Rojava: A libertarian myth under scrutiny - "Since its establishment in late 2012, the de facto autonomous region of Rojava in northern Syria has attracted the attention of European leftists, mainly because of the influence of Murray Bookchin's theories about libertarian municipalism on the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan."
Sowell and Race - "1: Different groups will have different outcomes. Recently Sowell wrote, “one fallacy behind many other fallacies is the notion that there is something unusual about different races being unequally represented in various institutions, careers or at different income or achievement levels.” Nowhere in human history have different groups, even ones living in close proximity, had equal outcomes. Differences in phenomena like culture and demographics means that some groups will, on average, have greater achievements than other groups, whether those achievements are in business, science, sports, arts, or entertainment... most on the political left persist in the belief that different outcomes — especially differences in income — among different groups must be due to “sinister forces” like racism...
2: Discrimination isn’t a very good explanation for group differences... some blacks did better than whites in the U.S. Second-generation black West Indians earned more, on average, than Anglo-Saxons. Sowell implied that this could only be consistent with the belief that discrimination explains why blacks have, on average, lower incomes than whites if white employers were willing to hire West Indians but not other blacks. That makes no sense given that white employers probably had no way of determining the ethnic background of prospective black employees. Sowell attributes the lack of black success to, in part, the welfare system and a “cracker culture” that is hostile to work and education. Sowell would later point out at that some groups thrived despite discrimination. In his 1990 book Preferential Policies, he pointed to the Chinese in Malaysia as an example...
3: For groups to advance, they must invest in “human capital.”... Fostering resentment toward other groups among the people they purportedly lead enables those leaders to keep those people dependent on them. Such leaders have no incentive to help those people develop human capital because once they do, they will no longer need those leaders."
Bears in a Honey Trap – Foreign Policy - "Russians have always loved womanizers. It is central to the concept of muzhik, the manly salt-of-the-earth man. Whenever a rumor of another Yeltsin woman surfaced, his ratings spiked instantly... Caught in embarrassing moments, American public figures prostrate themselves before the public, and before their families — in public. Russians, however, lack what they see as this deeply Puritanical impulse, so they swagger and mock, or yawn... Even when they see Shenderovich in this tape, they say, ‘Not bad! The guy’s already 70 and he’s so energetic!’"... "What would be political murder is if they published someone with boys," he said. "And they didn’t find any gays among the opposition in two years [of trolling for dirt]."... "Russia has a significantly freer culture," he claimed. "For us, cheating on your wife, for the majority, is not something unusual. Moreover, for us, snorting cocaine — what’s unusual about that? Everyone snorts it." Especially, he said, "all journalists. And if they don’t snort, they drink. Or huff.""
The CIA and KGB Both Tried to Blackmail This World Leader With Sex Tapes - "In their more desperate but imaginative moments, spies for both governments tried to turn Sukarno’s famed sexual prowess against him. These efforts included a CIA-produced pornographic film and a “honey pot” scheme with KGB operatives dressed as flight attendants... the Soviets did at one point attempt to blackmail Sukarno by filming him having sex with a group of flight attendants. “When … Sukarno visited Moscow in the 1960s, the KGB sought to take advantage of his renowned sexual appetite, sending a batch of glamorous young women posing as air hostesses to his hotel”... Sukarno openly supported polygamy, Elizabeth Martyn explained in The Women’s Movement in Postcolonial Indonesia. He took on four “official” wives while maintaining a “de facto” marriage with a fifth wife. And Sukarno once bragged to a U.S. diplomat that he was “a very physical man who needed sex every day,” and shocked his government hosts in Washington when he demanded they provide him with call girls during a visit... “When the Russians later confronted him with a film of the lurid encounter, Sukarno was apparently delighted,” Lister wrote. “Legend has it he even asked for extra copies.”"
Honey traps: Do spies use sex to extract secrets? - "In 1978, undercover Sandinista operative Nora Astorga lured a Nicaraguan general into her bedroom, where assailants slit his throat. When Israeli technician Mordechai Vanunu went public with secrets about Israel's nuclear capabilities in 1986, he fled to London, only to be seduced by a woman who led him to Mossad agents in Rome. (A rabbi later determined that the Mossad's actions were, in fact, kosher.)... No one has perfected the honey trap quite like the Russians. One former KGB agent has said that the Soviet intelligence agency didn't ask Russian women to stand up for their country but "asked them to lay down."... China, too, seems to employ honey traps regularly. When former Deputy Mayor of London Ian Clement was seduced and drugged in his Beijing hotel room in 2009 only to find his BlackBerry stolen the next day, he admitted that he "fell for the oldest trick in the book.""
Otto Fong - "Police report lodged against the anonymous writer for making false claims while rebutting Prof Tommy Koh."
While Otto Fong is weaponising the police in Singapore, he complained about police harassment in 2012
JK Rowling defends Nagini casting in Fantastic Beasts - "JK Rowling has defended the casting of a Korean actress as Voldemort's snake Nagini in the Fantastic Beasts sequel. The latest trailer has revealed Claudia Kim as Nagini and sees her transform into a snake. Some have criticised the fact the only Asian actor in the cast plays a reptile that is a villain's slave... Rowling has been criticised in the past for the lack of diversity in her Harry Potter books and one fan accused her of the casting of Nagini as an Asian woman as an afterthought to try and increase representation. Another fan felt it played into the representation of Asian people as "peripheral in a white-centric world" and "Asian women exist to mainly serve white men's interests.""
When you choose to ride on the back of the SJW tiger and you cannot get off, the only way off is to kill it
How religion cuts crime: Church-goers are less likely to shoplift, take drugs and download music illegally - "People who regularly visit a place of worship are less likely to get involved in low level crime and delinquency, according to new research. A survey from Manchester University found a direct correlation between higher visits to religious places and lower crime figures, especially in relation to shoplifting, drug use and music piracy...
researchers from the University of Oregon found that crime rates are higher in countries where more people believe in heaven than in hell."
No Time For Crime: Study Finds More Religious Communities Have Lower Rates Of Black, White and Latino Violence - "while young adults who considered themselves religious were less likely than others to commit violent or property crimes, those who claimed to be spiritual but set apart from organized religion were more likely to engage in both types of criminal activity."
How France created the metric system - "Today, the metric system, which was created in France, is the official system of measurement for every country in the world except three: the United States, Liberia and Myanmar, also known as Burma"
What happens to police departments that collect more fines? They solve fewer crimes. - The Washington Post
Robbers Cave Experiment / Realistic Conflict Theory - "Muzafer Sherif is a famous social psychologist important to the psychological understanding of groups and its members. His main contribution is known as Realistic Conflict Theory, and accounts for group conflict, negative prejudices, and stereotypes as being the result of competition between groups for desired resources. Sherif validated his theory in one his most famous experiments, "The Robber's Cave""
Handy three-way hood lets you block out human interaction - "Worn as a hood, the front of the handy creation covers up the sides of your face so your desk buddies can’t catch your eye or get your attention. It’s the equivalent of putting on blinkers, and visibly showing people you’re not up for chatting so you can go about your business without distraction."
Does this mean that the burqa and niqab block out human interaction and so should be banned to protect women the same way the Grid Girls and other women are now out of work?
Elon Musk wanted to impress his girlfriend Grimes with $420 share price: SEC - "The SEC made the connection clear after announcing that it had sued Musk for falsely asserting that he had secured funding to take the company private at $420 a share"
'Distracted boyfriend' meme ruled sexist by Swedish watchdog
Sweden.
Western Civilisation "Not Welcome Here" - "The rejection of a Bachelor of Arts in Western Civilisation is predicated on the absurd notion that anyone who wants to talk about or study Western Civilisation must be a white supremacist. In some academic circles, Western Civilisation is held responsible for all evils in the world, past, present and future... When I added that I thought all students studying an undergraduate degree in history, or any humanities degree for that matter, should be required to do a foundation course in Western Civilisation, he was shocked and horrified. From his point of view, knowing about what happened during the Scientific Revolution or the Enlightenment is an irrelevancy and a waste of students’ time. For him, history is about ‘issues,’ not knowledge... The new humanities maintain that for the last 500 years, Western Civilisation has got it wrong when it comes to knowledge, truth and science. These fields tend to claim that both knowledge and truth are not absolute, but are relative. For example, there is no objective truth and truth is dependent on who is speaking it and in what context. Insofar as science is concerned, they claim that scientific theories don’t really provide us with what we could call knowledge but are actually “invented” rather than discovered. History as a discipline best exemplifies the influence of the postmodernists and their ilk on the humanities... a study of all 746 history subjects taught in Australian universities revealed that 244 of those subjects were devoted entirely to class, gender, and race. Many were a pastiche of identity politics in which the stunning complexity of the past is increasingly reduced to a very limited range of themes... A keyword search of all the history subject descriptions taught in 2017 reveals that there were more instances of the words gender and race than there are Enlightenment or Reformation. What is more, a perusal of the University of Sydney’s history faculty staff profiles reveals that 20 of the 32 staff have variously identified gender and sexuality, racial thought, women’s history and power as their current historical fixations. The left-wing leitmotifs of class, race, and gender have replaced the essential core subjects which explain the political, intellectual, social and material basis of the history of Western Civilisation. This approach is not only boring and repetitive, it is fundamentally anti-intellectual"
Do you boast about your fitness? Watch out – you’ll unavoidably become rightwing - "Unavoidably, over time, this makes you more rightwing, as you descend into an aerobics-powered moral universe where only the weak need each other, and all the strong need is a waterpouch in their backpack that pipes straight into their mouths."
The Guardian is the new Onion
Data mining reveals the hidden laws of evolution behind classical music
Why “Open Borders” is a Dangerous Idea - "It is my fear that the primary near-term effect will be surging tribalism. Unlimited mass migration could cripple liberal Western powers with perpetual ethnic tension, and halt their ability to effectively act on the world stage. This could cede the century to more unified authoritarian powers such as Russia and China who have drastically different value systems and views of human dignity. The open borders philosophy is wrong, because, like the failed ideologies of the past century, it doesn’t account for unpleasant facts about human nature and society. The truth Communism missed is that human beings prefer self-interest to compelled altruism. The truth open borders advocates miss is that human societies are tribal... Many elite Westerners have a passionate belief in diversity because they have lived it. Not always in their neighborhoods, but quite often at university. What they fail to realize is that a top-flight university offers a very narrow type of diversity. For example, in my university class we had over 50 nationalities. It was a wonderful experience, and I formed abiding friendships with people from all over the world. What I later realized, is that the social cohesion of my class was greatly assisted by the fact that the admissions office was a border. They had heavily screened the incoming class for intelligence, socialization, and personality characteristics. The relevant distinction wasn’t between the Tamil Brahmins and Tatar Russians, but between students and non-students. We were all members of a university created community, enjoying carefully curated luxury diversity. None of this is surprising, elites have always gotten along. What the connoisseurs of luxury diversity miss, is that not everyone is a well-socialized member of the culturally converging global bourgeoisie. People from across the world differ significantly in behavior and custom. Some of these behaviors and customs are awesome, others, such as honour killings, are not... There is also a faulty assumption that diverse societies become more tolerant and inclusive over time. The Indian sub-continent is one of the most diverse places on the planet. This heterogeneity is long-standing and a result of waves of mass migration onto the sub-continent over tens of thousands of years. Yet after all this civilizational experience with diversity, India still has xenophobia, with more than 40% of respondents to the World Values Survey stating that they would “not like to live next door to a person of another race”... History has demonstrated innumerable times that at-scale diversity doesn’t create utopia but tension. This tension can sometimes be negotiated, but often leads to societal fragmentation, secession, or the establishment of sprawling despotisms like the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Mughal empires... Of the top ten most diverse countries in the world, every single one has suffered major, lethal political violence since 2001. Diversity is not some holy sacrament, it is a deadly serious socio-political challenge that needs to be prudently managed. It is a mistake to believe that unregulated mass migration will bring about redemption for guilty Westerners. For whatever economic benefits it may bring, it will also bring tribalism, disunity, and violence"
L'origine de Bert
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
A half-hour history of Europe
A half-hour history of Europe - History Extra
"‘Argument can be made one reason why Europe was relatively peaceful in the 19th century is because stasis [?] diverted them all abroad. I mean, Germany certainly encouraged France to go abroad on the ground that she wouldn't then worry about Alsace-Lorraine. So you could say that they just turned their violence elsewhere’...
‘Yes, you could and you'd be right. There're all kinds of ways in which we suppress, overcome, cope with violence. It's called diplomacy and it’s called nation building and so on. But the fact is in the 19th century Europe became very powerful, it became technologically more advanced than most other states. It was therefore in a position to as you say, conquer them. Although I have to say, I’m not a defender of the Empire here, it was not as violent as some of the battles, I mean there was nothing that we did to other people that compared with the 30 Years War which we did to ourselves. Or for that matter, the First and Second World War. Europe’s capacity for violence against itself was supreme’...
‘I was quite interested in your off-the-cuff three or four sentences about all of these teenage knights that went out and had wars because this was a great thing to do and so forth. Perhaps you could say, not entirely seriously, that war has, there had been more peace, because statesmen became older’...
‘Alexander I, Edward III - all these people, they were all young men… Alexander the Great... Louis XIV… they became the most belligerent - Frederick the Great certainly - when they were, all the hormones were jambling and they were getting up and showing off and being virile and whatever. And of course being male. And I do find that a curious feature of Europe’s history related to kingship - people tend to die young and therefore their sons were even younger. So maybe just a by the way phenomenon, but it is true that they were very young...
When the war was over, and as you say old men tended to rule the roost, however briefly, the peace, so-called, tended to last two generations and it was about 50 60 years, almost like clockwork, the next war comes along. And that suggests to me that this habit of violence, this inclination to violence has a lot to do with the memory of horror, the memory of war. It's not just a measure of how politics is working’...
Probably all states - Frederick the Great said it, Louis XIV said it. It is the nature of power to want to expand, that's what power does. In Europe you've got these very confined borders, you’ve got a lot of people. And on the whole technology was advancing, populations were growing, they were up against each other, they end up fighting. I think it’s as simple as that...
England or Britain's history in Europe is quite different from that of France, Germany, and other countries and is different because we were an island. And we're an island, and therefore don't rub up against our neighbors in the same way. And the wars Britain fought, really since 17th century were on the whole accidental wars. They were not wars of aggrandisement. There were aggrandisement abroad - extra continental, but we didn't fight wars in Europe, except as a mercenary for other people...
The Islamic incursion - we have to be careful about terms here - round the Mediterranean in the Eighth century and so on, was as complete as it was. Almost none of their conquests reverted to Christianity. These were Christian territories. Almost none of them reverted to Christianity. They penetrated right through almost Vienna in the north and of course up through Spain into France in south... the whole of North Africa, the whole of the Levant went over to Islam. The consequence of that was that Christendom shrank by about a third, that’s not in any history book I’ve read... Islam was very, very important to European history, because it defined Europe... we're no longer the Eastern or Southern Mediterranean...
‘Was it less violent than Christianity? Was that one reason it was perhaps a bit more successful and permanently successful?’...
‘I don't know the answer to that... all religions change at the time, not least Christianity... the Coptic Christians in Egypt… you can worship as you wish. Whereas the Church in Constantinople was endlessly excommunicating them and telling them they were distance [?] and heretics, and so on.’...
People who are genetically attuned to having strong leaders... even today, when we are sort of supposedly programmed and conditioned to democracy or to some concept of democracy, when democracy errs or when democracy is appearing to fail or not deliver as promised, the concept of the strong leader. comes out.
