Links - 2nd December 2018 (2)

Google Walkout Organizers Explain Their Demands - "A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity, for example making sure there are women of color at all levels of the organization, and accountability for not meeting this commitment... A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously... Promote the Chief Diversity Officer to answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations directly to the Board of Directors. In addition, appoint an Employee Representative to the Board. Both the CDO and the Employee Representative should help allocate permanent resources for demands 1-4 and other equity efforts, ensure accountability to these demands, and propose changes when equity goals are not met. A company is nothing without its workers. From the moment we start at Google we’re told that we aren’t just employees; we’re owners. Every person who walked out today is an owner, and the owners say: Time’s up."
Comments: "I hope this walk out serves as a wake up call to boards of directors all across American but especially in the progressive hot beds of NYC and the Cali Coast, that when you embrace a culture of active progressivism in the workplace, it embraces you too, and you will be constrained, you will be shamed, you will be on display. Rejecting the scientific liberalism of James Damore in retrospect feels like an unforced corporate error that will be very hard to walk back."
"Every story has two sides. Here we've heard, at most, half of one side. Anyhow, as an employment lawyer, I can tell you the easiest way to get rid of harassers (especially high level ones) is through a severance package. They have rights too and, in cases where there is no direct evidence (which is 90% of cases), it's the most cost effective way to end a bad situation for your employees and move on. Plaintiff's lawyers will tell you the same thing. Sad that these protesters didn't think to talk to any experts in the field before staging their protests/photo ops. I guess to them the message matters more than the reality."

Lucas Lynch - "This concern over safe spaces is so overblown. Good thing it's limited to just a bunch of nutty college students who won't possibly be in a position to control everything we see and hear. This one is really astonishing... This is how a religion takes over our society. Google, of course, is one of the most liberal, open and tolerant workplaces on the planet. And the ideologues will simply demand more power and more money as efforts to make distributions 100% equal fail and fail again, as the reality is that many of the supposed inequalities in representation aren't due to systemic oppression. Put such an ideology completely in charge of the world's information and be very afraid of what could come next."
Comments: "Do these companies realize they are merely hastening the demise of American corporate hegemony around the world?? You think Chinese companies are devoting ANY resources to dealing with this nonsense? Nope."
"Insane that people thought this was ever a small domain of blue-haired activists on college campuses. This shit goes to the top of corporate America. As Andrew Sullivan said "we are all on campus now""
"How many anonymous sexual misconduct complaints against the Chief Diversity Officer would it take before they were fired I wonder? #listenandbelieve"

Andrew Sullivan: We All Live on Campus Now - "the most common rebuttal to my intermittent coverage of campus culture has been: Why does it matter? These are students, after all. They’ll grow up once they leave their cloistered, neo-Marxist safe spaces. The real world isn’t like that. You’re exaggerating anyway... The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself. Polarization has made this worse — because on the left, moderation now seems like a surrender to white nationalism... Liberals welcome dissent because it’s our surest way to avoid error. Cultural Marxists fear dissent because they believe it can do harm to others’ feelings and help sustain existing identity-based power structures... it is about the spirit of the First Amendment. One of the reasons I defended Katie Roiphe against a campaign to preemptively suppress an essay of hers (even to the point of attempting to sabotage an entire issue of Harper’s) is because of this spirit... This is a real-world echo of the campus habit of disrupting speakers, no-platforming conservatives, and shouting people down. But now this reflexive hostility to speech is actually endorsed by writers and editors. Journalism itself has become a means of intimidating journalists... An entirely intended byproduct of this kind of bullying — and Roiphe is just the latest victim — is silence... No one feels capable of saying anything in public. In the #MeToo debate, the gulf between what Twitter screams and what pops up in your private email in-box is staggering... When the perpetrator of an anonymous list accusing dozens of men of a whole range of sexual misdeeds is actually celebrated by much of mainstream media (see this fawning NYT profile), you realize that we are living in another age of the Scarlet Letter. Moira Donegan has yet to express misgivings about possibly smearing the innocent — because the cause is far more important than individual fairness... Almost every corporation now has affirmative action for every victim-group in hiring and promotion. Workplace codes today read like campus speech codes of a few years ago"
When even Andrew Sullivan is using "cultural marxism" unironically!

I translated Chinese writer Louis Cha ‘Jin Yong’. Here’s why he never caught on in the West - "all of Mr Cha’s books have been re-published in a number of Asian languages, including Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, the mother tongues of countries that share many of the cultural underpinnings of China... the OUP edition [translation of Louis Cha] sells steadily in small numbers. The main reason, I think, is the style of the storytelling. Which is ironic, because in Chinese terms, Cha’s writing was a huge leap in the direction of Western literary methodology compared with his forebears. Apart from the subject matter – often dramatic events from Chinese history that mean nothing elsewhere – the amount of description and the things described and not described, I think, make it difficult for Western readers to relate to Cha’s work... Cha was writing in those days to fill space in the newspaper and the more words he wrote, the more space he filled – just like Dickens. I once asked him about all the flowery names he gave to the kung fu fighting moves and weapons and whether they precisely described things he knew of. He said, no, he was largely just making it up to sound colourful. That was a relief for me... The Chinese diaspora turned out to be the natural market for English versions of Cha’s books, at least in the short term. Hundreds of people have contacted me over the years since The Book and the Sword was published to ask when I would do another one, and, interestingly, almost all of them are people of Chinese ancestry living in places like Canada and Australia. They understand the cultural context because of their family background, but they cannot read the Chinese books. So an English version is, for them, a godsend."

