Links - 1st March 2019

America’s .. Duopoly (Ep. 356) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "GEHL: In fact, John Adams said at one point, “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and concerting measures in opposition to each other.” And if you take a look at George Washington’s farewell address, which he wrote in 1796, he talks about dangers, which could come in front of the Republic in the future. And he specifically focuses on two. One is foreign influence, and the other is partisanship. The other danger is the formation of strong parties...
our political parties work well together in one particular area, and that is actually colluding together, over time, behind the scenes, to create rules and practices that essentially erect barriers to entry, ways to keep out new competition.
In their report, Gehl and Porter identify the “five key inputs to modern political competition: candidates, campaign talent, voter data, idea suppliers, and lobbyists.” Here’s what they write: “Increasingly, most everything required to run a modern campaign and govern is tied to or heavily influenced by one party or the other, including think tanks, voter data, and talent.”...
The lack of vigorous competition, they argue, has allowed the Democrats and Republicans to carve out diametrically opposed political bases, fairly narrow and extremely partisan.
GEHL: So years ago, we created partisan primaries in order to actually take the selection of a candidate out of this “smoke-filled back room” and give the selection of the party candidate choice to citizens. So that was designed to give more control to citizens. It turns out it has had a very deleterious effect on competition, and has increased the power of the parties.
And the parties, Gehl and Porter argue, use those partisan bases to support the desires of the political industry’s true customers, and its wealthiest: special interests. Industries like healthcare, real estate, and financial services; also, labor unions and lobbyists. In this duopolistic business model, polarization is a feature, not a bug.
PORTER: We have a chart in our report that just selects some, what we call landmark-type legislation over the last 50, 60 years. And if you go back even 20 or 30 years ago, the landmark legislation was consensus.
For instance: the Social Security Act of 1935 had 90 percent Democratic support and 75 percent Republican. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had 60 percent Democratic support and, again, 75 percent Republican...
Think back to the 2016 presidential election. You had one national party, the Democrats, that tried as hard as it could — to the point of cheating, essentially — to pre-select its candidate, Hillary Clinton, who then lost. And you had the other national party, the Republicans, try as hard as it could to keep a certain candidate off the ballot — but they failed, and he won."

Donald Trump Moves to Deport Vietnam War Refugees - "The Trump administration is resuming its efforts to deport certain protected Vietnamese immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades—many of them having fled the country during the Vietnam War."
Mischievous article by the Atlantic. If you didn't read the article you wouldn't find out that these Vietnamese are “violent criminal aliens.”. And if you didn't read the whole article you wouldn't know that they have been convicted - so it's not just Trump's allegations

Undocumented Irish Caught In Trump's Immigration Dragnet - ""It's really indiscriminate. ICE, in their aggressive tactics of detention, are going after the Irish as much as they're going after any other nationality," says Ronnie Millar, director of the Irish International Immigrant Center in Boston... Millar, director of the Irish International Immigrant Center in Boston, says that Irish immigrants are "on high alert." "They have no confidence that the color of their skin provides any protection for them," he says. O'Riordan didn't necessarily think being white would save him from deportation orders. He thought staying out of trouble would keep him under the radar. He says other detainees are surprised he was arrested."
White privilege!

Green card doctor faces deportation 26 years after committing minor offence as a teen - "A doctor who has lived in the US for almost 40 years has been arrested and threatened with deportation over minor offences he committed as a teenager. Polish national Lukasz Niec was living in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on a permanent green card with his wife and two daughters when immigration agents stormed into his home last week and took him into custody. His detention stems from two minor crimes he committed as a 17-year-old: destruction of property worth less than $100, and receiving and concealing stolen goods"
Strange, I was told this only happens to non-white people

Why Are Immigrants Being Deported for Minor Crimes? - "Sylvain is one of thousands of immigrants who have been charged with “aggravated felonies” by the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The term, first introduced in the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, applies specifically to immigrants and asylum-seekers: If they’re convicted of any of the crimes in this category, they can be deported and prohibited from reentering the U.S. for 20 years. In 1988, the list of aggravated felonies was limited to serious crimes such as murder and drug trafficking. But Congress expanded the definition over the years, most extensively in 1996."
It's all Trump's fault

*Steve Locke story moved to a dedicated BLM post*
 

Clara Sorrenti⚙️ on Twitter - "Whether you like it or not, Joseph Stalin was one of the greatest anti-fascists in the history of the anti-fascist movement. Under Stalin's command, the Red Army defeated the nazis and saved several ethnic groups from nazi extermination. This is a legacy we cannot forget.

h on Twitter - "When you say Stalin was good, you're standing with:
W.E.B. DuBois
Frida Kahlo
Albert Einstein
Che Guevara
Nelson Mandela
Huey P. Newton
When you say he was bad, you're antagonizing these people, their supporters and readers, their ideas, and standing with Nazis."

Tim Pool - Childish Gambino makes a video where he kills a ton of... - "Childish Gambino makes a video where he kills a ton of people with guns.
Monetized, approved.
Youtuber makes Edgy Humor?
Heeeellll no
Independent News Content?
No fucking way
If you arent a mainstream corporation Youtube will come for you eventually"

How the Weighted Blanket Became a Must-Have Holiday Gift - "the triumphant story of the Gravity Blanket and many of its new contemporaries sounds more like a story of appropriation—a story about the sale of the special-needs community’s promise of life-changing comfort to the meditation-app-using, Instagram-shopping masses... the mainstreaming of the weighted blanket seems to imply a conflating of chronic anxiety or sensory issues with feelings of stress—or, perhaps more ominously, the repackaging of a coping strategy that originated in a marginalized community as a profitable relaxation fad at a moment when people feel particularly stressed.
We knew the grievance mongering wouldn't stop at "cultural appropriation"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Augustine's Confessions - "Famously, the time he stole pears as a child, not because he wanted to eat them, but because he wanted to steal...
Essentially, there had been this belief that if they could convert the Roman Empire, if Christianity could convert the Roman Empire, basically if paganism could be got away with... then surely this would bring Christ back. And this is the great trauma of the early churches. Jesus says in the Gospels, or it's reported that he says: before some of you here die, I will return. When they die, that was a bit of a crisis. What had happened? So there was this whole debate, well, is it because we're not good enough? Is it because we haven't converted enough? Is it because we're still grappling with the powers of Satan and paganism and so forth? And then gradually you get this sense as it heads up towards Constantine's conversion and his legitimation of Christianity in 312, that maybe this is the turning point, maybe this sort of existential dimension of Christianity, at last, we're gonna have control, at last the Kingdom of God can come on earth, at last Christ can return. And he doesn't because frankly he screws up. Well, what happens is the moment the church actually gets its hands on a great deal of money, a great deal of prestige, an awful lot of people suddenly decide they want to be Christians who to be absolutely honest are a bit iffy...
Up until that time, people in the Latin speaking world had tended to see the Bible as a kind of source of folk wisdom... it's the wisdom of fishermen. But what Ambrose does... a super literate, fluent in Greek, philosophically trained mind whose leisure time seems to be spent reading third century Greek philosophers, and among them, critically is the philosopher, Christian philosopher Origen of Caesaria, who's the person who really developed the idea of allegory in the New Testament, taking an idea that's already there in the Platonic tradition, but really bringing it over to Christianity, not only the New Testament, but also those lascivious stories of the Hebrew Bible as well. He finds that it's really an allegory. The Book of Kings, they're all having war back and forth. How can this be religious? Of course, the answer is it's an allegory for the war within the soul...
In the City of God, Book 14, he talks about the sin of Adam... he specifically goes back and he says, you think that the sin of Adam was sex because they are fruitful and multiply after they eat the fruit of the apple, but... that's not how it works. The sin of Adam is that moment of pride where he sets himself apart from god. And he actually says that the real sign of that is male impotence. It's not the fact that men are constantly lusting when they don't want to lust. It's the fact that their body won't always follow them when they do want to lust. That's the real sign of the human will being torn out of the divine unity."

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Iliad - "There are critical readings that say the tragedy is, ever since the Second World War, people have read it as a great pacifist polemic about the pain and the suffering of violence. I'm afraid we're talking about an ancient Greek warrior society, whether it's the 13th, the eighth or the fifth century BC, which is almost always at war, where men are trained for war and men are excited by war, and there may well have been lots of women who wished they'd hang it up and stop it. But that was all the aristocrats, aristocracy knew what to do and it's how they spent their whole time training. And I think they found the poetry of it very exciting...
My take is that the genius consists, whoever it was, in not describing the fall of Troy, in the Iliad. Why is the Iliad called the Iliad? It's a nonsense because Iliad means the poem about Ilios or Ilion, Troy. And actually Troy doesn't fall in the Ilios. And it's not about the death of Achilles, which is the most interesting and exciting aspect because of what was then thought about the fact that he lived so shorter life and yet he lives on eternally in memory. So those two absolutely cardinal facts about the Trojan War story excluded though adumbrated, referred to, and so on - brilliant. Absolute genius that whoever it was, I imagine there was one guy, I call him the monumental, I call him the monumental composer...
‘Is there any consensus about the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus?’
‘There is no homosexual sex whatsoever between them in the Iliad. There's plenty outside the Iliad. Whoever put that thing together in the form it's in not only decided not to but actually makes sure he tells us that they’re each sleeping on opposite sides of the tent with their own woman. That is a detail that someone has gone out of their way to put in. And I think that makes it much more profound. And if you do actually read, I'm not one of these people who thinks that Iliad is about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. However, when you read about what happens to ordinary soldiers, especially when they got a weak commander they don't trust, that not trusting commander is a crucial thing. In a passionate way, they get just one other soldier in an intense friendship, not at all sexual, but they call each other mom, they call each other pop, they bathe each other. Because when you're stuck in some swamp in some part of the world that you don't know, that one intense relationship, and I actually think by not making it sexual, he has completely trumped the relationship with Briseis'"

The Gender Paradox of the Nordic Welfare State

The Gender Paradox of the Nordic Welfare State

"Western liberals have a special place in their hearts for the Nordic countries. Their affection is nurtured by a conviction that done correctly, public policy can magically smooth out human contradiction and rid us of difficult tradeoffs. Nowhere is that hope more pronounced than in the Nordic policies related to gender, work, and family life, particularly as they affect women. Work/family, career/children, ambition/breastfeeding, family dinners, and hygge: In these gender-leveling countries, you really can have it all.

