Ten Plagues of California Are Turning The Golden State into a Third-World Hell Hole - "In your typical Third-World megalopolis, basic city functions fall into disrepair, while once-eradicated diseases run rampant -- and the local bigwig boasts about saving the world.Los Angeles is quickly becoming a typical Third-World megalopolis, and the rest of the state isn't far behind... the problem goes back at least to last October, when the city noticed nine cases of typhus... "out-of-control rat population can even lead to the spread of dangerous strains of salmonella and bubonic plague."
Rats at the police station, filth on L.A. streets — scenes from the collapse of a city that’s lost control - Los Angeles Times - "We’ve got thousands of people huddled on the streets, many of them withering away with physical and mental disease. Sidewalks have disappeared, hidden by tents and the kinds of makeshift shanties you see in Third World places. Typhoid and typhus are in the news, and an army of rodents is on the move."
California to pay full health benefits for illegal immigrants - "California will become the first state in the country to pay for some adults living in the country illegally to have full health benefits as the solidly liberal state continues to distance itself from President Trump’s administration... to pay for part of it, the state will begin taxing people who don’t have health insurance"
Priorities!
Opinion | America’s Cities Are Unlivable. Blame Wealthy Liberals. - The New York Times - "The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it. When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by. Since 2010, migration out of California has surged.The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality. Just look at San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi’s city. One of every 11,600 residents is a billionaire, and the annual household income necessary to buy a median-priced home now tops $320,000. Yet the streets there are a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a “Black Mirror” hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions. Wealthy homeowners are crowdfunding a legal effort arguing that a proposed homeless shelter is an environmental hazard. A public-school teacher suffering from cancer is forced to pay for her own substitute. And there is no end in sight to such crushing success. At every level of government, our representatives, nearly all of them Democrats, prove inadequate and unresponsive to the challenges at hand. Witness last week’s embarrassment, when California lawmakers used a sketchy parliamentary maneuver to knife Senate Bill 50, an ambitious effort to undo restrictive local zoning rules and increase the supply of housing.It was another chapter in a dismal saga of Nimbyist urban mismanagement that is crushing American cities... there is the refusal on the part of wealthy progressives to live by the values they profess to support at the national level... What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out."
The Bipartisan Cry of ‘Not in My Backyard’ - The New York Times - "people who live in whiter neighborhoods today are more supportive of restrictive development, and that cities that were whiter on average than their respective metropolitan areas in 1970 have more restrictive land use in the 21st century, a pattern that helps explain why segregation persists.. Beyond race, the crucial divide in the politics of housing development isn’t between left and right, but between people who own homes and those who don’t. William Fischel, an economist at Dartmouth, has long argued that homeowners who fear threats to their property values are motivated as voters to protect them.More recently, Andrew Hall and Jesse Yoder at Stanford compared voter file data with housing deeds for 18 million voters in Ohio and North Carolina. They found that buying a home prompts people to participate much more in local elections, particularly when zoning questions are on the ballot. And the effect of homeownership is far larger — boosting turnout by about four percentage points — than most strategies political campaigns use to drive voters to the polls, like personalized phone calls.The more expensive the home people buy, Mr. Hall and Mr. Yoder find, the larger the increase in their likelihood of voting. That suggests that homeowners aren’t more likely to vote merely because they become invested in their communities. Their motivation also appears to grow as the value of their asset does.One possible interpretation: “It’s not that you become more selfish, but you become more likely to translate selfishness into political action,” Mr. Hall said of homeowners. “Renters could be just as selfish, but they’re not getting their act together as a group to vote.”Generations of American politicians have argued that homeowners make good citizens — and in the early days of the nation, only property owners could vote. It seems reasonable that a financial stake in the community would make people more likely to care for it. But this research suggests that homeownership can also prompt people to oppose what’s good for their communities in a larger sense — at least if you believe, as Mr. Carson does, that many communities need more housing... liberals who say they support redistributive policies also oppose new development around them. Their ideology on national issues clashes with their personal interests as homeowners, and if forced to pick one they tend to choose the latter. Even being shown messages reminding them of the benefits of new housing for low- and middle-income families does little to alter their views."
Hypocrisy adds insult to injury
Homelessness jumps 12% in L.A. County and 16% in the city; officials ‘stunned’ - Los Angeles Times
How to Solve Los Angeles's Homelessness Crisis - "The mayor’s response has been to increase public spending on homelessness sharply, but he’s had frustratingly little to show for it. When the homelessness issue burst onto front pages a few years ago, Garcetti jumped into action with an ambitious plan to build emergency shelters in all 15 districts of the city. But as the mayor soon discovered, the issue with an “emergency” plan oriented around construction is that Los Angeles is a far cry from Bob Moses’s New York. Eighty percent of the shelters have been held up by red tape and community resistance... the mayor had been touting the 20,000 people the city had moved off the street and into some form of housing... while the Garcetti administration was helping to move 380 people off the street each week, some 480 others were joining the ranks of homeless Angelenos. Put another way, until someone does something about the city’s larger housing crisis, homelessness will be as much a part of the city’s landscape as Runyon Canyon. Would building more housing bring an end to homelessness in L.A.? That might be too much to ask. As in most U.S. cities, a large share of the city’s homeless are thought to be mentally ill... the city’s mild climate makes living outdoors a more viable option than in colder communities... Los Angeles also attracts an enormous number of homeless young adults from elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Among the 18-to-24-year-olds living on L.A.’s streets, whose numbers grew by nearly 25 percent this past year, a disproportionate share are newcomers to the city, who don’t have strong ties to the region... One of the ironies of this unfolding humanitarian disaster is that homelessness is a problem most pronounced in successful cities, where dynamic economies all too often meet rigidly regulated housing markets... Detroit’s poverty rate is twice that of New York City’s, but because of its notably inexpensive real estate, it maintains a homelessness rate a third the size... you start to see a rising rate of homelessness once a city’s average rent reaches 22 percent of median income, and an even more rapid rate of increase once that number hits 32 percent. In Los Angeles, the average rent is 49 percent of median income. Some studies have shown that the city has as many as 600,000 people who regularly put as much as 90 percent of their monthly income toward rent. Simply put, these people need a lucky bounce to not end up homeless... Governor Gavin Newsom set the goal of building 3.5 million new housing units in California over the next seven years, an implicit acknowledgment that insufficient housing supply was the driving force behind the state’s ruinously high rents. This was a controversial stance for a progressive politician whose ideological allies often prefer to blame profit-hungry landlords and absentee owners... the bill died in committee, sunk by anti-growth legislators who denounced it as a threat to local control. When a bill to help the most vulnerable people in California fails, one can hardly blame Sacramento’s dwindling band of conservative legislators, because they are very much on the margins of the state’s political life. They can hardly muster the votes to name a park bench, let alone decide the fate of California’s housing regulations. As Michael Hendrix, also of Manhattan Institute, has observed, the real culprits are self-described progressives... their resistance to one form of disruptive change, as represented by the gradual replacement of single-family homes with higher-density apartment buildings that could house many more families at far lower cost, is contributing to another form of disruptive change—the transformation of large swaths of Los Angeles into unsanitary homeless encampments, where women, men, and children are forced to spend much of their waking hours fending off vermin."
L'origine de Bert
Thursday, July 04, 2019
Links - 4th July 2019 (2) (Homelessness and other Californian Problems)
Post ID: 8185535407321931869
Writers blocked: Even fantasy fiction is now offensive
What happens when you write for an age group that contains a lot of SJWs who are very free and need targets for their hatred, and work in an industry full of them (literature departments, after all, are full of Critical Theorists and their ilk):
Writers blocked: Even fantasy fiction is now offensive | The Spectator
It was Lionel Shriver who saw the writing on the wall. Giving a keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival three years ago in which she decried the scourge of modern identity politics, Shriver observed that the dogma of ‘cultural appropriation’ —which demands no less than complete racial segregation in the arts — had not yet wrapped its osseous fingers around the publishing industry. But, she warned: ‘This same sensibility is coming to a bookstore near you.’ Reader, it has come.
Next month a young, Asian-American author called Amélie Wen Zhao was due to celebrate the publication of her debut novel Blood Heir, the first in a three-part fantasy series for which Zhao was reportedly paid a six-figure sum by Delacorte Press, a children’s imprint of Penguin Random House. Set in the Russian-inspired ‘Cyrillian Empire’, Blood Heir tells the story of a magic-wielding princess who is forced to flee her kingdom following her father’s murder. ‘In a world where the princess is the monster, oppression is blind to skin colour, and good and evil exist in shades of grey… comes a dark Anastasia retelling,’ blurbed the publishers.
Before the manuscript had even reached the presses, however, a furore erupted when Zhao, a 26-year-old banker born in Paris and raised in Beijing, was accused of racism. Armed with merely the blurb and a handful of excerpts from the book, her critics — many of them fellow authors, editors and bloggers in the Young Adult genre (known as YA) — repeatedly tore into Zhao on sites such as Twitter and Goodreads, outraged by, among other things, the novel’s depiction of indentured labour. For despite Blood Heir’s Slavic setting, her detractors assumed the plot was inspired by American slavery and thus something Zhao had no business writing about because she is not black. In a tirade that might surprise students of Russian antiquity, one critic reportedly raged: ‘[R]acist ass writers, like Amélie Wen Zhao, […] literally take Black narratives and force it into Russia when that shit NEVER happened in history.’
One prominent writer even claimed the very premise of a fictional world in which ‘oppression is blind to skin colour’ was racist and joined others in pillorying Zhao for creating — and then killing — a ‘black’ character in the novel. No matter that the only discernible evidence for the character’s ethnicity was a vague description of dark curls and ‘bronze’ skin. Another YA author, Ellen Oh, who joined in the fray by piously tweeting ‘colourblindness is extremely tone deaf. Learn from this and do better’, was herself forced to issue an apology after being castigated for using the phrase ‘tone deaf’, a turn of events that would be comical were it not so preposterous.
For Zhao, the onslaught proved too much and in January she released a statement titled ‘To The Book Community: An Apology’ in which she confirmed she had withdrawn Blood Heir from publication. However, in a volte-face last month, Zhao revealed that, with help from multicultural scholars and ‘sensitivity readers’, she had re-written the novel and would now be publishing it in November.
Would that Zhao were an outlier. If anything, hers is now a typical experience in the vicious world of YA publishing. Last year another fantasy novel, about a young protagonist rebelling against a sectarian society, inspired an 8,000 word blog post calling it ‘the most dangerous, offensive book I have ever read’ and set off a wave of recrimination against the author on social media. Around the same time Keira Drake, a marketing consultant turned YA writer, agreed to pulp hardback copies of her debut fantasy novel and re-write it with help from — you guessed it — sensitivity readers after critics claimed it contained ‘damaging’ depictions of Native Americans.
Because this persecution on the most spurious grounds is endemic — and because so many of its actors are themselves YA authors — plenty of those brandishing the proverbial pitchforks have, upon publication of their own novels, subsequently found themselves staring down the sharp side of a four-pronged rod. In February, Kosoko Jackson, a gay, black, erstwhile sensitivity reader who had previously joined in the skirmishes against other authors, pulled his own debut novel, A Place for Wolves, after his peers pronounced it ‘insensitive’ to Muslims on account of its Albanian Muslim antagonist.
Nor is the contagion confined to American authors. Last month John Boyne, best known for the Holocaust novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, received such a barrage of abuse prior to the publication of his latest book, My Brother’s Name Is Jessica, which features a transgender central character, that he was briefly forced off Twitter. Critics labelled the book ‘transphobic’, suggesting that because Boyne is not transgender the story ‘lacked authenticity’ and its title ‘misgendered’ the fictional protagonist.
At almost the same moment that Boyne was deleting his Twitter account, Lincolnshire-based Zoe Marriott, a prolific writer of YA fiction, was also being hounded on the site over her new fantasy novel, The Hand, the Eye and the Heart, because it’s set in ‘fairy-tale China’. One prominent YA blogger warned: ‘White authors need to stay the hell away from the stories of people of colour.’ Curiously, said blogger’s day job involves manning the tills at Foyles, one of London’s most revered bookshops — pity the poor sod who dares trouble her for a copy of Othello, or Tolkien for that matter. The father of fantasy fiction has come in for criticism for his portrayal of orcs in The Lord of the Rings. Some feel his work is ‘racialised’. And what’s a sensitive young bookseller to do if a young customer requests a C.S. Lewis, whose Narnia books were branded ‘blatantly racist’ and misogynistic by fellow fantasy author Philip Pullman? Pullman has since been labelled ‘transphobic’ himself after tweeting in October that he was ‘finding the trans argument impossible to follow’.
Once you start seeing goblins in fairyland, there’s no end to it. Even the most enlightened author can cause offence. It is only a matter of time before it begins to eat away at every genre until, as Shriver predicted, ‘All that’s left is memoir’.
Already poets might understandably feel anxious: last summer The Nation, one of America’s most venerable literary magazines, published a 14-line poem about homelessness, which was swiftly accused of co-opting a ‘black vernacular’ and criticised for its use of the word ‘crippled’. Instead of defending the verses it had previously deemed worthy of publication, the magazine immediately issued an apology so spineless one of its own columnists said it resembled ‘a letter from [a] re-education camp’.
But it’s not just writers who ought to be worried. The logical apogee of a prohibition on cultural intercourse is a future in which each person is allowed to document only his or her precise subjective experience. A future, in other words, where fiction is history. And that sounds like a very dreary prospect for us all.
On the same topic:
The return of book-burning
"You could argue that she has ‘listened to feedback’ and acted accordingly. But the line between listening to feedback and being bullied by very angry zealots is a thin one, and this incident seems to have crossed it. Zhao relies on these people for her income and is scared. That’s understandable. And really, really bad.
Our cultural landscape is increasingly controlled by the permanently outraged. Books – even trashy fantasy novels – are a key component of civilisation. They are tangible, material repositories of humanity, in all its forms. Burning books is the sign of a society going wildly wrong. Banning books, also. Scaring authors into pulling the publication of their books surely sits in the same egregious territory.
Nobody has a monopoly on morality and it is gross to try to force writers to comply with your particular worldview. There is no requirement for any minority group (or, for that matter, any majority group) to be represented in a story. There is no requirement when representation does occur for it to be positive or negative. People who think otherwise have forgotten what fiction is, and they have forgotten what freedom is, too...
Perhaps most dangerous of all, our schools and universities are becoming infected, too. English literature degrees are being restructured to avoid offending students. History syllabuses are being manipulated to teach what we wish had happened, rather than what did. Obsessive identitarians try to get writers fired because they don’t sign up to the latest woke teaching on gender or Brexit.
If you insist upon politicised representation of minority groups, framed in the values of 21st-century Guardianista academics, then any study – or enjoyment – of literature is dead. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen – they’re all going to send you scurrying for your safe space...
The tragedy is, we all know where oppressive moral authoritarianism ends, and we know that largely thanks to books"
Social Justice Warriors Harass Chinese Immigrant Author Into Cancelling Her Own Book After Charges Of Racism
"Zhao was instantly accepted in the young-adult literature community — for awhile. She supported writers of color and spoke out on diversity issues. But she didn’t alienate anyone, writing in one tweet: “I’ve been asked several times why I didn’t write a Chinese #ownvoices novel. I don’t want to be boxed into the permanent ‘Other;’ I want diverse books written by PoC to become part of the mainstream.”
That all changed a week ago when vicious rumors began circulating in the community about her. Some influencers started claiming someone was harassing people who didn’t like her book and disparaging “authors of color.” One woman named Zhao as the culprit, though no proof was provided.
Rosenfield reports that more accusations surfaced, including charges of plagiarism and racism over a scene in her book that involved a slave auction...
She included the reason why she wrote about a slave auction. She did not intend to evoke thoughts of American slavery, but was instead writing “a specific critique of the epidemic of indentured labor and human trafficking prevalent in many industries across Asia, including in my own home country.” These issues are still happening today.
But American social justice warriors can’t look past themselves and their own perceived victimhood, and read anything about slavery as pertaining to America’s own history, ignoring the horrors that are still going on in the world today. It didn’t matter that Zhao was actually writing about a problem in Asia, she was locked into the American social justice view of slavery.
“The narrative and history of slavery in the United States is not something I can, would, or intended to write, but I recognize that I am not writing in merely my own cultural context. I am so sorry for the pain this has caused,” Zhao added in her statement.
Do other people get to decide an author’s intent? Books are regularly discussed, so it was possible for Zhao’s book to be used as a discussion topic relating to slavery throughout history and around the world, but the chattering class didn’t want this to happen. Instead, they silenced a minority woman."
Writers blocked: Even fantasy fiction is now offensive | The Spectator
It was Lionel Shriver who saw the writing on the wall. Giving a keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival three years ago in which she decried the scourge of modern identity politics, Shriver observed that the dogma of ‘cultural appropriation’ —which demands no less than complete racial segregation in the arts — had not yet wrapped its osseous fingers around the publishing industry. But, she warned: ‘This same sensibility is coming to a bookstore near you.’ Reader, it has come.
