Links - 11th July 2018 (1)

The Real-Life Walk of Shame that Inspired that 'Game of Thrones' Scene - "Jane Shore was one of King Edward IV’s many mistresses. After his death in 1483 (and the suspicious death of his son, Edward V), Edward’s brother ascended to the throne as King Richard III. Richard wasn’t as charmed by Shore as his brother had been, and charged her and two others with conspiring against him. He accused her of sorcery and witchcraft—the scoliosis-afflicted King believed she used spells to “waste and wither” his body—but couldn’t come up with enough evidence."

The best toys for kids? Fewer options may lead to more creativity - "kids who played with four toys played longer with each toy. But kids who played with fewer toys also had “higher quality” play—that is, they played in a greater variety of ways with the limited number of toys than they did when presented with 16 options"

Singapore’s impotent immigration policy - "The government is reluctant to do more than fiddle at the edges of its model of economic development and its model of community-based social construction. But without one or both of these models being radically transformed, it is difficult to see how it is going to be able to realise its goal of reducing tensions between foreigners and Singaporeans — no matter how seriously it seeks such an end."

After-birth abortion: why should the baby live? - "Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled."

Nazi Germany pursued 'Hitler salute' Finnish dog - "A Finnish dog which gave Nazi salutes so annoyed Germany's World War II government that it launched a campaign against its owner.
Meanwhile in the UK they're so anti-Nazi they prosecute people for the same actions that annoyed Hitler

Never Again: Is gun control movement too white?
The same message that presented by a black person would've been good is unacceptable when articulated by a white. We used to have a name for this sort of double standard

What is the gender pay gap at your company? - "Of those that have submitted their figures, 78% pay men more than women, 14% pay women more and 8% said they had no gender pay gap, based on the median measure. Firms with more than 250 staff must state the average difference between male and female employees."
Feminism means we must pay female toilet cleaners the same as male CEOs

Xi calls for strengthened ideological work in colleges - "The president called for greater efforts to teach Marxist theory to help students lay an ideological foundation for their lives. Ideological and political work is fundamentally work about individuals, Xi said. The work must focus on students, caring for them, serving them, and helping them improve in ideological quality, political awareness, moral characteristics and humanistic quality to enable them to develop both ability and integrity... Liu also called on authorities to realize the significance of improving the ideological and political work and uphold the Party's leadership over colleges"

Ciccotta: 'Everyone's a Little Bit Racist' – 'Avenue Q' and the Death of Liberal Humor - "I’ve seen Avenue Q twice since it first opening in 2003. Since then, the left has noticeably increased their efforts to place restrictions on comedy. Comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Larry the Cable Guy refuse to perform on college campuses over concerns that their material will be falsely labeled as “racist” or “sexist.” Just this past week, popular comedian Dave Chapelle was labeled “homophobic” and “transphobic” over jokes made in his recent Netflix special... Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Yang claimed in a blog post that he when he first saw Avenue Q he thought it was a work of “satirical brilliance.” But when revisiting the show in 2013, Yang claimed that he was disturbed by “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.” Further revealing the evolution of American liberalism, Yang called it “a handy theme song” for “those seeking to dismissively minimize acts of racial insensitivity,” a concern he suggests he didn’t have when he was first exposed to the show."
The moral arc of history seems to be accelerating. It takes less than 2 decades for an icon of liberal culture to become problematic

Mustsharenews.com - Posts - "Every durian is a good durian, so here are the taste profiles of 6 popular breeds in Singapore for all you durian connoisseurs. D24. Mao Shan Wang. XO. Golden Phoenix. Red Prawn. D13."

Male birth control pill that lowers testosterone set for 3-month trial - "To balance out the effects of men's low testosterone levels while taking the drug, the patients were given a synthetic androgen, or male steroid hormone, to help them maintain their "male" characteristics. The artificial hormone is designed to mimic the role testosterone plays in non-sperm-related functions in the body, like sex drive, musculation, and hair growth."

'Territorialization' - Activist Details Real Reasons for Toulouse Unrest - "While mainstream media blames social woes, Fatiha Boudjahla, a teacher and activist from Toulouse, told Sputnik in an interview that gang leaders in an isolated community have concluded an alliance of convenience with Islamists in order to oust local police from the districts and remind everyone that French laws do not apply to this territory... Boudjahla — co-founder of the Viv(r)e la République movement advocating for equal rights and opposing "any kind of bigotry," and author of the book Féminisme, Tolérance, Racisme, Culture: Le Grand Détournement - believes those incidents were used as an excuse by gangsters aligned with the "bearded guys" to "prevent police from being present on the territory which reminds them that French laws still apply there.""

