Links - 20th September 2020 (2)

How you define racism may stop you from seeing it where it exists - "Some things are glaringly racist – being called racial slurs, being attacked for looking or sounding different, being mistreated because of skin colour. Most of us can probably agree these things are racist.These fit into the established understanding of racism – ‘the belief that one’s own racial or ethnic group is superior’ – as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary.But these basic definitions can miss crucial aspects of the true meaning of racism – power dynamics, prejudice, and structural racism.Professor Peter Wade, a sociologist from the University of Manchester, tells us how racism more complex and insidious than the traditional definition, explaining that it is a system of oppression that has historically existed and continues to do so against minorities and debilitating their lives in covert and overt ways... Changing the definition of racism could bridge the current disconnect between those oppressed and those doing the oppressing."
Is the "true meaning of racism" like the "true meaning of Christmas"?
Translation: grievance mongers need to keep seeing racism to keep themselves relevant
Considering that most minorities don't think they're discriminated against, this sort of Orwellian wordplay will just alienate the "oppressed" even more

Prof finds majority of minorities don't face discrimination - "The study, led by Professor Brian Boutwell, consisted of reviewing response data from a survey of more than 14,000 Americans, finding that the vast majority claim to have “never” or “rarely” been a victim of discrimination. The results, relatively consistent across racial lines, found that only 25 percent of Americans responded “yes” to ever experiencing discrimination... when asked about what they think caused unfair treatment, most respondents eschewed “race” as a motivating factor.  Rather, most instead chalked up their discriminatory experiences to “other” causes, such as personal appearance or political views"
So by obsessing about racism (which isn't a big issue) and stoking political partisanship, liberals are just increasing oppression

Brandon Orselli on Twitter - "*image* bUt ReAL wOmEn CaN't LoOk LiKe JrPg ChArAcTeRs"

Finnish reading dogs help kids learn and grow - "Fifth-grader Donita is reading aloud from a children’s book while a Bernese mountain dog called Hilma-Maria listens attentively. When Donita scratches Hilma’s chin, the big dog’s eyes close blissfully.Hilma is no ordinary dog – she’s a “reading dog,” on the job today at Hovirinta School in Kaarina, a town in southwestern Finland. Hilma’s mistress, Maarit Haapasaari, who is with her in the small classroom, started to use reading dogs in Kaarina in 2011, bringing the method to Finland for the first time.Reading to a dog can be a highly rewarding experience for kids in need of reading practice. “The idea is to encourage children with reading difficulties to read aloud,” she says. “Dogs will listen contentedly to a child, not caring if the reader makes mistakes or only reads slowly.”Kids who read to dogs experience a sense of fulfilment that boosts the children’s self-esteem and encourages them to pick up books more readily in future."... “Together with creative writing specialist Veera Vähämaa, we’ve also developed and registered a concept we call ‘Writing stories to tell to dogs,’” says Haapasaari. “Children write their own stories that they can then read aloud to a dog.""

Being Libertarian - UK - Posts - "Communism is about love. Love for humanity, your neighbours, your community. Without love, it's impossible to be a Communist, or at least a good Communist."
"Communism loved 50 million people to death in my country."

anjana on Twitter - "feminism is calling your landlord your owner. thank u for our rights UN"

Infographic: Fight Back Against Wokeness With More Gendered Language | The Babylon Bee

What Is Baby Shark? - Origins of Pinkfong's Viral Video - "The video isn't recent: It dates back to November 2015, uploaded by a Korean education company called Pinkfong. While it was pretty successful from the start, the video went really viral in Asia in August 2017, Forbes reports, when people began posting videos of themselves doing the dance moves and hashtagging it #babysharkchallenge"

Orwell & Goode - Posts - "The health director of Los Angeles is the most unhealthy looking person I have ever seen."
"False Information. Checked by independent fact-checkers"
"Lmao they fact checked an opinion"

We Don’t Celebrate the USSR on Victory in Europe Day—Here’s Why - "when Americans, Britons, and Europeans celebrate V-E Day, we are not (or should not be) celebrating the number of Germans killed in the war or the magnitude of sacrifice made to ensure their defeat. We are celebrating peace; we are celebrating justice; and we are celebrating the kind of world order which the Allied victory made possible — a world order to which the Soviet Union contributed nothing."

