Links - 18th January 2021 (1)

George W. Bush won't support Donald Trump’s reelection, report says - "George W. Bush will not support the re-election of Donald Trump, according to people familiar with his thinking, The New York Times reported Saturday.The paper said the former president and Texas governor won't vote for Trump's reelection and that his brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, "isn't sure how he'll vote." The paper spotlights several members of the Republican Party who are dissenting from party lines, though Bush was the only prominent Texas politician mentioned. Freddy Ford, a spokesman for Bush, told The Texas Tribune that Bush would steer clear of speaking publicly on his presidential vote and called The New York Times assertion false. "This is completely made up," Ford said in an email. "He is retired from presidential politics and has not indicated how he will vote."... In 2014, before Jeb Bush ran for president (a race he lost to Trump), George P. told the Texas Tribune’s Evan Smith he wouldn’t endorse his father."
It's only wrong when Fox News or the Daily Mail report material challenging the liberal consensus. But the New York Times can lie as much as they want and still be trustworthy

I,Hypocrite - Posts - "having *Flag of England* or *Flag of United Kingdom* in your display name is an easy way of someone saying they’re racist, islamophobic, homophobic and hate women"
Comment: "We have the same nonsense here, it started with the confederate flag which was ostensibly reasonable even if debatable, then it was the Gadsden flag which literally has zero connection with slavery or the confederacy, now it's the actual American flag. Their goal is to destroy our history and demonize our institution so we'll accept even worse institutions."
"what's even more ridiculous is that the "Confederate flag", which folks despise sooo much, is actually the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia...not the actual Confederacy."
So much for the "myth" that liberals hate their countries, as well as the "myth" of the slippery slope (it used to be just the English flag that was demonised)

Bev on Twitter - "Chinese Peranakans in Singapore have had a history of blackface. Since a lot of them were colonial collaborators, they aspired towards their colonisers’ culture as well — this involved putting on and enjoying minstrel. As a peranakan, I feel like we need to talk about this more."
So since the arts in Singapore have a history of structural racism, we need to defund them

Dr. Carly Goldstein в Twitter - "@ZackBergerMDPhD My house was burglarized in Feb. So much stolen and damaged in the process. Made me incredibly sad to think how desperately they needed my jewelry and computer...probably more than I did. It still sucks and feels violating, but kudos for finding compassion in your frustration."
When you're such a bleeding heart you excuse those who rob you

Explicit tweet depicts BDSM dog play involving SAF uniforms; Mindef investigating

Balaji S. Srinivasan on Twitter - "Democrats need to learn experts aren’t always right. Republicans need to learn experts aren’t always wrong. Libertarians need to learn that a state can succeed. Progressives need to learn that a state can fail"

Allie Beth Stuckey on Twitter - "Liberal privilege is never having to worry about losing your job or your business for voicing your political opinions. You can be a full on communist, falsely accuse 10 people of racism, & support partial birth abortion and you won’t be viewed as problematic in the slightest."

Burgess Owens on Twitter - "The most popular racist term today... "White Privilege". Don't you dare tell me my skin color holds me back. Don't you dare tell me my skin color makes me a victim."

Bill Maher on the Perils of Political Correctness - The New York Times - "“My whole career,” Maher says, “has been this battle: Why can’t I talk on TV the way I talk at home or with my friends? My goal was to take that gap, which on most shows you can drive a truck through, and close it to nothing.”
Most late-night hosts don’t criticize both the right and the left as much as you do. Why do you think that is?
It’s hard to answer that question without sounding self-serving. I will say this: Our studio audience is not representative of liberals across the country. Your paper and The Atlantic had long articles in the last year saying that 80 percent of Americans think this politically correct BS has gone too far. But the people on Twitter are the people who control the media a lot. They’re the millennials who probably grew up with helicopter parents who afforded them a sense of entitlement. They are certainly more fragile than previous generations. Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Crying rooms. Microaggressions. That crowd feels like anything that upsets their tender sensibilities is completely out of line... liberals protect people, and P.C. people protect feelings. They don’t do anything. They’re pointing at other people who are somehow falling short of their standards, which could have changed three weeks ago. They’re constantly moving the goalposts so they can go, “Gotcha!” For example, when I was growing up, the most liberal thing you could do is not see color. Well, that’s wrong now. You see color, always, so you can register your white privilege. But I grew up in the Martin Luther King era: Judge by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. I still think that’s the best way to do it. Not see it... the air on the left is becoming stale. I railed for years against the Fox News bubble, and that is as strong as ever, but I didn’t think it would get this bad on the left. Comedians are afraid to make jokes in clubs, because somebody will tape it and send it out on Twitter and get the mob after you... Of course, intolerance exists everywhere, but the places where, let’s say, human rights workers have their work cut out for them the most are probably traditional Islamic societies. To conflate thinking that with Islamophobia is a facile and unconvincing trick.
I do wonder if, at least in the past, you’ve done some conflating of your own as far as, for example, treating theocracies or dictators as exemplars of Islamic rank and file.
I think you have it backwards. The government of Pakistan is more liberal than the people. Their senate recently passed legislation to end child marriages and local police forces have intervened. Yes, we have things in our country that are at odds with liberal values, but someone once said that, at some point, a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind... to those who say, when I mention instances of Islamism, “But it’s not everywhere,” I say, “If a doctor tells you you have cancer, do you go, Yeah, but it’s not everywhere?”... I define political correctness as the elevation of sensitivity over truth...
I saw this headline: “Mario Lopez Apologizes.” It was this groveling apology to the L.G.B.T.Q. community. You know what the problem was? They asked him about this trend in Hollywood of letting your 3-year-old decide their gender and Mario Lopez said maybe 3 is a little young for that decision. Monster!... Young people should be the free ones pushing the boundaries and not the ones inhibiting us. “Well, I’m not a woman, so I could not possibly know that experience.” “I’m not a person of color, so I can’t speak about that.” Professors are afraid to speak, because what they say, even if it’s science, might go against the politically correct notion. This is pernicious. I’m sorry, but I have to lay that at the doorstep of the far left and the younger generation. It’s not the worst thing in the world to hear something you find somewhat offensive. You can turn the channel. Look at something else. Go to a puppet show; you’ll never be offended."
Re: Pakistan - So much for the myth that governments (and politicians) are always to blame, not the people

California Restaurant Industry Group Sues Berkeley Over Natural Gas Ban - "The California Restaurant Association filed suit against the city of Berkeley Thursday alleging that its recently approved ban on the use of natural gas in newly constructed buildings will have "uniquely negative impacts" on the culinary community.In July, Berkeley became the first city in the U.S. to ban natural gas pipes in new buildings as a means of achieving greenhouse gas reduction goals... a shift to electric heat would change the cooking process and increase costs. "Many restaurants will be faced with the inability to make many of their products which require the use of specialized gas appliances to prepare, including for example flame-seared meats, charred vegetables, or the use of intense heat from a flame under a wok," the lawsuit said. "Indeed, restaurants specializing in ethnic foods so prized in the Bay Area will be unable to prepare many of their specialties without natural gas.""
If they can show it will hurt ethnic food more, they can argue it's racist and get it struck down! Or all the restaurants can just leave Berkeley

Anonymous professors attack colleague behind ‘grievance studies’ hoax as threat to university - "Peter Boghossian’s colleagues believe he “likely” committed academic dishonesty by seeking to publish several hoax papers in peer-reviewed academic journals associated with what he calls “grievance studies.”The Portland State University philosophy professor would like to respond to their concerns in person, but he can’t.The 11 professors and one doctoral student left their names off a letter to the editor published by the student newspaper Friday, while including their titles and departments... The professor told The College Fix he had taken great pains to engage critics, contrary to the anonymous letter’s portrayal.When Boghossian moderated a discussion with the fired Google engineer James Damore earlier this year, he told the audience that all tenured and tenure-track women’s studies professors had been invited to “be with us tonight on stage” for a “conversation,” not a debate. The same invitation was available for a future event on intersectionality... Boghossian compared this effort to having a conversation with someone who believes in Santa Claus.These “cowards” are the “very same people who laud and champion diversity,” yet spurn one of the few heterodox voices on campus, he said: “I’m not a hardline dogmatist” and he’s never voted Republican.He’s also not tenured, leading Boghossian to previously predict PSU will fire him... The PSU Vanguard, which published the anonymous letter, is also catching heat for not only publishing an anonymous letter, but mocking Boghossian in cover art and inside graphics.It also failed to verify the accuracy of his partners’ names, referring to “Heather” Pluckrose, editor-in-chief of Areo magazine, and James “Lindsey,” a mathematician and author. Pluckrose’s name was corrected to “Helen” sometime Tuesday, but Lindsay’s name is still misspelled.The anonymous colleagues are “obviously enraged at me” to the point where none of them caught the misspellings before submitting the letter... Nearly all the 26 comments now posted criticize the letter writers. A self-identified “female math undergraduate” said she had crossed off PSU as a potential graduate school, comparing the letter writers to “evolution denialists.”... “It is utterly incredible to me what the university has become … They can’t defend their ideas, they link me with Trump, they attack me as a person.”... “Talk about wasting somebody’s time,” Lindsay continues, reading the portion of the letter about the strain on peer reviewers. “They wanted to make a graduate or undergraduate level course in masculinities based on the Hooter’s paper,” referring to one of the published hoax papers on “Breastaurant Masculinity.”He defends the project as “an audit to raise the quality of scholarship coming out of shit fields” by professors who are “trying to turn [academia] into a cult.”Mike Nayne, a filmmaker who has been documenting the trio, says off-screen with Boghossian: “You’ve just been written up in the ‘Mean Girls’ burn book.” Boghossian says he’s not expecting sympathetic colleagues to write “another letter in support of me” because they are “too terrified … they’d be targeted and they could go up before the diversity board”... The scholars have given no evidence that the trio “falsified data” – a “legally specific claim” – yet they raise the question of how “extremely implausible data” was accepted so easily by several journals"
Yet liberals are upset by the journal of controversial ideas, which will allow pseudononymity. I guess knowing authors' identity is only important when they say the "wrong" things

