Links - 11th February 2019

Spanish language academy in row over eradicating gender bias from constitution - "The Real Academia Española, the official arbiter of the Spanish language, has become embroiled in a dispute over gender equality after the government asked it to examine whether Spain’s Constitution could become more gender nuetral.Spain’s deputy prime minister and equality minister, Carmen Calvo, said earlier this week she would ask the RAE to study updating the 1978 constitution with “inclusive” language.“We have a constitution in the masculine,” she said - noting that it referred to “ministers and deputies” with the male form of the noun - “which dates back to 40 years ago”.The heart of the issue lies in the traditional Spanish use of male pronouns and noun forms to refer to both genders collectively. Some critics say that effectively makes women invisible, while defenders of the current linguistic format say the inclusion of women is implied and accuse feminists of whipping up fury over non-existent sexism... It is not the first time the RAE has been at the centre of a row over linguistic sexism. In March it was forced to remove the definition of an "easy woman" after months of public protest. And in June, when a Spanish factory refused delayed wages to three female workers on the grounds their contract used the masculine noun for workers, the RAE appeared to blame feminists, tweeting that “perhaps the insistence that the male noun makes women invisible has brought this lamentable confusion”."

The RAE Rejects "Todos y Todas" - "The reasoning behind the creation of the phrase “todos y todas,” famously used by the former president of Argentina Cristina Kirchner, is that inclusivity is important. The term “todos” means “everyone” in Spanish, in this context, and grammatically it includes all genders, even though it has a masculine (-os) ending. The idea behind grammatical changes like “todos y todas” is to make sure women don’t feel overshadowed and invisible when people are talking in general terms.Ignacio Bosque, author of an RAE report titled “Sexismo lingüístico y la visibilidad de la mujer” (Linguistic sexism and women’s visibility) argues that, since “todos” and many other plural masculine terms, like “profesores”, grammatically includes women, so there is no need to create new terms. The use of the masculine grammatical gender as also gender neutral is very much a part of Spanish grammar, as it is with many Romance languages and even English (mankind, firemen, etc.)... Using “todos y todas” instead is a good step forward, as it includes feminine-identified people as well, but ideally terms would be genderless, as we have worked on in English with examples such as “police officer” and “businessperson”. Moving towards language that doesn’t refer to gender at all could contribute to the creation of a society that doesn’t pay attention to gender as much in terms of who gets to have what position and issues like that."
Next step guaranteed: calls to get rid of grammatical gender

OPINION: Inclusive gender-neutral Spanish is riling linguistic authorities, but will it stick? - "The Royal Academy of Spanish (RAE) is the largest authority on the language, and replies with a categorical “absolutely not” when questioned if an x, @ or e ending is possible.Pedro Luis Garcia, the ex-president of the Argentine Language Academy, spoke to Infobae explaining his views on the subject.“The use of the @ sign at the end of the word to suggest the double value of both feminine and masculine is a monstrosity because the @ sign is not a linguistic character and cannot be integrated into words…As for the use ‘x’ at the end of the word, ‘x’ itself doesn’t allude to a double meaning but rather to an unknown, as it is the symbol of an enigma to be solved.”Writer Hector Luis Alamo also wrote an article in Latino Rebels giving a strong case against the ‘x-ing’ of Spanish, saying that Latino plays the role both of a masculine and a neutral substantive.“When we read about the “Latino vote,” for instance, no one in their right mind believes the topic at hand to be strictly voters identifying as Latino men,” he wrote. “Anyone who doesn’t understand that the “Latino vote” means all Latinos, of any category (are there categories?), possesses at best a weak grasp on both the English and Spanish languages.”

The X-ing of Language: The Case AGAINST ‘Latinx’ - "Confronted once with an angry audience member who wanted to know why he insisted on referring to himself as “a Negro” and not “a Black man” — “There is no country called Negro!” the guy yelled from the back of the room — James Baldwin explained that he didn’t invent the word Negro, nor did anyone living at the time. “Do you suppose,” he asked, “that because it angers you, that suddenly an entire nation is able to change its vocabulary? In any case, I distrust the emphasis on vocabulary.”... even though his grandmother referred to herself as “a nigger,” it didn’t stop her from raising a family “and instill[ing] somehow into her children some dignity that did not depend on the word.”... “What is PC but a verbal form of gentrification?” the hapless yet indomitable Nathan asked in this week’s season finale of South Park. “Spruce everything up, get rid of all the ugliness in order to create a false sense of paradise.” Incidentally, this brand of language monitoring is not only faux-advancement, it also hinders the discussions needed to ensure the advancement it aims to achieve. You don’t need to have read Orwell to understand how the more people are made to fear misspeaking, the less they’ll speak, and that a lack of dialogue leads to widespread complacency. The most insidious form of censorship is self-censorship... For those hung up on the -o, I suggest they worry less about the history of Latino and discover its present meaning. Language isn’t dead, after all, but living. Definitions continue to transform all the time, all around us. The word no longer applies strictly to male Latinos but all Latinos, just as the “men” in “all men are created equal” now means all people. The word queer, for example, literally means “odd” or “worthless,” a fact which doesn’t keep millions in the LGBT community from donning the term proudly. The word Latino, once a fork, has evolved into a spork, and so there’s no reason to invent an all-purpose substitute. If we dump Latino for Latinx because it offends some people, then we should go on dumping words forever since there will always be some people who find some words offensive... If being a reactionary means challenging paternalism, then sign me up. After all, isn’t that the intention of language monitors: the urge to force people to do what’s best for them and others? As part of a species that believes in “bad words,” people must be protected from what they say and write. So language monitors sanitize words with x’s and @’s to make sure we’re not corrupted (or stay corrupted)."

