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Friday, November 26, 2021

Links - 26th November 2021 (2 - General Wokeness)

Sera-Jade (WARNING: this unit has low bio-quality) on Twitter - "If you equate both titles “Supreme Leader” and “Prime Minister” with the descriptor “head-of-state” but think one sounds more ‘totalitarian’ than the other as if “Supreme” is not simply just a synonym for “Prime” and “Leader” a synonym for “Minister” - then you might be a racist!"
"New Zealand / Prime minister: Jacinda Ardern
North Korea / Supreme leader:  Kim Jong-un"

Autopsies can uphold white supremacy - The Washington Post
Naturally, liberals are against attempts at objectivity, since that prevents them from imposing their narrative

Gina Bontempo on Twitter - "You’re telling me that a piece of rope hanging in Bubba Wallace’s NASCAR garage was more worthy of national coverage for WEEKS than 5-year-old Cannon Hinnant being executed in cold blood in front of his sisters?"

ZUBY: on Twitter - "'Woke' white liberals need to stop projecting their racism and guilt onto everybody else. They assume that because they are racist and obsessed with skin colour, that everybody else must be. Nah fam. That's just you. "

Leonydus Johnson (leave/me/alone) on Twitter - "I learned today that the world used to be full of carebears and butterflies and all the Native Americans, Africans, Arab Muslims and anyone who was brown pranced in meadows and sang songs of peace and love while riding on unicorns until white people showed up and killed them all."

Human Nature and IQ, SAT, GRE, ASVAB - "Every so often there is some talk about eliminating requirements for the SAT or the GRE.   A headline from the NYT: “Go Ahead, California, Get Rid of the SAT”   The writer claims standardized tests penalize poor kids who get good grades. He calls it a “barrier.”   I rarely see discussions about the reverse situations. There are poor kids who get bad grades but find a path upward because of standardized testing...  My senior year of high school I took the required test to join the military — the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB)... these tests are thinly veiled IQ tests. The SAT and ASVAB both correlate with IQ at r = .8.   A study on Army recruits found that scores on an intelligence test, along with 2-mile run time, were the best predictors of success in infantry training.   Research on tank gunners found that replacing a gunner who scores around the 20th percentile with one who scores around the 55th percentile improves the likelihood of hitting a target by 34 percent.   To qualify, potential military recruits must score higher than roughly one-third of all who take the ASVAB. The lowest acceptable percentile score to join is 36 for the Air Force, 35 for the Navy, 32 for the Marine Corps, and 31 for the Army.   By definition, the worst test taker who makes it into the military still scores higher than one-third of his or her peers. The military slices off the bottom third of standardized test-takers, not allowing them to join.    The psychology professor Linda Gottfredson has written: “IQ 85…the U.S. military sets its minimum enlistment standards at about this level…The U.S. military has twice experimented with recruiting men of IQ 80-85 (the first time on purpose and the second time by accident), but both times it found that such men could not master soldiering well enough to justify their costs.”   In the 1960s, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara initiated Project 100,000 which lowered the testing requirement. This allowed people at the 10th percentile (70~ IQ)—a standard deviation lower than the previous standard—to join.   Supposedly, the aim was to alleviate poverty. LBJ had recently begun his War on Poverty program.   The story was that getting more recruits into the military would help them move into the middle class.   And they needed more recruits for the Vietnam War. Lowering recruitment standards was an easy way to get them.   Recruits of Project 100,000 were 9 times more likely to require remedial training and training took up to 4 times longer to complete compared to their peers who had entered under the higher score requirement.   In Vietnam, men recruited under the lower testing threshold were 2.5 times more likely to die in combat.   Did the veterans who made it home achieve upward mobility? No.   Compared to civilians with similar attributes who were not recruited, McNamara’s Morons (as they were later termed) were less likely to be employed, less likely to own a business, and obtained less education.   Later, the policy changed to improve the talent pool of the armed forces. Higher ASVAB score thresholds were reinstated. Along with additional rigid requirements.   Today, 71% of Americans between 17 and 24 are ineligible for military service.   Over 24 million of the 34 million of young Americans cannot join the armed forces—even if they wanted to...    The SAT is a “barrier” according to that NYT op-ed. But it’s also a gateway. Most poor kids don’t take the SAT. Or any other standardized test. Maybe more should.   The chattering class is using poor kids as pawns to eliminate standardized testing. Which helps their own kids. Rich kids who “don’t test well.”   But they know how to strategically boost their GPAs, get recommendation letters from important people, and stack their resumes with extracurriculars. They have “polish.”   Interestingly, despite the chatter about getting rid of the SAT and the GRE, there is no talk of eliminating the ASVAB military test. No one says that it’s biased, unreliable, or discriminatory.  There are two reasons for this.
1. In the military, actions have real consequences. People want service members to be held to a high standard. For military recruits, a pencil and paper test is a reasonable requirement. But for those interested in studying at a place of higher learning, it’s a bridge too far.
2. The military is viewed as a lower middle-class organization. Influential members of society know their kids won’t be joining. So they don’t care about military entry standards the way they do for college and grad school."
McNamara "knew" that IQ was a "myth". Apparently the "low IQ" soldiers weren't socialised enough, which was why they failed to perform. Damn self-fulfilling prophecy and stereotype threat!
Given how woke the US military is becoming, it's only a matter of time before they forget the lessons they learnt and abolish ability testing due to "racism"