Seamus (FreedomToons) on Twitter - "hey guys, I'm drawing the line. if you support bad thing, unfollow me. i only support good thing and will no longer be associating with people who i am better than"
So brave! So stunning!
This is a parody of liberals who proclaim that if you disagree with them, unfollow them

Men hired for sexual fantasy break into wrong house - "In a sex fantasy gone wrong, two men with machetes entered the wrong house in New South Wales, Australia, before quickly realising their error.One of them has now been acquitted of entering a home armed with a weapon in July 2019, Australian media report.They had been hired to carry out a client's fantasy of being tied up in his underwear and stroked with a broom... "He was willing to pay A$5,000 if it was 'really good'," the judge said.However, the client moved to another address 50km (30 miles) away without updating the two men. They then entered a home on the street of the original address. When the resident noticed a light on in his kitchen at 06:15, he assumed it was a friend who came by daily to make morning coffee.When the men called out the name of their client, the resident turned on the light and removed a sleep apnoea mask he was wearing.It was then that he saw them standing above his bed with the machetes, which they appeared to have brought as props for the role play. When they realised their error, one of the pair said, "Sorry, mate", and shook the resident's hand, according to local reports.The two men then drove to the correct address, where the client noticed one man had a "great big knife" in his trousers and asked them to leave the weapons in their car.The client then cooked bacon, eggs and noodles, and a short time later, the police arrived at the property, found the machetes in the car and arrested the hired pair."

Links - 17th January 2021 (2)

Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside - "A widespread misconception in much of psychology is that (a) as vertebrate animals evolved, “newer” brain structures were added over existing “older” brain structures, and (b) these newer, more complex structures endowed animals with newer and more complex psychological functions, behavioral flexibility, and language. This belief, although widely shared in introductory psychology textbooks, has long been discredited among neurobiologists and stands in contrast to the clear and unanimous agreement on these issues among those studying nervous-system evolution. We bring psychologists up to date on this issue by describing the more accurate model of neural evolution, and we provide examples of how this inaccurate view may have impeded progress in psychology. We urge psychologists to abandon this mistaken view of human brains."

Why Do Paper Cuts Hurt so Much? - "Physically, paper cuts hurt as much as they do for a variety of reasons. They typically occur on parts of our bodies that are the most sensitive, such as the fingers, lips or tongue. The nerve networks of these body parts can discriminate with exceptional clarity and specificity, sensations of pressure, heat, cold and injury. Our brains even have specialized areas to receive signals coming from these parts in high definition. The exquisite sensing abilities that makes our fingers, lips and tongue so good at what they normally do, also makes injuries all the more painful.These same highly sensitive areas are also parts we use all the time. Cuts on fingers, lips and the tongue tend to reopen throughout day dooming us to relive the pain again and again. Finally, the depth of the wound is perfect for exposing and exciting the nerve fibers of the skin without damaging them the way a deeper, more destructive injury can severely damage the nerve fibers impairing their ability to communicate pain. With a paper cut, the nerve fibers are lit, and they are fully operational"

Why Are So Many American Jews Politically Liberal? - "The explanation of Jewish liberalism as a fulfillment of Judaism also downplayed the fact that Jewish leftism was intensely secular and rejected the Orthodox definition of Jewish identity... Another interpretation looked not to Judaism but to recent history to explain this Jewish commitment to liberalism. Prior to the late nineteenth century, the Jewish political orientation in Europe and the Arab lands was passive. Jews feared the state and were detached from political involvement. Since the parties of the left in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries favored Jewish emancipation and opposed anti‑Semitism, Jews naturally supported the political left and distrusted the political establishment, which was often anti‑Semitic... With good reason, Jews identified anti‑Semitism with the right... While favoring the amelioration of social and economic problems by a strong central government, the Jewish approach to politics also contained an anarchistic strain. Jews had a deep distrust of authority because established political and social authority had threatened Jewish interests... In contrast to the Irish, Jews tended to view politics in terms of social and economic redemption rather than as an opportunity for personal advancement. Largely excluded from the politics of eastern Europe, most Jews did not believe politics was a place where a nice Jewish boy should pursue a career. Jews were influential in postwar American politics as intellectuals, contributors, and voters, but not as politicians. Skeptical toward politicians, Jews are not skeptical toward the political process. For them, it is the means to create a better world."

Doing yoga on log, fail GIFs - Gifvif

Parliament: New ERP system 'not a threat to privacy' - "Data collected by a satellite-tracked electronic road-pricing (ERP) system Singapore is building will be "aggregated and anonymised", said Transport Minister Lui Tuck Yew in response to questions about how privacy will be safeguarded." - Nov 3, 2014
ERP, traffic data to be used to counter terror threat - "Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) data and public transport cameras will be added to the Home Team's arsenal in the fight against terrorism and serious crime - as the Government toughens its stance on the use of such information in the face of mounting threats." - Apr 7 2016

The Best Cleaning Product Only Costs About $1 - "These holy grail items are as low-cost as they are versatile. Plus, they’re probably a whole lot greener than most of the chemicals you’re already using...
Salt
Vinegar
Hydrogen Peroxide
Lemon
Rubbing Alcohol"

Sewer Cleaners Wanted in Pakistan: Only Christians Need Apply. - The New York Times - "A recent spate of deaths among Christian sewer cleaners in Pakistan underscores how the caste discrimination that once governed the Indian subcontinent’s Hindus lingers, no matter the religion.Like thousands of other lower-caste Hindus, Mr. Eric’s ancestors converted to Christianity centuries ago, hoping to escape a cycle of discrimination that ruled over every aspect of their lives: what wells of water they could drink from, what jobs they could hold. Manual sewer cleaners, known as sweepers, are at the bottom of that hierarchy, the most untouchable of the untouchable Hindu castes.But when the Indian subcontinent broke up in 1947 and Pakistan was formed as a homeland for the region’s Muslims, a new, informal system of discrimination formed. In Pakistan, Muslims sit at the top of the hierarchy. And as one of Pakistan’s small Christian minority, Mr. Eric has now been forced into the same work his Hindu ancestors had tried to avoid through religious conversion. Although India has outlawed caste-based discrimination with mixed success, in Pakistan it is almost encouraged by the state. In July, the Pakistani military placed newspaper advertisements for sewer sweepers with the caveat that only Christians should apply. After activists protested, the religious requirement was removed... Doctors often refuse to treat the sweepers, who are seen as unclean and untouchable.Officially, Pakistan denies the existence of caste-based practices in the country. But across the country, the discrimination persists.One form of abuse commonly meted out on Pakistan’s religious minorities has been to accuse them of blasphemy, a crime that is punishable by death in the country, and that at times has been used to settle personal disputes. In one infamous case in 2010, Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, was sentenced to death, accused of blaspheming Islam. It later emerged that her Muslim colleagues had ordered her to fetch water as they harvested berries on a hot day. When she drank from the communal cup, they accused her of polluting it and an argument ensued."

Meme - "THE LEFT: We now live in a world where the richest 8 men own more than the poorest 3.6 BILLION"
""LIBERALS": That's an outrage! At least 4 of them should be women of colour"
Why corporates love liberalism so much

Russia’s Clash With the West Is About Geography, Not Ideology - "In the latter half of the 19th century, Russia had been contained by France and Britain — in the Balkans, the Middle East, India, and China — well before Kennan made “containment” a household word. Its defensive options being limited, its military doctrine has historically been offensive. It has sought to dominate its neighbors as a means of preventing the borderlands from being used against it by other powers. Whereas the West sees Russia’s fear of invasion as groundless, history has shown Russian leaders that foreign intentions are typically hidden or fluid. Each age brings a new existential threat; there would always be another Napoleon or Hitler... While military conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine have been attributed to aggressive Kremlin efforts to re-establish elements of the Soviet empire, it is notable that Russia has not annexed any of the breakaway regions — with the exception of Crimea, which houses the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The reason is not merely deniability, but also the fact that annexation of pro-Russian territories would have strengthened the pro-Western forces in the remaining parts of each country. Annexation would undermine Russia’s primary objective, which is keeping the countries beyond the reach of Western institutions seen to threaten Russian interests. The presence of frozen conflicts in the three nations effectively blocks them from joining NATO. The alliance has always rejected aspirants with unresolved border disputes, internal territorial conflicts, and insufficient military capacity to provide for a credible national defense... Gorbachev, no fan of Putin’s, also supported the annexation of Crimea, as well as Russian military action in Georgia. The West, he wrote in his memoirs, had been “blind to the kind of sentiments NATO expansion aroused” in Russia. "
I find it interesting how Russia thinks to protect itself it is justified in oppressing others

Jennifer Wright on Twitter - ""Women in the past were modest and had more respect for themselves." Here's Agnes Sorel, who had her gowns tailored to expose her favorite boob in the 1440s"

Caitlin Johnstone on Twitter - "Trump could have run as a Democrat in 2016 with a liberal-sounding platform, enacted the exact same policies he's enacted as president, and, as long as he kept saying nice-sounding things, Democrats would think he's awesome right now."

madison is not a fan of fascism or cops on Twitter - "day one of my zero waste journey! used my pasta water from breakfast to make my coffee "

Can’t You Just Fire Me? Man Paid to Do Nothing Wanted $2 Million - Bloomberg - "An executive who was paid about $18,000 a month by LafargeHolcim Ltd. to do nothing failed in his suit to force the cement maker to fire him with a payout worth more than $2 million. Timing was his undoing. When his employer Lafarge SA announced in 2015 a staff-buyout program as part of its merger with Holcim Ltd., Antoine Zenone hoped he could get a golden handshake. But the company told him he wasn’t eligible and French judges have said “non” -- three times in a row... Zenone was seeking about 2.1 million euros ($2.3 million) and until recently had been paid 16,195 euros gross a month by Lafarge without having to provide any work"

Baltimore's 30,000 Public Employees Cost Taxpayers $2 Billion But Can't Save Their Own City - "Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com investigated just how much taxpayer money flows into the Baltimore bureaucracy at every level: federal, state, and local. We found the city drowning in taxpayer dollars... Baltimore received more funding per resident ($573) than the comparable cities of Portland, OR ($274); Nashville, TN ($353); Oklahoma City, OK ($201); Detroit, MI ($372); and Milwaukee, WI ($183)"
Clearly, proof that even more money is needed!

