Links - 29th October 2019 (1)

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "A staffer, submitting a question anonymously, suggested that the headline that had caused all the trouble—“TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM”—“amplifies without critique the desired narrative of the most powerful figure in the country.”"
"The New York Times is struggling to move from the collusion narrative of Trump to a race-based narrative of trump (found in the transcript of the meeting). The paper received strong pushback for a friendly Trump headline that they ultimately changed. That controversy led to this staff meeting on Trump coverage."

Tim Pool on Twitter - ".@dcexaminer reporter @Julio_Rosas11 is confronted for wearing a shirt with an American flag on the sleeve. A protester is extremely offended."
"On the right wing side you'll be safe and have a conversation
On the left wing side you will be harassed and possibly attacked
Journalists have always known this, at NoNATO 2012 black block leftists yelled "charge the press" and attacked journalists"

A post by Orwell & Goode on August 13 - "The journey of @teenvogue going from a bit useless to woke AF crusaders!"
"In 2006
Teen Vogue: Beauty lesson. 5-minute makeup tricks from a pro
mean girls. how to deal with them
back to school cool
135 fall shopping ideas. leggings, book bags, jeans, minis, the best new shoes & why we're mad for plaid
kate bosworth
The Sugar Hash. Why you needles [sp?] kick it now"
"In 2019
Teen Vogue: The legacy of Karl Marx’s ideas and how they’re relevant to the current political climate"

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Is Trump a White Supremacist?No less than seven Democrat Presidential candidates have declared the President to be a white supremacist — Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Tom Steyer. So what is a white supremacist? The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent article on the subject
“white nationalist is defined as ‘one of a group of militant whites who espouse white supremacy and advocate enforced racial segregation,’ while white supremacist is ‘a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races.’"...
Outside of anti-terrorism efforts, the administration hasn’t been targeting the Muslim community... is there evidence that Trump feels whites are superior to Hispanics/Latinx? Not really. In fact, support for Trump has risen in Hispanic communities and is comparable to Hispanic support for Mitt Romney. So what about Trump feeling superior to blacks? He dated a black model, Kara Young, for two years in the nineties. She’s been quoted as saying she never heard him say anything negative about any race. Trump was friendly with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. He even got a civil rights award. In office he has been meeting regularly with various black groups and has supported increasing funds for historically black colleges. Support from blacks has been rising, especially from males.
So how about Trump and Jews? White supremacists have a universal hate for Jews. He has a Jewish daughter and son-in-law who are key members of his administration. Trump’s been strongly supportive of Israel. The national socialists have criticized Trump for cozying up to Jews and Richard Spenser prefers Ilhan Omar over Trump due to her anti-Israel stances...
 The last big criticism claiming that Trump is a white supremacist is his supposedly saying there were many fine people among the white nationalists and supremacists marching in Charlottesville. This oft-repeated claim has been thoroughly debunked. He clearly stated at the time that he was not referring to neo-Nazis or white supremacists. This was confirmed by his press office and in a personal statement two days after the rally. Trump has condemned the KKK and white supremacists at least six times. This includes a 9/17 resolution and in a State of the Union Speech... if he really were a white supremacist then he’s been doing an extraordinarily bad job at it."

Ezra Levant on Twitter - "Donald Trump seems to be saying China has to get its human rights house in order before it can expect an end to American tariffs. Amazing. All the woke leaders in the world, from Merkel to Trudeau to Ardern bend the knee to China on human rights AND trade."

