HDL ‘Good Cholesterol’ Found Not to Cut Heart Risk - NYTimes.com - "Now, a new study that makes use of powerful databases of genetic information has found that raising HDL levels may not make any difference to heart disease risk. People who inherit genes that give them naturally higher HDL levels throughout life have no less heart disease than those who inherit genes that give them slightly lower levels. If HDL were protective, those with genes causing higher levels should have had less heart disease"
Why Alcohol Is Good for You - "Heavy drinkers also live longer than abstainers. (Only 61 percent of heavy drinkers died during the study.) In other words, consuming disturbingly large amounts of alcohol seems to be better than drinking none at all... drinking isn’t just about de-stressing. In fact, the cultural traditions surrounding alcohol tend to emphasize a second, and perhaps even more important, function: socializing... moderate drinkers have more friends and higher quality “friend support” than abstainers. They’re also more likely to be married."
Knee Surgery No Better Than Placebo - "Perez was assigned to the placebo group of the trial: He was given anesthesia and doctors made incisions in his knee so that it looked as though he had an arthroscope inserted. This sham surgery group was compared to other patients who underwent an actual arthroscopic procedure"
Meanwhile, most faith healing is for pain...
The Problem With Eyewitness Testimony - "Bias creeps into memory without our knowledge, without our awareness. While confidence and accuracy are generally correlated, when misleading information is given, witness confidence is often higher for the incorrect information than for the correct information. This leads many to question the competence of the average person to determine credibility issues. Juries are the fact-finders, and credibility issues are to be determined by juries. The issue then arises whether juries are equipped to make these determinations. Expert testimony may not be helpful. Indeed, since the very act of forming a memory creates distortion, how can anyone uncover the "truth" behind a person’s statements? Perhaps it is the terrible truth that in many cases we are simply not capable of determining what happened, yet are duty-bound to so determine. Maybe this is why we cling to the sanctity of the jury and the secrecy of jury findings"
When radiologists take a selfie - Imgur
George R.R. Martin on 'Game of Thrones' and Sexual Violence - NYTimes.com - NYTimes.com - "Q. Why have you included incidents of rape or sexual violence in your “Song of Ice and Fire” novels? What larger themes are you trying to bring out with these scenes?
A. An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. My novels are epic fantasy, but they are inspired by and grounded in history. Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought, from the ancient Sumerians to our present day. To omit them from a narrative centered on war and power would have been fundamentally false and dishonest, and would have undermined one of the themes of the books: that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil... I have to take issue with the notion that Westeros is a “dark and depraved place.” It’s not the Disneyland Middle Ages, no, and that was quite deliberate … but it is no darker nor more depraved than our own world. History is written in blood. The atrocities in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” sexual and otherwise, pale in comparison to what can be found in any good history book. As for the criticism that some of the scenes of sexual violence are titillating, to me that says more about these critics than about my books. Maybe they found certain scenes titillating. Most of my readers, I suspect, read them as intended."
I suppose critics want to bowdlerize Shakespeare too. Why is it okay to slaughter thousands, but not to rape one woman?
For ‘Game of Thrones,’ Rising Unease Over Rape’s Recurring Role - NYTimes.com - "At a certain point, you get the feeling that you can’t walk through a chapter without expecting something horrible — almost always to a female character — just to prove that this is indeed a very scary and dark piece of literature"
You have to be a feminist to think that A Song of Ice and Fire visits horrible things "almost always" on females
The Ever Increasing Size of Godzilla: Implications for Sexual Selection and Urine Production - "So why is Godzilla obtaining ever larger sizes with time? Skyscrapers. Skyscraper height has increased dramatically over the last century. For Godzilla to continue to plow through buildings in major metropolises, a more formidable size is needed. Of course this size change can only be evolutionarily adaptive if it changes the fitness of Godzilla, i.e. in the simplest case the number of offspring passed to the next generation. If Godzilla is able to topple buildings this might allow for greater acquisition of resources in this case food in the form of people. This would increase the lifespan of Godzilla allow for more reproduction or allow for greater amount of energy to be passed to the offspring increasing their rate of survival Or perhaps toppling buildings is a sexual display that sexual partners cue on. Sexual selection! Of course the real problem of a 55,000 ton Godzilla is the urine production. Using the handy Kaiju post, we can quickly calculate that, 151,436,928 gallons per day. That is about 1.8 of the largest production oil tankers."
New report highlights the BBC's Islamism and immigration bias - "Ed West, the author of the study, writes that like any organisation, the BBC has a "tendency towards groupthink" and one that perhaps reflects "minority - even elitist - viewpoint[s]". Examples of the bias include the use of "unanimously pro-migration interviews" for a special feature on migration in 2002 - a feature which has been slammed as "propaganda". Even the television soap opera, Eastenders, has been criticised for masking the real truth about immigration in Britain, with the report suggesting that the predominantly white cast in East London is not reflective of reality. It states, "a realistic East London soap opera would have to show a white family moving out every year, to be replaced by Bangladeshis or Somalis, and much of the programme would need to be subtitled." Broadcaster Jeff Randall, formerly of the BBC, suggested that the organisation's attitudes to multiculturalism were not impartial, stating, "When I was there, this was not up for grabs. Multiculturalism was 'a good thing'. The BBC supported it. Don’t take my word for it because, when I complained to the BBC about our coverage of asylum-seekers, this is what I got back from a very senior BBC news executive: 'Jeff, the BBC internally is not neutral about multiculturalism. It believes in it, and it promotes diversity. Let’s face up to that'." On the subject of Islamism, the report asserts that the BBC "tends to downplay activities on the part of Islamists". An unnamed producer revealed that, "The BBC has a set of anxieties about Islam... they think it's quaint." The BBC's schools website, aimed at educating children, apparently gives an uncritical view of Islam, one in which men and woman are equal and 'the Prophet Muhammed stressed the importance of women'. But coverage of Christianity tends to be more harsh, with the same website stating, "Many people think the Christian Church is sexist. It does not treat men and women equally." The corporation has also been charged with being, "soft on honour killing and FGM (female genital mutiliation)" according to an unnamed producer working within the organisation"
Sony Crams 3,700 Blu-Rays' Worth of Storage in a Single Cassette Tape - "Stupid hipster 80s fetishism notwithstanding, cassette tapes don't get much love. That's a shame, because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data. Especially now: Sony just unveiled tape that holds a whopping 148 GB per square inch, meaning a cassette could hold 185 TB of data"
Military Personnel Reveal The Most Unusual Punishments They've Ever Seen | Business Insider
How Singapore’s media restrictions hurt even the PAP - "Singapore’s recent past suggests that governance has suffered as a result of the media regulatory regime. Problems were not tackled in time, not because they emerged suddenly and out of the blue, but because censorship allowed the government to remain in denial for too long. I recall that back in the 1990s, when I was a journalist in the national media, there were already signs of unease about the government’s immigration policies. I had colleagues who felt it was in the public interest to investigate the generous Singapore Inc scholarships for foreign nationals, for example. Certainly, there were also many journalists knew they should report and comment on the great public unhappiness about the new policy on market-pegged ministerial salaries. And newsrooms were fully aware of the mounting anxiety about healthcare and other costs, as a result of the PAP’s neoliberal turn towards market fundamentalism... By dampening doubts and dissent, by allowing government to operate in an echo chamber, the media gave yesterday’s policy makers an easier ride. But, today’s policy makers are paying the price."
Singapore Inc. Needs a Rethink, Economists Say - Southeast Asia Real Time - WSJ - "the current social contract – optimal for places with young populations, rapid growth, full employment, and rising real wages – “would not be sufficient to ensure equitable and inclusive growth in the face of the changes unleashed by globalization, rapid technological change, and our own policies,” the economists said in the paper released Monday on the IPS website. The authors include academics and former senior civil servants who carry significant heft in policy-making circles, including Manu Bhaskaran, a partner at consultancy Centennial Group and adjunct research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy; Donald Low, a former senior bureaucrat at Singapore’s finance ministry; Tan Kim Song, an economics professor at the Singapore Management University; and Yeoh Lam Keong, former chief economist at the Government of Singapore Investment Corp... These electoral setbacks “reflected a discontent with the current model of economic and social development: the over-riding emphasis on growth over distribution; the inadequacy of our social safety nets and the uncertainty this creates; wage stagnation for significant elements of the workforce even as a small segment at the top enjoys large increases; and the increase in inequality,” the economists wrote in the paper... The solution, they said, involves creating sturdier social safety nets and rolling back a market-fundamentalist approach that has transferred risks from the state to citizens in areas like public housing, social security, and healthcare. While retaining the essence of Singapore’s admired social institutions, policy makers should also borrow successful ideas from Scandinavian and East Asian contemporaries, and reject existing dogma – like the insistence on the virtues of small government and low taxes, and a reflexive rejection of expanded welfare – the economists said."
L'origine de Bert
Thursday, May 29, 2014
The Stereotype of #YesAllWomen
#YesAllWomen in the wake of Elliot Rodger: Why it’s so hard for men to recognize misogyny.
"When women took to Twitter to share their own everyday experiences with men who had reduced them to sexual conquests and threatened them with violence for failing to comply—filing their anecdotes under the hashtag #YesAllWomen—some men joined in to express surprise at these revelations, which amassed more quickly than observers could digest. How can some men manage to appear polite, kind, even “wonderful” in public while perpetuating sexism under the radar of other men’s notice? And how could this dynamic be so obvious to so many women, yet completely foreign to the men in their lives? Some #YesAllWomen contributors suggested that men simply aren’t paying attention to misogyny. Others claimed that they deliberately ignore it. There could also be a performative aspect to this public outpouring of male shock—a man who expresses his own lack of awareness of sexism implicitly absolves himself of his own contributions to it.
But there are other, more insidious hurdles that prevent male bystanders from helping to fight violence against women. Among men, misogyny hides in plain sight, and not just because most men are oblivious to the problem or callous toward its impact. Men who objectify and threaten women often strategically obscure their actions from other men, taking care to harass women when other men aren’t around...
A drunk man stepped right between us... we politely endured him as he dominated our conversation, insisted on hugging me, and talked too long about his obsession with my friend’s hair. I escaped inside, and my friend followed a few minutes later. The guy had asked for her phone number, and she had declined, informing him that she was married and, by the way, her husband was at the party. “Why did I say that? I wouldn’t have been interested in him even if I weren’t married,” she told me. “Being married was, like, the sixth most pressing reason you weren’t into him,” I said. We agreed that she had said this because aggressive men are more likely to defer to another man’s domain than to accept a woman’s autonomous rejection of him...
Another young woman was alone at the bar when an older man scooted next to her. He was aggressive, wasted, and sitting too close, but she smiled curtly at his ramblings and laughed softly at his jokes as she patiently downed her drink. “Why is she humoring him?” my friend asked me. “You would never do that.” I was too embarrassed to say: “Because he looks scary” and “I do it all the time.”
Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize. Two weeks before the murders, Louis C.K.—who has always recognized pervasive male violence against women in his stand-up—spelled out how this works in an episode of Louie, where he recalls watching a man and a woman walking together on a date. “He goes to kiss her, and she does an amazing thing that women somehow learn how to do—she hugged him very warmly. Men think this is affection, but what this is is a boxing maneuver.” Women “are better at rejecting us than we are,” C.K. said. “They have the skills to reject men in the way that we can then not kill them.”"
While the coping strategies are interesting, a Gramscian analysis would say that women are complicit in their consent, and are thus part of the problem.
Also, it's rich that this is presented as an "all women" problem, considering these are people who are normally against "stereotypes". Some stereotypes (e.g. "male privilege") are evidently more acceptable than others.
"A survey of 10,648 women federal workers by the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) in 1980. In the survey, which defined harassment very broadly ('unwanted sexual attention'), about 40 percent of women reported having been harassed within the preceding two years; an update in 1988 reported a rate of 42 percent. Men in the original MSPB study reported harassment rates of about 15 percent"
- Sexual Harassment as an Ethical Issue in Academic Life / Leslie Francis
That is possibly workplace-only sexual harassment, but from other sources:
Statistics – Academic and Community Studies- Stop Street Harassment
"Using a national sample of 12,300 Canadian women ages 18 and older from 1994, sociology professors Ross Macmillan, Annette Nierobisz, and Sandy Welsh studied the impact of street harassment on women’s perceived sense of safety in 2000. During their research, they found that over 80 percent of the women surveyed had experienced male stranger harassment in public...
Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates conducted a nationally representative telephone survey of 612 adult women between June 17 and June 19, 2000. From this survey, they found that almost all women had experienced street harassment: 87 percent of American women between the ages of 18-64 had been harassed by a male stranger; and over one half of them experienced “extreme” harassment including being touched, grabbed, rubbed, brushed or followed by a strange man on the street or other public place...
During the summer of 2003, members of the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team in Chicago surveyed 168 neighborhood girls and young women (most of whom were African American or Latina) ages 10 to 19 about street harassment and interviewed 34 more in focus groups. They published their findings in a report titled “Hey Cutie, Can I Get Your Digits?” Of their respondents, 86 percent had been catcalled on the street, 36 percent said men harassed them daily...
83 percent of women in Tel Aviv reported experiencing street harassment in a study conducted by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality’s committee for advancing the status of women...
In a poll conducted by the Ending Violence Against Women (EVAW) Coalition in London, 43 percent of young women ages 18-34 had experienced street harassment just during the past year alone. The total sample size was 1047 adults and the poll was conducted in early March 2012...
France: “Researchers from The National Institute of Statistics and Economics Studies found in a 2013 study that 25% of women aged 18-29 reported being scared when they walked on the streets. They also discovered that 1 in 5 women have suffered from verbal harassment on the street in the past year, and 1 in 10 said they had been kissed or caressed against their consent.”"
What many of the sources do not report (at least according to the summary here) is frequency. It is misleading to say that 99% of women have been sexually harassed if for half of them the incidents took place more than a year ago.
I would say the France and London results are the most telling - only 25-43% of young women experienced street harassment in the past year. Consider that this is the age group most likely to be victims of street harassment (and that the past year is not an especially short period of time) and the frequency of harassment, while significant, is nowhere near as prevalent as what #YesAllWomen would suggest.
"When women took to Twitter to share their own everyday experiences with men who had reduced them to sexual conquests and threatened them with violence for failing to comply—filing their anecdotes under the hashtag #YesAllWomen—some men joined in to express surprise at these revelations, which amassed more quickly than observers could digest. How can some men manage to appear polite, kind, even “wonderful” in public while perpetuating sexism under the radar of other men’s notice? And how could this dynamic be so obvious to so many women, yet completely foreign to the men in their lives? Some #YesAllWomen contributors suggested that men simply aren’t paying attention to misogyny. Others claimed that they deliberately ignore it. There could also be a performative aspect to this public outpouring of male shock—a man who expresses his own lack of awareness of sexism implicitly absolves himself of his own contributions to it.
But there are other, more insidious hurdles that prevent male bystanders from helping to fight violence against women. Among men, misogyny hides in plain sight, and not just because most men are oblivious to the problem or callous toward its impact. Men who objectify and threaten women often strategically obscure their actions from other men, taking care to harass women when other men aren’t around...
A drunk man stepped right between us... we politely endured him as he dominated our conversation, insisted on hugging me, and talked too long about his obsession with my friend’s hair. I escaped inside, and my friend followed a few minutes later. The guy had asked for her phone number, and she had declined, informing him that she was married and, by the way, her husband was at the party. “Why did I say that? I wouldn’t have been interested in him even if I weren’t married,” she told me. “Being married was, like, the sixth most pressing reason you weren’t into him,” I said. We agreed that she had said this because aggressive men are more likely to defer to another man’s domain than to accept a woman’s autonomous rejection of him...