Next month a young, Asian-American author called Amélie Wen Zhao was due to celebrate the publication of her debut novel Blood Heir, the first in a three-part fantasy series for which Zhao was reportedly paid a six-figure sum by Delacorte Press, a children’s imprint of Penguin Random House. Set in the Russian-inspired ‘Cyrillian Empire’, Blood Heir tells the story of a magic-wielding princess who is forced to flee her kingdom following her father’s murder. ‘In a world where the princess is the monster, oppression is blind to skin colour, and good and evil exist in shades of grey… comes a dark Anastasia retelling,’ blurbed the publishers.
Before the manuscript had even reached the presses, however, a furore erupted when Zhao, a 26-year-old banker born in Paris and raised in Beijing, was accused of racism. Armed with merely the blurb and a handful of excerpts from the book, her critics — many of them fellow authors, editors and bloggers in the Young Adult genre (known as YA) — repeatedly tore into Zhao on sites such as Twitter and Goodreads, outraged by, among other things, the novel’s depiction of indentured labour. For despite Blood Heir’s Slavic setting, her detractors assumed the plot was inspired by American slavery and thus something Zhao had no business writing about because she is not black. In a tirade that might surprise students of Russian antiquity, one critic reportedly raged: ‘[R]acist ass writers, like Amélie Wen Zhao, […] literally take Black narratives and force it into Russia when that shit NEVER happened in history.’
One prominent writer even claimed the very premise of a fictional world in which ‘oppression is blind to skin colour’ was racist and joined others in pillorying Zhao for creating — and then killing — a ‘black’ character in the novel. No matter that the only discernible evidence for the character’s ethnicity was a vague description of dark curls and ‘bronze’ skin. Another YA author, Ellen Oh, who joined in the fray by piously tweeting ‘colourblindness is extremely tone deaf. Learn from this and do better’, was herself forced to issue an apology after being castigated for using the phrase ‘tone deaf’, a turn of events that would be comical were it not so preposterous.
For Zhao, the onslaught proved too much and in January she released a statement titled ‘To The Book Community: An Apology’ in which she confirmed she had withdrawn Blood Heir from publication. However, in a volte-face last month, Zhao revealed that, with help from multicultural scholars and ‘sensitivity readers’, she had re-written the novel and would now be publishing it in November.
Would that Zhao were an outlier. If anything, hers is now a typical experience in the vicious world of YA publishing. Last year another fantasy novel, about a young protagonist rebelling against a sectarian society, inspired an 8,000 word blog post calling it ‘the most dangerous, offensive book I have ever read’ and set off a wave of recrimination against the author on social media. Around the same time Keira Drake, a marketing consultant turned YA writer, agreed to pulp hardback copies of her debut fantasy novel and re-write it with help from — you guessed it — sensitivity readers after critics claimed it contained ‘damaging’ depictions of Native Americans.
Because this persecution on the most spurious grounds is endemic — and because so many of its actors are themselves YA authors — plenty of those brandishing the proverbial pitchforks have, upon publication of their own novels, subsequently found themselves staring down the sharp side of a four-pronged rod. In February, Kosoko Jackson, a gay, black, erstwhile sensitivity reader who had previously joined in the skirmishes against other authors, pulled his own debut novel, A Place for Wolves, after his peers pronounced it ‘insensitive’ to Muslims on account of its Albanian Muslim antagonist.
Nor is the contagion confined to American authors. Last month John Boyne, best known for the Holocaust novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, received such a barrage of abuse prior to the publication of his latest book, My Brother’s Name Is Jessica, which features a transgender central character, that he was briefly forced off Twitter. Critics labelled the book ‘transphobic’, suggesting that because Boyne is not transgender the story ‘lacked authenticity’ and its title ‘misgendered’ the fictional protagonist.
At almost the same moment that Boyne was deleting his Twitter account, Lincolnshire-based Zoe Marriott, a prolific writer of YA fiction, was also being hounded on the site over her new fantasy novel, The Hand, the Eye and the Heart, because it’s set in ‘fairy-tale China’. One prominent YA blogger warned: ‘White authors need to stay the hell away from the stories of people of colour.’ Curiously, said blogger’s day job involves manning the tills at Foyles, one of London’s most revered bookshops — pity the poor sod who dares trouble her for a copy of Othello, or Tolkien for that matter. The father of fantasy fiction has come in for criticism for his portrayal of orcs in The Lord of the Rings. Some feel his work is ‘racialised’. And what’s a sensitive young bookseller to do if a young customer requests a C.S. Lewis, whose Narnia books were branded ‘blatantly racist’ and misogynistic by fellow fantasy author Philip Pullman? Pullman has since been labelled ‘transphobic’ himself after tweeting in October that he was ‘finding the trans argument impossible to follow’.
Once you start seeing goblins in fairyland, there’s no end to it. Even the most enlightened author can cause offence. It is only a matter of time before it begins to eat away at every genre until, as Shriver predicted, ‘All that’s left is memoir’.
Already poets might understandably feel anxious: last summer The Nation, one of America’s most venerable literary magazines, published a 14-line poem about homelessness, which was swiftly accused of co-opting a ‘black vernacular’ and criticised for its use of the word ‘crippled’. Instead of defending the verses it had previously deemed worthy of publication, the magazine immediately issued an apology so spineless one of its own columnists said it resembled ‘a letter from [a] re-education camp’.
But it’s not just writers who ought to be worried. The logical apogee of a prohibition on cultural intercourse is a future in which each person is allowed to document only his or her precise subjective experience. A future, in other words, where fiction is history. And that sounds like a very dreary prospect for us all.
On the same topic:
The return of book-burning
"You could argue that she has ‘listened to feedback’ and acted accordingly. But the line between listening to feedback and being bullied by very angry zealots is a thin one, and this incident seems to have crossed it. Zhao relies on these people for her income and is scared. That’s understandable. And really, really bad.
Our cultural landscape is increasingly controlled by the permanently outraged. Books – even trashy fantasy novels – are a key component of civilisation. They are tangible, material repositories of humanity, in all its forms. Burning books is the sign of a society going wildly wrong. Banning books, also. Scaring authors into pulling the publication of their books surely sits in the same egregious territory.
Nobody has a monopoly on morality and it is gross to try to force writers to comply with your particular worldview. There is no requirement for any minority group (or, for that matter, any majority group) to be represented in a story. There is no requirement when representation does occur for it to be positive or negative. People who think otherwise have forgotten what fiction is, and they have forgotten what freedom is, too...
Perhaps most dangerous of all, our schools and universities are becoming infected, too. English literature degrees are being restructured to avoid offending students. History syllabuses are being manipulated to teach what we wish had happened, rather than what did. Obsessive identitarians try to get writers fired because they don’t sign up to the latest woke teaching on gender or Brexit.
If you insist upon politicised representation of minority groups, framed in the values of 21st-century Guardianista academics, then any study – or enjoyment – of literature is dead. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen – they’re all going to send you scurrying for your safe space...
The tragedy is, we all know where oppressive moral authoritarianism ends, and we know that largely thanks to books"
Social Justice Warriors Harass Chinese Immigrant Author Into Cancelling Her Own Book After Charges Of Racism
"Zhao was instantly accepted in the young-adult literature community — for awhile. She supported writers of color and spoke out on diversity issues. But she didn’t alienate anyone, writing in one tweet: “I’ve been asked several times why I didn’t write a Chinese #ownvoices novel. I don’t want to be boxed into the permanent ‘Other;’ I want diverse books written by PoC to become part of the mainstream.”
That all changed a week ago when vicious rumors began circulating in the community about her. Some influencers started claiming someone was harassing people who didn’t like her book and disparaging “authors of color.” One woman named Zhao as the culprit, though no proof was provided.
Rosenfield reports that more accusations surfaced, including charges of plagiarism and racism over a scene in her book that involved a slave auction...
She included the reason why she wrote about a slave auction. She did not intend to evoke thoughts of American slavery, but was instead writing “a specific critique of the epidemic of indentured labor and human trafficking prevalent in many industries across Asia, including in my own home country.” These issues are still happening today.
But American social justice warriors can’t look past themselves and their own perceived victimhood, and read anything about slavery as pertaining to America’s own history, ignoring the horrors that are still going on in the world today. It didn’t matter that Zhao was actually writing about a problem in Asia, she was locked into the American social justice view of slavery.
“The narrative and history of slavery in the United States is not something I can, would, or intended to write, but I recognize that I am not writing in merely my own cultural context. I am so sorry for the pain this has caused,” Zhao added in her statement.
Do other people get to decide an author’s intent? Books are regularly discussed, so it was possible for Zhao’s book to be used as a discussion topic relating to slavery throughout history and around the world, but the chattering class didn’t want this to happen. Instead, they silenced a minority woman."
Post ID: 689217660271730995
Links - 4th July 2019 (1)
Je fais des poupées en latex grandeur nature: elles comblent un vide sexuel... ou affectif - "Un autre client d’un certain âge a développé des sentiments pour sa poupée. Il était veuf, ses enfants avaient quitté le domicile familial, alors il s’est pris d’affection pour elle. Il l’habillait, il lui parlait et il me disait :
"Ce n’est pas pour le sexe, c’est simplement pour avoir de la compagnie".
C’est étrange, mais si ça peut l’aider à aller mieux, j’en suis très content."
How Building Churches Out of Egg Whites Transformed Filipino Desserts - "The Holy Rosary Church dates back to 1877 and the Spanish colonial era, a period when, Evangelista explains, “Local churches were built with egg whites.” As evangelizing Spanish colonists built churches across the islands, laborers used egg whites as an emulsifier in the concrete. “Food is in the foundations here,” Evangelista adds.As the well-attended Holy Rosary Church attests, this had a lasting influence on the country’s architecture and spiritual life. But its legacy is also on display in Filipino bakeries and home kitchens. Because what else is there to do with millions of leftover egg yolks but bake delicious desserts?"
Pagans, History Buffs Rage as Sweden Considers Banning "Nazi" Runes - "The government's reported plans to ban the traditional runic alphabet alongside heathen imagery, due to their alleged popularity in Neo-Nazi circles, have sparked the ire of politicians and ordinary Swedes alike... According to the government proposal, ancient Norse symbols, imagery, and traditional jewellery can also be banned as "incitement of ethnic hatred". This applies, among other things, to Thor's Hammer known as Mjölner, the Valknut (or Odin's knot) and the magical stave Vegvisir... Banning an entire written language restricts the freedom of religion, which is backed by the Swedish Constitution and international conventions, they argued. Additionally, by adding contrived meaning to the runic script, the government is making the same mistake as the Nazis, who widely utilised Nordic imagery... "So, the government wants to ban runic writing. Well, will they destroy the Rök Stone outside Vadstena and several other priceless rune stones from the Viking Age? A more anti-history government is indeed hard to find", a Swede wrote."
They need to ban Buddhists from using the swastika
Three Gorges Migration Not the Largest in Chinese History - "In 127 BC, during the reign of Emperor Hanwu, about 100,000 people from what is now Hebei, Shandong, Henan and Anhui provinces were summoned to move to the Hetao Plain and areas to the south of the Yellow River. In 119 BC, 720,000 poor people migrated to southern Inner Mongolia, northwestern Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces, southern Ningxia and the Hexi Corridor of Gansu Province. The next year, both officials and common people thought to be treacherous were exiled to border areas, their number estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Also, there are some other migrations organized by officials at different places. In a period of more than 20 years, the government had implemented a migration of 1.2 million people, more than 3 percent of the total population, 36 million, of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). Most of the moving and resettlement fees were borne by the government. En route, the migration was supervised by a large number of officials and soldiers. The migrants covered hundreds of kilometers, sometimes 3,000 kilometers, before they finally settled down"
Women Don’t Belong in Combat Units - WSJ - "Most female aspirants couldn’t pass the test, so the Marines changed it from a pass/fail requirement to an unscored exercise with no bearing on the candidate’s ultimate evaluation. The weapons-company hike during the IOC is now “gender neutral,” meaning that officers can hand their pack to a buddy if they get tired, rather than carrying it for the course’s full 10 miles.Lowering these physical requirements risks reducing the American military’s lethality. A more serious effect of sex integration has become taboo to mention: the inevitable introduction of eros into combat units. Putting young, hormonally charged men and women into stressful close quarters for extended periods guarantees sexual liaisons, rivalries and breakups, all of which undermine the bonding essential to a unified fighting force.... Long before infantry integration became a feminist imperative, evidence was clear that a coed military was a sexually active one. In 1988 then-Navy Secretary Jim Webb reported that of the unmarried enlisted Navy and Air Force women stationed in Iceland, half were pregnant... The argument for putting women into combat roles has always been nonmilitary: Combat experience qualifies soldiers for high-ranking Pentagon jobs. But war isn’t about promoting equality. Its objective is to break the enemy’s will through precise lethal engagement, with the lowest possible loss of American life. The claim that female combat soldiers will perform as lethally as men over an extended deployment entails a denial of biological reality as great as the one underlying the transgender crusade"
Why Many of Today’s News Reporters Believe It’s Their Duty to Lie to You - "Fournier basically endorsed the idea that journalists need to stop seeing themselves as neutral relaters of facts and begin shaping narratives for the public, in order to hold the powerful accountable... This new viewpoint of how to “do” the news quickly spread like wildfire throughout the entire DNC media complex. At last, reporters were actually being encouraged by their editors to give free rein to their own political biases, while engaged in “reporting the news.” Far from being desirable, political neutrality in the newsroom came to be viewed as a bad thing... We are now 11 years removed from 2008, when many media outlets in the political news industry enthusiastically embraced the new accountability journalism guidelines. What are the results?Reporters and editors gave in to their worst impulses. They began to give free rein to their most naked biases. And it began showing up loudly and clearly in their “news coverage.” By the time Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama in 2012, most U.S. news media outlets had ditched even a pretense of neutrality between the candidates... Since Acosta thinks Trump is a very bad president who must be “held accountable” at all times, the accountability journalism philosophy gives him the green light to crudely distort Trump’s words to achieve his goal of being a “heroic” journalist who is holding a president “accountable.”... The DNC media complex’s biases and its political agenda are why they fell so hard for the Trump–Russia collusion hoax for more than two years. A neutral and impartial news industry that checked its own biases at the door and investigated thoroughly would never have fallen for it.Far from making the U.S. political news industry better, accountability journalism totally ruined it... What many in the mainstream news media loved the most about accountability journalism is that it allowed them to openly be what they always were: political activists disguised as reporters, chafing under the repressive strictures of the old model of neutrality and objectivity."
If people don't trust the media, it's the people's fault!
What are the Democrats doing that will likely cause them to lose the 2020 election against Trump? - Quora - "The Democrats are doing everything they can to alienate their moderate voters. It’s hard to imagine how they could do a better job of it.I am a mellow, moderate, middle aged mom. I have never been particularly interested in politics, but I have voted solid Democrat for 32 years because I viewed the Democrats as the party of compassion and open-minded tolerance. Sadly, I would not describe the Democrats that way anymore.Most of my friends are mellow, middle aged and older moderates like me. None of them are happy with where the Democratic Party is going...
Late Abortion. Watching the Democrats light up the World Trade Center to celebrate being able to kill late term babies was one of the most shocking, horrifying things I have ever witnessed. This is far beyond a deal-breaker for me. Even if this was the only issue I had with the Democrats, I would switch parties and never vote Democrat again.
Government Daycare. I don’t think this is a big issue for most people, but it’s a big deal to me. The government has no business getting involved in the Mommy Wars. Full time daycare for a small child in my city costs about $1,000 per month. How is it fair for the government to essentially give working moms (or dads) $1,000 per month to support their choice, and not give stay at home moms (or dads) the same amount of money for their parenting choice? Offering free government daycare pressures and coerces parents to choose going back to work instead of caring for their own kids. No fair.
A bunch of other crazy liberal concepts in no particular order:
Modern (4th wave?) feminism, The Patriarchy, & Rape Culture
Equity (rather than equality)
What the Democrats did to Brett Kavanaugh. (I’m the mother of a teenaged son. I was appalled at how the Democrats treated Kavanaugh.)
What the Progressives are doing to Joe Biden now
Colleges and students shutting down even moderately conservative speakers.
Blatant mainstream media bias against conservatives
The constant hysterical hatred of Trump. The endless accusations against Trump. Get over it already!"
"the ever-rising qualifications from the Left and an increasing influence of the Alt-Left’s intersectionality ideology. For example:
Pros for Alt-Left
(+) Be a woman
(+) Be LGBT or vocal ally
(+) Be a minority
(+) Hate Trump
Negatives for Alt-Left
(-) Don’t be white
(-) Don't be affluent
(-) Don't be a man
(-) Don't be straight
(-) Don't be old"
Frigid Offices Might Be Killing Women’s Productivity (Facebook post)
Comments: "Umm, I have run warm my entire life. A warm office is a nightmare to me. My brain will catch on fire. As well, germs love warm offices. Germ incubators."
"Clearly the authors of this article have never never met a woman experiencing menopause...who would love to work in a refrigerator."
"Except for the portion of us women who run hot. For us, cold offices are heaven. I can always add layers or a blanket. If it’s warm, there’s only so much I can remove and stay within dress code. Haha!"
