The Gender Wage Gap—A Myth that Just Won’t Die - "You wouldn’t compare the incomes of elementary school teachers with Bachelor’s degrees to those of individuals with PhDs in physics and complain that there is a “teacher-physicist wage gap”—but this is precisely what this statistic does... women actually tend to earn more than men with the same part-time jobs. When women do find themselves in male-dominant fields, they actually tend to do better than their male counterparts in terms of finding a job. Take, for example, academic jobs. One study from 2010 looked specifically at applications for tenure-track jobs in electrical engineering and physics. They found that while women comprised only 11 percent of engineering applicants and 12 percent of physics applicants, they were much more likely to receive job offers. In fact, the study found that 32 and 20 percent of job offers went to female candidates in engineering and physics, respectively."
For Love or Money: Why Married Men Make More - "married men earn approximately 11 percent more per hour than men who have never been married, even after controlling for work experience, education, age and other factors. Economists also find that divorced or separated men make about 9 percent more than never-married men do. The wage gap, present at all ages, is even wider for those 45 and older. Why does this premium occur? Some attribute it to employer discrimination. Others believe that married men make more money because marriage makes them more productive, while still others say that highly productive men are more likely to be married... The selection hypothesis offers the most compelling explanation of the marriage wage gap"
Don’t be a bachelor: Why married men work harder, smarter and make more money - "Married men are motivated to maximize their income. For many men, this responsibility ethic translates into a different orientation toward work, more hours, and more strategic work choices. Sociologist Elizabeth Gorman finds that married men are more likely to value higher-paying jobs than their single peers. This is partly why studies find that men increase their work hours after marrying and reduce their hours after divorcing. It’s also why married men are less likely to quit a current job without finding a new job. Indeed, they are also less likely to be fired than their single peers."
Here's What Really Happened at That Company That Set a $70,000 Minimum Wage - "The 20 percent raises Price implemented in 2012 were supposed to be a one-time deal. Then something strange happened: Profits rose just as much as the previous year, fueled by a surprising productivity jump -- of 30 to 40 percent. He figured it was a fluke, but he piled on 20 percent raises again the following year. Again, profits rose by a like amount. Baffled, he did the same in 2014 and profits continued to rise, though not quite as much as before, because Gravity had to do more hiring."
Chez Chiara: Mother's Day in France and the Former French Colonies of MENA - "For it was only with the urgent need to repopulate France after the "Great War" of 1914-1918 (and the influenza epidemic of 1919) that Mother's Day took on a national character. Later, the debacle of the Occupation of France in 1940, and the establishment of the Vichy Government saw the birth of Mother's Day as a national institution, both at the level of the obligations of the public school system, and at the level of national law."
Entomological warfare - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "Entomological warfare (EW) is a type of biological warfare that uses insects to attack the enemy. The concept has existed for centuries and research and development have continued into the modern era. EW has been used in battle by Japan and several other nations have developed and been accused of using an entomological warfare program."
Here Are 20 Examples of Cissexism That We've Probably All Committed at Some Point — Everyday Feminism - "7. Asking ‘Is It a Boy or a Girl?’
Want to get an accurate answer on that one?
Ask the person in question, not the person carrying them to term.
8. Assuming You Know a Child’s Gender Identity Before They Tell You
Yes, this includes your own child...
9. Having Sex Education Using Genital to Explain Gender Practices...
(Reason 9 ½: If you don’t click on that link, you’re cissexist! BLARRRGH!)
10. You Show Off Your Baby Photos with Little Hesitation
12. Referring to Equal Marriage as ‘Gay Marriage’ or ‘Same-Sex Marriage’
17. Regarding the Misgendering of Cis People as a Serious Offense"
Poe's Law - I can't tell if this is satire
Australian High Schools Are Now Teaching Feminism to Their Students - "Topics covered include objectification, gender equality's ties to domestic violence, media representations of gender, statistical breakdowns around the pay gap, and female visibility in sport."
Jesuit motto: "'Give me the child for his first seven years, and I'll give you the man
Lazy Australian accent comes from drunk slurring - expert - "Dean Frenkel, a public speaking and communication lecturer, said "drunken Aussie-speak" first originated many generations ago with early settlers in the country who liked to have a pint or ten but sober parents are passing the accent onto their children... Frenkel says the average Australian speaks "to just two thirds capacity - with one third of our articulator muscles always sedentary as if lying on the couch"... The Australian accent is known for its flat tone and nasality, as well as the elision of syllables. This new theory attributes those characteristics to the colonials heavy drinking habits... This isn't the first time the Aussie accent has been under fire, with Winston Churchill famously describing it as "the most brutal maltreatment ever inflicted upon the mother tongue""
#PissForEquality: Feminists Fall For 4Chan Troll Campaign by Peeing Themselves - "Within 24 hours, numerous feminists on Twitter were posting images of their stained and soiled pants in order to show support for “rape victims” who had defecated or urinated while being assaulted (another meme created by 4chan)... The sheer hilarity of social justice warriors being so gullible as to fall for such an obvious troll again illustrates how leftists are so desperate to engage in “virtue signaling” that they will literally piss themselves and put photos of it on Twitter to try and earn ‘progressive’ social brownie points. This is by no means the first time that feminists have openly embraced something that was originally created by 4chan to make fun of them. The “free bleeding” movement, in which feminists post pictures of themselves showing menstrual blood running down their legs in order to draw attention to ‘period shaming’ – was another troll campaign contrived by 4chan... #PissForEquality and the “free bleeding” movement – both created by 4chan to make fun of radical feminists – illustrate why more and more women don’t describe themselves as feminists. 3rd wave feminism has become synonymous with outlandish preoccupations like manspreading, trigger warnings, safe spaces, slut walks and free bleeding, while genuine threats to women’s rights – particularly in Islamic countries – continue to be ignored. This is easily the funniest feminist story of the year. Period. ‘Full retard’ doesn’t even begin to cover it."
Déjà vu? - "Steve Sailer has compared [the European refugee crisis] to the entry of the Goths into the Roman Empire... To some degree, optimism was justified. Large numbers of barbarians had become useful citizens, particularly soldiers. But past success is no guarantee against future failure. First, a demographic pressure cooker was developing beyond the Empire’s borders, and many more barbarians would soon follow the example of the Goths. Second, even as longtime Roman soldiers, they often felt greater loyalty to their own people than to abstract principles of humanitas. Third, many had trouble accepting the Roman idea that only the State may use violence."
The big passport scam: Pakistanis dumping IDs to become Syrian - "A Pakistani identity card in the bushes, a Bangladeshi one in a cornfield. A torn Iraqi driver's license bearing the photo of a man with a Saddam-style mustache, another one with a scarfed woman displaying a shy smile. Documents scattered only metres from Serbia's border with Hungary provide evidence that many of the migrants flooding Europe to escape war or poverty are scrapping their true nationalities and likely assuming new ones, just as they enter the European Union... Serbian border police say that 90 percent of those arriving from Macedonia, some 3,000 a day, claim they are Syrian, although they have no documents to prove it. The so-called Balkan corridor for the migrant flight starts in Turkey, then goes through Macedonia and Serbia before entering the European Union in Hungary. "You can see that something is fishy when most of those who cross into Serbia enter January first as the date of their birth," said border police officer Miroslav Jovic. "Guess that's the first date that comes to their mind." The chief of the European Union border agency Frontex said that trafficking in fake Syrian passports has increased."
Is Pornography Really about “Making Hate to Women”? Pornography Users Hold More Gender Egalitarian Attitudes Than Nonusers in a Representative American Sample - "According to radical feminist theory, pornography serves to further the subordination of women by training its users, males and females alike, to view women as little more than sex objects over whom men should have complete control. Composite variables from the General Social Survey were used to test the hypothesis that pornography users would hold attitudes that were more supportive of gender nonegalitarianism than nonusers of pornography. Results did not support hypotheses derived from radical feminist theory. Pornography users held more egalitarian attitudes—toward women in positions of power, toward women working outside the home, and toward abortion—than nonusers of pornography. Further, pornography users and pornography nonusers did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward the traditional family and in their self-identification as feminist. The results of this study suggest that pornography use may not be associated with gender nonegalitarian attitudes in a manner that is consistent with radical feminist theory."
Treaty of Shimonoseki - "The date 17 April 1995 marked the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, in which China ceded its sovereignty over Taiwan in perpetuity... Thus, the Shimonoseki Treaty holds symbolic significance for the Taiwanese, and to commemorate the event, the Taiwan Association of University Professors organized a "Farewell to China" march in downtown Taipei on 16 April 1995"
Japanese man hid in sewer to film women's underwear
Garlic gets the girl: Forget aftershave - just eat garlic to attract women, study finds - Telegraph - "The effect only came into play once the men were eating a substantial amount of garlic, the researchers found. In the first experiment, when the men ate 6g of garlic - the equivalent of two cloves - with bread and cheese - there was no difference in the ratings between then and when they simply ate the bread and cheese on its own. But when the dosage was doubled to 12g, or four cloves, the men were judged to smell more attractive than when they hadn't eaten it. In the third experiment, when the men ate the same amount (12g) of garlic but in capsule form (12 x 1,000mg garlic capsules), their odour was also perceived as more attractive."
Ryanair pledges to end 'abrupt culture' to win new customers - "Europe's biggest budget airline, has promised to transform its "abrupt culture" in a bid to win customers from costlier rivals, admitting for the first time that it had a significant problem with customer service... "We should try to eliminate things that unnecessarily piss people off," Chief Executive Michael O'Leary told the company's annual general meeting after several shareholders complained about the impact of customer service on sales. He said the company would overhaul its web site, set up a new team to respond to emails and stop fining customers whose carry-on baggage exceeds minimum sizes by a matter of millimeters."
Even Famous Female Economists Get No Respect - The New York Times - "Men’s voices tend to dominate economic debate, although perhaps this is shaped by how we talk about the contributions of female economists. This is easiest to see in how we discuss the work of economist power couples.
He is conflating multiple factors here. In all these examples, they are male/female partner duos. I suppose it's the usual ordering of partnered couples as "Mr and Mrs", "husband and wife" and the like. To isolate the effect he claims to talk about he should look at unpartnered male/female pairs
L'origine de Bert
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
The Failure of Multiculturalism
The Failure of Multiculturalism
"Thirty years ago, many Europeans saw multiculturalism—the embrace of an inclusive, diverse society—as an answer to Europe’s social problems. Today, a growing number consider it to be a cause of them...
As a political tool, multiculturalism has functioned as not merely a response to diversity but also a means of constraining it. And that insight reveals a paradox. Multicultural policies accept as a given that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. They seek to institutionalize diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes—into a singular, homogeneous Muslim community, for example—and defining their needs and rights accordingly. Such policies, in other words, have helped create the very divisions they were meant to manage...
Both proponents and critics of multiculturalism broadly accept the premise that mass immigration has transformed European societies by making them more diverse... From a historical perspective, however, the claim that these countries are more plural than ever is not as straightforward as it may seem. Nineteenth-century European societies may look homogeneous from the vantage point of today, but that is not how those societies saw themselves then.
Consider France. In the years of the French Revolution, for instance, only half the population spoke French and only around 12 percent spoke it correctly. As the historian Eugen Weber showed, modernizing and unifying France in the revolution’s aftermath required a traumatic and lengthy process of cultural, educational, political, and economic self-colonization. That effort created the modern French state and gave birth to notions of French (and European) superiority over non-European cultures. But it also reinforced a sense of how socially and culturally disparate most of the population still was. In an address to the Medico-Psychological Society of Paris in 1857, the Christian socialist Philippe Buchez wondered how it could happen that “within a population such as ours, races may form—not merely one, but several races—so miserable, inferior and bastardised that they may be classed as below the most inferior savage races, for their inferiority is sometimes beyond cure.” The “races” that caused Buchez such anxiety were not immigrants from Africa or Asia but the rural poor in France.
In the Victorian era, many Britons, too, viewed the urban working class and the rural poor as the other...
The social and cultural differences between a Victorian gentleman or factory owner, on the one hand, and a farm hand or a machinist, on the other, were in reality much greater than those between a white resident and a resident of Bangladeshi origin are today. However much they may view each other as different, a 16-year-old of Bangladeshi origin living in Bethnal Green and a white 16-year-old probably wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, and follow the same soccer club. The shopping mall, the sports field, and the Internet bind them together, creating a set of experiences and cultural practices more common than any others in the past.
A similar historical amnesia plagues discussions surrounding immigration...
As the scholar Max Silverman has written, the notion that France assimilated immigrants from elsewhere in Europe with ease before World War II is a “retrospective illusion.” And much the same is true of the United Kingdom. In 1903, witnesses to the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration expressed fears that newcomers to the United Kingdom would be inclined to live “according to their traditions, usages and customs.” There were also concerns, as the newspaper editor J. L. Silver put it, that “the debilitated sickly and vicious products of Europe” could be “grafted onto the English stock.” The country’s first immigration law, the 1905 Aliens Act, was designed principally to stem the flow of European Jews. Without such a law, then Prime Minister Arthur Balfour argued at the time, British “nationality would not be the same and would not be the nationality we should desire to be our heirs through the ages yet to come.” The echoes of contemporary anxieties are unmistakable...
A century and a half ago, class was a far more important frame for understanding social interactions. However difficult it is to conceive of now, many at the time saw racial distinctions in terms of differences not in skin color but in class or social standing...
Over the past few decades, however, class has diminished in importance in Europe, both as a political category and as a marker of social identity. At the same time, culture has become an increasingly central medium through which people perceive social differences. The shift reflects broader trends...
As the ideological spectrum has narrowed and as the mechanisms for change have eroded, the politics of ideology have given way to the politics of identity...
One of the most prevalent myths in European politics is that governments adopted multicultural policies because minorities wanted to assert their differences. Although questions about cultural assimilation have certainly engrossed political elites, they have not, until relatively recently, preoccupied immigrants themselves...
The immigrants brought with them traditions and mores from their homelands, of which they were often very proud. But they were rarely preoccupied with preserving their cultural differences, nor did they generally consider culture to be a political issue. What troubled them was not a desire to be treated differently but the fact that they were treated differently. Racism and inequality, not religion and ethnicity, constituted their key concerns...
The [new] approach redefined the concepts of racism and equality. Racism now meant not simply the denial of equal rights but also the denial of the right to be different. And equality no longer entailed possessing rights that transcended race, ethnicity, culture, and faith; it meant asserting different rights because of them...
The problem with Birmingham’s policies, observed Joy Warmington, director of what was then the Birmingham Race Action Partnership (now BRAP), a charitable organization working to reduce inequality, in 2005, is that they “have tended to emphasize ethnicity as a key to entitlement. It’s become accepted as good practice to allocate resources on ethnic or faith lines. So rather than thinking of meeting people’s needs or about distributing resources equitably, organizations are forced to think about the distribution of ethnicity.” The consequences were catastrophic. In October 2005, two decades after the original Handsworth riots, violence broke out in the neighboring area of Lozells. In 1985, Asian, black, and white demonstrators had taken to the streets together to protest poverty, unemployment, and police harassment. In 2005, the fighting was between blacks and Asians...
Why did two communities that had fought side by side in 1985 fight against each other in 2005? The answer lies largely in Birmingham’s multicultural policies...
The council’s policies, in other words, not only bound people more closely to particular identities but also led them to fear and resent other groups as competitors for power and influence. An individual’s identity had to be affirmed as distinctive from the identities of those from other groups: being Bangladeshi in Birmingham also meant being not Irish, not Sikh, and not African Caribbean. The consequence was the creation of what the economist Amartya Sen has termed “plural monoculturalism”—a policy driven by the myth that society is made up of distinct, uniform cultures that dance around one another...
