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Thursday, October 04, 2018

Links - 4th October 2018 (1)

U.S. Obesity Rates & Trends – The State of Obesity - "Asian Americans have far lower rates of obesity than any other racial or ethnic group... Boys are slightly more likely to have obesity than girls. Among adults, women have slightly higher levels of obesity than men"
This suggests that fat shaming (as with Asians) works
This is what happens when you glorify obesity for women


Sara Al Iraqiya - #Hilton becomes Shari’a compliant just in time for #ISNA2018. How festive! - "@HiltonHotels kicks out my friend for wearing t shirt reading "I am an #exMuslim" as to not upset #ISNA convention guests. Great job enforcing #sharia in America, #Hilton!"

The Alt-Centrist - Posts - "Blue Check Watch with 27.9k followers suspended from Twitter.
Highlighting Twitter's hypocrisy is against its terms and conditions.
https://twitter.com/meme_america"

Metro on Twitter - "The support for our Trump Baby balloon has been so massive, we’re going global" (17 July 2018)
Metro on Twitter - "Flying the Sadiq Khan balloon is not an exercise of free speech – it is a party for bigots" (31 August 2018)

Girl, 3, 'needed emergency surgery after FGM in London' - "Today’s case is only the third time that charges of FGM have been brought to court. The two previous cases both resulted in acquittals, meaning that there has not been a single FGM conviction in the UK despite it being illegal in this country since 1985. Official figures show that thousands of Londoners have suffered FGM"

Fury as police suggests NOT prosecuting those behind FGM - "The force was bombarded with online complaints after replying to a tweet asking why there had been no prosecutions for female genital mutilation (FGM). The police reply, which has since been deleted, read: "educating and safeguarding vulnerable girls is the focus. "Prosecuting/jailing parents unlikely to benefit child.""

Greens deputy leadership candidate quits election race after father jailed for raping a child - "Aimee Challenor was seen as one of the frontrunners for the position and has claimed she was unaware what her father had done. The party’s equality spokeswoman and former parliamentary candidate had hired her father to run her campaigns even after he had been charged with the crimes, which were initially reported to police in late 2015. David Challenor, 50, was jailed for 22 years for holding a 10-year-old girl captive in his “torture den” attic where he electrocuted her while playing out his sadomasochistic fantasies. A court was told how he would dress up as a small girl in adult-sized baby dresses and nappies before carrying out the attacks at his home... Ms Challenor issued a statement on her website confirming she was withdrawing from the race and said she had, despite living in the family home, only recently heard about her father’s crimes"

How the left made Tommy Robinson - "It is the cultural elite’s cowardly instinct to chill open discussion about issues like Islam, multiculturalism, mass immigration and social tensions that created Tommy Robinson and his various movements, through allowing him to present himself as a seer in a time of silence. If Robinson really is the monster the left claim he is, they are his Dr Frankenstein. Throughout his political career, from his leadership of the English Defence League to his current role as self-styled alt-media revealer of ‘The Truth’ about Britain’s Muslim grooming gangs and other problematic Islamic activities, Robinson’s appeal has continually been based on his willingness to say the unsayable. He has benefited directly from a climate in which critical discussion of Islam and British values is demonised. And he has been successful because people aggrieved at the lack of openness around Britain’s cultural difficulties see in him someone who will speak on their behalf. He is censorship’s offspring... the liberal media continually tell us to panic about far-right extremism when the evidence of our eyes tells us Islamist extremism is a far greater threat: more than 450 Europeans have been slaughtered by Islamist terrorists in the past five years. He is only possible in an era in which commentators mock people who raise concerns about cultural tensions in Sweden even as Jews are attacked in Malmo. An era in which even to say the word Islamist when talking about Islamist terrorism can win you hisses and boos. Witness the shutting down of then UKIP leader Paul Nuttall during a TV debate last year when he dared to put the word ‘Islamist’ before ‘terrorist’ when commenting on the barbarism in Manchester."

Tommy Robinson is richer and has more international support after two-month imprisonment, research shows - "he is currently a free man after judges at the Court of Appeal quashed a 13-month sentence at Leeds Crown Court as the result of a "fundamentally flawed process"."

Lesbian activists block Pride in London march to protest against trans women - "She said her sexuality is seen as transphobic and exclusive ‘just because we are women attracted to women.’ ‘We don’t want any kind of penis in our bedroom,’ she said. ‘I’m really sad I have to reassert this again. ‘It’s everywhere online – it’s everywhere in LGBTQ centres’"

Are Ahmadis Muslims? Let us ask Prophet Muhammad - "An Ahmadi Muslim shopkeeper, Mr. Asad Shah, was recently stabbed to death in Glasgow, UK. Mr. Tanveer Ahmad, a Sunni Muslim of Pakistani origin, claimed he committed the act because Asad had “disrespected Islam.” In his eyes, Asad was a blasphemer. The Sunni extremist group, Almi Majlis Tahaffuz Khatme Nubuwat (AMTKN), found to have links with Al Qaeda, sent out a message congratulating all Muslims on Asad’s murder. Just a few days later, ‘Kill Ahmadis’ pamphlets were found at the group’s Mosque in Stockwell. Other Sunni groups in Pakistan also praised Mr. Tanveer as a hero of Islam and congratulated the Sunnis on his “courageous act.” Following the murder, the Muslim Council of Britain released a statement clarifying that they would not identify Mr. Asad Shah as a Muslim. King’s College academic Mr. Shiraz Maher also voiced the same sentiment, asking if there was a problem if he did not consider Mr. Asad Shah a ‘real Muslim?’ Also following the murder, a sign calling on fellow Sunnis to boycott the Ahmadi Muslims and sever all ties with them was put up at the largest Sunni Mosque in Slough, UK. “Qadianis (pejorative for Ahmadi Muslims) ... are not Muslims,” the sign said"

The dark secret of Thailand’s child brides - "Since 2003, under Thailand’s strict child protection laws, no one under 17 can marry, and sex with a minor is a prosecutable offence. However, in the southern provinces of Thailand – Narathiwat, Pattani and Yalla, which are majority Muslim – a legal loophole allows Muslim communities to apply Islamic law to family matters. According to this law, there is no minimum age for marriage and, culturally, girls are deemed eligible as soon as they start menstruating. In this way, child marriage has continued as an unregulated norm and a solution to underage pregnancy and rape – with the Thai government appearing to turn a blind eye... The practice is also particularly lucrative for imams practising on the Thai side of the Golok river, who charge four times as much to conduct a marriage for a visiting Malaysian as they do for people from their own community. In Malaysia, Che Abdul Karim would have found it difficult or impossible to obtain permission to marry Ayu; in Thailand, he simply paid the imam 4,500 baht (£105), and it was done... Their reluctance, she added, is rooted in sensitivity over self-determination for Islamic communities in the deep south of Thailand. For 14 years, a civil war has been raging in Narathiwat, Pattani, Yalla and occasionally southern areas of Songkhla. Its roots lie in Thailand’s annexation and conquest in 1909 of the Malay sultanate of Patani, which covered most of these provinces. A separatist movement formed in the 1950s exploded into all-out insurgency in 2004. Though the conflict has quietened in recent years, bombings and shootings are still common, and the fighting has cost almost 7,000 lives, 90% of them civilians."

'Anomalies' in data logs in final MH370 report suggest they were modified: Report - "Members of the Independent Group, which worked with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) on investigations into the MH370 mystery, claimed to have found "some anomalies in the message logs that were included in factual information released by Malaysia on March 8, 2014, and the Safety Investigation Report released by Malaysia on July 30"."

Parents horrified by sexy pole-dancing act at Chinese kindergarten - "Pole dancing is by nature sexy and flirtatious, and by that measure, it is for the eyes of adults, not young children"

What HDB didn't tell you about Punggol (and Pasir Gudang) - "Because of the concentration of petrochemical activities in Pasir Gudang, Singaporeans living in the north-east have at various times reported “chemical smells”. What they are smelling is actually a mixture of sulfur dioxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The odour can be acrid and gas-like, and residents — some from as far as Ang Mo Kio due to north-easterly prevailing winds — have reported experiencing headaches, eye irritation, itchy throat and other respiratory conditions that correspond to symptoms experienced during and after exposure to airborne chemicals. Exposure to airborne VOCs has also been known to trigger asthma attacks in sufferers."

We Need to Start Barking at White People Who Speak Out of Turn - "One thing, however, that we can and definitely should start doing is what M’Baku and his Que Dog Jabari tribe did when encountering a problematic white dude who was speaking when there was no ask or need or purpose for the thoughts and opinions of problematic white dudes. Bark."
So much for fighting stereotypes

Saudi students file for asylum in Canada as deadline to return home passes - "As the Aug. 31 deadline for Saudi students to leave Canada passes, at least 20 students are filing asylum claims in an attempt to stay in the country."

