Links - 23rd August 2017 (1)

(This was scheduled for 18th August but didn't publish)

Kotaro Hanawa's answer to What shouldn't one do in Japan as a foreigner? - Quora - "In Japan, it’s illegal to carry any types of weapon: this even includes cutter knives and scissors. Yes, people get arrested and criminally charged for carrying scissors!! Violators can be punished up to 10 years in prison. Screwdrivers are also illegal to carry in public, under the Picking Prohibition Act... Some hostess clubs even forcefully abduct people to buy their products. I was abducted by them once during my high school trip to Osaka and was forced to pay all of my money for good. They don’t have mercy for anyone... Although it’s widely known that the age of consent in Japan is 13, you still need parental consent in order to date anyone under the age of 18 or 20... Japanese people often don’t like seeing people showing their skin. It’s generally advised to avoid wearing tank tops or sleeveless clothing during the summer — regardless of gender. If you think the weather is too hot and want to wear tank top, it’d be best to wear a see through T-shirt on top of your tank top to feel cool, without showing your bare skin, since it’s considered to be rude. If you’re a teenage or adult male, it’s recommended to wear something under your T-shirt, even during summer. A lot of girls despise boys who wear only one layer of clothing. They consider it gross, since our humid climate drenches their clothes with sweat... Although body hair on men may be considered sexy in many cultures around the world, many Japanese find it disgusting. It’s common for boys to shave their body hair. Hell, I’ve ended up shaving my body hair after being socially pressured to do so. It’s recommended that you don’t proactively show your body hair in public places, as some Japanese may find it scary and even barbaric (this is another reason why Japanese don’t like just tank tops.)... Don’t talk to strangers to find a girlfriend!! Many western cultures tolerate boys talking to girls that they find attractive, even if they’re strangers. In Japan, that can be considered sexual harassment, even if she’s your classmate. You should wait until she talks to you first instead. I learned this the hard way…"

Assassination Porn - Twenty-Six Letters - Quora - "The assault on congressional Republicans cannot really be isolated from the escalating violence of the protests against President Trump. Groups like the antifa movement employ the tactics of intimidation and actual violence—and they do so, it must be said, with the tacit approval of establishment progressivism, the media and the Democratic Party. Which leading Democratic politicians have stood up to denounce antifa street violence or suppression of conservative speech and activity on college campuses? Which mainstream media outlets have decried the rising tide of leftist street violence? Few if any. And this is hardly surprising, for the hostility of, say, CNN to Trump is only somewhat less unhinged than that of, say, MoveOn.Org | Democracy In Action. Mainstream progressivism, though perhaps made uncomfortable by the violent rhetoric and actual violence of the Resistance, doesn’t really disapprove of it... it was just disgraceful to claim, as some conservatives and Trump supporters immediately did, that the Left as a whole has blood on its hands. The last point is actually correct, though you’d think that Democrats & etc., who instantly blamed Sarah Palin for the shooting of former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords despite a lack of evidence of any connection between Palin and the killer, would blush to make it. (That shooter, incidentally, turned out to be a genuine head case: a paranoid schizophrenic, long obsessed with Giffords, who believed among other things that the rules of English grammar had been cooked up by the deep state as a mind-control measure.) No, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and the Pussy Hat Brigade et al., are not guilty of murder. But on the other hand, they do bear responsibility for the climate of fear and hate in which the attack on the GOP congressmen took place. By all accounts the shooter, though he could certainly be described as a social misfit, was not clinically insane... The fervor with which Trump assassination porn is embraced by people describing themselves as progressives, devoted to social justice and all good things, shines a not-very-flattering light on the Left. Like many of the Roman senators who stood by while the conspirators stabbed Caesar to death, these progressives would not raise a hand against Trump themselves—but many wouldn’t mind seeing someone else bump him off."