Except as the Kurdish-Swedish writer Nima Sanandaji shows in “The Nordic Glass Ceiling,” a paper he wrote for the Cato Institute, that’s just so much wishful thinking. Enthusiasm for women’s balanced lives in Iceland, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden has rested on cherry-picked numbers, half-truths, and a stubborn denial of unintended consequences...

The Nordic generosity towards young families does appear to increase female labor force participation... Maybe, but—and in policy, as in life, there is always a but—women pay a price. A UCLA study found that merely 11% of managers and professionals in Sweden are women, a number markedly lower than in many other developed economies, including France, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Notably, Iceland—the Nordic country with a smallish welfare state and with by far the shortest parental leave—ranks among the highest in the share of female managers in the world. The U.S. also stands as a rebuke to the common activist claim that generous family leave is a requirement for boosting gender equality. American women have a similarly high ratio of managers and professionals as Iceland, with no federal requirement for paid leave at all.

A growing body of research points to one reason for what many people might think of as counterintuitive findings: lengthy parental leave unintentionally pushes women to lose momentum in developing human capital and workplace seniority and to put more energy into domestic life. One paper quoted by Sanandaji concludes that parental leave not only doesn’t overcome the gender divisions of labor, it “may possibly exacerbate them.”

More ironically yet, the high taxes necessary to maintain the family-friendly welfare state also encourage women to work fewer hours. High taxes reduce the “opportunity costs” to working 30 instead of 40 hours (or part time, a particularly common arrangement among Nordic women.) High taxes also mean that “substitutable services”—private babysitters, prepared foods, house cleaners—remain out of reach for middle-class women. (Again, Iceland is an exception when it comes to taxes; its rates are relatively low).

Now, gender equality and women in executive positions are not the only goods in life, and it could well be that children, mothers, and possibly even fathers, are better off with more family time and respite from the frenzied work-and-spend treadmill endured by many two-career families in the United States. Media reports tend to show Scandinavians to be fairly content with their lot...

Sweden, Iceland, and Norway have created hard-to-resist government incentives to get parents to share leave time equally. Fathers have between 10 and 12 weeks reserved specifically for them. (Norway’s daddy quota is only 4 weeks). Mothers have a similar number of weeks assigned to them and the rest is for couples to decide. As expected, fathers take more leave than they did before these reforms, but they still account for less than 30% of the total time available to parents. In Denmark and Finland, men take less than 9% of total leave. Recently, Denmark debated a new policy reserving more leave specifically for fathers. It was mothers who objected: they didn’t want to give up any mommy time. Swedes with children under school age have a right to shorten their work hours without risking their jobs. The result? 43% of mothers with young children work part time, compared to 10% of fathers, and gender wage gaps remain close to the OECD average, about where they were before the reforms.

As Sanandaji observes, Nordics have also turned to quotas in their quest for gender parity. In 2003, Norway passed a law requiring women to have 40% of the board seats in public companies. So far, the law has not gone as expected: there was no appreciable impact on the gender pay gap, or on women’s career plans. In fact, Norwegian companies had less experienced board members, greater company leverage, higher company acquisition rates, and declining operating performance. About 20% of the companies that would have been affected by the legislation changed their corporate ownership structure to get out of the requirement"

Links - 28th February 2019 (2)

Nicholas J. Fuentes on Twitter - "Who could have guessed that redefining marriage to accommodate homosexuals was only the first phase of a systematic effort to undermine the traditional family? Oh wait, everybody with common sense did.
Remember how they used to say that gay marriage wouldn’t affect you? Now your kids are being taught how to have safe anal sex in schools lmfao. Oh yeah and your son will be wearing makeup and dresses."

Ed Krassenstein on Twitter: "Nice try but you are over the 280 character limit with this FAKE Tweet!… " - "Now more than ever we need transgressive and proud Santa Clauses: HIV+ Santas, Muslim Lesbian Santas, Santas with different types of bodies, Santas with genderfluid identities, Santas with acne and rebellious hygeine. Doesn't Jesus teach tolerance of all people?"

Henry on Twitter - ""This 'Sesame Street' Muppet will become the first to experience homelessness"
"Oscar the Grouch been living in a trash can for 49 years"
Male disposability

A #Palestinian toddler taken by his parents to... - Hussein Sam Ayoub - "A #Palestinian toddler taken by his parents to the #Hamas-led riots on the #Gaza-#Israel border passed away from inhaling tear gas (Later it was proven he had a breathing condition), world wide attention and condemnation.
An #Israeli pregnant women shot along with 9 others at a bus stop by a Palestinian terrorist is in critical condition, had an emergency c-section, and her baby passed away, silence from the world and media."
Actually it's celebrated as 'Resistance'

The Atlantic - Posts - "Trump Moves to Deport Vietnam War Refugees"
"Exclusive: The White House again wants to deport certain groups of protected migrants, a reversal after backing away from the policy months ago."
The Atlantic is being mischievous. If you don't scroll down you don't find out they're criminals. And if you stopped at the paragraph calling them alleged criminals you wouldn't find out they're convicted criminals

Lauren Southern on Twitter - "So I got banned from Patreon a year ago for a protest with Defend Europe against a boat called the Aquarius. My “manifest observable behaviour” apparently was wrong because this was a ship set out to rescue immigrants.
The Aquarius operations have now been totally shut down because of illegal activities, multiple government investigations into its operating NGOs partaking in human trafficking and the dumping of 24 tonnes of toxic waste into the Med.
Despite our protest being vindicated, and the government shutting them down... I will never receive an apology from Patreon. Nor will they reinstate my account. That’s because it wasn’t about morals a year ago, it was about politics.
Nothing has changed since then."

Claire Lehmann, Founding Editor: I have good news and bad news we're making good - "As you know, we are crowdfunded. Our primary revenue stream is the direct patronage of our readers, who currently support us through Patreon with US$23,400 a month. Up until now, Patreon has been a safe, reliable and mostly politically neutral solution. Recently this has changed with the targeting of creators as part of what we see as a move against free speech. Now, we and many other creators have been forced to consider other options, including SubscribeStar... We have chosen crowdfunding over a more traditional ad-driven model because it allows us the freedom to focus on quality over quantity; to publish voices and points of view that we know our readers appreciate, even if they may not attract always massive clicks or mainstream advertisers. We're proud to be a boot-strap operation. We’ve raised no venture capital and answer to no board of owners/investors. This gives us absolute editorial freedom, but it also makes us reliant on readers. Please consider joining more than 3,500 readers who support us monthly."

Why Bitcoin? Patreon Pushed By Mastercard to Ban Accounts in 'Terrible Precedent' - "Crowdfunding platform Patreon is grappling with fiat currency centralization after MasterCard demanded it must block the account of a prominent US author and several others. Citing an email from the company in August, Robert Spencer, who penned multiple books about countering Jihad and advised law enforcement agencies, said it had “axed” him and he could no longer put contributed funds to any use... Responding publicly, Patreon denied it had chosen to ban Spencer, alleging that “unfortunately Mastercard required” it to “remove” his account. Patreon has since gained negative publicity for further bans, including last week’s move against podcast host Sam Harris."

Lawyer Pursues Filing Formal Complaint With FTC Over Patreon, PayPal Antitrust Violation - "Attorney Lior Leser released a video detailing his intentions to file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission regarding the alleged antitrust violation committed by Patreon and Paypal against SubscribeStar (amongst many others). Leser has plans on taking the filing seriously, basically putting together a case file of all of the violations PayPal and Patreon committed when it came to what looks like colluding to remove people from having access to payments through their services, especially with pulling out of SubscribeStar... The media has basically looked upon situations where PayPal and Patreon have banned people from their services as a form of being on the “right side of history”, and that these corporations are aligning themselves with the radical Social Justice Warrior community. However, many of these people aren’t educated enough about history to recognize that when this kind of silencing and censorship becomes widespread against ideological dissidents, it’s just a matter of time before it affects the “allies” in the same way it affects the “enemy”."

