Strangely, this great 2011 article I previously linked in 2011 was hard to find via Google - and after I added keywords to make it easier to find, it became impossible to find via them.
Hopefully making a dedicated post will make it easier to locate in future.
Blasphemy Law and the Marginalisation of Pakistan’s Moderate Muslims | Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses
"Blasphemy Law and the Marginalisation of Pakistan’s Moderate Muslims
Sushant Sareen
In a country where the man in charge of maintaining law and order and fighting Islamic terrorists, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, has no compunctions in declaring that he would personally shoot anyone committing blasphemy, where a minister for religious affairs justifies suicide bombings in Britain because of the knighthood given to author Salman Rushdie, and where the chief justice of Lahore High Court enunciates a new principle of jurisprudence under which the courts don’t require any witness to establish a case of blasphemy against an accused, a Mumtaz Qadri (the assassin who murdered Punjab Governor Salman Taseer for calling the infamous Blasphemy Law a ‘black law’) is pretty much par for the course. The real significance of Taseer’s murder lies in what it exemplifies viz. radicalisation has seeped far too deep into Pakistan’s society and is today the norm, while the liberals and moderates with whom the rest of the world interfaces are the exception.
The outpouring of grief, condemnation and soul searching by liberal and moderate writers has conveyed an impression that there is widespread revulsion over the assassination. Nothing can be farther from the truth. According to Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, the ‘moderates’ have a strong presence only in the editorial pages of the English language press, the readership of which is not more than a few hundred thousand in a nation of close to 180 million people. More than anything else, the deluge of write-ups on Taseer’s killing in the English media illustrates the panic being felt by sections of the Pakistani elite, which until now had been unaffected by the tide of religious fanaticism sweeping Pakistan.
The times when this tiny elite used to set the social, cultural and political agenda of Pakistan are long gone. Over the last couple of decades, street and state power has been steadily shifting away from this marginalised section, as is evident from million man marches in support of Qadri, the showering of rose petals on Qadri by Pakistani lawyers, and the difficulty of finding a cleric willing to read Taseer’s funeral prayers. Even worse, leading lights of the lawyers movement, who never tired of telling the world that they were fighting in defence of rule of law and a more liberal state, flatly refused to publicly condemn Qadri.
If this was the ‘civil society’s’ reaction, the response of the state was no better. From the Prime Minister down all senior government functionaries distanced themselves from Taseer’s stand against the death sentence to Aasia Bibi for allegedly committing blasphemy. Interior Minister Rehman Malik advised a ruling party lawmaker, Sherry Rehman, to leave the country if she wants to live. Her crime: moving a private member’s bill seeking amendments in the blasphemy law to prevent its abuse and misuse. The mullahs are baying for her blood, issuing fatwas that hold her murder a righteous and obligatory act for Muslims. But there has been absolutely no response from the state against this blatant incitement to murder. What is worse, many police officials, including those involved in anti-terrorist operations, are reported to have voiced support for Qadri and justified his actions.
With the Pakistani state leaning over backwards to appease the Islamists, the latter have latched on to the blasphemy law to stamp their domination on the social, political, cultural, legal and constitutional discourse. They have felt further emboldened by the judiciary’s complicity with, if not capitulation to, Islamism. To quote Pakistani columnist and Member of National Assembly, Ayaz Amir: “lower-tier judges go out of their way to look for loopholes when dangerous terrorists are on trial, thus giving them the benefit of the doubt, and...close all loopholes and don spectacles of the utmost strictness when it comes to the trial of a poor Christian...charged with blasphemy, on the flimsiest of evidence...” The attitude of the superior judiciary is no better, with the Chief Justice declaring that the court couldn’t be a mute bystander and let Pakistan become a secular state, and the Lahore High Court forbidding the government from granting any clemency to Aasia Bibi.
The seriousness of the systemic crisis confronting Pakistan can also be gauged from the fact that the mullahs who are in the vanguard of extolling Qadri’s act belong to the anti-Taliban Barelvi sect which is being touted as the face of moderate Islam and is being propped up by the Pakistani state as a counterforce to the pro-Taliban Deobandi sect. But as is clear from the Taseer murder, when it comes to fanaticism, there is little to choose between the Barelvis and the Deobandis. In other words, the struggle in Pakistan is no longer between moderate and radical Islam, but between two competing versions of radical Islam.
What has contributed to the unbridled rise in power and influence of the Islamists is the absence of a convincing and credible religious and ideological narrative that can counter them. The best that the ‘moderates’ can come up with is that the fundamentalists do not represent the ‘silent majority’, something that has been proved by the consistently poor performance of religious parties in successive elections. But as Hajrah Mumtaz writes, “the phrase ‘silent majority’ in Pakistan can only be used in the context of its original meaning — it originates from Homer’s Odyssey, and refers to the dead who are in the majority as compared to the living...if Pakistan has a ‘silent majority at all, it is in this manner.” What the ‘moderates’ cannot or don’t want to understand is that the extremists don’t need to win a majority in Parliament to push for what they want; they can easily force their way through the use of their street power and firepower.
By concentrating only on the inequities of the blasphemy law, the Pakistani ‘moderates’, as also the rest of the world, are missing the woods for the trees. The real battle to be fought is the one against radical Islamic thought and not for some minor changes in law. But this is a battle that has still not been joined in any serious manner."
L'origine de Bert
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Links - 14th November 2018 (1)
11 Foods That Shouldn't Ever Need An Expiration Date - "Honey keeps indefinitely. It may change color and become crystalized, but it will stay safe to eat. If your honey does crystallize, just place the open jar in warm water and stir until the crystals dissolve."
Rosenhan experiment - Wikipedia - "The Rosenhan experiment or Thud experiment was an experiment conducted to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. The experimenters feigned hallucinations to enter psychiatric hospitals, and acted normally afterwards. They were diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and were given antipsychotic drugs. The study was conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan, a Stanford University professor, and published by the journal Science in 1973 under the title "On being sane in insane places"... While listening to a lecture by R. D. Laing, who was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, Rosenhan conceived of the experiment as a way to test the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses. The study concluded "it is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals" and also illustrated the dangers of dehumanization and labeling in psychiatric institutions... Despite constantly and openly taking extensive notes on the behavior of the staff and other patients, none of the pseudopatients were identified as impostors by the hospital staff, although many of the other psychiatric patients seemed to be able to correctly identify them as impostors"
Perhaps this is why today people think mental illness isn't as 'real' as physical illness, despite the protestations of people trying to elevate them to the same level
Brown University Releases a $100 Million Plan to Increase Inclusivity - "Glenn Loury, a professor of economics at Brown and a prominent critic of the graduate students’ statement, recently declared on Facebook that during his decade at the institution as a black faculty member doing scholarly work on race, ethnicity, and inequality, “I have found the university to be an extremely warm, welcoming, supportive and open environment to undertake my work. I know well the people who run this institution, and the notion that they are racially insensitive is a shameful slander with no basis in fact.” Noting that “the administration has lavished resources on me, and has enthusiastically supported any number of initiatives that contribute to promoting a just and decent society, both within the United States and throughout the world,” he expressed these specific misgivings:
The notion that Brown needs a revolutionary reshaping in order to become hospitable to "students of color," the idea that "anti-black pedagogy" at Brown needs to be countered with some mandatory indoctrination of faculty, the proposal that external student committees should review purportedly "racist" departmental appointment processes, the initiative of creating "specialty positions" in academic departments to ensure their openness to hiring "faculty of color"—these are all mischievous intrusions on the academic prerogatives of a distinguished faculty which no self-respecting scholar of any color should welcome. They are a step onto a slippery slope that slides down into intellectual mediocrity, and I will have nothing to do with them...
It could be considered “insensitive” for a feminist scholar to probe whether the transgender community is helping to ossify the notion that there are inherently masculine and feminine traits; or for a scholar of transgenderism to probe whether radical feminism denies real gender identities (to reference one heated disagreement on the left). Are those still legitimate areas of inquiry? Is sensitivity really a primary value that a university ought to instill in its faculty and graduate students? (The work of Darwin and his successors in biology was extremely insensitive to the feelings of several generations of religious believers. Isn’t it good that they pressed forwards anyway?) Perhaps it would be better to inculcate humanism or tolerance or inherent dignity, values that help communities flourish without stigmatizing the search for truth."
God's Foreknowledge and Man's Free Will (2) - "The question is an ancient one. Even in Augustine’s day (354-430), the question had to be faced. In those days, the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians taught that man had a free will and that God saved only those who wanted to be saved by their (alleged) free will. Augustine most emphatically denied it. The Roman Catholic Church most emphatically taught it and killed those who denied it. All the Reformers, without exception, denied free will, as did the Reformed and Presbyterian churches throughout Europe... The only answer that anyone can give is that the church of Christ since Pentecost to today, including Paul’s epistles to the Galatians and the Romans, all the great creeds of the church and all the greatest theologians, have held to this one position: Man’s fall resulted in his total depravity, that is, his total inability to do any good and his ability to do only what is evil. This includes his will: the will of fallen man is totally unable to do anything pleasing to God; it is totally unable to contribute even 0.001% to a man’s salvation; it can do nothing but hate God (Rom. 1:30)."
Basically Protestants don't believe in free will, Catholics do
Foreign parents of Singaporean boys worry over national service issues - "“If you benefited from the government, you had education here or used up government benefits, you should be liable for NS. But for the case of the Thai kid, he didn’t go through the Singapore education system. I feel like it’s unfair for him, for the family,” said Tee, whose wife is a Singapore permanent resident. Tee is among a number of parents with foreign spouses who face the possibility of their sons violating NS obligations should they migrate to other countries. These parents spoke to Yahoo News Singapore about the implications of any long-term move overseas for their sons in the wake of Ekawit’s case, and urged flexibility from the authorities on the issue... The case has also put a spotlight on the dilemma that Singaporean males face should they wish to renounce their citizenship. Ekawit’s mother told Singapore authorities that she wished to renounce her son’s Singapore citizenship but was told that Ekawit could do so only after turning 21... Many netizens who have followed Ekawit’s case questioned why a Singaporean male who could only renounce his citizenship at 21 is obligated to do NS before that. Under the law, Singaporean males are liable for NS registration from the age of 16.5 years old... Loy pointed out that there are some misconceptions that NS defaulters are typically punished with fines and not imprisonment. He said that the High Court set out new sentencing benchmarks last year that peg the penalties for NS dodgers to the length of their default period... Thuraisingam noted that of particular interest is that the extent of an NS defaulter’s connection to Singapore is not a factor in the sentencing process. “This is because the assessment of the degree of the defaulter’s connection to Singapore is within the prerogative of the Ministry of Defence (Mindef), and as such, is a matter of Mindef policy, not law,” he said."
Basically don't register your sons for Singapore citizenship. Or they will be punished for their parents' crimes
After Ekawit Tangtrakarn, Singapore NS obligations need clarity - "I remember clearly the phone conversation I had this year with a Ministry of Defence (Mindef) officer who was supposed to answer my questions about dual citizenship and NS. The call was as informative as it was confusing... I was concerned about the bond. Four children at $75,000 each is the price of an apartment. The officer assured me that the bond was only for exit permits longer than two years. As long as I was happy to renew the exit permit every two years, I needn’t worry about the bond. Finland allows dual citizenship and for minors to renounce their citizenship. It also has mandatory national service. Should my children serve in the Finnish Army first, would they also be able to serve in the SAF? Or vice versa? The answer was yes – there is no restriction against serving in multiple militaries, at least from Mindef’s point of view. That answer struck me as oddly pragmatic for a country that doesn’t allow dual citizenship. I asked specifically if any of my sons, especially considering that one of them is only a year old, could theoretically give up their citizenship without serving NS. I don’t recall the precise answer, but I was given the clear impression that it was a negative.. In 2006, Deputy Prime Minister and then Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean said that “only those who have emigrated at a young age and have not enjoyed substantial socio-economic benefits are allowed to renounce their citizenship without serving national service.” Given that one cannot renounce citizenship until the age of 21, and that NS liability begins at age 16 and a half, it is unclear how this is accomplished, and the authorities are tight-lipped on how a Singaporean might access this conditional right to renounce their citizenship without serving NS... something is already broken: boys like Ekawit Tangtrakarn are paying the price for our neuroses. And if Singapore cannot do right for this one estranged former son, all the future sons of Singapore, especially those with a choice of which nationality to identify with, would think twice before joining the family."
The Great Chinese Art Heist - "In each case, the robbers focused their efforts on art and antiquities from China, especially items that had been looted by foreign armies. Many of these objects are well documented and publicly known, making them very hard to sell and difficult to display. In most cases the pieces have not been recovered; they seem to simply vanish... When an eight-person team arrived at New York's Metropolitan Museum, it was led by an archaeologist and largely composed of employees from Chinese state media and Beijing's palace museum. As the group poked around and asked about the art on display, one participant, a researcher named Liu Yang who had gained some notoriety for his zeal in cataloging China's lost treasures, sleuthed through the museum's long corridors, looking for objects he might recognize. The visit ended without incident, but the shift in tactics was evident: China was no longer content to sit back passively and hope for the return of its art. The hunt was on. Soon, all across Europe, thefts began... “When we are young, we are indoctrinated to believe that the foreigners stole from us,” Liu once told The New Yorker. “But maybe it's out of context. Whatever of ours [the foreigners] stole, we can always snatch it back one day.”
Maybe China will give up all of the land it has stolen since the Qin Dynasty
It’s not science I don’t trust – it’s the scientists | The Spectator - "The study by Nathan Cofnas et al — Does Activism in the Social Sciences Explain Conservatives’ Distrust of Scientists? — pours scorn on the idea that conservatives are any more anti-science than lefties. It’s not science they distrust so much as scientists — especially ones in more nebulous, activism-driven fields like ecology or sociology... ‘Take any politicised issue that is connected to some disagreement about scientific fact. I do not believe there is a single case in the last couple of decades where a major scientific organisation took a position that went against the platform of the Democratic party.’ He added: ‘What an odd coincidence that “science” always, without exception, supports the liberal worldview.’... In 2014, a paper was published in Science called ‘When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality’. This demonstrated that instinctively homophobic, buttoned-up conservatives were more likely to become liberal on meeting a gay man. Their study showed that ‘a 20-minute conversation with a gay canvasser’ increased their acceptance of same-sex marriage nine months later. Great! Except as two graduate students subsequently demonstrated, no study was ever conducted. To the chagrin of the social scientists who had welcomed this paper and its heartwarming message, it had to be retracted. Where are the peer-reviewers who are supposed to vet these things? Well, it turns out they’re generally willing to give a free pass to any thesis that accords with the liberal narrative. For example, over the course of more than a decade, Diederik Stapel ‘published dozens of sensational papers on such topics as how easily Whites or men can be prompted to discriminate against Blacks or women’. When exposed as a fraud, Stapel explained that he was merely giving social scientists what they were ‘waiting for’. Stapel probably had a point. If research supports a liberal shibboleth — say, the notion that violence is a learned behaviour rather than innate — then it will be given huge prominence. In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics testified to Congress that ‘more than 3,500’ studies had investigated the link between exposure to media violence and actual violent behaviour. This was a lie. Even those few studies — fewer than 1,000 — that purported to find a causal link often did so on the flimsiest of evidence. For example, one established the elevated ‘aggression’ caused by watching an exciting film by asking a child ‘whether he would pop a balloon if one were present’. If the evidence doesn’t accord with the correct ‘woke’ narrative then right-thinking social scientists tailor it till it does. This is what happened to a 2007 study showing racially diverse communities are more suspicious, withdrawn, ungenerous, fractured and fractious. Such an incendiary refutation of the well-known truth that ‘diversity is strength’ could not go unedited. So it didn’t. Publication was delayed until the author could ‘develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity’. To publish the facts on their own would be ‘irresponsible’... every time some unhelpful conservative type cites it to back up their argument that diversity causes social problems, he accuses them of selectively citing his findings because they’ve ignored the bit at the end where he explains that diversity will be good one day."
