Links - 14th July 2019 (1)

“Men Are Scum”: Inside Facebook’s War on Hate Speech - "Facebook was taking down “men are scum”?Belsky hopped on a 500-person (Facebook) group of female comics. A bunch of them were getting banned for similar infractions, even as they reported sexist invective being hurled their way. They decided to protest by spamming the platform. On November 24, dozens of “men are scum” posts went up. And then … they came right down. Belsky was put back in Facebook jail. The women of Men Are Scum became a brief Internet cause célèbre, another data point in the never-ending narrative that Facebook doesn’t care about you... Another idea is to treat the genders themselves differently. Caragliano cues up a slide deck. On it is a graph showing internal research that Facebook users are more upset by attacks against women than they are by attacks against men. Women would be protected against all hate speech, while men would be protected only against explicit calls for violence. “Women are scum” would be removed. “Men are scum” could stay.Problem solved? Well … not quite. Bickert foresees another hurdle. “My instinct is not to treat the genders differently,” she tells me. “We live in a world where we now acknowledge there are many genders, not just men and women. I suspect the attacks you see are disproportionately against those genders and women, but not men.” If you create a policy based on that logic, though, “you end up in this space where it’s like, ‘Our hate-speech policy applies to everybody—except for men.’ ” Imagine how that would play... For philosophical and financial reasons, Facebook was established with one set of universally shared values. And in order to facilitate as much “sharing” as possible, no one group or individual would be treated differently from another. If you couldn’t call women “scum,” then you couldn’t call men “scum,” either... Facebook’s campus exists, in other words, as a physical manifestation of its business model: a privatization of the public square... Bickert is articulating not just the classic Facebookian position that sharing is good, but also what used to be a fairly uncontroversial idea, protected by the First Amendment, that a democratic society functions best when people have the right to say what they want, no matter how offensive. This Brandeisian principle, she fears, is eroding. “It’s scary,” she says. “When they talk to people on U.S. college campuses and ask how important freedom of speech is to you, something like 60 percent say it’s not important at all. The outrage about Facebook tends to push in the direction of taking down more speech. Fewer groups are willing to stand up for unpopular speech.”
So much for feminism being about equality and feminists not hating men (at least Facebook is slightly less bad about double standards than, say, Twitter).

Reebok Russia stirs controversy with 'face-sitting' slogan in feminist ad campaign - "“Sit not on the needle of men’s approval – sit on men’s face.”The provocative slogan could have come straight from a Femen protest but it was actually featured in an advert by sportswear company Reebok in Russia."

Dear Men, Feminism Needs You – Jessica Valenti - "men can and should figure out for themselves how to be a true ally to women — without creating more work for us"
Given that she's busy bathing in male tears, this speaks to an immense sense of clueless entitlement

How US billionaires are fuelling the hard-right cause in Britain | George Monbiot - "Among the world’s biggest political spenders are Charles and David Koch, co-owners of Koch Industries, a vast private conglomerate of oil pipelines and refineries, chemicals, timber and paper companies, commodity trading firms and cattle ranches. If their two fortunes were rolled into one, Charles David Koch, with $120bn, would be the richest man on Earth... We found three payments over the past two years from the Charles Koch Foundation. They amount to $170,000 (£130,000), earmarked for “general operating support”. The payments were made to Spiked US Inc... the Charles Koch Foundation has now given Spiked US Inc a total of $300,000, “to produce public debates in the US about free speech, as part of its charitable activities”. She claims the foundation supports projects “on both the left and the right”. The Koch Foundation has funded “a free speech-oriented programme of public debates on campus titled the Unsafe Space Tour” and four live events, the first of which is titled “Should we be free to hate?” She told me: “We’re very proud of our work on free speech and tolerance, and we are proud to be part of the programme.”"
Libertarianism and free speech are the new "hard-right"
It's only okay when Soros does it - and if you complain about him, you are a "hard right" (or "far right") anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist

Even More Evidence That We’re Eating All Wrongt - "“The American Heart Association recommends that you keep your total fat consumption to less than 30 percent of total calories, and to keep your saturated fat to less than 10 percent of calories,” says Dr. Sonia Anand, the director of the population genomics program at Canada’s McMaster University and an author on the studies. But Anand and her colleagues argue that current research fails to support the idea that saturated fat is the real heart killer. “This study adds a whole large data set for such bodies to consider," she says. "And it may be time to revise that recommendation.” ... The second study focused on fruit, vegetable, and legume intake. As expected, consumption of produce did indeed reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. But while the USDA recommends five servings per day, Anand and her colleagues found that the benefits (at least in terms of avoiding death from heart-related trouble) tapered off around three servings of fruits and vegetables per day. They also noted that raw vegetables seem to confer a stronger benefit than cooked. It may be that some of the nutrients destroyed by the cooking process are key"

Making A Fortune: 19 Million Public Employees Across America Cost Taxpayers Nearly $1 Trillion - "Tree trimmers in Chicago lopped off $106,000. New York City school janitors cleaned off $165,000 while out earning the principals at $135,000. Lifeguards in Los Angeles County, California, made up to $365,000. In the small school district in Southlake, Texas (8,000 students), the school superintendent earned $420,000... There were 105,000 local and state government employees out-earning every governor of the 50 states at a salary of $190,000 or more."

