Effects of sexualized video games on online sexual harassment.
Oddly, the study's official abstract doesn't mention that it was women who were doing more harassing in *both* the pre- and post-treatment conditions - of both men and women, or that men were sexually harassed more than women. Doubtless, the study will then be used to bash men for being creeps
The authors posit that the moral panic about men sexually harassing women could have led to these results - women don't see what they do as sexual harassment, and men aren't seen as objects of sexual harassment. Which shows the obvious harms of bashing men
Medieval Weapons That Maimed and Killed - "The humble caltrop, a spiked metal device, was scattered on the ground to puncture enemy feet. The sharp objects were important enough that Philip the Good of Burgundy included caltrops in his niece’s dowry.Unlike many medieval weapons, it is still used today, scattered across roads by drug gangs to puncture police tires."
Maria Folau, ANZ Bank: Netball New Zealand statement | Israel Folau, GoFundMe - "Netball New Zealand is standing beside Maria Folau as controversy surrounds her support of husband Israel, and her religious views... One of Netball New Zealand’s major sponsors, ANZ, has raised concerns about Folau’s support for her husband.The Adelaide Thunderbirds star, like her husband is deeply religious, and reposted Israel’s Instagram post, where he asked for people to donate up to $3 million to help him fund his legal battle against Rugby Australia."
It is leftist wrongthink to support your husband's attempts to raise funds for court - even if that's not endorsing any of the views that got him un-personed. Apparently due process is bigotry
Israel Folau’s GoFundMe page shut down - "Israel Folau’s GoFundMe page has been pulled down with refunds to be issued to all donors.The fund-raising account, which had raised over $700,000, was taken down due to the breaching of GoFundMe's terms of services, with the company declaring they “do not tolerate the promotion of discrimination or exclusion”... Folau had his $4 million RA contract terminated in May after a post he made on Instagram citing the Bible was deemed homophobic"
It is only okay to exclude certain groups
Israel Folau supporters call for boycott of rugby and Qantas after sacking over anti-gay social media post - "“Israel Folau is from a devoutly religious Polynesian family. He has not sought to impose his views on anybody. He has merely repeated, as one correspondent wrote at the weekend, ‘what his religion has held for thousands of years. “Whether you choose to believe it is up to you. And if you don’t, then probably you don’t believe in hell either. I suspect that had Folau been a Muslim stating exactly the same religious beliefs that, in the unlikely event he was dismissed, it would have led to calls of Islamophobia’.”"
Israel Folau and the right to freedom of expression | Coffee House - "The list of ‘sins’ outlined in the Instagram post goes far beyond homosexuality. Despite this, most articles led with headlines about an ‘anti-gay’ or ‘homophobic’ post, which led me (and I assume many others) to believe that homosexuality was the only issue mentioned. Where are all the outraged ‘fornicators’ and atheists?... is it genuinely ‘hateful’ to express views on what is sinful behaviour? The contents of the bible may well be offensive to anyone who doesn’t believe in it, but are we comfortable with the ‘hate’ label being used if we disagree or are offended by its contents?... can we genuinely say that we are perfectly happy with people holding controversial views, but just not expressing them? What if Folau was asked about it at a press conference? What if Folau was giving a sermon in church on the subject? This is a difficult, if not impossible, line to draw. Just ask former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron – he felt it would be far easier to deny having views on homosexuality than trying to defend holding them. One of the more controversial aspects of this whole situation is the involvement of Rugby Australia’s main sponsor Qantas airlines, and its CEO Alan Joyce. Joyce is gay, and was one of the most prominent advocates of same-sex marriage during Australia’s 2017 referendum... Now the irony here is that Qantas’ CEO seems to be a great defender of people (and businesses) using their platform to speak out on social issues, but clearly not if he disagrees with them...
Is it ‘hateful’ to support a person that has made a ‘hateful’ comment?
A very hostile reception awaited any rugby players who expressed solidarity with Folau, particularly if they ‘liked’ the Instagram post in question. Billy Vunipola, the star number 8 of the English National Rugby Team, posted his own thoughts on Instagram after receiving multiple calls from people telling him to ‘unlike’ the post, clarifying that he didn’t ‘hate’ anyone but rather saw Folau’s post as an encouragement to live ‘closer to how God intended’... It’s also clear that sponsors should not be given an unchecked right to censor or shape the views of players. A recent example of a sensible compromise on this was when New Zealand rugby star Sonny Bill Williams, who is a Muslim, was exempted from wearing the logos of banks, alcohol brands or gambling companies on his club’s kit... it’s not a stretch to imagine an athlete saying that he wasn’t going to fly – not because he was scared, but because he thought that carbon emissions were destroying the planet. How comfortable would we be for that player to be sacked because his views conflicted with the interests of an airline sponsor?"
Israel Folau found guilty: Anthony Mundine claims ‘it’s about racism’ - "Controversial Aussie boxer Anthony Mundine has waded into the Israel Folau saga claiming the dumped Aussie fullback was a victim of racism in his war with Rugby Australia... “People are missing the point here, it’s not about the Bible or the Biblical quote that Izzy put up, it’s a black man expressing it,” Mundine, a devout Muslim, told Channel 7 on Wednesday afternoon.“If it was about the biblical quote then why don’t they push to ban that... “We take oaths of office in every court of the land. The Prime Minister is sworn in with his hand on the Bible — the same bible which Israel Folau has quoted and he’s now had his dignity, his integrity, his employment, his vocation and his income stolen from him.“I coached Australian rugby, I was proud of it, I was proud of the boys and I was proud of everything we stood for. Today, I’m ashamed of the people who’ve inherited our proud legacy."
If Sonny Bill Williams was treated like Israel Folau – Whale Oil Beef Hooked - "just like the American news story of the Christian bakers who didn’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding the media is not interested in shining the same spotlight on Muslims.Many Muslim bakeries did not want to bake cakes for gay weddings either but only new media commentator Steven Crowder was prepared to make that point. Once he made his point and provided the video evidence the Muslim bakeries (unlike the Christian bakery) were not targeted by the mainstream media or with lawsuits by gay couples and they did not have their businesses destroyed."
Imam Tawhidi - "People are emailing me requesting that I speak about the #IsraelFolau matter. I haven’t said anything because I am utterly disgusted by the level of hypocrisy Australia is witnessing. Islamists wish death upon Gays and then dine with PM Turnbull, but quoting the Bible is hate speech? The same Bible our government and all of its Judicial departments use to take oath? We have to accept the fact that religious texts reject and accept many things, but from an ethical perspective we need to find a common ground to accept one another regardless. For the sake of the stability of this country. I have opinions many don’t like, but you won’t see me going crazy on Burka street, Melbourne. Unfortunately a lot of greed was involved in this case as well."
2016: Malcolm Turnbull regrets inviting homophobic sheikh to Iftar dinner | LGBT rights | The Guardian
Man who won $30M lottery while in middle of divorce ordered to share winnings - "The Michigan appeals court says a marriage isn’t over until it’s over. It means Mary Beth Zelasko can keep $15 million awarded by an arbitrator, although she and Rich Zelasko had been separated for two years when he bought the Mega Millions ticket in 2013"
So, Gutenberg Didn't Actually Invent the Printing Press - "Gutenberg himself is a, but not the, source of printing. Rather, key innovations in what would become revolutionary printing technology began in east Asia, with work done by Chinese nobles, Korean Buddhists, and the descendants of Genghis Khan—and, in a truth Davis acknowledges briefly, their work began several centuries before Johannes Gutenberg was even born."
Teacher's remains found buried under Chinese school after 16 years - "Deng Shiping had refused to approve a new sports facility because he felt it had been poorly constructed.A man reportedly involved in building the site has now confessed to killing and burying Mr Deng in January 2003, police say."
Males with a uterus and fallopian tubes, a rare disorder of sexual development. - "A man (46,XY) is described with an intraabdominal uterus and fallopian tubes. His testes, each of which contained a gonadoblastoma, occupied the intraabdominal adnexal position, leaving the scrotum empty. His external genitalia were unambiguously male. A vagina opened into the urethra. His presenting complaint was inguinal hernia. This developmental defect has been described previously, but genetic aspects and its relation to other conditions, "mixed" gonadal dysgenesis in particular, remains obscure pending the recognition and reporting of more cases studied in the light of recent cytogenetic advances."
New FDA Warning Cautions Against Grain-Free Dog Food - "Grain-free dog food used to be a relative rarity, reserved for pets with certain dietary issues. But in the past decade, millions of dog owners have shied away from conventional foods that include ingredients such as rice or oats, out of concern that grains might be bad for dogs’ health. Now grain-free options constitute almost half of the dog-food market in the United States. Over the same period, gluten-free and low-carbohydrate diets also exploded in popularity for humans. Leaving grains out of your dog’s diet, however, might be a far greater health risk than keeping them in. According to a warning from the Food and Drug Administration released last week, grain-free food might be giving dogs a life-threatening heart problem called dilated cardiomyopathy, or DCM... Contrary to the broad cultural embrace of grain-free diets in recent years, science has offered little evidence to support their adoption among America’s canine companions. “It’s extremely, extremely rare for dogs to have a grain sensitivity,” says Lisa Lippman, the lead veterinarian for the in-home veterinary service Fuzzy Pet Health, in New York City. “This misinformation is a battle we face almost every day in the clinic, and it’s something that’s definitely been a source of frustration for us since before [the FDA warning] even came out.”... “People will anthropomorphize or project onto their pets whatever they think they need to eat themselves”"
Is it animal abuse to put a dog on a keto diet?
What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs - The New York Times - "Dynamic and wildly profitable Internet companies like Facebook and Google may get most of the attention, but Silicon Valley is littered with firms that just get by doing roughly the same thing year after year — has-beens like Ask.com, a search engine that no longer innovates but happily takes in $400 million in annual revenue, turning a profit in the process. Mayer, who is 39, was hired to keep Yahoo from suffering this sort of fate... Generally speaking, there are only a few ways to make money on the Internet. There are e-commerce companies and marketplaces — think Amazon, eBay and Uber — that profit from transactions occurring on their platforms. Hardware companies, like Apple or Fitbit, profit from gadgets. For everyone else, though, it more or less comes down to advertising... At its peak, Yahoo’s market capitalization reached $128 billion. It was $20 billion larger than Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company. But this growth obscured a looming problem. While Yahoo was busy enlarging its portfolio, a new generation of start-ups was focusing on perfecting one single product... Mayer’s refusal to delegate became a sticking point, too. She insisted on personally approving every hire. One executive complained to a friend that Mayer spent as much time deliberating Yahoo’s parking policies as she did strategizing over the sale of its Alibaba stock. Mayer also had a habit of operating on her own time... Mayer’s largest management problem, however, related to the start-up culture she had tried to instill. Early on, she banned working from home. This policy affected only 164 employees, but it was initiated months after she constructed an elaborate nursery in her office suite so that her son, Macallister, and his nanny could accompany her to work each day. Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; strategic goals were sacrificed, as employees did not want to change projects and leave themselves open to a lower score... Aswath Damodaran, a professor at N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business, has long argued about the danger of companies that try to return to the growth stage of their life cycle. These technology companies, he said, are run by people afflicted with something he calls the Steve Jobs syndrome. “We have created an incentive structure where C.E.O.s want to be stars,” Damodaran explained. “To be a star, you’ve got to be the next Steve Jobs — somebody who has actually grown a company to be a massive, large-market cap company.” But, he went on, “it’s extremely dangerous at companies when you focus on the exception rather than the rule.” He pointed out that “for every Apple, there are a hundred companies that tried to do what Apple did and fell flat on their faces.”... All breakthrough companies, after all, will eventually plateau and then decline. U.S. Steel was the first billion-dollar company in 1901, but it was worth about the same in 1991. Kodak, which once employed nearly 80,000 people, now has a market value below $1 billion. Packard and Hudson ruled the roads for more than 40 years before disappearing. These companies matured and receded over the course of generations, in some cases even a century. Yahoo went through the process in 20 years. In the technology industry, things move fast. “Sometimes,” Damodaran told me, “companies have to act their age.” For Yahoo, embracing its maturity means settling for a business that earns close to $1 billion in profit every year. It has outlasted other formerly iconic Internet portals, from AltaVista to Excite, and even dwarfs more recent web sensations like Myspace and Ask.com. For a company that started out as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” that’s not a bad way to grow old."
L'origine de Bert
Monday, August 26, 2019
Different concepts of being Chinese
When people talk (in English) about being 'Chinese', the discussion is muddled by the fact that 'Chinese' in English has multiple senses.
Critics of multiculturalism sometimes counter that there is no way a foreigner can become 'Chinese' - but really, this depends on what you mean by being 'Chinese'.
Mandarin is more helpful in delineating the different senses of being 'Chinese' (as one might use the English term):
中国人 - Chinese (nationality)
华人 - Chinese (ethnicity) - including the 55 officially recognised ethnic minorities (at least from the 20th century onwards)
汉人 - Someone of Han Ethnicity (about 92% of China's population)
华侨/华裔 - Chinese (diaspora)
Critics of multiculturalism sometimes counter that there is no way a foreigner can become 'Chinese' - but really, this depends on what you mean by being 'Chinese'.
Mandarin is more helpful in delineating the different senses of being 'Chinese' (as one might use the English term):
中国人 - Chinese (nationality)
华人 - Chinese (ethnicity) - including the 55 officially recognised ethnic minorities (at least from the 20th century onwards)
汉人 - Someone of Han Ethnicity (about 92% of China's population)
华侨/华裔 - Chinese (diaspora)
Post ID: 2055961245105419019
Links - 26th August 2019 (1)
Several US states consider legislation to decriminalise prostitution - "Lawmakers across the country are beginning to reconsider how to handle prostitution, as calls for decriminalisation are slowly gaining momentum.Decriminalisation bills have been introduced in Maine and Massachusetts; a similar bill is expected to be introduced to the city council in Washington DC in June; and lawmakers in Rhode Island held hearings in April on a proposal to study the impact of decriminalising prostitution.New York may be next: some Democratic lawmakers are about to propose a comprehensive decriminalisation bill that would eliminate penalties for both women and men engaged in prostitution, as well as the johns whom they service... Kamala Harris became the first candidate to endorse some manner of decriminalisation, an idea also floated by another contender, the former governor of Colorado, John Hickenlooper.“When you’re talking about consenting adults, I think that yes, we should really consider that we can’t criminalise consensual behaviour as long no one is being harmed,” said Ms Harris, in an interview with The Root.Supporters of decriminalisation see their efforts as part of a larger, decades long liberalisation of American mores, like lifting Sunday bans on selling alcohol and legalising marijuana.They also frame the issue as an act of harm-reduction for prostitutes and a tacit admission that modern law enforcement and age-old moral indignation has done little to stem the practice."
The Feminist Divide Over Decriminalizing Sex Work - "One woman, who asked only to be identified as Adrian, held a sign reading "Listen to Sex Workers," and another woman, who goes by SX, brought one that said "Consensual Sex Workers Against Sex Trafficking." They shouted a common mantra for sex workers: "Nothing about us without us." Anti-decriminalization activists attempted to step in front of them and cover their signs, and SX told Broadly hers was later confiscated by an NYPD detective.As the rally continued, some speakers made rhetorical gestures to Adrian and SX, calling them "ignorant" of their own oppression... Adrian told Broadly it's "frustrating" to be spoken about as though she doesn't know what's best for herself. "There are so many different experiences within the sex trade," she said. "Some experiences are horrible and exploitative. Other people have empowering experiences. Mostly, it's just a job—it can be very mundane. Sometimes you hate it, some days you like it. It's really frustrating having people paint us all as victims.""They don't understand the basic concept that you have ownership over your body and you have your own choice," SX added. "That basic idea isn't there for them. As much as they're listening to survivors and trafficked people they're not listening to consensual sex workers as well.""
It's feminist and empowering to tell women they're too stupid to know they're being oppressed
So much for My Body My Choice
Influencers Aren't Flooding Chernobyl to Take Photos - "Three of the four people that Zupan chose to highlight in his tweet aren’t influencers at all... people still struggle with how to best format their posts from solemn places. A crying photo will get you ridiculed for being inauthentic or cringey. Present yourself too seriously and you’ll look like you’re “posing for a rap album cover amid the abandoned buildings”... You could, as some seem to wish, not share anything at all. But as Natalie Shure, who researches history for TruTV, notes, “Most people do it specifically because they want to remember the site and what it meant to them. Those goals are in line with those of public history projects, not antithetical to them.”... most of these users are all trying to say the same thing: I was here."
