The Girl Who Silenced the World for 5 Minutes! English Subs - YouTube - "When Severn Cullis-Suzuki stepped on stage at the plenary session of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, she knew this was her one opportunity to speak to the world’s most influential decision-makers."
Some people claim Greta will make a difference when all the previous hysteria hasn't because she's a kid. This girl was 12 at the time. And coming from more than 2 decades ago, it's interesting to see how while the playbook evolves, in many ways the more things change the more things stay the same
Comment: "Weaponizing children to deliver a narrative at the UN. v1.992.
A) The ozone layer was fixed.
B) Somebody did give the poor people in South America everything they wanted. That economy collapsed because it was unsustanable. Venezuala.
C) You are now old enough to have had your own children. Did your doomsday prediction come true? Will you now retract it?"
Greta’s very corporate children’s crusade - "Greta Thunberg is just an ordinary 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl whose fiery visions have convinced the parliaments of Britain and Ireland to declare a “climate emergency”. Greta’s parents, actor Svante Thunberg and opera singer Malena Ernman, are just an ordinary pair of parent-managers who want to save the planet. Query their motives, and you risk being accused of “climate denial”, or of bullying a vulnerable child with Asperger’s. But the Greta phenomenon has also involved green lobbyists, PR hustlers, eco-academics, and a think-tank founded by a wealthy ex-minister in Sweden’s Social Democratic government with links to the country’s energy companies. These companies are preparing for the biggest bonanza of government contracts in history: the greening of the Western economies. Greta, whether she and her parents know it or not, is the face of their political strategy... Rentzhog admitted to meeting Greta’s mother Malena Ernman “3-4 months before everything started”—in early May 2018, when he and Malena had shared a stage at a conference called the Climate Parliament. Nor did Rentzhog stumble on Greta’s protest by accident. He now admits to having been informed “the week before” by “a mailing list from a climate activist” named Bo Thorén, leader of the Fossil Free Dalsland group.Independent journalist Rebecca Weidmo Uvell has obtained an earlier email from Bo Thorén’s search for fresh green faces. In February 2018, Thorén invited a group of environmental activists, academics and politicians to plan “how we can involve and get help from young people to increase the pace of the transition to a sustainable society”. In May, after Greta won second prize in an environmental op-ed writing competition run by the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Thorén approached all the competition winners with a plan for a “school strike”, modelled on the student walk-outs after the shootings at Parkland, Florida. “But no one was interested,” Greta’s mother claims, “so Greta decided to do it for herself.” Fortunately, Greta’s decision coincided with the publication of Scenes from the Heart, Svante and Malena’s memoir of how saving the planet had saved their family. Unfortunately, Malena omitted to tell her publisher that Ingmar Rentzhog had commandeered Greta’s stunt... Trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, Rentzhog set up We Don’t Have Time in late 2017 to “hold leaders and companies accountable for climate change” by leveraging “the power of social media”... When Greta met Rentzhog, he was the salaried chairman of a private think-tank owned by an ex-Social Democrat minister with a background in the energy sector. His board was stacked with powerful sectoral interests, including career Social Democrats, major union leaders, and lobbyists with links to Brussels. And his board’s vice-chair was a member of one of Sweden’s most powerful green energy investment groups... Greta’s father Svante, who now devotes himself to managing her career, declined my interview requests and refused to reply to a detailed list of written questions about Ingmar Rentzhog and Global Challenge. Instead, Svante issued an evasive three-paragraph statement through an intermediary... When I asked Rentzhog if he had introduced Greta and her parents to other Global Challenge board members, he replied, “I don’t know, maybe I did, but if Svante says no, maybe it was not connected.” Svante refuses to answer my questions about whether he and Greta have met members of the Global Challenge board. But Global Challenge board member Anders Wijkman remembers. Wijkman leads the anti-growth Club of Rome. Its alarmist 1972 report, A Limit to Growth?, has become a cornerstone of the “climate emergency” campaign. In December 2018, We Have No Time and Global Challenge launched the Club of Rome’s latest vision of apocalypse, the Climate Emergency Plan... The Climate Emergency Plan’s talking points are Greta’s talking points. “Around the year 2030, in ten years, 250 days, and ten hours,” the Scandinavian Cassandra told British parliamentarians, “we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it.” The only way to save ourselves is to follow the Climate Emergency Plan, and instantly green the global energy business through massive government investment and emergency legislation... They announced that their association with Rentzhog was over—a curious statement, considering that Svante claims they had never associated with him in the first place... Whatever Greta or her parents know or think, her eco-mob increases the likelihood of legislation and investment that will make colossal profits for people like Global Challenge, We Don’t Have Time and Sustainable Energy Angels. For Sweden’s energy titans, saving the planet means government contracts to print the green stuff. Green energy lobbyists use populist scare tactics and a children’s crusade to bypass elected representatives, but their goal is technocracy not democracy, profit not redistribution. Greta, a child of woke capitalism, is being used to ease the transition to green corporatism."
Being financed and supported by corporate interests is only a bad thing if you're on the "wrong" side
Also published as: Greta Thunberg and the plot to forge a climate warrior | News Review | The Sunday Times
Are We Really Running Out of Time to Stop Climate Change? - "Scientists never said the world was going to end in 12 years if we don't stop climate change. Even researchers known for ringing the alarm bells on climate change are far more likely to speak in terms of decimal places and nonlinear effects than to talk about the end of civilization as we know.Prominent activists rarely bring up doomsday, either. Messages from the Global Climate Strike organizers and the U.S.-based Sunrise Movement focus on long-term climate shifts, not an impending, sudden disaster. Still, the 12-year deadline looms large in the culture."It has achieved an absoluteness in its role in societal dialogue that's not in line with scientific fact," said Katharine Mach, a climate scientist at the University of Miami and one of several lead authors of the IPCC report."The world will not end if we pass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial levels""
Greta better take her own advice and listen to the scientists and stop pushing climate change hysteria
Lewis Spears on Twitter - "If the right want to beat Greta Thunberg, they have to fight fire with fire. It's time for a 15 year old climate change denier with down syndrome"
Ashley StClair 🇺🇸 on Twitter - "The people saying to leave Greta Thunberg alone are the same people who bullied the mini AOC girl off of the internet."
Comments: "14 year old Soph's funny/intelligent take on Greta. She has been banned from paypal, and youtube. Find her Freespeech TV."
Justin Murphy on Twitter - "Not even being provocative but if you think Greta Thunberg has the maturity to guide global policy-making then you cannot object to Jeffrey Epstein paying 16-year-olds for sex."
Replies: "people treat age in a manner that suits their needs.
Want liberal voters? Lower voting age to 16.
Guns are bad, so raise age for purchase to 21?
Trust a 16 yr old on climate change, but don't question them because they are a child."
"can you simultaneously think that a 16-year-old is capable of making wise decisions concerning complex scientific matters of global import and NOT capable of making decisions concerning her own body?"
Greta Thunberg without a script to read from - YouTube
"After a truly brilliant message to world leaders at the UN, Greta was absolutely lost for words answering a question during a news conference.
Her reply was truly astounding "
/out/ - Outdoors » Thread #1585509 - "Greta Thunberg - ”The problem of plastic pollution in the... *surrounded by plastic while in the train*"
Mirror
Psychologist says he's worried about the mental wellbeing of climate change activist Greta Thunberg - "one of Australia's most-high profile psychologists has accused the girl of being an 'entitled political pawn' in need of treatment. Dr Michael Carr-Gregg compared Greta's position in the spotlight to the fame of a child TV star who could 'burn out' after being thrust into the spotlight... Dr Carr-Gregg said he was wary of Greta's Asperger's and history of mental health in his analysis of the teenager, who he believes has a 'sense of entitlement'.'I am worried that we use a kid like this, who arguably should be getting treatment because she's said she's had anorexia, said she's got Asperger's and said she's battled depression,' he said.'As a parent, if this was my child, I'm not sure I'd be putting them on the world stage.'Dr Carr-Gregg said he was worried about Greta's future, her current psychological health and how it would impact other young people.'It sends a message to other teenagers that they can speak to adults in this very, very dismissive way',' he said. 'She seems to be caught up in a doomsday scenario where she's massively exaggerating the threats posed by climate change and that has a flow-on effect because it causes all this existential anxiety in our children, hence the climate strikes,' he said.He said kids should be in school but are instead rallying because 'they've been convinced the end of the world is nigh'... Dr Carr-Gregg mentioned the 'Twitter war' between Greta and Donald Trump where the president appeared to mock the teenager.'She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!,' Mr Trump tweeted following Greta's impassioned speech.The climate activist swiftly responded by changing her Twitter bio to 'A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.'... Dr Carr-Gregg said he didn't think children should be used as 'political props'. 'My criticism isn't so much of her, but her parents and the climate change activists who use her shamelessly and I think that the Left can be somewhat hypocritical at times,' he said.Dr Carr-Gregg said the rest of world needs to put pressure on China and India - the largest emitters... The psychologist said that because Greta is a 16-year-old female 'no one is allowed to debate' her views.'We all just have to lie down and accept it'... Prime Minister Scott Morrison has also come out swinging against Greta's stance on global warming, saying 'we've got to let kids be kids.'He said children need to be protected from 'needless anxiety' and reminded the younger generation that they live in a 'wonderful country and pristine environment.' "
She literally says she has multiple mental conditions/illnesses/disorders, yet many people, when this is brought up, claim that talking about them is a personal attack. And/or conflate criticism with attack, or criticism of her handlers/enablers/manipulators with criticism of her
Children should be used as political props when it's your politics they're promoting
Stop the Exploitation of Greta Thunberg - "The global media covers Greta with gushing accolades. She has appeared on the covers of Time, British Vogue, and – oddly enough – men’s magazine GQ. She has been nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Celebrities line up to meet her. She has already published two books.Speaking as a mother, I have a different perspective. I’m following Greta’s journey and I am appalled to see a minor being exploited to advance a political agenda. I would never permit one of my own children to be used in this way.History teaches us that early fame often leads to disastrous outcomes. Corey Feldman, Michael Jackson, Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears. The list of child celebrities whose lives fell apart once they reached adulthood is endless.Greta already faced significant challenges before she rose to global fame. She talks openly about the fact that she’s been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. She also has Selective Mutism, a condition defined by Britain’s National Health Service as “a severe anxiety disorder where a person is unable to speak in certain social situations, such as with classmates at school or to relatives they don’t see very often.”... Since Greta is only 16, no one can ask her tough questions – like how to square her goals with representative democracy. Anyone who criticizes her is vulnerable to the charge of bullying a child.Greta is being used to promote a political agenda by people who don’t care about her long-term welfare. What will happen to her when the novelty wears off? She won’t be a cute little teenager for much longer. How can she go back to living a quiet life when she’s gotten used to being greeted by cheering crowds wherever she goes?And where are Greta’s parents in all of this? They seem to be her enablers. Her father accompanied her on her boat journey across the Atlantic. He is an actor and her mother is an opera singer. Perhaps they are vicariously living out their own dreams of global fame via their daughter."
HowToTravelLikeABasicBitch (@hownottotravellikeabasicbitch) • Instagram photos and videos - "•I DONT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT GRETA• Currently there’s a 16 year-old girl who skipped school for climate change named Greta from Sweden getting international attention for standing up for the environment. I am here to explain to you 3 reasons why it’s wrong. Check HIGHLIGHT:GRETA for more detail and clarity.
1. GRETA EXPERIENCES NO DIRECT DANGER DUE TO ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS. Greta does not live any effects of climate change or environmental hazard and therefore has no idea what she’s speaking about. Meanwhile Brown & Black activists are DYING for the planet all across the world and have been speaking from their direct lived experiences at the cost of their lives.
2. By placing Greta as the mouthpiece of a movement it’s WHITE WASHING, SILENCING, AND ERASING BROWN & BLACK CHILDREN and their movements as a DIRECT RESPONSE to their lived situations AND sets a precedent that “leaders” in their field must be White in order for issues to matter and for solutions to be created, regardless of how ill-informed and disconnected they are.
3. THERE ARE ALREADY INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF SWEDEN FIGHTING FOR THIS. They’re called the Sámit. IF there was to be any environmental representation, it would be them considering they have to fight their own government for resource preservation.
I have no issue with Greta herself. I do have an issue with the space she occupies. By continuing to uplift her in international media, this is inadvertently saying that what Brown & Black People have been voicing and dying for, for years, doesn’t fucking matter, just like our lives."
Supporting Greta Thunberg is evidence of 'white supremacy', activists claim - "Support for Greta Thunberg is evidence of "white supremacy", "white privilege" and "white power", activists claim."
Inasmuch as climate change hysteria is a white obsession, they are right
Greta Thunberg, after pointed UN speech, faces attacks from the right - "The day before Thunberg's UN speech, Mr D'Souza likened her image to ones used in Nazi propaganda, posting a photo on Twitter of Thunberg, wearing her signature long braids, next to an illustration of a young woman with a similar hairstyle standing in front of a swastika flag. "Children - notably Nordic white girls with braids and red cheeks - were often used in Nazi propaganda""
Of course, the ACLU using a photo of a white baby holding an American flag = promotion of white supremacy
Pointing out that Greta Thunberg looks strikingly similar to images in Nazi propaganda = you are racist
Experts Agree Restructuring World Economy Best Way to Treat Child’s Anxiety - "Today, 16-year-old Sweedish activist Greta Thunberg spoke at the U.N. Climate Summit, scolding world leaders for their inaction and accusing them of “Stealing the dreams of [her] childhood.” After the speech, experts agreed that the best way to treat this child’s anxiety would be to completely restructure of the world economy."
Stefan Molyneux on Twitter - "Oh lord above. Which countries are Greta Thunberg targeting for climate sins? Germany, France, Brazil, Argentina and Turkey. Not the two countries responsible for the most CO2 emissions. Not India. Not China. It’s all so ridiculous and political."
Matt Walsh on Twitter - "The Left: How dare you attack a 16 year old girl? She’s a child you monsters!
Also the Left:
Reza Aslan: Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid's? *Covington's Nicholas Sandmann"
Bonus points - both are white, so the left can't play the race card (so they can still play the gender one)
CJ Pearson on Twitter - "I’ve been attacked, lied about, and spat on by the Left and the media more times than I can count. The only kids the Left won’t attack are the ones that agree with the nonsensical rhetoric they spew."
Gad Saad on Twitter - "Progressive Noble Logic: If you scrutinize a position espoused by a 16-year-old activist who has received worldwide attention, you're a monster because you're "attacking" an innocent child. Also: 3-year-old children are old enough to unequivocally state their gender identity."
It's Disgusting What the Climate Panic Brigade Is Doing to Greta Thunberg | VodkaPundit - "The lecture goes on in a similar vein, with poor Thunberg looking more and more disturbed as she continues. The Swedish teenager is not some science prodigy who graduated young from some Ivy League school with an advanced agree in physics or anything like that. Rather, the daughter (and granddaughter) of famous actors and opera singers suffers from Asperger's syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and selective mutism. I'm no medical professional, but these things might have been brought on when (according to public sources), starting at the age of eight, Thunberg was subjected to such a barrage of climate panic that she eventually became depressed and lethargic, and also developed an eating disorder... While Trump might seem callous here to some, to me he looks like a man unwilling to join in on this international display of child abuse.Finally, I'd add that when someone castigates their own audience, and the audience applauds, then the castigation is not meant. It's nothing but a theatrical affectation for TV cameras -- a hoax perpetrated by the speaker and the audience, together. I doubt someone Thunberg's age knows the ins and outs of speechmaking to understand that, but whoever handles her does. Certainly the people there at the UN got exactly the TV clip they wanted, even at the "price" of pretending to be publicly shamed.Shame on those exploiting this young woman instead of helping her through her troubles."
The cult of Greta Thunberg - "Anyone who doubts that the green movement is morphing into a millenarian cult should take a close look at Greta Thunberg. This poor young woman increasingly looks and sounds like a cult member... It actually makes sense that Ms Thunberg – a wildly celebrated 16-year-old Swede who founded the climate-strike movement for schoolkids – should sound cultish. Because climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies. Consider Extinction Rebellion, the latest manifestation of the upper-middle classes’ contempt for industrialisation and progress. It is at times indistinguishable from old fundamentalist movements that warned mankind of the coming End of Days... It struck me that this was a march against people. Most radical protest and direct action is aimed at officialdom or government or people with power. This macabre schlep through London was aimed squarely at ordinary people. Banners and placards made no disguise of the marchers’ contempt for how the masses live. We were told that ‘Meat = heat’ (that is, if you carry on eating meat, you fat bastards, the planet will get even hotter) and that driving and flying are destroying Mother Earth. Of course, it’s okay for them to fly – Emma Thompson jetted first-class from LA to London to lecture us plebs about all our eco-destructive holidaymaking. It’s only a problem when we do it; it’s only bad when we take advantage of the miracle of mass food production and the expansion of flight to make our lives fuller and more pleasurable. They detest that. They detest mass society and its inhabitants: the masses. In keeping with all millenarian movements, the extinction-obsessed green cult reserves its priestly fury for ordinary people. Even when it is putting pressure on the government, it is really asking it to punish us. It wants tighter controls on car-driving, restrictions on flying, green taxes on meat. That these things would severely hit the pockets of ordinary people – but not the deep pockets of Emma Thompson and the double-barrelled eco-snobs who run Extinction Rebellion – is immaterial to the angry bourgeoisie. So convinced are they of their own goodness, and of our wickedness, that they think it is utterly acceptable for officialdom to make our lives harder in order to strongarm us into being more ‘green’... What they have done to Ms Thunberg is unforgivable. They have pumped her – and millions of other children – with the politics of fear. They have convinced the next generation that the planet is on the cusp of doom. They have injected dread into the youth. ‘I want you to panic’, said Ms Thunberg at Davos, and the billionaires and celebs and marauding NGOs that were in attendance all lapped it up. Because adult society loves nothing more than having its own fear and confusions obediently parroted back to it by teenagers. They celebrate Thunberg because she tells them how horrible they are: it is an entirely S&M relationship, speaking to the deep self-loathing of the 21st-century elites."