Paypal Pulls Support For SubscribeStar Users, Including Tim Pool, Sargon of Akkad - "This was corroborated by Sargon of Akkad, who also detailed how this is part of the continued efforts from Social Justice Warriors to deplatform anyone who doesn’t align with the radicals on the Left. This recent purge started with Patreon, which was documented by Nick Monroe on Twitter, and now it’s escalated to SubscribeStar... Sleeping Giants was pulling the strings in organizing the deplatforming. It’s a Twitter account with a massive reach, consisting of 214,000 followers. They’ve been actively using shame tactics to demonetize various non-Leftists individuals, organizations, and media outlets for speaking out about the SJW agenda. This includes getting advertising pulled from major outlets like Tucker Carlson on Fox News or Breitbart... Basically, the goal of Social Justice Warriors at this point is to either deplatform their ideological opponents by getting them off of places like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, or Facebook, and barring that, they go after the funding of various pundits in order to financially starve them out of the spotlight. This seems to be a trend lately, especially after notable opposition to the extreme Left, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Sargon of Akkad, and James Allsup were Frecently banned from Patreon."

Patreon betrays the trust of its users - "Many YouTube personalities had turned to Patreon when demonetization practically eliminated all advertising revenue for creators with politically incorrect or controversial content. Seeking a secure way to ensure they could fund their own work, trust was placed in Patreon that they wouldn’t be influenced by ideologically based pressure groups.In his interview, Jack Conte told Rubin that Patreon was different saying “advertisers are not stakeholders in the Patreon ecosystem” thus leaving them free from censorship by corporations... A group called Women, Action and the Media (WAM), had organized a campaign to censor Facebook back in 2013, urging participants to contact advertisers to complain about their products appearing on pages with content they found offensive. It only took a week for the campaign to succeed"
"Hate speech" is the modern liberal equivalent of corrupting our youth with ungodly filth

Far-left extremists are raising money on Patreon to “inspire insurrection”. - "There are several far-left users who appear to be blatantly violating Pareon’s Community Guidelines. These users are raising thousands of dollars each month and are actively using that money to organize and advocate for violent and often illegal criminal activity."

Patreon Lets Podcaster Who Cheered Oakland Violence Raise Funds on Platform - "Patreon allowed a far-left proponent of “Black Marxism” who publicly celebrated acts of unprovoked violence against peaceful protesters in Oakland, California last week to profit from its platform."

More Violent Extremism Unearthed on Funding Platform Patreon - "Both Breitbart News and Far Left Watch have documented numerous examples of violent extremism on Patreon. So far, Patreon has not responded to Breitbart’s request for comment nor taken action against any of the pages identified."

Tanjong Rhu Wanton Mee - Old School Wanton Noodles With NEW Shop At Bugis - "there are different schools of Wanton Noodles in Singapore – some Malaysian style with more use of black sauce; Thai Bak Mee Moo Daeng which emphasizes on the use of pork lard and minimal seasonal; or soupy Hong Kong Wonton Noodles."

How to Force a Public Wi-Fi Network Login Page to Open - "You open your laptop in an airport, at a coffee shop, or perhaps in your hotel or conference room. You sit down to work, select the correct Wi-Fi network, and … nothing. Your Wi-Fi icon may show it's connected, but your browser says You are not connected to the internet no matter how hard you try. That popover login screen just never loads...
An easy trick is to load the router's default page. Try entering 192.168.1.1, 127.1.1.1, 1.1.1.1, or http://localhost in your browser address bar, and you might get the default login page to load...
try visiting a non-HTTPS site; example.com is a great option as it's non-secured and maintained by ICANN...
You may have noticed your device loading captive.apple.com when connecting to Wi-Fi; you could go to that site directly to force your browser to test the connection. Here are the default pages, each of which works on any platform:
Apple iOS and macOS: captive.apple.com
Microsoft Windows: www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt
Google Android and Chrome: google.com/generate_204
Tip: The reason you need to load a non-HTTPS site is that if you try to visit a secure site and your network tries to redirect your browser to a login screen, your browser will prevent the redirect to keep your data secure—something that will also keep you from logging into that Wi-Fi network."
Since almost every site kicks you to https nowadays, it's nice knowing that you still have example.com on http, so you can get redirected to the login page

Crime and Unemployment: Effects across Age and Race Categories - "Negative criminal opportunity-related and positive criminal motivation-related effects are found at the aggregate level, but these vary among age groups and are more evident for white than for African American arrest rates. Further, these effects hold even when controlling for the potential influence of other variables identified in recent research as having an impact on the unemployment-crime relationship."
In other words, race does play a role in the relationship between unemployment and crime. So it's not just about poverty.

Variations in Correlates of Race-Specific Urban Homicide Rates - "A variety of factors from past homicide studies serve to predict white rates of homicide, allowing for the development of a broad profile of white communities with low rates of homicides. In contrast, only two factors (population size and residential segregation) are statistically-significant predictors of homicide rates among African Americans, resulting in an essentially non-descriptive community profile. The results suggest that the two groups may be subject to different social forces, and the ensuing discussion poses the possibility that understanding differences in homicide rates among African-American communities may require an incorporation of factors not normally considered in homicide research."

Scope and Conceptual Issues in Testing the Race-Crime Invariance Thesis: Black, White, and Hispanic Comparisons* - "Our goal in this article is to contribute conceptually and empirically to assessments of the racial invariance hypothesis, which posits that structural disadvantage predicts violent crime in the same way for all racial and ethnic groups... The mixed findings we report from our comparisons (across whites, blacks, and Hispanics; offense types; type of disadvantage) suggest caution and uncertainty about the notion that structural sources of violence affect racial/ethnic groups in uniform ways."

How to Optimize Your Apology (Ep. 353) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "HO: Something that doctors worry about a lot is whether they should apologize after a mistake was made. And the reason they worry is that they’re scared of lawsuits.
So a doctor’s apology might be used against them in a malpractice suit. At the same time, there was evidence showing that a doctor was less likely to get sued if they did apologize.
HO: So people have identified what they call a vicious cycle, where doctors are afraid to apologize because they’re scared of getting sued. But the patients, the only reason they sue is perhaps because they never got an apology. To combat this, a lot of states started passing what are called “I’m sorry” laws. These are laws that basically say that if a doctor apologizes to a patient, that apology can’t be used in court against them.
Ho was curious to find out what happened to malpractice claims once doctors could apologize without fear of reprisal. He and the economist Elaine Liu tried to measure just how much an apology was worth.
HO: We found shockingly really big effects. We found that states that passed this law saw the speed of settlements increase by around 20 percent. We saw that for sort of moderate injuries, the final size of the settlements decreased by around $20,000. For sort of major injuries, which included quadriplegia and death, the size of the final settlements decreased by around $50,000 or $60,000...
LIST: The first data pattern that jumps out of our experiment is that you really have to squint hard to make the case that apologies by themselves work. It’s very difficult to find consistent and significant impacts of the apology alone on future spending or the number of trips that consumers take...
HO: And in one video he looks really angry about the Monica Lewinsky thing. And, in another case, Bill Clinton looks apologetic for Monica Lewinsky. The people that saw apologetic Clinton, the apology worked. They liked him more. But the thing is that people that saw angry Clinton respected him more, right? There’s this tradeoff between being liked and being respected. So the other sort of major cost of an apology is it can make you look incompetent."

The Germans who fought Hitler

The Germans who fought Hitler - History Extra

"Hitler almost by magic seemed to have some supernatural power that protected him at the very last moment. The plots didn't succeed... The facts have been known for some time. No one's ever put them together to present the picture. And indeed even the facts were uncongenial to know after the Second World War when no one wanted to believe there’d ever been a good German...

I discovered this whole conspiracy beginning in 1938 when Hitler was about to be removed, with the agreement of Winston Churchill and the plotters thought with British government as well. At the moment he ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia he was going to be killed. The plan was to take him to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s father where he's going to be declared to be mad but he was actually going to be killed on the way…

There was this extraordinary organization built up during the war known as the Schwarze Kapelle, the black orchestra, which did these things. Tried to warn the West of when he was going to launch his attacks, frustrated his plans, passed us his crucial military secrets, tried to kill him probably seven times of which we only publicly know the 20th of July and von Stauffenberg and sought to establish an early peace. These were people of extraordinary moral courage, who quite contrary to a lie put about after the war, that there was only ever a German resistance when it was obvious that Hitler was going to be defeated, actually began in 1935 and sustained their opposition at the very highest level of Hitler's administration right the way through to the hangman's noose in 1944...

Was the Second World War the war that didn't have to be?... Was the peace after it the peace that didn't have to hand over Eastern Europe to the Russians?...

In 1937 Carl Goerdeler the mayor of Leipzig, one time candidate for Chancellor of Germany and a high official in Hitler's government came to the national liberal club and had a dinner in which he warned that Hitler was intent on war, nothing would stop him. Appeasements wouldn't work. And in September of the following year, 1938, he was going to launch a coup, launch an invasion to take Sudetenland. And the deal was, supported by himself, members of the Foreign Office and all the key German generals that if Britain stood up to him, then at the moment that he ordered the troops to march on Sudetenland, they would remove him in a coup.

The coup by the way is in place, there are 50 armed officers ready to attack the Chancellory, the back door of the Chancellory has been secretly opened, only 15 SS men are there. It's supported by the Chief of Police in Berlin, by every one of the army officers in command of the regiments around Berlin and by key officials in the Foreign Office. Just at the moment, literally, within half an hour of the coup being launched, up pops Chamberlain and proposes Munich...

On the day war is declared on the first of September, 1939, [he] meets a colleague... and says this: if Germany loses this war, it will be history for Germany. But if Germany wins this war, if Hitler wins this war, it will be a catastrophe for mankind. We are utterly dedicated to make sure that he loses and help the Allies win. And that's what they do right through the whole period of the war until after the 20th of July plot...