Today there is much talk in European countries of a so-called Muslim community—of its views, its needs, its aspirations. But the concept is entirely new. Until the late 1980s, few Muslim immigrants to Europe thought of themselves as belonging to any such thing. That wasn’t because they were few in number. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, for example, there were already large and well-established South Asian, North African, and Turkish immigrant communities by the 1980s.
The first generation of North African immigrants to France was broadly secular, as was the first generation of Turkish immigrants to Germany. By contrast, the first wave of South Asian immigrants to arrive in the United Kingdom after World War II was more religious. Yet even they thought of themselves not as Muslims first but as Punjabis or Bengalis or Sylhetis...
In channeling financial resources and political power through ethnically based organizations, governments provided a form of authenticity to certain ethnic identities and denied it to others.
Multicultural policies seek to build a bridge between the state and minority communities by looking to particular community organizations and leaders to act as intermediaries. Rather than appeal to Muslims and other minorities as citizens, politicians tend to assume minorities’ true loyalty is to their faith or ethnic community. In effect, governments subcontract their political responsibilities out to minority leaders.
Such leaders are, however, rarely representative of their communities. That shouldn’t be a surprise: no single group or set of leaders could represent a single white community... A white Christian probably has more in common with a black Christian than with a white atheist; a white socialist would likely think more like a Bangladeshi socialist than like a white conservative; and so on. Muslims and Sikhs and African Caribbeans are no different; herein rests the fundamental flaw of multiculturalism...
In their own ways, racist populism and radical Islamism are each expressions of a similar kind of social disengagement in an era of identity politics...
An ideal policy would marry multiculturalism’s embrace of actual diversity, rather than its tendency to institutionalize differences, and assimilationism’s resolve to treat everyone as citizens, rather than its tendency to construct a national identity by characterizing certain groups as alien to the nation. In practice, European countries have done the opposite. They have enacted either multicultural policies that place communities in constricting boxes or assimilationist ones that distance minorities from the mainstream.
Moving forward, Europe must rediscover a progressive sense of universal values, something that the continent’s liberals have largely abandoned, albeit in different ways... there is a section of the left that has combined relativism and multiculturalism, arguing that the very notion of universal values is in some sense racist...
There has also been a guiding assumption throughout Europe that immigration and integration must be managed through state policies and institutions. Yet real integration, whether of immigrants or of indigenous groups, is rarely brought about by the actions of the state; it is shaped primarily by civil society, by the individual bonds that people form with one another, and by the organizations they establish to further their shared political and social interests. It is the erosion of such bonds and institutions that has proved so problematic... To repair the damage that disengagement has done, and to revive a progressive universalism, Europe needs not so much new state policies as a renewal of civil society"
*
Kenan Malik's discussion with Amartya Sen of his book Illusions of Identity
"For Amartya Sen... Why, he asks in his new book Identity and Violence, 'should a British citizen who happens to be Muslim have to rely on clerics and other leaders of the religious community to communicate with the prime minister?'...
At the heart of the book is an argument against what Sen calls the communitarian view of identity - the belief that identity is something to be 'discovered' rather than chosen...
'First, the recognition that identities are robustly plural and the importance of one identity need not obliterate another. And second, that a person has to make choices about what relative importance to attach, in a particular context, to their divergent loyalties and identities. The individual belongs to many different groups and it's up to him or her to decide which of those groups he or she would like to give priority to.' We are multitudes and we can choose among our multitudes.
Sen is particularly critical of the ways in which communitarian notions of identity have found their way into social policy, especially through the ideas of multiculturalism, and in so doing have diminished the scope for individual freedom...
What policymakers have created in Britain, Sen suggests, is not multiculturalism but 'plural monoculturalism', a system in which people are constantly herded into different identity pens. 'Take the case of the Bangladeshis', says Sen. 'Bangladesh's separation from Pakistan was not based on their religion but on their language, their literature and their secular politics. At the time of independence Bangladeshis who came here had a very strong sense of Bengali identity. But all that disappeared, because the official government classification ignored language, culture and secular politics, and insisted on viewing all Bangladeshis as Muslims. Suddenly they had lost all identity other than being Islamic. And suddenly Bangladeshis stopped being Bangladeshis and were merged with all other Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia.'
'We have a system in which Muslim organisations are in charge of all Muslims, Hindu organisations in charge of all Hindus, Jewish organisations in charge of all Jews and so on'. This parcelling out of the nation can only weaken civil society. 'In downplaying political and social identities, as opposed to religious identities, the government has weakened civil society precisely when there is a great need to strengthen it.' Multicultural policies, in other words, have allowed mainstream politicians to abandon their responsibilities for engaging directly with Muslim communities. Far from promoting a sense of integration, the policy has encouraged Muslims to see themselves as semi-detached...
The same person, Sen suggests, 'can be without contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a historian, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).'"
"Thirty years ago, many Europeans saw multiculturalism—the embrace of an inclusive, diverse society—as an answer to Europe’s social problems. Today, a growing number consider it to be a cause of them...
As a political tool, multiculturalism has functioned as not merely a response to diversity but also a means of constraining it. And that insight reveals a paradox. Multicultural policies accept as a given that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. They seek to institutionalize diversity by putting people into ethnic and cultural boxes—into a singular, homogeneous Muslim community, for example—and defining their needs and rights accordingly. Such policies, in other words, have helped create the very divisions they were meant to manage...
Both proponents and critics of multiculturalism broadly accept the premise that mass immigration has transformed European societies by making them more diverse... From a historical perspective, however, the claim that these countries are more plural than ever is not as straightforward as it may seem. Nineteenth-century European societies may look homogeneous from the vantage point of today, but that is not how those societies saw themselves then.
Consider France. In the years of the French Revolution, for instance, only half the population spoke French and only around 12 percent spoke it correctly. As the historian Eugen Weber showed, modernizing and unifying France in the revolution’s aftermath required a traumatic and lengthy process of cultural, educational, political, and economic self-colonization. That effort created the modern French state and gave birth to notions of French (and European) superiority over non-European cultures. But it also reinforced a sense of how socially and culturally disparate most of the population still was. In an address to the Medico-Psychological Society of Paris in 1857, the Christian socialist Philippe Buchez wondered how it could happen that “within a population such as ours, races may form—not merely one, but several races—so miserable, inferior and bastardised that they may be classed as below the most inferior savage races, for their inferiority is sometimes beyond cure.” The “races” that caused Buchez such anxiety were not immigrants from Africa or Asia but the rural poor in France.
In the Victorian era, many Britons, too, viewed the urban working class and the rural poor as the other...
The social and cultural differences between a Victorian gentleman or factory owner, on the one hand, and a farm hand or a machinist, on the other, were in reality much greater than those between a white resident and a resident of Bangladeshi origin are today. However much they may view each other as different, a 16-year-old of Bangladeshi origin living in Bethnal Green and a white 16-year-old probably wear the same clothes, listen to the same music, and follow the same soccer club. The shopping mall, the sports field, and the Internet bind them together, creating a set of experiences and cultural practices more common than any others in the past.
A similar historical amnesia plagues discussions surrounding immigration...
As the scholar Max Silverman has written, the notion that France assimilated immigrants from elsewhere in Europe with ease before World War II is a “retrospective illusion.” And much the same is true of the United Kingdom. In 1903, witnesses to the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration expressed fears that newcomers to the United Kingdom would be inclined to live “according to their traditions, usages and customs.” There were also concerns, as the newspaper editor J. L. Silver put it, that “the debilitated sickly and vicious products of Europe” could be “grafted onto the English stock.” The country’s first immigration law, the 1905 Aliens Act, was designed principally to stem the flow of European Jews. Without such a law, then Prime Minister Arthur Balfour argued at the time, British “nationality would not be the same and would not be the nationality we should desire to be our heirs through the ages yet to come.” The echoes of contemporary anxieties are unmistakable...
A century and a half ago, class was a far more important frame for understanding social interactions. However difficult it is to conceive of now, many at the time saw racial distinctions in terms of differences not in skin color but in class or social standing...
Over the past few decades, however, class has diminished in importance in Europe, both as a political category and as a marker of social identity. At the same time, culture has become an increasingly central medium through which people perceive social differences. The shift reflects broader trends...
As the ideological spectrum has narrowed and as the mechanisms for change have eroded, the politics of ideology have given way to the politics of identity...
One of the most prevalent myths in European politics is that governments adopted multicultural policies because minorities wanted to assert their differences. Although questions about cultural assimilation have certainly engrossed political elites, they have not, until relatively recently, preoccupied immigrants themselves...
The immigrants brought with them traditions and mores from their homelands, of which they were often very proud. But they were rarely preoccupied with preserving their cultural differences, nor did they generally consider culture to be a political issue. What troubled them was not a desire to be treated differently but the fact that they were treated differently. Racism and inequality, not religion and ethnicity, constituted their key concerns...
The [new] approach redefined the concepts of racism and equality. Racism now meant not simply the denial of equal rights but also the denial of the right to be different. And equality no longer entailed possessing rights that transcended race, ethnicity, culture, and faith; it meant asserting different rights because of them...
The problem with Birmingham’s policies, observed Joy Warmington, director of what was then the Birmingham Race Action Partnership (now BRAP), a charitable organization working to reduce inequality, in 2005, is that they “have tended to emphasize ethnicity as a key to entitlement. It’s become accepted as good practice to allocate resources on ethnic or faith lines. So rather than thinking of meeting people’s needs or about distributing resources equitably, organizations are forced to think about the distribution of ethnicity.” The consequences were catastrophic. In October 2005, two decades after the original Handsworth riots, violence broke out in the neighboring area of Lozells. In 1985, Asian, black, and white demonstrators had taken to the streets together to protest poverty, unemployment, and police harassment. In 2005, the fighting was between blacks and Asians...
Why did two communities that had fought side by side in 1985 fight against each other in 2005? The answer lies largely in Birmingham’s multicultural policies...
The council’s policies, in other words, not only bound people more closely to particular identities but also led them to fear and resent other groups as competitors for power and influence. An individual’s identity had to be affirmed as distinctive from the identities of those from other groups: being Bangladeshi in Birmingham also meant being not Irish, not Sikh, and not African Caribbean. The consequence was the creation of what the economist Amartya Sen has termed “plural monoculturalism”—a policy driven by the myth that society is made up of distinct, uniform cultures that dance around one another...
Today there is much talk in European countries of a so-called Muslim community—of its views, its needs, its aspirations. But the concept is entirely new. Until the late 1980s, few Muslim immigrants to Europe thought of themselves as belonging to any such thing. That wasn’t because they were few in number. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, for example, there were already large and well-established South Asian, North African, and Turkish immigrant communities by the 1980s.
The first generation of North African immigrants to France was broadly secular, as was the first generation of Turkish immigrants to Germany. By contrast, the first wave of South Asian immigrants to arrive in the United Kingdom after World War II was more religious. Yet even they thought of themselves not as Muslims first but as Punjabis or Bengalis or Sylhetis...
In channeling financial resources and political power through ethnically based organizations, governments provided a form of authenticity to certain ethnic identities and denied it to others.
Multicultural policies seek to build a bridge between the state and minority communities by looking to particular community organizations and leaders to act as intermediaries. Rather than appeal to Muslims and other minorities as citizens, politicians tend to assume minorities’ true loyalty is to their faith or ethnic community. In effect, governments subcontract their political responsibilities out to minority leaders.
Such leaders are, however, rarely representative of their communities. That shouldn’t be a surprise: no single group or set of leaders could represent a single white community... A white Christian probably has more in common with a black Christian than with a white atheist; a white socialist would likely think more like a Bangladeshi socialist than like a white conservative; and so on. Muslims and Sikhs and African Caribbeans are no different; herein rests the fundamental flaw of multiculturalism...
In their own ways, racist populism and radical Islamism are each expressions of a similar kind of social disengagement in an era of identity politics...
An ideal policy would marry multiculturalism’s embrace of actual diversity, rather than its tendency to institutionalize differences, and assimilationism’s resolve to treat everyone as citizens, rather than its tendency to construct a national identity by characterizing certain groups as alien to the nation. In practice, European countries have done the opposite. They have enacted either multicultural policies that place communities in constricting boxes or assimilationist ones that distance minorities from the mainstream.
Moving forward, Europe must rediscover a progressive sense of universal values, something that the continent’s liberals have largely abandoned, albeit in different ways... there is a section of the left that has combined relativism and multiculturalism, arguing that the very notion of universal values is in some sense racist...
There has also been a guiding assumption throughout Europe that immigration and integration must be managed through state policies and institutions. Yet real integration, whether of immigrants or of indigenous groups, is rarely brought about by the actions of the state; it is shaped primarily by civil society, by the individual bonds that people form with one another, and by the organizations they establish to further their shared political and social interests. It is the erosion of such bonds and institutions that has proved so problematic... To repair the damage that disengagement has done, and to revive a progressive universalism, Europe needs not so much new state policies as a renewal of civil society"
*
Kenan Malik's discussion with Amartya Sen of his book Illusions of Identity
"For Amartya Sen... Why, he asks in his new book Identity and Violence, 'should a British citizen who happens to be Muslim have to rely on clerics and other leaders of the religious community to communicate with the prime minister?'...
At the heart of the book is an argument against what Sen calls the communitarian view of identity - the belief that identity is something to be 'discovered' rather than chosen...
'First, the recognition that identities are robustly plural and the importance of one identity need not obliterate another. And second, that a person has to make choices about what relative importance to attach, in a particular context, to their divergent loyalties and identities. The individual belongs to many different groups and it's up to him or her to decide which of those groups he or she would like to give priority to.' We are multitudes and we can choose among our multitudes.
Sen is particularly critical of the ways in which communitarian notions of identity have found their way into social policy, especially through the ideas of multiculturalism, and in so doing have diminished the scope for individual freedom...
What policymakers have created in Britain, Sen suggests, is not multiculturalism but 'plural monoculturalism', a system in which people are constantly herded into different identity pens. 'Take the case of the Bangladeshis', says Sen. 'Bangladesh's separation from Pakistan was not based on their religion but on their language, their literature and their secular politics. At the time of independence Bangladeshis who came here had a very strong sense of Bengali identity. But all that disappeared, because the official government classification ignored language, culture and secular politics, and insisted on viewing all Bangladeshis as Muslims. Suddenly they had lost all identity other than being Islamic. And suddenly Bangladeshis stopped being Bangladeshis and were merged with all other Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia.'
'We have a system in which Muslim organisations are in charge of all Muslims, Hindu organisations in charge of all Hindus, Jewish organisations in charge of all Jews and so on'. This parcelling out of the nation can only weaken civil society. 'In downplaying political and social identities, as opposed to religious identities, the government has weakened civil society precisely when there is a great need to strengthen it.' Multicultural policies, in other words, have allowed mainstream politicians to abandon their responsibilities for engaging directly with Muslim communities. Far from promoting a sense of integration, the policy has encouraged Muslims to see themselves as semi-detached...
The same person, Sen suggests, 'can be without contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a historian, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).'"
