Why Does Scotland Want Independence? It’s Culture vs. Economics - NYTimes.com - "It seems slightly bonkers for Scots to get so frustrated about ceding power to bureaucrats in London and turn immediately to bureaucrats in Brussels, but there it is"
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Dear iPhone 6 users: Welcome to 2012! (image) - ""If you need help with your iPhone's new features, just ask an Android user. We've had this stuff for years"
Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America - "Berkeley linguistics professor John McWhorter, born at the dawn of the post-Civil Rights era, spent years trying to make sense of this question. Now he dares to say the unsayable: racism's ugliest legacy is the disease of defeatism that has infected black America. Losing the Race explores the three main components of this cultural virus: the cults of victimology, separatism, and antiintellectualism that are making blacks their own worst enemies in the struggle for success."
Ethnicity and conflict: theory and facts. - "Over the second half of the 20th century, conflicts within national boundaries became increasingly dominant. One-third of all countries experienced civil conflict. Many (if not most) such conflicts involved violence along ethnic lines. On the basis of recent theoretical and empirical research, we provide evidence that preexisting ethnic divisions do influence social conflict. Our analysis also points to particular channels of influence. Specifically, we show that two different measures of ethnic division--polarization and fractionalization--jointly influence conflict, the former more so when the winners enjoy a "public" prize (such as political power or religious hegemony), the latter more so when the prize is "private" (such as looted resources, government subsidies, or infrastructures). The available data appear to strongly support existing theories of intergroup conflict. Our argument also provides indirect evidence that ethnic conflicts are likely to be instrumental, rather than driven by primordial hatreds."
Viewing ethnic conflicts as only about race is seductively simplistic
California affirmative-action ban: Why liberals should let it stand. - "UCLA and UC–Berkeley are far more socioeconomically diverse than most selective colleges. In 2011–12, the proportion of students eligible for Pell grants (federal financial aid for lower-income students) at UCLA was 38 percent and at Berkeley 37 percent, compared with just 13 percent at another top public institution, the University of Virginia. These steps helped accomplish what education is supposed to do—promote social mobility. But they are likely to disappear if universities can go back to recruiting by race. Prestige-conscious universities receive no points from the U.S. News & World Report rankings for admitting low-income students. They’re actually “diverting” funding from things that will boost rankings... To their credit, universities care about racial diversity, perhaps because the lack of it is visible. But they generally do not aggressively pursue socioeconomic diversity except where race has been taken off the table and recruiting low-income students is the next best way to achieve racial diversity. The second major reason that liberals should be concerned about a return of racial preferences is the one raised by the Chinese-American protesters: The shift would hurt Asian-Americans, who have suffered their own history of discrimination"
A German Man Was Evicted Because His Sex Swing Was Too Squeaky - "A German court ruled Friday that a landlady had the right to evict a tenant who broke his rental agreement of keeping quiet between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. by using his “very old,” loud, chain sex swing"
What your doctor wishes you would ask about sex - ""There's this idea that women want to be magically carried off into the bedroom" to spark arousal, explained Foley. But even when women don't initially feel in the mood, said Foley, they may want to make time and effort for sexual intimacy. "Don't expect it to look like Madonna in one of her musical videos singing 'I want it. I want it,'" said Foley, referring to a lyric in the Michigan-bred pop star's 1989 song "Hanky Panky." "Instead, think that once I start being touched and touch my partner," said Foley, "my body will remind me of how much I want it.""
More problems with 'enthusiastic consent'
Dad Calls Cops on Son to Teach Him a Lesson, Cops Shoot Son Dead - "James Comstock told the Des Moines Register he called the police on his son Tyler after the latter took the former's truck in retaliation for refusing to buy him cigarettes. Ames Police Officer Adam McPherson reportedly spotted the lawn care company vehicle and pursued it onto the Iowa State University campus, where a brief standoff ensued after Tyler allegedly refused orders to turn off the engine. McPherson eventually fired six shots into the truck, two of which struck Tyler who was later pronounced dead. The official report claims the action was necessary in order "to stop the ongoing threat to the public and the officers." Tyler's dad says he was unarmed at the time."
American shares contacts of almost 100 Singapore girls he slept with on Craigslist - "During these 4 years, I've bedded 65 Chinese women, 13 Malay ladies, 5 Indians and 9 Eurasian girls.... All very friendly and wonderful sex partners. About 70% were single, the rest married. The one thing common among all of them is that they love sex and other than a half dozen of them, seem to only want to be fucked by Caucasians (at least that's the impression I got from our conversation)"
Answer to What does it feel like to be hit on as a woman? - Quora - "It's really annoying.
A few weeks ago I went to the beach on the prettiest day ever to walk around and take photos and read for a few hours. I left after one hour, because my day was literally going like this:
5 minutes of reading. Interruption by a dude wanting to hit on me. 15 minutes of trying to get rid of him politely.
5 minutes of reading. Another interruption by a dude. 15 more minutes of getting hit on.
Pack up my stuff and go for a walk, because maybe if I'm moving dudes won't bug me so much. Accidentally make eye contact with a passerby. Get hit on by passerby. Tell passerby 3 times that no, I don't want to go get lunch with him and no, I don't want a tour of the downtown.
Walk down the beach some more. Get hit on by three dudes while taking photos of waves. Give one my number just so he'll leave me alone. Save his number in my phone so I know not to answer when he calls.
Leave beach and look for someplace I can read my book in peace."
Rosie Law's answer to What does it feel like to be hit on as a woman? - Quora - "It can be very flattering, but mainly it tends to be annoying. It can be much like being stuck, in the middle of the High Street, by market researchers! You don't want what they're offering, you've told them that you're not interested, but they still keep pestering you in the hope that they can persuade you to change your mind."
I’ve Raped Countless Women—According to Feminists - "If you want to get angry at a bunch of stupid feminist broads, check out this collection of these signs... worse than her sanctimonious expression is what her sign actually says: “I need FEMINISM because men can still RAPE even without laying a hand on a woman.” Now that is one talented man, let me just say. I’ve never heard of such an ability as to rape someone while your hands are basically tied behind your back (and hopefully the guy’s in jail so he never demonstrates his act on me). Of course what this radical feminist is saying is that ogling women is tantamount to rape, and that she needs feminism (as if abstract ideas can be in one’s possession) until that day when men get their choice (choice!) taken away as to whether or not they may direct their eyeballs in the direction of a female."
The coolest, weirdest Internet community you’ll never be able to join - "Bushfield is the one-man impresario behind LearnedLeague, a booming, invitation-only, underground trivia competition I joined two years ago"
Queen Victoria’s Secret Scottish Sex Castle - "Victoria’s grief at the premature death of Albert from typhoid in 1861 was as intense as her passion for him when alive – she became the epitome of the inconsolable widow perpetually in black and invariably sour in temperament. That is, until a rough-tongued Scotsman rekindled the flame."
Jose Canaura - Mobile Uploads - "So I was nominated for ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. I'm not going to participate nor will I pay the donation money. With a little bit of research, fairly simple, I found the following. As of 2012, ALSA has directed only 7.71% of its budget to Research"
That awkward moment when you haven't unlocked your boyfriend as a playable character yet.
People Keep Getting Into Strangers' Cars Because They Think It's An Uber
Draper Kauffman's answer to What does it feel like to be a male who pretends to be a female online? - Quora - "I swapped accounts with her, and you won't be surprised to find out that when I was writing as her, I got all the same sexist shit, and when she was writing as me, she got treated with considerably more respect. So was it the perceived gender, not the writing style, that made the difference? Probably, because the difference was immediate. But I was also intrigued by the fact that our writing styles did gradually shift. Hers became more direct and concise, and I found myself trying to sound more sympathetic to people's emotions and stress levels and writing things like, "It's important to all of us to maintain a level of civil discourse, so it would be helpful if you would be less confrontational in these situations," instead of, "Stop flaming everyone or we'll boot you!"... A decade or so later, playing WoW, I was amused at how people treated female toons differently, even though most people were aware that many (most?) female characters were being played by male players. Random strangers were much more helpful, but also less likely to accept advice, if you switched from a male character to a female character. I also had the impression that male players seemed more cooperative and less confrontational when playing female characters than when playing male characters. So, again, it's a chicken and egg question. Do male players change behavior when playing female toons, and thereby elicit different responses from others? Or do the different responses elicit the changed behavior? Or is it a mutual reinforcing loop based in part on real interactions and in part on our knowledge of the expected differences in gender roles? My hunch is the latter, but I think that we really do automatically adopt the gender identities of our avatars to a considerable extent."
L'origine de Bert
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Get Peppy Or Get Out
Get Peppy Or Get Out - New York Times
Much has been written about football players as a disturbed overclass, but on Super Bowl Sunday, let's not neglect that other all-American totem: the cheerleader. Once content with frothy squeals, today's cheerleaders can boast that their athletic, high-difficulty displays cause more deaths and injuries than any high-school or college women's sport. Driven to interpersonal frenzies, they can also get downright nasty:
*Last fall, two high-school cheerleaders from Bainbridge Island, Wash., spiked the drink of a fellow cheerleader with vomit-inducing ipecac syrup. Although police discounted the incident as a possible prank, Ann Noble, mother of a cheerleader who wasn't involved, disagreed. ''They wanted to put her out of the game,'' she said, ''because they didn't think she was a good enough cheerleader.''
*Citing safety concerns, Andrews High School in Andrews, Tex., prohitibted Callie Smartt, who has cerebral palsy and led cheers in a wheelchair, from traveling to away games and cheering on the sideline at home games. Her colleagues' reaction: relief. ''It was like she was forced on us,'' the head cheerleader, Jennifer Francis, told a local paper. ''We got sick of it.''
*Karen Reamey, the mother of a junior-varsity cheerleader in Rustburg, Va., was recently convicted of misdemeanor assault and battery for shoving, punching and ripping the wig off another cheerleader's mother in the middle of a squad practice. Motive? An argument over a $5 fee for after-practice cheerleader snacks.
Reacting to the form's broader pathologies, the X-Cheerleaders, a New York-based group of dancers and former cheerleaders, perform feminist cheers at venues all over the country. Though their shows poke fun at cheerleading's misdeeds, a co-director, Jody Oberfelder, still prefers cheering to football. ''I can't get very excited about people running into each other,'' says Oberfelder, who is skipping the Super Bowl. ''Cheerleaders are powerful women doing amazing group acrobatics. It's those silly uniforms that make them look like Barbie dolls.''
Much has been written about football players as a disturbed overclass, but on Super Bowl Sunday, let's not neglect that other all-American totem: the cheerleader. Once content with frothy squeals, today's cheerleaders can boast that their athletic, high-difficulty displays cause more deaths and injuries than any high-school or college women's sport. Driven to interpersonal frenzies, they can also get downright nasty:
*Last fall, two high-school cheerleaders from Bainbridge Island, Wash., spiked the drink of a fellow cheerleader with vomit-inducing ipecac syrup. Although police discounted the incident as a possible prank, Ann Noble, mother of a cheerleader who wasn't involved, disagreed. ''They wanted to put her out of the game,'' she said, ''because they didn't think she was a good enough cheerleader.''
*Citing safety concerns, Andrews High School in Andrews, Tex., prohitibted Callie Smartt, who has cerebral palsy and led cheers in a wheelchair, from traveling to away games and cheering on the sideline at home games. Her colleagues' reaction: relief. ''It was like she was forced on us,'' the head cheerleader, Jennifer Francis, told a local paper. ''We got sick of it.''
*Karen Reamey, the mother of a junior-varsity cheerleader in Rustburg, Va., was recently convicted of misdemeanor assault and battery for shoving, punching and ripping the wig off another cheerleader's mother in the middle of a squad practice. Motive? An argument over a $5 fee for after-practice cheerleader snacks.
Reacting to the form's broader pathologies, the X-Cheerleaders, a New York-based group of dancers and former cheerleaders, perform feminist cheers at venues all over the country. Though their shows poke fun at cheerleading's misdeeds, a co-director, Jody Oberfelder, still prefers cheering to football. ''I can't get very excited about people running into each other,'' says Oberfelder, who is skipping the Super Bowl. ''Cheerleaders are powerful women doing amazing group acrobatics. It's those silly uniforms that make them look like Barbie dolls.''
Post ID: 807676358726918469
Friday, September 12, 2014
Japanese male porn stars rarer than Bengal Tigers: actor
Japan's vast pornography industry is desperately short of men, one actor claims, insisting even the endangered Bengal Tiger is more numerous.
A veteran porn star known only as Shimiken says he is one of just 70 male actors, with just a handful of them doing all the heavy lifting.
"Everyday I meet the same people and see the same names on scripts," he said on Twitter under his @shimiken username last month, adding the number was "lower than that of Bengal Tigers".
Quite why there aren’t enough willing participants is a mystery to Shimiken: "This job is like an Aladdin’s Cave, in many senses."
"In contrast, the number of porn actresses is as high as 10,000, with 4,000 movies released every month," Shimiken said. "We lack porn actors here."
The huge imbalance in the field stands in marked contrast to other areas of employment in Japan, where men outnumber women. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has declared he wants 30 per cent of senior positions occupied by women by 2020.
The number of tigers in the world has fallen drastically from around 100,000 in the early 20th century to about 4,000 today, according to the international conservation body, WWF.
Most Bengal tigers live in India, where a little over 1,700 are found, according to another conservation group, the IUCN Global Species Programme.
A veteran porn star known only as Shimiken says he is one of just 70 male actors, with just a handful of them doing all the heavy lifting.
"Everyday I meet the same people and see the same names on scripts," he said on Twitter under his @shimiken username last month, adding the number was "lower than that of Bengal Tigers".
Quite why there aren’t enough willing participants is a mystery to Shimiken: "This job is like an Aladdin’s Cave, in many senses."
"In contrast, the number of porn actresses is as high as 10,000, with 4,000 movies released every month," Shimiken said. "We lack porn actors here."
The huge imbalance in the field stands in marked contrast to other areas of employment in Japan, where men outnumber women. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has declared he wants 30 per cent of senior positions occupied by women by 2020.
The number of tigers in the world has fallen drastically from around 100,000 in the early 20th century to about 4,000 today, according to the international conservation body, WWF.
Most Bengal tigers live in India, where a little over 1,700 are found, according to another conservation group, the IUCN Global Species Programme.
Post ID: 6032483220793740891
Everyone's A Little Bit Racist
"I was talking about racist comments with my therapist, who's an Indian by the way, and we had so much laughter over it. He told me that he believes everyone is racist, which i find appalling, and after his explanation, I can agree to his point. One being, as born and bred Singaporeans, we had kinda seen enough racist during the early days, when I was a kid in fact. However, once when we are able to overlook the race issue, and just accept ourselves as who we are, racist comments does not affect us at all. Instead, it provides a platform to laugh about oneself, and to share it with other races. Like my Indian therapist will tell me the racist comments about Indians, and he laughs about it, and I shared by version of Chinese racist jokes. The idea being, we are living in a multiracial country, and it is a fact. There's no need to pretend that at times we havn't no racist thoughts. To pretend that we are not racist is quite a joke. Everyone is racist in minor ways. The fact that I do not date my own race, as a chinese, I never had a chinese partner. That act itself made me a racist in his point of view. So in other words, racist comments will not hurt us, if we can learn to laugh about it, the absurdity of it, or the slight truth in it. It is about how the individual reacts and the interactions amongst human that make a racist comment vile or simply a laughable topic to share. Being a gay chinese woman, my favourite racist comment has always been 'the straightest part of a chinese person is only the hair'. Personally I think it is funny. It's the perception of it. For usually, one tells a racist joke in the idea of joke, but also the connotation to bring another race down. But it also help one to learn how to laugh at oneself, and put perspective on a lighter note. Instead of seeing it as a form of vile triggers. Ultimately, the simple fact that there are different races itself is a universal truth. And that despite of the fact that we pretend that we are not racist, or try had to be a non racist, we are born racist. But of course, it all boils down to individuals, who makes the how racist ideology malicious, or we just simply live with the fact and enjoy the ride. For we know, that if we don't give it the attention it wants, that vileness can't hurt nobody."
