Links - The Google Diversity Memo

Google Employee's Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes 'Internally Viral' - "At least eight Google employees tweeted Friday about a document that was circulated within the company calling for replacing Google's diversity initiatives with policies that encourage "ideological diversity" instead. The document, which is the personal opinion of one senior software engineer, was shared on a company mailing list but has since gone "internally viral"... The person who wrote the document argued that the representation gap between men and women in software engineering persists because of biological differences between the two sexes, according to public tweets from Google employees. It also said Google should not offer programs for underrepresented racial or gender minorities... While the vast majority of Google employees did not support the document's arguments, some did. According to Dogan, who works on the company's Go programming language, the document's author was emboldened by some of the positive responses he got. "The author is now in contact with me explaining why he received *supportive* response," she tweeted. "If HR does nothing in this case, I will consider leaving this company for real for the first time in five years," she wrote in a threaded tweet"
Of course all the sexists and racists (e.g. feminists) are dismissing him because he's a white male. Ironically someone said discrimination against conservatives was justified because they were essentialist assholes.
Some people claimed if you have 2 equally qualified people, offering the minority the job as a matter of policy didn't count as discrimination. I wonder what they would call it if the minority was not offered it as a matter of policy
What does it say if you expect HR to crack down on someone because he disagrees with you, or you'll leave the company?
I wonder how many of the people condemning him have read what he wrote

Exclusive: Here's The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated] - "Despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired. This needs to change...
Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this)...
While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment."
This guy knows his stuff and can cite all the scientific findings supporting his position.
I'm not sure what is worse - those who didn't read it but bashed him based on a caricature or those who did read it and still bashed him on a caricature (e.g. "Saying that a very large group of people can't do their jobs because of their chromosomes"), given that the conclusion was the exact opposite: "I'm also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I'm advocating for quote the opposite: treat people as individuals"

Here Are the Citations for the Anti-Diversity Manifesto Circulating at Google
Conveniently, Gizmodo left them out so his case looked less ironclad than it really was. Then again those who go on the sexism bandwagon won't bother to read the citations anyway, but it's good for reasonable to know that they are there

Google on Anti-Diversity Manifesto: Employees Must 'Feel Safe Sharing Their Opinions'
At least there's this, though she claimed it "advanced incorrect assumptions about gender"

So, about this Googler’s manifesto. – Yonatan Zunger - "(1) Despite speaking very authoritatively, the author does not appear to understand gender.
(2) Perhaps more interestingly, the author does not appear to understand engineering.
(3) And most seriously, the author does not appear to understand the consequences of what he wrote, either for others or himself."
Tellingly, his responses are:
1) Dismiss what he said as false without presenting any evidence at all
2) Reconceptualise engineering (this is at least somewhat defensible)
3) Threaten him and shoot the messenger
Luckily many (the majority?) of the responses challenge him
Comment: "“I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this” — funny that you’re the one displaying a paternalistic attitude over women here. I realize that this isn’t as fun as straight out blackballing the author, but perhaps you could ask the woman’s opinion before banning her for her own good?"

Google Fires Author of Divisive Memo on Gender Differences - "James Damore, the Google engineer who wrote the note, confirmed his dismissal in an email, saying that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes”... firing him could be seen as confirming some of the claims in the memo itself – that the company’s culture makes no room for dissenting political opinions. That outcome could galvanize any backlash against Alphabet’s efforts to make its workforce more diverse... The subject of Google’s ideological bent came up at the most recent shareholder meeting, in June. A shareholder asked executives whether conservatives would feel welcome at the company. Executives disagreed with the idea that anyone wouldn’t. “The company was founded under the principles of freedom of expression, diversity, inclusiveness and science-based thinking,” Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt said at the time. “You’ll also find that all of the other companies in our industry agree with us.""
So much for freedom of expression, diversity, inclusiveness and science-based thinking

Google has fired the employee who penned a controversial memo on women and tech - "In a memo to employees, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the employee who penned a controversial memo that claimed that women had biological issues that prevented them from being as successful as men in tech had violated its Code of Conduct, and that the post had crossed “the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” He added: “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK.”"
Maybe a conservative company should fire an employee who talks about evolution, because that promotes harmful stereotypes about humans and insults human dignity. And the military should fire people who talk about how transgendered people who are on hormones should not be deployed to warzones on combat roles because it will be hard for them to fight.

NPR: Women at Google were so upset over memo citing biological differences they skipped work
SPOING!
This is what happens when you hire SJWs who need exams postponed because Trump won

Internal Messages Show Some Google Employees Supported James Damore’s Manifesto - ""Let's take a step back," the Googler wrote, "and look at what is actually making everyone in Google upset on this thread and in general since the start of the 2016 election season"... Call for employees to give each other hugs at an all hands meeting because the wrong candidate won a presidential election in the country, following by a mass mailing on how to help your kids deal with grief due to the same occurrence
Ok now we know what happens when SJWs graduate from college and go into the workforce

Kirsten Powers and others who’ve read the Google ‘anti-diversity’ memo slam hysterical media coverage - "Probably the most terrifying thing about Darmore is watching people, in real time, lie about what he said, even though we can all read it"

The Most Common Error in Coverage of the Google Memo - "Whether one regards those suggestions as brilliant, rooted in pernicious gender stereotypes, or anywhere in between, they are clearly and explicitly suggestions to increase diversity in a manner the author regards as having a stronger chance of actually working than some of the tactics that he is critiquing... To object to a means of achieving x is not to be anti-x. The failure to apply that same logic to the author of the memo is straightforwardly frustrating for those who agree with many of the views that the memo expressed. And it should also frustrate those who disagree with the author but care about social justice. Every prominent instance of journalism that proceeds with less than normal rigor when the subject touches on social justice feeds a growing national impulse to dismiss everything published about these subjects—even important, rigorous, accurate articles. Large swathes of the public now believe the mainstream media is more concerned with stigmatizing wrong-think and being politically correct than being accurate. The political fallout from this shift has been ruinous to lots of social-justice causes—causes that would thrive in an environment in which the public accepted the facts... To me, the Google memo is an outlier—I cannot remember the last time so many outlets and observers mischaracterized so many aspects of a text everyone possessed... coverage rooted in stigma will be no more effective in stopping the embrace of beliefs expressed by the author than it was at stopping Donald Trump from being elected president."
If the media lies, why is it problematic to call it the lying media?

On That Google Memo About Sex Differences - "A Google employee (James Damore) was recently fired for sharing a memo that referenced some of my scholarly research on psychological sex differences (e.g., personality traits, mate preferences, status-seeking). Google's Vice President of Diversity, Integrity, & Governance, Danielle Brown, deemed the employee's claims "advanced incorrect assumptions about gender"... In the case of personality traits, evidence that men and women may have different average levels of certain traits is rather strong. For instance, sex differences in negative emotionality are universal across cultures; developmentally emerge across all cultures at exactly the same age; are linked to diagnosed (not just self-reported) mental health issues; appear rooted in sex differences in neurology, gene activation, and hormones; are larger in more gender egalitarian nations; and so forth (for a short review of this evidence, see here). In my view, claiming that sex differences exist in negative emotionality is not an "incorrect assumption about gender." It is an empirically well-supported claim (at least, based on the best psychological science we have so far)... Culturally universal sex differences in personal values and certain cognitive abilities are a bit larger in size (see here), and sex differences in occupational interests are quite large. It seems likely these culturally universal and biologically-linked sex differences play some role in the gendered hiring patterns of Google employees"
Science is evil. Don't be evil

Google's Other Ugly Secret: Some Managers Keep Blacklists - "Within Google, a few sympathetic employees were dismayed to see Damore so vehemently criticized by their colleagues. In a poll distributed on a mailing list dedicated to discussing the manifesto, opinion broke down differently than it did in non-anonymous Google Plus posts. The contentious internal discussion revived a concern dating back to 2015: An unknown number of Google managers maintain blacklists of fellow employees, evidently refusing to work with those people. The blacklists are based on personal experiences of others' behavior, including views expressed on politics, social justice issues, and Google's diversity efforts... one Google employee declared his intent to quit if Damore were not fired, and another said that he would refuse to work with Damore in any capacity... Damore's manifesto wasn't classic political speech, said Harmeet Kaur Dhillon, an experienced business and labor lawyer. Rather, it's what she called "controversial speech," not unlike any other opinion that might anger co-workers. She added, "These are not insane views that he's extolling here -- they're [just] out of the mainstream. He's entitled to hold views that are inconsistent with the mainstream." As to whether Google had an obligation to fire Damore, "The question is whether he's acting on those views in a way that violates discrimination law""
36% either strongly or almost agreed with the document's point of view, 57% disagreed that the document was harmful and shouldn't have been shared
The fact that an anonymous poll had different results is evidence of virtue signalling
If many of a company's employees refuse to work with a gay person or threaten to quit if a gay person is not fired, should the gay person be fired?

The Google Memo: Four Scientists Respond - "The author of the Google essay on issues related to diversity gets nearly all of the science and its implications exactly right... The social science evidence on implicit and explicit bias has been wildly oversold and is far weaker than most people seem to realize... It is a painfully familiar atmosphere, one that is a lot like academia. Here, I mainly focus on the reactions to the essay on the Gizmodo site, which indirectly and ironically validate much of the author’s analysis. Very few of the comments actually engage the arguments; they just fling insults and slurs. Yes, slurs. In 1960, the most common slurs were insulting labels for demographic groups. In 2017, the most common slurs involve labelling anyone who you disagree with on issues such as affirmative action, diversity, gaps, and inequality as a racist, sexist, homophobe, or bigot... The arrogance of most of the comments reflects exactly the type of smug self-appointed superiority that has led to widespread resentment of the left among reasonable people...
Among commentators who claim the memo’s empirical facts are wrong, I haven’t read a single one who understand sexual selection theory, animal behavior, and sex differences research. When the memo went viral, thousands of journalists and bloggers transformed themselves overnight from not understanding evolutionary psychology at all to claiming enough expertise to criticize the whole scientific literature on biological sex differences... Google’s new ‘VP of Diversity’, Danielle Brown, criticized the memo because it ‘advanced incorrect assumptions about gender’; I was impressed to see that her Michigan State B.A. in Business and her U. Michigan M.B.A. qualify her to judge the scientific research... almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate. Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately... Graded fairly, his memo would get at least an A- in any masters’ level psychology course... no gender feminist I’ve met has ever been able to give a coherent answer to the question ‘What empirical findings would convince you that psychological sex differences evolved?’...
‘equality and diversity’ dogma... relies on two core assumptions:
- The human sexes and races have exactly the same minds, with precisely identical distributions of traits, aptitudes, interests, and motivations; therefore, any inequalities of outcome in hiring and promotion must be due to systemic sexism and racism;
- The human sexes and races have such radically different minds, backgrounds, perspectives, and insights, that companies must increase their demographic diversity in order to be competitive; any lack of demographic diversity must be due to short-sighted management that favors groupthink.
The obvious problem is that these two core assumptions are diametrically opposed... corporate diversity was never justified to shareholders as a way to avoid lawsuits, PR blowback, or moral shame; it was justified as a competitive business necessity."

