Links - 9th February 2024 (1)

Meme - Gia Macool @GiaMMacool: "Men don't have commitment issues. They maintain the same friends, barber shop, football team, clothes, and preferences from their youth. It's just you they have a problem with."

Video | Facebook - "My childhood before there were smartphones ❤️ *killing time doing silly things like plucking leaves from bushes & selectively skipping from pavement stone to pavement stone*"

TED talks are lying to you - "The writer had a problem. Books he read and people he knew had been warning him that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a sort of creativity doldrums... And yet the troubled writer also knew that there had been, over these same years, fantastic growth in our creativity promoting sector. There were TED talks on how to be a creative person... If you listened to certain people, creativity was the story of our time, from the halls of MIT to the incubators of Silicon Valley.  The literature on the subject was vast... He had heard these things before. Each story seemed to develop in an entirely predictable fashion...   Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all tell us, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on it. And by dint of careful study and the hardest science — by, say, sliding a jazz pianist’s head into an MRI machine — we can crack the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power.  That was the ultimate lesson. That’s where the music, the theology, the physics and the ethereal water lilies were meant to direct us. Our correspondent could think of no books that tried to work the equation the other way around — holding up the invention of air conditioning or Velcro as a model for a jazz trumpeter trying to work out his solo... we’re talking about the literature of creativity, for Pete’s sake. If there is a non-fiction genre from which you have a right to expect clever prose and uncanny insight, it should be this one. So why is it so utterly consumed by formula and repetition? What our correspondent realized, in that flash of bathtub-generated insight, was that this literature isn’t about creativity in the first place... his creative friends, when considered as a group, were obviously on their way down, not up. The institutions that made their lives possible — chiefly newspapers, magazines, universities and record labels — were then entering a period of disastrous decline. The creative world as he knew it was not flowering, but dying.  When he considered his creative friends as individuals, the literature of creativity began to seem even worse — more like a straight-up insult. Our writer-to-be was old enough to know that, for all its reverential talk about the rebel and the box breaker, society had no interest in new ideas at all unless they reinforced favorite theories or could be monetized in some obvious way. The method of every triumphant intellectual movement had been to quash dissent and cordon off truly inventive voices. This was simply how debate was conducted... The literature of creativity was something completely different. Everything he had noticed so far was a clue: the banality, the familiar examples, the failure to appreciate what was actually happening to creative people in the present time. This was not science, despite the technological gloss applied by writers like Jonah Lehrer. It was a literature of superstition, in which everything always worked out and the good guys always triumphed and the right inventions always came along in the nick of time. In Steven Johnson’s "Where Good Ideas Come From" (2010), the creative epiphany itself becomes a kind of heroic character, helping out clueless humanity wherever necessary... Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges that, far from being an act of individual inspiration, what we call creativity is simply an expression of professional consensus. Using Vincent van Gogh as an example, the author declares that the artist’s “creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art.”... What determines “creativity,” in other words, is the very faction it’s supposedly rebelling against: established expertise... What your correspondent realized, relaxing there in his tub one day, was that the real subject of this literature was the professional-managerial audience itself, whose members hear clear, sweet reason when they listen to NPR and think they’re in the presence of something profound when they watch some billionaire give a TED talk. And what this complacent literature purrs into their ears is that creativity is their property, their competitive advantage, their class virtue. Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world."

We need to talk about TED - "In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky.  But have you ever wondered why so little of the future promised in TED talks actually happens? So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change. Are the ideas wrong? Or is the idea about what ideas can do all by themselves wrong?... The first reason is over-simplification... "you know what, I'm gonna pass because I just don't feel inspired ...you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell."  At this point I kind of lost it. Can you imagine?   Think about it: an actual scientist who produces actual knowledge should be more like a journalist who recycles fake insights! This is beyond popularisation. This is taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing. This is not the solution to our most frightening problems – rather this is one of our most frightening problems. So I ask the question: does TED epitomize a situation where if a scientist's work (or an artist's or philosopher's or activist's or whoever) is told that their work is not worthy of support, because the public doesn't feel good listening to them?   I submit that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilizational disaster...    TED of course stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and I'll talk a bit about all three. I Think TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment.  The key rhetorical device for TED talks is a combination of epiphany and personal testimony (an "epiphimony" if you like ) through which the speaker shares a personal journey of insight and realisation, its triumphs and tribulations. What is it that the TED audience hopes to get from this? A vicarious insight, a fleeting moment of wonder, an inkling that maybe it's all going to work out after all? A spiritual buzz?  I'm sorry but this fails to meet the challenges that we are supposedly here to confront. These are complicated and difficult and are not given to tidy just-so solutions. They don't care about anyone's experience of optimism. Given the stakes, making our best and brightest waste their time – and the audience's time – dancing like infomercial hosts is too high a price. It is cynical.   Also, it just doesn't work... the corollaries of placebo science and placebo medicine are placebo politics and placebo innovation. On this point, TED has a long way to go.   Perhaps the pinnacle of placebo politics and innovation was featured at TEDx San Diego in 2011. You're familiar I assume with Kony2012, the social media campaign to stop war crimes in central Africa? So what happened here? Evangelical surfer bro goes to help kids in Africa. He makes a campy video explaining genocide to the cast of Glee. The world finds his public epiphany to be shallow to the point of self-delusion. The complex geopolitics of central Africa are left undisturbed. Kony's still there. The end. You see, when inspiration becomes manipulation, inspiration becomes obfuscation. If you are not cynical you should be sceptical. You should be as sceptical of placebo politics as you are placebo medicine...    We hear that not only is change accelerating but that the pace of change is accelerating as well. While this is true of computational carrying-capacity at a planetary level, at the same time – and in fact the two are connected – we are also in a moment of cultural de-acceleration.   We invest our energy in futuristic information technologies, including our cars, but drive them home to kitsch architecture copied from the 18th century. The future on offer is one in which everything changes, so long as everything stays the same. We'll have Google Glass, but still also business casual.  This timidity is our path to the future? No, this is incredibly conservative, and there is no reason to think that more gigaflops will inoculate us.  Because, if a problem is in fact endemic to a system, then the exponential effects of Moore's law also serve to amplify what's broken. It is more computation along the wrong curve, and I doubt this is necessarily a triumph of reason.    Part of my work explores deep technocultural shifts, from post-humanism to the post-anthropocene, but TED's version has too much faith in technology, and not nearly enough commitment to technology. It is placebo technoradicalism, toying with risk so as to reaffirm the comfortable.   So our machines get smarter and we get stupider. But it doesn't have to be like that. Both can be much more intelligent. Another futurism is possible... Worse is when economics is debated like metaphysics, as if the reality of a system is merely a bad example of the ideal.  Communism in theory is an egalitarian utopia.  Actually existing communism meant ecological devastation, government spying, crappy cars and gulags... Our options for change range from basically what we have plus a little more Hayek, to what we have plus a little more Keynes. Why?... At a societal level, the bottom line is if we invest in things that make us feel good but which don't work, and don't invest in things that don't make us feel good but which may solve problems, then our fate is that it will just get harder to feel good about not solving problems.  In this case the placebo is worse than ineffective, it's harmful. It's diverts your interest, enthusiasm and outrage until it's absorbed into this black hole of affectation.   Keep calm and carry on "innovating" ... is that the real message of TED? To me that's not inspirational, it's cynical."
The Titan's designers thought of a whole new paradigm. And...

‘Thought Leader’ gives talk that will inspire your thoughts | CBC Radio (Comedy/Satire Skit) - YouTube - "Let's look at a picture of the planet for no reason. What happens if I put some words over it? How about a number? By doing this, I've now made you think that I know what I'm talking about."

Low-flying helicopter sparks massive crocodile orgy in Australia - "A large-scale saltwater crocodile mating frenzy was recently triggered by an unlikely suspect in Australia — a low-flying Chinook helicopter. Ranchers from the Koorana Crocodile Farm in Queensland, which is home to over 3,000 crocodiles, said their scaly residents became aroused after the flyby and "mated like mad."... One reason may be tied to helicopters simulating many of the warning signs of an incoming thunderstorm. Heavy rains are known to have an aphrodisiac effect on many species of crocodilians. And saltwater crocodiles (Crocodylus porosus) appear to time mating so new hatchlings do not drown in flood water after heavy rains and storms, O'shea said. They mate during thunderstorms so offspring are more likely to hatch in more moderate conditions... The sound of a Chinook's powerful rotors may resemble the sound of competing crocodilian males, such as the low bellowing sounds of males looking for a mate, or the sound of males slapping the water with their jaws — another territorial and courting behavior."

Australians are selling valuable old CorningWare casserole dishes for thousands on Ebay - "CorningWare dishes were all the rage in cookware the 70s but fell out of fashion for being 'daggy' and 'outdated'.  However in recent years the brand has become highly sought after by collectors and home chefs for its high-quality glass, durability and nostalgic value... The white casserole dishes with a clear lid come in a range of patterns and designs with the most unpopular at the time fetching up to $15,000 on Ebay... 'I just found out the other day that most modern CorningWare is just fairly ordinary glass, the original was some super heat-resistant stuff but when Corning was taken over the new owners went for cheap,' one woman wrote in a Reddit thread.   'The original CorningWare material was a by-product of research for the US military, for shielding ballistic missiles on re-entry into earth's atmosphere. Strong stuff,' another wrote. Stanley Donald Stookey, a glass chemist, is hailed for 'forever changing cookware' after he accidentally created the super-strong glass the original CorningWare dishes are made of during a botched experiment in the 50s.  The material was used as nose cones in guided missiles in the American military before it was made into an 'indestructible' line of cookware that can withstand extreme heat and is immune to chips and breakages."

Transgender monkeys and $8K lobster tanks: Gov't spending grievances aired in 'Festivus Report' - "In the most wonderful time of the year for Washington budget hawks, Sen. Rand Paul released his annual airing of spending grievances Friday in honor of the “Seinfeld”-immortalized holiday “Festivus.”  From science experiments on transgender monkeys to $38 million in COVID payments to dead people, Paul’s report detailed what he called “a whopping $9 billion of waste” of taxpayer funds...   In lieu of actual employee IDs, some fraudsters uploaded headshots of Barbie dolls to the AI system – which apparently accepted that the obviously plastic faces as “proof of identity” and OK’d sending checks off to the scammers behind the scheme."
Of course, if relief had been too slow to send off, people would've slammed the government for inefficiency

Meme - *Parking lot symbol - pregnant woman with stroller*
*Fat man with BBQ*

Meme - Emmanuel Macron: Authoritarian Left: "I'm maoist. A good program is a program that works"
"Neoliberalism and financial capitalism is coming to an end"
"Make our planet great again"
"It's not the citizen who will pay, but the multinationals."
"I am a yellow vest."
"We are the real populists."
"Something doesn't work any more in this capitalism that increasingly benefits the few."
"My advice to young people: go read Karl Marx."
"Yes, I'm a socialist."
Authoritarian Right: "My goal is to kick out all illegals who don't belong in France."
"Africa has Civilisational Problems."
"Petain was a great soldier"
"I include myself in the Gaulish resistance."
"What's missing in French politics is a king."
"Valeurs Actuelles is a very good newspaper"
"Honesty forces me to tell you that I'm not a socialist."
"As soon as something goes wrong it's blamed on the State."
"We have humiliated the France of the Manif Pour Tous."
Libertarian Left: "Colonization is a crime against humanity."
"Merkel saved our common dignity by welcoming refugees"
"Liberalism is a leftist value"
"White privilege is a fact."
"You see the rise of populism, like leprosy in Europe."
"Gauls are resistant to change."
"There is no French culture."
"Our values recognize the free rational individual as being above everything."
"I'm not going to ban Uber and the VFH, that would sending them back to selling drugs."
Libertarian Right:
"I take responsibility of being a liberal."
"We put a crazy amount ot money in the social minima and people don't make it"
"The Brits were lucky to have Thatcher."
"I want France to to be a start-up nation."
"I don't believe in the Amish system."
"The best way to afford a suit is to work."
 "Young French people have to want to become billionaires."
"All you have to do to cross the road to find a job"
"In the train stations we meet those who have succeeded and those who are nothing..."

