will wish to reflect upon these issues when setting the theme for the St George’s Day in 2016 and onwards.”"
I wonder if they sold Coca Cola at the event
English 'too nervous' to celebrate St George's Day - Telegraph - "The think tank British Future believes the English are "too nervous" to celebrate St George's Day, after a poll found they were more likely to be able to correctly name the date of the US Independence Day and St Patrick’s Day than they are their own national saint’s day"
He withered away for 7 years. Doctors didn’t realize his passion was killing him. - "Tests conducted on the man’s bagpipes found a slew of fungi and yeast living inside the musical instrument. Inside the air bag was a mixture of Paecilomyces variotti, Fusarium oxysporum, Rhodotorula mucilaginosa, and Penicillium species. In a petri dish, they formed a psychedelic swirl of green, orange and red mold. There was pink yeast on the instrument’s mouthpiece as well as fungi on the neck, chanter, chanter reed, chanter reed protector, bass drome and tenor drome, researchers found. Even the bagpipe carrying case had mold inside... The study noted similar illnesses befalling saxophone and trombone players, although they were fortunate enough for their instruments to be identified as the cause before it was too late. According to the Guardian, however, it wasn’t the first time that bagpipes have been identified as a health hazard."
Survey sheds new light on faculty attitudes and experiences toward trigger warnings - "very few institutions have adopted formal trigger warning policies -- just 1 percent of respondents said they were required to use them. But about 8 percent said that students on their campuses have made efforts to initiate such policies, and 15 percent of respondents said students in their courses had asked for trigger warnings. Twelve percent said students complained about the absence of trigger warnings in their classes... A majority of respondents -- 62 percent -- said they believed trigger warnings have or will have a negative effect on academic freedom, and 45 percent think warnings have a negative effect on classroom dynamics... the American Association of University Professors last year in its statement on trigger warnings. "Some discomfort is inevitable in classrooms if the goal is to expose students to new ideas, have them question beliefs they have taken for granted, grapple with ethical problems they have never considered, and, more generally, expand their horizons so as to become informed and responsible democratic citizens," the statement says. "Trigger warnings suggest that classrooms should offer protection and comfort rather than an intellectually challenging education. They reduce students to vulnerable victims rather than full participants in the intellectual process of education. The effect is to stifle thought on the part of both teachers and students who fear to raise questions that might make others 'uncomfortable.'" Bertin said there was some anecdotal evidence to suggest that faculty members who identified themselves as junior or newer to the profession were more open to trigger warnings"
Why Your Granola Is Really a Dessert - The New York Times - "Commercial varieties of granola are often loaded with enough added sugar to rival a slice of chocolate cake. Homemade granola recipes are often no better, calling for ample amounts of refined sugar, maple syrup, honey and other sweeteners. Granola bars and cereals are widely marketed as wholesome and natural, or made with whole grains, which helps to give the products a health halo. But experts say they are junk foods in disguise. Even the federal government’s dietary guidelines label granola as a “grain-based dessert,” placing it in the same category as cookies, doughnuts and cake... Dr. Jackson’s original granula consisted of little more than graham flour, which was baked into brittle sheets, broken into little pieces and then baked again. It was more like an unsweetened early version of Grape Nuts than the granola of today. Dr. Jackson wanted an alternative to the more common breakfasts of that time, which were typically some combination of meat, bread and cheese, and griddlecakes fried in grease and doused with syrup, butter or jam"
We need to call American breakfast what it often is: dessert - "Crushed-up cookies in a bowl: That's how many cereals really should be viewed... Eggs, particularly when served with vegetables, are a dependable, nutrient-rich option. They're also satiating, thanks to their protein and fat. A less satiating breakfast is going to be low fat, low protein, and high sugar — like a low-fat muffin... And don't forget: Not everyone necessarily has to eat breakfast. That's a myth that was mostly cooked up by the makers of sugary desserts — I mean, breakfasts — outlined here."
Rail breakdowns: Where does the buck stop? - "Mr Kuek has inherited a company which has not been focused on its core business for nearly a decade in its pursuit of enhancing "shareholder value". Perhaps in not so many words, a Committee of Inquiry convened after two massive breakdowns in December 2011 indicated as much. The company underwent a hollowing out of its engineering expertise as executives disenchanted by the corporate emphasis on retail and rental left. And yet the way SMRT has turned out is not all the doing of the company itself and its board. The Land Transport Authority (LTA), as regulator, has a part to play, and perhaps even the Ministry of Transport. For instance, a plan to upgrade the MRT network's signalling system had been proposed as far back as the late 1990s, when former navy chief Kwek Siew Jin was heading SMRT. Yet, nothing was done until recently... multiple-line failures are extremely rare. And they are rare because rail systems are inherently robust. They have to be, as they move millions of people across billions of kilometres a year."
Is Sushi ‘Healthy’? What About Granola? Where Americans and Nutritionists Disagree - The New York Times - "The results suggest a surprising diversity of opinion, even among experts. Yes, some foods, like kale, apples and oatmeal, are considered “healthy” by nearly everyone. And some, like soda, french fries and chocolate chip cookies, are not. But in between, some foods appear to benefit from a positive public perception, while others befuddle the public and experts alike. (We’re looking at you, butter.) “Twenty years ago, I think we knew about 10 percent of what we need to know” about nutrition, said Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. “And now we know about 40 or 50 percent”... Where does this leave a well-meaning but occasionally confused shopper? Reassured, perhaps: Nutrition science is sometimes murky even to experts. Your overall diet probably matters a lot more than whether you follow rigid rules or eat just one “good” or “bad” food... We also asked our experts whether they considered their own diet healthful, and how they described it. Ninety-nine percent of nutritionists said their diet was very or somewhat healthy. The most popular special diet type was “Mediteranean”; 25 percent of our nutritionists picked it. But the most common answer, even for experts, was “no special rules or restrictions.”"
Feminism In Action: This Man Loves Women So Much He Lives In A Compound With 17 Of Them - "This isn’t your everyday compound—women run things here! Russell knows women are capable of so much more than traditionally female jobs, so he makes sure women are involved in every aspect of the compound. Whether it’s training with high-powered rifles on the firing range, scraping deer skins clean, or tattooing the date of the Cataclysm on the back of each member’s neck, Russell makes sure that if there’s work to be done, there’s a badass lady doing it. With such amazing, hardworking women around, he’s lucky to call them all his wives!"