Muslim staff escape NHS hygiene rule - "Female staff who follow the Islamic faith will be allowed to cover their arms to preserve their modesty despite earlier guidance that all staff should be "bare below the elbow"... The rules were drawn up to reduce the number of patients who were falling ill, and even dying, from superbugs such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile"

S’porean denied travel insurance claim despite 24-hour flight delay - "Ng purchased travel insurance from AIG, and had her claim denied.
Ng said that her claim was denied because “the airline letter did not indicate that the delay was due to mechanical delay”."

What smartphone photography is doing to our memories - "Smartphone photography isn’t making us dumber. It’s shifting the way our minds work, refocusing our attention"

Jack Mintz: Actually, evidence shows ‘diversity’ makes countries weaker — not stronger - "the most fragmented societies were found to have lower growth in per capita GDP and poorer quality public institutions: fewer years of schooling, worse infrastructure, higher fiscal deficits, lower credit liquidity and higher black-market premiums. According to Alesina et al.’s estimates, if Canada’s ethnic fragmentation was as low as in the U.S., we would have 0.4 percentage points more in annual growth in per capita GDP... When ethnically fragmented populations are associated with high degree of income inequality, the risk of social conflict grows... Fragmentation also impacts governance. Ethnically fragmented populations tend to have more party proliferation, especially under proportional representation. Voters gravitate to parties to which they identify culturally or socially, not just on the basis of national issues. First-past-the-post voting in countries like Canada and the U.S. reduces party proliferation in fragmented countries... there is no evidence to support the political hypothesis that ethnic and linguistic fragmentation — a.k.a. “diversity” — leads to higher growth. Only religious fragmentation has been correlated with improved growth... Canadians have had difficulty in defining Canada’s national identity (beyond the right to health care as Roy Romanow put in his 2002 report). It is not surprising, then, that Canada is one of the most decentralized federations in the world."

Wednesday, October 03, 2018

Links - 3rd October 2018 (2)

Makansutra founder reveals “shocking” costs for hawkers at new Government-run food centres - "“The folks at social enterprise food centres pay a total of $4000 pmth on average. The shocking facts, (just some) seen in some of the contracts, include compulsory payments for
“coin changing service”,
a Gross Turnover Profit percentage (they take a percentage of your overall takings each month or basic rents, whichever is higher),
separate charges for crockery washing, collection and return (despite efforts and cost to facilitate self tray-return)
and this brazen clause (see image) that hawkers pay the management $600 a month to have them spot check their food quality and operation ( in short, charge the hawkers to do what they naturally do anyway). As if they know better than the hawkers how to cook and operate.
They also have monetary penalties like in a food court model for closures and they are expected to open 8-12 hours a day (minus preparation time). The law only allow people to work up to 12 hours a day. The old NEA hawker centres will allow emergency closures like for health, religious holidays and personal issues, just let them know.
Despite these startling high cost of operation and management fees, they are expected to offer at least one dish at below $3 in the menu.”
Seetoh further noted that such costs will have an impact on the prices consumers have to pay and predicted that this will have a “domino effect on all other F&B rentals in Singapore” if such costs continue to prevail at the SEHCs"

The last of Singapore’s old-style Kopitiams to make way for development next year - "Located at 59 Jalan Benaan Kapal near the Kallang Indoor Stadium, the unassuming shipyard style canteen has served thousands of Singaporeans over the years and has earned a place in the hearts of many, with it’s ridiculously low prices, nostalgia-inducing food and beverages and kindly shopkeepers. About 10 stalls at the Jalan Benaan Kapal food centre – which remains modern Singapore’s oldest food centres – serve a variety of Singapore favorites, from Kopi that costs $0.50, Kopi and toast sets for $1 and a plethora of other local dishes like chicken rice, nasi padang, lontong, and mee goreng."

‘Countrywide problem’: Mother whose son's daycare group has ‘2 out of 25’ German-speaking kids to RT - "A mother who is frustrated by the situation in her son’s daycare group, where only “two out of twenty five speak German”, told RT that the problem may result in “lost children” who can neither speak German nor integrate."

The babies who nap in sub-zero temperatures - "Would you put your baby or toddler outside in the freezing cold for their lunchtime nap? Most Nordic parents wouldn't give it a second thought. For them it's part of their daily routine."

Toronto District School Board chair defends controversial Islamic guidebook - "The guide, compiled by volunteers but stamped with the TDSB logo, recommends a number of religious intrusions in the classroom ranging from the explaining and reciting of the Muslim greeting “As-salamu alaykum” (peace be upon you) during morning announcements to having children make paper cut-outs of famous mosques. But it was the guidebook’s definition of the phrase Islamophobia that caused B’nai Brith to send off a complaint, calling it “fear, prejudice, hatred or dislike directed against Islam or Muslims, or towards Islamic politics or culture.” The Jewish advocacy group in their original press release saw big problems with this: “The TDSB definition, if enforced, could lead to punishment for students or teachers who display ‘dislike’ towards the persecution of LGBTQ people in the Islamic Republic of Iran, harsh restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia, and Palestinian terrorism against Israelis, all of which are examples of ‘Islamic politics’.”... The 170-page guidebook addresses issues such as women’s rights in Islam in an entirely positive light without acknowledging its challenges and controversies."

Backers Hound Chuck Tingle, Zoe Quinn For Answers Regarding Delayed $85,000 Kickstarter Project - "According to the Kickstarter page the adventure dating simulator was supposed to be released in beta between February and April of 2017. When April rolled around there was still no pre-alpha access. Then May came, then June, and by July there was an update to backers informing them about why some of the merchandise was missing for the physical backer rewards... After the January, 2018 update there was silence… a lot of it. In fact, there were no further updates until a report on Kickscammed popped up, noting that the project hadn’t been delivered on its stated date and that the creators of the project had not responded to inquiries about its delivery date. When Chuck Tingle and Zoe Quinn were reached for comment by Kickscammed, they didn’t return any of the queries."

Left-Wing Media Cabal Outed, Features 400 Members From Journalism, Academia - "This kind of social engineering through media manipulation has been going on for years across nearly every sector of media journalism, including video games... These groups existing and shaping news media narratives has proven to be very dangerous when it comes to informing the general public, since the views and the news being presented are sculpted by what a self-appointed group of gatekeepers want you to know as opposed to what you should know."

Teen dating violence is down, but boys still report more violence than girls - "When it comes to teen dating violence, boys are more likely to report being the victim of violence—being hit, slapped, or pushed—than girls. That’s the surprising finding of new research from the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University... “It could be that it’s still socially acceptable for girls to hit or slap boys in dating relationships,” she said. “This has been found in studies of adolescents in other countries as well.”"
Male privilege!

Silicon Valley Sex Parties: Emily Chang's Brotopia - "Women trying to break into the bro-centric world of Silicon Valley apparently must also navigate another minefield: invitations to exclusive, drug-fueled sex parties attended by some of the tech industry’s most powerful men. And it isn’t once-in-blue-moon thing, either. These parties are a regularly tech industry occurrence"

Men Pay $895 at 'Male Feminism Camp' to Cope With Their Own Toxicity - "For $895 you could have secured yourself a place in this summer's "Women Teach Men" wellness retreat in the scenically mountainous town of Ojai, California."

Why Do They Hate Us? – Foreign Policy - "The real war on women is in the Middle East."

The violent misogyny of the gender debate | Coffee House - "Social pressure is used to threaten the employment of those considered Terfs: read this Mumsnet thread for a disturbing litany of what happens to women who ask questions about the self-identity agenda in the workplace, especially in academia and the public sector. In politics, women who question the self-ID agenda have faced censure and expulsion in Labour, the Greens and, yes, the Women’s Equality Party. It is hard not to conclude that such things are at least partly the result of a concerted attempt to stigmatise and demonise women who attempt to raise concerns about a policy that they feel poses risks to their safety and even their fundamental existence... a group of people who were raised male and in some cases retain full male anatomy are perpetuating a narrative that harm – including physical violence — can and should be inflicted on women who question the things those people say are true... Britain in 2018 is still a country where women who speak out risk a smack in the mouth."

