Jesse Singal on Twitter (on "Neither male nor female: Why some nonbinary people are 'microdosing' hormones") - "Outlets have completely, completely given up on covering this like they would any other health or science subject. It's just astounding how radical the journalistic shift has been."
"It is a completely bizarre way to cover females taking steroids for essentially recreational reasons - given what we know from state-sponsored doping programmes."
"For those of us who see wanting to look more masculine or feminine as essentially fashion choices and don't accept trans metaphysics it does indeed look astonishing. Basically us oldies see wanting to look a particular way as essentially trivial. For many young people it's the very essence of their being. I blame post modernism, free market capitalism and the Internet."
"I blame shit music. Music used to be the centre of youth culture. Now it’s gender."
"For most people, taking hormones is very closely regulated."
"The testosterone is being prescribed for cosmetic reasons. I'm not in position to know whether or not this is a sanctioned use of such treatment and I feel like whoever wrote this piece ought to have delved into that seemingly glaring issue at least a little bit ya know."
"I read this and now believe we're redefining dysphoria."
"The only good thing is that these people cannot reproduce. The worst thing is that because they can't reproduce, they ideologically kidnap the young generation and brainwash to make them like them."
"Reporting on science & medicine ought to be balanced and thorough. This was one-sided and superficial.There is no discussion of the medical case against elective hormonal treatments. Or of the more serious side effects (like osteoporosis, thrombosis, some forms of cancer...) And that's not even addressing the elephant in the room: questions of when such treatments are elective versus therapeutic, what exactly they are treating if it's the latter, whether medical standards need any revision.Good exposition would acknowledge those questions exist."
"Whatever happened to "First do no harm?""
"They've been taken over by the TRA's. That and they can't ignore the cash machine this has created. Why else would the medical community give girls double mastectomies?"
"The use of “they” for a singular person makes teaching HS English difficult. Close reading a narrative with imprecise pronouns is not fun."
The document that reveals the remarkable tactics of trans lobbyists | Coffee House - "The document is the work of Dentons, which says it is the world’s biggest law firm; the Thomson Reuters Foundation, an arm of the old media giant that appears dedicated to identity politics of various sorts; and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Youth & Student Organisation (IGLYO)...‘It is recognised that the requirement for parental consent or the consent of a legal guardian can be restrictive and problematic for minors.’
You might think that the very purpose of parenting is, in part, to ‘restrict’ the choices of children who cannot, by definition, make fully-informed adult choices on their own. But that is not the stance of the report. Indeed, it suggests that ‘states should take action against parents who are obstructing the free development of a young trans person’s identity in refusing to give parental authorisation when required.’ In short, this is a handbook for lobbying groups that want to remove parental consent over significant aspects of children’s lives. A handbook written by an international law firm and backed by one of the world’s biggest charitable foundations... This is an issue that is ‘difficult to win public support for’ and best hidden behind the ‘veil of protection’ provided by a popular issue such as gay rights. Again, anyone who has even glanced at the UK transgender debate will recognise this description. Another recommendation is even more revealing: ‘Avoid excessive press coverage and exposure.’ According to the report, the countries that have moved most quickly to advance trans rights and remove parental consent have been those where the groups lobbying for those changes have succeeded in stopping the wider public learning about their proposals... Although it offers extensive advice about the need to keep the trans-rights agenda out of the public’s gaze, the report has rather less to say about the possibility that advocates might just try doing what everyone else in politics does and make a persuasive argument for their cause. Actually convincing people that this stuff is a good idea doesn’t feature much in the report... I started my first job as a researcher in the Commons in 1994. I’ve been studying and writing about politics and policy ever since. And in my experience of how changes in the law are brought about, the approach described in that report is simply not normal or usual. In a democracy, we are all free to argue for whatever policy or position we wish. But normally, anyone who wants to change the law accepts that to do so they need to win the support or, at least, the consent of the people whose authority ultimately gives the law its force. The approach outlined, in detail, in the Dentons report amounts to a very different way of lobbying to get the laws and policies you want. Even more notably, it suggests that in several countries people have been quite successful in lobbying behind a ‘veil’ and in a way that deliberately avoids the attention of the public. That, I think, should interest anyone who cares about how politics and policy are conducted, whether or not they care about the transgender issue... no policy made in the shadows can survive in sunlight."
Defining trans accurately now gets you banned from Twitter - The Post Millennial - "The trans debate on Twitter is basically insane. While Twitter claims that its “mission is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information, and to express their opinions and beliefs without barriers,” that’s only true if you toe the progressive party line on trans. If you don’t, you’re out, with barely an explanation. 4th Wave Now was banned... The tweet in question referenced an article by Pique Resilience Project founder Chiara Canaan, who came to believe she was trans after a bad break up at 15 years old. Now 22 and a lesbian, she has spoken out about her experience to help other girls from making the mistake she did. Apparently, tweeting about the biological reality of sex is a no-no, worthy of account suspension...
'People who have threatened me with death or violence have faced fewer disciplinary sanctions from Twitter than 4thWave is for referring to someone's natal sex. IT REALLY MAKES YOU THINK.'
“Parent-skeptics who question medicalising gender-atypical youth,” 4th Wave Now speaks out in favour of the “watchful waiting” approach to trans questioning kids, as opposed to the instant medical transitioning that many advocate for. .. how exactly is the term “natal male” hate speech?... Meanwhile, the person who was referred to as a “natal male,” calls the LGB Alliance a hate group for advocating for same-sex attracted persons’ rights. Claims that trans women are not male. And that sex is a social construct. It’s odd that making the claim that women don’t actually exist isn’t hate speech, but saying that they do exist, is. Twitter clearly has no idea what it’s doing, or how to establish standards. Either that, or they are making a distinct foray into misogyny."
No wonder liberals love Twitter so much
Michael Canup on Twitter - "Liberals: young people make poor, rash decisions. lets raise the smoking age to 21.
Also liberals: my 4 year old says he's a girl so we're transitioning him."
At least three gender-transitioning children have been taken into care because of their parents' objections - "The cases raise fears that parents are powerless to act if they think their child is making a wrong decision. Social workers at one council — Hillingdon in west London — say they placed two children in foster homes over the rows. Another — Ealing, also in west London — said it had done the same with “less than five” kids. It refused to say how many. Not all councils responded to the Sun’s Freedom of Information request for figures. Tory MP Peter Bone said: “I’m very shocked. Often parents and children do not see eye-to-eye but that is not a reason to be placed into care.” And Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend, which campaigns against kids transitioning, said: “Parents who see how their children are being sucked into this are being punished.”"
Transgender man gives birth to non-binary partner's baby with female sperm donor - "Proud dad Reuben Sharpe today tells how HE gave birth to a miracle baby in Britain’s most modern family.The 39-year-old transitioned to a man 12 years ago.But he still had maternal instincts and six years ago stopped taking testosterone in the hope of one day having a child.And that dream came true when he and partner Jay had a bouncing baby.Jay is non-binary – so does not identify as male or female.The sperm donor was a trans woman... and even the DOCTOR was transgender."
What a convoluted way of describing heterosexual reproduction
Melbourne youth gender clinic in data row - "Victoria’s Andrews government has been slammed for claiming it does not routinely collect basic data about risky medical treatment of vulnerable children and teens at Australia’s biggest youth transgender clinic in Melbourne... She asked for the data in August following reports in The Australian about the safety and ethics of medical treatment amid a worrying global spike in troubled teenage patients, mostly girls, sent to gender clinics. Last year at RCH there were 269 new referrals, 1394 per cent higher than in 2012, when Dr Telfer took charge. RCH has refused requests for interviews, data and comment... The clinic has trained these school GPs in “gender-affirming healthcare” or the pro-trans “affirmative model”, which views children as “experts” in their trans identity... In parliament, Ms Crozier raised the case of Melbourne mother “Clair”, featured on Neil Mitchell’s 3AW radio program this month, who said she had been called by a school counsellor “out of the blue” to be told her 14-year-old “socially awkward” daughter was a trans boy. The counsellor had been seeing the girl for three weeks without her mother knowing and had given her information about gender clinics and trans websites. Clair said she had been advised to avoid the RCH clinic, where her daughter might be put on the path to trans medical treatment, and instead took her to a psychologist who diagnosed high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome. “Apparently Asperger’s children sometimes have gender confusion”"
Is the tide beginning to turn on trans lunacy? - "2019 may, with luck, go down as the year when the tide began to turn against the bizarre worldview of transgender activists. In the run-up to the General Election, Jo Swinson found herself flummoxed by the question ‘What is a woman?’. Days later, she was unceremoniously dumped by voters. Meanwhile, the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was busy introducing himself to the crowd at the Pink News Awards: ‘My name is Jeremy Corbyn, pronouns he/him.’ That was met by a big fat ‘no’ from the electorate, too. Despite this recent pushback, 2019 has also shown what happens when senior members of the medical, educational and legal professions not only succumb to the demands of trans activists, but use transgender ideology to shore up their own moral authority. The victims are children... One in 50 prisoners – 1,500 inmates – now identifies as transgender. This is massively more than the number in the general population. Transgender prisoners not only get perks, such as being able to shower alone or have their own cell – crucially, they can also apply to switch between male and female jails. One woman prisoner – assaulted by a transgender inmate while incarcerated in the same institution – is now taking the government to court over this policy... Tragically, women are still prevented from freely discussing the impact of gender self-identification upon their lives. In universities, debates and conferences have been shut down following threats from transgender activists. Gender-critical professors have spoken out about the threats and abuse they have received for raising concerns that sex is being conflated with gender. Posie Parker, a women’s rights activist and leading critic of the transgender movement, was permanently banned from Facebook. The social-media giant cited ‘safety and security reasons’ for kicking her off the platform and, in the process, denying thousands of people an opportunity to discuss Posie’s views... despite all the attempts to curtail debate, common sense has – on occasion – won out in 2019. Two major BBC programmes, Newsnight and Radio 4’s File on 4, reported on the experiences of people who detransition, as well as raising serious questions about the treatment of children who question their gender identity and the dangers of doctors prescribing puberty-blocker hormones. Parents raised concerns about changes to school sex and relationships classes that will mean very young children are taught that gender is how they think and feel. To challenge this, author Rachel Rooney has written an excellent book, My Body is Me, which aims to teach children to be comfortable with their bodies as they are, rather than looking to change their bodies to bring them in line with their brains. Inevitably, this benign message has been labelled ‘anti‑trans extremism’. Elsewhere, the High Court ruled that a woman who gave birth could not be named as the father on her child’s birth certificate despite having transitioned to a man post-partum."
Apparently saying biological sex is real is hate speech and traumatising to trans people, but trans critics getting censored, death threats and being attacked is a good thing
When you can't live without bananas
Thursday, April 09, 2020
Meghan Murphy and Trans Mania
Toronto's Meghan Murphy Meltdown: A Case Study in Media-Driven Social Panic
"According to CBC radio host Carol Off, Murphy is someone whose extremism summons to mind comparisons with “a Holocaust denier or a white supremacist.” A Globe & Mail writer dedicated a column to branding Murphy an agent of “fear and meanness.” Toronto Mayor John Tory was so concerned by Murphy’s apparently horrifying message that he publicly called out his city’s chief librarian for permitting Murphy to deliver a speech on library premises. Hundreds of angry Torontonians gathered to protest that speech on Tuesday, telling at least one Murphy supporter to “go kill yourself, go bleed out and die.” The next day, Toronto’s governing council voted to review library policies, with a view toward ensuring that such a shocking spectacle would never again blacken the city’s reputation. For good measure, a pair of drag queens named Fay and Fluffy announced they would no longer come to the library to read books to children.
Is Murphy a Nazi? A war criminal? Perhaps a hooded KKK leader who appeared at the podium under a burning cross? Well, not quite. Meghan Murphy is a young Vancouver-based feminist activist and writer who says out loud what most Canadians think: that the rights of trans women must be balanced against the rights of girls and women as a whole, and that the admission of male-bodied individuals into spaces where women are vulnerable is an issue that can’t be resolved by screaming slogans or Tweeting emojis. As National Post columnist Chris Selley wrote after he attended Murphy’s Toronto event, the substance of her speech wasn’t even that controversial. The true scandal was out on the street, where progressive hypocrites yelled at Murphy’s feminist supporters in the way that Westboro Baptist Church members berate women entering an abortion clinic...
The notion that only one side of this argument has legitimate points to make is unsustainable, which is why a full-fledged schism now is developing within the wider LGBT movement.
In fact, it is this development that so alarms ideological enforcers within orthodox gender circles, as they (rightly) fear that they are losing their monopoly position. This, in turn, helps explain their fanatical desire to shut Murphy down—since the spectacle of her speaking common sense may invite other people to imagine that they can do the same without suffering punishment. And then, eventually, as with all cultish movements that rule by fear instead of persuasion, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.
As a man, I have no personal stake in this battle—because the entire weight of gender-ideology extremism is borne by girls and women. (There are no women demanding access to my health-club locker room, or making a mockery of male athletic competitions.) But I do have a stake as a journalist. For I know of no other issue that has had such a mind-warping effect on the work of otherwise intelligent writers and broadcasters.
Not only is it now considered perfectly normal (even admirable) for state-funded journalists to compare gender-crits to Holocaust deniers. One also sees the opposite phenomenon at work: Male-bodied individuals are praised as “shining examples of what humans can accomplish with training and effort” when they take medals away from biological women. In some cases, genuine sociopaths from among this group are even lauded by the media for their “courage.” This includes Rachel McKinnon, a cycling “champion” who dominates much smaller (female) competitors, told critics to “die in a grease fire,” and recently celebrated the death of a 36-year-old feminist from brain cancer. Throwing people into grease fires seems a lot closer to Nazi talk than anything Meghan Murphy ever said. And yet this would be the very same Rachel McKinnon who is regularly celebrated on the CBC in sunny features with titles such as We Have to Promote Inclusive Sport.
To any normal observer, it must seem like the media has lost its collective mind. The question is: Why?
When conservatives try to provide an answer, the focus often centers on the ideological distortions contained within orthodox gender studies. But that explanation doesn’t satisfy, because campus cults exist in all corners of academia, often without their dogmas metastasizing into mainstream culture and politics. What’s unusual about radicalized gender activism is that it has imposed itself not only on policy-making, but also on the way that policy-making is debated and critiqued in the media. And so even as some measure of sanity seems to be returning to this issue, it’s worth taking the opportunity to understand how mainstream journalists turned themselves into cheerleaders for dogmas that few people actually believe...
The whole arc of left-wing activism over the last century has created a spirit of triumphalism in regard to every cause premised on an expansion of asserted rights—including anti-sexism, anti-racism and anti-homophobia... There is no acknowledgment that social-justice campaigners now have scraped up against the bare-metal limits of the rights that can be vindicated by society without biting into other, older rights won by previous activist cohorts.
A third factor is the role of social media, including within the LGBT community, where a healthy debate might once have occurred. In the pre-Twitter past, different factions of the queer movement often were able to assert themselves within a patchwork of different media. But Twitter now allows the angriest and shrillest voices to coalesce into a de facto ideological inquisition. Britain’s PinkNews, in particular, has become a notorious enforcer (and is now dismissively referred to as Penis News by exasperated lesbian critics). Canada’s Xtra is moving in the same direction...
As early as 2011, Toronto’s Star newspaper showed you could set the internet on fire with this sort of article [on "trans" kids]. And the established form of writing these pieces is such that they are presented more as celebrations than actual profiles. Crucially, stories about detransition are effectively taboo—because even acknowledging the existence of de-transitioned youth serves to impugn the media’s own sunny approach to the issue (which is why detransitioned youth increasingly are bypassing the mainstream media and setting up their own web channels). All told, the media has a natural incentive to act as a one-way filter in regard to news about trans issues.
A fourth factor is the economic decline of traditional journalism as a whole, which has affected the way newsrooms now are run and staffed.
As recently as the late 1990s, which is when I began my career in journalism, media organizations were able to insulate themselves against social panics and fads through the employment of a large corps of experienced, risk-averse, highly professional desk editors and middle managers. They supplied a sort of ideological ballast, so that a small number of activist journalists within the organization couldn’t exert veto power on controversial issues. Over the last 20 years, that entire stratum of professionals has been packaged out, and the editorial staffing in these organizations generally consists of just two groups: (a) a small corps of managing journalists in their 50s and 60s who are desperately trying to make it to retirement; and (b) a larger corps of poorly paid 20-somethings. Because members of this latter high-turnover group (rightly) feel have little expectation of long-term employment, their primary ideological loyalties are to social media, not to their nominal bosses.
In some cases, media bosses no longer even pretend that their staffers are anything but in-house social-justice activists...
Fifth and finally, there is the extraordinary classism that infects the woke media"
Canadian literary editor fired after supporting free speech - The Post Millennial - "Will Johnson, a Canadian literary editor, was fired from his position at the Humber Literary Review for supporting Meghan Murphy’s right to freedom of speech... “I didn’t know what the word TERF meant. All I saw was internet trolls screaming at feminists.” Johnson said, noting that he did consider himself a feminist—especially on the issue of sexual violence, one of the main themes of his upcoming memoir... “I posted that I love trans people, but I find the activists who claim to be representing them to be petulant, small-minded shitheads. That tweet went a little bit viral, inspiring a cavalcade of conversation on both sides”... Johnson notes the irony in that he has an extensive history of pro-LGBT editing. As far back as 2017, Johnson was interviewing a non-binary man for the Nelson Star, featuring his narrative on parenting as part of an exclusive."
"According to CBC radio host Carol Off, Murphy is someone whose extremism summons to mind comparisons with “a Holocaust denier or a white supremacist.” A Globe & Mail writer dedicated a column to branding Murphy an agent of “fear and meanness.” Toronto Mayor John Tory was so concerned by Murphy’s apparently horrifying message that he publicly called out his city’s chief librarian for permitting Murphy to deliver a speech on library premises. Hundreds of angry Torontonians gathered to protest that speech on Tuesday, telling at least one Murphy supporter to “go kill yourself, go bleed out and die.” The next day, Toronto’s governing council voted to review library policies, with a view toward ensuring that such a shocking spectacle would never again blacken the city’s reputation. For good measure, a pair of drag queens named Fay and Fluffy announced they would no longer come to the library to read books to children.
Is Murphy a Nazi? A war criminal? Perhaps a hooded KKK leader who appeared at the podium under a burning cross? Well, not quite. Meghan Murphy is a young Vancouver-based feminist activist and writer who says out loud what most Canadians think: that the rights of trans women must be balanced against the rights of girls and women as a whole, and that the admission of male-bodied individuals into spaces where women are vulnerable is an issue that can’t be resolved by screaming slogans or Tweeting emojis. As National Post columnist Chris Selley wrote after he attended Murphy’s Toronto event, the substance of her speech wasn’t even that controversial. The true scandal was out on the street, where progressive hypocrites yelled at Murphy’s feminist supporters in the way that Westboro Baptist Church members berate women entering an abortion clinic...
The notion that only one side of this argument has legitimate points to make is unsustainable, which is why a full-fledged schism now is developing within the wider LGBT movement.
