Links - 29th November 2018 (1)

Law Society withdraws guidance on sharia wills - "The Law Society has withdrawn guidance on how to prepare sharia-compliant wills following criticism from solicitors and the justice secretary, Chris Grayling... The National Secular Society welcomed the decision. “This is an important reversal for what had seemed to be the relentless march of sharia to becoming de facto British law,” said its director Keith Porteous Wood. “Until now, politicians and the legal establishment either encouraged this process or spinelessly recoiled from acknowledging what was happening. This is particularly good news for women who fare so badly under sharia law, which is non-democratically determined, non-human rights compliant and a discriminatory code.”... The Law Society document said: “Clients in England and Wales can legally choose to bequeath their assets according to sharia rules, providing the will is signed in accordance with the requirements set out in the Wills Act 1837.” It listed the male and female heirs to an estate, according to sharia law, and explained: “As a general rule, a male heir will inherit twice the amount that a female heir will receive, illegitimate children are not heirs and no heir can inherit via a deceased parent.”"

Trigger Me Timbers - Posts - "Young men of color are joining white supremacist groups. Here's why"
"Damn White Supremacists and their open acceptance of people from all ethnic backgrounds! Wait... what?"

Why Young Men of Color Are Joining White-Supremacist Groups
The definition of white supremacy in the article is very interesting. Orwell might almost be proud

Otto Fong - On a three-person gay relationship: Since Singapore... - "On a three-person gay relationship:
Since Singapore and Malaysia are too backwards to embrace gay marriage soon - much less gay adoption - I urge all gay couples to not rule out the possibility of a three-person relationship."
I'm pretty sure Fong has at some point has dismissed the slippery slope of gay rights/gay marriage as a myth

Antifa Mob takes over Portland streets, directs traffic, harasses drivers - "Over the weekend, there was a vigil in Portland, Oregon for Patrick Kimmons, a black man who was shot by police. Afterwards, members of Antifa blocked streets, directed traffic, and harassed drivers and other people... The car in the second video was seriously damaged"

Are IQ Tests Biased? - "Where one minority group shows lower scores, the differences could be real. This could indicate a poorer educational system (differences in educational opportunities, poverty, neighborhoods, home life…), but this doesn't mean the test is biased. Tests, further, should not be abandoned, as they can be used to assess the impact of interventions, and spot deficiencies in teaching different groups. Further, returning to "judgment calls" would introduce even more bias. When you look at mean score differences between groups on the WISC R, there may be real differences, especially when SES convolutes the data. Some recall studies that African Americans score 15 points lower on IQ tests that Caucasians, but when SES is controlled this drops to 5 points or less. This is to say that being poor or rich may have more of an impact on your IQ and perhaps intelligence (whatever that is) than your ethnicity. Other efforts look at predictive validity. Most IQ tests predict performance on achievement tests very well. But, if achievement tests are biased too, then we would expect high predictive validity and this wouldn't rule out bias. However, some argue that if our culture does value some skills over others, then the test is still an accurate predictor of a person's ability to succeed in our culture. Thus, IQ and achievement tests could be culturally biased and heavily so, but their reflection of the dominant culture's values is desirable. To design truly "culture free" tests would be to design tests that don't measure anything. Other efforts look at construct validity, but the factor structure of the WAIS III holds up with African American, Caucasian, and Hispanic children. Thus, it is measuring the same thing in each child. Now, whether that is what you mean when you say intelligence or not is another question…

To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right - "Put simply, Pascal suggests that before disagreeing with someone, first point out the ways in which they’re right. And to effectively persuade someone to change their mind, lead them to discover a counter-point of their own accord. Arthur Markman, psychology professor at The University of Texas at Austin, says both these points hold true."

The Deadly Global War for Sand - "Apart from water and air, humble sand is the natural resource most consumed by human beings. People use more than 40 billion tons of sand and gravel every year. There's so much demand that riverbeds and beaches around the world are being stripped bare. (Desert sand generally doesn't work for construction; shaped by wind rather than water, desert grains are too round to bind together well.) And the amount of sand being mined is increasing exponentially."

