How a Feminist Prophet Became an Apostate—An Interview with Dr Phyllis Chesler
"During 60 years as an academic, feminist campaigner, and psychotherapist, she has frequently courted controversy. Her new memoir, A Politically Incorrect Feminist, details her experiences as a leader of the Second Wave feminist movement in the United States. Readers are introduced to a star cast that includes household names such as Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem, as well as women such as Kate Millett, Robin Morgan, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Mary Daly, and Shulamith Firestone, women who produced influential work that is now often forgotten, or else misremembered by Third Wave feminists keen to distance themselves from their feminist foremothers...
Since the turn of the century, Chesler has focused on the rise of antisemitism, the demonisation of Israel, and the refusal of progressives to recognise the oppression of women under Islam. Several of her books have tackled this topic head on, and Chesler has predictably been accused of Islamophobia and widely vilified, which has included enduring efforts to no-platform her in recent years.
And here’s another group she has come into conflict with: feminists. In 2002, Chesler published Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, which described the ways in which women perpetrate abuse against other women. Those feminists who clung to a naïve view of feminine virtue accused her of betraying the movement, and a few sought to block publication of the book...
She is particularly upfront in speaking about the dark side of the feminist movement. This darkness is rooted, she believes, in the dysfunctional ways in which women often relate to one another. Although Chesler used to believe that “all women were kind, caring, maternal, valiant, and noble under siege, and that all men were their oppressors,” she now knows this to be false, as do all except the most starry-eyed feminists. In fact, as she tells me, “women are hugely aggressive—but mainly towards other women. Unlike men, most women have been taught to deny this in themselves and to remain unaware of their own behaviour. Usually, the aggression is ‘indirect’… It consists of spreading gossip about and then socially ostracising a target girl or woman, especially one who is perceived as ‘prettier’ or more talented or simply ‘different’.”
In Politically Incorrect Feminist, Chesler describes the communitarianism found within Second Wave feminist circles as reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: “Many feminists came to believe that feminist ideas and activism belonged to the movement, not to any individual, and especially not to the feminist who did the writing or organised the protest.” Achievements never belonged to a particular woman, but rather to “‘the people, the sisterhood, the boundary-less merging of one with all.” Anyone who defied this dictum was liable to be trashed—that is, bad-mouthed and exiled from the movement. In the 1980s, Chesler interviewed women who had been involved in the Second Wave and many of them spoke about the experience of being trashed, “and then at the end I’d say ‘and did you ever do this to another woman?’” The answer was always ‘no’: “the amnesia was total, the denial was total, because it’s not nice, it’s not ‘good girl’ behaviour.”
To a large extent, this is the sort of behaviour typically found on the Left, and Chesler is keen to stress that interpersonal aggression manifests itself in any revolutionary movement in which a “take-no-prisoners ethos” is at play. Indeed, much of the worst in-fighting was imported directly from the Left, since Chesler believes that some feminists brought with them “its tactics of intimidation and interrogation.”
The difference though is that, unlike men, women tend to take such conflict deeply personally. Chesler diverges from many other feminists in recognising that there are some average psychological differences between men and women. She now feels that her fellow Second Wave activists failed to recognise “that men and women are different in certain ways”—including their resilience in the face of conflict...
One chapter of Politically Incorrect Feminist deals with a particularly painful truth that Chesler has not previously written about: the high rates of mental illness among Second Wave feminists... “I don’t mean neurotic, difficult, anxious, or eccentric. I mean clinically schizophrenic or manic depressive, suicidal, addicted to drugs or alcohol, or afflicted with a personality disorder.”... This memoir serves as a useful rejoinder to any feminist tempted to idealise the past.
One shocking episode that Chesler details in her memoir highlights this with particular clarity. In 1979, Chesler was raped by her then-employer, Davidson Nicol—a senior official at the United Nations and dignitary from Sierra Leone. She tells me that this rape proved to be less traumatic than the subsequent behaviour of her fellow feminists. When Chesler disclosed what had happened to Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem—some of the most powerful women in the movement at the time—they refused to support her in confronting her attacker. Chesler writes that Morgan told her that it would “look bad for feminism” for a “white feminist to charge a black man with rape and sexual harassment,” and that Steinem backed up this decision. Even Andrea Dworkin failed to stand up for her, telling Chesler that in her opinion “accusing a black man would make feminists look like racists.” This, despite the fact that several women of colour were supportive of Chesler’s desire to confront Nicol, particularly given that he was well known to be predatory.
This was a betrayal that hurt Chesler deeply. It is also a betrayal that Steinem has repeated since, infamously supporting Bill Clinton in the face of allegations of predatory behaviour because—her critics suggest—it suited her interests to support the Democratic Party...
Chesler and Steinem have since parted ideological company. Steinem became, Chesler believes, over-eager to embrace a brand of feminism that was “less about violence against women and more about racism, prison reform, climate change, foreign ‘occupations,’ and nuclear war.” In recent years, Steinem has also been a close ally of Linda Sarsour, the Women’s March leader who has been accused of acting as an apologist for Sharia law and has made statements widely interpreted as anti-Semitic.
In contrast, Chesler has been strongly critical of Islam and has written a number of books on the abuse of women in Muslim-majority countries. This is partly influenced by her own experiences, detailed in her book An American Bride in Kabul. Aged 20, Chesler married a fellow student and travelled with him back to his native country of Afghanistan. On arrival in Kabul her passport was removed and she spent five months effectively imprisoned in her husband’s family home. There she witnessed what she describes as gender apartheid: “polygamy, purdah, women in burqas who were forced to sit at the back of the bus, arranged first-cousin marriages, child brides, honor killings.” Chesler has no compunction in calling such practices “barbaric.” She almost died of dysentery before eventually being allowed to return home, pregnant and weighing only 90 pounds. She had an illegal abortion.
This is not an experience shared by Chesler’s feminist contemporaries in the United States, and this may in part be why she refuses to conform to the orthodox view of Islam on the Left. As she tells me, “What passes for feminism today, at least in the academy, is faux feminism. It is far more concerned with racism than with sexism and anyone who does not toe this line is called out as a racist. Faux feminism is far more invested in condemning America, the Enlightenment, Western Civilization, Western-only imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism; in condemning truth tellers like Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali.” As she sees it, feminists who refuse to stand up against the treatment of women in Muslim majority countries are simply lacking in courage: “They’re afraid they’ll be ostracised if they don’t follow the party line.”
Such fears are not without basis. It is the issue of Islam, more than any other, that has attracted controversy for Chesler in recent years. She tells me that she now needs security on campus when she lectures, and that she has been disinvited and from a number of events. Where once she was given front-page coverage in the New York Times, now she cannot get published in the Left-leaning media. Instead she writes for conservative outlets in which she can be certain that her work won’t be “rendered into some ‘politically correct’ form.” Some left-wing feminists told her that they would never read her work because of where it was published, but when she asked them to suggest an alternative platform “they could not do so.” What choice does she have?
Chesler is not optimistic. She speaks of feeling “aghast, heartbroken, outraged” at the state of contemporary feminism and the new threats facing women. She is particularly concerned about abuses within the surrogacy industry and is currently campaigning against proposed legislation that would legalise commercial surrogacy in the state of New York. We also spoke about the transgender movement, which Chesler sees as a progressive obsession which has “totally supplanted all or any remaining interest in biological women’s special woes.”"
You either die a feminist or live long enough to see yourself become a bigot
L'origine de Bert
Thursday, June 27, 2019
How a Feminist Prophet Became an Apostate—An Interview with Dr Phyllis Chesler
Post ID: 7218625971072404869
Links - 27th June 2019 (2) (Milkshakes)
Ukip candidate Carl Benjamin doused in milkshake for fourth time in a week
Logic, Empathy, Honesty - Posts - ""You can't say that, because it might incite someone toward violence"
"Lol he thew a milkshake at a politician that's so funny""
Throwing milkshakes at politicians is good when they're representing the "far right"
Post Tumblr Stress Disorder III - Posts - "Remember everyone, dumping milkshakes on people totally isn't violence.
*Picture of milkshakes being dumped on a black person and 2 white people, presumably during Jim Crow*"
Army veteran 'attacked' with milkshake outside polling station for wearing a Brexit rosette - "Don MacNaughton, 81, who served with the Paras for 22-years was covered in the strawberry drink by a "yob" who spotted his Brexit Party rosette."
Good Ideas Vs Bad: Discussion Group - "Heh heh, what's wrong Nazis? Can't handle a little milkshake? Its perfectly legal nonviolence you Nazi babies"
"THAT CIS WHITE MALE CALLED ME THE WRONG PRONOUN! THIS IS LITERALLY TRANSPHOBIC VIOLENCE! I'LL SEE YOU IN COURT!"
One in five Brits think throwing milkshakes is an acceptable protest - "one in five Britons (18%) consider throwing milkshakes to be an acceptable form of protest. By contrast, the vast majority (72%) think it is unacceptable, with the remaining 10% unsure. The results are almost certainly partisan. Those who have found themselves bombarded by beverages are all on the political right, and the results show that supporters of left wing parties like Labour and the Lib Dems are more likely to think it is acceptable (27%) than those on the right (6% of Conservative voters). Were the situation reversed and left wing politicians were finding themselves assailed, we expect the same question would find the opposite results"
Would it be okay to throw a milkshake at Anna Soubry? - "Would it be okay for someone to throw a milkshake at Anna Soubry? After all, she has devoted herself to overthrowing the largest act of democracy in UK history. She also voted for the bombing of Libya in 2011, which destabilised entire swathes of northern Africa and caused untold suffering. Does such anti-democracy and imperialism deserve a milkshake? What about Emily Thornberry? Another anti-democrat and cheerleader for the destruction in Libya. Can she be ‘milkshaked’? Ed Miliband, perhaps? After all, he once stood for office on an anti-immigration platform and even produced a mug calling for restrictions on immigration. And from Tommy Robinson a couple of weeks ago to Nigel Farage today, isn’t it people who are supposedly iffy about immigrants who get milkshaked?... If you want to grasp the extraordinary double standards in the great (and mad) milkshake debate, try to imagine what the response would be if Emily Thornberry had been milkshaked. Do you think memes would be made? Do you think Burger King would hint that milkshaking politicians is a good idea, as it did a couple of days ago in relation to the milkshaking of Robinson and UKIP’s Carl Benjamin? Do you think Guardian journalists and Momentum’s army of middle-class tweeters would be making jokes about it? Of course not. It would be denounced as violence against women. It would be held up as proof of the febrile, violent climate whipped up by the anti-Corbyn media. There would be a clamour for the arrest and imprisonment of the milkshake-thrower.We know this for a fact because earlier this year a man was jailed for a month for throwing an egg at Jeremy Corbyn. That man was denounced by the people who make up today’s pro-milkshaking lobby as a fascist, a danger, a scumbag who deserved to face the full force of the law. That we live in a country in which someone who eggs Corbyn can be jailed for a month, while someone who milkshakes Nigel Farage can become a meme hero, deserves an explanation. What it speaks to is a chattering class that is now so cut off, confused and panicked about its inability to connect with ordinary people that it is effectively green-lighting assaults on politicians it dislikes."
Happiness charity leader leaves after tweet promoting acid attack on Nigel Farage - "Ruth Townsley, head of measurement and policy at Happy City, appeared to put a post on her Twitter account advocating violence against the Brexit Party leader... A tweet from her account read: "Bravo to Paul Crowther, good on you mate. Great that milkshakes have become a thing when it comes to the racists in our midst. I'd prefer acid but milkshakes will do for now I guess. Another tweet on her account in 2017 said: "I've decided that violence against the rich is entirely justified and it's time to start killing them. That fella in the US got it right.""
I'm sure this was just "satire"
Given that milkshakes are already violence (since eggs are too...
Left-Wing Comedian Fantasizes About Acid Attacking Right-Wing Politicians - "A left-wing comedian in the United Kingdom says she fantasizes about acid-attacking right-wing politicians, asking “why bother with milkshakes?”During an appearance on Radio 4 last night, Jo Brand, who is a lifelong Labour Party supporter, tacitly endorsed political violence.“Certain unpleasant characters are being thrown to the fore, and they’re very, very easy to hate, and I’m kind of thinking, why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?” asked Brand."
It's only wrong to encourage violence when you're on the right
That was only a prelude. Where they have thrown milkshakes, they will end with throwing milkshakes
Jo Brand: The Unbearable Hypocrisy of The BBC - The Liberalists - "Markus Meechan, aka Count Dankula, was sentenced for a hate crime.He had uploaded a video to YouTube, in which he taught his girlfriends pug to perform a Nazi-like salute to the command “Gas the Jews”.He incited no violence, he targeted no one. He made a joke that some found to be in poor taste.This is an incredibly important event to keep in mind over the coming days, after British Comedian Jo Brand made a joke, live on air, on a tax payer funded network, about throwing acid on British politicians... A pattern we have seen consistently emerge over recent years is one of unidirectional outrage and suppression of speech along political lines. The BBC, with its powerful left-wing bias, immediately jumped to the defense of Brand, saying the joke on the show was “deliberately provocative as the title implies.”... “Hate speech” is just a tool used by left-wing activists in charge of media organizations across the country in order to strip away the rights of people who would oppose them."
Logic, Empathy, Honesty - Posts - "BBC: "I would throw battery acid on you" *cringe*
BBC: *Accusations of hatespeech* "I wouldn't even rape you" *smile*"
Milkshakes and Microaggressions - "What strikes me (in the mental sense, not the milkshake sense) is that the political faction that now lobs eggs and milkshakes at people, committing physical assault by my standards even if it’s unlikely to do permanent damage, is also the faction that believes countless tiny purported wrongs or “microaggressions”—ranging from posting accurate crime statistics or culturally-appropriating yoga to using biology-based rather than politics-based pronouns—are examples of fascistic oppression, acts they routinely liken to “violence.”It‘s always frightening to ask what the left’s end goal is, but is part of the plan to create a world in which throwing objects at people is not considered assault but talking to them is?... Since so much of what the left does has the structure of a stress test—seeing how much the bland bourgeois normals will put up with—I won’t be shocked if and when the eggs and milkshakes are routinely replaced by stones. We’re fighting fascism, they’ll say, and the occasional death among our enemies was really just an unfortunate, accidental side effect of expressing our support for democracy."
This isn’t anti-fascism – this is mental - "One of the tragedies of modern political times is the degradation of the word anti-fascism.This once proud tradition, encompassing the leftists who went to Spain to fight Franco and the activists who chased the National Front out of Asian neighbourhoods in the Seventies and Eighties, is now the butt of jokes.It’s become a byword for hysterical left-wing intolerance, evoking images of scrawny students shouting at Jacob Rees-Mogg or chubby, bearded Corbynistas milkshaking Nigel Farage. And the Trump protests in London yesterday proved this bad rep is now – sadly – thoroughly deserved.In a viral video clip, a group of anti-Trump protesters and anti-fascist activists – all straight out of central casting – surround a Trump supporter and shout ‘Nazi scum’ at him... one of the most striking things about the ‘Trump is Hitler’ argument is how thoroughly mainstream it is on the liberal-left. This is not just about idiots on the streets or flinging tweets. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan essentially made the same accusation... Anti-fascism used to mean risking life and limb to fight and kill actual fascists, dodging blows and bullets to defend minorities and freedom. Now it means screaming in right-wingers’ faces and rugby tackling men old enough to be your grandfather"
Birmingham police launch hate crime probe after LGBT+ campaigners 'pelted with eggs'
You're only allowed to attack the 'far right'
Violence Breaks Out In Anti-Trump Protests As Crowd Confront Trump Supporters - "A supporter of President Trump gets hit in the face by a milkshake as fights break out at anti-Trump protests in central London.In a video filmed by a LBC reporter, one woman can be seen screaming "nazi scum" into the face of one Trump supporter, as anti-Trump chants got louder and louder. But when a milkshake was thrown at the defender, he began to lash out at the protesters.Another man had a 'Make America Great Again' cap stolen in the altercation, and was pushed around by the protesters as he tried to retrieve it."
Liberal logic: self-defence by the "far right" is violence and means they deserve to be jailed
Trump baby blimp stabbed by far-right activist
Liberal logic: throwing a milkshake at someone from the "far right" (i.e. assault) is legitimate political protest. Throwing an egg at a leftist is assault and shows you are violent. Stabbing a blimp is violence. I'm sure someone stabbing the Sadiq blimp would bepraised as brave and stunning for standing up against "racism"
Logic, Empathy, Honesty - Posts - ""You can't say that, because it might incite someone toward violence"
"Lol he thew a milkshake at a politician that's so funny""
Throwing milkshakes at politicians is good when they're representing the "far right"
Post Tumblr Stress Disorder III - Posts - "Remember everyone, dumping milkshakes on people totally isn't violence.
*Picture of milkshakes being dumped on a black person and 2 white people, presumably during Jim Crow*"
Army veteran 'attacked' with milkshake outside polling station for wearing a Brexit rosette - "Don MacNaughton, 81, who served with the Paras for 22-years was covered in the strawberry drink by a "yob" who spotted his Brexit Party rosette."