E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty‐first Century The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture - Putnam - 2007 - "In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer"
The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws - "On Pol.is, a topic is put up for debate. Anyone who creates an account can post comments on the topic, and can also upvote or downvote other people’s comments. That may sound much like any other online forum, but two things make Pol.is unusual. The first is that you cannot reply to comments. “If people can propose their ideas and comments but they cannot reply to each other, then it drastically reduces the motivation for trolls to troll,” Tang says. The second is that it uses the upvotes and downvotes to generate a kind of map of all the participants in the debate, clustering together people who have voted similarly. Although there may be hundreds or thousands of separate comments, like-minded groups rapidly emerge in this voting map, showing where there are divides and where there is consensus. People then naturally try to draft comments that will win votes from both sides of a divide, gradually eliminating the gaps."
Rosenhan experiment - Wikipedia - "The Rosenhan experiment or Thud experiment was an experiment conducted to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. The experimenters feigned hallucinations to enter psychiatric hospitals, and acted normally afterwards. They were diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and were given antipsychotic drugs. The study was conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan, a Stanford University professor, and published by the journal Science in 1973 under the title "On being sane in insane places"... While listening to a lecture by R. D. Laing, who was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, Rosenhan conceived of the experiment as a way to test the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses. The study concluded "it is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals" and also illustrated the dangers of dehumanization and labeling in psychiatric institutions... Despite constantly and openly taking extensive notes on the behavior of the staff and other patients, none of the pseudopatients were identified as impostors by the hospital staff, although many of the other psychiatric patients seemed to be able to correctly identify them as impostors"
Perhaps this is why today people think mental illness isn't as 'real' as physical illness, despite the protestations of people trying to elevate them to the same level
Brown University Releases a $100 Million Plan to Increase Inclusivity - "Glenn Loury, a professor of economics at Brown and a prominent critic of the graduate students’ statement, recently declared on Facebook that during his decade at the institution as a black faculty member doing scholarly work on race, ethnicity, and inequality, “I have found the university to be an extremely warm, welcoming, supportive and open environment to undertake my work. I know well the people who run this institution, and the notion that they are racially insensitive is a shameful slander with no basis in fact.” Noting that “the administration has lavished resources on me, and has enthusiastically supported any number of initiatives that contribute to promoting a just and decent society, both within the United States and throughout the world,” he expressed these specific misgivings:
The notion that Brown needs a revolutionary reshaping in order to become hospitable to "students of color," the idea that "anti-black pedagogy" at Brown needs to be countered with some mandatory indoctrination of faculty, the proposal that external student committees should review purportedly "racist" departmental appointment processes, the initiative of creating "specialty positions" in academic departments to ensure their openness to hiring "faculty of color"—these are all mischievous intrusions on the academic prerogatives of a distinguished faculty which no self-respecting scholar of any color should welcome. They are a step onto a slippery slope that slides down into intellectual mediocrity, and I will have nothing to do with them...
It could be considered “insensitive” for a feminist scholar to probe whether the transgender community is helping to ossify the notion that there are inherently masculine and feminine traits; or for a scholar of transgenderism to probe whether radical feminism denies real gender identities (to reference one heated disagreement on the left). Are those still legitimate areas of inquiry? Is sensitivity really a primary value that a university ought to instill in its faculty and graduate students? (The work of Darwin and his successors in biology was extremely insensitive to the feelings of several generations of religious believers. Isn’t it good that they pressed forwards anyway?) Perhaps it would be better to inculcate humanism or tolerance or inherent dignity, values that help communities flourish without stigmatizing the search for truth."
God's Foreknowledge and Man's Free Will (2) - "The question is an ancient one. Even in Augustine’s day (354-430), the question had to be faced. In those days, the Pelagians and Semi-Pelagians taught that man had a free will and that God saved only those who wanted to be saved by their (alleged) free will. Augustine most emphatically denied it. The Roman Catholic Church most emphatically taught it and killed those who denied it. All the Reformers, without exception, denied free will, as did the Reformed and Presbyterian churches throughout Europe... The only answer that anyone can give is that the church of Christ since Pentecost to today, including Paul’s epistles to the Galatians and the Romans, all the great creeds of the church and all the greatest theologians, have held to this one position: Man’s fall resulted in his total depravity, that is, his total inability to do any good and his ability to do only what is evil. This includes his will: the will of fallen man is totally unable to do anything pleasing to God; it is totally unable to contribute even 0.001% to a man’s salvation; it can do nothing but hate God (Rom. 1:30)."
Basically Protestants don't believe in free will, Catholics do
Foreign parents of Singaporean boys worry over national service issues - "“If you benefited from the government, you had education here or used up government benefits, you should be liable for NS. But for the case of the Thai kid, he didn’t go through the Singapore education system. I feel like it’s unfair for him, for the family,” said Tee, whose wife is a Singapore permanent resident. Tee is among a number of parents with foreign spouses who face the possibility of their sons violating NS obligations should they migrate to other countries. These parents spoke to Yahoo News Singapore about the implications of any long-term move overseas for their sons in the wake of Ekawit’s case, and urged flexibility from the authorities on the issue... The case has also put a spotlight on the dilemma that Singaporean males face should they wish to renounce their citizenship. Ekawit’s mother told Singapore authorities that she wished to renounce her son’s Singapore citizenship but was told that Ekawit could do so only after turning 21... Many netizens who have followed Ekawit’s case questioned why a Singaporean male who could only renounce his citizenship at 21 is obligated to do NS before that. Under the law, Singaporean males are liable for NS registration from the age of 16.5 years old... Loy pointed out that there are some misconceptions that NS defaulters are typically punished with fines and not imprisonment. He said that the High Court set out new sentencing benchmarks last year that peg the penalties for NS dodgers to the length of their default period... Thuraisingam noted that of particular interest is that the extent of an NS defaulter’s connection to Singapore is not a factor in the sentencing process. “This is because the assessment of the degree of the defaulter’s connection to Singapore is within the prerogative of the Ministry of Defence (Mindef), and as such, is a matter of Mindef policy, not law,” he said."
Basically don't register your sons for Singapore citizenship. Or they will be punished for their parents' crimes
After Ekawit Tangtrakarn, Singapore NS obligations need clarity - "I remember clearly the phone conversation I had this year with a Ministry of Defence (Mindef) officer who was supposed to answer my questions about dual citizenship and NS. The call was as informative as it was confusing... I was concerned about the bond. Four children at $75,000 each is the price of an apartment. The officer assured me that the bond was only for exit permits longer than two years. As long as I was happy to renew the exit permit every two years, I needn’t worry about the bond. Finland allows dual citizenship and for minors to renounce their citizenship. It also has mandatory national service. Should my children serve in the Finnish Army first, would they also be able to serve in the SAF? Or vice versa? The answer was yes – there is no restriction against serving in multiple militaries, at least from Mindef’s point of view. That answer struck me as oddly pragmatic for a country that doesn’t allow dual citizenship. I asked specifically if any of my sons, especially considering that one of them is only a year old, could theoretically give up their citizenship without serving NS. I don’t recall the precise answer, but I was given the clear impression that it was a negative.. In 2006, Deputy Prime Minister and then Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean said that “only those who have emigrated at a young age and have not enjoyed substantial socio-economic benefits are allowed to renounce their citizenship without serving national service.” Given that one cannot renounce citizenship until the age of 21, and that NS liability begins at age 16 and a half, it is unclear how this is accomplished, and the authorities are tight-lipped on how a Singaporean might access this conditional right to renounce their citizenship without serving NS... something is already broken: boys like Ekawit Tangtrakarn are paying the price for our neuroses. And if Singapore cannot do right for this one estranged former son, all the future sons of Singapore, especially those with a choice of which nationality to identify with, would think twice before joining the family."
The Great Chinese Art Heist - "In each case, the robbers focused their efforts on art and antiquities from China, especially items that had been looted by foreign armies. Many of these objects are well documented and publicly known, making them very hard to sell and difficult to display. In most cases the pieces have not been recovered; they seem to simply vanish... When an eight-person team arrived at New York's Metropolitan Museum, it was led by an archaeologist and largely composed of employees from Chinese state media and Beijing's palace museum. As the group poked around and asked about the art on display, one participant, a researcher named Liu Yang who had gained some notoriety for his zeal in cataloging China's lost treasures, sleuthed through the museum's long corridors, looking for objects he might recognize. The visit ended without incident, but the shift in tactics was evident: China was no longer content to sit back passively and hope for the return of its art. The hunt was on. Soon, all across Europe, thefts began... “When we are young, we are indoctrinated to believe that the foreigners stole from us,” Liu once told The New Yorker. “But maybe it's out of context. Whatever of ours [the foreigners] stole, we can always snatch it back one day.”
Maybe China will give up all of the land it has stolen since the Qin Dynasty
It’s not science I don’t trust – it’s the scientists | The Spectator - "The study by Nathan Cofnas et al — Does Activism in the Social Sciences Explain Conservatives’ Distrust of Scientists? — pours scorn on the idea that conservatives are any more anti-science than lefties. It’s not science they distrust so much as scientists — especially ones in more nebulous, activism-driven fields like ecology or sociology... ‘Take any politicised issue that is connected to some disagreement about scientific fact. I do not believe there is a single case in the last couple of decades where a major scientific organisation took a position that went against the platform of the Democratic party.’ He added: ‘What an odd coincidence that “science” always, without exception, supports the liberal worldview.’... In 2014, a paper was published in Science called ‘When contact changes minds: An experiment on transmission of support for gay equality’. This demonstrated that instinctively homophobic, buttoned-up conservatives were more likely to become liberal on meeting a gay man. Their study showed that ‘a 20-minute conversation with a gay canvasser’ increased their acceptance of same-sex marriage nine months later. Great! Except as two graduate students subsequently demonstrated, no study was ever conducted. To the chagrin of the social scientists who had welcomed this paper and its heartwarming message, it had to be retracted. Where are the peer-reviewers who are supposed to vet these things? Well, it turns out they’re generally willing to give a free pass to any thesis that accords with the liberal narrative. For example, over the course of more than a decade, Diederik Stapel ‘published dozens of sensational papers on such topics as how easily Whites or men can be prompted to discriminate against Blacks or women’. When exposed as a fraud, Stapel explained that he was merely giving social scientists what they were ‘waiting for’. Stapel probably had a point. If research supports a liberal shibboleth — say, the notion that violence is a learned behaviour rather than innate — then it will be given huge prominence. In 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics testified to Congress that ‘more than 3,500’ studies had investigated the link between exposure to media violence and actual violent behaviour. This was a lie. Even those few studies — fewer than 1,000 — that purported to find a causal link often did so on the flimsiest of evidence. For example, one established the elevated ‘aggression’ caused by watching an exciting film by asking a child ‘whether he would pop a balloon if one were present’. If the evidence doesn’t accord with the correct ‘woke’ narrative then right-thinking social scientists tailor it till it does. This is what happened to a 2007 study showing racially diverse communities are more suspicious, withdrawn, ungenerous, fractured and fractious. Such an incendiary refutation of the well-known truth that ‘diversity is strength’ could not go unedited. So it didn’t. Publication was delayed until the author could ‘develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity’. To publish the facts on their own would be ‘irresponsible’... every time some unhelpful conservative type cites it to back up their argument that diversity causes social problems, he accuses them of selectively citing his findings because they’ve ignored the bit at the end where he explains that diversity will be good one day."
E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty‐first Century The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture - Putnam - 2007 - "In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer"
The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws - "On Pol.is, a topic is put up for debate. Anyone who creates an account can post comments on the topic, and can also upvote or downvote other people’s comments. That may sound much like any other online forum, but two things make Pol.is unusual. The first is that you cannot reply to comments. “If people can propose their ideas and comments but they cannot reply to each other, then it drastically reduces the motivation for trolls to troll,” Tang says. The second is that it uses the upvotes and downvotes to generate a kind of map of all the participants in the debate, clustering together people who have voted similarly. Although there may be hundreds or thousands of separate comments, like-minded groups rapidly emerge in this voting map, showing where there are divides and where there is consensus. People then naturally try to draft comments that will win votes from both sides of a divide, gradually eliminating the gaps."
Post ID: 7444888468413963329
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Links - 13th November 2018 (2)
I Paid $100,000, and All I Got Was This Lousy Degree - ""Your Money" columnist Ron Lieber asks us to feel the pain of Cortney Munna, a 26-year-old NYU graduate who owes $100,000 for "an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women's studies" that is not quite as lucrative as she expected. Munna "makes $22 an hour working for a photographer" in San Francisco (one of the most expensive cities in the country) and dreads the thought of "slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back," which she says "feels wrong to me." To his credit, Lieber assigns some responsibility for this state of affairs to Munna and her mother... Lieber also wants to blame Citibank (featured in a photo accompanying the column) for "handing over $40,000 to an undergraduate who had already amassed debt well into the five figures." That may turn out to have been a bad business decision, but is it a bank's job to tell a loan applicant what her priorities should be? Citibank made it possible for Munna to realize her dream of attending the college of her choice instead of various less expensive options, and Lieber is saying, in effect, that it should have told her to aim lower. Likewise, he faults NYU's financial aid office for not giving Munna better advice, which would have meant suggesting that she attend a different, cheaper school. Not only is it unrealistic to expect a college to send away a student who is ready to pay full tuition, but at the time Munna and her mother probably would have resented the suggestion."
Student Debt Is Worse for Women - "women hold almost two-thirds of the nation’s student-loan debt, nearly $900 billion of the $1.4 trillion total, with black women holding the highest average debt of any racial, ethnic, and gender group among graduates who completed bachelor’s degrees... Even knowing that fields dominated by women tend to pay less than fields dominated by men, Chandler saw social work as the right choice for her"
My Degrees Make Me Unemployable - "I did everything I was told; “Study hard, go to a good college. You’ll get a good job and not have to work for minimum wage.” I got a Master’s degree for good measure to ensure my career profitability. Sadly, nearing my 40’s I stare at a bleak job outlook. When I was younger, I told my Dad my plans for travel and saving the world and he warned me that I was too idealistic for my own good. My idealism translated into my college majors, English and History... I had a conversation with the Dean of Arts and Sciences who, in response to hearing I was an English major, said that I’d be “highly unemployable”. I was discouraged by his comment and realize now that I was too idealistic to appreciate its value... at 37, when most of my friends are well established in a career, can afford to take vacations and have a solid 401(k), I must say I am a bit envious. I know we sacrificed a lot so I could stay home with our children (something I would never change) but I did have brighter hopes for my future. I thought my degrees and past work experience would speak for themselves. I thought I’d seamlessly transition back into the workforce. But, I am highly educated in looking at perspectives, analyzing situations and problem-solving. I guess I’ll do just that."
WaPo Feels Really Sorry For Black, Transgender Rite Aid Shooter - "The media wants everyone to know this black, transgender mass shooter was a poet just ‘struggling to find her way.’
Details are still emerging as to what motivated a 26 year old temporary worker at a Rite Aid facility in Aberdeen, Md. to open fire late last week, killing three and injuring three others before turning the gun on herself. But in a move unheard of when mass shooters fit the straight, white male narrative, some mainstream media are running cover for the suspect, ignoring her transgenderism or insisting readers consider the suspect’s “struggle.” Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler told reporters Friday that suspect Snochia Moseley showed up to work on time Thursday morning, went home on a break and returned with a 9mm Glock pistol, pepper spray, and a pair of handcuffs."
If you assume straight white males have no problems in life, you can assume there're no mitigating factors when they shoot up places
China could be exposed in trade war as US allies choose compromise - "Trump pressure on partners pays off as they succumb to the art of the deal"
U.S. Near Bottom, Hong Kong and Singapore at Top of Health Havens - "Want medical care without quickly draining your fortune? Try Singapore or Hong Kong as your healthy havens. The U.S. will cost you the most for treatment, both in absolute terms and relative to average incomes, while life expectancy of Americans -- about 79 years -- was exceeded by more than 25 countries and territories"
As a Rotherham grooming gang survivor, I want people to know about the religious extremism which inspired my abusers - "Like terrorists, they firmly believe that the crimes they carry out are justified by their religious beliefs... Experts say that grooming gangs are not the same as paedophile rings. It’s something that central Government really needs to understand in order to prevent more grooming gang crime in the future. In November 2017, the Swedish government held a meeting where they stated that: “Sexual violence is being used as a tactic of terrorism”, and as such, it was recognised as a threat to Sweden’s national security... Religious indoctrination is a big part of the process of getting young men involved in grooming gang crime. Religious ideas about purity, virginity, modesty and obedience are taken to the extreme until horrific abuse becomes the norm. It was taught to me as a concept of “othering”."
