Why Do Men Rape? An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective | Aaron Goetz - Academia.edu
"We propose five types of rapists (or contexts of rape), (1) disadvantaged men who resort to rape, (2) “specialized” rapists who are sexually aroused by violent sex, (3) men who rape opportunistically, (4) high-mating-effort men who are dominant and often psychopathic, and (5) partner rapists motivated by assessments of increased risk of sperm competition. We next discuss evidence for each type of rapist.
The first hypothesized rapist type includes men who are motivated to rape if they have no other means of securing copulations. This may be referred to as the disadvantaged male hypothesis. This hypothesis also has been referred to as the mate deprivation hypothesis (Lalumie ´re, Chalmers, Quinsey, & Seto, 1996). It is supported by data indicating that rapes are committed disproportionately by men with low socioeconomic status (Kalichman, Williams, Cherry, Belcher, & Nachimson, 1998; Thornhill & Thornhill, 1983). Furthermore, Krill, Lake, and Platek (2006) presented evidence that men convicted of rape display lower facial symmetry, an indicator of poor genetic quality. Facial symmetry is linked positively with physical and psychological health (Shackelford & Larsen, 1997), and men with lower facial symmetry are perceived as less attractive and as less desirable mates (Gangestad & Thornhill, 1999; Gangestad, Thornhill, & Yeo, 1994). Deprived of mates by normal means, some men may resort to rape...
Another type of rapist may be the specialized rapist... Because rape carries high potential costs for the rapist, particularly if caught in the act, rapists with a psychology that motivated quicker arousal and ejaculation during rape might have been more successful than men who did not possess such a psychology (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000).
Support for the existence of this hypothesized group has been generated by investigating whether men are aroused by depictions of rape versus depictions of casual sex. Meta-analyses indicate that convicted rapists demonstrate greater sexual arousal to scenes of sexual coercion involving force than do nonrapists (Hall, Shondrick, & Hirschman, 1993; Lalumiere & Quinsey, 1994; Thornhill & Thornhill, 1992)...
Thornhill and Palmer (2000) have hypothesized that some rapists may be capable of producing a high-sperm-count ejaculate that would increase the chance of fertilization. Men seem to be capable of unconsciously adjusting sperm number in ejaculates, such as in response to a greater risk of sperm competition (Baker & Bellis, 1989, 1993), but it is unknown whether rapists adjust sperm numbers during rape...
There is indirect evidence corroborating the hypothesis that rapists’ ejaculates are more competitive than nonrapists. Gottschall and Gottschall (2003) estimated that pregnancy rates resulting from rape are two times that of consensual per-incident rates. That is, approximately 6% of rapes result in pregnancy compared to approximately 3% of consensual copulations...
Burch and Gallup (2006) hypothesized that men may have an adaptation that functions to adjust semen chemistry to cause ovulation immediately following a rape...
The third hypothesized rapist type is the opportunistic rapist... The universality of laws and societal norms prohibiting rape (wife rape being a special exception; see below) indicates an appreciation that men are more likely to rape when the costs are low (Palmer, 1989; Thornhill & Palmer, 2000). The fact that rapes regularly occur during wartime has been presented as evidence of the assessment of victim vulnerability and decreased likelihood of detection (e.g., Gottschall, 2004)...
Women with family members, particularly adult male family members, living nearby are much less likely to be physically assaulted by their partner (Figueredo et al., 2001; Kanin, 1957). This suggests that potential rapists are attending to the probability of retaliation by a victim’s adult male family members.
A fourth hypothesized rapist type is the highmating- effort rapist. High-mating-effort rapists, in contrast to other types, such as disadvantaged rapists, appear to be more sexually experienced (Lalumiere & Quinsey, 1996). These rapists may be characterized as aggressive, dominant, and having high self-esteem. Such rapists often may be characterized as psychopathic (Lalumiere, Harris, Quinsey, & Rice, 2005). Lalumiere et al. argue that high mating effort is an important facet of psychopathy. They argue that although most men appear to deploy mating strategies according to environmental contexts, psychopathic men deploy a high-mating-effort strategy in most contexts, pursuing many partners with little investment, and using coercion and rape when noncoercive tactics fail...
Research evidence corroborates the plausibility of this rapist type. Dean and Malamuth (1997), for example, found that men who scored high on a Sexual Experience measure, “were more likely to report sexual coercion if they were also self-centered as opposed to nurturant”... Lalumiere and Quinsey (1996) found that a strong indicator of past sexual coercion is positive self-perceived mating success and an extensive history of casual sexual relationships. Finally, the risk of date rape is greater when the man initiated the date, spent money on the woman, and provided transportation (Muehlenhard & Linton, 1987). Perceived relative deprivation, in which an individual’s (high) expectations about having sex are not satisfied (Malamuth et al., 2005) also may play a role in the sexually coercive behavior of high-matingeffort men. For example, men who report a greater likelihood of committing rape tend to endorse statements expressing an increased perception of mate deprivation, but do not report an overall fewer number of sexual opportunities...
A final hypothesized rapist type includes men motivated to rape their partners under conditions of increased sperm competition risk... most likely to occur when a man learns or suspects that his long-term partner recently has been sexually unfaithful...
Women are particularly likely to be raped by their partner during a breakup instigated by men’s concerns about their partner’s infidelity (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000)...
Men are more aroused by and prefer sexually explicit images that suggest the occurrence of sperm competition than by sexually explicit images that do not suggest the occurrence of sperm competition (Kilgallon & Simmons, 2005; Pound, 2002). Furthermore, men who spend a greater proportion of time apart from their partners since the couple’s last copulation (and therefore face a higher risk of sperm competition) report that they find their partner more attractive, are more interested in copulating with their partner, and believe that their partner is more interested in copulating with them (Shackelford, Goetz, McKibbin, & Starratt, 2007; Shackelford et al., 2002). These results are independent of relationship satisfaction, total time since last copulation, and total time spent apart...
Goetz and Shackelford (2006) documented in two studies that men’s sexually coercive behavior is positively related to their partner’s infidelities, that is, to the risk of sperm competition. Men with partners who committed infidelities, or who suspected that their partner had committed infidelities (indicating increased risk of sperm competition), were more likely to perform sexually coercive behaviors, including rape. These findings are consistent with the existence of psychological mechanisms that motivate men to commit partner rape in response to risk of sperm competition...
Aside from death, perhaps the greatest cost to women who are raped is the circumvention of their mate choice. This is because anything that circumvents women’s choice in mating can severely jeopardize their reproductive success (Symons, 1979).
Researchers have speculated that a variety of female traits evolved to reduce the risks of being raped. Smuts (1992) argued that women form alliances with groups of men and other women for protection against would-be rapists. Wilson and Mesnick (1997) proposed and found support for the bodyguard hypothesis: Women’s mate preferences for physically and socially dominant men may reflect antirape adaptation. Of course, women may form alliances or prefer dominant mates for reasons other than to avoid rape. Alliances offer protection from such dangers as assault or predation, and dominant mates may possess higher-quality genes, for example. Davis and Gallup (2006) proposed the intriguing possibility that preeclampsia and spontaneous abortion may be adaptations that function to terminate pregnancies not in the woman’s best reproductive interests, such as those resulting from rape...
Reproductive age women are hypothesized to experience more psychological pain due to the greater risk of conception. Thornhill and Thornhill (1990a) documented support for this hypothesis, documenting that reproductive-age women are more traumatized by rape than are postreproductive-age women or prereproductive-age girls...
Petralia and Gallup (2002) examined whether a woman’s capacity to resist rape varies across the menstrual cycle. Women in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle showed an increase in handgrip strength, but only when presented with a sexual coercion scenario...
Research documented a significant decrease in performance of risky behaviors by women in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesized function of rapeavoidance mechanisms, particularly when women are fertile...
Women in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle rated the men as more sexually coercive. This suggests that women at greater risk of conception may be more attuned to signs of male sexual coerciveness than women at lesser risk of conception. This may represent an evolved cognitive error management bias (see Haselton, Nettle, & Andrews, 2005, for an overview) towards identifying men as sexually coercive, which might serve to protect women from being raped"
L'origine de Bert
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Links - 16th May 2017 (1)
Almost No More White NYC Cab Drivers, but Blacks Still Can't Catch a Ride? - "I happened to be in a cab driven by a black man from Senegal. I told him about Leon’s dilemma, and this cabbie went off on his own racist rant about the difference between American blacks and those from other countries. He claimed he could tell from half a block away whether someone was an American black or not, and he said he made it a point to try never to pick up American blacks. “But why not?” I asked. “You’re black as well.” “Me and other drivers talk, and we all have the same experience,” he said. He told me of a specific example where he picked up an American black man in Manhattan and took him up to Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. “He ran away without paying, and what am I supposed to do? I can’t chase him,” he said. He wrote it off as lost income but promised himself not to pick up any more American blacks"
Apparently you're supposed to lose money so you can be non-racist
By the numbers: Taxi driver is the job with the No. 1 murder rate | syracuse.com - "Taxi drivers lead the list with about eight drivers killed per 100,000 workers. Their murder rate is almost twice that of police officers. What are the deadliest jobs? Logging, followed by fishing and airline pilots or engineers. Most deaths, about 40 percent, involve transportation crashes. Falls, being struck by an object or equipment and murder are the next major causes of death on the job"
Perhaps the risk of getting killed is why even black cab drivers racially discriminate
Syrian refugee 'felt oppressed' by Stop the War protest - "Hassan Akkad, from Damascus, asked why the group was not protesting against President Assad instead, but was drowned out. He said: "British people not letting a Syrian say something about Syria in a protest about Syria. It's mad." The 29-year-old said he had wanted to be the voice of Syrians who were still in the country but left the protest "livid". Stop the War was founded in September 2001, after US president George W Bush announced a "war on terror". After a video of the encounter was shared widely online, Mr Akkad told the BBC: "I didn't see them protesting against the chemical attacks, I didn't see them protesting against Putin bombing Syria for the last two years... "I went to them respectfully and said, 'Listen I'm a Syrian refugee who lives here and I have an opinion, it's a protest about Syria I want to say something'. "They didn't even address me, they ignored my existence. With their megaphones they went louder and louder and the organisers told them to carry on." Mr Akkad left Syria in September 2015. He says he was imprisoned twice and tortured for protesting against Assad's regime... After the group would not let Mr Akkad speak, he said: "I felt oppressed, it was like being back in Syria. Like how the Syrian police used to mute our voices.
Solidarity and anti-imperialism means ignoring the people you're supposedly advocating for and imposing your pre-conceived notions on them because the West is evil
Marvel removes 'secret, coded anti-Christian and anti-Jewish messages inserted into X-Men Gold comic by Muslim artist' after fans spot them - "Referring to that protest, Syaf said in a series of posts on Facebook during a back and forth with another Facebook member: 'This is a special memory for me. 'The number is a peace act, when a governor did blasphemy to our holy book.' He added: 'I don't hate Jews or Christians, I worked with them for 10 years. A lot of good friends too. For all that happened I apologize sincerely'... According to BleedingCool, a website on comic books, Syaf had drawn in political figures into comic panels before. It said in an issue of Batgirl, he featured Joko Widodo, the current president of Indonesia, and the former governor of Jakarta. "
If it'd been a White Christian inserting anti-Muslim messages...
The Heroic Universe Why the new approach to diversity in comics sucks! - "when it comes to actually introducing fully developed black/Hispanic/Asian/Indigenous/female/LBGTQ characters into these books, the strategy seems to be: “let’s take characters who are straight, white and male, then transform them into black/Hispanic/Asian/Indigenous/female/LBGTQ variations of said character.” Real comics fan would consider this approach an absolute slap in the face. It’s insulting. It’s lazy. And completely unsustainable... these new characters with old familiar names have not earned the right for us to care about them. We don’t know their challenges, what motives them, how they respond to success and – better still – how they respond to failure. Any feelings that we have about these characters are artificial; we’ve been manipulated into having a feeling about them because they carry a name that we’re familiar with."
Confessions of a Recovering Tumblr Feminist - "For me, feminism was an enticing religion. Raised in a home devoid of faith, I eagerly accepted its philosophy as my ticket to salvation. As I steeped myself in this type of feminism: the type that emanates from online Tumblr echo chambers and the ideological enclaves of Women’s studies departments, it taught me a number of ideas and values I was eager to apply to my own life. For example, feminist ideology taught me that any opinions that were conservative, or just didn’t align with the party line were violence. It also taught me that the best way to fight opposition is to try to silence it. Don’t like what someone says? Protest them. Shut their event down... Social justice theory also taught me about microaggressions. Rarely did I go a day without interpreting what someone said as such, as a personal affront to myself or one of the 7 marginalized identities that feminist social-justice Tumblr gifted me. Social justice theory also taught me that anyone who said anything I didn’t agree with was sexist or homophobic. For example, if someone brought up the fact that some research suggests lesbians and gay men have a disproportionately higher rate of engaging in domestic violence, the feminist rebuttal would essentially be to accuse the other person of being a homophobe instead of engaging in dialogue. Feminist theory also taught me that the best way to fight oppression was to call people out. Unfortunately, what feminism doesn’t tell you is that running around making accusations of sexism towards everyone you disagree with isn’t productive. Nonetheless, calling people out became sort-of a competitive sport for me. In retrospect, I wonder if maybe I was a little bit too extreme of a social justice feminist; not all feminists go around calling people racists or sexists, right? Not all of them. But many do; many of my peers volley accusations of racism and sexism daily"
Feminist Author To Young Girls: Don't Read Books By Men - "Caitlin Moran, the feminist author of How to Be a Woman, is now insisting that girls eschew reading books by male authors until the girls have become women... 'if there’s one thing that has made me, perhaps, happier in myself, and more confident about writing the truth, and less apt to run myself down for my appearance, weight, loudness and unusualness than many, many other women, it’s that I never read books by men when I was younger.'"
Comments: "As a man, young girls, "Don't listen to feminists.""
"If you read a book where a woman is described as beautiful and immediately believe you need to take drastic action to become beautiful then there's nothing wrong with the author, you're just stupid. When reading The Hobbit as a teen I didn't suddenly feel the manic urge to make myself be really short and have really hairy feet. Know why? Cause I'm not stupid. The solution to this problem is not for young women to not read books by men, the solution is to make people less stupid so they can read books by men without drawing idiotic conclusions from those books."
Perspective Needed -- Feminism's Lie: Denying Reality About Sexual Power And Rape - "Women who do not understand rape cannot defend themselves against it... Neither militant feminism, which is obsessed with politically correct language, nor academic feminism, which believes that knowledge and experience are ``constituted by'' language, can understand preverbal or non-verbal communication. Feminism, focusing on sexual politics, cannot see that sex exists in and through the body. Sexual desire and arousal cannot be fully translated into verbal terms. This is why men and women misunderstand each other. Trying to remake the future, feminism cut itself off from sexual history. It discarded and suppressed the sexual myths of literature, art and religion. Those myths show us the turbulence, mysteries and passions of sex. In mythology we see men's sexual anxiety, their fear of woman's dominance. Much sexual violence is rooted in men's sense of psychological weakness toward women... THE Italian philosophy of life espouses high-energy confrontation. A male student makes a vulgar remark about your breasts? Don't slink off to whimper with the campus shrinking violets. Deal with it. On the spot. Say, ``Shut up, you jerk! And crawl back to the barnyard where you belong!'' In general, women who project this take-charge attitude toward life get harassed less often. I see too many dopey, immature, self-pitying women walking around like melting sticks of butter. It's the Yvette Mimieux syndrome: Make me happy. And listen to me weep when I'm not."
Disabled veteran says United Airlines staff kicked his service dog and asked if he was retarded as delays forced him to spend THREE days at the airport
Let's Boycott United Airlines - "United Airlines has been a real dick lately. On Monday morning, the world woke up to a very disturbing video of a hapless passenger being bloodied and dragged off an overbooked flight so that a United employee flying stand-by could fly instead. This is just the latest in an increasingly enraging pattern of bad behavior by the airline. So what can you do about it? Easy: stop giving United your money... What’s especially despicable about United is the fact that this latest jaw-dropping incident doesn’t seem out of the ordinary for the airline. It was just a couple of weeks ago that United refused to allow three young girls to board their flight, because they were wearing leggings. United didn’t apologize for that incident, instead pointing concerned customers to an arcane clause in its contact of carriage. That opened United up to a real shitstorm of bad press. Then again, United must be used to this kind of thing by now."
