Links - 1st April 2020 (2)

Emerald Robinson ✝️ on Twitter - "Legacy media outlets continue to lose their audience after the Russia Hoax: CNN hit 3 year low in ratings. USA Today now has only 178k paid individual subscribers. The paper may soon be phased out. MSNBC ratings fell 18%. Brian Stetler (CNN) had only 85k viewers in Dec 2019."

Belarus’s Soviet Economy Has Worked Better Than You Think - Bloomberg - "Call it the Belarus exception. Almost 28 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this deeply cautious nation of 9.5 million—rolled over through the centuries by Moscow’s wars with other parts of Europe—has kept alive many of the industrial jobs and social ecosystems that centrally planned factory budgets once supported across the bloc... its transition from command to semi-market economy, delivered at the speed of a mud-bound tractor, has by some economic measures made this a better place to live than any other former Soviet republic, barring the three Baltic States that joined the European Union... In place of the potholed roads, rundown buildings, and the depopulation found in some other struggling ex-Soviet nations, President Alexander Lukashenko, now 65 and in charge since 1994, has turned Minsk into something of a Soviet theme park. It’s a vision of how he believes things might have been without the communist empire’s 1991 collapse. Statues of Lenin and other Bolshevik heroes still dominate cityscapes. Stalin-era buildings and boulevards are immaculately maintained and painted; parks are manicured and pavements swept clean... It was made possible by billions of dollars’ worth of de facto annual Russian energy subsidies, in the form of large quantities of crude oil which Belarus buys at a discount. Russia is withdrawing those"

You Can Get a Pilot License in India After Just 35 Minutes in Air - Bloomberg - "“The fudging of log books is rampant both in airlines and in flying clubs,” said Mohan Ranganathan, a former commercial pilot and aviation safety consultant based in Chennai. He said the 2011 audit found violations in most flying clubs in the country. “Hours were logged with aircraft not even in airworthy condition. One aircraft had no engines but several hundred hours were logged.”... Over logging has been common practice in India since the 1960s, according to a retired commander who has flown in India for over 40 years... airlines can soon tell if a pilot has faked certificates because they don’t have basic skills, but the carrier can’t fire them because they have DGCA licenses. To bring them up to scratch, airlines have to do expensive corrective training.. Even with the minimum 200 hours mandated by the Indian government, pilots would be unlikely to have experienced all of the weather and other conditions they’re likely to meet flying a commercial jet, said Neil Hansford, an aviation consultant, who has worked in the industry in Asia, Europe and his home country, Australia since 1984.  Airlines should hire pilots with at least 1,000 hours of flying time and preferably match the 1,500 hours mandated by Qantas Airways Ltd... For budget airlines in Asia, that’s often not an option. Singapore’s Tiger Airways Holding Ltd. said it hires holders of multi-crew or commercial pilot licenses with about 200 flying hours and then gives them further training.  Full-service carrier Asiana Airlines Inc., based in Seoul, looks for at least 300 hours, said spokesman Daewoong Im. “Realistically, it’s difficult to get a non-military person with more than 300 flying hours”.. While schools in the U.S. use a Hobbs Meter, which automatically logs flight times and other data for training aircraft, some Indian schools still enter flight times by hand, making it easier to falsify data. Indian flying academies that falsify data run cars on aviation fuel to avoid a mismatch between flight times and fuel consumption, said three people who have worked directly with flying schools in the country."

‘Ramayana, Mahabharata Are True Accounts Of The Period...Not Myths’ - "I think it is time to think about India’s history from an Indian perspective. For the last 60 years, our writing and understanding of history has been influenced by the West. Indian research has been far too dependent on the West to write its own history. We are dependent on their translations and interpretation. And, these are my personal views, history writing in India is Euro-centric and imperialistic... Western schools of thought look at material evidence of history. We can’t produce material evidence for everything. India is a continuing civilisation. To look for evidence would mean digging right though the hearts of villages and displacing people. We only have to look at the people to figure out the similarities in their lives and the depiction in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. For instance, the Ramayana mentions that Rama had travelled to Bhadrachalam (in Andhra Pradesh). A look at the people and the fact that his having lived there for a while is in the collective memory of the people cannot be discounted in the search for material evidence. In continuing civilisations such as ours, the writing of history cannot depend only on archaeological evidence. We have to depend on folklore too."
This is your brain on anti-colonialism