Post ID: 5758409613464161990
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Links - 15th December 2015
Man had sex with underage girls, then made them prostitutes - "Some of the girls who applied for a job at his social escort agency were as young as 15 years old. But that didn't stop him from using them to provide sexual services to men. Chew Tiong Wei also had sex with some of them because he wanted to "try" them out before hiring them. A 17-year-old girl whom Chew had sex with went on to make about $20,000 for him in about a year. The university undergraduate slept with about 50 men, charging them $400 to $1,000 each. As with his other girls, Chew took 40 per cent of her takings as his cut. His other "social escorts" were not as lucrative, but Chew still earned $1.047 million from at least 19 prostitutes from 2007 until last year... Within the next year, he made between $20,000 and $30,000, motivating him to improve his business. In 2010, he spent about $24,000 to hire professionals to create a website and a short-messaging service (SMS) database program for his business... The girls would be asked for their personal particulars such as their NRIC and age, relevant sexual experience, preferred age limit of their customers, sexual services they are willing to provide and their minimum price. When it came to recruiting females under 18, Chew would convince them to have sex with him first before hiring them. He would tell them he needed to "try" them out and provide pointers so they could "get used to the whole feel". That was how he convinced a 15-year-old girl to have sex with him in June 2008 before recruiting her to be a prostitute... For the next six months, the girl had paid sex with 76 male customers and gave Chew about $6,770. He also met another 15-year-old girl, who saw his advertisement and asked her 16-year-old female friend along for the interview and photoshoot in a hotel room. After Chew took pictures of them in their lingerie, he said he wanted to test their sexual services and offered to paid them. They agreed and engaged in a threesome with Chew, who paid them $50 each... He told her she would need to talk to a customer first and kiss him if he did not make the first move. They then had sex with a condom, only for her to push him away at some point when she felt pain. He assured her that everything would be fine and they resumed, even having unprotected sex at some point.
Afterwards, he told her not to push the customer away during sex... Chew also filmed himself having sex with his prostitutes in hotel rooms or his Toa Payoh home on 27 occasions. Many of them were unaware they were being filmed"
Pimp who earned S$2.5 million from social escort business pleads guilty - "Chew decided to set up a database system to keep track of clients and their respective bookings. Chew eventually had about six administrative staff helping to attend to clients, to set up meetings with prostitutes and to procure more women for the trade."
Online vice-ring pimp who made $1m in profits over 5 years convicted of vice offences - "A 38-year-old online vice-ring pimp who received nearly $2.6 million in revenue and earned a profit of about $1 million over five years was convicted of various offences... Chew's vice-ring involved at least 22 prostitutes, 11 of whom were below age 18 at the time of the offences. The youngest was 15... He pleaded guilty to evading tax by under-declaring his profit for the year of assessment 2012 in his income tax return. He declared his profit to be $40,166, when it was actually $175,779. The tax undercharged amounted to $15,118.25. He also declared his profit for the year of assessment 2013 to be $20,345, when it was actually $160,417. The tax undercharged amounted to $11,846.40. In April last year, Chew also submitted a Productivity and Innovation Credit cash payout application form for purchasing a $15,000 software. In the form, he declared that he had met the conditions of employing and making CPF contributions for at least three local employees, and provided the particulars of his father, mother and wife. They were never employed by Chew, but he had made CPF contributions into their accounts. Chew later obtained a PIC cash payout of $9,000 and a PIC bonus of $15,000."
What’s Behind Baltimore’s Record-Setting Rise in Homicides - "Since the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black Baltimore resident who died in police custody on April 19, the balance of power between police and citizens in the city appears to have tilted on its axis. Protests following Gray’s death, which at first experienced little police pushback, have led to elevated levels of violence around the city by criminals who some experts say appear emboldened. There were 43 homicides in May, the most in any month since December 1971—when the city was almost one-third bigger than it is today. According to numbers compiled by the Baltimore Sun and the FBI, the average number of monthly murders in May from 2009 to 2014 was 21... Since six officers were indicted in Gray’s death on May 1, police officers’ concerns over potential prosecution for improper use of force now appear to be holding many of them back from arresting suspects altogether. When they do, they’re surrounded by smartphone-wielding citizens. It’s as if the police are no longer patrolling Baltimore the way they once did; instead, the citizens are patrolling them. “The cops I’ve spoken to say it’s different now,” said Peter Moskos, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor and former Baltimore City police officer. “Cops are saying, If we’re going to get in trouble for well-intentioned mistakes, then f— it, I’m not working”... The number of murders has doubled while shootings are up more than 80%, and most experts say that it’s at least partly linked to a reluctance by police to actively do their jobs... Many on-duty officers are also being pulled away from their normal beats to back up other officers during a stop or an arrest because of the groups of people who gather to record their actions. Police Commissioner Anthony Batts has described situations in which “30 to 50 people” are surrounding officers on duty. “They’re still doing their jobs, but now these stops takes four officers instead of two because they’re surrounded by people filming them,” Moskos said. Baltimore also appears to be at least a short-term test case for how much of an effect policing has on crime. Moskos said some experts don’t accept the notion that policing is linked to crime rates and that crime can only be lessened by tackling root causes like poverty or poor education, rather than boosting a police force."
Presumably it's better for 10 people to be killed in crime than for 1 person to be killed by a police officer
US tackles crowdfunding man who spent money on himself - "In 2012, Erik Chevalier raised more than $122,000 (£79,000) to make a board game called The Doom That Came to Atlantic City. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said much of the money raised went on rent, personal equipment and moving expenses. In a settlement, Mr Chevalier agreed to honour refunds and to be honest in any future crowdfunding projects. The legal action is believed to be the first against someone who misrepresented crowdfunding projects or misappropriated funds."
BBC World Service - The Documentary, Wall in the Head - "We stole some motorbikes but got caught on the Bavarian border. One shot by the border police and that would've been the end of us. It was a completely stupid thing to do, but thank god they just arrested us and we were locked up. And because I was a political prisoner, I've now got a better pension. Back then I never though I was providing for the future"
Hanged on a comma: drafting can be a matter of life and death - "Sir Roger was an Irish nationalist activist. He was tried under the Treason Act 1351 – text here. A full description of the trial appears here. For reasons that are discussed below, he was famously said to have been “hanged on a comma”... Sir Roger’s counsel argued that acts performed outside the UK could not amount to treason within the UK. This argument was based on interpreting the wording of the statute. Or rather, interpreting the English version of the statute, for the original was written in Norman French... At one point during the appeal hearing, the discussion descends to whether a mark on the original roll indicates a comma, a bracket or just a centuries-old fold in the paper!"
Back to the issue of Singaporeans and their accent - "You should always put the client's needs before yours, you are not as important as the client, you should be humble and treat the client as a VIP. If the client wants to speak the Queen's English, then you jolly well stuff your Singlish where the sun don't shine and you speak proper English. And by the same token, if the client wants to speak Hokkien (which was the case when I dealt with a Taiwanese client in London who was thrilled to meet a fellow Hokkien person), then I stuffed my Queen's English where the sun don't shine and spoke to him in Hokkien (his Taiwanese Hokkien wasn't easy to understand). Either way, you let the other party decide what kind of language they want to speak, you don't impose your preferences on them... I cringe at the way Singlish has evolved in the last 20 years. I no longer recognize it and when I try to speak Singlish to Singaporeans these days, they do not understand me. This is because when I learnt Singlish back in the 1980s, it was such a rich mix of English infused with Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Malay and Tamil - it was beautiful to listen to and a joy to speak. Nowadays, Singaporean-Chinese people tend to speak only Mandarin and English, so the moment I use a loanword from any other of those Chinese dialects, Malay or Tamil, I am met with blank stares"
“For the Avoidance of Doubt” - "Never use for the avoidance of doubt. Sometimes a drafter will use this phrase in a contract to introduce language that seeks to clarify preceding language, usually by indicating that something either falls within or is excluded from the scope of the preceding language. In this context, for the avoidance of doubt says, in effect, “excuse us if we state the obvious.”"
As a Navy SEAL Sniper, my ruck was routinely 120... - Craig "Sawman" Sawyer - "As a Navy SEAL Sniper, my ruck was routinely 120 pounds. My second line was another 50-60 pounds. My main weapon, if carrying the Tac 50 was another 30 pounds. I'm 6 ft, 220 pounds with a 33 inch waist. There were many times I could barely stand up with my own equipment on my back. I had to jump that gear from airplanes in the dark, lock it out of submarines and swim it into hostile countries, hump it through jungles, deserts and mountains for further than I'm allowed to disclose. I can tell you from sacrificing my health in that capacity for my country, that's a brutally physical job, no matter how you slice it. It takes a brute to get those tools into a foreign country, not to mention actually WINNING the fight against their country's fiercest Special Forces Units. Less than 1% of the fittest and baddest males are capable of making the grade. What if your 275 pound teammate goes down in a firefight? I can barely drag him out of there using all the strength and insane determination I have. The fact is, nobody less physically capable could get him to the helo to get him off target and back home. Does he deserve to have teammates he can save, but who could not save him?... I must say, though, that until women are directly and routinely competing with monsters like Mike Tyson for the world heavyweight boxing championship, UFC championships, competing very effectively with the NFL Superbowl champs, and competing directly with male heavyweight powerlifting champions, putting them in front line Spec Ops units that require they beat the most capable foreign Special Forces Units to death, even if hand-to-hand combat is required (and it has ALWAYS boiled down to that historically) within a primal and necessarily physical profession, for our national security is…misguided. That's the nicest term I can place upon such a supremely foolish development. This is a classic example of decisions being made by those who have ZERO concept of what it really takes to win a fight with no rules, in the dark of night, halfway around the globe, when our nation's security is at risk and successful force is required to save the day, at all cost. Failure is not an option. When this kind of politics is involved, the standards are changed to fit the narrative, every time. In practical application in the real world, whether or not it is admitted to the public, the standards are forced down to accommodate the story. This ends up putting people in harm's way who are not prepared. Catastrophe follows. U.S. Army Col. David Hackworth wrote about this using the example of the mom who wrote her Congressman demanding her son make it through Special Forces training, then after political pressure was applied and standards were dropped to get her son through so he could have his fancy title, her son died in combat because he was in over his head. He didn't have what it took. The standards would have handled that, if only allowed. What's worse is he likely got some of his more capable teammates killed because they were counting on him to cover their backs as they had for him. The standards are NEVER kept when politics gets forced into the matter. This brand of interference is expensive in the cost of lives, morale and unit effectiveness"
Furries from A to Z (Anthropomorphism to Zoomorphism) - "Th is study explored the furry identity. Furries are humans interested in anthropomorphic art and cartoons. Some furries have zoomorphic tendencies. Furries often identify with, and/or assume, characteristics of a special/totem species of nonhuman animal. Th is research surveyed both fur-ries (n = 217) and non-furry individuals (n = 29) attending a furry convention and a comparison group of college students (n = 68). Furries commonly indicated dragons and various canine and feline species as their alternate-species identity; none reported a nonhuman-primate identity. Dichotomous responses ("yes" or "no") to two key furry-identity questions ("do you consider yourself to be less than 100% human" and "if you could become 0% human, would you") pro-duced a two-by-two furry typology. Th ese two independent dimensions are self-perception (undistorted versus distorted) and species identity (attained versus unattained). One-quarter of the furry sample answered "yes" to both questions, placing them in the "Distorted Unattained" quadrant. Th is type of furry has certain characteristics paralleling gender-identity disorder. To explore this parallel, the furry typology, and the proposed construct of "Species Identity Disorder" needs further research."
What is HD? The difference between 720p, 1080i and 1080p
Afterwards, he told her not to push the customer away during sex... Chew also filmed himself having sex with his prostitutes in hotel rooms or his Toa Payoh home on 27 occasions. Many of them were unaware they were being filmed"
Pimp who earned S$2.5 million from social escort business pleads guilty - "Chew decided to set up a database system to keep track of clients and their respective bookings. Chew eventually had about six administrative staff helping to attend to clients, to set up meetings with prostitutes and to procure more women for the trade."
Online vice-ring pimp who made $1m in profits over 5 years convicted of vice offences - "A 38-year-old online vice-ring pimp who received nearly $2.6 million in revenue and earned a profit of about $1 million over five years was convicted of various offences... Chew's vice-ring involved at least 22 prostitutes, 11 of whom were below age 18 at the time of the offences. The youngest was 15... He pleaded guilty to evading tax by under-declaring his profit for the year of assessment 2012 in his income tax return. He declared his profit to be $40,166, when it was actually $175,779. The tax undercharged amounted to $15,118.25. He also declared his profit for the year of assessment 2013 to be $20,345, when it was actually $160,417. The tax undercharged amounted to $11,846.40. In April last year, Chew also submitted a Productivity and Innovation Credit cash payout application form for purchasing a $15,000 software. In the form, he declared that he had met the conditions of employing and making CPF contributions for at least three local employees, and provided the particulars of his father, mother and wife. They were never employed by Chew, but he had made CPF contributions into their accounts. Chew later obtained a PIC cash payout of $9,000 and a PIC bonus of $15,000."
What’s Behind Baltimore’s Record-Setting Rise in Homicides - "Since the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black Baltimore resident who died in police custody on April 19, the balance of power between police and citizens in the city appears to have tilted on its axis. Protests following Gray’s death, which at first experienced little police pushback, have led to elevated levels of violence around the city by criminals who some experts say appear emboldened. There were 43 homicides in May, the most in any month since December 1971—when the city was almost one-third bigger than it is today. According to numbers compiled by the Baltimore Sun and the FBI, the average number of monthly murders in May from 2009 to 2014 was 21... Since six officers were indicted in Gray’s death on May 1, police officers’ concerns over potential prosecution for improper use of force now appear to be holding many of them back from arresting suspects altogether. When they do, they’re surrounded by smartphone-wielding citizens. It’s as if the police are no longer patrolling Baltimore the way they once did; instead, the citizens are patrolling them. “The cops I’ve spoken to say it’s different now,” said Peter Moskos, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor and former Baltimore City police officer. “Cops are saying, If we’re going to get in trouble for well-intentioned mistakes, then f— it, I’m not working”... The number of murders has doubled while shootings are up more than 80%, and most experts say that it’s at least partly linked to a reluctance by police to actively do their jobs... Many on-duty officers are also being pulled away from their normal beats to back up other officers during a stop or an arrest because of the groups of people who gather to record their actions. Police Commissioner Anthony Batts has described situations in which “30 to 50 people” are surrounding officers on duty. “They’re still doing their jobs, but now these stops takes four officers instead of two because they’re surrounded by people filming them,” Moskos said. Baltimore also appears to be at least a short-term test case for how much of an effect policing has on crime. Moskos said some experts don’t accept the notion that policing is linked to crime rates and that crime can only be lessened by tackling root causes like poverty or poor education, rather than boosting a police force."
Presumably it's better for 10 people to be killed in crime than for 1 person to be killed by a police officer
US tackles crowdfunding man who spent money on himself - "In 2012, Erik Chevalier raised more than $122,000 (£79,000) to make a board game called The Doom That Came to Atlantic City. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said much of the money raised went on rent, personal equipment and moving expenses. In a settlement, Mr Chevalier agreed to honour refunds and to be honest in any future crowdfunding projects. The legal action is believed to be the first against someone who misrepresented crowdfunding projects or misappropriated funds."
BBC World Service - The Documentary, Wall in the Head - "We stole some motorbikes but got caught on the Bavarian border. One shot by the border police and that would've been the end of us. It was a completely stupid thing to do, but thank god they just arrested us and we were locked up. And because I was a political prisoner, I've now got a better pension. Back then I never though I was providing for the future"
Hanged on a comma: drafting can be a matter of life and death - "Sir Roger was an Irish nationalist activist. He was tried under the Treason Act 1351 – text here. A full description of the trial appears here. For reasons that are discussed below, he was famously said to have been “hanged on a comma”... Sir Roger’s counsel argued that acts performed outside the UK could not amount to treason within the UK. This argument was based on interpreting the wording of the statute. Or rather, interpreting the English version of the statute, for the original was written in Norman French... At one point during the appeal hearing, the discussion descends to whether a mark on the original roll indicates a comma, a bracket or just a centuries-old fold in the paper!"