In fact, it is this development that so alarms ideological enforcers within orthodox gender circles, as they (rightly) fear that they are losing their monopoly position. This, in turn, helps explain their fanatical desire to shut Murphy down—since the spectacle of her speaking common sense may invite other people to imagine that they can do the same without suffering punishment. And then, eventually, as with all cultish movements that rule by fear instead of persuasion, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.
As a man, I have no personal stake in this battle—because the entire weight of gender-ideology extremism is borne by girls and women. (There are no women demanding access to my health-club locker room, or making a mockery of male athletic competitions.) But I do have a stake as a journalist. For I know of no other issue that has had such a mind-warping effect on the work of otherwise intelligent writers and broadcasters.
Not only is it now considered perfectly normal (even admirable) for state-funded journalists to compare gender-crits to Holocaust deniers. One also sees the opposite phenomenon at work: Male-bodied individuals are praised as “shining examples of what humans can accomplish with training and effort” when they take medals away from biological women. In some cases, genuine sociopaths from among this group are even lauded by the media for their “courage.” This includes Rachel McKinnon, a cycling “champion” who dominates much smaller (female) competitors, told critics to “die in a grease fire,” and recently celebrated the death of a 36-year-old feminist from brain cancer. Throwing people into grease fires seems a lot closer to Nazi talk than anything Meghan Murphy ever said. And yet this would be the very same Rachel McKinnon who is regularly celebrated on the CBC in sunny features with titles such as We Have to Promote Inclusive Sport.
To any normal observer, it must seem like the media has lost its collective mind. The question is: Why?
When conservatives try to provide an answer, the focus often centers on the ideological distortions contained within orthodox gender studies. But that explanation doesn’t satisfy, because campus cults exist in all corners of academia, often without their dogmas metastasizing into mainstream culture and politics. What’s unusual about radicalized gender activism is that it has imposed itself not only on policy-making, but also on the way that policy-making is debated and critiqued in the media. And so even as some measure of sanity seems to be returning to this issue, it’s worth taking the opportunity to understand how mainstream journalists turned themselves into cheerleaders for dogmas that few people actually believe...
The whole arc of left-wing activism over the last century has created a spirit of triumphalism in regard to every cause premised on an expansion of asserted rights—including anti-sexism, anti-racism and anti-homophobia... There is no acknowledgment that social-justice campaigners now have scraped up against the bare-metal limits of the rights that can be vindicated by society without biting into other, older rights won by previous activist cohorts.
A third factor is the role of social media, including within the LGBT community, where a healthy debate might once have occurred. In the pre-Twitter past, different factions of the queer movement often were able to assert themselves within a patchwork of different media. But Twitter now allows the angriest and shrillest voices to coalesce into a de facto ideological inquisition. Britain’s PinkNews, in particular, has become a notorious enforcer (and is now dismissively referred to as Penis News by exasperated lesbian critics). Canada’s Xtra is moving in the same direction...
As early as 2011, Toronto’s Star newspaper showed you could set the internet on fire with this sort of article [on "trans" kids]. And the established form of writing these pieces is such that they are presented more as celebrations than actual profiles. Crucially, stories about detransition are effectively taboo—because even acknowledging the existence of de-transitioned youth serves to impugn the media’s own sunny approach to the issue (which is why detransitioned youth increasingly are bypassing the mainstream media and setting up their own web channels). All told, the media has a natural incentive to act as a one-way filter in regard to news about trans issues.
A fourth factor is the economic decline of traditional journalism as a whole, which has affected the way newsrooms now are run and staffed.
As recently as the late 1990s, which is when I began my career in journalism, media organizations were able to insulate themselves against social panics and fads through the employment of a large corps of experienced, risk-averse, highly professional desk editors and middle managers. They supplied a sort of ideological ballast, so that a small number of activist journalists within the organization couldn’t exert veto power on controversial issues. Over the last 20 years, that entire stratum of professionals has been packaged out, and the editorial staffing in these organizations generally consists of just two groups: (a) a small corps of managing journalists in their 50s and 60s who are desperately trying to make it to retirement; and (b) a larger corps of poorly paid 20-somethings. Because members of this latter high-turnover group (rightly) feel have little expectation of long-term employment, their primary ideological loyalties are to social media, not to their nominal bosses.
In some cases, media bosses no longer even pretend that their staffers are anything but in-house social-justice activists...
Fifth and finally, there is the extraordinary classism that infects the woke media"
Canadian literary editor fired after supporting free speech - The Post Millennial - "Will Johnson, a Canadian literary editor, was fired from his position at the Humber Literary Review for supporting Meghan Murphy’s right to freedom of speech... “I didn’t know what the word TERF meant. All I saw was internet trolls screaming at feminists.” Johnson said, noting that he did consider himself a feminist—especially on the issue of sexual violence, one of the main themes of his upcoming memoir... “I posted that I love trans people, but I find the activists who claim to be representing them to be petulant, small-minded shitheads. That tweet went a little bit viral, inspiring a cavalcade of conversation on both sides”... Johnson notes the irony in that he has an extensive history of pro-LGBT editing. As far back as 2017, Johnson was interviewing a non-binary man for the Nelson Star, featuring his narrative on parenting as part of an exclusive."
Post ID: 4775525028688537814
Links - 9th April 2020 (2) (Trans Mania)
‘Many unanswered questions’: Swedish church removes LGBT-themed altarpiece… but NOT for the reason you may think - "After two weeks of deliberation, a church in Sweden decided that a newly-acquired LGBT-friendly painting was too problematic to serve as its altarpiece. Its depiction of Adam and Eve as two same-sex couples was not the issue. The St. Paul’s Church in the southern city of Malmo accepted the painting as its altarpiece on the first day of Advent two weeks ago. The artwork by Swedish photographer and artist Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin was meant to symbolize inclusivity. It predictably generated a lot of buzz, attracting both praise and controversy online... The pastor, however, had an issue with the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve to try the forbidden fruit. In the painting, it was depicted as a transgender person. “The serpent traditionally symbolizes evil, and turning it into a transgender person can mean that a transgender person is evil or is the devil,” Svensson explained. “The Church of Sweden certainly cannot stand by that.” Furthermore, the painting contains apples, a Biblical symbol of knowledge, the pastor added. This invites a question about the kind of knowledge the painting portrays, along with “so many different interpretations” that make the imagery problematic, Svensson said."
After dancer strips at Seattle conference on homelessness, agency director suspended - "Performer Beyoncé Black St. James danced topless in a sheer bodysuit, gave lap dances and kissed attendees... Zylstra was paid about $123,000 a year, according to a county spokesperson. The performance was in the same room as a catered lunch at All Home’s annual conference, this year at South Seattle College with the theme of “Decolonizing our Collective Work.” The only note on the agenda was “Lunch with Cultural Presentation”... In a short video, St. James, a Spokane-based entertainer who identifies as a trans woman on her Facebook page, can be seen doing high kicks in a revealing bodysuit and with silver pasties. “No one expected it,” the staffer said. “So I think some people felt uncomfortable.” The first person St. James kissed seemed surprised, according to the staffer, but the ones following seemed more enthusiastic."
Transphobia!
The Oracle of Delphi is a cryptid - "Three women with penises
The Louvre, Paris Fr"
"oh i’m sorry were you saying something about me being an “artifact of the modern patriarchal medical-industrial complex” cause I was too busy looking at this photo of a 2000 year old classical greek marble statue of three transgender women just sorta chilling and being gorgeous."
"lmao @appropriately-inappropriate some freak photoshopped it
making it ever so clear that 1. we’re dealing with fetishists and 2. no one on tumblr bothers to fact check anything, especially if it suits their agenda"
"It’s hella stupid that only one of the figures would have pubic hair and im fucking cackling, yeah, they really just photoshopped David’s dick onto one of the three graces"
Maya Forstater loses employment tribunal after backlash over trans tweets - "A researcher who lost her job after tweeting that men cannot change their biological sex has lost an employment tribunal after her opinions were ruled “absolutist”.The Central London Employment Tribunal upheld the firing of tax expert Maya Forstater, 45, over a series of tweets questioning government plans to allow people to self-identify as another gender.Ms Forstater was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), which is a think-tank based in London and Washington that campaigns against poverty.She was accused of using “offensive and exclusionary” language on Twitter for saying “men cannot change into women”. Her legal dispute against her former employer was seen as a test on whether a “gender-critical” view – that there are only two biological sexes – was a protected philosophical belief under the 2010 Equality Act. Judge James Tayler decided that Ms Forstater’s view was “incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others”... Judge Tayler said the tax expert was not entitled to ignore the legal rights of transgender people and the “enormous pain that can be caused by misgendering a person”. He concluded: “If a person has transitioned from male to female and has a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), that person is legally a woman. That is not something Ms Forstater is entitled to ignore. Ms Forstater’s position is that even if a trans woman has a GRC, she cannot honestly describe herself as a woman. That belief is not worthy of respect in a democratic society."
"In times of universal deceit, to tell the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell (attr)
Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "Dress however you please.Call yourself whatever you like.Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.Live your best life in peace and security.But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill"
"JK Rowling dared say that biological sex is real and is now being cancelled by the very woke outrage mob she helped create. The world's tiniest violin plays. #TERF #IStandWithMaya"
"Maya Forstater, a researcher who lost her job after tweeting that men cannot change their biological sex, has lost an employment tribunal after her opinions were ruled “absolutist”. She was accused of using “offensive and exclusionary” language on Twitter."
Science is transphobic. But of course only "right wingers" deny science
ripx4nutmeg on Twitter - "Without any sense of irony, TRAs are calling for JK Rowling's books to be burned because they believe she is a Nazi"
Appalling Apostolic Memes for Liberty-Minded Teens - "Man, this just keeps getting better and better. The left screeches about Trump being a Nazi and trying to burn books and such, but then they go and do it to their own possessions.
imagine having to burn the only book you have ever read must be tough being a liberal today"
On a 2017 JK Rowling book burning exchange - but equally applicable today
In Unexpected Plot Twist, Far Left Now The Ones Burning Harry Potter Books | The Babylon Bee - "Unfortunately, many on the left could not figure out how to get a fire going. There are books on the subject, but they've only ever read Harry Potter."
Star Wars Mark Hamill apologises for liking JK Rowling's 'TERF' tweet'
Science and freedom of speech are 'transphobic'. How radically must society be transformed to appease a tiny minority?
OLIVIA ☭ HILL on Twitter - "Psst. Rowling wasn't some amazing writer who uniquely helped you through a hard time in your youth.
She was pushed in your face as the only viable entertainment option by a bigoted culture. You weren't blessed to read her. You were robbed of the chance to read diverse voices.
You didn't read her books because of merit. You read her books because of a powerful marketing machine. Be mad that it fed you a cis het white antisemitic TERF and told you that was progress and representation."
The perils of being an 'ally' - you get thrown to the wolves as the slightest perceived infraction by people who despise you for even existing
Comment: “She has all our money at this point, so I’m going to stand here and scream in the middle of cyberspace because I can’t cancel a billionaire who already ended the series.”
Sophia (Narwhal) Narwitz on Twitter - "Tranny here. And yeah, Rowling & the researcher are correct. Hormones dont change my biology. I will forever have male chromosomes, & more. I am biologically male. If I wasnt then I wouldnt need to transition. Is the fringe left/woke community really becoming this anti-science 🤦🏻♀️"
In just a few words, JK Rowling has changed the transgender debate | The Spectator Australia - "One of the (many) frustrations of writing a lot about sex and gender is knowing that there are a lot of people who are concerned about these issues but who do not, for various reasons, say so... Many are fearful of the backlash, the accusations of transphobia that could follow. Some of these women are prominent and famous and rich and powerful. The fact that such people keep quiet gives you some idea of the power of fear here... the broader effect of the Forstater case is that issues of sex and gender, the implications of transgenderism for society and individuals, are now going to be talked about by more people."
I write LGBTQ-inclusive books for children. JK Rowling's tweet breaks my heart | The Independent
The Independent: ""No one tells us what to write, so we'll never tell you what to think."
Also The Independent: This article
Germany′s Cabinet approves ban on gay, transgender ′conversion therapy′ - "The German Cabinet approved a bill to ban the advertising or offering of "conversion therapy" to transgender and gay people. The proposed legislation was expanded to include 16- to 18-year-olds... Under the bill, parents or caregivers would also be punished for making a 16- to 18-year-old undergo the therapy, which often uses conditioning techniques considered psychologically abusive by medical professionals. Bärbel Bas, the chair of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary faction, pushed for the bill to go further. "I wish to see a comprehensive ban for the so-called conversion therapy for adults, however, this would be difficult to implement legally""
Trans mania is about to explode in Germany. So all the lawsuits in 10-20 years time will have foreign Anglo precedents to draw upon
Looks like the SPD doesn't think adults should be able to make their own decisions
Trans Contestant Sues Miss USA Over 'Natural Born Woman' Rule - "Anita Green of Clackamas, Oregon, holds the title of 2019 Miss Earth Elite Oregon, and competed in the 2018 Miss Montana contest but failed to compete in last year’s Miss United States of America pageant due to her application being rejected.Her lawsuit, which was filed last Tuesday, says she was denied her the full and equal advantages and privileges of the defendant’s services in violation of Oregon’s public accommodations law and is therefore discriminatory... Green has had a trailblazing pageant career, being the first transgender contestant in the Miss Montana USA pageant and only the third openly transgender contestant to compete in a Miss Universe pageant competition. Transgender competitors in female beauty pageants are becoming more of a regular feature. Miss Spain’s winner, Angela Ponce, became Miss Universe’s first ever transgender entry in its 66-year history."
Married women need to sue about the rule banning them from taking part
Emilia Dimitrova - "Lol @ "Slippery slope"
2005: We just want tolerance! ️
2010: We just want to get married! ️
2015: Bake the cake, bigot! ️
2018: Suck the lady's dick, transphobe! ️
2019: Convicted pedophiles twerk for toddlers in the library under police protection. ️"
Keywords: Suck the dick, bigot
When You Say “I Would Never Date A Trans Person,” It’s Transphobic. Here’s Why.
Lesbians who would never date men are sexist
Former Nike contractor sues company for not using the right pronouns - The Post Millennial - "A computer engineer and employee of Nike’s has filed an official civil rights lawsuit against the company for what the disgruntled employee says is gender identity-based discrimination... Lyles would eventually take medical leave due to the amount of stress Lyles experienced working with those who misgendered her, and following the end of her contract with Nike, filed her lawsuit, claiming that Nike failed to protect Lyles’s civil rights, disabling her from being able to obtain a full-time job at the company... “Lyles was a mediocre [contractor] with a limited skill set”... An independent investigation by BOLI investigators, though, found that Nike employees working with Lyles’ stating that Lyles’ account of the events support Lyles’ story, noting that Nike was not fully prepared to integrate a non-binary transmasculine worker. Two managers told BOLI that no one was “aware of [Lyles’] preferred pronouns.”"
I guess this proves the company never really gave her realy problems, since she didn't have anything real to sue them for
Transgender woman accused of 'hate speech' after wearing t-shirt stating she is still biologically male - "Debbie Hayton, a physics teacher in the Midlands, lives as a transgender women after changing her gender from male to female in 2012. But unlike many people in the trans-community, she does not believe her sex can be changed and is vocal about the fact that she will always biologically remain a man. She is now potentially facing expulsion from the LGBT committee of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) for wearing a top adorned with the slogan: “Trans women are men. Get over it!”... 12 members of the LGBT committee wrote to Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC, a federation of unions representing 5.5m working Britons, saying that by wearing the T-shirt Ms Hayton had “gone beyond discourse, and the expression of alternative viewpoints, and is now propagating hate speech against the trans community”. The case against Ms Hayton comes after fellow transgender woman Kristina Jayne Harrison told an employment tribunal in November that attempts to “legally coerce society” into treating males as females in all circumstances is “inevitably doomed to fail”... “The process of having surgery or hormone treatment cannot ultimately transform your sex. Every cell in my body has male chromosomes. I have a prostate. These things cannot be completely deconstructed. It is not possible to be biologically female. But that does not mean I can’t live a fulfilling life being treated as a woman.” Nicola Williams, founder of Fair Play for Women, said: “Accusations of transphobia are thrown at women so often for so little that the word has lost all meaning. When even trans people can get called transphobes, I hope people now understand how ludicrous and far-fetched these attacks have always been. The trans movement has been hijacked by gender extremists.”"
Trans mania means silencing trans people who don't hew to the party line - even when they talk about themselves
After dancer strips at Seattle conference on homelessness, agency director suspended - "Performer Beyoncé Black St. James danced topless in a sheer bodysuit, gave lap dances and kissed attendees... Zylstra was paid about $123,000 a year, according to a county spokesperson. The performance was in the same room as a catered lunch at All Home’s annual conference, this year at South Seattle College with the theme of “Decolonizing our Collective Work.” The only note on the agenda was “Lunch with Cultural Presentation”... In a short video, St. James, a Spokane-based entertainer who identifies as a trans woman on her Facebook page, can be seen doing high kicks in a revealing bodysuit and with silver pasties. “No one expected it,” the staffer said. “So I think some people felt uncomfortable.” The first person St. James kissed seemed surprised, according to the staffer, but the ones following seemed more enthusiastic."
Transphobia!
The Oracle of Delphi is a cryptid - "Three women with penises
The Louvre, Paris Fr"
"oh i’m sorry were you saying something about me being an “artifact of the modern patriarchal medical-industrial complex” cause I was too busy looking at this photo of a 2000 year old classical greek marble statue of three transgender women just sorta chilling and being gorgeous."
"lmao @appropriately-inappropriate some freak photoshopped it
making it ever so clear that 1. we’re dealing with fetishists and 2. no one on tumblr bothers to fact check anything, especially if it suits their agenda"
"It’s hella stupid that only one of the figures would have pubic hair and im fucking cackling, yeah, they really just photoshopped David’s dick onto one of the three graces"
Maya Forstater loses employment tribunal after backlash over trans tweets - "A researcher who lost her job after tweeting that men cannot change their biological sex has lost an employment tribunal after her opinions were ruled “absolutist”.The Central London Employment Tribunal upheld the firing of tax expert Maya Forstater, 45, over a series of tweets questioning government plans to allow people to self-identify as another gender.Ms Forstater was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), which is a think-tank based in London and Washington that campaigns against poverty.She was accused of using “offensive and exclusionary” language on Twitter for saying “men cannot change into women”. Her legal dispute against her former employer was seen as a test on whether a “gender-critical” view – that there are only two biological sexes – was a protected philosophical belief under the 2010 Equality Act. Judge James Tayler decided that Ms Forstater’s view was “incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others”... Judge Tayler said the tax expert was not entitled to ignore the legal rights of transgender people and the “enormous pain that can be caused by misgendering a person”. He concluded: “If a person has transitioned from male to female and has a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), that person is legally a woman. That is not something Ms Forstater is entitled to ignore. Ms Forstater’s position is that even if a trans woman has a GRC, she cannot honestly describe herself as a woman. That belief is not worthy of respect in a democratic society."