The Benefits of Grunting During Tennis - "studies have shown that you do get extra oomph from a short, sharp yell, helping you exert more focused energy than you would without it. But there’s another advantage to letting out a belly groan with every shot: distraction! For highly skilled tennis players, hearing how a ball comes off a racket is useful information in processing a quick response. A grunt obscures that information, and it isn’t just the world’s best who get affected. According to a 2012 study from the University of Hawaii and the University of British Columbia, players are significantly worse at anticipating the ball’s direction and speed when a hitter grunts"
Post ID: 2551350159870588569
Saturday, September 17, 2016
Links - 17th September 2016
Chilcot Report and the delusions of Western democracy - "Now, when this very democratically elected UK prime minister cheated, lied, fabricated false evidence, engaged in massive propaganda, went on a rampage about "terrorism" in order to join the United States to invade Iraq, was he the military strongman of a Third World dictatorship or was he in fact the democratically elected prime minister of a Western liberal democracy?...
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies ad Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York."
To limit myself just to the first 3 leaps of logic that come to mind:
1) As per the Chilcot Report, "There were no lies - there was no deceit"
2) Blair and Bush neither intended nor commissioned the murder of "hundreds of thousands". You might as well blame Albert Einstein for making the atomic bomb possible and so being responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki
3) Many sections of the press were openly skeptical - indeed hostile, to the Iraq War, even before it started
I hope his research isn't as badly argued as this
Glasgow mosque leader praises extremist killer - "The religious leader at Scotland's biggest mosque has praised an extremist who was executed for committing murder in Pakistan, the BBC can reveal. Imam Maulana Habib Ur Rehman of Glasgow Central Mosque used the messaging platform WhatsApp to show his support for Mumtaz Qadri. Qadri was hanged in February after murdering a local politician who opposed strict blasphemy laws... Maulana Habib Ur Rehman is the most senior imam at Glasgow Central Mosque, a role which involves leading prayers and giving religious guidance and teachings... The support for Qadri expressed in the UK by some Muslims from a group within Islam that is generally regarded as moderate was unexpected. Those supporting his actions came from within Sunni Islam, and a group known as Barelvis, who control just under 40% of mosques in the UK. These Sufis are not generally connected with jihadist groups, and present themselves in Pakistan and elsewhere as defenders of a moderate, peaceful Islam. However, on the day of Qadri's funeral, one of the co-directors of the Association of British Muslims, Paul Salahuddin-Armstrong, was so shocked by comments on social media in the UK praising the killer that he wrote a blog post. "Horrified… I honestly don't know where to begin," he said. He said he was also "appalled" to find a prominent mosque in Birmingham - the Ghamkol Sharif - had termed Qadri a "martyr" on its website... the Imam refers to Qadri as "brother" and says that, by killing his employer whom he was paid to protect, he was "carrying out the collective responsibility of the ummat," or Muslims as a whole. His execution, he says, "is a collective failure of Pakistani Muslims"... The Imam also likens Qadri's actions to those fighting Nazi occupation during World War Two."
China tells Japan to stop interfering in South China Sea - "Meeting in the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, Li told Abe that China's stance on the South China Sea was completely in line with international law, state news agency Xinhua reported. "Japan is not a state directly involved in the South China Sea issue, and thus should exercise caution in its own words and deeds, and stop hyping up and interfering", Li said, according to Xinhua. Japan's Kyodo news agency said Abe told Li that a rules-based international order must be respected. The agency also said Abe and Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc had agreed the ruling must be observed."
International law = obeying China
Singapore’s Response to Family Violence: 1997 to 2007— what comes next? Accessibility & Dissemination - "The most notable information is that Indians are clearly over-represented (Malays and Others may also be, however this is less clear) and Chinese are underrepresented, in comparison with populations levels, of those seeking services... Historically and currently, the out-of-bound markers for public dialogue have built a fence around addressing cultural issues in any way that would undermine racial harmony (Chia, 2005). However, we are ignoring “the elephant in the room” if we remain silent on the role of culture in family violence."
How can we blame this on Chinese Privilege?
Leaked document says 2,000 men allegedly assaulted 1,200 German women on New Year’s Eve - "Officials have linked the sexual assaults to the influx of refugees. "There is a connection between the emergence of this phenomenon and the rapid migration in 2015," Holger Münch, president of the German Federal Crime Police Office, told Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Many suspects had originally come to Germany from North African countries rather than Syria, officials said."
Cover up during Ramadan, Kelantan mufti tells non-Muslims - "The Kelantan Mufti today urged non-Muslims to dress conservatively throughout the fasting month of Ramadan as provocative attire could be haram for surrounding Muslims."
Home Office told: 'Don't eat in front of Muslims during Ramadan' - "the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, which claims to be fighting a ‘political jihad against Islamophobia’, attacked the document. It said: “It is designed to create more hatred in the hearts of non-Muslims. We don’t care how much non-Muslims eat in front of us. “It’s never been an issue and never will be and we have never asked for any special treatment or sensitivity from non-Muslims whilst fasting.”"
'They have a lot of terms and conditions' - "All over Singapore, hawker stalls are suffering the same plight - a shortage of manpower... "Singaporeans want to sleep until 8, but by 8 we've started work. I beg you to let us hire foreigners""
English Heritage 'deadly serious' about bid to get jousting into Olympics - "jousting should be seen as England’s first national sport. Jousting’s heyday was in the 15th and 16th centuries, with Henry VIII one of its most famous advocates. Historians have recently speculated that the reason Henry became such a cruel and petty tyrant is that jousting injuries brought about a change in his personality... It has been Maryland’s official sport since 1962."
Why Gender-Neutral Child-Raising Is A Terrible Idea - "Our schools medicate boys into convenient passivity instead of channeling their natural energy. School curricula and pedagogy play to the strengths of girls. More distressing still, people seem to be losing interest in boys. Adoption agencies have trouble placing them... The neglect of boys is a longstanding problem, but its latest front may be the most toxic we’ve yet seen. Under the label “gender-neutral parenting,” liberals are now trying to liberate boys from boyhood... For evidence of how “neutral” modern parents really are, consider Michelle, a lesbian parent, who publicly admits she regularly battles her young son’s interest in being a boy. “I’m constantly like trying to queer my relationship with him and get him to wear tutus. He hates it. He’s just like, ‘no,’” she says. Later on in the same video, Michelle laments the tyranny of Old MacDonald being a man. “Why couldn’t it be a lesbian farmer?” she wonders. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad... are we still permitted to tell our sons that their boyhood is something good and meaningful? Are we still permitted to teach them that manhood is worth earning?"