Thread by @opheliajcbrown - "Buying plus sized clothing from thrift stores so you can tailor the items down to fit your size 0 body ISN'T A CUTE YOUTUBE VIDEO IDEA. It's fatphobic and classist and taking resources away from poor and fat people who have an infinitely harder time finding clothes than you do...
I've kept quiet about this for literally YEARS because I was terrified straight size people would come after me, but I don't care anymore. As a fat person who can't afford clothes unless they're from a thrift store - y'ALL NEED TO STOP ASAP.
The next time I see a skinny girl buying a size 3X sweater because it "looks comfy and cute" I'm going to grab it from her and wheel away with it faster than she can blink. SOMETIMES YOU DON'T DESERVE CUTE THINGS IF IT MEANS FAT PEOPLE GET CLOTHING.
Like OKAY if it's in a store and there are dozens of that item, WHATEVER. But in a THRIFT STORE? REALLY? Stay in your freakin' aisle. Stay out of the plus sized section. STAY OUT OF OUR WAY. We deal with enough crap let alone not having clothes that fit us bc y'all stole it all...
this applies to ANY marginalized person/group of people. Stop talking over us. LISTEN WHEN WE TELL YOU YOU'RE IN THE WRONG. Being privileged isn't bad until you ignore your privilege! USE YOUR PRIVILEGE TO BOOST MARGINALIZED VOICES! NOT TO STEAL OUR CLOTHES!"
Ahh entitlement

Satiria - Posts - "White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests — but many don't like their results"
"I'm Transgender. Will This Impact My Experience?"

Lucas Lynch - ""It's racist to tell non-white Americans to 'go home'" says everyone telling Israelis to 'go home' back to Europe."

Bill Mitchell on Twitter - "CNN is wondering, "If Trump's comments weren't racist, why did he randomly pick 4 people of color?"
Seriously?
He picked #TheSquad, not randomly 4 people of color. They cannot be THIS stupid or believe we are."

Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "The Left makes it about race when it's really about #TheSquad's hatred for the USA. There's a 4th of July video of a crowd of MAGA hat-wearing Vietnamese-Americans shouting how much they love America. Trump would never tell them to leave."

The Dangers of Defining Deviancy Up - "changes in social norms are not unidirectional—they can swing in the opposite direction and, instead of increasing permissiveness, norms can become more restrictive. This is what happens when we define deviancy up. Instead of treating atrocities as banal or becoming desensitized to wrongdoing, the most minor infractions are treated as if they are serious offenses. As the hasty condemnation of the behavior of a boisterous group of teenagers at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18 has reminded us, this trend is best illustrated by what we understand to be instances of prejudice, and how we respond...  the newly capacious definitions of racism and sexism have increased the number of situations and infractions that can fall under the rubric of these labels, and this has narrowed the spectrum of permissible views on a number of already sensitive topics, such as affirmative action, social mobility, immigration, gender imbalances in STEM fields, and so on. Matt Grossman, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center has explained how this is disproportionately stigmatizing the political opinions of political centrists and conservatives. To illustrate this point, he turned to common social science survey questions:
    “Racial resentment,” an aspect of “symbolic racism,” is measured by asking for agreement or disagreement with statements like “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class” or “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”
    “Hostile sexism” is measured with agreement or disagreement with statements like “when women lose to men in a fair competition, they typically complain about being discriminated against” or “women are too easily offended.” The related “modern sexism” scale taps similar attitudes.
    “Authoritarianism” is measured with questions asking respondents to choose between pairs of parenting values such as “independence” vs. “respect for elders” or “self-reliance” vs. “obedience.”
    Thus, in a crude popularization, respondents [to such surveys] who favor obedient children and individual-level explanations for economic disadvantage could easily be labeled racist, sexist authoritarians...
So alarming has this political polarization become that nearly three in four foreign policy analysts and commentators surveyed in September of last year described it as a critical threat to the national security of the United States. The expanded definitions of racism and sexism are rooted in an understandable desire to protect members of marginalized groups, but they do not bring us any closer to that goal. In addition to the price we pay in social divisions, the new definitions have done little to actually address racial or other forms of inequality in a meaningful way. Recent data suggest that little has changed in the last 40 years in income inequality between whites and blacks and that reductions in the gender wage gap have stalled. Furthermore, it’s likely that this new focus has distracted those who adhere to it from the hard work of practical, tangible political change.This was the prescient argument made by the philosopher Richard Rorty more than 20 years ago"

Which professions are paid too much given their value to society? - "Most valuable to society after correcting for current salary: Research, Teaching, Engineering & Programming
Most deleterious to society: Law, Management, Finance (in descending order of damage)
The main point that strikes me is that, with the exception of research, all the estimates are fairly small relative to salary. And, that’s even if we ignore the points in the section right above.This suggests that at least for “normal jobs”, your donations to charity are a more significant component of your social impact... if someone earning $100,000 per year donates 10% of their income to [the Against Malaria Foundation], they create $0.8m of social value per year, which is about as large as the largest externality estimates in the table."