Good Ideas Vs Bad: Discussion Group - "Heh heh, what's wrong Nazis? Can't handle a little milkshake? Its perfectly legal nonviolence you Nazi babies"
"THAT CIS WHITE MALE CALLED ME THE WRONG PRONOUN! THIS IS LITERALLY TRANSPHOBIC VIOLENCE! I'LL SEE YOU IN COURT!"
One in five Brits think throwing milkshakes is an acceptable protest - "one in five Britons (18%) consider throwing milkshakes to be an acceptable form of protest. By contrast, the vast majority (72%) think it is unacceptable, with the remaining 10% unsure. The results are almost certainly partisan. Those who have found themselves bombarded by beverages are all on the political right, and the results show that supporters of left wing parties like Labour and the Lib Dems are more likely to think it is acceptable (27%) than those on the right (6% of Conservative voters). Were the situation reversed and left wing politicians were finding themselves assailed, we expect the same question would find the opposite results"
Would it be okay to throw a milkshake at Anna Soubry? - "Would it be okay for someone to throw a milkshake at Anna Soubry? After all, she has devoted herself to overthrowing the largest act of democracy in UK history. She also voted for the bombing of Libya in 2011, which destabilised entire swathes of northern Africa and caused untold suffering. Does such anti-democracy and imperialism deserve a milkshake? What about Emily Thornberry? Another anti-democrat and cheerleader for the destruction in Libya. Can she be ‘milkshaked’? Ed Miliband, perhaps? After all, he once stood for office on an anti-immigration platform and even produced a mug calling for restrictions on immigration. And from Tommy Robinson a couple of weeks ago to Nigel Farage today, isn’t it people who are supposedly iffy about immigrants who get milkshaked?... If you want to grasp the extraordinary double standards in the great (and mad) milkshake debate, try to imagine what the response would be if Emily Thornberry had been milkshaked. Do you think memes would be made? Do you think Burger King would hint that milkshaking politicians is a good idea, as it did a couple of days ago in relation to the milkshaking of Robinson and UKIP’s Carl Benjamin? Do you think Guardian journalists and Momentum’s army of middle-class tweeters would be making jokes about it? Of course not. It would be denounced as violence against women. It would be held up as proof of the febrile, violent climate whipped up by the anti-Corbyn media. There would be a clamour for the arrest and imprisonment of the milkshake-thrower.We know this for a fact because earlier this year a man was jailed for a month for throwing an egg at Jeremy Corbyn. That man was denounced by the people who make up today’s pro-milkshaking lobby as a fascist, a danger, a scumbag who deserved to face the full force of the law. That we live in a country in which someone who eggs Corbyn can be jailed for a month, while someone who milkshakes Nigel Farage can become a meme hero, deserves an explanation. What it speaks to is a chattering class that is now so cut off, confused and panicked about its inability to connect with ordinary people that it is effectively green-lighting assaults on politicians it dislikes."
Happiness charity leader leaves after tweet promoting acid attack on Nigel Farage - "Ruth Townsley, head of measurement and policy at Happy City, appeared to put a post on her Twitter account advocating violence against the Brexit Party leader... A tweet from her account read: "Bravo to Paul Crowther, good on you mate. Great that milkshakes have become a thing when it comes to the racists in our midst. I'd prefer acid but milkshakes will do for now I guess. Another tweet on her account in 2017 said: "I've decided that violence against the rich is entirely justified and it's time to start killing them. That fella in the US got it right.""
I'm sure this was just "satire"
Given that milkshakes are already violence (since eggs are too...
Left-Wing Comedian Fantasizes About Acid Attacking Right-Wing Politicians - "A left-wing comedian in the United Kingdom says she fantasizes about acid-attacking right-wing politicians, asking “why bother with milkshakes?”During an appearance on Radio 4 last night, Jo Brand, who is a lifelong Labour Party supporter, tacitly endorsed political violence.“Certain unpleasant characters are being thrown to the fore, and they’re very, very easy to hate, and I’m kind of thinking, why bother with a milkshake when you could get some battery acid?” asked Brand."
It's only wrong to encourage violence when you're on the right
That was only a prelude. Where they have thrown milkshakes, they will end with throwing milkshakes
Jo Brand: The Unbearable Hypocrisy of The BBC - The Liberalists - "Markus Meechan, aka Count Dankula, was sentenced for a hate crime.He had uploaded a video to YouTube, in which he taught his girlfriends pug to perform a Nazi-like salute to the command “Gas the Jews”.He incited no violence, he targeted no one. He made a joke that some found to be in poor taste.This is an incredibly important event to keep in mind over the coming days, after British Comedian Jo Brand made a joke, live on air, on a tax payer funded network, about throwing acid on British politicians... A pattern we have seen consistently emerge over recent years is one of unidirectional outrage and suppression of speech along political lines. The BBC, with its powerful left-wing bias, immediately jumped to the defense of Brand, saying the joke on the show was “deliberately provocative as the title implies.”... “Hate speech” is just a tool used by left-wing activists in charge of media organizations across the country in order to strip away the rights of people who would oppose them."
Logic, Empathy, Honesty - Posts - "BBC: "I would throw battery acid on you" *cringe*
BBC: *Accusations of hatespeech* "I wouldn't even rape you" *smile*"
Milkshakes and Microaggressions - "What strikes me (in the mental sense, not the milkshake sense) is that the political faction that now lobs eggs and milkshakes at people, committing physical assault by my standards even if it’s unlikely to do permanent damage, is also the faction that believes countless tiny purported wrongs or “microaggressions”—ranging from posting accurate crime statistics or culturally-appropriating yoga to using biology-based rather than politics-based pronouns—are examples of fascistic oppression, acts they routinely liken to “violence.”It‘s always frightening to ask what the left’s end goal is, but is part of the plan to create a world in which throwing objects at people is not considered assault but talking to them is?... Since so much of what the left does has the structure of a stress test—seeing how much the bland bourgeois normals will put up with—I won’t be shocked if and when the eggs and milkshakes are routinely replaced by stones. We’re fighting fascism, they’ll say, and the occasional death among our enemies was really just an unfortunate, accidental side effect of expressing our support for democracy."
This isn’t anti-fascism – this is mental - "One of the tragedies of modern political times is the degradation of the word anti-fascism.This once proud tradition, encompassing the leftists who went to Spain to fight Franco and the activists who chased the National Front out of Asian neighbourhoods in the Seventies and Eighties, is now the butt of jokes.It’s become a byword for hysterical left-wing intolerance, evoking images of scrawny students shouting at Jacob Rees-Mogg or chubby, bearded Corbynistas milkshaking Nigel Farage. And the Trump protests in London yesterday proved this bad rep is now – sadly – thoroughly deserved.In a viral video clip, a group of anti-Trump protesters and anti-fascist activists – all straight out of central casting – surround a Trump supporter and shout ‘Nazi scum’ at him... one of the most striking things about the ‘Trump is Hitler’ argument is how thoroughly mainstream it is on the liberal-left. This is not just about idiots on the streets or flinging tweets. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan essentially made the same accusation... Anti-fascism used to mean risking life and limb to fight and kill actual fascists, dodging blows and bullets to defend minorities and freedom. Now it means screaming in right-wingers’ faces and rugby tackling men old enough to be your grandfather"
Birmingham police launch hate crime probe after LGBT+ campaigners 'pelted with eggs'
You're only allowed to attack the 'far right'
Violence Breaks Out In Anti-Trump Protests As Crowd Confront Trump Supporters - "A supporter of President Trump gets hit in the face by a milkshake as fights break out at anti-Trump protests in central London.In a video filmed by a LBC reporter, one woman can be seen screaming "nazi scum" into the face of one Trump supporter, as anti-Trump chants got louder and louder. But when a milkshake was thrown at the defender, he began to lash out at the protesters.Another man had a 'Make America Great Again' cap stolen in the altercation, and was pushed around by the protesters as he tried to retrieve it."
Liberal logic: self-defence by the "far right" is violence and means they deserve to be jailed
Trump baby blimp stabbed by far-right activist
Liberal logic: throwing a milkshake at someone from the "far right" (i.e. assault) is legitimate political protest. Throwing an egg at a leftist is assault and shows you are violent. Stabbing a blimp is violence. I'm sure someone stabbing the Sadiq blimp would bepraised as brave and stunning for standing up against "racism"
Post ID: 1577596884574884037
TOXIC FEMININTY
TOXIC FEMININTY: negative traits linked with female behavior, caused not by biology but by a feminist society that rewards these traits and discourages the opposite
- Fear of vulnerability so as not to appear weak and soft (like "traditional" women)
- Anger and outrage as a normalized female emotion
- A need to dominate/control men
- Sexual promiscuity in the name of empowerment but in practice used as a means of control
- Fragility of self, because self-worth derives from power rather than from within
- Blaming men and society (i.e. the "patriarchy") for feelings, actions, and consequences e.g. ”If men, employers and society didn't oppress me, I wouldn't have to act out on behalf of women."
- An ingrained belief that educational and financial superiority is crucial to women’s happiness
- Mocking women who dare to be anything other than the above
Copyright 20l9 Suzanne Venker
I found this on The Screen - Posts but haven't found a primary source. This might be a summary of a YouTube video of Venker's
- Fear of vulnerability so as not to appear weak and soft (like "traditional" women)
- Anger and outrage as a normalized female emotion
- A need to dominate/control men
- Sexual promiscuity in the name of empowerment but in practice used as a means of control
- Fragility of self, because self-worth derives from power rather than from within
- Blaming men and society (i.e. the "patriarchy") for feelings, actions, and consequences e.g. ”If men, employers and society didn't oppress me, I wouldn't have to act out on behalf of women."
- An ingrained belief that educational and financial superiority is crucial to women’s happiness
- Mocking women who dare to be anything other than the above
Copyright 20l9 Suzanne Venker
I found this on The Screen - Posts but haven't found a primary source. This might be a summary of a YouTube video of Venker's
Post ID: 2728448283804365097
Links - 27th June 2019 (1)
I Testified Before Congress About Hate Crimes and the Alt-Right. Here’s What Happened. - "Several of them essentially conceded that the FBI's hate crime statistics do not, in fact, provide reliable evidence of a significant spike in hate crimes. Bro—who was credible, well-informed, and extremely friendly—pushed back on one representative's suggestion that perhaps local municipalities should be compelled by the federal government to report hate crime data. In general, the panelists seemed to understand that not all white nationalist activity can be properly considered something for the authorities to handle, given First Amendment protections for hateful speech. In my remarks, I tried to get across the point that the alt-right is a small fringe group, and that white nationalists are responsible for a relatively small number of murders relative to the overall violent crime rate."
Missing Pregnant Chicago Teen Marlen Ochoa-Uriostegui Found Slain, Her Baby Ripped From Her Womb - "The mystery over the fate of a 19-year-old pregnant Chicago teen missing for the past three weeks took a dark turn on Wednesday when authorities announced she’d been found slain, with her baby cut out of her womb, and stuffed into a garbage can in the yard of a woman who’d allegedly offered her free baby clothes online. The baby of Marlen Ochoa-Uriostegui is said to be in critical condition at a local hospital after being passed off as the 46-year-old woman's child late last month, immediately after the teenager was reported missing at nine months pregnant"
Using Amino Acids to Identify Pornographic Images
How the EU hurts the world’s poorest - "Thanks to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which heavily subsidises EU farmers, Africa’s markets are flooded with their cheap excess produce. If you go to any African market, you can buy all kinds of European produce sold at very, very cheap prices. This is driving African farmers out of the market. At the same time, the EU imposes strict limitations on what African countries can export to the European market. In particular, African farmers cannot export value-added goods. So if a farmer in Ghana is producing cocoa, or a farmer in Kenya is producing coffee, they can perhaps get less than a dollar for their product as they have to export it raw. Only a fraction of the money you pay for a jar of coffee goes to an African farmer. The value-added goods, such as processed coffee, are then produced in Europe. Germany, especially, has been doing a lot of harm... The UK and the EU use their influence selectively to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on African countries. We should follow a consistent policy. We impose sanctions on African countries but we are happy to trade with other human-rights abusers like Saudi Arabia. One danger is that these sanctions are driving African countries closer and closer into the arms of the Chinese. This is a real own goal. Sanctions are a blunt instrument. The leaders responsible for human-rights abuses are protected. They still have access to the best lifestyles money can buy. Their money is stashed away in British and other foreign banks. Sanctions don’t touch them at all. Instead, they hit the poorest hardest... Each time I visit Africa, I see conditions getting worse. I never see any sign of British foreign aid doing much. Instead, I see big houses and nice cars, which all belong to local foreign-aid managers and government workers... Foreign aid was supposed to achieve two objectives: reduce poverty and buy influence. It has done neither. Since independence some five decades ago, the West has given African countries around £600 billion in aid, according to the World Bank. But parts of the continent are getting poorer, hungrier and angrier. Seven of the UN’s 15 peacekeeping missions are in Africa. According to the World Bank, by 2030 nine in 10 of the poorest people in the world will live in Africa.At the same time, Africa is virtually becoming a neo-colony of the NGOs. Hundreds of thousands of NGOs have taken over the role of states. NGOs provide basic needs like education, health, water, food and security. When it comes to buying influence, African leaders are very happy to receive Western aid money for their own personal and political reasons. But they are not paying attention to the UK or the West anymore. Foreign aid is widely seen as a Western conspiracy to keep Africa poor.Instead, African countries are working with China... I’m aware that if anyone else raises these issues they will be accused of being racist. But nobody can accuse me, an African, of being racist against my own people! Instead of throwing good money after bad, what I want is for Africa to be given the opportunity to trade itself out of poverty."
Verified Twitter Journalist Threatens to Contact Man’s Employer Because He Did the ‘OK’ Hand Sign - "Finnish Twitter user Iisak Selin responded to a tweet by journalist David MacDougall with a photo of himself using the hand gesture.MacDougall responded by tweeting, “Hi Iisak – Do you have a job? I wonder what your employers think of you making a sign that has been co-opted by white supremacists and racists? Would be interesting to find out. Or maybe a future employer is interested…”... I wonder when MacDougall and his ilk will stop abusing their platforms to threaten to doxx people simply because they don’t like their politics and do some actual journalism."
Of course, if you are upset at the media you're undermining democracy
Why we misread Suu Kyi and her refusal to demonise the Burmese Army - "It is somewhat understood that she is not fully in charge of the country’s administration, given the outsized constitutional powers available to the military, but it seems almost inexplicable why she wouldn’t stand atop a rostrum and use the very large microphone the world has handed her, to decry the generals. Instead of calling them murderers and rapists, she chooses to work with them, appoint some of them to important positions and generally behave as though she was among friends when she is with men in uniform... In her moral universe, courage is the freedom from fear, which she defines as the freedom from hostility, or the freedom from the need to hate. It is a courage that makes it possible to sit next to someone, instead of standing up to them... This idea, of not holding any one irredeemable, is central to the Buddhist conception of metta, the unbounded, unconditional loving-kindness for all fellow beings. Metta demands a breadth of compassion that is able to separate a person from their deeds. To see a murderer only as a murderer is to make forgiveness impossible. Without forgiveness, there can be no compassion, and the person remains outside the circle of metta. It is a profound conviction in the inherent goodness of people and a commitment to the power of love as an agent of social change. The politics of metta may appear at first glance as too high-minded and divorced from the gruesome realities on the ground but, in fact, Suu Kyi's willingness to deal with the army without any baggage allows the space for practical, hard-nosed politics. Suu Kyi has sought to appoint former generals to positions that help her to navigate the trenchant obstructions built into parliamentary processes and use their talent and networks to take forward policy changes"
Saeed Noori sentenced to life in prison - "A mother whose car was used by her ISIS sympathiser son to mow down pedestrians in Melbourne collapsed in court as he was sentenced to life in prison... Noori came to Australia from Afghanistan as a refugee in 2004, becoming an Australian citizen two years later.Justice Hollingworth noted Noori's mental health issues, including schizophrenia, which were compounded by years of heavy drug use and a gambling addiction."What happened was not due to a drug-induced psychosis. There is nothing specific in the days leading up that seems to have triggered your particular actions that day," she told Noori."The offending was entirely unprovoked, and displayed a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life."Justice Hollingworth said Noori was motivated by beliefs that he was being spied on by ASIO, telling police the Australian government was racist."
At least it's not "mental illness"
How can I delete Yahoo emails by year, like for the whole (past) year? - Quora - "If you are in the new yahoo mail interface, in the search box, hit any key and you'll see a drop down appear.At the lower right is an Advanced Search link. Click that.In the window that pops up, change the date drop down to Custom Date and two new fields will appear. Fill them in with the date range, then click search mail.Select all the mail you want and hit delete as you normally would.You can also just type in to the search box:after:”2017/01/01″ before:”2018/01/01″For example, to search for all mail received in 2017."
Aka How to display Yahoo emails by date instead of scrolling infinitely
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "I spoke to Ashkan Sultani about this. He's the former Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. And here's what he said.