No, the Google manifesto isn’t sexist or anti-diversity. It’s science - "As mentioned in the memo, gendered interests are predicted by exposure to prenatal testosterone – higher levels are associated with a preference for mechanically interesting things and occupations in adulthood. Lower levels are associated with a preference for people-oriented activities and occupations. This is why STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields tend to be dominated by men. We see evidence for this in girls with a genetic condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, who are exposed to unusually high levels of testosterone in the womb. When they are born, these girls prefer male-typical, wheeled toys, such as trucks, even if their parents offer more positive feedback when they play with female-typical toys, such as dolls. Similarly, men who are interested in female-typical activities were likely exposed to lower levels of testosterone. As well, new research from the field of genetics shows that testosterone alters the programming of neural stem cells, leading to sex differences in the brain even before it's finished developing in utero. This further suggests that our interests are influenced strongly by biology, as opposed to being learned or socially constructed. Many people, including a former Google employee, have attempted to refute the memo's points, alleging that they contradict the latest research. I'd love to know what "research done […] for decades" he's referring to, because thousands of studies would suggest otherwise. A single study, published in 2015, did claim that male and female brains existed along a "mosaic" and that it isn't possible to differentiate them by sex, but this has been refuted by four – yes, four – academic studies since. This includes a study that analyzed the exact same brain data from the original study and found that the sex of a given brain could be correctly identified with 69-per-cent to 77-per-cent accuracy."

The Evolution of Culturally-Variable Sex Differences: Men and Women Are Not Always Different, but When They Are…It Appears Not to Result from Patriarchy or Sex Role Socialization - "In this chapter, evidence is marshaled across 21 data sources that directly challenge this foundational assumption of social role theory. Empirically, sex differences in most psychological traits—in personality, sexuality, attitudes, emotions, behaviors, and cognitive abilities—are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian sex role socialization and greater sociopolitical gender equity. Even sex differences in many physical traits such as height, obesity, and blood pressure are larger in cultures with more egalitarian sex role socialization and greater sociopolitical gender equity. Three alternative evolutionary perspectives on psychological sex differences—obligate sex differences, facultatively mediated sex differences, and emergently-moderated sex differences—appear to better explain the universal and culturally-variable sex differences reliably observed across human cultures"
The previous article cites this as showing that "women are, on average, higher in neuroticism and agreeableness, and lower in stress tolerance"

Asja Francisti: "After I have seen the way #GoogleMemo story evolved, I am 100% sure that American feminists were sent from some dystopian Margaret Atwood/Iranian mullahs wet dream future to destroy both feminism and women in general. I mean what better way to prove that you're not manipulative, hysterical, emotionally unstable sufferer of eternal victim complex than to dox a guy and get him fired by accusing him of the things he never said and willfully misinterpreting every word he did say? Today, these women are a sad, walking, talking caricature of the worst misogynistic joke."

Julian Assange offers job to fired Google employee who wrote anti-diversity memo - ""Women & men deserve respect. That includes not firing them for politely expressing ideas but rather arguing back." He had previously tweeted: "Identity politics 2.0 wars come to Google. Oh no. But mass spying is fine since its equal opportunity predation.""

"Can Hiring Quotas Work? The Effect Of The Nitaqat Program On The Saudi" by Jennifer R. Peck - "This paper studies the effects of quota-based labor regulations on firms in the context of Saudi Arabia's Nitaqat program, which imposed quotas for Saudi hiring at private firms. I use a comprehensive firm-level administrative dataset and exploit kinks in hiring incentives generated by the quotas to estimate the effects of this policy. I find that the program increased native employment at substantial cost to firms, as demonstrated by increasing exit rates and decreasing total employment at surviving firms. Firms without any Saudi employees at the onset of the program appear to bear most of these costs."

Study offers clues on why women choose medicine over engineering - "the girls in their study tended to choose careers in the biological sciences--social sciences, environmental sciences and medicine--over the mathematically based sciences because they perceived the latter to be less people-oriented and to have less value to society... girls and boys who were more people-oriented--who placed a high value on doing work that helped and involved people--were two to three times more likely to chose college majors and careers in the biological sciences than the mathematically-based sciences. Girls were more likely to be people-oriented and placed a higher value on English than mathematics, while boys ranked the value of mathematics more highly... The researchers also found that math and science self-confidence and performance anxiety played smaller roles in career choice in their study than previous studies have found, indicating that simply raising girls' confidence about math and science is not enough to draw them to mathematically based sciences"
Of course, it's sexier to blame sexism

Chivalry Is Dead? Researchers Say No, People Are More Likely To Protect Women And Children - "participants of both genders were more likely to sacrifice a male or gender-neutral bystander than a woman... participants were told that if they decided to keep all of their money, the individuals they met would be subjected to mild electric shocks. But if they sacrificed their money, the people would be spared. Again, participants were more likely to save women from a negative fate than men. Both experiments show an aversion to harming women, a notion typically associated with chivalry. Interestingly, however, women in particularly were loath to shock other women in the second experiment... “There is indeed a gender bias in these matters: society perceives harming women as more morally unacceptable”"
I've finally found research on how both men and women have a pro-woman bias and want to protect women, not men. Now to find the article where a journalist said when he finds a sad story of a male child he will ask if there's a female child with the same problem, since people show more sympathy
Keywords: pro female, want to protect women, people show more sympathy to women, bias towards women, more pity for women, sympathetic to women, pay to punish those who hurt women, both men and women, cost, more care for women, more sympathy for women than men, express more sympathy for women
Addendum: Paper: Moral Chivalry: Gender and Harm Sensitivity Predict Costly Altruism - Oriel FeldmanHall, Tim Dalgleish, Davy Evans, Lauren Navrady, Ellen Tedeschi, Dean Mobbs, 2016

Moral Chivalry. Gender and Harm Sensitivity Predict Costly Altruism - "women typically receive more help than their male counterparts (Eagly & Crowley, 1986), and in the Dictator game—where one can choose to forgo money in order to be fair—female players are allocated more money than male players"

An issue whose time has come - "“Be careful, it's the third rail.” I received this strong advice to steer clear of studying sex differences from a senior colleague around the year 2000 when my research into brain mechanisms of emotional memory began drawing me into the issue of sex differences—or better yet, sex influences—on brain function. And in a way, he was right. For the vast majority of his long and distinguished neuroscience career, exploring sex influences was indeed a terrific way for a brain scientist not studying reproductive functions to lose credibility at best, and at worst, become a pariah in the eyes of the neuroscience mainstream... Due to a deeply ingrained, implicit (but false) assumption that “equal” means “the same,” most neuroscientists knew, and even feared that establishing that males and females are not the same in some aspect of brain function meant establishing that they were not equal. This assumption is false and deeply harmful, in particular to the health of women (see Cahill, 2014), but remains deeply impactful nonetheless. As a result of these powerful but misguided driving forces, today, sex influences of all types-and-sizes run unexamined and uncontrolled in neuroscience... Fortunately, times are changing. The past 15 to 20 years in particular witnessed an explosion of research (despite the prevailing biases against the topic) documenting sex influences at all levels of brain function. So overpowering is the wave of research that the standard ways of dismissing sex influences (e.g., “They are all small and unreliable,” “They are all due to circulating hormones,” “They are all due to human culture,” and “They don't exist on the molecular level”) have all been swept away, at least for those cognizant of the research. This themed issue of the Journal of Neuroscience Research (JNR) heralds a zeitgeist shift. It is the first ever from a mainstream neuroscience journal entirely devoted to the issue of sex influences on brain/nervous system functioning. Papers from about 70 groups of authors, from those who have been investigating the issue for decades to those uncovering them only recently, forcefully document the fact that sex influences on brain function are ubiquitous, regularly reshaping findings—hence conclusions—at all levels of our field, and powerfully demonstrating how much “sex matters.”"
Unfortunately it is still taboo in many quarters
So much for Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender (which is not peer reviewed, and got negative reviews from many academics in the field)

It may be illegal for Google to punish engineer over anti-diversity memo—commentary - "federal labor law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions. The purpose of the memo was to persuade Google to abandon certain diversity-related practices the engineer found objectionable and to convince co-workers to join his cause, or at least discuss the points he raised... the engineer's memo largely is a statement of his political views as they apply to workplace policies. The memo is styled as a lament to "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber." California law prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action... the engineer complained in parts of his memo about company policies that he believes violate employment discrimination laws. Those policies include support programs limited by race or gender and promotional and hiring scoring policies that consider race and gender. It is unlawful for an employer to discipline an employee for challenging conduct that the employee reasonably believed to be discriminatory, even when a court later determines the conduct was not actually prohibited by the discrimination laws. In other words, the engineer doesn't have to be right that some of Google's diversity initiatives are unlawful, only that he reasonably believes that they are."

Rebels of Google: 'Senior Leaders Focus on Diversity First and Technology Second' - "Breitbart News is now exclusively publishing a series of interviews with Google employees who contacted us in the wake of the manifesto’s publication to confirm its allegations. The interview series, entitled “Rebels of Google,” will be published in full over the coming days. Because every employee who spoke to us fears for their job if their identities were made public, we have provided aliases in place of their real names. In the first interview of the series, a Google employee (alias “Hal”) speaks of witch-hunts and intolerance at Google, as well as dysfunction at the company’s upper echelons... A lot of social justice activists essentially spend all day fighting the culture war, and get nothing done. The company has made it a point to hire more people like this. The diversity gospel has been woven into nearly everything the company does, to the point where senior leaders focus on diversity first and technology second. The companywide “Google Insider” emails used to talk about cool new tech, but now they’re entirely about social justice initiatives. Likewise, the weekly all-hands “TGIF” meetings used to focus on tech, but now they’re split about 50/50 between tech and identity politics signaling. For conservative employees, this is obviously demoralizing, but it is also dangerous. Several have been driven out of the company or fired outright for sharing a dissenting view. Others have had their promotions denied or suffered other forms of deniable retaliation. Most of us just keep our heads down because we can’t afford to lose our jobs... The pro-censorship voices are very loud, and they have the management’s ear. The anti-censorship people are afraid of retaliation, and people are afraid to openly support them because everyone in their management chain is constantly signaling their allegiance to far-left ideology. Our leadership (Sundar in particular) is weak, so he capitulates to the meanest bullies on the block."