Désirée Lim Harkins - "For chrissakes, let's stop worrying about the threat of 'foreign intervention'. At its mildest, this variant of xenophobia is alarmingly inconsistent. The kneejerk willingness to accuse other Singaporeans of treason exists in the very same space where international cooperation and diplomatic ties are lauded alongside the tireless flow of global capital. The interactions that are labelled 'treacherous' are, quite obviously, not all meetings between foreigners and Singaporeans, but only those meetings that are regarded threatening by the government. (By 'threatening', I don't mean a problem for security, but 'out of its control'.) The working definition of 'foreign intervention' essentially applies to those interactions between Singaporeans and foreigners that the state does not sanction - whether it's interviews with a famous statesman, funding from a wealthy non-Singaporean, or even attendance at a large-scale (legal) protest. At its most troubling, the narrative of 'foreign intervention' is deeply divisive. It asks us to treat foreigners as inherently suspicious. Of course, they are allowed to labour for us, be of economic benefit to us, but god forbid they have a social impact on the country they are embedded in. As the blatant suspicion towards Malaysian-born citizens indicates, it also creates a hierarchical notion of citizenship: Singaporeans are seen to exist along a continuum of 'more or less suspicious' depending on their birthplace or parentage... There is *nothing* categorically wrong with allowing oneself to be persuaded or influenced by a foreigner. It is not at all clear why this should be treated as a bad thing, unless we adopt the absurd position that we are not allowed to have views other than those held by 'our countrymen', whatever those may be... Political interactions with foreigners, on the other hand, can also have a democracy-ENHANCING effect: for example, if we band together with citizens from neighbouring countries to discuss how basic human rights can be improved throughout the region. The point is, there is nothing inherently wrong with adopting ideas suggested by foreigners, agreeing to cooperate with foreigners, or accepting their help"
Backlash builds against China as Belt and Road ties fray - "Many countries have taken note of the fate of the Hambantota port project in Sri Lanka, part of Belt and Road. The Sri Lankan government became heavily indebted to Beijing and was forced to lease the port to the Chinese for 99 years. That China often sends over the necessary labor for infrastructure projects, instead of employing locals, is another sore spot."
26th MEU battalion commander fired during deployment over equal opportunity concerns - "An infantry battalion commander sacked in the middle of a deployment with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU, was at least partially fired for allegedly using a term that could be disparaging to members of the LGBTQ community"
Comments: "Do people not understand that our military is trained to kill people and destroy things?"
"So, the Corps is telling me that if a LGBTQ Commander said something like: "Get that straight-assed vehicle out of here!" they would have been relieved?"
Why identity politics benefits the right more than the left | Sheri Berman - "Studies make clear, however, that racism has been decreasing over time, among Republicans and Democrats. (Views of immigration have also grown more favorable.)... Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson, for example, found that simply making white Americans aware that they would soon be a minority increased their propensity to favor their own group and become wary of those outside it. (Similar effects were found among Canadians. Indeed, although this tendency is most dangerous among whites since they are the most powerful group in western societies, researchers have consistently found such propensities in all groups.) ... In the past, the Republican and Democratic parties attracted supporters with different racial, religious, ideological and regional identities, but gradually Republicans became the party of white, evangelical, conservative and rural voters, while the Democrats became associated with non-whites, non-evangelical, liberal and metropolitan voters. This lining up of identities dramatically changes electoral stakes: previously if your party lost, other parts of your identity were not threatened, but today losing is also a blow to your racial, religious, regional and ideological identity. (Mason cites a study showing that in the week following Obama’s 2012 election, Republicans felt sadder than American parents after the Newtown school shooting or Bostonians after the Boston Marathon bombing.) This social sorting has led partisans of both parties to engage in negative stereotyping and even demonization... Once the other party becomes an enemy rather than an opponent, winning becomes more important than the common good and compromise becomes an anathema. Such situations also promote emotional rather than rational evaluations of policies and evidence. Making matters worse, social scientists consistently find that the most committed partisans, those who are the angriest and have the most negative feelings towards out-groups, are the most politically engaged... 'Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness'... as one Trump supporter put it, every time Democrats attack him “it makes me angry, which causes me to want to defend him more” – potentially alienate wavering Republican-leaning independents, and help divert debate from policies, corruption and other substantive issues... Scholars consistently find that incivility spreads rapidly, generates anger and defensive reactions, demobilizes moderates and activates the strongest partisans, corrodes faith in government, trust in institutions and respect for our fellow citizens... identity politics is a both more powerful and efficacious for Republicans (and rightwing populists more generally) than it is for Democrats, since the former are more homogeneous"
Identity Politics Does More Harm Than Good to Minorities - "The fundamental objective of left-wing identitarians is to strengthen the weaker groups while simultaneously weakening the strongest (whites, especially cishetero white males) to achieve a more ‘equitable’ distribution of power... Evidence suggests that a group’s bargaining power is contingent on, among other things, the amount of resources – material and non-material – that it brings to the negotiating table. In light of this, feminism makes strategic sense. Women constitute roughly half the population of any given nation... racial identitarianism, in comparison, is less promising... Another difference between feminist identity politics and racial identity politics is that the rest of society does not always have strong personal, much less familial, ties to black folks, guaranteeing constant interaction... It is because he acknowledged this reality that Martin Luther King stressed non-violent resistance to Jim Crow laws... In his critique of black nationalism, MLK could be describing black identity politics today: a constant litany of grievances and bluster with no realistic strategy to eliminate the cause of those complaints... the main beneficiaries of racial identity politics are the identitarians themselves. They are the ones making good money selling books encouraging black people to scapegoat white people for all their problems. They play to the unfortunate human weakness for blaming your problems on other people – something that’s also exploited by right-wing demagogues encouraging the white working class to blame immigrants for their problems. Ironically, these snake-oil salesmen would not have achieved anything like the success they have without the complicity of guilty white liberals... Instead of reserving what was once a very effective tool at our disposal as a nuclear option – the stigmatizing power of the label ‘racist’ – identitarians are rendering it a blank bullet through overuse. Steven Bannon has said that he looks forward to the day when calling someone ‘racist’ has lost all power to stigamitize and he has no greater allies than racial identitarians and their guilty white devotees. The day is fast approaching when mainstream white society will react to accusations of racism with yawns and shrugs... It’s that kind of talk that will lead to Trump winning a second term."
What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence - The New York Times - "Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, the second-largest in Sri Lanka, is designed to handle a million passengers per year. It currently receives about a dozen passengers per day. Business is so slow that the airport has made more money from renting out the unused cargo terminals for rice storage than from flight-related activities. In one burst of activity last year, 350 security personnel armed with firecrackers were deployed to scare off wild animals, the airport’s most common visitors... “We always thought China’s investments would help our economy,” says Amantha Perera, a Sri Lankan journalist and university researcher. “But now there’s a sense that we’ve been maneuvered into selling some of the family jewels.”... It’s tempting to see OBOR as a muscled-up Marshall Plan, the American-led program that helped rebuild Western Europe after World War II. OBOR, too, is designed to build vital infrastructure, spread prosperity and drive global development. Yet little of what China offers is aid or even low-interest lending. Much OBOR financing comes in the form of market-rate loans that weaker countries are eager to receive — but may struggle to repay. Even when the projects are well suited for the local economy, the result can look a bit like a shell game: Things are built, money goes to Chinese companies and the country is saddled with more debt. What happens when, as is often the case, infrastructure projects are driven more by geopolitical ambition or the need to give China’s state-owned companies something to do? Well, Sri Lanka has an empty airport for sale... “They take on loans like it’s a drug addiction and then get trapped in debt servitude. It’s clearly part of China’s geostrategic vision.”This charge conjures the specter of colonialism, when the British and Dutch weaponized debt to take control of nations’ strategic assets... In Sri Lanka today, Chinese tour groups often traipse through a Colombo museum to see the trilingual stone tablet the admiral brought here — proof, it seems, that China respected all peoples and religions. No mention is made of a less savory aspect of Zheng He’s dealings in Ceylon. On a later expedition, around 1411, his troops became embroiled in a war. Zheng He prevailed and took the local king back to China as a prisoner... it’s worth remembering that dredging deepwater ports and laying down railroad ties to secure new trade routes — and then having to defend them from angry locals — was precisely how Britain started down the slippery slope to empire."
Student Debt Is Worse for Women - "women hold almost two-thirds of the nation’s student-loan debt, nearly $900 billion of the $1.4 trillion total, with black women holding the highest average debt of any racial, ethnic, and gender group among graduates who completed bachelor’s degrees... Even knowing that fields dominated by women tend to pay less than fields dominated by men, Chandler saw social work as the right choice for her"
My Degrees Make Me Unemployable - "I did everything I was told; “Study hard, go to a good college. You’ll get a good job and not have to work for minimum wage.” I got a Master’s degree for good measure to ensure my career profitability. Sadly, nearing my 40’s I stare at a bleak job outlook. When I was younger, I told my Dad my plans for travel and saving the world and he warned me that I was too idealistic for my own good. My idealism translated into my college majors, English and History... I had a conversation with the Dean of Arts and Sciences who, in response to hearing I was an English major, said that I’d be “highly unemployable”. I was discouraged by his comment and realize now that I was too idealistic to appreciate its value... at 37, when most of my friends are well established in a career, can afford to take vacations and have a solid 401(k), I must say I am a bit envious. I know we sacrificed a lot so I could stay home with our children (something I would never change) but I did have brighter hopes for my future. I thought my degrees and past work experience would speak for themselves. I thought I’d seamlessly transition back into the workforce. But, I am highly educated in looking at perspectives, analyzing situations and problem-solving. I guess I’ll do just that."
WaPo Feels Really Sorry For Black, Transgender Rite Aid Shooter - "The media wants everyone to know this black, transgender mass shooter was a poet just ‘struggling to find her way.’
Details are still emerging as to what motivated a 26 year old temporary worker at a Rite Aid facility in Aberdeen, Md. to open fire late last week, killing three and injuring three others before turning the gun on herself. But in a move unheard of when mass shooters fit the straight, white male narrative, some mainstream media are running cover for the suspect, ignoring her transgenderism or insisting readers consider the suspect’s “struggle.” Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler told reporters Friday that suspect Snochia Moseley showed up to work on time Thursday morning, went home on a break and returned with a 9mm Glock pistol, pepper spray, and a pair of handcuffs."
If you assume straight white males have no problems in life, you can assume there're no mitigating factors when they shoot up places
China could be exposed in trade war as US allies choose compromise - "Trump pressure on partners pays off as they succumb to the art of the deal"
U.S. Near Bottom, Hong Kong and Singapore at Top of Health Havens - "Want medical care without quickly draining your fortune? Try Singapore or Hong Kong as your healthy havens. The U.S. will cost you the most for treatment, both in absolute terms and relative to average incomes, while life expectancy of Americans -- about 79 years -- was exceeded by more than 25 countries and territories"
As a Rotherham grooming gang survivor, I want people to know about the religious extremism which inspired my abusers - "Like terrorists, they firmly believe that the crimes they carry out are justified by their religious beliefs... Experts say that grooming gangs are not the same as paedophile rings. It’s something that central Government really needs to understand in order to prevent more grooming gang crime in the future. In November 2017, the Swedish government held a meeting where they stated that: “Sexual violence is being used as a tactic of terrorism”, and as such, it was recognised as a threat to Sweden’s national security... Religious indoctrination is a big part of the process of getting young men involved in grooming gang crime. Religious ideas about purity, virginity, modesty and obedience are taken to the extreme until horrific abuse becomes the norm. It was taught to me as a concept of “othering”."
Désirée Lim Harkins - "For chrissakes, let's stop worrying about the threat of 'foreign intervention'. At its mildest, this variant of xenophobia is alarmingly inconsistent. The kneejerk willingness to accuse other Singaporeans of treason exists in the very same space where international cooperation and diplomatic ties are lauded alongside the tireless flow of global capital. The interactions that are labelled 'treacherous' are, quite obviously, not all meetings between foreigners and Singaporeans, but only those meetings that are regarded threatening by the government. (By 'threatening', I don't mean a problem for security, but 'out of its control'.) The working definition of 'foreign intervention' essentially applies to those interactions between Singaporeans and foreigners that the state does not sanction - whether it's interviews with a famous statesman, funding from a wealthy non-Singaporean, or even attendance at a large-scale (legal) protest. At its most troubling, the narrative of 'foreign intervention' is deeply divisive. It asks us to treat foreigners as inherently suspicious. Of course, they are allowed to labour for us, be of economic benefit to us, but god forbid they have a social impact on the country they are embedded in. As the blatant suspicion towards Malaysian-born citizens indicates, it also creates a hierarchical notion of citizenship: Singaporeans are seen to exist along a continuum of 'more or less suspicious' depending on their birthplace or parentage... There is *nothing* categorically wrong with allowing oneself to be persuaded or influenced by a foreigner. It is not at all clear why this should be treated as a bad thing, unless we adopt the absurd position that we are not allowed to have views other than those held by 'our countrymen', whatever those may be... Political interactions with foreigners, on the other hand, can also have a democracy-ENHANCING effect: for example, if we band together with citizens from neighbouring countries to discuss how basic human rights can be improved throughout the region. The point is, there is nothing inherently wrong with adopting ideas suggested by foreigners, agreeing to cooperate with foreigners, or accepting their help"
Backlash builds against China as Belt and Road ties fray - "Many countries have taken note of the fate of the Hambantota port project in Sri Lanka, part of Belt and Road. The Sri Lankan government became heavily indebted to Beijing and was forced to lease the port to the Chinese for 99 years. That China often sends over the necessary labor for infrastructure projects, instead of employing locals, is another sore spot."
26th MEU battalion commander fired during deployment over equal opportunity concerns - "An infantry battalion commander sacked in the middle of a deployment with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, or MEU, was at least partially fired for allegedly using a term that could be disparaging to members of the LGBTQ community"
Comments: "Do people not understand that our military is trained to kill people and destroy things?"
"So, the Corps is telling me that if a LGBTQ Commander said something like: "Get that straight-assed vehicle out of here!" they would have been relieved?"
Why identity politics benefits the right more than the left | Sheri Berman - "Studies make clear, however, that racism has been decreasing over time, among Republicans and Democrats. (Views of immigration have also grown more favorable.)... Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson, for example, found that simply making white Americans aware that they would soon be a minority increased their propensity to favor their own group and become wary of those outside it. (Similar effects were found among Canadians. Indeed, although this tendency is most dangerous among whites since they are the most powerful group in western societies, researchers have consistently found such propensities in all groups.) ... In the past, the Republican and Democratic parties attracted supporters with different racial, religious, ideological and regional identities, but gradually Republicans became the party of white, evangelical, conservative and rural voters, while the Democrats became associated with non-whites, non-evangelical, liberal and metropolitan voters. This lining up of identities dramatically changes electoral stakes: previously if your party lost, other parts of your identity were not threatened, but today losing is also a blow to your racial, religious, regional and ideological identity. (Mason cites a study showing that in the week following Obama’s 2012 election, Republicans felt sadder than American parents after the Newtown school shooting or Bostonians after the Boston Marathon bombing.) This social sorting has led partisans of both parties to engage in negative stereotyping and even demonization... Once the other party becomes an enemy rather than an opponent, winning becomes more important than the common good and compromise becomes an anathema. Such situations also promote emotional rather than rational evaluations of policies and evidence. Making matters worse, social scientists consistently find that the most committed partisans, those who are the angriest and have the most negative feelings towards out-groups, are the most politically engaged... 'Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness'... as one Trump supporter put it, every time Democrats attack him “it makes me angry, which causes me to want to defend him more” – potentially alienate wavering Republican-leaning independents, and help divert debate from policies, corruption and other substantive issues... Scholars consistently find that incivility spreads rapidly, generates anger and defensive reactions, demobilizes moderates and activates the strongest partisans, corrodes faith in government, trust in institutions and respect for our fellow citizens... identity politics is a both more powerful and efficacious for Republicans (and rightwing populists more generally) than it is for Democrats, since the former are more homogeneous"
Identity Politics Does More Harm Than Good to Minorities - "The fundamental objective of left-wing identitarians is to strengthen the weaker groups while simultaneously weakening the strongest (whites, especially cishetero white males) to achieve a more ‘equitable’ distribution of power... Evidence suggests that a group’s bargaining power is contingent on, among other things, the amount of resources – material and non-material – that it brings to the negotiating table. In light of this, feminism makes strategic sense. Women constitute roughly half the population of any given nation... racial identitarianism, in comparison, is less promising... Another difference between feminist identity politics and racial identity politics is that the rest of society does not always have strong personal, much less familial, ties to black folks, guaranteeing constant interaction... It is because he acknowledged this reality that Martin Luther King stressed non-violent resistance to Jim Crow laws... In his critique of black nationalism, MLK could be describing black identity politics today: a constant litany of grievances and bluster with no realistic strategy to eliminate the cause of those complaints... the main beneficiaries of racial identity politics are the identitarians themselves. They are the ones making good money selling books encouraging black people to scapegoat white people for all their problems. They play to the unfortunate human weakness for blaming your problems on other people – something that’s also exploited by right-wing demagogues encouraging the white working class to blame immigrants for their problems. Ironically, these snake-oil salesmen would not have achieved anything like the success they have without the complicity of guilty white liberals... Instead of reserving what was once a very effective tool at our disposal as a nuclear option – the stigmatizing power of the label ‘racist’ – identitarians are rendering it a blank bullet through overuse. Steven Bannon has said that he looks forward to the day when calling someone ‘racist’ has lost all power to stigamitize and he has no greater allies than racial identitarians and their guilty white devotees. The day is fast approaching when mainstream white society will react to accusations of racism with yawns and shrugs... It’s that kind of talk that will lead to Trump winning a second term."
