Links - 8th October 2019 (1)

Jose Antonio Vargas: ‘I’m an Undocumented Citizen’ - "“I'm here as an undocumented immigrant with no papers, no green card, no passport, and no legal documents, but I am still a citizen of this country,” says Jose Antonio Vargas in a new video filmed at the 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival."
Of course liberals keep accusing others of gaslighting

The New York Times and the problem with ‘radicalisation’ | Coffee House - "at some point in the present decade the word became used, not just as a term of faux-science, but as a way to dismiss almost any position against which a certain individual or group of individuals were opposed. Voters were said to have been ‘radicalised’ before putting a mark in the box beside the name of Donald Trump in 2016. Likewise every ‘wrong’ vote in Europe has become an example of further ‘radicalisation’ of the general public.Sometimes these claims are so ridiculous that it is hard to work out whether they are truth or satire. Three years ago the Guardian ran a piece by an anonymous author claiming to have been ‘radicalised’ by watching various YouTube videos. So radicalised did he become that, as the headline put it,  ‘“Alt-right” online poison nearly turned me into a racist.’That piece – which I wrote about at the time – in fact turned out to be a spoof. So keen was the Guardian to claim that a range of liberal and conservative voices online were in fact causing a problem at least equal to that of Isis and al-Qaeda, that the paper didn’t just not bother to find out if their contributor was for real or not. It didn’t bother to find out whether he was actually real or not.Now the New York Times has gone one better. Yesterday, they ran a prominent piece in the print and online editions headlined ‘The Making of a YouTube Radical’. The piece is about a single unheard of young man in America who claims that because he watched ‘radical’ videos on YouTube he became ‘radicalised’... The montage of scary YouTube personalities which the NYT illustrates the piece with, and likes to blame for such a horrific story of absorption of wrong opinions is – conveniently enough – a number of the paper’s hate figures. Jordan Peterson, of course. Then some people from ‘InfoWars’. And Milton Friedman. That’s right. The late Nobel Prize winning economist is now – posthumously – a ‘radicalising’ figure. In trying to elide all such boundaries the NYT itself provides a very good demonstration of why people might be turning away from the mainstream media. The paper doesn’t even attempt to give a fair summary of the problems it claims to be identifying. So it would be interesting to try this exercise back on the NYT. In recent times there have been a number of shootings and other attacks on synagogues in the US... only two months ago the paper published a cartoon which was widely recognised as being violently anti-Semitic. It showed a dog with the Star of David around its neck leading a blind US President. Purest Der Sturmer in its way, and so blatant in its racism that the NYT condemned itself for anti-Semitism. But who knows which brains that NYT cartoon fed into? Who knows who it radicalised? Who knows the future radicals to whom it gave a nod and a wink, saying ‘If this is acceptable to the NYT, why shouldn’t you go to the illogical next stage?’ Of course this is the sort of speculation the NYT does not wish to engage in. Because the paper – rather obviously – doesn’t want to take itself down. But they clearly do want to take down a range of popular online competitors, including popular internet talk-show hosts like Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. It seems to have a problem with those platforms on which people are willing to have open and difficult conversations about issues which are far from fixed but which the boundary-beaters at the NYT and other journals are trying to ensure are closed. Which is why they devote a lengthy article and create bar-charts and content-charts to analyse the precise YouTube watching habits of one young and unknown man who has never actually done anything... the subject’s ‘transformation was complete’ but this ‘transformation’ resulted in nothing, other than watching YouTube videos.This isn’t news. It isn’t even fully informed or nuanced analysis. It is simply another demonstration of the double-standard, drive-by shootings that parts of the media are willing to perform in this inglorious stage of its history. A habit which, funnily enough, demonstrates why people might be becoming sceptical – and moving online – in the first place."

