Links - 30th May 2017 (1)

Xiaxue - Posts - "BREAKING: SHREY BHARGAVA NEWLY DEMISED ACTING CAREER
In the midst of the Ah Boys to Men racial debate, new evidence has come to light.
First and foremost, I have newfound respect for Maxi Lim, one of the cast members of ABTM, who have spoken up on the issue. He wrote what is possibly the most formidable take down of Shrey and his blatant hypocrisy + racial shit-stirring. BAM! Shrey just got bitch slapped. In the post, he mentioned how Shrey has acted with a thick Indian accent before. The most beautiful last line says: "Lastly, if you are cast, I hope you stand on your beliefs and reject the role." - not to mention never ever act in another role involving accents/stereotyping again. You dug your grave now lie in it...
Shrey has openly marketed himself as an expert on accents on NUMEROUS occasions. He himself has mimicked many different accents, including the Indian one he so found so objectionable.
Shockingly, he even has a stand up comedy routine that is ENTIRELY based off mimicking accents and NOTHING ELSE. Don't say he is forced to do accents in shows because he gets no roles otherwise - NOBODY WROTE HIS STAND UP ROUTINE FOR HIM BUT HIMSELF.
In the standup, Shrey reduces many races to caricatures, and teaches the audience how to mimic both North and South Indians.
So get this... HE HIMSELF CAN DO ACCENTS TO GET THE AUDIENCE TO LAUGH, BUT GOD FORBID JACK NEO DOES THE SAME.
Fucking hypocrite of the year. Now it is 100% clear. You are not above stereotype humour - in fact, you seem to thrive solely on it.
I've also included Shrey acting as an Arab(?) in The Noose.
GUILTY CONSCIENCE DING DING DING. The video was on his Facebook page, and he QUICKLY DELETED it."

6 Crazy Chinese Versions of American Fast Food - "4. Dunkin Donuts Dry Pork and Seaweed Donut"

#DeleteUber is What Happens When Outrage Culture Erases Logic - "Uber drivers, many of whom are immigrants themselves, may now be negatively affected by the actions of a thoughtless mob, a group of people who desperately wanted the adrenaline rush that comes with public outrage."

Is Crime Genetic? Scientists Don’t Know Because They’re Afraid to Ask - "research has consistently revealed that parenting styles correlate with self-control development in children, and self-control in childhood predicts a variety of important outcomes, including criminal behavior... Most of the evidence about the causes of crime overlooks genetic transmission. Yet, some research has found that once you account for genetic influences on self-control, previously identified social transmission effects (read: parenting) on the child’s self-control become unstable. In other words, when you control for genetic transmission (the alternative explanation that most criminologists overlook), the effect of parenting on self-control diminishes or goes away entirely. Consider another type of parenting effect — one that shows up in the news frequently — spanking. Not long ago, we examined the relationship between spanking and behavioral problems in children. Once we controlled for genetic transmission, there was no spanking effect in the way that most scholars think about spanking effects. Put another way, our evidence did not support the conclusion that spanking causes behavioral problems in the sense that most psychologists would argue... A remarkable study in Sweden recently found that highly disadvantaged neighborhoods had more crime. Yet that neighborhood effect disappeared when risk factors concentrated within certain families were taken into account. Once again, social transmission effects weakened (and, in this case disappeared) when other factors like genetic transmission were controlled for... it seems that the word “gene” makes social scientists nauseated. Not long ago, in fact, the top journal in the field of criminology published an article calling for an end to twin studies. Let that resonate a moment. There was an actual call to remove a perfectly good research technique from the field, one that also happens to be exceedingly valuable when trying to rule out widespread problems like genetic confounding."

Conscious consumerism is a lie. Here is what you can really do to save the environment. - "Making series of small, ethical purchasing decisions while ignoring the structural incentives for companies’ unsustainable business models won’t change the world as quickly as we want. It just makes us feel better about ourselves. Case in point: A 2012 study compared footprints of “green” consumers who try to make eco-friendly choices to the footprints of regular consumers. And they found no meaningful difference between the two. The problem is that even though we want to make the right choices, it’s often too little, too late. For example, friends are always asking me where to take their old clothes so that they are either effectively recycled or make it into the hands of people who need them. My answer? It doesn’t matter where you take them: It will always end up in the exact same overloaded waste stream, which may or may not eventually dump it in Haiti... There’s also the issue of privilege. The sustainability movement has been charged with being elitist—and it most certainly is. You need a fair amount of disposable income to afford ethical and sustainable consumption options, the leisure time to research the purchasing decisions you make, the luxury to turn up your nose at 95% of what you’re offered, and, arguably, a post-graduate degree in chemistry to understand the true meaning behind ingredient labels... Globally, we’re projected to spend $9.32 billion in 2017 on green cleaning products. If we had directed even a third of that pot of money (the typical markup on green cleaning products) toward lobbying our governments to ban the toxic chemicals we’re so afraid of, we might have made a lot more progress by now."
Instead of "Be the change that you wish to see in the world" we have "Force everyone else to be as virtuous as you want"