How the Women's March's "genital-based" feminism isolated the transgender community - "While clever, Suh's pussy hats set the tone for a march that would focus acutely on genitalia at the expense of the transgender community. Signs like "Pussy power," "Viva la Vulva" and "Pussy grabs back" all sent a clear and oppressive message to trans women, especially: having a vagina is essential to womanhood... She expected her local march to have its fair share of trans-exclusionary radical feminists, known as TERFs. As Lejeck described it, there are two categories of TERFS: One is the accidental TERF — "the ones who have signs that equate womanhood with having a vagina""
American Political Decay or Renewal? | Foreign Affairs - "The idea that the government could deport 11 million people from the country, many of them with children who are U.S. citizens, seems highly implausible. So some form of amnesty appears inevitable. Immigration critics are right, however, that the United States has been very lax in enforcement. Doing this properly would require not a wall but something like a national biometric ID card, heavy investment in courts and police, and, above all, the political will to sanction employers who violate the rules. Moving to a much more restrictive policy on legal immigration, in which some form of amnesty for existing immigrants is exchanged for genuine efforts to enforce new and tougher rules, would not be economically disastrous. When the country did this before, in 1924, the way was paved, in certain respects, for the golden age of U.S. equality in the 1940s and 1950s... “Populism” is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like. There is of course no reason why democratic voters should always choose wisely, particularly in an age when globalization makes policy choices so complex. But elites don’t always choose correctly either, and their dismissal of the popular choice often masks the nakedness of their own positions. Popular mobilizations are neither inherently bad nor inherently good; they can do great things, as during the Progressive era and the New Deal, but also terrible ones, as in Europe during the 1930s. The American political system has in fact suffered from substantial decay, and it will not be fixed unless popular anger is linked to wise leadership and good policies. It is still not t0o late for this to emerge."
Dept warns Muslims not to skip fasting - Community - "THERE are about 50 hotspots in Penang where Muslims will tend to skip their fast during Ramadan and state Islamic Affairs Department is on to them. These hotspots are mainly food courts, cyber cafes, snooker centres, family entertainment centres and playgrounds, said state Religious Affairs Committee chairman Abdul Malik Abul Kassim. “There were 154 cases of Muslims eating in public during Ramadan and were charged under Section 15 of the Penang Syariah Criminal Offences Enactment last year."
Review: Weapons of Math Destruction - ""big data increases inequality and threatens democracy"... Weapons of math destruction, which O’Neil refers to throughout the book as WMDs, are mathematical models or algorithms that claim to quantify important traits: teacher quality, recidivism risk, creditworthiness but have harmful outcomes and often reinforce inequality, keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. They have three things in common: opacity, scale, and damage. They are often proprietary or otherwise shielded from prying eyes, so they have the effect of being a black box. They affect large numbers of people, increasing the chances that they get it wrong for some of them. And they have a negative effect on people, perhaps by encoding racism or other biases into an algorithm or enabling predatory companies to advertise selectively to vulnerable people, or even by causing a global financial crisis... She shares stories of people who have been deemed unworthy in some way by an algorithm. There’s the highly-regarded teacher who is fired due to a low score on a teacher assessment tool, the college student who couldn’t get a minimum wage job at a grocery store due to his answers on a personality test, the people whose credit card spending limits were lowered because they shopped at certain stores. To add insult to injury, the algorithms that judged them are completely opaque and unassailable. People often have no recourse when the algorithm makes a mistake. Many WMDs create feedback loops that perpetuate injustice. Recidivism models and predictive policing algorithms—programs that send officers to patrol certain locations based on crime data—are rife with the potential for harmful feedback loops"
Sorry, the United Kingdom Does Not Owe India Reparations - "History, is among other things, the story of the rise and fall of states and empires. And by their nature, politics and state-building always help and hurt certain groups. In an empire or after conquest by an empire, there are always privileged elites, collaborators, people whose lives don’t change at all, and groups that have the worst of it. This is a phenomenon not limited to colonialism and European imperialism, which is why I strongly disagree with the narrative that tries to cast Western imperialism as a uniquely immoral, when in fact all imperial projects, including the Mongols, the Arabs, and other Western empires were a mixed bag. The only substantive difference between Western imperialism and what came prior to it is the fact that Western colonialism occurred in tandem with the industrial, scientific, and political revolutions, all of which eventually shook up non-Western societies in unprecedented ways relative to their tradition arrangements. And while this proved quite shocking to many societies, it was relatively more peaceful and less rapacious than some of the actions of previous empires that literally pillaged and leveled cities and literally enslaved whole populations... Mongolia is not wealthy. Are reparations only a way of guilting rich nations into giving away more money, though they give generous aid as is? Countries that have successfully developed or are developing are doing so because of good economic policies and political discipline and not infusions of money... Indians in many ways were beneficiaries of the British imperial system as well as its victims... More Indian crown jewels are in fact locked in a vault in the Central Bank of Iran in Tehran where the National Jewelry Museum is located than in Great Britain (and they were seized by force too) but it is odd to hear no calls for their return in India"
DURIAN LOVERS UNITE: 5 REPUTABLE DEALERS
PAP Community Foundation pre-school orders its students to bow to great leader Lee Kuan Yew's poster - "The kindergarten at my block asking the children to bow three time out of respect to the photo of Mr Lee after telling them a short story of him. Do the children understand?"
The Muslim who wanted Coke Zero - "Tahera Ahmad’s job title at Northwestern University in Chicago is Director of Interfaith Engagement, which means her position is only pertinent while there is a perceived problem with the current level of engagement between faiths... Tahera asked the flight attendant for a Coke Zero and the flight attendant gave her a Diet Coke. The horror. Tahera flipped her lid and demanded a Coke Zero but since those airline carts are not Walmart-sized the flight attendant did not have a full Coke Zero and could only give her half of a can... we started to hear from her fellow passengers on that flight. They told a completely different story... "This person is a liar plain and simple and is just pulling the discrimination card.” And here is what another of her fellow passengers said:
“Don’t believe this woman. My wife and I were on this flight. She was very rude and because she couldn’t get a whole can of pop she flipped out and started pulling the discrimination card.""
Remember The 'Discriminated' Muslim Woman? Here's What REALLY Happened - "She went to see the movie Taken 2, starring Liam Neeson, and guess what? She found the fictional tale to be full of, you guessed it, Islamophobia."
Islamophobia or a misunderstanding over a diet coke? - "what we do also know about Ms Ahmed is that she herself will quite happily openly promote public discrimination against ex-Muslims and that she personally pushed quite hard to Censor Ayaan Hirsi Ali"
Apparently you're supposed to lose money so you can be non-racist
By the numbers: Taxi driver is the job with the No. 1 murder rate | syracuse.com - "Taxi drivers lead the list with about eight drivers killed per 100,000 workers. Their murder rate is almost twice that of police officers. What are the deadliest jobs? Logging, followed by fishing and airline pilots or engineers. Most deaths, about 40 percent, involve transportation crashes. Falls, being struck by an object or equipment and murder are the next major causes of death on the job"
Perhaps the risk of getting killed is why even black cab drivers racially discriminate
Syrian refugee 'felt oppressed' by Stop the War protest - "Hassan Akkad, from Damascus, asked why the group was not protesting against President Assad instead, but was drowned out. He said: "British people not letting a Syrian say something about Syria in a protest about Syria. It's mad." The 29-year-old said he had wanted to be the voice of Syrians who were still in the country but left the protest "livid". Stop the War was founded in September 2001, after US president George W Bush announced a "war on terror". After a video of the encounter was shared widely online, Mr Akkad told the BBC: "I didn't see them protesting against the chemical attacks, I didn't see them protesting against Putin bombing Syria for the last two years... "I went to them respectfully and said, 'Listen I'm a Syrian refugee who lives here and I have an opinion, it's a protest about Syria I want to say something'. "They didn't even address me, they ignored my existence. With their megaphones they went louder and louder and the organisers told them to carry on." Mr Akkad left Syria in September 2015. He says he was imprisoned twice and tortured for protesting against Assad's regime... After the group would not let Mr Akkad speak, he said: "I felt oppressed, it was like being back in Syria. Like how the Syrian police used to mute our voices.
Solidarity and anti-imperialism means ignoring the people you're supposedly advocating for and imposing your pre-conceived notions on them because the West is evil
Marvel removes 'secret, coded anti-Christian and anti-Jewish messages inserted into X-Men Gold comic by Muslim artist' after fans spot them - "Referring to that protest, Syaf said in a series of posts on Facebook during a back and forth with another Facebook member: 'This is a special memory for me. 'The number is a peace act, when a governor did blasphemy to our holy book.' He added: 'I don't hate Jews or Christians, I worked with them for 10 years. A lot of good friends too. For all that happened I apologize sincerely'... According to BleedingCool, a website on comic books, Syaf had drawn in political figures into comic panels before. It said in an issue of Batgirl, he featured Joko Widodo, the current president of Indonesia, and the former governor of Jakarta. "
If it'd been a White Christian inserting anti-Muslim messages...
The Heroic Universe Why the new approach to diversity in comics sucks! - "when it comes to actually introducing fully developed black/Hispanic/Asian/Indigenous/female/LBGTQ characters into these books, the strategy seems to be: “let’s take characters who are straight, white and male, then transform them into black/Hispanic/Asian/Indigenous/female/LBGTQ variations of said character.” Real comics fan would consider this approach an absolute slap in the face. It’s insulting. It’s lazy. And completely unsustainable... these new characters with old familiar names have not earned the right for us to care about them. We don’t know their challenges, what motives them, how they respond to success and – better still – how they respond to failure. Any feelings that we have about these characters are artificial; we’ve been manipulated into having a feeling about them because they carry a name that we’re familiar with."
Confessions of a Recovering Tumblr Feminist - "For me, feminism was an enticing religion. Raised in a home devoid of faith, I eagerly accepted its philosophy as my ticket to salvation. As I steeped myself in this type of feminism: the type that emanates from online Tumblr echo chambers and the ideological enclaves of Women’s studies departments, it taught me a number of ideas and values I was eager to apply to my own life. For example, feminist ideology taught me that any opinions that were conservative, or just didn’t align with the party line were violence. It also taught me that the best way to fight opposition is to try to silence it. Don’t like what someone says? Protest them. Shut their event down... Social justice theory also taught me about microaggressions. Rarely did I go a day without interpreting what someone said as such, as a personal affront to myself or one of the 7 marginalized identities that feminist social-justice Tumblr gifted me. Social justice theory also taught me that anyone who said anything I didn’t agree with was sexist or homophobic. For example, if someone brought up the fact that some research suggests lesbians and gay men have a disproportionately higher rate of engaging in domestic violence, the feminist rebuttal would essentially be to accuse the other person of being a homophobe instead of engaging in dialogue. Feminist theory also taught me that the best way to fight oppression was to call people out. Unfortunately, what feminism doesn’t tell you is that running around making accusations of sexism towards everyone you disagree with isn’t productive. Nonetheless, calling people out became sort-of a competitive sport for me. In retrospect, I wonder if maybe I was a little bit too extreme of a social justice feminist; not all feminists go around calling people racists or sexists, right? Not all of them. But many do; many of my peers volley accusations of racism and sexism daily"
Feminist Author To Young Girls: Don't Read Books By Men - "Caitlin Moran, the feminist author of How to Be a Woman, is now insisting that girls eschew reading books by male authors until the girls have become women... 'if there’s one thing that has made me, perhaps, happier in myself, and more confident about writing the truth, and less apt to run myself down for my appearance, weight, loudness and unusualness than many, many other women, it’s that I never read books by men when I was younger.'"
Comments: "As a man, young girls, "Don't listen to feminists.""
"If you read a book where a woman is described as beautiful and immediately believe you need to take drastic action to become beautiful then there's nothing wrong with the author, you're just stupid. When reading The Hobbit as a teen I didn't suddenly feel the manic urge to make myself be really short and have really hairy feet. Know why? Cause I'm not stupid. The solution to this problem is not for young women to not read books by men, the solution is to make people less stupid so they can read books by men without drawing idiotic conclusions from those books."
Perspective Needed -- Feminism's Lie: Denying Reality About Sexual Power And Rape - "Women who do not understand rape cannot defend themselves against it... Neither militant feminism, which is obsessed with politically correct language, nor academic feminism, which believes that knowledge and experience are ``constituted by'' language, can understand preverbal or non-verbal communication. Feminism, focusing on sexual politics, cannot see that sex exists in and through the body. Sexual desire and arousal cannot be fully translated into verbal terms. This is why men and women misunderstand each other. Trying to remake the future, feminism cut itself off from sexual history. It discarded and suppressed the sexual myths of literature, art and religion. Those myths show us the turbulence, mysteries and passions of sex. In mythology we see men's sexual anxiety, their fear of woman's dominance. Much sexual violence is rooted in men's sense of psychological weakness toward women... THE Italian philosophy of life espouses high-energy confrontation. A male student makes a vulgar remark about your breasts? Don't slink off to whimper with the campus shrinking violets. Deal with it. On the spot. Say, ``Shut up, you jerk! And crawl back to the barnyard where you belong!'' In general, women who project this take-charge attitude toward life get harassed less often. I see too many dopey, immature, self-pitying women walking around like melting sticks of butter. It's the Yvette Mimieux syndrome: Make me happy. And listen to me weep when I'm not."
Disabled veteran says United Airlines staff kicked his service dog and asked if he was retarded as delays forced him to spend THREE days at the airport
Let's Boycott United Airlines - "United Airlines has been a real dick lately. On Monday morning, the world woke up to a very disturbing video of a hapless passenger being bloodied and dragged off an overbooked flight so that a United employee flying stand-by could fly instead. This is just the latest in an increasingly enraging pattern of bad behavior by the airline. So what can you do about it? Easy: stop giving United your money... What’s especially despicable about United is the fact that this latest jaw-dropping incident doesn’t seem out of the ordinary for the airline. It was just a couple of weeks ago that United refused to allow three young girls to board their flight, because they were wearing leggings. United didn’t apologize for that incident, instead pointing concerned customers to an arcane clause in its contact of carriage. That opened United up to a real shitstorm of bad press. Then again, United must be used to this kind of thing by now."
How the Women's March's "genital-based" feminism isolated the transgender community - "While clever, Suh's pussy hats set the tone for a march that would focus acutely on genitalia at the expense of the transgender community. Signs like "Pussy power," "Viva la Vulva" and "Pussy grabs back" all sent a clear and oppressive message to trans women, especially: having a vagina is essential to womanhood... She expected her local march to have its fair share of trans-exclusionary radical feminists, known as TERFs. As Lejeck described it, there are two categories of TERFS: One is the accidental TERF — "the ones who have signs that equate womanhood with having a vagina""
American Political Decay or Renewal? | Foreign Affairs - "The idea that the government could deport 11 million people from the country, many of them with children who are U.S. citizens, seems highly implausible. So some form of amnesty appears inevitable. Immigration critics are right, however, that the United States has been very lax in enforcement. Doing this properly would require not a wall but something like a national biometric ID card, heavy investment in courts and police, and, above all, the political will to sanction employers who violate the rules. Moving to a much more restrictive policy on legal immigration, in which some form of amnesty for existing immigrants is exchanged for genuine efforts to enforce new and tougher rules, would not be economically disastrous. When the country did this before, in 1924, the way was paved, in certain respects, for the golden age of U.S. equality in the 1940s and 1950s... “Populism” is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like. There is of course no reason why democratic voters should always choose wisely, particularly in an age when globalization makes policy choices so complex. But elites don’t always choose correctly either, and their dismissal of the popular choice often masks the nakedness of their own positions. Popular mobilizations are neither inherently bad nor inherently good; they can do great things, as during the Progressive era and the New Deal, but also terrible ones, as in Europe during the 1930s. The American political system has in fact suffered from substantial decay, and it will not be fixed unless popular anger is linked to wise leadership and good policies. It is still not t0o late for this to emerge."
Dept warns Muslims not to skip fasting - Community - "THERE are about 50 hotspots in Penang where Muslims will tend to skip their fast during Ramadan and state Islamic Affairs Department is on to them. These hotspots are mainly food courts, cyber cafes, snooker centres, family entertainment centres and playgrounds, said state Religious Affairs Committee chairman Abdul Malik Abul Kassim. “There were 154 cases of Muslims eating in public during Ramadan and were charged under Section 15 of the Penang Syariah Criminal Offences Enactment last year."
