Left Jumps Trump For Saying What Democrats Have About Baltimore - "Once again, President Trump’s critics have invoked racial invective in an effort to tarnish his image while ignoring similar comments from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and 2020 presidential hopeful.Less than a week ago, in a reply to Maryland’s Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, who made disparaging comments about the living conditions of asylum-seekers on the southern border, Trump told Cummings to focus his attention on his home district. “Cummings’ District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous and filthy place. … No human being would want to live there,” Trump wrote. The so-called mainstream media was apoplectic, falling all over themselves to call Trump and his comments racist as quickly as possible.Let’s rewind to a Dec. 8, 2015, speech Sanders delivered in Baltimore: “The fact of the matter is that America is the wealthiest country in the history of the world. But anyone who took the walk that we took around this neighborhood [in west Baltimore] would not think you’re in a wealthy nation. You would think that you’re in a Third World country.”The reaction from the same media? Crickets... Even former mayor Catherine Pugh (2016-19), during a walking tour in September 2018, condemned parts of her own city. “What the hell? We should just take all this sh-t down,” she said, regarding the dilapidated and boarded up buildings and row houses in east Baltimore. “You can smell the rats. Oh my G-d, you can smell the dead animals.” While she was absolutely correct, nothing changed during her scandal-ridden administration, ending with her resignation in May of this year after she pushed a series of children’s books in exchange for city contracts. Were Pugh’s comments racist? What about the myriad reports by PBS, The Baltimore Sun, and the New York Times?... Frankly, the city has been slumping for decades under constant Democratic control — politicians who have continued to mishandle things the same way for decades, yet somehow have expected improvements. The last Republican mayor of Baltimore was Theodore McKeldin (1963-67), and the last time a Republican was elected to the City Council was 1939. When one-party rule goes unchecked for decades, complacency, carelessness, and corruption set in. When people condemn President Trump for his remarks while giving a free pass to the politicians making similar comments on the other side of the aisle, they are simply looking for a scapegoat. Trump has been in office two and a half years — he is most certainly not responsible for the strife that has befallen Baltimore... Project Baltimore reported that in 13 of 39 city high schools, zero students were proficient in math. Zero. Let that sink in for a minute. In six more Baltimore high schools, only 1 percent tested proficient. In roughly half the schools, 3,804 students attempted the exam, with a mere 14 proficient in math. Not 14 percent, 14 actual students. It’s no wonder the poverty rate in Baltimore is 22 percent. Incompetent so-called leaders and teachers’ unions have corrupted the public school system. They hide behind tenure while indoctrinating students instead of educating them, condemning the next generation to the consequences of the corrupt and broken system they created. It’s not all their fault, though: the children they teach have largely grown up in chaotic homes that do not value learning. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who spent more than 30 years as a pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, reported that 65 percent of the children in Baltimore live within single-parent families, a trend that has been worsening for decades and is statistically worse in black communities compared to white, Hispanic, and Asian communities. Sadly, Baltimore is not an anomaly. See also Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, and St. Louis, just to mention a few... pointing out these things, which should be obvious, gets you labeled with an “-ist” or a “-phobe.”"
Trump Called ‘Racist’ For Saying Baltimore Is ‘Rat’ ‘Infested.’ But PBS Aired Documentary Confirming Trump’s Comments. - "CNN’s Victor Blackwell, for example, lashed out at Trump for suggesting Baltimore was “infested” with rats, claiming the infestation language from Trump was some racist code for black and brown people... PBS aired a documentary called "Rat Film" about the troubled city last year, detailing the issues the president highlighted about Baltimore.The documentary, as one might suspect, was not condemned as "racist" when it was aired."'Rat Film,' a documentary that takes the decades-long fight waged against Baltimore’s rat population and uses it as a lens through which to look at how the city has addressed myriad social issues over the decades, airs tonight on PBS," The Baltimore Sun reported in February 2018. The docu, created by Baltimore filmmaker Theo Anthony, was "a crowd favorite" at Maryland's Film Festival, according to the news outlet... Patch reported last year that Baltimore was among one of the nation’s "Rattiest Cities" according to a report from Orkin, a pest control company."
Baltimore’s new deputy police commissioner gets mugged at gunpoint - "The robbery came just a month after the department launched a new “crime reduction strategy” that it said would “reduce the victimization and fear of victimization of violent crime in Baltimore City.”There have been 185 homicides in the city so far this year, with 166 from shootings, according to the Sun, with only St. Louis having more murders per 100,000 people"
Donald Trump at the Overton Window - "Things have been good for the rats in Baltimore. For homo sapiens sapiens? Not so good. Drugs. Violence. Poverty. Squalor. “The Wire” was more documentary than fiction.But rats have, as the book of Genesis recommended, been fruitful. Also, they have multiplied. Quoth Catherine Pugh, mayor of Baltimore until just a couple of months ago, when she stepped down because of charges of corruption, rats were so plentiful in Baltimore that “you could smell them.”But that was in September of last year, before Donald Trump turned his gimlet eye on Baltimore, a city that has suffered not only from more than half a century of local Democratic control but also from nearly 25 years of representation by Elijah Cummings, a race-hustling confidence man right out of central casting... Politico, along with the rest of the virtue-signaling, chest-less media, sobbed in impotent disbelief. “President Donald Trump on Monday opened new fronts in the bitter tirade he launched over the weekend against Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore, lobbing insults at civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.”You know that the president’s observation was impermissible because Politico called it “bitter,” which ever since Obama’s “bitter clingers” remark has been code for “right-wing redneck.”... What Al Sharpton really is, as the president noted, is a “con man,” a race-hustling mountebank. Thomas Sowell was less polite but more accurate when he said that Sharpton headed “a trail of slime going back more than a quarter of a century, during which he has whipped up mobs and fomented race hatred from the days of the Tawana Brawley ‘rape’ hoax of 1987 to the Duke ‘rape’ hoax of 2006 and the Ferguson riots of 2014.”...
'as morally offensive as is the expression of racism wherever it is found, a false charge of racism is equally offensive, perhaps even more so, because the consequences of a false charge of racism enable an authentic racist to conceal his racism by exploiting the loose way the term is used to cover up his actions. The same is true of a false charge of sexism or anti-Semitism. This is the lesson we should all have learned from the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Because of his false and irresponsible charges of communism against liberals, socialists, and others among his critics, many communists and agents of communist influence sought to pass themselves off as Jeffersonian democrats or merely idealistic reformers'...
“People discerning a racist motive for Trump’s attack on Elijah Cummings are missing a key point: Trump attacks those who criticize him and his administration, black or white.” Hume follows up with an amusing and color-coordinated list of people Trump has put in their place (Bernie Sanders: crazy, Elizabeth Warren: total fraud, Justin Amash: loser, Joe Biden: low IQ, Harry Reid: insane, etc., etc.)... Public discourse in America has long been held hostage to a species of racist moral blackmail that has made it almost impossible to tell the truth about many central social realities. Trump opened the window on that paralyzing darkness when he dared to violate the taboo against criticizing failure when it happened to be presided over by blacks. But to do so is not racist. In fact, it is anti-racist, because it dares to hold everyone, blacks as well as whites, to the same standard."
Democrats Control America’s Most Dangerous Cities. So Why Do They Keep Passing the Buck on Gun Crime? - "Progressives and conservatives traditionally have exhibited different attitudes to the lessons of history. While conservatives have tended to take cues from the past as they build measured hopes for the future, progressives have urged that we break free from tradition in order to create bold and ambitious blueprints for a society they consider to be more just. In the United States, however, this pattern appears to be breaking down, as it is now progressives who tend to embrace a more rigid, backward-looking approach, especially on issues tied to identity. Unlike conservatives, progressives aren’t looking to revive a better, sometimes idealized version of their country. But they have become bogged down in the politics of historical redress, at the expense of forward-looking policies that would actually improve people’s lives. A microcosm of this larger tendency was put on display during last month’s Democratic primary debates, which touched on the issue of urban gun violence. No Democratic presidential candidate expressed a sense of responsibility for the plague of violent crime in America’s cities, even though the largest urban areas are almost all controlled by Democratic politicians... The Democrats like to suggest that the problem of gun crime can’t ever be fully tackled until their party controls the White House and both houses of Congress, at which point they might pass aggressive gun-control legislation at the national level. But the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab has identified a meaningful role for city government initiatives in improving community safety. A 2014 empirical study of a summer-job program found that even part-time, minimum wage jobs can help reduce violent crime among youth in high-crime areas of Chicago by more than 40 percent. The study’s authors speculate that the program’s success is less attributable to poverty alleviation than to the social, psychological and cultural benefits of having a job... Preventing the deaths of today’s black youth would do a lot more good than dwelling on a racist past whose evils can never be undone."
L'origine de Bert
Friday, November 01, 2019
CIA turned our celebrities into ‘sissy pants’, says Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
CIA turned our celebrities into ‘sissy pants’, says Chinese Academy of Social Sciences | World | The Times
Beijing has accused the CIA of secretly fuelling the trend for effeminate or “sissy” celebrities in China.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Cass), one of the country’s leading research institutions, studied China’s booming entertainment industry and its demand for androgynous, coiffed male celebrities, derided in state media as “xiao xian rou” which means “little fresh meat”.
A Cass report accuses the CIA of beginning its campaign to “brainwash” Asian men in Japan in 1962 with the foundation of the Johnny & Associates talent agency.
It claims the agency’s founder, Johnny Kitagawa, was “loyal to the Americans rather than the Japanese” and colluded with the CIA to use “entertainment to brainwash the Japanese people . . . to weaken the male temperament of Japanese society”.
Since then, the Chinese report, titled “Do you know how hard the CIA is working”, says, weakened male temperament has spread to other parts of east Asia.
Beijing’s experts compared China’s entertainment industry, which “advocates feminine male artists”, to Hollywood, where “male stars are not like this, most of them are tough guys”.
The biggest celebrities in mainland China often are imported from the K-Pop industry in South Korea. Their style has influenced a generation of young fans in China who like their idols to be pale and delicate.
This has irked Beijing, which connects national strength with male muscularity. An editorial in the state-run Xinhua news agency derided xiao xian rou as “sissy boys” unfit for the task of “helping our nation reach its renaissance”.
Last year, Xinhua, the state news agency, lambasted singers in a new group, New F4, as “sissy pants” and said they were “not men, but not women”.
“They look androgynous and wear make-up. They are slender and weak,” the influential opinion columnist using the pen name Xinshiping wrote. “The impact this sick culture will have on our young generation is immeasurable.”
To counter the popularity of xiao xian rou, the government has backed films such as Wolf Warrior 2, with male leads who are macho and militaristic. “Anyone who offends China will be killed no matter how far the target is,” the tagline for the film, which features guns, explosions and tanks, reads.
While China is still a highly patriarchal society, notions of gender and sexuality have become more diverse, especially since homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness in 2001.
Beijing has accused the CIA of secretly fuelling the trend for effeminate or “sissy” celebrities in China.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Cass), one of the country’s leading research institutions, studied China’s booming entertainment industry and its demand for androgynous, coiffed male celebrities, derided in state media as “xiao xian rou” which means “little fresh meat”.
A Cass report accuses the CIA of beginning its campaign to “brainwash” Asian men in Japan in 1962 with the foundation of the Johnny & Associates talent agency.
It claims the agency’s founder, Johnny Kitagawa, was “loyal to the Americans rather than the Japanese” and colluded with the CIA to use “entertainment to brainwash the Japanese people . . . to weaken the male temperament of Japanese society”.
Since then, the Chinese report, titled “Do you know how hard the CIA is working”, says, weakened male temperament has spread to other parts of east Asia.
Beijing’s experts compared China’s entertainment industry, which “advocates feminine male artists”, to Hollywood, where “male stars are not like this, most of them are tough guys”.
The biggest celebrities in mainland China often are imported from the K-Pop industry in South Korea. Their style has influenced a generation of young fans in China who like their idols to be pale and delicate.
This has irked Beijing, which connects national strength with male muscularity. An editorial in the state-run Xinhua news agency derided xiao xian rou as “sissy boys” unfit for the task of “helping our nation reach its renaissance”.
Last year, Xinhua, the state news agency, lambasted singers in a new group, New F4, as “sissy pants” and said they were “not men, but not women”.
“They look androgynous and wear make-up. They are slender and weak,” the influential opinion columnist using the pen name Xinshiping wrote. “The impact this sick culture will have on our young generation is immeasurable.”
To counter the popularity of xiao xian rou, the government has backed films such as Wolf Warrior 2, with male leads who are macho and militaristic. “Anyone who offends China will be killed no matter how far the target is,” the tagline for the film, which features guns, explosions and tanks, reads.
While China is still a highly patriarchal society, notions of gender and sexuality have become more diverse, especially since homosexuality was declassified as a mental illness in 2001.
Post ID: 4488267618847258833
Links - 1st November 2019 (1)
Singh’s NDP trails all major parties for candidates — he seeks more women, minorities - "Singh said he’s not worried, despite having difficulty attracting the kinds of candidates he wants, particularly women.“It’s a lot harder to recruit many women, who are so qualified and so capable but don’t see themselves as leaders and they won’t say yes on the first try,” he said.“It takes multiple attempts to encourage women to come forward"
So much for no means no
How to Stop the Corporate Virtue-Signaling Before It’s Too Late - "There are enough forces fueling the political polarization in the west—from Black Lives Matter to Fox News to Vladimir Putin. The last thing we need right now is for corporations to be adding fuel to the fire by taking sides in the culture wars.The dangers of this kind of corporate politicization became apparent in Australia last year after the government announced a plebiscite on the question of gay marriage. While a healthy debate took place in the political realm, many of the country’s biggest corporations, including Qantas, began to actively campaign for the “yes” side. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, who is openly gay, was one of the most outspoken. He ended up getting a pie in his face. Peter Dutton, whose Liberal National Party was opposed to same-sex marriage, argued that corporations should “stick to their knitting.” Dutton said that Qantas executives were welcome to campaign on their own dimes but he urged them not to “use an iconic brand and the might of a multi-billion dollar business on issues best left to the judgment of issues and elected decision-makers.” Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop, Anthony Fisher, was also concerned, warning that corporations getting political on social issues was threatening to democracy. “In our polity, corporations enjoy various privileges such as legal personality and perpetuity, limitation of liability, corporate tax rates, protections of intellectual property and bankruptcy law et cetera, on the understanding that they will use those advantages for their well-understood commercial purposes, and not so as to become a Fifth Estate governing our democracy”... Jeremy Sammut, a researcher at Australia’s Centre for Independent Studies, documented the corporate intrusion into politics in his recent paper, “Curbing Corporate Social Responsibility: Preserving pluralism – and preventing politicisation – in Australian business.”Sammut points out that the corporate virtue-signaling almost exclusively tends to favor the political tastes of the “elites” over the “ordinary” people, and that’s what makes it so dangerous... As Harvard professor Amy Chua points out in her recent book Political Tribes, “when groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.” It’s easy to feel threatened when even corporations are piling on with the politicians. For another example of this, check out the videos of Americans burning their sneakers after Nike lionized NFL player Colin Kaepernick for refusing to stand for the national anthem before games. The Kaepernick controversy has been a gift to Donald Trump, who uses it to rile up voters."
Schrödinger’s (Wo)Manhood - "Much like Schrödinger’s unfortunate cat, which is simultaneously dead and alive, manhood and womanhood in our era are held to be simultaneously entirely in the brain and everywhere except the brain. In matters concerning gender equity in STEM, one must profess that the differences between men and women manifest solely in the pelvic and chest anatomy, not the brain. Consequently, if women constitute less than 50 percent of the people studying or working in a field, the only acceptable explanation is sexism, not a difference in the typical preferences of the two sexes.On the other hand, transgender activists maintain that the distinction between being a man or a woman is entirely in the mind, and a person’s reproductive anatomy is not what defines them as male or female. Whatever a person states about his or her gender identity reflects their authentic inner nature, and may not be challenged. Scholars who raise questions about transgender identity face not only criticism and counterarguments (fair game for anyone making a claim), but also demands that their published work be removed from the written record rather than rebutted in open debate... (Interestingly, transgender men make remarkably few demands concerning their status as men. One reason is surely that modern Western society has fewer spaces that are explicitly male-only, and those that remain mostly face pressure to admit women rather than expand their concept of manhood. Facing a dearth of explicitly men-only spaces to which they can demand access, some transgender men have actually demanded access to women-only spaces.)"
Labor fight roils Bernie Sanders campaign, as workers demand the $15 hourly pay the candidate has proposed for employees nationwide - "Campaign field hires have demanded an annual salary they say would be equivalent to a $15-an-hour wage, which Sanders for years has said should be the federal minimum. The organizers and other employees supporting them have invoked the senator’s words and principles in making their case to campaign manager Faiz Shakir"
Whoops!