Man inspired by Crimewatch programme jailed for Carousell scams - "Inspired by a Crimewatch TV episode about Carousell scams, an unemployed couple decided to commit the same offences.Muhammad Haadii Asmadi, 30, was jailed 10 months on Monday (18 May) after he pleaded guilty to nine out of 24 charges of cheating and abetting by conspiracy to cheat via the online marketplace platform, with the remaining considered for sentencing.His fiancee, Sushilawati Selamat, also 30, was earlier sentenced to eight months’ jail"

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage - "Customers called in saying their pizza was delivered cold. Or the wrong pizza was delivered and they wanted a new pizza.Again, none of his restaurants delivered.He realized that a delivery option had mysteriously appeared on their company's Google Listing. The delivery option was created by Doordash... Doordash was causing him real problems. The most common was, Doordash delivery drivers didn't have the proper bags for pizza so it inevitably would arrive cold. It led to his employees wasting time responding to complaints and even some bad Yelp reviews.But he brought up another problem - the prices were off. He was frustrated that customers were seeing incorrectly low prices. A pizza that he charged $24 for was listed as $16 by Doordash.My first thought: I wondered if Doordash is artificially lowering prices for customer acquisition purposes.My second thought: I knew Doordash scraped restaurant websites. After we discussed it more, it was clear that the way his menu was set up on his website, Doordash had mistakenly taken the price for a plain cheese pizza and applied it to a 'specialty' pizza with a bunch of toppings.My third thought: Cue the Wall Street trader in me…..ARBITRAGE!!!! If someone could pay Doordash $16 a pizza, and Doordash would pay his restaurant $24 a pizza, then he should clearly just order pizzas himself via Doordash, all day long. You'd net a clean $8 profit per pizza... Some regional director would be able to show top-line revenue growth while some accounting line-item, somewhere, would not match up, but the company was already losing hundreds of millions of dollars. I imagined their systems might even be built to discourage catching these mistakes because it would detract, or at a minimum distract, from top-line revenue... Tricking businesses onto your platform and creating additional headaches for small business owners in the pursuit of Softbankian growth is a bad as it gets. Many restauranteurs were complaining about their Google listings being "hijacked" by Doordash, sometimes even usurping their own preferred delivery.These underhanded tricks aren't unique to Doordash though. In recent weeks there has been some great work coming out around a Yelp - Grubhub phone scam. This one is just priceless (seriously, read this Buzzfeed piece). Grubhub for their own sites generates a phone number for each restaurant that goes to a centralized, Grubhub owned call center. If someone calls in and orders via this number, the restaurant gets charged a fee. Apparently, some enterprising BD folks came up with the idea that Yelp could put the Grubhub phone numbers in place of the real restaurant phone number on the Yelp listing. Customers who think they’re “helping” their local restaurants by calling in the order are still creating a fee for Grubhub... What is it about the food delivery platform business? Restaurants are hurt. The primary labor is treated poorly. And the businesses themselves are terrible... Delivery can work. Just look at a Domino’s stock chart. But, delivery has been carefully built as part of a holistic business model and infrastructure. Maybe that’s the viable model... You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and increased prices. But is that even viable?"

'I am Korean yet culturally black' - "Cindy Wilson, author of "Too Much Soul: The Journey of an Asian Southern Belle," was born I Wol-yang in Seoul and adopted by African-American parents in 1975 when she was a few months old. Her name was changed to Cindy and she was brought to America by her adoptive parents the following year.Unlike some other adoptees who have spent a great deal of time and energy to find their birth parents, Wilson has never tried to find her roots. She said she considers her adoptive parents, not birth parents, to be her true family.Raised in Mississippi, Wilson identifies as being part of the African American community, even though she is Asian."
Luckily she's not white

Most implicit bias training in health care lacks proper foundation, research finds - "An increasing number of medical schools and other health care organizations are starting to incorporate implicit bias training in their curriculums to help health care professionals recognize any unconscious prejudice and attitudes they may have toward certain groups of people. However, current training is not grounded in a framework where research findings translate to clinical treatment, raising a serious concern about the effectiveness of the training"

