"It is not enough for the knight of romance that you agree that his lady is a very nice girl—if you do not admit that she is the best that God ever made or will make, you must fight. There is in all men a demand for the superlative, so much so that the poor devil who has no other way of reaching it attains it by getting drunk. It seems to me that this demand is at the bottom of the philosopher’s effort to prove that truth is absolute and of the jurist’s search for criteria of universal validity which he collects under the head of natural law...
The jurists who believe in natural law seem to me to be in that naïve state of mind that accepts what has been familiar and accepted by all men everywhere. No doubt it is true that, so far as we can see ahead, some arrangements and the rudiments of familiar institutions seem to be necessary elements in any society that may spring from our own and that would seem to us to be civilized—some form of permanent association between the sexes—some residue of property individually owned—some mode of binding oneself to specified future conduct—at the bottom of all, some protection for the person. But without speculating whether a group is imaginable in which all but the last of these might disappear and the last be subject to qualifications that most of us would abhor, the question remains as to the Ought of natural law.
It is true that beliefs and wishes have a transcendental basis in the sense that their foundation is arbitrary. You cannot help entertaining and feeling them, and there is an end of it. As an arbitrary fact people wish to live, and we say with various degrees of certainty that they can do so only on certain conditions. To do it they must eat and drink. That necessity is absolute. It is a necessity of less degree but practically general that they should live in society. If they live in society, so far as we can see, there are further conditions. Reason working on experience does tell us, no doubt, that if our wish to live continues, we can do it only on those terms. But that seems to me the whole of the matter. I see no a priori duty to live with others and in that way, but simply a statement of what I must do if I wish to remain alive. If I do live with others they tell me that I must do and abstain from doing various things or they will put the screws on to me. I believe that they will, and being of the same mind as to their conduct I not only accept the rules but come in time to accept them with sympathy and emotional affirmation and begin to talk about duties and rights. But for legal purposes a right is only the hypostasis of a prophecy—the imagination of a substance supporting the fact that the public force will be brought to bear upon those who do things said to contravene it—just as we talk of the force of gravitation accounting for the conduct of bodies in space. One phrase adds no more than the other to what we know without it. No doubt behind these legal rights is the fighting will of the subject to maintain them, and the spread of his emotions to the general rules by which they are maintained; but that does not seem to me the same thing as the supposed a priori discernment of a duty or the assertion of a preexisting right. A dog will fight for his bone.
The most fundamental of the supposed preexisting rights—the right to life—is sacrificed without a scruple not only in war, but whenever the interest of society, that is, of the predominant power in the community, is thought to demand it."
--- Natural Law / Oliver Wendell Holmes
L'origine de Bert
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Links - 23rd July 2019 (1)
Man Who Threatened to Kill 2 Senators Who Supported Kavanaugh Gets 18 Months in Prison - The New York Times - "The man, Ronald DeRisi, 75, of Smithtown, N.Y., left multiple expletive-laden voice mail messages at the offices of the senators and threatened to assault and murder them. He was sentenced in Central Islip, N.Y., by Judge Joseph F. Bianco."
"Only the right causes violence"
China's divorce rule dubbed 'Law that makes men laugh and women cry' - "According to the new law, residential property is no longer to be regarded as jointly owned and divided equally in the event of a divorce.Instead, whoever paid for the apartment or house is the legal owner and gets to keep it in its entirety... My husband's parents bought it when we married. It's in my husband's name so he and his parents-in-law are saying that under the new law I am not entitled to half of it," said Mrs Zhang."My lawyer thinks I can get maybe 200,000 RMB (£20,000) based on money I paid towards the mortgage. That's ridiculous, because I think the effort I put into the marriage is priceless."A major reason why the new law is regarded as unjust by most women is that in China men, or their parents, traditionally buy the family home. Indeed, many women will refuse to marry until that happens.It is such a custom that tying the knot with a man who doesn't own a property is known as a 'naked wedding'. But as house prices have accelerated, there is now a widespread perception that some women have been marrying solely because they know it will guarantee them the right to half the home's value if they divorce"
Apparently gender equality means women expecting men to have a house before they'll marry them and yet being entitled to half of it if they divorce
China Guide: Driving in China, Traffic regulations, accidents: Understanding how traffic in China works will - "The Road Traffic Safety Law of the People's Republic of China applies to all vehicles in China except military and often diplomatic vehicles, which are allowed to not follow any rules... Be aware that, in China, it is not uncommon to move into the opposing traffic lane, when possible, to take a left turn. As a consequence, vehicles enter the road to the left on its left hand side before going to the right. This practice can cause huge inconvenience to other road users.When nearing a junction, you should look out for vehicles that may be moving on the wrong side of the road or that might appear from random directions.Driving in the center of the road is not unusual. If a vehicle is approaching on the wrong side of the road you should make way as far as possible, even if that requires stopping and pulling over all the way to the right hand edge of a cycle lane.Roundabouts are vaguely explained in Chinese driving test preparation. At roundabouts in China only the vehicle that gets there first has priority, or if it is bigger, moves faster or has a specific purpose that gives it priority... Usually drivers don’t pay much attention to pedestrian crossings and people are often standing on a crossing, waiting for all the vehicles to pass.Even with the green light on, a pedestrian should not completely rely on it, since traffic lights have been programmed to allow vehicles to cross when the pedestrian green light is on. So, before crossing the street you should look to your left and right, and make sure it is safe to cross."
China Traffic with Traffic Rules, How to Drive in China - "People’s Republic of China Road Traffic Safety Law has a bias towards reducing collisions and being polite, which actually states that law-abiding citizens should give way politely to those breaking the law and driving impolitely... From experience, an obvious reason why vehicles do not always drive on the right hand side of the road, regardless of road markings, is that the middle of the road is the safest place to be. There are often pedestrians, and parked or slow-moving vehicles on the right hand side of the road, and vehicles often emerge from side roads without a safe gap in the traffic to do so. Therefore the incidence of oncoming vehicles is often less than the incidence of obstacles on the right of the road, hence the rule. It is easier to see obstacles in front and avoid them from a position in the center of the road... At junctions with traffic lights it would be hoped that vehicles would stop for the red light and go only on the green light. However this is not the case, with larger vehicles still streaming across the junction seconds after the light has turned red, and smaller vehicles and pedestrians ignoring the lights altogether and trying to get across the junction any way they can. Go on the green light, but be careful. The standard rules of priority don’t seem to apply in China, e.g. major road traffic has priority over minor road traffic, vehicles entering traffic in a lane yield priority to vehicles already in that lane, vehicles entering a roundabout yield to vehicles on the roundabout, pedestrians have priority over vehicles, especially on pedestrian crossings, etc. Instead the vehicle that is driven most aggressively or that is larger is given priority, or else there is a road traffic accident. Safety, or accident avoidance by the more responsible party, is number one in China. In fact “number one” (the first one in the gap or one’s self) is number one in China."
“We Singapore or Chinapore?” – Singaporean hits out after unsavoury experience with Mustafa staff unable to speak English - "A Singaporean vented his frustrations online after a sour experience with Mustafa Centre staff who were unable to assist him because they do not understand English.Revealing that he was exasperated by staff from China who could not answer his question about where a particular product is located, Facebook user Raguvaran Naidu recounted his experience on social media... Asserting that he is not racist or against Chinese nationals, Raguvaran urged the Singapore Government to “hire people who can speak English at the very least!” He added: “From ordering food at a coffee shop to this, it’s getting worse by the day! We Singapore or Chinapore? What’s our first language?! "
If you were in the US and complained about Spanish speaking staff being unable to speak English... good luck to you
“Speak American” – Multilingualism and the English-Only Movement | Change From Within - "Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act requires that public entities receiving federal funds must offer vital documents in every language their clients speak. That’s right. The U.S. officially endorses your right to have a voter’s ballot in any language you like, and it is the responsibility of the state or federal agency to provide such a document... “They need to learn to speak English” is a common statement when “those illegals” come up at family gatherings, and the anti-immigrant, anti-Spanish-speaking sentiment is undoubtedly tied to the deep-seated racism against Latinos that I, unfortunately, have to struggle to uproot from my subconscious.Understanding the problematic nature of this sentiment means understanding the history of white, Anglo supremacy in this country. To say that people must speak English is not an innocent statement rooted in a desire to have a functioning society as is often asserted by those who argue for English-Only legislation. Demanding, mandating, and forcing those who don’t speak English to do so has been a tool of cultural genocide in the United States for a very long time... the English-Only movement, as has often been the case in our history, is inextricably tied to racism against those who do not speak English"
I can already see the motte and bailey tactic used here - conflating monolingualism with expecting everyone to speak English (indeed OP expressly uses this in the comments)
Comments: "You refer only to white people as English speaking. Black people speak English as well. You sound like you have issues with white people. In fact, I know more white people who have taken the time to attempt to learn spanish than I do black people."
"while you may come across like the nicer guy, you are actually holding these people back and keeping them down."
Dodgeball isn’t just problematic, it’s an unethical tool of ‘oppression’: researchers - "Thousands of academics are gathering in Vancouver for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences from June 1-7. They will present papers on everything from child marriage in Canada to why dodgeball is problematic. In its Oh, The Humanities! series, the National Post showcases some of the most interesting research... a trio of education theorists will argue that dodgeball is not only problematic, in the modern sense of displaying hierarchies of privilege based on athletic skill, but that it is outright “miseducative.”... Dodgeball is a tool of “oppression.”... Dodgeball is “miseducative” because it “reinforces the five faces of oppression,” as defined by the late Iris Marion Young, a social and political theorist at the University of Chicago. As Butler’s abstract describes it, those “faces” are “marginalization, powerlessness, and helplessness of those perceived as weaker individuals through the exercise of violence and dominance by those who are considered more powerful.” Young’s list of these fundamental types of oppression also includes exploitation and cultural domination... The moral problem with dodgeball, he said, is that it encourages students to aggressively single others out for dominance, and to enjoy that exclusion and dominance as a victory."
Decriminalizing prostitution would negatively impact Indigenous women: expert - "An academic testifying about Canada's prostitution laws says decriminalization would disproportionately affect Indigenous women and girls.The testimony was part of a court hearing in London, Ont. looking into the constitutionality of the country's prostitution laws, also referred to as the Nordic Model or Bill C-36. Indigenous women are now over represented in the sex industry but there's no evidence that prostitution existed prior to colonization, said Cherry Smiley, an academic who studies the impact of prostitution on the lives on Indigenous women and girls. "The underlying ideology of sex buyers is that they can buy a woman and engage in sex on his terms," Smiley said... Smiley testified that there's a hierarchy within the sex trade, and Indigenous women are near the bottom. They are seen as less desirable and cannot charge as much for the same sexual acts as white women, Smiley said.She said there are stereotypes about Indigenous women as hyper-sexed, and decriminalizing prostitution and seeing it as "work" would entrench those stereotypes because women would be choosing to work in the sex industry.Prostitution is built on a foundation of inequality, so decriminalization would justify that inequality, she testified... Smiley said she rejects the idea that decriminalization of prostitution, or allowing women to work in escort agencies, for example, is a form of harm reduction, because in her view the very act of prostitution is so harmful that the harm cannot be reduced.Two defence witnesses testified earlier that the laws push the sex trade further underground and put sex workers at greater risk of harm."
When you beg the question, you can get any result you want
Trump’s kids meeting the Queen during UK visit will cost millions - "US president Donald Trump’s four adult children and their spouses have joined him on his state visit to the United Kingdom this week. And US taxpayers are picking up the hefty bills for their hotels, transportation, and security."
Naturally, people were bashing him for this
Barack Obama's first visit to Brussels to cost Belgium more than €10m - "As Belgium's capital and host to the EU and Nato, Brussels is used to deploying heavy security when big names pop by. But US President Barack Obama's visit on Tuesday will strain the city like never before with €10m ($10.4m, £8.4m) of Belgian money being spent to cover his 24 hours in the country.The president will arrive on Tuesday night with a 900-strong entourage, including 45 vehicles and three cargo planes"
Naturally, if you criticised this you were racist
Barack Obama had the best interpreter during his Cuba trip – his daughter Malia - "Barack arrived in Cuba with his wife Michelle and two daughters Malia and Sasha... The President has had a busy itinerary during the trip, which has included a meeting with leader Raul Castro"
"Only the right causes violence"
China's divorce rule dubbed 'Law that makes men laugh and women cry' - "According to the new law, residential property is no longer to be regarded as jointly owned and divided equally in the event of a divorce.Instead, whoever paid for the apartment or house is the legal owner and gets to keep it in its entirety... My husband's parents bought it when we married. It's in my husband's name so he and his parents-in-law are saying that under the new law I am not entitled to half of it," said Mrs Zhang."My lawyer thinks I can get maybe 200,000 RMB (£20,000) based on money I paid towards the mortgage. That's ridiculous, because I think the effort I put into the marriage is priceless."A major reason why the new law is regarded as unjust by most women is that in China men, or their parents, traditionally buy the family home. Indeed, many women will refuse to marry until that happens.It is such a custom that tying the knot with a man who doesn't own a property is known as a 'naked wedding'. But as house prices have accelerated, there is now a widespread perception that some women have been marrying solely because they know it will guarantee them the right to half the home's value if they divorce"
Apparently gender equality means women expecting men to have a house before they'll marry them and yet being entitled to half of it if they divorce
China Guide: Driving in China, Traffic regulations, accidents: Understanding how traffic in China works will - "The Road Traffic Safety Law of the People's Republic of China applies to all vehicles in China except military and often diplomatic vehicles, which are allowed to not follow any rules... Be aware that, in China, it is not uncommon to move into the opposing traffic lane, when possible, to take a left turn. As a consequence, vehicles enter the road to the left on its left hand side before going to the right. This practice can cause huge inconvenience to other road users.When nearing a junction, you should look out for vehicles that may be moving on the wrong side of the road or that might appear from random directions.Driving in the center of the road is not unusual. If a vehicle is approaching on the wrong side of the road you should make way as far as possible, even if that requires stopping and pulling over all the way to the right hand edge of a cycle lane.Roundabouts are vaguely explained in Chinese driving test preparation. At roundabouts in China only the vehicle that gets there first has priority, or if it is bigger, moves faster or has a specific purpose that gives it priority... Usually drivers don’t pay much attention to pedestrian crossings and people are often standing on a crossing, waiting for all the vehicles to pass.Even with the green light on, a pedestrian should not completely rely on it, since traffic lights have been programmed to allow vehicles to cross when the pedestrian green light is on. So, before crossing the street you should look to your left and right, and make sure it is safe to cross."
China Traffic with Traffic Rules, How to Drive in China - "People’s Republic of China Road Traffic Safety Law has a bias towards reducing collisions and being polite, which actually states that law-abiding citizens should give way politely to those breaking the law and driving impolitely... From experience, an obvious reason why vehicles do not always drive on the right hand side of the road, regardless of road markings, is that the middle of the road is the safest place to be. There are often pedestrians, and parked or slow-moving vehicles on the right hand side of the road, and vehicles often emerge from side roads without a safe gap in the traffic to do so. Therefore the incidence of oncoming vehicles is often less than the incidence of obstacles on the right of the road, hence the rule. It is easier to see obstacles in front and avoid them from a position in the center of the road... At junctions with traffic lights it would be hoped that vehicles would stop for the red light and go only on the green light. However this is not the case, with larger vehicles still streaming across the junction seconds after the light has turned red, and smaller vehicles and pedestrians ignoring the lights altogether and trying to get across the junction any way they can. Go on the green light, but be careful. The standard rules of priority don’t seem to apply in China, e.g. major road traffic has priority over minor road traffic, vehicles entering traffic in a lane yield priority to vehicles already in that lane, vehicles entering a roundabout yield to vehicles on the roundabout, pedestrians have priority over vehicles, especially on pedestrian crossings, etc. Instead the vehicle that is driven most aggressively or that is larger is given priority, or else there is a road traffic accident. Safety, or accident avoidance by the more responsible party, is number one in China. In fact “number one” (the first one in the gap or one’s self) is number one in China."