Another young woman was alone at the bar when an older man scooted next to her. He was aggressive, wasted, and sitting too close, but she smiled curtly at his ramblings and laughed softly at his jokes as she patiently downed her drink. “Why is she humoring him?” my friend asked me. “You would never do that.” I was too embarrassed to say: “Because he looks scary” and “I do it all the time.”
Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize. Two weeks before the murders, Louis C.K.—who has always recognized pervasive male violence against women in his stand-up—spelled out how this works in an episode of Louie, where he recalls watching a man and a woman walking together on a date. “He goes to kiss her, and she does an amazing thing that women somehow learn how to do—she hugged him very warmly. Men think this is affection, but what this is is a boxing maneuver.” Women “are better at rejecting us than we are,” C.K. said. “They have the skills to reject men in the way that we can then not kill them.”"
While the coping strategies are interesting, a Gramscian analysis would say that women are complicit in their consent, and are thus part of the problem.
Also, it's rich that this is presented as an "all women" problem, considering these are people who are normally against "stereotypes". Some stereotypes (e.g. "male privilege") are evidently more acceptable than others.
"A survey of 10,648 women federal workers by the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) in 1980. In the survey, which defined harassment very broadly ('unwanted sexual attention'), about 40 percent of women reported having been harassed within the preceding two years; an update in 1988 reported a rate of 42 percent. Men in the original MSPB study reported harassment rates of about 15 percent"
- Sexual Harassment as an Ethical Issue in Academic Life / Leslie Francis
That is possibly workplace-only sexual harassment, but from other sources:
Statistics – Academic and Community Studies- Stop Street Harassment
"Using a national sample of 12,300 Canadian women ages 18 and older from 1994, sociology professors Ross Macmillan, Annette Nierobisz, and Sandy Welsh studied the impact of street harassment on women’s perceived sense of safety in 2000. During their research, they found that over 80 percent of the women surveyed had experienced male stranger harassment in public...
Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates conducted a nationally representative telephone survey of 612 adult women between June 17 and June 19, 2000. From this survey, they found that almost all women had experienced street harassment: 87 percent of American women between the ages of 18-64 had been harassed by a male stranger; and over one half of them experienced “extreme” harassment including being touched, grabbed, rubbed, brushed or followed by a strange man on the street or other public place...
During the summer of 2003, members of the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team in Chicago surveyed 168 neighborhood girls and young women (most of whom were African American or Latina) ages 10 to 19 about street harassment and interviewed 34 more in focus groups. They published their findings in a report titled “Hey Cutie, Can I Get Your Digits?” Of their respondents, 86 percent had been catcalled on the street, 36 percent said men harassed them daily...
83 percent of women in Tel Aviv reported experiencing street harassment in a study conducted by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality’s committee for advancing the status of women...
In a poll conducted by the Ending Violence Against Women (EVAW) Coalition in London, 43 percent of young women ages 18-34 had experienced street harassment just during the past year alone. The total sample size was 1047 adults and the poll was conducted in early March 2012...
France: “Researchers from The National Institute of Statistics and Economics Studies found in a 2013 study that 25% of women aged 18-29 reported being scared when they walked on the streets. They also discovered that 1 in 5 women have suffered from verbal harassment on the street in the past year, and 1 in 10 said they had been kissed or caressed against their consent.”"
What many of the sources do not report (at least according to the summary here) is frequency. It is misleading to say that 99% of women have been sexually harassed if for half of them the incidents took place more than a year ago.
I would say the France and London results are the most telling - only 25-43% of young women experienced street harassment in the past year. Consider that this is the age group most likely to be victims of street harassment (and that the past year is not an especially short period of time) and the frequency of harassment, while significant, is nowhere near as prevalent as what #YesAllWomen would suggest.
Post ID: 8000358758476741055
Monday, May 26, 2014
Links - 26th May 2014
These Dreamy Photos Answer The Question: 'What Would I Have Looked Like In Another Decade?' - "Ohio State University student Annalisa Hartlaub was able to paint a picture by depicting each decade's quintessential mainstream and counterculture looks. Using herself as a model and tinting each picture to realistically reflect the technology of the decade, Hartlaub's "Counter // Culture" photo project catalogs nearly 100 years of fashion history from 1920 through today. "
Should We Raise the Minimum Wage? 11 Questions and Answers - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic - "By the 1980s, economists largely agreed that increasing the minimum wage hurt employment among teens and other unskilled workers. But that consensus collapsed during the next decade, with the rise of what’s known now as the “new minimum wage research.” The chief demolition crew consisted of David Card and Alan Krueger, whose most famous study compared employment at fast food restaurants in New Jersey, where the minimum wage had recently been raised, with employment at fast food restaurants in Pennsylvania, where wages stayed stable. When Card and Krueger analyzed the results of this “natural experiment,” they found no evidence that raising worker pay had killed jobs. That sparked a fight that’s continued on, in various permutations, to today. Conservatives tend to champion work by David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, and William Wascher, of the Federal Reserve Board. Early critics of Card and Krueger, their research compares employment trends across entire states, using elaborate statistical controls to isolate the impact of minimum wages. They have consistently found that requiring businesses to pay their workers more reduces employment among teens. Liberals, meanwhile, favor work by a group of economists fronted by Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dube is best co-authored study that used contemporary data to essentially repeat Card and Krueger’s natural experiment in thousands of counties across the the country. It found no significant evidence that higher minimum wages hurt employment among restaurant workers. Both sides have criticized each others’ ideas fiercely, and attempted variations on the other sides’ preferred research methods, mostly, it seems, to show how their their academic nemeses botched their own approach. Meanwhile, Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West of Texas A&M University have recently added a new wrinkle to the controversy with a paper that says minimum wages can noticeably bring reduce total employment by slowing down hiring. Now they're in a fight with Dube. And so it goes."
A summit of food safety experts leaves 100 ill with food poisoning.
The end of Sarah Palin - "If the politically engaged seem bored with Obama, they have all but forgotten Sarah Barracuda, the manqué of anti-Obama populism... My personal favorite line was this: "The American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of 'personal discovery.'" You could almost hear that punch landing."
Oberlin College tables its trigger warning policy: Do the warnings threaten academic freedom? - "Blecher said the problem with the policy and trigger warnings generally is that “what could trigger off somebody in the abstract is almost anything.” That means that professors in all kinds of disciplines could have to rethink what they teach and how—and how to warn students about it ahead of time. Referring to language in the tabled policy, he said, “it had this long list of ‘isms,’ so you’d end up having to fill your whole syllabus with their advice or suggestions, depending on what you’re teaching.” As to the policy’s alternative reading suggestion, Blecher added, “What are you going to do, have two syllabi?”"
Comment: "I'm someone who's supposed to be helped by trigger warnings and I think the idea is stupid. I was sexually assaulted by a coach as a kid. It left me with definite issues with male authority figures. In grade 7 I had a gay teacher. Trust me, that year was just one long trigger warning. But even in grade 7 I knew the issue was mine to deal with. I'm not going to ask the teacher to stop being male. I'm sorry but you have to deal with the issues yourself. You can maybe ask your friends to be very empathetic about certain issues but even then it's easier for me just to drop out of some conversations than expect everyone else to watch what they say. I can't and don't want to control the world or expect it to coddle me. I do want to focus on how I react to the world."
How the Tea Party movement can save itself and become a powerful force for good. - "What does everyone get wrong about the Tea Party? When Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel described it as a collection of “mean, racist people,” he was doing little more than bluntly restating views that are widely held on the left. When Tea Party conservatives counter such charges of racism by noting the popularity of African-Americans like Ben Carson, Allen West, Herman Cain, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, they are routinely dismissed. One scholar, University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker, went so far as to attribute the rise of conservative black candidates and activists to Tea Party prominence to the triumph of tokenism. Yet when you delve into Parker’s data on the racial attitudes of white voters toward blacks, as Robert VerBruggen and Cathy Young did a few years back, you’ll find that the views of whites who support the Tea Party and those who don’t are not that far apart. It turns out that whites who have negative attitudes about minorities tend to also have negative attitudes about other whites. You’d be on much firmer ground calling the Tea Party cranky than you would be calling it racist... Tea Party conservatives will often distinguish between government transfers that flow to deserving productive citizens (like themselves) and those that benefit people they see as undeserving freeloaders (unlike themselves)... But this distinction was absolutely central to FDR’s New Deal and Bill Clinton’s commitment to help those who “work hard and play by the rules.” Few serious people deny that means-tested programs can make it hard for poor families to climb the economic ladder, and there is nothing hypocritical about believing both that these programs should be made more work-friendly and that the safety net for older Americans should be protected. Finally, the Tea Party has been assailed as inauthentic, a faux grassroots, “astroturf” movement financed by shadowy elites who have essentially duped an army of cranky retirees into doing their bidding... The fact that wealthy campaign donors are far more likely to support establishment Republicans over Tea Party conservatives in GOP primaries tells a different story."
Alice Robb – How Capital Letters Became Internet Code for Yelling - "In 2006, Belgian software developer Pieter Hintjens launched the “CAPSoff” campaign, aiming to get the offending key kicked off the keyboard altogether."
Rolling to good health? Senior citizens hooked on strange activity - "Every weekday morning, they take turns rolling down a slope at Bedok Reservoir. They are led by 71-year-old retiree Lew Keh Lam, known to the group as 'Master', who started the activity seven years ago. Mr Lew claims rolling downhill can cure all forms of ailments, including cancer, Parkinson's Disease and stroke. "Our body is short of negative ions. In the morning, before the sun shines, there're a lot of negative ions in the grass. If your body requires the negative ions, it will allow you to roll, and when you don't need it, it won't let you roll," said Mr Lew in Mandarin."
Donald Sterling’s racist history: The L.A. Clippers owner hurt more minorities as a property owner. - "Sterling caused actual harm to dozens of families, and the response was near silence. And it’s in that contrast that we can clearly see our public hypocrisy on racism. When it comes to open bigotry, everyone is an anti-racist. The same Republicans who question the Civil Rights Act and oppose race-conscious policy are on the front lines when it’s time to denounce the outlandish racism of the day. “I wholeheartedly disagree with him,” said Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul in response to Cliven Bundy’s digression on “the Negro.” Sean Hannity, the Fox News personality who championed Bundy’s cause of free grazing rights, blasted Bundy for his “ignorant, racist, repugnant, despicable” comments. Indeed, the mere hint of racial insensitivity is enough to bring the hammer down, as we rush to refute and repudiate the transgressor... At the same time, we all but ignore the other dimension of racism—the policies and procedures that sustain our system of racial inequality... In a world where racism looks like cartoonish bigotry, it’s hard to build broad outrage for unfair voter identification laws or huge disparities in health care access... Lyndon Johnson’s prejudice—he said the word nigger, a lot—is less important than his civil rights record... A world where Donald Sterling hates black people but rents to them at fair prices is better than one where he loves them, but still discriminates."
One of the perils of oversensitivity to offensive words: you ignore actions that cause real harm to the groups you supposedly want to protect (though not all the examples of supposedly harmful actions are necessarily unjustifiable)
"A trained ape could get a status of forces agreement": Was Donald Rumsfeld's attack on Obama's foreign policy race-baiting? - "while making the case for war with Iraq, he used the “trained ape” reference again... It’s clear that Rumsfeld likes the reference, which is why he used it again when criticizing the Obama administration over its policies in Afghanistan... The response from the Internet was predictable... it’s clear from the context of Rumsfeld’s remarks that this wasn’t a reference to President Obama, specifically. To wit, the sentence that immediately preceded “A trained ape could get a status of forces agreement” was “This administration, the White House and the State Department have failed to get a status of forces agreement.” It’s a broad target that encompasses a range of people, not just Obama. In fact, when you consider the full interview, it’s easy to see the rhetorical logic... From his self-interested description of administration diplomacy to his unacknowledged role in facilitating the status quo, there’s a lot to criticize in Rumsfeld’s short interview. What’s unfair is to attack him for race-baiting. You don’t have to like the Iraq war architect (I don’t!) to see that he was using a favorite phrase, not whistling to the racists"
It's easier to denounce someone as racist (yet again) and dismiss him than to show how he is wrong
Lyndon Johnson was a civil rights hero. But also a racist. - "Perhaps the simple explanation, which Johnson likely understood better than most, was that there is no magic formula through which people can emancipate themselves from prejudice, no finish line that when crossed, awards a person’s soul with a shining medal of purity in matters of race. All we can offer is a commitment to justice in word and deed, that must be honored but from which we will all occasionally fall short. Maybe when Johnson said “it is not just Negroes but all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry,” he really meant all of us, including himself. Nor should Johnson’s racism overshadow what he did to push America toward the unfulfilled promise of its founding. When Republicans say they’re the Party of Lincoln, they don’t mean they’re the party of deporting black people to West Africa, or the party of opposing black suffrage, or the party of allowing states the authority to bar freedmen from migrating there, all options Lincoln considered. They mean they’re the party that crushed the slave empire of the Confederacy and helped free black Americans from bondage. But we shouldn’t forget Johnson’s racism, either. After Johnson’s death, Parker would reflect on the Johnson who championed the landmark civil rights bills that formally ended American apartheid, and write, “I loved that Lyndon Johnson.” Then he remembered the president who called him a nigger, and he wrote, “I hated that Lyndon Johnson.”"
Should We Raise the Minimum Wage? 11 Questions and Answers - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic - "By the 1980s, economists largely agreed that increasing the minimum wage hurt employment among teens and other unskilled workers. But that consensus collapsed during the next decade, with the rise of what’s known now as the “new minimum wage research.” The chief demolition crew consisted of David Card and Alan Krueger, whose most famous study compared employment at fast food restaurants in New Jersey, where the minimum wage had recently been raised, with employment at fast food restaurants in Pennsylvania, where wages stayed stable. When Card and Krueger analyzed the results of this “natural experiment,” they found no evidence that raising worker pay had killed jobs. That sparked a fight that’s continued on, in various permutations, to today. Conservatives tend to champion work by David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, and William Wascher, of the Federal Reserve Board. Early critics of Card and Krueger, their research compares employment trends across entire states, using elaborate statistical controls to isolate the impact of minimum wages. They have consistently found that requiring businesses to pay their workers more reduces employment among teens. Liberals, meanwhile, favor work by a group of economists fronted by Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dube is best co-authored study that used contemporary data to essentially repeat Card and Krueger’s natural experiment in thousands of counties across the the country. It found no significant evidence that higher minimum wages hurt employment among restaurant workers. Both sides have criticized each others’ ideas fiercely, and attempted variations on the other sides’ preferred research methods, mostly, it seems, to show how their their academic nemeses botched their own approach. Meanwhile, Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West of Texas A&M University have recently added a new wrinkle to the controversy with a paper that says minimum wages can noticeably bring reduce total employment by slowing down hiring. Now they're in a fight with Dube. And so it goes."
A summit of food safety experts leaves 100 ill with food poisoning.
The end of Sarah Palin - "If the politically engaged seem bored with Obama, they have all but forgotten Sarah Barracuda, the manqué of anti-Obama populism... My personal favorite line was this: "The American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of 'personal discovery.'" You could almost hear that punch landing."
Oberlin College tables its trigger warning policy: Do the warnings threaten academic freedom? - "Blecher said the problem with the policy and trigger warnings generally is that “what could trigger off somebody in the abstract is almost anything.” That means that professors in all kinds of disciplines could have to rethink what they teach and how—and how to warn students about it ahead of time. Referring to language in the tabled policy, he said, “it had this long list of ‘isms,’ so you’d end up having to fill your whole syllabus with their advice or suggestions, depending on what you’re teaching.” As to the policy’s alternative reading suggestion, Blecher added, “What are you going to do, have two syllabi?”"