Indigenous body positive brand asks white people not to wear their shirts - "California-based clothing brand, Nalgona Positivity Pride released a controversial statement specifically to its ‘White Allies’ asking them to not wear their clothes and thanking them for “not culturally appropriating”.The move has been criticised by some on social media for trying to empower one group while broadly negatively categorising another. For a brand that promotes positively, some believe this is perhaps not the right approach to get attention.
How long till they go bankrupt? Apparently cultural appropriation is okay if you're not white - as usual white people are evil
"DEAR WHITE ALLIES
ALL SHIRTS WITH INDIGENOUS DESIGNS WERE CREATED FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND PEOPLE OF COLOR TO WEAR.
BEFORE YOU PURCHASE ASK YOURSELF, "DOES THIS BELONG TO ME?" APPRECIATION FOR ANOTHER CULTURE DOES NOT GRANT PERMISSION TO TAKE, CONSUME, OR RE-PURPOSE MARGINALIZED CULTURES. INDIGENOUS CULTURES CONTINUE TO EXPERIENCE COLONIALISM, CULTURAL GENOCIDE, & LAND THEFT. WE ALL HAVE A ROLE IN THE DISEMPOWERMENT AND EMPOWERMENT OF LOCAL INDIGENOUS PEOPLES. ASK YOURSELF, WHAT HAVE I DONE LATELY FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES? HOW HAVE I USED MY PRIVILEGE TO HELP UNCOVER THE VOICES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN MY COMMUNITY?
SUPPORTING INDIGENOUS EFFORTS GOES BEYOND WEARING A SHIRT. WANT TO SUPPORT IN OTHER WAYS? PURCHASE OTHER NON-CULTURALLY RELEVANT SHIRTS OR DONATE TO NPP.
THANK YOU FOR NOT CULTURALLY APPROPRIATING"
The conversation surrounding cultural... - Sophie's Obsessions - "The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts. To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same. The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things"
I've seen non-white people bitching too, so it's convenient to only blame white people
Restaurants on level 5 of Jewel Changi Airport hit hard by requirement to stay open till 3am - ""We can only serve appetisers after midnight and we came up with the midnight high tea menu to resolve this problem. It is available from 10pm to 3am but there are still no customers despite this"... The only restaurant that is doing well in the wee hours is Rumours Bar & Grill, which is the only outlet on the fifth level that is allowed to sell alcoholic drinks past midnight... The picture is more mixed for restaurants opening late in other parts of Jewel."
The Men’s Mental Health Double-Bind - "many mental health organizations and high-profile individuals are sending out an insistent message that men must talk more about their mental health... However, other individuals and organizations are sending out a completely different message, namely that men as a group need to remain silent and "check their privilege."... Such messages can be seen all over the Internet, with pleas for men to shut-up or stop whining. Of note, these pleas come from both men and women. These echo comments men often hear in face-to-face interactions, even from their intimates and their employers.Indeed, such perspectives can emanate from high places, including the U.S. Senate, with Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono recently stating, "I just want to say to the men in this country: just shut up and step up. Do the right thing for a change." For some, male silence is a sign of moral rectitude.This situation creates a men’s mental health double-bind. On the one hand, men are being told to talk more and open-up; on the other hand, men are being told to check their privilege and be silent. This can only create cognitive and emotional distress... Numerous groups have attempted to organize discussions about issues affecting men’s mental health. These are sometimes met with hostility.For example, a group of male and female students at Ryerson University created a men’s issues group, holding events to discuss men's mental health. This group was refused official status by Ryerson University’s Student Union on numerous occasions, with members being stigmatized and abused by some campus activists... other groups have invited well-known mental health scholars as guest speakers, with unforeseen consequences. For example, the University of Toronto Men's Issues Society invited Dr. Warren Farrell to talk about men’s mental health issues, but his lecture was met with violence and vandalism by protesters who tried to shut down the event... Several British psychologists recently formed a male psychology group offering public lectures, a website, a newsletter and a social space to discuss men’s mental health issues (full disclosure: I am a member).As the group grew, the leadership applied for the group to be recognized as an official section of the British Psychological Society (BPS). This would require a vote from the whole BPS membership.Bizarrely, this was opposed by an organized group entitled "no to male psychology," which campaigned for a no vote. In the resultant ballot, over 4,000 BPS members voted, with two-thirds in favour of the new section. This was welcome news, but it can not go unnoticed that 30 percent of BPS members who voted did not want a male psychology section."
So much for feminism being about men
'Check your privilege' means 'Shut your mouth' - "Fortgang is quite right to complain that being obsessively on the lookout for white male heterosexual bias can obscure more than it reveals, in part by ignoring how much heterosexual white men can differ.In any case, Fortgang didn't complain about being asked to reflect on the incompleteness of his worldview. He complained about the dismissal of opinions based on who was uttering them.And while the phrase "check your privilege" could be used, hypothetically, to deepen a conversation instead of to shut it down, the critics don't seem all that interested in doing so. One of the most-linked critiques announces in its very first sentence that the author has been un-friending people who linked approvingly to Fortgang's essay.It's a free country, and people can be as narrow-minded as they like. But they should know that they're proving Fortgang's point about the illiberalism – on college campuses and elsewhere – that's too often behind the cliche."
The surprising truth about Indian food - "I was in a narrow kitchen in Mumbai, one of India’s most strikingly modern cities, watching an ancient Indian meal being cooked on vessels of baked clay. Utensils made from leaves, wood and metal were scattered across the kitchen. The food was being prepared using only ingredients native to the subcontinent, which meant that the sharpness of chillies (native to Mexico) and the starch of the potatoes (imported from South America) were missing.“No cabbages, cauliflower, peas or carrots, either,” said Kasturirangan Ramanujam, one of the cooks preparing the meal. But that won’t stop him from making an elaborate feast for my family that will include rice, the mulligatawny-like saatramudu, protein-rich kuzhambu gravy and an astonishing array of vegetables and snacks.This is the shraadha meal that is eaten by many Hindu families in southern India on the death anniversaries of close family members – in this case, the anniversary of my father-in-law’s passing. While the feast is believed to feed families’ departed ancestors, it has inadvertently created a living memory of the region’s culinary history, because it is made entirely from recipes and ingredients that have existed on the subcontinent for at least a millennium"
Man gets jail, caning for scrawling racist graffiti in Geylang - "She said that "a strong deterrent sentence" ought to be imposed, adding that the High Court had previously noted that offences involving racial relations needed to be deterred "as racial harmony forms the bedrock upon which peace and progress in Singapore are founded"... When asked by District Judge John Ng if he had anything to say, Chen, who was not represented, said "I think nine strokes is OK".The judge said that even though Chen was "prepared to accept the sentence", the court would be giving a marginally reduced sentence in view of the aggregation principle, which holds that the total sentence should not be crushing on the offender.He ordered the permanent marker used in the offences to be forfeited to police."
Strange how there wasn't a racial riot over this
Norway Now Kills More Whales Than Japan And Iceland Combined - "The IWC has not formally commented on Norway’s whaling since 2001 and the international community has not presented a demarche to Norway since 2006,"
The wrong side of history has become a crowded place. Time to rethink - "Like the crevice down the back of a sofa, full of coins and old bits of Play-Doh, the Wrong Side of History has become a crowded place in recent years. Among those consigned to it have been Brexiteers, anti-vaxxers, vaccine proponents, feminists who don’t accept the idea of gender as an innate essence, the leftwing Somali-American politician Ilhan Omar, and Benjamin Netanyahu. When the online publication Vox asked a panel of experts what we’d look back on with shame in 50 years, answers included the war on drugs, laws restricting the purchase of sex, and meat-eating. But perhaps what we should really look back on with shame is banging on about the right and wrong sides of history. A clue to the problem came when the ethicist Karen Swallow Prior, responding to Vox, nominated abortion as the thing we’ll come to agree was an immoral horror. The average progressive would object vehemently, of course. But who’s to say Prior is wrong? Appealing to the judgment of history involves consulting a bunch of imaginary people from the future, so it’s hardly a surprise when they turn out to agree with whoever is doing the consulting... Khan opposed Trump’s visit on the persuasive grounds that “the far right is on the rise around the world, threatening our hard-won rights and freedoms”. But that helps to show why the “wrong side of history” idea makes no sense. If the far right’s eventual defeat were guaranteed, there would be much less to worry about. The real hazard, though, comes when the idea is used by contemporary pontificators to avoid confronting the possibility that they, themselves, might be wrong. Once you’re confident of history’s position, you needn’t ask whether your critics might have a point; you can dismiss them as anachronistic fuddy-duddies who haven’t caught up with the latest advance toward moral truth. The irony is that it is a good idea to reflect on the judgment of history – not to reinforce your opinions, but rather to unsettle them, and infuse them with a dose of humility. The past is full of periods when people endorsed ridiculous or horrifying views, but they evidently didn’t think so at the time. Why should any of us be immune, just because our time happens to be now?"
The Feminist Divide Over Decriminalizing Sex Work - "One woman, who asked only to be identified as Adrian, held a sign reading "Listen to Sex Workers," and another woman, who goes by SX, brought one that said "Consensual Sex Workers Against Sex Trafficking." They shouted a common mantra for sex workers: "Nothing about us without us." Anti-decriminalization activists attempted to step in front of them and cover their signs, and SX told Broadly hers was later confiscated by an NYPD detective.As the rally continued, some speakers made rhetorical gestures to Adrian and SX, calling them "ignorant" of their own oppression... Adrian told Broadly it's "frustrating" to be spoken about as though she doesn't know what's best for herself. "There are so many different experiences within the sex trade," she said. "Some experiences are horrible and exploitative. Other people have empowering experiences. Mostly, it's just a job—it can be very mundane. Sometimes you hate it, some days you like it. It's really frustrating having people paint us all as victims.""They don't understand the basic concept that you have ownership over your body and you have your own choice," SX added. "That basic idea isn't there for them. As much as they're listening to survivors and trafficked people they're not listening to consensual sex workers as well.""
It's feminist and empowering to tell women they're too stupid to know they're being oppressed
So much for My Body My Choice
Influencers Aren't Flooding Chernobyl to Take Photos - "Three of the four people that Zupan chose to highlight in his tweet aren’t influencers at all... people still struggle with how to best format their posts from solemn places. A crying photo will get you ridiculed for being inauthentic or cringey. Present yourself too seriously and you’ll look like you’re “posing for a rap album cover amid the abandoned buildings”... You could, as some seem to wish, not share anything at all. But as Natalie Shure, who researches history for TruTV, notes, “Most people do it specifically because they want to remember the site and what it meant to them. Those goals are in line with those of public history projects, not antithetical to them.”... most of these users are all trying to say the same thing: I was here."
Indigenous body positive brand asks white people not to wear their shirts - "California-based clothing brand, Nalgona Positivity Pride released a controversial statement specifically to its ‘White Allies’ asking them to not wear their clothes and thanking them for “not culturally appropriating”.The move has been criticised by some on social media for trying to empower one group while broadly negatively categorising another. For a brand that promotes positively, some believe this is perhaps not the right approach to get attention.
How long till they go bankrupt? Apparently cultural appropriation is okay if you're not white - as usual white people are evil
"DEAR WHITE ALLIES
ALL SHIRTS WITH INDIGENOUS DESIGNS WERE CREATED FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND PEOPLE OF COLOR TO WEAR.
BEFORE YOU PURCHASE ASK YOURSELF, "DOES THIS BELONG TO ME?" APPRECIATION FOR ANOTHER CULTURE DOES NOT GRANT PERMISSION TO TAKE, CONSUME, OR RE-PURPOSE MARGINALIZED CULTURES. INDIGENOUS CULTURES CONTINUE TO EXPERIENCE COLONIALISM, CULTURAL GENOCIDE, & LAND THEFT. WE ALL HAVE A ROLE IN THE DISEMPOWERMENT AND EMPOWERMENT OF LOCAL INDIGENOUS PEOPLES. ASK YOURSELF, WHAT HAVE I DONE LATELY FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLES? HOW HAVE I USED MY PRIVILEGE TO HELP UNCOVER THE VOICES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN MY COMMUNITY?
SUPPORTING INDIGENOUS EFFORTS GOES BEYOND WEARING A SHIRT. WANT TO SUPPORT IN OTHER WAYS? PURCHASE OTHER NON-CULTURALLY RELEVANT SHIRTS OR DONATE TO NPP.
THANK YOU FOR NOT CULTURALLY APPROPRIATING"
The conversation surrounding cultural... - Sophie's Obsessions - "The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts. To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same. The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things"
I've seen non-white people bitching too, so it's convenient to only blame white people
Restaurants on level 5 of Jewel Changi Airport hit hard by requirement to stay open till 3am - ""We can only serve appetisers after midnight and we came up with the midnight high tea menu to resolve this problem. It is available from 10pm to 3am but there are still no customers despite this"... The only restaurant that is doing well in the wee hours is Rumours Bar & Grill, which is the only outlet on the fifth level that is allowed to sell alcoholic drinks past midnight... The picture is more mixed for restaurants opening late in other parts of Jewel."
The Men’s Mental Health Double-Bind - "many mental health organizations and high-profile individuals are sending out an insistent message that men must talk more about their mental health... However, other individuals and organizations are sending out a completely different message, namely that men as a group need to remain silent and "check their privilege."... Such messages can be seen all over the Internet, with pleas for men to shut-up or stop whining. Of note, these pleas come from both men and women. These echo comments men often hear in face-to-face interactions, even from their intimates and their employers.Indeed, such perspectives can emanate from high places, including the U.S. Senate, with Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono recently stating, "I just want to say to the men in this country: just shut up and step up. Do the right thing for a change." For some, male silence is a sign of moral rectitude.This situation creates a men’s mental health double-bind. On the one hand, men are being told to talk more and open-up; on the other hand, men are being told to check their privilege and be silent. This can only create cognitive and emotional distress... Numerous groups have attempted to organize discussions about issues affecting men’s mental health. These are sometimes met with hostility.For example, a group of male and female students at Ryerson University created a men’s issues group, holding events to discuss men's mental health. This group was refused official status by Ryerson University’s Student Union on numerous occasions, with members being stigmatized and abused by some campus activists... other groups have invited well-known mental health scholars as guest speakers, with unforeseen consequences. For example, the University of Toronto Men's Issues Society invited Dr. Warren Farrell to talk about men’s mental health issues, but his lecture was met with violence and vandalism by protesters who tried to shut down the event... Several British psychologists recently formed a male psychology group offering public lectures, a website, a newsletter and a social space to discuss men’s mental health issues (full disclosure: I am a member).As the group grew, the leadership applied for the group to be recognized as an official section of the British Psychological Society (BPS). This would require a vote from the whole BPS membership.Bizarrely, this was opposed by an organized group entitled "no to male psychology," which campaigned for a no vote. In the resultant ballot, over 4,000 BPS members voted, with two-thirds in favour of the new section. This was welcome news, but it can not go unnoticed that 30 percent of BPS members who voted did not want a male psychology section."
So much for feminism being about men
'Check your privilege' means 'Shut your mouth' - "Fortgang is quite right to complain that being obsessively on the lookout for white male heterosexual bias can obscure more than it reveals, in part by ignoring how much heterosexual white men can differ.In any case, Fortgang didn't complain about being asked to reflect on the incompleteness of his worldview. He complained about the dismissal of opinions based on who was uttering them.And while the phrase "check your privilege" could be used, hypothetically, to deepen a conversation instead of to shut it down, the critics don't seem all that interested in doing so. One of the most-linked critiques announces in its very first sentence that the author has been un-friending people who linked approvingly to Fortgang's essay.It's a free country, and people can be as narrow-minded as they like. But they should know that they're proving Fortgang's point about the illiberalism – on college campuses and elsewhere – that's too often behind the cliche."