"as someone who runs hot I have a hard time with a change to this. Anything over 75 and I spend my time in the office sweating, and my productivity plummets. Hell, I have a fan mounted at my desk for summer months. Someone who’s cold can put on more clothes, but I can’t strip "
"in our office, it was the women who wanted it cold"
"Notably, the women in the study were college students and therefore probably not menopausal or peri menopausal. I suspect that if a cohort of older women were tested, the results might be different."
These 3 S’poreans Took A Leap Of Faith To Switch Careers And Are Now Successful - MyCareersFuture - "3 Singaporeans who proved that pursuing passion over paycheck was a good call." (Facebook blurb)
I like how success is still defined as earning a lot of money
"Ce n’est pas pour le sexe, c’est simplement pour avoir de la compagnie".
C’est étrange, mais si ça peut l’aider à aller mieux, j’en suis très content."
How Building Churches Out of Egg Whites Transformed Filipino Desserts - "The Holy Rosary Church dates back to 1877 and the Spanish colonial era, a period when, Evangelista explains, “Local churches were built with egg whites.” As evangelizing Spanish colonists built churches across the islands, laborers used egg whites as an emulsifier in the concrete. “Food is in the foundations here,” Evangelista adds.As the well-attended Holy Rosary Church attests, this had a lasting influence on the country’s architecture and spiritual life. But its legacy is also on display in Filipino bakeries and home kitchens. Because what else is there to do with millions of leftover egg yolks but bake delicious desserts?"
Pagans, History Buffs Rage as Sweden Considers Banning "Nazi" Runes - "The government's reported plans to ban the traditional runic alphabet alongside heathen imagery, due to their alleged popularity in Neo-Nazi circles, have sparked the ire of politicians and ordinary Swedes alike... According to the government proposal, ancient Norse symbols, imagery, and traditional jewellery can also be banned as "incitement of ethnic hatred". This applies, among other things, to Thor's Hammer known as Mjölner, the Valknut (or Odin's knot) and the magical stave Vegvisir... Banning an entire written language restricts the freedom of religion, which is backed by the Swedish Constitution and international conventions, they argued. Additionally, by adding contrived meaning to the runic script, the government is making the same mistake as the Nazis, who widely utilised Nordic imagery... "So, the government wants to ban runic writing. Well, will they destroy the Rök Stone outside Vadstena and several other priceless rune stones from the Viking Age? A more anti-history government is indeed hard to find", a Swede wrote."
They need to ban Buddhists from using the swastika
Three Gorges Migration Not the Largest in Chinese History - "In 127 BC, during the reign of Emperor Hanwu, about 100,000 people from what is now Hebei, Shandong, Henan and Anhui provinces were summoned to move to the Hetao Plain and areas to the south of the Yellow River. In 119 BC, 720,000 poor people migrated to southern Inner Mongolia, northwestern Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces, southern Ningxia and the Hexi Corridor of Gansu Province. The next year, both officials and common people thought to be treacherous were exiled to border areas, their number estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Also, there are some other migrations organized by officials at different places. In a period of more than 20 years, the government had implemented a migration of 1.2 million people, more than 3 percent of the total population, 36 million, of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). Most of the moving and resettlement fees were borne by the government. En route, the migration was supervised by a large number of officials and soldiers. The migrants covered hundreds of kilometers, sometimes 3,000 kilometers, before they finally settled down"
Women Don’t Belong in Combat Units - WSJ - "Most female aspirants couldn’t pass the test, so the Marines changed it from a pass/fail requirement to an unscored exercise with no bearing on the candidate’s ultimate evaluation. The weapons-company hike during the IOC is now “gender neutral,” meaning that officers can hand their pack to a buddy if they get tired, rather than carrying it for the course’s full 10 miles.Lowering these physical requirements risks reducing the American military’s lethality. A more serious effect of sex integration has become taboo to mention: the inevitable introduction of eros into combat units. Putting young, hormonally charged men and women into stressful close quarters for extended periods guarantees sexual liaisons, rivalries and breakups, all of which undermine the bonding essential to a unified fighting force.... Long before infantry integration became a feminist imperative, evidence was clear that a coed military was a sexually active one. In 1988 then-Navy Secretary Jim Webb reported that of the unmarried enlisted Navy and Air Force women stationed in Iceland, half were pregnant... The argument for putting women into combat roles has always been nonmilitary: Combat experience qualifies soldiers for high-ranking Pentagon jobs. But war isn’t about promoting equality. Its objective is to break the enemy’s will through precise lethal engagement, with the lowest possible loss of American life. The claim that female combat soldiers will perform as lethally as men over an extended deployment entails a denial of biological reality as great as the one underlying the transgender crusade"
Why Many of Today’s News Reporters Believe It’s Their Duty to Lie to You - "Fournier basically endorsed the idea that journalists need to stop seeing themselves as neutral relaters of facts and begin shaping narratives for the public, in order to hold the powerful accountable... This new viewpoint of how to “do” the news quickly spread like wildfire throughout the entire DNC media complex. At last, reporters were actually being encouraged by their editors to give free rein to their own political biases, while engaged in “reporting the news.” Far from being desirable, political neutrality in the newsroom came to be viewed as a bad thing... We are now 11 years removed from 2008, when many media outlets in the political news industry enthusiastically embraced the new accountability journalism guidelines. What are the results?Reporters and editors gave in to their worst impulses. They began to give free rein to their most naked biases. And it began showing up loudly and clearly in their “news coverage.” By the time Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama in 2012, most U.S. news media outlets had ditched even a pretense of neutrality between the candidates... Since Acosta thinks Trump is a very bad president who must be “held accountable” at all times, the accountability journalism philosophy gives him the green light to crudely distort Trump’s words to achieve his goal of being a “heroic” journalist who is holding a president “accountable.”... The DNC media complex’s biases and its political agenda are why they fell so hard for the Trump–Russia collusion hoax for more than two years. A neutral and impartial news industry that checked its own biases at the door and investigated thoroughly would never have fallen for it.Far from making the U.S. political news industry better, accountability journalism totally ruined it... What many in the mainstream news media loved the most about accountability journalism is that it allowed them to openly be what they always were: political activists disguised as reporters, chafing under the repressive strictures of the old model of neutrality and objectivity."
If people don't trust the media, it's the people's fault!
What are the Democrats doing that will likely cause them to lose the 2020 election against Trump? - Quora - "The Democrats are doing everything they can to alienate their moderate voters. It’s hard to imagine how they could do a better job of it.I am a mellow, moderate, middle aged mom. I have never been particularly interested in politics, but I have voted solid Democrat for 32 years because I viewed the Democrats as the party of compassion and open-minded tolerance. Sadly, I would not describe the Democrats that way anymore.Most of my friends are mellow, middle aged and older moderates like me. None of them are happy with where the Democratic Party is going...
Late Abortion. Watching the Democrats light up the World Trade Center to celebrate being able to kill late term babies was one of the most shocking, horrifying things I have ever witnessed. This is far beyond a deal-breaker for me. Even if this was the only issue I had with the Democrats, I would switch parties and never vote Democrat again.
Government Daycare. I don’t think this is a big issue for most people, but it’s a big deal to me. The government has no business getting involved in the Mommy Wars. Full time daycare for a small child in my city costs about $1,000 per month. How is it fair for the government to essentially give working moms (or dads) $1,000 per month to support their choice, and not give stay at home moms (or dads) the same amount of money for their parenting choice? Offering free government daycare pressures and coerces parents to choose going back to work instead of caring for their own kids. No fair.
A bunch of other crazy liberal concepts in no particular order:
Modern (4th wave?) feminism, The Patriarchy, & Rape Culture
Equity (rather than equality)
What the Democrats did to Brett Kavanaugh. (I’m the mother of a teenaged son. I was appalled at how the Democrats treated Kavanaugh.)
What the Progressives are doing to Joe Biden now
Colleges and students shutting down even moderately conservative speakers.
Blatant mainstream media bias against conservatives
The constant hysterical hatred of Trump. The endless accusations against Trump. Get over it already!"
"the ever-rising qualifications from the Left and an increasing influence of the Alt-Left’s intersectionality ideology. For example:
Pros for Alt-Left
(+) Be a woman
(+) Be LGBT or vocal ally
(+) Be a minority
(+) Hate Trump
Negatives for Alt-Left
(-) Don’t be white
(-) Don't be affluent
(-) Don't be a man
(-) Don't be straight
(-) Don't be old"
Frigid Offices Might Be Killing Women’s Productivity (Facebook post)
Comments: "Umm, I have run warm my entire life. A warm office is a nightmare to me. My brain will catch on fire. As well, germs love warm offices. Germ incubators."
"Clearly the authors of this article have never never met a woman experiencing menopause...who would love to work in a refrigerator."
"Except for the portion of us women who run hot. For us, cold offices are heaven. I can always add layers or a blanket. If it’s warm, there’s only so much I can remove and stay within dress code. Haha!"
"as someone who runs hot I have a hard time with a change to this. Anything over 75 and I spend my time in the office sweating, and my productivity plummets. Hell, I have a fan mounted at my desk for summer months. Someone who’s cold can put on more clothes, but I can’t strip "
"in our office, it was the women who wanted it cold"
"Notably, the women in the study were college students and therefore probably not menopausal or peri menopausal. I suspect that if a cohort of older women were tested, the results might be different."
These 3 S’poreans Took A Leap Of Faith To Switch Careers And Are Now Successful - MyCareersFuture - "3 Singaporeans who proved that pursuing passion over paycheck was a good call." (Facebook blurb)
I like how success is still defined as earning a lot of money
Post ID: 7560083843738646742
Wednesday, July 03, 2019
Links - 3rd July 2019 ('Whiteness')
'Whiteness' Forum Denounces The Christian Cartoon 'VeggieTales' As Racist - "Cal State San Marcos held a so-called "Whiteness Forum" last Thursday where a variety of topics pertaining to America's systemic racism was discussed. The two-hour event featured more than a dozen poster board projects critiquing various aspects of society. On top of lambasting the NFL and white women for perpetuating racism, the cartoon where talking vegetables perform biblical stories for children somehow found its way into the discussion, with speakers alleging it portrays racial stereotypes."The Christian cartoon 'VeggieTales' is racist because the villains are vegetables of color"... The "Whiteness Forum" began as an extension of Professor Dreama Moon’s Communications 454 class titled "The Communication of Whiteness." The annual event serves a showcase for her student's projects. Some students who attend are offered extra credit from their professors. One student who attended told The College Fix the event essentially teaches people to feel guilty about being white."
Yale women’s studies professor: Gay white men are symbols of heterosexuality - "Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten offer a “vision of heterosexuality without straight people,” according to commentary by a Yale University assistant professor in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies responding to the politician’s recent image on the cover of TIME magazine... Professor Greta LaFleur argues the photo is a symbol of heteronormativity... LaFleur goes on to suggest that Pete and Chasten may not actually be gay... This has riled some who see Buttigieg’s ascendance as major progress in the quest for LGBT rights. Republican political consultant Tim Miller, writing in The Bulwark, noted that just a few years ago, the Buttigieg marriage would have been illegal. As a sign of progress, even President Donald Trump last week said Buttigieg’s same-sex marriage was no big deal.Perhaps it is Trump’s acceptance that riles academics like LaFleur, who writes Buttigieg’s palatable brand of gayness isn’t sufficiently confrontational... LaFleur finishes the post by complaining that Buttigieg, a white male, is getting more press coverage than women like Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Stacy Abrams (who has yet to join the race.)"
Time to abolish gay marriage!
Richard Carranza held training on 'white-supremacy culture' - "City Department of Education brass are targeting a “white-supremacy culture” among school administrators — by disparaging ideas like “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word,” The Post has learned.A presentation slide obtained by The Post offers a bullet-point description of the systemic, supposedly pro-white favoritism that Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza claims must be eradicated from the DOE, and provides just one insight into his anti-bias training efforts.The list — derived from “Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups” by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun — names more than a dozen hallmarks of “white-supremacy culture” that school administrators are expected to steer clear of.“They include such dynamics as “paternalism,” a “sense of urgency” and “power hoarding,” according to the slide, which an insider said was part of mandatory training sponsored and funded by the department’s Office of Equity and Access and recently administered to principals, central office supervisors and superintendent teams. The seminar is concurrent with Carranza’s larger push to root out “implicit bias” in the school system... “Having to talk about someone’s own whiteness is a requirement for them to become liberated.”... Several recent attendees of the DOE’s overarching implicit-bias training sessions — mandatory for all, including teachers — have bristled at the program’s emphasis on the inherent insidiousness of “white” culture.White employees who object when accused of harboring deep-seated bias are branded “fragile” and “defensive”... Carranza said on Monday that such skeptics often don’t realize their own biases until they are forced to confront them and that they are likely the ones who need the training the most"
When you hate "whiteness", you basically hate success
We all knew it wouldn't stop at elite colleges
If you say you're not in denial, that's proof that you're in denial
Richard Carranza has made whiteness 'toxic', DOE insiders claim - "At least four top Department of Education executives who have been demoted or stripped of duties under Carranza’s sweeping reorganization are poised to sue the city, claiming he has created “an environment which is hostile toward whites”... The women — all white, veteran administrators — contend they were pushed aside for less qualified persons of color... Under Carranza’s leadership, sources said, whites, in some cases, are being told they must give up power or lose responsibilities no matter how well they have performed.More than a dozen high-ranking superintendents and deputies who had served under ex-Chancellor Carmen Fariña have been demoted — some with large pay cuts — or pushed into retirement, sources said. Others have lesser duties and new bosses... the DOE has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants to coach supervisors on how to “disrupt the power structure and dismantle institutional racism,” a supervisor said... “White supremacy is characterized by perfectionism, a belief in meritocracy, and the Protestant work ethic,” the exec said, adding that whites who object when accused of deep-rooted bias are called “fragile” and “defensive.”“Can you imagine if we scrutinized blackness or brownness? We’re being trained in anti-bias not to stereotype blacks, but they’re fostering a stereotyping of whites.”"
Ironically there is a high chance that they welcomed 'diversity' when it was first introduced
DOE-sponsored group said Asians benefit from white privilege - "A city DOE-sponsored panel designed to combat racism told parents that Asian American students “benefit from white supremacy” and “proximity to white privilege,” an outraged mom told The Post.The comments drew backlash from some parents and Asian activists, but not the Department of Education, which neither denied nor denounced them.The panel was helmed by the Center for Racial Justice in Education, a group being paid about $400,000 by the DOE, led by Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, to conduct near-weekly training sessions throughout the city to address what it believes is rampant racism infecting schools."
Since anti racism is about hating success...
NYC teachers allegedly told to favor black students in 'racial equity' training - "In controversial “implicit bias” training, New York City’s public-school educators have been told to focus on black children over white ones — and one Jewish superintendent who described her family’s Holocaust tragedies was scolded and humiliated, according to firsthand accounts... “If I had a poor white male student and I had a middle-class black boy, I would actually put my equitable strategies and interventions into that middle class black boy because over the course of his lifetime he will have less access and less opportunities than that poor white boy,” the consultant, Darnisa Amante, is quoted as saying by those in the room.“That’s what racial equity is,” Amante explained.Mona Davids, president of the NYC Parents Union, was appalled.“It’s completely absurd — they want to treat black students as victims and punish white students. That defeats the purpose of what bias awareness training should be,” said Davids, who is black... One Jewish superintendent shared stories about her grandmother Malka who told of bombs falling in Lodz, Poland, and running from the Nazis in the wee hours by packing up her four children and hiding in the forest, and her grandfather Naftali, who spent nearly six years in a labor and concentration camp, where he witnessed the brutal execution of his mother and sister.“My grandparents taught me to understand the dangers of ‘targeted racism’ or the exclusion of any group, and the importance of equity for all people. This is my core value as an educator,” the superintendent told colleagues.“At the break, I stood up and, to my surprise, I was verbally attacked by a black superintendent in front of my colleagues. She said ‘This is not about being Jewish! It’s about black and brown boys of color only. You better check yourself.’”“I was traumatized,” the Jewish educator said. “ It was like 1939 all over again. I couldn’t believe this could happen to me in NYC!”... In Manhattan, a middle-school teacher with her own kids in public schools, said the DOE training “is a catalyst for hate and division.”“I have colleagues who won’t participate during ‘Courageous Conversations’ (the DOE protocol for implicit-bias workshops) because they don’t feel safe.”She cringes at training phrases like “replacement thinking” and the disdain for “whiteness.”"
DOE job ad sought ‘teachers of color’ for NYC schools - "An online job posting for a Manhattan school district specifically sought “teachers of color” amid an alleged push by Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza to combat “toxic whiteness” in Big Apple public schools"
Racial discrimination in hiring is only bad when it privileges those with 'whiteness'
Copyranter: The go-to ad joke is - still - the white male moron - "In advertising, humor sells. Brands like to know that, at the very least, they’re making consumers laugh. Agencies like to make clients laugh because if they’re laughing, there’s a better chance that they’ll be buying... After seeing this new TurboTax commercial featuring a white male dullard and his pool a few times, I went deep ad archive diving, watching most of the national major brand spots released in the Western world over the last year. Hundreds of ads. I found over 50 White Man Moron ads.And as I glanced at the credits on all these spots, I noticed an obvious if inexplicable thing: Most of the creatives who created these dumb white man ads — as in like 80 percent of them — were … white males.Self-loathing, much? Maybe they’re making fun of certain male acquaintances who look and act like these dimwits? Or maybe it’s just hyper-laziness — they can write these characters in their sleep, because they are these characters?"