‘White-Informed Civility’ Is the Latest Target in the Campus Wars - WSJ - "From the land that irony forgot—which earlier gave us microaggressions and trigger warnings—comes a new and surprising movement, this time to combat civility. Civility, you see, is a manifestation of the white patriarchy. Spearheading this campaign are a duo of University of Northern Iowa professors, who assert that “civility within higher education is a racialized, rather than universal, norm.” Their article in the Howard Journal of Communications, “Civility and White Institutional Presence: An Exploration of White Students’ Understanding of Race-Talk at a Traditionally White Institution,” describes a need to stamp out what they call “whiteness-informed civility,” or WIC. The pervasiveness of WIC, it seems, erases “racial identity” and reinforces “white racial power.”... the “woke” white student’s endeavor to avoid microaggressions against black peers is itself a microaggression—a form of noblesse oblige whereby white students are in fact patronizing students of color. Not only that, but by treating black students with common courtesy and expecting the same in return, white students elide black grievances, bypassing the “race talk” that is supposed to occur in preamble to all other conversations... Students are pointedly discouraged from rebutting feelings that don’t jibe with verifiable reality"
In another age it might've been considered racist and sexist to say that racial minorities and women were incapable of civility
Microaggressions are racist. Avoiding them is also racist. But then all whites are assumed to be racist, so


A Visit to Islamic England - WSJ - "Inside the East London Mosque, visitors were expected to dress “modestly.” Headscarves were provided at reception for any woman who showed up without one. A kind man on staff showed me around the men’s quarters. He gave me a bag filled with booklets about Islam. In one, Muslims are encouraged to “re-establish the Shari’ah,” or Islamic law. Those who ignore this mandate are “of little worth to any society.”... I was unprepared for what I would see next in Luton, a small town 30 miles north of London and the birthplace of the English Defense League, which has held unruly anti-Muslim demonstrations... All the businesses had a religious flair: The eateries were halal, the fitness center was sex-segregated, and the boutiques displayed “modest” outfits on mannequins. Pakistani flags flew high and proud. I never saw a Union Jack... I grabbed the first booklet that was in English. It was by Zakir Naik, a fundamentalist preacher from India. “The Qur’an says that Hijab has been prescribed for the women,” the booklet explained in one section, “so that they are recognised as modest women and this will also prevent them from being molested.” Other tourists might remember London for Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus and Big Ben. I’ll remember it for its failed multiculturalism. Or perhaps this is what successful multiculturalism looks like."

Why honey is the only food that doesn't go bad - "“Honey in its natural form is very low moisture. Very few bacteria or microorganisms can survive in an environment like that, they just die. They’re smothered by it, essentially.” The fact that organisms can't survive long in honey means they don't get the chance to spoil it. Another thing that sets honey apart from other sugars is its acidity. Honey's pH is between 3 and 4.5 (or, more precisely, 3.26-4.48), which also kills off anything trying to make a home in honey."

Small Boobs Classified As A Physical Defect By Russian Officials

Organisations have to stop unnecessary collection of NRIC details from September 2019 - "organisations can collect, use or disclose NRIC numbers or copies of the NRIC only under certain specific circumstances. First, if they are required by the law or deemed necessary to accurately verify one’s identity to a “high degree of fidelity”, the PDPC said in its press release... The second exception is when failing to provide NRIC details could pose a significant safety or security risk, or may pose a risk of significant impact or harm to an individual and the organisation... The updated guidelines do not apply to a public agency or an organisation acting on its behalf"

All reported rapes in Oslo by foreigners: police - "From a UNHCR summary, news of a culture clash with terrible consequences:
A report released by the (Oslo) police on Wednesday states that all assault rapes during last year were committed by men with a non-Western origin. All the reported rapes during the last 5 years are done by men with a foreign origin. Police inspector Hanne Kristin Rodhe says the perpetrators often are unemployed, have been asylum-seekers during the last five years and come from a traumatized environment. She adds that their perception of women can be one of the motives behind the rapes."

Tajikistan removes hijabs from women and shaves beards off men to tackle jihadism - "the parliament voted to ban Arabic or 'foreign-sounding names' after a rise in babies named Mohammad... Tajikistan is a majority Muslim country, but has a secular government."
Islamophobia!

Unpacking Peggy McIntosh's Knapsack - "I grew up a very poor white kid. By which I mean, single-mother-on-welfare-in-Alberta poor. As a child, I remember feeling utterly hopeless about ever making any sort of life for myself. If I were at school in British Columbia today, I would now have to deal with seeing this admonition every morning as well. One wonders why Teresa Downs doesn’t simply step down from her $200,000 a year job and pass it to a person of colour since she acquired it unfairly. Is her public declaration of culpability supposed to be compensation enough? Presumably, like Peggy McIntosh, she has convinced herself that human well-being will be better served by shaming the children of people whose average annual income is around $23,000... Identity politics have made organizing in social movements almost impossible, as division and suspicion are increasingly encouraged and groups splinter as a result. Every work and every action is now scrutinized for micro-aggressions and the “invisible package of unearned assets” benefitting anyone not deemed to be sufficiently ‘marginal.’ No one, it seems, is interested in questioning the wealth gap anymore. Those of us on the Left who still care about social justice are now expected to devote the limited resource of our attention bandwidth to the cultural appropriateness of cafeteria food. And, all the while, the emphasis on divisive racial categories and the arrogant dismissal of debate has handed the radical Right the best recruiting tool it has ever had... The year I turned 25, I was serving as a United Nations Peacekeeper in the former Yugoslavia. My unit engaged the Croatian Army in what would come to be known as the Battle of Medak Pocket... The area that the Croatian army had briefly overrun had been mixed Croatian and Serbian farming villages. These people had lived together for half a century. They had intermarried, lived in the same streets, eaten the same food, and attended the same social events. But slowly, starting in the 1980s, political leaders and demagogues of various stripes had started using a politics of identity to solidify their social and political power. Each side’s citizens were repeatedly told by respected academic figures that they were being robbed, and that the ‘other’ was exploiting unearned ‘social privilege’ granted by their ethnic status. Children were taught this in school as received truth and ostracized if they dared to question it. Slowly, this curated resentment built into hatred. From there, events developed according to an inescapable logic... the same divisive hatreds were being broadcast across Rwanda by Télévision Libre des Mille Collines... Every time identity politics has been used by any faction in human history for any reason violence eventually follows. No matter how detailed and intricate the justification, no matter how reasonable it can be made to sound as a way to correct for unequal social conditions and historical injustice, it always ends in the same foul basement of mutual fear, loathing, and depravity"

Suicide Bombings and Muslim Identity

"Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential thinkers in the Islamic world, and the father of modern Islamism among the Sunni, wrote, "The Koran points to another contemptible characteristic of the Jews: their craven desire to live, no matter at what price and regardless of quality, honor, and dignity." This statement is really a miracle of concision. While it may seem nothing more than a casual fillip against the Jews, it is actually a powerful distillation of the Muslim worldview. Stare at it for a moment or two, and the whole machinery of intolerance and suicidal grandiosity will begin to construct itself before your eyes. The Koran's ambiguous prohibition against suicide appears to be an utter non-issue. Surely there are Muslim jurists who might say that suicide bombing is contrary to the tenets of Islam (where are these jurists, by the way?) and that suicide bombers are therefore not martyrs but fresh denizens of hell. Such a minority opinion, if it exists, cannot change the fact that suicide bombings have been rationalized by much of the Muslim world (where they are called "sacred explosions")...

If all Muslims had responded as Turkey did (where a mere 4 percent think suicide bombings are "often" justified, 9 percent "sometimes," and 7 percent "rarely"), we would still have a problem worth worrying about; we would, after all, be talking about more than 200 million avowed supporters of terrorism. But Turkey is an island of ambassadorial goodwill compared with the rest of the Muslim world...

A significant percentage of the world's Muslims believe that the men who brought down the World Trade Center are now seated at the right hand of God...

For devout Muslims, religious identity seems to trump all others. Despite the occasional influence of Pan-Arabism, the concept of an ethnic or national identity has never taken root in the Muslim world as it has in the West. The widespread support for Saddam Hussein among Muslims, in response to the American attack upon Iraq, is as good a way as any of calibrating the reflexivity of Muslim solidarity. Saddam Hussein was, as both a secularist and a tyrant, widely despised in the Muslim world prior to the American invasion; and yet the reaction of most Muslims revealed that no matter what his crimes against the Iraqi people, against the Kuwaitis, and against the Iranians, the idea of an army of infidels occupying Baghdad simply could not be countenanced, no matter what humanitarian purpose it might serve. Saddam may have tortured and killed more Muslims than any person in living memory, but the Americans are the "enemies of God."...

