Links - 29th September 2017 (2)

Incest and necrophilia 'should be legal' according to youth branch of Swedish Liberal People's Party - "It called for the repeal of several laws to make consensual sex between brothers and sisters aged over 15 legal, as well as allowing people to "bequeath" their bodies for intercourse after death without fearing the perpetrator would be prosecuted... “I understand that [incest] can be considered unusual and disgusting, but the law cannot stem from it being disgusting”... It is not the first time similar proposals have been raised in Europe. In 2014, the German Ethics Council also called for an end to the criminalisation of incest between siblings, after examining the case of a man who was jailed for having four children with his sister. The council argued that the risk of disability in children was not sufficient to warrant a law putting couples in “tragic situations”, and that decriminalising incest would not fuel the spread of the “very rare” practice. “The majority of the German Ethics Council is of the opinion that it is not appropriate for a criminal law to preserve a social taboo,” a statement said."

The Disturbing Wedding Trend in China of Groomsmen Sexually Assaulting Bridesmaids - "Teasing the bride and groom on their wedding day is part of Chinese marriage custom. However, in recent years, that custom has been twisted in an alarming way in mainland China to include groomsmen sexually assaulting bridesmaids."
Maybe the men are fed up by the ragging

'Islamist,' 'Terrorist' Now Forbidden Words - "In a stunning display of “progressive” political correctness, the Associated Press announced that, among other words and expressions, “Islamist” and “terrorist” are no longer acceptable. Instead, ‘Islamist’ is to be dropped altogether and the perpetrators of Islamist terrorist attacks are to called “militants,” “attackers” or “lone wolves”... Even if a journalist doesn’t want to use AP style, “If you don’t write it this way and you submit an article to a mainstream publication, the editors will change your words”... Along with the changes to the word Islamist and terrorist, the AP also decided the words “migrant” or “refugee” must no longer be used; rather the appropriate words are now “people struggling to enter Europe.” Similarly, AP says “pro-life” should be called “anti-abortion.” “Illegal immigrant” and “undocumented” may also not be used anymore (AP had already forbidden the use of “illegals” and “alien”)."

The Islamic State's (ISIS, ISIL) Magazine - "The Islamic State (ISIS) regularly puts out a glossy propaganda magazine aimed at recruiting jihadists from the West. It is sophisticated, slick, beautifully produced and printed in several languages including English. In order to combat extremist groups, it is critical to understand their underlying ideology. Therefore, Clarion Project will continue to post the issues of Dabiq and Rumiyah here as they are released."

Eating Clean is Useless - "if you accept clean eating ideals, you may think you can't afford to eat healthily—organic foods cost about 40 percent more than conventional foods, according to Consumer Reports. "Of course you can't afford to eat healthily—if you're buying $12 bottles of green juice and all organic, non-GMO, clean food," Scott-Dixon says. Seventy percent of Americans are overweight, and only one in ten eat the recommended amount of produce each day. The poorest states eat even less than that. Adding extra financial and accessibility barriers to entry surely isn't helping the majority, and hits underserved populations especially hard... Deweese says she hates the term clean eating. "It's a social status thing. It's more about 'I'm better because I eat clean,'" she says. Adds Scott-Dixon, "'Clean eating' is a preoccupation of people who, in socioeconomic terms, really don't have any real, legitimate worries. It's a first-world problem."

Are organic foods safer or healthier than conventional alternatives?: a systematic review. - "The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods. Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria."

Vincent Liu: Japanese vs. Singaporean Women - "I'm not sure about the rest of Asia, but when I was growing up in Singapore, there was a huge consensus among Singaporean males that Japanese females are much prettier than our Singaporean counterparts. Given that most of my friends who claimed it as a fact only came to that conclusion based on seeing pretty Japanese actresses on TV, I've always felt quite ambivalent about this point - come on, people always put on prettier than average faces on TV, but does that prove the case for the general population? Given that I recently had the opportunity to visit Japan, I decided to put the claims to the test and do some observations on my own, through the perennial hobby of mine - people watching"

Japan's top court has approved blanket surveillance of the country's Muslims - "the presiding judges did not make a judgment on police profiling and surveillance tactics which a lower court had upheld as "necessary and inevitable" to guard against international terrorism."

