Links - 1st January 2019 (2)

In France, talking about money is more taboo than talking about sex - "The Marxist ideology progressively introduced into France in the 1920s and 1930s may also have played a role. “What we remember from the Marxist ideology is that profit is bad. It’s an oversimplification, but it still has an influence on leftists,” she says. Indeed, the Odoxa poll shows that eight out of 10 French people, whatever their income, say that being rich is frowned upon in their society... while French people young and old may continue to feel uncomfortable discussing money, they do seem to be pretty good at saving it. In fact, they rank among the world’s biggest savers. French people save an average of “15.5% of their gross available income,” says Flavien Neuvy, an economist and the director of the Cetelem Consumer Observatory. Savings rates tend to be tightly linked to the amount of trust that people have in the future. “In France, we are pessimistic,” he says, “so we usually want to save.”"

Some Canadians Are Buying Dirt Cheap Phone Plans From France To Save Money, Here's How That Works - "Canadian’s have some of the highest priced phone plans on the planet, it’s almost enough for you to just buy a phone in a different country to use here. Well, it turns out that’s exactly what some people have decided to do with phone plans from France... Canadian phone plans are so bad that it would really be cheaper for us all to just get French plans and pay the roaming fees... One plan lists unlimited fixed calls, unlimited texting and 100 GB of data a month for just 19.99 Euros a month. That’s just $30.48 Canadian a month"

Razib Khan Hired And Fired By The New York Times, Both On The Same Day! - "the kind of stuff Razib writes, usually with supporting graphs, tables, and references to papers in journals with titles like Current Directions in Psychological Science. Don’t read Razib if you’re not willing to engage with the latest results in behavioral genetics, population genetics, computational genomics, and related areas of the human sciences... Razib is of course a race realist, as anyone who knows as much genetics as he does is bound to be. True, the Times also publishes Nicholas Wade, another race realist, to write in their Science section: but Wade is a skillful diplomat, who softens his articles on population genetics with many qualifications and cautions about the provisional nature of results and the fallacy of inferring “ought” from “is.” Razib can’t be bothered with diplomacy, he just talks science … and sometimes also history, and religion, and philosophy, always from a deep background of reading, quoting half a dozen scholarly books and papers to you as he goes... Gawker.com, a Cultural Marxist website, did a hit piece on Razib exposing his associations with such racist white-supremacist racist far-right racist bigots as racist Taki Theodoracopulos, racist Steve Sailer, and oh my God! racist John Derbyshire.I am of course exaggerating their fondness for the word “racist,” but not by much: the Gawker piece is 518 words; “racist” occurs seven times (not counting the title occurrence), for an average of once every 74 words. That puts “racist” up there with “and” and “the.”"

Newtown Shootings: A Caution About Violence and SSRIs - "SSRI’s are the leading drugs in a recent list compiled of the Top Ten Drugs that cause violent behavior."

The ordinary people making the world more right-wing
Apparently right wing is a slur

Woman arrested for choking wrong man over alleged butt grab - "An upstate woman choked a nightclub bouncer unconscious because she thought he grabbed her butt — only to learn one of her own friends was the real groper... The 125-pound woman then walked up behind the club’s bouncer and strangled him until he fell to the floor unconscious"
"Creeps" will be "creeps"

పినవ on Twitter - "Public Service Announcement for men: BOXERS ARE NOT SHORTS YOU CANNOT WEAR THEM OUTSIDE."
"Don't tell us what to wear. Teach the girls not to stare"

God Emperor Trump - Posts - "When polled, 46% of San Francisco residents have plans to move out of the area—61% said they planned to leave the state—with Texas being a primary destination."
">enact shitty Democrat policies
>flee shitty Democrat policies
>move to Republican state
>enact shitty Democrat policies"

