Links - 11th October 2018

Politicians are threatening our right to have private discussions - we must not let them ban secret social media groups - "A cross-party group of MPs, led by Labour’s Lucy Powell, are today leading the latest in a long line of attempts to clamp down on internet freedom. Their calls to outlaw secret forums on social media and make large social media companies legally liable for content published on their services are as nonsensical as they are authoritarian... It should be staggering that this attack on free association comes from a Labour MP. Does she not know the history of her own party, the history of workers’ rights? That combination and private association were prohibited and criminal? Do Tories not remember that companies could be seen as conspiracies just a century and a half ago?"

Crypto’s 80% Plunge Is Now Worse Than Stocks' Dot-Com Crash

Amsterdam stabbing suspect believes Islam is insulted in the Netherlands: prosecutors - "An Afghan asylum-seeker accused of stabbing two Americans in Amsterdam believes that Islam is insulted in the Netherlands, Dutch prosecutors said Monday, giving the first indication of why they think a “terrorist motive” was behind the attack... “From the suspect’s statements so far, it is clear the man had a terrorist motive … and that he traveled to the Netherlands for that reason”... Wilders reacted with a tweet, writing: “Muslim terrorists hate our way of life and our freedoms. They answer criticism of Islam with violence.”"

The truth about the ‘senior academics’ defending Corbyn | Coffee House - "Scanning the list I cannot recognise one name. Well, I think, perhaps they are not in fields I am acquainted with. Yet it is not just that. Many of them are from institutions that I have never heard of. A number are from institutions that almost nobody not actually on the payrolls of these universities could have heard of. Not one of these ‘senior academics’ is at Oxford or Cambridge. Only two signatories are even from one of the UK’s top 10 universities, one of whom, ‘Bart Cammaerts’, is listed as being from the London School of Economics. I see from looking at the LSE’s website that this ‘Senior academic’ is in fact an associate professor in the ‘department of media and communications’ who is currently taking a sabbatical away from the rigorous demands of that role. A whole glut of the signatories come from Goldsmiths, University of London – a college famous for making its graduates unemployable... Of course it is understandable that these people might be die-hard supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. And it might even be understandable that they should wish to excuse the anti-Semitism that Corbyn has encouraged in the Labour party. But why would the Guardian choose to misrepresent their status? In an era in which we are all so exercised about the propagation of ‘fake news’, why should the left’s in-house paper describe someone in Bournemouth who writes about ‘One Direction’ as a ‘senior academic’. One wonders."

Half-sword - Wikipedia - "Half-sword, in 14th- to 16th-century fencing with longswords, refers to the technique of gripping the central part of the sword blade with the left hand in order to execute more forceful thrusts against armoured and unarmoured opponents"

US Open 2018 Women's Final Incident MEGATHREAD : tennis - "It's funny, this whole Serena incident has given me as a left wing liberal guy a good insight and even sympathy toward what some conservative folks must go through trying to have discussions and respectful disagreements with many folks on my side of the aisle. I just got finished getting covered in rhetorical piss and shit by several women in a Facebook discussion about this subject. Despite the fact that they knew nothing about the rules of tennis or how code violations worked, and despite me patiently and gently trying to explain those rules and why Serena wasn't unfairly persecuted, I got labeled a "mansplainer" by them and denigrated as not able to have a valid opinion on the subject because I was neither a woman, nor black, so I basically needed to just shut the hell up."

US Open Serena Williams umpire: USTA boss Katrina Adams sorry to Carlos Ramos - "US Tennis association chief executive Katrina Adams has been overheard apologising to controversial umpire Carlos Ramos just days after she declared chair umpires have “double standards” when dealing with men’s and women’s matches... Adams came under fire in some circles for inflaming the sensitive situation when she released a statement hours after the final supporting Serena’s protest, labelling Serena a “true champion” who “showed a great deal of class and sportsmanship”. She also moved to excuse Williams’ behaviour during an interview with ESPN the following day when she suggested Williams would not have expected her outburst towards Ramos to have been captured on live TV... Adams was reportedly heard apologising to Ramos at the Davis Cup event, according to Associated Press journalist Andrew Dampf. It constitutes a huge backflip from the USTA, which has been Williams’ biggest supporter... some umpires are considering refusing to officiate matches involving Williams in the wake of her attack on Ramos. Ramos, 47, was “thrown to the wolves for simply doing his job and was not willing to be abused for it,” one anonymous umpire told the English paper. Australian former umpire Richard Ings also reported feelings of unrest. “The umpiring fraternity is thoroughly disturbed at being abandoned by the WTA,” Ings told ESPN.com. “They are all fearful that they could be the next Ramos. They feel that no one has their back when they have to make unpopular calls.”"
Must be that internalised misogyny

Cartoon Movement - How to draw Serena Williams - "Whiter skin just to play it safe...
Do not show her in an angry mood - it would be an ugly racial stereotype...
Not too muscular. That would suggest that black women are less feminine which is not acceptable!...
Ok, it doesn't look like Serena anymore but at least it's not racist"

Are Women Penalized More Than Men in Tennis? Data Says No - The New York Times - "Each situation should be evaluated on its own merits, but according to data compiled by officials at Grand Slam tournaments for the past 20 years, men are penalized more often for verbal abuse. Those figures, obtained by The New York Times, show that from 1998 to 2018 at the four Grand Slam events, men have been fined for misbehavior with much more frequency than women with one significant exception: coaching violations... men appear to be fined proportionally more often than women for a variety of offenses"