"In times of universal deceit, to tell the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell (attr)
Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "Dress however you please.Call yourself whatever you like.Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.Live your best life in peace and security.But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill"
"JK Rowling dared say that biological sex is real and is now being cancelled by the very woke outrage mob she helped create. The world's tiniest violin plays. #TERF #IStandWithMaya"
"Maya Forstater, a researcher who lost her job after tweeting that men cannot change their biological sex, has lost an employment tribunal after her opinions were ruled “absolutist”. She was accused of using “offensive and exclusionary” language on Twitter."
Science is transphobic. But of course only "right wingers" deny science
ripx4nutmeg on Twitter - "Without any sense of irony, TRAs are calling for JK Rowling's books to be burned because they believe she is a Nazi"
Appalling Apostolic Memes for Liberty-Minded Teens - "Man, this just keeps getting better and better. The left screeches about Trump being a Nazi and trying to burn books and such, but then they go and do it to their own possessions.
imagine having to burn the only book you have ever read must be tough being a liberal today"
On a 2017 JK Rowling book burning exchange - but equally applicable today
In Unexpected Plot Twist, Far Left Now The Ones Burning Harry Potter Books | The Babylon Bee - "Unfortunately, many on the left could not figure out how to get a fire going. There are books on the subject, but they've only ever read Harry Potter."
Star Wars Mark Hamill apologises for liking JK Rowling's 'TERF' tweet'
Science and freedom of speech are 'transphobic'. How radically must society be transformed to appease a tiny minority?
OLIVIA ☭ HILL on Twitter - "Psst. Rowling wasn't some amazing writer who uniquely helped you through a hard time in your youth.
She was pushed in your face as the only viable entertainment option by a bigoted culture. You weren't blessed to read her. You were robbed of the chance to read diverse voices.
You didn't read her books because of merit. You read her books because of a powerful marketing machine. Be mad that it fed you a cis het white antisemitic TERF and told you that was progress and representation."
The perils of being an 'ally' - you get thrown to the wolves as the slightest perceived infraction by people who despise you for even existing
Comment: “She has all our money at this point, so I’m going to stand here and scream in the middle of cyberspace because I can’t cancel a billionaire who already ended the series.”
Sophia (Narwhal) Narwitz on Twitter - "Tranny here. And yeah, Rowling & the researcher are correct. Hormones dont change my biology. I will forever have male chromosomes, & more. I am biologically male. If I wasnt then I wouldnt need to transition. Is the fringe left/woke community really becoming this anti-science 🤦🏻♀️"
In just a few words, JK Rowling has changed the transgender debate | The Spectator Australia - "One of the (many) frustrations of writing a lot about sex and gender is knowing that there are a lot of people who are concerned about these issues but who do not, for various reasons, say so... Many are fearful of the backlash, the accusations of transphobia that could follow. Some of these women are prominent and famous and rich and powerful. The fact that such people keep quiet gives you some idea of the power of fear here... the broader effect of the Forstater case is that issues of sex and gender, the implications of transgenderism for society and individuals, are now going to be talked about by more people."
I write LGBTQ-inclusive books for children. JK Rowling's tweet breaks my heart | The Independent
The Independent: ""No one tells us what to write, so we'll never tell you what to think."
Also The Independent: This article
Germany′s Cabinet approves ban on gay, transgender ′conversion therapy′ - "The German Cabinet approved a bill to ban the advertising or offering of "conversion therapy" to transgender and gay people. The proposed legislation was expanded to include 16- to 18-year-olds... Under the bill, parents or caregivers would also be punished for making a 16- to 18-year-old undergo the therapy, which often uses conditioning techniques considered psychologically abusive by medical professionals. Bärbel Bas, the chair of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary faction, pushed for the bill to go further. "I wish to see a comprehensive ban for the so-called conversion therapy for adults, however, this would be difficult to implement legally""
Trans mania is about to explode in Germany. So all the lawsuits in 10-20 years time will have foreign Anglo precedents to draw upon
Looks like the SPD doesn't think adults should be able to make their own decisions
Trans Contestant Sues Miss USA Over 'Natural Born Woman' Rule - "Anita Green of Clackamas, Oregon, holds the title of 2019 Miss Earth Elite Oregon, and competed in the 2018 Miss Montana contest but failed to compete in last year’s Miss United States of America pageant due to her application being rejected.Her lawsuit, which was filed last Tuesday, says she was denied her the full and equal advantages and privileges of the defendant’s services in violation of Oregon’s public accommodations law and is therefore discriminatory... Green has had a trailblazing pageant career, being the first transgender contestant in the Miss Montana USA pageant and only the third openly transgender contestant to compete in a Miss Universe pageant competition. Transgender competitors in female beauty pageants are becoming more of a regular feature. Miss Spain’s winner, Angela Ponce, became Miss Universe’s first ever transgender entry in its 66-year history."
Married women need to sue about the rule banning them from taking part
Emilia Dimitrova - "Lol @ "Slippery slope"
2005: We just want tolerance! ️
2010: We just want to get married! ️
2015: Bake the cake, bigot! ️
2018: Suck the lady's dick, transphobe! ️
2019: Convicted pedophiles twerk for toddlers in the library under police protection. ️"
Keywords: Suck the dick, bigot
When You Say “I Would Never Date A Trans Person,” It’s Transphobic. Here’s Why.
Lesbians who would never date men are sexist
Former Nike contractor sues company for not using the right pronouns - The Post Millennial - "A computer engineer and employee of Nike’s has filed an official civil rights lawsuit against the company for what the disgruntled employee says is gender identity-based discrimination... Lyles would eventually take medical leave due to the amount of stress Lyles experienced working with those who misgendered her, and following the end of her contract with Nike, filed her lawsuit, claiming that Nike failed to protect Lyles’s civil rights, disabling her from being able to obtain a full-time job at the company... “Lyles was a mediocre [contractor] with a limited skill set”... An independent investigation by BOLI investigators, though, found that Nike employees working with Lyles’ stating that Lyles’ account of the events support Lyles’ story, noting that Nike was not fully prepared to integrate a non-binary transmasculine worker. Two managers told BOLI that no one was “aware of [Lyles’] preferred pronouns.”"
I guess this proves the company never really gave her realy problems, since she didn't have anything real to sue them for
Transgender woman accused of 'hate speech' after wearing t-shirt stating she is still biologically male - "Debbie Hayton, a physics teacher in the Midlands, lives as a transgender women after changing her gender from male to female in 2012. But unlike many people in the trans-community, she does not believe her sex can be changed and is vocal about the fact that she will always biologically remain a man. She is now potentially facing expulsion from the LGBT committee of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) for wearing a top adorned with the slogan: “Trans women are men. Get over it!”... 12 members of the LGBT committee wrote to Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC, a federation of unions representing 5.5m working Britons, saying that by wearing the T-shirt Ms Hayton had “gone beyond discourse, and the expression of alternative viewpoints, and is now propagating hate speech against the trans community”. The case against Ms Hayton comes after fellow transgender woman Kristina Jayne Harrison told an employment tribunal in November that attempts to “legally coerce society” into treating males as females in all circumstances is “inevitably doomed to fail”... “The process of having surgery or hormone treatment cannot ultimately transform your sex. Every cell in my body has male chromosomes. I have a prostate. These things cannot be completely deconstructed. It is not possible to be biologically female. But that does not mean I can’t live a fulfilling life being treated as a woman.” Nicola Williams, founder of Fair Play for Women, said: “Accusations of transphobia are thrown at women so often for so little that the word has lost all meaning. When even trans people can get called transphobes, I hope people now understand how ludicrous and far-fetched these attacks have always been. The trans movement has been hijacked by gender extremists.”"
Trans mania means silencing trans people who don't hew to the party line - even when they talk about themselves
Post ID: 1022242920436656968
Transgender Rights
BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Transgender Rights
"‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. How bewilderingly old fashioned, perhaps worse that sounds. That a time when a BBC schools video tells nine year olds, that it's really, really exciting. There are 100 genders, if not more now. Gender is the new social battlefield, where minorities who see themselves with some justification as having been marginalized and discriminated against, are not only fighting the normative majority, but increasingly with each other.
Two of the three Labour leadership candidates have waded into this increasingly venomous cultural Civil War. They've pledged themselves to a transgender manifesto that labels named women's and gay rights organizations, trans exclusionary hate groups. The manifesto insists that trans women are women and trans men are men. The refusal to accept this fundamental aspect of their perceived identity, or even attempts to discuss it are now explicitly or implicitly regarded as hateful bigotry. In this case meriting expulsion from the party.
The main women's group involved says it's only concerned with protecting hard won women's rights, particularly female changing rooms, refuges, prisons, which could and in many cases already are open to male bodied people. Some even with records of sexual offenses...
Can biology be a matter of opinion? Is it morally right or even scientifically tenable to make an absolute distinction between sex and gender? The one objective assigned at birth the other subjective and a matter entirely of feelings and individual self perception. Where does masculinity end and femininity begin? What constitutes transphobia? Most worrying for many, what’s behind the huge increase in sometimes very young children, mostly girls, mostly identifying as gay boys who say they want to change gender, and how should they be treated?'...
‘Do you see no dangers in this? I mean do you not think that, for example, bad men might be inclined to define themselves as women in the way that in the past teaching and the priesthood have attracted paedophiles?’
‘I think firstly, it's, I think it's deeply prejudicial to compare trans people to pedophiles’
‘No no, I wasn't, I wasn't. I was saying that bad people. Under your proposal, people can define their gender without any policing whatsoever, I've just asked you to consider the practical consequences of that. Could that attract bad people that define themselves as women? Remember that you're not policing it in any way’
‘I think you have in the spaces in which this is talked about, you already have protocols in place to deal with these things... furthermore, if a man seeks to do harm to women, they probably would do so without bothering to go through the process of the transition.’...
‘The real question here is do trans women's rights conflict with cis women's rights and I think that there's no basis for that.’
‘But you see that a lot of people disagree with you, including some groups of Women's Alliance and other groups where you've been very vocal against them and and refer to them as, as hate groups. Now, they do disagree with you. They are thought, they have a thought through position, you have your thought through position. Why go into this stance of flinging about accusations of hate or hatred, of transphobia. Not simply saying you don’t understand me and I want you to listen to me and change your mind. Why go into this quite extreme position?’
‘I think it's right to describe any organization which was founded for the purpose of and exists for the purpose of limiting the rights of a marginalized group as, as a bigoted one’
‘But it is the rights of an existing group who also feel themselves to be marginalized. That is the clash.’
‘But that assumes that that these groups actually do represent cis women. And I don't think that's actually the case. To be honest, I think these are these are quite small groups, which don't represent the majority of people's opinion. And ultimately it would be quite absurd if it did, because trans people are very significant.’
‘Well, lots of trans people have different views to you, as well’…
‘Once you've got so sectarian you end up in a position where you have an argument with some radical feminists, with liberals, with centralists. So you start out as a broad and progressive coalition. Do you not worry that it narrows in which becomes a bit of a sort of sectarian identity politics argument?’...
‘Women have the right to have sex, single sex exemptions, where they can be just women on their own. And we think that the way to deal with the threats to other groups is to make sure that those groups have space so they feel safe in’...
‘If let's just say there are two rooms, one for men, one for women, whether it's a toilet, whatever, and there are trans men and trans women, where would they belong?’...
‘What they have said is there was a dark joke going around, going on around the Tavistock. That soon there would be no gay people left. Now that's a very serious thing and what confuses me about this issue is... I do wonder why this isn't seen as as more vital and more important to discussion than it is… One of my main problems with this whole discussion is that the word transgender has replaced the word transsexual. And I think people think when they defend trans rights, they think they're defending transsexual rights, but of course they're not.
They're defending a whole range of things that falls under Stonewall’s umbrella, which includes cross dressers. So when people say that trans women are women, they are saying that, you know, a cross dresser like Pippa Bunce who dresses as a woman two days out of the week, is the same sex as my wife and daughter… One of the ironies of my situation is that I'm friends with many trans people now… they are all of the opinion that they are male. And they're of the opinion that they have dysphoria. And they want to try and live in a way that, where they can present in a feminine way without disturbing or getting in the way of women’s rights. What I find poisonous is this argument that women have to move over and make room for really what is a male problem, you know.’"
It is curious that trans activists accuse those who say that the system can be abused by criminals pretending to be trans of claiming that trans people are criminals. Criminally bad misunderstanding is a great way to stoke faux outrage
Of course there's also pretending that there're no abuses of the system today, and that no one will seek to abuse it
Trans activists claim trans people are unsafe in 'their own' toilets and other spaces too, so a third space for trans people would be best for everyone
"‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. How bewilderingly old fashioned, perhaps worse that sounds. That a time when a BBC schools video tells nine year olds, that it's really, really exciting. There are 100 genders, if not more now. Gender is the new social battlefield, where minorities who see themselves with some justification as having been marginalized and discriminated against, are not only fighting the normative majority, but increasingly with each other.
Two of the three Labour leadership candidates have waded into this increasingly venomous cultural Civil War. They've pledged themselves to a transgender manifesto that labels named women's and gay rights organizations, trans exclusionary hate groups. The manifesto insists that trans women are women and trans men are men. The refusal to accept this fundamental aspect of their perceived identity, or even attempts to discuss it are now explicitly or implicitly regarded as hateful bigotry. In this case meriting expulsion from the party.
The main women's group involved says it's only concerned with protecting hard won women's rights, particularly female changing rooms, refuges, prisons, which could and in many cases already are open to male bodied people. Some even with records of sexual offenses...
Can biology be a matter of opinion? Is it morally right or even scientifically tenable to make an absolute distinction between sex and gender? The one objective assigned at birth the other subjective and a matter entirely of feelings and individual self perception. Where does masculinity end and femininity begin? What constitutes transphobia? Most worrying for many, what’s behind the huge increase in sometimes very young children, mostly girls, mostly identifying as gay boys who say they want to change gender, and how should they be treated?'...
‘Do you see no dangers in this? I mean do you not think that, for example, bad men might be inclined to define themselves as women in the way that in the past teaching and the priesthood have attracted paedophiles?’
‘I think firstly, it's, I think it's deeply prejudicial to compare trans people to pedophiles’
‘No no, I wasn't, I wasn't. I was saying that bad people. Under your proposal, people can define their gender without any policing whatsoever, I've just asked you to consider the practical consequences of that. Could that attract bad people that define themselves as women? Remember that you're not policing it in any way’
‘I think you have in the spaces in which this is talked about, you already have protocols in place to deal with these things... furthermore, if a man seeks to do harm to women, they probably would do so without bothering to go through the process of the transition.’...
‘The real question here is do trans women's rights conflict with cis women's rights and I think that there's no basis for that.’
‘But you see that a lot of people disagree with you, including some groups of Women's Alliance and other groups where you've been very vocal against them and and refer to them as, as hate groups. Now, they do disagree with you. They are thought, they have a thought through position, you have your thought through position. Why go into this stance of flinging about accusations of hate or hatred, of transphobia. Not simply saying you don’t understand me and I want you to listen to me and change your mind. Why go into this quite extreme position?’
‘I think it's right to describe any organization which was founded for the purpose of and exists for the purpose of limiting the rights of a marginalized group as, as a bigoted one’
‘But it is the rights of an existing group who also feel themselves to be marginalized. That is the clash.’
‘But that assumes that that these groups actually do represent cis women. And I don't think that's actually the case. To be honest, I think these are these are quite small groups, which don't represent the majority of people's opinion. And ultimately it would be quite absurd if it did, because trans people are very significant.’
‘Well, lots of trans people have different views to you, as well’…
‘Once you've got so sectarian you end up in a position where you have an argument with some radical feminists, with liberals, with centralists. So you start out as a broad and progressive coalition. Do you not worry that it narrows in which becomes a bit of a sort of sectarian identity politics argument?’...
‘Women have the right to have sex, single sex exemptions, where they can be just women on their own. And we think that the way to deal with the threats to other groups is to make sure that those groups have space so they feel safe in’...
‘If let's just say there are two rooms, one for men, one for women, whether it's a toilet, whatever, and there are trans men and trans women, where would they belong?’...
‘What they have said is there was a dark joke going around, going on around the Tavistock. That soon there would be no gay people left. Now that's a very serious thing and what confuses me about this issue is... I do wonder why this isn't seen as as more vital and more important to discussion than it is… One of my main problems with this whole discussion is that the word transgender has replaced the word transsexual. And I think people think when they defend trans rights, they think they're defending transsexual rights, but of course they're not.
They're defending a whole range of things that falls under Stonewall’s umbrella, which includes cross dressers. So when people say that trans women are women, they are saying that, you know, a cross dresser like Pippa Bunce who dresses as a woman two days out of the week, is the same sex as my wife and daughter… One of the ironies of my situation is that I'm friends with many trans people now… they are all of the opinion that they are male. And they're of the opinion that they have dysphoria. And they want to try and live in a way that, where they can present in a feminine way without disturbing or getting in the way of women’s rights. What I find poisonous is this argument that women have to move over and make room for really what is a male problem, you know.’"
It is curious that trans activists accuse those who say that the system can be abused by criminals pretending to be trans of claiming that trans people are criminals. Criminally bad misunderstanding is a great way to stoke faux outrage
Of course there's also pretending that there're no abuses of the system today, and that no one will seek to abuse it
Trans activists claim trans people are unsafe in 'their own' toilets and other spaces too, so a third space for trans people would be best for everyone
Post ID: 2401586326829744040
Links - 9th April 2020 (1)
Will Labour ever understand what went wrong? - "Denis Healey's advice – "when you’re in a hole, stop digging" – was never more necessary than for today's Labour Party. It lost the December 2019 general election in resounding fashion, and yet a considerable section of the Party insists on believing that it was the electorate, not the party leadership under Jeremy Corbyn, that got it wrong. Other causes they have been blamed include Brexit, the opinion polls, the BBC and mainstream media in general, Boris Johnson's lies, and a failure to campaign in seats they might lose instead of in seats that they thought, in a fit of delusional optimism, they could win... Rebecca Long Bailey, shadow Business Secretary... presents herself as an old-fashioned Socialist in the footsteps of Tony Benn and Michael Foot... she won herself a standing ovation led by the platform party, including Mr Corbyn himself, when she recited the old Clause Four of the Labour Party's constitution, and declared that although it was no longer printed on the back of Labour membership cards, it is still "written on our hearts."... Adopted in 1920, it declared that the party's purpose was "to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable popular administration and control of each industry or service"... Some of the best advice for Labour comes from some of the most unlikely directions. Former Tory leader, for example, William Hague, writing in the Daily Telegraph, analysed a number of instances since the war where either the Conservatives or Labour had suffered a severe drubbing at the polls, and had realised the need, in Healey's phrase, to stop digging. In 1951, 1964, 1970, 1979, 1997 and 2010, a party returned to power after a long spell in opposition, and irrespective of the party concerned, he found five factors which made such a recovery possible."The first," he wrote, "is an appreciation of the strengths and appeal of the other side." Yet most candidates in the coming Labour leadership election seem utterly baffled by Boris Johnson's success, particularly among working-class voters, and could see no redeeming features in him at all.Second, they must stop making excuses and recognise that they themselves, and not some external factor, are the problem. In Labour's case, obviously, not enough people saw them as a plausible government. British elections are usually won on the centre ground, centre-right or centre-left. It wasn't Brexit that lost Labour the election, it was Mr Corbyn and friends.Third was a willingness to accept policies of the outgoing government, even those they had bitterly opposed. However difficult, Labour has to take a positive view of Brexit. In 1951 the Tories accepted the NHS; in 1997 Tony Blair accepted fundamental aspects of Thatcherism, such as privatisation... The fourth factor in a successful return to power was a determination to assure nervous voters that the party was a safe pair of hands that could be trusted. That meant Labour reassuring the City just as it meant the Tories reassuring the trade union movement, that an incoming government would be one it could work with. The reassurances given must be plausible. It also means relying on persuasion, not dogma. It requires sensitivity and tact.And the fifth secret of a successful return was to look and sound "modern", a party of the future not the past. Labour's manifesto seemed to have been written by people who thought of the Seventies as a golden age instead of the disaster it nearly was. The stain of anti-Semitism was a particular throw-back. And it is not modern to argue that Labour ought to have a female leader because it hasn't had one before. That horse has bolted. Modern women want fair treatment based on their merits, not their X chromosomes."
