Links - 23rd July 2019 (2)

STAR WARS "PREQUELS" FANS - "How old were you when you realized that the reason they hate droids in a New Hope... Is because they waged a Galactic War with droids a generation earlier?"

Hundreds of F&B outlets in Singapore to stop providing straws - "By July 1, over 270 food and beverage (F&B) outlets in Singapore will remove straws completely from their premises or provide them only on request.These include cafes and eateries such as Nando’s Singapore, Pastamania, A Poke Theory and Bettr Barista as well as those run by Spa Esprit Group which include Tiong Bahru Bakery and Open Farm Community.Wildlife Reserves Singapore and the Accor Group — which operates Raffles, Swissotel, Fairmont, Sofitel, Novotel and other hotel brands — have also come on board the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) initiative, which is part of the group’s PACT (Plastic ACTion) business coalition and supported by the National Environment Agency and Zero Waste SG."
Hundreds of places to boycott. Or at least not buy cold drinks from, since any drinks served with ice will be dilute and uneven, and drinks served without it will become warm
One day they find out that straw hysteria was a corporate conspiracy to save costs and look good while doing it

The Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom on Twitter - "My friend runs a midwife non profit. Today a bunch of boxes arrived. They're full of donated t shirts.
Her non profit doesn't need t-shirts.
Some white people led org just assumed because she goes to African countries that she needs...t-shirts.
And she literally has no time to figure out how to get rid of the boxes but she needs to because they are taking up space for the work. We are now crowdsourcing assistants to help her figure out how to dispose of this "donation".
It's about to take three black and brown women to deal with the mess created by white donations.
Anyway, whiteness."
Clearly white people need to stop trying to help brown/black people, since that is "whiteness". And brown/black people never make mistakes

Matt Adams - I was strolling through college campus unaccompanied... - "I was strolling through college campus unaccompanied as I often do. Not worried about being harassed or raped because I am a man. See group of young ladies struggling to set up a folding table. Two strong women have extended the legs and are trying to flip the table upright. I approach them uninvited and say hello. One flees, triggered. "let me help with that girls" I easily flip the table upright with... my masculine strength. Now upright, I can see the sign taped to the table top. FEMINIST BAKESALE. I give a low-pitched chuckle with my testosterone privileged vocal cords. "See you girls have been busy in the kitchen, what did you bake?" One strong woman stands with a box to rest on the table. Her eyes are welled with tears at the oppression she is suffering. "C-cupcakes" - "I love cupcakes, let me see what you have there" I reach my phallic hand over and open the virginal box this poor woman is holding. My male gaze objectifies the cupcakes. "Oh those look good. How much?" Another strong woman speaks up, images of Susan B. Anthony flash in her head. "They're a dollar for men because of the corrupt patria--" I stop her short in a textbook case of verbal rape. "That sounds fine. Give me the whole box." I pull out a capitalist paper bill with the image of a Cis White Male Slaveowner on it. The strong woman before me whimpers in psychic pain as I hand the bill to her, she has been reduced to a slave -- nay -- a commodity. "Thank you" she says meekly, feeling violated. I give a sensual grunt as I bite into one of the sweet, moist cupcakes. "Mmmm... It was my privilege.""

People in the UK are now called Nazis if they don't want to surrender their national sovereignty to Germany. : conspiracy

Entertain Your Nerdy Ass ☑️ - "*Hayley Atwell in figure hugging dress*
""The reason why Captain America stayed in the past"

Reighe on Twitter - "But the nazis were SJWs. They decided that a particular ethnic group is unfairly occupying too many positions of power in society, and warred against that perceived social injustice. That's the definition of SJW"

Apostate Prophet on Twitter - "You know what's crazy? Being a former Muslim with Muslim parents, relatives, and friends and being told by naive Californian white people that you're a bigot and a hateful islamophobe because you analyze your former religion."

Apostate Prophet on Twitter "Apparently,- if you do what I do and your work consists of studying and presenting Islam and its problems, you have to worry about being censored on platforms like Twitter and Facebook for voicing your opinion or sharing basic knowledge.
This never happens with other religions.
Even if you are a former Muslim and you suffered under this religion, are subject to oppression by this religion, and face death sentences for your existence in a dozen countries, some idiots in California will tell you that you just can't speak out because it's bad for business...
Corporations like these and their political allies (usually on the left of the political spectrum) are so ill-informed, emotionally driven, and fooled, that they think everything negative about Islam is equal to racism, bigotry, and hate; that it must be isolated and silenced.
In their warm seats in the safe West, with their money-hunger & their naivety, they don't allow those who are oppressed to speak up: because working with the government of Pakistan is better business than entertaining thought criminals waiting for their death in Pakistan prisons.
If my personal account is banned, simply for criticizing MY former religion, then I won't use this platform in any way, because I don't want to be part of a platform that is run by hypocrites and fascists who judge minorities of minorities because they think they know everything.
If I have to be careful here and self-censor, because these corporations can't tell what is good and what is bad, because they want to shut you down for having opinions, then I don't want a part of that.
To hell with you and your platforms. Keep licking the blood on your hands."