If there's only one demographic you can make fun of...
The myth of white exceptionalism | Coffee House - "The notion that whites are a fallen category who can only redeem their sordid group history by denigrating or ignoring it, and that they must be judged against a different standard than other groups, is preventing a measured discussion of questions of immigration and ethnic change. This opens space for less reasonable voices who are willing to provide answers to questions many are asking... is it racist for a white person to vote for reduced immigration? Is it racist for whites to identify with a caucasian racial image as a group symbol? Save your answers. Now let’s change the questions. Is it racist for a Chinese-American person to favour increased Chinese immigration to grow the size of their community? What about for Hawaiians to identify with a Polynesian racial image as a symbol of their group? Now recall your answers. Even if you answered these questions consistently, if you are white, you probably cringed when completing the first set... Our cultural cringe can’t be a logical response based on a consistent definition of racism. Indeed, if we bracket critical race theory, which is ideologically-motivated and anti-science, there is no basis for [this response]... One assumption is that the attachment of powerful whites to their own group will spell disaster for vulnerable minorities. But that is not the case. Social psychologist Marilynn Brewer shows that in-group attachment is not correlated with out-group hostility except in cases of violent conflict. A white American’s warmth towards their own group is, for instance, associated with warmer feelings toward African-Americans... Ethnic majorities are not malign forces: 80 percent of countries have an ethnic majority and the vast majority (think Akan, Tswana, Persian) are peaceful. The systematic study of political violence since 1945 doesn’t find that a moderate attachment to ethnic majority identity predicts genocide. Rather, as political scientist Barbara Harff pointed out, the combination of war, autocracy and an exclusivist ideology which brooks no dissent (whether socialist, civic nationalist, ethnic nationalist or Islamist) is what heightens the risk of genocide. For instance, civic nationalist Indonesia has suffered far worse violence against its Chinese minority than ethnocratic Malaysia, despite the latter’s ‘sons of the soil’ policy which economically favours Malays. Indeed it is domination by an ethnic or religious minority (i.e. Sunnis in Iraq, Alawi in Syria) that increases the risk of civil war. A larger ethnic majority doesn’t lead to a greater oppression of minorities: as I show in my book, the numerical preponderance of whites in US states or Latin American countries bears no relationship to the local white-black income gap. Ethnic identity isn’t principally about using group affiliation to acquire money and power, but, as psychologists note, consists of affective attachment to myths, symbols, traditions and memories – regardless of whether the group is in the majority or the minority. The key is to keep this moderate... The fact white group identity makes us feel uncomfortable suggests that what African-American academic John McWhorter terms the ‘religion of antiracism’ is not the preserve of campus radicals. They may be its fundamentalists, but in moderate form, the religion permeates the deep tissue of western high culture, pervading its liberal institutions... The collapsing of the complexity of the real world into a simplistic binary of racism/openness is why western cultural elites are unable to defuse the cultural grievances driving populist right politics"
Mum's fury at men who left her to get attacked on London Tube - "A fashion chief executive attacked by an unwell 6ft man on a busy Tube carriage has slammed two men who moved seats and left her to defend herself.Tamara Cincik was kicked and threatened while travelling to a business meeting in central London yesterday... 'He was screaming and shouting at me and saying things like 'I am going to f****** kick you' then he did actually kick me. It was intimidating, he was a big guy and I am only size eight.' The fashion CEO is keen to stress she does not blame this man, who she desribes as being 6ft tall and of Southeast Asian descent... 'I remain more angry with those white middle class men who left me to it. As fathers, husbands and sons they should be ashamed of themselves.'... 'You are cowards with less empathy and strength than two size 8 women and a Greek female pensioner. Shame on you."
Gender equality means women are still entitled to protection by men who they don't know
Anti-racism means "minorities" who attack you are innocent, and white men who don't defend you are guilty. But if the white men protected you they'd probably be racist for 'punching down' anyway
Yale women’s studies professor: Gay white men are symbols of heterosexuality - "Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten offer a “vision of heterosexuality without straight people,” according to commentary by a Yale University assistant professor in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies responding to the politician’s recent image on the cover of TIME magazine... Professor Greta LaFleur argues the photo is a symbol of heteronormativity... LaFleur goes on to suggest that Pete and Chasten may not actually be gay... This has riled some who see Buttigieg’s ascendance as major progress in the quest for LGBT rights. Republican political consultant Tim Miller, writing in The Bulwark, noted that just a few years ago, the Buttigieg marriage would have been illegal. As a sign of progress, even President Donald Trump last week said Buttigieg’s same-sex marriage was no big deal.Perhaps it is Trump’s acceptance that riles academics like LaFleur, who writes Buttigieg’s palatable brand of gayness isn’t sufficiently confrontational... LaFleur finishes the post by complaining that Buttigieg, a white male, is getting more press coverage than women like Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Stacy Abrams (who has yet to join the race.)"
Time to abolish gay marriage!
Richard Carranza held training on 'white-supremacy culture' - "City Department of Education brass are targeting a “white-supremacy culture” among school administrators — by disparaging ideas like “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word,” The Post has learned.A presentation slide obtained by The Post offers a bullet-point description of the systemic, supposedly pro-white favoritism that Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza claims must be eradicated from the DOE, and provides just one insight into his anti-bias training efforts.The list — derived from “Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups” by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun — names more than a dozen hallmarks of “white-supremacy culture” that school administrators are expected to steer clear of.“They include such dynamics as “paternalism,” a “sense of urgency” and “power hoarding,” according to the slide, which an insider said was part of mandatory training sponsored and funded by the department’s Office of Equity and Access and recently administered to principals, central office supervisors and superintendent teams. The seminar is concurrent with Carranza’s larger push to root out “implicit bias” in the school system... “Having to talk about someone’s own whiteness is a requirement for them to become liberated.”... Several recent attendees of the DOE’s overarching implicit-bias training sessions — mandatory for all, including teachers — have bristled at the program’s emphasis on the inherent insidiousness of “white” culture.White employees who object when accused of harboring deep-seated bias are branded “fragile” and “defensive”... Carranza said on Monday that such skeptics often don’t realize their own biases until they are forced to confront them and that they are likely the ones who need the training the most"
When you hate "whiteness", you basically hate success
We all knew it wouldn't stop at elite colleges
If you say you're not in denial, that's proof that you're in denial
Richard Carranza has made whiteness 'toxic', DOE insiders claim - "At least four top Department of Education executives who have been demoted or stripped of duties under Carranza’s sweeping reorganization are poised to sue the city, claiming he has created “an environment which is hostile toward whites”... The women — all white, veteran administrators — contend they were pushed aside for less qualified persons of color... Under Carranza’s leadership, sources said, whites, in some cases, are being told they must give up power or lose responsibilities no matter how well they have performed.More than a dozen high-ranking superintendents and deputies who had served under ex-Chancellor Carmen Fariña have been demoted — some with large pay cuts — or pushed into retirement, sources said. Others have lesser duties and new bosses... the DOE has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants to coach supervisors on how to “disrupt the power structure and dismantle institutional racism,” a supervisor said... “White supremacy is characterized by perfectionism, a belief in meritocracy, and the Protestant work ethic,” the exec said, adding that whites who object when accused of deep-rooted bias are called “fragile” and “defensive.”“Can you imagine if we scrutinized blackness or brownness? We’re being trained in anti-bias not to stereotype blacks, but they’re fostering a stereotyping of whites.”"
Ironically there is a high chance that they welcomed 'diversity' when it was first introduced
DOE-sponsored group said Asians benefit from white privilege - "A city DOE-sponsored panel designed to combat racism told parents that Asian American students “benefit from white supremacy” and “proximity to white privilege,” an outraged mom told The Post.The comments drew backlash from some parents and Asian activists, but not the Department of Education, which neither denied nor denounced them.The panel was helmed by the Center for Racial Justice in Education, a group being paid about $400,000 by the DOE, led by Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, to conduct near-weekly training sessions throughout the city to address what it believes is rampant racism infecting schools."
Since anti racism is about hating success...
NYC teachers allegedly told to favor black students in 'racial equity' training - "In controversial “implicit bias” training, New York City’s public-school educators have been told to focus on black children over white ones — and one Jewish superintendent who described her family’s Holocaust tragedies was scolded and humiliated, according to firsthand accounts... “If I had a poor white male student and I had a middle-class black boy, I would actually put my equitable strategies and interventions into that middle class black boy because over the course of his lifetime he will have less access and less opportunities than that poor white boy,” the consultant, Darnisa Amante, is quoted as saying by those in the room.“That’s what racial equity is,” Amante explained.Mona Davids, president of the NYC Parents Union, was appalled.“It’s completely absurd — they want to treat black students as victims and punish white students. That defeats the purpose of what bias awareness training should be,” said Davids, who is black... One Jewish superintendent shared stories about her grandmother Malka who told of bombs falling in Lodz, Poland, and running from the Nazis in the wee hours by packing up her four children and hiding in the forest, and her grandfather Naftali, who spent nearly six years in a labor and concentration camp, where he witnessed the brutal execution of his mother and sister.“My grandparents taught me to understand the dangers of ‘targeted racism’ or the exclusion of any group, and the importance of equity for all people. This is my core value as an educator,” the superintendent told colleagues.“At the break, I stood up and, to my surprise, I was verbally attacked by a black superintendent in front of my colleagues. She said ‘This is not about being Jewish! It’s about black and brown boys of color only. You better check yourself.’”“I was traumatized,” the Jewish educator said. “ It was like 1939 all over again. I couldn’t believe this could happen to me in NYC!”... In Manhattan, a middle-school teacher with her own kids in public schools, said the DOE training “is a catalyst for hate and division.”“I have colleagues who won’t participate during ‘Courageous Conversations’ (the DOE protocol for implicit-bias workshops) because they don’t feel safe.”She cringes at training phrases like “replacement thinking” and the disdain for “whiteness.”"
DOE job ad sought ‘teachers of color’ for NYC schools - "An online job posting for a Manhattan school district specifically sought “teachers of color” amid an alleged push by Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza to combat “toxic whiteness” in Big Apple public schools"
Racial discrimination in hiring is only bad when it privileges those with 'whiteness'
Copyranter: The go-to ad joke is - still - the white male moron - "In advertising, humor sells. Brands like to know that, at the very least, they’re making consumers laugh. Agencies like to make clients laugh because if they’re laughing, there’s a better chance that they’ll be buying... After seeing this new TurboTax commercial featuring a white male dullard and his pool a few times, I went deep ad archive diving, watching most of the national major brand spots released in the Western world over the last year. Hundreds of ads. I found over 50 White Man Moron ads.And as I glanced at the credits on all these spots, I noticed an obvious if inexplicable thing: Most of the creatives who created these dumb white man ads — as in like 80 percent of them — were … white males.Self-loathing, much? Maybe they’re making fun of certain male acquaintances who look and act like these dimwits? Or maybe it’s just hyper-laziness — they can write these characters in their sleep, because they are these characters?"
If there's only one demographic you can make fun of...
The myth of white exceptionalism | Coffee House - "The notion that whites are a fallen category who can only redeem their sordid group history by denigrating or ignoring it, and that they must be judged against a different standard than other groups, is preventing a measured discussion of questions of immigration and ethnic change. This opens space for less reasonable voices who are willing to provide answers to questions many are asking... is it racist for a white person to vote for reduced immigration? Is it racist for whites to identify with a caucasian racial image as a group symbol? Save your answers. Now let’s change the questions. Is it racist for a Chinese-American person to favour increased Chinese immigration to grow the size of their community? What about for Hawaiians to identify with a Polynesian racial image as a symbol of their group? Now recall your answers. Even if you answered these questions consistently, if you are white, you probably cringed when completing the first set... Our cultural cringe can’t be a logical response based on a consistent definition of racism. Indeed, if we bracket critical race theory, which is ideologically-motivated and anti-science, there is no basis for [this response]... One assumption is that the attachment of powerful whites to their own group will spell disaster for vulnerable minorities. But that is not the case. Social psychologist Marilynn Brewer shows that in-group attachment is not correlated with out-group hostility except in cases of violent conflict. A white American’s warmth towards their own group is, for instance, associated with warmer feelings toward African-Americans... Ethnic majorities are not malign forces: 80 percent of countries have an ethnic majority and the vast majority (think Akan, Tswana, Persian) are peaceful. The systematic study of political violence since 1945 doesn’t find that a moderate attachment to ethnic majority identity predicts genocide. Rather, as political scientist Barbara Harff pointed out, the combination of war, autocracy and an exclusivist ideology which brooks no dissent (whether socialist, civic nationalist, ethnic nationalist or Islamist) is what heightens the risk of genocide. For instance, civic nationalist Indonesia has suffered far worse violence against its Chinese minority than ethnocratic Malaysia, despite the latter’s ‘sons of the soil’ policy which economically favours Malays. Indeed it is domination by an ethnic or religious minority (i.e. Sunnis in Iraq, Alawi in Syria) that increases the risk of civil war. A larger ethnic majority doesn’t lead to a greater oppression of minorities: as I show in my book, the numerical preponderance of whites in US states or Latin American countries bears no relationship to the local white-black income gap. Ethnic identity isn’t principally about using group affiliation to acquire money and power, but, as psychologists note, consists of affective attachment to myths, symbols, traditions and memories – regardless of whether the group is in the majority or the minority. The key is to keep this moderate... The fact white group identity makes us feel uncomfortable suggests that what African-American academic John McWhorter terms the ‘religion of antiracism’ is not the preserve of campus radicals. They may be its fundamentalists, but in moderate form, the religion permeates the deep tissue of western high culture, pervading its liberal institutions... The collapsing of the complexity of the real world into a simplistic binary of racism/openness is why western cultural elites are unable to defuse the cultural grievances driving populist right politics"
Mum's fury at men who left her to get attacked on London Tube - "A fashion chief executive attacked by an unwell 6ft man on a busy Tube carriage has slammed two men who moved seats and left her to defend herself.Tamara Cincik was kicked and threatened while travelling to a business meeting in central London yesterday... 'He was screaming and shouting at me and saying things like 'I am going to f****** kick you' then he did actually kick me. It was intimidating, he was a big guy and I am only size eight.' The fashion CEO is keen to stress she does not blame this man, who she desribes as being 6ft tall and of Southeast Asian descent... 'I remain more angry with those white middle class men who left me to it. As fathers, husbands and sons they should be ashamed of themselves.'... 'You are cowards with less empathy and strength than two size 8 women and a Greek female pensioner. Shame on you."
Gender equality means women are still entitled to protection by men who they don't know
Anti-racism means "minorities" who attack you are innocent, and white men who don't defend you are guilty. But if the white men protected you they'd probably be racist for 'punching down' anyway
Post ID: 5287853877038960128
Tuesday, July 02, 2019
Links - 2nd July 2019 (2)
Grooming gang victim: "I was raped by more than 100 men but police arrested me not them" - "As a vulnerable, lost teenager, Cassie Pike was raped by more than 100 men.Yet it was Cassie – not her string of vile attackers – who police repeatedly arrested.The nightmare that began when she was a troubled 11-year-old eventually drove her to attempt suicide.But for five hellish years, the authorities turned a blind eye.Officers in Halifax, West Yorks, knew Cassie was being trafficked around the country to be abused by multiple men.When her rapists plied her with drugs to make it easier to force her into sex, police issued the teenager with a warning for possessing them. Incredibly, they even arrested her on suspicion of facilitating a child sex offence after she and another underage girl got into an abuser’s car... She still gets death threats from the families of the men jailed for raping her, and has been placed in police protection hundreds of miles from her Halifax home"
Charlithians 3:16 on Twitter - "normal views:
-pump your kids full of hormones
-kill your babies
-ship in violent 70 IQs by the millions
extremist views:
-don’t teach my kids about sucking dick in 2nd grade
-don’t have gay (or any) sex on the sidewalk
-I don’t want my kids to grow up in Somalia 2.0"
Elekta - Indians for Hire Only by Indian Management | Glassdoor - "Everyone considered this company as Little India since managers from every department only hires Indians colleagues or friends. The product quality has deteriorated, you have people left and right coming out of India out of no where. They have no clue to what they are doing. Their resumes looks really polished but when it comes to the real work they are useless, all talk no action. Indian managers expects to have them trained by experience employees or else. HR is aware of this practice by hiring only Indians but they are powerless since they are scared of losing their jobs. There are way better talented local applicants than what Indian managers hires but it is a common practice for Indian managers to only bring in Indians from their own kind. This is a common practice for all companies but Elekta have also been infected and company is going down everyday."