Comment: "I'm someone who's supposed to be helped by trigger warnings and I think the idea is stupid. I was sexually assaulted by a coach as a kid. It left me with definite issues with male authority figures. In grade 7 I had a gay teacher. Trust me, that year was just one long trigger warning. But even in grade 7 I knew the issue was mine to deal with. I'm not going to ask the teacher to stop being male. I'm sorry but you have to deal with the issues yourself. You can maybe ask your friends to be very empathetic about certain issues but even then it's easier for me just to drop out of some conversations than expect everyone else to watch what they say. I can't and don't want to control the world or expect it to coddle me. I do want to focus on how I react to the world."
How the Tea Party movement can save itself and become a powerful force for good. - "What does everyone get wrong about the Tea Party? When Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel described it as a collection of “mean, racist people,” he was doing little more than bluntly restating views that are widely held on the left. When Tea Party conservatives counter such charges of racism by noting the popularity of African-Americans like Ben Carson, Allen West, Herman Cain, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, they are routinely dismissed. One scholar, University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker, went so far as to attribute the rise of conservative black candidates and activists to Tea Party prominence to the triumph of tokenism. Yet when you delve into Parker’s data on the racial attitudes of white voters toward blacks, as Robert VerBruggen and Cathy Young did a few years back, you’ll find that the views of whites who support the Tea Party and those who don’t are not that far apart. It turns out that whites who have negative attitudes about minorities tend to also have negative attitudes about other whites. You’d be on much firmer ground calling the Tea Party cranky than you would be calling it racist... Tea Party conservatives will often distinguish between government transfers that flow to deserving productive citizens (like themselves) and those that benefit people they see as undeserving freeloaders (unlike themselves)... But this distinction was absolutely central to FDR’s New Deal and Bill Clinton’s commitment to help those who “work hard and play by the rules.” Few serious people deny that means-tested programs can make it hard for poor families to climb the economic ladder, and there is nothing hypocritical about believing both that these programs should be made more work-friendly and that the safety net for older Americans should be protected. Finally, the Tea Party has been assailed as inauthentic, a faux grassroots, “astroturf” movement financed by shadowy elites who have essentially duped an army of cranky retirees into doing their bidding... The fact that wealthy campaign donors are far more likely to support establishment Republicans over Tea Party conservatives in GOP primaries tells a different story."
Alice Robb – How Capital Letters Became Internet Code for Yelling - "In 2006, Belgian software developer Pieter Hintjens launched the “CAPSoff” campaign, aiming to get the offending key kicked off the keyboard altogether."
Rolling to good health? Senior citizens hooked on strange activity - "Every weekday morning, they take turns rolling down a slope at Bedok Reservoir. They are led by 71-year-old retiree Lew Keh Lam, known to the group as 'Master', who started the activity seven years ago. Mr Lew claims rolling downhill can cure all forms of ailments, including cancer, Parkinson's Disease and stroke. "Our body is short of negative ions. In the morning, before the sun shines, there're a lot of negative ions in the grass. If your body requires the negative ions, it will allow you to roll, and when you don't need it, it won't let you roll," said Mr Lew in Mandarin."
Donald Sterling’s racist history: The L.A. Clippers owner hurt more minorities as a property owner. - "Sterling caused actual harm to dozens of families, and the response was near silence. And it’s in that contrast that we can clearly see our public hypocrisy on racism. When it comes to open bigotry, everyone is an anti-racist. The same Republicans who question the Civil Rights Act and oppose race-conscious policy are on the front lines when it’s time to denounce the outlandish racism of the day. “I wholeheartedly disagree with him,” said Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul in response to Cliven Bundy’s digression on “the Negro.” Sean Hannity, the Fox News personality who championed Bundy’s cause of free grazing rights, blasted Bundy for his “ignorant, racist, repugnant, despicable” comments. Indeed, the mere hint of racial insensitivity is enough to bring the hammer down, as we rush to refute and repudiate the transgressor... At the same time, we all but ignore the other dimension of racism—the policies and procedures that sustain our system of racial inequality... In a world where racism looks like cartoonish bigotry, it’s hard to build broad outrage for unfair voter identification laws or huge disparities in health care access... Lyndon Johnson’s prejudice—he said the word nigger, a lot—is less important than his civil rights record... A world where Donald Sterling hates black people but rents to them at fair prices is better than one where he loves them, but still discriminates."
One of the perils of oversensitivity to offensive words: you ignore actions that cause real harm to the groups you supposedly want to protect (though not all the examples of supposedly harmful actions are necessarily unjustifiable)
"A trained ape could get a status of forces agreement": Was Donald Rumsfeld's attack on Obama's foreign policy race-baiting? - "while making the case for war with Iraq, he used the “trained ape” reference again... It’s clear that Rumsfeld likes the reference, which is why he used it again when criticizing the Obama administration over its policies in Afghanistan... The response from the Internet was predictable... it’s clear from the context of Rumsfeld’s remarks that this wasn’t a reference to President Obama, specifically. To wit, the sentence that immediately preceded “A trained ape could get a status of forces agreement” was “This administration, the White House and the State Department have failed to get a status of forces agreement.” It’s a broad target that encompasses a range of people, not just Obama. In fact, when you consider the full interview, it’s easy to see the rhetorical logic... From his self-interested description of administration diplomacy to his unacknowledged role in facilitating the status quo, there’s a lot to criticize in Rumsfeld’s short interview. What’s unfair is to attack him for race-baiting. You don’t have to like the Iraq war architect (I don’t!) to see that he was using a favorite phrase, not whistling to the racists"
It's easier to denounce someone as racist (yet again) and dismiss him than to show how he is wrong
Lyndon Johnson was a civil rights hero. But also a racist. - "Perhaps the simple explanation, which Johnson likely understood better than most, was that there is no magic formula through which people can emancipate themselves from prejudice, no finish line that when crossed, awards a person’s soul with a shining medal of purity in matters of race. All we can offer is a commitment to justice in word and deed, that must be honored but from which we will all occasionally fall short. Maybe when Johnson said “it is not just Negroes but all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry,” he really meant all of us, including himself. Nor should Johnson’s racism overshadow what he did to push America toward the unfulfilled promise of its founding. When Republicans say they’re the Party of Lincoln, they don’t mean they’re the party of deporting black people to West Africa, or the party of opposing black suffrage, or the party of allowing states the authority to bar freedmen from migrating there, all options Lincoln considered. They mean they’re the party that crushed the slave empire of the Confederacy and helped free black Americans from bondage. But we shouldn’t forget Johnson’s racism, either. After Johnson’s death, Parker would reflect on the Johnson who championed the landmark civil rights bills that formally ended American apartheid, and write, “I loved that Lyndon Johnson.” Then he remembered the president who called him a nigger, and he wrote, “I hated that Lyndon Johnson.”"
Post ID: 7996208957359178630
Trolling FAPs for Fun and Amusement
(On Roy Ngerng)
A: "Our tongue is just like a two edged knife. Choose to bless and not to hurt."
Heavenly Father, teach us to be gentle as we speak. Convict our hearts and guard our lips. To be mindful of the words that we speak today.
Problem is Roy has chose to hurt so it is only fair he gets back his just desserts. Had he chosen to bless others
Me: I guess Lee Kuan Yew deserves what's coming to him then.
A: You carry on twisting words and insulting others, you just wait and see how the almighty will "take care" of you. KARMA is a bitch, don't say we didn't warn you.
Me: You might wish to know that you have just committed an offence under Section 508 of the Penal Code, Act caused by inducing a person to believe that he will be rendered an object of divine displeasure
"Whoever voluntarily causes or attempts to cause any person to do anything which that person is not legally bound to do, or to omit to do anything which he is legally entitled to do, by inducing or attempting to induce that person to believe that he, or any person in whom he is interested, will become or will be rendered by some act of the offender an object of divine displeasure if he does not do the thing which it is the object of the offender to cause him to do, or if he does the thing which it is the object of the offender to cause him to omit, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both."
A: Again, stop twisting words and playing the fool here.
Me: Verily, I am unworthy and worth less than dust. I abase myself.
B: Dafuq did I just read lol...
A: "Our tongue is just like a two edged knife. Choose to bless and not to hurt."
Heavenly Father, teach us to be gentle as we speak. Convict our hearts and guard our lips. To be mindful of the words that we speak today.
Problem is Roy has chose to hurt so it is only fair he gets back his just desserts. Had he chosen to bless others
Me: I guess Lee Kuan Yew deserves what's coming to him then.
A: You carry on twisting words and insulting others, you just wait and see how the almighty will "take care" of you. KARMA is a bitch, don't say we didn't warn you.
Me: You might wish to know that you have just committed an offence under Section 508 of the Penal Code, Act caused by inducing a person to believe that he will be rendered an object of divine displeasure
"Whoever voluntarily causes or attempts to cause any person to do anything which that person is not legally bound to do, or to omit to do anything which he is legally entitled to do, by inducing or attempting to induce that person to believe that he, or any person in whom he is interested, will become or will be rendered by some act of the offender an object of divine displeasure if he does not do the thing which it is the object of the offender to cause him to do, or if he does the thing which it is the object of the offender to cause him to omit, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both."
A: Again, stop twisting words and playing the fool here.
Me: Verily, I am unworthy and worth less than dust. I abase myself.
B: Dafuq did I just read lol...
Post ID: 3727857250030773251
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Ten Gurumantras for a cool life
Ten Gurumantras for a cool life:
1. Money is not everything. There's also Mastercard & Visa.
2. One should love animals. They are tasty too.
3. Save water. Drink on the rocks.
4. Fruits/Salads are healthy. So leave it for sick.
5. Books are holy. So don't touch them.
6. Don't shout in the office. It disturbs those who are sleeping.
7. Love thy neighbor. But don't get caught.
8. Hard work never killed anyone, but why take the chance.
9. Why do something today when it can be done tomorrow. By someone else.
10. Every one should marry because happiness is not the only thing in life
Post ID: 7203899131169804658
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Links - 22nd May 2014
Accounting Quality Effects of imposing Gender Quotas on Boards of Directors - "This paper studies the consequences on accounting quality of imposing gender quotas on boards of directors. We use a Norwegian law from 2003 requiring that 40 percent of directors be women as a unique setting to test whether the imposition of board members affects firms’ monitoring. The Gender Quota was an exogenous shock for Norwegian firms, and they were heterogeneously affected by this quota. We test the effects of the quota on the monitoring role of the board of directors, estimating differences in the level of earnings management on firms. We find that firms undertaking greater board changes to fulfill the 2003 quota are more likely to record abnormal levels of the accrual component of earnings after the passage of the law. We conclude that quotas may lead to boards with lower monitoring capabilities that, in turn, are less able to constrain earnings management."
Gender quotas: hurting corporate governance
Keywords: accounting irregularities
The Changing of the Boards: The Impact on Firm Valuation of Mandated Female Board Representation - "In 2003, a new law required that 40 percent of Norwegian firms’ directors be women – at the time only nine percent of directors were women. We use the pre-quota cross-sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota. We find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in Tobin’s Q over the following years, consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value. The quota led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance, consistent with less capable boards."
Gender quotas: hurting corporate performance
A Female Style in Corporate Leadership? Evidence from Quotas - "This paper studies the impact of gender quotas for corporate board seats on corporate decisions. We examine the introduction of Norway’s 2006 quota, comparing affected firms to other Nordic companies, public and private, that were unaffected by the rule. We find that affected firms undertook fewer workforce reductions than comparison firms, increasing relative labor costs and employment levels and reducing short-term profits. The effects are strongest among firms without female board members beforehand and are present even for boards with older and more experienced members afterward. The boards appear to be affecting corporate strategy in part by selecting likeminded executives."
iTunes 11.2 and Podcasts App 2.1 ... - Ars Technica OpenForum - "I had synced podcasts on my iPhone and a couple of iPods to iTunes using a smart playlist that limited it to EXACTLY the episodes that I wanted. I could even set up smart playlists for specific topics and have the search criteria filter it to matching topics, like say I wanted all the podcasts I'd downloaded on New York, for an upcoming trip. Now the smart playlists are showing all these OLD episodes which I've listened to or deleted right after it downloaded. What is RETARDED is that they show old episodes which don't show in the regular Podcasts view of iTunes. I've deleted these old episodes, because I don't want them syncing to the devices, but they may be hidden in another view, either My Podcasts or Unplayed. The list view count is down from something like 2030 to 1753 since I've upgraded. Why the fuck can't they live well enough alone. They keep making it worse every time out and now, apparently they want you to manage podcasts independently on each iOS device, apart from what's on iTunes."
Each new iTunes version has some new shit to make life more difficult
"You Gave the Right of Suffrage to the Negro - Why Not Give It to Us?" - "I copy below from one of Lincoln's letters, which is published in the Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume XI, page 130, in which letter he takes up the question of the contemplated reconstruction of the Confederate States. Referring to those who had been in rebellion against the United States Government, be said: "I cannot see if universal amnesty is granted, how under the circumstances I can avoid exacting in return universal suffrage, or at least suffrage ON THE BASIS OF INTELLIGENCE AND MILITARY SERVICE." Referring to the colored man he said: "I am clear and decided as to what course I shall pursue in the premises, regarding it a religious duty as the Nation's guardian of these (colored) people WHO HAVE so heroically vindicated their manhood on the battle field, where in assisting to save the life of the Republic, THEY HAVE DEMONSTRATED IN BLOOD THEIR RIGHT TO THE BALLOT, which is but the humane protection of the flag they have so fearlessly defended." By carefully reading Lincoln's letter, a part of which is quoted above, it will be seen that he said in substance that he could not grant suffrage without exacting military service in return, thus establishing the fact that all those who have the right of suffrage are subject to MILITARY SERVICE, which is the same principle carried out with aliens who pay taxes but cannot be drafted as soldiers, because they do not have the suffrage. This makes it plain that those who do not have the suffrage are not under obligation to go to war or to enforce our laws, but those who do have the suffrage arc under obligation to go to war if necessary and to help enforce the laws of this country. Lincoln strengthened this doctrine by only proposing in the above letter to give suffrage to those negroes who had served in the United States Army. He proposed to give it to those colored men "who have so heroically vindicated their manhood on the battle field." He also confirmed this doctrine during his first Presidential term by saying that United States soldiers, including thousands of foreigners in the field bearing arms and offering their lives in battle for the defense of this Republic, many of whom had not been naturalized, were entitled to the right of suffrage and should be allowed to vote on the battle fields, thus thoroughly establishing the doctrine that the right of suffrage can only be obtained by being willing and able to defend this government in time of war and by enforcing the laws in time of peace."
Where is the Ice Hotel in Iceland? / Icehotel Iceland - "We are sorry to inform you that there is no Ice Hotel in Iceland. The original Icehotel is in Lappland, Sweden. Nevertheless, Iceland is a fantastic destination for winter vacation. Visit a Viking Winter Wonderland with hot springs, glaciers, waterfalls, volcanoes, fjords and Northern Lights"
Chinese spies at Sydney University - "China is building large covert informant networks inside Australia's leading universities, prompting Australia to strengthen its counter-intelligence capabilities. Chinese intelligence officials have confirmed to Fairfax Media that they are building networks to monitor the ethnic Chinese community to protect Beijing's "core interests". Much of the monitoring work takes place in higher education institutions, including Sydney University and Melbourne University, where more than 90,000 students from mainland China are potentially exposed to ideas and activities not readily available at home. Fairfax has interviewed lecturers and Chinese-born students who have suffered repercussions because of comments they made in Australian classrooms which were reported through Chinese intelligence channels... Such informant networks are driving the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to increase its capabilities. ''They have more resources in Sydney University than we do,'' an Australian official said. ''No question.''"
