Andrew Sullivan: At Kavanaugh-Ford Hearings Everyone Lost
"Yesterday was a spectacle I hope we do not have to experience again. We watched two human beings, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, exposed in the rawest possible fashion to the entire world, over the gravest of accusations, with no definitive evidence apart from personal testimony to draw on, 36 years after an alleged crime took place. It was a grotesque political drama, in which everyone lost.
Both Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh have been traumatized and ill-served by the process. At the all-day Senate hearing, there was no real sifting of evidence about her allegation that he sexually assaulted her, because nothing but memories were on the table. (We still don’t even know when or where the alleged attack happened.) Other witnesses were not called to testify, which they obviously should have been, if only to say (as they all have) that they had no memory of the event. So we were left to judge the credibility of two individuals, who both said they were 100 percent certain...
He behaved, it seemed to me, exactly as an innocent man would behave if accused of a crime in his teenage years — especially a crime that was unveiled by his political opponents at the very last moment. It was one that he could not possibly refute (no one can prove a negative) and it catalyzed a media frenzy — multiple gang rapes! — that continues to get more extreme every day. There’s a reason we have statutes of limitation. When alleged crimes happened decades ago, proof is very hard, and allegations much easier. And when the alleged perpetrator was also a minor, we’re in a very weird and difficult place...
Even his yearbook was being dissected. Stupid cruelties and brags from teenage boys were now being used to define his character, dismiss his record as a judge, his sterling references, his respected scholarship, his devoted family, his relationship with women in every capacity. He had to fend off new accusations, ever more grave and ever more vague.
And there were times, it seems to me, that he simply couldn’t win. If he hadn’t hired and mentored many women, it would be proof he was a misogynist and rapist. But the fact that he did hire and mentor many of them was also proof he was a misogynist and a rapist, who only picked the pretty ones. If he hadn’t shown anger, he would have been obviously inhuman. When he did express rage … well, that was a disqualifying temperament for a judge. It didn’t help that the Democrats made no pretense of having an open mind, or that any glimpse at mainstream media — let alone media Twitter — revealed that it had already picked a side. This was, for the major papers, especially the New York Times, a righteous battle against another white straight male, and the smug, snarky virtue-signaling on Twitter was in overdrive. Even Kavanaugh’s choking-up was mocked — just another contemptible “bro-crier.”
And so when Lindsey Graham suddenly unloaded on the Democrats, I felt a wave of euphoria. “Yes,” I said to myself. “Go get ’em, Butters!” When Senator Blumenthal got all self-righteous about a single lie destroying someone’s credibility, I actually LOL-ed. Then I remembered all those op-eds and essays that decided to judge one moment in one man’s teens as somehow deeply revealing about … white privilege, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, toxic homosociality, bro culture, alcoholism, patriarchy … you name it, Kavanaugh was suddenly its foul epitome. He was an instant symbol of all the groups of people the left now hates, by virtue of their race or gender or orientation. And maybe he is. But did any of that necessarily make him guilty of anything, except by association?...
By dinnertime, I felt like I’d vote for him, if I were a senator — because I found the Democrats so nauseatingly priggish. Then I remembered I was against the Kavanaugh nomination for other reasons entirely...
When public life means the ransacking of people’s private lives even when they were in high school, we are circling a deeply illiberal drain... These lines are also blurred in authoritarian regimes, where the power of the government knows few limits in monitoring a person’s home or private affairs or correspondence or tax returns or texts. These boundaries definitionally can’t exist in theocracies, where the state is interested as much in punishing and exposing sin, as in preventing crime. The Iranian and Saudi governments — like the early modern monarchies — seek not only to control your body, but also to look into your soul. They know that everyone has a dark side, and this dark side can be exposed in order to destroy people. All you need is an accusation.
The Founders were obsessed with this. They realized how precious privacy is... it is the distinguishing mark of specifically totalitarian societies that this safety is eradicated altogether by design. There, the private is always emphatically public, everything is political, and ideology trumps love, family, friendship or any refuge from the glare of the party and its public... You are, in fact, always guilty before being proven innocent. You always have to prove a negative. And no offense at any point in your life is ever forgotten or off the table.
Perhaps gay people are particularly sensitive to this danger, because our private lives have long been the target of moral absolutists, and we have learned to be vigilant about moral or sex panics. For much of history, a mere accusation could destroy a gay person’s life or career, and this power to expose private behavior for political purposes is immense...
It seems to me that the Democrats have ensured this past week that if Kavanaugh is confirmed, they will have created an embittered foe in the Thomas mold. And if they end up with Barrett, they will have have someone on the Court more certain to strike down Roe than Kavanaugh."
***
Daniel Jordan - "Seems like the term dog whistle has become so popular lately. But it's not being used correctly; perhaps some politicians really are brilliant enough to speak in such coded double entendres to their own base. Certainly the idea that Trump and his supporters both use and hear such dog whistles so frequently seems to be incompatible with the idea that Trump is an inarticulate man... For one to skillfully use double entendres and coded messages as masterfully as has been accused requires a certain kind of mental acumen that I really don't think Trump himself possesses... Now take a look at what we have here with Kavanaugh being accused of using dog whistling as if it's appealing to a base....he's not needing to be elected. This is not a campaign. He needs to be confirmed; the term could not possibly apply unless the public in their ignorance is buying into the absolute political theatrics demonstrated by Dem. senators Harris and Booker. More often than not the term is being used by left leaning politicians to create or interpret their own 'code' to reiterate to their own base what they should think about their political opponents. Typically in the form of 'veiled' racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, mysogyny etc. It really just amounts to absolute histrionics which is continuing to fuel things such as the #walkaway campaign. People are waking up to how baseless these accusations are. The hyperbolic nature of such things has been a big part of what is polarizing most western democracies."
Partisan Bias, Motivated Reasoning, and the Debate Over the Kavanaugh Nomination - "One of the most striking aspects of the debate over the sexual assault accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is the extremely high correlation between what people think of the allegations and whether they believe Kavanaugh should be confirmed aside from them"
Benny on Twitter - "We learned today that Ford cannot remember:
- Time/date/location of party
- Who drove her to party
- Who was at party
- Who pushed her into room
- Who drove her from party
- Date/who paid for her polygraph
- Grandmother's funeral date?
But "100% sure" it was Kavanaugh 36 yrs ago"
Traumatic Moments Are Burned Into Memory, Scientists Say - "memory is fallible. A question on many people's minds is, how well can anyone recall something that happened over 35 years ago? Pretty well, say scientists, if the memory is of a traumatic event."
Yet, if you can only remember one thing...
Trauma, PTSD, and Memory Distortion - "people do not store the details of an experience in their memory accompanied by labels specifying their origins. Instead, they rely on heuristics, such as how familiar the event details feel, to determine whether a remembered detail actually occurred or was merely suggested or imagined. Critically, post-event processing—such as actively imagining new details or experiencing unwanted intrusive thoughts—can increase the familiarity of new details enough that people may mistakenly claim those new details as genuine memory traces. This is memory distortion... The participants scored well on their ability to recognize scenes that they had indeed been shown as part of the video. However, about one-fourth of the time, they “recognized” scenes that they hadn’t actually seen! They were far more likely to “over-remember” the traumatic scenes than the non-traumatic ones, and they did so with confidence... those with the PTSD-like symptoms were more likely than the others to “over-remember” traumatic elements of the film that they hadn’t actually seen. This is further evidence of a link between PTSD symptoms and memory distortion."
Fundraiser for Ford Family by Team Christine Blasey Ford : Help Christine Blasey Ford - "$528,475 of $150,000 goal"
"She has nothing to gain"
PIERS: The day DC died of shame: Two broken souls publicly tortured - "Kavanaugh’s not just any man. He’s one of America’s most experienced, respected judges; so a man who until two weeks ago, was considered to be someone of total integrity, someone beyond reproach... For these two previously unknown people to be dragged through such a revolting public court of gladiatorial barbarism for the delectation of a mass TV audience was painful, so painful I could barely watch at times. Yet it was an absolutely inevitable consequence of the way Washington has spiralled in recent years into a vile cesspit of extreme partisan bullsh*t – fuelled by rampant, vicious social media... what we watched today was nothing short of a circus - a long, disturbing, wretched circus; a circus watched by a baying global mob, most of whom decided long before the hearings began whom they believed... The Democrats, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein, timed this bombshell to cause maximum damage to the nomination process, and to exploit the inevitable scandalous headlines to influence the vital midterm elections in just 40 days time. Feinstein knew about Ford’s allegation two months ago. The right thing to do would have been to publicly demand an immediate investigation – including, if necessary, by the FBI. Instead, she held it back, waiting to strike when the potential political gain was at its most timely. In doing so, she behaved in exactly the same reprehensibly partisan self-serving manner that Republicans have behaved over previous Democrat Supreme Court nominations. But that makes her just as bad as them. Shame on Senator Feinstein, shame on the Democrats.
The Kavanaugh Circus Could Destroy The "Me Too" Movement - "Farrow and his colleague Jane Mayer did a huge disservice to the Me Too movement by publishing an incredibly thin sexual-abuse allegation against Brett Kavanaugh. That story, a prime example of how some media outlets and left-wing voices have mishandled the accusations against the judge, will likely create a climate in which fewer victims are believed, more innocent men suffer for crimes they didn’t commit, and neutral observers are more inclined to doubt claims of sexual assault... They write of Kavanaugh’s accuser, Deborah Ramirez: “In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty,” saying she was only willing to go on the record “after six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney,” at which point “she felt confident enough of her recollections.” Their effort to publish this story should’ve stopped right there. What’s more, they couldn’t find a single eyewitness to confirm that Kavanaugh was present at the party Ramirez describes, or even to confirm they heard this account from the accuser herself. One friend of Ramirez’s told The New Yorker: “This is a woman I was best friends with. We shared intimate details of our lives. And I was never told this story by her, or by anyone else. It never came up. I didn’t see it; I never heard of it happening.”.. Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono has advanced the extremely dangerous notion that it doesn’t matter whether Kavanaugh committed misconduct or not. Last week, she insisted that “not only do women like Dr. Ford . . . need to be heard, but they need to be believed” and that all men need to “just shut up and step up.” And when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Hirono Sunday whether Kavanaugh has “the same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America,” the Democratic senator replied, “I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases.” With this answer, Hirono - who casts herself as one of our government’s foremost opponents of sexual abuse - dealt a significant blow to the seriousness of the Me Too movement. If it doesn’t actually matter whether alleged abusers actually abused anyone, and it’s just a question of partisanship, why should Americans listen to the stories of victims at all? Just decide whether or not you like the politics of the person being accused, and that’s that."
Rolling Stone Jackie must be laughing
Juanita Broaddrick Shows Up At Kavanaugh Hearing To ‘Look Hypocrite Democrats In The Eye’ - "Juanita Broaddrick, a woman who has accused Bill Clinton of rape, showed up outside the Senate calling Democrats “hypocrites” for not believing her allegations... “I have twenty times more evidence for my rape by Bill Clinton than Dr. Ford has against Kavanaugh,” Broaddrick says, “Democrats turned their backs on me. They refused to read my testimony or acknowledge me in 1999 when I went public with my story. Democrats turned their backs on me.” Broaddrick said that the mantra the ‘All women deserve to be believed” does not apply to her. “All women are to be believed if they’re not conservatives and as long as the assault was not done by Democrats.” Broaddrick brought up the domestic abuse allegations against DNC Co-Chair Keith Ellison: “Ellison is leading the Democratic party right now. He should be kicked out of office. Karen Monahan has 10 times the evidence that Dr. Ford does. Where is her hearing?”"
Robby Starbuck on Twitter - "So according to Julie Swetnick’s accusation we’re supposed to believe that a gang of serial rapists were terrorizing young women at house parties and not only did no one ever report it but she KEPT GOING TO THE PARTIES? Oh and the FBI missed this on 6 background checks? Really?!"
EXCLUSIVE: Woman Who Partied with Georgetown Prep Football Team Disputes Gang Rape Allegations - "The latest allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh the day before Christine Blasey Ford is scheduled to testify have thrown another grenade into the confirmation process. Significant holes have already been demonstrated in the accusations made by Julie Swetnick that Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge were present at parties where she says she witnessed excessive drinking and drugging of girls at parties where "gang" or "train" rapes occurred. Swetnick claims to have repeatedly witnessed such events at multiple parties before she eventually became a victim herself... Lisa Miller, who graduated in 1981 from Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, a private Roman Catholic college-preparatory school for girls, spoke to PJ Media about the new allegations from Julie Swetnick. According to Miller, such activity described by Swetnick did not happen. She said such activities would have been widely known.
Kavanaugh Gave a Messy, Angry Performance That Would Never Be Allowed From a Woman
Feminists: Men should be more in touch with their feelings
Also feminists: Not like that!!!
Andrew Sullivan: America, Land of Brutal Binaries - "it is close to impossible, in this polarized climate, to deal with the specifics and complexities of each scandal from a non-tribal perspective. And so it seems that Kavanaugh is either a perfect exemplar of judicial expertise and impeccable moral conduct, or he is a lying rapist determined to destroy and control the lives of all women. Ghomeshi is evil, and granting any space for such a monster to defend or account for himself is itself an act of oppression, which must be shamed and punished. Those appear to be our choices, ladies and gentlemen, in this particular polarization cycle. There is little nuance in these battles and absolutely no mercy for anyone unlucky enough to get caught up in their swirling vortex. This is what our culture is driving us toward, and it’s a culture where each moment of conflict galvanizes and tribalizes us still further, in what seems like an endlessly repeating loop of resentment, righteousness, and revenge. It’s now even invaded the Catholic church. Haidt and Lukianoff note how humans are constructed genetically for this kind of tribal warfare, to divide the world instinctively into in-groups and out-groups almost from infancy. For homo sapiens, it is natural to see the world, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it, as radically “divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad.” It is much harder to see, as Solzhenitsyn did, even after he had been sent to the gulag by his ideological enemies, that good and evil run through every human heart... offering someone a chance to provide testimony in a private session wherever she chooses is not “silencing” her. Senator Hirono has gone further and told half the citizenry to “shut up” solely because they are male... "props to everyone at NYRB for this, it’s rare to have a win.” The “win” was a journalist getting another journalist fired for attempting to start a difficult conversation... Their hypothesis is that the members of the iGen generation (those born in the mid- to late 1990s) have been raised (unwittingly and with good intentions) in such a way to maximize tribal identities rather than dilute them. They have been told, in Haidt’s and Lukianoff’s view, that safety is far more important than exposure to the unknown, that they should always trust their feelings, and that life is a struggle between good people and evil people. This infantilizes them, emotionalizes them, and tribalizes them... “When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them.” Those words were written in 1945 by Pauli Murray, a transgender, black civil rights activist... Today’s well-intentioned activists — the ones driving much of the conversation around Kavanaugh and, on a much smaller scale, Buruma — in contrast, are drawing an ever smaller, purer, more tightly policed circle, in order to wage a scorched earth war against another, ever-purer, tightly policed circle. And God help anyone who gets in their way."
Two men tell Senate that they, not Kavanaugh, assaulted Christine Blasey Ford - "Two men have come forward to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to claim that they are the ones who actually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford during a house party in 1982 — and not Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh."
L'origine de Bert
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Friday, September 28, 2018
Links - 28th September 2018 (2)
Domestic abuse husband 'let down' before his murder - "A solicitor who was abused and murdered by his violent wife was let down by authorities, a report has found. Doctors failed to raise concerns about injuries to David Edwards, according to the domestic homicide review... A perception that men were not domestic abuse victims may have contributed to the situation, the report concluded."
Male privilege!
Daycare provider who hanged toddler sentenced in Minneapolis - "Nataliia Karia received 10 years probation on Monday for hanging a toddler in her daycare and running over two men with her minivan, before attempting suicide. She had faced 13 years in prison. All of the victims of the November 2016 incident survived their injuries."
Drunk seductress, 36, forced herself on boy then falsely accused him of rape - "A female paedophile who had sex with a 14-year-old schoolboy then accused him of rape has been jailed for four years and eight months."
If it were the other way around...
Japanese basketball players in prostitute ‘disgrace’ - "Four Japanese basketball players have apologised for bringing “disgrace” to their nation after they were kicked out of the Asian Games for paying prostitutes for sex. The regional Olympics was hit by scandal after the players were spotted in a notorious red light district of the Indonesian capital Jakarta wearing their national jerseys"
Malaysian professor ‘killed wife and daughter with yoga ball leaking carbon monoxide that was left in car boot in Hong Kong’ - "Khaw Kim-sun, 53, a specialist in anaesthesiology, put the inflatable ball containing carbon monoxide in the boot of a yellow Mini Cooper driven by his wife, Wong Siew-fung, 47"
Who needs democracy when you have data? - "For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia... What information is available is deeply flawed; systematic falsification of data on everything from GDP growth to hydropower use pervades Chinese government statistics. Australian National University researcher Borge Bakken estimates that official crime figures, which the government has a clear incentive to downplay, may represent as little as 2.5 percent of all criminal behavior."