Back to the issue of Singaporeans and their accent - "You should always put the client's needs before yours, you are not as important as the client, you should be humble and treat the client as a VIP. If the client wants to speak the Queen's English, then you jolly well stuff your Singlish where the sun don't shine and you speak proper English. And by the same token, if the client wants to speak Hokkien (which was the case when I dealt with a Taiwanese client in London who was thrilled to meet a fellow Hokkien person), then I stuffed my Queen's English where the sun don't shine and spoke to him in Hokkien (his Taiwanese Hokkien wasn't easy to understand). Either way, you let the other party decide what kind of language they want to speak, you don't impose your preferences on them... I cringe at the way Singlish has evolved in the last 20 years. I no longer recognize it and when I try to speak Singlish to Singaporeans these days, they do not understand me. This is because when I learnt Singlish back in the 1980s, it was such a rich mix of English infused with Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Malay and Tamil - it was beautiful to listen to and a joy to speak. Nowadays, Singaporean-Chinese people tend to speak only Mandarin and English, so the moment I use a loanword from any other of those Chinese dialects, Malay or Tamil, I am met with blank stares"
“For the Avoidance of Doubt” - "Never use for the avoidance of doubt. Sometimes a drafter will use this phrase in a contract to introduce language that seeks to clarify preceding language, usually by indicating that something either falls within or is excluded from the scope of the preceding language. In this context, for the avoidance of doubt says, in effect, “excuse us if we state the obvious.”"
As a Navy SEAL Sniper, my ruck was routinely 120... - Craig "Sawman" Sawyer - "As a Navy SEAL Sniper, my ruck was routinely 120 pounds. My second line was another 50-60 pounds. My main weapon, if carrying the Tac 50 was another 30 pounds. I'm 6 ft, 220 pounds with a 33 inch waist. There were many times I could barely stand up with my own equipment on my back. I had to jump that gear from airplanes in the dark, lock it out of submarines and swim it into hostile countries, hump it through jungles, deserts and mountains for further than I'm allowed to disclose. I can tell you from sacrificing my health in that capacity for my country, that's a brutally physical job, no matter how you slice it. It takes a brute to get those tools into a foreign country, not to mention actually WINNING the fight against their country's fiercest Special Forces Units. Less than 1% of the fittest and baddest males are capable of making the grade. What if your 275 pound teammate goes down in a firefight? I can barely drag him out of there using all the strength and insane determination I have. The fact is, nobody less physically capable could get him to the helo to get him off target and back home. Does he deserve to have teammates he can save, but who could not save him?... I must say, though, that until women are directly and routinely competing with monsters like Mike Tyson for the world heavyweight boxing championship, UFC championships, competing very effectively with the NFL Superbowl champs, and competing directly with male heavyweight powerlifting champions, putting them in front line Spec Ops units that require they beat the most capable foreign Special Forces Units to death, even if hand-to-hand combat is required (and it has ALWAYS boiled down to that historically) within a primal and necessarily physical profession, for our national security is…misguided. That's the nicest term I can place upon such a supremely foolish development. This is a classic example of decisions being made by those who have ZERO concept of what it really takes to win a fight with no rules, in the dark of night, halfway around the globe, when our nation's security is at risk and successful force is required to save the day, at all cost. Failure is not an option. When this kind of politics is involved, the standards are changed to fit the narrative, every time. In practical application in the real world, whether or not it is admitted to the public, the standards are forced down to accommodate the story. This ends up putting people in harm's way who are not prepared. Catastrophe follows. U.S. Army Col. David Hackworth wrote about this using the example of the mom who wrote her Congressman demanding her son make it through Special Forces training, then after political pressure was applied and standards were dropped to get her son through so he could have his fancy title, her son died in combat because he was in over his head. He didn't have what it took. The standards would have handled that, if only allowed. What's worse is he likely got some of his more capable teammates killed because they were counting on him to cover their backs as they had for him. The standards are NEVER kept when politics gets forced into the matter. This brand of interference is expensive in the cost of lives, morale and unit effectiveness"
Furries from A to Z (Anthropomorphism to Zoomorphism) - "Th is study explored the furry identity. Furries are humans interested in anthropomorphic art and cartoons. Some furries have zoomorphic tendencies. Furries often identify with, and/or assume, characteristics of a special/totem species of nonhuman animal. Th is research surveyed both fur-ries (n = 217) and non-furry individuals (n = 29) attending a furry convention and a comparison group of college students (n = 68). Furries commonly indicated dragons and various canine and feline species as their alternate-species identity; none reported a nonhuman-primate identity. Dichotomous responses ("yes" or "no") to two key furry-identity questions ("do you consider yourself to be less than 100% human" and "if you could become 0% human, would you") pro-duced a two-by-two furry typology. Th ese two independent dimensions are self-perception (undistorted versus distorted) and species identity (attained versus unattained). One-quarter of the furry sample answered "yes" to both questions, placing them in the "Distorted Unattained" quadrant. Th is type of furry has certain characteristics paralleling gender-identity disorder. To explore this parallel, the furry typology, and the proposed construct of "Species Identity Disorder" needs further research."
What is HD? The difference between 720p, 1080i and 1080p
Post ID: 2180914481512756126
Descriptivism vs Prescriptivism
KING FUCKO — gollyplot: flittering-sylph: Man I hate it...
flittering-sylph: Man I hate it when people use the pronoun “you” as a singular pronoun in an informal setting. “You” is plural, unless thou dost speak to an unfamiliar person. The correct singular second person pronoun is “thou” in most cases. Grammar never changes. Pronouns must always stay one way until the end of time. Learn thy proper English. *sigh* Kids these days.
gollyplot: If thou this mistake shouldst make on thine own blog, then know, villain, that thou art a dirty descriptivist, and no friend of mine. Ne'er should language itself alter, it doth remain fixèd as such, untouch’d by change. Wouldst thou, vile descriptivist, that we forget the heritage of our great tongue? Nay, say I. Thou art but a dickhead who sayest so.
kingfucko: stynt ðy clappe! beoð ðo writerris be wetleas knafen. ðy langag o engelond diffoulened be, ille usenid bi sclaundrous novelri.
flittering-sylph: Man I hate it when people use the pronoun “you” as a singular pronoun in an informal setting. “You” is plural, unless thou dost speak to an unfamiliar person. The correct singular second person pronoun is “thou” in most cases. Grammar never changes. Pronouns must always stay one way until the end of time. Learn thy proper English. *sigh* Kids these days.
gollyplot: If thou this mistake shouldst make on thine own blog, then know, villain, that thou art a dirty descriptivist, and no friend of mine. Ne'er should language itself alter, it doth remain fixèd as such, untouch’d by change. Wouldst thou, vile descriptivist, that we forget the heritage of our great tongue? Nay, say I. Thou art but a dickhead who sayest so.
kingfucko: stynt ðy clappe! beoð ðo writerris be wetleas knafen. ðy langag o engelond diffoulened be, ille usenid bi sclaundrous novelri.
Post ID: 3507031229622186415
Monday, December 07, 2015
On Germaine Greer in Cardiff
What the row over banning Germaine Greer is really about - "The word “TERF” is sprayed around like confetti, with very little understanding of what it means. I’ve been called a TERF, even though I think trans women are women and absolutely have a place in feminism. I think it’s become a politer way of saying “witch”. It’s also about undergraduates rebelling against their parents’ generation and its liberal deification of free speech. After all, the last time students tried to have Greer disinvited from addressing a university crowd, one of those defending her right to speak was Rachael Padman, the trans academic whose appointment to the all-women’s college Newnham Greer tried to kibosh in 1996. Padman said she hoped the Cambridge Union would “give Germaine a fair hearing, but of course robustly interrogate her”. Here was someone directly affected by Greer’s beliefs, defending her right to express them. The fact that the trans rights struggle is the first progressive cause to come of age in the time of Twitter leaves anyone who wants to explore the thorny issue of gender and biological sex, and the meaning of both and the differences between them, in a difficult position... several guests also said things which have become unsayable on social media, even by trans people themselves: one referred to using the term “trans*” (the asterisk denotes that the term includes not just transgender people, but those who reject the gender binary, or are otherwise genderfluid) and was told, laughingly, by others that this was very two years ago. There are places on the internet where you will be told to “die in a fire” if you write “transwomen” instead of “trans women”. (Not pressing the spacebar is said to indicate that you don’t believe they are real women). After a while, you begin to wonder if the opacity of language isn’t accidental at all. Trans activists, tired of being treated as objects of curiousity, fear or pity by outsiders, have decided to seize control of the discourse and develop their own ways of talking about how they feel. This is understandable, but it also means that everyone is constantly making mistakes... Even trans people who do not have the “correct” opinions feel worried about broaching the subject; I know a group of “gender critical” trans women who are castigated regularly as “TERF tokens” and “Uncle Toms”... If you "listened to women" on abortion, you'd hear a much higher level of anti-abortion views than if you listened to men, for example. What people mean when they say that is "listen to mainstream feminist opinion". But that doesn't have quite the same snappy righteousness, though, does it? Although trans issues have benefited hugely from the speed and reach of online activism, in other ways they have been ill-served by being the first progressive cause to blossom fully in the social media age. Nuance is impossible. Dare to write anything other than a saccharine celebration of diversity, or solemn sermons about how brave trans people are, and your opinion is read as an attack on the very idea that they should be allowed to carry on living at all... Should a person with a penis and beard (no surgery or hormones are required to legally transition) be allowed into a women-only rape shelter?... It’s not – as many people on Twitter seem to believe – as simple as identifying the group you feel is most fashionably oppressed and sprinting to shout: “Solidarity!”... there is now a strange conflation of rhetorical with actual, physical violence. Such views are said to lead directly to the dehumanisation of trans people that puts them in danger of street attacks and death. It is a difficult point to argue when confronted with the facts: the only person convicted of murdering a trans woman in Britain this year is Joaquin Gomez-Hernandez, who killed his wife, Vanessa Santillan, after finding her in bed with a client. He had no job, and lived off her earnings as a sex worker; a familiar tale of a bruised male ego curdling into rage. Not an avid reader of Germaine Greer, I would guess... The current orthodoxy is that issues should be left to those directly affected by them to discuss, but consider this for more than a minute and the absurdity reveals itself. The rights of severely disabled people who cannot communicate would, under this logic, never get discussed. Plus: gender affects us all; free speech affects us all... The new no-platforming of feminists means that one duff opinion sees you bundled off the stage, whatever you planned to talk about. Germaine Greer could go to a university to talk about her LP collection and there would be students desperate to ban her"
Women are more flamed for their opinions? But they don't get told to check their male privilege...
Germaine Greer and the scourge of 'no-platforming' - "The "no-platforming" campaign against Germaine Greer reflects a deeper sickness afflicting Western universities. While the stated aim is to reduce harm, the end result is enforced ignorance... Students at Cardiff University have seemingly been deprived of their opportunity to hear one of the most significant female intellectuals of the last century... It is important to note that while Greer has answered questions on transgenderism during interviews and panel discussions, she has not published any comment about transgenderism for over 15 years... Meanwhile, there has been an alarming amount of vitriol and hatred expressed towards Greer on Twitter. In her Newsnight interview with Kirsty Wark, Greer said that while she did not think that post-operative male-to-female transsexuals were "women", this was not a prohibition. If people wanted to pursue sex reassignment surgery, they should "carry on". "It happens to be an opinion," she said, visibly exasperated... In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American scholar and anti-free speech advocate,coined the term "intersectional feminism". Intersectional feminism is about how people experience various forms of intersecting oppression, from racial oppression, to gender oppression, to other forms of marginalization. Intersectional feminism is vastly different from the kind of liberation feminism that Greer advocated in the seventies. It is the fashionable version of feminist activism that is present on university campuses today. Within intersectionality, free speech is dangerous. It is something to be overcome, not utilised for political effect. To protect vulnerable groups such as women, people of colour, sexual assault victims or transgender individuals, freedom of expression must be curtailed, lest someone's speech cause emotional harm."
There is a certain dramatic irony about feminists silencing and censoring other feminists
How Germaine Greer is having her voice snatched away by feminist students - "Since I read The Female Eunuch in 1970, when the feminist bestseller was published, I’ve been an irritated admirer of Germaine Greer. Irritated, because she has tiresome political views (a Marxist anarchist Liberal Democrat is hard to warm to), frequently changes her mind but is always sure she is right and can be guilty of sweeping unfairness to whole sections of society, especially men. But there is much more reason to admire Greer, for she has an original mind, challenges her followers with everything she writes and says, is never dull and has tremendous guts. She infuriated, inspired, energised and helped liberate generations of women and we all owe her a great debt of gratitude... Issues of sexual identity and orientation are very fashionable among the young at present. Being ‘cisgender’, is, in plain English, thinking you have the same gender identity you were given at birth, and straight is totally uncool. Non-binary or gender queer, i.e. being not exclusively male or female, is what’s currently trendy. But what is really exciting in today’s society is to be transgender, famously exemplified by Olympic gold medallist Bruce Jenner... As a young woman, I was happy to describe myself as a feminist, but it’s a label I have reluctantly come to reject. Like the majority of my female friends, young and old, I find those who now call themselves feminist a spineless, whingeing lot seemingly bent on claiming the very status of victims that Greer fought so hard to liberate us from. Most young men and women today take it for granted that they will have equal career opportunities and have better things to do than look for reasons to take offence. However, sadly, many of today’s self-declared feminists do not. Typical of their nonsense was the petition initiated by Rachael Melhuish, the Women’s Officer at Cardiff University Students’ Union... Greer, who has dedicated her academic life to opening doors and fighting for women to be heard in society, is having the door slammed and her voice snatched away by feminist students. An irony no doubt lost on the Women’s Officer... ‘check your privilege’, which you use to silence others. It operates a bit like a game of bridge: you can use your blackness, poverty, disability, homosexuality, discontent with your sexual organs or anything else that’s bugging you to trump those you perceive to be less oppressed and tell them to shut up... While people die under repressive regimes around much of the world for uttering criticisms of their rulers, ignorant and spoiled young people in the West declare themselves the judge of who can and cannot be heard on their campuses. There were always Left-wing students who tried to bar or shout down speakers from the Right, and they are still with us yelling about fascists and Zionists and climate-change deniers and Islamophobia. But contemporary feminists have taken such protests to a level of lunacy that would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerous to themselves and to society... Remember Nobel-prize winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt being hounded out of his job for making a crass joke? Or the barrister who was publicly humiliated for complimenting barrister Charlotte Proudman’s photo on a networking website? Ironically, they show the truth of Greer’s assertion in The Female Eunuch: ‘The fear of freedom is strong in us.’"
Germaine Greer gives university lecture despite campaign to silence her - "“I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock,” she said. “You can beat me over the head with a baseball bat. It still won’t make me change my mind.” Greer quoted the BBC Strictly Come Dancing judge Len Goodman, who said when judging an unconvincing rumba that just because someone told him his pencil was a hammer, it did not change the fact that it really was a pencil. She also referred to a Will Young pop video featuring a naked trans man walking down a street, claiming that if an elderly woman had done that she would have been thrown into a waste disposal unit... "I do agree that calling people names may add to their misery but it happens to old women every day"... Greer said five women had approached her as she travelled to Cardiff to back her stance on trans women. “They said: ‘I’m so glad that someone is saying what we think. We don’t think that post-operative male transexuals are women but we are not allowed to say so’. I will say so because I don’t believe they are women. That’s not tantamount to calling them names. I also happen to believe that the surgery is unethical.” When it was pointed out that trans people were being killed in the US because of their sexuality, Greer replied: “We have two women a week being murdered in England by their partners. They are not my fault and the transexuals in America aren’t my fault either ... If you want to turn me into a demon you have to have some evidence ... I don’t accept post-operative males as females.”"
Women are more flamed for their opinions? But they don't get told to check their male privilege...