Up to 7 years’ jail for sex crime accused who refuse to undergo forensic exam under new framework | The Straits Times - "It may soon be an offence if an accused person in a sexual assault case refuses to take part in a forensic medical examination as part of investigations.  Under the Criminal Procedure (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill introduced in Parliament on Jan 10, such accused individuals who are required to do so but refuse without a reasonable excuse can be jailed for up to seven years, fined or both.  Forensic medical examinations consist of physical medical examinations, collection of samples from any body part as well as taking of photographs, casts and impressions of body parts, which may include intimate parts."
This is basically state assault

‘Haram’ to sleep with teddy bears, dolls, says popular preacher - "popular preacher Ustaz Azhar Idrus has warned that sleeping with such toys is considered haram (forbidden).  According to Kosmo, he reminded parents and guardians not to allow their children to sleep with toys or dolls, such as teddy bears.   “These days, many young girls sleep with such toys, and this is forbidden and not permissible. These toys are only for children to play with,” he said in a video of a recent lecture session.  “Why do even our young women, aged 18 to 20, sleep with teddy bears or dolls on their heads? It is because they see celebrities doing it. Fathers, when you look into your daughter’s room, if there are such toys, it is considered forbidden,” he added.  He also said that angels would not visit homes with such toys.  He said these toys were only allowed for children who have not reached puberty. “Only young children are allowed to play with these toys. Also, hanging toy figures in cars, such as monkey or spider figures, are not allowed. Only place them on the seat for young children to play with so they do not disturb us while driving”"

Parents of teenage daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons, study finds - "parents who had daughters first are 5 per cent more likely to split... A fist-born child's gender does not change the likelihood of divorce until the child hits 12 years old.   The difference increases when the child is 15, as almost 10 per cent more couples with girls as their oldest split up than those with boys. Parents with daughters as their second-born or subsequent children had a similar pattern... There is no different between the genders at the age of 19, the study published in the Economic Journal reported.     However, the increased risk of divorced was non-existent if the father was brought up with a sister - and it applied to both married and cohabiting couples... It did not highlight a causal link between having girls and getting a divorce - but a survey found 'parents of teenage daughters report more disagreements over child rearing, fathers of teenage daughters report worse family relationships and mothers of teenage daughters report more favourable attitudes towards divorce and lower life satisfaction'.  The University of Melbourne's Jan Kabatek - one of the study's authors - suggested that parents may argue more over how to bring up teen girls than teen boys"

Woman scammed 10 people of S$880,000 including lover who cheated parents of life savings for her - "A married woman managed to get three different men to fall in love with her and transfer her large sums of money, with one of them cheating his parents into handing over their life savings.  In total, she cheated 10 people of more than S$880,000 (US$646,000).  Even when she was charged and her trial was pending, 49-year-old Joceyln Kwek Sok Koon managed to cheat her husband's ex-colleague of S$338,600, lying to him that she could help him obtain permanent residency in Singapore...   The court heard that Kwek got to know her lover and co-accused Lai Sze Yin in July 2016, when the 24-year-old man delivered a parcel to her home.  Even though Kwek was married and had two children, she began dating Lai. To conceal her real identity from Lai's family, she created a persona she assumed - a young woman named Rachel Lam Xin Yi who was studying in the National University of Singapore.  She never met Lai's family but would talk to his parents over the phone, gaining their trust that way and buying them gifts.   She managed to get Lai to trick his parents and younger sister into handing over a total of S$150,000 on the guise of investments or a car loan...   To keep up the charade, she sent photos to the victim that she passed off as hers. The victim did a reverse Google image search and realised the pictures were of a Korean blogger.  Despite confronting Kwek and arguing over it, the victim continued his relationship with her...   After learning that the victim wanted to apply for permanent residency for himself and his family, Kwek lied to him that she could help act as his sponsor to fund the application.  She did so to buy herself more time to repay the money that she already owed him. She instructed him not to contact the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) or Manpower Ministry or else he would be immediately deported.  In January 2021, the victim lost his job at the bank and his employment pass was cancelled. He was supposed to fly back to the United Kingdom but stayed in Singapore after Kwek assured him that his PR application had been approved.  She told him not to take up any other job offer and again warned him against contacting ICA or MOM.  When the victim asked for proof of her claims, Kwek forged documents from ICA. No restitution was made to this victim, who fell into debt as a result of Kwek's actions and whose mental health deteriorated.  He also faced investigations by ICA for overstaying...   Kwek portrayed herself as a wealthy person, showing the victim pictures of "her property". As she bought expensive abalone from the victim's friend in bulk, the victim believed that she was rich.  Kwek sent a photo of another person to the victim, claiming it was her. The victim realised this was a photo of another person, because Kwek accidentally sent him the full screenshot of the profile.  Despite this, the victim continued his romantic relationship with Kwek that had begun in May 2021."

Is the west talking itself into decline? - "The industrial revolution was one of the most important events in human history. Over a handful of decades, technological breakthroughs kicked economic output off its centuries-long low plateau and sent populations, living standards and life expectancy soaring.  Yet for all its vital importance, there is still disagreement over why all this took off when and where it did.  One of the most compelling arguments comes from US economic historian Robert Allen, who argues that Britain’s successes in commerce in the 16th and 17th centuries pushed wages up and energy costs down, creating strong incentives to substitute energy and capital for labour and to mechanise manufacturing processes. Others place greater emphasis on the role of UK institutions, while some argue that innovative ideas emerged as a result of increasing interactions among growing and densifying populations.  Another interesting theory is that of economic historian Joel Mokyr, who argues in his 2016 book A Culture of Growth that it was broader cultural change that laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution. Prominent British thinkers including Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton championed a progress-oriented view of the world, centred on the idea that science and experimentation were key to increasing human wellbeing. While persuasive, Mokyr’s theory has until recently been only that: a theory. But a fascinating paper published last month by a quartet of economists puts some evidence behind the argument. The researchers analysed the contents of 173,031 books printed in England between 1500 and 1900, tracking how the frequency of different terms changed over time, which they use as a proxy for the cultural themes of the day.  They found a marked increase in the use of terms related to progress and innovation starting in the early 17th century. This supports the idea that “a cultural evolution in the attitudes towards the potential of science accounts in some part for the British industrial revolution and its economic take-off”.  To explore whether this holds for other countries, I have adapted and extended their analysis to include Spain, which was economically competitive with Britain well into the 17th century, but then fell behind. Using data from millions of books digitised as part of the Google Ngram project, I have found that the upsurge in discussions of progress in British books occurs about two centuries before the same uptick in Spain, mirroring trends in the countries’ economic development. And it’s not just that people talk more about progress when their country is moving forward. In both, culture evolved before growth accelerated.  The finding that language and culture can play important roles in triggering economic development has major implications for the west today.  Extending the same analysis to the present, a striking picture emerges: over the past 60 years the west has begun to shift away from the culture of progress, and towards one of caution, worry and risk-aversion, with economic growth slowing over the same period. The frequency of terms related to progress, improvement and the future has dropped by about 25 per cent since the 1960s, while those related to threats, risks and worries have become several times more common. That simultaneous rise in language associated with caution could well be not a coincidence but an equal and opposite force acting against growth and progress.  Ruxandra Teslo, one of a growing community of progress-focused writers at the nexus of science, economics and policy, argues that the growing scepticism around technology and the rise in zero-sum thinking in modern society is one of the defining ideological challenges of our time. Some may counter that a rebalancing of priorities from perpetual advancement to caution is a good thing, but this could be a catastrophic mistake. As well as economic growth, the drive for progress brought us modern medicine, significantly longer and healthier lives, plentiful food supplies, dramatic reductions in poverty, and ever more and ever cheaper renewable energy. The challenges facing the modern world will be solved by more focus on progress, not less.  The pre-industrial world was one of mass conflict, exploitation and suffering. If we are to avoid backsliding, advocates for innovation, growth and abundance must defeat the doomers."
When a culture loses confidence in itself. Of course, the de-growth and neo-Malthusians will be happy

Two centuries of vibecessions - "Economic sentiment positively predicts growth (and the signal is getting stronger) while non-economic sentiment predicts it negatively (and is getting weaker)... But to Alphaville’s eyes the most interesting aspect is how both economic and non-economic sentiment has collapsed over the past 50 years, despite far fewer economic setbacks... eyeballing the chart above, it seems like the falling frequency of recessions might have meant that the sentiment impact of each economic downturn is actually far sharper, and is slower to recover afterwards.  Or in other words, when recessions were just part of the weather, people shrugged them off more easily, but nowadays every one is cause for existential national angst. Perhaps we’ve all just become economic snowflakes?"

Meme - Disney Devil: "Wanna hear about my new movie, Wish? There's this powerful wizard that builds a utopian city and grants people wishes as their king. He only requires their worship. But he won't grant wishes that would have "cOnSeqUenCeS". Anyway, he's the bad guy. And there's this good guy named Sata- uhh, I mean a harmless little girl. She wants the wishing powers to herself so that she can grant wishes that don't even make sense. But the selfish wizard won't give away his powers! So she has to go on a journey to defeat the wizard and..."

