Links - 16th May 2017 (1)

Almost No More White NYC Cab Drivers, but Blacks Still Can't Catch a Ride? - "I happened to be in a cab driven by a black man from Senegal. I told him about Leon’s dilemma, and this cabbie went off on his own racist rant about the difference between American blacks and those from other countries. He claimed he could tell from half a block away whether someone was an American black or not, and he said he made it a point to try never to pick up American blacks. “But why not?” I asked. “You’re black as well.” “Me and other drivers talk, and we all have the same experience,” he said. He told me of a specific example where he picked up an American black man in Manhattan and took him up to Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. “He ran away without paying, and what am I supposed to do? I can’t chase him,” he said. He wrote it off as lost income but promised himself not to pick up any more American blacks"
Apparently you're supposed to lose money so you can be non-racist

By the numbers: Taxi driver is the job with the No. 1 murder rate | syracuse.com - "Taxi drivers lead the list with about eight drivers killed per 100,000 workers. Their murder rate is almost twice that of police officers. What are the deadliest jobs? Logging, followed by fishing and airline pilots or engineers. Most deaths, about 40 percent, involve transportation crashes. Falls, being struck by an object or equipment and murder are the next major causes of death on the job"
Perhaps the risk of getting killed is why even black cab drivers racially discriminate

Syrian refugee 'felt oppressed' by Stop the War protest - "Hassan Akkad, from Damascus, asked why the group was not protesting against President Assad instead, but was drowned out. He said: "British people not letting a Syrian say something about Syria in a protest about Syria. It's mad." The 29-year-old said he had wanted to be the voice of Syrians who were still in the country but left the protest "livid". Stop the War was founded in September 2001, after US president George W Bush announced a "war on terror". After a video of the encounter was shared widely online, Mr Akkad told the BBC: "I didn't see them protesting against the chemical attacks, I didn't see them protesting against Putin bombing Syria for the last two years... "I went to them respectfully and said, 'Listen I'm a Syrian refugee who lives here and I have an opinion, it's a protest about Syria I want to say something'. "They didn't even address me, they ignored my existence. With their megaphones they went louder and louder and the organisers told them to carry on." Mr Akkad left Syria in September 2015. He says he was imprisoned twice and tortured for protesting against Assad's regime... After the group would not let Mr Akkad speak, he said: "I felt oppressed, it was like being back in Syria. Like how the Syrian police used to mute our voices.
Solidarity and anti-imperialism means ignoring the people you're supposedly advocating for and imposing your pre-conceived notions on them because the West is evil

Marvel removes 'secret, coded anti-Christian and anti-Jewish messages inserted into X-Men Gold comic by Muslim artist' after fans spot them - "Referring to that protest, Syaf said in a series of posts on Facebook during a back and forth with another Facebook member: 'This is a special memory for me. 'The number is a peace act, when a governor did blasphemy to our holy book.' He added: 'I don't hate Jews or Christians, I worked with them for 10 years. A lot of good friends too. For all that happened I apologize sincerely'... According to BleedingCool, a website on comic books, Syaf had drawn in political figures into comic panels before. It said in an issue of Batgirl, he featured Joko Widodo, the current president of Indonesia, and the former governor of Jakarta. "
If it'd been a White Christian inserting anti-Muslim messages...

The Heroic Universe Why the new approach to diversity in comics sucks! - "when it comes to actually introducing fully developed black/Hispanic/Asian/Indigenous/female/LBGTQ characters into these books, the strategy seems to be: “let’s take characters who are straight, white and male, then transform them into black/Hispanic/Asian/Indigenous/female/LBGTQ variations of said character.” Real comics fan would consider this approach an absolute slap in the face. It’s insulting. It’s lazy. And completely unsustainable... these new characters with old familiar names have not earned the right for us to care about them. We don’t know their challenges, what motives them, how they respond to success and – better still – how they respond to failure. Any feelings that we have about these characters are artificial; we’ve been manipulated into having a feeling about them because they carry a name that we’re familiar with."

Confessions of a Recovering Tumblr Feminist - "For me, feminism was an enticing religion. Raised in a home devoid of faith, I eagerly accepted its philosophy as my ticket to salvation. As I steeped myself in this type of feminism: the type that emanates from online Tumblr echo chambers and the ideological enclaves of Women’s studies departments, it taught me a number of ideas and values I was eager to apply to my own life. For example, feminist ideology taught me that any opinions that were conservative, or just didn’t align with the party line were violence. It also taught me that the best way to fight opposition is to try to silence it. Don’t like what someone says? Protest them. Shut their event down... Social justice theory also taught me about microaggressions. Rarely did I go a day without interpreting what someone said as such, as a personal affront to myself or one of the 7 marginalized identities that feminist social-justice Tumblr gifted me. Social justice theory also taught me that anyone who said anything I didn’t agree with was sexist or homophobic. For example, if someone brought up the fact that some research suggests lesbians and gay men have a disproportionately higher rate of engaging in domestic violence, the feminist rebuttal would essentially be to accuse the other person of being a homophobe instead of engaging in dialogue. Feminist theory also taught me that the best way to fight oppression was to call people out. Unfortunately, what feminism doesn’t tell you is that running around making accusations of sexism towards everyone you disagree with isn’t productive. Nonetheless, calling people out became sort-of a competitive sport for me. In retrospect, I wonder if maybe I was a little bit too extreme of a social justice feminist; not all feminists go around calling people racists or sexists, right? Not all of them. But many do; many of my peers volley accusations of racism and sexism daily"