“We Singapore or Chinapore?” – Singaporean hits out after unsavoury experience with Mustafa staff unable to speak English - "A Singaporean vented his frustrations online after a sour experience with Mustafa Centre staff who were unable to assist him because they do not understand English.Revealing that he was exasperated by staff from China who could not answer his question about where a particular product is located, Facebook user Raguvaran Naidu recounted his experience on social media... Asserting that he is not racist or against Chinese nationals, Raguvaran urged the Singapore Government to “hire people who can speak English at the very least!” He added: “From ordering food at a coffee shop to this, it’s getting worse by the day! We Singapore or Chinapore? What’s our first language?! "
If you were in the US and complained about Spanish speaking staff being unable to speak English... good luck to you
“Speak American” – Multilingualism and the English-Only Movement | Change From Within - "Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act requires that public entities receiving federal funds must offer vital documents in every language their clients speak. That’s right. The U.S. officially endorses your right to have a voter’s ballot in any language you like, and it is the responsibility of the state or federal agency to provide such a document... “They need to learn to speak English” is a common statement when “those illegals” come up at family gatherings, and the anti-immigrant, anti-Spanish-speaking sentiment is undoubtedly tied to the deep-seated racism against Latinos that I, unfortunately, have to struggle to uproot from my subconscious.Understanding the problematic nature of this sentiment means understanding the history of white, Anglo supremacy in this country. To say that people must speak English is not an innocent statement rooted in a desire to have a functioning society as is often asserted by those who argue for English-Only legislation. Demanding, mandating, and forcing those who don’t speak English to do so has been a tool of cultural genocide in the United States for a very long time... the English-Only movement, as has often been the case in our history, is inextricably tied to racism against those who do not speak English"
I can already see the motte and bailey tactic used here - conflating monolingualism with expecting everyone to speak English (indeed OP expressly uses this in the comments)
Comments: "You refer only to white people as English speaking. Black people speak English as well. You sound like you have issues with white people. In fact, I know more white people who have taken the time to attempt to learn spanish than I do black people."
"while you may come across like the nicer guy, you are actually holding these people back and keeping them down."
Dodgeball isn’t just problematic, it’s an unethical tool of ‘oppression’: researchers - "Thousands of academics are gathering in Vancouver for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences from June 1-7. They will present papers on everything from child marriage in Canada to why dodgeball is problematic. In its Oh, The Humanities! series, the National Post showcases some of the most interesting research... a trio of education theorists will argue that dodgeball is not only problematic, in the modern sense of displaying hierarchies of privilege based on athletic skill, but that it is outright “miseducative.”... Dodgeball is a tool of “oppression.”... Dodgeball is “miseducative” because it “reinforces the five faces of oppression,” as defined by the late Iris Marion Young, a social and political theorist at the University of Chicago. As Butler’s abstract describes it, those “faces” are “marginalization, powerlessness, and helplessness of those perceived as weaker individuals through the exercise of violence and dominance by those who are considered more powerful.” Young’s list of these fundamental types of oppression also includes exploitation and cultural domination... The moral problem with dodgeball, he said, is that it encourages students to aggressively single others out for dominance, and to enjoy that exclusion and dominance as a victory."
Decriminalizing prostitution would negatively impact Indigenous women: expert - "An academic testifying about Canada's prostitution laws says decriminalization would disproportionately affect Indigenous women and girls.The testimony was part of a court hearing in London, Ont. looking into the constitutionality of the country's prostitution laws, also referred to as the Nordic Model or Bill C-36. Indigenous women are now over represented in the sex industry but there's no evidence that prostitution existed prior to colonization, said Cherry Smiley, an academic who studies the impact of prostitution on the lives on Indigenous women and girls. "The underlying ideology of sex buyers is that they can buy a woman and engage in sex on his terms," Smiley said... Smiley testified that there's a hierarchy within the sex trade, and Indigenous women are near the bottom. They are seen as less desirable and cannot charge as much for the same sexual acts as white women, Smiley said.She said there are stereotypes about Indigenous women as hyper-sexed, and decriminalizing prostitution and seeing it as "work" would entrench those stereotypes because women would be choosing to work in the sex industry.Prostitution is built on a foundation of inequality, so decriminalization would justify that inequality, she testified... Smiley said she rejects the idea that decriminalization of prostitution, or allowing women to work in escort agencies, for example, is a form of harm reduction, because in her view the very act of prostitution is so harmful that the harm cannot be reduced.Two defence witnesses testified earlier that the laws push the sex trade further underground and put sex workers at greater risk of harm."
When you beg the question, you can get any result you want
Trump’s kids meeting the Queen during UK visit will cost millions - "US president Donald Trump’s four adult children and their spouses have joined him on his state visit to the United Kingdom this week. And US taxpayers are picking up the hefty bills for their hotels, transportation, and security."
Naturally, people were bashing him for this
Barack Obama's first visit to Brussels to cost Belgium more than €10m - "As Belgium's capital and host to the EU and Nato, Brussels is used to deploying heavy security when big names pop by. But US President Barack Obama's visit on Tuesday will strain the city like never before with €10m ($10.4m, £8.4m) of Belgian money being spent to cover his 24 hours in the country.The president will arrive on Tuesday night with a 900-strong entourage, including 45 vehicles and three cargo planes"
Naturally, if you criticised this you were racist
Barack Obama had the best interpreter during his Cuba trip – his daughter Malia - "Barack arrived in Cuba with his wife Michelle and two daughters Malia and Sasha... The President has had a busy itinerary during the trip, which has included a meeting with leader Raul Castro"
Post ID: 2324122989811144441
Monday, July 22, 2019
Links - 22nd July 2019
Fact Check: International Voter ID Laws - Civitas Institute - "Collins asserted that the United States makes voting more difficult than its peer countries. “We don’t seem to make voting easy for people in this country; other Western democracies do,” he stated, citing weekend election days and vote-by-mail systems. He goes on to ask, “Why do we seem to make things difficult for voters?”Made within the context of the voter ID discussion, those comments suggest that voter ID requirements are yet another way that the United States differs from its peer countries in adding burdens to its electorate.However, many countries hailed as more voter-friendly than the United States have voter ID laws in place.Norway mandates that voters present a photo ID, including a “passport, driving license, or bank card that includes a photo,” to vote.Voters in Northern Ireland must present an “acceptable photo identification” to cast an in-person ballot.Germany requires that voters bring a state-issued voter identification card, but they can substitute another form of ID for that card if they fail to deliver it at the polls.Ballots in Switzerland are issued by mail, and voters who return their ballots in person are required to show an ID and a state-issued polling card to do so.France requires a voter ID.Israel requires a voter ID.Mexico requires a voter ID.Iceland requires a voter ID."
Norway, Northern Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, France, Israel, Mexico and Iceland - classic examples of fascist states!
Health and Safety | Tourism Malaysia - "Generally, the level of food hygiene throughout the country is high. However, make sure your food and drinking water are safe. Food from street vendors should be treated with care. Drink only bottled or boiled water, or carbonated (bubbly) drinks in cans or bottles. If possible, avoid tap water, fountain drinks, and ice cubes"
This is the official Malaysia tourism website
No more bottled water, plastic-wrapped food at gov't events - "The government will no longer provide drinking water in plastic bottles or food wrapped in plastic at its events, in a bid to cut down single-use disposable plastics."
Great way to increase food waste and carbon emissions and poison your guests
E-waste a bigger problem than plastic waste, says Masagos - "While there is plenty of focus on plastic waste, the more pressing issue facing Singapore is electronic waste, Environment and Water Resources Minister Masagos Zulkifli said yesterday."E-waste is very toxic. People underestimate the toxicity of the e-waste that we dispose of and for the longest time we weren't processing it," he said.Plastics, on the other hand, were being collected properly and then incinerated, the minister said."And we scrub all the toxic dioxins when we incinerate."... Mr Masagos also recalled that plastic bags solved a problem the Republic faced in the 1970s."Back when we didn't bag our trash, we just threw food into our rubbish chutes and caused pests to come, and at the same time, it would corrode the linings of chutes, and we had to repair them so often," he said."This problem got mitigated when we started bagging our trash.""
Now we need a video of a dolphin being poisoned by an iPhone (dolphins are even more charismatic than turtles). Then eco warriors will call for smartphones to be banned like straws!
Bastiat would observe that plastic bags are a lot more visible than pests and chute linings, so people will obsess about them and ignore the invisible
Pictured: Man who went to gardaí to complain over quality of his drugs - "A cannabis user brought a bag of the drug to a Garda station to complain it was "not of good quality".Arthur Liwembe (34) was immediately arrested when he went to the station of his own accord and presented the cannabis to an officer to say he was not happy with it.He has been spared six months in jail and instead ordered to carry out 200 hours of community service.However, Dublin District Court heard he has separately been given a deportation order.Liwembe, an asylum seeker and former student nurse, pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of cannabis at Kilmainham Garda station"
Should HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ have had more actors of color? Twitter suggestion met with ridicule - "HBO’s hit new series based on the Chernobyl tragedy has divided opinion online, but the oddest reaction yet has come from a budding UK actor wondering why the show’s creators had not chosen more people of color for the cast.While the docudrama has come under criticism for various historical inaccuracies, the lack of racial diversity among the actors has not been brought up — until now, that is — for the simple reason that 1980s Ukraine was not exactly a thriving hub of modern-day multiculturalism. That should have been no reason to leave black and brown actors out though, according to actress Karla Marie Sweet, who tweeted that there are “so many great actors of colour” in the UK who “would’ve been amazing” in the series. Sweet felt “disappointed” to see “yet another hit show with a massive cast” that “makes it looks like PoC don’t exist.” She later set her account to private after the inevitable backlash that followed. Just to clear up any confusion, the show “makes it look” like there were no people of color to reflect the reality of the time and place — and the producers seem to have been at least trying to create an authentic vibe.Needless to say, Sweet’s tweet didn’t exactly go down well on Twitter, where she was promptly told to “learn history.”"
So much for the media having a duty to represent reality (See also, casting of minority actors to play historically white characters or fictionally white characters, when the reverse is condemned)
An electric scooter scourge is stalking Paris | Financial Times - "The first problem is safety. The tiny wheels make the scooters hard to use on the many cobbled streets of Paris. Few users wear helmets or obey the rules of the road, and anecdotal evidence suggests many riders and pedestrians have been injured. Then there is the parking, or rather the lack of it. Pedestrians in Paris must navigate around scooters thrown carelessly across the pavement or abandoned in doorways, because most rental companies do not have docking stations. “It’s incredibly ugly,” complains Gaspard Gantzer, who is campaigning to be elected as the city’s next mayor in 2020. “And Paris is the world’s most beautiful city.” Inevitably, French cities are hastily designating parking areas and starting to fine users and rental companies that fail to comply... Even the environmental, commercial and social benefits of the electric trottinettes are questionable. Every morning and evening, conventionally powered vans drive all over Paris to pick up the stray scooters and take them away for charging. The recharging is often done by freelance “juicers” who plug them in at home to earn some pocket money... A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that the average rental
e-scooter had a lifespan of just three months, whereas it took almost four months for a rental company to break even on its investment in the product. In Paris, the average lifespan is probably a lot less, and Mr Gantzer reckons some last less than a month"
What Is CanLit? - The New York Times - "“CanLit” is a contraction for Canadian Literature, and I’m often asked by writers from other lands, “Doug, what, exactly, is CanLit?” Basically, but not always, CanLit is when the Canadian government pays you money to write about life in small towns and/or the immigration experience. If the book is written in French, urban life is permitted, but only from a nonbourgeois viewpoint."
No, Pot Legalization Probably Didn’t Increase Homicide Rates - "Despite Berenson’s claim of “sharp increases in murders and aggravated assaults since 2014” in Oregon, for example, the FBI reported that the murder rate there went up a grand total of 1.0 percent from 2015 to 2016, as compared to a nationwide uptick of 7.9 percent, and then dropped by 11.6 percent between 2016 and 2017, a significantly steeper drop than in the rest of the country. If one insists on positing a tight causal relationship between pot laws and murder rates, one could just as easily argue that Oregon’s homicide trajectory has been softened by pot legalization in these years, at least relative to national trends, saving a number of Oregonians’ lives. And of course, such a focus on state laws and crime rates ignores the larger picture: “Cannabis consumption, and especially heavy cannabis consumption, has been on the rise since 1992,” said Kleiman in his email. “Over that period, national homicide rates have fallen more than 50%.”... These are important questions. But the way to get people to take them seriously is, well, to take them seriously — not to revert to the over-the-top claims of the past. Berenson laments the fact that anyone who points out that marijuana legalization could have certain net-negative effects “may be mocked as a modern-day believer in ‘Reefer Madness,’ the notorious 1936 movie that portrays young people descending into insanity and violence after smoking marijuana.” But if you don’t want to be lumped in with Reefer Madness, don’t make unjustified claims about reefer!"
Melania Trump: A Quintessential Female Icon - "You couldn’t find a better female icon than First Lady Melania Trump: an immigrant who came to America to flee communism and in pursuit of the American dream. She is beautiful, classy, educated, and fluent in six languages.So why do feminists detest her?... Maybe to be deemed worthy of empowerment you have to march down city streets half naked with “slut” written across your chest, or have a “female penis” – at least those are the only women feminism seems to be interested in putting on a pedestal... Maybe the left hates her because she’s a successful legal immigrant... The left’s double standard over women and immigrants couldn’t be more appalling.They want to let anyone waltz over the U.S. southern border, and not require them to learn the language or assimilate in any form. In contrast, the First Lady is a multilingual legal immigrant and instead of applauding her intellect and skill the left mocks her for speaking accented english... In addition to disliking the gracious First Lady on the premise of her legal immigration, the left also criticizes her fashion choices. Regardless of how objectively well-dressed and poised the First Lady is, the left never fails to see a flaw... First Ladies Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton were plastered all over magazine covers... If her last name was that of a Democrat, magazines would be scrambling to do feature pieces on her before their competitors could, no doubt hailing her grace and beauty."
Labour unveil taxes on homeowners who have a garden and forces of sale of land on the cheap - "Labour was accused of pursuing the policies of Venezuela last night as it unveiled plans for a tax raid on middle-class homeowners and powers to force landlords to sell on the cheap. A report, called Land for the Many, said council tax should be replaced with a new 'progressive' levy targeting larger homes with gardens... it called for Britons to be forced to attend town hall planning meetings in the same way they have to go on jury service...
under current arrangements, local authorities or infrastructure companies such as HS2, which is building the high speed rail link between London and Birmingham and on to Manchester, are required to compensate land and home owners affected by the development at market values. Corbyn and his team, headed by shadow chancellor John McDonnell, want to change that. They would buy land at its current (and always lower) 'land use value' rather than at a market price which recognises the uplift that development can bring. This could trigger a financial crisis... Some of these development holdings will have been bought or financed on credit from the banks. If land values plummet, banks will be left with a black hole on their books."
EXCLUSIVE: Queens man unaware of $2 bail, spends nearly 5 months at Rikers Island - "He could have been free for the cost of a cup of coffee.A Queens man spent nearly five months at Rikers Island — from November 2014 to April 2015 — without knowing his bail was just $2, according to records and his lawyers.Aitabdel Salem, 41, who was acquitted of bail jumping at a Manhattan Supreme Court trial last week, had been jailed on $25,000 bail for attacking an NYPD cop who was arresting him for stealing a coat at a Zara store in the Flatiron District on Nov. 21, 2014, court papers show.Although Salem didn't know it for more than four months, he caught a lucky break when prosecutors could not get an indictment. He was ordered released on Nov. 28, 2014 on the police assault arrest.But he still had dollar bails set on each of two minor offenses — that included tampering and mischief charges — so he could not have been freed without first paying the tiny amount."
Norway, Northern Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, France, Israel, Mexico and Iceland - classic examples of fascist states!
Health and Safety | Tourism Malaysia - "Generally, the level of food hygiene throughout the country is high. However, make sure your food and drinking water are safe. Food from street vendors should be treated with care. Drink only bottled or boiled water, or carbonated (bubbly) drinks in cans or bottles. If possible, avoid tap water, fountain drinks, and ice cubes"
This is the official Malaysia tourism website
No more bottled water, plastic-wrapped food at gov't events - "The government will no longer provide drinking water in plastic bottles or food wrapped in plastic at its events, in a bid to cut down single-use disposable plastics."
Great way to increase food waste and carbon emissions and poison your guests
E-waste a bigger problem than plastic waste, says Masagos - "While there is plenty of focus on plastic waste, the more pressing issue facing Singapore is electronic waste, Environment and Water Resources Minister Masagos Zulkifli said yesterday."E-waste is very toxic. People underestimate the toxicity of the e-waste that we dispose of and for the longest time we weren't processing it," he said.Plastics, on the other hand, were being collected properly and then incinerated, the minister said."And we scrub all the toxic dioxins when we incinerate."... Mr Masagos also recalled that plastic bags solved a problem the Republic faced in the 1970s."Back when we didn't bag our trash, we just threw food into our rubbish chutes and caused pests to come, and at the same time, it would corrode the linings of chutes, and we had to repair them so often," he said."This problem got mitigated when we started bagging our trash.""
Now we need a video of a dolphin being poisoned by an iPhone (dolphins are even more charismatic than turtles). Then eco warriors will call for smartphones to be banned like straws!