MSG and gluten intolerance: Is the nocebo effect to blame? - "I told my companions at a large banquet that the kitchen had promised to avoid using MSG. Everyone thanked me and happily ate their meal, dish after poisoned dish. An hour later? Two hours later? The next day? Nothing... yet foreigners living in China routinely complained of reactions to their food that included headaches, chest pain, and shortness of breath. Was there something about my presence that conferred temporary resistance to MSG? Or could it be that MSG sensitivity was only in their heads?... Double-blinded studies failed to turn up evidence of a clinical condition. MSG, many people noted, appears in everything from sushi to Doritos. Journalists performed experiments similar to mine, their results echoing the consensus of professional scientists: In the overwhelming majority of cases, MSG sensitivity is a psychological phenomenon. Despite this thorough debunking, a surprisingly large number of people—generally those who lived through the epidemic—still insist they are sensitive to MSG. Google around and you’ll turn up scores of alarmist websites, which tend to combine outdated research with anecdotal, indignant rebuttals of the current scientific wisdom: “How dare you suggest my MSG sensitivity is only in my head?"... Occasionally, as with vaccines and climate change denial, alarmism veers into paranoia, yielding accusations that a shadowy East Asian cabal is paying off scientists and journalists to regurgitate their propaganda... two-thirds of people who think they are gluten intolerant really aren’t. In light of this, the even-handed Sanghavi suggested that “patients convinced they have gluten intolerance might do well to also accept that their self-diagnosis may be wrong.” Predictably, the comment thread exploded with rebuttals: defensive anecdotes, doctrinal pronouncements about the evils of gluten, and accusations of corporate malfeasance, all of which bear a striking resemblance in tone and content to the rhetoric of anti-MSG advocates. For many, the truth of physiological gluten intolerance has now acquired a quasi-religious status... Suggesting that gluten intolerance might have a psychological basis threatens a similarly foundational belief, namely that we are rational beings, competent interpreters of reality immune to mass hysteria and self-deception... Under oath, eyewitnesses constantly forget crucial details and replace them with their own fabrications. They aren’t liars—they’re just human... Food historian Ian Mosby has explained the “success” of Chinese restaurant syndrome by connecting it to racialized discourse that drew on a vision of Chinese cooking as bizarre or extreme. In the case of gluten intolerance, it doesn’t take much to come up with a plausible confirmation bias. Only nine years ago, 1 in every 11 Americans was on a low-carb diet. In a country terrified of weight gain and recently obsessed with the Atkins diet, gluten makes a great villain... food aversions often turn into a way of life. Like religion, avoiding gluten requires personal sacrifice. Gluten intolerance creates communities, which, like religious communities, share stories of suffering and redemption, and share meals made special by the presence of a food taboo. It’s no wonder people take offense at the suggestion that gluten intolerance could be psychological—after all, who wants to have built their way of life on a “mere” trick of the mind?... Many basic claims of nutrition science are unintuitive and sometimes don’t stand up to repeated research. (Salt? Cholesterol? Vitamins? Alcohol? Coffee?)"
Male rape in America: A new study reveals that men are sexually assaulted almost as often as women. - "gender norms are shaking loose in a way that allows men to identify themselves—if the survey is sensitive and specific enough—as vulnerable. A recent analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator... The final outrage in Stemple and Meyer’s paper involves inmates, who aren’t counted in the general statistics at all... Those surveys turned up the opposite of what we generally think is true. Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse."
How gay Americans can best help gay Africans. - "So far, advocates for change have mostly worked to raise awareness of abuses and apply political pressure on governments that have passed or are considering anti-gay laws. Some of this pressure has come in the form of Western governments threatening to withdraw aid, or actually withdrawing it. Rather than helping, this tends to make things worse for sexual minorities on the continent, who are blamed for the cuts, according to Tabengwa and many other African human-rights activists... The U.S. LGBTQ movement started to gain traction only in the late 1960s, at a time when vast social and cultural changes had already shaken long-held prejudices and challenged conventional sexual morality. These cultural changes are what made the coming-out movement thinkable, and it was the expanding number of out LGBTQ people that eventually changed the political landscape. Without the cracks in the cultural conservatism that pre-dated the ’60s, there would have been much less room for tolerance... If what’s needed is to change African hearts and minds, we must shift our approach away from a scolding, punitive, paternalistic one and reach instead for something more engaged, more connected to actual Africans, and more focused on the communities where the necessary cultural shifts must happen"
It's a lot easier to be outraged and offended at homophobes than to try to engage them
Gender quotas: hurting corporate governance
Keywords: accounting irregularities
The Changing of the Boards: The Impact on Firm Valuation of Mandated Female Board Representation - "In 2003, a new law required that 40 percent of Norwegian firms’ directors be women – at the time only nine percent of directors were women. We use the pre-quota cross-sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota. We find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in Tobin’s Q over the following years, consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value. The quota led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance, consistent with less capable boards."
Gender quotas: hurting corporate performance
A Female Style in Corporate Leadership? Evidence from Quotas - "This paper studies the impact of gender quotas for corporate board seats on corporate decisions. We examine the introduction of Norway’s 2006 quota, comparing affected firms to other Nordic companies, public and private, that were unaffected by the rule. We find that affected firms undertook fewer workforce reductions than comparison firms, increasing relative labor costs and employment levels and reducing short-term profits. The effects are strongest among firms without female board members beforehand and are present even for boards with older and more experienced members afterward. The boards appear to be affecting corporate strategy in part by selecting likeminded executives."
iTunes 11.2 and Podcasts App 2.1 ... - Ars Technica OpenForum - "I had synced podcasts on my iPhone and a couple of iPods to iTunes using a smart playlist that limited it to EXACTLY the episodes that I wanted. I could even set up smart playlists for specific topics and have the search criteria filter it to matching topics, like say I wanted all the podcasts I'd downloaded on New York, for an upcoming trip. Now the smart playlists are showing all these OLD episodes which I've listened to or deleted right after it downloaded. What is RETARDED is that they show old episodes which don't show in the regular Podcasts view of iTunes. I've deleted these old episodes, because I don't want them syncing to the devices, but they may be hidden in another view, either My Podcasts or Unplayed. The list view count is down from something like 2030 to 1753 since I've upgraded. Why the fuck can't they live well enough alone. They keep making it worse every time out and now, apparently they want you to manage podcasts independently on each iOS device, apart from what's on iTunes."
Each new iTunes version has some new shit to make life more difficult
"You Gave the Right of Suffrage to the Negro - Why Not Give It to Us?" - "I copy below from one of Lincoln's letters, which is published in the Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume XI, page 130, in which letter he takes up the question of the contemplated reconstruction of the Confederate States. Referring to those who had been in rebellion against the United States Government, be said: "I cannot see if universal amnesty is granted, how under the circumstances I can avoid exacting in return universal suffrage, or at least suffrage ON THE BASIS OF INTELLIGENCE AND MILITARY SERVICE." Referring to the colored man he said: "I am clear and decided as to what course I shall pursue in the premises, regarding it a religious duty as the Nation's guardian of these (colored) people WHO HAVE so heroically vindicated their manhood on the battle field, where in assisting to save the life of the Republic, THEY HAVE DEMONSTRATED IN BLOOD THEIR RIGHT TO THE BALLOT, which is but the humane protection of the flag they have so fearlessly defended." By carefully reading Lincoln's letter, a part of which is quoted above, it will be seen that he said in substance that he could not grant suffrage without exacting military service in return, thus establishing the fact that all those who have the right of suffrage are subject to MILITARY SERVICE, which is the same principle carried out with aliens who pay taxes but cannot be drafted as soldiers, because they do not have the suffrage. This makes it plain that those who do not have the suffrage are not under obligation to go to war or to enforce our laws, but those who do have the suffrage arc under obligation to go to war if necessary and to help enforce the laws of this country. Lincoln strengthened this doctrine by only proposing in the above letter to give suffrage to those negroes who had served in the United States Army. He proposed to give it to those colored men "who have so heroically vindicated their manhood on the battle field." He also confirmed this doctrine during his first Presidential term by saying that United States soldiers, including thousands of foreigners in the field bearing arms and offering their lives in battle for the defense of this Republic, many of whom had not been naturalized, were entitled to the right of suffrage and should be allowed to vote on the battle fields, thus thoroughly establishing the doctrine that the right of suffrage can only be obtained by being willing and able to defend this government in time of war and by enforcing the laws in time of peace."
Where is the Ice Hotel in Iceland? / Icehotel Iceland - "We are sorry to inform you that there is no Ice Hotel in Iceland. The original Icehotel is in Lappland, Sweden. Nevertheless, Iceland is a fantastic destination for winter vacation. Visit a Viking Winter Wonderland with hot springs, glaciers, waterfalls, volcanoes, fjords and Northern Lights"
Chinese spies at Sydney University - "China is building large covert informant networks inside Australia's leading universities, prompting Australia to strengthen its counter-intelligence capabilities. Chinese intelligence officials have confirmed to Fairfax Media that they are building networks to monitor the ethnic Chinese community to protect Beijing's "core interests". Much of the monitoring work takes place in higher education institutions, including Sydney University and Melbourne University, where more than 90,000 students from mainland China are potentially exposed to ideas and activities not readily available at home. Fairfax has interviewed lecturers and Chinese-born students who have suffered repercussions because of comments they made in Australian classrooms which were reported through Chinese intelligence channels... Such informant networks are driving the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to increase its capabilities. ''They have more resources in Sydney University than we do,'' an Australian official said. ''No question.''"
MSG and gluten intolerance: Is the nocebo effect to blame? - "I told my companions at a large banquet that the kitchen had promised to avoid using MSG. Everyone thanked me and happily ate their meal, dish after poisoned dish. An hour later? Two hours later? The next day? Nothing... yet foreigners living in China routinely complained of reactions to their food that included headaches, chest pain, and shortness of breath. Was there something about my presence that conferred temporary resistance to MSG? Or could it be that MSG sensitivity was only in their heads?... Double-blinded studies failed to turn up evidence of a clinical condition. MSG, many people noted, appears in everything from sushi to Doritos. Journalists performed experiments similar to mine, their results echoing the consensus of professional scientists: In the overwhelming majority of cases, MSG sensitivity is a psychological phenomenon. Despite this thorough debunking, a surprisingly large number of people—generally those who lived through the epidemic—still insist they are sensitive to MSG. Google around and you’ll turn up scores of alarmist websites, which tend to combine outdated research with anecdotal, indignant rebuttals of the current scientific wisdom: “How dare you suggest my MSG sensitivity is only in my head?"... Occasionally, as with vaccines and climate change denial, alarmism veers into paranoia, yielding accusations that a shadowy East Asian cabal is paying off scientists and journalists to regurgitate their propaganda... two-thirds of people who think they are gluten intolerant really aren’t. In light of this, the even-handed Sanghavi suggested that “patients convinced they have gluten intolerance might do well to also accept that their self-diagnosis may be wrong.” Predictably, the comment thread exploded with rebuttals: defensive anecdotes, doctrinal pronouncements about the evils of gluten, and accusations of corporate malfeasance, all of which bear a striking resemblance in tone and content to the rhetoric of anti-MSG advocates. For many, the truth of physiological gluten intolerance has now acquired a quasi-religious status... Suggesting that gluten intolerance might have a psychological basis threatens a similarly foundational belief, namely that we are rational beings, competent interpreters of reality immune to mass hysteria and self-deception... Under oath, eyewitnesses constantly forget crucial details and replace them with their own fabrications. They aren’t liars—they’re just human... Food historian Ian Mosby has explained the “success” of Chinese restaurant syndrome by connecting it to racialized discourse that drew on a vision of Chinese cooking as bizarre or extreme. In the case of gluten intolerance, it doesn’t take much to come up with a plausible confirmation bias. Only nine years ago, 1 in every 11 Americans was on a low-carb diet. In a country terrified of weight gain and recently obsessed with the Atkins diet, gluten makes a great villain... food aversions often turn into a way of life. Like religion, avoiding gluten requires personal sacrifice. Gluten intolerance creates communities, which, like religious communities, share stories of suffering and redemption, and share meals made special by the presence of a food taboo. It’s no wonder people take offense at the suggestion that gluten intolerance could be psychological—after all, who wants to have built their way of life on a “mere” trick of the mind?... Many basic claims of nutrition science are unintuitive and sometimes don’t stand up to repeated research. (Salt? Cholesterol? Vitamins? Alcohol? Coffee?)"
Male rape in America: A new study reveals that men are sexually assaulted almost as often as women. - "gender norms are shaking loose in a way that allows men to identify themselves—if the survey is sensitive and specific enough—as vulnerable. A recent analysis of BJS data, for example, turned up that 46 percent of male victims reported a female perpetrator... The final outrage in Stemple and Meyer’s paper involves inmates, who aren’t counted in the general statistics at all... Those surveys turned up the opposite of what we generally think is true. Women were more likely to be abused by fellow female inmates, and men by guards, and many of those guards were female. For example, of juveniles reporting staff sexual misconduct, 89 percent were boys reporting abuse by a female staff member. In total, inmates reported an astronomical 900,000 incidents of sexual abuse."
How gay Americans can best help gay Africans. - "So far, advocates for change have mostly worked to raise awareness of abuses and apply political pressure on governments that have passed or are considering anti-gay laws. Some of this pressure has come in the form of Western governments threatening to withdraw aid, or actually withdrawing it. Rather than helping, this tends to make things worse for sexual minorities on the continent, who are blamed for the cuts, according to Tabengwa and many other African human-rights activists... The U.S. LGBTQ movement started to gain traction only in the late 1960s, at a time when vast social and cultural changes had already shaken long-held prejudices and challenged conventional sexual morality. These cultural changes are what made the coming-out movement thinkable, and it was the expanding number of out LGBTQ people that eventually changed the political landscape. Without the cracks in the cultural conservatism that pre-dated the ’60s, there would have been much less room for tolerance... If what’s needed is to change African hearts and minds, we must shift our approach away from a scolding, punitive, paternalistic one and reach instead for something more engaged, more connected to actual Africans, and more focused on the communities where the necessary cultural shifts must happen"
It's a lot easier to be outraged and offended at homophobes than to try to engage them
Post ID: 1397221036743023516
Healthcare in Singapore: socialising the benefits and privatising the costs
How to reassure Ah Pek on the Pioneer Package
"Perhaps the challenge really lies in the complexity of the design. From a policy perspective, the PGP sits on top of the existing 3M (Medisave, MediShield, Medifund), Chas (Community Health Assist Scheme) and CDMP (Chronic Disease Management Programme) schemes, which arguably, most Singaporeans do not fully understand anyway. In the proposed system, there are multiple tiers of subsidy depending on whether the presenting disease is deemed "simple" or "complex", whether the disease is included in the CDMP, and so on.
The contrast with many countries with universal health coverage is stark. The message should be simple: At the point you need health care, concentrate on getting well; don't worry about money. In many schemes globally, there are no co-payments required, or if there are, these are in the form of fixed amounts with annual limits. In Singapore, the individual's co-payment can soar while the Government's share (subsidy amount) is capped.
Australia announced in its Budget last week that the government would impose a A$7 (S$8.20) co-payment for each visit to the general practitioner, up to a total of A$70 a year for concessional patients.
No caveats depending on type of disease, no exclusions depending on housing type or income. Just a simple A$7 figure to understand and remember.
This brings me to the second point. It is better to frame the scheme to be viewed through the lens of the pioneer and not the policymaker.
While $9 billion is an admirable commitment to the health- care needs of the pioneer generation, the pioneer would much rather know what he needs to pay individually rather than the amount the Government subsidises.
Imagine the thoughts running through the mind of a pioneer: "Yes, it is good to know there is a $28.50 per visit subsidy for a common illness like a cough or cold, but how much do I need to pay? Nothing? $10? $20? More?"
In stores, it is clever marketing to highlight a large discount - but what really matters to the customer is what he pays, not the discount. The Government's concerns over unanticipated costs and the instinct to safeguard public coffers are understandable and perhaps even natural.
But to the Singaporean living on $1,000 a month, a mis-estimation of the medical bill by $50 is 5 per cent of all he has; to the Government, the same mis-estimation occurring for even 10 per cent of our pioneers is $2.25 million, or barely a quarter of a per cent of the $9 billion allocated.