What I am more puzzled by is why it appears to be so much stronger in Eastern Europe then Western Europe. I mean, it's clearly the case that Slavs have a natural tendency to seek a strong leader whereas certainly the British, but also the French and the Germans, are basically sceptical and anyone gets too much power, they sort of go for them...
It was certainly programmed into the DNA of Russia's leaders. From Peter the Great it’s very explicit. Peter the Great, Catherine the Great. They all state - oh, I think all this Voltarian Rationalism and possibly even democracy is fine, but not for Russia. Russia is so big, the Boyars have caused enough trouble, it's so big, it must have a strong leader and strong central government. That's just essential and ironic thing is that it was Russia that took Communism most to its heart because Communism offered a framework for strong central leadership and it does to this day...
‘All of these forces brought the continent of Europe closer to self-destruction in the twentieth century. Yet more people died in the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648 than ever died - one third of Europe - than ever died in the wars of the Twentieth Century.’"
"‘Argument can be made one reason why Europe was relatively peaceful in the 19th century is because stasis [?] diverted them all abroad. I mean, Germany certainly encouraged France to go abroad on the ground that she wouldn't then worry about Alsace-Lorraine. So you could say that they just turned their violence elsewhere’...
‘Yes, you could and you'd be right. There're all kinds of ways in which we suppress, overcome, cope with violence. It's called diplomacy and it’s called nation building and so on. But the fact is in the 19th century Europe became very powerful, it became technologically more advanced than most other states. It was therefore in a position to as you say, conquer them. Although I have to say, I’m not a defender of the Empire here, it was not as violent as some of the battles, I mean there was nothing that we did to other people that compared with the 30 Years War which we did to ourselves. Or for that matter, the First and Second World War. Europe’s capacity for violence against itself was supreme’...
‘I was quite interested in your off-the-cuff three or four sentences about all of these teenage knights that went out and had wars because this was a great thing to do and so forth. Perhaps you could say, not entirely seriously, that war has, there had been more peace, because statesmen became older’...
‘Alexander I, Edward III - all these people, they were all young men… Alexander the Great... Louis XIV… they became the most belligerent - Frederick the Great certainly - when they were, all the hormones were jambling and they were getting up and showing off and being virile and whatever. And of course being male. And I do find that a curious feature of Europe’s history related to kingship - people tend to die young and therefore their sons were even younger. So maybe just a by the way phenomenon, but it is true that they were very young...
When the war was over, and as you say old men tended to rule the roost, however briefly, the peace, so-called, tended to last two generations and it was about 50 60 years, almost like clockwork, the next war comes along. And that suggests to me that this habit of violence, this inclination to violence has a lot to do with the memory of horror, the memory of war. It's not just a measure of how politics is working’...
Probably all states - Frederick the Great said it, Louis XIV said it. It is the nature of power to want to expand, that's what power does. In Europe you've got these very confined borders, you’ve got a lot of people. And on the whole technology was advancing, populations were growing, they were up against each other, they end up fighting. I think it’s as simple as that...
England or Britain's history in Europe is quite different from that of France, Germany, and other countries and is different because we were an island. And we're an island, and therefore don't rub up against our neighbors in the same way. And the wars Britain fought, really since 17th century were on the whole accidental wars. They were not wars of aggrandisement. There were aggrandisement abroad - extra continental, but we didn't fight wars in Europe, except as a mercenary for other people...
The Islamic incursion - we have to be careful about terms here - round the Mediterranean in the Eighth century and so on, was as complete as it was. Almost none of their conquests reverted to Christianity. These were Christian territories. Almost none of them reverted to Christianity. They penetrated right through almost Vienna in the north and of course up through Spain into France in south... the whole of North Africa, the whole of the Levant went over to Islam. The consequence of that was that Christendom shrank by about a third, that’s not in any history book I’ve read... Islam was very, very important to European history, because it defined Europe... we're no longer the Eastern or Southern Mediterranean...
‘Was it less violent than Christianity? Was that one reason it was perhaps a bit more successful and permanently successful?’...
‘I don't know the answer to that... all religions change at the time, not least Christianity... the Coptic Christians in Egypt… you can worship as you wish. Whereas the Church in Constantinople was endlessly excommunicating them and telling them they were distance [?] and heretics, and so on.’...
People who are genetically attuned to having strong leaders... even today, when we are sort of supposedly programmed and conditioned to democracy or to some concept of democracy, when democracy errs or when democracy is appearing to fail or not deliver as promised, the concept of the strong leader. comes out.
What I am more puzzled by is why it appears to be so much stronger in Eastern Europe then Western Europe. I mean, it's clearly the case that Slavs have a natural tendency to seek a strong leader whereas certainly the British, but also the French and the Germans, are basically sceptical and anyone gets too much power, they sort of go for them...
It was certainly programmed into the DNA of Russia's leaders. From Peter the Great it’s very explicit. Peter the Great, Catherine the Great. They all state - oh, I think all this Voltarian Rationalism and possibly even democracy is fine, but not for Russia. Russia is so big, the Boyars have caused enough trouble, it's so big, it must have a strong leader and strong central government. That's just essential and ironic thing is that it was Russia that took Communism most to its heart because Communism offered a framework for strong central leadership and it does to this day...
‘All of these forces brought the continent of Europe closer to self-destruction in the twentieth century. Yet more people died in the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648 than ever died - one third of Europe - than ever died in the wars of the Twentieth Century.’"
Post ID: 4722833815284276901
Links - 21st November 2018 (1)
Feminism may have won the vote, but it has lost its way - "Modern-day feminism is looking more and more like a group of “clever” women ganging up to pull the rug from under the feet of other women. Women who monetise their brains are denying other women the ability to monetise their bodies. It’s elitist, unfair and hypocritical... when giving a public lecture at a new research forum in London on the subject of society in the 1960s and how far we have come since, I chose to walk on stage and address the audience in a cutting edge piece of feminist fashion by the designer Jenna Young... the accompanying lecture delivered at the same event by a well-known and well-respected male colleague, who wore his usual suit, had been made available online. Mine had not. I was later told that a couple of attendees believed I was objectifying myself. They claimed to be feminists. My voice was, as a result, wiped from the face of history. This reflects the attitude of many present day feminists: that whatever an individual woman chooses to do is irrelevant. She is deemed not to know her own mind; not to know what is best for her... The other justification given for denying individual women the right to do what they want with their own lives – and their own bodies – is that their choice has negative consequences on the rest of the sisterhood... This notion of putting the “social good” ahead of the good of an individual is, of course, a natural tendency. It can also be a slippery slope. Take it to its extreme, and we should be forcing women to have children (by limiting access to abortions and birth control) in an effort to resolve the current demographic crisis, or restricting people’s ability to move abroad, so as to avoid the consequences of a brain-drain. We end up, as Friedman and Hayek knew too well, in an authoritarian state."
Emotional intelligence: fact or fad? - "Let's consider the claim that emotional intelligence is more important than IQ for predicting success. Differences between people's IQ scores can explain about 25 per cent of the differences between people's job performance. In contrast, differences in people's emotional intelligence can explain just over 3 per cent of differences in job performance. For jobs that require workers to express positive emotions (for example, service with a smile for customer service), differences in emotional intelligence explain around 7 per cent of differences in job performance. So the idea that emotional intelligence is more important than IQ is plainly not true... people with high emotional intelligence tend to use more effective coping strategies, and to feel more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions . In addition, my colleagues and I found that differences in people's emotional intelligence can explain 29 per cent of the differences in people's eudaimonic wellbeing (the aspect of wellbeing related to reaching one's potential)."
Jordan Burling: Women jailed after teen 'rotted to death' - "The mother and grandmother of an emaciated teenager who was likened to a World War Two concentration camp victim have been jailed for manslaughter. Jordan Burling, 18, went into cardiac arrest in Leeds in 2016 and died weighing less than six stone (37kg)."
Law student, 20, pours water mixed with BLEACH on to men's groins in Russia to stop 'manspreading' - "Calling herself a 'social activist', Miss Dovgalyuk has previously achieved worldwide attention by flashing her underwear to commuters to raise awareness for upskirting laws in Russia."
What feminism leads to
Why do people think this 'manspreading' video is a Kremlin hoax? - "An online news outlet in St Petersburg called Bumaga quoted a man who supposedly appeared in her video, admitting that he was paid to sit on the train and get squirted. Bumaga reproduced a post by the man on the Russian social network Vkontakte. (His account was deleted and the BBC could not immediately reach the man for comment). Additionally, in the video, Anna states that it was created "in assistance with friends who share my position." Speaking to the BBC, she denied that it was staged or that anyone was paid to get diluted bleach thrown on them. "This is some completely random guy," she says, "I don't know what kind of actor he considers himself to be... but there is no evidence, it's just somebody's claim."... no evidence has surfaced that Anna Dovgalyuk set out to make a viral propaganda video at the behest of the Kremlin"
At level of international law, there is no established human right to 'sexual orientation' - "there is no established human right to “sexual orientation” at international law — it is a contested proposition. There is no United Nations (UN) treaty which expressly underwrites discrimination on grounds of “sexual orientation”, itself an ambiguous term... to invoke “rightful equal status” begs the question. What should rightfully be equated with what? An issue cannot be resolved just by declaring something is equal/unequal. The criteria for whether X is equal to Y must come from an independent philosophy which supplies the basis for drawing distinctions. Are durians equal to mangosteens? Yes, if your criteria is “fruits” and no, if the criteria is “colour”. There are no uncontroversial philosophies regarding questions of public sexual morality. To invoke “equality” as a rhetorical slogan does little to elucidate the substantive issues. Third, there is no necessary relationship between a “common secular space” and repealing Section 377A. It begs the question of what “secular”, a protean term, means. There are many forms of secularism — agnostic or anti-religious. Some types of liberal, militant secularism seek to exclude all religiously influenced views from law and public policy debate. This is undemocratic and undermines viewpoint diversity. Viewpoints should be assessed not on their intellectual origins but their cogency and merits... Religious groups have the right under article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to articulate their views and instruct members of their faith community."
Murder is wrong according to most religions. Therefore we shouldn't make murder illegal, because that would be allowing religion into secular space
BBC accidentally quotes Donald Trump saying 'war will follow' - "Speaking about his decision to re-impose sanctions on Iran, who he accused of "slaughter in Syria and Yemen", he said "more will follow". It appears a BBC staffer misheard that, tweeting that Mr Trump said "war will follow". In a clarification the BBC said it was an "honest mistake" and the real words appeared to be "more will follow"."
If the media posts fake news, saying they are fake news is, presumably, an attack on the media
How An Anonymous Accusation Derailed My Life - "Being accused of sexual misconduct is extremely alienating. #MeToo was an expression of solidarity but there is no solidarity for the accused... Someone I know tweeted that it was ironic that supposedly liberal guys keep saying they believe women, but they don’t believe the women who accused them. I’ve wondered about the meaning of “believe women.“ I had assumed it was intended to encourage people to take accusations seriously. Certainly, sexual assault is enormously under-reported. But an anonymous accusation is problematic. What does “believe women“ mean when it isn’t even clear that an anonymous accuser is a woman?... it’s simply impossible to respond to an anonymous accusation. You find yourself confessing to every sin you’ve ever committed, real or imagined. Meanwhile, your accuser doesn’t even have a name. The truth is, all of us have wronged someone at some point... Someone told me I shouldn’t deny the accusations. They asked if I wanted to be on the wrong side of the issue. Someone else asked me if I believed in the #MeToo movement enough to take a bullet. Over the course of this year, I’ve come to believe that if a movement embraces anonymous lists and a presumption of guilt, it is already poisoned and not worth supporting... (U.S. numbers suggest that at least 5% of rape allegations are false or baseless, a higher rate than other major crimes such as murder). Of course, in some sense, Donegan didn’t have to worry, because no one is truly innocent. Even if you’re not guilty of the particular crime of which you stand accused, you’re likely to be guilty of something. It’s a Kafkaesque scenario. The accused can either refuse to engage, or try to maintain their specific innocence from a position of more general guilt. Either way, the trial is over before any defense can arrive"
Barry Floyd - "There are 326 million Americans... 63% of them them cannot afford a thousand dollar emergency... 76% Live paycheck to paycheck... 29 million have no healthcare whatsoever... 50% of all wage earners earn $30,000 a year or less as... Healthcare related emergencies are now the top leading cause of bankruptcy in the US... All of this in the RICHEST country planet earth has EVER SEEN!"
Science suffers as China’s internet censors plug holes in Great Firewall - ""Internet accessibility is a major obstacle for our research. It makes international collaboration difficult and damages the reputation and competitiveness of Chinese science institutes"... Sites now commonly used for research are also blocked. These include Google Scholar, important for scholarly searches; Google Docs and Dropbox, which allow scientists to share materials for organizing conferences and managing collaborations; and even, unfathomably, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory... Even before the crackdown, scientists had to cope with slow internet speeds. With an average connection speed of 7.6 megabits per second (Mbps), China ranks 74th globally, according to a recent study by Akamai Technologies of Cambridge, Massachusetts. That is less than a third as fast as South Korea, the world leader at 28.6 Mbps. An unusual proposal last March from Luo Fuhe, vice chairman of the China Association for Promoting Democracy, a minor political party, declared that slow internet speeds and restrictions on nonpolitical sites were having "an enormous impact on China's social and economic development, and on scientific research"... "The most damaging part," he says, "is the nontransparent and uncertain nature of the filtering.""
Ambrosine Chetrit - "This is the British Labour Party conference today under Jeremy Corbyn. The flags of Palestinians not one Union British flag in sight"
If patriotism is such a bad thing, why is supporting a foreign country such a good thing?
Fresh Blow For May’s Chequers Plan As Poll Shows Voters Prefer 'Canada-Style' Brexit Model - "16% would opt to Remain in the EU with curbs on trade deals with other countries, and only 11% supported a ‘Norway-style’ option that would allow unrestricted EU migration"
Melissa Chen - "I know most people tend to focus on 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' when discussing Tom Wolfe's literary legacy, but one of his lesser-known works that should be more visible and relevant to our current sociopolitical climate is "Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers." You would think that the term "social justice warrior" was a brand new way to capture the concept of a well-meaning political hipster who lacks moral clarity. It turns out that Tom Wolfe already described this phenomenon in the early 70s with his irreverent and snarky essay, "Radical Chic." The story recounts a fundraiser that Leonard Bernstein (then conductor of the NY Philharmonic) and his wife held at their Park Avenue apartment for the Black Panther Party... he was struck by the incongruity of the Bernsteins hosting a fundraiser for radical black socialist/communist militants in their two-story, thirteen-room penthouse duplex, and it’s this irony, this inherent satire, that gives “Radical Chic” a bite in its searing indictment of a certain segment of the white liberal establishment, long before the existence of Tumblr. It was an essay that, today, seems prescient and incisive in criticizing the general phenomena of white guilt and armchair agitation, especially among high society circles... various minorities groups in San Francisco would intimidate government programs into giving them money. He writes about how a combination of bureaucratic ineptitude and white guilt have conspired to disburse money to groups who might be pursuing agendas that are antagonistic to the goals of anti-poverty programs."
Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens - "Perhaps our current science over-estimates the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating... I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games... Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity"
Cancer Establishment Admits We’re Getting Overtested and Overtreated - "Overtesting helps explain why health-care costs for Americans are much higher than in any other nation, whereas our health ranking is low, roughly equivalent to that of Cubans... screening often detects growths that represent no significant threat and yet are nonetheless often treated with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, all of which degrade health"
Is Science Hitting a Wall?, Part 1 - "In “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, four economists claim that “a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms show[s] that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.”... Another sign that science is running out of gas is the sharp increase in average ages of winners of Nobel Prizes in science, and especially physics."