Bastiat would observe that plastic bags are a lot more visible than pests and chute linings, so people will obsess about them and ignore the invisible
Pictured: Man who went to gardaí to complain over quality of his drugs - "A cannabis user brought a bag of the drug to a Garda station to complain it was "not of good quality".Arthur Liwembe (34) was immediately arrested when he went to the station of his own accord and presented the cannabis to an officer to say he was not happy with it.He has been spared six months in jail and instead ordered to carry out 200 hours of community service.However, Dublin District Court heard he has separately been given a deportation order.Liwembe, an asylum seeker and former student nurse, pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of cannabis at Kilmainham Garda station"
Should HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ have had more actors of color? Twitter suggestion met with ridicule - "HBO’s hit new series based on the Chernobyl tragedy has divided opinion online, but the oddest reaction yet has come from a budding UK actor wondering why the show’s creators had not chosen more people of color for the cast.While the docudrama has come under criticism for various historical inaccuracies, the lack of racial diversity among the actors has not been brought up — until now, that is — for the simple reason that 1980s Ukraine was not exactly a thriving hub of modern-day multiculturalism. That should have been no reason to leave black and brown actors out though, according to actress Karla Marie Sweet, who tweeted that there are “so many great actors of colour” in the UK who “would’ve been amazing” in the series. Sweet felt “disappointed” to see “yet another hit show with a massive cast” that “makes it looks like PoC don’t exist.” She later set her account to private after the inevitable backlash that followed. Just to clear up any confusion, the show “makes it look” like there were no people of color to reflect the reality of the time and place — and the producers seem to have been at least trying to create an authentic vibe.Needless to say, Sweet’s tweet didn’t exactly go down well on Twitter, where she was promptly told to “learn history.”"
So much for the media having a duty to represent reality (See also, casting of minority actors to play historically white characters or fictionally white characters, when the reverse is condemned)
An electric scooter scourge is stalking Paris | Financial Times - "The first problem is safety. The tiny wheels make the scooters hard to use on the many cobbled streets of Paris. Few users wear helmets or obey the rules of the road, and anecdotal evidence suggests many riders and pedestrians have been injured. Then there is the parking, or rather the lack of it. Pedestrians in Paris must navigate around scooters thrown carelessly across the pavement or abandoned in doorways, because most rental companies do not have docking stations. “It’s incredibly ugly,” complains Gaspard Gantzer, who is campaigning to be elected as the city’s next mayor in 2020. “And Paris is the world’s most beautiful city.” Inevitably, French cities are hastily designating parking areas and starting to fine users and rental companies that fail to comply... Even the environmental, commercial and social benefits of the electric trottinettes are questionable. Every morning and evening, conventionally powered vans drive all over Paris to pick up the stray scooters and take them away for charging. The recharging is often done by freelance “juicers” who plug them in at home to earn some pocket money... A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that the average rental
e-scooter had a lifespan of just three months, whereas it took almost four months for a rental company to break even on its investment in the product. In Paris, the average lifespan is probably a lot less, and Mr Gantzer reckons some last less than a month"
What Is CanLit? - The New York Times - "“CanLit” is a contraction for Canadian Literature, and I’m often asked by writers from other lands, “Doug, what, exactly, is CanLit?” Basically, but not always, CanLit is when the Canadian government pays you money to write about life in small towns and/or the immigration experience. If the book is written in French, urban life is permitted, but only from a nonbourgeois viewpoint."
No, Pot Legalization Probably Didn’t Increase Homicide Rates - "Despite Berenson’s claim of “sharp increases in murders and aggravated assaults since 2014” in Oregon, for example, the FBI reported that the murder rate there went up a grand total of 1.0 percent from 2015 to 2016, as compared to a nationwide uptick of 7.9 percent, and then dropped by 11.6 percent between 2016 and 2017, a significantly steeper drop than in the rest of the country. If one insists on positing a tight causal relationship between pot laws and murder rates, one could just as easily argue that Oregon’s homicide trajectory has been softened by pot legalization in these years, at least relative to national trends, saving a number of Oregonians’ lives. And of course, such a focus on state laws and crime rates ignores the larger picture: “Cannabis consumption, and especially heavy cannabis consumption, has been on the rise since 1992,” said Kleiman in his email. “Over that period, national homicide rates have fallen more than 50%.”... These are important questions. But the way to get people to take them seriously is, well, to take them seriously — not to revert to the over-the-top claims of the past. Berenson laments the fact that anyone who points out that marijuana legalization could have certain net-negative effects “may be mocked as a modern-day believer in ‘Reefer Madness,’ the notorious 1936 movie that portrays young people descending into insanity and violence after smoking marijuana.” But if you don’t want to be lumped in with Reefer Madness, don’t make unjustified claims about reefer!"
Melania Trump: A Quintessential Female Icon - "You couldn’t find a better female icon than First Lady Melania Trump: an immigrant who came to America to flee communism and in pursuit of the American dream. She is beautiful, classy, educated, and fluent in six languages.So why do feminists detest her?... Maybe to be deemed worthy of empowerment you have to march down city streets half naked with “slut” written across your chest, or have a “female penis” – at least those are the only women feminism seems to be interested in putting on a pedestal... Maybe the left hates her because she’s a successful legal immigrant... The left’s double standard over women and immigrants couldn’t be more appalling.They want to let anyone waltz over the U.S. southern border, and not require them to learn the language or assimilate in any form. In contrast, the First Lady is a multilingual legal immigrant and instead of applauding her intellect and skill the left mocks her for speaking accented english... In addition to disliking the gracious First Lady on the premise of her legal immigration, the left also criticizes her fashion choices. Regardless of how objectively well-dressed and poised the First Lady is, the left never fails to see a flaw... First Ladies Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton were plastered all over magazine covers... If her last name was that of a Democrat, magazines would be scrambling to do feature pieces on her before their competitors could, no doubt hailing her grace and beauty."
Labour unveil taxes on homeowners who have a garden and forces of sale of land on the cheap - "Labour was accused of pursuing the policies of Venezuela last night as it unveiled plans for a tax raid on middle-class homeowners and powers to force landlords to sell on the cheap. A report, called Land for the Many, said council tax should be replaced with a new 'progressive' levy targeting larger homes with gardens... it called for Britons to be forced to attend town hall planning meetings in the same way they have to go on jury service...
under current arrangements, local authorities or infrastructure companies such as HS2, which is building the high speed rail link between London and Birmingham and on to Manchester, are required to compensate land and home owners affected by the development at market values. Corbyn and his team, headed by shadow chancellor John McDonnell, want to change that. They would buy land at its current (and always lower) 'land use value' rather than at a market price which recognises the uplift that development can bring. This could trigger a financial crisis... Some of these development holdings will have been bought or financed on credit from the banks. If land values plummet, banks will be left with a black hole on their books."
EXCLUSIVE: Queens man unaware of $2 bail, spends nearly 5 months at Rikers Island - "He could have been free for the cost of a cup of coffee.A Queens man spent nearly five months at Rikers Island — from November 2014 to April 2015 — without knowing his bail was just $2, according to records and his lawyers.Aitabdel Salem, 41, who was acquitted of bail jumping at a Manhattan Supreme Court trial last week, had been jailed on $25,000 bail for attacking an NYPD cop who was arresting him for stealing a coat at a Zara store in the Flatiron District on Nov. 21, 2014, court papers show.Although Salem didn't know it for more than four months, he caught a lucky break when prosecutors could not get an indictment. He was ordered released on Nov. 28, 2014 on the police assault arrest.But he still had dollar bails set on each of two minor offenses — that included tampering and mischief charges — so he could not have been freed without first paying the tiny amount."
Post ID: 7594603927476549201
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Links - 21st July 2019 (3)
The Danger of Economics 101 in Public Discourse - "Many economic propositions are more an expression of the speaker’s ideology or dogma rather than empirical fact. Consider, for a moment, some often heard claims about the economy:
• Free trade makes everyone in society better off.
• Minimum wages reduce employment.
A professional economist would react to these statements with much less certitude. He/she would say that these propositions hold up only under certain (strict) assumptions.But in public discourse, many of these economic propositions are often taken as fact. In debating the value of the recently concluded Singapore-European Union Free Trade Agreement, for example, it is not unusual to hear statements along the lines of “any Economics 101 class will tell you that free trade benefits everyone in society.”But that is exactly the problem: it is precisely because it is Economics 101 that these claims are made without qualification and without any reference to empirical reality... The students of Economics 101 often forget the simplifying assumptions, and only remember its conclusions. They also extrapolate those conclusions to contexts where the (forgotten) assumptions do not hold... The work by the legendary economic professor Paul Samuelson suggests for instance that tariffs could benefit a large economy such as the United States. In other instances, tariffs may play a distributional role in compensating the “losers” of globalisation... [For minimum wage] In the “standard model”, firms are assumed to be working in a one-sector, perfectly competitive market. As Gary Fields, Professor of Labour Economics and Economics at Cornell University argued, the effects of decreased labour in the theoretical one-sector market “do not carry over” when the analysis is complicated to include multiple sectors.The assumption of a perfectly competitive labour markets is also problematic. When there is a “monopsony” power (i.e. employers having more market power than workers), a minimum wage can increase both wages and employment"
How women are taking on the world of Dungeons and Dragons - "“For example, (we’re) making sure their armour is practical,” she says. “So, we’ve been trying to eradicate ‘boob armour’ — a metal plate that moulds around a women’s breast, because that would be deadly — and ‘chainmail bikinis.’ Why would you only have chainmail on a bikini?”
If they want to be realistic, will they give female characters reduced strength and a debuff for 3 days a month? Or is realism only good when it advances liberal causes?
Vampire: The Masquerade’s latest edition is trying to deal with sex and power in 2018 - "I was giving William all of the skills he needed to be a competent sexual predator. You see, in V5 — just as in previous editions of Vampire — feeding is a pleasurable act for vampires somewhat akin to sexual intercourse. For humans it’s described as an even higher form of ecstasy.Gaining someone’s consent to feed from them, and then stealing that memory away, would prove to be one of the most uncomfortable moments I’ve ever had in gaming.
SJW logic: pretend murder is okay, but pretend one sided sexual assault isn't
Canadian university sued after student had child fetishes - "A Canadian University has found itself in the middle of a human rights complaint after a male student came to school with disturbing child fetishes including wearing diapers and having the stories of Beatrix Potter read to him by an English professor.Katrin Roth, Vancouver Island University's former director of human rights and workplace safety ended up filing the complaint alleging the Nanaimo university failed to adequately support and protect professors, staff and students.In 105-page complaint to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, several women became so disturbed by the man, they had to change their daily routines to avoid him... the student harassed several women, complimenting them on their clothing while leering at their chests, repeatedly asking staff members to go on dates, and following female staff members... the man submitted a photo of himself partially nude alongside a dirty diaper as part of an English essay... On two occasions the man is alleged to have asked the university's nurse to change his dirty diapers, although she refused the second time... Even in emails, he communicated in childish, baby talk opening a message 'Hewoh'.He wrote about how he had enjoyed the day's stories, 'especially the pee pee part!' and then went onto reveal how he 'sometimes call people poo poo heads."
The rebirth of racial stereotypes - "In reality, rather than providing a safe space for elbow-patched professors desperately clinging on to patriarchal, whites-only reading lists, universities were already busy internationalising and diversifying the curriculum. Academics unable or unwilling to defend a disciplinary canon were quite happy to point to inclusivity as the determiner of course content. Far from threatening the foundations of the university, protesting students pushed at an open door and inside found a seat at the departmental table... Too often, the decolonise movement draws upon patronising and racist stereotypes about black students. Kingston University changed its geography course on rural Britain following concern that it ‘normalised white experiences’. It was assumed that black and ethnic-minority students were less likely to visit the countryside and could therefore struggle ‘to grasp concepts such as the “rural idyll”’. So the course has been redesigned to encompass ‘rural areas globally, with an emphasis on Africa and Asia’. But why should black students struggle with the concept of a ‘rural idyll’ any more than other students? And why should a black kid born and bred in a British city be expected to feel more affinity for rural Africa than the English countryside? New life is being breathed into jaded old stereotypes. The push to get black-Caribbean authors on to reading lists suggests that the most significant factor about an author is not their contribution to the discipline being studied, but their skin colour. The life and works of Toussaint L’Ouverture and CLR James are well worth studying — but I’m convinced neither man would welcome inclusion in the curriculum simply to fill a quota for black-Caribbeans. For years women and black writers fought against being labelled according to their gender and skin colour and to have their ideas recognised in their own right. The decolonise movement assumes a key cause of underperformance by black students at university is a result of them not seeing themselves reflected in the curriculum... This assumes that the whole point of education is a narcissistic focus on the self. But education should take us beyond ourselves, it should open up new horizons and help us learn about the world and other people in it. If we only learn about people who look like us then we risk learning very little"
ERIK FIN on Twitter - "San Francisco in one photo.
Fully Robotic Coffeeshop next to the Starving Jobless Homeless"
Thread by @RVAwonk: "So ... it appears that Facebook helped the reporter who wrote this story identify the person behind the doctored video of Nancy Pelosi — i.e […]" - "So ... it appears that Facebook helped the reporter who wrote this story identify the person behind the doctored video of Nancy Pelosi — i.e., Facebook used its own internal data to help publicly identify a private citizen.
That’s extremely troubling... Facebook is handing over information to reporters regarding what people are doing on their personal Facebook accounts?... it’s beyond disturbing that Facebook revealed supposedly private data to a reporter to help him publicly ID a private citizen...
If Facebook thinks it’s ok to reveal private user data to a reporter to identify someone who — according to Facebook — didn’t even violate the company’s policies, what’s stopping them from handing over your personal data to a reporter?
(Hint: Nothing is stopping them.)"
A devastating analysis of the tax cut shows it’s done virtually no economic good - Los Angeles Times - "You may remember all the glowing predictions made for the December 2017 tax cuts by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration: Wages would soar for the rank-and-file, corporate investments would surge, and the cuts would pay for themselves.The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has just published a deep dive into the economic impact of the cuts in their first year, and emerges from the water with a different picture. The CRS finds that the cuts have had virtually no effect on wages, haven’t contributed to a surge in investment, and haven’t come close to paying for themselves. Nor have they delivered a cut to the average taxpayer.
From painkiller to empathy killer: acetaminophen (paracetamol) reduces empathy for pain - "Because empathy regulates prosocial and antisocial behavior, these drug-induced reductions in empathy raise concerns about the broader social side effects of acetaminophen, which is taken by almost a quarter of adults in the United States each week."
Do police numbers really affect knife crime? - "The impact of police cuts and police increases could be “asymmetric”, the review says, and smaller, incremental changes may not have an effect. Cautiously, though, it suggests that there probably is a causal link. Yet there are two things worth noting. First, the link isn’t huge – an “elasticity” of about -0.3, which is to say you get a 3% reduction in crime for every 10% increase in policing. That’s not insignificant, but police numbers in England and Wales have only gone down by about 15% since 2010, so it’s no use if you want to explain a 33% rise in knife crime since 2011.Second, the review of the literature found that increasing your police force had different effects on different crimes. Property crime went down most – which makes sense, as some of those crimes are presumably carried out by people who are weighing the potential risks and benefits, and that calculation will be affected by seeing more police around.But, the review said, violent crime was much less affected – which again makes sense. “Much violent crime … is conducted in the heat of the moment in pubs or on the street, or behind closed doors in the home”, it notes, so one would not “expect consideration or even awareness of potential police attention to come into play”.So police numbers probably are important, but May still has a point if she’s saying that it’s not the dominant factor in the increase in knife crime. You could even argue that reducing police numbers was the right thing to do, given that crime was falling. Let’s look at what the dominant factors could be. Some of them are out of the government’s hands: for instance, socioeconomic shocks often lead to crime, and although we didn’t see that in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, Jennings thinks it could be having a delayed effect.But others are firmly in the government’s hands. Both Kirchmaier and Jennings said that a decade of cuts to social services and youth centres have probably contributed (although, again, it’s hard to tease out). Welfare cuts have led to a growth in youth homelessness, which makes young people more at risk of joining gangs.And the Government’s continued cowardice over drugs leaves a huge industry in the hands of violent criminals – with gangs now recruiting “across county lines”, away from urban centres, and seeking new markets. A former Metropolitan Police chief has partly blamed school exclusions, driven by Government educational policy, for the rise in knife crime."