The surprising truth about Indian food - "I was in a narrow kitchen in Mumbai, one of India’s most strikingly modern cities, watching an ancient Indian meal being cooked on vessels of baked clay. Utensils made from leaves, wood and metal were scattered across the kitchen. The food was being prepared using only ingredients native to the subcontinent, which meant that the sharpness of chillies (native to Mexico) and the starch of the potatoes (imported from South America) were missing.“No cabbages, cauliflower, peas or carrots, either,” said Kasturirangan Ramanujam, one of the cooks preparing the meal. But that won’t stop him from making an elaborate feast for my family that will include rice, the mulligatawny-like saatramudu, protein-rich kuzhambu gravy and an astonishing array of vegetables and snacks.This is the shraadha meal that is eaten by many Hindu families in southern India on the death anniversaries of close family members – in this case, the anniversary of my father-in-law’s passing. While the feast is believed to feed families’ departed ancestors, it has inadvertently created a living memory of the region’s culinary history, because it is made entirely from recipes and ingredients that have existed on the subcontinent for at least a millennium"
Man gets jail, caning for scrawling racist graffiti in Geylang - "She said that "a strong deterrent sentence" ought to be imposed, adding that the High Court had previously noted that offences involving racial relations needed to be deterred "as racial harmony forms the bedrock upon which peace and progress in Singapore are founded"... When asked by District Judge John Ng if he had anything to say, Chen, who was not represented, said "I think nine strokes is OK".The judge said that even though Chen was "prepared to accept the sentence", the court would be giving a marginally reduced sentence in view of the aggregation principle, which holds that the total sentence should not be crushing on the offender.He ordered the permanent marker used in the offences to be forfeited to police."
Strange how there wasn't a racial riot over this
Norway Now Kills More Whales Than Japan And Iceland Combined - "The IWC has not formally commented on Norway’s whaling since 2001 and the international community has not presented a demarche to Norway since 2006,"
The wrong side of history has become a crowded place. Time to rethink - "Like the crevice down the back of a sofa, full of coins and old bits of Play-Doh, the Wrong Side of History has become a crowded place in recent years. Among those consigned to it have been Brexiteers, anti-vaxxers, vaccine proponents, feminists who don’t accept the idea of gender as an innate essence, the leftwing Somali-American politician Ilhan Omar, and Benjamin Netanyahu. When the online publication Vox asked a panel of experts what we’d look back on with shame in 50 years, answers included the war on drugs, laws restricting the purchase of sex, and meat-eating. But perhaps what we should really look back on with shame is banging on about the right and wrong sides of history. A clue to the problem came when the ethicist Karen Swallow Prior, responding to Vox, nominated abortion as the thing we’ll come to agree was an immoral horror. The average progressive would object vehemently, of course. But who’s to say Prior is wrong? Appealing to the judgment of history involves consulting a bunch of imaginary people from the future, so it’s hardly a surprise when they turn out to agree with whoever is doing the consulting... Khan opposed Trump’s visit on the persuasive grounds that “the far right is on the rise around the world, threatening our hard-won rights and freedoms”. But that helps to show why the “wrong side of history” idea makes no sense. If the far right’s eventual defeat were guaranteed, there would be much less to worry about. The real hazard, though, comes when the idea is used by contemporary pontificators to avoid confronting the possibility that they, themselves, might be wrong. Once you’re confident of history’s position, you needn’t ask whether your critics might have a point; you can dismiss them as anachronistic fuddy-duddies who haven’t caught up with the latest advance toward moral truth. The irony is that it is a good idea to reflect on the judgment of history – not to reinforce your opinions, but rather to unsettle them, and infuse them with a dose of humility. The past is full of periods when people endorsed ridiculous or horrifying views, but they evidently didn’t think so at the time. Why should any of us be immune, just because our time happens to be now?"
Post ID: 2176146231282049827
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Links - 25th August 2019 (3)
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Trump's visit - "There has not been an invitation to make a joint address to Parliament. John Bercow, the speaker, it's in his gift, he clearly thinks that Donald Trump is less deserving than President Xi, which some would say is a controversial choice. In America, say, how, you're giving someone who's never, really, there's no human rights in China, there's no freedom of expression. And yet he gets an address to Parliament, and Donald Trump, our closest ally doesn't? So that's kind of raised a few eyebrows in the US"
'Scorched Earth': Mueller's Targets Speak Out - "“They were clearly on a fishing expedition,” Moore said, recounting the incident to RealClearInvestigations publicly for the first time.“They seemed desperate to find something to hang onto the narrative” of Russian collusion, he said... the special counsel's nearly two dozen prosecutors and 40 FBI agents used harshly aggressive tactics to pressure individuals to either cop to crimes or implicate others in felonies involving collusion. Although they interacted with Mueller’s team at different times and in different places, the witnesses and targets often echoed each other. Almost all decried what they called Mueller’s “scorched earth” methods that affected their physical, mental and financial health. Most said they were forced to retain high-priced Washington lawyers to protect them from falling into "perjury traps" for alleged lying, which became the special counsel’s charge of last resort. In the end, Mueller convicted four Trump associates for this so-called process crime, and investigated an additional five individuals for allegedly making false statements – including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Some subjects of investigation said Mueller’s agents and prosecutors tried to pressure them into admitting things to give the appearance of collusion. They demanded to know if they had spoken to anyone with a “Russian accent.” They threatened to jail them "for life" and to drag their wives or girlfriends into the investigation.Former special prosecutors say the tactics used by Mueller’s team appear excessive... Some have formally complained to the Justice Department that their privacy was violated. Others have filed legal complaints, maintaining the Special Counsel’s Office abused its authority. Corsi, for one, is suing Mueller personally for millions of dollars for unconstitutionally spying on him and harassing him and his family, as well as allegedly leaking secret grand jury information about him to the press in violation of his privacy rights. Still others want to see Mueller’s office criminally investigated for prosecutorial misconduct.“Leaking grand jury hearing information to the press is a crime,” said former Independent Counsel Sol Wisenberg. “It can never be justified.”... These 10 witnesses find it beyond ironic that some partisans are now faulting Mueller for not doing enough to find incriminating evidence against Trump and his associates – “He blew it!” liberal HBO political talk show host Bill Maher said. They find it chilling that, equally unsatisfied, congressional Democrats seek to re-interview Mueller’s witnesses. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has sent letters to some of the peripheral witnesses interviewed for this story, demanding they produce more documents and testify before his panel, forcing them to relive their nightmare."
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Whatever your opinion is of Trump, this is a great day for the republic. Neither the President nor his staff coordinated with Russia to influence the election. There is no Manchurian Candidate and Trump is not being controlled by Putin. This news should come as a relief to anyone concerned about the independence of the Administration... Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller remained on the job. Trump made his entire White House staff and campaign staff available for interviews. Trump did not exercise executive privilege to block documents. The Mueller investigation was given all the resources they requested and the White House did not claim executive privilege over any part of the final report. The law does not require the release of the Mueller Report but it is being released to Congress and the Public... The President has criticized the press but he has not thrown them in jail"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Trump's visit: Day 2 - "The Democrats at the end of the day, I always ask them, what is the charge for impeachment? Impeachment in the Constitution is defined as a high crime. And so far, nobody has in, the Mueller report offers no evidence of a high crime... Not exactly [that there was obstruction], not exactly. There are some evidences that the President wasn't as cooperative as they say he should have been. The truth was and the Mueller report leaves this out, that the President wiaved all his privileges about everyone. One of the reasons they have all of these anecdotes against him is he waived his privileges that he could have asserted. His attitude was I did nothing wrong. Let everyone talk to Miller. Let's get this over with as quickly as possible. He didn't know that this was going to be a two year witch hunt, so to speak… I've always said to him that I think tweeting is fine, but it needs to be reviewed. I'm a journalist, and I wouldn't even post anything to Newsmax without an editor... he's the president and as we know, Donald Trump makes his own decisions... and it's worked for him. I mean, his poll numbers are astounding, considering they've thrown the kitchen sink at him...
‘What we've just been hearing that Donald Trump likes to be liked, he doesn't respond to slights. So whatever you think of him, how is it in the national interest for the Official Opposition, the people who might be our next prime minister and our next foreign secretary or next but one, not just to snab the president but to insult him?’...
‘Why are you and your leader willing to honour… the president of China? I want to put two points to you. You talk about the President's racism, China locks away a million Muslim Uighers in internment camps, is that not racism? You talk about women's rights, the Chinese use sanctions fines, the forced insertion of coils, forced abortion by law, to prevent the right to choose, but they're worthy of your respect are they?’
‘And I tell you what, you know, Jeremy went to state banquet when the Chinese President came over and, and in the meetings around that, he raised many issues. And actually what was interesting was the Chinese reaction to that was, we know that he does this, and we know that he is, he treats everybody equally, and he criticizes all countries, and that's the right thing to do. But the reason, I think that we are, we have, I personally am so angry at this particular American President and I admit that I am, is that I love America. And I love the values that America has stood for. And I will honor the dead of D Day... when you have a close friend, and they're going wrong, you are more likely to be, to be more adamant with them and clearer with them than someone who is, who has not been as close a friend, and who you are trying to build a relationship up with’...
‘This is fascinating, you're insulting the president in order to have a better relationship with him’…
'How do you feel about long serving servants of your party who share your view on Europe, Alistair Campbell, being turfed out of the party, while people who are caught on tape making anti semitic racist comments, the sort of thing you say you object to from Donald Trump are still in the party. Peter Wilson, who's very close to Jeremy Corbyn, of course.'"
Presumably this means Trump is justified in scolding his allies but not dictators since they are close friends and he needs to tell them where they're going wrong
Dear LGBT, If you don’t want to be treated differently for being gay, then stop acting like being gay somehow makes you special. Your sexual orientation is neither an achievement nor a holiday. You have not accomplished anything simply by being attracted to one sex or another. : metacanada
Women in Siberian coal town beg Trudeau to let them come to Canada as environmental refugees - "Fed up residents of a polluted city in central Russia are making an emotional plea to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, begging to be admitted to Canada as environmental refugees.In a video posted on YouTube over the weekend, dozens of women in Kiselyovsk, a city of 90,000 in Siberia, take turns reading emotional statements, explaining how coal dust from nearby mines and factories has blanketed their homes and made their lives unbearable... One of the organizers of the "move to Canada" appeal, Vitaly Sheshtakov, was quoted by the local newspaper as saying living conditions in Canada are similar to Siberia, only much cleaner."We chose Canada because the climate there is similar to our region. So that they [Russian authorities] wouldn't say that we just wanted to move to warm countries.""
Refugees protest rural Sweden relocation - "When the transport arrived at a housing centre in Grytan south of Östersund the asylum-seekers didn't like the look of what they saw."I am 75-years-old and come from the Middle East. Then I get sent to a place that looks like this," said a man from Syria to the local Östersunds-Posten daily, pointing to the icy road."It is dangerous for me to be here," he said.The asylum-seekers, who originate from several countries, refused to leave the bus when it arrived at the small Swedish town. The police were called to assist at the scene but declined to help in escorting the group from the bus.The group is demanding that they be returned to Malmö or some other bigger city... The Migration Board's (Migrationsverket) press officer Fredrik Bengtsson explained that asylum-seekers are not entitled to select the location of their residence... The group of asylum-seekers have explained that they feel cheated by the Migration Board."
Opening door to refugees, Lithuania says finds few takers - Reuters - "“We are prepared to accept refugees immediately, but there are no refugees in Italy or Greece who agreed to resettle in Lithuania,” Rimantas Vaitkus, deputy chancellor of the Lithuanian government told Reuters on Monday.Lithuania has agreed to settle 1,105 refugees in the next two years, mostly from Italy and Greece, according to European Commision proposals which foresaw relocation of a total of 160,000 people.“It seems that refugees know about Sweden, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, which either have generous social security or have been actively attracting immigrants,” said Vaitkus."
It's Time for Sweden to Admit Explosions Are a National Emergency - "Sweden has experienced a sharp rise in explosions in recent years, predominantly related to conflicts between warring criminal gangs. The use of explosives in the Nordic country is now at a level that is unique in the world for a state not at war, according to police. In response, the government issued a first-ever ”amnesty for explosives” in the fall of 2018, allowing people in possession of such weapons to hand them over to police with immunity. But this didn’t stem the tide: some 50 explosions were reported in the first three months of 2019 alone—an average of more than one every other day and an increase over the same period in 2018, a year that saw a record number of more than three blasts per week... There has been a corresponding marked escalation in gang-related shootings, which increasingly take place in broad daylight. Sweden had 45 deadly shootings in what police refer to as ”criminal environments” last year, which is an increase by a factor of 10 in one generation. In contrast, neighbouring Norway has less than three. Deadly shootings per capita in Sweden are now considerably higher than the European average. And systematic witness intimidation, paired with a code of silence in the country’s socio-economically weak immigrant areas, has made this type of crime difficult for the Swedish legal system to tackle. The rise in gang violence and other types of crime—including sexual offenses and a wave of robberies against children—has had far-reaching implications for Swedish society. In a country which boasts ”the world’s first feminist government,” a third of young women now report feeling unsafe going out at night. A recent survey in the country’s three largest cities showed that safety is now the main priority for Swedes who are looking to buy homes. Crime emerged as a top priority among voters ahead of the election to the European Parliament... According to the prevailing ideology of the Swedish political establishment, this wave of violence, which is baffling to many European neighbours, should not be happening. A longstanding cornerstone of the country’s political conversation dictates that crime must be understood in socio-economic terms, and that welfare provisions are a cure-all against violence and social unrest. Yet Sweden is one of Europe’s most generous welfare states... young criminals receive remarkably soft sentences. For example, a 16-year-old convicted of an execution-style killing at a Stockholm pizza restaurant in 2018 was sentenced to three years in institutional care for young people. The country also has one of the smallest police forces per capita in the EU."
This suggests that the liberal response to crime - welfare and a light touch - doesn't work (at least not in all scenarios)
Tolerance Brigade - Posts - "never seen a gay guy say men are trash so all of u girls are lying"
Curiously two Twitter accounts which tweeted this got suspended
Local bodies in Japan to promote 'workation' so staff can take longer holidays - "A national council of local governments to promote "workation," where employees can do their jobs while on vacation, is set to be established as early as the end of the year on the initiative of the Wakayama and Nagano prefectural governments"
???
Nearly 200 dodgy Australian day care centres are shut down after police find links to Islamic State, bikie gangs and large-scale fraud
'Scorched Earth': Mueller's Targets Speak Out - "“They were clearly on a fishing expedition,” Moore said, recounting the incident to RealClearInvestigations publicly for the first time.“They seemed desperate to find something to hang onto the narrative” of Russian collusion, he said... the special counsel's nearly two dozen prosecutors and 40 FBI agents used harshly aggressive tactics to pressure individuals to either cop to crimes or implicate others in felonies involving collusion. Although they interacted with Mueller’s team at different times and in different places, the witnesses and targets often echoed each other. Almost all decried what they called Mueller’s “scorched earth” methods that affected their physical, mental and financial health. Most said they were forced to retain high-priced Washington lawyers to protect them from falling into "perjury traps" for alleged lying, which became the special counsel’s charge of last resort. In the end, Mueller convicted four Trump associates for this so-called process crime, and investigated an additional five individuals for allegedly making false statements – including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Some subjects of investigation said Mueller’s agents and prosecutors tried to pressure them into admitting things to give the appearance of collusion. They demanded to know if they had spoken to anyone with a “Russian accent.” They threatened to jail them "for life" and to drag their wives or girlfriends into the investigation.Former special prosecutors say the tactics used by Mueller’s team appear excessive... Some have formally complained to the Justice Department that their privacy was violated. Others have filed legal complaints, maintaining the Special Counsel’s Office abused its authority. Corsi, for one, is suing Mueller personally for millions of dollars for unconstitutionally spying on him and harassing him and his family, as well as allegedly leaking secret grand jury information about him to the press in violation of his privacy rights. Still others want to see Mueller’s office criminally investigated for prosecutorial misconduct.“Leaking grand jury hearing information to the press is a crime,” said former Independent Counsel Sol Wisenberg. “It can never be justified.”... These 10 witnesses find it beyond ironic that some partisans are now faulting Mueller for not doing enough to find incriminating evidence against Trump and his associates – “He blew it!” liberal HBO political talk show host Bill Maher said. They find it chilling that, equally unsatisfied, congressional Democrats seek to re-interview Mueller’s witnesses. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has sent letters to some of the peripheral witnesses interviewed for this story, demanding they produce more documents and testify before his panel, forcing them to relive their nightmare."
