I've lost control of my life - an entomologist rates ant emojis - "Samsung: This ant has an unexplained, double-jointed thorax, and no evidence of a waist. Her four-footed pose suggests that she a centaur rather than an ant. Centaur ants would be cool. I’m not sure what was intended here. 2/10.
emojidex: This ant… makes me sad. All of her legs are broken. The MS Paint art style and gradient abuse convey distress. She has a duck beak. Despite this, her expression suggests perseverance and determined cheerfulness. I want this ant to have a better life. I am rooting for her. 3/10
Mozilla: This is a termite. -10/10"
LEVY: Federally funded guide tells Muslims how to vote - "A federally funded Canadian Muslim Voting Guide — released three days before the Oct. 21 election — gives Conservative leader Andrew Scheer a series of failing grades for apparently associating with far-right, Islamophobic figures, opposing the M-103 motion and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and for proposing immigration policies that “compromise asylum seekers.”The highly partisan, anti-Zionist guide — produced by the Canadian Islamophobia Industry Research Project out of Wilfrid Laurier University — contends that newly re-elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been the “target of Islamophobic hate campaigns” and gives him a free pass for his black face antics because of his public stance against Islamophobia... Conservative senator Linda Frum said as disturbing as it is to see academics using Jew-hatred as a “useful metric” on how to assess a political party, what is worse is that the Liberal government paid for this “hateful propaganda.“This is a clear violation of parliamentary ethics, election law, not to mention simple decency,” she said Friday.B’nai Brith Canada CEO Michael Mostyn called it “totally unacceptable” that government funds were used to promote an anti-Semitic movement in Canada.“It is (also) deeply troubling that taxpayer dollars were used to subsidize a document ‘guiding’ Canadians on whom to support in an election,” he said.Late Friday, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) issued a statement saying SSHRC has launched an investigation into what appears to be “an unapproved use of funds” allocated for a different purpose."
Three Women Have Been Charged for Running an Elderly Fight Club at Nursing Home - "Three women have been charged with running a fight club for patients with dementia inside of Danby House, a nursing home located in North Carolina.Police arrested Taneshia Deshawn Jordan, Tonacia Yvonne Tyson, McKey on counts of assaulting an individual with a disability.According to reports, a staff member filmed as two women with dementia fought each other in one of their rooms
WaPo blasted for dubbing ISIS leader ‘austere religious scholar’ in head-scratching headline - "The Washington Post’s bizarre editorial decision to describe terror chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar” in an obituary headline has brought a storm of criticism upon the newspaper. As authorities offered confirmation that US forces had killed the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) leader in a raid on a safe house in northwestern Syria on Saturday night, the paper rolled out on obit marking the death of the barbarous jihadist by describing him as the “austere religious scholar at the helm of the Islamic State.” The Post acknowledged that the Iraqi led the terror group with “shocking brutality” but focused much of its obituary on his academic endeavors... Strangely, the first version of the story described al-Baghdadi as “Islamic State’s terrorist-in-chief,” only for it to later be changed to “austere religious scholar”. Perhaps the paper’s editors didn’t want to offend their IS readers?... Many others contrasted the Jeff Bezos owned newspapers' treatment of the US president with its delicate description of the violent terrorist leader.“The Washington Post writes harsher about our President than they do the leader of ISIS who cuts people’s heads off and murders innocents,” Charlie Kirk, the prominent conservative commentator, said. The backlash was so great that it appears to have prompted another headline switcheroo, as the piece now describes al-Baghdadi as an "extremist leader.""
Anything to minimise Trump's accomplishments. When Osama got assassinated, their headline was "Osama bin Laden killed: Leader of terrorist group al-Qaeda was 54."
CNN and Jake Tapper Cut Away from Trump's Baghdadi Presser - Say Honoring US Troops a "Lesser Matter" (VIDEO) - "During the press briefing on this historic event CNN and Jake Tapper cut away saying honoring US military men and women was a lesser matter."