Poll Shows Activism Highest Among Nonreligious Democrats - "Religiously unaffiliated voters, who may or may not be associated with other civic institutions, seem most excited about supporting or donating to causes, going to rallies, and expressing opinions online, among other activities. Political engagement may be providing these Americans with a new form of identity. And in turn, they may be helping to solidify the new identity of the Democratic Party... religiously unaffiliated Democrats were more than twice as likely to have attended a rally within the past 12 months compared with their religious peers. During that time, they were significantly more likely to have contacted an elected official or to have donated to a candidate or cause. And nearly half of religiously unaffiliated Democrats said they had bought or boycotted a product for political reasons or posted political opinions online, compared with roughly one-quarter of their religious peers. “Culturally, this is the subgroup of the Democratic Party that feels most at odds with the direction of the country and what the Trump administration is doing,” said Dan Cox, the research director at PRRI. “These secular Democrats also tend to be the most liberal.” Secular Democrats were also much more likely to say they’re angry about what’s going on in the country today: Forty-one percent described themselves this way, compared with 28 percent of religious Democrats. Of all the groups highlighted in the data—divided by race, education, geographic region, and more—secular Democrats were the most likely to say they’re feeling this rage. This may shape the political landscape: “There’s no emotion that’s more linked to activism and engagement than anger,” Cox said... “There’s a sociological story you can tell about this community,” said Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts who is writing a book on what he calls “political hobbyism.” “This online world of political identity … is basically acting as a replacement for people who maybe a generation or two before would identify as Catholic or as Jewish or as Irish or Italian.”... “You see Democrats who will say on surveys that their most important issues are the environment or racial equality, and they take absolutely no interest in voting in local primaries or local municipal elections, where a lot of those issues are worked out,” Hersh said. “It’s a lot more gratifying to be talking about the Kavanaugh hearing.”"
Aka "Politics as the New Religion for Progressive Democrats" - they indeed are more zealous than their enemies

Lawyer reprimanded, gets additional fine for poem on death penalty - "The Attorney-General had complained that in his poem, Mr Thuraisingam alleged that "million dollar men", including judges, had "turned blind" to a cruel and unjust law, and were more concerned with acquiring financial wealth and material goods."

SPICES IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE - "Satirical fantasy it may be, yet the various visions of Cockayne that survive suggest something of the depth of the medieval fixation with spices. They were objects of extraordinary charm and appeal, so enticing that they did not seem out of place among the pleasures of a dream. It was, moreover, a dream that cooks labored hard to turn into reality, for spices featured as conspicuously in the real-world smoke and grime of the medieval kitchen and hall as they did in the make-believe landscape of Cockayne. Other foodstuffs have at one time or another held a similar grip on the imagination — coffee, tea, sugar, and chocolate — yet all were, in comparison, passing fads. None accumulated a comparable body of myth and lore nor carried quite the same social clout."

Spices and Their Costs in Medieval Europe - "In so far as any spices had any preservative qualities, and really only cinnamon did, spices were not a necessity, because other, far cheaper commodities could preserve foods, meats, especially, far more effectively. Spices thus by definition were not a necessity if such substitutes were available.
i) salt, instead, was the almost universal preservative for meat, fish, butter, etc.; and salt, for bodily requirements as well, was a necessity, which is why so many hard-hearted princes taxed salt to heavily.
ii) Pickling, as mixture of salt brine and vinegar, another form of food preservation for fish especially, and also meats
iii) Salting, smoking, and desiccation another form of preserving.
iv) Perhaps the crucial point is that European consumption of spices rapidly waned long before the coming of refrigeration.
e) Furthermore the concept of necessity, that spices were a necessary food preservative, is inconsistent with the equally common and more correct view that spices represented the cream of the luxury trades. A luxury good, especially whose high price made it generally available only to the rich, cannot be a necessity...
this century was a Golden Age of generally high real wages, high real incomes for much of the lower strata, with very low rents and grain prices, when even the poor could afford to eat much meat... it is not true that spices were required to disguise the natural taste of bad meat: in particular, a large collection of late-medieval French and English recipe books and much other literary evidence on cuisine indicate that for those special feasts when spices were used liberally, both fish and fowl were cooked when perfectly fresh and the meats generally appear to be fresh (after being properly hung)... I present a series of late-medieval English recipes, taken from the previously mentioned collection Pleyn Delit: Medieval Cookery for Modern Cooks, by Hieatt and Butler. They are quite unlike modern English recipes, and surprisingly similar, in many respects, to the Indian recipes just shown"