Bernie Sanders Campaign Responds to $15 Minimum Wage Controversy with Better Hours for Staff - "Amid a pay war within his own 2020 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders will limit the amount of time his organizers can work to guarantee that no one is making less than $15 per hour"
Bernie Sanders, Defender of Bread Lines as Sign of Prosperity, Attacks Amazon’s Corporate Lingo as ‘Orwellian’ - "Take Sanders' defenses of the authoritarian Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, which he visited and enthusiastically supported while mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s. When asked about his support for the Sandinistas in light of the food shortages in the country that resulted in people standing in bread lines, Sanders retorted:
It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don't line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.
Then there is Sanders' support for the Castro regime in Cuba, which, according to his telling, had "deficiencies" but also instilled in the population a genuine love of the government."
How wings really work - "It’s one of the most tenacious myths in physics and it frustrates aerodynamicists the world over. Now, University of Cambridge’s Professor Holger Babinsky has created a 1-minute video that he hopes will finally lay to rest a commonly used yet misleading explanation of how wings lift.“A wing lifts when the air pressure above it is lowered. It’s often said that this happens because the airflow moving over the top, curved surface has a longer distance to travel and needs to go faster to have the same transit time as the air travelling along the lower, flat surface. But this is wrong,” he explained. “I don’t know when the explanation first surfaced but it’s been around for decades. You find it taught in textbooks, explained on television and even described in aircraft manuals for pilots. In the worst case, it can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of some of the most important principles of aerodynamics.”To show that this common explanation is wrong, Babinsky filmed pulses of smoke flowing around an aerofoil... “What actually causes lift is introducing a shape into the airflow, which curves the streamlines and introduces pressure changes – lower pressure on the upper surface and higher pressure on the lower surface,” clarified Babinsky, from the Department of Engineering. “This is why a flat surface like a sail is able to cause lift – here the distance on each side is the same but it is slightly curved when it is rigged and so it acts as an aerofoil. In other words, it’s the curvature that creates lift, not the distance.”"
Targeting Barcelona was sadly predictable – Spain holds both historic and modern importance to jihadists - "What happened in Barcelona, however, was not a freak incident. The writing has been on the wall for years. No, not because of foreign policy often cited as a legitimate grievance of why we see “backlash” on our streets, despite Isil writing in its magazine Dabiq in 2016 that “even if you were to stop bombing us … we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.”On the contrary, Spain has kept a low profile and avoided foreign policy adventures since the departure of former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar in 2004, a close ally of the United States in “the war on terror” post-9/11. Under his leadership, Spain took part in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a decision for which Aznar paid a heavy price. Following the Madrid attacks, he lost in an election he expected to win to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who immediately ordered the withdrawal of Spanish troops. Spain has erred on the side of caution ever since and as countries around the world stepped-up their roles in a US-led coalition against Isil in Iraq, the country remained a reluctant partner. But just because Spain had little appetite to confront Isil, the group still showed interest in Spain.The country has been identified as a key target on extremist websites for historical reasons, given that Muslims ruled in Spain for close to eight centuries until 1492, a fact that informs Isil’s central narrative in the fight against the “crusaders”. In January 2016, the terrorist organization issued a chilling video threatening to launch attacks in Spain and to reconquer the territory of the Iberian Peninsula that previously was part of the Islamic caliphate. “We will recover our land from the invaders”, Isil vowed in the video message... [The Jihadist] interest is not so much informed by our actions but rather eminently shaped by a skewed historical narrative and fascist ideology."
If you take a very generous view of "Western foreign policy", you can claim the Reconquista as part of it. Or maybe you can pretend that the Reconquista was Western Imperialism and Muslims are just punching up and fighting Colonialism
An angry minority made foxhunting a political issue - yet today, support remains undimmed - "Hunting is not a ‘controversial’ activity among those who live and work in the countryside. Some like it, some don’t, but the idea that this traditional and slightly odd activity should have become a national political issue is fairly ludicrous wherever you are viewing it from. The fact that somewhere in the 20th Century the eradication of hunts and the 40,000-odd people who follow them became, in the words of a leading Labour politician “totemic to the Labour party”, is utterly bizarre.The 'totemic’ ban was passed in 2004, but it has little to do with animals or their welfare. The chairman of the government inquiry into hunting with hounds in 2000 stated very clearly that hunting was not cruel, and it remains perfectly legal to shoot a fox, trap a fox or snare a fox. In fact, research has shown a big drop in the UK’s fox population since the ban on hunting came into force. The one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that the fox is no better off as a result of the ban. There can be no logical justification for such a ridiculous law, so what was the real motivation for the ban? If that was not already obvious, the admission of one MP as soon as the law was passed that it was “class war”, and the subsequent continuing campaigns against hunts that are no longer hunting foxes can leave only one conclusion. The anti-hunting movement is not really about the welfare of animals, it is about a hatred of people, and so it continues its obsessive pursuit of hunts. Meanwhile, in the countryside, support for hunting remains undimmed. More women and young people continue to take up hunting as it remains open and accessible to everyone. Hunting prevails in some of the most marginal of rural communities. In many remote rural areas, hunts play an important social role in times of challenge and change.The real shame is that this issue continues to soak up so much energy that could be used for something positive, not least given the huge challenges facing the countryside in the coming years. Our ever-growing population puts more pressure on green spaces as the demand for housing and infrastructure grows, and when the absolute priority should be to ensure that Brexit works for the countryside it remains bizarre that issues like hunting remain so high on the agendas of some politicians... hunting and badger culling were among the least influential issues when it came to how people voted in the 2017 General Election, as they were in 2015 and 2010. But the tide of e-petitions, automatically generated emails and social media posts on hunting reinforce that there is a small proportion of the population which is fixated with animal rights issues, for reasons that have little to do with animals... There has been no benefit to the huntsman or the fox, but worse than that, hundreds of hours of police time and thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money continue to be wasted"
What do drones and GPS owe to a 1744 shipwreck? - "In rural China, delivery drones are starting to look like a leapfrog technology: one that catches on most quickly where there is not a competing established infrastructure - in this case, of big-box retail stores and roads for van deliveries.Zhangwei, for example, is a village in Jiangsu province where few people own cars, and only half have fridges, but everyone has a phone - and they use those mobiles to place orders at online retailer JD.com for everything from disposable nappies to fresh crabs. As Jiayang Fan describes in the New Yorker, about four times a day, warehouse workers dispatch the village's orders on a drone that carries up to 30lb at 45 miles per hour. Everyone is happy - except for Big Auntie, the woman who runs the village shop."
How important will blockchain be to the world's economy? - "the computers solving Bitcoin's cryptographic puzzles consume, by one estimate, about as much electricity as Ireland... In removing the need for intermediaries, blockchains may sometimes remind us why their services can be worth paying for.Intermediaries can fix mistakes. Your bank can send a replacement internet banking login. Lose the passcode to your Bitcoin wallet, and you can kiss your currency goodbye.They can also resolve disputes. How best to do that with blockchain "smart contracts" is most kindly described as an evolving conversation.And trust in an intermediary has to be replaced by trust in other things - that software is reliable, and that incentive structures will not break down in unexpected circumstances.But assessing software is hard. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a pioneering investment fund on the Ethereum blockchain, raised $150m before someone hacked it, and stole $50m."
So much for no means no
How to Stop the Corporate Virtue-Signaling Before It’s Too Late - "There are enough forces fueling the political polarization in the west—from Black Lives Matter to Fox News to Vladimir Putin. The last thing we need right now is for corporations to be adding fuel to the fire by taking sides in the culture wars.The dangers of this kind of corporate politicization became apparent in Australia last year after the government announced a plebiscite on the question of gay marriage. While a healthy debate took place in the political realm, many of the country’s biggest corporations, including Qantas, began to actively campaign for the “yes” side. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, who is openly gay, was one of the most outspoken. He ended up getting a pie in his face. Peter Dutton, whose Liberal National Party was opposed to same-sex marriage, argued that corporations should “stick to their knitting.” Dutton said that Qantas executives were welcome to campaign on their own dimes but he urged them not to “use an iconic brand and the might of a multi-billion dollar business on issues best left to the judgment of issues and elected decision-makers.” Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop, Anthony Fisher, was also concerned, warning that corporations getting political on social issues was threatening to democracy. “In our polity, corporations enjoy various privileges such as legal personality and perpetuity, limitation of liability, corporate tax rates, protections of intellectual property and bankruptcy law et cetera, on the understanding that they will use those advantages for their well-understood commercial purposes, and not so as to become a Fifth Estate governing our democracy”... Jeremy Sammut, a researcher at Australia’s Centre for Independent Studies, documented the corporate intrusion into politics in his recent paper, “Curbing Corporate Social Responsibility: Preserving pluralism – and preventing politicisation – in Australian business.”Sammut points out that the corporate virtue-signaling almost exclusively tends to favor the political tastes of the “elites” over the “ordinary” people, and that’s what makes it so dangerous... As Harvard professor Amy Chua points out in her recent book Political Tribes, “when groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.” It’s easy to feel threatened when even corporations are piling on with the politicians. For another example of this, check out the videos of Americans burning their sneakers after Nike lionized NFL player Colin Kaepernick for refusing to stand for the national anthem before games. The Kaepernick controversy has been a gift to Donald Trump, who uses it to rile up voters."
Schrödinger’s (Wo)Manhood - "Much like Schrödinger’s unfortunate cat, which is simultaneously dead and alive, manhood and womanhood in our era are held to be simultaneously entirely in the brain and everywhere except the brain. In matters concerning gender equity in STEM, one must profess that the differences between men and women manifest solely in the pelvic and chest anatomy, not the brain. Consequently, if women constitute less than 50 percent of the people studying or working in a field, the only acceptable explanation is sexism, not a difference in the typical preferences of the two sexes.On the other hand, transgender activists maintain that the distinction between being a man or a woman is entirely in the mind, and a person’s reproductive anatomy is not what defines them as male or female. Whatever a person states about his or her gender identity reflects their authentic inner nature, and may not be challenged. Scholars who raise questions about transgender identity face not only criticism and counterarguments (fair game for anyone making a claim), but also demands that their published work be removed from the written record rather than rebutted in open debate... (Interestingly, transgender men make remarkably few demands concerning their status as men. One reason is surely that modern Western society has fewer spaces that are explicitly male-only, and those that remain mostly face pressure to admit women rather than expand their concept of manhood. Facing a dearth of explicitly men-only spaces to which they can demand access, some transgender men have actually demanded access to women-only spaces.)"
Labor fight roils Bernie Sanders campaign, as workers demand the $15 hourly pay the candidate has proposed for employees nationwide - "Campaign field hires have demanded an annual salary they say would be equivalent to a $15-an-hour wage, which Sanders for years has said should be the federal minimum. The organizers and other employees supporting them have invoked the senator’s words and principles in making their case to campaign manager Faiz Shakir"
Whoops!
Bernie Sanders Campaign Responds to $15 Minimum Wage Controversy with Better Hours for Staff - "Amid a pay war within his own 2020 presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders will limit the amount of time his organizers can work to guarantee that no one is making less than $15 per hour"
Bernie Sanders, Defender of Bread Lines as Sign of Prosperity, Attacks Amazon’s Corporate Lingo as ‘Orwellian’ - "Take Sanders' defenses of the authoritarian Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, which he visited and enthusiastically supported while mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s. When asked about his support for the Sandinistas in light of the food shortages in the country that resulted in people standing in bread lines, Sanders retorted:
It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don't line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.
Then there is Sanders' support for the Castro regime in Cuba, which, according to his telling, had "deficiencies" but also instilled in the population a genuine love of the government."
How wings really work - "It’s one of the most tenacious myths in physics and it frustrates aerodynamicists the world over. Now, University of Cambridge’s Professor Holger Babinsky has created a 1-minute video that he hopes will finally lay to rest a commonly used yet misleading explanation of how wings lift.“A wing lifts when the air pressure above it is lowered. It’s often said that this happens because the airflow moving over the top, curved surface has a longer distance to travel and needs to go faster to have the same transit time as the air travelling along the lower, flat surface. But this is wrong,” he explained. “I don’t know when the explanation first surfaced but it’s been around for decades. You find it taught in textbooks, explained on television and even described in aircraft manuals for pilots. In the worst case, it can lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of some of the most important principles of aerodynamics.”To show that this common explanation is wrong, Babinsky filmed pulses of smoke flowing around an aerofoil... “What actually causes lift is introducing a shape into the airflow, which curves the streamlines and introduces pressure changes – lower pressure on the upper surface and higher pressure on the lower surface,” clarified Babinsky, from the Department of Engineering. “This is why a flat surface like a sail is able to cause lift – here the distance on each side is the same but it is slightly curved when it is rigged and so it acts as an aerofoil. In other words, it’s the curvature that creates lift, not the distance.”"
Targeting Barcelona was sadly predictable – Spain holds both historic and modern importance to jihadists - "What happened in Barcelona, however, was not a freak incident. The writing has been on the wall for years. No, not because of foreign policy often cited as a legitimate grievance of why we see “backlash” on our streets, despite Isil writing in its magazine Dabiq in 2016 that “even if you were to stop bombing us … we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam.”On the contrary, Spain has kept a low profile and avoided foreign policy adventures since the departure of former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar in 2004, a close ally of the United States in “the war on terror” post-9/11. Under his leadership, Spain took part in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a decision for which Aznar paid a heavy price. Following the Madrid attacks, he lost in an election he expected to win to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who immediately ordered the withdrawal of Spanish troops. Spain has erred on the side of caution ever since and as countries around the world stepped-up their roles in a US-led coalition against Isil in Iraq, the country remained a reluctant partner. But just because Spain had little appetite to confront Isil, the group still showed interest in Spain.The country has been identified as a key target on extremist websites for historical reasons, given that Muslims ruled in Spain for close to eight centuries until 1492, a fact that informs Isil’s central narrative in the fight against the “crusaders”. In January 2016, the terrorist organization issued a chilling video threatening to launch attacks in Spain and to reconquer the territory of the Iberian Peninsula that previously was part of the Islamic caliphate. “We will recover our land from the invaders”, Isil vowed in the video message... [The Jihadist] interest is not so much informed by our actions but rather eminently shaped by a skewed historical narrative and fascist ideology."
If you take a very generous view of "Western foreign policy", you can claim the Reconquista as part of it. Or maybe you can pretend that the Reconquista was Western Imperialism and Muslims are just punching up and fighting Colonialism
An angry minority made foxhunting a political issue - yet today, support remains undimmed - "Hunting is not a ‘controversial’ activity among those who live and work in the countryside. Some like it, some don’t, but the idea that this traditional and slightly odd activity should have become a national political issue is fairly ludicrous wherever you are viewing it from. The fact that somewhere in the 20th Century the eradication of hunts and the 40,000-odd people who follow them became, in the words of a leading Labour politician “totemic to the Labour party”, is utterly bizarre.The 'totemic’ ban was passed in 2004, but it has little to do with animals or their welfare. The chairman of the government inquiry into hunting with hounds in 2000 stated very clearly that hunting was not cruel, and it remains perfectly legal to shoot a fox, trap a fox or snare a fox. In fact, research has shown a big drop in the UK’s fox population since the ban on hunting came into force. The one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that the fox is no better off as a result of the ban. There can be no logical justification for such a ridiculous law, so what was the real motivation for the ban? If that was not already obvious, the admission of one MP as soon as the law was passed that it was “class war”, and the subsequent continuing campaigns against hunts that are no longer hunting foxes can leave only one conclusion. The anti-hunting movement is not really about the welfare of animals, it is about a hatred of people, and so it continues its obsessive pursuit of hunts. Meanwhile, in the countryside, support for hunting remains undimmed. More women and young people continue to take up hunting as it remains open and accessible to everyone. Hunting prevails in some of the most marginal of rural communities. In many remote rural areas, hunts play an important social role in times of challenge and change.The real shame is that this issue continues to soak up so much energy that could be used for something positive, not least given the huge challenges facing the countryside in the coming years. Our ever-growing population puts more pressure on green spaces as the demand for housing and infrastructure grows, and when the absolute priority should be to ensure that Brexit works for the countryside it remains bizarre that issues like hunting remain so high on the agendas of some politicians... hunting and badger culling were among the least influential issues when it came to how people voted in the 2017 General Election, as they were in 2015 and 2010. But the tide of e-petitions, automatically generated emails and social media posts on hunting reinforce that there is a small proportion of the population which is fixated with animal rights issues, for reasons that have little to do with animals... There has been no benefit to the huntsman or the fox, but worse than that, hundreds of hours of police time and thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money continue to be wasted"
What do drones and GPS owe to a 1744 shipwreck? - "In rural China, delivery drones are starting to look like a leapfrog technology: one that catches on most quickly where there is not a competing established infrastructure - in this case, of big-box retail stores and roads for van deliveries.Zhangwei, for example, is a village in Jiangsu province where few people own cars, and only half have fridges, but everyone has a phone - and they use those mobiles to place orders at online retailer JD.com for everything from disposable nappies to fresh crabs. As Jiayang Fan describes in the New Yorker, about four times a day, warehouse workers dispatch the village's orders on a drone that carries up to 30lb at 45 miles per hour. Everyone is happy - except for Big Auntie, the woman who runs the village shop."
