Links - 16th September 2018

US indicates readiness to work with Hamas if it ends terror; Hamas says no - "Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman argued that Hamas had destroyed the Gazan economy and misused donor funds to target Israel instead of improving the lives of the people who live in the Strip. “Despite the billions of dollars invested for the benefit of Palestinians in Gaza over the past 70 years, 53 percent of the people there live below the poverty level , and the unemployment rate is a crippling 49%. The Palestinians of Gaza are stuck in a vicious cycle where corrupt and hateful leadership has provoked conflicts leading to reduced opportunities and the poverty and hopelessness that follow.” In veiled criticism of the United Nations and the international community, Kushner, Greenblatt and Friedman wrote: “The international community also bears some blame. More countries want to simply talk and condemn than are willing to confront reality, propose realistic solutions and write meaningful checks.”"
It's okay, whatever it is many people will still blame the US and Israel

Going Shopping in the 60s - "Ask anyone who lived in 1960s Singapore where they used to shop in town, and they will invariably give one of two answers: Raffles Place, or High Street and North Bridge Road."

Disruption, deferment & renouncing citizenship. What can & cannot be done if you have NS liabilities. - "if you are subject to the Enlistment Act and have not fulfilled your NS liabilities, the Government may withhold your renunciation of citizenship, i.e you are still considered to be a Singaporean and will have to serve NS."

Ex-Channel 8 supporting actor earns more from 1 show in China than a local actor makes in 2 years - "When asked about what is the most important attitude to have if an actor wants to make it in China, Wong said it was to “reset your attitude”, because whatever accomplishment you might have achieved in Singapore, will not mean much in a different market."

Families ordered to remove kids’ paddling pool from garden by housing officials in case BURGLAR drowns - "The residents of the six flats in Strood, Kent, bought the paddling pool to bring the community together... The problems arouse when a security gate to the shared garden broke recently, which meant people from outside could easily get inside the back area of the flats... The housing association landlord has since said management will consider allowing the residents to keep the pool if it is enclosed by a locked fence"

How Video Games Make You Work - "Video games usually offer the chance to escape the mundane texture and circumstances of everyday life, by pushing us into situations and roles that are too dangerous, expensive, or rarefied for reality. We become the marine, the race-car driver, the fighter pilot, the international soccer star. But many games mimic the rhythm and monotony of more familiar jobs, allowing us to rehearse or reënact a working day once we’ve clocked out. In most cases, the designer zeroes in on the most interesting challenge or nuance of a profession, and turns it into a game"

Opinion | Why It’s Almost Impossible to Find a Postcard in China - The New York Times - "For many Americans, sending a postcard from an exotic locale is still a mainstay of modern travel, if only to prove you actually went somewhere. It’s short and sweet, no heavy messaging required, the Twitter of a block-print age. And who doesn’t enjoy finding a handwritten missive among the supermarket fliers and other invasive species that swarm our mailboxes?... the relative rarity of the handwritten postcard here is symptomatic of a pell-mell rush toward a digital and depersonalized future. It seems sad to see the broad strokes of Chinese culture and communication shrunk to a 3-by-5-inch screen, and delicate brush lettering now reduced to pecking with two thumbs."