The Same: From my understanding, it is a natural thing for humans to distrust and show fear and aggression towards other humans whom we choose to believe, are different from ourselves. It could be a religion thing, a race thing, a sexuality thing, it could be of a nation thing. I am having problem understanding the issue of naming and categorizing types of people. Like Racist and Xenophobes.
The Same: From my understanding, it is a natural thing for humans to distrust and show fear and aggression towards other humans whom we choose to believe, are different from ourselves. It could be a religion thing, a race thing, a sexuality thing, it could be of a nation thing. I am having problem understanding the issue of naming and categorizing types of people. Like Racist and Xenophobes.
Post ID: 2629369926803725519
Tuesday, September 09, 2014
Links - 9th September 2014
Soul mates are doomed - "Why wouldn’t anyone want to be with someone who was made for them in heaven? Well, because taking that view of a relationship could ultimately contribute to the couple’s demise, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Researchers observed that while there are myriad ways people talk about love, two common ways of framing relationships — the “other half/soul mate” approach and the “our love is a journey, look how far we’ve come” approach — both contribute hugely to the way people view conflict in their relationships, but in nearly opposite ways. For people with a we’re-on-a-journey view of their partners, everyday relationship struggles are just surmountable hurdles along the way. But for “soul mates,” conflicts are more difficult to deal with — after all, if two people are truly “made for each other,” why would they face any conflict in the first place? “Our findings corroborate prior research showing that people who implicitly think of relationships as perfect unity between soul mates have worse relationships than people who implicitly think of relationships as a journey of growing and working things out”"
Coca Cola's Dasani Bottled Water has Lethal Drug: Facts - "It is a fact that potassium chloride is used as a lethal drug, in some cardiac surgery procedures that cannot be carried out on the beating heart. In such cases, the surgical team will bypass the heart with a heart-lung machine and inject potassium chloride into the heart muscle to stop the heartbeat. However, the amount of potassium chloride used is the key here. As mentioned in an article on OpEdNews.com that raises these concerns, for potassium chloride to be toxic, a person has to consume more than 2500 mg/kg (of his weight) of KCl, which is an extremely large amount. The amount of KCl, which is less than 5 mg in each Dasani bottled water, is negligible according to FDA standards. Responding to these concerns, a representative from Coca-Cola stated that potassium chloride is added to their Dasani bottled water "because consumers prefer it.""
Students outraged as Yale fraternity suspended for 'no means yes' chants establishes chapter at Edinburgh - "The Edinburgh University Students' Association (EUSA) has developed a reputation this academic year for having a zero-tolerance attitude towards misogyny, and 'lad culture'. In September 2013, it became the first students' union in the country to ban the controversial anthem 'Blurred Lines', while in December, it passed a motion declaring that 'EUSA is a feminist'... Natan Misak, a second year Economics student at the University of Edinburgh, originally from Brooklyn, New York, said: "One of the reasons I left the US for university was to escape the 'bro culture' of frats. I wanted to get away from the 'us' versus 'them' mentality that they breed.""
Presumably feminists don't have an 'us' versus 'them' mentality. Maybe because 'misogynists' aren't real people
The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'The End of Poverty': Brother, Can You Spare $195 Billion? - "Sachs's missionary zeal is infectious, but the flaws in ''The End of Poverty'' should sound important notes of caution. There is, for one thing, the matter of Sachs's ego. Anyone who can write that ''as a young faculty member, I lectured widely to high acclaim, published broadly and was on a rapid academic climb to tenure, which I received in 1983 when I was 28'' clearly lacks the gift of understatement. This faith in his own abilities is what allowed him, as a relative newcomer to development economics, to declare that he had found the answer to extreme global poverty where others who had devoted their lives to it have failed. However, longtime experts in the field who read this book may feel a strong sense of déjà vu. They should. Much of Sachs's argument can be summed up in this passage from Walt W. Rostow's book ''The Stages of Economic Growth,'' written in 1960: ''The creation of the preconditions for takeoff was largely a matter of building social overhead capital -- railways, ports and roads -- and of finding an economic setting in which a shift from agriculture and trade to manufacture was profitable.'' Sachs neglects to mention the extent to which the Rostow model dominated discussions of development in the 1950's, 60's and 70's. But in that era, waste and corruption fattened up United Nations agencies and recipient governments while doing very little for the poor. As the development expert William Easterly has observed, Sachs's sales pitch has been made in the past, and the results were meager. Elsewhere, Sachs oversells or contradicts his own arguments. On the question of AIDS prevention, for example, he triumphantly cites a recent article to argue against the hypothesis that Africans engage in more sexual activity outside of marriage than is the case in other cultures. Sachs's assertion, while politically correct, is off the mark. The very article he cites goes on to say that because of ''the much higher number of cumulative sexual acts'' outside of wedlock in countries like Uganda, the likelihood of H.I.V. transmission is much greater in Africa. Furthermore, these sexual practices make quick-fix solutions -- like promoting condom use -- much less effective. Similarly, Sachs dismisses critics who argue that culture is an important factor in explaining poverty even as he concedes that religious and cultural traditions have prevented women from educating themselves, which in turn has slowed development. He acknowledges that governments should not invest in business capital: ''When governments run businesses, they tend to do so for political rather than economic reasons.'' But he fails to consider just how much this dictum applies to everything governments run. His unspoken assumption is that governments as corrupt as Nigeria's or Kenya's would allocate health or education investments in a nonpolitical manner."
Article #27, Copyright, Enjoy Arts & Scientific Development : Youth For Human Rights Video - "Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author."
If copyright is a human right, can we prosecute pirates for violating human rights?
Topic: Meatspin source video. — Tinychan - "The magic happens at 6:14 :D"
'Twice as Many' British Muslims Fighting for ISIS as UK Armed Forces - "There are now more than twice as many British Muslims fighting for Islamic State than there are serving in the British armed forces, according to a British Member of Parliament (MP). Khalid Mahmood, the MP for Perry Barr in Birmingham, estimates that at least 1,500 young British Muslims have been recruited by extremists fighting in Iraq and Syria in the last three years."
Answer to Wealth: Is getting rich worth it? - Quora - "being rich is better than not being rich, but it's not nearly as good as you imagine it is... The next thing you need to understand about money is this: all of the things you picture buying, they are only worthwhile to you because you cannot afford them (or have to work really hard to acquire them). Maybe you have your eye on a new Audi -- once you can easily afford it, it just doesn't mean as much to you anymore. Everything is relative, and you are more or less powerless to that. Yes, the first month you drive the Audi, or eat in a fancy restaurant, you really enjoy it. But then you sort of get used to it. And then you are looking towards the next thing, the next level up. And the problem is that you have reset your expectations, and everything below that level doesn't get you quite as excited anymore... Most people hold the illusion that if only they had more money, their life would be better and they would be happier. Then they get rich, and that doesn't happen, and it can throw them into a serious life crisis. "
▶ The Bob & Tom Show Camel Toe Song (Original version) - YouTube
An Arab View... - "As soon as the sirens went off, many Palestinians took to the streets and rooftops, especially in Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods, to cheer Hamas. Sometimes they responded to the Hamas rockets by launching fireworks into the air as a sign of joy, and chanting, "We are all Hamas!" and, "O Jews, the army of Mohammed is coming after you!" Scenes of jubilation over the rocket attacks on Israel were also reported in several Palestinian cities in the West Bank, including Ramallah, the center of Palestinian "pragmatism and moderation." Later, upon learning that Hamas's rockets had failed to kill Israelis in the two cities, the Palestinians voiced disappointment... The celebrations reflect the strong hostility that many Palestinians continue to feel toward Israel despite 20 years of a peace process, and billions of dollars of Western aid. This hostility is the direct result of years of anti-Israel and anti-Western incitement in the Arab and Islamic world. The hostility is directed not only toward Israel, but also its friends -- above all, the United States. Similar outbursts of joy had erupted in many parts of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem immediately after Palestinians heard of the 9/11 terror attacks in the US. And this was not the first time that Palestinians had expressed joy over the targeting of Israeli cities. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Palestinians and some Arab citizens of Israel took to rooftops to cheer Hizbullah's rocket attacks on northern cities in Israel. During the second intifada, many Palestinians, particularly in the Gaza Strip, used to take to the streets to sing and dance and hand out candies after hearing about another suicide bombing inside Israel. And when Saddam Hussein fired rockets at Israel in the early 1990's, Palestinians also took to the streets and rooftops, chanting, "O beloved Saddam, strike strike at Tel Aviv!"... In today's world of the Palestinians, anyone who talks about peace with Israel is a traitor and a collaborator; but anyone who calls for the destruction of Israel and fires rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a hero."
220 minors caught on cybersoliciting - "The National Police Agency reported Thursday that police gave correctional guidance nationwide to a total of 220 minors younger than 18 who tried to provide sex for money or sell their used underwear online from January to June this year... Since more and more minors are attempting to find men willing to pay for sex through the Internet, the NPA reasoned that sexual crimes against minors could not be prevented using their conventional approach of giving guidance to minors found soliciting in busy commercial areas."
Facebook Removes Developer of Elven Blood from the Platform - Inside Facebook - "There are no confirmed reasons as to why the applications have been taken down. However, other application developers have previously complained about Facebook Platform terms of service breaches, like cross-promotion of applications through notifications. Prior to the application’s removal “Elven Blood” had around 240,000 monthly active users according to AppData"
And... now it's on iOS, with a shitty way to invite friends (and the same requirements to have friends to progress)
Iraq Crisis: Kurds Push to Take Mosul Dam as U.S. Gains Controversial Guerrilla Ally - WSJ - "Syrian commanders say the security and quality of life is improving as their guerrilla forces expand rapidly, propelled by thousands of young volunteers. Recruitment is boosted by the deployment of women soldiers on the front line, often in all-female units. "The jihadists don't like fighting women, because if they're killed by a female, they think they won't go to heaven," said one female fighter."
Scientists explain their processes with a little too much honesty [17 pictures] | 22 Words - "We did not make the corrections suggested by reviewer 1 because we think reviewer 1 is a f***ing idiot #overlyhonestmethods"
Religion and intergroup conflict: findings from the Global Group Relations Project. - "When religion was infused in group life, groups were especially prejudiced against those groups that held incompatible values, and they were likely to discriminate against such groups. Moreover, whereas disadvantaged groups with low levels of religious infusion typically avoided directing aggression against their resource-rich and powerful counterparts, disadvantaged groups with high levels of religious infusion directed significant aggression against them-despite the significant tangible costs to the disadvantaged groups potentially posed by enacting such aggression. This research suggests mechanisms through which religion may increase intergroup conflict and introduces an innovative method for performing nuanced, cross-societal research. "
This is a good counter to those who claim that ostensibly religious conflicts have nothing to do with religion, and that religion doesn't make people do bad things
The science behind Isis savagery - "Revenge, which is a strong value in Arab culture, may play a part in perpetuating the savagery. Of course vengeful retaliation for savagery begets more savagery in a never-ending cycle. But more, while revenge is a powerful motivator, it is also a deceiver, because the evidence is that taking revenge on someone, far from quelling the distress and anger which drives it, actually perpetuates and magnifies it"
Coca Cola's Dasani Bottled Water has Lethal Drug: Facts - "It is a fact that potassium chloride is used as a lethal drug, in some cardiac surgery procedures that cannot be carried out on the beating heart. In such cases, the surgical team will bypass the heart with a heart-lung machine and inject potassium chloride into the heart muscle to stop the heartbeat. However, the amount of potassium chloride used is the key here. As mentioned in an article on OpEdNews.com that raises these concerns, for potassium chloride to be toxic, a person has to consume more than 2500 mg/kg (of his weight) of KCl, which is an extremely large amount. The amount of KCl, which is less than 5 mg in each Dasani bottled water, is negligible according to FDA standards. Responding to these concerns, a representative from Coca-Cola stated that potassium chloride is added to their Dasani bottled water "because consumers prefer it.""
Students outraged as Yale fraternity suspended for 'no means yes' chants establishes chapter at Edinburgh - "The Edinburgh University Students' Association (EUSA) has developed a reputation this academic year for having a zero-tolerance attitude towards misogyny, and 'lad culture'. In September 2013, it became the first students' union in the country to ban the controversial anthem 'Blurred Lines', while in December, it passed a motion declaring that 'EUSA is a feminist'... Natan Misak, a second year Economics student at the University of Edinburgh, originally from Brooklyn, New York, said: "One of the reasons I left the US for university was to escape the 'bro culture' of frats. I wanted to get away from the 'us' versus 'them' mentality that they breed.""
Presumably feminists don't have an 'us' versus 'them' mentality. Maybe because 'misogynists' aren't real people
The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'The End of Poverty': Brother, Can You Spare $195 Billion? - "Sachs's missionary zeal is infectious, but the flaws in ''The End of Poverty'' should sound important notes of caution. There is, for one thing, the matter of Sachs's ego. Anyone who can write that ''as a young faculty member, I lectured widely to high acclaim, published broadly and was on a rapid academic climb to tenure, which I received in 1983 when I was 28'' clearly lacks the gift of understatement. This faith in his own abilities is what allowed him, as a relative newcomer to development economics, to declare that he had found the answer to extreme global poverty where others who had devoted their lives to it have failed. However, longtime experts in the field who read this book may feel a strong sense of déjà vu. They should. Much of Sachs's argument can be summed up in this passage from Walt W. Rostow's book ''The Stages of Economic Growth,'' written in 1960: ''The creation of the preconditions for takeoff was largely a matter of building social overhead capital -- railways, ports and roads -- and of finding an economic setting in which a shift from agriculture and trade to manufacture was profitable.'' Sachs neglects to mention the extent to which the Rostow model dominated discussions of development in the 1950's, 60's and 70's. But in that era, waste and corruption fattened up United Nations agencies and recipient governments while doing very little for the poor. As the development expert William Easterly has observed, Sachs's sales pitch has been made in the past, and the results were meager. Elsewhere, Sachs oversells or contradicts his own arguments. On the question of AIDS prevention, for example, he triumphantly cites a recent article to argue against the hypothesis that Africans engage in more sexual activity outside of marriage than is the case in other cultures. Sachs's assertion, while politically correct, is off the mark. The very article he cites goes on to say that because of ''the much higher number of cumulative sexual acts'' outside of wedlock in countries like Uganda, the likelihood of H.I.V. transmission is much greater in Africa. Furthermore, these sexual practices make quick-fix solutions -- like promoting condom use -- much less effective. Similarly, Sachs dismisses critics who argue that culture is an important factor in explaining poverty even as he concedes that religious and cultural traditions have prevented women from educating themselves, which in turn has slowed development. He acknowledges that governments should not invest in business capital: ''When governments run businesses, they tend to do so for political rather than economic reasons.'' But he fails to consider just how much this dictum applies to everything governments run. His unspoken assumption is that governments as corrupt as Nigeria's or Kenya's would allocate health or education investments in a nonpolitical manner."
Article #27, Copyright, Enjoy Arts & Scientific Development : Youth For Human Rights Video - "Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author."
If copyright is a human right, can we prosecute pirates for violating human rights?
Topic: Meatspin source video. — Tinychan - "The magic happens at 6:14 :D"
'Twice as Many' British Muslims Fighting for ISIS as UK Armed Forces - "There are now more than twice as many British Muslims fighting for Islamic State than there are serving in the British armed forces, according to a British Member of Parliament (MP). Khalid Mahmood, the MP for Perry Barr in Birmingham, estimates that at least 1,500 young British Muslims have been recruited by extremists fighting in Iraq and Syria in the last three years."