Friends Don't Let Friends Become Chinese Billionaires - "China Daily reported Friday that unnatural deaths have taken the lives of 72 mainland billionaires over the past eight years. (Do the math.)Which means that if you're one of China's 115 current billionaires, as listed on the 2011 Forbes Billionaires List, you should be more than a little nervous.Mortality rate notwithstanding, what's more disturbing is how these mega wealthy souls met their demise. According to China Daily, 15 were murdered, 17 committed suicide, seven died from accidents and 19 died from illness. Oh, yes, and 14 were executed. (Welcome to China.)I don't know about you but I find it somewhat improbable that among such a small population there could be so many "suicides," "accidents" and "death by disease" (the average age of those who died from illness was only 48). I'm only speculating but the homicide toll could really be much higher"

Legos have a surprisingly high price on the second-hand market - "According to research from Russia’s Higher School of Economics, Lego boasts an extremely high value when sold secondhand — and it actually has a higher rate of return than gold, bonds, and stocks.The study, published last month by assistant professor Victoria Dobrynskaya, is titled “The Toy of Smart Investors.” Dobrynskaya studied 2,000 Lego sets that were released between 1980 to 2014. She then compared their retail cost to how much they’d yield on the secondhand market in 2015. Dobrynskaya was surprised to find that plenty of Lego sets yielded a return rate of 11 percent, while others could be flipped at a whopping 613 percent.“Although it may seem odd to invest in a toy, a huge secondary market for Lego sets with tens of thousands of investors developed in the 2000s,” the study notes. “Lego is not just a toy, but also a reasonable alternative investment with average returns comparable to stock returns, low market and crash risks and a positive alpha.”"

Four-Year-Old Girl Calling Out Disney's Aladdin Goes Viral - "Madison questions why Jasmine needs Aladdin to show her the world, seeing as she's more than capable of exploring it herself"
"4 year old girl coached by her feminist mother tries to stir up shit about a movie that existed outrage-free in animated form for almost 30 years goes viral."

Goodbye Humanities—Hating White Males Is Not a Curriculum - "If you regard literary studies in the 1950s as a time when tweedy scholars were putting together standard editions of canonical writers such as Emily Dickinson, the respondents recall something else, “a moment in which white men possessed the power to determine the worthiness of the things around them.” If you think the job market was an embarrassment of riches for everyone in the field, you have only glamorized those “halcyon days of overabundant employment for white men whose purported civility wasn’t, it turns out, so civil.”There is more. If you have any nostalgia at all for those boom times, you fail to recognize “the very necessary unsettling of white male dominance.” After reading that line, you know that a list of previously excluded identities will soon follow... how many 19-year-old students want to take a class taught by teachers with such a racial and sexual chip on their shoulders? Apart from a batch of social justice kids who relish blaming the White Man for all social ills, few undergraduates find the approach appetizing... Undergraduates choose English because they love the material and are inspired by the teachers. English can’t rely on the kind of pipeline effect that feeds psychology, chemistry . . . whereby students choose those fields to “become” them (psychology majors become psychologists, chemistry majors become chemists. English has, at best, a weak parallel; English majors becoming English teachers.This is to say that English thrives only when its subject matter is treated affirmatively, and teachers have some charisma. How many students want to listen to identitarian teachers stand at the podium and complain about racism and sexism for 15 weeks?"
At least if you demonise white men, you have a ready market of racist and sexist students

Thread by @ZachG932: "1/n Spent some time on LexisNexis over the weekend. Depending on your political orientation, what follows will either disturb or encourage y […]" - "Spent some time on LexisNexis over the weekend. Depending on your political orientation, what follows will either disturb or encourage you. But regardless of political orientation, I'm sure we can all say 'holy fucking shit'
Number of news articles mentioning:
'Diversity and Inclusion'
'Whiteness'
'Critical Race Theory'
'Unconscious Bias'
'White Privilege'
'Systemic Racism'
'Diversity Training'
So many of these graphs look the same that, without the title, it looks like I'm simply reposting a single chart
Some of these terms (such as the one below) turn up so many results that I had to limit the search to a single news source
Number of New York Times articles mentioning:
'Privilege'
'Discrimination'
'Social Justice'
'Police Brutality'
'Marginalized'...
Note that the slope begins pointing upward before 2015, which is consistent with my findings that the 'wokening' was underway before Trump entered the picture."
The rise of political correctness, quantified