Germaine Greer and the scourge of 'no-platforming' - "The "no-platforming" campaign against Germaine Greer reflects a deeper sickness afflicting Western universities. While the stated aim is to reduce harm, the end result is enforced ignorance... Students at Cardiff University have seemingly been deprived of their opportunity to hear one of the most significant female intellectuals of the last century... It is important to note that while Greer has answered questions on transgenderism during interviews and panel discussions, she has not published any comment about transgenderism for over 15 years... Meanwhile, there has been an alarming amount of vitriol and hatred expressed towards Greer on Twitter. In her Newsnight interview with Kirsty Wark, Greer said that while she did not think that post-operative male-to-female transsexuals were "women", this was not a prohibition. If people wanted to pursue sex reassignment surgery, they should "carry on". "It happens to be an opinion," she said, visibly exasperated... In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American scholar and anti-free speech advocate,coined the term "intersectional feminism". Intersectional feminism is about how people experience various forms of intersecting oppression, from racial oppression, to gender oppression, to other forms of marginalization. Intersectional feminism is vastly different from the kind of liberation feminism that Greer advocated in the seventies. It is the fashionable version of feminist activism that is present on university campuses today. Within intersectionality, free speech is dangerous. It is something to be overcome, not utilised for political effect. To protect vulnerable groups such as women, people of colour, sexual assault victims or transgender individuals, freedom of expression must be curtailed, lest someone's speech cause emotional harm."
There is a certain dramatic irony about feminists silencing and censoring other feminists
How Germaine Greer is having her voice snatched away by feminist students - "Since I read The Female Eunuch in 1970, when the feminist bestseller was published, I’ve been an irritated admirer of Germaine Greer. Irritated, because she has tiresome political views (a Marxist anarchist Liberal Democrat is hard to warm to), frequently changes her mind but is always sure she is right and can be guilty of sweeping unfairness to whole sections of society, especially men. But there is much more reason to admire Greer, for she has an original mind, challenges her followers with everything she writes and says, is never dull and has tremendous guts. She infuriated, inspired, energised and helped liberate generations of women and we all owe her a great debt of gratitude... Issues of sexual identity and orientation are very fashionable among the young at present. Being ‘cisgender’, is, in plain English, thinking you have the same gender identity you were given at birth, and straight is totally uncool. Non-binary or gender queer, i.e. being not exclusively male or female, is what’s currently trendy. But what is really exciting in today’s society is to be transgender, famously exemplified by Olympic gold medallist Bruce Jenner... As a young woman, I was happy to describe myself as a feminist, but it’s a label I have reluctantly come to reject. Like the majority of my female friends, young and old, I find those who now call themselves feminist a spineless, whingeing lot seemingly bent on claiming the very status of victims that Greer fought so hard to liberate us from. Most young men and women today take it for granted that they will have equal career opportunities and have better things to do than look for reasons to take offence. However, sadly, many of today’s self-declared feminists do not. Typical of their nonsense was the petition initiated by Rachael Melhuish, the Women’s Officer at Cardiff University Students’ Union... Greer, who has dedicated her academic life to opening doors and fighting for women to be heard in society, is having the door slammed and her voice snatched away by feminist students. An irony no doubt lost on the Women’s Officer... ‘check your privilege’, which you use to silence others. It operates a bit like a game of bridge: you can use your blackness, poverty, disability, homosexuality, discontent with your sexual organs or anything else that’s bugging you to trump those you perceive to be less oppressed and tell them to shut up... While people die under repressive regimes around much of the world for uttering criticisms of their rulers, ignorant and spoiled young people in the West declare themselves the judge of who can and cannot be heard on their campuses. There were always Left-wing students who tried to bar or shout down speakers from the Right, and they are still with us yelling about fascists and Zionists and climate-change deniers and Islamophobia. But contemporary feminists have taken such protests to a level of lunacy that would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerous to themselves and to society... Remember Nobel-prize winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt being hounded out of his job for making a crass joke? Or the barrister who was publicly humiliated for complimenting barrister Charlotte Proudman’s photo on a networking website? Ironically, they show the truth of Greer’s assertion in The Female Eunuch: ‘The fear of freedom is strong in us.’"
Germaine Greer gives university lecture despite campaign to silence her - "“I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock,” she said. “You can beat me over the head with a baseball bat. It still won’t make me change my mind.” Greer quoted the BBC Strictly Come Dancing judge Len Goodman, who said when judging an unconvincing rumba that just because someone told him his pencil was a hammer, it did not change the fact that it really was a pencil. She also referred to a Will Young pop video featuring a naked trans man walking down a street, claiming that if an elderly woman had done that she would have been thrown into a waste disposal unit... "I do agree that calling people names may add to their misery but it happens to old women every day"... Greer said five women had approached her as she travelled to Cardiff to back her stance on trans women. “They said: ‘I’m so glad that someone is saying what we think. We don’t think that post-operative male transexuals are women but we are not allowed to say so’. I will say so because I don’t believe they are women. That’s not tantamount to calling them names. I also happen to believe that the surgery is unethical.” When it was pointed out that trans people were being killed in the US because of their sexuality, Greer replied: “We have two women a week being murdered in England by their partners. They are not my fault and the transexuals in America aren’t my fault either ... If you want to turn me into a demon you have to have some evidence ... I don’t accept post-operative males as females.”"
Post ID: 861072392640887839
Sunday, December 06, 2015
Links - 6th December 2015
Can Singapore be both the exception and the rule? - "at its core, Singaporean exceptionalism needs the sustenance of regular and noticeable successes to refresh belief in its relevance. It is this reliance that makes this brand of exceptionalism far more easily lost. Without the trappings of success, Singaporean exceptionalism would have little to show for its unorthodoxy. It then follows that the narrative of exceptionalism in Singapore is almost always merged with a seemingly contradictory concession that we are also in a constantly precarious state, with local and global threats lurking just around the corner. Over time it has been nuanced to speak of how we“took advantage of disadvantage” and “turned vulnerabilities into strengths”. Yet believing that we are special enough to defy the odds, but always vulnerable, effectively narrows the range of ideas that can be considered, let alone debated... the party’s rhetoric of pragmatism conflates Singaporean exceptionalism with PAP exceptionalism – making the party unassailable, since debating the PAP becomes tantamount to critiquing Singapore’s accomplishments and potential."
Smite the Unbelievers - "Just because a given percentage agree with the death penalty for apostasy does not entail that they’d automatically kill an apostate personally, but it probably indicates a level of tolerance and acceptance of intimidation and violence directed toward the act of apostasy... To me it is interesting that many liberals I see on the internet with whom I am on good terms otherwise with seem more focused on policing “Islamophobia” than in the genuine illiberalism which is so common among today’s 1.5 billion Muslims... Several years ago the financial journalist Heidi Moore decided to “whitesplain” Islam to me... The reality is that many liberals who are deeply worried about Islamophobia know as much about Islam as Ben Carson does. That’s a fact. I say this as someone who knows a fair amount about the religion, despite my obvious distaste for it. The arguments that American liberals and conservatives have about Islam are not about Islam, but about each other’s self-perceptions, and their cartoon of what Islam is."
“Yellow Fever” by Sally Wen Mao | The Poetry Project - "You are the kind of person who would frame a print of Hokusai’s
Dream of a Fisherman’s Wife and stroke the airplane
at night, imagining yourself as monster, tentacular
ladykiller. I am the eavesdropper sitting in your ear listening...
With the smugness of a man who has
just caught a trout, you say I do like those Asian women.
I will fuck you up with the spastic ember of a Puccini opera."
The Myth of Basic Science - WSJ - "When you examine the history of innovation, you find, again and again, that scientific breakthroughs are the effect, not the cause, of technological change... n the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. and Britain made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics... In 2003, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a paperon the “sources of economic growth in OECD countries” between 1971 and 1998 and found, to its surprise, that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. It is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored. In 2007, the economist Leo Sveikauskas of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that returns from many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero and that “many elements of university and government research have very low returns, overwhelmingly contribute to economic growth only indirectly, if at all.” As the economist Walter Park of American University in Washington, D.C., concluded, the explanation for this discrepancy is that public funding of research almost certainly crowds out private funding"
Others may know us better than we know ourselves, study finds - "the individual is more accurate in assessing one's own internal, or neurotic traits, such as anxiety, while friends are better barometers of intellect-related traits, such as intelligence and creativity, and even strangers are equally adept as our friends and ourselves at spotting the extrovert in us all, a psychology domain known as "extroversion"... The self has difficulty in accurately judging itself in areas that are desirable or undesirable, what she calls evaluative traits. Intelligence, attractiveness, creativity are hard for the self to judge objectively because "there is so much at stake, meaning your life is going to be so much different if you are intelligent or not intelligent, attractive or not. Everybody wants to be seen as intelligent and attractive, but these desirable traits we're not going to judge accurately in ourselves."
Tampons aren't the only product to get taxed at 5% - "Mobility aids for the elderly
Smoking cessation products
Maternity pads
Car seats for children
Solar panels
Energy supplies"
Too bad there're no feminists campaigning for those products
Eating vegetables can seriously damage your health - "Eating vegetables may be the cause of a cancer that kills 3,000 people a year in Britain. Research suggests that the increased use of nitrate fertilisers since the Second World War may be one of the main reasons for the dramatic rise in cancer of the gullet. The number of cases is escalating faster than any other form of cancer in Britain."
Have spare time before boarding? Dine in at Old Chang Kee’s first Changi Airport outlet - "She claims that Old Chang Kee has touched the hearts of all generations in Singapore and is a brand which Singapore is proud of and has graced many National Day events as the key caterer."
"Claims"
My trigger-warning disaster: “9 1/2 Weeks,” “The Wire” and how coddled young radicals got discomfort all wrong - "They argued that if someone is in an abusive relationship, they can never consent to sex because they are being manipulated. This triggered me. I was furious. Sexual assault survivor support is about empowerment. The model says, “Hey! It’s not for you to tell the survivor what happened to them; that’s their story, they know, don’t fucking label it.” What these students were essentially doing was stripping every person in an abusive relationship of all their agency. They were telling every survivor that they were raped, even when the survivor may have wanted to have sex with their abuser. They were claiming god like knowledge of every sexual encounter. And they were only 20. If that. Their frontal lobes haven’t even fully developed... Memory, emotional trauma, grief and healing are complicated and unique to an individual’s experience. Blanket trigger warnings treat them as impersonal predictable entities. The current movement of calling for trigger warnings prioritizes the shielding of students from the traumatic, whereas, ironically, so many other therapeutic models focus on talking through and confronting trauma as a mode of healing... Colleges are the new helicopter parents, places where the quest for emotional safety and psychic healing leads not to learning, but regression... if you promote trigger warnings in subjects that are supposed to make people feel uncomfortable, you’re basically promoting a culture of extreme privilege, cause I’m pretty sure that the trans women who are being murdered weekly, the black men who are victims of police brutality daily, and the neighborhoods in America that are plagued by everyday violence, aren’t given any trigger warnings. Let’s be honest: life is a trigger."
Why NFL Players Are So Likely to Declare Bankruptcy - "They get bad advice and make bad decisions. Ismail blew money on a wide range of sketchy investments, including a religious movie, a music label, and various high-risk restaurant and retail endeavors. Many players have sued their advisors after allegedly being scammed out of millions. In one suit filed in 2013, a group of 16 former and current NFL playersclaimed they were collectively bilked for more than $50 million based on the actions of an advisor who had allegedly invested the money in an illegal casino."
Westminster Abbey » Stamford Raffles - "he raised Java to happiness and prosperity unknown under former rulers"
Many ‘Syrian Refugees’ Are Neither Syrian nor Refugees - "The European Union’s official statistical agency, Eurostat, recorded 213,0000 arrived migrants in April, May, and June of this year; only 44,000 — 1 in five — were fleeing war in Syria. With new international attention turned to the problem over the last month, that proportion likely has changed. But even the International Organization for Migration reports that Syrians make up only 40 percent of the total migrant population. Another 11 percent are Afghans fleeing the Taliban; Eritreans fleeing their own oppressive government are 7 percent; and many thousands more hail from Iraq, Pakistan, and sub-Saharan Africa. Perhaps the most telling statistic is the ratio of men to women and children in the overall migrant population: 72 percent to 13 percent and 15 percent, respectively, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Given the typical profile of economic migrants, this dramatic disproportion suggests that many men are seeking economic opportunity, not sanctuary from violence... The heart-rending photo of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi dead on a Turkish beach turned international attention to the migrant crisis. But Aylan and his family were entirely out of harm’s way. According to the Guardian, the Kurdi family had been living in Turkey for three years. Aylan’s father, Abdullah, was seeking to move the family to Sweden — to get dental care."
Keywords: not from Syria, not Syrian, most migrants
Europe's Welfare States Attract Refugees, Moslty Single Men - "The Swedish newspaper Local reported last week that “more than 30 asylum seekers refused to get off a bus that took them to temporary accommodation at a holiday park on Sunday night because they didn’t want to stay in such a rural location.” Other countries without an extensive welfare state don’t seem to have Sweden’s problem. Reuters reported that Lithuania “is throwing its doors open to refugees fleeing war and hardship in the Middle East, but is finding few takers.” Rimantas Vaitkus, deputy chancellor of the Lithuanian government, told the news agency: “We are prepared to accept refugees immediately, but there are no refugees in Italy or Greece who agreed to resettle in Lithuania. . . . It seems that refugees know about Sweden, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, which either have generous social security or have been actively attracting immigrants”... Merkel helped create Germany’s refugee crisis back in September when she announced that she would disregard European Union rules requiring refugees to seek asylum in the European country they first arrive in"
Unconventional Opinions: the Backlash against TTIP, TPP and Investment Arbitration - "There is a high degree of transparency about the working of investment arbitration proceedings before the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID or Centre), which is the most popular destination for arbitration pursuant to ISDS. There is nothing secretive or improper about how tribunals are appointed. The usual procedure is that each party chooses one of the three arbitrators and the third is chosen either by the Centre or by the party-nominated arbitrators. In each case, the nominated arbitrators must confirm that they are independent and impartial. The parties have the right to challenge the appointment of anyone not meeting the necessary standards of integrity. Such challenges are rare, even though the prejudiced party would have every incentive to raise a challenge if it perceived bias on the part of the prospective tribunal. In general, while investors and states have free reign to appoint whomsoever they wish as arbitrator, there has emerged an elite of established arbitrators from a diverse range of backgrounds, the vast majority of whom are of the highest intellectual calibre and standard of probity... There is also little truth in the charge that ICSID proceedings alienate public interest groups. Hearings are frequently held in public, sometimes being webcast to a worldwide audience, for free. NGOs can and do participate in proceedings and submit amicus briefs, just as they can in many domestic court systems"
Some Chinese Grandparents Are Making Their Grandkids Fat - "children in China who are mainly cared for by grandparents are twice as likely to be overweight or obese"
Do Chimps Trade Food for Sex? - "Some studies report cases of male chimps trying to sweeten the deal: sharing game they killed, or crops they filched, with females that mated with them. In a 2007 West African chimp study, a female consorted more frequently with a male that gave her stolen papayas, leading researcher Kimberley Hockings, a postdoctoral student at Oxford Brookes University in the U.K., to suggest the male was trading "forbidden fruit" for "other currencies.""
The Latest Things You Can't Do in Iran: Go to Coffee Shops, Eat Chicken on TV - "If those sound absurd, it's because they are, but they do make some sense within the internal logic of Iranian oppression. And, perhaps just as importantly, they are signs of how drastically Iranian society is suffering in the country's confrontation with the West... People are furious that their economy is so bad that they often can't even buy chicken anymore, and seeing chicken on TV might remind them of this. Of course, while Moghadam is addressing this problem in one of the few ways he actually can, the real cause isn't culinary TV, it's the Iranian nuclear program and the crippling Western sanctions that it has drawn."