David Cumin and Paul Moon: Law against hate speech helped Hitler's rise - "Some commentators have made an argument for banning speech that claims racial superiority or inferiority (the definition of racism) by claiming that if only there were such laws in 1920s Germany, six million Jews and others might not have been systematically murdered.As compelling as that argument sounds, it is not based in reality. There were hate speech laws in the Weimar Republic, including against "insulting religious communities". Hundreds of Nazi affiliates were prosecuted under these laws.Police also cited possible disruption to order as a reason to shut down meetings where Hitler was to speak. The National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party was banned from speaking in all German states before it rose to power. Hate speech laws did not work. In fact, some have made a case that they actually helped the Nazis. Presenting as political martyrs arguably helped rally more public support, in much the same way that the current use of "health and safety" to ban speakers in New Zealand has propelled their publicity.The gag of Hitler was accompanied with posters of him and the caption "One alone of 2000 million people of the world is forbidden to speak in Germany".There is another, less practical and more fundamental, reason for opposing legislation against hate speech. Even if we could define what is and what is not hateful and even if there were real harms caused and even if the laws were effective, giving power to the state to effectively govern speech is a dangerous precedent. Just as the Nazis were persecuted by hate speech laws in the Weimar Republic, they went on to implement their own suppression on expression.The Third Reich organised a massive propaganda campaign and excluded opposing views in media, forced boycotts on Jewish businesses, and burnt books they disapproved of. In the words of Holocaust survivor, Aryeh Neier, "Those who call for censorship in the name of the oppressed ought to recognise it is never the oppressed who determine the bounds of censorship"."
• Free trade makes everyone in society better off.
• Minimum wages reduce employment.
A professional economist would react to these statements with much less certitude. He/she would say that these propositions hold up only under certain (strict) assumptions.But in public discourse, many of these economic propositions are often taken as fact. In debating the value of the recently concluded Singapore-European Union Free Trade Agreement, for example, it is not unusual to hear statements along the lines of “any Economics 101 class will tell you that free trade benefits everyone in society.”But that is exactly the problem: it is precisely because it is Economics 101 that these claims are made without qualification and without any reference to empirical reality... The students of Economics 101 often forget the simplifying assumptions, and only remember its conclusions. They also extrapolate those conclusions to contexts where the (forgotten) assumptions do not hold... The work by the legendary economic professor Paul Samuelson suggests for instance that tariffs could benefit a large economy such as the United States. In other instances, tariffs may play a distributional role in compensating the “losers” of globalisation... [For minimum wage] In the “standard model”, firms are assumed to be working in a one-sector, perfectly competitive market. As Gary Fields, Professor of Labour Economics and Economics at Cornell University argued, the effects of decreased labour in the theoretical one-sector market “do not carry over” when the analysis is complicated to include multiple sectors.The assumption of a perfectly competitive labour markets is also problematic. When there is a “monopsony” power (i.e. employers having more market power than workers), a minimum wage can increase both wages and employment"
How women are taking on the world of Dungeons and Dragons - "“For example, (we’re) making sure their armour is practical,” she says. “So, we’ve been trying to eradicate ‘boob armour’ — a metal plate that moulds around a women’s breast, because that would be deadly — and ‘chainmail bikinis.’ Why would you only have chainmail on a bikini?”
If they want to be realistic, will they give female characters reduced strength and a debuff for 3 days a month? Or is realism only good when it advances liberal causes?
Vampire: The Masquerade’s latest edition is trying to deal with sex and power in 2018 - "I was giving William all of the skills he needed to be a competent sexual predator. You see, in V5 — just as in previous editions of Vampire — feeding is a pleasurable act for vampires somewhat akin to sexual intercourse. For humans it’s described as an even higher form of ecstasy.Gaining someone’s consent to feed from them, and then stealing that memory away, would prove to be one of the most uncomfortable moments I’ve ever had in gaming.
SJW logic: pretend murder is okay, but pretend one sided sexual assault isn't
Canadian university sued after student had child fetishes - "A Canadian University has found itself in the middle of a human rights complaint after a male student came to school with disturbing child fetishes including wearing diapers and having the stories of Beatrix Potter read to him by an English professor.Katrin Roth, Vancouver Island University's former director of human rights and workplace safety ended up filing the complaint alleging the Nanaimo university failed to adequately support and protect professors, staff and students.In 105-page complaint to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, several women became so disturbed by the man, they had to change their daily routines to avoid him... the student harassed several women, complimenting them on their clothing while leering at their chests, repeatedly asking staff members to go on dates, and following female staff members... the man submitted a photo of himself partially nude alongside a dirty diaper as part of an English essay... On two occasions the man is alleged to have asked the university's nurse to change his dirty diapers, although she refused the second time... Even in emails, he communicated in childish, baby talk opening a message 'Hewoh'.He wrote about how he had enjoyed the day's stories, 'especially the pee pee part!' and then went onto reveal how he 'sometimes call people poo poo heads."
The rebirth of racial stereotypes - "In reality, rather than providing a safe space for elbow-patched professors desperately clinging on to patriarchal, whites-only reading lists, universities were already busy internationalising and diversifying the curriculum. Academics unable or unwilling to defend a disciplinary canon were quite happy to point to inclusivity as the determiner of course content. Far from threatening the foundations of the university, protesting students pushed at an open door and inside found a seat at the departmental table... Too often, the decolonise movement draws upon patronising and racist stereotypes about black students. Kingston University changed its geography course on rural Britain following concern that it ‘normalised white experiences’. It was assumed that black and ethnic-minority students were less likely to visit the countryside and could therefore struggle ‘to grasp concepts such as the “rural idyll”’. So the course has been redesigned to encompass ‘rural areas globally, with an emphasis on Africa and Asia’. But why should black students struggle with the concept of a ‘rural idyll’ any more than other students? And why should a black kid born and bred in a British city be expected to feel more affinity for rural Africa than the English countryside? New life is being breathed into jaded old stereotypes. The push to get black-Caribbean authors on to reading lists suggests that the most significant factor about an author is not their contribution to the discipline being studied, but their skin colour. The life and works of Toussaint L’Ouverture and CLR James are well worth studying — but I’m convinced neither man would welcome inclusion in the curriculum simply to fill a quota for black-Caribbeans. For years women and black writers fought against being labelled according to their gender and skin colour and to have their ideas recognised in their own right. The decolonise movement assumes a key cause of underperformance by black students at university is a result of them not seeing themselves reflected in the curriculum... This assumes that the whole point of education is a narcissistic focus on the self. But education should take us beyond ourselves, it should open up new horizons and help us learn about the world and other people in it. If we only learn about people who look like us then we risk learning very little"
ERIK FIN on Twitter - "San Francisco in one photo.
Fully Robotic Coffeeshop next to the Starving Jobless Homeless"
Thread by @RVAwonk: "So ... it appears that Facebook helped the reporter who wrote this story identify the person behind the doctored video of Nancy Pelosi — i.e […]" - "So ... it appears that Facebook helped the reporter who wrote this story identify the person behind the doctored video of Nancy Pelosi — i.e., Facebook used its own internal data to help publicly identify a private citizen.
That’s extremely troubling... Facebook is handing over information to reporters regarding what people are doing on their personal Facebook accounts?... it’s beyond disturbing that Facebook revealed supposedly private data to a reporter to help him publicly ID a private citizen...
If Facebook thinks it’s ok to reveal private user data to a reporter to identify someone who — according to Facebook — didn’t even violate the company’s policies, what’s stopping them from handing over your personal data to a reporter?
(Hint: Nothing is stopping them.)"
A devastating analysis of the tax cut shows it’s done virtually no economic good - Los Angeles Times - "You may remember all the glowing predictions made for the December 2017 tax cuts by congressional Republicans and the Trump administration: Wages would soar for the rank-and-file, corporate investments would surge, and the cuts would pay for themselves.The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has just published a deep dive into the economic impact of the cuts in their first year, and emerges from the water with a different picture. The CRS finds that the cuts have had virtually no effect on wages, haven’t contributed to a surge in investment, and haven’t come close to paying for themselves. Nor have they delivered a cut to the average taxpayer.
From painkiller to empathy killer: acetaminophen (paracetamol) reduces empathy for pain - "Because empathy regulates prosocial and antisocial behavior, these drug-induced reductions in empathy raise concerns about the broader social side effects of acetaminophen, which is taken by almost a quarter of adults in the United States each week."
Do police numbers really affect knife crime? - "The impact of police cuts and police increases could be “asymmetric”, the review says, and smaller, incremental changes may not have an effect. Cautiously, though, it suggests that there probably is a causal link. Yet there are two things worth noting. First, the link isn’t huge – an “elasticity” of about -0.3, which is to say you get a 3% reduction in crime for every 10% increase in policing. That’s not insignificant, but police numbers in England and Wales have only gone down by about 15% since 2010, so it’s no use if you want to explain a 33% rise in knife crime since 2011.Second, the review of the literature found that increasing your police force had different effects on different crimes. Property crime went down most – which makes sense, as some of those crimes are presumably carried out by people who are weighing the potential risks and benefits, and that calculation will be affected by seeing more police around.But, the review said, violent crime was much less affected – which again makes sense. “Much violent crime … is conducted in the heat of the moment in pubs or on the street, or behind closed doors in the home”, it notes, so one would not “expect consideration or even awareness of potential police attention to come into play”.So police numbers probably are important, but May still has a point if she’s saying that it’s not the dominant factor in the increase in knife crime. You could even argue that reducing police numbers was the right thing to do, given that crime was falling. Let’s look at what the dominant factors could be. Some of them are out of the government’s hands: for instance, socioeconomic shocks often lead to crime, and although we didn’t see that in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, Jennings thinks it could be having a delayed effect.But others are firmly in the government’s hands. Both Kirchmaier and Jennings said that a decade of cuts to social services and youth centres have probably contributed (although, again, it’s hard to tease out). Welfare cuts have led to a growth in youth homelessness, which makes young people more at risk of joining gangs.And the Government’s continued cowardice over drugs leaves a huge industry in the hands of violent criminals – with gangs now recruiting “across county lines”, away from urban centres, and seeking new markets. A former Metropolitan Police chief has partly blamed school exclusions, driven by Government educational policy, for the rise in knife crime."
David Cumin and Paul Moon: Law against hate speech helped Hitler's rise - "Some commentators have made an argument for banning speech that claims racial superiority or inferiority (the definition of racism) by claiming that if only there were such laws in 1920s Germany, six million Jews and others might not have been systematically murdered.As compelling as that argument sounds, it is not based in reality. There were hate speech laws in the Weimar Republic, including against "insulting religious communities". Hundreds of Nazi affiliates were prosecuted under these laws.Police also cited possible disruption to order as a reason to shut down meetings where Hitler was to speak. The National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party was banned from speaking in all German states before it rose to power. Hate speech laws did not work. In fact, some have made a case that they actually helped the Nazis. Presenting as political martyrs arguably helped rally more public support, in much the same way that the current use of "health and safety" to ban speakers in New Zealand has propelled their publicity.The gag of Hitler was accompanied with posters of him and the caption "One alone of 2000 million people of the world is forbidden to speak in Germany".There is another, less practical and more fundamental, reason for opposing legislation against hate speech. Even if we could define what is and what is not hateful and even if there were real harms caused and even if the laws were effective, giving power to the state to effectively govern speech is a dangerous precedent. Just as the Nazis were persecuted by hate speech laws in the Weimar Republic, they went on to implement their own suppression on expression.The Third Reich organised a massive propaganda campaign and excluded opposing views in media, forced boycotts on Jewish businesses, and burnt books they disapproved of. In the words of Holocaust survivor, Aryeh Neier, "Those who call for censorship in the name of the oppressed ought to recognise it is never the oppressed who determine the bounds of censorship"."
Post ID: 5274658151595923092
Prioritising what matters
NUSWhispers - Posts
"Many years ago, one of my modules’ lab exam was rescheduled to an evening session which clashed with my gf’s birthday (we booked a special dinner). An added complication was that it was her first birthday in Singapore without any family members around. It was either I celebrate her birthday with her and get a reduced grade or she ‘celebrates’ alone while I may get a higher grade.
I was very inclined towards attending the lab session and she also said she’s ok to spend dinnertime alone. However, I decided to heck it and yolo by skipping the lab session and going for dinner with her instead. She was shocked and asked why. I told her, “In 10 years’ time, my grade won’t matter. You will.”
Needless to say, I got a poorer grade for that module for skipping a lab exam without valid excuse. But boy, did it feel saccharine.
Fast forward 5 years later, we broke up.
Fast forward another 5 years (i.e. now), here I am clutching the rejection letter from a prestigious masters course and they cited my inadequate grades and pointed that module out in particular (it was a foundational module).
Fml."
"Many years ago, one of my modules’ lab exam was rescheduled to an evening session which clashed with my gf’s birthday (we booked a special dinner). An added complication was that it was her first birthday in Singapore without any family members around. It was either I celebrate her birthday with her and get a reduced grade or she ‘celebrates’ alone while I may get a higher grade.
I was very inclined towards attending the lab session and she also said she’s ok to spend dinnertime alone. However, I decided to heck it and yolo by skipping the lab session and going for dinner with her instead. She was shocked and asked why. I told her, “In 10 years’ time, my grade won’t matter. You will.”
Needless to say, I got a poorer grade for that module for skipping a lab exam without valid excuse. But boy, did it feel saccharine.
Fast forward 5 years later, we broke up.
Fast forward another 5 years (i.e. now), here I am clutching the rejection letter from a prestigious masters course and they cited my inadequate grades and pointed that module out in particular (it was a foundational module).
Fml."
Post ID: 349654838282650403
Links - 21st July 2019 (2)
What Chinese corner-cutting reveals about modernity - "In our apartment in central Beijing, we fight a daily rearguard action against entropy. The mirror on my wardrobe came off its hinges six months ago and is now propped up against the wall, one of many furnishing casualties. Each of our light fittings takes a different bulb, and a quarter of them are permanently broken. In the bedroom, the ceiling-high air-conditioning unit runs its moisture through a hole knocked in the wall, stuffed with an old cloth to avoid leakage, while the balcony door, its sealant rotted, has a towel handy to block the rain when it pours through... The apartment is five years old. By Chinese standards, it’s far better than the average... My time in China has taught me the pleasure and value of craftsmanship, simply because it’s so rare. To see somebody doing a job well, not just for its own reward, but for the satisfaction of good work, thrills my heart... the prevailing attitude is chabuduo, or ‘close enough’. It’s a phrase you’ll hear with grating regularity, one that speaks to a job 70 per cent done, a plan sketched out but never completed, a gauge unchecked or a socket put in the wrong size. Chabuduo is the corrosive opposite of the impulse towards craftmanship, the desire, as the sociologist Richard Sennett writes in The Craftsman (2008), ‘to reject muddling through, to reject the job just good enough’. Chabuduo implies that to put any more time or effort into a piece of work would be the act of a fool. China is the land of the cut corner, of ‘good enough for government work’... You don’t have a proper cold-storage chain to send vaccines? Well, stick some ice in the parcels and put them in the post. Chabuduo, and children cough to death. Why take the sludge to a disposal site? Just pile it up here, where everyone else has been putting it. Chabuduo, and 91 people are crushed by a landslide in Guangdong. Separate out the dangerous materials? What does it matter, just stick that nitrate over there. Chabuduo, and a fireball goes up in Tianjin, north China’s chief port, incinerating 173 people. ‘There’s a Tianjin-level explosion every month,’ a staff member at a national-level work-safety programme told me, asking for anonymity. ‘But mostly they happen in places that nobody cares about.’... Why is China caught in this trap? In most industries here, vital feedback loops are severed. To understand how to make things, you have to use them. Ford’s workers in the US drove their own cars, and Western builders dwelt, or hoped to dwell, in homes like the ones they made. But the migrants lining factory belts in Guangdong make knick-knacks for US households thousands of miles away. The men and women who build China’s houses will never live in them... The opacity of Chinese companies means it’s often hard to pin down the blame for even cataclysmic failure; the maker’s marks once inscribed on every brick in a city’s walls have been replaced with the mirages of holding companies and shell enterprises. Local governments fearful of higher unemployment and lower GDP work assiduously to shield their favoured businesses from any consequences for their actions."