Singapore has world's fastest walkers - "The most dramatic increases were found in Asia among the fast-growing "tiger" economies. Pedestrians in Singapore were the fastest, walking 30 per cent faster than they did in the early 1990s, and in China, the pace of life in Guangzhou has increased by more than 20 per cent. Copenhagen and Madrid were the fastest European cities, beating Paris and London. And despite its reputation as "the city that never sleeps", New York ranked only eighth in the pace race, behind Dublin and Berlin. A professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, Richard Wiseman, who helped conduct the research, used a 1994 study of pedestrians' speed as a comparison and found that on average city dwellers now moved 10 per cent faster."

What My Harvard College Reunion Taught Me About Life - "2. Every classmate who became a teacher or doctor seemed happy with the choice of career.
3. Many lawyers seemed either unhappy or itching for a change, with the exception of those who became law professors. (See No. 2 above.)
4. Nearly every single banker or fund manager wanted to find a way to use accrued wealth to give back (some had concrete plans, some didn’t), and many, at this point, seemed to want to leave Wall Street as soon as possible to take up some sort of art.
5. Speaking of art, those who went into it as a career were mostly happy and often successful, but they had all, in some way, struggled financially.
6. They say money can’t buy happiness, but in an online survey of our class just prior to the reunion, those of us with more of it self-reported a higher level of happiness than those with less.
7. Our strongest desire, in that same pre-reunion class survey—over more sex and more money—was to get more sleep.
10. Those who chose to get divorced seemed happier, post-divorce.
11. Those who got an unwanted divorce seemed unhappier, post-divorce.
12. Many classmates who are in long-lasting marriages said they experienced a turning point, when their early marriage suddenly transformed into a mature relationship. “I’m doing the best I can!” one classmate told me she said to her husband in the middle of a particularly stressful couples’-therapy session. From that moment on, she said, he understood: Her imperfections were not an insult to him, and her actions were not an extension of him. She was her own person, and her imperfections were what made her her. Sometimes people forget this, in the thick of marriage.
13. Nearly all the alumni said they were embarrassed by their younger selves, particularly by how judgmental they used to be.
18. Staying at the house of an old friend, whenever possible, is preferable to spending a night in a hotel. Unless you’re trolling for a new spouse or a one-night stand, as some of my classmates seemed to have been doing, in which case: hotel, hotel, hotel.
21. A life spent drinking too much alcohol shows up, 30 years later, on the face.
22. For the most part, the women fared much better than the men in the looks department.
23. For the most part, the men fared much better than the women—surprise, surprise—in the earning-potential-and-leadership department."
Perhaps 22 and 23 are linked

Large Majorities Dislike Political Correctness - "25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.” Most members of the “exhausted majority,” and then some, dislike political correctness. Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24. On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages. Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness—and it turns out race isn’t, either. Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness... Three quarters of African Americans oppose political correctness... If age and race do not predict support for political correctness, what does? Income and education... Among devoted conservatives, 97 percent believe that political correctness is a problem. Among traditional liberals, 61 percent do. Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem... progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country... nearly half of Latinos argued that “many people nowadays are too sensitive to how Muslims are treated,” while two in five African Americans agreed that “immigration nowadays is bad for America.”... contemporary callout culture merely looks like an excuse to mock the values or ignorance of others... The gap between the progressive perception and the reality of public views on this issue could do damage to the institutions that the woke elite collectively run. A publication whose editors think they represent the views of a majority of Americans when they actually speak to a small minority of the country may eventually see its influence wane and its readership decline. And a political candidate who believes she is speaking for half of the population when she is actually voicing the opinions of one-fifth is likely to lose the next election."
Apparently most Americans are Nazis
It seems progressivism is the true white spuremacy (not just due to race but also income and education)