Links - 23rd August 2019 (1)

Cloyd Rivers on Twitter - "I am 25yrs. with a fine arts degree. No job, no insurance, on foodstamps and $20,000 in college debt. I am the 99%"
"1 - Go to college
2 - Accumulate debt
3 - Pick stupid major
4 - Graduate with useless degree and no useful skills
5 - Pretend you're a victim
6 - Blame society
7 - Vote Democrat
Merica"

Equally Wed - Posts - "Equal rights for others does not mean less rights for you. It's not pie"
It's not pie, it's cake. Gay/transgender cake

Malaysian switched at birth wants to switch religion - "Sales executive Zulhaidi Omar, 29, was raised in an ethnic Malay family, and discovered his true origins only after a Chinese woman at a supermarket where he worked noticed his features were similar to those of her father... His natural father, Teo Ma Leong, 66, said he had always suspected the fifth of his six children was switched at birth, because the boy had a dark complexion, the Star said.“A check with the hospital gave us no clues, so we brought him up as one of our own, although we knew our actual son was out there somewhere,” Teo added.As a child, Zulhaidi said, he was teased about his Chinese-like features and never felt accepted by the family in which he was brought up, so he left them when he was 13.“My Malay father had left us when I was three,” he said. “My mother remarried, but I could not get along with my stepfather, so I left.”He waited on tables and worked at a car wash to put himself through school, eventually ending up with a diploma in business administration.The other changeling, Tian Fa, 29, was brought up by the Teos, married a Chinese woman, and has no intention of seeking out his biological parents, the Star said.Now Zulhaidi wants to renounce Islam and take a Chinese name.Whether Muslims can convert to another faith is a tricky legal question in Malaysia"

Teen Vogue on Twitter - "Yes, sex work is real work!
Comments: "Why is a teen magazine promoting prostitution to their 13-year-old readers?"
"Teen Vogue. Teen. Vogue. Teenager. Teen. Promoting sex work? Are you grooming young kids now? Don’t you think you could have maybe published this in adult Vogue since your demographic is probably 15 year olds or is that too much to ask from you psychos?"
"Several years ago, when I was a middle school librarian, I stopped subscribing to Teen Vogue...because of articles very much like that. A couple of girls told me that was the right decision."

Bring back the brothel, says female French MP - "France must bring back the brothel to protect its prostitutes from exploitation, trafficking and aggression in the street, an MP from Nicolas Sarkozy's rightwing party has said... Brunel's stance is supported by a majority of French people: 59% of respondents supported the reopening of so-called maisons closes (literally, closed houses)... the number opposed to the reintroduction of brothels has dropped from 26% seven years ago to just 10% now. Women remain markedly more against the idea than men."
Too bad they adopted the Nordic model instead

Sex – Not A Commodity In France Anymore - "One may remember that demonstration of prostitutes who chanted the slogan “Less whores than good wives”, implying that conjugality is the place where lovemaking can be repeated monotonously without feeling, where women are merely subservient objects to men. There was also a romanticism attached to prostitution, among writers, in the world of bad boys, a world untouched by the law, in which a number of cinematic masterpieces have been made. Paintings and drawings of “Maisons closes” (brothels), and prostitution appear frequently in art over the centuries."

The impact of the 'Swedish model' in France: chronicle of a disaster foretold - "the concept of sexual humanitarianism refers to the global hegemony of a neo-abolitionist discourse, which systematically conflates prostitution with trafficking, framing prostitution as “paradigmatic of a system of male power” and seeking its abolition by removing the demand for sexual services. This trend is best exemplified by the global resonance of the “Swedish model” – a policymaking framework aiming to reduce the demand for prostitution by decriminalising sex work and criminalising the purchase of sex – as an ideal instrument to fight trafficking... ninety-eight per cent of the surveyed sex workers, both migrants and non-migrants, were against it... As early as 2014, rates for sex work had already begun to decrease and many clients stopped calling for fear of being fined. The words of a 27-year-old French woman working as an escort in Paris further illustrate this:
“The threat of criminalisation in the near future has already scared away some of my clients: the most respectful ones”. (Paris, 2014)...
The anticipated negative effects of this law have been confirmed by new research... The main aims of the law were to decrease the number of sex workers and to protect them by abolishing the previous criminalisation of public soliciting, and shifting criminality to the clients instead. However, the law ended up achieving the opposite of its intended aims... cases of violence, of all kinds, have increased and that impoverishment, increased health risks and increased exposure to violence form a vicious circle. All of these negative dynamics could have been avoided if politicians had listened to sex workers, trusted the results of the 2014-15 survey and relied on the existing scholarly literature on the impact of the ‘Swedish Model’. They prioritized their sexual humanitarian, neo-abolitionist agenda instead of taking seriously the concerns of the people they purported to help."