Opinion | The Problem With Greta Thunberg’s Climate Activism - The New York Times - "Climate activists in Western Europe had already been radicalizing for some time when record heat engulfed the Continent last month. The high reached 109 degrees in Paris two Thursdays ago. Yet many environmentalists have come to believe that extreme weather alone will never spur Europeans to give up fossil fuels. Nor will talking about it. Provocations and disruption are needed... Europeans act like Americans, holding tight to their driving and consuming habits.Climate activists have therefore changed their emphasis. No more eliciting pieties by explaining what happens when carbon dioxide rises past 400 parts per million. Better to use the specter of imminent self-extinction to rally the public behind actions like banning cars from city centers and halting new oil exploration.This new focus may have the virtue of conveying urgency. But it is going to bring the climate protesters into conflict with democracy, whether they realize it or not... Ms. Thunberg believes people should act, not argue... Her politics rests on two things. First is simplification. “The climate crisis already has been solved,” she said at a TED Talk in Stockholm this year. “We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change.” Second is sowing panic, as she explained at the World Economic Forum in Davos last winter... Kids her age have not seen much of life. Her worldview might be unrealistic, her priorities out of balance. But in our time, and in her cause, that seems to be a plus. People have had enough of balance and perspective. They want single-minded devotion to the task at hand. This Ms. Thunberg provides. That climate change be understood as an “emergency” is her first objective. Increasingly, authorities share it. The week of the heat wave, according to The Economist, the Met Office, the British meteorological agency, was trying to speed up its “attribution studies” so that it can link incidents of extreme weather to global warming before the public’s attention drifts. This is a political, not a meteorological, goal. There are also calls to politicize language: In May, The Guardian announced it would use the term “climate crisis” rather than “climate change” in its articles, and “global heating” rather than “global warming.” Alliances between institutional authorities and activists like Ms. Thunberg often backfire. With questions of global warming, the problems of credibility are already large, even without fresh incitements to politicization. Sometime after the age of 16, most people learn that not even the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are above self-interest and human error. It is also hard to say what a real, non-utopian low-carbon politics would look like, once the public got involved in legislating and regulating. Contrary to the assumptions of many of Ms. Thunberg’s admirers, it might resemble contemporary populist agendas more than the world imagined by the United Nations’ modelers and the governance experts of Davos. Protectionism could be in: If you establish a system of carbon pricing, countries that don’t practice it are “dumping,” and their imports must be excluded. Immigration could be out: It is difficult to see how any kind of long-term mass immigration is consistent with a desire to lower Europe’s carbon output. And that is before we even broach the question of what kind of civilization we want, and at what level of technological complexity. On a planet of eight billion people, it is not just destination weddings that require considerable expenditure of energy. So does food. So does clean drinking water. So does communication. Increasingly, climate agitators want action, not distraction. That often requires demonizing anyone who stands in the way. In July the climate editor of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad complained that Paris’s declaration of a “climate state of emergency” on July 9 had not been accompanied by a ban on automobile traffic in Paris or by a dimming of the lights on the Eiffel Tower. In Germany the word “Flugscham” is one of the last year’s more interesting coinages. It means not fear of flying but shame of flying, and of the pollution it brings about. The German economist Niko Paech urges shaming people for booking cruises and driving S.U.V.s, too. Behind the new boldness of climate activists is the assumption that ordinary Europeans’ good intentions are sincere and their inaction is hypocritical. It could be the other way around. Whatever the case, Europeans’ slowness to act on the climate cannot simply be dismissed as “denial.” Those who read the United Nations reports and tut-tut but fail to take to the streets might be less resolute — but they might simply disagree, or have other priorities. Democracy often calls for waiting and seeing. Patience may be democracy’s cardinal virtue. Climate change is a serious issue. But to say, “We can’t wait,” is to invite a problem just as grave."
Greta Thunberg will sail to US on boat with no toilet to avoid flying
Presumably ocean pollution from throwing your waste into the sea is better than carbon emissions. And everyone is free (and rich) enough to spend 2 weeks on a boat instead of a few hours on a plane
Crew of Five Are Flying To New York To Bring Greta’s Boat Back! - "Climate activist Greta Thunberg causes more greenhouse gas emissions from her sailing trip from the United Kingdom to the United States than if she had flown. About five employees would sail the yacht back to Europe... The sailing trip triggers at least six climate-damaging air travel across the Atlantic. If Thunberg had flown with her father, only two would have been necessary to come to New York...
This proves that Thunberg’s decision to sail by racing yacht had nothing whatsoever to do with saving emissions, and was no more than a silly publicity stunt."
Lucas Lynch - When it comes down to it, very few people actually... - "When it comes down to it, very few people actually believe in 'expertise' as meaningful. They'll appeal to it when it aligns with ideas they already believe in, and ignore it when they don't. Don't believe me? Just remember that all those people you know bemoaning an unqualified reality TV star as president that wanted a top-rated daytime talkshow host to take his place, cheer for a bartender in Congress, and are extolling the climate-science advice of an autistic 16 year old child."
Lucas Lynch - "And just like that, everyone who said Richard Dawkins should stick to commenting on things within his realm of expertise started taking climate science advice from an autistic 16 year-old Swedish girl...One who, except for her ignorant anti-nuclear stance, I basically agree with, by the way. But please spare me your real and true concern for 'expertise'..."
Thread by @ShellenbergerMD - "If you want people to think your goal isn't climate but rather making (& keeping) nations poor, then attacking France & Brazil, which get 86% & 79% of their power from zero-carbon sources, is a great strategy...
Attacking nuclear as "extremely dangerous" reinforces the sense that what you want isn't lower emissions but "de-growth"
Why? Because nuclear
- is how France & your country, Sweden, get 86% & 90% of their power from zero-carbon sources
- is THE SAFEST way to make electricity
French President @EmmanuelMacron is right: Your "Very radical positions [are] likely to antagonize our societies"
Indeed, they already have
But then, perhaps that was the goal all along?
Around the world, those seeking to shut down nuclear plants & replace them with nat gas & a few "renewables" are @Greenpeace @billmckibben @NaomiAKlein et al. while those people defending nuclear are the climate scientists for whom you claim to speak... If you are going to condemn fossil fuels as "evil" then you should contemplate why it is that oil and gas companies are spending millions to promote the unreliable renewables that you, too, are promoting...
If you're going to moralize against species extinction along with your allies @ExtinctionR then consider how wind turbines are killing endangered species around the world & may be contributing to the insect die-off in Germany and elsewhere"
Meme - "15yr olds joining ISIS are too young to know what they're doing.
15yr olds on climate change are experts.
Welcome to clown world."
Meme - "One of these kids complained that her childhood was stolen."
The Red-Headed Libertarian™️ on Twitter - "Greta Thunberg snubbed for Nobel Peace Prize by committee run by Norway, one of the world's biggest oil and natural gas exporters"
"@Newsweek Between 1940-1944, Irene Sendler smuggled 2500 children out of the Warsaw ghetto. When she was found out, she was tortured & beaten for several days. Her limbs broken Irene was nominated for the Nobel peace prize in 2007 They gave it to Al Gore for his slideshow That’s a snub."
Greta Thunberg's refusal to fly on airplanes leaves her stranded on wrong side of the globe - "Climate change activist Greta Thunberg is asking for help after her refusal to fly on airplanes has left her stranded on the wrong side of the globe. The Swedish teenager's plea came on Friday after the United Nations announced the COP25 environmental summit would be hosted in Madrid, Spain. The summit was slated to take place in Chile, but the South American country withdrew hosting responsibilities this week amid national civil unrest."
The perils of being a luddite
Greta Thunberg Calls on Facebook to Censor Her Critics - "The celebrated Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has threatened to quit Facebook if the social media platform refuses to silence her critics... Ms. Thunberg is finding criticism enervating, suggesting that those who oppose her crusade are “interfering with democracy” and should be censored by Facebook. The climate icon urged her fans to “challenge” Facebook to silence her antagonists, insisting that “if enough of us demand change — then change will come.”"
Her getting off Facebook would be great! But this is probably like all the American liberals who threatened to move to Canada if Trump were elected
Climate activist Greta Thunberg demands Facebook users urge platform take responsibility for content - "London's Natural History Museum said that it had named a minute species of beetle after her.The 'Nelloptodes gretae' is less than 1 millimeter long and lacks eyes and wings"
The beetle is blind, so...
Sorry, Greta Thunberg, but you’re (mostly) wrong - "Despite the tearful claims of stolen childhoods, suffering and death, Greta’s generation has grown up in the most prosperous time in human history. Global hunger is at an all-time low. Fewer live in poverty than ever before. Life expectancy is up. Disease is generally down.And all of this has occurred in the face of rising global temperatures, because this is what Greta gets right: Global warming is real, and human activity is likely to blame... Yet despite this, humans have thrived due to a multitude of advancements. In the United States, for example, increased use of air conditioning has reduced heat-related mortality despite higher temperatures. Globally, malaria, which was once forecast to become more widespread in a changing climate, has been on the steady decline as a result of highly successful control efforts.In other words, fewer people are dying and suffering than ever before. Greta describes a bleak future on the brink of ecological collapse, and although she highlights a plethora of important environmental problems, much of what she describes is only loosely tied to climate change and not entirely supported by science. While she is correct that extinctions are occurring at an alarming rate and some ecosystems are struggling, these are primarily a result of local land-use modification in developing nations rather than a result of global climatic change. Likewise, she suggests that warming will be worse than predicted due to “tipping points, most feedback loops, and additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution,” but this is only half-true.Most scientists believe warming will progress in a rather linear fashion with progressively worsening effects; the idea that Earth as we know it will be very different if we don’t act in eight or 10 years is arbitrary. Fortunately, Earth has relatively few “tipping points” and positive “feedback loops,” although there are some notable exceptions. As for “toxic air pollution,” this has likely slowed global warming by blocking the sun. And in an ironic twist, Greta is concerned global warming will progress more rapidly once highly polluted countries clean up their act... Any solution to combat climate change should seek to reduce the impact on day-to-day life while striving to maintain the unprecedented global rise in wealth. Anything else would be potentially catastrophic and could reverse decades of dramatic gains combating poverty. Fortunately, even though Greta maintains that “solutions are nowhere in sight,” there is reason for optimism. For instance, modern nuclear energy is safe, produces almost no carbon, and unlike wind or solar, can run reliably and continuously. We should be constructing new nuclear plants, not dismantling them.Further in the future, emerging technologies that capture carbon from the atmosphere and even convert it into fuel show great promise. Unlike Greta’s bleak outlook, these solutions would require relatively few changes to our current lifestyles, yet would effectively and seamlessly reduce carbon emissions. Most Americans simply aren’t willing to give up their cell phones and cars, nor should they. A common refrain from Thunberg is that we should “listen to the science.” I wholeheartedly agree. The science suggests that despite some major environmental challenges, humans across the planet are better off than ever before, and the future is not unremittingly bleak. We should strive to keep it that way while combating climate change and preserving our environment in a controlled, yet effective manner.
Kalkstein is a climate scientist at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point."
Of course climate change hystericists only want to listen to the scientists who will support their agenda (or more to the point, those who can claim support it)
Greta Thunberg 'ignored' by world leaders at climate summit, admits protests have achieved 'nothing' - "Thunberg, as she typically does, also reverted to climate change alarmism on Friday, claiming the actions of humanity will result in an unsustainable future if environmental actions continue to go unchecked... Thunberg arrived in Europe this week after embarking on a three-week transatlantic journey, which made headlines because the trip did not save carbon emissions as expected. Thunberg travels via boat, train, and car because she refuses to fly.
Greta Thunberg's plan to save carbon emissions backfires over travel on luxury yacht - "Nikki Henderson, a 26-year-old yacht skipper, flew to the U.S. from Britain to sail Thunberg's ship — the La Vagabonde, a 48-foot catamaran — the 3,500 mile journey from the U.S. to Portugal... Adding insult to injury, the vessel Thunberg used for her journey is not climate friendly because it has two diesel engines and is made from products that use petroleum for production. Craig Rucker — president of Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, a free-market environmental organization — said Thunberg's travel logistics are "rife with irony." "The irony of protesting capitalism and oil on board a carbon-fiber (petrochemical) yacht owned by European royals who made billions operating Monaco as a tax haven was rich""
Psychology Today article blasted conservative commentator for calling Greta Thunberg 'mentally ill' — yet initially admitted she has been diagnosed with 'mental illnesses' - "Thunberg was described as having been diagnosed with "several mental illnesses". But on Thursday, the words "mental illnesses" were gone from the paragraph in question. Vanished. Gone. Kaput. And without explanation. Not one editor's note. Not even an indication the article had been updated. TheBlaze on Thursday messaged a Psychology Today editor and asked for an explanation regarding why the words "mental illnesses" disappeared from the paragraph describing Thunberg, but the editor didn't immediately respond. One could understand why Psychology Today characterizing Thunberg as having been diagnosed with "several mental illnesses" might be problematic given the piece later rips Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire for calling Thunberg a "mentally ill Swedish child"... a New York Times profile of Thunberg said in "early adolescence she battled severe depression, so much so that she stopped eating for a while and stopped growing."And in an April Facebook post, Thunberg celebrated Autism Awareness Day, said she's "proud to be on the spectrum!" and acknowledges she's had her "fair share of depressions, alienation, anxiety and disorders.""
How Greta Thunberg's rise could backfire on environmentalists - " the free market is already doing these things based on the same capitalist incentives Greta and so many other activists are blaming for environmental disaster. Natural gas is cheaper and produces 50% fewer emissions than coal, nuclear power has been modernized and made much safer in recent decades while producing no emissions. For-profit entities like a company called Carbon Engineering are working on machines that literally suck carbon emissions out of the atmosphere.Each of these innovations has enjoyed some level of government support here and there, but raw capitalistic profit motives are the primary driver. Warren and those like her are failing to see that millions more Americans who use their consumer spending powers to reduce their carbon footprint will send corporate America chasing after those dollars in a much faster and more effective way than government fiat... Based on all the politically partisan slogans and signs we saw at the climate protests over the past few days, are we sure the top motivation is the environment and not politics? If the activists protesting right now could get the most serious climate change threats eliminated, but without politically defeating President Trump and Republicans and/or putting the big oil companies out of business in the process, would they still be interested in the cause?... This new focus on making environmentalism an angrier protest movement threatens to make the effort to protect the planet just another wedge issue that politicians often use to motivate their base of voters. Similar wedge issues like abortion and gun control have long shifted become tribal controversies with little chance of progress and compromise."
Greta Thunberg busted for misleading public about her train voyage - The Post Millennial - "Poor Greta Thunberg. The 16-year-old Swedish climate activist renowned for skipping school and accusing world leaders of “doing nothing,” allegedly had to travel in a little less comfort than what she is used to on her way home from the UN Climate Conference in Madrid and tweeted about it:“Traveling on overcrowded trains through Germany. And I’m finally on my way home!” Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s state railway company, however, had this to say:
“Dear #Greta, thank you for supporting our railway in the fight against climate change! We are happy that you travelled with us in the ICE 174. And that with 100 percent eco electricity. It would have been even better if you had also mentioned how friendly and competent the team looked after you in your seat in First Class.”... This seems to suggest that Thunberg is willing to bend the truth to suit her agenda... This stunt has been tried before. Three years ago, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK Labour Party who lost the election to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives last week, claimed that the train he was travelling on was overcrowded and was shown sitting on the floor of the carriage, making a political point about alleged under-funding and mismanagement of the British railways, arguing they needed to be re-nationalized. Yet later he was found to have passed through an almost empty carriage, where he could have chosen a comfortable seat with a view and a table if he had so wished, before he made the video on the floor of the corridor instead. Like Corbyn, Thunberg seems to thrive on pointing out faults in our society, and her mission is to show that we need to “change the system.” And like so many angry, young protesters before her, “everything” is wrong... Being economical with the truth, no matter what your intentions are, tends to come back and bite you. If she wants to keep sympathy for her cause strong, perhaps her team of PR consultants should make sure she doesn’t exaggerate her plight. After all, most 16-year-olds can only dream of travelling the world on state-of-the-art yachts and in first-class train carriages while skipping school for months at a time."
Sitting on the floor for a photo when you're in First Class - so brave, so stunning. No wonder so many adult men feel "threatened" by her
Hilariously, I saw lots of people slamming Deutsche Bahn, but few calling out Greta's spreading of fake news
Greta Thunberg tells cheering crowd 'we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall' - "Greta Thunberg told cheering protesters today 'we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall' if they fail to take urgent action on climate change.The Swedish teen activist was addressing the crowd at a Fridays for Future protest in Turin, Italy."