A business secretary who wants to destroy business. Hmm.
Love and Money | LendingTree - "Our survey results showed a large gap between gender ratings when it came to the impact of debt on attractiveness. For the women rated in the study, there was very little difference between the average rating of the women in good financial standings versus those in bad standings. For our fictional male profiles, respondents rated a good financial standing nearly two times higher than a bad one. Sixty-five percent of female survey respondents said it was extremely important for their partner to work. Business News Daily came to a similar conclusion; it found that 75 percent of women said it was unlikely that they’d date a man who was unemployed.In the same Business News Daily study, 46 percent of men said they would date someone who was unemployed. In our study, less than a third of men considered their partner being employed as “extremely important”... there are dating sites set up solely for the purpose of finding a partner who is financially stable... 4.1 percent of women and 5.3 percent of men said they have checked their partner’s credit score at some point, and roughly 35 percent of women and 30 percent of men said they hadn’t in previous relationships, but they would."
OUR FINE FURRY FLYING FRIENDS & SO MUCH MORE
Bull trying to mount a motorcycle
Sperm donations from dead men should be allowed, study says - "Sperm can be collected after death either through electrical stimulation of the prostate gland or surgery, and can then be frozen."
30 Pics Showing How Canadians Are Dealing With An Unprecedented Blizzard - "A massive blizzard hit Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, covering the area in huge amounts of snow."
Meme - "Wanna Go Back to My Place? We Can Play Doctor if Ya Know What I Mean"
"Oh Yeah That Sounds Hot"
"Wtf Is He Doing? I've Been Waiting for Like an Hour"
Joseph Clark on Twitter - "UTILITARIAN POTUS CANDIDATE: "On day one, I will direct the NIH to breed 2.1 trillion rats, to be fed a constant morphine drip. By year's end, the opiate-rodents will have undergone more pleasure than has hitherto been experienced in our nation's entire history. End of speech.""
75kg pig made to bungee jump 68m in China to welcome Year of the Rat
Man charged in credit union robbery wanted to 'try something new' - "Xengxai Yang of Appleton was charged Monday in Outagamie County court with robbery of a financial institution with a dangerous weapon... Yang told police that he had "decided to try something new today, so I robbed a bank." The robbery wasn't planned, he said."
Babylon Bee – Liberals taste their own medicine - "With now over 670,000 followers on Facebook, it regularly gains national spotlight for, well, making liberals whine...And this is why I love it.The Left has long dominated the entertainment industry from sitcoms that routinely take jabs through scripted dialogue to late-night shows that thrive by making fun of conservatives. You can’t even watch SNL anymore without liberals shoving their ideology down your throat... Liberals hate The Babylon Bee so much that they moved their focus from attacking the Daily Wire... The well-known “fact-checking” website Snoopes has repeatedly tried to take action to damper and restrain the Babylon Bee’s reach... Comedy is powerful, it has a power about it that allows the truth to flow undisrupted. This is why liberals hate it so much, they hate being opposed and exposed.Now, this is not to say liberals can’t laugh at themselves. There are plenty that can. The same principle applies to both sides. However, it’s the pushback from major publication that indicates the Babylon Bee is doing exactly what it needs to be doing: breaking down the nonsensical world the far-Left is trying to build, one joke at a time."
CEO’s pet rabbit flew business class from San Francisco to Japan - "Ogawa registered Coco as an emotional support animal, allowing her to bring her pet rabbit onto the flight.Thus, it cost just US$100 (S$135) for Ogawa to bring her rabbit onto the flight, in a special case.Later, the flight attendant informed Ogawa that there would be nobody sitting beside her on the 11-hour flight, thus Coco was allowed to use the seat beside Ogawa."
Homeless man who murdered woman and her son jailed for life - "A homeless man who turned on the woman who tried to help him and killed her and her teenage son has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 30 years.Aaron Barley stabbed Tracey Wilkinson 17 times and inflicted eight knife wounds on her son, Pierce, after sneaking into their home in Stourbridge, West Midlands, dressed in a balaclava. Barley, who was given food, friendship and shelter by the family, also tried to kill Wilkinson’s husband, Peter, when he returned home after walking the dog... Tracey Wilkinson, 50, took pity on Barley, when she found him huddled in a cardboard box outside a supermarket in September 2016. She drove him home and gave him her husband’s dinner. The family helped Barley find accommodation and made sure he had a hot meal every night.Peter Wilkinson, 47, gave Barley a job at his company but had to sack him after he began taking drugs... Barley’s motive remains unknown. He refused to give an explanation to the police and would not allow toxicology tests to be done, meaning it is not known if he had been drinking or taking drugs... Barley rocked from side to side as details of his 21 previous convictions for offences including an assault on a former partner were read out.Volunteers at an alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre have reported that Barley said he wanted to kill someone with a knife – with his “two aims in life” being to kill a police officer and a prison officer. But his remarks were dismissed as bravado caused by drug abuse."
Migrants in Singapore mostly from Malaysia - "Malaysians form the biggest group of migrants living and working in Singapore, accounting for almost half - or 44 per cent - of the foreign-born population here, United Nations figures show. They are followed by Chinese nationals, who make up around 18 per cent of the migrant pool... Rounding off the top three sources of migrants is Indonesia, which made up 6.4 per cent... followed by Indians (5.9 per cent), Pakistanis (5.1 per cent) and Bangladeshis (3.2 per cent). Those from Hong Kong and Macau together make up 3.3 per cent. This diverse group of migrants has tripled in the last 30 years... The UN figures reveal, for the first time, where migrants in Singapore were originally from"
This includes not just new citizens but PRs, work pass holders and dependents, and students
It's not surprising people think PRCs are the majority of migrants, since Malaysians can pass for Singaporeans
Trump’s new Puerto Rico hate-tweets rest on a very ugly premise - The Washington Post - "In an unusually disgusting and hateful series of tweets, he claimed that Puerto Rico has already gotten $91 billion in aid, which he said has been “wasted” by “grossly incompetent” leaders there."
April 2019
Trump administration refuses to release aid to Puerto Rico despite earthquakes - "The Trump administration is refusing to release all available disaster aid to Puerto Rico despite this week’s earthquakes, citing concerns about “corruption” and “financial mismanagement” on the island"
January 9, 2020
Puerto Rico residents outraged after discovering warehouse full of unused aid from Hurricane Maria - "People in a southern Puerto Rico city discovered a warehouse filled with water, cots and other unused emergency supplies, then set off a social media uproar Saturday when they broke in to retrieve goods as the area struggles to recover from a strong earthquake. With anger spreading in the U.S. territory after video of the event in Ponce appeared on Facebook, Gov. Wanda Vázquez quickly fired the director of the island's emergency management agency... The information upset many in Puerto Rico already angry over the government's botched response to Hurricane Maria, with similar incidents of supplies going unused being uncovered months later."
January 19, 2020
The Real Reason Shoppers Aren’t Returning - "Eighty-six percent of consumers continue to make most of their purchases at brick and mortar locations. Yet many brick and mortar retailers fear how much business they are losing to online retailers. Yes, retailers must learn to compete with an online business, but that’s not the only reason a customer doesn’t return. Something as simple as a dirty restroom or a broken shelf could impact a return visit. Even something about the parking lot – too much traffic, having to walk too far, trash on the ground, etc. – could impact the experience enough to make a customer look for an alternative store. In addition, 40% of customers surveyed said they are likely to spend less money in a store where there is a negative experience, while 43% said they are likely to jump to a competitor if they encounter any of these negative experiences. In other words, customers know what good service is. What’s more, they expect it. The report goes on to say that when customers have a problem-free experience, they come back and spend more"
Death to Merit! College Admissions Process Descends Into The Abyss - "There is nothing wrong, and much that is right, about looking at high school grades as predictors of collegiate success. But, to better predict such success, why not look at both high school grades and SAT/ACT scores? How does removing information about students make for better-informed evaluations of them? Even those whose research points to the superiority of high school GPA over the SAT/ACT simultaneously confess that “better marks on both measures predict a better chance of completion.” Our schools’ flight from common sense raises troubling questions about what exactly is going on and what the results of this move will be. According to some studies, the consequences of this change will be to harm the very persons most in need of help getting into college—inner-city and minority students... the Fordham Institute published American University professor Seth Gershenson’s study of grade inflation in American high schools, which demonstrates that grade inflation is real and rampant in high schools. These are the very high school grades that colleges now tell us should be relied on in place of the SAT/ACT. In fact, so ravaged by grade inflation are our high schools today, argues Gershenson, that “two-thirds of U.S. teenagers are ill-prepared for college when they leave high school.”... “grade inflation was more severe in schools attended by affluent students than in those attended by lower-income pupils (emphasis mine). So, richer students—those who live in suburbs and are primarily white—are playing the academic game with Monopoly Money grades. How bad is grade inflation in high schools today? A 2017 study finds that the average high school GPA (grade point average) in 2016 was 3.38 (out of a possible 4). The study also found that the average high school GPA has risen steadily over the years. From this, Gershenson concludes, “Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder to assume that an A truly represents excellence.”... “During the 1920s, the established Northeastern Anglo-Saxon elites who then dominated the Ivy League wished to sharply curtail the rapidly growing numbers of Jewish students, but their initial attempts to impose simple numerical quotas provoked enormous controversy and faculty opposition. Therefore, the approach subsequently taken . . . was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration . . . the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired. As a consequence, university leaders could honestly deny the existence of any racial or religious quotas, while still managing to reduce Jewish enrollment to a much lower level. . . .”... “Asians have some of the highest academic credentials but the lowest acceptance rates at the nation’s top schools.”"
A business secretary who wants to destroy business. Hmm.
Love and Money | LendingTree - "Our survey results showed a large gap between gender ratings when it came to the impact of debt on attractiveness. For the women rated in the study, there was very little difference between the average rating of the women in good financial standings versus those in bad standings. For our fictional male profiles, respondents rated a good financial standing nearly two times higher than a bad one. Sixty-five percent of female survey respondents said it was extremely important for their partner to work. Business News Daily came to a similar conclusion; it found that 75 percent of women said it was unlikely that they’d date a man who was unemployed.In the same Business News Daily study, 46 percent of men said they would date someone who was unemployed. In our study, less than a third of men considered their partner being employed as “extremely important”... there are dating sites set up solely for the purpose of finding a partner who is financially stable... 4.1 percent of women and 5.3 percent of men said they have checked their partner’s credit score at some point, and roughly 35 percent of women and 30 percent of men said they hadn’t in previous relationships, but they would."
OUR FINE FURRY FLYING FRIENDS & SO MUCH MORE
Bull trying to mount a motorcycle
Sperm donations from dead men should be allowed, study says - "Sperm can be collected after death either through electrical stimulation of the prostate gland or surgery, and can then be frozen."
30 Pics Showing How Canadians Are Dealing With An Unprecedented Blizzard - "A massive blizzard hit Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, covering the area in huge amounts of snow."
Meme - "Wanna Go Back to My Place? We Can Play Doctor if Ya Know What I Mean"
"Oh Yeah That Sounds Hot"
"Wtf Is He Doing? I've Been Waiting for Like an Hour"
Joseph Clark on Twitter - "UTILITARIAN POTUS CANDIDATE: "On day one, I will direct the NIH to breed 2.1 trillion rats, to be fed a constant morphine drip. By year's end, the opiate-rodents will have undergone more pleasure than has hitherto been experienced in our nation's entire history. End of speech.""
75kg pig made to bungee jump 68m in China to welcome Year of the Rat
Man charged in credit union robbery wanted to 'try something new' - "Xengxai Yang of Appleton was charged Monday in Outagamie County court with robbery of a financial institution with a dangerous weapon... Yang told police that he had "decided to try something new today, so I robbed a bank." The robbery wasn't planned, he said."
Babylon Bee – Liberals taste their own medicine - "With now over 670,000 followers on Facebook, it regularly gains national spotlight for, well, making liberals whine...And this is why I love it.The Left has long dominated the entertainment industry from sitcoms that routinely take jabs through scripted dialogue to late-night shows that thrive by making fun of conservatives. You can’t even watch SNL anymore without liberals shoving their ideology down your throat... Liberals hate The Babylon Bee so much that they moved their focus from attacking the Daily Wire... The well-known “fact-checking” website Snoopes has repeatedly tried to take action to damper and restrain the Babylon Bee’s reach... Comedy is powerful, it has a power about it that allows the truth to flow undisrupted. This is why liberals hate it so much, they hate being opposed and exposed.Now, this is not to say liberals can’t laugh at themselves. There are plenty that can. The same principle applies to both sides. However, it’s the pushback from major publication that indicates the Babylon Bee is doing exactly what it needs to be doing: breaking down the nonsensical world the far-Left is trying to build, one joke at a time."
CEO’s pet rabbit flew business class from San Francisco to Japan - "Ogawa registered Coco as an emotional support animal, allowing her to bring her pet rabbit onto the flight.Thus, it cost just US$100 (S$135) for Ogawa to bring her rabbit onto the flight, in a special case.Later, the flight attendant informed Ogawa that there would be nobody sitting beside her on the 11-hour flight, thus Coco was allowed to use the seat beside Ogawa."
Homeless man who murdered woman and her son jailed for life - "A homeless man who turned on the woman who tried to help him and killed her and her teenage son has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 30 years.Aaron Barley stabbed Tracey Wilkinson 17 times and inflicted eight knife wounds on her son, Pierce, after sneaking into their home in Stourbridge, West Midlands, dressed in a balaclava. Barley, who was given food, friendship and shelter by the family, also tried to kill Wilkinson’s husband, Peter, when he returned home after walking the dog... Tracey Wilkinson, 50, took pity on Barley, when she found him huddled in a cardboard box outside a supermarket in September 2016. She drove him home and gave him her husband’s dinner. The family helped Barley find accommodation and made sure he had a hot meal every night.Peter Wilkinson, 47, gave Barley a job at his company but had to sack him after he began taking drugs... Barley’s motive remains unknown. He refused to give an explanation to the police and would not allow toxicology tests to be done, meaning it is not known if he had been drinking or taking drugs... Barley rocked from side to side as details of his 21 previous convictions for offences including an assault on a former partner were read out.Volunteers at an alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre have reported that Barley said he wanted to kill someone with a knife – with his “two aims in life” being to kill a police officer and a prison officer. But his remarks were dismissed as bravado caused by drug abuse."
Migrants in Singapore mostly from Malaysia - "Malaysians form the biggest group of migrants living and working in Singapore, accounting for almost half - or 44 per cent - of the foreign-born population here, United Nations figures show. They are followed by Chinese nationals, who make up around 18 per cent of the migrant pool... Rounding off the top three sources of migrants is Indonesia, which made up 6.4 per cent... followed by Indians (5.9 per cent), Pakistanis (5.1 per cent) and Bangladeshis (3.2 per cent). Those from Hong Kong and Macau together make up 3.3 per cent. This diverse group of migrants has tripled in the last 30 years... The UN figures reveal, for the first time, where migrants in Singapore were originally from"
This includes not just new citizens but PRs, work pass holders and dependents, and students
It's not surprising people think PRCs are the majority of migrants, since Malaysians can pass for Singaporeans
Trump’s new Puerto Rico hate-tweets rest on a very ugly premise - The Washington Post - "In an unusually disgusting and hateful series of tweets, he claimed that Puerto Rico has already gotten $91 billion in aid, which he said has been “wasted” by “grossly incompetent” leaders there."
April 2019
Trump administration refuses to release aid to Puerto Rico despite earthquakes - "The Trump administration is refusing to release all available disaster aid to Puerto Rico despite this week’s earthquakes, citing concerns about “corruption” and “financial mismanagement” on the island"
January 9, 2020
Puerto Rico residents outraged after discovering warehouse full of unused aid from Hurricane Maria - "People in a southern Puerto Rico city discovered a warehouse filled with water, cots and other unused emergency supplies, then set off a social media uproar Saturday when they broke in to retrieve goods as the area struggles to recover from a strong earthquake. With anger spreading in the U.S. territory after video of the event in Ponce appeared on Facebook, Gov. Wanda Vázquez quickly fired the director of the island's emergency management agency... The information upset many in Puerto Rico already angry over the government's botched response to Hurricane Maria, with similar incidents of supplies going unused being uncovered months later."
January 19, 2020
The Real Reason Shoppers Aren’t Returning - "Eighty-six percent of consumers continue to make most of their purchases at brick and mortar locations. Yet many brick and mortar retailers fear how much business they are losing to online retailers. Yes, retailers must learn to compete with an online business, but that’s not the only reason a customer doesn’t return. Something as simple as a dirty restroom or a broken shelf could impact a return visit. Even something about the parking lot – too much traffic, having to walk too far, trash on the ground, etc. – could impact the experience enough to make a customer look for an alternative store. In addition, 40% of customers surveyed said they are likely to spend less money in a store where there is a negative experience, while 43% said they are likely to jump to a competitor if they encounter any of these negative experiences. In other words, customers know what good service is. What’s more, they expect it. The report goes on to say that when customers have a problem-free experience, they come back and spend more"
Death to Merit! College Admissions Process Descends Into The Abyss - "There is nothing wrong, and much that is right, about looking at high school grades as predictors of collegiate success. But, to better predict such success, why not look at both high school grades and SAT/ACT scores? How does removing information about students make for better-informed evaluations of them? Even those whose research points to the superiority of high school GPA over the SAT/ACT simultaneously confess that “better marks on both measures predict a better chance of completion.” Our schools’ flight from common sense raises troubling questions about what exactly is going on and what the results of this move will be. According to some studies, the consequences of this change will be to harm the very persons most in need of help getting into college—inner-city and minority students... the Fordham Institute published American University professor Seth Gershenson’s study of grade inflation in American high schools, which demonstrates that grade inflation is real and rampant in high schools. These are the very high school grades that colleges now tell us should be relied on in place of the SAT/ACT. In fact, so ravaged by grade inflation are our high schools today, argues Gershenson, that “two-thirds of U.S. teenagers are ill-prepared for college when they leave high school.”... “grade inflation was more severe in schools attended by affluent students than in those attended by lower-income pupils (emphasis mine). So, richer students—those who live in suburbs and are primarily white—are playing the academic game with Monopoly Money grades. How bad is grade inflation in high schools today? A 2017 study finds that the average high school GPA (grade point average) in 2016 was 3.38 (out of a possible 4). The study also found that the average high school GPA has risen steadily over the years. From this, Gershenson concludes, “Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder to assume that an A truly represents excellence.”... “During the 1920s, the established Northeastern Anglo-Saxon elites who then dominated the Ivy League wished to sharply curtail the rapidly growing numbers of Jewish students, but their initial attempts to impose simple numerical quotas provoked enormous controversy and faculty opposition. Therefore, the approach subsequently taken . . . was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration . . . the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired. As a consequence, university leaders could honestly deny the existence of any racial or religious quotas, while still managing to reduce Jewish enrollment to a much lower level. . . .”... “Asians have some of the highest academic credentials but the lowest acceptance rates at the nation’s top schools.”"
