Links - 25th November 2018 (2)

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Romantic Love - "[On writing romance novels] ‘I feel that really people do know the difference so I just feel no one thinks it's okay to go around killing people, as long as you wear a dinner jacket because they watch a James Bond film.’
‘Why don’t people have affairs in your books?’
‘Because I don’t think that's what I want to write about. It's not true love, if you have affairs. Just better not to. Lots of people do write about affairs if you want a book with affairs in it, you know, I'm sure there's someone out thee for people to read’
‘But want interests me is that your readers presumably don’t want to read about affairs either… I'm interested to know from your point of view why people are so obsessed with wanting to have that vicarious experience through your books of what it's like to fall in love’
‘Because falling in love is wonderful. I mean, it's obviously a long time ago, for me, and for you, but we can remember, and it was pretty special and it has kept us going all through the years, and I'm not saying the actual in-love state lasts forever, but it develops into something. Or can develop into real companionship and shared sense of humor. I mean, so many other things and I think that's what falling love can lead to that. It doesn't always, but it can.’...
‘I often argue that we're living at a time when it's the generation of friendships. But friendships can be passionate, that's true, but friendships and all other kinds of love are never replacements for romantic love.’...
‘I'm glad you've mentioned friendship because I think it's been desperately underrated. It's been regarded a sort of love for wimps for these two centuries now’...
'Friendship, which now really has been relegated. For someone like Aristotle and for his followers like someone like say, Thomas Aquinas, great Christian theologian. Friendship was the master love, not romantic love. Friendship was where the real greatness of life could be discovered.'...
'Literature, novels, are subversive. They’re subversive of moral constraints. And that's their function. And they enable us to vicariously live in a world without moral constraints'"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of 2017 - "‘The students that need protecting from views they don't agree with. Gloria’s recently reported example where the inaugural guest at Sussex university’s Free Speech Society was ordered to submit his talk in advance to ensure that it didn't offend anybody.’...
'When people say I find that offensive, it means shut up and they're saying it even more frequently than they were a year ago, which is worrying. And I'm worried about attributing the most malign motives to political opponents, which I think is a result of echo chambers where you never hear something that you find offensive.'...
'There are more people being disinvited and not allowed on university companies today than in the past... I'm now asked to submit speeches in advance. I am told, endlessly what the safe space policy is. It’s not just a group of people getting together and having a chat. I’m told as an outside speaker. Student societies are warned constantly about what can and can’t be said. That is a change. And as a historian, as somebody interested in society, you must be able to see that is dangerously censorious. And your generation's getting the blame because you are not arguing against it. You are excusing it.'...
'I read history at University and it worries me very much the way we want to kind of manipulate history. One of the things you learn when you study history is that we’re only at a pinpoint in time, tomorrow everything will be different. And there's this kind of arrogance that the views we have today have some kind of special significance and that we can re-interpret the past and attach blame. As she said turn history into a morality play. And this is fundamentally an unhealthy thing to do and by the way any one of us, any number of us may be the victim of this in the future. Social views will change again, and suddenly we find ourselves being torn down, the iconoclasts will go for all of us as well'"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Religious orthodoxy versus liberal values - "'Secularism has dramatically changed in the last 20 years. It started as a way for a diverse society to live with its own diversity. And that's a good thing. And it's turned into a campaign to eliminate religion from the public square. Secularism’s betrayed its best insight.'...
[On circumcision] ‘How is banning a non-negotiable aspect of Jewish identity, the state being neutral with regard to religion?’
‘It's not a question of being neutral. It's about protecting children and safeguarding children. I think the state has every right to want to safeguard children. So while you have a right to your beliefs, you don't necessarily have a right to impose them on others. And you certainly don’t have the right to impose them with a knife’
‘So you’re happy for the state to ban a religion’...
‘I don't accept your premise that’s it’s non negotiable, it's a tradition. All traditions can be moved away from. Religion has a long history, it's very adept at evolving and changing. So this idea that religion is fixed and can't be changed is just a premise I don’t agree with’...
‘I think there is a case for saying it's a harm against a person under the Offense of the person act. So I think we just need to treat religion in the same way as we do any other belief.’...
I think there's an increasing intolerance of religious institutions and freedom of association based on a religious tradition. And we’re seeing that in a number of areas. Perhaps the worst I've come across is in Belgium where care homes have been fined for not facilitating euthanasia. In other words, a right to euthanasia has been enshrined in law. Not only do you have a right to euthanasia, but there becomes an obligation on a Catholic care home to facilitate euthanasia if the individual chooses to enter that care home...
Interestingly, most of the objections to Catholic schools in particular come from the fact that they tend to discriminate in their admissions policy and large number of non-Catholics who would like to attend those schools can’t get in. So I think the question ought to be asked, why are these schools are popular with non-Catholics? Perhaps they are doing something which other schools are not doing... The vast majority of schools, Catholic schools do keep their doors open [to non-Catholics], but there are some areas of the country where they are so popular and you can't expect the church to build a school for the education of Catholic children and then discriminate against Catholic children in the admissions policy. So you need to allow these schools to expand...
‘These arguments [against male circumcision] are extremely close to some of the nasty and most poisonous things that have been said in this country, from the Middle Ages, onwards... blood libel’...
‘Anybody doing what is involved in circumcision in a non-religious context would be breaking the law. And so it depends what your starting point is... You think to have this debate, to have this, even to have this debate is somehow, courting a return to some kind of appalling anti-Semitism’
Condemning female genital cutting must be Islamophobic

