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Saturday, May 04, 2019

The Collapse of the Caliphate

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Collapse of the Caliphate

"‘The police and social services struggled to see young women who were out drinking, taking drugs and having sex as children... because they were behaving in ways that we associate with adulthood. They are still children, even if you scan their brains, you would see massive differences in the brain cortex between the ages of 15 and 25’...

‘Only last week, young people were out demonstrating on climate change. And everybody tells me we had to listen to them, because they had more wisdom with this campaign for votes for 16 year olds. And my concern here is that what you're basically saying is that young people, and you've noticed that until the age of 25 the brain changes, you can never be held to account for anything. I mean, how are they ever going to grow up? Are all ISIS members brainwashed, in which case send them all on a rehabilitation course.’…

‘I think there's a US academic launch Lawrence Steinberg who worked on the use of the death penalty for people under 18 in the US. And his study showed that although young people's brains are of course, developing, what they lack usually is what we might call the brake.

So they usually are more likely to be violent, to not think through their decisions, to not think through consequences and to behave impulsively. In all of those cases, that doesn't mean we can't take young people seriously at all. I think it just means that when they make decisions, they might be making bad decisions with very serious consequences that they hadn't really thought through properly. That's why we have mitigating circumstances. That's why judges take into account young people's behavior in courts differently than they do adults.’...

‘I suppose there are two ways of looking at these people. They're either psychopaths or they’re theologians’...

‘I think they're neither. And both. The World Bank did a survey… in Iraq and Syria about a year and a half ago, and they found that the overwhelming majority of them had a better social standing and a better education than the national average in the countries that they come from.

Let's not forget that the current leader of Al-Qaeda *something* is a surgeon, bin Laden was a an engineer, etc, etc. This is an ideological position that people take to join groups like ISIS, and anybody and everybody can be vulnerable, inverted commas.

I remember going to prison one time with a leading Imam and we went to do a presentation and he was asked to go and speak to somebody who was a convicted terrorist. He went in the same color as me, and he came out very, very pale. And I asked him, what's the matter? And he turned to me and said, the guy's got a point. He went in with these theological position and claims that he won the theological argument, but the guy hit him with the intellectual, the ideological, the social and the emotional, and the Imam had nothing. It's a combination of both of those and much more‘...

'What does the war on terror, what does our foreign policy got to do with European Muslims including Brits flying thousands of miles to go and kill other Muslims and take Yazidi sex slaves. That's a red herring… nobody travels all that way to kill other Muslims because of something that our government might do'...

‘The first witness’s argument was that she was young and not a fully developed human, and so on. But she went even further than that didn't she? That no one really is either a victim or a perpetrator she said at one stage’

‘I think that's really dangerous, because then actually, what you're doing is making nobody morally or legally culpable for anything... Extremism isn't actually just on the margins. It's actually mainstream, within families or some families’"


Shamima Begum was too young at 15 to be responsible for joining ISIS. Kids are old enough at 8 to take hormone blockers and start gender transition

Interestingly, this Imam doesn't believe that jihadists have a corrupted view of Islam

Links - 4th May 2019 (3)

Report: Hackers Fool Tesla Autopilot into Driving Towards Oncoming Traffic - "Hackers have reportedly begun using stickers which confuse Tesla’s autopilot system to trick the cars into driving into the wrong lanes or towards oncoming traffic... Tesla has had a number of issues relating to its autopilot system, some of which have allegedly proven fatal in the past"

Your Own Personal Slaves – Daniel Garcia Art - "Which of these products do you use?
I wanted to do a piece about all the products we depend on, that are made or reaped by forced labor, child workers, sex slaves, etc."
Of course the guy in the picture is wearing a Che Guevera T-shirt

American vs. British scones: Why the sweet American kind are a delicious pastry in their own right. - "An American scone does not need jam or clotted cream—or any filling, really: It’s a self-contained snack (though an extra smear of butter never killed anyone … at least not right away). It’s pleasantly sweet, and it has wiggle room for all sorts of additions: spices, fruits, nuts, even chocolate. A wise baker will not overload an American scone with extra goodies, nor will she shy away from them. Freed of cultural baggage and expectations of authenticity, the American scone is flexible in shape and content. Like Dylan going electric, this casting off of tradition may upset some people. But such flexibility is key to the deliciousness of a great American scone."

Vaccines Against Measles And Other Diseases Confer Added Protections - "A new study shows that vaccination with a weakened strain of salmonella not only protects against typhoid fever but also seems to rev up the immune system to fight off other problems, like influenza and yeast infection."

Electric Vehicles Send Real-Time Data to Chinese Government - "The automakers say they are merely complying with local laws, which apply only to alternative energy vehicles. Chinese officials say the data is used for analytics to improve public safety, facilitate industrial development and infrastructure planning, and to prevent fraud in subsidy programs.But other countries that are major markets for electronic vehicles — the United States, Japan, across Europe — do not collect this kind of real-time data. And critics say the information collected in China is beyond what is needed to meet the country's stated goals. It could be used not only to undermine foreign carmakers' competitive position, but also for surveillance — particularly in China, where there are few protections on personal privacy. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has unleashed a war on dissent, marshalling big data and artificial intelligence to create a more perfect kind of policing, capable of predicting and eliminating perceived threats to the stability of the ruling Communist Party... Jose Munoz, the head of Nissan's China operations, said he was unaware of the monitoring system until the AP told him, but he stressed that the automaker operated according to the law. Asked by the AP about the potential for human rights abuses and commercial conflicts posed by the data sharing, Munoz smiled and shrugged... "It's useless to be concerned about it," said Min Zeren, who owns a Tesla Model S. "If you're concerned about it, then there's no way to live in this country.""

Cedar Grove Farm - "Dear Lucky Brand, My name is Quintin McEwen and I am the owner-operator of a Canadian sheep farm. Today I saw an advertisement highlighting your “shearless wool” clothing and I am absolutely shocked by your blatant disregard for my industry and not gathering the facts before you launched this campaign. The picture of the sheep on your tag is a direct violation of the Canadian Sheep Farmers Code of Practice. Farmers are responsible for shearing their sheep, because if the sheep’s wool becomes over grown (like the one on your tag) their chance of becoming sick and immobile drastically increases. Shearing sheep in a huge part of keeping my sheep healthy. I don’t make any money from the wool they produce and every time I get them shorn I lose money (it typically costs around $5/ewe to shear and I get about $3 of wool from a ewe). And we aren’t talking a few dollars. I lose hundreds of dollars every year on shearing, but I gladly do it because my sheep need it to stay healthy and it’s my job as a responsible farmer to make sure my animals get the care they need. And the fact that your company believe a polyester product is a better alternative for our planets health than wool product seems crazy to me. How can filling our planet with more plastic byproducts be a better alternative than using an all natural, biodegradable, sustainable product?"

Google's Brand New AI Ethics Council Is Already Falling Apart - "Google recently appointed an external ethics council to deal with tricky issues in artificial intelligence. The group is meant to help the company appease critics while still pursuing lucrative cloud computing deals.In less than a week, the council is already falling apart, a development that may jeopardize Google’s chance of winning more military cloud-computing contracts... a group of employees started a petition asking the company to remove another member: Kay Coles James, president of a conservative think tank who has fought against equal-rights laws for gay and transgender people. More than 500 staff signed the petition anonymously by late Monday morning local time. Employee activism on equal pay for women, sexual harassment, AI ethics and doing business in China has roiled Google over the past year. The protests have been effective"

Clear racial preference for Prime Minister, President: Survey - "the vast majority of the 2,000 respondents prefer the country’s top leaders to be of the same race as themselves. This sentiment was markedly stronger among respondents aged 50 and above"
Even Malays and Indians prefer Chinese to the other minority
IPS survey methodology is a lot more rigorous than that of market research firms; I take the black box survey on people liking Tharman with a pinch of salt


Why Girls Like Bad Boys - "I guess you could sum it up by saying it's a combination of the newness and unexpectedness of the bad boy with the comfort and ease he puts women in. He's exciting and refreshingly different, and at the same time he isn't heaping women with his expectations of them and getting upset if they don't meet them. Women can both find something new and just be themselves around him – and that's quite a rare thing for women to find in a man.No wonder girls like bad boys."

The Conversationalist - "In conversation, though, the conversationalist must manage a whole host of things. He has to manage how he’s feeling, what he’s expressing through his words, voice tone, and nonverbal communication, he has to read how others are feeling and what they are expressing, he has to steer the conversation so that it stays on productive and value-building topics and avoids destructive ones, he has to reward others’ efforts to contribute and provide value and remove embarrassment from them when they slip up and make a faux pas. And that’s just for starters."

Chinese VPN user fined for accessing overseas websites as part of Beijing’s ongoing ‘clean up’ of internet - "It is not the first time authorities have singled out a Chinese citizen for punishment for offering VPN services in China. In 2017, as part of a 14-month nationwide campaign against unauthorised internet connections, including VPN services, a Chinese man from southwest Guangxi province, Wu Xiangyang, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for selling VPN services online. Wu also had to pay a fine of 500,000 yuan (US$72,790), an amount equivalent to the profits he had made from his VPN business since 2013."

Decades of data suggest parenthood makes people unhappy - "Folk knowledge assumes having children is the key to living a happy, meaningful life; however, empirical evidence suggests nonparents are the more cheery bunch.
The difference is most pronounced in countries like the United States. In countries that support pro-family policies, parents can be just as happy as their child-free peers... Countries like Spain and Portugal, where parents report being 3.1 and 8 percent happier than nonparents respectively, culturally center on extended families. The Spanish manage personal problems through family, an approach that extends to child rearing where many hands make light work... Glass and Robin note that their results could be tempered by parental selectivity. They propose that countries like Spain and Italy, which have low fertility rates, may select toward people who truly desire to have children... our modern parenting model, in which we view children as material to be molded into a particular type of adult, is not only wrongheaded but also a source of stress and misery for many parents."