'Good Samaritan's nightmare': Renowned Niagara winemaker's killer found not criminally responsible - "A Hamilton man has been found not criminally responsible for stabbing and killing a stranger — renowned Niagara winemaker Paul Pender — who tried to help him in early 2022.  Court documents from the trial state when Bradley House stabbed the 54-year-old head winemaker for Tawse Wine and Spirits outside Pender's cottage in Selkirk, Ont., House was "incapable" of rational thought and knowing what he did was morally wrong.  House, who pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder, used drugs before the stabbing and had a history of mental health issues.  Crown attorney Gabe Settimi had argued the stabbing was drug induced while House's lawyers, Beth Bromberg and Kristian Ferreira, argued the stabbing was caused by his mental health issues and delusions."
Of course, if you don't want to help people in need, you are a heartless monster

Links - 8th February 2024 (2 - General Wokeness)

Race, class, and criminal adjudication: Is the US criminal justice system as biased as is often assumed? A meta-analytic review - "It is widely reported that the US criminal justice system is systematically biased in regard to criminal adjudication based on race and class. Specifically, there is concern that Black and Latino defendants as well as poorer defendants receive harsher sentences than Whites or Asians or wealthier defendants. We tested this in a meta-analytic review of 51 studies including 120 effect sizes. Several databases in psychology, criminal justice and medicine were searched for relevant articles. Overall results suggested that neither class nor race biases for criminal adjudications for either violent or property crimes could be reliably detected. For all crimes, effect sizes (in terms of r) for Black vs White comparisons were.054, for Latinos vs Whites, 0.057 and for Asians vs Whites −0.028. There was significant heterogeneity between studies, particularly for Asian vs White comparisons. Effect sizes were smaller than our evidentiary threshold, indicating they are indistinguishable from statistical noise. For drug crimes, evidentiary standards were met, although effect sizes were very small. Better quality studies were less likely to produce results supportive of disparities. Studies with citation bias produced higher effect sizes than did studies without citation bias suggesting that researcher expectancy effects may be driving some outcomes in this field, resulting in an overestimation of true effects. Taken together, these results do not support beliefs that the US criminal justice system is systemically biased at current. Negativity bias and the overinterpretation of statistically significant “noise” from large sample studies appear to have allowed the perception or bias to be maintained among scholars, despite a weak evidentiary base. Suggestions for improvement in this field are offered. Narratives of “systemic racism” as relates to the criminal justice system do not appear to be a constructive framework from which to understand this nuanced issue."
Of course, nowadays if a "minority" population is disproportionately affected by a problem, this is considered injustice and due to discrimination, even if there's no procedural injustice

Genetic confounding - "When you hear "privilege" or "discrimination" always think "genetic confounding" or risk wasting billions on futile efforts"
There're 29 studies linked here
It is more comforting for the left to believe in tabula rasa
The implications for left wing economics are also interesting

Displacement, Diversity, and Mobility: Career Impacts of Japanese American Internment - "One of the largest population displacement episodes in the U.S. took place in 1942, when over 110,000 persons of Japanese origin living on the West Coast were forcibly sent away to ten internment camps for one to three years. Having lost jobs and assets, after internment they had to reassess labor market and location choices. This paper studies how internees' careers were affected in the long run. Combining Census data, camp records, and survey data I develop a predictor of a person's internment status based on Census observables. Using a difference-in-differences framework I find that internment had a positive average effect on earnings in the long run. Chiefly due to strong pre- WWII anti-Asian discrimination, the comparison group is composed of non-interned Japanese and Chinese Americans. The evidence is consistent with mechanisms related to increased occupational and geographic mobility, possibly facilitated by the camps' high economic diversity. I find no evidence of other potential drivers such as increased labor supply, or changes in cultural preferences. These findings provide evidence of labor market frictions preventing people from accessing their most productive occupations and locations, and shed light on the resilience of internees who overcame a very adverse initial shock."
Clearly, racism really destroyed their lives and they need reparations

Sexual offending runs in families: A 37-year nationwide study - "We report strong evidence of familial clustering of sexual offending, primarily accounted for by genes rather than shared environmental influences. Future research should possibly test the effectiveness of selective prevention efforts for male first-degree relatives of sexually aggressive individuals, and consider familial risk in sexual violence risk assessment."
Obviously, poverty causes crime

Final Fantasy XVI Review - Victory In The Land Of Gods And Monsters - Game Informer - "FFXVI fails to say anything new or remarkable on this front; a miss made all the more glaring given the main cast of FFXVI features few people of color. Inspired by medieval Europe, a majority-white cast commenting on and fighting against slavery and the systems that uphold it, with little insight or representation from the types of real-world people often affected by slavery, is the biggest miss of FFXVI."
Any media product that doesn't have a racial quota and doesn't shove wokeness is bad

The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization - "We talk grandly about the globalized Great Reset. We blindly accept the faddish Green New Deal. We virtue signal about defunding the police. We merely shrug at open borders. And we brag about banning fertilizers and pesticides, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and discounting Armageddon in the nuclear age — as if on autopilot we have already reached utopia.  But meanwhile, Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies in the first place. Take fuel. Europeans arrogantly lectured the world that they no longer need traditional fuels. So they shut down nuclear power plants. They stopped drilling for oil and gas. And they banned coal.  What followed was a dystopian nightmare. Europeans will burn dirty wood this winter as their civilization reverts from postmodern abundance to premodern survival.  The Biden Administration ossified oil fields. It canceled new federal oil and gas leases. It stopped pipeline construction and hectored investors to shun fossil fuels.  When scarcity naturally followed, fuel prices soared.  The middle class has now mortgaged its upward mobility to ensure that it might afford gasoline, heating oil, and skyrocketing electricity.  The duty of the Pentagon is to keep America safe by deterring enemies, reassuring allies, and winning over neutrals.  It is not to hector soldiers based on their race. It is not to indoctrinate recruits in the woke agenda. It is not to become a partisan political force.  The result of those suicidal Pentagon detours is the fiasco in Afghanistan, the aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the new bellicosity of China, and the loud threats of rogue regimes like Iran.  At home, the Biden Administration inexplicably destroyed the southern border, as if civilized nations of the past never needed such boundaries. Utter chaos followed. Three million migrants have poured into the United States. While some cross over clandestinely, others clear border stations without an adequate audit, and largely without skills, high school diplomas, or capital.  The streets of our cities are anarchical — and by intent.  Defunding the police, emptying the jails, and destroying the criminal justice system unleashed a wave of criminals. It is now open season on the weak and innocent.  America is racing backward into the 19th-century Wild West. Predators maim, kill, and rob with impunity. Felons correctly conclude that bankrupt postmodern “critical legal theory” will ensure them exemption from punishment.  Few Americans know anything about agriculture, except to expect limitless supplies of inexpensive, safe, and nutritious food at their beck and call.  But that entitlement for 330 million hungry mouths requires massive water projects, and new dams and reservoirs. Farmers rely on steady supplies of fertilizer, fuels, and chemicals. Take away that support — as green nihilists are attempting — and millions will soon go hungry, as they have since the dawn of civilization.  Perhaps nearly a million homeless now live on the streets of America. Our major cities have turned medieval with their open sewers, garbage-strewn sidewalks, and violent vagrants. So we are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism discounts all the institutions and the methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed, and sheltered America.  Instead, we arrogantly are reverting to a new feudalism as the wealthy elite — terrified of what they have wrought — selfishly retreat to their private keeps.  But the rest who suffer the consequences of elite flirtations with nihilism cannot even afford food, shelter, and fuel. And they now feel unsafe, both as individuals and as Americans."

Pitfalls of Relying on "Lived Experience" to Resolve Debates over Public Policy - "Activists, politicians, commentators, and others often say that we should judge policy issues based on the "lived experience" of members of various groups, particularly those that have been victimized by various types of injustices... one major pitfall of relying on personal "lived experience" is that it can't tell us whether the experience in question is representative... people who have experienced some type of evil do not have any special insight on how to address it... members of the groups in question often differ among themselves about how to address the wrongs they have suffered. The left can cite survivors of school shootings who say the solution is more gun control. The right, in turn, points to those who say the answer is more gun rights.   Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas are both black men who grew up in largely fatherless homes, and have experienced racism and discrimination (Thomas, perhaps more so, because he grew up in then still-segregated Georgia). Both have written eloquent memoirs based on their experiences. Yet they also have drawn very different conclusions from them... Perhaps the conundrum could be resolved by saying we should privilege the views of the majority within the group in question... But majority public opinion is often influenced by ignorance, partisanship, and a variety of other biases. That's true of a wide range of groups. Thus, we cannot assume that majority opinion within a given group is necessarily the "correct" interpretation of that group's lived experience. Admittedly, there are some situations where lived experience really does have great epistemic value. If someone claims that "X never happens," the claim can readily be refuted by citing someone who can credibly claim to have personally witnessed X. The testimony of Holocaust survivors is an important part of the evidence proving that the Holocaust actually happened (though there is a lot of other evidence, too). The testimony of former inmates of Chinese concentration camps for Uighurs gives the lie to Chinese government claims that such camps do not exist. At the same time, however, Holocaust survivors rarely have any special insight into how to prevent similar atrocities from occurring again... subjective feelings are rarely enough to base policy decisions on. And a person who cannot grasp the subjective experience of being a concentration camp inmate or a victim of racial discrimination, can nevertheless still come to understand why these are grave injustices...  if the perceived lived experience of women or racial minorities must be privileged when it comes to wrongs members of those groups believe they have suffered, the same logic applies to other groups, as well.  For every left-wing life experience narrative, there is a right-wing one that can be used to bolster the other side—and vice versa. If we want to get at the truth, we cannot give a privileged status to either"
The left hates the lived experience of those who have suffered side effects from covid vaccines, or white victims of racism

Lived Experiences Aren’t Special - "the Facebook group for the news website Vox bans “comments that invalidate the lived experiences of group members.”... let’s suppose that I made the argument that smoking causes cancer, and that I backed this up with a mountain of scientific data and peer-reviewed studies. Now suppose that someone responded to all of this with the following: “But my grandpa Bob smoked cigarettes all of his life and never developed cancer! So smoking doesn’t cause cancer after all!” Would you be convinced by this reply? I hope not... Most students have no difficulty seeing this point, perhaps because the link between smoking and cancer has been made abundantly clear to them. Yet students will often turn around and commit this error later on when talking about issues that they might have a personal stake in... it’s not just progressive activists who will build cases on experiences or anecdotes. When others do it, the reasoning is equally flimsy. But progressive activists are unique in that they view these experiences as sacred and unquestionable. While most recognize that experiences are useful illustrative tools, lived experiences take on the status of quasi-divine revelation for them... Either lived experiences have special weight on their own merits, or they have special weight within the context of a larger postmodern epistemic system. If the former, then according special weight to lived experiences amounts to nothing more than fallacious statistical reasoning. If the latter, then it is circular reasoning, which is also fallacious."
Left wingers always get upset when I mention the cigarette smoking and lung cancer example

The Poverty of "Lived Experiences" - "A “Lived Experience” is an event that has been interpreted by Woke Folk as manifesting oppression: i.e, while I was walking down the street, someone bumped into my shoulder without stopping to apologize because they were racist. This is the difference between an experience and a “Lived Experience;” the former is an empirical claim that relays an event that is independently verifiable and is thus subject to scrutiny under public reason. The latter is a phenomenological claim which colors an event with intentionality, or its “aboutness relation;” and crucially, that relation is not subject to independent scrutiny. The empiricist reports on an event that occurred at some point in time and space; the phenomenologist relays the meaning of that event as interpreted by the phenomenologist...   Matters which are of interest to those who analyze the truth of empirical claims have unambiguously right and wrong answers, and matters which are of interest to those who evaluate textual interpretations have no such answers. It is a category error to attempt to apply the equations of force and motion to the question of how to properly interpret the ending of Anna Karenina, and it is similarly erroneous to attempt to apply to the tools of literary criticism to the question of how much rocket fuel needs to be loaded onto a spaceship. It is this category error that is central to the problems of Woke Folks’ understanding of “Lived Experiences” (as well as much of the contents of social science research which rely on interpretive methodology- a discussion for another time.)... It is this latter question of what it means to “know” something that represents the point of greatest philosophical divergence between Woke Folk and political dissidents, as the former hold to radically subjectivist accounts of knowledge whilst the latter insist upon at least some measure of objectivity. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the epistemic chasm that separates Woke Folk from political dissidents; indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that if this epistemic dispute were to be resolved immediately, the Culture War would end tomorrow.  The problem is that Woke Folk are radically skeptical of objectivity; they do not believe that it is possible to acquire knowledge of the world in a manner that stands independently of particular social values. A detailed exposition of how their epistemology is derived lies beyond the scope of this article, as does a comprehensive critique of it; for the present purposes, it is sufficient to note that Woke Folk believe in a plurality of “knowledges” that are dependent upon membership in particular demographics, and that “objectivity” is just the name given by straight white males to their own particular type of “knowledge.”... y pivoting from standards of discourse that are universally and independently accountable to our senses and reason, to standards of discourse in which the conclusions that are rendered are not open to challenge or confrontation from the outside, Woke Folk aim to introduce ideas that are effectively immune from criticism. Under a paradigm that values reason and evidence, an interlocutor is welcomed to challenge ideas in a fashion that allows anyone from any walk of life to evaluate concepts. But under a paradigm in which “Lived Experiences,” which are the subjective interpretations of events from one’s demographically-dependent base of “knowledge,” are held as immutable and not open to discussion or debate, all interlocutors are obligated to listen and believe."