Anti-trump activists leave behind a mountain of litter after listening to ranting Corbyn blast Trump - "Anti-Trump protesters have left behind swathes of litter after listening to Jeremy Corbyn slam the President for his stance on the environment... Organisers admitted that the total turnout was only in the tens of thousands, despite predictions that hundreds of thousands would march against the President."

Filipinos Visit DepEd Website More than Pornhub - "Alexa—the data company, not the virtual assistant—has released its list of The Top 500 Sites on the Web. And while the Philippines has made the news more than once for being the country that spends the most time on Pornhub, it turns out that Filipinos spend even more time on the Department of Education's official website."

It isn’t Trump who’s a big baby – it’s Sadiq - "There’s only one problem with their self-satisfied flapping over Trump’s online namecalling – Sadiq started it! He was the first name-caller in this ridiculous, teenage Twitterspat. He likened Trump to fascists... Sadiq likened Trump to the people who destroyed Europe and murdered and gassed to death millions of Jews; Trump called Sadiq a midget. I’m saying Sadiq got off very lightly here."
Apparently if Sadiq insults Donald and Donald insults him back, Donald is in the wrong. But then, he is automatically wrong, so

A new book says married women are miserable. Don’t believe it. - "Women should be wary of marriage — because while married women say they’re happy, they’re lying. According to behavioral scientist Paul Dolan, promoting his recently released book Happy Every After, they’ll be much happier if they steer clear of marriage and children entirely... The problem? That finding is the result of a grievous misunderstanding on Dolan’s part of how the American Time Use Survey works. The people conducting the survey didn’t ask married people how happy they were, shoo their spouses out of the room, and then ask again. Dolan had misinterpreted one of the categories in the survey, “spouse absent,” which refers to married people whose partner is no longer living in their household, as meaning the spouse stepped out of the room.Oops... Dolan’s other claims also “fall apart with a cursory look at the evidence”... author Naomi Wolf learned of a serious mistake in a live, on-air interview about her forthcoming book Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love. In the book, she argues that men were routinely executed for sodomy in Britain during the 1800s. But as the interviewer pointed out, it appears she had misunderstood the phrase “death recorded” in English legal documents — she thought it meant a person had been executed, when it actually meant the death penalty had been deferred for their whole natural life. That meant that the executions she said occurred never actually happened... in many respects we got lucky in the Dolan case. Dolan was using publicly available data, which meant that when Kimbrough doubted his claims, he could look up the original data himself and check Dolan’s work. “It’s good this work was done using public data,” Kimbrough told me, “so I’m able to go pull the data and look into it and see, ‘Oh, this is clearly wrong.’”Many researchers don’t do that. They instead cite their own data, and decline to release it so they don’t get scooped by other researchers... Books often go to print with less fact-checking than an average Vox article"

Happiness and Academic Malpractice - "it’s pretty clear that few survey respondents are unhappy. Indeed, the .2 difference between bars represents the entirety of the difference between “happy” and “fucking miserable” as represented by Dolan in the Guardian article. This is a pretty trivial difference by any stretch of the imagination. Is the difference statistically significant? Dolan doesn’t say. Are these results adjusted for socio-demographic differences between respondents? Dolan doesn’t say that either. Are both heterosexual and same-sex marriages depicted in Figure 10? More silence from Dolan.Indeed, Dolan’s book contains very few methodological details. He is candid about not doing the data analysis himself... Dolan’s book, in short, doesn’t appear to support what he said in the Guardian interview... Dolan’s suggestion that marriage isn’t related to women’s physical health is refuted by the earlier research he cites in his book. The American Time Use Survey data he invokes offers no evidence in support of the contention that the “healthiest and happiest population subgroup are women who never married or had children.” Moreover, my own analysis of data from the General Social Survey supports Kimbrough’s findings—and repudiates Dolan’s. The figure below shows that married women are much more likely to report being “very happy” than are their previously married or never-married contemporaries. The only part of the story that Dolan appears to get right is the claim that people with kids are a bit less happy. Elsewhere Dolan offers claims that can be refuted just as easily. For instance, in a portion of his book excerpted by the Guardian in January of this year, he claims that people who make over $100,000 a year are no happier than those making under $25,000... Academics make mistakes, even dumb ones. Dolan could have easily come clean about everything, but he didn’t... Dolan’s “findings” about marriage were spread far and wide in the days after the May 25 Guardian article. The Guardian itself repeated the fiction two days later (and again, two days after that), but couldn’t be bothered to correct it. Meanwhile, the story had already popped up in clickbait at the New York Post, the UK’s Telegraph, and myriad other sites. Far fewer have set the story straight (two exceptions are the aforementioned BBC segment and a detailed explainer in Vox)."
If the Daily Mail once got a story wrong 10 years ago, that means it can't be trusted and only idiots read it.
If the Guardian repeatedly gets things wrong (and unlike the Daily Mail doesn't update or retract stories), there's no problem

Teenage who was sexually assaulted multiple times ends her own life through legal euthanasia
Luckily this was the Independent and not the Daily Mail, so we don't need to write off everything they publish even though they got this (and other stories) wrong