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "Whatever your opinion is of Trump, this is a great day for the republic. Neither the President nor his staff coordinated with Russia to influence the election. There is no Manchurian Candidate and Trump is not being controlled by Putin. This news should come as a relief to anyone concerned about the independence of the Administration... Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller remained on the job. Trump made his entire White House staff and campaign staff available for interviews. Trump did not exercise executive privilege to block documents. The Mueller investigation was given all the resources they requested and the White House did not claim executive privilege over any part of the final report. The law does not require the release of the Mueller Report but it is being released to Congress and the Public... The President has criticized the press but he has not thrown them in jail"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Trump's visit: Day 2 - "The Democrats at the end of the day, I always ask them, what is the charge for impeachment? Impeachment in the Constitution is defined as a high crime. And so far, nobody has in, the Mueller report offers no evidence of a high crime... Not exactly [that there was obstruction], not exactly. There are some evidences that the President wasn't as cooperative as they say he should have been. The truth was and the Mueller report leaves this out, that the President wiaved all his privileges about everyone. One of the reasons they have all of these anecdotes against him is he waived his privileges that he could have asserted. His attitude was I did nothing wrong. Let everyone talk to Miller. Let's get this over with as quickly as possible. He didn't know that this was going to be a two year witch hunt, so to speak… I've always said to him that I think tweeting is fine, but it needs to be reviewed. I'm a journalist, and I wouldn't even post anything to Newsmax without an editor... he's the president and as we know, Donald Trump makes his own decisions... and it's worked for him. I mean, his poll numbers are astounding, considering they've thrown the kitchen sink at him...
‘What we've just been hearing that Donald Trump likes to be liked, he doesn't respond to slights. So whatever you think of him, how is it in the national interest for the Official Opposition, the people who might be our next prime minister and our next foreign secretary or next but one, not just to snab the president but to insult him?’...
‘Why are you and your leader willing to honour… the president of China? I want to put two points to you. You talk about the President's racism, China locks away a million Muslim Uighers in internment camps, is that not racism? You talk about women's rights, the Chinese use sanctions fines, the forced insertion of coils, forced abortion by law, to prevent the right to choose, but they're worthy of your respect are they?’
‘And I tell you what, you know, Jeremy went to state banquet when the Chinese President came over and, and in the meetings around that, he raised many issues. And actually what was interesting was the Chinese reaction to that was, we know that he does this, and we know that he is, he treats everybody equally, and he criticizes all countries, and that's the right thing to do. But the reason, I think that we are, we have, I personally am so angry at this particular American President and I admit that I am, is that I love America. And I love the values that America has stood for. And I will honor the dead of D Day... when you have a close friend, and they're going wrong, you are more likely to be, to be more adamant with them and clearer with them than someone who is, who has not been as close a friend, and who you are trying to build a relationship up with’...
‘This is fascinating, you're insulting the president in order to have a better relationship with him’…
'How do you feel about long serving servants of your party who share your view on Europe, Alistair Campbell, being turfed out of the party, while people who are caught on tape making anti semitic racist comments, the sort of thing you say you object to from Donald Trump are still in the party. Peter Wilson, who's very close to Jeremy Corbyn, of course.'"
Presumably this means Trump is justified in scolding his allies but not dictators since they are close friends and he needs to tell them where they're going wrong
Dear LGBT, If you don’t want to be treated differently for being gay, then stop acting like being gay somehow makes you special. Your sexual orientation is neither an achievement nor a holiday. You have not accomplished anything simply by being attracted to one sex or another. : metacanada
Women in Siberian coal town beg Trudeau to let them come to Canada as environmental refugees - "Fed up residents of a polluted city in central Russia are making an emotional plea to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, begging to be admitted to Canada as environmental refugees.In a video posted on YouTube over the weekend, dozens of women in Kiselyovsk, a city of 90,000 in Siberia, take turns reading emotional statements, explaining how coal dust from nearby mines and factories has blanketed their homes and made their lives unbearable... One of the organizers of the "move to Canada" appeal, Vitaly Sheshtakov, was quoted by the local newspaper as saying living conditions in Canada are similar to Siberia, only much cleaner."We chose Canada because the climate there is similar to our region. So that they [Russian authorities] wouldn't say that we just wanted to move to warm countries.""
Refugees protest rural Sweden relocation - "When the transport arrived at a housing centre in Grytan south of Östersund the asylum-seekers didn't like the look of what they saw."I am 75-years-old and come from the Middle East. Then I get sent to a place that looks like this," said a man from Syria to the local Östersunds-Posten daily, pointing to the icy road."It is dangerous for me to be here," he said.The asylum-seekers, who originate from several countries, refused to leave the bus when it arrived at the small Swedish town. The police were called to assist at the scene but declined to help in escorting the group from the bus.The group is demanding that they be returned to Malmö or some other bigger city... The Migration Board's (Migrationsverket) press officer Fredrik Bengtsson explained that asylum-seekers are not entitled to select the location of their residence... The group of asylum-seekers have explained that they feel cheated by the Migration Board."
Opening door to refugees, Lithuania says finds few takers - Reuters - "“We are prepared to accept refugees immediately, but there are no refugees in Italy or Greece who agreed to resettle in Lithuania,” Rimantas Vaitkus, deputy chancellor of the Lithuanian government told Reuters on Monday.Lithuania has agreed to settle 1,105 refugees in the next two years, mostly from Italy and Greece, according to European Commision proposals which foresaw relocation of a total of 160,000 people.“It seems that refugees know about Sweden, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, which either have generous social security or have been actively attracting immigrants,” said Vaitkus."
It's Time for Sweden to Admit Explosions Are a National Emergency - "Sweden has experienced a sharp rise in explosions in recent years, predominantly related to conflicts between warring criminal gangs. The use of explosives in the Nordic country is now at a level that is unique in the world for a state not at war, according to police. In response, the government issued a first-ever ”amnesty for explosives” in the fall of 2018, allowing people in possession of such weapons to hand them over to police with immunity. But this didn’t stem the tide: some 50 explosions were reported in the first three months of 2019 alone—an average of more than one every other day and an increase over the same period in 2018, a year that saw a record number of more than three blasts per week... There has been a corresponding marked escalation in gang-related shootings, which increasingly take place in broad daylight. Sweden had 45 deadly shootings in what police refer to as ”criminal environments” last year, which is an increase by a factor of 10 in one generation. In contrast, neighbouring Norway has less than three. Deadly shootings per capita in Sweden are now considerably higher than the European average. And systematic witness intimidation, paired with a code of silence in the country’s socio-economically weak immigrant areas, has made this type of crime difficult for the Swedish legal system to tackle. The rise in gang violence and other types of crime—including sexual offenses and a wave of robberies against children—has had far-reaching implications for Swedish society. In a country which boasts ”the world’s first feminist government,” a third of young women now report feeling unsafe going out at night. A recent survey in the country’s three largest cities showed that safety is now the main priority for Swedes who are looking to buy homes. Crime emerged as a top priority among voters ahead of the election to the European Parliament... According to the prevailing ideology of the Swedish political establishment, this wave of violence, which is baffling to many European neighbours, should not be happening. A longstanding cornerstone of the country’s political conversation dictates that crime must be understood in socio-economic terms, and that welfare provisions are a cure-all against violence and social unrest. Yet Sweden is one of Europe’s most generous welfare states... young criminals receive remarkably soft sentences. For example, a 16-year-old convicted of an execution-style killing at a Stockholm pizza restaurant in 2018 was sentenced to three years in institutional care for young people. The country also has one of the smallest police forces per capita in the EU."
This suggests that the liberal response to crime - welfare and a light touch - doesn't work (at least not in all scenarios)
Tolerance Brigade - Posts - "never seen a gay guy say men are trash so all of u girls are lying"
Curiously two Twitter accounts which tweeted this got suspended
Local bodies in Japan to promote 'workation' so staff can take longer holidays - "A national council of local governments to promote "workation," where employees can do their jobs while on vacation, is set to be established as early as the end of the year on the initiative of the Wakayama and Nagano prefectural governments"
???
Nearly 200 dodgy Australian day care centres are shut down after police find links to Islamic State, bikie gangs and large-scale fraud
Post ID: 8548460204291359994
Kendrick Oliver on the Race to the Moon
Kendrick Oliver on the Race to the Moon | History Extra Podcast - History Extra
"The kind of rationales for engaging in the space race are very much related to questions of kind of cold war prestige, you know, main reason that John F Kennedy was interested in going to the moon is not because he had any particular personal interest in space exploration. But he was aware, this is one arena where people were looking at particularly in the kind of newly decolonized or decolonizing areas of the the global south, the third world that they were looking at SpaceX exploration and what the Soviets were achieving, and begin to that maybe this was a sign that the Soviet model of economic organization, central planning was the way to go. And that was not something that Kennedy was very keen...
The Americans become more and more concerned about the capacity of the Soviet Union to launch a surprise attack... overhead surveillance of the Soviet Union's territory. And this leads to such things as the U2 program as well. It's very, very difficult to do by any other means. Because you know, the Soviet Union is a closed society. And therefore, you can't, it's not that easy to have people sort of wandering around and having a look at seeing what's going on. And so the other device that they start thinking about is a satellite.
But of course, if you launch a satellite and name it as a surveillance satellite it’s most likely thereafter to get resistance from the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union will protest about it. And so what you need to do is cast the satellite, the first satellite, the precedent setting device, basically, as a scientific device, a peaceful device...
Initially, I think the Kennedy administration was thinking this was going to be costing about seven to $9 billion, it turns out to be closer in the region of 20. And as time goes on, as those costs become clearer and clearer, and as a sense of social crisis begins to affect the United States, from the mid 1960s onwards, when you have a whole series of kind of unrest in American cities, you have the Johnson administration announcing a war on poverty, which is subsequently partly as a result of, primarily as a result of the expenditures on Vietnam is unable to fund, people start looking at the Apollo program and saying is this really what we need? Is this the priority for us?
There are, of course, lots of people who still think it is and who still think of it as a important venture in cold war terms and well worth the investment. If you are an aerospace engineer, somewhere in California and Florida, you're making a lot of money out of this, you think this is great, but if you're African American living in Harlem, and there's a huge degree of kind of deprivation around you, you're much less likely to be a kind of cheerleader for this program. So by the 1967, 1968, there's a growing sense of sort of opposition and even within opinion polls, it's actually quite rare from the mid 1960s onwards for there to be majority support for the Apollo program…
Even as Armstrong and Aldrin are making their steps upon the moon, there was quite a lot of opposition, still being felt and still being rehearsed in various sectors of the press. Just prior to the launch of Apollo 11. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy whose, had been until he’d been associated with Martin Luther King who had been assassinated the previous year, led a group of what he called the poor people's campaign to the Apollo 11 launch site in Cape Canaveral to protest the expenditure upon the space program, to emphasize this wasn't a, the kind of priority, this wasn't the most important thing that that Americans should be investing in at this particular moment…
‘What, if anything, did it actually gain the US?’
‘That is sort of super controversial. And it's something that people are still arguing about. You know, what ultimately was the point of this?... a lot of the analogies that were being used around mid 1962, were comparisons to Christopher Columbus. Is this going to be the opening, the opening step in a kind of wide new kind of horizon of possibility, you land on the moon, you start creating a colony on the moon, you practice for going on to Mars and so on? Or is it more like Leif Ericsson? You know, many hundreds of years ago, going on a sort of ship around to North America and nothing really, you know, creating a settlement there. And nothing really follows as a result of of it.
And so those, you know, that question about what does it actually give the United States beyond the prestige of doing it? Well, certainly, you can count, there's some scientific knowledge that's produced in terms of the nature of the moon, the makeup of the moon, it helps to generate a new understanding of how the moon came to be. There are other sort of spin offs from the program, I mean, people talk about miniaturization, for example, people talk about Velcro, Teflon, those sort of things, that the things that were developed as a result of the Apollo program that might not have been developed anyway. But NASA always found it quite difficult to develop much, to sell the spin offs really, in terms of generating much enthusiasm for them. It never found there was a huge amount of interest in the scientific payoffs either for the Apollo program. And so I think it is actually quite difficult to judge that this had a, that the investment was really worth it.
And certainly that's a judgment that's beginning to be made within the Nixon administration... an achievement should have a legacy. And that's where the struggle comes in I think a little bit in terms of thinking about the Apollo program"
"The kind of rationales for engaging in the space race are very much related to questions of kind of cold war prestige, you know, main reason that John F Kennedy was interested in going to the moon is not because he had any particular personal interest in space exploration. But he was aware, this is one arena where people were looking at particularly in the kind of newly decolonized or decolonizing areas of the the global south, the third world that they were looking at SpaceX exploration and what the Soviets were achieving, and begin to that maybe this was a sign that the Soviet model of economic organization, central planning was the way to go. And that was not something that Kennedy was very keen...
The Americans become more and more concerned about the capacity of the Soviet Union to launch a surprise attack... overhead surveillance of the Soviet Union's territory. And this leads to such things as the U2 program as well. It's very, very difficult to do by any other means. Because you know, the Soviet Union is a closed society. And therefore, you can't, it's not that easy to have people sort of wandering around and having a look at seeing what's going on. And so the other device that they start thinking about is a satellite.
But of course, if you launch a satellite and name it as a surveillance satellite it’s most likely thereafter to get resistance from the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union will protest about it. And so what you need to do is cast the satellite, the first satellite, the precedent setting device, basically, as a scientific device, a peaceful device...
Initially, I think the Kennedy administration was thinking this was going to be costing about seven to $9 billion, it turns out to be closer in the region of 20. And as time goes on, as those costs become clearer and clearer, and as a sense of social crisis begins to affect the United States, from the mid 1960s onwards, when you have a whole series of kind of unrest in American cities, you have the Johnson administration announcing a war on poverty, which is subsequently partly as a result of, primarily as a result of the expenditures on Vietnam is unable to fund, people start looking at the Apollo program and saying is this really what we need? Is this the priority for us?
There are, of course, lots of people who still think it is and who still think of it as a important venture in cold war terms and well worth the investment. If you are an aerospace engineer, somewhere in California and Florida, you're making a lot of money out of this, you think this is great, but if you're African American living in Harlem, and there's a huge degree of kind of deprivation around you, you're much less likely to be a kind of cheerleader for this program. So by the 1967, 1968, there's a growing sense of sort of opposition and even within opinion polls, it's actually quite rare from the mid 1960s onwards for there to be majority support for the Apollo program…
Even as Armstrong and Aldrin are making their steps upon the moon, there was quite a lot of opposition, still being felt and still being rehearsed in various sectors of the press. Just prior to the launch of Apollo 11. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy whose, had been until he’d been associated with Martin Luther King who had been assassinated the previous year, led a group of what he called the poor people's campaign to the Apollo 11 launch site in Cape Canaveral to protest the expenditure upon the space program, to emphasize this wasn't a, the kind of priority, this wasn't the most important thing that that Americans should be investing in at this particular moment…
‘What, if anything, did it actually gain the US?’
‘That is sort of super controversial. And it's something that people are still arguing about. You know, what ultimately was the point of this?... a lot of the analogies that were being used around mid 1962, were comparisons to Christopher Columbus. Is this going to be the opening, the opening step in a kind of wide new kind of horizon of possibility, you land on the moon, you start creating a colony on the moon, you practice for going on to Mars and so on? Or is it more like Leif Ericsson? You know, many hundreds of years ago, going on a sort of ship around to North America and nothing really, you know, creating a settlement there. And nothing really follows as a result of of it.
And so those, you know, that question about what does it actually give the United States beyond the prestige of doing it? Well, certainly, you can count, there's some scientific knowledge that's produced in terms of the nature of the moon, the makeup of the moon, it helps to generate a new understanding of how the moon came to be. There are other sort of spin offs from the program, I mean, people talk about miniaturization, for example, people talk about Velcro, Teflon, those sort of things, that the things that were developed as a result of the Apollo program that might not have been developed anyway. But NASA always found it quite difficult to develop much, to sell the spin offs really, in terms of generating much enthusiasm for them. It never found there was a huge amount of interest in the scientific payoffs either for the Apollo program. And so I think it is actually quite difficult to judge that this had a, that the investment was really worth it.
And certainly that's a judgment that's beginning to be made within the Nixon administration... an achievement should have a legacy. And that's where the struggle comes in I think a little bit in terms of thinking about the Apollo program"
Post ID: 6060616706330527678
Links - 25th August 2019 (2)
One nation under Galt: How Ayn Rand's toxic philosophy permanently transformed America - "Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy."