Battle of the narcissists - "the Acosta affair proved that there’s perhaps one thing the US media like talking about more than Trump: themselves. Immediately after, Twitter was flooded with journalists slamming Trump and expressing solidarity with Acosta. CNN thundered that the pulling of Acosta’s hard pass was a ‘threat to our democracy’.The recent murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul was casually invoked to put the press-bashing Trump on a sliding scale with Islamist strongmen butchering their critics... while Trump might talk a lot of trash about the press, what he’s actually done to it doesn’t amount to much. President Obama, on the other hand, waged a war on whistleblowers – using the antiquated Espionage Act – that caught many journalists in the crossfire... CNN’s Jake Tapper rightly noted in 2014 that Obama had used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers more than all the previous presidents combined"
Words speak louder than actions

Jim Acosta violated one of the oldest rules of journalism - "The conduct of a handful of so-called reporters during President Trump’s news conference was disgraceful beyond measure. This is not journalism, this is narcissism.Naturally, the boorish Jim Acosta of CNN was the instigator. As is his habit, Acosta doesn’t ask questions — he makes accusations and argues. Almost daily, he does it with the press secretary; Wednesday, he did it with the president... There was a time not long ago when young journalists were taught not to become the story. Apparently, many news organizations have flipped that lesson on its head. But we are witnessing something more insidious here than media trash talk. Plain and simple, we are watching expressions of personal hatred."

Welcome To The Dystopia: People Are Arguing About Whether This Trump Press Conference Video Is Doctored - "There's no evidence that the video was deliberately sped up — but the change in format, from a high-quality video to a low-quality GIF, turns the question of whether it was "doctored" into a semantic debate.This video analysis by BuzzFeed News demonstrates what the GIF conversion process does to video. While it's not technically "sped up" by intent, it effectively is in practice. The video-to-GIF conversion removes frames from the source material by reducing the frame rate. The GIF-making tool GIF Brewery, for example, typically reduces source video to 10 frames per second. Raw, televised video typically has a frame rate of 29.97 frames per second... The entire ordeal is a near-perfect example of a scenario disinformation experts have predicted and warned of, where the very threat of video manipulation can lead to a blurring of reality. "These technological underpinnings [of AI, Photoshop, and editing programs lead] to the increasing erosion of trust,” computational propaganda researcher Renee DiResta told BuzzFeed News in early 2018. “It makes it possible to cast aspersions on whether videos — or advocacy for that matter — are real.”"

Jim Acosta's Poor Decision to Confront Sarah Sanders - "Whenever a reporter who has not been kidnapped by terrorists, shot by an assailant, or won a big prize becomes an actor in her own story, she has lost the fight... the press secretary’s briefing—long an informal, in camera affair, once intended for a meaningful exchange of information and facts—has only been available for live broadcast in its entirety for a little more than 20 years, since the middle of Bill Clinton’s first term. On its face, that sounds like progress: independent journalists speaking truth to power, on behalf of—and in front of—the people. In practice, the ritual has all too often become a circus of reportorial self-expression, and sometimes self-promotion... I once read some good advice from a journalist —was it Nicholas Lemann?—who suggested that no profile writer should ask a hostile question if he didn’t believe it would produce a meaningful, revealing answer. Did Acosta really think his interrogatory to Sanders would? Did he think it would make the CNN suits sit up and say howdy? Who knows, but he has engaged in similar jousting in the past... Acosta’s confrontation—so florid, so vivid—also plays directly into Trump’s received narrative about a hostile, combative, and even unfair press... The last thing Trump—or the press, or the public—needs is another convenient villain in the performative arena of the long-running reality show that is his administration. Acosta’s broadside blurs the line between reporting and performance, between work and war, at a time when journalists have a greater obligation than ever to demonstrate that what they do is real, and matters—and is not just part of the passing show."