Nordic Model: The Ongoing Criminalization of Sex Workers in Northern Europe - "Operation Homeless rested on “promotion” law’s indirect criminalization of sex-worker’s renting a flat. Upon discovering the address of a worker (through surveillance or when a worker reports a violent crime) the police will contact the landlord and threaten prosecution unless the worker is evicted. The Oslo police refused to provide Amnesty International with the number of landlords prosecuted in this campaign, which doesn’t seem to have even been a consideration. The evicted workers not only lose their housing but also often lose the month’s rent and their security deposit (AI, 36, 41, 43; and Bjørndahl, 33). These workers then face future housing discrimination from landlords who are reasonably afraid to rent to a known sex worker. The evicted themselves undoubtedly become more vulnerable to extortion by landlords and other third parties, and to exploitation and abuse in the streets. Criminalization regimes generally exclude sex sector workers from the protection of law and provision of justice. Under the Swedish Model this is more grotesque, as ostensibly legal workers find themselves excluded from labor protections and basic rights. According to the Norwegian state itself, “the threshold for reporting a violent customer to the police ..seems to be higher after the law” (New Republic). As mentioned above, reporting a crime can lead to eviction or, for migrant sex workers, deportation...
“There is very little evidence to suggest that any criminal laws related to SW stop demand for sex or reduce the number of sex workers. Rather, all of them create an environment of fear and marginalisation for sex workers …These laws can undermine sex workers’ ability to work together to identify potentially violent clients …The approach of criminalising the client has been shown to backfire on sex workers. ” — UNAIDS Guidance Note on HIV and SW; p.31... Ann Jordan, an expert in international law and the director of American University’s Program on Human Trafficking and Forced Labor, describes the Swedish Model as “a failed experiment.”"

In China, they’re closing churches, jailing pastors – and even rewriting scripture - "Early Rain is the latest victim of what Chinese Christians and rights activists say is the worst crackdown on religion since the country’s Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong’s government vowed to eradicate religion... “The goal of the crackdown is not to eradicate religions,” said Ying Fuk Tsang, director of the Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “President Xi Jinping is trying to establish a new order on religion, suppressing its blistering development. [The government] aims to regulate the ‘religious market’ as a whole.”While the CCP is officially atheist, Protestantism and Catholicism are two of five faiths sanctioned by the government and religious freedom has been enshrined in the constitution since the 1980s. For decades, authorities tolerated the house churches, which refused to register with government bodies that required church leaders to adapt teachings to follow party doctrine... “What really makes the government nervous is Christianity’s claim to universal rights and values.”... “Ten years ago, we used to be able to say the party was not really interested in what people believed internally,” said Pils. “Xi Jinping’s response is much more invasive and it is in some ways returning to Mao-era attempts to control hearts and minds.”Bibles, sales of which have always been controlled in China, are no longer available for purchase online, a loophole that had existed for years. In December, Christmas celebrations were banned in several schools and cities across China."
And some people thought it would stop at Uighers, or even Muslims
Of course China shills claim Uighers who are persecuted are all terrorists, and Christians who are persecuted are all foreign agents

Dressing Up the Brain: Wearing a Suit Makes You Think Differently - "wearing clothing that’s more formal than usual makes people think more broadly and holistically, rather than narrowly and about fine-grained details. In psychological parlance, wearing a suit encourages people to use abstract processing more readily than concrete processing. Research on the effects of clothing on cognition remains in its early stages. Another similar study showed that when subjects wore a white coat that they believed belonged to a doctor, they became more attentive"

Ancient Chinese Buildings Are Held Together With Rice, Sugar, and Blood - "Sticky rice is sweet, and augments savory dishes such as zongzi, pyramids of rice and fillings neatly wrapped in leaves, or tang yuan, a sweet soup with rice dumplings. It is also waxy—a texture that comes from the polysaccharide amylopectin, which gives the rice a denser microstructure. Mixed with lime mortar, the grains boost compressive strength, helping walls bear loads without fracturing. They are also highly water resistant, which protects buildings against erosion... Animal blood might sound like a grisly substance for building walls, but it was a perfectly normal additive used by several cultures. Historical recipes written in French, Italian, and English have detailed ways to mix oxblood and lime mortars. In China, builders used pig blood to improve the consistency of their mortar, according to a 2014 study. It is also easily available, resulting in diverse regional dishes such as pork blood soup and pig blood curd... Incredibly, structures built with sticky rice mortar have survived more than natural erosion. A Ming tomb, of the minister Xu Pu and his wife, was nearly damaged by a bulldozer when found in 1978, but it was “so firm [the vehicle] could do nothing about it,” according to a 2009 paper. Its three authors describe another near-miracle: in 1604, when a 7.5-magnitude earthquake shook the port city of Quanzhou, many temples, stupas, and bridges were not destroyed. Instead, sticky rice mortar kept their foundations firmly secured."

Parliament tightens its abortion law - "Under the new abortion law approved after hours of more late-night debate in Parliament, women pregnant with twins, triplets or more must now obtain permission from a medical board if they want to abort one fetus or more"
From Norway

Muslim rights group says ‘Aladdin’ is racist and Islamophobic, slams Disney for releasing the film during the ‘Trump era’ - "A Muslim civil rights group has blasted Disney for releasing Aladdin during the “Trump era”, saying the story is rooted in racism, Orientalism, and Islamophobia.The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim rights group in the United States, has urged movie reviewers to address the racial and Islamophobic stereotypes perpetuated in the live-action remake of Disney’s Aladdin."
They should just have whitewashed it - then no one could complain it was Islamophobic or racist
More proof that you can never win against grievance mongers