Feminist Author To Young Girls: Don't Read Books By Men - "Caitlin Moran, the feminist author of How to Be a Woman, is now insisting that girls eschew reading books by male authors until the girls have become women... 'if there’s one thing that has made me, perhaps, happier in myself, and more confident about writing the truth, and less apt to run myself down for my appearance, weight, loudness and unusualness than many, many other women, it’s that I never read books by men when I was younger.'"
Comments: "As a man, young girls, "Don't listen to feminists.""
"If you read a book where a woman is described as beautiful and immediately believe you need to take drastic action to become beautiful then there's nothing wrong with the author, you're just stupid. When reading The Hobbit as a teen I didn't suddenly feel the manic urge to make myself be really short and have really hairy feet. Know why? Cause I'm not stupid. The solution to this problem is not for young women to not read books by men, the solution is to make people less stupid so they can read books by men without drawing idiotic conclusions from those books."

Perspective Needed -- Feminism's Lie: Denying Reality About Sexual Power And Rape - "Women who do not understand rape cannot defend themselves against it... Neither militant feminism, which is obsessed with politically correct language, nor academic feminism, which believes that knowledge and experience are ``constituted by'' language, can understand preverbal or non-verbal communication. Feminism, focusing on sexual politics, cannot see that sex exists in and through the body. Sexual desire and arousal cannot be fully translated into verbal terms. This is why men and women misunderstand each other. Trying to remake the future, feminism cut itself off from sexual history. It discarded and suppressed the sexual myths of literature, art and religion. Those myths show us the turbulence, mysteries and passions of sex. In mythology we see men's sexual anxiety, their fear of woman's dominance. Much sexual violence is rooted in men's sense of psychological weakness toward women... THE Italian philosophy of life espouses high-energy confrontation. A male student makes a vulgar remark about your breasts? Don't slink off to whimper with the campus shrinking violets. Deal with it. On the spot. Say, ``Shut up, you jerk! And crawl back to the barnyard where you belong!'' In general, women who project this take-charge attitude toward life get harassed less often. I see too many dopey, immature, self-pitying women walking around like melting sticks of butter. It's the Yvette Mimieux syndrome: Make me happy. And listen to me weep when I'm not."

Disabled veteran says United Airlines staff kicked his service dog and asked if he was retarded as delays forced him to spend THREE days at the airport

Let's Boycott United Airlines - "United Airlines has been a real dick lately. On Monday morning, the world woke up to a very disturbing video of a hapless passenger being bloodied and dragged off an overbooked flight so that a United employee flying stand-by could fly instead. This is just the latest in an increasingly enraging pattern of bad behavior by the airline. So what can you do about it? Easy: stop giving United your money... What’s especially despicable about United is the fact that this latest jaw-dropping incident doesn’t seem out of the ordinary for the airline. It was just a couple of weeks ago that United refused to allow three young girls to board their flight, because they were wearing leggings. United didn’t apologize for that incident, instead pointing concerned customers to an arcane clause in its contact of carriage. That opened United up to a real shitstorm of bad press. Then again, United must be used to this kind of thing by now."

How the Women's March's "genital-based" feminism isolated the transgender community - "While clever, Suh's pussy hats set the tone for a march that would focus acutely on genitalia at the expense of the transgender community. Signs like "Pussy power," "Viva la Vulva" and "Pussy grabs back" all sent a clear and oppressive message to trans women, especially: having a vagina is essential to womanhood... She expected her local march to have its fair share of trans-exclusionary radical feminists, known as TERFs. As Lejeck described it, there are two categories of TERFS: One is the accidental TERF — "the ones who have signs that equate womanhood with having a vagina""

American Political Decay or Renewal? | Foreign Affairs - "The idea that the government could deport 11 million people from the country, many of them with children who are U.S. citizens, seems highly implausible. So some form of amnesty appears inevitable. Immigration critics are right, however, that the United States has been very lax in enforcement. Doing this properly would require not a wall but something like a national biometric ID card, heavy investment in courts and police, and, above all, the political will to sanction employers who violate the rules. Moving to a much more restrictive policy on legal immigration, in which some form of amnesty for existing immigrants is exchanged for genuine efforts to enforce new and tougher rules, would not be economically disastrous. When the country did this before, in 1924, the way was paved, in certain respects, for the golden age of U.S. equality in the 1940s and 1950s... “Populism” is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like. There is of course no reason why democratic voters should always choose wisely, particularly in an age when globalization makes policy choices so complex. But elites don’t always choose correctly either, and their dismissal of the popular choice often masks the nakedness of their own positions. Popular mobilizations are neither inherently bad nor inherently good; they can do great things, as during the Progressive era and the New Deal, but also terrible ones, as in Europe during the 1930s. The American political system has in fact suffered from substantial decay, and it will not be fixed unless popular anger is linked to wise leadership and good policies. It is still not t0o late for this to emerge."