Why the word 'moist' makes you cringe - "So who's most likely to cringe at the word moist? “A young, neurotic, female who is well-educated and somewhat disgusted by bodily function""

How global warming and mind-eating parasites are creating a global intelligence gap - "Schistosomiasis and toxoplasmosis may sound like something you would pick up in a developing country, but the reality is that more and more so-called "third world" parasites are becoming endemic to the United States. Already, some 60 million people — that’s right 60 million — are infected with toxoplasma gondii or, as it's more fondly known as, the “cat poop parasite.”"

'Like a Big Mac But Juicier': Burger King renames sandwiches to troll McDonald's - "After McDonald’s lost its Big Mac trademark in the EU earlier this month, competitor Burger King wasted no time taking a big, juicy bite out of the world’s biggest burger chain. Burger King’s Swedish operation recently revamped menus to poke fun at McDonald’s loss. Under the header Not Big Mac’s (sic), the sign listed meal options like “Burger Big Mac Wished It Was”, “Like a Big Mac, But Actually Big” and “Big Mac-ish But Flame-Grilled of Course”... The stunt comes after McDonald’s lost the rights to its Big Mac trademark as part of its own lawsuit against a smaller burger company, the Irish chain Supermac’s. However, EU regulators found that McDonald’s had not proven genuine use of the name in the five years leading up to the case"

Germany’s soldiers of misfortune - "Fighter jets and helicopters that don’t fly. Ships and submarines that can’t sail. Severe shortages of everything from ammunition to underwear.If it sounds like an exaggeration to compare Germany’s Bundeswehr to “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” look no further than the army’s standard-issue assault rifle, Heckler & Koch’s G36. The government decided to scrap the weapon after discovering that the gun misses its target if it’s too hot... Much of the media now portrays the U.S. as a security threat on par with Russia. Public attitudes have moved in a similar direction. Security discussions are driven by a handful of like-minded think tank analysts who seem to spend most their time on Twitter, fretting about whether Trump will pull the plug on NATO... Many Germans appear blissfully unaware that their security, and by extension their prosperity, relies to no small degree on the presence of the U.S. nuclear shield... In Berlin and other German cities, some Bundeswehr personnel say they prefer not to wear their uniform when traveling to and from work, in order to avoid aggressive stares and rude comments. And in Potsdam, a regional capital near Berlin, local politicians have been debating whether it’s appropriate for city trams to carry recruitment advertisements for the Bundeswehr."

The Oscars and the ‘curse’ of winning - "The Real Oscar Curse: The Negative Consequences of Positive Status Shifts looks at the status change that occurs when actors win or receive nominations for an Academy Award.Its findings suggest there can be a negative impact as a result of sudden positive shifts of status, with implications for a range of workplace situations... the divorce rate for male Oscar winners is 205 percent higher compared to their non-nominees in the first year after their award wins."

The mental health of young people

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The mental health of young people

"It's a neat but terribly worrying paradox. Now children are the most physically safe, but mentally fragile generation in history. Tragic individual cases make headlines, but a series of surveys in recent weeks, a barrage of statistics show that they're not exceptions. We already knew from an OECD report that British children were the unhappiest in the Western world. A YouGov poll published this week for the Prince's Trust suggested the number of youngsters that think life simply isn't worth living has doubled in a decade to one in five. Teenage suicides reflect that. They've nearly doubled over the same period, as has the number of girls being treated by the NHS for self harming, boys now too. Three children in every class, we're told, have a diagnosable mental disorder, and it's getting worse every year. So what's wrong with our children? It can't just be the internet. Are we failing to look after them, or are we protecting them too much? The snowflake generation shielded from the rough edges of life by helicopter parents and teachers tiptoeing around their sensitivities. Are the snowflakes melting? It's Children's Mental Health Week, but is that part of the problem? Are we medicalizing the normal stresses of adolescence and making them worse? Or is it more complicated, a toxic mix of anxieties about identity, ill-defined boundaries, educational pressures? What's wrong with our kids? And who should do what about it?...

I think part of the problem with awareness raising campaigns is in a sense for me there’s just far too many of them. And they actually raise anxiety. If you think about it, there's a new awareness raising campaign every day. I've actually looked at this. There’s awareness raising every day of the year. So we're constantly bombarded with things that are causing a risk to our health and our wellbeing...

‘The thing about literacy is you have to learn a language. So one of the things that I've wondered is where, you know, primary school [students] learn that literacy that language of describing themselves as in trauma, depressed, having panic attacks, anxiety - they haven't learned that on the playground from each other, have they?’

‘Well, again, one of the problems is language actually, because in English, we have a very limited emotional vocabulary. When you look at other languages, they have a much broader amount of words that they can use to describe their emotions and their mental health. So if I say to you, I'm feeling anxious, that could be anything from common or garden anxiety right through to an anxiety disorder, and one is a medical issue, and the other is not’...

‘The more interventions there’s been by governments, NGOs, in terms of mental health, the more you've got generations of young people who self diagnose themselves and describe themselves through medicalized, pathologised language like this’...
if we encourage it, if we basically say, keep talking about it, then seven or eight and nine year olds are gonna see that this is the way you get attention...

‘Over the same period, that we've seen these huge increases in anxiety and depression, what has been the change in the child's real world, the biggest change is that children have been deprived of play, of real play. Of going outside and playing... there has just been a huge decline over the decades, accelerating in the most recent couple of decades, in children's opportunities to just go out and play with other children... you were playing with other kids, no adults around to solve the problems for you. You learn how to solve the problems, you learn how to deal with the minor bullying that was occurring, you learned how to negotiate with your peers, you learn that you can control things. Play is something that you create, you learn that you can control things, you can solve problems. If you're always being in a situation where there's some adult there, the adults are solving the problems for you and you are not learning that you're capable of it...

Sometimes people think that the reason children aren’t playing outdoors with other kids, physically playing is because the computer is so seductive. I don't think that's the real cause. There're actually studies showing that kids would be preferring to play physically with other kids than playing on the computer...

Most of the research suggests that computer play far from being the problem is the saving grace. For example, there was a major study done by the University of Columbia School of mental health of over 3000 children aged six to 11, in which they looked at how much time they were playing on, playing computer games. And independently of that they measured, had measures of their intellectual, social and emotional functioning… the children who were playing more were actually doing better socially, emotionally and intellectually… we are no longer allowing children to have real adventures outdoors. So they can have virtual adventures on the computer. And now some people want to take that away from them, too. And then they will have no adventures. We are not allowing them to go out and socialize with other children away from adults, which children have always needed to do...

I can't believe the school is now any harder than it was in the 1950s when people learnt trigonometry and Latin at the age of eight or whatever. Also definitions of childhood itself have changed... the notion of children facing stresses they never would have faced in history, when, of course, our very notions of childhood and adolescence are contemporary inventions, they did not exist for the Victorians. So someone at the age of 14… in 1850 might find themselves working down a mine. The idea there is a particular particular horrific, dystopian scenario that teenagers find themselves in today compared to the past"

Links - 4th May 2019 (2)

Italian driver hijacks and sets alight to school bus full of children 'in retaliation' for migrant drownings - "An Italian bus driver of Senegalese descent was arrested on Wednesday after hijacking his own vehicle and setting it on fire, allegedly threatening to kill more than 50 children on board whose hands he had bound.The 47-year-old man said he was acting in revenge for the thousands of migrants, many of them African, who have drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years while trying to reach Europe from Libya... Police said the suspect had a criminal record, with convictions for sexual molestation and driving while drunk. He obtained Italian citizenship in 2004.Mr Salvini, the interior minister and head of the anti-immigration League party, asked why a person with a criminal record was allowed to drive a school bus... The traffic has slowed considerably after the EU beefed up the Libyan Coast Guard – which has been accused of human rights abuses – and Italy’s populist government decreed last summer that it was closing its ports to NGO vessels that rescue asylum seekers."
Maybe it's Europeans' fault that migrants drown in the Mediterranean because they let them stay in Europe. So they should turn them all away instead - since what Italy's 'populist' government is doing seems to be working
Naturally the media isn't obsessing over this like Christchurch


Number Of Migrant Deaths In Mediterranean Fell In 2018 - "Fewer migrants attempted the perilous Mediterranean crossing toward Europe last year, leading to a drop in migrant deaths at sea, as patterns of migration shifted amid growing anti-immigrant sentiment."

NVIDIA Develops AI That Can Remove Noise, Grain, And Even Watermarks From Photos - "Researchers from NVIDIA, Aalto University, and MIT have developed an AI that can remove noise from grainy photos and automatically enhance them. This technology can be beneficial in several real-world situations where it is difficult to obtain clear image data like MRI scans, astronomical imaging, and more."

Drinking a litre a day of mineral water 'can prevent onset of Alzheimer's' by flushing out aluminium - "Drinking a litre of mineral water every day can prevent cognitive decline in Alzheimer's sufferers by removing aluminium from their bodies, a study found yesterday.British researchers found drinking silicon-rich mineral water 'significantly reduced' the levels of neurotoxin aluminium in the body.Aluminium has long been linked to the development of Alzheimer’s but no scientific relationship has yet been proved."

Having 'white nuclear family' promotes white supremacy, says New York professor, report says - "A City University of New York sociology professor reportedly said in a tweetstorm last week that “the white-nuclear family” promotes racism, prompting a backlash on social media.Jessie Daniels, described as an expert on “the Internet manifestations of racism” on her CUNY page, infuriated social media users after reportedly saying that white families promote racism by default... She reportedly ended her arguement suggesting that “white people” should confront their racism and stop perpetuating inequality by leaving their homes for their children."