Review: Weapons of Math Destruction - ""big data increases inequality and threatens democracy"... Weapons of math destruction, which O’Neil refers to throughout the book as WMDs, are mathematical models or algorithms that claim to quantify important traits: teacher quality, recidivism risk, creditworthiness but have harmful outcomes and often reinforce inequality, keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. They have three things in common: opacity, scale, and damage. They are often proprietary or otherwise shielded from prying eyes, so they have the effect of being a black box. They affect large numbers of people, increasing the chances that they get it wrong for some of them. And they have a negative effect on people, perhaps by encoding racism or other biases into an algorithm or enabling predatory companies to advertise selectively to vulnerable people, or even by causing a global financial crisis... She shares stories of people who have been deemed unworthy in some way by an algorithm. There’s the highly-regarded teacher who is fired due to a low score on a teacher assessment tool, the college student who couldn’t get a minimum wage job at a grocery store due to his answers on a personality test, the people whose credit card spending limits were lowered because they shopped at certain stores. To add insult to injury, the algorithms that judged them are completely opaque and unassailable. People often have no recourse when the algorithm makes a mistake. Many WMDs create feedback loops that perpetuate injustice. Recidivism models and predictive policing algorithms—programs that send officers to patrol certain locations based on crime data—are rife with the potential for harmful feedback loops"
Sorry, the United Kingdom Does Not Owe India Reparations - "History, is among other things, the story of the rise and fall of states and empires. And by their nature, politics and state-building always help and hurt certain groups. In an empire or after conquest by an empire, there are always privileged elites, collaborators, people whose lives don’t change at all, and groups that have the worst of it. This is a phenomenon not limited to colonialism and European imperialism, which is why I strongly disagree with the narrative that tries to cast Western imperialism as a uniquely immoral, when in fact all imperial projects, including the Mongols, the Arabs, and other Western empires were a mixed bag. The only substantive difference between Western imperialism and what came prior to it is the fact that Western colonialism occurred in tandem with the industrial, scientific, and political revolutions, all of which eventually shook up non-Western societies in unprecedented ways relative to their tradition arrangements. And while this proved quite shocking to many societies, it was relatively more peaceful and less rapacious than some of the actions of previous empires that literally pillaged and leveled cities and literally enslaved whole populations... Mongolia is not wealthy. Are reparations only a way of guilting rich nations into giving away more money, though they give generous aid as is? Countries that have successfully developed or are developing are doing so because of good economic policies and political discipline and not infusions of money... Indians in many ways were beneficiaries of the British imperial system as well as its victims... More Indian crown jewels are in fact locked in a vault in the Central Bank of Iran in Tehran where the National Jewelry Museum is located than in Great Britain (and they were seized by force too) but it is odd to hear no calls for their return in India"
DURIAN LOVERS UNITE: 5 REPUTABLE DEALERS
PAP Community Foundation pre-school orders its students to bow to great leader Lee Kuan Yew's poster - "The kindergarten at my block asking the children to bow three time out of respect to the photo of Mr Lee after telling them a short story of him. Do the children understand?"
The Muslim who wanted Coke Zero - "Tahera Ahmad’s job title at Northwestern University in Chicago is Director of Interfaith Engagement, which means her position is only pertinent while there is a perceived problem with the current level of engagement between faiths... Tahera asked the flight attendant for a Coke Zero and the flight attendant gave her a Diet Coke. The horror. Tahera flipped her lid and demanded a Coke Zero but since those airline carts are not Walmart-sized the flight attendant did not have a full Coke Zero and could only give her half of a can... we started to hear from her fellow passengers on that flight. They told a completely different story... "This person is a liar plain and simple and is just pulling the discrimination card.” And here is what another of her fellow passengers said:
“Don’t believe this woman. My wife and I were on this flight. She was very rude and because she couldn’t get a whole can of pop she flipped out and started pulling the discrimination card.""
Remember The 'Discriminated' Muslim Woman? Here's What REALLY Happened - "She went to see the movie Taken 2, starring Liam Neeson, and guess what? She found the fictional tale to be full of, you guessed it, Islamophobia."
Islamophobia or a misunderstanding over a diet coke? - "what we do also know about Ms Ahmed is that she herself will quite happily openly promote public discrimination against ex-Muslims and that she personally pushed quite hard to Censor Ayaan Hirsi Ali"
Post ID: 7526021639944295480
Monday, May 15, 2017
Justifying Censorship with Claims of Harm
David Bromwich · What are we allowed to say?
"Free speech is an aberration – it is best to begin by admitting that. In most societies throughout history and in all societies some of the time, censorship has been the means by which a ruling group or a visible majority cleanses the channels of communication to ensure that certain conventional practices will go on operating undisturbed...
The case for censorship seems to have begun in the need for strictures against blasphemy...
The doctrine that truth in an open debate has nothing to fear from falsehood had been supposed to apply above all to truths about historical events and new theories in the natural sciences. The sanction against Holocaust denial treats grown-ups – the gullible audience of the false claim – as children not yet in possession of their mature faculties. Many Europeans, it is supposed, were so effectively brainwashed two generations ago that, even now, they and their offspring can’t risk any exposure to falsehoods of a certain kind. They lack the mental resources to resist the intoxication. This pattern of enforcement presumably will not last for ever. When the Holocaust becomes a more distant memory – perhaps a century from now – the idea of denying that it took place will seem merely bizarre.
These partial exceptions apply to the sort of representation that many regard as a violent stimulant to weak minds. It is a narrow category and shows no sign of expanding. By contrast, the pressure to ban or denounce The Satanic Verses came from sensitivity to the feelings of an audience that would never be tempted to read it. The charge was no less imposing for that; the book was said to cause an injury, a wound – the relevant claim is that wrong words or gestures can amount to aggressive misrepresentation or ‘misrecognition’...
We don’t defend the right to publish offensive words because we think the author well-meaning. The point is that we distrust the ambition of those who would take away the right more than we distrust the character of those who write or speak recklessly...
The libertarian argument in support of publishing The Satanic Verses had been simple and radical: any book deserves protection from censorship. The sentimental secondary argument pressed by defenders of the book – that its satire originated in faith (of a sort) as deep as orthodoxy – was constructed by unbelievers to assist the image of unbelievers.
The Rushdie affair set the pattern for the Western reaction to the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo. Perhaps because of the precedent, the grounds of defence in 2015 shifted at a faster pace from straightforward political affirmation of press liberty to a claim for the moral courage and stature of the artists. At the same time, the question that had lingered for 25 years – whether aesthetic ‘framing’ could somehow purge the noxious elements of a work – grew harder to answer in the case of satirical drawings that never pretended to the complexity of a postmodern novel...
A great proportion of satire in all ages has been directed by the haughty against the low and mean; consider the conduct of Pope towards his inferior Colley Cibber in The Dunciad. Satire may come from the palace as well as the gutter. Nor does it serve reliably as an antidote to dishonesty and stupidity. It may answer stupidity with mischief and pretence with ridicule, but its weapons are wielded in a cause whose motives have rarely been single-minded...
Freedom is the international face we prepare to meet the faces that we meet – and on that stage the great principle is often restated. The vainglory of adopting free speech as a banner-slogan is recognised but the temptation to strut is not altogether avoided. And yet in our private conduct, and especially in educational institutions where the manners of public debate are learned, the ethic of free speech has taken a very different turn. People know that their words are monitored, beyond their power to calibrate, and the respectable are more cautious than ever before. They take great care not to speak bluntly...
In this new regime of manners, it is impossible to overrate the part played by the soft despotism of social media. Our verbal surroundings online are created by affinity; and each day a hundred small choices close the circle more tightly. You don’t say wrong things: the sort of things that will startle your friends. Or rather, your friends by definition are the people who won’t be startled by anything you are likely to say. What are the implications for free speech? Doublethink, Orwell wrote apropos of life in Oceania, was the mental technique that allowed one to ‘hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them’. The process found its consummation in ‘the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.’...
On the subject of hate speech, for example, Garton Ash cites (with only a mild demur regarding the medical evidence) the judgment by the cultural theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic that ‘the immediate short-term harms of hate speech include rapid breathing, headaches, raised blood pressure, dizziness, rapid pulse rate, drug-taking, risk-taking behaviour and even suicide.’ He has to treat the nonsense with studied politeness because this sort of thing is all over the academic literature on free speech. And it is spreading: a letter to the New York Times on 31 July from an administrator in the city’s Education Department denounces a reading-skills exam that used an extract from Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence; the passage in question begins, ‘It was generally agreed in New York that the Countess Olenska had “lost her looks”’; the complaint is that ‘any girl taking the exam’ will experience the mention of losing your looks as a ‘psychic punch’ that impairs concentration on the rest of the exam...
Asked in a late interview how he fell away from his belief in Catholic doctrine, Graham Greene said he had been converted by arguments and he had forgotten the arguments. Something like this has happened to left liberals where freedom of speech is concerned. The last two generations were brought to see its value by arguments, and they have forgotten the arguments. Few have felt oppressed by the rigours of censorship; more have been interested in censoring harmful speech by politicians or members of the ‘dominant culture’ (which includes white people of humble means). Taking note of the recent protests that forced the ‘disinviting’ of commencement speakers at Brown, Johns Hopkins, Williams and Haverford, the censorious monitoring at Brandeis University of a teacher who said that Mexican labourers were once called ‘wetbacks’, and many similar incidents over the last three years, the sociologist Jonathan Cole pointed out in the Atlantic that the students at these elite establishments, including the most vigilant of the speech monitors, have followed all their lives ‘a straight and narrow path’. They have never deviated into ‘a passion unrelated to school work, and have not been allowed, therefore, to live what many would consider a normal childhood – to play, to learn by doing, to challenge their teachers, to make mistakes’. They have always been on good behaviour; and they don’t regret it. They are therefore ill-equipped to defend anything the authorities or their activist classmates tell them should count as bad behaviour. These people have grown up, Cole adds, in the years since 2001 when the schools and the popular culture, in America above all, kept up an incessant drone about personal safety, the danger of terrorist attacks, and the opacity of every culture to every other culture. It is a generation in which the word ‘fragile’ is routinely applied to daily shifts of mood.
Few of them have had the experience of being a minority of one, or a little more than one. Admittedly most people have never been in that situation (including, perhaps, most of the people one might call good). But a new keenness of censorious distrust has come from a built-in suspicion of the outliers in public discussion. Social media refer to these people as ‘trolls’ and sometimes as ‘stalkers’; any flicker of curiosity about their ideas is pre-empted by a question that is not a question: ‘What’s wrong with them?’ Meanwhile, those inside a given group have their settled audience of friends and followers, to adopt the revealing jargon of Facebook and Twitter: a self-sufficient collectivity and happy to stay that way. To be ‘friended’ in the Facebook world is to be safe – walled-up and wadded-in by chosen and familiar connections. An unsafe space is a space where, if they knew you were there, they might unfriend you...
Where Facebook has a thumbs-up symbol – meaning ‘I like this and kind of agree!’ – but no thumbs-down, who will risk an exorbitant word? The cost would be a forced exit from the group; and the group is the lungs that make speech possible. A provocative and half-disagreeable remark amounts to a declaration of the intention to defect. To someone who has grown up in such a setting, the older protections of individual speech are an irrelevance.
At Yale University last Halloween, a diversity administrator sent around a notice to students to mind that their costumes didn’t cause offence or encroach on sensibilities of gender, race or culture. The associate master of a residential college responded with an email addressed to the students in her college, saying that Halloween was a time for a lark and everyone should lighten up. Even a decade ago, both the cautionary letter and the reply would have seemed hilarious for their condescension and paternalism. In the present climate, it was the reply that led to an immediate demand by some residents of the college that the associate master be sacked (and with her the master, her husband, who had failed to keep her in line). An undergraduate writing with much emotion in a student newspaper testified that the permission granted to culturally appropriative and possibly insulting costumes had deprived her of a safe space; after reading the wretched email, she found herself unable to eat, sleep or do homework in a building where authority had been ceded to the person who wrote it. From the point of view of her group, this student was speaking common sense. Who would want to smash a formed consensus for inoffensive costumes? On the same Halloween of 2015, at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, photos of two female students dressed in sombreros, ponchos and moustaches set off a protest march of thousands, including activists from neighbouring campuses, and the scandal prompted the dean of the college to resign...
What drove the early modern proponents of free speech to deny the legitimacy of any form of censorship? The heart of Milton’s attack in Areopagitica lies in his refusal to claim innocence for any human activity. It is the presumption of innocence by the censor that most deeply informs the zeal for silencing opinions that are thought to be intolerable...
To try to purify ourselves, by renouncing all exposure to dangerous words, is to legislate for the preservation of our innocence, but Milton doubts that this can be done. The censor holds a very different view: impurity invades or insinuates from outside, it is a kind of pollution, and the duty of moral guardians is to secure and deliver us... But the benefits obtainable through censorship turn out to be delusive once we recognise that good and evil ‘grow up together almost inseparably’. So Milton concludes that censorship cannot make us better. Impurity, after all, springs from us, among others. Any law devised to winnow out the noxious materials can only weaken the very people it protects...
The real antagonist of On Liberty is not intellectual backwardness. It is rather what Mill calls ‘our merely social intolerance’: a form of tyranny possible to every person, which, if we obeyed its promptings, would become a lever for ‘intellectual pacification’ and ‘the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind’...
'If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.'
Quote this passage to a roomful of academics today, withhold the name of Mill and not one in three will credit that any intelligent person could ever think something so improbable. If the ‘power of coercion’ is taken to mean a painful use of force, that, they will agree, is bad. But by coercion Mill also means the affixing of any penalty at all to dissent from what the majority supposes are the components of a better world. ‘The power itself is illegitimate.’ Mill speaks here neither for truth nor for utility, and gives value to something separate: the right of the person who wants to speak not to be silenced. This insight of On Liberty is consonant with the Mill of The Subjection of Women rather than Utilitarianism. There are things that are owing to persons, he believes, simply because they are persons. Freedom from subordination because of one’s sex or sect is an irreducible good. So is the freedom to know your mind by speaking your mind to another person. Mill hates pacification more than he loves progress. His own brief comment makes the best gloss on the passage: ‘Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil.’...
In 1964 the aim of the [Free Speech Movement] protests had been to remove the last barriers on ‘unrestricted’ free speech. Savio was always explicit about this. Fifty years later, the chancellor of UC Berkeley, Nicholas Dirks, sent a public letter to faculty, students and staff advising how best to honour the spirit of the Free Speech Movement. They should always remember that they live in a diversely constituted ‘community’ where a standard of ‘respect’ was a precondition of ‘safe’ use of the privilege of free speech. Above all, they must take care not to speak with unseemly passion... This is what Mill meant by ‘quiet suppression’.
Two contradictory thoughts now dominate the Anglo-American approach to feelings in the context of public debate. For the speaker, feelings must be restrained – a neutral style of rational euphemism is recommended. On the other hand, the emotion felt by the listener in response to a speech must be treated as authoritative, unarguable, closed to correction or modification by other witnesses. ‘The group which feels hurt is the ultimate arbiter of whether a hurt has taken place’; so, too, the person who listens and testifies on behalf of his or her group. Reproach from a traumatised listener admits of no answer, only apology, even though apologies are only interesting in proportion as they are spontaneous and warranted. The apology that is demanded and forked out has the moral stature of hush money: it makes a fetish of insincerity. With some help from the jargon of political and religious heresy, one would say these are not so much apologies as formal acts of self-criticism and recantation. Thus far, they have mostly been extorted in communities the size of a guild or a college. At the same time the rigour of exclusion within these mini-communities is itself a cause of the near autistic breakdown of political speech in America...
An example [of microaggression] often cited is the laying on the non-dominant person the burden to testify about her experience from her special place in a spectrum of diversity. Any word or gesture that is taken to imply such singling out is a microaggression if the person addressed thinks that it is. This makes for a double bind: a white student passing a black and not looking at him could plausibly be charged with microaggression. Replay the same encounter, but with an unusually long look – say, five or six seconds – and the charge of microaggression is just as plausible.
How should the infraction be punished? By re-education, it has been suggested, in the form of additional diversity training and sensitivity training. Persuaded by this concept and by a therapeutic literature and practice that cater to it, young people of more than one race have come to think themselves uniquely delicate and exposed. The counterpart of the microaggression is the microtrauma which makes up in nearness and frequency what it lacks in intensity and duration. Here again one is struck by the action of displacement. The two American presidents since 2001 have said over and over that their primary duty was ‘the safety of the American people’. No earlier presidents spoke in quite this way: the oath of office contains not a word about safety but commits the chief magistrate to uphold the constitution. Safety in argument or debate is of course an unintelligible demand, but the trouble with those who think they want it isn’t that they are incapable of giving reasons backed by evidence. Rather, they have had no practice in using words to influence people unlike themselves...
‘Debate is not a death sentence,’ Beatrix Campbell recently observed in a letter in the LRB (14 July), ‘and feeling offended is not the same as feeling or being exterminated. There is a human right to life, but there is no right to be not offended.’ The truth is that in some areas we are close to excogitating a right not to feel offended. In America, the definitions governing what counts as sexual harassment are wide enough to have let in a troop of other causes... Feeling counts because feeling in the offended person is a dispositive fact: proof (which needs no further support) that a crime was committed. We are not far in America – is it just America? – from evolving a right to feel good about ourselves. Possibly the best counteraction is to repudiate membership in a species that could want to do this. Misanthropy and the rejection of censorship here join forces unambiguously.
What a distinguished and very dead philosopher referred to as the religion of humanity may turn out to be as dangerous as all the other religions. With the joint arrival of multicultural etiquette and globalisation, we have come to dwell increasingly on hidden injuries that threaten the norms and civilities desirable for people everywhere. This involves a fresh dedication to the discovery of faults of manners and usage that could cause friction. But, as was observed half a century ago by Nigel Dennis – an irreplaceable satirist of political and religious fanaticism – ‘Our sins are rarely as disgusting as we suppose them to be, and never as disgusting as the attention we pay them.’ Nor do we know ourselves well enough to be sure that our corrections are correct. The narcissism of humanity remains as conspicuous as ever at a moment when we can least afford the indulgence...