How to Get Trump Voters to Support Refugees, Obamacare - "just 8 percent of the liberals in Willer and Feinberg’s study were able to craft an argument that would appeal to conservatives’ value of loyalty toward your own kind. (So something like, “Our fellow citizens of the United States of America deserve to stand alongside us ... We should lift our fellow citizens up, not bring them down.”) What’s worse, some of them picked an argument that directly contradicted what many conservatives value, with arguments like, “your religion should play no part in the laws of the United States”... [Liberals] who read an argument saying we should maintain high levels of military spending because it’s a poverty-fighting tool— “through the military, the disadvantaged can achieve equal standing”—were more likely to support a robust defense budget than those who read a paper on how the military “ensures the United States is the greatest nation in the world.”... Still, there’s one thing Feinberg said definitely won’t work. In the wake of the executive order, Feinberg said he saw lots of liberals lobbing ad-hominem attacks, such as “you're being un-American” or “you’re making the Statue of Liberty cry.” “People typically do not do well when attacked,” he said, “this could simply push them to be more staunch in their position.” If you can’t persuade your political foes, that is, you can at least try not to make the conflict worse."

FASCISTS ON CAMPUS: How The Academic Left Paved The Way For Anti-Free Speech Riots - "the academic left has built up a pseudointellectual bulwark around such fascism. They’ve told students that they deserve “safe spaces” – areas in which their ideas are not challenged in any way. They’ve forwarded the culture of “microaggressions,” which urges students to see any speech they find offensive as a form of “aggression” to be countered by other aggression... As a professor at Cal State LA posted on his door before my speech there last year, “The best response to micro-aggression is macro-aggression.” This line of thought encourages student evil. As Professor Roy Baumeister writes in Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, “Hypersensitive people who often think their pride is being assaulted are potentially dangerous. Even when a neutral observer would conclude that no serious provocation occurred, it is still important to recognize that, in the perpetrator’s own view, he or she was merely responding to an attack.” Colleges churn out these oversensitive people."
The line about macro-aggression comes from Professor Robert Weide at CSU-LA

The (lack of) science behind happiness and creativity - "creativity calls on persistence and problem-solving skills, not positivity. Computational scientist Anna Jordanous at Kent University and linguist Bill Keller of Sussex University in England dug through through over half century of study on the creative process in various fields, and isolated 14 components of creativity. Happiness wasn’t one of them... negative emotions are actually beneficial to the creative process."

A new study shows how Star Trek jokes and geek culture make women feel unwelcome in computer science - "Work from our lab shows that when high school girls see Star Trek posters and video games in a computer science classroom, they are less interested than boys in taking the course. When the classroom is devoid of décor, girls still opt out. It is only when an alternate image of computer science is presented by replacing geeky objects with art and nature posters that girls become as interested as boys."
If you don't fit the culture of a workplace, it's the workplace that needs to change - not you

Polar bears eating DOLPHINS and global warming may be to blame

Why I Left the Left- "Do you believe in free speech? Do you believe that people should be judged by their character, not their skin color? Do you believe in freedom of religion? If you believe these things, you’re probably not a progressive. You might think you’re a progressive. I used to think I was. My show, “The Rubin Report” was originally part of the progressive “The Young Turks” network... If you’re black, or female, or Muslim, or Hispanic or a member of any other minority group, you’re judged differently than the most evil of all things – a white, Christian male. The Regressive Left ranks minority groups in a pecking order to compete in a kind of Oppression Olympics. Gold medal goes to the most offended. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that his children would be judged by their character and not their skin color was a liberal idea, but these days, it’s not a progressive ideal."