How important will blockchain be to the world's economy? - "the computers solving Bitcoin's cryptographic puzzles consume, by one estimate, about as much electricity as Ireland... In removing the need for intermediaries, blockchains may sometimes remind us why their services can be worth paying for.Intermediaries can fix mistakes. Your bank can send a replacement internet banking login. Lose the passcode to your Bitcoin wallet, and you can kiss your currency goodbye.They can also resolve disputes. How best to do that with blockchain "smart contracts" is most kindly described as an evolving conversation.And trust in an intermediary has to be replaced by trust in other things - that software is reliable, and that incentive structures will not break down in unexpected circumstances.But assessing software is hard. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a pioneering investment fund on the Ethereum blockchain, raised $150m before someone hacked it, and stole $50m."
Post ID: 73992429582012852
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Links - 29th October 2019 (2)
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Steve Bannon full interview - "People in the United Kingdom should see this more than anything, you voted on Brexit. And what you had was a civil service that said, we're not going to do that. And it broke the back of the Tory party. Okay, it broke the back of the Tory party. That's the permanent political class that runs things. That's what's got to be addressed. And President Trump has got it in Washington, DC, just as much as you've got it in London...
You have some very attractive personalities running in the Democratic Party. What is happening every day is they're being more radicalized, they've essentially become an open borders party. They've already said the show of hands of that on the first debate was unanimous about paying unlimited health care for illegal immigrants...
Right now, there's a very disturbing trend. And I think maybe even the preliminary to a, a major confrontation started economically. Remember, war in the future will be cyber and economic, almost more than kinetic. And you're seeing China, Iran, Turkey, with North Korea, and now Russia forming I think some sort of working group, the United States is already in quasi economic war with these right now. The tariffs are essentially sanctions on China, we’ve sanctioned North Korea, we've sanctioned Iran and we’re looking to our allies to help us with secondary sanctions. We've began this kind of economic confrontation a little bit with Turkey, Turkey just bought the planes, the jets from Russia, Russia is doing joint combat exercises in the Pacific with China, you can see the control of the Eurasian landmass coming apart. And there's a working partnership... what Donald Trump has done geopolitically and this one I think he's done, he saved NATO. Remember, NATO hadn't gotten up to the 2% and this is why he was hectoring it the entire time. These threats are real threats. And that's why NATO has got to be a robust alliance. When you hear John McCain, these other people denigrate Trump on NATO, it's the exact opposite. Donald Trump's put his political capital on the rejuvenation of NATO. This budget that just went down that the conservatives are not happy about, a big part of that is about national security, to support NATO operations, support operation around the world. What Donald Trump has, I think done is put in high relief, exactly what we're facing. The next 20, 30, 40 years is about the Eurasian landmass. It is China, Iran, Turkey, Russia and North Korea… these are all totalitarian surveillance states. Okay. And I think the conflict coming in the future is against the western democracies, and those like India, and Japan and Korea, that believe in, the industrial democracies that believe in freedom and the democratic process versus these totalitarian governments. And it's very clear to me, that that's the storm clouds on the rise. And I think Donald Trump in his wisdom is putting together, that's why he's put such a focus on the South China Sea. That's why he's putting such a focus on the streets of Taiwan. That's why he's putting such a focus. That's why we have a carrier battle group up in the north Arabian Sea. And it's not to be provocative, trying to start a kinetic war. What is doing is telling our allies, particularly NATO, in Europe that depend upon the Persian Gulf, remember, we're now energy independent. We're an energy exporter. So these places in the world are not as significant as they used to be, except to our allies"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Johnson meets Macron - "You must assume that people will take negotiating positions. One of the things that was most aggravating for me is listening to... the BBC more generally and public media more generally, treat statements from the European Union as though they’re statements of fact, rather than negotiating stances, and every single thing they say is a negotiating stance, even down to Mr. Hogan's threats of a poisoned atmosphere"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Detroit & US 2020 elections - "We in the United States have to get back to governing. And I really think we're distracted by the wrong issues. You know, if you sit here and you watch the Mueller investigation, or you watch these other issues, this is not what the American citizens care about. The American citizens care about a Congress that works, a Congress that legislates, a Congress that thinks about what they need. And look, this is not new. This has been going on for over a decade right now. Where Washington spends more time talking about the distractions, then they talk about the real issues. This may get worse before it gets better. But at some point, the United States citizens are going to force the government to govern…
‘Should he quit it? Should he quit this talk on race?’...
‘Everyone should quit this. If everyone would wake up every morning in Washington and say, look, how can I make this country better for citizens? I think that's what everyone in Washington and by the way, that's on the right, that's on the left, and that's in the center.’"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Kashmir Tensions - "There's overwhelming support for what he's done outside the Valley of Kashmir, they say why should Kashmir have autonomy if it's part of India? Why should Indians not be able to buy land?"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Trump's Greenland bid - "On the 20th of September former President Obama is scheduled to speak in northern Denmark at the University of Aalborg. It's a small town, but he will get a big response and you suddenly realize Donald Trump was going, he was scheduled to visit Denmark on the second and third of September, was terrified of the contrast between the reception that former President Obama would get and that he would get. And then he began to look around for an excuse as to why he couldn't go to Denmark, Greenland became it."
Why Good Teaching Evaluations May Reward Bad Teaching: On Grade Inflation and Other Unintended Consequences of Student Evaluations. - "I address the paradox that university grade point averages have increased for decades, whereas the time students invest in their studies has decreased. I argue that one major contributor to this paradox is grading leniency, encouraged by the practice of university administrators to base important personnel decisions on student evaluations of teaching. Grading leniency creates strong incentives for instructors to teach in ways that would result in good student evaluations. Because many instructors believe that the average student prefers courses that are entertaining, require little work, and result in high grades, they feel under pressure to conform to those expectations. Evidence is presented that the positive association between student grades and their evaluation of teaching reflects a bias rather than teaching effectiveness. If good teaching evaluations reflected improved student learning due to effective teaching, they should be positively related to the grades received in subsequent courses that build on knowledge gained in the previous course. Findings that teaching evaluations of concurrent courses, though positively correlated with concurrent grades, are negatively related to student performance in subsequent courses are more consistent with the assumption that concurrent evaluations are the result of lenient grading rather than effective teaching"
Market mechanisms don't always improve outcomes
I Was a Female Incel - "this bullying was perpetuated almost exclusively by women. For all the talk of a shadowy cis-hetero-patriarchal conspiracy whereby men get power by pitting innocent women against each other, men never bullied me or taunted me for being awkward or different. Mostly they either ignored me or appreciated my strength, intellect, and humor. It was girls who bullied me, and bullied me relentlessly, even though I clearly posed no threat whatsoever to their various sexual pursuits. They did it to tell me that they viewed me as inferior, even though the very men they pursued seemed to prefer the company of girls like me to girls like them, who they tended to view as unoriginal and desperate for attention. (I will admit that I harbored some resentment that the boys romantically pursued these other girls instead of me.) Ultimately, this appeared to me not to be an issue of boys pitting girls against each other, but rather of socially powerful girls using their social power—and their sex appeal, in particular—to oppress both women and men they deemed unworthy, knowing damn well that the other girls were too timid, and the boys not socially permitted, to fight back... I was introduced to radical feminism. As I scrolled through blog after blog of ignorant, hateful misandrist drivel, I felt a righteous anger stirring inside me. Here were the same pretty, popular girls that used their social power to degrade me talking about how oppressed they were. They spoke proudly about degrading their bodies through cheap, meaningless sex. They bragged about destroying the sexual and social confidence of men and then called it ’empowerment.’ They saw the entire world as a perpetual struggle between the female collective and an oppressive patriarchal system, and their purpose in life was smashing that system. They laughed off the idea that they, too, might be oppressive... Most women will never understand just how terrifying girls—especially pretty girls—are to men (or, in this case, gay women)."
The Problem with 'White Fragility' Theory - "it appears that DiAngelo and her disciples have become so focused on white ‘illiteracy’ in the conversation about race that they are prepared to sacrifice the scientific method on the altar of fighting ‘institutional racism.’... in many cases, progressive activism is inspired by ideas that lack sufficient support from social science research... I have lamented how progressives such as Claudia Rankine have turned the Emmy-award-winning show Breaking Bad into a paradigm of ‘whiteness’ by misinterpreting the motives that drove Walter White to become a modern Macbeth (failing, I might add, to see the irony that Walter White’s final act is the murder of white supremacists). I have questioned whether micro-aggressions really are a thing, drawing attention to a devastating critique of the micro-aggression research paradigm (MRP) written by eminent Emory University psychologist Scott O. Lilienfeld in his review of the psychological literature... I have come across serious critiques of the Implicit Association Test (IAT)... I have been asked, explicitly or implicitly: why are you so uptight? Why do you have a problem with the pursuit of social justice? Why do you get defensive about white privilege? I am then directed to the work of Dr. Robin DiAngelo on ‘white fragility.’ As a career economist with an undergraduate degree in philosophy, I have found myself distraught by this unwillingness to engage in debate about the merits of progressive ideas and the social science research that underlies them... The notion of ‘white fragility’ is an unambiguous example of the slippery slope that can ensue. Invoking ‘white fragility’ when presented with serious critiques of the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the IAT, the micro-aggression research paradigm, white privilege, and other progressive ideas, is like hearing someone blithely dismiss a rigorous critique of communism as ‘bourgeois.’ One does not have to invoke communism’s worst abuses to appreciate the hostility to scientific inquiry of those who wave away objections by attributing them to a white ‘racialized’ perspective (to use DiAngelo’s word). Socialization and acculturation are powerful forces in the development of one’s capacity to think critically about social, political, and economic issues, but they do not make it impossible. To believe otherwise is to replace the scientific method (ironically enough) with a reactionary reflexive need to categorize any objections—reasonable or otherwise—as manifestations of ‘white fragility.’ In other words, ‘white fragility’ becomes an Orwellian device to dismiss objections from white people in the same way that ‘bourgeois’ was a semantic weapon to dismiss the objections of ‘capitalists’ to communist doctrine... DiAngelo remains determined to demonstrate to “red-faced” white people that they have been socialized into a “racialized” worldview. In her stubborn persistence, invoking ‘white fragility’ elevates a banal observation about universal defense mechanisms into an old Marxist storyline about ‘false consciousness’ as a central force in the perpetuation of systemic exploitation.As I have argued elsewhere, the specter of Marxism haunts the contemporary social justice movement... This kind of thinking has a tendency to transform education into indoctrination. When the scientific method is subordinated to the eradication of ‘racialized’ perspectives, we cease to learn about the hows and whys of social and economic disparities across racial groups and instead become immersed in the propagation of ideas that lack support from social science research. At which point it becomes difficult to dismiss concerns that progressive activism is not about social justice at all, but about ideological intolerance and conformity, driven by agendas reminiscent of Marxist thought and activism"
If a non-white person disputes liberal doctrine, just accuse them of internalised whiteness or internalised white supremacy - or even better, of being a white supremacist
You have some very attractive personalities running in the Democratic Party. What is happening every day is they're being more radicalized, they've essentially become an open borders party. They've already said the show of hands of that on the first debate was unanimous about paying unlimited health care for illegal immigrants...
Right now, there's a very disturbing trend. And I think maybe even the preliminary to a, a major confrontation started economically. Remember, war in the future will be cyber and economic, almost more than kinetic. And you're seeing China, Iran, Turkey, with North Korea, and now Russia forming I think some sort of working group, the United States is already in quasi economic war with these right now. The tariffs are essentially sanctions on China, we’ve sanctioned North Korea, we've sanctioned Iran and we’re looking to our allies to help us with secondary sanctions. We've began this kind of economic confrontation a little bit with Turkey, Turkey just bought the planes, the jets from Russia, Russia is doing joint combat exercises in the Pacific with China, you can see the control of the Eurasian landmass coming apart. And there's a working partnership... what Donald Trump has done geopolitically and this one I think he's done, he saved NATO. Remember, NATO hadn't gotten up to the 2% and this is why he was hectoring it the entire time. These threats are real threats. And that's why NATO has got to be a robust alliance. When you hear John McCain, these other people denigrate Trump on NATO, it's the exact opposite. Donald Trump's put his political capital on the rejuvenation of NATO. This budget that just went down that the conservatives are not happy about, a big part of that is about national security, to support NATO operations, support operation around the world. What Donald Trump has, I think done is put in high relief, exactly what we're facing. The next 20, 30, 40 years is about the Eurasian landmass. It is China, Iran, Turkey, Russia and North Korea… these are all totalitarian surveillance states. Okay. And I think the conflict coming in the future is against the western democracies, and those like India, and Japan and Korea, that believe in, the industrial democracies that believe in freedom and the democratic process versus these totalitarian governments. And it's very clear to me, that that's the storm clouds on the rise. And I think Donald Trump in his wisdom is putting together, that's why he's put such a focus on the South China Sea. That's why he's putting such a focus on the streets of Taiwan. That's why he's putting such a focus. That's why we have a carrier battle group up in the north Arabian Sea. And it's not to be provocative, trying to start a kinetic war. What is doing is telling our allies, particularly NATO, in Europe that depend upon the Persian Gulf, remember, we're now energy independent. We're an energy exporter. So these places in the world are not as significant as they used to be, except to our allies"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Johnson meets Macron - "You must assume that people will take negotiating positions. One of the things that was most aggravating for me is listening to... the BBC more generally and public media more generally, treat statements from the European Union as though they’re statements of fact, rather than negotiating stances, and every single thing they say is a negotiating stance, even down to Mr. Hogan's threats of a poisoned atmosphere"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Detroit & US 2020 elections - "We in the United States have to get back to governing. And I really think we're distracted by the wrong issues. You know, if you sit here and you watch the Mueller investigation, or you watch these other issues, this is not what the American citizens care about. The American citizens care about a Congress that works, a Congress that legislates, a Congress that thinks about what they need. And look, this is not new. This has been going on for over a decade right now. Where Washington spends more time talking about the distractions, then they talk about the real issues. This may get worse before it gets better. But at some point, the United States citizens are going to force the government to govern…
‘Should he quit it? Should he quit this talk on race?’...
‘Everyone should quit this. If everyone would wake up every morning in Washington and say, look, how can I make this country better for citizens? I think that's what everyone in Washington and by the way, that's on the right, that's on the left, and that's in the center.’"
BBC World Service - The World This Week, Kashmir Tensions - "There's overwhelming support for what he's done outside the Valley of Kashmir, they say why should Kashmir have autonomy if it's part of India? Why should Indians not be able to buy land?"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Trump's Greenland bid - "On the 20th of September former President Obama is scheduled to speak in northern Denmark at the University of Aalborg. It's a small town, but he will get a big response and you suddenly realize Donald Trump was going, he was scheduled to visit Denmark on the second and third of September, was terrified of the contrast between the reception that former President Obama would get and that he would get. And then he began to look around for an excuse as to why he couldn't go to Denmark, Greenland became it."
Why Good Teaching Evaluations May Reward Bad Teaching: On Grade Inflation and Other Unintended Consequences of Student Evaluations. - "I address the paradox that university grade point averages have increased for decades, whereas the time students invest in their studies has decreased. I argue that one major contributor to this paradox is grading leniency, encouraged by the practice of university administrators to base important personnel decisions on student evaluations of teaching. Grading leniency creates strong incentives for instructors to teach in ways that would result in good student evaluations. Because many instructors believe that the average student prefers courses that are entertaining, require little work, and result in high grades, they feel under pressure to conform to those expectations. Evidence is presented that the positive association between student grades and their evaluation of teaching reflects a bias rather than teaching effectiveness. If good teaching evaluations reflected improved student learning due to effective teaching, they should be positively related to the grades received in subsequent courses that build on knowledge gained in the previous course. Findings that teaching evaluations of concurrent courses, though positively correlated with concurrent grades, are negatively related to student performance in subsequent courses are more consistent with the assumption that concurrent evaluations are the result of lenient grading rather than effective teaching"
Market mechanisms don't always improve outcomes
I Was a Female Incel - "this bullying was perpetuated almost exclusively by women. For all the talk of a shadowy cis-hetero-patriarchal conspiracy whereby men get power by pitting innocent women against each other, men never bullied me or taunted me for being awkward or different. Mostly they either ignored me or appreciated my strength, intellect, and humor. It was girls who bullied me, and bullied me relentlessly, even though I clearly posed no threat whatsoever to their various sexual pursuits. They did it to tell me that they viewed me as inferior, even though the very men they pursued seemed to prefer the company of girls like me to girls like them, who they tended to view as unoriginal and desperate for attention. (I will admit that I harbored some resentment that the boys romantically pursued these other girls instead of me.) Ultimately, this appeared to me not to be an issue of boys pitting girls against each other, but rather of socially powerful girls using their social power—and their sex appeal, in particular—to oppress both women and men they deemed unworthy, knowing damn well that the other girls were too timid, and the boys not socially permitted, to fight back... I was introduced to radical feminism. As I scrolled through blog after blog of ignorant, hateful misandrist drivel, I felt a righteous anger stirring inside me. Here were the same pretty, popular girls that used their social power to degrade me talking about how oppressed they were. They spoke proudly about degrading their bodies through cheap, meaningless sex. They bragged about destroying the sexual and social confidence of men and then called it ’empowerment.’ They saw the entire world as a perpetual struggle between the female collective and an oppressive patriarchal system, and their purpose in life was smashing that system. They laughed off the idea that they, too, might be oppressive... Most women will never understand just how terrifying girls—especially pretty girls—are to men (or, in this case, gay women)."