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Assisted Dying - "I know it's terrible cliche to say slippery slopes but that's what we've got with abortion. There's no getting away from it. I've reread the 1967 Abortion Act. What the salient points of it today and how it has ended up, whether you're pro-abortion or not pro-abortion, was not what the people who drafted that legislation thought was happening. It was not what Parliament voted for. Everything was going to be fine because there were going to be 2 doctors. And 2 doctors who were God were going to make the right decisions. And of course it just became a matter of somebody deciding they wanted an abortion"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, 31/07/2013 (Wagner) - "One of the things that Wagner wanted to do is to put art at the centre of society and indeed at the centre of the state. He wanted the primary concern of the state to be art and actually he found a king in Ludwig II who thought the same... Wagner believed that everyone should go to the opera free of charge...
Shouldn't you really be rather satisfied because it's quite difficult now to go along to a Wagner opera without examining your conscience, which is not something one has to do about almost any other artist or any other activity?...
'I think art is reinterpreted by each successive generation. I think that's been fairly well attested to'...
Yes this music has been used in that way but it's not the way that it is being used today. I don't think, I don't anybody goes along to Wagner today because they are Hitlerian any more than because they're in favor of incest, any more than because they want to get rid of God, or any more than they are a Marxist which is what Wagner was in eighteen forty eight...
Every cultural relativist and every literary studies says that I can no longer appreciate Shakespeare because of his treatment of women. I have to now reinterpret everything in, on the context of every contemporary prejudice because you know you can no longer enjoy Robinson Crusoe because guess what? Apparently he's pro slavery and he has a servant... it's the first english novel and it's a great novel. I appreciate it. I will not have political correctness destroy art"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Talking Rot - "A lot of people in developed countries now, you know, will look at the expiration date and they'll sort of take that as gospel and they'll throw away a half gallon of milk or yogurt because the date on the package changes instead of using their senses. Looking or smelling or, or even feeling potentially. And those were skills that people in early generations in the nineteenth century, certainly in the eighteenth century - that's what they used all the time. They used their senses and I think modern people have much less of a tolerance for food that's going slightly bad. For example back in the nineteenth century there was a whole culinary genre for foods like souring milk. There was an appreciation for the tang that sour milk could give to dishes. I think there's much less appreciation now for the different taste of food at different stages of decay... Vitamins had not yet been discovered so there was not a robust understanding that fruits and vegetables were important for good health. On the contrary people often said, you know fruits and vegetables are frivolities. They're delicious but they're not particularly good for health and in fact on the contrary they can be dangerous if they're not ripe enough. The idea of eating underripe fruit in particular was seen as a special hazard for young children and many people attributed the higher rates of death in summer to the fact that they said children were eating underripe fruit and in fact people were much more likely to cook their fruits and vegetables a lot"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, May snaps back - "When you look at Japan's armed forces they are very large and very powerful already. It has a 250,000 man standing army, it has a larger navy than the United Kingdom, it has a very powerful and modern air force"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Girl Guides: The revamp - "[On World War II] All the men went to the battle front, the women were working in factories and who was left to run the country but the girls? Nobody ever asked a twelve year old: and what did you do in the war? Well she was running an evacuee hostel, she was working in a hospital, running nurseries. In France and Poland I discovered it was the Girl Guides who were the backbone of the Resistance movement"

Arlene Foster on Irish language act: 'More people speak Polish' - "Mrs Foster said if there was to be an Irish language act, there should be a Polish language act because more people in Northern Ireland speak Polish than Irish. Referring to Sinn Fein demands, she told a party event in Lurgan, Northern Ireland: "If you feed a crocodile, it will keep coming back for more.""
More people speak Polish as a main language than Irish

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Micromastery: A hidden path to happiness? - "People who win the Nobel prize are obsessed with their subject right? You can imagine them sitting there endless hour after endless hour thinking about nothing else, right? Wrong. They are actually fifteen times more likely than us mere mortals to dabble in all sorts of creative activities and we should be doing the same at least that's what Robert Twigger says in his new book called micromastery"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Monday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "The challenge of an electric vehicle is that it has only two hundred moving parts, whereas the average car is genuinely a work of a global engineering and it has over two thousand moving parts so I think it, the barriers to entry for the competition is going to be significantly lower this time"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Manchester attack: The US leaks - "This comes down to numbers. If they told us just how many people they think had these extreme views right across the UK, we wouldn't sleep at night. It's in thousands and they haven't got the watchers, they haven't got the capability to follow all of those people. So they have to go where they think the danger is the most imminent and most serious. In the case of this guy, those fears were first voiced five years ago by two Muslim workers, youth workers who phoned into the anti terrorist line saying: we're really worried about this guy, he's got extreme views. Now that was in his last year at high school when he was seventeen Salman Abedi. He didn't do anything then for five years and then this happens, and that's the problem: that somebody can suddenly switch, suddenly change"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "'The supercycle theory was... that the traditional boom and bust in commodities which has gone on for time immemorial was going to come to an end because China was going to consume so much of this stuff that the price was just going to keep on rising forever'
'Exactly and that sort of take, fails to take into account frankly sort of human ingenuity. Commodity bull markets sew the seeds of their own demise, you know. Why do we have hybrid cars, now why do we have solar power, why do we have wind - is because oil's one hundred and fifty dollars'"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Copley Medal winner: Sir Andrew Wiles - "The proof alone takes one hundred twenty pages but that's without all the thousands of pages of mathematics that precedes it... it opened a chink in the door of a big program in mathematics which is trying to unify the different branches of mathematics. The branch that's like calculus, differential equations and so on, and the branch that's like algebra. And these usually lead relatively separate lives but there's a place in my field where they seem to come together"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Critical terror threat: What is being done to counter it? - "We have to be unequivocal that no amount of excuses, no amount of twisted reasoning about a foreign policy here or a foreign policy there can be an excuse. The reality is these people hate our values. You have to only have to look at their propaganda to realize the seeds of Salafist Jihadism which this lot are currently pursuing go back way before foreign wars. They started in the 30s and 50s by a guy that went to America and didn't like the values. It's about the values they hate. They hate our rule of law, they hate our equality, they hate our democracy
Somehow victim blaming is okay when it comes to jihadist attacks