Face facts, America, Donald Trump is a success. Let's count the ways. - "White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently tweeted, “Which is the more underreported story of @POTUS year one? Defeat of ISIS. Booming Trump economy”... According to the Media Research Center, coverage of Trump on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts in September, October and November was more than 90% negative... 93-year-old former president Jimmy Carter said, “I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about.”... Ross Douthat, writing in The Times, called the ISIS defeat “a case where the media is not adequately reporting an important success because it does not fit into the narrative of Trumpian disaster in which our journalistic entities are all invested.”... Consumer confidence: In October, consumer confidence rose to the highest level in 17 years, according to the New York-based Conference Board."
Democratic debate: Going home to the heart of Ohio's Trump country - "Many of my family, friends, former teachers, coaches, classmates and church congregates — and all their friends — in this county of 30,000 people are Trump supporters, and I didn't want to put them out there, by name, for the trolls to feast on.I love my hometown and its people too much.These folks already get made fun of enough for being from Appalachia. They're good, respectful people who are focused on taking care of their families. They want to be left alone. They don't care about stupid Twitter wars, and I don't want to be responsible for thrusting them into the vicious rhetorical crossfire between leftist activists and Trump sycophants... a lot of folks didn't want to talk about Trump. They didn't want to put themselves out there for fear of being verbally bludgeoned on Facebook and Twitter, or in the grocery store or even at church.And those who did want to talk, well, they seemed to speak for those who wanted to remain silent: They're tired of certain cable news networks and the leftist political class stereotyping them as a bunch of toothless, racist, backwoods rubes. "I don't want to talk about it because you can't have an opinion unless it's their opinion," an African-American Trump supporter said about the left. "Either you believe the way they believe, or you're a racist or a homophobe. The reason I'm working is because of what Trump's done. I just want to put my hard hat on and go to work every day." The man, who added he's a registered Democrat, talked to Enquirer photographer Albert Cesare and me for nearly an hour on his front porch on a hot evening. He said a lady at his church had given him grief for supporting "racist" Trump, but the man said he has seen no hard evidence that's true... The truth is, these aren't a bunch of Bible-thumping hillbillies. I spoke with nearly 20 Trump supporters. Most of them didn't want to be quoted, but every single one of them said the No. 1 thing they like about Trump is he's focused on jobs. Nothing about Russia or building walls or locking anyone up.I know it's hard for the out-of-touch political class obsessed with hating Trump and all his supporters to fathom this, but there aren't stereotypes on every street corner and dirt road here... Ironically, I often see more leftover Obama bumper stickers during my 15-minute commute to The Enquirer than I saw Trump signs back home... there's not this widespread obsession with Trump — and never has been — in the areas where he dominated at the polls. It might be hard for some to grasp this, but don't believe everything you read in the alt-reality world of social media.Every person I talked to about Trump, generally said:He was the lesser of two evils — and still is.I like what he's doing on the economy.I wish he'd stop tweeting.Sounds like the same thing Trump supporters in Greater Cincinnati — and everywhere else in Ohio — say... Gallia County's unemployment rate is 5.6%, the lowest it has been since 1979"
Democrats' racism message may swing my vote to President Trump - "I am not a President Trump supporter. But if the alternative to him in next year’s election is open borders and the Green New Deal, I may become a Trump voter... they’ve trafficked in hysteria and hyperbole, particularly in their response to the El Paso, Texas, shooting. Democrats fell over themselves to implicate the president’s rhetoric and policies. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pronounced Trump “directly responsible” for the massacre because of his rhetoric. Imagine. Having never met the gunman, the freshman congresswoman looked into his heart and determined that he wouldn’t have killed if not for Trump. Is it any wonder the president’s defenders reacted? Not that they had to look far for material: Thirteen hours after the Texas shooting, a self-described anti-borders leftist and Elizabeth Warren supporter killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio.You can guess how many Democrats acknowledged apparent parallels between their own ideas, some of which was echoed by the Dayton shooter, and the ideas they blamed for 22 deaths in El Paso. Its current trajectory gives the Democratic Party two problems in 2020. First, the agenda: a spending spree like no country has ever attempted, supposedly financed by a handful of wealthy taxpayers. What could go wrong?Second, the message to voters. Progressives have long denounced America as hopelessly retrograde and racist. Naturally, they’re talking about everyone except themselves... The contempt descended into incoherence even before the shootings. Candidate Andrew Yang matter-of-factly predicts the disappearance of millions of low-skill jobs. Yet he and his party argue for essentially allowing millions of low-skill workers to enter the country without consequences. If you work in an industry likely to absorb some of that labor, you might wonder if this is how the Democrats plan to revive their brand as champion of the little guy. Are you the little guy they have in mind, or have you slipped a bit on their list? Today’s party seems to answer: You only ask because you don’t like brown skin... No one deliberately votes to be despised."