Dozens of men tricked into 'Hunger Games'-style competition via Tinder - "In some kind of modern-love social experiment, dozens of men in New York City reportedly showed up for what they thought was a Tinder date but ended up being in a "Hunger Games"-style competition against each other to win that date... the "most troubling thing" about what he witnessed was that she seemed to target "for lack of a better term, nerdy looking dudes" with "flowers and their shirt tucked in," who may have been earnestly looking for love."
Oxytocin and social norms reduce xenophobia - "the bonding hormone oxytocin together with social norms significantly increases the willingness to donate money to refugees in need, even in people who tend to have a skeptical attitude towards migrants"
Income inequality not gender inequality positively covaries with female sexualization on social media - "Female sexualization is increasing, and scholars are divided on whether this trend reflects a form of gendered oppression or an expression of female competitiveness. Here, we proxy local status competition with income inequality, showing that female sexualization and physical appearance enhancement are most prevalent in environments that are economically unequal. We found no association with gender oppression. Exploratory analyses show that the association between economic inequality and sexualization is stronger in developed nations. Our findings have important implications: Sexualization manifests in response to economic conditions but does not covary with female subordination. These results raise the possibility that sexualization may be a marker of social climbing among women that track the degree of status competition in the local environment."
Feminist theory takes yet another hit
Here's Your List Of Hillary Clinton's 'Accomplishments' - ""If you want to stump a Democrat," Carly Fiorina suggested during Wednesday's GOP debate, "ask them to name an accomplishment of Mrs. Clinton's" as secretary of state. Hillary herself seems just as stumped... Even her fans struggle for an answer. None of the Hillary supporters assembled at a focus group could name one... Politico tried to come to Hillary's rescue after the debate, asking 20 top Democrats to name her "greatest accomplishment." But it's hard to see how the answers help her much, since several on that list came before she became secretary of state, such as the Pediatric Research Equity Act. Remember that one? One listed a speech she gave in China on women. Several did mention sanctions on Iran, which would have been a great accomplishment if they had led to Iran abandoning its nuclear ambitions. Oops. The problem Clinton backers are having is they're looking at it all wrong. Hillary's great achievements as secretary of state are easy to find, all around the world. Just look at the unrest in Syria, the collapse of Libya, the rise of ISIS, the death of a U.S. ambassador, renewed Russian aggression . .. Now that is a long list."
Online Shopping Is Making Us Accumulate More Junk - "Sites like Amazon have made it especially easy to shop. In 1999, the Seattle retailer patented a one-click buying process, which allows customers to purchase something without entering their shipping address or credit-card info. It launched its Prime program in 2005, and now more than 100 million people have signed on to pay $119 a year for “free” two-day shipping. As a result, most other major retailers offer free shipping, too. Returning stuff is a little more difficult—shoppers usually have to print a label and then go to the post office or a UPS or FedEx site to return packages. Many wait too long, or decide the hassle isn’t worth it because the stuff was cheap anyway. A recent NPR/Marist poll found that nine in 10 consumers rarely or never return stuff they’ve bought online."
Woman who complained about noisy mosque jailed for blasphemy - "An Indonesian court has sentenced a Buddhist woman to 18 months in prison for blasphemy after she was accused of insulting Islam. Meiliana, a 44-year-old ethnic Chinese woman, had complained the Muslim call to prayer, which is repeated five times a day, was being played too loudly at the mosque near her house in North Sumatra... Since 2004, 147 people have been imprisoned under blasphemy or related laws, according to monitoring by Human Rights Watch"
What Would Reza Aslan Say?
This isn't even Aceh, the usual retort of apologists
The Islam apologists, including Reza Aslan, smear Sam Harris by misrepresenting his words « Why Evolution Is True - "It takes a certain amount of mendacity to listen to Sam’s words, which are perfectly clear, and distort them to make it seem that Sam wants to stop all Muslim immigration to Europe and the U.S. But we see that mendacity in many apologists for Islam, and most notably in the odious Reza Aslan, whose reputation rests solely on whitewashing religion, especially Islam"
6 times the Strauss family had serious beef with each other - "In September 1907, the last surviving Strauss brother Eduard had several thousand compositions on manuscript paper of his late brother Josef incinerated. Eduard claimed Josef asked him to destroy his unfinished works (possibly including a grand opera) in case they fell into the hands of others who might pass them off as their own. But it’s equally possible that Eduard, to avoid unfavourable comparisons with his brother, found the works and destroyed them after Josef’s death."
'Crazy Rich Asians' plays well to hometown crowd in Singapore - "Some viewers worried the movie ignored the reality of everyday life on the ground. "Not everyone is rich here, a lot of people live normal lives," said retiree Irene Ee, 65. "Now everyone will think we have so much money, we should pay for everyone else's needs.""
Maybe some Singaporeans think Hollywood films are an accurate depiction of the US
1 in 2 Singapore residents do not have a close friend from another race: survey
Since movies have a duty to represent reality, the lack of minority representation in Crazy Rich Asians is good. Indeed this is already implicitly conceded when SJWs bash Singaporean Chinese for being racist
No-deal Brexit myths debunked - ROSS CLARK explains why we WON'T starve and planes WILL take off - "With the Government releasing the first batch of its ‘no-deal’ impact assessments today, Brexit critics are gleefully anticipating dire headlines. They have jumped on outlandish predictions for life after Brexit, from rioting and planes being grounded, to empty supermarket shelves and warnings that a no-deal Brexit would push food prices up by 12 per cent. But what’s the truth? Here, ROSS CLARK analyses claims from proponents of the new Project Fear"
Nurses who failed English test aimed at curbing immigration set for a reprieve - "Language rules introduced to curb immigration are set to be relaxed after they prevented native English-speaking nurses from working in the NHS. The NHS has a shortage of 40,000 nurses and recruiters and NHS employers have been lobbying for looser language requirements so that thousands of nurses from countries such as Australia, India and the Philippines can work in Britain. In June, the Observer uncovered evidence that Australians and other native English-speaking nurses were being turned down because they could not pass the International English Language Testing System test"
Difficulty of NHS language test ‘worsens nurse crisis’, say recruiters - "IELTS has four elements: speaking, listening, reading and writing. To qualify to work in the NHS, candidates need to score at least seven out of nine in each section. Purcell, who spent AU$650 (£386) on the test, managed 6.5 in writing and seven in reading... Native English speakers average just 6.3 in writing and 6.7 in reading, according to the British Council, a joint owner of the test. HCL says foreign nurses who come to the UK to study only need to reach 6.0 to get a place on a nursing degree at universities including Warwick and Gloucester."
The Sex Offender Registry Leaves Female Sex Offenders Open to Abuse
Feminism is about gender equality, which means protecting women by subjecting them to different rules from men
NYU Scholar Accused of Harassment Assails Rush to Judgment as Sign of ‘Sexual Paranoia’ - "The emails between Avital Ronell and her advisee, Nimrod Reitman, were florid and campy, filled with expressions of affection that seemed over the top and inappropriate to the investigators who would scrutinize them years later... It was, she said in an interview on Friday, a rush to judgment in an era when legitimate concerns about sexual harassment can veer off into “sexual paranoia.” Silenced until now by a confidentiality agreement with the university, she said she was tired of being portrayed as a predator when in fact, she insisted, there had been no inappropriate physical contact between herself and her doctoral advisee, and the communications he objected to were freely reciprocated... The final report on the Title IX investigation, excerpts of which were obtained by The Chronicle, supports Reitman’s contention that he felt pressured at times to use effusively affectionate language in his emails to her."
This Woman Lost An Internship At NASA For The Most Hilarious Reason Ever - "in a scene pulled directly from your nightmares, the jubilant poster had unwittingly tweeted obscenities at her brand-new boss."
Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter - "NASA engineer Homer Hickam deactivated his Twitter after a sustained harassment campaign from members of the furry community following a brief interaction with a would-be NASA intern (a furry) who spewed profanity at him. He also deleted his blog defending the furry"
Swearing on social media really could cost you your job - "poor spelling and grammar is more damaging to a candidate’s reputation than drunken photos."
Outrage over a safe sex guide calling vagina a "front hole"
Biology - and science more generally - is only endorsed when it suits the liberal agenda
Healthline changes their website then says 'front hole' claims are untrue.
Male privilege!
Daycare provider who hanged toddler sentenced in Minneapolis - "Nataliia Karia received 10 years probation on Monday for hanging a toddler in her daycare and running over two men with her minivan, before attempting suicide. She had faced 13 years in prison. All of the victims of the November 2016 incident survived their injuries."
Drunk seductress, 36, forced herself on boy then falsely accused him of rape - "A female paedophile who had sex with a 14-year-old schoolboy then accused him of rape has been jailed for four years and eight months."
If it were the other way around...
Japanese basketball players in prostitute ‘disgrace’ - "Four Japanese basketball players have apologised for bringing “disgrace” to their nation after they were kicked out of the Asian Games for paying prostitutes for sex. The regional Olympics was hit by scandal after the players were spotted in a notorious red light district of the Indonesian capital Jakarta wearing their national jerseys"
Malaysian professor ‘killed wife and daughter with yoga ball leaking carbon monoxide that was left in car boot in Hong Kong’ - "Khaw Kim-sun, 53, a specialist in anaesthesiology, put the inflatable ball containing carbon monoxide in the boot of a yellow Mini Cooper driven by his wife, Wong Siew-fung, 47"
Who needs democracy when you have data? - "For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia... What information is available is deeply flawed; systematic falsification of data on everything from GDP growth to hydropower use pervades Chinese government statistics. Australian National University researcher Borge Bakken estimates that official crime figures, which the government has a clear incentive to downplay, may represent as little as 2.5 percent of all criminal behavior."
Dozens of men tricked into 'Hunger Games'-style competition via Tinder - "In some kind of modern-love social experiment, dozens of men in New York City reportedly showed up for what they thought was a Tinder date but ended up being in a "Hunger Games"-style competition against each other to win that date... the "most troubling thing" about what he witnessed was that she seemed to target "for lack of a better term, nerdy looking dudes" with "flowers and their shirt tucked in," who may have been earnestly looking for love."
Oxytocin and social norms reduce xenophobia - "the bonding hormone oxytocin together with social norms significantly increases the willingness to donate money to refugees in need, even in people who tend to have a skeptical attitude towards migrants"
Income inequality not gender inequality positively covaries with female sexualization on social media - "Female sexualization is increasing, and scholars are divided on whether this trend reflects a form of gendered oppression or an expression of female competitiveness. Here, we proxy local status competition with income inequality, showing that female sexualization and physical appearance enhancement are most prevalent in environments that are economically unequal. We found no association with gender oppression. Exploratory analyses show that the association between economic inequality and sexualization is stronger in developed nations. Our findings have important implications: Sexualization manifests in response to economic conditions but does not covary with female subordination. These results raise the possibility that sexualization may be a marker of social climbing among women that track the degree of status competition in the local environment."
Feminist theory takes yet another hit
Here's Your List Of Hillary Clinton's 'Accomplishments' - ""If you want to stump a Democrat," Carly Fiorina suggested during Wednesday's GOP debate, "ask them to name an accomplishment of Mrs. Clinton's" as secretary of state. Hillary herself seems just as stumped... Even her fans struggle for an answer. None of the Hillary supporters assembled at a focus group could name one... Politico tried to come to Hillary's rescue after the debate, asking 20 top Democrats to name her "greatest accomplishment." But it's hard to see how the answers help her much, since several on that list came before she became secretary of state, such as the Pediatric Research Equity Act. Remember that one? One listed a speech she gave in China on women. Several did mention sanctions on Iran, which would have been a great accomplishment if they had led to Iran abandoning its nuclear ambitions. Oops. The problem Clinton backers are having is they're looking at it all wrong. Hillary's great achievements as secretary of state are easy to find, all around the world. Just look at the unrest in Syria, the collapse of Libya, the rise of ISIS, the death of a U.S. ambassador, renewed Russian aggression . .. Now that is a long list."
Online Shopping Is Making Us Accumulate More Junk - "Sites like Amazon have made it especially easy to shop. In 1999, the Seattle retailer patented a one-click buying process, which allows customers to purchase something without entering their shipping address or credit-card info. It launched its Prime program in 2005, and now more than 100 million people have signed on to pay $119 a year for “free” two-day shipping. As a result, most other major retailers offer free shipping, too. Returning stuff is a little more difficult—shoppers usually have to print a label and then go to the post office or a UPS or FedEx site to return packages. Many wait too long, or decide the hassle isn’t worth it because the stuff was cheap anyway. A recent NPR/Marist poll found that nine in 10 consumers rarely or never return stuff they’ve bought online."
Woman who complained about noisy mosque jailed for blasphemy - "An Indonesian court has sentenced a Buddhist woman to 18 months in prison for blasphemy after she was accused of insulting Islam. Meiliana, a 44-year-old ethnic Chinese woman, had complained the Muslim call to prayer, which is repeated five times a day, was being played too loudly at the mosque near her house in North Sumatra... Since 2004, 147 people have been imprisoned under blasphemy or related laws, according to monitoring by Human Rights Watch"
What Would Reza Aslan Say?
This isn't even Aceh, the usual retort of apologists
The Islam apologists, including Reza Aslan, smear Sam Harris by misrepresenting his words « Why Evolution Is True - "It takes a certain amount of mendacity to listen to Sam’s words, which are perfectly clear, and distort them to make it seem that Sam wants to stop all Muslim immigration to Europe and the U.S. But we see that mendacity in many apologists for Islam, and most notably in the odious Reza Aslan, whose reputation rests solely on whitewashing religion, especially Islam"
6 times the Strauss family had serious beef with each other - "In September 1907, the last surviving Strauss brother Eduard had several thousand compositions on manuscript paper of his late brother Josef incinerated. Eduard claimed Josef asked him to destroy his unfinished works (possibly including a grand opera) in case they fell into the hands of others who might pass them off as their own. But it’s equally possible that Eduard, to avoid unfavourable comparisons with his brother, found the works and destroyed them after Josef’s death."
'Crazy Rich Asians' plays well to hometown crowd in Singapore - "Some viewers worried the movie ignored the reality of everyday life on the ground. "Not everyone is rich here, a lot of people live normal lives," said retiree Irene Ee, 65. "Now everyone will think we have so much money, we should pay for everyone else's needs.""
Maybe some Singaporeans think Hollywood films are an accurate depiction of the US
1 in 2 Singapore residents do not have a close friend from another race: survey
Since movies have a duty to represent reality, the lack of minority representation in Crazy Rich Asians is good. Indeed this is already implicitly conceded when SJWs bash Singaporean Chinese for being racist
No-deal Brexit myths debunked - ROSS CLARK explains why we WON'T starve and planes WILL take off - "With the Government releasing the first batch of its ‘no-deal’ impact assessments today, Brexit critics are gleefully anticipating dire headlines. They have jumped on outlandish predictions for life after Brexit, from rioting and planes being grounded, to empty supermarket shelves and warnings that a no-deal Brexit would push food prices up by 12 per cent. But what’s the truth? Here, ROSS CLARK analyses claims from proponents of the new Project Fear"
Nurses who failed English test aimed at curbing immigration set for a reprieve - "Language rules introduced to curb immigration are set to be relaxed after they prevented native English-speaking nurses from working in the NHS. The NHS has a shortage of 40,000 nurses and recruiters and NHS employers have been lobbying for looser language requirements so that thousands of nurses from countries such as Australia, India and the Philippines can work in Britain. In June, the Observer uncovered evidence that Australians and other native English-speaking nurses were being turned down because they could not pass the International English Language Testing System test"
Difficulty of NHS language test ‘worsens nurse crisis’, say recruiters - "IELTS has four elements: speaking, listening, reading and writing. To qualify to work in the NHS, candidates need to score at least seven out of nine in each section. Purcell, who spent AU$650 (£386) on the test, managed 6.5 in writing and seven in reading... Native English speakers average just 6.3 in writing and 6.7 in reading, according to the British Council, a joint owner of the test. HCL says foreign nurses who come to the UK to study only need to reach 6.0 to get a place on a nursing degree at universities including Warwick and Gloucester."
The Sex Offender Registry Leaves Female Sex Offenders Open to Abuse
Feminism is about gender equality, which means protecting women by subjecting them to different rules from men
NYU Scholar Accused of Harassment Assails Rush to Judgment as Sign of ‘Sexual Paranoia’ - "The emails between Avital Ronell and her advisee, Nimrod Reitman, were florid and campy, filled with expressions of affection that seemed over the top and inappropriate to the investigators who would scrutinize them years later... It was, she said in an interview on Friday, a rush to judgment in an era when legitimate concerns about sexual harassment can veer off into “sexual paranoia.” Silenced until now by a confidentiality agreement with the university, she said she was tired of being portrayed as a predator when in fact, she insisted, there had been no inappropriate physical contact between herself and her doctoral advisee, and the communications he objected to were freely reciprocated... The final report on the Title IX investigation, excerpts of which were obtained by The Chronicle, supports Reitman’s contention that he felt pressured at times to use effusively affectionate language in his emails to her."