Answer to Wealth: Is getting rich worth it? - Quora - "being rich is better than not being rich, but it's not nearly as good as you imagine it is... The next thing you need to understand about money is this: all of the things you picture buying, they are only worthwhile to you because you cannot afford them (or have to work really hard to acquire them). Maybe you have your eye on a new Audi -- once you can easily afford it, it just doesn't mean as much to you anymore. Everything is relative, and you are more or less powerless to that. Yes, the first month you drive the Audi, or eat in a fancy restaurant, you really enjoy it. But then you sort of get used to it. And then you are looking towards the next thing, the next level up. And the problem is that you have reset your expectations, and everything below that level doesn't get you quite as excited anymore... Most people hold the illusion that if only they had more money, their life would be better and they would be happier. Then they get rich, and that doesn't happen, and it can throw them into a serious life crisis. "
▶ The Bob & Tom Show Camel Toe Song (Original version) - YouTube
An Arab View... - "As soon as the sirens went off, many Palestinians took to the streets and rooftops, especially in Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods, to cheer Hamas. Sometimes they responded to the Hamas rockets by launching fireworks into the air as a sign of joy, and chanting, "We are all Hamas!" and, "O Jews, the army of Mohammed is coming after you!" Scenes of jubilation over the rocket attacks on Israel were also reported in several Palestinian cities in the West Bank, including Ramallah, the center of Palestinian "pragmatism and moderation." Later, upon learning that Hamas's rockets had failed to kill Israelis in the two cities, the Palestinians voiced disappointment... The celebrations reflect the strong hostility that many Palestinians continue to feel toward Israel despite 20 years of a peace process, and billions of dollars of Western aid. This hostility is the direct result of years of anti-Israel and anti-Western incitement in the Arab and Islamic world. The hostility is directed not only toward Israel, but also its friends -- above all, the United States. Similar outbursts of joy had erupted in many parts of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem immediately after Palestinians heard of the 9/11 terror attacks in the US. And this was not the first time that Palestinians had expressed joy over the targeting of Israeli cities. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Palestinians and some Arab citizens of Israel took to rooftops to cheer Hizbullah's rocket attacks on northern cities in Israel. During the second intifada, many Palestinians, particularly in the Gaza Strip, used to take to the streets to sing and dance and hand out candies after hearing about another suicide bombing inside Israel. And when Saddam Hussein fired rockets at Israel in the early 1990's, Palestinians also took to the streets and rooftops, chanting, "O beloved Saddam, strike strike at Tel Aviv!"... In today's world of the Palestinians, anyone who talks about peace with Israel is a traitor and a collaborator; but anyone who calls for the destruction of Israel and fires rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a hero."
220 minors caught on cybersoliciting - "The National Police Agency reported Thursday that police gave correctional guidance nationwide to a total of 220 minors younger than 18 who tried to provide sex for money or sell their used underwear online from January to June this year... Since more and more minors are attempting to find men willing to pay for sex through the Internet, the NPA reasoned that sexual crimes against minors could not be prevented using their conventional approach of giving guidance to minors found soliciting in busy commercial areas."
Facebook Removes Developer of Elven Blood from the Platform - Inside Facebook - "There are no confirmed reasons as to why the applications have been taken down. However, other application developers have previously complained about Facebook Platform terms of service breaches, like cross-promotion of applications through notifications. Prior to the application’s removal “Elven Blood” had around 240,000 monthly active users according to AppData"
And... now it's on iOS, with a shitty way to invite friends (and the same requirements to have friends to progress)
Iraq Crisis: Kurds Push to Take Mosul Dam as U.S. Gains Controversial Guerrilla Ally - WSJ - "Syrian commanders say the security and quality of life is improving as their guerrilla forces expand rapidly, propelled by thousands of young volunteers. Recruitment is boosted by the deployment of women soldiers on the front line, often in all-female units. "The jihadists don't like fighting women, because if they're killed by a female, they think they won't go to heaven," said one female fighter."
Scientists explain their processes with a little too much honesty [17 pictures] | 22 Words - "We did not make the corrections suggested by reviewer 1 because we think reviewer 1 is a f***ing idiot #overlyhonestmethods"
Religion and intergroup conflict: findings from the Global Group Relations Project. - "When religion was infused in group life, groups were especially prejudiced against those groups that held incompatible values, and they were likely to discriminate against such groups. Moreover, whereas disadvantaged groups with low levels of religious infusion typically avoided directing aggression against their resource-rich and powerful counterparts, disadvantaged groups with high levels of religious infusion directed significant aggression against them-despite the significant tangible costs to the disadvantaged groups potentially posed by enacting such aggression. This research suggests mechanisms through which religion may increase intergroup conflict and introduces an innovative method for performing nuanced, cross-societal research. "
This is a good counter to those who claim that ostensibly religious conflicts have nothing to do with religion, and that religion doesn't make people do bad things
The science behind Isis savagery - "Revenge, which is a strong value in Arab culture, may play a part in perpetuating the savagery. Of course vengeful retaliation for savagery begets more savagery in a never-ending cycle. But more, while revenge is a powerful motivator, it is also a deceiver, because the evidence is that taking revenge on someone, far from quelling the distress and anger which drives it, actually perpetuates and magnifies it"
Post ID: 3625790689586154567
"There is no better way to learn than to talk to someone who disagrees with you"
Robert Reich:
"I have a conservative friend with whom I make a point to have lunch at least once a month. Why? I like him but that’s not the main reason. He makes me think. In forcing me defend my assumptions and ideas, he gets me to examine them more deeply. I hope I do the same for him. One of the biggest problems in America today is most of us live in ideological cocoons surrounded by people who think like us. Yet there is no better way to learn than to talk to someone who disagrees with you."
"I have a conservative friend with whom I make a point to have lunch at least once a month. Why? I like him but that’s not the main reason. He makes me think. In forcing me defend my assumptions and ideas, he gets me to examine them more deeply. I hope I do the same for him. One of the biggest problems in America today is most of us live in ideological cocoons surrounded by people who think like us. Yet there is no better way to learn than to talk to someone who disagrees with you."
Post ID: 4763491469844216794
Friday, September 05, 2014
10 Book Challenge
Someone nominated me for this 10 book challenge.
In your status, list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don't take more than a few minutes and don't think too hard. They don't have to be the "right" books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way.
So right off the top of my head. Here's my list:
1) The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter
2) Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, David Buss
3) Huis Clos (aka No Exit), Jean-Paul Sartre
4) Dictatorship of virtue : how the battle over multiculturalism is reshaping our schools, our country, and our lives, Richard Bernstein
5) Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin
6) The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud
7) The Japanese Disease: Sex and Sleaze in Modern Japan, Declan Hayes
8) Sex in History, Reay Tannahill
9) Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, Thomas Sowell
10) Daughter of the Empire, Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts
I nominate: no one.
I've nominated no one because you've probably been tagged already, and there's too much meme shit around already.
In your status, list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don't take more than a few minutes and don't think too hard. They don't have to be the "right" books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way.
So right off the top of my head. Here's my list:
1) The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter
2) Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, David Buss
3) Huis Clos (aka No Exit), Jean-Paul Sartre
4) Dictatorship of virtue : how the battle over multiculturalism is reshaping our schools, our country, and our lives, Richard Bernstein
5) Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin
6) The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud
7) The Japanese Disease: Sex and Sleaze in Modern Japan, Declan Hayes
8) Sex in History, Reay Tannahill
9) Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, Thomas Sowell
10) Daughter of the Empire, Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts
I nominate: no one.
I've nominated no one because you've probably been tagged already, and there's too much meme shit around already.
Post ID: 8737208756074092027
Links - 5th September 2014
Nate Doromal's answer to Why would the IDF arrest Palestinian teens playing soccer? - Quora - "A story was told to me by a IDF soldier. He was in a tank and taking small arms fire from a window. He looked at the window and saw a 10 year old boy. Under the boy's shoulder there was a rifle sticking out. There was a man using the boy as a human shield. He wondered if he should take the shot or not from the tank turret gun. The risk was that if the man pulled out a rocket launcher then certainly he and his team would all die. In the end, he decided not to take the shot. Luckily nothing else happened. He had another friend in a similar situation where the aggressor had a rocket launcher and his friend perished in that situation."
Why do human beings keep fighting wars? - "The early American psychologist William James once suggested that war is so prevalent because of its positive psychological effects. It creates a sense of unity in the face of a collective threat. It binds people together – not just the army engaged in battle, but the whole community. It brings a sense of cohesion, with communal goals, and inspires individual citizens (not just soldiers) to behave honourably and unselfishly, in the service of a greater good. It supplies meaning and purpose, transcending the monotony of everyday life. Warfare also enables the expression of higher human qualities that often lie dormant in ordinary life, such as courage and self-sacrifice. This seems tantamount to suggesting that human beings fight wars because we enjoy doing so"
Last of the burrnesha: Balkan women who pledged celibacy to live as men
Please don’t tell me what I should think about Israel - "we turn to Britain, where I now live, and where, as Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times recently, “not having a negative opinion of Israel is tantamount to not having a conscience”... a film festival being cancelled is not on a par with civilian deaths. But it says something very telling about certain lazily left-ish attitudes towards Israel in this country, not least because the Tricycle is not the only theatre in Britain to cancel a Jewish event: a theatre company from Jerusalem was forced not to perform in Edinburgh after protests, and a show featuring dancers from Ben Gurion University is also being targeted. Meanwhile, the London Palestine Action group protests outside factories in this country that allegedly manufacture weapons for drones for Israel. At least that protest is logical, unlike those who congratulate themselves for shutting down Jewish cultural events. Things have come to a pretty pass when a liberal American Jew finds clearer thinking among a Palestinian liberation group than those who run theatres a few miles from her home."
Global epidemiology of HIV among female sex workers: influence of structural determinants - "Decriminalisation of sex work would have the greatest effect on the course of HIV epidemics across all settings, averting 33—46% of HIV infections in the next decade"
Legalized prostitution: There’s no way to end demand for sex work. So why are Sweden and Canada trying? - "Legalizing prostitution appears to be somewhat more popular in Canada than in the United States. An Angus Reid survey conducted in June found that Canadians were split 45–45 on whether buying sex should be legal. But the gender gap on legalization was yawning: Fifty-six percent of men believe that buying sex should be legal, while 55 percent of women believe that it should not be. Canada’s Conservatives attract far less support from women than men, and embracing the Swedish model seems like a shrewd way to shore up female support for the party by uniting feminists and social conservatives. What should worry Canadians is that the fundamental premise of the Swedish model—that it is possible to “end demand”—is profoundly flawed... One imagines that many of the men who purchase sexual services find themselves unable to experience physical intimacy via other means, in which case it is cruel to assume that their motives are necessarily predatory. And then there are men who are wary of investing every sexual encounter with emotional significance, and who appreciate the transactional nature of sex work. It’s not entirely clear that it is preferable for these men to manipulate their way into getting the casual sex they crave rather than have them pay for it... If legalizing sex work really does decrease the rate of sexual assault and the spread of venereal disease, as the latest evidence strongly suggests, we need to have a much better reason for banning it than the fact that we hold prostitutes and johns in such low esteem."
Valar Morghulis: A Statistical Guide To Deaths In Game Of Thrones - ""Hold up," you say. "You're meaning to tell me that the infant mortality rate in Game of Thrones is lower than Afghanistan's?" Well, I guess, but George R.R. Martin is not about to name every two-year-old struck with pneumonia at King's Landing."
Swedish man arrested for being too buff - "Police in Malmö arrested a man after approaching him because his muscular physique led them to suspect steroid use"
Using Twitter, Linguists Find Global ‘Superdialects’ - "a Spanish speaker from urban Madrid, for instance, sounds more like someone from urban Miami than someone from rural Andalucía. Cities, the researchers found, naturally exert a “linguistic centripetal force that favors dialect unification.” In plain English, people living in densely-populated urban environments begin to sound more and more like one another, and more and more like those living in other densely-populated urban environments across the globe. The ubiquity of Twitter and other tools for mass communication have helped the process along."
I Went to a Blowjob Bar in Bangkok, Thailand - "Bangkok, Thailand, is one of the world's deepest pits of pure sin, a forbidden zone where you can get pretty much whatever sexual perversion tickles your pickle presented to you on a silver platter, with drugs and booze on the side. Countless massage parlors, brothels, and call services exist to cater to the humongous sex-tourism industry. So how does an aspiring entrepreneur, uh... stick out in such a super-saturated marketplace? Well, the first step is to take a cue from branding experts: Be as obvious and memorable as possible. That's the thinking behind Dr. BJ’s Salon, the most notorious suck bar in Bangkok... “I think the name conveys what we do pretty well," he told me recently when I visited the salon. "It’s easy to remember, and the logo is easy to spot. When I got involved in the sex industry, I couldn’t understand why no one made an effort to stand out. How could they not take note of the real experts in retail? We looked at what McDonald’s and KFC did. In every location, you see Ronald and the Colonel, right? We wanted to do that too. Dr. BJ is the Ronald McDonald of the sex industry"... "It’s sleazy to be like, I got a blowjob from a whore, but it’s interesting to be like, I went to a place called Dr. BJ's and got blown by a fake nurse.”"
User talk:Groyn88 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This has the most warnings I've ever seen on Wikipedia
Letters of last resort - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "According to Peter Hennessy's book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, 1945 to 1970, the process by which a Trident submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes, amongst other checks, establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting"
Understanding Genetics: Hair Color - "You are right in saying that almost always, two redheads will have kids with red hair (click here to learn why). But as your family shows, this doesn't mean that all of the kids will have the same shade of red. They can have strawberry blonde, almost orange, auburn and mixtures of all three. What do all these hair colors have in common? A pigment called pheomelanin. Our bodies make at least two different pigments, eumelanin and pheomelanin. It is the amount of each of these that determines hair color."
"Honor Killings" of Muslim Males in the West - "Islamic honor killings normally target the women-folk, bearers of the family honor ('ird), not the men involved with them. But in some cases, to be documented here, men kill or maim other men for reasons related to family "honor.""
Top public transport system a necessity, not a luxury - "Singapore has the highest car ownership costs in the world. The rationale for this - to keep roads uncongested - is a good one. However, the trade-off is that many people will not be able to own cars. In contrast, cars are an achievable aspiration for most people in many other countries. The sacrifice of the majority in Singapore, so that a minority can enjoy uncongested roads to drive on, must not be trivialised. It also means that public transport here cannot be just a "next-best", utilitarian form of transport. On the contrary, it must not only be comfortable but also be superlative. It is absurd to contend that comfort is a choice that one pays for, when more comfortable options such as cars have been priced beyond the reach of most people; it is also coldly out of touch to think that ordinary people have the choice to pay for better transport... It is the attitude of policymakers that has to change, and not that of commuters."
Man jumps to his death in a mall after meeting his virtual girlfriend of six years for the first time - "Gonzales asked the woman: “Is that really you? How can that girl be you? You have dark skin. You fooled me for six years!” Gonzales first met the woman through social media. They carried on a virtual relationship for six years. When the two finally met in person, Gonzales was disappointed with the woman he saw standing in front of him. Gonzales reportedly had a hard time facing the fact that the woman looked different in person than on the photos she posted. The woman used Instagram filters to enhance her looks before posting her photos to the Internet."
Thai Military Looks to Boost Nation's Spirits - WSJ - "The centers would organize rural equivalents of a series of street parties in Bangkok, such as one Wednesday night in an area previously used as a rally site for antigovernment protesters and featured female dancers dressed in revealing army fatigues as one of its attractions... Wassana Aiemjaroon, a 42-year-old street cleaner who attended Wednesday's street party, said she was happy to see people enjoying themselves. "I'd been very stressed by the political tension for years and felt insecure with the situation. Now I'm happier and I can laugh," she said."