The Acosta affair: An unpopular opinion - "Jim Acosta was called on by the president to ask a question.I'll say that again. He was called on by Donald Trump to ask whatever question he liked. And when he'd finished asking one, he then asked another - with interruption follow-ups in between.It was only when he attempted his third question - or possibly fourth depending on how you define the follow-ups - that the president got angry and asked him to sit down... What happened in that room was not the ultimate fight for press freedom. This wasn't someone risking life and limb against a regime where freedom of speech is forbidden. This was a bloke sitting in a room full of colleagues who were all trying to ask questions too.This was a man who'd had his turn and had been told he couldn't hog the whole time... The president took CNN's question and then took more. And when he tried to move on, he couldn't. Once the Acosta incident was over, he went on to take questions from journalists from all over the world - for a total of 90 minutes... Fox and MSNBC have always played to their own bases. But now CNN, too, has editorialised its evening slot with Chris Cuomo - who gives us an essay, a comment piece, on whatever is getting him fired up. It's a good watch actually. And makes you engaged. But make no mistake - it's the same game that Trump is playing. The one they pretend to despise"

Andrew Sullivan: America’s Fever Is Still Rising - "The Kavanaugh hearings were a disaster in terms of encouraging that perception of bias. The coverage was ludicrously tilted against Kavanaugh, and along urban, left-feminist lines. Reporters like Jim Acosta don’t help either. I’m a First Amendment fanatic, but Acosta’s self-regard appears to be fathomless. He and Trump almost need each other to sustain a mutual narcissism. I’ve also been a little shocked, to tell the truth, by the way CNN has moved in just a couple of years into MSNBC territory. The surrender of mainstream newsrooms and magazines to the social-justice cult has also hurt their credibility with readers who are looking for insight rather than ideology. All of this makes it easy for partisans to ignore or dismiss all the excellent journalism being done by mainstream outlets. Trump’s entire business career was brutally exposed by the New York Times, for example, a month before the election and it mattered not a jot. It also seems evident that Trump has little to fear from Mueller. One small nugget from the exit polls that hasn’t been adequately noted: Americans believe that the Mueller investigation is politically motivated by a 54–41 percent margin, and they disapprove of Mueller’s handling of the inquiry by 46–41 percent. Since Mueller was appointed by a Republican-led DOJ, is himself a lifelong Republican, and, by almost everyone’s account, has behaved impeccably, this is grim news... the way in which social-justice ideology construes gender as implying a monolithic political position is at odds with, well, reality... a greater emphasis on gender and gender solidarity actually increases partisanship and polarization... Make women feel they have to vote one way because they are women, and they actually get more partisan, not less"

Teach "Don't Steal", not "Lock your doors" - Posts - "umm wow it's never ok to joke about rape. by the way #killallmen is just a joke don't be so sensitive"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Could Jeremy Corbyn be PM? - "'Comrades, we must topple
this cruel and callous Tory government as soon as we can. And if we can't
get a general election we should organize with our brothers and sisters in the trade union to bring an end to this government with a general strike'
'Laura Smith, a Labour MP calling for a general strike.'
'Well, that's not our position. I mean, Laura's an absolutely amazing MP. She's one of the Northwest MPs with myself and she's so full of energy and enthusiasm but we're certainly not advocating general strikes'
'Why then did a Shadow Cabinet colleague, the shadow justice secretary Richard Burgon give her a standing ovation within a second'
Corbyn declined to be interviewed - though all his predecessors had been

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, China's Uighur Muslims - "Analysis of publicly available satellite images has found evidence of a growing system of giant new prison type facilities. And just to give you an example, John, one of them at which we were stopped from filming outside of, consists of these huge imposing H shaped buildings that you can see on the satellite images surrounded by a perimeter fence with 16 watchtowers. And prison design experts we've spoken to have looked at that building and have said that they believe it is very difficult to imagine that it could be used for any other purpose than holding people and they put their minimum effort in that single facility that their minimum estimate in that single facility at 11,000 people. It would put it on a par with some of the biggest prisons in the world. Now locals there that we've spoken to... locals call it a re-education center. And that gets you to the heart of what's going on here. That is the term that China has begun using in recent days... China says that these people. these Muslim groups are now attending - apparently willingly, it claims, anti extremism training in these reeducation camps. But our evidence suggests that it is in fact mass incarceration by any other name of many thousands of people. We've also heard John interestingly claims that this large scale repression is reaching far far beyond China's borders. Uighers in Britain have told us that they are facing pressure from the Chinese authorities to provide details of their documents, their driving license, their academic courses of study, their passports, et cetera, and to refrain from speaking out"