Why So Many People Make Their Password 'Dragon'

Research: Drunk People Are Better at Creative Problem Solving

Microsoft just exposed email's ugliest secret - "It came out yesterday that the company had read through a user's inbox as part of an internal leak investigation. Microsoft has spent today in damage-control mode, changing its internal policies and rushing to point out that they could have gotten a warrant if they’d needed one. By all indications, the fallout is just beginning."

Just the Tip - Posts - "And here she is, for the third time, stunning, all smiles, with her royal whisker-biscuit busted all to hell. 8 hours after shitting a watermelon, Princess Kate is in full hair and makeup, standing precariously in high heels in front of a hospital, hoping her goddamn industrial strength pad doesn’t slip, confident that the red dress she picked will mask any potential bloody mishaps. Once again I am in awe of her composure, because after my third vaginal crochet job I could do little more than waddle to the shitter and occasionally spritz the injured area with a numbing solution amid hisses and gasps of pain."
That's why you pay them

Being a cupcake on Tinder - "I got more attention as a cupcake on Tinder than I have on any dating site I've ever joined. Which sounds kind of sad. Let me rephrase... no, actually that's about right. Women are naturally drawn to cupcakes. They can't help it"

Halal and kosher meat ending up in British food chain - "Britons are inadvertently eating meat from animals slaughtered while they are still conscious, a top vet has warned. Lord Trees, who is a former president of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, said the meat would mainly be found in pies and ready meals. There has been a sharp rise in the number of sheep and poultry being killed without being stunned first. This has been attributed to religious practices. But Lord Trees, a crossbench peer, said it was highly probable that some unstunned meat was entering the ‘standard’ food chain as well."

Excluding Jews and Others from Juries - "Comes the news that Frederick Cohn, the Jewish defense lawyer for Abdel Hameed Shehadeh, asked Brooklyn-based federal judge Eric Vitaliano to exclude Jews from the jury. Shehadeh is charged with three counts of making false statements in connection with his attempts to join jihadis in Pakistan. "Your Honor" Cohn explained in February, "I'm not wild about having Jews on the jury in this case. Given that there's going to be inflammatory testimony about Jews and Zionism, I think it would be hard for Jews to cast aside any innate antipathy. The American Jewish community is heavily aligned with Israel and Zionism." This news brings to mind the London trial, almost exactly a decade ago, of Abdullah el-Faisal, when the defense successfully excluded Jews and Hindus from a trial jury"

Why can’t we speak plainly about migrant crime? | Coffee House - "For the time-being we can deplore the murder of an 85-year old Holocaust survivor and praise the heroism of Arnaud Beltrame, but not do either victim the decency of trying to learn much information about their killers, what might have motivated them or what views we might come to as a consequence. To do so would be to trespass upon the fiercest dogmas of our day. We can feel sad. And we can tell people that we feel sad. But who would dare to do anything more than that?... Is it possible that there are facts which one person is allowed to say, but another is not? Can it be the case that, because of certain racial or religious characteristics, one person’s statement of facts is another person’s demonstration of prejudice?... In Germany friends and readers describe to me how they are learning anew how to read their daily newspapers. When the news says that ‘A person was killed by another person’ for instance, and no names or other identifying characteristics are given, people guess – correctly – that the culprit is probably of migrant background. For the time-being serious crimes are still reported, but the decision has been taken that the public should not really be informed about them. Of course if you were to report them, or mull on them on social media then you would now risk losing that platform. So the media isn’t much use. And social media isn’t either."

Britain’s flawed definition of extremism is storing up trouble | Coffee House - "the allegation that saying that ‘Allah is gay’ is ‘a threat to fundamental British values’ is seriously stretching things... Ahmed Hassan was convicted at the Old Bailey of placing a bomb on a packed rush-hour train last September. The device left at Parsons Green, London, failed to detonate. But various interesting details emerged at his trial. One was confirmation that Hassan should never have been in the UK in the first place. He had travelled to Calais illegally and there spent time in the illegal ‘Jungle’ camp – that place whose occupants Lily Allen and Juliet Stevenson forever tell us we must take in if we are not to be deemed bigots... Instead of getting Hassan out of the country ASAP, the UK continued to do everything it could for him, including finding him a school place and placing him with a foster family to whom they forgot to mention the Isis stuff... The British state currently has to find a reason to explain why saying ‘Allah is gay’ is a fundamental assault on British values, but admitting to being a trained member of Isis is not. It has to explain why approaching the borders legally can lead to expulsion but breaking into the country illegally cannot. Of course what this is is the enforcement of what one might call ‘Rowley-ism’, after the Metropolitan Police’s former assistant commissioner Mark Rowley. It was he who last month embedded the idea that the UK faces an equally balanced challenge: Islamist extremism on the one side, far-right extremism on the other. In order to sustain this equation it appears that for the time-being one must draw a moral equivalence between Muslims who blow things up and non-Muslims who do not, but have mean views. And an equivalence between Muslims who call for murder and non-Muslims who do not"