Post ID: 2023139854018527610
Opening the lock
(this was supposed to be posted yesterday but went to drafts)
This has been going around, and someone asked for help with it, so I've laid out my thought process to solve this below:
Clue 1) 682 - one digit is right and in its place
So it's 6??, ?8? or ??2
Only 6, 8 or 2 can be in the number (assumption: "one" here means "one and only one" - similar assumption applies below)
Clue 2) 614 - one digit is right but in the wrong place
So the full number contains either 6, 1 or 4 but not the other 2
With 1) we know it can't be 6
Possible numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9
Clue 3) 206 - two digits are right but both are in the wrong place
We know it cannot be 6. So the number contains 2 and 0
Possible numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9
Definite numbers: 0, 2
Clue 4) 738 - all digits are wrong
Possible numbers: 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9
Definite numbers: 0, 2
From 1), we know it ends with 2
So the number is ??2
From 3) we know the middle number cannot be 0
So the number is 0?2
Possible numbers to fill the gap: 1, 4, 5, 9
From 2) we know it's 1 or 4 but also that the centre number cannot be 1
So it's 042
Clue 5) 380 - one digit is right but in the wrong place
This seems unnecessary
This has been going around, and someone asked for help with it, so I've laid out my thought process to solve this below:
Clue 1) 682 - one digit is right and in its place
So it's 6??, ?8? or ??2
Only 6, 8 or 2 can be in the number (assumption: "one" here means "one and only one" - similar assumption applies below)
Clue 2) 614 - one digit is right but in the wrong place
So the full number contains either 6, 1 or 4 but not the other 2
With 1) we know it can't be 6
Possible numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9
Clue 3) 206 - two digits are right but both are in the wrong place
We know it cannot be 6. So the number contains 2 and 0
Possible numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9
Definite numbers: 0, 2
Clue 4) 738 - all digits are wrong
Possible numbers: 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9
Definite numbers: 0, 2
From 1), we know it ends with 2
So the number is ??2
From 3) we know the middle number cannot be 0
So the number is 0?2
Possible numbers to fill the gap: 1, 4, 5, 9
From 2) we know it's 1 or 4 but also that the centre number cannot be 1
So it's 042
Clue 5) 380 - one digit is right but in the wrong place
This seems unnecessary
Post ID: 2066618151654031805
Wednesday, April 08, 2020
Links - 8th April 2020 (2)
France to make 'Gallic Google' Qwant government's default search engine amid privacy issues - "French government computers are to adopt the Gallic-funded search engine Qwant as their default browser amid alleged concerns that Google insufficiently protects data privacy.Founded in 2013, Qwant is a Franco-German encrypted search engine that functions the same way as Google but doesn’t keep logs and places a heavy emphasis on user privacy."
Call It a Crime of Pasta - The New York Times - "According to the mayor’s office, in mid-October police inspectors busted a local restaurant for serving untraceable orecchiette, a violation of Italian and European Union regulations that require food in restaurants to be clearly sourced. The police fined the restaurateur and forced him to trash three kilos of pasta, or about seven pounds. The November news reports (“Strong hand against the handmade orecchiette in Old Bari” wrote La Repubblica) immediately worried the sharp-elbowed women of Bari, who are permitted to sell small plastic baggies of pasta for personal use, but who are not licensed to deliver large, unlabeled shipments to restaurants. The women don’t earn much to begin with, and fear having to wear hairnets, issue receipts and pay taxes. People here are asking if the Italian zeal for regulations, however often ignored, will end up overpowering the local pride in a custom that has brought Bari — where many families have their go-to pasta lady — tourists and much-needed good press... Vito Leccese, the mayor’s chief of staff, said his boss received a police bodyguard after taking on criminally linked street-food vendors and upset some traditionalists for prohibiting locals from selling raw mussels rinsed in seaport water... Michele Fanelli, an advocate for local traditions who also offers classes in orecchiette making, has stepped forward to defend the women, arguing that they are last vestiges of a disappearing Bari. “Globalization is threatening the traditions”"
The joys of regulation!
Asia Times | 75% of young want to escape South Korean ‘Hell’ - "From afar, South Koreans might appear to be blessed among East Asians.Citizens of a prosperous democracy that has birthed a hero-to-zero national success story, world-beating corporate brands, a futuristic infrastructure and the glitzy K-pop universe that is beloved across the region, they boast enviable looks, lifestyles and quality of life.Up close, things look different. According to a recent survey of 5,000 persons, 75% of 19-34 year old natives of the world’s 11th richest nation want out... 79.1% of young women and 72.1% of young men want to leave Korea, that 83.1% of young women and 78.4% of young men consider Korea “hell” and that 29.8% of young women and 34.1% of young men consider themselves “losers.”... “I don’t think Korea is particularly unequal – it is quite middle class compared to other wealthy countries – but if you go back one or two generations, things were very equal: everyone had nothing.” he said. “When everyone has nothing you don’t feel poor, but now, even if you have quite a decent standard of living, you look at others around and you may feel, ‘Oh my god!’”"
Student brings books to school in microwave after backpack ban - The Post Millennial - "A student at Spalding Grammar School in the U.K. has been suspended for his silent protest of his school’s ban on backpacks. The ban was brought forth under the guise of health and safety. The school stated, “injury was being caused to younger students as a result of sixth formers carrying ever-larger bags on their shoulders.” Jacob Ford, 17, protested the ban by taking his school supplies to class in a microwave... Ford brought his supplies to class not only in a microwave but also a wicker basket, another day in a saucepan and finally in a part of a lawnmower"
I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You. - "while these products may teach kids specific coding languages, they actually have very little to do with the work of creating software... Coding is not the new literacy. While most parents are literate and know to read to their kids, most are not programmers and have no idea what kind of skills a programmer needs. Coding books for kids present coding as a set of problems with “correct” solutions. And if your children can just master the syntax, they’ll be able to make things quickly and easily. But that is not the way programming works. Programming is messy. Programming is a mix of creativity and determination. Being a developer is about more than syntax, and certain skills can only be taught to the very young... There are no books that teach you how to solve a problem no one has seen before. This is why I don’t want my kids to learn syntax. I want them to learn to solve problems, to dive deep into an issue, to be creative... every time you involve your kids when you work on something you value, you are teaching them how to do things well. You are preparing them to write code.But you’re not only teaching them that. You’re teaching them the world is full of interesting things to discover. You’re showing them how to be passionate and look for that ephemeral sense of quality in everything they do. The best part is that even if they don’t become coders—most shouldn’t and won’t—the same skills can be used in nearly any career, in every hobby, in every life. When we force kids to learn syntax, we reinforce the idea that if something is not a blatantly employable skill, it’s not valuable. Adults can learn syntax. Only kids can learn to embrace curiosity"
Esoterismo Global - Posts - "**3 storeyed building with each storey being bigger than the one below it* Defying Physics, gravity, math, engineering, space, time, NASA, Einstein and the Holy Spirit."
Gabino Iglesias - "I just spent an inordinate amount of time reading about how Hollywood movies got handmade posters in Ghana for years. In many cases the artists hadn't seen the movies. These are glorious. Here are some of my favorites"
Ben Sixsmith on Twitter - "Dozens of bearded, bespectacled young men who write about decolonizing Marvel films are currently sweating over the keyboards in an effort dig up supposedly incriminating quotes from Roger Scruton and convince the world that he, unlike them, was no intellectual."
Late LG Ng rejected PM Lee's offer to "live off" Govt unlike LGs Desmond Kuek and Ng Yat Chung - "He revealed that he was one of the key architects behind the decision to retire military officers by the age of 50, so as to create career progression in the SAF... the SAF doesn’t guarantee anyone a second career after retirement at 50. He said, “You look for it yourself. To a certain extent, people who are scholars would find a second career easier, because the good scholars are also attracted into the Administrative Service.” “Of course, they can do something else. Some of them go into politics, and so politics becomes their second career – Teo Chee Hean, George Yeo, you know. And some of them, on their own effort, find jobs with Temasek companies. But it’s up to Temasek to accept them… Mindef does not have such powers. It’s between the individual and Temasek,” he emphasized. “The decision-maker is the employer. Mindef has no power to insist. Mindef may recommend, but Mindef cannot insist.”... LG Ng also disclosed that he had a meeting with then-DPM Lee Hsien Loong one year before his retirement from SAF. LG Ng recalled, “Of course, he asked me what I wanted to do next. Was I thinking of a permanent secretary position, a statutory board, ambassadorship?” “If I had decided that I wanted to become an ambassador, I’m sure the Defence Minister would have called the Foreign Minister and said, our CDF is retiring and wants to be an ambassador, could you consider him?” he continued. “In any case, I said no, I think it’s fair and ethical that I will look after myself. I said, we’ve just started this system. I’m the first case. So as principal architect, I surely cannot be seen in my second career to be living off the Government.” “The basis of the second career is that the SAF has trained and groomed a person who is of this calibre, and a person of this calibre should be able to hold his own outside of the SAF”"
Subaru responds to 'unfortunate' name of new vehicle: 'We had nothing to do with this' - "Subaru is apologizing after the outlandish, NSFW name of one of its new vehicles went viral on Twitter.The car, which the Japanese automaker unveiled at the 2020 Singapore Motor Show, was labeled the Forester Ultimate Customised Kit Special edition. And yes, that acronym spells out exactly what you think it does."
What does human flesh taste like? Canadian English teacher faces child abuse charges for showing BBC video in South Korea - "An English teacher from Canada who showed a BBC documentary titled “What does human flesh taste like?” to a group of children as young as six faces child abuse charges in South Korea."... In the footage, which is almost four minutes long, the host of the show allows a medical professional to take a sample of flesh from his thigh for analysis and has the sample cooked. The host, Greg Foot, then smells the sample, saying its aroma is “a lot richer than pork or chicken” and that “it’s like beef and ale stew or something”. However, noting that eating human flesh is illegal, he stops short of tasting it. Instead he gets a scientist to analyse the sample’s aroma, concluding that it is closest to a mixture of beef and lamb. He then cooks and eats a burger made up of a mixture the analysis suggests is close to his own flesh. “I think that’s going to be the closest I am ever going to get to tasting human. I tell you what, it’s pretty good”, he says.The teacher told police she had searched for the video in response to a question from a child about what human flesh would taste like. Her lawyer said she did not intend to shock the children."
Meme - "I'm PISSED I Spent My Skinny Years Thinking I Was Fat"
Scottish Journo Told She Needs Protective Gear To Hold Drop Bear - "Debi Edward, UK’s ITV News Asia correspondent, was reporting on the bushfires when she was told that some locals had a surprise for her reserved only for “special visitors”. She was going to hold the koala’s terrifying cousin, the drop bear, on camera. Now Debi doesn’t know much about drop bears so she’s told some basic facts about the animal. Drop bears are “vicious”, have fangs, and are poisonous... To protect her from the feral creature, Debi was geared up in full body armour complete with goggles and gloves and boots. Not to mention, someone had a dart gun handy… just in case... “I’m trying not to be worried because I’ve been told that he can sense if I’m worried”... I absolutely do not blame her for saying “fucking Aussies” afterwards – what a bloody good sport."
New York City 'poop train' a disgusting nightmare for Alabama town: 'It smells like death' - "A stinking trainload of human waste from New York City is stranded in a tiny Alabama town, spreading a stench like a giant backed-up toilet — and the "poop train" is just the latest example of the South being used as a dumping ground for other states' waste... New York City has discontinued shipping it to Alabama for the time being, said Eric Timbers, a city spokesman. Its waste, recovered from the sewage treatment process and often called "biosolids," has been sent out of state partly because the federal government in the late 1980s banned disposal in the Atlantic Ocean.In an earlier trash saga, a barge laden with 3,186 tons (2,890 metric tons) of non-toxic paper and commercial garbage from Long Island and New York City wandered the ocean for months in 1987, seeking a place to dump it after plans by a private developer to turn it into methane gas in North Carolina fell through. It was turned away by North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Belize and the Bahamas."
Immune cell that kills most cancers discovered by accident by British scientists - "A new type of immune cell which kills most cancers has been discovered by accident by British scientists, in a finding which could herald a major breakthrough in treatment.Researchers at Cardiff University were analysing blood from a bank in Wales, looking for immune cells that could fight bacteria, when they found an entirely new type of T-cell.That new immune cell carries a never-before-seen receptor which acts like a grappling hook, latching on to most human cancers, while ignoring healthy cells.In laboratory studies, immune cells equipped with the new receptor were shown to kill lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer.Professor Andrew Sewell, lead author on the study and an expert in T-cells from Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, said it was “highly unusual” to find a cell that had broad cancer-fighting therapies, and raised the prospect of a universal therapy."
There's a story like this every few years
A Brief History of Fascinators, the Haiku of Hats - "It was named in the 1960s, re-emerged with heightened artistry in the late 70s, and today is worn by both royals and the fashion forward. It traces back through the centuries, perhaps to the moment in the 1770s when on a whim Marie Antoinette planted some feathers—ostrich and peacock—into her pomaded hair... “You know,” says Jones, “they’re supposed to look like a caprice. Something that means nothing. And things which are supposed to mean nothing—they actually mean everything.”"
Call It a Crime of Pasta - The New York Times - "According to the mayor’s office, in mid-October police inspectors busted a local restaurant for serving untraceable orecchiette, a violation of Italian and European Union regulations that require food in restaurants to be clearly sourced. The police fined the restaurateur and forced him to trash three kilos of pasta, or about seven pounds. The November news reports (“Strong hand against the handmade orecchiette in Old Bari” wrote La Repubblica) immediately worried the sharp-elbowed women of Bari, who are permitted to sell small plastic baggies of pasta for personal use, but who are not licensed to deliver large, unlabeled shipments to restaurants. The women don’t earn much to begin with, and fear having to wear hairnets, issue receipts and pay taxes. People here are asking if the Italian zeal for regulations, however often ignored, will end up overpowering the local pride in a custom that has brought Bari — where many families have their go-to pasta lady — tourists and much-needed good press... Vito Leccese, the mayor’s chief of staff, said his boss received a police bodyguard after taking on criminally linked street-food vendors and upset some traditionalists for prohibiting locals from selling raw mussels rinsed in seaport water... Michele Fanelli, an advocate for local traditions who also offers classes in orecchiette making, has stepped forward to defend the women, arguing that they are last vestiges of a disappearing Bari. “Globalization is threatening the traditions”"
The joys of regulation!
Asia Times | 75% of young want to escape South Korean ‘Hell’ - "From afar, South Koreans might appear to be blessed among East Asians.Citizens of a prosperous democracy that has birthed a hero-to-zero national success story, world-beating corporate brands, a futuristic infrastructure and the glitzy K-pop universe that is beloved across the region, they boast enviable looks, lifestyles and quality of life.Up close, things look different. According to a recent survey of 5,000 persons, 75% of 19-34 year old natives of the world’s 11th richest nation want out... 79.1% of young women and 72.1% of young men want to leave Korea, that 83.1% of young women and 78.4% of young men consider Korea “hell” and that 29.8% of young women and 34.1% of young men consider themselves “losers.”... “I don’t think Korea is particularly unequal – it is quite middle class compared to other wealthy countries – but if you go back one or two generations, things were very equal: everyone had nothing.” he said. “When everyone has nothing you don’t feel poor, but now, even if you have quite a decent standard of living, you look at others around and you may feel, ‘Oh my god!’”"
Student brings books to school in microwave after backpack ban - The Post Millennial - "A student at Spalding Grammar School in the U.K. has been suspended for his silent protest of his school’s ban on backpacks. The ban was brought forth under the guise of health and safety. The school stated, “injury was being caused to younger students as a result of sixth formers carrying ever-larger bags on their shoulders.” Jacob Ford, 17, protested the ban by taking his school supplies to class in a microwave... Ford brought his supplies to class not only in a microwave but also a wicker basket, another day in a saucepan and finally in a part of a lawnmower"
I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You. - "while these products may teach kids specific coding languages, they actually have very little to do with the work of creating software... Coding is not the new literacy. While most parents are literate and know to read to their kids, most are not programmers and have no idea what kind of skills a programmer needs. Coding books for kids present coding as a set of problems with “correct” solutions. And if your children can just master the syntax, they’ll be able to make things quickly and easily. But that is not the way programming works. Programming is messy. Programming is a mix of creativity and determination. Being a developer is about more than syntax, and certain skills can only be taught to the very young... There are no books that teach you how to solve a problem no one has seen before. This is why I don’t want my kids to learn syntax. I want them to learn to solve problems, to dive deep into an issue, to be creative... every time you involve your kids when you work on something you value, you are teaching them how to do things well. You are preparing them to write code.But you’re not only teaching them that. You’re teaching them the world is full of interesting things to discover. You’re showing them how to be passionate and look for that ephemeral sense of quality in everything they do. The best part is that even if they don’t become coders—most shouldn’t and won’t—the same skills can be used in nearly any career, in every hobby, in every life. When we force kids to learn syntax, we reinforce the idea that if something is not a blatantly employable skill, it’s not valuable. Adults can learn syntax. Only kids can learn to embrace curiosity"
Esoterismo Global - Posts - "**3 storeyed building with each storey being bigger than the one below it* Defying Physics, gravity, math, engineering, space, time, NASA, Einstein and the Holy Spirit."
Gabino Iglesias - "I just spent an inordinate amount of time reading about how Hollywood movies got handmade posters in Ghana for years. In many cases the artists hadn't seen the movies. These are glorious. Here are some of my favorites"
Ben Sixsmith on Twitter - "Dozens of bearded, bespectacled young men who write about decolonizing Marvel films are currently sweating over the keyboards in an effort dig up supposedly incriminating quotes from Roger Scruton and convince the world that he, unlike them, was no intellectual."