The English Department's Willful Self-Destruction — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal - "the newly released report, The Decline of the English Department. And as the title indicates—the decline is far from hype. By almost any measure, English departments are diminishing numerically, dropping standards, or calcifying into a hard-left intellectual status quo... Much of the decline is self-inflicted. As the English discipline moves farther away from its core of the greatest works of English, American, and European literature, either to attract students or for political reasons, its very reason for existing is reduced... Just because a professor is liberal does not mean he or she brings politics into the classroom; certainly, many liberal professors, particularly the older ones, take great care to teach objectively. But en vogue scholarship methods are transforming even the teaching of very traditional literature. Formerly, the emphasis was on studying literary works in order to understand the meaning of the author’s words as he or she intended them to be understood. A new generation of literary scholars, however, has been trained to read literature to uncover hidden structures of modern political concerns, such as racism or classism. Or to focus on their own feelings rather than on the meaning intended by the author... I was able to uncover more than a few professors who openly put politics ahead of scholarship... Even though activism is not supposed to enter into a college classroom at a public university, it appears to be fully accepted in Asheville’s English department. Wray’s colleague Anne Jansen has written an article entitled: “Literary Activism: An Aesthetic Political Strategy for the Twenty-First Century”... Current trends are also effecting a coarsening, a clouding of the barriers between low and high cultures, that makes one question what purpose the curriculum serves... some professors have attempted to scrub their pasts of work that has gained, or could gain, them notoriety. One case is that of UNC-Wilmington’s Alessandro Porco, whose master’s thesis and first book consisted of obscene and childish poems, mostly written in honor of Porco’s favorite kinky porn star. His early writing is no longer mentioned on the UNC-Wilmington website, most likely due in part to the Pope Center’s exposure given him at the time he was hired... with the older generation, which is more rooted in traditional scholarship, being replaced by younger Ph.D.s who are steeped in left-wing politics and a “pop culture as high culture” lowering of standards, it is hard to see a way out of the downward cycle"

UNC’s ‘Literature of 9/11’ course sympathizes with terrorists, paints U.S. as imperialistic - "The readings mostly focus on justifying the actions of terrorists – painting them as fighting against an American regime, or mistaken idealists, or good people just trying to do what they deem right. None of the readings assigned in the freshman seminar present the Sept. 11 attacks from the perspective of those who died or from American families who lost loved ones. “ENGL 72: Literature of 9/11” is taught by Neel Ahuja, an associate professor of English, comparative literature, and geography at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill."

Murder Of 3-Year-Old In South Africa Is Part Of An Alarming 'Epidemic' - "Courtney Pieters, a 3-year-old girl from a suburb of Cape Town, went missing on May 4. Her body was found nine days later, buried in a shallow grave about two-thirds of a mile from her home. She had been raped twice... the United Nations ranked South Africa among the world's 10 most violent nations."

Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry - "One of the hazards of the job is client dependency. Ishii says that between thirty and forty per cent of the women in ongoing relationships with rental husbands eventually propose marriage... One woman had been impersonating a man’s wife for seven years: the real wife had put on weight, so the husband hired the stand-in to go out with him and his friends. The same actress had also replaced overweight mothers at school events; the children of overweight parents may be subject to bullying... A hostess in a cabaret club hired a client to request her. A blind woman rented a seeing friend to identify the good-looking men at a singles dance. A pregnant woman rented a mother to persuade her boyfriend to acknowledge their child, and a young man rented a father to conciliate the parents of his pregnant lover... two or three times a year, he stages entire fake weddings. The cost is around five million yen (around forty-seven thousand dollars). In some cases, the bride invites real co-workers, friends, and family members. In others, everyone is an actor except the bride and her parents... Of all the services offered by Family Romance, the most perplexing to me was “Rental Scolder.” Scolders are hired not, as I had assumed, by clients wishing to berate third parties but by people who “made a mistake” and need help to “atone.”... I decided to splurge on an in-room massage... a smiling young woman knocked on the door, waited to be asked inside, took off her shoes, and gave me a form to sign. The form said that I agreed not to demand a sexual massage, and that if I was a man I would keep the hotel-room door ajar... It felt like unconditional love—the kind you don’t get, or ask for, from people in your life, because they have needs, too, and you always have to take turns. I didn’t have to give her a massage or listen to her problems, because I had given her money, with which she could do anything she wanted: pay bills, buy an aquamarine coat, or even hire someone to give her a massage or listen to her problems. This hour, during which she paid attention to me and I didn’t pay attention to her, wasn’t going to be entered in a ledger where she could accumulate resentment toward me over the years. I didn’t have to feel guilty: that was what I was paying for. I’d started off assuming that the rental schema somehow undercut the idea of unconditional love. Now I found myself wondering whether it was even possible to get unconditional love without paying... I had read about a host-club worker who studied romance novels in order to be able to anticipate and fulfill his clients’ every need, and consequently had no time left for a personal life. “Women’s ideal romance entails hard work,” he said, “and that is nearly impossible in the real world.” He said he could never have worked so hard for a real girlfriend."