Moody's: Trump on his way to an easy 2020 win if economy holds up - "President Donald Trump looks likely to cruise to reelection next year under three different economic models Moody’s Analytics employed to gauge the 2020 race.Barring anything unusual happening, the president’s Electoral College victory could easily surpass his 2016 win over Democrat Hillary Clinton, which came by a 304-227 count.Moody’s based its projections on how consumers feel about their own financial situation, the gains the stock market has achieved during Trump’s tenure and the prospects for unemployment, which has fallen to a 50-year low... The Moody’s models have been backtested to 1980 and were correct each time — except in 2016, when they ndicated Clinton would get a narrow victory."
Trump’s Middle-Class Economic Progress - WSJ - "President Trump’s critics can’t deny that the economy is doing well, so instead they insist all the benefits have gone to the rich and large corporations. “America’s middle class is under attack,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren asserted in her presidential campaign announcement last December.The latest data from the Census Bureau monthly surveys tell a different story. Real median household income—the amount earned by those in the very middle—hit $65,084 (in 2019 dollars) for the 12 months ending in July. That’s the highest level ever and a gain of $4,144, or 6.8%, since Mr. Trump took office. By comparison, during 7½ years under President Obama—starting from the end of the recession in June 2009 through January 2017—the median household income rose by only about $1,000... Mr. Obama inherited a financial mess, but the median income continued its decline during almost all of his first term and rose only slowly in his second term—the weakest recovery from a recession since the 1930s. “We never saw a recovery where incomes took such a long time to recover the lost ground,” says Sentier founder Gordon Green."
Thanks, Obama!
Renato Mariotti: Trump Tax Doc Discrepancies Don't Prove Fraud - "Former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst Renato Mariotti agreed there was some smoke here, but agreed that the story in itself didn’t prove fraud. He cited his experience prosecuting such cases... if lawyers or ‘legal experts’ tell you that these discrepancies in and of themselves prove bank fraud or tax charges, they are misleading you. They are troubling and merit investigation, but significantly more is needed"
House Rules: Seven ordered to pay compensation to contestant - "A former contestant who was portrayed as a “villain” on reality reno show House Rules has won a workers’ compensation case against Channel 7 for “psychological” injury.The landmark ruling by the NSW Workers Compensation Commission found Nicole Prince was legally an employee of Seven, despite her contract with the network explicitly stating there was no employment relationship... the decision is likely to have far-reaching ramifications for reality TV shows filmed in Australia, with broadcasters and production companies open to similar workers compensation claims, and potentially liable for superannuation and payroll tax... Mr Burge ordered Seven to pay compensation to Ms Prince, who has been referred to a medical specialist to determine the level of permanent impairment arising from the injury."
No more reality TV in Australia?