Liberal, Not Lefty - Posts - "Davies is a fantastic lawyer and role model of mine, I'm glad she took the case and is representing Minassian. No doubt she will face an onslaught of criticism for representing Minassian from illiterate 3rd wave feminists, despite there being NOTHING more "feminist" (to use their own self professed label) than knowing our best-in-world justice system must be upheld at all times, to ensure it functions & holds weight when an innocent person DOES take the stand. I say "no doubt" it will happen, because these same hypocrites criticized Marie Henein for representing Gian Ghomeshi, calling her a "traitor to her gender for defending a misogynist". She was even disinvited from campus events she was scheduled to speak at. (To no one's surprise, the feminists who called Henein a traitor were deafeningly silent when it came to brandishing "TRAITOR" on the female crown witnesses who PERJURED on the stand -- ruining the case, and tainting other potentially truthful testimony, for the women who followed them. If you want to talk about being a traitor to the female victims, lying on the stand seems to be more relevant than upholding a progressive justice system. ..But hey, maybe that's just me.) These people, who smeared Henein, who will likely do the same to Davies, and who often are the ones advocating for "innocent until proven guilty" NOT applying to rape cases... if the rule of law is not upheld for EVERY accused, there is no rule of law upheld for ANY accused... It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at black men falsely accused of rape by white supremacists in the Jim Crow era"
Emotional intelligence: fact or fad? - "Let's consider the claim that emotional intelligence is more important than IQ for predicting success. Differences between people's IQ scores can explain about 25 per cent of the differences between people's job performance. In contrast, differences in people's emotional intelligence can explain just over 3 per cent of differences in job performance. For jobs that require workers to express positive emotions (for example, service with a smile for customer service), differences in emotional intelligence explain around 7 per cent of differences in job performance. So the idea that emotional intelligence is more important than IQ is plainly not true... people with high emotional intelligence tend to use more effective coping strategies, and to feel more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions . In addition, my colleagues and I found that differences in people's emotional intelligence can explain 29 per cent of the differences in people's eudaimonic wellbeing (the aspect of wellbeing related to reaching one's potential)."
Jordan Burling: Women jailed after teen 'rotted to death' - "The mother and grandmother of an emaciated teenager who was likened to a World War Two concentration camp victim have been jailed for manslaughter. Jordan Burling, 18, went into cardiac arrest in Leeds in 2016 and died weighing less than six stone (37kg)."
Law student, 20, pours water mixed with BLEACH on to men's groins in Russia to stop 'manspreading' - "Calling herself a 'social activist', Miss Dovgalyuk has previously achieved worldwide attention by flashing her underwear to commuters to raise awareness for upskirting laws in Russia."
What feminism leads to
Why do people think this 'manspreading' video is a Kremlin hoax? - "An online news outlet in St Petersburg called Bumaga quoted a man who supposedly appeared in her video, admitting that he was paid to sit on the train and get squirted. Bumaga reproduced a post by the man on the Russian social network Vkontakte. (His account was deleted and the BBC could not immediately reach the man for comment). Additionally, in the video, Anna states that it was created "in assistance with friends who share my position." Speaking to the BBC, she denied that it was staged or that anyone was paid to get diluted bleach thrown on them. "This is some completely random guy," she says, "I don't know what kind of actor he considers himself to be... but there is no evidence, it's just somebody's claim."... no evidence has surfaced that Anna Dovgalyuk set out to make a viral propaganda video at the behest of the Kremlin"
At level of international law, there is no established human right to 'sexual orientation' - "there is no established human right to “sexual orientation” at international law — it is a contested proposition. There is no United Nations (UN) treaty which expressly underwrites discrimination on grounds of “sexual orientation”, itself an ambiguous term... to invoke “rightful equal status” begs the question. What should rightfully be equated with what? An issue cannot be resolved just by declaring something is equal/unequal. The criteria for whether X is equal to Y must come from an independent philosophy which supplies the basis for drawing distinctions. Are durians equal to mangosteens? Yes, if your criteria is “fruits” and no, if the criteria is “colour”. There are no uncontroversial philosophies regarding questions of public sexual morality. To invoke “equality” as a rhetorical slogan does little to elucidate the substantive issues. Third, there is no necessary relationship between a “common secular space” and repealing Section 377A. It begs the question of what “secular”, a protean term, means. There are many forms of secularism — agnostic or anti-religious. Some types of liberal, militant secularism seek to exclude all religiously influenced views from law and public policy debate. This is undemocratic and undermines viewpoint diversity. Viewpoints should be assessed not on their intellectual origins but their cogency and merits... Religious groups have the right under article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to articulate their views and instruct members of their faith community."
Murder is wrong according to most religions. Therefore we shouldn't make murder illegal, because that would be allowing religion into secular space
BBC accidentally quotes Donald Trump saying 'war will follow' - "Speaking about his decision to re-impose sanctions on Iran, who he accused of "slaughter in Syria and Yemen", he said "more will follow". It appears a BBC staffer misheard that, tweeting that Mr Trump said "war will follow". In a clarification the BBC said it was an "honest mistake" and the real words appeared to be "more will follow"."
If the media posts fake news, saying they are fake news is, presumably, an attack on the media
How An Anonymous Accusation Derailed My Life - "Being accused of sexual misconduct is extremely alienating. #MeToo was an expression of solidarity but there is no solidarity for the accused... Someone I know tweeted that it was ironic that supposedly liberal guys keep saying they believe women, but they don’t believe the women who accused them. I’ve wondered about the meaning of “believe women.“ I had assumed it was intended to encourage people to take accusations seriously. Certainly, sexual assault is enormously under-reported. But an anonymous accusation is problematic. What does “believe women“ mean when it isn’t even clear that an anonymous accuser is a woman?... it’s simply impossible to respond to an anonymous accusation. You find yourself confessing to every sin you’ve ever committed, real or imagined. Meanwhile, your accuser doesn’t even have a name. The truth is, all of us have wronged someone at some point... Someone told me I shouldn’t deny the accusations. They asked if I wanted to be on the wrong side of the issue. Someone else asked me if I believed in the #MeToo movement enough to take a bullet. Over the course of this year, I’ve come to believe that if a movement embraces anonymous lists and a presumption of guilt, it is already poisoned and not worth supporting... (U.S. numbers suggest that at least 5% of rape allegations are false or baseless, a higher rate than other major crimes such as murder). Of course, in some sense, Donegan didn’t have to worry, because no one is truly innocent. Even if you’re not guilty of the particular crime of which you stand accused, you’re likely to be guilty of something. It’s a Kafkaesque scenario. The accused can either refuse to engage, or try to maintain their specific innocence from a position of more general guilt. Either way, the trial is over before any defense can arrive"
Barry Floyd - "There are 326 million Americans... 63% of them them cannot afford a thousand dollar emergency... 76% Live paycheck to paycheck... 29 million have no healthcare whatsoever... 50% of all wage earners earn $30,000 a year or less as... Healthcare related emergencies are now the top leading cause of bankruptcy in the US... All of this in the RICHEST country planet earth has EVER SEEN!"
Science suffers as China’s internet censors plug holes in Great Firewall - ""Internet accessibility is a major obstacle for our research. It makes international collaboration difficult and damages the reputation and competitiveness of Chinese science institutes"... Sites now commonly used for research are also blocked. These include Google Scholar, important for scholarly searches; Google Docs and Dropbox, which allow scientists to share materials for organizing conferences and managing collaborations; and even, unfathomably, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory... Even before the crackdown, scientists had to cope with slow internet speeds. With an average connection speed of 7.6 megabits per second (Mbps), China ranks 74th globally, according to a recent study by Akamai Technologies of Cambridge, Massachusetts. That is less than a third as fast as South Korea, the world leader at 28.6 Mbps. An unusual proposal last March from Luo Fuhe, vice chairman of the China Association for Promoting Democracy, a minor political party, declared that slow internet speeds and restrictions on nonpolitical sites were having "an enormous impact on China's social and economic development, and on scientific research"... "The most damaging part," he says, "is the nontransparent and uncertain nature of the filtering.""
Ambrosine Chetrit - "This is the British Labour Party conference today under Jeremy Corbyn. The flags of Palestinians not one Union British flag in sight"
If patriotism is such a bad thing, why is supporting a foreign country such a good thing?
Fresh Blow For May’s Chequers Plan As Poll Shows Voters Prefer 'Canada-Style' Brexit Model - "16% would opt to Remain in the EU with curbs on trade deals with other countries, and only 11% supported a ‘Norway-style’ option that would allow unrestricted EU migration"
Melissa Chen - "I know most people tend to focus on 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' when discussing Tom Wolfe's literary legacy, but one of his lesser-known works that should be more visible and relevant to our current sociopolitical climate is "Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers." You would think that the term "social justice warrior" was a brand new way to capture the concept of a well-meaning political hipster who lacks moral clarity. It turns out that Tom Wolfe already described this phenomenon in the early 70s with his irreverent and snarky essay, "Radical Chic." The story recounts a fundraiser that Leonard Bernstein (then conductor of the NY Philharmonic) and his wife held at their Park Avenue apartment for the Black Panther Party... he was struck by the incongruity of the Bernsteins hosting a fundraiser for radical black socialist/communist militants in their two-story, thirteen-room penthouse duplex, and it’s this irony, this inherent satire, that gives “Radical Chic” a bite in its searing indictment of a certain segment of the white liberal establishment, long before the existence of Tumblr. It was an essay that, today, seems prescient and incisive in criticizing the general phenomena of white guilt and armchair agitation, especially among high society circles... various minorities groups in San Francisco would intimidate government programs into giving them money. He writes about how a combination of bureaucratic ineptitude and white guilt have conspired to disburse money to groups who might be pursuing agendas that are antagonistic to the goals of anti-poverty programs."
Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens - "Perhaps our current science over-estimates the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating... I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games... Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity"
Cancer Establishment Admits We’re Getting Overtested and Overtreated - "Overtesting helps explain why health-care costs for Americans are much higher than in any other nation, whereas our health ranking is low, roughly equivalent to that of Cubans... screening often detects growths that represent no significant threat and yet are nonetheless often treated with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, all of which degrade health"
Is Science Hitting a Wall?, Part 1 - "In “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, four economists claim that “a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms show[s] that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.”... Another sign that science is running out of gas is the sharp increase in average ages of winners of Nobel Prizes in science, and especially physics."
Liberal, Not Lefty - Posts - "Davies is a fantastic lawyer and role model of mine, I'm glad she took the case and is representing Minassian. No doubt she will face an onslaught of criticism for representing Minassian from illiterate 3rd wave feminists, despite there being NOTHING more "feminist" (to use their own self professed label) than knowing our best-in-world justice system must be upheld at all times, to ensure it functions & holds weight when an innocent person DOES take the stand. I say "no doubt" it will happen, because these same hypocrites criticized Marie Henein for representing Gian Ghomeshi, calling her a "traitor to her gender for defending a misogynist". She was even disinvited from campus events she was scheduled to speak at. (To no one's surprise, the feminists who called Henein a traitor were deafeningly silent when it came to brandishing "TRAITOR" on the female crown witnesses who PERJURED on the stand -- ruining the case, and tainting other potentially truthful testimony, for the women who followed them. If you want to talk about being a traitor to the female victims, lying on the stand seems to be more relevant than upholding a progressive justice system. ..But hey, maybe that's just me.) These people, who smeared Henein, who will likely do the same to Davies, and who often are the ones advocating for "innocent until proven guilty" NOT applying to rape cases... if the rule of law is not upheld for EVERY accused, there is no rule of law upheld for ANY accused... It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at black men falsely accused of rape by white supremacists in the Jim Crow era"
Post ID: 5720189110118304929
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
Links - 20th November 2018 (2)
I made a machine learning chicken rice classifier in ~4 hours to tell me what type of chicken rice I bought for lunch
Google Chrome Begins 'Syncing' All Browser Data to Your Identity Without Asking - "Google users are concerned about their browsing privacy after a recent update at Google secretly logs Chrome browser users into their online Google accounts, syncing data without asking, a move one expert says has “enormous implications for user privacy and trust.”"
Rice Cooked in Black Beans (_Moros Y Cristianos_) recipe - "This dish gets its name from the wars between the dark-skinned Moors (moros) and the lightskinned Spaniards (cristianos) that occurred during the eighth century in Spain"
Overthinking It: Using Food As A Racial Metaphor - "That got us thinking about the very long list of foods that double as shorthands for racial betrayal. Banana and Oreo, sure. There's Twinkie, which does the same work as banana. There's apple, leveled at Native Americans who are allegedly white on the inside. And there's coconut, which is a sort of an all-purpose, you're-white-on-the-inside epithet for all manner of brownness — Desis, Latinos, Afro-Caribbeans."
Robot cognition requires machines that both think and feel - "The point is not that emotion is needed for intelligent, autonomous robots – the answer is yes – but that emotion needs to be hooked up to everything that goes on in a cognitive system. Emotion is not an ‘add-on’ module that endows a robot with feelings or allows it to express an internal state"
Why we need to bring back the art of communal bathing - "Living in a society where actual nudity has been eclipsed by idealised or pornographic images of it, many of us are, independently of our will, disgusted by hairy backs, flabby bellies and ‘strange-looking’ nipples. The relatively liberal attitude towards such issues in countries such as Denmark, where nudity in the bathhouse is the norm, and in some cases mandatory, exemplifies how the practice might help renormalise a basic sense of diversity and break through the rigid laws that regulate the so-called ‘normal body"
Androphobia — and How to Address It - "“Androphobia” is not a word in popular usage but I think it should be. It’s a far better word than “misandry” to describe the expression of fear of and aversion to men that permeates much of feminist discourse right now. Misandry is the hatred of men. Feminists who exhibit hostility towards men tell us that they do not hate men. They simply fear them and argue that hostility is a perfectly natural consequence of this which should be accepted. I think we should take them seriously and treat the problem as “androphobia” — an irrational fear which sufferers should be supported sympathetically to overcome... 100% of deaths by spider-bite are caused by spiders but the vast majority of spiders will do you no harm. If fear of spiders is affecting how you live your life, your arachnophobia needs treating. 100% of deaths by plane crash are caused by planes but the vast majority of planes do not crash. If your fear of flying limits your career and leisure opportunities, you might want to consider having your aviophobia treated. Most violent & sexual crimes are committed by men but the vast majority of men do not commit violent and sexual crime. If fear of men is affecting how you live your life, your androphobia needs treating... “CBT helps replace catastrophic cognitions with reasonable beliefs. When fear begins, it’s important to remind yourself to review the evidence that this is a false alarm, you are not in danger. The goal is to develop a nurturing, coaching inner voice to help stay grounded and effectively accept and cope with panicky feelings as they run their course.” The already tiny risk of violent attack can be reduced further by taking the same kind of precautions one takes against other kinds of crime and using the same kind of judgement one uses with other kinds of relationships. If we live life in constant fear and distrust of men, we could possibly reduce the risk further but at what cost? Avoiding interactions and relationships with half the population reduces the likelihood of having friends, lovers and meaningful bonds too... Presenting women’s psyches as so deeply dependent on their sexual “inviolateness” is demeaning, harmful and regressive in the true sense of the word. For me, those experiences of minor sexual assault were among a number of unpleasant and criminal things that have happened to me as someone who lives in a big city and rank below being shoved around in Central London by a group of teenage girls when I was also a teenage girl, having a shopping trolley rammed into my leg by a woman who felt I had not got out of her way fast enough (I still have a dent), being cornered by a shouting and wildly gesticulating street preacher to whom I had suggested God did not exist and having my purse stolen twice, my bike twice and my phone once. Arseholes exist. They need dealing with. I survived."