Evaluation of a proposal for reliable low-cost grid power with 100% wind, water, and solar - "Previous analyses have found that the most feasible route to a low-carbon energy future is one that adopts a diverse portfolio of technologies. In contrast, Jacobson et al. (2015) consider whether the future primary energy sources for the United States could be narrowed to almost exclusively wind, solar, and hydroelectric power and suggest that this can be done at “low-cost” in a way that supplies all power with a probability of loss of load “that exceeds electric-utility-industry standards for reliability”. We find that their analysis involves errors, inappropriate methods, and implausible assumptions. Their study does not provide credible evidence for rejecting the conclusions of previous analyses that point to the benefits of considering a broad portfolio of energy system options. A policy prescription that overpromises on the benefits of relying on a narrower portfolio of technologies options could be counterproductive, seriously impeding the move to a cost effective decarbonized energy system."
Presumably PNAS has been taken over by paid nuclear and fossil fuel lobbyists

Why Renewables Advocates Protect Fossil Fuel Interests, Not The Climate - "if solar and wind are substitutes for fossil fuels, why are the world’s biggest oil and gas firms promoting them?Over the last three years, the five largest publicly-traded oil and gas companies, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP, and Total invested a whopping one billion dollars into advertising and lobbying for renewables and other climate-related ventures."

The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables - "the two greatest successes when it comes to nuclear energy are Sweden and France, two nations held up by democratic socialists for decades as models of the kind of societies they want... it is only nuclear that has, by powering high-speed trains everywhere from France to Japan to China, decarbonized transportation, which is the source of about one-third of the emissions humankind creates... Ordinary people tell pollsters they want renewables for the same reason they buy products labeled “natural”: they are in the grip of an unconscious appeal-to-nature fallacy.The appeal-to-nature fallacy is the mistaken belief that the world can be divided into “natural” and “unnatural” things, and that the former are better, safer, or cleaner than the latter.In reality, solar farms require hundreds of times more land, an order of magnitude more mining for materials, and create hundreds of times more waste, than do nuclear plants.And wind farms kill hundreds of thousands of threatened and endangered birds, may make the hoary bat go extinct, and kill more people than nuclear plants.But because of our positive feelings toward sunlight, water and wind, which we view as more natural than uranium, many people unconsciously assume renewables are better for the environment. By contrast, renewable energy advocates and investors like Gore, McKibben, Klein and the heads of Sierra Club and NRDC know perfectly well that solar and wind farms have huge environmental impacts. They have to deal with the public backlash every day.Google for a few minutes and you'll find widespread resistance to solar and wind farms around the world. It's the kind of grassroots opposition championed by Gore, McKibben, and Klein — but only when it's against nuclear and fossil fuel plants... After World War II, the working class in developed nations become materially rich, undermining the case that only a radical, socialist transformation of society could end poverty... In response, radical critics of capitalism shifted their focus. The problem was no longer that capitalism was causing material poverty but rather that it was destroying the environment."

Addendum: "The problem with nuclear is that it doesn’t demand the radical re-making of society, like renewables do, and it doesn’t require grand fantasies of humankind harmonizing with nature. Nor does nuclear provide cover for funnelling billions to progressive interest groups in the name of "community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture, or transit systems.""
Social work: no place for Christians - "social work is more often a reflection of dominant social mores than a challenge to them. For example, while it now espouses homosexual equality and acceptance, this has not always been the case. A 1971 edition of the British Journal of Social Work published an article advocating aversion therapy for gay and ‘cross-dressing’ men. The key change has been the adoption of ‘anti-oppressive practice’ (AOP), a central component of social-work training pre- and post-qualification... Some even argue that social workers have a duty to combat ‘animal oppression’. As someone who has owned and bred several racing greyhounds, I can only hope this remains a fringe sentiment or else I, as someone who lectures on social work at a university, may end up in a similar position to Ngole. The striking thing about the radical social-work movement is how, in quite a short space of time, it went from viewing the working class as the solution to society’s problems to seeing it as the problem – a group of unenlightened bigots who required professional training to eradicate their prejudices... Yet if Ngole does not allow his private beliefs to affect his practice, then why should he not be allowed to pursue a career in social work? In other words, as long as he does not discriminate against homosexual clients, or try to convert them, then there is no reason why he cannot perform his job.But this is the glaring problem with AOP. It actively encourages social workers to challenge and attempt to change the beliefs and behaviours of those they encounter who do not adhere to the current moral orthodoxy. So, if a social worker’s own beliefs do not adhere to that orthodoxy, then he or she is in trouble"

India's first nuclear missile submarine crippled as sailor leaves hatch open - "A hatch left open on the INS Arihant lead to saltwater flooding the propulsion area, rendering the $2.9 billion submarine inoperative."

American Military Aid to Israel Is Less Than It Seems - "According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the United States spends roughly $36 billion annually on military capabilities in Europe, almost 10 times its annual assistance package to Israel. Of course, that spending accounts for operations in more than two dozen countries. But those are countries that, unlike Israel, Washington is treaty-bound to defend... Israel is hardly the only American ally in the Middle East to receive military aid. Egypt is the second-largest non-NATO recipient after Israel, and Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are beneficiaries as well. Unlike U.S. aid to Israel, most of which is funneled back to the American defense sector, U.S. defense spending toward its forward-operating presence in Europe and Asia is composed of hundreds of thousands of “boots on the ground”"

The Perfect Irony That ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ Film Was Also a Real-Life Scam - "both Low and DiCaprio have starring roles in a 251-page Department of Justice indictment documenting the multibillion dollar criminal scheme. Low, the alleged mastermind of what Attorney General Loretta Lynch referred to as the greatest kleptocracy the world has ever seen, was DiCaprio’s friend. They’d partied together in Vegas and Cannes; they schemed together to beat the system in Hollywood. Most of all, though, he handed DiCaprio the money to make his dream project — The Wolf of Wall Street — that no one in Hollywood would bankroll... It seems the socially-awkward Low had a thing for rich, mildly attractive, blonde daughters of famous American families. Because while at Wharton, Low developed a well-known crush on Paris Hilton. His roommates say he watched House of Wax, her debut movie, at least a half-dozen times. Little did Low know that, one day, a drunken Paris Hilton would regularly party with him, and be photographed with his sweaty, alcohol-flushed face on her shoulder... he was dating Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr. They watched the Super Bowl together in a private box with Aziz and Red Granite co-founder Joey McFarland, who until then had mostly been known as Hilton’s party-planner. While they all watched the game, Katie Holmes stopped in to say “hi,” as did fellow model Kate Upton... The only person to truly see Low for the criminal he was? A fellow conman — the OG Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort, who acted honorably when he crossed paths with Low. As Belfort recalled: “They flew me to Cannes four or five months after they bought the movie and they wanted to announce it in Cannes. It hadn’t even gone into production yet, and they threw a launch party. They must have spent $3 million on a launch party. They flew in Kayne West, and I said to Anne [his girlfriend], ‘This is a fucking scam, anybody who does this has stolen money.’ You wouldn’t spend money you worked for like that”"

What’s The Deal With Pussy Slapping? - "Pussy slapping, also called cunt spanking, clit slapping, clit smacking, vagina slapping, and clit tapping, is pretty much what it sounds like. Though one might get the visual image of an open-handed slap on the pussy as if it were a face, that’s not quite the way it goes. It can involve the head of a dick slapping the clit, a hand, a finger, or objects such as rulers, or for more advanced kinksters, a whip or belt. In some porn, it’s related to squirting."

What I Learned About Racism as the Only Chinese Person at a 'Chinese' Festival - "The local butcher shop has been renamed "The China Butcher Shop," while the bakery has transformed into a "Chinese Bakery" selling fresh "Chinese donuts and pretzels." There's light beer, dark oak furniture, and red Chinese lanterns. The phrase "Ni hao!" is being shouted out at will.Amid all this, I am the only real-life Chinese person in sight. The source of my confusion lies in the small German city of Dietfurt, situated along the Altmühl river in the south east of the country. Every Thursday before Ash Wednesday, the city is transformed into "Bavarian China," and its inhabitants become "Chinese," dressing up in "traditional" clothing and wearing yellowface makeup. This annual festival is not some niche sideshow—around 20,000 people flock to Dietfurt every year to take part... For me, racism means writing people off based entirely on their origin or skin color. Or when people think a "Chinese costume" consists of a kimono and chopsticks, "because it's all Asian anyway." But how devaluing is it when a whole city celebrates their perception of Chinese culture? Calling themselves Chinese, having a Chinese landmark in their town, and regularly receiving guests from China?"

Aristotle's Biology

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Aristotle's Biology

"We have Plato's dialogues, beautiful and complete, but entirely concerned with metaphysical and moral issues, and a philosophy that I would say, but then again, I am a scientist is embedded and founded upon a contempt for the empirical world, indeed, for anything that we could call science today. In many ways, I regard Plato as the antithesis of a scientist. And the paradox for me, is that Aristotle somehow manages to shake off the influence of this gigantic figure, this penetrating intellect and reshape himself...

‘I think it's time to remember how limited he was by lack of technology, we use that word. Instruments, microscopes, and so on, so forth. For instance, he thought that flies generated, self generating with life, for instance. Did he doubt that when he said it, or did he say that with authority?’