Perhaps the risk of getting the numbers wrong is a yoke easier borne by the Government's accountants than by elderly Singaporeans."
(Emphasis mine)
Me: let me guess.. gahmen partly owns our restructured hospitals
Someone: no
Gaahmen 100% owns restructured hospitals
Me: HAHA
then restructure simi
Someone: restructure the costs
"socialise the costs... and privatise the benefits"
that's 1 aspect. the other is that healthcare workers were previously considered civil servants
Me: so more expensive
Someone: meaning they enjoyed civil service benefits, and yes more ex
not to mention that the life expectancy of HCW is actually slightly lower
cos of the stresss, night shifts and constant garbage that MOH threw out
Me: actually since 1994 new civil servants have had SHIT benefits
Someone: yea well... $$$
Me: trying to keep the civil service young
well too bad young people wont stay
Someone: also, HCW as civil servants meant that the old fear of a commie insurrection thru the ranks of HCW, was still alive
that's my conspiracy theory
but essentially the new scheme afforded them the powers of a corporate entity, that could fire people at will
purely to "cut costs"
but have administrative bloat
Me: ah yes very important
and can hire lots of foreigners
cos no longer civil servants
and can claim that civil service has few employees
lower turnover!
Someone: MOH owns MOH Holdings, which owns all the hospitals
thru the clusters
yes, forgot about that
becos of the neverending exodus of HCW (nurses, drs, and allied health)
this new system afforded Ah Gong flexiibility to hire cheap foreign labor in unlimited numbers
yea... cos I think staff turnover is a minor KPI for civil service? can't recall
in 2004-2007, when the system shifted to the flat rate reimbursement
some people made noise
MOH responded by getting MOHH to fire them
"services no longer required"
"corporate decision"
Last time, in 1994 during the restructuring, MOH paid hosp per subsidised pts seen
so hosp made money based on factory converyor belt
but still made money seeing subsidised, so it was in a sense still ok
sicne the recent change, its flat rate and "I don't care if you sink or swim"
which causes the hospitals to scramble to get rid of subsidised patients
Me: no wonder so hard to have subsidised appts now
eh so how does the "subsidy" work if hospitals are not paid per patient?
and how do they ensure govt hospitals dont dump subsidised patients
Someone: they don't.
like i said, MOH 2010 ruling: dump subsidised
essentially a Gahmen decree to turn a profit at the expense of subsidised patients, but also not to let the public find out
Me: hurr
Someone: now hosp must stretch their dollar... and the rich subsidise the poor, indirectly, so... dunno good or bad
Me: so the so-called subsidy is really a price ceiling set by the government
and not a real subsidy
I'm sure this is not a secret
can I blog it
Someone: well
it says something about the system that a cold chill runs down my spine just when ou asked that question
and i worry about my license
well since there's no hard copy of the decree, its all hearsay anyway
Me: yeah so a hard copy exists somewhere
Someone: heh. so who's gonna find it?
Lisbeth Salander?
"Perhaps the challenge really lies in the complexity of the design. From a policy perspective, the PGP sits on top of the existing 3M (Medisave, MediShield, Medifund), Chas (Community Health Assist Scheme) and CDMP (Chronic Disease Management Programme) schemes, which arguably, most Singaporeans do not fully understand anyway. In the proposed system, there are multiple tiers of subsidy depending on whether the presenting disease is deemed "simple" or "complex", whether the disease is included in the CDMP, and so on.
The contrast with many countries with universal health coverage is stark. The message should be simple: At the point you need health care, concentrate on getting well; don't worry about money. In many schemes globally, there are no co-payments required, or if there are, these are in the form of fixed amounts with annual limits. In Singapore, the individual's co-payment can soar while the Government's share (subsidy amount) is capped.
Australia announced in its Budget last week that the government would impose a A$7 (S$8.20) co-payment for each visit to the general practitioner, up to a total of A$70 a year for concessional patients.
No caveats depending on type of disease, no exclusions depending on housing type or income. Just a simple A$7 figure to understand and remember.
This brings me to the second point. It is better to frame the scheme to be viewed through the lens of the pioneer and not the policymaker.
While $9 billion is an admirable commitment to the health- care needs of the pioneer generation, the pioneer would much rather know what he needs to pay individually rather than the amount the Government subsidises.
Imagine the thoughts running through the mind of a pioneer: "Yes, it is good to know there is a $28.50 per visit subsidy for a common illness like a cough or cold, but how much do I need to pay? Nothing? $10? $20? More?"
In stores, it is clever marketing to highlight a large discount - but what really matters to the customer is what he pays, not the discount. The Government's concerns over unanticipated costs and the instinct to safeguard public coffers are understandable and perhaps even natural.
But to the Singaporean living on $1,000 a month, a mis-estimation of the medical bill by $50 is 5 per cent of all he has; to the Government, the same mis-estimation occurring for even 10 per cent of our pioneers is $2.25 million, or barely a quarter of a per cent of the $9 billion allocated.
Perhaps the risk of getting the numbers wrong is a yoke easier borne by the Government's accountants than by elderly Singaporeans."
(Emphasis mine)
Me: let me guess.. gahmen partly owns our restructured hospitals
Someone: no
Gaahmen 100% owns restructured hospitals
Me: HAHA
then restructure simi
Someone: restructure the costs
"socialise the costs... and privatise the benefits"
that's 1 aspect. the other is that healthcare workers were previously considered civil servants
Me: so more expensive
Someone: meaning they enjoyed civil service benefits, and yes more ex
not to mention that the life expectancy of HCW is actually slightly lower
cos of the stresss, night shifts and constant garbage that MOH threw out
Me: actually since 1994 new civil servants have had SHIT benefits
Someone: yea well... $$$
Me: trying to keep the civil service young
well too bad young people wont stay
Someone: also, HCW as civil servants meant that the old fear of a commie insurrection thru the ranks of HCW, was still alive
that's my conspiracy theory
but essentially the new scheme afforded them the powers of a corporate entity, that could fire people at will
purely to "cut costs"
but have administrative bloat
Me: ah yes very important
and can hire lots of foreigners
cos no longer civil servants
and can claim that civil service has few employees
lower turnover!
Someone: MOH owns MOH Holdings, which owns all the hospitals
thru the clusters
yes, forgot about that
becos of the neverending exodus of HCW (nurses, drs, and allied health)
this new system afforded Ah Gong flexiibility to hire cheap foreign labor in unlimited numbers
yea... cos I think staff turnover is a minor KPI for civil service? can't recall
in 2004-2007, when the system shifted to the flat rate reimbursement
some people made noise
MOH responded by getting MOHH to fire them
"services no longer required"
"corporate decision"
Last time, in 1994 during the restructuring, MOH paid hosp per subsidised pts seen
so hosp made money based on factory converyor belt
but still made money seeing subsidised, so it was in a sense still ok
sicne the recent change, its flat rate and "I don't care if you sink or swim"
which causes the hospitals to scramble to get rid of subsidised patients
Me: no wonder so hard to have subsidised appts now
eh so how does the "subsidy" work if hospitals are not paid per patient?
and how do they ensure govt hospitals dont dump subsidised patients
Someone: they don't.
like i said, MOH 2010 ruling: dump subsidised
essentially a Gahmen decree to turn a profit at the expense of subsidised patients, but also not to let the public find out
Me: hurr
Someone: now hosp must stretch their dollar... and the rich subsidise the poor, indirectly, so... dunno good or bad
Me: so the so-called subsidy is really a price ceiling set by the government
and not a real subsidy
I'm sure this is not a secret
can I blog it
Someone: well
it says something about the system that a cold chill runs down my spine just when ou asked that question
and i worry about my license
well since there's no hard copy of the decree, its all hearsay anyway
Me: yeah so a hard copy exists somewhere
Someone: heh. so who's gonna find it?
Lisbeth Salander?
Post ID: 3755249783920075263
Monday, May 19, 2014
Links - 19th May 2014
Fuck No Misconceptions - "i fucking hate tumblr so much seriously
you guys are always like “i want equality!” except gay people are better than straight people and women are better than men and poc are better than white people and trans people are better than cis people
if you claim you want equality, but put someone down because they’re privileged, that doesn’t make you an advocate for equality, it makes you an asshole"
"You know I don’t understand this whole “We minorities are underprivileged every single day of our lives!” Like what? Where in America do you live that that is an every day thing? I’m Latina, female, pansexual, and on anxiety meds and you know what? In this whole week and the week before I have no felt “underprivileged” not once!
You know what? Being a woman I get helped out a lot for no reason other than the fact that I’m a woman. For example I was at the airport not too long ago coming back from Thailand. I was grabbing my bags from the conveyor belt and one of them was getting away from me. I was so weak (because I had been sick for weeks) that I couldn’t pick it up. A nice gentleman picked it up for me and put it on my cart. I saw many men helping out women with their bags, but not once did I see a single man getting any help at all with their bags.
In short, stop trying to make up shit and realize that good things do happen to you and sometimes it’s solely because you’re a female."
A Point of View: Sex and the French - "Whenever a French man of state has sex with someone not his wife, people call me up and ask why he did it. When I say people do, I really mean journalists (a sub-species whose personhood is sometimes in doubt) and I suppose I really mean newspaper editors and radio producers (a still more dubious class). But they do call, and they do ask. This is simply because I lived in France for some years and have written a lot about life there, and the false assumption is made that I am intimately expert on all its corners, including those obscure from my view. This is a version of the popular journalist's "fallacy of omniscience by proximity". I'm sure that anyone who ever wrote from Korea gets similar calls: "You lived there, right? You must have often seen out-of-favour relatives being eaten alive by ravenous dogs? Can't you tell our listeners something about it?"... Far from wanting to keep sex in the private sphere, the puritans can't wait to drag it out in public. Puritans are the least buttoned-up people in the world. They can't wait to pin a scarlet A for adultery on someone's clothing, or hold a public humiliation ritual... "What is it with these people?" the Brit journalists keep saying, speaking of the French ones. "Why do they refuse to invade the privacy of someone they've never met, or hang around all night to grab a few illicit pictures, causing immense pain to some stranger's wife and children, in order to obsess over a sexual affair of a kind they wish they were having themselves? And they call themselves journalists!... I think that one of the ways the French table civilises us is that it asks us both to indulge our hungers and to control them, at the same time. We do not gorge. We wait until everyone is seated. We consider the company even as we eye the dishes. The point of great French dining is not that we should simply sit down and celebrate our appetites, but that we have to transform our hungers into civilised desires. Learning which fork to use means learning when not to. Self-righteousness about other people's appetites is uncivilised. But not being able to control your own when the social occasion demands it is very bad manners. And that is one more thing I learned in France."
Be The Mayor - Welcome - "Waging an ongoing battle for the foursquare mayorship of your favorite venue?
Check here to see how you match up."
When Will I Be Mayor - "Have you ever wanted to become the mayor fo your favorite venue on foursquare? We can help make that dream, a reality. We search your foursquare? history to find out how many more times you need to check in get that coveted Mayorship. We even monitor venues that you are close, and send you weekly updates on your progress!"
Mathematical beauty activates same brain region as great art or music
'Startling Russian Fiction' Used to Justify Actions in Ukraine, U.S. Says - ""As Russia spins a false narrative to justify its illegal actions in Ukraine, the world has not seen such startling Russian fiction since Dostoyevsky wrote: 'The formula "two plus two equals five" is not without its attractions,'" the State Department said Wednesday in an online statement, referring to a quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novella "Notes from the Underground," published in 1864... "Putin's press conference reveals that we may have reached the weird moment when the dictator believes his own propaganda""
Short people are more prone to paranoia, study suggests - "researchers found that decreasing a person's height in a virtual experiment made them feel poorly about themselves, mistrustful, and more fearful that others were trying to hurt them... the women were more likely to think that they were being stared at and that other passengers in the train car had bad intentions towards them or were attempting to provoke them."
Maybe this is part of why women have poorer self-esteem and are more risk-averse
Are tall people smarter than short people? Research finds ‘moderate’ genetic connection between height, IQ - "Higher IQ scores and being taller than average are both associated with better health, according to previous research cited in the study. Short people are thought to be at higher risk for cardiovascular disease, while higher IQ is linked to lower overall mortality risk and a lower risk of heart disease, stroke and suicide. Study results don't always favor tall people, though. Other research has foundthat taller women are at increased risk for cancer after menopause, and studies on soldiers and athletes have found shorter individuals live longer on average than their taller peers."
Meanwhile IQ is supposedly rubbish
China Wants Jimmy Kimmel to Apologize… For a Third Time - "ABC has already issued two public apologies over a racially insensitive Jimmy Kimmel Live sketch in which a child suggested the U.S. “kill everyone in China” to solve its debt problem in an unscripted moment, but that didn’t stop a Chinese official from demanding Monday that the network say sorry again — and this time, “with a sincere attitude.” “ABC should face up to its mistake, and respond with a sincere attitude to the reasonable demands by Chinese people in America, and prevent a similar incident from occurring again,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a news conference, according to the Hollywood Reporter."
Meanwhile they keep demanding that Japan apologises for World War II. If Kimmel must apologise thrice (at least), Japan will never be able to apologise enough
Getting in on the act: How the porn industry intends to reinvent itself - "the Porn Weekender experience. For their money, they are provided with accommodation, taken on set for two days to see how films are made, and are allowed to direct the actors and create scenarios that they would like to see filmed, tell the performers what to wear, what to do, and so on. They can also request which models they'd like to take part and they can use their own cameras to film and photograph as much as they want. At all times, the models can veto any request they find distasteful... The oddest thing about the business plan, however, is that if the customers provide a health certificate proving they are free from Hepatitis B and C, HIV (I and II), syphilis, gonorrhoea and chlamydia, and they successfully perform with a consenting model for two 15-minute scenes… they are actually paid for their efforts; €200 for the men, €400 for the women. "I've been inundated with requests from men, women and couples – straight and lesbian – inquiring about taking part in a scene," says Steve. "The couples usually want to try a threesome with a girl, and so did the one lesbian couple who enquired. Very few actually take that line of enquiry further. Most feel being on site and directing the models is interactive enough. "It is overwhelmingly men who want to see if they have what it takes to be a porn star. The reality is that they probably haven't. It is generally accepted in the industry that only one in 300 men can actually perform for the length of time required, with all the stopping and starting, under the lights and in view of other people." Steve has had dozens of enquiries from men wanting to take part in a film during the six months that Porn Weekender has been up and running; only three have turned up to the set – and none was able to perform. "We are prepared to pay them for two reasons – first, having them pay us or the models for sex would be prostitution, and we don't do that. Second, finding a man who can do this is so rare that it would actually be an event. I'm not kidding, the guys that can do this, get 'wood' on demand and for hours on end, they're freaks of nature"... There is a cycle of responses that goes: anticipation, embarrassment, shock, amazement, desire, loss of desire, acute senses of time and hunger, before moving on to boredom. A typical scene might involve a girl finding a toy under a pillow and playing with it; another girl catches her at it, joins in… cue hunger, boredom etc. The reason for this is that it all appears so clinical; the focused and specific nature of the acting is so surprisingly professional that it leaves no room for thoughts of the erotic... "I enjoy the lifestyle and the travel and meeting people, but you don't enjoy the sex. At least 90 per cent of the orgasms you have are faked; there is too much to concentrate on – the director, the camera angles and so on – that you just can't concentrate on enjoying yourself." All the actresses are so convincing in their expressions of coital bliss, that when Bianca says this, the eyes of every man in the room become glazed as they re-evaluate their sexual experiences one by one and become increasingly glum"
Aware objects tying NSmen benefits to public goods, - "Associate Professor Daniel Goh, a sociologist at the National University of Singapore, pointed out that while Aware's position was that no group should be specially privileged, they did not challenge certain groups of people, like single mothers, with access to some of these benefits. MP Alex Yam, who sits on the Government Parliamentary Committee for Defence and Foreign Affairs agreed. He cited how the recently announced Pioneer Generation Package would provide health care benefits for those above 65. This was also a "fundamental benefit", he pointed out... When asked about this allegation, Ms Lim retorted: "The Pioneer Generation Package is different. It was not an entitlement, but a kind of compensation for what they had lost out earlier." MP Ellen Lee, the deputy chairman of the same GPC, said that the reality is that some NSmen do need help for the sacrifices that they have gone through to serve the nation, be it in their studies or careers."