More Women Are Pumping, but Research Is Lacking - "The number seems small, but gets larger and larger as you contemplate it: 6 percent. That is the estimated share of breastfeeding mothers who exclusively pump and bottle their milk for their infants, never directly nursing. It is a number that was functionally zero less than a generation ago. And it is a subset of a much larger figure, the 85 percent of breastfeeding mothers who use a pump at least some of the time. This is no less than a “quiet revolution” in human nutrition, as researchers put it. Women have become, in Jill Lepore’s evocative phrasing, their own wet nurses. When pumping, their breast milk becomes a commodity... This “quiet revolution” is built on a foundation of surprisingly scant research and social support... while pumping might support direct nursing, it is not equivalent to direct nursing, researchers have found. The microbiome of expressed breast milk is different, for one. “Indirect breastfeeding” is associated with a greater prevalence of pathogens, which “could pose a risk of respiratory infection in the infant, potentially explaining why infants fed pumped milk are at increased risk for pediatric asthma,” according to Shirin Moossavi of the University of Manitoba. Plus, breast milk degrades when it is cooled, as it often is when stored for bottle-feeding. There is also the risk of contamination, given that dangerous bacteria flourish on pump parts. Researchers also sense that the experience of breastfeeding—the eye-gazing, the cuddling—is a big part of the benefit of breastfeeding for the baby, and a big part of the joy of breastfeeding for the mother. How does bottle-feeding change the equation? How does the experience of needing to pump as often as 10 times a day change things? It is unclear... time with the baby gets supplanted by time with the pump, leaving many women stressed out and exhausted—something that may have an effect on the quantity of milk produced, as well as the mother’s health and the overall stress level of the family."

Breastfeeding pressure is intense. So why are breast pumps so terrible? - " In total, I spent about 90 minutes a day pumping, and though I could type on my laptop during some of that time thanks to the hands-free bra I purchased, I was still losing hours every week assembling, disassembling, and cleaning tiny parts — hours I could have spent working, playing with my baby, talking to my husband, or catching up on much-needed sleep.Given the loss of work time, it’s no surprise that pumping may harm women’s earning power — a 2012 study found that mothers who breastfed their babies for at least six months suffered a greater drop in earnings after having children than moms who didn’t breastfeed... breastfeeding is often touted as an inexpensive way to feed your baby, “but that’s only true if you assume your time has no value.”... Human milk is an “absolutely terrific growth medium for bacteria,” Rasmussen explained — and if pump parts aren’t cleaned properly, they can introduce bacteria into the milk. But it’s not really clear how dangerous that is. “Women are not reporting sick children from the use of their pumps in great numbers, so how big this effect is, we really do not know”"

Human breast milk may help babies tell time via circadian signals from mom - "The composition of breast milk changes across the day, giving energizing morning milk a different cocktail of ingredients than soothing evening milk. Researchers believe this “chrononutrition” may help program infants’ emerging circadian biology, the internal timekeeper that allows babies to distinguish day from night... Breast milk changes dramatically over the course of the day. For example, levels of cortisol – a hormone that promotes alertness – are three times higher in morning milk than in evening milk. Melatonin, which promotes sleep and digestion, can barely be detected in daytime milk, but rises in the evening and peaks around midnight.Night milk also contains higher levels of certain DNA building blocks which help promote healthy sleep. Day milk, by contrast, has more activity-promoting amino acids than night milk. Iron in milk peaks at around noon; vitamin E peaks in the evening. Minerals like magnesium, zinc, potassium and sodium are all highest in the morning.Daytime milk may pack a special immune punch. Among mothers who provided researchers with milk samples across the first month postpartum, immune components – including key antibodies and white blood cells – looked higher in day milk compared to night milk. Another study found higher levels of a component important for immune system communication in day milk compared to night milk.While it’s clear that milk changes over the course of the day, scientists know little about what this means for infant health... According to a 2005-2007 survey, over 85% of breastfeeding mothers in the U.S. have pumped their milk."