This Woman Lost An Internship At NASA For The Most Hilarious Reason Ever - "in a scene pulled directly from your nightmares, the jubilant poster had unwittingly tweeted obscenities at her brand-new boss."
Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter - "NASA engineer Homer Hickam deactivated his Twitter after a sustained harassment campaign from members of the furry community following a brief interaction with a would-be NASA intern (a furry) who spewed profanity at him. He also deleted his blog defending the furry"
Swearing on social media really could cost you your job - "poor spelling and grammar is more damaging to a candidate’s reputation than drunken photos."
Outrage over a safe sex guide calling vagina a "front hole"
Biology - and science more generally - is only endorsed when it suits the liberal agenda
Healthline changes their website then says 'front hole' claims are untrue.
Post ID: 563250779300517952
On blaming others for your problems
Humans of New York:
"“I’m studying human development. A few years ago I came across an article that said there were no successful black nations in the world. It really angered me. I thought: ‘Some fellow is trying to run us down.’ But then I discovered the author of the article was Nigerian. And the more I read, the more I realized it was true. And I started to think that maybe we should be mad at ourselves. I always hear my friends complaining about the politicians in this country. I tell them: ‘Imagine that lightning strikes and suddenly you’re the president. Would you know enough honest people to form a government?’ And they freeze. Because our culture doesn’t ascribe a premium to honesty. People will laugh at you for being honest and broke. Nigeria has the highest concentration of black people in the world. So this is where it should happen. But development doesn’t begin with things, it begins with people. I’m not saying that self-criticism is the answer. But it’s the beginning of the answer. Maybe we should be a little less proud and a little more discontent. Maybe we should stop blaming our immorality on poverty. I grew up in the slums and I don’t want to hear it. Don’t blame it on colonialism, nepotism, racism, or any of the ‘isms.’ And don’t blame it on the slave trade. Because slavery didn’t begin with white people. White people purchased slaves from our shores—that’s true. But black people did the selling. And we were paid for what we sold.” (Lagos, Nigeria)"
"“I’m studying human development. A few years ago I came across an article that said there were no successful black nations in the world. It really angered me. I thought: ‘Some fellow is trying to run us down.’ But then I discovered the author of the article was Nigerian. And the more I read, the more I realized it was true. And I started to think that maybe we should be mad at ourselves. I always hear my friends complaining about the politicians in this country. I tell them: ‘Imagine that lightning strikes and suddenly you’re the president. Would you know enough honest people to form a government?’ And they freeze. Because our culture doesn’t ascribe a premium to honesty. People will laugh at you for being honest and broke. Nigeria has the highest concentration of black people in the world. So this is where it should happen. But development doesn’t begin with things, it begins with people. I’m not saying that self-criticism is the answer. But it’s the beginning of the answer. Maybe we should be a little less proud and a little more discontent. Maybe we should stop blaming our immorality on poverty. I grew up in the slums and I don’t want to hear it. Don’t blame it on colonialism, nepotism, racism, or any of the ‘isms.’ And don’t blame it on the slave trade. Because slavery didn’t begin with white people. White people purchased slaves from our shores—that’s true. But black people did the selling. And we were paid for what we sold.” (Lagos, Nigeria)"
Post ID: 8102167865147865671
Links - 28th September 2018 (1)
EU food safety agency says aspartame poses no risk for consumers
Given that this is Europe where they're terrified of GMOs and don't have chlorinated chicken, this is a strong statement indeed
Revelation: Anthony Bourdain Was Defending Asia Argento, Attacking Harvey Weinstein, At the Same He Was Helping “Navigate” Settlement with Underage Actor - "Anthony Bourdain committed suicide on June 8th. His death was a shock until some associated his abrupt decision with tabloid photographs of girlfriend Asia Argento cavorting with a young Italian journalist. But now this comes to light: Bourdain and his attorney were helping Argento navigate a settlement and $380,000 pay off to an underage actor she allegedly raped. It’s mind boggling. Bourdain had been Argento’s steadfast supporter, speaking out against her alleged rapist, Harvey Weinstein. He was fully committed to her cause, to #MeToo, and loyal to his girlfriend"
Looks like it's not just male feminists who do protest too much
Asia Argento denies sexual assault of 17-year-old, says Anthony Bourdain made payment to accuser - ""I am deeply shocked and hurt by having read news that is absolutely false," Argento said in a statement to reporter Yashar Ali on Tuesday morning, referring to an article published on Sunday in the New York Times... The Times reported that it received documents that included a selfie of Argento and Bennett in bed. It also reported that three people familiar with the case had said the documents were authentic."
Asia Argento was representative of #metoo when she was seen as a victim, but not now that she's revealed to be a predator. Meanwhile, anti-gay men found doing strange things in public toilets with other men prove that anti-gay men are all closeted gays
MeToo actress Asia Argento now admits to sex with under-age boy - "Asia Argento, the Hollywood actress and "MeToo" activist accused of sexual assault on an underage boy, has privately admitted having sex with the fellow actor despite issuing a public denial."
Asia Argento sent unwanted topless video to comedian and then 'freaked out' when he got upset
Asia Argento Says 17-Year-Old Jimmy Bennett Sexually Assaulted Her - "As for her statement after the story broke -- "I have never had any sexual relationship with Bennett" -- Heller says she was being honest because it was a one-time only encounter and not a relationship... The attack against Bennett is odd ... because Argento has spoken out against shaming alleged victims in sexual assault cases."
Asia Argento Gives Rose McGowan 24 Hours to Retract Assault Comments - "Asia Argento is threatening legal action against Rose McGowan. On Twitter, Argento gave McGowan 24 hours to retract claims she made detailing how she discovered that Argento had reportedly paid off actor Jimmy Bennett, who alleges the actress assaulted him when he was 17 years old."
Female solidarity!
America’s Empty-Church Problem - "Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways... culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful... For decades, liberals have called the Christian right intolerant. When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however, they don’t become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. Research shows that evangelicals who don’t regularly attend church are less hostile to gay people than those who do. But they’re more hostile to African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims... White Democrats who are disconnected from organized religion are substantially more likely than other white Democrats to call the American dream a myth"
Sir Patrick Stewart quits Labour Party and reveals 'awkward' encounter with Jeremy Corbyn - "Sir Patrick Stewart, one of Labour’s most high-profile members, has abandoned the party he has supported for 73 years after saying he no longer knows “what it stands for”. The Star Trek actor, who attended his first Labour event when he was five, said: “It doesn’t feel like my party any more” as he attacked Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership."
The Forgotten Story of How "Punching Up" Harmed the Science-Fiction/Fantasy World - "It relies on crude and often skewed definitions of power, privilege and oppression—so that, for instance, Jeong, a Harvard Law School graduate and successful journalist from a minority group with higher income and lower incarceration rates than white Americans, can outscore an unemployed white high school dropout in “oppression points.” (Or so that Jeong supporter Rani Molla, another journalist with an elite degree and from a thriving demographic, can deride “whiny” rural white workers at a chicken processing plant.) However, the normalization of “punching up” can also do more immediate and tangible harm. In many cases, it can enable and excuse abusive behavior supposedly motivated by righteous anger or “anti-oppression” activism... the sci-fi/fantasy world was rocked by revelations about the bizarre online past of a much-praised young author in the field, the Thai-born, Hong Kong-based Benjanun Sriduangkaew, one of that year’s finalists for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Sriduangkaew was outed as a notorious social justice “rage-blogger” known by the fitting moniker “Requires Hate” (a shortened version of the title of her blog, “Requires Only That You Hate”), whose vitriol-soaked takedowns and callouts of “problematic” works and authors had sown fear in the SFF community since 2011. What’s more, Requires Hate also doubled as a prolific troll and cyberbully who mainly went by “Winterfox” but sometimes used other handles."
The incoherent, divisive dogma of cultural appropriation outrage - "Richard Wagner declared that unconverted Jews could never authentically belong in Europe’s folk-cultural life, because of their appearance, their avarice and their inability to master European languages. In arts such as music, he believed Jews could only produce inferior copies of the great German composers’ works. The popularity of Jewish composers in his time, Wagner raged, was a sign of the terminal decay of European music: Jews were its scavengers, like a “swarming colony of insect life” dissolving a corpse’s flesh. Within a century, such ideas were rhyming to the tramp of jackboots."
6 months with BlueSG electric vehicle car sharing: My driving experience - "At this point of time, BlueSG’s appeal is very selective and it really depends if 1) there are stations near your residence and your destination spots, 2) you don’t mind driving and all its related hassles, 3) you don’t mind playing Russian Roulette."
Instagram Stories At Two: What Price Have We Paid For Recording Everything? - "The downside of having a virtual guest list is that it soon instilled the constant need to throw a party... more than a third of millennials have intentionally posted misleading photos to make their holiday seem better than it is and 65% of those do so specifically to make others envious... "I have definitely seen my friends acting up for the camera"... A 2017 study found Instagram to be the worst social network in terms of its impact on mental health, linking it to depression and anxiety"
Why It's Not OK to Hate Men - "misandry – the unapologetic hatred of men as an undifferentiated group – is nothing new. Radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanis (founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men and shooter of Andy Warhol) were the most famous man-haters in the 1970s, but were pretty much disavowed at the time by many more mainstream feminists and later by third wave feminists. Misandry went out of fashion during the 1980s and the idea that feminists were all ‘lesbians and man haters’ was rightly ridiculed. Now it’s back – and much closer to the mainstream than it was 50 years ago... “You can’t hate all men can you? Actually I can,” writes Suzanne Moore, a British feminist, in the New Statesman in 2016. “As a class, I hate men.” Men are not a class but this doesn’t deter Moore from continuing her peroration. “I think any intelligent woman hates men,” she continues. She even comes up with a hash tag in the hope that this blanket condemnation will catch on – #yesallmen... Power is everything – which tells you something, perhaps, about the status anxiety of this theory’s most fanatical adherents... Hating men is not going to advance the cause of gender equality. On the contrary, if you tell someone that you hate them, simply because they have a penis, they have two basic alternative responses (other than ignoring you, which is probably the most sensible response). They can cringe and apologise – as many liberals do in the face of such onslaughts, hoping in vain for rehabilitation. The Maoists and their show trials did a lot to reveal the intrinsic human propensity to confess to imaginary sins. Alternatively, and more dangerously, you can respond with, “If you are justified in hating me then I am justified in hating you.”"
This is what a feminist looks like
Malaysia’s secret ‘hell’: victims of violence, extortion and abuse of power in immigration detention centres tell their stories - "more than 100 foreigners in Malaysia’s immigration centres had died in the preceding two years as a result of “various diseases and unknown causes”. More than half of the victims were ethnic Rohingya refugees escaping persecution in Myanmar."
The Crackdown Continues: Twitter Suspends Libertarian Accounts, Including Ron Paul Institute Director
Women's Studies 101: It's So Cool! If You Use Your Imagination You Can Blame Men for Everything!
FACT CHECK: Was Arnold Schwarzenegger Forced to Sleep Outside a Hotel He Had Helped Open? - "Social media users love to share words of inspiration and wisdom — if you can pair a profound (or at least vague) life lesson with a striking photo of a celebrity, all the better. That was the case in early 2018, when a photograph of California’s former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared along with an elaborate, but false, back story...
'when he was governor of California he inaugurated a hotel with his statue. Hotel staff told Arnold, “at any moment you can come and have a room reserved for you.” when Arnold stepped down as governor and went to the hotel, the administration refused to give him a room arguing that he should pay for it, since they were in great demand.'"
Sweden rape: Most convicted attackers foreign-born, says TV - "the total number of offenders over five years was 843. Of those, 197 were from the Middle East and North Africa, with 45 coming from Afghanistan. "We are very clear in the programme that it is a small percentage of the people coming from abroad who are convicted of rape," chief editor Ulf Johansson told the BBC. He pointed out that the number of reported rapes in Sweden was far higher, so no conclusions could be drawn on the role of immigrants in sexual attacks... A former police officer born in Afghanistan told the programme that some young Afghans who had come to Sweden in recent years had views that differed significantly from Sweden's idea of sexual equality."
Presumably this is clear evidence of xenophobic/racist bias in the Swedish court system
Nobody Should Listen to Twitter Mobs - "Mobbing people over “bad” tweets and hounding them out of jobs is a good way to create a new norm that discourages people from being forthright on social media. It threatens to turn Twitter from a place where people are freewheeling and unfiltered into an environment where people stay on message and work to promote their personal brand. If that happens, Twitter will just be Instagram."
Move over ‘monkey Jesus’, China’s technicolour Buddha joins the wall of shame for botched repair works - "Most restorations are believed to have been done by “Buddhist believers who voluntarily pooled small amounts of money they saved from cheap groceries or discounts … they believe they were protecting the relics and had good intentions,” the internet user wrote... “Relics are called relics because they look old, showing their historical value,” Xu said. “Restoration work may show the faith of a Buddhist believer, but if the restoration covers up the marks of the original relics, then they are turned into idols for worship, not relics any more.”"
Botched Chinese temple fresco restoration sparks outrage - "The new frescoes in Chaoyang’s Yunjie Temple are definitely bold and colorful – too bad they don’t look a thing like the delicate historic originals they were meant to restore. They were painted directly onto the nearly 300-year-old original ones using bright colors and bold lines, with almost no stylistic similarity to the originals... destroying cultural relics is quite common in China."
Many Singaporeans would say that if you can't do better you have no right to criticise the restoration
Given that this is Europe where they're terrified of GMOs and don't have chlorinated chicken, this is a strong statement indeed
Revelation: Anthony Bourdain Was Defending Asia Argento, Attacking Harvey Weinstein, At the Same He Was Helping “Navigate” Settlement with Underage Actor - "Anthony Bourdain committed suicide on June 8th. His death was a shock until some associated his abrupt decision with tabloid photographs of girlfriend Asia Argento cavorting with a young Italian journalist. But now this comes to light: Bourdain and his attorney were helping Argento navigate a settlement and $380,000 pay off to an underage actor she allegedly raped. It’s mind boggling. Bourdain had been Argento’s steadfast supporter, speaking out against her alleged rapist, Harvey Weinstein. He was fully committed to her cause, to #MeToo, and loyal to his girlfriend"
Looks like it's not just male feminists who do protest too much
Asia Argento denies sexual assault of 17-year-old, says Anthony Bourdain made payment to accuser - ""I am deeply shocked and hurt by having read news that is absolutely false," Argento said in a statement to reporter Yashar Ali on Tuesday morning, referring to an article published on Sunday in the New York Times... The Times reported that it received documents that included a selfie of Argento and Bennett in bed. It also reported that three people familiar with the case had said the documents were authentic."
Asia Argento was representative of #metoo when she was seen as a victim, but not now that she's revealed to be a predator. Meanwhile, anti-gay men found doing strange things in public toilets with other men prove that anti-gay men are all closeted gays
MeToo actress Asia Argento now admits to sex with under-age boy - "Asia Argento, the Hollywood actress and "MeToo" activist accused of sexual assault on an underage boy, has privately admitted having sex with the fellow actor despite issuing a public denial."
Asia Argento sent unwanted topless video to comedian and then 'freaked out' when he got upset
Asia Argento Says 17-Year-Old Jimmy Bennett Sexually Assaulted Her - "As for her statement after the story broke -- "I have never had any sexual relationship with Bennett" -- Heller says she was being honest because it was a one-time only encounter and not a relationship... The attack against Bennett is odd ... because Argento has spoken out against shaming alleged victims in sexual assault cases."
Asia Argento Gives Rose McGowan 24 Hours to Retract Assault Comments - "Asia Argento is threatening legal action against Rose McGowan. On Twitter, Argento gave McGowan 24 hours to retract claims she made detailing how she discovered that Argento had reportedly paid off actor Jimmy Bennett, who alleges the actress assaulted him when he was 17 years old."
Female solidarity!
America’s Empty-Church Problem - "Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways... culturally conservative white Americans who are disengaged from church experience less economic success and more family breakdown than those who remain connected, and they grow more pessimistic and resentful... For decades, liberals have called the Christian right intolerant. When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however, they don’t become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. Research shows that evangelicals who don’t regularly attend church are less hostile to gay people than those who do. But they’re more hostile to African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims... White Democrats who are disconnected from organized religion are substantially more likely than other white Democrats to call the American dream a myth"
Sir Patrick Stewart quits Labour Party and reveals 'awkward' encounter with Jeremy Corbyn - "Sir Patrick Stewart, one of Labour’s most high-profile members, has abandoned the party he has supported for 73 years after saying he no longer knows “what it stands for”. The Star Trek actor, who attended his first Labour event when he was five, said: “It doesn’t feel like my party any more” as he attacked Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership."