Why did Chamberlain not allow that to happen? And I think the answer to that question lies in the personality of Chamberlain. He knew about the coup - of that I'm very clear. I think his flight to Godesberg before Munich was a deliberate attempt, at least in part to frustrate the coup. I think he regarded the plotters as undemocratic, and he's probably right. But I think above all, he believed that he was a great Peacemaker of the age and if anybody was going to deliver peace he was. And it was better to deal with the devil you knew, which was Hitler, rather than the plotters you didn't know. And I think in this, of course, lies Chamberlain's fundamental misjudgment that he believed that Hitler was a conventional leader, a conventional politician who could be negotiated with, who could be appeased, whereas Hitler, the others understood was a man of unique evil, who was never going to be appeased and was always going to go to war. And it's that fundamental misjudgment which I think causes him to have the hubris to believe that he could make peace himself with Hitler, rather than relying on the plotters to do the job...

Genuinely speaking, this was the best chance to get rid of Hitler. And if it did work, there wouldn't have been a Second World War. Would we then have a German government that was less democratic than we wished, that was slightly militarist, that was inherently anti semitic? Probably we would. But would it have been one that nevertheless clung to broadly Christian values and was in the line of German governments back to the Kaiser? Probably it would have been as well and that's the fundamental difference...

‘How many serious attempts were there to try to bring down Hitler?’

‘The answer is, we don't know... I've counted in the book, I think, seven or eight serious plots. And one of the things that is extraordinary is the extent to which Hitler almost by magic seemed to have some supernatural power that protected him. At the very last moment, the plots didn't succeed... Some of them fatalistically came to believe in the end that he was protected by malevolent power, and one of them, Canaris, said the truth is that God does not want him to be killed. God wants Germany to pay the full measure of her debt for the evil that he has created.’...

Right from the start, they seek to prevent the war widening from Czechoslovakia to Poland. And after the Polish invasion they seek to prevent the war widening to the west because then it became a global war. And constantly they're saying to the Allies through secret channels I discovered in Sweden, a bank in Sweden, to London. Look, here's a piece you can do. If we get rid of Hitler will you agree to this peace? Constantly Churchill and Roosevelt, who have adopted a policy from Casablanca onwards of unconditional surrender to keep Stalin on board are saying no. So these constant attempts to strike a peace in which by the way, Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was actually a member of the Abwehr, is closely involved with Bishop Belle of Chichester are constantly refused because they come up against the rock of unconditional surrender...

Is it ever possible to be a traitor and a patriot at the same time? That's the central question. My answer that is yes. And the lives of these men and women illuminate that fact...

The question you also have to ask is other parallels between that age and this and there are frightening parallels and lots of them, and I list them in the book. Are we going therefore to see the same outcome on balance? I think, no. And for two key reasons. First of all, there isn't a Hitler. There isn't somebody who combines both unique evil on the one hand, and unique genius in handling power on the other who is determined on war. Now, are the conditions right for somebody to emerge, maybe, but there's nobody there with that quality.

But secondly, and more comfortingly, actually, our democracies now are much more deeply founded than was the Weimar Republic Germany. A pretty rickety institution, quite easily overturned. If you look at America today, what I think you conclude is, the antibodies of the American Constitution are doing their work in restraining the power of President Trump indeed are quite recently in America, in Washington. And people described to me in exactly those terms. not perfectly, of course, but they are working in the battle between Trump and the Constitution. I think the Constitution is winning. And I think in Britain, it is probably inconceivable even though populism is abroad, and seems to be one of the primary spirits of our age. For, for the moment, at least, it's very difficult to see that our own constitutional settlement. It could be temporary, subverted, but could not be overturned in the way that the Weimar Republic was. In that sense, I think the worst aspects of this cannot be replicated today."

Links - 28th February 2019 (1)

Amanda Ellen - I've stopped watching SNL for the last long while,... - "I've stopped watching SNL for the last long while, since they got heavy in the Trump/Baldwin skits. I didn't know why it annoyed me so much, I can't stand Trump, and usually love roasts of him. But I've come to the conclusion I find the Baldwin skits so unfunny, because they come from a place of clear hate for him. Good comedic acting, especially impersonations, mandates empathy and an approach of understanding for the character played. That's true whether you hate the person you are playing the role of, or love them. Otherwise it just comes off as a one note, unfunny mockery with no depth. ..Hence why SNL usually has more people clapping in political agreement, than laughing in comedic reaction"

Teaching kids to code: I’m a developer and I think it doesn’t actually teach important skills. - " It’s hard to teach the difference between merely executing steps, such as following a recipe, and doing something well. It can only be passed on through feel and experience. And every time you involve your kids when you work on something you value, you are teaching them how to do things well. You are preparing them to write code.But you’re not only teaching them that. You’re teaching them the world is full of interesting things to discover. You’re showing them how to be passionate and look for that ephemeral sense of quality in everything they do. The best part is that even if they don’t become coders—most shouldn’t and won’t—the same skills can be used in nearly any career, in every hobby, in every life. When we force kids to learn syntax, we reinforce the idea that if something is not a blatantly employable skill, it’s not valuable. Adults can learn syntax. Only kids can learn to embrace curiosity"

What We Talk About When We Talk About Immigration - "Can the elite “anywhere people” begin to understand why the “somewhere people” stayed at home, let alone why they now don’t want the streets in which they grew up inhabited by people who don’t share their culture or language? Last year Douglas Murray wrote a well-researched and erudite book called The Strange Death of Europe, which seemed to sum up what a lot of people were thinking, but the anywhere-person newspaper The Guardian’s only response was to call it “gentrified xenophobia.”... virtually no one when they are talking about their concerns about immigration in the current climate are talking about people who are skilled and highly educated like my father. This has been one of the more disingenuous moves made by those seeking to make an economic case for immigration: highlighting a specific top tier as the norm that can be applied to all. Many of those who leave their countries of origin and do well already come from elite classes. For example, Brahmin from India’s highest caste represent only 3% of people in India, but 45% of Indians living in the United States... trade unions traditionally supported strong immigration controls fearing the downward pressure that increased competition for low-skilled jobs might have on wages. They recognised and openly articulated that the special interests of the working class were diametrically opposed to those of poor immigrants coming from abroad. For Friedman, uncontrolled immigration was only desirable in the free market and is fundamentally incompatible with the welfare state. The issue is that welfare is “sticky,” it takes away the incentives for people to move out. This is not only true of immigrants who fail to achieve their dreams (in the past many thousands of unsuccessful US immigrants moved back to their homelands), but also of native populations... In the past, before the welfare state, areas recovering from creative destruction were able to bounce back much more quickly. But since the welfare state has become so strong, the natural incentives to adapt to change are no longer there, which in turn can lock in endemic multigenerational poverty... The benefit of cheap labour does not come without its costs, as Reihan Salam notes:
'It is generally accepted that it is more expensive to provide the same quality of education to disadvantaged kids than to those from better off families. For one, high-poverty schools often have a hard time attracting and retaining the best teachers, and poor children are more likely to need social services'...
every penny spent on a child living in poverty born to immigrant parents is a penny not spent on a child in a similar position born to native parents. This produces strong incentives for political struggle since the levers of power categorically allocate resources to this group or that group. Polarization becomes inevitable... the Office of National Statistics reported that 50.5 percent of all households received more in benefits (including in kind benefits such as education) than they paid in taxes. Given these facts, there is a serious question: can we afford mass low-skilled immigration?"
Extrapolating from skilled migration to make a case for migration in general is problematic

Warning: Telling a Lame Joke in an Elevator can Endanger Your Career - "I wrote a conciliatory email to the colleague who filed the complaint: Prof. Simona Sharoni, who teaches Gender and Women’s Studies at a small New England college. As she did not grow up in the U.S., I explained the intended meaning of what I said, apologized if it caused her discomfort and suggested we engage in a dialogue. I further suggested that to raise a complaint that many might consider “frivolous” would only provide ammunition to those who opposed the women’s movement and efforts by women to flag and seek redress for real forms of harassment... The ethics and executive committees found me guilty of using a phrase they described as “inappropriate and offensive.” They censured me again for emailing Prof. Sharoni. They insisted that I offer an apology that would satisfy both them and her. I categorically refused. In acting this way, the ISA ignored its own code of conduct, which requires any aggrieved party to try to resolve a conflict privately before asking for adjudication from the ethics committee. Prof. Sharoni did no such thing and rebuffed my attempt to do so. She complained about my email and asked the ISA to tell me never to contact her again. It is nothing short of bizarre that an organization whose members study international conflict and know the value of dialogue over coercion opted for coercion from the outset."

Senator Hirono: Democrats Struggle To Relate To Voters Due To 'How Smart We Are'

MSM Blast Trump Nomination Of Fox News Reporter For U.N. Job, But Two Dozen 'Journalists' Joined Obama Team

It’s Now Racist To Ask Students To ‘Be Respectful In Class’ - "White professors can no longer tell their students to “be respectful in class” or ask them to take their feet off of desks or to turn off their phones, lest they be investigated for racial bias. Anita Moss, a senior lecturer of biology at the University of Texas-San Antonio (UTSA) was investigated after she called police on a repeatedly disruptive student, according to the College Fix. Moss, who is white, had been telling Paige Burgess, who is black, all semester to be less disruptive and to take her feet off of chairs... UTSA conducted an investigation and found Moss did not discriminate against the student. The university spoke to Burgess, interviewed current and previous students, and concluded “racial bias was not a factor.” Burgess herself said she never thought she was disciplined because of the color of her skin... Even though Moss was cleared of racial discrimination and had positive reviews from students, she was removed from class for the semester. The racial bias investigation was not the only investigation going on. Her demands for proper classroom etiquette were also reviewed, and led to her removal... UTSA President Taylor Eighmy sent an email to students on November 13 announcing the investigations against Moss, writing that “regardless of the final outcomes regarding yesterday’s incident, we have an obligation as an institution to take a hard look at our campus climate—especially for students of color—and enact systemic change to make UTSA a more inclusive campus.”"

