Links - 20th January 2013

"Equality has no place for genius." ― Allen Bloom

***

Alarming trend where teenaged girls shame their peers for 'dressing too slutty and wearing too much make-up' - "A deeply worrying trend, known as ‘slut-shaming,’ has taken flight in recent years, fuelled by microblogging sites such as Tumblr, as well as Facebook. In these posts, teenage girls – and sometimes boys – criticize certain body types or wardrobe choices, often being ruthless in the process. In one such post, a blogger writes with accompanying pictures: ‘Hey girls, uhm did you know – open books, NOT legs?’... One girl posted: ‘Hello citizens, did you know? This is deodorant. Use it’... In 2011, male model Cole Mohr was pictured with an outer-space background holding a sign that read: ‘Dear Girls, don’t be insecure, you don’t need make-up and nice clothes. You’re all f****** beautiful.’ In response, Tumblr user einsteinonacid posted a photo in response that read: ‘Dear boy in outer space: Don’t tell me what to do’... Last December, Swedish high school students staged a riot after a 17-year-old girl posted a photo on Instagram requesting that all ‘sluts’ were identified... Outraged, students in Gothenburg took to the streets in protest. In total, 27 young people were arrested in the riots"
"A misogynist is a man who hates women as much as women hate each other."
Is this silencing young girls' voices?
Is criticising questionable clothing choices so different from criticising a lack of deodorant use (Bonus 1: both involve stereotypes!)?
Bonus 2: This is the first feminist riot I've heard of
This fits with my theory on Why Women Hate Sluts, Prostitutes and Porn

Photos : 17 photos de familles flippantes autour de Noël - "Vous vous sentez mal dans votre peau, alors que Noël approche ? Rassurez-vous : on a retrouvé des photos de “Christmas party” qui vous feront chaud au coeur."

トヨタ　実写版　ドラえもん CM １～４総集編　-ReBORN-　TOYOTA - YouTube
Doraemon Toyota ads

9GAG - One does not simply walk into mo..oh wait. - "it's nice to see a picture like this that reminds us that Romania is not just bad government."

STAR WARS: The Old Republic - Agent voice accent inconsistenties - Page 2 - "SWTOR perfectly ilustrates why we have such primitave games now. You know this picture: FPS map design in 1993 and in 2010 http://i.imgur.com/BITmX.jpg
Same with SWTOR - three or four choices?? When I was a kid, I played RPGs with atleast (atleast!) ten choices for every conversation. Because writing doesn't consume so much money compared to voice acting. L.A. Noire - text based detective quests had so so SO much more details to investigate. Again - doing fancy face recording takes a lot of money and time. Same with FPSes - big explorable maps now take a lot of resources to create - so many different textures, sounds, etc...
Games are now primitive, but atleast they look nice!
That's why a lot of people think that PlayStation 2 era was the gold age of gaming - graphics were pretty decent, but they still didn't cost milions to make, so there were a lot more in games..."

Backlash apart, talk of combating deafness does not equate to genocide - "Perhaps the most extreme expression of this proud-to-be-deaf movement was the decision of two deaf lesbian activists, Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough, to shop around for a sperm donor born deaf. The baby they thus bred was, indeed, born as deaf, and his parents refused to have him given an implant. Faced with all this, Dimity Dornan is in full retreat, insisting she never called deafness a "scourge", and meant it to refer only to polio. She even denied she wanted to eradicate deafness, saying "deaf children will always be deaf and they should be proud of that". Oh dear. The absurd difficulties of negotiating the multicultural minefields and the politics of offence. And so do we retreat into our tribes, no longer even daring to speak."

Islam does not discriminate against transsexuals - "It is a gross exaggeration that “criminality, terrorism and all types of physical and mental abuse” are attributed to the loneliness felt by transsexual community. Transsexuals perpetrated none of the terrorism acts. We have heard that extremists and religious zealots conducted most of those acts... Islam recognises transsexuals as a group of people and if one cares to examine further, Islam provides a space for transsexuals in the line of obligatory prayers in mosques."

A Man. A Woman. Just Friends? - NYTimes.com - " doesn’t the sex thing get in the way? At times, no doubt. It’s harder for the young, of course — all those hormones, and so many of your peers are unattached. In fact, one of the most common solutions to Harry’s quandary is to have sex and then remain friends. If the sex thing gets in the way, the answer often seems to be to just get it out of the way... So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end... We have trouble, in our culture, with any love that isn’t based on sex or blood. We understand romantic relationships, and we understand family, and that’s about all we seem to understand. We have trouble with mentorship, the asymmetric love of master and apprentice, professor and student, guide and guided; we have trouble with comradeship, the bond that comes from shared, intense work; and we have trouble with friendship, at least of the intimate kind. When we imagine those relationships, we seem to have to sexualize them. Close friendships between members of the same sex, after all, are also suspect. Even Oprah has had to defend her relationship with Gayle King, and as for men and men, forget about it"

