Links - 21st August 2019 (2)

We Need to Forgive the NYU Student Who Killed Her Child - "Michelle Jones is not like other PhD candidates rolling up to New York University this year. Firstly, she only got out of the joint two days before school started. Secondly, folks at Harvard are still arguing over whether they should have admitted her. And thirdly, when she was still a teenager, she killed her 4-year-old son and buried his body in the woods... we should forgive Jones because continuing to punish a woman for something heinous she did while a teenager will not help that woman’s murdered child in any way"
Luckily she didn't do something truly heinous and unforgiveable, like make racist remarks when she was 16 and be a conservative Parkland student, like Kyle Kashuv

How Harvard Should Handle the Kyle Kashuv Mess - "almost everyone did or said something in private at 16 that doesn’t necessarily reflect on their character years later... Harvard might conserve the valuable stigma that the college and its defenders want attached to racial slurs, while still alleviating the concerns of its critics, by affirming its desire for ideological diversity among its undergraduates and pledging to replace Kashuv with an openly conservative wait-listed applicant.“This isn’t about his politics,” it could then credibly announce."

Harvard is Dumber Than Twitter - "No matter which side you take, one fact is impossible to shake off: America’s premiere educational institution has just declared that, moving forward, it will be in the business of scrutinizing the personal correspondence of all applicants to assure that only those who hold correct views are allowed in.Just what are the correct views? Unlike the other criteria taken into consideration when evaluating a candidate for admission, the university has made no effort to clearly communicate the moral standard by which it now judges young men and women. Even if you accept that it is somehow Harvard’s business to parse something offensive a kid wrote in a Google doc to his friends some years ago, long before he was catapulted, through circumstances beyond his control, into national prominence, consider the following questions.Would Harvard, say, bar a budding anti-Zionist activist who tweeted that the Jewish lobby controls America with its dirty money? Would it punish a young African American kid who, emulating his favorite rappers, used language that is hurtful to women and gays? Would it censor only teenagers, or do offenses committed at 11 or 12 also count? Or would it reserve its harshest judgments for the wrong kind of people—retrograde whites, especially men, including Jews, certainly, but not members of other minority groups, except for Asians, against whom Harvard already openly discriminates? These questions make some sense when applied to social media, our unremitting court of public opinion where everyone is always guilty and redemption is never on the horizon. This week, Harvard proved itself even dumber than Twitter, replacing the golden standard of education—a process of trial and error, guided by empathy and care—with the mean-spiritedness, narrow-mindedness, and mob mentality of the social network. It’s really not much of an exaggeration, at this point, to argue that Harvard’s mission is apparently no longer the development of young minds but rather the surveillance of young souls from childhood on, in order to certify an immaculate record of political correctness. The main model that springs to mind for this kind of secular institutional rage for the moral perfection of children is the early Soviet Union, where childhood indiscretions or undesirable class or ethnic origins could cost budding scholars their shot at a Party badge. The Sovietization of what passes for “higher education” in 21st century America is sad. It also proves Karl Marx’s famous quip about history unfurling first as tragedy and then as farce... the same university that reacted so harshly to Kashuv’s transgression is also the one that just a month ago summarily dismissed perhaps the most directly influential senior African American on campus—Ronald Sullivan, the famous criminal lawyer and the master of Winthrop House. His crime? Representing Harvey Weinstein in court. Harvard believes that there are crimes that simply cannot be forgiven. For adolescents, that means using vile language in private conversation. For adults, that means defending people accused of crimes in the press in an actual courtroom, as the law demands. Now think for a moment about the values that Harvard is inculcating in its young charges. The moral is simple: Don’t let your children apply there, because sooner or later the result will be tragic—for them, for you, and for America."

New York passes bill to allow driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants - "The Senate approved the Green Light Bill with 33 votes to 29, and the result was met with cheers and shouts from the gallery... "We are taking a stand for the rights of immigrants in a time where their livelihoods are being threatened and degraded to extreme degrees"... Twelve other states have similar provisions"
Since a driver's license is sufficient to vote in New York (and probably the twelve other states)...