The Problem with 'White Fragility' Theory - "it appears that DiAngelo and her disciples have become so focused on white ‘illiteracy’ in the conversation about race that they are prepared to sacrifice the scientific method on the altar of fighting ‘institutional racism.’... in many cases, progressive activism is inspired by ideas that lack sufficient support from social science research... I have lamented how progressives such as Claudia Rankine have turned the Emmy-award-winning show Breaking Bad into a paradigm of ‘whiteness’ by misinterpreting the motives that drove Walter White to become a modern Macbeth (failing, I might add, to see the irony that Walter White’s final act is the murder of white supremacists). I have questioned whether micro-aggressions really are a thing, drawing attention to a devastating critique of the micro-aggression research paradigm (MRP) written by eminent Emory University psychologist Scott O. Lilienfeld in his review of the psychological literature... I have come across serious critiques of the Implicit Association Test (IAT)... I have been asked, explicitly or implicitly: why are you so uptight? Why do you have a problem with the pursuit of social justice? Why do you get defensive about white privilege? I am then directed to the work of Dr. Robin DiAngelo on ‘white fragility.’ As a career economist with an undergraduate degree in philosophy, I have found myself distraught by this unwillingness to engage in debate about the merits of progressive ideas and the social science research that underlies them... The notion of ‘white fragility’ is an unambiguous example of the slippery slope that can ensue. Invoking ‘white fragility’ when presented with serious critiques of the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the IAT, the micro-aggression research paradigm, white privilege, and other progressive ideas, is like hearing someone blithely dismiss a rigorous critique of communism as ‘bourgeois.’ One does not have to invoke communism’s worst abuses to appreciate the hostility to scientific inquiry of those who wave away objections by attributing them to a white ‘racialized’ perspective (to use DiAngelo’s word). Socialization and acculturation are powerful forces in the development of one’s capacity to think critically about social, political, and economic issues, but they do not make it impossible. To believe otherwise is to replace the scientific method (ironically enough) with a reactionary reflexive need to categorize any objections—reasonable or otherwise—as manifestations of ‘white fragility.’ In other words, ‘white fragility’ becomes an Orwellian device to dismiss objections from white people in the same way that ‘bourgeois’ was a semantic weapon to dismiss the objections of ‘capitalists’ to communist doctrine... DiAngelo remains determined to demonstrate to “red-faced” white people that they have been socialized into a “racialized” worldview. In her stubborn persistence, invoking ‘white fragility’ elevates a banal observation about universal defense mechanisms into an old Marxist storyline about ‘false consciousness’ as a central force in the perpetuation of systemic exploitation.As I have argued elsewhere, the specter of Marxism haunts the contemporary social justice movement... This kind of thinking has a tendency to transform education into indoctrination. When the scientific method is subordinated to the eradication of ‘racialized’ perspectives, we cease to learn about the hows and whys of social and economic disparities across racial groups and instead become immersed in the propagation of ideas that lack support from social science research. At which point it becomes difficult to dismiss concerns that progressive activism is not about social justice at all, but about ideological intolerance and conformity, driven by agendas reminiscent of Marxist thought and activism"
If a non-white person disputes liberal doctrine, just accuse them of internalised whiteness or internalised white supremacy - or even better, of being a white supremacist
Post ID: 7824468465082376412
On Deepavali not being Commercialised in Singapore
Kirsten Han: Singapore: We are a multiracial society! We have Chinese, Malays, Indians and “Others” (CMIO)! We are an example to the world!
It’s #Deepavali today.
Singapore malls: MERRY CHRISTMAS
Please do better.
@miraxpath: Because Spore businesses are only about the $$$. So St Pat's day rather than Thaipusam to sell alcohol, Halloween. Xmas rather than Deepavali to sell overpriced alcohol and tat. If a fake disney festival were to be invented in Jan/Feb, CNY might be a goner.
Me: All businesses are about the $$$. Actually isn't it better for Hindus that capitalism doesn't hijack Deepavali?
@miraxpath: Sure. Kirsten worries more than most Hindus about mall decorations for Deepavali. Also, there is so much variety in the way Deepavali is celebrated, that there would be blood if capitalism got involved! What language, what day, what spelling of Deepavali, which myth, WTF!
Me: Can I quote you on that as a Hindu? Hehe
@miraxpath: I am not a hindu though.
Me: Damn, lose points.
It’s #Deepavali today.
Singapore malls: MERRY CHRISTMAS
Please do better.
@miraxpath: Because Spore businesses are only about the $$$. So St Pat's day rather than Thaipusam to sell alcohol, Halloween. Xmas rather than Deepavali to sell overpriced alcohol and tat. If a fake disney festival were to be invented in Jan/Feb, CNY might be a goner.
Me: All businesses are about the $$$. Actually isn't it better for Hindus that capitalism doesn't hijack Deepavali?
@miraxpath: Sure. Kirsten worries more than most Hindus about mall decorations for Deepavali. Also, there is so much variety in the way Deepavali is celebrated, that there would be blood if capitalism got involved! What language, what day, what spelling of Deepavali, which myth, WTF!
Me: Can I quote you on that as a Hindu? Hehe
@miraxpath: I am not a hindu though.
Me: Damn, lose points.
Post ID: 1522214625829025238
Links - 29th October 2019 (1)
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "A staffer, submitting a question anonymously, suggested that the headline that had caused all the trouble—“TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM”—“amplifies without critique the desired narrative of the most powerful figure in the country.”"
"The New York Times is struggling to move from the collusion narrative of Trump to a race-based narrative of trump (found in the transcript of the meeting). The paper received strong pushback for a friendly Trump headline that they ultimately changed. That controversy led to this staff meeting on Trump coverage."
Tim Pool on Twitter - ".@dcexaminer reporter @Julio_Rosas11 is confronted for wearing a shirt with an American flag on the sleeve. A protester is extremely offended."
"On the right wing side you'll be safe and have a conversation
On the left wing side you will be harassed and possibly attacked
Journalists have always known this, at NoNATO 2012 black block leftists yelled "charge the press" and attacked journalists"
A post by Orwell & Goode on August 13 - "The journey of @teenvogue going from a bit useless to woke AF crusaders!"
"In 2006
Teen Vogue: Beauty lesson. 5-minute makeup tricks from a pro
mean girls. how to deal with them
back to school cool
135 fall shopping ideas. leggings, book bags, jeans, minis, the best new shoes & why we're mad for plaid
kate bosworth
The Sugar Hash. Why you needles [sp?] kick it now"
"In 2019
Teen Vogue: The legacy of Karl Marx’s ideas and how they’re relevant to the current political climate"
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Is Trump a White Supremacist?No less than seven Democrat Presidential candidates have declared the President to be a white supremacist — Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Tom Steyer. So what is a white supremacist? The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent article on the subject
“white nationalist is defined as ‘one of a group of militant whites who espouse white supremacy and advocate enforced racial segregation,’ while white supremacist is ‘a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races.’"...
Outside of anti-terrorism efforts, the administration hasn’t been targeting the Muslim community... is there evidence that Trump feels whites are superior to Hispanics/Latinx? Not really. In fact, support for Trump has risen in Hispanic communities and is comparable to Hispanic support for Mitt Romney. So what about Trump feeling superior to blacks? He dated a black model, Kara Young, for two years in the nineties. She’s been quoted as saying she never heard him say anything negative about any race. Trump was friendly with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. He even got a civil rights award. In office he has been meeting regularly with various black groups and has supported increasing funds for historically black colleges. Support from blacks has been rising, especially from males.
So how about Trump and Jews? White supremacists have a universal hate for Jews. He has a Jewish daughter and son-in-law who are key members of his administration. Trump’s been strongly supportive of Israel. The national socialists have criticized Trump for cozying up to Jews and Richard Spenser prefers Ilhan Omar over Trump due to her anti-Israel stances...
The last big criticism claiming that Trump is a white supremacist is his supposedly saying there were many fine people among the white nationalists and supremacists marching in Charlottesville. This oft-repeated claim has been thoroughly debunked. He clearly stated at the time that he was not referring to neo-Nazis or white supremacists. This was confirmed by his press office and in a personal statement two days after the rally. Trump has condemned the KKK and white supremacists at least six times. This includes a 9/17 resolution and in a State of the Union Speech... if he really were a white supremacist then he’s been doing an extraordinarily bad job at it."
Ezra Levant on Twitter - "Donald Trump seems to be saying China has to get its human rights house in order before it can expect an end to American tariffs. Amazing. All the woke leaders in the world, from Merkel to Trudeau to Ardern bend the knee to China on human rights AND trade."
Thread by @opheliajcbrown - "Buying plus sized clothing from thrift stores so you can tailor the items down to fit your size 0 body ISN'T A CUTE YOUTUBE VIDEO IDEA. It's fatphobic and classist and taking resources away from poor and fat people who have an infinitely harder time finding clothes than you do...
I've kept quiet about this for literally YEARS because I was terrified straight size people would come after me, but I don't care anymore. As a fat person who can't afford clothes unless they're from a thrift store - y'ALL NEED TO STOP ASAP.
The next time I see a skinny girl buying a size 3X sweater because it "looks comfy and cute" I'm going to grab it from her and wheel away with it faster than she can blink. SOMETIMES YOU DON'T DESERVE CUTE THINGS IF IT MEANS FAT PEOPLE GET CLOTHING.
Like OKAY if it's in a store and there are dozens of that item, WHATEVER. But in a THRIFT STORE? REALLY? Stay in your freakin' aisle. Stay out of the plus sized section. STAY OUT OF OUR WAY. We deal with enough crap let alone not having clothes that fit us bc y'all stole it all...
this applies to ANY marginalized person/group of people. Stop talking over us. LISTEN WHEN WE TELL YOU YOU'RE IN THE WRONG. Being privileged isn't bad until you ignore your privilege! USE YOUR PRIVILEGE TO BOOST MARGINALIZED VOICES! NOT TO STEAL OUR CLOTHES!"
Ahh entitlement
Satiria - Posts - "White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests — but many don't like their results"
"I'm Transgender. Will This Impact My Experience?"
Lucas Lynch - ""It's racist to tell non-white Americans to 'go home'" says everyone telling Israelis to 'go home' back to Europe."
Bill Mitchell on Twitter - "CNN is wondering, "If Trump's comments weren't racist, why did he randomly pick 4 people of color?"
Seriously?
He picked #TheSquad, not randomly 4 people of color. They cannot be THIS stupid or believe we are."
Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "The Left makes it about race when it's really about #TheSquad's hatred for the USA. There's a 4th of July video of a crowd of MAGA hat-wearing Vietnamese-Americans shouting how much they love America. Trump would never tell them to leave."
The Dangers of Defining Deviancy Up - "changes in social norms are not unidirectional—they can swing in the opposite direction and, instead of increasing permissiveness, norms can become more restrictive. This is what happens when we define deviancy up. Instead of treating atrocities as banal or becoming desensitized to wrongdoing, the most minor infractions are treated as if they are serious offenses. As the hasty condemnation of the behavior of a boisterous group of teenagers at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18 has reminded us, this trend is best illustrated by what we understand to be instances of prejudice, and how we respond... the newly capacious definitions of racism and sexism have increased the number of situations and infractions that can fall under the rubric of these labels, and this has narrowed the spectrum of permissible views on a number of already sensitive topics, such as affirmative action, social mobility, immigration, gender imbalances in STEM fields, and so on. Matt Grossman, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center has explained how this is disproportionately stigmatizing the political opinions of political centrists and conservatives. To illustrate this point, he turned to common social science survey questions:
“Racial resentment,” an aspect of “symbolic racism,” is measured by asking for agreement or disagreement with statements like “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class” or “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”
“Hostile sexism” is measured with agreement or disagreement with statements like “when women lose to men in a fair competition, they typically complain about being discriminated against” or “women are too easily offended.” The related “modern sexism” scale taps similar attitudes.
“Authoritarianism” is measured with questions asking respondents to choose between pairs of parenting values such as “independence” vs. “respect for elders” or “self-reliance” vs. “obedience.”
Thus, in a crude popularization, respondents [to such surveys] who favor obedient children and individual-level explanations for economic disadvantage could easily be labeled racist, sexist authoritarians...
So alarming has this political polarization become that nearly three in four foreign policy analysts and commentators surveyed in September of last year described it as a critical threat to the national security of the United States. The expanded definitions of racism and sexism are rooted in an understandable desire to protect members of marginalized groups, but they do not bring us any closer to that goal. In addition to the price we pay in social divisions, the new definitions have done little to actually address racial or other forms of inequality in a meaningful way. Recent data suggest that little has changed in the last 40 years in income inequality between whites and blacks and that reductions in the gender wage gap have stalled. Furthermore, it’s likely that this new focus has distracted those who adhere to it from the hard work of practical, tangible political change.This was the prescient argument made by the philosopher Richard Rorty more than 20 years ago"
Which professions are paid too much given their value to society? - "Most valuable to society after correcting for current salary: Research, Teaching, Engineering & Programming
Most deleterious to society: Law, Management, Finance (in descending order of damage)
The main point that strikes me is that, with the exception of research, all the estimates are fairly small relative to salary. And, that’s even if we ignore the points in the section right above.This suggests that at least for “normal jobs”, your donations to charity are a more significant component of your social impact... if someone earning $100,000 per year donates 10% of their income to [the Against Malaria Foundation], they create $0.8m of social value per year, which is about as large as the largest externality estimates in the table."
More Women Are Pumping, but Research Is Lacking - "The number seems small, but gets larger and larger as you contemplate it: 6 percent. That is the estimated share of breastfeeding mothers who exclusively pump and bottle their milk for their infants, never directly nursing. It is a number that was functionally zero less than a generation ago. And it is a subset of a much larger figure, the 85 percent of breastfeeding mothers who use a pump at least some of the time. This is no less than a “quiet revolution” in human nutrition, as researchers put it. Women have become, in Jill Lepore’s evocative phrasing, their own wet nurses. When pumping, their breast milk becomes a commodity... This “quiet revolution” is built on a foundation of surprisingly scant research and social support... while pumping might support direct nursing, it is not equivalent to direct nursing, researchers have found. The microbiome of expressed breast milk is different, for one. “Indirect breastfeeding” is associated with a greater prevalence of pathogens, which “could pose a risk of respiratory infection in the infant, potentially explaining why infants fed pumped milk are at increased risk for pediatric asthma,” according to Shirin Moossavi of the University of Manitoba. Plus, breast milk degrades when it is cooled, as it often is when stored for bottle-feeding. There is also the risk of contamination, given that dangerous bacteria flourish on pump parts. Researchers also sense that the experience of breastfeeding—the eye-gazing, the cuddling—is a big part of the benefit of breastfeeding for the baby, and a big part of the joy of breastfeeding for the mother. How does bottle-feeding change the equation? How does the experience of needing to pump as often as 10 times a day change things? It is unclear... time with the baby gets supplanted by time with the pump, leaving many women stressed out and exhausted—something that may have an effect on the quantity of milk produced, as well as the mother’s health and the overall stress level of the family."
Breastfeeding pressure is intense. So why are breast pumps so terrible? - " In total, I spent about 90 minutes a day pumping, and though I could type on my laptop during some of that time thanks to the hands-free bra I purchased, I was still losing hours every week assembling, disassembling, and cleaning tiny parts — hours I could have spent working, playing with my baby, talking to my husband, or catching up on much-needed sleep.Given the loss of work time, it’s no surprise that pumping may harm women’s earning power — a 2012 study found that mothers who breastfed their babies for at least six months suffered a greater drop in earnings after having children than moms who didn’t breastfeed... breastfeeding is often touted as an inexpensive way to feed your baby, “but that’s only true if you assume your time has no value.”... Human milk is an “absolutely terrific growth medium for bacteria,” Rasmussen explained — and if pump parts aren’t cleaned properly, they can introduce bacteria into the milk. But it’s not really clear how dangerous that is. “Women are not reporting sick children from the use of their pumps in great numbers, so how big this effect is, we really do not know”"
Human breast milk may help babies tell time via circadian signals from mom - "The composition of breast milk changes across the day, giving energizing morning milk a different cocktail of ingredients than soothing evening milk. Researchers believe this “chrononutrition” may help program infants’ emerging circadian biology, the internal timekeeper that allows babies to distinguish day from night... Breast milk changes dramatically over the course of the day. For example, levels of cortisol – a hormone that promotes alertness – are three times higher in morning milk than in evening milk. Melatonin, which promotes sleep and digestion, can barely be detected in daytime milk, but rises in the evening and peaks around midnight.Night milk also contains higher levels of certain DNA building blocks which help promote healthy sleep. Day milk, by contrast, has more activity-promoting amino acids than night milk. Iron in milk peaks at around noon; vitamin E peaks in the evening. Minerals like magnesium, zinc, potassium and sodium are all highest in the morning.Daytime milk may pack a special immune punch. Among mothers who provided researchers with milk samples across the first month postpartum, immune components – including key antibodies and white blood cells – looked higher in day milk compared to night milk. Another study found higher levels of a component important for immune system communication in day milk compared to night milk.While it’s clear that milk changes over the course of the day, scientists know little about what this means for infant health... According to a 2005-2007 survey, over 85% of breastfeeding mothers in the U.S. have pumped their milk."