Samuel Huntington has famously described the conflict between Islam and the West as a "clash of civilizations." Huntington observed that wherever Muslims and non-Muslims share a border, armed conflict tends to arise. Finding a felicitous phrase for an infelicitous fact, he declared that "Islam has bloody borders"

--- The end of faith : religion, terror, and the future of reason / Sam Harris


Interestingly, this book is in the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, and one of its tags is "Religion -- Controversial literature"

Links - 3rd October 2018 (1)

Study affirms Google search results lean left - "despite the tech giant’s claim to be free of bias, the searches were 40 percent more likely to produce material that leans either to the “left” or the “far left” rather than the “right.” The researchers for CanIRank concluded Google’s “ranking algorithms aren’t designed to provide a fairly balanced or completely honest representation of controversial issues.” To assess how fairly search engine results portray political candidates and controversial issues, the study collected more than 1,200 URLs ranking highly in Google.com for politically charged keywords such as “gun control,” “abortion” and “Black Lives Matter.” To assess the “political slant,” the researchers used politically active individuals from both the left and right as well as special software. Along with finding that search results are 40 percent more likely to lean left, 16 percent of political keywords contained no right-leaning pages at all within the first page of results. The analysis concluded “factors within the Google algorithm itself may make it easier for sites with a left-leaning or centrist viewpoint to rank higher in Google search results compared to sites with a politically conservative viewpoint.”... the CanIRank study found that a search of “Republican platform” turned up only the official text of the platform and seven left-leaning results highly critical of it, with zero results in support. No right-leaning websites were found among the top results of searches on words such as “minimum wage,” “abortion,” NAFTA,” “Iraq war,” “campaign finance reform,” “global warming” and “marijuana legalization.” CanIRank pointed out the influence of search engine results on elections... voters largely trust the results, and the top search results are broadly perceived as being the most accurate and authoritative."

Top Google News story on Aug. 28? CNN saying Google News isn’t ‘rigged’ – World Tribune: Window on the Real World - "Another recent report, this one by Information Liberation, revealed bias against conservatives in YouTube’s new search algorithm. When searching for a particular YouTube video by it’s exact title, the report showed that similarly themed videos from mainly left-leaning media sources were ranked above the titled video... the change in YouTube’s algorithm “would appear to back up reports from Breitbart’s ‘Rebels of Google’ interview series in which former and current employees stated that there were active efforts within Google and specifically YouTube to demote conservative content.” Following the reports, economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the Trump administration would be “taking a look” at regulating Google."

Acosta on Trump attacks: Imagine what life would be like if government was the only ‘trusted’ news source
For all the moral panic about government regulation at least the government has democratic accountability in a way that a private company like Google doesn't

Married couple trying to get pregnant for four years were actually having anal sex - "The unnamed husband and wife, aged 26 and 24, sought out obstetrician Liu Hongmei earlier this year when a team of medics visited their village in Bijie city in China’s south-western Guizhou province. She was quoted as saying: ‘The couple were very young, the man 26 and the woman 24. They were very healthy, but, despite being married for four years, couldn’t conceive.’... the woman had regular sex but that it was “unusually painful” every time... The woman’s symptoms led Doctor Liu to believe that she may have had some sort of gynaecological disease. Liu said she was ‘shocked’ when an examination revealed the wife to be a virgin."

Identity politics and the perils of zero-sum thinking - The Washington Post - "one antidote to dangerous zero-sum thinking about racial and ethnic groups is to deemphasize identity politics... Frederick Douglass advocated it back in the nineteenth century. If a man who had personally experienced the oppression of racially based slavery could look beyond identity politics, then so can the vast majority of modern Americans who are fortunate enough to have avoided comparable horrors. One side’s identity-group mobilization is all too likely to generate backlash from the other, a dynamic that all too often results in conflicts in which both groups end up worse off than they would be otherwise. Such struggles reinforce and inflame the dangerous zero-sum thinking that too often leads to intergroup hostility and oppression"

South Korea bans coffee in all schools - teachers included - in bid to promote healthy living - "The ministry said the move aimed to tackle the side-effects of consuming too much caffeine including dizziness, a rapid heartbeat, sleep disorders or nervousness. It warned that continuous caffeine consumption could harm a young child's physical and mental health... There are fears that students may be taking coffee to help them cope with long hours of study and stress... South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world for children aged ten to 19."

How Islam Created Europe - "A classical geography is organically reasserting itself, as the forces of terrorism and human migration reunite the Mediterranean Basin, including North Africa and the Levant, with Europe. The Continent has absorbed other groups before, of course. In fact, Europe has been dramatically affected by demographic eruptions from the east: In the medieval centuries, vast numbers of Slavs and Magyars migrated into central and eastern Europe from deeper inside Eurasia. But those peoples adopted Christianity and later formed polities, from Poland in the north to Bulgaria in the south, that were able to fit, however bloodily, inside the evolving European state system. As for the Algerian guest workers who emigrated to France and the Turkish and Kurdish guest workers who emigrated to Germany during the Cold War, they represented a more containable forerunner to the current migration."

Opinion | The Metamorphosis of the Western Soul - The New York Times - "“It isn’t just that Easterners versus Westerners think about the world differently,” Nisbett told me. “They’re literally seeing a different world.”... A 2010 study of 325 million American names by Jean Twenge of the University of San Diego and others found a sharp increase in parents giving their children uncommon names starting in 1983. Parents, suggested its authors, wanted them to “stand out and be a star.”... The 1980s saw the rise of a self-esteem movement whose promoters promised that self-love would make America competitive again... We call such sensitivity to signals of failure “perfectionism.” This mode of thinking is a predictor of self-harm, depression and suicide. A 2017 study by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill of 40,000 students in the United States, Britain and Canada found that, between 1989 and 2016, the extent to which people felt they had to “display perfection to secure approval” had risen by a staggering 33 percent. An adult morbidity survey in England shows that between 2000 and 2014, the number of adults reporting self-harm more than doubled. In the United States rates of anxiety and depression in adolescents are rising. Despite widespread adoption of antidepressants since the 1980s, the United States’ suicide rate rose by 24 percent between 1999 and 2014, according to the C.D.C. The global financial crisis in 2008 did not help. Interestingly, narcissism, which was increasing during the 1990s and 2000s, has reportedly started to fall."
This could help explain the rise of SJWism too

The Complicated and Scandalous History of Islamic Wine Poetry - "drinking was entirely halal in Islam’s earliest years... unlike with, say, pork, the verbal form of the word haram is never used in the case of drink; the imperative in 5:90 is fajtaniboohu (“so avoid it”). Is this prohibition, or mere discouragement? We know some clerics argued it was only the latter... If the status of wine was hotly debated by clerics, outside the walls of their parlors the matter was less controversial: almost everyone of social standing was a drinker... It simply was not unusual for Muslim intellectuals, even theologians, to drink. The polymath Abu Zayd al-Balkhi (d. 934), for instance, was simultaneously a physician who advocated wine consumption for its “unique” health benefits and the author of a respected commentary on the Quran. The slightly longer answer is that Abu Nuwas was participating, through his poems, in an argument that had always existed within Islam, not just about the place of wine, but the places of humor, satire, individual liberty, sin, and divine forgiveness. That this argument would later be settled in favor of the conservative and prohibitionist camp was more an accident of history and politics than anything essential and inherent in the Quran"

Game of Thrones castle with 15 bedrooms goes on sale... for less than the price of a one-bed London flat - "Gosford Castle in County Armagh, Northern Ireland was used to portray Riverrun castle on the show and at half-a-million pounds is less than the price of an average London flat - which will set you back £574,586."

Fury after it's revealed Jeremy Corbyn defended 'anti-Semitic' public art showing men playing Monopoly - "The graphic, called Freedom for Humanity, was painted on a property near Brick Lane in East London by international graffiti artist Kalen Ockerman, known as Mear One. It showed a number of bankers around a monopoly board, betting with money, and a sign on the edge of the frame reads: "The new world order is the enemy of humanity.""

One in four voters think that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite after clashes with the Jewish community, poll reveals - "ONE in four voters think that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite after two years of clashes with the Jewish community, a damning poll for The Sun reveals today. Nearly half of adults thinks the Labour Party has a serious problem with anti-semitism, with 31 per cent believing Mr Corbyn personally condones the prejudice... Mr Corbyn’s claims that he did not lay a wreath for dead terrorists accused of masterminding the killing of Israeli athletes are in tatters according to damning new data collected last week by OnePoll... A massive 48 per cent of voters aware of the saga do not believe his version of events, and a third say he should quit over the scandal. Even one in five Labour voters questioning his claim that “I was present at the wreath-laying ceremony but don’t think I was involved.”"