'I think Facebook has consistently aggressively violated consumer privacy. And I believe at least in the US, it's a calculated decision. It's akin to double parking, being comfortable with the fines of a parking ticket because you know you'd make more on say the package delivery. I think the company is prioritize growth at any cost’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘This document was, a lot of it was about this rather fantastic scifi type thing of urban transportation. Uber's selling itself as the future of urban transportation.’
‘Well, when you're trying to sell a roughly $10 billion loss making business for a total value of $80 billion, you need a story. And that story involves many strands, which are indeed sci fi and one of them is clearly autonomous driving, which is many years in the future for all sorts of societal, financial and technical reasons.’
‘I take it Richard, you wouldn't be buying the shares.’
‘Well, I think that if you take a look at the Lyft IPO, which has just gone out about a month ago, it's down about 25%, since IPO. And I think that the reality is you also need to realize that for investors, they're looking at this artificial scarcity. Uber and Lyft are only floating about 10% of its shares. So were the entirety of the company to be floated, could the market absorb the kind of volume of money that required entirely funding an $80 million IPO?’...
‘There were skeptics around Facebook, there were skeptics around Google and Amazon and both, and all three of those have proven to be wildly successful, and rewarded those who bought the shares. But you didn't think Uber fits that description?’
‘Well, Uber has many issues in its past, which are still haunting it today. There were major protests in 10 US cities and London yesterday about driver pay. It relies on labor arbitrage. And, and it needs to source a constant stream of drivers to keep its business going.’...
‘You think they’re just wildly optimistic about the potential for ride sharing and Uber Eats to grow at the scale they're talking about’
‘Yes, I think there's one classic error that's made in in looking at companies like Uber, which is extrapolating the behavior of a small cohort of relatively wealthy users to the entire market. And assuming that you can replace a 100 year tradition of car ownership and usage with ride sharing, and it could end up proving to be the top of a very frothy tech market when you see the reaction to Uber’s shares’"
Uber’s IPO prospectus for dummies: This jargon-free translation says i - "An account by the name of “horsesatemymoney” provided this analysis:
Abbreviated version of prospectus
We don’t make money
We probably will never make money
Our current business relies on shareholders to fund cheap cab rides in the hope that regulators will let us become a monopoly and charge whatever we want but the regulators are not playing along
We have therefore spent more money expanding into other low margin highly competitive activities like food delivery or trucking despite there being lots of specialist logistics firms so not obvious how we are going to make any money there either
We hope in the future there will be driverless cars and that we can then make money because no drivers but other people are developing them too
We have annoyed lots of regulators so we have lots of disputes and problems with regulators
We don’t pay much tax and have done lots of aggressive tax planning and so we have lots of disputes and problems with tax authorities
We don’t employ anyone (or we say we don’t) but we have lots of de facto employees and so we have lots of disputes and problems with drivers and employment tribunals
We don’t actually own many assets because we managed to get our drivers to provide their own cars
We have an app but other cab companies also have apps
Current investors want to get out and so we hope you will buy some shares anyway because you have heard of us also we need more money to fund the businesses that don’t make money
We are expanding into more business lines that don’t make money and we need more money to fund those
We are really big and you have heard of us plus we say we are a tech disruptor so don’t worry that we make no money it will all be great because you will be an Uber investor"
Missing Pregnant Chicago Teen Marlen Ochoa-Uriostegui Found Slain, Her Baby Ripped From Her Womb - "The mystery over the fate of a 19-year-old pregnant Chicago teen missing for the past three weeks took a dark turn on Wednesday when authorities announced she’d been found slain, with her baby cut out of her womb, and stuffed into a garbage can in the yard of a woman who’d allegedly offered her free baby clothes online. The baby of Marlen Ochoa-Uriostegui is said to be in critical condition at a local hospital after being passed off as the 46-year-old woman's child late last month, immediately after the teenager was reported missing at nine months pregnant"
Using Amino Acids to Identify Pornographic Images
How the EU hurts the world’s poorest - "Thanks to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which heavily subsidises EU farmers, Africa’s markets are flooded with their cheap excess produce. If you go to any African market, you can buy all kinds of European produce sold at very, very cheap prices. This is driving African farmers out of the market. At the same time, the EU imposes strict limitations on what African countries can export to the European market. In particular, African farmers cannot export value-added goods. So if a farmer in Ghana is producing cocoa, or a farmer in Kenya is producing coffee, they can perhaps get less than a dollar for their product as they have to export it raw. Only a fraction of the money you pay for a jar of coffee goes to an African farmer. The value-added goods, such as processed coffee, are then produced in Europe. Germany, especially, has been doing a lot of harm... The UK and the EU use their influence selectively to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on African countries. We should follow a consistent policy. We impose sanctions on African countries but we are happy to trade with other human-rights abusers like Saudi Arabia. One danger is that these sanctions are driving African countries closer and closer into the arms of the Chinese. This is a real own goal. Sanctions are a blunt instrument. The leaders responsible for human-rights abuses are protected. They still have access to the best lifestyles money can buy. Their money is stashed away in British and other foreign banks. Sanctions don’t touch them at all. Instead, they hit the poorest hardest... Each time I visit Africa, I see conditions getting worse. I never see any sign of British foreign aid doing much. Instead, I see big houses and nice cars, which all belong to local foreign-aid managers and government workers... Foreign aid was supposed to achieve two objectives: reduce poverty and buy influence. It has done neither. Since independence some five decades ago, the West has given African countries around £600 billion in aid, according to the World Bank. But parts of the continent are getting poorer, hungrier and angrier. Seven of the UN’s 15 peacekeeping missions are in Africa. According to the World Bank, by 2030 nine in 10 of the poorest people in the world will live in Africa.At the same time, Africa is virtually becoming a neo-colony of the NGOs. Hundreds of thousands of NGOs have taken over the role of states. NGOs provide basic needs like education, health, water, food and security. When it comes to buying influence, African leaders are very happy to receive Western aid money for their own personal and political reasons. But they are not paying attention to the UK or the West anymore. Foreign aid is widely seen as a Western conspiracy to keep Africa poor.Instead, African countries are working with China... I’m aware that if anyone else raises these issues they will be accused of being racist. But nobody can accuse me, an African, of being racist against my own people! Instead of throwing good money after bad, what I want is for Africa to be given the opportunity to trade itself out of poverty."
Verified Twitter Journalist Threatens to Contact Man’s Employer Because He Did the ‘OK’ Hand Sign - "Finnish Twitter user Iisak Selin responded to a tweet by journalist David MacDougall with a photo of himself using the hand gesture.MacDougall responded by tweeting, “Hi Iisak – Do you have a job? I wonder what your employers think of you making a sign that has been co-opted by white supremacists and racists? Would be interesting to find out. Or maybe a future employer is interested…”... I wonder when MacDougall and his ilk will stop abusing their platforms to threaten to doxx people simply because they don’t like their politics and do some actual journalism."
Of course, if you are upset at the media you're undermining democracy
Why we misread Suu Kyi and her refusal to demonise the Burmese Army - "It is somewhat understood that she is not fully in charge of the country’s administration, given the outsized constitutional powers available to the military, but it seems almost inexplicable why she wouldn’t stand atop a rostrum and use the very large microphone the world has handed her, to decry the generals. Instead of calling them murderers and rapists, she chooses to work with them, appoint some of them to important positions and generally behave as though she was among friends when she is with men in uniform... In her moral universe, courage is the freedom from fear, which she defines as the freedom from hostility, or the freedom from the need to hate. It is a courage that makes it possible to sit next to someone, instead of standing up to them... This idea, of not holding any one irredeemable, is central to the Buddhist conception of metta, the unbounded, unconditional loving-kindness for all fellow beings. Metta demands a breadth of compassion that is able to separate a person from their deeds. To see a murderer only as a murderer is to make forgiveness impossible. Without forgiveness, there can be no compassion, and the person remains outside the circle of metta. It is a profound conviction in the inherent goodness of people and a commitment to the power of love as an agent of social change. The politics of metta may appear at first glance as too high-minded and divorced from the gruesome realities on the ground but, in fact, Suu Kyi's willingness to deal with the army without any baggage allows the space for practical, hard-nosed politics. Suu Kyi has sought to appoint former generals to positions that help her to navigate the trenchant obstructions built into parliamentary processes and use their talent and networks to take forward policy changes"
Saeed Noori sentenced to life in prison - "A mother whose car was used by her ISIS sympathiser son to mow down pedestrians in Melbourne collapsed in court as he was sentenced to life in prison... Noori came to Australia from Afghanistan as a refugee in 2004, becoming an Australian citizen two years later.Justice Hollingworth noted Noori's mental health issues, including schizophrenia, which were compounded by years of heavy drug use and a gambling addiction."What happened was not due to a drug-induced psychosis. There is nothing specific in the days leading up that seems to have triggered your particular actions that day," she told Noori."The offending was entirely unprovoked, and displayed a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life."Justice Hollingworth said Noori was motivated by beliefs that he was being spied on by ASIO, telling police the Australian government was racist."
At least it's not "mental illness"
How can I delete Yahoo emails by year, like for the whole (past) year? - Quora - "If you are in the new yahoo mail interface, in the search box, hit any key and you'll see a drop down appear.At the lower right is an Advanced Search link. Click that.In the window that pops up, change the date drop down to Custom Date and two new fields will appear. Fill them in with the date range, then click search mail.Select all the mail you want and hit delete as you normally would.You can also just type in to the search box:after:”2017/01/01″ before:”2018/01/01″For example, to search for all mail received in 2017."
Aka How to display Yahoo emails by date instead of scrolling infinitely
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "I spoke to Ashkan Sultani about this. He's the former Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. And here's what he said.
'I think Facebook has consistently aggressively violated consumer privacy. And I believe at least in the US, it's a calculated decision. It's akin to double parking, being comfortable with the fines of a parking ticket because you know you'd make more on say the package delivery. I think the company is prioritize growth at any cost’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘This document was, a lot of it was about this rather fantastic scifi type thing of urban transportation. Uber's selling itself as the future of urban transportation.’
‘Well, when you're trying to sell a roughly $10 billion loss making business for a total value of $80 billion, you need a story. And that story involves many strands, which are indeed sci fi and one of them is clearly autonomous driving, which is many years in the future for all sorts of societal, financial and technical reasons.’
‘I take it Richard, you wouldn't be buying the shares.’
‘Well, I think that if you take a look at the Lyft IPO, which has just gone out about a month ago, it's down about 25%, since IPO. And I think that the reality is you also need to realize that for investors, they're looking at this artificial scarcity. Uber and Lyft are only floating about 10% of its shares. So were the entirety of the company to be floated, could the market absorb the kind of volume of money that required entirely funding an $80 million IPO?’...
‘There were skeptics around Facebook, there were skeptics around Google and Amazon and both, and all three of those have proven to be wildly successful, and rewarded those who bought the shares. But you didn't think Uber fits that description?’
‘Well, Uber has many issues in its past, which are still haunting it today. There were major protests in 10 US cities and London yesterday about driver pay. It relies on labor arbitrage. And, and it needs to source a constant stream of drivers to keep its business going.’...
‘You think they’re just wildly optimistic about the potential for ride sharing and Uber Eats to grow at the scale they're talking about’
‘Yes, I think there's one classic error that's made in in looking at companies like Uber, which is extrapolating the behavior of a small cohort of relatively wealthy users to the entire market. And assuming that you can replace a 100 year tradition of car ownership and usage with ride sharing, and it could end up proving to be the top of a very frothy tech market when you see the reaction to Uber’s shares’"
Uber’s IPO prospectus for dummies: This jargon-free translation says i - "An account by the name of “horsesatemymoney” provided this analysis:
Abbreviated version of prospectus
We don’t make money
We probably will never make money
Our current business relies on shareholders to fund cheap cab rides in the hope that regulators will let us become a monopoly and charge whatever we want but the regulators are not playing along
We have therefore spent more money expanding into other low margin highly competitive activities like food delivery or trucking despite there being lots of specialist logistics firms so not obvious how we are going to make any money there either
We hope in the future there will be driverless cars and that we can then make money because no drivers but other people are developing them too
We have annoyed lots of regulators so we have lots of disputes and problems with regulators
We don’t pay much tax and have done lots of aggressive tax planning and so we have lots of disputes and problems with tax authorities
We don’t employ anyone (or we say we don’t) but we have lots of de facto employees and so we have lots of disputes and problems with drivers and employment tribunals
We don’t actually own many assets because we managed to get our drivers to provide their own cars
We have an app but other cab companies also have apps
Current investors want to get out and so we hope you will buy some shares anyway because you have heard of us also we need more money to fund the businesses that don’t make money
We are expanding into more business lines that don’t make money and we need more money to fund those
We are really big and you have heard of us plus we say we are a tech disruptor so don’t worry that we make no money it will all be great because you will be an Uber investor"
Post ID: 3082939926005274745
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Links - 26th June 2019 (3) (Vegetarianism/Veganism)
Are avocados and almonds vegan? Here's why some say no - "The video asks which of avocados, almonds, melon, kiwi or butternut squash are suitable for vegans. The answer, at least according to QI, is none of them. Commercial farming of those vegetables, at least in some parts of the world, often involves migratory beekeeping"
Nothing is vegan. Vegans need to kill themselves, since in nature bees etc are needed to pollinate plants"
Internet Goes After Vegans Who Challenge Carnivores To Eat Their Meat Raw - "If you think eating vegetables is natural, pluck them ot of the ground with your bare hands and eat them RAW."
"The only reason people can survive today on a purely vegetarian or vegan diet, is because of the abundance of food which is available for us {mainly due to our step from hunter gatherers, to farming and agriculture around 10,000 years ago)... if anything eating meat (and indeed cooking it) is more "natural" than living on a purely vegetarian diet; a feat only made possible by our modern lifestyle"
Your vegan diet is not cruelty free : TumblrInAction
Vegan logic: it's okay to be cruel to humans, but not animals (excluding the animals killed indirectly by a vegan diet)
Yes, eating meat affects the environment, but cows are not killing the climate - "A key claim underlying these arguments holds that globally, meat production generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. However, this claim is demonstrably wrong, as I will show. And its persistence has led to false assumptions about the linkage between meat and climate change... For livestock, they considered every factor associated with producing meat. This included emissions from fertilizer production, converting land from forests to pastures, growing feed, and direct emissions from animals (belching and manure) from birth to death.However, when they looked at transportation’s carbon footprint, they ignored impacts on the climate from manufacturing vehicle materials and parts, assembling vehicles and maintaining roads, bridges and airports. Instead, they only considered the exhaust emitted by finished cars, trucks, trains and planes. As a result, the FAO’s comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock to those from transportation was greatly distorted... In its most recent assessment report, the FAO estimated that livestock produces 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. There is no comparable full life-cycle assessment for transportation. However, as Steinfeld has pointed out, direct emissions from transportation versus livestock can be compared and amount to 14 versus 5 percent, respectively. Many people continue to think avoiding meat as infrequently as once a week will make a significant difference to the climate. But according to one recent study, even if Americans eliminated all animal protein from their diets, they would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by only 2.6 percent... Removing animals from U.S. agriculture would lower national greenhouse gas emissions to a small degree, but it would also make it harder to meet nutritional requirements... the energy in plants that livestock consume is most often contained in cellulose, which is indigestible for humans and many other mammals. But cows, sheep and other ruminant animals can break cellulose down and release the solar energy contained in this vast resource. According to the FAO, as much as 70 percent of all agricultural land globally is range land that can only be utilized as grazing land for ruminant livestock."
Since up to 70% of agricultural land cannot grow plants, claims that we will save a lot of land and resources by going vegan are false
Let Them Eat Meat : Veganism is Not the Lifestyle of Least Harm, and “Intent” Does Nothing For Animals - "In 2003, Steven Davis wrote a paper called, “The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet.”...