The shared sorrow of Louis Cha ‘Jin Yong’ and Deng Xiaoping - "He said lightheartedly that this was the third time he had made a comeback, just like “the characters in your books have to go through hell before they rise to the top. That is life.” Deng Rong, the younger daughter of Deng Xiaoping, said her father used to read Cha’s martial arts novels – obtained from Hong Kong because they were banned in China – at noon and then half an hour before going to bed. Even on business trips, Deng would take a martial arts novel with him."

I can only have sex when I’m drunk? : TooAfraidToAsk - "I’m 23F and I just realized that I only have sex when I’m drunk. The prospect of engaging in sexual activities SOBER came up the other day, and I started to panic and felt really uncomfortable at the thought of it. I suddenly realized that, for the last 3 years, I will only engage in any sexual act with my boyfriend provided I am drunk. What the heck do I do with this information? Is this normal?
Edit: My boyfriend is not raping me, jesus fucking christ."

ANDREW SULLIVAN: THINKING. OUT. LOUD. - "Of all the debates Sullivan has been embroiled in, his collision with the gay left is the hardest to reconstruct, because the gay-rights debate has been transformed in the two decades since, not least by his own writing. Yet Sullivan wrote the first major article in America calling for gay people to be given the right to marry—and he was savaged by other gays. His talks were picketed by a group called the Lesbian Avengers, who waved signs with Sullivan’s head in the crosshairs of a gun. In gay bars he was denounced as a “collaborator” and physically attacked. He was anathemised by mainstream gay-rights organisations, who refused to engage with him. Why? The Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein spoke for this tendency when he claimed that Sullivan was “promoting the bargain of assimilation. But this deal comes with a price. It requires gays to maintain the illusion that we’re just like straights… [But] we were interested in messing with the codes of sexuality.” By advocating marriage, Sullivan was opting into the very system gay people should destroy. He was just “Rush Limbaugh with monster pecs,” a self-hater who “would solve the faggot problem by urging gay men not to act like fags”. Today, marriage is the Number One demand of the gay-rights movement... Many of the people who denounced him as “evil” for proposing marriage were now—without any apology—getting married themselves
When gay marriage was considered heteronormative and thus homophobic

15 photos of the USS Indianapolis, whose World War II sinking started the deadliest shark attack in history - "About 300 of the 1,195 sailors would go down with the heavy cruiser, and approximately 900 survivors would have to wait about four days in the water to get rescued. Subjected to dehydration, heat, delirium from drinking salt water, and shark attacks, only 316 would make it out of the water alive... The loud noise, thrashing and blood drew in many sharks, which are thought to have killed a few dozen to 150 sailors, making it the worst shark attack in history."

Public toilets in South Korea to be monitored to crack down on spycam porn - "Public bathrooms at all transport hubs in South Korea, including airports, bus terminals and metro and train stations, will be regularly monitored as a measure to better deal with secret cameras installed in public toilets, as well as spycam pornography that has been prevalent in the country's cyberspace... Spycam pornography, locally known as "molka", generally refers to secretly produced, sexually exploitive videos or pictures of women in public spaces, such as restrooms and subways, among others. Such content has also been created and shared online by victims' former boyfriends, typically in retaliation, with the intent to damage the women's future job and marriage prospects... Once entering a bathroom stall, checking for peepholes that may contain secret lenses - and stuffing tissues inside if there are indeed holes - has become common practice among South Korean women, they say. The new measures were introduced as government data showed that 24 per cent of all spycam-related crimes have so far taken place at transport sites - including public restrooms in crowded metro stations, highway rest areas and airports... The new government measure requires all South Koreans who operate transport sites to establish a special team to monitor the property, including public restrooms, and to inspect for secretly installed cameras at least once a day... A public bathroom that has been monitored and regulated well and consistently for a significant amount of time will be designated a "clean zone"... While there is no doubt that the mass women's rights rallies have been the major driving force behind the changes, recent research showed that only about 50 per cent of South Korean women and 20 per cent of South Korean men endorse the cause. A study by the Korea Press Foundation, which surveyed some 1,000 Korean men and women aged 20 to 59, found that 72.5 per cent of those who did not support the rallies think the protests may, in fact, make more South Koreans think negatively of feminism. At the same time, 17.1 per cent said South Korean women do not experience gender-based violence and discrimination to an extent that they need to hold a mass rally. The women's rights rallies have been a subject of debate as some participants have made controversial remarks against men during previous editions. They were later accused by critics of openly committing hate speech."

Eduardo Marqués Collado's answer to Why does Spain have such a low crime rate compared to other European countries like France, the UK, Italy, or Portugal? - Quora - "Spanish law makes a big, huge distinction between crimes that involve violence (or the threat of violence) vs. those that don’t, up to the point of considering them different crimes altogether... Consequently, criminals in Spain have huge incentives to act as non-violently as possible. That’s why there is so many petty thefts and scams, yet so very little armed robbery, for example."