Linda Sarsour Has Raised $80K For Anti-Muslim Hate Crime That Allegedly Did Not Happen - "They’re not even mentioning that I was the victim. They came at me. The woman that’s in the hospital is part of the group that was aggressing me"

Labor Market Rigidity and the Disaffection of European Muslim Youth - "The problem of labor market rigidity is especially acute in Belgium where the differences between native and immigrant unemployment, employment and wages are among the highest in the OECD"

Muslim man attacked by thugs shouting ‘ISIS’ has no idea who ISIS is

In Japan, Small Children Take the Subway and Run Errands Alone - "What accounts for this unusual degree of independence? Not self-sufficiency, in fact, but “group reliance,” according to Dwayne Dixon, a cultural anthropologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese youth. “[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others,” he says."

Noahpinion: The siren song of homogeneity - "the decline in anti-immigrant sentiment is being driven by whites - anti-immigrant sentiment is actually slightly up among blacks and Hispanics. That implies that much of what anti-immigrant sentiment does exist is not due to a growing yearning for a homogeneous white nation... the case for homogeneity comes down to the idea that a homogeneous society is a nicer place to live. Alt-right people cite Japan's stunningly low crime rate, for example, as evidence that ethnically similar people don't fight. They also claim that homogeneity increases social trust. There is a reasonably large body of research that supports the "trust" idea. For a good list of links to those papers, check out this post by blogger James Weidmann, better known as Roissy. Roissy sums up the thesis in one simple equation: "Diversity + Proximity = War"...
almost none of these studies are very good at dealing with endogeneity...
Japan has always reported relatively low levels of interpersonal trust - until recently, considerably lower than in the U.S. Now keep in mind, that's trust, which is very different from trustworthiness...
genocides between extremely distinct groups - for example, the Belgian genocide in the Congo - are the exception, not the rule. In fact, plenty of mass killings happen among people who don't recognize any ethnic differences between the sides at all - the Khmer Rouge, Mao Zedong, the Spanish Civil War, etc. "
On racial/ethnic diversity and social trust

The Wrath of the Killdozer - "Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado was a profoundly frustrated muffler repair man. In the late 1990s—after years of protests, petitions, and town meetings—it became obvious to the 52-year-old that he was entwined in a gross miscarriage of justice. His business was ruined by some shady zoning changes, and Heemeyer contended that mayor and city council were corrupt. Even as he was forced to give up his legal fight and sell his land, he hatched one last plan to secretly retool his muffler shop to serve a single malevolent purpose: to construct a machine that would allow him to exact his revenge upon those who had wronged him."

Hi I'm Caramelkh : SRS - "I'm demisexual, polyromantic, fat positive genderqueer (neutrois, femme presenting), sexual assault survivor (7 times), native american, muslim neuroatypical with OCD, aspergers, social phobias, depression, post traumatic stress, anxiety issues and I can't walk very far. I will not tolerate any form of oppressive bullshit language and I will not hesitate to call you out on it. My preferred pronouns are ze/zy/zo/zum. After reading this you still know nothing about me other than that the long list of labels means I get to have experienced nearly every type of kyriarchy oppression and so I can call people out on anything and say it triggers and offends me. If people get bored, I invent new oppressions. I'm triggered by the color teal."

Silent Majority: Too much freedom in S’pore equals freedom to be raped | New Nation - "There are always places where such freedom can be found. But together with it, there will be freedom to be discriminated against, freedom to be raped, freedom to be mugged, freedom to be shot – complete freedom. As for me, I am staying put, humidity and all. I am blessed and proud to be a Singaporean."

Soaplands booming, thanks to pensioners and Chinese tourists - ""When they come to Japan, they are specially moved by the heartfelt service provided by the masseuses, which make them feel they're receiving the ministrations of a lover. Not merely sex, these run the gamut of free cigarettes or juice (paid for by the girls out of their own pockets), or even an offer to iron out the wrinkles on their slacks"... Some older Chinese also appear to have trouble restraining themselves from provoking a debate with the girls on the subject of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands territorial dispute, he adds. "But in traditional Yoshiwara fashion, the girls avoid confrontations by dispensing an extra measure of energetic 'service' that leaves such customers in no shape to complain about anything," the critic grins."