‘With quite a bit of authority, but I think it was because precisely because he didn't have the means to observe that there were probably tiny eggs sort of left by the flies, and so forth. So this phenomenon, which we call spontaneous generation, he talks mostly about it in the context of oysters and sea animals in shells, they're the ones that sort of, their spontaneous generation is the one that he discusses to the greater, with the greatest length and then I mean, it's quite an interesting theory. And in that he says that everywhere in nature, in even sort of the natural heat in the air is a little bit of that sort of form or soul that can potentially sort of create a generation and because those kinds of animals are so sort of low grade, they don't need particularly complicated move, soul movements in order to generate. So they can sort of just generate out of the natural heat of the air’

‘I think there's a real mystery behind Aristotle's love for spontaneous generation. So basically when he can't actually observe something copulating and giving birth to creatures laying eggs because the larvae are too small or because of some other crock of biology, he has a tendency to sort of say, yeah, I think it's spontaneously generated. And the reason that this is so hard is because it's so at variance with all the rest of his biology. I mean his whole theory as Sophia said is that there's a form and this form is embodied in the parents and the parents transmit it, especially the father, via the seminal fluid. From father to offspring in the matter and all that stuff. And he's got an incredibly elaborate theory to explain how all that works and then when it comes to snails, he sort of says well you know form it's just kind of everywhere… although you're right he does usually do that for the lower things - lower things - but he knows perfectly well how complicated snails, he’s got a dissection of them, right? He knows it's got organs and stuff... he knows that an eel is as complicated as any fish’...

‘He really struggles with spontaneous generation. He devotes a chapter to it in the generation of animals, and he's not satisfied, he tries to fit it into his formula of the causes that should be here, and he says, but they're not here. And I think he's dissatisfied, I'd say he's dissatisfied with his explanation’...

‘Very interesting thing about snails, he says that snails have been observed to copulate. Very, very strange, that is, and maybe it was just recreational sex’...

‘They lay these these things that look like egg cases and some people say they are egg cases and you can see the baby snails on them. But actually, they're not really. Actually they’re just generated from earth.’...

As I argued, though not everybody would agree with me on this, Plato hates the empirical world, he's completely uninterested, he's interested in this, these, in these forms that exist around beyond the senses, and that is as anti scientific a philosophy as can possibly be imagined"

Links - 4th May 2019 (1)

Japanese Twitter community shocked to learn that train timetables are made with Microsoft Excel

Progressive professors want a blacklist of Quillette writers - "Dr. Katja Thieme, a professor of English at the University of British Columbia, took to Twitter recently to enact her own unique brand of McCarthyism. “YES. If you are an academic and you publish in Quillette, we see you. We fucking see you. And we are looking right at you.” This was in response to the following tweet by a Denison University History professor who stated, “And any member of our field who publishes with Quillette should lose all credibility.” One of Thieme’s followers then followed up with the astonishing suggestion that there should be a literal blacklist of academics who have written for the magazine. “It would be nice to have a list of Canadian academics who have published in that shitrag.” Using social pressure to stigmatize is a hallmark of witch hunts throughout history, and this tactic hides in plain sight on social media. But one wonders what the point is of declaring a publication dedicated to free speech and open discourse off limits? It appears that this mob is fearful of what could be gained by engaging in an honest exploration of ideas. What’s frightening about the ease with which these comments are made is that I highly doubt any of these educators have actually read Quillette.It has become fashionable to spout nonsense such as Quillette is “racist,” or Quillette is “white supremacist.” When asked to provide evidence, accusers often claim that they do not have to provide evidence, or they just never respond... There are actual white supremacists out there. But these are not the people Sears and his followers spend their time attacking. Instead, they spend most of their day attacking their own townsfolk who have varied and unsettled opinions of how to achieve the good life... The prolonged Twitter spat between Thieme and Sears’ following and the readers and writers of Quillette ended with a chorus of academics pledging to keep writing for Quillette or deciding to write for Quillette for the first time as a result of the attempted blacklisting...
'These people are the reason why the academy is failing & why so many of us choose to leave.'"

The real college-admissions scam is the university system itself. - "None of this could have happened if higher education had not itself become a corrupt institution, featuring low classroom demands, no core knowledge acquisition, low grading standards, fashionable (but society-destroying) left-wing activism, luxury-hotel amenities, endless partying, and huge expense. Students often learn virtually nothing during their college years, as University of California, Irvine, education school dean Richard Arum writes in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. They may even lose that pittance of knowledge with which they entered college. Seniors at Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Berkeley scored lower in an undemanding test of American history than they did as freshmen, according to a 2007 study commissioned by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. College is only desultorily about knowledge acquisition, at least outside of the STEM fields (and even those fields are under assault from identity politics)... What the pay-to-play admissions scam does not demonstrate, however, is that “legacy” admissions are somehow more corrupt than race-based affirmative-action admission policies—which seems to be the primary lesson that left-wing commentators and politicians are taking from the scandal—or that meritocracy is a “myth” that has now been debunked. Racial preferences are a far more significant deviation from academic meritocracy than legacy preferences, which are not even implicated in the current scandal. An underreported but salient detail in the Singer scam is that he “falsified students’ ethnicities,” according to the New York Times, because “some families and students perceive their racial backgrounds can hurt or aid their chances of getting in to schools that consider race in their admissions decisions.” This is not a mere perception; it is the truth. The claim that blacks are disadvantaged in college admissions, especially compared with legacies, is false... the 30 legacies admitted were also more academically qualified, with an average SAT score of 1,389, 33 points higher than the class average. By contrast, nearly 60 percent of all black and Hispanic applicants were admitted. Though the Times did not report their average SAT scores, it is a virtual certainty, given unbroken national patterns, that they were roughly a standard deviation below the class average... [there is] emotional malaise inflicted on racial-preference beneficiaries more generally by academic mismatch. It is not surprising that a standard item in the diversity demands regularly generated by “underrepresented minority” students is for a beefed-up mental-health bureaucracy... America’s education problem is not that too few students are going to college, but that too many are. One easy solution to the college-debt crisis would be to stop encouraging so many people to go to college in the first place"

Oslo stabbing: Pupil attacks teacher with knife and fork from school canteen in Norway capital - "A pupil has injured a teacher and three other staff members with a knife and fork taken from a school kitchen in the Norwegian capital Oslo, police said.The boy – who studied at the school – was arrested after reports he attacked staff with a knife. The motive was not immediately clear... A survey for Norway’s educational association last year found around one in five teachers had experienced violence over the previous 12 months"
Reading between the lines...

Tibetans told to put Buddha aside and worship at altar of Xi Jinping | World | The Sunday Times - "Chinese communist officials have ordered Tibetans to replace altars to prominent Buddhist figures in their homes with images of President Xi Jinping... In other displays of religious repression, monks have been threatened with punishment for holding Tibetan language classes in monasteries; parts of ancient temples have been converted into tourist facilities as Beijing promotes Buddhism as a money-earner; and the authorities have issued a database of “verified” reincarnated lamas for worshippers... Officials have made clear that they intend to seek to impose the next Dalai Lama, who by tradition is a reincarnation found as a child.They have already pursued this policy in the case of the Panchen Lama, the second holiest figure in Tibetan Buddhism, who has not been seen since 1995 when he was six. He will turn 30 in April in his presumed Beijing detention. China has named its own Panchen, the son of party officials."

Larissa Nolan: Man up, Hollywood, and stop making boys into wimps | Ireland | The Sunday Times - "The other day I praised my son for being “manly”. He’d handled a situation with a maturity beyond his nine years, showing honour, courage and responsibility. It seemed a fitting compliment. Yet he looked shocked. “I don’t want to be that,” he told me. “That’s a bad thing.” I reminded him of his school motto, right there on the crest of his uniform: “Viriliter Age”, meaning act manly. It was sad, as a mother, to have to reassure a boy his innate being is, in fact, a good trait. Not something to feel ashamed of, or guilty about.That any child should feel bad about their gender identity is particularly rotten in a supposedly progressive society. Yet it wasn’t wholly a surprise, considering the cultural brainwashing from a radical left agenda that is being force-fed to younger generations in the form of cinema. It seems impossible to go to a kids’ movie nowadays without being lectured on Hollywood’s twin pillars of liberalism: political correctness and identity politics. I just want to bring them out for an afternoon of innocence and pleasure, not ideology and propaganda. Instead it’s like being at mass.Worryingly, the constant message being transmitted is one of emasculation. Boys are inept imbeciles who require eye-rolling, risk-taking, can-do girls to come to their rescue. They’re to be ridiculed, chastised and denigrated. Males are weak, females are cool and powerful — in every film... Hollywood is telling us there is no place in society for masculinity. What might this do to boys’ mental health, and self-esteem, at a time when we pride ourselves on such concerns? I can’t decide which outcome is worse: that our boys grow up to be self-loathing male feminists, or react with resentment.What kind of sexist attitude does it engender in young girls when all their heroines are hard-bitten female leaders who, for all their independence and achievements, are obsessed with men and competing against them? Women in the movies get everything their own way. That’s not equality.It has left me questioning whether it is irresponsible to bring children to what should be “family-friendly” cinema while this plague is infecting screens."
Where the war on "toxic masculinity" leads us

Opinion | Japanese attractions are refusing entry to tourists, and it’s easy to see why - "The English-language version of national newspaper The Asahi recently reported that a “no-foreigners policy” was spreading as “a growing number of tourism facilities in Japan are refusing to accept non-Japanese group travellers because of the bad manners and abhorrent actions of some visitors from abroad”. Nanzoin temple, in Fukuoka prefecture, is one such destination. Its priests have been complaining that an influx of tourists from cruise ships calling into Fukuoka has altered the atmosphere of the temple, famed for its 41-metre-long bronze reclining Buddha, with travellers splashing around in a waterfall within the grounds, blaring music from portable speakers and even climbing onto rooftops. By 2016, their transcendental patience had worn so thin that the priests asked a local tourism website to delete information on the temple. Visitors today will find signs in 12 languages telling non-Japanese groups that they are not welcome, according to The Asahi, although solo tourists are still allowed in, as they are believed to be better behaved. In Kumamoto prefecture, the Yatsushiro shrine has suffered a similar fate, having been overrun with day-tripping cruise passengers, while an izakaya owner in the overcrowded city of Kyoto admitted that he would lie about his establishment being fully booked when groups of five or more foreigners showed up. “I want Kyoto to stop staging promotional campaigns targeting foreign sightseers”... The Cinque Terreare a string of five fishing villages on the picturesque Italian Riviera, a Unesco World Heritage Site and a tourist honeypot, drawing the crowds to Instagram the houses’ colourful facades and hike the clifftop trails. But only those appropriately shod. Anyone attempting to take to the walkways this summer in flip-flops could face a fine of up to €2,500 (US$2,810).English-language digital news site The Local Italy reported that rescuers were fed up of having to go to the aid of ill-prepared visitors who had become stranded on the mountainous paths."
Imagine if a white country did this

