Links - 20th September 2016

Modern feminism has got it wrong about men - Telegraph - "cultural "feminist" changes, the types that insist lads mags, Page 3 and wolf-whistling are automatically offensive and should therefore be scrapped from the public consciousness... at their crux is the notion that men are either genetically or socially conditioned to be evil. This explains why relatively harmless acts - an admiring glance, a whistle, a propensity for lads mags - are imbued with such weighty significance, often lazily labelled as "rapey". If a man looks at me, I infer he's doing it for the exact same reason a woman would - because he finds me interesting to look at. If a man whistles at me, I take it as the compliment I believe it was intended to be. If I see a man looking at a female glamour model, I suppose nothing more than he is looking at her because a naked woman is pretty much universally aesthetically pleasing... I'm horrified with the regularity and ease with which the word "misogynist" is flung about online. Recently, I wrote an article for a feminist publication on the importance of prioritisation and pragmatism in social progression and suggesting these were often sadly absent from feminist campaigning. During the subsequent inevitable Twitter storm (during which "feminists" threatened to "rip me apart", called me a "piece of s---" and a "brainless bimbo" in an incredibly sisterly fashion) a male tweeter calmly pointed out several historical instances where negotiation had resulted in progression. As a result, he was publicly called a "pendantic misogynist" by the mob. A pedant he might have been, but it's worth noting the official definition of misogynist as "someone who hates women" rather than "anyone who dares question the popular feminist status quo". In the same article, I dared to suggest that we should take into account men's feelings and viewpoints on key feminist issues. "Men have had their voices heard for FAR TOO LONG! IT'S OUR TURN!" came the online battle cry, as though even garnering some male opinions would be a threat to womankind's empowerment, so toxic and self-serving they would inevitably be. The Everyday Sexism movement is a fantastic idea - an opportunity for an open debate on the ways in which genders mindlessly form prejudices against each other. So why have its followers largely excluded men from the conversation? "You can't be sexist towards men!" was a university student's response to this question at another debate I attended (she was studying feminism, by the way). Which is a bit like saying black people can't be racist... Today's feminism teaches British women to see themselves as victims and victims cannot exist without a villain, in this instance – men. In order for this thesis to have any kind of logic, feminists have made sweeping, inaccurate judgments about an entire demographic, based on nothing more than their gender. Ironically, the exact practice they claim to be fighting"

Protesters threaten violence and death against International Men’s Issues Conference in Detroit at Doubletree, Hilton - "this is apparently too much for those who oppose the idea of a men’s human rights movement. Organization against the conference for a planned protest on June 7 appeared on Facebook, where threats of violence were made by anti-MHRA commenters were allowed to remain but comments by men’s advocates requesting an open dialog were repeatedly deleted. In the characteristic Orwellian nature of those who oppose men’s issues, the administration of the group rationalized this by claiming that they need to “make a safe space”... This is not the first time that this sort of thing has happened. When Karen Straughan was due to speak at Ryerson University the administration fined the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE, the group sponsoring her) a $1600 “security fee” due to the history of violence and criminal behavior on the part of Feminists and their allies at their previous protests of academic events. Some may be discouraged by the violent tendencies of these people. I would heart. These people are putting their values (or lack thereof) on display for the world to see. They are not organizing to attend the event, listen to what is being said, and ask incisive questions. On the contrary, the only thing they are interested in is shutting down the event. They are destroying their credibility before the world... During the 2006 Duke lacrosse false rape case, Feminists and their friends paraded around a banner reading “castrate,” an open call for sexual violence against the three young men who were falsely accused of rape. Again, in their typical Orwellian fashion, they rationalized their call to violence by saying they were “opposing sexual violence.” Of which there was none... In pursuit of a sexual misconduct policy which defined rape so broadly beyond its legal definition that it essentially eviscerated due process, the Feminist group “Radical Womyn of Antioch” threatened Antioch College with violence if they failed to adopt the policy they proposed"
No true feminist...

Millions of bees die after Zika spraying in South Carolina
Some people were valling for mosquito genocide

Native Americans migrated to the New World in three waves, Harvard-led DNA analysis shows - "An exhaustive study of DNA taken from dozens of Native American groups that span from Canada to the tip of South America is helping to settle a question that has long divided scientists: When people arrived in the Americas more than 15,000 years ago, the Harvard-led research shows, they came in successive waves, not all at once"
The Native Americans who were in the Americas in 1492 were themselves invaders and immigrants

The Most Violent Era In America Was Before Europeans Arrived - "the 20th century, with its hundreds of millions dead in wars and, in the case of Germany, China, Russia and other dictatorships, genocide, was not the most violent - on a per-capita basis that honor may belong to the central Mesa Verde of southwest Colorado and the Pueblo Indians. Writing in the journal American Antiquity, Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler and colleagues document how nearly 90 percent of human remains from that period had trauma from blows to either their heads or parts of their arms."

A new exposé of Mother Teresa shows that she—and the Vatican—were even worse than we thought - "Lest you think this is atheist hype, the summary below is from an official press release by the Université de Montréal... the three researchers collected 502 documents on the life and work of Mother Teresa. After eliminating 195 duplicates, they consulted 287 documents to conduct their analysis, representing 96% of the literature on the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity (OMC). Facts debunk the myth of Mother Teresa...
1. The woman was in love with suffering and simply didn’t take care of her charges, many of whom fruitlessly sought medical care.
2. She was tightfisted about helping others, seequestered money donated for her work, and took money from dictators.
3. She was deliberately promoted by BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (a fellow anti-abortionist), and her beatification was based on phony miracles...
I ran into Mother Teresa once: we were flying on the same plane, and as I disembarked from the coach section, she appeared right in front of me as she exited from the first-class section. Not even wondering why a woman who professed humility was flying first class, I was elated and gobsmacked, feeling quite fortunate to have run into her. But I had bought into the myth, and that was well before the pushback began."

