Links - 6th May 2019 (3)

Veterans slam decision to include Muslim prayer during Anzac service - "Furious war veterans have slammed the decision to say a Muslim prayer during an Anzac Day dawn service to honour those who lost their lives in the Christchurch mass shooting.The Returned and Services Association (RSA) branch at Titahi Bay near Wellington in New Zealand has now chosen to include the prayer at the end of its two-hour 10am civic ceremony.However, the club originally chose to invite Newlands Mosque imam Mohamed Zewada to read a prayer from the Quran at the end of the dawn ceremony.The news quickly garnered negative attention from war veterans, with many claiming the club was disrespecting the legacy of Anzac Day... Mr Brown told Daily Mail Australia the 6am dawn service is a military service and should have nothing political or religious involved... 'Originally the parade had a firing party with rifles, but as soon as it happened we thought that would be quite an untenable position, so out of respect we cancelled the firing party'"
Apparently the Canterbury Mosque victims are war heroes

New Zealand: Anzac Day events cancelled in New Zealand after terrorist attacks - "Fears of a backlash to the Christchurch terror attack has seen some Anzac Day commemorations in New Zealand cancelled"

Iranian women's right activist condemns Western feminists - "A women's rights activist in Iran has said it is 'insulting' for Western visitors to wear the hijab in an attempt at solidarity.Masih Alinejad, who has spearheaded Iranian women's struggle against the head covering, said female dignitaries from Europe had left her fellow campaigners 'on their own' by choosing to wear the hijab when they visited Iran. .. 'Iranian women, they fight against the compulsory hijab and they are alone, they are on their own.'There were three female politicians from the Netherlands - they went to Iran the same day when one of the women of the White Wednesdays movement put her headscarf on a stick and waved it in public, she got arrested.'The same day there were three female politicians from the Netherlands in Iran obeying compulsory hijab law without challenging it.'The female politicians from Sweden - they were very well-known when they started to publish a picture to mock President Trump's Cabinet... 'I said to myself, when it comes to America, they are trying to say men and women are equal. But when it comes to [Iran] they are trying to send another message, that men are more equal than women. 'So the female politicians who go and visit Iran, the tourists, athletes, actresses - all of them, when they go to my beautiful country they say that this is a cultural issue, we wear it out of respect to the culture of Iran.'Let me be clear with you: calling a discriminatory law a part of our culture - this is an insult to a nation.'... Ms Alinejad said she admired Ms Ardern's 'compassion' for the Muslim community but said it 'broke her heart' to see her wearing the hijab.'I also felt that you are using one of the most visible symbols of oppression for Muslim women in many countries for solidarity,' she said"

Jacinda Ardern: ‘Very little of what I have done has been deliberate. It's intuitive’ - "“Very little of what I have done has been deliberate. It’s intuitive. I think it’s just the nature of an event like this. There is very little time to sit and think in those terms. You just do what feels right.”... [She had] seen the shooter’s manifesto, the 74-page screed he posted online. “I haven’t read it in full, but I saw enough of it to know part of what his aspirations were.”... Under New Zealand’s proportional system – in which people get two votes, one for their local politician and one for a party, as in Germany – a single-party majority is near impossible. This means Ardern must negotiate with both NZ First and the Green party to advance any legislation"
One would've suspected this from New Zealand's response to the Christchurch Mosque Attacks but this confirms it. Why is it a good thing to not think when leading?
So much for 'stereotypes'
How typical of censors to want to ban something they haven't even read

After Christchurch: Why Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern Was The Wrong Leader For New Zealand - "Jacinda Ardern’s mental health problems are a matter of public record... '“It is an impressive performance from a politician who said for years that she was not interested in leading the Labour party, let alone the country. She has given multiple reasons, including a desire to have a family; a concern that her anxiety would preclude her from the top job, the condition having “ballooned” during her time as deputy [Prime Minister] and a wariness about the demands of the job, something she observed working for the then prime minister, Helen Clark, in 2005…Ardern has frequently spoken of her anxiety. As recently as June, she said she was not cut out to be Labour leader: “When you’re a bit of an anxious person, and you constantly worry about things, there comes a point where certain jobs are just really bad for you.”'...
Ardern at one point seemed to be a throwback to an earlier type of left-wing politics, in that she actually campaigned on reducing immigration and formed a coalition government with Winston Peter’s New Zealand First party, which has made immigration patriot noises in the past"

