Links - 6th May 2019 (2)

Behind the 'White People' Rant That Roiled Columbia - "“We invented science and industry, and you want to tell us to stop because we’re so baaad. We invented the modern world. We saved billions of people from starvation. We built modern civilization. White people are the best thing that ever happened to the world. We are so amazing! I love myself! And I love white people! Fuck yeah, white people! Fuck yeah, white men! We did everything! I don’t hate other people. I just love white men.” Viral outrage was swift, spreading from Twitter to the media. The Columbia Spectator noted that the rant occurred amid “a string of hate crimes targeted at students of color at Ivy League institutions.” An NBC writer likened von Abele to the murderer in Charlottesville, Virginia. A university statement declared, “At Columbia, we stand firmly against white supremacist language and violence.”... "I’m afraid of the identitarian right as well,” he said. “I just don’t think that they have the same level of political or cultural power as the identitarian left. If groups with the views of Richard Spencer or David Duke were running university administrations or large parts of the internal structure of the federal government or the media, then I would be terrified"... Mostly, von Abele told me, he worries that the values that made Western civilization great are under attack by the faction in the academy that exalts group identity rather than “the principles of personalism and individualism”... On a historical timescale, treating persons rather than tribes, races, or religions as the unit of political or moral significance is not normal, von Abele said. He believes the West’s abnormal approach enabled the prosperity that Steven Pinker writes about in his work on human progress. And he sees what he calls left-identitarianism as a force urging a rejection of personalism and a return to group identity, abetted by an academy that doesn’t appreciate the loss that would entail... "If you insult someone for their identity, then a reaction that you can expect is for them to say that they’re proud of it... enthusiasm for Trump waned on the identitarian right after they saw his actual policies... “I had a lot of students emailing me who are pretty supportive,” von Abele said. “Overall, I received more supportive mail than hate mail, actually. From the emails that I got, it seems like the general environment on campus is that no one really feels like they can openly support me, but they sort of can secretly support me.”"
It's not okay to be white

Rutgers Professor Brittany Cooper: Concept of 'Time' Is Racist - "A professor at Rutgers University who previously argued that Jesus was “queer” stated on NPR last week that the concept of time is owned by white people.Rutgers University Professor Brittany Cooper is back with another hot take. This time, she’s arguing that the modern conceptualization of time is racist."

Holding science accountable for upholding white supremacy - Columbia Daily Spectator - "Consider the Nobel Prize in Physics: For 55 years (from 1963 until 2018), not a single woman received it. And there has still yet to be a Black laureate. This isn’t because there haven’t been any female or Black physicists worth recognizing. Rather, hegemonic masculinity and systemic racism excluded and continue to exclude women, people of color, and others who are marginalized from the field. Although sciences in general have made efforts to become more inclusive, physics has remained particularly homogenous."
So much for liberals being pro-science

University Educator: Mowing Your Lawn & Acting Respectable Is Racist - ""Another aspect of white liberalism is policing people's tones of voice," she continued. "The obsession with civility, refusing to hear black and brown people when they aren't following white cultural norms of communication.""For young people speaking today to you, what they're saying is a matter of life and death," she said without providing a shred of evidence for what she is claiming... "That's actually where the connection lands between white liberalism and white supremacy because it's by maintaining law and order and by maintaining civility by keeping your front lawn nice and tidy and by putting that 'all are welcome in our communities' sign on your front lawn, you are denying the fact that all the while you are with the other hand passing money to a deadly institution that polices with great disparity and causes tragic, tragic harm to the communities that are our neighbors and the communities that we actually should be building forward with.""

Occupy Democrats Logic - Posts - "Finally, a New Emoji to Mock Men"
"How long until you motherfuckers can convince them this is a hate symbol? I'll give it a month"
"Police issue hate speech warning as new "finger pinch" emoji is linked to racist far-right groups."

Report: More than half of immigrants on welfare - "More than half of the nation's immigrants receive some kind of government welfare, a figure that's far higher than the native-born population's... About 51% of immigrant-led households receive at least one kind of welfare benefit, including Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches and housing assistance, compared to 30% for native-led households, according to the report from the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for lower levels of immigration.Those numbers increase for households with children, with 76% of immigrant-led households receiving welfare, compared to 52% for the native-born... Camarota said one of the most shocking findings from the report was the high number of native-born Americans also on welfare. About 76% of immigrant households with children are on welfare, but so are 52% of native-born households with children...
The majority of immigrants using welfare come from Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean. The use of welfare is lower for immigrants from East Asia (32%), Europe (26%) and South Asia (17%).
Immigrants who have been in the U.S. more than 20 years use welfare less often, but their rates remain higher than native-born households"
Ideally this would quantify the welfare impact, as well as look at the net impact of both immigrants and natives

