On Facebook and YouTube, musicians are getting blocked or muted - The Washington Post - "his audience started to disappear, one by one, all the way down to none.“What the hell is going on?” Spence recalls shouting to his son across the living room as the viewer count conspicuously dropped. Just minutes into the airing of the concert, Facebook issued Spence a notification that his video — an original performance of an hour-long piece composed by Mozart in 1786 — somehow contained one minute and 18 seconds of someone else’s work, in this case, “audio owned by Naxos of America.” Spence, and presumably Mozart, would beg to differ.“They’re blocking my use of my own content,” Spence said later in a phone interview, “which feels dystopian.”... These oft-overzealous algorithms are particularly fine-tuned for the job of sniffing out the sonic idiosyncrasies of pop music, having been trained on massive troves of “reference” audio files submitted by record companies and performing rights societies. But classical musicians are discovering en masse that the perceptivity of automated copyright systems falls critically short when it comes to classical music, which presents unique challenges both in terms of content and context. After all, classical music exists as a vast, endlessly revisited and repeated repertoire of public-domain works distinguishable only through nuanced variations in performance. Put simply, bots aren’t great listeners. After the removal of his clips, Spence’s only recourse was to file a dispute with Facebook by filling out a single-field form. This was followed by six hours of fruitless chats with various Facebook representatives. It took nearly four days to clear the spurious claim, and in the interim, Facebook suspended Camerata’s access to live-streaming.Clearing copyright claims has since become part of Spence’s new routine, casting emails into an opaque dispute system he describes as “the DMV on steroids.” And the hits keep coming: YouTube blocked a recent live stream of a recorded Camerata performance of Carl Nielsen’s Wind Quintet, Op. 43, after it attracted a swarm of five automated copyright claims from different record companies. It’s gotten to the point where Camerata videos are prefaced by a warning screen, explaining their anticipated disappearance in advance.“I have no protection for my own produced material,” Spence says. “If you want to put a copyright claim against me, I’m happy to take the time to write back to you and say, ‘This is an erroneous claim and here’s why.’ But when you’re immediately blocking videos or streams, that’s negatively impacting our very mission in a time where this now has become mission critical.”... Michael Sheppard, a Baltimore-based pianist, composer and teacher, was recently giving a Facebook Live performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 3, Op. 2, in C) when Facebook blocked the stream, citing the detection of “2:28 of music owned by Naxos of America” — specifically a passage recorded by the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom Sheppard is not.The takedown led Sheppard into what he describes as “a byzantine web of ridiculousness” starting with Facebook’s dispute form: “Beethoven died in 1827,” he responded. “This music is very much in the public domain. Please unblock it.”... musician and blogger Sebastian Tomczak received multiple copyright claims against a 10-hour stretch of white noise he uploaded to YouTube three years prior... It might be tempting to glance at the copyright claims and simply blame the names listed at the bottom — the seemingly aggressive record companies issuing them all. But many of those companies are as helpless against the system as the targets of their claims.Take Naxos, the classical mother ship that represents about 2.5 million tracks and, according to senior manager of video and new media Duncan Hammons, considers copyright protection “among our chief duties per our relationship with our distributed label clients.”... “Though the technology works most of the time in terms of correctly identifying instances of our clients’ content on-platform, it still generates a not-insignificant amount of mismatches that require human review to differentiate,” Hammons says. “The chances of conflicts with this amount of content are considerable. For these reasons there is always a volume of potentially erroneous auto-generated claims that unless contested, I may never be made explicitly aware.”... the faith that platforms and record companies invest in these technologies may be as flawed as the systems themselves.“We built these systems around the presumption that everybody is either: A, a pirate, or B, should be a copyright expert”"
Antifa Activist Goes Viral Bragging About Lawsuit Against Landlord for Demanding Rent — Turns Out It’s His Grandma - "A militant antifa activist went viral recently for filing a complaint against his landlord for tracking his coronavirus stimulus check and demanding rent — but he conveniently left out that the landlord is his grandmother.Austin Goodrich, 22, received an outpouring of sympathy for his situation after filing the lawsuit in Oregon on April 22. The complaint said that the actions of his landlord left him “feeling overwhelmingly violated and vulnerable.” Goodrich was demanding that his grandmother waive all rent due until the end of his lease on June 30, waive all due and past-due amounts, return his security deposit and give him an excellent rental reference. Since she did not respond to his absurd requests, he filed a lawsuit... Goodrich tweeted that his landlord had text him hours after he received his stimulus money asking whether he planned to use it to pay rent.However, the defendant is not only his grandmother and landlord — she is also his tax preparer... Goodrich previously made waves when he helped shut down a College Republicans event at Portland State in 2019... Goodrich locked his Twitter account after it was revealed that his landlord is his grandmother."