Meme - James Lindsay, anti-Fascist @ConceptualJames: "Remember, the Woke listed "2+2=4" explicitly as "white supremacy in math education."
Heather Theijsmeijer @HTheijsmeijer: "There are many math education practices that we (white folk) don't see as racist or supremacist, because they are so ingrained in our background and experiences (and we have been the ones to benefit from them). Thanks, @Jason_To for shining a light on these."
"White Supremacy in Math Education
"2 + 2 = 4"

Meme - Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630: "If all white people are responsible for "Jim Crow" all Black people are responsible for "Black crime" - and all men for rape, women for infanticide, etc. It's literally one or the other: citizens bear responsibility for the sins of their tribal members, or not."
Frank McCormick I Chalkboard Heresy @CBHeresy: "Individuals can shoot people. Demographics cannot shoot people. Ascribing collective racial guilt to an entire demographic of people is race Marxism."
"Dear White People: Stop using Dr. King as an example of a peaceful protest... YOU SHOT HIM TOO"
Power relations means never having to say you're sorry

Meme - Lucky: "I think it would be cool to own some slaves"
*crowd boos*
"Don't worry, I'd only want to have white slaves"
*crowd cheers*
"Because they'd be the most reliable"
*crowd boos*

Right Fragility: Trumpists Adopt Woke Habits - The Atlantic - "Some on the hard left believe that it is wrong to generalize about groups, but quite readily delineate “whites” and “whiteness” as unitary categories. Some leftist education reformers justify racial-preference policies on a quest for diverse views in classrooms, even as they consider it racist if Black students are expected to represent their “diversity” in classroom discussions. This tension is not considered inconvenient as long as both phenomena are processed as countering racism: fostering diverse views to decenter whiteness, and countering white supremacy by pushing back at unfair expectations. To question any of this is to not “get it,” because the overriding principle of battling white privilege is sacrosanct even in the face of logic."

People of Color Have Agency - "Several times in my life I have gotten into a fight with other members of the anti-imperialist left over a question that I would not ordinarily consider a question: was Japan an imperial power?  I felt (and feel) that there was not much to debate. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Japan engaged in what would be seen, in any European context, as straightforwardly imperialist behavior... I know people who will unapologetically tell you that there is no such thing as a historical crime conducted by people of color that they are themselves ultimately morally responsible for... The arguments as I understand them include the idea that British and other European actions in China provoked Chinese behavior that in turn provoked Japan’s behavior which we called imperialism, that Japan’s expansionism can be excused because they suffered from land and resource constraints other expansionistic powers did not, that Japan would never have thought to engage in these behaviors if they hadn’t seen the European example first…. One way or another, all roads lead to a world where white people were responsible for Japanese rulers ordering invasion after invasion, slaughtering local populations, and raping local women, where the Japanese committed war crimes and yet were blameless. Blameless - and thus powerless. This is, on the face of it, anti-white ideology - all of the bad stuff in the world happens as a direct result of white actions, white power. Yet I have always felt that there’s something else going on in these debates. I suspect that placing all of the blame for historical crimes on white people is strangely comforting for white leftists: it advances a vision of the world where only white people matter... All of this to score meaningless political points in debates about inequality and injustice.... this condition has been generalized to domestic politics too: in the liberal mind of 2021, white people do, people of color are done to. Were I a person of color, I would find this impossibly insulting... you can’t expect Black students to follow such rules, as they are too damaged by white supremacy to comply. I find this attitude, which I heard from both Black people and white, to be really ugly. Quite racist, in fact. You really have to marvel at where we’ve come in race relations in this country when “Black people are incapable of following rules” is represented as an antiracist position... should progressives view Black people and other people of color as empowered adults with the capacity to make their own decisions, and thus as responsible for the consequences of those decisions, or as noble, permanent victims?  Worth saying, of course, that the large majority of Black people in this country live their lives every day without breaking such rules - including most Black Smith students. But to recognize this is to give the lie to the proffered defense. We can, I think, generalize this in some ways. The movement that I grew up in that would eventually come to be called the LGBTQ movement once held that queer people were strong, that they were so much stronger than they were given credit for by society. The foundational assumption of the LGBTQ movement of today is that people in those communities are permanently and existentially weak; any insult or injury to them, no matter how small, will inevitably be a life-altering trauma... This is not progress... Many seem to think that their duty, as defined in the past year of post-George Floyd America, is to simply pretend that crime does not exist as a political issue... Consider this “study” out of the University of Michigan. The authors launched it with great fanfare, particularly claiming that this report debunks the idea that Black men have committed many of the anti-Asian crimes that have been so much in the news lately. How did they arrive at this conclusion? By defining what counts as a hate incident in utterly absurd ways. The report aggregates statements the researchers consider racist with actual violent incidents, leading to (for example) a gross equivalence between the vicious beating of an elderly Asian man with a cruise line refusing to serve those with passports from China and Macau. Of the 184 listed incidents, 55 are just Trump saying his usual looney anti-China shit!... this dishonest aggregation allows them to release headline numbers that show that Black men are responsible for a low percentage of the incidents... One of the biggest problems with this condescending insistence that people of color are permanent victims is that insisting that they have no ability to make change in the world hinders our ability to make intelligent determinations about choices of relevance to them moving forward. The existence (and persistence) of challenges to nations that were once colonized is routinely chalked up 100% to the influence of the imperialists who were responsible, in the circles in which I run... Consider, for example, Botswana and Burkina [edit: Burkina, not Burkini] Faso. Both are African countries that suffered under imperialism for about 80 years, Botswana under the English, Burkina Faso under the French. Both are landlocked, which is typically seen as a significant disadvantage to development. Both must import their oil and do not have the kind of energy wealth that fast-rising African nations like Gabon enjoy. Both count mining of valuable minerals as their major economic driver and have, at times, struggled to diversify. Both face many of the basic challenges to African nations writ large, such as a lack of transportation and telecommunications infrastructure. Yet despite these similarities, their internal conditions are very different. Botswana is flourishing while Burkina Faso struggles... how can you derive meaningful lessons for the rest of the continent from this difference if you insist that imperialism determines everything?...  to act as though everything that happens in Africa is an expression of the crimes of white people inherently devalues the hard work and sound choices of countries like Botswana. And for what? To insert white people into every conversation? To ensure that every political discussion inevitably becomes a disquisition on the habits of Europeans, who many critics correctly say are overrepresented in published history?... when Asian Americans who are not political obsessives look at the news about these attacks, then read in the newspaper where some elite liberal explains that Black people have nothing to do with it, it does not convince them. It makes them more suspicious of all progressive arguments and leaves them subject to conspiratorial thinking."
The anti-imperialist left don't hate imperialism - they hate the West/white people
Another example of how criticising China is considered racism / racist

School indoctrination is turning British youth woke – and Tories remain silent - "Contrary to the fairy tales Conservative politicians tell themselves, these young people will not change their views as they pass through milestones like taking a job, owning a home, or having children. The woke revolution is cultural, not material. Consider the findings of my recent Policy Exchange reports on the politics of young Britons and public opinion on culture war issues. Among survey respondents under 26, more were opposed to than supportive of the vice-chancellor of Sussex University’s defence of the academic freedom of gender-critical philosopher Kathleen Stock, who was hounded by a mob of campus trans activists. This age group is evenly divided between those who want J K Rowling dropped by her publisher and those who think she should stay, or between those who want Churchill’s statue to be removed or for it to remain in Parliament Square. By contrast, those over 50 support Rowling and Churchill by an overwhelming 85 to five margin.  Young people are influenced by social media, but schools play an important part in reinforcing woke beliefs. A clear majority of British schoolchildren are being indoctrinated with cultural socialist ideas. Among the 18-year-olds I sampled, 63 per cent were taught or heard from an adult at school about at least one of “white privilege”, “unconscious bias” or “systemic racism” – three concepts derived from critical race theory. If we include radical feminist ideas such as “patriarchy” or the idea of many genders, this rises to 78 per cent. Those who have been taught more of these critical social justice (CSJ) ideas are more likely to favour political correctness as a way of protecting disadvantaged groups, rather than viewing PC as stifling free expression. Those young people who dissent from orthodoxy do so at their own risk, and the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) agenda forces them to self-censor. A majority of Right-leaning young people who said they were taught at least three of five CSJ concepts worried about being expelled or punished for voicing their opinions. Nearly half of Right-leaning employees under 35 who have taken diversity training worry about being fired or losing their reputation. Peer pressure is often immense, adding to institutional sanctions. The vast majority of young people support Remain, and only a third of Remainer youth say they would date a Leave supporter. Those who discriminate in dating are also far more likely to discriminate in hiring. Eight in 10 young Remainers who say they would be “very uncomfortable” dating a Leaver say, all else being equal, that they would favour a Remainer over a Leaver for a job. As Ed West remarks in his book Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, there is a powerful anti-Tory youth culture, reproduced in the media and education system, with the momentum of two decades behind it. This outlook has turned more strident among the under-25s as politics becomes moralised into a cosmic struggle between good and evil. No wonder the 2019 election revealed an unprecedented 43-point partisan gap between the voting patterns of the over-65s and under-25s. This is not about “generation rent” failing to achieve middle-class material goals like home ownership or a family. Neither housing tenure nor marital status makes much difference to attitudes toward free speech or the British past when you control for education, age and other factors. While there is evidence that people shift 20 points to the Right over their lifetime, this is nowhere near enough to make up for the Tories’ current deficit among those under 35... My work shows that the public opposes wokeness by more than two to one across 25 issues, and these questions split the Left while uniting the Right. Yet the Tories seem incapable of tacking the spread of cultural socialism in schools, the NHS, the police and civil service. Conservative MPs lack both the conviction and courage to act, unlike their US Republican counterparts like Ron DeSantis. Too many are business liberals who pray at the altar of economic dynamism and care little about the country’s culture and traditions. This is reflected in the unprecedented net migration figure of over half a million and the years-long inattention to the flow of asylum seekers crossing the Channel.  If most Britons no longer believe in freedom of speech or scientific reason and view our past as a racist nightmare, this is not some “culture war” sideshow. It undermines the very essence of British civilisation."