CRAZY ASIAN LADY DANCING TO PSY - YouTube
What Economists Think About Raising the Minimum Wage - NYTimes.com - "of those who responded, about a quarter said they were “uncertain” about the proposition. Exactly zero percent said they either agreed or disagreed “strongly”... Ask economists about whether raising the minimum wage is worth the potential risks to low-skilled workers, though, and the responses tend to be much more favorable to a minimum-wage increase"
Smite the Unbelievers - "Just because a given percentage agree with the death penalty for apostasy does not entail that they’d automatically kill an apostate personally, but it probably indicates a level of tolerance and acceptance of intimidation and violence directed toward the act of apostasy... To me it is interesting that many liberals I see on the internet with whom I am on good terms otherwise with seem more focused on policing “Islamophobia” than in the genuine illiberalism which is so common among today’s 1.5 billion Muslims... Several years ago the financial journalist Heidi Moore decided to “whitesplain” Islam to me... The reality is that many liberals who are deeply worried about Islamophobia know as much about Islam as Ben Carson does. That’s a fact. I say this as someone who knows a fair amount about the religion, despite my obvious distaste for it. The arguments that American liberals and conservatives have about Islam are not about Islam, but about each other’s self-perceptions, and their cartoon of what Islam is."
“Yellow Fever” by Sally Wen Mao | The Poetry Project - "You are the kind of person who would frame a print of Hokusai’s
Dream of a Fisherman’s Wife and stroke the airplane
at night, imagining yourself as monster, tentacular
ladykiller. I am the eavesdropper sitting in your ear listening...
With the smugness of a man who has
just caught a trout, you say I do like those Asian women.
I will fuck you up with the spastic ember of a Puccini opera."
The Myth of Basic Science - WSJ - "When you examine the history of innovation, you find, again and again, that scientific breakthroughs are the effect, not the cause, of technological change... n the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. and Britain made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics... In 2003, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a paperon the “sources of economic growth in OECD countries” between 1971 and 1998 and found, to its surprise, that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. It is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored. In 2007, the economist Leo Sveikauskas of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that returns from many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero and that “many elements of university and government research have very low returns, overwhelmingly contribute to economic growth only indirectly, if at all.” As the economist Walter Park of American University in Washington, D.C., concluded, the explanation for this discrepancy is that public funding of research almost certainly crowds out private funding"
Others may know us better than we know ourselves, study finds - "the individual is more accurate in assessing one's own internal, or neurotic traits, such as anxiety, while friends are better barometers of intellect-related traits, such as intelligence and creativity, and even strangers are equally adept as our friends and ourselves at spotting the extrovert in us all, a psychology domain known as "extroversion"... The self has difficulty in accurately judging itself in areas that are desirable or undesirable, what she calls evaluative traits. Intelligence, attractiveness, creativity are hard for the self to judge objectively because "there is so much at stake, meaning your life is going to be so much different if you are intelligent or not intelligent, attractive or not. Everybody wants to be seen as intelligent and attractive, but these desirable traits we're not going to judge accurately in ourselves."
Tampons aren't the only product to get taxed at 5% - "Mobility aids for the elderly
Smoking cessation products
Maternity pads
Car seats for children
Solar panels
Energy supplies"
Too bad there're no feminists campaigning for those products
Eating vegetables can seriously damage your health - "Eating vegetables may be the cause of a cancer that kills 3,000 people a year in Britain. Research suggests that the increased use of nitrate fertilisers since the Second World War may be one of the main reasons for the dramatic rise in cancer of the gullet. The number of cases is escalating faster than any other form of cancer in Britain."
Have spare time before boarding? Dine in at Old Chang Kee’s first Changi Airport outlet - "She claims that Old Chang Kee has touched the hearts of all generations in Singapore and is a brand which Singapore is proud of and has graced many National Day events as the key caterer."
"Claims"
My trigger-warning disaster: “9 1/2 Weeks,” “The Wire” and how coddled young radicals got discomfort all wrong - "They argued that if someone is in an abusive relationship, they can never consent to sex because they are being manipulated. This triggered me. I was furious. Sexual assault survivor support is about empowerment. The model says, “Hey! It’s not for you to tell the survivor what happened to them; that’s their story, they know, don’t fucking label it.” What these students were essentially doing was stripping every person in an abusive relationship of all their agency. They were telling every survivor that they were raped, even when the survivor may have wanted to have sex with their abuser. They were claiming god like knowledge of every sexual encounter. And they were only 20. If that. Their frontal lobes haven’t even fully developed... Memory, emotional trauma, grief and healing are complicated and unique to an individual’s experience. Blanket trigger warnings treat them as impersonal predictable entities. The current movement of calling for trigger warnings prioritizes the shielding of students from the traumatic, whereas, ironically, so many other therapeutic models focus on talking through and confronting trauma as a mode of healing... Colleges are the new helicopter parents, places where the quest for emotional safety and psychic healing leads not to learning, but regression... if you promote trigger warnings in subjects that are supposed to make people feel uncomfortable, you’re basically promoting a culture of extreme privilege, cause I’m pretty sure that the trans women who are being murdered weekly, the black men who are victims of police brutality daily, and the neighborhoods in America that are plagued by everyday violence, aren’t given any trigger warnings. Let’s be honest: life is a trigger."
Why NFL Players Are So Likely to Declare Bankruptcy - "They get bad advice and make bad decisions. Ismail blew money on a wide range of sketchy investments, including a religious movie, a music label, and various high-risk restaurant and retail endeavors. Many players have sued their advisors after allegedly being scammed out of millions. In one suit filed in 2013, a group of 16 former and current NFL playersclaimed they were collectively bilked for more than $50 million based on the actions of an advisor who had allegedly invested the money in an illegal casino."
Westminster Abbey » Stamford Raffles - "he raised Java to happiness and prosperity unknown under former rulers"
Many ‘Syrian Refugees’ Are Neither Syrian nor Refugees - "The European Union’s official statistical agency, Eurostat, recorded 213,0000 arrived migrants in April, May, and June of this year; only 44,000 — 1 in five — were fleeing war in Syria. With new international attention turned to the problem over the last month, that proportion likely has changed. But even the International Organization for Migration reports that Syrians make up only 40 percent of the total migrant population. Another 11 percent are Afghans fleeing the Taliban; Eritreans fleeing their own oppressive government are 7 percent; and many thousands more hail from Iraq, Pakistan, and sub-Saharan Africa. Perhaps the most telling statistic is the ratio of men to women and children in the overall migrant population: 72 percent to 13 percent and 15 percent, respectively, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Given the typical profile of economic migrants, this dramatic disproportion suggests that many men are seeking economic opportunity, not sanctuary from violence... The heart-rending photo of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi dead on a Turkish beach turned international attention to the migrant crisis. But Aylan and his family were entirely out of harm’s way. According to the Guardian, the Kurdi family had been living in Turkey for three years. Aylan’s father, Abdullah, was seeking to move the family to Sweden — to get dental care."
Keywords: not from Syria, not Syrian, most migrants
Europe's Welfare States Attract Refugees, Moslty Single Men - "The Swedish newspaper Local reported last week that “more than 30 asylum seekers refused to get off a bus that took them to temporary accommodation at a holiday park on Sunday night because they didn’t want to stay in such a rural location.” Other countries without an extensive welfare state don’t seem to have Sweden’s problem. Reuters reported that Lithuania “is throwing its doors open to refugees fleeing war and hardship in the Middle East, but is finding few takers.” Rimantas Vaitkus, deputy chancellor of the Lithuanian government, told the news agency: “We are prepared to accept refugees immediately, but there are no refugees in Italy or Greece who agreed to resettle in Lithuania. . . . It seems that refugees know about Sweden, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, which either have generous social security or have been actively attracting immigrants”... Merkel helped create Germany’s refugee crisis back in September when she announced that she would disregard European Union rules requiring refugees to seek asylum in the European country they first arrive in"
Unconventional Opinions: the Backlash against TTIP, TPP and Investment Arbitration - "There is a high degree of transparency about the working of investment arbitration proceedings before the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID or Centre), which is the most popular destination for arbitration pursuant to ISDS. There is nothing secretive or improper about how tribunals are appointed. The usual procedure is that each party chooses one of the three arbitrators and the third is chosen either by the Centre or by the party-nominated arbitrators. In each case, the nominated arbitrators must confirm that they are independent and impartial. The parties have the right to challenge the appointment of anyone not meeting the necessary standards of integrity. Such challenges are rare, even though the prejudiced party would have every incentive to raise a challenge if it perceived bias on the part of the prospective tribunal. In general, while investors and states have free reign to appoint whomsoever they wish as arbitrator, there has emerged an elite of established arbitrators from a diverse range of backgrounds, the vast majority of whom are of the highest intellectual calibre and standard of probity... There is also little truth in the charge that ICSID proceedings alienate public interest groups. Hearings are frequently held in public, sometimes being webcast to a worldwide audience, for free. NGOs can and do participate in proceedings and submit amicus briefs, just as they can in many domestic court systems"
Some Chinese Grandparents Are Making Their Grandkids Fat - "children in China who are mainly cared for by grandparents are twice as likely to be overweight or obese"
Do Chimps Trade Food for Sex? - "Some studies report cases of male chimps trying to sweeten the deal: sharing game they killed, or crops they filched, with females that mated with them. In a 2007 West African chimp study, a female consorted more frequently with a male that gave her stolen papayas, leading researcher Kimberley Hockings, a postdoctoral student at Oxford Brookes University in the U.K., to suggest the male was trading "forbidden fruit" for "other currencies.""
The Latest Things You Can't Do in Iran: Go to Coffee Shops, Eat Chicken on TV - "If those sound absurd, it's because they are, but they do make some sense within the internal logic of Iranian oppression. And, perhaps just as importantly, they are signs of how drastically Iranian society is suffering in the country's confrontation with the West... People are furious that their economy is so bad that they often can't even buy chicken anymore, and seeing chicken on TV might remind them of this. Of course, while Moghadam is addressing this problem in one of the few ways he actually can, the real cause isn't culinary TV, it's the Iranian nuclear program and the crippling Western sanctions that it has drawn."
CRAZY ASIAN LADY DANCING TO PSY - YouTube
What Economists Think About Raising the Minimum Wage - NYTimes.com - "of those who responded, about a quarter said they were “uncertain” about the proposition. Exactly zero percent said they either agreed or disagreed “strongly”... Ask economists about whether raising the minimum wage is worth the potential risks to low-skilled workers, though, and the responses tend to be much more favorable to a minimum-wage increase"
Post ID: 3932763816068436871
Life and Death
Life asked Death, "Death, Why do people love me but hate you?"
Death responded, "Because you are a beautiful lie and I am the painful truth"
Death responded, "Because you are a beautiful lie and I am the painful truth"
Post ID: 550996900277595118
Saturday, December 05, 2015
Links - 5th December 2015
Head of Russian Media Group Questioned About Ties to 'Grammar Nazis' - "In the latest case, prosecutors in southern Russia on Wednesday summoned for questioning Alexei Pavlovsky, the head of Bonus Media, which supports the local branch of the popular Total Dictation educational project. The project tests how accurately people can transcribe a text read orally. "They asked me first about the dictation, about my other civil initiatives, and then politely inquired about what I knew about grammar Nazis, and whether they were financing my activities," Pavlovsky wrote on his Facebook page. The language purists dubbed "grammar Nazis" do not appear to be a formal group and have not been known to engage in organizational financing of anybody's activities... Maria Burdukovskaya was charged with "promoting Nazi ideology" this spring, after she posted a "grammar Nazi" picture on her social network page — a post she said was aimed to "support the correct use and purity of the Russian language,""
The home-chefs causing panic in restaurants - "The main Paris restaurateurs' union Synhorcat has appealed to the French government to take steps to curb the phenomenon, arguing that bistros and brasseries risk being put out of business. "In the space of three years Airbnb has tripled its presence in Paris - to the point that there are now 50,000 flats advertised on its website," Synhorcat's president Didier Chenet tells me. He says small and medium-sized hotels have been hit hard and over the summer they had to drop their prices. "If the government doesn't do something to stop the underground restaurants, it will be the same disaster"... All agree too that part of the explanation for Vizeat's success is the disappointment that too often accompanies eating out in Paris. Quality of food, price and service can be out of line with what visitors have been led to expect, and the well-travelled young are increasingly discerning."
The Power of Negative Thinking - WSJ - "peppy affirmations designed to lift the user's mood through repetition and visualizing future success often achieve the opposite of their intended effect. Fortunately, both ancient philosophy and contemporary psychology point to an alternative: a counterintuitive approach that might be termed "the negative path to happiness." This approach helps to explain some puzzles, such as the fact that citizens of more economically insecure countries often report greater happiness than citizens of wealthier ones. Or that many successful businesspeople reject the idea of setting firm goals... Just thinking in sober detail about worst-case scenarios—a technique the Stoics called "the premeditation of evils"—can help to sap the future of its anxiety-producing power. The psychologist Julie Norem estimates that about one-third of Americans instinctively use this strategy, which she terms "defensive pessimism." Positive thinking, by contrast, is the effort to convince yourself that things will turn out fine, which can reinforce the belief that it would be absolutely terrible if they didn't... Focusing on one goal at the expense of all other factors also can distort a corporate mission or an individual life, says Christopher Kayes, an associate professor of management at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Prof. Kayes, who has studied the "overpursuit" of goals, recalls a conversation with one executive who "told me his goal had been to become a millionaire by the age of 40…and he'd done it. [But] he was also divorced, and had health problems, and his kids didn't talk to him anymore." Behind our fixation on goals, Prof. Kayes's work suggests, is a deep unease with feelings of uncertainty."
Pope Francis Met With a Gay Couple at the Vatican Before He Met Kim Davis During His Trip to the United States
If Pope Francis meeting with Kim Davis means he endorsed her, does Obama meeting both the Dalai Lama and Xi Jinping mean he's a hypocrite?
Does Your Parents' Income Affect Your Choice of College Major? - "Kids from lower-income families tend toward “useful” majors, such as computer science, math, and physics. Those whose parents make more money flock to history, English, and performing arts. The explanation is fairly intuitive. “It’s … consistent with the claim that kids from higher-earning families can afford to choose less vocational or instrumental majors, because they have more of a buffer against the risk of un- or under-employment”... Clark’s data, along with Weeden’s, provides a reason to reexamine the expected-earnings-by-major statistics that are so often scrutinized by indecisive college students. One recent finding out of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce is that majoring in the humanities gets you about $50,000 per year in median mid-career earnings, while a computer-science degree is good for about $75,000 per year... doctors and surgeons tended to come from families with lower incomes than musicians and artists. When compared to their parents, doctors on average improved on their parents’ income by 40 percent. Artists, though, trailed their parents’ earnings by 35 percent... Even though income and occupational prestige vary across generations, wealth and education levels remain relatively consistent over time... From this angle, college majors and occupations start to look more and more like easily-interpreted, if slightly crude, badges doled out to people based on the wealth and educational levels of the parents they were born to. There’s a reason that the first question asked at parties is often “So, what do you do?” “If we tend to avoid asking acquaintances about their income,” four prominent sociologistswrote in the 2011 anthology The Inequality Reader, “it’s not just because doing so is viewed as too intrusive and personal but also because we suspect that querying about occupation will yield more in the way of useful information.”"
Addendum: Aka Rich Kids Study English
These 5 Facts Explain Russia’s Economic Decline - "Corruption, cheap oil and unproductive workers all hold Russia back—though Russians don't seem to care... Typically, a stumbling economy brings about change in political leadership. Some countries, like Greece, take this to an extreme—Athens has seen five different governments in five years. But Russians have gone the other way—as their economy has slowed, Putin has grown more popular; he now holds an approval rating of 86 percent. More surprising is that while 73 percent of Russians are unhappy with their economy, 7 in 10 approve of the way Putin is handling it. How is that possible? About 90 percent of all Russians get their news from Russian television channels directly controlled by the Kremlin. By framing sanctions and the invasion of Ukraine as “Russia vs. the West”, Putin has succeeded in stoking the country’s nationalism. Today, 63 percent of Russians have a very favorable view of their country, up from 29 percent in 2013 and 51 percent in 2014. It’s easier under those circumstances to blame bad economic circumstances on outsiders. Credit where credit’s due—Putin knows what his people want to hear. It’s just not clear if he knows how to fix his flailing economy."