Maggi seasoning: The bright yellow package is what so many global cuisines have in common - The Washington Post - "For Nguyen, a Vietnamese writer, cook and the author of “Vietnamese Food Any Day,” Maggi means a small, brown glass bottle with a square bottom and slender neck filled with an inky seasoning sauce. “It is transformative to many foods but is really part of the flavor profile of banh mi,” she notes. “You can’t quite get real banh mi without Maggi.” For Mexican American chef Wesley Avila in Los Angeles, Maggi also denotes a beloved seasoning sauce that gives stews and meat an extra oomph. But the version Avila loves is Jugo Maggi, more syrupy and milder than its Vietnamese counterpart. For D.C.-based chef Kwame Onwuachi, Maggi was also a staple in his kitchen growing up when making Nigerian and Jamaican dishes. Except, if you say “Maggi” to Onwuachi, it means one thing only: foil-wrapped bouillon cubes that took such dishes as jollof rice and hearty soups to new, umami-packed heights. Shayma Saadat, a Pakistani Afghani cook and food writer who lives in Toronto, also has fond memories of the bouillon cubes she would pick up from South Asian grocery stores to give daals and yakhni, a deeply flavorful broth used to make rice dishes, a meaty infusion of flavor. But Maggi for Saadat also means tall glass bottles filled with a zippy chile garlic sauce. “I always keep a bottle in my fridge,” Saadat says... Like salt, fat, acid and heat, Maggi is one of the few great unifiers of the world’s kitchens and may be Switzerland’s largest and most influential culinary contribution... The Maggi is so important to the kitchen, one prep cook has the pleasurable task of unwrapping hundreds of foil-wrapped bouillon cubes, one-by-one, before service."

New Classical Tracks: Alexandre Tharaud revels in Rachmaninoff | Classical MPR - "Mozart's actually much more difficult to play than Rachmaninoff, because there are things in music that are a lot more difficult than just technical difficulties."

Howard Shore on composing for film, TV and the concert hall - extended audio - "Lord of the Rings is essentially a choral piece for Symphony Orchestra and, and chorus and lots of soloists as well. So the voice was really an important part of Lord of the Rings."

A university gallery showed art with Confederate imagery. Then students called to remove it. - The Washington Post - "Danielle Luokkanen, a senior studio art major who is white and helped install some of the pieces while working at the Hunt Gallery, described the show as a series of “thinly veiled microaggressions.”No one was more surprised by these reactions than the artists behind the exhibit, titled “Relevant/Scrap.” Jere Williams, 49, is a printmaker and sculptor whose work has been shown in galleries and won awards. His creative partner Pam Sutherland, 50, is an award-winning collage and mixed-media artist. The two white artists intended for the exhibit to be provocative and to spark a dialogue, but they didn’t expect a firestorm.Students wanted an explanation for the use of such loaded imagery. During the opening, they asked incisive questions about the artists’ intent. “They were forceful,” said Martha Walker, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, “and they kept hitting the same points when they didn’t really get answers that were satisfying them.” The next day, the administration of the small private liberal arts college faced growing discontent among students and, mindful of other recent conflicts over Confederate statues, worried that the art might attract hate groups. The gallery’s director contacted the artists by phone, and, although it’s unclear who proposed removing the exhibit, both the director and the artists agreed to do so. Within 48 hours of its premiere, the art came down... “When did empathy become racist?”... Several of them said the art verged on hate speech. That’s why they wanted it removed. When I told Friedman this, he was quick to point out that there is no legal definition of hate speech in the United States. No matter how controversial a piece of art is, he said, it “still may have value as a provocative reminder of what we collectively find as distasteful or hateful or inappropriate.”"
So much for putting Confederate statues in museums - it's clear grievancemongers just want things they don't like destroyed

The Secrets Of Chinese Stir-Frying: Why Does It Always Seem To Go Wrong At Home? - "The enemy of home stir-frying is the small wok — especially when it’s crowded with too many ingredients. Lots of vegetables, for example, in a too-small wok, steam rather than fry when you cook them. The flavors and textures of steaming and frying are totally different! You need girth in your wok and not too many ingredients cooking in it!... Stir-fry over the biggest flame you can muster: another key! One of the essentials of Chinese-restaurant stir-frying is what they call “the taste of the wok.” This taste comes from high-heat contact between ingredients and metal. Once again, if the wok’s not hot enough, the food will taste braised, or even steamed. Now, it’s not easy to reproduce the dramatic inferno of restaurant burners at home — but make sure to crank the heat all the way up on your hottest stovetop burner!... Most home cooks are surprised to realize that the proteins of Chinese-restaurant stir-fries are often pre-cooked, in another way, before they go into the stir-fry! The most important form of pre-cooking proteins is: frying in deep oil! Proteins are usually marinated and/or coated as well. Believe me: it changes everything! No more grey, listless meat in your stir-fries!"

The hypocrisy of Malay Muslims - "The Malay Muslims who get upset when people talk bad about Islam or when Muslims present a version of Islam that is unfamiliar to them are the same Malay Muslims who shout “It’s freedom of speech!” when Muslims belittle other religions or when an Islamic scholar says something that is potentially inflammatory but is parallel to their beliefs... The Malay Muslims who say that freedom of religion is mutually exclusive from Islam, disallowing the propagation or profession of other faiths while discriminating against converts from Islam or apostates, are the same Malay Muslims who use that term to justify the propagation of Islam, to fight back cases of Islamophobia, to encourage adherents of other religions to join Islam and to defend converts into Islam who are attacked by their family or friends. But where were you when Lina Joy wanted to get her religion changed legally? Where is your outrage regarding the Raif Badawi case? Did you try to defend Juli Jalaluddin when she was deported out of Malaysia? The Malay Muslims who are against pluralism and expect religious minorities to respect the needs and wants of the Muslim majority are the same Malay Muslims who would be appalled at the news of abuse or killings of Muslim minorities in foreign countries, saying, “We should respect other religions! We have to learn to live in peace and harmony!” But where were you when protests were held against the construction of a Hindu temple? Or when Molotov cocktails were thrown at a church? Where were you when a church was forced to take down their cross?... Their “freedom of speech” means “freedom of speech only for my group.” Their “freedom of religion” means “freedom to only practise Islam.” Their disagreement on takfir means “as long as you think like me, you’re still a Muslim.”"