Classroom Decorations Can Distract Young Students - "Researchers observed five-year-olds in highly decorated classrooms and in classrooms that were relatively bare. And the kids were less able to hold their focus, spent more time off-task and had smaller learning gains in the busy rooms than in the bare rooms."
The politics of penetration from a lesbian perspective - "When I bought my very first “strap-on” (67 dollars and difficult to use), I told my gay male friend about it, thinking he wouldn’t impose any of his moral beliefs or principles on me. But instead of sparking an awkward conversation, it became a debate. He assumed that since I was gay, I must be a feminist, too. I think my response went something like, “Umm, no amigo! It doesn’t work that way. Who the hell told you I am a feminist? And stop using the word lesbian.” His argument was that since lesbians reject the penis, they must be feminists, and therefore the simple act of buying and using the “strap-on” only gave him “supportive evidence” to question my sexual identity and think of my “lesbian sex” as “bisexual sex.”
Why do human beings keep fighting wars? - "The early American psychologist William James once suggested that war is so prevalent because of its positive psychological effects. It creates a sense of unity in the face of a collective threat. It binds people together – not just the army engaged in battle, but the whole community. It brings a sense of cohesion, with communal goals, and inspires individual citizens (not just soldiers) to behave honourably and unselfishly, in the service of a greater good. It supplies meaning and purpose, transcending the monotony of everyday life. Warfare also enables the expression of higher human qualities that often lie dormant in ordinary life, such as courage and self-sacrifice. This seems tantamount to suggesting that human beings fight wars because we enjoy doing so"
Last of the burrnesha: Balkan women who pledged celibacy to live as men
Please don’t tell me what I should think about Israel - "we turn to Britain, where I now live, and where, as Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times recently, “not having a negative opinion of Israel is tantamount to not having a conscience”... a film festival being cancelled is not on a par with civilian deaths. But it says something very telling about certain lazily left-ish attitudes towards Israel in this country, not least because the Tricycle is not the only theatre in Britain to cancel a Jewish event: a theatre company from Jerusalem was forced not to perform in Edinburgh after protests, and a show featuring dancers from Ben Gurion University is also being targeted. Meanwhile, the London Palestine Action group protests outside factories in this country that allegedly manufacture weapons for drones for Israel. At least that protest is logical, unlike those who congratulate themselves for shutting down Jewish cultural events. Things have come to a pretty pass when a liberal American Jew finds clearer thinking among a Palestinian liberation group than those who run theatres a few miles from her home."
Global epidemiology of HIV among female sex workers: influence of structural determinants - "Decriminalisation of sex work would have the greatest effect on the course of HIV epidemics across all settings, averting 33—46% of HIV infections in the next decade"
Legalized prostitution: There’s no way to end demand for sex work. So why are Sweden and Canada trying? - "Legalizing prostitution appears to be somewhat more popular in Canada than in the United States. An Angus Reid survey conducted in June found that Canadians were split 45–45 on whether buying sex should be legal. But the gender gap on legalization was yawning: Fifty-six percent of men believe that buying sex should be legal, while 55 percent of women believe that it should not be. Canada’s Conservatives attract far less support from women than men, and embracing the Swedish model seems like a shrewd way to shore up female support for the party by uniting feminists and social conservatives. What should worry Canadians is that the fundamental premise of the Swedish model—that it is possible to “end demand”—is profoundly flawed... One imagines that many of the men who purchase sexual services find themselves unable to experience physical intimacy via other means, in which case it is cruel to assume that their motives are necessarily predatory. And then there are men who are wary of investing every sexual encounter with emotional significance, and who appreciate the transactional nature of sex work. It’s not entirely clear that it is preferable for these men to manipulate their way into getting the casual sex they crave rather than have them pay for it... If legalizing sex work really does decrease the rate of sexual assault and the spread of venereal disease, as the latest evidence strongly suggests, we need to have a much better reason for banning it than the fact that we hold prostitutes and johns in such low esteem."
Valar Morghulis: A Statistical Guide To Deaths In Game Of Thrones - ""Hold up," you say. "You're meaning to tell me that the infant mortality rate in Game of Thrones is lower than Afghanistan's?" Well, I guess, but George R.R. Martin is not about to name every two-year-old struck with pneumonia at King's Landing."
Swedish man arrested for being too buff - "Police in Malmö arrested a man after approaching him because his muscular physique led them to suspect steroid use"
Using Twitter, Linguists Find Global ‘Superdialects’ - "a Spanish speaker from urban Madrid, for instance, sounds more like someone from urban Miami than someone from rural Andalucía. Cities, the researchers found, naturally exert a “linguistic centripetal force that favors dialect unification.” In plain English, people living in densely-populated urban environments begin to sound more and more like one another, and more and more like those living in other densely-populated urban environments across the globe. The ubiquity of Twitter and other tools for mass communication have helped the process along."
I Went to a Blowjob Bar in Bangkok, Thailand - "Bangkok, Thailand, is one of the world's deepest pits of pure sin, a forbidden zone where you can get pretty much whatever sexual perversion tickles your pickle presented to you on a silver platter, with drugs and booze on the side. Countless massage parlors, brothels, and call services exist to cater to the humongous sex-tourism industry. So how does an aspiring entrepreneur, uh... stick out in such a super-saturated marketplace? Well, the first step is to take a cue from branding experts: Be as obvious and memorable as possible. That's the thinking behind Dr. BJ’s Salon, the most notorious suck bar in Bangkok... “I think the name conveys what we do pretty well," he told me recently when I visited the salon. "It’s easy to remember, and the logo is easy to spot. When I got involved in the sex industry, I couldn’t understand why no one made an effort to stand out. How could they not take note of the real experts in retail? We looked at what McDonald’s and KFC did. In every location, you see Ronald and the Colonel, right? We wanted to do that too. Dr. BJ is the Ronald McDonald of the sex industry"... "It’s sleazy to be like, I got a blowjob from a whore, but it’s interesting to be like, I went to a place called Dr. BJ's and got blown by a fake nurse.”"
User talk:Groyn88 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This has the most warnings I've ever seen on Wikipedia
Letters of last resort - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "According to Peter Hennessy's book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, 1945 to 1970, the process by which a Trident submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes, amongst other checks, establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting"
Understanding Genetics: Hair Color - "You are right in saying that almost always, two redheads will have kids with red hair (click here to learn why). But as your family shows, this doesn't mean that all of the kids will have the same shade of red. They can have strawberry blonde, almost orange, auburn and mixtures of all three. What do all these hair colors have in common? A pigment called pheomelanin. Our bodies make at least two different pigments, eumelanin and pheomelanin. It is the amount of each of these that determines hair color."
"Honor Killings" of Muslim Males in the West - "Islamic honor killings normally target the women-folk, bearers of the family honor ('ird), not the men involved with them. But in some cases, to be documented here, men kill or maim other men for reasons related to family "honor.""
Top public transport system a necessity, not a luxury - "Singapore has the highest car ownership costs in the world. The rationale for this - to keep roads uncongested - is a good one. However, the trade-off is that many people will not be able to own cars. In contrast, cars are an achievable aspiration for most people in many other countries. The sacrifice of the majority in Singapore, so that a minority can enjoy uncongested roads to drive on, must not be trivialised. It also means that public transport here cannot be just a "next-best", utilitarian form of transport. On the contrary, it must not only be comfortable but also be superlative. It is absurd to contend that comfort is a choice that one pays for, when more comfortable options such as cars have been priced beyond the reach of most people; it is also coldly out of touch to think that ordinary people have the choice to pay for better transport... It is the attitude of policymakers that has to change, and not that of commuters."
Man jumps to his death in a mall after meeting his virtual girlfriend of six years for the first time - "Gonzales asked the woman: “Is that really you? How can that girl be you? You have dark skin. You fooled me for six years!” Gonzales first met the woman through social media. They carried on a virtual relationship for six years. When the two finally met in person, Gonzales was disappointed with the woman he saw standing in front of him. Gonzales reportedly had a hard time facing the fact that the woman looked different in person than on the photos she posted. The woman used Instagram filters to enhance her looks before posting her photos to the Internet."
Thai Military Looks to Boost Nation's Spirits - WSJ - "The centers would organize rural equivalents of a series of street parties in Bangkok, such as one Wednesday night in an area previously used as a rally site for antigovernment protesters and featured female dancers dressed in revealing army fatigues as one of its attractions... Wassana Aiemjaroon, a 42-year-old street cleaner who attended Wednesday's street party, said she was happy to see people enjoying themselves. "I'd been very stressed by the political tension for years and felt insecure with the situation. Now I'm happier and I can laugh," she said."
Classroom Decorations Can Distract Young Students - "Researchers observed five-year-olds in highly decorated classrooms and in classrooms that were relatively bare. And the kids were less able to hold their focus, spent more time off-task and had smaller learning gains in the busy rooms than in the bare rooms."
The politics of penetration from a lesbian perspective - "When I bought my very first “strap-on” (67 dollars and difficult to use), I told my gay male friend about it, thinking he wouldn’t impose any of his moral beliefs or principles on me. But instead of sparking an awkward conversation, it became a debate. He assumed that since I was gay, I must be a feminist, too. I think my response went something like, “Umm, no amigo! It doesn’t work that way. Who the hell told you I am a feminist? And stop using the word lesbian.” His argument was that since lesbians reject the penis, they must be feminists, and therefore the simple act of buying and using the “strap-on” only gave him “supportive evidence” to question my sexual identity and think of my “lesbian sex” as “bisexual sex.”
Post ID: 7753924357867553968
Wednesday, September 03, 2014
Rotherham: what happens when you don't want to be "racist"
BBC Radio 4 - Today, 29/08/2014, Abusers 'targeted care homes' in Rotherham
"Rotherham was most dangerous at night for the hundreds of children who were sexually abused here. Taxis roamed the streets transporting girls around the town, or sometimes further afield.
Among the many astonishing facts revealed this week was that the criminal gangs actively targeted children's homes.
A former care worker who spent four years from 2003 working in homes in Rotherham has told this program how the girls were abused...
Attempts to stop the abuse came to nothing.
One white taxi driver was banned from transporting the girls on suspicion of being a pedophile, but the former care worker says no action was ever taken against drivers of Pakistani descent, who were the main abusers.
He eventually left the care sector, feeling unable to care."
Rotherham sex abuse scandal: we cannot ignore that race played a part in these crimes
"The vast majority of the Rotherham victims were also racially abused.
Ever since the first reports, and subsequent convictions, of so called “Asian grooming gangs” began to appear, a debate has opened up about how to confront the racial element of these crimes. It was inappropriate, many people argued, to explicitly describe them as “Asian” or “Muslim” gangs at all. Others said to even touch on the race of the perpetrators, or the victims, was to itself pander to racism. When I first heard the reports, I sympathised with this argument.
I was wrong. There is no longer any debate about what happened in Rotherham. A major British town was turned into a rape camp. The overwhelming majority of the abusers were Asian men, primarily of Pakistani descent. And their victims were overwhelmingly white girls...
In the section that deals specifically with what Jay euphemistically calls “issues of ethnicity”, the report tortuously expands on this. It says, accurately, “there is no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation, and across the UK the greatest numbers of perpetrators of CSE are white men”. But it then goes on to demonstrate that in Rotherham there was indeed a clear link between race and abuse...
This is despite the fact that, as Jay underlines, the perpetrators of crimes of this nature normally select victims of the same ethnic origin. In Rotherham the opposite occurred. Pakistani men targeted white girls so that they could rape them.
But race did not just provide a motivational element in these horrific crimes. It was also a major contributing factor in the perpetrators' ability to get away with their abuse on such a scale for such a long period of time.
The evidence is again damning. As Jay recounts, the abuse was organised in such a way that “it offered career and financial opportunities to young Asian men who got involved”. Yet time and again the racial element of their crimes directly or indirectly obstructed efforts to prevent them.
Local councillors admitted they “believed that by opening up these issues they could be 'giving oxygen' to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion”. Local youngsters confirmed to the Jay inquiry what had been reported to a previous inquiry, namely that ”young people in Rotherham believed at that time that the Police dared not act against Asian youths for fear of allegations of racism”. Several people interviewed by Jay “expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police”. Jay herself states that “messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to 'downplay' the ethnic dimensions of child sex exploitation”. Although the report claims not to have found evidence of direct influence on individual cases, it then adds “Unsurprisingly, front line staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as 'racist'”...
Imagine if it came to light that in another region of the country, organised gangs of white men had been systematically engaging in the rape and abuse of black children. The local white community knew about it, but shielded the crimes behind a wall of silence. Officers in the local authority were aware of it, but were told by their political masters to keep quiet about the racial element of the crime for fear of offending their local constituency. Police officers who attempted to investigate where specifically warned by their superiors to ignore any racial aspect to the offences.
There would be a national outcry. The racism inherent in those crimes would not be pushed to the margins, but to the forefront of our enraged response. There would be a full public inquiry, along the lines of Lawrence. And that reaction would be wholly appropriate.
We cannot just ignore racism because it doesn’t fit a neat binary perception of the victim being black and the perpetrator being white. When a Pakistani man calls a white child a “white bitch” because she tries to stop him raping her, that isn’t just horrific sexual abuse, it’s also horrific racial abuse.
Those who tried to cover up the racial aspect of these crimes did so because they feared giving “oxygen” to racists. But what kind of perversion is that? You counter racism by covering up racism?
Rotherham: In the face of such evil, who is the racist now?
"If South Yorkshire Police can mount a raid on Sir Cliff Richard’s home in pursuit of evidence linked to a single allegation of child sex abuse 30 years ago, why were South Yorkshire Police incapable of pursuing multiple allegations against multiple men who raped 1,400 children over 16 years?...
Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham from 1994 to 2012, actually admitted to the BBC’s World At One that “there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that. Perhaps, yes, as a true Guardian reader and liberal Leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard”...
Equally horrifying is the suggestion that certain Pakistani councillors asked social workers to reveal the addresses of the shelters where some of the abused girls were hiding. The former deputy leader of the council, Jahangir Akhtar, is accused of “ignoring a politically inconvenient truth” by insisting there was not a deep-rooted problem of Pakistani-heritage perpetrators targeting young white girls. The inquiry was told that influential Pakistani councillors acted as “barriers to communication” on grooming issues.
Front-line youth workers who submitted reports in 2002, 2003 and 2006 expressing their alarm at the scale of the child sex-offending say the town hall told them to keep quiet about the ethnicity of the perpetrators in the interests of “community cohesion”.
Fear of appearing racist trumped fears of more children being abused. Not only were negligent officials not prosecuted, they prospered. Shaun Wright, a former Labour councillor who was in charge of Rotherham children’s services during a five-year period when a blind eye was turned to the worst case of mass child abuse in British history, is now South Yorkshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner...
Powerless white working-class girls were caught between a hateful, imported culture of vicious misogyny on the one hand, and on the other a culture of chauvinism among the police, who regarded them as worthless slags. Officials trained up in diversity and political correctness failed to acknowledge what was effectively white slavery on their doorstep. Much too embarrassing to concede that it wasn’t white people who were committing racist hate crimes in this instance...
The fear of appearing racist was more pressing in official minds than enforcing the law of the land or rescuing terrified children. It is one of the great scandals of our lifetime."
Addendum:
"One 11-year-old known as Child H told police that she and another girl had been sexually assaulted by grown men. Nothing was done. When she was 12, Child H was found in the back of a taxi with a man who had indecent pictures of her on his phone. Despite the full co-operation of her father, who insisted his daughter was being abused, police failed to act. Four months later, Child H was found in a house alone with a group of Pakistani men. What did the police do? They arrested the child for being drunk and disorderly and ignored her abusers...