Abba admit outrageous outfits were worn to avoid tax - "The glittering hotpants, sequined jumpsuits and platform heels that Abba wore at the peak of their fame were designed not just for the four band members to stand out – but also for tax efficiency, according to claims over the weekend.Reflecting on the group's sartorial record in a new book, Björn Ulvaeus said: "In my honest opinion we looked like nuts in those years. Nobody can have been as badly dressed on stage as we were."And the reason for their bold fashion choices lay not just in the pop glamour of the late 70s and early 80s, but also in the Swedish tax code.According to Abba: The Official Photo Book, published to mark 40 years since they won Eurovision with Waterloo, the band's style was influenced in part by laws that allowed the cost of outfits to be deducted against tax – so long as the costumes were so outrageous they could not possibly be worn on the street."
Muslim girls, 9, wear white for a Sydney hijab ceremony - "Muslim girls in Sydney are dressed in white from head to toe as part of a hijab ceremony to signify the age when they must cover up their bodies, with an Islamic imam slamming it as a step toward Sharia law. Australia's most senior Shia cleric Sheikh Kamal Mousselmani presided over the ceremony where 24 girls walked on stage to show their maturity.'The hijab is compulsory for the girls when they become nine according to our religion'.. The girls were dressed in white, the same shade as a wedding dress, however Sheikh Mousselmani denied the ceremony was about preparing girls for marriage, despite Islamic law saying girls reach maturity at the age of eight... Adelaide Shia leader Imam Shaikh Mohammad Tawhidi said Islam classified eight as the adult age for girls and was worried by the ceremony's symbolism.'I confirm that according to Islamic jurisprudence, a Muslim girl reaches the stage of maturity at eight to nine years of age'"
L'origine de Bert
Thursday, December 26, 2019
Why are women, as a whole, more neurotic than men?
Since Quora (predictably) deleted this question (no wonder I hardly write there nowadays), I am reposting my answer here:
Why are women, as a whole, more neurotic than men?
Costa, Terracciano and McCrae found that across 26 cultures (with 23,031 people studied), women were more neurotic than men (in the Big Five personality traits).
Neuroticism here is defined as the tendency to experience negative emotions, or emotional instability, and neuroticism is actually associated with psychological disorders (so I'm not sure why you think there's a contradiction between women suffering from more psychological disorders and their being more neurotic than men).
Multiple researchers ((deleted Wikispaces link), The Evolution of Personality Variation in Humans and Other Animals, The Association Between Risk Taking And Personality) conclude that neuroticism is correlated with risk aversion; if you are afraid of risks you're going to spend more time worrying about them, which is/leads to neuroticism.
Meanwhile, it has been found that women are more risk averse than men. Suggestively, it seems that this sex difference also exists in animals (BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SEX DIFFERENCES IN RISK AVERSION AND COMPETITIVENESS).
This relates to Triver's theory of parental investment (Tool Module: Sexual Selection and the Theory of Parental Investment). Basically women take more risks in reproduction, so they will be more risk-averse than men (because risk loving women did not survive to reproduce).
Addendum: We also know that neurotic women have more children, which supports the above.
IIRC the other answers spouted the usual liberal line about patriarchal oppression making women neurotic.
Why are women, as a whole, more neurotic than men?
Costa, Terracciano and McCrae found that across 26 cultures (with 23,031 people studied), women were more neurotic than men (in the Big Five personality traits).
Neuroticism here is defined as the tendency to experience negative emotions, or emotional instability, and neuroticism is actually associated with psychological disorders (so I'm not sure why you think there's a contradiction between women suffering from more psychological disorders and their being more neurotic than men).
Multiple researchers ((deleted Wikispaces link), The Evolution of Personality Variation in Humans and Other Animals, The Association Between Risk Taking And Personality) conclude that neuroticism is correlated with risk aversion; if you are afraid of risks you're going to spend more time worrying about them, which is/leads to neuroticism.
Meanwhile, it has been found that women are more risk averse than men. Suggestively, it seems that this sex difference also exists in animals (BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SEX DIFFERENCES IN RISK AVERSION AND COMPETITIVENESS).