Communists rage a lot against landlords. It seems they just want to live rent-free
Andy Ngรด on Twitter - ".@CasResistance, a Portland antifa & regional separatist group, instructed its members to steal from stores on #MayDay."
Looks like communists want everything for free
JustJanis on Twitter - "So my friend’s vet has a comfort-dog assistant that helps sick patients know that everything will be alright and this is really all you need to see today ️"
'Tulsa for Tesla': US oil city uses 75-foot-tall statue of Elon Musk to persuade CEO to build new electric car factory - "Tulsa, the second-largest city in Oklahoma, has a rich history in the oil business. But its city leaders made a new and creative pitch to woo Tesla into building its next electric car factory there. City officials started transforming the town's landmark Golden Driller statue Wednesday, to resemble Tesla CEO Elon Musk, complete with company logos added to the 75-foot-tall structure. The company has reportedly picked Tulsa and Austin, Texas, as finalists for its new factory that is expected to employ more than 10,000 people... Tulsa touts its low tax rates and cost of living as reasons for Tesla to build its next U.S. assembly plant in town. But some neighbors even said they want Musk to go even a step further -- and relocate his company out of the Bay Area entirely... Musk made national headlines last week for threatening to relocate his company out of Alameda County, after county officials ordered him to stop production at the Fremont plant, which had reopened early in sharp defiance of the previous county health order. It even prompted President Trump to weigh in."
๐๐๐ง๐ข๐ค๐ฃ๐ฎ ๐พ๐ช๐ง๐ฉ๐๐จ on Twitter - "I was playing Fifa 19 with some random dude online & he was using his headset & prolly forgot to turn it off. So I was leading 3 nil at halftime & I heard him say “if I win, will u sleepover?” And a girl replied yes but u won’t win. I had to let bro win 5-3 for the culture "
Police summon Jolovan Wham for posing in public with smiley face - "When is a photo a protest and a piece of cardboard a threat? Social worker and civil rights advocate Jolovan Wham will find out as he is now under formal police investigation over a photo of him holding a smiley face in public.Wham said Wednesday that he has been ordered to report to Tanglin police, around two months after he took the photo in a show of solidarity with two youths under separate probes for photos they took of themselves demanding climate action... It is illegal to hold public demonstrations without a permit in Singapore, even if it is just a silent protest involving one person. And the only public place Singaporeans have been granted a permit to do so is the Speaker’s Corner in Hong Lim Park... In 2018, artist Seelan Palay was jailed two weeks after refusing to pay a fine after being convicted of an unlawful procession. He had walked from Hong Lim Park to the Parliament House while holding a mirror."
Positivity is illegal in Singapore
Ryan Creamer Wiki & Bio - Comedian - "Ryan Creamer (born September 9, 1992) is a comedian, writer, and performer based in Olney, Maryland. He is known for his verified Pornhub account where he makes wholesome videos... Creamer was scrolling through Pornhub when he noticed a "Work for Us" option at the bottom of the page. When he realized that anyone could get verified, he applied and started posting wholesome videos after he was accepted. His first upload "I Tuck You in After You Have Cum" was posted on Reddit and he started to gain a following. Other videos he has posted include "I, Your Step Brother, Decline Your Advances but Am Flattered Nonetheless," "I Ride in a Taxi and Don't Have Sex With the Driver," "POV FOREHEAD KISS COMPILATION," and "I Hug You and Say I Had a Really Good Time Tonight." Creamer has stated that he had received a number of supportive messages from viewers and has received support from the sex industry"
:-) - "some places use clams to test the toxicity of the water. It’s like that in Warsaw- we get our water from the river, and the main water pump has 8 clams that have triggers attached to their shells. If the water gets too toxic, they close, and the triggers shut off the city water supply automatically.The clams are just better at measuring the water quality than any man-made sensors."
Who's afraid of the feminists? - "A new YouGov poll, commissioned by the charity HOPE Not Hate, finds that 33% of people agree with the statement “Feminism is to blame for making some men feel marginalised and demonised in society”... significant percentages of every age group, including 33% of 18- to 24-year-olds, agrees that feminism makes some men feel marginalised. More men (42%) than women agreed, but a quarter of women did too. The charity themselves described it as “staggering”, and linked it to far-right YouTubers... Sometimes men have more “feminist” attitudes than women: for instance, men are more likely than women to say that it is “always” or “usually” wrong for men to comment on women’s appearance in the street... 83% of Britons support “equality of opportunity for women” – again, more among men (86%) than women (81%)... It took me all of five seconds to find a feminist magazine declaring that men can be allies but they cannot be feminists... [feminist antics are] I think, part of a wider need to signal membership of a group: publicly denouncing someone for heresy is a clear signal that you are pure. I’ve heard some feminists complain that working for gender equality has been partly displaced by this call-out culture, policing public spaces for incorrect language or bad opinions, and that this puts people off feminism as a label. I can entirely believe that that’s the case, although I don’t imagine that it’s unique to feminism"
More and more people are realising how toxic and misandristic feminism is
If men are more feminist than women in their views on women, is this oppression and ignoring 'minority' preferences?