The Real Reason Apple Made the iPhone SE So Cheap - "Over the past few years, Apple has methodically pivoted its business strategy away from getting you to replace your iPhone as frequently as possible. Instead, it’s maximizing the money it makes in a different way: selling you subscription services and accessories that work with the iPhone.  The recently updated iPhone SE is a prime example of that new strategy in action... Like Apple’s other new iPhones, the new iPhone SE has no headphone jack, which means buyers will at least consider buying a pair of AirPods ($159) or AirPods Pro ($250) to listen to music and take calls. Or perhaps they’ll buy an Apple Watch instead, which only works with iOS and starts at $499 for the latest model. Apple’s new focus on subscription services is good for customers in some ways. Phones are more affordable, and there’s less pressure to constantly upgrade.But Apple’s change in strategy has also put some seams in the formerly almost seamless iOS experience. Sometimes the upsell tactics are subtle, like putting Apple TV and Music icons front and center on new iPhone home screens. But other upsell tactics are more aggressive. In the settings of a new device, for instance, you’ll find a countdown warning you of how many days are left to buy AppleCare. Apple Music sends push notifications offering free trials. After a few days, you’ll notice that the free iCloud storage — a measly 5 GB — has already run out. When you use Apple Wallet, a giant advertisement for Apple Card hovers at the bottom of your screen."

How Alberta Won the Rat Race - "Along an 18-mile strip of land between the Canadian province of Alberta and its neighbor Saskatchewan, the rat patrol keeps guard. An eight-person team, armed with poison and shotguns, hunts daily for any sign of the rodent invaders.The Alberta rat patrol checks more than 3,000 farms a year, but it rarely sees an actual rat. Alberta has 4.3 million people, 255,000 square miles, and no rats—bar the stray handful that make it into the killing zone each year. Ever since 1950, a sternly enforced program of exclusion and extermination has kept the province rat-free. Nowhere else in the world comes close; the only other rat-free areas are isolated islands such as the remote British territory of South Georgia. Public support and education have been key to Alberta’s success. Locals use hotlines (310-RATS or 310-FARM) to report any sign of rodents, though false alarms are common. School programs educate kids about the telltale signs of the invaders. Keeping pet rats is banned and can earn you a fine of almost $4,000... The whole program currently costs just about $380,000 a year—most of the money is spent on exterminators’ salaries—but saves Alberta’s farmers millions... a hugely ambitious program launched in 2016, Predator Free New Zealand, envisages wiping out not only rats but stoats and possums by 2050. It’s an expensive effort. The pilot scheme—conducted on two inhabited islands, covering almost 15 square miles—cost about $3 million"

‘Always Sticking to Your Convictions’ Sounds Like a Good Thing – But It Isn’t - "a curious fact about American society’s supercharged political culture is that even the most humble debates (think: Which fried chicken sandwiches are best?) turn a tweet into matters of conviction.The result is that many of us come to see criticism as intolerable and disagreement with our opinions as a mark of moral inferiority. That’s a problem not just because it can lead to incivility; it’s a problem because it can lead to dogmatism, and when it comes to matters like climate change or immigration, even violent fanaticism... people do change their minds about such things, but the connection between conviction and identity helps to explain why it is so difficult for them to do so – even when the evidence points in the other direction... as Yale psychologist Dan Kahan and his colleagues have emphasized, it can actually be pragmatically rational to end up ignoring the evidence and sticking to your convictions. No one wants to crush their self-image; nor does anyone want to be voted off the island.  Conviction’s connection to identity also helps to explain how our increasingly polarized political culture can encourage us to turn every debate – from debates over chicken sandwiches to the path of hurricanes – into a grudge match...  For many, identity is increasingly constructed online, their self-image determined by what social networks say about them and what they say in response.Social networks, in turn, can act as tools for reinforcing and policing the way in which people describe each other and the convictions these descriptions encourage. Platforms like Facebook not only let people communicate their emotions; they let people reward and punish each other for doing so. Put these facts together – that our identities are shaped by cultural narratives and those narratives are increasingly told online – and you get our digitalized political culture, which promotes, rewards and upholds blind conviction."

Hardcore History 65 – Supernova in the East IV

Hardcore History 65 – Supernova in the East IV

"Morale, of course, is a psychological state, isn't it? So right now we're in the realm of harder to pin down and harder to say that what applies to Person A will apply to Person B, necessarily. But morale is one of those things that on a tactical level, on a battlefield level is undeniably huge, and they've been writing about it, military strategists, since the Bronze Age. The idea is not to kill everybody on a battlefield traditionally, it's to kill enough people to break their will to continue fighting right? To destroy their morale. Killing is a means to an end. Nobody denies this. What is interesting though, is to try to extrapolate what applies, and that is, if not provable, then demonstrable, right? You, you might not be able to prove it in a laboratory, but it's been shown to be true enough times. So you could say reliably, right?

Morale is the most important thing on a tactical battlefield. Is it the most important thing on the strategic one? Does it apply to whole nation states? Can you break their morale? This is an open question in the Second World War. Some people say you can, some people say you can't. Some people say you can but only if you do it this way. Some people say you can but only if you do it that way, what breaks the nation's morale? And what proof do you have that that's something that even occurs? Much of the justification for some of the bombing that's going to be done from the air on cities and populations in cities is based on this idea that you will get them to, you know, petition their governments and say we must have peace now. We can't be bombed anymore...

This is part of the interwar years of aerial development and theory on how aircraft are going to be these great peacemakers sometimes, because very quickly, the populations will tell their governments, you know, you got to get a peace deal going right now, we're not gonna put up with this. And then the Germans bomb places like London, and the evidence seems to contradict that 180 degrees. The people in London and Britain weren't ready to give in because they were being bombed, they were pissed off. Now, does this mean that it doesn't work? No, it means that the jury's still out, right? We're not bombing enough. We're not bombing with the right kinds of bombs, the right kinds of planes. Now, the technology hasn't caught up with theory yet. I mean, there are still people that think once we use these nuclear weapons, we can finally get that morale question working at the grand strategy level the way designed. And by the way, when Germany at the end of the war was bombed to rubble, they finally saw something more akin to numbness creeping into the population, rather than a sense that, you know, they wanted the war to end at all costs, that they were ready to give in, that it made you more likely to surrender. At the very, very end, I think they may have seen some of that, but by that point, you already destroyed all the industry in Germany. So why did it, I mean you didn't bomb them for morale reasons then. You just leveled them and if you want to say it worked, okay, but let's be honest about why...

Civil Rights and wartime are two things that we all understand are sort of at odds with each other. It's tough to maintain peacetime levels of civil rights in wartime, especially Total War. But the problem is, in this conflict in the second world war, this is something that the framework exists, the propaganda is geared toward and people understand it as a war between people who believe in things like what we would call civil rights, and people who don't. And so there's an irony attached to it that in order to beat the people who don't believe in civil rights, you have to do things that reduce the amount of civil rights in the countries that are fighting for that. There's a quote from, I think it's from Mein Kampf, a famous Hitler quote where he said that the great strength of a totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it...

[This] reminds me of some of the critiques of the US Founding Fathers about wars’ danger to political and civil liberty. Wartime exalts the power of the state over the individual, for obvious and understandable reasons. But that's why the fascist states like war and praise war because it dovetails into something they already believe in: the power of the state. In the western democracies that are supposed to have the civil protections that tend to get steamrolled in wartime. Well, it works against the basic, you know, framework of the system as it's at least advertised. If you want a practical example, I would only cite executive order 9066, which is infamous, but if you read it it doesn't sound like it should be.

This is an executive order signed by President Roosevelt... it along with several subsequent sorts of orders and directives, ends up creating a situation where you get 110 to 120,000 people of Japanese birth or descent. The majority of them by the way, you know, 60 or 70% of them American born citizens, sent to what we used to call and it sounded better than, relocation camps. When I was a teenager it got changed to the more ominous internment camps. And now it's common to see the much more ominous, but not Nazi death camp, equivalent of concentration camps. If you actually go read executive order 9066 it, it sounds short. It sounds vague and it sounds something that's sort of commonsensical. I mean, if you look at it, you just think, well, I'd be mad at a president, it would be dereliction of duty if he didn't do something like this...