Threats of violence are good when they come from the right people
Why We Strike Again by Greta Thunberg, Luisa Neubauer and Angela Valenzuela - "the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all. Our political leaders can no longer shirk their responsibilities."
Well, now that she's come out and admitted it's not (just) about the environment... Of course many of her supporters will continue to pretend that it is
Greta Thunberg says Canadian oil and gas violates children's rights - The Post Millennial - "Greta Thunberg has joined up with 15 more young climate activists. They have claimed that Canada and Norway are violating the rights of children throughout the world with their oil and gas production.The activist’s claim that the higher output of fossil-fuel production violates the countries obligations in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child."
I guess not using fossil fuels and having kids die due to an undeveloped economy doesn't violate children's rights
Lucas Lynch - "When someone says they simply can't fathom so many people hating a teenage child, and you give them this look... *Covington's Nicholas Sandmann*"
Bruce Sawyer - "Climate change realist Naomi Seibt: "Greta is stuck in a bubble""
"You can't criticize the message of a teenager, so the only option is to send another teenager. The future of all debate will be fought with child proxies. You must fight children with children."
"We've finally done it. 2020 will be the year of the child proxy soldier. We're now living in the Metal Gear Solid universe."
Meme - "Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old Swdish environmental activist who shares her anger, frustration and anxiety about the climate with the world. She is neither a scientist nor an economist. She offers no practical solutions to the economic devastation her ideas would cause. Admirable passion. Wrong thesis. Media star.
Google Search: 176 million results
Boyan Slat is a 23-year-old inventor who designed the world‘s first ocean plastic cleanup system at age 16. He now leads a group developing advanced technologies to rid the world's oceans of plastic. His solution involves no economic destruction. Admirable passion. Right thesis. Media: not interested.
Google Search: 270,000 results"
Of course, liberals will claim some white male boomer created this
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Today guest edits: Greta Thunberg - "‘When you talk to these people, negotiators, they say that the COP 26 is our last chance, which of course, it is not, there's no last chance, we can always prevent it from getting worse’...
If all of the globe, we went to zero emissions, let's be clear, let's unpack the word net. This is a new term that's being put in whereby that means that wealthy parts of the world mostly will carry on emitting from some sectors they call difficult, like aviation, for example. And they will rely on the future generations, for Greta’s generation to suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. This is the hidden story behind this word net
Looks like she's realised she's propagating fake news with her 2030 deadline
Zero net emissions actually means what you put into the air is offset by what you take away. This zealous obsession with zero emissions - even though zero net emissions has the same effect - belies the religious fanaticism of climate change hysteria, which is really about moral purity
Greta Thunberg's Dad Appears to Be Writing Her Facebook Posts - "A Facebook glitch on Thursday evening revealed that Greta Thunberg’s Facebook page is run by accounts belonging to her father and a climate activist in India... People on message boards like 4chan took advantage, sharing screenshots of posts on Greta Thunberg’s page by her dad, actor Svante Thunberg, and Adarsh Prathap, an Indian delegate at the U.N. climate change organization. None of the posts appeared to have been composed by the 17-year-old Swedish climate activist herself... While public figures regularly employ social media managers to communicate in their voice, Thunberg claimed she really was behind all her posts. She said she just prefers to use her dad’s account... Hailed as a planetary savior by many activists and journalists, Thunberg has recently been forced to issue a number of clarifications to her fans on social media.Last month, she defended a photo she tweeted of herself posing on the floor of what she said was an “overcrowded” trained after the railway revealed that she had actually traveled first class. According to Thunberg, she had sat on the floor until a seat opened up.Days earlier, Thunberg apologized for saying during a speech in Italy that world leaders should be “put against the wall.” In English the phrase is associated with execution by firing squad. But Thunberg said she only meant to say they must be held accountable."
Strange, Svante claimed that he wasn't into climate activism (and so could not have been responsible for manipulating Greta). Dear me...
An Open Letter to Greta Thunberg - "You have declared yourself a leader and said that your generation will start a revolution. You have comported yourself as a credentialed adult and climate change activist who has fearlessly addressed politicians and world leaders. You have dropped out of school and declared that there isn’t any reason to attend, or any reason for you to study since there will be no future for you to inherit. You have, rather than attend your classes, been leading Friday Climate Strikes for all students in your generation across the globe. Your attendance at oil pipelines has been striking. There, you unequivocally declare that all oil needs to remain in the ground where it belongs.I shall, therefore, against the backdrop of your activism, address you as an adult rather than as a child... You proclaim that we need to live within the planetary boundaries, to focus on equity and “take a few steps back” for the sake of all living species. You resent the hierarchical distinctions between human and animals and entertain no qualitative distinction between a monkey, a malaria-infested mosquito and a snarling hyena. You mouth slogans such as: “We have set in motion an irreversible chain reaction beyond control,” and you advocate for universal veganism on the Ellen DeGeneres show. You do not buy new clothes, and you don’t want the rest of us to either. You want us all to stop flying in jet planes without giving us an alternative as to how we would re-transform our financial and trading systems—to say nothing of our personal enjoyment of the world—without regression to a primeval era. Few can afford to cross the Atlantic in a $6M zero carbon yacht financed by rich people who made their wealth by the very means you condemn as loathsome... we did not rob you of your childhood or of your dreams. You are the legatee of a magnificent technological civilization which my generation and the one before it and several others preceding it all the way to the Industrial Revolution and the Renaissance, bequeathed to you. That growth-driven, capitalist technological civilization has created the conditions for you to harangue us over our betrayal. It is a civilization that eradicated diseases such as small pox from the word, and that lifted millions out of abject poverty in a universe you think is dying and decaying. It assured you a life expectancy that exceeded that of your ancestors. Most likely by focusing on economic growth which you demonize, and scientific advancement, that civilization will further enhance a robust quality of life and health for your descendants.Here is a hard truth to ponder, Greta: if the great producers of this world whom you excoriate were to withdraw their productivity, wealth and talents—in short—their minds from the world today, your generation would simply perish... your generation is unable to work up to forty hours per week without being chronically depressed and anxious. Its members cannot even decide if they want to be a boy or a girl, or both, or neither, or a “they.” They cannot eat meat without crying. I might add that your generation needs “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” as pre-conditions for learning in school. Its members have a pathological need to be coddled and protected from the challenging realities of life. Your generation is the biggest demander and consumer of carbon spewing technological gadgets and devices. An hour without any of them and too many of you succumb to paralyzing lethargy. Your generation is the least curious and most insular set of individuals one has ever encountered. Your hubris extends so far that you think you have nothing to learn from your elders.Yes, we have betrayed you: by capitulating the world of leadership to bored, attention-deficit children who spout bromides, platitudes and slogans that a rudderless and morally relativistic culture accepts because a significant number of its denizens have become intellectually bankrupt and morally lazy.The logical endpoint of your ecological vision would see us living in primeval conditions eking out an existence in jungle swamps in which we would regard poisonous snakes and man-eating tigers as our moral equals. We would have to adapt ourselves to nature rather than adapt nature to meet our needs, like all members of civilized civilizations do. Your vision would see us foraging for mushrooms and plants without knowing which were inimical to our digestive systems. Under your system we would swelter from heat, die from rampant plagues and starvation because there will be no air-conditioning units, no sophisticated plumbing and irrigations and sewer systems, no anti-bacterial soap made from animal matter, no pesticides and chemicals to sanitize our food and drinking supplies: just one primordial swamp of human putrefaction.If civilization is left in the hands of your ecofascist supporters we will be living in grass huts, drinking animal feces infested water, and shrinking in fear from polar bears instead of killing them for food when they attack us... Your apocalyptic predictions have been made for millennia, and, we’re still here. We will still be here long after you’ve grown up and we have forgiven you for skipping classes, thereby lowering the intelligence quotient of an entire generation."
On the one hand, greenies tell us that we must listen to Greta because she is mature and has an important message. On the other, they tell us we cannot criticise or critically engage her because she is a child and those who do so are cowardly bullies, insecure neckbeards, craven men who bully children etc
Are We Really Running Out of Time to Stop Climate Change? - "society is going to have to start hitting some important deadlines fast. There's a big one coming 12 years after the IPCC report. Blowing through it won't immediately plunge society into a "Mad Max"-style dystopia, as some have suggested... Some scientists are nervous that overemphasizing the 2030 deadline might mislead the public about the nuances of climate change... Scientists never said the world was going to end in 12 years if we don't stop climate change. Even researchers known for ringing the alarm bells on climate change are far more likely to speak in terms of decimal places and nonlinear effects than to talk about the end of civilization as we know... "It has achieved an absoluteness in its role in societal dialogue that's not in line with scientific fact," said Katharine Mach, a climate scientist at the University of Miami and one of several lead authors of the IPCC report."The world will not end if we pass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial levels""
Looks like she needs to take her own advice and listen to the scientists. Ironically the article advocates telling a noble lie. Luckily, people are gullible so this may (unfortunately) work
L'origine de Bert
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Monday, February 10, 2020
Links - 10th February 2020 (2)
Maoism | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'Now, China's rulers don't like to dwell now on the country's desire to lead the world revolution under Mao because it doesn't fit with contemporary rhetoric about China's peaceful rise to superpower status and about China's non interference in other countries. But it is all the same, an important part of Cold War history and one that has many contemporary afterlives... I think there are a couple of reasons for why Mao and Maoism’s global impact has been to an extent neglected. One reason is to do with the global Cold War or the outcome of the Cold War least in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. So when the Soviet bloc states suddenly collapse between 1989 and 1991, I think there was a widespread assumption that communism in general, communist regimes had been sent to the dustbin of history. And therefore there was perhaps no need to engage seriously with these ideas, even when they underpinned regimes which were still holding on to power as the Chinese Communist Party was after 1989. But I think that China has also contributed to the effacing of awareness of the global history of Maoism for the reason that I alluded to above, namely, that this history of my wanting to lead the world’s revolution just doesn't fit with contemporary foreign policy narratives about peaceful rise, about non interference in other countries. These narratives are very important to the contemporary Chinese self image because many people in China, many politicians in China do see the country as becoming a global superpower. And there's a desire to contrast China's behavior and China's rise to superpower status with the rise centuries earlier of the West, which of course, was extremely aggressive and colonialist and imperialist in the history of its own rise’...
Mao’s legacy in contemporary Chinese politics became particularly conspicuous after 2012. So that year, the Chinese Communist Party under the current President Xi Jinping began for the first time since Mao's death in 1976 to publicly renormalize aspects of Maoist political culture, things like criticism, self criticism sessions, which were a key part of the Maoist political repertoire for propaganda thought control since the 1940s. Xi Jinping brought back catchphrases such as the mass line, which is, you know, another Maoist slogan from the 1940s. Supposedly all about encouraging criticism of officials from the grassroots. And most notably of all, Xi Jinping has brought back the personality cult and at the end of February 2018, Xi Jinping and his central committee abolished the 1982 constitutional restriction that limited the president to only two consecutive terms. So like Mao, Xi Jinping could be ruler for life."
Pakistan protest: Patients die as lawyers ransack Lahore hospital - "Three patients died when hundreds of lawyers attacked a hospital in Lahore during a furious dispute with doctors.Video showed the lawyers ransacking wards at the cardiac hospital, beating up staff and smashing equipment.As panic spread, doctors and paramedics hid, leaving patients unattended, including those in a critical state... The lawyers had been protesting over the alleged mistreatment of some of their colleagues by hospital staff last month. But the final trigger for the violence appears to have been a video posted on social media by a doctor on Tuesday night in which he poked fun at the lawyers... Video footage shared on social media showed lawyers - in suits and ties - smashing medical equipment and windows, and beating up staff and officials including Punjab information minister Fayazul Hasan Chauhan who had arrived on the scene to try to restore calm... "Pakistanis have been witnesses to violent acts by lawyers for several years now," commented one television anchor on Geo TV on Thursday. "They have assaulted citizens, attacked policemen, raised their hands on judges and vandalised courts. But yesterday they crossed all limits," she added. Other commentators said it was a new low for Pakistani society's sinking levels of tolerance which is giving way to mob justice."
Physiological pH for Dummies - "Above 7.45 to 14: Dead
Just above 7.45: Respiratory or metabolic alkalosis
7.45-7.35: Life as you know it
Just below 7.35: Respiratory or metabolic acidosis
Below 7.35 to 0: Dead
... So stop trying to acidify or alkalize your body. Your kidneys and lungs won't let you do it"
Improbable Research - "The Bavarian Pickle-Juice Experiment is using salty waste-water from pickle-making to keep roads from becoming icy. Ig Nobel Prize winner Elisabeth Oberzaucher alerts us to this, with the comment “Waste from the food industry keeps roads ice-free"...
Additional food processing byproducts such as cheese, pickle, potato or beet juice were often incorporated into mixtures depending on the region."
Cheese brine discovery honored with Gladfelter Award - "Norby collected a jug of mozzarella cheese brine from F and A Dairy in Dresser and let it sit outside of his office in -20 degree weather until it finally froze. He discovered that the runoff from making the cheese contained the same amount of saline as commercial brine. The cheese brine, however, only cost about nine cents per gallon. That showed a savings of $1.20 per gallon...
Polk County saved $40,000 in the first winter alone and the dairy saved $10,000 in trucking costs for disposal of its brine. The program continues and has been copied around the state and the nation."
Sharon Corr reunited with baby who 'attended' her concert as an embryo in a laboratory - "Singer Sharon Corr has reunited with her ‘youngest fan’ - a one-year-old girl who attended her first gig as an embryo.The celebrated violinist and The Corrs member, 49, was invited back in May 2018 to the labs of Institut Marques in Barcelona, Spain to play a concert for an unusual audience: hundreds of embryos that were then developing in their incubators... It claims that musical vibrations during IVF fertilisation can help to increase the chances of IVF success by up to 5% and can also support embryo development... The CEO of Institut Marques, Dr Marisa López-Teijón, has won an Ig Nobel Prize for her odd research that showed that a developing human foetus responds more strongly to music that is played electromechanically inside the mother’s vagina than on the belly."
Stripper had sex with boyfriend's disabled Star Wars fan son then beheaded him - "Roena Cheryl Mills, 43, was last Thursday found guilty of the first-degree murder of 29 year-old Bo White at a house in Lerona, West Virginia, in April 2018.Mills – who has the phrase ‘special kinda crazy’ tattooed across her chest – reportedly targeted Bo after having sex with him in return for drugs.She is said to have battered and stabbed him to death before chopping his body up... James White reportedly found his son’s body before sheriff’s deputies did, but believed a prank was being played on him, as he was high at the time."
Can You Trust TripAdvisor Restaurant Reviews? It’s Complicated. - "Despite its mediocre reputation in New York’s food world, Olio e Piú was busy in part because at the time, it was ranked the No. 1 restaurant in New York City — on TripAdvisor. While New Yorkers are more likely to turn to user-generated review sites like Foursquare, Yelp, or Google Maps to navigate the city’s shifting restaurant landscape, TripAdvisor holds considerable clout with international travelers, especially those coming from the European Union, which has 53 percent of all listings... its reported annual revenue of $1.62 billion eclipses both Yelp’s and Foursquare’s by a margin of hundreds of millions... n New York, possibly no one is winning more from TripAdvisor than the Group, a local restaurant conglomerate that serves some 10,000 customers each month. Currently, four of the top 10 slots on TripAdvisor’s New York restaurant rankings are owned by the company: Olio e Piú; Boucherie West Village, a 320-seat French brasserie opened by a former Pastis chef; and its spinoffs, Boucherie Union Square and Petite Boucherie. None of these restaurants are on any critics’ hot lists, but all of them consistently dominate the upper echelons of TripAdvisor’s rankings... a single one-star review has the same weight as five five-star reviews, meaning that targeting people likely to complain is the most effective means of pulling up the overall average. Even after restaurants land on the top 10, they can’t stop putting work into TripAdvisor... an extensive investigation by the Times of London claimed that a third of TripAdvisor reviews are fake. A 2019 analysis of nearly 250,000 reviews of hotels in major tourist destinations by a U.K. consumer group found that one out of seven reviews contained “blatant hallmarks” of being fake... More than 60 percent of the five-star reviews on Olio e Piú’s page come from user profiles that have never reviewed another restaurant. Prior to 2017, that figure was 5 percent. By comparison, at another West Village Italian restaurant, Via Carota, that statistic is currently 1 percent. While some of these one-off review accounts may well be from real customers, many of them follow a suspiciously similar format. Two consecutive reviews, both titled “10/10 Would Recommend,” belong to users named @olioepiulover and @olioepiulover2... In some cases, identical or nearly identical review text, including the names of servers, appeared at multiple restaurants. Many of the accounts used the same stock imagery for profile photos, and more than a few seemed intent on mentioning special promotions, such as Olio e Piú’s weekly discount on bottles of wine... Setting aside questions of accuracy, TripAdvisor’s algorithm fails to capture the diversity that makes New York’s restaurant scene so significant in the first place. In a recent examination of the top 100 restaurants on TripAdvisor, 27 percent were Italian, 10 percent were French, and 31 percent were American, with a heavy emphasis on steakhouses"
Meet the Billionaire Couple Behind Panda Express, Who Built a $3 Billion Fortune Selling 90 Million Pounds of Orange Chicken Each Year
YouTube chef gets creative by selling advertisements placed over her boobs - "On YouTube channel Kuma Cooking, the apparently Japanese host, who is unnamed and unidentified, cooks simple dishes like garlic fried rice (above) while wearing a tight-fitting top. “Kuma” features dishes that are easy for working adults to prepare, especially for those who stay alone or only need to cook a meal for one."