The Labour Party, in particular, is mired in shame over “cultural sensitivity” in Rotherham. Especially, cynics might point out, a sensitivity to the culture of Muslims whose votes they don’t want to lose...
A recent poll showed that 44 per cent of young Britons believe that Muslims do not share the same values as the rest of the population, while 28 per cent said they felt Britain would be “better off” with fewer Muslims"
One liberal response is to frame this as a class issue and claim this is no different from how child sexual abuse of working class children has always been treated. But there don't seem to be historical statistics backing up this claim (or maybe magnitude doesn't matter - as long as it's happened in the past it's not different right now even if the scale is much bigger)
"Rotherham was most dangerous at night for the hundreds of children who were sexually abused here. Taxis roamed the streets transporting girls around the town, or sometimes further afield.
Among the many astonishing facts revealed this week was that the criminal gangs actively targeted children's homes.
A former care worker who spent four years from 2003 working in homes in Rotherham has told this program how the girls were abused...
Attempts to stop the abuse came to nothing.
One white taxi driver was banned from transporting the girls on suspicion of being a pedophile, but the former care worker says no action was ever taken against drivers of Pakistani descent, who were the main abusers.
He eventually left the care sector, feeling unable to care."
Rotherham sex abuse scandal: we cannot ignore that race played a part in these crimes
"The vast majority of the Rotherham victims were also racially abused.
Ever since the first reports, and subsequent convictions, of so called “Asian grooming gangs” began to appear, a debate has opened up about how to confront the racial element of these crimes. It was inappropriate, many people argued, to explicitly describe them as “Asian” or “Muslim” gangs at all. Others said to even touch on the race of the perpetrators, or the victims, was to itself pander to racism. When I first heard the reports, I sympathised with this argument.
I was wrong. There is no longer any debate about what happened in Rotherham. A major British town was turned into a rape camp. The overwhelming majority of the abusers were Asian men, primarily of Pakistani descent. And their victims were overwhelmingly white girls...
In the section that deals specifically with what Jay euphemistically calls “issues of ethnicity”, the report tortuously expands on this. It says, accurately, “there is no simple link between race and child sexual exploitation, and across the UK the greatest numbers of perpetrators of CSE are white men”. But it then goes on to demonstrate that in Rotherham there was indeed a clear link between race and abuse...
This is despite the fact that, as Jay underlines, the perpetrators of crimes of this nature normally select victims of the same ethnic origin. In Rotherham the opposite occurred. Pakistani men targeted white girls so that they could rape them.
But race did not just provide a motivational element in these horrific crimes. It was also a major contributing factor in the perpetrators' ability to get away with their abuse on such a scale for such a long period of time.
The evidence is again damning. As Jay recounts, the abuse was organised in such a way that “it offered career and financial opportunities to young Asian men who got involved”. Yet time and again the racial element of their crimes directly or indirectly obstructed efforts to prevent them.
Local councillors admitted they “believed that by opening up these issues they could be 'giving oxygen' to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion”. Local youngsters confirmed to the Jay inquiry what had been reported to a previous inquiry, namely that ”young people in Rotherham believed at that time that the Police dared not act against Asian youths for fear of allegations of racism”. Several people interviewed by Jay “expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police”. Jay herself states that “messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to 'downplay' the ethnic dimensions of child sex exploitation”. Although the report claims not to have found evidence of direct influence on individual cases, it then adds “Unsurprisingly, front line staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as 'racist'”...
Imagine if it came to light that in another region of the country, organised gangs of white men had been systematically engaging in the rape and abuse of black children. The local white community knew about it, but shielded the crimes behind a wall of silence. Officers in the local authority were aware of it, but were told by their political masters to keep quiet about the racial element of the crime for fear of offending their local constituency. Police officers who attempted to investigate where specifically warned by their superiors to ignore any racial aspect to the offences.
There would be a national outcry. The racism inherent in those crimes would not be pushed to the margins, but to the forefront of our enraged response. There would be a full public inquiry, along the lines of Lawrence. And that reaction would be wholly appropriate.
We cannot just ignore racism because it doesn’t fit a neat binary perception of the victim being black and the perpetrator being white. When a Pakistani man calls a white child a “white bitch” because she tries to stop him raping her, that isn’t just horrific sexual abuse, it’s also horrific racial abuse.
Those who tried to cover up the racial aspect of these crimes did so because they feared giving “oxygen” to racists. But what kind of perversion is that? You counter racism by covering up racism?
Rotherham: In the face of such evil, who is the racist now?
"If South Yorkshire Police can mount a raid on Sir Cliff Richard’s home in pursuit of evidence linked to a single allegation of child sex abuse 30 years ago, why were South Yorkshire Police incapable of pursuing multiple allegations against multiple men who raped 1,400 children over 16 years?...
Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham from 1994 to 2012, actually admitted to the BBC’s World At One that “there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that. Perhaps, yes, as a true Guardian reader and liberal Leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard”...
Equally horrifying is the suggestion that certain Pakistani councillors asked social workers to reveal the addresses of the shelters where some of the abused girls were hiding. The former deputy leader of the council, Jahangir Akhtar, is accused of “ignoring a politically inconvenient truth” by insisting there was not a deep-rooted problem of Pakistani-heritage perpetrators targeting young white girls. The inquiry was told that influential Pakistani councillors acted as “barriers to communication” on grooming issues.
Front-line youth workers who submitted reports in 2002, 2003 and 2006 expressing their alarm at the scale of the child sex-offending say the town hall told them to keep quiet about the ethnicity of the perpetrators in the interests of “community cohesion”.
Fear of appearing racist trumped fears of more children being abused. Not only were negligent officials not prosecuted, they prospered. Shaun Wright, a former Labour councillor who was in charge of Rotherham children’s services during a five-year period when a blind eye was turned to the worst case of mass child abuse in British history, is now South Yorkshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner...
Powerless white working-class girls were caught between a hateful, imported culture of vicious misogyny on the one hand, and on the other a culture of chauvinism among the police, who regarded them as worthless slags. Officials trained up in diversity and political correctness failed to acknowledge what was effectively white slavery on their doorstep. Much too embarrassing to concede that it wasn’t white people who were committing racist hate crimes in this instance...
The fear of appearing racist was more pressing in official minds than enforcing the law of the land or rescuing terrified children. It is one of the great scandals of our lifetime."
Addendum:
"One 11-year-old known as Child H told police that she and another girl had been sexually assaulted by grown men. Nothing was done. When she was 12, Child H was found in the back of a taxi with a man who had indecent pictures of her on his phone. Despite the full co-operation of her father, who insisted his daughter was being abused, police failed to act. Four months later, Child H was found in a house alone with a group of Pakistani men. What did the police do? They arrested the child for being drunk and disorderly and ignored her abusers...
The Labour Party, in particular, is mired in shame over “cultural sensitivity” in Rotherham. Especially, cynics might point out, a sensitivity to the culture of Muslims whose votes they don’t want to lose...
A recent poll showed that 44 per cent of young Britons believe that Muslims do not share the same values as the rest of the population, while 28 per cent said they felt Britain would be “better off” with fewer Muslims"
One liberal response is to frame this as a class issue and claim this is no different from how child sexual abuse of working class children has always been treated. But there don't seem to be historical statistics backing up this claim (or maybe magnitude doesn't matter - as long as it's happened in the past it's not different right now even if the scale is much bigger)
Post ID: 3995837971792453663
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Hello Kitty is not a Cat
Hello Kitty is not a cat, she's a British schoolgirl, says Sanrio
"Hello Kitty is not a cat, says Sanrio.
As preparations are made for the cute white feline character's 40th birthday celebrations, the Japanese company that created the global marketing phenomenon has set the record straight - and caused chaos on the Internet, said the Los Angeles Times.
Hello Kitty is actually a British schoolgirl named Kitty White, said the report. Her origin story includes things such as: She is a Scorpio, she has a twin sister, and their parents are George and Mary White.
Anthropologist Christine R. Yano from the University of Hawaii, who has spent years studying the popularity of Hello Kitty, is the one who brought the misunderstanding to light, said the Times.
She said Sanrio corrected her "very firmly" when she described Hello Kitty as a cat while preparing text for an upcoming Kitty retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum.
"That's one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show," she told the Times. "Hello Kitty is not a cat. She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it's called Charmmy Kitty."
Hello Kitty - a "perpetual third-grader" who "lives outside of London" - was created in the 1970s, when the Japanese loved the idea of Britain, Yano said. "It represented the quintessential idealised childhood, almost like a white picket fence. So the biography was created exactly for the tastes of that time."
On Twitter, singer Josh Groban was among those who reacted strongly to the story, said the Times. He said on Wednesday: "Hello Kitty is a cat. She has whiskers and a cat nose. Girls don't look like that. Stop this nonsense."
Peanuts Worldwide, the company behind the comic strip, confirmed on Twitter that "Snoopy IS a dog"."
Syrian rebel leader Zahran Alloush delivers speech to Islamist militants with a Hello Kitty notebook
"Hello Kitty is not a cat, says Sanrio.
As preparations are made for the cute white feline character's 40th birthday celebrations, the Japanese company that created the global marketing phenomenon has set the record straight - and caused chaos on the Internet, said the Los Angeles Times.
Hello Kitty is actually a British schoolgirl named Kitty White, said the report. Her origin story includes things such as: She is a Scorpio, she has a twin sister, and their parents are George and Mary White.
Anthropologist Christine R. Yano from the University of Hawaii, who has spent years studying the popularity of Hello Kitty, is the one who brought the misunderstanding to light, said the Times.
She said Sanrio corrected her "very firmly" when she described Hello Kitty as a cat while preparing text for an upcoming Kitty retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum.
"That's one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show," she told the Times. "Hello Kitty is not a cat. She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it's called Charmmy Kitty."
Hello Kitty - a "perpetual third-grader" who "lives outside of London" - was created in the 1970s, when the Japanese loved the idea of Britain, Yano said. "It represented the quintessential idealised childhood, almost like a white picket fence. So the biography was created exactly for the tastes of that time."
On Twitter, singer Josh Groban was among those who reacted strongly to the story, said the Times. He said on Wednesday: "Hello Kitty is a cat. She has whiskers and a cat nose. Girls don't look like that. Stop this nonsense."
Peanuts Worldwide, the company behind the comic strip, confirmed on Twitter that "Snoopy IS a dog"."
Syrian rebel leader Zahran Alloush delivers speech to Islamist militants with a Hello Kitty notebook
Post ID: 5110003519863475193
Why they didn't land troops behind the trenches during World War I
Nick Malik's answer to In World War I why didn't countries bypass trenches by landing troops beyond them? - Quora
"The use of ships to transport large invading armies was a "new idea" and militaries are run by old men.
Today, we understand and accept the idea of the Marines, but in 1914, moving whole armies that way was novel.
Traditional military services were segregated and very few "troop transport" ships existed. Remember that many world navies still fought pitched sea battles. Last thing you want, when a ship sinks, is to take both your navy and your army. Armies didn't trust the navy, and vice versa.
with so many structural reasons, it was not an idea that would fly."
Joel Parker's answer to In World War I why didn't countries bypass trenches by landing troops beyond them? - Quora
"There wasn't a lot of open beach to land in Holland & the German North Sea coast. The Rhine estuarine plain has been largely canalized through Belgium and the Netherlands, & German coastal cities were heavily defended with extended fortifications & huge coastal defense guns. Perhaps France could have been invaded but as noted here amphibious assaults on a large scale were unprecedented & considered too high risk for success."
Kyle Murao's answer to In World War I why didn't countries bypass trenches by landing troops beyond them? - Quora
"whereas the Nazis had kind of a wimpy navy, the imperial German navy during WW1 was enormous. If the Allies had attempted an amphibious landing of the scale required to achieve a strategic breakthrough, it might have been necessary not only to bottle it up in port, but to destroy it outright--something the RN had singularly failed to do at Jutland in 1916, where the Germans fought the British to a tactical standstill. German U-boats would also have posed a big threat to slow-moving troop transports crossing the Channel or the North Sea."
"The use of ships to transport large invading armies was a "new idea" and militaries are run by old men.
Today, we understand and accept the idea of the Marines, but in 1914, moving whole armies that way was novel.
Traditional military services were segregated and very few "troop transport" ships existed. Remember that many world navies still fought pitched sea battles. Last thing you want, when a ship sinks, is to take both your navy and your army. Armies didn't trust the navy, and vice versa.
with so many structural reasons, it was not an idea that would fly."
Joel Parker's answer to In World War I why didn't countries bypass trenches by landing troops beyond them? - Quora
"There wasn't a lot of open beach to land in Holland & the German North Sea coast. The Rhine estuarine plain has been largely canalized through Belgium and the Netherlands, & German coastal cities were heavily defended with extended fortifications & huge coastal defense guns. Perhaps France could have been invaded but as noted here amphibious assaults on a large scale were unprecedented & considered too high risk for success."
Kyle Murao's answer to In World War I why didn't countries bypass trenches by landing troops beyond them? - Quora
"whereas the Nazis had kind of a wimpy navy, the imperial German navy during WW1 was enormous. If the Allies had attempted an amphibious landing of the scale required to achieve a strategic breakthrough, it might have been necessary not only to bottle it up in port, but to destroy it outright--something the RN had singularly failed to do at Jutland in 1916, where the Germans fought the British to a tactical standstill. German U-boats would also have posed a big threat to slow-moving troop transports crossing the Channel or the North Sea."
Post ID: 8391631961564372248
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
The Dividing Line Between Good and Evil
"I credited myself with unselfish dedication. But meanwhile I had been thoroughly prepared to be an executioner. And if I had gotten into an NKVD school under Yezhov, maybe I would have matured just in time for Beria.
So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
Socrates taught us: Know thyself!
Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.
If Malyuta Skuratov had summoned us, we, too, probably would have done our work well!
From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.
And correspondingly, from evil to good."
--- The Gulag Archipelago / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.
Socrates taught us: Know thyself!
Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.
If Malyuta Skuratov had summoned us, we, too, probably would have done our work well!
From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.
And correspondingly, from evil to good."
--- The Gulag Archipelago / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Post ID: 1610733156425885571
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Links - 26th August 2014
Lizzy Lee - Lizzy Lee's Photos - "This. is the best zheng hu anything I've seen ever. The ghost of Singa past will continue haunting you during 7th month."
Sierra Leone's 365 Ebola deaths traced back to one healer - "It has laid waste to the tribal chiefdoms of Sierra Leone, leaving hundreds dead, but the Ebola crisis began with just one healer's claims to special powers. The outbreak need never have spread from Guinea, health officials revealed to AFP, except for a herbalist in the remote eastern border village of Sokoma. "She was claiming to have powers to heal Ebola. Cases from Guinea were crossing into Sierra Leone for treatment," Mohamed Vandi, the top medical official in the hard-hit district of Kenema, told AFP. "She got infected and died. During her funeral, women around the other towns got infected.""
Cultural Imperialism!
Watch Would-Be Suicide Bomber React To Video Of Failed Bomb Attempt - "the report “shatters the illusion that those who are driven by hate can have their minds changed.” The report included footage of the would-be suicide bomber at the very moment her detonator failed outside of a hospital. After shedding her jacket, the woman can be seen crying and clutching at her neck and chest... the woman told Vittert that she is proud of her actions and hopes to once again “taste and smell paradise.” She maintains that she is still intent on blowing herself up in order to kill Israelis, and urges other young women to do the same."