Airline meals: eight of the best and three of the worst, according to a very frequent flyer

Peppa Pig criticised for using the word 'fireman' in episode - "People have criticised the children's TV show Peppa Pig after it referred to firefighters as 'firemen' in an episode called The Fire Engine. London Fire Brigade (LFB) posted a message on social media saying: "Come on @peppapig, we've not been firemen for 30 years."Using out of date stereotypical gender specific wording prevents young girls from becoming firefighters.""
It starts with 'inclusive language', and we are told those with concerns are paranoid far right conservatives. Then the police arrest you for 'misgendering'

Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years - ""I'd always thought gays were regular people, just like you and me, and that the stereotype of homosexuals as hedonistic, sex-crazed deviants was just a destructive myth," said mother of four Hannah Jarrett, 41, mortified at the sight of 17 tanned and oiled boys cavorting in jock straps to a throbbing techno beat on a float shaped like an enormous phallus. "Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong."... the event confirmed the worst fears of thousands of non-gay spectators, cementing in their minds a debauched and distorted image of gay life straight out of the most virulent right-wing hate literature... "I knew it. I said we needed 100 dancers on the 'Show Us Your Ass' float, but everybody insisted that 50 would be enough," said Lady Labia, spokesperson for LAGALABATATA. "Next year, we're really going to give those breeders something to look at.""

Friday, May 03, 2019

Links - 3rd May 2019 (2)

Journalist Complains of Being Fired Just Days After Mocking 'Right-Wing' Reporter's Pay: How Will I Afford My Therapist? - "A reporter gloated that alternative journalist Tim Pool was “not doing so well” professionally — just days before bemoaning losing her own job. Sarah Morrison, a self-described liberal freelance writer for outlets including Vocative and The Guardian, mocked Pool in response to his Twitter takedowns last week of the media’s tantrum about “Make America Great Again” hat-wearing Covington Catholic School students... Pool, for the record, has said that he does not see himself as a member of either the political right or left."

How the National Coalition for Men and Other MRA Groups Use the Rhetoric of 'Equality' to Punish Women - "Men's rights activists have also been lobbying to redefine sexism to include "misandry" as a way to codify their sense of victimhood, knock women down a peg or two, and further secure their elevated place in society (which they are very anxious about losing)"
Of course, feminists would never do such a thing
I love the irony of claiming that it's sexism to allow 'sexism' to cover misandry


Peter Kro-THOT-kin on Twitter - "We are in a war between those who choose to be human and those who choose to be white. In order to effectively stamp out fascism, we must take on all hierarchies at once. White supremacy cannot be disentangled from patriarchy and class oppression. Liberalism is not the answer."
From a blue checkmark, of course

Woman's friends turned on her after she slimmed down from size 28 to size zero - "the home educator, of West Salem in Ohio, says she was shocked to lose around 15 close pals, many of whom she’d known for years, after beating the bulge.Jen told Metro US: ‘It’s really sad. I lost probably ninety percent of my friends. I don’t know why. ‘They just became petty, they just stopped talking to me. It’s not because I’ve changed. My heart is the same. My outside has changed, but my inside is the same.’She added: ‘They would make fun of me, and pick on me because of what I’m eating. They would say things like “Oh, are you too good to eat pizza now?” I can’t eat the cheese or carbs anymore, since the surgery, because they make me feel sick. ‘Interestingly, it wasn’t always my larger friends who reacted badly. The issue with my slimmer friends was that I started to get more attention. You always look better as a thin person if you go out with less attractive friends, and I think some of them were resentful that I was starting to get attention too.’... she constantly feels cold since losing most of her body fat, leaving her too chilly to don the skimpy outfits she had dreamed of wearing while obese"

These are America’s favorite foods from around the world - "An international YouGov study of more than 25,000 people in 24 markets finds that American food ranks 7th out of the 34 cuisines. YouGov asked people which of 34 national cuisines they had tried and whether they liked or disliked them. Italian cuisine beat all other fares, with pizza and pasta standing among the most popular foods in the world. The cuisine received an average popularity score of 84% across the 24 nations we studied...
Italian, Chinese and Japanese cuisines are the world's most popular"
Least popular cuisines worldwide: Peruvian, Finnish, Saudi Arabian (Filipino is 4th)
Most culinarily cosmopolitan countries: Philippines, Singapore, Australia (liking the most types of food)
Most culinarily conservative: Japan, China, Thailand

Addendum: Interestingly British food is disliked in Europe but more appreciated outside it - no wonder there's Brexit!
Keywords: the Japanese like, Japanese food, cuisine globally, Italian cuisine is world's most popular, Washington Post, WashingtonPost, most popular cuisine in the world, countries rate each other's cuisines, countries rate each other's foods, rating cuisines by country, Italian cuisine is world’s most popular, rate other countries' cuisines, rate other cuisines, Peruvian food, Peruvian cuisine, Italian Japanese French

Homebuyer is shocked to discover the basin in his new luxurious flat is smaller than his hand - "A homebuyer in a Chinese city has vented his fury after discovering a sink smaller than his hand in his expensive flat.He was shocked to see the extremely small basin - meant for people to wash their hands in - while checking into his new home in a luxury residential complex in Guangzhou"

Hulu Series 'Shrill' Collaborates with Planned Parenthood: Getting an Abortion Makes You Feel 'Really Good' and 'F*cking Powerful' - "after Annie rests post-abortion, she tells her roommate that she now feels “really, really good” and “very fucking powerful.” Hulu has featured a number of shows with political messages over the last few years.The growing streaming service picked up Sarah Silverman’s commentary show I Love You, America, which featured plenty of political posturing, such as when Silverman compared President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler in October. I Love You, America was later cancelled after only 21 episodes.Hulu is also home to the series Handmaid’s Tale, which depicts a society where women are sexually subservient to men. The show has become a hit with the Resistance crowd on the left, many of whom think the world of Handmaid’s Tale — adapted for TV and based on the best-selling novel by Margaret Atwood — is comparable to Trump’s America."
So much for people being pro-abortion being a paranoid far right Christian conservative myth made up to oppress women

Actress declares that her 'first abortion' at age 19 was 'my best one.' And the audience loves it. - "Actress and outspoken abortion advocate Martha Plimpton ("The Goonies" and a host of TV shows) proudly told a Seattle audience that she got her "first abortion" at age 19 from a Seattle Planned Parenthood and that it was her "best" abortion... The crowd responded with wild cheering"

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 228 - William Gunn and Alex Holcombe on "Is Elsevier helping or hurting scientific progress?" - "The cost structure of some of the society journals are quite a lot higher than the cost structure of Elsevier. The AAAS, the publishers of one of the largest scientific journals, Science, they estimated that it would cost them $30,000 per article, which is, if they went to an all author-pays model. Which is quite a lot higher than Elsevier or some of the other commercial publishers charge. And in fact a lot of societies use Elsevier to host their journals because of that cost structure...
There was an analysis done… where they looked at the content of faculty tenure review packets. And they looked to see kind of what phrases were mentioned more, what things people were using to assess their faculty for promotion.And what they found that was a surprising finding, was that the impact factor of the journal -- which is bad way of measuring the importance of a journal, because it's just basically an average of how many things are published divided by how many citations were there, so it's a terrible metric…But that used to have this status of, oh researchers have no choice because we have to publish in these high impact factor journals because it's important for our career.And in fact, when you look at the data that is mentioned in single digit percentages of tenure review packets"

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 227 - Sarah Haider on "Dissent and free speech" - "I'm friends with scientists and teachers of science in Muslim majority countries, who regularly communicate with me how frustrating their jobs are. And how difficult it is for them to navigate doing what they do, and trying to really teach science and the benefits of science, and what’s the state of our knowledge today, without stepping on religious toes...
There is sort of a hindering of a group of people who are potentially my allies. And really on the same page. And they'll reach out to me and they'll say,“I'm 100% with you. I agree with you, but I don't want to retweet you. I'm not going to share it, because there's my best friend who won't speak to me again. Or maybe not that extreme, but that suddenly there's this cloud of suspicion that'll be cast over me, because I share somebody like you, or because I follow somebody like you.”"