15 year challenge - "2004: We can't allow the government to use the existence of terrorism as an excuse to take our rights away.
2019: After the terrorist attack in New Zealand, the government needs to shut down every right-wing forum IMMEDIATELY and put every one of its users on a watchlist. Free speech only enables Nazism!"

Are We A Racist Country? - "Since that tragedy the entire country has been convulsed with paroxysms of masochistic self-flagellation, swallowing the premise that we are some South Pacific equivalent of the pre-Civil War American South. Rallies have been held, legislation suggested, accusatory columns and tweets written. Former aerobics instructor Marama Davidson and her comrade, genocidal maniac selfie collector, Golriz Ghahraman have been front and centre, concluding with perfect reasonableness that a single homicidal Australian is a stand-in for all "white" people in New Zealand...
In 2016, the Finance website Insider Monkey sought to measure national attitudes to race by combining two previous surveys—one by the Washington Post and the other from part of the World Values Survey. Cunningly framed questions such as "Would you mind having someone of a different race living next to you?" were designed to uncover hidden racism. In all, the studies covered the responses of over 85,000 people from 61 countries.
Here are the top 10 "most racist countries" according to their findings:
India
Lebanon
Bahrain
Libya
Egypt
the Philippines
Kuwait
Palestine
South Africa
South Korea
Notice anything about these countries? "White people", the exemplars of racism according to Davidson and Co, are rather thin on the ground. In fact in the top 25, there is not an Anglosphere country to be seen (with the possible exception of South Africa). They are all to be found at the other end; Canada, Australia, the U.K., the U.S., and New Zealand being among the least racist... It is in Anglosphere countries with their shared heritage of common law freedoms and Christian ethics that minorities have been best protected.Racism is an original sin of all humanity. The Muslim immigrants who died in Christchurch knew something that Davidson and Co refuse to acknowledge—New Zealand is one of the most open and tolerant nations in the World. That’s why they chose to come here."
In the spirit of Moynihan: The amount of racism in a country is an inverse function of the amount of complaints about racism there

Don't Deny Girls the Evolutionary Wisdom of Fairy-Tales - "There’s been a war on “princess culture” for some time. Legions of pink-phobic parents all but go into mourning whenever their daughter begs for some glitter-flecked, rosy-hued item in a store—as if it might cast a spell on her, sending her down the path to Stepfordhood instead of STEM... Ironically, far from contaminating young female minds, these Disney princess stories—and their fairy-tale-fic precursors—provide vitally helpful messages that parents could be discussing with their girls.Cinderella, for example, revolves around the perniciousness of what researchers call “female intrasexual competition”—the often-underhanded ways women compete with each other... This, in turn, allows them to take such abuse less personally than if they buy into the myth of female society as one big supportive sisterhood... In Townsend’s research, even when women wanted nothing but a one-time hookup with a guy, they often were surprised to wake up with worries like “Does he care about me?” and “Is sex all he was after?”... A prince is a man who could have any woman, but—very importantly—he’s bewitched by our girl, the modest but beautiful scullery maid. A man “bewitched” (or, in contemporary terms, “in love”) is a man less likely to stray—so the princess story is actually a commitment fantasy. Because of this, princess films can be the perfect foundation for parents of teen girls to have conversations about the realities of evolved female emotions in the mating sphere. A young woman who’s been schooled (in simple terms) about evolutionary psychology is less likely to behave in ways that will leave her miserable—understanding that being “sexually liberated” might not make her emotionally liberated enough to have happy hookups with a string of Tinder randos... Children aren’t idiots. They know that talking mirrors and pumpkins that Uber a girl to the royal prom aren’t real, and they aren’t having their autonomy brainwashed away by feature-length cartoons—just as none of us dropped anvils on the neighbor kids after watching Road Runner. Ultimately, these bans of princess movies are really about what’s psychologically soothing for the parents, not what’s good for children. Preventing children from watching princess films and other fantasy kid fare gives parents the illusion of control, the illusion that they’re doing something meaningful and protective for their children."