But the ones "coercing" young people into huge student-loan debt ar ethe people who hate Rand
These seven moral rules unite human beings, according to research - "Curry’s group studied ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, across over 600 sources. The universal rules of morality are:
Help your family
Help your group
Return favors
Be brave
Defer to superiors
Divide resources
Respect others’ property"
This shows just how alien liberal morality is to all other moral systems
How Malaysia has learned nothing from Japan - "We cannot truly be great until we remove the things that prevent us from getting there — our preoccupation with tribalism, pork barrel politics, the national tidak apa (it doesn’t matter) culture and the general slipshod nature that is associated with the Malaysian way of doing things... Don’t talk to me about cars when Malaysians have yet to understand the virtues of punctuality and efficient customer service.It isn’t just Japan we can learn from — China is industrious, with the most sophisticated manufacturing supply chain in the world, Korea has made marketing its culture an art and Thailand’s economy has proven resilient even in times of political turmoil.I love my country but sometimes it’s difficult to be proud of it; when we have politicians with limited imagination, tunnel vision and a knack for infighting and a populace forever keening over racial issues."
Pursuing 'efficiency' in the public sector: why privatisation is not necessarily the answer - "There is a common misconception that the private sector is inherently more efficient at the provision of public services. But this is not supported by theory or evidence... Public services are provided mainly in areas where standard competitive market conditions do not apply. For example, distributional outcomes are often important: public services are generally thought best to follow need rather than willingness or capacity to pay (like justice or disability services), and minimum service levels are often desired even if they are high cost (like services to rural and remote communities)... A review of 129 reports and case studies undertaken by Graeme Hodge found that outsourcing works well in some cases and badly in others. And it is worth noting that many studies that found benefits did not take into account the broader economic and social costs of outsourcing. For example, outsourcing frequently results in significant job cuts, and the welfare costs of increased unemployment may exceed any savings. This lack of support for private sector primacy continues to be found in more recent studies. Public and private hospitals show similar efficiency levels once their different roles are taken into account. Public and private schools show similar levels of attainment once the demographic profile of the students is factored in."
Is the private sector more efficient? A cautionary tale - "This review finds no conclusive evidence that one model of ownership (i.e. public, private or mixed) is intrinsically more efficient than the others, irrespective of how efficiency is defined. Instead the literature suggests that the efficiency of service provision is dependent on the type of service (health, education, etc.) and other specific contextual factors (e.g. regulation, market competition)...
Health: Most of the literature identified in this review is focused on the health sector. In this sector there is no conclusive evidence that either public or private provision is more efficient. This finding is replicated across high-, middle- and low-income countries. However, the literature does highlight a difference between private for-profit and private non-profit providers. While private non-profit providers have similar levels of efficiency to public hospitals, many studies find that private for-profit hospitals have lower levels of efficiency than the other two models...
Privatisation of state owned enterprises: Studies which look at the comparative efficiency of enterprises before and after privatisation (i.e. the transfer of ownership from public to private) find that privatisation can lead to improved efficiency, but this is not always the outcome. A significant number of high-income country studies find efficiency improves following privatisation. Evidence from low- and middle-income countries is limited and more mixed. The studies suggest there needs to be additional factors (e.g. a developed stock market) or prior reforms (e.g. national banking reforms) for privatisation to improve efficiency in these contexts."
Myth 5: The private sector is more efficient than the public sector - "The largest study of the efficiency of privatized companies looked at all European companies privatized during 1980-2009. It compared their performance with companies that remained public and with their own past performance as public companies. The result? The privatized companies performed worse than those that remained public and continued to do so for up to 10 years after privatization. Even in the super-competitive telecoms sector, where customers have benefited from lower costs and increasing variety of services over the years, this result holds. A global survey found that ‘privatized sectors perform significantly worse’ than telecom companies remaining in state hands"
Why Were Medieval Europeans So Obsessed With Long, Pointy Shoes? - "Shoes with absurdly long toes were expensive and would clearly impair the wearer from efficiently partaking in any kind of physical labor. So they were also an indicator of leisure and luxury, free of extraneous effort or the tyranny of practicality... Poulaines stand out even more because medieval fashion was often governed by clean lines and a practical, chaste minimalism, Shawcross says. (Poulaines also marked a rare period in history when men’s fashion outshone women’s in terms of sheer frill, according to Keily.) Perhaps the best explanation for this confounding flamboyance is that the shoes emerged soon after the Black Death killed 30 to 60 percent of the population of Europe. “It may have been a reaction to a type of austerity,” Keily says. “The plague left a landscape with a lot of people who had lost close family members, a generation of mourning. Suddenly there were less people who had more money to spend on clothing.” So poulaines may have been a kind of retail therapy for coping with the surprise disappearance of 25 million people. Keily points to other fashion trends that followed widespread losses of life, such as the conspicuous designs that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, following World War II... Eventually, the English crown felt the need to intervene, in part because of the lascivious connotations that the increasingly extended toe-tips carried. “People thought the longer the toe, the more masculine the wearer,” Shawcross says. “But some people weren’t keen on that connotation.” Parliament equated wearing the shoes to public indecency, and stepped forward to put limits on a variety of racy fashions"
The Surprising Resilience of Failed Fast Food Chains - "while Kenny Rogers was winding down its U.S. operations it was doing the opposite in Asia, having been bought by a Malaysian firm in 2008. Three years later, the chain was earning $100 million in revenue—nearly all from overseas—despite the fact Kenny Rogers is presumably less of a draw in Asia than he might be in the U.S."
Super Quick Video Tips: How to Open a Stubborn Jar Lid - YouTube
If asked the right way, toddlers will choose broccoli over cake, study finds - ""Would you like cake or broccoli?" If you ask a child under the age of 3, the answer—eight times out of 10—will be broccoli.But this has less to do with parents successfully instilling healthy food preferences than the order in which the choices are presented. A study led by the University of California, Irvine and published in the online journal PLOS One has found that toddlers are highly subject to "recency bias" when faced with "or" questions: They tend to pick the last option, even if it's not what they actually want."
Want to expand your toddler's vocabulary? Find another child - "Previous work has shown that infants attend selectively to their mother's voice over another female's voice. But new research suggests that children learn new words best from other children."
Domestic abuse cuts both ways, and differently, for women and men - "women tend to endure the most severe kinds of physical violence, including homicide, in part because men are often stronger.What is not so well known, however, is that males are more likely to be recipients of different kinds of spousal violence — such as slapping, kicking, biting and hitting with the fist. Men also more often experience emotional abuse when their jealous spouses try to limit their contact with friends or family, or demand to know who they were with and where they were at all times... 418,000 Canadian males and 341,000 females report being victims of physical or sexual spousal violence... Lysova knows the kind of data they’re uncovering can disturb some people, who don’t want to see information about men’s domestic anguish used to erode hard-won programs for female victims of violence. But Lysova emphasizes that supporting survivors “should not be a zero-sum game” in which only one gender receives empathy."... By 2014... the proportion of women reporting spousal violence had dropped dramatically, to 3.5 per cent. But the segment of spousal violence against males had declined slower, to 4.2 per cent... While there are now hundreds of shelters across the country for women who are fleeing domestic abuse, Lysova said, “We know there are no shelters for men in Canada. Where do they go?”"
This replicates research showing that women are more abusive to their spouses than men (since 70% of non-reciprocal partner violence is caused by the woman)
So much for feminism being about men too
Availability of cookies during an academic course session affects evaluation of teaching.
Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "How's your comic coming?"
"Pretty cutting-edge. The characters are queer POC."
"How about their personalities?"
"Their what"
Britney Spears' music used by British navy to scare off Somali pirates - "Her songs were chosen by the security team because they thought the pirates would hate them most. These guys can't stand western culture or music, making Britney's hits perfect. As soon as the pirates get a blast of Britney, they move on as quickly as they can"
Hospital Lets Kids Drive To Surgery To Help Reduce Anxiety And Stress, And It's A Success - "The cars aren't just easy to drive around in and look cute but are fully equipped. Both the one-seater cars come with a stereo, a collection of preloaded music, and an MP3 player which can be operated by the children or by using a remote control. The cars even have working headlights, doors that open, and even back up and dashboard lights. This way the children are made to be excited by driving the cars into the operating room. They are so preoccupied with the car that they forget about the surgery itself."
British man calls S’pore a Disneyland for adults with little racism after 9 years here - "When asked if he faced racism in Singapore, Francis, a black British man, said it was minimal.
“I can’t say there’s much… There’s a tiny, tiny amount of racism here, but it’s so small it’s ridiculous.
I would say there’s none.”...
he said even though he “mixes a lot” with the Malays and the Indians, he does not do that much with the Singaporean Chinese. When asked to elaborate on his answer, he said he does not see a lot of Chinese locals out on the weekends.
“If you’re living next door (to a Singaporean Chinese), you don’t normally see them. They’re either inside doing something, or they’re out.
Their children are studying.”...
Francis also spoke of his quest to find the best chicken rice in Singapore.He said that when he first came here, he spent a year just eating chicken rice.He tried the dish from all over Singapore in order to find out the best one there is.In his second year, he switched to wanton noodle soup, and then to laksa for his third year.He said with a laugh, laksa is “completely different no matter where you go”.However, he did not say in the interview which place he thinks has the best chicken rice, wanton noodle soup, or laksa."
Maybe Sangeetha would say Malays are more oppressed than black people
Presumably you should only shut up and listen when a minority is talking when that minority is complaining - praise needs to be ignored as it is problematic (for the narrative)
Lived experience is only valid when it advances victim culture
But the ones "coercing" young people into huge student-loan debt ar ethe people who hate Rand
These seven moral rules unite human beings, according to research - "Curry’s group studied ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, across over 600 sources. The universal rules of morality are:
Help your family
Help your group
Return favors
Be brave
Defer to superiors
Divide resources
Respect others’ property"
This shows just how alien liberal morality is to all other moral systems
How Malaysia has learned nothing from Japan - "We cannot truly be great until we remove the things that prevent us from getting there — our preoccupation with tribalism, pork barrel politics, the national tidak apa (it doesn’t matter) culture and the general slipshod nature that is associated with the Malaysian way of doing things... Don’t talk to me about cars when Malaysians have yet to understand the virtues of punctuality and efficient customer service.It isn’t just Japan we can learn from — China is industrious, with the most sophisticated manufacturing supply chain in the world, Korea has made marketing its culture an art and Thailand’s economy has proven resilient even in times of political turmoil.I love my country but sometimes it’s difficult to be proud of it; when we have politicians with limited imagination, tunnel vision and a knack for infighting and a populace forever keening over racial issues."
Pursuing 'efficiency' in the public sector: why privatisation is not necessarily the answer - "There is a common misconception that the private sector is inherently more efficient at the provision of public services. But this is not supported by theory or evidence... Public services are provided mainly in areas where standard competitive market conditions do not apply. For example, distributional outcomes are often important: public services are generally thought best to follow need rather than willingness or capacity to pay (like justice or disability services), and minimum service levels are often desired even if they are high cost (like services to rural and remote communities)... A review of 129 reports and case studies undertaken by Graeme Hodge found that outsourcing works well in some cases and badly in others. And it is worth noting that many studies that found benefits did not take into account the broader economic and social costs of outsourcing. For example, outsourcing frequently results in significant job cuts, and the welfare costs of increased unemployment may exceed any savings. This lack of support for private sector primacy continues to be found in more recent studies. Public and private hospitals show similar efficiency levels once their different roles are taken into account. Public and private schools show similar levels of attainment once the demographic profile of the students is factored in."
Is the private sector more efficient? A cautionary tale - "This review finds no conclusive evidence that one model of ownership (i.e. public, private or mixed) is intrinsically more efficient than the others, irrespective of how efficiency is defined. Instead the literature suggests that the efficiency of service provision is dependent on the type of service (health, education, etc.) and other specific contextual factors (e.g. regulation, market competition)...
Health: Most of the literature identified in this review is focused on the health sector. In this sector there is no conclusive evidence that either public or private provision is more efficient. This finding is replicated across high-, middle- and low-income countries. However, the literature does highlight a difference between private for-profit and private non-profit providers. While private non-profit providers have similar levels of efficiency to public hospitals, many studies find that private for-profit hospitals have lower levels of efficiency than the other two models...
Privatisation of state owned enterprises: Studies which look at the comparative efficiency of enterprises before and after privatisation (i.e. the transfer of ownership from public to private) find that privatisation can lead to improved efficiency, but this is not always the outcome. A significant number of high-income country studies find efficiency improves following privatisation. Evidence from low- and middle-income countries is limited and more mixed. The studies suggest there needs to be additional factors (e.g. a developed stock market) or prior reforms (e.g. national banking reforms) for privatisation to improve efficiency in these contexts."
Myth 5: The private sector is more efficient than the public sector - "The largest study of the efficiency of privatized companies looked at all European companies privatized during 1980-2009. It compared their performance with companies that remained public and with their own past performance as public companies. The result? The privatized companies performed worse than those that remained public and continued to do so for up to 10 years after privatization. Even in the super-competitive telecoms sector, where customers have benefited from lower costs and increasing variety of services over the years, this result holds. A global survey found that ‘privatized sectors perform significantly worse’ than telecom companies remaining in state hands"
Why Were Medieval Europeans So Obsessed With Long, Pointy Shoes? - "Shoes with absurdly long toes were expensive and would clearly impair the wearer from efficiently partaking in any kind of physical labor. So they were also an indicator of leisure and luxury, free of extraneous effort or the tyranny of practicality... Poulaines stand out even more because medieval fashion was often governed by clean lines and a practical, chaste minimalism, Shawcross says. (Poulaines also marked a rare period in history when men’s fashion outshone women’s in terms of sheer frill, according to Keily.) Perhaps the best explanation for this confounding flamboyance is that the shoes emerged soon after the Black Death killed 30 to 60 percent of the population of Europe. “It may have been a reaction to a type of austerity,” Keily says. “The plague left a landscape with a lot of people who had lost close family members, a generation of mourning. Suddenly there were less people who had more money to spend on clothing.” So poulaines may have been a kind of retail therapy for coping with the surprise disappearance of 25 million people. Keily points to other fashion trends that followed widespread losses of life, such as the conspicuous designs that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, following World War II... Eventually, the English crown felt the need to intervene, in part because of the lascivious connotations that the increasingly extended toe-tips carried. “People thought the longer the toe, the more masculine the wearer,” Shawcross says. “But some people weren’t keen on that connotation.” Parliament equated wearing the shoes to public indecency, and stepped forward to put limits on a variety of racy fashions"
The Surprising Resilience of Failed Fast Food Chains - "while Kenny Rogers was winding down its U.S. operations it was doing the opposite in Asia, having been bought by a Malaysian firm in 2008. Three years later, the chain was earning $100 million in revenue—nearly all from overseas—despite the fact Kenny Rogers is presumably less of a draw in Asia than he might be in the U.S."
Super Quick Video Tips: How to Open a Stubborn Jar Lid - YouTube
If asked the right way, toddlers will choose broccoli over cake, study finds - ""Would you like cake or broccoli?" If you ask a child under the age of 3, the answer—eight times out of 10—will be broccoli.But this has less to do with parents successfully instilling healthy food preferences than the order in which the choices are presented. A study led by the University of California, Irvine and published in the online journal PLOS One has found that toddlers are highly subject to "recency bias" when faced with "or" questions: They tend to pick the last option, even if it's not what they actually want."
Want to expand your toddler's vocabulary? Find another child - "Previous work has shown that infants attend selectively to their mother's voice over another female's voice. But new research suggests that children learn new words best from other children."
Domestic abuse cuts both ways, and differently, for women and men - "women tend to endure the most severe kinds of physical violence, including homicide, in part because men are often stronger.What is not so well known, however, is that males are more likely to be recipients of different kinds of spousal violence — such as slapping, kicking, biting and hitting with the fist. Men also more often experience emotional abuse when their jealous spouses try to limit their contact with friends or family, or demand to know who they were with and where they were at all times... 418,000 Canadian males and 341,000 females report being victims of physical or sexual spousal violence... Lysova knows the kind of data they’re uncovering can disturb some people, who don’t want to see information about men’s domestic anguish used to erode hard-won programs for female victims of violence. But Lysova emphasizes that supporting survivors “should not be a zero-sum game” in which only one gender receives empathy."... By 2014... the proportion of women reporting spousal violence had dropped dramatically, to 3.5 per cent. But the segment of spousal violence against males had declined slower, to 4.2 per cent... While there are now hundreds of shelters across the country for women who are fleeing domestic abuse, Lysova said, “We know there are no shelters for men in Canada. Where do they go?”"