Is there any bias among Indians of hiring other Indian workers in the IT industry? - Quora - "I started working for an International IT company in Adelaide. And it would change my view forever.On my first day of work, I noticed over 25% of the staff in the company are of Indian descent... middle and senior management roles are reserve for first – staff of Indian descent, second – staff of Anglo Australian descent.There are Vietnamese and Chinese Australians who have been with the company for many years, highly qualified, work long hours for years and they would be overlooked for promotions. A less qualified person of Indian descent would be employed externally to take the role as their manager... I noticed he was actively hiring staff from the Indian office. Indian staff from his region in India are made team leaders while non Indian staff with useful skills were hired but were never put in position of important. Staff turnover were high because of the long hours and often mistreatment, but he would just replace them with Indian staff... I tried to talk, discuss and complain about the racism and bullying with the senior vegetarian Indian managers (the Brahmin caste) and they would often greeted me with a friendly smile and a promise of things would change. They even acknowledged the bullying and the mistreatment of staff by the manager of Sikh religion. And I wasn’t the only one. Lots of people complained about it. But the discrimination would continue. The Brahmin priest castes would be in charge, they would put other castes and Sikhs as middle managers. The middle managers would do the bullying and discrimination. The Brahmin priest castes would do the smiling and avoiding meat."
"I’m currently interviewing as a software engineer at companies and having this exact problem. I’ve seen this a lot, not just in Silicon Valley, but every tech hub. I’ve been in tech for a long time so I naturally have a lot of Indian friends, and they always verify this practice."
"I worked for a great US company in Singapore. And saw this as well."
"Many Indians in IT firms don’t just discriminate at the national level, many of them discriminate on a religion, race or caste-level"
"I have friends from all ethnic groups (Latino, Chinese, Japanese, White) and they all say the same thing: once an Indian is hired in a position of relative power (say middle management) a constant stream of resumes from his family or friends will come and, after that, most of the group will be Indian. I, like other people who answered, also have very good Indian friends and they themselves say the same thing: Indians have a long running tradition of nepotism and cronyism and they do the same here in Silicon Valley."
It is notable that only towards the end do you get someone claiming this isn't true - on Quora too
Watch Arnold Schwarzenegger Get Drop Kicked And Barely Flinch - "At the Arnold Classic Africa sports festival, the actor barely flinched when drop kicked by a local idiot... this rando goes fully airborne and launches himself at Arnold, and the actor and fitness icon barely flinches upon impact-- only taking a couple of steps forward"
Uber and Lyft drivers at a DC airport trigger surge pricing by turning off apps at the same time - "Drivers for Uber and Lyft admit to manipulating the ride sharing apps so that customers will have to pay for a price surge.A group of up to 150 drivers routinely use the trick while waiting in the parking lot for passengers at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia.The drivers artificially inflate the fare by simultaneously turning off their apps for a couple of minutes.This tricks the app into thinking that there are no drivers available, which leads to a ‘price surge.’... The drivers say that the insufficient pay they receive from the companies are forcing them to pass on higher costs to the consumer... The drivers interviewed by WJLA-TV say that they have had to take pay cuts for three straight years."
Douglas Todd: Why are Vancouver and Toronto so unhappy? - "Vancouver and Toronto feature the four factors most correlated with Canadian unhappiness, according to a groundbreaking study out of UBC’s Vancouver School of Economics and McGill University.Metro Vancouver and Toronto are known for the qualities that characterize the country’s least happy regions: Long traffic commutes, stratospheric housing prices, high population densities and large proportions of foreign-born residents.Even though scholars have not proved these factors are the direct causes of Vancouver and Toronto residents exhibiting the least life satisfaction of 98 communities in Canada, the researchers found they are strongly correlated to residents’ lack of a sense of well-being and belonging.In a new study titled How Happy are Your Neighbours?, John Helliwell, Hugh Shiplett and Christopher Barrington-Leigh discovered Canadians are happier in smaller towns. “We found life to indeed be less happy in the cities,” they write. “This was despite higher incomes, lower unemployment rates and higher education in the urban areas.”... the Royal Bank of Canada reports Metro Vancouver housing costs are an “astounding 85 per cent of a typical household’s income.” That compares to 78 per cent in Toronto, 22 per cent in average Canadian urban centres and six per cent in the hinterlands... Even though neighbours aren’t physically close in small towns, they have more social networks than people in crowded urban centres"
Freakonomics Radio Live: “Would You Eat a Piece of Chocolate Shaped Like Dog Poop?” (Ep. 372) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "we have set up a team called the SPEED Team. It stands for Subway Performance Evaluation and Education Development, because we love acronyms, right? We subscribe to the PUMA initiative at New York City Transit Authority. You know what PUMA stands for?... Please Use More Acronyms...
MOSER: So, Napoleon started his Italian campaign at the end of the 18th century. And he won Lombardy and Venetia, which are two states in Italy. These states, by 1801 were under French control, and they got all the French laws, including copyright. But Italy did not have copyrights. So now in Italy, you have two sets of states. They have the same language, they have similar culture. They both get flooded with Napoleon, with the soldiers, with everything, with the gambling, all of that. But only two states have copyrights for the next 20 years.So now we can actually look what that does to music. Because now we have these two states where composers own what they produce, what they create, and what we wanted to see is whether, once you give an artist an intellectual property right, whether that actually makes them produce more and whether it makes them produce better stuff... Having basic copyright protection is important for two reasons. The first one is that it gives people an incentive to produce better work, but then the other one is if you actually make art something that people can make money off, you also change the type of person who can become an artist.So we see this actually with 19th-century novelists. Before copyrights were really a thing, the only people who would write were people who, when we matched them with their parents’ wealth records, they were actually just wealthy — there’d be men and women, but they would both be wealthy. Once you have stronger copyrights in England, then, when you look again at the parents of the people who would become writers and become novelists, now all of a sudden we have people from humbler backgrounds."
Unplanned Movie Banned In Canada By Social Justice Distributors - "Chuck Konzelman, the producer, writer, and director, told Grandin Media that the “politically progressive” and “left leaning” nature of the Canadian distribution industry is what affected the release of the film"
Signals that baffled astronomers for 17 years traced to observatory's microwave oven - "For 17 years, astronomers at a well-known Australian radio telescope known as "The Dish" had not been able to figure out the source of a strange, vexing interference."
Quebec: The most corrupt province - "Under the Quiet Revolution, Quebec underwent an unprecedented modernization, both in mindset and of the bricks and-mortar variety. The latter occurred at a dizzying speed; over 3,000 km of major highway were built in the 1960s alone. But modernization came at the price of proper oversight: in 1968, referring to widespread government corruption, historian Samuel Huntington singled out the province as “perhaps the most corrupt area [in] Australia, Great Britain, United States and Canada.”... There are some who posit that government corruption is inevitable in part because government is so omnipresent in the province’s economic life. According to Statistics Canada, Quebec’s provincial and municipal government spending is equivalent to 32 per cent of its GDP, seven percentage points higher than the national average... the factor most important to this history of corrupton may be Quebec’s nagging existential question of whether to remain part of the country. That 40-year threat of separation has been a boon for provincial coffers"
Lost Your Passport? For Americans in Austria, Any McDonald’s Can Help - The New York Times - "For American tourists who find themselves in a bind in Austria and don’t know the German words for police (“polizei”), “help!” (“hilfe!”) or the European equivalent of 911 (112), any McDonald’s will do.Under a new partnership announced by the United States Embassy in Vienna, beginning on Wednesday, American citizens need only locate the golden arches of the fast-food chain restaurant to seek help to contact a consular office... In 2017, a McDonald’s restaurant in Italy worked with archaeologists to uncover an ancient ruin underneath its building, allowing visitors to walk along a 147-foot stretch of a Roman road.And in September last year, workers at a McDonald’s in Marseille, France, won a court battle to keep the franchise open, saying it had played a vital role as a social integrator in a troubled neighborhood"
Does Paying for Expensive Dates Entitle Men to Sex? - "According to study published in 2011 titled "You Owe Me," women feel less obligated than men feel they should be to have sex following an expensive date.* However, women feel even less obligated if the date was inexpensive and the bill was split between the man and the woman."
American University Students and Staff Call for Minority-Only 'Spaces' on Campus to Promote Inclusion - "AU students are criticizing the university’s Hub for Organizing Multiculturalism and Equity (HOME) for being “marketed to students of all backgrounds rather than to students of color.”"
Here’s The Salary You Need To Earn To Afford These Homes In Singapore - "It is a dangerous game to overextend yourself to afford a pricier home. The government has done its part by introducing the MSR and TDSR. On your part, you should not take on the maximum amount of debt you can just because you are allowed to do it.Further, by locking your money in your home, you may be unable to invest your money for your future or enjoy life – going on holidays, splurging on indulgences or buying new gadgets. Instead you will likely be living a stressful lifestyle where going out of work or getting sick may spell financial disaster for your family.This is how many Singaporean families veer into ending up asset rich but cash poor."
The Work in Sex Work - "Legally, trafficking describes the recruiting, harboring, transporting, provisioning, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act. Driving a sex worker, doing a sex worker’s taxes, seeing a sex worker, working with a sex worker — all can get you arrested on trafficking charges. In fact, when two prostitutes work together, each one can be charged for trafficking the other. This definition, capacious to the point of absurdity, muddies discussions about trafficking while stripping consenting sex workers of any autonomy... I started working in the sex industry when I was seventeen because I owed a debt: not to a pimp, but to my college... Sex trafficking is not a human rights issue. It is a labor issue. Elites refuse to see this because they refuse to recognize transactional sex as real work."
Charlithians 3:16 on Twitter - "normal views:
-pump your kids full of hormones
-kill your babies
-ship in violent 70 IQs by the millions
extremist views:
-don’t teach my kids about sucking dick in 2nd grade
-don’t have gay (or any) sex on the sidewalk
-I don’t want my kids to grow up in Somalia 2.0"
Elekta - Indians for Hire Only by Indian Management | Glassdoor - "Everyone considered this company as Little India since managers from every department only hires Indians colleagues or friends. The product quality has deteriorated, you have people left and right coming out of India out of no where. They have no clue to what they are doing. Their resumes looks really polished but when it comes to the real work they are useless, all talk no action. Indian managers expects to have them trained by experience employees or else. HR is aware of this practice by hiring only Indians but they are powerless since they are scared of losing their jobs. There are way better talented local applicants than what Indian managers hires but it is a common practice for Indian managers to only bring in Indians from their own kind. This is a common practice for all companies but Elekta have also been infected and company is going down everyday."
Is there any bias among Indians of hiring other Indian workers in the IT industry? - Quora - "I started working for an International IT company in Adelaide. And it would change my view forever.On my first day of work, I noticed over 25% of the staff in the company are of Indian descent... middle and senior management roles are reserve for first – staff of Indian descent, second – staff of Anglo Australian descent.There are Vietnamese and Chinese Australians who have been with the company for many years, highly qualified, work long hours for years and they would be overlooked for promotions. A less qualified person of Indian descent would be employed externally to take the role as their manager... I noticed he was actively hiring staff from the Indian office. Indian staff from his region in India are made team leaders while non Indian staff with useful skills were hired but were never put in position of important. Staff turnover were high because of the long hours and often mistreatment, but he would just replace them with Indian staff... I tried to talk, discuss and complain about the racism and bullying with the senior vegetarian Indian managers (the Brahmin caste) and they would often greeted me with a friendly smile and a promise of things would change. They even acknowledged the bullying and the mistreatment of staff by the manager of Sikh religion. And I wasn’t the only one. Lots of people complained about it. But the discrimination would continue. The Brahmin priest castes would be in charge, they would put other castes and Sikhs as middle managers. The middle managers would do the bullying and discrimination. The Brahmin priest castes would do the smiling and avoiding meat."
"I’m currently interviewing as a software engineer at companies and having this exact problem. I’ve seen this a lot, not just in Silicon Valley, but every tech hub. I’ve been in tech for a long time so I naturally have a lot of Indian friends, and they always verify this practice."
"I worked for a great US company in Singapore. And saw this as well."
"Many Indians in IT firms don’t just discriminate at the national level, many of them discriminate on a religion, race or caste-level"
"I have friends from all ethnic groups (Latino, Chinese, Japanese, White) and they all say the same thing: once an Indian is hired in a position of relative power (say middle management) a constant stream of resumes from his family or friends will come and, after that, most of the group will be Indian. I, like other people who answered, also have very good Indian friends and they themselves say the same thing: Indians have a long running tradition of nepotism and cronyism and they do the same here in Silicon Valley."
It is notable that only towards the end do you get someone claiming this isn't true - on Quora too
Watch Arnold Schwarzenegger Get Drop Kicked And Barely Flinch - "At the Arnold Classic Africa sports festival, the actor barely flinched when drop kicked by a local idiot... this rando goes fully airborne and launches himself at Arnold, and the actor and fitness icon barely flinches upon impact-- only taking a couple of steps forward"
Uber and Lyft drivers at a DC airport trigger surge pricing by turning off apps at the same time - "Drivers for Uber and Lyft admit to manipulating the ride sharing apps so that customers will have to pay for a price surge.A group of up to 150 drivers routinely use the trick while waiting in the parking lot for passengers at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia.The drivers artificially inflate the fare by simultaneously turning off their apps for a couple of minutes.This tricks the app into thinking that there are no drivers available, which leads to a ‘price surge.’... The drivers say that the insufficient pay they receive from the companies are forcing them to pass on higher costs to the consumer... The drivers interviewed by WJLA-TV say that they have had to take pay cuts for three straight years."
Douglas Todd: Why are Vancouver and Toronto so unhappy? - "Vancouver and Toronto feature the four factors most correlated with Canadian unhappiness, according to a groundbreaking study out of UBC’s Vancouver School of Economics and McGill University.Metro Vancouver and Toronto are known for the qualities that characterize the country’s least happy regions: Long traffic commutes, stratospheric housing prices, high population densities and large proportions of foreign-born residents.Even though scholars have not proved these factors are the direct causes of Vancouver and Toronto residents exhibiting the least life satisfaction of 98 communities in Canada, the researchers found they are strongly correlated to residents’ lack of a sense of well-being and belonging.In a new study titled How Happy are Your Neighbours?, John Helliwell, Hugh Shiplett and Christopher Barrington-Leigh discovered Canadians are happier in smaller towns. “We found life to indeed be less happy in the cities,” they write. “This was despite higher incomes, lower unemployment rates and higher education in the urban areas.”... the Royal Bank of Canada reports Metro Vancouver housing costs are an “astounding 85 per cent of a typical household’s income.” That compares to 78 per cent in Toronto, 22 per cent in average Canadian urban centres and six per cent in the hinterlands... Even though neighbours aren’t physically close in small towns, they have more social networks than people in crowded urban centres"
Freakonomics Radio Live: “Would You Eat a Piece of Chocolate Shaped Like Dog Poop?” (Ep. 372) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "we have set up a team called the SPEED Team. It stands for Subway Performance Evaluation and Education Development, because we love acronyms, right? We subscribe to the PUMA initiative at New York City Transit Authority. You know what PUMA stands for?... Please Use More Acronyms...
MOSER: So, Napoleon started his Italian campaign at the end of the 18th century. And he won Lombardy and Venetia, which are two states in Italy. These states, by 1801 were under French control, and they got all the French laws, including copyright. But Italy did not have copyrights. So now in Italy, you have two sets of states. They have the same language, they have similar culture. They both get flooded with Napoleon, with the soldiers, with everything, with the gambling, all of that. But only two states have copyrights for the next 20 years.So now we can actually look what that does to music. Because now we have these two states where composers own what they produce, what they create, and what we wanted to see is whether, once you give an artist an intellectual property right, whether that actually makes them produce more and whether it makes them produce better stuff... Having basic copyright protection is important for two reasons. The first one is that it gives people an incentive to produce better work, but then the other one is if you actually make art something that people can make money off, you also change the type of person who can become an artist.So we see this actually with 19th-century novelists. Before copyrights were really a thing, the only people who would write were people who, when we matched them with their parents’ wealth records, they were actually just wealthy — there’d be men and women, but they would both be wealthy. Once you have stronger copyrights in England, then, when you look again at the parents of the people who would become writers and become novelists, now all of a sudden we have people from humbler backgrounds."
Unplanned Movie Banned In Canada By Social Justice Distributors - "Chuck Konzelman, the producer, writer, and director, told Grandin Media that the “politically progressive” and “left leaning” nature of the Canadian distribution industry is what affected the release of the film"
Signals that baffled astronomers for 17 years traced to observatory's microwave oven - "For 17 years, astronomers at a well-known Australian radio telescope known as "The Dish" had not been able to figure out the source of a strange, vexing interference."