The Constitution gives the US president a lot of warfighting authority. And so to quote Harry Truman, Roosevelt's successor, when it comes to ultimate responsibility for things, the buck stops here, meaning the President's desk and in the case of Roosevelt, you know, when weighing decisions versus outcomes, the buck stops there. But when you think about it, that's pretty common, isn't it? I mean, certainly in the Third Reich, the buck stops with Hitler, doesn't it? In the Soviet Union, it sure as heck stops with Stalin, doesn't it? He's the one with the responsibility. I think it's fair to say the buck stops with Churchill in the UK, even though that's a Western democracy and they have a parliament.

Who does the buck stop with though in Japan? Earlier we spent quite a bit of time talking about the unique way that the Japanese system, its politics and its culture developed, after, well, really for more than a century before the Second World War and how the system itself would break down. In the war, this is one of the ways it breaks down. There is no place the buck stops, when it comes to Japanese military responsibility. And if you're analyzing the Second World Wars from sort of the big picture level, this is one of the strangest things.

The Japanese command and control, their leadership situation, none of this is anything like any of the other powers. We'd said it's got a very sort of uniquely Japanese sort of feel to it. At the same time, this diffusion of responsibility is something that the other governments either did away with because they're totalitarian, they don't believe in diffusion of power anyway. Or temporarily suspended a lot of it like in the US in the UK with their wartime governments, the Japanese kind of don't. And it's because they can't. There are certain elements that are built into the system right? American propaganda used to always lump the Japanese in with the Germans and the Italians, right? It was always the big three: Hitler Mussolini and Tojo. Is that they're all totalitarians, all fascists, all dictators.

But Tojo wasn't. Might have liked to have been. Japan might have done better if he was. He was the most powerful Prime Minister John L McClane says in A Modern History of Japan, the most powerful Prime Minister of Japan had ever had. Gobbled up a couple of other political offices too, seems to be consolidating his power. Still couldn't control his underlings. He's an army general, couldn't even totally control the army. Forget about the Navy. We talked about the fact that the Japanese have the most hostile inter-service rivalry problem I've ever seen. Army and the Navy actively dislike each other. Don't tell each other things. There really is nobody who can tell them what to do.

When you hear the way sometimes Tojo is treated by his supposed underlings. Well that puts the lie to the idea that they're anything like Hitler or Stalin in terms of their power because a Hitler’d kill ya. So would Stalin if a general walked in to the office, demanded that you overturn a decision and then called you a stupid fool to your face, James L McLean tells a story in his book where that's exactly what happened to Tojo. Tells another story of another general who walks in, bursts into to Tojo’s office and demands that he either resign or shoot himself…

There's no one here who can override one side, referee disputes. What do you do if the Army and the Navy have disagreements on how to fight the war? And you can't make them agree with each other and unify? And we're all on the same team here, right? What if they go their own way? What if they don't even tell you? Some of the things they're doing, the Japanese war effort throughout the entire conflict looks very strange"

Links - 17th January 2021 (1)

Under new Cambridge law, undocumented immigrants won’t be arrested for driving without a license - " It’s the law that you need a license to drive.But, if you’re undocumented and driving without a license in Cambridge, police have been advised not to arrest you for that.It’s all part of a new law that passed unanimously in the city, which encourages police to summons unlicensed drivers instead of arresting them. The procedure has already been practiced for a while, but city leaders said they felt compelled to officially make it a law, in fear of what could happen to immigration laws should President Trump be re-elected."
It's amazing how much contempt there is for the law in the US - not just among individuals but institutions (and in this case, government itself)

Lily Martin - "How DARE you improve infant mortality rates to never before seen levels...How DARE you create wealth and improve living standards for the vast majority of people such as has never occurred before in history...How DARE you provide universal education, universal suffrage, strive for equal opportunities and human rights such as this earth has never seen before...How DARE you innovate and create technologies which improve the quality of life for millions of people across the globe...How DARE you provide asylum and a better life for thousands of people whose own inheritance didn’t furnish them with the benefits of the west...Hang your head in shame for your strivings and improvements across so many sectors of society....legal...technological....scientific....humanitarian....etcBe ashamed...be VERY ashamed...because Greta said so..."

Australians Against Destructive Leftism - "Descendants of convicts should demand reparations. Their ancestors were torn from their native lands, forced into labour and denied basic rights, causing generations of psychological trauma."

It'z rinaldo msr home of comedy - Posts - "Before you call a guy ugly, remember 95% of your beauty can be removed by a towel.

If Innovation Makes Everything Cheaper, Why Does It Make Nuclear Power More Expensive? - "only by sticking with the same design and the same team were builders able to shorten construction times and reduce costs over time. Keeping the same design and switching teams — or keeping the same team but switching designs — increased costs.The good news is that when utilities stick with the same team and design, costs decline on average by 12 percent. The bad news is that “it is not possible to directly transfer previous knowledge and experience gained on the construction of any type of reactor to the new projects.”Why? Because standardization gives construction managers the opportunity to “learn by doing” and build each consecutive nuclear reactor a little faster and a little cheaper. This makes intuitive sense. “There is no substitute for experience” is oft-repeated because it’s so often true. What matters most is the tacit knowledge in the heads of construction managers, not reactor models.Standardization reduces costs in other ways, the economists found. It reduces the burden on safety regulators whose own lack of experience slows down construction. It reduces the burden on suppliers of key parts, including reactor vessels, steam generators, and turbines. And it lowers technological uncertainty, which can lower the cost of financing — a major source of construction costs.All of this leaves Berthélemy and Rangel with their awkward finding: “innovation hampers the competitiveness of nuclear power through an increase in construction costs.” This is true for both the U.S. and France, but especially for the U.S. Where France has a single national utility that centralized decision-making, the U.S. had dozens of utilities choosing mostly bespoke designs.The difference between the two nations led a former commissioner with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to quip, “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the United States the figures are reversed.”... Is nuclear power really so different from other sectors? Consider that some of our most radical tech innovations — from the iPhone to the Tesla — are more expensive, not cheaper, than the products they replace, because they offer radical performance improvements alongside greater functionality.And that’s the rub. Nuclear plants made expensive by innovation don’t offer the radically improved performance that their promoters often claim, or that their customers are willing to pay... In truth, from food and clothing to solar panels and natural gas turbines, it’s incremental innovation, experience, and economies of scale — not radical innovation in product design — that, over a period of decades, drive down prices"

Alfred Kinsey: The Story Behind The Father Of The Sexual Revolution - "Although Kinsey has often been hailed as the “father of the sexual revolution,” it was not just religious voices who sought to defame him. Statisticians have pointed out that these subjects were not representative of the “population at large” and leaned towards people who were “sexually active and adventurous.” In other words, Kinsey’s research was in part biased.Kinsey himself was certainly biased in favor of sexual activity, having once declared “there are only three kinds of sexual abnormalities: abstinence, celibacy, and delayed marriage.”But how professional Kinsey was throughout his research is also often brought to question. He allegedly encouraged his research associates to engage in sexual activity with each other and pressured students and team members alike to engage in that activity with him. Kinsey’s assistant, Clyde Martin, even engaged in a sexual relationship with his wife. Kinsey kept recorded video and image evidence of sexual intercourse between subjects, assistants, and friends. Some of these he even participated in. He collected erotica from around that world which was deemed illegal by the U.S. Customs Service... Kinsey went so far as to research sexual stimulation in children as young as five months old. One of the subjects he interviewed for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was a 63-year-old pedophile named Rex King who had attempted “to bring to orgasm boys between the ages of 2 months and 15 years.” It only recently emerged that this data around sexuality in children came from one single man in Kinsey’s research, rather than from the several that Kinsey had initially claimed.By shielding King in this way, Kinsey may have enabled him"

Lucas Lynch - "Can mathematics be antiracist"
"First they came for the sociology departments, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a sociologist...But thankfully math and sciences were protected, because they believe in a sense of objectivity and logic and would therefore dismantle any such nonsense that activists tried to...... oh shit..."

Communism and the environment - "When communist governments took control of Eastern European nations in 1949, they embraced the Marxist ideology on natural resources - that natural resources have no intrinsic value; their sole purpose is to serve humans. At the same time, the governments promoted heavy industry to feed their military apparatus. The combination was devastating to the environment"
Doesn't stop all the communists when they bash capitalism

This City Hall, brought to you by Amazon - "Chicago has offered to let Amazon pocket $1.32 billion in income taxes paid by its own workers. This is truly perverse. Called a personal income-tax diversion, the workers must still pay the full taxes, but instead of the state getting the money to use for schools, roads or whatever, Amazon would get to keep it all instead.“The result is that workers are, in effect, paying taxes to their boss,” says a report on the practice from Good Jobs First, a think tank critical of many corporate subsidies... Fresno promises to funnel 85 percent of all taxes and fees generated by Amazon into a special fund. That money would be overseen by a board, half made up of Amazon officers, half from the city. They’re supposed to spend the money on housing, roads and parks in and around Amazon.The proposal shows a park with a sign: “This park brought to you by Amazon,” with the company’s smiling arrow corporate logo."

I’m cheating on my husband, but I’m much happier now—and it’s better for him, too.

Dirty truth behind washed and ready to eat vegetables - "We found a staggering amount of bacteria on food claiming to be washed and ready to eat. Glen Pinna from Biotech Laboratories compared a bag of ready to eat lettuce, with a fresh piece of produce.Our tests show loose lettuce has 470,000 microbes per gram, while the washed leaves out of a packet has 9.5 million microbes per gram.The results for broccoli were also surprising. Straight from the shelf, it has 280,000 bacteria per gram. Out of a packet labelled washed, the amount grows to 850,000. Pinna explained washed and ready to eat bags are actually ripe for bacteria growth."The conditions they're creating is really promoting the growth of bacteria," he said. "Anything that you're chopping up and putting into a bag and sealing and not holding under five degrees, those bugs are going to increase."In fact, he advises to avoid all ready to eat products."... all lettuce and leafy vegetables need a wash before eating.However, when it came to fruits such as apples, tomatoes, strawberries and grapes you may as well save the water. There was not much difference between washed and unwashed variations."