60% of U.S. Colleges Nix Testing Requirement for Admission - "Approximately 60 percent of U.S. colleges have nixed testing for student admission amid claims the tests give an advantage to applicants who are white and wealthier than other potential students because they have access to test preparation.  The debate about the claim’s accuracy has not been settled, some saying testing can help disadvantaged students"

To demonstrate why standardized testing is wrong, aNti-rAciSm proponents are actually, seriously comparing different racial groups to ANIMALS.

Why Elites Dislike Standardized Testing - "federal prosecutors exposed a crooked college admissions consulting operation that bribed SAT administrators and college athletic coaches in order to get wealthy, underqualified applicants into elite universities. Also charged were 33 wealthy parents who had paid for admissions bribes, including actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, Gordon Caplan, a co-chair of the international law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and Douglas Hodge, the former chief executive of Pimco... People are going to say that this scandal is proof that the meritocracy is broken and corrupt. And it’s likely that many commentators will use this event as an opportunity to attack the SAT and the ACT. Progressives view test-based admissions as inequitable because some marginalized groups are significantly underrepresented among the pool of top-scoring college applicants. But millionaires and elites also hate standardized admissions tests, because their children’s admission to top colleges is contingent upon test scores.  Under pressure from both the academic left and wealthy parents, hundreds of colleges have become “test optional,” allowing students to submit applications without test scores. Some elite schools, including Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr and the University of Chicago have adopted these policies.  It is absolutely true that the SAT is the reason this scandal occurred. But for standardized testing requirements, the millionaires and celebrities charged in this scheme would not have needed to search for “side doors” to get their children into elite colleges; they could have walked right in through the front...   Opponents of tests like to argue that tests primarily measure socioeconomic status and parental resources, but it’s not true that rich parents unfairly distort the college admissions process by outspending other people on test prep. There’s not a clear causal relationship between income and test scores, and there’s no evidence that expensive test prep gets better results than cheap or free alternatives.  According to data released by The College Board, the median SAT test taker in 2013 scored a 496 on the SAT’s critical reading section and a 514 on the math. The median student whose family earns less than $20,000 will score a 435 on the critical reading section and a 462 on math, considerably below average. Students from families earing $60,000-80,000 perform similarly to the overall distribution, and median scores continue to rise about 10 points for every marginal $20,000 of family income. The median student from a family earning more than $200,000 per year scores a 565 on critical reading and a 586 on math. The richest students perform a little more than half a standard deviation above average, while the poorest perform a bit more than half a standard deviation below.  But while it’s true that higher-income students get better scores on average and lower-income students do worse, it doesn’t necessarily follow that money raises test scores. This is a mere correlation, and, as anyone who did well on the SAT knows, correlation doesn’t imply causation.  SAT scores correlate strongly enough with IQ that the SAT is interchangeable with IQ as a test of general cognitive ability. Cognitive ability is highly heritable; the single strongest predictor of a child’s IQ is the IQ of the child’s parents. There is also a correlation between income and IQ. That means smarter than average parents are likely to have smarter than average kids and higher than average incomes. The educational attainment of an SAT taker’s parents is about as strongly correlated with higher scores as high income is... it has never been true that poorer students lack access to test prep; most students prepare for the SAT, and high quality materials and practice questions drawn from old tests have been available in inexpensive test-prep books for decades. In 2015 the College Board partnered with Kahn Academy to provide free online test prep resources, and about 60% of test takers now utilize the free official test-prep resources.  Despite what commercial test prep companies might claim in their marketing materials, there is no evidence that expensive commercial prep materials or private tutoring yield better results than test prep with inexpensive practice materials or the free official online resources.   It’s worth noting that the scores most rich kids and most children of highly educated parents earn are still far too low to get into elite colleges. The median child from a family earning $200,000 scores an 1151, which puts you in the bottom half of the admitted class at a school like Ole Miss or University of Alabama, and is far short of the 1500 earned by the median student who enrols at Yale.  If rich people could just spend their way to high test scores, then they wouldn’t be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to bribe their way into elite schools...   You can tell an objective, meritocratic system is working when it pushes out people that the establishment would prefer to admit (people like Zoe Kazan), and it admits the people that the establishment would prefer to reject (Jews and Asians). It is phenomenal that CEOs and power brokers and celebrities are getting indicted for desperately trying to bribe someone to get their mediocre kids into good schools, because that means meritocratic systems are throwing barriers in front of the children of elites when they can’t compete on an objective test.   There’s a reason Zoe is attacking the SAT rather other controversial aspects of the college admissions process like the preferential treatment of legacies: Testing impedes the success of people like her.  If Yale goes test-optional, what else is there in the admissions portfolio that could possibly scuttle the application of somebody like Zoe Kazan? When millionaires and celebrities attack the testing establishment, they pretend to do so on behalf of the marginalized and disadvantaged, but they really want to destroy the SAT because it is the only mechanism by which your kid can get into an elite college ahead of their kid."
Since liberals don't want to believe that IQ is genetically influenced - or even that IQ is real - they hate standardised tests

