Political shadows over academia: The disinvitation of Dr Sol Iglesias from NUS Event - "Dr Sol Iglesias, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of the Philippines-Diliman, has been said to have been disinvited from a panel at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The panel, part of the “Global Research Forum: Towards a Public Asian Studies” scheduled for January 2024, was to address “Public Intellectuals, Populism and Power: Perspectives from Southeast Asia.” Dr Iglesias’ disinvitation came after initial communications and preparations, including discussions about travel funding and logistics. On November 2, she was abruptly informed by her NUS colleague that the decision to exclude her came from “higher-ups” in the university. No official explanation was provided, but Dr Iglesias suspects it is linked to her marriage to Dr Thum Ping Tjin, a Singaporean historian, democracy activist, and the managing editor of the independent media outlet, New Naratif... Dr Iglesias expressed her disappointment and concern, stating, “My academic freedom has been violated by NUS, part of a persistent failure of the university to protect and uphold academic freedom.” She further elaborated on the implications of her disinvitation, “This is not just about me being disinvited; it’s a reflection of the broader pattern of NUS’s failure to respect and uphold academic freedom.” Dr Iglesias’ case is not isolated. She refers to other instances where NUS’s commitment to academic freedom appears to be in question. She highlighted a recent communication from the NUS president following a government-issued Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) order related to an article on government corruption. The president’s message emphasized adherence to Singapore’s laws, which critics argue could indirectly restrict academic freedom. Another significant incident involved a 2020 webinar on “Public Discourse, Truth and Trust,” where speakers critical of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) were replaced at the last minute. The incident sparked speculations about the influence of political considerations in academic discourse. Dr Iglesias further points to the treatment of her husband, Dr Thum, as indicative of the challenges faced by academics in Singapore. Dr. Thum’s critical research on Singapore’s political history and his advocacy for democracy have met with significant opposition from authorities. This includes a prolonged interrogation by the Minister of Home Affairs and Law, K Shanmugam, at the Select Committee, during discussions on the fake news law proposal, and a subsequent police investigation after the 2020 General Elections."
NUS is good at gaming rankings, but not at doing what a university is supposed to
Paul Kirkby #MBGA 🇬🇧 on X - "I am absolutely furious at Laura Kuenssberg for calling for Suella Braverman to be sacked while live on air. This is an outrageous abuse of her position as a BBC presenter. Kuenssberg is supposed to be impartial, but she has made it clear that she is biased against Braverman. She has repeatedly criticized the Home Secretary, even when she has been right. In her latest attack, Kuenssberg said that Braverman "made the job of the police harder this weekend" by criticizing their handling of a pro-Palestinian protest. But Kuenssberg is wrong. Braverman was right to criticize the police. They allowed the protesters to chant anti-Semitic slogans and burn Israeli flags. This is unacceptable in a civilized society. Kuenssberg's call to sack Braverman is a dangerous precedent. It is an attempt to silence a strong and independent voice in the Conservative government. I urge the BBC to take action against Kuenssberg. She should be suspended or even sacked for her blatant bias and her abuse of her position. We cannot allow the BBC to be used as a tool to silence the right. #BackBraverman #SackKuenssberg"
The dreadful restoration of David Cameron - "The Restoration of Dave is even more troubling than it might seem at first. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a role to which he is less well-suited than foreign secretary. Perhaps only the appointment of Blair, the architect of Iraq’s destruction, would have been worse. After all, Cameron’s decision to intervene militarily in Libya in 2011 led to the implosion of the country and unleashed forces that are still tearing the wider region apart. The war in Libya was arguably one of the most calamitous foreign-policy moves of the 21st-century. Even Barack Obama conceded in 2016 that it was a ‘shitshow’. And now the co-author of that ‘shitshow’ is heading up the UK’s foreign policy again. Cameron’s political resurrection serves as a reminder of the catastrophic failures of the technocratic model of politics that reigned before Brexit. It’s a reminder that Sunak’s tired brand of managerialism has failed before and will fail again. Nudging and nannying at home while bombing with abandon abroad didn’t work in the 2010s. And it certainly isn’t the answer to the UK’s problems today."
An Ingenious Blend of Airplane and Helicopter - the Fairey Rotodyne - "Long before powered flight was actually achieved, inventors and aircraft designers had attempted to combine the speed of horizontal flight with the ability to take off and land vertically. The development of rotary-wing aircraft was the first practical solution to that problem."