'“The predominant feeling among wildlife ecologists is that no-till agriculture will have broadly positive effects on mammalian wildlife” populations (Wooley et al., 1984). Pasture-forage production, with herbivores harvesting the forage, would be the ultimate in ‘no-till’ agriculture. Because of the low numbers of times that equipment would be needed to grow and harvest pasture forages it would be reasonable to estimate that the pasture-forage model may reduce animal deaths by 50% or more. In other words, only 7.5 animals of the field per ha would die to produce pasture forages as compared to the intensive cropping system (15/ha) used to produce a vegan diet.'... Davis wasn’t savvy enough to say that the ruminant animals should be raised only on marginal land not suited for crop growth... Matheny... assumes that plant and animal protein quality are equivalent, even though it is widely accepted that plant protein is not as digestible as animal protein. In her entry “Tryptophan, Milk and Depression,” The Vegan RD Ginny Messina writes: “Since protein from plant foods is slightly less digestible than animal protein, vegan protein and amino acid needs are about 10% higher than for omnivores.”... plant products often have fiber, polysaccharides and phytic acid interfering with absorption of nutrients. Also important: Matheny forgot that dead animals aren’t used only for food. Animal byproducts end up in all sorts of things, and the fact that people are wearing animal skins in Davis’ world means less cotton and synthetic fibers that need to be created, another way to reduce our impact on animals... A recent study shows that bees have the same demonstratable emotions that dogs, rats and starlings do. If insect lives count (and vegans who say they don’t will often be at odds with their own ethics), it doesn’t make sense to only consider mammals in a calculation of the harm industrial agriculture causes. We should also consider the grasshoppers [and other insects]... it’s a little inconsistent for vegans to be nonplussed by the disappearance of animals into a farm machine vortex of death yet be outraged when baby male chicks meet pretty much the exact same end as a byproduct of egg production. Why is instant death fine if you’re a mouse and horrible if you are a baby chick?... The life and death of a farm animal doesn’t have to be that bad, and in fact is arguably better than most of the animals who live in freedom and are constantly fighting for life. Even Matheny agrees that the life of an animal on a farm is probably no worse than never having come into existence... a vegan diet is not the diet of least possible harm. How could it be? Veganism is a rigid avoidance of animal products no matter what – it doesn’t allow for adaptation. In a scenario where it is clearly less harmful to eat animals than to eat plants, veganism demands that you nevertheless eat the plants. And it is easy to think of cases where eating animal products would cause less harm to animals than growing crops. Eating dumpstered meat, road kill, and our companion animals and our relatives when they die, for instance... How many more animals would have to die in the growth, production and processing of crops to achieve the equivalent amount of nutrition and energy that a single blue whale provides?... as Matheny himself accidentally suggests, a lifestyle that includes hunting invasive species leads to less harm overall than a vegan diet... It is inconsistent to say that we must give up animal products because farming animals releases more greenhouse gases than plant farming, but then not also say that we must give up all activities that release more greenhouse gases than other possibilities. Why do we have to be vegan, but are still allowed to drive, fly, eat more than we must to survive, buy computers and televisions, eat rice, drink coffee and wine, and maintain a civilization? If veganism is not a subsistence lifestyle, it is disingenuous to single out the main thing it dislikes – animal use – and object to that and only that on subsistence lifestyle grounds... Furthermore, if our goal is to reduce methane emissions as much as possible, this means that not raising animals doesn’t go far enough. We should also kill all the wild animals that we can, since they too release methane"
So maybe the vegan solution is to kill food animals painlessly
Nothing is vegan. Vegans need to kill themselves, since in nature bees etc are needed to pollinate plants"
Internet Goes After Vegans Who Challenge Carnivores To Eat Their Meat Raw - "If you think eating vegetables is natural, pluck them ot of the ground with your bare hands and eat them RAW."
"The only reason people can survive today on a purely vegetarian or vegan diet, is because of the abundance of food which is available for us {mainly due to our step from hunter gatherers, to farming and agriculture around 10,000 years ago)... if anything eating meat (and indeed cooking it) is more "natural" than living on a purely vegetarian diet; a feat only made possible by our modern lifestyle"
Your vegan diet is not cruelty free : TumblrInAction
Vegan logic: it's okay to be cruel to humans, but not animals (excluding the animals killed indirectly by a vegan diet)
Yes, eating meat affects the environment, but cows are not killing the climate - "A key claim underlying these arguments holds that globally, meat production generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. However, this claim is demonstrably wrong, as I will show. And its persistence has led to false assumptions about the linkage between meat and climate change... For livestock, they considered every factor associated with producing meat. This included emissions from fertilizer production, converting land from forests to pastures, growing feed, and direct emissions from animals (belching and manure) from birth to death.However, when they looked at transportation’s carbon footprint, they ignored impacts on the climate from manufacturing vehicle materials and parts, assembling vehicles and maintaining roads, bridges and airports. Instead, they only considered the exhaust emitted by finished cars, trucks, trains and planes. As a result, the FAO’s comparison of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock to those from transportation was greatly distorted... In its most recent assessment report, the FAO estimated that livestock produces 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. There is no comparable full life-cycle assessment for transportation. However, as Steinfeld has pointed out, direct emissions from transportation versus livestock can be compared and amount to 14 versus 5 percent, respectively. Many people continue to think avoiding meat as infrequently as once a week will make a significant difference to the climate. But according to one recent study, even if Americans eliminated all animal protein from their diets, they would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by only 2.6 percent... Removing animals from U.S. agriculture would lower national greenhouse gas emissions to a small degree, but it would also make it harder to meet nutritional requirements... the energy in plants that livestock consume is most often contained in cellulose, which is indigestible for humans and many other mammals. But cows, sheep and other ruminant animals can break cellulose down and release the solar energy contained in this vast resource. According to the FAO, as much as 70 percent of all agricultural land globally is range land that can only be utilized as grazing land for ruminant livestock."
Since up to 70% of agricultural land cannot grow plants, claims that we will save a lot of land and resources by going vegan are false
Let Them Eat Meat : Veganism is Not the Lifestyle of Least Harm, and “Intent” Does Nothing For Animals - "In 2003, Steven Davis wrote a paper called, “The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet.”...
'“The predominant feeling among wildlife ecologists is that no-till agriculture will have broadly positive effects on mammalian wildlife” populations (Wooley et al., 1984). Pasture-forage production, with herbivores harvesting the forage, would be the ultimate in ‘no-till’ agriculture. Because of the low numbers of times that equipment would be needed to grow and harvest pasture forages it would be reasonable to estimate that the pasture-forage model may reduce animal deaths by 50% or more. In other words, only 7.5 animals of the field per ha would die to produce pasture forages as compared to the intensive cropping system (15/ha) used to produce a vegan diet.'... Davis wasn’t savvy enough to say that the ruminant animals should be raised only on marginal land not suited for crop growth... Matheny... assumes that plant and animal protein quality are equivalent, even though it is widely accepted that plant protein is not as digestible as animal protein. In her entry “Tryptophan, Milk and Depression,” The Vegan RD Ginny Messina writes: “Since protein from plant foods is slightly less digestible than animal protein, vegan protein and amino acid needs are about 10% higher than for omnivores.”... plant products often have fiber, polysaccharides and phytic acid interfering with absorption of nutrients. Also important: Matheny forgot that dead animals aren’t used only for food. Animal byproducts end up in all sorts of things, and the fact that people are wearing animal skins in Davis’ world means less cotton and synthetic fibers that need to be created, another way to reduce our impact on animals... A recent study shows that bees have the same demonstratable emotions that dogs, rats and starlings do. If insect lives count (and vegans who say they don’t will often be at odds with their own ethics), it doesn’t make sense to only consider mammals in a calculation of the harm industrial agriculture causes. We should also consider the grasshoppers [and other insects]... it’s a little inconsistent for vegans to be nonplussed by the disappearance of animals into a farm machine vortex of death yet be outraged when baby male chicks meet pretty much the exact same end as a byproduct of egg production. Why is instant death fine if you’re a mouse and horrible if you are a baby chick?... The life and death of a farm animal doesn’t have to be that bad, and in fact is arguably better than most of the animals who live in freedom and are constantly fighting for life. Even Matheny agrees that the life of an animal on a farm is probably no worse than never having come into existence... a vegan diet is not the diet of least possible harm. How could it be? Veganism is a rigid avoidance of animal products no matter what – it doesn’t allow for adaptation. In a scenario where it is clearly less harmful to eat animals than to eat plants, veganism demands that you nevertheless eat the plants. And it is easy to think of cases where eating animal products would cause less harm to animals than growing crops. Eating dumpstered meat, road kill, and our companion animals and our relatives when they die, for instance... How many more animals would have to die in the growth, production and processing of crops to achieve the equivalent amount of nutrition and energy that a single blue whale provides?... as Matheny himself accidentally suggests, a lifestyle that includes hunting invasive species leads to less harm overall than a vegan diet... It is inconsistent to say that we must give up animal products because farming animals releases more greenhouse gases than plant farming, but then not also say that we must give up all activities that release more greenhouse gases than other possibilities. Why do we have to be vegan, but are still allowed to drive, fly, eat more than we must to survive, buy computers and televisions, eat rice, drink coffee and wine, and maintain a civilization? If veganism is not a subsistence lifestyle, it is disingenuous to single out the main thing it dislikes – animal use – and object to that and only that on subsistence lifestyle grounds... Furthermore, if our goal is to reduce methane emissions as much as possible, this means that not raising animals doesn’t go far enough. We should also kill all the wild animals that we can, since they too release methane"
So maybe the vegan solution is to kill food animals painlessly
Post ID: 6655052975751951161
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370: Where Is It?
"That part of the flight took more than an hour to accomplish and suggested that this was not a standard case of a hijacking. Nor was it like an accident or pilot-suicide scenario that anyone had encountered before. From the start, MH370 was leading investigators in unexplored directions...
The disappearance of the airplane has provoked a host of theories. Many are preposterous. All are given life by the fact that, in this age, commercial airplanes don’t just vanish.
This one did, and more than five years later its precise whereabouts remain unknown. Even so, a great deal about the disappearance of MH370 has come into clearer view, and reconstructing much of what happened that night is possible. The cockpit voice recorder and the flight-data recorder may never be recovered, but what we still need to know is unlikely to come from the black boxes. Instead, it will have to come from Malaysia...
Despite reflexive denials by Malaysian officials, and outright obfuscation by the Malaysian air force, the truth about the airplane’s strange flight path quickly began to emerge. It turned out that MH370 had continued to link up intermittently with a geostationary Indian Ocean satellite operated by Inmarsat, a commercial vendor in London, for six hours after the airplane disappeared from secondary radar. This meant that the airplane had not suddenly suffered some catastrophic event. During those six hours it is presumed to have remained in high-speed, high-altitude cruising flight. The Inmarsat linkups, some of them known as “handshakes,” were electronic blips: routine connections that amounted to the merest whisper of communication, because the intended contents of the system—passenger entertainment, cockpit texts, automated maintenance reports—had been isolated or switched off...
The Malaysian regime was said to be one of the most corrupt in the region. It was also proving itself to be furtive, fearful, and unreliable in its investigation of the flight. Accident investigators dispatched from Europe, Australia, and the United States were shocked by the disarray they encountered. Because the Malaysians withheld what they knew, the initial sea searches were concentrated in the wrong place—the South China Sea—and found no floating debris. Had the Malaysians told the truth right away, such debris might have been found and used to identify the airplane’s approximate location; the black boxes might have been recovered. The underwater search for them ultimately centered on a narrow swath of ocean thousands of miles away. But even a narrow swath of the ocean is a big place. It took two years to find the black boxes from Air France 447, which crashed into the Atlantic on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009—and the searchers had known exactly where to look...
[The Malaysian report] was stamped secret and withheld even from other Malaysian investigators, but after it was leaked by someone on the inside, its inadequacies became clear. In particular, it held back on divulging all that was known about the captain, Zaharie. No one was surprised. The prime minister at the time was a nasty man named Najib Razak, who was alleged to be monumentally corrupt. The press in Malaysia was censored. Troublemakers were being picked up and made to disappear. Officials had reason for caution. They had careers to protect, and maybe their lives. It is obvious that decisions were made to not pursue certain avenues that might have reflected poorly on Malaysia Airlines or the government.
The third official investigation was the accident inquiry, intended not to adjudicate liability but to find probable cause, and to be conducted according to the highest global standards by an international team. It was led by an ad hoc working group assembled by the Malaysian government, and was a mess from its inception. The police and military disdained it. Government ministers saw it as a risk. Foreign specialists who were sent to assist began retreating almost as soon as they arrived. An American expert, referring to the international aviation protocol that is supposed to govern accident inquiries, told me, “Annex 13 is tailored for accident investigations in confident democracies, but in countries like Malaysia, with insecure and autocratic bureaucracies, and with airlines that are either government-owned or seen as a matter of national prestige, it always makes for a pretty poor fit.”...
The internet provokes emotion even in response to unremarkable events. A catastrophe taps into something toxic. Gibson [who looks for debris] was accused of exploiting the families and of being a fraud, a publicity hound, a drug addict, a Russian agent, an American agent, and at the very least a dupe. He began receiving death threats... “I once made the mistake of going on Twitter. Basically, these people are cyberterrorists. And it works. It’s effective.” He has been traumatized...
A hijacking is the “third party” solution favored in the official report. It is the least painful explanation for anyone in authority that night. It has immense problems, however. The main one is that the cockpit door was fortified, electrically bolted, and surveilled by a video feed that the pilots could see. Also, less than two minutes passed between Zaharie’s casual “good night” to the Kuala Lumpur controller and the start of the diversion, with the attendant loss of the transponder signal. How would hijackers have known to make their move precisely during the handoff to Vietnamese air traffic control, and then gained access so quickly and smoothly that neither of the pilots had a chance to transmit a distress call? It is possible of course that the hijackers were known to the pilots—that they were invited into the cockpit—but even that does not explain the lack of a radio transmission, particularly during the hand-flown turn away from Beijing. Both of the control yokes had transmitter switches, within the merest finger reach, and some signal could have been sent in the moments before an attempted takeover. Furthermore, every one of the passengers and cabin-crew members has been investigated and cleared of suspicion by teams of Malaysian and Chinese investigators aided by the FBI. The quality of that police work is open to question, but it was thorough enough to have uncovered the identities of two Iranians who were traveling under false names with stolen passports—seeking, however, nothing more nefarious than political asylum in Germany. It is possible that stowaways—by definition unrecorded on the airplane’s manifest—had hidden in the equipment bay. If so, they would have had access to two circuit breakers that, if pulled, would have unbolted the cockpit door. But that scenario has problems, too. The bolts click loudly when they open—an unambiguous sound that would have been familiar to the pilots. The hijackers would then have had to open a galley-floor hatch from below, climb a short ladder, evade notice by the cabin crew, evade the surveillance video, and enter the cockpit before either of the pilots transmitted a distress call. It is unlikely that this could have happened, just as it is unlikely that a flight attendant held hostage could have used the door keypad to allow sudden entry without firing off a warning. Furthermore, what would the purpose be of a hijacking? Money? Politics? Publicity? An act of war? A terrorist attack? The intricate seven-hour profile of MH370’s deviation into oblivion fits none of these scenarios. And no one has claimed responsibility for the act. Anonymity is not consistent with any of these motives...
Reasonable people may resist the idea that a pilot would murder hundreds of innocent passengers as the collateral price of killing himself. The definitive response is that this has happened before. In 1997, a captain working for a Singaporean airline called SilkAir is believed to have disabled the black boxes of a Boeing 737 and to have plunged the airplane at supersonic speeds into a river. In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 was deliberately crashed into the sea by its co-pilot off the coast of Long Island, resulting in the loss of everyone on board. In 2013, just months before MH370 disappeared, the captain of LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 flew his Embraer E190 twin jet from cruising altitude into the ground, killing all 27 passengers and all six crew members. The most recent case is the Germanwings Airbus that was deliberately crashed into the French Alps on March 24, 2015, also causing the loss of everyone on board...
Zaharie was often lonely and sad. His wife had moved out, and was living in the family’s second house. By his own admission to friends, he spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms waiting for the days between flights to go by. He was also a romantic. He is known to have established a wistful relationship with a married woman and her three children, one of whom was disabled, and to have obsessed over two young internet models, whom he encountered on social media, and for whom he left Facebook comments that apparently did not elicit responses. Some were shyly sexual. He mentioned in one comment, for example, that one of the girls, who was wearing a robe in a posted photo, looked like she had just emerged from a shower... There is a strong suspicion among investigators in the aviation and intelligence communities that he was clinically depressed.
If Malaysia were a country where, in official circles, the truth was welcome, then the police portrait of Zaharie as a healthy and happy man would carry some weight. But Malaysia is not such a country, and the official omission of evidence to the contrary only adds to all the other evidence that Zaharie was a troubled man.
Forensic examinations of Zaharie’s simulator by the FBI revealed that he experimented with a flight profile roughly matching that of MH370... Victor Iannello, an engineer and entrepreneur in Roanoke, Virginia, who has become another prominent member of the Independent Group and has done extensive analysis of the simulated flight, underscores what the Malaysian investigators ignored. Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight—in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone. Iannello believes that Zaharie was responsible for the diversion. Given that there was nothing technical that Zaharie could have learned by rehearsing the act on a gamelike Microsoft consumer product, Iannello suspects that the purpose of the simulator flight may have been to leave a bread-crumb trail to say goodbye. Referring to the flight profile that MH370 would follow, Iannello said of Zaharie, “It’s as if he was simulating a simulation.”...
In Kuala Lumpur, I met with one of Zaharie’s lifelong friends, a fellow 777 captain whose name I have omitted because of possible repercussions for him. He too believed that Zaharie was guilty, a conclusion he had come to reluctantly. He described the mystery as a pyramid that is broad at the base and one man wide at the top, meaning that the inquiry might have begun with many possible explanations but ended up with a single one. He said, “It doesn’t make sense. It’s hard to reconcile with the man I knew. But it’s the necessary conclusion.” I asked about the need Zaharie would have had to somehow deal with his cockpit companion, First Officer Fariq Hamid. He replied, “That’s easy. Zaharie was an examiner. All he had to say was ‘Go check something in the cabin,’ and the guy would have been gone.” I asked about a motive. He had no idea. He said, “Zaharie’s marriage was bad. In the past he slept with some of the flight attendants. And so what? We all do. You’re flying all over the world with these beautiful girls in the back. But his wife knew.” He agreed that this was hardly a reason to go berserk, but thought Zaharie’s emotional state might have been a factor...