The Forgotten Story of How "Punching Up" Harmed the Science-Fiction/Fantasy World - "It relies on crude and often skewed definitions of power, privilege and oppression—so that, for instance, Jeong, a Harvard Law School graduate and successful journalist from a minority group with higher income and lower incarceration rates than white Americans, can outscore an unemployed white high school dropout in “oppression points.” (Or so that Jeong supporter Rani Molla, another journalist with an elite degree and from a thriving demographic, can deride “whiny” rural white workers at a chicken processing plant.) However, the normalization of “punching up” can also do more immediate and tangible harm. In many cases, it can enable and excuse abusive behavior supposedly motivated by righteous anger or “anti-oppression” activism... the sci-fi/fantasy world was rocked by revelations about the bizarre online past of a much-praised young author in the field, the Thai-born, Hong Kong-based Benjanun Sriduangkaew, one of that year’s finalists for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Sriduangkaew was outed as a notorious social justice “rage-blogger” known by the fitting moniker “Requires Hate” (a shortened version of the title of her blog, “Requires Only That You Hate”), whose vitriol-soaked takedowns and callouts of “problematic” works and authors had sown fear in the SFF community since 2011. What’s more, Requires Hate also doubled as a prolific troll and cyberbully who mainly went by “Winterfox” but sometimes used other handles."
The incoherent, divisive dogma of cultural appropriation outrage - "Richard Wagner declared that unconverted Jews could never authentically belong in Europe’s folk-cultural life, because of their appearance, their avarice and their inability to master European languages. In arts such as music, he believed Jews could only produce inferior copies of the great German composers’ works. The popularity of Jewish composers in his time, Wagner raged, was a sign of the terminal decay of European music: Jews were its scavengers, like a “swarming colony of insect life” dissolving a corpse’s flesh. Within a century, such ideas were rhyming to the tramp of jackboots."
6 months with BlueSG electric vehicle car sharing: My driving experience - "At this point of time, BlueSG’s appeal is very selective and it really depends if 1) there are stations near your residence and your destination spots, 2) you don’t mind driving and all its related hassles, 3) you don’t mind playing Russian Roulette."
Instagram Stories At Two: What Price Have We Paid For Recording Everything? - "The downside of having a virtual guest list is that it soon instilled the constant need to throw a party... more than a third of millennials have intentionally posted misleading photos to make their holiday seem better than it is and 65% of those do so specifically to make others envious... "I have definitely seen my friends acting up for the camera"... A 2017 study found Instagram to be the worst social network in terms of its impact on mental health, linking it to depression and anxiety"
Why It's Not OK to Hate Men - "misandry – the unapologetic hatred of men as an undifferentiated group – is nothing new. Radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanis (founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men and shooter of Andy Warhol) were the most famous man-haters in the 1970s, but were pretty much disavowed at the time by many more mainstream feminists and later by third wave feminists. Misandry went out of fashion during the 1980s and the idea that feminists were all ‘lesbians and man haters’ was rightly ridiculed. Now it’s back – and much closer to the mainstream than it was 50 years ago... “You can’t hate all men can you? Actually I can,” writes Suzanne Moore, a British feminist, in the New Statesman in 2016. “As a class, I hate men.” Men are not a class but this doesn’t deter Moore from continuing her peroration. “I think any intelligent woman hates men,” she continues. She even comes up with a hash tag in the hope that this blanket condemnation will catch on – #yesallmen... Power is everything – which tells you something, perhaps, about the status anxiety of this theory’s most fanatical adherents... Hating men is not going to advance the cause of gender equality. On the contrary, if you tell someone that you hate them, simply because they have a penis, they have two basic alternative responses (other than ignoring you, which is probably the most sensible response). They can cringe and apologise – as many liberals do in the face of such onslaughts, hoping in vain for rehabilitation. The Maoists and their show trials did a lot to reveal the intrinsic human propensity to confess to imaginary sins. Alternatively, and more dangerously, you can respond with, “If you are justified in hating me then I am justified in hating you.”"
This is what a feminist looks like
Malaysia’s secret ‘hell’: victims of violence, extortion and abuse of power in immigration detention centres tell their stories - "more than 100 foreigners in Malaysia’s immigration centres had died in the preceding two years as a result of “various diseases and unknown causes”. More than half of the victims were ethnic Rohingya refugees escaping persecution in Myanmar."
The Crackdown Continues: Twitter Suspends Libertarian Accounts, Including Ron Paul Institute Director
Women's Studies 101: It's So Cool! If You Use Your Imagination You Can Blame Men for Everything!
FACT CHECK: Was Arnold Schwarzenegger Forced to Sleep Outside a Hotel He Had Helped Open? - "Social media users love to share words of inspiration and wisdom — if you can pair a profound (or at least vague) life lesson with a striking photo of a celebrity, all the better. That was the case in early 2018, when a photograph of California’s former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared along with an elaborate, but false, back story...
'when he was governor of California he inaugurated a hotel with his statue. Hotel staff told Arnold, “at any moment you can come and have a room reserved for you.” when Arnold stepped down as governor and went to the hotel, the administration refused to give him a room arguing that he should pay for it, since they were in great demand.'"
Sweden rape: Most convicted attackers foreign-born, says TV - "the total number of offenders over five years was 843. Of those, 197 were from the Middle East and North Africa, with 45 coming from Afghanistan. "We are very clear in the programme that it is a small percentage of the people coming from abroad who are convicted of rape," chief editor Ulf Johansson told the BBC. He pointed out that the number of reported rapes in Sweden was far higher, so no conclusions could be drawn on the role of immigrants in sexual attacks... A former police officer born in Afghanistan told the programme that some young Afghans who had come to Sweden in recent years had views that differed significantly from Sweden's idea of sexual equality."
Presumably this is clear evidence of xenophobic/racist bias in the Swedish court system
Nobody Should Listen to Twitter Mobs - "Mobbing people over “bad” tweets and hounding them out of jobs is a good way to create a new norm that discourages people from being forthright on social media. It threatens to turn Twitter from a place where people are freewheeling and unfiltered into an environment where people stay on message and work to promote their personal brand. If that happens, Twitter will just be Instagram."
Move over ‘monkey Jesus’, China’s technicolour Buddha joins the wall of shame for botched repair works - "Most restorations are believed to have been done by “Buddhist believers who voluntarily pooled small amounts of money they saved from cheap groceries or discounts … they believe they were protecting the relics and had good intentions,” the internet user wrote... “Relics are called relics because they look old, showing their historical value,” Xu said. “Restoration work may show the faith of a Buddhist believer, but if the restoration covers up the marks of the original relics, then they are turned into idols for worship, not relics any more.”"
Botched Chinese temple fresco restoration sparks outrage - "The new frescoes in Chaoyang’s Yunjie Temple are definitely bold and colorful – too bad they don’t look a thing like the delicate historic originals they were meant to restore. They were painted directly onto the nearly 300-year-old original ones using bright colors and bold lines, with almost no stylistic similarity to the originals... destroying cultural relics is quite common in China."
Many Singaporeans would say that if you can't do better you have no right to criticise the restoration
Post ID: 1759508734700355526
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Links - 27th September 2018 (2)
The Scientists Who Starved to Death Surrounded By Food - "As the invading German army poured into the city looting and destroying anything of value, a group of Russian botanists holed up inside the vault of the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry with a precious collection of seeds and edible plants. This collection, containing seeds from nearly 200,000 varieties of plants of which about a quarter was edible, constituted one of the world’s largest repositories of the genetic diversity of food crops. Among them were plenty of rice, wheat, corn, beans and potatoes, enough to sustain the botanists and see them through the worst days of the siege. But the scientists hadn’t barricaded themselves in the vault with food grains to save their lives, but rather to protect these seeds from the Nazis as well as from the starving people plundering through the streets in search for anything to eat"
(GC) - "Colorado is ordering Jack Phillips to bake a Pro-LGBT Cake. Again"
"I think it’s weird that there is only one baker in all of Colorado."
How Title IX Became a Political Weapon - WSJ - "As long as Title IX’s victims were wrestlers or swimmers from low-revenue men’s sports that were jettisoned to achieve participation-parity with women’s sports, nobody much cared. But now that the law is being turned into a tool to suppress free speech on college campuses, even liberals are starting to cry foul... “The very idea that a professor could be hit with a Title IX investigation over an opinion article she wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education is so palpably ridiculous that there is simply no need to go further.”... The case brought against Brown University in the early 1990s by a coalition of feminists and trial lawyers set the stage. It alleged that Brown—which offered more women’s sports teams than men’s at the time—had violated the law by downgrading two women’s teams. The university produced reams of data showing that women at Brown had more opportunities to play sports than men, but more men than women played intramural sports by 3 to 1 and club sports by a whopping 8 to 1. To the applause of the Clinton administration, the court ruled that such data didn’t matter. The responsibility of the school wasn’t to provide equal opportunity to participate in sports—it was to educate women to be interested in sports. In effect the ruling said that Brown women didn’t know what they wanted. They only thought they were dancers or actors or musicians. They had to be taught that they were really athletes. They didn’t know what was good for them but the government did... If colleges couldn’t produce enough actual female bodies on the playing field, the schools were forced to cut male athletes until the participation rates of both sexes were the same... The new demands to combat what federal education officials also call a “rape culture” on campus are so excessive that even current and former Harvard Law professors have publicly complained that their school’s attempt to comply has undermined due process and is “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.” But for Ms. Kipnis, it is the reduction of women to helpless, permanent victim status that has roused her and other feminists to anger."
An Alt-Right No-Show - WSJ - "The anticipatory media coverage of the event didn’t quite reach Super-Bowl hype levels, but it was close. And the number of white supremacists who showed up for the Sunday rally? Not 200. Not 100. About 20... In the last 12 months, the left—abetted by some in the media—has transformed Charlottesville into “Charlottesville”—a one-word symbol of civic and racial strife presumably at large in Donald Trump’s America... We wish Mr. Trump was more adept at navigating through this minefield. We also wish we didn’t have to read in the second paragraph of the New York Times coverage of Sunday’s microscopic rally that “even with the low turnout, almost no one walked away with the sense that the nation’s divisions were any closer to healing.” Even no news is bad news these days."
Long Hair on Men: Only for the Young? - WSJ - "“People seem freer about their appearance,” he said. Though it may sound implausible, Mr. Keefer has found long locks easier to maintain than a cropped cut. “I’ll condition my hair, but I mostly just run a brush through it before I shower and wash it”... Still, it is worth noting that in many workplaces (if not, say, the Senate), long hair is no longer verboten; none of the men I talked to had faced any censure at work"
The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens - "teens perform joy on Instagram but confess sadness on Tumblr. The site, he said, is a “safe haven from their local friends. … On Tumblr they tell their most personal stories. They share things that they normally wouldn’t share with their local friends because of the fear of judgment. That has held true for every person that I’ve met.”... A study by Priceonomics found that Tumblr is the top source for BuzzFeed’s viral content... The outrage clicks were so powerful, Lilley and Greenfield decided to experiment with “negative attention.” Haters are more loyal than fans, so they promoted the bad hacks. The worst hacks brought in thousands of followers, and that’s how Lifehackable built the bulk of its audience. “Tom knew what was happening, and so then he was more incentivized to actually not do his job right,” Lilley said. “And in sucking, he succeeded.”"
For a pittance, Kenya is mortgaged to China :: Kenya - "the Chinese nationals who ‘own’ the SGR, run operations like masters on a slave plantation. Kenyan workers who spoke to Wafula said that they experience “racism and blatant discrimination.” Kenyans can’t eat at the same tables as Chinese. And when they’re being dropped off from work, they can’t ride in the same vans either. This sounds more like apartheid than industrialisation to me. And the segregation is made worse by the fact that the lingua franca on SGR precincts is Standard Chinese. Notice boards are printed in it, and records are kept in it"
Westminster crash: Salih Khater named as suspect - "The man arrested on suspicion of terror offences after a car crashed outside the Houses of Parliament has been named as Salih Khater by government sources. The 29-year-old British citizen, originally from Sudan, has also been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, Met Police said. He came to the UK as a refugee and was granted asylum.... as of the end of June 2018, there were 676 live investigations into potential terrorist plots. Since March 2017, 13 Islamist plots and four far-right plots had been foiled, he added."
Strange that they obsess so much about the "far right" when the threat is so minor
BBC Cast a Black Woman as a Historical English Queen. - "The new series of the 'The Hollow Crown' on the BBC has cast a black woman (Sophie Okonedo) as Margaret of Anjou. This is an actual historical figure who was the wife of Henry VI and thus was Queen of England from 1445-1461 and from 1470-1471... The only reason I post this is because there always seems to be an outrage when movies/tv shows are supposedly 'white washed'. For example, more recently, Scarlett Johansson was cast as an Asian character in a Hollywood adaptation of a Japanese anime franchise: 'Ghost in the Shell'. There was outrage because this was apparently 'yellowface'... That is just a fantasy character however. The difference with this is that it's a real historical figure being represented inaccurately. Just imagine the outrage if someone like Martin Luther King was cast as a white guy."
Being subject to double standards based on race is white privilege!
Joseph Fiennes 'shocked' to be cast as Michael Jackson - "Some fans have reacted angrily to the casting, but Fiennes said he thought Jackson was "probably closer to my colour than his original colour". Sky Arts said producers had "creative freedom" in the casting. Fiennes said he believed Jackson - who died in 2009 - had a "pigmentation issue" with his skin, so the issue of race should not come into play"
If they'd cast a black actor and lightened his skin...
Superheroes Don’t Wear Ponytails, and Yes, It’s Sexist - "why don’t Black Widow, Gamora, Scarlet Witch, and Mantis — and even superheroines beyond Infinity War, from Wonder Woman to Jessica Jones, Elektra, Storm, and She-Hulk — ever seem to take a second to throw their hair into a chic chignon (or, more likely, a half-assed messy bun like the rest of us do before an activity as simple as getting on the elliptical)?... The simplest answer is that comics are a visual medium, and a bunch of long, flowing hair swirling around during an already epic fight scene looks pretty cool
SJW logic: If you don't have a problem with people having superpowers you shouldn't have a problem with story logic bent for diversity ends (e.g. MaRey Sue [Rey in Star Wars]). But we need realistic hair physics on women
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four Describes the Authoritarian Left Better Than It Does Trump - "Consider the Junior Anti-Sex League, the prudish youths in Orwell's story who think the "sex impulse" is dangerous and devote themselves to spying on interactions between the sexes. "Eroticism was the enemy," they believed. "Desire was thoughtcrime." If this prissiness finds its echo in anyone today, it isn't in the creepily oversexed, pussy-grabbing Trump—it's in the stiff buzz-killers of the campus feminist movement. These radical wallflowers demonize drunk sex, bossily insisting all sexual interactions must be "sober, imaginative, enthusiastic, creative, wanted, informed, mutual and honest." (Even the Junior Anti-Sex League didn't come up with such a thorough list of what counts as acceptable sex.) They drag male students to campus kangaroo courts for allegedly doing sex the wrong way. Student officials in Britain have banned the making of "animal noises" in the student bar lest they arouse sexual bravado in men, and sexual dread in women. Fortunately, it is curable. Some universities make freshmen undergo diversity training, inculcating them with the correct mindset on all matters racial, religious, and social. The University of Delaware, going full O'Brien, referred to its diversity training as "treatment" for incorrect attitudes. The New York Times reported last year that more and more students think diversity training "smacks of some sort of Communist re-education program." The modern campus, as devoted to treating moral infection as to imparting knowledge, could adopt O'Brien's cry as its slogan: "Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you!" And of course there's thoughtcrime. The Party punishes anyone who dares to hold a point of view it disagrees with. Not unlike modern P.C. warriors who will brand you a "denier" if you're not fully eco-conformist and a "misogynist" if you criticize feminism. Witness the doublespeak of today's leftist lovers of censorship. They create Safe Spaces, they speak of "the right to be comfortable". These are darkly Orwellian euphemisms for censorship... how about Newspeak, the Party's made-up, minimalist language that it pressures people to adopt? That finds expression today in the Pronoun Police, who demonize the use of "he" and "she" as potentially transphobic and invent Newspeak pronouns in their stead. Some campuses now want everyone to use "ze" as a default pronoun. "Ze" might be the most Newspeak word ever: a strange small word you must use if you want to be considered morally good. Then there is the war on history, the demolition of ugly or inconvenient historical ideas and symbols. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, old things that have fallen out of favor are plunged down the memory hole. Today, P.C. zealots demand the tearing down of statues of old colonialists or the renaming of university halls that are named after people from the past who—shock, horror—had different values to ours. The Year Zero fervor of Orwell's Party is mirrored now in the behaviour of intolerant culture warriors."
After the bitcoin boom: hard lessons for cryptocurrency investors - "eight months later, the $23,000 he invested in several digital tokens is worth about $4,000, and he is clearheaded about what happened."