Quebec: The most corrupt province - "Under the Quiet Revolution, Quebec underwent an unprecedented modernization, both in mindset and of the bricks and-mortar variety. The latter occurred at a dizzying speed; over 3,000 km of major highway were built in the 1960s alone. But modernization came at the price of proper oversight: in 1968, referring to widespread government corruption, historian Samuel Huntington singled out the province as “perhaps the most corrupt area [in] Australia, Great Britain, United States and Canada.”... There are some who posit that government corruption is inevitable in part because government is so omnipresent in the province’s economic life. According to Statistics Canada, Quebec’s provincial and municipal government spending is equivalent to 32 per cent of its GDP, seven percentage points higher than the national average... the factor most important to this history of corrupton may be Quebec’s nagging existential question of whether to remain part of the country. That 40-year threat of separation has been a boon for provincial coffers"
Lost Your Passport? For Americans in Austria, Any McDonald’s Can Help - The New York Times - "For American tourists who find themselves in a bind in Austria and don’t know the German words for police (“polizei”), “help!” (“hilfe!”) or the European equivalent of 911 (112), any McDonald’s will do.Under a new partnership announced by the United States Embassy in Vienna, beginning on Wednesday, American citizens need only locate the golden arches of the fast-food chain restaurant to seek help to contact a consular office... In 2017, a McDonald’s restaurant in Italy worked with archaeologists to uncover an ancient ruin underneath its building, allowing visitors to walk along a 147-foot stretch of a Roman road.And in September last year, workers at a McDonald’s in Marseille, France, won a court battle to keep the franchise open, saying it had played a vital role as a social integrator in a troubled neighborhood"
Does Paying for Expensive Dates Entitle Men to Sex? - "According to study published in 2011 titled "You Owe Me," women feel less obligated than men feel they should be to have sex following an expensive date.* However, women feel even less obligated if the date was inexpensive and the bill was split between the man and the woman."
American University Students and Staff Call for Minority-Only 'Spaces' on Campus to Promote Inclusion - "AU students are criticizing the university’s Hub for Organizing Multiculturalism and Equity (HOME) for being “marketed to students of all backgrounds rather than to students of color.”"
Here’s The Salary You Need To Earn To Afford These Homes In Singapore - "It is a dangerous game to overextend yourself to afford a pricier home. The government has done its part by introducing the MSR and TDSR. On your part, you should not take on the maximum amount of debt you can just because you are allowed to do it.Further, by locking your money in your home, you may be unable to invest your money for your future or enjoy life – going on holidays, splurging on indulgences or buying new gadgets. Instead you will likely be living a stressful lifestyle where going out of work or getting sick may spell financial disaster for your family.This is how many Singaporean families veer into ending up asset rich but cash poor."
The Work in Sex Work - "Legally, trafficking describes the recruiting, harboring, transporting, provisioning, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act. Driving a sex worker, doing a sex worker’s taxes, seeing a sex worker, working with a sex worker — all can get you arrested on trafficking charges. In fact, when two prostitutes work together, each one can be charged for trafficking the other. This definition, capacious to the point of absurdity, muddies discussions about trafficking while stripping consenting sex workers of any autonomy... I started working in the sex industry when I was seventeen because I owed a debt: not to a pimp, but to my college... Sex trafficking is not a human rights issue. It is a labor issue. Elites refuse to see this because they refuse to recognize transactional sex as real work."
Post ID: 4199233962973533672
The Struggle for Gay Rights Is Over
Gay Rights Have Already Been Won
"In January 2018, the National LGBTQ Task Force held its annual Creating Change conference at a hotel around the corner from where I live in Washington, D.C. Creating Change, which bills itself as the “foremost political, leadership, and skills-building conference for the LGBTQ social justice movement,” brings together thousands of activists from across the country. Yet surveying the various panel discussions left me confused. “Elephant in the Waiting Room: Self-Love, Health, Queering Fat Acceptance” was the title of one workshop. “The Politics of Colony and Post-hurricane Politics in PR and USVI” was another. Most puzzling for a gathering ostensibly dedicated to the political interests of people discriminated against because of their same-sex attraction was the discussion simply entitled “Asexuals.”
As the topics of conversation at America’s largest assembly of gay activists suggests, America is rapidly becoming a post-gay country...
After the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was repealed, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a group that represented gay soldiers discharged under the directive, merged with OutServe, an advocacy group for gay military personnel. (That amalgamation has itself since been fused with a group representing the families of LGBTQ soldiers.) Not long after the Supreme Court delivered its decision recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in 2015, Freedom to Marry declared its job finished and wound down operations. Later that year, the Empire State Pride Agenda, the major gay-rights organization in New York State, declared that it, too, would disband after 25 years of work. A host of other federal and state-level organizations have followed suit.
Despite evident progress, however, many gay-rights activists are hesitant to exult in their victories. To listen to some movement grandees is to think that the situation has actually never been worse. “The coordinated, systematic onslaught of attacks on L.G.B.T.Q. civil rights has been unprecedented in scale and scope,” Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said of the Trump administration in an interview with Benoit Denizet-Lewis for The New York Times Magazine this past January. “For Gays, the Worst Is Yet to Come. Again,” declared the headline of a characteristically pessimistic Times op-ed by the legendary gay activist and playwright Larry Kramer...
At a time when Americans are riven by tribal differences related to politics, race, gender, geography, religion, and other factors, it is hard to find another issue around which there is so much consensus as basic fairness for gay people. Writing recently in The New York Times about a road trip through red-state America, Samantha Allen, a self-described “queer transgender woman,” observed that in “what is ostensibly Trump country, I met many L.G.B.T. people who saw no need to flee their conservative home states for the coastal safe havens of generations past, thanks to local progress.” The headline read in part: “In the heartland, it’s never been a better time to be L.G.B.T.”
If only the people running America’s gay organizations would listen. “The Trump administration’s anti-LGBTQ policies are bad enough,” read a 2018 fundraising email from the Victory Fund, an organization committed to electing LGBTQ public officials. “But his vile rhetoric—as well as that of his allies—could be even more dangerous.” As an example of the president’s “vile rhetoric,” the organization cited a private comment he reportedly made about his vice president, Mike Pence, wanting to “hang” gays (which the White House summarily denied). It was an obvious joke about Pence’s religiosity and social conservatism, an example not of Trump’s purported homophobia but the lack of respect he has for even his most loyal followers, up to and including his own vice president, whom he is apparently willing to mock before a group of White House visitors. No matter. Not to be out-outraged, the Human Rights Campaign called Trump’s sarcastic comment about Pence “evil.”
Perhaps fearing that few beyond their perpetually infuriated base of die-hard supporters will listen, some gay groups have reached for dubious statistical evidence to back their claims of a Trump-induced homophobic backlash...
As for the report on LGBTQ homicides, it is unclear how many of the murders included in the report were actually motivated by antigay animus. According to Walter Olson of the Cato Institute, who researched the individual incidents, “it is hard to see any evidence at all that the perpetrators were motivated by such bias” in 16 of the 20 slayings of gay men. “In two cases, it’s mentioned specifically that police don’t attribute the killings to hate.” Using such specious data to claim a “massive increase in anti-LGBTQ violence since Trump took office,” as the Victory Fund did in a fundraising solicitation, is irresponsible.
Nonetheless, hysteria about America’s supposedly deepening homophobia flourishes. Earlier this year, an academic journal quietly retracted a study by a Columbia University professor purporting to show that living in areas with high levels of antigay sentiment reduces gay people’s life expectancies by a dozen years. Before it was withdrawn, the paper was cited 141 times in other academic publications. More infamously, the gay actor Jussie Smollett claimed that Trump supporters yelling “This is MAGA country” assaulted him at 2 a.m. on a Chicago street in the middle of a polar vortex. That so many people initially believed his story reflects the pervasiveness of the sentiment that a tide of homophobia descended upon America in the time since Trump became the 45th president.
The picture is different for transgender Americans. They have seen some of their progress curtailed, in the form of the Trump administration’s ban on (most) transgender military service and some administrative rulings that remove gender identity from federal antidiscrimination regulations. But it is the conflation of transgender issues with the gay rights movement, a recent development and not one undertaken without some controversy among gays and lesbians themselves, which accounts for much if not most of the evidence cited as representing regression on gay rights...
Gays economically outperform heterosexuals...
When I asked the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s leading gay-rights group, for statistics on the number of LGBTQ people annually denied employment, housing, or service at a hotel or restaurant due to their sexuality or gender identity, the group was unable to provide me with any. Most social movements are able to identify the extent of the problems they seek to address. Gun-control advocates, for instance, can readily give you the number of people killed every year by firearms. Anti-hunger campaigners can recite by memory the percentage of malnourished children.
Instead, HRC directed me to a poll in which 63 percent of LGBTQ people self-reported “discrimination in their personal lives.” Such language is sufficiently vague to encompass everything from a stray homophobic comment heard on the street to being fired, and is thus not a useful gauge of the extent of a problem remediable by government action. Blanket discrimination against gay people simply on the basis of their sexual orientation is not widespread. According to the gay legal advocate Andrew Koppelman:
Hardly any of these cases have occurred: a handful in a country of 300 million people... Even in the large number of states with no antidiscrimination protection for gay people, I am unaware of any case where a couple was unable to conduct a wedding....
Perhaps the most high-profile case of homophobic discrimination in recent memory was the one that led to last year’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision from the Supreme Court. In a 7–2 decision, all the more damning for having been written by the judicial hero of the modern gay-rights movement, Anthony Kennedy, the Court decisively ruled against a gay couple’s attempt to force a Christian baker in Colorado to make a cake for their wedding ceremony. The court assailed Colorado bureaucrats for running roughshod over the First Amendment rights of the baker, whose religious convictions forbade him not from serving gay people—he offered to make the couple all the baked goods they could ever wish to consume—but from expressing approval for something he considers sinful.
We gay people are expected to be grievously offended by the behavior of Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop. But many, if not most, of the gay people I know can live with the fact that a baker in Colorado does not approve of our relationships. America is a land of some 330 million people, and I do not require every small-business owner across the country to reject 2,000 years of religious teaching in order to pursue my happiness.
Guided by a moral absolutism resembling the religious zeal of those they oppose, some gay activists and their progressive allies have taken a zero-sum approach to the issue of antidiscrimination, seeking to punish and stigmatize people who hold the exact same view of marriage that Barack Obama expressed up until May 2012. One member of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission alleged that Jack Phillip’s invocation of his Christian faith was akin to Nazi justifications for the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the state of New York is threatening to close an evangelical adoption agency that refuses to place children with gay couples, despite the fact that the agency does not even accept government funding and that no gay couple had ever even complained about being denied service.
If you had told gay activists 10 or even five years ago that their energies would center upon campaigns related to various foods—forcing pious pastry chefs to make cakes and boycotting Chick-Fil-A, or “hate chicken,” because its Christian owner has donated money to efforts opposing same-sex marriage—most would have considered their missions complete. To understand why so many in the movement refuse to accept victory, it helps to understand the tensions that have long existed at its heart.
Since the emergence of “homophile” activists in the 1950s, the tenor and aims of the American gay-rights cause have alternated between two tendencies: integrationist and separatist. Broadly defined, integrationists have argued for the incorporation of gay people into all aspects of American society, while separatists believe that American society itself should be upended...
One of the first groups to emerge in the aftermath of Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front, adopted its name as an homage to the communist National Liberation Front of North Vietnam, derided marriage as “one of the most insidious and basic sustainers of the system,” denounced the “dirty, vile, fucked-up capitalist conspiracy,” and donated funds to the Black Panthers, an organization not exactly known for holding progressive views on homosexuality. “We are a revolutionary group of men and women, formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished,” the GLF declared in its founding manifesto.
By the 1980s, the deadly AIDS epidemic and resulting government indifference helped swing the pendulum back in the direction of integration. AIDS enforced a maturation on the gay community, and a tempering of the previous decade’s sexual excesses. This shift did not occur without controversy; gays who advocated closing down bathhouses and safer sex practices (like Larry Kramer) were derided as puritans and “sexual Nazis” by their liberationist brethren. But by the time the worst years of the epidemic were over, gays understood how much they had to gain from mainstream social acceptance in the form of hospital-visitation rights and relationship recognition—and had demonstrated that they had more in common with the straight majority than perhaps either side had recognized. “AIDS and its onslaught imposed a form of social integration that may never have taken place otherwise,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in 1996...
Dale Carpenter, the author of the definitive account of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case striking down sodomy laws, told me that the winning legal team “consciously eschewed argument rooted in sexual liberation in favor of arguments that emphasized commitment, love, and family—and especially the idea that lesbians, gays and bisexuals are ‘just like’ heterosexuals.” The integrationist lawyers had to overrule their separatist colleagues who had “urged that the final Supreme Court briefs mention BDSM and other sexual subcultures as deserving specific constitutional protection.” After the historic decision was handed down, many separatists objected that it didn’t go far enough. One Columbia University professor wrote a law-review article dismissing Lawrence as mere “domesticated liberty.”
Like the African American civil-rights movement (which had its own separationist analogue in the form of black nationalism) before it, the cause of gay equality has been most successful when its spokesmen and women addressed the American majority as fellow citizens seeking the same rights and responsibilities they take for granted.
Now that it possesses cultural and political power, the gay-rights movement is reverting to the control of its radical element, with many in the vanguard bent on upending the American social order that only recently accepted it. Success has lowered the stakes; responsible leaders (including many of the moderate and conservative gays who played an unsung role in the movement’s success) have retired from the fight, clearing the field for the sort of culture-war topics roiling the left at large.
Under Trump, the gay-rights movement is beset by mission creep. Just what are we trying to accomplish anymore, and on behalf of whom? The ever-proliferating set of sexual and gender identities one encounters is a direct result of the radicals’ hold over the movement. Take, for example, the Wesleyan University Open House, which once described itself as “a safe space for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderfuck, Polyamourous, Bondage/Disciple, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism (LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM) communities and for people of sexually or gender dissident communities.” Gay is passé.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the prevalence of the word queer...
And again, there’s the uncomfortable merger of sorts with the transgender movement. As a demonstrative example, the most recent Pride edition of the pioneering gay magazine Out is devoted largely to transgender issues and doesn’t featuring a single living lesbian within its pages...
Even if the connection to the transgender cause makes a certain sort of sense, left-wing activists are also exploiting the gay-rights movement to push agendas utterly extraneous to gay equality. Twice in the past three years, anti-Zionist activists have hijacked the stage at the Creating Change conference to attack Jewish delegates and Israel, the only country in the Middle East that even remotely respects the dignity of LGBTQ people. Meanwhile, it has become an annual ritual for followers of the Black Lives Matter movement to halt gay-pride parades in major cities across North America to protest the very presence of uniformed police officers, despite a recent survey finding that 79 percent of LBTQ people (and 77 percent of nonwhite LGBTQ people) support a police presence at Pride celebrations...
Starved of real enemies, many in the gay community are turning on their own. Among many queer types, the three words gay white men have become a euphemism for all that’s wrong with the world. Them, the LGBTQ web channel launched two years ago by Condé Nast, is a stew of resentments against this entire demographic group. Some sample headlines from a recurring column: “Dear White Gay Men, Black Panther Is Not About You,” “Dear White Gay Men: Stop Turning Yourselves Into Heroes,” “Dear White Gay Men: Labeling People of Color ‘Divisive’ Isn’t a Critique – It’s Racism.”
With his unabashed religious faith, military service, and bourgeois domesticity, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is the political embodiment of gay integration. For precisely this reason, the separatist, “queer” left despises him... A culture that once preached individuality and personal freedom has become conformist and hectoring, its self-appointed queer commissars constantly policing the language and bringing pressure to bear on those who run afoul of their ever-evolving standards...
California now bans taxpayer-funded travel to any state that “authorizes discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression,” a list that includes Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Texas. Who does that help? Not gay people in red states. But it does boost those political forces bent on convincing Americans that the gay-rights movement will only be satisfied once every individual citizen agrees with its precepts (a tough proposition in a religious country), and that gays will use strong-arm tactics to achieve this goal.
Trump’s promise to protect religious liberty from a hegemonic secular left is one of the major reasons why so many evangelical Christians supported a thrice-married sexual reprobate in 2016... The illiberal queer left and the illiberal religious right exist in a mutually reinforcing, codependent relationship.
From a legal standpoint, the movement has achieved nearly everything it needs for gay people to prosper as equal citizens. Instead of fighting this pointless war over wedding cakes, it should declare unilateral victory. Of course, it’s unreasonable to expect this to happen. For many of those whose political identities have been shaped by crusades against government discrimination and pervasive societal ignorance, victimhood is too essential an identity to be so easily discarded.
But there might not be many people left willing to foot the bill. As gays grow more comfortable with their place in America, it’s going to be harder and harder to sustain gay organizations...
Perhaps this is why so many gay activists have resorted to alarmist rhetoric, fanning the flames of hysteria to scare donors into opening their wallets. Devoid of genuine bigotry to condemn and substantive assaults on equality to resist, they resort to ever more desperate accusations and pettier concerns, complaining about a directive from the State Department prohibiting embassies from flying the rainbow flag (but not from displaying it on embassy walls), or cynically misconstruing a presidential joke told at the vice president’s expense as a wish for gay people to be lynched. Each of these contrived outrages is presented as a terrifying blow against gay equality, when they are nothing more than blips.
The smallness of the American debate over these issues does not really strike you until you’ve spent time overseas in places where it is truly dangerous to be gay. Across wide swaths of the planet, homosexuality itself—or even the advocacy of equal rights—is criminalized, and societal acceptance lags far behind that found in the liberal democratic West. The money and resources poured into suing bakers and florists would be far better spent on these genuine fights for human liberty...
For those born into a form of adversity, sometimes the hardest thing to do is admitting that they’ve won."
When power relies on pretending that there is a problem...
