Elman España - Posts | Facebook - "I’m sorry, but if a married, 44-year-old Will Smith gradually developed a sexual relationship with one of Willow’s 23-year-old friends under the guise of “helping her heal,” every single female on my thread would be dragging him through the mud as a sick man who manipulated and exploited a young girl who was half his age. He would have been labeled as a predator and all sorts of conversations about the problem with prominent men in positions of power who use their status to take advantage of helpless young girls would ensue. But with Jada, it’s all jokes and support for her finding her happiness. "
Meme - "A girl with an "eat the rich" sweater just boarded in first class"
Oliver Jia (オリバー・ジア) on Twitter - "you were told communism is bad by people who said slavery was good"
"I was told that communism is bad by my Chinese family who survived the Cultural Revolution which killed 20 million people."
John Ivison: Preposterous NDP policy resolutions suggest the inmates are taking over - "In this modern socialist utopia, the rich are taxed into insolvency, the military is disbanded and capitalism abolished. That is an exaggeration – but barely. This year’s bumper crop of bad ideas includes: taxing all wealth over $1 billion at 100 per cent (“every billionaire is a policy failure”); compelling the Bank of Canada to buy all future Government of Canada bond issues; nationalizing “Big Oil”; expressing solidarity with Cuba and Venezuela; removing statues of John A. Macdonald, an “architect of a policy of genocide”, and, phasing out the Canadian Armed Forces (and subsequently retraining its members to work in community services, public transit and parks). There is the usual toxic brew of anti-Semitism – Israel should be boycotted and sanctioned until it ends its “apartheid practices” – and foreign policy delusion – Canada should withdraw from NATO, NORAD and all major trade deals. It’s no surprise that Modern Monetary Theory has its disciples among New Democrats, who see it as a way to finance their air castles. Under an NDP government, debt would be simply a record of the money spent and not taxed, with no need to worry about paying it back... The NDP has a well-deserved reputation for getting it wrong on the big things. J.S. Woodsworth, the leader of its progenitor party CCF, opposed Canada’s entry into the Second World War, even as German jackboots marched into Poland."
Adam Zivo: Unserious NDP faction wants to abolish the military and pull out of NATO - "When Jack Layton was the NDP’s leader a decade ago, he focused on instituting reforms that could give the party a credible chance at governing. Real power has to deal with real problems in the real world, and so he squelched delusional voices that believed, for example, that conflict can be avoided by simply asking nicely. Among improvements in other policy areas, Layton affirmed his support for NATO and for the conscientious use of military force. His reward was a crescendo of support, carrying the NDP to historic levels of influence. His successor, Thomas Mulcair, followed in his steps, with mixed results. The NDP’s current leader, Jagmeet Singh, has been less interested in building upon the lessons of the Layton days. Instead, he seems preoccupied with cosplaying as Bernie Sanders, copying trendy leftist positions from the United States in an attempt to bolster enthusiasm within his base... Canada’s “peace” movement is driven not by the love for peace, but rather by a kind of civilizational self-loathing that is as juvenile as it is obsessive. Operated by a small but dedicated cadre of academics and social miscellanea, it produces and disseminates propaganda that serves, more than anything else, to justify the atrocities committed by autocrats abroad... any crime can be apologized for so long as it scores points against Canada and the West more broadly. To them, China is a benign power that is not engaging in cultural genocide against Uyghurs (as a China scholar, let me assure you that this is wrong). Venezuela’s brutalities towards its own people are excusable and criticism of it is an act of imperialism. In Libya, Moammar Gadhafi should have been given the freedom to massacre the popular uprising against his dictatorship. Preventing Serbia’s ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians was a tragedy. In Syria, Bashar Assad is not a bad guy because, as one faction of the Syrian freedom movement is jihadist, the entire freedom movement is illegitimate. Furthermore, according to these activists, Russia’s destabilizing shadow-war on Ukraine is actually NATO’s fault, because the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, which ousted the corrupt and Russophilic Viktor Yanukovych, was obviously orchestrated by the CIA, provoking a blameless Russia. Eastern Europeans support NATO not because of legitimate grievances against Russian imperialism but because, unable to think for themselves, they have simply been duped by the CIA and vaguely-defined “corporate interests.” These are the beliefs of the Canadian peace movement. So long as you can vilify the West, war is peace, and genocide, repression and war crimes are acceptable, even desirable. Intellectually and morally bankrupt, these activists shield themselves from introspection by maintaining a tightly controlled echo chamber, where even the NDP, their greatest political ally, is considered compromised."