Dept warns Muslims not to skip fasting - Community - "THERE are about 50 hotspots in Penang where Muslims will tend to skip their fast during Ramadan and state Islamic Affairs Department is on to them. These hotspots are mainly food courts, cyber cafes, snooker centres, family entertainment centres and playgrounds, said state Religious Affairs Committee chairman Abdul Malik Abul Kassim. “There were 154 cases of Muslims eating in public during Ramadan and were charged under Section 15 of the Penang Syariah Criminal Offences Enactment last year."

Review: Weapons of Math Destruction - ""big data increases inequality and threatens democracy"... Weapons of math destruction, which O’Neil refers to throughout the book as WMDs, are mathematical models or algorithms that claim to quantify important traits: teacher quality, recidivism risk, creditworthiness but have harmful outcomes and often reinforce inequality, keeping the poor poor and the rich rich. They have three things in common: opacity, scale, and damage. They are often proprietary or otherwise shielded from prying eyes, so they have the effect of being a black box. They affect large numbers of people, increasing the chances that they get it wrong for some of them. And they have a negative effect on people, perhaps by encoding racism or other biases into an algorithm or enabling predatory companies to advertise selectively to vulnerable people, or even by causing a global financial crisis... She shares stories of people who have been deemed unworthy in some way by an algorithm. There’s the highly-regarded teacher who is fired due to a low score on a teacher assessment tool, the college student who couldn’t get a minimum wage job at a grocery store due to his answers on a personality test, the people whose credit card spending limits were lowered because they shopped at certain stores. To add insult to injury, the algorithms that judged them are completely opaque and unassailable. People often have no recourse when the algorithm makes a mistake. Many WMDs create feedback loops that perpetuate injustice. Recidivism models and predictive policing algorithms—programs that send officers to patrol certain locations based on crime data—are rife with the potential for harmful feedback loops"

Sorry, the United Kingdom Does Not Owe India Reparations - "History, is among other things, the story of the rise and fall of states and empires. And by their nature, politics and state-building always help and hurt certain groups. In an empire or after conquest by an empire, there are always privileged elites, collaborators, people whose lives don’t change at all, and groups that have the worst of it. This is a phenomenon not limited to colonialism and European imperialism, which is why I strongly disagree with the narrative that tries to cast Western imperialism as a uniquely immoral, when in fact all imperial projects, including the Mongols, the Arabs, and other Western empires were a mixed bag. The only substantive difference between Western imperialism and what came prior to it is the fact that Western colonialism occurred in tandem with the industrial, scientific, and political revolutions, all of which eventually shook up non-Western societies in unprecedented ways relative to their tradition arrangements. And while this proved quite shocking to many societies, it was relatively more peaceful and less rapacious than some of the actions of previous empires that literally pillaged and leveled cities and literally enslaved whole populations... Mongolia is not wealthy. Are reparations only a way of guilting rich nations into giving away more money, though they give generous aid as is? Countries that have successfully developed or are developing are doing so because of good economic policies and political discipline and not infusions of money... Indians in many ways were beneficiaries of the British imperial system as well as its victims... More Indian crown jewels are in fact locked in a vault in the Central Bank of Iran in Tehran where the National Jewelry Museum is located than in Great Britain (and they were seized by force too) but it is odd to hear no calls for their return in India"

DURIAN LOVERS UNITE: 5 REPUTABLE DEALERS

PAP Community Foundation pre-school orders its students to bow to great leader Lee Kuan Yew's poster - "The kindergarten at my block asking the children to bow three time out of respect to the photo of Mr Lee after telling them a short story of him. Do the children understand?"

The Muslim who wanted Coke Zero - "Tahera Ahmad’s job title at Northwestern University in Chicago is Director of Interfaith Engagement, which means her position is only pertinent while there is a perceived problem with the current level of engagement between faiths... Tahera asked the flight attendant for a Coke Zero and the flight attendant gave her a Diet Coke. The horror. Tahera flipped her lid and demanded a Coke Zero but since those airline carts are not Walmart-sized the flight attendant did not have a full Coke Zero and could only give her half of a can... we started to hear from her fellow passengers on that flight. They told a completely different story... "This person is a liar plain and simple and is just pulling the discrimination card.” And here is what another of her fellow passengers said:
“Don’t believe this woman. My wife and I were on this flight. She was very rude and because she couldn’t get a whole can of pop she flipped out and started pulling the discrimination card.""

Remember The 'Discriminated' Muslim Woman? Here's What REALLY Happened - "She went to see the movie Taken 2, starring Liam Neeson, and guess what? She found the fictional tale to be full of, you guessed it, Islamophobia."

Islamophobia or a misunderstanding over a diet coke? - "what we do also know about Ms Ahmed is that she herself will quite happily openly promote public discrimination against ex-Muslims and that she personally pushed quite hard to Censor Ayaan Hirsi Ali"