Germany set to make 'educational state-funded feminist pornography' - "The idea might have been inspired by Sweden, where in 2009 the state film institute spent £44,813 financing Dirty Diaries, a series of short porn films produced by female film artists."
Apparently they haven't been on PornHub
From Somali refugee to Swedish reporter - "Here is a story of a young journalist who went from Somali refugee to Swedish reporter trying to expose the Al-Shabab, but being left out to dry by all... [As Amun Abdullahi] washed her community’s dirty linen in public, she was accused of betraying secrets of her people and bringing “shame on the Swedish-Somalis.” In reports for Swedish Radio, she revealed that some Somali asylum seekers scorch their fingertips to make fingerprints unrecognizable, and that Somali women were over-represented in abortions... She said she had mentally prepared herself for the threats and social ostracism. What she was not prepared for was betrayal and isolation from her own journalist colleagues on one of Sweden’s most influential political radio shows, Konflikt. Amun’s work was dismissed as mere “hearsay” and “rumours.” Behind Amun’s witch-hunt stood one of Sweden’s leading liberal journalists, Randi Mossige-Norheim. Despite evidence of Al-Shabab recruitment in Sweden, Randi Mossige-Norheim maintained it was not the job of Amun Abdullahi to judge anyone. She laced her critique of Amun by the politically correct verdict: “We don’t judge anybody.”... “You see what the Swedish journalists have done? Why should you want to report (on Al-Shabab) when the Swedes don’t want to?”... Amun Abdullahi is today a broken-hearted reporter, who dared to roar. She has abandoned not only journalism, but also Sweden, moving back to Somalia where she has set up a girls’ school. About Sweden she says: “Here you cannot tell the truth. The truth is kept hidden, and the people are silenced. Not all dreams come true,” she sighs."
“Sweden is More Dangerous than Mogadishu” - "This place is more dangerous than Mogadishu.
What do you mean? Here you cannot tell the truth.
The truth is kept hidden, and the people are silenced.
Not all dreams come true, she says.
She came to Sweden as a refugee, now she is fleeing again. On her way to Somalia to start anew.
If you lose your things in a fire, it is not a problem.
But if you have faith in something, and you lose it, then it hurts.
I had faith in journalism, and in spite of its shortcomings I also believed in Swedish Radio.
I also had faith in myself, quite a lot actually.
And all three things were crushed in one go."
London Seen As More Dangerous Than Somalia, Warns Chuka Umunna - "For some young people the streets of London are more dangerous than Somalia, Chuka Umunna has warned. In a sobering speech in the Commons on Friday afternoon, the former shadow cabinet minister told MPs about the number of stabbings that take place in his Streatham constituency - including one man who had seen two of his sons fall victim to knife crime. "This constituent had come to the UK with his sons from Somalia – a country ravaged by lawlessness, extreme violence and civil war - because he wanted a better future for his children and for them to be safe," Umunna said. "He is completely bewildered by what has happened. When I asked him whether he felt his sons would be safer in Mogadishu than in London, he told me he felt it would be less dangerous for his children to live there than here - he massively regrets moving them to our capital."
The Lost World of Soviet PCs - "Commercial isolation from the U.S. produced a strange parallel universe of technology in the Soviet Union, and computers were no exception"
What do British Muslims really think? - "Liberal opinion in Britain has, for more than two decades, maintained that most Muslims are just like everyone else, but with more modest dress sense and more luxuriant facial hair; any differences would fade with time and contact... The survey of British Muslim opinion — What British Muslims Really Think — will be published in full... When I was chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I played a principal role in the creation of UK laws against religious discrimination — and it was a report that I commissioned exactly 20 years ago that first introduced the term Islamophobia to Britain... The data... shows what the polling experts call “a chasm” opening between Muslims and non-Muslims on such fundamentals as marriage, relations between men and women, schooling, freedom of expression and even the validity of violence in defence of religion. And the chasm isn’t going to disappear any time soon; indeed, the gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim youngsters are nearly as large as those between their elders... more than half mix with non-Muslims daily, probably at work or college — but 30% never translate that into a friendship that would take them into a non-Muslim’s house more than once a year. One in five never enter a non-Muslim home... more than half of ethnic-minority children attend schools where white British children are in the minority... Two out of five Muslims — men and women — say they believe that a woman should always obey her husband... One in three British Muslims supports the right of a man to have more than one wife, even though it is illegal in the UK... Amra, a female sharia court judge, says: “In my experience, it’s not men who have demanded it; it’s women."... More than half of the sample reported that they believe that homosexuality should be illegal. Even more opposed gay marriage, and nearly half thought that it was unacceptable for a gay person to teach their children. A quarter supported the introduction of sharia law in parts of the UK... “You know, we [liberal Muslims] are a dying breed — in 10 years there will be very few of us left unless something really important is done.”... Many of our (distinctly un-diverse) elite political and media classes simply refuse to acknowledge the truth. Any undesirable behaviours are attributed to poverty and alienation. Backing for violent extremism must be the fault of the Americans. Oppression of women is a cultural trait that will fade with time, nothing to do with the true face of Islam... while our liberal elite wrings its hands in anguish and makes school children celebrate Eid, Diwali, Hanukkah — and Easter — hundreds of young people are being seduced to join Islamist fanatics abroad, thousands of young girls are shipped off to have their genitals mutilated, and many more are pressured into marriages they do not want... the integration of Muslims will probably be the hardest task we’ve ever faced. It will mean abandoning the milk-and-water multiculturalism still so beloved of many, and adopting a far more muscular approach to integration... While many of us are comfortable condemning less numerous and less powerful minorities [on things like homophobia], we are reluctant to speak clearly when it comes to Muslims"
2 years after Trevor Philips wrote this, the obsession is still on "hate crimes" and the "far right" instead
Trevor Philips: Former equalities chief says Muslims are 'not like us' - "Trevor Philips, ex head of the much-maligned Equality and Human Rights Commission, has been blasted after claiming that Government efforts to integrate Muslim communities are "disrespectful" and should be stopped... Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect. "Because what you are essentially saying is the fact that they behave in a different way, some of which we may not like, is because they haven’t yet seen the light. It may be that they see the world differently to the rest of us."... Government equalities Tsar warned that hand-wringing liberals obsessed with political correctness and multiculturalism are failing crime victims."
James Bond museum on Austrian mountain sidesteps politically incorrect scenes - "As James Bond collects his casino winnings in the film Octopussy he turns to an Indian character to share some of the rupees he has won in a high-stakes game of backgammon. Roger Moore’s character declares: “Keep you in curry for a few weeks, won’t it?” The scene is one of many that the owners of the Bond film rights are trying to forget as they authorise a museum devoted to the fictional British superspy on an Austrian mountain peak."
Standards commission explains why George Soros' donation to fund Amnesty abortion campaign was illegal - "THE STANDARDS IN Public Office Commission (SIPO) has explained why it ordered Amnesty International to return a donation made by billionaire George Soros for its My Body My Rights campaign. Sipo said current legislation governing donations to political groups forces those who receive donations over €100 to register as a third-party. The Electoral Act also bans foreign donations from an individual other than an Irish citizen who resides outside the island of Ireland – meaning Soros’ €137,000 donation did not meet the criteria for an acceptable donation."
Not so Uniquely Singapore after all
But of course it's only unacceptable to liberals when it's right wingers like the Koch brothers doing it
Correlation implies causation – when it does or does not with vaccines - "There are seven additional tests of the correlation data that could be used to move a finding of correlation between two sets of data from an unknown causal relationship to a presumed one...
1. The data must be strong
2. The data must be consistent
3. The data must be specific
4. The data must be temporal
5. The data must possess a dose response effect
6. The implication of causality must be biologically plausible
7. The data must be coherent."
Google Chrome Begins 'Syncing' All Browser Data to Your Identity Without Asking - "Google users are concerned about their browsing privacy after a recent update at Google secretly logs Chrome browser users into their online Google accounts, syncing data without asking, a move one expert says has “enormous implications for user privacy and trust.”"
Rice Cooked in Black Beans (_Moros Y Cristianos_) recipe - "This dish gets its name from the wars between the dark-skinned Moors (moros) and the lightskinned Spaniards (cristianos) that occurred during the eighth century in Spain"
Overthinking It: Using Food As A Racial Metaphor - "That got us thinking about the very long list of foods that double as shorthands for racial betrayal. Banana and Oreo, sure. There's Twinkie, which does the same work as banana. There's apple, leveled at Native Americans who are allegedly white on the inside. And there's coconut, which is a sort of an all-purpose, you're-white-on-the-inside epithet for all manner of brownness — Desis, Latinos, Afro-Caribbeans."
Robot cognition requires machines that both think and feel - "The point is not that emotion is needed for intelligent, autonomous robots – the answer is yes – but that emotion needs to be hooked up to everything that goes on in a cognitive system. Emotion is not an ‘add-on’ module that endows a robot with feelings or allows it to express an internal state"
Why we need to bring back the art of communal bathing - "Living in a society where actual nudity has been eclipsed by idealised or pornographic images of it, many of us are, independently of our will, disgusted by hairy backs, flabby bellies and ‘strange-looking’ nipples. The relatively liberal attitude towards such issues in countries such as Denmark, where nudity in the bathhouse is the norm, and in some cases mandatory, exemplifies how the practice might help renormalise a basic sense of diversity and break through the rigid laws that regulate the so-called ‘normal body"
Androphobia — and How to Address It - "“Androphobia” is not a word in popular usage but I think it should be. It’s a far better word than “misandry” to describe the expression of fear of and aversion to men that permeates much of feminist discourse right now. Misandry is the hatred of men. Feminists who exhibit hostility towards men tell us that they do not hate men. They simply fear them and argue that hostility is a perfectly natural consequence of this which should be accepted. I think we should take them seriously and treat the problem as “androphobia” — an irrational fear which sufferers should be supported sympathetically to overcome... 100% of deaths by spider-bite are caused by spiders but the vast majority of spiders will do you no harm. If fear of spiders is affecting how you live your life, your arachnophobia needs treating. 100% of deaths by plane crash are caused by planes but the vast majority of planes do not crash. If your fear of flying limits your career and leisure opportunities, you might want to consider having your aviophobia treated. Most violent & sexual crimes are committed by men but the vast majority of men do not commit violent and sexual crime. If fear of men is affecting how you live your life, your androphobia needs treating... “CBT helps replace catastrophic cognitions with reasonable beliefs. When fear begins, it’s important to remind yourself to review the evidence that this is a false alarm, you are not in danger. The goal is to develop a nurturing, coaching inner voice to help stay grounded and effectively accept and cope with panicky feelings as they run their course.” The already tiny risk of violent attack can be reduced further by taking the same kind of precautions one takes against other kinds of crime and using the same kind of judgement one uses with other kinds of relationships. If we live life in constant fear and distrust of men, we could possibly reduce the risk further but at what cost? Avoiding interactions and relationships with half the population reduces the likelihood of having friends, lovers and meaningful bonds too... Presenting women’s psyches as so deeply dependent on their sexual “inviolateness” is demeaning, harmful and regressive in the true sense of the word. For me, those experiences of minor sexual assault were among a number of unpleasant and criminal things that have happened to me as someone who lives in a big city and rank below being shoved around in Central London by a group of teenage girls when I was also a teenage girl, having a shopping trolley rammed into my leg by a woman who felt I had not got out of her way fast enough (I still have a dent), being cornered by a shouting and wildly gesticulating street preacher to whom I had suggested God did not exist and having my purse stolen twice, my bike twice and my phone once. Arseholes exist. They need dealing with. I survived."
Germany set to make 'educational state-funded feminist pornography' - "The idea might have been inspired by Sweden, where in 2009 the state film institute spent £44,813 financing Dirty Diaries, a series of short porn films produced by female film artists."
Apparently they haven't been on PornHub
From Somali refugee to Swedish reporter - "Here is a story of a young journalist who went from Somali refugee to Swedish reporter trying to expose the Al-Shabab, but being left out to dry by all... [As Amun Abdullahi] washed her community’s dirty linen in public, she was accused of betraying secrets of her people and bringing “shame on the Swedish-Somalis.” In reports for Swedish Radio, she revealed that some Somali asylum seekers scorch their fingertips to make fingerprints unrecognizable, and that Somali women were over-represented in abortions... She said she had mentally prepared herself for the threats and social ostracism. What she was not prepared for was betrayal and isolation from her own journalist colleagues on one of Sweden’s most influential political radio shows, Konflikt. Amun’s work was dismissed as mere “hearsay” and “rumours.” Behind Amun’s witch-hunt stood one of Sweden’s leading liberal journalists, Randi Mossige-Norheim. Despite evidence of Al-Shabab recruitment in Sweden, Randi Mossige-Norheim maintained it was not the job of Amun Abdullahi to judge anyone. She laced her critique of Amun by the politically correct verdict: “We don’t judge anybody.”... “You see what the Swedish journalists have done? Why should you want to report (on Al-Shabab) when the Swedes don’t want to?”... Amun Abdullahi is today a broken-hearted reporter, who dared to roar. She has abandoned not only journalism, but also Sweden, moving back to Somalia where she has set up a girls’ school. About Sweden she says: “Here you cannot tell the truth. The truth is kept hidden, and the people are silenced. Not all dreams come true,” she sighs."
“Sweden is More Dangerous than Mogadishu” - "This place is more dangerous than Mogadishu.
What do you mean? Here you cannot tell the truth.
The truth is kept hidden, and the people are silenced.
Not all dreams come true, she says.
She came to Sweden as a refugee, now she is fleeing again. On her way to Somalia to start anew.
If you lose your things in a fire, it is not a problem.
But if you have faith in something, and you lose it, then it hurts.
I had faith in journalism, and in spite of its shortcomings I also believed in Swedish Radio.
I also had faith in myself, quite a lot actually.
And all three things were crushed in one go."
London Seen As More Dangerous Than Somalia, Warns Chuka Umunna - "For some young people the streets of London are more dangerous than Somalia, Chuka Umunna has warned. In a sobering speech in the Commons on Friday afternoon, the former shadow cabinet minister told MPs about the number of stabbings that take place in his Streatham constituency - including one man who had seen two of his sons fall victim to knife crime. "This constituent had come to the UK with his sons from Somalia – a country ravaged by lawlessness, extreme violence and civil war - because he wanted a better future for his children and for them to be safe," Umunna said. "He is completely bewildered by what has happened. When I asked him whether he felt his sons would be safer in Mogadishu than in London, he told me he felt it would be less dangerous for his children to live there than here - he massively regrets moving them to our capital."