Scientists unravel why women love make-up - "Make-up contributes to building relationships with others and feelings of pleasure in women"

'Tis the season... to wear much more make-up: Women use three times as much during festive season - "Women wear around three times as much make-up during the Christmas season, according to a poll, slathering 12 products on to their faces before going on a night out. In contrast, they apply just four cosmetic items on a normal day and a mere eight on an evening out at any other time of year. Of course, the time they spend in front of the mirror increases too, with an hour needed to create the perfect look for a Christmas party or meal with friends. That’s up from 20 minutes of preening on a typical day and 40 minutes of preparation for a non-festive evening out"

Why women use makeup: implication of psychological traits in makeup functions - "makeup could support two opposite "up" functions, i.e., "camouflage" vs "seduction." Concerning their psychological profiles, results showed that women of the functional class "camouflage" are more anxious, defensive, and emotionally unstable compared to those of the functional class "seduction," who appear to be more sociable, assertive, and extroverted"

When Is Wearing Makeup A "Choice"? - "In most if not all contexts, I don't really think wearing makeup is a "choice." At least, it's not a choice in the sense of a decision where the branching options are neutral and equally weighted and carry few, if any, negative social consequences, the way making a ham sandwich or a veggie wrap for lunch is a choice. Culturally speaking, the playing field is tilted pretty heavily in makeup's favor"
Is having an abortion a choice?

The tourists held by Greek police as illegal migrants - "Jung says that outside the station the uniformed officer, without any kind of warning, turned on him again, hitting him in the face. "There were members of the public who saw what happened, like the man who works in the shop opposite the police station, but they were too afraid to help me," he says. Inside the police station, Jung says he was attacked a third time in the stairwell where there were no people or cameras... Jung was held with a number of migrants from Africa and Asia who had also been rounded up as part of the police's anti-immigration operation Xenios Zeus - named, strangely, after the ancient Greek god of hospitality... "I travelled through Azerbaijan, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Armenia but I never felt in as much danger as in Athens," he says. "Whenever people ask me if they should visit Greece I tell them to go to Turkey instead""

Complaints against wedding planners on the rise - "Enchanted Wedding is managed by a husband and wife team, Mr Ejay Reyzal and Madam Hafyza Azmi, and has been operating since 2009. Calls made to the company over three days went unanswered. E-mails sent to the wedding planners were also unanswered. But in a Berita Harian report yesterday, Mr Ejay offered a strange explanation for his absence - that he had been possessed. He said he has plans to return the money for the items which were promised but were not delivered, and that the company had no plans to close. "We will rise up with renewed vigour," he said."

India textbook says meat-eaters lie and commit sex crimes - ""They easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, they are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes," it says. The chapter, full of factual inaccuracies, refers to Eskimos (Inuit) as "lazy, sluggish and short-lived", because they live on "a diet largely of meat". It adds: "The Arabs who helped in constructing the Suez Canal lived on wheat and dates and were superior to the beef-fed Englishmen engaged in the same work.""

Rat Cascade – Futility Closet - "Joseph Barad and Edward Markoff were certainly humane -- the rat trap they patented in 1908 merely fastened a jingling necklace around the animal's neck and released it."

After Mass Effect: Redefining Videogame Storytelling - "nobody loved the original Mass Effect for the gameplay. They loved it for the story. But the storytelling technology has not received the love the gameplay has. And as storytellers, BioWare is just losing ground... Earlier, I wrote about the moment in Mass Effect when I had to choose to save just one of two lives I cared about. Five years later, that’s still one of the most poignant moments in that game. The Walking Dead achieved that intensity twice in its first episode alone. And over the next four episodes the choices became harder and more intense. I honestly had tears in my eyes as I made my final decisions playing that game... BioWare has rested on its laurels. It’s made hella money, but I feel the moment may be over for it. Someone else is on the block and they’ve drunk BioWare’s milkshake. They’ve taken the reputation for best storyteller in the business."

Cookery workshop: Anglo-Saxon recipes revealed

Student finds 'brain' in KFC meal

Norwegian authorities take away children from Indian couple because they were eating with their hands - "Authorities also complained that the parents should not be sleeping in the same bed as their infants... 'Feeding a child with the hand is normal in Indian tradition and when the mother is feeding with a spoon there could be phases when she was overfeeding the child. 'They said it was force feeding. These are basically cultural differences'... Despite the Indian government's intervention, Norwegian officials are refusing to meet the request for any further explanation... Norway's Child Protective Service has come under much scrutiny in the past for excessive behaviour in their handling of child cruelty. Lawyer Svein Kjetil Lode Svendsen said: 'There has been a report in UN in 2005 which criticized Norway for taking too many children in public care. 'The amount was 12,500 children and Norway is a small country.'"