No One Is Obligated to Find You Sexy - "Imagine for a moment if a group of less-than-athletic men held a protest against the NFL accusing professional football of being non-inclusive, demanding that all body types be represented among their players.Imagine a horde of former American Idol contestants protesting the show’s 2019 return, decrying the on-camera humiliation they endured in their auditions. “They held us to standards that are unrealistic for the average singer. We need diversity of singing voices!” they cry.What if a group of medical school wash-outs demanded to be accepted as surgeons, or if run-of-the-mill music teachers demanded first chair seats in premier orchestras?Most of us would think the protestors had gone mad.This past weekend, a group of body positivity activists protested a Victoria’s Secret store in London... This meme of forced beauty standards has been around for quite some time. People write numerous articles and scholarly papers about the negative effects of “unrealistic beauty standards” perpetuated by popular culture. But these aren’t beauty “standards” at all. They are examples of exceptional beauty."

Think Eastern Europe is Authoritarian? Try Germany and France - "The supposed descent of Eastern European countries, and particularly Poland and Hungary, into the grips of authoritarian nationalist regimes has been the subject of heated discussion... In view of these now prevalent attitudes, it may be useful to look at a recently concluded French study by Libertex, a libertarian polling operation, on the open exchange of information in various European countries. This comparative study, which looks at various European countries in terms of their openness to dissenting political views, constructs several criteria for its investigation. Among them are the relative absence of hate speech laws, an impartial (non-politicized) judicial system, the willingness or unwillingness of governments to ask Google and Facebook to censor unacceptable political opinion (a practice that in Western Europe almost always targets the right), the number of news agencies, and the possibility of holding open discussion without government censorship... According to Libertex, censorship targeting right-of-center authors and movements rarely receives the same media scrutiny as complaints issuing from the multicultural Left... Even the governments of such relatively free countries as Britain sometimes treat brutally those who get in the way of their efforts to build a multicultural society."

East-Siders Always Think Their Side of the Island Is Better. But Why?
As someone suggested to me, it's all the old money people who live in landed property in Katong

Anon Tumblr Gay ★ on Twitter - "Say bad things about a minority = discrimination
Say good things about a minority = stereotyping
Sexual preference against a minority = prejudice
Sexual preference for a minority = fetishisation
Don’t practise minority habits = insularism
Practise minority habits = appropriation"

More Companies Embrace Casual Dress Codes - "Goodbye suits and A-line skirts. Hello polo shirts, khakis and even bluejeans.More companies are beginning to move to a more casual dress culture — and not just on Fridays.This week, Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs announced it's relaxing its dress code... "Goldman Sachs has a broad and diverse client base around the world, and we want all of our clients to feel comfortable with and confident in our team, so please dress in a manner that is consistent with your clients' expectations... Virgin Atlantic also relaxed its dress code. The company confirmed that it is no longer forcing female flight attendants to wear makeup. And they can now wear pants. Previously, female flight attendants could only wear pants if they made a special request... More companies are shifting toward a less formal dress code, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. As many as half of firms surveyed by the group said they allow casual dress every day. That's up six percentage points from 2017 and 18 percentage points since 2014... Generation Z and millennials make up 40 percent percent of the workforce, according to the Pew Research Center.Jamie Notter, a workplace culture expert, says the casual dress code trend has been around since millennials entered the workforce 10 to 15 years ago. It reflects companies' increased focus "on employees rather than management""