Links - 13th May 2016

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Die Klassen: How Syrians Adapt to Life in Germany - "'I told them I don't want to claim benefits in such a degrading manner. Do you know, they stamp our hands when we go to the socio. Is that shameful? Do you know what this stamp means to us in Syria? In Syria we stamp animals. It's what we do to sheep. I am a human being. You let me in, you stamp me. And then you let me out again?'
When in Germany, do as the Syrians do. Or you're racist

Tom-dee culture in Thailand - "Webster, the 30-year-old proprietor of Bangkoklesbian.com, refuses to identify herself as a tom or dee. And when she tells Thai lesbians she’s neither, and that she’s attracted to all types of women, the reaction can range from confusion to disgust."
This is the Butch-Femme duality by another name

France says Facebook must face French law in nudity censorship case - "Facebook will have to face a censorship lawsuit over a 19th century oil painting of a woman's genitalia, a Paris appeals court ruled on Friday. The ruling favored a French teacher whose Facebook account was suspended when he posted an image (NSFW) of a famous Gustave Courbet painting called L’Origine du monde. The portrait depicts a woman naked from the waist down at a graphic angle, and it hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The teacher claimed that Facebook censored him, and he is asking for €20,000 (or about $22,500) in damages. Facebook countered that the man’s lawsuit was invalid because Facebook's Terms of Service stipulate (section 15) that all users must resolve disputes with the social network, "in the US District Court for the Northern District of California or a state court located in San Mateo County.”"
Posting L'Origine du monde gets you suspended from Facebook?!

Forest Dwellers To Be Displaced By Paris Climate Agreement - "the Paris climate agreement could indeed make millions of forest dwellers homeless. This conclusion is as a result of considerations that many developing countries will attempt to curb carbon emissions by setting aside forested areas as reserves. The experts are worried however, that the creation of national parks often leads to the removal of the people who live in these areas"

Zac Goldsmith accuses Sadiq Khan of 'giving platform and oxygen' to extremists - "He accused Mr Khan of “hiding behind Britain’s Muslims” by branding as an “Islamophobe” anyone who spotlighted his record...“He is calling Islamophobia to prevent legitimate questions being asked,” he said. “I think he is playing with fire. The questions are genuine, they are serious. They are about his willingness to share platforms with people who want to ‘drown every Israeli Jew in the sea’. “It’s about his having employed someone who believed the Lee Rigby murder was fabricated. It’s about his career before being an MP, coaching people in how to sue the police... Mr Goldsmith criticised Mr Khan for defending speakers at a 2006 protest against the publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed — including Dr Azam Tamimi, who said on TV: “Fire will be throughout the world if they don’t stop.” Tooting MP Mr Khan said later: “Speakers can get carried away but they are just flowery words.” The Tory candidate said it was “just weird” that Mr Khan spoke up for Yusuf al-Qaradawi — who reportedly supported Hamas suicide bombings — at a Commons committee meeting. And he claimed Mr Khan had spoken up for extremists who called for Jews to be driven into the sea.

Gender Differences in the Relational and Collective Bases for Trust - "A variety of research suggests that men and women differ in their interdependent orientation: whereas women tend to be more relationally interdependent, men tend to be more collectively interdependent (e.g. Gabriel & Gardner, 1999). The current study sought to investigate differences in interdependence within the domain of trust. In particular, the authors predicted that men would tend to trust individuals based on whether or not they shared group memberships. On the other hand, women were predicted to trust those who shared direct or indirect relationship connections. Results from an online trust-dilemma game supported these predictions. Implications for our understanding of the impact of gender on social identity and self-representation are discussed."

Circle of Friends or Members of a Group? Sex Differences in Relational and Collective Attachment to Groups - "In the current investigation, we studied sex differences in belonging needs by exploring men's and women's attachment to groups. Previous work has shown that women's social needs tend to be expressed in terms of relational bonds, whereas men's also have a strong collective component (e.g. Gabriel & Gardner, 1999). In this research, we asked men and women to consider one of their important group memberships and to complete Prentice, Miller, and Lightdale's (1994) group attachment scales. In two studies, findings showed that the extent to which a woman was relationally attached (i.e. felt close to the other members of her group) was sufficient to explain the group's importance to her. In contrast, men's ratings of group importance depended upon the extent of both relational and collective attachment (i.e.attached to the group identity). Implications for real-world groups are discussed"
Collectively, these 2 studies suggest that for a group to be strong, it's better to have men in it than women

Atheist Group Forces Calif. Mother to Remove Cross Honoring Dead Son - "Ann Marie Devaney placed a white Christian cross near an on-ramp to Highway 15 inLake Elsinore, Calif., after her 19-year-old son Anthony was struck and killed by a car while crossing the street there in May 2012. After two years, Devaney has agreed to remove the cross after the American Humanist Association pressured the city of Lake Elsinore, reportedly on behalf of an atheist resident who argues the cross' presence on government-owned highway is unconstitutional... "It's so petty and sad that they have to complain over removing a cross," Devaney told the local media outlet. "It's his personal preference that he was Christian. What's wrong with having a cross up?" The American Humanist Association previously sent a letter to the city of Lake Elsinore, claiming a local atheist was irked by the cross and alerted them of its presence"
Maybe this is why Americans don't like atheists