Late LG Ng rejected PM Lee's offer to "live off" Govt unlike LGs Desmond Kuek and Ng Yat Chung - "He revealed that he was one of the key architects behind the decision to retire military officers by the age of 50, so as to create career progression in the SAF... the SAF doesn’t guarantee anyone a second career after retirement at 50. He said, “You look for it yourself. To a certain extent, people who are scholars would find a second career easier, because the good scholars are also attracted into the Administrative Service.” “Of course, they can do something else. Some of them go into politics, and so politics becomes their second career – Teo Chee Hean, George Yeo, you know. And some of them, on their own effort, find jobs with Temasek companies. But it’s up to Temasek to accept them… Mindef does not have such powers. It’s between the individual and Temasek,” he emphasized. “The decision-maker is the employer. Mindef has no power to insist. Mindef may recommend, but Mindef cannot insist.”... LG Ng also disclosed that he had a meeting with then-DPM Lee Hsien Loong one year before his retirement from SAF. LG Ng recalled, “Of course, he asked me what I wanted to do next. Was I thinking of a permanent secretary position, a statutory board, ambassadorship?” “If I had decided that I wanted to become an ambassador, I’m sure the Defence Minister would have called the Foreign Minister and said, our CDF is retiring and wants to be an ambassador, could you consider him?” he continued. “In any case, I said no, I think it’s fair and ethical that I will look after myself. I said, we’ve just started this system. I’m the first case. So as principal architect, I surely cannot be seen in my second career to be living off the Government.” “The basis of the second career is that the SAF has trained and groomed a person who is of this calibre, and a person of this calibre should be able to hold his own outside of the SAF”"
Subaru responds to 'unfortunate' name of new vehicle: 'We had nothing to do with this' - "Subaru is apologizing after the outlandish, NSFW name of one of its new vehicles went viral on Twitter.The car, which the Japanese automaker unveiled at the 2020 Singapore Motor Show, was labeled the Forester Ultimate Customised Kit Special edition. And yes, that acronym spells out exactly what you think it does."
What does human flesh taste like? Canadian English teacher faces child abuse charges for showing BBC video in South Korea - "An English teacher from Canada who showed a BBC documentary titled “What does human flesh taste like?” to a group of children as young as six faces child abuse charges in South Korea."... In the footage, which is almost four minutes long, the host of the show allows a medical professional to take a sample of flesh from his thigh for analysis and has the sample cooked. The host, Greg Foot, then smells the sample, saying its aroma is “a lot richer than pork or chicken” and that “it’s like beef and ale stew or something”. However, noting that eating human flesh is illegal, he stops short of tasting it. Instead he gets a scientist to analyse the sample’s aroma, concluding that it is closest to a mixture of beef and lamb. He then cooks and eats a burger made up of a mixture the analysis suggests is close to his own flesh. “I think that’s going to be the closest I am ever going to get to tasting human. I tell you what, it’s pretty good”, he says.The teacher told police she had searched for the video in response to a question from a child about what human flesh would taste like. Her lawyer said she did not intend to shock the children."
Meme - "I'm PISSED I Spent My Skinny Years Thinking I Was Fat"
Scottish Journo Told She Needs Protective Gear To Hold Drop Bear - "Debi Edward, UK’s ITV News Asia correspondent, was reporting on the bushfires when she was told that some locals had a surprise for her reserved only for “special visitors”. She was going to hold the koala’s terrifying cousin, the drop bear, on camera. Now Debi doesn’t know much about drop bears so she’s told some basic facts about the animal. Drop bears are “vicious”, have fangs, and are poisonous... To protect her from the feral creature, Debi was geared up in full body armour complete with goggles and gloves and boots. Not to mention, someone had a dart gun handy… just in case... “I’m trying not to be worried because I’ve been told that he can sense if I’m worried”... I absolutely do not blame her for saying “fucking Aussies” afterwards – what a bloody good sport."
New York City 'poop train' a disgusting nightmare for Alabama town: 'It smells like death' - "A stinking trainload of human waste from New York City is stranded in a tiny Alabama town, spreading a stench like a giant backed-up toilet — and the "poop train" is just the latest example of the South being used as a dumping ground for other states' waste... New York City has discontinued shipping it to Alabama for the time being, said Eric Timbers, a city spokesman. Its waste, recovered from the sewage treatment process and often called "biosolids," has been sent out of state partly because the federal government in the late 1980s banned disposal in the Atlantic Ocean.In an earlier trash saga, a barge laden with 3,186 tons (2,890 metric tons) of non-toxic paper and commercial garbage from Long Island and New York City wandered the ocean for months in 1987, seeking a place to dump it after plans by a private developer to turn it into methane gas in North Carolina fell through. It was turned away by North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Belize and the Bahamas."
Immune cell that kills most cancers discovered by accident by British scientists - "A new type of immune cell which kills most cancers has been discovered by accident by British scientists, in a finding which could herald a major breakthrough in treatment.Researchers at Cardiff University were analysing blood from a bank in Wales, looking for immune cells that could fight bacteria, when they found an entirely new type of T-cell.That new immune cell carries a never-before-seen receptor which acts like a grappling hook, latching on to most human cancers, while ignoring healthy cells.In laboratory studies, immune cells equipped with the new receptor were shown to kill lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer.Professor Andrew Sewell, lead author on the study and an expert in T-cells from Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, said it was “highly unusual” to find a cell that had broad cancer-fighting therapies, and raised the prospect of a universal therapy."
There's a story like this every few years
A Brief History of Fascinators, the Haiku of Hats - "It was named in the 1960s, re-emerged with heightened artistry in the late 70s, and today is worn by both royals and the fashion forward. It traces back through the centuries, perhaps to the moment in the 1770s when on a whim Marie Antoinette planted some feathers—ostrich and peacock—into her pomaded hair... “You know,” says Jones, “they’re supposed to look like a caprice. Something that means nothing. And things which are supposed to mean nothing—they actually mean everything.”"
Post ID: 2230726205511499323
Links - 8th April 2020 (1)
dr jpa 🇺🇸 on Twitter - "If you are positive thinking every day, work hard, strive to become the best version of yourself, surround yourself with inspiring people and never give up, there will be no limit to how exhausted you will be. --Svend Brinkmann, Danish Professor, Psychology"
Mother jailed for involving children in divorce case - "A mother, together with a male colleague, turned her two children against their father during divorce proceedings, so much so that their 15-year-old daughter publicly alleged that her father sexually abused her and her younger brother.But these allegations were unfounded, and the woman was found to have breached court orders by involving her children in the acrimonious divorce, in which she and her children accused the father of being a "mega-evolved sexual fetishist womanising pervert"."
California couple left bikes in yard to lure thieves, beat them with bats and post videos to YouTube: police
Philip Gehr - "Up early in the morning before the kids. Cutting the product *pouring Tootie Fruities into a Fruit Loops box*"
Those Vegan Guys - Posts - "Darren: "Why would you want to eat things that look and taste like meat if you're a vegan, why not just eat meat?"
Karen: "Why would you play computer game shooters when you could just go outside and shoot actual people?"
Darren: "Because that would make me a murderer"
Karen: "Ta dah""
Of course, there're people who think it's wrong to kill computer game characters, or who think killing them promotes bad values
Why cheating comes naturally to Indians - "We Indians are born fraudsters and hustlers. The big guns obviously hunt bigger game. The returns are higher. Every Indian cheats to the best of her ability. You do the best you can. It’s what school taught us. To learn to cheat in India is to learn how to survive. If you don’t, society will treat you as an imbecile who never grew up. Like the freelance writer.The working principle is this: If you don’t exploit, then you will automatically become the exploited. What happens then is that since everyone is cheating everybody else, all this cheating cancels each other out in the final sum. No one really gains. But it’s something we are habituated and genetically inclined to do, like the way we drive. It’s a mix of nature and culture. The shopkeeper wakes up and ups his shutters. The spider waits for the fly to come flying in. It could be the smallest of shopkeepers. It’s the reason people don’t change neighbourhoods, although familiarity is no guarantee that you will not be cheated. There is a cold bloodedness to our human relationships: false obsequiousness always follows a successful heist. The cheater respects the cheated’s stupidity. Without that he will be nothing. This cheating can be about the smallest of things, beginning with plumbers, electricians, carpenters, the cab ride from the airport or train station.The cigarette seller will keep five rupees and refuse to return the change.The mobile phone shop man will take a look at you, size you up, then quote you an inflated price for a phone cover and case.The parking attendant will take an extra ten for parking.Every tourist is fair game, which is why we have to chaperone, baby sit and play tourist-guide to our foreign guests. They can’t be left alone. They will be fleeced. You will hand in a five hundred rupee note, the cashier will keep it and return much less than you’d calculated. When you say "Hey, what happened to the rest?", he’ll reply: "Oh sorry I thought you gave me a hundred." He’s testing you. On your face he will make you feel that you’re being unnecessarily difficult. Secretly, he respects you... That’s the reason why Indian parents always warn their kids: Don’t let your guard down for a moment. The moment you do, you’ve been had... Basically if you don’t look local enough, you don’t bargain hard and question every transaction, you will be a sitting duck. That’s the default Indian setting. No Indian trusts the next Indian. Trust signals gullibility, not a valued trait in our urban jungle."
Will castigating the writer for perpetuating "stereotypes" be silencing a "minority"?
Konstantin Kisin on Twitter - "Students at Sheffield University are being paid £9.34 per hour to report on their fellow students. This is tremendous progress as in the Soviet Union, these roles were unpaid."
Turning students into a woke Stasi - "A friendly word of warning to black students thinking of applying to the University of Sheffield: don’t. Racism is endemic at this university. You will be confronted with racist abuse everywhere – in your accommodation, the library and the student bar. Racism at Sheffield University is – apparently – so rife that the vice-chancellor has had to resort to paying students to police not just the words but also the thoughts of their peers in a bid to get to grips with it.The university has announced that it will employ 20 of its own students at the generous rate of £9.34 an hour to tackle racist language on campus. The qualifications needed to become a ‘race-equality champion’ have not been made public. Thankfully, details have been provided about the role so we can make a guess at the skills required. The informers will be expected to tackle ‘microaggressions’ — that is, ‘comments or actions which might be unintentional, but which can cause offence to a minority group’. Sheffield’s vice-chancellor, Koen Lamberts, has said the aim of the initiative will be to ‘change the way people think about racism’ through initiating ‘healthy conversations’... will they be paid a commission for the numbers they inform on? What about snitches, sorry – champions – who find no sinners, no matter how hard they try? Will they risk losing their jobs? The East German Stasi seemed to have the answers to some of these questions – surely an all-expenses-paid fact-finding trip to Berlin by Sheffield’s senior-management team is perfectly justified.University lecturers and students must be among the most sensitive and most politically correct people in the UK today – and Sheffield is unlikely to be an exception. Sadly, this new initiative will inevitably lead to a massive increase in reports of racism. This won’t, of course, mean that the university has actually become more racist. It will mean that students have been taught to interpret every question posed to them, every sentence of every conversation, even every intended compliment as an expression of racist thinking. Every remark must be seen in the worst light possible. No joke shared between friends, no chat about home or holidays can be spared analysis for unintentional racism. What’s more, students will be taught that nothing can be questioned or challenged informally among friends – everything should be reported to officials who can intervene and instigate a ‘healthy’ conversation. What sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have labelled ‘victimhood culture’, where an accusation is as good as proof and being a victim becomes a form of social status, will take root. This will be to the benefit of no one other than the bureaucrats and administrators who manage the campus."
Long weekends are alluring, but the shorter working day is more practical - "When Microsoft gave its 2,300 employees in Japan five Fridays off in a row, it found productivity jumped 40 per cent. When financial services company Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand trialled eight Fridays off in a row, its 240 staff reported feeling more committed, stimulated and empowered... Arguably it is the pressure to fit family and personal commitments into the few hours between getting home and bedtime that is the main source of today’s time-squeeze, particularly for families. This suggests the priority should be the shorter working day rather than the four-day week... It’s worth bearing in mind the historical fall in the working week from 72 to 40 hours was achieved at a rate of only about 3.5 hours a decade. The biggest single step — from six to five-and-half days — was a reduction of 8 per cent in working hours.Moving to a six-hour day or a four-day week would involve a reduction of about 20 per cent in one step. It therefore seems practical to campaign for this in a number of stages.We should also treat with caution results of one-off, short-term, single-company experiments with the four-day week. These typically occur in organisations with leadership and work cultures willing and able to experiment with the concept. Employees are likely to see themselves as “special” and may be conscious of the need to make the experiment work. Painless economy-wide application cannot be taken for granted"
Taxpayer-funded electric vehicle chargers barely used: Report - "A $182.5 million federal government program has so far subsidized 102 electric vehicle charging stations across Canada, but some locations are used barely once-a-day according to an audit by Natural Resources Canada... The federal program is intended to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions"
"Sustainability" requires subsidies
Farmers Are Buying 40-Year-Old Tractors Because They're Actually Repairable - "When a brand new John Deere tractors breaks down, you need a computer to fix it. When a John Deere tractor manufactured in 1979 breaks down, you can repair it yourself or buy another old John Deere tractor. Farming equipment—like televisions, cars, and even toothbrushes—now often comes saddled with a computer. That computer often comes with digital rights management software that can make simple repairs an expensive pain in the ass... The tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s look and run like modern tractors, but lack the computer components that drive up costs and make repair a nightmare... Farmers are at the center of right-to-repair, a grass-roots consumer movement that says people should have the right to repair their own stuff. When a John Deere tractor breaks down, John Deere requires its owner to take it to an authorized dealer for repairs. Apple wants the same for its iPhones and recently told Congress that people would hurt themselves if they repaired their own stuff"
B.C. Supreme Court rules Indigenous ceremony at Vancouver Island school didn't violate religious rights - "The B.C. Supreme Court has ruled that an Indigenous smudging ceremony performed in a Port Alberni classroom in 2015 does not constitute a violation of religious rights for non-Indigenous students.The controversy began in September 2015 at John Howitt Elementary School after a student's parent claimed their child was unable to leave the classroom when the ceremony was taking place, which infringed on their religious neutrality... "This was an incredibly difficult case to go through and the court agrees that some of the petitioner’s arguments were insensitive and regrettable hyperbole especially considering the magnitude of what occurred in the residential school," said Sayers. "It was tough for all concerned to sit through this hearing and listen to assertions about Nuu-chah-nulth culture and hope that it never happens again.""
Apparently if you can't force others to watch your ritual, that is reminiscent of forced cultural re-education (residential schools)
The medieval ‘Shame Flute’ was used to punish bad musicians in the Middle Ages - "The contraption, which is essentially a heavy iron flute – although you probably wouldn’t want play it – was shackled to the musician’s neck.The musician’s fingers were then clamped to the keys, to give the impression they were playing the instrument.Finally, just to further their humiliation, they were forced to wear the flute while being paraded around town, so the public could throw rotten food and vegetables at them. At the time, it was considered a fitting punishment for crimes against music.But the Shame Flute – which is probably, if we’re being picky, closer in appearance to today’s clarinet – wasn’t just used to punish devious musicians. It was used on pretty much any public performer whose work was considered objectionable.Played your lute a bit out of tune? Shame Flute. Dropped a couple of juggling balls while jesting? Shame Flute."
Malaysia has become hub for Iranian activity, Western intel suggests - "Western intelligence analysts have noted extensive and growing activity by Iran in Malaysia, and that Iran has been shifting more activity to Malaysia from African countries... “Malaysia is the meeting point between various terrorist organizations and the Iranians”... In most of his statements, Mohamad refers to “the Jews” and not to Israelis, without bothering to differentiate between the two. And he makes no attempt to hide this. In 2012, he said he was proud to be called an anti-Semite. In his personal blog, he wrote, “The Jews control the world by a proxy,” and last August he said that “the term anti-Semitism was only coined to prevent people from criticizing the Jews for their evil deeds.”... Mohamad’s odious statements are not confined to Jews and Israel. Other countries in the West are also a target. At the same conference, he said, “There is significant evidence that the attack on the Twin Towers was staged.” He claimed the goal was to enable the U.S. government to operate against different Arab countries. No such theory was ever mentioned before it appeared on the website of the Malaysian Foreign Ministry"
Mother jailed for involving children in divorce case - "A mother, together with a male colleague, turned her two children against their father during divorce proceedings, so much so that their 15-year-old daughter publicly alleged that her father sexually abused her and her younger brother.But these allegations were unfounded, and the woman was found to have breached court orders by involving her children in the acrimonious divorce, in which she and her children accused the father of being a "mega-evolved sexual fetishist womanising pervert"."
California couple left bikes in yard to lure thieves, beat them with bats and post videos to YouTube: police
Philip Gehr - "Up early in the morning before the kids. Cutting the product *pouring Tootie Fruities into a Fruit Loops box*"
Those Vegan Guys - Posts - "Darren: "Why would you want to eat things that look and taste like meat if you're a vegan, why not just eat meat?"
Karen: "Why would you play computer game shooters when you could just go outside and shoot actual people?"
Darren: "Because that would make me a murderer"
Karen: "Ta dah""
Of course, there're people who think it's wrong to kill computer game characters, or who think killing them promotes bad values
Why cheating comes naturally to Indians - "We Indians are born fraudsters and hustlers. The big guns obviously hunt bigger game. The returns are higher. Every Indian cheats to the best of her ability. You do the best you can. It’s what school taught us. To learn to cheat in India is to learn how to survive. If you don’t, society will treat you as an imbecile who never grew up. Like the freelance writer.The working principle is this: If you don’t exploit, then you will automatically become the exploited. What happens then is that since everyone is cheating everybody else, all this cheating cancels each other out in the final sum. No one really gains. But it’s something we are habituated and genetically inclined to do, like the way we drive. It’s a mix of nature and culture. The shopkeeper wakes up and ups his shutters. The spider waits for the fly to come flying in. It could be the smallest of shopkeepers. It’s the reason people don’t change neighbourhoods, although familiarity is no guarantee that you will not be cheated. There is a cold bloodedness to our human relationships: false obsequiousness always follows a successful heist. The cheater respects the cheated’s stupidity. Without that he will be nothing. This cheating can be about the smallest of things, beginning with plumbers, electricians, carpenters, the cab ride from the airport or train station.The cigarette seller will keep five rupees and refuse to return the change.The mobile phone shop man will take a look at you, size you up, then quote you an inflated price for a phone cover and case.The parking attendant will take an extra ten for parking.Every tourist is fair game, which is why we have to chaperone, baby sit and play tourist-guide to our foreign guests. They can’t be left alone. They will be fleeced. You will hand in a five hundred rupee note, the cashier will keep it and return much less than you’d calculated. When you say "Hey, what happened to the rest?", he’ll reply: "Oh sorry I thought you gave me a hundred." He’s testing you. On your face he will make you feel that you’re being unnecessarily difficult. Secretly, he respects you... That’s the reason why Indian parents always warn their kids: Don’t let your guard down for a moment. The moment you do, you’ve been had... Basically if you don’t look local enough, you don’t bargain hard and question every transaction, you will be a sitting duck. That’s the default Indian setting. No Indian trusts the next Indian. Trust signals gullibility, not a valued trait in our urban jungle."