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 224 - Rick Nevin on "The long-term effects of lead on crime" - "if you look at the rise and fall of crime, and map it against the rise and fall of lead exposure with a 23 year time lag, it was an unbelievably close fit. That might sound like a coincidence. I have since discovered exactly the same pattern in almost a dozen other nations around the world... People are generally unaware of the fact that black juvenile felony arrest rates now are less than 1/2 of what the white juvenile felony arrest rates were in the early 1980s.You can see the much steeper decline in black juvenile arrest rates over the last 20 or 30 years. That is, again, completely consistent with the much steeper decline in more severely elevated blood lead levels among black children 20 years earlier... The phase out of lead in gasoline, the cost was justified by the anticipated benefit of better educational achievement and higher lifetime earnings as a result of that.A researcher named Joel Schwartz, who actually won the MacArthur award, I believe, for his work on this subject, put together this perspective that there was a strong association between IQ levels and education attainment and subsequent lifetime earning.There's a lot of research, even as early as the 1960s, especially in the 70s, that showed that lead clearly had an impact on IQ scores. Putting those two together, he said "If we reduce childhood lead exposure, you're going to increase education attainment and significantly increase lifetime earnings as a result."...
In the case of James Flynn in particular -- Flynn gets more credit -- they actually call the rising IQ trend the "Flynn Effect" now. Even though he was credited with discovering it, he makes it clear in The Rising Curve that he doesn't think that any of the explanations for it are satisfactory, that there's something else missing. I'm convinced that it's lead.'...
'I have a weakness for book titles that reference earlier book titles as a response to them.There was a pair of books -- I forget the authors -- One was titled How the Mind Works. The second one was titled The Mind Doesn't Work That Way'"

Commie Gibberish Of The Day - Posts - "Sadiq Khan on why he allowed the Trump baby blimp: "Can you imagine if we limited freedom of speech because soembody's feelings might be hurt?""
"Arrests for offensive Facebook and Twitter posts soar in London"

Mike Prinke's answer to What was Darth Vader's general mental stability like? - Quora - "Anakin Skywalker suffers from anger issues at a young age as a consequence of his station as a slave. He is exceedingly talented, brilliant, even, but will see no opportunities in life, can’t escape under penalty of head explosion, and is frequently bullied. The novels reveal to us that Watto would often beat him as a child, and include a scene deleted from the films where he gets into a fight with another kid. It is likely that his mother was not spared any of the same kind of treatment but that as a young boy he was helpless to intervene on her behalf. He frequently fantasizes and even dreams about becoming a powerful Jedi so that he can come back and free all the slaves. This is the root of what would become a messiah complex later in life. He is in effect always trying to compensate for frustration and powerlessness he felt as a child."

Anti Social Justice Warriors - Posts - "We need to talk about how female monsters in fiction are always single"
"So are male monsters. And a lot of them have "unattainable" body types as well. Besides, I thought women were supposed to be all "independant", "not needing a man", and all that other shit. Or maybe there just isn’t enough time to cram in a villain love interest to make insecure feminists feel better about themselves?"

Facebook banning Milo - Primary Sources

After Milo's ban from Facebook, many people are justifying this with claims that he promoted "violence and hate" (as per Facebook's claims).

To judge the veracity of this claim, we should look at what Milo actually said rather than taking the word of the media and/or Facebook, for example that he called Islam a "barbaric, alien" culture:


https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/photos/a.599546946849871/1389350767869481/?type=3

"Whatever you think about her, Candace Owens had nothing to do with what happened in New Zealand. People aren’t radicalized by their own side. They get pushed to the far-Right BY THE LEFT, not by others on the Right.

Everyone on the Right in public life is constantly rejecting ethnonationalism and violence. I, for instance, have spent my entire career denouncing political violence. Candace has never been especially controversial and has never had many far-Right fans. She gets less popular the further Right you go.

Likewise, the violence directly inspired by grassroots Right-wing media figures comes from Antifa, not our supporters. Attacks like this happen because the establishment panders to and mollycoddles extremist Leftism and barbaric, alien religious cultures. Not when someone dares to point it out."


Presumably if you condemn jihadists (see below in context with the above - both statements seem to have been made in March 2019), you are Islamophobic.


https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/posts/1389926114478613

"I explicitly denounced violence. I said that we on the Right are constantly disavowing racists. I pointed out the inconvenient fact that it is Leftists committing the majority of political violence. And I criticized the establishment for pandering to Islamic fundamentalism. So Australia banned me again.

Note that not a single word or phrase I used is quoted by the Australian government. To do so would reveal that I said nothing remotely objectionable. This is why you should never temper your speech for the scolds, nannies and censors of the elite establishment: it doesn’t make any difference. They ban you anyway. All you do is compromise your principles.

Coleman and his party deserve to be annihilated at the next election for their betrayal of such fundamental western values as free speech and for cravenly folding to pressure from the Left. And I suspect that electoral annihilation is exactly what’s about to happen."


Apparently, if you denounce violence you are promoting it.


Of course there're some earlier remarks of his that are more controversial, but a lot of them are objective facts. For example from that article from 2016:

"There are eleven Muslim countries in which I could be killed for being a homosexual" (These Arab countries still think the death penalty for homosexuals is OK: "Currently, there are 6 countries where the death penalty is implemented for engaging in same-sex relationships including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Yemen and in certain provinces in Nigeria and Somalia.In 5 other countries, the implementation of the death penalty is not very common. These countries include Afghanistan, Mauritania, Pakistan, Qatar and the UAE.")

"Women are treated abominably everywhere in the Muslim world" (Women′s rights in the Islamic world: "Women will soon be allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, but what about other fundamental rights? We take a look at the lamentable state of women's rights in the Islamic kingdom and other countries across the region.")

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Features First-Ever Baptist Model In Floor-Length Denim Skirt

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Features First-Ever Baptist Model In Floor-Length Denim Skirt | The Babylon Bee

"In a controversial move, Sports Illustrated has unveiled photos of its first ever Baptist swimsuit model, pictured in a floor-length denim skirt, modest collared blouse, and no makeup or jewelry whatsoever, other than her purity ring.

The "hot" photoshoot includes pictures of the woman lying on the beach, rolling around in the water, and reading Passion and Purity on the beach in sexy poses, all while completely covered up.

Christians quickly praised the decision.

"We are glad SI finally sees the value of modesty," one leading evangelical said. "A woman mostly covered from head to toe is a great precedent to set, and we hope more models going forward will be dressed this modestly."

The woman, Becky Grace-Charity-Faith Benson, said she's proud to represent her Baptist religious heritage. "It's important for young Christian girls to see that beauty isn't just being skinny or wearing b*kinis---it's wearing a comfy pair of sneaks, a long, denim skirt you made at home, or a modest one-piece bathing suit under a swim shirt and long, flowy swim skirt."

The goodwill the magazine earned among Christians evaporated, however, when the magazine also included a modestly dressed Muslim woman in the issue, and evangelical leaders quickly called on the magazine to feature a less modestly dressed woman in her place."

(Re: Halima Aden)

Links - 3rd May 2019 (1)

University suspends student who complained about 'Islamisation' of Britain - "A student who claimed the NHS should not be free to immigrants and lamented about the 'Islamisation' of Britain has been kicked out of his university... The University of Central Lancashire told Mr Walsh he could return to his social work studies in September if he signed a good conduct agreement and agreed to undertake a diversity training course.However the first-year student from Wigan, Lancashire, is refusing to bow down.Mr Walsh, a Ukip member, said: 'Freedom of speech is a human right and I am determined to stand by this... the Government released a document this month to protect free speech in higher education bodies"

Lecturer sacked at uni where student was banned over halal comments - "Dr Chris Hill, 63, was dismissed in July after emailing colleagues saying he believed faith should be ‘mocked and ridiculed’, adding he was legally allowed to express dislike and antipathy towards religion... ‘The university has effectively reintroduced blasphemy as a crime on campus. In my view, critical thinking about religion is an essential part of democratic and academic life.’"

Listening to Music Impairs Creativity - "The music did tend to boost the mood of the participants who heard it, but that did not translate to higher levels of creativity."

Dealing with dining apps and the discount dilemma - ""There's a big difference between yielding and promotions," she says. "Promotions can cheapen your brand, but not yielding. Singapore Airlines does yielding by having different prices on different days a week. But is it a cheap brand? No, it's not. And an empty table is the same as an empty seat on a plane. It's perishable. Once the plane takes off, you've earned $0 from it.""

There's a Really Weird Link Between Cats And Entrepreneurs - "Almost 1,500 students who tested positive for exposure to T. gondii were 1.4 times more likely to be a business major. They were also 1.7 times more likely to have an emphasis on 'management and entrepreneurship'.As for the 197 business professionals the researchers evaluated, being T. gondii positive made them 1.8 times more likely to have started their own business at some point... Other studies have noticed a correlation between infection rates and neuroticism, for example.Others have found a negative link between T. gondii and economic performance, suggesting what makes some people risk-takers could increase insecurity and low ability to trust, weakening institutions rather than helping them grow."

Mind-altering parasite spread by CATS 'may lead to schizophrenia' - "the largest study of its kind, has found having the parasite could raise the risk of developing schizophrenia by 50 per cent. Unusual links between T. gondii and mind-altering behaviour, such as risk-taking, depression and car accidents, already exist... Patients infected with T. gondii were almost 50 per cent more likely to have been diagnosed with schizophrenia than those without, results showed.The association was even stronger when accounting for 'temporality' - patients who had not already been diagnosed with schizophrenia.According to the researchers, this 'corroborates that Toxoplasma has a positive effect on the rate of schizophrenia'."
Toxoplasmosis!

Chinese woman, 27, has had SEVENTEEN abortions in six years - "A young woman in China has been told by doctors she might never be able to have babies in the future after undergoing 17 abortions in six years... The patient, known by a pseudonym Xiao Ju, has been in a relationship with her boyfriend for six years and the couple don't use contraception"

Jobless mum advises daughter to get pregnant for easy life on benefits - "Sinead Clarkson, 36, has no qualifications, has never worked and rakes in £1,200 a month from the State.She has now admitted encouraging her 19-year-old daughter Melissa to follow her shameless example and ‘work the system’ by having a baby... Her mother, who has another daughter, Amie, aged 12, said: ‘I am better off on benefits. I refuse to work for a pittance and struggle.‘I don’t have any qualifications so it is easier to claim money than persuade an employer to give me a job."