Horror and disgust shouldn’t be our only response to pedophilia - "Sexual attraction to children is associated, on average, with lower IQ, a greater number of head injuries during childhood, and differences in the organization of the brain, suggesting that it is the result of neurodevelopmental disturbances. As a result, this is a preference that is hard-wired and not something that can be changed, exemplified by the fact that pedophiles (and likely, the priests in question) will have hundreds of victims over the course of a lifetime. One study estimated that a child molester who abuses boys will have, on average, 150 male victims... Roughly 1 per cent of the population is pedophilic, translating to 76 million people worldwide. Statistically speaking, every one of us knows at least one person who is a pedophile... Fact-based discussions will help us protect children by identifying at-risk individuals before they offend. But for some people, the fact that pedophiles exist at all forecloses on rational conversation. Shutting the discussion down out of discomfort, as many of us would understandably prefer to do, doesn’t eliminate the problem, but only sends it underground."
The myth of a New Nazism - "the collapse of the Weimar Republic happened in the midst of the worst economic crisis of the 20th century, when a third of the potential workforce was unemployed. Nothing on the scale of that economic calamity is happening today... The Weimar Republic also fell because the fascist movement used mass violence on the streets and decimated democratic and socialist, left-wing political forces. We have not seen anything similar to that today... the analogy between today and the rise of the Nazis obscures far more than it illuminates... The rise of fascism was an explicitly right-wing response to the rise of militant Communism. And that makes it very, very different from the rise of populism today... the Nazis never actually managed to win a majority in free and open elections. The largest share of the vote they ever received, in 1932, was about a third. The reason they were able to secure power was because of the active support of conservatives, the aristocrats and militarists, who sided with them in parliament, and, most importantly, because they were using mass violence and intimidation, exiling and murdering their opponents. This is how they came to power, through ruling-class support and force, not because of free and democratic elections... what prompted Professor Bessner and me to write this piece was that the over-reliance on the fascist analogy would lead us down the same path taken by pro-democratic and anti-fascist thinkers in the 1940s, like Hans Spier and Karl Loewenstein, both of whom fled Germany to the US in the 1930s. They came to the conclusion that fascism proved that democracy could not be trusted. And that for democracy to survive, the state had to curtail some freedoms. This line of thinking, this idea of militant democracy, which proved very influential in the US, led to the creation of very undemocratic, unaccountable institutions like the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council in the US. It was an ideological tendency that also led to the dramatic limiting of political horizons in postwar Europe... the so-called left [is] moving more and more in the direction of technocracy, and trying to achieve progress through technocracy, rather than through more popular control of the economy. And I think that is born of a deep disappointment with the masses, and a belief that the masses cannot be trusted to make the right economic decisions. And that tendency developed and deepened right through to the Obama administration, which was very much defined by technocracy."
How Accurate are Self-Reports? An Analysis of Self-Reported Healthcare Utilization and Absence When Compared to Administrative Data - "Results: Self-report and administrative data showed greater concordance for monthly compared to yearly healthcare utilization metrics. Percent agreement ranged from 30 to 99% with annual doctor visits having the lowest percent agreement. Younger people, males, those with higher education, and healthier individuals more accurately reported their healthcare utilization and absenteeism.
Conclusions: Self-reported healthcare utilization and absenteeism may be used as a proxy when medical claims and administrative data are unavailable, particularly for shorter recall periods."
Self-reporting isn't inaccurate
(GC) - "Colorado is ordering Jack Phillips to bake a Pro-LGBT Cake. Again"
"I think it’s weird that there is only one baker in all of Colorado."
How Title IX Became a Political Weapon - WSJ - "As long as Title IX’s victims were wrestlers or swimmers from low-revenue men’s sports that were jettisoned to achieve participation-parity with women’s sports, nobody much cared. But now that the law is being turned into a tool to suppress free speech on college campuses, even liberals are starting to cry foul... “The very idea that a professor could be hit with a Title IX investigation over an opinion article she wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education is so palpably ridiculous that there is simply no need to go further.”... The case brought against Brown University in the early 1990s by a coalition of feminists and trial lawyers set the stage. It alleged that Brown—which offered more women’s sports teams than men’s at the time—had violated the law by downgrading two women’s teams. The university produced reams of data showing that women at Brown had more opportunities to play sports than men, but more men than women played intramural sports by 3 to 1 and club sports by a whopping 8 to 1. To the applause of the Clinton administration, the court ruled that such data didn’t matter. The responsibility of the school wasn’t to provide equal opportunity to participate in sports—it was to educate women to be interested in sports. In effect the ruling said that Brown women didn’t know what they wanted. They only thought they were dancers or actors or musicians. They had to be taught that they were really athletes. They didn’t know what was good for them but the government did... If colleges couldn’t produce enough actual female bodies on the playing field, the schools were forced to cut male athletes until the participation rates of both sexes were the same... The new demands to combat what federal education officials also call a “rape culture” on campus are so excessive that even current and former Harvard Law professors have publicly complained that their school’s attempt to comply has undermined due process and is “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.” But for Ms. Kipnis, it is the reduction of women to helpless, permanent victim status that has roused her and other feminists to anger."
An Alt-Right No-Show - WSJ - "The anticipatory media coverage of the event didn’t quite reach Super-Bowl hype levels, but it was close. And the number of white supremacists who showed up for the Sunday rally? Not 200. Not 100. About 20... In the last 12 months, the left—abetted by some in the media—has transformed Charlottesville into “Charlottesville”—a one-word symbol of civic and racial strife presumably at large in Donald Trump’s America... We wish Mr. Trump was more adept at navigating through this minefield. We also wish we didn’t have to read in the second paragraph of the New York Times coverage of Sunday’s microscopic rally that “even with the low turnout, almost no one walked away with the sense that the nation’s divisions were any closer to healing.” Even no news is bad news these days."
Long Hair on Men: Only for the Young? - WSJ - "“People seem freer about their appearance,” he said. Though it may sound implausible, Mr. Keefer has found long locks easier to maintain than a cropped cut. “I’ll condition my hair, but I mostly just run a brush through it before I shower and wash it”... Still, it is worth noting that in many workplaces (if not, say, the Senate), long hair is no longer verboten; none of the men I talked to had faced any censure at work"
The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens - "teens perform joy on Instagram but confess sadness on Tumblr. The site, he said, is a “safe haven from their local friends. … On Tumblr they tell their most personal stories. They share things that they normally wouldn’t share with their local friends because of the fear of judgment. That has held true for every person that I’ve met.”... A study by Priceonomics found that Tumblr is the top source for BuzzFeed’s viral content... The outrage clicks were so powerful, Lilley and Greenfield decided to experiment with “negative attention.” Haters are more loyal than fans, so they promoted the bad hacks. The worst hacks brought in thousands of followers, and that’s how Lifehackable built the bulk of its audience. “Tom knew what was happening, and so then he was more incentivized to actually not do his job right,” Lilley said. “And in sucking, he succeeded.”"
For a pittance, Kenya is mortgaged to China :: Kenya - "the Chinese nationals who ‘own’ the SGR, run operations like masters on a slave plantation. Kenyan workers who spoke to Wafula said that they experience “racism and blatant discrimination.” Kenyans can’t eat at the same tables as Chinese. And when they’re being dropped off from work, they can’t ride in the same vans either. This sounds more like apartheid than industrialisation to me. And the segregation is made worse by the fact that the lingua franca on SGR precincts is Standard Chinese. Notice boards are printed in it, and records are kept in it"
Westminster crash: Salih Khater named as suspect - "The man arrested on suspicion of terror offences after a car crashed outside the Houses of Parliament has been named as Salih Khater by government sources. The 29-year-old British citizen, originally from Sudan, has also been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, Met Police said. He came to the UK as a refugee and was granted asylum.... as of the end of June 2018, there were 676 live investigations into potential terrorist plots. Since March 2017, 13 Islamist plots and four far-right plots had been foiled, he added."
Strange that they obsess so much about the "far right" when the threat is so minor
BBC Cast a Black Woman as a Historical English Queen. - "The new series of the 'The Hollow Crown' on the BBC has cast a black woman (Sophie Okonedo) as Margaret of Anjou. This is an actual historical figure who was the wife of Henry VI and thus was Queen of England from 1445-1461 and from 1470-1471... The only reason I post this is because there always seems to be an outrage when movies/tv shows are supposedly 'white washed'. For example, more recently, Scarlett Johansson was cast as an Asian character in a Hollywood adaptation of a Japanese anime franchise: 'Ghost in the Shell'. There was outrage because this was apparently 'yellowface'... That is just a fantasy character however. The difference with this is that it's a real historical figure being represented inaccurately. Just imagine the outrage if someone like Martin Luther King was cast as a white guy."
Being subject to double standards based on race is white privilege!
Joseph Fiennes 'shocked' to be cast as Michael Jackson - "Some fans have reacted angrily to the casting, but Fiennes said he thought Jackson was "probably closer to my colour than his original colour". Sky Arts said producers had "creative freedom" in the casting. Fiennes said he believed Jackson - who died in 2009 - had a "pigmentation issue" with his skin, so the issue of race should not come into play"
If they'd cast a black actor and lightened his skin...
Superheroes Don’t Wear Ponytails, and Yes, It’s Sexist - "why don’t Black Widow, Gamora, Scarlet Witch, and Mantis — and even superheroines beyond Infinity War, from Wonder Woman to Jessica Jones, Elektra, Storm, and She-Hulk — ever seem to take a second to throw their hair into a chic chignon (or, more likely, a half-assed messy bun like the rest of us do before an activity as simple as getting on the elliptical)?... The simplest answer is that comics are a visual medium, and a bunch of long, flowing hair swirling around during an already epic fight scene looks pretty cool
SJW logic: If you don't have a problem with people having superpowers you shouldn't have a problem with story logic bent for diversity ends (e.g. MaRey Sue [Rey in Star Wars]). But we need realistic hair physics on women
Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four Describes the Authoritarian Left Better Than It Does Trump - "Consider the Junior Anti-Sex League, the prudish youths in Orwell's story who think the "sex impulse" is dangerous and devote themselves to spying on interactions between the sexes. "Eroticism was the enemy," they believed. "Desire was thoughtcrime." If this prissiness finds its echo in anyone today, it isn't in the creepily oversexed, pussy-grabbing Trump—it's in the stiff buzz-killers of the campus feminist movement. These radical wallflowers demonize drunk sex, bossily insisting all sexual interactions must be "sober, imaginative, enthusiastic, creative, wanted, informed, mutual and honest." (Even the Junior Anti-Sex League didn't come up with such a thorough list of what counts as acceptable sex.) They drag male students to campus kangaroo courts for allegedly doing sex the wrong way. Student officials in Britain have banned the making of "animal noises" in the student bar lest they arouse sexual bravado in men, and sexual dread in women. Fortunately, it is curable. Some universities make freshmen undergo diversity training, inculcating them with the correct mindset on all matters racial, religious, and social. The University of Delaware, going full O'Brien, referred to its diversity training as "treatment" for incorrect attitudes. The New York Times reported last year that more and more students think diversity training "smacks of some sort of Communist re-education program." The modern campus, as devoted to treating moral infection as to imparting knowledge, could adopt O'Brien's cry as its slogan: "Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you!" And of course there's thoughtcrime. The Party punishes anyone who dares to hold a point of view it disagrees with. Not unlike modern P.C. warriors who will brand you a "denier" if you're not fully eco-conformist and a "misogynist" if you criticize feminism. Witness the doublespeak of today's leftist lovers of censorship. They create Safe Spaces, they speak of "the right to be comfortable". These are darkly Orwellian euphemisms for censorship... how about Newspeak, the Party's made-up, minimalist language that it pressures people to adopt? That finds expression today in the Pronoun Police, who demonize the use of "he" and "she" as potentially transphobic and invent Newspeak pronouns in their stead. Some campuses now want everyone to use "ze" as a default pronoun. "Ze" might be the most Newspeak word ever: a strange small word you must use if you want to be considered morally good. Then there is the war on history, the demolition of ugly or inconvenient historical ideas and symbols. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, old things that have fallen out of favor are plunged down the memory hole. Today, P.C. zealots demand the tearing down of statues of old colonialists or the renaming of university halls that are named after people from the past who—shock, horror—had different values to ours. The Year Zero fervor of Orwell's Party is mirrored now in the behaviour of intolerant culture warriors."
After the bitcoin boom: hard lessons for cryptocurrency investors - "eight months later, the $23,000 he invested in several digital tokens is worth about $4,000, and he is clearheaded about what happened."
Horror and disgust shouldn’t be our only response to pedophilia - "Sexual attraction to children is associated, on average, with lower IQ, a greater number of head injuries during childhood, and differences in the organization of the brain, suggesting that it is the result of neurodevelopmental disturbances. As a result, this is a preference that is hard-wired and not something that can be changed, exemplified by the fact that pedophiles (and likely, the priests in question) will have hundreds of victims over the course of a lifetime. One study estimated that a child molester who abuses boys will have, on average, 150 male victims... Roughly 1 per cent of the population is pedophilic, translating to 76 million people worldwide. Statistically speaking, every one of us knows at least one person who is a pedophile... Fact-based discussions will help us protect children by identifying at-risk individuals before they offend. But for some people, the fact that pedophiles exist at all forecloses on rational conversation. Shutting the discussion down out of discomfort, as many of us would understandably prefer to do, doesn’t eliminate the problem, but only sends it underground."
The myth of a New Nazism - "the collapse of the Weimar Republic happened in the midst of the worst economic crisis of the 20th century, when a third of the potential workforce was unemployed. Nothing on the scale of that economic calamity is happening today... The Weimar Republic also fell because the fascist movement used mass violence on the streets and decimated democratic and socialist, left-wing political forces. We have not seen anything similar to that today... the analogy between today and the rise of the Nazis obscures far more than it illuminates... The rise of fascism was an explicitly right-wing response to the rise of militant Communism. And that makes it very, very different from the rise of populism today... the Nazis never actually managed to win a majority in free and open elections. The largest share of the vote they ever received, in 1932, was about a third. The reason they were able to secure power was because of the active support of conservatives, the aristocrats and militarists, who sided with them in parliament, and, most importantly, because they were using mass violence and intimidation, exiling and murdering their opponents. This is how they came to power, through ruling-class support and force, not because of free and democratic elections... what prompted Professor Bessner and me to write this piece was that the over-reliance on the fascist analogy would lead us down the same path taken by pro-democratic and anti-fascist thinkers in the 1940s, like Hans Spier and Karl Loewenstein, both of whom fled Germany to the US in the 1930s. They came to the conclusion that fascism proved that democracy could not be trusted. And that for democracy to survive, the state had to curtail some freedoms. This line of thinking, this idea of militant democracy, which proved very influential in the US, led to the creation of very undemocratic, unaccountable institutions like the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council in the US. It was an ideological tendency that also led to the dramatic limiting of political horizons in postwar Europe... the so-called left [is] moving more and more in the direction of technocracy, and trying to achieve progress through technocracy, rather than through more popular control of the economy. And I think that is born of a deep disappointment with the masses, and a belief that the masses cannot be trusted to make the right economic decisions. And that tendency developed and deepened right through to the Obama administration, which was very much defined by technocracy."
How Accurate are Self-Reports? An Analysis of Self-Reported Healthcare Utilization and Absence When Compared to Administrative Data - "Results: Self-report and administrative data showed greater concordance for monthly compared to yearly healthcare utilization metrics. Percent agreement ranged from 30 to 99% with annual doctor visits having the lowest percent agreement. Younger people, males, those with higher education, and healthier individuals more accurately reported their healthcare utilization and absenteeism.
Conclusions: Self-reported healthcare utilization and absenteeism may be used as a proxy when medical claims and administrative data are unavailable, particularly for shorter recall periods."
Self-reporting isn't inaccurate
Post ID: 1271689560478240877
Who should we commemorate?
Who should we commemorate? - History Extra
"Speaking as a historian, what worries me in a case like this, is the destruction of very important evidence from the past. We wouldn't go into an archive and rip up the letters of a leading historical figure and I think one has to be very careful that one doesn't destroy the built fabric and do a similar kind of violence. So if you ask me as a historian, Rhodes’s statue is part of the historic fabric. It's a piece of historical evidence and I think it has to stay...
It's often authoritarian or totalitarian regimes that set about changing history and removing names or changing names. And I think that anyone growing up in a liberal democracy would be rather nervous or chary about going down that kind of route where somebody is no longer considered to be ideologically sound or acceptable and suddenly they disappear from history. There are some very painful echoes of that in 20th century history, and I think we would be very careful about going down that route...
Once you've taken the statue down or you've changed the name, then that person and the complex deeds that they may have been involved with are almost lost to history...
I think you'd be hard put to find anyone - probably anyone on the planet, who doesn't have a debit side to as it were balance against the credit side.
Almost by definition any great political leader, any great statesperson, any great cultural figure will have done things that can easily be used on the debit side and all those figures that you mentioned, in their ways, in different perspectives, from the perspective of different people - Cromwell appears to the English rather different than he appears to the Irish for example.