This replicates research showing that women are more abusive to their spouses than men (since 70% of non-reciprocal partner violence is caused by the woman)
So much for feminism being about men too
Availability of cookies during an academic course session affects evaluation of teaching.
Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "How's your comic coming?"
"Pretty cutting-edge. The characters are queer POC."
"How about their personalities?"
"Their what"
Britney Spears' music used by British navy to scare off Somali pirates - "Her songs were chosen by the security team because they thought the pirates would hate them most. These guys can't stand western culture or music, making Britney's hits perfect. As soon as the pirates get a blast of Britney, they move on as quickly as they can"
Hospital Lets Kids Drive To Surgery To Help Reduce Anxiety And Stress, And It's A Success - "The cars aren't just easy to drive around in and look cute but are fully equipped. Both the one-seater cars come with a stereo, a collection of preloaded music, and an MP3 player which can be operated by the children or by using a remote control. The cars even have working headlights, doors that open, and even back up and dashboard lights. This way the children are made to be excited by driving the cars into the operating room. They are so preoccupied with the car that they forget about the surgery itself."
British man calls S’pore a Disneyland for adults with little racism after 9 years here - "When asked if he faced racism in Singapore, Francis, a black British man, said it was minimal.
“I can’t say there’s much… There’s a tiny, tiny amount of racism here, but it’s so small it’s ridiculous.
I would say there’s none.”...
he said even though he “mixes a lot” with the Malays and the Indians, he does not do that much with the Singaporean Chinese. When asked to elaborate on his answer, he said he does not see a lot of Chinese locals out on the weekends.
“If you’re living next door (to a Singaporean Chinese), you don’t normally see them. They’re either inside doing something, or they’re out.
Their children are studying.”...
Francis also spoke of his quest to find the best chicken rice in Singapore.He said that when he first came here, he spent a year just eating chicken rice.He tried the dish from all over Singapore in order to find out the best one there is.In his second year, he switched to wanton noodle soup, and then to laksa for his third year.He said with a laugh, laksa is “completely different no matter where you go”.However, he did not say in the interview which place he thinks has the best chicken rice, wanton noodle soup, or laksa."
Maybe Sangeetha would say Malays are more oppressed than black people
Presumably you should only shut up and listen when a minority is talking when that minority is complaining - praise needs to be ignored as it is problematic (for the narrative)
Lived experience is only valid when it advances victim culture
Post ID: 8272209570848564057
Links - 25th August 2019 (1)
Here’s how you can report errant PMD riders in S’pore with your phone from July 31, 2019 - "If you’ve ever wanted to report an errant personal mobility device (PMD) or personal assisted bicycle (PAB) user for breaking the road traffic rules, you’ll soon have the chance. This is thanks to a new feature on the government’s MyTransport.SG mobile app, that will be launching on July 31."
A sea change for sexual conduct on campus - "“Respondents overwhelmingly agreed that due process is necessary for those accused of the heinous crime of sexual assault. Sixty-five percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Republicans, and 67 percent of Independents told researchers they agreed with the statement: ‘Students accused of crimes on college campuses should receive the same civil liberties protections from their colleges that they receive in the court system.’”"
Opinion | I’m a Democrat and a Feminist. And I Support Betsy DeVos’s Title IX Reforms. - The New York Times - "the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, ruling in a case from Michigan, declared that if a public university adjudicates what is essentially a “he said, she said” case, “the university must give the accused student or his agent an opportunity to cross-examine the accuser and adverse witnesses in the presence of a neutral fact-finder.” This year, two California appellate courts have overturned university decisions to suspend students for committing sexual assault because their procedures were so lacking in basic due process... Under the rules set up by the Obama administration, hundreds of colleges, including many in California, were placed under federal investigation and threatened with the loss of funding for failing to adequately investigate sexual assault complaints. The definition of what constituted an assault was vastly expanded. Nonpunitive resolutions such as mediation were forbidden, even if that is what both sides wanted... The Office of Civil Rights does not collect data on race in Title IX cases, but the little we know is disturbing: An analysis of assault accusations at Colgate, for example, found that while only 4.2 percent of the college’s students were black in the 2012-13 school year, 50 percent of the sexual-violation accusations reported to the school were against black students, and blacks made up 40 percent of the students who went through the formal disciplinary process.We have long over-sexualized, over-criminalized and disproportionately punished black men. It should come as no surprise that, in a setting in which protections for the accused are greatly diminished, this shameful legacy persists."
Ideologues react hysterically to the Trump administration’s suggested reforms to campus-rape tribunals. - "the feminist establishment has reacted with hysteria, characterizing the draft regulation as an assault on sexual-assault “survivors.” Maintenance of the campus-rape myth, it turns out, is incompatible with due process. Whether feminism itself is compatible with Enlightenment values appears increasingly doubtful... In 2014, a Title IX officer at Washington and Lee University issued a lugubrious warning to a male student—“a lawyer can’t help you here”—before expelling him for sexual assault. The proposed Education Department regulation tries to end these abuses. Ironically, in an administration regularly charged with ignoring the law, the DOE has carefully followed the legal framework for promulgating new federal rules. The 2011 Obama guidance was issued as a fait accompli; Donald Trump’s DOE, by contrast, is giving the public the opportunity to comment on the proposed rule before it becomes final. And the feminist establishment is responding as it does to any challenge to its ideological hegemony: with an attack of the vapors. The manager of Know Your IX, an advocacy group, first heard about the new regulation in a grocery store and sank to the ground in shock... What the advocates really mean is that defendants should have essentially no rights... Any cross-examination is “likely to jeopardize the rights and safety of student survivors,” the Center for American Progress announced. The senior legal counsel for the Victim Rights Law Center explained to the Chronicle of Higher Education that “rape is about power and control and not about sexual desire. Therefore, it is a bad idea to give the person with the power even more power to intimidate and hurt the victim.”... The narcissism that sees cross–examination as simply about “intimidating” the victim rather than about establishing the truth is typical of feminist identity politics, whereby all ideas are judged by one litmus test: are they good or bad for females?... Being convicted of campus rape is no big deal, say the activists, so why force an accuser to establish her case by “clear and convincing evidence?” These are the same avengers who have destroyed careers over a pat on the butt or a predilection for adolescent sexual humor. Yet we are supposed to believe that they will let bygones be bygones when a student falsely convicted of campus rape tries to enter the job market... Many of [the proposed] measures—such as escorts and increased security and monitoring of certain areas of the campus—play into the fiction that predatory rapists furtively roam college grounds, hoping to pounce in the dark. In fact, most of the “rapes” in question are foreseeable and avoidable events, the result of deliberate participation in drunken hook-ups with a chosen partner."
Fairness For All Students Under Title IX - "Four feminist law professors at Harvard Law School have called on the U.S. Department of Education to revise the previous Administration’s policies on sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus. In a memo submitted to the Education Department yesterday, they set out an agenda of fairness for all students, accusers and accused. In recent years the Education Department has pressured colleges and universities to adopt overbroad definitions of wrongdoing that are unfair to both men and women, and to set up procedures for handling complaints that are deeply skewed against the accused and also unfair to accusers.Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk Gersen, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Nancy Gertner are professors at Harvard Law School who have researched, taught, and written on Title IX, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and feminist legal reform. They were four of the signatories to the statement of twenty-eight Harvard Law School professors, published in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2014, that criticized Harvard University’s newly adopted sexual harassment policy as “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused” and “in no way required by Title IX law or regulation.” Janet Halley said “The college process needs legitimacy to fullyaddress campus sexual assault. Now is the time to build in respect for fairness and due process, academic freedom, and sexual autonomy.”"
The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones - "The appeal of a show that routinely kills major characters signals a different kind of storytelling, where a single charismatic and/or powerful individual, along with his or her internal dynamics, doesn’t carry the whole narrative and explanatory burden. Given the dearth of such narratives in fiction and in TV, this approach clearly resonated with a large fan base that latched on to the show.In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life... We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error."
8 Psychological Tricks of Restaurant Menus - "“paradox of choice,” which says that the more options we have, the more anxiety we feel. The golden number? Seven options per food category... “When we include over seven items, a guest will be overwhelmed and confused, and when they get confused they’ll typically default to an item they’ve had before”... Including a nice-looking picture alongside a food item increases sales by 30 percent... "If you crowd too many photos, it starts to cheapen the perception of the food,” Allen says. “The more items that are photographed on the menu, the guest perception is of a lower quality.” Most high-end restaurants avoid photos to maintain a perceived level of fanciness... making price tags as inconspicuous as possible. “We get rid of dollar signs because that’s a pain point,” says Allen. “They remind people they’re spending money.” Instead of $12.00 for that club sandwich, you’re likely to see it listed as 12.00, or even just 12. One Cornell University study found that written-out prices (“twelve dollars”) also encourage guests to spend more... “$9.95 I’ve found is a friendlier price than a $10, which has attitude to it.”... “Nested” pricing, or listing the price discretely after the meal description in the same size font, so your eyes just glide right over it... include an incredibly expensive item near the top of the menu, which makes everything else seem reasonably priced... Slightly more expensive items (so long as they still fall within the boundaries of what the customer is willing to pay) also suggest the food is of higher quality... Just like supermarkets put profitable items at eye level, restaurants design their menus to make the most of your gaze. The upper right corner is prime real estate, Rapp explains. “The upper right is where a person will go on a blank sheet of paper or in a magazine,” he says. That’s where the most profitable items usually go. “Then we build the appetizers on the upper left and salads underneath that. You want to keep the menu flowing well.”Another trick is to create space around high-profit items by putting them in boxes or otherwise separating them from the rest of the options... one review suggests that red stimulates the appetite, while yellow draws in our attention. “The two combined are the best food coloring pairings”... Longer, more detailed descriptions sell more food. Nearly 30 percent more, according to one Cornell study. “The more copy you write on the menu item, the less it costs in a customer’s mind because you’re giving them more for their money,” explains Rapp. So plain old “chocolate pudding” becomes “satin chocolate pudding.” Customers also rated the more thoroughly described food as tasting better... They make you feel nostalgic"
When Vagrants Go Viral - "Chinese social media has a habit of making homeless individuals "famous"—with unintended consequences"
The Conservative Manifesto Buried in 'Avengers: Endgame' - "Black Panther—which Slate described as “the most feminist superhero movie yet”—is about the hereditary monarch of a monoracial ethno-state that keeps immigrants at bay with a high-tech border wall and faces no economic slowdown because of it. In fact, Wakanda becomes the richest country in the world without any international trade whatsoever, all while maintaining traditional religious customs and above-replacement fertility rates—a kind of black Israel. (It does eventually reconcile itself to foreign aid under T’Challa, but not to immigration.) Trouble only begins when Killmonger (a foreigner) challenges Black Panther’s claim to the throne—not because he thinks the current occupant is illegitimate, but because he wants to use Wakandan technology to launch a global, race-based revolution, with no regard for national boundaries.Then in Avengers: Infinity War, Wakanda opens its border wall and promptly gets invaded by aliens.So perhaps it is fitting that Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel movie to end all Marvel movies, is even more Burkean—and badass—than its predecessors, a sustained cinematic rejoinder to everything Hollywood believes... Thanos is just one shade darker than Planned Parenthood—another magenta Moloch—whose acolytes justify abortion with strikingly similar logic: If a woman can’t give her child a comfortable life, the thinking goes—comfort as defined by elites—then maybe terminating it in utero is actually a kindness: to the child, which is saved a lifetime of suffering, and to society, which is saved a lifetime of palliative care"
Andy Ngo on Twitter - "The blurring of the line between mainstream & extremist Islam: a preacher inside the al-Aqsa mosque gives a sermon on how Muslims will establish a caliphate, lay siege to Rome, take over the White House, & impose a tax on infidels."
Transcript: Al-Aqsa Mosque Address by Abu Hanifa Awda: We Will Lay Siege to Rome, Turn White House Black, Impose Jizya Tax on London, and Pray on the Slopes of the Rockies and Andes | MEMRI TV
The moral panic over homophobia - "Once, there were moral panics over homosexuality. Now there’s a moral panic over homophobia. Consider the way in which the grotesque attack on a lesbian couple on a London bus has been used to promote the idea that LGBT people live in a state of existential danger. It comes straight from the moral-panic and crime-panic playbook: one nasty, shocking crime is used to depict society as a hotbed of rough, unenlightened beasts whose backward attitudes – in this case on homosexuality – threaten to tear apart the social fabric itself. A horrible incident carried out by five people becomes elevated into a symbol of evil that society as a whole must organise itself against... There is something nauseating about the way in which gay-rights groups and political observers held up this crime as typical, as an ordinary event in a society like ours that is apparently riddled with homophobia... the vast majority of that alleged 80 per cent surge in ‘attacks’ on gay people – which comes from a Stonewall / YouGov survey of 5,000 LGBT people in Britain – were instances of being ‘insulted, pestered, intimidated or harassed’. Nobody deserves to experience such rude behaviour, but let’s be honest about what such a broad, verbal-based category of ‘attack’ could include – everything from being called a name on Twitter to being pestered for a snog by some drunken idiot in a bar. Eighty-seven per cent of respondents said they had been pestered or insulted, while 11 per cent said they had been physically assaulted. Even this, however, is contradicted by a far larger survey of LGBT people carried out by the government, which involved 108,000 people, not just 5,000. The results were published in February. They suggest that two per cent had experienced physical violence, while 26 per cent had experienced verbal harassment, including ‘hurtful comments’... Everyone receives hurtful comments for one reason or another. And given that opposition to same-sex marriage is now considered bigotry, and saying that men cannot become women has been rebranded as transphobia, it is very likely that many of these hurtful comments or insults involved people merely expressing a particular political, moral or religious opinion about gay lifestyles or transgender issues... what we are witnessing is a classical example of ‘crime construction’ – the inflation of statistics to give the impression that a particular kind of crime is out of control. It used to be people on the right who did this, with their carefully constructed moral and crime panics about football hooligans or black muggers. Now it is increasingly done by people who are ostensibly on the left, who see hate crime everywhere, who think homophobia is rampant, who think speech is bigotry and sometimes even criminal, and who think Brexit has unleashed unprecedented levels of anti-social violence. In all these instances, crime has been overblown in order to construct an elitist, moralistic message about the vulnerability of certain identity groups and the wickedness of the uneducated, un-PC, dangerous throng"
A sea change for sexual conduct on campus - "“Respondents overwhelmingly agreed that due process is necessary for those accused of the heinous crime of sexual assault. Sixty-five percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Republicans, and 67 percent of Independents told researchers they agreed with the statement: ‘Students accused of crimes on college campuses should receive the same civil liberties protections from their colleges that they receive in the court system.’”"
Opinion | I’m a Democrat and a Feminist. And I Support Betsy DeVos’s Title IX Reforms. - The New York Times - "the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, ruling in a case from Michigan, declared that if a public university adjudicates what is essentially a “he said, she said” case, “the university must give the accused student or his agent an opportunity to cross-examine the accuser and adverse witnesses in the presence of a neutral fact-finder.” This year, two California appellate courts have overturned university decisions to suspend students for committing sexual assault because their procedures were so lacking in basic due process... Under the rules set up by the Obama administration, hundreds of colleges, including many in California, were placed under federal investigation and threatened with the loss of funding for failing to adequately investigate sexual assault complaints. The definition of what constituted an assault was vastly expanded. Nonpunitive resolutions such as mediation were forbidden, even if that is what both sides wanted... The Office of Civil Rights does not collect data on race in Title IX cases, but the little we know is disturbing: An analysis of assault accusations at Colgate, for example, found that while only 4.2 percent of the college’s students were black in the 2012-13 school year, 50 percent of the sexual-violation accusations reported to the school were against black students, and blacks made up 40 percent of the students who went through the formal disciplinary process.We have long over-sexualized, over-criminalized and disproportionately punished black men. It should come as no surprise that, in a setting in which protections for the accused are greatly diminished, this shameful legacy persists."