At NDP convention, a new wealth tax on millionaires and a $20 minimum wage gain favour - "Other resolutions that passed over the weekend included... a resolution in favour of solidarity with protesting farmers in India."
the void on Twitter - "10 years from now, expect OnlyFans women to complain about how they were “groomed” or “forced” to twerk on OnlyFans. They’ll blame men for their bad choices. No accountability whatsoever..."
Matt Walsh on Twitter - "Okay, I’ll punch you in the face and then accuse you of violent assault when you punch me back. You can’t bring up my punch in your response because that would be what aboutism. You’re clearly just not comfortable discussing your own behavior."
This DAD can't even bond with his daughter- wife accuses him of assault unbelievable - "I [36f] just ruined my whole family by asking one single question.
So for some context, my husband and daughter both play video games. I do not. They usually play them by themselves but since the whole Corona virus thing has happened they've started playing them together. So they've been spending a lot of time together, yeah yeah I feel left out and I've been lonely.
So my husband [39m] and daughter [13f] stay in a room by themselves for long periods at a time. I'm talking hours a day. They'll just sit in there playing video games all the fucking time. I just thought "weird, they usually never spend time together, but they've been with each other for hours a day in a room by themselves." They will occasionally leave the house and go to the grocery store together or a McDonald's or something, but they'll come back and play some video games.
I don't know why I asked, but after them staying in a room together for 6 hours my husband came out, went to the living room and gave me a kiss. I felt super suspicious of him and I straight up asked him, "Have you been sexually assaulting our daughter?" I thought he did, I mean they never really were ever together, but all of a sudden they suspiciously started spending tons of time together. He immediately gave me a "What the fuck" look and pushed me off him onto the couch. I screamed at him "What the hell is wrong with you" I thought I caught him, I thought I figured out that my husband was doing stuff to our daughter. He straight up left the house, didn't tell me bye or anything. He didn't even say anything to our daughter.
30 minutes pass, he hasn't answered the phone or responded to any of my texts. I decide I'm going to get to the bottom of this and find out what the hell is going on. I go to my daughters room and she's sitting there on her phone. I sit on her bed, she had a nervous look on her face, but I got the courage to ask her, "Has your dad been sexually assaulting you?" She seemed to put two and two together at this point and figured that's why he left the house, but to my demise she said something along the lines of "What the fuck mom? No!" I felt my heart drop. She is a good kid, she has never cursed before, most certainly not at me. So I could tell this really bothered her. All I said was, "I'm sorry" I then walked outside and started crying.
My husband pulls in the drive way around an hour later. He walks in the living room, sees me, and says "Me and Kate are going to be spending some time at my parents house. And don't get any fucking ideas, because she asked me to come get her" He said this in the meanest tone he possible could, I just wanted to die in that moment. They pack up for 10ish minutes, then leave. I just ruined my whole fucking family just like that. I now know he hasn't done anything to our daughter, just their reactions proved that. I'm so fucked up for just ruining everything.
What do I do? They left me? I just wanted my daughter to be safe and I just fucked up everything. They probably hate me now. I don't blame them, I just accused my husband of the worse thing possible. Please just someone help me"
Quantifying the presumption of innocence - "Across all 3 types of crimes and all 3 categories of appearance, median participants’ prior odds of guilt were close to 0.50, indicating that prospective jurors generally believed the defendants were just as likely to be guilty as innocent prior to the introduction of any evidence. A main effect for appearance was detected. ‘Bad’ and ‘mediocre’ defendants were perceived to be more likely to be guilty than ‘good’ defendants. There were no differences between the various alleged crimes"
The Problem | RepresentUs - "Professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at more than 20 years worth of data to answer a simple question: Does the government represent the people? Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all."
How the New York Times A/B tests their headlines - "The New York Times is a big deal. As they tell their advertisers, the NYT is the #1 news source for young, rich thought leaders... Frequent NYT readers will end up thinking the world is scarier and more shocking than it really is."
