Links - 28th August 2018 (1)

Islamic school's gender segregation is unlawful, court of appeal rules - "Schools in Britain will no longer be able to substantially segregate boys and girls, after the court of appeal ruled that a co-educational faith school in Birmingham had caused unlawful discrimination by separating the two sexes. The court overturned a ruling by the high court last year involving Al-Hijrah school, a voluntary-aided mixed-sex state school that had been strongly criticised by Ofsted school inspectors for failing to uphold British values. On appeal, Ofsted argued that the school had breached the 2010 Equalities Act by strictly segregating pupils from the age of nine, teaching them in different classrooms and making them use separate corridors and play areas. The segregation policy was also applied to clubs and school trips... The National Secular Society welcomed the court ruling as “an important blow” for gender equality. Stephen Evans, its campaign director, said: “Our society is often too slow to condemn discrimination when it comes cloaked in religion, particularly Islam. But gender apartheid is an assault on women’s rights and dignity.”

Ofsted chief receives threats over private faith school criticism - "The head of Ofsted has received threats and abuse after accusing private faith schools run by religious conservatives of deliberately resisting British values and equalities law. Amanda Spielman, the chief inspector of schools in England, said she had received some “pretty venomous stuff” from what she believed to be a “mixture of Islamic extremists and the hard left”... inspectors had found texts that encouraged domestic violence, the subjugation of women and homophobia at schools run religious conservatives.
Strange that she didn't hear from the "far right"

Ethnic differences in Singapore's dementia prevalence: the stroke, Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and dementia in Singapore study. - "Logistic regression (adjusted for age, sex, education) showed that Malays had twice the risk for AD as Chinese, and Indians had more than twice the risk for AD and VD than Chinese. Singapore's dementia prevalence, primarily influenced by its Chinese majority, is lower than seen in the West. The striking interethnic differences suggest a need for a dementia incidence study and further investigation of underlying genetic and cultural differences between the three ethnic groups in relation to dementia risk."
Given that Indians in Singapore are richer than Chinese, this is unlikely to be explained by SES