Reports of bodily harm at the enunciation of unpleasant words, and of clinical depression from exposure to despised historical names in public places, suggest a delicacy that would render politics eventually impossible"
If "hate speech" causes "harm" like rapid breathing, what about the conservative offended by gay men in public?
"Free speech is an aberration – it is best to begin by admitting that. In most societies throughout history and in all societies some of the time, censorship has been the means by which a ruling group or a visible majority cleanses the channels of communication to ensure that certain conventional practices will go on operating undisturbed...
The case for censorship seems to have begun in the need for strictures against blasphemy...
The doctrine that truth in an open debate has nothing to fear from falsehood had been supposed to apply above all to truths about historical events and new theories in the natural sciences. The sanction against Holocaust denial treats grown-ups – the gullible audience of the false claim – as children not yet in possession of their mature faculties. Many Europeans, it is supposed, were so effectively brainwashed two generations ago that, even now, they and their offspring can’t risk any exposure to falsehoods of a certain kind. They lack the mental resources to resist the intoxication. This pattern of enforcement presumably will not last for ever. When the Holocaust becomes a more distant memory – perhaps a century from now – the idea of denying that it took place will seem merely bizarre.
These partial exceptions apply to the sort of representation that many regard as a violent stimulant to weak minds. It is a narrow category and shows no sign of expanding. By contrast, the pressure to ban or denounce The Satanic Verses came from sensitivity to the feelings of an audience that would never be tempted to read it. The charge was no less imposing for that; the book was said to cause an injury, a wound – the relevant claim is that wrong words or gestures can amount to aggressive misrepresentation or ‘misrecognition’...
We don’t defend the right to publish offensive words because we think the author well-meaning. The point is that we distrust the ambition of those who would take away the right more than we distrust the character of those who write or speak recklessly...
The libertarian argument in support of publishing The Satanic Verses had been simple and radical: any book deserves protection from censorship. The sentimental secondary argument pressed by defenders of the book – that its satire originated in faith (of a sort) as deep as orthodoxy – was constructed by unbelievers to assist the image of unbelievers.
The Rushdie affair set the pattern for the Western reaction to the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo. Perhaps because of the precedent, the grounds of defence in 2015 shifted at a faster pace from straightforward political affirmation of press liberty to a claim for the moral courage and stature of the artists. At the same time, the question that had lingered for 25 years – whether aesthetic ‘framing’ could somehow purge the noxious elements of a work – grew harder to answer in the case of satirical drawings that never pretended to the complexity of a postmodern novel...
A great proportion of satire in all ages has been directed by the haughty against the low and mean; consider the conduct of Pope towards his inferior Colley Cibber in The Dunciad. Satire may come from the palace as well as the gutter. Nor does it serve reliably as an antidote to dishonesty and stupidity. It may answer stupidity with mischief and pretence with ridicule, but its weapons are wielded in a cause whose motives have rarely been single-minded...
Freedom is the international face we prepare to meet the faces that we meet – and on that stage the great principle is often restated. The vainglory of adopting free speech as a banner-slogan is recognised but the temptation to strut is not altogether avoided. And yet in our private conduct, and especially in educational institutions where the manners of public debate are learned, the ethic of free speech has taken a very different turn. People know that their words are monitored, beyond their power to calibrate, and the respectable are more cautious than ever before. They take great care not to speak bluntly...
In this new regime of manners, it is impossible to overrate the part played by the soft despotism of social media. Our verbal surroundings online are created by affinity; and each day a hundred small choices close the circle more tightly. You don’t say wrong things: the sort of things that will startle your friends. Or rather, your friends by definition are the people who won’t be startled by anything you are likely to say. What are the implications for free speech? Doublethink, Orwell wrote apropos of life in Oceania, was the mental technique that allowed one to ‘hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them’. The process found its consummation in ‘the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.’...
On the subject of hate speech, for example, Garton Ash cites (with only a mild demur regarding the medical evidence) the judgment by the cultural theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic that ‘the immediate short-term harms of hate speech include rapid breathing, headaches, raised blood pressure, dizziness, rapid pulse rate, drug-taking, risk-taking behaviour and even suicide.’ He has to treat the nonsense with studied politeness because this sort of thing is all over the academic literature on free speech. And it is spreading: a letter to the New York Times on 31 July from an administrator in the city’s Education Department denounces a reading-skills exam that used an extract from Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence; the passage in question begins, ‘It was generally agreed in New York that the Countess Olenska had “lost her looks”’; the complaint is that ‘any girl taking the exam’ will experience the mention of losing your looks as a ‘psychic punch’ that impairs concentration on the rest of the exam...
Asked in a late interview how he fell away from his belief in Catholic doctrine, Graham Greene said he had been converted by arguments and he had forgotten the arguments. Something like this has happened to left liberals where freedom of speech is concerned. The last two generations were brought to see its value by arguments, and they have forgotten the arguments. Few have felt oppressed by the rigours of censorship; more have been interested in censoring harmful speech by politicians or members of the ‘dominant culture’ (which includes white people of humble means). Taking note of the recent protests that forced the ‘disinviting’ of commencement speakers at Brown, Johns Hopkins, Williams and Haverford, the censorious monitoring at Brandeis University of a teacher who said that Mexican labourers were once called ‘wetbacks’, and many similar incidents over the last three years, the sociologist Jonathan Cole pointed out in the Atlantic that the students at these elite establishments, including the most vigilant of the speech monitors, have followed all their lives ‘a straight and narrow path’. They have never deviated into ‘a passion unrelated to school work, and have not been allowed, therefore, to live what many would consider a normal childhood – to play, to learn by doing, to challenge their teachers, to make mistakes’. They have always been on good behaviour; and they don’t regret it. They are therefore ill-equipped to defend anything the authorities or their activist classmates tell them should count as bad behaviour. These people have grown up, Cole adds, in the years since 2001 when the schools and the popular culture, in America above all, kept up an incessant drone about personal safety, the danger of terrorist attacks, and the opacity of every culture to every other culture. It is a generation in which the word ‘fragile’ is routinely applied to daily shifts of mood.
Few of them have had the experience of being a minority of one, or a little more than one. Admittedly most people have never been in that situation (including, perhaps, most of the people one might call good). But a new keenness of censorious distrust has come from a built-in suspicion of the outliers in public discussion. Social media refer to these people as ‘trolls’ and sometimes as ‘stalkers’; any flicker of curiosity about their ideas is pre-empted by a question that is not a question: ‘What’s wrong with them?’ Meanwhile, those inside a given group have their settled audience of friends and followers, to adopt the revealing jargon of Facebook and Twitter: a self-sufficient collectivity and happy to stay that way. To be ‘friended’ in the Facebook world is to be safe – walled-up and wadded-in by chosen and familiar connections. An unsafe space is a space where, if they knew you were there, they might unfriend you...
Where Facebook has a thumbs-up symbol – meaning ‘I like this and kind of agree!’ – but no thumbs-down, who will risk an exorbitant word? The cost would be a forced exit from the group; and the group is the lungs that make speech possible. A provocative and half-disagreeable remark amounts to a declaration of the intention to defect. To someone who has grown up in such a setting, the older protections of individual speech are an irrelevance.
At Yale University last Halloween, a diversity administrator sent around a notice to students to mind that their costumes didn’t cause offence or encroach on sensibilities of gender, race or culture. The associate master of a residential college responded with an email addressed to the students in her college, saying that Halloween was a time for a lark and everyone should lighten up. Even a decade ago, both the cautionary letter and the reply would have seemed hilarious for their condescension and paternalism. In the present climate, it was the reply that led to an immediate demand by some residents of the college that the associate master be sacked (and with her the master, her husband, who had failed to keep her in line). An undergraduate writing with much emotion in a student newspaper testified that the permission granted to culturally appropriative and possibly insulting costumes had deprived her of a safe space; after reading the wretched email, she found herself unable to eat, sleep or do homework in a building where authority had been ceded to the person who wrote it. From the point of view of her group, this student was speaking common sense. Who would want to smash a formed consensus for inoffensive costumes? On the same Halloween of 2015, at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California, photos of two female students dressed in sombreros, ponchos and moustaches set off a protest march of thousands, including activists from neighbouring campuses, and the scandal prompted the dean of the college to resign...
What drove the early modern proponents of free speech to deny the legitimacy of any form of censorship? The heart of Milton’s attack in Areopagitica lies in his refusal to claim innocence for any human activity. It is the presumption of innocence by the censor that most deeply informs the zeal for silencing opinions that are thought to be intolerable...
To try to purify ourselves, by renouncing all exposure to dangerous words, is to legislate for the preservation of our innocence, but Milton doubts that this can be done. The censor holds a very different view: impurity invades or insinuates from outside, it is a kind of pollution, and the duty of moral guardians is to secure and deliver us... But the benefits obtainable through censorship turn out to be delusive once we recognise that good and evil ‘grow up together almost inseparably’. So Milton concludes that censorship cannot make us better. Impurity, after all, springs from us, among others. Any law devised to winnow out the noxious materials can only weaken the very people it protects...
The real antagonist of On Liberty is not intellectual backwardness. It is rather what Mill calls ‘our merely social intolerance’: a form of tyranny possible to every person, which, if we obeyed its promptings, would become a lever for ‘intellectual pacification’ and ‘the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind’...
'If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.'
Quote this passage to a roomful of academics today, withhold the name of Mill and not one in three will credit that any intelligent person could ever think something so improbable. If the ‘power of coercion’ is taken to mean a painful use of force, that, they will agree, is bad. But by coercion Mill also means the affixing of any penalty at all to dissent from what the majority supposes are the components of a better world. ‘The power itself is illegitimate.’ Mill speaks here neither for truth nor for utility, and gives value to something separate: the right of the person who wants to speak not to be silenced. This insight of On Liberty is consonant with the Mill of The Subjection of Women rather than Utilitarianism. There are things that are owing to persons, he believes, simply because they are persons. Freedom from subordination because of one’s sex or sect is an irreducible good. So is the freedom to know your mind by speaking your mind to another person. Mill hates pacification more than he loves progress. His own brief comment makes the best gloss on the passage: ‘Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil.’...
In 1964 the aim of the [Free Speech Movement] protests had been to remove the last barriers on ‘unrestricted’ free speech. Savio was always explicit about this. Fifty years later, the chancellor of UC Berkeley, Nicholas Dirks, sent a public letter to faculty, students and staff advising how best to honour the spirit of the Free Speech Movement. They should always remember that they live in a diversely constituted ‘community’ where a standard of ‘respect’ was a precondition of ‘safe’ use of the privilege of free speech. Above all, they must take care not to speak with unseemly passion... This is what Mill meant by ‘quiet suppression’.
Two contradictory thoughts now dominate the Anglo-American approach to feelings in the context of public debate. For the speaker, feelings must be restrained – a neutral style of rational euphemism is recommended. On the other hand, the emotion felt by the listener in response to a speech must be treated as authoritative, unarguable, closed to correction or modification by other witnesses. ‘The group which feels hurt is the ultimate arbiter of whether a hurt has taken place’; so, too, the person who listens and testifies on behalf of his or her group. Reproach from a traumatised listener admits of no answer, only apology, even though apologies are only interesting in proportion as they are spontaneous and warranted. The apology that is demanded and forked out has the moral stature of hush money: it makes a fetish of insincerity. With some help from the jargon of political and religious heresy, one would say these are not so much apologies as formal acts of self-criticism and recantation. Thus far, they have mostly been extorted in communities the size of a guild or a college. At the same time the rigour of exclusion within these mini-communities is itself a cause of the near autistic breakdown of political speech in America...
An example [of microaggression] often cited is the laying on the non-dominant person the burden to testify about her experience from her special place in a spectrum of diversity. Any word or gesture that is taken to imply such singling out is a microaggression if the person addressed thinks that it is. This makes for a double bind: a white student passing a black and not looking at him could plausibly be charged with microaggression. Replay the same encounter, but with an unusually long look – say, five or six seconds – and the charge of microaggression is just as plausible.
How should the infraction be punished? By re-education, it has been suggested, in the form of additional diversity training and sensitivity training. Persuaded by this concept and by a therapeutic literature and practice that cater to it, young people of more than one race have come to think themselves uniquely delicate and exposed. The counterpart of the microaggression is the microtrauma which makes up in nearness and frequency what it lacks in intensity and duration. Here again one is struck by the action of displacement. The two American presidents since 2001 have said over and over that their primary duty was ‘the safety of the American people’. No earlier presidents spoke in quite this way: the oath of office contains not a word about safety but commits the chief magistrate to uphold the constitution. Safety in argument or debate is of course an unintelligible demand, but the trouble with those who think they want it isn’t that they are incapable of giving reasons backed by evidence. Rather, they have had no practice in using words to influence people unlike themselves...
‘Debate is not a death sentence,’ Beatrix Campbell recently observed in a letter in the LRB (14 July), ‘and feeling offended is not the same as feeling or being exterminated. There is a human right to life, but there is no right to be not offended.’ The truth is that in some areas we are close to excogitating a right not to feel offended. In America, the definitions governing what counts as sexual harassment are wide enough to have let in a troop of other causes... Feeling counts because feeling in the offended person is a dispositive fact: proof (which needs no further support) that a crime was committed. We are not far in America – is it just America? – from evolving a right to feel good about ourselves. Possibly the best counteraction is to repudiate membership in a species that could want to do this. Misanthropy and the rejection of censorship here join forces unambiguously.
What a distinguished and very dead philosopher referred to as the religion of humanity may turn out to be as dangerous as all the other religions. With the joint arrival of multicultural etiquette and globalisation, we have come to dwell increasingly on hidden injuries that threaten the norms and civilities desirable for people everywhere. This involves a fresh dedication to the discovery of faults of manners and usage that could cause friction. But, as was observed half a century ago by Nigel Dennis – an irreplaceable satirist of political and religious fanaticism – ‘Our sins are rarely as disgusting as we suppose them to be, and never as disgusting as the attention we pay them.’ Nor do we know ourselves well enough to be sure that our corrections are correct. The narcissism of humanity remains as conspicuous as ever at a moment when we can least afford the indulgence...
Reports of bodily harm at the enunciation of unpleasant words, and of clinical depression from exposure to despised historical names in public places, suggest a delicacy that would render politics eventually impossible"
If "hate speech" causes "harm" like rapid breathing, what about the conservative offended by gay men in public?
Post ID: 4194578191374127283
Links - 15th May 2017 (2)
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, The All-Seeing Eye - "[On Turkey's fortune tellers] Those too afraid of terror attacks to leave their houses consult apps and TV mystics. One app *name*, has been downloaded over 1/2 million times. Users upload pictures of their coffee grounds swirled the requisite 3 times, and a team of remote mystics respond with their predictions...
[On SE Nigeria] 60% of parents know they're sending their kids into prostitution abroad, she says. Because of the hardship here, it's very tempting. This contradicts the narrative of many anti-trafficking groups who say most women are simply duped. A decade ago, maybe, says Sister Bibiana (sp?), but those innocent times are gone. She learnt this the hard way last year while distributing leaflets warning people that if they sent their children to Europe, they'd almost certainly end up in prostitution. In one marketplace the women threw the leaflets back at us... Why can't our girls go to Europe? Are you going to give them work instead?"
Mama Yuli: The trans women's leader no-one messes with - ""I felt like a weight had been lifted from me. I saw that if we wear beautiful clothes and make-up you could easily attract guys," she says. Waria are often lusted after - most work as prostitutes. Many are also rejected by their families, and as Indonesia embraces a stricter version of Islam, they are increasingly despised, or even attacked by vigilantes... "I have been stripped naked, beaten and my face slashed with a knife," she says. "And they chant 'Allahu Akbar' while they hit us." Mama Yuli says she wasn't pretty enough to become a prostitute, so instead she became their protector. And it was while she was working with the prostitutes that she heard her parents had died. To this day she feels somehow responsible. "They were so disappointed that I was wearing women's clothes that they died," she says. "It's as if I killed them."
Was Lee Kuan Yew really being Islamophobic when he said Muslims should be less strict?
Disapproving of transexuality supposedly can lead to trans people killing themselves. Now we see that the converse (kind of) can occur too
Semyon Gluzman: Meeting a Soviet-era dissident again after 35 years - "Some activists in the West were confused when Gorbachev released the political prisoners. The dissidents were not what they expected. Not everyone can be a Mandela. One woman in Holland who used to write letters to a dissident invited him to stay with her. But within hours of his arriving, she discovered he was a fascist"
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent, Too Many Ways to Talk - "Among young people in America, texting is now the #1 cause of car crashes"
Travelling the world with cats and a dog - "there's the paperwork, and what I've discovered to be the fundamental, immutable law of pet migration. The stricter and more extensive the requirements ahead of travel - for passports, jabs, microchips, special crates, transit fees and all the rest of it - the bigger the smiles of the customs officials at the destination airport, as they wave away your dossier full of hard-won paperwork without a glance, and crouch down to stroke the new arrival."