Sask. First Nation shocked at child killer's transfer to healing lodge on its land | CBC News - "The chief of the Nekaneet First Nation says his band is 'shocked' that convicted child murderer Terri-Lynne McClintic has transferred to a minimum-security healing lodge on their land. "We have no say in who goes there," Alvin Francis, chief of Nekaneet, said. "My heart goes out to the Stafford family because it is a horrible crime." McClintic was convicted eight years ago of the gruesome rape and murder of an eight-year-old Ontario girl. There are no fences around the minimum-security Okimaw Ohci healing lodge near Maple Creek, where McClintic is now serving her sentence."

NTUC has lost sight of original purpose - "The National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) was set up decades ago for the people. It helped with employment issues and provided affordable meals, insurance, education and more. Over the years, however, it seems that the NTUC's management has lost sight of its original purpose. It is not uncommon today to hear complaints of sky-high rents for shops in NTUC-managed malls. The prices at NTUC Foodfare outlets are not cheap, insurance premiums are going up and items in their supermarket chain cost quite a bit too."

WVS Database - "With industrialization and the rise of postindustrial society, generational replacement makes self-expression values become more wide spread and countries with authoritarian regimes come under growing mass pressure for political liberalization... Norms concerning marriage, family, gender and sexual orientation show dramatic changes but virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving in the same direction, at roughly similar speeds... Although a majority of the world’s population still believes that men make better political leaders than women, this view is fading in advanced industrialized societies, and also among young people in less prosperous countries... Since 1981, economic development, democratization, and rising social tolerance have increased the extent to which people perceive that they have free choice, which in turn has led to higher levels of happiness around the world... Objective factors that have been found to favour democracy (including economic prosperity, income equality, ethnic homogeneity, world market integration, global media exposure, closeness to democratic neighbours, a Protestant heritage, social capital and so forth) exert an influence on democracy mostly insofar as these factors favour emancipative values. Emancipative values do not strengthen people’s desire for democracy, for the desire for democracy is universal at this point in history. But emancipative values do change the nature of the desire for democracy. And they do so in a double way... The social dominance of Islam and individual identification as Muslim both weaken emancipative values"

British paper sues Lance Armstrong for $1.5m over lost libel action - "The disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong is being sued for more than $1.5m by a British newspaper which lost a libel action for publishing doping allegations against him."

Why the Democratic Party has to “fight dirty” if they want to beat the Republicans
"It's only okay when we do it"

A feminist manifesto: a feminist makes the case against feminism - "patriarchy and capitalism are of the same system. They support one another and one cannot be removed without the other... this idea that every woman should be a feminist, I don't actually agree with because not every woman needs to be on the streets, not every woman needs to put her body on the line"
Strange how women are/were more oppressed in traditional societies than modern ones, even though the latter have more capitalism

Dave Rubin on Twitter - "'The Simpsons' To Drop Beloved Character Apu Following Backlash, Report Says"
"Social Justice, which is neither about being social, nor achieving justice, ruins everything it touches. Goodbye to a great character on the longest running comedy in history thanks to a mob of self-absorbed zombies who can only destroy and never create"

‘The Simpsons’ producer confirms Apu is being written out of show following controversy - "If you are a show about cultural commentary and you are too afraid to comment on the culture, especially when it’s a component of the culture you had a hand in creating, then you are a show about cowardice"

Trigger Me Timbers - Posts - "SJWs: Apu is a racist character - FIX THIS!!
Fox: [Writes Apu out of the show to avoid offending anyone further]
SJWs: Not like that, you White Supremacist!!"

Lucas Lynch - "Thank you, no come again. Political correctness kills off one of the most beloved minority characters. A similar result actually to the closing of the musical "The Great Comet of 1812" - Josh Groban was replaced by one of the actors of Hamilton, and ticket sales fell off a cliff. To save the musical they brought in Mandy Patankin, after which people cried that this was a racist conspiracy. Patankin then declined to take the role, after which the musical did indeed close, and numerous actors of color all lost very good jobs."