Ideologues react hysterically to the Trump administration’s suggested reforms to campus-rape tribunals. - "the feminist establishment has reacted with hysteria, characterizing the draft regulation as an assault on sexual-assault “survivors.” Maintenance of the campus-rape myth, it turns out, is incompatible with due process. Whether feminism itself is compatible with Enlightenment values appears increasingly doubtful... In 2014, a Title IX officer at Washington and Lee University issued a lugubrious warning to a male student—“a lawyer can’t help you here”—before expelling him for sexual assault. The proposed Education Department regulation tries to end these abuses. Ironically, in an administration regularly charged with ignoring the law, the DOE has carefully followed the legal framework for promulgating new federal rules. The 2011 Obama guidance was issued as a fait accompli; Donald Trump’s DOE, by contrast, is giving the public the opportunity to comment on the proposed rule before it becomes final. And the feminist establishment is responding as it does to any challenge to its ideological hegemony: with an attack of the vapors. The manager of Know Your IX, an advocacy group, first heard about the new regulation in a grocery store and sank to the ground in shock... What the advocates really mean is that defendants should have essentially no rights... Any cross-examination is “likely to jeopardize the rights and safety of student survivors,” the Center for American Progress announced. The senior legal counsel for the Victim Rights Law Center explained to the Chronicle of Higher Education that “rape is about power and control and not about sexual desire. Therefore, it is a bad idea to give the person with the power even more power to intimidate and hurt the victim.”... The narcissism that sees cross–examination as simply about “intimidating” the victim rather than about establishing the truth is typical of feminist identity politics, whereby all ideas are judged by one litmus test: are they good or bad for females?... Being convicted of campus rape is no big deal, say the activists, so why force an accuser to establish her case by “clear and convincing evidence?” These are the same avengers who have destroyed careers over a pat on the butt or a predilection for adolescent sexual humor. Yet we are supposed to believe that they will let bygones be bygones when a student falsely convicted of campus rape tries to enter the job market... Many of [the proposed] measures—such as escorts and increased security and monitoring of certain areas of the campus—play into the fiction that predatory rapists furtively roam college grounds, hoping to pounce in the dark. In fact, most of the “rapes” in question are foreseeable and avoidable events, the result of deliberate participation in drunken hook-ups with a chosen partner."
Fairness For All Students Under Title IX - "Four feminist law professors at Harvard Law School have called on the U.S. Department of Education to revise the previous Administration’s policies on sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus. In a memo submitted to the Education Department yesterday, they set out an agenda of fairness for all students, accusers and accused. In recent years the Education Department has pressured colleges and universities to adopt overbroad definitions of wrongdoing that are unfair to both men and women, and to set up procedures for handling complaints that are deeply skewed against the accused and also unfair to accusers.Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk Gersen, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Nancy Gertner are professors at Harvard Law School who have researched, taught, and written on Title IX, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and feminist legal reform. They were four of the signatories to the statement of twenty-eight Harvard Law School professors, published in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2014, that criticized Harvard University’s newly adopted sexual harassment policy as “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused” and “in no way required by Title IX law or regulation.” Janet Halley said “The college process needs legitimacy to fullyaddress campus sexual assault. Now is the time to build in respect for fairness and due process, academic freedom, and sexual autonomy.”"
The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones - "The appeal of a show that routinely kills major characters signals a different kind of storytelling, where a single charismatic and/or powerful individual, along with his or her internal dynamics, doesn’t carry the whole narrative and explanatory burden. Given the dearth of such narratives in fiction and in TV, this approach clearly resonated with a large fan base that latched on to the show.In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life... We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error."
8 Psychological Tricks of Restaurant Menus - "“paradox of choice,” which says that the more options we have, the more anxiety we feel. The golden number? Seven options per food category... “When we include over seven items, a guest will be overwhelmed and confused, and when they get confused they’ll typically default to an item they’ve had before”... Including a nice-looking picture alongside a food item increases sales by 30 percent... "If you crowd too many photos, it starts to cheapen the perception of the food,” Allen says. “The more items that are photographed on the menu, the guest perception is of a lower quality.” Most high-end restaurants avoid photos to maintain a perceived level of fanciness... making price tags as inconspicuous as possible. “We get rid of dollar signs because that’s a pain point,” says Allen. “They remind people they’re spending money.” Instead of $12.00 for that club sandwich, you’re likely to see it listed as 12.00, or even just 12. One Cornell University study found that written-out prices (“twelve dollars”) also encourage guests to spend more... “$9.95 I’ve found is a friendlier price than a $10, which has attitude to it.”... “Nested” pricing, or listing the price discretely after the meal description in the same size font, so your eyes just glide right over it... include an incredibly expensive item near the top of the menu, which makes everything else seem reasonably priced... Slightly more expensive items (so long as they still fall within the boundaries of what the customer is willing to pay) also suggest the food is of higher quality... Just like supermarkets put profitable items at eye level, restaurants design their menus to make the most of your gaze. The upper right corner is prime real estate, Rapp explains. “The upper right is where a person will go on a blank sheet of paper or in a magazine,” he says. That’s where the most profitable items usually go. “Then we build the appetizers on the upper left and salads underneath that. You want to keep the menu flowing well.”Another trick is to create space around high-profit items by putting them in boxes or otherwise separating them from the rest of the options... one review suggests that red stimulates the appetite, while yellow draws in our attention. “The two combined are the best food coloring pairings”... Longer, more detailed descriptions sell more food. Nearly 30 percent more, according to one Cornell study. “The more copy you write on the menu item, the less it costs in a customer’s mind because you’re giving them more for their money,” explains Rapp. So plain old “chocolate pudding” becomes “satin chocolate pudding.” Customers also rated the more thoroughly described food as tasting better... They make you feel nostalgic"
When Vagrants Go Viral - "Chinese social media has a habit of making homeless individuals "famous"—with unintended consequences"
The Conservative Manifesto Buried in 'Avengers: Endgame' - "Black Panther—which Slate described as “the most feminist superhero movie yet”—is about the hereditary monarch of a monoracial ethno-state that keeps immigrants at bay with a high-tech border wall and faces no economic slowdown because of it. In fact, Wakanda becomes the richest country in the world without any international trade whatsoever, all while maintaining traditional religious customs and above-replacement fertility rates—a kind of black Israel. (It does eventually reconcile itself to foreign aid under T’Challa, but not to immigration.) Trouble only begins when Killmonger (a foreigner) challenges Black Panther’s claim to the throne—not because he thinks the current occupant is illegitimate, but because he wants to use Wakandan technology to launch a global, race-based revolution, with no regard for national boundaries.Then in Avengers: Infinity War, Wakanda opens its border wall and promptly gets invaded by aliens.So perhaps it is fitting that Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel movie to end all Marvel movies, is even more Burkean—and badass—than its predecessors, a sustained cinematic rejoinder to everything Hollywood believes... Thanos is just one shade darker than Planned Parenthood—another magenta Moloch—whose acolytes justify abortion with strikingly similar logic: If a woman can’t give her child a comfortable life, the thinking goes—comfort as defined by elites—then maybe terminating it in utero is actually a kindness: to the child, which is saved a lifetime of suffering, and to society, which is saved a lifetime of palliative care"
Andy Ngo on Twitter - "The blurring of the line between mainstream & extremist Islam: a preacher inside the al-Aqsa mosque gives a sermon on how Muslims will establish a caliphate, lay siege to Rome, take over the White House, & impose a tax on infidels."
Transcript: Al-Aqsa Mosque Address by Abu Hanifa Awda: We Will Lay Siege to Rome, Turn White House Black, Impose Jizya Tax on London, and Pray on the Slopes of the Rockies and Andes | MEMRI TV
The moral panic over homophobia - "Once, there were moral panics over homosexuality. Now there’s a moral panic over homophobia. Consider the way in which the grotesque attack on a lesbian couple on a London bus has been used to promote the idea that LGBT people live in a state of existential danger. It comes straight from the moral-panic and crime-panic playbook: one nasty, shocking crime is used to depict society as a hotbed of rough, unenlightened beasts whose backward attitudes – in this case on homosexuality – threaten to tear apart the social fabric itself. A horrible incident carried out by five people becomes elevated into a symbol of evil that society as a whole must organise itself against... There is something nauseating about the way in which gay-rights groups and political observers held up this crime as typical, as an ordinary event in a society like ours that is apparently riddled with homophobia... the vast majority of that alleged 80 per cent surge in ‘attacks’ on gay people – which comes from a Stonewall / YouGov survey of 5,000 LGBT people in Britain – were instances of being ‘insulted, pestered, intimidated or harassed’. Nobody deserves to experience such rude behaviour, but let’s be honest about what such a broad, verbal-based category of ‘attack’ could include – everything from being called a name on Twitter to being pestered for a snog by some drunken idiot in a bar. Eighty-seven per cent of respondents said they had been pestered or insulted, while 11 per cent said they had been physically assaulted. Even this, however, is contradicted by a far larger survey of LGBT people carried out by the government, which involved 108,000 people, not just 5,000. The results were published in February. They suggest that two per cent had experienced physical violence, while 26 per cent had experienced verbal harassment, including ‘hurtful comments’... Everyone receives hurtful comments for one reason or another. And given that opposition to same-sex marriage is now considered bigotry, and saying that men cannot become women has been rebranded as transphobia, it is very likely that many of these hurtful comments or insults involved people merely expressing a particular political, moral or religious opinion about gay lifestyles or transgender issues... what we are witnessing is a classical example of ‘crime construction’ – the inflation of statistics to give the impression that a particular kind of crime is out of control. It used to be people on the right who did this, with their carefully constructed moral and crime panics about football hooligans or black muggers. Now it is increasingly done by people who are ostensibly on the left, who see hate crime everywhere, who think homophobia is rampant, who think speech is bigotry and sometimes even criminal, and who think Brexit has unleashed unprecedented levels of anti-social violence. In all these instances, crime has been overblown in order to construct an elitist, moralistic message about the vulnerability of certain identity groups and the wickedness of the uneducated, un-PC, dangerous throng"
Post ID: 6004516771366862911
Friday, August 23, 2019
Links - 23rd August 2019 (3) (ACLU)
The ACLU Condemns DeVos’s Title IX Reforms, Says These Due Process Safeguards ‘Inappropriately Favor the Accused’ - "It's no surprise that victims' rights activists and their allies are furious about the Education Department's proposed changes to Title IX, the federal statute that deals with sex and gender discrimination on campus.It is surprising, however, to see the American Civil Liberties Union joining in this chorus. The ACLU has long defended the rights of accused terrorists, criminals, neo-Nazis, and the Westboro Baptist Church. The group works tirelessly to protect due process, even for the least sympathetic among us... I am astonished to see the ACLU take the position that a government policy gives an accused person too many rights, especially when these rights are things the ACLU has generally supported. (In other words, they are not weird new rights invented out of thin air. These are standard protections that regrettably were not applied to campus sexual misconduct adjudication during the Obama years.)... The ACLU recently broke with longstanding tradition to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court—and ran ads saying that Kavanaugh's denials of sexual impropriety should be dismissed, since other accused rapists like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein also denied the charges against them. Between that and this, principles of due process and the presumption of innocence seem to be falling off the organization's radar as things that should be defended, at least when the person who needs these protections lacks sympathy from intersectional progressives. Even on this front, though, the critics of Title IX reform seem to forget that the students who face sexual misconduct adjudication on campus are—as best we can tell—disproportionately men of color and immigrants. Who will speak for them, if not civil liberties organizations?"
The ACLU got taken over by liberals, so due process is something Nazis support
Title IX: The Civil Rights the ACLU Won't Defend - "The ACLU doesn’t object to any of those due-process protections when a person faces criminal charges. Indeed, it favors an even higher burden of proof, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” to find an individual guilty.But the ACLU opposes the new rules for campuses... One line in particular was shocking to civil libertarians: It promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused. Since when does the ACLU believe a process that favors the accused is inappropriate or unfair?Not when a prosecutor believes she has identified a serial rapist, or a mass murderer, or a terrorist. In those instances, it is the ACLU’s enemies who declare that crime is alarmingly high and reason that strong due-process rights therefore make the world unacceptably unsafe. It is the ACLU’s enemies who conflate supporting survivors of violent crime with weakening protections that guard against punishing innocents. Those enemies now have the ACLU’s own words to use against it."
Betsy DeVos’s Title IX Rules Highlight How Bad Campus Kangaroo Courts Have Become - "the rules will not only require colleges to permit cross-examination of witnesses (including the accuser), but will also prohibit universities from relying on the statements of any witness who refuses to submit to cross-examination.Cross-examination is so fundamental to adversary proceedings that it’s is simply incredible that some universities have been prosecuting and expelling students without permitting the accused’s representative to question his accuser. Prohibiting cross-examination irrevocably stacks the deck against the accused. The Supreme Court has rightly called cross-examination “the greatest legal engine ever invented for discovery of the truth.”... "Not only did some schools deny cross-examination, but they also denied the accused access to the relevant evidence in his case, including exculpatory evidence?” Yes, they did deny access to evidence. It wasn’t uncommon for accused students to walk into hearings with only a cursory understanding of the charges against them and partial access to evidence, and then have to respond — on the fly — without access to any legal help. Yes, the kangaroo courts could be that bad... The rules also dispense with the single investigator/adjudicator model that allowed universities to place a single person in the position of investigator, prosecutor, and adjudicator. There were no safeguards against bias. Again, this requirement is so basic that it’s simply stunning that it has to be articulated. In a crucial change, the proposed rules protect the First Amendment by significantly tightening the definition of some forms of sexual misconduct. As Reason’s Robby Soave explains, “Under the previous system, administrators were obliged to investigate any unwanted conduct of a sexual nature, which is a fairly wide swath of behavior. Some officials even interpreted this to include mundane speech that happened to involve gender or sex.”The new proposed rules, by contrast, apply controlling language from the Supreme Court to define sexual harassment as sexual assault, quid pro quo harassment, and “unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to the recipient’s education program or activity.” Through this change, the DOE finally conforms its harassment definition to the language of Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, a case that defined the standard for peer-on-peer hostile-environment sexual harassment... The old-school ACLU knew there was no contradiction between defending due process and “supporting survivors.” Indeed, it was through healthy processes that we not only determined whether a person had been victimized, but also prevented the accused from becoming a “survivor” of a profound injustice. I hate to use arguments that sound remotely like “arc of history” determinism, but the college procedures DeVos is abolishing were so manifestly unfair and prone to grotesque abuse that they were not sustainable. Courts by the dozens — and judges from across the ideological spectrum — were ruling against universities, sometimes with the strongest of words. If the Department of Education didn’t make systematic changes, courts were going to force its hand — case by agonizing case."
The ACLU And The Zombie Apologists - ""If your support of due process is contingent on your sympathies for accuser or accused, then you do not support due process or the Constitution."... Remember, due process “inappropriately favors the accused.” Those four words are the ACLU’s epitaph."
Leaked Internal Memo Reveals the ACLU Is Wavering on Free Speech - "The American Civil Liberties Union will weigh its interest in protecting the First Amendment against its other commitments to social justice, racial equality, and women's rights, given the possibility that offensive speech might undermine ACLU goals."Our defense of speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed," wrote ACLU staffers in a confidential memo obtained by former board member Wendy Kaminer.It's hard to see this as anything other than a cowardly retreat from a full-throated defense of the First Amendment... The memo also makes clear that the ACLU has zero interest in defending First Amendment rights in conjunction with Second Amendment rights. If controversial speakers intend to carry weapons, the ACLU "will generally not represent them."... Kaminer, though, sees the memo as yet more evidence that the ACLU "has already lost its zeal for vigorously defending the speech it hates."... Kaminer notes that the ACLU is of course free to change its position on free speech—but it should own up to this evolution... It seems fairly clear to me what's happening here. Leadership would probably like the ACLU to remain a pro-First Amendment organization, but they would also like to remain in good standing with their progressive allies. Unfortunately, young progressives are increasingly hostile to free speech, which they view as synonymous with racist hate speech. Speech that impugns marginalized persons is not speech at all, in their view, but violence. This is why a student Black Lives Matter group shut down an ACLU event at the College of William & Mary last year, chanting "liberalism is white supremacy" and "the revolution will not uphold the Constitution." Campus activism is illiberal, and liberal free speech norms conflict with the broad protection of emotional comfort that the young, modern left demands."