Rebels of Google: 'Constant Abuse, Sneers, Insults And Smears ... Sometimes You Get Punched' - "sometimes you get punched. I know at least one engineer did get punched in retaliation for something he posted — I am sure he will corroborate this to you directly... To my understanding, none of these activities were subject to H.R. action. But why would that be the case — bias in support of these discriminatory and hostile behaviors goes pretty much all the way up, management’s just clever enough not to add to the fire (often) but just to let the lower ranks make it happen. You have to remember these people are quite intelligent... The message is clear: if you do not align with SJWs, you do not belong here. Not only do you not belong here — our resident SJWs will gossip around to get you to never, ever work in a good job again. So shut up."

Debating British monarchy

Debating British monarchy | Podcast | History Extra

"[On George V] He was terribly good as being the father of his people. He wasn't very good at being the father of his own children...

For the first twenty six years of his life George the Fifth as he became did not expect to become king and he went on to be a hugely successful king. And many, certainly in modern times, of this country's most successful monarchs - Queen Victoria, George the Fifth, George the Sixth, the present Queen were not born expecting that they would rein.

So one of the slightly quixotic conclusions that one might draw from this and I can't suppose this would necessarily play all that well at Highgrove House is that the best preparation to be a monarch is not to be born expecting to be a monarch... Maybe actually if you're going to be a monarch who reigns rather than rules, maybe it's a positive advantage not to be very well educated. I mean that sounds slightly perverse and again it may not play very well at Highgrove but there is a kind of case for that...

There were two different parts of the English constitution - the dignified part and the efficient part and the efficient part allegedly was the cabinet and the House of Commons and the dignified part was the monarchy and the House of Lords and Bagehot said that a monarch had three rights - to warn, to encourage and to be consulted and this is often trotted out as the essence of how to be a constitutional monarch...

'All the kings we're talking about here like all the other forty one subjects of these books and like Elizabeth the Second today were crowned and anointed with holy oil in a ceremony full of mystery and sanctity... If Prince Charles, when he becomes King, wishes to be crowned not just Defender of the Faith which is of course the Protestant faith in a Protestant service but Defender of All Faiths. There's going to have to be some very nifty theological footwork to try to make that work.'

'At which the English monarchy has of course excelled since the sixteenth century'...

Monarchs historically are generically male and that's because they're supposed to be warrior kings and philosopher kings and lawgivers. And that's historically what monarchs were supposed to do in a time when they ruled. Whereas constitutional monarchy is in a sense emasculated monarchy. They don't do any of those things anymore.

And there's a sense in which it's feminised monarchy. It's much easier for a woman to be a constitutional monarch I think than for a man because if you are a man you are still hankering after these macho things. Doing things, interfering. Whereas actually the point of being a constitutional monarch is that you don't interfere. And the Queen has done that very brilliantly I think. We don't really know what the Queen thinks about anything and to have sustained that across sixty years is a truly extraordinary-'

'And culturally we are used to the idea of figureheads being female. That figureheads on ships are female, statues of great conceptual qualities: justice or liberty are female'...

'Part of the challenge of constitutional monarchy is finding other things for them to do... finding alternative things for them to do which keep them occupied, keep them in the public eye but keep them out of the business of government is in a sense the challenge of constitutional monarchy'"

Links - 9th August 2017

Gaza on the Brink - "If you ask Palestinians in either Gaza or the West Bank who’s responsible for their suffering, most would probably say Israel. But what would they say if they were safely overseas and no longer needed to fear their own governments?... why have so many Gazans fled or tried to flee? The Palestinians Bar’el met had a uniform answer: Hamas. Not a single one of them even mentioned Israel in their responses... There are numerous UN agencies ostensibly devoted exclusively to helping the Palestinians, while human rights groups allocate disproportionate attention to this issue. In both cases, their only real interest in Palestinian suffering is finding some way to blame Israel for it. They couldn’t care less about protecting Palestinians from the abuses of their own government. That’s why they keep issuing reports accusing Israel of being the “key cause” of Palestinian suffering, as one UN agency put it this week, despite all evidence to the contrary... For Palestinians, blaming anyone other than Israel for their problems risks serious repercussions from either their own governments or vigilante groups affiliated with both governments... Blaming Israel is always the safest solution, even in cases where it’s patently untrue... the very fact that Israel is the one party no Palestinian fears to criticize is in itself a potent refutation of Palestinian claims that Israel is an oppressive regime. People who truly live under an oppressive regime are generally afraid to go on record criticizing it."

There Won’t Be Peace While the Power Is Out - "just like in Gaza, the Israeli taxpayer got stuck with the bill, because Israel cares more about Palestinians’ electricity needs than either the PA or Hamas does. If all this were happening because both governments were simply broke, it would be understandable. But in fact, both seem to have plenty of money for their top priority: incentivizing or directly funding anti-Israel terror. The PA, for instance, spent $129 million last year paying above-market salaries to convicted terrorists sitting in Israeli jails, and another $175 million a year in stipends for families of terrorists killed while trying attack Israelis. In other words, its entire debt to Augusta Victoria comes to less than 15 percent of what it spends on anti-Israel terrorists every year, while the “unpayable” portion of its debt to the IEC amounted to just over 40 percent of what it spends on those terrorists every year. So it’s not that it can’t afford to pay for medical care or electricity for its people; it simply considers paying terrorists higher priority."

Egypt 'starts flooding Gaza tunnels' - "The Egyptian military has begun flooding tunnels used by Palestinian militants and smugglers under the border with Gaza, reports say. It is the latest move by Egypt to destroy the tunnels, part of an offensive against insurgents. Excavators have been digging there for weeks to turn the area into what authorities say will be fish farms. Egypt has destroyed thousands of homes and evicted families from the border, where it is creating a buffer zone."
It's only wrong when Israel does it

Why Singapore’s Army Sang Israeli Songs - "Shortly after Singapore declared independence in 1965, the newly created sovereign city-state waited for military assistance from Egypt and India, but got no reply. It was then that Israel’s ambassador to Thailand and Mossad officer Hezi Carmel agreed to help... Singapore’s army, which is now considered one of the strongest in Southeast Asia, adopted a number of IDF practices, including its models of conscription and reserve service (and, for a minute, its marching songs). You know how it goes: ex-British possessions got to help each other out."

Look to Israel for a case study in proportional representation's flaws - "Israel is dogged by a perpetually hung parliament thanks to PR, which has regularly hampered leaders' attempts to push through controversial policies. In the words of Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser: "Designing policy in Israel is like writing poetry while standing on a ball."... Successive governments have paid dearly for forming coalitions with radical minority partners, especially when it comes to the perennial problems associated with the Palestinian conflict. Instead of Israelis having faith in one party to see out its full tenure without having the rug pulled from beneath its feet, reality has meant a constant battle between warring coalition members – often leading to mid-term collapse of governments and early elections. Too many cooks routinely spoil the broth – especially when many of them hail from the extremist, fundamentalist end of the political spectrum... Ultra-orthodox parties use horse-trading to siphon off a significant part of the national budget in order to fund their supporters' unproductive lifestyles (in which most adult males spend their days learning in seminaries rather than as members of the workforce). The unswerving loyalty of ultra-orthodox voters to certain political parties is repaid by their elected officials digging in their heels, time and again, whenever there are calls to reduce the over-generous funding of the religious sector."

Engineering student says Canadian school rejected him for being Israeli - "A Canadian trade school reportedly turned down an Israeli student applicant simply for being Israeli. Israeli civil engineering student and amateur carpenter Stav Daron, who initially spoke with Mako News reporter Ido Daniel, said that he applied to study at the Island School of Building Arts, a Canadian trade school specializing in wood construction and design"

Don't use Chinese privilege to shame me - "In the recent flame war unwittingly initiated by the influencer (Ellie) who panned the food at Ramadan bazaar and suggested her followers give it a miss, a Twitter user accused her of assuming that the bazaar was there for her “privileged Chinese ass”. Aside from my bewilderment at the fact that an opinion on food could take on ethnic connotations, that comment got my (Chinese) hackles up. I’m peeved that the incident was turned into a racial debate, when clearly, it was simply a matter of ignorance and insensitivity. On this point, I’m prepared to throw myself to the wolves (i.e. trolls) and align myself with Xiaxue in saying that I feel the influencer should’ve stuck by her guns... when did it become the done thing to pull the race card to shame someone into recanting a perfectly legitimate personal opinion?... Does being Chinese make us the poster children of privilege? Because being the majority, I was told that we’re lucky to be insulated from being discriminated against. Someone tell that to Ellie."
It's a lot sexier to shame people for being "racist" than to actually make a coherent argument

Man drinking pint while fleeing terror becomes symbol of London spirit

London attack: CNN accused of ‘fake news’ over ‘staged’ anti-ISIS protest in viral video - "In a video uploaded by user @markantro on Monday, CNN anchor Becky Anderson can be seen standing to one side while police and TV producers assist a group of Muslim women assemble a makeshift memorial featuring flowers and protest signs. “Look at all the people around me here, behind me here, sad about last night but hopeful for tomorrow,” Anderson says in the news clip. “On the left here, Londoners came to help hurt, behind me you can see a sign here, hashtag ‘turn to love’, hashtag ‘for London’, hashtag ‘ISIS will lose’, and flowers left in remembrance of those who left their lives.” The original uploader described it as “#fakenews”. “CNN creating the narrative,” he tweeted. “Note the white police officers leaving before the CNN shot & the Asian officers coming in. They then left after they went off air! Amazing thing is, I was getting called a ‘weekend warrior’ by several journalist [crews] while filming this.”"

Margaret Court: Tennis is 'full of lesbians', says Australian Grand Slam legend - ""When I was playing there was only a couple [of lesbians]," Court said. "But those couple that led took young ones into parties and things. What you get at the top is often what you'll get right through that sport.""

Aiswarya Ashln on Twitter: "Walked into Pizza Hut and they said non muslims can't eat here until 8:30, lol at our country honestly"
Malaysia Boleh!