Sarah Sands jailed for killing paedophile Michael Pleasted - "Sarah Sands, 32, was found guilty of the manslaughter of Michael Pleasted, 77, by reason of loss of control... He was stabbed eight times and bled to death... Judge Nicholas Cooke QC said it was a "truly exceptional case" as he reduced her sentence from seven years to three-and-a-half, taking into consideration her position as a single mother. Sands, who was cleared of murder, had armed herself with a knife and carried out a "determined and sustained attack"... Sands, who has been in custody for the past 10 months, could be released on parole in 11 months. The judge emphasised the case was "unique" as Sands had lost control rather than taken the law into her own hands and engaged in "vigilante conduct"... During the trial, Sands told the court she had not intended to hurt Pleasted when she went to his flat with a knife, claiming instead she wanted him to admit to his crimes so his young accusers would not have to go to court. "Sands told the jury she was "frightened", adding: "It was not how it was meant to go. He was meant to listen to me". However she said Pleasted "smirked" when he answered the door and told her the boys were all liars who had ruined his life."
If she had been a man and hadn't stabbed a pedophile...
How the U.S. spends more helping its citizens than other rich countries, but gets way less - "a new study argues that the real waste in the American system comes not from welfare programs like food stamps, but from widespread tax breaks that subsidize spending on things like health care and housing. Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Peterson Institute for International Economics, argues in a new report that once you take these kinds of tax breaks into account, the U.S. actually devotes far more resources than many other countries to “social spending” -- spending on pensions, health care, family support, unemployment, housing assistance, and similar benefits meant to help people out in hard times. And, compared with most advanced countries, the U.S. gets far less bang for its buck in terms of health outcomes and equality... There’s a clear political rationale behind the American system of giving people tax breaks on their health care spending, rather than having the government give them health care: The public pays fewer taxes, and the government doesn’t appear to be spending money. But the Peterson study suggests this system merely hides the true level of government spending. Tax breaks for lunches eaten on business trips are rarely given the same amount of scrutiny as the use of food stamps at the grocery store, but the ultimate cost to the government is the same. The American system also does less to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, since the private sector mostly depends on individuals and households to spend money, and people can’t spend money they don’t have, says Kirkegaard. The result is that the U.S. spends a lot on social services, and still has relatively high levels of inequality"
Are Children Who Are Raised by Gay Parents More Likely to Be Gay Themselves? - "Do the sexual inclinations of parents influence those of their children? Of 77 adult children of homosexual parents who volunteered for three different investigations, at least 23 (30%) were currently homosexual: twelve (55%) of 22 daughters and three (21%) of fourteen sons of lesbians; five (29%) of seventeen daughters and three (17%) of eighteen sons of gays; none of six sons with both a gay and a lesbian parent. At least 25 (32%) were currently heterosexual. Of the ten with transsexual parents, one of nine daughters was currently lesbian, one was currently heterosexual, and one was transsexual. The son's sexual preference was not reported. These findings suggest that parents' sexual inclinations influence their children's"
The women who fooled everyone by pretending to be executives at Ashley Madison’s sister websites
Affirmative action for all in India - "The Patels - a populous and reasonably prosperous caste comprising about one in every eight people in Gujarat - are demanding reservations for members of the community in government educational institutions and government jobs. What is more surprising is the mechanism by which they want the ratification of such a demand: They want the state to recognise them as part of the "other backward classes" (OBCs) of India, a label of relatively recent - and political - origin for groups in India who are socially and economically disadvantageous... This system of affirmative action was supposed to last only a decade - until 1960 - but, of course, nothing of the sort happened. Instead - and in this might be seen both positive and negative as a result of the deliberate and unintended consequences of the policy - over the decades, the beneficiaries of reservation not only claimed what was offered by the state, but also organised themselves politically on caste-based platforms... Affirmative action was going nowhere; rather, it was expanding its reach and now comprised a full 50 percent of all government-managed opportunities."
Africans reject Jamie's Jollof rice recipe - "The reaction from Africans began with dozens of comments posted on the chef's website in the past week. The conversation then moved on to social media where it escalated. The Oliver recipe has attracted 4,500 comments, a large number of them seemingly from Africans - and many outraged at what they say are changes Oliver has made to the traditional recipe. In the past 24 hours Twitter joined the debate using hashtags like #jollofgate and #jollof... By creating this recipe Oliver has increased the exposure of the dish. Vera Kwakofi, from BBC Africa, says that's part of the problem: "The danger is that in five years his version will become the official one." The blogger behind Motley Musing agrees: "We have to ask ourselves who actually benefits from Jamie Oliver's 'appreciation' of Jollof rice. This doesn't necessarily translate into value for Africans. For so long, different African cultures have been appropriated without any direct benefit to Africans themselves, and people are particularly sensitive to this."
Moral of the story: don't bother cooking minorites' food
Ireland to 'decriminalise' small amounts of drugs, including heroin, cocaine and cannabis, for personal use
The home-chefs causing panic in restaurants - "The main Paris restaurateurs' union Synhorcat has appealed to the French government to take steps to curb the phenomenon, arguing that bistros and brasseries risk being put out of business. "In the space of three years Airbnb has tripled its presence in Paris - to the point that there are now 50,000 flats advertised on its website," Synhorcat's president Didier Chenet tells me. He says small and medium-sized hotels have been hit hard and over the summer they had to drop their prices. "If the government doesn't do something to stop the underground restaurants, it will be the same disaster"... All agree too that part of the explanation for Vizeat's success is the disappointment that too often accompanies eating out in Paris. Quality of food, price and service can be out of line with what visitors have been led to expect, and the well-travelled young are increasingly discerning."
The Power of Negative Thinking - WSJ - "peppy affirmations designed to lift the user's mood through repetition and visualizing future success often achieve the opposite of their intended effect. Fortunately, both ancient philosophy and contemporary psychology point to an alternative: a counterintuitive approach that might be termed "the negative path to happiness." This approach helps to explain some puzzles, such as the fact that citizens of more economically insecure countries often report greater happiness than citizens of wealthier ones. Or that many successful businesspeople reject the idea of setting firm goals... Just thinking in sober detail about worst-case scenarios—a technique the Stoics called "the premeditation of evils"—can help to sap the future of its anxiety-producing power. The psychologist Julie Norem estimates that about one-third of Americans instinctively use this strategy, which she terms "defensive pessimism." Positive thinking, by contrast, is the effort to convince yourself that things will turn out fine, which can reinforce the belief that it would be absolutely terrible if they didn't... Focusing on one goal at the expense of all other factors also can distort a corporate mission or an individual life, says Christopher Kayes, an associate professor of management at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Prof. Kayes, who has studied the "overpursuit" of goals, recalls a conversation with one executive who "told me his goal had been to become a millionaire by the age of 40…and he'd done it. [But] he was also divorced, and had health problems, and his kids didn't talk to him anymore." Behind our fixation on goals, Prof. Kayes's work suggests, is a deep unease with feelings of uncertainty."
Pope Francis Met With a Gay Couple at the Vatican Before He Met Kim Davis During His Trip to the United States
If Pope Francis meeting with Kim Davis means he endorsed her, does Obama meeting both the Dalai Lama and Xi Jinping mean he's a hypocrite?
Does Your Parents' Income Affect Your Choice of College Major? - "Kids from lower-income families tend toward “useful” majors, such as computer science, math, and physics. Those whose parents make more money flock to history, English, and performing arts. The explanation is fairly intuitive. “It’s … consistent with the claim that kids from higher-earning families can afford to choose less vocational or instrumental majors, because they have more of a buffer against the risk of un- or under-employment”... Clark’s data, along with Weeden’s, provides a reason to reexamine the expected-earnings-by-major statistics that are so often scrutinized by indecisive college students. One recent finding out of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce is that majoring in the humanities gets you about $50,000 per year in median mid-career earnings, while a computer-science degree is good for about $75,000 per year... doctors and surgeons tended to come from families with lower incomes than musicians and artists. When compared to their parents, doctors on average improved on their parents’ income by 40 percent. Artists, though, trailed their parents’ earnings by 35 percent... Even though income and occupational prestige vary across generations, wealth and education levels remain relatively consistent over time... From this angle, college majors and occupations start to look more and more like easily-interpreted, if slightly crude, badges doled out to people based on the wealth and educational levels of the parents they were born to. There’s a reason that the first question asked at parties is often “So, what do you do?” “If we tend to avoid asking acquaintances about their income,” four prominent sociologistswrote in the 2011 anthology The Inequality Reader, “it’s not just because doing so is viewed as too intrusive and personal but also because we suspect that querying about occupation will yield more in the way of useful information.”"
Addendum: Aka Rich Kids Study English
These 5 Facts Explain Russia’s Economic Decline - "Corruption, cheap oil and unproductive workers all hold Russia back—though Russians don't seem to care... Typically, a stumbling economy brings about change in political leadership. Some countries, like Greece, take this to an extreme—Athens has seen five different governments in five years. But Russians have gone the other way—as their economy has slowed, Putin has grown more popular; he now holds an approval rating of 86 percent. More surprising is that while 73 percent of Russians are unhappy with their economy, 7 in 10 approve of the way Putin is handling it. How is that possible? About 90 percent of all Russians get their news from Russian television channels directly controlled by the Kremlin. By framing sanctions and the invasion of Ukraine as “Russia vs. the West”, Putin has succeeded in stoking the country’s nationalism. Today, 63 percent of Russians have a very favorable view of their country, up from 29 percent in 2013 and 51 percent in 2014. It’s easier under those circumstances to blame bad economic circumstances on outsiders. Credit where credit’s due—Putin knows what his people want to hear. It’s just not clear if he knows how to fix his flailing economy."
Sarah Sands jailed for killing paedophile Michael Pleasted - "Sarah Sands, 32, was found guilty of the manslaughter of Michael Pleasted, 77, by reason of loss of control... He was stabbed eight times and bled to death... Judge Nicholas Cooke QC said it was a "truly exceptional case" as he reduced her sentence from seven years to three-and-a-half, taking into consideration her position as a single mother. Sands, who was cleared of murder, had armed herself with a knife and carried out a "determined and sustained attack"... Sands, who has been in custody for the past 10 months, could be released on parole in 11 months. The judge emphasised the case was "unique" as Sands had lost control rather than taken the law into her own hands and engaged in "vigilante conduct"... During the trial, Sands told the court she had not intended to hurt Pleasted when she went to his flat with a knife, claiming instead she wanted him to admit to his crimes so his young accusers would not have to go to court. "Sands told the jury she was "frightened", adding: "It was not how it was meant to go. He was meant to listen to me". However she said Pleasted "smirked" when he answered the door and told her the boys were all liars who had ruined his life."
If she had been a man and hadn't stabbed a pedophile...
How the U.S. spends more helping its citizens than other rich countries, but gets way less - "a new study argues that the real waste in the American system comes not from welfare programs like food stamps, but from widespread tax breaks that subsidize spending on things like health care and housing. Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Peterson Institute for International Economics, argues in a new report that once you take these kinds of tax breaks into account, the U.S. actually devotes far more resources than many other countries to “social spending” -- spending on pensions, health care, family support, unemployment, housing assistance, and similar benefits meant to help people out in hard times. And, compared with most advanced countries, the U.S. gets far less bang for its buck in terms of health outcomes and equality... There’s a clear political rationale behind the American system of giving people tax breaks on their health care spending, rather than having the government give them health care: The public pays fewer taxes, and the government doesn’t appear to be spending money. But the Peterson study suggests this system merely hides the true level of government spending. Tax breaks for lunches eaten on business trips are rarely given the same amount of scrutiny as the use of food stamps at the grocery store, but the ultimate cost to the government is the same. The American system also does less to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, since the private sector mostly depends on individuals and households to spend money, and people can’t spend money they don’t have, says Kirkegaard. The result is that the U.S. spends a lot on social services, and still has relatively high levels of inequality"
Are Children Who Are Raised by Gay Parents More Likely to Be Gay Themselves? - "Do the sexual inclinations of parents influence those of their children? Of 77 adult children of homosexual parents who volunteered for three different investigations, at least 23 (30%) were currently homosexual: twelve (55%) of 22 daughters and three (21%) of fourteen sons of lesbians; five (29%) of seventeen daughters and three (17%) of eighteen sons of gays; none of six sons with both a gay and a lesbian parent. At least 25 (32%) were currently heterosexual. Of the ten with transsexual parents, one of nine daughters was currently lesbian, one was currently heterosexual, and one was transsexual. The son's sexual preference was not reported. These findings suggest that parents' sexual inclinations influence their children's"
The women who fooled everyone by pretending to be executives at Ashley Madison’s sister websites
Affirmative action for all in India - "The Patels - a populous and reasonably prosperous caste comprising about one in every eight people in Gujarat - are demanding reservations for members of the community in government educational institutions and government jobs. What is more surprising is the mechanism by which they want the ratification of such a demand: They want the state to recognise them as part of the "other backward classes" (OBCs) of India, a label of relatively recent - and political - origin for groups in India who are socially and economically disadvantageous... This system of affirmative action was supposed to last only a decade - until 1960 - but, of course, nothing of the sort happened. Instead - and in this might be seen both positive and negative as a result of the deliberate and unintended consequences of the policy - over the decades, the beneficiaries of reservation not only claimed what was offered by the state, but also organised themselves politically on caste-based platforms... Affirmative action was going nowhere; rather, it was expanding its reach and now comprised a full 50 percent of all government-managed opportunities."
Africans reject Jamie's Jollof rice recipe - "The reaction from Africans began with dozens of comments posted on the chef's website in the past week. The conversation then moved on to social media where it escalated. The Oliver recipe has attracted 4,500 comments, a large number of them seemingly from Africans - and many outraged at what they say are changes Oliver has made to the traditional recipe. In the past 24 hours Twitter joined the debate using hashtags like #jollofgate and #jollof... By creating this recipe Oliver has increased the exposure of the dish. Vera Kwakofi, from BBC Africa, says that's part of the problem: "The danger is that in five years his version will become the official one." The blogger behind Motley Musing agrees: "We have to ask ourselves who actually benefits from Jamie Oliver's 'appreciation' of Jollof rice. This doesn't necessarily translate into value for Africans. For so long, different African cultures have been appropriated without any direct benefit to Africans themselves, and people are particularly sensitive to this."
Moral of the story: don't bother cooking minorites' food
Ireland to 'decriminalise' small amounts of drugs, including heroin, cocaine and cannabis, for personal use
Post ID: 5647048211618122037
Homosexuality in Hinduism and Buddhism
"The issue of homosexuality within Hinduism is controversial and views of homosexuality are varying and diverse, in part because the accepted Hindu religious texts do not explicitly mention homosexuality... Modern Hindus regard all beings as manifestations of one universal Atman [Spirit]. Homosexuality has an extensive history in India. Ancient texts like Rig Veda, which dates back to around 1500 BCE, sculptures, and vestiges depict sexual acts between women as revelations of a feminine world where sexuality was based on pleasure and fertility...