The student Left’s culture of intolerance is creating a new generation of conservatives - "The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton was in Paris during the 1968 riots and has said that it was whilst witnessing the uprising that he became a conservative. The violence at Berkeley mirrors the street protests in Paris from 1968. Privileged and excitable students living in one of the most blessed parts of the world went out and created havoc in order to overthrow an opponent that they refused to tolerate. The Parisians, at least, had a deeper political cause – but the Berkeley students carried out the ugliest form of protest. It is the form of protest that says “I don’t like that view, therefore you must not be allowed to express it” and it is causing a lot of students to have their own ‘Scruton moment’... There has been a spike in membership in conservative college clubs including Young Americans for Liberty, which boasts 804 chapters filled with 308,927 members... Analysis from market research firm, The Gild, shows that ‘Gen Z’ is the most conservative generation since 1945. The research reveals that ‘Gen Z’ Britons are more likely to favour conservative spending, dislike tattoos and body-piercings, and oppose marijuana legislation."
Actually I still don't know what 1968 was about

16 Angry and Hilarious Bad Parking Notes Left on Cars
The free condom is nice

Study: Democrats Moving Left Faster Than Republicans Moving Right - "it’s been a liberal talking point that Republican extremism is to blame for political polarization and gridlock. In the old days, the argument goes, Republicans were a moderate party, but over the past generation the GOP has been gradually taken over by its far-right wing... Now, a paper on polarization and inequality released in August by political scientists from Princeton, Georgetown, and the University of Oregon (and highlighted this week in a Washington Post article) provides some empirical evidence that Democratic Party’s leftward drift is more pronounced than the GOP’s rightward drift, at least at the state level. The study’s overall argument is that income inequality has increased political polarization at the state level since the 1990s. But the authors find that that this happens more by moving state Democratic parties to the left than by moving state Republican parties to the right. As the Democratic Party lost power at the state level over the past 15 years, it also effectively shed its moderate wing. Centrist Democrats have increasingly lost seats to Republicans, “resulting in a more liberal Democratic party” overall. The authors find that the ideological median of Republican legislators has shifted much less."

Note left on handicapped car calls mom, disabled child lazy - "A 10-year-old Colorado girl who was born with a rare genetic disease which leaves her bones weak and brittle is speaking out after finding a note calling her and her mother "lazy" and idiotic for parking in a handicapped spot... it begins with a friendly "GREETINGS!" It then twists into an arrogant scolding for parking in a spot which was declared as better deserving of others — despite them having a handicapped sign."

‘Men Working’ sign deemed sexist by Ohio college, demands work halt - "Sarah Belden pointed out that the sign was accurate. “There was no women in the crew working on the building, it was politically correct," she told WKEF."
It's not just elite colleges - this was a community college

Empathy Cards by Emily McDowell are greeting cards designed for cancer patients by a cancer survivor. - "I promise never to refer to your illness as a "journey". Unless someone takes you on a cruise."

How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love - "A friend at Columbia recruited him into an offshoot of MIT’s famed professional blackjack team, and he spent the next few years bouncing between New York and Las Vegas, counting cards and earning up to $60,000 a year. The experience kindled his interest in applied math, ultimately inspiring him to earn a master’s and then a PhD in the field. “They were capable of using mathema­tics in lots of different situations,” he says. “They could see some new game—like Three Card Pai Gow Poker—then go home, write some code, and come up with a strategy to beat it."... He played with the dial and found a natural resting point where the 20,000 women clumped into seven statistically distinct clusters based on their questions and answers... One cluster was too young, two were too old, another was too Christian. But he lingered over a cluster dominated by women in their mid-twenties who looked like indie types, musicians and artists. This was the golden cluster. The haystack in which he’d find his needle. Somewhere within, he’d find true love. Actually, a neighboring cluster looked pretty cool too—slightly older women who held professional creative jobs, like editors and designers. He decided to go for both. He’d set up two profiles and optimize one for the A group and one for the B group... he noticed latent variables emerging. In the younger cluster, the women invariably had two or more tattoos and lived on the east side of Los Angeles. In the other, a disproportionate number owned midsize dogs that they adored... Then came the message from Christine Tien Wang, a 28-year-old artist and prison abolition activist. McKinlay had popped up in her search for 6-foot guys with blue eyes near UCLA, where she was pursuing her master’s in fine arts. They were a 91 percent match."

No, Research Has Not Established That You Inherited Your Intelligence From Your Mother - "The piece is bylined “Editorial Staff,” presumably because everyone was too embarrassed to put a real name on it... As the second source for the splashy “intelligence is inherited from the mother” claim, the Second Nexus Editorial Staff link us to…Cosmopolitan magazine. Oddly enough, in her brief summary, Cosmo writer Lauren Smith sources her material back to…Psychology Spot, touting it as citing “new research” when it emphatically does not. Then, at the bottom of the Cosmopolitan post, yet another source is linked: Good Housekeeping. A click on that just takes the reader to the same Lauren Smith-authored post featured on the Cosmo site. This tautological cross-referencing gets almost as tangled as the genetics of intelligence"