Indigenous knowledge systems can help solve the problems of climate change
Comments: "Sorry but aboriginal Australians did not live 'completely sustainably' as you say, they were responsible for a number of megafauna extinctions, mainly because the fecundity of said fauna was so low"
"Piffle. We already KNOW that we can heal climate change if we reduce our numbers to less than a million, roam in small groups as hunter gatherers and return to the stone age."
"Interesting facts, but they really have no place here. This is about identity and feelings, and other stuff. Hope and justice. If you want facts, data, history and logic, I suggest you take your elitist attitude over to a scientific journal." (this didn't seem to be a parody)
"So reduce life expectancy back to 30 something and infant mortality up to 50%, problem solved."
"Yep. And chuck the disabled onto anthills"

Baby boomers caused millennials' destructive spending habits - "Millennials are threatening dozens of industries. They don't buy napkins. They won't play golf. They aren't buying homes or cars. And they're not even eating at Buffalo Wild Wings."
Apparently industries are entitled to our money

Why Wonder Woman's Ending Doesn't Work - "Few would deny that Wonder Woman is a good film. It’s the best entry in the DC Extended Universe by a wide margin, offering up some intense action underscored by impressive central characterisation – Gal Gadot is Wonder Woman and Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor gives us the best superhero love interest ever put to screen. In fact, Patty Jenkins’ direction is so assured that she manages to make the character’s electric theme from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice work in a 1917-set adventure. However, that only gets us two-thirds of the way. Just as undeniable as basic quality is that the ending’s a major deflation, letting down Diana Prince and Trevor, and reaffirming several systemic problems with the franchise."

Batikhäxor: Swedish feminists accused of widespread sexual exploitation of young refugees - "The “Batikhäxor” are the explosive new scandal rocking Sweden. Swedish social service workers tend to be older women that are outspoken advocates of socialism, feminism, multiculturalism, ect. It is now being alleged that many of these women actually get involved in social services in order to have sex with young immigrant men. Some Swedish media outlets are even accusing these women of “exploiting teenagers” for sex. These women are being called”Batikhäxor,” which is sometimes translated into English as “Dye Witch.” It is a derogatory Swedish slang term for an unattractive woman who is an outspoken advocate of feminism and political correctness. Similar to what is called a “Social Justice Warrior” in the USA, but specifically for older women. The ongoing double-murder trial of Johanna Moller has brought the scandal to the forefront. Moller is accused of having an Afghan refugee murder her husband and father. During the trial, it has been alleged that she routinely plied underage refugees with drugs and alcohol and had sex with them. She even took naked pictures with them, which were leaked to the press. Swedish commentator Ann Heberlein says that she personally knows of numerous cases of female social workers having sex with young refugee men"

Report: Swedish Women Prove Their Tolerance by Having Sex With Refugees - "another Swedish woman has been exposed as performing lap dances for “child refugees” (migrants in their 20’s and 30’s) and having “intimate relationships with them at an asylum centre in Åmål. Volunteers working at the Calais migrant camp in France before it was demolished were also accused of having sex with migrants by other charity workers. A whistleblower who worked at the Calais camp said women were having sex with “boys believed to be under the age of consent,” as well as prostituting themselves out to several different sexual partners every day. The founder of CareForCalais, a volunteer charity, also left her husband for a relationship with a Tunisian migrant who later ripped her off for thousands of pounds. Clare Moseley began a relationship with the migrant after she had “promoted her charity’s no sex with migrants policy”."

YouTuber Laci Green Slams 'Everyday Feminism' for Publicly Excommunicating Her - "Feminist YouTuber Laci Green’s decision to reach across the political aisle and engage with individuals critical of her views has been met with a mixture of acceptance and skepticism—but mostly acceptance. Critics of progressivism generally embrace discourse and debate as productive pursuits. The same can’t be said of leftist feminists, who’ve taken to vilifying the popular YouTuber for “sleeping with the enemy,” both literally and figuratively. Green’s apparent closeness with non-social-justice YouTubers has led to misogynistic remarks reducing her to her sex, and stripping her of personal agency. This serves as the perfect example of how modern feminism isn’t empowering... “Liberal feminist card: REVOKED! Dialogue is OPPRESSIVE! There’s NO SUCH THING as hating men! Identity politics are VALID CRITICISM!” quipped Green on Twitter. “[I’m] looking forward to dragging all the blatantly anti-science bulls**t on this condescending ass website without feeling guilty”... “The witch hunts and censorship and labeling everyone a Nazi is actively hurting the causes feminists fight for,” replied Green. “[T]he silence is more harmful to feminism at this point [in my opinion]. My main beef with it comes from the sex [education] world. To me, caring about it means speaking up about toxicity within, even though that toxicity will likely turn itself on you. If you do decide to say something: my advice is to be as patient and self-aware as you can. Stay true to yourself, know what you stand for and who you are, and don’t let others bully you into silence on either side.”"

Elderly German Woman Fined 1,350 Euros After Sharing Anti-Migrant Joke on Facebook - "A 62-year old woman living in Berlin, Jutta B., had her home raided and arrested by police for the crime of sharing an image on Facebook captioned as “Do you have anything against refugees?”... Following the fine, the woman received a number of abusive messages from others on Facebook. A left-wing “anti-fascist” group, Anti-Fascist Action, has reportedly sent death threats to the woman."

Canada's New Law Lets Government Take Children Away If Parents Don’t Accept Their Gender Identity

Canada's New Law Lets Government Take Children Away If Parents Don’t Accept Their Gender Identity - "The Supporting Children, Youth and Families Act of 2017, also know as Bill 89, was passed in Ontario by a vote of 63 to 23, The Christian Times reported. The law, which replaces old laws governing child protection, foster care and adoption services, instructs all child services and judges, to take into consideration a child’s “race, ancestry, place of origin, color, ethnic origin, citizenship, family diversity, disability, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.” Minister of Child and Family Services Michael Coteau, who introduced the bill, said “I would consider that a form of abuse, when a child identifies one way and a caregiver is saying no, you need to do this differently”... The child services in Ontario, Canada got into hot water back in April after it removed two foster children from a Christian couple’s home because they said no to lying to the girls that the Easter bunny is real"
How come children can opt to take hormone blockers which damage their health even if most non gender conforming children don't turn out to be transgender, but yet can't consent to sex?

At Evergreen State, Hand Gestures Are Microaggressions - "vergreen State College has become a total and complete clusterf**k, like if Tumblr kids did the French Revolution. The college has been shut down for three school days due to violent threats, as a mob runs the campus. Student protesters have managed to beat down the wills of the school administration so much, that they can prevent them from making any hand gesture at all because they believe it is a “microaggression.”"

Evergreen State Activists Demand Humiliating Video Be Deleted - "the activists demanded that the video of their campaign be taken down from the Internet—because they claim it was “stolen” by “white supremacists.” The video of the students’ shrieking arguments and attempts to bully the professor into agreeing with them made the rounds on social media, causing humiliation for both Evergreen and the student activists involved in the debacle. The mob demanded his resignation following the spread of the video"

When the Left Turns on Its Own - The New York Times - "Reasonable people can debate whether or not social experiments like a Day of Absence are enlightening. Perhaps there’s a case to be made that a white-free day could be a useful way to highlight the lack of racial diversity, particularly at a proudly progressive school like Evergreen. Yet reasonable debate has made itself absent at Evergreen. For expressing his view, Mr. Weinstein was confronted outside his classroom last week by a group of some 50 students insisting he was a racist. The video of that exchange — “You’re supporting white supremacy” is one of the more milquetoast quotes — must be seen to be believed. It will make anyone who believes in the liberalizing promise of higher education quickly lose heart. When a calm Mr. Weinstein tries to explain that his only agenda is “the truth,” the students chortle... photographs and names of his students were circulated online. “Fire Bret” graffiti showed up on campus buildings. What was that about safe spaces?... Shutting down conservatives has become de rigueur. But now anti-free-speech activists are increasingly turning their ire on free-thinking progressives. Liberals shouldn’t cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what’s liberalism about?"

Parasitism

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Parasitism

"[They make up] Half the world's biomass - humans have 400 parasites knocking about the most of us...

Most of the cells within your skin are not your cells - they're the cells either of parasites or of bacteria who for the time being are being helpful rather than parasitic but can switch... the proportion of cells in your body which are human are equivalent to your left leg from the knee to the toe. That's the only human cells. All the rest are other cells...

If the hosts are too successful... if you grow mice in the lab... and ensure there is absolutely no other living creature, parasite or bacteria or anything else within these mice: they're called axenic mice, then they're very very feeble and weak and they die... Many things which have been thought to be harmful parasites, almost inevitably turn out to be doing good things as well as bad things...

'The famous mitochondria... started life off at the dawn of time as an intracellular parasite, has been reduced by this battle between the host and the parasite to become an essential part of the cellular machinery but can now and again itself, tiny as it is, turn on its owner and destroy it'

'Parasites can have a positive and good'

'Trouble is, words like positive and good don't really belong in biology. It turns into theology then'...

There is a strong tie between various psychiatric conditions things like schizophrenia, depression and so on. People with those conditions are much more likely to have the toxoplasma in their brain and there are claims - and the figures are fairly impressive - that if you look at people who have been killed by dangerous driving, they are twice as likely to be have been infected by toxoplasma as is the general population...

A lot of parasites, for example some of the worms that infect our guts, lay their eggs and they come out in our feces and they go into the environment. And because those eggs then have to last survive very well in the environment in order for the next host to pick them up, they are very resistant in the environment so they got hard shells around them and so on. So that means that quite often they are very well preserved in archaeological remains...

When flush toilets first came in to Brian what did they do to Cholera? They made it worse. Because what happened was that they just pumped it straight into the river Thames...

If we were to remove all parasites quite simply in nature there would, nature would be less diverse. We would see less diversity at the genetic level, looking at traits and behaviors. Even talking about all the different ways that parasites can shape hosts' behaviors and traits and appearance and also genes. But also at the ecosystem level.

So it's been shown recently in the tropics that if there is one particular host species which is quite dominant in the community the parasites can target that species, knock it back and that would let otherwise inferior competitors to flourish. That is until they themselves become common and parasites can go after them...

There is a new wave of research showing that the microbes residing within us and ones as part of our microbiome, the microbial community that we harbor can actually provide a barrier of defense against parasitic infection"

Links - 5th August 2017

The Impact of Moral Incentives on Credit Card Repayment in Indonesia - "Messages stating that “non-repayment of debts by someone who is able to repay is an injustice” significantly increased the number of clients meeting minimum payments, proving more effective than substantial financial incentives for repayment. Sending either a simple reminder or an Islamic quote unrelated to debt repayment had no effect... Cash rebates equal to 50 percent of the customer’s minimum payment increased the share of customers making the minimum repayment by 7 percent, less than half the effect of the moral messages. The cost of text message reminders was negligible, but the bank incurred additional costs to fulfill rebates, making the moral appeal significantly more cost-effective at increasing repayment."