The Lost World of Soviet PCs - "Commercial isolation from the U.S. produced a strange parallel universe of technology in the Soviet Union, and computers were no exception"
What do British Muslims really think? - "Liberal opinion in Britain has, for more than two decades, maintained that most Muslims are just like everyone else, but with more modest dress sense and more luxuriant facial hair; any differences would fade with time and contact... The survey of British Muslim opinion — What British Muslims Really Think — will be published in full... When I was chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, I played a principal role in the creation of UK laws against religious discrimination — and it was a report that I commissioned exactly 20 years ago that first introduced the term Islamophobia to Britain... The data... shows what the polling experts call “a chasm” opening between Muslims and non-Muslims on such fundamentals as marriage, relations between men and women, schooling, freedom of expression and even the validity of violence in defence of religion. And the chasm isn’t going to disappear any time soon; indeed, the gaps between Muslim and non-Muslim youngsters are nearly as large as those between their elders... more than half mix with non-Muslims daily, probably at work or college — but 30% never translate that into a friendship that would take them into a non-Muslim’s house more than once a year. One in five never enter a non-Muslim home... more than half of ethnic-minority children attend schools where white British children are in the minority... Two out of five Muslims — men and women — say they believe that a woman should always obey her husband... One in three British Muslims supports the right of a man to have more than one wife, even though it is illegal in the UK... Amra, a female sharia court judge, says: “In my experience, it’s not men who have demanded it; it’s women."... More than half of the sample reported that they believe that homosexuality should be illegal. Even more opposed gay marriage, and nearly half thought that it was unacceptable for a gay person to teach their children. A quarter supported the introduction of sharia law in parts of the UK... “You know, we [liberal Muslims] are a dying breed — in 10 years there will be very few of us left unless something really important is done.”... Many of our (distinctly un-diverse) elite political and media classes simply refuse to acknowledge the truth. Any undesirable behaviours are attributed to poverty and alienation. Backing for violent extremism must be the fault of the Americans. Oppression of women is a cultural trait that will fade with time, nothing to do with the true face of Islam... while our liberal elite wrings its hands in anguish and makes school children celebrate Eid, Diwali, Hanukkah — and Easter — hundreds of young people are being seduced to join Islamist fanatics abroad, thousands of young girls are shipped off to have their genitals mutilated, and many more are pressured into marriages they do not want... the integration of Muslims will probably be the hardest task we’ve ever faced. It will mean abandoning the milk-and-water multiculturalism still so beloved of many, and adopting a far more muscular approach to integration... While many of us are comfortable condemning less numerous and less powerful minorities [on things like homophobia], we are reluctant to speak clearly when it comes to Muslims"
2 years after Trevor Philips wrote this, the obsession is still on "hate crimes" and the "far right" instead
Trevor Philips: Former equalities chief says Muslims are 'not like us' - "Trevor Philips, ex head of the much-maligned Equality and Human Rights Commission, has been blasted after claiming that Government efforts to integrate Muslim communities are "disrespectful" and should be stopped... Continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect. "Because what you are essentially saying is the fact that they behave in a different way, some of which we may not like, is because they haven’t yet seen the light. It may be that they see the world differently to the rest of us."... Government equalities Tsar warned that hand-wringing liberals obsessed with political correctness and multiculturalism are failing crime victims."
James Bond museum on Austrian mountain sidesteps politically incorrect scenes - "As James Bond collects his casino winnings in the film Octopussy he turns to an Indian character to share some of the rupees he has won in a high-stakes game of backgammon. Roger Moore’s character declares: “Keep you in curry for a few weeks, won’t it?” The scene is one of many that the owners of the Bond film rights are trying to forget as they authorise a museum devoted to the fictional British superspy on an Austrian mountain peak."
Standards commission explains why George Soros' donation to fund Amnesty abortion campaign was illegal - "THE STANDARDS IN Public Office Commission (SIPO) has explained why it ordered Amnesty International to return a donation made by billionaire George Soros for its My Body My Rights campaign. Sipo said current legislation governing donations to political groups forces those who receive donations over €100 to register as a third-party. The Electoral Act also bans foreign donations from an individual other than an Irish citizen who resides outside the island of Ireland – meaning Soros’ €137,000 donation did not meet the criteria for an acceptable donation."
Not so Uniquely Singapore after all
But of course it's only unacceptable to liberals when it's right wingers like the Koch brothers doing it
Correlation implies causation – when it does or does not with vaccines - "There are seven additional tests of the correlation data that could be used to move a finding of correlation between two sets of data from an unknown causal relationship to a presumed one...
1. The data must be strong
2. The data must be consistent
3. The data must be specific
4. The data must be temporal
5. The data must possess a dose response effect
6. The implication of causality must be biologically plausible
7. The data must be coherent."
Post ID: 4483661993115354032
The totalitarian in all of us
"In abandoning Europe we would be abandoning not only the fountainheads of most of our own culture and traditions; we would also be abandoning almost all the other areas in the world where progressive, representative government is a working proposition. We would be placing ourselves in culturally and politically. To traditions and institutions, we loudly in the dark. I am not sure the position of a lonely country, maintain confidence in our own would henceforth have to whistle that whistling could be loud enough to do the trick.
I know that there are many people--and probably some among you--who will reply indignantly that I am selling short the strength and soundness of our institutions, and who will maintain that American democracy has nothing to fear from Europe's diseases and nothing to learn from Europe's experiences.
I wish I could believe that were true. I wish I could believe that the human impulses which give rise to the nightmares of totalitarianism were ones which Providence had allocated only to other peoples and to which the American people had been graciously left immune. Unfortunately, I know this is not true. After all, most of us are Europeans once or twice removed; and some of us are less removed than that. There are openly totalitarian forces already working in our society...And it is not even with these small existing groups of extremists that the real danger lies. The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us. It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down at the usual helpless and invisible depth. If confidence and security were to disappear, don't think that he would not be waiting to take their place. Others may lull themselves to sleep with the pleasing assumption that the work of building freedom in this country was accomplished once and for all by our forefathers. I prefer to accept the word of a great European, the German poet Goethe, that freedom is something that has to be reconquered every day. In that never-ending process of re-conquest, I would hate to see this country lose all its allies.
--- Measures short of war / George Kennan (1947)
totalitarianism today notes that Kennan "worried that the rise or expansion of communism into Western Europe would give American extremists cause to enact illiberal legislation"
They continue:
"Kennan made these remarks at a time when popular fear of communism was threatening to overwhelm sound policy deliberation. In a sense, such a threat challenges democracies following periods of crisis-- the fear trumps the reasoning, the emotions overwhelm the mind"
In light of this, Trump Derangement Syndrome and the Nazi Moral Panic's parallels with McCarthyism (which started just a few years after Kennan's speech) are even more evident.
Ironically, Popper would not have tolerated all those people who keep ranting about punching "Nazis" and boasting that they won't talk to them - all the while invoking the paradox of tolerance.
I know that there are many people--and probably some among you--who will reply indignantly that I am selling short the strength and soundness of our institutions, and who will maintain that American democracy has nothing to fear from Europe's diseases and nothing to learn from Europe's experiences.
I wish I could believe that were true. I wish I could believe that the human impulses which give rise to the nightmares of totalitarianism were ones which Providence had allocated only to other peoples and to which the American people had been graciously left immune. Unfortunately, I know this is not true. After all, most of us are Europeans once or twice removed; and some of us are less removed than that. There are openly totalitarian forces already working in our society...And it is not even with these small existing groups of extremists that the real danger lies. The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us. It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down at the usual helpless and invisible depth. If confidence and security were to disappear, don't think that he would not be waiting to take their place. Others may lull themselves to sleep with the pleasing assumption that the work of building freedom in this country was accomplished once and for all by our forefathers. I prefer to accept the word of a great European, the German poet Goethe, that freedom is something that has to be reconquered every day. In that never-ending process of re-conquest, I would hate to see this country lose all its allies.
--- Measures short of war / George Kennan (1947)
totalitarianism today notes that Kennan "worried that the rise or expansion of communism into Western Europe would give American extremists cause to enact illiberal legislation"
They continue:
"Kennan made these remarks at a time when popular fear of communism was threatening to overwhelm sound policy deliberation. In a sense, such a threat challenges democracies following periods of crisis-- the fear trumps the reasoning, the emotions overwhelm the mind"
In light of this, Trump Derangement Syndrome and the Nazi Moral Panic's parallels with McCarthyism (which started just a few years after Kennan's speech) are even more evident.
Ironically, Popper would not have tolerated all those people who keep ranting about punching "Nazis" and boasting that they won't talk to them - all the while invoking the paradox of tolerance.
Post ID: 6000123155313278124
Links - 20th November 2018 (1)
Maldives marine artwork destroyed for being a 'threat to Islamic unity' - "A new sculptural work, Coralarium, created by artist and environmentalist Jason deCaires Taylor, was demolished last week after it was deemed anti-Islamic. The semi-submerged artwork was criticised by religious leaders and scholars in the Maldives, where Islam is the official religion. The depiction of human figures in art is discouraged under Islamic law."
Asafoetida - "This is a gum from a variety of giant fennel, which naturally has a horrid and offensive smell, rather like rotting garlic, as in foetid. Yet it is considered the most blessed of flavourings amongst Jain and Brahmin Indians, who eat neither garlic nor onions, for it adds a very similar savouriness. Asafoetida is also a Godsend to the many millions of others who won’t eat or can’t properly digest raw or undercooked onion or who don’t like garlic, either to eat or subsequently smell on their breath"
A Breakthrough for U.S. Troops: Combat-Ready Pizza - The New York Times - "To qualify for M.R.E. duty, a food item has to be able to survive years of storage in a dank ship’s hold or a sun-baked shipping container, withstand Arctic freezes and tropical monsoons, stave off assaults by insects, and remain intact through a parachute airdrop or even a free fall from 100 feet. Forget 30-minute delivery — Army regulations say it has to stay fresh for 36 months. And after all that, the pizza still has to be tasty enough to eat... To accommodate an increasingly diverse force and to combat what the Army called menu fatigue, the directorate doubled the number of M.R.E. varieties, adding entrees like Thai chicken and vegetarian tortellini."
3 Ways Men Wanting to 'Focus On Her Pleasure' During Sex Can Still Be Sexist - Everyday Feminism
Since men are sexist whatever they do, they might as well reap the benefits and not bother getting woke to try to appease a crowd that will always despise them
Video: These women are stripping down for men's rights - "According to these women, feminists are dominating the conversation about gender issues, and it’s time for men to get a turn. That’s why they formed the “Lovely Ladies for Men’s Issues” and are releasing a calendar, full of sexy pictures and facts about the issues men face in today’s world."
These women look like feminists but...
Among other things they call out the misandry that's endemic in feminism
The Ombudsman: Are Top Executives Paid Enough? An Evidence-Based Review - "Our review of the evidence found that the notion that higher pay leads to the selection of better executives is undermined by the prevalence of poor recruiting methods. Moreover, higher pay fails to promote better performance. Instead, it undermines the intrinsic motivation of executives, inhibits their learning, leads them to ignore other stakeholders, and discourages them from considering the long-term effects of their decisions on stakeholders. Relating incentive payments to executives’ actions in an effective manner is not possible. Incentives also encourage unethical behavior. Organizations would benefit from using validated methods to hire top executives, reducing compensation, eliminating incentive plans, and strengthening stockholder governance related to the hiring and compensation of executives."
Higher pay = worse performance
Performance for Pay? The Relation Between CEO Incentive Compensation and Future Stock Price Performance - "Measures of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) excess compensation are negatively related to future firm returns and operating performance. The effect is stronger for more overconfident CEOs at firms with weaker corporate governance. Overconfident CEOs receiving high excess pay undertake activities such as overinvestment and value-destroying mergers and acquisitions that lead to shareholder wealth losses. "
Why We Choke Under Pressure (and How Not To) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "BEILOCK: There’s research showing that when you have friendly faces in front of you, people who are supportive — although that could feel nice, it actually creates pressure-filled situations. You often start thinking of yourself as they might. And so when my mother is in the room, I sometimes think of myself as a young girl. And you also are quite self-conscious... We know that sometimes people don’t perform up to their potential, precisely when they want to the most. And sometimes that happens because people pay too much attention to the details of what they’re doing, details that should be left on autopilot...
It’s a standard assumption in labor economics that higher pay leads to more effort, and that more effort leads to better performance, or at least higher productivity. What happened in this case, when the stakes were raised all the way to $10?
GNEEZY: So, the findings were striking. You see reduction in success rates across the board. All six games that we played resulted in lower success rate when the incentives were really high."
Does Money Really Affect Motivation? A Review of the Research - "if we want an engaged workforce, money is clearly not the answer. In fact, if we want employees to be happy with their pay, money is not the answer. In a nutshell: money does not buy engagement... for every standard deviation increase in reward, intrinsic motivation for interesting tasks decreases by about 25%. When rewards are tangible and foreseeable (if subjects know in advance how much extra money they will receive) intrinsic motivation decreases by 36%... The more emotionally stable, extraverted, agreeable or conscientious people are, the more they tend to like their jobs (irrespective of their salaries). But the personality of employees’ is not the most important determinant of their engagement levels. In fact, the biggest organizational cause of disengagement is incompetent leadership"
Time To Rethink CEO Compensation: Those With Higher Pay And Equity Lead Worse-Performing Companies - "Companies that paid their CEOs above the median have performed poorly in comparison with those that compensated their chief executives at or below the median (even though equity accounts for 70% or more of the typical annual pay package). This finding has held true especially in the long run"
The verdict on juries: fair, effective and efficient - "Ministry of Justice research has debunked some myths about juries, including the idea that they discriminate against black defendants or won't convict rapists, or that there are some crown courts where the police are unlikely to get convictions... all-white juries in Nottingham, a racially diverse area, appeared to be more sensitive in cases involving racial conflict and were more likely to convict a white defendant accused of assaulting a black victim. In rape cases the study found that, contrary to popular belief and previous official reports, juries convict more often than they acquit, with a 55% conviction rate in crown court rape trials"
White people overcompensate and are more favourable to black people when in a jury
8 Ways Domestic Cats Are a Serious Threat to Nature - "In the United States, an estimated 60 to 100 million cats range free, and the number of domestic cats has tripled during the past 40 years. Scientists from the Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimate that domesticated cats—both free-roaming pets and feral—kill as many as 4 billion birds and 22 billion small mammals in the U.S. each year. This makes them “likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals”...
CATS REPRODUCE LIKE RABBITS (IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING)....
CAT OWNERS ARE IN SERIOUS DENIAL...
In Cat Wars, Marra tells the story of Stephens Island, off the south island of New Zealand, where cats drove an endemic, flightless wren to extinction in—wait for it—roughly one year."
Left Outside the Social-Justice Movement's Small Tent - "“I never voiced my personal disagreements because having dissenting views is strictly forbidden in the activist circles I was a part of,” he explained. “If you’re white, you will be charged with being a ‘bad ally.’ (There's also certain gatherings you cannot come to because your mere presence might be threatening.) If you’re a person of color, your disagreements will usually be dismissed as some form of ‘internalized racism,’ ‘internalized sexism,’ or ‘respectability politics,’ among many other activist jargon's thrown at individuals who do not conform the groups views.”... “I discussed how trigger warnings have almost been rendered useless now that they’re used to alert individuals when talking about normal everyday things, like food, cars and animals. And that their use could potentially have adverse effects on academic freedom. I was accused of being outrageously insensitive and apparently made three activist cohorts have traumatic breakdowns.”... I asked if he thought his race and ethnicity made it easier or harder to dissent. “A little easier, I guess,” he replied, “But it really doesn't feel good being a called a ‘house nigger.’” He says he was ultimately kicked out of student-led social justice groups."... too many left-wing student groups treat no one as badly as students of color or women who consider themselves to be classical liberals, libertarians, or conservatives, or who merely disagree with the actions of progressive protesters on campus. They’re seen as special kinds of traitors."