Pakistan asks Facebook and Twitter to help identify blasphemers - "Pakistan has asked Facebook and Twitter to help identify Pakistanis suspected of blasphemy so it can prosecute them or pursue their extradition. Under the country’s strict blasphemy laws, anyone found to have insulted Islam or the prophet Muhammad can be sentenced to death."
Illiberal arts colleges: Pay more, get less (free speech) - "schools where students have attempted disinvite speakers are substantially wealthier and more expensive than average... The quintessentially liberal commitment to free and open dialogue is indispensable for building mutual understanding and respect in a diverse society. Cultural separation fueled by economic inequality, however, undermines that dialogue and respect. The spectacle of rich, “progressive” protestors refusing to hear a lecture on the roots of their own privilege; well, it tells you how much work there is to do. The class gap in American today is economic, educational and residential. Perhaps most dangerous of all, it is cultural, too. Mutual distrust across class lines is one of the causes of our current toxic politics. Greater understanding, shared learning and self-reflection are all needed now more than ever. And you don’t learn anything by shouting others down."
Lawyer proposes motion to end serving of alcohol at Malaysian Bar events - "Lawyer Mohd Amir Sharil Bahari Md Noor had in his motion noted the diverse backgrounds of Malaysian Bar members who are multi-ethnic and of different religions, before going on to say that “all major religions” allegedly prohibit the consumption of alcohol... “Whereas the intention of serving alcohol on Malaysian Bar functions remains questionable,” the lawyer better known as Amir Bahari wrote in his proposed motion for the Malaysian Bar’s 71st annual general meeting (AGM) this Saturday. “Whereas the application of Jurisprudence principle of Harm Must Be Eliminated should be upheld at all times"... In his campaign last month for the Kuala Lumpur Bar chairman post, Amir Bahari had among other things promised to “Islamise” the Kuala Lumpur Bar by discontinuing the serving of alcohol at its events."
This Is What Flight Attendant Training in China Looks Like - "Trainee stewardesses also hold a piece of paper between their knees in order to learn how to stand properly."
Filter bubbles revisited: The internet may not be driving political polarization. - "Americans older than 75 experienced by far the greatest ideological divergence of any age group over the time period studied. Yet just 20 percent of this group reported using social media as of 2012. In contrast, the vast majority (80 percent) of Americans aged 18 to 39 used social media. Yet according to the study’s findings, this younger group was hardly any more polarized in 2012 than it had been in 1996, when online media barely existed. “These facts argue against the hypothesis that the internet is a primary driver of rising political polarization”... The finding is consistent with a previous body of work by Gentzkow, Shapiro, and others, who have found little evidence for the hypothesis—advanced by legal scholar Cass Sunstein—that the internet is tearing us apart. In 2011, for instance, they reported that people were actually more likely to encounter opposing views in online media than they are in their day-to-day interactions with neighbors, co-workers, and family."
3 Ways the Gay Rights Agenda™ Has Perpetuated Oppression - Everyday Feminism - "The Repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell... The repeal of DADT had no impact on the military’s daily assault on racial and gender justice; it just gave out brownie points to an otherwise oppressive institution."
Muslim imam Sheikh Mohammed Tawhidi in hiding after supporting calls from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to close Australia s Muslim schools - "Mohammed Tawhidi, of the Islamic Association of South Australia, said he agrees with Ms Ali's call to close Islamic schools in Australia. He has also rejected extremist groups. Ms Ali cancelled her tour of Australia this week because of fears for her safety. "These schools do exist that are a problem and they need to be either shut down or changed completely," Imam Tawhidi said. Fearing reprisals, the Adelaide-based Imam said he was escorted into hiding by police."
University Feminists Demand Ban for Pro-Life Society Before It Even Starts - "Campaigners from the University of Liverpool have demanded that the new organisation must be shut down because it is “misogynistic” and a “danger” to women"
Religious chocolate nipples ranging from young girls to mature ladies launched in Japan - "A new brand of chocolates manufactured by the Mme KIKI company will be hitting the shelves next year in Japan in the form of women’s nipples. The “CHOCONIP” set will be sold with eight different nipples representing the transformation from a young girl’s nipple to the mature age female nipple. The CHOCONIP set of chocolates has been inspired by the Jison-in Temple in Wakayama Prefecture, which in the past was a facility only for women to worship at, known as a nyonin koya in Japanese. The picture below shows the worshipping of nipples at the Jison-in Temple in Wakayama for things such as fertility and safe child-birth... The Mme KIKI company, which will be manufacturing the chocolate nipples, has said the idea came to them suddenly when they thought “Why don’t we make chocolate in the shape of young girls’ nipples?”"
Sailor-style school uniform outfits for men are warm, fleecy and said to reduce stress
Damn Japs
Upcoming party in Shibuya combines house music with cutting open a tuna, girls get in free
Only in Japan: Rent a hot guy to make you cry then wipe your tears away
Bacon is a bit of a misnomer in Japan. When you say the word bacon to a foreigner, they often imagine crispy, tasty strips of goodness; you also might need to wipe up a bit of their drool. However, when confronted with “bacon” in Japan, the disappointment is immense. What is labeled as bacon looks like strangely cut pre-cooked ham. Even when you attempt to bring home the bacon and cook it yourself, as much as you attempt to crisp it up, you will still have supremely floppy frustration. Or you overcook it and end up with black burnt inedible garbage. There is a little trick that has been making its way around the Internet that is turning floppy disappointments into crispy deliciousness. All it takes is one little secret ingredient! Sugar
Japanese high school holds annual contest to decide the prettiest “girl” in school - "one Japanese all-boys high school, faced with an utter lack of girls to ogle, chose to get a little creative"
School textbook is withdrawn after “teacher” on the front is recognized as Japanese adult video star - "This Thai textbook publisher, however, has come under fire for apparently sourcing an image from the internet to use on a book’s front cover"
$15 Melon vs. $270 Japanese Melon Taste Test
Remembering the war in New Guinea - Australian attitudes towards the Japanese - "observation and experience heightened the hatred that Australian front-line soldiers felt for the Japanese. Racist prejudgements, and even the threat to Australia, did not goad Australian soldiers in the same way as personal experiences or personal expectations based on reports from other front-line soldiers. Many Australians who campaigned against the Japanese considered their opponent evil, detestable, underhanded and frightening in his methods. At the jungle training school at Canungra, recruits were told that the Japanese was "a cunning little rat", who was "full of little ruses and tricks." Australians were unwilling to take Japanese prisoners largely because of distrust born of bad experiences, with Japanese offering surrender and then acting as human bombs by detonating concealed explosive. The thousands of Australian soldiers who passed through Canungra were advised to shoot any Japanese surrendering with their hands closed. Frank Rolleston recalls that an apparently defenceless Japanese carrying a white cloth at Milne Bay was shot down on the grounds that "we were not prepared to take the slightest risk with an enemy that had proved to be the limit in deception and treachery." The fact that Australian wounded, and the stretcher bearers who carried them, could expect no immunity from enemy fire was a major source of criticism, as was Japanese bombing of medical facilities. Thus a medical officer wrote about a tent "ward" attacked by enemy aircraft in Papua: "When the smoke cleared the twelve [patients] were still in the tents, but each one was dead - killed by the deliberate sub-human fury of Tojo's men." Japanese callousness and brutality towards helpless men caused fierce animosity in Australians. While unchivalrous and callous behaviour was encountered against the Germans, the Japanese lifted brutality to a higher level. Brutal acts were committed more often by Japanese than by any other enemy. I'm sure you are all aware of Japanese massacres of Australian prisoners in Malaya, Singapore, Timor, New Britain, Ambon."
To Erase Militarist Past, Japan Must Re-Learn It - "Radha Binod Pal... was the only Indian judge at the so-called Tokyo Trials, Japan’s protracted version of Nuremberg. In his 1,235-page dissent, he voted to acquit the 25 Japanese accused by Allied powers of the “unprecedented” crime of “conspiring against peace”... the Soviet Union’s representative had previously served as a judge in Josef Stalin’s mock trials of the 1930s. The British, Dutch and French presuming to judge Japan’s conduct invited attention to their own much-despised imperialisms in Asia. Though “fiendish,” Pal argued, Japan’s expansionism was hardly unprecedented. Like all modern imperialist and industrial powers, Japan had sought to advance its outsized ambitions and respond to perceived threats. Other points raised by Pal also warned against an easy moral clarity about Japan’s war in Asia. He argued that the firebombing of Japanese cities and the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should also be counted as major war crimes. In fact, the trial was rendered absurd from the very beginning by Allied Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur’s aggressive and obsessive attempt to shield Emperor Hirohito from responsibility for his country’s crimes. The chief Japanese militarist Hideki Tojo was forced to recant his statement of the obvious: that he could not have done anything against the wishes of the divinely ordained emperor. The American chief prosecutor lunched with Hirohito on the day Tojo’s death sentence was confirmed. Even the right-wing General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s chief intelligence officer, privately denounced the trials as the “worst hypocrisy in recorded history”... Japanese revisionists may be heartened by the inscription in stone at Pal’s memorial at Yasukuni:
When time shall have softened passion and prejudice,/ When reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation,/ Then justice, holding evenly her scales, will require/ much of past censure and praise to change places"
More than 40 per cent of Japan's adult singles are virgins, says study - "The last time the study was conducted in 2010, only 36.2 per cent of men and 38.7 percent of women said they were virgins... An organisation called Virgin Academia, set up by the non-profit organisation White Hands, now offers lectures focusing on how to establish healthy relationships, as well as activities such as nude life drawing classes."
Man beaten to pulp after offering to pay for attackers’ meal - "A good Samaritan who offered to lend two men short on cash a couple bucks to cover their meal at a Brooklyn eatery ended up beaten and robbed for trying to help"
People Without Electricity Don’t Get 8 Hours’ Sleep Either - "People from these groups—two in Africa, one in South America—tend to nod off long after sundown and wake before dawn, contrary to the romantic vision of life without electric lights and electronic gadgets... “Seeing the same pattern in three groups separated by thousands of miles on two continents (makes) it pretty clear that this is the natural pattern,” says study leader and sleep researcher Jerome Siegel of the University of California, Los Angeles. “Maybe people should be a little bit more relaxed about sleeping. If you sleep seven hours a night, that’s close to what our ancestors were sleeping”... Though the San, Tsimane, and Hadza often average less than seven hours of sleep, they seem to be getting enough sleep. They seldom nap, and they don’t have trouble dozing off. The San and Tsimane languages have no word for insomnia, and when researchers tried to explain it to them, “they still don’t seem to quite understand,” Siegel says. So what are they doing in the hours after dark? The Tsimane eat, chat and sometimes weave or even hunt, Yetish says. The Hadza connect with family and friends after days hunting for tubers, game and wild honey"
How The Cars Of Logan Grappled With The Very Real Future
I turned $1.24 into $1000 of UberEATS credit - "I created a URL where I shared my unique referral code. I then claimed some free advertising credit and ran some ads to my site directed at those looking to use Uber EATS for the first time (the only way my referral code works)."
PatchCleaner - safely clean your windows installer directory - "When applications are installed and updated on the Windows Operating System a hidden directory "c:\Windows\Installer" is used to store the installer (.msi) files and the patch (.msp) files. Generally these files are important as during updating, patching or uninstalling software it will use the .msi/.msp files. If you blanketly delete all the files in this folder, you will find yourself needing to rebuild windows. Over time as your computer is patched and patched again, these installer files become outdated and orphaned. They are no longer required, but they can take up many gigabytes of data."
Man 'ran into ocean to avoid £375 restaurant bill' - "Terry Peck, 33, ran up a tab of A$621 (£375) at the Omeros Bros Seafood Restaurant on Australia's Gold Coast on Sunday evening. He is believed to have ordered two lobster mornays, 21 oyster shooters, a baby octopus and Corona beers... Lifeguards took two police officers out on jet skis to pursue Peck and, when he refused to return to land, they arrested him the water... After leaving court Peck told waiting reporters: “The lobster was a bit overcooked.” Mark Hunnybun, assistant manager at the Omeros Bros restaurant, refuted the claim, telling ABC: "We cook our lobsters perfectly here — we pride ourselves on cooking our lobsters perfectly""
Farm spices up yoga class with a bunch of baby goats
[On SE Nigeria] 60% of parents know they're sending their kids into prostitution abroad, she says. Because of the hardship here, it's very tempting. This contradicts the narrative of many anti-trafficking groups who say most women are simply duped. A decade ago, maybe, says Sister Bibiana (sp?), but those innocent times are gone. She learnt this the hard way last year while distributing leaflets warning people that if they sent their children to Europe, they'd almost certainly end up in prostitution. In one marketplace the women threw the leaflets back at us... Why can't our girls go to Europe? Are you going to give them work instead?"
Mama Yuli: The trans women's leader no-one messes with - ""I felt like a weight had been lifted from me. I saw that if we wear beautiful clothes and make-up you could easily attract guys," she says. Waria are often lusted after - most work as prostitutes. Many are also rejected by their families, and as Indonesia embraces a stricter version of Islam, they are increasingly despised, or even attacked by vigilantes... "I have been stripped naked, beaten and my face slashed with a knife," she says. "And they chant 'Allahu Akbar' while they hit us." Mama Yuli says she wasn't pretty enough to become a prostitute, so instead she became their protector. And it was while she was working with the prostitutes that she heard her parents had died. To this day she feels somehow responsible. "They were so disappointed that I was wearing women's clothes that they died," she says. "It's as if I killed them."
Was Lee Kuan Yew really being Islamophobic when he said Muslims should be less strict?
Disapproving of transexuality supposedly can lead to trans people killing themselves. Now we see that the converse (kind of) can occur too
Semyon Gluzman: Meeting a Soviet-era dissident again after 35 years - "Some activists in the West were confused when Gorbachev released the political prisoners. The dissidents were not what they expected. Not everyone can be a Mandela. One woman in Holland who used to write letters to a dissident invited him to stay with her. But within hours of his arriving, she discovered he was a fascist"
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent, Too Many Ways to Talk - "Among young people in America, texting is now the #1 cause of car crashes"
Travelling the world with cats and a dog - "there's the paperwork, and what I've discovered to be the fundamental, immutable law of pet migration. The stricter and more extensive the requirements ahead of travel - for passports, jabs, microchips, special crates, transit fees and all the rest of it - the bigger the smiles of the customs officials at the destination airport, as they wave away your dossier full of hard-won paperwork without a glance, and crouch down to stroke the new arrival."
Pakistan asks Facebook and Twitter to help identify blasphemers - "Pakistan has asked Facebook and Twitter to help identify Pakistanis suspected of blasphemy so it can prosecute them or pursue their extradition. Under the country’s strict blasphemy laws, anyone found to have insulted Islam or the prophet Muhammad can be sentenced to death."
Illiberal arts colleges: Pay more, get less (free speech) - "schools where students have attempted disinvite speakers are substantially wealthier and more expensive than average... The quintessentially liberal commitment to free and open dialogue is indispensable for building mutual understanding and respect in a diverse society. Cultural separation fueled by economic inequality, however, undermines that dialogue and respect. The spectacle of rich, “progressive” protestors refusing to hear a lecture on the roots of their own privilege; well, it tells you how much work there is to do. The class gap in American today is economic, educational and residential. Perhaps most dangerous of all, it is cultural, too. Mutual distrust across class lines is one of the causes of our current toxic politics. Greater understanding, shared learning and self-reflection are all needed now more than ever. And you don’t learn anything by shouting others down."
Lawyer proposes motion to end serving of alcohol at Malaysian Bar events - "Lawyer Mohd Amir Sharil Bahari Md Noor had in his motion noted the diverse backgrounds of Malaysian Bar members who are multi-ethnic and of different religions, before going on to say that “all major religions” allegedly prohibit the consumption of alcohol... “Whereas the intention of serving alcohol on Malaysian Bar functions remains questionable,” the lawyer better known as Amir Bahari wrote in his proposed motion for the Malaysian Bar’s 71st annual general meeting (AGM) this Saturday. “Whereas the application of Jurisprudence principle of Harm Must Be Eliminated should be upheld at all times"... In his campaign last month for the Kuala Lumpur Bar chairman post, Amir Bahari had among other things promised to “Islamise” the Kuala Lumpur Bar by discontinuing the serving of alcohol at its events."
This Is What Flight Attendant Training in China Looks Like - "Trainee stewardesses also hold a piece of paper between their knees in order to learn how to stand properly."
Filter bubbles revisited: The internet may not be driving political polarization. - "Americans older than 75 experienced by far the greatest ideological divergence of any age group over the time period studied. Yet just 20 percent of this group reported using social media as of 2012. In contrast, the vast majority (80 percent) of Americans aged 18 to 39 used social media. Yet according to the study’s findings, this younger group was hardly any more polarized in 2012 than it had been in 1996, when online media barely existed. “These facts argue against the hypothesis that the internet is a primary driver of rising political polarization”... The finding is consistent with a previous body of work by Gentzkow, Shapiro, and others, who have found little evidence for the hypothesis—advanced by legal scholar Cass Sunstein—that the internet is tearing us apart. In 2011, for instance, they reported that people were actually more likely to encounter opposing views in online media than they are in their day-to-day interactions with neighbors, co-workers, and family."