Oh, My God | Tell Me Something I Don't Know - "This goes back to the concept of a mamzer. Now in Yiddish and in Hebrew a mamzer is a bastard and so you'll hear this in America: you know that guy who took my parking space. What a mamzer, right? But actually in Torah a mamzer is the issue of an adulterous woman - not an adulterous man, a married men can do whatever he wants... but if a married woman has a child born to somebody who is not her husband that child is considered a mamzer and mamzerum - mamzers - have a particular stigma. Which is that they can't marry a fellow Jew except for a fellow mamzer or a convert. And the stigma is so severe that it carries on to ten generations of the issue of the original mamzer. So basically the mamzer has almost no marriage pool so Israeli civil courts never order paternity tests to determine if a child was born to a married woman who's had an affair because they don't want any child or those subsequent generations to bear that stigma. They also interestingly do their best to look the other way - they do back flips to presume that maybe it wasn't adulterous. So even if she is estranged from her husband and her husband's been living in a foreign land they say well maybe about nine months before the birth he took an overnight flight, he took a red eye back and they rekindled that original spark. So we can't prove they didn't have sex that night so maybe it's actually the husband's child and it's not a mamzer...
[On the slave boy in Matthew and Luke] Interestingly enough both Matthew and Luke in the original text did not use the word slave or servant, they use the word pais, from the Greek. Which means beloved boy. What do we know about our friends the Romans? We know that they would leave their wives at home and bring their young men with them and when you actually consider it through that prism the story makes a lot more logical sense. Why would an occupying officer seek out a local homeless Jewish mystic faith healer to come into his house to heal a common slave unless he was much more than just a common slave and why would the apostles be so repulsed by this? Viewed in this context the story makes a lot of sense especially considering Jesus's record of forgiving prostitutes and adulterers and blessing a gay union"

Pilot Cancels Transatlantic Flight Because Of Passenger's Wifi Hotspot Name - "Shortly before the flight was scheduled to depart, a passenger discovered a wifi hotspot with the name “Jihadist Cell London 1.”"

The cherry picked science in Vox’s Charles Murray article - "As Timothy B. Lee writes, “This debunking of Charles Murray doesn’t appear to include a single quote of Murray’s arguments in his own words.” (Lee is a reporter at Vox, but presumably he was not involved in editing the article.) ... it is important to emphasize just how mainstream Murray’s views are in the field of intelligence research. The most controversial sentence in The Bell Curve attributed about half of the black-white IQ gap to genetics, the rest to environment. In 2013, a survey of 228 intelligence researchers found that the typical scientist in this field agrees... behavioral geneticists will announce over 600 SNPs statistically associated with educational attainment — and IQ by proxy. Are you ready to come back to this topic with that data in hand?"

Black Lives Matter Hosted Black-People-Only Party on Memorial Day - "The venue was evasive when Heat Street questioned them on whether holding racially-segregated events is legal."

Doctors warn women against putting wasp nests in their vaginas - "Some online retailers have been selling oak galls, which are nests that house wasp eggs before they hatch, and touting them as a natural way of cleaning female genitals. The product reportedly is crushed into a paste and applied topically, with one listing on Etsy, which has now been removed, claiming it can improve a woman’s sex life."

Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album attacked by feminist writer - "Amanda Marcotte slammed the Fab Four's seminal album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, because it 'repelled the female gaze.' Marcotte, who writes for left-wing US website Salon, 'resents' Sgt Pepper because it transformed the Beatles from being a band teenage girls could enjoy to 'respectable art' aimed at 'grown men'... Marcotte courted controversy in 2007 when she called supporters of defendants in the Duke lacrosse rape case: 'rape-loving scum'. It was later found that all three men, students at Duke University in the US, were falsely accused of the crime."

Civil society's role cannot be to provide public goods - "While there are important roles for civil society, the argument that we should count on civil society to provide housing solutions instead of pursuing policy change reflects a misunderstanding about the nature of housing problems, how public policies work, and what civil society can and cannot do... policies represent collective decisions about what society deems important and who may claim public resources. For instance, if education or healthcare policiesdiscriminate against the children of single, unmarried parents, we would find that deeply objectionable... The issue at hand is therefore also one of fairness and equality: Public goods should be evenly accessible to all members of society. When we see unevenness in our public policy, we should work harder to resolve it collectively, rather than push the resolution to individual actors such as civil society."
The definition of public goods is really broad nowadays
Why is it okay for housing policy to "discriminate" against singles? Or cigarette smokers. And non-Singaporeans, for that matter

Trump protesters could be facing decades in prison for inauguration demonstrations - "the 212 protesters were arrested by the Metropolitan Police Department and initially charged with felony rioting, a crime that carries a 10-year prison sentence and a $25,000 fine. On April 27, the Superior Court of the District of Columbia added additional charges that include urging to riot, conspiracy to riot and destruction of property.The possibility of long-term prison sentences for these protesters could have a chilling effect on participation in future rallies, particularly at a time of heightened levels of anti-Trump activism... Alsip and the other defendants face the additional strain of having to pay for travel expenses to and from Washington for each of their court hearings before they go to trial. “Most of us don’t have a whole lot of money,” she said. “Generally we are fighting the rich because we are economically or politically disadvantaged and don’t have a lot of capital.”"
Apparently it's a threat to free speech to prosecute Trump protesters for rioting and destroying property

Feminist writer says wonder woman isn't feminist enough, because she's sexy and good looking - "Christina Cauterucci – a writer for Slate, argues that Wonder woman fails as a Feminist movie because of the super-heroine’s sex appeal... It gets worse.She also thinks the movie is homophobic. I can’t even see the logic here... Maybe the reason there aren’t enough women in the movie is because this is a movie about the allied powers fighting Germany and the Ottoman empires in the first world war – a war I don’t remember many women lining up to fight in?"
Can't help that she's Jewish either
Feminists would say that since Wonder Woman is fiction anyway, we should pretend that lots of women fought in World War I too

Israeli 'Wonder Woman' Star Gal Gadot Attacked On Twitter For 'Zionist' Pro-IDF Views - "The comments come in response to Gadot’s military service, where she spent a mandatory two years in the Israeli Defense Force. Gadot has been vocally supportive of the Israeli military since her service and has been criticized frequently for it. “I am sending my love and prayers to my fellow Israeli citizens” wrote Gadot in a Facebook post two years ago. “Especially to all the boys and girls who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children…We shall overcome!!! Shabbat Shalom! #weareright #freegazafromhamas #stopterror #coexistance #loveidf”. The post received over 200,000 likes in support, but started a very bitter group of critics against Gadot’s work."
If saying you support the IDF means you support genocide, does saying you support US troops mean you endorse waterboarding and Abu Ghraib style torture? Then again at least waterboarding and Abu Ghraib style torture actually happened

When Will Wonder Woman Be a Fat, Femme Woman of Color? - Ms. Magazine Blog - "On Paradise Island, there are Black warriors in addition to white ones, which is a good start, but other women of color are missing. Also, while the female warriors are strong and ass-kicking, they all have tall, thin body types and they all could be models on a runway. In fact, in a pivotal battle scene, Wonder Woman struts across the battlefield as if on a catwalk. As a result, their physical strength plays second fiddle to their beauty, upholding the notion that in order to access power women must be beautiful in a traditional way. Especially with the body positivity movement gaining steam, the film could have spotlighted female warriors with fat, thick and short body types"
Not the Onion, but Ms Magazine

'Wonder Woman' And The Power Of Watching A Woman Save The World - "I cried within the first five minutes of “Wonder Woman.” And then about 10 minutes later. And then another 15 minutes after that. In fact, I found myself choking up on and off throughout the entire 2+ hour film ― not because the movie was sad, but because I had never seen anything quite like it. Just the visual of seeing an army of ripped, powerful women charging down to protect each other and their world was enough to bring me to tears.. “I blacked out with joy,” Meredith Fineman, CEO of FinePoint told HuffPost about watching the film’s opening scenes. “It was only women ― fighting, being strong, putting themselves in danger, with muscles and beauty”... When it comes to pop culture, we speak often about representation; the simple yet often unfulfilled idea that it matters to see someone like you fill a variety of imagined roles on screen... Movies and TV shows help expand (and reinforce) what we see as “normal” and what we believe to be possible. It should feel both normal and possible to see a woman help save the world, even if she’s not an immortal Amazonian daughter of Zeus."
In the grand scheme of things, these people have slightly fewer issues than the feminists who want a fat, ugly, brown/black Wonder Woman
If representation matters, why isn't anyone calling for a superhero who's a fat, ugly neckbeard who has bad skills with women?
Comments: "its not like she's the first (or only) comic book super heroin in a movie. It all just feels manufactured to me. Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, Ellen Ripley in Aliens, Katniss in the Hunger Games, Sarah Connor in Terminator, Alice in Resident Evil, Rhona Mitra as Eden Sinclair in Doomsday, and Sonja in Underworld: Rise of Lycans, Kate Beckinsale in Underworld, Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider, Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron in Prometheus, Charlize Theron in Aeon Flux, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, Halli Berry in Catwoman and X-Men, Gina Carano in Haywire, Furiosa in Mad Max, Rey in Star Wars, Pam Grier in Foxy Brown, all are movies with strong female leads (or at least co-stars). Why the floodworks for this movie?"
Of course there's a lot more misandry and racism in the comments but it is Huffpost

Grant Morrison Weighs In On “Batman v Superman’s” Wonder Woman - "Grant Morrison says that while he can appreciate why current takes on Wonder Woman are so aggressive, readers should expect something closer to her creator’s vision when they pick up the “Wonder Woman: Earth One” graphic novel. “I can understand why they’re [depicting a warrior Wonder Woman],” Morrison said in an interview with Nerdist. “I get all that, but that’s not what [creator] William Marston wanted, that’s not what he wanted at all!”... “[Marston’s] original concept for Wonder Woman was an answer to comics that he thought were filled with images of blood-curdling masculinity”... “Yanick Paquette did this amazing design job, where there are no phallic objects. The only phallic objects are like these Greek towers that are almost like this haunting echo of the culture they came from… Wonder Woman’s Invisible Plane is now shaped like a vagina, it’s the most incredible thing. It opens up in the back and it has a little clitoris hood, everything is a female-based design. It’s all based on shells and natural stuff. He’s created this entire newly designed world for the Amazons. And for the first 48 pages, there are no men — it’s just women talking to each other.”"

Sex, Love, Bondage: The Vision of William Moulton Marston - "It was while working in this capacity that Marston had the idea to create a new kind of superhero, one who would combat crime with love, rather than violence. It was his wife’s idea that this new hero should be a woman...
Wonder Woman is very much the product of Marston’s worldview. Through his psychological research, Marston had come to the conclusion that women were naturally superior to men, both morally and in terms of skill. Further, he believed that women’s tendency toward loving submission was far preferable to masculine authority, which he viewed as toxic and violent.
Such themes were apparent in the early Wonder Woman stories, where the all-women utopia of Paradise Island was accompanied by the Reform Island penal colony, where enemies of the Amazons were not punished, but rehabilitated. Additionally, the goal of the much-vaunted bondage imagery that pervaded Marston’s stories was two-fold: first, to serve as a metaphor for the oppression women suffer in patriarchal society, and second, to add an erotic element so that young readers found themselves associating submission with love, through what Marston called “sex love training.”"