On Campus, A Minority, and Reflecting on Free Speech - "The perception that minority students are so incompetent at formulating rebuttals against speech that is offensive or intolerant — read: conservative — that they need to be “protected” from it is beyond backward. It is both patronizing and paternalistic. I’m gay, black and an immigrant, and believe me, I’m more than capable of speaking up in defense of my values — especially in the face of those who despise my mere existence. As a minority student, I often encounter this kind of well-meaning, but deeply misguided dialogue that advocates for minorities by assuming their grievances. This effectively misrepresents and reduces these alleged victim groups to the very stereotypes and misconceptions protesters want to draw attention to, and, in most cases, wish to censor. Furthermore, this argument implicitly assumes the bigoted and racist stereotype that racial and ethnic minorities “all think alike” simply because we happen to “all look alike.”... this type of wanton censoring, in fact, dates back to the 1980s and ’90s, when speech codes — university policies restricting expression protected by the First Amendment — proliferated across colleges and universities. The theoretical underpinnings for such punishments appeared mostly in the legal doctrines of critical race theorists who argued that racist speech needs to be severely penalized as a means of protecting minorities from both physical and mental violence. Due to their unconstitutionality, speech codes did not survive legal challenges and, in some cases, harmed their intended beneficiaries. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 20 black students were charged by whites with “offensive speech.”"
How Free Speech on Campus Protects Disadvantaged Groups - "Every attempt to censor Charles Murray or Milo Yiannopoulos makes it easier to mount a campaign to fire someone like Lisa Durden (who made controversial comments about holding an “all black Memorial Day celebration” that excluded whites). Progressives lose the moral high ground they would need to defend radical and provocative speech—which is unfortunate because they are arguably the ones who need free-speech protections most. Americans tend to be politically to the right of most university faculty and students—and as a result the public is more likely to be shocked and offended by views expressed by progressive scholars than by academic conservatives, who are few in number, generally rather moderate politically, and usually cautious about what they say publicly. Politicians are also more likely to throw their weight behind campaigns against left-leaning scholars, given that Republicans control most state governments, and thereby the purse strings of most public universities. And if progressive scholars face a constant threat from the right coming from off-campus, they also face a threat from the left on campus. Many of the student-led campaigns that have made national news in the last two years have targeted professors who, themselves, identify as liberal or progressive—but who managed to challenge or violate some tenet of the prevailing activist orthodoxy... as Harvard’s President Faust warned in her commencement address, any effort to limit some speech “opens the dangerous possibility that the speech that is ultimately censored may be our own.”"
Racism In High School: 'I'm Not Oreo Or Ghetto -- I'm Just Being Me' - "It can be tough and scary to approach people this way, when I know that some people will turn out to be not nice at all. But I’ve seen how shameful race-based judgments are, and I would be ashamed to let those experiences change who I am."
'Kept male companion' to businesswoman fails in bid to rescind ex-wife's maintenance - "A man who claimed that he has no personal income and was just a “consort” to a lover who was a successful businesswoman has failed in his attempt to rescind a monthly maintenance of $2,000 for his ex-wife... “All I need to do is keep (the partner) happy as her consort…. Here is the danger: if the day should come that (the partner) tires of me, I will no longer be her consort and be out on the streets”. The man also submitted to the court a private investigator’s report to show that his former wife did not require maintenance as she was using money to play mahjong."
Maybe maintenance could be used to justify the gender wage gap in Singapore - even if it were real
Forget Nature Versus Nurture. Nature Has Won - "In Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are Robert Plomin makes the case that genetic differences cause most variation in psychological traits – things like personality and cognitive abilities. The way your parents raise you, the schools you attend – they don’t have much effect on those traits. Children are similar to their parents, but that similarity is due to shared genetics, rather than shared family environment... The children of successful professionals get higher-than-average scores, but that’s because they share genes linked to greater achievement, rather than gaining from their home environment. Parent-offspring similarity in occupational status and income is chiefly due to genetic factors and almost nothing to do with upbringing. There are (on average) genetic differences between people in different professions, and between different social classes. I’m sure that absolutely everyone will be happy to hear that... The science discussed in the book is generally sound, as you’d expect from one of the world’s leading psychometricians... Steven Pinker said: “For most of the twentieth century it was assumed that psychological traits were caused by environmental factors, called nurture.” This was completely wrong. Problems like p-value fishing and the current ‘replication crisis’ are nothing compared to the tsunami that’s coming. Indeed, social scientists have done such a terrible job that it’s hard to see how the field can be repaired. They wanted the false results they got, and they still do. I’m sure their descendants will as well. Isn’t heritability grand?"
Asafoetida - "This is a gum from a variety of giant fennel, which naturally has a horrid and offensive smell, rather like rotting garlic, as in foetid. Yet it is considered the most blessed of flavourings amongst Jain and Brahmin Indians, who eat neither garlic nor onions, for it adds a very similar savouriness. Asafoetida is also a Godsend to the many millions of others who won’t eat or can’t properly digest raw or undercooked onion or who don’t like garlic, either to eat or subsequently smell on their breath"
A Breakthrough for U.S. Troops: Combat-Ready Pizza - The New York Times - "To qualify for M.R.E. duty, a food item has to be able to survive years of storage in a dank ship’s hold or a sun-baked shipping container, withstand Arctic freezes and tropical monsoons, stave off assaults by insects, and remain intact through a parachute airdrop or even a free fall from 100 feet. Forget 30-minute delivery — Army regulations say it has to stay fresh for 36 months. And after all that, the pizza still has to be tasty enough to eat... To accommodate an increasingly diverse force and to combat what the Army called menu fatigue, the directorate doubled the number of M.R.E. varieties, adding entrees like Thai chicken and vegetarian tortellini."
3 Ways Men Wanting to 'Focus On Her Pleasure' During Sex Can Still Be Sexist - Everyday Feminism
Since men are sexist whatever they do, they might as well reap the benefits and not bother getting woke to try to appease a crowd that will always despise them
Video: These women are stripping down for men's rights - "According to these women, feminists are dominating the conversation about gender issues, and it’s time for men to get a turn. That’s why they formed the “Lovely Ladies for Men’s Issues” and are releasing a calendar, full of sexy pictures and facts about the issues men face in today’s world."
These women look like feminists but...
Among other things they call out the misandry that's endemic in feminism
The Ombudsman: Are Top Executives Paid Enough? An Evidence-Based Review - "Our review of the evidence found that the notion that higher pay leads to the selection of better executives is undermined by the prevalence of poor recruiting methods. Moreover, higher pay fails to promote better performance. Instead, it undermines the intrinsic motivation of executives, inhibits their learning, leads them to ignore other stakeholders, and discourages them from considering the long-term effects of their decisions on stakeholders. Relating incentive payments to executives’ actions in an effective manner is not possible. Incentives also encourage unethical behavior. Organizations would benefit from using validated methods to hire top executives, reducing compensation, eliminating incentive plans, and strengthening stockholder governance related to the hiring and compensation of executives."
Higher pay = worse performance
Performance for Pay? The Relation Between CEO Incentive Compensation and Future Stock Price Performance - "Measures of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) excess compensation are negatively related to future firm returns and operating performance. The effect is stronger for more overconfident CEOs at firms with weaker corporate governance. Overconfident CEOs receiving high excess pay undertake activities such as overinvestment and value-destroying mergers and acquisitions that lead to shareholder wealth losses. "
Why We Choke Under Pressure (and How Not To) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "BEILOCK: There’s research showing that when you have friendly faces in front of you, people who are supportive — although that could feel nice, it actually creates pressure-filled situations. You often start thinking of yourself as they might. And so when my mother is in the room, I sometimes think of myself as a young girl. And you also are quite self-conscious... We know that sometimes people don’t perform up to their potential, precisely when they want to the most. And sometimes that happens because people pay too much attention to the details of what they’re doing, details that should be left on autopilot...
It’s a standard assumption in labor economics that higher pay leads to more effort, and that more effort leads to better performance, or at least higher productivity. What happened in this case, when the stakes were raised all the way to $10?
GNEEZY: So, the findings were striking. You see reduction in success rates across the board. All six games that we played resulted in lower success rate when the incentives were really high."
Does Money Really Affect Motivation? A Review of the Research - "if we want an engaged workforce, money is clearly not the answer. In fact, if we want employees to be happy with their pay, money is not the answer. In a nutshell: money does not buy engagement... for every standard deviation increase in reward, intrinsic motivation for interesting tasks decreases by about 25%. When rewards are tangible and foreseeable (if subjects know in advance how much extra money they will receive) intrinsic motivation decreases by 36%... The more emotionally stable, extraverted, agreeable or conscientious people are, the more they tend to like their jobs (irrespective of their salaries). But the personality of employees’ is not the most important determinant of their engagement levels. In fact, the biggest organizational cause of disengagement is incompetent leadership"
Time To Rethink CEO Compensation: Those With Higher Pay And Equity Lead Worse-Performing Companies - "Companies that paid their CEOs above the median have performed poorly in comparison with those that compensated their chief executives at or below the median (even though equity accounts for 70% or more of the typical annual pay package). This finding has held true especially in the long run"
The verdict on juries: fair, effective and efficient - "Ministry of Justice research has debunked some myths about juries, including the idea that they discriminate against black defendants or won't convict rapists, or that there are some crown courts where the police are unlikely to get convictions... all-white juries in Nottingham, a racially diverse area, appeared to be more sensitive in cases involving racial conflict and were more likely to convict a white defendant accused of assaulting a black victim. In rape cases the study found that, contrary to popular belief and previous official reports, juries convict more often than they acquit, with a 55% conviction rate in crown court rape trials"
White people overcompensate and are more favourable to black people when in a jury
8 Ways Domestic Cats Are a Serious Threat to Nature - "In the United States, an estimated 60 to 100 million cats range free, and the number of domestic cats has tripled during the past 40 years. Scientists from the Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimate that domesticated cats—both free-roaming pets and feral—kill as many as 4 billion birds and 22 billion small mammals in the U.S. each year. This makes them “likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for U.S. birds and mammals”...
CATS REPRODUCE LIKE RABBITS (IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING)....
CAT OWNERS ARE IN SERIOUS DENIAL...
In Cat Wars, Marra tells the story of Stephens Island, off the south island of New Zealand, where cats drove an endemic, flightless wren to extinction in—wait for it—roughly one year."
Left Outside the Social-Justice Movement's Small Tent - "“I never voiced my personal disagreements because having dissenting views is strictly forbidden in the activist circles I was a part of,” he explained. “If you’re white, you will be charged with being a ‘bad ally.’ (There's also certain gatherings you cannot come to because your mere presence might be threatening.) If you’re a person of color, your disagreements will usually be dismissed as some form of ‘internalized racism,’ ‘internalized sexism,’ or ‘respectability politics,’ among many other activist jargon's thrown at individuals who do not conform the groups views.”... “I discussed how trigger warnings have almost been rendered useless now that they’re used to alert individuals when talking about normal everyday things, like food, cars and animals. And that their use could potentially have adverse effects on academic freedom. I was accused of being outrageously insensitive and apparently made three activist cohorts have traumatic breakdowns.”... I asked if he thought his race and ethnicity made it easier or harder to dissent. “A little easier, I guess,” he replied, “But it really doesn't feel good being a called a ‘house nigger.’” He says he was ultimately kicked out of student-led social justice groups."... too many left-wing student groups treat no one as badly as students of color or women who consider themselves to be classical liberals, libertarians, or conservatives, or who merely disagree with the actions of progressive protesters on campus. They’re seen as special kinds of traitors."
On Campus, A Minority, and Reflecting on Free Speech - "The perception that minority students are so incompetent at formulating rebuttals against speech that is offensive or intolerant — read: conservative — that they need to be “protected” from it is beyond backward. It is both patronizing and paternalistic. I’m gay, black and an immigrant, and believe me, I’m more than capable of speaking up in defense of my values — especially in the face of those who despise my mere existence. As a minority student, I often encounter this kind of well-meaning, but deeply misguided dialogue that advocates for minorities by assuming their grievances. This effectively misrepresents and reduces these alleged victim groups to the very stereotypes and misconceptions protesters want to draw attention to, and, in most cases, wish to censor. Furthermore, this argument implicitly assumes the bigoted and racist stereotype that racial and ethnic minorities “all think alike” simply because we happen to “all look alike.”... this type of wanton censoring, in fact, dates back to the 1980s and ’90s, when speech codes — university policies restricting expression protected by the First Amendment — proliferated across colleges and universities. The theoretical underpinnings for such punishments appeared mostly in the legal doctrines of critical race theorists who argued that racist speech needs to be severely penalized as a means of protecting minorities from both physical and mental violence. Due to their unconstitutionality, speech codes did not survive legal challenges and, in some cases, harmed their intended beneficiaries. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 20 black students were charged by whites with “offensive speech.”"
How Free Speech on Campus Protects Disadvantaged Groups - "Every attempt to censor Charles Murray or Milo Yiannopoulos makes it easier to mount a campaign to fire someone like Lisa Durden (who made controversial comments about holding an “all black Memorial Day celebration” that excluded whites). Progressives lose the moral high ground they would need to defend radical and provocative speech—which is unfortunate because they are arguably the ones who need free-speech protections most. Americans tend to be politically to the right of most university faculty and students—and as a result the public is more likely to be shocked and offended by views expressed by progressive scholars than by academic conservatives, who are few in number, generally rather moderate politically, and usually cautious about what they say publicly. Politicians are also more likely to throw their weight behind campaigns against left-leaning scholars, given that Republicans control most state governments, and thereby the purse strings of most public universities. And if progressive scholars face a constant threat from the right coming from off-campus, they also face a threat from the left on campus. Many of the student-led campaigns that have made national news in the last two years have targeted professors who, themselves, identify as liberal or progressive—but who managed to challenge or violate some tenet of the prevailing activist orthodoxy... as Harvard’s President Faust warned in her commencement address, any effort to limit some speech “opens the dangerous possibility that the speech that is ultimately censored may be our own.”"
Racism In High School: 'I'm Not Oreo Or Ghetto -- I'm Just Being Me' - "It can be tough and scary to approach people this way, when I know that some people will turn out to be not nice at all. But I’ve seen how shameful race-based judgments are, and I would be ashamed to let those experiences change who I am."
'Kept male companion' to businesswoman fails in bid to rescind ex-wife's maintenance - "A man who claimed that he has no personal income and was just a “consort” to a lover who was a successful businesswoman has failed in his attempt to rescind a monthly maintenance of $2,000 for his ex-wife... “All I need to do is keep (the partner) happy as her consort…. Here is the danger: if the day should come that (the partner) tires of me, I will no longer be her consort and be out on the streets”. The man also submitted to the court a private investigator’s report to show that his former wife did not require maintenance as she was using money to play mahjong."
Maybe maintenance could be used to justify the gender wage gap in Singapore - even if it were real
Forget Nature Versus Nurture. Nature Has Won - "In Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are Robert Plomin makes the case that genetic differences cause most variation in psychological traits – things like personality and cognitive abilities. The way your parents raise you, the schools you attend – they don’t have much effect on those traits. Children are similar to their parents, but that similarity is due to shared genetics, rather than shared family environment... The children of successful professionals get higher-than-average scores, but that’s because they share genes linked to greater achievement, rather than gaining from their home environment. Parent-offspring similarity in occupational status and income is chiefly due to genetic factors and almost nothing to do with upbringing. There are (on average) genetic differences between people in different professions, and between different social classes. I’m sure that absolutely everyone will be happy to hear that... The science discussed in the book is generally sound, as you’d expect from one of the world’s leading psychometricians... Steven Pinker said: “For most of the twentieth century it was assumed that psychological traits were caused by environmental factors, called nurture.” This was completely wrong. Problems like p-value fishing and the current ‘replication crisis’ are nothing compared to the tsunami that’s coming. Indeed, social scientists have done such a terrible job that it’s hard to see how the field can be repaired. They wanted the false results they got, and they still do. I’m sure their descendants will as well. Isn’t heritability grand?"