Will castigating the writer for perpetuating "stereotypes" be silencing a "minority"?
Konstantin Kisin on Twitter - "Students at Sheffield University are being paid £9.34 per hour to report on their fellow students. This is tremendous progress as in the Soviet Union, these roles were unpaid."
Turning students into a woke Stasi - "A friendly word of warning to black students thinking of applying to the University of Sheffield: don’t. Racism is endemic at this university. You will be confronted with racist abuse everywhere – in your accommodation, the library and the student bar. Racism at Sheffield University is – apparently – so rife that the vice-chancellor has had to resort to paying students to police not just the words but also the thoughts of their peers in a bid to get to grips with it.The university has announced that it will employ 20 of its own students at the generous rate of £9.34 an hour to tackle racist language on campus. The qualifications needed to become a ‘race-equality champion’ have not been made public. Thankfully, details have been provided about the role so we can make a guess at the skills required. The informers will be expected to tackle ‘microaggressions’ — that is, ‘comments or actions which might be unintentional, but which can cause offence to a minority group’. Sheffield’s vice-chancellor, Koen Lamberts, has said the aim of the initiative will be to ‘change the way people think about racism’ through initiating ‘healthy conversations’... will they be paid a commission for the numbers they inform on? What about snitches, sorry – champions – who find no sinners, no matter how hard they try? Will they risk losing their jobs? The East German Stasi seemed to have the answers to some of these questions – surely an all-expenses-paid fact-finding trip to Berlin by Sheffield’s senior-management team is perfectly justified.University lecturers and students must be among the most sensitive and most politically correct people in the UK today – and Sheffield is unlikely to be an exception. Sadly, this new initiative will inevitably lead to a massive increase in reports of racism. This won’t, of course, mean that the university has actually become more racist. It will mean that students have been taught to interpret every question posed to them, every sentence of every conversation, even every intended compliment as an expression of racist thinking. Every remark must be seen in the worst light possible. No joke shared between friends, no chat about home or holidays can be spared analysis for unintentional racism. What’s more, students will be taught that nothing can be questioned or challenged informally among friends – everything should be reported to officials who can intervene and instigate a ‘healthy’ conversation. What sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have labelled ‘victimhood culture’, where an accusation is as good as proof and being a victim becomes a form of social status, will take root. This will be to the benefit of no one other than the bureaucrats and administrators who manage the campus."
Long weekends are alluring, but the shorter working day is more practical - "When Microsoft gave its 2,300 employees in Japan five Fridays off in a row, it found productivity jumped 40 per cent. When financial services company Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand trialled eight Fridays off in a row, its 240 staff reported feeling more committed, stimulated and empowered... Arguably it is the pressure to fit family and personal commitments into the few hours between getting home and bedtime that is the main source of today’s time-squeeze, particularly for families. This suggests the priority should be the shorter working day rather than the four-day week... It’s worth bearing in mind the historical fall in the working week from 72 to 40 hours was achieved at a rate of only about 3.5 hours a decade. The biggest single step — from six to five-and-half days — was a reduction of 8 per cent in working hours.Moving to a six-hour day or a four-day week would involve a reduction of about 20 per cent in one step. It therefore seems practical to campaign for this in a number of stages.We should also treat with caution results of one-off, short-term, single-company experiments with the four-day week. These typically occur in organisations with leadership and work cultures willing and able to experiment with the concept. Employees are likely to see themselves as “special” and may be conscious of the need to make the experiment work. Painless economy-wide application cannot be taken for granted"
Taxpayer-funded electric vehicle chargers barely used: Report - "A $182.5 million federal government program has so far subsidized 102 electric vehicle charging stations across Canada, but some locations are used barely once-a-day according to an audit by Natural Resources Canada... The federal program is intended to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions"
"Sustainability" requires subsidies
Farmers Are Buying 40-Year-Old Tractors Because They're Actually Repairable - "When a brand new John Deere tractors breaks down, you need a computer to fix it. When a John Deere tractor manufactured in 1979 breaks down, you can repair it yourself or buy another old John Deere tractor. Farming equipment—like televisions, cars, and even toothbrushes—now often comes saddled with a computer. That computer often comes with digital rights management software that can make simple repairs an expensive pain in the ass... The tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s look and run like modern tractors, but lack the computer components that drive up costs and make repair a nightmare... Farmers are at the center of right-to-repair, a grass-roots consumer movement that says people should have the right to repair their own stuff. When a John Deere tractor breaks down, John Deere requires its owner to take it to an authorized dealer for repairs. Apple wants the same for its iPhones and recently told Congress that people would hurt themselves if they repaired their own stuff"
B.C. Supreme Court rules Indigenous ceremony at Vancouver Island school didn't violate religious rights - "The B.C. Supreme Court has ruled that an Indigenous smudging ceremony performed in a Port Alberni classroom in 2015 does not constitute a violation of religious rights for non-Indigenous students.The controversy began in September 2015 at John Howitt Elementary School after a student's parent claimed their child was unable to leave the classroom when the ceremony was taking place, which infringed on their religious neutrality... "This was an incredibly difficult case to go through and the court agrees that some of the petitioner’s arguments were insensitive and regrettable hyperbole especially considering the magnitude of what occurred in the residential school," said Sayers. "It was tough for all concerned to sit through this hearing and listen to assertions about Nuu-chah-nulth culture and hope that it never happens again.""
Apparently if you can't force others to watch your ritual, that is reminiscent of forced cultural re-education (residential schools)
The medieval ‘Shame Flute’ was used to punish bad musicians in the Middle Ages - "The contraption, which is essentially a heavy iron flute – although you probably wouldn’t want play it – was shackled to the musician’s neck.The musician’s fingers were then clamped to the keys, to give the impression they were playing the instrument.Finally, just to further their humiliation, they were forced to wear the flute while being paraded around town, so the public could throw rotten food and vegetables at them. At the time, it was considered a fitting punishment for crimes against music.But the Shame Flute – which is probably, if we’re being picky, closer in appearance to today’s clarinet – wasn’t just used to punish devious musicians. It was used on pretty much any public performer whose work was considered objectionable.Played your lute a bit out of tune? Shame Flute. Dropped a couple of juggling balls while jesting? Shame Flute."
Malaysia has become hub for Iranian activity, Western intel suggests - "Western intelligence analysts have noted extensive and growing activity by Iran in Malaysia, and that Iran has been shifting more activity to Malaysia from African countries... “Malaysia is the meeting point between various terrorist organizations and the Iranians”... In most of his statements, Mohamad refers to “the Jews” and not to Israelis, without bothering to differentiate between the two. And he makes no attempt to hide this. In 2012, he said he was proud to be called an anti-Semite. In his personal blog, he wrote, “The Jews control the world by a proxy,” and last August he said that “the term anti-Semitism was only coined to prevent people from criticizing the Jews for their evil deeds.”... Mohamad’s odious statements are not confined to Jews and Israel. Other countries in the West are also a target. At the same conference, he said, “There is significant evidence that the attack on the Twin Towers was staged.” He claimed the goal was to enable the U.S. government to operate against different Arab countries. No such theory was ever mentioned before it appeared on the website of the Malaysian Foreign Ministry"
Post ID: 1637018360349482420
Sunday, April 05, 2020
Links - 5th April 2020 (2) (Hate Crimes)
Only one in 100 hate crimes investigated by pioneering police unit lead to charge - "Fewer than one in 100 alleged hate crimes investigated by the UK’s first dedicated police unit have resulted in a charge, as experts say £1.7 million would have been better spent fighting violent crime. Just 17 cases, or 0.92 per cent of the 1,851 incidents logged by the UK’s first online hate crime hub have led to charges. Only seven of those charges resulted in a prosecution, meaning that under one in 200 proceeded to court... London Assembly member Susan Hall described the hub, which was set to cost £1.7 million over two years when it was launched by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, as "an exercise in spin over substance"... there have been complaints by senior officers and rank-and-file police that they have distracted forces from their “core” role of catching burglars and violent offenders and diverted them to incidents where no offence has been committed like hate crimes.Almost 150 people have been murdered this year in London, the highest number for more than a decade"
Leftist logic will be that this shows that the police aren't doing their jobs and should charge more people
Hate Crime Laws: Dangerous and Divisive by David B. Kopel - "The great promise of American law is Equal Protection: everyone is equal before the law. Colorado’s Ethnic Intimidation statute runs contrary to this promise, by creating preferred classes of victims. Proposed “hate crimes” laws would make the problem even worse. Different groups should not be contending for special status in our criminal law. Identity politics strikes at the heart of the American motto of e pluribus unum, and encourages people to think of themselves as members of particular groups -- rather than as, most of all, Americans first. Laws based on identity politics lead to skewed prioritization of law enforcement resources, and impinge on values of free speech, which includes the freedom to hold and express the most odious ideas. Until Colorado’s statute is repealed, it should be improved by stronger penalties for the creation of hoaxes."
LARPing Hate - "Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War is a timely and witty new book from Wilfred Reilly, a youngish black professor of political science at Kentucky State. He concludes that America’s real problem is not the vaunted outbreak of Trump-inspired hate crimes but instead the Establishment’s hate hysteria: There is no race war in the USA in 2018. Let’s stop letting liars tell us there is…or we might actually get one...
[He] has assembled a database of 409 recent fake hate crimes, which is a lot... “Between 15 and 50 percent of hate crime accusations are flatly false.”... it’s clear that hoaxes are common enough that the media and college administrations should be less credulous about promoting any new hate assertion until substantial evidence for its validity is assembled. Moreover, authorities need to be aware that some kinds of hate charges are inherently less likely to be true than others. While racist violence out behind a biker bar at closing time might not be implausible, many of the most publicized tales are set in improbably non-Trumpist surroundings, such as the women’s dorm at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village. Reilly writes, “But my strong suspicion is that at least half of college campus hate incident reports are fakes.” Reilly recommends that colleges immediately call the police rather than leave the investigation up to, say, the college’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIBs) department, which is likely to exploit it for its own ends. In contrast, the police, to their credit, seem to treat hate allegations with evenhanded skepticism... while in the past, blacks, such as Tawana Brawley, perpetrated most of the fake antiblack hate hoaxes, in recent years leftist whites appear to be pitching in with more antiwhite hoaxes. And, over the past dozen years or so, rightist whites have started to stage a few hate hoaxes of their own... I have a vague suspicion that the rise in hate hoaxes is related to the similar rise among young adults of Live Action Role Playing, such as going to Comic-Con dressed as an Imperial Stormtrooper and fighting lightsaber battles with other people dressed as Chewbacca and Princess Leia... Reilly’s Hate Crime Hoax offers several remedies for the current epidemic of hate crime hoaxes.First, be less naive. “Trust, but verify.” Second, 'Colleges and police departments need to actually punish individuals discovered to have falsified hate crime allegations.'
Reilly endorses David Kopel’s mooted reform of recognizing that hate hoaxes, comic as they often are, should be no laughing matter legally. Instead, hate hoaxes spread fear and loathing of the targeted race and therefore should be punished as the hate crimes that they are... The state of Louisiana treats policemen as a group protected by hate crime laws, which in the wake of the Black Lives Matter assassinations of recent years seems rational... Northern Ireland’s long history of cycles of Protestant-versus-Catholic vengeance violence is testimony that the state can have a particular interest in deterring criminality against groups. Individual-upon-individual acts of revenge are bad enough for the keeping of the peace, but race-upon-race crime might set off long processes that can go on for many years. But this concept also means that the law should distinguish between “hate crimes” in which animus against a group rather than a person was the motivation and “anger crimes” in which the aggressor’s motivation was to harm a particular individual. That would mean that punishing a criminal additionally for, say, shouting a racial epithet in the heat of a fight would not be considered a hate crime.It’s essential for the sake of justice that hate crimes be defined objectively rather than making it a hate crime for, say, a white person to “punch down” at a black but not for a black person to “punch up” at a white. Violence motivated by animus toward a racial group should be punished equally no matter who punches whom.This, however, is considered a highly controversial point of view by the ACLU.If the goal of hate crime legislation is not merely to punch up at whites but to deter crimes that increase society’s overall level of racial animosity, then interracial hate hoaxes should be punished especially hard."
This is why liberals hate the police so much - because they investigate instead of credulously believing whatever supports the liberal narrative
Final defendant in Facebook hate crime case sentenced to 7 years - "Tesfaye Cooper, 20, like his three co-defendants, had faced more than 50 felony counts following his arrest in the kidnapping and assault case that captured national attention in the weeks following President Donald Trump’s election victory.Video of Cooper and co-defendant Jordan Hill taunting and hitting their victim –– a white teen who was a former classmate of Hill’s at a suburban alternative high school –– was live-streamed on Facebook and became the subject of frenzied internet debate... Hill cuts the victim’s clothes and hair with a knife, nicking his scalp. Among the taunts shouted at him were orders to say “I love black people” and “F— Trump.” Later, prosecutors said the teen was forced to drink water from a toilet bowl and lick the floor."
Too bad they didn't do something truly horrific, like being white and "smirking" at a "minority"
Southaven man who reported racist graffiti on vehicles charged with insurance fraud - "A Mississippi man was charged with insurance fraud after he reported racist graffiti had been spray-painted on two of his vehicles... His pickup truck has two N****** spray-painted on it. A car was painted with the phrase 'Leave N******' and 'Trump.'Foster was taken into custody Friday and charged with insurance fraud and tampering with evidence, but Southaven police stopped short of explicitly saying Foster was responsible for the graffiti... he painted his wife's car after it was spray-painted."
Nation's Liberals Devastated After Learning Hate Crime Didn't Actually Happen | The Babylon Bee - "“I needed this to be true,” said liberal columnist Hanna Spalding. “When I first heard the news of this attack, I was filled with so much hope. I felt so validated. Then that was taken away. Now I just want to cry into my pillow.”The attack had been called “a modern-day lynching” by democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker but after Chicago police reported that the “trajectory of the investigation” into Smollet’s story had shifted, Smollet was stripped of his victim status. Booker became irate, phoning the Chicago police chief and shouting repeatedly, “Check it again! CHECK IT AGAIN!” After some deep breathing exercises, Booker spoke with reporters. “How are we supposed to intentionally turn the nation against each other and exploit these divisions for political power if people won’t commit a simple hate crime once in a while?”"
A Medical Dean Sees a Fishing Knot and Calls it a Hate Crime - "What happens at the University of Michigan Medical School when an employee practices making fishing knots with surgical rope and the knot is found? The dean of the medical school, Dr. Marschall Runge, jumped to the conclusion that the knot was a noose; a hate crime had occurred... Even after the University of Michigan police investigated the incident and discovered the innocent nature of the knot, Runge was unapologetic. While admitting the incident was innocent, Runge claimed the fishing knot “has affected the entire community, and many experienced intense emotional reactions.”... If Runge decides his error means the University of Michigan needs to spend more money combatting bias he will probably face little opposition. Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan at Flint calculated in 2018 that the University of Michigan “has nearly 100 diversity administrators, more than 25 of them earning over $100,000 a year.” Perry estimated the budget of those administrators at about $11 million annually.When your career depends upon finding bias, you will probably find bias. The more bias you find, the more successful you will be – you’ll need to hire still more diversity administrators – and as you do, you will get promoted up the diversity administrator ranks.Few will be brave enough to object to the growing expenditures; and if they do, the objectors will be accused of bias. Dean Runge could have used his mistake as a teaching opportunity about confirmation bias."
Universities Are Too Often Serving As “Hate-Crime Hoax” Mills. - "Advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center make headlines by claiming that hate crimes have surged since Trump’s election, but the real surge is in hate-crime hoaxes, especially among university students... They all point to a sickness in American society, with our institutions of higher education too often doubling as “hate-hoax mills,” encouraged by a bloated grievance industry in the form of diversity administrators.At Oberlin College, in particular, this problem precedes the Trump era... With their preoccupation with identity, privilege, and oppression, our institutions of higher education increasingly promote a paranoid climate of perpetual crisis. Is it surprising, then, that participants in this hothouse environment would respond to an incentive structure that rewards victimhood by manufacturing it?"
Girl says she made up story of white classmates cutting her dreadlocks - "A 12-year-old girl who previously claimed that three white classmates cut off her dreadlocks in a bullying incident at a Virginia private school now says she made up the story... The African-American girl alleged at the time that her classmates called her “ugly” during the attack... The girl’s tale captured international headlines and prompted the school to refer the case to police last Thursday.Investigators later reviewed security footage from the playground and did not see the events the girl described... The story bears a striking similarity to one that played out in Toronto early last year, when an 11-year-old girl claimed that her hijab had been cut by scissors... Last week’s incident captured additional attention because U.S. Vice President Mike Pence‘s wife, Karen, teaches at the school."
On Facebook, people who had questioned the veracity of the alleged assault were called racist, naturally. On the NYT Facebook many people were claiming she'd been pressured into recanting - just as there were people claiming the Chicago Police fabricated evidence that Jussie Smollett faked his hate crime
Maxim Lott on Twitter - "Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks on Playground"
"Virginia Girl Recants Story of Boys Cutting Off Her Dreadlocks"
".@NYTimes removed race references from story after it turned out to be a hoax"
Jussie Smollett Claps Back at Derrick Jaxn Over Dreadlock Girl Comparison - "Jussie Smollett reacted angrily on Monday when self-help social media star Derrick Jaxn likened him to a 12-year-old who falsely claimed her dreadlocks were hacked off by three white classmates."
Why we keep falling for hate-crime hoaxes - "12-year-old Amari Allen appeared on television to share how she had been brutalized by racist white boys at Immanuel Christian School in Springfield, Virginia. The sixth-grader, who is black, wept as she recalled how she was pinned down during recess, had her arms pulled behind her back and had a hand placed over her mouth so she couldn’t scream.She said the boys cut off her dreadlocks, calling it “nappy.”... When the story first broke, left-wing politicians and activists raged. Rep. Rashida Tlaib published a personalized message on Twitter to the girl: “You see, Amari, you may not feel it now but you have a power that threatens their core. I can’t wait to watch you use it and thrive.” On Twitter, some even found a way to blame the Trump administration, noting ominously that Vice President Mike Pence’s wife, Karen, teaches art part-time at the school.As with Jussie Smollett’s original accusations, Allen’s yarn had all the elements of a rage-bait story. Fervid media interest turned a regional non-incident into a national crisis, featured prominently and uncritically on televised reports from NBC, MSNBC, CNN and CBS, in addition to numerous print and online outlets.Left-wing activists and the mainstream media refuse to learn lessons about hate-crime hoaxes. Sensational claims deserve additional scrutiny. Was Allen or her family asked why no known students had come forward to corroborate her claims? She said it happened during recess — around dozens of other students presumably.The accused boys were also never sought for comment. On the contrary, the NAACP demanded “immediate disciplinary action” against the minor suspects.It’s hard to blame the public and media consumers for their naive credulity. The real problem is that highly publicized fake hate crimes like this one usually receive little public coverage after it is revealed that the original accusation was a hoax.Then, too, few Americans are aware that in just the past few years, several children have been caught fabricating hate-crime allegations.In January 2017, police in Gambrills, Maryland, identified a “14-year-old black female” as the suspect responsible for sending out a violent racist threat against her high school using a Twitter account pretending to be part of the Ku Klux Klan.The following month, students at Plano West Senior High in Texas discovered their school vandalized with racist, anti-black graffiti all over its buildings and school vans. After several months, police arrested and charged Alexandria Monet Butler and Elizabeth Joy Police, two black female minors, for the incident. They were caught on camera vandalizing the school. Then last year, a 5-year-old black child in Grand Rapids, Michigan, launched a frenzied police search after she told her family that a white man in the neighborhood had urinated on her and called her a racist slur. A 60-year-old man was arrested. The child made up the story with her friends.Nor are incidents like these confined to the United States. In early 2018, Khawlah Noman, an 11-year-old Muslim girl in Toronto, claimed that a man had attacked her by cutting her hijab. The story reverberated across the country, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately issuing comments condemning Islamophobia in Canada. Local police invested huge resources into catching the at-large suspect. Noman had fabricated the incident. She was never charged.The Boy Who Cried Wolf is as old as time immemorial, to be sure. What’s different today is the mind-boggling credulity of mainstream media and politicians, who jump to ideological conclusions and dial the outrage to 11 before the facts have played out.It’s no surprise that children lie, but when they are rewarded by an all-too-willing media and audience, we should expect more incidents like what happened in Virginia. The final result: Americans are bound to become ever more cynical and skeptical of hate-crime allegations — even when they’re true."