3 Ways the Gay Rights Agenda™ Has Perpetuated Oppression - Everyday Feminism - "The Repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell... The repeal of DADT had no impact on the military’s daily assault on racial and gender justice; it just gave out brownie points to an otherwise oppressive institution."
Muslim imam Sheikh Mohammed Tawhidi in hiding after supporting calls from Ayaan Hirsi Ali to close Australia s Muslim schools - "Mohammed Tawhidi, of the Islamic Association of South Australia, said he agrees with Ms Ali's call to close Islamic schools in Australia. He has also rejected extremist groups. Ms Ali cancelled her tour of Australia this week because of fears for her safety. "These schools do exist that are a problem and they need to be either shut down or changed completely," Imam Tawhidi said. Fearing reprisals, the Adelaide-based Imam said he was escorted into hiding by police."
University Feminists Demand Ban for Pro-Life Society Before It Even Starts - "Campaigners from the University of Liverpool have demanded that the new organisation must be shut down because it is “misogynistic” and a “danger” to women"
Religious chocolate nipples ranging from young girls to mature ladies launched in Japan - "A new brand of chocolates manufactured by the Mme KIKI company will be hitting the shelves next year in Japan in the form of women’s nipples. The “CHOCONIP” set will be sold with eight different nipples representing the transformation from a young girl’s nipple to the mature age female nipple. The CHOCONIP set of chocolates has been inspired by the Jison-in Temple in Wakayama Prefecture, which in the past was a facility only for women to worship at, known as a nyonin koya in Japanese. The picture below shows the worshipping of nipples at the Jison-in Temple in Wakayama for things such as fertility and safe child-birth... The Mme KIKI company, which will be manufacturing the chocolate nipples, has said the idea came to them suddenly when they thought “Why don’t we make chocolate in the shape of young girls’ nipples?”"
Sailor-style school uniform outfits for men are warm, fleecy and said to reduce stress
Damn Japs
Upcoming party in Shibuya combines house music with cutting open a tuna, girls get in free
Only in Japan: Rent a hot guy to make you cry then wipe your tears away
Bacon is a bit of a misnomer in Japan. When you say the word bacon to a foreigner, they often imagine crispy, tasty strips of goodness; you also might need to wipe up a bit of their drool. However, when confronted with “bacon” in Japan, the disappointment is immense. What is labeled as bacon looks like strangely cut pre-cooked ham. Even when you attempt to bring home the bacon and cook it yourself, as much as you attempt to crisp it up, you will still have supremely floppy frustration. Or you overcook it and end up with black burnt inedible garbage. There is a little trick that has been making its way around the Internet that is turning floppy disappointments into crispy deliciousness. All it takes is one little secret ingredient! Sugar
Japanese high school holds annual contest to decide the prettiest “girl” in school - "one Japanese all-boys high school, faced with an utter lack of girls to ogle, chose to get a little creative"
School textbook is withdrawn after “teacher” on the front is recognized as Japanese adult video star - "This Thai textbook publisher, however, has come under fire for apparently sourcing an image from the internet to use on a book’s front cover"
$15 Melon vs. $270 Japanese Melon Taste Test
Remembering the war in New Guinea - Australian attitudes towards the Japanese - "observation and experience heightened the hatred that Australian front-line soldiers felt for the Japanese. Racist prejudgements, and even the threat to Australia, did not goad Australian soldiers in the same way as personal experiences or personal expectations based on reports from other front-line soldiers. Many Australians who campaigned against the Japanese considered their opponent evil, detestable, underhanded and frightening in his methods. At the jungle training school at Canungra, recruits were told that the Japanese was "a cunning little rat", who was "full of little ruses and tricks." Australians were unwilling to take Japanese prisoners largely because of distrust born of bad experiences, with Japanese offering surrender and then acting as human bombs by detonating concealed explosive. The thousands of Australian soldiers who passed through Canungra were advised to shoot any Japanese surrendering with their hands closed. Frank Rolleston recalls that an apparently defenceless Japanese carrying a white cloth at Milne Bay was shot down on the grounds that "we were not prepared to take the slightest risk with an enemy that had proved to be the limit in deception and treachery." The fact that Australian wounded, and the stretcher bearers who carried them, could expect no immunity from enemy fire was a major source of criticism, as was Japanese bombing of medical facilities. Thus a medical officer wrote about a tent "ward" attacked by enemy aircraft in Papua: "When the smoke cleared the twelve [patients] were still in the tents, but each one was dead - killed by the deliberate sub-human fury of Tojo's men." Japanese callousness and brutality towards helpless men caused fierce animosity in Australians. While unchivalrous and callous behaviour was encountered against the Germans, the Japanese lifted brutality to a higher level. Brutal acts were committed more often by Japanese than by any other enemy. I'm sure you are all aware of Japanese massacres of Australian prisoners in Malaya, Singapore, Timor, New Britain, Ambon."
To Erase Militarist Past, Japan Must Re-Learn It - "Radha Binod Pal... was the only Indian judge at the so-called Tokyo Trials, Japan’s protracted version of Nuremberg. In his 1,235-page dissent, he voted to acquit the 25 Japanese accused by Allied powers of the “unprecedented” crime of “conspiring against peace”... the Soviet Union’s representative had previously served as a judge in Josef Stalin’s mock trials of the 1930s. The British, Dutch and French presuming to judge Japan’s conduct invited attention to their own much-despised imperialisms in Asia. Though “fiendish,” Pal argued, Japan’s expansionism was hardly unprecedented. Like all modern imperialist and industrial powers, Japan had sought to advance its outsized ambitions and respond to perceived threats. Other points raised by Pal also warned against an easy moral clarity about Japan’s war in Asia. He argued that the firebombing of Japanese cities and the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should also be counted as major war crimes. In fact, the trial was rendered absurd from the very beginning by Allied Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur’s aggressive and obsessive attempt to shield Emperor Hirohito from responsibility for his country’s crimes. The chief Japanese militarist Hideki Tojo was forced to recant his statement of the obvious: that he could not have done anything against the wishes of the divinely ordained emperor. The American chief prosecutor lunched with Hirohito on the day Tojo’s death sentence was confirmed. Even the right-wing General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s chief intelligence officer, privately denounced the trials as the “worst hypocrisy in recorded history”... Japanese revisionists may be heartened by the inscription in stone at Pal’s memorial at Yasukuni:
When time shall have softened passion and prejudice,/ When reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepresentation,/ Then justice, holding evenly her scales, will require/ much of past censure and praise to change places"
More than 40 per cent of Japan's adult singles are virgins, says study - "The last time the study was conducted in 2010, only 36.2 per cent of men and 38.7 percent of women said they were virgins... An organisation called Virgin Academia, set up by the non-profit organisation White Hands, now offers lectures focusing on how to establish healthy relationships, as well as activities such as nude life drawing classes."
Man beaten to pulp after offering to pay for attackers’ meal - "A good Samaritan who offered to lend two men short on cash a couple bucks to cover their meal at a Brooklyn eatery ended up beaten and robbed for trying to help"
People Without Electricity Don’t Get 8 Hours’ Sleep Either - "People from these groups—two in Africa, one in South America—tend to nod off long after sundown and wake before dawn, contrary to the romantic vision of life without electric lights and electronic gadgets... “Seeing the same pattern in three groups separated by thousands of miles on two continents (makes) it pretty clear that this is the natural pattern,” says study leader and sleep researcher Jerome Siegel of the University of California, Los Angeles. “Maybe people should be a little bit more relaxed about sleeping. If you sleep seven hours a night, that’s close to what our ancestors were sleeping”... Though the San, Tsimane, and Hadza often average less than seven hours of sleep, they seem to be getting enough sleep. They seldom nap, and they don’t have trouble dozing off. The San and Tsimane languages have no word for insomnia, and when researchers tried to explain it to them, “they still don’t seem to quite understand,” Siegel says. So what are they doing in the hours after dark? The Tsimane eat, chat and sometimes weave or even hunt, Yetish says. The Hadza connect with family and friends after days hunting for tubers, game and wild honey"
How The Cars Of Logan Grappled With The Very Real Future
I turned $1.24 into $1000 of UberEATS credit - "I created a URL where I shared my unique referral code. I then claimed some free advertising credit and ran some ads to my site directed at those looking to use Uber EATS for the first time (the only way my referral code works)."
PatchCleaner - safely clean your windows installer directory - "When applications are installed and updated on the Windows Operating System a hidden directory "c:\Windows\Installer" is used to store the installer (.msi) files and the patch (.msp) files. Generally these files are important as during updating, patching or uninstalling software it will use the .msi/.msp files. If you blanketly delete all the files in this folder, you will find yourself needing to rebuild windows. Over time as your computer is patched and patched again, these installer files become outdated and orphaned. They are no longer required, but they can take up many gigabytes of data."
Man 'ran into ocean to avoid £375 restaurant bill' - "Terry Peck, 33, ran up a tab of A$621 (£375) at the Omeros Bros Seafood Restaurant on Australia's Gold Coast on Sunday evening. He is believed to have ordered two lobster mornays, 21 oyster shooters, a baby octopus and Corona beers... Lifeguards took two police officers out on jet skis to pursue Peck and, when he refused to return to land, they arrested him the water... After leaving court Peck told waiting reporters: “The lobster was a bit overcooked.” Mark Hunnybun, assistant manager at the Omeros Bros restaurant, refuted the claim, telling ABC: "We cook our lobsters perfectly here — we pride ourselves on cooking our lobsters perfectly""
Farm spices up yoga class with a bunch of baby goats
Post ID: 9176226684306769035
Women and Phobias
"Phobias are defined as intense fears in the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situation. Gender differences in the prevalence and presentation of phobias are common but tend to vary across types. Women are twice as likely as men to meet the criteria for a diagnosis of any specific phobia (27% vs. 13%) or multiple phobias (5% vs. 2%). Specifically. women are more apt to report animal (12% vs.3% men), natural environment (5% vs. 3% men) and situational (17% vs 9% men) phobias. Height and flying phobias tend to be distributed more evenly across gender (60% women), and blood-injection-injury phobia is equally common in both genders (LeBeau et al.. 2010).
Gender differences in specific phobias have been linked to biological and environmental factors. The heritability of specific phobias runs between 30% and 60%, with variation across subtypes. Interestingly, there appears to be a genetic factor specifically associated with the development of animal and situational phobias, which might explain why women tend to report more of these phobias than men.
Genetic factors in the development of phobias appear to be most influential during early childhood. As children grow, their genetic vulnerabilities tend to be shaped by social and environmental factors—a process moderated by gender. Socialization processes teach women and men what to fear, how much to fear, and how to respond to fearful stimuli in ways that are consistent with their gender roles. For example, women learn to overestimate the probability that an object or situation is harmful and are more apt to experience these events as unpredictable and uncontrollable. Fear expression and avoidance of fearful stimuli are more consistent with female (vs. male) gender roles and are more apt to be reinforced in women and discouraged in men. Indeed, men are typically encouraged to approach (vs. avoid) fearful stimuli, reducing their risk for phobias through repeated exposure (Craske, 2003). Moreover, women tend to be better at identifying the emotional states of others’ through nonverbal cues (e.g.. facial expression, body language). This heightened sensitivity to socially transmitted information puts women at greater risk for developing specific phobias through processes of vicarious conditioning, such as observational learning. Research also shows that girls are more susceptible to parental modeling of fear and anxiety than boys."
--- Catherine E. Gallagher and Margo C. Watt in Phobias: The Psychology of Irrational Fear: The Psychology of Irrational Fear / edited by Irena Milosevic Ph.D., Randi E. McCabe Ph.D.
In other words, women have more irrational fears than men (since phobias are irrational fears).
Gender differences in specific phobias have been linked to biological and environmental factors. The heritability of specific phobias runs between 30% and 60%, with variation across subtypes. Interestingly, there appears to be a genetic factor specifically associated with the development of animal and situational phobias, which might explain why women tend to report more of these phobias than men.
Genetic factors in the development of phobias appear to be most influential during early childhood. As children grow, their genetic vulnerabilities tend to be shaped by social and environmental factors—a process moderated by gender. Socialization processes teach women and men what to fear, how much to fear, and how to respond to fearful stimuli in ways that are consistent with their gender roles. For example, women learn to overestimate the probability that an object or situation is harmful and are more apt to experience these events as unpredictable and uncontrollable. Fear expression and avoidance of fearful stimuli are more consistent with female (vs. male) gender roles and are more apt to be reinforced in women and discouraged in men. Indeed, men are typically encouraged to approach (vs. avoid) fearful stimuli, reducing their risk for phobias through repeated exposure (Craske, 2003). Moreover, women tend to be better at identifying the emotional states of others’ through nonverbal cues (e.g.. facial expression, body language). This heightened sensitivity to socially transmitted information puts women at greater risk for developing specific phobias through processes of vicarious conditioning, such as observational learning. Research also shows that girls are more susceptible to parental modeling of fear and anxiety than boys."
--- Catherine E. Gallagher and Margo C. Watt in Phobias: The Psychology of Irrational Fear: The Psychology of Irrational Fear / edited by Irena Milosevic Ph.D., Randi E. McCabe Ph.D.
In other words, women have more irrational fears than men (since phobias are irrational fears).
Post ID: 3399406024470803369
Links - 15th May 2017 (1)
Why Did Hayek Support a Basic Income? - "it is based on concepts that are absolutely central to libertarian thought – the twin ideas of freedom and coercion... Can we really dismiss the possibility that hard economic times, combined with an excess supply of labor and a small number of employers, will leave some employers with considerable market power over their workers? Are we really willing to say that each and every one of the outrages documented by Bertram et al. is the product of workers’ free choice, rather than (what they appear to be) something imposed on workers against their will by those who wield power over them? If libertarians are concerned to protect the freedom of all, and not just the freedom of most, we will want some mechanism that catches those who fall through the cracks left by imperfect market competition. We will want, too, some mechanism for protecting individuals whose economic vulnerability renders them vulnerable to domination outside the marketplace – the woman, for example, who stays with her abusive husband because she lacks the financial resources to support herself without him."
FAIRNESS: Man Who Says He's A Woman DOMINATING Women's Weightlifting - " Laurel Hubbard, a transgender "woman" from Kiwi, took a commanding win in Sunday's Australian International event in Melbourne. The athlete wrecked the biological women during Sunday's showdown, setting four national records. "Hubbard lifted a combined total of 268kg – 19kg better than silver medallist Iuniarra Sipaia of Samoa""
Helen Zille learns there's never a good time to cheer colonialism in South Africa—or elsewhere - "Helen Zille, the controversial premier of the republic’s Western Cape province and a former leader of South Africa’s Democratic Alliance (DA), will face discipline from her party after tweeting Thursday that “for those claiming legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water, etc.” [emphasis in original]. She later added “specialized health care and medication” to the list before expressing gratitude that she was boarding an airplane, where, without an Internet connection, she could “cut off those who think EVERY aspect of colonial legacy was bad.” [emphasis in original]"
Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Pupils taught Disney fairy tales promote sexism and domestic violence in online lesson plan - "pupils as young as 11 are being taught that loyal heroine Belle is in an abusive relationship with the Beast in which "her only asset is her sexuality"."
Young, British Muslims 'getting more radical' - Telegraph - "The study found disturbing evidence of young Muslims adopting more fundamentalist beliefs on key social and political issues than their parents or grandparents. Forty per cent of Muslims between the ages of 16 and 24 said they would prefer to live under sharia law in Britain, a legal system based on the teachings of the Koran. The figure among over-55s, in contrast, was only 17 per cent... Britain's foreign policies were a key issue among the Muslim population as a whole, with 58 per cent arguing that many of the world's problems are "a result of arrogant Western attitudes". However, knowledge of foreign affairs was sketchy, with only one in five knowing that Mahmoud Abbas was the Palestinian president... The Policy Exchange report, Living Together Apart: British Muslims and the Paradox of Multiculturalism — says there is strong evidence of a "growing religiosity" among young Muslims, with an increasing minority firmly rejecting Western life... The report also raises questions about the scale of the problems created by Islamophobia, with 84 per cent of those questioned saying they believed they had been "treated fairly" in Britain. There was also criticism of the decision by some councils to ban Christian symbols in case they offended Muslims or other communities. Three quarters said it was wrong for a council to have banned an advert for a Christmas carol service."
A researcher who interviewed hundreds of married women found the happiest "never bought into" a "dangerous fantasy" - "The collective wisdom seems to be: ‘Sometimes you will be miserable. This is the reality of long-term intimacy. Carry on."