So it's always going to be a balance, and I think that's what we have to take into account. The danger, I think, in taking offence against monuments, in pulling them down, is that we then present history as a kind of moral pageant.
The only people we're going to remember are those who are wholly good, wholly on the right side, and that runs not only against the nature of history but also the nature of our own moral lives on a day-to-day basis, because we know that no one is perfect. And that if we're going to be accurate, not only to the past, but the present, we need to reflect all sides of a personality...
‘There was a campaign by present donors to Oriel college in Oxford saying, we may stop funding this college if you take down a statue of Rhodes because they’re then worried how future generations might potentially judge them’...
‘We give in good faith and we expect the institution to respect our gift in good faith. If you behave in this way toward Cecil Rhodes, that's in our view bad faith. And we would worry about what would happen to our gifts in the future. You can expand that, I think, to dealings with almost any institution, any charity... History is a very fickle beast... I'm not sure that we would be able to guess what the world might look like in 50 or 100 years’...
‘I think it's not so much about the future as the present, so that what this business, these interesting debates, these controversies perhaps point to is thinking more seriously in the here and now, about what we're doing. Then at least we could say to those who come after us, we thought carefully, we made a considered decision. This is reflective of the values and the views of our contemporaries. Meddle with it at your peril. At least we would pass on to the future a clear view of what we thought at this stage. The argument perhaps about monuments from the past is that they were not democratically arrived at. Nobody, as it were, consulted a wide range of people. They were often the enthusiasms of individuals or particular institutions.’"
"Speaking as a historian, what worries me in a case like this, is the destruction of very important evidence from the past. We wouldn't go into an archive and rip up the letters of a leading historical figure and I think one has to be very careful that one doesn't destroy the built fabric and do a similar kind of violence. So if you ask me as a historian, Rhodes’s statue is part of the historic fabric. It's a piece of historical evidence and I think it has to stay...
It's often authoritarian or totalitarian regimes that set about changing history and removing names or changing names. And I think that anyone growing up in a liberal democracy would be rather nervous or chary about going down that kind of route where somebody is no longer considered to be ideologically sound or acceptable and suddenly they disappear from history. There are some very painful echoes of that in 20th century history, and I think we would be very careful about going down that route...
Once you've taken the statue down or you've changed the name, then that person and the complex deeds that they may have been involved with are almost lost to history...
I think you'd be hard put to find anyone - probably anyone on the planet, who doesn't have a debit side to as it were balance against the credit side.
Almost by definition any great political leader, any great statesperson, any great cultural figure will have done things that can easily be used on the debit side and all those figures that you mentioned, in their ways, in different perspectives, from the perspective of different people - Cromwell appears to the English rather different than he appears to the Irish for example.
So it's always going to be a balance, and I think that's what we have to take into account. The danger, I think, in taking offence against monuments, in pulling them down, is that we then present history as a kind of moral pageant.
The only people we're going to remember are those who are wholly good, wholly on the right side, and that runs not only against the nature of history but also the nature of our own moral lives on a day-to-day basis, because we know that no one is perfect. And that if we're going to be accurate, not only to the past, but the present, we need to reflect all sides of a personality...
‘There was a campaign by present donors to Oriel college in Oxford saying, we may stop funding this college if you take down a statue of Rhodes because they’re then worried how future generations might potentially judge them’...
‘We give in good faith and we expect the institution to respect our gift in good faith. If you behave in this way toward Cecil Rhodes, that's in our view bad faith. And we would worry about what would happen to our gifts in the future. You can expand that, I think, to dealings with almost any institution, any charity... History is a very fickle beast... I'm not sure that we would be able to guess what the world might look like in 50 or 100 years’...
‘I think it's not so much about the future as the present, so that what this business, these interesting debates, these controversies perhaps point to is thinking more seriously in the here and now, about what we're doing. Then at least we could say to those who come after us, we thought carefully, we made a considered decision. This is reflective of the values and the views of our contemporaries. Meddle with it at your peril. At least we would pass on to the future a clear view of what we thought at this stage. The argument perhaps about monuments from the past is that they were not democratically arrived at. Nobody, as it were, consulted a wide range of people. They were often the enthusiasms of individuals or particular institutions.’"
Post ID: 8170968469732308559
Links - 27th September 2018 (1)
MagicGate: game culture’s new civil war - "Jeremy Hambly’s UnsleevedMedia channel has become prominent in part due to his criticism of WOTC’s incorporation of identity and sexual politics: WOTC has reduced the attractiveness of female character designs, uses ‘they’ as the second-person singular pronoun in official texts, and uses explicitly ‘inclusive’ language and tone-policing at MTG events. After Hambly made negative comments about a female cosplayer (someone who dresses up as a fictional character at public events), he was accused of ‘harassment’ and banned for life from participating in WOTC-sanctioned tournaments and online play. He became the first MTG player to be banned for life without the possibility of appeal without having cheated or committed a crime. It seems that Hambly’s severe punishment was due not to a violation of MTG guidelines, but to his unpopularity among some fans and his criticism of WOTC policies. Hambly’s supporters are often described as bigots and misogynists intent on making MTG a space ‘unsafe for female players’. They are dismissed as insincere ‘trolls’. But matters became more serious when he exposed a number of criminals convicted of sex crimes who were, at that time, not banned from MTG events. A number of paedophiles had ‘judge’ status and therefore had access to child gamers through game stores and sanctioned tournaments. His vlogs named the individuals using data in the public domain and contrasted their MTG accreditation with his lifetime ban. (Later on, WOTC did ban some of the individuals he named.) The decision to ban Hambly led to a division in MTG fandom, dubbed ‘MagicGate’, with those who had also tired of its identitarian drift siding with Hambly. Activists began to describe these critical fans as ‘dangerous’ ‘Nazis’ and ‘harassers’ intent on making MTG an ‘unsafe environment’. They began equating their criticism and mockery with actual violence. The meme of ‘punch a Nazi’ has circulated widely among left-wingers for years, with their definition of ‘Nazi’ seemingly being anyone critical of identity politics. (A Kickstarter is currently trying to raise funds for a comic advocating political violence called Always Punch Nazis.)... a man asked him if he was Jeremy Hambly. When he said yes, the man repeatedly punched him while holding his shirt, yelling that he was going to kill him. Hambly broke free and went inside the bar. The attacker was prevented from entering and punched a window before leaving. According to witnesses, the alleged attacker was another convention attendee and professor, whose social-media profiles proclaim he ‘punches Nazis’. In a tweet before the altercation, the suspect said that he would ‘fight’ anyone who objected to the attendance of noted feminist Anita Sarkeesian at GenCon. (Hambly posted a negative comment about her presence before the attack.)... some have even taken his attacker’s side. Chelsea Pendragon, who writes for the website ‘Comic Crusaders’, wrote an op-ed (later removed) in which she advocated violence when persuasion and boycotting do not generate obedience... if you exercise your freedom of speech you will be assaulted. Verbal criticism is now ‘repeated acts of terrorism’."
Presumably it's a moral duty to not just punch but kill "Nazis"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'Islamophobia is a form of racism' - "Just to put this into some context, most people think of veiling or covering in any sense as something that was brought into by Islam or originated from Islam, but actually it's much older than that. We see veiling or covering of women amongst the Hittites, the Greeks, the Persians, Romans, and there was a gender as well as a class aspect to this, so that women who were the elitist women in society generally tended to be secluded from society based on their class and social standing. The sense was that noble women would have far more to lose if they were dishonoured. And it's in this context that you have verses from the Koran in seventh century Arabia as well, where there's already a sense that women wore loose clothing. Some women would have their head covered. Some women, men and women actually, because even today, you have some men who, in North Africa, who refuse to show their face fully because they have it covered... you have verses in the Koran that say that prophets' wives should be asked for something behind a screen, and that's where you get the context of hijab from. You also have verses that say tell the believing women to draw something upon their front so that they're not displaying their beauty to all and sundry. And these are the kind of verses that have led to a diversity of expressions...
'There's a lot of diversity and dress across the Muslim world.'...
'There is absolutely. And I think that's one of the issues that most Muslim women and men have. Is that why has the niqab and the full face veiling, even the burka become, even if it's only a small minority, become such an issue, an increasing issue. When actually there is a huge diversity of how Muslim women choose to dress. And if the Koran and post-Koranic traditions were so clear on what women had to, how women had to dress then you would have uniformity. Having said that, I would argue that there is an increasing sense of homogeneity now amongst lots of Muslim women. That they feel there is only one way to dress modestly. So, modesty itself has been reduced to how you cover'...
Do we have a useful definition of hatred of Muslims and is Islamophobia the right term?"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Boris' burka jibe - "'Other people on social media and other places have documented how in a pension, in a GP surgery, pensioners stood up and used Boris Johnson's terminology when there was a woman wearing a niqab sitting there... We need to have accountability'...
'This article was written in support of women being allowed to wear the burka'...
'I think this seems to be a divergence from the concern that has been raised. The concern is not the raising of the issue, the concern is about the dehumanising of Muslim women by using terminology that is deeply, deeply concerning. That is the problem, the use of words which a politician recognizes would have a certain impact and appearing to deliberately use them to stoke up this hatred... there are consequences to the words that are used'"
Yet we are told at the same time that Death to America doesn't mean Death to America. Go figure - only certain people's words count and need accountability
Apparently it's not dehumanising to wear a burka - but it is to comment on how you look
I back Boris on the burka, and so do millions of Muslim women like me - "Morocco is sealing shut the factories which weave the fabric to make burkas. Turkey strictly forbids the niqab (the veil that leaves all the face covered apart from the eyes) and even the hijab among its judicial and military personnel. Yet in 2018 Britain finds itself mummified within the niqab... I fully back Boris’s right to objectify the veil because the veil itself is an instrument of objectification. Unlike him, however, I would ban the niqab from British streets altogether. Its true purpose is to demarcate the wearer and the secular world, to overshadow the public space. It derives from misogyny. Islamism views women as a threat to society, so it is best that they are seen and not heard. Some women even remain veiled inside their family homes. My religion does mandate modesty, but there is no basis in Islam for the niqab. The reaction to Boris’s comments, particularly the false accusation of Islamophobia, plays into the Islamists’ hands. It masks the diversity of Muslim opinion, treating voices like mine as if they do not exist, and aided by pseudo-intellectual liberals in the West, allows Islamists to falsely present their dress code as the only true face of Islam... [In the West] these differing opinions are tolerated as part of each of our personal expressions, and experiences, of Islam. They are not tolerated by the Islamists, as I have found myself, having received threatening and vulgar abuse for speaking out. If we do not defend our public spaces as secular shrines to pluralism, not only will public discourse on these issues be extinguished, but it will become that much harder for anti-Islamist Muslims like me to speak out. That’s why I back Boris."
Boris Johnson burka row: Sky Data poll finds majority back former Foreign Secretary - "60 percent did not believe Mr Johnson’s controversial comments in a newspaper earlier this week amounted to racism while 33 percent thought it did."
Boris Johnson’s burka ‘joke’ was a ‘pretty good one’, Rowan Atkinson says as row over remark intensifies - "All jokes about religion cause offence, so it's pointless apologising for them. You should really only apologise for a bad joke. On that basis, no apology is required."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Corbyn reacts to Netanyahu - "'He's a man who speaks about dialogue and peace making. But you don't need to attend terrorist memorial events to do that. If he's serious about dialogue and peacemaking, where is his record of dialogue with the Israelis? He's now in a tweet war...
When you say he opposes all forms of violence don't you find it odd that he has so often been on stages and at places where people who support violence, whether it's against Jewish people or homosexuals or whoever it's against, where they happen to be?'...
'I can't answer that question. It's an absurd question'"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Mexican-American War - "Manifest Destiny... Mexicans weren't ready to govern themselves, is at the heart of Manifest Destiny. It's an assumption that white Anglo-American Protestants should govern North America, because they were superior and liberty-loving and superior to both the native peoples... and the Mexicans... it was manifest destiny. It's obvious, it's manifest and its destiny, it's determined by God, that the United States should over-spread the continent...
'The brutality with which some Americans respond to that... there's a great deal of opposition among some of the soldiers. The Mexican War has the highest desertion rate of any war in American history. Over 8 percent of the soldiers in the American forces desert during the conflict... many of them are Catholic'...
'There is that fear with the creation of St Patrick's Battalion, a group of deserters that were mostly Irish Catholic, but also other immigrants and some escaped slaves and they join the Mexican side... fight very fiercely against the Americans... that brings the fear that can these Catholics in our midst be trusted to be loyal to the United States.'"
Maybe that's why they detained the Japs during World War II
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Warfare - the Soundtrack of Their Lives - "This social phenomenon has been given a name in Korean... the Sampo generation, which is said to have given up three things: dating, marriage and having children... South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. The average woman here is expected to have one point zero five children in her life. That's exactly half the rate needed to maintain a stable population...
I spot a sign outside the ladies' reassuring students that there are no hidden cameras in the loos. There are whole websites dedicated to showing the result of that particular form of invasive voyeurism. I even hear about a subgenre of this phenomenon in which men post videos they've secretly recorded of themselves having sex with their girlfriends. The horrifying twist is that these videos are popular because the women have gone on to take their own lives, as a result of the videos being put online"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Jeremiah Tower: My Life in Five Dishes - "Thank God kale has disappeared... Kale is winter food for cows for god's sakes. I hate all the shows: Gordon Ramsey's trying to get somebody to cry and no no that's not what our industry is about at all. Like Jamie Oliver right now. He just went too far...
'But it's the chef's job to innovate.'
'Yes, but innovating what? Innovating presentation? I mean now every plate in the world, in any restaurant you've heard of it, it all looks the same. Whether it's in Sydney or Tokyo, London, Paris, you know, there's that dot dot dot dot dot, the little sauce around the plate. Are you supposed to taste each of those dots in order? And therefore, in which order? They should give you a little diagram of how to eat this dish. And then that sort of smear of stuff across the plate which I've recently described as somebody took a cat's *beep* and wiped the plate with it... The only American thing about American cuisine now is this stupid plating presentation"
2410 The Battle for Dorking and Spy Fever | The History Network - "The home office would routinely request proof that a naturalized British citizen of German origin had relinquished all rights to German citizenship. With the outbreak of war in 1914, the State organized the rounding up and internment of German nationals. Naturalized British citizens of German origin were asked to sign a declaration showing their commitment to Britain. The first wave of internment occurred in August and September 1914, but this only amounted to 10,000 Germans. It was not until the anti German riots in May 1915 that it was decided that all Germans of military age should be interned... spy fever, with the outset of war had turned into open Germanophobia"
Strangely, British Germans are not complaining about this today, unlike Japanese Americans
Low-background steel - Wikipedia - "Low-background steel is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first atomic bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. With the Trinity test and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and then subsequent nuclear weapons testing during the early years of the Cold War, background radiation levels increased across the world. Modern steel is contaminated with radionuclides because its production uses atmospheric air. Low background steel is so called because it does not suffer from such nuclear contamination. This steel is used in devices that require the highest sensitivity for detecting radionuclides. The primary source of low-background steel is ships that were constructed before the Trinity test, most famously the scuttled German World War I battleships in Scapa Flow"
Why forgetting is really important for memory: U of T research - "Richards says there are two very good reasons why you may want to forget at least some of the information you come across. For one, in a constantly changing world old information becomes outdated and not as important to remember... The other important reason reflects a concept used in models for artificial intelligence known as regularization. This principle aims to get computer models to learn how to make generalizations based on large amounts of data. In order to do this, there must be some forgetting of details in the data involved in order to prioritize the core information that is necessary for decisions"
Starship Troopers: One of the Most Misunderstood Movies Ever - "Starship Troopers is satire, a ruthlessly funny and keenly self-aware sendup of right-wing militarism. The fact that it was and continues to be taken at face value speaks to the very vapidity the movie skewers."
Redcore CEO admits ‘100pc China-developed browser’ is built on Google’s Chrome, says writing code from scratch would ‘take many years’
Presumably it's a moral duty to not just punch but kill "Nazis"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'Islamophobia is a form of racism' - "Just to put this into some context, most people think of veiling or covering in any sense as something that was brought into by Islam or originated from Islam, but actually it's much older than that. We see veiling or covering of women amongst the Hittites, the Greeks, the Persians, Romans, and there was a gender as well as a class aspect to this, so that women who were the elitist women in society generally tended to be secluded from society based on their class and social standing. The sense was that noble women would have far more to lose if they were dishonoured. And it's in this context that you have verses from the Koran in seventh century Arabia as well, where there's already a sense that women wore loose clothing. Some women would have their head covered. Some women, men and women actually, because even today, you have some men who, in North Africa, who refuse to show their face fully because they have it covered... you have verses in the Koran that say that prophets' wives should be asked for something behind a screen, and that's where you get the context of hijab from. You also have verses that say tell the believing women to draw something upon their front so that they're not displaying their beauty to all and sundry. And these are the kind of verses that have led to a diversity of expressions...
'There's a lot of diversity and dress across the Muslim world.'...