Post ID: 1781126404407638520
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Ignoring grooming gang victims
I saw an interesting quote online recently regarding the UK grooming gangs, attributed to ex-chief prosecutor Nazir Afzal who allegedly said the Home Office told police forces in 2008 that “as far as these young girls who are being exploited in towns and cities, we believe they have made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour and therefore it's not for you police officers to get involved in."
I tried looking for the provenance of the quote, but only found the usual "far right" sources.
Fortunately, UKIP sourced the quote as coming from:
"Mr Nazir Afzal on the BBC's PM programme 19/10/2018 (quoted comment spoken at approx. 34 minutes 10 seconds): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0000sf1"
Indeed, I have verified that the very same words were spoken on the programme. Readers are invited to verify this themselves - the programme is available to listen to till 18th November. To forestall the inevitable accusations of this being taken out of context, I have transcribed the relevant bits of this programme dealing with grooming.
The quote, of course, is also compatible with one theory that I've heard - that this isn't specifically a problem when dealing with "Asian" men, but that there is a long history in the UK of dismissing allegations of sexual abuse of working class girls (I have been unable to pull up historical data on the relative scale of the problem).
However, given that it is documented (in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (1997 – 2013) among other places, no less) that "diversity" considerations played a part in the coverup, it is simplistic to pretend that the current round of allegations are the same as the others; history, after all, doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.
Transcript:
'They threatened them with violence. They plied them with alcohol and drugs.'
'The men who have been convicted of these appalling crimes deliberately targeted their victims because of their vulnerability.'
'Details can be reported for the first time about a group of 20 men, mainly of Pakistani heritage, who targeted 15 girls in Huddersfield over a period of seven years, we get reaction.'...
'Details can be reported for the first time about a gang of 20 men who groomed and sexually abused vulnerable girls in the Huddersfield area. The men were convicted in a series of trials of subjecting more than a dozen girls to what one judge described as a campaign of violent wicked abuse. Danny Savage reports from Leeds Crown Court'
'Over a period of seven years ending in 2011, 15 girls were sexually abused by scores of older Asian men. One of the victims was only 11 years old. A consistent theme heard in court is that girls would be driven up onto the remote moors above West Yorkshire towns late at night, and abandoned if they didn't comply with sexual demands from the men. One sheep farmer living in a remote Pennine house has told the BBC how he found distressed girls on his doorstep on a number of occasions. Victims and their families say they repeatedly told West Yorkshire Police what was happening, but no arrests were made until years later.'...
'A pattern of vile and wicked abuse carried out over a period of seven years. 15 girls sexually abused and raped by a group of men, mainly of Pakistani heritage. Now a judge has ruled that 20 men convicted of the offenses in a series of trials at Leeds Crown Court can be publicly named. The men were convicted more than 120 offenses against 15 girls, some as young as 11. Their identities can now be revealed and reporting restrictions lifted after a legal challenge by the BBC and other media organizations. DCI Ian Mottershaw from West Yorkshire Police said the investigation had been complex with tireless work over five years.'
'We welcome the convictions and the sentences which have been passed down throughout this year to those individuals who subjected vulnerable young children to unthinkable sexual and physical abuse. Child sexual exploitation is one of the most important challenges facing the police. Safeguarding the vulnerable and protecting victims is West Yorkshire police's top priority is totally unacceptable and it is the responsibility of all agencies, communities and individuals to identify those responsible and help bring them to justice'
'Michael Quinn from the Crown Prosecution Service emphasized the vulnerability of the victims upon whom these men had preyed'
'The men who have been convicted of these appalling crimes deliberately targeted their victims because of their vulnerability. They groomed them and exploited them for their own sexual gratification. Sometimes they used threats of violence. Typically they plied them with alcohol and drugs. At the heart of this case, is the victims who have all showed immense courage in coming forward to assist the investigation and support the prosecution case. I sincerely hope that the convictions of their abusers will go some way to helping these young women rebuild their lives.'
'The BBC's Johnny Savage has been following the case and Danny, just explain why these names are emerging today.'
'Well, Carolyn, basically there was a reporting restriction so we couldn't talk about any of these trials, which have been ongoing for months now, because they were all connected to each other. So these men, there was such a large number of them, they had to be tried over a period of three trials if you like. So we had the first the second and the third trial. Now that they finished we can talk about what has happened, the concern was that anything reported about the first may have influenced the second or third. Now what we know is that the men groomed these girls either by making them feel special or plying them with alcohol. It's a, it's a familiar story for anybody who's heard about these sort of cases before. They gave them cannabis and other drugs. They then used violence and threats to control them. On one occasion threatening to bomb a girl's family home, threatening to physically attack other family members also kept the gills in line if you like. The victims in this case, and they were often taken to parties where they were given drink and drugs and then forced to engage in sexual activity with men who were sometimes decades older than them. On other occasions they were assaulted in carparks above takeaways, at snooker clubs, and we've heard consistently throughout these cases of victims being taken up onto the wild moors about the West Yorkshire towns like Huddersfield, in Bradford and if they didn't comply with what their abusers wanted to do they were beaten up and threatened with being left there. And sometimes, we've heard from one victim who was actually dumped up on the Moors late at night when she didn't want to do what her abusers wanted her to. We also heard from a farmer, I've talked to a farmer over the last few days who has found girls abandoned up on the moors in the past and has had to take them to safety. So it is backed up by the experience of people living in the area and victims and their families say they repeatedly told police and the authorities what was happening at the time. One woman says she even wrote to the Prime Minister at the time but said it had fallen on deaf ears and one girl said when she tried to tell two officers who took her to hospital after she was assaulted by one of our abusers the police said to her you must have wanted it. Now I tried to get a question into West Yorkshire Police today about the fact that their actions were described as disgraceful by the prosecution during one of the trials here, but the police were only giving a statement today, they weren't answering any questions. Carolyn'
'What can you tell us about the perpetrators and why there were several trials?'
'Well, there were 20 perpetrators in all. They're mainly of Pakistani heritage. They were from Huddersfield, Bradford, Dewsbury and Sheffield, aged now between 27 and 54, one of the youngest victims was just 11 years old, the ringleader Amir Singh Diwali was jailed for life and told he must serve a minimum of 18 years. The judge said his treatment of the girls was inhuman. Other abusers had terrifying nicknames such as Bully, and Dracula which just intimidated their victims even more. Now, so far, 16 of the 20 men convicted have been jailed. The judge said to, Judge Geoffrey Marson said to some of them on conviction, the way you treated the girls defies understanding, the abuse was vile and wicked, and so far as the 16 men have been jailed for a total of 221 years if you add their sentences together but there are still four more other men who are due to be sentenced next month who have been found guilty already but are awaiting sentencing so we don't know how long they're going to prison for yet.'
'Tony Savage, thank you. Well Barry Sheerman is the Labour MP for Huddersfield. Just before we came on air, I asked him how long he'd been aware of the problem'
'Way back, long time ago. I was calling for action in 2007, made a major, major speech in Westminster Hall in Parliament in January 2009. But I'd been dealing with constituency cases that I knew that it was going on. And of course people, you know, they think this is just Huddersfield and Kirklees of the North, but yet these cases now have been in Rochdale and Birmingham in Burnley, Leicester, Peterborough, Newcastle, Oxford, Telford, Norwich, High Wycombe, Middlesborough, Bristol and more. So, this was a national crime, these gangs were in all these big towns and cities in Britain, and we were slow, slow to react'
'And these girls were calling out this behavior for a long time. it was drawn to your attention, why didn't the authorities pay attention?'
'Well, Carolyn, you got to be careful about authorities. I couldn't get the BBC or the media to take any interest. When I did my 2007, I put it on record, they were protected by Parliamentary privilege to report what I said, I got almost no coverage. Everyone thought it was too difficult and too disturbing. When I went to see my local police, who's in charge, a very nice man in charge of child protection, he said, Mr. Sheerman, it's so difficult to get evidence These girls are in love with or in fear of the perpetrator. And we haven't got the resources for surveillance and proper investigation. So you know, there were a lot of people aware, but there weren't the resources or the willingness really to grapple'
'And all the girls being looked after now, have they received the care that you are calling for?'
'I don't think anyone yet knows. Many of these cases are we know current, very recent, and that is why I like us to have a serious inquiry. You know, the government could appoint a very serious independent, someone like the Children's Commissioner, someone of that caliber, to look about why this happened, what the roots of it were, why these men got into these gangs and thought they could do this to young girls. And secondly, what has happened to the victims and how they've been treated.'
'Of course there was the Alexis J report wasn't there into Rotherham, but you want more''
'I'll certainly want more because this is such a deep concerning pattern of behavior in all our major, nearly all of our towns and cities, it's just quite overwhelming that the amount of activity that was going on. We must get this sorted'
'Barry Sheerman. Well Simon Bailey is the Chief Constable of Norfolk Police and the National Police Chiefs' Council lead for child protection. So Bailely you heard there the list of towns and cities cited by Barry Sherman. Cases like that, he said, too difficult, too disturbing it seemed to deal with. That's just not good enough is it?'
'I think when Professor Alexis J shone a light on the horrific abuse in Rotherham in 2014, it was a wake up call for the whole of the country. And increasingly over the last four years, there have been more and more cases. We've become increasingly aware of this particular pattern of abuse. And we are coming to terms with the fact that this is taking place in towns and cities, hamlets up and down the country. And unfortunately, today is just another example of the scale of the challenge that we face. And we as a country have to start asking the very difficult question as to what culturally drives this, what makes it all right in the eyes of these particular groups to abuse some of the most vulnerable children in society in the way that, in the way they do'
'You're pointing towards the point that has been made, been made before. Concerns about being labeled racist if you call out this action, is that what you're saying?'
'Look, I think Barry Sheerman mentioned it, he was raising in Parliament years ago, and it was being ignored, as he said by the media and other agencies. I think there has been a problem, I think it's a less of a problem. We've invested a significant amount of money in tackling the threat. But we would also recognize that there is so much more to be done. And we genuinely at this moment in time don't understand the cultural drivers behind this particular model of abuse.'
'Alexis Jay said, by far, the majority of perpetrators were described as Asian by victims, yet throughout the entire period counselors didn't engage directly with the Pakistani heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Now, are you saying that you want to address it, but what do you do? And how can you come to a point where any girl in future coming forward isn't going to just fear that they won't be believed?'
'Well, let me, let me address that issue first and foremost. The police service in the last four years since Professor J's report has taken some really significant steps to improve the response. And, and I believe in the vast majority of cases, young girls, young children, because they are children coming forward now will be dealt with very, very differently indeed. And whilst I recognize it's difficult, officers have now been trained to understand, to spot the signs of abuse, and the police service has taken some really significant steps forward in understanding some of those vulnerable children who have had difficult upbringings, in lots of cases have found themselves socially isolated, are no longer being dealt with as a problem. And they are recognized as being the victims that they are. The biggest challenge for us is, is actually asking the difficult questions, of saying: right, why is it that we are seeing this model of abuse? Why is it becoming so prolific? Why are we seeing such appalling acts being performed on these, on these children?'
'Why do you think it is?'
'I don't know. And that's the question that we have to ask ourselves as a country. We have to now lift the lid off this, we have to be bold, we have to ignore the allegations that we are being racist because we are not being racist. We have to really challenge ourselves to ask the question: how is it that this model of abuse that has become so prolific, it's still there and undoubtedly there will still be incidents taking place up and down the country, is being allowed to continue?'
'Simon Bailey, thank you.'...
'A judges ruled that details can be reported about 20 men who were convicted of child sexual abuse in a series of trials. The men who are mainly of Pakistani heritage lived in Yorkshire. They targeted 15 girls over a period of seven years. between 2004 and 2011. Reporting restrictions were lifted following a legal challenge by the BBC and other media organizations. Nazir Afzal is former chief crown prosecutor in northwest of England. He was the main prosecutor in the case against the Rochdale grooming gang in 2012. And Nazir Afzal, you hear the case here we heard from the local MP listing the towns and cities that have experienced similar cases. How do you respond?'
'Good afternoon, Carolyn, I think there's about 20 now, 20 towns and cities that have had this type of model of street grooming prosecuted, and it is sadly no surprise, I suppose there's one silver lining, namely the fact that these individuals are now being prosecuted, we've now got I think more than 200 men have now been prosecuted over the last five, seven years for this type of behavior. But the reality of course, is this has been going on for perhaps two decades. And so we're now having a reckoning in effect. And in large part, it is about the failure of authorities. It's the failure of all agencies, all agencies, to not listen to what these young girls invariably were going through. And yes, we've learned, they, they all keep talking about learning lessons. But the reality of course, is they should have got it right first time, and the only person that knew they weren't going to be listened to was the perpetrator, the offender, and he knew that and therefore he was able to carry on being, abusing them in the way that he did.'
'And in the meantime, these vulnerable and brave young women suffered and tried to give evidence that, that the wider issue these girls were calling out this behavior for a long time before anything was done.'
'Absolutely, Carolyn. If you think about it, you may not know this but back in 2008, the Home Office sent a circular to all police forces in the country saying 'as far as these young girls who are being exploited in, in towns and cities, we believe that they've made an informed choice about their sexual behavior. And therefore it's not for you police officers to get involved in'. That's the landscape coming from the top down in 2008, rest assured all agencies are gonna listen to it. It only changed because of the work that we did. And the work the Times newspaper did in 2010, 11. The fact that we were able to bring the prosecution in Rochdale led to this investigation in West Yorkshire opening, it only opened in 2013 and the series of prosecutions that followed indicate to me that the agencies are getting it right now. But the reality of course, is that we've lost a generation of young girls who've been left behind and abused.'
'And looking back at the Alexis J report into Rochdale staff describing nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist, erm how do you counteract that suspicion and that fear because, it's very difficult for people to come forward if they think that they're going to be tainted or tarred or labeled in some way?'
'Carolyn, 2011, 12, maybe it's easier for me because I'm from a British Pakistani heritage, that I was able to say these things. The reality of course, is that it's not their gender - sorry it's not their race or ethnicity that drives their behaviors, it's the fact that they are men and the fact that they think they can get away with it that drives it. And you have to call it what it is. The reality is that most victims of child sexual abuse will be harmed in the home or online or institutions. And the vast majority of offenders are British white men. But when it comes to street grooming of the type that we're dealing with here, the British Pakistani men and South Asian men generally are sadly the group that are disproportionately involved. Let's not forget, the, the ringleader of this particular gang in Huddersfield was born in India, of Sikh heritage. So the reality is, it's much wider than we think, it's much worse than we think, but we have to listen, you start by listening to victims and survivors, and you therefore improve your services. And I don't buy political correctness, I believe that we've just been incompetent. If we did our job properly, this generation of girls would not have suffered'
'Nazir Afzal, thank you'...
'Over a period of seven years ending in 2011, 15 girls were sexually abused by scores of men, mainly of Pakistani heritage. One of the victims was only 11 years old. The ringleader, Amere Singh Dhaliwal, was jailed for life and told he must serve a minimum of 18 years. He was found guilty of 54 offenses, including 22 rapes involving 11 girls. The judge said his treatments of them was inhuman. Other abusers had nicknames, such as Bully, and Dracula. Victims and their families say they repeatedly told police and the authorities what was happening, but no action was taken. One mother said she even wrote to the Prime Minister. Another parent, whose words are spoken by a producer, described what life was like.'