Is AWARE against free education for Malays too?
Sultan of Brunei unveils strict sharia penal code - "67-year-old Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah – one of the world's wealthiest men – said in his decree that the move was "a must" under Islam, dismissing "never-ending theories" that sharia punishments were cruel in comments clearly aimed at detractors. "Theory states that Allah's law is cruel and unfair but Allah himself has said that his law is indeed fair," he said. The initial phase beginning on Thursday introduces fines or jail terms for offences ranging from indecent behaviour, failure to attend Friday prayers, and out-of-wedlock pregnancies. A second phase covering crimes such as theft and robbery is to be implemented later this year, involving more stringent penalties such as severing of limbs and flogging. Late next year, punishments such as death by stoning for offences including sodomy and adultery will be introduced... The sultan first proposed the sharia penal code in 1990s, and in recent years has increasingly warned of rising crime and pernicious outside influences including the internet. He has called Islam a "firewall" against globalisation. He announced the implementation plans in October. Brunei is the first country in east or south-east Asia to introduce a sharia penal code on a national level. Situated on Borneo island, which it shares with Malaysia and Indonesia, the small state already practised a relatively conservative form of Islam compared with its Muslim-majority neighbours, banning the sale of alcohol and restricting other religions. Muslim ethnic Malays, who make up about 70% of the population, are broadly supportive of the move by their revered father-figure."
you guys are always like “i want equality!” except gay people are better than straight people and women are better than men and poc are better than white people and trans people are better than cis people
if you claim you want equality, but put someone down because they’re privileged, that doesn’t make you an advocate for equality, it makes you an asshole"
"You know I don’t understand this whole “We minorities are underprivileged every single day of our lives!” Like what? Where in America do you live that that is an every day thing? I’m Latina, female, pansexual, and on anxiety meds and you know what? In this whole week and the week before I have no felt “underprivileged” not once!
You know what? Being a woman I get helped out a lot for no reason other than the fact that I’m a woman. For example I was at the airport not too long ago coming back from Thailand. I was grabbing my bags from the conveyor belt and one of them was getting away from me. I was so weak (because I had been sick for weeks) that I couldn’t pick it up. A nice gentleman picked it up for me and put it on my cart. I saw many men helping out women with their bags, but not once did I see a single man getting any help at all with their bags.
In short, stop trying to make up shit and realize that good things do happen to you and sometimes it’s solely because you’re a female."
A Point of View: Sex and the French - "Whenever a French man of state has sex with someone not his wife, people call me up and ask why he did it. When I say people do, I really mean journalists (a sub-species whose personhood is sometimes in doubt) and I suppose I really mean newspaper editors and radio producers (a still more dubious class). But they do call, and they do ask. This is simply because I lived in France for some years and have written a lot about life there, and the false assumption is made that I am intimately expert on all its corners, including those obscure from my view. This is a version of the popular journalist's "fallacy of omniscience by proximity". I'm sure that anyone who ever wrote from Korea gets similar calls: "You lived there, right? You must have often seen out-of-favour relatives being eaten alive by ravenous dogs? Can't you tell our listeners something about it?"... Far from wanting to keep sex in the private sphere, the puritans can't wait to drag it out in public. Puritans are the least buttoned-up people in the world. They can't wait to pin a scarlet A for adultery on someone's clothing, or hold a public humiliation ritual... "What is it with these people?" the Brit journalists keep saying, speaking of the French ones. "Why do they refuse to invade the privacy of someone they've never met, or hang around all night to grab a few illicit pictures, causing immense pain to some stranger's wife and children, in order to obsess over a sexual affair of a kind they wish they were having themselves? And they call themselves journalists!... I think that one of the ways the French table civilises us is that it asks us both to indulge our hungers and to control them, at the same time. We do not gorge. We wait until everyone is seated. We consider the company even as we eye the dishes. The point of great French dining is not that we should simply sit down and celebrate our appetites, but that we have to transform our hungers into civilised desires. Learning which fork to use means learning when not to. Self-righteousness about other people's appetites is uncivilised. But not being able to control your own when the social occasion demands it is very bad manners. And that is one more thing I learned in France."
Be The Mayor - Welcome - "Waging an ongoing battle for the foursquare mayorship of your favorite venue?
Check here to see how you match up."
When Will I Be Mayor - "Have you ever wanted to become the mayor fo your favorite venue on foursquare? We can help make that dream, a reality. We search your foursquare? history to find out how many more times you need to check in get that coveted Mayorship. We even monitor venues that you are close, and send you weekly updates on your progress!"
Mathematical beauty activates same brain region as great art or music
'Startling Russian Fiction' Used to Justify Actions in Ukraine, U.S. Says - ""As Russia spins a false narrative to justify its illegal actions in Ukraine, the world has not seen such startling Russian fiction since Dostoyevsky wrote: 'The formula "two plus two equals five" is not without its attractions,'" the State Department said Wednesday in an online statement, referring to a quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novella "Notes from the Underground," published in 1864... "Putin's press conference reveals that we may have reached the weird moment when the dictator believes his own propaganda""
Short people are more prone to paranoia, study suggests - "researchers found that decreasing a person's height in a virtual experiment made them feel poorly about themselves, mistrustful, and more fearful that others were trying to hurt them... the women were more likely to think that they were being stared at and that other passengers in the train car had bad intentions towards them or were attempting to provoke them."
Maybe this is part of why women have poorer self-esteem and are more risk-averse
Are tall people smarter than short people? Research finds ‘moderate’ genetic connection between height, IQ - "Higher IQ scores and being taller than average are both associated with better health, according to previous research cited in the study. Short people are thought to be at higher risk for cardiovascular disease, while higher IQ is linked to lower overall mortality risk and a lower risk of heart disease, stroke and suicide. Study results don't always favor tall people, though. Other research has foundthat taller women are at increased risk for cancer after menopause, and studies on soldiers and athletes have found shorter individuals live longer on average than their taller peers."
Meanwhile IQ is supposedly rubbish
China Wants Jimmy Kimmel to Apologize… For a Third Time - "ABC has already issued two public apologies over a racially insensitive Jimmy Kimmel Live sketch in which a child suggested the U.S. “kill everyone in China” to solve its debt problem in an unscripted moment, but that didn’t stop a Chinese official from demanding Monday that the network say sorry again — and this time, “with a sincere attitude.” “ABC should face up to its mistake, and respond with a sincere attitude to the reasonable demands by Chinese people in America, and prevent a similar incident from occurring again,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said at a news conference, according to the Hollywood Reporter."
Meanwhile they keep demanding that Japan apologises for World War II. If Kimmel must apologise thrice (at least), Japan will never be able to apologise enough
Getting in on the act: How the porn industry intends to reinvent itself - "the Porn Weekender experience. For their money, they are provided with accommodation, taken on set for two days to see how films are made, and are allowed to direct the actors and create scenarios that they would like to see filmed, tell the performers what to wear, what to do, and so on. They can also request which models they'd like to take part and they can use their own cameras to film and photograph as much as they want. At all times, the models can veto any request they find distasteful... The oddest thing about the business plan, however, is that if the customers provide a health certificate proving they are free from Hepatitis B and C, HIV (I and II), syphilis, gonorrhoea and chlamydia, and they successfully perform with a consenting model for two 15-minute scenes… they are actually paid for their efforts; €200 for the men, €400 for the women. "I've been inundated with requests from men, women and couples – straight and lesbian – inquiring about taking part in a scene," says Steve. "The couples usually want to try a threesome with a girl, and so did the one lesbian couple who enquired. Very few actually take that line of enquiry further. Most feel being on site and directing the models is interactive enough. "It is overwhelmingly men who want to see if they have what it takes to be a porn star. The reality is that they probably haven't. It is generally accepted in the industry that only one in 300 men can actually perform for the length of time required, with all the stopping and starting, under the lights and in view of other people." Steve has had dozens of enquiries from men wanting to take part in a film during the six months that Porn Weekender has been up and running; only three have turned up to the set – and none was able to perform. "We are prepared to pay them for two reasons – first, having them pay us or the models for sex would be prostitution, and we don't do that. Second, finding a man who can do this is so rare that it would actually be an event. I'm not kidding, the guys that can do this, get 'wood' on demand and for hours on end, they're freaks of nature"... There is a cycle of responses that goes: anticipation, embarrassment, shock, amazement, desire, loss of desire, acute senses of time and hunger, before moving on to boredom. A typical scene might involve a girl finding a toy under a pillow and playing with it; another girl catches her at it, joins in… cue hunger, boredom etc. The reason for this is that it all appears so clinical; the focused and specific nature of the acting is so surprisingly professional that it leaves no room for thoughts of the erotic... "I enjoy the lifestyle and the travel and meeting people, but you don't enjoy the sex. At least 90 per cent of the orgasms you have are faked; there is too much to concentrate on – the director, the camera angles and so on – that you just can't concentrate on enjoying yourself." All the actresses are so convincing in their expressions of coital bliss, that when Bianca says this, the eyes of every man in the room become glazed as they re-evaluate their sexual experiences one by one and become increasingly glum"
Aware objects tying NSmen benefits to public goods, - "Associate Professor Daniel Goh, a sociologist at the National University of Singapore, pointed out that while Aware's position was that no group should be specially privileged, they did not challenge certain groups of people, like single mothers, with access to some of these benefits. MP Alex Yam, who sits on the Government Parliamentary Committee for Defence and Foreign Affairs agreed. He cited how the recently announced Pioneer Generation Package would provide health care benefits for those above 65. This was also a "fundamental benefit", he pointed out... When asked about this allegation, Ms Lim retorted: "The Pioneer Generation Package is different. It was not an entitlement, but a kind of compensation for what they had lost out earlier." MP Ellen Lee, the deputy chairman of the same GPC, said that the reality is that some NSmen do need help for the sacrifices that they have gone through to serve the nation, be it in their studies or careers."
Is AWARE against free education for Malays too?
Sultan of Brunei unveils strict sharia penal code - "67-year-old Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah – one of the world's wealthiest men – said in his decree that the move was "a must" under Islam, dismissing "never-ending theories" that sharia punishments were cruel in comments clearly aimed at detractors. "Theory states that Allah's law is cruel and unfair but Allah himself has said that his law is indeed fair," he said. The initial phase beginning on Thursday introduces fines or jail terms for offences ranging from indecent behaviour, failure to attend Friday prayers, and out-of-wedlock pregnancies. A second phase covering crimes such as theft and robbery is to be implemented later this year, involving more stringent penalties such as severing of limbs and flogging. Late next year, punishments such as death by stoning for offences including sodomy and adultery will be introduced... The sultan first proposed the sharia penal code in 1990s, and in recent years has increasingly warned of rising crime and pernicious outside influences including the internet. He has called Islam a "firewall" against globalisation. He announced the implementation plans in October. Brunei is the first country in east or south-east Asia to introduce a sharia penal code on a national level. Situated on Borneo island, which it shares with Malaysia and Indonesia, the small state already practised a relatively conservative form of Islam compared with its Muslim-majority neighbours, banning the sale of alcohol and restricting other religions. Muslim ethnic Malays, who make up about 70% of the population, are broadly supportive of the move by their revered father-figure."
Post ID: 4352901657475654586
Hong Kong Girls vs China Girls vs ABC Girls
Addendum: The subtitles don't show up on mobile, but on a proper computer it's hunky dory.
Translation from Reddit posted on video page:
-- Dining: Hong Kong Girl --
HKGirl: What should we eat later?
Guy : How about Korean BBQ? Korean BBQ is pretty good.
HKGirl: I'd get pimples.
Guy : How about Sushi then?
HKGirl: I don't even eat fish, shouldn't you know that already?
Guy : How about that restaurant with very delicious food?
HKGirl: But we have to wait ...
Guy : Okay, well, what do you want to eat?
HKGirl: Why can't you be more decisive? Are you a real man?
// HKGirl turns around and leaves.
-- Dining: Mainland Girl --
MLG: Where should we go for dinner?
Guy: Korean BBQ, Korean BBQ is pretty good. (with very lousy Mandarin)
MLG: How about we go to Peninsula for buffet? It's excellent there.
Guy: ... now?
MLG: Yeah! C'mon, let's go.
//MLG dragged the guy away
-- Dining: ABC Girl --
ABC: So where should we go for dinner tonight?
Guy: Well, how about we just find a restaurant nearby?
ABC: How about McDonald's?
Guy: MacDonald?!
ABC: C'mon ...
ABC: We can even pay for our own!
Guy: We pay for our own?!
ABC: Yeah!
ABC: Let's go! Let's go!
//ABC drags the guy away.
-- Meeting Friends: Hong Kong Girl --
Friend: Hey! Ain't you Ng! Long time no see!
Guy : Ain't you Look Chard? (Look Chard sounds like 6 7 which means stupid, dumb, dork in Cantonese)
Friend: Yeah! I'm Look Chard.
Guy : Yeah! Long time no see!
Friend: How have you been?
Guy : Oh, like usual, just walking around with my girlfriend.
Friend: You're so lucky having a girlfriend.
Guy : Oh, it's nothing. Let me introduce her to you.
Guy : WTF! Where did she go?
Guy : Hey! Come back!
// Guy runs away after his girlfriend.
-- Meeting Friends: Mainland Girl --
Friend: Ng! Long time no see!
Guy : Look Chard! Long time no see!
Friend: So how are you?
Guy : Oh, like usual, just walking around with my girlfriend.
Friend: You're so lucky having a girlfriend.
Guy : Oh, it's nothing. Let me introduce her to you.
Guy : WTF! Where did she go again?
Friend: Where?
MLG : You guys don't need to pay me any attention. I'll just do my makeup for a bit. You guys keep talking.
-- Meeting Friends: ABC Girl --
Friend: You're Ng! Long time no see!
ABC : Nice to meet you!
Friend: Nice to meet you!
ABC : Have you two known each other for a long time?
Friend: Yeah! We go way back. And you?
ABC : We only met since last week. Didn't he tell you?
Friend: Oh I didn't know.
ABC : How about we text (each other)? Give me your phone number?
Friend: Of course, no problem.
// Guy totally ignored.
-- After Dinner: Hong Kong Girl --
Guy: So we have finished dinner. So like you wanna — (cut off by HKG)
HKG: I need to go home. My parents said I have to be home before dusk.
Guy: Okay, I will take the bus with you.
HKG: You meant taxi.
Guy: Taxi?
// Guy follows HKG.
-- After Dinner: Mainland Girl --
Guy: Dinner is done. (with very lousy Mandarin)
Guy: You wanna ... ? You wanna come to my home for a cup of coffee?
MLG: Sure! I really want coffee.
Guy: Really? Let's take a taxi!
// Guy drags MLG away.
-- After Dinner: ABC --
Guy: So dinner is done.
Guy: Actually, do you wanna — (cut off by ABC)
ABC: How about let's go to your home? Coffee?
Guy: Good Idea!
Guy: But my dad and my mom are home.
ABC: Then, let's go to mine?
Guy: For real?
ABC: Yeah, there is no one. I live alone.
Guy: Really?
ABC: Hurry up!
Guy: Reallllly?
// ABC drags guy away.
(Ending Text: If you were him, which one would you choose?)