NYC schools chancellor calls for end to elite school test - "Schools Chancellor Meisha Ross-Porter called for an end to the specialized high school entrance exam Thursday while fuming about new admissions data that showed Asians dominating the controversial test once again... Test backers assert that it’s a colorblind measure that has forged some of the most academically renowned schools in the country. Others also note that many of the immigrant Asian groups that predominate at the eight schools come from low-income backgrounds rather than privilege."

Meme - Lil Nas X ‘Satan Shoes’: "If you don't like it, just don't buy it."
*Aunt Jemima*: *Triggered*

La comunidad afro celebró el cambio de logo de Blancaflor
Comment: "The Aunt Jemima from Argentina?
Well, the woke ridiculousness did it again, my friends. After 65 years, this famous brand of flour called "Blancaflor" removed its famous drawing of a black lady from the packaging, because it is, of course, associated with sLaVEry and rACisM. But the best part is that her image was replaced with the image of two arms cooking something. Some people simply assumed that these two arms belong to a woman, which caused outrage, because "of courrrse, these narrow minded bigots are implying that women belong in the kitchen". On the other hand, some people perceived that these arms belong to a man, and it also caused controversy because "this HORRIBLE man stole the spotlight from some poor black lady". Once again, there's no way to win with these idiots.
Well, I, for one, used to love the black lady and I am going to miss her Good bye, black lady!
Edit: Just to make it clear for the cry-babies. Whether the packaging is actually racist or not, that's debatable. The point is that, even after removing the black lady, people still found two completely different reasons to be offended."

ryan cooper on Twitter - "sales of mega-pickups, which have basically been deliberately designed to intimidate and kill pedestrians, are booming"
Maybe it's projection
A blue check mark, of course

Black man's jaywalking ticket in N.S. was racial discrimination, says rights board - "A human rights board of inquiry has found that a Black man was discriminated against by Halifax police when he was ticketed for jaywalking... the officers first stopped Symonds as he headed for the Nook Espresso Bar across from his office without using a crosswalk at the corner. They warned him about jaywalking and told him he was free to go. Perryman said that first encounter was “brief and cordial.”  The decision says the facts of what happened next were disputed, with Symonds telling the board he crossed at the intersection when he returned to his office and the two police officers saying they observed him again crossing in the middle of the block and that he didn’t yield to a bus. The officers followed him into his office building and gave him a ticket.  Under the province’s Motor Vehicle Act, it’s an offence if someone crosses a road at a place where there’s not a regular crossing for pedestrians and doesn’t “yield the right of way to vehicles on the roadway.”  However, Perryman found in his ruling that it was “more likely than not” that Symonds didn’t jaywalk on his return trip and concluded the officers’ decision to wait and observe the man was based in part on race. Perryman has ordered the Halifax Regional Police to pay Symonds $15,232 and give him a written apology. He also suggests all new hires complete training in policing without bias... Perryman noted that he was concerned about the decision of the officers to remain and observe Symonds after the first encounter, as the man exited the coffee shop to return to work.  His decision says the officers told the board of inquiry they kept watching Symonds because they had some time available and that it was a so-called “de-escalating tactic,” where they believed police presence would deter law-breaking.  Perryman said he found those explanations inadequate."
Minorities should be allowed to do whatever they want