'There is absolutely. And I think that's one of the issues that most Muslim women and men have. Is that why has the niqab and the full face veiling, even the burka become, even if it's only a small minority, become such an issue, an increasing issue. When actually there is a huge diversity of how Muslim women choose to dress. And if the Koran and post-Koranic traditions were so clear on what women had to, how women had to dress then you would have uniformity. Having said that, I would argue that there is an increasing sense of homogeneity now amongst lots of Muslim women. That they feel there is only one way to dress modestly. So, modesty itself has been reduced to how you cover'...
Do we have a useful definition of hatred of Muslims and is Islamophobia the right term?"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Boris' burka jibe - "'Other people on social media and other places have documented how in a pension, in a GP surgery, pensioners stood up and used Boris Johnson's terminology when there was a woman wearing a niqab sitting there... We need to have accountability'...
'This article was written in support of women being allowed to wear the burka'...
'I think this seems to be a divergence from the concern that has been raised. The concern is not the raising of the issue, the concern is about the dehumanising of Muslim women by using terminology that is deeply, deeply concerning. That is the problem, the use of words which a politician recognizes would have a certain impact and appearing to deliberately use them to stoke up this hatred... there are consequences to the words that are used'"
Yet we are told at the same time that Death to America doesn't mean Death to America. Go figure - only certain people's words count and need accountability
Apparently it's not dehumanising to wear a burka - but it is to comment on how you look
I back Boris on the burka, and so do millions of Muslim women like me - "Morocco is sealing shut the factories which weave the fabric to make burkas. Turkey strictly forbids the niqab (the veil that leaves all the face covered apart from the eyes) and even the hijab among its judicial and military personnel. Yet in 2018 Britain finds itself mummified within the niqab... I fully back Boris’s right to objectify the veil because the veil itself is an instrument of objectification. Unlike him, however, I would ban the niqab from British streets altogether. Its true purpose is to demarcate the wearer and the secular world, to overshadow the public space. It derives from misogyny. Islamism views women as a threat to society, so it is best that they are seen and not heard. Some women even remain veiled inside their family homes. My religion does mandate modesty, but there is no basis in Islam for the niqab. The reaction to Boris’s comments, particularly the false accusation of Islamophobia, plays into the Islamists’ hands. It masks the diversity of Muslim opinion, treating voices like mine as if they do not exist, and aided by pseudo-intellectual liberals in the West, allows Islamists to falsely present their dress code as the only true face of Islam... [In the West] these differing opinions are tolerated as part of each of our personal expressions, and experiences, of Islam. They are not tolerated by the Islamists, as I have found myself, having received threatening and vulgar abuse for speaking out. If we do not defend our public spaces as secular shrines to pluralism, not only will public discourse on these issues be extinguished, but it will become that much harder for anti-Islamist Muslims like me to speak out. That’s why I back Boris."
Boris Johnson burka row: Sky Data poll finds majority back former Foreign Secretary - "60 percent did not believe Mr Johnson’s controversial comments in a newspaper earlier this week amounted to racism while 33 percent thought it did."
Boris Johnson’s burka ‘joke’ was a ‘pretty good one’, Rowan Atkinson says as row over remark intensifies - "All jokes about religion cause offence, so it's pointless apologising for them. You should really only apologise for a bad joke. On that basis, no apology is required."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Corbyn reacts to Netanyahu - "'He's a man who speaks about dialogue and peace making. But you don't need to attend terrorist memorial events to do that. If he's serious about dialogue and peacemaking, where is his record of dialogue with the Israelis? He's now in a tweet war...
When you say he opposes all forms of violence don't you find it odd that he has so often been on stages and at places where people who support violence, whether it's against Jewish people or homosexuals or whoever it's against, where they happen to be?'...
'I can't answer that question. It's an absurd question'"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Mexican-American War - "Manifest Destiny... Mexicans weren't ready to govern themselves, is at the heart of Manifest Destiny. It's an assumption that white Anglo-American Protestants should govern North America, because they were superior and liberty-loving and superior to both the native peoples... and the Mexicans... it was manifest destiny. It's obvious, it's manifest and its destiny, it's determined by God, that the United States should over-spread the continent...
'The brutality with which some Americans respond to that... there's a great deal of opposition among some of the soldiers. The Mexican War has the highest desertion rate of any war in American history. Over 8 percent of the soldiers in the American forces desert during the conflict... many of them are Catholic'...
'There is that fear with the creation of St Patrick's Battalion, a group of deserters that were mostly Irish Catholic, but also other immigrants and some escaped slaves and they join the Mexican side... fight very fiercely against the Americans... that brings the fear that can these Catholics in our midst be trusted to be loyal to the United States.'"
Maybe that's why they detained the Japs during World War II
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Warfare - the Soundtrack of Their Lives - "This social phenomenon has been given a name in Korean... the Sampo generation, which is said to have given up three things: dating, marriage and having children... South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world. The average woman here is expected to have one point zero five children in her life. That's exactly half the rate needed to maintain a stable population...
I spot a sign outside the ladies' reassuring students that there are no hidden cameras in the loos. There are whole websites dedicated to showing the result of that particular form of invasive voyeurism. I even hear about a subgenre of this phenomenon in which men post videos they've secretly recorded of themselves having sex with their girlfriends. The horrifying twist is that these videos are popular because the women have gone on to take their own lives, as a result of the videos being put online"
BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Jeremiah Tower: My Life in Five Dishes - "Thank God kale has disappeared... Kale is winter food for cows for god's sakes. I hate all the shows: Gordon Ramsey's trying to get somebody to cry and no no that's not what our industry is about at all. Like Jamie Oliver right now. He just went too far...
'But it's the chef's job to innovate.'
'Yes, but innovating what? Innovating presentation? I mean now every plate in the world, in any restaurant you've heard of it, it all looks the same. Whether it's in Sydney or Tokyo, London, Paris, you know, there's that dot dot dot dot dot, the little sauce around the plate. Are you supposed to taste each of those dots in order? And therefore, in which order? They should give you a little diagram of how to eat this dish. And then that sort of smear of stuff across the plate which I've recently described as somebody took a cat's *beep* and wiped the plate with it... The only American thing about American cuisine now is this stupid plating presentation"
2410 The Battle for Dorking and Spy Fever | The History Network - "The home office would routinely request proof that a naturalized British citizen of German origin had relinquished all rights to German citizenship. With the outbreak of war in 1914, the State organized the rounding up and internment of German nationals. Naturalized British citizens of German origin were asked to sign a declaration showing their commitment to Britain. The first wave of internment occurred in August and September 1914, but this only amounted to 10,000 Germans. It was not until the anti German riots in May 1915 that it was decided that all Germans of military age should be interned... spy fever, with the outset of war had turned into open Germanophobia"
Strangely, British Germans are not complaining about this today, unlike Japanese Americans
Low-background steel - Wikipedia - "Low-background steel is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first atomic bombs in the 1940s and 1950s. With the Trinity test and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and then subsequent nuclear weapons testing during the early years of the Cold War, background radiation levels increased across the world. Modern steel is contaminated with radionuclides because its production uses atmospheric air. Low background steel is so called because it does not suffer from such nuclear contamination. This steel is used in devices that require the highest sensitivity for detecting radionuclides. The primary source of low-background steel is ships that were constructed before the Trinity test, most famously the scuttled German World War I battleships in Scapa Flow"
Why forgetting is really important for memory: U of T research - "Richards says there are two very good reasons why you may want to forget at least some of the information you come across. For one, in a constantly changing world old information becomes outdated and not as important to remember... The other important reason reflects a concept used in models for artificial intelligence known as regularization. This principle aims to get computer models to learn how to make generalizations based on large amounts of data. In order to do this, there must be some forgetting of details in the data involved in order to prioritize the core information that is necessary for decisions"
Starship Troopers: One of the Most Misunderstood Movies Ever - "Starship Troopers is satire, a ruthlessly funny and keenly self-aware sendup of right-wing militarism. The fact that it was and continues to be taken at face value speaks to the very vapidity the movie skewers."
Redcore CEO admits ‘100pc China-developed browser’ is built on Google’s Chrome, says writing code from scratch would ‘take many years’
Post ID: 4753401556115866306
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Links - 26th September 2018 (2)
Halfway to boiling: the city at 50C - "It is the temperature at which human cells start to cook, animals suffer and air conditioners overload power grids. Once an urban anomaly, 50C is fast becoming reality"
Spies through the ages - History Extra - "What Ivan the Terrible did was use it to exterminate not merely all his opponents, but everyone he thought might be one of his opponents, most of whom weren't, and that's what Stalin it. And that is why, one of the things that Stalin did when he came to power was to ask the greatest filmmaker of the age Eisenstein to make a film on Ivan the Terrible, and to show that the purges and the killings which Ivan the Terrible had been responsible for were actually essential to the survival of the Russian state, which they weren't. And that's what Stalin said about his own purges, and they weren't necessary then either...
[On forgetting what was learnt about espionage] 'Quite often it's a bit like talking to economists who have never heard of the industrial revolution.'
'Something I found really interesting was your suggestion about ideology, and that when we saw the rise of extremist Islamist terrorism, that the security services weren't prepared to grapple with the ideology, and they didn't understand the consequences of that.'
'That's something which, at the end of the 20th century, we were worse at than we had been during the Cold War [and] the Second World War... people in intelligence services knew about Nazi fascist ideology, people in the Cold War knew about Communist ideology in its style and its form amongst others. But the problem with Islamist extremism is that this is religious extremism, and what you need to understand that is not political scientists. You need theologians. And it never occurred... that they should have hired theologians... understanding Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and for that matter, Islamic State without understanding their ideology is a bit like attempting to understand Stalin without knowing about communism, and a bit like attempting to understand Hitler without bothering to read Mein Kampf...
Non-Muslims have a very feeble understanding of the Koran and what is in the Koran. So far as Mohammad is concerned, those biographies of Mohammad that are most widely read by Muslims in England and elsewhere, I'm thinking of the single most popular one, a very good one in many ways, describe him as the greatest General in the world. Well, if the account in the Koran is to believed, which all Muslims believe is to be believed, that's absolutely right. He won all 27 battles that he fought and he was engaged in lots of smaller conflicts. And one of the things that he used, as any good general would have done, was military intelligence. So the idea that there is an intelligence dimension to the life of Mohammed I think would surprise most people."
If you think Islamist terrorism is a reaction to Western Foreign Policy, you conveniently have no need to hire theologians
Britain’s refugee camps - History Extra - "The refrain that I heard constantly while I was doing the research for the book was, we left with 55 pounds in a suitcase, because that is what Idi Amin allowed people to leave Uganda with. And then within one generation, we had become entrepreneurs and successful business owners in Britain, so there's a very strong Ugandan Asian narrative as well as a white British narrative about the Ugandan Asian expulsion and it's very much a narrative of success and upwards mobility and entrepreneurship."
Some people respond better to adversity than others
Nelson Mandela’s extraordinary life - History Extra - "Blacks could do the under-coat when decorating or painting a house, but could not do the top coat. Black building workers could pass a brick to a white bricklayer but could not lay the bricks even though they're quite capable of doing it themselves...
The history of the Afrikaans people is a very interesting one, and quite a tragic one. They were themselves oppressed by the British. Remember, the first ever concentration camps were not in Nazi Germany. They are actually during the Boer Wars when the British fought the Afrikaaner whites for dominance and control of the gold fields and the mines and so on. That is about the traditional colonial objective of plundering the assets of the country, and it resulted in two bloody wars and concentration camps, I think 25,000 Afrikaans women and children were killed, and then died in miserable, horrible unsanitary conditions in those concentration camps. And that's very much part of Afrikaaner folklore, that this will never happen to us again. And therefore we have to have a strong state that defends our people...
They came to see [Mandela, who took the trouble to understand them] not as the Prisoner, the terrorist only but actually as a person and as a formidable person and then beyond that is actually somebody that could save them from the fate that South Africa was beckoning for it... He went into prison as a burly freedom fighter, and with a touch of arrogance and vanity and he became increasingly humble, but strong...
The irony is people tend to forget... There was... more violence in between him walking out of prison and him becoming President in those four years, than at any time under apartheid, the previous fifty years... because De Klerk... still believed they could hang on to power despite some accommodation to the black majority... deliberate divide and rule policy"
Too bad Mandela didn't just yell at them for being racist
Rethinking 20th-century Britain - History Extra - "The United Kingdom as an economic, political, ideological unit separate from, that emerges from the British Empire. So, the basic idea of the book is just like as India or Australia, or Canada, had become independent from the British Empire, so does the United Kingdom. It is a genuinely post-imperial nation that emerges after 1945...
One of the most remarkable things about the history of 20th century Britain is that we don't have nationalism. We have perhaps some idea that was some great national feeling in 1940, this perhaps the idea that Enoch Powell or Margaret Thatcher were nationalists, but nationalism as a notion doesn't exist. Nationalism in British history is the ideology of opponents whether Nazis or Italian fascists, or Irish Republicans, or Indian anti-imperialists. You can't really be a British nationalist in the British way of thinking about nationalism... ... the dominant ideas for at least the first half of the 20th century were either Imperial in which the British empire encompassed lots of nations or liberal in which the idea of nationalism was repugnant. Nationalism implied breaking up the world economy into national economies...
Many people think that Brexit is nostalgia for Empire and I think that's wrong. If there is a nostalgic element it's a nostalgia for a national economy, where the nation's politicians control the economy, control industry. Now that's, gone has gone since that since the 1970s and the people who voted to remain in the EEC in 1975 are the people who today have voted to leave. People that were brought up in a national economy, and I think don't much like the new liberal economy...
That welfare state was actually remarkably un-generous in the 1940s... the moment of its glory was the 1970s. And while Thatcherism has made the welfare state much less generous, less universal, it is the case that welfare spending today is higher than it's ever been in both absolute and relative terms. So we are living peak welfare."
Catholics in Elizabethan England - History Extra - "Elizabeth's reign has more recorded torture than any other in English history. It's not something we necessarily associate with her, but her name is on the warrants. You see her signature, that beautiful signature on the torture warrants"
Ed: Republished as "Editor’s pick: covert Catholicism in Elizabethan England"
Britain’s foreign policy secrets - History Extra - "When Britain wanted to use propaganda against the IRA, which they did, and the examples include famously trying to portray the IRA as satanic worshipers by constructing upside-down crosses in fields in Northern Ireland... This was particularly controversial because it was so close to home, and the Foreign Office justified this by trying to play up the foreignness of the IRA. So they're playing up the links to Ireland, playing up the links to the Soviets, saying Soviet inspired, and perhaps most oddly playing up the links to Vatican City... they're foreign inspired, and therefore they can be subject to British covert operations"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'Predators are attracted to aid work' - "'It would appear that the reputation of the organization has been put first, ahead of the protection of the vulnerable, and that is completely unacceptable. It has to stop'
'They tried to cover it up, because we saw that happening after the Times... story on Haiti'...
'[Hopefully] this time we don't just have a flurry of interest in this, in 2018, and then it quiets down... This wasn't addressed properly in the first place... the vast majority of people who work in aid are not involved in sexual exploitation and abuse but we do know, and we were told this in evidence that predators are attracted to aid organizations'...
[Since] Haiti... there has been a seemingly endless stream of stories exposing incidents of abuse across the world in many of the big international aid charities. Today, a committee of MPs in Westminster is delivering a report that says sexual abuse in the aid sector is endemic across organizations, countries and institutions and there has been an abject failure to deal with it. There has been complacency verging on complicity"
The Catholic Church is not unique
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, The UK's gender pay gap - "'Looking at the data though, isn't it possible that some of it could be misleading? That's certainly the view of the think tank the Institute for Economic Affairs. They say that it leads to worthless statistics because it rather than making comparisons with like-for-like roles they instead measure pay across organizations altogether irrespective of different roles, age or hours worked.'
'That's exactly what the statistics are doing. They are looking at the average pay in organizations and seeing where it's going'
'That's the point being made by the IEA'
'I know, but yes'
'Be more forensic about it than being so broadbrushed'
'But you can't do that sort of analysis of looking at every individual job. We already have legislation fifty years ago, that legislated for equal pay, but we're taking half a century later there is still a page of almost 20 percent and what this data is showing is that in organizations, most of the wages are going to men. There's a whole variety of reasons for that, but now that this data is out there, it gives women an opportunity to say to their bosses, why aren't we being paid as much as men?'...
'Smaller businesses complain often about how much red tape, bureaucracy, they have to deal with.'"
Looks like feminists like generalisations and broad statistics when they suit their agenda
Feminist logic - a male CEO must be paid as much as a female janitor
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Could human beings be hacked? - "I don't know if people believe that without nationalism, we would be living in some kind of liberal paradise but much more likely we would have been living in tribal kills. Nationalism makes you care about millions of complete strangers whom we, you have never met before, and this has been quite good for humankind, until today... until today, most of our major problems could be solved on the national level, but this is no longer the case. The three biggest problems facing humankind in 21st century are nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption, and you simply cannot solve any of these problems on the national level."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "'The fear of falling foul of US sanctions is so powerful that almost literally anything the European Union does won't have much effect'...