The 10 English words that will make you sound cool in France - "Just as certain English speakers believe that a mélange is more sophisticated than a mixture, so in France sometimes using an English word will make you appear cooler or more sophisticated."
The William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale: ALMOST HALF (49%) OF U.S. COLLEGE STUDENTS “INTIMIDATED” BY PROFESSORS WHEN SHARING DIFFERING BELIEFS: SURVEY - "The 2015 Buckley Free Speech Survey, which was conducted by nationally respected pollster, McLaughlin & Associates, revealed a wealth of information about how college students view rights and topics such as: The First Amendment; speech codes; academic freedom; trigger warnings; “political correctness;” and intellectual diversity, among other things. The national survey of 800 undergraduate students was conducted online and respondents were carefully selected and screened from a nationwide representative platform of individuals who elect to participate in online surveys...
Forty-nine percent (49%) of survey participants said they have often felt intimidated to share beliefs that differ from their professors, including 14% who said “frequently” and 35% who said “sometimes”;
Exactly half (50%) said they have often felt intimidated to share beliefs that differ from their classmates, including 16% who said “frequently” and 34% who said “sometimes”;
The majority of students (53%) say their professors have often used class time to express their own views about matters outside of coursework, including 14% who say “frequently” and 38% who say “sometimes”;
Greater than six in ten (63%) say political correctness on college campuses is either a “big problem” (19%) or “somewhat of a problem” (44%)...
By a 52-42% margin, students say their college or university should forbid people from speaking on campus who have a history of engaging in hate speech;
Seventy-two percent (72%) of students surveyed said they support disciplinary action for “any student or faculty member on campus who uses language that is considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive”;
When students were asked to identify the amendment that deals with free speech, 68% correctly cited the First Amendment. One in three (32%) incorrectly listed another amendment;
The majority (52%) said that the First Amendment does not make an exemption for hate speech and that all speech is protected under the First Amendment. One in three (35%) say that hate speech is not protected under the First Amendment...
Liberal students are more likely than conservative students to say the First Amendment is outdated, 30% to 10%, respectively;
By a nearly two to one margin, students said their school is generally more tolerant of liberal ideas and beliefs than conservative ideas and beliefs, 37% to 20%...
By a 51% to 36% margin, students favor their school having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty...
Seven in ten (72%) say their college or university should be doing more to promote policies that increase diversity of opinions in the classroom and on campus;
Almost nine in ten (87%) agree that there is education value in listening to and understanding views and opinions that they may disagree with and are different than their own"
And liberals say there's no problem on college campuses
Nearly half of US college students believe hate speech should not be protected - "48 percent of students do not think the First Amendment should protect hate speech... 58 percent of students think it is important not to be exposed to "intolerant or offensive ideas." Respondents who labeled themselves Democrats were 19 percentage points more likely than those who identified as Republican to believe there are instances when speakers should be disinvited by a university. Disinviting speakers is supported by 78% of "very liberal" students and by 38% of "very conservative" students... Thirteen percent of students responded in the affirmative that racist speech is a form of violence... Four professors from across the political spectrum discussed research that shows that, for the first time, children are more accepting of authoritarianism than their parents, and the upshot of this attitude on campus is a climate of ideological intolerance."
So much for the myth of campus censorship, and how the real problem is conservatives
Mao’s legacy in contemporary Chinese politics became particularly conspicuous after 2012. So that year, the Chinese Communist Party under the current President Xi Jinping began for the first time since Mao's death in 1976 to publicly renormalize aspects of Maoist political culture, things like criticism, self criticism sessions, which were a key part of the Maoist political repertoire for propaganda thought control since the 1940s. Xi Jinping brought back catchphrases such as the mass line, which is, you know, another Maoist slogan from the 1940s. Supposedly all about encouraging criticism of officials from the grassroots. And most notably of all, Xi Jinping has brought back the personality cult and at the end of February 2018, Xi Jinping and his central committee abolished the 1982 constitutional restriction that limited the president to only two consecutive terms. So like Mao, Xi Jinping could be ruler for life."
Pakistan protest: Patients die as lawyers ransack Lahore hospital - "Three patients died when hundreds of lawyers attacked a hospital in Lahore during a furious dispute with doctors.Video showed the lawyers ransacking wards at the cardiac hospital, beating up staff and smashing equipment.As panic spread, doctors and paramedics hid, leaving patients unattended, including those in a critical state... The lawyers had been protesting over the alleged mistreatment of some of their colleagues by hospital staff last month. But the final trigger for the violence appears to have been a video posted on social media by a doctor on Tuesday night in which he poked fun at the lawyers... Video footage shared on social media showed lawyers - in suits and ties - smashing medical equipment and windows, and beating up staff and officials including Punjab information minister Fayazul Hasan Chauhan who had arrived on the scene to try to restore calm... "Pakistanis have been witnesses to violent acts by lawyers for several years now," commented one television anchor on Geo TV on Thursday. "They have assaulted citizens, attacked policemen, raised their hands on judges and vandalised courts. But yesterday they crossed all limits," she added. Other commentators said it was a new low for Pakistani society's sinking levels of tolerance which is giving way to mob justice."
Physiological pH for Dummies - "Above 7.45 to 14: Dead
Just above 7.45: Respiratory or metabolic alkalosis
7.45-7.35: Life as you know it
Just below 7.35: Respiratory or metabolic acidosis
Below 7.35 to 0: Dead
... So stop trying to acidify or alkalize your body. Your kidneys and lungs won't let you do it"
Improbable Research - "The Bavarian Pickle-Juice Experiment is using salty waste-water from pickle-making to keep roads from becoming icy. Ig Nobel Prize winner Elisabeth Oberzaucher alerts us to this, with the comment “Waste from the food industry keeps roads ice-free"...
Additional food processing byproducts such as cheese, pickle, potato or beet juice were often incorporated into mixtures depending on the region."
Cheese brine discovery honored with Gladfelter Award - "Norby collected a jug of mozzarella cheese brine from F and A Dairy in Dresser and let it sit outside of his office in -20 degree weather until it finally froze. He discovered that the runoff from making the cheese contained the same amount of saline as commercial brine. The cheese brine, however, only cost about nine cents per gallon. That showed a savings of $1.20 per gallon...
Polk County saved $40,000 in the first winter alone and the dairy saved $10,000 in trucking costs for disposal of its brine. The program continues and has been copied around the state and the nation."
Sharon Corr reunited with baby who 'attended' her concert as an embryo in a laboratory - "Singer Sharon Corr has reunited with her ‘youngest fan’ - a one-year-old girl who attended her first gig as an embryo.The celebrated violinist and The Corrs member, 49, was invited back in May 2018 to the labs of Institut Marques in Barcelona, Spain to play a concert for an unusual audience: hundreds of embryos that were then developing in their incubators... It claims that musical vibrations during IVF fertilisation can help to increase the chances of IVF success by up to 5% and can also support embryo development... The CEO of Institut Marques, Dr Marisa López-Teijón, has won an Ig Nobel Prize for her odd research that showed that a developing human foetus responds more strongly to music that is played electromechanically inside the mother’s vagina than on the belly."
Stripper had sex with boyfriend's disabled Star Wars fan son then beheaded him - "Roena Cheryl Mills, 43, was last Thursday found guilty of the first-degree murder of 29 year-old Bo White at a house in Lerona, West Virginia, in April 2018.Mills – who has the phrase ‘special kinda crazy’ tattooed across her chest – reportedly targeted Bo after having sex with him in return for drugs.She is said to have battered and stabbed him to death before chopping his body up... James White reportedly found his son’s body before sheriff’s deputies did, but believed a prank was being played on him, as he was high at the time."
Can You Trust TripAdvisor Restaurant Reviews? It’s Complicated. - "Despite its mediocre reputation in New York’s food world, Olio e Piú was busy in part because at the time, it was ranked the No. 1 restaurant in New York City — on TripAdvisor. While New Yorkers are more likely to turn to user-generated review sites like Foursquare, Yelp, or Google Maps to navigate the city’s shifting restaurant landscape, TripAdvisor holds considerable clout with international travelers, especially those coming from the European Union, which has 53 percent of all listings... its reported annual revenue of $1.62 billion eclipses both Yelp’s and Foursquare’s by a margin of hundreds of millions... n New York, possibly no one is winning more from TripAdvisor than the Group, a local restaurant conglomerate that serves some 10,000 customers each month. Currently, four of the top 10 slots on TripAdvisor’s New York restaurant rankings are owned by the company: Olio e Piú; Boucherie West Village, a 320-seat French brasserie opened by a former Pastis chef; and its spinoffs, Boucherie Union Square and Petite Boucherie. None of these restaurants are on any critics’ hot lists, but all of them consistently dominate the upper echelons of TripAdvisor’s rankings... a single one-star review has the same weight as five five-star reviews, meaning that targeting people likely to complain is the most effective means of pulling up the overall average. Even after restaurants land on the top 10, they can’t stop putting work into TripAdvisor... an extensive investigation by the Times of London claimed that a third of TripAdvisor reviews are fake. A 2019 analysis of nearly 250,000 reviews of hotels in major tourist destinations by a U.K. consumer group found that one out of seven reviews contained “blatant hallmarks” of being fake... More than 60 percent of the five-star reviews on Olio e Piú’s page come from user profiles that have never reviewed another restaurant. Prior to 2017, that figure was 5 percent. By comparison, at another West Village Italian restaurant, Via Carota, that statistic is currently 1 percent. While some of these one-off review accounts may well be from real customers, many of them follow a suspiciously similar format. Two consecutive reviews, both titled “10/10 Would Recommend,” belong to users named @olioepiulover and @olioepiulover2... In some cases, identical or nearly identical review text, including the names of servers, appeared at multiple restaurants. Many of the accounts used the same stock imagery for profile photos, and more than a few seemed intent on mentioning special promotions, such as Olio e Piú’s weekly discount on bottles of wine... Setting aside questions of accuracy, TripAdvisor’s algorithm fails to capture the diversity that makes New York’s restaurant scene so significant in the first place. In a recent examination of the top 100 restaurants on TripAdvisor, 27 percent were Italian, 10 percent were French, and 31 percent were American, with a heavy emphasis on steakhouses"
Meet the Billionaire Couple Behind Panda Express, Who Built a $3 Billion Fortune Selling 90 Million Pounds of Orange Chicken Each Year
YouTube chef gets creative by selling advertisements placed over her boobs - "On YouTube channel Kuma Cooking, the apparently Japanese host, who is unnamed and unidentified, cooks simple dishes like garlic fried rice (above) while wearing a tight-fitting top. “Kuma” features dishes that are easy for working adults to prepare, especially for those who stay alone or only need to cook a meal for one."
The 10 English words that will make you sound cool in France - "Just as certain English speakers believe that a mélange is more sophisticated than a mixture, so in France sometimes using an English word will make you appear cooler or more sophisticated."
The William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale: ALMOST HALF (49%) OF U.S. COLLEGE STUDENTS “INTIMIDATED” BY PROFESSORS WHEN SHARING DIFFERING BELIEFS: SURVEY - "The 2015 Buckley Free Speech Survey, which was conducted by nationally respected pollster, McLaughlin & Associates, revealed a wealth of information about how college students view rights and topics such as: The First Amendment; speech codes; academic freedom; trigger warnings; “political correctness;” and intellectual diversity, among other things. The national survey of 800 undergraduate students was conducted online and respondents were carefully selected and screened from a nationwide representative platform of individuals who elect to participate in online surveys...
Forty-nine percent (49%) of survey participants said they have often felt intimidated to share beliefs that differ from their professors, including 14% who said “frequently” and 35% who said “sometimes”;
Exactly half (50%) said they have often felt intimidated to share beliefs that differ from their classmates, including 16% who said “frequently” and 34% who said “sometimes”;
The majority of students (53%) say their professors have often used class time to express their own views about matters outside of coursework, including 14% who say “frequently” and 38% who say “sometimes”;
Greater than six in ten (63%) say political correctness on college campuses is either a “big problem” (19%) or “somewhat of a problem” (44%)...
By a 52-42% margin, students say their college or university should forbid people from speaking on campus who have a history of engaging in hate speech;
Seventy-two percent (72%) of students surveyed said they support disciplinary action for “any student or faculty member on campus who uses language that is considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive”;
When students were asked to identify the amendment that deals with free speech, 68% correctly cited the First Amendment. One in three (32%) incorrectly listed another amendment;
The majority (52%) said that the First Amendment does not make an exemption for hate speech and that all speech is protected under the First Amendment. One in three (35%) say that hate speech is not protected under the First Amendment...
Liberal students are more likely than conservative students to say the First Amendment is outdated, 30% to 10%, respectively;
By a nearly two to one margin, students said their school is generally more tolerant of liberal ideas and beliefs than conservative ideas and beliefs, 37% to 20%...
By a 51% to 36% margin, students favor their school having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty...
Seven in ten (72%) say their college or university should be doing more to promote policies that increase diversity of opinions in the classroom and on campus;
Almost nine in ten (87%) agree that there is education value in listening to and understanding views and opinions that they may disagree with and are different than their own"
And liberals say there's no problem on college campuses
Nearly half of US college students believe hate speech should not be protected - "48 percent of students do not think the First Amendment should protect hate speech... 58 percent of students think it is important not to be exposed to "intolerant or offensive ideas." Respondents who labeled themselves Democrats were 19 percentage points more likely than those who identified as Republican to believe there are instances when speakers should be disinvited by a university. Disinviting speakers is supported by 78% of "very liberal" students and by 38% of "very conservative" students... Thirteen percent of students responded in the affirmative that racist speech is a form of violence... Four professors from across the political spectrum discussed research that shows that, for the first time, children are more accepting of authoritarianism than their parents, and the upshot of this attitude on campus is a climate of ideological intolerance."
So much for the myth of campus censorship, and how the real problem is conservatives
Post ID: 2037028802897131781
How the rise of China’s middle class migrants is challenging Australian fears
How the rise of China’s middle class migrants is challenging Australian fears
"New research shows there has been a marked change in the profile of Chinese migrants arriving in Australia. Rather than common stereotypes that paint Chinese migrants in one of two extremes – impoverished hopefuls in the land of plenty or ultra-rich property buyers pushing up prices for locals – the research shows the migrants of today are a product of China’s burgeoning “new middle class”.
The modern migrant is likely to be highly skilled, educated, and investment-focused, as likely to be drawn to the country for its clean air and lifestyle as anything else. Not only that, but higher levels of English and varied immigration schemes are helping them to settle in areas far beyond traditional ethnic Chinese enclaves in Sydney and Melbourne.
In a recent paper titled ‘Shifting dynamics of Chinese settlement in Australia: an urban geographic perspective’, human geographer Thomas Sigler and his fellow authors at the University of Queensland identify the year 2000 as a watershed in this great migration.
Before this, ethnic Chinese in Australia were typically economic migrants born outside mainland China, with many coming from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
But Sigler and company say that since then, visa schemes designed to encourage foreign real estate investment as well as skilled worker and student migration have resulted in an influx of affluent and educated mainland Chinese.
More than half of all mainland-China-born immigrants in Australia moved there between 2006 and 2015, according to scholars Dallas Rogers and Ilan Wiesel, and by 2016, mainland Chinese living in Australia accounted for 2.1 per cent of the country’s population.
Not only are Chinese migrants growing in number – they are spreading farther into the country.
While Sydney and Melbourne are still home to the lion’s share of mainland China-born migrants, there have been dramatic increases in the numbers of Chinese settlers in medium-sized capital cities such as Adelaide and Perth.
Part of the reason for this is that the rise of China’s middle class has brought about higher levels of education – and, in particular, English-language ability...
While scholars had projected this influx of migrants would lead to more multicultural neighbourhoods, Sigler and his colleagues found that on the contrary, Chinese migrants were still likely to live in ethnic enclaves – it was just that these enclaves were more numerous and more spread out...
Helping to drive this great migration is Australia’s reputation as a stable democracy with solid infrastructure and a respected education system. Its proximity to China also appeals.
“The education, medical and even social system is more advanced in Australia. This will be beneficial for our next generation”...
“Compared with other top liveable cities in the world, Australian cities have the best policies and multicultural environment for new migrants.”
However, there is another reason China’s middle class is attracted to Australia: government policy has shifted to embrace them...
Australia is set to overtake Britain as the second most popular destination for international students (the United States is No 1), and this is a trend the Australian government appears eager to encourage.
“Applying for a student visa to come to Australia was a lot easier than America, at least at the time I was applying”...
Students from China now make up the largest portion of Australia’s foreign student intake. As of June 30 this year, almost a quarter (23.1 per cent) of the 486,934 student visa holders in Australia were Chinese nationals.
Australia also attracts capital from foreign investors through programmes like the “golden ticket” Significant Investor Visa (SIV).
