Links - 30th April 2018 (3)

Chinese woman charged over fatal breast implant in Australia - "A Chinese national was charged with manslaughter Tuesday (Sep 5) over an alleged botched attempt at breast augmentation surgery at a Sydney beauty clinic, which led to the death of the salon's manager."

How a Lack of Touch is Destroying Men - "We American men have a tragic laundry list of reasons why we are not comfortable with touch:
We fear being labeled as sexually inappropriate by women.
We live in a virulently homophobic culture so all contact between men is suspect.
We don’t want to risk any hint of being sexual toward children.
We don’t want to risk our status as macho or authoritative by being physically gentle.
We don’t ever want to deal with rejection when we reach out."

THIS HITLER NONSENSE … - "The thing my father and I have often discussed, through the years, is the eye-rolling art of comparing American presidents to Hitler. It is such an absurdity we find it amusing …and frustrating. It’s often just a punch line. Like the Soup Nazi wasn’t really a Nazi. He was just mean. The Nazi part made it funny. You know …over-the-top. Like “grammar Nazi” or “spelling Nazi.” Nobody is really a “Nazi.” It’s our representation of something we consider jarring, strident, intractable and inhumane... ironically, the American president who could’ve actually been likened to Hitler (before Hitler) in some of his methods was …wait for it …Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln broke more constitutional law than any other president in U.S history. He imprisoned political opponents without due process. He suspended habeas corpus. He was personally responsible for the deaths of six hundred thousand people. He invaded countries that had declared their own sovereignty and forced them back into a union they didn’t want to be a part of. He unilaterally annexed Nevada, without 60 thousand residents, (a pre-requisite for becoming a state) in order to carry it and win the 1864 election. In other words, he pretty much rigged it."

Your baby is a little bit racist, science says - "Infants between 6 and 9 months looked at faces of their own race for longer after listening to happy music, and faces of other races for longer after listening to sad music... infants between 6 and 8 months watched videos of a woman looking at a corner of the TV screen. In some videos, the woman is gazing at an animal; in others, the animal appears in a different corner of the screen. The infants were more likely to follow the adult’s line of sight if she was of their own race, indicating that infants are more likely to learn from adults of their own race than adults of other races"
Maybe babies learn to be racist in the womb

Baby Racists: At Our Sweetest Age, We're Capable of Nasty Impulses - "15-month-old toddlers watched an experimenter with a collection of four small toys share them either evenly or unevenly with two other adult volunteers. When allowed to choose which experimenters the babies wanted to play with later, 70% of them preferred the ones who had divided the toys evenly. Nice, but there was an exception: when the two adults who were receiving the evenly or unevenly divided toys were of different races and the race of the one who got more toys matched the babies’ own, the 70% preference for the fair distributor dropped and the share of babies wanting to play with the unfair one rose. The implication: unfairness is bad, unless someone from your clan is getting the extra goodies."

Man gets 12 months' jail for having sex with underage girl - "Ray Reuven Roche Carbolido, a healthcare assistant by profession, sent the 15-year-old girl a WeChat chat request... While chatting with the girl, he asked her if she wanted to have sex. She agreed and went to Carbolido's home in Ang Mo Kio, a residential area in northeastern Singapore, that same night. The pair engaged in sexual acts, including intercourse using a condom that had been brought along by the girl. The court learned that the girl had told Carbolido she was only 15 and asked him if he was worried about having sex with a minor. He replied that it should not be a problem as it was consensual, and so she went to his home. Six days later, the girl was taken to KK Women's and Children's Hospital after starting to feel pain in her private parts. She was diagnosed with herpes simplex virus... The girl admitted to the police that she had had sexual encounters with several men, one of whom was Carbolido, between March 19 and 24. Carbolido was sent for a medical examination on April 5 after his arrest, and no sexually transmitted infection was found"
If a victim gets victimised repeatedly and consensually, does that make him more or less of a victim?
Straits Times: "some other sexual acts were also performed between them"