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of the Public Sector - "There's no doubt the pay cap which has been in place since 2011 has eroded the living standards of millions of public sector workers. In fact, as the Institute of Fiscal Studies pointed out in May, they are still paid on average more than similarly qualified workers in the private sector and often have superior pensions, but the gap is narrowing, and the interesting argument is how the comparisons should be made. Is there something special about working in the public sector or is the idea of an ethos, a self serving myth? What should our attitude be towards those who work for the state and for us?"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Fake News - "Joseph Pulitzer whose legacy funds the greatest prize in high minded journalism actually invented the yellow press and his sensational semi lies it's said were responsible for America going to war with Spain...
For years I was one of those defenders of objectivity in the mainstream media in the pursuit of truth and to be honest I was ridiculed by academics and media professionals who thought I was naive or elitist. There's something rather, I'm rather suspicious at the moment the only reason this has come up is to basically say all these stupid ignorant voters were sold fake news stories and voted the wrong way so now we're going to believe in truth and objectivity, so I started to not trust the mainstream media ideals that I once espoused...
Fake news in Britain is something approaching a moral panic. The real risk is dubious news. Highly exaggerated stuff, the traditional yellow journalism which has taken on a new life on Facebook is taking all out of control and that is largely result of exaggeration rather than complete fakery...
'Part of what I think is argued by those who would try to defend the blurring of this line is that it's impossible to draw the line between fact and opinion and that anyone who says you can is either a liar or a humbug.'
'No, something either happened or it didn't'...
The level of trust in the media, according to public opinion polls, I think on both sides of the Atlantic, the level of trust is lower for journalists than it is for politicians"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Virtue Signalling - "I think virtue signaling is actually anti morality. It's all about fundamentally demonizing people with a range of views so that the demonizer can demonstrate his or her own virtue. It's a way of spreading hatred and shutting down dissent and it's only found on the left...
'Our first witness, the writer and columnist James Bartolomew who if he didn't actually invent the term, certainly popularized it in a magazine article two years ago from whence it has taken off. What do you mean by it?'
'I mean, I mean saying things in order to make yourself, convince yourself or convince other people that you are virtuous without actually doing anything virtuous. Often by expressing hatred, especially in Britain where people will say I hate the Daily Mail, indicating that they're open minded and liberal or I hate UKIP, indicating they're not racist. So they are using words to attribute virtue, good feelings, good, good attitude to themselves without ever having, having to go to the bother of doing anything good'...
When I was in Singapore I saw in a school a sign saying: being virtuous is doing the right thing when other people can't see you. And I wish that kind of idea was used more in British schools where I fear that they are led to believe that being virtuous consists of having the right attitudes about feminism, gays, racialism...
Sometimes somebody will be trying to portray themselves as virtuous without doing anything. I'm sure that as a Christian you are against pride, the sin of pride and the people describing themselves as virtuous without being virtuous is inherently a bad thing"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Meritocracy Of Grammar Schools - "'I'm perplexed by this endless discussion about moving people out of a particular class and social mobility and what kind of jobs they get and so on and so forth. Is that what you think education's for?'
'I think what we think social mobility is about is ensuring that we get a better mix of people running this country, we got a better mix of people who are in positions of power'...
'So it's not an educational aim at all. So you're actually interested in the types, you're doing a social engineering project of your own and you're using schools as a vehicle so you are actually indifferent to whether young people are receiving the great knowledge passed on'...
Government and academics and commentators look at outcomes and they see quite rightly that middle class kids by large outperform on average outperform working class kids in entry to grammar school and in entry to universities, to top universities and jump to the conclusion from that, that it must be that the selection procedures are therefore in some way biased and unfair and therefore they start adjusting the selection procedures with things like positive discrimination. My research over 20, 25 years suggests that while social background factors do have some influence on children's performance in education - obviously, they do - by far the biggest influence is ability. And what's missing in this whole debate is any recognition of different distributions of ability between the different classes... What we've got is is this absurd position now, if we look at the pressure that's been put in the last four, five years on our top universities to lower entry grades for children from certain kinds of backgrounds, the IFS, the Institute of Fiscal Studies produced a report just a few years ago that showed that universities recruit meticulously on meritocratic principles. There is no element of anything other than a concern with the academic performance of that child on which universities base their selection. So we have a meritocratic process of selection for university and the government is now coming and trampled all over it by saying to universities, you've got to stop that because it doesn't look meritocratic in terms of its outcome. We've got have equal outcomes between the children, different classes. We end up destroying meritocracy in the name of trying to advance it...
The university where I was at pioneered positive discrimination in favor of children from certain inner London comprehensives. Now I used to participate in the open day for those kids who would come down, have a look at the university. And the idea was we'll show you what a university looks like. And it was all very well intentioned. And one day I made the mistake of actually telling one of these youngsters: this, of course, is what we call Scheme B entry. So you don't have to get as good an A level as all the other kids have to get in order to get into this university, because we recognize that you're up against all these problems. And she was, rightly in my view, outraged. And she said to me, in that case, I'm not coming to this university...
Michael Young felt meritocracy was a bad idea precisely because he recognized that there is heritability to some extent of ability"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Nationalism - "All forms of European Nationalism, they all start off being nice. But the problem is when they're put under pressure - effectively Scottish nationalism is almost value free at the moment because there's no actual ruling in an absolute sense. There's no crisis, which they have to respond to. There's no sense of who's, who belongs, who doesn't belong. And across Europe all we can see is the same pattern. It starts off with folk dancing and ends up with barbed wire"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Morality of the Green Belt - "That doesn't actually have anything to do with the intrinsic value of nature. It is a planning policy for the containment of urban areas. And in fact, I suspect that debate would have been very different if all this time instead of being called Green Belt it had been called Urban Containment Zones or something kinda technical, as most planning policies are... unfortunately, this debate gets tied up with the debate around the intrinsic value of nature which actually green belts have nothing to do with. There are bits of green belt land, which are in the inner city... a derelict petrol station next to a tube station and a main road. But technically it is green belt land. And then an affordable housing provider cannot build affordable housing there, because that is green belt. Equally there are huge amounts of the green belts surrounding our cities which are actually of extremely low environmental value often because they're kinda agri desert, very very low bio diversity, far lower biodiversity than the urban areas in the inner city often are. And also things like golf courses. We use more land in England for golf than we do for homes...
The planning system I think does have strong tools for protecting nature, things like national parks, areas of outstanding national beauty, these are all excellent policies for protecting the really, really valuable bits of nature. I just don't think that the Green Belt per se, is a particularly effective way protecting nature. And in many ways, it's quite damaging. Millions of people commute every day across the Green Belt. Twice. That is adding hugely to the carbon impact on the economy because they cannot live close to where the jobs are, because Green Bbelt policies insist we build homes. often on greenfield sites beyond the Green Belt and then demand that people commute 30 miles into town to work"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The morality of generational voting - "[On the young] Are they just another grasping interest group with invented grievances, falling for electroral bribes and keen to get others to pay for what they want? Is youthful idealism an unqualified good? From the French Revolution to the Hitler Youth and Mao's Red Guards, it's caused more than it's fair share of human misery after all. Is it wrong to pit young against old in a competition for resources? Should democracy be more than competing selfishness?...
Even 18 year olds grow up eventually... students nowadays are paying university tuition fees, and lots of them quite rightly don't like to them to pay the university tuition fees, but what they forget is that in their parents' generation not many of them had the opportunity to go to university in the first place...
What we're actually against is the extremes. He then defined extremes in such a way as to make, well how many people voted for President Trump? 63 million? 63 million extremists in America. And how many millions voted for Brexit? N million Britons are extreme? They happen to be the majority of the electorate. This is ridiculous. This is not extremism. He is defining as extremism things that he doesn't like."