Vincent Kelly Pollard, Jitney, jeepney, and dypni - " "Jeepney" derives from "jeep" and "knee". Immediately after World War II, those two words combined to describe the face-to-face seating of Filipino passengers in refurbished American military "jeeps," each of them enhanced with individualized externalized artistry.Jitney, on the other hand, refers to a particular kind of taxicab once prominent in African-American neighborhoods in urban areas like Chicago"
The Hunting Ground: A closer look at the influential documentary reveals the filmmakers put advocacy ahead of accuracy. - "[Kamilah] Willingham’s story is not an illustration of a sexual predator allowed to run loose by self-interested administrators. The record shows that what happened that night was precisely the kind of spontaneous, drunken encounter that administrators who deal with campus sexual assault accusations say is typical. (The filmmakers, who favor David Lisak’s poorly substantiated position that our college campuses are rife with serial rapists, reject the suggestion that such encounters are the source of many sexual assault allegations.) Nor is Willingham’s story an example of official indifference. Harvard did not ignore her complaints; the school thoroughly investigated them. And because of her allegations, the law school education of her alleged assailant has been halted for the past four years... The filmmakers present what happened between Kamilah Willingham and Brandon Winston as a terrifying warning to female college students and their parents, and a call to arms to government officials and college administrators. They offer the case as prima facie evidence that draconian regulations, laws, and punishments are required to end what they say is a scourge of sexual violence. But there is another story, which the filmmakers do not tell. It’s a story in which Willingham’s accusations are taken seriously and Winston’s actions are thoroughly investigated, first by Harvard University and later by the Middlesex County district attorney’s office. It’s a story in which neither the school nor the legal system finds that a rape occurred, and in which Willingham’s credibility is called seriously into question. It’s a story of an ambiguous sexual encounter among young adults that almost destroyed the life of the accused, a young black man with no previous record of criminal behavior. It’s a story that demonstrates how deeply the filmmakers’ politics colored their presentation of the facts—and how deeply flawed their influential film is as a result... Toward the end of The Hunting Ground, a graphic announces: “A grand jury in Boston indicted Kamilah’s accused assailant with two counts of sexual assault.” What the filmmakers don’t explain is that the grand jury charges stemmed from Winston’s touching of KF. The grand jury declined to indict him on any charges concerning Willingham. She appeared at his trial not as a victim but as a witness... There was no mention during the five-day trial of Winston drugging anyone’s drinks, a key accusation Willingham makes in The Hunting Ground"
New Research Reveals Boys Are More Sensitive Than Girls - "In another blow to the genderless brigade, Dr. Allan N. Schore concluded the following facts from a boatload of research:
Boys mature slower physically, socially, and linguistically.
Stress-regulating brain circuitries mature slower in boys prenatally, perinatally, and postnatally.
Boys are affected more negatively by early environmental stress, inside and outside the womb, than are girls. Girls have more built-in mechanisms that foster resiliency against stress."
Drone Over a Middle Ages Festival Taken Down by A Spear - "The participant, clad in the appropriate attire to make the entire encounter all the better, ignoring the mock battle everyone else was focused on, quickly grabbed a spear and rushed towards the drone. He took just one small step and heaved, taking it down like a true marksman.Now the makers of this video were kind enough to put the drone kill shot right at the start, and also included a slowed down close up at the end, but if you are interested in what a Russian Middle Ages festival looks like then watch the rest of it too"
MDMA is now proven to help those with trauma – so let’s decriminalise it and put it back in the medicine cabinet - "When MDMA (later known as ecstasy) was discovered by Shulgin in the 1950s, he noted that it had very special properties of calmness, clarity and empathy that set it apart from the many other chemically related amphetamine-like drugs. He then told this to his wife, who was a psychotherapist and who agreed and suggested that these properties were ideal as a medicinal adjunct to psychotherapy... All was well until the MDMA was recruited by the rave scene as a “dance drug” and renamed ecstasy. This led to a backlash from the media who hated the idea of young people becoming ecstatic, and developed a campaign of moral panic to get it banned. Horror stories of brain damage were invented and the few deaths massively publicised in relation to the harms of MDMA compared with other drugs such as alcohol. This campaign worked and ecstasy was banned across the globe at the end of the 1980s, despite eloquent and compelling protestations from the many therapists that had used it and patients who had benefited... just two psychotherapy sessions with MDMA as part of a psychological treatment course can massively improve PTSD – often resulting in a full recovery in patients who had to that point been resistant to other conventional forms of treatment such as the SSRI antidepressant medicines and cognitive behaviour therapy.In light of these successes we have begun to treat people who have become alcohol dependent with MDMA in an attempt to deaden the mental pain of prior traumas. Such individuals are very common, indeed the norm, in alcohol treatment services and have a massively high failure rate with conventional abstinence-based treatments"
Why Eggs Are a Killer Weight Loss Food - "Eggs rank high on the Satiety Index scale, which means they may help you feel fuller for longer. High-protein foods, like eggs, may also help you snack less between meals... The thermic effect of food is the energy required by the body to metabolize foods, and is higher for protein than for fat or carbs... Eating eggs for breakfast may increase your feeling of fullness and make you automatically eat fewer calories, for up to 36 hours... Eggs are inexpensive, available almost everywhere and can be prepared in a matter of minutes."
Are eggs bad for your health again? - "Helen Bond, a dietitian for the British Dietetic Association, says the overwhelming scientific consensus is the cholesterol in eggs has little effect on our heart health.“It has been firmly established it is not dietary cholesterol that causes blood cholesterol levels to rise but eating a lot of foods high in saturated fats; not eggs but butter, fatty meat products and cheese,” says Bond, who likes to fry eggs “guilt-free” on the top of her AGA cooker so she doesn’t need to use any fat... “Eggs are one of the rare food sources that contain lutein, a carotenoid with anti-inflammatory properties that is very important for eye health and is linked to the prevention of age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness. And they contain high levels of cysteine, an amino acid that is important for breaking down acetaldehyde, the toxic compound produced when alcohol is consumed and is responsible for many hangover symptoms.“Eating eggs is the best thing to do after a heavy night out.”... University of Sydney nutrition scientists reported in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that putting people on a high-egg diet (12 eggs a week) or a low-egg diet (less than two a week) made no difference to their cardiovascular risk markers. Even people with type 2 diabetes suffered no adverse effects in terms of inflammation and glucose levels from eating a diet high in eggs... the post-workout muscle-building response in people who ate whole eggs after a weight-training session was 40 per cent greater than in those who ate the same amount of protein from just egg whites... Blood samples of middle-aged men who regularly ate eggs correlated with the blood profiles of men who avoided type 2 diabetes.There may be gender differences"
Four-day week: trial finds lower stress and increased productivity - "The founder of one of the first big companies to switch to a four-day working week has called on others to follow, claiming it has resulted in a 20% rise in productivity, appeared to have helped increase profits and improved staff wellbeing.Analysis of one of the biggest trials yet of the four-day working week has revealed no fall in output, reduced stress and increased staff engagement, fuelling hopes that a better work-life balance for millions could be in sight... Smaller companies experimenting with the four-day week have found performance has been better in the first few weeks as excitement about the project took hold, before falling slightly."
Women Needed a Magazine that Doesn't Lie to Them. So I Started One - "All the publications mentioned in her Jezebel article—The Hairpin, The Toast, Bust, Bitch, xoJane, Autostraddle, Refinery29, AfterEllen and Jezebel itself—push a liberal, feminist message. The same is true of older outlets such as Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour and Allure. Go ahead and find me a single successful, mainstream women’s lifestyle-and-culture publication that doesn’t regularly exhibit a bias against conservative points of view... For decades, magazines have sold women countless lies about sex, emotional fulfillment and health issues—usually under the guise of “empowerment.” They prey on women’s insecurities by normalizing unhealthy extremes (first it was borderline anorexia, now it’s obesity). They encourage casual sex and lie to readers about its emotional ramifications. They tell women they’ll be unhappy with a husband and kids but fulfilled working for a male boss at a big corporation. They laud celebrities who aren’t good role models, turned Hillary Clinton into an object of worship, and attack or ignore women who don’t share their views... “What if there were a conservative Cosmo?”From that question, Evie Magazine was born. She’s an online publication covering health, beauty, fashion, relationships, career and culture. Her mission is to empower, educate and entertain young women with content that celebrates femininity, encourages virtue, and offers a more honest perspective than they get elsewhere. She’s Classier than Cosmo, Sexier than Refinery29, and Smarter than Bustle... Is Evie “feminist”? That depends on your definition of feminism. The reality is, modern feminism in its doctrinaire form isn’t popular. Many women realize that, at its core, progressive third-wave feminism can express itself as a form of self-hatred: a rejection of our feminine beauty, unique gifts and the natural role we play in our communities. In effect, it seeks to turn first-rate women into second-rate men. Paradoxically, this movement also is suffused with negative and condescending attitudes toward masculinity, whereas Evie readers love their men, and are thankful for the protection and sacrifice that men often have been called upon to deliver throughout history... Is Evie “feminist”? That depends on your definition of feminism. The reality is, modern feminism in its doctrinaire form isn’t popular. Many women realize that, at its core, progressive third-wave feminism can express itself as a form of self-hatred: a rejection of our feminine beauty, unique gifts and the natural role we play in our communities. In effect, it seeks to turn first-rate women into second-rate men. Paradoxically, this movement also is suffused with negative and condescending attitudes toward masculinity, whereas Evie readers love their men, and are thankful for the protection and sacrifice that men often have been called upon to deliver throughout history... Women often are told sweet-sounding adages like, “you’re perfect just the way you are!” But those sentiments often aren’t truthful, and discourage self-improvement."
Vincent Kelly Pollard, Jitney, jeepney, and dypni - " "Jeepney" derives from "jeep" and "knee". Immediately after World War II, those two words combined to describe the face-to-face seating of Filipino passengers in refurbished American military "jeeps," each of them enhanced with individualized externalized artistry.Jitney, on the other hand, refers to a particular kind of taxicab once prominent in African-American neighborhoods in urban areas like Chicago"
The Hunting Ground: A closer look at the influential documentary reveals the filmmakers put advocacy ahead of accuracy. - "[Kamilah] Willingham’s story is not an illustration of a sexual predator allowed to run loose by self-interested administrators. The record shows that what happened that night was precisely the kind of spontaneous, drunken encounter that administrators who deal with campus sexual assault accusations say is typical. (The filmmakers, who favor David Lisak’s poorly substantiated position that our college campuses are rife with serial rapists, reject the suggestion that such encounters are the source of many sexual assault allegations.) Nor is Willingham’s story an example of official indifference. Harvard did not ignore her complaints; the school thoroughly investigated them. And because of her allegations, the law school education of her alleged assailant has been halted for the past four years... The filmmakers present what happened between Kamilah Willingham and Brandon Winston as a terrifying warning to female college students and their parents, and a call to arms to government officials and college administrators. They offer the case as prima facie evidence that draconian regulations, laws, and punishments are required to end what they say is a scourge of sexual violence. But there is another story, which the filmmakers do not tell. It’s a story in which Willingham’s accusations are taken seriously and Winston’s actions are thoroughly investigated, first by Harvard University and later by the Middlesex County district attorney’s office. It’s a story in which neither the school nor the legal system finds that a rape occurred, and in which Willingham’s credibility is called seriously into question. It’s a story of an ambiguous sexual encounter among young adults that almost destroyed the life of the accused, a young black man with no previous record of criminal behavior. It’s a story that demonstrates how deeply the filmmakers’ politics colored their presentation of the facts—and how deeply flawed their influential film is as a result... Toward the end of The Hunting Ground, a graphic announces: “A grand jury in Boston indicted Kamilah’s accused assailant with two counts of sexual assault.” What the filmmakers don’t explain is that the grand jury charges stemmed from Winston’s touching of KF. The grand jury declined to indict him on any charges concerning Willingham. She appeared at his trial not as a victim but as a witness... There was no mention during the five-day trial of Winston drugging anyone’s drinks, a key accusation Willingham makes in The Hunting Ground"
New Research Reveals Boys Are More Sensitive Than Girls - "In another blow to the genderless brigade, Dr. Allan N. Schore concluded the following facts from a boatload of research:
Boys mature slower physically, socially, and linguistically.
Stress-regulating brain circuitries mature slower in boys prenatally, perinatally, and postnatally.
Boys are affected more negatively by early environmental stress, inside and outside the womb, than are girls. Girls have more built-in mechanisms that foster resiliency against stress."
Drone Over a Middle Ages Festival Taken Down by A Spear - "The participant, clad in the appropriate attire to make the entire encounter all the better, ignoring the mock battle everyone else was focused on, quickly grabbed a spear and rushed towards the drone. He took just one small step and heaved, taking it down like a true marksman.Now the makers of this video were kind enough to put the drone kill shot right at the start, and also included a slowed down close up at the end, but if you are interested in what a Russian Middle Ages festival looks like then watch the rest of it too"
MDMA is now proven to help those with trauma – so let’s decriminalise it and put it back in the medicine cabinet - "When MDMA (later known as ecstasy) was discovered by Shulgin in the 1950s, he noted that it had very special properties of calmness, clarity and empathy that set it apart from the many other chemically related amphetamine-like drugs. He then told this to his wife, who was a psychotherapist and who agreed and suggested that these properties were ideal as a medicinal adjunct to psychotherapy... All was well until the MDMA was recruited by the rave scene as a “dance drug” and renamed ecstasy. This led to a backlash from the media who hated the idea of young people becoming ecstatic, and developed a campaign of moral panic to get it banned. Horror stories of brain damage were invented and the few deaths massively publicised in relation to the harms of MDMA compared with other drugs such as alcohol. This campaign worked and ecstasy was banned across the globe at the end of the 1980s, despite eloquent and compelling protestations from the many therapists that had used it and patients who had benefited... just two psychotherapy sessions with MDMA as part of a psychological treatment course can massively improve PTSD – often resulting in a full recovery in patients who had to that point been resistant to other conventional forms of treatment such as the SSRI antidepressant medicines and cognitive behaviour therapy.In light of these successes we have begun to treat people who have become alcohol dependent with MDMA in an attempt to deaden the mental pain of prior traumas. Such individuals are very common, indeed the norm, in alcohol treatment services and have a massively high failure rate with conventional abstinence-based treatments"
Why Eggs Are a Killer Weight Loss Food - "Eggs rank high on the Satiety Index scale, which means they may help you feel fuller for longer. High-protein foods, like eggs, may also help you snack less between meals... The thermic effect of food is the energy required by the body to metabolize foods, and is higher for protein than for fat or carbs... Eating eggs for breakfast may increase your feeling of fullness and make you automatically eat fewer calories, for up to 36 hours... Eggs are inexpensive, available almost everywhere and can be prepared in a matter of minutes."
Are eggs bad for your health again? - "Helen Bond, a dietitian for the British Dietetic Association, says the overwhelming scientific consensus is the cholesterol in eggs has little effect on our heart health.“It has been firmly established it is not dietary cholesterol that causes blood cholesterol levels to rise but eating a lot of foods high in saturated fats; not eggs but butter, fatty meat products and cheese,” says Bond, who likes to fry eggs “guilt-free” on the top of her AGA cooker so she doesn’t need to use any fat... “Eggs are one of the rare food sources that contain lutein, a carotenoid with anti-inflammatory properties that is very important for eye health and is linked to the prevention of age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness. And they contain high levels of cysteine, an amino acid that is important for breaking down acetaldehyde, the toxic compound produced when alcohol is consumed and is responsible for many hangover symptoms.“Eating eggs is the best thing to do after a heavy night out.”... University of Sydney nutrition scientists reported in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that putting people on a high-egg diet (12 eggs a week) or a low-egg diet (less than two a week) made no difference to their cardiovascular risk markers. Even people with type 2 diabetes suffered no adverse effects in terms of inflammation and glucose levels from eating a diet high in eggs... the post-workout muscle-building response in people who ate whole eggs after a weight-training session was 40 per cent greater than in those who ate the same amount of protein from just egg whites... Blood samples of middle-aged men who regularly ate eggs correlated with the blood profiles of men who avoided type 2 diabetes.There may be gender differences"
Four-day week: trial finds lower stress and increased productivity - "The founder of one of the first big companies to switch to a four-day working week has called on others to follow, claiming it has resulted in a 20% rise in productivity, appeared to have helped increase profits and improved staff wellbeing.Analysis of one of the biggest trials yet of the four-day working week has revealed no fall in output, reduced stress and increased staff engagement, fuelling hopes that a better work-life balance for millions could be in sight... Smaller companies experimenting with the four-day week have found performance has been better in the first few weeks as excitement about the project took hold, before falling slightly."