'The so-called blocking legislation which has been in force since the mid 90s but this is the first time we see it's extended. And it's specifically now as of today going to prohibit EU businesses, or anyone else subject to EU jurisdiction from complying effectively with the US secondary sanctions'...
'Sort of a double jeopardy. If you comply to US sanctions you might fall foul of the European Union'..
'In the UK it's a criminal offense'
'It's a criminal offence to obey US sanctions'"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, British Identity at the V&A: Boscobel Plaque of Charles II - "They effectively preserved the monarchy putting their own lives at risk, and also foregoing the possibility of enormous riches because there was a thousand pound reward for anybody giving information for the capture of the king after the Battle of Worcester. They kept him alive, he was there to come back and take the crown. Five brothers got a hundred pound pension to be paid in perpetuity, going to the eldest son of the eldest son, and I believe until recently, it was still being paid. Sadly, not Index linked"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Trump reimposes Russia sanctions - "'More than 20 nations around the world, not just Britain, not just the United States: Norway, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden. I could go on, have all held Russia responsible for the attempted murder and the use of Novichok.'
'They're making this under the pressure, and I want to repeat, if you want. Russia would cooperate with you, with Great Britain, United States in colonial style, it's exactly as China cooperated with the British and France in the beginning of 20th Century. It will be no.'"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, A tale of two birds - "'Let's go back to the name, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Crows are birds. If they want to be a curlew protecting organization, then be clear about that.'
'So in other words you'd be happy to have the curlews wiped out by the crows'
'No, absolutely. Well, yeah. Well, absolutely, if that was necessary... we would welcome them protecting curlews, not at the expense of a native species, which is the crow... Animals aren't aware of whether they face extinction. They're aware if they're suffering'"
Extinction is a good thing in certain contexts apparently
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'End immigration targets after Brexit' - "'Even as she [from Poland] worries about her own future Paulina wants tougher rules for new migrants. She thinks Britain can for EU citizens be a soft touch.'
'At the moment there's no control like immigration and I fully understand that. Maybe because I have just classed UK as my home, but the UK government is too easy.'"
Spies through the ages - History Extra - "What Ivan the Terrible did was use it to exterminate not merely all his opponents, but everyone he thought might be one of his opponents, most of whom weren't, and that's what Stalin it. And that is why, one of the things that Stalin did when he came to power was to ask the greatest filmmaker of the age Eisenstein to make a film on Ivan the Terrible, and to show that the purges and the killings which Ivan the Terrible had been responsible for were actually essential to the survival of the Russian state, which they weren't. And that's what Stalin said about his own purges, and they weren't necessary then either...
[On forgetting what was learnt about espionage] 'Quite often it's a bit like talking to economists who have never heard of the industrial revolution.'
'Something I found really interesting was your suggestion about ideology, and that when we saw the rise of extremist Islamist terrorism, that the security services weren't prepared to grapple with the ideology, and they didn't understand the consequences of that.'
'That's something which, at the end of the 20th century, we were worse at than we had been during the Cold War [and] the Second World War... people in intelligence services knew about Nazi fascist ideology, people in the Cold War knew about Communist ideology in its style and its form amongst others. But the problem with Islamist extremism is that this is religious extremism, and what you need to understand that is not political scientists. You need theologians. And it never occurred... that they should have hired theologians... understanding Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and for that matter, Islamic State without understanding their ideology is a bit like attempting to understand Stalin without knowing about communism, and a bit like attempting to understand Hitler without bothering to read Mein Kampf...
Non-Muslims have a very feeble understanding of the Koran and what is in the Koran. So far as Mohammad is concerned, those biographies of Mohammad that are most widely read by Muslims in England and elsewhere, I'm thinking of the single most popular one, a very good one in many ways, describe him as the greatest General in the world. Well, if the account in the Koran is to believed, which all Muslims believe is to be believed, that's absolutely right. He won all 27 battles that he fought and he was engaged in lots of smaller conflicts. And one of the things that he used, as any good general would have done, was military intelligence. So the idea that there is an intelligence dimension to the life of Mohammed I think would surprise most people."
If you think Islamist terrorism is a reaction to Western Foreign Policy, you conveniently have no need to hire theologians
Britain’s refugee camps - History Extra - "The refrain that I heard constantly while I was doing the research for the book was, we left with 55 pounds in a suitcase, because that is what Idi Amin allowed people to leave Uganda with. And then within one generation, we had become entrepreneurs and successful business owners in Britain, so there's a very strong Ugandan Asian narrative as well as a white British narrative about the Ugandan Asian expulsion and it's very much a narrative of success and upwards mobility and entrepreneurship."
Some people respond better to adversity than others
Nelson Mandela’s extraordinary life - History Extra - "Blacks could do the under-coat when decorating or painting a house, but could not do the top coat. Black building workers could pass a brick to a white bricklayer but could not lay the bricks even though they're quite capable of doing it themselves...
The history of the Afrikaans people is a very interesting one, and quite a tragic one. They were themselves oppressed by the British. Remember, the first ever concentration camps were not in Nazi Germany. They are actually during the Boer Wars when the British fought the Afrikaaner whites for dominance and control of the gold fields and the mines and so on. That is about the traditional colonial objective of plundering the assets of the country, and it resulted in two bloody wars and concentration camps, I think 25,000 Afrikaans women and children were killed, and then died in miserable, horrible unsanitary conditions in those concentration camps. And that's very much part of Afrikaaner folklore, that this will never happen to us again. And therefore we have to have a strong state that defends our people...
They came to see [Mandela, who took the trouble to understand them] not as the Prisoner, the terrorist only but actually as a person and as a formidable person and then beyond that is actually somebody that could save them from the fate that South Africa was beckoning for it... He went into prison as a burly freedom fighter, and with a touch of arrogance and vanity and he became increasingly humble, but strong...
The irony is people tend to forget... There was... more violence in between him walking out of prison and him becoming President in those four years, than at any time under apartheid, the previous fifty years... because De Klerk... still believed they could hang on to power despite some accommodation to the black majority... deliberate divide and rule policy"
Too bad Mandela didn't just yell at them for being racist
Rethinking 20th-century Britain - History Extra - "The United Kingdom as an economic, political, ideological unit separate from, that emerges from the British Empire. So, the basic idea of the book is just like as India or Australia, or Canada, had become independent from the British Empire, so does the United Kingdom. It is a genuinely post-imperial nation that emerges after 1945...
One of the most remarkable things about the history of 20th century Britain is that we don't have nationalism. We have perhaps some idea that was some great national feeling in 1940, this perhaps the idea that Enoch Powell or Margaret Thatcher were nationalists, but nationalism as a notion doesn't exist. Nationalism in British history is the ideology of opponents whether Nazis or Italian fascists, or Irish Republicans, or Indian anti-imperialists. You can't really be a British nationalist in the British way of thinking about nationalism... ... the dominant ideas for at least the first half of the 20th century were either Imperial in which the British empire encompassed lots of nations or liberal in which the idea of nationalism was repugnant. Nationalism implied breaking up the world economy into national economies...
Many people think that Brexit is nostalgia for Empire and I think that's wrong. If there is a nostalgic element it's a nostalgia for a national economy, where the nation's politicians control the economy, control industry. Now that's, gone has gone since that since the 1970s and the people who voted to remain in the EEC in 1975 are the people who today have voted to leave. People that were brought up in a national economy, and I think don't much like the new liberal economy...
That welfare state was actually remarkably un-generous in the 1940s... the moment of its glory was the 1970s. And while Thatcherism has made the welfare state much less generous, less universal, it is the case that welfare spending today is higher than it's ever been in both absolute and relative terms. So we are living peak welfare."
Catholics in Elizabethan England - History Extra - "Elizabeth's reign has more recorded torture than any other in English history. It's not something we necessarily associate with her, but her name is on the warrants. You see her signature, that beautiful signature on the torture warrants"
Ed: Republished as "Editor’s pick: covert Catholicism in Elizabethan England"
Britain’s foreign policy secrets - History Extra - "When Britain wanted to use propaganda against the IRA, which they did, and the examples include famously trying to portray the IRA as satanic worshipers by constructing upside-down crosses in fields in Northern Ireland... This was particularly controversial because it was so close to home, and the Foreign Office justified this by trying to play up the foreignness of the IRA. So they're playing up the links to Ireland, playing up the links to the Soviets, saying Soviet inspired, and perhaps most oddly playing up the links to Vatican City... they're foreign inspired, and therefore they can be subject to British covert operations"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'Predators are attracted to aid work' - "'It would appear that the reputation of the organization has been put first, ahead of the protection of the vulnerable, and that is completely unacceptable. It has to stop'
'They tried to cover it up, because we saw that happening after the Times... story on Haiti'...
'[Hopefully] this time we don't just have a flurry of interest in this, in 2018, and then it quiets down... This wasn't addressed properly in the first place... the vast majority of people who work in aid are not involved in sexual exploitation and abuse but we do know, and we were told this in evidence that predators are attracted to aid organizations'...
[Since] Haiti... there has been a seemingly endless stream of stories exposing incidents of abuse across the world in many of the big international aid charities. Today, a committee of MPs in Westminster is delivering a report that says sexual abuse in the aid sector is endemic across organizations, countries and institutions and there has been an abject failure to deal with it. There has been complacency verging on complicity"
The Catholic Church is not unique
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, The UK's gender pay gap - "'Looking at the data though, isn't it possible that some of it could be misleading? That's certainly the view of the think tank the Institute for Economic Affairs. They say that it leads to worthless statistics because it rather than making comparisons with like-for-like roles they instead measure pay across organizations altogether irrespective of different roles, age or hours worked.'
'That's exactly what the statistics are doing. They are looking at the average pay in organizations and seeing where it's going'
'That's the point being made by the IEA'
'I know, but yes'
'Be more forensic about it than being so broadbrushed'
'But you can't do that sort of analysis of looking at every individual job. We already have legislation fifty years ago, that legislated for equal pay, but we're taking half a century later there is still a page of almost 20 percent and what this data is showing is that in organizations, most of the wages are going to men. There's a whole variety of reasons for that, but now that this data is out there, it gives women an opportunity to say to their bosses, why aren't we being paid as much as men?'...
'Smaller businesses complain often about how much red tape, bureaucracy, they have to deal with.'"
Looks like feminists like generalisations and broad statistics when they suit their agenda
Feminist logic - a male CEO must be paid as much as a female janitor
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Could human beings be hacked? - "I don't know if people believe that without nationalism, we would be living in some kind of liberal paradise but much more likely we would have been living in tribal kills. Nationalism makes you care about millions of complete strangers whom we, you have never met before, and this has been quite good for humankind, until today... until today, most of our major problems could be solved on the national level, but this is no longer the case. The three biggest problems facing humankind in 21st century are nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption, and you simply cannot solve any of these problems on the national level."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "'The fear of falling foul of US sanctions is so powerful that almost literally anything the European Union does won't have much effect'...
'The so-called blocking legislation which has been in force since the mid 90s but this is the first time we see it's extended. And it's specifically now as of today going to prohibit EU businesses, or anyone else subject to EU jurisdiction from complying effectively with the US secondary sanctions'...
'Sort of a double jeopardy. If you comply to US sanctions you might fall foul of the European Union'..
'In the UK it's a criminal offense'
'It's a criminal offence to obey US sanctions'"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, British Identity at the V&A: Boscobel Plaque of Charles II - "They effectively preserved the monarchy putting their own lives at risk, and also foregoing the possibility of enormous riches because there was a thousand pound reward for anybody giving information for the capture of the king after the Battle of Worcester. They kept him alive, he was there to come back and take the crown. Five brothers got a hundred pound pension to be paid in perpetuity, going to the eldest son of the eldest son, and I believe until recently, it was still being paid. Sadly, not Index linked"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Trump reimposes Russia sanctions - "'More than 20 nations around the world, not just Britain, not just the United States: Norway, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden. I could go on, have all held Russia responsible for the attempted murder and the use of Novichok.'
'They're making this under the pressure, and I want to repeat, if you want. Russia would cooperate with you, with Great Britain, United States in colonial style, it's exactly as China cooperated with the British and France in the beginning of 20th Century. It will be no.'"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, A tale of two birds - "'Let's go back to the name, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Crows are birds. If they want to be a curlew protecting organization, then be clear about that.'
'So in other words you'd be happy to have the curlews wiped out by the crows'
'No, absolutely. Well, yeah. Well, absolutely, if that was necessary... we would welcome them protecting curlews, not at the expense of a native species, which is the crow... Animals aren't aware of whether they face extinction. They're aware if they're suffering'"
Extinction is a good thing in certain contexts apparently
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'End immigration targets after Brexit' - "'Even as she [from Poland] worries about her own future Paulina wants tougher rules for new migrants. She thinks Britain can for EU citizens be a soft touch.'
'At the moment there's no control like immigration and I fully understand that. Maybe because I have just classed UK as my home, but the UK government is too easy.'"
Post ID: 2693759263156489178
50 Years of the Abortion Act
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, 50 Years of the Abortion Act
"It was Christopher Hitchens who said that if you accept that the concept of a child has any meaning then the concept of the unborn child has to have meaning... the most fundamental human right is the right to life...
‘I don't think there's any more appalling thing that could be done to a person than sexual crime, but we live in a society that holds as an objective value human life.
We don't allow the victims of sexual crime to execute their attackers. So it seems to me that we're placing a greater value on the human life of the attacker than on the child.
And it seems to me that if you are going for abortion in cases of say rape or incest, you are basically saying, well, it's okay to visit the crimes of the father on the child, but not on the father himself...
I believe that every person should have the right over their own body, but I would take a sort of John Stuart Mill's approach of your right to wave your fist stops just short of the end of my nose. A woman's right over her body is absolute to the extent that it doesn't cause the death of another'...
'I think that the question of rights always exists in a hierarchy and the Right to Life, I think, is the highest right. So for example, if a woman or a man is found by their flatmate having ingested a lethal dose of pain killers and having written a persuasive and eloquent note on why they want to end their own life no one would fault the flat mate for calling the ambulance, no one would fault the doctor for treating them, even though they've exercised their right to do what they want with their own body.'...
‘I fear our society is not honest about the reality of abortion. Now, Professor Savage, I was astonished when she said that perhaps the reason why many doctors would rather not carry out an abortion after 12 weeks was because of squeamishness. Well they’re not squeamish about removing a liver are they? No.
They’re squeamish about abortion, because particularly after 12 months (sic), it requires the dismemberment of what, when you look at it, is very clearly a human being, and that is the reality of abortion... let us not either hide it behind clinical language behind closed doors or try and obfuscate'...
'If we are conscious of the person who, and the rights of disabled people, does it not affect their rights, their personhood that 90 percent of babies which are diagnosed in the womb as having Down’s syndrome are aborted - does that not have some clear impact upon grown, disabled people's own sense of personhood, rights that people like them can be so discarded in the womb on the grounds of their disability.'"
"It was Christopher Hitchens who said that if you accept that the concept of a child has any meaning then the concept of the unborn child has to have meaning... the most fundamental human right is the right to life...
‘I don't think there's any more appalling thing that could be done to a person than sexual crime, but we live in a society that holds as an objective value human life.
We don't allow the victims of sexual crime to execute their attackers. So it seems to me that we're placing a greater value on the human life of the attacker than on the child.
And it seems to me that if you are going for abortion in cases of say rape or incest, you are basically saying, well, it's okay to visit the crimes of the father on the child, but not on the father himself...
I believe that every person should have the right over their own body, but I would take a sort of John Stuart Mill's approach of your right to wave your fist stops just short of the end of my nose. A woman's right over her body is absolute to the extent that it doesn't cause the death of another'...
'I think that the question of rights always exists in a hierarchy and the Right to Life, I think, is the highest right. So for example, if a woman or a man is found by their flatmate having ingested a lethal dose of pain killers and having written a persuasive and eloquent note on why they want to end their own life no one would fault the flat mate for calling the ambulance, no one would fault the doctor for treating them, even though they've exercised their right to do what they want with their own body.'...
‘I fear our society is not honest about the reality of abortion. Now, Professor Savage, I was astonished when she said that perhaps the reason why many doctors would rather not carry out an abortion after 12 weeks was because of squeamishness. Well they’re not squeamish about removing a liver are they? No.
They’re squeamish about abortion, because particularly after 12 months (sic), it requires the dismemberment of what, when you look at it, is very clearly a human being, and that is the reality of abortion... let us not either hide it behind clinical language behind closed doors or try and obfuscate'...
'If we are conscious of the person who, and the rights of disabled people, does it not affect their rights, their personhood that 90 percent of babies which are diagnosed in the womb as having Down’s syndrome are aborted - does that not have some clear impact upon grown, disabled people's own sense of personhood, rights that people like them can be so discarded in the womb on the grounds of their disability.'"
Post ID: 9200116321304155615
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