What the World’s Emptiest International Airport Says About China’s Influence - The New York Times - "Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, the second-largest in Sri Lanka, is designed to handle a million passengers per year. It currently receives about a dozen passengers per day. Business is so slow that the airport has made more money from renting out the unused cargo terminals for rice storage than from flight-related activities. In one burst of activity last year, 350 security personnel armed with firecrackers were deployed to scare off wild animals, the airport’s most common visitors... “We always thought China’s investments would help our economy,” says Amantha Perera, a Sri Lankan journalist and university researcher. “But now there’s a sense that we’ve been maneuvered into selling some of the family jewels.”... It’s tempting to see OBOR as a muscled-up Marshall Plan, the American-led program that helped rebuild Western Europe after World War II. OBOR, too, is designed to build vital infrastructure, spread prosperity and drive global development. Yet little of what China offers is aid or even low-interest lending. Much OBOR financing comes in the form of market-rate loans that weaker countries are eager to receive — but may struggle to repay. Even when the projects are well suited for the local economy, the result can look a bit like a shell game: Things are built, money goes to Chinese companies and the country is saddled with more debt. What happens when, as is often the case, infrastructure projects are driven more by geopolitical ambition or the need to give China’s state-owned companies something to do? Well, Sri Lanka has an empty airport for sale... “They take on loans like it’s a drug addiction and then get trapped in debt servitude. It’s clearly part of China’s geostrategic vision.”This charge conjures the specter of colonialism, when the British and Dutch weaponized debt to take control of nations’ strategic assets... In Sri Lanka today, Chinese tour groups often traipse through a Colombo museum to see the trilingual stone tablet the admiral brought here — proof, it seems, that China respected all peoples and religions. No mention is made of a less savory aspect of Zheng He’s dealings in Ceylon. On a later expedition, around 1411, his troops became embroiled in a war. Zheng He prevailed and took the local king back to China as a prisoner... it’s worth remembering that dredging deepwater ports and laying down railroad ties to secure new trade routes — and then having to defend them from angry locals — was precisely how Britain started down the slippery slope to empire."
Post ID: 6667578139717150621
Fetishising failure and hating success - power relations means never having to say you're wrong
A: Poynter chimes in
CNN's Jim Acosta's actions to Trump don't represent the best of journalism | Poynter
B: I’m calling stuff like this out every time you post it, because I want to highlight to you that you inevitably take the side of the powers that be and leave them uncriticised or make the infractions of the powerless or less powerful bigger than it is. As if they are on the same level, which they are not.
Example - you post about a suspected kidnapping of a Muslim woman by her family at an airport. You don’t criticize the family/society but immediately try to score points against liberals/leftists by saying we aren’t protesting it enough.
I don’t know if you realise it, but when your primary aim to score points against activists/liberals and criticise them and you do so without addressing the oppression, the real winners are the oppressors. Congrats, you are their best spokesperson now.
C: Always entertaining to read your triggered responses to A's FB posts. Just to clarify, did you just twist some unrelated post to call him a spokesman for kidnappers of Muslim women? Cause that's what it looks like.
B: I am talking to A, not you.
Me: the taliban did nothing wrong. They are powerless compared to the USA. We must always side with the oppressed
A: I think I understand how you think now and I suppose our differences are a reflection of the different ways we see the world.
You see me as taking the side of someone or some group that is more powerful and oppresses another group.
I don't see society as comprising fixed groups that have power and that don't, because I think that oppression hierarchy is nonsensical. To me, oppression is when the truth is twisted in service of an agenda. And Trump does that precisely because the "social justice" set have done that for so long and paved the way for him to do so. There's no objective truth, only power and feelings, and that's what Trump harnesses in his tribe.
B: i don’t agree with your comment on oppression but let’s move past that.
I don’t have a problem with you pointing out when truth is twisted or misreported or something.
But when you post only when you think one side (hint: not the oppressors) is twisting the truth, and there is no nuance or more than on one dimension to your commentary. For eg, “the White House is awful in how it treats the press but Acosta isn’t a hero either”. It is fair comment, I won’t agree with you on the substance but I can agree it is a fair comment.
When you post “Jim Acosta is no hero because he didn’t subscribe to the very highest standard of journalism”, the implication is that he deserved what he got. So guess who you are empowering then?
A: I didn't think it was necessary to point out that Trump twists the truth because everyone knows it. I'm pointing out that everyone acts as though he's the only one doing it, when nobody else has clean hands.
D: the rest of us who ain't partisan noted the presence of this para critical of the White House grounds of decision in your link as we ain't selectively blind.
"That said, The White House accusation that Acosta manhandled the intern trying to retrieve the microphone is nonsense. It makes us wonder if the White House was looking for an opportunity to pick a fight."
E: It may or not represent the best of governance, just as the journalist's actions may or may not represent the best of journalism. A wrong is a wrong, and calling out one wrong does not mean endorsing the wrong that wasn't called out.
F: succinctly put
B's comments are very revealing.
Basically the liberal modus operandi is to find the supposedly powerless and blindly take their side.
When did a concern for protecting the weak turn into fetishising weakness and hating success?
In the liberal view, morality is just power relations rather than being based on more transcendental principles.
As Murakami puts it, "Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg".
A very explicit example of this is the headline condemnation of the John Roberts court as protecting the powerful - the legal merits of its decisions seem secondary to its ostensible effects and their implications for power relations.
This view of the world through the lens of power relations helps to explain why leftists have turned against Israel - Palestinians are seen as the marginalised ones and must be supported, whereas previously the Holocaust and Arab attacks meant Israel was the victim.
This is an inversion of Thrasymachus's conceptual of justice as might makes right - into might makes wrong. The former at least has some form of logic to it (e.g. the strong have succeeded and deserve to define justice, or perhaps that what the strong do helps them succeed so we should learn from them, or their principles have been vindicated by their success in a form of the Mandate of Heaven).
Liberal logic seems to be that no one can succeed without having had some unfair advantage.
Yet this logic only works if everyone is identical - which they are not. And even if they are, random chance means some people will succeed and others fail.
On a practical level, loving failure and weakness and hating success and strength means you're encouraging people to fail, and discouraging them from succeeding. Which besides being unhealthy for personal development is also not sustainable for a flourishing society.
It also views success as a zero sum game (if one group is ahead, others must be behind) and pits everyone against each other, ergo the poison of identity politics.
CNN's Jim Acosta's actions to Trump don't represent the best of journalism | Poynter
B: I’m calling stuff like this out every time you post it, because I want to highlight to you that you inevitably take the side of the powers that be and leave them uncriticised or make the infractions of the powerless or less powerful bigger than it is. As if they are on the same level, which they are not.
Example - you post about a suspected kidnapping of a Muslim woman by her family at an airport. You don’t criticize the family/society but immediately try to score points against liberals/leftists by saying we aren’t protesting it enough.
I don’t know if you realise it, but when your primary aim to score points against activists/liberals and criticise them and you do so without addressing the oppression, the real winners are the oppressors. Congrats, you are their best spokesperson now.
C: Always entertaining to read your triggered responses to A's FB posts. Just to clarify, did you just twist some unrelated post to call him a spokesman for kidnappers of Muslim women? Cause that's what it looks like.
B: I am talking to A, not you.
Me: the taliban did nothing wrong. They are powerless compared to the USA. We must always side with the oppressed
A: I think I understand how you think now and I suppose our differences are a reflection of the different ways we see the world.
You see me as taking the side of someone or some group that is more powerful and oppresses another group.
I don't see society as comprising fixed groups that have power and that don't, because I think that oppression hierarchy is nonsensical. To me, oppression is when the truth is twisted in service of an agenda. And Trump does that precisely because the "social justice" set have done that for so long and paved the way for him to do so. There's no objective truth, only power and feelings, and that's what Trump harnesses in his tribe.
B: i don’t agree with your comment on oppression but let’s move past that.
I don’t have a problem with you pointing out when truth is twisted or misreported or something.
But when you post only when you think one side (hint: not the oppressors) is twisting the truth, and there is no nuance or more than on one dimension to your commentary. For eg, “the White House is awful in how it treats the press but Acosta isn’t a hero either”. It is fair comment, I won’t agree with you on the substance but I can agree it is a fair comment.
When you post “Jim Acosta is no hero because he didn’t subscribe to the very highest standard of journalism”, the implication is that he deserved what he got. So guess who you are empowering then?
A: I didn't think it was necessary to point out that Trump twists the truth because everyone knows it. I'm pointing out that everyone acts as though he's the only one doing it, when nobody else has clean hands.
D: the rest of us who ain't partisan noted the presence of this para critical of the White House grounds of decision in your link as we ain't selectively blind.
"That said, The White House accusation that Acosta manhandled the intern trying to retrieve the microphone is nonsense. It makes us wonder if the White House was looking for an opportunity to pick a fight."
E: It may or not represent the best of governance, just as the journalist's actions may or may not represent the best of journalism. A wrong is a wrong, and calling out one wrong does not mean endorsing the wrong that wasn't called out.
F: succinctly put
B's comments are very revealing.
Basically the liberal modus operandi is to find the supposedly powerless and blindly take their side.
When did a concern for protecting the weak turn into fetishising weakness and hating success?
In the liberal view, morality is just power relations rather than being based on more transcendental principles.
As Murakami puts it, "Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg".
A very explicit example of this is the headline condemnation of the John Roberts court as protecting the powerful - the legal merits of its decisions seem secondary to its ostensible effects and their implications for power relations.
This view of the world through the lens of power relations helps to explain why leftists have turned against Israel - Palestinians are seen as the marginalised ones and must be supported, whereas previously the Holocaust and Arab attacks meant Israel was the victim.
This is an inversion of Thrasymachus's conceptual of justice as might makes right - into might makes wrong. The former at least has some form of logic to it (e.g. the strong have succeeded and deserve to define justice, or perhaps that what the strong do helps them succeed so we should learn from them, or their principles have been vindicated by their success in a form of the Mandate of Heaven).
Liberal logic seems to be that no one can succeed without having had some unfair advantage.
Yet this logic only works if everyone is identical - which they are not. And even if they are, random chance means some people will succeed and others fail.
On a practical level, loving failure and weakness and hating success and strength means you're encouraging people to fail, and discouraging them from succeeding. Which besides being unhealthy for personal development is also not sustainable for a flourishing society.
It also views success as a zero sum game (if one group is ahead, others must be behind) and pits everyone against each other, ergo the poison of identity politics.
Post ID: 3853343363951372517
Links - 13th November 2018 (1)
Episode 97: Art History BB: Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds — The Art History Babes - "‘His father had been imprisoned by the nationalist government on suspicion of being a leftist after the People's Republic of China was founded, his father was again accused - this time of being a rightest under Chairman Mao’s anti-intellectual campaign’
‘No wonder he has such a great sense of humour.’"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Moral Progress - "It was the late Tory MP Alan Clark whose louche reputation was hard earned. Taken to task on this program, I think, for making unwanted approaches to women famously replied: How do I know they’re unwanted until I make them?...
‘I don't think we want to confuse moral progress with puritanical intolerance and I fear that that's one of the things that's emerged at the moment. You can feel as though you're kind of on the side of virtue, if you shout burn the witch and identify things as evil and you can feel better about yourself, but whether it makes you a morally autonomous responsible person, I doubt it.’...
'I don’t think there’s any such thing as moral progress. Where do we get the idea from that motion is forward? Where is this strange -ometer which allows us to tell whether something is progress or just change? It seems to me the only way you can tell is whether things deteriorate in a serious way in the long run as a consequence.'"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Elite Universities - "‘All it will lead to is patronizing working class kids and people from disadvantaged backgrounds and I hate to say it, but now we have a situation where we put BAME into that. So ethnic minority, disadvantaged - so we categorize people in the worst possible way. And I also think it represents a degraded understanding of what going to university was. At least when I went to Warwick, I felt as though I competed with my equals, and got there intellectually as an equal, and I didn't feel inferior that way even though I didn't quite know what fork to use.’...
Predictive analytics and the facts shows that candidates who've been admitted on the basis of contextual offers tended to just as well in that final degree class. And if it's all about learning and getting the best possible students then what you have to do is find those with the greatest potential. Just looking at headline grades is not scientific, it's not what the university is doing, nor should they...
‘I grew up in a severely cash-limited working class household in Hackney, I went up to Lincoln College, Oxford to take their entrance exams in 1962 before A levels and they awarded me an exhibition. Had Lincoln College said to me, Geoffrey, you haven't done terribly well in our exams, but because your father is a packer in a Whitechapel warehouse we're going to lower the bar for you, I would have felt angry and deeply insulted...
I've got the 2016 figures in front of me for Oxford. In 2016, a UK-domiciled BME students admitted to Oxford as undergraduates represented 15.1% of the total admissions but the UK BME population is only 13 percent so Oxford's doing better than that particular benchmark...
[On the class divide in admissions] It's not a problem that you can reasonably expect Oxford or any other university to address by lowering the bar"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Moral Complicity - "In my experience, when you enter certain institutions, you hang your ethics on a peg outside and when you're in, you don't speak up because it's not just you who knows what’s going on. Everybody knows what's going on. I think this was the case in Hollywood and that includes, I expect, a lot of young hopefuls who chose to keep silent about what had happened to them because they were more interested in advancing their careers than in advancing feminism...
‘I spoke to my wife yesterday and she said that reading about Weinstein had just kinda reminded her of how many times in her life that she'd been subject to casual sexual harassment, verbal and physical. Should I hae told her not to be such a wuss?’
‘I think that you have to be careful in talking about sexual harassment. It’s interesting that she said casual sexual harassment. I think that sexual harassment means something very serious. It's quite a weighty term. It's not… what some people describe as you know, glances at the bar being called perhaps unpleasant names, being told to do rude stuff or being shouted at, catcalled - that kinda thing... that can be classed as bad behavior… tell women that they're not strong enough to deal with it themselves, but that they have to have the authorities or some celebrity tweet about it. That's very negative, I think.’...
‘She's quite... self confident person, but I suspect I think she suggests that people who were less self-confident would have found that very difficult.’...
The idea that every woman, especially every young woman is faced with sexual harassment, deviant sexual behavior and terrible things happening to them, is absolutely untrue. There's no evidence for it... What's now being classed as sexual harassment. And again it’s sort of unwelcome glances at the bar, it's being asked out on a date, it's being told that you look pretty. I'm really paraphrasing stuff that I've read on Twitter and that people have claimed against people. It has gone so far now that we can't have a serious conversation about sexual harassment and rape which are very serious issues, which I think potentially, we do need to have a conversation about, but the mass hysteria in this case is completely clouding any sensible argument… I think that banter, can sometimes be very enjoyable. It completely depends on how you deal with the situation. I think what you're in danger of arguing is that we should come to every relationship, every new encounter with each other, sceptically. That we need to completely distrust the other person in our relationship… We argued and women argued for years that we were strong enough and capable enough and ugly enough to deal with the public sector...