'She would come home disorientated, scratches, bites. On one occasion, she came home and her neck was completely black with bites from one side to the other. A taxi had just pulled up outside and pushed her out. I could see another girl in the back and then it just drove off"
I tried looking for the provenance of the quote, but only found the usual "far right" sources.
Fortunately, UKIP sourced the quote as coming from:
"Mr Nazir Afzal on the BBC's PM programme 19/10/2018 (quoted comment spoken at approx. 34 minutes 10 seconds): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0000sf1"
Indeed, I have verified that the very same words were spoken on the programme. Readers are invited to verify this themselves - the programme is available to listen to till 18th November. To forestall the inevitable accusations of this being taken out of context, I have transcribed the relevant bits of this programme dealing with grooming.
The quote, of course, is also compatible with one theory that I've heard - that this isn't specifically a problem when dealing with "Asian" men, but that there is a long history in the UK of dismissing allegations of sexual abuse of working class girls (I have been unable to pull up historical data on the relative scale of the problem).
However, given that it is documented (in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (1997 – 2013) among other places, no less) that "diversity" considerations played a part in the coverup, it is simplistic to pretend that the current round of allegations are the same as the others; history, after all, doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.
Transcript:
'They threatened them with violence. They plied them with alcohol and drugs.'
'The men who have been convicted of these appalling crimes deliberately targeted their victims because of their vulnerability.'
'Details can be reported for the first time about a group of 20 men, mainly of Pakistani heritage, who targeted 15 girls in Huddersfield over a period of seven years, we get reaction.'...
'Details can be reported for the first time about a gang of 20 men who groomed and sexually abused vulnerable girls in the Huddersfield area. The men were convicted in a series of trials of subjecting more than a dozen girls to what one judge described as a campaign of violent wicked abuse. Danny Savage reports from Leeds Crown Court'
'Over a period of seven years ending in 2011, 15 girls were sexually abused by scores of older Asian men. One of the victims was only 11 years old. A consistent theme heard in court is that girls would be driven up onto the remote moors above West Yorkshire towns late at night, and abandoned if they didn't comply with sexual demands from the men. One sheep farmer living in a remote Pennine house has told the BBC how he found distressed girls on his doorstep on a number of occasions. Victims and their families say they repeatedly told West Yorkshire Police what was happening, but no arrests were made until years later.'...
'A pattern of vile and wicked abuse carried out over a period of seven years. 15 girls sexually abused and raped by a group of men, mainly of Pakistani heritage. Now a judge has ruled that 20 men convicted of the offenses in a series of trials at Leeds Crown Court can be publicly named. The men were convicted more than 120 offenses against 15 girls, some as young as 11. Their identities can now be revealed and reporting restrictions lifted after a legal challenge by the BBC and other media organizations. DCI Ian Mottershaw from West Yorkshire Police said the investigation had been complex with tireless work over five years.'
'We welcome the convictions and the sentences which have been passed down throughout this year to those individuals who subjected vulnerable young children to unthinkable sexual and physical abuse. Child sexual exploitation is one of the most important challenges facing the police. Safeguarding the vulnerable and protecting victims is West Yorkshire police's top priority is totally unacceptable and it is the responsibility of all agencies, communities and individuals to identify those responsible and help bring them to justice'
'Michael Quinn from the Crown Prosecution Service emphasized the vulnerability of the victims upon whom these men had preyed'
'The men who have been convicted of these appalling crimes deliberately targeted their victims because of their vulnerability. They groomed them and exploited them for their own sexual gratification. Sometimes they used threats of violence. Typically they plied them with alcohol and drugs. At the heart of this case, is the victims who have all showed immense courage in coming forward to assist the investigation and support the prosecution case. I sincerely hope that the convictions of their abusers will go some way to helping these young women rebuild their lives.'
'The BBC's Johnny Savage has been following the case and Danny, just explain why these names are emerging today.'
'Well, Carolyn, basically there was a reporting restriction so we couldn't talk about any of these trials, which have been ongoing for months now, because they were all connected to each other. So these men, there was such a large number of them, they had to be tried over a period of three trials if you like. So we had the first the second and the third trial. Now that they finished we can talk about what has happened, the concern was that anything reported about the first may have influenced the second or third. Now what we know is that the men groomed these girls either by making them feel special or plying them with alcohol. It's a, it's a familiar story for anybody who's heard about these sort of cases before. They gave them cannabis and other drugs. They then used violence and threats to control them. On one occasion threatening to bomb a girl's family home, threatening to physically attack other family members also kept the gills in line if you like. The victims in this case, and they were often taken to parties where they were given drink and drugs and then forced to engage in sexual activity with men who were sometimes decades older than them. On other occasions they were assaulted in carparks above takeaways, at snooker clubs, and we've heard consistently throughout these cases of victims being taken up onto the wild moors about the West Yorkshire towns like Huddersfield, in Bradford and if they didn't comply with what their abusers wanted to do they were beaten up and threatened with being left there. And sometimes, we've heard from one victim who was actually dumped up on the Moors late at night when she didn't want to do what her abusers wanted her to. We also heard from a farmer, I've talked to a farmer over the last few days who has found girls abandoned up on the moors in the past and has had to take them to safety. So it is backed up by the experience of people living in the area and victims and their families say they repeatedly told police and the authorities what was happening at the time. One woman says she even wrote to the Prime Minister at the time but said it had fallen on deaf ears and one girl said when she tried to tell two officers who took her to hospital after she was assaulted by one of our abusers the police said to her you must have wanted it. Now I tried to get a question into West Yorkshire Police today about the fact that their actions were described as disgraceful by the prosecution during one of the trials here, but the police were only giving a statement today, they weren't answering any questions. Carolyn'
'What can you tell us about the perpetrators and why there were several trials?'
'Well, there were 20 perpetrators in all. They're mainly of Pakistani heritage. They were from Huddersfield, Bradford, Dewsbury and Sheffield, aged now between 27 and 54, one of the youngest victims was just 11 years old, the ringleader Amir Singh Diwali was jailed for life and told he must serve a minimum of 18 years. The judge said his treatment of the girls was inhuman. Other abusers had terrifying nicknames such as Bully, and Dracula which just intimidated their victims even more. Now, so far, 16 of the 20 men convicted have been jailed. The judge said to, Judge Geoffrey Marson said to some of them on conviction, the way you treated the girls defies understanding, the abuse was vile and wicked, and so far as the 16 men have been jailed for a total of 221 years if you add their sentences together but there are still four more other men who are due to be sentenced next month who have been found guilty already but are awaiting sentencing so we don't know how long they're going to prison for yet.'
'Tony Savage, thank you. Well Barry Sheerman is the Labour MP for Huddersfield. Just before we came on air, I asked him how long he'd been aware of the problem'
'Way back, long time ago. I was calling for action in 2007, made a major, major speech in Westminster Hall in Parliament in January 2009. But I'd been dealing with constituency cases that I knew that it was going on. And of course people, you know, they think this is just Huddersfield and Kirklees of the North, but yet these cases now have been in Rochdale and Birmingham in Burnley, Leicester, Peterborough, Newcastle, Oxford, Telford, Norwich, High Wycombe, Middlesborough, Bristol and more. So, this was a national crime, these gangs were in all these big towns and cities in Britain, and we were slow, slow to react'
'And these girls were calling out this behavior for a long time. it was drawn to your attention, why didn't the authorities pay attention?'
'Well, Carolyn, you got to be careful about authorities. I couldn't get the BBC or the media to take any interest. When I did my 2007, I put it on record, they were protected by Parliamentary privilege to report what I said, I got almost no coverage. Everyone thought it was too difficult and too disturbing. When I went to see my local police, who's in charge, a very nice man in charge of child protection, he said, Mr. Sheerman, it's so difficult to get evidence These girls are in love with or in fear of the perpetrator. And we haven't got the resources for surveillance and proper investigation. So you know, there were a lot of people aware, but there weren't the resources or the willingness really to grapple'
'And all the girls being looked after now, have they received the care that you are calling for?'
'I don't think anyone yet knows. Many of these cases are we know current, very recent, and that is why I like us to have a serious inquiry. You know, the government could appoint a very serious independent, someone like the Children's Commissioner, someone of that caliber, to look about why this happened, what the roots of it were, why these men got into these gangs and thought they could do this to young girls. And secondly, what has happened to the victims and how they've been treated.'
'Of course there was the Alexis J report wasn't there into Rotherham, but you want more''
'I'll certainly want more because this is such a deep concerning pattern of behavior in all our major, nearly all of our towns and cities, it's just quite overwhelming that the amount of activity that was going on. We must get this sorted'
'Barry Sheerman. Well Simon Bailey is the Chief Constable of Norfolk Police and the National Police Chiefs' Council lead for child protection. So Bailely you heard there the list of towns and cities cited by Barry Sherman. Cases like that, he said, too difficult, too disturbing it seemed to deal with. That's just not good enough is it?'
'I think when Professor Alexis J shone a light on the horrific abuse in Rotherham in 2014, it was a wake up call for the whole of the country. And increasingly over the last four years, there have been more and more cases. We've become increasingly aware of this particular pattern of abuse. And we are coming to terms with the fact that this is taking place in towns and cities, hamlets up and down the country. And unfortunately, today is just another example of the scale of the challenge that we face. And we as a country have to start asking the very difficult question as to what culturally drives this, what makes it all right in the eyes of these particular groups to abuse some of the most vulnerable children in society in the way that, in the way they do'
'You're pointing towards the point that has been made, been made before. Concerns about being labeled racist if you call out this action, is that what you're saying?'
'Look, I think Barry Sheerman mentioned it, he was raising in Parliament years ago, and it was being ignored, as he said by the media and other agencies. I think there has been a problem, I think it's a less of a problem. We've invested a significant amount of money in tackling the threat. But we would also recognize that there is so much more to be done. And we genuinely at this moment in time don't understand the cultural drivers behind this particular model of abuse.'
'Alexis Jay said, by far, the majority of perpetrators were described as Asian by victims, yet throughout the entire period counselors didn't engage directly with the Pakistani heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Now, are you saying that you want to address it, but what do you do? And how can you come to a point where any girl in future coming forward isn't going to just fear that they won't be believed?'
'Well, let me, let me address that issue first and foremost. The police service in the last four years since Professor J's report has taken some really significant steps to improve the response. And, and I believe in the vast majority of cases, young girls, young children, because they are children coming forward now will be dealt with very, very differently indeed. And whilst I recognize it's difficult, officers have now been trained to understand, to spot the signs of abuse, and the police service has taken some really significant steps forward in understanding some of those vulnerable children who have had difficult upbringings, in lots of cases have found themselves socially isolated, are no longer being dealt with as a problem. And they are recognized as being the victims that they are. The biggest challenge for us is, is actually asking the difficult questions, of saying: right, why is it that we are seeing this model of abuse? Why is it becoming so prolific? Why are we seeing such appalling acts being performed on these, on these children?'
'Why do you think it is?'
'I don't know. And that's the question that we have to ask ourselves as a country. We have to now lift the lid off this, we have to be bold, we have to ignore the allegations that we are being racist because we are not being racist. We have to really challenge ourselves to ask the question: how is it that this model of abuse that has become so prolific, it's still there and undoubtedly there will still be incidents taking place up and down the country, is being allowed to continue?'
'Simon Bailey, thank you.'...
'A judges ruled that details can be reported about 20 men who were convicted of child sexual abuse in a series of trials. The men who are mainly of Pakistani heritage lived in Yorkshire. They targeted 15 girls over a period of seven years. between 2004 and 2011. Reporting restrictions were lifted following a legal challenge by the BBC and other media organizations. Nazir Afzal is former chief crown prosecutor in northwest of England. He was the main prosecutor in the case against the Rochdale grooming gang in 2012. And Nazir Afzal, you hear the case here we heard from the local MP listing the towns and cities that have experienced similar cases. How do you respond?'
'Good afternoon, Carolyn, I think there's about 20 now, 20 towns and cities that have had this type of model of street grooming prosecuted, and it is sadly no surprise, I suppose there's one silver lining, namely the fact that these individuals are now being prosecuted, we've now got I think more than 200 men have now been prosecuted over the last five, seven years for this type of behavior. But the reality of course, is this has been going on for perhaps two decades. And so we're now having a reckoning in effect. And in large part, it is about the failure of authorities. It's the failure of all agencies, all agencies, to not listen to what these young girls invariably were going through. And yes, we've learned, they, they all keep talking about learning lessons. But the reality of course, is they should have got it right first time, and the only person that knew they weren't going to be listened to was the perpetrator, the offender, and he knew that and therefore he was able to carry on being, abusing them in the way that he did.'
'And in the meantime, these vulnerable and brave young women suffered and tried to give evidence that, that the wider issue these girls were calling out this behavior for a long time before anything was done.'
'Absolutely, Carolyn. If you think about it, you may not know this but back in 2008, the Home Office sent a circular to all police forces in the country saying 'as far as these young girls who are being exploited in, in towns and cities, we believe that they've made an informed choice about their sexual behavior. And therefore it's not for you police officers to get involved in'. That's the landscape coming from the top down in 2008, rest assured all agencies are gonna listen to it. It only changed because of the work that we did. And the work the Times newspaper did in 2010, 11. The fact that we were able to bring the prosecution in Rochdale led to this investigation in West Yorkshire opening, it only opened in 2013 and the series of prosecutions that followed indicate to me that the agencies are getting it right now. But the reality of course, is that we've lost a generation of young girls who've been left behind and abused.'
'And looking back at the Alexis J report into Rochdale staff describing nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist, erm how do you counteract that suspicion and that fear because, it's very difficult for people to come forward if they think that they're going to be tainted or tarred or labeled in some way?'
'Carolyn, 2011, 12, maybe it's easier for me because I'm from a British Pakistani heritage, that I was able to say these things. The reality of course, is that it's not their gender - sorry it's not their race or ethnicity that drives their behaviors, it's the fact that they are men and the fact that they think they can get away with it that drives it. And you have to call it what it is. The reality is that most victims of child sexual abuse will be harmed in the home or online or institutions. And the vast majority of offenders are British white men. But when it comes to street grooming of the type that we're dealing with here, the British Pakistani men and South Asian men generally are sadly the group that are disproportionately involved. Let's not forget, the, the ringleader of this particular gang in Huddersfield was born in India, of Sikh heritage. So the reality is, it's much wider than we think, it's much worse than we think, but we have to listen, you start by listening to victims and survivors, and you therefore improve your services. And I don't buy political correctness, I believe that we've just been incompetent. If we did our job properly, this generation of girls would not have suffered'
'Nazir Afzal, thank you'...
'Over a period of seven years ending in 2011, 15 girls were sexually abused by scores of men, mainly of Pakistani heritage. One of the victims was only 11 years old. The ringleader, Amere Singh Dhaliwal, was jailed for life and told he must serve a minimum of 18 years. He was found guilty of 54 offenses, including 22 rapes involving 11 girls. The judge said his treatments of them was inhuman. Other abusers had nicknames, such as Bully, and Dracula. Victims and their families say they repeatedly told police and the authorities what was happening, but no action was taken. One mother said she even wrote to the Prime Minister. Another parent, whose words are spoken by a producer, described what life was like.'
'She would come home disorientated, scratches, bites. On one occasion, she came home and her neck was completely black with bites from one side to the other. A taxi had just pulled up outside and pushed her out. I could see another girl in the back and then it just drove off"
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