Idiotocin on Twitter - "Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix can shrug their shoulders as much as they like about their little movie but when the armed forces are preparing to deal with active shooters at screenings you might want to admit that you’ve made Citizen Kane for incels. To the people in my mentions... no, I do not want a shooting to happen so that I can be proven right, because I am not a psychopath. Funny that your minds went there, though.
Oh and I’ve muted this thread so you’re all just screaming at each other xoxo"
"Hello there, I'm just replying here to let you know that zero (0) acts of violence, be they white supremacist, incel, or otherwise, have been committed due to the 2019 film Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Todd Phillips"
"@Philip_Ellis blocked you"
On Joker
Liberals like to pretend that no one is able to respond to their claims - because they block anyone who is
Comments: "Nananananah I can’t hear you! I win!"
"I know how concerned he was, so I think we should update him every month on the current number of shootings at joker screenings, both public and private, just to help assure him that people are staying safe I think it would mean a lot to him"

Chicago woman mauled to death by the French bulldog she rescued - "An animal rights activist was mauled to death in her Chicago home by at least one of her three dogs... All of the dogs appeared to be well cared for, Van Sickle told People. “It was evident to us this was a very loving home, a very pet-friendly home.”It is unclear why the attack occurred."
Damn bias against bulldogs!

Dog who viciously attacked, killed its owner in her Fox Lake home will likely be euthanized - "Lake County Animal Care and Control Spokeswoman Hannah Goering said that there is no evidence the dog, a 2-year-old male French bulldog mix named Blue, had been trained to fight.“Blue is in great health, no visible scars or torn-up ears”... Blue and Rocco both had blood on them but authorities believe Blue was the primary biter. He had previously bit Urso’s boyfriend on April 13 and April 21. Police were called to Urso’s residence on both of those occasions and Blue was seized by Lake County Animal Care and Control. The dog was returned to Urso after she requested it back... Blue will likely be humanely euthanized unless Urso’s family expresses interest in adapting him, which none of them have so far, Goering said. If they do express interest, the matter could end up in court and health officials would argue against the adoption because the dog is a public health risk."

Activist critical of police undergoes use of force scenarios

"We've seen protests all across the country after police officers have been accused of shooting people who aren't armed. Jarrett Maupin, a vocal critic of police during recent protests, went through force training with local authorities. FOX 10's Troy Hayden also went through the training and discusses the results."

Reverend Jarrett Maupin: "I didn't understand how importance (sic) compliance was, but after going through this, yeah, my attitude has changed. This is all unfolding in 10-15 seconds. People need to comply with the orders of law enforcement officers, for their own sake"

 

Kudos to him for being willing to challenge his beliefs. Of course most people who bash and/or hate the police would rather not see the reality of being in a dangerous situation with uncooperative suspects who could be armed.

Then again, since many think ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), it is a good bet that they WANT more police to die, so this exercise wouldn't change their minds anyway.

Links - 20th September 2020 (1)

How to Record Vocals for Karaoke | How to Use Audacity - YouTube
With the current version you need to press Shift+R, not record (as one comment pointed out)

Matthew Higham on Twitter - "This power line happened to be laid straight through the skull of an Anglo Saxon woman buried in a previously undiscovered 6th century graveyard."
"@AventuraObscura This was actually my very first archaeological dig in Oakington, UK 2014. We named her "Piper." Took a bit to get that photo, but you can see some of the grave goods she was buried with (some beautiful brooches and a necklace)"

Recursive patterns in online echo chambers - "Despite their entertainment oriented purpose, social media changed the way users access information, debate, and form their opinions. Recent studies, indeed, showed that users online tend to promote their favored narratives and thus to form polarized groups around a common system of beliefs. Confirmation bias helps to account for users’ decisions about whether to spread content, thus creating informational cascades within identifiable communities. At the same time, aggregation of favored information within those communities reinforces selective exposure and group polarization. Along this path, through a thorough quantitative analysis we approach connectivity patterns of 1.2 M Facebook users engaged with two very conflicting narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. Analyzing such data, we quantitatively investigate the effect of two mechanisms (namely challenge avoidance and reinforcement seeking) behind confirmation bias, one of the major drivers of human behavior in social media. We find that challenge avoidance mechanism triggers the emergence of two distinct and polarized groups of users (i.e., echo chambers) who also tend to be surrounded by friends having similar systems of beliefs. Through a network based approach, we show how the reinforcement seeking mechanism limits the influence of neighbors and primarily drives the selection and diffusion of contents even among like-minded users, thus fostering the formation of highly polarized sub-clusters within the same echo chamber. Finally, we show that polarized users reinforce their preexisting beliefs by leveraging the activity of their like-minded neighbors, and this trend grows with the user engagement suggesting how peer influence acts as a support for reinforcement seeking."
This provides yet more empirical support for preference falsification and virtue signalling