“This Is Serious”: Facebook Begins Its Downward Spiral - "There was a time when Facebook made us feel good about using the service—I used to love it. It was fun to connect with old friends, share pictures of your vacation with everyone, or show off a video of your nephew being extra-specially cute. But, over time, Facebook has had to make Wall Street happy, and the only way to feed that beast is to accumulate more, more, more: more clicks, more time spent on the site, more Likes, more people, more connections, more hyper-personalized ads. All of which adds up to more money. But as one recent mea culpa by an early Internet guru aptly noted, “What if we were never meant to be a global species?” If Facebook doesn’t solve these problems, and I’m not sure If it actually can, the outcomes could be devastating for the company."
From 2018
Facebook can track you using dust on your camera lens - "Gizmodo has uncovered a Facebook patent that shows it could one day use data stored on your photos to suggest people you might know on the platform. The technology would match photos uploaded to different accounts and apply it to Facebook's People You May Know (PYMK) feature."
From 2018
Meme - "Cartoons then: *Cap'n Crunch*
Cartoons now: *Ugly Cap'n Crunch*"
Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets - "Many people underreport embarrassing behaviours and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias. An important paper in 1950 provided powerful evidence of how surveys can fall victim to such bias. Researchers collected data, from official sources, on the residents of Denver: what percentage of them voted, gave to charity, and owned a library card. They then surveyed the residents to see if the percentages would match. The results were, at the time, shocking. What the residents reported to the surveys was very different from the data the researchers had gathered. Even though nobody gave their names, people, in large numbers, exaggerated their voter registration status, voting behaviour, and charitable giving... Men Google more questions about their sexual organ than any other body part: more than about their lungs, liver, feet, ears, nose, throat, and brain combined. Men conduct more searches for how to make their penises bigger than how to tune a guitar, make an omelette, or change a tyre. Men’s top Googled concern about steroids isn’t whether they may damage their health but whether taking them might diminish the size of their penis. Men’s top Googled question related to how their body or mind would change as they aged was whether their penis would get smaller. Do women care about penis size? Rarely, according to Google searches. For every search women make about a partner’s phallus, men make roughly 170 searches about their own. True, on the rare occasions women do express concerns about a partner’s penis, it is frequently about its size, but not necessarily that it’s small. More than 40% of complaints about a partner’s penis size say that it’s too big. “Pain” is the most Googled word used in searches with the phrase “___ during sex.” Yet only 1% of men’s searches looking to change their penis size are seeking information on how to make it smaller... let me put forth the following conjecture, ready to be tested by scholars across a range of fields. The primary explanation for discrimination against African Americans today is not the fact that the people who agree to participate in lab experiments make subconscious associations between negative words and black people; it is the fact that millions of white Americans continue to do things like search for “nigger jokes”."
The problem with reading too much into Google search data is it assumes that Google searches are representative of the population you want to study, or that Google search data directly translates to real world results (Google trends being abused a lot is a prime example of this, since it measures relative frequency rather than absolute)
Proof that Americans are lying about their sexual desires - "The rate at which women watch violent porn is roughly the same in every part of the world. It isn’t correlated with how women are treated... Less than 20 percent of porn watched these days features vaginal sex to completion among two people who can conceivably have a healthy baby. Cartoons, anal sex to completion, oral sex to completion, foot sex to completion, incest, elderly porn, tickling, animal porn, sex with objects, etc."
Assuming that just because people watch a certain type of porn means that they are primarily turned on by that kind of sex or even should be in such relationships is problematic, to say the least. If nothing else, people watch porn for something lacking in their sex lives
I spent a whole school year commuting to class by plane to save money on rent - "A college graduate has revealed that he spent a whole school year commuting to class by plane - flying from Los Angeles to San Francisco three times a week just so he could avoid paying rent. The student, named Bill, who asked for his last name not to be shared, said he took a total of 238 flights from August 2022 to May 2023, and spent a total of $5,592.66 and 576,445 frequent flier miles on his travels. Bill, who never missed a class, explained to Los Angeles news outlet KTLA that he was ecstatic when he was accepted into University of California, Berkeley's one-year Master of Engineering program last year. However, he didn't want to give up his low-rent apartment in LA and knew he wanted to move back after graduating, so to avoid having to pay 'expensive' rent in the Bay Area, he decided to fly back and forth for his classes... he had to wake up at 3.30am on the days he had class, so he could get on a 6am flight from LAX to SFO. After arriving in San Francisco, he took the 8.30am BART train to Berkley, and made it to class by 10am. After a full day of learning, he would do the reverse back to LA, and would usually arrive home around midnight... While he did spend more than $5,000 on commuting - and roughly 76,000 minutes, he calculated - he still saved a ton of money since rent near the college averages around $3,358 per month... Thankfully, he was also able to cut costs by using more than half a million airline miles he had built up."