What makes gambling wrong but insurance right? - "Almost a decade ago, I tried to place a bet with a leading UK betting shop that I would die within a year. They should have taken the bet - I am still alive. But they will not gamble on life and death. A life insurance company, by contrast, does little else."
Indonesian army destroys much-mocked tiger statue - "The Indonesian army has demolished a tiger statue in front of a base in West Java after it became a laughing stock online. The grinning tiger in a small village in Garut was supposed to be a mascot for the Siliwangi Military Command. But internet users found it hilarious because it was so different from the fierce tiger on official logos."
Southern Poverty Law Center overuses 'extremism': Jon Gabriel - "The SPLC is a non-profit heralded for its noble history defending civil rights. Founded in 1971, the Montgomery, Ala. legal advocacy organization sued the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups in the South on behalf of victims. Big settlements and harsh sanctions were levied against the racist organizations, successfully shuttering some and scaring off many others. But by 1986, these groups had rapidly declined. The SPLC could have declared “mission accomplished.” But since funds were still coming in, they declared a new mission statement. No longer would they fight Grand Wizards and Jim Crow, but turned instead to an endlessly expanding target of “extremism.” The change in goals was so stark, the entire legal staff resigned... The fact that the presidential choice of 63 million Americans is equated with a lynch mob skulking around Dixie shows how far the SPLC has strayed from its roots. Half the country can now be declared hate-filled extremists if this group is allowed to define the terms. And those targeted by the SPLC face dangerous consequences."
How to Fight Like a Viking - "Their reputation, experts say, came not so much from their weapons or armor as from their innovative tactics and high morale."
Who Was Ellen Krantz? - "Ephrem Tadele Yohannes followed Elin Krantz out of the tram, abducted her, pulled her into the wooden area in Länsmansgården and raped her there in the most violent way imaginable. Elin Krantz was hit and kicked by Ephrem Tadele Yohannes with so much force, her brain suffered from permanent damage resulting in a lack of oxygen, her head, neck, arms and legs were covered with contusions and hemorrhaging and her membranes around the vaginal opening were burst open... The biggest irony of it all is that Elin Krantz, who fell for the propaganda of "tolerance" and diversity, was a supporter of multiculturalism in Sweden. She was supposedly a member of the Facebook group “We Like Diversity”, called herself “multicultural” and supported immigration of people from the third-world countries into Sweden... Because Sweden is so multicultural now, no Swedish media could publish the fact that the perpetrator was an immigrant or that he was black in their reports on the case. They could not even mention his name by law, so they referred to him merely as a “23 year old”, saying things like “the 23 year old was charged with murder and aggravated rape”. However, thanks to the internet we know who he is."
Is It Safe Yet to Have an Honest Conversation About Secondhand Smoke and Lung Cancer? - "the main goal of smoking bans was "to change societal behavior" by stigmatizing smoking, making it less convenient and less socially acceptable. Indeed, even if you accept every allegation about the hazards of secondhand smoke, it's clear that the real "public health" payoff from smoking bans, in terms of reducing tobacco-related morbidity and mortality, comes from shrinking the number of smokers."
We Used Terrible Science to Justify Smoking Bans - "the extravagant promises made by anti-smoking groups—that implementing bans would bring about extraordinary improvements in cardiac health—never materialized. Newer, better studies with much larger sample sizes have found little to no correlation between smoking bans and short-term incidence of heart attacks, and certainly nothing remotely close to the 60 percent reduction that was claimed in Helena. The updated science debunks the alarmist fantasies that were used to sell smoking bans to the public, allowing for a more sober analysis suggesting that current restrictions on smoking are extreme from a risk-reduction standpoint."
People Are Actually Mad That Wonder Woman Gal Gadot Has No Armpit Hair - "Wonder Woman has never had armpit hair in the comics or on screen. The new film is also set during World War 1, around the same time women began shaving their pits."
Ideological odd couple Robert George and Cornel West issue a joint statement against 'campus illiberalism' - "Stylistically and politically, Robert P. George and Cornel West don’t have much in common. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, is one of the country’s most prominent conservative intellectuals. West, a professor of the practice of public philosophy and African and African-American studies at Harvard University, is a self-described “radical Democrat” who, in addition to many books, once released a spoken-word album. So when George and West agree on something and lend their names to it, people take notice -- as they did this week, when the pair published a statement in support of “truth seeking, democracy and freedom of thought and expression.” It’s a politely worded denunciation of what George and West call “campus illiberalism”"
It's okay, they can still be condemned as right wing extremists pushing an anti-progressive agenda based on a tiny number of isolated and exaggerated incidents
Cultural Bias on IQ Tests - "They found that 73.3% of the “experts” believed that Cognitive Ability Tests (IQ tests) did not have any racial bias"... a panel from The National Research Council and The National Academy of Sciences conducted an investigation of bias in mental testing, and concluded that cultural bias explained virtually none of the racial variance in IQ scores. In 1996, the American Psychological Association formed a panel, and it resulted in the publication entitled “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns” which concluded “Considered as predictors of future performance, the tests do not seem to be biased against African Americans”... the black and white test score difference was significantly larger for questions which were judged to be the least cultural and the lowest for questions judged to be the most cultural... blacks and whites had exactly the same order of hardest to least difficult questions. Moreover, the correlation between how often whites got a question wrong to how often blacks got a question wrong as a function of total score was 0.95."
Research paper (PDF): Admixture in the Americas: Regional and National Differences - "We find that European ancestry is consistently and usually strongly positively correlated with cognitive ability and socioeconomic outcomes (mean r for cognitive ability = .708; for socioeconomic well-being = .643)... We failed to find evidence of international colorism or culturalism (i.e., neither skin reflectance nor self-reported race/ethnicity showed incremental predictive ability once genomic ancestry had been taken into account) (Section 14). The association between European ancestry and cognitive outcomes was robust across a number of alternative measures of cognitive ability"
Cryptic Admixture, Mixed-Race Siblings, & Social Outcomes - "genetic data is open to the same fundamental differences in interpretation. Do blacks with more European admixture have higher IQs because they have more high IQ genes, or did their parents and wider society give them more IQ-boosting advantages because of their relatively European appearance? Or perhaps blacks with more white ancestry simply inherited greater amounts of cultural and material resources from their white ancestors... Heritability estimates rely on a so-called Equal Environment Assumption (EEA), that differential family resemblance is due to genetic similarity, and not to environmental similarity mediated by kinship. Behavior geneticists have assembled various kinds of evidence in support of this assumption. The strongest empirical evidence in support of the EEA uses twins with misidentified zygosity (i.e. the relative trait similarity of fraternal twins who mistakenly believe they are identical twins and vice versa). For example, IQ scores are not more similar among fraternal twins that are mistakenly raised as identical twins (Scarr et al., 1979; Matheny 1979). This is a fairly low-tech behavior genetic solution to the EEA problem, and there is an analogous solution to the admixture problem. The original report from the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study by Scarr and Weinberg (1976) showed that the transracially adopted children with one black parent scored 12 points higher on IQ tests than the transracially adopted children with two black parents. Scarr asked whether this could be due to an “Expectancy Effect,” that is if the biracial children scored higher on the tests because their white adoptive parents treated them differently. She tested this idea by looking at the children with misidentified racial background. Twelve of the biracial children were mistakenly believed to have two black parents. These biracial children nevertheless had the same higher IQ scores as the biracial children with correctly identified racial background (pp. 732-733)."
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, It's Just Not Cricket - "[On Boko Haram in Nigeria] Maidaguri became the centre of the Boko Haram insurgency... A handful of places to go out are still open but Joy complains these are mainly clubs. If you want to go on a romantic date, Joy tells me, there's really just the zoo...
[On Japan] In a recent survey of young adults between the ages of 18-34 conducted by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 70% of unmarried men and 60% of unmarried women were not in a relationship, and many were virgins"
El Chapo Confessed His Crimes to Sean Penn (??) in a Secret Jungle Clearing (???) - "The scene: “A jungle clearing atop a mountain at an undisclosed location in Mexico.” The characters: Escaped Mexican billionaire drug kingpin El Chapo and, uh, Sean Penn? The result: A presumably edited, rambling 11,000-word account of a madman’s meeting with a criminal."
A sarcastic response to Syria's militants - "the station's manager, Raed Fares, has had enough of being told what to do by the powerful jihadist group, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham or JFS - which until last July was linked to al-Qaeda and known as the al-Nusra Front. "They tried to force us to stop playing music on air," says Fares. "So we started to play animals in the background as a kind of sarcastic gesture against them." In what appear to be further acts of sarcastic sabotage aimed at JFS's ban on music, Radio Fresh FM has introduced long sequences of bongs from London's Big Ben clock, endless ticking sounds, ringing explosions and the whistle of shells flying through the air. And instead of songs with melodies, the station now plays recordings of tuneless chanting football fans... It's not that surprising that IS doesn't like Fares. After all, he did once design a poster depicting Syria as an alien with a monster called ISIS exploding out of its chest. The group has since been pushed out of Idlib province... Humour, it seems, is never far from the surface with Raed Fares. Take his response to another of JFS's demands, to get rid of women news readers - who are also haram, they say. Has he, I ask him, agreed to swap them for men? "No, I have another solution for that issue. We simply put their voices through a computer software program which makes them sound like men.""
Who is trolling the Pope? - "posters of a stern-looking Pope Francis. Underneath his glum, almost menacing face, was a list of complaints: he'd removed priests, ignored the concerns of cardinals and "decapitated" an ancient Catholic group, the Knights of Malta... At roughly the same time the posters were plastered around the city's walls, cardinals in Rome were opening their email inboxes to find a "fake" front page of the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. It had the traditional Latin motto which sits on the paper's masthead beneath a papal coat of arms, and a list of questions sent to the Pope by a group of conservative cardinals, with the answer, in each case, "Sic et non!" - "Yes and no!" This is the Pope being trolled on his home turf - and what's more, in Latin... At the forefront of the opposition to Pope Francis is an American Cardinal, Raymond Burke, a stickler for the rules who once told John Kerry, when he was a presidential candidate, that he could not receive communion because of his previous support for abortion. Cardinal Burke has dedicated much of his life to studying the church's laws, and he wants to ensure they are enforced. He believes this Pope is tinkering dangerously with Christianity's 2,000-year-old tradition and has even threatened to issue an "act of correction" against Francis. This would be a very bold, highly unusual move - it hasn't happened for centuries.
Nonetheless, liberals will not be happy until Pope Francis is no longer Catholic
FAIRNESS: Man Who Says He's A Woman DOMINATING Women's Weightlifting - " Laurel Hubbard, a transgender "woman" from Kiwi, took a commanding win in Sunday's Australian International event in Melbourne. The athlete wrecked the biological women during Sunday's showdown, setting four national records. "Hubbard lifted a combined total of 268kg – 19kg better than silver medallist Iuniarra Sipaia of Samoa""
Helen Zille learns there's never a good time to cheer colonialism in South Africa—or elsewhere - "Helen Zille, the controversial premier of the republic’s Western Cape province and a former leader of South Africa’s Democratic Alliance (DA), will face discipline from her party after tweeting Thursday that “for those claiming legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative, think of our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water, etc.” [emphasis in original]. She later added “specialized health care and medication” to the list before expressing gratitude that she was boarding an airplane, where, without an Internet connection, she could “cut off those who think EVERY aspect of colonial legacy was bad.” [emphasis in original]"
Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Pupils taught Disney fairy tales promote sexism and domestic violence in online lesson plan - "pupils as young as 11 are being taught that loyal heroine Belle is in an abusive relationship with the Beast in which "her only asset is her sexuality"."
Young, British Muslims 'getting more radical' - Telegraph - "The study found disturbing evidence of young Muslims adopting more fundamentalist beliefs on key social and political issues than their parents or grandparents. Forty per cent of Muslims between the ages of 16 and 24 said they would prefer to live under sharia law in Britain, a legal system based on the teachings of the Koran. The figure among over-55s, in contrast, was only 17 per cent... Britain's foreign policies were a key issue among the Muslim population as a whole, with 58 per cent arguing that many of the world's problems are "a result of arrogant Western attitudes". However, knowledge of foreign affairs was sketchy, with only one in five knowing that Mahmoud Abbas was the Palestinian president... The Policy Exchange report, Living Together Apart: British Muslims and the Paradox of Multiculturalism — says there is strong evidence of a "growing religiosity" among young Muslims, with an increasing minority firmly rejecting Western life... The report also raises questions about the scale of the problems created by Islamophobia, with 84 per cent of those questioned saying they believed they had been "treated fairly" in Britain. There was also criticism of the decision by some councils to ban Christian symbols in case they offended Muslims or other communities. Three quarters said it was wrong for a council to have banned an advert for a Christmas carol service."
A researcher who interviewed hundreds of married women found the happiest "never bought into" a "dangerous fantasy" - "The collective wisdom seems to be: ‘Sometimes you will be miserable. This is the reality of long-term intimacy. Carry on."
What makes gambling wrong but insurance right? - "Almost a decade ago, I tried to place a bet with a leading UK betting shop that I would die within a year. They should have taken the bet - I am still alive. But they will not gamble on life and death. A life insurance company, by contrast, does little else."
Indonesian army destroys much-mocked tiger statue - "The Indonesian army has demolished a tiger statue in front of a base in West Java after it became a laughing stock online. The grinning tiger in a small village in Garut was supposed to be a mascot for the Siliwangi Military Command. But internet users found it hilarious because it was so different from the fierce tiger on official logos."
Southern Poverty Law Center overuses 'extremism': Jon Gabriel - "The SPLC is a non-profit heralded for its noble history defending civil rights. Founded in 1971, the Montgomery, Ala. legal advocacy organization sued the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups in the South on behalf of victims. Big settlements and harsh sanctions were levied against the racist organizations, successfully shuttering some and scaring off many others. But by 1986, these groups had rapidly declined. The SPLC could have declared “mission accomplished.” But since funds were still coming in, they declared a new mission statement. No longer would they fight Grand Wizards and Jim Crow, but turned instead to an endlessly expanding target of “extremism.” The change in goals was so stark, the entire legal staff resigned... The fact that the presidential choice of 63 million Americans is equated with a lynch mob skulking around Dixie shows how far the SPLC has strayed from its roots. Half the country can now be declared hate-filled extremists if this group is allowed to define the terms. And those targeted by the SPLC face dangerous consequences."
How to Fight Like a Viking - "Their reputation, experts say, came not so much from their weapons or armor as from their innovative tactics and high morale."
Who Was Ellen Krantz? - "Ephrem Tadele Yohannes followed Elin Krantz out of the tram, abducted her, pulled her into the wooden area in Länsmansgården and raped her there in the most violent way imaginable. Elin Krantz was hit and kicked by Ephrem Tadele Yohannes with so much force, her brain suffered from permanent damage resulting in a lack of oxygen, her head, neck, arms and legs were covered with contusions and hemorrhaging and her membranes around the vaginal opening were burst open... The biggest irony of it all is that Elin Krantz, who fell for the propaganda of "tolerance" and diversity, was a supporter of multiculturalism in Sweden. She was supposedly a member of the Facebook group “We Like Diversity”, called herself “multicultural” and supported immigration of people from the third-world countries into Sweden... Because Sweden is so multicultural now, no Swedish media could publish the fact that the perpetrator was an immigrant or that he was black in their reports on the case. They could not even mention his name by law, so they referred to him merely as a “23 year old”, saying things like “the 23 year old was charged with murder and aggravated rape”. However, thanks to the internet we know who he is."
Is It Safe Yet to Have an Honest Conversation About Secondhand Smoke and Lung Cancer? - "the main goal of smoking bans was "to change societal behavior" by stigmatizing smoking, making it less convenient and less socially acceptable. Indeed, even if you accept every allegation about the hazards of secondhand smoke, it's clear that the real "public health" payoff from smoking bans, in terms of reducing tobacco-related morbidity and mortality, comes from shrinking the number of smokers."
We Used Terrible Science to Justify Smoking Bans - "the extravagant promises made by anti-smoking groups—that implementing bans would bring about extraordinary improvements in cardiac health—never materialized. Newer, better studies with much larger sample sizes have found little to no correlation between smoking bans and short-term incidence of heart attacks, and certainly nothing remotely close to the 60 percent reduction that was claimed in Helena. The updated science debunks the alarmist fantasies that were used to sell smoking bans to the public, allowing for a more sober analysis suggesting that current restrictions on smoking are extreme from a risk-reduction standpoint."
People Are Actually Mad That Wonder Woman Gal Gadot Has No Armpit Hair - "Wonder Woman has never had armpit hair in the comics or on screen. The new film is also set during World War 1, around the same time women began shaving their pits."