Are Indians by nature unhygienic? - "There is no point in getting infuriated or defensive about this. The general lack of cleanliness and hygiene hits the eye wherever one goes in India — hotels, hospitals, households, work places, railway trains, airplanes and, yes, temples. Indians think nothing of spitting whenever they like and wherever they choose, and living in surroundings which they themselves make unliveable by their dirty habits. The Indian Public Health Association has regularly been reporting the “scary situation” in Indian hotels, restaurants and eateries. The last, in particular, do not follow hygienic practices, use unclean containers, utensils and cups and plates and are often located near open drains or garbage bins... Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh courted a controversy with his remark that India needed more toilets than temples"
The black cop who has a problem with 'Black Lives Matter' - "Stalien expressed his frustration that his efforts to investigate black-on-black violence and bring the culprits to justice had met with outright hostility from the very community he sought to protect. "They called me 'Uncle Tom', and 'wanna be white boy', and I couldn't understand why," he wrote."
I Sometimes Don't Want to Be White Either - "There was a time in my 20s when everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself, my Whiteness, my ancestors... and my descendants. I remember deciding that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically. If I was going to pass on my privilege, I wanted to pass it on to someone who doesn’t have racial privilege; so I planned to adopt. I disliked my Whiteness, but I disliked the Whiteness of other White people more. I felt like the way to really end racism was to feel guilty for it, and to make other White people feel guilty for it too"
Keywords: white guilt
Beware of Kafkatrapping - "The accuser states, "Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of (sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…) confirms that you are guilty of (sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…)." Harking back to The Trial, Raymond explains how the novel's plot parallels the structure and purpose of the accuser's nonargument. No specific acts are named in the accusation, which makes the claim unfalsifiable. The vague charge constitutes a thought crime, which also makes it unfalsifiable. As with The Trial, the process seems designed to create guilt and to destroy resistance so that you become malleable. Indeed, "the only way out … is … to acquiesce in his own destruction." Even if you are innocent, the only path to redemption is for you to plead guilty and accept punishment. Ideally, for the accuser, you even come to believe in your own guilt... A separate problem arises if the accuser honestly believes the kafkatrapping. A woman who believes all men are oppressors is unlikely to cooperate with them in a good will attempt to solve social problems. She is more likely to seek a position of dominance over men, which she justifies in the name of self-defense or as a payback that is her due. This heightens tension between the sexes and obstructs sincere attempts to resolve problems. A kafkatrapper true believer becomes increasingly isolated from people who are seen as "the enemy" because they disagree; the true believer becomes increasingly unable to even communicate with or have empathy for a broad spectrum of people"
How Feminism Makes Women More Vulnerable to Rape - "it is easy to see how the naive boosterism of feminism has backfired. Feminists' inability to condemn excessive drinking, the push for affirmative consent laws, and the focus on women's passivity have all increased the likelihood for rape to occur, despite good intentions. This must end"
Since the writer is female, feminists presumably won't call her a rapist for thinking affirmative consent is a bad idea
Can the US end its addiction to painkillers? - "She kicked prescription painkillers and other drugs six months ago. But in the back of her mind are euphoric memories of opioid stupors and the knowledge that a doctor nearby will write a prescription any time she asks. "They didn't ask me too many questions because I've been in three car accidents and I have extremely bad migraines due to my neck pain, so I can get Percocet whenever I want," Kearney-Argow, 23, told Al Jazeera, referring to a strong pain reliever that can also give a high. "Even if that wasn't true and I told the doctor that, they would prescribe it to me anyway. It's too easy to get any opiates down here.""
The SJW mental disorder? - "One thing I have noticed is that a lot of these blogs proudly state their supposed mental disorders. It just makes me wonder, are these people just mentally not well? I know it's a stretch, but do they ever actually step back and go "hey, we are all kinda mental here, maybe our ideas aren't on the most solid of grounds?". They all gather together with the intent purpose of being victimized or oppressed. They all want the world to conform and change to their very specific worldview, and if anyone criticises them, they go full nuclear. There are just a range of patterns that I see forming, and they all stand out as being very mentally unstable. This has the danger of going meta as hell here. Could there in fact be a SJW mental disorder?"
"I also found the article on narcissistic defense mechanisms very telling"
"You just list all your perceived disabilities and disadvantages in your "about" section to gain oppression points. Then you can trade in those points for credibility when someone disagrees with you.
umblr is actually just a big MMORPG. You join a faction (radfem, transfat, redpiller, black seperatist, etc.) and conduct raids on the blogs of other less oppressed factions. Whoever has the most oppression points gets to type the same phrase over and over again in ALL CAPS and wins."
The Over-Sexualization Of Harley Quinn - "she is far from a strong female character, and she is not someone any girl should aspire to be. Quite the opposite, actually... Harley Quinn was never meant to be a character that merited imitation. She was meant to teach young girls about the dangers of domestic violence and to be an example of what not to be. She is a tragic character."
Parody ad campaign for Taiwan tourism celebrates plummeting number of mainland tourists - "The series of mock tourism ad photos boasts beautifully shot backdrops from all around Taiwan. Typical phrases meant to inspire tourists from abroad to come and visit like -- "All this awaits you!" -- are absent, replaced with a single sardonic slogan in English -- "Welcome to Taiwan, without Chinese!" For good measure, the parody ads also include some phrases in Chinese like: "No more trouble caused by Chinese tourists, A carefree journey begins here" and "Without Chinese tourists, it's now possibly to relax in the most popular destinations.""
Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies ad Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York."