Smollett to Cops: Not My Fault You Spent So Much - "Jussie Smollett's legal team says "it's ridiculous and a stretch" to make him pay Chicago $130,000 to cover the cost of the police investigation into his alleged attack in January, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. "The filing of a police report, in and of itself, does not necessitate a sprawling investigation nor does it, as a practical matter, usually result in an investigation as extensive as the one CPD chose to undertake in this case," William J. Quinlan writes in a 12-page motion asking to have a city lawsuit against Smollett thrown out, per the Chicago Tribune. In other words, it was the city's decision, not Smollett's, to spend so much."
Of course, if they hadn't spent so much this would've been proof of racism
'Nerd' and 'geek' insults should be classed as hate crimes, academic claims - "Psychology lecturer and psychotherapist Dr Sonja Falck said the "divisive and humiliating" anti-IQ terms are hate crime's "last taboo". Dr Falck, who also runs a Harley-Street psychotherapy practice warned that the harmful words should be categorised in the same way as homophobic, racial, and religious slurs are under UK hate speech legislation... Her research has now been published in her new book 'Extreme Intelligence'. Speaking at the book launch, she said the next Government must take legislative action to force societal change. She said: "The N-word was common parlance in the UK until at least the 1960s. "Other insulting slurs about age, disability, religion and gender identity remained in widespread use until relatively recently. "Society at the time turned a blind eye to their impact by passing them off as harmless banter."
Due to the slippery slope, there will never be a "last taboo"
RIP Beto on Twitter - "A pair of Indian-American boys attacked African-American girls in New Jersey. According to a NYT op-ed, that was "enacting American whiteness," proves that "whiteness evolves" & race is not a matter of "blood or the color of our our skin."
"On "A Racist Attack Shows How Whiteness Evolves"
Dwayne Grayson Hate Crime Charges Withdrawn for ‘Restorative Justice’ - "Charges against a 20-year-old man who was accused of a hate crime in connection with the beating of an elderly Asian victim were withdrawn as part of a “restorative justice” effort by prosecutors in the case. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin made the decision on March 2 in the case against Dwayne Grayson, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.Boudin, who was described in a Jacobin profile last year as a “socialist and the child of revolutionaries,” campaigned heavily on a progressive vision of criminal justice reform during the district attorney race... One of the men in the video is seen attacking the victim with a broom.At one point, the man filming shouted “I hate Asians!”Several of the people in the video appeared to mock the victim as he wept... Authorities said Amerson had robbed the same victim two months before the attack that was captured on video."
Hate crimes are only bad when they're committed by white people
Leftist logic will be that this shows that the police aren't doing their jobs and should charge more people
Hate Crime Laws: Dangerous and Divisive by David B. Kopel - "The great promise of American law is Equal Protection: everyone is equal before the law. Colorado’s Ethnic Intimidation statute runs contrary to this promise, by creating preferred classes of victims. Proposed “hate crimes” laws would make the problem even worse. Different groups should not be contending for special status in our criminal law. Identity politics strikes at the heart of the American motto of e pluribus unum, and encourages people to think of themselves as members of particular groups -- rather than as, most of all, Americans first. Laws based on identity politics lead to skewed prioritization of law enforcement resources, and impinge on values of free speech, which includes the freedom to hold and express the most odious ideas. Until Colorado’s statute is repealed, it should be improved by stronger penalties for the creation of hoaxes."
LARPing Hate - "Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War is a timely and witty new book from Wilfred Reilly, a youngish black professor of political science at Kentucky State. He concludes that America’s real problem is not the vaunted outbreak of Trump-inspired hate crimes but instead the Establishment’s hate hysteria: There is no race war in the USA in 2018. Let’s stop letting liars tell us there is…or we might actually get one...
[He] has assembled a database of 409 recent fake hate crimes, which is a lot... “Between 15 and 50 percent of hate crime accusations are flatly false.”... it’s clear that hoaxes are common enough that the media and college administrations should be less credulous about promoting any new hate assertion until substantial evidence for its validity is assembled. Moreover, authorities need to be aware that some kinds of hate charges are inherently less likely to be true than others. While racist violence out behind a biker bar at closing time might not be implausible, many of the most publicized tales are set in improbably non-Trumpist surroundings, such as the women’s dorm at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village. Reilly writes, “But my strong suspicion is that at least half of college campus hate incident reports are fakes.” Reilly recommends that colleges immediately call the police rather than leave the investigation up to, say, the college’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIBs) department, which is likely to exploit it for its own ends. In contrast, the police, to their credit, seem to treat hate allegations with evenhanded skepticism... while in the past, blacks, such as Tawana Brawley, perpetrated most of the fake antiblack hate hoaxes, in recent years leftist whites appear to be pitching in with more antiwhite hoaxes. And, over the past dozen years or so, rightist whites have started to stage a few hate hoaxes of their own... I have a vague suspicion that the rise in hate hoaxes is related to the similar rise among young adults of Live Action Role Playing, such as going to Comic-Con dressed as an Imperial Stormtrooper and fighting lightsaber battles with other people dressed as Chewbacca and Princess Leia... Reilly’s Hate Crime Hoax offers several remedies for the current epidemic of hate crime hoaxes.First, be less naive. “Trust, but verify.” Second, 'Colleges and police departments need to actually punish individuals discovered to have falsified hate crime allegations.'
Reilly endorses David Kopel’s mooted reform of recognizing that hate hoaxes, comic as they often are, should be no laughing matter legally. Instead, hate hoaxes spread fear and loathing of the targeted race and therefore should be punished as the hate crimes that they are... The state of Louisiana treats policemen as a group protected by hate crime laws, which in the wake of the Black Lives Matter assassinations of recent years seems rational... Northern Ireland’s long history of cycles of Protestant-versus-Catholic vengeance violence is testimony that the state can have a particular interest in deterring criminality against groups. Individual-upon-individual acts of revenge are bad enough for the keeping of the peace, but race-upon-race crime might set off long processes that can go on for many years. But this concept also means that the law should distinguish between “hate crimes” in which animus against a group rather than a person was the motivation and “anger crimes” in which the aggressor’s motivation was to harm a particular individual. That would mean that punishing a criminal additionally for, say, shouting a racial epithet in the heat of a fight would not be considered a hate crime.It’s essential for the sake of justice that hate crimes be defined objectively rather than making it a hate crime for, say, a white person to “punch down” at a black but not for a black person to “punch up” at a white. Violence motivated by animus toward a racial group should be punished equally no matter who punches whom.This, however, is considered a highly controversial point of view by the ACLU.If the goal of hate crime legislation is not merely to punch up at whites but to deter crimes that increase society’s overall level of racial animosity, then interracial hate hoaxes should be punished especially hard."
This is why liberals hate the police so much - because they investigate instead of credulously believing whatever supports the liberal narrative
Final defendant in Facebook hate crime case sentenced to 7 years - "Tesfaye Cooper, 20, like his three co-defendants, had faced more than 50 felony counts following his arrest in the kidnapping and assault case that captured national attention in the weeks following President Donald Trump’s election victory.Video of Cooper and co-defendant Jordan Hill taunting and hitting their victim –– a white teen who was a former classmate of Hill’s at a suburban alternative high school –– was live-streamed on Facebook and became the subject of frenzied internet debate... Hill cuts the victim’s clothes and hair with a knife, nicking his scalp. Among the taunts shouted at him were orders to say “I love black people” and “F— Trump.” Later, prosecutors said the teen was forced to drink water from a toilet bowl and lick the floor."
Too bad they didn't do something truly horrific, like being white and "smirking" at a "minority"
Southaven man who reported racist graffiti on vehicles charged with insurance fraud - "A Mississippi man was charged with insurance fraud after he reported racist graffiti had been spray-painted on two of his vehicles... His pickup truck has two N****** spray-painted on it. A car was painted with the phrase 'Leave N******' and 'Trump.'Foster was taken into custody Friday and charged with insurance fraud and tampering with evidence, but Southaven police stopped short of explicitly saying Foster was responsible for the graffiti... he painted his wife's car after it was spray-painted."
Nation's Liberals Devastated After Learning Hate Crime Didn't Actually Happen | The Babylon Bee - "“I needed this to be true,” said liberal columnist Hanna Spalding. “When I first heard the news of this attack, I was filled with so much hope. I felt so validated. Then that was taken away. Now I just want to cry into my pillow.”The attack had been called “a modern-day lynching” by democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker but after Chicago police reported that the “trajectory of the investigation” into Smollet’s story had shifted, Smollet was stripped of his victim status. Booker became irate, phoning the Chicago police chief and shouting repeatedly, “Check it again! CHECK IT AGAIN!” After some deep breathing exercises, Booker spoke with reporters. “How are we supposed to intentionally turn the nation against each other and exploit these divisions for political power if people won’t commit a simple hate crime once in a while?”"
A Medical Dean Sees a Fishing Knot and Calls it a Hate Crime - "What happens at the University of Michigan Medical School when an employee practices making fishing knots with surgical rope and the knot is found? The dean of the medical school, Dr. Marschall Runge, jumped to the conclusion that the knot was a noose; a hate crime had occurred... Even after the University of Michigan police investigated the incident and discovered the innocent nature of the knot, Runge was unapologetic. While admitting the incident was innocent, Runge claimed the fishing knot “has affected the entire community, and many experienced intense emotional reactions.”... If Runge decides his error means the University of Michigan needs to spend more money combatting bias he will probably face little opposition. Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan at Flint calculated in 2018 that the University of Michigan “has nearly 100 diversity administrators, more than 25 of them earning over $100,000 a year.” Perry estimated the budget of those administrators at about $11 million annually.When your career depends upon finding bias, you will probably find bias. The more bias you find, the more successful you will be – you’ll need to hire still more diversity administrators – and as you do, you will get promoted up the diversity administrator ranks.Few will be brave enough to object to the growing expenditures; and if they do, the objectors will be accused of bias. Dean Runge could have used his mistake as a teaching opportunity about confirmation bias."
Universities Are Too Often Serving As “Hate-Crime Hoax” Mills. - "Advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center make headlines by claiming that hate crimes have surged since Trump’s election, but the real surge is in hate-crime hoaxes, especially among university students... They all point to a sickness in American society, with our institutions of higher education too often doubling as “hate-hoax mills,” encouraged by a bloated grievance industry in the form of diversity administrators.At Oberlin College, in particular, this problem precedes the Trump era... With their preoccupation with identity, privilege, and oppression, our institutions of higher education increasingly promote a paranoid climate of perpetual crisis. Is it surprising, then, that participants in this hothouse environment would respond to an incentive structure that rewards victimhood by manufacturing it?"
Girl says she made up story of white classmates cutting her dreadlocks - "A 12-year-old girl who previously claimed that three white classmates cut off her dreadlocks in a bullying incident at a Virginia private school now says she made up the story... The African-American girl alleged at the time that her classmates called her “ugly” during the attack... The girl’s tale captured international headlines and prompted the school to refer the case to police last Thursday.Investigators later reviewed security footage from the playground and did not see the events the girl described... The story bears a striking similarity to one that played out in Toronto early last year, when an 11-year-old girl claimed that her hijab had been cut by scissors... Last week’s incident captured additional attention because U.S. Vice President Mike Pence‘s wife, Karen, teaches at the school."
On Facebook, people who had questioned the veracity of the alleged assault were called racist, naturally. On the NYT Facebook many people were claiming she'd been pressured into recanting - just as there were people claiming the Chicago Police fabricated evidence that Jussie Smollett faked his hate crime
Maxim Lott on Twitter - "Black Virginia Girl Says White Classmates Cut Her Dreadlocks on Playground"
"Virginia Girl Recants Story of Boys Cutting Off Her Dreadlocks"
".@NYTimes removed race references from story after it turned out to be a hoax"
Jussie Smollett Claps Back at Derrick Jaxn Over Dreadlock Girl Comparison - "Jussie Smollett reacted angrily on Monday when self-help social media star Derrick Jaxn likened him to a 12-year-old who falsely claimed her dreadlocks were hacked off by three white classmates."
Why we keep falling for hate-crime hoaxes - "12-year-old Amari Allen appeared on television to share how she had been brutalized by racist white boys at Immanuel Christian School in Springfield, Virginia. The sixth-grader, who is black, wept as she recalled how she was pinned down during recess, had her arms pulled behind her back and had a hand placed over her mouth so she couldn’t scream.She said the boys cut off her dreadlocks, calling it “nappy.”... When the story first broke, left-wing politicians and activists raged. Rep. Rashida Tlaib published a personalized message on Twitter to the girl: “You see, Amari, you may not feel it now but you have a power that threatens their core. I can’t wait to watch you use it and thrive.” On Twitter, some even found a way to blame the Trump administration, noting ominously that Vice President Mike Pence’s wife, Karen, teaches art part-time at the school.As with Jussie Smollett’s original accusations, Allen’s yarn had all the elements of a rage-bait story. Fervid media interest turned a regional non-incident into a national crisis, featured prominently and uncritically on televised reports from NBC, MSNBC, CNN and CBS, in addition to numerous print and online outlets.Left-wing activists and the mainstream media refuse to learn lessons about hate-crime hoaxes. Sensational claims deserve additional scrutiny. Was Allen or her family asked why no known students had come forward to corroborate her claims? She said it happened during recess — around dozens of other students presumably.The accused boys were also never sought for comment. On the contrary, the NAACP demanded “immediate disciplinary action” against the minor suspects.It’s hard to blame the public and media consumers for their naive credulity. The real problem is that highly publicized fake hate crimes like this one usually receive little public coverage after it is revealed that the original accusation was a hoax.Then, too, few Americans are aware that in just the past few years, several children have been caught fabricating hate-crime allegations.In January 2017, police in Gambrills, Maryland, identified a “14-year-old black female” as the suspect responsible for sending out a violent racist threat against her high school using a Twitter account pretending to be part of the Ku Klux Klan.The following month, students at Plano West Senior High in Texas discovered their school vandalized with racist, anti-black graffiti all over its buildings and school vans. After several months, police arrested and charged Alexandria Monet Butler and Elizabeth Joy Police, two black female minors, for the incident. They were caught on camera vandalizing the school. Then last year, a 5-year-old black child in Grand Rapids, Michigan, launched a frenzied police search after she told her family that a white man in the neighborhood had urinated on her and called her a racist slur. A 60-year-old man was arrested. The child made up the story with her friends.Nor are incidents like these confined to the United States. In early 2018, Khawlah Noman, an 11-year-old Muslim girl in Toronto, claimed that a man had attacked her by cutting her hijab. The story reverberated across the country, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately issuing comments condemning Islamophobia in Canada. Local police invested huge resources into catching the at-large suspect. Noman had fabricated the incident. She was never charged.The Boy Who Cried Wolf is as old as time immemorial, to be sure. What’s different today is the mind-boggling credulity of mainstream media and politicians, who jump to ideological conclusions and dial the outrage to 11 before the facts have played out.It’s no surprise that children lie, but when they are rewarded by an all-too-willing media and audience, we should expect more incidents like what happened in Virginia. The final result: Americans are bound to become ever more cynical and skeptical of hate-crime allegations — even when they’re true."
Smollett to Cops: Not My Fault You Spent So Much - "Jussie Smollett's legal team says "it's ridiculous and a stretch" to make him pay Chicago $130,000 to cover the cost of the police investigation into his alleged attack in January, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. "The filing of a police report, in and of itself, does not necessitate a sprawling investigation nor does it, as a practical matter, usually result in an investigation as extensive as the one CPD chose to undertake in this case," William J. Quinlan writes in a 12-page motion asking to have a city lawsuit against Smollett thrown out, per the Chicago Tribune. In other words, it was the city's decision, not Smollett's, to spend so much."
Of course, if they hadn't spent so much this would've been proof of racism
'Nerd' and 'geek' insults should be classed as hate crimes, academic claims - "Psychology lecturer and psychotherapist Dr Sonja Falck said the "divisive and humiliating" anti-IQ terms are hate crime's "last taboo". Dr Falck, who also runs a Harley-Street psychotherapy practice warned that the harmful words should be categorised in the same way as homophobic, racial, and religious slurs are under UK hate speech legislation... Her research has now been published in her new book 'Extreme Intelligence'. Speaking at the book launch, she said the next Government must take legislative action to force societal change. She said: "The N-word was common parlance in the UK until at least the 1960s. "Other insulting slurs about age, disability, religion and gender identity remained in widespread use until relatively recently. "Society at the time turned a blind eye to their impact by passing them off as harmless banter."
Due to the slippery slope, there will never be a "last taboo"
RIP Beto on Twitter - "A pair of Indian-American boys attacked African-American girls in New Jersey. According to a NYT op-ed, that was "enacting American whiteness," proves that "whiteness evolves" & race is not a matter of "blood or the color of our our skin."
"On "A Racist Attack Shows How Whiteness Evolves"
Dwayne Grayson Hate Crime Charges Withdrawn for ‘Restorative Justice’ - "Charges against a 20-year-old man who was accused of a hate crime in connection with the beating of an elderly Asian victim were withdrawn as part of a “restorative justice” effort by prosecutors in the case. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin made the decision on March 2 in the case against Dwayne Grayson, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.Boudin, who was described in a Jacobin profile last year as a “socialist and the child of revolutionaries,” campaigned heavily on a progressive vision of criminal justice reform during the district attorney race... One of the men in the video is seen attacking the victim with a broom.At one point, the man filming shouted “I hate Asians!”Several of the people in the video appeared to mock the victim as he wept... Authorities said Amerson had robbed the same victim two months before the attack that was captured on video."
Hate crimes are only bad when they're committed by white people
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