Post ID: 4052860656228835140
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Links - 18th May 2014
Must Be Singapore - "PAP Youth Wing: Monotone speaking, inspiring such confidence"
Chris Powell's answer to What am I missing out on in life if I don't have a girlfriend? - Quora - "Hmmmm...
You'll miss out on...
-Used tampons sitting in the trash can every month.
-Hair clogging your sink and shower
-Extra clothes to wash (girls have skid marks, bro)
-Burnt dinners to clean up
-Mood swings that have to be dealt with on a delicate level.
-Constant need of approval
-Constant need of attention
-Constant need of affection
-Constant questioning of your actions
-You miss out on privacy
-Catering to someone else's every need
-Poker night at your favorite bar
Just a few things...
But let's not forget the most important part you'll miss out on...
Other women! ;) (jk)"
Driver Who Fatally Injured Teen Now Suing Dead Teen's Family - "A woman who struck three teens on bikes while driving her SUV, killing one and injuring the others, is now suing the deceased teen, his family, and the other two boys. She is claiming $1.35 million in damages for her psychological suffering... Cameron, the family's lawyer, has filed a lawsuit against Simon for medical and funeral costs on behalf of the boys and their families. He alleges that she was speeding and may have been intoxicated and talking on her cellphone. "They did not apply their brakes properly," Simon's claim states. "They were incompetent bicyclists.""
Playboy Sued for Allegedly Indulging in Painful 'Fore-Play' - "Woman claims she was struck in the buttocks with a golf club during event"
Zombie apocalypse training exercise cancelled by Quebec - "There will be no zombie apocalypse in Quebec next week. The provincial government has stepped in to cancel plans for a zombie-themed emergency training exercise. Participants at an annual symposium on civil security had been planning to use a hypothetical zombie attack to test emergency preparedness. Such a theme has been used elsewhere. The logic behind it is to use something that can never actually occur, as opposed to a flood or an ice storm, because that way emergency-preparedness officials might think of new problems and solutions... Hypothetical zombie attacks are becoming a popular emergency preparedness teaching tool. Even the Centers for Disease Control in the United States has used the tactic."
Anup Sastry's answer to How can I find a decent and expressive guy and make him my friend? - Quora - "A girl asking for tips on "how to friendzone a guy"
Now i have seen everything in life... Can die peacefully"
Chinese man ties gas canister to girlfriend and ignites it - "After rescuing the girl and extinguishing the blaze, police then rescued the man who suffered more severe burns as a result, and who is not expected to survive. The young woman's family said they had warned her against getting involved too quickly with Li Moulian, from Lufeng City located in the southeast of Guangdong Province. Her uncle Wu Chin, 47, said: 'We had warned her that she needed to know more about him before deciding to spend her life with him, it seems sadly the warnings were true as he clearly has mental problems. 'To suddenly accuse her in the middle of the night trying to kill his parents shows he is obviously severely paranoid. 'It is a bad start in life for the child as well with the father having obvious mental problems.'"
Jessica Hui's answer to Do women prefer toilet seats be left up or down? - Quora - "Down. Being that we, you know, generally sit on the toilet, it's not a great prospect to unwittingly (especially in the middle of the night or early in the morning) plop down on a seatless toilet and possibly fall in."
"Why wouldn't you want to check first before you pee? I always check first to make sure the seat is up before I pee. If I didn't I'd probably end up peeing all over the seat cover half the time.
Do women just take a flying butt-first leap at the toilet when they go to pee? Is that why they don't check?"
Infidels go to hell, Isma leader reminds Muslims mourning Karpal’s passing - "In a rebuke aimed at Muslims mourning the death of veteran opposition politician Karpal Singh, a leader of Islamist group Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (Isma) stressed today that infidels go to hell when they die. Isma central committee member Mohd Hazizi Ab Rahman, called on Muslims to be more discerning when they pay their respects. “In the Quran, Allah stated many times that the place for those who die an infidel is hell,” Hazizi was quoted as saying on Isma’s website. “Therefore, for those who refute this, it means they have rejected Allah’s revelation,” he added. Hazizi’s remarks were in response to several Muslims who claimed on social media that Karpal will be rewarded in the afterlife for his good deeds... Hazizi’s comments echoed a statement by the National Fatwa Council in December last year, advising Muslims against using the phrase “rest in peace” in reference to deceased non-Muslims. The council said it was fine for Muslims to mourn the death of non-Muslims but insisted that those who die as infidels will not receive forgiveness and blessings from Allah."
PAP Flip Flop: Singaporeans Skills Not Enough, But Too Much Skills - "On Saturday, I nearly fell off my chair when I read what Tan Chuan-Jin had said. At first, Today reported that Tan Chuan-Jin had said that, “The Government has identified more than 50 firms that have a disproportionately low share of Singaporean professionals, managers and executives compared to others in their industry and that may have scope to improve their hiring and career development practices.” However, Chuan-Jin then added that, “In some cases, the issue may not be a problem with their HR practices per se, but rather, a gap in the skills that are available in the local workforce.” So, according to Chuan-Jin, maybe it’s not that firms were unfair in not hiring Singaporeans. Maybe Singaporeans just didn’t have the skills? So, Singaporeans do not have the skills to be “professionals, managers and executives”? But then, I saw another report in The Business Times which reported that, “Acting Manpower Minister Tan Chuan-Jin yesterday cautioned against Singapore producing too many graduates who can’t find enough good jobs – a predicament South Korea and Taiwan find themselves in today.” He had said that, “Their relentless pursuit of paper qualifications resulted in a glut of graduates… The director-general of Taiwan’s Ministry of Education stated that ‘the abundance of (university) places had undermined the quality of degrees and created a skills mismatch in the job market. People became over-educated and underemployed.”"
Bad comprehension skills = "Flip Flop"
After Prank by Dutch Girl on Twitter, Real Trouble - NYTimes.com - "Youthful pranks in the age of Twitter are no laughing matter, especially if you are a 14-year-old Dutch girl impersonating a terrorist. When the girl, using the Twitter handle @QueenDemetriax_, sent a threat to American Airlines on Sunday, she surely could not have imagined that by Tuesday she would be arrested by the Rotterdam police, attract a global media storm and become the object of both fierce derision and sympathy."
PM defends three core principles of Singapore - "Or you can go by race - 'That person is the right race, so he gets extra marks in the exam, extra advantage for schools admissions and for jobs.' - Is that the Singapore we have fought to build?" he asked."
"Or you can go by race. That person is the right race, he gets extra marks in his PR and naturalisation application. He is the reason why we can keep Singapore at the same racial proportion for decades despite the mathematical impossibility from our natural birth rates. Do we want that? Is that the Singapore we have fought to build?"
US Airways Tweets Out VERY NSFW Photo Of Woman With Toy Plane - "US Airways apologized for an extremely graphic photo that it shared earlier today, depicting a naked woman in a sexual position with a toy plane. On Monday afternoon, the airline tweeted the photo to a customer who was complaining about their service. US Airways said in the tweet, "We welcome feedback, Elle. If your travel is complete, you can detail here for review and follow up.""
Ladies of the Guardian: please stop writing about sex - "It’s a firm rule that, to write on matters sexual, you have to be a young female with a jaunty prose style and a strong belief that (fully consensual) sex is GREAT! It’s good dirty fun – if you’re doing it right! Articles that take a more nuanced line are as rare as non-Etonian cabinet ministers. A visiting Martian might be curious to know why this puffing of sex has to come from female writers – don’t men enjoy the bliss of sex too? Yes they do, but when they express this they are prone to a dodgy excess, to thinking Bad Thoughts that disrespect women, to tainting this magic playground with the sins of our fathers. They must patiently stay on the naughty step a while longer. All sexuality is equal, but some is more in tune with the basic goodness of sex. Only women can fully express this goodness. (Male writers must stick to sober, sad sex topics like erectile dysfunction)... Ladies of the Guardian: please stop writing about sex, because you’re not good enough at it. Serious writing about sex means pondering some difficult truths – for example, that the sexual impulse is something that needs to be reined in, most of the time. It has to be kept within pretty tight confines. This is difficult to reflect on; it means suspecting one’s own impulses, admitting their moral fallibility. Easier to pretend that sex is just a pure, easy, innocent pleasure-source, and that people who doubt it are repressed reactionaries. I recently came across an excellent essay on this issue, by the American writer Mark Greif, called ‘Afternoon of the Sex Children’. Sexual liberation was a good and necessary thing, he says. But, fuelled by commercialism, it developed a downside: it led to a culture of the simplistic promotion of sex, as a badge of being a liberated modern. A true test of liberation, he says, ‘must be whether you have also been freed to be free from sex... There’s a fine line between a healthy frankness about sex and an unhealthy evasion of its complexity. By ignoring this line the whole time, the Guardianmakes itself look lightweight."
Kitten Nearly Dies On Vegan Diet, Gets Healed With Meat - "Veterinarians in Australia who cared for a violently ill vegan kitten are warning pet owners not to "force ideologies" on their pets"
Age at Coresidence, Premarital Cohabitation, and Marriage Dissolution: 1985–2009 - "Does the age at which premarital cohabitors moved in together explain why they have been found to have an increased risk of marital dissolution? Explanations for the increased risk of marriage dissolution among those who marry young center on marital role preparation; for premarital cohabitors, many, if not most, of these roles began at the onset of cohabitation, not marriage. Analyses of the 1995, 2002, and 2006–2010 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (N = 7,037) revealed that age at coresidence explained a substantial portion of the higher marital dissolution risk of premarital cohabitors. In comparisons standardized by age at coresidence, the difference in risk of marital dissolution between premarital cohabitors and those who married without prior cohabitation (“direct marriers”) was much smaller than in comparisons standardized by age at marriage, and in some models this difference was not significant. Selection into direct marriage and premarital cohabitation was also examined."
Seven Reasons Why Gay People Are Better Than Straight People - "EDITOR'S NOTE: We do not think all gay people are better than all straight people. We, in fact, do not think all gay people are anything. (Or all straight people, for that matter.) These are just some general observations. So please, lighten up."
If someone had posted "Seven Reasons Why Straight People Are Better Than Gay People"...
Chris Powell's answer to What am I missing out on in life if I don't have a girlfriend? - Quora - "Hmmmm...
You'll miss out on...
-Used tampons sitting in the trash can every month.
-Hair clogging your sink and shower
-Extra clothes to wash (girls have skid marks, bro)
-Burnt dinners to clean up
-Mood swings that have to be dealt with on a delicate level.
-Constant need of approval
-Constant need of attention
-Constant need of affection
-Constant questioning of your actions
-You miss out on privacy
-Catering to someone else's every need
-Poker night at your favorite bar
Just a few things...
But let's not forget the most important part you'll miss out on...
Other women! ;) (jk)"
Driver Who Fatally Injured Teen Now Suing Dead Teen's Family - "A woman who struck three teens on bikes while driving her SUV, killing one and injuring the others, is now suing the deceased teen, his family, and the other two boys. She is claiming $1.35 million in damages for her psychological suffering... Cameron, the family's lawyer, has filed a lawsuit against Simon for medical and funeral costs on behalf of the boys and their families. He alleges that she was speeding and may have been intoxicated and talking on her cellphone. "They did not apply their brakes properly," Simon's claim states. "They were incompetent bicyclists.""
Playboy Sued for Allegedly Indulging in Painful 'Fore-Play' - "Woman claims she was struck in the buttocks with a golf club during event"
Zombie apocalypse training exercise cancelled by Quebec - "There will be no zombie apocalypse in Quebec next week. The provincial government has stepped in to cancel plans for a zombie-themed emergency training exercise. Participants at an annual symposium on civil security had been planning to use a hypothetical zombie attack to test emergency preparedness. Such a theme has been used elsewhere. The logic behind it is to use something that can never actually occur, as opposed to a flood or an ice storm, because that way emergency-preparedness officials might think of new problems and solutions... Hypothetical zombie attacks are becoming a popular emergency preparedness teaching tool. Even the Centers for Disease Control in the United States has used the tactic."
Anup Sastry's answer to How can I find a decent and expressive guy and make him my friend? - Quora - "A girl asking for tips on "how to friendzone a guy"
Now i have seen everything in life... Can die peacefully"
Chinese man ties gas canister to girlfriend and ignites it - "After rescuing the girl and extinguishing the blaze, police then rescued the man who suffered more severe burns as a result, and who is not expected to survive. The young woman's family said they had warned her against getting involved too quickly with Li Moulian, from Lufeng City located in the southeast of Guangdong Province. Her uncle Wu Chin, 47, said: 'We had warned her that she needed to know more about him before deciding to spend her life with him, it seems sadly the warnings were true as he clearly has mental problems. 'To suddenly accuse her in the middle of the night trying to kill his parents shows he is obviously severely paranoid. 'It is a bad start in life for the child as well with the father having obvious mental problems.'"
Jessica Hui's answer to Do women prefer toilet seats be left up or down? - Quora - "Down. Being that we, you know, generally sit on the toilet, it's not a great prospect to unwittingly (especially in the middle of the night or early in the morning) plop down on a seatless toilet and possibly fall in."
"Why wouldn't you want to check first before you pee? I always check first to make sure the seat is up before I pee. If I didn't I'd probably end up peeing all over the seat cover half the time.
Do women just take a flying butt-first leap at the toilet when they go to pee? Is that why they don't check?"
Infidels go to hell, Isma leader reminds Muslims mourning Karpal’s passing - "In a rebuke aimed at Muslims mourning the death of veteran opposition politician Karpal Singh, a leader of Islamist group Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (Isma) stressed today that infidels go to hell when they die. Isma central committee member Mohd Hazizi Ab Rahman, called on Muslims to be more discerning when they pay their respects. “In the Quran, Allah stated many times that the place for those who die an infidel is hell,” Hazizi was quoted as saying on Isma’s website. “Therefore, for those who refute this, it means they have rejected Allah’s revelation,” he added. Hazizi’s remarks were in response to several Muslims who claimed on social media that Karpal will be rewarded in the afterlife for his good deeds... Hazizi’s comments echoed a statement by the National Fatwa Council in December last year, advising Muslims against using the phrase “rest in peace” in reference to deceased non-Muslims. The council said it was fine for Muslims to mourn the death of non-Muslims but insisted that those who die as infidels will not receive forgiveness and blessings from Allah."
PAP Flip Flop: Singaporeans Skills Not Enough, But Too Much Skills - "On Saturday, I nearly fell off my chair when I read what Tan Chuan-Jin had said. At first, Today reported that Tan Chuan-Jin had said that, “The Government has identified more than 50 firms that have a disproportionately low share of Singaporean professionals, managers and executives compared to others in their industry and that may have scope to improve their hiring and career development practices.” However, Chuan-Jin then added that, “In some cases, the issue may not be a problem with their HR practices per se, but rather, a gap in the skills that are available in the local workforce.” So, according to Chuan-Jin, maybe it’s not that firms were unfair in not hiring Singaporeans. Maybe Singaporeans just didn’t have the skills? So, Singaporeans do not have the skills to be “professionals, managers and executives”? But then, I saw another report in The Business Times which reported that, “Acting Manpower Minister Tan Chuan-Jin yesterday cautioned against Singapore producing too many graduates who can’t find enough good jobs – a predicament South Korea and Taiwan find themselves in today.” He had said that, “Their relentless pursuit of paper qualifications resulted in a glut of graduates… The director-general of Taiwan’s Ministry of Education stated that ‘the abundance of (university) places had undermined the quality of degrees and created a skills mismatch in the job market. People became over-educated and underemployed.”"
Bad comprehension skills = "Flip Flop"
After Prank by Dutch Girl on Twitter, Real Trouble - NYTimes.com - "Youthful pranks in the age of Twitter are no laughing matter, especially if you are a 14-year-old Dutch girl impersonating a terrorist. When the girl, using the Twitter handle @QueenDemetriax_, sent a threat to American Airlines on Sunday, she surely could not have imagined that by Tuesday she would be arrested by the Rotterdam police, attract a global media storm and become the object of both fierce derision and sympathy."