To limit myself just to the first 3 leaps of logic that come to mind:
1) As per the Chilcot Report, "There were no lies - there was no deceit"
2) Blair and Bush neither intended nor commissioned the murder of "hundreds of thousands". You might as well blame Albert Einstein for making the atomic bomb possible and so being responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki
3) Many sections of the press were openly skeptical - indeed hostile, to the Iraq War, even before it started
I hope his research isn't as badly argued as this
Glasgow mosque leader praises extremist killer - "The religious leader at Scotland's biggest mosque has praised an extremist who was executed for committing murder in Pakistan, the BBC can reveal. Imam Maulana Habib Ur Rehman of Glasgow Central Mosque used the messaging platform WhatsApp to show his support for Mumtaz Qadri. Qadri was hanged in February after murdering a local politician who opposed strict blasphemy laws... Maulana Habib Ur Rehman is the most senior imam at Glasgow Central Mosque, a role which involves leading prayers and giving religious guidance and teachings... The support for Qadri expressed in the UK by some Muslims from a group within Islam that is generally regarded as moderate was unexpected. Those supporting his actions came from within Sunni Islam, and a group known as Barelvis, who control just under 40% of mosques in the UK. These Sufis are not generally connected with jihadist groups, and present themselves in Pakistan and elsewhere as defenders of a moderate, peaceful Islam. However, on the day of Qadri's funeral, one of the co-directors of the Association of British Muslims, Paul Salahuddin-Armstrong, was so shocked by comments on social media in the UK praising the killer that he wrote a blog post. "Horrified… I honestly don't know where to begin," he said. He said he was also "appalled" to find a prominent mosque in Birmingham - the Ghamkol Sharif - had termed Qadri a "martyr" on its website... the Imam refers to Qadri as "brother" and says that, by killing his employer whom he was paid to protect, he was "carrying out the collective responsibility of the ummat," or Muslims as a whole. His execution, he says, "is a collective failure of Pakistani Muslims"... The Imam also likens Qadri's actions to those fighting Nazi occupation during World War Two."
China tells Japan to stop interfering in South China Sea - "Meeting in the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, Li told Abe that China's stance on the South China Sea was completely in line with international law, state news agency Xinhua reported. "Japan is not a state directly involved in the South China Sea issue, and thus should exercise caution in its own words and deeds, and stop hyping up and interfering", Li said, according to Xinhua. Japan's Kyodo news agency said Abe told Li that a rules-based international order must be respected. The agency also said Abe and Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc had agreed the ruling must be observed."
International law = obeying China
Singapore’s Response to Family Violence: 1997 to 2007— what comes next? Accessibility & Dissemination - "The most notable information is that Indians are clearly over-represented (Malays and Others may also be, however this is less clear) and Chinese are underrepresented, in comparison with populations levels, of those seeking services... Historically and currently, the out-of-bound markers for public dialogue have built a fence around addressing cultural issues in any way that would undermine racial harmony (Chia, 2005). However, we are ignoring “the elephant in the room” if we remain silent on the role of culture in family violence."
How can we blame this on Chinese Privilege?
Leaked document says 2,000 men allegedly assaulted 1,200 German women on New Year’s Eve - "Officials have linked the sexual assaults to the influx of refugees. "There is a connection between the emergence of this phenomenon and the rapid migration in 2015," Holger Münch, president of the German Federal Crime Police Office, told Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Many suspects had originally come to Germany from North African countries rather than Syria, officials said."
Cover up during Ramadan, Kelantan mufti tells non-Muslims - "The Kelantan Mufti today urged non-Muslims to dress conservatively throughout the fasting month of Ramadan as provocative attire could be haram for surrounding Muslims."
Home Office told: 'Don't eat in front of Muslims during Ramadan' - "the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, which claims to be fighting a ‘political jihad against Islamophobia’, attacked the document. It said: “It is designed to create more hatred in the hearts of non-Muslims. We don’t care how much non-Muslims eat in front of us. “It’s never been an issue and never will be and we have never asked for any special treatment or sensitivity from non-Muslims whilst fasting.”"
'They have a lot of terms and conditions' - "All over Singapore, hawker stalls are suffering the same plight - a shortage of manpower... "Singaporeans want to sleep until 8, but by 8 we've started work. I beg you to let us hire foreigners""
English Heritage 'deadly serious' about bid to get jousting into Olympics - "jousting should be seen as England’s first national sport. Jousting’s heyday was in the 15th and 16th centuries, with Henry VIII one of its most famous advocates. Historians have recently speculated that the reason Henry became such a cruel and petty tyrant is that jousting injuries brought about a change in his personality... It has been Maryland’s official sport since 1962."
Why Gender-Neutral Child-Raising Is A Terrible Idea - "Our schools medicate boys into convenient passivity instead of channeling their natural energy. School curricula and pedagogy play to the strengths of girls. More distressing still, people seem to be losing interest in boys. Adoption agencies have trouble placing them... The neglect of boys is a longstanding problem, but its latest front may be the most toxic we’ve yet seen. Under the label “gender-neutral parenting,” liberals are now trying to liberate boys from boyhood... For evidence of how “neutral” modern parents really are, consider Michelle, a lesbian parent, who publicly admits she regularly battles her young son’s interest in being a boy. “I’m constantly like trying to queer my relationship with him and get him to wear tutus. He hates it. He’s just like, ‘no,’” she says. Later on in the same video, Michelle laments the tyranny of Old MacDonald being a man. “Why couldn’t it be a lesbian farmer?” she wonders. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad... are we still permitted to tell our sons that their boyhood is something good and meaningful? Are we still permitted to teach them that manhood is worth earning?"
Are Indians by nature unhygienic? - "There is no point in getting infuriated or defensive about this. The general lack of cleanliness and hygiene hits the eye wherever one goes in India — hotels, hospitals, households, work places, railway trains, airplanes and, yes, temples. Indians think nothing of spitting whenever they like and wherever they choose, and living in surroundings which they themselves make unliveable by their dirty habits. The Indian Public Health Association has regularly been reporting the “scary situation” in Indian hotels, restaurants and eateries. The last, in particular, do not follow hygienic practices, use unclean containers, utensils and cups and plates and are often located near open drains or garbage bins... Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh courted a controversy with his remark that India needed more toilets than temples"
The black cop who has a problem with 'Black Lives Matter' - "Stalien expressed his frustration that his efforts to investigate black-on-black violence and bring the culprits to justice had met with outright hostility from the very community he sought to protect. "They called me 'Uncle Tom', and 'wanna be white boy', and I couldn't understand why," he wrote."