Why 'Wonder Woman' Soared and 'Ghostbusters' Sagged - "One film ignored gender politics while the other tried to capitalize on it — and audiences made their choice"
Misogyny was the reason Ghostbusters failed huh?

Is 'Wonder Woman' the New 'Ghostbusters?' - "Some social justice warriors aren’t keen on the finished product anyway. Turns out they didn’t like giving co-star Chris Hemsworth, a man, so many funny moments. The movie failed to properly “out” Kate McKinnon’s character as a lesbian. Even director Paul Feig slyly suggested the character is gay, but the studio preferred to blur that matter. And it didn’t give the women more fully developed characters.Then again, it looks like the “Wonder Woman” movie may not be perfect, either.: Three men wrote Wonder Woman, and that's a problem"
Even such blatant SJW pandering as Ghostbusters didn't satisfy some of them. So why bother?

Policing Offence

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Policing Offence

"The politics of offence, identity and rights are becoming ever more complicated and toxic. You can say it's great to have a black president but not that you'd like a white one. Ditto women. Just when you've learned to call the sexually ambiguous or at least transient transgender, you're told the concept of gender is now unacceptably binary and hence insulting.

There're exploding tripwires of social acceptability everywhere, with a new language to describe perceived offensiveness: microaggressions. So-called safe spaces and trigger warnings to protect students from being confronted with ideas they don't agree with. Presumably calling them the snowflake generation for their oversensitivity is unacceptably offensive too.

It only seems to work one way. Black or brown people can't be racist about whites. Women, if that's not too binary a description, can't be sexist about men...

Are we stifling opinion and debate, making the political personal and identity more important than ideas?...

It basically is a way of trying to trump each other by how many suffering points we have based on not what you've thought or said or achieved but based on the accidents of birth and skin colour...

'Often it is presented as natural and that is the problem. We need to accept that we're socialized in certain ways and often women are presented as, when Theresa May was announced as Prime Minister a lot of people were talking about how women always clear up men's mess as if we are hardwired to do that. Yes we're socialized to do that but it's not naturally ingrained within us'

'Isn't this what takes us into this kind of - so it might be all right to say that women are better write, crime writers than men. As long as I say women are socialized to be better crime writers. So you end up in this situation where as long as I use all the right words it will be okay'...

I've just written this book called 'I find that offensive' and the thing that drives me mad is when people start every sentence: as a woman i find that offensive or as a lesbian I find that offensive or as a person of color I find that offensive, you know what I mean...

Identity is used to try and trump somebody else and silence them. You know if somebody says as a woman I find that offensive, you are meant to shut up...

People are drawing attention to the fact that they are systematically being silenced. So what we need to realize is that we can talk about individuals and we talk about specific instances but actually what this is a product of is a system that is unfair...

'You just critiqued essentialism a moment ago. So I mean when you say they're drawing attention to the fact that they have been systematically silenced, I mean there is no comparison between: when you say as a woman does that mean a Theresa May woman, an Andrea Leadsom woman? A you woman, a me woman?...

We're not having sophisticated discussion about oppression in society at the moment. What we are having is competing identities trying to say what's acceptable to be said and policing ourselves. You know like people say you are not allowed to say that about lesbian, gay rights because you're not from the LGBT community... if you only look at things through the prism of identity you avoid critiquing them for what they are saying, what their ideas and what their politics are. That's what my critique is.'

'And i agree with that to an extent but that is to assume that we aren't all judged on certain qualities. That we aren't all judged on being a woman, on being a person of color. That those things we carry them with us every day and we are judged on those criteria'

'No no. When you say we carry them with us, it's become fashionable to make a virtue out of producing them as part of your argument which is actually an essentializing way of reducing politics down to identity'...

'I think identity nowadays actually squashes ideas and puts an end to politics full stop. I think one other consequence of this that we can see is that not all identities are equal.

So feminists have spent decades arguing that we need to have more women represented in positions of leadership so they can act as role models for younger women. And then we get to women at the weekend in the runoff for the Conservative party leadership and suddenly these are the wrong kind of women. These are just are females who happen to be put into a position of power. They're not women that feminists actually approve of.

I think one of the consequences of this and where this takes us is that we've become unable to separate out the personal from the political nowadays and we've become unable to separate out things that we disagree with from things that we are insulted by and we're far too quick to jump to be outraged and jump to be insulted than actually sit down and be able to engage in political dialogue'

'I'm rarely outraged by things people say to me but isn't it important for us to be sensitive to the effect our words have on other people?'

'I actually think it's patronizing and insulting to worry so much about the effect that we might have on somebody by our words that we stop ourselves from saying those words. I actually think it's far more respectful to say what we think and assume that the person we're talking to is able to cope with debate in exactly the same way that we consider ourselves able to cope with debate... I think it's very very insulting to talk down to people and I think the biggest way you can talk down to someone is by changing your language'...

'Peter Thatchell... Even you have fallen foul of this stuff, haven't you? You've been accused, unfairly I'm sure, of bigotry, racism and transphobia. If it happens to you what hope for the rest of us?'

'Well precisely. Particularly when there is no evidence ever presented for those allegations... I was one of the champions of identity politics forty years ago, fifty years ago... in those days women, ethic minority people, lesbians, gay men, disabled people, others were totally excluded from the public discourse and political debate...

What I think has to some extent gone wrong is as your previous speakers have alluded to is that identity is increasingly being used as a weapon to either denigrate or silence people because of their particular traits or background. Now I believe that a good idea is a good idea regardless of who proposes it or what their background is. Just because someone is a straight white male doesn't mean to say automatically their idea is invalid. They should be judged on the content of what they say, not on those characteristics...

You have to judge someone on what they intended. If they have made a mistake, be ready to forgive and to educate rather than punish. And I think so much of identity politics is about punishing people who make mistakes...

'I asked her to explain exactly why it was impossible for a black person to be a racist about white people or women to be racist about, sexist about men. And she answered with a distinction which I didn't quite follow between prejudice and racism but it had something to do with historic power structures. I think her real argument-'

'I understand the point and the point is that racism is prejudice plus power... these ideas are almost impossible to understand unless you spend your life in discussing these kinds of questions and for me one of the criteria, criteria for a political idea is that it's something that people can understand. If a political idea is something that you can't understand unless you're steeped in that area it's a problematic idea for me'...

'She started to get into contradictory territory because she actually understood something of the dangers of essentializing people to their identity. She mentioned the word essentialism but she actually then went on to do exactly that very thing it seemed to me. And although she kept saying yes I know the danger of doing that but on the other hand I think it's important that we are able to draw attention to the historic plight of women when we talk... rather arrogantly assume all of the struggles of your particular gender or know.

I'm always very tempted to say there's an Irish person, you can't possibly say that's me because you know I mean I went through the famine you know... She is asserting, her view is that in a world of absolute equality there would be no gender differences. Now that is a very debatable proposition. If we're going to say well where anybody who doesn't agree with her about that debatable proposition is somehow deemed to be offensive we're in a very difficult world'

'Or also privileged. I mean that's the thing is where like you don't know because I'm the woman and I understand it because of. And you think no it's a political analysis, let's discuss it'...

He felt as a Guardian writer, reader that he could talk to Guardian writers and readers but he didn't think that UKIP's telling the same joke to the same material to a UKIP audience should be allowed. Very liberal, very Guardian"

Who Owns Culture?

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Who Owns Culture?

"A big brass cockerel suddenly became an unlikely though some might say appropriate prize in the great twenty first century tussle over history, justice and restitution. The cockerel stands in the hall of Jesus College Cambridge. Has done for a century or more. It was originally part of the treasure taken by a British punitive expedition that overthrew and ransacked the African kingdom of Benin in the late nineteenth century, the zenith of British imperialism. The exact opposite for the Benin Empire of course.

The students at Jesus College have voted unanimously to call for the cock to be returned, not without some controversy. The original motion was deemed despicable for its supposed paternalistic and colonial language and because not enough black students in the wider university had been consulted. Being right on is very exacting these days.

To the students it's a simple matter of justice. Wicked imperialist loot to be returned to its rightful owners.

The history is slightly more complicated. The kingdom of Benin was destroyed after it had massacred a peaceful and though doubtless scheming British delegation. Benin itself was an imperial military dictatorship that enslaved fellow Africans to sell to European traders.

As it no longer exists the question rises over who exactly in present day Nigeria it should be returned to. Nonetheless the Jesus cockerel takes its place alongside the Elgin marbles as cultural symbols of past injustice for which we must make amends...

I'm glad that Britons who valued the Elgin marbles looked after them at a time when Greeks were indifferent to them and I'm just sorry that the British Museum didn't have care of artifacts that are now being destroyed in Aleppo and Palmyra...

I think that the whole idea of repatriation is Romantic, essentialist. It's based on the idea that everything is the cultural property of somebody along essentially ethnic lines...

If we look at the principle of the Benin bronzes there's already a conflict in Nigeria. Are the cultural owners of those the Nigerian people in which case they go to the National Museum in Lagos? Are they the property of the Oba of Benin who was the original owner? In which case ninety nine point nine percent of the Benin people, the Nigerian people would never see them. And the security in both cases would probably leave much to be desired...

There are whole museums like the Accademia museum in Venice was entirely created by Napoleon to commemorate a culture that he had effectively destroyed... you can't build, rebuild a load of churches and put these paintings back and I think that that's the case with most of these situations...

The Parthenon Marbles, they are part of the whole culture of antiquity which has had an enormous impact on western culture. Most of which, that impact, took place outside Greece. Most Classical civilization was created by people who had never went to Greece...

[On returning the Elgin marbles] 'What is special about the original location? I mean is it something about the hill upon which they stand or are we trying to get at something about people? Because if it's about people I mean today's Greeks aren't like Ancient Greeks at all'...

'The new museum that has been built is designed specifically to display the sculptures in the way they were meant to be displayed'

'No no no. Clearly not that. Because they were up high on the Parthenon. They clearly were not designed to be in a museum'...

At a time when Modern Greeks - I'm talking about the nineteenth century - have clearly shown no interest in their own heritage it was English Romantics who came along and gave them a sense of pride in their Classical past. And as part of the symbol of how much we valued it, these marbles came back to Britain and to be looked after and now the Greeks realize how important they are...