The SIV is open to all nationalities but is targeted at Chinese investors who commit A$5 million in “complying investments” to qualify for a four-year visa that can be converted to permanent residency. Nearly 90 per cent of SIVs for the top source countries were granted to Chinese nationals...
China’s new breed of mobile migrant worker has also spawned anxiety in some quarters – an anxiety that often plays out in newspaper articles in which the Chinese community is made the bogeyman for Australia’s housing affordability crisis."
"New research shows there has been a marked change in the profile of Chinese migrants arriving in Australia. Rather than common stereotypes that paint Chinese migrants in one of two extremes – impoverished hopefuls in the land of plenty or ultra-rich property buyers pushing up prices for locals – the research shows the migrants of today are a product of China’s burgeoning “new middle class”.
The modern migrant is likely to be highly skilled, educated, and investment-focused, as likely to be drawn to the country for its clean air and lifestyle as anything else. Not only that, but higher levels of English and varied immigration schemes are helping them to settle in areas far beyond traditional ethnic Chinese enclaves in Sydney and Melbourne.
In a recent paper titled ‘Shifting dynamics of Chinese settlement in Australia: an urban geographic perspective’, human geographer Thomas Sigler and his fellow authors at the University of Queensland identify the year 2000 as a watershed in this great migration.
Before this, ethnic Chinese in Australia were typically economic migrants born outside mainland China, with many coming from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
But Sigler and company say that since then, visa schemes designed to encourage foreign real estate investment as well as skilled worker and student migration have resulted in an influx of affluent and educated mainland Chinese.
More than half of all mainland-China-born immigrants in Australia moved there between 2006 and 2015, according to scholars Dallas Rogers and Ilan Wiesel, and by 2016, mainland Chinese living in Australia accounted for 2.1 per cent of the country’s population.
Not only are Chinese migrants growing in number – they are spreading farther into the country.
While Sydney and Melbourne are still home to the lion’s share of mainland China-born migrants, there have been dramatic increases in the numbers of Chinese settlers in medium-sized capital cities such as Adelaide and Perth.
Part of the reason for this is that the rise of China’s middle class has brought about higher levels of education – and, in particular, English-language ability...
While scholars had projected this influx of migrants would lead to more multicultural neighbourhoods, Sigler and his colleagues found that on the contrary, Chinese migrants were still likely to live in ethnic enclaves – it was just that these enclaves were more numerous and more spread out...
Helping to drive this great migration is Australia’s reputation as a stable democracy with solid infrastructure and a respected education system. Its proximity to China also appeals.
“The education, medical and even social system is more advanced in Australia. This will be beneficial for our next generation”...
“Compared with other top liveable cities in the world, Australian cities have the best policies and multicultural environment for new migrants.”
However, there is another reason China’s middle class is attracted to Australia: government policy has shifted to embrace them...
Australia is set to overtake Britain as the second most popular destination for international students (the United States is No 1), and this is a trend the Australian government appears eager to encourage.
“Applying for a student visa to come to Australia was a lot easier than America, at least at the time I was applying”...
Students from China now make up the largest portion of Australia’s foreign student intake. As of June 30 this year, almost a quarter (23.1 per cent) of the 486,934 student visa holders in Australia were Chinese nationals.
Australia also attracts capital from foreign investors through programmes like the “golden ticket” Significant Investor Visa (SIV).
The SIV is open to all nationalities but is targeted at Chinese investors who commit A$5 million in “complying investments” to qualify for a four-year visa that can be converted to permanent residency. Nearly 90 per cent of SIVs for the top source countries were granted to Chinese nationals...
China’s new breed of mobile migrant worker has also spawned anxiety in some quarters – an anxiety that often plays out in newspaper articles in which the Chinese community is made the bogeyman for Australia’s housing affordability crisis."
Post ID: 5715032004270541335
Links - 10th February 2020 (1)
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Post ID: 2460555725549248943
Sunday, February 09, 2020
Links - 9th February 2020 (2)
Online Cesspool Got You Down? You Can Clean It Up, For a Price - The New York Times - "The image of the internet as an egalitarian free-for-all — a place where no amount of money could buy you a superior experience, and where no lack of money could condemn you to an inferior one — persisted for years. Unlike the rest of consumer culture, the internet seemed immune to class division. Bill Gates used the same apps, visited the same websites and logged into the same social networks as the guy who mowed Bill Gates’s lawn — at least in theory, anyway. And now? Well, check your credit-card statement. Today’s internet is full of premium subscriptions, walled gardens and virtual V.I.P. rooms, all of which promise a cleaner, more pleasant experience than their free counterparts. The pay walls have been rebuilt, and the artists no longer work for tips. Hundreds of millions of people shell out for Netflix accounts, Patreon podcasts, Twitch streams, Spotify and news subscriptions. The average American spent more than $1,300 on digital media last year. Even Hulu pulled the plug on its free tier in 2016... Billions of people still use the free internet every day, of course. But it feels increasingly like wading into a sludge pit of algorithmically promoted misinformation, privacy-invading apps and subpar user experiences... “I think it’s becoming clear what things that are allegedly free actually cost,” Libin told me. Many of the internet’s cornerstone services, he added, “just seem to be more and more slimy and exploitative, and I think that people realize that.”... Class division has even come to virtual goods. A study by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England found that Fortnite character skins — they’re like costumes for your avatar — have become a source of social cachet for young kids. Poorer kids who use the free, default skin inside the game report being bullied by their peers who can afford to buy rarer ones... Google has taken out a patent on a system that would allow advertisers to subsidize passengers’ rides to their businesses. Start-ups have developed tools that would allow advertisers to suggest detours midride. (“There is an Outback Steakhouse 1.2 miles away from your destination. Would you like to stop there in exchange for a free ride today?”)"
Opinion | Are Liberals Against Marriage? - The New York Times - "While marital fertility fell in the 1970s after the baby boom ran its course, the baby bust of the last 10 years hasn’t affected married couples, whose fertility rate has stayed level or very modestly increased. So while it’s important to debate questions like how the cost of child care affects childbearing decisions within marriages, the question of why marriage has declined so precipitously in the first place still looms over the fertility discussion. And with it comes a longstanding liberal-versus-conservative disagreement about how much to emphasize economic trends versus cultural transformations — or, more tersely, neoliberalism versus cultural liberalism — to explaining the waning of wedlock... [from] the 1960s through the 1980s, there was a clear liberal-led attack on the institutional form of marriage... This assault was undertaken in a spirit of social optimism... the emerging progressivism seems hostile not only to anything tainted by conservative religion or gender essentialism but to any idea of sexual or reproductive normativity, period, outside a bureaucratically supervised definition of “consent.” And it’s therefore disinclined to regard lifelong monogamy as anything more than one choice among many, one script to play with or abandon, one way of being whose decline should not necessarily be mourned, and whose still-outsize cultural power probably requires further deconstruction to be anything more than a patriarchal holdover, a prison and a trap. The combination of forces that have produced this ideological shift is somewhat murky — it follows a general turn leftward on social issues after the early 2000s, a further weakening of traditional religion, the cultural ripples from Obergefell v. Hodges, the increasing political polarization of the sexes and, of course, the so-called Great Awokening. But it does not feel like a coincidence that the new phase tracks with the recent decline in childbearing... Certainly the new phase of liberalism is increasing the political polarization of both marital practice and marital beliefs"
Maybe I am a backward European man, but the burkini SI Swimsuit Issue is really not working for me - "If the purpose of these photos is the kind of winking titillation that became redundant with the advent of internet pornography, I am not titillated. And I don’t want to pretend that I am... maybe it is my cultural background, but the hijab and the burka signal whatever is the opposite of sexy. It makes me think of separate gender swimming pools, of housebound Saudi women asking their male guardian for written permission to visit a doctor. It’s just jarring and odd. If the purpose is, as the Kenya-born Somali-American Aden claims, to show off that “modestly dressed” women can be “beautiful” then it seems to me a little insincere to stretch the definition of modesty to posing in an edition of a magazine designed to be ogled by men.But like many secular 21st-century men, I do not judge women’s virtue by their “modesty,” so that’s really none of my business. It does seem a little weird to have that quality celebrated in a post-feminist society, but I guess that’s cultural relativism for you. If, however, the purpose of the picture is to get clicks for an otherwise moribund print publication and to show that it has “moved with the times” then OK"
City of Richfield Scrubs Robbery Post from Police FB Page in Apparent ‘Politically Correct’ Move - "The City of Richfield Police Department gave themselves a well-deserved pat on the back and boasted on social media in early October about three gas station robbery suspects that had been apprehended and subsequently charged. That is until city administrators apparently deemed the post to be politically incorrect with bad “optics” and took it down two days later... An unidentified Richfield page administrator replied that they “removed the post due to complaint(s).”The RPD Facebook page administrator refused to give any further information about who had complained about the post or about the nature of the complaints which led to its removal. Since it seemed unusual that there would be complaints about robbery suspects being arrested and charged, a data practices information request was submitted to RPD to learn the nature and source of the complaints, as well as to learn who was responsible for removing the post. Additionally, the Alpha News researcher subsequently called Richfield Police Chief Jay Henthorne to inquire about what led to the removal.In the Oct. 14 telephone conversation, Chief Henthorne tried to explain that the “social media team along with our city administration pulled it” because they were looking at different options for posting in the future “with possibly not using pictures.” When pressed about the report of complaints received, Chief Henthorne indicated that the concern about the post had come from inside the city administration, not from an outside source. He stated further that the post was taken down at the direction of “city administration” following an “internal discussion”... Another piece of documentation received, below, is what appears to be a portion of an email or text conversation between two unidentified City of Richfield staff, employees or officials on Sat., Oct. 12, that requests that the “FB picture of the robbery suspect” be taken down because “the optics are not great right now.”... the removal of the post appears to have been directly motivated by one or more people within the City of Richfield who were more worried about the “optics” of the post than letting the public know about a dangerous, repeat offender."
Why English 'discounts' are not OK in France - "The word may have a French root, but that has cut no ice with French language guardians the Academie français, who are not at all happy about discounts... the Academie said there was “no need” to use ‘discount’ to describe the “ancient practice” of reducing store prices, as there are multiple French words to choose from, like rabais, compte, remise or réduction... In fact, the Academie stated, the English word discount is even "borrowed from the ancient French word desconte, or descompte,” which could be found in the very first edition of the Academie’s dictionary, defined as “what one can take from or reduce on a sum that one pays.”"
'Adulting' is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that - Los Angeles Times - "he is learning to create and stick to a personal budget, build a resume and apply for jobs and navigate romantic relationships in a time when online interactions are eclipsing face-to-face encounters... Adulting classes for college students and postgrads have swelled in popularity in recent years, in part because many high schools have largely abandoned “life skills” courses such as home economics, which were created to help students navigate the path to adulthood. That trend, combined with armies of hovering parents who emphasize academic achievement to the exclusion of almost everything else, has resulted in university classrooms filled with students who scored a 5 on their AP Physics test, but struggle to plan for a week’s worth of groceries and meals... More than 200 students filled out applications explaining why they wanted to take the 12-week course. The women accepted fewer than half who applied... Students enrolled in “Intro to Baking” learn to make bread, cakes, pastries and other confections “without setting you or your roommates on fire”"
If business school is bad because it's non-academic, why is this good?
Is 3-D Printing the Future of Terrorism? - WSJ - "On Oct. 9, a gunman tried to massacre worshipers on Yom Kippur at a synagogue in Halle, Germany, and crossed a new threshold: It was the first time a terrorist perpetrated a deadly attack with homemade weapons using 3-D-printed components—including a 3-D-printed gun... his primary aim was to “prove the viability of improvised weapons”—and inspire like-minded extremists to research, develop and deploy 3-D-printer technology as a new tool of terror... By live streaming the attack, he deliberately demonstrated the shortcomings of these weapons in hopes that the next killer would improve on them. ICSR reports some 2,200 people watched the video of the Halle attack in real time."
A Low-Fare Loophole for International Travelers - WSJ - "Usually a carrier must be from a country on one end of a route or the other to secure government approvals to make the trip. U.S. airlines can’t pick up passengers in Canada and fly them nonstop to France. Nor can an Asian airline like Singapore compete directly on trans-Atlantic routes against U.S. and European airlines... Some airlines are allowed to carry customers between two non-native countries, usually when a fuel stop is involved. It’s called the fifth freedom. Established with an international treaty in 1944, the nine aviation freedoms lay out what commercial airlines can and can’t do throughout the world.Though long-range planes have eliminated the need for many fuel stops, fifth-freedom flights continue to thrive. Even low-cost startups are taking the fifth: AirAsia X, a Malaysian carrier, and Scoot, a Singaporean airline, both fly to Honolulu with a stop in Osaka, Japan, so they can tap into robust Japan-Hawaii traffic. Flights between Honolulu and Osaka start as low as $280 round trip... U.S. airlines accused Emirates and Etihad, both based in the United Arab Emirates, of receiving government subsidies resulting in unfair competition, and asked the U.S. State Department to renegotiate the U.S. aviation treaty with the U.A.E. The state-owned airlines deny receiving government subsidies. The dispute ended earlier this year with the U.A.E. airlines agreeing to publish annual financial statements consistent with internationally recognized accounting standards"
Are All Democrats Socialist? Don’t Believe the Hype - WSJ - "Right-leaning media like to lavish the lion’s share of coverage on the radicals of the Democratic Party—to paint the entirety of their opposition as out-of-step cry-bully socialists. But the left-leaning media bear responsibility as well. The same journalists who decry “alternative facts” seize on every Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar tidbit with Gollum-like zeal.Yet it’s not clear that the social-media warriors they’ve elevated to pop-star status are the least bit representative of the party. As Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota told Politico: “Suddenly an entire party is being branded by the perspectives of two of its members, who represent 1% of the caucus.” The rest of the Democratic freshmen are less visible not only due to clickbait bias but because they are busy creating legislation or holding town halls in their districts—that is, doing their jobs. In the midterms, the gains that won the Democrats a majority were driven by quieter pragmatists in suburban and exurban districts... “No Democrat in a majority-making competitive district ran even one ad on free college, a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, or a passing a nationwide $15 . . . minimum wage.” Yet many Americans remain worried that the Democrats are readying to Make America Unrecognizable, and the party shares some of the blame. They’ve hardly shouted themselves hoarse decrying socialism and have let it hinder the pragmatic idealists among them. If Democrats want the privilege of governing, they need to assert more effectively the values that center the party in every sense of the word... Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s overreaching Green New Deal was dealt a devastating blow by the Senate, falling on a 57-0 procedural vote. This dead end certainly was noticed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Despite Republicans’ hysterical depiction of Mrs. Pelosi as a horsewoman of the San Franciscopocalypse, she has increasingly held the reasonable middle. Recall her dismissive comments on the “green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is.” More recently she mused, “While there are people who have a large number of Twitter followers, what’s important is that we have large numbers of votes on the floor of the house.”"
The King: Henry V On Film | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "One interesting element they do include in the film that bizarrely does have historical truth is the fact that the Dauphin of France sent Henry the Fifth tennis balls to mock him and sort of goad him into fighting. That is true. The Dauphin of France really did or perhaps his father Charles V, sent tennis balls and also a reference to soft cushions. They said, here you go. Why don't you lounge on your soft cushions and play tennis balls because you're this young getabout [sp?] prince, you're not a real King...