If you want to see intolerance in action, look no further than the humanists' war on faith schools – Telegraph Blogs (not currently available) - "Spearheaded by the British Humanist Association (BHA), and cheered on by liberal broadsheet newspapers and people who fancy themselves as right-on, the campaign depicts itself as a socially enlightened effort to prevent children from being split into religious camps. But in truth it is a deeply illiberal assault on the fundamental right of parents to socialise their children into the values and beliefs that they consider to be true and profound. The rights of parents over their children, and of religious communities more broadly, are being severely undermined by those who, with an Orwellian glint in their eye, would love nothing more than to rid Britain of the alleged blight of faith schools... The great irony here is that humanists often bang on about how faith schools infect their pupils with intolerant attitudes, yet they themselves exhibit extraordinary intolerance towards schools with a religious ethos. No amount of PC-sounding lingo about trying to prevent “social segregation” or seeking to “bring all children together” can disguise the fact that the war on faith schools is fundamentally a war on institutions that have the temerity to hold and teach different values to those preached by your average Guardian-reading, liberal atheist. Finding the beliefs promoted by these institutions weird and morally repulsive, anti-human humanists want the institutions shut down, or their beliefs watered down so much that they disappear into a mulch of state-enforced celebrations of all faiths as equally valid. It is the height of illiberalism to call upon the state and its agents to harry and hector those whose beliefs we don’t like. A fundamental part of religious freedom, and a key aspect of parental autonomy, is the right of parents to impart their beliefs to their offspring. And this will necessarily involve some form of discrimination – that is, parents being discriminating about whom they allow to teach their children or whom they allow their children to associate with. This was recognised by the great liberal thinker Hannah Arendt, who argued in the late 1950s: “To force parents to send their children to [a certain] school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies – the private right over their children and the social right to free association.” Under the guise of promoting “children’s rights”, under the cover of promoting what one atheist thinker calls “the human right [of children] not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas”, modern-day humanist are violating the very real religious freedoms and moral automony of parents, families and communities. This is in essence an authoritarian and profoundly paternalistic campaign to rescue children… from their own parents"

To lose one party may be regarded as a misfortune, but three? - "I have long argued that for strength and durability, political parties need to be built around core ideas or principles. The corollary is that they should not be built around personalities. By this measure, I have had doubts for several years about the prospects for the Singapore People’s Party (SPP). Many Singaporeans, including those associated with The Online Citizen, have lionised Chiam See Tong. But I think a longer perspective would yield a more mixed assessment. For the third time, he stands at the centre of an internal party crisis"

BBC Radio 4 - Today, Utoeya survivor: 'Show Breivik humanity' - "Reconsider how we treat our enemies, or those we perceive to be our enemies... our wars on terror, our use of violence and oppression to remain safe seems to fail. We're constantly under threat from various sources. Maybe it's time to reconsider how we deal with that and maybe Norway can be an example in that we treat our prisoners humanely. We treat those who want to damage our society humanely. And by showing that humanity, we show that we're all equally human. Equally valuable in many ways."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Iain Duncan Smith on Brexit - "There's nothing worse and demeans politics than when another politician jumps up and down and in losing any kind of argument wants to hurl a kind of name like racist at people"

What British Muslims Really Think: Trevor Phillips Says Muslim Views Have A Different 'Centre Of Gravity' - "Phillips, who led the Equality and Human Rights Commission and presented the Channel 4 show What British Muslims Really Think on Wednesday night, said many British Muslims “basically do not want to participate in the way that other people do,” and have different views on gender, sexuality, Jews and terrorism. More than half of Muslims in Britain think homosexuality should be illegal, while 47% believe teachers should not be gay, according to a report from Channel 4 which is the most comprehensive survey of British Muslims ever conducted. The poll found only 34% of British Muslims would tell the police if they thought someone they knew was getting involved with supporters of terrorism in Syria. Phillips warned that fewer than one in five British Muslims is “liberal” according to the survey, and these people are a small minority that is “dwindling”. One in six Muslims would like to live more separately from the rest of the population, which Phillips claims has a direct correlation with sympathy for terrorism... “What we’ve found in talking to Muslims is there is a current of what people would call liberal Muslim opinion, [that] says that actually Muslims need to find a form of Islam that is completely compatible with British life, and so on,” he added. “Those people think of themselves as a very small minority now, within a minority and our survey says that maybe fewer than one in five Muslims belong to that group, and they feel that they are dwindling... He added that his own Afro-Carribean community had “backward” views on homosexuality, but “as a society we’ve been absolutely clear about that, if you have those attitudes you can keep them in your head but you can’t do anything about them. People have lost their jobs, and I myself have prosecuted people of my own background for that reason. “We are more nervous, I think, about Muslims because we feel people will be offended, it’s a large group, but my view is, looking at the results of this survey, which I have to say surprised me, that we have gone beyond the situation where we can say ‘Ok, don’t worry, they’ll come round in time’, because that is not going to happen. We have to make things change now.”"
Naturally, people are slamming him. At least they can't claim he has white privilege

Voter ID, Suppression Fail - "if the intent of the new laws really is to suppress minority group voting, it's not likely to work. There has been a lot of academic research recently on the effects of stricter voter ID requirements, and—contrary to Barber's apocalyptic statements—they don't seem to have much of an impact on minority turnout at all... 'the nonphoto ID law has a positive and significant relationship with Latino turnout'"

--- CRITICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE --- - "Formalist Criticism
Biographical Criticism
Historical Criticism
Gender Criticism
Psychological Criticism
Sociological Criticism
Mythological Criticism
Reader-Response Criticism
Deconstructionist Criticism"