The important answers probably don’t lie in the ocean but on land, in Malaysia. That should be the focus moving forward. Unless they are as incompetent as the air force and air traffic control, the Malaysian police know more than they have dared to say"
"That part of the flight took more than an hour to accomplish and suggested that this was not a standard case of a hijacking. Nor was it like an accident or pilot-suicide scenario that anyone had encountered before. From the start, MH370 was leading investigators in unexplored directions...
The disappearance of the airplane has provoked a host of theories. Many are preposterous. All are given life by the fact that, in this age, commercial airplanes don’t just vanish.
This one did, and more than five years later its precise whereabouts remain unknown. Even so, a great deal about the disappearance of MH370 has come into clearer view, and reconstructing much of what happened that night is possible. The cockpit voice recorder and the flight-data recorder may never be recovered, but what we still need to know is unlikely to come from the black boxes. Instead, it will have to come from Malaysia...
Despite reflexive denials by Malaysian officials, and outright obfuscation by the Malaysian air force, the truth about the airplane’s strange flight path quickly began to emerge. It turned out that MH370 had continued to link up intermittently with a geostationary Indian Ocean satellite operated by Inmarsat, a commercial vendor in London, for six hours after the airplane disappeared from secondary radar. This meant that the airplane had not suddenly suffered some catastrophic event. During those six hours it is presumed to have remained in high-speed, high-altitude cruising flight. The Inmarsat linkups, some of them known as “handshakes,” were electronic blips: routine connections that amounted to the merest whisper of communication, because the intended contents of the system—passenger entertainment, cockpit texts, automated maintenance reports—had been isolated or switched off...
The Malaysian regime was said to be one of the most corrupt in the region. It was also proving itself to be furtive, fearful, and unreliable in its investigation of the flight. Accident investigators dispatched from Europe, Australia, and the United States were shocked by the disarray they encountered. Because the Malaysians withheld what they knew, the initial sea searches were concentrated in the wrong place—the South China Sea—and found no floating debris. Had the Malaysians told the truth right away, such debris might have been found and used to identify the airplane’s approximate location; the black boxes might have been recovered. The underwater search for them ultimately centered on a narrow swath of ocean thousands of miles away. But even a narrow swath of the ocean is a big place. It took two years to find the black boxes from Air France 447, which crashed into the Atlantic on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009—and the searchers had known exactly where to look...
[The Malaysian report] was stamped secret and withheld even from other Malaysian investigators, but after it was leaked by someone on the inside, its inadequacies became clear. In particular, it held back on divulging all that was known about the captain, Zaharie. No one was surprised. The prime minister at the time was a nasty man named Najib Razak, who was alleged to be monumentally corrupt. The press in Malaysia was censored. Troublemakers were being picked up and made to disappear. Officials had reason for caution. They had careers to protect, and maybe their lives. It is obvious that decisions were made to not pursue certain avenues that might have reflected poorly on Malaysia Airlines or the government.
The third official investigation was the accident inquiry, intended not to adjudicate liability but to find probable cause, and to be conducted according to the highest global standards by an international team. It was led by an ad hoc working group assembled by the Malaysian government, and was a mess from its inception. The police and military disdained it. Government ministers saw it as a risk. Foreign specialists who were sent to assist began retreating almost as soon as they arrived. An American expert, referring to the international aviation protocol that is supposed to govern accident inquiries, told me, “Annex 13 is tailored for accident investigations in confident democracies, but in countries like Malaysia, with insecure and autocratic bureaucracies, and with airlines that are either government-owned or seen as a matter of national prestige, it always makes for a pretty poor fit.”...
The internet provokes emotion even in response to unremarkable events. A catastrophe taps into something toxic. Gibson [who looks for debris] was accused of exploiting the families and of being a fraud, a publicity hound, a drug addict, a Russian agent, an American agent, and at the very least a dupe. He began receiving death threats... “I once made the mistake of going on Twitter. Basically, these people are cyberterrorists. And it works. It’s effective.” He has been traumatized...
A hijacking is the “third party” solution favored in the official report. It is the least painful explanation for anyone in authority that night. It has immense problems, however. The main one is that the cockpit door was fortified, electrically bolted, and surveilled by a video feed that the pilots could see. Also, less than two minutes passed between Zaharie’s casual “good night” to the Kuala Lumpur controller and the start of the diversion, with the attendant loss of the transponder signal. How would hijackers have known to make their move precisely during the handoff to Vietnamese air traffic control, and then gained access so quickly and smoothly that neither of the pilots had a chance to transmit a distress call? It is possible of course that the hijackers were known to the pilots—that they were invited into the cockpit—but even that does not explain the lack of a radio transmission, particularly during the hand-flown turn away from Beijing. Both of the control yokes had transmitter switches, within the merest finger reach, and some signal could have been sent in the moments before an attempted takeover. Furthermore, every one of the passengers and cabin-crew members has been investigated and cleared of suspicion by teams of Malaysian and Chinese investigators aided by the FBI. The quality of that police work is open to question, but it was thorough enough to have uncovered the identities of two Iranians who were traveling under false names with stolen passports—seeking, however, nothing more nefarious than political asylum in Germany. It is possible that stowaways—by definition unrecorded on the airplane’s manifest—had hidden in the equipment bay. If so, they would have had access to two circuit breakers that, if pulled, would have unbolted the cockpit door. But that scenario has problems, too. The bolts click loudly when they open—an unambiguous sound that would have been familiar to the pilots. The hijackers would then have had to open a galley-floor hatch from below, climb a short ladder, evade notice by the cabin crew, evade the surveillance video, and enter the cockpit before either of the pilots transmitted a distress call. It is unlikely that this could have happened, just as it is unlikely that a flight attendant held hostage could have used the door keypad to allow sudden entry without firing off a warning. Furthermore, what would the purpose be of a hijacking? Money? Politics? Publicity? An act of war? A terrorist attack? The intricate seven-hour profile of MH370’s deviation into oblivion fits none of these scenarios. And no one has claimed responsibility for the act. Anonymity is not consistent with any of these motives...
Reasonable people may resist the idea that a pilot would murder hundreds of innocent passengers as the collateral price of killing himself. The definitive response is that this has happened before. In 1997, a captain working for a Singaporean airline called SilkAir is believed to have disabled the black boxes of a Boeing 737 and to have plunged the airplane at supersonic speeds into a river. In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 was deliberately crashed into the sea by its co-pilot off the coast of Long Island, resulting in the loss of everyone on board. In 2013, just months before MH370 disappeared, the captain of LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 flew his Embraer E190 twin jet from cruising altitude into the ground, killing all 27 passengers and all six crew members. The most recent case is the Germanwings Airbus that was deliberately crashed into the French Alps on March 24, 2015, also causing the loss of everyone on board...
Zaharie was often lonely and sad. His wife had moved out, and was living in the family’s second house. By his own admission to friends, he spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms waiting for the days between flights to go by. He was also a romantic. He is known to have established a wistful relationship with a married woman and her three children, one of whom was disabled, and to have obsessed over two young internet models, whom he encountered on social media, and for whom he left Facebook comments that apparently did not elicit responses. Some were shyly sexual. He mentioned in one comment, for example, that one of the girls, who was wearing a robe in a posted photo, looked like she had just emerged from a shower... There is a strong suspicion among investigators in the aviation and intelligence communities that he was clinically depressed.
If Malaysia were a country where, in official circles, the truth was welcome, then the police portrait of Zaharie as a healthy and happy man would carry some weight. But Malaysia is not such a country, and the official omission of evidence to the contrary only adds to all the other evidence that Zaharie was a troubled man.
Forensic examinations of Zaharie’s simulator by the FBI revealed that he experimented with a flight profile roughly matching that of MH370... Victor Iannello, an engineer and entrepreneur in Roanoke, Virginia, who has become another prominent member of the Independent Group and has done extensive analysis of the simulated flight, underscores what the Malaysian investigators ignored. Of all the profiles extracted from the simulator, the one that matched MH370’s path was the only one that Zaharie did not run as a continuous flight—in other words, taking off on the simulator and letting the flight play out, hour after hour, until it reached the destination airport. Instead he advanced the flight manually in multiple stages, repeatedly jumping the flight forward and subtracting the fuel as necessary until it was gone. Iannello believes that Zaharie was responsible for the diversion. Given that there was nothing technical that Zaharie could have learned by rehearsing the act on a gamelike Microsoft consumer product, Iannello suspects that the purpose of the simulator flight may have been to leave a bread-crumb trail to say goodbye. Referring to the flight profile that MH370 would follow, Iannello said of Zaharie, “It’s as if he was simulating a simulation.”...
In Kuala Lumpur, I met with one of Zaharie’s lifelong friends, a fellow 777 captain whose name I have omitted because of possible repercussions for him. He too believed that Zaharie was guilty, a conclusion he had come to reluctantly. He described the mystery as a pyramid that is broad at the base and one man wide at the top, meaning that the inquiry might have begun with many possible explanations but ended up with a single one. He said, “It doesn’t make sense. It’s hard to reconcile with the man I knew. But it’s the necessary conclusion.” I asked about the need Zaharie would have had to somehow deal with his cockpit companion, First Officer Fariq Hamid. He replied, “That’s easy. Zaharie was an examiner. All he had to say was ‘Go check something in the cabin,’ and the guy would have been gone.” I asked about a motive. He had no idea. He said, “Zaharie’s marriage was bad. In the past he slept with some of the flight attendants. And so what? We all do. You’re flying all over the world with these beautiful girls in the back. But his wife knew.” He agreed that this was hardly a reason to go berserk, but thought Zaharie’s emotional state might have been a factor...
The important answers probably don’t lie in the ocean but on land, in Malaysia. That should be the focus moving forward. Unless they are as incompetent as the air force and air traffic control, the Malaysian police know more than they have dared to say"
Post ID: 6581215421377312773
Links - 26th June 2019 (2) (South Africa)
UK gives £19million aid to South Africa - its president spends £17.5million on his palace - "The costly upgrade to Zuma’s once-humble home in the village of Nkandla includes Astroturf sports fields and tennis courts, a gymnasium and state-of-the art security systems, including fingerprint-controlled access pads.And nearby roads have benefited from a further £40 million of improvements.When African journalists revealed the astronomical cost of the work, Zuma’s ministers turned on the whistle-blowers, saying that revealing the details of ‘top secret’ documents was illegal."
Man beaten to death by vigilantes after girl, 7, falsely claimed she had been raped in South Africa
The perils of mob justice
South Africa’s Zulu nation joins white farmers in fight against government land seizures - "The largest ethnic group in South Africa, Zulu, has spoken out against the expropriation of land without compensation in the country. Zulu is ready to cooperate with the country's white farmers, known as Afrikaners or Boers.Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini has said the group will cooperate with South African minority rights group AfriForum.“The Zulu nation I’m talking about will not exist if we don’t have food. That’s why I say farmers must come closer so that we discuss what we can do when we talk about agriculture and the availability of enough food in the land. That’s why I’m asking AfriForum of the Boers to come and help us,” Zwelithini said, as quoted by eNews Channel Africa.“Because when government started talking about the appropriation of land, expropriation without compensation, Boers downed tools. There is no food in South Africa”... The land expropriation program run by President Cyril Ramaphosa is designed to redistribute land to poor black people to tackle severe inequality 24 years after the end of apartheid. It mostly involves lands owned by Boers, whites primarily of Dutch descent."
White South African farm activist beaten killed murdered - "A South African activist who spoke out against attacks on white farmers has been found stabbed and beaten to death on her own farm.Annette Kennealy, 51, was killed on a smallholding in Limpopo province on either Monday night or Tuesday morning where she had been staying with an employee... Kennealy was a publicly outspoken supporter of the white Afrikaner community, a prominent farmer and a former councillor with the opposition Democratic Alliance.In her last Facebook post, she shared a link alleging that 10 farm attacks, including one murder, had been reported in four days in 21019.She also routinely shared links and stories relating to politics in South Africa, and the government's plans to start expropriating farms from white land-owners... Ramaphosa has said everyone should 'relax' about the land reform process and that it would 'end up very well'."
Of course this is just normal crime and if you suggest they're being targeted you're racist
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, A Different Yemen - "I asked Yemen's information minister… why it seemed so very quiet. Oh but it's after lunch, he explained. Everyone's chewing qat... The nearest suppliers are up in the mountains well inside Houthi territory but in Yemen qat is like water. It finds a way. And so every day, fresh leaves are transported down across front lines and thrust into eager bulging cheeks...
[On Cape Town] Here, the noticeably darker hues of Central and West African immigrants have steadily supplanted the burnished copper brown collections of people from South Africa’s own mixed race community who call themselves colored. Once this street reverberated with racuous badanage in Cape Afrikaans, the local lingua franca. Today a proliferation of accents can be heard - French African, Somali, Yoruba - a linguistic Babel reflecting how rapidly this dynamic complex city is changing. Forget the old divides between white colored and black African which plagued apartheid era South Africa for over 50 years. Whilst those palpable tensions still exist now the enmity is also between Capetonians and Nigerians, Somalians and Congolese. Many coloureds and black South Africans balk at this seemingly unchecked immigration, much of it illegal and openly despise the foreigners flocking to their city. Using a certain, some would say irrefutable logic. We suffered for decades under apartheid. They didn't. Yet now they want to come here and enjoy the fruits of our suffering? If anyone deserves what post apartheid South Africa has to offer, surely it's us. Reports in the Cape August newspaper have detailed some heinous killings of foreign Africans by necklacing - having a car tire hung around their necks and set alight. The attackers were xenophobic inhabitants of sprawling destitute townships like Kaylicher [sp?] on the anger. The victims those outsiders foolish enough to try and live or do business there… Practically all the vendors here are foreign, selling generic depictions of black Africa, which cater to a wholly fallacious and stereotypical image of what Cape Town is like. I smile as I watch the stallholders, stands festooned with tatty Afrocentric trinkets and garish boutiques, pretending to be South African, playing on the acute white guilt of the unsuspecting tourists who, struggling to tell the difference between all these like black guys might be fleeced of 1000 Rand, that's 55 pounds, for an authentic tribal carving, made in China... Not everyone objects to the influx of foreign Africans, as long as they’re law abiding and hardworking. Many South African whites, and more than a few coloreds, express what to them is a universally acknowledged truth, and not even under their breath. You see, our blacks are lazy. I gasp to hear this old apartheid era slander repeated. It refers to a perceived poor work ethic amongst Causa people and other black South Africans, which was once used to just defy white supremacy. As a humanist... I believe that my country is the world. We're all people after all. Mutability, transcience and death are the only true constants in life. But to me, it seems that yet again, colored Capetonians are in danger of being written out of their city’s story, this time by immigration."
I'm sure some people blame white people for the tensions between black South Africans and other Africans
S. Africa's Decline Worst of Nations Not at War, Model Shows - "South Africa’s performance on a range of social, economic and governance measures deteriorated more in the past 12 years than any other nation not at war, according to Eunomix Business & Economics Ltd.The decline is likely to continue as the country wrestles with the consequences of nine years of worsening corruption and policy paralysis under former President Jacob Zuma, the Johannesburg-based political-risk advisory company said. The fragility of the economy may also limit the tenure of his successor Cyril Ramaphosa, who faces his first national election on May 8, it said... An index of security, governance, prosperity and welfare indicators shows South Africa slumped to 88th out of 178 nations in 2018 from 31st in 2006, according to an analysis of the country’s prospects by Eunomix... South Africa’s decline in ranking is only been superseded by conflict-riven countries such as Mali, Ukraine and Venezuela and its peers now include Colombia, Jamaica, Latvia and the Philippines, compared with Portugal and Slovenia in 2008... Orthodox economics adopted during the rule of former President Thabo Mbeki, who was in power from 1999 until 2008, have been abandoned in favor of more populist policies. They include a drive to adopt land expropriation without compensation, free tertiary education and more stringent black economic empowerment requirements for mining companies."
Presumably since this is the fault of racism, seizing the land of and attacking white farmers is the only way to reverse this decline
Man beaten to death by vigilantes after girl, 7, falsely claimed she had been raped in South Africa
The perils of mob justice
South Africa’s Zulu nation joins white farmers in fight against government land seizures - "The largest ethnic group in South Africa, Zulu, has spoken out against the expropriation of land without compensation in the country. Zulu is ready to cooperate with the country's white farmers, known as Afrikaners or Boers.Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini has said the group will cooperate with South African minority rights group AfriForum.“The Zulu nation I’m talking about will not exist if we don’t have food. That’s why I say farmers must come closer so that we discuss what we can do when we talk about agriculture and the availability of enough food in the land. That’s why I’m asking AfriForum of the Boers to come and help us,” Zwelithini said, as quoted by eNews Channel Africa.“Because when government started talking about the appropriation of land, expropriation without compensation, Boers downed tools. There is no food in South Africa”... The land expropriation program run by President Cyril Ramaphosa is designed to redistribute land to poor black people to tackle severe inequality 24 years after the end of apartheid. It mostly involves lands owned by Boers, whites primarily of Dutch descent."