Designer’s tweets during first trip to Japan perfectly show why it’s such a great place to visit - "In just the first day of his stay, designer tweeted more than 50 things that pleasantly surprised him about Japan."
From Astrology to Cult Politics—the Many Ways We Try (and Fail) to Replace Religion - "Ultimately, religion is about the human need for meaning. This need is inherent, not learned. It is a fundamental component of the human condition. Indeed, the degree to which humans perceive their lives as meaningful correlates reliably with observable measures of psychological and physical health. A sense of meaning also helps people mobilize toward the pursuit of their goals (persistence), and serves to protect them from the negative effects of stress and trauma (resilience). In short, people who view their lives as full of meaning are more likely to thrive than those who don’t. When people turn away from one source of meaning, such as religion, they don’t abandon the search for meaning altogether. They simply look for it in different forms. As I discuss in my new book, Supernatural: Death, Meaning and the Power of Invisible World, the decline of traditional religion has been accompanied by a rise in a diverse range of supernatural, paranormal and related beliefs. Nearly one third of Americans report having felt in contact with someone who has died, feel that they have been in the presence of a ghost, and believe ghosts can interact with and harm humans. These numbers are going up, not down, as more people seek something to fill the religion-shaped hole in their lives. By no coincidence, infrequent church attendees are roughly twice as likely to believe in ghosts as regular churchgoers... The parts of the United States where secular liberals are predominant tend to be the same areas where the market for alternative spiritual experiences and products is most lucrative. Even prominent media outlets such as The New York Times and (in Britain) The Guardian, whose readership consists primarily of secular liberals, frequently publish articles about topics such as witchcraft and astrology—even if they are careful not to legitimize the claims made by proponents of these beliefs... In his 2011 book, The Believing Brain, Michael Shermer argues that alien beings are “secular gods—deities for atheists.”... Another doctrine lying within this borderland between science fiction and religion is transhumanism, whose adherents dream of transcending mortality through medicine and bioengineering... And if you imagine that secular ideologies and political movements now seem to exhibit faux-religious characteristics, you aren’t alone. “We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong,” wrote Andrew Sullivan recently in New York magazine. “And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical. They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided.”... studies find that it is people who score low on commitment to a religious faith who are most likely to invest in political ideologies to counter threats to meaning in life. Also, the more extreme secular ideologies on both the left and right often involve conspiracy theories, which are cognitively similar to paranormal and supernatural-lite religious substitutes and similarly motivated by the need for meaning. Importantly, there are reasons to doubt that these various alternatives to religion can successfully meet people’s need for meaning. Modern religious substitutes often reflect the individualism of the West, which is in tension with our species’ inherent social nature."
Meme - "Me
My Femboy bf *kissing*
My Tomboy gf *kissing*"
Unusual Buildings: 10+ Photos From Around The World
Why Modern Movies Suck - Nobody Can Stay Dead! - YouTube
The pandemic showed the value of tinned food - so why are people still so snobbish? - "I’ve also noted people who live in food-spoiling continental climates don’t get squeamish about tins. I’ve seen Greeks, Croats and Italians decant olives and mixed-bean salad from tins without fear of being deemed oiks."
Meme - "Adeline Brie
You're friends on Facebook
Works at OnlyFans
Studied at Chemeketa Community College
Idk who your friend Richard Rivera is but he laughed at my pictures and I saw y'all are friends so I'm blocking you both
This person is unavailable on Messenger."
People go bonkers over laugh reacts
Meme - "*Thirst trap photo*
"You're so beautiful
marry me?"
"Never mind I just jerked off you mean nothing to me"
Post-nut clarity is real
Wife leaves shocking 'tip' scolding waitress for calling her husband 'sweetheart' as social media users slam jilted spouse as 'rude and insecure' - "A waitress has revealed the shocking moment she was left a 'tip' from an angry customer - as her expected 20 percent bonus was instead a furious note saying: 'Don't call my husband sweetheart.'... 'In the southern US, everyone is called honey, sweety, sweetheart and my personal favourite, ‘sugar'', said one commenter."