Lana Del Rey's Instagram Post Is a Classic White Feminism Trap
Basically feminism now demonises white women almost as much as it demonises men
How a Jeopardy! Champ's Play to Become a Feminist Public Intellectual Crashed - ""I try to remember, as a straight dude, that the discomfort I feel at gay porn sites is how women online are made to feel most of the time"
This post perfectly encapsulates Chu’s online presence: pompous woke posturing mixed with a baffling non-sequitur. Why was he watching gay porn if it makes him uncomfortable? How does that relate to being a woman online? Why did he put this on the internet, with his whole legal name on it and everything? The documentary Who is Arthur Chu?, recently released on various VOD platforms, leans toward a fairly routine character study rather than seek to answer such questions. In interviews, Arthur gives accounts of his childhood, his thorny relationship with his father, the pressures of being the first-born child of immigrants, and his introduction to identity politics. This is interesting material, but it feels like sitting in on a particularly unproductive therapy session. Arthur has little self-awareness, and despite talking at length, he never reaches any real insight. The film is much more successful at finding dark humor in the contrast between the way Arthur sees himself and the way he actually behaves, particularly in his relationship with his wife Eliza. Almost every time she appears on screen, she’s hard at work ironing his shirts, cooking his dinner, or supporting his narcissistic bid for fame as a professional feminist, all while he lies around the house giving her orders. The people closest to him seem to live in a perpetual wince. His mother worries that Eliza will leave him. After a public speaking gig goes badly, his father gently suggests that he should keep his day job. When his younger brother and sister sit together for an interview, they struggle to find anything positive to say about him... The comedy of Arthur Chu is that he thought he could understand what being a woman is like by visiting a gay porn site. The tragedy is that he did not think to simply listen to a woman — for example, his wife"
IT ENDS TONIGHT: Arthur Chu's Wife Dumps Him, Has Marriage Dissolved
Taking on the Social Justice Warriors - "Even if Remain wins out and Trump is defeated in 2020, one thing is pretty certain: we will continue to live in polarised times. In my new book Whiteshift I argue that one of the main forces driving this fracturing is the perfectionist creed of multiculturalism, whose shock troops are the so-called Social Justice Warriors (SJWs)... You know a non-academic has struck a chord when, at the last count, his book has accrued 562 academic citations, far more than anything I’ve managed as a longstanding professor. In 2017’s The Road to Somewhere, David Goodhart helps make sense of our post-UKIP, post-Brexit world. He nicely lays his finger on the key divide in modern western societies between ‘Anywheres’, whose identity is tied to their credentials and achievements, and the ‘Somewheres’, whose identity is rooted in place, ethnicity or nationhood.In Britain, about a quarter of the population are Anywheres, many of whom attended residential universities and voted Remain. Somewheres, about half the population, tended to vote Leave. About half the UK population lives within 20 miles of where they were born, and this group exists a world away from the bubble of those who form opinions in the media and academia, or play a leading role in politics and finance. Somewheres have stronger national identities than Anywheres, view change as loss and tend to want less immigration and economic change. Their interests are ill-served by an Anywhere elite, whose mobility and lack of connection to place renders them tone-deaf to the longings of those with a Somewhere worldview. Goodhart suggests the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum was a democratic expression of discontent from the Somewheres, whose cultural and economic interests have been repeatedly ignored by governments since Blair. He urges more Somewhere input into culture and politics – and a new accommodation between Somewheres and Anywheres that better balances the desires of each – in order reduce the pressures driving populism and polarisation"
Why do 'open' liberals live in closed communities? - "in American liberal enclaves like San Francisco. They may deplore Trump’s wall, but their restrictions on development serve as a financial barrier to incomers.In Britain, house prices act as a one-way valve, encouraging people to move northwards in search of a higher quality of life, but impeding those who prioritise higher wages from moving in the opposite direction.This results is what Watling calls a “surplus of ‘trapped’ labour” that keeps wage levels low in the North. This is the trouble with saying ‘not in my backyard’ — it’s not just your backyard that’s affected.Of course, not all nimbys are Remain-voting liberals. Many are dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries. But there’s something especially repellent about people who preach about openness without practicing it where it matters.In particular, a liberal immigration policy means that millions more people will come to work here each decade. So where are they going to live?"
New Black Panthers ‘Fight’ Racism by Targeting Chinese Restaurants, Get Disowned by OG Black Panthers - "the NBPP was allegedly protesting the forceful eviction of Africans “from their homes and hospitals” in China"
Damn white supremacy!