Iraq's Jews, Nazis and the Arab World (what Ethnic Cleansing really looks like)

Terrorism supporters keep claiming that history didn't start on October 7th. Too bad they won't like the history before that either:

 

Faerie 🧡 on X

The Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, in which the combined population of the Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa (excluding Israel) was reduced from about 900,000 in 1948 to under 8,000 today, and approximately 600,000 of them became citizens of Israel.

Did you know the biggest Jewish community in the Middle East was in Baghdad. Baghdad 'pauperized' its Jews and forced them to leave for the Jewish state in 1951-1952

After Adolf Hitler’s defeat in May 1945, many Nazis melted away from the Reich. They were smuggled out by organisations like the infamous Odessa group & the Catholic lay network Intermarium, as well as the CIA and KGB. They ensured the continuation of the Nazi legacy in the postwar Arab world.

Egypt was a prime destination for German Nazi relocation in the Arab world. Dr. Aribert Heim was notoriously known as “Dr. Death” for his grotesque medical experiments on Jewish prisoners in the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen concentration camps. He was fond of surgical procedures including organ removals without anesthesia, injecting gasoline into prisoners to observe the manner of death, and decapitating Jews with healthy teeth so he could cook the skulls clean to make desk decorations. Dr. Heim converted to Islam and became “Uncle Tarek” Hussein Farid in Cairo, Egypt, where he lived a happy life as a medical doctor for the Egyptian police.  I kid you not .

2 of Goebbels’s Nazi propagandists, Alfred Zingler & Dr. Johann von Leers, became Mahmoud Saleh & Omar Amin & worked in the Egyptian Information Department. In 1955, Zingler and von Leers helped establish the virulently anti-Semitic Institute for the Study of Zionism in Cairo. Hans Appler, another Goebbels propagandist, became Saleh Shafar who, in 1955, became an expert for an Egyptian unit specializing in anti-Jewish & anti-Zionist hate propaganda. Erich Altern, a Gestapo agent, Himmler coordinator in Poland, and expert in Jewish affairs, became Ali Bella, working as a military instructor in training camps for Palestinian terrorists.

A German newspaper estimated there were fully 2,000 Nazis working openly and under state protection in Egypt.  Franz Bartel, an assistant Gestapo chief in Katowice, Poland, became El Hussein and a member of Egypt’s Ministry of Information. Hans Becher, a Gestapo agent in Vienna, became a police instructor in Cairo. Wilhelm Boerner, a brutal Mauthausen guard, became Ali Ben Keshir, working in the Egyptian Interior Ministry and as an instructor for a Palestinian terrorist group. Egyptian society was so enamored with the Nazi war against the Jews that a young army officer felt compelled to write a postwar letter to Hitler via the Cairo weekly, Al Musawwar, as though Hitler were still alive.

Egypt was hardly alone in reinventing the Nazi war against the Jews. German Nazis also took up postwar positions of influence in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. Iraq, long a Nazi Arab stronghold, was arguably among the most agitated in the Arab world. From the moment Hitler took power in 1933, Iraq had distinguished itself throughout the Arab world as a top Nazi ally. The nexus was continually stoked by resident gestapo agents such as Fritz Grobba. Grobba employed such tactics as dispensing cash among politicians & deploying sexy German women among ranking members of the army. From 1933, Radio Berlin began broadcasting hate messages in Arabic including fallacious reports about non-existent Jewish outrages in Palestine. Grobba, cultivated many Iraqis as surrogate Nazis. Iraqi Arab Hitler-style youth marched in Nuremburg torch light parades hosted by their Berlin counterparts. German was taught in Iraqi schools. When WW II broke out in 1939, Nazism became a fervent cause among many Iraqis. In May 1941, Iraqi fascists backed by popular support tried to overthrow the pro-Western monarchy & seize British oil fields in Iraq to facilitate the oil-dependent German advance . They failed , so in Baghdad decided to do the next best thing, exterminate its Jews. Jews were ordered to stay in their homes, their doors were marked with a red hamsa. At the last minute, the extermination plot fell apart. The coup leaders fled . In that power vacuum on June 1-2, 1941, dejected swarms of soldiers, in concert with police, common criminals and nondescript mobs rampaged through Baghdad hunting for Jews. They were easily found. Hundreds of Jews were cut down by sword and rifle, some decapitated. Babies were sliced in half and thrown into the Tigris river. Girls were raped in front of their parents. Parents were mercilessly killed in front of their children. Hundreds of Jewish homes and businesses were looted, then burned. The carnage continued unabated for almost two days until finally the British-backed monarchy was induced to restore order. This Holocaust-era pogrom became known as the Farhud. In Arabic, it means “violent dispossession.”  Throughout the last years of the war, the murder spree was celebrated across the Arab world and in German ceremonies. At war’s end, in mid-1945, hundreds of thousands of dispossessed European survivors emerged from their ghettos, concentration camps, and forests, desperate to enter Jewish Palestine to restart their lives. However, rather than striking humanitarian chords in Iraq, the European Jewish plight only heightened hatred against Jews, especially in Iraq. Many mainstream Arabs resented and belittled the Holocaust as nothing more than a ploy for expanding Jewish Palestine’s population. This view was little more than a continuation of the virulent wartime preaching of Hitler ally Haj Amin al-Husseini, aka the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Many Iraqis seemed driven more by their obsession with Jewish Palestine and perpetuating Nazi precepts and anti-Jewish campaign than by a desire to rebuild their country or strengthen their democracy. Everything escalated & in February 1947, when the UN agreed to vote on the question of Palestine’s partition. The 1937 Peel Commission’s recommendation for partition had now evolved from a white piece of paper into a binding international ballot among the world’s governments.

The possibility of a legitimised Jewish state in the midst of Arab lands was unthinkable. The Palestine conflict still dominated & defined the Iraqi national agenda, paralysing Iraq’s other vital needs, such as the economy, infrastructure, health services, and education. The country’s newspapers warned that if “the Zionist entity” came into nationhood, no Iraqi government could control the Arab streets in Baghdad. Uniformly, the Arab regimes, including the Baghdad government, officially threatened that if the UN dared vote yes to partition, the Arabs would exact reprisals against approx 850,000 Jews who lived in countries throughout the extended Middle East & other Arab countries. Violence against Iraqi Jews intensified in the months leading up to the vote. For example, on May 9, 1947, a Bagdhad mob killed a hapless Jewish man after hysterical accusations that he gave poisoned candy to Arab children. In the Jewish quarter of Fallujah, homes were ransacked & Jews were compelled to move in with friends and relatives in Baghdad. Jewish “donations” were extorted and sent to Palestinian Arabs. The names of the “donors” were read on the radio to encourage more of the same. Yet the Jews still deluded themselves that as loyal Iraqis, they belonged in the nation where they had dwelled for 2,600 years. This hardship would pass, they believed. The Jewish Agency emissary in Iraq, encouraging relocation to the Jewish state, reported back to Jerusalem: “No attention is paid [by the Jews] to the frightful manifestations of hostility around them, which place all Jews on the verge of a volcano about to erupt.”

On November 29, 1947, the UN voted 33 yes, 13 no, with 10 abstentions, to create two states: one Palestinian Arab, the other Jewish.  Once the UN vote registered, a new anti-Jewish campaign exploded in Iraq. This time, it wasn’t just pogroms but systematic pauperisation, taking a cue from the confiscatory techniques developed by the Nazis who had now infested the government. Jews were charged with trumped-up offenses and fined exorbitant amounts of money . All the while, mob chants of “death to the Jews” became ever more commonplace.  Israel was set to declare its independence on May 14, 1948. In April 1948, Iraq shut down the Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline, thereby slashing its own income from oil royalties. Production at the Kirkuk field was immediately cut by 25 percent, from 4.3 million tons annually to 3.1 million tons. 

The pipeline closure convulsed the delicate negotiations between the Baghdad regime and the British Petroleum controlled Iraq Petroleum Company over a number of issues, such as calculation of royalties in gold as compared to sterling, which had recently declined in value.  By necessity, the question of hiring Iraqis as key company officers, and even a much-needed £3 million IPC loan to the Iraq government, were also sent to the back burner. In Iraq’s view, business and the national economy were overshadowed by the need to confront Israel.

The day after Israel declared its independence, on May 15, 1948, the new nation was invaded from all sides by armies contributed by most of the Arab states. It was not termed a war of liberation by the Arab leadership but a war of utter extermination. “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres,” promised Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League.

Iraq’s military forces saw limited action. Martial law was imposed by Baghdad, so the dismal battle news was censored. The Arab armies, although more numerous, and rich in death rhetoric, were poorly organized, disunified, and militarily unprepared. Israel was not defeated. The UN negotiated and implemented an armistice with Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Only Iraq refused to sign, continuing its state of war and demanding what it called “a second round,” or another chance to fight.

Ironically, as a result of the war, Israel now controlled even more of the land of Palestine. It was very convenient to once again blame Iraq’s Jews and Zionist gangs for this latest military disaster.

On July 19, 1948, Iraq amended penal code Law 51 against anarchy, immorality, and communism, adding the word “Zionism.” Zionism itself now became a crime, punishable by up to seven years in prison. As every Jew was thought to be a Zionist, every Jew was thereby criminalised . Only two Muslim witnesses were needed to denounce a Jew, with virtually no avenue of appeal.  In urban sweeps, thousands of Jewish homes were searched for secret caches of money thought destined for Israel. Frequently this necessitated demolishing walls as part of the search

1 man was sentenced to 5 years hard labour for possessing a scrap of paper with an Old Testament Hebrew inscription; the paper was presumed to be a coded Zionist message. 100’s of Jews were arrested, forced to confess tortured , punished financially, & sentenced to jail terms

The greatest shock to the Jewish community occurred when the single wealthiest Jew in Iraq, Ford automobile importer Shafiq Ades, was accused of sending cars to Israel. Ades was tried by a military tribunal, quickly found guilty, fined $20 million and handed a death sentence.  

His entire estate was liquidated. A few days later, on September 23, 1948, Ades was publicly hanged in Basra. His body was allowed to languish in the square for hours, to be abused by the celebrating crowds.

Many more arrests, executions, and confiscations followed. In October, all Jews — an estimated 1,500 — were summarily dismissed from their government positions. This satisfied those with animus against the Jews .  It also crippled key infrastructure the Irrigation Department, the Basra port, the Telephone and Telegraph Office, and the Railways Administration. About 25% of the Basra port staff suddenly became unavailable. Some 350 Jewish workers were dismissed from the Railway Administration alone; there was no one to replace them or to train replacements. Workers were imported from Pakistan. The Jewish banks, key to foreign commerce, lost their licenses to import money.