Why the Muslim world isn't saying anything about China’s repression and 'cultural cleansing' of its downtrodden Muslim minority - "activists have found evidence of Chinese authorities tracking Uighurs’ cellphone activity and forcing them to cut off their beards and dresses. Others say China has demanded the Uighur diaspora hand over personal information – and threatened their families if they do not... It’s not as if Muslim countries haven’t spoken out about human rights in the past. As Myanmar’s military ramped up its violence against Rohingya Muslims late last year, citizens in Jordan and Iran staged multiple protests in solidarity with the Rohingya... Many Muslim-majority countries aren’t speaking out because they don’t want to jeopardize their economic relationships in China... Egypt, a BRI partner country, has even appeared to help China with its Uighur crackdown. Last summer, Egypt detained dozens of Uighur students in the country without giving a reason, denied them access to lawyers and their families... Many Middle Eastern states also have a poor human rights record, and prioritize social stability over individual rights, much like China does... although many Gulf states can afford to make a political stand against China, they “are mostly ultra-authoritarian states that advocate non-interference in other states’ internal affairs to avoid the same interference in theirs.”... Turkey, which is majority-Muslim, has spoken out against China’s treatment of its Uighurs in the past – and China has not forgotten... "The United States, European Union and others need to remain vocal on human rights and bring on larger contingents of like-minded countries to collectively stand against these policies""
Better to just bash Israel
Strange how the Evil West speaks out more about the Uighers than Muslim countries


Imam Tawhidi calls for ALL Islamic schools to be shut down - "A Muslim leader has thrown his support behind Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali after she said all Muslim schools in Australia needed to be shut down. Imam Shaikh Mohammad Tawhidi, who has openly spoken out against ISIS and extremists, told 7 News on Wednesday Muslim schools in Australia were a danger to the country... Imam Tawhidi was escorted by police into hiding after he made the comments, in fear of retribution from the Muslim community... His call comes after Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 47, likened extreme Muslim groups to white supremacists. 'We should treat Hizb ut-Tahrir the way we treat skin heads and white supremacists and all sorts of remnants of the Nazi party,' she told 7 News on Tuesday night. Hizb ut-Tahrir hit headlines last week after it said all Muslims who left the religion should be put to death... A 'propaganda' video was posted online on Monday labelling her a racist and sexist. The three-minute clip, posted to Facebook by a group called Persons of Interest, described Ms Ali as a 'white supremacist'. 'This is the language of patriarchy and misogyny. This is the language of white supremacy. This is the language used to justify war and genocide,' women in the video said."
Killing Muslim apostates is anti-white supremacy

Female Genital Mutilation IS a Muslim Issue. And, it’s a Medical Issue. And, it’s an African Issue. And, it’s a Human Rights Issue. - "Slate has put up an extremely misleading article up, Female Genital Mutilation Isn’t a Muslim Issue. It’s a Medical Issue. Articles such as the one above are why people end up eventually not believing the media at all. First, a few minutes of Googling will show that female genital mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision is not simply an issue related to African culture, and does have some relationship to Islam... I do have to wonder if this is one case where liberal progressive concern for not seeming to be racist against Africans by imputing upon them barbaric cultural practices is trumped by their concern not to disparage Islam... a simple scatter plot illuminates the correlation between Islam and FGM, even though the practice is found among plenty of non-Muslim Africans. Additionally, the chart has a lacunae. Do you know the country with the largest number of women in the world who are the victims of FGM? Indonesia! (obviously, not an African country, just the world’s largest Muslim country, famed for its moderate practice of Islam)... of the Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence the Shafi considers female circumcision obligatory. The Hanbali school considers the practice strongly encouraged, while the Hanafi and Maliki schools consider it preferred... there are surveys that 93 percent of Muslim women have been subject to some form of circumcision... A certain type of anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim thinker infers from the Quran all that is Islam. This is simply not a valid way to go about understanding the history of Muslims and their modern cultures. And yet you have the Muslim writer in Slate asserting “Further, there is no religious sanction for the procedure found in the Quran.” (actually, there is no sanction for the almost universal practice of male circumcision among Muslims in the Quran either) This reference misunderstands how Islam and most Muslims have related to their religion historically. The Quran is not equivalent to the Christian Bible. Rather, it is more like the Hebrew Bible to Rabbinical Jews. It is a starting point, but not the ending point. Religious practice is more often dependent upon Hadith, Sunnah, and later commentaries by learned jurists, as well as interpretations by living jurists. From the viewpoint of many Muslim Americans this is a ridiculous way to look at the religion. As an atheist I would assert descriptively that their view of Islam has mapped itself upon a phenomenology of religion which derives directly from American confessional Protestantism... Unlike in Judaism, circumcision in Islam is not necessarily obligatory (among the Hanafi and Maliki it is simply high preferred). As I note above it is not mentioned in the Quran. There probably wasn’t a need because all the peoples of Arabia were circumcised when the Quran was compiled."

Tuesday, October 02, 2018

Links - 2nd October 2018 (2)

Veteran architect & NUS prof Tay Kheng Soon questioned by police over Facebook post - "The 77-year-old adjunct professor at the National University of Singapore Department of Architecture revealed he had posted a picture of the Genocide Memorial in Armenia, which he visited recently, and wrote that he saw and learnt of the 1.5 million Armenian Christians exterminated by the Ottoman Turks in 1911. This resulted in a person named Azhari Ali objecting to his characterisation of the event, claiming Tay had “unfairly singled out Islam”, even though that was not the intention of the post. Tay then urged the authorities to “establish guidelines to ascertain what should be appropriate responses to complaints made by the public as to their import”, as he felt it was an inconvenience to many people when someone like him is being called up for questioning because of a social media posting being reported to the police... Tay, who is behind several iconic structures in Singapore, including the People’s Park Complex and KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, also said he hoped that “modern Singapore has matured enough to accept robust, sincere and polite discourse”."
Convict Tay Kheng Soon for hate speech for using violence against minorities in the form of hate facts!

Malaysians can now sue for sexual harassment thanks to a case involving...coconuts?

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Moral Philosophy for the Internet - "I saw that the person who's been charged with the Finsbury Park Mosque murder say that he was radicalized by the media. And then he said it was because he watched a three part BBC drama, Three Girls. Are we gonna ban that as well?...
It's inconvenient for us to challenge them. I think the problem is, especially the debate about radicalism, is we haven't challenged the Islamist ideas and the Islamist narrative head on. We are too frightened to, so instead what we're resorting to is the old tool, the convenient tool, the polite tool, the quiet tool that nobody notices, which is censorship. We must not let that happen... If you talk to a civil engineer, an ethics module is an integral part of their training. They build bridges. History tells us it's very bad if bridges fIf you talk to a computer scientist, if you talk to an electronic engineer, ethics is nowhere near their training"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Trump implicated in federal crime - "‘The special counsel was established to investigate possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. We’re two years into an exhaustive and highly expensive investigation that has consumed the country and there’s zero evidence of that. The issues related to today with the campaign manager, Paul Manafort are utterly unrelated and vastly pre-date the campaign, go back to 2005 and the issues with the Michael Cohen plea involve a good number of personal issues. The one that does brush up against the campaign is a possible question of whether one singular payout should or should not have been allocated as a campaign expense. To put that in proportion, the Obama campaign in 2008 had millions of dollars in unreported FEC donations and was subjected to a mere fine. So these are presented unfortunately and sadly really in particularly US media as issues that I think a democratic political opposition are hopeful. Some are gonna tear the President down. In fact, today is a re-affirmation that this is an investigation that appears to be just a circle to nowhere and it appears also, I think, to be winding down… I don't think Michael Cohen knows anything about Russia. And I think frankly, if he did know about Russia it would have been included in his plea negotiation, and he would have been vastly quicker to try to see some sort of cooperation with the Special Counsel's Office, which he so far has refused to do...
The impeachment process contains as many risks for the Democrats in some ways as it does for the Republicans… Bill Clinton was impeached by the Republican Party largely by a vote in the house and he left office with record approval ratings. If he could have run again, he would’ve probably won. If you want a way to galvanize the Republican base, to say that your man is in jeopardy, your man is in danger, this is the Democrats playing politics. The only way to stop this is to come out and vote. I think it could have a very profound effect. And so you could find the paradoxical situation where the Democrats win the House in November, that allows them to start impeachment proceedings and that guarantees that Donald Trump wins in 2020."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Is AI the future of the legal system? - "‘He’s suggesting we follow France’s example, and write protections into the law here and that we should be able to sue an algorithm’
‘The French back in the 1960s, passed a law, saying a machine cannot make a decision about a human being. I don't think people want machines to make decisions about them’...
'The key characteristic of judges is that they are accountable, they are susceptible to scrutiny. And of course the writing of an algorithm isn't'"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Peter Brook on his life and work - "He committed a central crime that I couldn't forgive him for as a friend, and that is that he felt that our job as directors or as designers, writers, or as actors was to give lessons to the audience. There’s a dreadful word which you can't translate which exists in German. Lehrstücke. A teaching piece. Can you think of anything more awful? Come to the theatre tonight and you will learn something. And what you will learn is what the author has decided is the political method of the day, so it becomes propaganda. And so for me political theatre, Godot [sp?] said something very extraordinary. He said that wherever I place my camera, whatever my viewpoint, it is in itself a political statement, but I don't want to be read as such. I just know that I can't be free from my own viewpoint, being there as that place of the camera. And that way, you can say that everything is political, but the moment we turn it into political to sell a message then it's no difference from the commercials, it's a commercial, a commercial for what we and our gang have decided is the political correctness of today. For God's sake, let’s avoid that"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, The Fallout of US Sanctions on Iran - "A Christian minister asked if Boris Johnson had ever read the Bible because there in the New Testament, we find the Apostle Paul saying that women in church should remain silent and wear head coverings and that slaves should obey their masters. If he was attempting to accuse Islam of patriarchal oppression then shouldn't he do the same with Christianity?"
Apparently Christians still have slaves today and justify it with religion