Avoiding marginalised people in the street : socialjustice101 - "I am a white, cis hetero presenting male. For the last 3 years, I have been actively crossing the street to avoid women, especially at night. I do this to try and reduce their anxiety that I may be an attacker. After the tragic events last summer, I started doing the same when I encountered BIPOC. I just felt like the last thing BIPOC needed was to have to face white people. With this in mind though, I've also seen a lot of black people in the UK, describe how white people always cross the road to avoid them and how this is a microagression. so Im really torn here and would like sokr advice about what the best thing to do is? Should I actively try and interact with minorities and try and be a good ally? or should i step to one side and give them the space they need yo breathe, whilst silmultaniously trying to be an ally?"

The Independent - Posts | Facebook - "Exclusive: Born and raised in London, Ace Ruele Aristotles has three children in UK"
"UK-born actor Ace Ruele faces deportation to Jamaica"
So many people in the comments are unwilling and/or unable to understand that the UK (and indeed, most of the world) does not practise jus solis. They need to decolonise their thinking from the hegemony of American liberalism

Meme - "The party that tells us DACA kids shouldn't have to suffer for the crimes of their parents also tell us that Americans should suffer for the crimes of slavery centuries ago."
Basically only white people inherit Original Sin

#UsToo: Why haven't more black women been sexually harassed? - "No one wants to be sexually harassed in the workplace, but everyone would like to think that they’re worthy of being sexually harassed in the workplace. When I was sexually harassed at White Castle, back in the mid ‘00s, causing me to walk off the line mid-shift, it was one of the most difficult times in my life, but it was nice to know that someone wanted to take advantage of me. My concern is that not enough black women are being sexually harassed in the media. In the past few weeks, literally hundreds of women have come forward to allege sexual harassment—and worse—against Harvey Weinstein, James Toback, Brett Ratner et alia, and few, if any of them, have been black."

Cathy Reisenwitz 🥑 on Twitter - "I’m watching the Boondocks for the first time and I have feelings. I understand the viewer is supposed to laugh at some of these characters. But I must say it feels gross, as an exceedingly melanin-deficient person, to laugh at Black characters."
Having real, believable black characters who are treated the same way as white people is racist
The poisonous obsession with "punching down" strikes again

Anyone who has no slave is his own slave
A slave who looks on while a fellow slave is tied up and thrown into the grave with his master should realise that the same thing could be done to him someday
It is when the son is being given advice that the slave learns...
"We think this trade must go on," one local king in Bonny infamously said in the 19th Century.  "That is the verdict of our oracle and our priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God."... Acclaimed Igbo historian Adiele Afigbo described the slave trade in south-eastern Nigeria which lasted until the late 1940s and early 1950s as one of the best kept secrets of the British colonial administration.  While the international trade ended, the local trade continued... Records from the UK's National Archives at Kew Gardens show how desperately the British struggled to end the internal trade in slaves for almost the entire duration of the colonial period"
Only white people get judged for their ancestors' sins, while black people who have been involved in the slave trade in living memory are innocent