Women Needed a Magazine that Doesn't Lie to Them. So I Started One - "All the publications mentioned in her Jezebel article—The Hairpin, The Toast, Bust, Bitch, xoJane, Autostraddle, Refinery29, AfterEllen and Jezebel itself—push a liberal, feminist message. The same is true of older outlets such as Cosmopolitan, Elle, Glamour and Allure. Go ahead and find me a single successful, mainstream women’s lifestyle-and-culture publication that doesn’t regularly exhibit a bias against conservative points of view... For decades, magazines have sold women countless lies about sex, emotional fulfillment and health issues—usually under the guise of “empowerment.” They prey on women’s insecurities by normalizing unhealthy extremes (first it was borderline anorexia, now it’s obesity). They encourage casual sex and lie to readers about its emotional ramifications. They tell women they’ll be unhappy with a husband and kids but fulfilled working for a male boss at a big corporation. They laud celebrities who aren’t good role models, turned Hillary Clinton into an object of worship, and attack or ignore women who don’t share their views... “What if there were a conservative Cosmo?”From that question, Evie Magazine was born. She’s an online publication covering health, beauty, fashion, relationships, career and culture. Her mission is to empower, educate and entertain young women with content that celebrates femininity, encourages virtue, and offers a more honest perspective than they get elsewhere. She’s Classier than Cosmo, Sexier than Refinery29, and Smarter than Bustle... Is Evie “feminist”? That depends on your definition of feminism. The reality is, modern feminism in its doctrinaire form isn’t popular. Many women realize that, at its core, progressive third-wave feminism can express itself as a form of self-hatred: a rejection of our feminine beauty, unique gifts and the natural role we play in our communities. In effect, it seeks to turn first-rate women into second-rate men. Paradoxically, this movement also is suffused with negative and condescending attitudes toward masculinity, whereas Evie readers love their men, and are thankful for the protection and sacrifice that men often have been called upon to deliver throughout history... Is Evie “feminist”? That depends on your definition of feminism. The reality is, modern feminism in its doctrinaire form isn’t popular. Many women realize that, at its core, progressive third-wave feminism can express itself as a form of self-hatred: a rejection of our feminine beauty, unique gifts and the natural role we play in our communities. In effect, it seeks to turn first-rate women into second-rate men. Paradoxically, this movement also is suffused with negative and condescending attitudes toward masculinity, whereas Evie readers love their men, and are thankful for the protection and sacrifice that men often have been called upon to deliver throughout history... Women often are told sweet-sounding adages like, “you’re perfect just the way you are!” But those sentiments often aren’t truthful, and discourage self-improvement."
Post ID: 6861427187557506923
Toilet Philosophy
Knee-Deep
Slavoj Žižek
"In a famous scene from Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty, the roles of eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at toilets around a table, chatting pleasantly, and when they want to eat, sneak away to a small room. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matière-à-penser: the three basic types of toilet form an excremental correlative-counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking (the raw, the cooked and the rotten). In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that in the famous discussion of European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that ‘German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.’ It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement.
Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. In terms of the predominance of one sphere of social life, it is German metaphysics and poetry versus French politics and English economics. The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology."
Slavoj Žižek
"In a famous scene from Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty, the roles of eating and excreting are inverted: people sit at toilets around a table, chatting pleasantly, and when they want to eat, sneak away to a small room. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matière-à-penser: the three basic types of toilet form an excremental correlative-counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking (the raw, the cooked and the rotten). In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that in the famous discussion of European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that ‘German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.’ It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement.
Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. In terms of the predominance of one sphere of social life, it is German metaphysics and poetry versus French politics and English economics. The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology."
Post ID: 3352663142459807828
Links - 21st July 2019 (1)
'I tattooed my face so I couldn't get a normal job' - "Kayleigh Peach was so determined to become a successful tattoo artist that on her first day as an apprentice she got the word "cursed" etched over her eye.She thought her tattooed face would put off most employers and leave her no choice but to pursue her ambition."
She probably then complains about discrimination
Michael Cohen’s Non-Crime: Prosecutor Twists Campaign-Finance Law - "a candidate may intend for good toothpaste and soap, a quality suit, and a healthy breakfast to positively influence his election, but none of those are campaign expenditures, because all of those purchases would typically be made irrespective of running for office. And even if the candidate might not have brushed his teeth quite so often or would have bought a cheaper suit absent the campaign, these purchases still address his underlying obligations of maintaining hygiene and dressing himself.To use a more pertinent example, imagine a wealthy entrepreneur who decides to run for office. Like many men and women with substantial business activities, at any one time there are likely several lawsuits pending against him personally, or against those various businesses. The candidate calls in his company attorney: “I want all outstanding lawsuits against our various enterprises settled.” His lawyer protests that the suits are without merit — the company should clearly win at trial, and he should protect his reputation of not settling meritless lawsuits. “I agree that these suits lack merit,” says our candidate, “but I don’t want them as a distraction during the campaign, and I don’t want to take the risk that the papers will use them to portray me as a heartless tycoon. Get them settled.”The settlements in this hypothetical are made “for the purpose of influencing the election,” yet they are not “expenditures” under the Federal Election Campaign Act. Indeed, if they were, the candidate would have to pay for them with campaign funds. Thus, an unscrupulous but popular businessman could declare his candidacy, gather contributions from the public, use those contributions to settle various preexisting lawsuits, and then withdraw from the race. A nice trick!"
By Bradley A. Smith, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission
We don’t want billionaires’ charity. We want them to pay their taxes | Owen Jones - "Rather than philanthropy, the super-wealthy should give their money to governments that know better how to spend it"
Interesting assumptions - governments are superior in social spending
Will the Guardian now investigate its own tax arrangements? | Coffee House - "Something odd happened at the Guardian on Monday as the paper’s editorial staff were basking in the glow of their just-published splash about the Panama papers. They were understandably excited, having sat on the revelations for months, and were about to put flesh on the bones of the stories that had broken on Sunday evening about the elaborate tax-avoidance schemes of assorted Tory bigwigs. The Guardian was one of 107 media organisations that had been secretly going through the cache of 11.5 million documents stolen from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca... they either didn’t know or had forgotten about the Guardian Media Group’s use of a tax-exempt shell company in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying corporation tax when it sold its 50 per cent holding in Auto Trader to Apax Partners in 2008 (hat tip to Guido Fawkes). Further, they were similarly ignorant about the hundreds of millions GMG has invested in offshore hedge funds over the years. But that seems unlikely. After all, right-wing hacks like me lose no opportunity to draw attention to the paper’s creative tax affairs, particularly when confronted with self-righteous columnists like Owen Jones and Polly Toynbee wagging their fingers at Vodafone and Starbucks for avoiding paying their ‘fair share’. A second possibility — and, admittedly, this is farfetched — is that the paper’s hacks have actually read and been convinced by the former editor Alan Rusbridger’s long, rambling explanation of why the directors of GMG aren’t tax-dodgers after all. In his 2,000-word essay on the subject, published three years after the allegations were first put to him (so much for transparency!), he claims it was perfectly right and proper that GMG didn’t pay a single penny in corporation tax on its £302 million profit from that sale. Insofar as I understand it (and I’ve read it three times) the gist of Rusbridger’s argument is that GMG’s tax affairs are all fine and dandy because they’re perfectly legal. Hmm. Couldn’t exactly the same defence be made of the Tory bigwigs?No, the correct explanation, I believe, is that the paper’s hacks were applauding the sheer brazenness of their hypocrisy"
Owen Jones Distances Himself From Guardian - "Challenged by Toby Young on the Daily Politics, Owen Jones swerved the question of the Guardian attacking offshore tax shelters whilst sheltering half-a-billion of its assets in the Caymans:
“I am not responsible for my employer’s tax affairs.”
While writing in today’s paper that “while the poor’s smallest misdemeanours are punished, the rich are able to draft the loopholes they then use to avoid tax”"
Owen Jones, HSBC, The Guardian and mel - "For a long time I have been very frustrated with the Guardian’s lack of coverage, and particularly investigation, into HSBC crimes. The reasons are obvious – the Guardian is a bigger recipient of advertising revenue from HSBC than all other online papers. What I find even more frustrating is the dishonesty of its contributors in admitting that, or that their income from HSBC has any bearing on their editorial policy. If so, that would be the first time in the history of newspapers."
10 tricks to appear intelligent during development meetings - "While you may think you work for the good of the people of [fill in the name of country here], you actually work for the donor. And donors love nothing more than holding meetings...
5 | Say: ‘I don’t see a gender component’
Letting the group know you care very much about gender issues is something that will endear you to peers and supervisors alike. Donors love people who are looking for the gender angle, even if the project is the artificial insemination of goats in the Andes mountains...
9 | Openly mock the standing government
The only real barrier to your success as a development organisation is whoever’s currently sitting in the presidential palace/mansion/hut. You and the donor are the most effective team ever assembled for this kind of work, and the plans you’ve collectively put together would be an unmitigated success if not for the policies of the president/king/high lord of all he/she surveys."
What Makes Call-Out Culture So Toxic - "Because call-outs tend to be public, they can enable a particularly armchair and academic brand of activism: one in which the act of calling out is seen as an end in itself.What makes call-out culture so toxic is not necessarily its frequency so much as the nature and performance of the call-out itself. Especially in online venues like Twitter and Facebook, calling someone out isn’t just a private interaction between two individuals: it’s a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit or how pure their politics are. Indeed, sometimes it can feel like the performance itself is more significant than the content of the call-out. This is why “calling in” has been proposed as an alternative to calling out: calling in means speaking privately with an individual who has done some wrong, in order to address the behaviour without making a spectacle of the address itself... most call-outs I have witnessed immediately render anyone who has committed a perceived wrong as an outsider to the community. One action becomes a reason to pass judgment on someone’s entire being, as if there is no difference between a community member or friend and a random stranger walking down the street (who is of course also someone’s friend). Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them as people with complicated stories and histories. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out. More often than not, this boundary is constructed through the use of appropriate language and terminology – a language and terminology that are forever shifting and almost impossible to keep up with. In such a context, it is impossible not to fail at least some of the time... How do we hold people to account who are experts at using anti-oppressive language to justify oppressive behaviour? We don’t have a word to describe this kind of perverse exercise of power, despite the fact that it occurs on an almost daily basis in progressive circles. Perhaps we could call it anti-oppressivism... when people are reduced to their identities of privilege (as white, cisgender, male, etc.) and mocked as such, it means we’re treating each other as if our individual social locations stand in for the total systems those parts of our identities represent. Individuals become synonymous with systems of oppression, and this can turn systemic analysis into moral judgment. Too often, when it comes to being called out, narrow definitions of a person’s identity count for everything."
Why Does Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Anger Lefty Feminists So Much? - "We’re accustomed to feminist icons like Linda Hirshman and Gloria Feldt scoffing at the “stay-at-home” mom – a snub of their feminist forbearers and a sign that the women’s movement has still only seen limited success. No one was surprised, for instance, when women’s activist Hilary Rosen suggested Ann Romney “had never worked a day in her life.” For these women, choosing to be a wife and mother rather than pursue a high-powered career was simply not an acceptable choice.But the tides have shifted. Now the career woman who has focused almost exclusively on building her professional credentials (and we all know you don’t rise to elite corporate positions without sacrificing family) is the target of recent feminist frustration. Suddenly women on the left are bashing high-level professional women as elitist, unable to sympathize with the problems of real working women... Women like Dowd or Bamberger are not concerned about such traditional goals of “feminism” – they’re merely striking a feminist pose in defense of their real agenda: a bigger government controlling more of our economy and society. When Sandberg instructs women to take control over their choices, or Mayer makes difficult corporate policies, they undermine the progressives’ raison d’etre. The independence and real feminism Sandberg and Mayer represent flies in the face of the collective activism, gender-based politics, and expanded government that progressives really seek to advance. “Feminism” is a mask, as well as a weapon, for the advance of the state – and it’s an effective one."
Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers - "In addition to Mayer, two other female executives — Kathy Savitt, former chief marketing officer, and Megan Liberman, editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, identified in the lawsuit as Yahoo’s vice president of news at the time — are accused in the lawsuit of discriminating on the basis of gender.“When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines, were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,” the lawsuit said. “Savitt has publicly expressed support for increasing the number of women in media and has intentionally hired and promoted women because of their gender, while terminating, demoting or laying off male employees because of their gender.“Of the approximately 16 senior-level editorial employees hired or promoted by Savitt … in approximately an 18-month period, 14 of them, or 87 percent, were female,” the lawsuit said."
Silicon Valley men push back on gender equity efforts - "“It’s a witch hunt,” he said in a phone interview, contending men are being fired by “dangerous” human resources departments. “I’m sitting in a soundproof booth right now because I’m afraid someone will hear me. When you’re discussing gender issues, it’s almost religious, the response. It’s almost zealotry.”... Few were willing to talk openly about their thinking, for fear of standing out in largely progressive Silicon Valley.Even so, “witch hunt” is the new whispered meme. Some in tech have started identifying as “contrarians,” to indicate subtly that they do not follow the “diversity dogma.” And self-described men’s rights activists in Silicon Valley said their numbers at meetings were rising... Few were willing to talk openly about their thinking, for fear of standing out in largely progressive Silicon Valley.Even so, “witch hunt” is the new whispered meme. Some in tech have started identifying as “contrarians,” to indicate subtly that they do not follow the “diversity dogma.” And self-described men’s rights activists in Silicon Valley said their numbers at meetings were rising... Another start-up investor, John Durant, wrote that “Charles Darwin himself would be fired from Google for his views on the sexes.”And the investor Peter Thiel’s business partner, Eric Weinstein, tweeted, “Dear @Google, Stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.”... “Some companies have hiring goals like ‘We’ll give you a bonus if you’re a hiring manager and you hire 70 percent women to this organization.’ That’s illegal.”... “Some companies have hiring goals like ‘We’ll give you a bonus if you’re a hiring manager and you hire 70 percent women to this organization.’ That’s illegal”... Cassie Jaye, who lives in Marin and made a documentary about the men’s rights movement called “The Red Pill,” said that the tech world and the men’s rights community had “snowballed” together and that the rise in the number of people in Mgtow is new.On the Mgtow message boards, members discuss work ( “Ever work for a woman? Roll up your sleeves and share your horror story”), technology (“The stuff girlfriends and wives can’t stand — computers, games, consoles”) and dating (mostly best practices to avoid commitment).“I think there are a lot of guys living this lifestyle without naming it, and then they find Mgtow,” said Ms. Jaye, who calls herself a former feminist."
She probably then complains about discrimination
Michael Cohen’s Non-Crime: Prosecutor Twists Campaign-Finance Law - "a candidate may intend for good toothpaste and soap, a quality suit, and a healthy breakfast to positively influence his election, but none of those are campaign expenditures, because all of those purchases would typically be made irrespective of running for office. And even if the candidate might not have brushed his teeth quite so often or would have bought a cheaper suit absent the campaign, these purchases still address his underlying obligations of maintaining hygiene and dressing himself.To use a more pertinent example, imagine a wealthy entrepreneur who decides to run for office. Like many men and women with substantial business activities, at any one time there are likely several lawsuits pending against him personally, or against those various businesses. The candidate calls in his company attorney: “I want all outstanding lawsuits against our various enterprises settled.” His lawyer protests that the suits are without merit — the company should clearly win at trial, and he should protect his reputation of not settling meritless lawsuits. “I agree that these suits lack merit,” says our candidate, “but I don’t want them as a distraction during the campaign, and I don’t want to take the risk that the papers will use them to portray me as a heartless tycoon. Get them settled.”The settlements in this hypothetical are made “for the purpose of influencing the election,” yet they are not “expenditures” under the Federal Election Campaign Act. Indeed, if they were, the candidate would have to pay for them with campaign funds. Thus, an unscrupulous but popular businessman could declare his candidacy, gather contributions from the public, use those contributions to settle various preexisting lawsuits, and then withdraw from the race. A nice trick!"
By Bradley A. Smith, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission
We don’t want billionaires’ charity. We want them to pay their taxes | Owen Jones - "Rather than philanthropy, the super-wealthy should give their money to governments that know better how to spend it"
Interesting assumptions - governments are superior in social spending
Will the Guardian now investigate its own tax arrangements? | Coffee House - "Something odd happened at the Guardian on Monday as the paper’s editorial staff were basking in the glow of their just-published splash about the Panama papers. They were understandably excited, having sat on the revelations for months, and were about to put flesh on the bones of the stories that had broken on Sunday evening about the elaborate tax-avoidance schemes of assorted Tory bigwigs. The Guardian was one of 107 media organisations that had been secretly going through the cache of 11.5 million documents stolen from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca... they either didn’t know or had forgotten about the Guardian Media Group’s use of a tax-exempt shell company in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying corporation tax when it sold its 50 per cent holding in Auto Trader to Apax Partners in 2008 (hat tip to Guido Fawkes). Further, they were similarly ignorant about the hundreds of millions GMG has invested in offshore hedge funds over the years. But that seems unlikely. After all, right-wing hacks like me lose no opportunity to draw attention to the paper’s creative tax affairs, particularly when confronted with self-righteous columnists like Owen Jones and Polly Toynbee wagging their fingers at Vodafone and Starbucks for avoiding paying their ‘fair share’. A second possibility — and, admittedly, this is farfetched — is that the paper’s hacks have actually read and been convinced by the former editor Alan Rusbridger’s long, rambling explanation of why the directors of GMG aren’t tax-dodgers after all. In his 2,000-word essay on the subject, published three years after the allegations were first put to him (so much for transparency!), he claims it was perfectly right and proper that GMG didn’t pay a single penny in corporation tax on its £302 million profit from that sale. Insofar as I understand it (and I’ve read it three times) the gist of Rusbridger’s argument is that GMG’s tax affairs are all fine and dandy because they’re perfectly legal. Hmm. Couldn’t exactly the same defence be made of the Tory bigwigs?No, the correct explanation, I believe, is that the paper’s hacks were applauding the sheer brazenness of their hypocrisy"
Owen Jones Distances Himself From Guardian - "Challenged by Toby Young on the Daily Politics, Owen Jones swerved the question of the Guardian attacking offshore tax shelters whilst sheltering half-a-billion of its assets in the Caymans:
“I am not responsible for my employer’s tax affairs.”