'Affirmative Consent' Will Make Rape Laws Worse - "this is what happens when you combine two principles designed to make it easier to prosecute sexual assault: affirmative consent and "enlarged definition of criminal sexual contact that would include the touching of any body part, clothed or unclothed, with sexual gratification in mind." The result is that "if Person B neither invites nor rebukes a sexual advance, then anything that happens afterward is illegal." Defenders of the thinking behind this proposal might say no prosecutor is going to bring such a silly case, but that's the opposite of comforting. Who would pass a law intended to be unenforced in almost every case? It's eerily totalitarian: a sort of blanket mandate convenient for targeting undesirables and threatening suspects... I'm struggling to know how a man (or a woman) could ever be fully sure that they were not breaking the law. Even affirmative consent can, after all, presumably be withdrawn at any time -- without a clear "no," under the prevailing thinking about affirmative consent. I'm reminded of a joke about a hypochondriac going to the doctor because he's worried about a silent heart attack, which is to say, a heart attack with no symptoms. The doctor runs a bunch of tests and says: "You're fine, sir. I did all the tests, and you haven't had a silent heart attack." The patient looks at him and says: "Yeah, but what about now? I still have no symptoms." If silence does not signal consent, does it signal consent has been revoked? You see the mess this approach creates... In the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of people were walking around this country with a constant background terror of being assaulted, and a lot of people decided that the way to solve that problem was to make a lot of men, mostly poor and black or Hispanic, feel in constant terror of the justice system, by expanding the laws on the books so that prosecutors and judges had a lot more power to put people in jail for long periods. The advocates thought that this form of terror was better, and more manageable, but in fact, it is worse, because it weakens the vital principles of equal justice and leaves the victims of the system with no recourse at all. You can call a cop to catch a criminal, but who do you call to protect you from the prosecutor? And from the legislators who handed the prosecutor such power?"
If feminists proclaim that "men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter", that suggests that they hate men

Destroy all churches in Gulf, says Saudi Grand Mufti - "Saudi Arabia’s top cleric made the comment in view of an age-old rule that only Islam can be practiced in the region. The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia is the highest official of religious law in the Sunni Muslim kingdom. He is also the head of the Supreme Council of Ulema (Islamic scholars) and of the Standing Committee for Scientific Research and Issuing of Fatwas"

Chop Chop Biryani & Meats: Swap Mutton For Roasted Pork With Nasi Biryani At Amoy Street Food Centre - "The siu yoke was very well-executed, with crispy pork crackling and an even ratio of fat to lean meat. It was also tender but still retained a bite. I never thought I’d say this, but roast pork really tastes so good with biryani rice."

The Straits Times - Posts - "Heard of "siew yoke biryani"?
Chop Chop Biryani & Meats stretches the boundaries of nasi biryani with pork masala, sambal sotong, braised char siew and salted egg yolk popcorn chicken."
Comments: "But curry also cross over and have east asian versions
30 yrs down the road this will just be another laksa"
"there are halal char kway teow and chow hor fun without the lard to cater to Indian-Muslim. So non-halal briyani to cater to other races' taste buds should be alright."
"please exercise sensitivity."
"sensitivity? how do you think Chinese feel about halal dimsum?"
"Oh for fucks sake... Its just fucking briyani served with fucking pork... Just because Muslims cant eat it doesnt mean others cant as well... Hundred and one stalls serving the usual briyani and everyone gotta bitch about this one... Eh guess something that wasnt halal to begin with... Bacon... But now all over the bloody place you see turkey bacon or beef bacon thats halal... Food might have cultural significance but that doesn't mean it cant be adapted to suit the tastes of others... To those who like pork...congrats now got one more pork dish to try... Enjoy yourselves... To everyone else who cannot or dont like, kindly turn your attention to other stalls that sell the usual briyani..."
"Its a disgrace to Briyani. They have tainted our food.. I accept Fusion in singapore, but adding pork to everything doesn't immediately make it fusions food. Look at how the Chinese Muslims in China cook great delicacies that's fusion. Wake up la deyss!"
"Well said Muhammad Habeeb Shafi. I hope you will agree that the Halal McDonald's, KFC, Burger King, Domino's and Subway in Singapore are disgraces to fast food and tainted, and that you don't accept them"
"Just let it be, no one's ever complained about char siew rice or bak kut teh and so on being tainted by being made halal. What's the big deal about it?"
"Pork biryani is infact a delicacy in India where biryani originated. Its made with wild boar."
"making it non halal n it was a halal dish make 1 wonder why they doing it"
"To say briyani isnt indian or to say using pork is intrusive, dey you open your eyes, fusion food is everywhere. Singaporean food IS fusion(fish head curry combines elements of chinese, malay and indian. If you eat it with bread, you can throw in ang moh in the mix)"
"I'm looking for the "Indonesian will claim it" comments."