If you buy snapper, yellowtail or seabass in Canada, that’s probably not what you’re getting - "Nearly half of seafood samples tested at Canadian grocery stores and restaurants is wrongly labelled, according to an investigation into seafood fraud that claims such practices can harm consumer health and wallets, as well as hurt the environment... Oceana Canada wants the federal government to increase labelling requirements to match those in the European Union. In the EU, labels must show the fish’s scientific species name, catch method, and origin — among other information. It also requires catch documentation. Studies show that seafood fraud rates appear to have fallen since the union implemented the more stringent labelling practices."
The free market doesn't provide after all. Maybe libertarians will claim that this shows that consumers don't care about the species of fish they get so it's still unnecessary regulation

Germany: Rising Security Threat as Authorities Warn Islamic Extremists Have Doubled to 11,000 - "Authorities warned that the number of Muslim fundamentalists including “jihadists” living in Germany has doubled to 11,000 in just a few years. Salafism — the radical Islamic ideology to which international terror groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda are usually said to subscribe — has grown rapidly in recent years, according to security statistics reported by Tagesspiegel. The 11,000 figure, which represents the number of Salafist residents known to regional authorities in each state, has risen sharply from 5,500 in 2013, and marks a rise of almost 300 per cent from 2011, when domestic intelligence estimated around 3,800 fundamentalists to have been active in the EU nation."

Opinion | Europe’s Welcome Sign to Terrorists - The New York Times - "Stolen, doctored and fake passports from the Schengen area are among the most sought-after forms of identification by terrorists, drug smugglers, human traffickers and other criminals. As of last year, eight Schengen countries were on the list of the top 10 nations reporting stolen or lost passports in Interpol’s databases. Not one of those countries systematically screened passports at their borders. Among the European countries that are not parties to the Schengen Agreement is the United Kingdom, which began screening passports against Interpol’s database following the 2005 terrorist attacks there that killed 52 people and injured more than 700. The U.K. now screens about 150 million passports a year, more than all other European Union nations combined, and catches more than 10,000 people a year trying to cross its borders using invalid travel documents... Based on my 14 years of experience running Interpol, I know that terrorists will be much more likely to succeed as long as countries fail to properly check the identities of those who cross their borders."

China Built the World’s Largest Telescope. Then Came the Tourists - "China spent $180 million to create the telescope, which officials have repeatedly said will make the country the global leader in radio astronomy. But the local government also spent several times that on this nearby Astronomy Town—hotels, housing, a vineyard, a museum, a playground, classy restaurants, all those themed light fixtures. The government hopes that promoting their scope in this way will encourage tourists and new residents to gravitate to the historically poor Guizhou province... It also plans to increase the permanent population by hundreds of thousands. That’s a lot of cell phones, each of which persistently emits radio waves with around 1 watt of power."

I Sold My Soul on Twitter. Now I’m Trying to Win It Back - "I didn’t like John McCain’s politics... ordinary Americans lost a real war hero who refused early release from a North Vietnamese prison unless every man taken in before his capture was released with him... But you wouldn’t know any of this from my left-wing Twitter feed, which looks like normal-human Twitter did the day U.S. soldiers killed Osama Bin Laden: Macabre celebration, and attacks on anyone who has anything nice to say about McCain. Dear lord, social media has turned us into terrible people... if someone died—for real Twitter addicts, that’s Asshole Christmas. If you could make a facile point that reinforced your team’s political stance on the day someone collapsed in front of his wife and kids—you were a true hero, the Twitter version of a captured pilot resisting torture in a POW camp. Except your prison was your mother’s basement, or your half of a Brooklyn apartment covered with Cheetos... these hate spasms aren’t about policy or any actual analysis of McCain’s legacy. They’re about playing Twitter tough guy by spitting on a bogeyman’s casket. The lessons I’ve learned since my divorce from left-wing Twitter go beyond social media. I’m now skeptical of any ideology whose organizing principle is based on the practice of dividing the world between angels and villains... in those days, I’d declare—with a straight face—that Republicans such as John McCain weren’t much different from real historical Nazis. And you can still find plenty of people who think and Tweet this way on social media... (Last month, film director Mark Duplass made the mistake of Tweeting out: “I don’t agree with [Ben Shapiro] on much, but he’s a genuine person who once helped me for no other reason than to be nice.” This single Tweet actually became a trending story on Twitter for a whole day, and Duplass was forced to apologize.) The left takes joy in eating its own. And when someone suggests adding a conservative source to the communal reading list, things quickly become hysterical."

Why Do We Feel the Need to Transgender the Dead? - "very instance of cross-dressing, whether on stage or off, is spuriously interpreted to mean that the figure in question was communicating some secret truth about their “gender-nonconforming” souls. For those of us who have long championed gay rights, it feels like a ghoulish, faux-enlightened form of gay-conversion therapy. These cultural grave-diggers imagine themselves to be fashionably transgressive. But what they are really peddling is a deeply conservative notion of what it means to be male or female. According to this conception, the lesbianism of historical figures is reimagined as a rejection of womanhood itself, just as the act of dressing as a woman for stage or fetish is reimagined as a rejection of manhood. The dead cannot possibly speak for themselves. So it is up to the rest of us to ensure that the true narratives of feminist pioneers, gay men and lesbians are not removed from the pages of history."

The amazing 1969 prophecy that racial preferences would cause the exact grievances of protesters today - Heterodox Academy - "agitation to change the environment from one in which they are unable to compete to one in which they can. Demands will be made for elimination of competition, reduction in standards of performance, adoption of courses of study which do not require intensive legal analysis, and recognition for academic credit of sociological activities which have only an indirect relationship to legal training. Second, it seems probable that this group will seek personal satisfaction and public recognition by aggressive conduct, which, although ostensibly directed at external injustices and problems, will in fact be primarily motivated by the psychological needs of the members of the group to overcome feelings of inferiority caused by lack of success in their studies. Since the common denominator of the group of students with lower qualifications is one of race this aggressive expression will undoubtedly take the form of racial demands–the employment of faculty on the basis of race, a marking system based on race, the establishment of a black curriculum and a black law journal, an increase in black financial aid, and a rule against expulsion of black students who fail to satisfy minimum academic standards."

Mike Simpson, M.D. on Twitter - "I do not condone body shaming. But, as a physician, I also cannot condone people pretending that obesity is healthy. Beauty may be skin deep, but fat deposits go all the way to your internal organs."

Women cheer as Swedish man-free music festival opens - "Held in Sweden's second-largest city of Gothenburg, the two-day Statement Festival, forbids men but not transgender people. It was announced last year after police received four rape and 23 sexual assault reports at Sweden's largest Bravalla Festival, which was cancelled this year as a result."
Feminism!

Protesters damage 'sexist' open-air urinals in Paris - "Feminist protesters have begun vandalising the new open-air street urinals in Paris, labelling them sexist and discriminatory. Several of the eco-friendly urinals have been placed in public spots in recent months as an experiment to counter Paris’s problem of urine-soaked pavements. But protesters in recent days targeted two on the Île Saint-Louis and near Gare de Lyon station – plastering them with stained sanitary towels and tampons, then blocking them with concrete... Equality campaigners and women’s groups, along with local residents and parents, have complained that the open-air urinals are sexist and discriminatory."
I'm sure these feminists would also damage female toilets that are designed to be bigger than male toilets in the name of potty parity

Do Immigrants Import Their Economic Destiny?

Do Immigrants Import Their Economic Destiny?

"How do immigrants change the countries they move to? Immigration has become a big political issue in the U.S., the UK, Germany, and beyond, and experts and pundits alike have tried answering this question. At least among economists, almost all the debate has focused on the short run, and most of that has focused on lower-skilled immigrants. The overall answer is fairly clear: low-skilled immigrants don’t have a major effect on the rest of the economy one way or the other. That means that in the short run, the most important effect of low-skilled immigration is that it helps low-skilled migrants themselves.

But what happens in the very long run?...

Three lines of research point the way to a substantial answer:

- The Deep Roots literature on how ancestry predicts modern economic development,
- The Attitude Migration literature, which shows that migrants tend to bring a lot of their worldview with them when they move from one country to another,
- The New Voters-New Policies literature, which shows that expanding the franchise to new voters really does change the nature of government...

A glance at the map tells much of the tale: Today’s rich countries tend to be in East Asia, Northern and Western Europe, or are heavily populated by people who came from those two regions. The major exceptions are oil-rich countries...

To sum up some of the key findings of this new empirical literature: There are three major long-run predictors of a nation’s current prosperity, which combine to make up a nation’s SAT score:

S: How long ago the nation’s ancestors lived under an organized state.