Only fascists criticise the (liberal) media!
Media exposure and dimensions of anxiety sensitivity: differential associations with PTSD symptom clusters - "media exposure and trait anxiety predicted hyperarousal and re-experiencing symptoms"
So if the media cause mental illness...
Kiwi fat ban ruins couple’s new life Down Under - "A ROLY-POLY Welsh woman has been told she can’t emigrate to New Zealand – because she is too fat. Rowan Trezise, 33, had been hoping to move to the nation – which prides itself on its mammoth All Blacks rugby players – to be with her husband Richie, who has started a new job there. Kiwi officials at first refused entry to them BOTH because they were too big. After making a calculation using the body mass index they feared the cuddly couple would be a burden on the nation’s health service. Richie, 35, lost the pounds, passed a second test and got a visa. But Rowan, an airport worker from Cardiff, is still too big and is now hoping to shed the pounds before Christmas so she can join her telecommunications engineer husband. If she fails, Richie will come back... Mark Watts, spokesman for Telecom New Zealand, was sympathetic but declined to criticise the rules. He said the strict visa scheme “enables us to get skilled workers from around the world.”"
Too bad they're white, so they can't blame "racism"
Facebook - "In July 2018, three friends set up a Twitter account with the handle "sharonliew86". One of them was Zainal Abidin Shaiful Bahari, while the other 2 were not mentioned in the media reports. By early 2019, the account was run by Zainal alone... One rule some people have for satire is to target those who are in positions of power (“punching up”) and to spare those who are not (“punching down”). “Punching” is a form of “disparagement humour”—referring to “jokes in which one party is victimised, belittled, or suffers some misfortunes or acts of aggression”."
Of course, Alfian would have choice words if a Chinese person had been behind it being "ironically racist"
James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "Jan 8 I recently read Isaac Asimov's review of "1984" (written in the year 1984). It actually convinced me that it's not a very good book and it's very appealing to conservatives because it's specifically about Stalin"
"How soon until Orwell's 1984 gets cancelled by the Woke because it shows how totalitarian they are? It was about if the Fabian Socialists got Stalin's power (hello, 2021). Notice how they don't like being identified for what they are in that regard."
Restaurants are cooking your steak wrong on purpose - "chefs are under bottom-line pressure to reduce throwaways that occur when customers say a steak is too well-done. An under-cooked steak, on the other hand, can always be salvaged with a touch more fire as my friend’s was. Most chefs regard beef cooked to medium-rare — with an internal temperature of 130 degrees off the grill and 135 degrees after resting — as the best way to bring out flavor and retain moisture in tender cuts such as rib-eye and top loin. Unlike rare, medium-rare allows time for the outside to caramelize and develop a sear... Adding to the issue is the fact that many chefs have dispensed with using meat thermometers and just go by feel, says Fortuna, who keeps a close eye on his steaks’ outer char as well as on their inner moisture. “[Using a thermometer] creates a hole, juice comes out and the meat gets dry”... Then there’s the fad factor. Some chefs are swayed to undercook because rawness and near-rawness is seen as somehow superior. “Overcooking steak is regarded [by some] as a greater moral and aesthetic sin than undercooking it,” Mark Schatzker, author of “Steak: One Man’s Search for the World’s Tastiest Piece of Beef,” tells The Post. “A rare steak is edgy … [but] an overcooked steak, on the other hand, is a criminal act, like putting ketchup on foie gras.”"
Anger Increases Susceptibility to Misinformation - "The effect of anger on acceptance of false details was examined using a three-phase misinformation paradigm. Participants viewed an event, were presented with schema-consistent and schema-irrelevant misinformation about it, and were given a surprise source monitoring test to examine the acceptance of the suggested material. Between each phase of the experiment, they performed a task that either induced anger or maintained a neutral mood. Participants showed greater susceptibility to schema-consistent than schema-irrelevant misinformation. Anger did not affect either recognition or source accuracy for true details about the initial event, but suggestibility for false details increased with anger. In spite of this increase in source errors (i.e., misinformation acceptance), both confidence in the accuracy of source attributions and decision speed for incorrect judgments also increased with anger. Implications are discussed with respect to both the general effects of anger and real-world applications such as eyewitness memory."