"In January 2018, the National LGBTQ Task Force held its annual Creating Change conference at a hotel around the corner from where I live in Washington, D.C. Creating Change, which bills itself as the “foremost political, leadership, and skills-building conference for the LGBTQ social justice movement,” brings together thousands of activists from across the country. Yet surveying the various panel discussions left me confused. “Elephant in the Waiting Room: Self-Love, Health, Queering Fat Acceptance” was the title of one workshop. “The Politics of Colony and Post-hurricane Politics in PR and USVI” was another. Most puzzling for a gathering ostensibly dedicated to the political interests of people discriminated against because of their same-sex attraction was the discussion simply entitled “Asexuals.”
As the topics of conversation at America’s largest assembly of gay activists suggests, America is rapidly becoming a post-gay country...
After the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was repealed, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a group that represented gay soldiers discharged under the directive, merged with OutServe, an advocacy group for gay military personnel. (That amalgamation has itself since been fused with a group representing the families of LGBTQ soldiers.) Not long after the Supreme Court delivered its decision recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in 2015, Freedom to Marry declared its job finished and wound down operations. Later that year, the Empire State Pride Agenda, the major gay-rights organization in New York State, declared that it, too, would disband after 25 years of work. A host of other federal and state-level organizations have followed suit.
Despite evident progress, however, many gay-rights activists are hesitant to exult in their victories. To listen to some movement grandees is to think that the situation has actually never been worse. “The coordinated, systematic onslaught of attacks on L.G.B.T.Q. civil rights has been unprecedented in scale and scope,” Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said of the Trump administration in an interview with Benoit Denizet-Lewis for The New York Times Magazine this past January. “For Gays, the Worst Is Yet to Come. Again,” declared the headline of a characteristically pessimistic Times op-ed by the legendary gay activist and playwright Larry Kramer...
At a time when Americans are riven by tribal differences related to politics, race, gender, geography, religion, and other factors, it is hard to find another issue around which there is so much consensus as basic fairness for gay people. Writing recently in The New York Times about a road trip through red-state America, Samantha Allen, a self-described “queer transgender woman,” observed that in “what is ostensibly Trump country, I met many L.G.B.T. people who saw no need to flee their conservative home states for the coastal safe havens of generations past, thanks to local progress.” The headline read in part: “In the heartland, it’s never been a better time to be L.G.B.T.”
If only the people running America’s gay organizations would listen. “The Trump administration’s anti-LGBTQ policies are bad enough,” read a 2018 fundraising email from the Victory Fund, an organization committed to electing LGBTQ public officials. “But his vile rhetoric—as well as that of his allies—could be even more dangerous.” As an example of the president’s “vile rhetoric,” the organization cited a private comment he reportedly made about his vice president, Mike Pence, wanting to “hang” gays (which the White House summarily denied). It was an obvious joke about Pence’s religiosity and social conservatism, an example not of Trump’s purported homophobia but the lack of respect he has for even his most loyal followers, up to and including his own vice president, whom he is apparently willing to mock before a group of White House visitors. No matter. Not to be out-outraged, the Human Rights Campaign called Trump’s sarcastic comment about Pence “evil.”
Perhaps fearing that few beyond their perpetually infuriated base of die-hard supporters will listen, some gay groups have reached for dubious statistical evidence to back their claims of a Trump-induced homophobic backlash...
As for the report on LGBTQ homicides, it is unclear how many of the murders included in the report were actually motivated by antigay animus. According to Walter Olson of the Cato Institute, who researched the individual incidents, “it is hard to see any evidence at all that the perpetrators were motivated by such bias” in 16 of the 20 slayings of gay men. “In two cases, it’s mentioned specifically that police don’t attribute the killings to hate.” Using such specious data to claim a “massive increase in anti-LGBTQ violence since Trump took office,” as the Victory Fund did in a fundraising solicitation, is irresponsible.
Nonetheless, hysteria about America’s supposedly deepening homophobia flourishes. Earlier this year, an academic journal quietly retracted a study by a Columbia University professor purporting to show that living in areas with high levels of antigay sentiment reduces gay people’s life expectancies by a dozen years. Before it was withdrawn, the paper was cited 141 times in other academic publications. More infamously, the gay actor Jussie Smollett claimed that Trump supporters yelling “This is MAGA country” assaulted him at 2 a.m. on a Chicago street in the middle of a polar vortex. That so many people initially believed his story reflects the pervasiveness of the sentiment that a tide of homophobia descended upon America in the time since Trump became the 45th president.
The picture is different for transgender Americans. They have seen some of their progress curtailed, in the form of the Trump administration’s ban on (most) transgender military service and some administrative rulings that remove gender identity from federal antidiscrimination regulations. But it is the conflation of transgender issues with the gay rights movement, a recent development and not one undertaken without some controversy among gays and lesbians themselves, which accounts for much if not most of the evidence cited as representing regression on gay rights...
Gays economically outperform heterosexuals...
When I asked the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s leading gay-rights group, for statistics on the number of LGBTQ people annually denied employment, housing, or service at a hotel or restaurant due to their sexuality or gender identity, the group was unable to provide me with any. Most social movements are able to identify the extent of the problems they seek to address. Gun-control advocates, for instance, can readily give you the number of people killed every year by firearms. Anti-hunger campaigners can recite by memory the percentage of malnourished children.
Instead, HRC directed me to a poll in which 63 percent of LGBTQ people self-reported “discrimination in their personal lives.” Such language is sufficiently vague to encompass everything from a stray homophobic comment heard on the street to being fired, and is thus not a useful gauge of the extent of a problem remediable by government action. Blanket discrimination against gay people simply on the basis of their sexual orientation is not widespread. According to the gay legal advocate Andrew Koppelman:
Hardly any of these cases have occurred: a handful in a country of 300 million people... Even in the large number of states with no antidiscrimination protection for gay people, I am unaware of any case where a couple was unable to conduct a wedding....
Perhaps the most high-profile case of homophobic discrimination in recent memory was the one that led to last year’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision from the Supreme Court. In a 7–2 decision, all the more damning for having been written by the judicial hero of the modern gay-rights movement, Anthony Kennedy, the Court decisively ruled against a gay couple’s attempt to force a Christian baker in Colorado to make a cake for their wedding ceremony. The court assailed Colorado bureaucrats for running roughshod over the First Amendment rights of the baker, whose religious convictions forbade him not from serving gay people—he offered to make the couple all the baked goods they could ever wish to consume—but from expressing approval for something he considers sinful.
We gay people are expected to be grievously offended by the behavior of Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop. But many, if not most, of the gay people I know can live with the fact that a baker in Colorado does not approve of our relationships. America is a land of some 330 million people, and I do not require every small-business owner across the country to reject 2,000 years of religious teaching in order to pursue my happiness.
Guided by a moral absolutism resembling the religious zeal of those they oppose, some gay activists and their progressive allies have taken a zero-sum approach to the issue of antidiscrimination, seeking to punish and stigmatize people who hold the exact same view of marriage that Barack Obama expressed up until May 2012. One member of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission alleged that Jack Phillip’s invocation of his Christian faith was akin to Nazi justifications for the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the state of New York is threatening to close an evangelical adoption agency that refuses to place children with gay couples, despite the fact that the agency does not even accept government funding and that no gay couple had ever even complained about being denied service.
If you had told gay activists 10 or even five years ago that their energies would center upon campaigns related to various foods—forcing pious pastry chefs to make cakes and boycotting Chick-Fil-A, or “hate chicken,” because its Christian owner has donated money to efforts opposing same-sex marriage—most would have considered their missions complete. To understand why so many in the movement refuse to accept victory, it helps to understand the tensions that have long existed at its heart.
Since the emergence of “homophile” activists in the 1950s, the tenor and aims of the American gay-rights cause have alternated between two tendencies: integrationist and separatist. Broadly defined, integrationists have argued for the incorporation of gay people into all aspects of American society, while separatists believe that American society itself should be upended...
One of the first groups to emerge in the aftermath of Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front, adopted its name as an homage to the communist National Liberation Front of North Vietnam, derided marriage as “one of the most insidious and basic sustainers of the system,” denounced the “dirty, vile, fucked-up capitalist conspiracy,” and donated funds to the Black Panthers, an organization not exactly known for holding progressive views on homosexuality. “We are a revolutionary group of men and women, formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished,” the GLF declared in its founding manifesto.
By the 1980s, the deadly AIDS epidemic and resulting government indifference helped swing the pendulum back in the direction of integration. AIDS enforced a maturation on the gay community, and a tempering of the previous decade’s sexual excesses. This shift did not occur without controversy; gays who advocated closing down bathhouses and safer sex practices (like Larry Kramer) were derided as puritans and “sexual Nazis” by their liberationist brethren. But by the time the worst years of the epidemic were over, gays understood how much they had to gain from mainstream social acceptance in the form of hospital-visitation rights and relationship recognition—and had demonstrated that they had more in common with the straight majority than perhaps either side had recognized. “AIDS and its onslaught imposed a form of social integration that may never have taken place otherwise,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in 1996...
Dale Carpenter, the author of the definitive account of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case striking down sodomy laws, told me that the winning legal team “consciously eschewed argument rooted in sexual liberation in favor of arguments that emphasized commitment, love, and family—and especially the idea that lesbians, gays and bisexuals are ‘just like’ heterosexuals.” The integrationist lawyers had to overrule their separatist colleagues who had “urged that the final Supreme Court briefs mention BDSM and other sexual subcultures as deserving specific constitutional protection.” After the historic decision was handed down, many separatists objected that it didn’t go far enough. One Columbia University professor wrote a law-review article dismissing Lawrence as mere “domesticated liberty.”
Like the African American civil-rights movement (which had its own separationist analogue in the form of black nationalism) before it, the cause of gay equality has been most successful when its spokesmen and women addressed the American majority as fellow citizens seeking the same rights and responsibilities they take for granted.
Now that it possesses cultural and political power, the gay-rights movement is reverting to the control of its radical element, with many in the vanguard bent on upending the American social order that only recently accepted it. Success has lowered the stakes; responsible leaders (including many of the moderate and conservative gays who played an unsung role in the movement’s success) have retired from the fight, clearing the field for the sort of culture-war topics roiling the left at large.
Under Trump, the gay-rights movement is beset by mission creep. Just what are we trying to accomplish anymore, and on behalf of whom? The ever-proliferating set of sexual and gender identities one encounters is a direct result of the radicals’ hold over the movement. Take, for example, the Wesleyan University Open House, which once described itself as “a safe space for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderfuck, Polyamourous, Bondage/Disciple, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism (LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM) communities and for people of sexually or gender dissident communities.” Gay is passé.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the prevalence of the word queer...
And again, there’s the uncomfortable merger of sorts with the transgender movement. As a demonstrative example, the most recent Pride edition of the pioneering gay magazine Out is devoted largely to transgender issues and doesn’t featuring a single living lesbian within its pages...
Even if the connection to the transgender cause makes a certain sort of sense, left-wing activists are also exploiting the gay-rights movement to push agendas utterly extraneous to gay equality. Twice in the past three years, anti-Zionist activists have hijacked the stage at the Creating Change conference to attack Jewish delegates and Israel, the only country in the Middle East that even remotely respects the dignity of LGBTQ people. Meanwhile, it has become an annual ritual for followers of the Black Lives Matter movement to halt gay-pride parades in major cities across North America to protest the very presence of uniformed police officers, despite a recent survey finding that 79 percent of LBTQ people (and 77 percent of nonwhite LGBTQ people) support a police presence at Pride celebrations...
Starved of real enemies, many in the gay community are turning on their own. Among many queer types, the three words gay white men have become a euphemism for all that’s wrong with the world. Them, the LGBTQ web channel launched two years ago by Condé Nast, is a stew of resentments against this entire demographic group. Some sample headlines from a recurring column: “Dear White Gay Men, Black Panther Is Not About You,” “Dear White Gay Men: Stop Turning Yourselves Into Heroes,” “Dear White Gay Men: Labeling People of Color ‘Divisive’ Isn’t a Critique – It’s Racism.”
With his unabashed religious faith, military service, and bourgeois domesticity, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is the political embodiment of gay integration. For precisely this reason, the separatist, “queer” left despises him... A culture that once preached individuality and personal freedom has become conformist and hectoring, its self-appointed queer commissars constantly policing the language and bringing pressure to bear on those who run afoul of their ever-evolving standards...
California now bans taxpayer-funded travel to any state that “authorizes discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression,” a list that includes Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Texas. Who does that help? Not gay people in red states. But it does boost those political forces bent on convincing Americans that the gay-rights movement will only be satisfied once every individual citizen agrees with its precepts (a tough proposition in a religious country), and that gays will use strong-arm tactics to achieve this goal.
Trump’s promise to protect religious liberty from a hegemonic secular left is one of the major reasons why so many evangelical Christians supported a thrice-married sexual reprobate in 2016... The illiberal queer left and the illiberal religious right exist in a mutually reinforcing, codependent relationship.
From a legal standpoint, the movement has achieved nearly everything it needs for gay people to prosper as equal citizens. Instead of fighting this pointless war over wedding cakes, it should declare unilateral victory. Of course, it’s unreasonable to expect this to happen. For many of those whose political identities have been shaped by crusades against government discrimination and pervasive societal ignorance, victimhood is too essential an identity to be so easily discarded.
But there might not be many people left willing to foot the bill. As gays grow more comfortable with their place in America, it’s going to be harder and harder to sustain gay organizations...
Perhaps this is why so many gay activists have resorted to alarmist rhetoric, fanning the flames of hysteria to scare donors into opening their wallets. Devoid of genuine bigotry to condemn and substantive assaults on equality to resist, they resort to ever more desperate accusations and pettier concerns, complaining about a directive from the State Department prohibiting embassies from flying the rainbow flag (but not from displaying it on embassy walls), or cynically misconstruing a presidential joke told at the vice president’s expense as a wish for gay people to be lynched. Each of these contrived outrages is presented as a terrifying blow against gay equality, when they are nothing more than blips.
The smallness of the American debate over these issues does not really strike you until you’ve spent time overseas in places where it is truly dangerous to be gay. Across wide swaths of the planet, homosexuality itself—or even the advocacy of equal rights—is criminalized, and societal acceptance lags far behind that found in the liberal democratic West. The money and resources poured into suing bakers and florists would be far better spent on these genuine fights for human liberty...
For those born into a form of adversity, sometimes the hardest thing to do is admitting that they’ve won."
When power relies on pretending that there is a problem...
Post ID: 6596639163218930012
Links - 2nd July 2019 (1)
In the post-truth world, we need to remember the philosophy of science - "Accurate, effective reporting of science must be honest about the nature of the scientific arguments without losing the reader in technicalities. Achieving even an elementary understanding of the science requires distinguishing three dimensions: its subject (such as the past, present, and future climate), evidence about the subject (such as measurements of temperature), and theories about it (such as a hypothetical mechanism for global warming). To confuse any two of these three dimensions leads to alarming mental muddles, in which no theory lacks evidence, or nothing happens unobserved, or a change of theory is a change of climate. In other words, public discussions of science had better avoid basic mistakes in the philosophy of science, on pain of distorting scientific discoveries and their practical impacts... Kofman’s broadly sympathetic piece is entitled: “Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science.” The article contains some striking passages. Kofman assures us that what Latour’s critics “have always missed” is that he “never sought to deny the existence of gravity”. She then adds: “Gravity, he has argued time and again, was created and made visible by the labour and expertise of scientists.” In short, scientists created gravity. Really? Did no apples fall before gravity was thought of?"
Not all those pushing back against identity politics are white and male - "Tariq Modood, professor of sociology at Bristol University, a British Pakistani and one with both academic and state honours, believes the left’s obeisance to an unreflective anti-racism is “confused”. In a talk he gave to a workshop on “Labour and England” in September, he said that “the self-effacement of being British among the centre-left made it difficult for people like me to say I was British and was proud to be British, that we were British together…ethnic minorities are now more affirming of a British identity than the white English”. In an interview, he goes further, saying that minorities should “look to British imperial history – and find there proof of your Britishness. We were British subjects – and this resonates with quite a lot with people”... The shame which leftists and liberals often express – the writer Paul Mason wrote in 2015 that “I do not want to be English” – and the left-liberal contempt for what they claim is a continued attachment to imperial glory by whites, are themes picked up and developed by Iranian born Ali Ansari, now head of the Institute for Iranian Studies at St Andrews University... Neither he nor any other of this loose group (who in some cases do not know of each other’s work) deny the Empire’s brutalities: but they are impatient with white guilt. Deprecating British self deprecation, Ansari told me that “the empire is accused of being a racist project – in fact, imperialists who knew and worked in the empire were often very inclusive – cosmopolitanism came to be part of imperialism… Someone said – the ‘trouble with the British is that not only were they the greatest imperialists, but they are also the greatest anti-imperialists’.”... She has also been part of a group which formed the blog, All in Britain – criticising what the writers see as leftist anti-racist dogma which refuses to accept an improving culture of racial integration – and a critique of liberal excess in defence of those allegedly victimised. A blog by Udham Singh (a nom de plume) in March blasted the Teen Vogue columnist Emily Lindin, who had “recently tweeted: ‘if some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay’. Note the claim to victimhood here – absurdly, she thinks she is the one paying the price.”"