I think that Agincourt is sometimes held up as this like well we've been brilliant in the past, we’ll be brilliant in the future, which interestingly was a problem in the 15th century. Led to the collapse of the Hundred Years War by the English because they were so convinced after Agincourt and a later battle, the Battle of Verneuil that the English would just be able to turn things around in a single battle, that they stopped funding the war, they stopped supporting the garrisons in France. And then they were completely astonished when everything fell apart. So that sense of kind of like national complacency, I think is still an issue"
Opinion | Are Liberals Against Marriage? - The New York Times - "While marital fertility fell in the 1970s after the baby boom ran its course, the baby bust of the last 10 years hasn’t affected married couples, whose fertility rate has stayed level or very modestly increased. So while it’s important to debate questions like how the cost of child care affects childbearing decisions within marriages, the question of why marriage has declined so precipitously in the first place still looms over the fertility discussion. And with it comes a longstanding liberal-versus-conservative disagreement about how much to emphasize economic trends versus cultural transformations — or, more tersely, neoliberalism versus cultural liberalism — to explaining the waning of wedlock... [from] the 1960s through the 1980s, there was a clear liberal-led attack on the institutional form of marriage... This assault was undertaken in a spirit of social optimism... the emerging progressivism seems hostile not only to anything tainted by conservative religion or gender essentialism but to any idea of sexual or reproductive normativity, period, outside a bureaucratically supervised definition of “consent.” And it’s therefore disinclined to regard lifelong monogamy as anything more than one choice among many, one script to play with or abandon, one way of being whose decline should not necessarily be mourned, and whose still-outsize cultural power probably requires further deconstruction to be anything more than a patriarchal holdover, a prison and a trap. The combination of forces that have produced this ideological shift is somewhat murky — it follows a general turn leftward on social issues after the early 2000s, a further weakening of traditional religion, the cultural ripples from Obergefell v. Hodges, the increasing political polarization of the sexes and, of course, the so-called Great Awokening. But it does not feel like a coincidence that the new phase tracks with the recent decline in childbearing... Certainly the new phase of liberalism is increasing the political polarization of both marital practice and marital beliefs"
Maybe I am a backward European man, but the burkini SI Swimsuit Issue is really not working for me - "If the purpose of these photos is the kind of winking titillation that became redundant with the advent of internet pornography, I am not titillated. And I don’t want to pretend that I am... maybe it is my cultural background, but the hijab and the burka signal whatever is the opposite of sexy. It makes me think of separate gender swimming pools, of housebound Saudi women asking their male guardian for written permission to visit a doctor. It’s just jarring and odd. If the purpose is, as the Kenya-born Somali-American Aden claims, to show off that “modestly dressed” women can be “beautiful” then it seems to me a little insincere to stretch the definition of modesty to posing in an edition of a magazine designed to be ogled by men.But like many secular 21st-century men, I do not judge women’s virtue by their “modesty,” so that’s really none of my business. It does seem a little weird to have that quality celebrated in a post-feminist society, but I guess that’s cultural relativism for you. If, however, the purpose of the picture is to get clicks for an otherwise moribund print publication and to show that it has “moved with the times” then OK"
City of Richfield Scrubs Robbery Post from Police FB Page in Apparent ‘Politically Correct’ Move - "The City of Richfield Police Department gave themselves a well-deserved pat on the back and boasted on social media in early October about three gas station robbery suspects that had been apprehended and subsequently charged. That is until city administrators apparently deemed the post to be politically incorrect with bad “optics” and took it down two days later... An unidentified Richfield page administrator replied that they “removed the post due to complaint(s).”The RPD Facebook page administrator refused to give any further information about who had complained about the post or about the nature of the complaints which led to its removal. Since it seemed unusual that there would be complaints about robbery suspects being arrested and charged, a data practices information request was submitted to RPD to learn the nature and source of the complaints, as well as to learn who was responsible for removing the post. Additionally, the Alpha News researcher subsequently called Richfield Police Chief Jay Henthorne to inquire about what led to the removal.In the Oct. 14 telephone conversation, Chief Henthorne tried to explain that the “social media team along with our city administration pulled it” because they were looking at different options for posting in the future “with possibly not using pictures.” When pressed about the report of complaints received, Chief Henthorne indicated that the concern about the post had come from inside the city administration, not from an outside source. He stated further that the post was taken down at the direction of “city administration” following an “internal discussion”... Another piece of documentation received, below, is what appears to be a portion of an email or text conversation between two unidentified City of Richfield staff, employees or officials on Sat., Oct. 12, that requests that the “FB picture of the robbery suspect” be taken down because “the optics are not great right now.”... the removal of the post appears to have been directly motivated by one or more people within the City of Richfield who were more worried about the “optics” of the post than letting the public know about a dangerous, repeat offender."
Why English 'discounts' are not OK in France - "The word may have a French root, but that has cut no ice with French language guardians the Academie français, who are not at all happy about discounts... the Academie said there was “no need” to use ‘discount’ to describe the “ancient practice” of reducing store prices, as there are multiple French words to choose from, like rabais, compte, remise or réduction... In fact, the Academie stated, the English word discount is even "borrowed from the ancient French word desconte, or descompte,” which could be found in the very first edition of the Academie’s dictionary, defined as “what one can take from or reduce on a sum that one pays.”"
'Adulting' is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that - Los Angeles Times - "he is learning to create and stick to a personal budget, build a resume and apply for jobs and navigate romantic relationships in a time when online interactions are eclipsing face-to-face encounters... Adulting classes for college students and postgrads have swelled in popularity in recent years, in part because many high schools have largely abandoned “life skills” courses such as home economics, which were created to help students navigate the path to adulthood. That trend, combined with armies of hovering parents who emphasize academic achievement to the exclusion of almost everything else, has resulted in university classrooms filled with students who scored a 5 on their AP Physics test, but struggle to plan for a week’s worth of groceries and meals... More than 200 students filled out applications explaining why they wanted to take the 12-week course. The women accepted fewer than half who applied... Students enrolled in “Intro to Baking” learn to make bread, cakes, pastries and other confections “without setting you or your roommates on fire”"
If business school is bad because it's non-academic, why is this good?
Is 3-D Printing the Future of Terrorism? - WSJ - "On Oct. 9, a gunman tried to massacre worshipers on Yom Kippur at a synagogue in Halle, Germany, and crossed a new threshold: It was the first time a terrorist perpetrated a deadly attack with homemade weapons using 3-D-printed components—including a 3-D-printed gun... his primary aim was to “prove the viability of improvised weapons”—and inspire like-minded extremists to research, develop and deploy 3-D-printer technology as a new tool of terror... By live streaming the attack, he deliberately demonstrated the shortcomings of these weapons in hopes that the next killer would improve on them. ICSR reports some 2,200 people watched the video of the Halle attack in real time."
A Low-Fare Loophole for International Travelers - WSJ - "Usually a carrier must be from a country on one end of a route or the other to secure government approvals to make the trip. U.S. airlines can’t pick up passengers in Canada and fly them nonstop to France. Nor can an Asian airline like Singapore compete directly on trans-Atlantic routes against U.S. and European airlines... Some airlines are allowed to carry customers between two non-native countries, usually when a fuel stop is involved. It’s called the fifth freedom. Established with an international treaty in 1944, the nine aviation freedoms lay out what commercial airlines can and can’t do throughout the world.Though long-range planes have eliminated the need for many fuel stops, fifth-freedom flights continue to thrive. Even low-cost startups are taking the fifth: AirAsia X, a Malaysian carrier, and Scoot, a Singaporean airline, both fly to Honolulu with a stop in Osaka, Japan, so they can tap into robust Japan-Hawaii traffic. Flights between Honolulu and Osaka start as low as $280 round trip... U.S. airlines accused Emirates and Etihad, both based in the United Arab Emirates, of receiving government subsidies resulting in unfair competition, and asked the U.S. State Department to renegotiate the U.S. aviation treaty with the U.A.E. The state-owned airlines deny receiving government subsidies. The dispute ended earlier this year with the U.A.E. airlines agreeing to publish annual financial statements consistent with internationally recognized accounting standards"
Are All Democrats Socialist? Don’t Believe the Hype - WSJ - "Right-leaning media like to lavish the lion’s share of coverage on the radicals of the Democratic Party—to paint the entirety of their opposition as out-of-step cry-bully socialists. But the left-leaning media bear responsibility as well. The same journalists who decry “alternative facts” seize on every Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar tidbit with Gollum-like zeal.Yet it’s not clear that the social-media warriors they’ve elevated to pop-star status are the least bit representative of the party. As Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota told Politico: “Suddenly an entire party is being branded by the perspectives of two of its members, who represent 1% of the caucus.” The rest of the Democratic freshmen are less visible not only due to clickbait bias but because they are busy creating legislation or holding town halls in their districts—that is, doing their jobs. In the midterms, the gains that won the Democrats a majority were driven by quieter pragmatists in suburban and exurban districts... “No Democrat in a majority-making competitive district ran even one ad on free college, a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, or a passing a nationwide $15 . . . minimum wage.” Yet many Americans remain worried that the Democrats are readying to Make America Unrecognizable, and the party shares some of the blame. They’ve hardly shouted themselves hoarse decrying socialism and have let it hinder the pragmatic idealists among them. If Democrats want the privilege of governing, they need to assert more effectively the values that center the party in every sense of the word... Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s overreaching Green New Deal was dealt a devastating blow by the Senate, falling on a 57-0 procedural vote. This dead end certainly was noticed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Despite Republicans’ hysterical depiction of Mrs. Pelosi as a horsewoman of the San Franciscopocalypse, she has increasingly held the reasonable middle. Recall her dismissive comments on the “green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is.” More recently she mused, “While there are people who have a large number of Twitter followers, what’s important is that we have large numbers of votes on the floor of the house.”"
The King: Henry V On Film | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "One interesting element they do include in the film that bizarrely does have historical truth is the fact that the Dauphin of France sent Henry the Fifth tennis balls to mock him and sort of goad him into fighting. That is true. The Dauphin of France really did or perhaps his father Charles V, sent tennis balls and also a reference to soft cushions. They said, here you go. Why don't you lounge on your soft cushions and play tennis balls because you're this young getabout [sp?] prince, you're not a real King...
I think that Agincourt is sometimes held up as this like well we've been brilliant in the past, we’ll be brilliant in the future, which interestingly was a problem in the 15th century. Led to the collapse of the Hundred Years War by the English because they were so convinced after Agincourt and a later battle, the Battle of Verneuil that the English would just be able to turn things around in a single battle, that they stopped funding the war, they stopped supporting the garrisons in France. And then they were completely astonished when everything fell apart. So that sense of kind of like national complacency, I think is still an issue"
Post ID: 5237350628032625227
Morality in the 21st Century: Jonathan Haidt
BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 8: Jonathan Haidt
"‘If we look back to previous centuries, there was always something holding societies together. In the 17th century, let's say, that was religion. Then it was culture, and a strong sense of national culture. And then there was a strong sense also of morality, that people of different religions might nonetheless share a respect for various shared traditions.
And somehow or other, from that beautiful equilibrium of the mid century, in the 60s, people began to say, well, let's ease this restriction and that make more room for diversity.
And nothing bad seemed to happen. But we seem now you think to have lost that balance and in particular, through the social media, we now instead of having a national culture, have global noise, which you can hone in on in different ways, but then seem to bind us together.’...
‘We have forms of identity politics, that are different from the ones that lead the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, I just went back and read some of his speeches. And King was, in a sense, relentless in addressing people as brothers and sisters, in talking about our common humanity, in talking about our common American heritage and traditions. King was brilliant at drawing a circle around his enemies and including people and I think it was a rel-, an approach that comes out of a religious background, and a Christian background’
‘And indeed, holding people accountable to the founding documents, you know, all men are created equal, are endowed. He was really saying, let's live up to what we have professed to live up to’...
'Some forms [of identity politics] on campus at least, are pretty advanced in uniting people in common opposition to the oppressor class. And so the more you take young minds and tell them to see the world in terms of polarities, see the world in terms of dimensions of privilege and power, the more you're basically ramping up that tribalism, and I think that's the problem.'...
‘What's scary about this and where I think universities should perhaps be, instead of going along with this tide, taking stand against it.’
‘Yes, but it's very hard for them to do it alone. For one thing, there's litigation. In America, everyone's afraid of being sued. So what if, what if you're not fully supportive? What if you don't do the things that are demanded of you? And then someone commits suicide, the parents could sue you. What if you get bad publicity? What if the students write an angry essay? So it's very hard for universities to do this themselves.
Now, my hope is that the University of Chicago has emerged as the one university that has very publicly broken away from the trend. The Ivy League schools have generally gone in for the sort of the Safe Space attitude, as far as I can tell. And so if the University of Chicago finds that its numbers go way up, and if its reputation goes up, because I don't think most students want this overprotection. So if it does well, I think other schools will follow it.’...
‘We have come out of a few hundred years in which nation states are the dominant way of organizing. Before that there were empires, there were multi cultural empires around. There was the Ottoman Empire and then going back to the Roman Empire. So nation states aren't the only way to organize ourselves.
Now, I happen to think that they're generally pretty good ways. They are the largest unit that you can still get our tribal psychology working in positive ways. That is, I think you have to have a sense, if you're going to take care of the poor, if you're gonna have a sense that we owe people something, it never works on a global level, it has to have some sense of boundaries, that here's the community within which we have a social contract. We have expectations of each other, and therefore we will help each other when in need. I’m drawing on a Swedish historian, Lars Trigrd has has explained this, this view’
‘In England, David Goodheart for instance has argued very strongly that without a sense of national identity, we don't feel that social contract. We don't feel that sense of obligation to the the poor and the stranger within our midst. And it does worry me if we can't restore that.’…
‘It's possible that we're in a phase change in which 50 years from now nation states won't be nearly as important, and we can certainly see what we would lose by that. But it's hard for us to see what we would gain’
‘I think the alternatives, you either have empires or you have tribes’
‘But there could be something else. That's, it's an open question... I think nation states are pretty stable thing. They can be made to work well, they can be quite toxic too. But they, that's what we know. And we know that it can work and we know that it's not working well. Now, we know that that's declining. As for whether the the solution is to restore what we had, to go back to a stronger sense of nationhood, which is certainly what, that's what the authoritarian leaders want. That doesn't mean that they're wrong.
I'm just saying, that is one way. There may be some way forward. I don't know what it is. I wouldn't put my money on it. But I'm just saying I'm not certain that we have to go back to to nation states. I do think that the dream of a general globalist John Lennon, imagine no religions, no countries, no possessions, just everybody living life in peace and sharing. That ain't gonna work. That's never going to work. But could there be something short of that, could be something that would satisfy the globalists who don't like national boundaries. But that wouldn't just be diffused people, you know, in the void? I don't know.’
‘It's clear that we could get back to smaller ideas of local communities, and begin to think of nation states as communities of communities. That may, may be one way forward.’
‘Well, that's definitely an option for United States. Our whole country was founded on an idea of federalism in which the states were supposed to be really the main units that did almost all the lawmaking and that's why the Constitution is written the way it is. It's very short. And the US Constitution is very short. And it says everything not in here is left to the States. And over time, we've centralized more and more. And that's made it so that there's much more at stake in every national election. If the other side gets control, it's a complete disaster for your side. So at least in the United States one possible way forward is to go back to federalism’...
‘When I got interested in morality, at the time, it was all about Lawrence Kohlberg and moral reasoning. And that just felt so flat to me and I was reading, I was reading ethnographies and religious texts and I was seeing oh my, all over the world, people care about food and sex and menstruation and skin. I mean, all these things are in the moral texts of so many societies. And so I started thinking, well, why, you know, why do most societies care about all this physical bodily stuff? And I began to see that that's normal. That's the default.
And it's it's a historical achievement in a sense to thin out morality. To say, no, no, no, morality is just about how I treat you and you treat me and so it’s fairness and harm. And that's it. That's morality. And that's what secular people basically sort of said. And that is actually pretty good morality. If you are in a port city, and your money is made by commerce, and you have to deal with very different people. Let's have contracts. You don't hurt me, I don't hurt you. That's great. And so you get you know, in Amsterdam and London, you get this flourishing of a more cosmopolitan, progressive lifestyle. So that is definitely a way of living.
But what happened, I began to notice this in the United States because the Democrats were, had this more, this progressive, thin morality focused on care and fairness. But they kept losing to Republican candidates that I thought were weak candidates and bad candidates who were able to press many more moral buttons. So George W. Bush, he had speech writers who could write speeches that would allow him to appeal to certain virtues of loyalty and authority and tradition and, and duty and responsibility, that, that really resonated with most Americans. So that's what led to me taking a more systematic approach, looking at our evolutionary history and looking at anthropological texts and saying, where do they match? What are the best foundations for being the taste buds or the foundations?’...
‘Loyalty, authority and sanctity are the three moral foundations that you see the most variance on, the sort of the globalists, progressives often reject those because those are the foundations of more tradition, constraint, and even race, you know, racism and exclusion. It would be the negative side of it. That's where the, that's where the action is in the cultural war, those three’
‘And let me float a hypothesis around. Let's take the 18th century that believed in universality. Reason, philosophy. Forget about all this tribalism. Stuff that gave us wars of religion. So we have the Age of Reason. 18th century. Get rid of all the thick stuff, like tribalism and identity.’
‘And let's just specify that this is some people in the capital cities, this is not the whole 18th century.’
‘This is the flag bearer, the banners, bearers of enlightenment. The thick stuff comes roaring back in the 19th century, in the form of identity politics of a 19th century kind. Built around either nation, or race, or class. So you get nation states, you get the Aryan race, you get Marxism. And identity politics comes back to fill the vacuum left in the, by the 18th century, which wanted to abolish identity.
We had a second attempt to abolish identity. The second half of the 20th century. Let's all do our own thing. Let's forget about universal. Let's forget about tribes. Everything's going to be the individual. Are we now seeing those thick identities come roaring back with the same dangers, as they posed in the 19th century? After all the 19, when they came back in the 19th century, the result was a century later, two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the Gulag and the KGB. I mean, are you fearing this return of identity politics that might harbor some great dangers for Western liberal democracies?’
‘Perhaps. Just let me, while sympathizing with your general history, let me make it a bit more complicated by saying that on any trait you want to look at, people fell on a bell curve with some people much higher than the average and some below. So some people love freedom, individualism, they hate being bound in. Now in the modern political terminology, these people tend towards libertarianism, at least in this country. On the other extreme, are people who really need to be part of a tribe. And if they're raised orthodox, Jewish or evangelical Christian, then they're done, they've got their tribe. But if they're raised in a more secular setting, they don't.
When they get to college, they might find certain identity based groups more appealing. I just gave a talk at the University of California at Berkeley last week, and walking down the sort of the central strip on Sproul Plaza, I was stunned to see about 50 or 60 tables, they do what's called tabling, there are 50 or 60 tables, where students are recruiting for various groups. Most of the groups were ethnic identity groups. It was like the Latino business students and the Filipino, you know, chemists. I mean, it was everything. It was like the Balkans. I mean, no violence was, much, you know, friendlier, but I've never seen so much Balkanization’
‘Tribes are returning’
‘For those who need them, for those who want them. The one other thing I would add to your story to make it a little less threatening is that I think Steve Pinker and others who point to progress are right, that there is a long term decline in the acceptability of violence. And two years ago, when I was, two or three years ago, when I would talk about these issues, I would always point out: now look, the data on polarization is terrible. All the signs about American democracy are horrible, but there's been no violence, there's been like, essentially zero violence.