(PDF) Female Economic Dependence and the Morality of Promiscuity - "In environments in which female economic dependence on a male mate is higher, male parental investment is more essential. In such environments, therefore, both sexes should value paternity certainty more and thus object more to promiscuity (because promiscuity undermines paternity certainty). We tested this theory of anti-promiscuity morality in two studies (N = 656 and N = 4,626) using U.S. samples. In both, we examined whether opposition to promiscuity was higher among people who perceived greater female economic dependence in their social network. In Study 2, we also tested whether economic indicators of female economic dependence (e.g., female income, welfare availability) predicted anti-promiscuity morality at the state level. Results from both studies supported the proposed theory. At the individual level, perceived female economic dependence explained significant variance in anti-promiscuity morality, even after controlling for variance explained by age, sex, religiosity, political conservatism, and the anti-promiscuity views of geographical neighbors. At the state level, median female income was strongly negatively related to anti-promiscuity morality and this relationship was fully mediated by perceived female economic dependence. These results were consistent with the view that anti-promiscuity beliefs may function to promote paternity certainty in circumstances where male parental investment is particularly important."

Unfair share of trainee places is given to white boys, warns report - "Employers need to reserve places on apprenticeship schemes for young women, disabled people and ethnic minorities to create a more level playing field, the country’s equality body has said.The government has pledged to create 3 million apprenticeships in England by next year. But almost 90% of apprentices aged 16-24 are white, compared with 82% of the population.While there are similar numbers of female and male apprentices, women remain significantly under-represented in the better-paid industries... With National Apprenticeship Week starting on Monday, the Equality and Human Rights Commission says firms need to take steps to get more people from minority groups into trainee schemes, favouring them against other similarly qualified candidates if necessary."
Given that women are already over-represented in higher education...

College Forced Conservative To Advocate Liberal Causes. Now The Case Is Going To A Jury. - "William Felkner was once a graduate student at Rhode Island College (RIC), working toward a degree from the college’s School of Social Work. As part of his “policy and organizing” class, his professor required him to lobby the state legislature for progressive “social and economic justice” policies, which Felkner, a conservative libertarian, did not support. When Felkner refused to advocate for policies with which he disagreed, he was given a failing grade in the class"

Boycott Watami: The Izakaya you Might Want to Skip - "the Watami business conglomerate has been rated in the top five on the list of Black Companies in Japan since 2012. Black Companies, called ブラック企業 (black kigyou) in Japanese mean companies with unethical work and hiring practices. Companies with high instances of sexual harassment, unpaid overtime, grueling workloads, low pay, and discrimination against temp workers (among other things) are what can put a company on the literal “black” list. Japanese Black Companies are also usually hostile to unions and don’t abide by the proper laws regarding maternity leave and overtime pay.

Orwell & Goode - Posts - "Aussaults old man. Made a hero, given +$20k"
"Smiles at old man. Pilloried by media, life ruined"

Trevor Noah Is Fed Up With Wokeness: 'This S**t Is Getting Ridiculous' - "Trevor Noah thinks Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke is being forced to apologize too much ― and it’s time to put a stop to it"
He can never stop being a white man, so

Kelvin Cochran’s Christian Views Cost Atlanta Fire Chief His Job - "To this point, Kelvin Cochran’s story is one that would make a university diversity officer rejoice. Born poor and black, he rose above poverty and discrimination to become not only a professional leader but also one who dedicated himself to combating the discrimination that had wounded him early in life. He was professional. He was inclusive. He was compassionate. Unfortunately for Cochran, however, he was also Christian — and that brings us to the rest of the story... The idea that an Atlanta fire chief could possibly hold to — and express — orthodox Christian beliefs kicked up a firestorm. After a flurry of meetings, Atlanta police chief George Turner called Cochran and informed him of the controversy. Four days later, Cochran was suspended without pay. His suspension letter failed to outline the charges against him and also failed to detail a single act in violation of the 21 provisions of the city’s Code of Ordinances that constitute a “cause of action” for termination... Cochran fought discrimination his entire life. Cochran was an Obama appointee in the Department of Homeland Security. Cochran made a concerted effort to include his LGBT employees. Cochran was fired."

Fired after writing anti-gay book, ex-fire chief set to receive $1.2M settlement - "Atlanta's City Council has voted to pay $1.2 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the city's former fire chief who was dismissed after he wrote a book that included anti-gay passages."

The Screen - Posts - "A recent Freedom of Information Act request to the West Midlands Police, UK, has found women are the victims in the majority of revenge porn attacks but, they are also the majority of perpetrators as well... An explanation for why women are the majority of perpetrators and victims can be found in Dr Tania Reynolds’ research. Dr Reynolds, a social psychology postdoctoral researcher at the Kinsey Institute, conducted a series of five studies to examine the gossiping techniques of women and the motivations behind them. She found gossip isn’t just a trivial part of conversations between women rather, women use it as a weapon against perceived rivals"

Testosterone from a brother in the womb can make female twins less successful, study suggests - "our findings are consistent with the idea that passive exposure to prenatal testosterone changes women’s education, labour market and fertility outcomes"

FSU research offers insight into why women gossip - "people don’t like malicious gossipers. She went on to explain that those who frame gossip as concern are given an advantage. By phrasing a nasty rumor sweetly, it still harms the perceptions of the person they’re talking about but the gossiper isn’t seen as vindictive.In this way, gossip can be used as a strategy to tarnish the reputation of another person while protecting one’s own"

US Women's Soccer Team Files Gender Discrimination Lawsuit - "The women’s and men’s teams have separate collective bargaining agreements with U.S. Soccer.While the men receive higher bonuses when they play for the national team, the women have guaranteed salaries that their counterparts do not.Additional multimillion-dollar bonuses for World Cup participation are paid out by FIFA — the international governing body of soccer — not the U.S. federation. A pool of over $400 million is available for the 32-team men’s tournament, compared to only $30 million for the 24-team women’s event.The bonuses are based on the revenue each tournament pulls in. While the 2015 Women’s World Cup generated close to $73 million, the 2018 men’s tournament generated an estimated $6.1 billion in revenue. Male players actually received a smaller percentage of the revenue, 9 percent, compared to the 13 percent paid out to female players for their tournament."
Equal pay for unequal work, of course. Otherwise it's 'discrimination'

Thursday, May 02, 2019

Links - 2nd May 2019 (3) ('Racism', Knife crime, Anti-Semitism etc)

Chipotle manager fired for refusing to serve a group of black customers may be rehired - "A Chipotle manager was fired from a Saint Paul, Minnesota branch after a video of her refusing to serve black customers went viral. But social media users pointed to old tweets from the man who posted the video that suggested he had a history of dining and dashing. In the video, posted to Twitter last week, the white manager is seen laughing and telling the group of men, “You gotta pay cause you never have money when you come in here.”... “They got that woman fired out of a job because they wanted to lie for retweets. i am livid,” one person tweeted in response"

St. Paul Chipotle manager says she was standing up for her employees - "Dominique Moran, the manager at the Grand Avenue Chipotle in St. Paul, said she had her team’s best interest in mind when she repeatedly refused service to the group of men Thursday night. She was surprised that Chipotle initially fired her and hasn’t decided if she will return to her job with the store... In the videos, Masud Ali, 21, says he and his friends were racially stereo­typed... Moran said that her crew members recognized two of the men from a previous night when they allegedly didn’t have money to pay for their food, something she said has happened many other times... “It was really frightening to be honest,” Moran said. “From our point of view we had five cameras on us.” She said her crew was tired of having to put up with the men and “I think the anger came out of me. I was scared and panicking. I didn’t know what to do so I called the police.”... In several other tweets, apparently posted by Ali between 2014 and 2016, he repeatedly joked about dining and dashing from Chipotle and other restaurants. Those tweets have since been deleted.In a statement Sunday, Chipotle said the company was already aware of Ali’s tweets when it decided to fire the manager."
It seems the safest thing to do is to let your employer lose money

Former Equality Commission chairman TREVOR PHILLIPS: ‘This is black children killing black children’ - "I’m the son of poor immigrants and have no doubt that, were I a teenager today, I too would be caught up in the carnage.This epidemic of knife crime has not appeared from nowhere. It has been gathering for some time, yet the warnings from me and others were ignored. Even now, the political response has been pathetic, focusing – irrelevantly, in my opinion – on police numbers... the forlorn attempts by politicians and media to ignore this truth – to avoid ‘stigmatising’ minority communities – has been counterproductive, a hand-wringing dereliction of responsibility. It might make ‘right-on’ white liberals feel better. But the price of their smugness is an ongoing bloody massacre of black children with a casualty list that seems to lengthen by the day... In areas where the gangs are primarily black or from another ethnic group, police might even be permitted to apply for exemption from race discrimination laws for a limited period. This could free their hands to act against specific targets – and few would be more pleased than minority parents who constantly worry that their children may never come home... At the same time, we need to disrupt the supply of fresh youngsters entering the cycle of death. Instead of spending yet more energy and cash on pointless campaigns against social media ‘hate crimes’, we should offer families at risk new homes outside the area."

Clownworld: UK Criminals Steal ‘Knife Amnesty’ Bin - "Criminals in the UK town of Weston-super-Mare broke into and stole the knives from a ‘knife amnesty box’ that was located on a street corner."