Sen. Gillibrand: The Future Is Female. Don Jr: I Have A Question. - "Donald Trump Jr., a father of five, was unimpressed by the tweet, asking Gillibrand an important question: When should I tell my young sons "there's no future for them?"... Whoopi Goldberg actually suggested Trump's sons have predatory "tendencies.""You only worry about this for your child if you think your child has these tendencies," Goldberg said. "If you think your child is not someone who is assaulting people, it shouldn’t be a concern for you."... Trump hit back by re-upping a video clip of Goldberg excusing Roman Polanski for rape, because, per Goldberg, it wasn't really "rape-rape." Whatever that means."

Irish lecturer stabbed to death in Paris 'insulted the Mohammed' - "The 66-year-old academic, named locally as John Dowling, was attacked and stabbed 13 times outside the Paris university where he worked... Ali has told police that the teacher had made fun of his Muslim religion during English classes at the university.‘He produced a drawing, which he showed off in class, insulting the Prophet Mohammed,’ Ali said, according to Ms Denis.Despite this claim, Ms Denis said ‘nobody remembers such an incident. ‘We don’t have proof of radicalization, but rather a feeling that we’re dealing with someone who is very religious, very pious, very practicing.’"

Facebook's Community Standards Ban Discussing 'Sexual Preference' - "Tumblr isn’t the only social media platform cracking down on NSFW content. Earlier this week, Facebook users uncovered a new set of community standards that outright ban discussing “sexual preference,” “sexual roles,” “breasts,” and “buttocks” on the site... outing oneself as queer could be banned for being “suggestive” content. Furthermore, Facebook’s community standards don’t just apply to Facebook alone. They also govern all social media platforms owned by Facebook, as Wired reported in April. That means both Instagram and Facebook Messenger are impacted by the new rules... The move by Tumblr has since been strongly criticized for harming queer users, sex workers, and adult artists—criticisms that are similarly being levied against Facebook."

21 Breathtaking Photos Of Isolated Tribes From All Around The World

Being Classically Liberal - Posts - "Black girl, 9, kills herself after classmates bully her for having white friend"
The Other 98% - "Trump's America 2018"
"(M.P.) The Other 98% comes out swinging against interracial friendships. Trump's America, I tell you!"
This is what happens when liberals teach kids that black and white people can't be friends and that black people need to be cautious, suspicious and distrustful of white people

Boy, 9, found hanged 'was bullied for being white' - "A boy of nine who was found hanged is believed to have killed himself after he was ‘bullied for being white’ by an Asian gang at school... Aaron’s mother, Kelly-Marie Dugmore, 30, and stepfather Paul Jones, 43, said that despite complaints to the school, nothing was done to stop the bullying.Aaron had recently started in Year Five at Erdington Hall Primary School in Birmingham, a school where 75 per cent of pupils come from ethnic minority backgrounds... His mother claimed she went to see the head teacher of the school several times only to be told: ‘You didn’t have to come to this school, you chose to come here.’A neighbour of the boy’s grandmother earlier told how ‘he had been targeted by a gang of older bullies at the school’."

The Atlantic - Posts - "Trump Moves to Deport Vietnam War Refugees
Exclusive: The White House again wants to deport certain groups of protected migrants, a reversal after backing away from the policy months ago."
From all the comments bashing Trump, it's clear that either no one reads articles. Then again the article itself is also mischievous by actively obscuring important facts
If we can't judge a book by its cover, can we judge an article by its headline?

Pat Sajak Savages The Academy Awards In Less Than 280 Characters On Twitter - "“Here’s a quick fix for the Academy Awards show: expand it to two nights,” he tweeted Monday morning. “On the first night, give out awards, and celebrate the history and wonder of movies. On the second night, hold your political rally.”

The Verge - Posts - "The five emoji skin tone options don't accommodate a diverse world"
"How do you choose which emoji skin tone to use?"
Comments: "Remember when The Verge used to do tech news instead of this crap?"
"get rid of them all and force everyone to use Simpsons yellow. Problem solved."
"Riiiiight.... also remember to add the 131 genders please! "
"C'mon man. If your identity hangs on the color of an emoji please see a professional. Just use yellow. 🏻🏼🏽🏾🏿"
"The simple yellow spherical blobs were the most inclusive emojis one could ever have.No chance of dissecting who is on the other side... Just a personal expression conveyed using a digital form.Now it leaves room for needless articles like this."
"Just think: had we not invented this problem in the first place, we wouldn’t need this conversation."
Another example of the slippery slope

Links - 27th February 2019

Dogs That Don't Shed: 23 Hypoallergenic Dog Breeds - "Non-shedding and hypoallergenic dogs seem to be more popular than ever. With dog allergies so common, many pet lovers are seeking hypoallergenic dog breeds - sometimes paying thousands of dollars to get them. And still others are going hypoallergenic for the hair, or lack of it. Dog shedding is a big problem for many pet owners, but it's another strike off the list for owners of hypoallergenic dog breeds. While no dog is truly hypoallergenic as all dogs shed some allergens, there are some breeds that are known to be better for allergy-sufferers. And, these same dogs that don't shed may just have you put away the lint roller for good."

Why You Should Never, Ever Use Quora - "Four years ago, Eric Mill wrote about Quora’s tendency to hoard knowledge, and nothing’s changed since.According to their About page, “Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge.” With 300 million monthly users, and nearly 40 million questions asked so far, they’re doing a good job of growing the world’s knowledge, but a terrible job of sharing it.All of Quora’s value is derived from the answers provided by its users, and they go to great lengths to make a well-designed platform for finding and replying to questions.But they do everything they can to make sure you can’t get those contributions back out... When Quora shuts down, and it will eventually shut down one day, all of that collected knowledge will be lost unless they change their isolationist ethos.Back in 2012, Adam D’Angelo wrote, “We hope to become an internet-scale Library of Alexandria.”As long as Quora keeps boarding up the exits, we may see it end the same way."

NYC high school bans Nazi props from 'Sound of Music' production - "Lisa Mars of LaGuardia High reportedly ordered the props removed, though the New York City Department of Education later told the New York Daily News that the symbols and flags would still appear in two scenes. The prominent performing arts school was made legendary in the musical “Fame.”... The Third Reich symbols appear in the play in the context of the family von Trapp opposing the Nazis. LaGuardia students designed the set.“This is a very liberal school, we’re all against Nazis,” one sophomore performer told the Daily News. “But to take out the symbol is to try to erase history… Obviously the symbols are offensive. But in context, they are supposed to be.”"

Women May Have Their Own Scientific Truth, Princeton Now Teaches Students - "Maybe we've been studying physics all wrong? Maybe feminism and critical race theory have the key to mysteries on the quantum level? A 2017 paper in The Minnesota Review (a Duke University publication) argued just that. "Combining intersectionality and quantum physics can provide for differing perspectives on organizing practices long used by marginalized people, for enabling apparatuses that allow for new possibilities of safer spaces, and for practices of accountability," it proposed.The superposition of electrons apparently mirrors the ambiguous nature of identity ― and vice verse.And have you considered the study of "chemistry from a gender perspective?" What about introducing "feminist ecology" to the study of glaciers in order to promote more equitable "human-ice interactions?"This critical take on the hard sciences (no masculinity intended) as offered by Taylor ― whose doctoral dissertation was "A Foucauldian Analysis of the Science, Ethics and Politics of the Medical Production of Cisgendered Lives" ― has been around for a while, but seems to be gaining a new wind at a time of heightened identity politics. To some, the inter-faculty creep of unsystematic and ideologically-driven ideas from the humanities to the sciences is a challenge to the empiric method itself.Marcel Kuntz, a research director in the French National Institute of Scientific Research, wrote in 2012 that letting postmodernism have its way within the scientific community could "[slow] down or [prevent] much needed scientific research." Though parts of critical theory may be intellectually challenging and even motivated by lofty goals, Kuntz argued that their underlying aim of shattering the hierarchy of truth can be deleterious to progress."This form of postmodernist assault on science has been difficult to grasp for many scientists, because it comes disguised in the clothes of democracy, freedom of speech and tolerance of opinion," wrote Kunts. "However... scientists will never be able to win in postmodern courtroom-style debates: all 'social constructs' of science are equal, but some are more equal than others.""
The Science Wars were bad enough, but cloaked in the guise of social justice the real War On Science is even more dangerous

Princeton’s course on how marginalized scientists can produce “different ways of knowing” « Why Evolution Is True - "(while some scientists may be bigots, science itself cannot be, as it’s simply a method for producing knowledge.) And I’d argue against anyone who claims that different sexes or ethnic groups will produce “different kinds of scientific knowledge”. Maybe they’ll ask different questions, and if that’s what Catherine Taylor means, fine, but there are already plenty of women scientists who ask exactly the same type of questions, in the same way, as do men scientists. Check out Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier’s work on CRISPR/Cas9, which builds on work by a whole community of scientists of different sex and nationality. Doudna and Charpentier approach molecular biology in exactly the way everyone else does. In fact, if the answers to the course’s questions were “no”, there would be no need for such a course. What we have here is a semester-long exercise in confirmation bias... The course above is an embarrassment for a school of Princeton’s reputation. It is simply social-justice propaganda that will distort science for ideological ends. It’s dubious scholarship, a waste of the students’ tuition money, and unlikely itself to produce new knowledge. It will produce clones that parrot Clune-Taylor’s ideology. It’s taught by Catherine Clune-Taylor, a postdoctoral research associate in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton. (In general, I don’t favor courses being taught entirely by postdocs.) Her thesis at the University of Alberta was ““From Intersex to DSD: A Foucauldian Analysis of the Science, Ethics and Politics of the Medical Production of Cisgendered Lives.” Enough said."