Homosexuality is also a complex matter in Hinduism because of the many types of religious life. In general, “twice-born” Hindus (men who are of a higher caste) are prohibited from homosexual acts (maithunam pumsi). On the other hand, the Kama Sutra states that homosexual sex "is to be engaged in and enjoyed for its own sake as one of the arts". In general, then, the Hindu evaluation of homosexuality depends heavily on the context. The Laws of Manu is one of the standard books in the Hindu canon and is a basic text on which all gurus base their teachings. This scripture comprises 2684 verses, divided into twelve chapters presenting the norms of domestic, social, and religious life in India [circa 500 BCE] under the Brahmin influence. One verse in the text says that a young woman who ”pollutes” another young woman must be fined two hundred panas, pay the double of her nuptial fee, and receive ten lashes with a rod.“ Another verse says that an adult woman who ”pollutes” a young woman shall instantly have her head shaved or two fingers cut off, and be made to ride through the town on a donkey. But if a man of a high caste commits an “unnatural offence” with a male, or has intercourse with a female in a cart drawn by oxen, in water, or in the daytime, shall bathe, dressed in his clothes, as his punishment. Many people have criticized the Laws of Manu for heavily favoring members of the higher castes while discriminating against members of the lower castes.
There are great differences amongst Hindus regarding whether homosexuality is acceptable behavior. In Hinduism, love is regarded as an eternal force. It is seen as devotion between two people, whether romantic or platonic. Hindus believe love and devotion are important in attaining Moksha—liberation from the cycle of rebirths. Erotic desire or Kama in Hinduism was deemed as one of the most legitimate pleasures on earth (thus accounting for the vast numbers of erotic treatises, poetry, and sensuous sculptures of ancient India). But this did not mean that lascivious behavior was promoted. Premarital sex in Hinduism is frowned upon and extramarital sex is prohibited. Sex was promoted within the context of a loving couple—usually heterosexual. But extremely ascetic schools of thought would have viewed sex as a distraction from the pursuit of Moksha.
Marriage in Hinduism is said to fulfill three functions: Prajaa, Dharma, and Rati. In marriage, Prajaa is progeny for perpetuation of one’s family, Dharma is fulfillment of responsibilities, and Rati is companionship as friends and mutual pleasure as lovers. These three functions are given in the Dharma Shastras, books that are not considered to be religiously binding within Hinduism. In Hinduism, many of the divinities are androgynous and some change gender to participate in homoerotic behavior. In modern India, transgendered men known as Hijras have sex with men. They religiously identify as a separate third sex, with many undergoing ritual castration. In Hindu thought, a man who penetrates a Hijra is not defined as gay. Kama Sutra sex acts involving homosexuality are regarded in some castes as permissible while not in other castes.
Even though Hinduism does not obviously condemn homosexuality, Hindus are often intolerant of gays and lesbians. Many Hindus denounce homosexuality due to Hinduism’s emphasis on the sanctity of marriage and its disapproval of premarital sex. Homosexuality remains taboo in India and is legally banned in Section 377 of India's penal code. The 1996 film “Fire” which depicts a romantic relationship between two Hindu women was banned for “religious insensitivity” after a group of Hindu fundamentalists attacked cinemas where it was being screened.“ The human rights organization People’s Union for Civil Liberties has reported that sexual minorities in India face severe discrimination and violence, especially those from rural and lower caste backgrounds.
Buddhism’s views on homosexuality are similarly vague to those in Hinduism. Buddhism has three main branches: Theravada, the oldest form of Buddhism that emphasizes the monastic life; Mahayana Buddhism, a later form that includes Zen, Nichiren, and other sects, and Vajrayana, a unique form that arose in India and Tibet and is led by the Dalai Lama. Theravada Buddhism is most commonly found in Southeast Asia and focuses on the original teachings of the Buddha. In Theravada Buddhism there are two main ways of life: the life of the monk and the life of the lay person. Buddhist monks are expected to live lives of celibacy and there is no explicit rule prohibiting gays from monastic life. Lay Buddhists, those who live outside the monastery, are expected to adhere to Five Precepts that outline ethical behavior, the third of which is a vague proscription “not to engage in sexual misconduct.”
Right and wrong behavior in Buddhism is generally determined by considerations such as how it would affect others and the motivations behind the behavior. As homosexuality is not explicitly mentioned in any of the Buddha’s sayings recorded in the Pali Canon [Tripitaka], many interpreters have taken this to mean that homosexuality should be evaluated in the same way as heterosexuality. Buddhism does not traditionally place great value on procreation like many other religions. From the Buddhist viewpoint, being married with children is regarded as generally positive, but not compulsory (although social norms in various Buddhist countries often have different views). Despite this, in practice, Theravada Buddhist countries are not very open to homosexuality. This has much to do with cultural norms, as well as the concept of karma, which remains strong in countries such as Thailand. Prom this viewpoint, a person’s characteristics and situations are a result of past behavior, good or bad. Homosexuality and other alternative forms of sexuality are seen by some as karmic punishments for heterosexual misconduct in a past life.
In a 1997 interview, the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, was asked about homosexuality. He did not offer a strong answer either way, but noted that all monks are expected to refrain from sex. For laypeople, he commented that the purpose of sex in general is for procreation, so homosexual acts do seem unnatural. He said that sexual desires are natural, perhaps including homosexual desires, but that one should not try to increase those desires or indulge them without self-control. The Dalai Lama was more specific in a meeting with Buddhist leaders and human rights activists in San Francisco in 1997, where he commented that all forms of sex other than penile-vaginal sex are prohibited for Buddhists, whether between heterosexuals or homosexuals. At a press conference the day before the meeting, he said, “From a Buddhist point of view, [gay sex] is generally considered sexual misconduct.” But he did note that this rule is for Buddhists, and from society’s viewpoint, homosexual relationships can be “of mutual benefit, enjoyable, and harmless."
--- Gay and Lesbian Communities the World Over / Rita James Simon, Alison Brooks
"In the Jataka tales of the previous life of the Buddha, there are often strong homoerotic overtones, as, for example, in the story of the handsome Cobra King who falls in love with Ananda or in the tale of the Buddha and Ananda who in a previous life are sons of Brahman parents and refuse to marry so that they may remain together). These Jataka tales provide an implicit affirmation of homoerotic attractions.
SCHALOW writes about Kukai and the tradition of male love in Japanese Buddhism. Japanese culture has historically had positive attitudes toward same-sex love. According to legend, monastic homoeroticism was introduced by the monk Kukai, known popularly as Kobo Daishi, upon his return from studies in China. The Kobo Daishi ikkan no sho, a text revealed by Kukai to another monk, describes techniques for seducing a temple acolyte and a variety of positions for anal intercourse. There is a wide variety of additional Japanese literature highlighting the theme of male love between an older monk and a young acolyte, and perhaps the most famous work to extol same-sex love is The Great Mirror of Male Love, written by Ihara Saikaku in the 17th century. Japanese Buddhist priestly tradition stressed the power of love between priests and their acolytes in the quest to attain enlightenment.
LEUPP has produced an excellent analytical description of male-male sex in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868} and, in particular, of Japanese Buddhist monastic homoeroticism. Leupp finds that the homosocial world of monasteries, which excluded women, helps explain the prevalence of same-sex relations within the monasteries. Many Buddhist monks felt justified indulging in same-sex relations because the Buddha preached against male-female sex. The effort to justify male-male sexuality in Buddhist terms reached its height during the Tokugawa period.
GOLDSTEIN, an anthropologist, gives a brief discussion of the dab-dob (ldab-ldob), translated as “swish-swish” or working monks, who were attracted to other males and noted for how they wore their monastic garments as well as their athletic prowess. Because the monastic discipline prohibited oral and anal sex, the dab-dob engaged in a form of intercrura] intercourse, the insertion of the penis between the thighs of the partner from behind. Goldstein also writes about the other homosexual practices of the dab-dob, which included the sexual seduction and even the abduction of young boys. He maintains that their homosexual behaviors were considered sinful, although the dab-dob lived up to the letter of the monastic law."
--- Buddhism / Robert E. Goss in Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies / ed. Timothy Murphy
Homosexuality is also a complex matter in Hinduism because of the many types of religious life. In general, “twice-born” Hindus (men who are of a higher caste) are prohibited from homosexual acts (maithunam pumsi). On the other hand, the Kama Sutra states that homosexual sex "is to be engaged in and enjoyed for its own sake as one of the arts". In general, then, the Hindu evaluation of homosexuality depends heavily on the context. The Laws of Manu is one of the standard books in the Hindu canon and is a basic text on which all gurus base their teachings. This scripture comprises 2684 verses, divided into twelve chapters presenting the norms of domestic, social, and religious life in India [circa 500 BCE] under the Brahmin influence. One verse in the text says that a young woman who ”pollutes” another young woman must be fined two hundred panas, pay the double of her nuptial fee, and receive ten lashes with a rod.“ Another verse says that an adult woman who ”pollutes” a young woman shall instantly have her head shaved or two fingers cut off, and be made to ride through the town on a donkey. But if a man of a high caste commits an “unnatural offence” with a male, or has intercourse with a female in a cart drawn by oxen, in water, or in the daytime, shall bathe, dressed in his clothes, as his punishment. Many people have criticized the Laws of Manu for heavily favoring members of the higher castes while discriminating against members of the lower castes.
There are great differences amongst Hindus regarding whether homosexuality is acceptable behavior. In Hinduism, love is regarded as an eternal force. It is seen as devotion between two people, whether romantic or platonic. Hindus believe love and devotion are important in attaining Moksha—liberation from the cycle of rebirths. Erotic desire or Kama in Hinduism was deemed as one of the most legitimate pleasures on earth (thus accounting for the vast numbers of erotic treatises, poetry, and sensuous sculptures of ancient India). But this did not mean that lascivious behavior was promoted. Premarital sex in Hinduism is frowned upon and extramarital sex is prohibited. Sex was promoted within the context of a loving couple—usually heterosexual. But extremely ascetic schools of thought would have viewed sex as a distraction from the pursuit of Moksha.
Marriage in Hinduism is said to fulfill three functions: Prajaa, Dharma, and Rati. In marriage, Prajaa is progeny for perpetuation of one’s family, Dharma is fulfillment of responsibilities, and Rati is companionship as friends and mutual pleasure as lovers. These three functions are given in the Dharma Shastras, books that are not considered to be religiously binding within Hinduism. In Hinduism, many of the divinities are androgynous and some change gender to participate in homoerotic behavior. In modern India, transgendered men known as Hijras have sex with men. They religiously identify as a separate third sex, with many undergoing ritual castration. In Hindu thought, a man who penetrates a Hijra is not defined as gay. Kama Sutra sex acts involving homosexuality are regarded in some castes as permissible while not in other castes.
Even though Hinduism does not obviously condemn homosexuality, Hindus are often intolerant of gays and lesbians. Many Hindus denounce homosexuality due to Hinduism’s emphasis on the sanctity of marriage and its disapproval of premarital sex. Homosexuality remains taboo in India and is legally banned in Section 377 of India's penal code. The 1996 film “Fire” which depicts a romantic relationship between two Hindu women was banned for “religious insensitivity” after a group of Hindu fundamentalists attacked cinemas where it was being screened.“ The human rights organization People’s Union for Civil Liberties has reported that sexual minorities in India face severe discrimination and violence, especially those from rural and lower caste backgrounds.
Buddhism’s views on homosexuality are similarly vague to those in Hinduism. Buddhism has three main branches: Theravada, the oldest form of Buddhism that emphasizes the monastic life; Mahayana Buddhism, a later form that includes Zen, Nichiren, and other sects, and Vajrayana, a unique form that arose in India and Tibet and is led by the Dalai Lama. Theravada Buddhism is most commonly found in Southeast Asia and focuses on the original teachings of the Buddha. In Theravada Buddhism there are two main ways of life: the life of the monk and the life of the lay person. Buddhist monks are expected to live lives of celibacy and there is no explicit rule prohibiting gays from monastic life. Lay Buddhists, those who live outside the monastery, are expected to adhere to Five Precepts that outline ethical behavior, the third of which is a vague proscription “not to engage in sexual misconduct.”
Right and wrong behavior in Buddhism is generally determined by considerations such as how it would affect others and the motivations behind the behavior. As homosexuality is not explicitly mentioned in any of the Buddha’s sayings recorded in the Pali Canon [Tripitaka], many interpreters have taken this to mean that homosexuality should be evaluated in the same way as heterosexuality. Buddhism does not traditionally place great value on procreation like many other religions. From the Buddhist viewpoint, being married with children is regarded as generally positive, but not compulsory (although social norms in various Buddhist countries often have different views). Despite this, in practice, Theravada Buddhist countries are not very open to homosexuality. This has much to do with cultural norms, as well as the concept of karma, which remains strong in countries such as Thailand. Prom this viewpoint, a person’s characteristics and situations are a result of past behavior, good or bad. Homosexuality and other alternative forms of sexuality are seen by some as karmic punishments for heterosexual misconduct in a past life.
In a 1997 interview, the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, was asked about homosexuality. He did not offer a strong answer either way, but noted that all monks are expected to refrain from sex. For laypeople, he commented that the purpose of sex in general is for procreation, so homosexual acts do seem unnatural. He said that sexual desires are natural, perhaps including homosexual desires, but that one should not try to increase those desires or indulge them without self-control. The Dalai Lama was more specific in a meeting with Buddhist leaders and human rights activists in San Francisco in 1997, where he commented that all forms of sex other than penile-vaginal sex are prohibited for Buddhists, whether between heterosexuals or homosexuals. At a press conference the day before the meeting, he said, “From a Buddhist point of view, [gay sex] is generally considered sexual misconduct.” But he did note that this rule is for Buddhists, and from society’s viewpoint, homosexual relationships can be “of mutual benefit, enjoyable, and harmless."
--- Gay and Lesbian Communities the World Over / Rita James Simon, Alison Brooks
"In the Jataka tales of the previous life of the Buddha, there are often strong homoerotic overtones, as, for example, in the story of the handsome Cobra King who falls in love with Ananda or in the tale of the Buddha and Ananda who in a previous life are sons of Brahman parents and refuse to marry so that they may remain together). These Jataka tales provide an implicit affirmation of homoerotic attractions.
SCHALOW writes about Kukai and the tradition of male love in Japanese Buddhism. Japanese culture has historically had positive attitudes toward same-sex love. According to legend, monastic homoeroticism was introduced by the monk Kukai, known popularly as Kobo Daishi, upon his return from studies in China. The Kobo Daishi ikkan no sho, a text revealed by Kukai to another monk, describes techniques for seducing a temple acolyte and a variety of positions for anal intercourse. There is a wide variety of additional Japanese literature highlighting the theme of male love between an older monk and a young acolyte, and perhaps the most famous work to extol same-sex love is The Great Mirror of Male Love, written by Ihara Saikaku in the 17th century. Japanese Buddhist priestly tradition stressed the power of love between priests and their acolytes in the quest to attain enlightenment.
LEUPP has produced an excellent analytical description of male-male sex in Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868} and, in particular, of Japanese Buddhist monastic homoeroticism. Leupp finds that the homosocial world of monasteries, which excluded women, helps explain the prevalence of same-sex relations within the monasteries. Many Buddhist monks felt justified indulging in same-sex relations because the Buddha preached against male-female sex. The effort to justify male-male sexuality in Buddhist terms reached its height during the Tokugawa period.
GOLDSTEIN, an anthropologist, gives a brief discussion of the dab-dob (ldab-ldob), translated as “swish-swish” or working monks, who were attracted to other males and noted for how they wore their monastic garments as well as their athletic prowess. Because the monastic discipline prohibited oral and anal sex, the dab-dob engaged in a form of intercrura] intercourse, the insertion of the penis between the thighs of the partner from behind. Goldstein also writes about the other homosexual practices of the dab-dob, which included the sexual seduction and even the abduction of young boys. He maintains that their homosexual behaviors were considered sinful, although the dab-dob lived up to the letter of the monastic law."
--- Buddhism / Robert E. Goss in Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies / ed. Timothy Murphy
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