Soon, the familiar sequence of Nazi-style pauperization began. Once a prosperous, generously spending community, Iraqi Jews stopped purchasing & general spending, from the bazaars to the restaurants. Jewish businesses were boycotted; their owners were arrested; funds dried up. Many Jewish firms went out of business. Arab employees soon became ex-employees, which only further punished the weakened economy. Jewish government employees, highly skilled were now destitute and reduced to selling matches on the streets to avoid being arrested for vagrancy. Jewish home values dropped by 80%. The national treasury was crippled as a result of a 50% drop in oil revenues due to the Haifa line shutdown and the considerable military expenditures for the unproductive venture against Israel in the 1948 war.

The once genteel and gracious life of Jews in Iraq was about to terminate. The Zionists had seen the process during prior years in Germany, Austria, Poland, Holland, Hungary, and elsewhere. Now it was time for the Zionist underground to step up its activities.  It had been smuggling Jews out of Iraq for years, generally through Transjordan and Lebanon. The war for Israeli independence had obstructed those westward routes. The refugee caravans now looked east to Iran. The first 26 people were smuggled through in November 1948, even though Islamic Iran had not recognized Israel. Now, the transit operation would not be limited to dozens but to thousands. A little bribery helped immensely ! $450,000 was given, mainly to the Iranian prime minister, but also to other government officials & media sources. Bribes in hand, Irans prime minister announced that Iran would open its doors as a grand humanitarian gesture in keeping with its 6,000 year tradition of tolerance. Iraqi Jews in large numbers were now permitted to transit via Iran. Eventually the number of such travelers rose to 1,000 per month.  With the escapees went their money and some possessions; in other words, it was a flight of capital as well as people.

This further battered Iraq’s national economy. A debate gripped Iraq. Should the Jews be expelled ? Expelling Jews to Israel would only provide more manpower to the Jewish state. On the other hand, every Jew was considered a spy and an enemy; why keep them in the country ?  Should all their economic holdings be seized ? That would only glut the market with cheap land, homes, and possessions, especially since Jews were already sacrificing their assets at just 5 or 10% of their worth — anything to extract some value and flee. One refugee recalled, “When the Jews left, they sold their possessions for pennies. A rug worth 2,000 to 3,000 dinars sold for 20 to 30 dinars.”  Moreover, the rapid subtraction of Jews from the financial, administrative, retail, and export sectors was devastating.

One day, they were just gone. Unlike Germany, a nation of 60 million where non-Jews had rushed in to fill the professional and commercial vacuum, within the small Iraqi population, in many cases, there was no one to replace the Jews — certainly not overnight.

In 1949 , an estimated 130k Jews lived in Iraq , with 90k residing in Baghdad. The Chamber of Commerce listed 2,430 member companies. A third of the board and almost all of its employees were Jewish. Jewish firms transacted 45% of the exports and nearly 75% of the imports. A quarter of all Iraqi Jews worked in transportation, such as the railways & port administration. The controller of the budget was Jewish. A key director of the Iraqi National Bank was Jewish & The Currency Office board members were all Jewish. The Foreign Currency Committee was about 95% Jewish. Over the centuries, Jews were essential to the Iraqi economy.  Do you see where this is going ? 

On March 3, 1950, to halt the uncontrolled flight of assets & people, Iraqi Prime Minister Tawfig as-Suwaydi engineered the passage of an amendment to Law 1, the Denaturalisation Act. The amendment authorised revocation of citizenship to any Jew who willingly left the country. The new measure mimicked similar legislation in Nazi Germany. Upon exit, Jewish assets were frozen but were still available to the emigrants for use within Iraq. Once Jews registered to emigrate, the decision was permanent, they were required to leave within 15 days. 

The window would not be wide. The amendment to Law 1 would expire in 1 year. The doors swung open, albeit only briefly. Iraqi officials guesstimated that 7,000 to 10,000 of the most undesirable Jews, mainly those already pauperised, would be the only ones to leave.  The wealthier Jews, officials were convinced, would never abandon their lives. The state thought it could declare “good riddance” to just a fraction of its Jewish citizens and maintain the remainder. They were wrong. 

The exit doors became floodgates. Thousands immediately registered to leave. Household by household, Jewish families finally — almost unanimously — realised that their precious 2,600-year existence in Iraq was over. In wave after wave, groups of refugees left the country via the overland route. Soon, large overcrowded refugee camps sprang up in Iran to accommodate the exodus.  Quickly it became clear that the land route was now insufficient for such a volume.

Israel’s Mossad Le-Aliya, the clandestine group invented during the Hitler-era to smuggle Jews to safety, knew an airlift was needed to rescue as many Jews as possible before Iraq changed its mind. The Mossad called in its most reliable partner for airlifting Jews: Alaska Airlines. Its president, James Wooten, had been instrumental in rescuing the Jews of Yemen just after the state was born. El Al, Wooten, and Alaska formed a new airline with a new identity called NEAT. The newly formed Near East Air Transport (NEAT) was born . Israeli ownership was hidden, so NEAT appeared to be strictly an Alaska Airlines venture. Israel’s original passenger projections vastly exceeded anything that the stunned Iraqi government officials had contemplated.

Israel envisioned flying out about half the Iraqi Jewish population — 40,000 the first year, and more thereafter, for a total of 60,000. Flights would operate through Nicosia, Cyprus, or possibly direct to Tel Aviv if the fact of Israel-bound flights could be kept secret. NEAT needed an Iraqi partner to secure charter rights in Iraq. The perfect partner was Iraq Tours, based in Baghdad. Who was the chairman of Iraq Tours? It was Iraq’s Prime Minister Tawfig as-Suwaydi, the man who had engineered Law 1, the Denaturalisation Act.

On May 19, 1950, the first 175 Jews were airlifted out of Iraq. Israel at first called the rescue Operation Ali Baba, it later became known as Operation Ezra & Nehemiah, for the prophets who had led the Jews of Babylon out of exile back to Israel millennia before. Within days of the airlift’s inauguration, some 30 000 Jews had registered at their synagogues and were therefore required to leave Iraq within 15 days. Only 7K had completed the lengthy and redundant bureaucratic process of obtaining all the right forms, from all the right people, with all the right stamps, in all the right order ! Once at the airport, departing Jews were abused and humiliated. Rings were pulled from their hands and linings were torn from their hats as officials looked for valuables during a thorough and humiliating search. Their papers were slowly re-registered and re-stamped & only then were they approved for takeoff. Generally, an additional 6 hour ordeal. There weren’t enough hours in the day, seats on the small aircraft, or planes in the tiny NEAT fleet to possibly transfer the thousands.

Thousands who were now stateless in their own country, penniless amid all the wealth they had left behind, and reviled in the nation they had loved for two millennia.

The Iraqi government, furious over the mass departure .

They were now stateless refugees, devoid of rights in Iraq & essentially all Zionist criminals ! Many were homeless & sleeping on the streets. Baghdad’s government announced that if these Jews were not removed swiftly the government was to move them into concentration camps.

The very phrase “concentration camp,” coming on the heels of the Holocaust, was chilling.  More planes were needed. More firms were needed. The British wanted their national airlines, BOAC and BEA, to participate in the lucrative airlift. The Iraqis also wanted their national airline, Iraqi Airways, to join the project. So Iraqi Airways was given the ground maintenance contract, 30 dinars for every flight. British planes were used, but with a 7.7 percent fee to Iraqi Airways.

Who was the director-general of Iraqi Airways? It was Sabah Said, the son of the re-ascended Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Said; the prime minister’s son received an additional 5.5 percent “special fee.”

Israel’s fragile infrastructure was now so strained it could barely accept any more Iraqi refugees. Scores of thousands of refugees were streaming in from war-ravaged Europe as well as other Arab nations. Israel did not know whether it had enough tents, let alone housing units. The Jewish state tried to negotiate for fewer refugees per month. Nuri Said now realised that his 120,000 captive Jews constituted more than just undesirables. These Jews could be turned into a demographic weapon against Israel.

In March 1951, Nuri engineered another statute, Law 5, freezing all the assets of the Jews who were denaturalised by the previous law. Those seizures were deemed a “freezing” of accounts, not legal confiscation; so under international law, the assets could never be claimed. Law 5 was concocted in secret; leading government officials only learned about it just before the vote. As the measure was being ratified, Baghdad’s telephones went dead so desperate Jews wouldn’t learn of the new law & use precious moments to transfer or save their property.

To make sure Jews could not touch their funds, the government ordered the banks closed for three , 120k Jews would arrive in Israel penniless with no hope of recovering their former wealth. Nuri demanded that Israel absorb 10k refugees per month.This was to intensify the strain on Israel’s resources. Exacerbating the crisis, Nuri ruled that as of May 31, 1951, no more exit visas would be issued. If Israel would not accept these stateless enemies now, the concentration camps would be readied. 

Nuri clearly expected the Jewish state to crack beneath the weight of the humanitarian effort. Numbers negotiation commenced between Iraqi and Israeli go-betweens. However, Nuri was adamant that the Jews must transfer en masse.  

Jewish Agency emissaries in the field confirmed the dire conditions of refugees who would now arrive with nothing. The number of destitute people was growing .After the passing of this law, 80% were penniless and unable to even cover the cost of their emigration.

Israeli foreign minister Moshe Sharett vociferously condemned Iraq’s extortion and state-sponsored theft. Estimates of the value of Iraqi Jewry’s blocked assets ranged from 6 million to 12 million dinars or, at its highest valuation, some $300 million in 21st century money. Sharett swore that Israel “considers this act of robbery by force of law to be the continuation of the evil oppression which Iraq has always practiced against defenseless minorities... We have a reckoning to conduct with the Arab world as to the compensation due to Arabs who left Israeli territory and abandoned their property there because of the war of the Arab world against our state. The act perpetrated by the Iraqi kingdom against the property of Jews that have not transgressed against Iraqi law, and have not undermined her status or plotted against her, forces us to combine the two accounts. Hence,” Sharett declared, “the government has decided to inform the appropriate UN institution & I proclaim this publicly, that the value of the Jewish property frozen in Iraq will be taken into account by us in calculating the sum of the compensation we have agreed to pay to Arabs who abandoned property in Israel.”  Israel had no choice but to absorb all 120,000 Iraqi Jews.

The flights increased, day and night, using twin engines, four engines, any craft available, through Nicosia or direct to Tel Aviv — as many as possible, as fast as possible. In some months, as many as 15,000 people were flown.

The daily spectacle of forlorn Jews hustled into truck after truck, clutching nothing but a bag & their clothes, caused jubilation in Baghdad. The crowds gleefully stoned the trucks that delivered the refugees to the airport. The Jews were mocked every step of the way.

Between January 1950 and December 1951, Israel airlifted, bused, or otherwise smuggled out 119,788 Iraqi Jews — all but a few thousand. Within those two years. Iraq ,to its national detriment, had excised one of its most commercially, industrially, and intellectually viable groups, a group that for 2,600 years had loyally seen the three provinces of Mesopotamia as their chosen place on earth. This dispossessed group, who arrived in Israel with nothing but their memories, rose to become some of the Jewish state’s most productive citizens. 