While writing in today’s paper that “while the poor’s smallest misdemeanours are punished, the rich are able to draft the loopholes they then use to avoid tax”"
Owen Jones, HSBC, The Guardian and mel - "For a long time I have been very frustrated with the Guardian’s lack of coverage, and particularly investigation, into HSBC crimes. The reasons are obvious – the Guardian is a bigger recipient of advertising revenue from HSBC than all other online papers. What I find even more frustrating is the dishonesty of its contributors in admitting that, or that their income from HSBC has any bearing on their editorial policy. If so, that would be the first time in the history of newspapers."
10 tricks to appear intelligent during development meetings - "While you may think you work for the good of the people of [fill in the name of country here], you actually work for the donor. And donors love nothing more than holding meetings...
5 | Say: ‘I don’t see a gender component’
Letting the group know you care very much about gender issues is something that will endear you to peers and supervisors alike. Donors love people who are looking for the gender angle, even if the project is the artificial insemination of goats in the Andes mountains...
9 | Openly mock the standing government
The only real barrier to your success as a development organisation is whoever’s currently sitting in the presidential palace/mansion/hut. You and the donor are the most effective team ever assembled for this kind of work, and the plans you’ve collectively put together would be an unmitigated success if not for the policies of the president/king/high lord of all he/she surveys."
What Makes Call-Out Culture So Toxic - "Because call-outs tend to be public, they can enable a particularly armchair and academic brand of activism: one in which the act of calling out is seen as an end in itself.What makes call-out culture so toxic is not necessarily its frequency so much as the nature and performance of the call-out itself. Especially in online venues like Twitter and Facebook, calling someone out isn’t just a private interaction between two individuals: it’s a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit or how pure their politics are. Indeed, sometimes it can feel like the performance itself is more significant than the content of the call-out. This is why “calling in” has been proposed as an alternative to calling out: calling in means speaking privately with an individual who has done some wrong, in order to address the behaviour without making a spectacle of the address itself... most call-outs I have witnessed immediately render anyone who has committed a perceived wrong as an outsider to the community. One action becomes a reason to pass judgment on someone’s entire being, as if there is no difference between a community member or friend and a random stranger walking down the street (who is of course also someone’s friend). Call-out culture can end up mirroring what the prison industrial complex teaches us about crime and punishment: to banish and dispose of individuals rather than to engage with them as people with complicated stories and histories. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out. More often than not, this boundary is constructed through the use of appropriate language and terminology – a language and terminology that are forever shifting and almost impossible to keep up with. In such a context, it is impossible not to fail at least some of the time... How do we hold people to account who are experts at using anti-oppressive language to justify oppressive behaviour? We don’t have a word to describe this kind of perverse exercise of power, despite the fact that it occurs on an almost daily basis in progressive circles. Perhaps we could call it anti-oppressivism... when people are reduced to their identities of privilege (as white, cisgender, male, etc.) and mocked as such, it means we’re treating each other as if our individual social locations stand in for the total systems those parts of our identities represent. Individuals become synonymous with systems of oppression, and this can turn systemic analysis into moral judgment. Too often, when it comes to being called out, narrow definitions of a person’s identity count for everything."
Why Does Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Anger Lefty Feminists So Much? - "We’re accustomed to feminist icons like Linda Hirshman and Gloria Feldt scoffing at the “stay-at-home” mom – a snub of their feminist forbearers and a sign that the women’s movement has still only seen limited success. No one was surprised, for instance, when women’s activist Hilary Rosen suggested Ann Romney “had never worked a day in her life.” For these women, choosing to be a wife and mother rather than pursue a high-powered career was simply not an acceptable choice.But the tides have shifted. Now the career woman who has focused almost exclusively on building her professional credentials (and we all know you don’t rise to elite corporate positions without sacrificing family) is the target of recent feminist frustration. Suddenly women on the left are bashing high-level professional women as elitist, unable to sympathize with the problems of real working women... Women like Dowd or Bamberger are not concerned about such traditional goals of “feminism” – they’re merely striking a feminist pose in defense of their real agenda: a bigger government controlling more of our economy and society. When Sandberg instructs women to take control over their choices, or Mayer makes difficult corporate policies, they undermine the progressives’ raison d’etre. The independence and real feminism Sandberg and Mayer represent flies in the face of the collective activism, gender-based politics, and expanded government that progressives really seek to advance. “Feminism” is a mask, as well as a weapon, for the advance of the state – and it’s an effective one."
Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers - "In addition to Mayer, two other female executives — Kathy Savitt, former chief marketing officer, and Megan Liberman, editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, identified in the lawsuit as Yahoo’s vice president of news at the time — are accused in the lawsuit of discriminating on the basis of gender.“When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines, were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,” the lawsuit said. “Savitt has publicly expressed support for increasing the number of women in media and has intentionally hired and promoted women because of their gender, while terminating, demoting or laying off male employees because of their gender.“Of the approximately 16 senior-level editorial employees hired or promoted by Savitt … in approximately an 18-month period, 14 of them, or 87 percent, were female,” the lawsuit said."
Silicon Valley men push back on gender equity efforts - "“It’s a witch hunt,” he said in a phone interview, contending men are being fired by “dangerous” human resources departments. “I’m sitting in a soundproof booth right now because I’m afraid someone will hear me. When you’re discussing gender issues, it’s almost religious, the response. It’s almost zealotry.”... Few were willing to talk openly about their thinking, for fear of standing out in largely progressive Silicon Valley.Even so, “witch hunt” is the new whispered meme. Some in tech have started identifying as “contrarians,” to indicate subtly that they do not follow the “diversity dogma.” And self-described men’s rights activists in Silicon Valley said their numbers at meetings were rising... Few were willing to talk openly about their thinking, for fear of standing out in largely progressive Silicon Valley.Even so, “witch hunt” is the new whispered meme. Some in tech have started identifying as “contrarians,” to indicate subtly that they do not follow the “diversity dogma.” And self-described men’s rights activists in Silicon Valley said their numbers at meetings were rising... Another start-up investor, John Durant, wrote that “Charles Darwin himself would be fired from Google for his views on the sexes.”And the investor Peter Thiel’s business partner, Eric Weinstein, tweeted, “Dear @Google, Stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.”... “Some companies have hiring goals like ‘We’ll give you a bonus if you’re a hiring manager and you hire 70 percent women to this organization.’ That’s illegal.”... “Some companies have hiring goals like ‘We’ll give you a bonus if you’re a hiring manager and you hire 70 percent women to this organization.’ That’s illegal”... Cassie Jaye, who lives in Marin and made a documentary about the men’s rights movement called “The Red Pill,” said that the tech world and the men’s rights community had “snowballed” together and that the rise in the number of people in Mgtow is new.On the Mgtow message boards, members discuss work ( “Ever work for a woman? Roll up your sleeves and share your horror story”), technology (“The stuff girlfriends and wives can’t stand — computers, games, consoles”) and dating (mostly best practices to avoid commitment).“I think there are a lot of guys living this lifestyle without naming it, and then they find Mgtow,” said Ms. Jaye, who calls herself a former feminist."
Post ID: 555434660706875090
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Links - 20th July 2019 (3)
Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 195 - Zach Weinersmith on "Emerging technologies that'll improve and/or ruin everything" - "something like a fifth or a quarter of elite scientists will admit to taking nootropic drugs, brain enhancers like modafinil or Adderall. I've heard cocaine. So there's already an arms race happening... Once 25% of people are doing it, you're pretty highly incentivized to do it too, and not just peer pressure. Economic pressure...
'Of the technologies you looked at, which do you think is least risky, and which do you think is most risky to society or civilization as a whole?'
'I would say least risky has got to be organ printing or maybe precision medicine. Any of the medical stuff. To the extent we can come up with some way it's bad, the good so outweighs it. With organ printing you could say well, it's going to change the way we think about our bodies, and that's probably true. I don't know if it's negative but it's weird. On the other hand there's, whatever it was, 122,000 people in the US waiting for an organ. It's very hard to say, "Well there's an ethical conundrum with giving you an immediate exit from dialysis."'...
'Safe Is Not an Option: Overcoming the Futile Obsession with Getting Everyone Back Alive that is Killing Our Expansion into Space.'...
'A lot of times, risk aversion doesn't actually mitigate risk. He discussed some cases I think with the Space Shuttle, where basically escape hatches were built in the design, which actually make it substantially more dangerous, because it's just one more thing to break.'...
My wife is a parasitologist, for example and there are all sorts of stories about parasitologists who want to bring ... I probably shouldn't repeat this, but who want to bring some species home from South America or Africa, and they bring it in their bodies to get it through customs...
Gell-Mann amnesia... there's this funny thing that happens where if you read anything in the popular press about a subject that you personally happen to be an expert in, you discover how off-base it is. And you're like, "Oh god, they're just misrepresenting everything and misunderstanding everything."And then when you read about anything that you're not an expert in, you kind of forget that. And you just take it as truth. And you forget that there's no reason to expect that your particular field should be an exception and maybe you should be more uncertain about everything."
2506 Sidearms of the Great War | The History Network - "Artillery is estimated to have caused 90% of Battlefield casualties in the Great War
2507 William ‘Billy’ Bishop pt.1 | The History Network - "Landing was not a strength for him, and he soon would gain reputation for causing more damage to his planes by landing than did any fight with the enemy"
EPISODE 100! Meme Fest: The Art of Memes — The Art History Babes - "The art movement continuously rejected the ruling art conventions and questioned the status of art. The Dadaists embodied the essence of anti-art. So that being said, Dadists never had a clear goal with their own art intentions, they were just making art that made no sense. But it reflected the social situation of the time"
Episode 117: Art History BB: The Swing — The Art History Babes - "During this time in France, a swing was considered a symbol of infidelity. Between the rhythmic movement of the swing to the position of the body, it was considered a metaphor for sex… additionally the fountain she faces and kicks her shoe toward could be a nod to Cupid, the Roman god of desire and lust. Cupid raises his finger to his lips. Is this an attempt at hushing the barking dog? The hardly visible but obviously aggravated dog is barking at the man pushing the swing but to no avail. The pup’s warnings are going unnoticed by this oblivious man. And desire is overpowering fidelity in the scene. And just the cherry on top, if peering up her skirt isn't kind of scandalous enough, the angle of his outstretched arm is just undeniably phallic."
Episode 102: Vinny Van Gogh — The Art History Babes - "‘I wonder how many times doctors told Van Gogh to do cocaine about his epilepsy.’...
‘They used to smoke cigarettes when women were pregnant, to keep them from gaining too much weight.’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Friday's business with Rob Young - "This is a weird scene to say the least. Workers are celebrating being fired. Car manufacturer Ford announced that they’ll be closing down its factory after 50 years of operation in Brazil. These workers are celebrating that they got a very good severance package"
IVITA 4600g/pair Silicone Breast Forms TG Crossdress Large Fake Boobs H/HH Cup Cup by IVITA - Shop Online for Baby in Australia - "Product Material: 100% medical liquid silicone Suitable for people£º
1: Breast cancer (Unilateral mastectomy)
2: Small breasts girl
3: Cross dressers"
Biden Suggests Starting ‘Physical Revolution’ To Deal With Republicans - "Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden appeared to suggest using violence against Republicans on Monday in response to a question about how he as president would deal with opposition to his agenda in the Senate from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell."
Joe Biden 2020 Campaign and Democratic Party Miscalculations - "'Fifty-six percent of Democrats self-identify as “moderate” and 9 percent even embrace “conservative,” according to an April poll from the Judy Ford Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University. While leftist activists pine for the end of the legislative filibuster to grease the skids for partisan legislation, a December GW Politics poll found that 66 percent of Democrats said they prefer elected officials who “make compromises with people they disagree with” over those who “stick to their positions.” Only 36 percent of Republicans said the same.'...
key candidates have made such extreme statements in the effort to appeal to what turned out to be the Democratic minority that they’ve rendered themselves more vulnerable in the general election. It’s hard to walk back pledges to wipe away private health insurance or tear down border walls, for example. It turns out that dreams of a united, energized progressive tidal wave may well die in the face of a more-moderate electorate that mainly seeks a return to normalcy, modest reforms, and an end to daily political drama. We’ll see, of course, and I freely acknowledge this take could age badly, but at the very least there is a real recognition that the Online Left is out of step with the bulk of the Democratic electorate. That fact alone could help diminish the power of angry online activism and the reduce the influence of Twitter tirades. If that happens, win or lose Joe Biden will have made an important contribution to American political discourse."
Opinion | Dear Millennials: The Feeling Is Mutual - The New York Times - "a video of Joe Biden saying he had “no empathy” for “the younger generation” that “tells me how tough things are” resurfaced on social media. The video was over a year old, but it elicited predictable howls from members of the dissed demographic. “Nothing says ‘perfect candidate to lead the most powerful nation in the world’ like ‘I have no empathy,’” wrote someone with the Twitter handle @anarchopriapism.My own reactionary reaction was different. O.K., I thought, I could definitely vote for Joe — provided he has the mettle to stand his ground.I’ve been saying for a while now that both parties could use a Sister Souljah moment, in which a candidate shows the intestinal fortitude to rebuke some obnoxious person or faction within his political base... The signature move in each of these instances (and there are so many more) is to allege an invisible harm in order to inflict an actual one. In place of an eye for an eye, we have professional destruction for emotional upset. Careers and reputations built over decades come to ruin, or nearly so, on account of a personal mistake or a disfavored opinion. All of these struggle sessions play to the sound of chortling twenty-somethings, who have figured out that, in today’s culture, the quickest way to acquire and exercise power is to take offense. This is easy to do, because the list of sins to which one may take offense grows with each passing year, from the culturally appropriated sombrero to the traditionally gendered pronoun... He could make a virtue of the defect by emphasizing his distance from everything that defines the worst aspects of millennial culture — the coddled minds and censorious manner and inability to understand the way the world works. Does it ever occur to some of our more militant millennials that the pitiless standards they apply to others will someday be applied pitilessly to them?"
Turns Out NASA Creates Posters For Every Space Mission And They’re Hilariously Awkward
Professor Who Published Fake Gender Studies Papers To Prove Point Now Targeted By His Own University - "PSU philosophy professor Peter Boghossian is being investigated by his employer for committing a “human subjects” ethics violation by contributing to the hoax, which itself was an academic study."
Strange how sending out fake resumes to study discrimination isn't an ethics violation
15 Gross Medieval Foods That People Actually Ate In The Middle Ages - "During the Middle Ages, it was believed that beaver tails were "cold" and thus could be eaten on fast days. In the 17th century it was no longer just the tail that was allowed on fast days but the whole beaver itself. Apparently, when the Bishop of Quebec asked his superiors whether his parish could eat beavers on Fridays during Lent, the church declared that indeed they could for the beaver was a fish due to the fact that it was an excellent swimmer.
Ever wondered how to roast a cat? According to one Medieval recipe, you start off by cutting off its head and throwing it away “because it is not for eating, for they say that eating the brains will cause him who eats them to lose his senses and judgment.” Then, you cut the cat open and clean it. At this stage, the feline may look ready to be roasted but alas - you must first bury it in the ground for a day and a night before you do so. You can serve the roasted cat by soaking it in broth and garlic.
Forget swans and peacocks that looked as if they were alive. The singing chicken was so much more impressive. It was prepared by tying the bird’s neck with quicksilver and ground sulphur, which, when the bird was reheated, made it sound like it was singing. It was also not uncommon to have a swan, pig or fish breathe fire, an impressive feat that was achieved by soaking cotton in alcohol and then lighting it inside the animal.
A sheep's penis was a rather curious medieval dish that was prepared by washing and cleaning it and then stuffing it with the yolks of ten eggs, saffron, milk, and fat. The whole thing was then blanched, roasted and sprinkled with ginger, cinnamon, and pepper.
There's no denying that medieval chefs were extremely innovative - they not only prepared scrumptious dishes from real-life beasts but also created their very own unique creatures that did not even exist. This creature was known as "Cockentrice" and was prepared by boiling a rooster, cutting it in half and sewing it to the bottom of a pig. The whole thing was then stuffed, roasted, and covered in egg yolks and saffron before being served to the very lucky dinner guests.