Thug let off 21 times for carrying a knife, and one arrested for 17 separate assaults on police - "Criminals are being spared jail despite committing dozens of offences involving violence or weapons, according to shock new figures.One dangerous offender was convicted 21 times for possession of a knife without being sent to prison. Another committed 33 assaults before being jailed for his 34th.The disturbing examples of ‘soft justice’ come amid fears that the approach is fuelling Britain’s epidemic of violence and knife crime. Last night, a senior police representative said the figures showed criminals were ‘laughing at the justice system’. Other critics predicted that the scandal would only worsen under Government plans to axe short jail sentences."
Of course it's more important to crack down on hate crimes

Germany: Stabbings and Knife Crimes at Record High - "Police reported more than 4,100 knife-related crimes in 2018, compared to around 3,800 reported during 2017 — and only 400 in 2008. Overall, during the past ten years, knife-related crimes in Germany have increased by more than 900% — from one a day to more than ten a day.
German media do not report most knife-related violence. Crimes that are reported are often dismissed as "isolated incidents" that are unrelated to mass immigration. Moreover, many crime reports, including those in police blotters, omit references to the nationalities of the perpetrators and victims — apparently to avoid inflaming anti-immigration sentiments.... Many Germans have the sense that danger lurks everywhere, but the lack of official statistics seemingly allows German authorities to pretend that the problem is imaginary"

Hundreds of police swarm Melbourne’s CBD as ethnic groups clash - "African and Pacific Islander teenage gangs went to war in Melbourne on Saturday night.Witnesses watched on in horror as hundreds of riot squad officers were forced to use capsicum spray and batons to break up a series of organised brawls across the city.One man likened the scenes to 'something out of Braveheart', claiming officers could do little but watch on as the clashing groups fought outside Flinders Street Station... Moomba Festival has been spoiled by youth gang violence for the past four years... Last year African gang violence ruined Moomba for the third year in a row, with dozens of teenagers caught on camera charging onto a tram with police in hot pursuit... Federal Liberal MP Jason Wood said police were reluctant to make arrests due to fear of criticism."

Vietnamese, Sudanese gang conflict in Melbourne - ""There will be huge conflict. We need to take action."That's the ominous warning from a masked Vietnamese teenager. He's among many in his Melbourne community who've vowed revenge on the Sudanese after a string of brazen daylight assaults at shopping strips... Social analyst David Chalke said while crime gangs had been around forever, the combination of race and cultural tensions was "far more incendiary"."

Businessman, 77, with advanced motor neurone disease takes his own life by removing oxygen mask - "However John said he did not want a change in the law in favour of assisted dying as it 'could make people vulnerable to pressure'."

Radio 4's Woman's Hour team given 'impartiality training' after rules broken in Brett Kavanaugh show - "Miss Garvey, who has led protests over the BBC's gender pay gap, was ticked off by bosses after she gave 'the impression of sympathising' with a guest who believed Mr Kavanaugh, 54, was guilty of sexual assault."

Muslim pogroms against Jews prior to Zionism - "A popular myth amongst those that describe themselves as Anti-Zionists[1] is that this conflict between Jews and Muslims only started when large scale Jewish immigration to Palestine commenced. This myth has become widely accepted in the Main Stream Media (MSM) and in academic institutions it has become almost universally accepted that Jews and Muslims lived in peace prior to 1948. As such this myth is taught as fact in schools and universities worldwide by educators who have scant regard for the truth...
Of all of these in recent (Pre Zionism )the Safed [pogrom of 1834 stands out for its savagry. This pogrom is known in Jewish history as ‘The great plunder of Safed’ and it lasted for a remarkable 33 days of uninterrupted murder, raping and pillaging of Jewish lives and property (15th June 1834 to the 17th of July) The motivation, along with greed, was clearly anti-Semitic."

'We despair': French Jews feel abandoned by government and society - "Jews in France are in “despair” and feel so abandoned by government and society that they see no future at all for their children, prominent members of the community have said... "20 per cent of all French people also believe in a Zionist plot. We have to accept the idea that today there are several sections of society ranged against the Jews. Those include many Muslims — not all Muslims — the extreme right and the extreme left.”... the judiciary was failing to grasp the gravity of the situation, pointing to a recent decision by a judge that a shooting attack on a man leaving a synagogue was not a hate crime."

We May Never Know the Motivations of the Man Who Shouted Anti-Semitic Slurs Before Trying to Kills Jews - "As if the target selection and time and day of the week of the attack weren’t enough, Abdi helpfully explained why he was doing what he was doing as he was doing it: The driver “yelled several expletives at the victims referencing their Jewish heritage,” according to an LAPD deputy chief. So, this is an open-and-shut case of someone very nearly killing Jews merely because they are Jews, right here on U.S. soil, in the middle of a major American metropolitan area. Or is it?... it seems mental illness and addiction were to blame for a series of attacks on Jewish targets and only Jewish targets. Maybe that’s because even these fairly threatening yet grindingly routizined manifestations of anti-Semitism don’t slot into an existing media or political narrative: As The New York Times noted last month, none of the anti-Semitic incidents in New York during the previous 22 months was the responsibility of anyone associated with a far right-wing group. The attack in L.A. may have been of a kind that just isn’t deemed to be important or notable at the moment. Or maybe, because it can’t be blamed on a neo-fascist extremist, it’s contours are somehow more difficult for journalists and political leaders to recognize. It’s a shame we’ll never get to find out why it happened."

Are Attacks Against Brooklyn Jews About Anti-Semitism? - "Jews are being targeted, say residents of these communities, by members of non-white ethnic groups who see Jews as symbols of gentrification in their neighborhoods.“It’s less of an anti-Semitic thing than they needed a target to respond to this word: gentrification,” said Mendel Turner, 28, a salesman at the Borsalino hat store on Kingston Avenue... Public school children frequently yell “Heil Hitler!” into the front gate of her kids’ school, she said... while the attacks are targeting Jews, it may be because black people identify Judaism as “a form of almost hyper-whiteness"
And this comes from the Forward, a Jewish magazine

Addendum:
New York Times Focuses on ‘Gentrification’ as Cause of Antisemitic Attacks - "if it is really “gentrification” that young African-American men are upset by, why don’t they beat up the gentrifiers, that is, the wealthier new arrivals to these neighborhoods, the hipsters or the yuppies, rather than Orthodox Jews who have been there for a long time?In addition, these neighborhoods — Williambsburg and Crown Heights, in particular — have been gentrifying for decades. Yet, though there was a progrom in Crown Heights in 1991, the current outbreak of antisemitic violence seems relatively sudden and recent... It’s possible that the Times attention to the topic is an example of something I noticed back in February 2017 under the headline, “Trump’s Big Achievement: Making The New York Times Care About Antisemitism.” I wrote then, “Of all the possible consequences of a Trump presidency that have been warned about or hoped for, a heightened attention by New York Times editors to antisemitism probably falls in the category of unexpectedly positive developments (though here, too, to the extent that it inaccurately depicts Jews primarily as victims, we may want to be careful what we wish for).”It’s possible too that the outbreak of antisemitism (or the attention to it) is a result not of Trump but of Democratic Party politicians, such as Ilhan Omar, a Democratic representative from Minnesota who is from Somalia. She openly advocates a boycott of Israel and has said American political support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins,” a reference to $100 bills.Maybe the violence has something to do with the bail reform that went into effect in New York on January 1. That is a possibility that the Times explored in a different article but makes no mention of in this one.Perhaps the hate is being spread from local mosques, of which there are several.And if “gentrification” is the cause of the tension, one wonders, too, why the Hispanics aren’t attacking, as they did in the early 1990s? Or, for that matter, why aren’t the Orthodox Jews, who also face gentrification, attacking random people on the streets?Usually when a neighborhood gentrifies the consequence is less street crime, not more.Ascribing motives or causation for antisemitism, which is essentially irrational, is always a risky endeavor. But I myself was priced out of a Brooklyn neighborhood a few years ago, and it never occurred to me to beat anyone up over it, least of all a visibly Orthodox Jew."
Maybe gentrification explains why there're quite a few reports of anti-Asian attacks in Vancouver, but (almost) none in Toronto

Now they call us ‘White Jews’: A new American antisemitism - "The labeling of Jews as “white” and debates on how to “treat Jews,” as if Jews are packages in a supermarket is a form of dehumanizing rhetoric designed to force Jewish people into a binary of “white/non-white” that is currently trendy in US discussions. The new toxic discussion taking place primarily in the United States is designed to label Jews as “white supremacists.”... Rebecca Vilkomerson tweeted about it on December 24.“We white Jews especially need to recognize that centering out own status as victims here is a power move, as well as a way to avoid self-reflection on our relative status in a white supremacist world”... It is particularly interesting, given the history of antisemitism, how Jews are now considered not only recipients of white privilege, due to their often passing as white, but are seen as emblematic of whiteness and a part of white supremacy... How can this be, only 70 years after the Holocaust that the people genocided for being non-white and non-European are now called white supremacists? It is part of a carefully managed agenda in the United States to not permit Jews to be part of discussions about “people of color” or racism. The reason for this is that hatred of Jews has always been about creating an all-encompassing other that is dehumanized and then defining that as “the Jews.”... Today in the US where the popular view in some left-leaning circles is that being “white” is a kind of slander, Jews are “white Jews.”The term “white Jews” is anti-Jewish because no other group is subjected to this same slur of forcibly shoehorning them into a false whiteness. For instance, Muslims, of which there are almost two billion, are not called “white Muslims.”... The only minority group in America told that it cannot discuss its suffering, and that it is “white.”"
Power relations!
Sadly the author does not realise that identity politics should just be put in the dustbin


Why is the story of the Jewish refugees so little known? - "Even where there is awareness of the mass expulsion of Jews from Arab lands, they are not generally seen as victims: their plight was apparently successfully resolved. In the fashionable “hierarchy of oppression” of marginalized groups, Jews rank well down the list."

Anti-Semitism row at University of Essex as students vote AGAINST starting a Jewish Society - "Hundreds of students at the University of Essex have voted against setting up a Jewish society on the campus, while a lecturer voiced his opposition on Facebook claiming it was a group for 'Zionists'.More than 200 student union members - around a third of those polled - answered 'no' to the question 'Should there be a Jewish society?'... Dr Ali also expressed opposition to the idea of a Jewish society on a Facebook post on the University of Essex Freshers' Page 2018-2019.The original post said that Israel plans to 'expel 36,000 Palestinians from the Negev', and Dr Ali commented that 'the Zionists next want to create a society here at our university!' It is not the first time Dr Ali has shared questionable and controversial material on Facebook, including one post that appeared to deny the Holocaust... There are already several religious societies currently ratified by the university's student's union - including those for Christianity and Islam."
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