I Sometimes Don't Want to Be White Either - "There was a time in my 20s when everything I learned about the history of racism made me hate myself, my Whiteness, my ancestors... and my descendants. I remember deciding that I couldn’t have biological children because I didn’t want to propagate my privilege biologically. If I was going to pass on my privilege, I wanted to pass it on to someone who doesn’t have racial privilege; so I planned to adopt. I disliked my Whiteness, but I disliked the Whiteness of other White people more. I felt like the way to really end racism was to feel guilty for it, and to make other White people feel guilty for it too"
Keywords: white guilt
Beware of Kafkatrapping - "The accuser states, "Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of (sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…) confirms that you are guilty of (sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression…)." Harking back to The Trial, Raymond explains how the novel's plot parallels the structure and purpose of the accuser's nonargument. No specific acts are named in the accusation, which makes the claim unfalsifiable. The vague charge constitutes a thought crime, which also makes it unfalsifiable. As with The Trial, the process seems designed to create guilt and to destroy resistance so that you become malleable. Indeed, "the only way out … is … to acquiesce in his own destruction." Even if you are innocent, the only path to redemption is for you to plead guilty and accept punishment. Ideally, for the accuser, you even come to believe in your own guilt... A separate problem arises if the accuser honestly believes the kafkatrapping. A woman who believes all men are oppressors is unlikely to cooperate with them in a good will attempt to solve social problems. She is more likely to seek a position of dominance over men, which she justifies in the name of self-defense or as a payback that is her due. This heightens tension between the sexes and obstructs sincere attempts to resolve problems. A kafkatrapper true believer becomes increasingly isolated from people who are seen as "the enemy" because they disagree; the true believer becomes increasingly unable to even communicate with or have empathy for a broad spectrum of people"
How Feminism Makes Women More Vulnerable to Rape - "it is easy to see how the naive boosterism of feminism has backfired. Feminists' inability to condemn excessive drinking, the push for affirmative consent laws, and the focus on women's passivity have all increased the likelihood for rape to occur, despite good intentions. This must end"
Since the writer is female, feminists presumably won't call her a rapist for thinking affirmative consent is a bad idea
Can the US end its addiction to painkillers? - "She kicked prescription painkillers and other drugs six months ago. But in the back of her mind are euphoric memories of opioid stupors and the knowledge that a doctor nearby will write a prescription any time she asks. "They didn't ask me too many questions because I've been in three car accidents and I have extremely bad migraines due to my neck pain, so I can get Percocet whenever I want," Kearney-Argow, 23, told Al Jazeera, referring to a strong pain reliever that can also give a high. "Even if that wasn't true and I told the doctor that, they would prescribe it to me anyway. It's too easy to get any opiates down here.""
The SJW mental disorder? - "One thing I have noticed is that a lot of these blogs proudly state their supposed mental disorders. It just makes me wonder, are these people just mentally not well? I know it's a stretch, but do they ever actually step back and go "hey, we are all kinda mental here, maybe our ideas aren't on the most solid of grounds?". They all gather together with the intent purpose of being victimized or oppressed. They all want the world to conform and change to their very specific worldview, and if anyone criticises them, they go full nuclear. There are just a range of patterns that I see forming, and they all stand out as being very mentally unstable. This has the danger of going meta as hell here. Could there in fact be a SJW mental disorder?"
"I also found the article on narcissistic defense mechanisms very telling"
"You just list all your perceived disabilities and disadvantages in your "about" section to gain oppression points. Then you can trade in those points for credibility when someone disagrees with you.
umblr is actually just a big MMORPG. You join a faction (radfem, transfat, redpiller, black seperatist, etc.) and conduct raids on the blogs of other less oppressed factions. Whoever has the most oppression points gets to type the same phrase over and over again in ALL CAPS and wins."
The Over-Sexualization Of Harley Quinn - "she is far from a strong female character, and she is not someone any girl should aspire to be. Quite the opposite, actually... Harley Quinn was never meant to be a character that merited imitation. She was meant to teach young girls about the dangers of domestic violence and to be an example of what not to be. She is a tragic character."
Parody ad campaign for Taiwan tourism celebrates plummeting number of mainland tourists - "The series of mock tourism ad photos boasts beautifully shot backdrops from all around Taiwan. Typical phrases meant to inspire tourists from abroad to come and visit like -- "All this awaits you!" -- are absent, replaced with a single sardonic slogan in English -- "Welcome to Taiwan, without Chinese!" For good measure, the parody ads also include some phrases in Chinese like: "No more trouble caused by Chinese tourists, A carefree journey begins here" and "Without Chinese tourists, it's now possibly to relax in the most popular destinations.""
Post ID: 4178554168634004385
Friday, September 16, 2016
Links - 16th September 2016
Sex-Related Neuroanatomical Basis of Emotion Regulation Ability - "Behavioral research has demonstrated that males have a higher capability of regulating their own and others' emotions than females; however, little is known about the sex-specific brain mechanisms involved in emotion regulation ability. In the present study, we used voxel-based morphometry to investigate the neural basis underlying emotion regulation ability in a large sample of young adults. Assessment of emotion regulation ability was performed using the Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale. As expected, males significantly scored higher in emotion regulation ability than females did. More importantly, we found the sex differences in the neuroanatomical basis of emotion regulation ability. Males showed a stronger positive relation between emotion regulation ability and regional gray matter volume (rGMV) in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In contrast, females demonstrated a stronger positive relation between emotion regulation ability and rGMV in an anatomical cluster that extends from the left brainstem to the left hippocampus, the left amygdala and the insular cortex. The present study provides the first empirical evidence regarding the sex-linked neuroanatomical correlates of emotion regulation ability. These findings may help understand why there is a higher prevalence of affective disorders in females and maladaptive behaviors in males."