Is English Literature a conspiracy to keep non-elites poor in Singapore ? - "I always thought that we were deliberately taught badly in a Government school so that we will develop a hatred for the humanities and take up technocratic careers. In Secondary 1, Swiss Cottage had Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Was Great Expectations strategically chosen to keep us Government kids from living out our potential ?"
Italian Journalist Defies Hamas: 'Out of Gaza Far from Hamas Retaliation: Misfired Rocket Killed Children in Shati' - "Italian journalist Gabriele Barbati said he was able to speak freely about witnessing a Hamas misfire that killed nine children at the Shati camp, confirming the Israel Defense Forces version of events, but only after leaving Gaza, “far from Hamas retaliation”... Barbati said he was unable to speak about the Al Shifa hit, but he was certain that it was a Hamas rocket that hit the Shati camp, and a witness saw militants rushing to clean the debris. Blogger Elder of Ziyon, who praised Barbati for telling the truth in a war where many journalists have been intimidated by Hamas, noted that “When Hamas made the area off limits to reporters, it was cleaning the area from any debris that could show the truth.”"
Foreign press gives mixed accounts of Hamas intimidation in Gaza - "In the text that accompanied the video report on NDTV’s website, Jain wrote that it was published “after our team left the Gaza Strip – Hamas has not taken very kindly to any reporting of its rockets being fired. But just as we reported the devastating consequences of Israel’s offensive on Gaza’s civilians, it is equally important to report on how Hamas places those very civilians at risk by firing rockets deep from the heart of civilian zones. “ Two days later, Jain published an article on NDTV’s website with the story behind his report, explaining that his team waited days before airing the video clip due to “fear of reprisals from Hamas against us and those who worked with us, [and] fear of inviting an Israeli response on the spot”... On Wednesday, the Christian Broadcasting Network aired an interview with Archbishop Alexios, whom reporter George Thomas called “Gaza’s most prominent Christian leader.” CBN estimates there are 1,500 Christians living in Gaza. Alexios said Hamas used his church to fire rockets, but he would not discuss details on camera for security reasons."
Palestinian journalists decry intimidation - Features - Al Jazeera English - "From a total of 180 countries, Israel landed the 96th spot for worst violators of press freedoms, according to Reporters Without Borders' 2014 Press Freedom Index, an annual publication that ranks governments' treatment of journalists. The occupied Palestinian territories - including the PA-controlled West Bank and the Hamas-administered Gaza Strip - earned the 138th ranking."
A little video gaming 'linked to well-adjusted children' - "Scientists found young people who spent less than an hour a day engaged in video games were better adjusted than those who did not play at all. But children who used consoles for more than three hours reported lower satisfaction with their lives overall... Dr Iroise Dumontheil, of Birkbeck, University of London, who was not involved in the research, said: "Other studies have shown that playing first-person shooter games, but not other types, can lead to increased visuospatial processing and memory abilities."
Reddit Users Were Asked To Sum Up Their First Sexual Experience With A GIF. The Responses Were Magnificent (SFW) - Imgur
Lord of the Rings: A theory about the eagle 'plot hole'. (Very long, it even has maps) : FanTheories - "I think everyone knows the eagle 'plot hole' in The Lord of the Rings. Why didn't they get the eagles to fly the ring to Mount Doom? My theory is that Gandalf had planned on doing exactly that."
Anya Deason's answer to Why does Hamas hide weaponry in hospitals and schools? - Quora - "In America and Europe, there is knee-deep hypocrisy on this issue. If poor people from a neighboring city decided to shoot rockets into affluent, American or European neighborhoods, none of the American or European peace activists would be willing to sacrifice their children, their nice homes or themselves, so poor people could express their dissatisfaction with the unfairness of life via ballistics. Kid yourselves not: there's plenty of economic injustice in America and Europe, but in democratic societies, the rule of law is observed despite blatant inequities... since there have been times in history when armed resistance was necessary, terrorists like to equate their violent actions with those exceptional times. When your alleged oppressor supplies you with electricity and treats your casualties in their hospitals, it's not one of those times in history. When your alleged oppressor provides warnings before shooting into civilians areas, it's not one of those times in history. When your alleged oppressor puts its citizens in jail for life for committing crimes against your people, it's not one of those times in history. When your alleged oppressor is a tiny country that is open to a two state solution, assuming you recognize their right to exist, it's not one of those times in history. Years ago on C-SPAN, I listened to speeches by teenagers at Seeds of Peace, and almost all the Israeli kids said they wanted peace and friendship, reflecting what their parents taught them. None of the Palestinian kids took that approach, and since they were just kids, their beliefs reflect the beliefs of the adults in their lives. It's a shame, because violent movements rarely achieve the intended results. If Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatmas Gandhi had instructed their followers to commit terrorist acts, like bombing buses or shooting rockets at civilians, they would not have been successful in liberating their people. It really comes down to this: do you want a better future for yourselves and your children, or do you want to fight? Most groups who use terrorism as a tactic do not want peace. When peace activists don't suffer from a daily threat of rocket fire and bus bombings, it's easy to say they would never block terrorists from entering their country with bombs strapped to their chests."
Matt Wasserman's answer to Restaurant Business: Are the drinks and beverages normally the highest profit margin items on the menu for restaurants and fast-food restaurants? - Quora - "Over 60% profit, which is crazy high for the restaurant biz. And bigger chains get even better prices on syrup... The legend that soda has even higher margins than that stems from free refill policies seen at many restaurants. If refills are free, soda must be nearly so. The reality is this is an accounting hack - it's impossible to inventory open containers of syrup, so restaurants (and convenience stores) inventory the cups instead (where applicable) and write the syrup off as an expense."
Man accidentally kills himself taking gun-toting selfie
Chris Everett's answer to Should lobbying be made illegal in the USA? - Quora - "This, right here, is what the first amendment is all about. It's about ensuring that we can talk about our political leaders, without risk of being fined or jailed for such. Money in politics is an unfortunate thing, but it's better than the alternative. Money, in the end, is purely democratic. Your dollar counts the same as one of Bill Gate's dollars. Sure, he has more of them, but if your dollar can't be used, Bill Gates still has access... You don't. Taking a few hundred dollars to the print shop can produce you a fair number of handbills to give out or slide under doors. Make those acts illegal, and you've destroyed competitive democracy."
Addendum: Keywords - free speech, political, corporations, Citizens United, censoring corporations
Dutch paedophile club to fight their ban at the European Court of Human Rights - "The Dutch paedophile society Vereniging MARTIJN is planning to appeal their case at the European Court of Human Rights after being banned by the Supreme Court of The Netherlands last April. The club’s lawyer has announced that the case will be put to the European judges no later than October this year. Vereniging MARTIJN has been advocating legal and social acceptance of sexual relations between adults and children in the Netherlands since 1982, actively seeking a platform for their ideas through engaging the press and initiating political discourse on the topic. Last April, the Supreme Court of The Netherlands ruledVereniging MARTIJN 's existence a threat to public order. Emphasising that forbidding a club should only be considered under extreme circumstances under democratic law, the Supreme Court argued that an exception needed to be made in order to protect children."
100 years ago, campaigning for homosexuality to be legal could've been banned to protect children
Moshe Feiglin and the 'liberation' of Gaza - " Elected as a member of the Knesset only in January 2013, today he already serves as deputy speaker of the Knesset. In May, a poll listed him has the fourth most popular member of Likud... Attack the entire ‘target bank’ throughout Gaza with the IDF’s maximum force (and not a tiny fraction of it) with all the conventional means at its disposal. All the military and infrastructural targets will be attacked with no consideration for ‘human shields’ or ‘environmental damage’. It is enough that we are hitting exact targets and that we gave them advance warning... According to polls, most of the Arabs in Gaza wish to leave. Those who were not involved in anti-Israel activity will be offered a generous international emigration package. Those who choose to remain will receive permanent resident status. After a number of years of living in Israel and becoming accustomed to it, contingent on appropriate legislation in the Knesset and the authorization of the Minister of Interior, those who personally accept upon themselves Israel’s rule, substance and way of life of the Jewish State in its Land, will be offered Israeli citizenship."
Bob Anderson's answer to Dating and Relationships: Why don't good guys get girls? - Quora - "I'm a 67M now but when I was in my 20s I was a weekend warrior and I hung around with a motorcycle gang. We'd go to the park on weekends and girls would come walking in from all over to get a motorcycle ride. Nice-looking girls, too. 15-18 years old most of'em (they'd all swear they were at least 18). Anyway, I had a friend that had this gf named Ann. Ann & I became good friends so one day I asked her - you're a good-looking girl and I'm certain you wouldn't have any trouble attracting a more "suitable" bf than one of these guys. What is it that keeps you here, hanging out with motorcycle-types ?. She looked me full in the face and said "it isn't boring". Maybe that's why. It isn't boring or it's thrilling in some way (it doesn't take long to get knee-deep in drama when you hang around bikers). If she had to put up with a "bad boy" that's the breaks. Like having to break eggs to make an omelet."
Top 9 Facts The Media Wouldn't Tell You About Hamas - "Hamas Restricts Media Access and Threatens Journalists.
Hamas’ Military Headquarters Are Located Underneath a Hospital.
Hamas Shoots Peace Protesters.
Hamas Falsifies Casualty Numbers... “The authorities in Gaza generally count every young man who did not wear a uniform as a civilian — even if he was involved in terrorist activity and was therefore considered by the IDF a legitimate target, military sources said”... in 2008-2009, Israel’s military operation in Gaza ended with 1,166 dead Palestinians. The Palestinians attempted to claim that two thirds of those dead were civilians. Later, they themselves admitted that two thirds were terrorists.
Hamas Built Its Terror Tunnels Thanks to Dual-Purpose Aid... "Israel had banned construction goods because Hamas used them to build an underground network of weapons depots, bunkers and rocket-launching pads.” Hamas utilized at least 600,000 tons of cement to build the tunnels, which cost an estimated $100 million.
Hamas Killed Children in Building The Terror Tunnels. According to a 2012 paper in the Journal of Palestine Studies titled, “Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon: The Unintended Dynamics of Israel’s Siege,” children were used to dig Gaza’s tunnels. In fact, 160 children were killed. The author, Nicolas Pelham, wrote, “nothing was done to impede the use of children in the tunnels, where, much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies.”
Hamas Uses Women, Children, and the Mentally Ill as Human Shields...
As John Nolte points out, CNN treats Hamas terrorists better than it treats Tea Partiers."
Dan Kim's answer to Is Hamas more ethical than the Israeli army? - Quora - "illing Palestinian civilian "spy" and dragging him through the street... beating civilians who are trying to escape from areas where Israel warned that they would be bombing. You see, Hamas has killed plenty of civilians in this conflict... of their own side."
Social Media Arguments: Can’t-Win Propositions - NYTimes.com - "I know, how could I be so stupid? To think that I could have a constructive conversation about something on social media. Luckily, my part in the Twitter fight didn’t last long. A friend saw my tweets and instantly sent me the text message: “ABORT! ABORT! ABORT!”... I quickly called my friend and pleaded, “How do I make it stop?” “You can’t make it stop,” he proclaimed while admonishing me. “What were you thinking? You know you can’t win a Twitter fight. You can never win an argument with someone on social media.” Sadly, he was right. Trying to discuss an even remotely contentious topic with someone on social media is a fool’s errand... If you haven’t experienced this wrath (I’d be shocked if most people have not), try this simple experiment: Go to a social website and offer even the slightest morsel of opinion on something. You can pick from Gaza, Israel, Justin Bieber, Orlando Bloom, Jay Z and Beyoncé, the N.S.A., President Obama or any other esoteric topic. Then watch what happens. One person says one thing and then the digital mob is upon you... I asked a number of journalists whose job it is to be attacked by people online, and they said they simply don’t respond. An editor at The New Yorker said, “The rule about engaging is that you should never engage.” A former Gawker employee said a mantra at the company is to, “Never complain, never explain.” A co-worker at The New York Times told me, “Don’t feed the trolls.” And another said that angry tweets are simply “spitballs on a battleship”... Take the short sentence, “Yeah, you’re right.” In the middle of an argument on Twitter that could easily read as sarcasm, even if the person is being sincere. As the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Nowhere is that more true than with digital conversations. Surprisingly, the conflict and dispute experts I spoke with said that you should actually engage with your detractors, allowing your emotions to cool first, and in a really heated instance, take the discussion elsewhere. “On Facebook and Twitter people are not responding to the person who posted the message, they’re playing to the crowd""
Hamas’ phony statistics on civilian deaths - "Data published by the New York Times strongly suggests that a very large number— perhaps a majority—of those killed are closer to the combatant end of the continuum than to the civilian end. First of all, the vast majority of those killed have been male rather than female. In an Islamic society, males are far more likely to be combatants than females. Second, most of those killed are within the age range (15-40) that are likely to be combatants. The vast majority of these are male as well. The number of people over 60 who have been killed is infinitesimal. The number of children below the age of 15 is also relatively small, although their pictures have been shown more frequently than others. In other words, the genders and ages of those killed are not representative of the general population of Gaza. It is far more representative of the genders and ages of combatants. These data strongly suggest that a very large percentage of Palestinians killed are on the combatant side of the continuum. They also prove, as if any proof were necessary to unbiased eyes, that Israel did not target civilians randomly. If it had, the dead would be representative of the Gaza population in general, rather than of the subgroups most closely identified with combatants."
Civilian or Not? New Fight in Tallying the Dead From the Gaza Conflict - NYTimes.com - "It seems unlikely that there will ever be a definitive breakdown both sides accept: Israel contends that some of the casualties were caused by errant Hamas rockets or mortars. Human rights groups acknowledge that people killed by Hamas as collaborators and people who died naturally, or perhaps through domestic violence, are most likely counted as well... The Times analysis, looking at 1,431 names, shows that the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll: They are 9 percent of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, but 34 percent of those killed whose ages were provided. At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71 percent of the population and 33 percent of the known-age casualties... Surviving children might deny that their father was a fighter, but a medical worker might say he arrived at the emergency room with a weapon in hand."
Grady Judd's sex stings under microscope with officers breaking rules - "n the decade since Chris Hansen and "To Catch a Predator" popularized Internet sex stings, more than 1,200 men in Florida alone have been arrested, accused of preying on underage teens and children for sex. But as the stings put more and more men behind bars, detectives are working harder and harder to keep up their arrest numbers. And the tactics they're using to put alleged sexual offenders in jail are sweeping up large numbers of law-abiding men, too. A yearlong investigation by 10 Investigates reveals many of the men whose mugshots have been paraded out by local sheriffs in made-for-TV press conferences were not seeking to meet children online. Instead, they were minding their own business, looking for other adults, when detectives started to groom and convince them to break the law."
90-Year-Old Sex Columnist Shatters Taboos in India - NYTimes.com - "When the women’s magazine Femina introduced a sex column, an outraged reader filed an obscenity complaint with the police, claiming that the magazine’s editors were fabricating outrageous letters to increase readership. Sathya Saran, then the editor, responded by delivering a sack of unopened letters to the judge. “He read them over the lunch hour and dismissed the case,” she said. Dr. Watsa said yes when Meenal Baghel, the editor of The Mumbai Mirror, approached with the idea for Ask the Sexpert. It was the first time such questions appeared in a daily newspaper in India, rather than the specialized venue of a men’s or women’s magazine, and it remains — even nine years later — a daily shock to Indian sensibilities. Commuters in Mumbai can be spotted folding over their newspaper before reading it on the train, and subscribers have been known to snip the column out with scissors before sharing the newspaper with their children. One Mumbai journalist said she liked to read the column aloud to her mother as a form of torture, routinely forcing her to run from the room"
Too much sex in sex education book, Fremont parents say - "Teri Topham, whose daughter is going into ninth grade in Fremont and who teaches high school at a Fremont charter school, said she would throw the book out. "I flipped through it and saw sections that mentioned bondage with ropes and handcuffs," Topham said. "Not only does it have material that is too explicit and inappropriate, it doesn't meet their need for their ages. I am astounded the health teachers and school board said, 'yes, this is the best book we could find.'"