Matt Walsh on Twitter - "call me old fashioned, but i was raised to take care of my husband make his plate every night, wash his work clothes for him, make sure he’s up for work the next morning, always have a clean house for him to come home to, etc. and that’s exactly wife i will be"
"Read the insane responses to this completely inoffensive tweet. Apparently women are allowed to choose, unless they choose to be attentive wives. That’s not an acceptable choice anymore."
Feminism isn't about choice after all (except the choice to have an abortion)

Teacher Defends Her Sexual Relationship With Her Student By Arguing His Grades Improved - "Brianne Altice, 36 was sent to jail after she admitted to having sexual relations with 3 of her students. She was given a lengthy sentence of 2 to 30 years in prison during a high profile trial.Altice pleaded guilty to sexual abuse charges stemming from allegations that she had sex with three students ages 16 and 17 in 2013.Recently Altice has defended her relationship with one of the students by saying that his grades improved with a little help from her. "

Her ID pic is killing me - "*pretty brunette*
*ID pic in black hijab*"

How to Create a Guest Account in Windows 10 - "Windows used to have a dedicated Guest account you could enable that would allow someone to temporarily use your computer, while ensuring they wouldn’t see your private data. Guest accounts also had limited access, so anyone logged in as a guest couldn’t install software or change system settings.This option is no longer easily accessible in Windows 10—but you can still create a guest account using the Command Prompt."
Why do I need to use the command prompt to add a Guest account in the current build of Windows 10? Updates should improve things, not regress them. And with the frequent changes most of the information online about "Windows 10" and guest accounts is outdated

Where your tax dollar goes - "How much money does Ottawa spend and what are its biggest expenses?Most people think it's health care or provincial transfers. Most people are wrong.The federal government spent $311 billion in the fiscal year 2016-17. The biggest single expense was elderly benefits. This includes Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement... Budgets have evolved from economic planning to political documents. They are printed into tidy books and given titles like an "Economic Action Plan" and "Building a Stronger Middle Class." It's hard to blame politicians who try to spin whatever spending measures they're introducing. The brutal truth of public finances is, governments don't really have much wiggle room. Much of the spending is baked into the plan long before any politicians even get elected. In general terms, about a quarter of any budget goes to transfers to individuals (those elderly benefits we started with, but also Employment Insurance and Children's Benefits). Another quarter of the pie goes to the provinces (including the Canada Social Transfer and the Canada Health Transfer). Crown corporations, public debt charges and national defence combine for another 18 per cent. That's nearly 70 per cent of a budget all but spent before you even get to your ideas around jobs, innovation, tax cuts or whatever buzzwords dominate that year's leadup to the budget. Governments inevitably focus the budget on that discretionary chunk of spending. But can we have a proper, informed debate on public spending when all those sunk costs are buried in the back of the book and left out of most conversations?Yalnizyan says the conversation is too often focused on how much we're paying in taxes and not enough on what we're buying with those tax dollars."

'Child marriage a necessity in Kelantan’ – roundtable by PAS gov’t concludes - "A roundtable organised by the PAS-led Kelantan government has concluded that underage marriage is consistent with the syariah law and even a “necessity” in the state."

The Best Way to Handle Winter Weather - "Research suggests that there are two kinds of people who tolerate the cold very well: indigenous Arctic groups, and men. And the more people are exposed to cold temperatures, the better they acclimate... people can psychologically adapt to the temperature outside if they are exposed to it for about 10 days or more"

DNA Tests Can Have a Placebo Effect - "people who were told they had the high-risk version of CREB1 ran for less time than before, and people who were told they had the protective version of FTO reported being less hungry than before. The team didn’t rely just on these self-reported measures. The people who ran on treadmills wore masks measuring the oxygen and carbon dioxide in their breaths. The people who drank smoothies had their blood drawn to test for hunger-hormone levels. The participants’ bodies agreed with their perceptions of fatigue and hunger.If these effects persist over time, the genetic information could end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy"

