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Saturday, August 14, 2021

Links - 14th August 2021 (2)

Canada Post suspends employees who refused to deliver the Epoch Times - "Two Canada Post carriers were reportedly suspended after refusing to deliver the Epoch Times because they politically disagreed with their editorial stance... they felt the Epoch Times' negative coverage of the Chinese government encouraged hate and xenophobia towards Asians, prompting them to refuse to deliver the paper... The paper was founded by Chinese Americans, and is focused editorially on covering the censorship and human rights violations committed by the Chinese government as well as the nefarious agenda of the Chines Communist Party... "If the delivery of mail is up to the individual carrier to decide based on his/her impression of ‘hatred’, no one can trust the post office any more... We are a media started by Asian immigrants. There is no way we would publish content that is anti-Asian. Please read our content more carefully. To a media that’s leaning left, we may seem on the right. We believe we are neutral and independent. We disagree with your label""
Considering that the Epoch Times itself is run by Chinese people, this is ironic
Conflating criticism of the CCP with anti-Asian hate speech is a sneaky rhetorical trick
The left only likes minority immigrants when they toe the line

How Britain stole $45 trillion from India - "New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik... Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938... Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way – mostly with silver – as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third) to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them... On top of this, the British were able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for much more than they “bought” them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100 percent of the original value of the goods but also the markup... anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would do so using special Council Bills – a unique paper currency issued only by the British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then use the bills to pay Indian producers... If India had been able to invest its own tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings in development – as Japan did – there’s no telling how history might have turned out differently. India could very well have become an economic powerhouse. Centuries of poverty and suffering could have been prevented... during the entire 200-year history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income"
Amazing voodoo logic. Even if you think taxation is theft, the British would not be no different from all other governments
This sort of anti-trade mentality is why merchants were despised in Ancient China and suggests that shops are all "stealing" from us since they're middle men. Clearly the solution is to loot the local department store to prevent their "theft"
It seems they believe fiat money is immoral and we should return to the gold standard

World history by per capita GDP - "Angus Maddison, the famed British economic historian who passed away earlier this year, is best known for his estimates of world gross domestic product (GDP) that go back all the way to the year 1 AD... the growth of India’s GDP between 1500 and 1600 was 22.7%, between 1600 and 1700 it was 22.2% and between 1700 and 1820 it logged 21%. So it’s not as if there was any huge decline in the rate of growth. Of course, that doesn’t preclude the possibility that Indian growth, too, may have taken off if the country was not under the thumb of the British. But China continued to be an independent country, albeit one much plagued by the Western powers, and its rate of growth too during the period was nothing to be proud of. What the data seem to be saying is that the coming of the British did not, at least in the first 100 years of colonial rule, make much of a difference to the growth rate of the Indian economy... In 1 AD, India’s GDP per capita was $450, as was China’s. But Italy under the Roman Empire had a per capita income of $809. In 1000 AD, India’s per capita income was $450 and China’s $466. But the average of the West Asian countries, such as Turkey and Iraq, was much higher at $621. In terms of general prosperity, therefore, it was the Arab world that was doing well a millennium ago. The Caliphate in Baghdad was a centre of power at the time and both science and culture flourished. By 1500, though, new centres of prosperity had emerged. India’s per capita income was $550 and China’s $600 in 1500. The Arab world had declined. But standards of living in Western Europe at that time had already gone far ahead... 1600 was the year the East India Company was founded. In contrast, India’s per capita income continued to be $550, while China’s was $600. Note that even Ireland, one of the poorest of Western Europe’s countries, had a per capita income of $615, higher than India’s and China’s. In short, the per capita GDP numbers mirror the changes in power, prosperity and cultural and scientific achievement."
I guess the British were to blame for India's lack of economic development before the East India Company ever arrived

Charles Venable Resigns as Head of Indianapolis Museum of Art - The New York Times - "the museum was seeking a director who would work not only to attract a more diverse audience but to maintain its “traditional, core, white art audience.” A group of 85 Newfields employees and members of the board of governors released a public letter on Tuesday calling for Venable’s resignation. More than 1,900 artists, local arts leaders and former employees of the museum also issued an open letter over the weekend calling for his removal. They asked the museum’s major funders to pause financial support until reforms, including a more diverse board and curatorial staff, could be implemented... it was meant to indicate that the museum would not abandon its existing audience as it moved toward greater diversity, equity and inclusion... the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has had to reckon with what employees called structural inequities. Gary Garrels, formerly its top curator, resigned in July amid staff anger, after he used the term “reverse discrimination” in an all-staff Zoom call."
Clear proof that the explicit goal of anti-racism is to alienate and marginalise white people, and destroy institutions