PM defends three core principles of Singapore - "Or you can go by race - 'That person is the right race, so he gets extra marks in the exam, extra advantage for schools admissions and for jobs.' - Is that the Singapore we have fought to build?" he asked."
"Or you can go by race. That person is the right race, he gets extra marks in his PR and naturalisation application. He is the reason why we can keep Singapore at the same racial proportion for decades despite the mathematical impossibility from our natural birth rates. Do we want that? Is that the Singapore we have fought to build?"
US Airways Tweets Out VERY NSFW Photo Of Woman With Toy Plane - "US Airways apologized for an extremely graphic photo that it shared earlier today, depicting a naked woman in a sexual position with a toy plane. On Monday afternoon, the airline tweeted the photo to a customer who was complaining about their service. US Airways said in the tweet, "We welcome feedback, Elle. If your travel is complete, you can detail here for review and follow up.""
Ladies of the Guardian: please stop writing about sex - "It’s a firm rule that, to write on matters sexual, you have to be a young female with a jaunty prose style and a strong belief that (fully consensual) sex is GREAT! It’s good dirty fun – if you’re doing it right! Articles that take a more nuanced line are as rare as non-Etonian cabinet ministers. A visiting Martian might be curious to know why this puffing of sex has to come from female writers – don’t men enjoy the bliss of sex too? Yes they do, but when they express this they are prone to a dodgy excess, to thinking Bad Thoughts that disrespect women, to tainting this magic playground with the sins of our fathers. They must patiently stay on the naughty step a while longer. All sexuality is equal, but some is more in tune with the basic goodness of sex. Only women can fully express this goodness. (Male writers must stick to sober, sad sex topics like erectile dysfunction)... Ladies of the Guardian: please stop writing about sex, because you’re not good enough at it. Serious writing about sex means pondering some difficult truths – for example, that the sexual impulse is something that needs to be reined in, most of the time. It has to be kept within pretty tight confines. This is difficult to reflect on; it means suspecting one’s own impulses, admitting their moral fallibility. Easier to pretend that sex is just a pure, easy, innocent pleasure-source, and that people who doubt it are repressed reactionaries. I recently came across an excellent essay on this issue, by the American writer Mark Greif, called ‘Afternoon of the Sex Children’. Sexual liberation was a good and necessary thing, he says. But, fuelled by commercialism, it developed a downside: it led to a culture of the simplistic promotion of sex, as a badge of being a liberated modern. A true test of liberation, he says, ‘must be whether you have also been freed to be free from sex... There’s a fine line between a healthy frankness about sex and an unhealthy evasion of its complexity. By ignoring this line the whole time, the Guardianmakes itself look lightweight."
Kitten Nearly Dies On Vegan Diet, Gets Healed With Meat - "Veterinarians in Australia who cared for a violently ill vegan kitten are warning pet owners not to "force ideologies" on their pets"
Age at Coresidence, Premarital Cohabitation, and Marriage Dissolution: 1985–2009 - "Does the age at which premarital cohabitors moved in together explain why they have been found to have an increased risk of marital dissolution? Explanations for the increased risk of marriage dissolution among those who marry young center on marital role preparation; for premarital cohabitors, many, if not most, of these roles began at the onset of cohabitation, not marriage. Analyses of the 1995, 2002, and 2006–2010 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (N = 7,037) revealed that age at coresidence explained a substantial portion of the higher marital dissolution risk of premarital cohabitors. In comparisons standardized by age at coresidence, the difference in risk of marital dissolution between premarital cohabitors and those who married without prior cohabitation (“direct marriers”) was much smaller than in comparisons standardized by age at marriage, and in some models this difference was not significant. Selection into direct marriage and premarital cohabitation was also examined."
Seven Reasons Why Gay People Are Better Than Straight People - "EDITOR'S NOTE: We do not think all gay people are better than all straight people. We, in fact, do not think all gay people are anything. (Or all straight people, for that matter.) These are just some general observations. So please, lighten up."
If someone had posted "Seven Reasons Why Straight People Are Better Than Gay People"...
Post ID: 350141789104000952
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Skin Colour and Natural/Sexual Selection
"Although there is very good evidence supporting this hypothesis [that light skinned people produce more Vitamin D in temperate regions] (Jablonski and Chaplin 2000; Molnar 1983), it has also come in for criticism. Robins (1991), for example, argues that rickets was only a problem in urban industrial societies where people lived indoors, frequently in crowded slum conditions. This argument proposes that rickets would not have much of an effect on people who foraged or farmed outdoors, and thus it is unlikely that the disease had any effect on changes in skin coloration that happened thousands of years ago.
An alternative explanation for skin color difference is based on the reaction of different people to cold weather. Studies on soldiers from World War I through the 1950s showed that those with dark skin color were about four times more likely to suffer frostbite than soldiers with light skin (Boas and Almquist 1999:296; Post, Daniels, and Binford 1975). Thus, it might also be true that light skin color somehow confers a degree of protection against cold weather."
--- Cultural Anthropology / Serena Nanda, Richard Warms
"A preference for lighter than average skin, at least among males evaluating females, is reported with very high frequency in the ethnographic literature (van den Berghe and Frost 1986). Investigators working in modern, racially stratified societies often assume that preferences for lighter skin result from the political and social doininance of light-skinned over dark-skinned peoples (Lancaster 1991). However, cross-cultural evidence |nakes it clear that racial hierarchies. while they may exaggerate skin color preferences, do not create them. Some of the evidence comes from historical records of societies in which darker-skinned people dominated lighter-skinned subjects. In both the ancient Roman and the Islamic worlds the presence of large numbers of light-skinned northern slaves went hand in hand with an idealization of whiteness or lightness as a criterion of female beauty. More evidence comes from relatively unstratified societies that show it consistent pattern of preference for lighter than average skin color in females. This preference occurs across populations with a wide range of skin colors, and it is found even in societies whose standards of attractiveness with regard to fatness and facial proportions are sharply at variance with contemporary Western standards. It is reported by male and female and Western anti non-Western ethnographers, and it is manifest both in infonnants’ statements and in cosmetic practices. Evidence regarding female preferences for male skin color is much more mixed.
Why should there be a widespread preference for lighter than average skin color, and why should this preference be more marked in males’ evaluations of females than vice versa? Skin color, like the waist-to-hip ratio, seems to be a relatively invariant marker of female mate value. Estrogen production suppresses melanin production, so that females typically lighten with the onset of puberty, gradually darkening in step with declining ovarian function from young adulthood to old age. In light-haired populations hair color too may track changes in female fecundity. Thus an attraction to light-skinned mates may be a genetic adaptation in human males. This attrilction, however, is also affected by experience and social cues. Men adapt their preferences to local conditions. so that while men in dark-skinned populations commonly report an attraction to lighter than average females, they also commonly report an aversion to Europeans whose skin color puts them far outside the local normal range of variation. And in some modern societies, social responses to sun-tanning may also modify skin color preferences."
--- Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective / edited by Lee Cronk, Napoleon A. Chagnon, William Irons
Related:
Why The “Make Lupita Beautiful Campaign(TM)” Is A Fool’s Errand | Just Four Guys
"'After a lecture of mine on the subject of sex differences in mate preferences, one woman suggested that I should suppress my findings because of the distress they would cause women. Women already have it bad enough in this male-dominated world, she felt, without having scientists tell them that their mating problems may be based in men’s evolved psychology. Yet suppression of this truth is unlikely to help, just as concealing the fact that people have evolved preferences for succulent, ripe fruit is unlikely to change their preferences. Railing against men for the importance they place on beauty, youth and fidelity is like railing against meat eaters because they prefer animal protein. Telling men not to become aroused by signs of youth and health is like telling them not to experience sugar as sweet'...
The above quotations are very important, for they deeply inform the current “campaign” to “Make Lupita Beautiful” – a “campaign” that, by all accounts, will not win many Black (and perhaps other male) male mating minds.
By “Lupita”, of course, I am referring to Ms. Lupita Nyong’o, the Oscar-winning actress in the film “12 Years a Slave”. People Magazine has designated her the year’s most beautiful person, and it, along with other such “attempts” over the past year, have elicited quite a backlash from Black and other Men, in response: they do NOT agree with People and others in the entertainment business; as Buss has written in his highly acclaimed book, they “Want Something Else”...
Aside from “Alt” and/or “Feminist-Porn” (read: where Lesbians are heavily represented), one is hard put to find many examples of prominent porn actresses, of any color, who have very short hair. And when it comes to Black Porn, the Weave (or Lacefront wig), is Queen. One doesn’t even find many instances of Sistas rocking natural hairstyles that often in Porn – few braids, locs, afro-puffs and the like, and regardless of length. This suggests overwhelmingly, that Black (and other Men) who consume Porn featuring Black Women, have very specific sets of physical traits that they desire – and by all accounts, Ms. Lupita, ain’t it...
This brings us to the one notable standout exception in our time: our 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. While many Black Urban Thinking types will knee-jerkingly assert that Obama was elected by more Whites than anyone else, the fact remains that one major reason as to WHY he has proven so electorally successful is due to Black Women voters – who, let’s not kid ourselves, make up the majority of the Black Vote, period – is BECAUSE of who he selected to be his eventual First Lady – a Black looking Black Woman, in Michelle Obama...
Yet, by his own hand, there is scant, if any, evidence of Barack Obama having EVER dated a Sista, regardless of skintone. In his sprawling autobiographical work, “Dreams From My Father”, he recounts several instances where he had girlfriends, all of whom were White. Moreover, no one has come forward from “Barry’s” past who has confirmed that he has indeed dated Sistas prior to Michelle. It just raises interesting – albeit, for many Sistas themselves – uncomfortable - questions, as to what were Obama’s motivations for courting Michelle – could it be possible that it was to burnish his “street cred”? After all, political marriages are by no means anything new...
We are now dealing with the revealed, empirical preferences of Men, in this case Black ones, and “campaigns” to “deprogram” them not only are likely to spectacularly fail, but they also raise very real questions as to the ethics of such an enterprise to begin with (think of the idea of attempts to “deprogram” Gays and Lesbians, for example)."
An alternative explanation for skin color difference is based on the reaction of different people to cold weather. Studies on soldiers from World War I through the 1950s showed that those with dark skin color were about four times more likely to suffer frostbite than soldiers with light skin (Boas and Almquist 1999:296; Post, Daniels, and Binford 1975). Thus, it might also be true that light skin color somehow confers a degree of protection against cold weather."
--- Cultural Anthropology / Serena Nanda, Richard Warms
"A preference for lighter than average skin, at least among males evaluating females, is reported with very high frequency in the ethnographic literature (van den Berghe and Frost 1986). Investigators working in modern, racially stratified societies often assume that preferences for lighter skin result from the political and social doininance of light-skinned over dark-skinned peoples (Lancaster 1991). However, cross-cultural evidence |nakes it clear that racial hierarchies. while they may exaggerate skin color preferences, do not create them. Some of the evidence comes from historical records of societies in which darker-skinned people dominated lighter-skinned subjects. In both the ancient Roman and the Islamic worlds the presence of large numbers of light-skinned northern slaves went hand in hand with an idealization of whiteness or lightness as a criterion of female beauty. More evidence comes from relatively unstratified societies that show it consistent pattern of preference for lighter than average skin color in females. This preference occurs across populations with a wide range of skin colors, and it is found even in societies whose standards of attractiveness with regard to fatness and facial proportions are sharply at variance with contemporary Western standards. It is reported by male and female and Western anti non-Western ethnographers, and it is manifest both in infonnants’ statements and in cosmetic practices. Evidence regarding female preferences for male skin color is much more mixed.
Why should there be a widespread preference for lighter than average skin color, and why should this preference be more marked in males’ evaluations of females than vice versa? Skin color, like the waist-to-hip ratio, seems to be a relatively invariant marker of female mate value. Estrogen production suppresses melanin production, so that females typically lighten with the onset of puberty, gradually darkening in step with declining ovarian function from young adulthood to old age. In light-haired populations hair color too may track changes in female fecundity. Thus an attraction to light-skinned mates may be a genetic adaptation in human males. This attrilction, however, is also affected by experience and social cues. Men adapt their preferences to local conditions. so that while men in dark-skinned populations commonly report an attraction to lighter than average females, they also commonly report an aversion to Europeans whose skin color puts them far outside the local normal range of variation. And in some modern societies, social responses to sun-tanning may also modify skin color preferences."
--- Adaptation and Human Behavior: An Anthropological Perspective / edited by Lee Cronk, Napoleon A. Chagnon, William Irons
Related:
Why The “Make Lupita Beautiful Campaign(TM)” Is A Fool’s Errand | Just Four Guys
"'After a lecture of mine on the subject of sex differences in mate preferences, one woman suggested that I should suppress my findings because of the distress they would cause women. Women already have it bad enough in this male-dominated world, she felt, without having scientists tell them that their mating problems may be based in men’s evolved psychology. Yet suppression of this truth is unlikely to help, just as concealing the fact that people have evolved preferences for succulent, ripe fruit is unlikely to change their preferences. Railing against men for the importance they place on beauty, youth and fidelity is like railing against meat eaters because they prefer animal protein. Telling men not to become aroused by signs of youth and health is like telling them not to experience sugar as sweet'...
The above quotations are very important, for they deeply inform the current “campaign” to “Make Lupita Beautiful” – a “campaign” that, by all accounts, will not win many Black (and perhaps other male) male mating minds.
By “Lupita”, of course, I am referring to Ms. Lupita Nyong’o, the Oscar-winning actress in the film “12 Years a Slave”. People Magazine has designated her the year’s most beautiful person, and it, along with other such “attempts” over the past year, have elicited quite a backlash from Black and other Men, in response: they do NOT agree with People and others in the entertainment business; as Buss has written in his highly acclaimed book, they “Want Something Else”...
Aside from “Alt” and/or “Feminist-Porn” (read: where Lesbians are heavily represented), one is hard put to find many examples of prominent porn actresses, of any color, who have very short hair. And when it comes to Black Porn, the Weave (or Lacefront wig), is Queen. One doesn’t even find many instances of Sistas rocking natural hairstyles that often in Porn – few braids, locs, afro-puffs and the like, and regardless of length. This suggests overwhelmingly, that Black (and other Men) who consume Porn featuring Black Women, have very specific sets of physical traits that they desire – and by all accounts, Ms. Lupita, ain’t it...
This brings us to the one notable standout exception in our time: our 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. While many Black Urban Thinking types will knee-jerkingly assert that Obama was elected by more Whites than anyone else, the fact remains that one major reason as to WHY he has proven so electorally successful is due to Black Women voters – who, let’s not kid ourselves, make up the majority of the Black Vote, period – is BECAUSE of who he selected to be his eventual First Lady – a Black looking Black Woman, in Michelle Obama...
Yet, by his own hand, there is scant, if any, evidence of Barack Obama having EVER dated a Sista, regardless of skintone. In his sprawling autobiographical work, “Dreams From My Father”, he recounts several instances where he had girlfriends, all of whom were White. Moreover, no one has come forward from “Barry’s” past who has confirmed that he has indeed dated Sistas prior to Michelle. It just raises interesting – albeit, for many Sistas themselves – uncomfortable - questions, as to what were Obama’s motivations for courting Michelle – could it be possible that it was to burnish his “street cred”? After all, political marriages are by no means anything new...
We are now dealing with the revealed, empirical preferences of Men, in this case Black ones, and “campaigns” to “deprogram” them not only are likely to spectacularly fail, but they also raise very real questions as to the ethics of such an enterprise to begin with (think of the idea of attempts to “deprogram” Gays and Lesbians, for example)."
Post ID: 8402203761820515825
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