So much for "age appropriate"
Sierra Leone's 365 Ebola deaths traced back to one healer - "It has laid waste to the tribal chiefdoms of Sierra Leone, leaving hundreds dead, but the Ebola crisis began with just one healer's claims to special powers. The outbreak need never have spread from Guinea, health officials revealed to AFP, except for a herbalist in the remote eastern border village of Sokoma. "She was claiming to have powers to heal Ebola. Cases from Guinea were crossing into Sierra Leone for treatment," Mohamed Vandi, the top medical official in the hard-hit district of Kenema, told AFP. "She got infected and died. During her funeral, women around the other towns got infected.""
Cultural Imperialism!
Watch Would-Be Suicide Bomber React To Video Of Failed Bomb Attempt - "the report “shatters the illusion that those who are driven by hate can have their minds changed.” The report included footage of the would-be suicide bomber at the very moment her detonator failed outside of a hospital. After shedding her jacket, the woman can be seen crying and clutching at her neck and chest... the woman told Vittert that she is proud of her actions and hopes to once again “taste and smell paradise.” She maintains that she is still intent on blowing herself up in order to kill Israelis, and urges other young women to do the same."
Is English Literature a conspiracy to keep non-elites poor in Singapore ? - "I always thought that we were deliberately taught badly in a Government school so that we will develop a hatred for the humanities and take up technocratic careers. In Secondary 1, Swiss Cottage had Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Was Great Expectations strategically chosen to keep us Government kids from living out our potential ?"
Italian Journalist Defies Hamas: 'Out of Gaza Far from Hamas Retaliation: Misfired Rocket Killed Children in Shati' - "Italian journalist Gabriele Barbati said he was able to speak freely about witnessing a Hamas misfire that killed nine children at the Shati camp, confirming the Israel Defense Forces version of events, but only after leaving Gaza, “far from Hamas retaliation”... Barbati said he was unable to speak about the Al Shifa hit, but he was certain that it was a Hamas rocket that hit the Shati camp, and a witness saw militants rushing to clean the debris. Blogger Elder of Ziyon, who praised Barbati for telling the truth in a war where many journalists have been intimidated by Hamas, noted that “When Hamas made the area off limits to reporters, it was cleaning the area from any debris that could show the truth.”"
Foreign press gives mixed accounts of Hamas intimidation in Gaza - "In the text that accompanied the video report on NDTV’s website, Jain wrote that it was published “after our team left the Gaza Strip – Hamas has not taken very kindly to any reporting of its rockets being fired. But just as we reported the devastating consequences of Israel’s offensive on Gaza’s civilians, it is equally important to report on how Hamas places those very civilians at risk by firing rockets deep from the heart of civilian zones. “ Two days later, Jain published an article on NDTV’s website with the story behind his report, explaining that his team waited days before airing the video clip due to “fear of reprisals from Hamas against us and those who worked with us, [and] fear of inviting an Israeli response on the spot”... On Wednesday, the Christian Broadcasting Network aired an interview with Archbishop Alexios, whom reporter George Thomas called “Gaza’s most prominent Christian leader.” CBN estimates there are 1,500 Christians living in Gaza. Alexios said Hamas used his church to fire rockets, but he would not discuss details on camera for security reasons."
Palestinian journalists decry intimidation - Features - Al Jazeera English - "From a total of 180 countries, Israel landed the 96th spot for worst violators of press freedoms, according to Reporters Without Borders' 2014 Press Freedom Index, an annual publication that ranks governments' treatment of journalists. The occupied Palestinian territories - including the PA-controlled West Bank and the Hamas-administered Gaza Strip - earned the 138th ranking."
A little video gaming 'linked to well-adjusted children' - "Scientists found young people who spent less than an hour a day engaged in video games were better adjusted than those who did not play at all. But children who used consoles for more than three hours reported lower satisfaction with their lives overall... Dr Iroise Dumontheil, of Birkbeck, University of London, who was not involved in the research, said: "Other studies have shown that playing first-person shooter games, but not other types, can lead to increased visuospatial processing and memory abilities."
Reddit Users Were Asked To Sum Up Their First Sexual Experience With A GIF. The Responses Were Magnificent (SFW) - Imgur
Lord of the Rings: A theory about the eagle 'plot hole'. (Very long, it even has maps) : FanTheories - "I think everyone knows the eagle 'plot hole' in The Lord of the Rings. Why didn't they get the eagles to fly the ring to Mount Doom? My theory is that Gandalf had planned on doing exactly that."
Anya Deason's answer to Why does Hamas hide weaponry in hospitals and schools? - Quora - "In America and Europe, there is knee-deep hypocrisy on this issue. If poor people from a neighboring city decided to shoot rockets into affluent, American or European neighborhoods, none of the American or European peace activists would be willing to sacrifice their children, their nice homes or themselves, so poor people could express their dissatisfaction with the unfairness of life via ballistics. Kid yourselves not: there's plenty of economic injustice in America and Europe, but in democratic societies, the rule of law is observed despite blatant inequities... since there have been times in history when armed resistance was necessary, terrorists like to equate their violent actions with those exceptional times. When your alleged oppressor supplies you with electricity and treats your casualties in their hospitals, it's not one of those times in history. When your alleged oppressor provides warnings before shooting into civilians areas, it's not one of those times in history. When your alleged oppressor puts its citizens in jail for life for committing crimes against your people, it's not one of those times in history. When your alleged oppressor is a tiny country that is open to a two state solution, assuming you recognize their right to exist, it's not one of those times in history. Years ago on C-SPAN, I listened to speeches by teenagers at Seeds of Peace, and almost all the Israeli kids said they wanted peace and friendship, reflecting what their parents taught them. None of the Palestinian kids took that approach, and since they were just kids, their beliefs reflect the beliefs of the adults in their lives. It's a shame, because violent movements rarely achieve the intended results. If Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatmas Gandhi had instructed their followers to commit terrorist acts, like bombing buses or shooting rockets at civilians, they would not have been successful in liberating their people. It really comes down to this: do you want a better future for yourselves and your children, or do you want to fight? Most groups who use terrorism as a tactic do not want peace. When peace activists don't suffer from a daily threat of rocket fire and bus bombings, it's easy to say they would never block terrorists from entering their country with bombs strapped to their chests."
Matt Wasserman's answer to Restaurant Business: Are the drinks and beverages normally the highest profit margin items on the menu for restaurants and fast-food restaurants? - Quora - "Over 60% profit, which is crazy high for the restaurant biz. And bigger chains get even better prices on syrup... The legend that soda has even higher margins than that stems from free refill policies seen at many restaurants. If refills are free, soda must be nearly so. The reality is this is an accounting hack - it's impossible to inventory open containers of syrup, so restaurants (and convenience stores) inventory the cups instead (where applicable) and write the syrup off as an expense."
Man accidentally kills himself taking gun-toting selfie
Chris Everett's answer to Should lobbying be made illegal in the USA? - Quora - "This, right here, is what the first amendment is all about. It's about ensuring that we can talk about our political leaders, without risk of being fined or jailed for such. Money in politics is an unfortunate thing, but it's better than the alternative. Money, in the end, is purely democratic. Your dollar counts the same as one of Bill Gate's dollars. Sure, he has more of them, but if your dollar can't be used, Bill Gates still has access... You don't. Taking a few hundred dollars to the print shop can produce you a fair number of handbills to give out or slide under doors. Make those acts illegal, and you've destroyed competitive democracy."
Addendum: Keywords - free speech, political, corporations, Citizens United, censoring corporations
Dutch paedophile club to fight their ban at the European Court of Human Rights - "The Dutch paedophile society Vereniging MARTIJN is planning to appeal their case at the European Court of Human Rights after being banned by the Supreme Court of The Netherlands last April. The club’s lawyer has announced that the case will be put to the European judges no later than October this year. Vereniging MARTIJN has been advocating legal and social acceptance of sexual relations between adults and children in the Netherlands since 1982, actively seeking a platform for their ideas through engaging the press and initiating political discourse on the topic. Last April, the Supreme Court of The Netherlands ruledVereniging MARTIJN 's existence a threat to public order. Emphasising that forbidding a club should only be considered under extreme circumstances under democratic law, the Supreme Court argued that an exception needed to be made in order to protect children."
100 years ago, campaigning for homosexuality to be legal could've been banned to protect children
Moshe Feiglin and the 'liberation' of Gaza - " Elected as a member of the Knesset only in January 2013, today he already serves as deputy speaker of the Knesset. In May, a poll listed him has the fourth most popular member of Likud... Attack the entire ‘target bank’ throughout Gaza with the IDF’s maximum force (and not a tiny fraction of it) with all the conventional means at its disposal. All the military and infrastructural targets will be attacked with no consideration for ‘human shields’ or ‘environmental damage’. It is enough that we are hitting exact targets and that we gave them advance warning... According to polls, most of the Arabs in Gaza wish to leave. Those who were not involved in anti-Israel activity will be offered a generous international emigration package. Those who choose to remain will receive permanent resident status. After a number of years of living in Israel and becoming accustomed to it, contingent on appropriate legislation in the Knesset and the authorization of the Minister of Interior, those who personally accept upon themselves Israel’s rule, substance and way of life of the Jewish State in its Land, will be offered Israeli citizenship."
Bob Anderson's answer to Dating and Relationships: Why don't good guys get girls? - Quora - "I'm a 67M now but when I was in my 20s I was a weekend warrior and I hung around with a motorcycle gang. We'd go to the park on weekends and girls would come walking in from all over to get a motorcycle ride. Nice-looking girls, too. 15-18 years old most of'em (they'd all swear they were at least 18). Anyway, I had a friend that had this gf named Ann. Ann & I became good friends so one day I asked her - you're a good-looking girl and I'm certain you wouldn't have any trouble attracting a more "suitable" bf than one of these guys. What is it that keeps you here, hanging out with motorcycle-types ?. She looked me full in the face and said "it isn't boring". Maybe that's why. It isn't boring or it's thrilling in some way (it doesn't take long to get knee-deep in drama when you hang around bikers). If she had to put up with a "bad boy" that's the breaks. Like having to break eggs to make an omelet."
Top 9 Facts The Media Wouldn't Tell You About Hamas - "Hamas Restricts Media Access and Threatens Journalists.
Hamas’ Military Headquarters Are Located Underneath a Hospital.
Hamas Shoots Peace Protesters.
Hamas Falsifies Casualty Numbers... “The authorities in Gaza generally count every young man who did not wear a uniform as a civilian — even if he was involved in terrorist activity and was therefore considered by the IDF a legitimate target, military sources said”... in 2008-2009, Israel’s military operation in Gaza ended with 1,166 dead Palestinians. The Palestinians attempted to claim that two thirds of those dead were civilians. Later, they themselves admitted that two thirds were terrorists.
Hamas Built Its Terror Tunnels Thanks to Dual-Purpose Aid... "Israel had banned construction goods because Hamas used them to build an underground network of weapons depots, bunkers and rocket-launching pads.” Hamas utilized at least 600,000 tons of cement to build the tunnels, which cost an estimated $100 million.
Hamas Killed Children in Building The Terror Tunnels. According to a 2012 paper in the Journal of Palestine Studies titled, “Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon: The Unintended Dynamics of Israel’s Siege,” children were used to dig Gaza’s tunnels. In fact, 160 children were killed. The author, Nicolas Pelham, wrote, “nothing was done to impede the use of children in the tunnels, where, much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies.”
Hamas Uses Women, Children, and the Mentally Ill as Human Shields...
As John Nolte points out, CNN treats Hamas terrorists better than it treats Tea Partiers."
Dan Kim's answer to Is Hamas more ethical than the Israeli army? - Quora - "illing Palestinian civilian "spy" and dragging him through the street... beating civilians who are trying to escape from areas where Israel warned that they would be bombing. You see, Hamas has killed plenty of civilians in this conflict... of their own side."
Social Media Arguments: Can’t-Win Propositions - NYTimes.com - "I know, how could I be so stupid? To think that I could have a constructive conversation about something on social media. Luckily, my part in the Twitter fight didn’t last long. A friend saw my tweets and instantly sent me the text message: “ABORT! ABORT! ABORT!”... I quickly called my friend and pleaded, “How do I make it stop?” “You can’t make it stop,” he proclaimed while admonishing me. “What were you thinking? You know you can’t win a Twitter fight. You can never win an argument with someone on social media.” Sadly, he was right. Trying to discuss an even remotely contentious topic with someone on social media is a fool’s errand... If you haven’t experienced this wrath (I’d be shocked if most people have not), try this simple experiment: Go to a social website and offer even the slightest morsel of opinion on something. You can pick from Gaza, Israel, Justin Bieber, Orlando Bloom, Jay Z and Beyoncé, the N.S.A., President Obama or any other esoteric topic. Then watch what happens. One person says one thing and then the digital mob is upon you... I asked a number of journalists whose job it is to be attacked by people online, and they said they simply don’t respond. An editor at The New Yorker said, “The rule about engaging is that you should never engage.” A former Gawker employee said a mantra at the company is to, “Never complain, never explain.” A co-worker at The New York Times told me, “Don’t feed the trolls.” And another said that angry tweets are simply “spitballs on a battleship”... Take the short sentence, “Yeah, you’re right.” In the middle of an argument on Twitter that could easily read as sarcasm, even if the person is being sincere. As the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Nowhere is that more true than with digital conversations. Surprisingly, the conflict and dispute experts I spoke with said that you should actually engage with your detractors, allowing your emotions to cool first, and in a really heated instance, take the discussion elsewhere. “On Facebook and Twitter people are not responding to the person who posted the message, they’re playing to the crowd""
Hamas’ phony statistics on civilian deaths - "Data published by the New York Times strongly suggests that a very large number— perhaps a majority—of those killed are closer to the combatant end of the continuum than to the civilian end. First of all, the vast majority of those killed have been male rather than female. In an Islamic society, males are far more likely to be combatants than females. Second, most of those killed are within the age range (15-40) that are likely to be combatants. The vast majority of these are male as well. The number of people over 60 who have been killed is infinitesimal. The number of children below the age of 15 is also relatively small, although their pictures have been shown more frequently than others. In other words, the genders and ages of those killed are not representative of the general population of Gaza. It is far more representative of the genders and ages of combatants. These data strongly suggest that a very large percentage of Palestinians killed are on the combatant side of the continuum. They also prove, as if any proof were necessary to unbiased eyes, that Israel did not target civilians randomly. If it had, the dead would be representative of the Gaza population in general, rather than of the subgroups most closely identified with combatants."
Civilian or Not? New Fight in Tallying the Dead From the Gaza Conflict - NYTimes.com - "It seems unlikely that there will ever be a definitive breakdown both sides accept: Israel contends that some of the casualties were caused by errant Hamas rockets or mortars. Human rights groups acknowledge that people killed by Hamas as collaborators and people who died naturally, or perhaps through domestic violence, are most likely counted as well... The Times analysis, looking at 1,431 names, shows that the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll: They are 9 percent of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, but 34 percent of those killed whose ages were provided. At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71 percent of the population and 33 percent of the known-age casualties... Surviving children might deny that their father was a fighter, but a medical worker might say he arrived at the emergency room with a weapon in hand."
Grady Judd's sex stings under microscope with officers breaking rules - "n the decade since Chris Hansen and "To Catch a Predator" popularized Internet sex stings, more than 1,200 men in Florida alone have been arrested, accused of preying on underage teens and children for sex. But as the stings put more and more men behind bars, detectives are working harder and harder to keep up their arrest numbers. And the tactics they're using to put alleged sexual offenders in jail are sweeping up large numbers of law-abiding men, too. A yearlong investigation by 10 Investigates reveals many of the men whose mugshots have been paraded out by local sheriffs in made-for-TV press conferences were not seeking to meet children online. Instead, they were minding their own business, looking for other adults, when detectives started to groom and convince them to break the law."