Stone Age food was haute cuisine - "The meal – or, more likely, the dish, one element of a more varied repast – was simple, but elegantly so. It comprised freshwater carp eggs, cooked in a fish broth.The top of the earthenware bowl in which it was prepared was sealed with leaves of some sort – the eggs perhaps fried off before the stock was added, the leaves holding in steam and perhaps also adding a note or two of their own.All up, then, the dish – a fish roe soup a little like a Korean altang, perhaps, or a Thai tom yam khai pla – likely had a pleasing and rounded depth of flavour, a certain delicacy and a beguiling aroma. It would not have been out of place on a menu in any posh restaurant from New York to Tokyo.Except that this particular meal was cooked almost 6000 years ago, not far from what is these days Berlin."

A No Deal Brexit would be a liberation, not a crisis - "The UK already conducts more than 55 per cent of its export trade with non-EU members, primarily under WTO rules, and the proportion is rising. Even if allowance is made for those non-EU countries that have preferential trade deals with the EU (which may not immediately carry over on Brexit), about half of our exports go to the remaining non-EU countries... we shall, of course, continue to have ‘access’ to EU markets under WTO rules, as the US has ‘access’ to EU markets now... Most countries now permit traders to submit their customs documentation electronically in advance of the goods arriving at the border. Virtually all submissions of the EU’s own Single Administrative Document (SAD), for declaring imports and exports, are now made online, for example. This means that most trade arriving from countries that are members of neither the Single Market nor the EU Customs Union suffer little or no hold-up at the border when entering the EU. There is no reason for this to change after Brexit. Streamlined, computerised borders are the norm."

‘I was sacked for saying Brexit is good’ - "Andres Georgi had been earning a living as a bicycle courier for Deliveroo in Berlin. But earlier this month, he made the mistake of making smalltalk with a British customer, Redfern Jon Barrett, a writer, activist and Remainer. Georgi said that Brexit was a good thing.After the exchange, Barrett sent a tweet complaining to Deliveroo and branding Georgi a Nazi... most people appreciated the conversation, he says – even when it hit upon touchy political subjects. ‘With my Turkish customers I could speak about Erdogan and we always had a good laugh.’"
Ironically, German law means you can't call people (who are demonstrably not Nazis) Nazis
More evidence that we are all Nazis now

Brexit was about more than immigration - "the fact remains that the number-one reason people voted to leave the EU was, according to the Ashcroft polls, ‘the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK’. Aka, sovereignty.‘Regain control over immigration’ was second, and it is in many ways inseparable from the first. Taking back control means taking back control of borders, too.For many people who voted Leave, then, Brexit meant sovereignty and sovereignty meant controlling immigration. It was not simply a vote to reduce migration by any means necessary... May seems to think that becoming a colony of the EU is a small price to pay for insulating us from the economic shock of a proper Brexit. And she’s betting that ending free movement is enough to keep voters onside... The public backlash to the Withdrawal Agreement has been swift, among both Leavers and Remainers, as reflected across various polls. According to a YouGov survey, 58 per cent of Leave voters say the deal doesn’t respect the referendum result – just 26 per cent think it does... After May released her so-called Chequers proposal for future trade with the EU, one poll showed that sovereignty and the ability to do trade deals – the two things Chequers would concede to the EU – had leapfrogged immigration to become Leave voters’ top two concerns... Ipsos MORI found that in the months after the Brexit vote, when it seemed, briefly, that the government was actually planning to implement it, both Leavers and Remainers became more positive about immigration – even though the number of people who wanted numbers decreased remained the same."

A Reply to Nick Cohen - "Just as we were once instructed that criticising the Soviet Union played into the hands of American imperialism, those who attack Ikhwani, salafi, Wahhabi, and Khomeinist fanatics today stand accused of promoting the interests of the nativist Right. This kind of Stalinist blackmail, as Cohen certainly knows, led generations of progressive intellectuals into cowardly silence and complacent appeasement of totalitarianism. My description of the Islamic veil as a strategic tool in the struggle for control of the public space causes Cohen great indignation. But I have been saying this for 15 years, as have liberal Muslim intellectuals such as Kamel Daoud, Boualem Sansal, Fatiah Boudjahlat, and the feminists of the Maghreb. Cohen complains that I only denounce the Left, and not the Right. But this is because I expect more of a Left that was traditionally critical of religion and has now retreated into moral relativity. A stroke of the pen cannot erase the authentic treason of the progressive European intellectuals who have justified—indeed, excused—terrorism in the name of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or colonialism, or the “Arab-Muslim humiliation.” As I write, Corbyn is completing his transformation into a British Jacques Doriot, the French Communist who became a collaborator in 1940 and fought as a Waffen SS lieutenant on the Russian front."

M&S knickers display 'won't change over feminist concern' - "Marks & Spencer has said it won't change a display suggesting women must have "fancy little knickers", amid a feminist backlash. The retailer was blasted for its "vomit-inducing" shopfront in Nottingham, which included a menswear showcase of "outfits to impress"... The commercials follow the theme of "must-haves" for men and women and feature model David Gandy doing the washing up.Gandy has responded to the backlash by tweeting that men who want any "must have fancy knickers" can find them at M&S... Another window display at the same Nottingham store is aimed at women and suggests they, too, must have "outfits to impress". M&S said in a statement its stores had various combinations of Christmas window displays, but the same two displays would appear next to one another at some other branches."
Another classic case of feminist (wilful?) blindness just to push their grievance agenda. Or maybe in their battle against 'stereotypes', any suggestion that men can have outfits to impress or women can have fancy knickers is taboo

Radio station banned 'Baby, it's Cold Outside' over claims it's about rape. This English teacher disagreed - "A number of radio stations across the United States and Canada are banning the Christmas song 'Baby, It’s Cold Outside' over criticisms that the lyrics are about rape. The song, written by Guys and Dolls writer Frank Loesser in 1944, has been the target of disapproval... The teacher reveals that contextually, it’s normal in 1940s America for a woman to be chaperoned when she is with another man. The woman in the song is "staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house". The Tumblr user adds: "The song makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore it’s normal and expected for a lady’s gentleman companion to pressure her despite her protests, because he knows she would have to say that whether or not she meant it, and if she really wants to stay she won’t be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than, 'I’m staying because I want to.'" So it’s not actually a song about rape – in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so."
Today's feminist is tomorrow's rape apologist

We'll probably kill journalists who don't report the truth, says Thai leader - "Thailand’s junta leader, Prayuth Chan-ocha, has said he will “probably just execute” any journalist who does not “report the truth”. Last month Gen Prayuth said he had the power to shut down news outlets, and on Wednesday he took an even harsher line. “We’ll probably just execute them,” said Prayuth, without a trace of a smile, when asked by reporters how the government would deal with those who do not adhere to the official line"

The Morality of Human Difference

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Human Difference

"As the BBC correspondent in South Africa covering the bloody meltdown of apartheid, I was quite a student of racism. I used to report on the race classification boards that would decide in which of a dozen or more groups you belonged, how far you were up or down the hierarchy of color which decided almost every aspect of your life. They used light meters to measure skin shade, I remember, and pushed pencils through your hair to see how curly it was. The developing science of genetics was already showing that Afrikaners who thought themselves the purest white were on average 6.9% black and the whole apparatus of institutionalized racism would come crashing down to a global chorus of condemnation.

Now President Macron of France wants to go further. He wants to abolish the notion of race itself. He plans to remove the commitment to racial equality in the French constitution because he says, all humans are basically the same, which makes the very idea of racial difference prejudice, nonsense...

If you abolish race, you rule out positive as well as negative discrimination. And what about all the other group identites? The feminists, the gays, the trans, who campaign so loudly for recognition and parity and safe spaces where others are kept out? Where does that leave those LBGT only student halls in Sheffield, that black feminist festival in Paris where white men will be banned? Does diversity divide us or promote and protect the marginalized?...

‘Recently Reni Eddo-Lodge, who's won the Jhalak prize for writers of color, wrote amongst many other things, obviously, that this is a country where racism is at an all time high. That struck me as arrant nonsense’…

‘For me, it's difficult to answer that question. And the reason is racism now is far more covert. It's less overt... Last Friday I did a talk on the Windrush and the contributions of the people from the Empire and Windrush. I played them an extract from till their first do part [sp?]. Most of the people under 30 were shocked’...

‘I think that makes my point that the racism of 30 years ago was much greater than it is to-’

‘It was greater in the wider public arena, in the fact that that could be screened on the BBC... just because we don't get those overt displays of rife racism doesn't mean that anything has got better’...