Medieval dinner parties were spectacles in themselves. People liked to be amused at the table and so medieval chefs came up with the idea of serving live animals that appeared to be dead at first glance but that would then run off once served at the table. Take the live chicken for example – a chicken was plucked alive in boiling water and glazed which gave it the appearance of it having been roasted. When the chicken fell asleep in the kitchen, it was brought out onto the table along with other dishes. But just as the chicken was about to be carved it would make off down the table, leaving chaos in its wake. Similarly, live frogs would often be placed inside a pie. When the top of the pie was cut open, the frogs would leap out and spring down the table, causing as much alarm as laughter among the guests"
'Of the technologies you looked at, which do you think is least risky, and which do you think is most risky to society or civilization as a whole?'
'I would say least risky has got to be organ printing or maybe precision medicine. Any of the medical stuff. To the extent we can come up with some way it's bad, the good so outweighs it. With organ printing you could say well, it's going to change the way we think about our bodies, and that's probably true. I don't know if it's negative but it's weird. On the other hand there's, whatever it was, 122,000 people in the US waiting for an organ. It's very hard to say, "Well there's an ethical conundrum with giving you an immediate exit from dialysis."'...
'Safe Is Not an Option: Overcoming the Futile Obsession with Getting Everyone Back Alive that is Killing Our Expansion into Space.'...
'A lot of times, risk aversion doesn't actually mitigate risk. He discussed some cases I think with the Space Shuttle, where basically escape hatches were built in the design, which actually make it substantially more dangerous, because it's just one more thing to break.'...
My wife is a parasitologist, for example and there are all sorts of stories about parasitologists who want to bring ... I probably shouldn't repeat this, but who want to bring some species home from South America or Africa, and they bring it in their bodies to get it through customs...
Gell-Mann amnesia... there's this funny thing that happens where if you read anything in the popular press about a subject that you personally happen to be an expert in, you discover how off-base it is. And you're like, "Oh god, they're just misrepresenting everything and misunderstanding everything."And then when you read about anything that you're not an expert in, you kind of forget that. And you just take it as truth. And you forget that there's no reason to expect that your particular field should be an exception and maybe you should be more uncertain about everything."
2506 Sidearms of the Great War | The History Network - "Artillery is estimated to have caused 90% of Battlefield casualties in the Great War
2507 William ‘Billy’ Bishop pt.1 | The History Network - "Landing was not a strength for him, and he soon would gain reputation for causing more damage to his planes by landing than did any fight with the enemy"
EPISODE 100! Meme Fest: The Art of Memes — The Art History Babes - "The art movement continuously rejected the ruling art conventions and questioned the status of art. The Dadaists embodied the essence of anti-art. So that being said, Dadists never had a clear goal with their own art intentions, they were just making art that made no sense. But it reflected the social situation of the time"
Episode 117: Art History BB: The Swing — The Art History Babes - "During this time in France, a swing was considered a symbol of infidelity. Between the rhythmic movement of the swing to the position of the body, it was considered a metaphor for sex… additionally the fountain she faces and kicks her shoe toward could be a nod to Cupid, the Roman god of desire and lust. Cupid raises his finger to his lips. Is this an attempt at hushing the barking dog? The hardly visible but obviously aggravated dog is barking at the man pushing the swing but to no avail. The pup’s warnings are going unnoticed by this oblivious man. And desire is overpowering fidelity in the scene. And just the cherry on top, if peering up her skirt isn't kind of scandalous enough, the angle of his outstretched arm is just undeniably phallic."
Episode 102: Vinny Van Gogh — The Art History Babes - "‘I wonder how many times doctors told Van Gogh to do cocaine about his epilepsy.’...
‘They used to smoke cigarettes when women were pregnant, to keep them from gaining too much weight.’"
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Friday's business with Rob Young - "This is a weird scene to say the least. Workers are celebrating being fired. Car manufacturer Ford announced that they’ll be closing down its factory after 50 years of operation in Brazil. These workers are celebrating that they got a very good severance package"
IVITA 4600g/pair Silicone Breast Forms TG Crossdress Large Fake Boobs H/HH Cup Cup by IVITA - Shop Online for Baby in Australia - "Product Material: 100% medical liquid silicone Suitable for people£º
1: Breast cancer (Unilateral mastectomy)
2: Small breasts girl
3: Cross dressers"
Biden Suggests Starting ‘Physical Revolution’ To Deal With Republicans - "Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden appeared to suggest using violence against Republicans on Monday in response to a question about how he as president would deal with opposition to his agenda in the Senate from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell."
Joe Biden 2020 Campaign and Democratic Party Miscalculations - "'Fifty-six percent of Democrats self-identify as “moderate” and 9 percent even embrace “conservative,” according to an April poll from the Judy Ford Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University. While leftist activists pine for the end of the legislative filibuster to grease the skids for partisan legislation, a December GW Politics poll found that 66 percent of Democrats said they prefer elected officials who “make compromises with people they disagree with” over those who “stick to their positions.” Only 36 percent of Republicans said the same.'...
key candidates have made such extreme statements in the effort to appeal to what turned out to be the Democratic minority that they’ve rendered themselves more vulnerable in the general election. It’s hard to walk back pledges to wipe away private health insurance or tear down border walls, for example. It turns out that dreams of a united, energized progressive tidal wave may well die in the face of a more-moderate electorate that mainly seeks a return to normalcy, modest reforms, and an end to daily political drama. We’ll see, of course, and I freely acknowledge this take could age badly, but at the very least there is a real recognition that the Online Left is out of step with the bulk of the Democratic electorate. That fact alone could help diminish the power of angry online activism and the reduce the influence of Twitter tirades. If that happens, win or lose Joe Biden will have made an important contribution to American political discourse."
Opinion | Dear Millennials: The Feeling Is Mutual - The New York Times - "a video of Joe Biden saying he had “no empathy” for “the younger generation” that “tells me how tough things are” resurfaced on social media. The video was over a year old, but it elicited predictable howls from members of the dissed demographic. “Nothing says ‘perfect candidate to lead the most powerful nation in the world’ like ‘I have no empathy,’” wrote someone with the Twitter handle @anarchopriapism.My own reactionary reaction was different. O.K., I thought, I could definitely vote for Joe — provided he has the mettle to stand his ground.I’ve been saying for a while now that both parties could use a Sister Souljah moment, in which a candidate shows the intestinal fortitude to rebuke some obnoxious person or faction within his political base... The signature move in each of these instances (and there are so many more) is to allege an invisible harm in order to inflict an actual one. In place of an eye for an eye, we have professional destruction for emotional upset. Careers and reputations built over decades come to ruin, or nearly so, on account of a personal mistake or a disfavored opinion. All of these struggle sessions play to the sound of chortling twenty-somethings, who have figured out that, in today’s culture, the quickest way to acquire and exercise power is to take offense. This is easy to do, because the list of sins to which one may take offense grows with each passing year, from the culturally appropriated sombrero to the traditionally gendered pronoun... He could make a virtue of the defect by emphasizing his distance from everything that defines the worst aspects of millennial culture — the coddled minds and censorious manner and inability to understand the way the world works. Does it ever occur to some of our more militant millennials that the pitiless standards they apply to others will someday be applied pitilessly to them?"
Turns Out NASA Creates Posters For Every Space Mission And They’re Hilariously Awkward
Professor Who Published Fake Gender Studies Papers To Prove Point Now Targeted By His Own University - "PSU philosophy professor Peter Boghossian is being investigated by his employer for committing a “human subjects” ethics violation by contributing to the hoax, which itself was an academic study."
Strange how sending out fake resumes to study discrimination isn't an ethics violation
15 Gross Medieval Foods That People Actually Ate In The Middle Ages - "During the Middle Ages, it was believed that beaver tails were "cold" and thus could be eaten on fast days. In the 17th century it was no longer just the tail that was allowed on fast days but the whole beaver itself. Apparently, when the Bishop of Quebec asked his superiors whether his parish could eat beavers on Fridays during Lent, the church declared that indeed they could for the beaver was a fish due to the fact that it was an excellent swimmer.
Ever wondered how to roast a cat? According to one Medieval recipe, you start off by cutting off its head and throwing it away “because it is not for eating, for they say that eating the brains will cause him who eats them to lose his senses and judgment.” Then, you cut the cat open and clean it. At this stage, the feline may look ready to be roasted but alas - you must first bury it in the ground for a day and a night before you do so. You can serve the roasted cat by soaking it in broth and garlic.
Forget swans and peacocks that looked as if they were alive. The singing chicken was so much more impressive. It was prepared by tying the bird’s neck with quicksilver and ground sulphur, which, when the bird was reheated, made it sound like it was singing. It was also not uncommon to have a swan, pig or fish breathe fire, an impressive feat that was achieved by soaking cotton in alcohol and then lighting it inside the animal.
A sheep's penis was a rather curious medieval dish that was prepared by washing and cleaning it and then stuffing it with the yolks of ten eggs, saffron, milk, and fat. The whole thing was then blanched, roasted and sprinkled with ginger, cinnamon, and pepper.
There's no denying that medieval chefs were extremely innovative - they not only prepared scrumptious dishes from real-life beasts but also created their very own unique creatures that did not even exist. This creature was known as "Cockentrice" and was prepared by boiling a rooster, cutting it in half and sewing it to the bottom of a pig. The whole thing was then stuffed, roasted, and covered in egg yolks and saffron before being served to the very lucky dinner guests.
Medieval dinner parties were spectacles in themselves. People liked to be amused at the table and so medieval chefs came up with the idea of serving live animals that appeared to be dead at first glance but that would then run off once served at the table. Take the live chicken for example – a chicken was plucked alive in boiling water and glazed which gave it the appearance of it having been roasted. When the chicken fell asleep in the kitchen, it was brought out onto the table along with other dishes. But just as the chicken was about to be carved it would make off down the table, leaving chaos in its wake. Similarly, live frogs would often be placed inside a pie. When the top of the pie was cut open, the frogs would leap out and spring down the table, causing as much alarm as laughter among the guests"
Post ID: 6156201837475751749
The Data-Driven Guide to Sane Parenting
The Data-Driven Guide to Sane Parenting (Ep. 376) - Freakonomics Freakonomics
"If you’ve ever had a child, or ever been a child, you know there’s a lot of parenting advice out there. Much of which is not very nuanced.
Emily OSTER: No one’s in the middle. People are yelling. The first person is like, “Well, I did that, and my kid’s amazing.” And then someone will be like, “Well, actually, if you do that, there’s a very good chance your baby will die, and only someone who hates their baby would do that.”...
Oster went back and started reading the underlying studies that contribute to the conventional wisdom on pregnancy and child-rearing. She found that a lot of the studies were built around small sample sizes or incomplete data. A lot of the analysis didn’t control for things like income and education level. Consider, for instance, one of the most controversial topics of early motherhood: breastfeeding...
OSTER: There are some small but not zero benefits in the short run, particularly around improving digestive health, lowering episodes of diarrhea, and maybe some evidence that it lowers rates of ear infections in the first year of life. But many of these claims that people make — breastfeeding is going to give your kid an I.Q. bump, breastfeeding is going to make your kid thin, it’s going to prevent allergies or asthma later — these things are just not supported in the data... this is the one long-term effect where it looks like maybe we have some good evidence, it suggests that it may actually lower breast cancer risks for the mother.
DUBNER: What’s the mechanism for that?
OSTER: Mechanisms are always hard, but in this case, I think we have some sense that it changes some of the composition of the cells in the breast in a way that may help protect against breast cancer... I am constantly comparing things to getting in a car, because getting in a car is very risky. And I think that there are many kinds of risks that people talk about in pregnancy and childhood which are far less risky than getting in a car, where people are like, “Oh, only somebody who’s a terrible parent would even consider doing that.” It’s like, “Well, actually, do you get in the car?”...
The advisors — doctors, primarily — aren’t necessarily practiced in risk-reward calculations.
OSTER: There is relatively little training on data analysis in medical school...
It is definitely true that drinking a lot of alcohol is very bad, and even one or two times having a large amount of alcohol can be very dangerous. But the data does not support the conclusion that occasional alcohol consumption — say, no more than a glass at a time, a few times a week — is dangerous for your baby...
Caffeine, again, the restrictions are very, very stringent. And I think some people take that to mean none, no caffeine. The truth is, there’s certainly no evidence that having two cups of coffee a day is dangerous. And there really isn’t much evidence that going up to, say, three or four cups a day, has any negative impact either. When you get into eight cups a day, that data is a little more complicated...
DUBNER: You write the following about going back to work yourself, as an economist: “The eighth hour at my job is better than the fifth hour with the kids on a typical day. And that is why I have a job, because I like it. It should be okay to say this.” Is it not okay to say this among certain friends or family members?
OSTER: Yeah, I think sometimes it’s not. I think it can feel often in these conversations that parents have with each other, and particularly moms, that if you work, you’re supposed to say, “Oh, well of course I have to work. I’d love to spend more time with my kids.” And if you don’t work, you sort of say, “Well, I have to stay home.” And I think you get a lot of judgment on both sides in a way that I think is really not helpful...
We do have good evidence from policy changes in the U.S. and from other places that that is good for infant health, that having some maternity-leave opportunities, some ability to be home early in life, is good.When we then think about going from four months to, say, two years, there we don’t see much evidence that that influences long-term outcomes. I think that going to everybody having a year is probably not as important as trying to make sure that people have a few months.
DUBNER: You write the following: “By the time I had Penelope” — which was your first kid — “I was 31. Up to that point in my life, there had been surprisingly few instances in which I could not defeat a problem with hard work.”"
"If you’ve ever had a child, or ever been a child, you know there’s a lot of parenting advice out there. Much of which is not very nuanced.
Emily OSTER: No one’s in the middle. People are yelling. The first person is like, “Well, I did that, and my kid’s amazing.” And then someone will be like, “Well, actually, if you do that, there’s a very good chance your baby will die, and only someone who hates their baby would do that.”...
Oster went back and started reading the underlying studies that contribute to the conventional wisdom on pregnancy and child-rearing. She found that a lot of the studies were built around small sample sizes or incomplete data. A lot of the analysis didn’t control for things like income and education level. Consider, for instance, one of the most controversial topics of early motherhood: breastfeeding...
OSTER: There are some small but not zero benefits in the short run, particularly around improving digestive health, lowering episodes of diarrhea, and maybe some evidence that it lowers rates of ear infections in the first year of life. But many of these claims that people make — breastfeeding is going to give your kid an I.Q. bump, breastfeeding is going to make your kid thin, it’s going to prevent allergies or asthma later — these things are just not supported in the data... this is the one long-term effect where it looks like maybe we have some good evidence, it suggests that it may actually lower breast cancer risks for the mother.
DUBNER: What’s the mechanism for that?
OSTER: Mechanisms are always hard, but in this case, I think we have some sense that it changes some of the composition of the cells in the breast in a way that may help protect against breast cancer... I am constantly comparing things to getting in a car, because getting in a car is very risky. And I think that there are many kinds of risks that people talk about in pregnancy and childhood which are far less risky than getting in a car, where people are like, “Oh, only somebody who’s a terrible parent would even consider doing that.” It’s like, “Well, actually, do you get in the car?”...
The advisors — doctors, primarily — aren’t necessarily practiced in risk-reward calculations.
OSTER: There is relatively little training on data analysis in medical school...
It is definitely true that drinking a lot of alcohol is very bad, and even one or two times having a large amount of alcohol can be very dangerous. But the data does not support the conclusion that occasional alcohol consumption — say, no more than a glass at a time, a few times a week — is dangerous for your baby...
Caffeine, again, the restrictions are very, very stringent. And I think some people take that to mean none, no caffeine. The truth is, there’s certainly no evidence that having two cups of coffee a day is dangerous. And there really isn’t much evidence that going up to, say, three or four cups a day, has any negative impact either. When you get into eight cups a day, that data is a little more complicated...
DUBNER: You write the following about going back to work yourself, as an economist: “The eighth hour at my job is better than the fifth hour with the kids on a typical day. And that is why I have a job, because I like it. It should be okay to say this.” Is it not okay to say this among certain friends or family members?
OSTER: Yeah, I think sometimes it’s not. I think it can feel often in these conversations that parents have with each other, and particularly moms, that if you work, you’re supposed to say, “Oh, well of course I have to work. I’d love to spend more time with my kids.” And if you don’t work, you sort of say, “Well, I have to stay home.” And I think you get a lot of judgment on both sides in a way that I think is really not helpful...
We do have good evidence from policy changes in the U.S. and from other places that that is good for infant health, that having some maternity-leave opportunities, some ability to be home early in life, is good.When we then think about going from four months to, say, two years, there we don’t see much evidence that that influences long-term outcomes. I think that going to everybody having a year is probably not as important as trying to make sure that people have a few months.
DUBNER: You write the following: “By the time I had Penelope” — which was your first kid — “I was 31. Up to that point in my life, there had been surprisingly few instances in which I could not defeat a problem with hard work.”"
Post ID: 5978148325138884424
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