White South African farm activist beaten killed murdered - "A South African activist who spoke out against attacks on white farmers has been found stabbed and beaten to death on her own farm.Annette Kennealy, 51, was killed on a smallholding in Limpopo province on either Monday night or Tuesday morning where she had been staying with an employee... Kennealy was a publicly outspoken supporter of the white Afrikaner community, a prominent farmer and a former councillor with the opposition Democratic Alliance.In her last Facebook post, she shared a link alleging that 10 farm attacks, including one murder, had been reported in four days in 21019.She also routinely shared links and stories relating to politics in South Africa, and the government's plans to start expropriating farms from white land-owners... Ramaphosa has said everyone should 'relax' about the land reform process and that it would 'end up very well'."
Of course this is just normal crime and if you suggest they're being targeted you're racist
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, A Different Yemen - "I asked Yemen's information minister… why it seemed so very quiet. Oh but it's after lunch, he explained. Everyone's chewing qat... The nearest suppliers are up in the mountains well inside Houthi territory but in Yemen qat is like water. It finds a way. And so every day, fresh leaves are transported down across front lines and thrust into eager bulging cheeks...
[On Cape Town] Here, the noticeably darker hues of Central and West African immigrants have steadily supplanted the burnished copper brown collections of people from South Africa’s own mixed race community who call themselves colored. Once this street reverberated with racuous badanage in Cape Afrikaans, the local lingua franca. Today a proliferation of accents can be heard - French African, Somali, Yoruba - a linguistic Babel reflecting how rapidly this dynamic complex city is changing. Forget the old divides between white colored and black African which plagued apartheid era South Africa for over 50 years. Whilst those palpable tensions still exist now the enmity is also between Capetonians and Nigerians, Somalians and Congolese. Many coloureds and black South Africans balk at this seemingly unchecked immigration, much of it illegal and openly despise the foreigners flocking to their city. Using a certain, some would say irrefutable logic. We suffered for decades under apartheid. They didn't. Yet now they want to come here and enjoy the fruits of our suffering? If anyone deserves what post apartheid South Africa has to offer, surely it's us. Reports in the Cape August newspaper have detailed some heinous killings of foreign Africans by necklacing - having a car tire hung around their necks and set alight. The attackers were xenophobic inhabitants of sprawling destitute townships like Kaylicher [sp?] on the anger. The victims those outsiders foolish enough to try and live or do business there… Practically all the vendors here are foreign, selling generic depictions of black Africa, which cater to a wholly fallacious and stereotypical image of what Cape Town is like. I smile as I watch the stallholders, stands festooned with tatty Afrocentric trinkets and garish boutiques, pretending to be South African, playing on the acute white guilt of the unsuspecting tourists who, struggling to tell the difference between all these like black guys might be fleeced of 1000 Rand, that's 55 pounds, for an authentic tribal carving, made in China... Not everyone objects to the influx of foreign Africans, as long as they’re law abiding and hardworking. Many South African whites, and more than a few coloreds, express what to them is a universally acknowledged truth, and not even under their breath. You see, our blacks are lazy. I gasp to hear this old apartheid era slander repeated. It refers to a perceived poor work ethic amongst Causa people and other black South Africans, which was once used to just defy white supremacy. As a humanist... I believe that my country is the world. We're all people after all. Mutability, transcience and death are the only true constants in life. But to me, it seems that yet again, colored Capetonians are in danger of being written out of their city’s story, this time by immigration."
I'm sure some people blame white people for the tensions between black South Africans and other Africans
S. Africa's Decline Worst of Nations Not at War, Model Shows - "South Africa’s performance on a range of social, economic and governance measures deteriorated more in the past 12 years than any other nation not at war, according to Eunomix Business & Economics Ltd.The decline is likely to continue as the country wrestles with the consequences of nine years of worsening corruption and policy paralysis under former President Jacob Zuma, the Johannesburg-based political-risk advisory company said. The fragility of the economy may also limit the tenure of his successor Cyril Ramaphosa, who faces his first national election on May 8, it said... An index of security, governance, prosperity and welfare indicators shows South Africa slumped to 88th out of 178 nations in 2018 from 31st in 2006, according to an analysis of the country’s prospects by Eunomix... South Africa’s decline in ranking is only been superseded by conflict-riven countries such as Mali, Ukraine and Venezuela and its peers now include Colombia, Jamaica, Latvia and the Philippines, compared with Portugal and Slovenia in 2008... Orthodox economics adopted during the rule of former President Thabo Mbeki, who was in power from 1999 until 2008, have been abandoned in favor of more populist policies. They include a drive to adopt land expropriation without compensation, free tertiary education and more stringent black economic empowerment requirements for mining companies."
Presumably since this is the fault of racism, seizing the land of and attacking white farmers is the only way to reverse this decline
Post ID: 4250023175067554238
The Joys and Perils of Victimhood
"In his book The Seventh Million, the Israeli journalist Tom Segev describes a visit to Auschwitz and other former death camps in Poland by a group of Israeli high school students...
These regular school tours to the death camps are part of Israeli civic education. The political message is straightforward: Israel was founded on the ashes of the Holocaust, but if Israel had already existed in 1933 the Holocaust would never have happened. Only in Israel can Jews be safe and free. The Holocaust was proof of that. So the victims of Hitler died as martyrs for the Jewish homeland, indeed as potential Israeli citizens, and the State of Israel is both the symbol and the guarantor of Jewish survival.
This message is given further expression, on those bleak and wintry spots where the Jewish people came close to annihilation, by displays of the Israeli flag and singing of the national anthem. But Segev noticed a peculiarly religious, or pseudoreligious, aspect to the death camp visits as well. The Israeli students in Poland, in his view, were like Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem, oblivious to everything except the sacred places. They marched along the railway tracks in Auschwitz-Birkenau like Christians on the Via Dolorosa. They brought books of prayers, poems, and psalms, which they recited in front of the ruined gas chambers. They played cassette tapes of music composed by a Holocaust survivor named Yehuda Poliker. And at one of the camps, a candle was lit in the crematorium, where the students knelt in prayer.
Some call this a form of secular religion. The historian Saul Friedlander was harsher and called it a union of kitsch and death. I felt the pull of kitsch emotion myself on my only visit to Auschwitz, in 1990. By kitsch I don’t mean gaudiness or camp but rather an expression of emotion that is displaced, focused on the wrong thing, or, to use that ghastly word properly for once, inappropriate. I am not the child of Holocaust survivors... even I couldn’t escape a momentary feeling of vicarious virtue, especially when I came across tourists from Germany. They were the villains, I the potential victim. But for the grace of God, I thought, I would have died here too. Or would I? An even more grotesque calculation passed through my mind: How did I fit into the Nuremberg laws?... I was woken from these smug and morbid thoughts by the sight of a tall man in American Indian dress, followed by young Japanese, Germans, and others of various nationalities banging on tambourines, yelling something about world peace.
All this seems far away from Primo Levi’s [a Holocaust survivor] fears of oblivion. One of the cruelest curses flung at the Jewish victims by an SS officer at Auschwitz was the promise that even if one Jew survived the camp no one would believe what had happened to him or her. The SS man was quite wrong, of course. We cannot imagine the victims’ torment, but we believe it. And far from forgetting the most recent and horrible chapter in the long book of Jewish suffering, the remembrance of it grows in volume the further the events recede into the past. Holocaust museums and memorials proliferate. Holocaust movies and television soap operas have broken box-office records. More and more people visit the camps, whose rotting barracks have to be carefully restored to serve as memorials and movie sets.
In a curious way, the Jewish Holocaust has been an inspiration to others. For almost every community, be it a nation or a religious or ethnic or sexual minority, has a bone to pick with history. All have suffered wrongs, and to an increasing and in my View alarming extent, all want these wrongs to be recognized, publicly, ritually, and sometimes financially. What I find alarming is not the attention we are asked to pay to the past. Without history, including its most painful episodes, we cannot understand who we are, or indeed who others are. A lack of historical sense means a lack of perspective. Without perspective we flounder in the dark and will believe anything, no matter how vile. 80 history is good, and it is right that victims who died alone and in misery should be remembered. And minorities are still vulnerable to persecution, Christians by Muslims, Sunnis by Shiites, Shiites by Sunnis, Muslim Uighurs by Han Chinese, Bosnians by Serbs, and on and on. What is alarming, however, is the extent to which so many minorities have come to define themselves above all as historical victims. What this reveals is precisely a lack of historical perspective.
Sometimes it is as if everyone wants to compete with the Jewish tragedy, in what an Israeli friend once called the Olympics of suffering. Am I wrong to detect a hint of envy when I read that Iris Chang, the Chinese-American author of a best seller about the 1937 Nanking Massacre, wishes for a Steven Spielberg to do justice to that event? (Her book bears the subtitle The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.) It is, it appears, not enough for Chinese-Americans to be seen as the , heirs of a great civilization; they want to be recognized as heirs of their very own Holocaust. In an interview, Chang related how a woman came up to her in tears after a public reading and said that Chang’s account of the massacre had made her “feel proud to be Chinese-American.” A massacre seems a peculiar source of pride.
Chinese-Americans are not the only ones to be prey to such emotions. The idea of victimhood also haunts Hindu nationalists, Armenians, African-Americans, American Indians, Japanese-Americans, and homosexuals who have adopted AIDS as a badge of identity. Larry Kramer’s book on AIDS, for example, is entitled Reports from the Holocaust. Even the placid, prosperous Dutch, particularly those now in their teens and twenties, much too young to have experienced any atrocity at all, have narrowed down their historical perspective to the hardship suffered under German occupation in World War II. This is no wonder, since pre- twentieth-century history has been virtually abolished from the curriculum as irrelevant.
The use of Spielberg’s name is of course telling, for the preferred way to experience historical suffering is at the movies. Hollywood makes history real. When Oprah Winfrey played a slave in the movie Beloved, she told the press that she collapsed on the set, crying and shaking. “I became so hysterical,” she said, “that I connected to the raw place. That was the transforming moment. The physicality, the beatings, going to the field, being mistreated every day was nothing compared to the understanding that you didn’t own your life. ” And remember, this was just a movie...
It becomes problematic when a cultural, ethnic, religious, or national community bases its communal identity almost entirely on the sentimental solidarity of remembered victimhood. For that way lies historical myopia and, in extreme circumstances, vendetta.
Why has it come to this? Why do so many people wish to identify themselves as vicarious Victims? There is no general answer. Histories are different, and so are their uses. Memories, fictionalized or real, of shared victimhood formed the basis of much nineteenth-century nationalism. But nationalism, though not always absent, does not seem to be the main driving force for vicarious victims today. There is something else at work. First there is the silence of the actual victims: the silence of the dead, but also of the survivors. When the survivors of the Nazi death camps arrived in Israel on rusty, overloaded ships, shame and trauma prevented most of them from talking about their suffering. Victims occupied a precarious place in the new state of Jewish heroes. It was as though victimhood were a stain that had to be erased or overlooked. And so most survivors preferred to keep quiet. A similar thing happened in Europe...
It was left up to the next generation, the sons and daughters of the victims, to break the silence...
There is a universal piety in remembering our parents. It is a way of honoring them. But remembering our parents, especially if their suffering remained mute and unacknowledged, is also a way of asserting ourselves, of telling the world who we are... Speaking openly about the communal suffering of one’s ancestors—as Jews, Japanese-Americans, Chinese, Hindus, etc—can be a way of “coming out,” as it were, of . nailing the colors of one’s identity to the mast. The only way a new generation can be identified with the suffering of previous generations is for that suffering to be publicly acknowledged, over and over again. This option is especially appealing when few or indeed no other tags of communal identity remain, often because of the survivors’ desire to assimilate. When J ewishness is reduced to a taste for Woody Allen movies and bagels, or Chineseness to Amy Tan novels and dim sum on Sundays, the quasi authenticity of communal suffering will begin to look very attractive.
The scholar K. Anthony Appiah made this point in an analysis of identity politics in contemporary America. The languages, religious beliefs, myths, and histories of the old countries tend to fade away as the children of immigrants become Americans. This often leads to defensive claims of Otherness, especially when there is little Otherness left to defend...
He goes on to say that “the new talk of ‘identity’ offers the promise of forms of recognition and of solidarity that could make up for the loss of the rich, old kitchen comforts of ethnicity.” Alas, however, those forms too often resemble the combination of kitsch and death described by Friedlander. Identity, more and more, rests on the pseudoreligion of victimhood. What Appiah says about ethnic minorities might even be applied to women: the more emancipated women become, the more some extreme feminists begin to define themselves as helpless victims of men.
But surely nationalities are not the same as ethnic minorities in America, let alone women. Indeed they are not. By and large, people of different nations still speak different languages, have different tastes in food, and share distinct histories and myths. These distinctions, however, are becoming fuzzier all the time. To a certain extent, especially in the richer countries, we are all becoming minorities in an Americanized world, where we watch Seinfeld while eating Chinese takeout. Few nations are defined by religion anymore, even though some, such as Iran and Afghanistan, have busily been reviving that definition. National histories, celebrating national heroes, are fading away in favor of social studies, which have replaced patriotic propaganda based on historical continuity with celebrations of contemporary multiculturalism. Literary canons, though perhaps less under siege in Europe than they are in the United States, are also becoming increasingly obsolete. Combined with a great deal of immigration to such countries as Britain, Germany, France, and Holland, these developments have eroded what kitchen comforts of ethnicity remained in European nation-states.
Perhaps the strongest, most liberating, and most lethal glue that has bound national communities together is the way we choose or are forced to be governed. Some nations have been defined mainly by their political systems. The United States is such a place. Sometimes politics and religion are combined in monarchies. Nowhere is politics entirely without irrational elements: customs, religion, and historical quirks all leave their marks. It was an extreme conceit born of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that political utopias could be based on pure reason. Nationalism, in the sense of worshiping the nation-state as an expression of the popular will, was part of this. Politics was destined to replace the bonds of religion, or region, or race. This did some good. It also did a great deal of harm. The twin catastrophes of communism and fascism showed how dangerous it is to see the nation-state as a pure expression of the people’s will. In any event, the ideological split between left and right, which was spawned by the division in the French National Assembly in 1789 and was eventually hardened by the cold war, effectively collapsed with the end of the Soviet Union. And the effects of global capitalism and multinational political arrangements, especially in Europe, have to some extent undermined the perception that nations are defined by the way they are governed. For it doesn’t seem to matter anymore how they are governed: decisions always appear to be made somewhere else. The current English obsession with the culture of Englishness has come just at the time of increasing integration into European institutions.
So where do we go in this disenchanted world of broken- down ideologies, religions, and national and cultural borderlines?... A half-century of secular, democratic, progressive change has surely been a huge success. We have finally been liberated from irrational ethnic comforts. And yet, after all that, a growing number of people seek to return to precisely such comforts, and the form they often take is the pseudoreligion of kitsch and death. Segev argues that the modern Israeli tendency to turn the Holocaust into a civic religion is a reaction against secular Zionism. The “new man”—socialist, heroic, pioneering—turned out to be inadequate. More and more, people want to rediscover their historical roots. To be serious about religion is demanding, however. As Segev says, “Emotional and historical awareness of the Holocaust provides a much easier way back into the mainstream of Jewish history, without necessarily imposing any real personal moral obligation. The ‘heritage of the Holocaust’ is thus largely a way for secular Israelis to express their connection to Jewish heritage.”...
Just as the Romantic idealism and culture worship of Herder and Fichte followed the secular rationalism of the French philosophes, our attraction to kitsch and death heralds a new Romantic age, which is antirational, sentimental, and communitarian. We see it in the politics of Clinton and Blair, which have replaced socialist ideology with appeals to the community of feeling, where we all share one another’s pain. We saw it in the extraordinary scenes surrounding the death of Princess Diana, when the world, so TV reporters informed us, united in mourning. Princess Diana was in fact the perfect embodiment of our obsession with victimhood. Not only did she identify with victims, often in commendable ways, hugging AIDS patients here and homeless people there, but she was seen as a suffering victim herself: of male chauvinism, royal snobbery, the media, British society, and so on. Everyone who felt victimized in any way identified with her, especially women and members of ethnic minorities. And it says something about the state of Britain, changed profoundly by immigration, American influence, and common European institutions, yet unsure of its status in Europe, that so many people felt united as a nation only when the princess of grief had died.
This sharing of pain has found its way into the manner in which we look at history, too. Historiography is less and less a matter of finding out how things really were or trying to explain how things happened. For not only is historical truth irrelevant but it has become a common assumption that there is no such thing. Everything is subjective or a sociopolitical construct. And if the civic lessons we learn at school teach us anything, it is to respect the truths constructed by others, or, as it is more usually phrased, the Other. So we study memory, that is to say, history as it is felt, especially by its victims. By sharing the pain of others, we learn to understand their feelings and to get in touch with our own...
[Fetishising historical suffering as similar] is ahistorical, because the actual experiences of historical victims get blended in a kind of soup of pain. Although it is undoubtedly true that Chinese, Jews, gays, and others have suffered, it is not so that they all suffered in the same way. The distinctions tend to get lost. It is all too typical of our neoromantic age that a well-known Dutch ballet dancer and novelist named Rudi van Dantzig should announce in a pamphlet issued by the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam that homosexuals and other minorities in the Netherlands should take anti-Nazi resisters as models for their struggle against social discrimination.