I'm interested in the broader trend. So why there have been more claims since the nineteen eighties for repatriation but also a receptivity to those claims from museum professionals. And i am concerned that this is really about what a museum is and that what is at stake is really the kind of Enlightenment values that the museum was founded on. So that, that's been subject to great scrutiny and then you've had the politicization of culture. So culture's been asked to do things like make amends for past wrongs like kind of apologize for colonization when I think it just can't possibly do that...

If we take the Benin bronzes for example. The rooster that is being subject to this claim. I mean that was created in the thirteenth to the fourteenth century in a medieval African kingdom. That has got nothing to do with Nigeria...

'In Iraq after the fall of Saddam a trove of tens of thousands of Jewish documents both secular and religious were discovered in a base, in the basement of the intelligence service almost completely submerged under water. Left for longer they would have been destroyed. They were rescued and taken to America. There has been a fight ever since. Iraq says they are part of Iraq. The Jews say they are part of the Jews of Iraq, they belong to the Jews of Iraq who were either murdered or chucked out of Iraq and therefore they should not go back to Iraq. In your view who should own them? Iraq, the Jews or should they go to the British Museum?'

'My answer to the question is where is best for those artifacts?... We should learn and the problem with these battles is that we do not learn. They become objects of atonement or objects of identity and one that is an insult to those past human civilisations... Who speaks for that culture and on what basis? On the basis of blood? And do I speak therefore for people who live in Scotland?... there are questionable racial claims that are made'...

The Greeks were willing to donate their own bullets to the enemy so that lead from the Parthenon wasn't used for bullets against them so I think it's just false to say they didn't value them...

If it is true as Professor Sandis just said that the British Museum has plenty of other stuff that could tell the story and could do without the Elgin marbles, then it must also be true that if half the Elgin marbles are still in Athens it can equally be argued that there's plenty of stuff there to tell the story without the return of the other half. And so I rather reject the binary position.

I mean it seems to me that these objects have several significances. And at the moment the division let's say of the Elgin marbles between London and Athens is helping both of those positions. Some of them are there to establish the context, reminders that these people lived in this particular place although of course we have no trace of what these people were like and the rest is saying look this is what these marbles, this is what this sort of art contribute to the, contributed to the development of Western Civilization"

Links - 4th August 2017 (2)

Music | Tell Me Something I Don't Know - "'I play an unusual musical instrument... what common household object wound up being an instrument in liturgical music in the nineteenth century... I'm very fortunate and very careful with my saw. But also the saw that I play today has no teeth thanks to the New York city police. They gave me a ticket saying that the teeth are a weapon and therefore I cannot play in a public space... the amount of metal in the teeth is so small that fortunately it makes no difference for the sound... the discovery that a handsaw can make music was made by lumberjacks perhaps as might be expected. But what is less expected is the turn that the musical saw took about one hundred years later from being a folk instrument to being what one might call a liturgical instrument because it was adopted by priests and missionaries to aid in their work... [In the second half of the 18th century and the early 19th century] musical instruments were an uncommon luxury but hand saws were essential because they needed to build the church as their destination... It is angelic, spiritual, mesmerizing. It is the closest sound to that of the human voice"

Polish leader Beata Szydło rages at European leaders over Manchester terror attack - "“If you cannot see that today terrorist danger is a fact that can hurt every country in Europe and you think that Poland should not defend itself, you are going hand in hand with those who point this weapon against Europe, against all of us. “This is an attack on Europe, on our culture, our tradition. Why am I talking about that? That is a good question because all of us in this room have to answer the question… Do we want politicians that claim that we have to get used to attacks and who describe terrorist attacks as ‘incidents’? “Or do we want strong politicians that can see a danger and fight against it effectively?”"

There's A War On Sugar. Is It Justified? - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Robert LUSTIG: We started comparing what sugar did versus what alcohol did, and we realized, you know what, sugar and alcohol do the exact same thing... We started comparing what sugar did versus what alcohol did, and we realized, you know what, sugar and alcohol do the exact same thing, and it makes sense that it should, because after all, where do you get alcohol from? Fermentation of sugar. We were now seeing the diseases of alcohol without the alcohol...
KAHN: we’ve seen, clearly, smoking cessation in a large proportion of the population. And when people stop smoking, that’s usually been associated with weight gain. Psychotropic drugs, smoking cessation, potential infections have been attributed to a rise in obesity...
LUSTIG: We don’t want to turn off our reward system entirely. If we do, we get into trouble. We actually did this. We did this experiment with a medicine back in the early 2000s. That medicine was called Rimonabant . What it was was it was the anti-marijuana medicine. It blocked the endo-cannabinoid receptors in the brain, and by doing so reduced reward for alcohol and for food. In fact, people who took Rimonabant lost a fair amount of weight. It looked very promising. Until we started looking at the Phase 3 data and started realizing that a lot of these people became severely depressed, and many of them committed suicide... if you take away a reward, you take away the reason for living."

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Orthorexia Nervosa: When 'Healthy' Food Becomes Harmful - "It felt like my only hope, so every time that I would go into a search engine and type in how do I get well, how do I get this alternative cure, the diet industry, the lifestyle and health industry just bombarded me. It saturated me with information. And as soon as I discovered on the internet that food might be an answer to a health problem I was having I took it to really extreme measures and I went in the space of eighteen months from being totally indifferent to food to cutting out animal products to cutting out eating cooked food to only eating fruit to only eating organic watermelon and drinking water and I believed that anything else would kill me or give me cancer or heart disease. Somebody with orthorexia, they will change their allegiance with food whenever the next new extreme thing comes along... every day I was chasing a new high. How extreme can I go with food, what can I cut down on today?... you don't need friends because food is your friend... I didn't believe that face to face friends were any good for me... when you're orthorexic you don't take responsibility for things. I didn't think well I messed up. I thought oh I must have eaten too much sugar today and the sugar has caused me to lapse in concentration so I am going to solve this emotional problem with a detox. I literally went to a health food shop, I picked up a detox kit, I went home with my detox kit, I was literally throwing stuff out the fridge. I mean what was in there apart from kale that could have killed me, I don't know...
People want to know who they are and if someone could say I am a raw foods vegan they've now established who they are as a person and their value comes from how well they stick to it... I do hear about this from a lot of countries that one wouldn't automatically connect it to. Brazil, Poland, Portugal, Turkey are countries that have a lot of discussion of orthorexia, which aren't obviously the world's wealthiest countries"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Little Kitchen of Horrors - "The Brothers Grimm tried to make it nice for us. Originally the person who wanted to eat the children wasn't a wicked witch. The story goes like this. There was a terrible famine in Germany and a mother and a father and their two children who lived in a small house one day realized that they were down to their last four slices of bread - one slice for each of them and the mother looked at the children and she looked at the father and she said: what if there were more slices for each person? What if we killed one of the children and ate that child and the father cries and he pleads with her and she says: there's nothing we can do. If we don't eat one of the children we'll starve and our other child will die too. So eventually he agrees. He says ok I see your reasoning so let's kill and eat our child and this they do and the three of them share the meal and they share the remaining bread between them. And then another famine comes and again they're down to their last three slices of bread and the mother looks at the three slices of bread and she looks at the child and she says to her husband there are only three slices of bread. What if there were only the two of us to eat those three slices? What if we killed our other child and ate our other child. Again he begs and he pleads but she says if we don't we'll die ourselves so eventually he says alright you go right ahead and do it. So she kills the only remaining child and they roast and eat that remaining child and they share the remaining bread between them. And they go on living happily in the forest and there it ends. No retribution, it just ends like that... these stories are plainly coping mechanisms for crises so it's not very surprising that we find them cropping up in time of war because war hugely disrupt the food supply and also in times of famine"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Liberte, Egalite, Gastronomie? - "Nicolas Sarkozy, he had a problem during political campaign because everybody knew that he didn't drink, and everybody know that he loves pizza... a French politician is expected to have a considered opinion about their food as president... according to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, a third of all tourists visiting France come for the wine and the food, but that reputation according to some has been ebbing away. The Michelin Guide awards more stars to restaurants in Tokyo than Paris...
In Medieval Europe the food people ate was determined by class not geography. 'If you go back to the middle ages you can't talk about national cuisines. You have a kind of western cuisine with nuances, depending on where you are in Italy France or in England but mostly you have the same kind of aristocratic cuisine everywhere. For instance you have a huge place for spices or you mix sugar and salt, sweet dish with salt as well so you have the same features for every cuisine everywhere. With some nuances as I said, like for instance English and Italian preferred maybe to have more sweet in the addition more than French people maybe at least until the fifteenth century. At that time you can't talk about a French cuisine... [On the 17th and 18th centuries) neither butter nor cream were used in the middle age so that's something very new and it will be something which will increase until the nineteenth and twentieth century"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The Fish Japan Ate - "At the most typical Japanese type of sushi generally in the old days was made up of fish that had interesting textures. That included shellfish, clams - things that were crunchy. All those different crunchy chewy whatever textures were considered an interesting feature of sushi. Over the course of the past hundred years this has been completely reversed so today the emphasis on bluefin tuna is primarily an emphasis on the culinary value of succulence. Totally soft, melt in your mouth fat... when I started looking into the history of tuna in Japan I was very surprised to discover that it had not been considered at all a desirable fish to eat by the Japanese a hundred years ago. It was considered to be very smelly and bloody and it would go bad easily. The fish that Japanese people tended to prize were much different. They were small light fleshed fish with delicate flavors and some texture, you know they liked clams, they liked squid, they liked small white fish... [On post-WWII] more western style diets started to impact Japan a bit. Eating red meat, eating beef, eating fattier cuts of meat. Another thing that we can see happen was the result of Japan's high tech export economy peaking in the nineteen seventies when they were flying these huge plane loads of electronics manufactured in Japan over to the US in particular, and those planes were going back empty. And Japan Airlines, an executive in their cargo division whose job it was to find products to put in those planes going back to Japan so that the cargo division of Japanese make more money. He looked all over the place for all kinds of stuff to put in those planes, couldn't really find much in North America that he thought Japanese would be that interested in but he discovered a bunch of sport fishermen particularly off the east coast of the US and Canada that would catch these huge bluefin tuna for sport, have their photo taken with them and then send them to the town dump"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, I Don't Cook - "Studies suggest that in countries like the US and the UK people are cooking less than we did in the past. Market researchers NPD found that less than sixty percent of evening meals eaten at home last year in the US were cooked compared to seventy five percent thirty years ago"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Foodunnit? - "His research has involved interviewing more than one hundred active residential burglars in St. Louis, Missouri. 'Burglary tends to flow out of intense periods of partying. They're not eating, they're using drink and drugs. If they have any money they're gonna spend it on drink and drugs to kind of keep that party going. So they get inside, they're very elated to be in the house. All of a sudden they're not vulnerable to being seen by passers-by. They feel a good deal safer, and so all of a sudden they: realize everything here, I can have anything in here I want. Now they're hungry, you know they're hungry and they're also partial to partying so if they can find any alcohol, any food in the refrigerator, they are going to be very tempted to use it. Now there's a problem in this because if you get too seduced by all that's available to you, you end up spending too much time in the property and you make yourself vulnerable to arrest. But criminals aren't good at avoiding temptation... I've known burglars who've gotten to houses, they've eaten, then they found alcohol and they've drunk so much that they've actually collapsed there and been caught simply because they were too intoxicated to move"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The Real Value of a Cup of Tea - "[On tea plantations] The houses the workers live in and their schools and hospitals are provided by the estates. Decent housing and good sanitation is a legal obligation and in return tea workers' wages are significantly below even India's modest minimum wage... most tea estates don't seem to be keeping their side of the bargain... one estate tried to lock us up... everywhere we found the same story: broken houses and filthy conditions"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Hands Off My Food! - "They are only going to eat at the white hot chicken joints because those are the trendier places and that's what bothers me and that's where I think this becomes a case of cultural appropriation...
Food Historian: I would want to make a case for the necessity of what you might call brokers or interpreters or cross cultural agents. The word appropriation makes it sound as if it's straightforward and quick and easy. It's not. It takes a great deal of work. I have a friend who's just published a book on food of Persia for which she went to Persia for some considerable time to collect the materials. That is not a straightforward or easy thing to do. So I think that we need these brokers unless we're all to live in little boxes. I mean I think we need people from inside the culture who have deep emotional understanding of it and commitment to it. I think we often need people outside the culture who can bring to it an outsider's view that perhaps throws into focus things that insiders can't say...
You're seeing in Mexico a fascinating thing that's been happening for the past twenty years which I'll call a re-Mexicanization of Mexico. On that side of the border within the country itself in cosmopolitan society the sentiment was that everything that's Mexican is bad and that everything that's European is good. So the Mexican attitude in Mexico City was that well I don't want mescal. My great grandfather used to drink that and he's poor. He's like gimme a Pinot Grigio and I'll have some risotto with that. So even on that side you're seeing restaurant tours going: no we're not going to get wagyu beef. Why not? We're going to serve grasshoppers because that's what we've always had... I don't think any one Mexican can claim to know this is the one true iteration of this"
So because black people are bad at marketing and don't bother marketing it in a trendy way, it's white people's fault because 'cultural appropriation'