"The New York Times is struggling to move from the collusion narrative of Trump to a race-based narrative of trump (found in the transcript of the meeting). The paper received strong pushback for a friendly Trump headline that they ultimately changed. That controversy led to this staff meeting on Trump coverage."
Tim Pool on Twitter - ".@dcexaminer reporter @Julio_Rosas11 is confronted for wearing a shirt with an American flag on the sleeve. A protester is extremely offended."
"On the right wing side you'll be safe and have a conversation
On the left wing side you will be harassed and possibly attacked
Journalists have always known this, at NoNATO 2012 black block leftists yelled "charge the press" and attacked journalists"
A post by Orwell & Goode on August 13 - "The journey of @teenvogue going from a bit useless to woke AF crusaders!"
"In 2006
Teen Vogue: Beauty lesson. 5-minute makeup tricks from a pro
mean girls. how to deal with them
back to school cool
135 fall shopping ideas. leggings, book bags, jeans, minis, the best new shoes & why we're mad for plaid
kate bosworth
The Sugar Hash. Why you needles [sp?] kick it now"
"In 2019
Teen Vogue: The legacy of Karl Marx’s ideas and how they’re relevant to the current political climate"
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Is Trump a White Supremacist?No less than seven Democrat Presidential candidates have declared the President to be a white supremacist — Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Andrew Yang, and Tom Steyer. So what is a white supremacist? The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent article on the subject
“white nationalist is defined as ‘one of a group of militant whites who espouse white supremacy and advocate enforced racial segregation,’ while white supremacist is ‘a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races.’"...
Outside of anti-terrorism efforts, the administration hasn’t been targeting the Muslim community... is there evidence that Trump feels whites are superior to Hispanics/Latinx? Not really. In fact, support for Trump has risen in Hispanic communities and is comparable to Hispanic support for Mitt Romney. So what about Trump feeling superior to blacks? He dated a black model, Kara Young, for two years in the nineties. She’s been quoted as saying she never heard him say anything negative about any race. Trump was friendly with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. He even got a civil rights award. In office he has been meeting regularly with various black groups and has supported increasing funds for historically black colleges. Support from blacks has been rising, especially from males.
So how about Trump and Jews? White supremacists have a universal hate for Jews. He has a Jewish daughter and son-in-law who are key members of his administration. Trump’s been strongly supportive of Israel. The national socialists have criticized Trump for cozying up to Jews and Richard Spenser prefers Ilhan Omar over Trump due to her anti-Israel stances...
The last big criticism claiming that Trump is a white supremacist is his supposedly saying there were many fine people among the white nationalists and supremacists marching in Charlottesville. This oft-repeated claim has been thoroughly debunked. He clearly stated at the time that he was not referring to neo-Nazis or white supremacists. This was confirmed by his press office and in a personal statement two days after the rally. Trump has condemned the KKK and white supremacists at least six times. This includes a 9/17 resolution and in a State of the Union Speech... if he really were a white supremacist then he’s been doing an extraordinarily bad job at it."
Ezra Levant on Twitter - "Donald Trump seems to be saying China has to get its human rights house in order before it can expect an end to American tariffs. Amazing. All the woke leaders in the world, from Merkel to Trudeau to Ardern bend the knee to China on human rights AND trade."
Thread by @opheliajcbrown - "Buying plus sized clothing from thrift stores so you can tailor the items down to fit your size 0 body ISN'T A CUTE YOUTUBE VIDEO IDEA. It's fatphobic and classist and taking resources away from poor and fat people who have an infinitely harder time finding clothes than you do...
I've kept quiet about this for literally YEARS because I was terrified straight size people would come after me, but I don't care anymore. As a fat person who can't afford clothes unless they're from a thrift store - y'ALL NEED TO STOP ASAP.
The next time I see a skinny girl buying a size 3X sweater because it "looks comfy and cute" I'm going to grab it from her and wheel away with it faster than she can blink. SOMETIMES YOU DON'T DESERVE CUTE THINGS IF IT MEANS FAT PEOPLE GET CLOTHING.
Like OKAY if it's in a store and there are dozens of that item, WHATEVER. But in a THRIFT STORE? REALLY? Stay in your freakin' aisle. Stay out of the plus sized section. STAY OUT OF OUR WAY. We deal with enough crap let alone not having clothes that fit us bc y'all stole it all...
this applies to ANY marginalized person/group of people. Stop talking over us. LISTEN WHEN WE TELL YOU YOU'RE IN THE WRONG. Being privileged isn't bad until you ignore your privilege! USE YOUR PRIVILEGE TO BOOST MARGINALIZED VOICES! NOT TO STEAL OUR CLOTHES!"
Ahh entitlement
Satiria - Posts - "White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests — but many don't like their results"
"I'm Transgender. Will This Impact My Experience?"
Lucas Lynch - ""It's racist to tell non-white Americans to 'go home'" says everyone telling Israelis to 'go home' back to Europe."
Bill Mitchell on Twitter - "CNN is wondering, "If Trump's comments weren't racist, why did he randomly pick 4 people of color?"
Seriously?
He picked #TheSquad, not randomly 4 people of color. They cannot be THIS stupid or believe we are."
Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "The Left makes it about race when it's really about #TheSquad's hatred for the USA. There's a 4th of July video of a crowd of MAGA hat-wearing Vietnamese-Americans shouting how much they love America. Trump would never tell them to leave."
The Dangers of Defining Deviancy Up - "changes in social norms are not unidirectional—they can swing in the opposite direction and, instead of increasing permissiveness, norms can become more restrictive. This is what happens when we define deviancy up. Instead of treating atrocities as banal or becoming desensitized to wrongdoing, the most minor infractions are treated as if they are serious offenses. As the hasty condemnation of the behavior of a boisterous group of teenagers at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18 has reminded us, this trend is best illustrated by what we understand to be instances of prejudice, and how we respond... the newly capacious definitions of racism and sexism have increased the number of situations and infractions that can fall under the rubric of these labels, and this has narrowed the spectrum of permissible views on a number of already sensitive topics, such as affirmative action, social mobility, immigration, gender imbalances in STEM fields, and so on. Matt Grossman, Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center has explained how this is disproportionately stigmatizing the political opinions of political centrists and conservatives. To illustrate this point, he turned to common social science survey questions:
“Racial resentment,” an aspect of “symbolic racism,” is measured by asking for agreement or disagreement with statements like “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class” or “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”
“Hostile sexism” is measured with agreement or disagreement with statements like “when women lose to men in a fair competition, they typically complain about being discriminated against” or “women are too easily offended.” The related “modern sexism” scale taps similar attitudes.
“Authoritarianism” is measured with questions asking respondents to choose between pairs of parenting values such as “independence” vs. “respect for elders” or “self-reliance” vs. “obedience.”
Thus, in a crude popularization, respondents [to such surveys] who favor obedient children and individual-level explanations for economic disadvantage could easily be labeled racist, sexist authoritarians...
So alarming has this political polarization become that nearly three in four foreign policy analysts and commentators surveyed in September of last year described it as a critical threat to the national security of the United States. The expanded definitions of racism and sexism are rooted in an understandable desire to protect members of marginalized groups, but they do not bring us any closer to that goal. In addition to the price we pay in social divisions, the new definitions have done little to actually address racial or other forms of inequality in a meaningful way. Recent data suggest that little has changed in the last 40 years in income inequality between whites and blacks and that reductions in the gender wage gap have stalled. Furthermore, it’s likely that this new focus has distracted those who adhere to it from the hard work of practical, tangible political change.This was the prescient argument made by the philosopher Richard Rorty more than 20 years ago"
Which professions are paid too much given their value to society? - "Most valuable to society after correcting for current salary: Research, Teaching, Engineering & Programming
Most deleterious to society: Law, Management, Finance (in descending order of damage)
The main point that strikes me is that, with the exception of research, all the estimates are fairly small relative to salary. And, that’s even if we ignore the points in the section right above.This suggests that at least for “normal jobs”, your donations to charity are a more significant component of your social impact... if someone earning $100,000 per year donates 10% of their income to [the Against Malaria Foundation], they create $0.8m of social value per year, which is about as large as the largest externality estimates in the table."
More Women Are Pumping, but Research Is Lacking - "The number seems small, but gets larger and larger as you contemplate it: 6 percent. That is the estimated share of breastfeeding mothers who exclusively pump and bottle their milk for their infants, never directly nursing. It is a number that was functionally zero less than a generation ago. And it is a subset of a much larger figure, the 85 percent of breastfeeding mothers who use a pump at least some of the time. This is no less than a “quiet revolution” in human nutrition, as researchers put it. Women have become, in Jill Lepore’s evocative phrasing, their own wet nurses. When pumping, their breast milk becomes a commodity... This “quiet revolution” is built on a foundation of surprisingly scant research and social support... while pumping might support direct nursing, it is not equivalent to direct nursing, researchers have found. The microbiome of expressed breast milk is different, for one. “Indirect breastfeeding” is associated with a greater prevalence of pathogens, which “could pose a risk of respiratory infection in the infant, potentially explaining why infants fed pumped milk are at increased risk for pediatric asthma,” according to Shirin Moossavi of the University of Manitoba. Plus, breast milk degrades when it is cooled, as it often is when stored for bottle-feeding. There is also the risk of contamination, given that dangerous bacteria flourish on pump parts. Researchers also sense that the experience of breastfeeding—the eye-gazing, the cuddling—is a big part of the benefit of breastfeeding for the baby, and a big part of the joy of breastfeeding for the mother. How does bottle-feeding change the equation? How does the experience of needing to pump as often as 10 times a day change things? It is unclear... time with the baby gets supplanted by time with the pump, leaving many women stressed out and exhausted—something that may have an effect on the quantity of milk produced, as well as the mother’s health and the overall stress level of the family."
Breastfeeding pressure is intense. So why are breast pumps so terrible? - " In total, I spent about 90 minutes a day pumping, and though I could type on my laptop during some of that time thanks to the hands-free bra I purchased, I was still losing hours every week assembling, disassembling, and cleaning tiny parts — hours I could have spent working, playing with my baby, talking to my husband, or catching up on much-needed sleep.Given the loss of work time, it’s no surprise that pumping may harm women’s earning power — a 2012 study found that mothers who breastfed their babies for at least six months suffered a greater drop in earnings after having children than moms who didn’t breastfeed... breastfeeding is often touted as an inexpensive way to feed your baby, “but that’s only true if you assume your time has no value.”... Human milk is an “absolutely terrific growth medium for bacteria,” Rasmussen explained — and if pump parts aren’t cleaned properly, they can introduce bacteria into the milk. But it’s not really clear how dangerous that is. “Women are not reporting sick children from the use of their pumps in great numbers, so how big this effect is, we really do not know”"
Human breast milk may help babies tell time via circadian signals from mom - "The composition of breast milk changes across the day, giving energizing morning milk a different cocktail of ingredients than soothing evening milk. Researchers believe this “chrononutrition” may help program infants’ emerging circadian biology, the internal timekeeper that allows babies to distinguish day from night... Breast milk changes dramatically over the course of the day. For example, levels of cortisol – a hormone that promotes alertness – are three times higher in morning milk than in evening milk. Melatonin, which promotes sleep and digestion, can barely be detected in daytime milk, but rises in the evening and peaks around midnight.Night milk also contains higher levels of certain DNA building blocks which help promote healthy sleep. Day milk, by contrast, has more activity-promoting amino acids than night milk. Iron in milk peaks at around noon; vitamin E peaks in the evening. Minerals like magnesium, zinc, potassium and sodium are all highest in the morning.Daytime milk may pack a special immune punch. Among mothers who provided researchers with milk samples across the first month postpartum, immune components – including key antibodies and white blood cells – looked higher in day milk compared to night milk. Another study found higher levels of a component important for immune system communication in day milk compared to night milk.While it’s clear that milk changes over the course of the day, scientists know little about what this means for infant health... According to a 2005-2007 survey, over 85% of breastfeeding mothers in the U.S. have pumped their milk."
Post ID: 3067493978716348012
Monday, October 28, 2019
Links - 28th October 2019 (2)
Group steals an estimated $30,000 in merchandise from North Face store - "A group of close to a dozen people stole an estimated $30,000 from a Wisconsin North Face store in under 30 seconds."
Comments: "They’re just misunderstood, let’s see their kindergarten photos to prove it!"
"Their families must be very proud of them"
"Their mothers should be so proud ‘cause they are such good boys! Ha ha"
"I had a dream...."
"So frustrating to see this. Can't they at last taze or paper spray them while the authorities get there??? Oh wait...they'll probably sue for "injuries.""
"And they ran right past the belt rack! Go figure.."
"I hope they stole some belts too.#nobodywantstoseeallthat#pullyourpantsup#gross"
"Ugh! Just have to be a stereotype, hope they get caught."
"I’m waiting for liberals to argue that shoplifting is a cure for income inequality"
"I didn't see any white people, but I was amazed they could run with shorts down to their knees.... Lol"
"Let's just DEFLECT and talk about police brutality being the cause of this, lol!!"
"And black people wonder why police racially profile them."
"MSNBC will spin this somehow to be Trump’s fault."
"Climate change, police abuse and the Betsy Ross flag must have caused this."
"This is the crap that causes decent black men like my sons to be profiled and harassed !"
"And then when the mugshots appear it becomes the cry of there is a high percentage of people of color in jail...and it is so unjust and unfair. Uh huh. This certainly isn't helping the numbers."
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "At 4pm on December 2nd, 2015, a man by the name of Mario Woods was walking back and forth talking to himself in front of a San Francisco apartment building. A man and his girlfriend were sitting nearby in a car eating when Woods reaches into the car, unprovoked, with a knife. The man opened the door to push Woods back and stepped into the sidewalk. That’s when Woods slashed him with the knife.The victim was bleeding heavily and took himself to the hospital. Police showed up at the location and spoke with a witness that saw the knife attack. Other officers entered the area looking for the attacker and found Woods nearby waiting to board a bus.When he saw the officers Woods stepped back and pulled a knife out of his pants while telling the officers “you’re not going to take me today”. The two officers pulled their firearms and told Woods to drop the knife. He responded by saying “You better squeeze that motherfucker and kill me”.As this standoff continued, other officers arrived with less-than-lethal weapons. Three beanbags were fired from a 12-gage shotgun and Woods refused to drop the knife. Then a beanbag was fired from a more powerful gun. This dropped Woods to one knee but he didn’t let go of the knife. Then one officer tried pepper spray, which had no visible effect.Woods then started walking toward a crowd with his knife. An officer stepped in between the crowd and Woods then ordered him to backup. It was then that officers fired at Woods to protect the policeman, who stepped between Woods and the crowd, that was just 10-feet away. Woods died at the scene.The autopsy reported that Woods had methamphetamines, THC, and antidepressants in his system. In addition to the fatal gunshots Woods had five injured from the less-than-lethal weapons.The end of the encounter was captured on two students cell phones and sparked protests. The officer’s were found to have followed official protocol. The city settled with Woods’s mother for $400,000 and altered the use of force protocol.The victim was severely injured and lost his job. Over two years later he was homeless and living out of his car.This was the police shooting that started Colin Kaepernick on his path of protesting police violence."