Campus yoga group goes inactive after cultural appropriation complaint - "A yoga club at American University has gone inactive after a complaint of cultural appropriation.The campus Bhakti Yoga Club invited a non-Indian group to perform the Indian epic “The Ramayana." This did not sit well with American University student Maya Krishnan, who complained to the President’s Council on Diversity and Inclusion... “The sponsors of this show and the artists acted as if their actions were acceptable because they have converted to the Hare Krishna sect of Hinduism. The reality of this is that white European dancers will never know my intersectional experience as a Hindu woman, being a brown bodied person and the other aspects of systematic racism that I, as well as other South Asian people, have experienced.”"
'Easy' Cooking Isn't Easy: A Thanksgiving Lament - "Homemade beef barbacoa tacos. Short-rib potpie. “Weekday” French toast. Make-ahead coconut cake. They might as well be skyscraper blueprints, so improbable is the possibility that I will begin making my own nut butters, baking my own sandwich bread, or turning that fall farmer’s market bounty into jars of homemade applesauce... I can order excellent pad thai from my phone in under a minute. Or, I can find a recipe for “easy” pad thai, run—literally, run—to the grocery store at lunch, hope that grocery store sells fish sauce, then spend 40 minutes making the dish and 20 minutes cleaning up. The decision to cook from scratch may have many virtues, but ease is not one of them. Despite what we’re told, cooking the way so many Americans aspire to do it today is never fast, and rarely easy compared to all the other options available for feeding ourselves... More of our cookbooks are written by chefs publishing recipes adapted from their restaurants, as opposed to the self-taught home cooks who traditionally authored the lion’s share of the category. Ingredients have gotten more exotic, and less likely to be collected within a trip to your average American grocery store. Za’atar? Yuzu juice? Persian cucumber? For a special cooking project, fine, but galling to discover in the ingredients list for a weeknight dinner. At the same time, magazine test kitchens have shifted from being staffed by seasoned home cooks to young culinary-school graduates, trained in the practices of the professional kitchen (which are entirely based around the premise that a corps of cooks will be working 12 hours a day to create the dishes). Even when these recipes are simplified for home cooking, the fundamental approaches often aren’t practical... real “easy” cooking, if that’s what you’re after, is far too simple to sustain a magazine and cookbook industry. It relies on foods that can be purchased at a single point of sale and involves a bare minimum of ingredients and a small repertoire of techniques"
Why Do Millennials Hate Groceries? - "twenty- and thirtysomethings are bidding adieu to yet another cultural mainstay of the Baby Boomer generation—shopping trips to supermarkets. With an abundance of options on the streets and at their fingertips, young shoppers are eating out at restaurants and bars, ordering in on their phones, or snagging groceries at convenience stores, such as CVS, and superstores, such as Walmart... Why Do Millennials Hate Groceries? - "twenty- and thirtysomethings are bidding adieu to yet another cultural mainstay of the Baby Boomer generation—shopping trips to supermarkets. With an abundance of options on the streets and at their fingertips, young shoppers are eating out at restaurants and bars, ordering in on their phones, or snagging groceries at convenience stores, such as CVS, and superstores, such as Walmart... The big story here is not that young people are uniquely turning away from groceries. Rather, the story is a structural shift toward eating out at restaurants, among Millennials and their parents (and perhaps even their grandparents)... Using Census data, the economist Mark J. Perry calculated that for the first time on record, Americans are spending more money at restaurants and bars than at grocery stores... Using Census data, the economist Mark J. Perry calculated that for the first time on record, Americans are spending more money at restaurants and bars than at grocery stores."
Professional Privilege Checkers Inc. - Posts - "Magic is not for white people. Leave that shit to brown + black women and stop fucking up the cosmic balance with ur fake witchy shenanigans"
"So you felt the need to say brown first lol meanwhile all practices come from Africa. From black people. From my people. Lol but yea ok"
The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru - The New York Times - "Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.”... Watching Rhodes work, I remember that he is still, chiefly, a writer, who is using a new set of tools — along with the traditional arts of narrative and spin — to create stories of great consequence on the biggest page imaginable. The narratives he frames, the voices of senior officials, the columnists and reporters whose work he skillfully shapes and ventriloquizes, and even the president’s own speeches and talking points, are the only dots of color in a much larger vision... “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once... “Instead of adjusting his policies to the reality, and adjusting his perception of reality to the changing realities on the ground, the conclusions he draws are exactly the same, no matter what the costs have been to our strategic interests,” he says. “In an odd way, he reminds me of Bush.” The comparison is a startling one — and yet, questions of tone aside, it is uncomfortably easy to see the similarities between the two men, American presidents who projected their own ideas of the good onto an indifferent world."
What does this say about the US media?
'Anti-Islamic' posters in Essex showing crusader chasing woman in burqa with AK-47 investigated by police - "Posters put up in an Essex town bearing the phrase “Islamists not welcome” are being treated as a hate crime, police have said."
This may be a brilliant troll job to get liberals to welcome Islamism. If you oppose sharia law you're Islamophobic
Islamism, Salafism, and jihadism: A primer - "Islamist groups believe Islamic law or Islamic values should play a central role in public life. They feel Islam has things to say about how politics should be conducted, how the law should be applied, and how other people—not just themselves—should conduct themselves morally. To be or become an Islamist, however, is a conscious act of political affirmation. As the Princeton historian Michael Cook writes, Islamists are “at pains to construe their politics out of their Islamic heritage.” This also explains, in part, why Islamism isn’t just a reaction to modernity, but a product of it. In the pre-modern era, Islam imbued every aspect of public life, providing an overarching religious, legal, and moral culture. It went without saying, so it wasn’t said. With the advent of modernity, Islam, for the first time, became a distinct political project. But why not treat Islamists as we would treat any other ideology or political platform? For starters, modern liberal sensibilities shy away from enshrining a privileged position to any one religion, out of fear of placing constraints on individual freedom—yet the point of Islamism is to advocate for a privileged social and political role for Islamic belief"
Porn star: I didn't have sex with Trump - "An adult film star who previously alleged an extramarital affair with Donald Trump now says in a statement the affair never happened. A lawyer for porn actress Stormy Daniels confirmed his client’s statement Tuesday. Daniels’ real name is Stephanie Clifford."
Indian car owner protects vehicle with a layer of cow dung as summer temperatures exceed 45 degrees Celsius - "An image of her car being shared on social media showed her Toyota sedan completely slathered with cow dung to keep it cool in the hot weather... The use of cow dung as insulation comes from an old practice by rural residents who used it on their walls and floors as insulation – it would keep their homes warm in winter and cooler in summer.Cow dung cakes – poop made with hay and dried in the sun – have also been used as fuel in villages and people have been known to use it in soap and as organic manure. Politicians have also claimed various benefits of cow urine and other bovine-related products. Last month, Pragya Singh Thakur, who contested in the just-concluded general election on a BJP ticket, claimed that she cured her cancer with the help of cow urine... In Uttar Pradesh – where the ruling BJP administration has proposed to set up 1,000-capacity cow shelters in seven districts of the state – a government ayurvedic pharmacy has mooted a plan to collect, process and sell packaged bottles of cow urine as a health drink"
If you use shit can people call you a shithole?
New Jersey man faces prison for sexual conduct with minor, child porn - "Mell began communicating with the 15-year-old through text messages and SnapChat in 2017. He was 51 at the time.Mell already had “a pre-existing relationship with the minor” when he began communicating with her, according to the brief filed in support of his release on bail.“In fact, it was the minor’s mother who first introduced Mr. Mell to obtain flight lessons for the minor”... Mell flew with her in his private plane from Somerset Airport to Barnstable, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod “for the purpose of engaging in illicit conduct, specifically, a sexual act with a person under the age of eighteen."On the flight back, Mell put the aircraft in autopilot mode and engaged in sex acts"
Not all those pushing back against identity politics are white and male - "Tariq Modood, professor of sociology at Bristol University, a British Pakistani and one with both academic and state honours, believes the left’s obeisance to an unreflective anti-racism is “confused”. In a talk he gave to a workshop on “Labour and England” in September, he said that “the self-effacement of being British among the centre-left made it difficult for people like me to say I was British and was proud to be British, that we were British together…ethnic minorities are now more affirming of a British identity than the white English”. In an interview, he goes further, saying that minorities should “look to British imperial history – and find there proof of your Britishness. We were British subjects – and this resonates with quite a lot with people”... The shame which leftists and liberals often express – the writer Paul Mason wrote in 2015 that “I do not want to be English” – and the left-liberal contempt for what they claim is a continued attachment to imperial glory by whites, are themes picked up and developed by Iranian born Ali Ansari, now head of the Institute for Iranian Studies at St Andrews University... Neither he nor any other of this loose group (who in some cases do not know of each other’s work) deny the Empire’s brutalities: but they are impatient with white guilt. Deprecating British self deprecation, Ansari told me that “the empire is accused of being a racist project – in fact, imperialists who knew and worked in the empire were often very inclusive – cosmopolitanism came to be part of imperialism… Someone said – the ‘trouble with the British is that not only were they the greatest imperialists, but they are also the greatest anti-imperialists’.”... She has also been part of a group which formed the blog, All in Britain – criticising what the writers see as leftist anti-racist dogma which refuses to accept an improving culture of racial integration – and a critique of liberal excess in defence of those allegedly victimised. A blog by Udham Singh (a nom de plume) in March blasted the Teen Vogue columnist Emily Lindin, who had “recently tweeted: ‘if some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay’. Note the claim to victimhood here – absurdly, she thinks she is the one paying the price.”"
Campus yoga group goes inactive after cultural appropriation complaint - "A yoga club at American University has gone inactive after a complaint of cultural appropriation.The campus Bhakti Yoga Club invited a non-Indian group to perform the Indian epic “The Ramayana." This did not sit well with American University student Maya Krishnan, who complained to the President’s Council on Diversity and Inclusion... “The sponsors of this show and the artists acted as if their actions were acceptable because they have converted to the Hare Krishna sect of Hinduism. The reality of this is that white European dancers will never know my intersectional experience as a Hindu woman, being a brown bodied person and the other aspects of systematic racism that I, as well as other South Asian people, have experienced.”"
'Easy' Cooking Isn't Easy: A Thanksgiving Lament - "Homemade beef barbacoa tacos. Short-rib potpie. “Weekday” French toast. Make-ahead coconut cake. They might as well be skyscraper blueprints, so improbable is the possibility that I will begin making my own nut butters, baking my own sandwich bread, or turning that fall farmer’s market bounty into jars of homemade applesauce... I can order excellent pad thai from my phone in under a minute. Or, I can find a recipe for “easy” pad thai, run—literally, run—to the grocery store at lunch, hope that grocery store sells fish sauce, then spend 40 minutes making the dish and 20 minutes cleaning up. The decision to cook from scratch may have many virtues, but ease is not one of them. Despite what we’re told, cooking the way so many Americans aspire to do it today is never fast, and rarely easy compared to all the other options available for feeding ourselves... More of our cookbooks are written by chefs publishing recipes adapted from their restaurants, as opposed to the self-taught home cooks who traditionally authored the lion’s share of the category. Ingredients have gotten more exotic, and less likely to be collected within a trip to your average American grocery store. Za’atar? Yuzu juice? Persian cucumber? For a special cooking project, fine, but galling to discover in the ingredients list for a weeknight dinner. At the same time, magazine test kitchens have shifted from being staffed by seasoned home cooks to young culinary-school graduates, trained in the practices of the professional kitchen (which are entirely based around the premise that a corps of cooks will be working 12 hours a day to create the dishes). Even when these recipes are simplified for home cooking, the fundamental approaches often aren’t practical... real “easy” cooking, if that’s what you’re after, is far too simple to sustain a magazine and cookbook industry. It relies on foods that can be purchased at a single point of sale and involves a bare minimum of ingredients and a small repertoire of techniques"
Why Do Millennials Hate Groceries? - "twenty- and thirtysomethings are bidding adieu to yet another cultural mainstay of the Baby Boomer generation—shopping trips to supermarkets. With an abundance of options on the streets and at their fingertips, young shoppers are eating out at restaurants and bars, ordering in on their phones, or snagging groceries at convenience stores, such as CVS, and superstores, such as Walmart... Why Do Millennials Hate Groceries? - "twenty- and thirtysomethings are bidding adieu to yet another cultural mainstay of the Baby Boomer generation—shopping trips to supermarkets. With an abundance of options on the streets and at their fingertips, young shoppers are eating out at restaurants and bars, ordering in on their phones, or snagging groceries at convenience stores, such as CVS, and superstores, such as Walmart... The big story here is not that young people are uniquely turning away from groceries. Rather, the story is a structural shift toward eating out at restaurants, among Millennials and their parents (and perhaps even their grandparents)... Using Census data, the economist Mark J. Perry calculated that for the first time on record, Americans are spending more money at restaurants and bars than at grocery stores... Using Census data, the economist Mark J. Perry calculated that for the first time on record, Americans are spending more money at restaurants and bars than at grocery stores."
Professional Privilege Checkers Inc. - Posts - "Magic is not for white people. Leave that shit to brown + black women and stop fucking up the cosmic balance with ur fake witchy shenanigans"
"So you felt the need to say brown first lol meanwhile all practices come from Africa. From black people. From my people. Lol but yea ok"
The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru - The New York Times - "Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.”... Watching Rhodes work, I remember that he is still, chiefly, a writer, who is using a new set of tools — along with the traditional arts of narrative and spin — to create stories of great consequence on the biggest page imaginable. The narratives he frames, the voices of senior officials, the columnists and reporters whose work he skillfully shapes and ventriloquizes, and even the president’s own speeches and talking points, are the only dots of color in a much larger vision... “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once... “Instead of adjusting his policies to the reality, and adjusting his perception of reality to the changing realities on the ground, the conclusions he draws are exactly the same, no matter what the costs have been to our strategic interests,” he says. “In an odd way, he reminds me of Bush.” The comparison is a startling one — and yet, questions of tone aside, it is uncomfortably easy to see the similarities between the two men, American presidents who projected their own ideas of the good onto an indifferent world."
What does this say about the US media?
'Anti-Islamic' posters in Essex showing crusader chasing woman in burqa with AK-47 investigated by police - "Posters put up in an Essex town bearing the phrase “Islamists not welcome” are being treated as a hate crime, police have said."
This may be a brilliant troll job to get liberals to welcome Islamism. If you oppose sharia law you're Islamophobic
Islamism, Salafism, and jihadism: A primer - "Islamist groups believe Islamic law or Islamic values should play a central role in public life. They feel Islam has things to say about how politics should be conducted, how the law should be applied, and how other people—not just themselves—should conduct themselves morally. To be or become an Islamist, however, is a conscious act of political affirmation. As the Princeton historian Michael Cook writes, Islamists are “at pains to construe their politics out of their Islamic heritage.” This also explains, in part, why Islamism isn’t just a reaction to modernity, but a product of it. In the pre-modern era, Islam imbued every aspect of public life, providing an overarching religious, legal, and moral culture. It went without saying, so it wasn’t said. With the advent of modernity, Islam, for the first time, became a distinct political project. But why not treat Islamists as we would treat any other ideology or political platform? For starters, modern liberal sensibilities shy away from enshrining a privileged position to any one religion, out of fear of placing constraints on individual freedom—yet the point of Islamism is to advocate for a privileged social and political role for Islamic belief"
Porn star: I didn't have sex with Trump - "An adult film star who previously alleged an extramarital affair with Donald Trump now says in a statement the affair never happened. A lawyer for porn actress Stormy Daniels confirmed his client’s statement Tuesday. Daniels’ real name is Stephanie Clifford."
Indian car owner protects vehicle with a layer of cow dung as summer temperatures exceed 45 degrees Celsius - "An image of her car being shared on social media showed her Toyota sedan completely slathered with cow dung to keep it cool in the hot weather... The use of cow dung as insulation comes from an old practice by rural residents who used it on their walls and floors as insulation – it would keep their homes warm in winter and cooler in summer.Cow dung cakes – poop made with hay and dried in the sun – have also been used as fuel in villages and people have been known to use it in soap and as organic manure. Politicians have also claimed various benefits of cow urine and other bovine-related products. Last month, Pragya Singh Thakur, who contested in the just-concluded general election on a BJP ticket, claimed that she cured her cancer with the help of cow urine... In Uttar Pradesh – where the ruling BJP administration has proposed to set up 1,000-capacity cow shelters in seven districts of the state – a government ayurvedic pharmacy has mooted a plan to collect, process and sell packaged bottles of cow urine as a health drink"
If you use shit can people call you a shithole?
New Jersey man faces prison for sexual conduct with minor, child porn - "Mell began communicating with the 15-year-old through text messages and SnapChat in 2017. He was 51 at the time.Mell already had “a pre-existing relationship with the minor” when he began communicating with her, according to the brief filed in support of his release on bail.“In fact, it was the minor’s mother who first introduced Mr. Mell to obtain flight lessons for the minor”... Mell flew with her in his private plane from Somerset Airport to Barnstable, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod “for the purpose of engaging in illicit conduct, specifically, a sexual act with a person under the age of eighteen."On the flight back, Mell put the aircraft in autopilot mode and engaged in sex acts"
Post ID: 9090600836420486953
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