What often gets characterized as boorish behavior is just general flirting'
There's an interesting parallel with censorship where people think they are resilient enough to deal with controversial ideas, but other people need to be protected
‘No wonder he has such a great sense of humour.’"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Moral Progress - "It was the late Tory MP Alan Clark whose louche reputation was hard earned. Taken to task on this program, I think, for making unwanted approaches to women famously replied: How do I know they’re unwanted until I make them?...
‘I don't think we want to confuse moral progress with puritanical intolerance and I fear that that's one of the things that's emerged at the moment. You can feel as though you're kind of on the side of virtue, if you shout burn the witch and identify things as evil and you can feel better about yourself, but whether it makes you a morally autonomous responsible person, I doubt it.’...
'I don’t think there’s any such thing as moral progress. Where do we get the idea from that motion is forward? Where is this strange -ometer which allows us to tell whether something is progress or just change? It seems to me the only way you can tell is whether things deteriorate in a serious way in the long run as a consequence.'"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Elite Universities - "‘All it will lead to is patronizing working class kids and people from disadvantaged backgrounds and I hate to say it, but now we have a situation where we put BAME into that. So ethnic minority, disadvantaged - so we categorize people in the worst possible way. And I also think it represents a degraded understanding of what going to university was. At least when I went to Warwick, I felt as though I competed with my equals, and got there intellectually as an equal, and I didn't feel inferior that way even though I didn't quite know what fork to use.’...
Predictive analytics and the facts shows that candidates who've been admitted on the basis of contextual offers tended to just as well in that final degree class. And if it's all about learning and getting the best possible students then what you have to do is find those with the greatest potential. Just looking at headline grades is not scientific, it's not what the university is doing, nor should they...
‘I grew up in a severely cash-limited working class household in Hackney, I went up to Lincoln College, Oxford to take their entrance exams in 1962 before A levels and they awarded me an exhibition. Had Lincoln College said to me, Geoffrey, you haven't done terribly well in our exams, but because your father is a packer in a Whitechapel warehouse we're going to lower the bar for you, I would have felt angry and deeply insulted...
I've got the 2016 figures in front of me for Oxford. In 2016, a UK-domiciled BME students admitted to Oxford as undergraduates represented 15.1% of the total admissions but the UK BME population is only 13 percent so Oxford's doing better than that particular benchmark...
[On the class divide in admissions] It's not a problem that you can reasonably expect Oxford or any other university to address by lowering the bar"
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Moral Complicity - "In my experience, when you enter certain institutions, you hang your ethics on a peg outside and when you're in, you don't speak up because it's not just you who knows what’s going on. Everybody knows what's going on. I think this was the case in Hollywood and that includes, I expect, a lot of young hopefuls who chose to keep silent about what had happened to them because they were more interested in advancing their careers than in advancing feminism...
‘I spoke to my wife yesterday and she said that reading about Weinstein had just kinda reminded her of how many times in her life that she'd been subject to casual sexual harassment, verbal and physical. Should I hae told her not to be such a wuss?’
‘I think that you have to be careful in talking about sexual harassment. It’s interesting that she said casual sexual harassment. I think that sexual harassment means something very serious. It's quite a weighty term. It's not… what some people describe as you know, glances at the bar being called perhaps unpleasant names, being told to do rude stuff or being shouted at, catcalled - that kinda thing... that can be classed as bad behavior… tell women that they're not strong enough to deal with it themselves, but that they have to have the authorities or some celebrity tweet about it. That's very negative, I think.’...
‘She's quite... self confident person, but I suspect I think she suggests that people who were less self-confident would have found that very difficult.’...
The idea that every woman, especially every young woman is faced with sexual harassment, deviant sexual behavior and terrible things happening to them, is absolutely untrue. There's no evidence for it... What's now being classed as sexual harassment. And again it’s sort of unwelcome glances at the bar, it's being asked out on a date, it's being told that you look pretty. I'm really paraphrasing stuff that I've read on Twitter and that people have claimed against people. It has gone so far now that we can't have a serious conversation about sexual harassment and rape which are very serious issues, which I think potentially, we do need to have a conversation about, but the mass hysteria in this case is completely clouding any sensible argument… I think that banter, can sometimes be very enjoyable. It completely depends on how you deal with the situation. I think what you're in danger of arguing is that we should come to every relationship, every new encounter with each other, sceptically. That we need to completely distrust the other person in our relationship… We argued and women argued for years that we were strong enough and capable enough and ugly enough to deal with the public sector...
What often gets characterized as boorish behavior is just general flirting'
There's an interesting parallel with censorship where people think they are resilient enough to deal with controversial ideas, but other people need to be protected
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz: Continually Mistaken, Chronically Admired - "In 2006, Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz praised the economic policies of Hugo Chávez... Stiglitz’s mistake is “consistently to downplay the possibility of human error—that is, to deny that human beings (or at least uncorrupt human beings such as himself) are fallible.”... Stiglitz had plenty of company among progressives in endorsing Chávez, but this hardly absolves him. When he met with the Venezuelan president in October 2007, there might have been no point in confronting the “endearing” leader with the civil rights abuses cited against him at the time. (In May, the Americas director of Human Rights Watch had publicly protested Chávez’s decision to shut down a television station critical of his policies.) As an economist with prestige and influence, though, Stiglitz might have urged that Chávez loosen his government’s chokehold on the private sector before it did lasting damage to the economy... Chávez wasn’t the only economic strongman and human rights abuser who won Stiglitz’s endorsement. Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s dictator from 1991 until his death in 2012, hosted the Nobel laureate in September 2007"
Socialism Is So Hot Right Now - "S ocialism is on the march! It’s just that nobody quite knows what it is. A Gallup poll in August found that 57 percent of Democrats said they view socialism positively, while only 47 percent had a favorable view of capitalism. Only 16 percent of Republicans thought well of socialism... its chief utility is as a romantic indictment of the capitalist status quo... “Listen to today’s socialists, and you’ll hear less the language of poverty than of power,” Robin says. He’s right. But this has always been the case. As a matter of practical politics, socialism’s durability as a concept owes almost nothing to economics and almost everything to the desire for power—power for the poor, for the left-out, for the “workers of the world”—and for the intellectuals who claim to speak for them... To the extent that the labels “conservative” and “liberal” or “left” and “right” mean anything in this context, the difference stems from which authority the combatants cite. Möser looked to established tradition to legitimize his arguments. Marx (and those like him) looked instead to the future, to an idealized and utopian Shangri-la at the end of History. What unites both worldviews is that each is based on a fiction. Möser defended feudalism by resorting to wholly literary and folkloric tales of an imagined past. Marx invoked not just an imagined past, but more important, an imagined future. What ties these visions together is that they seek to impose one coalition of elite preferences on all of society... We can debate how much socialism there was in Hitler’s National Socialism. It is remarkable, however, that many of the people insisting that Norway or Sweden is obviously socialist even though they both are more free-market than Hitlerite Germany are aghast at the suggestion that the National Socialists were…socialists"
The business of voluntourism: do western do-gooders actually do harm? - "Save the Children looked at orphanages in Sri Lanka in 2005 and found that 92% of children had a living parent. A 2006 survey by Unicef in Liberia found that 98% of children living in orphanages were not orphans... the last thing a Guatemalan highland village needs is imported unskilled labour. People are desperate for jobs. Public works serve the community better and last longer when locals do them. Besides, long-term change happens when people can solve their own problems, rather than having things done for them... A study of 162 Americans who travelled to Honduras to build houses after Hurricane Mitch in 1998 found that years later, this work had made no difference to their giving or volunteering. And even if the houses they built didn’t fall over, they were expensive. The houses in Honduras built by international volunteers cost $30,000 apiece, including airfare, while local Christian organisations could build them for $2,000. If well-wishers had contributed money instead of labour, 15 times more houses could have been built. The helpful choice would have been to stay at home. Money goes far in poor countries. Two thousand dollars can pay for a week-long trip by an unskilled American volunteer – or it could pay the salary of a village teacher for four months... governments don’t have – or are not willing to spend – money for anti-poverty work. Funding for orphanages, by contrast, just drops from the sky. In many poor countries, it dwarfs funding for every other kind of relief or development work... Every single boy in that institution already had abandonment issues. If it was hard for me to leave these boys behind, how much harder was it for them to see me go? And the next adult who came for a few weeks? And the next one? They might have learned that there are people who love them and will take them on walks. But they also learned that these people always leave... the Australian parliament is considering a law to label orphanage tourism as child trafficking and ban it entirely"
Human dignity is an ideal with remarkably shallow roots
Eating meat, possessing child pornography: The dilemma of consumer responsibility - "an individual's decision whether or not to eat meat has no noticeable effect on the meat industry... In the second story, involving Simon and the judge, the judge represents society's attitude toward the possession of child pornography. In most Western societies, the mere possession of child pornography is considered a serious crime. In Australia and the United Kingdom, for example, maximum penalties for the possession of child pornography lie between two and five years. In the United States, in 2010, the average sentence for "non-production" child pornography offences was 95 months. Offenders are typically regarded as deserving such serious punishment because their activities contribute to the suffering of children... The argument given for making possession of child pornography a serious crime is a consequentialist one, directly analogous to the consequentialist argument for vegetarianism... our society sees the possession of child pornography as morally wrong, but generally sees nothing morally wrong with the consumption of meat."
How Misinfodemics Spread Disease - "Misinformation based on discredited studies continues to mutate and spread online—in memes, articles, and videos, through platforms including Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. Like the germs running through the River Thames, toxic information now flows through our digital channels."
Ditch the almond milk: why everything you know about sustainable eating is probably wrong - "In South America, soy farming (mostly for animal feed), is driving deforestation and the destruction of Brazil’s Cerrado grasslands. “Both release huge amounts of carbon dioxide and are a biodiversity disaster,” says Dr John Kazer, footprint certification manager at the Carbon Trust. Usually 90% less, tofu originating from deforested Brazilian pastures has a carbon footprint twice that of chicken...
Cooking in industrial food manufacturing is more efficient than cooking at home, which makes using pre-cooked rice or tinned chickpeas over dried an energy saver. (Don’t worry about the can: there is healthy demand for recycled steel.) Think about using a microwave, too, advises Kazer: “For smaller portions for one or two, compared to the hob, the energy use is a lot lower.”...
A Danish government study worries some experts. “There’s a fear people are not reusing heavier bags enough,” says Hemingway, “to the extent the volume of bag-plastic in circulation could actually be increasing.” As we all accumulate bags, could this be creating an eco-anomaly?"
Why Men Are the New Minority in College - ""at most college campuses the attitude is that men are the problem. … I’ve had male students tell me that their first week in college they were made to feel like potential rapists.” Added Maloney: “There’s a lot of attention on empowering girls. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but males are the ones in crisis in education.” Jackson thinks there’s a surprising racial component. There’s not much work being done to encourage boys to go to college, he said, because not all of those boys are from racial and ethnic minorities society regards as disadvantaged. A lot of them are white."
Alternatively, as a feminist I know proclaimed, if women can overcome patriarchy and outperform men in college/university, it just shows that men are inadequate and it's their fault that there's a gender gap and they deserve to be unsuccessful
Post ID: 819321496025169639
Monday, November 12, 2018
Links - 12th November 2018
Police force unveils a new less revealing uniform for female Muslim officers - "West Yorkshire Police hopes that the looser fit will result in more ethnic minority recruits. Many forces already allow female officers to wear the hijab, or headscarf, but the new uniform is believed to be a UK first."
I thought the point of a uniform was for everyone to wear the same thing
Extremism Advances in the Largest Muslim Country - WSJ - "Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, has long stood as a role model for religious pluralism. That’s changing. Political Islam and violent extremism have been taking root in society and may soon do so in the government. President Joko Widodo’s choice of Ma’ruf Amin, a 75-year-old cleric, as his running mate in next year’s election marks an ugly turn for Indonesian politics... a foreign scholar who has lived in Indonesia for more than half a century told me of a Muslim man who asked his 12-year-old son what he had learned at school one day. “We learned about kafir”—infidels—his son replied. When the father asked what they had learned, the boy replied: “We learned that they must be killed.”"
It is interesting how in Turkey and Indonesia, countries championed as examples of moderate Islam supporting democracy, democracy was only ensured by the army and/or a dictator
Wearable Health Monitors: Do They Work? - WSJ
When wives beat their husbands, no one wants to believe it - "Partner violence by women is one of the most contentious subjects in social science. The first large-scale study of domestic abuse, the 1975 National Family Violence Survey conducted by the late University of New Hampshire sociologist Murray Straus and his colleague Richard Gelles (now at the University of Pennsylvania), found that similar numbers of women and men admitted to assaulting a spouse or partner in the previous 12 months. The researchers were skeptical initially, assuming most female violence had to be in self-defense, though in many cases the wife was the self-reported sole perpetrator. Later surveys showed that in mutually violent relationships, women were as likely as men to be the aggressors. These findings have been confirmed in more than 200 studies... two major federally backed surveys using different methods — the 2000 National Violence Against Women Survey by the National Institute of Justice and the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey by the Centers for Disease Control — found that about 40% of those reporting serious assaults by current or former partners in the past year were men, and most of their attackers were women. Female-on-male violence is often assumed to be harmless, given sex differences in size and strength. Yet women may use weapons — including knives, glass, boiling water and various household objects — while men may be held back from defending themselves by cultural taboos against harming woman... Discussions of female-on-male abuse have been met with extreme hostility from feminist academics, activists and commentators. Scholars studying the subject have been attacked as apologists for misogyny. Battered women's advocates tend to explain away female violence as almost entirely defensive, despite evidence to the contrary. One reason for this attitude is solidarity with women as victims; another is the dogmatic view that battering is an expression of patriarchal power."
Of course, we are still told that feminism is pro-men
Hawkers at new Pasir Ris centre upset over cashless payment system - "Some stallholders told The New Paper, on condition of anonymity, that NTUC Foodfare disbursed takings from cashless transactions to them only after five months. They also complained of tables not being cleared by the cleaning contractors, and of crockery being damaged by the dishwashers... A stallholder said that about five stalls had closed since its opening in January because of poor business."
When Censorship Is Crowdsourced - "the gravest threats to free speech in democratic countries now have little or nothing to do with government action (which is what Constitutions serve to restrain). And with few exceptions, public officials now sit as bystanders to the fight over who can say what... Taken together, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian and Google’s founding duo of Larry Page and Sergey Brin have far more impact on what we see and hear than any government. If you are, like me, a middle-aged person who has been concerned about protecting free speech since your college days, these developments will have a profoundly disorienting effect. When I was a university student in the early 1990s, it always was assumed that the primary threat to free speech was government — especially government in the Big Brother form that George Orwell had taught us to expect and fear... The very writers, publishers, poets, musicians, comedians, media producers and artists who once worried about being muzzled by the government are now self-organizing on social media (Twitter, especially) to censor each other... I described the bizarre saga of novelist Angie Abdou, who was repeatedly forced to submit her novel to various indigenous authorities before publication (and even then was hounded and attacked because she had dared to voice a young First Nations character)... In what world do poets have to ask permission to create verse about others?... One thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four that does still ring true about the current age of crowdsourced censorship is the reverse classism at work. In Orwell’s Oceania, the intellectual class is scrutinized relentlessly for the slightest deviation in thought or speech, while “proles” are free to wallow in astrology, smut and sentimental storytelling... the fact that government has no direct role in this new kind of censorship does not mean that public policy can’t be part of the solution. For while it’s true that government isn’t directly engineering these newly emergent forms of crowdsourced speech suppression, the current public funding model can indirectly encourage them... In another age, these people might have blamed the government for this. In 2018, on the other hand, they can only blame themselves."
Most beautiful universities
European Union Is Reconsidering Daylight Savings Time - "Daylight savings time could soon be a thing of the past in the European Union (EU). An international survey found a large majority of EU citizens are in favor of nixing the bi-annual ritual meant to take advantage of daylight as the seasons change... Studies on the health implications of changing the time each year are mainly inconclusive and have found both positive and negative effects. Further, technological advances such as artificial lighting and automated systems have made the agricultural benefits of daylight savings time obsolete."