Japan's Macho Cafe Is Like Hooters in Reverse - "Food and drink are on the expensive side, but if you order a can of beer, your macho waiter will pour it and then crush the can."
James Lindsay - Posts | Facebook - "I keep trying to explain the "Hegelian religion" thing. It's so important. You have to hear it. You have to see. It's why this is happening. Hegel's ideas have been boiled down to a belief that true freedom is only possible through the State, which must be perfected. The people who are taking over and their wide base of support religiously believe that by empowering the State and making sure it only has the right politics, you get to true freedom. Everything else is oppression. Everything else. Liberalism, freedom, reason, everything. For Hegel, this was an evolution of the "ideas of the world," toward the self-realization and actualization of the Absolute Spirit. This got turned material and political by Marx and then the neo-Marxists, who made it cultural. Identity was the weakest spot, so it's used now. Most of the people who believe this faith don't know Hegel (or Marx, or Gramsci, or Horkheimer, or Marcuse (or Fanon), or Crenshaw, etc.). They believe religiously that the State and the fight for State Power is what provides freedom (liberation) from oppression. It's the ideas. Not the people. The spirit, the method. They don't have to have read a damn one of those people to have adopted the fundamental belief structure, just like most Christians have never read more than a page or two of the Bible. The chief tenets of this faith are (1) that the Utopia will exist when the State controls everything and (2) when the state becomes perfected (by means of the "dialectical process" of pointing out all of its contradictions and shortcomings, relentlessly and purging wrongpolitik). That is, these people (broadly, the zealous left and those captured by it) believe religiously that they must "transform society" through a process of empowering and "perfecting" the state, and that anyone in their way is a "fascist" who creates oppression and must be stamped out."
Big breasts prove model's innocence - "A Japanese bikini model-turned-actress has been acquitted on trespass charges because a recreation of the alleged crime showed she couldn't possibly have fit through a hole because of her ample bust. The model, who goes by her professional name of Serena Kozakura, had been sentenced to 14 months in prison for willful destruction of property after a Nov. 6 incident in which she allegedly kicked a hole the door and re-entered her boyfriend's apartment following an argument with another woman she had discovered there... During the appeal hearing, the man and another witness both testified that Kozakura had kicked a hole in the door and then squeezed through to re-enter the apartment. But the hole in the door measured 28.3 inches by 8.7 inches - and that was way too small for Kozakura to fit her famous 40 inch bust through. "I lost work after being charged, but justice prevailed in the end," said a delighted Kozakura after the ruling. "I was always worried about being a bit fat, but this time I was glad.""
Apple consumption is related to better sexual quality of life in young women - "Even if some evidence exists of a positive correlation between regular intake of phytoestrogens, polyphenols, antioxidants and women’s sexual health, there is not a study addressing the potential correlation between daily apple consumption and women’s sexual function. We aim to assess whether there is a tie between daily apple intake and sexual function in a sample of healthy young sexually active Italian women, not complaining of any sexual disorders... This study suggests a potential relationship between regular daily apple consumption and better sexuality in our young women population."
Meme - "The day my husband asks me to pay halves on rent is the day I pack my bags"
"and go where? You can't even afford half rent mate"
‘Do not come to Amsterdam’: Residents join campaign against the city's nuisance visitors - "the city council is investigating a potential ban on laughing gas, restricting alcohol sales and prohibiting outdoor drinking in the Red Light District. In the longer term, meanwhile, the council is trying to shift the prostitution industry elsewhere, and is considering the impact of banning foreign tourists from coffeeshops, where cannabis is sold. This is, in fact, already a Dutch law but Amsterdam has simply not enforced it – something the mayor and a wide alliance of businesses and residents want to change (with a particular eye on British tourists, a third of whom say it’s their main reason for travel)... “The first visitors who came back were the drugs tourists. They go to the supermarket, eat and drink on the street, sleep in their cars… and they finance their little holiday with the extra amounts they buy here, to sell in their home country.” He argues that these low-spending groups contribute very little and leave behind litter and even human waste. “The message should be, for [badly-behaved] people who come, from England, for example, that there’s a big chance that you’ll be spoken to or fined,” he added. “Amsterdam will not accept it any more.”"