This is proof that women are more emotional (and crazier) than men
Hard disk reliability examined once more: HGST rules, Seagate is alarming - "For a second year, the standout reliability leader was HGST. Now a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, HGST inherited the technology and designs from Hitachi (which itself bought IBM's hard disk division). Across a range of models from 2 to 4 terabytes, the HGST models showed low failure rates; at worse, 2.3 percent failing a year. This includes some of the oldest disks among Backblaze's collection; 2TB Desktop 7K2000 models are on average 3.9 years old, but still have a failure rate of just 1.1 percent. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Seagate disks... Newer Seagate disks also show more encouraging results. Although still young, at an average age of just 0.9 years, the 4TB HDD.15 models show a reasonably low 2.6 percent failure rate. Coupled with their low price—Backblaze says that they tend to undercut HGST's disks—they've become the company's preferred hard drive model. As before, this doesn't mean that anyone with a Seagate disk is at risk of an imminent hard disk failure (though you should always have backups!). Backblaze operates disks outside of the manufacturer's specified parameters. Significantly, most consumer-grade disks aren't intended to be heavily used 24/7; they're meant to be operational for about 8 hours a day and replaced every 3 to 5 years. Most home usage environments are likely to be lower in vibration than Backblaze's 45-disk storage pods, too. In more normal conditions, the Seagates are likely to fare much better."
2016 Hard Drive Review: Testing 61,590 Hard Drives
Islamists who preached chastity caught having sex on beach - "A pair of Islamist politicians who have advocated for chastity were caught having sex on a Moroccan beach, officials said. The lovefest between Moulay Omar Benhammad, 63, and Fatima Nejjar, 62, landed them in hot water with their Islamic Unity and Reform Movement (MUR), which is the ideological wing of the Islamic Justice and Development Party"
New York's Biggest Douchebag is Now Terrorizing Asia With His 'JewJetting' - "Whether it’s feasting on caviar and champagne in first class or staying at the most luxurious suites in Shanghai, Mumbai or Tokyo, Lee has done it all — and at little to no cost. He’s an expert in cheating the system and will always find a way to get that free upgrade."
Kate Nardi has really strange facial expressions
Congenital analgesia: The agony of feeling no pain - "One of the things I'm going to have to face soon is the fact that I won't have my left leg anymore. I've had quite a bit of surgery on my left knee in the past and it's got to the point where my doctors have told me to wait until it gives out completely. Once that occurs they're just going to have to amputate."
British Muslims marched off Easyjet flight after WhatsApp messages mistaken for 'Isis material'
"If you suspect it, report it" and security hysteria lead to racial/other profiling
Heben Nigatu — deadlydinos: When straight men are like “but if... - "When straight men are like “but if I share a locker room with a gay guy he might look at me!”
Okay leaving aside the fact that gay doesn’t mean attracted to you
And gay doesn’t mean “lacking in any sort of human decency or inability to prevent staring”
DOES THE THOUGHT OF SOMEONE LOOKING AT YOU IN A SEXUAL WAY, EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE NOT TRYING TO BE SEXUAL, MAKE YOU SLIGHTLY UNCOMFORTABLE MY STRAIGHT MALE FRIEND?
DOES IT
DOES
IT"
Okay. I'm going into the girls' locker room
The Barbie Girls - Marketplace & Online Grocery Shopping Singapore | RedMart
I thought this was some doll thing but this is the Australian sense of the word
Frozen Lobsters from Fresh Seafood
If they're frozen...
Singapore Tamil Brahmin Singles (Singapore) - Meetup - "This is a Unique Platform for all Single ladies and gentlemen from the Tamil Brahmin Community in Singapore to meet up and socialise. Who knows about the outcome?Possibilities are endless-Networking, New Friendships, Romance and more."
That's exclusive
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Turkey Takes Action in Syria - "There's been a wave of anti-American sentiment from Turks towards Americans. But this is a nation well-versed in conspiracy theories. And polls show the majority of Turks somehow believe the US was somehow involved in the failed coup. The CIA somehow or the US government...
Most of what's on TV can trace its origins back to cinema or newspapers or the novel or, of course, to radio. But [the Great British] Bakeoff and its variants are pure television, which wouldn't work in another medium. TV realised that what we audience crave is to see ourselves. Or a slightly heightened and nicer version of us, with the unruly and grumpy and unattractive and just plain boring excluded at the selection stage."
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Russian warplanes use Iranian airbase - "'Putin has perhaps wrong-footed the West again'
'I think so David. I think that basing Russian warplanes in Iran tells us one more thing about Vladimir Putin. He loves being one step ahead of the West. This element of surprise. We've seen it so many times over the last few years. He loves catching the United States off-guard. Now whether that's Russia launching cruise missiles suddenly from the Caspian Sea towards Syria. Or whether it's announcing that Russia is going to be basing its warplanes in Iran. These are things that Putin can point to. Elements of surprise. And again in his world, in his mind I would imagine, this is an example of Russia catching the US off-guard and showing it's a great power'
'See that's why they make ideal friends with Iranian leaders. They love doing the same thing'"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Germany at Crossroads over Terror Threat - "Germany may have in effect imported terror too. I spoke to a senior intelligence source here actually a few days ago and he said to me that they are investigating, his agents are investigating 100s of reports that among refugees IS has actually sent in so-called hit squads. Teams of people posing as asylum seekers to come into Germany and prepare attacks... Another concern among the security services here. They know that IS are trying to radicalise young vulnerable asylum seekers... Many of them of course have been very traumatised by what they've gone through. They're now sitting in refugee accommodation waiting for their asylum papers to be processed. They can't work. There's not much to do. So they're very very vulnerable to radicalisation... Any suggestion of a greater role of the German military on the streets is obviously problematic for Germany given the legacy of World War II and the constitutional ban on the State deploying the army... German armed soldiers haven't deployed on the streets on home soil since the Second World War. It is the ultimate taboo to reverse that. And now it's being discussed"
Is the Internet Making Us an Angrier Society?, episode #162 of Question of the Day on Earwolf - "'I've had death threats... I've had it over 2 different articles... I said no war can be justified... nobody should go to college. The one where I said no one should go to college, a Senior at Brown sent me an email with a death threat. And I actually called Brown University's security and they're like: oh he's a Senior. Do you really want to cause him trouble? He said yeah we've had a problem with him before, he threatened a librarian. Do you really want to cause this kid a problem though? He's almost about to graduate"
People Are Pissed That Matt Bomer Is Going To Play A Trans Woman - "On social media, however, it was a much different story. Almost immediately following the Monday announcement, many expressed their frustration at Hollywood’s decision to cast Bomer, who is openly gay, in a transgender role... Both Eddie Redmayne and Jared Leto came under fire from a number of LGBT rights advocates for playing trans characters in 2015’s “The Danish Girl” and 2013’s “The Dallas Buyers Club,” respectively. It should be noted that both actors received Academy Award nominations for their roles; Leto took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 2014"
Moral of the story: don't bother making movies about "minorities"
Comments: "So now a member of the LGBT community playing a member of the LGBT community isn't acceptable because he's not the right kind of LGBT community member? Even when things are going in the right direction, it's the wrong direction. SMH"
"Gay people have played straight people for years, and over the past couple years some straight actors have played gay people. They are called actors for a reason. It's because they are ACTING."
