Links - 23rd May 2020 (1)

Evidence That Conservative Students Really Do Self-Censor - The Atlantic - "While majorities favor more viewpoint diversity and free-speech norms, an intolerant faction of roughly a quarter of students believe it is okay to silence or suppress some widely held views that they deem wrong.
Students across political perspectives engage in classroom self-censorship.
Students harbor divisive stereotypes about classmates with different beliefs, and a substantial minority are not open to engaging socially with classmates who don’t share their views.
Disparaging comments about political conservatives are common...
If confronted with an especially objectionable viewpoint, how appropriate would it be to take a series of actions, such as asking a tough question, publishing a dissent, or more extreme measures? An alarming 25.5 percent of survey respondents said it would be appropriate to “create an obstruction, such that a campus speaker endorsing this idea could not address an audience.” This authoritarian view was held by about 19 percent of self-identifying liberals, 3 percent of moderates, and 3 percent of conservatives... Also troubling were the undergraduates who reported having kept an opinion to themselves in the classroom, even though the opinion was related to the class, because they were worried about the potential consequences of expressing it. Almost 68 percent of conservatives censored themselves in this way, along with roughly 49 percent of moderates and 24 percent of liberals... almost a quarter of conservative students reported being more than slightly concerned that peers would file a complaint against them for speech related to a class they are in together...
Among students who self-identify as liberals, some 10 percent said they hear “disrespectful, inappropriate, or offensive comments” about foreign students at least several times a semester, 14 percent said they hear disparaging comments about Muslims, 20 percent said they hear such comments about African Americans, 20 percent said they hear such comments about Christians, 21 percent said they hear such comments about LGBTQ individuals, and 57 percent said they hear such comments about conservatives. Among moderates, 68 percent said that they hear “disrespectful, inappropriate, or offensive comments” about conservatives at least several times a semester. Out conservatives may face social isolation. Roughly 92 percent of conservatives said they would be friends with a liberal, and just 3 percent said that they would not have a liberal friend. Among liberals, however, almost a quarter said they would not have a conservative friend. Would UNC be a better place without conservatives? About 22 percent of liberals said yes. Would it be a better place without liberals? Almost 15 percent of conservatives thought so.
Amusingly on The Atlantic's Facebook people who either did not read the article or read it but were unwilling and/or unable to understand it were crowing that telling conservatives to think before they speak wasn't censorship, that freedom of speech was limited to the first amendment (evidently they confused self-censorship with government censorship) and that conservatives shouldn't be given free reign to spread hatred/lies. And one even called the author a troll, and another said he was a white privileged man. Predictable.
The fact that many moderates and a significant number of liberals were afraid of expressing their relevant opinions suggests that even non-conservatives are afraid of the left's (circular) firing squad
One person said this only showed conservatives thought they were being oppressed - not that they really were (ignoring the evidence about many liberals being willing to silence others). Presumably he would apply the same logic to minorities who think they're being discriminated against

Many teens are victims of digital dating abuse; boys get the brunt of it - " males were significantly more likely to have experienced digital dating abuse (32.3 percent) compared to females (23.6 percent), and more likely to experience all types of digital dating abuse, and were even more likely to experience physical aggression. No other differences emerged with respect to demographic characteristics such as sexual orientation, race and age."Specific to heterosexual relationships, girls may use more violence on their boyfriends to try to solve their relational problems, while boys may try to constrain their aggressive impulses when trying to negotiate discord with their girlfriends"... Students who reported depressive symptoms were about four times as likely to have experienced digital dating abuse. Those who reported that they had sexual intercourse were 2.5 times as likely to have experienced digital dating abuse. Most notably, those students who had sent a "sext" to another person were nearly five times as likely to be the target of digital dating abuse as compared to those who had not sent a sext. Finally, those who had been the target of cyberbullying also were likely to have been the target of digital dating abuse."

The Best Advice for Saving as Much as You Can - "You want to make as few decisions as possible. You know you need an emergency fund, so automate. Do the same with increasing your 401(k) contributions each year, or paying off your credit card debt. You have an entire life to lead, and you want as little time devoted to the nuts and bolts of your finances as possible. Train yourself not to adapt. There’s this notion that you have before you start your career that if I just make a certain amount of money I’m going to be great. But life doesn’t really work like that. You find yourself constantly adapting your spending and lifestyle to your income. You get a raise, so you buy a bigger house. This can cause a lot of problems if you’re not careful. Among those with credit card debt, the richest owe the most...
The smartest thing I ever did, financially, was decide to save a percentage of each paycheck...
I also use Acorns, an app that invests your spare change into exchange-traded funds (ETFs)"