Are the Rich Really Less Generous Than the Poor? - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "[On a real rather than laboratory experiment comparing the honesty of the rich and the poor] The rich returned way more than the poor — in fact, they returned twice as much. Return rates of the rich were roughly 80 percent and return rates of the poor were roughly 40 percent... the non-cash envelopes were also not returned by the poor families [even though they wouldn't benefit from keeping them]... the envelopes that the rich got were being returned much faster than the envelopes of the poor folks...
STOOP: We, then, need a theoretical model, to map behavior to preferences. We model it as follows: a household returns an envelope if A (its altruism towards Joost, the intended recipient of the card) minus N (the neediness of the contents of the envelope) minus P (the financial pressure, the stress costs) is greater than zero. When altruism outweighs the neediness (N) and the stress (P), then the household returns the envelope. With the data that we have, we can actually estimate the A, the N [and] the P.
ANDREONI: When we account for those, what we find is that the basic tendency to want to do the right thing is the same for the rich and the poor. But it’s the fact that rich and poor affects these other aspects of the decision and affects the outcome.
STOOP: What we find is, not surprisingly, that the N differs between the rich and the poor. Meaning that the poor need the money [more] than the rich. Also, in line with this relatively new literature on financial stresses of the poor, we find that P, the financial pressure, is greater for the poor for the rich. Then we have A, altruism, and we find that these are the same between the rich and the poor. I consider this to be really a hardcore economic insight. As economists, we always say that incentives shape behavior, and this is another example of that. There are many other studies that look only at behavior. So far, it seems as if our study is the only study that has disentangled behavior from preferences."
Do preferences really mean anything if they are not expressed in behavior?

Portland Stabbing Survivor Blames City for 'White Savior Complex', Says Women the Real Victims - "Micah Fletcher, the lone survivor of the Portland train stabbing has denounced people who have donated money to support him and the families of the two other men who were fatally injured in the violent attack. A lone suspect, Jeremy Christian, is alleged to have stabbed the three men when they attempted to calm him down during an anti-Muslim rant at two young women on the train... Fletcher insists that the real victims are the women, who he says must be traumatized from being targets of hate, and from the deaths of the two men who tried to intervene."

California Democrats Just Voted for Single-Payer Healthcare But Have No Idea How to Pay for It| Heat Street - "During the debate over the bill, Democrats nakedly admit that ObamaCare has left millions without insurance due to coverage gaps or spiking premiums... And don’t think the state can simply tax its way to a single-payer utopia. California currently has the highest sales tax and top marginal income tax rate in the country. Don’t bother squeezing the stones for more blood, either. Remember: Around five million people left the state in the last 10 years (600,000 decide red Texas was more hospitable). Free healthcare or not, people want out."

We Happily Invent New Crimes to Punish Men, But Ignore the Real Criminals - "the 52 other “hate incidents” – which were not criminal offences – included name calling, tweets, or even women overhearing offensive jokes. You read that right: “hate crime” data in the United Kingdom includes women not liking jokes that maybe weren’t even directed at them. Which is itself funny, in a “laugh or cry” kind of way... to date there has been not a single prosecution for FGM in all of the UK, even though there were 5,500 cases reported in 2016 alone... I headed to the city centre with one aim – if I saw random packs of men harassing women, I would give them a taste of their own medicine... In four hours, the only arguably inappropriate thing I saw was a group of three refreshed young women squeezing a buff man’s (highly admirable) pecs. He objected so much that he posed for selfies. Nowhere did I see a single man grope or wolf whistle a woman. Not even a single “get your bits out for the lads!” Nothing."

Renowned 'Food Science Expert' Says Feminism Is Making Everybody Fat - "“It’s certainly been fuelled by the fact women work and that we have changed things and we have allowed this huge change to happen,” she said... Boycott also says that she and other feminists shamed some women out of doing things like preparing meals for their family. “I said ‘don’t cook, don’t type. You’ll get ahead.’ We lost it. Schools gave up cooking. Everyone gave up cooking.”"

Belgian city to become first in world to go veggie... but only once a week - "Ghent's officials, in co-operation with Belgium's national vegetarian organisation, EVA (Ethical Vegetarian Alternative), is adopting Thursdays as a vegetarian day for officials and - from September - for the city's schoolchildren too."

Impact of Fathers on Parental Monitoring of Daughters and Their Affiliation With Sexually Promiscuous Peers: A Genetically and Environmentally Controlled Sibling Study. - "Girls who receive higher quality fathering engage in less risky sexual behavior (RSB) than their peers... higher quality fathering may decrease daughters’ engagement in RSB by increasing the amount of parental monitoring that they receive and decreasing their affiliation with peers who promote RSB"

When Doctors Admit Bias, Patients Are More Likely to Trust Them - "specialty bias occurs in all areas of medical expertise. One survey, for example, found that 79 percent of male surgeons would choose surgery if they were diagnosed with clinically localized prostate cancer while 92 percent of radiation oncologists would choose radiation therapy under the same circumstances. Specialty bias is unavoidable, and while the practice of surgeons spontaneously disclosing their biases is undertaken in earnest, it may not only be ineffective but actually is likely to backfire on the physicians’ intentions"

40 Years of STAR WARS: Why KOTOR Worked and How BioWare Has Changed - "Let’s face it: BioWare has changed. Most of the original developers have either moved on to greener pastures or are busy making their own beer. We could spend all day blaming the EA buyout, but what’s important is the legacy this company left behind. Games like KOTOR need to be studied. They represent important milestones in gaming history, essential innovations that revolutionized the way we play games today. Hopefully, BioWare recaptures the passion and dedication that made their classic games so great. Until then, we’ll always have KOTOR."

Liberal Bias in Social Psychology: Personal Experience II

Liberal Bias in Social Psychology: Personal Experience II

"Anyway, one of my former graduate students and current collaborators, Dr. Jarret Crawford, has been at the forefront of exposing bias in the ways ideological biases have been studied by (overwhelmingly) liberal social psychologists. He led a study examining whether liberals or conservatives showed more bias in their evaluations of scientific articles. This is a hot topic because liberals (including but not restricted to liberal social psychologists) are so often appalled at conservatives supposed anti-scientific views (see my previous posts on why this view is so highly overstated and also on why conservative skepticism about science is often more well-justified than liberal trust in it).

In our study, people read either an article reporting research showing that affirmative action harmed African-Americans and an article reporting research showing that same sex relationships were just as healthy as heterosexual relationships OR they read an article reporting research showing that affirmative action was beneficial to African-Americans and an article reporting research showing that same sex relationships were not as healthy as heterosexual relationships. So, everyone read one “liberal” and one “conservative” article. Furthermore, everything about the articles was held constant, except the result, so there were no objective differences in the quality of research supporting the liberal or conservative conclusions.

The main question was: Who would be more biased in their judgments of the article, liberals or conservatives? People were asked to indicate how true they considered the article to be, and how biased they considered the author to be.

And the resounding answer was: Liberals were far more biased. Liberals viewed the articles reporting “liberal” results (affirmative action and same sex relationships are good) as truer and reflecting less author bias than the articles reporting “conservative” results. Conservatives, in contrast, viewed the truthfulness and bias in the articles as nearly identical, regardless of their results...

This should have been important “news” – even “counterintuitive news” given how much the received wisdom emphasized conservative bias (and, for better or worse, social psychology has long been enamored of such counterintuitive findings – although, as this story demonstrates, perhaps it is primarily counterintuitive findings that do not challenge the supposed moral or intellectual superiority of liberals that are so privileged).

We could not get this published. It was rejected at two separate journals. Finally, we decided to bag every mention of liberals being more biased than conservatives, and resubmitted it to another journal. This time, it was accepted. Now, even though the text does not mention finding that liberals were more biased than conservatives, the pattern is right there, in the data reported in tables and figures, for anyone to see. The paper shows that liberals are more biased than conservatives, at least when and how we studied it. Neither I nor Jarret would or did claim that such a pattern is always necessarily true. But it was true in our data. We were just not permitted to say so."


In other words, liberals are more biased than conservatives. And in the peer review process, the exact same article was rejected when framed as liberals being more biased (i.e. what is actually found) but accepted when it didn't explicitly report this key finding.