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Grenfell Tower Fire - "It's perfectly legitimate to be angry about those issues that led to the fire. The problem comes when you then get people marching into the streets with socialist worker badges and saying Tories out and so on. And we've discussed already there have been tragedies of this kind in flats in Labour areas. There is a whole history of disasters in this country that have come about as negligence, which have hurt the rich more... It's a disgrace that their cries for help, their complaints were not addressed in the right way. But you will find that same kind of dispute between landlord and tenant, leaseholder and freeholder in some of the wealthiest blocks in London...
I think it's an act of terrible, cynical disrespect to the people who have suffered so grievously in the particular tragedy, because it's exploiting them. It's instrumentalizing them, weaponising them against the government."

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Mixed Societies - "The Prime Minister is on the warpath, threatening his opponents with unspecified retribution after the election, a settling of accounts morally, politically and legally, if he wins. For their part opposition parties set up mock prison cells for the Prime Minister and his family. This is probably the dirtiest election campaign I've witnessed in more than three decades in the region. Almost every poster seems to be defaced. Opposition papers print shocking, if vague allegations of corruption every day against governing party MPs. Civil Activists have been tricked into conversations with Israeli or Russian gentlemen, allegedly seeking dirt on the Hungarian born financier George Soros, the arch enemy of Fidez...
As a result of the flourishing trade, whether from Congo or Nigeria, a lot of Africans living in Africa itself wear so called traditional clothes designed and made right here in China...
An article in Indonesian with the headline, The Girl in the Red Dress causing you to lose your focus, above the picture of a woman who looked like me. My stomach dropped... There were cameras everywhere, but I thought I'd kept well out of anyone else's shot, but I hadn't. There I was doing my piece to camera stopping, fixing my hair, and then I put my hands on my head and stretched, arching my back. This is the moment when the viral video takes on a life of its own. It zooms in on that shot and slows down, zeroing in closer and closer on my armpits... I remember from my university days in Jogjakarta, that in traditional Javanese culture showing the souls of your feet to anyone was very impolite... Armpts... are sexy. Google pamer ketiak, he said. That translates as show off your armpits... soft porn...
I was in the remote province of Papua, a region that has been closed to foreign journalist for decades. There's a low level separatist conflict there. Indonesian military and security forces are accused by human rights groups of committing gross abuses there as they try to suppress dissent... within a day of our arrival, the military escorted me out. They said I had hurt the military's feelings with some tweets about the nature of the aid going in and the conduct of some of the officers."