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Chess champ Garry Kasparov on being beaten by a robot - "Fear is understatement. Most of people who marched with me against Putin at our peaceful rallies. They're either in jail, exile or worse like late Boris Nemtsov"
"So and you say that President Putin at the moment, it's a problem for Russia but he will eventually become everybody's-"
"No I said it ten years ago. Now it's problem for everybody. He attacked the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine. He is a constant threat for all neighboring countries and now we have enough proof to see interference with elections in the free world"

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby: London attack link to Islam as Christians killing Muslims is linked to Christianity - "Faith leaders must take responsibility for countering the religious justification for atrocities committed in their name, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has said. The Most Reverend Welby said throughout history religious scriptures have "been twisted and misused" by people to justify hates of violence and "We have got to say that if something happens within our own faith tradition we need to take responsibility for countering that". He said politicians should not just say "this is nothing to do with Islam" and focus on the security of political aspects of it as it is also an ideological problem. "I don't think it is getting us anywhere, just like saying Srebrenica had nothing to do with Christianity", he said... One of the big problems for the secular authorities trying to combat this is that they do not seem to understand "the basic tenets of the faith they are dealing with", he said. He explained: "They are often people who are unable to put themselves in the shoes of religious believers and understand a way of looking at the world that says that this defines your whole life, every single aspect of who you are and what you are".

Justin Welby: It's time to stop saying Isis has ‘nothing to do with Islam’ - "“If we treat religiously motivated violence solely as a security issue, or a political issue, then it will be incredibly difficult – probably impossible – to overcome it...
“This requires a move away from the argument that has become increasingly popular, which is to say that Isis is nothing to do with Islam, or that Christian militia in the Central African Republic are nothing to do with Christianity, or Hindu nationalist persecution of Christians in South India is nothing to do with Hinduism.”"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, The gay history of London - "'How has SoHo changed over the years?'
'Becoming I suppose more bland. It's more open. There is no longer the hint of danger or conspiracy'"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Monday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "We only rent our lifestyle and we pay for that rent through our income. If we don't have that income then we're likely to be thrown out of our own lifestyle"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Language: How has it changed? - "We've never had an academy, we've always worried about English. There has never been a Golden Age. Shakespeare was criticized, Keats was criticized"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Wednesday's business with Rob Young - "IT resilience, no matter what you put in place, could always be better. At the end of the day no matter how much work you do in the area of cybersecurity: whether it's protection or resilience, there's always more you can do. The problem is none of us have limitless budgets. We have to make choices when we run a business about those things we're going to spend money on. And it means having to make decisions about what level of resilience you're going to buy yourself. How much of an outage can your business afford to take?... I have yet to meet any organization that's planning for someone accidentally cutting the wrong power cord to their whole data center. I have however heard of it happening twice now"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, When does borrowing become 'cultural appropriation'? - "'I think the best way to respect other cultures is actually to appropriate it. Take it on, try on somebody else's clothes and turn it into something new and I think the real problem with this debate, and it is extremely ,chilling is that culture has been politicized to the point where tastes, habits, whether you do yoga or where Geisha costumes are no longer seen as something that is about respecting and enjoying some else's culture but it's seen as a kind of political statement. And it turns cultural interaction into a site of intense anxiety, rather than curiosity, appreciation, experimentation and exchange'
'I have to disagree strongly. I mean I wish we lived in a world where it took Kate Moss's daughter to politicize culture. The reality is that culture has been highly politicized for millennia, and if you take African culture because that's the example with Kate Moss's daughter wearing braids, you know that's a very traditional African hairstyle. African culture has been politicized ever since Britain had an empire and you know if you look at a fashion collections for example the Valentino collection last year which was accused of culture appropriation, not only did it dress white models in African clothes which as I said you know per se not necessary anything wrong with that. But it then describes the collection as tribal, primitive. All of these terms that black people in African cultures still are routinely labeled with in a highly politicized and patronizing way'...
'I wonder if you can actually say though that it is black culture. I don't think any culture is created in that kind of cultural vacuum.... I don't think it accurately reflects those cultural projects which are never created in this kind of pure vacuum of no exchange'...
'If you look at dreadlocks for example which is the thing that we're talking about here. Are they black or I mean the first I think literary example of them is in Hindu Vedic scriptures dating from 1700 BC. The Pharaohs wore them and I don't think Bob Marley was being racist when he appropriated them without proper footnotes'
'That's a reductive argument. You have to distinguish between different cultures clearly. So I have never said that dreadlocks, you know black culture has a monopoly over dreadlocks. But Rastafarianism is definitely something that has strong roots in black culture, in black nationalism and pride and Bob Marley was referencing that specific culture with his dreadlocks. So if other people want to wear dreadlocks and make them part of their own culture that's fine. But when it's combined with this ongoing discrimination and prejudice against the black cultures that manifest these traditions then that's a problem'
If A politicises B's culture, who is B at fault?
Jedi mind trick! We need to summon Egyptians to slap Bob Marley