Outlook 2013 Search Not Working - "Any Outlook OST or PST file that you’re using must be allowed to be indexed by Windows. This is a default file attribute when Outlook indexing is enabled, but for some reason, it was changed during my recent OS upgrade.
Find all OST and PST files that you’re using on your computer. In Windows 8, OST files are usually hidden and stored in the C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook folder.
For each file you’re using, right click on the file(s) and select Properties
Click on the Advanced button on the general tab
Ensure that the Allow this file to have contents indexed in addition to file is checked"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The EU Referendum - "People haven't got the facts and why aren't people listening to the experts? And the reason I am slightly nervous about this, it's become sort of like this notion of a kind of secular priesthood who are going to give you the truth. And then if you don't agree with them they sort of say you're ignorant because you won't listen to facts. I mean do you see the danger of reducing this down to a kind of technocratic managerial decision rather than the broad sweep of what democracy should be?...
'Are you really saying this issue is too important to be put to the general public?'
'To some extent yes. I think there are, it's too complex. It's too complex for people who work nine to five to go into all the intricacies'...
'People will feel that is incredibly patronizing'...
One other thing I think has been an enormous mistake was the televising of parliament. If anything democracy within Parliament has become boring and moribund because it's trying to reach beyond the House of Commons to the average voter and as such the kind of arguments that you get tend to banal, emotion driven and not terribly well informed... I felt that strongly during the gay marriage debate really came down to people signaling virtue to voters rather than actually engaging with points of law or theology or anything else like that and that's because the voters are watching"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Morality of Victors and Vanquished - "[On the results of the Brexit referendum] People saying well I think this or that is fair. You have to focus on demographics. Someone else might want to focus on classes. Some people do. Some people aren't too keen on people voting if they haven't got degrees. Do you not see that there's a segmenting of the demos which might become rather dangerous?...
What about wisdom? What about life experience? Your view seems to be that people who need to live and work in the EU, they're young, get preference over those have actually seen how the EU worked for quite a long time...
Maybe they don't want the younger generation to be deprived of their rights to being in a country which has national self government and democracy. Maybe they are thinking in terms of the national interest even though they may be old"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Chilcot Inquiry - "What about the complex relationship between morality and consequence? Would we think twice about it if Iraq were now a flourishing and peaceful democracy? Should our judgment of right and wrong be so determined by outcome?"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Nuclear Weapons - "For the Captain of a nuclear submarine to say let's press this thing is pure revenge and a complete waste of time because... he's going to be on the losing side... going to be a war criminal when the thing finishes. And therefore it seems to be totally logical that you wouldn't do it...
A number of our witnesses seemed to share a rather narrow nationalistic point of view that if Britain was finished, that was the end of the story. But of course it's not the end of the story. Because if what happens is Britain is wiped out by an unscrupulous aggressor and that unscrupulous aggressor faces no retaliation then the lesson to the rest of the world is clear. And by the way the unscrupulous aggressor remains in place."

Miley Cyrus 'felt sexualised' while twerking during 2013 MTV VMA performance - "In the beginning, it was kind of like saying, '[Screw] you. Girls should be able to have this freedom or whatever.' But it got to a point where I did feel sexualised"
???

A 14-year-old girl disproves a college professor's published theory on racism ... by Googling it. - "Published in 2002 in the Journal of Social History, Jensen's " No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization" claimed that, contrary to popular belief, there had never been any recorded instances of newspaper ads or shop signs that said "No Irish need apply" (or "NINA" for short)... Did you know that Frederick Douglass wrote in 1846, "No people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion, than the Irish people?" (He then went on to say that the Irish are also a bunch of violent drunkards responsible for their own plight. WHOOPS.) Or did you know that the Irish weren't even considered "white" until the last hundred years? So while you probably won't witness much Irish racism in 2015, the reverberations from that suffering surely still exist"
I'm surprised to see this on Upworthy

Guy Brutally Roasts PETA On Twitter, And People Are Finally Realizing The Truth - "it’s becoming increasingly clear that their attention-grabbing media presence may be more important to them than the lives of animals."

People with high IQs are less likely to die young, science says - "Scientists said one reason for the findings may be that smarter Brits live healthier lifestyles and are more likely not to smoke. They also tend to do more exercise and seek medical attention when ill. But researchers said increased spending power was unlikely to play a role, as income was accounted for. Another theory is brainier people simply have better genes linked to longer life."

Do Women's Orgasms Function as a Masculinity Achievement for Men? - "Our results showed that men felt more masculine and reported higher sexual esteem when they imagined that a woman orgasmed during sexual encounters with them, and that this effect was exacerbated for men with high masculine gender role stress"
Apparently women get very upset if a man doesn't come during sex