An African country reckons with its history of selling slaves - The Washington Post - "Less than a mile from what was once West Africa's biggest slave port, the departure point for more than a million people in chains, stands a statue of Francisco Félix de Souza, a man regarded as the father of this city.  There's a museum devoted to his family and a plaza in his name. Every few decades, his descendants proudly bestow his nickname — "Chacha" — on a de Souza who is appointed the clan's new patriarch.  But there's one part of de Souza's legacy that is seldom addressed. After arriving here in the late 1700s from Brazil, then a Portuguese colony, he became one of the biggest slave merchants in the history of the transatlantic slave trade... The trade largely stopped by the end of the 19th century, but Benin never fully confronted what had happened. The kingdoms that captured and sold slaves still exist today as tribal networks, and so do the groups that were raided. The descendants of slave merchants, like the de Souza family, remain among the nation's most influential people, with a large degree of control over how Benin's history is portrayed... Many members of the de Souza family are aghast at the idea.  "He was a man who helped modernize our nation," said Judicael de Souza, 43, noting his ancestor's role in expanding agricultural trade with Europe... Late last year, the family appointed its new patriarch, or Chacha. He is a construction engineer named Moise de Souza who lives in a concrete apartment building with a poster-size picture of himself on the wall. He has light brown skin, a point of pride for a family that often boasts about its ties to colonialists... he worried that members of his family would be livid if he shared that sentiment publicly in Benin. He vehemently opposes any mention of de Souza as a slave merchant in the new Ouidah museum.  "It's the reputation of our family," he said. "We don't want to be known for this dirty thing.""

Introducing Woke: Detect Insensitive Language in Your Source Code | by Caitlin Elfring | Better Programming

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts | Facebook - "A University of Minnesota student posted on Instagram about a late night encounter with police that left him “mentally and emotionally tormented”.  In response the police released video and audio of the encounter that told a very different story."
The most useful part of body cameras

S.F. high school students get a lesson in subtle white privilege - "Three weeks ago I processed the Capitol insurrection with my high school students. Rallying our inquiry skills, we analyzed the images of that historic day, images of white men storming through the Capitol, fearless and with no forces to stop them. “This,” I said, “is white supremacy, this is white privilege. It can be hard to pinpoint, but when we see, it, we know it.”  Across our Zoom screen, they affirmed, with nods, thumbs-ups, and emojis of anger and frustration. Fast-forward two weeks as we analyzed images from the inauguration... They saw a white man in a puffy jacket and huge mittens, distant not only in his social distancing, but in his demeanor and attire... Sen. Sanders is no white supremacist insurrectionist. But he manifests privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege, in ways that my students could see and feel.   “When you see privilege, you know it,” I’d told them weeks before. Yet, when they saw Sen. Bernie Sanders manifesting privilege, when seemingly no one else did, I struggled to explain that disparity. I am beyond puzzled as to why so many are loving the images of Bernie and his gloves. Sweet, yes, the gloves, knit by an educator. So “Bernie.”  Not so sweet? The blindness I see, of so many (Bernie included), to the privileges Bernie represents. I don’t know many poor, or working class, or female, or struggling-to-be-taken-seriously folk who would show up at the inauguration of our 46th president dressed like Bernie. Unless those same folk had privilege. Which they don’t. Ingrid Seyer-Ochi is a public school teacher."
I thought Jews weren't white
Of course teachers aren't trying to indoctrinate their students

Woman Behind Bernie's Mittens Quit Making Them Because Taxes Killed Her Business - "The Vermont school teacher who made Bernie Sanders’ mittens, featured in the most recent viral meme, said she had to stop making them after the federal government taxed her too much.  “People have been contacting me thinking that they can get mittens, and actually they can’t. I don’t have any more, and I don’t have much of a mitten business anymore because it really wasn’t worth it,” Jen Ellis explained... Even though Sanders admitted in 2019 that he would raise taxes on the middle class to support his Medicare for All plan, Ellis has shown support for the senator, sending him the repurposed sweater mittens in 2016 because she was “heartbroken” that he lost the Democratic nomination and “probably wouldn’t run again.”"
Only those who vote Republican are mocked for voting against their interests

Bernie Sanders meme: Viral image of senator at inauguration sparks a debate about sexism - "Some people posted on Twitter and suggested that the reaction to the picture and the popularity of the meme is a sign of wider misogyny in society. The crux of the argument seems to be that if a woman had turned up to an event like this wearing similar clothing, supposedly looking disgruntled and unenthusiastic, then people wouldn’t have had the same jubilant and positive reaction... 'I’ll admit the Bernie memes are funny BUT his openly grumpy disposition during a very historic moment for women and particularly women of color speaks volumes to me.'...  to be fair on Bernie, it was freezing cold and he is almost 80 years old, so it seems understandable why he might be wrapped up warm and not look so smiley. Also, Michelle Obama was seen looking less than happy at Trump’s inauguration (and later spoke about how she “stopped trying” smile during the event) and it became a meme way back in 2017. Some people think we should just let people enjoy things without having to create edgy discourse about every meme or online trend."
This is why in Communist countries they clap for their leaders for so long

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