Why the Dems Will Never Win Back Trump Voters - "The polls were wrong in 2016 because there was, essentially, a reverse “Bradley effect.” And it probably still skews the polls, even after Trump has been president for well over two years. Trump’s supporters are routinely slandered, in the legacy news media and on social media platforms, as morally repugnant reprobates or just too stupid to understand how to vote in their own best interests. There is no easier way to render a room silent at a social occasion or start an altercation at a family gathering than to praise President Trump or anything he has accomplished — no matter how benign.In other words, supporting Trump simply isn’t the done thing in polite society. To do so is to risk loss of social status — if not outright ostracism — and open conflict with friends or family. Trump supporters mislead pollsters or simply refuse to answer their questions pursuant to similar psychological and social incentives. All of which leads to a lot of confusion concerning who it is that supports President Trump and precisely why"
Tiers of Pride and Shame - "a drunk Columbia undergraduate student named Julian von Abele was filmed outside the campus’s main library delivering a passionate ode to whiteness. “White people are the best thing that ever happened to the world,” von Abele declared to a group of students, many of whom were not white. “We invented science and industry, and you want to tell us to stop because, ‘Oh my God we’re so bad.’” In an ill-fated attempt to pacify the collection of students surrounding him, he added the caveat, “I don’t hate other people, I just love white men.”... Many argued that von Abele’s tirade should be understood not as an isolated event, but as a symptom of the university’s ongoing complicity in white supremacy—a systemic problem calling for a systemic solution. Columbia’s Black Student Organization led the charge with a list of demands including extra time for affected students to complete their final exams; increased funding for minority faculty recruitment, on which the university has already spent $185 million since 2005 to little apparent effect; and an unfortunately phrased call for “the incorporation of scientific racism into the Frontiers of Science syllabus.” (Surely they meant the incorporation of information about scientific racism.) But an isolated event doesn’t indicate a systemic problem. Like so many things nowadays, extrapolating from a single event to a crisis is only wrong when your opponents do it. Just a few months ago, many commentators on the Right extrapolated a supposed crisis of illegal immigrant crime from the murder of a single American by an illegal immigrant. At the time, progressives recognized this for the irrational fear-mongering that it was. Yet it is the same flawed logic that extrapolates an alleged crisis of campus racism from a single racist incident.Besides, there remains the question (nearly unaskable in polite company) of whether von Abele’s drunken diatribe was actually racist to begin with. Sure it was narcissistic, self-pitying, and belligerent. But was it an expression of bigotry? At a glance, it’s hard to reconcile the belief that von Abele’s comments were bigoted with the fact that black activists routinely get praised for making similar statements. Von Abele’s remark, “I love myself and I love white people” sounds eerily similar to “I love my blackness and yours,” the Twitter mantra of Black Lives Matter leader Deray McKesson. “We’re white men, we did everything,” nearly echoes a statement made in a commencement speech by Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter: “Without black women…there would be no me, no you, no us, no civilized society of which we speak. We—I, you, and me—we owe everything to black women.” Von Abele’s monologue, universally condemned, took lines straight from the scripts of America’s most celebrated racial justice advocates. On the prejudice-plus-power conception of racism, von Abele’s position in the racial privilege hierarchy as a white person renders his comments racist, whereas McKesson and Garza’s positions as members of a historically marginalized group renders theirs permissible, if not enlightened... does the fact of anti-black racism, whether past or present, overt or systemic, prove that it’s okay for a white person to be banned from a campus for saying things that black people get ovations for? Decent, ethical people are supposed to vigorously nod “yes”—or better yet, not ask the question at all. Yet the view that black people cannot be racist would have been alien to the civil rights leaders and activists of yesteryear, who experienced far more anti-black racism than the leaders of Black Lives Matter do today. Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategist and the chief organizer of the March On Washington, was arrested no less than 23 times during an era of profound racism. He nevertheless considered it obvious that blacks could be racist just like whites, and he vocally opposed such racism wherever he encountered it. The same is true of Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panther party. But, more to the point, if we decide to give black activists a free pass to express racial pride because they face racial slights, why not allow von Abele the same pass? After all, Columbia’s campus is no stranger to anti-white rhetoric. Take, for instance, the criticism, commonly heard in Columbia dorm rooms, that the Western canon is deficient because it’s filled with “dead, white men.”... In my two and a half years on Columbia’s campus, I can count my experiences of anti-black racism on one hand—indeed, one finger. By comparison, I could fill a small diary with the anti-white comments (some intended in jest and others in earnest) that I’ve heard. I sometimes wonder how I would feel if I had to hear Frederick Douglass, Bayard Rustin, and James Baldwin dismissed in casual conversation not as bad writers but as “dead, black men.” I wonder whether I would have the presence of mind to dismiss such statements as harmless nonsense, or whether the experience of hearing my heroes derided in explicitly racial terms—terms that linked their inadequacy to my own racial identity—wouldn’t awaken a sense of grievance within me. I wonder, moreover, how I would feel if I couldn’t complain... if collective pride makes sense, then collective shame makes sense too... the progressive logic that encourages modern-day whites to feel shame for slavery and colonialism should also lead them to feel pride for their ancestors’ achievements. Both white chauvinists and white progressives dogmatically reject one half of the pride-shame binary. Both factions should go one step further and reject the concepts of collective pride and collective shame altogether."
Meme - "If...
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Equals...
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
Then...
Knowledge = 96%
Hardwork = 98%
Both are important, but fall short of 100%
But ATTITUDE = 100%"
"Laziness = 105%
Negativity = 132%
Procrastination = 192%
Selling your soul to Satan = 314%"
Meme - Woman: "White Men Need to Stop Being Repressed and Start Honestly Expressing Their Emotions"
Men: "We're Deeply Frustrated by a Society That Constantly Seems to Be Emasculating and Undermining Us While Delegitimising Any Complaints We Have Because of 'Privileges' That Do Nothing to Reduce the Frustration of Living in an Isolating, Sedentary and Self-Destructive Culture Increasingly Devoid of Age-Old Sources of Happiness Like Community, Religion, National Identity and Family"
Woman: "No Not Like That
Fragile Bigots Smh
I Bet You Have Small Dicks"
Brandon Metheny - "25 years ago today, a jury in New Mexico announced its verdict in one of the most infamous and misunderstood cases in recent memory: Liebeck v. McDonald's, also known as the "hot coffee lawsuit." This case is held up as one of most egregious examples of frivolous lawsuits. The story goes that a woman bought coffee from McDonald's, drove with it between her legs, spilled it on herself, sued McDonald's because it was hot, and took a cool $1 to $5 million (depending on who's telling the story) off of them. "Wait, she sued because coffee was hot? And she was driving with it between her legs? What did she expect? Anyone can sue for anything these days."
Guess what? That story is almost completely false. I mean, Stella Liebeck did have hot coffee spill on her. That part is true... The spilled coffee wasn't just unpleasant; it was served at nearly 190 degrees, which caused 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body, required multiple skin grafts, necessitated further care after she left the hospital, and left her permanently disfigured. She originally tried to settle with McDonald's and asked for $20,000; they responded with an offer of $800.
At that point, she hired an attorney who discovered that 1) McDonald's required franchisees to serve coffee between 180-190 degrees 2) no other coffee in the city was served at more than 160 degrees 3) 190 degree liquid causes third degree burns in less than 3 seconds and would burn the mouth if consumed at that temperature 4) 160 degree liquid takes over 20 seconds to cause third degree burns and 5) McDonald's had been sued over SEVEN HUNDRED times in the prior decade for coffee being too hot and had settled up to $500,000 in cases and been told to lower the temperature...
McDonald's knew the case was going poorly, so it looked to the one thing it had that Liebeck didn't: a bully pulpit. They started a massive PR effort that was basically a smear campaign, painting Liebeck as some irresponsible scofflaw trying to take their hard-earned money. And it worked, to the point that the annual "awards" for frivolous lawsuits are known as "The Stellas.""
Sydney Watson on Twitter - "Feminists: We want equality!
Me: Okay.
Feminists: And the vote.
Me: Sure.
Feminists: And sexual freedom.
Me: That's fair.
Feminists: ...and we must EXTERMINATE toxic masculinity!
Me: Wait, no-
Feminists: But men must still pay for us on dates!
Me: That's not equ-"
Meme: - "Jim:
Bachelors Degree in Philosophy, 100K student debt, Can't find a Philosopher job, Believes people without college degrees are stupid
Joe:
4 year paid apprenticeship, 0k student debt, earns 80k annually, Disconnected Jim's electricity for non-payment"
Comments: "They’re just misunderstood, let’s see their kindergarten photos to prove it!"
"Their families must be very proud of them"
"Their mothers should be so proud ‘cause they are such good boys! Ha ha"
"I had a dream...."
"So frustrating to see this. Can't they at last taze or paper spray them while the authorities get there??? Oh wait...they'll probably sue for "injuries.""
"And they ran right past the belt rack! Go figure.."
"I hope they stole some belts too.#nobodywantstoseeallthat#pullyourpantsup#gross"
"Ugh! Just have to be a stereotype, hope they get caught."
"I’m waiting for liberals to argue that shoplifting is a cure for income inequality"
"I didn't see any white people, but I was amazed they could run with shorts down to their knees.... Lol"
"Let's just DEFLECT and talk about police brutality being the cause of this, lol!!"
"And black people wonder why police racially profile them."
"MSNBC will spin this somehow to be Trump’s fault."
"Climate change, police abuse and the Betsy Ross flag must have caused this."
"This is the crap that causes decent black men like my sons to be profiled and harassed !"
"And then when the mugshots appear it becomes the cry of there is a high percentage of people of color in jail...and it is so unjust and unfair. Uh huh. This certainly isn't helping the numbers."
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "At 4pm on December 2nd, 2015, a man by the name of Mario Woods was walking back and forth talking to himself in front of a San Francisco apartment building. A man and his girlfriend were sitting nearby in a car eating when Woods reaches into the car, unprovoked, with a knife. The man opened the door to push Woods back and stepped into the sidewalk. That’s when Woods slashed him with the knife.The victim was bleeding heavily and took himself to the hospital. Police showed up at the location and spoke with a witness that saw the knife attack. Other officers entered the area looking for the attacker and found Woods nearby waiting to board a bus.When he saw the officers Woods stepped back and pulled a knife out of his pants while telling the officers “you’re not going to take me today”. The two officers pulled their firearms and told Woods to drop the knife. He responded by saying “You better squeeze that motherfucker and kill me”.As this standoff continued, other officers arrived with less-than-lethal weapons. Three beanbags were fired from a 12-gage shotgun and Woods refused to drop the knife. Then a beanbag was fired from a more powerful gun. This dropped Woods to one knee but he didn’t let go of the knife. Then one officer tried pepper spray, which had no visible effect.Woods then started walking toward a crowd with his knife. An officer stepped in between the crowd and Woods then ordered him to backup. It was then that officers fired at Woods to protect the policeman, who stepped between Woods and the crowd, that was just 10-feet away. Woods died at the scene.The autopsy reported that Woods had methamphetamines, THC, and antidepressants in his system. In addition to the fatal gunshots Woods had five injured from the less-than-lethal weapons.The end of the encounter was captured on two students cell phones and sparked protests. The officer’s were found to have followed official protocol. The city settled with Woods’s mother for $400,000 and altered the use of force protocol.The victim was severely injured and lost his job. Over two years later he was homeless and living out of his car.This was the police shooting that started Colin Kaepernick on his path of protesting police violence."
Why the Dems Will Never Win Back Trump Voters - "The polls were wrong in 2016 because there was, essentially, a reverse “Bradley effect.” And it probably still skews the polls, even after Trump has been president for well over two years. Trump’s supporters are routinely slandered, in the legacy news media and on social media platforms, as morally repugnant reprobates or just too stupid to understand how to vote in their own best interests. There is no easier way to render a room silent at a social occasion or start an altercation at a family gathering than to praise President Trump or anything he has accomplished — no matter how benign.In other words, supporting Trump simply isn’t the done thing in polite society. To do so is to risk loss of social status — if not outright ostracism — and open conflict with friends or family. Trump supporters mislead pollsters or simply refuse to answer their questions pursuant to similar psychological and social incentives. All of which leads to a lot of confusion concerning who it is that supports President Trump and precisely why"
Tiers of Pride and Shame - "a drunk Columbia undergraduate student named Julian von Abele was filmed outside the campus’s main library delivering a passionate ode to whiteness. “White people are the best thing that ever happened to the world,” von Abele declared to a group of students, many of whom were not white. “We invented science and industry, and you want to tell us to stop because, ‘Oh my God we’re so bad.’” In an ill-fated attempt to pacify the collection of students surrounding him, he added the caveat, “I don’t hate other people, I just love white men.”... Many argued that von Abele’s tirade should be understood not as an isolated event, but as a symptom of the university’s ongoing complicity in white supremacy—a systemic problem calling for a systemic solution. Columbia’s Black Student Organization led the charge with a list of demands including extra time for affected students to complete their final exams; increased funding for minority faculty recruitment, on which the university has already spent $185 million since 2005 to little apparent effect; and an unfortunately phrased call for “the incorporation of scientific racism into the Frontiers of Science syllabus.” (Surely they meant the incorporation of information about scientific racism.) But an isolated event doesn’t indicate a systemic problem. Like so many things nowadays, extrapolating from a single event to a crisis is only wrong when your opponents do it. Just a few months ago, many commentators on the Right extrapolated a supposed crisis of illegal immigrant crime from the murder of a single American by an illegal immigrant. At the time, progressives recognized this for the irrational fear-mongering that it was. Yet it is the same flawed logic that extrapolates an alleged crisis of campus racism from a single racist incident.Besides, there remains the question (nearly unaskable in polite company) of whether von Abele’s drunken diatribe was actually racist to begin with. Sure it was narcissistic, self-pitying, and belligerent. But was it an expression of bigotry? At a glance, it’s hard to reconcile the belief that von Abele’s comments were bigoted with the fact that black activists routinely get praised for making similar statements. Von Abele’s remark, “I love myself and I love white people” sounds eerily similar to “I love my blackness and yours,” the Twitter mantra of Black Lives Matter leader Deray McKesson. “We’re white men, we did everything,” nearly echoes a statement made in a commencement speech by Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter: “Without black women…there would be no me, no you, no us, no civilized society of which we speak. We—I, you, and me—we owe everything to black women.” Von Abele’s monologue, universally condemned, took lines straight from the scripts of America’s most celebrated racial justice advocates. On the prejudice-plus-power conception of racism, von Abele’s position in the racial privilege hierarchy as a white person renders his comments racist, whereas McKesson and Garza’s positions as members of a historically marginalized group renders theirs permissible, if not enlightened... does the fact of anti-black racism, whether past or present, overt or systemic, prove that it’s okay for a white person to be banned from a campus for saying things that black people get ovations for? Decent, ethical people are supposed to vigorously nod “yes”—or better yet, not ask the question at all. Yet the view that black people cannot be racist would have been alien to the civil rights leaders and activists of yesteryear, who experienced far more anti-black racism than the leaders of Black Lives Matter do today. Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr.’s strategist and the chief organizer of the March On Washington, was arrested no less than 23 times during an era of profound racism. He nevertheless considered it obvious that blacks could be racist just like whites, and he vocally opposed such racism wherever he encountered it. The same is true of Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panther party. But, more to the point, if we decide to give black activists a free pass to express racial pride because they face racial slights, why not allow von Abele the same pass? After all, Columbia’s campus is no stranger to anti-white rhetoric. Take, for instance, the criticism, commonly heard in Columbia dorm rooms, that the Western canon is deficient because it’s filled with “dead, white men.”... In my two and a half years on Columbia’s campus, I can count my experiences of anti-black racism on one hand—indeed, one finger. By comparison, I could fill a small diary with the anti-white comments (some intended in jest and others in earnest) that I’ve heard. I sometimes wonder how I would feel if I had to hear Frederick Douglass, Bayard Rustin, and James Baldwin dismissed in casual conversation not as bad writers but as “dead, black men.” I wonder whether I would have the presence of mind to dismiss such statements as harmless nonsense, or whether the experience of hearing my heroes derided in explicitly racial terms—terms that linked their inadequacy to my own racial identity—wouldn’t awaken a sense of grievance within me. I wonder, moreover, how I would feel if I couldn’t complain... if collective pride makes sense, then collective shame makes sense too... the progressive logic that encourages modern-day whites to feel shame for slavery and colonialism should also lead them to feel pride for their ancestors’ achievements. Both white chauvinists and white progressives dogmatically reject one half of the pride-shame binary. Both factions should go one step further and reject the concepts of collective pride and collective shame altogether."
Meme - "If...
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Equals...
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
Then...
Knowledge = 96%
Hardwork = 98%
Both are important, but fall short of 100%
But ATTITUDE = 100%"
"Laziness = 105%
Negativity = 132%
Procrastination = 192%
Selling your soul to Satan = 314%"
Meme - Woman: "White Men Need to Stop Being Repressed and Start Honestly Expressing Their Emotions"
Men: "We're Deeply Frustrated by a Society That Constantly Seems to Be Emasculating and Undermining Us While Delegitimising Any Complaints We Have Because of 'Privileges' That Do Nothing to Reduce the Frustration of Living in an Isolating, Sedentary and Self-Destructive Culture Increasingly Devoid of Age-Old Sources of Happiness Like Community, Religion, National Identity and Family"
Woman: "No Not Like That
Fragile Bigots Smh
I Bet You Have Small Dicks"
Brandon Metheny - "25 years ago today, a jury in New Mexico announced its verdict in one of the most infamous and misunderstood cases in recent memory: Liebeck v. McDonald's, also known as the "hot coffee lawsuit." This case is held up as one of most egregious examples of frivolous lawsuits. The story goes that a woman bought coffee from McDonald's, drove with it between her legs, spilled it on herself, sued McDonald's because it was hot, and took a cool $1 to $5 million (depending on who's telling the story) off of them. "Wait, she sued because coffee was hot? And she was driving with it between her legs? What did she expect? Anyone can sue for anything these days."
Guess what? That story is almost completely false. I mean, Stella Liebeck did have hot coffee spill on her. That part is true... The spilled coffee wasn't just unpleasant; it was served at nearly 190 degrees, which caused 3rd degree burns over 6% of her body, required multiple skin grafts, necessitated further care after she left the hospital, and left her permanently disfigured. She originally tried to settle with McDonald's and asked for $20,000; they responded with an offer of $800.