The Invasion of the German Board Games - " In North America, the complex board games created during the latter half of the 20th century typically took the form of simulated warfare. In Risk, Axis & Allies, Star Fleet Battles, and Victory in the Pacific, players take on the role of generals moving their units around tabletop maps. But for obvious reasons, this wasn’t a model that resonated positively with the generation of Germans who grew up in the shadow of the Third Reich. Which helps explain why all of the most popular Eurogames are based around building things—communities (Catan), civilizations (Terra Mystica), farms (Agricola)—rather than annihilating opponents. The result is a vastly more pacifist style of a game that can appeal to women as much as men, and to older adults as much as high-testosterone adolescents... But the gulf between the traditional American games of yore—“Ameritrash,” as the genre is dismissively referred to by the board-game cognoscenti—goes beyond the divide between militarism and pacifism. In Monopoly, that great bonfire of friendships, the conflict between players is direct, brutal, and zero-sum: You bankrupt me or I bankrupt you. Which is why so many rounds of Monopoly finish on a note of bitterness... In Eurogames, by contrast, such naked metaphors for capitalism and predation are outré. The Spanish-themed El Grande, for instance, does not permit players to attack their opponents directly. Rather, players maneuver their caballeros around a map of medieval Spain in a bid to win the favor of local courtiers. Players don’t beat their opponents so much as thwart them. The same is invariably true in rail-themed Eurogames such as Ticket To Ride, in which players rush to claim choice routes. The action is always passive-aggressive—never just aggressive... To outsiders, this churn of wood, brick, sheep, ore, and wheat always makes Eurogames seem overly complicated. (In Friedemann Friese’s masterpiece Power Grid, there is even a step called the “bureaucracy” phase.)... While people can tolerate losing, they despise the feeling of being eliminated from a game in progress. And so most Eurogames are designed such that scoring comes at the end of the game...  Perhaps no game encompasses this egalitarian ethos more fully than the aforementioned Power Grid (or Funkenschlag, as it’s known in Germany), in which players take on the role of CEOs in a highly regulated, centrally administered energy market. While the first player who builds houses and hotels in Monopoly can easily leverage their initial advantage to build yet more houses and hotels and crush the competition, the exact opposite dynamic takes place in Power Grid: The more players expand their energy network, the lower their priority in acquiring the coal, oil, uranium, and recyclables they need to actually fuel their power plants. The feature acts as a natural damping mechanism on runaway leaders, so that players tend toward parity as the action progresses, and almost every game is fairly close until the last turn.This way of playing caters to what most people actually want out of game nights: to unwind, to avoid boredom and humiliation, and to end the night as friends."

Roads to Liberty Podcast - Posts - "Remember when communism beat fascism, but liberalism took all the credit, told the world communism was evil and got to be in charge for long enough to let fascism regroup, switch tactics and take over? That was a whoopsie"
"As long as they admit it was real communism it is fine by me"
"it's not. Communism is a stateless moneyless classless society. Read a fucking book you degenerate retard"
"good, then communism didn't beat fascism."

Small Business Saturday: Why shopping local isn’t enough to take on Amazon
Also titled: "The death of small businesses in big cities, explained"
 and "Shopping local won't save small businesses from closing. Here's what ..."
Basically the message of this piece is: We should mobilise small interest groups to lobby government to impede business, because greedy landlords are so evil that they set high rents to drive out small businesses at the expense of being able to rent out their spaces (so evidently they are more evil than they are greedy). We need to stop consumers from buying what they want because we fetishise small businesses. And poor consumers who want to save money by buying from Walmart must be forced to buy from more expensive small businesses because helping small businesses is more visible than helping poor people. And ignore the related article at the bottom, also from Vox, titled: "The retail apocalypse: traditional retail chains are dying across America", so we can pretend this is all about the little guy being oppressed by big business

民主歌聲獻中華 成龍 豪情 005/139 - YouTube
Comment (from elsewhere): "This was Jackie Chan singing in 1989."If you are a Chinese, you will not bend the knee to a totalitarian dictatorship." - paraphrased from what he said during his performance.He was singing in support for democracy and against the what would become the Tiananmen crackdown that killed at least several hundreds of students.In 1989, Jackie Chan was not yet a tankie.This was a Jackie Chan that people respected."

Being Classically Liberal - Posts - "Do Classical Liberals support a role for government in aiding the poor and needy? (Long Post) Classical liberalism as an ideology is highly similar to libertarianism. However, unlike pure libertarians, classical liberals historically have acknowledged that government redistribution has some role to play in helping those in need (but not to the confiscatory extent that progressive liberals do.)  In 'the Road to Serfdom,' classical liberal economist F.A Hayek wrote that, "In a society that has reached the general level of wealth which ours has attained … some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision." Similarly, in a 1951 article, Nobel Prize winning economist (and classical liberal) Milton Friedman wrote, “Our humanitarian sentiments demand that some provision should be made for those who draw blanks in the lottery of life,” and “there is justification in trying to achieve a minimum income for all.”In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman proposed a negative income tax (NIT)"
>Lots of triggered libertarians (many of whom seem really to be anarchists) in the comments

Shared e-scooters to be banned in Montreal in 2020 - "Montreal will ban shared, dockless e-scooters in the city for 2020.The announcement was made at Wednesday's executive committee meeting by Coun. Éric Alan Caldwell, citing mass noncompliance with the city's rules for the vehicles."Our rules were not respected and the operators did not ensure they were respected," Caldwell said.Caldwell said that while e-scooters can have a place in cities such as Montreal, they must not come at the expense of impeding other modes of transportation in the city. "And that's what happened last year"... during the pilot, scooters were only parked in their designated zones 20 per cent of the time. "Eight e-scooters on 10 did not respect our rules... which led to problems," Caldwell said. "Security issues. Issues for other modes of transportation, be it pedestrians, cyclists, or drivers. Issues that led to disorder in the city.""