But intellectual enlightenment is probably not the issue here. Instead there is authenticity. When all truth is subjective, only feelings are authentic, and only the subject can know whether his or her feelings are true or false. One of the most remarkable statements along these lines was written by the novelist Edmund White. In an article about AIDS literature, he argues that literary expressions of the disease cannot be judged by critical standards. As he puts it, a trifle histrionically: “I can scarcely defend my feelings beyond saying that it strikes me as indecent to hand out grades to men and women on the edge of the grave.” He then stretches AIDS literature to encompass multiculturalism in general, and states not only that multiculturalism is incompatible with a literary canon but that he’d “go even further and say multiculturalism is incompatible with the whole business of handing out critical high and low marks.” In other words, our critical faculties cannot be applied to novels, poems, essays, or plays expressing the pain of Others. As White says about the AIDS genre, “We will not permit our readers to evaluate us; we want them to toss and turn with us, drenched in our night sweats.”
What makes us authentic, then, as Jews, homosexuals, Hindus, or Chinese, is our sense of trauma, and thus our status as victims, which cannot be questioned. The vulgar Freudianism of this View is remarkable in an age of debunking Freud. In fact, Freud’s endeavors were themselves a brilliant product of late-nineteenth-century identity politics. To secular, bourgeois, assimilated German and Austrian Jews, psychoanalysis was a logical route to self-discovery. What Freud did for his Viennese patients is in a way what Edmund White and other identity politicians are now doing for their various “communities,” and real politicians are borrowing their language.
Apart from the sentimentality that this injects into public life, the new religions of kitsch and death are disturbing for other reasons. For all Schwarcz’s talk of building bridges between mourning communities, I think the tendency to identify authenticity in communal suffering actually impedes understanding among people. Feelings can only be expressed, not discussed or argued about. This cannot result in mutual understanding but only in mute acceptance of whatever people wish to say about themselves, or in violent confrontation. The same is true of political discourse. Ideology has caused a great deal of suffering, to be sure, particularly in political systems where ideologies were imposed by force. But without any ideology political debate becomes incoherent, and politicians appeal to sentiments instead of ideas. And this can easily result in authoritarianism, for, again, you cannot argue with feelings. Those who try are denounced not for being wrong but for being unfeeling, uncaring, and thus bad people who don’t deserve to be heard...
The steady substitution of political argument in public life with the soothing rhetoric of healing seems wrong. We can make a start toward resolving the problem by drawing distinctions where few are made now. Politics is not the same as religion or psychiatry, even though it may be influenced by both. Memory is not the same as history, and memorializing is different from writing history. Sharing a cultural heritage is more than “negotiating an identity.” It is perhaps time for those of us who have lost religious, linguistic, or cultural ties with our ancestors to admit to that and let go. Finally, and I think this goes to the heart of the matter, we should recognize that truth is not just a point of view. There are facts that are not made up but real. And to pretend there is no difference between fact and fiction, or that all writing is fiction, is to paralyze our capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood. And that is the worst betrayal of Primo Levi and all those who suffered in the past. For Levi’s fear was not that future generations would fail to share his pain but that they would fail to recognize the truth."
--- The Joys and Perils of Victimhood in Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War / Ian Buruma
This is a good critique of victim culture, of the claim that just because one group suffered more doesn't mean we can't talk about another's, and of the race to the bottom in claiming offence and grievance.
From 1999. Of course, it's no surprise that 19 years later he got kicked out of the New York Review of Books for defying liberal groupthink by publishing Jian Ghomeshi's article.
These regular school tours to the death camps are part of Israeli civic education. The political message is straightforward: Israel was founded on the ashes of the Holocaust, but if Israel had already existed in 1933 the Holocaust would never have happened. Only in Israel can Jews be safe and free. The Holocaust was proof of that. So the victims of Hitler died as martyrs for the Jewish homeland, indeed as potential Israeli citizens, and the State of Israel is both the symbol and the guarantor of Jewish survival.
This message is given further expression, on those bleak and wintry spots where the Jewish people came close to annihilation, by displays of the Israeli flag and singing of the national anthem. But Segev noticed a peculiarly religious, or pseudoreligious, aspect to the death camp visits as well. The Israeli students in Poland, in his view, were like Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem, oblivious to everything except the sacred places. They marched along the railway tracks in Auschwitz-Birkenau like Christians on the Via Dolorosa. They brought books of prayers, poems, and psalms, which they recited in front of the ruined gas chambers. They played cassette tapes of music composed by a Holocaust survivor named Yehuda Poliker. And at one of the camps, a candle was lit in the crematorium, where the students knelt in prayer.
Some call this a form of secular religion. The historian Saul Friedlander was harsher and called it a union of kitsch and death. I felt the pull of kitsch emotion myself on my only visit to Auschwitz, in 1990. By kitsch I don’t mean gaudiness or camp but rather an expression of emotion that is displaced, focused on the wrong thing, or, to use that ghastly word properly for once, inappropriate. I am not the child of Holocaust survivors... even I couldn’t escape a momentary feeling of vicarious virtue, especially when I came across tourists from Germany. They were the villains, I the potential victim. But for the grace of God, I thought, I would have died here too. Or would I? An even more grotesque calculation passed through my mind: How did I fit into the Nuremberg laws?... I was woken from these smug and morbid thoughts by the sight of a tall man in American Indian dress, followed by young Japanese, Germans, and others of various nationalities banging on tambourines, yelling something about world peace.
All this seems far away from Primo Levi’s [a Holocaust survivor] fears of oblivion. One of the cruelest curses flung at the Jewish victims by an SS officer at Auschwitz was the promise that even if one Jew survived the camp no one would believe what had happened to him or her. The SS man was quite wrong, of course. We cannot imagine the victims’ torment, but we believe it. And far from forgetting the most recent and horrible chapter in the long book of Jewish suffering, the remembrance of it grows in volume the further the events recede into the past. Holocaust museums and memorials proliferate. Holocaust movies and television soap operas have broken box-office records. More and more people visit the camps, whose rotting barracks have to be carefully restored to serve as memorials and movie sets.
In a curious way, the Jewish Holocaust has been an inspiration to others. For almost every community, be it a nation or a religious or ethnic or sexual minority, has a bone to pick with history. All have suffered wrongs, and to an increasing and in my View alarming extent, all want these wrongs to be recognized, publicly, ritually, and sometimes financially. What I find alarming is not the attention we are asked to pay to the past. Without history, including its most painful episodes, we cannot understand who we are, or indeed who others are. A lack of historical sense means a lack of perspective. Without perspective we flounder in the dark and will believe anything, no matter how vile. 80 history is good, and it is right that victims who died alone and in misery should be remembered. And minorities are still vulnerable to persecution, Christians by Muslims, Sunnis by Shiites, Shiites by Sunnis, Muslim Uighurs by Han Chinese, Bosnians by Serbs, and on and on. What is alarming, however, is the extent to which so many minorities have come to define themselves above all as historical victims. What this reveals is precisely a lack of historical perspective.
Sometimes it is as if everyone wants to compete with the Jewish tragedy, in what an Israeli friend once called the Olympics of suffering. Am I wrong to detect a hint of envy when I read that Iris Chang, the Chinese-American author of a best seller about the 1937 Nanking Massacre, wishes for a Steven Spielberg to do justice to that event? (Her book bears the subtitle The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.) It is, it appears, not enough for Chinese-Americans to be seen as the , heirs of a great civilization; they want to be recognized as heirs of their very own Holocaust. In an interview, Chang related how a woman came up to her in tears after a public reading and said that Chang’s account of the massacre had made her “feel proud to be Chinese-American.” A massacre seems a peculiar source of pride.
Chinese-Americans are not the only ones to be prey to such emotions. The idea of victimhood also haunts Hindu nationalists, Armenians, African-Americans, American Indians, Japanese-Americans, and homosexuals who have adopted AIDS as a badge of identity. Larry Kramer’s book on AIDS, for example, is entitled Reports from the Holocaust. Even the placid, prosperous Dutch, particularly those now in their teens and twenties, much too young to have experienced any atrocity at all, have narrowed down their historical perspective to the hardship suffered under German occupation in World War II. This is no wonder, since pre- twentieth-century history has been virtually abolished from the curriculum as irrelevant.
The use of Spielberg’s name is of course telling, for the preferred way to experience historical suffering is at the movies. Hollywood makes history real. When Oprah Winfrey played a slave in the movie Beloved, she told the press that she collapsed on the set, crying and shaking. “I became so hysterical,” she said, “that I connected to the raw place. That was the transforming moment. The physicality, the beatings, going to the field, being mistreated every day was nothing compared to the understanding that you didn’t own your life. ” And remember, this was just a movie...
It becomes problematic when a cultural, ethnic, religious, or national community bases its communal identity almost entirely on the sentimental solidarity of remembered victimhood. For that way lies historical myopia and, in extreme circumstances, vendetta.
Why has it come to this? Why do so many people wish to identify themselves as vicarious Victims? There is no general answer. Histories are different, and so are their uses. Memories, fictionalized or real, of shared victimhood formed the basis of much nineteenth-century nationalism. But nationalism, though not always absent, does not seem to be the main driving force for vicarious victims today. There is something else at work. First there is the silence of the actual victims: the silence of the dead, but also of the survivors. When the survivors of the Nazi death camps arrived in Israel on rusty, overloaded ships, shame and trauma prevented most of them from talking about their suffering. Victims occupied a precarious place in the new state of Jewish heroes. It was as though victimhood were a stain that had to be erased or overlooked. And so most survivors preferred to keep quiet. A similar thing happened in Europe...
It was left up to the next generation, the sons and daughters of the victims, to break the silence...
There is a universal piety in remembering our parents. It is a way of honoring them. But remembering our parents, especially if their suffering remained mute and unacknowledged, is also a way of asserting ourselves, of telling the world who we are... Speaking openly about the communal suffering of one’s ancestors—as Jews, Japanese-Americans, Chinese, Hindus, etc—can be a way of “coming out,” as it were, of . nailing the colors of one’s identity to the mast. The only way a new generation can be identified with the suffering of previous generations is for that suffering to be publicly acknowledged, over and over again. This option is especially appealing when few or indeed no other tags of communal identity remain, often because of the survivors’ desire to assimilate. When J ewishness is reduced to a taste for Woody Allen movies and bagels, or Chineseness to Amy Tan novels and dim sum on Sundays, the quasi authenticity of communal suffering will begin to look very attractive.
The scholar K. Anthony Appiah made this point in an analysis of identity politics in contemporary America. The languages, religious beliefs, myths, and histories of the old countries tend to fade away as the children of immigrants become Americans. This often leads to defensive claims of Otherness, especially when there is little Otherness left to defend...
He goes on to say that “the new talk of ‘identity’ offers the promise of forms of recognition and of solidarity that could make up for the loss of the rich, old kitchen comforts of ethnicity.” Alas, however, those forms too often resemble the combination of kitsch and death described by Friedlander. Identity, more and more, rests on the pseudoreligion of victimhood. What Appiah says about ethnic minorities might even be applied to women: the more emancipated women become, the more some extreme feminists begin to define themselves as helpless victims of men.
But surely nationalities are not the same as ethnic minorities in America, let alone women. Indeed they are not. By and large, people of different nations still speak different languages, have different tastes in food, and share distinct histories and myths. These distinctions, however, are becoming fuzzier all the time. To a certain extent, especially in the richer countries, we are all becoming minorities in an Americanized world, where we watch Seinfeld while eating Chinese takeout. Few nations are defined by religion anymore, even though some, such as Iran and Afghanistan, have busily been reviving that definition. National histories, celebrating national heroes, are fading away in favor of social studies, which have replaced patriotic propaganda based on historical continuity with celebrations of contemporary multiculturalism. Literary canons, though perhaps less under siege in Europe than they are in the United States, are also becoming increasingly obsolete. Combined with a great deal of immigration to such countries as Britain, Germany, France, and Holland, these developments have eroded what kitchen comforts of ethnicity remained in European nation-states.
Perhaps the strongest, most liberating, and most lethal glue that has bound national communities together is the way we choose or are forced to be governed. Some nations have been defined mainly by their political systems. The United States is such a place. Sometimes politics and religion are combined in monarchies. Nowhere is politics entirely without irrational elements: customs, religion, and historical quirks all leave their marks. It was an extreme conceit born of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that political utopias could be based on pure reason. Nationalism, in the sense of worshiping the nation-state as an expression of the popular will, was part of this. Politics was destined to replace the bonds of religion, or region, or race. This did some good. It also did a great deal of harm. The twin catastrophes of communism and fascism showed how dangerous it is to see the nation-state as a pure expression of the people’s will. In any event, the ideological split between left and right, which was spawned by the division in the French National Assembly in 1789 and was eventually hardened by the cold war, effectively collapsed with the end of the Soviet Union. And the effects of global capitalism and multinational political arrangements, especially in Europe, have to some extent undermined the perception that nations are defined by the way they are governed. For it doesn’t seem to matter anymore how they are governed: decisions always appear to be made somewhere else. The current English obsession with the culture of Englishness has come just at the time of increasing integration into European institutions.
So where do we go in this disenchanted world of broken- down ideologies, religions, and national and cultural borderlines?... A half-century of secular, democratic, progressive change has surely been a huge success. We have finally been liberated from irrational ethnic comforts. And yet, after all that, a growing number of people seek to return to precisely such comforts, and the form they often take is the pseudoreligion of kitsch and death. Segev argues that the modern Israeli tendency to turn the Holocaust into a civic religion is a reaction against secular Zionism. The “new man”—socialist, heroic, pioneering—turned out to be inadequate. More and more, people want to rediscover their historical roots. To be serious about religion is demanding, however. As Segev says, “Emotional and historical awareness of the Holocaust provides a much easier way back into the mainstream of Jewish history, without necessarily imposing any real personal moral obligation. The ‘heritage of the Holocaust’ is thus largely a way for secular Israelis to express their connection to Jewish heritage.”...
Just as the Romantic idealism and culture worship of Herder and Fichte followed the secular rationalism of the French philosophes, our attraction to kitsch and death heralds a new Romantic age, which is antirational, sentimental, and communitarian. We see it in the politics of Clinton and Blair, which have replaced socialist ideology with appeals to the community of feeling, where we all share one another’s pain. We saw it in the extraordinary scenes surrounding the death of Princess Diana, when the world, so TV reporters informed us, united in mourning. Princess Diana was in fact the perfect embodiment of our obsession with victimhood. Not only did she identify with victims, often in commendable ways, hugging AIDS patients here and homeless people there, but she was seen as a suffering victim herself: of male chauvinism, royal snobbery, the media, British society, and so on. Everyone who felt victimized in any way identified with her, especially women and members of ethnic minorities. And it says something about the state of Britain, changed profoundly by immigration, American influence, and common European institutions, yet unsure of its status in Europe, that so many people felt united as a nation only when the princess of grief had died.
This sharing of pain has found its way into the manner in which we look at history, too. Historiography is less and less a matter of finding out how things really were or trying to explain how things happened. For not only is historical truth irrelevant but it has become a common assumption that there is no such thing. Everything is subjective or a sociopolitical construct. And if the civic lessons we learn at school teach us anything, it is to respect the truths constructed by others, or, as it is more usually phrased, the Other. So we study memory, that is to say, history as it is felt, especially by its victims. By sharing the pain of others, we learn to understand their feelings and to get in touch with our own...
[Fetishising historical suffering as similar] is ahistorical, because the actual experiences of historical victims get blended in a kind of soup of pain. Although it is undoubtedly true that Chinese, Jews, gays, and others have suffered, it is not so that they all suffered in the same way. The distinctions tend to get lost. It is all too typical of our neoromantic age that a well-known Dutch ballet dancer and novelist named Rudi van Dantzig should announce in a pamphlet issued by the Resistance Museum in Amsterdam that homosexuals and other minorities in the Netherlands should take anti-Nazi resisters as models for their struggle against social discrimination.
But intellectual enlightenment is probably not the issue here. Instead there is authenticity. When all truth is subjective, only feelings are authentic, and only the subject can know whether his or her feelings are true or false. One of the most remarkable statements along these lines was written by the novelist Edmund White. In an article about AIDS literature, he argues that literary expressions of the disease cannot be judged by critical standards. As he puts it, a trifle histrionically: “I can scarcely defend my feelings beyond saying that it strikes me as indecent to hand out grades to men and women on the edge of the grave.” He then stretches AIDS literature to encompass multiculturalism in general, and states not only that multiculturalism is incompatible with a literary canon but that he’d “go even further and say multiculturalism is incompatible with the whole business of handing out critical high and low marks.” In other words, our critical faculties cannot be applied to novels, poems, essays, or plays expressing the pain of Others. As White says about the AIDS genre, “We will not permit our readers to evaluate us; we want them to toss and turn with us, drenched in our night sweats.”