"Did any transgender actors actually audition for the role? Express any interest? And if they auditioned and Bomer auditioned for the part, do you automatically give it to the transgender actor even if Bomer gave the better performance?"
"If the role is for a straight person, does that mean only straight people can play that role? If only a deaf actor can play a deaf role, let's say the role is that of a teacher. Is someone with an education background more qualified to play that role? Should Laverne Cox only be considered for transgender roles?"
Teenage girl killed herself amid fears she would be branded racist over joke photo she sent friends, inquest hears - "The image was shared beyond the private group and Miss Connop feared their would be a backlash, the inquest heard. She died on July 7 after committing suicide at her family home"
Political correctness/SJW has now claimed at least one life
Social Justice Warriors Push Teen to Suicide - "Extremists of every stripe resort to indiscriminate violence, while moderates and innocent bystanders—including sympathizers to the social justice movement—are made victims based on the color of their skin or socioeconomic status... I was fully immersed in the social justice movement at the time—before I realized that it was more of a cult than an actual cause. I know how bad the culture is now, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get upset when people branded me a racist. And when you’re fully immersed in groupthink, the last thing you want is to be socially ostracized by your peers and disconnected from your only support network. It is a culture of fear... Phoebe Collop isn’t even the first victim of this culture of fear. In 2015, a fan artist who drew illustrations of her favorite characters in the cartoon show, Steven Universe, was bullied into attempting suicide. The artist, who went by the name Zamii, was accused by the Steven Universe and Homestuck fandoms—which are heavily immersed in social justice rhetoric—of racism, transphobia, fatphobia, ableism, and a litany of other sins. She came under fire for drawing an anime character with slightly slanted eyes and yellow skin, and again for drawing a “Native American” Fluttershy from the popular My Little Pony cartoon that was accused of being “stereotypical.” The complaints turned from a trickle into a torrent when she drew Rose Quartz, a Steven Universe character, with slightly less body fat than the official character. And the transphobia she was accused of? It’s because she called someone who identified as gender-neutral “dude.” No number of apologies on her part would get the bullying to stop. In all, over 40 Tumblr blogs and countless social media accounts were created to smear her reputation and brand her a bigot. When one of the show’s creators spoke up on her behalf, he was immediately bombarded with comments accusing him of apologia. He deleted the tweet, and Zamii found herself without any support. So she attempted suicide. Fortunately, she survived the attempt."
This is proof that women are more emotional (and crazier) than men
Hard disk reliability examined once more: HGST rules, Seagate is alarming - "For a second year, the standout reliability leader was HGST. Now a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, HGST inherited the technology and designs from Hitachi (which itself bought IBM's hard disk division). Across a range of models from 2 to 4 terabytes, the HGST models showed low failure rates; at worse, 2.3 percent failing a year. This includes some of the oldest disks among Backblaze's collection; 2TB Desktop 7K2000 models are on average 3.9 years old, but still have a failure rate of just 1.1 percent. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Seagate disks... Newer Seagate disks also show more encouraging results. Although still young, at an average age of just 0.9 years, the 4TB HDD.15 models show a reasonably low 2.6 percent failure rate. Coupled with their low price—Backblaze says that they tend to undercut HGST's disks—they've become the company's preferred hard drive model. As before, this doesn't mean that anyone with a Seagate disk is at risk of an imminent hard disk failure (though you should always have backups!). Backblaze operates disks outside of the manufacturer's specified parameters. Significantly, most consumer-grade disks aren't intended to be heavily used 24/7; they're meant to be operational for about 8 hours a day and replaced every 3 to 5 years. Most home usage environments are likely to be lower in vibration than Backblaze's 45-disk storage pods, too. In more normal conditions, the Seagates are likely to fare much better."
2016 Hard Drive Review: Testing 61,590 Hard Drives
Islamists who preached chastity caught having sex on beach - "A pair of Islamist politicians who have advocated for chastity were caught having sex on a Moroccan beach, officials said. The lovefest between Moulay Omar Benhammad, 63, and Fatima Nejjar, 62, landed them in hot water with their Islamic Unity and Reform Movement (MUR), which is the ideological wing of the Islamic Justice and Development Party"
New York's Biggest Douchebag is Now Terrorizing Asia With His 'JewJetting' - "Whether it’s feasting on caviar and champagne in first class or staying at the most luxurious suites in Shanghai, Mumbai or Tokyo, Lee has done it all — and at little to no cost. He’s an expert in cheating the system and will always find a way to get that free upgrade."
Kate Nardi has really strange facial expressions
Congenital analgesia: The agony of feeling no pain - "One of the things I'm going to have to face soon is the fact that I won't have my left leg anymore. I've had quite a bit of surgery on my left knee in the past and it's got to the point where my doctors have told me to wait until it gives out completely. Once that occurs they're just going to have to amputate."
British Muslims marched off Easyjet flight after WhatsApp messages mistaken for 'Isis material'
"If you suspect it, report it" and security hysteria lead to racial/other profiling
Heben Nigatu — deadlydinos: When straight men are like “but if... - "When straight men are like “but if I share a locker room with a gay guy he might look at me!”
Okay leaving aside the fact that gay doesn’t mean attracted to you
And gay doesn’t mean “lacking in any sort of human decency or inability to prevent staring”
DOES THE THOUGHT OF SOMEONE LOOKING AT YOU IN A SEXUAL WAY, EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE NOT TRYING TO BE SEXUAL, MAKE YOU SLIGHTLY UNCOMFORTABLE MY STRAIGHT MALE FRIEND?
DOES IT
DOES
IT"
Okay. I'm going into the girls' locker room
The Barbie Girls - Marketplace & Online Grocery Shopping Singapore | RedMart
I thought this was some doll thing but this is the Australian sense of the word
Frozen Lobsters from Fresh Seafood
If they're frozen...