York University academics see the evil of racism in three wise monkeys | News | The Times - "The three wise monkeys have been a cultural trope throughout the world for centuries as a symbol of seeing, hearing and speaking no evil.Academics at the University of York have decided that they could be seen as an oppressive racial stereotype, and pulled an image of the animals from their website to avoid offence... Scholars who have studied Japanese culture expressed surprise that anyone could take offence at the image, which became popular in Japan in the 17th century before spreading to the West. The animals are associated with the Tendai school of Buddhism, in which they are seen as helpers for divine figures. Tim Clark, who retired as curator of the British Museum’s Japanese collections in 2019, said that he had “no idea” why they might be deemed controversial... A spokeswoman for the University of York said that the organisers of the online conference, entitled Sensorial Fixations: Orality, Aurality, Opticality and Hapticity, were worried about a possible insult to ethnic minorities.“The Japanese symbol of the three wise monkeys was used to represent a postgraduate conference about the sensory experiences of the body, and it also appeared on a document that asked for submission of research papers to the conference on a range of areas, one of which included papers that represented black, indigenous and people of colour,” she said.“It was considered . . . that a monkey, which has been used in a derogatory way in the past, could cause offence in this context, despite this not being the intention of the organisers, so the image was removed.” The highest profile case of the three wise monkeys being labelled as racist began in 2007, when four activists in the union Unison used the image to criticise leaders who were turning a blind eye to their concerns. The leaders responded by saying that the image was intended as a racial slur against one of them, who was black.The activists were vindicated in 2013 when an employment tribunal awarded them £49,000 after ruling that no reasonable person would interpret their use of the monkeys as racist. Lord Moore of Etchingham, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, highlighted the academics’ decision in his column in the Spectator magazine.“One of the difficulties about being woke is that you develop a sort of hypersensitivity to particular phrases and images, which ultimately makes it almost impossible to say or do anything because you are concerned that someone may take offence,” he said.“You accept the premise that you could easily be guilty of doing wrong — they use the phrase ‘our privileges’. They say at the end: ‘We continue to strive to learn and we are deeply sorry.’ It’s almost as if they have inflicted upon themselves a show trial in which they do a stammering confession.“A lot of the time is spent blaming other people but it also comprises shaming yourself — abasing yourself because you have committed an inadvertent blasphemy. It’s very like a pseudo-religion. It’s people constantly saying: ‘We have sinned’.”"
The "myth" of the slippery slope strikes again!

Tories in a culture war of their own over the meaning of ‘woke’ | News | The Times - "Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the House of Commons, told MPs this morning that the “woke brigade” had “done the nation a service” in highlighting Britain's “proud” history by objecting to controversial monuments last summer.Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, wrote last weekend that the government would crack down on “woke worthies and town hall militants” who attempted to remove or rename public art with links to the slave trade."

Vada Pav: The ‘Indian burger’ McDonald’s can’t master

Nearly 50 years since its invention, the story of the vada pav hits the big screen at Jio MAMI - "A potato vada wedged between two pieces of bread is the favourite on-the-go snack for many Mumbaikars, yet, few know about Ashok Vaidya, the man who is credited with coming up with the idea for the snack at his stall outside Dadar railway station in 1966. Now, a new short documentary tracing his legacy has been selected for the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival."

Opinion | Do Kids Really Need to Learn to Code? - The New York Times - "WhiteHat Jr., which operates in India and the United States, mounted an advertising blitzkrieg in India telling parents that our children need to learn coding from the age of 4, 5 or 6 — or they will fall behind in life. Indian celebrities promoted the brand and spread the fear of losing out among families.WhiteHat Jr. was forced to take down five of its advertisements after the Advertising Standards Council of India, a self-regulatory body, found them in potential violation of its code... Unemployment has remained a great concern in India over time, and parents forced their children, irrespective of their aptitudes, to become doctors or engineers or to get management degrees because of the fear that if their children did not join any of those professions, they were certain to be failures... Tens of thousands of those engineers and doctors have no jobs now. Hundreds of engineering colleges are shutting down in India. Substandard private colleges in small towns and villages mushroomed to meet the demand and produced a generation of unskilled, unemployable engineers and doctors... Relentless advertising campaigns are telling Indian parents that coding is critical because making children code will develop their cognitive skills. Storytelling does all that too. And singing songs."

Want Smarter Kids? Teach Music, Not Coding, According to MIT - "there's not much, if any, connection between coding and today's point-and-click environment. Almost nobody in business, for example, requires much programming skill beyond, say, creating a spreadsheet. Furthermore, the basic coding skills taught in K-12 bears no resemblance to how professional programmers produce code. The "teach kids to code" movement therefore justifies such instruction because it supposedly improves math and language skills.However, that appears not to be the case, according to a December 2020 study conducted at MIT, which found that: "Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing. It's not the same as language, and it's not the same as math and logic." By contrast, what actually does increase other skills and brain power is teaching kids to play a musical instrument, according to a January 2021 study conducted at the University of Zürich and published in The Journal of Neuroscience."

Olympics branded a 'mockery' after inclusion of breakdancing for Paris Games - "squash had been overlooked yet again... Before breakdancing, officially named “breaking” beat it, squash has lost out to sports including skateboarding, sport climbing, BMX, surfing, golf and wushu, which the IOC permitted to run in parallel to the official games in Beijing in 2008... “It’s sort of making a mockery of what the Olympics is,” Martin said. “When you look at what it all used to stand for, the Olympics, it definitely fits in the category. What does the Olympics stands for these days, I don’t really know."

Cornell Offers Race-Based Exemption From Mandatory Flu Shot Policy for Students Who Identify As “Black, Indigenous, Or A Person Of Color” Racist policies strike again. And then if minorities suffer more, that can be blamed on "racism"

Kate Manne on Twitter - "Many forms of privilege we discuss are material: wealth, health, resources, freedoms, support. But there's also such a thing as *moral* privilege--the presumption that you're a good person, doing good in the world, not harm, even when the opposite is the case. Such is whiteness. This is especially true of white men. But white women are hardly immune to it. And it makes white women all too liable to be complicit, as they try to be one of the "good ones," i.e., not guilty, by the lights of white supremacist patriarchy."
From a Cornell professor
Original Sin in wokeness can never be cleansed

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