At that point, she hired an attorney who discovered that 1) McDonald's required franchisees to serve coffee between 180-190 degrees 2) no other coffee in the city was served at more than 160 degrees 3) 190 degree liquid causes third degree burns in less than 3 seconds and would burn the mouth if consumed at that temperature 4) 160 degree liquid takes over 20 seconds to cause third degree burns and 5) McDonald's had been sued over SEVEN HUNDRED times in the prior decade for coffee being too hot and had settled up to $500,000 in cases and been told to lower the temperature...
McDonald's knew the case was going poorly, so it looked to the one thing it had that Liebeck didn't: a bully pulpit. They started a massive PR effort that was basically a smear campaign, painting Liebeck as some irresponsible scofflaw trying to take their hard-earned money. And it worked, to the point that the annual "awards" for frivolous lawsuits are known as "The Stellas.""
Sydney Watson on Twitter - "Feminists: We want equality!
Me: Okay.
Feminists: And the vote.
Me: Sure.
Feminists: And sexual freedom.
Me: That's fair.
Feminists: ...and we must EXTERMINATE toxic masculinity!
Me: Wait, no-
Feminists: But men must still pay for us on dates!
Me: That's not equ-"
Meme: - "Jim:
Bachelors Degree in Philosophy, 100K student debt, Can't find a Philosopher job, Believes people without college degrees are stupid
Joe:
4 year paid apprenticeship, 0k student debt, earns 80k annually, Disconnected Jim's electricity for non-payment"
Post ID: 6644105500341383734
What's in a name?
From a sista, outta love - Posts
"nikhil @thenikhilkapur: your parents didn't immigrate halfway across the world for u to mispronounce your own name so it fits better in someone else's mouth.
a person's name has meaning behind it, cultural significance and represents their identity. the least anyone could do is learn to pronounce it correctly."
Comment:
"Funny, I thought they came here to perhaps give their child a better chance at success and let them have more opportunities than they would have had if they were back in their country. Thats what my parents told me when we came from Peru, but i guess they were wrong, it was that my name should be pronounced correctly."
"My parents immigrated to survive, not to complain."
"They're not gonna be able to pronounce my name "correctly" anyway, so I just say it like it's English because I'm speaking...English."
"I know plenty of people whose first and/or last names are frequently mispronounced who are not immigrants. Some languages have sounds that other languages don’t so it can be difficult for people to create those sounds. In fact I have a lot of immigrant friends who have trouble pronouncing my name and call me a different version of my name. Doesn’t bother me. When I did study abroad in Mexico, the family we were staying with couldn’t say my roommate Beth’s name correctly. They were not used to making the th sound. She told them they could call her by her middle name. All was good. If people are trying why not be understanding?"
"As a society I think we have bigger issues than having to know how to pronounce every name out there."
"That's extremely arrogant. Obviously if someone is purposefully making fun of the name, that's one thing, but sometimes it's a matter of not having the right phonetics in one language or not enough linguistic knowledge. Try being Japanese, most of the times they'll get names wrong due to a shortage of vowels and consonants. Be happy people try. No shade but their aren't millions of Nikhils running around. I'm just sayin"
"How others choose to pronounce my name is how they identify me. How I choose to pronounce my name is how I identify myself."
"Only people who are native English speakers can pronounce my name and mines basic. I embrace the 5 different sounds of my name. Who cares? I can’t expect them to pronounce it properly so I have them call me Brooklynn and it’s easier for them. Nbd"
"yeah but i got tired of trying to explain how it is pronounced just to have it mispronounced still, then i started saying "Jamie" in english, instead of "Jaime" in spanish, now i introduce myself saying it bothways, "Jaime, or you can call me Jamie", in case they have trouble saying it correctly. Im the one who immigrated, and im the one adjusting the pronounciation of my name. Also, a lot of people have nicknames and everybody calls them by their nicknames, they even introduce themeselves with their nickname. Almost nobody thinks about the "cultural signifcance" of peoples names or the identity that it gives them."
"This is so dumb. Holding it against someone that they can't pronounce my name right is like holding it against them that they can't pronounce words in my language. Why "don't hold it against foreigners if they have an accent and mispronounce words" but suddenly "wow how dare you mispronounce my name that contains sounds that don't exist in your language"?"
"I have a weird name Kasicki. People pronounce it wrong often. But you know what. It doesn’t bother me since I am a adult who doesn’t gets my panties in a twist if someone can’t pronounce my name. Cause honestly people have better things to do than worry about my last name"
"Also, this a melting pot with 1 common language, if ppl from another culture cant say ur name the “right way” gtf over it"
"Actually they kinda did. They sure as hell didn't come here for Irish or German national pride ya nit."
"Oh great we are getting triggered over names now"
"Sometimes I wish my ancestors had gotten a more imperialist agent when they got to Ellis Island, someone who'd rewrite our name, so people *would* pronounce it properly."
"My last name is French and to me, easy to say, but no one can say it"
"I mean we don’t care... I don’t even know how to pronounce is even when i was a kid.. multicultural family can be a task...
my spanish friends say anderson, protuguese andérson,
French Andersên, english ander-son....
Criollo
Africano !ándêsõn"
"This is like saying that I should start spelling my surname “Heß” because that’s how my family spelled it before they came here."
"A name is a sound people use to refer to you. It is completely irrelevant to identity"
"but I don’t even know how’s my name suppose to be pronounced"
"nikhil @thenikhilkapur: your parents didn't immigrate halfway across the world for u to mispronounce your own name so it fits better in someone else's mouth.
a person's name has meaning behind it, cultural significance and represents their identity. the least anyone could do is learn to pronounce it correctly."
Comment:
"Funny, I thought they came here to perhaps give their child a better chance at success and let them have more opportunities than they would have had if they were back in their country. Thats what my parents told me when we came from Peru, but i guess they were wrong, it was that my name should be pronounced correctly."
"My parents immigrated to survive, not to complain."
"They're not gonna be able to pronounce my name "correctly" anyway, so I just say it like it's English because I'm speaking...English."
"I know plenty of people whose first and/or last names are frequently mispronounced who are not immigrants. Some languages have sounds that other languages don’t so it can be difficult for people to create those sounds. In fact I have a lot of immigrant friends who have trouble pronouncing my name and call me a different version of my name. Doesn’t bother me. When I did study abroad in Mexico, the family we were staying with couldn’t say my roommate Beth’s name correctly. They were not used to making the th sound. She told them they could call her by her middle name. All was good. If people are trying why not be understanding?"
"As a society I think we have bigger issues than having to know how to pronounce every name out there."
"That's extremely arrogant. Obviously if someone is purposefully making fun of the name, that's one thing, but sometimes it's a matter of not having the right phonetics in one language or not enough linguistic knowledge. Try being Japanese, most of the times they'll get names wrong due to a shortage of vowels and consonants. Be happy people try. No shade but their aren't millions of Nikhils running around. I'm just sayin"
"How others choose to pronounce my name is how they identify me. How I choose to pronounce my name is how I identify myself."
"Only people who are native English speakers can pronounce my name and mines basic. I embrace the 5 different sounds of my name. Who cares? I can’t expect them to pronounce it properly so I have them call me Brooklynn and it’s easier for them. Nbd"
"yeah but i got tired of trying to explain how it is pronounced just to have it mispronounced still, then i started saying "Jamie" in english, instead of "Jaime" in spanish, now i introduce myself saying it bothways, "Jaime, or you can call me Jamie", in case they have trouble saying it correctly. Im the one who immigrated, and im the one adjusting the pronounciation of my name. Also, a lot of people have nicknames and everybody calls them by their nicknames, they even introduce themeselves with their nickname. Almost nobody thinks about the "cultural signifcance" of peoples names or the identity that it gives them."
"This is so dumb. Holding it against someone that they can't pronounce my name right is like holding it against them that they can't pronounce words in my language. Why "don't hold it against foreigners if they have an accent and mispronounce words" but suddenly "wow how dare you mispronounce my name that contains sounds that don't exist in your language"?"
"I have a weird name Kasicki. People pronounce it wrong often. But you know what. It doesn’t bother me since I am a adult who doesn’t gets my panties in a twist if someone can’t pronounce my name. Cause honestly people have better things to do than worry about my last name"
"Also, this a melting pot with 1 common language, if ppl from another culture cant say ur name the “right way” gtf over it"
"Actually they kinda did. They sure as hell didn't come here for Irish or German national pride ya nit."
"Oh great we are getting triggered over names now"
"Sometimes I wish my ancestors had gotten a more imperialist agent when they got to Ellis Island, someone who'd rewrite our name, so people *would* pronounce it properly."
"My last name is French and to me, easy to say, but no one can say it"
"I mean we don’t care... I don’t even know how to pronounce is even when i was a kid.. multicultural family can be a task...
my spanish friends say anderson, protuguese andérson,
French Andersên, english ander-son....
Criollo
Africano !ándêsõn"
"This is like saying that I should start spelling my surname “Heß” because that’s how my family spelled it before they came here."
"A name is a sound people use to refer to you. It is completely irrelevant to identity"
"but I don’t even know how’s my name suppose to be pronounced"
Post ID: 6934704100085424191
Links - 28th October 2019 (1)
Taipei notes - "My other visit here was thirty years ago, and most of all I am surprised by how little has changed. The architecture now looks all the more retro, the alleyways all the more noir, and the motorbikes have by no means vanished. Yes there are plenty of new stores, but overall it is recognizably the same city, something you could not say about Seoul.Real wages basically did not rise 2000-2016. The main story, in a nutshell, is that the domestic capital has flowed to China. About 9 percent of the Taiwanese population lives in China, and that is typically the more ambitious segment of the workforce.I am still surprised at how little the Taiwanese signal status with their looks and dress. The steady heat and humidity may account for some of that, though the same is not true in the hotter parts of mainland China... The quality of dining here is high and rising. Unlike in Hong Kong or Singapore, Taiwan has plenty of farms, its own greens, and thus farm to table dining here is common. Tainan Tai Tsu Mien Seafood is one recommendation, for an affordable Michelin one-star, emphasis on seafood. Addiction Aquatic Development has superb sushi and is a first-rate hangout. At the various Night Markets, it is still possible to get an excellent meal for only a few dollars."
University isn't for everyone – which is why we need more apprenticeships - "There are far too many young people who leave university with huge debts, and no clear sense of how their academic qualification has helped their career. It is also true that we have a desperate shortage in this country of people with the right skills in engineering, in electrics, in construction, in digital technology. We have a mismatch: unsatisfied university graduates, and unsatisfied employers."
How multiculturalism divides us - "a philosophy designed to break down barriers and bring people together has in fact achieved the very opposite. Modern Britain is dotted with monocultural ghettos whose inhabitants often live an utterly parallel existence to their compatriots dwelling in some cases just a few streets away. Is it perhaps because the active promotion of separation and difference – for that, ultimately, is what State-sponsored multiculturalism amounts to – drives wedges between people and is inimical to integration? Might it be that we took a wrong turn when we opted for the salad bowl over the melting pot?... You could travel to Cornwall or Norfolk or the Scottish Highlands and be largely untouched by multiculturalism. What do the inhabitants of these areas feel when they hear politicians and commentators describe their homeland in a way that simply doesn’t resonate with them? It is another example of the elites looking out from their vantage points in the cosmopolitan cities and concluding that the entire country looks the same. These champions of multiculturalism will fiercely upbraid those who argue against their creed. There are the usual insinuations that opponents must be motivated by racism – a logical fallacy which conflates culture and race, and ignores the obvious fact that one can be a committed multiracialist without embracing multiculturalism.In their minds, there is something ignoble and chauvinistic about striving to develop common cultural bonds among the population. But are nations and communities that defend a monoculture any less content than those which don’t? Japan, for example, is no less prosperous or happy for its deep cultural homogeneity. Should the Amish be forced to accept a dose of diversity? Would a Western liberal dream of telling a Native American or Indigenous Australian that their bitterness over cultural erosion was unfounded and ‘nativist’? Proponents of multiculturalism do not seem to see the hypocrisy in respecting ancient cultures and civilisations elsewhere while neglecting and derecognising our own... if we are to promote real integration and overcome the divisions that bedevil our society, we must start by ensuring that every lever of the State is used to cultivate the deepest, unforced cultural consensus among our disparate communities.This would mean, as a simple example, promoting only the common language. It is astonishing that well-meaning people ever thought it was wise for public bodies to translate official documents into dozens of foreign languages. It removes the incentive for newcomers to learn the native tongue, which in turn impacts their ability to find work, to truly integrate, to understand and feel part of the country they now call home."
Acceptance of gay sex in decline in UK for first time since Aids crisis - "The finding, based on a survey of 2,884 people, coincided with the first dip in more than a decade in people saying they think sex before marriage is not at all wrong, with people from non-Christian religious groups the most likely to disapprove... the Christian Institute, an educational charity that believes sex should only happen in a marriage between a man and a woman, said signs of a reversal may be a result of pushback against a “new orthodoxy that not to celebrate same-sex relations is homophobic”."
Premarital sex too
Could homophobia be on the rise? - "I was not delighted a couple of years ago when Barclays Bank decided to advertise its commitment to Pride by decking its branches in rainbow colours and adopting the slogan ‘Love happens here’. I don’t especially want ‘Love’ to happen at my bank. I just want them to make it easier to speak to a real person on their phone-lines and employ more people behind the tills in their branches.Likewise, when stopping at a motorway service station for a sandwich during Pride Month I did not feel my mood massively elevated by seeing that (courtesy of Marks and Spencer) one of the options was an ‘LGBT Sandwich’ (consisting of lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato). I got that instinct that I know a number of other gay people feel: something like ‘enough already.’ I don’t need my love life to invade other peoples’ sandwich selection. And I don’t see any remaining homophobes among the heterosexual population being won over by a sandwich whose recipe is concocted by acronym... acceptance of same-sex relationships has stalled: there has been no significant increase since 2016. The findings this week actually recorded a drop in acceptance levels. While this is within the margin of error, the BSA data does show that the liberalisation of attitudes has, at the very least, decelerated, leaving around a third of the population in some way opposed to gay relationships... it is striking that in what coverage there has been of this statistic there has been so little desire to go under the stats and look at potential causes. For instance, in its report, The Guardian decided to cite Ann Widdecombe’s recent comments on science and homosexuality as one potential factor. Which both overstates the likely influence enjoyed by the Brexit Party MEP and ignores the fact that Widdecombe is not some newbie on the British scene.In the same vein, The Guardian cites Jacob Rees-Mogg of the ERG who has in the past said that he could not support gay marriage for religious reasons (Rees-Mogg is a Catholic). Of course, it is possible that when Rees-Mogg and Widdecombe make exceedingly infrequent and somewhat reluctant interventions on this subject that they sway a significant and new segment of the British public. But I would think that this overstates things. And in any case, they made these particularly comments after the BSA survey was published. So it’s much more likely is that bigger forces are at play. But what are they?... the Muslim population of the UK doubled in the last decade and has been expected to double during this one... Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population"
Why ‘worthless’ humanities degrees may set you up for life - "One recent study of 1,700 people from 30 countries, meanwhile, found that the majority of those in leadership positions had either a social sciences or humanities degree. That was especially true of leaders under 45 years of age; leaders over 45 were more likely to have studied Stem."
Strange how we are told a humanities degree teaches critical thinking and soft skills, but the article didn't provide real evidence for these claims. For example the majority of leaders studying the social sciences or humanities sounds convincing - till you look at the source and realise 44% studied social sciences and only 11% humanities
This is the most regrettable college major in America - "two-thirds said that they had a major regret about their educational experience. The No. 1 regret: student loans, which about one in four grads say they regretted... Your college major can be a big source of regret too, PayScale found. It was the second most regretted thing about the college experience, with more than one in 10 people saying their chosen area of study was their biggest educational regret... the area of study that comes with the biggest side of regret: humanities. Indeed, more than one in five people who majored in humanities — which includes specific majors like English and history — say they regret that choice. Other research bolsters this finding, revealing that English in particular is the most regretted major"
This is the most regrettable college major in America - "More than half (54.3%) of people who majored in English say they are not satisfied with that choice of major... The English major is closely followed by a fine arts major (51.6%) and a political science major (38.2%) as the most regretted.Meanwhile, accounting is the major people say they are most satisfied with (just 14.8% say they weren't satisfied), followed by computer science (15%) and information technology (21.1%). And people who graduate with degrees in science, math or technology are the least likely to say they’d switch career fields entirely... So what’s going on with those who regret their English major? Some of this may be the earnings that graduates face depending on their major. People with a bachelor’s in English earn a median of $53,000 a year and fine arts $49,000 a year... Meanwhile, an accounting B.A. can earn you a median of $69,000, a computer science degree $83,000 and an IT major $73,000... The likelihood of getting a job may another factor. A 2015 report from Georgetown’s Center of Education and the Workforce found that college grads with experience and a major in the computers, science and math field had an unemployment rate of just 4.3%. Meanwhile, humanities and arts majors with experience saw unemployment at 5.8%. Even worse: The future might not be all the bright for English majors. Some of the jobs many of them desire like reporter or correspondent (the number of jobs in this field will decline by -9% through 2024, according to the government) and editor (-5%) have declining job growth, and other jobs like teacher only have average growth. Meanwhile, accountants will see 11% job growth, and jobs that are popular with computer science majors like software developer (17% growth) and computer systems analyst (up 21%) will boom."