Criticism of Mother Teresa: Too little and too late - "“Mother Teresa lied by exaggerating the figures of persons she was feeding daily in her acceptance speech while receiving the Nobel Prize in 1979. The ambulances donated by a Calcutta businessman were, in fact, used by her nuns as taxis to ferry around in Calcutta. Her nuns refused to pick up dying persons within even 200 meters of the compassion house. (Chatterjee has recorded his telephone conversations with the nuns and reproduced them verbatim in the book). But Mother Teresa continued to tell her Western audiences that her mission routinely picked up abandoned babies and the dying and dead bodies from Calcutta’s pavements... It’s disturbing to me that patients who could have been cured, including children, were allowed to die. Certainly Mother Teresa could have had a doctor look them over and do some triage. The fact is that she just didn’t care, for she thought she was winning souls for the Christian God.”

Mother Theresa's Masochism: Does Religion Demand Suffering to Keep People Passive? - "The team of academics from the Universities of Montreal and Ottawa set out to do research on altruism. In the process, they reviewed over 500 documents about Mother Teresa’s life and compiled an array of disturbing details about the soon-to-be saint, including dubious political connections and questionable management of funds—and, in particular, an attitude toward suffering that could give pause to even her biggest fans... By even her own words, Mother Teresa’s view of suffering made no distinction between avoidable and unavoidable suffering, and instead cultivated passive acceptance of both. As she put it, “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.” Or consider thisanecdote from her life: One day I met a lady who was dying of cancer in a most terrible condition. And I told her, I say, "You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus — a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you." And she joined her hands together and said, "Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me”... Miami resident Hemley Gonzalez was so shocked by his volunteer experience that he has founded an accountable charity to provide better care... Because of her opposition to contraception and her seeming disinterest in modern medicine, some have called Mother Teresa a friend of poverty rather than a friend of the poor."

A Critic’s Lonely Quest: Revealing the Whole Truth About Mother Teresa - The New York Times - "Dr. Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in homes run by Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, with children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin. He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another... In over a hundred interviews, Dr. Chatterjee heard volunteers describe how workers with limited medical training administered 10- to 20-year-old medicines to patients, and blankets stained with feces were washed in the same sink used to clean dishes... Dr. Chatterjee agreed that after Mother Teresa’s death in 1997, homes run by the Missionaries of Charity began taking their hygiene practices more seriously. The reuse of needles, he said, was eliminated."

Pointing Fingers At Mother Teresa's Heirs - "The donation issue first came up in the early 1990s when it was revealed that Charles Keating, an American banker known for the infamous “saving and loan scandal,” had donated up to $1.25 million to Missionaries of Charity. Amidst calls to return the money, Mother Teresa controversially chose to remain silent, an incident that is still sited by her critics who demand transparency. In early 2000, Susan Shields, a former Missionaries sister who left the organization “unhappy”, created a furor by saying she herself had “written receipts of $50,000″ in donation but there was no sign of the “flood of money.” Forbes India talked to a volunteer in the Los Angeles office of Missionaries of Charity who admitted that “even when bread was over at the soup kitchens, none was bought unless donated.” A report in German magazine Stern, revealed that in 1991 only seven percent of the donation received at Missionaries of Charity was used for charity"

Après Orsay, le musée Guimet évacué après une performance de Deborah de Robertis - "Soudain, un râle de plaisir brise le silence feutré du musée. Une femme s’est assise devant un mur de photographies. Nue, vêtue d’un seul kimono transparent. Elle laisse entrevoir entre ses cuisses écartées une pastèque qu’elle dévore goulûment en en faisant couler le jus sur sa poitrine."

Men need nights out with the lads, scientists say - Telegraph - "male bonding is more likely to lower a man's stress levels than a night out with his partner, or time spent with the family... stress-related illnesses only seemed to occur among females or couples"

Racial identity tied to happiness, study finds - "African American people who identify more strongly with their racial identity are generally happier... it may be fueled by a sense of belongingness -- that is, blacks with a strong sense of racial identity may feel more connected to their racial group, which in turn makes them happy. This sense of belongingness is especially important for happiness in women, Yap said. "For men, the potential factors relating identity to happiness is still an open question," he said."

I don't care about your "Preferred pronouns" - Age Of Shitlords - "Basically, every time special snowflakes invent a new gender, the next logical step is find an appropriate pronoun for it. So as the total number of genders increase, we can expect to see more pronouns in the future. Refusal to use someone’s preferred pronoun will get you labeled a “bigot” or “Misgendering asshole” on the Internet. And that’s cool and all, but it doesn’t end there. Like most rhetoric that Tumblr comes up with, being the narcissists that they are, they don’t feel accomplished unless they get to force their ideas on everyone else... a teacher in Oregon was given a $60,000 payout after she alleged that her coworkers had abused her by referring to her using inappropriate pronouns. Tumblr isn’t just infecting the real world, they have already taken it over, and are now making it dance to their beat. What these people fail to realize it that a pronoun isn’t a fashion accessory like a shoe or handbag, that you can just pick up when you want and throw away when you no longer need them. In Grammar, Pronouns are words used in place of names(Nouns). The primary purpose of pronouns is to help avoid repetition, and to make sentences easier to construct and understand. That’s it. Pronouns only exist to make it easier for us to communicate with one another... Pronouns were meant to make life easier, not to make it more complicated. Having to ask people for their preferred pronoun defeats the entire purpose of having pronouns in the first place"