That's not quite true now, there has been a little bit of violence, but actually not that much. You know, 2016. And during the presidential campaign, and that was an incredibly bitter campaign, and there was some pushing and shoving and there were some people injured. And there were couple of murders that might have been related to politics, but not much.
So the story that you tell I think is plausible, except I don't foresee a return to large scale violence. I think we could have a collapse of, we are having a collapse of trust. We could have political institutions breaking down. But I think that we really are different than we were 100 years ago in terms of our toleration of people punching each other or shooting each other’
‘Because to be able to talk to only people who are like you is impoverishing beyond measure. And it seems to me that diverse societies offer this possibility of conversation across differences, which we need to recover so that we don't fragment into an infinite number of sects of the like minded’
‘That would be my vision of a good, decent and humane, liberal society’
‘Jonathan, who are your moral role models?’
‘Well, I think many of them are my former advisors. People who modeled a love of learning, argument and debate. So I'm thinking especially of my postdoctoral supervisor Richard Shweder, a professor at the University of Chicago who had a reputation for being able to argue any side of anything, and beat you on both sides. But it wasn't just, it wasn't just trying to, trying to win. It was just, it was a love of engagement with ideas and a sense of playfulness. And so I think he influenced me a lot in my thinking about thinking and, and, and discussion.’...
‘Whenever I speak to college students, and I talk about call out culture, and I read a description of call out culture, and they all know what it is. And I ask them, how many of you think that you have this at your school, you know where you can say some innocent thing and you'll be torn to shreds on social media, no one will defend you.
And what I find is that 100% of the hands go up saying, yes, we have that here. And they hate it. And they recognize how inhumane it is. They recognize how it makes them afraid to speak honestly. So I would say the challenge to young people, and it really is for high school students more than college students, because, you know, they have to figure out a way to develop through their teen years without, without doing this to each other. The challenge is, how are you going to stand up to it? Either as an individual or perhaps that's too difficult. How can you arrange something? How can you set norms? How can you start a movement? What can you do so that young people can connect and the connection is positive and it's not done in fear? How can you, your generation, reduce or end call out culture?’
‘Would you endorse George Orwell's remark that if liberty means anything, it means the ability to say what people don't want to hear?’
‘I would. I'm not sure that that is the defining, I'd have to think about it if I'm going to take it literally, but certainly the sentiment that we must be able to challenge each other. That is essential for progress in any society because without that we get the orthodoxies, we get the crushing orthodoxies and the bullying and the mob mentality. So yes, I'll endorse it.’"
Maybe Richard Shweder was a "troll"
"‘If we look back to previous centuries, there was always something holding societies together. In the 17th century, let's say, that was religion. Then it was culture, and a strong sense of national culture. And then there was a strong sense also of morality, that people of different religions might nonetheless share a respect for various shared traditions.
And somehow or other, from that beautiful equilibrium of the mid century, in the 60s, people began to say, well, let's ease this restriction and that make more room for diversity.
And nothing bad seemed to happen. But we seem now you think to have lost that balance and in particular, through the social media, we now instead of having a national culture, have global noise, which you can hone in on in different ways, but then seem to bind us together.’...
‘We have forms of identity politics, that are different from the ones that lead the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, I just went back and read some of his speeches. And King was, in a sense, relentless in addressing people as brothers and sisters, in talking about our common humanity, in talking about our common American heritage and traditions. King was brilliant at drawing a circle around his enemies and including people and I think it was a rel-, an approach that comes out of a religious background, and a Christian background’
‘And indeed, holding people accountable to the founding documents, you know, all men are created equal, are endowed. He was really saying, let's live up to what we have professed to live up to’...
'Some forms [of identity politics] on campus at least, are pretty advanced in uniting people in common opposition to the oppressor class. And so the more you take young minds and tell them to see the world in terms of polarities, see the world in terms of dimensions of privilege and power, the more you're basically ramping up that tribalism, and I think that's the problem.'...
‘What's scary about this and where I think universities should perhaps be, instead of going along with this tide, taking stand against it.’
‘Yes, but it's very hard for them to do it alone. For one thing, there's litigation. In America, everyone's afraid of being sued. So what if, what if you're not fully supportive? What if you don't do the things that are demanded of you? And then someone commits suicide, the parents could sue you. What if you get bad publicity? What if the students write an angry essay? So it's very hard for universities to do this themselves.
Now, my hope is that the University of Chicago has emerged as the one university that has very publicly broken away from the trend. The Ivy League schools have generally gone in for the sort of the Safe Space attitude, as far as I can tell. And so if the University of Chicago finds that its numbers go way up, and if its reputation goes up, because I don't think most students want this overprotection. So if it does well, I think other schools will follow it.’...
‘We have come out of a few hundred years in which nation states are the dominant way of organizing. Before that there were empires, there were multi cultural empires around. There was the Ottoman Empire and then going back to the Roman Empire. So nation states aren't the only way to organize ourselves.
Now, I happen to think that they're generally pretty good ways. They are the largest unit that you can still get our tribal psychology working in positive ways. That is, I think you have to have a sense, if you're going to take care of the poor, if you're gonna have a sense that we owe people something, it never works on a global level, it has to have some sense of boundaries, that here's the community within which we have a social contract. We have expectations of each other, and therefore we will help each other when in need. I’m drawing on a Swedish historian, Lars Trigrd has has explained this, this view’
‘In England, David Goodheart for instance has argued very strongly that without a sense of national identity, we don't feel that social contract. We don't feel that sense of obligation to the the poor and the stranger within our midst. And it does worry me if we can't restore that.’…
‘It's possible that we're in a phase change in which 50 years from now nation states won't be nearly as important, and we can certainly see what we would lose by that. But it's hard for us to see what we would gain’
‘I think the alternatives, you either have empires or you have tribes’
‘But there could be something else. That's, it's an open question... I think nation states are pretty stable thing. They can be made to work well, they can be quite toxic too. But they, that's what we know. And we know that it can work and we know that it's not working well. Now, we know that that's declining. As for whether the the solution is to restore what we had, to go back to a stronger sense of nationhood, which is certainly what, that's what the authoritarian leaders want. That doesn't mean that they're wrong.
I'm just saying, that is one way. There may be some way forward. I don't know what it is. I wouldn't put my money on it. But I'm just saying I'm not certain that we have to go back to to nation states. I do think that the dream of a general globalist John Lennon, imagine no religions, no countries, no possessions, just everybody living life in peace and sharing. That ain't gonna work. That's never going to work. But could there be something short of that, could be something that would satisfy the globalists who don't like national boundaries. But that wouldn't just be diffused people, you know, in the void? I don't know.’
‘It's clear that we could get back to smaller ideas of local communities, and begin to think of nation states as communities of communities. That may, may be one way forward.’
‘Well, that's definitely an option for United States. Our whole country was founded on an idea of federalism in which the states were supposed to be really the main units that did almost all the lawmaking and that's why the Constitution is written the way it is. It's very short. And the US Constitution is very short. And it says everything not in here is left to the States. And over time, we've centralized more and more. And that's made it so that there's much more at stake in every national election. If the other side gets control, it's a complete disaster for your side. So at least in the United States one possible way forward is to go back to federalism’...
‘When I got interested in morality, at the time, it was all about Lawrence Kohlberg and moral reasoning. And that just felt so flat to me and I was reading, I was reading ethnographies and religious texts and I was seeing oh my, all over the world, people care about food and sex and menstruation and skin. I mean, all these things are in the moral texts of so many societies. And so I started thinking, well, why, you know, why do most societies care about all this physical bodily stuff? And I began to see that that's normal. That's the default.
And it's it's a historical achievement in a sense to thin out morality. To say, no, no, no, morality is just about how I treat you and you treat me and so it’s fairness and harm. And that's it. That's morality. And that's what secular people basically sort of said. And that is actually pretty good morality. If you are in a port city, and your money is made by commerce, and you have to deal with very different people. Let's have contracts. You don't hurt me, I don't hurt you. That's great. And so you get you know, in Amsterdam and London, you get this flourishing of a more cosmopolitan, progressive lifestyle. So that is definitely a way of living.
But what happened, I began to notice this in the United States because the Democrats were, had this more, this progressive, thin morality focused on care and fairness. But they kept losing to Republican candidates that I thought were weak candidates and bad candidates who were able to press many more moral buttons. So George W. Bush, he had speech writers who could write speeches that would allow him to appeal to certain virtues of loyalty and authority and tradition and, and duty and responsibility, that, that really resonated with most Americans. So that's what led to me taking a more systematic approach, looking at our evolutionary history and looking at anthropological texts and saying, where do they match? What are the best foundations for being the taste buds or the foundations?’...
‘Loyalty, authority and sanctity are the three moral foundations that you see the most variance on, the sort of the globalists, progressives often reject those because those are the foundations of more tradition, constraint, and even race, you know, racism and exclusion. It would be the negative side of it. That's where the, that's where the action is in the cultural war, those three’
‘And let me float a hypothesis around. Let's take the 18th century that believed in universality. Reason, philosophy. Forget about all this tribalism. Stuff that gave us wars of religion. So we have the Age of Reason. 18th century. Get rid of all the thick stuff, like tribalism and identity.’
‘And let's just specify that this is some people in the capital cities, this is not the whole 18th century.’
‘This is the flag bearer, the banners, bearers of enlightenment. The thick stuff comes roaring back in the 19th century, in the form of identity politics of a 19th century kind. Built around either nation, or race, or class. So you get nation states, you get the Aryan race, you get Marxism. And identity politics comes back to fill the vacuum left in the, by the 18th century, which wanted to abolish identity.
We had a second attempt to abolish identity. The second half of the 20th century. Let's all do our own thing. Let's forget about universal. Let's forget about tribes. Everything's going to be the individual. Are we now seeing those thick identities come roaring back with the same dangers, as they posed in the 19th century? After all the 19, when they came back in the 19th century, the result was a century later, two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the Gulag and the KGB. I mean, are you fearing this return of identity politics that might harbor some great dangers for Western liberal democracies?’
‘Perhaps. Just let me, while sympathizing with your general history, let me make it a bit more complicated by saying that on any trait you want to look at, people fell on a bell curve with some people much higher than the average and some below. So some people love freedom, individualism, they hate being bound in. Now in the modern political terminology, these people tend towards libertarianism, at least in this country. On the other extreme, are people who really need to be part of a tribe. And if they're raised orthodox, Jewish or evangelical Christian, then they're done, they've got their tribe. But if they're raised in a more secular setting, they don't.
When they get to college, they might find certain identity based groups more appealing. I just gave a talk at the University of California at Berkeley last week, and walking down the sort of the central strip on Sproul Plaza, I was stunned to see about 50 or 60 tables, they do what's called tabling, there are 50 or 60 tables, where students are recruiting for various groups. Most of the groups were ethnic identity groups. It was like the Latino business students and the Filipino, you know, chemists. I mean, it was everything. It was like the Balkans. I mean, no violence was, much, you know, friendlier, but I've never seen so much Balkanization’
‘Tribes are returning’
‘For those who need them, for those who want them. The one other thing I would add to your story to make it a little less threatening is that I think Steve Pinker and others who point to progress are right, that there is a long term decline in the acceptability of violence. And two years ago, when I was, two or three years ago, when I would talk about these issues, I would always point out: now look, the data on polarization is terrible. All the signs about American democracy are horrible, but there's been no violence, there's been like, essentially zero violence.
That's not quite true now, there has been a little bit of violence, but actually not that much. You know, 2016. And during the presidential campaign, and that was an incredibly bitter campaign, and there was some pushing and shoving and there were some people injured. And there were couple of murders that might have been related to politics, but not much.
So the story that you tell I think is plausible, except I don't foresee a return to large scale violence. I think we could have a collapse of, we are having a collapse of trust. We could have political institutions breaking down. But I think that we really are different than we were 100 years ago in terms of our toleration of people punching each other or shooting each other’
‘Because to be able to talk to only people who are like you is impoverishing beyond measure. And it seems to me that diverse societies offer this possibility of conversation across differences, which we need to recover so that we don't fragment into an infinite number of sects of the like minded’
‘That would be my vision of a good, decent and humane, liberal society’
‘Jonathan, who are your moral role models?’
‘Well, I think many of them are my former advisors. People who modeled a love of learning, argument and debate. So I'm thinking especially of my postdoctoral supervisor Richard Shweder, a professor at the University of Chicago who had a reputation for being able to argue any side of anything, and beat you on both sides. But it wasn't just, it wasn't just trying to, trying to win. It was just, it was a love of engagement with ideas and a sense of playfulness. And so I think he influenced me a lot in my thinking about thinking and, and, and discussion.’...
‘Whenever I speak to college students, and I talk about call out culture, and I read a description of call out culture, and they all know what it is. And I ask them, how many of you think that you have this at your school, you know where you can say some innocent thing and you'll be torn to shreds on social media, no one will defend you.
And what I find is that 100% of the hands go up saying, yes, we have that here. And they hate it. And they recognize how inhumane it is. They recognize how it makes them afraid to speak honestly. So I would say the challenge to young people, and it really is for high school students more than college students, because, you know, they have to figure out a way to develop through their teen years without, without doing this to each other. The challenge is, how are you going to stand up to it? Either as an individual or perhaps that's too difficult. How can you arrange something? How can you set norms? How can you start a movement? What can you do so that young people can connect and the connection is positive and it's not done in fear? How can you, your generation, reduce or end call out culture?’
‘Would you endorse George Orwell's remark that if liberty means anything, it means the ability to say what people don't want to hear?’
‘I would. I'm not sure that that is the defining, I'd have to think about it if I'm going to take it literally, but certainly the sentiment that we must be able to challenge each other. That is essential for progress in any society because without that we get the orthodoxies, we get the crushing orthodoxies and the bullying and the mob mentality. So yes, I'll endorse it.’"
Maybe Richard Shweder was a "troll"
Post ID: 7178010398844098176
Links - 9th February 2020 (1) (Screen time and children)
A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley - The New York Times - "The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them... Jason Toff, 32, who ran the video platform Vine and now works for Google, lets his 3-year-old play on an iPad, which he believes is no better or worse than a book. This opinion is unpopular enough with his fellow tech workers that he feels there is now “a stigma.”"
The Dangers of YouTube for Young Children - "whereas Disney has long mined cultures around the world for legends and myths—dropping them into consumerist, family-friendly American formats—ChuChu’s videos are a different kind of hybrid: The company ingests Anglo-American nursery rhymes and holidays, and produces new versions with subcontinental flair. The characters’ most prominent animal friend is a unicorn-elephant. Nursery rhymes become music videos, complete with Indian dances and iconography. Kids of all skin tones and hair types speak with an Indian accent... As YouTube became the world’s babysitter—an electronic pacifier during trips, or when adults are having dinner—parents began to seek out videos that soaked up more time. So nowadays what’s most popular on Toddler YouTube are not three-minute songs, but compilations that last 30 to 45 minutes, or even longer... Watching my daughter play with my phone is a horrifying experience, precisely because her mimicry of adult behaviors is already so accurate. Her tiny fingers poke at buttons, pinch to zoom, endlessly scroll. It’s as though she’s grown a new brain from her fingertips. Most parents feel some version of this horror. Watching them poke and pinch at our devices, we realize that these rectangles of light and compulsion are not going away, and we are all dosing ourselves with their pleasures and conveniences without knowing the consequences."
Social media, but not video games, linked to depression in teens, according to Montreal study - "Screen time — and social media in particular — is linked to an increase in depressive symptoms in teenagers... "What we found over and over was that the effects of social media were much larger than any of the other effects for the other types of digital screen time"... Conrod and her team found an increase in depressive symptoms when the adolescents were consuming social media and television... increased symptoms of depression are linked to being active on platforms such as Instagram, where teens are more likely to compare their lives to glitzy images in their feeds... "These sort of echo chambers — these reinforcing spirals — also continually expose them to things that promote or reinforce their depression, and that's why it's particularly toxic for depression."They also tested to see if the additional screen time was taking away from other activities that might decrease depressive symptoms, such as exercise, but found that was not the case. The most surprising finding for Boers was that time spent playing video games was not contributing to depressive symptoms.The study suggests the average gamer is not socially isolated, with more than 70 per cent of gamers playing with other people either online or in person."The findings surprised us," he said. "Video gaming makes one more happy. It's a good pastime."""
Is our use of digital technologies negatively affecting our brain health? We asked 11 experts. - "The answers, you’ll see, are far from certain or even consistent. There’s a lot not yet known about the connection between media use and brain health in adults and kids. The evidence that does exist on multitasking and memory, for instance, suggests a negative correlation, but a causal link is still elusive. Still, many of the researchers and human behavior experts we spoke with still feel an unease about where the constant use of digital technology is taking us.“We’re all pawns in a grand experiment to be manipulated by digital stimuli to which no one has given explicit consent,” Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, told us. But what are the results of the experiment?...