Brit 'prostitute' Sarah McGill deported from US for hotel room sex with virgin 14-year-old boy who paid her £340 - "A BRITISH woman has been ordered to leave the US immediately after sleeping with a 14-year-old virgin boy in a Florida hotel room. Sarah McGill, 28, is to be deported after being found guilty of lewd or lascivious battery - known as statutory rape in the UK."
If the genders were reversed...
Kopitiam requests KFC customers to stop taking its straws from Bukit Panjang outlet
It is easy to "save the earth" when others pay the cost
Joseph Wright: And then there was light - " Wright infuses subject pictures such as The Blacksmith's Shop with a sense of the miraculous that we usually associate with traditional representations of the Supper at Emmaus or the Nativity, treating the light from the forge as a manifestation of the unfathomable in just the way that Bellini or Caravaggio used miraculous light in their sacred paintings. But, in doing so, Wright implies that these are miracles not of faith but of beauty or technology. The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone Discovers Phosphorus perfectly illustrates the way Wright subtly replaced a Christian vocabulary for expressing wonder with a new reverence for reason and scientific inquiry. For he shows the alchemist kneeling in virtual adoration before the glowing vial of phosphorus in a pose that is traditionally used to depict St Andrew adoring his own cross. This is a miracle that science, not God, has effected."
Tucker Carlson Channels Bernie Sanders to Blast Jeff Bezos and Amazon - "“A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid, they qualify for federal welfare benefits,” said the Fox News titan. “Jeff Bezos isn’t paying his workers enough to eat, so you made up the difference in your tax dollars.”"
If it's on Fox News, it's wrong. Therefore Amazon workers are overpaid
DW Stories - "Roma girls in Bulgaria don't go on dates to find a husband, they are sold to the highest bidder at a controversial 'bride market'."
Black Feminist Vegan Is In Hot Water For Her Recent Comments - "Author Aph Ko is in hot water for some of the statements she’s made in regards to race and oppression. She’s basically come out and called blacks that fight against oppression, and ignore the rights of animals by choosing to still consume meat, are hypocrites and are siding with the ideology of White Supremacy... 'If black people don’t take animal oppression seriously, we’re siding with white supremacy'"
30 years ago, your feminism didn't need to be intersectional or trans-inclusive. But the moral arc of the universe has moved on
If one understands modern liberalism as a game of one-uping where one has to continually find new oppressions as old ones are resolved (a variant of the slippery slope), this is no longer confusing
Black vegans rock! - "I was bothered by the fact that social justice activists who were so committed to overturning oppression, couldn’t even factor in animal oppression, or even consider not eating meat. It was scary to realise people were so brainwashed that they couldn’t stop. As activists, we should be on a constant quest to learn about oppression."
Commentary: A nightmare scenario, Ang Mo Kio emptying out in 20 years - "The large-scale planned redevelopment of older HDB estates, whether through the Voluntary Early Redevelopment Scheme (VERS) or otherwise, is important to prevent a sudden shock to public housing prices, when the removal of a large number of old housing flats from the public housing market creates a huge supply shortage."
Jeremy Corbyn would be a problem for security, says historian to MI5 - "One question is how far Corbyn would wish to be informed. It doesn’t seem a subject that engages his attention. There are some people in the shadow cabinet who have called for the closing-down of MI5"
Southeast Asia's Vengeful Man-Eating Spirit Is a Feminist Icon
Does this mean we can say feminism is about hating men?
How WhatsApp Destroyed A Village - "Five days after the event, the police had rounded up most of the suspects. Each admitted to attacking the five men — all nomads passing through Rainpada, a tribal hamlet 200 miles northeast of Mumbai — and each said they’d done so after watching shocking videos on WhatsApp warning of outsiders abducting children. The suspects are now awaiting their trial. “Our clients’ position is that they genuinely thought that the five people were child kidnappers because they had been seeing this kind of information on WhatsApp for months,” Akshay Sagar and Manoj Khairnar, two of the four state-assigned lawyers representing the 28 people accused, told BuzzFeed News. “They said that as long as their children are safe, they have no regrets.”... For Rashmi Sinha, the tech entrepreneur, the problem is that WhatsApp was designed and built in the US, but is now being deployed in different markets around the world, where social norms and online behaviors vary. In her view, the original product was developed “to remove all friction from sharing” without prompts to “contextualize or comment” on forwarded content, a dangerous precedent that — when put in an environment where people are less educated, less experienced about the web — can have dire consequences."
The Harsh Truth About Progressive Cities - "Madison, Minneapolis, Austin, Portland, San Francisco. These are America’s most progressive, forward-thinking, open-minded, and social-justice-focused cities. They also have the worst racial disparities in the nation and some of the worst racial segregation."
Weather Channel Reporter Filmed Being Overly-Dramatic As Men In Shorts Casually Stroll By
They can still blame Trump for attacking the media
Linux developers threaten to pull “kill switch” - "Activists from the feminist and LGBTQIA+ communities have been trying to force the Linux project to join the Contributor Covenant since at least 2015. The Contributor Covenant is an agreement to implement a special Code of Conduct (frequently CoC from now on) aimed at changing the predominantly white, straight, and male face of programming. CC’s Code of Conduct is controversial particularly because it allows anyone to be banned from contributing code for any reason, usually with no mechanism for oversight or accountability. On September 16 the pro-CoC side got their wish–Linux had officially committed to implementing and obeying the CC Code of Conduct–and they immediately set about using it to remove top Linux coders. Sage Sharp, who describes theyself as a “diversity & inclusion consultant, hufflepuff, non-binary agender trans masculine” and has 7k followers, cites GeekFeminismWiki and targets Google’s Theo Ts’o with accusations of being a rape apologist...
1. Insertion of the CoC into other projects has heralded witch hunts where good contributors are removed over trivial matters or even events that happened a long time ago–like Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor who was purged after it was discovered he had a sex fetish where women are submissive.
2. The lack of proper definitions for punishments, time frames, and even what constitutes abuse or harassment leaves the Code of Conduct wide open for abuse (see 1).
3. It gives the people charged with enforcement omnipotent and unaccountable power.
4. It could force acceptance of contributions that wouldn’t make the cut if made by cis white males.
5. CC’s Code of Conduct is purely about power.
6. “‘In all that time I never had to know or care whether my fellow contributors were white, black, male, female, straight, gay, or from the planet Mars, only whether their code was good’; namely, in a project that receives contributions from volunteers who are anonymous beyond a chosen handle, specious claims of exclusion and harassment crumble beneath the most haphazard scrutiny. Contributors reveal as much about their race, sex, and orientation as they want because no one cares about that tangential shit at the end of the day. If there really was some “straight white males only” mentality, the community would insist on determining whether a new contributor is “one of us” before accepting their code, but they don’t do that in the slightest. Thus, it’s patently clear there is no culture of exclusion, but rather a culture of total indifference to individual differences beyond coding ability. The rhetoric of diversity and inclusiveness is just a weapon being used to attack a community that is inherently opposed to identity politics, which is why they’re seen as such a threat to these SJW gestapo.”"
SJWism ruins everything
Cyclist who had five bikes stolen says thieves are looking for quick times on Strava to try and find high-end bikes – warns other users to check their privacy settings
I thought the point of a uniform was for everyone to wear the same thing
Extremism Advances in the Largest Muslim Country - WSJ - "Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, has long stood as a role model for religious pluralism. That’s changing. Political Islam and violent extremism have been taking root in society and may soon do so in the government. President Joko Widodo’s choice of Ma’ruf Amin, a 75-year-old cleric, as his running mate in next year’s election marks an ugly turn for Indonesian politics... a foreign scholar who has lived in Indonesia for more than half a century told me of a Muslim man who asked his 12-year-old son what he had learned at school one day. “We learned about kafir”—infidels—his son replied. When the father asked what they had learned, the boy replied: “We learned that they must be killed.”"
It is interesting how in Turkey and Indonesia, countries championed as examples of moderate Islam supporting democracy, democracy was only ensured by the army and/or a dictator
Wearable Health Monitors: Do They Work? - WSJ
When wives beat their husbands, no one wants to believe it - "Partner violence by women is one of the most contentious subjects in social science. The first large-scale study of domestic abuse, the 1975 National Family Violence Survey conducted by the late University of New Hampshire sociologist Murray Straus and his colleague Richard Gelles (now at the University of Pennsylvania), found that similar numbers of women and men admitted to assaulting a spouse or partner in the previous 12 months. The researchers were skeptical initially, assuming most female violence had to be in self-defense, though in many cases the wife was the self-reported sole perpetrator. Later surveys showed that in mutually violent relationships, women were as likely as men to be the aggressors. These findings have been confirmed in more than 200 studies... two major federally backed surveys using different methods — the 2000 National Violence Against Women Survey by the National Institute of Justice and the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey by the Centers for Disease Control — found that about 40% of those reporting serious assaults by current or former partners in the past year were men, and most of their attackers were women. Female-on-male violence is often assumed to be harmless, given sex differences in size and strength. Yet women may use weapons — including knives, glass, boiling water and various household objects — while men may be held back from defending themselves by cultural taboos against harming woman... Discussions of female-on-male abuse have been met with extreme hostility from feminist academics, activists and commentators. Scholars studying the subject have been attacked as apologists for misogyny. Battered women's advocates tend to explain away female violence as almost entirely defensive, despite evidence to the contrary. One reason for this attitude is solidarity with women as victims; another is the dogmatic view that battering is an expression of patriarchal power."
Of course, we are still told that feminism is pro-men
Hawkers at new Pasir Ris centre upset over cashless payment system - "Some stallholders told The New Paper, on condition of anonymity, that NTUC Foodfare disbursed takings from cashless transactions to them only after five months. They also complained of tables not being cleared by the cleaning contractors, and of crockery being damaged by the dishwashers... A stallholder said that about five stalls had closed since its opening in January because of poor business."
When Censorship Is Crowdsourced - "the gravest threats to free speech in democratic countries now have little or nothing to do with government action (which is what Constitutions serve to restrain). And with few exceptions, public officials now sit as bystanders to the fight over who can say what... Taken together, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian and Google’s founding duo of Larry Page and Sergey Brin have far more impact on what we see and hear than any government. If you are, like me, a middle-aged person who has been concerned about protecting free speech since your college days, these developments will have a profoundly disorienting effect. When I was a university student in the early 1990s, it always was assumed that the primary threat to free speech was government — especially government in the Big Brother form that George Orwell had taught us to expect and fear... The very writers, publishers, poets, musicians, comedians, media producers and artists who once worried about being muzzled by the government are now self-organizing on social media (Twitter, especially) to censor each other... I described the bizarre saga of novelist Angie Abdou, who was repeatedly forced to submit her novel to various indigenous authorities before publication (and even then was hounded and attacked because she had dared to voice a young First Nations character)... In what world do poets have to ask permission to create verse about others?... One thing about Nineteen Eighty-Four that does still ring true about the current age of crowdsourced censorship is the reverse classism at work. In Orwell’s Oceania, the intellectual class is scrutinized relentlessly for the slightest deviation in thought or speech, while “proles” are free to wallow in astrology, smut and sentimental storytelling... the fact that government has no direct role in this new kind of censorship does not mean that public policy can’t be part of the solution. For while it’s true that government isn’t directly engineering these newly emergent forms of crowdsourced speech suppression, the current public funding model can indirectly encourage them... In another age, these people might have blamed the government for this. In 2018, on the other hand, they can only blame themselves."
Most beautiful universities
European Union Is Reconsidering Daylight Savings Time - "Daylight savings time could soon be a thing of the past in the European Union (EU). An international survey found a large majority of EU citizens are in favor of nixing the bi-annual ritual meant to take advantage of daylight as the seasons change... Studies on the health implications of changing the time each year are mainly inconclusive and have found both positive and negative effects. Further, technological advances such as artificial lighting and automated systems have made the agricultural benefits of daylight savings time obsolete."
Brit 'prostitute' Sarah McGill deported from US for hotel room sex with virgin 14-year-old boy who paid her £340 - "A BRITISH woman has been ordered to leave the US immediately after sleeping with a 14-year-old virgin boy in a Florida hotel room. Sarah McGill, 28, is to be deported after being found guilty of lewd or lascivious battery - known as statutory rape in the UK."
If the genders were reversed...
Kopitiam requests KFC customers to stop taking its straws from Bukit Panjang outlet
It is easy to "save the earth" when others pay the cost
Joseph Wright: And then there was light - " Wright infuses subject pictures such as The Blacksmith's Shop with a sense of the miraculous that we usually associate with traditional representations of the Supper at Emmaus or the Nativity, treating the light from the forge as a manifestation of the unfathomable in just the way that Bellini or Caravaggio used miraculous light in their sacred paintings. But, in doing so, Wright implies that these are miracles not of faith but of beauty or technology. The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone Discovers Phosphorus perfectly illustrates the way Wright subtly replaced a Christian vocabulary for expressing wonder with a new reverence for reason and scientific inquiry. For he shows the alchemist kneeling in virtual adoration before the glowing vial of phosphorus in a pose that is traditionally used to depict St Andrew adoring his own cross. This is a miracle that science, not God, has effected."
Tucker Carlson Channels Bernie Sanders to Blast Jeff Bezos and Amazon - "“A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid, they qualify for federal welfare benefits,” said the Fox News titan. “Jeff Bezos isn’t paying his workers enough to eat, so you made up the difference in your tax dollars.”"
If it's on Fox News, it's wrong. Therefore Amazon workers are overpaid
DW Stories - "Roma girls in Bulgaria don't go on dates to find a husband, they are sold to the highest bidder at a controversial 'bride market'."
Black Feminist Vegan Is In Hot Water For Her Recent Comments - "Author Aph Ko is in hot water for some of the statements she’s made in regards to race and oppression. She’s basically come out and called blacks that fight against oppression, and ignore the rights of animals by choosing to still consume meat, are hypocrites and are siding with the ideology of White Supremacy... 'If black people don’t take animal oppression seriously, we’re siding with white supremacy'"
30 years ago, your feminism didn't need to be intersectional or trans-inclusive. But the moral arc of the universe has moved on
If one understands modern liberalism as a game of one-uping where one has to continually find new oppressions as old ones are resolved (a variant of the slippery slope), this is no longer confusing
Black vegans rock! - "I was bothered by the fact that social justice activists who were so committed to overturning oppression, couldn’t even factor in animal oppression, or even consider not eating meat. It was scary to realise people were so brainwashed that they couldn’t stop. As activists, we should be on a constant quest to learn about oppression."
Commentary: A nightmare scenario, Ang Mo Kio emptying out in 20 years - "The large-scale planned redevelopment of older HDB estates, whether through the Voluntary Early Redevelopment Scheme (VERS) or otherwise, is important to prevent a sudden shock to public housing prices, when the removal of a large number of old housing flats from the public housing market creates a huge supply shortage."
Jeremy Corbyn would be a problem for security, says historian to MI5 - "One question is how far Corbyn would wish to be informed. It doesn’t seem a subject that engages his attention. There are some people in the shadow cabinet who have called for the closing-down of MI5"
Southeast Asia's Vengeful Man-Eating Spirit Is a Feminist Icon
Does this mean we can say feminism is about hating men?
How WhatsApp Destroyed A Village - "Five days after the event, the police had rounded up most of the suspects. Each admitted to attacking the five men — all nomads passing through Rainpada, a tribal hamlet 200 miles northeast of Mumbai — and each said they’d done so after watching shocking videos on WhatsApp warning of outsiders abducting children. The suspects are now awaiting their trial. “Our clients’ position is that they genuinely thought that the five people were child kidnappers because they had been seeing this kind of information on WhatsApp for months,” Akshay Sagar and Manoj Khairnar, two of the four state-assigned lawyers representing the 28 people accused, told BuzzFeed News. “They said that as long as their children are safe, they have no regrets.”... For Rashmi Sinha, the tech entrepreneur, the problem is that WhatsApp was designed and built in the US, but is now being deployed in different markets around the world, where social norms and online behaviors vary. In her view, the original product was developed “to remove all friction from sharing” without prompts to “contextualize or comment” on forwarded content, a dangerous precedent that — when put in an environment where people are less educated, less experienced about the web — can have dire consequences."