How the Weighted Blanket Became a Must-Have Holiday Gift - "Weighted blankets have been used as sleep aids and calming aids in special-needs communities for years... the triumphant story of the Gravity Blanket and many of its new contemporaries sounds more like a story of appropriation—a story about the sale of the special-needs community’s promise of life-changing comfort to the meditation-app-using, Instagram-shopping masses... the mainstreaming of the weighted blanket seems to imply a conflating of chronic anxiety or sensory issues with feelings of stress—or, perhaps more ominously, the repackaging of a coping strategy that originated in a marginalized community as a profitable relaxation fad at a moment when people feel particularly stressed."
Social Justice ruins everything"
This puts paid to the claim that more rights for someone else doesn't mean fewer rights for you - and it's not just where gay/transgender cake is concerned

Head of ITV comedy drops all-male writing teams | ITV | The Guardian - "ITV’s head of comedy has said she will no longer commission any show with an all-male writing team, or one that has just a “token woman”.Saskia Schuster took action after an audit of her shows revealed “an awful lot” of all-male teams and a “significant lack” of women in scripted commissions. She said for every five scripts sent to her by a man, she would receive just one by a woman.
So much for "more rights for some people doesn't mean fewer for others"

John Cusack deletes tweet after being accused of anti-Semitism - "Actor John Cusack deleted a tweet containing an anti-Semitic image Monday, blaming the initial post on a “bot.”The image Cusack posted depicted a giant hand bearing a Star of David enveloping a group of people, accompanied by the words "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize," which it attributed to Voltaire, with Cusack adding, "Follow the money."The quote, frequently misattributed to the French satirist, was in fact said by American white nationalist Kevin Alfred Strom."A bot got me," Cusack tweeted after deleting the initial tweet. "I thought I was endorsing a pro Palestinian justice retweet - of an earlier post - it came I think from a different source - Shouldn’t Have retweeted."
What does this say about the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism?

Political Moderates Are Lying - "there is a tipping point for when opinions held by a committed minority spread to the rest of the population. The tipping point is 10%... group preferences can change at the drop of hat. When Barack Obama openly supported gay marriage in 2012, his view not only became the de facto position of the Democratic Party but also produced preference changes across the US. Group preferences can also change radically over time. The Obama presidency significantly changed the political alignment of the Democratic voter base. According to Pew Research, between 2008 and 2016, Democrats have moved significantly leftward on a number of issues including racial discrimination, immigration, and the role of government. This is not unique to Democrats, however, as Republicans’ political preferences have been “Trumpified.”... Today, polarization among Republicans and Democrats is staggering. Tracking 10 political values since 1994, the Pew Research Center discovered a 36-percentage-point gap between Republicans and Democrats. The gap was only 15 points in 1994... how do moderates navigate this complex web of political tribes and echo chambers?Simply put, they falsify their preferences. Most moderates conform to group preferences that have been established by committed ideologues... Campus ideologues have created an “ethical” code of conduct for which the rest of the student body must follow. Aware of the reputational costs of defiance, the moderate majority conceal their true feelings, quietly nodding along to campus diktats. According to Gallup, 88% of students at Pomona College agreed that campus climate prevented them from speaking openly. In fact, one Pomona sophomore noted that defying campus dogma could result in being “socially shunned.” Surveys from the Foundation for Rights in Education and The Harvard Crimson also confirm this reality... fewer Americans (32%) occupy the political center in 2018 compared to 1994 (49%) and 2004 (49%). Preference falsification artificially inflates political polarization. If our political preferences have been falsified then our differences might not be as pronounced or as authentic as we think them to be.Nevertheless, group-based conformity is dangerous. Especially when most of us don’t actually agree with the directives of our intransigent overlords. Conformity can lead us down a path that most of us did not want to travel... Political tribalism has even distorted our view of who our real enemies are. A poll conducted by The Daily Beast revealed that Republicans were more favorable to Kim Jong Un (19%) compared to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (17%). Similarly, Democrats viewed Kim Jong Un (82%) less unfavorably than President Trump (88%)."