Ideological odd couple Robert George and Cornel West issue a joint statement against 'campus illiberalism' - "Stylistically and politically, Robert P. George and Cornel West don’t have much in common. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, is one of the country’s most prominent conservative intellectuals. West, a professor of the practice of public philosophy and African and African-American studies at Harvard University, is a self-described “radical Democrat” who, in addition to many books, once released a spoken-word album. So when George and West agree on something and lend their names to it, people take notice -- as they did this week, when the pair published a statement in support of “truth seeking, democracy and freedom of thought and expression.” It’s a politely worded denunciation of what George and West call “campus illiberalism”"
It's okay, they can still be condemned as right wing extremists pushing an anti-progressive agenda based on a tiny number of isolated and exaggerated incidents
Cultural Bias on IQ Tests - "They found that 73.3% of the “experts” believed that Cognitive Ability Tests (IQ tests) did not have any racial bias"... a panel from The National Research Council and The National Academy of Sciences conducted an investigation of bias in mental testing, and concluded that cultural bias explained virtually none of the racial variance in IQ scores. In 1996, the American Psychological Association formed a panel, and it resulted in the publication entitled “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns” which concluded “Considered as predictors of future performance, the tests do not seem to be biased against African Americans”... the black and white test score difference was significantly larger for questions which were judged to be the least cultural and the lowest for questions judged to be the most cultural... blacks and whites had exactly the same order of hardest to least difficult questions. Moreover, the correlation between how often whites got a question wrong to how often blacks got a question wrong as a function of total score was 0.95."
Research paper (PDF): Admixture in the Americas: Regional and National Differences - "We find that European ancestry is consistently and usually strongly positively correlated with cognitive ability and socioeconomic outcomes (mean r for cognitive ability = .708; for socioeconomic well-being = .643)... We failed to find evidence of international colorism or culturalism (i.e., neither skin reflectance nor self-reported race/ethnicity showed incremental predictive ability once genomic ancestry had been taken into account) (Section 14). The association between European ancestry and cognitive outcomes was robust across a number of alternative measures of cognitive ability"
Cryptic Admixture, Mixed-Race Siblings, & Social Outcomes - "genetic data is open to the same fundamental differences in interpretation. Do blacks with more European admixture have higher IQs because they have more high IQ genes, or did their parents and wider society give them more IQ-boosting advantages because of their relatively European appearance? Or perhaps blacks with more white ancestry simply inherited greater amounts of cultural and material resources from their white ancestors... Heritability estimates rely on a so-called Equal Environment Assumption (EEA), that differential family resemblance is due to genetic similarity, and not to environmental similarity mediated by kinship. Behavior geneticists have assembled various kinds of evidence in support of this assumption. The strongest empirical evidence in support of the EEA uses twins with misidentified zygosity (i.e. the relative trait similarity of fraternal twins who mistakenly believe they are identical twins and vice versa). For example, IQ scores are not more similar among fraternal twins that are mistakenly raised as identical twins (Scarr et al., 1979; Matheny 1979). This is a fairly low-tech behavior genetic solution to the EEA problem, and there is an analogous solution to the admixture problem. The original report from the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study by Scarr and Weinberg (1976) showed that the transracially adopted children with one black parent scored 12 points higher on IQ tests than the transracially adopted children with two black parents. Scarr asked whether this could be due to an “Expectancy Effect,” that is if the biracial children scored higher on the tests because their white adoptive parents treated them differently. She tested this idea by looking at the children with misidentified racial background. Twelve of the biracial children were mistakenly believed to have two black parents. These biracial children nevertheless had the same higher IQ scores as the biracial children with correctly identified racial background (pp. 732-733)."
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, It's Just Not Cricket - "[On Boko Haram in Nigeria] Maidaguri became the centre of the Boko Haram insurgency... A handful of places to go out are still open but Joy complains these are mainly clubs. If you want to go on a romantic date, Joy tells me, there's really just the zoo...
[On Japan] In a recent survey of young adults between the ages of 18-34 conducted by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 70% of unmarried men and 60% of unmarried women were not in a relationship, and many were virgins"
El Chapo Confessed His Crimes to Sean Penn (??) in a Secret Jungle Clearing (???) - "The scene: “A jungle clearing atop a mountain at an undisclosed location in Mexico.” The characters: Escaped Mexican billionaire drug kingpin El Chapo and, uh, Sean Penn? The result: A presumably edited, rambling 11,000-word account of a madman’s meeting with a criminal."
A sarcastic response to Syria's militants - "the station's manager, Raed Fares, has had enough of being told what to do by the powerful jihadist group, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham or JFS - which until last July was linked to al-Qaeda and known as the al-Nusra Front. "They tried to force us to stop playing music on air," says Fares. "So we started to play animals in the background as a kind of sarcastic gesture against them." In what appear to be further acts of sarcastic sabotage aimed at JFS's ban on music, Radio Fresh FM has introduced long sequences of bongs from London's Big Ben clock, endless ticking sounds, ringing explosions and the whistle of shells flying through the air. And instead of songs with melodies, the station now plays recordings of tuneless chanting football fans... It's not that surprising that IS doesn't like Fares. After all, he did once design a poster depicting Syria as an alien with a monster called ISIS exploding out of its chest. The group has since been pushed out of Idlib province... Humour, it seems, is never far from the surface with Raed Fares. Take his response to another of JFS's demands, to get rid of women news readers - who are also haram, they say. Has he, I ask him, agreed to swap them for men? "No, I have another solution for that issue. We simply put their voices through a computer software program which makes them sound like men.""
Who is trolling the Pope? - "posters of a stern-looking Pope Francis. Underneath his glum, almost menacing face, was a list of complaints: he'd removed priests, ignored the concerns of cardinals and "decapitated" an ancient Catholic group, the Knights of Malta... At roughly the same time the posters were plastered around the city's walls, cardinals in Rome were opening their email inboxes to find a "fake" front page of the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. It had the traditional Latin motto which sits on the paper's masthead beneath a papal coat of arms, and a list of questions sent to the Pope by a group of conservative cardinals, with the answer, in each case, "Sic et non!" - "Yes and no!" This is the Pope being trolled on his home turf - and what's more, in Latin... At the forefront of the opposition to Pope Francis is an American Cardinal, Raymond Burke, a stickler for the rules who once told John Kerry, when he was a presidential candidate, that he could not receive communion because of his previous support for abortion. Cardinal Burke has dedicated much of his life to studying the church's laws, and he wants to ensure they are enforced. He believes this Pope is tinkering dangerously with Christianity's 2,000-year-old tradition and has even threatened to issue an "act of correction" against Francis. This would be a very bold, highly unusual move - it hasn't happened for centuries.
Nonetheless, liberals will not be happy until Pope Francis is no longer Catholic
Post ID: 3810990644808611740
Friday, May 12, 2017
No Babies in Japan
BBC World Service - The Documentary, No Babies in Japan
"In the last few years, Japan's government has joined this matchmaking party. The central government has pumped billions of Japanese Yen into konkatsu activities sponsored by local governments...
The irony of course is that while Japan's birth rate is declining, its sex industry is thriving. The fūzoku industry, which includes brothels, massage parlors and love hotels, caters for the desires of mostly businessmen. The market reached an estimate $24 billion in 2014...
Japan and Asian countries have very different concepts of marriage and romance. Unmarried women have very high expectations for their future husbands' income. Most of the men say they don't care about their future partner's income. However, the majority of women want their future partner to have a high annual income. And there are only a few men who meet this criteria.
When I made a speech about this in Manchester a few years ago, an English professor asked: how can Japanese women ask such a rude question? How can they choose their future partner based on income? Isn't that disgraceful for women?
In Europe or America, people think of marriage as the result of romantic love. In Japan, an important part of thinking about marriage is the financial aspect. This doesn't mean people marry someone they don't like, but people seem to think the most important thing is how comfortably they can live after marrying...
[On a matchmaking event] It's too embarrassing to come here on your own, so I came with my friend. We were complaining that we don't have boyfriends. I'm looking for someone strong and masculine. I don't see such guys so far. Most of them look like the indoor type. They may be a bit herbivore. Perhaps many of them are not really used to talking to women. I think I'll have to compromise a bit to find someone...
I think Japanese guys may be compared to guys from abroad: they're not pushy enough, they're too shy. They were very chatty when we were bowling but in this free time they became very quiet. When the time came for talking to the girls they just can't face it...
At the bowling machicon what was surprising was how shy the men were but also how critical the women were of the men...
A lot of women seem to suggest that herbivore men are why they can't get married...
'Women who say that there are those who cannot get married, it's because they can't stop moaning. I mean how old are they now? 35? 40? Then what? Women over 25, they're just like Christmas cakes - past their expiry date. So that's it for them... Those who are over 35 yet still want to get married but are unable to do so, it's because they have problems. Problems such as being strong-willed - they don't get on with men. They go on about: ah, this person is a bit bald, this person is a bit small, ah, this person is a bit smelly, oh, this person's nostril hair is poking out. Based merely on things like this, they will reject a man'
'But don't you think it's unfair that men can still get married later but women have to adjust accordingly?'
'It's not unfair. Women during their teens and 20s have had their time. They got men to buy them meals, drive them to places, took many advantages. You didn't find a marital partner during those days? Are you kidding? At their age men have now stopped spending on them. And then they start to consider settling down. Yet these women are still picky. Past the age of 30 the position of men and women switch'...
'I'm worried about where Japanese people's sexual appetite has gone. According to the research conducted 6 years ago asking: do you ever fall in love with a character from the media or do you fall in love with stars or idols, the percentage is very high. The percentage is higher among women. Over a quarter of women have fallen in love this way, almost a third...
Based on the Western sense of value or culture, you think you have to have everything: intimacy, passionate love and sex all from one person. By contrast in Japan, people are diversifying where they get these things from. For example, they get passionate love experience from the idol of the character that they fall in love with, but they pay to have sex with prostitutes, thereby satisfying their physical need in the case of men and they get intimacy from their parents'...
'Virtual love, through western eyes is shocking but for Japanese people it's everywhere'...
'Surely the idea of physical interaction is essential for sexual satisfaction.'
'When I ask whether there's a difference between a real physical partner and a virtual partner, every westerner would say there's definitely a difference, whereas among young Japanese people there is an increasing number of them who say it's the same thing.'
'This is a lot for me to get my head around too I'm 35 and I still feel quite young but this new generation of Japanese people don't seem to share my world view. If so many young people are completely forgoing conventional physical relationships for virtual love which could include porn, prostitutes, host or hostess bars or even falling in love with characters from cartoons or films then surely this is a threat not just for Japan's economy but also for its society'...
'Guys don't hate women. It's because they like women, that's why those virtual female characters were created. Virtual women are the perfect versions of women. If women acted like them then it would have been great...
Virtual women aren't perfect. They may be autistic, bad cooking, small breasted and short. There are lots of imperfections in these so called ideal women. It's because they have their vulnerability and modesty, that's why men find them cute even if they are not good at cooking et cetera'...
'If it's an issue of men exerting control over women in the real or digital world then why according to Yamada's data are even women choosing virtual relationships than men?'...
'They're not interested in physical masturbation. From long ago Japan has been a male dominated culture so the very fact of being treated with warmth by men rather than physical desires is what they want. Just being spoken to kindly fulfills them enough...
If you go to a concert say Toshiki and they ask you from the stage: how you feeling? Have you already eaten? Just that makes them so pleased. Getting a kind word like that or at the most getting hugged is more than enough to get them satisfied. So I'm sure nobody does anything like masturbating'...
'The current system will fall apart in twenty years. In twenty years Japan will be overflowing with middle aged people who cannot depend on their parents, have very low paid jobs and are left single. When I speak to these people they say they don't want to think about what will happen to them twenty years from now when their parents have died.'...
'I've come to another match making event. We're not going bowling or drinking this time. Instead we're in a Buddhist temple where twenty sets of men and women are about to arrive. They're here to find their perfect partner - through meditation... they have two minutes to talk to each other based on their question form and then the men move on to the next woman until all participants have spoken'"
So much for SDN being Uniquely Singapore
"In the last few years, Japan's government has joined this matchmaking party. The central government has pumped billions of Japanese Yen into konkatsu activities sponsored by local governments...
The irony of course is that while Japan's birth rate is declining, its sex industry is thriving. The fūzoku industry, which includes brothels, massage parlors and love hotels, caters for the desires of mostly businessmen. The market reached an estimate $24 billion in 2014...
Japan and Asian countries have very different concepts of marriage and romance. Unmarried women have very high expectations for their future husbands' income. Most of the men say they don't care about their future partner's income. However, the majority of women want their future partner to have a high annual income. And there are only a few men who meet this criteria.
When I made a speech about this in Manchester a few years ago, an English professor asked: how can Japanese women ask such a rude question? How can they choose their future partner based on income? Isn't that disgraceful for women?
In Europe or America, people think of marriage as the result of romantic love. In Japan, an important part of thinking about marriage is the financial aspect. This doesn't mean people marry someone they don't like, but people seem to think the most important thing is how comfortably they can live after marrying...
[On a matchmaking event] It's too embarrassing to come here on your own, so I came with my friend. We were complaining that we don't have boyfriends. I'm looking for someone strong and masculine. I don't see such guys so far. Most of them look like the indoor type. They may be a bit herbivore. Perhaps many of them are not really used to talking to women. I think I'll have to compromise a bit to find someone...
I think Japanese guys may be compared to guys from abroad: they're not pushy enough, they're too shy. They were very chatty when we were bowling but in this free time they became very quiet. When the time came for talking to the girls they just can't face it...
At the bowling machicon what was surprising was how shy the men were but also how critical the women were of the men...
A lot of women seem to suggest that herbivore men are why they can't get married...
'Women who say that there are those who cannot get married, it's because they can't stop moaning. I mean how old are they now? 35? 40? Then what? Women over 25, they're just like Christmas cakes - past their expiry date. So that's it for them... Those who are over 35 yet still want to get married but are unable to do so, it's because they have problems. Problems such as being strong-willed - they don't get on with men. They go on about: ah, this person is a bit bald, this person is a bit small, ah, this person is a bit smelly, oh, this person's nostril hair is poking out. Based merely on things like this, they will reject a man'
'But don't you think it's unfair that men can still get married later but women have to adjust accordingly?'
'It's not unfair. Women during their teens and 20s have had their time. They got men to buy them meals, drive them to places, took many advantages. You didn't find a marital partner during those days? Are you kidding? At their age men have now stopped spending on them. And then they start to consider settling down. Yet these women are still picky. Past the age of 30 the position of men and women switch'...
'I'm worried about where Japanese people's sexual appetite has gone. According to the research conducted 6 years ago asking: do you ever fall in love with a character from the media or do you fall in love with stars or idols, the percentage is very high. The percentage is higher among women. Over a quarter of women have fallen in love this way, almost a third...
Based on the Western sense of value or culture, you think you have to have everything: intimacy, passionate love and sex all from one person. By contrast in Japan, people are diversifying where they get these things from. For example, they get passionate love experience from the idol of the character that they fall in love with, but they pay to have sex with prostitutes, thereby satisfying their physical need in the case of men and they get intimacy from their parents'...
'Virtual love, through western eyes is shocking but for Japanese people it's everywhere'...
'Surely the idea of physical interaction is essential for sexual satisfaction.'
'When I ask whether there's a difference between a real physical partner and a virtual partner, every westerner would say there's definitely a difference, whereas among young Japanese people there is an increasing number of them who say it's the same thing.'
'This is a lot for me to get my head around too I'm 35 and I still feel quite young but this new generation of Japanese people don't seem to share my world view. If so many young people are completely forgoing conventional physical relationships for virtual love which could include porn, prostitutes, host or hostess bars or even falling in love with characters from cartoons or films then surely this is a threat not just for Japan's economy but also for its society'...
'Guys don't hate women. It's because they like women, that's why those virtual female characters were created. Virtual women are the perfect versions of women. If women acted like them then it would have been great...
Virtual women aren't perfect. They may be autistic, bad cooking, small breasted and short. There are lots of imperfections in these so called ideal women. It's because they have their vulnerability and modesty, that's why men find them cute even if they are not good at cooking et cetera'...
'If it's an issue of men exerting control over women in the real or digital world then why according to Yamada's data are even women choosing virtual relationships than men?'...
'They're not interested in physical masturbation. From long ago Japan has been a male dominated culture so the very fact of being treated with warmth by men rather than physical desires is what they want. Just being spoken to kindly fulfills them enough...
If you go to a concert say Toshiki and they ask you from the stage: how you feeling? Have you already eaten? Just that makes them so pleased. Getting a kind word like that or at the most getting hugged is more than enough to get them satisfied. So I'm sure nobody does anything like masturbating'...
'The current system will fall apart in twenty years. In twenty years Japan will be overflowing with middle aged people who cannot depend on their parents, have very low paid jobs and are left single. When I speak to these people they say they don't want to think about what will happen to them twenty years from now when their parents have died.'...
'I've come to another match making event. We're not going bowling or drinking this time. Instead we're in a Buddhist temple where twenty sets of men and women are about to arrive. They're here to find their perfect partner - through meditation... they have two minutes to talk to each other based on their question form and then the men move on to the next woman until all participants have spoken'"
So much for SDN being Uniquely Singapore
Post ID: 2349044352793904833
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