Singapore Tamil Brahmin Singles (Singapore) - Meetup - "This is a Unique Platform for all Single ladies and gentlemen from the Tamil Brahmin Community in Singapore to meet up and socialise. Who knows about the outcome?Possibilities are endless-Networking, New Friendships, Romance and more."
That's exclusive
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Turkey Takes Action in Syria - "There's been a wave of anti-American sentiment from Turks towards Americans. But this is a nation well-versed in conspiracy theories. And polls show the majority of Turks somehow believe the US was somehow involved in the failed coup. The CIA somehow or the US government...
Most of what's on TV can trace its origins back to cinema or newspapers or the novel or, of course, to radio. But [the Great British] Bakeoff and its variants are pure television, which wouldn't work in another medium. TV realised that what we audience crave is to see ourselves. Or a slightly heightened and nicer version of us, with the unruly and grumpy and unattractive and just plain boring excluded at the selection stage."
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Russian warplanes use Iranian airbase - "'Putin has perhaps wrong-footed the West again'
'I think so David. I think that basing Russian warplanes in Iran tells us one more thing about Vladimir Putin. He loves being one step ahead of the West. This element of surprise. We've seen it so many times over the last few years. He loves catching the United States off-guard. Now whether that's Russia launching cruise missiles suddenly from the Caspian Sea towards Syria. Or whether it's announcing that Russia is going to be basing its warplanes in Iran. These are things that Putin can point to. Elements of surprise. And again in his world, in his mind I would imagine, this is an example of Russia catching the US off-guard and showing it's a great power'
'See that's why they make ideal friends with Iranian leaders. They love doing the same thing'"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Germany at Crossroads over Terror Threat - "Germany may have in effect imported terror too. I spoke to a senior intelligence source here actually a few days ago and he said to me that they are investigating, his agents are investigating 100s of reports that among refugees IS has actually sent in so-called hit squads. Teams of people posing as asylum seekers to come into Germany and prepare attacks... Another concern among the security services here. They know that IS are trying to radicalise young vulnerable asylum seekers... Many of them of course have been very traumatised by what they've gone through. They're now sitting in refugee accommodation waiting for their asylum papers to be processed. They can't work. There's not much to do. So they're very very vulnerable to radicalisation... Any suggestion of a greater role of the German military on the streets is obviously problematic for Germany given the legacy of World War II and the constitutional ban on the State deploying the army... German armed soldiers haven't deployed on the streets on home soil since the Second World War. It is the ultimate taboo to reverse that. And now it's being discussed"
Is the Internet Making Us an Angrier Society?, episode #162 of Question of the Day on Earwolf - "'I've had death threats... I've had it over 2 different articles... I said no war can be justified... nobody should go to college. The one where I said no one should go to college, a Senior at Brown sent me an email with a death threat. And I actually called Brown University's security and they're like: oh he's a Senior. Do you really want to cause him trouble? He said yeah we've had a problem with him before, he threatened a librarian. Do you really want to cause this kid a problem though? He's almost about to graduate"
People Are Pissed That Matt Bomer Is Going To Play A Trans Woman - "On social media, however, it was a much different story. Almost immediately following the Monday announcement, many expressed their frustration at Hollywood’s decision to cast Bomer, who is openly gay, in a transgender role... Both Eddie Redmayne and Jared Leto came under fire from a number of LGBT rights advocates for playing trans characters in 2015’s “The Danish Girl” and 2013’s “The Dallas Buyers Club,” respectively. It should be noted that both actors received Academy Award nominations for their roles; Leto took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 2014"
Moral of the story: don't bother making movies about "minorities"
Comments: "So now a member of the LGBT community playing a member of the LGBT community isn't acceptable because he's not the right kind of LGBT community member? Even when things are going in the right direction, it's the wrong direction. SMH"
"Gay people have played straight people for years, and over the past couple years some straight actors have played gay people. They are called actors for a reason. It's because they are ACTING."
"Did any transgender actors actually audition for the role? Express any interest? And if they auditioned and Bomer auditioned for the part, do you automatically give it to the transgender actor even if Bomer gave the better performance?"
"If the role is for a straight person, does that mean only straight people can play that role? If only a deaf actor can play a deaf role, let's say the role is that of a teacher. Is someone with an education background more qualified to play that role? Should Laverne Cox only be considered for transgender roles?"
Teenage girl killed herself amid fears she would be branded racist over joke photo she sent friends, inquest hears - "The image was shared beyond the private group and Miss Connop feared their would be a backlash, the inquest heard. She died on July 7 after committing suicide at her family home"
Political correctness/SJW has now claimed at least one life
Social Justice Warriors Push Teen to Suicide - "Extremists of every stripe resort to indiscriminate violence, while moderates and innocent bystanders—including sympathizers to the social justice movement—are made victims based on the color of their skin or socioeconomic status... I was fully immersed in the social justice movement at the time—before I realized that it was more of a cult than an actual cause. I know how bad the culture is now, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get upset when people branded me a racist. And when you’re fully immersed in groupthink, the last thing you want is to be socially ostracized by your peers and disconnected from your only support network. It is a culture of fear... Phoebe Collop isn’t even the first victim of this culture of fear. In 2015, a fan artist who drew illustrations of her favorite characters in the cartoon show, Steven Universe, was bullied into attempting suicide. The artist, who went by the name Zamii, was accused by the Steven Universe and Homestuck fandoms—which are heavily immersed in social justice rhetoric—of racism, transphobia, fatphobia, ableism, and a litany of other sins. She came under fire for drawing an anime character with slightly slanted eyes and yellow skin, and again for drawing a “Native American” Fluttershy from the popular My Little Pony cartoon that was accused of being “stereotypical.” The complaints turned from a trickle into a torrent when she drew Rose Quartz, a Steven Universe character, with slightly less body fat than the official character. And the transphobia she was accused of? It’s because she called someone who identified as gender-neutral “dude.” No number of apologies on her part would get the bullying to stop. In all, over 40 Tumblr blogs and countless social media accounts were created to smear her reputation and brand her a bigot. When one of the show’s creators spoke up on her behalf, he was immediately bombarded with comments accusing him of apologia. He deleted the tweet, and Zamii found herself without any support. So she attempted suicide. Fortunately, she survived the attempt."
Post ID: 5023898450305771122
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