Echo Chambers on Social Media: A comparative analysis - "Recent studies have shown that online users tend to select information adhering to their system of beliefs, ignore information that does not, and join groups - i.e., echo chambers - around a shared narrative. Although a quantitative methodology for their identification is still missing, the phenomenon of echo chambers is widely debated both at scientific and political level. To shed light on this issue, we introduce an operational definition of echo chambers and perform a massive comparative analysis on more than 1B pieces of contents produced by 1M users on four social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Gab. We infer the leaning of users about controversial topics - ranging from vaccines to abortion - and reconstruct their interaction networks by analyzing different features, such as shared links domain, followed pages, follower relationship and commented posts. Our method quantifies the existence of echo-chambers along two main dimensions: homophily in the interaction networks and bias in the information diffusion toward likely-minded peers. We find peculiar differences across social media. Indeed, while Facebook and Twitter present clear-cut echo chambers in all the observed dataset, Reddit and Gab do not. Finally, we test the role of the social media platform on news consumption by comparing Reddit and Facebook. Again, we find support for the hypothesis that platforms implementing news feed algorithms like Facebook may elicit the emergence of echo-chambers."

Echo Chambers: Emotional Contagion and Group Polarization on Facebook - "we explore the interplay between emotional state and engagement of users in the group dynamics. Our findings show that communities’ emotional behavior is affected by the users’ involvement inside the echo chamber. Indeed, to an higher involvement corresponds a more negative approach. Moreover, we observe that, on average, more active users show a faster shift towards the negativity than less active ones."
The more active you are inside your social media echo chamber, the more upset you become

Extremists More Willing To Share Their Opinions, Study Finds - "People with relatively extreme opinions may be more willing to publicly share their views than those with more moderate views, according to a new study.The key is that the extremists have to believe that more people share their views than actually do, the research found.The results may offer one possible explanation for our fractured political climate in the United States, where extreme liberal and conservative opinions often seem to dominate... The average student's views were near the mid-point of the scale -- but most rated the typical Stanford student as more pro-alcohol than themselves... Take as an example a community that tends to be moderate politically, but leans slightly liberal.People with more extreme liberal views in the community may be more likely than others to attend publicly visible protests and display bumper stickers espousing their liberal views, because they think the community supports them."Everyone else sees these extreme opinions being expressed on a regular basis and they may eventually come to believe their community is more liberal than it actually is," Morrison said. "The same process could occur in moderately conservative communities."You have a cycle that feeds on itself: the more you hear these extremists expressing their opinions, the more you are going to believe that those extreme beliefs are normal for your community.""

Seeing racism everywhere is not OK - "Considering the amount of publicity they get, one could be forgiven for thinking that white supremacists are a major force on the political landscape... the OK hand sign, that near-enough universal finger-and-thumb indication of affirmation or assent, has now been appropriated by racists. That is according to the Anti-Defamation League... How have white supremacists, these merchants of hate, managed to reach such levels of prominence and power? Is it through great marketing? The promise of a fulfilling life burning crosses in the woods? Or perhaps their racist arguments now resonate with an ever-growing number of people? If it were any of those reasons, we would be justified in seriously panicking. But the facts tell a different story.The biggest white-supremacist protest in recent decades, in Charlottesville, Virginia, attracted only a few hundred people. Richard Spencer, the most prominent figure in the white supremacist movement, has 77,000 followers on Twitter (and presumably not all of them subscribe to his views). And the claim that the OK symbol is white supremacist started off as a joke, on an internet messageboard, intended to troll self-styled lefties. So who is artificially inflating this movement’s strength? Who is empowering it? Oddly enough, it is the very people who are dedicated to opposing it.Organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League, which are dedicated to monitoring and combating ‘hate speech’, need to point to instances of it in order to justify their existence... Campaigning organisations like the ADL will claim they are raising awareness of the far-right threat in our midst. But their headline-grabbing activity is having the opposite ‘boy who cried wolf’ effect. Moreover, by finding signs of racism everywhere, even in an innocuous hand gesture, they are bringing actual racists into the mainstream by proxy."