Let’s Talk About Racism and Privilege: White Men Keep Out - "I remember one instance we waited for over 3 hours at one immigration office to turn in one piece of information only to be turned away. The woman at the counter said we only brought half of what she needed, even though the last time we waited hours to talk to her, she told us all we needed to bring was what we had just brought. “You’ll have to come back later,” she sneered. Had either of us been a different color than the other I might have thought she was racist. But instead, I just thought she didn’t like immigrants or didn’t like her job. It’s easy to take things personally and assume people are rude to us because of an outward characteristic than an internal one, whether it’s our weight, our height, our gender, or because of the color of our skin. But there’s usually more to the story if we’d go past our own assumptions about their assumptions... Regardless of ethnicity, women were about twice as likely as men (23 per cent vs 12 per cent), and minorities were twice as likely as whites, to have ever received food stamps... These statistics are from 2013, after the recession, even though more men, including a fair amount of white men, lost jobs in the recession than women. Middle-aged white men are by far the most likely group to commit suicide, especially those with less education and lower incomes. Why would someone with “privilege” rather kill themselves than accept an unemployment check? Could one element be that no one has empathy for them when they fail to live up to society’s expectations – thus keeping their benefit numbers low – reinforcing society’s belief that they are “privileged” (don’t deserve help) and their own belief that they will not get or receive help if they ask for it? Could a sense of being discriminated against drive more women and minorities to seek out and accept benefits because they believe they are entitled to help – thus reinforcing society’s expectation and their own that they are “disadvantaged” and need ongoing services and support from special programs?"

When You Say “I Would Never Date A Trans Person,” It’s Transphobic. Here’s Why.
Lesbians who refuse to date men are sexist
Black women who refuse to date non-black men are racist

Swedish police banned from describing criminals anymore in case they sound racist - "Swedish police will no longer be able to give descriptions of alleged criminals for fear of being seen as racist. According to an internal letter, police in capital city Stockholm are instructed to refrain from describing suspects' race and nationality... “We want to avoid pointing out ethnic groups as criminal”"

Is Complaining About Street Sexual Harassment Racist? - "the Hollaback! app — which tracks and maps users’ reports of street sexual harassment — doesn’t collect data on race, either. (That would be racist, the creators said.) But it does reveal that most of the smartphone-enabled reports come out of gentrifying neighborhoods in lower Manhattan and West Brooklyn. This appears to confirm what the video’s optics suggested: The people most loudly complaining about catcalls are the ones most insulated from more serious problems of racial profiling and economic inequality. After all, getting catcalled in a gentrifying neighborhood isn’t just a reminder that because someone is young and female her body is up for grabs (besides, that happens in subtler ways all the time). It foremost means being forced to acknowledge some of the people who lived there in a time before gut renovations and organic bodegas and speakeasies. A gentrifier like me can always move back to the quiet, catcall-free suburbs; the guy who hangs outside my subway stop all day probably can’t. So when he tells me I look beautiful today, I say “thank you” instead of tattling on an app. It’s never led to an escalation that made me uncomfortable and, as a result, I’ve been hesitant to complain about catcalls as an issue. But that may not be true for all women — especially the victims of street harassment not represented by Hollaback!’s narrow take. If men are “brazen enough to harass white women and their protected femininities on the street,” Cooper wrote, “what won’t they do to cis and trans women of color, whose womanhood is structurally devalued?” For trans women of color, street sexual harassment is often a matter of life and death. It’s their safety and comfort that gets lost when we allow street sexual harassment to be cast as a threat to white gentrifiers"
So apparently collecting data is racist and if a poor man catcalls a white woman, the woman should thank him or she's racist

Feminist Academics Protest 'Racist' Law Against Street Harassment - "“It is well known that racialised young men from the working classes already suffer more than other people from police violence and oppression,” assert the academics, in a letter opposing equality minister Marlène Schiappa’s announcement that MPs are working on legislation to reduce street harassment... A 2015 study conducted in migrant-heavy French districts Seine-Saint-Denis and Essonne, carried out by the High Council for Equality between Women and Men (HCEfh) – concluded that 100 per cent of women had been subjected at least once in their lives to sexual harassment or sexual assault... some areas of Paris have become virtual “no-go” zones for women, who reported no longer being able to leave their homes without migrants subjecting them to verbal abuse. Local media described how, over the previous 12 months — as immigrants and drug dealers flooded the east Paris district of Chapelle-Pajol — the streets became crowded with dozens of groups of young men harassing and sometimes even assaulting women who walked by."

Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression | Electronic Frontier Foundation - "In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is “dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism.” Subsequently Cloudflare, whose service was used to protect the site from denial-of-service attacks, has also dropped them as a customer, with a telling quote from Cloudflare’s CEO: “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power”... any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with. Those on the left face calls to characterize the Black Lives Matter movement as a hate group. In the Civil Rights Era cases that formed the basis of today’s protections of freedom of speech, the NAACP’s voice was the one attacked. Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t... we strongly believe that what GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare did here was dangerous. That’s because, even when the facts are the most vile, we must remain vigilant when platforms exercise these rights. Because Internet intermediaries, especially those with few competitors, control so much online speech, the consequences of their decisions have far-reaching impacts on speech around the world. And at EFF we see the consequences first hand: every time a company throws a vile neo-Nazi site off the Net, thousands of less visible decisions are made by companies with little oversight or transparency"

MILO: White Nationalism is Not the Answer - "“The reality is, if you force everyone to play identity politics, if you insist in pitting whites against blacks, women against men, straights against gays, the reality is you guys are gonna win and the left isn’t going to like it very much,” declared MILO. “But there’s a better way. Don’t fight identity politics with identity politics.”“White pride, white nationalism, white supremacy isn’t the way to go,” he continued. “The way to go is reminding them and yourselves that you should be aspiring to values and to ideas.” “You should be focusing on what unites people and not what drives them apart,” MILO concluded. “You shouldn’t give a shit about skin color, a shit about sexuality… You shouldn’t give a shit about gender, and you should be deeply suspicious of the people who do.”"
I thought Milo was supposed to be a racist white nationalist

"BPA-free" plastic alternatives may not be safe - "Your "BPA-free" plastic product may be no safer than the product it replaced, says a new UCLA study that analyzed the impact of a common BPA alternative on zebra fish embryos. The study joins a small but growing group of similar research sounding the alarm about so called "BPA-free" alternatives"

Chinese tofu maker ‘turned to arms dealing’ after business was forced to close down - "The two are said to have downloaded weapon blueprints online and manufactured gun parts in local hardware workshops in Ningbo"

Susanna Viljanen's answer to How come the Japanese Army and Navy was so inefficient against the US in WWII despite having put so much effort into their armed forces? - Quora - "Compared to Olympic fencing and historical European swordsmanship, kendo has no good defences and no good parries, and while kaeshi strikes certainly do exist, the defence relies more or less solely on swiftness, not on taking the enemy’s weapon into control and counter-striking when he is weak. And this was the Japanese main flaw. They were prepared only for a swift, offensive war: for a one-strike battle. They were not prepared for a lengthy war of attrition. They had no contingency plans. Their naval vessels were designed to deliver one single formidable battle-deciding strike - not to survive. The Japanese had an utterly callous attitude towards both human life and their equipment. They wasted their men like chaff. When in a no-win situation, they would rather expend everything in a futile banzai charge than retreat. Likewise, they would rather commit suicide than surrender honourably. They really did not know their enemies. It can be safely claimed that the Japanese had arguably the worst aircraft carriers in WWII, and their cruisers were made of explodium. They did not use their submarines aggressively enough. And, most of all, they never understood the importance of logistics... The Japanese commanders had a bad tendency to lose their nerve when things went pear-shaped. They would rather kill themselves than save what was saveable"

Christians should pray for Prince George to be gay, says minister - "Christians should pray for Prince George to be gay to force support for same-sex marriage in the Church of England, a senior Scottish Episcopal church minister and LGBTQ campaigner has said... The full post by Holdsworth about Prince George is part of a list of nine suggestions to force LGBT inclusion in the Church of England"
We've gone from Pray The Gay Away to Pray The Gay In

A Reverend Requested Prayers For Prince George To Be Gay, & People Are So Pissed - "while some of the criticism did come from those with seemingly anti-LGBTQ views, a fair bit of criticism came from those who simply thought that, just maybe, people shouldn't be praying for a child's sexuality to turn out one way or another. In fact, maybe someone else's sexuality is none of our business in the first place. "To use prayer as a mechanism for wishing this on Prince George is an unkind and destructive thing to do," Gavin Ashenden, a Christian Episcopal Church missionary bishop, told the BBC. "It doesn't have the prince's best interests at heart, but uses him as a gender-political football."
He continued: What is especially odd and incongruous is the fact that it is suddenly OK to pray for someone to be gay, but totally unacceptable to pray for them to be free from being gay. Unfortunately, this is far from the first time that the public has felt like it's necessary to comment on Prince George's potential sexuality. In August, he was labeled a "gay icon" by one website after a picture emerged of the little prince overjoyed to see a helicopter"