One of the ways you sense moral panic is that it tends to be focused on our kids or sexuality. So when you see someone saying we are going to have a lost generation, or that Bluetooth is leading youth to have sex at unprecedented rates, these are always indications of moral panic rather than concern about real things. From what I can tell, parenting culture in Silicon Valley is this performative craziness. I’m going to virtue-signal harder than anyone else. I am a better parent than you are because I put crazier restrictions on my family than you do. [Banning screens] feels very consistent with that.The reason those stories are satisfying is you come out of it thinking, “What assholes. If they think this stuff isn’t good, why do they continue to do it?” Then you have folks like Jaron Lanier who say, “Quit your social media now; it’s bad for you.” That feels irresponsible in another way — there are clearly billions of people who aren’t going to quit social media in part because it’s become a critical communications tech. It’s core to how they interact with the world. For a lot of work and play, it’s essential these days."
With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there's a likely culprit - "What happened so that so many more teens, in such a short period of time, would feel depressed, attempt suicide and commit suicide? After scouring several large surveys of teens for clues, I found that all of the possibilities traced back to a major change in teens’ lives: the sudden ascendance of the smartphone... Not only did smartphone use and depression increase in tandem, but time spent online was linked to mental health issues across two different data sets... Of course, it’s possible that instead of time online causing depression, depression causes more time online. But three other studies show that is unlikely (at least, when viewed through social media use).Two followed people over time, with both studies finding that spending more time on social media led to unhappiness, while unhappiness did not lead to more social media use. A third randomly assigned participants to give up Facebook for a week versus continuing their usual use. Those who avoided Facebook reported feeling less depressed at the end of the week. The argument that depression might cause people to spend more time online doesn’t also explain why depression increased so suddenly after 2012. Under that scenario, more teens became depressed for an unknown reason and then started buying smartphones, which doesn’t seem too logical... teens now spend much less time interacting with their friends in person. Interacting with people face to face is one of the deepest wellsprings of human happiness... Teens are also sleeping less, and teens who spend more time on their phones are more likely to not be getting enough sleep. Not sleeping enough is a major risk factor for depression"
Kids Whose Parents Limit Screen Time Do Worse in College, New Study Shows - "young people whose parents explicitly stated they were limiting tech to boost academic achievement actually did worse when they got to college. That was true even when the researchers controlled for the possibility that parents who set strict rules were simply responding to kids who were already struggling in school... parent who carefully control their kids' tech use might have a more general tendency towards helicopter parenting, and once their kids get to college and experience a taste of freedom and responsibility, they can't handle it."
Screen time -- even before bed -- has little impact on teen well-being - "The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, casts doubt on the widely accepted notion that spending time online, gaming, or watching TV, especially before bedtime, can damage young people's mental health."
Tech's Brain Effect: It's Complicated - “In fact, a recent study examining over 350,000 adolescents found a small but negative association with technology use and well-being, but they also found similar relationships between eating potatoes and wearing eyeglasses and well-being. And yet we don’t ask if potatoes and eyeglasses have destroyed a generation.”
Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 237 - Andy Przybylski on "Is screen time bad for you?" - "Listening to music, let's say another type of technology use, the effect of listening to music on well-being was about 13 times larger than screen time, in the negative direction. That doesn't mean that Mozart makes teenagers depressed. That means that if you're a kid and you're listening to loads of music, there probably might be something else going on in your life. It's nowhere near bullying or drug use... the negative effect is somewhere between whether or not you wear glasses, and how much potatoes you eat...
'A different kind of correlational fact that often comes up, in discussions of harmful effects of social media and smartphones, is just the trendline -- that depression and suicide rates among adolescents have been going up dramatically ever since smartphones became widespread, which was in about 2011, 2012'...
'It all depends on which dataset you look at. You don't see things like it in more tech-saturated countries, or in other industrialized countries. You don't see, two or three years ahead of the United States, the South Koreans and the Japanese having spiking rates of self-harm or depression, you know?In places where you know there's more internet penetration at an earlier time, or at a later time, or at the same time, you don't see the same trends in Germany, or the United Kingdom. Or Canada, where you have just as many iPhone sales per thousand kids...
Kids were, across all metrics, looking way, way, better from where they were in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s... if you chop things off at 2005 and 2014, and you exaggerate the Y axis, you can tell yourself a story that something happened in 2011, right?... it doesn't matter which way the tiny trend goes, right? It's evidence that -- there's directly conflicting headlines sometimes, where it's like it doesn't matter if the tiny trend means teens are having more sex or less sex. The very fact that there's any difference, it will get attributed to technology... this is the logic that that does undergird things like debates about violent video games, or other things where you kind of say, “Oh, I see the participants in one condition, they put slightly more hot sauce on a taco than in the other condition, after they've played Grand Theft Auto versus Tetris.”'...
'I presume that the person was told the hot sauce would be painful for the recipient? Because I could imagine a lot of people who like spicy food were like, “I want to be helpful! Here's a lot of hot sauce.”'
'I am so sorry your listeners have to hear about how embarrassing social psychology is... Let's say that you find a difference in the amount of hot sauce, or how angry somebody is, right? Do violent video game players just become infinitely angry, the more doses of gaming they have? That idea is actually insane. There's nearly a perfect negative correlation between violent video game sales over time and youth aggression and arrests... this is all about an opportunity cost. So we have a situation where someone has screamed, "There's a wolf in the forest, and it's a blue wolf." And what's happened is, Google and Facebook have jumped up and said, "Here's our blue wolf trap. We've created this new tool that will help you control the blue wolf." Right?But nobody asks... it's like, okay, well we're going to make a tool now. Here's a new tool to get rid of the “wolf in the forest” problem.And this is an opportunity cost. This costs us... by making it into a feature, we are actually diminishing the serious attention we should be giving to this idea that these platforms are bad for us. And are bad for our society.Let's just imagine that obesity was a problem in our society. Right? And what's happened is that the maker of the worst cereal -- you know, the cereal that we all think is really bad for us -- they say, “At the bottom of every new box of this cereal, there's a stopwatch. And you can use this stopwatch to measure how much time you've spent eating the cereal.”And then they have a website called, stopwatch.cereal.com, where they list all the new tools they've put at the bottom of their horrible cereal, as like their corporate responsibility to us. Promoting our wellbeing. And fighting our obesity.At best, it's homeopathy. Sorry, sorry -- Probably, it's homeopathy. At best, it's something that some high functioning people in society can use to exert more control, if there's like a nugget of something effective there, right?And then at worst what it does, is it distracts us from getting the real data, and figuring out if these things are actually used and whether or not they work.'"
More on the costs of worrying about non-existent problems like liberals love to do
Kids Are Not Hurt by Screen Time - Scientific American - "Overall, what we find is no connection between the amount of time that young people spend online using digital technologies and mental health symptoms like depression, anxiety. When we do find associations, they were actually quite surprising to us. We found that young people who sent more text messages actually reported better mental health. Now, again, this was a small association, but it reflects what other people have found: that people who are very connected off-line, that use technology in the positive ways to stay connected often, are more connected online as well and experiencing better mental health... “One of the issues with the research that’s been done to date has been that youth are, you know, in school. They have a survey put in front of them, and they’re asked to recall, over the past six months, ‘How often are you online?’ and ‘Have you ever felt depressed?’ And the correlation between those two things has been used to spread a lot of fear around this connection between social media use and things like depression—99.5 percent of the reasons that kids differ in their depression is due to something other than the time they spend online.”"
The Dangers of YouTube for Young Children - "whereas Disney has long mined cultures around the world for legends and myths—dropping them into consumerist, family-friendly American formats—ChuChu’s videos are a different kind of hybrid: The company ingests Anglo-American nursery rhymes and holidays, and produces new versions with subcontinental flair. The characters’ most prominent animal friend is a unicorn-elephant. Nursery rhymes become music videos, complete with Indian dances and iconography. Kids of all skin tones and hair types speak with an Indian accent... As YouTube became the world’s babysitter—an electronic pacifier during trips, or when adults are having dinner—parents began to seek out videos that soaked up more time. So nowadays what’s most popular on Toddler YouTube are not three-minute songs, but compilations that last 30 to 45 minutes, or even longer... Watching my daughter play with my phone is a horrifying experience, precisely because her mimicry of adult behaviors is already so accurate. Her tiny fingers poke at buttons, pinch to zoom, endlessly scroll. It’s as though she’s grown a new brain from her fingertips. Most parents feel some version of this horror. Watching them poke and pinch at our devices, we realize that these rectangles of light and compulsion are not going away, and we are all dosing ourselves with their pleasures and conveniences without knowing the consequences."
Social media, but not video games, linked to depression in teens, according to Montreal study - "Screen time — and social media in particular — is linked to an increase in depressive symptoms in teenagers... "What we found over and over was that the effects of social media were much larger than any of the other effects for the other types of digital screen time"... Conrod and her team found an increase in depressive symptoms when the adolescents were consuming social media and television... increased symptoms of depression are linked to being active on platforms such as Instagram, where teens are more likely to compare their lives to glitzy images in their feeds... "These sort of echo chambers — these reinforcing spirals — also continually expose them to things that promote or reinforce their depression, and that's why it's particularly toxic for depression."They also tested to see if the additional screen time was taking away from other activities that might decrease depressive symptoms, such as exercise, but found that was not the case. The most surprising finding for Boers was that time spent playing video games was not contributing to depressive symptoms.The study suggests the average gamer is not socially isolated, with more than 70 per cent of gamers playing with other people either online or in person."The findings surprised us," he said. "Video gaming makes one more happy. It's a good pastime."""
Is our use of digital technologies negatively affecting our brain health? We asked 11 experts. - "The answers, you’ll see, are far from certain or even consistent. There’s a lot not yet known about the connection between media use and brain health in adults and kids. The evidence that does exist on multitasking and memory, for instance, suggests a negative correlation, but a causal link is still elusive. Still, many of the researchers and human behavior experts we spoke with still feel an unease about where the constant use of digital technology is taking us.“We’re all pawns in a grand experiment to be manipulated by digital stimuli to which no one has given explicit consent,” Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, told us. But what are the results of the experiment?...
One of the ways you sense moral panic is that it tends to be focused on our kids or sexuality. So when you see someone saying we are going to have a lost generation, or that Bluetooth is leading youth to have sex at unprecedented rates, these are always indications of moral panic rather than concern about real things. From what I can tell, parenting culture in Silicon Valley is this performative craziness. I’m going to virtue-signal harder than anyone else. I am a better parent than you are because I put crazier restrictions on my family than you do. [Banning screens] feels very consistent with that.The reason those stories are satisfying is you come out of it thinking, “What assholes. If they think this stuff isn’t good, why do they continue to do it?” Then you have folks like Jaron Lanier who say, “Quit your social media now; it’s bad for you.” That feels irresponsible in another way — there are clearly billions of people who aren’t going to quit social media in part because it’s become a critical communications tech. It’s core to how they interact with the world. For a lot of work and play, it’s essential these days."
With teen mental health deteriorating over five years, there's a likely culprit - "What happened so that so many more teens, in such a short period of time, would feel depressed, attempt suicide and commit suicide? After scouring several large surveys of teens for clues, I found that all of the possibilities traced back to a major change in teens’ lives: the sudden ascendance of the smartphone... Not only did smartphone use and depression increase in tandem, but time spent online was linked to mental health issues across two different data sets... Of course, it’s possible that instead of time online causing depression, depression causes more time online. But three other studies show that is unlikely (at least, when viewed through social media use).Two followed people over time, with both studies finding that spending more time on social media led to unhappiness, while unhappiness did not lead to more social media use. A third randomly assigned participants to give up Facebook for a week versus continuing their usual use. Those who avoided Facebook reported feeling less depressed at the end of the week. The argument that depression might cause people to spend more time online doesn’t also explain why depression increased so suddenly after 2012. Under that scenario, more teens became depressed for an unknown reason and then started buying smartphones, which doesn’t seem too logical... teens now spend much less time interacting with their friends in person. Interacting with people face to face is one of the deepest wellsprings of human happiness... Teens are also sleeping less, and teens who spend more time on their phones are more likely to not be getting enough sleep. Not sleeping enough is a major risk factor for depression"
Kids Whose Parents Limit Screen Time Do Worse in College, New Study Shows - "young people whose parents explicitly stated they were limiting tech to boost academic achievement actually did worse when they got to college. That was true even when the researchers controlled for the possibility that parents who set strict rules were simply responding to kids who were already struggling in school... parent who carefully control their kids' tech use might have a more general tendency towards helicopter parenting, and once their kids get to college and experience a taste of freedom and responsibility, they can't handle it."
Screen time -- even before bed -- has little impact on teen well-being - "The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, casts doubt on the widely accepted notion that spending time online, gaming, or watching TV, especially before bedtime, can damage young people's mental health."
Tech's Brain Effect: It's Complicated - “In fact, a recent study examining over 350,000 adolescents found a small but negative association with technology use and well-being, but they also found similar relationships between eating potatoes and wearing eyeglasses and well-being. And yet we don’t ask if potatoes and eyeglasses have destroyed a generation.”
Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 237 - Andy Przybylski on "Is screen time bad for you?" - "Listening to music, let's say another type of technology use, the effect of listening to music on well-being was about 13 times larger than screen time, in the negative direction. That doesn't mean that Mozart makes teenagers depressed. That means that if you're a kid and you're listening to loads of music, there probably might be something else going on in your life. It's nowhere near bullying or drug use... the negative effect is somewhere between whether or not you wear glasses, and how much potatoes you eat...
'A different kind of correlational fact that often comes up, in discussions of harmful effects of social media and smartphones, is just the trendline -- that depression and suicide rates among adolescents have been going up dramatically ever since smartphones became widespread, which was in about 2011, 2012'...
'It all depends on which dataset you look at. You don't see things like it in more tech-saturated countries, or in other industrialized countries. You don't see, two or three years ahead of the United States, the South Koreans and the Japanese having spiking rates of self-harm or depression, you know?In places where you know there's more internet penetration at an earlier time, or at a later time, or at the same time, you don't see the same trends in Germany, or the United Kingdom. Or Canada, where you have just as many iPhone sales per thousand kids...
Kids were, across all metrics, looking way, way, better from where they were in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and early 90s... if you chop things off at 2005 and 2014, and you exaggerate the Y axis, you can tell yourself a story that something happened in 2011, right?... it doesn't matter which way the tiny trend goes, right? It's evidence that -- there's directly conflicting headlines sometimes, where it's like it doesn't matter if the tiny trend means teens are having more sex or less sex. The very fact that there's any difference, it will get attributed to technology... this is the logic that that does undergird things like debates about violent video games, or other things where you kind of say, “Oh, I see the participants in one condition, they put slightly more hot sauce on a taco than in the other condition, after they've played Grand Theft Auto versus Tetris.”'...
'I presume that the person was told the hot sauce would be painful for the recipient? Because I could imagine a lot of people who like spicy food were like, “I want to be helpful! Here's a lot of hot sauce.”'
'I am so sorry your listeners have to hear about how embarrassing social psychology is... Let's say that you find a difference in the amount of hot sauce, or how angry somebody is, right? Do violent video game players just become infinitely angry, the more doses of gaming they have? That idea is actually insane. There's nearly a perfect negative correlation between violent video game sales over time and youth aggression and arrests... this is all about an opportunity cost. So we have a situation where someone has screamed, "There's a wolf in the forest, and it's a blue wolf." And what's happened is, Google and Facebook have jumped up and said, "Here's our blue wolf trap. We've created this new tool that will help you control the blue wolf." Right?But nobody asks... it's like, okay, well we're going to make a tool now. Here's a new tool to get rid of the “wolf in the forest” problem.And this is an opportunity cost. This costs us... by making it into a feature, we are actually diminishing the serious attention we should be giving to this idea that these platforms are bad for us. And are bad for our society.Let's just imagine that obesity was a problem in our society. Right? And what's happened is that the maker of the worst cereal -- you know, the cereal that we all think is really bad for us -- they say, “At the bottom of every new box of this cereal, there's a stopwatch. And you can use this stopwatch to measure how much time you've spent eating the cereal.”And then they have a website called, stopwatch.cereal.com, where they list all the new tools they've put at the bottom of their horrible cereal, as like their corporate responsibility to us. Promoting our wellbeing. And fighting our obesity.At best, it's homeopathy. Sorry, sorry -- Probably, it's homeopathy. At best, it's something that some high functioning people in society can use to exert more control, if there's like a nugget of something effective there, right?And then at worst what it does, is it distracts us from getting the real data, and figuring out if these things are actually used and whether or not they work.'"
More on the costs of worrying about non-existent problems like liberals love to do
Kids Are Not Hurt by Screen Time - Scientific American - "Overall, what we find is no connection between the amount of time that young people spend online using digital technologies and mental health symptoms like depression, anxiety. When we do find associations, they were actually quite surprising to us. We found that young people who sent more text messages actually reported better mental health. Now, again, this was a small association, but it reflects what other people have found: that people who are very connected off-line, that use technology in the positive ways to stay connected often, are more connected online as well and experiencing better mental health... “One of the issues with the research that’s been done to date has been that youth are, you know, in school. They have a survey put in front of them, and they’re asked to recall, over the past six months, ‘How often are you online?’ and ‘Have you ever felt depressed?’ And the correlation between those two things has been used to spread a lot of fear around this connection between social media use and things like depression—99.5 percent of the reasons that kids differ in their depression is due to something other than the time they spend online.”"
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