Why Sweden’s populist moment matters - "As is the case with almost all elections these days, the elite-dominated media class raised concerns about fake news and Russian trolling. Sweden’s state-run SVT channel made no attempt to hide its hostility towards the Sweden Democrats, taking the unprecedented step of rebuking Akesson after a televised leaders’ debate. Akesson’s crime was to argue that the reason many immigrants cannot find a job is because ‘they are not Swedes’, and have not succeeded in fitting into Sweden. He then called for more opportunities for immigrants both to assimilate into the Swedish way of life and to integrate into the labour market... during the election campaign, Gustav Fridolin, co-leader of the Green Party in coalition Social Democrats, promised that, if re-elected, he would ‘reform’ the preschool curriculum to promote gender neutrality. In particular, Fridolin pledged to stop boys behaving like boys. His distrust of boys is justified on the grounds that there is a connection between the naughty behaviour of boys in preschools and ‘men’s behaviour at their workplaces’.

Dalai Lama: 'Europe Belongs to Europeans', Refugees Should Return and Rebuild Homelands - "The Dalai Lama has told a press conference in Sweden that “Europe belongs to the Europeans”, asserting that refugees should be repatriated so they can rebuild their homelands... Visiting the country to celebrate the 80th anniversary of its international anti-poverty efforts, the Dalai Lama made the comments on Wednesday, three days after Sweden’s general election in which the Sweden Democrats — a party reviled in both local and international media for its opposition to mass migration — gained a record share of the vote. It is not the first time the Buddhist icon, who is revered by millions of followers around the world, has commented on migration politics in Europe, having previously emphasised the importance of maintaining the continent as a homeland for its native peoples “from a moral point of view too”. Speaking to Germany’s Frankfurter Allegemier Zeitung newspaper in 2016, the Dalai Lama said refugees “should be admitted only temporarily”, stating he believed that “too many” were in Europe, and adding: “Germany in particular, cannot become an Arab country, Germany is Germany.”"
New alt-right leader

Sorry, the United Kingdom Does Not Owe India Reparations - "History, is among other things, the story of the rise and fall of states and empires. And by their nature, politics and state-building always help and hurt certain groups. In an empire or after conquest by an empire, there are always privileged elites, collaborators, people whose lives don’t change at all, and groups that have the worst of it. This is a phenomenon not limited to colonialism and European imperialism, which is why I strongly disagree with the narrative that tries to cast Western imperialism as a uniquely immoral, when in fact all imperial projects, including the Mongols, the Arabs, and other Western empires were a mixed bag. The only substantive difference between Western imperialism and what came prior to it is the fact that Western colonialism occurred in tandem with the industrial, scientific, and political revolutions, all of which eventually shook up non-Western societies in unprecedented ways relative to their tradition arrangements. And while this proved quite shocking to many societies, it was relatively more peaceful and less rapacious than some of the actions of previous empires that literally pillaged and leveled cities and literally enslaved whole populations... Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India 17 times, each time demolishing Hindu temples and carting away gold and jewels while the British, more archaeologically oriented, actually renovated long decaying temples... Iran and Iraq widely blame the Mongol conquests for destroying the irrigation systems that sustained them and their golden age, damage far exceeding European interference in those countries, but nobody seems to ask for reparations. Of course, Mongolia is not wealthy. Are reparations only a way of guilting rich nations into giving away more money, though they give generous aid as is? Countries that have successfully developed or are developing are doing so because of good economic policies and political discipline and not infusions of money. I am all for reparations given to individuals and countries for specific events and incidents when there is a clear wrong, like the British shooting of innocent civilians during the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in Amritsar. But it is virtually impossible to translate this tangible and definable definition of reparations to loosely-defined macro-historical phenomenon like imperial rule by one group over another. The list of demands would go on and on so as to have no meaning; virtually everyone could demand reparations from anyone else, even Britain could ask the denizens of Normandy for something... Indians in many ways were beneficiaries of the British imperial system as well as its victims... Finally, there is the matter of the Koh-i-Noor (it means mountain of light in Persian) diamond, a British crown jewel acquired from India that every Indian politician would like returned... The British acquired it from Lahore (now in Pakistan) after the conquest of the Sikh Empire. Pakistan and India are both successor states of British India. The diamond itself was never really the property of the Indian state, but always a prize fought for by conquerors. Virtually every possessor of the diamond seized it from its previous owner... More Indian crown jewels are in fact locked in a vault in the Central Bank of Iran in Tehran where the National Jewelry Museum is located than in Great Britain (and they were seized by force too) but it is odd to hear no calls for their return in India"

Number of white people arrested for terror offences outstrip any other single ethnic group, new figures show - "White suspects accounted for 38 per cent of terror-related arrests, followed by those of Asian appearance on 37 per cent and black suspects on 9 per cent."
Asians make up 4.9% of the UK population
Apparently all white suspects have the same far-right ideology. And since white people are the majority of those shot by US police, this means Black Lives Matter is lying

Hillary Clinton endorses Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon in New York primary - "Stuck in an edgy, unexpected primary fight with actress Cynthia Nixon, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo welcomed the cavalry Wednesday as the state Democratic convention kicked off at Hofstra University on Long Island"
"'There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."