Indeed, hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews from across the Muslim world were expelled to during those first years, some 850k in all. They transformed the Jewish state from a European haven into a true MidEast country, vastly populated with citizens of Arab countries .  

Source :
Edwin Black
New York Times bestselling author of “IBM and the Holocaust,” and “The Farhud, Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust.”"

 

This also has interesting implications for left wing economics, given that the impoverished Iraqi Jews later became so successful.

Links - 8th February 2024 (1 - Trans Mania)

Shame on the ghouls exploiting the Brianna Ghey tragedy - "two teenagers lured 16-year-old Brianna Ghey to a park near Warrington, Cheshire, under the guise of taking drugs together. Ghey was then stabbed 28 times. In the immediate aftermath of this horrific murder, many jumped to the conclusion that it must have been a hate crime, given that Ghey identified as transgender.  Cheshire Police disagreed. Transphobia was ruled out as a motive within 48 hours. Nevertheless, vigils and protests were held in Ghey’s name, including one organised in London outside the Department for Education, which the Transgender Action Block had decided was responsible for Ghey’s death. Apparently, the department had ‘deliberately created [a] trans-hostile environment’. On social media, it was also widely claimed that transphobia must have been the cause. Following the trial of the two suspects and their conviction yesterday for Ghey’s murder, we now know that the police were right to rule out transphobia as a motive... The sad truth is that had Brianna Ghey not been the victim that day, it would have been someone else. The trial has made it clear that Boy Y and Girl X were determined to kill someone. In fact, they had a whole ‘kill list’, which included the names of four other children. They had even explicitly discussed trying to hang one of the boys on the list, who seemed to be their preferred target... Yet none of this evidence from the court has stopped trans activists from claiming transphobia as a motive. Worse still, they have sought to blame Ghey’s murder on gender-critical feminists – on women whose only crime has been to stand up for their sex-based rights against the march of gender ideology. Trans activists seem to think that supporting women’s rights is tantamount to incitement to violence. When the guilty verdict came in, broadcaster and trans activist India Willoughby quickly took to X to accuse Harry Potter author JK Rowling and other gender-critical voices of ‘helping [to] kill’ Ghey. Former Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley similarly tweeted that ‘transphobia kills’. Labour MP Dawn Butler took aim at the Conservative government, accusing it of having ‘created so much hate towards the trans community’. Most absurd of all, Jolyon Maugham, the fox-beating lawyer who runs the Good Law Project, was so eager to blame ‘transphobia’ for Ghey’s murder that he did not even bother to wait for the guilty verdict. Police officers had to warn the supposedly top-flight lawyer that his baseless assertions about the killers’ motive could potentially prejudice the trial and be in contempt of court."

The cancellation of Carole Hooven - "the Archives of Sexual Behavior called “Cancel Culture”: Its Impact on Sex/Gender Teaching, Clinical Practice, and Research. It describes how Hooven was demonized to the extent that she had to take a leave from Harvard, where she was a lecturer in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, all for teaching that sex is binary... there are just two biological sexes, defined by whether their bodies are set up to produce large, immobile gametes (“females”) or small mobile gametes (“males”). There are no intermediate gametes, and thus no third sex. This is not a matter of controversy among sensible biologists.  People who are hermaphrodites, having both male and female gonadal tissue, are almost invariably sterile, and they, along with intersex individuals, comprise only about 0.018% of the population—about one person in every 5,600 individuals. If you plotted “frequency of sex” on the Y axis against “sex” on the X axis, you’d get two huge spikes at “male” and “female”, and a few blips between them representing the very rare intersex individuals and hermaphrodites. This is for all practical purposes a binary (some petulant people say that the 1/5600 people make sex not a binary, but they’re quibbling).   The sociocultural construct known as “gender” is more of a continuum, as there are now hundreds of different genders. Still, most people identify as either a member of the “male” or “female” genders, so a plot like the above, but for gender, would show two humps like a camel, one hump at male and the other at female, but a curve between them representing those who don’t identify as fully male or female. Gender is not binary, but neither is it a smooth continuous curve. It is what we call “bimodal”.  But I digress, for Hooven talked not about gender but about sex, and what she said was absolutely correct. But for that she was demonized. This is the way that the ideologues chill speech and impede biological research. If the facts don’t fit the progressive Left political program, then you just reinterpret (and mischaracterize) the facts. But, as we’ll see, the facts of biology are irrelevant to how we should treat individuals who are of different gender or are transsexual...   There are two lessons here. One is what we talked about at Stanford, and one that Luana just wrote about on Bari Weiss’s site: ideological views are preventing people from teaching and learning scientific facts, and this impedes understanding of the world. For example, if you don’t see two sexes (usually in approximately equal ratios), then you won’t go on to investigate why this happens, which turns out, according to the theory of Ronald Fisher and others, to be based on evolution and differential parental expenditure in offspring. Likewise, the greater investment of females than males in offspring, which rests ultimately on differences in gamete size, is a crucial factor in explaining sexual selection, which itself explains many of the differences between males and females of animal species in size, strength, behavior, and ornamentation.  Ideology like that experienced by Hooven impedes understanding of the world by closing off fruitful areas of investigation.  As we all know, one can’t predict whether a scientific path winds up in a blind alley or branches into a whole new area of understanding."

JB Pritzker, Jennifer Pritzker, & Synthetic Sex Identities - "One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions. I first wrote about the Pritzkers, whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call “transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.” The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises. Through investments in the techno-medical complex, where new highly medicalized sex identities are being conjured, Pritzkers and other elite donors are attempting to normalize the idea that human reproductive sex exists on a spectrum. These investments go toward creating new SSI using surgeries and drugs, and by instituting rapid language reforms to prop up these new identities and induce institutions and individuals to normalize them... In June 2002, the family announced an additional gift of $30 million to be invested in the University of Chicago’s Biological Sciences Division and School of Medicine. These investments provided the family with a bridgehead into the world of academic medicine, which it has since expanded in pursuit of a well-defined agenda centered around SSI... In 2013, around the time gender ideology reached the level of mainstream American culture, Jennifer Pritzker announced a transition to womanhood. Since then, Pritzker has used the Tawani Foundation to help fund various institutions that support the concept of a spectrum of human sexes... At least two clinics in California are now providing nonbinary surgeries and nullification surgeries for individuals who feel both male and female, or like neither... Like Stryker’s Arcus Foundation, the Pritzkers have forged a close relationship with the psychiatric establishment... Critics of the NSES standards created by the FoSE collaborative and now being implemented in Illinois under Gov. Pritzker may have concerns about a 72-page manual in which the term “anal sex” comes up 10 times and the word “intimacy” only half as often. The word “gender,” for what it’s worth, is used 270 times... what could possibly explain the abrupt drive of wealthy elites to deconstruct who and what we are and to manipulate children’s sex characteristics in clinics now spanning the globe while claiming new rights for those being deconstructed? Perhaps it is profit. Perhaps it is the pleasure of seeing one’s own personal obsessions writ large. Perhaps it is the human temptation to play God. No matter what the answer is, it seems clear that SSI will be an enduring part of America’s future."
Anti-Semites will zero in on the Jews pushing the woke agenda, while ignoring those who are against it (Tablet magazine is Jewish, for example)
The left only hate billionaires and their money influencing politics when they don't support the liberal agenda

UBC prof's top parenting tip: Let kids see penises, private parts - "An activist University of British Columbia professor is under fire for claiming young children should be exposed to adult genitals — to prepare them for seeing naked trans people. Journalism professor Katja Thieme made the comments on social media... Thieme doesn’t like it — not one bit — that some women feel uncomfortable sharing a change room with a biological male. That, she said, triggers “anti-trans activism”  “Teenage girl on the swim team sees or claims to have seen a trans person in the nude in the women’s changeroom. Her anti-trans parent or parents kick into high gear,” the academic wrote.  “They lean on coaches: Tell trans folk to change elsewhere. Coach says, no, we can’t, that’s discriminatory.  “They lean on the club admin: Send a warning message to all members that trans folk are using these facilities. Admin says, hell no, that’s crazy and would be very wrong.  “They contact Riley Gaines or other transphobes of their choice, they organize protests, events, meetings, hearings, and whatnot.”  Thieme has now locked down her Twitter profile.No wonder. One person responding on Twitter called her the “definition of grooming”"
Weird. We are told that it's a reactionary conspiracy theory that trans people are a threat to children

There are Infinite Genders. There are no genders.
It's interesting that even this article from 4 years ago claims there's a link between sex and gender, even though we're told that they are different and only people lacking in knowledge and wisdom don't know that (except when they're not different and it advantages the left to conflate them)
Someone defined gender as "a social construct related to a person's physical appearance, behaviors, and social expectations attached to that appearance". Sounds like ethnicity is really gender

Libs of TikTok on X - "BREAKING: New proposed bill in Maine says the state can take custody of a kid if the parents oppose s*x change surgery and the chemical castration of their kids"

Meme - Lia Thomas: "Now that I've conquered women's swimming, I believe my next endeavor will be the paraplegic games. And who knows, after that maybe the Special Olympics"

Meme - "If you can't say Merry Christmas, then don't demand people use your pronouns"

REDUXX on X - "Multiple female athletes dropped out of a women's martial arts tournament last week after being matched up to fight trans-identified males. In one of the women's divisions, the only participants left competing were men."
EXCLUSIVE: Women Abandon Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Tournament After Being Forced To Fight Males - "despite claiming to have had a policy in place that required female athletes to be informed, many are coming forward to reveal that NAGA has continued to pair women against trans-identified males without their knowledge and depriving them of the opportunity to opt out in many instances... professional martial artists Jayden Alexander and Ansleigh Wilk highlighted their experience being made to fight against males with no prior warning until stepping onto the mat... Both women also note that the experience of fighting Gregory was distinctly different than fighting a woman.  “The fact of the matter is that he had a man’s strength. I train with men and women and the difference is massive,” Alexander explains. “After my match with Cordelia, I sat mat-side and cried as my teammates massaged out my cramping forearms.”... most female participants feel unable to vocally protest the gender self-identification policies."