Newsofx - Posts - "Why do men kneel while proposing?"
"They're talking to the pussy, not to you."

Ilhan Omar on Twitter - "S̶u̶s̶p̶e̶n̶d̶ Cancel rent and mortgages"
Replies: "Willing to cancel your salary?"

Dr. Jessica Taylor on Twitter - "Beware any interventions or campaigns which encourage or convince women and girls to take responsibility for/ protect themselves from rape, sexual abuse, harassment, stalking or domestic abuse. Victim blaming is still victim blaming even when it’s called ‘keep yourself safe’."
Amazing. The clearest example of feminist lunacy yet

Man who donated his mom's body for dementia research learns it was strapped to a chair and blown up - "Doris Stauffer, 73, died in hospice care following a several year battle with Alzheimer’s, despite doctors saying she didn’t carry the gene for the disease
Medical officials feared the disease may have mutated and hoped to study her brain after her death but her neurologist was unable to accept her remains Finally, her son settled on the Biological Resource Center (BRC) in Maricopa County and signed an agreement to donate Doris' brain to Alzheimer's research Days later he received a wooden box labelled with his mother’s ashes and an ID number - but it was later discovered to  contain just the ashes of just her hand
The rest of her remains were sold to the US Military, strapped into a chair and blown up in a 'blast test' to study what happens to humans in cars hit by IED's"

An extinct bird just ‘evolved itself’ back into existence - "The Aldabra white-throated rail bird was declared extinct, a victim of rising sea levels almost 100,000 years ago.However, the flightless brown bird has recently been spotted – leaving scientists scratching their heads as to how – and why – the species has come back to life.According to research in the Zoological Journal of Linnean Society, the re-incarnated Aldabra bird is a product of ‘iterative evolution’. That’s when old genes thought to have died out re-emerge at a different point in time."

Meme - "Biggest dick award goes to my stepdad."
"Why is everyone hating me all i did was call my stepdad a dick."

Glass Vibrator Urn - "Have your loved one’s ashes preserved in this glass vibrator and keep the intimacy alive even when your former spouse is not. This unique sex toy allows you to pack up to 21 grams of the dearly departed inside of it, so you can enjoy their company every night"

Frisky dolphin gets very carried away mounting unsuspecting female tourist - "The holidaymaker was hoping to see the animals during a visit to Varadero, Cuba, last week - but the experience was more up close and personal than she expected."

Meme - "When you're going 15 over and see a cop behind the bushes...
Fuck! Please don't pull out!"

Aren't Women Wonderful? -  "I (25M) found out my girlfriend (23F) has an onlyfans and it’s killing me inside"
"The whole "women should do what they want" shtick sounds great until it's your girlfriend selling pics of her butthole to simps!"

Meme<.a>- "'lol if a girl hits me im gonna hit her back its obviously self defense' umm if a girl hits you theres a 99% chance its bc ur being a dick??'
'That‘s like saying it's fine to hit a girl for being a bitch, Neither is acceptable or justified.'
'dont you dare defend domestic abuse in my mentions. fuck outta here with that shit i dont associate myself with men like you'"
Only women can suffer domestic abuse, and it's from men.

Links - 12th January 2021

The Japanese Roots of Taiwanese Rice (And Its 30 Years of R&D) - "Rice has been cultivated in Taiwan for a long time. In fact, grains of rice have been found in prehistoric sites dating 3000-5000 years ago. But the story of the rice that we eat today starts with settlers from China in the 18th century and the long-grain, non-sticky rice that they brought with them and cultivated.Unlike farmers in many other parts of Qing China who practiced subsistence farming, these farmers made a surplus, which they then sold back to the mainland. Taiwan became known as a “regional grain storehouse” 「閩粵穀倉」for this reason. In 1752, farmers in Pingtung (southern Taiwan) even developed a kind of rice with a shorter growing season, so they could grow it twice a year — double the annual yield! However, this kind of rice is not the main one Taiwanese people eat today at mealtime; it is used to make traditional rice-based snacks, such as radish cake 蘿蔔糕. The rice that people eat at meals (and the kind that is used to brew Taiwan Beer) is actually short-grain sticky rice, similar to the kind Japanese and other northeast Asian people eat. This rice grows in temperate climates.Apparently, these are THE two subspecies of rice. In other words, ALL types of rice fall under these two categories 🤯 So Basmati rice, Jasmine rice, Mexican rice are all long-grain Indica rice 秈米 (Indica for India), and Japanese, Korean, and northern Chinese rice are all short-grain Japonica rice 粳米 . In Taiwan, these subspecies take the form of “the original rice” 在來米 and Ponlai rice 蓬萊米... why was there a need to grow Japanese rice in Taiwan?
Just as the industrial revolution in Europe was made possible by agricultural surpluses, Japan was then in the process of industrializing and needed people to move from farms to factories, which meant they needed other people to grow their rice– Taiwanese people. This division of labor was called “Agricultural Taiwan, Industrial Japan” (農業台灣，工業日本)
In the 1890s-1900s, rice shortages in Japan led to widespread riots. It seems that rice shortages occurred when Japanese troops were sent abroad (with large amounts of domestic rice). While the Japanese government tried to appease the people with rice from Korea, it wasn’t enough and also led to riots in the Korea. And the only other option was to spend huge amounts importing rice from Thailand. Clearly, an alternative, cheaper source of rice was needed...  In Japan, apparently, the more affordable Taiwanese rice flooded the local market, driving already suffering Japanese farming families bankrupt. (This was the time period when a lot of Japanese started immigrating to the Americas in search of a better life.)And in Taiwan, farmer incomes did rise, but still not enough to afford the rice they were growing. I wonder if this was a factor in making it the rice so desirable after the Japanese left? (Apparently, the reason food in Tainan is so sweet is because the people who grew sugar cane under brutal, exploitative conditions could not actually afford it, so sweet food was a luxury.)"

What is snow-washing? — End Snow-Washing" - "Snow-washing is a type of money laundering. It was coined by The Toronto Star to describe the flow of dirty money entering the Canadian economy for the purposes of tax evasion or terrorist financing, and the term is now being used internationally... An expert panel convened in B.C. has estimated that $46 billion is laundered or “washed” into Canada in 2018. Other experts have even pegged that figure to upwards of $100 billion... Canada has tied with South Korea for the weakest corporate transparency rules among all G20 nations, according to analysis undertaken by Transparency International in 2017. Shell companies are often associated with sleepy tropical locales such as the British Virgin Islands and Seychelles but it is just as easy in Canada to set up an anonymous untraceable company... Money laundering contributes to artificial price bubbles and makes housing unaffordable for Canadians. For instance, the expert panel in B.C. indicated that money laundering through B.C. real estate has contributed to a 5% increase in the price of housing. This is a big problem as vacancy rates are already quite low in major Canadian cities such, and it doesn’t take much money laundering to affect the price of real estate.Snow-washing also leads to greater opportunities for political and other corruption"

The not-so-sweet taste of hypocrisy about anti-Semitism - "When you become a funder of a group like the Women’s March, whose leaders have openly embraced and defended one of the country’s most notorious hate-mongers and anti-Semites, it’s clear that your claim to be working for a more equitable society is bunk. That ought to be obvious in the wake of the Oct. 27 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, perhaps the worst act of anti-Semitic violence in the history of the United States... Two of its leaders are open supporters of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and of notorious anti-Zionists.Women’s March co-president Tamika Mallory attended a “Savior’s Day” address in Chicago given by Farrakhan and was among those cheering him as he spouted his usual litany of anti-Semitic smears, in which he blamed Jews—whom he accused of controlling Hollywood and the media—for harming women. Afterwards, a smiling Mallory posed for a picture with the hate-monger.Just as bad is the fact that another key leader of the Women’s March is Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian-American activist who is a prominent supporter of the BDS movement targeting Israel. Sarsour has made it clear that Zionists, even those who are fellow liberal Trump-haters, aren’t welcome at the group’s marches. She is also a big fan of Farrakhan, but neither that nor her hate for Israel and those who support it haven’t prevented her from becoming a darling of the political left and its media cheering section. When confronted about their support for Farrakhan, the Women’s March refused to back down or to get rid of Mallory or Sarsour. To the contrary, they remain the faces of a group that is not only lauded for their anti-Trump activism, but now also has the support of Ben & Jerry’s—the moral equivalent of the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” for the left.When asked about Mallory and Sarsour, the ice-cream company was agnostic about their support for anti-Semitism... can one really dismantle anti-Semitism by supporting a Jew-hater like Farrakhan, and by championing a cause that advocates for denying to the Jews that which no one thinks to deny to any other people on the planet? Sarsour has been a hypocrite about anti-Semitism, and now the same can be said for Ben & Jerry’s.Some progressive Jews have already spoken out about disassociating from the Women’s March while Mallory and Sarsour remain at its head. But the message from Ben & Jerry’s is that it’s OK to hate Jews as long as you are “resisting” Trump. If liberal Jews, even those blaming Trump for Pittsburgh and act as if anti-Semitism is limited to the right, blithely accept this outrageous proposition, then they have lost their moral compass.After Pittsburgh, zero tolerance for Jew-hatred must be a given. The only thing people of conscience, whether liberal or conservative, should do is to “resist” Ben & Jerry’s new bitter taste."
Anti-semitism is only bad when it can be used to attack the right