A: How long ago the nation’s ancestors began to use Neolithic agriculture techniques.

T: How much of the world’s available technology the nation’s ancestors were using in 1000 B.C., 0 B.C., or 1500 A.D.

When estimating each nation’s current SAT score, it’s important to adjust for migration: Indeed, all three of these papers do some version of that. For instance, without adjusting for migration, Australia has quite a low ancestral technology score: Aboriginal Australians used little of the world’s cutting edge technology in 1500 A.D. But since Australia is now overwhelmingly populated by the descendants of British migrants, Australia’s migration-adjusted technology score is currently quite high.

On average, nations with high migration-adjusted SAT scores are vastly richer than nations with lower SAT scores: Countries in the top 10% of migration-adjusted technology (T) in 1500 are typically at least 10 times richer than countries in the bottom 10%. If instead you mistakenly tried to predict a country’s income today based on who lived there in 1500, the relationship would only be about one-third that size. The migration adjustment matters crucially: Whether in the New World, across Southeast Asia, or in Southern Africa, one can do a better job predicting today’s prosperity when you keep track of who moved where...

Let’s consider the case of Chinese migration throughout Asia. By the standards of European colonization, Chinese migration post-1500 has been relatively (I emphasize relatively) peaceful. The non-Chinese residents of these countries tended to have lower ancestral SAT scores than Chinese residents, so we can ask: did Asian countries with a higher percentage of Chinese-descended migrants end up economically freer?...

Overall, the relationship between a nation’s percent population of Chinese descent in 1980 and current economic freedom is strongly positive. Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the countries with the largest percentage of post-1500 Chinese immigrants, are the freest. Hong Kong, which had only a few thousand Chinese residents before the British arrival, is now the economically freest country in the world. Malaysia (a third of whose residents are of Chinese descent) and Thailand (10 percent) are next, and Malaysia is clearly the freer of the two. The remaining countries, Laos and Myanmar, are substantially less economically free than Singapore...

Economists have long known that some of the strongest statistical predictors of long-run national prosperity have been “percent Confucian” and “percent Buddhist.” A famed paper coauthored by Xavier Sala-i-Martin demonstrated that conclusively. It’s time for scholars to investigate whether, for most countries, a pro-Confucian migration policy is a good option...

Second-generation immigrants to the U.S. are more likely to favor income redistribution policies if they come from a country where the average citizen today also favors more redistribution. In this case, attitudes migrate, so heavy immigration from pro-redistribution cultures will tend to boost a nation’s number of pro-redistribution citizens decades later. More importantly, the same holds for trusting behavior: A study published in the American Economic Review, provocatively entitled “Inherited Trust and Growth,” finds that

…inherited trust of descendants of US-immigrants is significantly influenced by the country of origin…of their forbears…

So trusting attitudes migrate. And the link from trust to economic performance is well-accepted at this point: One famous paper, “Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff?” [Answer: Yes] is now routinely cited in economics textbooks. And why do low-trust societies generate worse economic performance? One reason is that low-trust individuals demand more government regulation...

In low-trust societies, people want someone checking up on untrustworthy businesses and individuals, and a strong government is one way to do just that. Together, this literature suggests that migration from low-trust societies will tend to hurt long-run economic performance, partly because low-trust individuals demand more government regulation...

…on average familistic values are associated with lower political participation and political action. They are also related to a lower level of trust, more emphasis on job security, less desire for innovation and more traditional attitudes toward working women...

Of course immigrants don’t just become voters: they sometimes become taste-makers, opinion-setters. As immigrants join the culture, they start to shape the culture. That means that immigrants and their descendants may shape political opinions the way they often shape people’s opinion about food: Migrants start eating some of the foods of the country they move to, but at the same time older residents start trying some foods from immigrant cultures. There’s a mutual exchange, and behavior meets somewhere in the middle...

Immigrants and their descendants will shape a political system isn’t by directly bringing their own attitudes into the voting booth: It’s also by shaping the political attitudes of their fellow citizens. That’s what happens in a melting pot: We all become a little like each other. So if we really are shaped by our neighbors, then we have yet another good reason to choose our neighbors wisely...

Some critics will argue that perhaps “this time is different”, and that even if immigrants import their cultural attitudes to their new homes, maybe they’ll leave those views just outside the voting booth. Perhaps, when it comes time to vote, migrants completely conform to their new home countries.

Here’s one way to check this “New Voters = No Change” theory: Look at times when large groups of individuals were suddenly given the vote, and then check to see if government policies changed within a few years. Even better, only look at large groups of individuals who had been living somewhat peacefully in the nation for decades. Here’s one such case: The women’s suffrage movement across Western civilization. This extension of the franchise has been heavily studied by economists: The best-known paper draws on the fact that different U.S. states extended the vote at different times to create a kind of natural experiment. It turns out that, contrary to the “New voters = No change” theory, giving the vote to women really did change government in a more progressive, expansionist direction...

Women did not quietly, meekly vote for whatever the men around them supported. They had their own minds, and those minds, when empowered by the vote, moved policy in a more progressive direction. And notice that the longer-run effect was twice the immediate effect: Expanding the franchise to a group that favored more government spending indeed increased government spending, but it took decades to see the full effect. In U.S. history, new voters have mattered.

And this is no one-off study: the policy impact of female suffrage has been studied extensively...

Together, these three literatures provide a combination of big-picture and close-up evidence that if a country is choosing between high-SAT and low-SAT immigration policies, the high-SAT approach will yield big benefits in the long run. Individual countries will always be exceptions to the rule, so some countries taking the low-SAT immigration path will still look pretty good. But wise citizens don’t bet on being the exception: they bet on being the rule."


This suggests, among other things, what "Chinese Privilege" is really about

Links - 2nd October 2018 (1)

Innovation and Urban Inequality Go Hand in Hand - "a growing chorus of urban theorists is making the case that the problems of the modern city are inextricable from their remarkable innovation and growth"

The benefits of inequality - "in the distant past, groups of hunter-gatherers may have recognized and accepted the benefits of living in hierarchical societies, even if they themselves weren’t counted among the well-off. This model could help explain why bands of humans moved from largely egalitarian groups to hierarchical cultures in which social inequality was rife."

Neoliberalism: Oversold? - "Although growth benefits are uncertain, costs in terms of increased economic volatility and crisis frequency seem more evident. Since 1980, there have been about 150 episodes of surges in capital inflows in more than 50 emerging market economies; as shown in the left panel of Chart 2, about 20 percent of the time, these episodes end in a financial crisis, and many of these crises are associated with large output declines... In addition to raising the odds of a crash, financial openness has distributional effects, appreciably raising inequality... Austerity policies not only generate substantial welfare costs due to supply-side channels, they also hurt demand—and thus worsen employment and unemployment. The notion that fiscal consolidations can be expansionary (that is, raise output and employment), in part by raising private sector confidence and investment, has been championed by, among others, Harvard economist Alberto Alesina in the academic world and by former European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet in the policy arena. However, in practice, episodes of fiscal consolidation have been followed, on average, by drops rather than by expansions in output"

A sad reminder of the art lost in the years after the Reformation - "We think of Henry VIII and the destruction of the monasteries, but that was not the end of the destruction, it marked the beginning. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, hailed the reign of his son, the boy king Edward VI, as that of a new Josiah, destroyer of idols. After his coronation an orgy of iconoclasm was launched. In churches rood screens, tombs with their prayers for the dead, and stain glass windows, were smashed. The Elizabethan antiquarian John Stow complained, some of this Christian Taliban “judged every image to be an idol”, so that not only religious art, but even the secular thirteenth century carvings of kings in Ludgate were broken."

The risks of alcohol (again) - "This leads them to argue that there is ‘no safe level’ of alcohol... to experience one extra problem, 25,000 people need to drink 10g alcohol a day for a year, that’s 3,650g a year each... The paper argues that their conclusions should lead public health bodies “to consider recommendations for abstention”. But claiming there is no ‘safe’ level does not seem an argument for abstention. There is no safe level of driving, but government do not recommend that people avoid driving... Presumably people who choose to drink alcohol moderately get some pleasure from it, and any risk needs to be traded off against this enjoyment."

Olympic silver medalists tend to live longer than the gold medal winners - "When it comes to Olympic track and field, silver medalists have historically outlived athletes who took the gold, based on an analysis of competitions in the decades between 1896 and 1948... Olympians who came in first and second place weren’t that different from one another. They tended to be similar in height, age, and in other physical attributes and ability... Silver medalists made more money, and higher income, in turn, appeared correlated with longer lifespans. Notably, the second-place contestants had a tendency to seek higher-paying occupations than the winners after the Olympics were over"

Russian Feminist Blogger Investigated For Potential Hate Speech Against Men - "One meme shows a woman wielding a frying pan with the caption: "Beat up a brute, save Russia!" Other materials include texts featuring profanity and violent imagery."