Schools shuts down claim pupil identities as a cat - "A school has clarified that none of their students “identifies as a cat or any other animal” after a classroom conversation on gender was leaked to the press.  It was reported that a dispute began at Rye College in East Sussex between a student and teacher when a 13-year-old child at was claimed to have rejected a classmate’s request to be identified as a cat."
This left winger claimed that this one claim by the school showed that the multiple examples I posted from all around the world of students identifying as cats were wrong and that no students in the world identified as cats. Furthermore, it seems schools never lie and audio recordings don't mean anything - we must trust bland corporate statements when they contradict our lying ears

Meme - Mars, The Angry Agender Jewitch: "Not a debate"
Marsi Thoroddsen: "Knowingly buying Harry Potter merch is knowingly supporting genocide."
No surprise they don't know what genocide means, since they don't know male from female

LGBTQ conversion therapy banned in Canberra as Sexuality and Gender Identity Conversion Practices Bill passes - "A bill seeking to ban LGBTQ conversion therapy in Canberra has been passed in the ACT Legislative Assembly, with Labor MLA and Uniting Church minister Gordon Ramsay choking back tears in the chamber... Kids could sue their parents."  Mr Coe said the new law had "the potential to send well-meaning parents and teachers to jail".   "Children and adolescents depend on the care and support of trusted adults and especially parents, teachers and others to help them in this journey and in this legislation there is no room for a child to safely question or explore their identity with their parents unless it's in just one direction," he said.  "This bill will mean that the only support that [young people] can receive from parents or teachers is active encouragement to pursue a transition.  "Despite what the co-sponsors of the bill have said, the bill does affect the ability of religious organisations or schools to teach the tenets of their faith.""
Poor homosexuals, who will now be convinced they are trans
So much for freedom of conscience. You're only allowed to be pushed towards the LGBTQ agenda, not away from it

Silenced teacher becomes a hero of the anti-woke resistance - "Burjoski said that her work environment was becoming increasingly woke, but she didn’t pay much attention to it, because politics wasn’t her thing. Then her troubles began, and suddenly her life got political. There would be no going back to happy anonymity, and for a dark period, it seemed there might be no going back to happiness of any kind.  On Jan. 17, 2022, during a Zoom meeting of the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB), Burjoski began a scheduled 10-minute presentation regarding what she believed were age-inappropriate additions to school libraries.  She read excerpts from two books about gender transitioning that, in her view, valorized an attitude of insouciance around medical transitioning, including the risk of infertility. Four minutes into her talk, board chair Scott Piatkowski removed her from the meeting, accusing her of violating the Human Rights Code. The following day, she was ordered to stay home and barred from speaking to colleagues or students.  Piatkowski publicly accused Burjoski of transphobia, claiming he had no choice but to expel her from the meeting. The WRDSB also filed a formal complaint and initiated a disciplinary investigation against her...  “What happened here should not happen in a democratic society,” because “the Human Rights Code does not prohibit public discussion of issues related to transgenderism or minors and transgenderism. It does not prohibit public discussion of anything.” The whole story is laid out in detail — and ancillary legal aspects summarized in a short video — on Burjoski’s website, cancelledteacher.com. Suffice to say that the clarity of the judgment as a precedent establishing that the Human Rights Code was never meant to limit public discussion is an early holiday gift to every classical liberal in Canada who is troubled by the erosion of free speech in our cultural institutions.  Judge Ramsay’s ruling should be distributed to every school board in the country. And to the legal department of every university for good measure. Let their administrations ponder the massive liability they may have been exposing themselves to by shutting down debate, especially in the arrogant, authoritarian manner in which many have done so... We all know the mantra in these legal dramas: “The process is the punishment.” And it’s true. The process is isolating, stressful and depressing, not to mention dauntingly expensive. Which is why most people in these situations fold at the prospect of fighting to the bitter — or sweet — end.  But Burjoski knew her fight was a proxy for nothing less than the future of our children’s right to an age-appropriate education and the right of parents and teachers to dissent from a divisive and illiberal pedagogy. She was scared witless, but she ran to the fire anyway.  All honour to Carolyn Burjoski, who merits our gratitude, and as well her own featured chapter in the annals of anti-woke resistance."

The movement to oppose gender activism in schools is growing - "Pamela Buffone founded the Canadian Gender Report (CGR). The group presents objective news, commentaries and reports from gender researchers in the North America and Europe, which demonstrate that the policies of the Canadian government and the views held by many in the media are extreme, both in their deference to activist-dictated policies and their indifference (even hostility) to parents’ expressed concerns over their children’s role as pedagogical guinea pigs for unproven theories. The patience and timidity that was so common among parents in the early days of the Buffones’ travails is over. The escalating fixation on “queer” activism in schools has produced a nationwide swell of protest. The recent multi-city, bullishly vigorous “1 Million March 4 Children” — which was organized by an alliance of Muslim groups, Christian social conservatives, secular classical liberals and other organizations — achieved an important goal: dissent from authoritarianism throughout the education matrix is finally perceived as a “thing.” Parents’ rights as the people who hold the primary responsibility of protecting their children from harm had better be taken seriously by politicians — or else. Bolstered by recent lawsuits around new social-transitioning rules favouring parents that were filed against the governments of Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, the timing is perfect for a just-released report from CGR, with Buffone at the editorial helm, which is in all but name a white paper for responsible legislation on a plethora of gender-identity issues.  Titled, “Canadian Schools Guidance: Towards an Evidence-based Mental Health Focused Policy,” it argues that, “The current policies on gender identity in schools need to be replaced with policies that are informed by well-established, long-standing biopsychosocial models of child and adolescent development which enable gender-questioning youth the opportunity to explore their identities without being told that they were ‘born in the wrong body.’ ” The introduction sets out the problematic issues the report will address, beginning with the fact that current policies in Canada “treat gender identity as a political and human rights issue,” but eschew “well-established research and theory on child and adolescent development,” including “underlying mental health issues with which the majority of these youth are struggling.” Schools contribute to the problem with teaching that contradicts science, and through instruction beginning “at an age where children are incapable of understanding the complex ideas within gender theory,” especially when presented “as fact.”... Chapter 6, “Social Transition without Parental Consent,” deserves special mention. The report writers argue that schools’ secretive facilitation of social transitioning (pronoun, name and physical presentation changes) goes beyond keeping confidences; it is an “active” intervention, and may have significant effects on a child’s psychological and physical functioning"

Meme - "Hey liserals, why is the Trans suicide attempt rate 41%? Because of people like me, you say? But you don't value my Opinion on virtually anything else, so how could my opinion of your 'identity' be all of the sudden so influential? Why is the suicide attempt rate of children who are severely bullied in school significantly less than 41%? Why is the suicide attempt rate of the oppressed black Americans significantly less than 41%, even during SLAVERY and Jim Crow?! Surely you aren't suggesting that you have it worse than people who were literally enslaved, right? I'm thinkin there's something else going on here!!"

Drag queen who posted about 'orgies' invited to school in 'spectacular safeguarding fail' - "A drag queen who posted on social media about "orgies" and said that "love has no age” was invited into a school in what campaigners labelled a “spectacular safeguarding fail”.  Aida H Dee, the persona behind Drag Queen Story Hour UK (DQSH), was invited to lecture 11-year-olds at Lewis School Pengam in Wales about the practice and “queerness”.  DQSH is run by Sab Samuel, a 27-year-old autistic male children's author who performs as Dee in a tight sequined dress, and has recently sparked protests in council libraries and the Tate... In 2020, Estyn, the Welsh government’s Ofsted, hailed Lewis School Pengam, founded in 1729, as an example of best practice on LGBT issues in a guide for other schools on “promoting inclusion”... Tanya Carter, spokesman for Safe Schools Alliance, a group of parents and teachers, said: “Schools have a duty to ensure they do not invite in groups and individuals which when children google them, they will encounter unsuitable and adult content... Unsuitable visitors to schools will only ever push children to even darker corners of the internet.”  The Wales-Women’s Rights Network said it was a “safeguarding fail on a spectacular level”.  Cathy Larkman, of the UK-wide Women’s Rights Network, said: “Are we really telling young men that this is what it means to be gay? That it is fair game to represent women in this way?  “Schools, and our children, would be far better served by bringing in strong aspirational gay role models for their pupils, such as lesbian fire-fighters or gay barristers.”... Estyn defended its 2020 guide as “vital to help promote and celebrate LGBT issues”."
Clearly there is no link between drag queens and pedophilia/sexualising children

Meme - "LorgarAurelian: Literally the origin of the word "bad" is old English term for troon, hermaphrodite, pederasts
bad (adj.) c. 1300, "inadequate, unsatisfactory, worthless; unfortunate;" late "wicked, evil, vicious; counterfeit;" from in surnames (William Badde, Petri Badde, Asketinus Baddecheese, Rads Badinteheved). Rare before 1400, and evil was more common until c. 1700 as the ordinary antithesis of good. It has no apparent relatives in other languages.* Possibly from Old English derogatory term beddel and its diminutive beedling "effeminate man, hermaphrodite, pederast," which probably are related to beedan "to defile.""

Meme - Gregus1032: "When I was single and on dating apps I've had several trans women message me. I told them "hey, look, if you wanna be just friends that's cool. But I'm looking for a relationship with cs women" Most of them said at one time or another "I bet I can turn you" It's just annoying."
The_AlmightyApple: "Honestly its creepy and predatory, its the same as when douchey guys try to "convert" a lesbian chick"
Damn transphobia!

Meme - "Me: Fuck, they're hot.
Friend: What gender are they?
Me: Relevance?
Friend: How can you think they're hot if you don't know what gender they are? What if you think you're going on a date with a girl and it turns out to be a guy?
Me: We date, possible sexy time, and I win.
Friend: What if you think they're a guy and they turn out to be a girl?
Me: We date, possible sexy time, and I win.
Friend: What if they end up being half way into a transition?
Me: We date, then cuddle on the couch and watch Netflix in our underwear, if they get dysphoria. If they don't, then we're back to sexy time. Either way, I still win.
Friend: What if -
Me: Listen carefully. The only answer is I win. Unless they're an asshole. Then they lose."
Clearly, gays and lesbians are assholes for refusing to date the opposite "gender".
Trans mania is anti-consent and anti-gay. This is why the LGB need to get rid of the T

Meme - ""Men wouldn't pretend to be transgender to get into women's spaces and harm women & girls."
CHRISTOPHER HAMBROOK. Lied about being transgender to stay in two women's shelters. Raped two women there: one who was deaf and one who had fled domestic abuse.
SHAWN HALLETT. Wore a wig & a dress to gain entry to.a gas station women's bathroom, where he held his phone under a cubicle wall to film women
Jacob GUERRERO. Wore a woman's wig and attached a camera to his shoes to film 12 women & girls as young as age 8 using the toilet in women's bathrooms."
JOEL HARDMAN. Wore a woman's wig and covered his beard with a mask to spy on women in shopping center toilets and make recordings
THOMAS BENSON. Convicted child sex abuser caught wearing a dress to enter the women's locker room at a public pool and approach little girls changing for swim classes.
SHANE GREEN. Convicted sex offender who falsely claimed to be trans in order to gain admission to a women's shelter, where he raped a woman.
GREGORY SCHWARTZ. Stole a pink child's dress ina department store, put it on & went into the women's bathroom, where he crawled under a stall and attempted to rape a woman.
RICHARD RENDLER. Convicted sex offender caught wearing a wig and fake breasts to enter women's bathroom in a shopping center.
JASON POMARE. Wore a dress and hid a camera in a purse to film women using the toilets in Macy's bathroom, at least twice.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ. Caught three times wearing a dress and wig to film women and a 5-yr-old girl through gaps in bathroom stalls
RODNEY PETERSEN. Wore a dress to enter a women-only dormitory on a college campus and film female students in bathrooms.
GAVIN SCoTT. Molested three female clothing shop employees after asking them to help him try on women's clothing"
TRAs claim that saying that female spaces need to be preserved is transphobic, because it's a myth that trans people are predators, yet the TRA line is that you can't question someone's gender identity (as that's gatekeeping). But of course no true trans person commits sex crimes, so it's only "obvious" in retrospect who was only pretending. Too bad for their victims