How the resurgence of white supremacy in the US sparked a war over free speech - "Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has helped make the US home to arguably the most freewheeling, unregulated public discourse in the world. And it has done this partly by defending, in the courts of law and public opinion, the speech rights of racists and fascists. The ACLU asserts that laws guaranteeing freedom of speech must embrace everybody (think the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis) if they’re going to protect anybody (think organised labour, anti-war protesters and Black Lives Matter). “The same laws or regulations used to silence bigots can be used to silence you,” its website explains.Over the course of the 20th century, the ACLU largely won the country over to its vision, making freedom of speech one of the most widely accepted principles in US political life... nine senior members of the organisation wrote to the board condemning the possibility that the ACLU might “reverse its historic role” in defending freedom of speech. Every major news outlet in the US reported on the conflict. Journalists from the left and right who cover the free-speech beat, including Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept and Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic, argued that curtailing white-supremacist speech would ultimately harm liberal causes... A long-time consensus has been breaking down,” the legal historian Laura Weinrib, who has written an important new history of free speech in 20th-century America, told me. One study suggests that many liberals have become increasingly intolerant of racist speech. Several other studies show that support for free speech is weakening, especially among millennials. “I think this generation perhaps doesn’t fully apprehend just how hard fought-for the right to freedom of speech was,” Romero told me recently. Partly as a result of these trends, free-speech defenders of all political stripes believe that the principle is under greater threat than it has been for generations. “We confront a real crisis now about the future of free speech in this country,” Wendy Kaminer, a former member of the ACLU’s national board, told me... large swathes of the left and the right have switched positions on freedom of speech... In one troubling recent case in France, highlighted by Glenn Greenwald, 12 activists were convicted of violating hate-speech laws for wearing T-shirts that read “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel”... “That’s absurd,” Romero said, when I asked him about the impression among some staff that the ACLU puts more into representing white supremacists than defending people of colour. “And it’s just not borne out by the facts.” A spokesperson for the ACLU said that, nationwide, the organisation dedicates more time and resources to fighting mass incarceration than any other issue. Other priorities include immigration, LGBT rights, national security issues and voting rights. It has filed at least 150 legal actions against the Trump administration."
ACLU sues Jeff Sessions over restricting asylum for victims of domestic, gang violence - "The Department of Justice said in a statement Wednesday morning that most victims of such crimes do not fit the definition for asylum claims."Our nation’s immigration laws provide for asylum to be granted to individuals who have been persecuted, or who have a well-founded fear of persecution, on account of their membership in a ‘particular social group,’ but most victims of personal crimes do not fit this definition — no matter how vile and reprehensible the crime perpetrated against them," the department said in a statement... Under U.S. and international law, a person may seek asylum based on persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group... Sessions' June memo overruled a 2014 decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals that gave asylum status to a Guatemalan woman who fled her husband after what the board called "repugnant abuse." The board found that the woman qualified for asylum because she was a member of a particular social group — in this case, married women in Guatemala who could not leave their relationship... Many asylum seekers "are leaving difficult and dangerous situations," Sessions said in a June speech. "But we cannot abandon legal discipline and sound legal concepts.""
International law is only good when it aligns with liberal priorities
The ACLU got taken over by liberals, so due process is something Nazis support
Title IX: The Civil Rights the ACLU Won't Defend - "The ACLU doesn’t object to any of those due-process protections when a person faces criminal charges. Indeed, it favors an even higher burden of proof, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” to find an individual guilty.But the ACLU opposes the new rules for campuses... One line in particular was shocking to civil libertarians: It promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused. Since when does the ACLU believe a process that favors the accused is inappropriate or unfair?Not when a prosecutor believes she has identified a serial rapist, or a mass murderer, or a terrorist. In those instances, it is the ACLU’s enemies who declare that crime is alarmingly high and reason that strong due-process rights therefore make the world unacceptably unsafe. It is the ACLU’s enemies who conflate supporting survivors of violent crime with weakening protections that guard against punishing innocents. Those enemies now have the ACLU’s own words to use against it."
Betsy DeVos’s Title IX Rules Highlight How Bad Campus Kangaroo Courts Have Become - "the rules will not only require colleges to permit cross-examination of witnesses (including the accuser), but will also prohibit universities from relying on the statements of any witness who refuses to submit to cross-examination.Cross-examination is so fundamental to adversary proceedings that it’s is simply incredible that some universities have been prosecuting and expelling students without permitting the accused’s representative to question his accuser. Prohibiting cross-examination irrevocably stacks the deck against the accused. The Supreme Court has rightly called cross-examination “the greatest legal engine ever invented for discovery of the truth.”... "Not only did some schools deny cross-examination, but they also denied the accused access to the relevant evidence in his case, including exculpatory evidence?” Yes, they did deny access to evidence. It wasn’t uncommon for accused students to walk into hearings with only a cursory understanding of the charges against them and partial access to evidence, and then have to respond — on the fly — without access to any legal help. Yes, the kangaroo courts could be that bad... The rules also dispense with the single investigator/adjudicator model that allowed universities to place a single person in the position of investigator, prosecutor, and adjudicator. There were no safeguards against bias. Again, this requirement is so basic that it’s simply stunning that it has to be articulated. In a crucial change, the proposed rules protect the First Amendment by significantly tightening the definition of some forms of sexual misconduct. As Reason’s Robby Soave explains, “Under the previous system, administrators were obliged to investigate any unwanted conduct of a sexual nature, which is a fairly wide swath of behavior. Some officials even interpreted this to include mundane speech that happened to involve gender or sex.”The new proposed rules, by contrast, apply controlling language from the Supreme Court to define sexual harassment as sexual assault, quid pro quo harassment, and “unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to the recipient’s education program or activity.” Through this change, the DOE finally conforms its harassment definition to the language of Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, a case that defined the standard for peer-on-peer hostile-environment sexual harassment... The old-school ACLU knew there was no contradiction between defending due process and “supporting survivors.” Indeed, it was through healthy processes that we not only determined whether a person had been victimized, but also prevented the accused from becoming a “survivor” of a profound injustice. I hate to use arguments that sound remotely like “arc of history” determinism, but the college procedures DeVos is abolishing were so manifestly unfair and prone to grotesque abuse that they were not sustainable. Courts by the dozens — and judges from across the ideological spectrum — were ruling against universities, sometimes with the strongest of words. If the Department of Education didn’t make systematic changes, courts were going to force its hand — case by agonizing case."
The ACLU And The Zombie Apologists - ""If your support of due process is contingent on your sympathies for accuser or accused, then you do not support due process or the Constitution."... Remember, due process “inappropriately favors the accused.” Those four words are the ACLU’s epitaph."
Leaked Internal Memo Reveals the ACLU Is Wavering on Free Speech - "The American Civil Liberties Union will weigh its interest in protecting the First Amendment against its other commitments to social justice, racial equality, and women's rights, given the possibility that offensive speech might undermine ACLU goals."Our defense of speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed," wrote ACLU staffers in a confidential memo obtained by former board member Wendy Kaminer.It's hard to see this as anything other than a cowardly retreat from a full-throated defense of the First Amendment... The memo also makes clear that the ACLU has zero interest in defending First Amendment rights in conjunction with Second Amendment rights. If controversial speakers intend to carry weapons, the ACLU "will generally not represent them."... Kaminer, though, sees the memo as yet more evidence that the ACLU "has already lost its zeal for vigorously defending the speech it hates."... Kaminer notes that the ACLU is of course free to change its position on free speech—but it should own up to this evolution... It seems fairly clear to me what's happening here. Leadership would probably like the ACLU to remain a pro-First Amendment organization, but they would also like to remain in good standing with their progressive allies. Unfortunately, young progressives are increasingly hostile to free speech, which they view as synonymous with racist hate speech. Speech that impugns marginalized persons is not speech at all, in their view, but violence. This is why a student Black Lives Matter group shut down an ACLU event at the College of William & Mary last year, chanting "liberalism is white supremacy" and "the revolution will not uphold the Constitution." Campus activism is illiberal, and liberal free speech norms conflict with the broad protection of emotional comfort that the young, modern left demands."
How the resurgence of white supremacy in the US sparked a war over free speech - "Since its founding in 1920, the ACLU has helped make the US home to arguably the most freewheeling, unregulated public discourse in the world. And it has done this partly by defending, in the courts of law and public opinion, the speech rights of racists and fascists. The ACLU asserts that laws guaranteeing freedom of speech must embrace everybody (think the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis) if they’re going to protect anybody (think organised labour, anti-war protesters and Black Lives Matter). “The same laws or regulations used to silence bigots can be used to silence you,” its website explains.Over the course of the 20th century, the ACLU largely won the country over to its vision, making freedom of speech one of the most widely accepted principles in US political life... nine senior members of the organisation wrote to the board condemning the possibility that the ACLU might “reverse its historic role” in defending freedom of speech. Every major news outlet in the US reported on the conflict. Journalists from the left and right who cover the free-speech beat, including Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept and Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic, argued that curtailing white-supremacist speech would ultimately harm liberal causes... A long-time consensus has been breaking down,” the legal historian Laura Weinrib, who has written an important new history of free speech in 20th-century America, told me. One study suggests that many liberals have become increasingly intolerant of racist speech. Several other studies show that support for free speech is weakening, especially among millennials. “I think this generation perhaps doesn’t fully apprehend just how hard fought-for the right to freedom of speech was,” Romero told me recently. Partly as a result of these trends, free-speech defenders of all political stripes believe that the principle is under greater threat than it has been for generations. “We confront a real crisis now about the future of free speech in this country,” Wendy Kaminer, a former member of the ACLU’s national board, told me... large swathes of the left and the right have switched positions on freedom of speech... In one troubling recent case in France, highlighted by Glenn Greenwald, 12 activists were convicted of violating hate-speech laws for wearing T-shirts that read “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel”... “That’s absurd,” Romero said, when I asked him about the impression among some staff that the ACLU puts more into representing white supremacists than defending people of colour. “And it’s just not borne out by the facts.” A spokesperson for the ACLU said that, nationwide, the organisation dedicates more time and resources to fighting mass incarceration than any other issue. Other priorities include immigration, LGBT rights, national security issues and voting rights. It has filed at least 150 legal actions against the Trump administration."
ACLU sues Jeff Sessions over restricting asylum for victims of domestic, gang violence - "The Department of Justice said in a statement Wednesday morning that most victims of such crimes do not fit the definition for asylum claims."Our nation’s immigration laws provide for asylum to be granted to individuals who have been persecuted, or who have a well-founded fear of persecution, on account of their membership in a ‘particular social group,’ but most victims of personal crimes do not fit this definition — no matter how vile and reprehensible the crime perpetrated against them," the department said in a statement... Under U.S. and international law, a person may seek asylum based on persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group... Sessions' June memo overruled a 2014 decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals that gave asylum status to a Guatemalan woman who fled her husband after what the board called "repugnant abuse." The board found that the woman qualified for asylum because she was a member of a particular social group — in this case, married women in Guatemala who could not leave their relationship... Many asylum seekers "are leaving difficult and dangerous situations," Sessions said in a June speech. "But we cannot abandon legal discipline and sound legal concepts.""
International law is only good when it aligns with liberal priorities
Post ID: 7540798679605272410
Caesar at Hastings
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum: EP8 Caesar at Hastings
"There were people using clubs on both sides at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Is there any older weapon than clubs? Maybe stones. And the Anglo Saxons were throwing stones at the Normans...
The one thing you notice when you pick up a gladius of any kind is its weightedness. It's not a heavy sword. swords are generally lighter than most people think anyway, but its weight balance is such that it feels like a cleaver, you know, like you could swing it in about halfway down, your swinging motion, the sword itself helps pick up steam. But it's really the point that does the majority of the damage, it's got a point that just is meant for just puncturing through things like armor.
And the Roman training generally insisted that they run up to the enemy's battle line, shove the big old shield in their face, and stab upward with this sword into the guts of the opponent. Because as the manuals pointed out, a slashing cut rarely kills. But a stabbing wound even an inch into the enemy is often fatal. Weird as that may sound right, an era before medicine, you pierce the viscera and somebody is probably going to die. Good chance of it anyway, let's qualify that remark, especially if you're using Roman medicine...
Adrian Goldsworthy says it's a myth that they [pila] were deliberately built to be flimsy at one point so that it would bend because we all grew up thinking that you know, these had a long tip. And then when they were thrown, the weight of the handle would bend the pilum downwards. So if it was sticking in your body, or your shields, or wherever you had this thing that was impeding you...
The final appeal of the Viking Age being denied, when the results of Hastings were confirmed… What happened at the Battle of Dyrrachium is the Byzantines were using mercenaries and auxiliaries just as the Romans had. In this case, some of them were refugees from the Battle of Hastings. Much of the Varangian Guard in 1081 were Anglo Saxons and the ironic twist from the Battle of Hastings is not only are there Anglo Saxons who fought at the Battle of Hastings at the Battle of Dyrrachium, they’re once again fighting Normans. In fact Normans where it's very likely there were some people who fought the Battle of Hastings too. This is like getting a second crack...
Just like the first fight though, the Anglo Saxons in the Varangian Guard, and if you believe the sources pursuing what they thought was a defeated foe, once again, just like at Hastings blows themselves out like a bunch of horses who've run too far and too fast, loses their cohesion and gets their rear end handed to them again. Famously, they're supposed to have tried to take refuge in a nearby church which the Normans proceed to burn down, killing them all. Welcome to Norman history, by the way.
The ironic part about it is they were supposed to be pursuing a beaten foe, because the Byzantines had managed to blow away a whole flank of Normans and Norman Knights. So this should have been the beginning of the end, they should have been able to wrap around them in a half moon sort of fashion, and just begin to roll up the enemy army. But what saved them is the proverbial big punch. When the Norman Knights charge again, supposedly at a joint in the line. So if you think about the Byzantine front line, having a left wing and a right wing in the center, there are joints or hinges between, you know, a wing and the center. They're supposed to have charged at one of those wings. Maybe again, physics of battle thing, in small groups that just continually scared the hell out of the people they were running into. Remember the Byzantines considered the Norman charge irresistible"
"There were people using clubs on both sides at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Is there any older weapon than clubs? Maybe stones. And the Anglo Saxons were throwing stones at the Normans...
The one thing you notice when you pick up a gladius of any kind is its weightedness. It's not a heavy sword. swords are generally lighter than most people think anyway, but its weight balance is such that it feels like a cleaver, you know, like you could swing it in about halfway down, your swinging motion, the sword itself helps pick up steam. But it's really the point that does the majority of the damage, it's got a point that just is meant for just puncturing through things like armor.
And the Roman training generally insisted that they run up to the enemy's battle line, shove the big old shield in their face, and stab upward with this sword into the guts of the opponent. Because as the manuals pointed out, a slashing cut rarely kills. But a stabbing wound even an inch into the enemy is often fatal. Weird as that may sound right, an era before medicine, you pierce the viscera and somebody is probably going to die. Good chance of it anyway, let's qualify that remark, especially if you're using Roman medicine...
Adrian Goldsworthy says it's a myth that they [pila] were deliberately built to be flimsy at one point so that it would bend because we all grew up thinking that you know, these had a long tip. And then when they were thrown, the weight of the handle would bend the pilum downwards. So if it was sticking in your body, or your shields, or wherever you had this thing that was impeding you...
The final appeal of the Viking Age being denied, when the results of Hastings were confirmed… What happened at the Battle of Dyrrachium is the Byzantines were using mercenaries and auxiliaries just as the Romans had. In this case, some of them were refugees from the Battle of Hastings. Much of the Varangian Guard in 1081 were Anglo Saxons and the ironic twist from the Battle of Hastings is not only are there Anglo Saxons who fought at the Battle of Hastings at the Battle of Dyrrachium, they’re once again fighting Normans. In fact Normans where it's very likely there were some people who fought the Battle of Hastings too. This is like getting a second crack...
Just like the first fight though, the Anglo Saxons in the Varangian Guard, and if you believe the sources pursuing what they thought was a defeated foe, once again, just like at Hastings blows themselves out like a bunch of horses who've run too far and too fast, loses their cohesion and gets their rear end handed to them again. Famously, they're supposed to have tried to take refuge in a nearby church which the Normans proceed to burn down, killing them all. Welcome to Norman history, by the way.
The ironic part about it is they were supposed to be pursuing a beaten foe, because the Byzantines had managed to blow away a whole flank of Normans and Norman Knights. So this should have been the beginning of the end, they should have been able to wrap around them in a half moon sort of fashion, and just begin to roll up the enemy army. But what saved them is the proverbial big punch. When the Norman Knights charge again, supposedly at a joint in the line. So if you think about the Byzantine front line, having a left wing and a right wing in the center, there are joints or hinges between, you know, a wing and the center. They're supposed to have charged at one of those wings. Maybe again, physics of battle thing, in small groups that just continually scared the hell out of the people they were running into. Remember the Byzantines considered the Norman charge irresistible"
Post ID: 5001473857169262025
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