Linda Sarsour & Farrakhan: For Liberals, The Ends Justify the Means - "There is almost nothing new in his latest hate-filled accusations. Farrakhan in the past has praised Hitler and derided Judaism as a gutter religion. Yet I say “almost nothing new” because the 84-year-old Farrakhan is now empowered by a new generation of leftist, minority, and feminist activists such as Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour, who coordinate marches with Farrakhan or ardently praise him.Not long ago, Representative Danny Davis (D., Ill.) spoke up in behalf of Farrakhan, calling him  “an outstanding human being.” Davis went on to use an unfortunate choice of words: “The world is so much bigger than Farrakhan and the Jewish question.”“The Jewish question”?The “Jewish question,” of course, refers to a 19th-century pan-European debate over whether Jews would ever assimilate into European countries. The debate quickly descended into abject anti-Semitism. And by the 20th century, in the German Third Reich, the phrase “Die Judenfrage” was to become the signature Nazi euphemism for the Final Solution. Davis is either ignorant or shameless or both.Even weirder was a recent revelation that in 2005, at a Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) event, a smiling Barack Obama, then a newly elected senator, had posed in the basement of the U.S. Capitol for a photo alongside a smiling Farrakhan... "[Obama] had people from the Nation of Islam working on his staff and in his office in the Chicago, his Senate staff,” Muhammad recently told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson in an interview. “The members of the Nation of Islam helped him in his Senate campaign and on the South Side of Chicago.”... Certainly, if a Senator John McCain or former governor Mitt Romney had posed for a photo-op in the U.S. Capitol with David Duke, while hiring members of the Klan to work on their staffs, they would have been disgraced and their careers quickly aborted. In the old days, anti-Semitism was more the domain of white rednecks railing against supposedly sneaky, rich, Eastern bankers and New York traders. Today it is the “intersectional” collection of black extremists, Palestinian nationalists, and radical feminists. They apparently feel immune from charges of anti-Semitism, on the premise that minorities cannot themselves be bigots and that leftists can loathe and single out Israel for inordinate venom, but not be anti-Semitic.In sum, the octogenarian Farrakhan is now a mainstream identity-politics activist and an apparently integral part of the new Democratic party’s “inclusion” agenda. Why else would Representative Jim Clyburn (the third-ranking Democrat in the House) have shared a stage with him? Or why would DNC vice chairman Keith Ellison (former Nation of Islam member) shrug off his relationship to Farrakhan with the assertion, “I am telling you, no one cares.” And if one looks to the Democratic hierarchy, he’s apparently right... Opponents of gentrification use the same old tactics of vandalizing newcomers’ property and attempting to destroy their businesses. In the old days, liberalism defended the efforts of “the other” to integrate into neighborhoods of the majority. Not now.Instead, it is okay for anti-gentrification activists to use racist language (“Be wary of white men” is a talking point in Los Angeles) to harass so-called yuppies, who wish to move into their traditional barrios. What would happen if there were like-minded bigots in Palos Verdes who organized patrols to stop Mexican Americans from buying homes in their neighborhood, as they marched with placards saying “Be wary of brown men”?So is the argument both that it’s fine for Latinos to be racist and that others are racists (which is not fine) for suggesting that Latinos are racists? Or is the defense that others were racist in the past, and so some now have a few more years in which they can be racists before we dial back the needle on the racist meter? Or is it weirder still: Whites are racists either for wishing to move into minority neighborhoods or to stay in their own white-majority neighborhoods?... Speaking of Russian colluders, we already know that British subject Christopher Steele was paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign to find dirt on Donald Trump and to thwart his candidacy. Steele did not register as a foreign agent of any sort. But unlike the Russians, he is easily extraditable from the United Kingdom. Why hasn’t he been indicted?... Other new disclosures show that Russian oil-money interests with ties to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin may well have funded and subsidized the efforts of multiple American green groups to retard American fracking... Sometimes the efforts of foreigners to warp U.S. elections are even more overt, at least in the case of foreign progressives in service to kindred American progressives. During the 2016 election, former mayor of Mexico City and often-mentioned Mexican presidential candidate Marcelo Ebrard was the subject of a flattering New Yorker profile. The puff piece (“How a One-Time Political Star in Mexico Ended Up Campaigning for Clinton”) praised Ebrard, a Mexican citizen, for “working on Latino get-out-the-vote campaigns on behalf of Hillary Clinton.”... Progressives are not much upset about the notion of foreigners meddling and warping U.S. politics. They indeed seem to approve of the idea that an American campaign would hire a British subject who, colluding with Russians, could help their candidate, Hillary Clinton, derail Donald Trump. And Russians aiding American greens to shut down fracking? Progressives shrug. A major Mexican politician moves to the U.S. to help Clinton organize Mexican-Americans voters to stop Trump — more shrugging."

CT Scan Reveals Mummified Monk Inside Ancient Buddha Statue - "Researchers brought a millennium-old statue of the Buddha, which had been on loan to the Drents Museum in the Netherlands, to the state-of-the-art hospital in the hopes that modern medical technology could shed light on an ancient mystery. For hidden inside the gold-painted figure was a secret—the mummy of a Buddhist monk in a lotus position. Shown outside of China for the first time last year, the statue had been the centerpiece of a recently completed exhibition at the Drents Museum that featured 60 human and animal mummies from around the world... The body inside the statue is thought to be that of Buddhist master Liuquan, a member of the Chinese Meditation School who died around A.D. 1100. How did Liuquan’s body end up inside an ancient Chinese statue? One possibility explored by the Drents Museum is the gruesome process of self-mummification in which monks hoped to transform themselves into revered “living Buddhas.” The practice of self-mummification among Buddhist monks was most common in Japan but occurred elsewhere in Asia, including in China. As described in Ken Jeremiah’s book “Living Buddhas,” monks interested in self-mummification spent upwards of a decade following a special diet that gradually starved their bodies and enhanced their chances of preservation. Monks eschewed any food made from rice, wheat and soybeans and instead ate nuts, berries, tree bark and pine needles in slowly diminishing quantities to reduce body fat and moisture, which can cause corpses to decay. They also ate herbs, cycad nuts and sesame seeds to inhibit bacterial growth. They drank a poisonous tree sap that was used to make lacquer so that the toxicity would repel insects and pervade the body as an embalming fluid. After years of adhering to the strict diet and nearing starvation, a monk was then buried alive in an underground chamber. Breathing through a bamboo tube, the monk sat in a lotus position and chanted sutra in the darkness. Each day he rang a bell inside the tomb to signal that he remained alive. When the peals finally ended, the air tube was removed and the tomb sealed. After three years, followers opened the tomb. Had the body mummified, it was taken to a nearby temple to be venerated. If the body did not mummify, an exorcism was performed and the monk reburied. To some practicing Buddhists, mummified monks are not dead but in a deep meditative state known as “tukdam.” Odds were low that the self-mummification process would work, but in rare cases it did. Just this January, a mummified monk in a lotus position, believed to be around 200 years old, was discovered wrapped in cattle skin in a house in a remote province of Mongolia."

The Death Toll of the Rwandan Genocide: A Detailed Analysis for Gikongoro Province
Rwanda's population in 1994 was 5.9 million. Estimates of the death toll range from 500,000 to 1 million, i.e. 10% to 20% of the population. Clearly genocide can successfully target at least as much as 10% of the population, or even 20% of it. In 1991, Tutsis made up 8.4% of Rwanda's population. With population projections that would be 11% of the population in 1994. However, moderate Hutus were also targeted by the genocide. I have not found numbers for how much of the population they would have accounted for.

History (HRW Report - Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, March 1999) - "Believing the Tutsi to be more capable, they found it logical for the Tutsi to rule Hutu and Twa just as it was reasonable for Europeans to rule Africans. Unaware of the “Hutu” contribution to building Rwanda, the Europeans saw only that the ruler of this impressive state and many of his immediate entourage were Tutsi, which led them to assume that the complex institutions had been created exclusively by Tutsi.Not surprisingly, Tutsi welcomed these ideas about their superiority, which coincided with their own beliefs... Once the Belgians had decided to limit administrative posts and higher education to the Tutsi, they were faced with the challenge of deciding exactly who was Tutsi... The very recording of the ethnic groups in written form enhanced their importance and changed their character. No longer flexible and amorphous, the categories became so rigid and permanent that some contemporary Europeans began referring to them as “castes.” The ruling elite, most influenced by European ideas and the immediate beneficiaries of sharper demarcation from other Rwandans, increasingly stressed their separateness and their presumed superiority. Meanwhile Hutu, officially excluded from power, began to experience the solidarity of the oppressed."
The Tutsis also benefited from Tutsi privilege. But of course those who mock the possibility that white genocide could ever occur in Western countries don't care

Bloomberg Tried to Ruin Me for Speaking Out on China Reporting - "my story shows the lengths that the Bloomberg machine will go to in order to avoid offending Beijing. Bloomberg’s company, Bloomberg LP, is so dependent on the vast China market for its business that its lawyers threatened to devastate my family financially if I didn’t sign an NDA silencing me about how Bloomberg News killed a story critical of Chinese Communist Party leaders. It was only when I hired Edward Snowden’s lawyers in Hong Kong that Bloomberg LP eventually called off their hounds after many attempts to intimidate me."