This isn't xenophobia because "white" countries are involved
Scientists develop new drug that can regenerate lost TEETH in mice and ferrets - "Suppression of the gene USAG-1 with an antibody treatment was found to allow teeth to grow back."
Reports predicting job loss via automation are overstating the case. - "there’s a huge difference between “robots” and “automation.” Once, many elevators were operated by people. An office building in D.C. still had elevator operators in the 2010s. They weren’t replaced by humanoid robots that listen to rider requests and manipulate a lever with mechanical fingers. They were replaced by a row of buttons riders press themselves. A lot of automation works this way. The distinction matters because automation happens all the time. Over the past 150 years, we’ve gone from a nation of farmers to a nation of factory workers to a nation of white collar and service employees, with much of that momentous change driven by automation. But while regional economies have been disrupted and recessions have created periodic unemployment crises, there has never been a chronic, structural shortage of jobs nationwide. New inventions create new markets and jobs to go with them. The robot job apocalypse scenario is based on the assumption that the next wave of automation technology will be fundamentally different. Artificial intelligence in particular is thought to be advancing so quickly that replacement jobs won’t keep pace. People wonder whether our fragile, imperfect species will be necessary much longer. But that’s not what the forecasters are saying... “At risk” of automation does not, in that analysis, mean “likely to be automated.” It means, “could theoretically be automated if someone had unlimited time, money, and access to the latest A.I.” That’s an enormous difference. Perhaps the engineers at Boston Dynamics, which makes those viral videos of disturbingly humanoid robots, could spend millions of dollars building a robot version of the guy who stands on the street corner twirling the big pointy sign that says “Going Out of Business Sale!!!” But they won’t, because nobody would buy that robot, because they can just hire the guy for $10 an hour. The recent McKinsey report takes this into account, estimating the cost of developing new automation technology, the price of the labor it would be replacing, and the time it would take for widespread adoption. That’s why its estimate is 27 percent of jobs, not 47 percent. But here, too, definitions matter. McKinsey predicts that of the 49.1 million who will have their jobs displaced by automation, 32 million will stay in the same occupation, and another 2.2 million will stay in the same occupational category. The number of people who will lose their jobs in the “have to find a new line of work” sense is only 14.9 million. Not 27 percent, but 9 percent. That’s because automation is more likely to change jobs than destroy them. Machines will perform an increasing share of boring, rote tasks, and people will move to more human work. When hundreds of thousands of ATMs were deployed in the 1980s and 1990s, the number of bank tellers went up, not down, because reduced labor costs allowed banks to open more branches. Now machines count the money, and people sell you auto loans. Automation works especially well when workers are partners in designing their new relationships to machines. Nine percent of jobs is still a lot. But the optimal number isn’t zero. The White House automation report notes that about 6 percent of jobs in the American economy are eliminated every three months through the normal process of some businesses shrinking or shutting down as others start up and expand... The wilder robot dystopia scenarios often proceed from failures of metaphor. Many powerful new A.I. systems use methods called “neural networks,” which people assume means, “like a human brain.” They are not like human brains. A.I. is pattern recognition. Alexa knows that certain spoken sounds correspond to the sequence of letters “peanut butter,” which is remarkable. But Alexa has no idea what “peanut butter” means or why it tastes good with jelly. The soberest predictions of automation job loss still rely on a lattice of interlocking predictions that may not come true. Five years ago, it seemed like we were on the cusp of robot taxis and freight trucks becoming widespread. Today, we’re stuck on the cusp. The last mile between “almost good enough” and “good enough” can be very long. Even the simple, routine tasks that are the heart of most job loss scenarios can be fiendishly difficult to automate. Amazon uses hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge robots in its warehouses. But they’re not androids that pick items off of shelves. The robots are the shelves, which move to humans, who still do the picking. Those simple, deft movements of eye and hand, recognizing and grasping myriad shapes in three dimensions, are the products of millions of years of evolution. Scientists and engineers are working hard to catch up. But they’re not going to fully solve those problems all at once, or in the next nine years, or for a long time after that"