Country names in French : French (mirror)
VIDEO: Body cam footage shows woman smiling, laughing after killing 2 people in crash - "Police body camera footage shows a 24-year-old Illinois woman smiling, laughing, and singing after authorities told her she killed two people in a crash. Stephanie Melgoza was sentenced to 14 years in prison on Thursday. Authorities said she was under the influence and speeding, with Megloza pleading guilty to two counts of aggravated DUI and two counts of aggravated reckless driving."
Meme - "Antinatalist: Doesn't want a kid because the parent will suffer
Child-Free: Doesn't want a kid because the kid will suffer
Perfect couple"
Man who killed 2-year-old daughter, left charred remains in pot gets over 21 years’ jail, caning - "the judge stressed that the victim's first name, Umaisyah, should be published so that she can be remembered by her name instead of as "the deceased" or "the victim"... The court heard that Umaisyah was abused by her parents until her eventual death. Her father would hit her with items such as a belt or a hanger and would punch her thigh and pinch her body. The couple also abused their other children in a similar fashion. The man would hit his children, who were aged between two and nine at the time, and leave them alone in the flat without adequate food and water. In March 2014, the accused and his wife were upset at the girl as she was playing with her faeces after soiling her diaper. When the girl cried "despite being asked not to", her mother slapped her cheeks and "flicked her lips", the prosecution said. The accused, who had consumed meth earlier that morning, forcefully slapped his daughter two to three times. As a result, the girl's legs went weak. She sat on the floor and her body started leaning to the right while her upper body bent forward. She stopped crying and started gasping for air. Her mother saw blood and liquid coming out of her mouth and nose. Umaisyah had suffered a significant traumatic brain injury which led to a concussive brain seizure. Her father performed a few rounds of cardiopulmonary resuscitation but she did not respond. Despite the life-threatening nature of her injuries, neither parent called for help or took her to hospital. They were concerned that they would be arrested for her injuries. The accused was also worried about being arrested for his drug use. It is possible that medical intervention could have saved the girl, the prosecution said. The couple, who have since divorced, tried to cover their tracks, destroying evidence and lying to the authorities and their own family members about the victim's whereabouts. On the day Umaisyah died, her parents placed her body in a metal pot and set her body on fire in the back of the accused's lorry. They made sure her body was fully burnt before placing the pot in a cardboard box, sealing it with masking tape and covering it in cling wrap. They kept the box under the kitchen stove in their flat. Umaisyah's uncle, named only as Z, was warned against touching the box and told it contained items from the accused's lorry... Umaisyah's uncle, Z, became increasingly curious about the contents of the box. He tried to throw it away in 2017 as it was dirty and there were cockroach eggs in the cling wrap. When Umaisyah's mother found out, she had the box freshly wrapped and warned her brother not to touch it again. After the mother went to prison in 2019, her brother opened the box and saw a lump that was decomposed and wet. He later showed the contents of the pot to his sister's friends when they visited the flat after attending her sentencing for other crimes. The friends felt uneasy and reported it to the police. The child's body was "charred beyond recognition", the prosecution said. At autopsy, small bones and a loose tooth were uncovered from the soot and debris, the court heard. All facial features were absent, and the hands and feet could not be identified... The man said he had found solace in religion, but Judge Abdullah said: "It's between you and your maker. It is irrelevant to sentencing. I'm here to impose punishment on behalf of the state.""
“As Good As It Gets”: Sauron’s Battle Armor In LOTR Gets Perfect Score From Medieval Arms Expert - YouTube
Featuring Toby Capwell
Meme - "First date
so what do you do?