What makes us authentic, then, as Jews, homosexuals, Hindus, or Chinese, is our sense of trauma, and thus our status as victims, which cannot be questioned. The vulgar Freudianism of this View is remarkable in an age of debunking Freud. In fact, Freud’s endeavors were themselves a brilliant product of late-nineteenth-century identity politics. To secular, bourgeois, assimilated German and Austrian Jews, psychoanalysis was a logical route to self-discovery. What Freud did for his Viennese patients is in a way what Edmund White and other identity politicians are now doing for their various “communities,” and real politicians are borrowing their language.
Apart from the sentimentality that this injects into public life, the new religions of kitsch and death are disturbing for other reasons. For all Schwarcz’s talk of building bridges between mourning communities, I think the tendency to identify authenticity in communal suffering actually impedes understanding among people. Feelings can only be expressed, not discussed or argued about. This cannot result in mutual understanding but only in mute acceptance of whatever people wish to say about themselves, or in violent confrontation. The same is true of political discourse. Ideology has caused a great deal of suffering, to be sure, particularly in political systems where ideologies were imposed by force. But without any ideology political debate becomes incoherent, and politicians appeal to sentiments instead of ideas. And this can easily result in authoritarianism, for, again, you cannot argue with feelings. Those who try are denounced not for being wrong but for being unfeeling, uncaring, and thus bad people who don’t deserve to be heard...
The steady substitution of political argument in public life with the soothing rhetoric of healing seems wrong. We can make a start toward resolving the problem by drawing distinctions where few are made now. Politics is not the same as religion or psychiatry, even though it may be influenced by both. Memory is not the same as history, and memorializing is different from writing history. Sharing a cultural heritage is more than “negotiating an identity.” It is perhaps time for those of us who have lost religious, linguistic, or cultural ties with our ancestors to admit to that and let go. Finally, and I think this goes to the heart of the matter, we should recognize that truth is not just a point of view. There are facts that are not made up but real. And to pretend there is no difference between fact and fiction, or that all writing is fiction, is to paralyze our capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood. And that is the worst betrayal of Primo Levi and all those who suffered in the past. For Levi’s fear was not that future generations would fail to share his pain but that they would fail to recognize the truth."
--- The Joys and Perils of Victimhood in Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War / Ian Buruma
This is a good critique of victim culture, of the claim that just because one group suffered more doesn't mean we can't talk about another's, and of the race to the bottom in claiming offence and grievance.
From 1999. Of course, it's no surprise that 19 years later he got kicked out of the New York Review of Books for defying liberal groupthink by publishing Jian Ghomeshi's article.
Post ID: 4577483820511803576
Links - 26th June 2019 (1) (Rohingya)
Why Jack Dorsey in Myanmar Isn’t the Problem; You Are. - "Some twitterers twisted Dorsey’s enjoyment of the country to say he must be “happy” that the Rohingya are being killed, and some bitingly asked how many dead bodies he had to step over. But many of the opinions tossed out by these reactive people hint that their perspectives are based on limited knowledge. Perhaps they intended to present good conscience, but the reality is that their less-than-280-character tweets are far removed from the actual issues... Journalists, too, have the same responsibility to act. So much about Myanmar is being hidden by the headlines that its international identity has become nothing but the Rohingya crisis... If you do nothing else, take a moment to think before you post on social media. This isn’t just about Myanmar; it’s about making comments on any context that you don’t have the full story. Ask yourself: Is it true? Do you know the whole situation? Are you asking questions, or are you making a judgment? Is that judgment based on multiple perspectives? Why might others be saying what they’re saying? What are you hoping to achieve by chiming in?"
Rohingya militants massacred Hindus in Myanmar, says Amnesty - "The Rohingya military group Arsa carried out deadly massacres and abductions of the Hindu community in Myanmar’s Rakhine state last year, a new report by Amnesty International has revealed... Only those who agreed to convert to Islam were spared... Arsa – the Arakan Rohingya Salvation army – are a group of trained fighters estimated to be in their hundreds. It was formed in around 2012 in reaction to long-term systematic discrimination against the Rohingya community in Rakhine, but only came to prominence in October 2016 after a series of attacks on Myanmar’s security forces.The Amnesty report, which has been verified through hundreds of witness accounts, is likely to be controversial because it backs up the assertion by Myanmar’s military and government that their campaign of violence carried out in Rakhine last year was in response to Arsa’s actions... The accounts by witnesses also reveal the level of fear that victims had about telling the truth, and that eight Hindu women who fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh were pressured by Arsa to make videos claiming the Myanmar military carried out the violence against them."
Just as ISIS enslaved Yazidi women because of US foreign policy, the Rohingya attacked Hindus because of oppression from Buddhist Burmese
Islamists Responsible for Rohingya Refugee Crisis - "Priscilla Clapp, who served as U.S. chief of mission in Burma from 1999 to 2002, strongly disputes the current "narrative" about Kyi and the response of her government to the terrorist attacks in Rakhine last October and August. In a September 7 interview with France 24 (a partial transcript of which was provided by PJ Media), Clapp argued that the attacks were "perpetrated by people in the Rohingya diaspora living in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia coming in through Bangladesh"... Clapp's assertions are backed up by an extensive analysis in 2005, written by Dr. Aye Chan, Professor of Southeast Asian History at Kanda International University in Japan, and discussed recently in a piece by author Andrew Bostom. According to Bostom, Chan's article, "The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma (Myanmar)," on the origins of the Bengali Muslim jihad in Western Myanmar in the late 19th century through the World War II era, illustrates that it is "rooted in Islam's same timeless institution of expansionist jihad which eliminated Buddhist civilization in northern India."Bostom also referred to an open letter, penned by Chan in 2014 to then-UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, demonstrating the transparent if "strenuous efforts" of Bengali Muslim migrants to Northwestern Myanmar "to take away Rakhine's [Arakan's] own [Buddhist] ethnic identity from the Rakhine people.""
Indian government says Rohingya Muslims are security threat - "India’s government said Monday that it has evidence there are extremists who pose a threat to the country’s security among the Rohingya Muslims who have left Myanmar and settled in many Indian cities. India’s Supreme Court was hearing a petition filed on behalf of two Rohingya refugees, challenging a government decision to deport the ethnic group from India...
'the August attack by the Rohingyas was preceded by a similar attack, last October, by the Rohingyas on the Burmese (Buddhist) police, and again, it was not their initial attack, but almost exclusively the retaliation by the Buddhist army, that was the focus of reports in the foreign press last fall. Reports of Rohingya villages being burnt down are reported uncritically... Professor Andrew Selth of Griffith University in Australia... has stated categorically that the name “Rohingya” was taken by “Bengali Muslims who live in Arakan State…most Rohingyas arrived with the British colonialists in the 19th and 20th centuries.” It is true that a handful of Bengali Muslims drifted down to Burma over the centuries, but Professor Selth makes the important point — unknown to Western reporters — that the vast majority of Rohingyas are recent arrivals, their great migration made possible by the fact that Burma was administratively part of British India until 1937, which meant there was no formal border to cross.'"
The Truth About Myanmar’s Rohingya Issue | The Diplomat - "Rakhine history expert Jacques P. Leider may have put it best in his analysis Rohingya: The Name, The Movement, The Quest for Identity. “By narrowing the debate on the Rohingyas to the legal and humanitarian aspects, editorialists around the world have taken an easy approach towards a complicated issue… where issues like ethnicity, history, and cultural identity are key ingredients of legitimacy... In even a cursory survey of Rohingya history, it is clear that the Rohingya are not an ethnic, but rather a political construction... The group referred to as “Rohingya” by contemporary Rohingya scholars (and most of the international community) today actually display huge diversity of ethnic origins and social backgrounds, and, as Leider argues, the existence of a “single identity” is difficult to pinpoint.”"
Ohio Attacker Was Wrong, Rohingyas Too Have A Bloody History To Answer For - "This demographic shift caused by the unabated migration of Bengali Muslims from Chittagong to Arakan triggered racial tensions between the indigenous Rakhines and the settlers. Clashes started erupting between the two groups, forcing the British to set up a special investigation commission led by one James Ester and Tin Tut (who became independent Burma’s first foreign minister). Though the commission recommended a halt to further migration and sealing the borders of Arakan with Bengal, these remained only on paper since the British retreated from Arakan at the outbreak of World War II.And then started another bloody chapter in relations between the Muslim Rohingyas and Buddhist Rakhines. The absence of the British sparked violent clashes between the two groups. The British had given huge caches of arms to the Rohingyas in northern Arakan to stave off the invading Japanese and act as a buffer to British India, as also to take on the Rakhines who had started supporting the Japanese. In March 1942, Rohingyas killed 20,000 Rakhines in northern Arakan, something that the Somali-origin Artan (the Ohio attacker) who spent seven years in Pakistan before migrating to the US in 2014 would have been blissfully unaware of. Once the Japanese overran large stretches of Burma, they started committing atrocities not only on the Rohingyas, but also the indigenous Burmese (including the Rakhines), Anglo-Burmese, British and the Indian migrants settled in Burma. They all fled to India; about 22,000 Rohingyas took shelter in Bengal. The British once again armed the Rohingyas and organised them under a ‘Volunteer Force’ to harass the Japanese. But the Rohingyas once again turned on the Rakhines, killing them and destroying their houses, Buddhist monasteries and pagodas, raping their women and forcibly converting them. Artan would also have been ignorant of this. The Rakhines started harbouring a deep-seated distrust and animosity towards the Rohingyas. This became more deep-seated when the Rohingyas started demanding integration of Arakan with East Pakistan during the mid-1940s when two-nation demand gained ground. Just before Burma gained independence in January 1948, the Rohingyas appealed to Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah to ask the British to incorporate Arakan in East Pakistan. Jinnah refused, saying he did not want to interfere in Burma’s affairs.But the unfazed Rohingyas founded the Mujahid Party in 1948 to carry on a jihad against the Rakhines in northern Arakan with the ultimate aim of creating a Muslim country of Arakan. They carried out many strikes against the Rakhines and their Buddhist shrines and monasteries, even torturing and killing Buddhist monks. It was only after the 1962 coup in Burma by General Ne Win that the military started cracking down on Rohingya terrorists who had the complete support of all the Rohingyas in Arakan. This triggered a moderate exodus of Rohingyas, who still form about 40 per cent of the population of Rakhine province, to East Pakistan. Many Rohingyas also migrated to West Pakistan."
Rohingya militants massacred Hindus in Myanmar, says Amnesty - "The Rohingya military group Arsa carried out deadly massacres and abductions of the Hindu community in Myanmar’s Rakhine state last year, a new report by Amnesty International has revealed... Only those who agreed to convert to Islam were spared... Arsa – the Arakan Rohingya Salvation army – are a group of trained fighters estimated to be in their hundreds. It was formed in around 2012 in reaction to long-term systematic discrimination against the Rohingya community in Rakhine, but only came to prominence in October 2016 after a series of attacks on Myanmar’s security forces.The Amnesty report, which has been verified through hundreds of witness accounts, is likely to be controversial because it backs up the assertion by Myanmar’s military and government that their campaign of violence carried out in Rakhine last year was in response to Arsa’s actions... The accounts by witnesses also reveal the level of fear that victims had about telling the truth, and that eight Hindu women who fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh were pressured by Arsa to make videos claiming the Myanmar military carried out the violence against them."
Just as ISIS enslaved Yazidi women because of US foreign policy, the Rohingya attacked Hindus because of oppression from Buddhist Burmese
Islamists Responsible for Rohingya Refugee Crisis - "Priscilla Clapp, who served as U.S. chief of mission in Burma from 1999 to 2002, strongly disputes the current "narrative" about Kyi and the response of her government to the terrorist attacks in Rakhine last October and August. In a September 7 interview with France 24 (a partial transcript of which was provided by PJ Media), Clapp argued that the attacks were "perpetrated by people in the Rohingya diaspora living in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia coming in through Bangladesh"... Clapp's assertions are backed up by an extensive analysis in 2005, written by Dr. Aye Chan, Professor of Southeast Asian History at Kanda International University in Japan, and discussed recently in a piece by author Andrew Bostom. According to Bostom, Chan's article, "The Development of a Muslim Enclave in Arakan (Rakhine) State of Burma (Myanmar)," on the origins of the Bengali Muslim jihad in Western Myanmar in the late 19th century through the World War II era, illustrates that it is "rooted in Islam's same timeless institution of expansionist jihad which eliminated Buddhist civilization in northern India."Bostom also referred to an open letter, penned by Chan in 2014 to then-UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, demonstrating the transparent if "strenuous efforts" of Bengali Muslim migrants to Northwestern Myanmar "to take away Rakhine's [Arakan's] own [Buddhist] ethnic identity from the Rakhine people.""
Indian government says Rohingya Muslims are security threat - "India’s government said Monday that it has evidence there are extremists who pose a threat to the country’s security among the Rohingya Muslims who have left Myanmar and settled in many Indian cities. India’s Supreme Court was hearing a petition filed on behalf of two Rohingya refugees, challenging a government decision to deport the ethnic group from India...
'the August attack by the Rohingyas was preceded by a similar attack, last October, by the Rohingyas on the Burmese (Buddhist) police, and again, it was not their initial attack, but almost exclusively the retaliation by the Buddhist army, that was the focus of reports in the foreign press last fall. Reports of Rohingya villages being burnt down are reported uncritically... Professor Andrew Selth of Griffith University in Australia... has stated categorically that the name “Rohingya” was taken by “Bengali Muslims who live in Arakan State…most Rohingyas arrived with the British colonialists in the 19th and 20th centuries.” It is true that a handful of Bengali Muslims drifted down to Burma over the centuries, but Professor Selth makes the important point — unknown to Western reporters — that the vast majority of Rohingyas are recent arrivals, their great migration made possible by the fact that Burma was administratively part of British India until 1937, which meant there was no formal border to cross.'"
The Truth About Myanmar’s Rohingya Issue | The Diplomat - "Rakhine history expert Jacques P. Leider may have put it best in his analysis Rohingya: The Name, The Movement, The Quest for Identity. “By narrowing the debate on the Rohingyas to the legal and humanitarian aspects, editorialists around the world have taken an easy approach towards a complicated issue… where issues like ethnicity, history, and cultural identity are key ingredients of legitimacy... In even a cursory survey of Rohingya history, it is clear that the Rohingya are not an ethnic, but rather a political construction... The group referred to as “Rohingya” by contemporary Rohingya scholars (and most of the international community) today actually display huge diversity of ethnic origins and social backgrounds, and, as Leider argues, the existence of a “single identity” is difficult to pinpoint.”"
Ohio Attacker Was Wrong, Rohingyas Too Have A Bloody History To Answer For - "This demographic shift caused by the unabated migration of Bengali Muslims from Chittagong to Arakan triggered racial tensions between the indigenous Rakhines and the settlers. Clashes started erupting between the two groups, forcing the British to set up a special investigation commission led by one James Ester and Tin Tut (who became independent Burma’s first foreign minister). Though the commission recommended a halt to further migration and sealing the borders of Arakan with Bengal, these remained only on paper since the British retreated from Arakan at the outbreak of World War II.And then started another bloody chapter in relations between the Muslim Rohingyas and Buddhist Rakhines. The absence of the British sparked violent clashes between the two groups. The British had given huge caches of arms to the Rohingyas in northern Arakan to stave off the invading Japanese and act as a buffer to British India, as also to take on the Rakhines who had started supporting the Japanese. In March 1942, Rohingyas killed 20,000 Rakhines in northern Arakan, something that the Somali-origin Artan (the Ohio attacker) who spent seven years in Pakistan before migrating to the US in 2014 would have been blissfully unaware of. Once the Japanese overran large stretches of Burma, they started committing atrocities not only on the Rohingyas, but also the indigenous Burmese (including the Rakhines), Anglo-Burmese, British and the Indian migrants settled in Burma. They all fled to India; about 22,000 Rohingyas took shelter in Bengal. The British once again armed the Rohingyas and organised them under a ‘Volunteer Force’ to harass the Japanese. But the Rohingyas once again turned on the Rakhines, killing them and destroying their houses, Buddhist monasteries and pagodas, raping their women and forcibly converting them. Artan would also have been ignorant of this. The Rakhines started harbouring a deep-seated distrust and animosity towards the Rohingyas. This became more deep-seated when the Rohingyas started demanding integration of Arakan with East Pakistan during the mid-1940s when two-nation demand gained ground. Just before Burma gained independence in January 1948, the Rohingyas appealed to Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah to ask the British to incorporate Arakan in East Pakistan. Jinnah refused, saying he did not want to interfere in Burma’s affairs.But the unfazed Rohingyas founded the Mujahid Party in 1948 to carry on a jihad against the Rakhines in northern Arakan with the ultimate aim of creating a Muslim country of Arakan. They carried out many strikes against the Rakhines and their Buddhist shrines and monasteries, even torturing and killing Buddhist monks. It was only after the 1962 coup in Burma by General Ne Win that the military started cracking down on Rohingya terrorists who had the complete support of all the Rohingyas in Arakan. This triggered a moderate exodus of Rohingyas, who still form about 40 per cent of the population of Rakhine province, to East Pakistan. Many Rohingyas also migrated to West Pakistan."
Post ID: 1907563833930958987
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