The Harsh Truth About Progressive Cities - "Madison, Minneapolis, Austin, Portland, San Francisco. These are America’s most progressive, forward-thinking, open-minded, and social-justice-focused cities. They also have the worst racial disparities in the nation and some of the worst racial segregation."
Weather Channel Reporter Filmed Being Overly-Dramatic As Men In Shorts Casually Stroll By
They can still blame Trump for attacking the media
Linux developers threaten to pull “kill switch” - "Activists from the feminist and LGBTQIA+ communities have been trying to force the Linux project to join the Contributor Covenant since at least 2015. The Contributor Covenant is an agreement to implement a special Code of Conduct (frequently CoC from now on) aimed at changing the predominantly white, straight, and male face of programming. CC’s Code of Conduct is controversial particularly because it allows anyone to be banned from contributing code for any reason, usually with no mechanism for oversight or accountability. On September 16 the pro-CoC side got their wish–Linux had officially committed to implementing and obeying the CC Code of Conduct–and they immediately set about using it to remove top Linux coders. Sage Sharp, who describes theyself as a “diversity & inclusion consultant, hufflepuff, non-binary agender trans masculine” and has 7k followers, cites GeekFeminismWiki and targets Google’s Theo Ts’o with accusations of being a rape apologist...
1. Insertion of the CoC into other projects has heralded witch hunts where good contributors are removed over trivial matters or even events that happened a long time ago–like Larry Garfield, a prominent Drupal contributor who was purged after it was discovered he had a sex fetish where women are submissive.
2. The lack of proper definitions for punishments, time frames, and even what constitutes abuse or harassment leaves the Code of Conduct wide open for abuse (see 1).
3. It gives the people charged with enforcement omnipotent and unaccountable power.
4. It could force acceptance of contributions that wouldn’t make the cut if made by cis white males.
5. CC’s Code of Conduct is purely about power.
6. “‘In all that time I never had to know or care whether my fellow contributors were white, black, male, female, straight, gay, or from the planet Mars, only whether their code was good’; namely, in a project that receives contributions from volunteers who are anonymous beyond a chosen handle, specious claims of exclusion and harassment crumble beneath the most haphazard scrutiny. Contributors reveal as much about their race, sex, and orientation as they want because no one cares about that tangential shit at the end of the day. If there really was some “straight white males only” mentality, the community would insist on determining whether a new contributor is “one of us” before accepting their code, but they don’t do that in the slightest. Thus, it’s patently clear there is no culture of exclusion, but rather a culture of total indifference to individual differences beyond coding ability. The rhetoric of diversity and inclusiveness is just a weapon being used to attack a community that is inherently opposed to identity politics, which is why they’re seen as such a threat to these SJW gestapo.”"
SJWism ruins everything
Cyclist who had five bikes stolen says thieves are looking for quick times on Strava to try and find high-end bikes – warns other users to check their privacy settings
Post ID: 1933370170985961238
Thursday, November 08, 2018
Links - 8th November 2018 (2)
Metal straws and reusable bags may not be as eco-friendly as you think - "you have just unwittingly contributed to 2.8 billion pounds of toxic waste from mining metal, 20 per cent of marine litter from international shipping and over 2 million tonnes of waste from packaging... Keeping in mind the adverse effects these 'greener' options might have on the environment, it does seem that our pro-environmental initiative may not be as beneficial as we thought, especially when we do not continue to use the item incessantly."
Yoda actor and Bert creator Frank Oz denies Sesame Street character is gay and says 'I know what and who he is' - "MANY Muppet fans were left heartbroken when Sesame Street poured cold water over one of its writer’s claims that live-in characters Bert and Ernie were gay. Now Bert’s creator Frank Oz has also disagreed with Mark Saltzman, who said he based the characters on his own gay relationship, by tweeting: “I created Bert. I know what and who he is.”... Saltzman, who joined the iconic kids’ show in 1984, effectively “outed” Bert and Ernie in what proved to be a controversial interview with Queerty. He said he based them on his own relationship with film editor Arnold Glassman, ending a decades-long debate over whether the Muppets who shared a basement apartment on 123 Sesame Street, but slept in different beds, were lovers... “It seems Mark Saltzman was asked if Bert & Ernie are gay. “It’s fine that he feels they are. They’re not, of course. But why that question? Does it really matter? “Why the need to define people as only gay? There’s much more to a human being than just straightness or gayness.”... Jon Stone, another writer on the show, said they were based on the real life frienship between Oz and Henson. The idea behind the characters was to show that two people with wildly different personalities could still get on... Social media turned on Oz for shattering the hearts of millions so brutally and argued the characters have evolved beyond their original parameters into icons for gay young people... Saltzman... appeared to pull a U-turn last night, telling the New York Times his comments were misinterpreted. Saltzman said he and Glassman were like Bert and Ernie, opposites who found a way to love each other."
As usual those preaching love and tolerance are full of hate
Believe (Some) Women - "“believe women” may not actually apply to all women judging from the media cycle this week following a rare interview with Woody Allen’s wife Soon-Yi Previn published in New York Magazine last Sunday... she has been labelled a liar and/or a victim (of Allen’s), both labels serving only to undermine Previn’s story. One of her fiercest critics this week was her younger brother Ronan Farrow, the reporter whose story on Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse effectively launched #MeToo and earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Yet despite his leading role in a movement that demands “believe women”, Ronan published a statement in which he not only disputed his sister’s allegations, but erased her entirely from her own story. Chillingly, nowhere in his statement, which was published on Twitter, does Ronan mention Previn by name, instead reducing her to an anonymous “ally” of Allen’s... Previn’s treatment reveals two inherent contradictions in the #MeToo movement. The first is that #MeToo decrees that all women are victims (since all men are predators) thus denying them agency in their own stories... Previn is a 47-year-old mother of two adult children who last year celebrated her 20th wedding anniversary with Allen: she clearly does not consider herself a victim of anyone except Farrow. Such a scenario, however, does not sit comfortably with proponents of #MeToo who must cast her as a victim in order to further demonize Allen. Which brings us to the second inherent contradiction: #MeToo demands that all women must be believed — except where their stories upset the prevailing narrative. In this case, Previn is doubly damned, for not only does she refuse to demonise Allen herself but she instead goes on to castigate Farrow, who, with her numerous adopted children and political activism – not to mention her crusade against Allen – has become something of a modern-day apostle in the public consciousness. Previn, therefore, has upset the natural order of #MeToo, not least because if one woman accuses another of abuse and #MeToo demands we “believe women”, how do we automatically know which woman to believe? As the revelations concerning Asia Argento – one of Ronan Farrow’s key sources in his Weinstein story who was recently accused of sexually assaulting a teenage boy have also demonstrated, the reality is that the world is a complicated place... Ultimately, dividing the world into victims and villains, as #MeToo demands of us, fails to take into account the complexities of human nature. And the trouble is that it’s a much more difficult concept to believe"
Most racism is from disaffected blacks: FW de Klerk Foundation - "The FW de Klerk Foundation says it has submitted a complaint to the SA Human Rights Commission regarding 45 social media postings that incite extreme violence against white South Africans... Sparrow described black beachgoers as “monkeys” on her Facebook page, and has since been reported to the police. The foundation noted that most media commentators viewed Sparrow’s remarks and the subsequent far ‘less controversial’ comments of Chris Hart and Gareth Cliff as evidence of rampant and pervasive white racism... “The messages are replete with threats to kill all whites – including children; to rape white women or to expel all whites from South Africa”"
Presumably it is more racist to call black beachgoers monkeys than to threaten to kill white people, because white people have the power in South Africa
Addendum: Presumably blacks in South Africa have no political power and are a minority
Ian Buruma: victim of Sexual McCarthyism - "MeToo has officially entered its McCarthyism stage. The ousting of Ian Buruma from the New York Review of Books is confirmation, for those who still needed it, that this hashtag movement is more about vengeance and censorship than justice. For Buruma’s crime was not to touch a woman without her consent or verbally harass his female workforce. It was merely to publish an essay by a man (Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi) who was accused of sexual assault and then acquitted in a court of law. When an esteemed editor can be expelled from polite society for publishing the words of a man who has not been found guilty of any crime, you know we live in dark, ugly times. MeToo is the midwife of this medieval-style policing of dissenting speech... for commissioning an essay and defending the right of an individual to continue to have a public presence after he has been acquitted of criminal offences — Buruma has been driven out of New York’s literary circle. It is unclear whether he resigned or was sacked, but it’s clear that he’s out because he dared to suggest we need nuance in the discussion about sexual misdemeanours and harassment... It used to be considered socially conscientious to treat acquitted people, and even ex-cons, fairly and humanely. Now it is seen as a social crime. MeToo wants everyone who is merely accused to be punished forever. That is a nasty, Stalinist and utterly unjust approach to public life. Buruma is defending the pillars of the free, civilised society; MeToo is attacking them."
Where is incest legal in Europe? Map shows countries where family members can have sex
The France information is outdated
As Japan's JET Programme hits its 30s, the jury's still out
The Physics of a Star Wars Bomber Dropping Bombs in Space - "why does the bomb fall at all? The gravitational force from the asteroid is likely MUCH weaker than that on the surface of the Earth. However, the bomb "falls" down with an acceleration MUCH greater than it would on Earth. So, what's the deal? Really, there is no way of knowing for sure. One answer would be that the bombs aren't falling at all. Instead they are tiny little rockets with thrusters on them to push them down. Would that still be a bomb? Who cares—it still looks cool in the movie. Wait! There is another example of bombers in Star Wars. In The Last Jedi, the movie starts off with some Resistance bombers attacking a First Order star destroyer. SPOILER ALERT: only one bomber makes it close enough to drop the bombs. But the bombs do indeed drop. In this case, you can actually see the bombs falling out of the spacecraft just like they would fall out of a B-17 bomber in WWII. There are no rockets on the bombs. They are just bombs. It's a bit harder to justify the physics in this scene."
Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’ - The New York Times - "In a rare act of collective defiance, scores of Cuban doctors working overseas to make money for their families and their country are suing to break ranks with the Cuban government, demanding to be released from what one judge called a “form of slave labor”... The legal challenges are all the more important because the doctors have lost a common backup plan: going to the United States. The American government, which has long tried to undermine Cuba’s leaders, established a program in 2006 to welcome Cuban doctors, with the aim of exacerbating the island’s brain drain. But in one of his final attempts to normalize relations with Cuba, President Barack Obama in January ended the program, which had allowed Cuban doctors stationed in other countries to get permanent residency visas for the United States."
So much for the success of communism
The 'Mandela Effect' and how your mind is playing tricks on you - "This form of collective misremembering of common events or details first emerged in 2010, when countless people on the internet falsely remembered Nelson Mandela was dead. It was widely believed he had died in prison during the 1980s. In reality, Mandela was actually freed in 1990 and passed away in 2013 – despite some people’s claims they remember clips of his funeral on TV."
Memory is treacherous
Nas Daily responds to S’porean criticism of his “almost perfect country” video with epic burn - "One thing my travels have taught me is that a lot of people lack PERSPECTIVE. And in Singapore, too many people lack it. I flew to Singapore from Papua New Guinea, on my own dime to promote my own beliefs. Now I’m in China making the same videos. I’ll happily take you along the ride and see how life is like outside of your bubble. But to be honest, I would never hire you. I don’t work well with crybabies.”
It's quite an achievement to so piss off someone whose brand is built on positivity
Ipswich woman 'terrified' by nursery rhyme alarm - "The "eerie" sound of a nursery rhyme which was used as a burglar deterrent "terrified" an Ipswich woman for about a year. The woman, from Bramford Road, heard the sound of "It's raining, it's pouring", but she had no idea where it was coming from... the song had begun playing continuously due to an itsy-bitsy spider... "Every time the spider went across the CCTV it set off the alarm"."
Why Brexitphobes are crap campaigners - "That these people have turned out to be lousy campaigners is, then, little wonder. Their instinct is to hector, dictate and direct, which clashes with one essential part of campaigning – listening. Asserting a monopoly on logic and morality, and insulting others in the process, is not the way to win people over."
I tried the Chinese practice of ‘sitting the month’ after childbirth - The Washington Post - "When my aunt learned I was pregnant with my fourth child, she begged me to respect the Chinese tradition of zuo yue zi, or “sitting the month.” Traced back to as early as the year 960, zuo yue zi is a set of diet and lifestyle restrictions practiced after birth to restore a woman’s “broken body.”... I could not resist examining the evidence relating to zuo yue zi — and I found inconsistent results. On the plus side were findings that a long recovery period improved a mother’s health-related quality of life and led to better bonding with her child. But a 2014 study of Chinese women found that limiting physical activity for a month was bad for muscular and cardiovascular health and increased postpartum depression."
The truth about a viral graphic on rape statistics - The Washington Post - "Among the tweets being circulated is a jarring graphic from December 2012 by the Enliven Project, intended to show the low rate of false reporting among rape victims. The Enliven Project is described as “a campaign to bring sexual violence out of the closet and lift survivors to their full potential”... When The Fact Checker asked Beaulieu why she did not change the graphic to fix errors she admitted, she said: “The original one is already the one that has gone viral and is the one that’s continuing to be circulated. I think what I did do was make sure that the link back to the site that’s on the graphic links to the full explanation that acknowledges the distinction.” Yet the link isn’t even a hyperlink, so the explanation is not readily accessible to those who may be scrolling through their news feeds. You literally have to type out a complex URL to find her explanations. Beaulieu said she intended the graphic to be a conversation-starter... the Enliven Project earns Three Pinocchios."
This is quite a consistent result - to feminists lying is acceptable to "start a conversation" (other examples include the gender wage gap)
Using more consistent methodology, since there're 2 falsely accused for every 10 jailed, we could conclude that 1 in 6 rape accusations is false
Police are being offered 'banter training' in a bid to tackle bullying and political incorrectness - "The three-hour course - which has been likened to "something out of The Office" - aims to reduce employment tribunal claims by "excluded and unhappy" staff... They also branded it a waste of cash as the force battles a 20 per cent increase in crime with 500 fewer officers due to cuts."
Fed-up residents create 'drug-dealer only' signs to highlight spiralling crime levels in their neighbourhood - "Guerrilla street artists have painted a parking bay marked 'drug dealers only' and installed six signs on lampposts after being commissioned by neighbours in Tower Hamlets, east London."
Yoda actor and Bert creator Frank Oz denies Sesame Street character is gay and says 'I know what and who he is' - "MANY Muppet fans were left heartbroken when Sesame Street poured cold water over one of its writer’s claims that live-in characters Bert and Ernie were gay. Now Bert’s creator Frank Oz has also disagreed with Mark Saltzman, who said he based the characters on his own gay relationship, by tweeting: “I created Bert. I know what and who he is.”... Saltzman, who joined the iconic kids’ show in 1984, effectively “outed” Bert and Ernie in what proved to be a controversial interview with Queerty. He said he based them on his own relationship with film editor Arnold Glassman, ending a decades-long debate over whether the Muppets who shared a basement apartment on 123 Sesame Street, but slept in different beds, were lovers... “It seems Mark Saltzman was asked if Bert & Ernie are gay. “It’s fine that he feels they are. They’re not, of course. But why that question? Does it really matter? “Why the need to define people as only gay? There’s much more to a human being than just straightness or gayness.”... Jon Stone, another writer on the show, said they were based on the real life frienship between Oz and Henson. The idea behind the characters was to show that two people with wildly different personalities could still get on... Social media turned on Oz for shattering the hearts of millions so brutally and argued the characters have evolved beyond their original parameters into icons for gay young people... Saltzman... appeared to pull a U-turn last night, telling the New York Times his comments were misinterpreted. Saltzman said he and Glassman were like Bert and Ernie, opposites who found a way to love each other."