Me remembering that women like bad boys: I, uh... sell drugs
... are you serious?
me remembering women also like sensitive men: yeah, to children in need"
No, hunter gatherers were not peaceful paragons of gender equality - " It seems like people are always trying to use hunter gatherers to further some wacky theory or other. The Paleo Diet isn’t too bad; it is at least a reasonably accurate representation of what hunter-gatherers actually eat, though your chances of replicating hunter-gather food at home are slim–which is why we end up with things like “Paleo Bread.” But then you have the far less accurate theories, often pushed by people who really ought to know better. Like the theory that hunter gatherers had no wars, or that they were all gender egalitarians. Or that there was once a global civilization of feminist goddess-worshipers who were wiped out by evil agriculturalists. Oh, those evil, evil agriculturalists. But let’s backtrack a minute. Where do these wacky theories come from? The short answer is that they come from Marxists. You may laugh or roll your eyes, but I was actually assigned Das Kapital twice in college–once in my major, political science, and once in my minor, anthropology. I was also assigned explicitly Marxist papers in my Feminism class. This was a reputable university where many of my professors were identifiably conservative, not an obvious liberal bastion like Berkley or Reed. Marx is deep in academia. You do not have to be explicitly citing Marx or realize that you are using theories of the world derived from Marx to be using one of Marx’s theories, anymore than you have to have studied the Chicago School of Economics or the Austrian School to pick up one of their theories and start using it. But most academics of the past 100 years or so have known the intellectual provenance of their ideas, because like me, they were assigned it in class and no one in academia is shy about explicitly citing Marx... suffice to say, real-life experience has not been terribly kind to Marx’s theories. Nonetheless, they still undergird a great deal of academic thinking and were formative in the educations of many, many anthropologists... Alas, many a beautiful theory has been destroyed by an ugly fact, and the ugly fact in this case is that pre-state people killed each other all the damn time. Take the Dorset, completely wiped out by the Thule (Inuit) about 700 years ago... Speaking of Columbus, he wrote of the Indians he met in the Bahamas, “Many of the men I have seen have scars on their bodies, and when I made signs to them to find out how this happened, they indicated that people from other nearby islands come to San Salvador to capture them; they defend themselves the best they can. I believe that people from the mainland come here to take them as slaves.”... “A recent study… gave some astonishing cross-cultural figures. The homicide rate in modern Britain is roughly 0.5/100,000; in the USA it is about 20 times as high, at about 10.5. The highest death rate recorded in a nation, as opposed to a tribe, is 34 / 100,000, in Colombia. Though it is difficult to calculate exact correspondences for much smaller populations, about whom much less is known, it is still clear that Stone Age tribes make up in enthusiasm what they lack in the technology of murder. Even the !Kung bushmen, popularised as “The Harmless People”, had a had a homicide rate of 41.9 on this scale; the Yanomamo come in at 165. The record appears to be held by the Hewa people of New Guinea, with a score of 778. … the Murngin hunter-gatherer aborigines of Northern Australia come in with a score of 330.”... Steven Pinker estimates, in The Better Angels of our Nature, that about 15% of people died of violence–murder or warfare–in pre-state societies. This is about the same % as the Russians lost in WWII, if we go with the high estimate of Soviet casualties–about half that if we take the low estimate... “The Genetic Pacification of Europe“–basically the idea that European governments have been executing their violent criminals (or otherwise letting them die in jail) for centuries, resulting in a drastic reduction in the prevalence of genes coding for violence in areas with long histories of strong, organized state rule... “The frequency distribution of variants of the MAO-A gene differs between ethnic groups. 59% of Black men, 54% of Chinese men, 56% of Maori men, and 34% of Caucasian men carry the 3R allele. 5.5% of Black men, 0.1% of Caucasian men, and 0.00067% of Asian men carry the 2R allele.”"
Weird. Liberals tell us that white people brought slavery to the New World
American tourist gang-raped on jungle trek in Papua New Guinea: Report - ""The male trekker was tied to a tree and the female tracker was repeatedly raped before three of her fingers were chopped. The incident took place for an hour before they (trekkers) were set free... Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed the attack and added that the couple were hiking without a licensed tour operator. There are endemic levels of domestic violence against women in the Pacific region, with a 2013 United Nations study finding that 80 per cent of men surveyed in PNG reported physically or sexually abusing their partners. Two years ago, a US academic was gang-raped by an armed mob in the country while conducting research on birds and the impact of climate change in a remote forest on Karkar Island in Madang province. In the same year, a group of eight Australian and New Zealand trekkers were violently attacked by bandits, with three of their porters killed, while hiking on the remote Black Cat track. Four of the eight tourists were also hurt, including one who was speared in the leg."
ƎƆ∀Ⅎ•Ǝ˥∀Ԁ•ℲƎHƆ on X - "Black people marinate their chicken is dawn dish soap or bleach so their opinions on food don't matter."