Tom Chivers has a theory about the latest Dawkins kerfuffle - "Richard said eugenics would “work” in the sense of changing population means in humans, but immediately added that he was against it... there are two types of people: the “high-decouplers”, which, in a statement like Dawkins’s, can easily separate the “is”s from the “ought”s. They can see that he’s making a statement about the malleability of human traits to artificial selection and, at the same time, realize that this doesn’t mean Dawkins favors such intervention.Then there are the “low-decouplers”, which couple Dawkins’s “is” statement with his “ought” statement. (I’d prefer to call the groups “couplers” and “uncouplers”.) These people embed Richard’s “eugenics would work” statement in a political and cultural milieu, and are unable to separate them. Ergo Richard, by saying “eugenics works”, is somehow justifying Nazism. That isn’t an exaggeration, as you can see if you’ve followed the pushback.As an example of a low-decoupler, I posted a tweet from a scientist who called Richard a “clown” who was “supporting eugenics” and deserved to be denounced. When I asked in my post if that scientist actually read what Richard wrote, I was denounced by the person (a woman) as a “sexist asshat”. (The exact wording was “So in addition to ‘Fuck eugenics’ and “Fuck dawks,’ I’d like to add, Fuck Jerry Coyne you sexist asshat”.) That, I realized after reading Chiver’s piece, was double “low-decoupling”: not only was the person unable to decouple Dawkins’s “is” from his “oughts”, but was unable to decouple my mild criticism of her from the presumption that I was a “sexist” (and an asshat, too). What would imply I was a “sexist” beyond her own sex?... 'I have a rule that I try to stick to, but which I break occasionally. That rule is “never say anything remotely contentious on Twitter”. No good ever comes of it. Arguments that need plenty of space and thought get compressed into 280 characters and defended in front of a baying audience; it is the worst possible medium for serious conversations.'...
They were angry because they deliberately misinterpreted what he said—either that or they couldn’t read or were just thick. What puzzles me is why so many people were and are so eager to demonize Dawkins. Jealousy is one reason, I suppose, but I don’t think that quite covers it. After all, there are psychological reasons for a seeming inability to decouple that the theory doesn’t cover.Chivers argues that it’s easier for scientists to decouple because they’re “used to taking things apart,” but I don’t buy that, either. It is those who are enraged by Dawkins—and they include many scientists, who have demonized him for his tweet)—or are determined to bring him down, who can’t decouple in this case. How bright do you have to be to understand that Richard was talking about the efficacy of artificial selection and not that it should be used in humans? Is that so hard—especially when Richard immediately explained what he meant in other tweets?"

Terrorism in the EU from 2006-2019 - the myth of the "danger" of the "far right"

In Terrorism in the EU in 2017, I analysed statistics from Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, on the motivations of failed, foiled and completed terrorist attacks in the EU, and showed that the moral panic about the "far right" was unwarranted, since they accounted for very few terrorist attacks in the EU.

After almost 2 years, I thought it was time for an update: I have dug up the 2018 and 2019 statistics, published by Europol in June (European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend report (TE-SAT) 2020), and they continue to show that right wing terrorism is much, much less significant than left wing and jihadist terrorism, which begs the question of why we continue to obsess so much about it:

In 2019, only 6 out of 119 attacks (5%) had a right wing motivation. This compares to jihadists at 21 (18%) and left wingers at 26 (22%).
(note that the relative magnitudes of the 3 motivations in 2017 and 2018 were similar to 2019, so the data appear to be quite stable)

One can't even claim that right wing terrorists are more dangerous because they are greater in number; if you look at conviction and acquittal data, the disparity becomes even more stark:

In 2019, there were 5 convictions and acquittals in the EU for right wing terrorism, out of a total of 520. This was under 1% of all convictions and acquittals. This contrasts with 362 jihadist (70%), 98 separatist (19%) and 48 left wing (9%) convictions and acquittals.

TE-SAT 2018 and TE-SAT 2019 don't provide a breakdown of convictions and acquittals for 2017 and 2018 respectively, but the texts suggest that the relative magnitudes of jihadist, left and right wing terrorism are the same as for 2019.

Of course, you'd have no idea about this if you only read the mainstream media.

For example, a April 3 2019 article in the New York Times Attacks by White Extremists Are Growing. So Are Their Connections (published, incidentally, just after my original analysis) tries to make it sound like Europe has a very bad white extremist problem.

The Washington Post beats the same drum, with a June 5 2020 article, As Trump vows crackdown on ‘antifa,’ growth of right-wing extremism frustrates Europeans, claiming pretty much the same thing.

We can't even excuse the media by saying that right wingers were a bigger threat in previous years and the journalists were just using older data.

Europol data on attacks from 2006-2012 and 2015-2016 also reflect that right wingers were a distant fourth behind separatist, jihadist/religious/islamist (the terminology isn't consistent) and left wing terrorism (though the ranking of the other 3 changes, in 2009 and 2011 there were marginally more right wing attacks than religious/islamist ones and in 2006 right wingers and islamists tied). There were even years with 0 right wing attacks.

And no, it's not that right winger were a bigger threat in 2013 and 2014 - data on attacks from 2013-2014 doesn't break them down properly, but from the arrest data we can clearly see that separatist, left wing and religiously inspired terrorists were a much bigger threat, which is consistent with attack data in every other year.

Presumably, it is more important to be morally right than factually correct, and since the "right wing" is bad, demonising them with fake news is a good thing.

Misunderstanding the character of an emergency

B: Today my father complained about how his old phone is not compatible with app that is suddenly mandatory by the state if he wants to leave his town without getting a fine.

*Lisa Simpson on stage meme: If you let politicians break the law in an emergency, they will create an emergency in order to break the law*

Me: So why don't we have more emergencies?

C: shhh, don’t ask them real questions!

D: why do you think they constantly declare everything a "state of emergency"?

Me: There were no non-foreign sanctions related emergencies declared in the US between October 24 2010 and February 15 2019 List of national emergencies in the United States - Wikipedia

Before that the US had no new emergencies declared (again excluding sanctions) from May 2004 to Oct 2009

A: you put "national" in there purposefully.
I know full well various states have declared weather related state of emergencies every year.
The executive powers they are using to do this do not need a "national emergency" to implement control. A state level emergency would suffice. This is specifically why my governor keeps extending the state level "state of emergency", because he would not be granted the emergency powers under the State law unless he did so, regardless of a declaration of a national emergency at the Federal level.

The problem is, most people aren't going to challenge something that might be an executive overreach if it only lasted a few days.
You could probably go back and find executive orders that might be unconstitutional under state of emergency if they were actually challenged, but there is little point to waste the money when it would take months to litigate and would be moot upon being resolved (and many judges may just dismiss the cases specifically because the challenge is moot AFTER the emergency is over).

The difference with COVID is that it is specifically demonstrating the overreach when you are dealing with emergencies that last for months. If anything, this is the perfect time to challenge executive actions to clear up what is and isn't allowed under declarations of emergency.

Me: what state are you in?
and do you think your state government is more tyrannical than the federal one?

A: the Federal one isn't closing down businesses and forcing fines on People.
That's all happened at the State and city level.

Me: you haven't answered what state you're in

A: it has no relevance on the debate.
If I state California, New York, New Mexico, or Texas, would it really make a difference?
What would you cite to make that relevant?

you can easily do a Google search for "[insert name of governor] extends state of emergency" and find they are all doing it in each of the states I mentioned.

Me: you claim states declare emergencies to gain power

Yet the fact is that it's rare for states to declare emergencies

So evidently this power has not been abused historically

so would you say that world war II did not merit a state of emergency that lasted 4ish years and that this emergency was an excuse to grab power?

A: please actually focus on what I actually stated.
Emergency powers are ripe with constitutional violations. Most are ignored because most only last a few days.
This overreach is only challenged in such situations as Covid.

I don't care if it's a few days or a few months, this situation is making it clear what actions are clear violations of the constitution and reining in executive authority.

Me: if you won't state what you think would justify an extended state of emergency, that suggests you think nothing would. And most people would disagree with that

A: so you believe a state of emergency should give the ability to violate the constitution?
Not once did I state that I said the State of Emergency itself is unconstitutional. I stated there are many examples of executive orders that are unconstitutional implemented under the state of emergency.

Me: erm. A state of emergency is literally to allow you to do things you can't normally.

What is a national emergency? Here are 8 things to know

A: they still cannot violate the constitution, unless you think the history of Japanese Internment is okay.

Me: actually,

States of Emergencies: Part IHarvard Law Review | ( Introduction The fight against COVID-19 has led many countries, including liberal democracies, to take extraordinary measures that would undoubtedly be constitutionally problematic in normal times. Around the world, we have witnessed entire countries being locked-down, with mass surveillance of cellphones, suspended religious services, restricted travel, and military-enforced curfews. While these measures are widely supported by...)

"Over 90 percent of constitutions in force today include emergency clauses that allow the government to step outside of the ordinary constitutional framework and to take actions that would not otherwise be permitted"

A: at this point, you're just saying it's fine to load people on trains.
I'm literally ending this discussion with you.
If you believe in unlimited executive authority with no checks and balances, just go to hell.
You are an absolute moron.

 

Ahh, Americans and their quaint ideas about "tyranny".

Pre-'Colonial' Slavery in the Muslim World

"The Qur'an gives no countenance to the idea that there are superior and inferior races and that the latter are foredoomed to a subordinate status; the overwhelming majority of Muslim jurists and theologians share this rejection. There are some early traditions, and early juridical opinions and rulings citing them, which assign a privileged status to the Arabs, as against other peoples within the Islamic community. The Caliph `Umar is even quoted, improbably, as saying that no Arab could he owned. Some pagan Arabs were in fact enslaved by the early caliphs and even by the Prophet himself, and the idea of Arab exemption from the normal rules regarding enslavement was not approved by later jurists.