Addendum:
Have you been radicalized by the New York Times? | Spectator USA - "One of the words that has become increasingly useless over recent years is ‘radicalization’. As more and more terrorist attacks took place across the West in recent years the word got trotted out with some utility... at some point in the present decade the word became used, not just as a term of faux-science, but as a way to dismiss almost any position against which a certain individual or group of individuals were opposed. Voters were said to have been ‘radicalized’ before putting a mark in the box beside the name of Donald Trump in 2016. Likewise every ‘wrong’ vote in Europe has become an example of further ‘radicalization’ of the general public. Sometimes these claims are so ridiculous that it is hard to work out whether they are truth or satire. Three years ago the Guardian ran a piece by an anonymous author claiming to have been ‘radicalized’ by watching various YouTube videos. So radicalized did he become that, as the headline put it, ‘“Alt-right” online poison nearly turned me into a racist.’That piece – which I wrote about at the time – in fact turned out to be a spoof. So eager was the Guardian to claim that a range of liberal and conservative voices online were in fact causing a problem at least equal to that of Isis and al-Qaeda, that the paper didn’t just not bother to find out if their contributor was for real or not. It didn’t bother to find out whether he was actually real or not. Now the New York Times has gone one better. Yesterday, they ran a prominent piece in the print and online editions headlined ‘The Making of a YouTube Radical’. The piece is about a single unheard of young man in America who claims that because he watched ‘radical’ videos on YouTube he became ‘radicalized’... The montage of scary YouTube personalities which the NYT illustrates the piece with, and likes to blame for such a horrific story of absorption of wrong opinions is – conveniently enough – a number of the paper’s hate figures. Jordan Peterson, of course. Then some people from Infowars. And Milton Friedman. That’s right. The late Nobel Prize winning economist is now – posthumously – a ‘radicalizing’ figure. In trying to elide all such boundaries the NYT itself provides a very good demonstration of why people might be turning away from the mainstream media... So it would be interesting to try this exercise back on the NYT. In recent times there have been a number of shootings and other attacks on synagogues in the US... only two months ago the paper published a cartoon which was widely recognized as being violently anti-Semitic. It showed a dog with the Star of David around its neck leading a blind US president. Purest Der Stürmer in its way, and so blatant in its racism that the NYT condemned itself for anti-Semitism. But who knows which brains that NYT cartoon fed into? Who knows who it radicalized? Who knows the future radicals to whom it gave a nod and a wink, saying ‘If this is acceptable to the NYT, why shouldn’t you go to the illogical next stage?’"

Thread by @EricRWeinstein - "There were two very REAL problems that the @nytimes addressed:
A) The on-line radicalization of young people.
B) The rise of competitors to legacy corporate media serving political interests and a complete exhaustion with the @nytimes narratives.
Here they used A to solve B"

Eric Weinstein on Twitter - "Does traditional media want to stop on-line radicalization? Here’s a simple question to test:
Q: Can you openly and forever admit that it is, and always has been, absolutely impossible to logically infer Xenophobia from someone wanting immigration restricted?
I bet MSM can’t.
Here’s a second one:
Q: Can we once and for all admit that there is some link between an eagerness to kill civilians in suicide attacks & ideology which is not uniformly distributed?
Again, MSM can do this simply from data without editorializing. This would slow radicalization.
A third question:
Q: Can we admit that it is at least formally possible that males could be better suited to at least a few high prestige and high paying cognitive activities than females without charging bigotry, bias, and misogyny?
Media saying this would stop radicalization.
A fourth way for MSM to stop radicalization:
Q: Can we stop reporting on one skin color being on watch for evilness?
Publishing racist arguments radicalizes majority groups. Super easy to stop. But not cheap. “I can’t be friends with X people.” articles get clicks. We get it.
In summary: the denial of basic reality enforced by threatening to make anyone unemployable if they use their eyes and their brains is making the loony right attractive. And for what??? These lies don’t bear a minute’s scrutiny. They just make our institutional Left look insane.
“It’s not the YouTube, stupid. It’s the New York Times.”
When the mainstream media acknowledges that it has been taken over by activism making mere acknowledgment of reality equivalent to unemployability & being a pariah, we will end this radicalization epidemic.
And not until."

22 countries signed an 'unprecedented' letter condemning China's oppression of Muslims. But none of them come from the Islamic world. - "Those 22 signatories are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK."
Strange how it's the "Islamophobic" countries that speak out for Muslims

Syria, Saudi, and NK support China's Uighur prison camps in Xinjiang - " 37 countries have signed a letter backing China's treatment of Uighurs in the Xinjiang region, days after 22 UN nations demanded China stop detaining the Muslim minority.Signatories of the letter include Saudi Arabia, Syria, North Korea, and Russia. The letter said China has made "remarkable achievements in the field of human rights""
Far better to just bash Israel while pretending there's Muslim solidarity

The case against Mars colonisation - "If humans do eventually land on Mars, they would not arrive alone. They would carry with them their earthly microbes. Trillions of them. There is a real risk that some of these microbes could find their way onto the surface of Mars and, in doing so, confuse – perhaps irreversibly so – the search for Martian life. This is because we wouldn't be able to distinguish indigenous life from the microbes we'd brought with us. Our presence on Mars could jeopardise one of our main reasons for being there – the search for life. Furthermore, there is no one way of knowing how our microbes may react with the vulnerable Martian ecosystem...
Robots have several inherent advantages. They are much cheaper than humans because they don't require a vast support infrastructure to provide things like water, food and breathable air. They are immune to the risks of cosmic radiation and other dangers inherent to space travel. And they won't get bored...
a majority of US adults believed that Nasa’s number one priority should be fixing problems on Earth. The billions – if not trillions – of dollars needed to colonise Mars could, for example, be better spent investing in renewable forms of energy to address climate change or strengthening our planetary defences against asteroid collisions.And of course, if we have not figured out how to deal with problems of our own making here on Earth, there is no guarantee that the same fate would not befall Mars colonists.Furthermore, if something truly horrible were to happen on Earth, it’s not clear Mars would actually be an effective salvation. Giant underground bunkers on Earth, for example, could protect more people, more easily than a colony on Mars."