Investigators conclude hand gestures at Army-Navy game were not racist. - "Investigators at the Navy and Military academies came to the conclusion that cadets and midshipmen who flashed controversial hand gestures during a televised pregame show last week were playing “the circle game” and not expressing a white supremacist message"
Duh
Of course liberals were bashing the investigations as biased and a coverup

Covington 2: Newsrooms falsely accuse West Point cadets of flashing ‘white supremacy’ symbol - "the “OK” hand gesture attributed to white supremacists is right-side up (fingers pointing upwards). The hand gestures seen on national television this weekend at the Army-Navy game show the cadets’ hands pointing downward and sideways because they are playing the “circle game,” not pledging their allegiance to white supremacy, you unbelievable idiots.Amazingly, the United States Naval Academy and United States Military Academy have launched separate investigations into their cadets. The media, meanwhile, are treating the story as though they're near-certain the students flashed "white supremacist" symbols on television... “White power symbols,” said NFL columnist Mike Freeman. “From Army cadets. Knowing they are on live television. Trump emboldens this trash. He absolutely does. These guys should be kicked out immediately.”... “Whatever it used to mean,” said CNN contributing opinion writer Jeff Yang, “this symbol used in this fashion is now indelibly associated with white supremacist individuals and agendas, and these cadets are making it on national TV, behind the head of a cadet of color.”Put another way: Even if they didn't mean it, they're still guilty."

Following discovery of 'circle game' photos, OPRF will pay $53K to reprint student yearbooks - Chicago Tribune - "officials found 18 photos inside of students making an upside-down “OK” gesture. The school said the students flashing the sign were of “of various races, ethnicities, genders and grades.”"
I guess $53k is cheap to virtue signal

Shailja Patel on Twitter - "I keep seeing people I respect sharing that "Buy more books than you can ever read" BS piece in Fast Capitalism. What is it about the word "books" that casts a magic veil over naked commodity fetishism?
DEMAND LIBRARIES.
FUND LIBRARIES.
USE LIBRARIES.
"Buy more food than you can ever eat."
"Buy more albums than you can ever listen to."
"Buy more art than you can ever look at."
"Buy more shoes than you can ever wear."
"Buy more cars than you can ever drive."
"Buy more houses than you can ever live in."
"Buy more buy more BUY"
I believe deeply in the value and power of books. That value and power lie in their circulation. Not in their accumulation.
I grew up in a home where books were luxuries. My parents owned very few books, and they were precious. School libraries and public libraries were everything to me. I want my book in the hands of everyone who needs to read it. Not sitting unread in private collections.
If you love books, and have disposable income to spend on books, please spend it on putting books into public circulation. On giving rather than hoarding books. On sharing rather than accumulating books. On getting books to everyone hungry to read them and be transformed."

The Rise And Fall Of The Comanche 'Empire' - "On what the raid on the Parker fort was like
"This is what Indians did to Indians and this just happened to be Indians meeting whites. But the automatic thing in battle is that all the adult males would be killed. That was automatic. That was one of the reasons that Indians fought to the death. The white men were astonished by it but they were assumed that they would be killed. Small children were killed. Very small children were killed. A lot of the children in say, the 3-10 range were often taken as captives. The women were often raped and often killed. And all of the people in those settlements back in those years knew what a Comanche raid was — knew what a Comanche raid meant. ... And it's an interesting kind of moral question as a historian about Plains Indians or American Indians in general. You have to come to terms with this — with torture, which they practiced all across the West — and these kind of grisly practices that scared white people to death."
On rewriting history to leave out Native American atrocities
"There was even an attempt at one point to deny that Indians were warlike. Comanches were incredibly warlike. They swept everyone off the Southern plains. They nearly exterminated the Apaches.""
On Pre-Columbian genocide which always gets ignored in order to shit on white people
Naturally a meme on this subject got wiped from "Archaeology/History Jokes & Puns (Or GTFO!)" - nothing can be allowed to challenge the liberal narrative

Iroquois Indians - Ohio History Central - "the Erie natives were related to the Iroquois. They lived along the eastern shores of Lake Erie in New York and Pennsylvania. The Iroquois Confederacy considered them enemies and wiped out the entire tribe."