Such an opinion did indeed reflect the social realities in the early centuries of the Islamic Empire, created by Arab conquests. By the ninth century, however, this privileged status had for all practical purposes ended... At no time did Muslim theologians or jurists accept the idea that there may be races of mankind predisposed by nature or foredoomed by Providence to the condition of slavery.

Such ideas were, however, known from the heritage of antiquity and found echoes in Muslim writings, the more so when they began to correspond to the changing realities of Muslim society. Aristotle, in his discussion of slavery, had observed that while some are by nature free, others are by nature slaves. For such, the condition of slavery is both 'beneficial and just,' and a war undertaken to reduce them to that condition is a just war.

This idea, along with others from the same source, was taken up and echoed by a few Muslim Aristotelians. Thus the tenth-century philosopher al-Farabi lists, among the categories of just war, one the purpose of which is to subjugate and enslave those whose 'best and most advantageous status in the world is to serve and be slaves' and who nevertheless refuse to accept slavery.' The idea of natural slavery is mentioned, though not developed, by some other Aristotelian philosophers. Al-'Amiri, for example, follows Aristotle in comparing the natural superiority of master to slave with the equally natural superiority of man to woman.

Aristotle does not specify which races he has in mind, merely observing that barbarians are more slavish (doulikoteroi) than Greeks, and Asiatics more so than Europeans. That, according to Aristotle, is why they are willing to submit to despotic government-that is, one that rules them as a master (despotes) rules his slaves. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, some Muslim philosophers were more specific. The great physician and philosopher Avicenna (980-1037) notes as part of God's providential wisdom that he had placed, in regions of great heat or great cold, peoples who were by their very nature slaves, and incapable of higher things-"for there must be masters and slaves." Such were the Turks and their neighbors in the North and the blacks in Africa. Similar judgments were pronounced by his contemporary, the Ismaili theologian Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani (d. 1021), who was chief of missions of the Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo. In a philosophical work, he dismisses "the Turks, Zanj, Berbers, and their like" as "by their nature" without interest in the pursuit of intellectual knowledge and without desire to understand religious truth.

By this time, the great majority of Muslim slaves were either Turks or blacks, and Aristotle's doctrine of natural slavery, brought up to date, provided a convenient justification of their enslavement.

Another attempt to justify the enslavement of a whole race, this time in religious rather than philosophical terms and restricted to the dark-skinned people of Africa, is the Muslim adaptation of the biblical story of the curse of Ham. In the biblical version (Genesis 9:1-27) the curse is servitude, not blackness, and it falls on Canaan, the youngest son of Ham, and not on his other sons, including Kush, later seen as ancestor of the blacks. The rationale of the story is obvious-the slaves of the Israelites were their near kinsmen the Canaanites, and a religious (i.e., ideological) justification was required for their enslavement, hence the story of the curse of Canaan. The slaves of the Arabs were not Canaanites but blacks-so the curse was transferred to them, and blackness added to servitude as part of the hereditary burden. This story, though widespread, was by no means universally accepted. Ibn Khaldun and some other Arab writers reject it as absurd, and attribute blackness to climatic and geographical factors. The idea, however, that blackness and slavery are somehow associated, as expressed in this story, was derived less from tradition than from reality

Such ideas have no place in the writings of Muslim jurists, who unanimously reject the enslavement of free Muslims, of whatever race or origin. Nor did the total identification of blackness with slavery, which occurred in North and South America, ever take place in the Muslim world. There were always white slaves as well as black ones, and free blacks as well as slaves. Nevertheless, the identification of blackness with certain forms of slavery went very far-and in later centuries white slaves grew increasingly rare.

Already in medieval times it became customary to use different words for black and white slaves. White slaves were normally called mamluk, an Arabic word meaning "owned," while black slaves were called 'abd. "' In time, the word 'abd ceased to be used of any but black slaves and eventually, in many Arabic dialects, simply came to mean a black man, whether slave or free. This transition from a social to an ethnic meaning is thus the reverse of the semantic development of our own word "slave," which began as the designation of an ethnic group and became a social term. In Western Islam-in North Africa and Spain-the word khadim, "servant" (dialectal form, khadem) is often specialized to mean "black slave," "slave woman," or "concubine."

It is not only in terminology that black and white slaves were distinguished. For one thing, white slaves, especially females, were more expensive; for another, black slaves were far more severely restricted in their social and occupational mobility...

Even religious groups with what some would call radical and progressive ideals seem to have accepted the slavery of the black man as natural. Thus, in the eleventh century we are told that the Carmathians established a kind of republic in eastern Arabia, abolished many of the prescriptions regarding persons and property which conventional Islam imposed-and had a force of thirty thousand black slaves to do the rough work.

Jurists occasionally discuss the status of black Muslim slaves. Muslim law unequivocally forbids the enslavement of free Muslims of whatever race, and was usually obeyed in this. There is, however, evidence that the law was not always strictly enforced to protect Muslim captives from black Africa. A fatwa (legal ruling) in a collection of such rulings by Spanish and North African authorities, compiled by a fifteenth-century Moroccan jurist, Ahmad alWansharisi, is instructive. The question to be decided is whether Ethiopian (i.e., black) slaves professing monotheism and observing religious practices could lawfully be bought and sold. The law is clear. An unbeliever may be enslaved, a Muslim may not; but the adoption of Islam by an unbeliever after his enslavement does not automatically set him free. Slavery, says the fatwa, is a condition arising from current or previous unbelief and persists after conversion, the owner of the slave retaining full property rights. If a group is known to have been converted to Islam, then the taking of slaves from this group is forbidden. However, the existence of a doubt as to whether conversion took place before or after enslavement does not invalidate the ownership or sale of the slave. It is significant that the writer of the fatwa discusses the question in relation to black slaves, that he is at some pains to insist that Islam does not necessarily involve freedom, and that he gives the benefit of the doubt not to the slave but to the slaveowner. The problem was clearly not academic. Other sources preserve complaints by black Muslim rulers about "holy wars" launched against them to take captives and by jurists-usually black jurists-at the enslavement of free, black Muslims contrary to law.

The question was discussed at some length by an African jurist, Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu (1556-1627)...

Ahmad Baba's answers, however, make it clear that many Muslim blacks were in fact being illegally enslaved, and he frankly faces the difficulty of distinguishing between lawful and unlawful slaves...

That this ruling was of little practical effect is shown by a later discussion of the illegal enslavement of black Muslims by the nineteenth-century Moroccan historian Ahmad ibn Khalid al-Nasiri (1834-97). Writing within the context of traditional society, he is nevertheless clearly affected by the new anti-slavery ideas current at the time. Al-Nasiri recognizes the legality of the institution of slavery in Muslim law but is appalled by its application. He complains in particular of "a manifest and shocking calamity widespread and established since of old in the lands of the Maghrib-the unlimited enslavement of the blacks, and the importation of many droves of them every year, for sale in the town and country markets of the Maghrib, where men traffic in them like beasts, or worse." This abuse is so old and so deep-rooted, says alNasiri, that "many of the common people believe that the cause of their enslavement in Holy Law is that they are black of color and imported from those parts."...

Despite such arguments and despite the decrees in favor of emancipation by Ahmad Bey of Tunis, the enslavement of blacks and their export to the Mediterranean lands and the Middle East continued and was defended by the increasingly flimsy argument that blacks were idolators and therefore that warfare against them was jihad, or holy war, and the captives were legally liable to enslavement. Since, for a conscientious Muslim, only a jihad could supply legally valid slaves, it was necessary to call every slave raid a jihad. One can understand the anger and anguish of a good Muslim like al-Nasiri.

White slaves were rarely used for rough labor and filled higher positions in domestic and administrative employment...

The importation of black slaves into the central Islamic lands, which began at the time of the conquest, continued without interruption until the nineteenth century and in some areas into the twentieth...

Between white and black slaves-even where the latter were numerous and powerful-there was for a long time one crucial distinction. Whereas white slaves could become generals, provincial governors, sovereigns, and founders of dynasties, this hardly ever happened with black slaves in the central Islamic lands. In Muslim India, a number of soldiers of African slave origin rose to high office, some even becoming rulers. Elsewhere, their opportunities for advancement were very limited. Only one of them ever became the ruler of a Muslim country outside the black zone-the famous Nubian eunuch Abu'l-Misk Kaffir, "Musky Camphor," who in the tenth century became regent of Egypt (and a very capable one). Historians clearly regarded this as remarkable, and the great Arab poet al-Mutanabbi found in Kaffir's blackness a worthy object of satirical abuse. In one of his most famous poems, he bitterly attacks the master of Egypt...

The same limitation of opportunity applies to the emancipated slave. The emancipated white slave was free from any kind of restriction; the emancipated black slave was at most times and places rarely able to rise above the lowest levels. In Umayyad times, we still hear of black poets and singers achieving some sort of social standing, even though they complain of discrimination. In later times, the black poet as a figure in Arabic literature disappears and none of any consequence are reported from the mid-eighth century onward. A few religious figures-saints and scholars-are said to have had black ancestry, but these again are exceptional. What is more important is that the black is almost entirely missing from the positions of wealth, power, and privilege. Medieval authors sometimes attribute this want of achievement by black slaves and freedmen to lack of capacity. The modern observer will recognize the effects of lack of opportunity"

 

Strange, we are told that race and racism were invented by White European colonialists to justify and facilitate colonialism.

Of course, we are also told that colonialism is a uniquely white phenomenon.