90-Year-Old Sex Columnist Shatters Taboos in India - NYTimes.com - "When the women’s magazine Femina introduced a sex column, an outraged reader filed an obscenity complaint with the police, claiming that the magazine’s editors were fabricating outrageous letters to increase readership. Sathya Saran, then the editor, responded by delivering a sack of unopened letters to the judge. “He read them over the lunch hour and dismissed the case,” she said. Dr. Watsa said yes when Meenal Baghel, the editor of The Mumbai Mirror, approached with the idea for Ask the Sexpert. It was the first time such questions appeared in a daily newspaper in India, rather than the specialized venue of a men’s or women’s magazine, and it remains — even nine years later — a daily shock to Indian sensibilities. Commuters in Mumbai can be spotted folding over their newspaper before reading it on the train, and subscribers have been known to snip the column out with scissors before sharing the newspaper with their children. One Mumbai journalist said she liked to read the column aloud to her mother as a form of torture, routinely forcing her to run from the room"
Too much sex in sex education book, Fremont parents say - "Teri Topham, whose daughter is going into ninth grade in Fremont and who teaches high school at a Fremont charter school, said she would throw the book out. "I flipped through it and saw sections that mentioned bondage with ropes and handcuffs," Topham said. "Not only does it have material that is too explicit and inappropriate, it doesn't meet their need for their ages. I am astounded the health teachers and school board said, 'yes, this is the best book we could find.'"
So much for "age appropriate"
Post ID: 195846857875974424
The Next Frontier: Microaggressions
Don't Sweat the Microaggressions - The Atlantic
"The study that might have put to rest much of the recent agitation about microaggressions has unfortunately never been published. Microaggressions, for those who are not up on the recent twists and turns of American public discourse, are the subtle prejudices found even in the most liberal parts of our polity. They are revealed when a lecturer cites mainly male sources and no gay ones, when we use terms such as “mankind,” or when we discuss what Michelle Obama wore when she visited pandas in China, something we would not note about a man...
[She] asked members of 80 groups in New York City what they felt about other such groups. She avoided broad strokes and asked not about divisions between black and white, but what African Americans felt about Africans from Nigeria and blacks from the West Indies. She asked Hispanics about Dominicans, Haitians, Mexicans, and Cubans, and so on.
What Carolyn found was that there was little love lost between any two groups. Members of all the 80 groups she studied attached all kind of unflattering labels to members of other groups, even if they were of the same race or ethnic group. When she interviewed members of subgroups, they were unsparing about each other. German Jews felt that Jews of Polish origin were very uncouth (and surely would not want their daughter to marry one or to share a synagogue with them). The Polish Jews, in turn, felt that those of German background were stuck up and “assimilated,” and hence one was best off crossing to the other side of the street if they neared. Iraqis from Basra considered those from Baghdad to be too modern, and those from Baghdad considered their brothers and sisters from Basra as provincial—and so on and so on. Today they would all be called at least microaggressive.
None of this is surprising to sociologists, who have long held that one major way community cohesion is promoted is by defining it against out-groups—and that there is a strong psychological tendency to attribute positive adjectives to an in-group and negatives on to the outsiders. In short, it’s part—not a pretty part—of human nature, or at least social nature. Choose any group and you will find its members griping about all the others.
I hence urge those who are troubled by the ways others talk about them to use Carolyn’s findings as a baseline. That is, not to ignore slurs and insults, and most certainly not racial, ethnic, or any other kind of prejudices, but merely to “deduct” from them what seems to be standard noise, the normal sounds of human rambling. We may wish for a world in which people say only kind things about each other, but until we get there, we should not take umbrage at every negative note or adjective that is employed. For now, that is something most of us do—yes, I suspect even those who rail against microaggression...
What we are seeing is a return to the peak of political correctness. While sensitivity is warranted, that movement had gone too far by the time a major newspaper's list of prohibited words numbered 5,000, including “going Dutch” and “welshing” on one’s commitments. The current vogue for microaggressions is not more sensible.
A leading authority on microaggression, Professor Derald Sue of Columbia University’s Psychology Department, suggests that we leave it to the victims of microaggression to tell us whether a turn of phrase is or is not an act of aggression. They will let us know that when we slip up and talk about “him” instead of “him or her,” we engage in gender microaggression, and that when we use the term “father and mother” we reveal our homophobic tendencies. When you cannot tell if you are aggressive before the other person responds, and anybody can declare he or she has been abused by anything we say, communion between members of different groups becomes even more difficult. What we need is more contact and fewer grounds for mutual accusations and sense of being victimized.
Instead, let’s focus on acts of aggression that are far from micro. Where? See tomorrow’s headlines. People are killing each other because they belong to the “wrong” confessional group, race, or country—in many parts of the world. At home the rich get richer and the poor stay poor, which should insult us more than poor word choice. And people shoot good people, children included, because (among other things) a lobby prevents the Congress from passing legislation that is supported by 90 percent of the public. Such behavior should trouble us more than anything anybody could possibly say."
"The study that might have put to rest much of the recent agitation about microaggressions has unfortunately never been published. Microaggressions, for those who are not up on the recent twists and turns of American public discourse, are the subtle prejudices found even in the most liberal parts of our polity. They are revealed when a lecturer cites mainly male sources and no gay ones, when we use terms such as “mankind,” or when we discuss what Michelle Obama wore when she visited pandas in China, something we would not note about a man...
[She] asked members of 80 groups in New York City what they felt about other such groups. She avoided broad strokes and asked not about divisions between black and white, but what African Americans felt about Africans from Nigeria and blacks from the West Indies. She asked Hispanics about Dominicans, Haitians, Mexicans, and Cubans, and so on.
What Carolyn found was that there was little love lost between any two groups. Members of all the 80 groups she studied attached all kind of unflattering labels to members of other groups, even if they were of the same race or ethnic group. When she interviewed members of subgroups, they were unsparing about each other. German Jews felt that Jews of Polish origin were very uncouth (and surely would not want their daughter to marry one or to share a synagogue with them). The Polish Jews, in turn, felt that those of German background were stuck up and “assimilated,” and hence one was best off crossing to the other side of the street if they neared. Iraqis from Basra considered those from Baghdad to be too modern, and those from Baghdad considered their brothers and sisters from Basra as provincial—and so on and so on. Today they would all be called at least microaggressive.
None of this is surprising to sociologists, who have long held that one major way community cohesion is promoted is by defining it against out-groups—and that there is a strong psychological tendency to attribute positive adjectives to an in-group and negatives on to the outsiders. In short, it’s part—not a pretty part—of human nature, or at least social nature. Choose any group and you will find its members griping about all the others.
I hence urge those who are troubled by the ways others talk about them to use Carolyn’s findings as a baseline. That is, not to ignore slurs and insults, and most certainly not racial, ethnic, or any other kind of prejudices, but merely to “deduct” from them what seems to be standard noise, the normal sounds of human rambling. We may wish for a world in which people say only kind things about each other, but until we get there, we should not take umbrage at every negative note or adjective that is employed. For now, that is something most of us do—yes, I suspect even those who rail against microaggression...
What we are seeing is a return to the peak of political correctness. While sensitivity is warranted, that movement had gone too far by the time a major newspaper's list of prohibited words numbered 5,000, including “going Dutch” and “welshing” on one’s commitments. The current vogue for microaggressions is not more sensible.
A leading authority on microaggression, Professor Derald Sue of Columbia University’s Psychology Department, suggests that we leave it to the victims of microaggression to tell us whether a turn of phrase is or is not an act of aggression. They will let us know that when we slip up and talk about “him” instead of “him or her,” we engage in gender microaggression, and that when we use the term “father and mother” we reveal our homophobic tendencies. When you cannot tell if you are aggressive before the other person responds, and anybody can declare he or she has been abused by anything we say, communion between members of different groups becomes even more difficult. What we need is more contact and fewer grounds for mutual accusations and sense of being victimized.
Instead, let’s focus on acts of aggression that are far from micro. Where? See tomorrow’s headlines. People are killing each other because they belong to the “wrong” confessional group, race, or country—in many parts of the world. At home the rich get richer and the poor stay poor, which should insult us more than poor word choice. And people shoot good people, children included, because (among other things) a lobby prevents the Congress from passing legislation that is supported by 90 percent of the public. Such behavior should trouble us more than anything anybody could possibly say."
Post ID: 2724087117360164909
Monday, August 25, 2014
Booker T. Washington on the Grievance Industry
"There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do do not want to lose their jobs...
I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public...
For them there was nothing to do but insist on the application of the abstract principles of protest. Indignation meetings in Faneuil Hall, Boston, became at one time so frequent as to be a nuisance. It would not have been so bad if the meetings had been confined to the subjects for which they were proposed; but when "The Intellectuals" found that the Southern people rarely, if ever, heard of their protests and, if they did hear of them, paid no attention to them, they began to attack the persons nearer home. They began to attack the people of Boston because they said that the people of Boston had lost interest in the cause of the Negro. After attacking the friends of the Negro elsewhere, particularly all those who happened to disagree with them as to the exact method of aiding the Negro, they made me a frequent and favourite object of attack -- not merely for the reasons which I have already stated, but because they felt that if they attacked me in some particularly violent way it would surprise people and attract attention. There is no satisfaction in holding meetings and formulating protests unless you can get them into the newspapers"
--- The Intellectuals and the Boston Mob in My Larger Education, Being Chapters from My Experience
I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public...
For them there was nothing to do but insist on the application of the abstract principles of protest. Indignation meetings in Faneuil Hall, Boston, became at one time so frequent as to be a nuisance. It would not have been so bad if the meetings had been confined to the subjects for which they were proposed; but when "The Intellectuals" found that the Southern people rarely, if ever, heard of their protests and, if they did hear of them, paid no attention to them, they began to attack the persons nearer home. They began to attack the people of Boston because they said that the people of Boston had lost interest in the cause of the Negro. After attacking the friends of the Negro elsewhere, particularly all those who happened to disagree with them as to the exact method of aiding the Negro, they made me a frequent and favourite object of attack -- not merely for the reasons which I have already stated, but because they felt that if they attacked me in some particularly violent way it would surprise people and attract attention. There is no satisfaction in holding meetings and formulating protests unless you can get them into the newspapers"
--- The Intellectuals and the Boston Mob in My Larger Education, Being Chapters from My Experience
Post ID: 2991632379343253391
Thursday, August 21, 2014
On being Swindled in Burma
Pris Yeo - It's easy to lose yourself in Bagan, along dusty roads...
"It's easy to lose yourself in Bagan, along dusty roads where thousands of pagodas along the huge river stretch as far as the eye can conceive. There's practically no Internet, no connection with the outside world, no politics and no one who seems to care or know what's going on beyond the bubble of the city. Slowly though, you begin to realize how artificial it all is, that every outwardly friendly person only wants something from you, as tourist dollars feeds the beast.
You're ever the outsider, so they stiff you on prices, or give you inferior products, and send the children begging you to buy their goods so they can go to school. Everyone attempts to speak the same few words in French after finding out where you come from, with identical accents, only to badger you to buy a painting or souvenir. Canned answers and speeches attempt to garner your trust and sympathy, only so you pay exorbitant amounts for what amounts to garbage, or end up overcharged after the fact, insisting that they offered you more than what was originally agreed. You are offered the history of the place, only to be guilt-tripped into buying afterward. People pretending to wipe the same spot over and over, just so they can ask for a cleaning donation as you pass. Shameless, shameless pandering, and ever a sense of falseness. In the land full of dusty sand and ancient stupas, garbage covers the streets and fields, plastic and styrofoam are indiscriminately thrown out of windows and blown along the streets. Unsustainable tourism at its worst, and I can't imagine how it'll turn out in 5 years with no intervention.
My iPhone was stolen in a moment of distraction, and the greatest annoyance are the lost photos and inability to communicate with friends. Then I tore my ligament again, coming over a particular bumpy road where the bike heaved and threw me off in protest. A few new scars to show, and no longer guided but the trusty google maps or a clock, we lost sense of time and place. We meandered away from the tourist populated areas, to quiet pagodas, some left to mounds of dust and it's own ruin.
The sunrises and sunsets were amazing, and perhaps the saving grace was a night spent on top of an unguarded pagoda, the Milky Way slowly blinking into view as we made new friends and drank and smoked and laughed about all kinds of weird adventures along the way. Our guesthouse was another bright spot, manned by the most lovely genuine ladies that we'd met, so different from all the artificial smiles and manufactured sad faces.
Naturally, the night we leave was the one where the sky decided to paint a show, and we had to miss it to catch our transport. Perhaps we should have miss edit anyway. The bus ride back to Yangon was a new kind of horrifying, ear splitting pop-techno songs played at full volume, only interspersed by screeching soap dramas. The road was so bumpy, three locals even sicked up, one unfortunately just right next to us. All I felt when the plane left and touched down in Bangkok is relief.
Myanmar, I'm glad to be out in one piece, but if I ever see you again, it'll probably be too soon."
"It's easy to lose yourself in Bagan, along dusty roads where thousands of pagodas along the huge river stretch as far as the eye can conceive. There's practically no Internet, no connection with the outside world, no politics and no one who seems to care or know what's going on beyond the bubble of the city. Slowly though, you begin to realize how artificial it all is, that every outwardly friendly person only wants something from you, as tourist dollars feeds the beast.
You're ever the outsider, so they stiff you on prices, or give you inferior products, and send the children begging you to buy their goods so they can go to school. Everyone attempts to speak the same few words in French after finding out where you come from, with identical accents, only to badger you to buy a painting or souvenir. Canned answers and speeches attempt to garner your trust and sympathy, only so you pay exorbitant amounts for what amounts to garbage, or end up overcharged after the fact, insisting that they offered you more than what was originally agreed. You are offered the history of the place, only to be guilt-tripped into buying afterward. People pretending to wipe the same spot over and over, just so they can ask for a cleaning donation as you pass. Shameless, shameless pandering, and ever a sense of falseness. In the land full of dusty sand and ancient stupas, garbage covers the streets and fields, plastic and styrofoam are indiscriminately thrown out of windows and blown along the streets. Unsustainable tourism at its worst, and I can't imagine how it'll turn out in 5 years with no intervention.
My iPhone was stolen in a moment of distraction, and the greatest annoyance are the lost photos and inability to communicate with friends. Then I tore my ligament again, coming over a particular bumpy road where the bike heaved and threw me off in protest. A few new scars to show, and no longer guided but the trusty google maps or a clock, we lost sense of time and place. We meandered away from the tourist populated areas, to quiet pagodas, some left to mounds of dust and it's own ruin.
The sunrises and sunsets were amazing, and perhaps the saving grace was a night spent on top of an unguarded pagoda, the Milky Way slowly blinking into view as we made new friends and drank and smoked and laughed about all kinds of weird adventures along the way. Our guesthouse was another bright spot, manned by the most lovely genuine ladies that we'd met, so different from all the artificial smiles and manufactured sad faces.
Naturally, the night we leave was the one where the sky decided to paint a show, and we had to miss it to catch our transport. Perhaps we should have miss edit anyway. The bus ride back to Yangon was a new kind of horrifying, ear splitting pop-techno songs played at full volume, only interspersed by screeching soap dramas. The road was so bumpy, three locals even sicked up, one unfortunately just right next to us. All I felt when the plane left and touched down in Bangkok is relief.
Myanmar, I'm glad to be out in one piece, but if I ever see you again, it'll probably be too soon."
Post ID: 3724164825628047765
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