As usual those preaching love and tolerance are full of hate
Believe (Some) Women - "“believe women” may not actually apply to all women judging from the media cycle this week following a rare interview with Woody Allen’s wife Soon-Yi Previn published in New York Magazine last Sunday... she has been labelled a liar and/or a victim (of Allen’s), both labels serving only to undermine Previn’s story. One of her fiercest critics this week was her younger brother Ronan Farrow, the reporter whose story on Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse effectively launched #MeToo and earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Yet despite his leading role in a movement that demands “believe women”, Ronan published a statement in which he not only disputed his sister’s allegations, but erased her entirely from her own story. Chillingly, nowhere in his statement, which was published on Twitter, does Ronan mention Previn by name, instead reducing her to an anonymous “ally” of Allen’s... Previn’s treatment reveals two inherent contradictions in the #MeToo movement. The first is that #MeToo decrees that all women are victims (since all men are predators) thus denying them agency in their own stories... Previn is a 47-year-old mother of two adult children who last year celebrated her 20th wedding anniversary with Allen: she clearly does not consider herself a victim of anyone except Farrow. Such a scenario, however, does not sit comfortably with proponents of #MeToo who must cast her as a victim in order to further demonize Allen. Which brings us to the second inherent contradiction: #MeToo demands that all women must be believed — except where their stories upset the prevailing narrative. In this case, Previn is doubly damned, for not only does she refuse to demonise Allen herself but she instead goes on to castigate Farrow, who, with her numerous adopted children and political activism – not to mention her crusade against Allen – has become something of a modern-day apostle in the public consciousness. Previn, therefore, has upset the natural order of #MeToo, not least because if one woman accuses another of abuse and #MeToo demands we “believe women”, how do we automatically know which woman to believe? As the revelations concerning Asia Argento – one of Ronan Farrow’s key sources in his Weinstein story who was recently accused of sexually assaulting a teenage boy have also demonstrated, the reality is that the world is a complicated place... Ultimately, dividing the world into victims and villains, as #MeToo demands of us, fails to take into account the complexities of human nature. And the trouble is that it’s a much more difficult concept to believe"
Most racism is from disaffected blacks: FW de Klerk Foundation - "The FW de Klerk Foundation says it has submitted a complaint to the SA Human Rights Commission regarding 45 social media postings that incite extreme violence against white South Africans... Sparrow described black beachgoers as “monkeys” on her Facebook page, and has since been reported to the police. The foundation noted that most media commentators viewed Sparrow’s remarks and the subsequent far ‘less controversial’ comments of Chris Hart and Gareth Cliff as evidence of rampant and pervasive white racism... “The messages are replete with threats to kill all whites – including children; to rape white women or to expel all whites from South Africa”"
Presumably it is more racist to call black beachgoers monkeys than to threaten to kill white people, because white people have the power in South Africa
Addendum: Presumably blacks in South Africa have no political power and are a minority
Ian Buruma: victim of Sexual McCarthyism - "MeToo has officially entered its McCarthyism stage. The ousting of Ian Buruma from the New York Review of Books is confirmation, for those who still needed it, that this hashtag movement is more about vengeance and censorship than justice. For Buruma’s crime was not to touch a woman without her consent or verbally harass his female workforce. It was merely to publish an essay by a man (Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi) who was accused of sexual assault and then acquitted in a court of law. When an esteemed editor can be expelled from polite society for publishing the words of a man who has not been found guilty of any crime, you know we live in dark, ugly times. MeToo is the midwife of this medieval-style policing of dissenting speech... for commissioning an essay and defending the right of an individual to continue to have a public presence after he has been acquitted of criminal offences — Buruma has been driven out of New York’s literary circle. It is unclear whether he resigned or was sacked, but it’s clear that he’s out because he dared to suggest we need nuance in the discussion about sexual misdemeanours and harassment... It used to be considered socially conscientious to treat acquitted people, and even ex-cons, fairly and humanely. Now it is seen as a social crime. MeToo wants everyone who is merely accused to be punished forever. That is a nasty, Stalinist and utterly unjust approach to public life. Buruma is defending the pillars of the free, civilised society; MeToo is attacking them."
Where is incest legal in Europe? Map shows countries where family members can have sex
The France information is outdated
As Japan's JET Programme hits its 30s, the jury's still out
The Physics of a Star Wars Bomber Dropping Bombs in Space - "why does the bomb fall at all? The gravitational force from the asteroid is likely MUCH weaker than that on the surface of the Earth. However, the bomb "falls" down with an acceleration MUCH greater than it would on Earth. So, what's the deal? Really, there is no way of knowing for sure. One answer would be that the bombs aren't falling at all. Instead they are tiny little rockets with thrusters on them to push them down. Would that still be a bomb? Who cares—it still looks cool in the movie. Wait! There is another example of bombers in Star Wars. In The Last Jedi, the movie starts off with some Resistance bombers attacking a First Order star destroyer. SPOILER ALERT: only one bomber makes it close enough to drop the bombs. But the bombs do indeed drop. In this case, you can actually see the bombs falling out of the spacecraft just like they would fall out of a B-17 bomber in WWII. There are no rockets on the bombs. They are just bombs. It's a bit harder to justify the physics in this scene."
Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’ - The New York Times - "In a rare act of collective defiance, scores of Cuban doctors working overseas to make money for their families and their country are suing to break ranks with the Cuban government, demanding to be released from what one judge called a “form of slave labor”... The legal challenges are all the more important because the doctors have lost a common backup plan: going to the United States. The American government, which has long tried to undermine Cuba’s leaders, established a program in 2006 to welcome Cuban doctors, with the aim of exacerbating the island’s brain drain. But in one of his final attempts to normalize relations with Cuba, President Barack Obama in January ended the program, which had allowed Cuban doctors stationed in other countries to get permanent residency visas for the United States."
So much for the success of communism
The 'Mandela Effect' and how your mind is playing tricks on you - "This form of collective misremembering of common events or details first emerged in 2010, when countless people on the internet falsely remembered Nelson Mandela was dead. It was widely believed he had died in prison during the 1980s. In reality, Mandela was actually freed in 1990 and passed away in 2013 – despite some people’s claims they remember clips of his funeral on TV."
Memory is treacherous
Nas Daily responds to S’porean criticism of his “almost perfect country” video with epic burn - "One thing my travels have taught me is that a lot of people lack PERSPECTIVE. And in Singapore, too many people lack it. I flew to Singapore from Papua New Guinea, on my own dime to promote my own beliefs. Now I’m in China making the same videos. I’ll happily take you along the ride and see how life is like outside of your bubble. But to be honest, I would never hire you. I don’t work well with crybabies.”
It's quite an achievement to so piss off someone whose brand is built on positivity
Ipswich woman 'terrified' by nursery rhyme alarm - "The "eerie" sound of a nursery rhyme which was used as a burglar deterrent "terrified" an Ipswich woman for about a year. The woman, from Bramford Road, heard the sound of "It's raining, it's pouring", but she had no idea where it was coming from... the song had begun playing continuously due to an itsy-bitsy spider... "Every time the spider went across the CCTV it set off the alarm"."
Why Brexitphobes are crap campaigners - "That these people have turned out to be lousy campaigners is, then, little wonder. Their instinct is to hector, dictate and direct, which clashes with one essential part of campaigning – listening. Asserting a monopoly on logic and morality, and insulting others in the process, is not the way to win people over."
I tried the Chinese practice of ‘sitting the month’ after childbirth - The Washington Post - "When my aunt learned I was pregnant with my fourth child, she begged me to respect the Chinese tradition of zuo yue zi, or “sitting the month.” Traced back to as early as the year 960, zuo yue zi is a set of diet and lifestyle restrictions practiced after birth to restore a woman’s “broken body.”... I could not resist examining the evidence relating to zuo yue zi — and I found inconsistent results. On the plus side were findings that a long recovery period improved a mother’s health-related quality of life and led to better bonding with her child. But a 2014 study of Chinese women found that limiting physical activity for a month was bad for muscular and cardiovascular health and increased postpartum depression."
The truth about a viral graphic on rape statistics - The Washington Post - "Among the tweets being circulated is a jarring graphic from December 2012 by the Enliven Project, intended to show the low rate of false reporting among rape victims. The Enliven Project is described as “a campaign to bring sexual violence out of the closet and lift survivors to their full potential”... When The Fact Checker asked Beaulieu why she did not change the graphic to fix errors she admitted, she said: “The original one is already the one that has gone viral and is the one that’s continuing to be circulated. I think what I did do was make sure that the link back to the site that’s on the graphic links to the full explanation that acknowledges the distinction.” Yet the link isn’t even a hyperlink, so the explanation is not readily accessible to those who may be scrolling through their news feeds. You literally have to type out a complex URL to find her explanations. Beaulieu said she intended the graphic to be a conversation-starter... the Enliven Project earns Three Pinocchios."
This is quite a consistent result - to feminists lying is acceptable to "start a conversation" (other examples include the gender wage gap)
Using more consistent methodology, since there're 2 falsely accused for every 10 jailed, we could conclude that 1 in 6 rape accusations is false
Police are being offered 'banter training' in a bid to tackle bullying and political incorrectness - "The three-hour course - which has been likened to "something out of The Office" - aims to reduce employment tribunal claims by "excluded and unhappy" staff... They also branded it a waste of cash as the force battles a 20 per cent increase in crime with 500 fewer officers due to cuts."
Fed-up residents create 'drug-dealer only' signs to highlight spiralling crime levels in their neighbourhood - "Guerrilla street artists have painted a parking bay marked 'drug dealers only' and installed six signs on lampposts after being commissioned by neighbours in Tower Hamlets, east London."
Post ID: 3624179323481835022
Observations - 8th November 2018
Maybe people are religious about their diets because they are hard so they need religious zeal to sustain them
"People used to curse taxi drivers and companies and praise Grab and Uber
Now they curse Grab and praise... taxi companies
Market competition!"
"It IS the lesser of two evils. Especially with Grab, they can just ban you from using the app without giving you proper reasons. And if you have GrabPay unused credits, they can forfeit it."
"my recent uber driver who is forced to go onto grab says that uber drivers and passengers are more civil towards each other than grab ones :S
he said it's because uber charges passengers if they cancel or MIA and this puts the onus on them to wait for the drivers who will usually return the courtesy... and that grab passengers are usually late which causes the drivers to give angry calls to the passengers who then turn up in a foul mood so it's a vicious cycle"
"Beauty fades, dumb is forever"
If a news story came out reporting that a study concluded that fire could be useful in the development of civilisation, there would be people indignantly condemning it in the comments and talking about how fire killed 10 kids the previous week
"those of my friends who have gone to work in chinese companies/ take the chinese govt grants etc have always ended up having to push the PRC agendas
i can't recall any exceptions...
basically writing all sorts of articles to say which China is correct, why what they advocate is correct etc etc"
"[China is] finalising the research which shows that Zheng He reached USA
before Columbus
Guess who is gonna kena claimed..."
"China has not been completely successful in its efforts to support science over mythology. But it has been successful in reducing the influence of religion at the national policy level – that is a real triumph"
When you hate religion so much you promote human rights violations
So if you use an iPhone, when you're overseas your phone may incur data roaming charges even if data is disabled because of automatic VoLTE connections. No wonder it's a phone for rich people
Modern version of fengshui: Finding and eliminating wireless dead zones
If someone tells me not to buy him a present and I do so anyway, technically I am violating his consent
"I am becoming increasingly sceptical of rape claims
Thanks in part to my female friends that said they were raped
Your instinct is to believe them, but as time goes on and the more details they add to their story you get the impression that a lot of things are not kosher about the truthfulness of their narrative
It also starts to come off as them trying to convince themselves they were victimised
i think there is only one case in which i came across where the female was victimised. the other cases I had fell apart when critically examined. if anything it seems to be good material for a study into how women may actually be instinctively using victimisation as a tool of male manipulation. it stands to reason that women descended from ancestors that were good at the art of male manipulation"
"One can speculate why- but women have a drive to invade male spaces and control them... it is a constant sore point for feminists that while women make up most of consumers in society it is the enterprises started and run by men that generate the most value
Creating enterprises from the ground up is too difficult for feminists- so the natural drive is to invade, co-opt and control already successful enterprises run by men
Be it demanding top companies promote women to their board, lowering standards for women in the military and fire service, or taking successful male-oriented cultural franchises and destroying them to get women on board"
"Stop being offended by what someone said to you, by that Facebook post, by a piece of art, by people displaying their affection. Be offended by WAR, POVERTY, INJUSTICE."
"The difference between being romantic and being creepy depends on how attractive you are"
I would pay money to see what happens when undesirable women throw themselves at incels
"I think relationship should be like Nintendo 64-Classic, fun to spend hours with, and every issue easily fixed by blowing on it then shoving it back in."
"sex work is the only activity where hiring a professional is considered wrong and is often illegal"
"aiyah after awhile u realise PMS = pre, present and post
ie. perpetual"
"I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men"
"A woman's loyalty is tested when her man has nothing. A man's loyalty is tested when he has everything"
"I once had a chat with prostitute who was fishing for business at a karaoke place and she told me not to feel sorry for women in their profession as they are very clear about their motivations. It was always about easy money, and no other job pays better. And don't be moved by their sob stories because it was just a sales tactic to increase your generosity."
"People used to curse taxi drivers and companies and praise Grab and Uber
Now they curse Grab and praise... taxi companies
Market competition!"
"It IS the lesser of two evils. Especially with Grab, they can just ban you from using the app without giving you proper reasons. And if you have GrabPay unused credits, they can forfeit it."
"my recent uber driver who is forced to go onto grab says that uber drivers and passengers are more civil towards each other than grab ones :S
he said it's because uber charges passengers if they cancel or MIA and this puts the onus on them to wait for the drivers who will usually return the courtesy... and that grab passengers are usually late which causes the drivers to give angry calls to the passengers who then turn up in a foul mood so it's a vicious cycle"
"Beauty fades, dumb is forever"
If a news story came out reporting that a study concluded that fire could be useful in the development of civilisation, there would be people indignantly condemning it in the comments and talking about how fire killed 10 kids the previous week
"those of my friends who have gone to work in chinese companies/ take the chinese govt grants etc have always ended up having to push the PRC agendas
i can't recall any exceptions...
basically writing all sorts of articles to say which China is correct, why what they advocate is correct etc etc"
"[China is] finalising the research which shows that Zheng He reached USA
before Columbus
Guess who is gonna kena claimed..."
"China has not been completely successful in its efforts to support science over mythology. But it has been successful in reducing the influence of religion at the national policy level – that is a real triumph"
When you hate religion so much you promote human rights violations
So if you use an iPhone, when you're overseas your phone may incur data roaming charges even if data is disabled because of automatic VoLTE connections. No wonder it's a phone for rich people
Modern version of fengshui: Finding and eliminating wireless dead zones
If someone tells me not to buy him a present and I do so anyway, technically I am violating his consent
"I am becoming increasingly sceptical of rape claims
Thanks in part to my female friends that said they were raped
Your instinct is to believe them, but as time goes on and the more details they add to their story you get the impression that a lot of things are not kosher about the truthfulness of their narrative
It also starts to come off as them trying to convince themselves they were victimised
i think there is only one case in which i came across where the female was victimised. the other cases I had fell apart when critically examined. if anything it seems to be good material for a study into how women may actually be instinctively using victimisation as a tool of male manipulation. it stands to reason that women descended from ancestors that were good at the art of male manipulation"
"One can speculate why- but women have a drive to invade male spaces and control them... it is a constant sore point for feminists that while women make up most of consumers in society it is the enterprises started and run by men that generate the most value
Creating enterprises from the ground up is too difficult for feminists- so the natural drive is to invade, co-opt and control already successful enterprises run by men
Be it demanding top companies promote women to their board, lowering standards for women in the military and fire service, or taking successful male-oriented cultural franchises and destroying them to get women on board"
"Stop being offended by what someone said to you, by that Facebook post, by a piece of art, by people displaying their affection. Be offended by WAR, POVERTY, INJUSTICE."
"The difference between being romantic and being creepy depends on how attractive you are"
I would pay money to see what happens when undesirable women throw themselves at incels
"I think relationship should be like Nintendo 64-Classic, fun to spend hours with, and every issue easily fixed by blowing on it then shoving it back in."
"sex work is the only activity where hiring a professional is considered wrong and is often illegal"
"aiyah after awhile u realise PMS = pre, present and post
ie. perpetual"
"I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men"
"A woman's loyalty is tested when her man has nothing. A man's loyalty is tested when he has everything"
"I once had a chat with prostitute who was fishing for business at a karaoke place and she told me not to feel sorry for women in their profession as they are very clear about their motivations. It was always about easy money, and no other job pays better. And don't be moved by their sob stories because it was just a sales tactic to increase your generosity."
Post ID: 8139531087883201821
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