Millennial Writer Cries at Work, Puts Mother on Speakerphone after Editor Corrects Her Spelling - "Hamster... The young woman, according to Blymire, "insists she doesn’t need to look it up because it’s FINE to spell it with a P because that’s HOW SHE WANTED TO SPELL IT."... Feelings trump reality. Misspelling words is "creative." The call ended, Blymire wrote, with the writer asked her mom if she should take the matter over her boss's head: "I mean, I always spell hamster with a P, she has no right to criticize me." Blymire added that "her boss seemed as dumbfounded through the conversation as I was in overhearing it." But being dumbfounded was limited to the person who overheard the whole silly scene... One can only hope this sort of muddle-headed nonsense is limited to the liberal arts vocations. Nobody wants to drive across a bridge built to some Millennial engineer's feelings about what won't collapse"
When you hire snowflakes...

A third of employers are unhappy with graduates' attitude to work - "“He was not willing to make the sacrifice of learning through the ranks. I can only attribute this to the stress of having 50k debt [from university loans] hanging over his head, and of finding out that the real world of work is different to how it’s painted in the lecture rooms. “Had we not had to waste around 12-14 months on unnecessary graduate ego-massaging time, I am sure that this employee would have tasted his success sooner, and opened doors to leadership opportunities by now.”"
48% were unhappy with "Attitudes/behaviours eg resilience"

Facebook is embedding tracking data inside the photos you download - "“Upload picture, and Facebook tags it with a secretly embedded tag: A008E8E97FA55Friend “A” on Facebook downloads it.Friend “A” texts it to another friend – someone you don’t know, their friend Friend “B”, and another friend of theirs Friend “C.”Friend “B” isn’t on Facebook, or maybe they mostly just post to Reddit.Friend “B” posts to Reddit. Facebook sees this (by scouring Reddit systematically, the way search engines scour the entire ‘web’ in general). After seeing this a few times, quickly repeated, Facebook now knows you are somewhat close to Friend “B.”So now Facebook knows who another of your “Friend of a Friend” connections are – a person you don’t even know about yourself!Here comes the second trick: Friend “C” (another person who is friends with “A”) actually **does** upload to Facebook. They got the text message, too. Friend “C” re-uploads the image, from the text message they got.Facebook sees this, and knows that you are communicating indirectly to Friend C, or someone close to Friend C (ie: Friend “A”). Again, you don’t know Friend C, either, but Facebook knows you are close to Friend C.Now Friend “C” uploads the picture you uploaded … but now Facebook puts a NEW secret tag on it. Facebook changes A008E8E97FA55 to BD0GE4EAG3A11.Now Facebook can see if Friend “C” texted it to another person – Friend “X”, or if that person is a friend of YOURS. Or maybe neither you, nor C know X, but you likely are friends of a friend of X, and friend A is less likely to be close to X than you and Friend C are. Not only can they track which picture goes where and when, but they can see the sequence of movements with astonishing accuracy.Repeat this activity on a large scale, and now Facebook knows your Facebook friends, Facebook followers, and your real-world friends, co-workers, and associations. They even know your “friends of friends” (people you don’t know) and their buying and lifestyle details, and yours, and how your friendship circles fit together, even outside of facebook.Now look at how they watch your purchasing and browsing habits, and you’ve got a stew going. A horrible, horrible, creepy stew, with a lot of power over society. Say, for example, Facebook wants to throw an election. They could determine who ‘everyone’ is, watch their purchases, note their connections, note who their friends are, and run behavioral tests 24×7 to see if people in certain categories are swayed by certain political ads."

Hong Kong’s famous roast pig-cutting ceremonies: is it time for them to get the chop? - "Should centuries-old, traditional roast pig—cutting ceremonies for special occasions be discouraged — even banned — in Hong Kong to appease animal lovers? The question is being debated across the city after a local university urged all departments to stop the tradition when a pig-cutting ceremony for its new veterinary centre drew criticism that it was killing animals before curing them... “There is no direct link between roast pig-cutting ceremonies and animal welfare. We have no plan to stop doing so or stop attending such ceremonies.”... “Those who were present, including myself, had a sumptuous lunch after the ceremony that included roast beef sandwiches and fried shrimp toast. It’s interesting that some people only targeted the roast pigs. “Like many of my fellow professionals, I am forever amazed by how such a vocal minority can make a big deal out of nothing.”... Incidentally, the Hong Kong Film Awards Association used a steamed cake instead of roast pig at the blessing ceremony on Friday ahead of this Sunday’s awards. The association’s head of publicity, Bonnie Wong, said it had stopped using roast pig for the ceremony since 2015. “Four years ago, association chairman Derek Yee Tung-sing asked us to come up with a substitute for roast pig for the blessing ceremony because there is no point in killing pigs for fun,” Wong said."
???
Presumably the roast pigs aren't eaten after the ceremony, which is why it's "for fun"