Matchlocks, Wheellocks and Flintlocks: How Early Small Arms Were Fired

Thai citizen born in Bangkok pleads guilty to defaulting on NS in Singapore - "Ekawit’s lawyer, S Radakrishnan, said that his client had no reason to believe that he would still be liable to serve in the armed forces of a country that he did not really understand or had links to. “For all intents and purposes, (Ekawit) was born, lived, studied, served national service and found a job in Thailand, and identifies as a Thai national. He has spent his entire life to date residing in Thailand,” said Radakrishnan. “He has never received any benefits from any social, economic, or educational services rendered by the Singapore government or its statutory boards.” Apart from short visits to his grandmother who lives here, Ekawit never lived in Singapore long enough to comprehend the gravity of the charges he is facing now"
Singapore demands its pound of flesh out of spite

Someone threatens to murder Dana Loesch's children. Twitter yawns. - "NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch took to Twitter with some screen caps of a recent set of exchanges she had... a human being at Twitter looking at that call to murder Dana Loesch’s children and deciding that it didn’t cross the line into “abusive behavior.”... Would the same decision be reached if it were a call to murder children of the Obamas or Clintons? Highly unlikely. The user in that hypothetical case would have been out in the cold faster than they could try to log back into their account. While I know I’ve mentioned it before, Kat McKinley had her account suspended for writing a column about government policy regarding transgender troops in the military, and it contained zero threats or derogatory terms."

I Was Banned for Life From Twitter - "For lack of a more precise starting point, the election of Donald Trump did away with our near-universal agreement over the right to speak, driven by a false belief that too much free speech helped Trump get elected. Large numbers of Americans began not just to tolerate, but to demand censorship. They wanted universities to deplatform speakers they did not agree with, giggling over the old-timey First Amendment and taunting “conservatives” for not being able to do anything about it. But the most startling change came within the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which once embodied “defend the right, not the content” when it stood up for the free speech rights of Nazis in the 1970s... “Hate speech,” clearly not prohibited according to the Supreme Court, is an umbrella term used by censorship advocates to describe anything they don’t want others to be able to listen to or watch. It is very flexible and thus very dangerous. As during the McCarthy-era in the 1950s when one needed only to label something “communist” to have it banned, so it is today with the new mark of “hate speech.”... Those who gleefully celebrate the fact that @jack who runs Twitter is not held back by the First Amendment and can censor at will seem to believe he will always yield his power in the way they want him to. Google (until May) had a slogan commanding its employees: “don’t be evil.” Yet in China, Google is deploying Dragonfly, a version of its search engine that will meet Beijing’s demands for censorship by blocking websites on command. Of course, in China they don’t call it hate speech; they call it anti-societal speech, and the propaganda Google will block isn’t from Russian bots but from respected global media. Meanwhile, Apple removes apps from its store at the command of the Chinese government in return for market access. Amazon, which agreed to pull hateful merchandise from its store in the U.S., the same week confirmed that it is “unwaveringly committed to the U.S. government and the governments we work with around the world” in using its AI and facial recognition technology to spy on their own people. Faced with a future loss of billions of dollars, as was the case for Google and Apple in China, what will corporations do in America? Once upon a time an easy solution to corporate censorship was to take one’s business elsewhere. In 2018, the platforms in question are near-global monopolies. Pretending Amazon, which owns the Washington Post and can influence elections, is just another company that sells things, is to pretend the role of unfettered debate in a free society is outdated"

Facebook says cartoon depicting two Arabs happily hanging an Orthodox Jew doesn’t violate its community standards - "In yet another display of Facebook’s apparent tolerance of extreme antisemitism, the social networking site has refused to take down a disturbing cartoon which features two smiling Arabs hanging an Orthodox Jewish man... Facebook has form in this area. In 2016 we reported that Facebook had allowed a post that called for the genocide of all Jews"

Joyce TOO on Twitter: - "We live in an age where you can build an entire culture around anal sex & venereal disease & then parade the streets with giant dildos & call it Pride. But say you’re proud to come from a people that gave the world Aristotle, Shakespeare & Beethoven & you’re called a monster."

HDB owners vs tenants: unpacking the great illusion - "If you have a HDB flat on a 99-year lease, are you an owner or a tenant? The real answer: you are actually an owner of a lease... A tenancy is a technical legal concept. The word ‘tenant’ should not be used loosely as the law has a very strict understanding of what is or is not a tenancy, and if a court considers someone a tenant, they will automatically be awarded a special bundle of rights. Those interested can read the seminal case of Street v Mountford (followed in Singapore law)"

Keywords: Own a lease
Very Religious Americans Lead Healthier Lives - "Very religious Americans are more likely to practice healthy behaviors than those who are moderately religious or nonreligious. The most religious Americans score a 66.3 on the Gallup-Healthways Healthy Behavior Index compared with 60.6 among those who are moderately religious and 58.3 for the nonreligious. This relationship, based on an analysis of more than 550,000 interviews, is statistically significant after controlling for major demographic and regional variables... Very religious Americans make healthier choices than their moderately religious and nonreligious counterparts across all four of the Healthy Behavior Index metrics, including smoking, healthy eating, and regular exercise"

Betty Crocker’s Absurd, Gorgeous Atomic-Age Creations - The New York Times - "Mrs. Lincoln and the women of the W.E.A. badly wanted the sacrosanct light of science to illuminate women’s work — done in the kitchen — with an emphasis on what was replicable, observable, gradable and expressive of human dominance over and mastery of nature. Thus were foods bound, in mayonnaise or white sauce, or imprisoned, inside a pepper ring, or a melon round, or a pastry case or frosting, or in unmoving suspension in gelatin or mousse. Or in a jelly­roll or loaf pan."

Bad News for the Highly Intelligent - "The survey of Mensa’s highly intelligent members found that they were more likely to suffer from a range of serious disorders... The biggest differences between the Mensa group and the general population were seen for mood disorders and anxiety disorders"

Trudeau retracts 'barbaric' remarks - "Justin Trudeau offered an apology and retraction Tuesday over comments he made about the description of honour killings as "barbaric" in a new citizenship guide... The updated Discover Canada booklet includes a line that says, "Canada's openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, 'honour killings,' female genital mutilation, forced marriage or other gender-based violence." The term "barbaric" has been in the guide since 2009, but "forced marriage" was added to the line in this new version. Trudeau took the government to task, however, for using the term "barbaric" and said an official government publication should make an "attempt at responsible neutrality." He said the acts are "absolutely unacceptable" and that's not a matter of debate, but the language chosen by the government to describe them is objectionable"
Maybe it's Islamophobic to condemn honour killings

Take a Look at the Outfit This DC Woman Has Worn Every Day This Year - "Briggman’s uniform is simple: she wears black slacks, black shoes, a grey blazer and a white shirt. Every. Single. Day. She has one necklace. When she feels like accessorizing, she’ll add a muted red leather belt. Her attitude toward dressing isn’t militant: on weekends she’ll wear black jeans instead of slacks, and in the winter she’ll slip into black boots instead of pumps. But everyday, her look is essentially the same. She’s been going strong for over a year, and she says the decision has changed her life.
So much for male privilege and women needing to agonise over what they wear daily

LOLA on Twitter - "Malaysians: Haha your food is shit, your actors come here, your Malays can’t even speak Malay
Singaporeans: your government
Malaysians: WTF SO DAMN RUDE AND UNCALLED FOR"

Tunisia lifts ban on Muslim women marrying non-Muslims
Comments: "Innalilahi wainna ilaihi Rajiuun, End of world is getting close, Islam is perfect, if she believes in Islam , she wont do that, coz A muslim woman isn't allowed to marry non Muslim man."
"a real Muslim woman will not do that , and those women who tweet Bravo! , bravo for what ? are they blind ?! the law is crystal clear ! Muslim woman will only marry Muslim Man if not why she accept islam and why u call ur self a Muslim !"
"so what is big in this news. but the fact is by islamic law muslim women cannot marry with non muslim. so respect the other religions laws. these idiots so called muslim rulers doing this only to please west and america. shame on them"
"Thus its a invitation to the wrath of the almighty... Idk how muslims of tunis are silent.. Tunis is a great Islamic state with rich rich islamic heritage... And then this..."
"In Islam women are allowed to marry non Muslim... if this non muslim will accept islam... if not then your relationships are haram..."
"Tunisia was a slave and still for their excolonizers , instead of violating Islamic laws why don't you create jobs of the highly unemployed people when we are aware that Tunisia has of the highest unemployment rate in the world."
" Tunisia should also legalise..marriage btween Father & Daughter..or Mother & Sons and between sisters n brothers ..the west n Christians has done it. Theres nothing wrong wt that..if they love each other..or marry animals they love..Tunisia should make LOVE as their religion..#keepyourcommentstourself"
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