‘Women are inherently unsafe… in the UK... it’s definitely on a different scale. But you know, I think the #metoo movement for example, has shown that whether we don't feel that our lives are at risk potentially on a day to day basis, we do feel threatened, we do feel marginalized, we do feel voiceless in a lot of different arenas.’

‘This country has a woman Prime Minister, a woman Director of Public Prosecutions, a woman Metropolitan Police Commissioner, a woman head of the Supreme Court, women-only shortlists in political parties... what more do you need for women to become, to feel safe?...

Going back to the safe space, specifically, it's safe - making women safe against men. Aren’t women who want such safe spaces, therefore not guilty of doing precisely what's been done to women in the past, and in many cultures now, which is basically demonizing by gender, demonizing by identity? Saying that basically men as a sex are inherently dangerous and that is a kind of prejudice is it not?’...

‘What’s it being safe from?... aren’t you being rather disingenuous? Safe space for women means keeping men out, doesn't it? Don't be disingenuous. Don't say some people might interpret it to have, to say, Oh, we can let men in, that's not what it’s about, is it?’

‘Well I’m a pseophologist, so I do see the nuance in things and I do also-’

‘Is that another word for being disingenuous?’

‘Perhaps’...

‘Words are whatever we mean them to mean’...

‘It was interesting that you said we do feel marginalized, we do things we do feel, you know, safer if we're on our own. It's on, when you talk about post #metoo. Who’s the we?... I don't think that all women are a lump, an indistinguishable one. Is there not a danger that identity politics just essentialises people as though we all share our identities and that means we’ve got the same views?’"


If covert racism is as bad as overt racism, why bother fighting overt racism since we know covert racism will never go away? It just makes the task of eliminating 'racism' even harder while not improving the situation at all

Links - 25th February 2019

Trump’s Plan to Decriminalize Homosexuality Is an Old Racist Tactic - "The truth is, this is part of an old colonialist handbook. In her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak coined the term “White men saving brown women from brown men” to describe the racist, paternalistic process by which colonizing powers would decry the way men in power treated oppressed groups, like women, to justify attacking them. Spivak was referencing the British colonial agenda in India. But Grennell’s attack might be a case of white men trying to save brown gay men from brown straight men, to the same end."
When Trump Derangement Syndrome means you support homophobia
Whataboutism is good when employed for progressive ends
Comments: "You'd probably support killing puppies if he said he liked them"
"If he doesn't, he's a racist. If he does, it's racist. When you have a non-falsifiable belief, that's called a conspiracy theory or a blind religion. And people who deal with facts cannot reason with people like you."
"he speaks out about a gay man being executed in a regime that executes gay people and is advocating for the ceasing of it. The only retort is "well, they don't execute as many since 2013"....wow"
"As a 53 year old gay man it's just this kind of "logic" and rhetoric that resulted in me starting to distance myself from the gay community during the 1990s, and solidly place myself in the libertarian camp. What turned me off on the gay community in the 1990s, and what we're witnessing now is unabashed tribalism"
"It's a shade away from regressive leftists excusing gay people being pushed off buildings as "it's their culture, leave them alone, don't be Islamophobic", or worse still the far left nutjob article that made the claim that Islamic executions of gay people are actually helping gay people because they're stopping them from suiciding. #walkaway"

UK employment hits another record high
Funny, given Brexit is meant to ruin the country

What does Singapore PM-in-waiting Heng Swee Keat’s 2019 budget say about an early election? - "programmes such as the Merdeka Generation Package were inherently political in nature – firstly, because such long-term packages created a sense of gratitude towards the government that provided them.“Second, providing for the needs of these generations is very different from simply providing one-off cash incentives, since health care benefits are consumed over a longer term and on a day-to-day basis,” he said. “In a sense it is a gift that keeps giving, since individuals will be cognisant of the benefits they have received each time they need to draw on their medical benefits.”"

Donald Low - Good piece. Another point worth highlighting is... - "in last year’s Budget, when the government announced that it intended to raise GST in a few years’ time, it also projected a small deficit for the year. But for the umpteenth time, the budget last year ended with a decent surplus. And given that some revenues aren’t included in the Budget while some expenditure items are overstated (https://www.straitstimes.com/…/budget-2015-in-deficit-yet-v…), a “decent” surplus should be taken in the right spirit. This is why the DBS economists mentioned in the article estimate the government has a war chest of over $19 billion to spend before the elections... competent fiscal management entails a certain degree of fiscal marksmanship or accuracy, i.e. getting your budget estimates right (or on target) most of the time.The persistent under-estimation of budget surpluses is not healthy. It allows the government to create a narrative of “money not enough” (hence justifying the GST increase), and it makes it harder for citizens (especially analysts) to form accurate expectations about the country’s long-term fiscal needs and how they should be financed. It also erodes trust in government if its projections of budget deficits are repeatedly proven wrong.Despite saying it is fiscally tight for most of its term in office, the government somehow manages to conjure up large, supposedly “one-off” budget giveaways in the year before elections. And citizens are supposed to be thankful for its largesse.So the next time government says money not enough (which may indeed be the case) and taxes need to be raised—probably in the budget or two after the elections—it shouldn’t be surprised if people are sceptical, distrustful or, to use the word of the month, complacent."

The Blockchain Is a Reminder of the Internet’s Failure - "My gripe is with human faith in technology. The same kind of utopian promises that bloomed during the Internet’s early heyday — “freedom, fairness, and equality for the society of tomorrow” — are on the tip of every bitcoin miner’s tongue. The passion of the true zealot is everywhere: “The blockchain will set us free.” But if there is one thing that we should have learned from the history of the last 25 years, it is that digital networks and computers and code are no solution to human brokenness. With each passing day, the opposite seems more likely to be true. Pressure exerted by the Internet cracked some long-existing social fissures wide open... Decentralization is the first commandment of the blockchain faith. But what did William Butler Yeats tell us happens when “the center cannot hold”? Things fall apart!"
"This time, it's different" doesn't just apply to financial crises

GOOGLE'S ANTI-BREITBART PLOT: Employees Targeted Site's Ad Revenue in 2017 - "The group sought to strike at Breitbart News’ revenue by kicking the site off Google’s market-dominating ad services. Although their efforts ultimately failed, the discussion featured senior Google employees speaking frankly about their reasons for targeting the site. These included unfounded allegations of “hate speech” and “fake news.”... Gray’s statement confirms that in Silicon Valley, conservative media was a prominent target of the fake news panic from the very beginning... a cabal of employees in Google’s ad department was directing the company’s ad clients to the page of Sleeping Giants, a far-left organization that attempts to blacklist conservative media organizations – including Breitbart News – by spreading slander to their advertisers."

LEAKED DOCUMENTS: Google Employees Considered Censoring Conservative Media After 2016 Election - "at Google, some engineers debated whether the company should suppress conservative news websites — The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically mentioned — to keep President Donald Trump from winning in 2020... Other employees were not so keen to censor, believing the move could backfire and lead to “conspiracy theories,” according to the documents... In January 2018, Google was caught incorrectly fact-checking conservative news websites while leaving left-leaning outlets untouched. The company quickly ended its “fact-checking” process."

Apple CEO Tim Cook: Banning 'Hate, Division' Is 'Right Thing to Do' - "Cook suggested that the Holocaust was a function of excessively free speech and expression, invoking Kristallnacht"

Twitter Censorship: Ads Critical of Illegal Immigration Are 'Hateful Content' - "Twitter rejected four advertisements from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) on the basis of the tweets containing “hateful content” on Tuesday. The hateful content in question appears to be the phrase “illegal alien.” The platform later reversed the decision, calling it an “error.”... In its initial comment on the matter, CIS indicated it was the use of the term “illegal alien” that Twitter considers hateful, despite the common usage of the term by legal entities including the Supreme Court. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey maintains that his company’s censorship and content management policies are not colored by left-wing or partisan Democrats biases"

Twitter Stock Drops on Fears of Conservative Exodus - "Twitter’s stock dropped, Thursday, after the social network faced controversy for banning two conservatives: Jesse Kelly and Laura Loomer. Financial news site the Street believes the drop is tied to fears of a conservative boycott of the social media platform."

Conservative Activist Laura Loomer Banned From Twitter After Criticizing Congresswoman-Elect Ilhan Omar - "Independent journalist Laura Loomer was banned from Twitter on Wednesday, following a tweet in which she accused Congresswoman-Elect Ilhan Omar of supporting Sharia law and female genital mutilation."

Facebook Reacts to Child Bride Sale 2 Weeks After Posting, 6 Days After Auction Ended - "Facebook allowed a child bride to be sold to the highest bidder before the social network finally decided to take action against the post over two weeks later, according to charity organization Plan International, which called the Facebook auction “beyond belief.”"