How Prophetic Was Gattaca? - "Gattaca’s depiction of a dystopian society has uneasily informed debate on public policy. For example, in 2003 an Australia Law Reform Commission produced a 1,100-page document in which Gattaca is quoted several times as a starting point for a discussion on “the ethical, legal and social implications of the New Genetics.” In a 2013 speech, US Senator Rand Paul referenced Gattaca as a warning to argue for the passage of legislation he introduced called the Life at Conception Act... According to Mitchell, the manner in which genes go about building an organism is in part affected by what engineers call noise. There is a randomness to neural development, subjecting the process to tiny random perturbation. Identical twins share the same DNA but are not completely identical. Even the two sides of our bodies, based on the same plan but executed independently, reveal slight differences. Mitchell’s claim is that much of what is labeled environmental “is intrinsic to each person, arising from inherent randomness in the process of brain development.” Plomin, for his part, repeatedly uses the word “probabilistic” to describe the effect of our genome on our destiny, contrasting this with “deterministic.”... more than 50 years of behavioral genetics have shown that “…genetic differences between people account for about half of their differences in tests of intelligence.” Mitchell states that “…intelligence is ‘genetic,’ in the sense that it relies on a complex program encoded in our genomes and can be seriously affected by mutations that compromise that program.”So Gattaca was prophetic, but not quite in the way Niccol intended. He created a dystopia that was based on what he thought of as a misunderstanding about the influence genes have on our destinies. But in fact, it wasn’t a misunderstanding; it’s been borne out by genetic research. The overlords of the society Niccol depicts are actually right about the science and he was wrong. What Niccol got wrong is that a society in which parents decide to fertilize numerous embryos and decide which one to implant and take to term, as they do in Gattaca, won’t be as dystopic as he imagines because genetically-engineered inequality won’t necessarily lead to unequal treatment, any more than randomly-generated genetic inequality will. As Plomin says, “[T]he American founders did not mean that all people are created identical…equal does not mean identical. If everyone were identical, there would be no need to worry about equal rights or equal opportunity. The essence of democracy is that people are treated fairly despite their difference.”"
The Hate-Crime Epidemic That Never Was: A Seattle Case Study - "most of the situations contained in the 500-plus documented incidents for 2018 turned out not to be hate crimes at all. Out of 521 confrontations or other incidents reported to the police at some point during the year, 181 (35 percent) were deemed insufficiently serious to qualify as crimes of any kind. Another 215 (41 percent) turned out to involve some minor element of bias (i.e., an ethnic slur used during a fight), but did not rise to the definition of hate crime. Only 125, or 24 percent, qualified as potential hate crimes—i.e., alleged “criminal incidents directly motivated by bias.” For purposes of comparison: There are 745,000 people living in Seattle, and 3.5-million in the metro area. Even that 125 figure represents an overestimate, at least as compared to what most of us imagine to be the stereotypical hate crime (of, say, a gang of white racists beating up someone of a different skin color). Seattle’s remarkably broad municipal hate-crime policies cover not only attacks motivated by racial or sexual animus, but also those related to “homelessness, marital status, political ideology, age and parental status.”Indeed, if there is a single archetypal Seattle hate incident that emerges from this data, it would seem to involve a mentally ill homeless man yelling slurs at someone. According to the City Auditor, 22 percent of hate perps were “living unsheltered” at the time of their crime, 20 percent were mentally ill, and 20 percent were severely intoxicated. The conviction rate in cases such as these has been very low. As Beekman notes, 398 reports of actual hate crime, i.e. instances of “malicious harassment” that were “verified by the Department,” occurred between 2012 and 2017. Of these, 128 were referred for prosecution, indicating authorities’ baseline belief that the accusation was not a hoax and that the police had managed to identify and apprehend a viable suspect. But not all of those cases were prosecuted. And only 37 of those that were prosecuted resulted in a conviction for malicious harassment between 2012 and 2017. That is an average of about six per year—fewer than half of which likely involved a sane, sober, non-homeless offender. That’s hardly an epidemic of hate. So why is this report getting so much publicity? Beekman notes in passing that in 2015, Seattle’s police department hired a full-time Bias Crimes Coordinator, who made it a priority to engage in “community outreach.”... a cynic might argue that the coordinator has had every reason to generate more hate-crime reports—since the existence of such reports helps justify the newly created position. One rather remarkable result is that Seattle has, during some recent years, reported more hate crimes than most U.S. states—including Florida... The scope of hate crime often gets exaggerated all over the United States. In my research, I’ve found that widely reported “surges” in hate crime often turn out to be mere artifacts of new reporting techniques, with actual conviction rates remaining low... many supposed hate crimes are probable hoaxes—and those which are not hoaxes often turn out to be un-prosecutable incidents of anonymous graffiti or shouted slurs."
University isn't for everyone – which is why we need more apprenticeships - "There are far too many young people who leave university with huge debts, and no clear sense of how their academic qualification has helped their career. It is also true that we have a desperate shortage in this country of people with the right skills in engineering, in electrics, in construction, in digital technology. We have a mismatch: unsatisfied university graduates, and unsatisfied employers."
How multiculturalism divides us - "a philosophy designed to break down barriers and bring people together has in fact achieved the very opposite. Modern Britain is dotted with monocultural ghettos whose inhabitants often live an utterly parallel existence to their compatriots dwelling in some cases just a few streets away. Is it perhaps because the active promotion of separation and difference – for that, ultimately, is what State-sponsored multiculturalism amounts to – drives wedges between people and is inimical to integration? Might it be that we took a wrong turn when we opted for the salad bowl over the melting pot?... You could travel to Cornwall or Norfolk or the Scottish Highlands and be largely untouched by multiculturalism. What do the inhabitants of these areas feel when they hear politicians and commentators describe their homeland in a way that simply doesn’t resonate with them? It is another example of the elites looking out from their vantage points in the cosmopolitan cities and concluding that the entire country looks the same. These champions of multiculturalism will fiercely upbraid those who argue against their creed. There are the usual insinuations that opponents must be motivated by racism – a logical fallacy which conflates culture and race, and ignores the obvious fact that one can be a committed multiracialist without embracing multiculturalism.In their minds, there is something ignoble and chauvinistic about striving to develop common cultural bonds among the population. But are nations and communities that defend a monoculture any less content than those which don’t? Japan, for example, is no less prosperous or happy for its deep cultural homogeneity. Should the Amish be forced to accept a dose of diversity? Would a Western liberal dream of telling a Native American or Indigenous Australian that their bitterness over cultural erosion was unfounded and ‘nativist’? Proponents of multiculturalism do not seem to see the hypocrisy in respecting ancient cultures and civilisations elsewhere while neglecting and derecognising our own... if we are to promote real integration and overcome the divisions that bedevil our society, we must start by ensuring that every lever of the State is used to cultivate the deepest, unforced cultural consensus among our disparate communities.This would mean, as a simple example, promoting only the common language. It is astonishing that well-meaning people ever thought it was wise for public bodies to translate official documents into dozens of foreign languages. It removes the incentive for newcomers to learn the native tongue, which in turn impacts their ability to find work, to truly integrate, to understand and feel part of the country they now call home."
Acceptance of gay sex in decline in UK for first time since Aids crisis - "The finding, based on a survey of 2,884 people, coincided with the first dip in more than a decade in people saying they think sex before marriage is not at all wrong, with people from non-Christian religious groups the most likely to disapprove... the Christian Institute, an educational charity that believes sex should only happen in a marriage between a man and a woman, said signs of a reversal may be a result of pushback against a “new orthodoxy that not to celebrate same-sex relations is homophobic”."
Premarital sex too
Could homophobia be on the rise? - "I was not delighted a couple of years ago when Barclays Bank decided to advertise its commitment to Pride by decking its branches in rainbow colours and adopting the slogan ‘Love happens here’. I don’t especially want ‘Love’ to happen at my bank. I just want them to make it easier to speak to a real person on their phone-lines and employ more people behind the tills in their branches.Likewise, when stopping at a motorway service station for a sandwich during Pride Month I did not feel my mood massively elevated by seeing that (courtesy of Marks and Spencer) one of the options was an ‘LGBT Sandwich’ (consisting of lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato). I got that instinct that I know a number of other gay people feel: something like ‘enough already.’ I don’t need my love life to invade other peoples’ sandwich selection. And I don’t see any remaining homophobes among the heterosexual population being won over by a sandwich whose recipe is concocted by acronym... acceptance of same-sex relationships has stalled: there has been no significant increase since 2016. The findings this week actually recorded a drop in acceptance levels. While this is within the margin of error, the BSA data does show that the liberalisation of attitudes has, at the very least, decelerated, leaving around a third of the population in some way opposed to gay relationships... it is striking that in what coverage there has been of this statistic there has been so little desire to go under the stats and look at potential causes. For instance, in its report, The Guardian decided to cite Ann Widdecombe’s recent comments on science and homosexuality as one potential factor. Which both overstates the likely influence enjoyed by the Brexit Party MEP and ignores the fact that Widdecombe is not some newbie on the British scene.In the same vein, The Guardian cites Jacob Rees-Mogg of the ERG who has in the past said that he could not support gay marriage for religious reasons (Rees-Mogg is a Catholic). Of course, it is possible that when Rees-Mogg and Widdecombe make exceedingly infrequent and somewhat reluctant interventions on this subject that they sway a significant and new segment of the British public. But I would think that this overstates things. And in any case, they made these particularly comments after the BSA survey was published. So it’s much more likely is that bigger forces are at play. But what are they?... the Muslim population of the UK doubled in the last decade and has been expected to double during this one... Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population"
Why ‘worthless’ humanities degrees may set you up for life - "One recent study of 1,700 people from 30 countries, meanwhile, found that the majority of those in leadership positions had either a social sciences or humanities degree. That was especially true of leaders under 45 years of age; leaders over 45 were more likely to have studied Stem."
Strange how we are told a humanities degree teaches critical thinking and soft skills, but the article didn't provide real evidence for these claims. For example the majority of leaders studying the social sciences or humanities sounds convincing - till you look at the source and realise 44% studied social sciences and only 11% humanities
This is the most regrettable college major in America - "two-thirds said that they had a major regret about their educational experience. The No. 1 regret: student loans, which about one in four grads say they regretted... Your college major can be a big source of regret too, PayScale found. It was the second most regretted thing about the college experience, with more than one in 10 people saying their chosen area of study was their biggest educational regret... the area of study that comes with the biggest side of regret: humanities. Indeed, more than one in five people who majored in humanities — which includes specific majors like English and history — say they regret that choice. Other research bolsters this finding, revealing that English in particular is the most regretted major"
This is the most regrettable college major in America - "More than half (54.3%) of people who majored in English say they are not satisfied with that choice of major... The English major is closely followed by a fine arts major (51.6%) and a political science major (38.2%) as the most regretted.Meanwhile, accounting is the major people say they are most satisfied with (just 14.8% say they weren't satisfied), followed by computer science (15%) and information technology (21.1%). And people who graduate with degrees in science, math or technology are the least likely to say they’d switch career fields entirely... So what’s going on with those who regret their English major? Some of this may be the earnings that graduates face depending on their major. People with a bachelor’s in English earn a median of $53,000 a year and fine arts $49,000 a year... Meanwhile, an accounting B.A. can earn you a median of $69,000, a computer science degree $83,000 and an IT major $73,000... The likelihood of getting a job may another factor. A 2015 report from Georgetown’s Center of Education and the Workforce found that college grads with experience and a major in the computers, science and math field had an unemployment rate of just 4.3%. Meanwhile, humanities and arts majors with experience saw unemployment at 5.8%. Even worse: The future might not be all the bright for English majors. Some of the jobs many of them desire like reporter or correspondent (the number of jobs in this field will decline by -9% through 2024, according to the government) and editor (-5%) have declining job growth, and other jobs like teacher only have average growth. Meanwhile, accountants will see 11% job growth, and jobs that are popular with computer science majors like software developer (17% growth) and computer systems analyst (up 21%) will boom."
How Prophetic Was Gattaca? - "Gattaca’s depiction of a dystopian society has uneasily informed debate on public policy. For example, in 2003 an Australia Law Reform Commission produced a 1,100-page document in which Gattaca is quoted several times as a starting point for a discussion on “the ethical, legal and social implications of the New Genetics.” In a 2013 speech, US Senator Rand Paul referenced Gattaca as a warning to argue for the passage of legislation he introduced called the Life at Conception Act... According to Mitchell, the manner in which genes go about building an organism is in part affected by what engineers call noise. There is a randomness to neural development, subjecting the process to tiny random perturbation. Identical twins share the same DNA but are not completely identical. Even the two sides of our bodies, based on the same plan but executed independently, reveal slight differences. Mitchell’s claim is that much of what is labeled environmental “is intrinsic to each person, arising from inherent randomness in the process of brain development.” Plomin, for his part, repeatedly uses the word “probabilistic” to describe the effect of our genome on our destiny, contrasting this with “deterministic.”... more than 50 years of behavioral genetics have shown that “…genetic differences between people account for about half of their differences in tests of intelligence.” Mitchell states that “…intelligence is ‘genetic,’ in the sense that it relies on a complex program encoded in our genomes and can be seriously affected by mutations that compromise that program.”So Gattaca was prophetic, but not quite in the way Niccol intended. He created a dystopia that was based on what he thought of as a misunderstanding about the influence genes have on our destinies. But in fact, it wasn’t a misunderstanding; it’s been borne out by genetic research. The overlords of the society Niccol depicts are actually right about the science and he was wrong. What Niccol got wrong is that a society in which parents decide to fertilize numerous embryos and decide which one to implant and take to term, as they do in Gattaca, won’t be as dystopic as he imagines because genetically-engineered inequality won’t necessarily lead to unequal treatment, any more than randomly-generated genetic inequality will. As Plomin says, “[T]he American founders did not mean that all people are created identical…equal does not mean identical. If everyone were identical, there would be no need to worry about equal rights or equal opportunity. The essence of democracy is that people are treated fairly despite their difference.”"
The Hate-Crime Epidemic That Never Was: A Seattle Case Study - "most of the situations contained in the 500-plus documented incidents for 2018 turned out not to be hate crimes at all. Out of 521 confrontations or other incidents reported to the police at some point during the year, 181 (35 percent) were deemed insufficiently serious to qualify as crimes of any kind. Another 215 (41 percent) turned out to involve some minor element of bias (i.e., an ethnic slur used during a fight), but did not rise to the definition of hate crime. Only 125, or 24 percent, qualified as potential hate crimes—i.e., alleged “criminal incidents directly motivated by bias.” For purposes of comparison: There are 745,000 people living in Seattle, and 3.5-million in the metro area. Even that 125 figure represents an overestimate, at least as compared to what most of us imagine to be the stereotypical hate crime (of, say, a gang of white racists beating up someone of a different skin color). Seattle’s remarkably broad municipal hate-crime policies cover not only attacks motivated by racial or sexual animus, but also those related to “homelessness, marital status, political ideology, age and parental status.”Indeed, if there is a single archetypal Seattle hate incident that emerges from this data, it would seem to involve a mentally ill homeless man yelling slurs at someone. According to the City Auditor, 22 percent of hate perps were “living unsheltered” at the time of their crime, 20 percent were mentally ill, and 20 percent were severely intoxicated. The conviction rate in cases such as these has been very low. As Beekman notes, 398 reports of actual hate crime, i.e. instances of “malicious harassment” that were “verified by the Department,” occurred between 2012 and 2017. Of these, 128 were referred for prosecution, indicating authorities’ baseline belief that the accusation was not a hoax and that the police had managed to identify and apprehend a viable suspect. But not all of those cases were prosecuted. And only 37 of those that were prosecuted resulted in a conviction for malicious harassment between 2012 and 2017. That is an average of about six per year—fewer than half of which likely involved a sane, sober, non-homeless offender. That’s hardly an epidemic of hate. So why is this report getting so much publicity? Beekman notes in passing that in 2015, Seattle’s police department hired a full-time Bias Crimes Coordinator, who made it a priority to engage in “community outreach.”... a cynic might argue that the coordinator has had every reason to generate more hate-crime reports—since the existence of such reports helps justify the newly created position. One rather remarkable result is that Seattle has, during some recent years, reported more hate crimes than most U.S. states—including Florida... The scope of hate crime often gets exaggerated all over the United States. In my research, I’ve found that widely reported “surges” in hate crime often turn out to be mere artifacts of new reporting techniques, with actual conviction rates remaining low... many supposed hate crimes are probable hoaxes—and those which are not hoaxes often turn out to be un-prosecutable incidents of anonymous graffiti or shouted slurs."
Post ID: 3504390157172975402
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