The Humanist Vocation - The New York Times - "the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise. Back when the humanities were thriving, the leading figures had a clear definition of their mission and a fervent passion for it. The job of the humanities was to cultivate the human core, the part of a person we might call the spirit, the soul, or, in D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, “the dark vast forest.”... The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn’t want to offend anybody."

Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself - The New York Times - ""For speaking at the Republican convention, I got attacked way more by liberal gay people than by conservative Christian people."... I ask him if he worries about the bromance with Vladimir V. Putin and Mr. Trump’s bizarre affinity for dictators. “But should Russia be allied with the West or with China?” Mr. Thiel says. “There are these really bad dictators in the Middle East, and we got rid of them and in many cases there’s even worse chaos.” So he doesn’t worry about Mr. Trump sending an intemperate tweet and spurring a war with North Korea? “A Twitter war is not a real war,” Mr. Thiel says... “It basically stands for the narrow proposition that you should not publish a sex tape,” Mr. Thiel says. “I think that’s an insult to journalists to suggest that’s journalism now. Transparency is good, but at some point it can go in this very toxic direction.” Just as there was “a self-fulfilling Hillary bubble” where “everybody was just too scared to say this was a really bad idea” to support this “very weak candidate,” Mr. Thiel believes Gawker manufactured “a totally insane bubble full of somewhat sociopathic people in New York.” When the case went to court in Florida, he contends, the culture that “you could do whatever you wanted and there were no consequences” was exposed."

Could Ancient Remedies Hold the Answer to the Looming Antibiotics Crisis? - The New York Times - "Thailand, Cambodia and other Asian countries have reported increasingly common cases of artemisinin-resistant malaria. Yet a recent study demonstrates that feeding rodents sweet wormwood leaves in their entirety — as opposed to a synthesized derivative — overcomes this resistance. The modern, stripped-down version of this ancient medicine may very well sacrifice some beneficial chemical synergy present in the whole plant. If Quave is right, the impending medical crisis will eventually jump-start antibiotic research and development. But it can take more than a decade for a standard antibiotic to transition from discovery to pharmacy, let alone an entirely novel concoction or seemingly convoluted treatment. Meanwhile, we will be stuck with a dwindling stock of extant antibiotics, our only recourse against increasingly armored pathogens."

Fandi Ahmad and the Staggering Burden of a Nation’s Dreams - "we approach the thorny issue on everyone’s minds: the dire lack of Chinese players in the team today compared to his generation. (Majority of the players now are Malay.)... When I point out that the older team had more Chinese players, Fandi responds candidly, as though he has been waiting for me to ask this question all along. “Sometimes people think we don’t take Chinese players and that we are racist. It’s not true, we welcome them. But they don’t want to sacrifice because the money is too little. If they’re good, once they make the national team, they ‘disappear’. They’re not committed; they just want to study [for better career prospects],” he says. As a result, his team is “monopolised by Malays”, although Fandi says that even they are becoming harder to recruit. He “can’t even pinpoint 50 good players” today, whereas he claims it was easier to convince people to play for Singapore during his time. Back then, it was apparently a privilege to serve the country through football. Despite the seemingly dismal reality, he keeps his spirits up, joking that players do have certain strengths based on their race. He’s observed that “Chinese players can be more disciplined, while Malays might be more talented” because “there’s too much creativity in their mind”... When he was younger, he made up his mind not to ignore fans after he was rejected by Diego Maradona himself when he asked for a signature"
It's only considered racism when it disadvantages 'minorities' (e.g. when you see Chinese doing better in their studies because they want to study for better career prospects or they're more disciplined)