Gay marriage plans offer 'quadruple lock' for opposed religious groups - "The consultation, issued by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in the summer, elicited 228,000 responses. Of these, 53% agreed that all couples, regardless of gender, should be able to have a civil marriage ceremony. In addition, mass petitions opposing same sex marriage were received, but to the fury of Tory MPs were excluded since the consultation was about how to introduce same sex marriage, and not whether to do so... Miller promised a quadruple lock, which would:
• Ensure that no religious organisation or individual minister can be compelled to marry same-sex couples or to permit this to happen on their premises.
• Provide an opt-in system for religious organisation who wish to conduct marriages for same-sex couples.
• Amend the Equality Act 2010 to reflect that no discrimination claims can be brought against religious organisations or individual ministers for refusing to marry a same-sex couple.
• Ensure that legislation will not affect the canon law of the Church of England or the Church in Wales. As a result, if either church wanted to conduct a same-sex marriage, it would require a change to primary legislation at a later date and a change to canon law...
"The system of locks will iron-clad the protection in law, adding to the existing protections in European legislation, so that those who do not want to conduct same-sex marriages will never have to"... In response to claims that teachers would be forced to support same sex marriages in the classroom, the government insisted that "… teachers, particularly in faith schools, will be able to continue to describe their belief that marriage is between a man and a woman while acknowledging and acting within the new legislative position which enables same-sex couples to get married"."
You're allowed to have any opinion you want, as long as it's the correct one
Tellingly, the pray the gay in clergyman said just 5 years later: "Every single political party needs to be asked repeatedly whether it will remove the Quadruple Lock on the C of E. Every single one without exception. So who is going to do that and when and how will that be decided?"

Government integration advisor: ‘Catholic schools cannot oppose gay marriage’ - "During a parliamentary hearing, Dame Louise Casey criticised Catholic schools who oppose marriage redefinition... she then went on to single out Catholic schools saying: “When does a teacher running a secular school say, ‘No, it’s fine for you not to do theatre,’ or music or those sorts of thing? When is that OK? I do not really have any view on which religion it is that it is promoting those sorts of views, but they are not OK, in the same way that it is not OK for Catholic schools to be homophobic and anti-gay marriage. That is not OK either—it is not how we bring children up in this country.”... Edward Leigh MP for Gainsborough tweeted: “Equalities czar says we ‘can’t condemn others for living differently’ then condemns Catholics for living differently.”"
This was 5 years after it was proclaimed that teachers were to be able to continue to disagree with gay marriage. The slippery slope is real
Strangely the Parliamentary transcript does not show up on Google

British equalities czar: ‘It is not OK for Catholic schools to be homophobic and anti-gay marriage’ - "Britain’s equalities czar has equated Christian schools with Islamic extremists for teaching that marriage is between a man and a woman"

What’s changed in Britain since same-sex marriage? - "It became clear, during this year’s general election, just how militant the LGBT lobby have become, following marriage redefinition. The primary target was Tim Farron, leader of England’s third largest political party, the Liberal Democrats. High-profile journalists had heard that Farron was a practising Christian. In every single interview thereafter, they demanded to know. Did he personally believe homosexual sex to be a sin? He practically begged the commentariat, to allow him to keep his personal faith and legislative convictions separate. For decades, he pointed out, he had out vocally and legislatively supported the LGBT Lobby. Likewise, he had long backed same-sex marriage, voting for it enthusiastically. This simply was no longer enough. Shortly after the election campaign, Farron resigned. He stated that it was now impossible, for a believing Christian to hold a prominent position in British politics... In the lead-up to the Parliamentary vote, we witnessed almost incomprehensible bullying. David Burrows MP, a mild-mannered supporter of the ‘Coalition for Marriage’, had excrement thrown at his house. His children received death threats and their school address was published online. Similarly, ‘Conservative’ broadcaster Iain Dale promised to, ‘publicly out’ gay MP’s, who did not vote for redefinition. Many hardworking Brits have lost their jobs... Even the National Trust, a British institution with over 4.2 million members, has decided to join the bullying LGBT crusade. A message went out. Each of the Trust’s 62,000 volunteers, would be required to wear a compulsory same-sex rainbow badge. Those who said they’d rather not were told they would be ‘moved out of sight’until they were prepared to publicly demonstrate inclusive tolerance... Across the UK, ‘sex education’ has been transformed and disfigured. TV programmes, aimed at children as young as three, promote ‘gender fluidity’, as an enabler of thoughtfulness and individuality. At the same time, Ministers have denied worried parents the right to withdraw their children from primary school classes"