'Nazi Lives Here': Vandals Strike Home of Purdue University College Republican Adviser - "The faculty adviser for Purdue University’s College Republican student group woke up to find that his home had been vandalized with paint, including the words “Nazi Lives Here” scrawled on his garage door. Professor David Bridges, who is the adviser of the College Republican (CR) group at Purdue University, discovered that his home had been vandalized with a red paint-like substance on his driveway, and the words “Nazi Lives Here” spray-painted on his garage door.The suspect is still at large, but Bridges believes that the vandalism was carried out by local Antifa members"
Since everyone to the right of Stalin is a Nazi, violence is justified against most of the world

PETA: Saying 'Bring Home the Bacon' Is as Bad as Racism, Anti-Gay Slurs - "People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is calling for an end to what it calls “speciesism,” or using animal names in negative contexts, such as “beat a dead horse” or “take the bull by the horns.”"
For those claiming the slippery slope is a hysterical conservative myth

Study: 'Sh*t' Is America's Most-Used Word on Twitter - "A recent study claims that American Twitter users are overwhelmingly negative on the platform and utilize swear words more often than those from other countries. Researchers claim Twitter data matches the “established stereotypes” about Americans.NPR reports that a study conducted by researchers from Canada claims that American Twitter users tweet more negative words than those from Canada. The study analyzed 40 million tweets to study the tweets of both American and Canadian users, finding that in general American users are more negative while Canadian users are more positive... "If you just survey lots of Canadians and Americans … personality traits on average just don’t seem to be any different.” Snefjella stated that it may actually be the language used by Americans that have negative connotations without having a negative meaning behind them, this could include curse words or common phrases"

University of Idaho Bans Pro-Life, Two-Genders Posts on Student-Run Feminist Blog - "A University of Idaho administrator has banned a female student from expressing pro-life views and stating that women have XX chromosomes on a university feminist blog, accusing the student of writing in a way that “directly challenges” opposing viewpoints. The Administrator advised the female student that she should avoid “hot button” issues in her future feminist articles... Salsbury stated that while she does “try very hard” not to censor students, Dilone had become an exception, because she did not use a proper “feminism lens” while writing her piece.“Feminism is the grounding philosophy undergirding the topics we allow on the blog,” stated Salsbury in her email to Dilone, “On more than one occasion, your personal views have been in direct conflict with one of the fundamental principles and tenets of feminism—that of choice.”... Upon reviewing a draft for another blog, Salsbury and the editor had instructed Dilone to remove language in which she stated that women have XX chromosomes, according to Students for Life of America.“Leave this part out. Not all women have XX chromosomes, and not all men have XY,” read the edits to Dilone’s draft, “Chromosomes have nothing to do with gender.”"
So much for feminism being about women's voices - it's only about feminists' voices

Merkel: EU Nations Must Prepare to Hand Sovereignty over to Brussels

WATCH: Students Want 'Clarence Thomas' Building Renamed. Then They're Asked To Explain Why. - "students who back a petition demanding the removal of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's name from a campus building are asked to explain why they so passionately support the effort. "I don't know" becomes a familiar refrain."

Dear Tigertones, please stop singing ‘Kiss The Girl’ | The Princetonian - "Even when gently crooned by an animated crab, the song “Kiss The Girl,” from the Disney hit “The Little Mermaid,” is more misogynistic and dismissive of consent than cute. By performing the song multiple times each semester, the Tigertones elevate it to an offensive and violating ritual... The song launches a heteronormative attack on women’s right to oppose the romantic and sexual liberties taken by men, further inundating the listener with themes of toxic masculinity"
This is not a joke. Then again, since feminism is a joke...

SAP Schools - "institutionalised racism designed to keep out non Chinese from moving up to the core of upper social strata"?

A perennial bugbear about education in Singapore is Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools, where some traditionally Chinese schools are designated to promote Mandarin and Chinese culture through special programmes and similar initiatives.

An article in Yale-NUS's Equality & Democracy goes so far as to call it "Singapore’s own bumiputera policy", which shows a shocking and fundamental misunderstanding of what the bumiputera policy entails.

A full takedown of the Yale-NUS article is beyond the scope of this blog post, but among other things, it:

- ignores the historical context of SAP schools being a concession to the Chinese community by the Singaporean government after smashing the Chinese school system (which was so extensive as to include "the first and only Chinese university established outside China and Taiwan"; imagine if the government had seized your land in 1950 and promised to pay you token $1,000 a year in perpetuity [far below market value] and some ignoramus had come along in 2000 and complained that your annual $1,000 payment was unjust to other taxpayers)
- takes an inequality of result to be proof of inequality of opportunity
- doesn't understand what affirmative action (as evoked by mention of the bumiputera policy) entails
- ignores government funding and support of racial minorities (for example, education for Malays in Singapore is free, and the GRC system enshrines minority representation in Parliament)
- fails to consider a control group. I am unable to find statistics on minority representation in non-SAP top schools, but a Mendaki paper reports that among students in Raffles Institution, "Few of them belong to the minority races". This suggests that in the counter-factual of SAP schools not existing, minority representation at the top would not increase appreciably (indeed, one must consider that SAP schools actually increase the number of minorities in non-SAP top schools, since the non-SAP top schools will take in the minority students who are unwilling and/or unable to attend SAP schools)

Another wild claim is that:

"It is institutionalised racism designed to keep out non Chinese from moving up to the core of upper social strata.

To understand the impact, look at

1) The entrance requirement for SAP primary schools.

2) The cut off points for SAP secondary schools.

3) The IP pathways and affiliates for SAP secondary schools.

4) Special bonus points to affiliate JCs

5) Rejection of DSA application from non SAP schools candidates at affiliated JCs.

SAP system practically removes a strata of capable students who has not the permission to offer Chinese as Mother Tongue at Primary Schools. The spectrum of exclusion limits school choices of non Chinese students with PSLE score of 230 - 250. The SAP IP programme and affiliate system gives students whose raw score would not qualify for top tier JCs special 2 bonus points just for being affiliated. SAP is a system that discriminates to exclude real competition from just as academically strong non chinese thus lead toward a compromised eventuality by those structurally excluded...

When a non chinese student with a lower raw score is denied entry to a school and a chinese student from an affiliate school with a higher raw score than the non Chinese student were enrolled by a window of 'affiliate bonus points'... It is outright racist.

Trail that back to SAP Primary schools, there is no cut off points, just PURE Eugenics reasoning of Mother's Tongue."


To test this claim (which overlaps with some of the Yale-NUS article's wild accusations) empirically I decided to look for some data.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find even archived information on official school rankings. Presumably it's been too long since MOE abolished them in 2012, so the information is no longer online.

So to see if SAP schools are really instruments to "keep out non Chinese from moving up to the core of upper social strata", one approach is to look at unofficial school rankings.

Salary.sg has one which ranks 155 school cutoffs (Secondary School Ranking (based on cut-off for 2018 intake) | Salary.sg - Your Salary in Singapore) so we have 147 schools in all.

Given that Singapore had 159 secondary schools in 2017 we can be confident that the Salary.sg list is very extensive (we don't know about the rigor of their methodology, but that's a limitation that we'll have to live with).

Here are the top 20 rankings by PSLE cutoff (numbers skip due to duplicates), or roughly the top 14% of secondary schools in Singapore:

1. Nanyang Girls’ High School IP SAP (girls) – 264
2. Methodist Girls’ School (Secondary) IB (girls) – 260
3. Raffles Girls’ School (Secondary) IP (girls) – 260
4. Hwa Chong Institution IP SAP (boys) – 258
5. Raffles Institution IP (boys) – 257
6. Anglo-Chinese School (Independent) IB (boys) – 256
7. CHIJ St. Nicholas Girls’ School IP SAP (girls) – 256
8. National Junior College IP (co-ed) – 256
9. Dunman High School IP SAP (co-ed) – 255
10. Cedar Girls’ Secondary School IP (girls) – 254
12. Catholic High School IP SAP (boys) – 253
14. St. Joseph’s Institution IB (boys) – 253
15. Singapore Chinese Girls’ School IP (girls) – 252
16. Victoria School IP (boys) – 252
18. Paya Lebar Methodist Girls’ School (Secondary) (girls) – 250
19. River Valley High School IP SAP (co-ed) – 250
23. Temasek Junior College IP (co-ed) – 249
25. Anderson Secondary School (co-ed) – 245
26. Bukit Panjang Govt. High School (co-ed) – 244
28. CHIJ Secondary (Toa Payoh) (girls) – 243

Only 6 of the top 20 schools in Singapore are SAP schools, which is less than a third. Interestingly, we also see SAP schools as far down as 42nd place.

So clearly, having SAP status is far from being either necessary or sufficient to being a top school in Singapore.

Another way to analyse this issue is to look at the PSC scholarship recipients in 2017.

School breakdown of President's Scholarship recipients (this is a subset of the 2 groups below - this is the most prestigious scholarship so we would expect to see it full of SAP school students):

RI - 2
ACS - 1
NJC - 1
SOTA - 1

That's a grand total of 0 from SAP schools

SAF Scholarship/SPF Scholarship (SAFS/SPFS):

RI - 3
NJC - 1
HCI - 2
ACS - 1
RVHS - 1

That's a measly 2 from SAP schools, meaning only a quarter of SAFS/SPFS recipients in 2017 came from SAP schools.

Public Administration:

ACS/ACJC - 6
Dunman High - 1
HCI - 9
NJC - 2
PJC - 1
RI - 13
RVHS - 1
SJI - 1
SOTA - 2
TJC - 1
VJC - 1

That's only 11 from SAP schools out of 38. Which is less than a third and similar to the figure we get from the other methodology (which suggests that both methodologies have some level of rigour). This replicates the 2016 numbers, as reported by the Yale-NUS article.

So in conclusion the institutionally racist country of Singapore is a miserable failure in its machinations of using SAP schools to oppress the non-Chinese, and needs to work harder at excluding racial minorities from its upper echelons.