Why Hitler is not a dirty word in India - "From coffee mugs and laptop cases to ice cream and artwork, everything sells in the Fuhrer’s name in India.. His 1925 autobiography, Mein Kampf, has been a bestseller since it was first published here in 1928. Indian management students scour it for leadership lessons... ‘Hitler’ became a soft pejorative used for strict teachers, bosses, even family patriarchs. Romantic soaps showed boyfriends flirtatiously calling their ladylove “Hitler-like”. A TV serial on a rather strict woman was called Hitler Didi, while the all-time superhit Sholay had an overblown caricature of Hitler in the form of a strict jailor. These representations have made Hitler more acceptable, even cute, in India... certain nationalists believe he was great as Bose had allied with him and even raised an Indian army in Germany called Freies Indien Legion."
This probably ties in to Indian anti-British sentiment

Why Were Medieval Europeans So Obsessed With Long, Pointy Shoes? - Atlas Obscura - "Shoes with absurdly long toes were expensive and would clearly impair the wearer from efficiently partaking in any kind of physical labor. So they were also an indicator of leisure and luxury, free of extraneous effort or the tyranny of practicality... Poulaines also had a sort of sex appeal, being cut to show off the colored hose around a lord’s ankle—considered quite sexy at the time... Most poulaines that survive today were made of leather, but medieval Europeans would have used every possible fabric, Keily says. The upper echelons of society, for example, used embroidered textiles, velvets, and silks. Such shoes might be hand-painted or etched with intricate patterns. Though these opulent poulaines appear in many medieval paintings, no actual examples survive... Poulaines stand out even more because medieval fashion was often governed by clean lines and a practical, chaste minimalism, Shawcross says. (Poulaines also marked a rare period in history when men’s fashion outshone women’s in terms of sheer frill, according to Keily.) Perhaps the best explanation for this confounding flamboyance is that the shoes emerged soon after the Black Death killed 30 to 60 percent of the population of Europe. “It may have been a reaction to a type of austerity”.. Eventually, the English crown felt the need to intervene, in part because of the lascivious connotations that the increasingly extended toe-tips carried. “People thought the longer the toe, the more masculine the wearer,” Shawcross says. “But some people weren’t keen on that connotation.” Parliament equated wearing the shoes to public indecency, and stepped forward to put limits on a variety of racy fashions... The only other city known to have taken a stand against the shoes was Paris, which had banned them in 1368."

Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident - "This paper provides a large scale, empirical evaluation of unintended effects from invoking the precautionary principle after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. After the accident, all nuclear power stations ceased operation and nuclear power was replaced by fossil fuels, causing an exogenous increase in electricity prices. This increase led to a reduction in energy consumption, which caused an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures. We estimate that the increase in mortality from higher electricity prices outnumbers the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting the decision to cease nuclear production has contributed to more deaths than the accident itself"
Not to mention all the deaths from the other aspects of Fukushima hysteria which also outnumbered those from the accident

The fragile generation - "‘I don’t know if most college students, even at those elite schools, are more fragile. What we do know is that rates of depression and anxiety [have been] sky-rocketing since around 2011.’Haidt says these issues are not related to the millennial generation, but to those born after 1995, who grew up with social media as the norm. He calls them the i-gen (the internet generation). This tendency towards vulnerability has a number of causes, he says, but there are three main ones: social media, rising national polarisation, and the decline in unsupervised (adult-free) time during childhood... this over-protection of children may have done more harm than good. ‘The key psychological idea in understanding the rise in fragility is the idea of anti-fragility’... 'If you protect your kids from germs and bacteria then the immune system can’t develop and your kids will be immunologically fragile… So protection can sometimes be harmful if there is an anti-fragile system at work'...
‘Kids need conflict, insult, exclusion – they need to experience these things thousands of times when they’re young in order to develop into psychologically mature adults. Every adult has to learn to handle these things and not get upset, especially by minor instances. But in the name of protecting our children we have deprived them of the unsupervised time they need to learn how to navigate conflict among themselves. That is one of the main reasons why kids and even college students today find words, ideas and social situations more intolerable than those same words, ideas and situations would have been for previous generations of students.’
The heightened vulnerability of college students has had a chilling effect on discussion in the academic world, and Haidt sees this in his day-to-day experience on campus... This is disastrous for academic life, as Haidt points out: ‘A university cannot function if people will not put their ideas forth, will not contest ideas that they think are wrong, will not stand up for ideas that they think are right.’... ‘Several people on the left are noticing that college students are less effective politically as activists, as progressives, when they have this morality and this ethos with such heavy concept creep.’... 'for 20 to 30 years now, Americans have been systematically undermining the development of resilience or toughness of their children.’ Referencing the work of Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-range Kids, he concludes: ‘We have made our children too safe to succeed.’"