Shortchanged: Women earn less than half of men's income - "The gender pay gap -- the difference in earnings for women workers compared with their male colleagues -- may be far worse than believed. A new analysis concludes that women earn 49 cents compared with every $1 men earn... Women who left the workforce for at least a year earned 39 percent less than women who never left. Men suffered the same 39 percent hit if they stepped away from work for a year."
Basically admitting the gender pay gap is unequal pay for unequal work
I read a few articles on the study. This is the only one which mentions men suffered the exact same penalty for not working

Harvard Study: "Gender Wage Gap" Explained Entirely by Work Choices of Men and Women - "if we truly want to measure the impact of sexism on male and female relative earnings, we want to look at men and women doing exactly the same job at exactly the same place. Fortunately, a new study by Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel of Harvard University—again, listed in that order because that is how they are presented in their paper—does just this. They look at data from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). This is a union shop with uniform hourly wages where men and women adhere to the same rules and receive the same benefits. Workers are promoted on the basis of seniority rather than performance, and male and female workers of the same seniority have the same choices for scheduling, routes, vacation, and overtime. There is almost no scope here for a sexist boss to favor men over women. And yet, even here, Emanuel and Bolotnyy find that female train and bus operators earn less than their male counterparts. From this observation, they go looking for possible causes, examining time cards and scheduling from 2011 to 2017 and factoring in sex, age, date of hire, tenure, and whether an employee was married or had dependents. They find that male train and bus drivers worked about 83 percent more overtime than their female colleagues and were twice as likely to accept an overtime shift—which pays time-and-a-half—on short notice and that around twice as many women as men never took overtime. The male workers took 48 percent fewer unpaid hours off under the Family Medical Leave Act each year. Female workers were more likely to take less desirable routes if it meant working fewer nights, weekends, and holidays. Parenthood turns out to be an important factor. Fathers were more likely than childless men to want the extra cash from overtime, and mothers were more likely to want time off than childless women. In other words, the difference in male and female earnings at the MBTA was explained by those “so-called ‘women’s choices’”... The “gender wage gap” is as real as unicorns and has been killed more times than Michael Myers. Yet politicians feel the need to genuflect before this phantom figure"

Lucas Lynch - If you want a leftist to suddenly become a defender... - "If you want a leftist to suddenly become a defender of free speech, just change the subject to Israel. Suddenly the very principles they denigrate become the nearest and dearest to their heart, even while they fail to realize that the entire reason for defending free speech for those with an opinion one finds vile is exactly to protect it for yourself.That being said, Marc Lamont Hill was not fired from CNN merely for criticizing Israel or standing up for Palestinian rights. He was fired for using the phrase "from the river to the sea", a slogan used by haters of Israel that is a call, implied or otherwise, for Israel and all Jews within it either to be expelled or exterminated... Interestingly Shaun King isn't sanctimoniously talking about how CNN is a private corporation and can hire and fire whoever they want, nor is he pointing out that Hill's rights have not been violated and then anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't understand the law. Which also shows that once the subject changes to Israel these same hypocrites understand that free-speech goes beyond the law – it is norm and custom, an institution that needs protection both from overreaching government and pitchfork or smartphone-wielding mob"

Liberal, Not Lefty - Posts - "Did the CBC really just tell Canadians to have one less child because "climate change" ?? When they simultaneously advocate for massively increased immigration and asylum seeker numbers ??"
This is not helping those who mock "white genocide" as a myth

Older version of firefox developer | Firefox Support Forum | Mozilla Support - "https://download-origin.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/devedition/releases/"

Firefox Classic Add-ons Archive - "Classic Add-Ons Archive is a new add-on for the Firefox web browser that can be best described as a local catalog of classic Firefox add-ons. The current version of the catalog lists 16706 Firefox add-ons that developers created over the past 14 years based on Firefox's XUL/XPCOM technology. The add-on can be installed in development versions of Firefox, and probably also in other browsers based on Firefox code.It is quite large, with more than 30 Megabytes, but that is justified considering that it is a local archive of Mozilla AMO."

Editing the iTunes XML File - "Listening to your favorite music while you're working can make long hours at the office seem a little less tedious. If you frequently transfer music to an iPod, USB flash drive or other portable device, the XML list that contains the library information for your iTunes collection might become corrupted. Rebuilding your iTunes library can take a considerable amount of time depending on the number of songs in your collection. If problems arise with your library file -- or if you want to move your iTunes collection to another computer -- you can use tools already built into iTunes and Windows to edit or repair the XML file and correct common problems."