Tommy Robinson was not 'convicted of journalism' - "Robinson approached the defendants last year as they arrived at court demanding to know their thoughts on the trial, and then asked why the press was not harrassing them as it had harrassed Robinson – which the judge deemed, given the wider context, to be an invitation to Robinson’s supporters ‘to engage in vigilante action’. The trial was covered by reporting restrictions which made it illegal to report details of the case until its conclusion. Ever since the verdict, Robinson’s supporters have claimed he is the victim of state oppression... his supporters do have a point about the level of media hatred thrown at Robinson, compared with the media’s treatment of predominantly Muslim grooming gangs"

The war over words - "It is a sign of the times that the intervention of the police in the debate about political language was not viewed as unusual by media commentators. Thankfully, Britain is not a police state, so it is still rare for the police to lecture parliamentarians about the language they use and the ideas they express. And yet no one asked the question, ‘When did the police assume responsibility for telling politicians what they should and should not say?’. Nor was the supposed link between the tone of political debate and hate crime seriously interrogated. Indeed, many in the media treated this new, literal policing of political language as a welcome development. Also, very few questions have been asked about the one-sided character of this campaign against ‘toxic’ speech. So, the tendency to hurl loaded words like xenophobe, fascist and racist at supporters of Brexit is rarely questioned by the crusaders against hateful language. The casual manner in which anti-Brexiteers use words like fascist to describe their opponents suggests they are not really interested in linguistic moderation... if Brexiteers really must avoid using the word ‘surrender’, then how are they meant to draw attention to what they perceive as the willingness of some politicians to kowtow to the EU? They could use the word ‘capitulate’ or ‘yield’, I suppose – but it is likely that these terms would be denounced as toxic, too. The principal objective of the new policing of words is not to moderate political language but to control what can be said. Because if words like traitor, surrender or betrayal cannot be used in political discourse, then it actually becomes very difficult to express a particular idea... This is what Orwell meant when he said that those who control language are able to determine what is considered to be true, what we are allowed to think... One of the consequences of verbal purification is to change the meaning of words. Consider the word ‘controversial’ itself. In recent years, campus culture warriors have turned this into a negative word. Why? Because genuine controversy provokes serious debates, and the outcome of a serious debate cannot be controlled in advance by censorious moral entrepreneurs"

My teen boys are blind to rape culture - The Washington Post (Jody Allard ) - "“Oh boy,” my son said, rolling his eyes. “Not rape culture again.”... My sons are part of the problem... When it comes to speaking out against rape culture and questioning their own ideas and behavior, they become angry and defensive. Not all men, they remind me, and my guts wrench as my own sons mimic the vitriol of a thousand online trolls. No matter how often my sons remind me that they are good men, they don’t understand that being “good” is an action. You don’t earn the honor by simply shaking your head when you hear about Turner and other rapists being given lenient sentences. You earn it by acting to end rape culture, and by doing it even when it’s awkward and uncomfortable as hell... they aren’t allies in the fight against rape culture because they refuse to acknowledge their own culpability when they call a girl a slut or a whore, laugh at a sexist joke or remain silent when their friends talk about their own questionable sexual behavior.And in this broken system, anyone who isn’t with us is against us. Particularly, and especially, men. Even my own sons — even yours. It’s not enough to teach our sons about consent; we have to encourage them to have the courage to speak out against rape culture, too."
Is this child abuse?

I Knew My Son Was Depressed, But I Didn't Know He Wanted to Die (Jody Allard)
Maybe, just maybe...