This relates to Triver's theory of parental investment (Tool Module: Sexual Selection and the Theory of Parental Investment). Basically women take more risks in reproduction, so they will be more risk-averse than men (because risk loving women did not survive to reproduce).
Addendum: We also know that neurotic women have more children, which supports the above.
IIRC the other answers spouted the usual liberal line about patriarchal oppression making women neurotic.
Post ID: 857303644231129668
Links - 26th December 2019 (1)
Detroit Police Chief Calls Rashida Tlaib Racist for Saying Only African Americans Should Work With Facial Recognition Software - "Rashida Tlaib, the freshman Democratic representative from Michigan, has been accused of racism following comments she made demanding that Detroit's chief of police only hire black analysts for the city's facial recognition crime centers.Rep. Tlaib made the comments on a visit to the Real Time Crime Center in Detroit on Monday where she told police chief James Craig: "Analysts need to be African Americans, not people that are not. I think non-African Americans think African Americans all look the same."... Craig said her comments were offensive given that his department hires high numbers of people, both white and black, that are trained extensively in using the tools... "to say people should be barred from working somewhere because of their skin color? That's racist"... "It's a double standard," Craig said. "Certainly, as the police chief of this city, if I had made a similar comment, people would be outraged and they would be calling for my resignation." The Detroit News, one of the most popular publications in the city, also released an editorial criticizing Tlaib—highlighting the double standard of her stance in contrast to her criticism of President Donald Trump and his "go back where they came from" tweets directed at herself and three other congresswomen."
Woke segregationism - "Sheffield University Students’ Union has banned white students from attending anti-racist meetings... The union says this is part of its shift from ‘a non-racist to an actively anti-racist’ stance... Asking for a clear hierarchy of racial groups according to their ‘power’ (sounds a bit racist, doesn’t it?) always proves fruitless, so we’re left in the dark to work out who exactly can be discriminatory to who on the basis of their race. But generally speaking, it is okay to be nasty to white people (not racism), but not okay to be nasty to every other racial group (racism)."
Actually this is a pretty blatant admission that anti-racism is about hating white people
Anti-racism event hosted by Edinburgh University bans white people from asking questions - "The conference has been organised by the Resisting Whiteness group which opposes racism and describes itself as a QTPOC (queer and trans people of colour) organisation... There will be two “safe spaces” at the event one of which white people will be barred from entering... "We will therefore not be giving the microphone to white people during the Q&As, not because we don't think white people have anything to offer to the discussion, but because we want to amplify the voices of people of colour.".... "Imagine if this event was called 'Resisting Blackness' and non-white people were told they could not ask questions, nor access a room because they were the 'wrong' colour."
China’s pork shortage puts dog and rabbit meat back on the menu in rural communities - "In a supermarket in the county’s town centre, the price of lean pork was 72 yuan (US$10) per kilogram while pork rib cost 74 yuan (US$10.50) a kilogram – more than double what was being charged a year ago and at least as high as prices in major cities like Shanghai and Beijing."
Teachers are increasingly becoming sugar babies to supplement salary - "US public school teachers are paid notoriously low wages and are often forced to work multiple part-time jobs just to meet their basic needs. Rather than drive Uber or tend coffee shop counters, an increasing amount of these educators are choosing to supplement their income by going on dates with wealthy "daddies."... just over 10,000 of the site's members self-identified as educators.Teacher salaries vary widely by state, but nationwide the average public school teacher can expect to bring home $60,483. In some states, like Mississippi and West Virginia, teachers on average make less than $46,000 per year. The average Sugar Baby, according to Seeking Arrangement's own stats, supposedly brings in $2,800 every month from their dates. That comes out to $33,600 per year. For some educators, that's nearly equivalent to working a second full-time teaching job."
Rubbish clickbait article. Median household income for West Virginia was $43,469 in 2017. Median household income in Mississippi is $43,529. Apparently a few teachers earning more than an entire household means teachers are underpaid
Malaysian Roti Canai Recipe - "In Indonesia, paratha roti came to be known as roti cane. In Malaysia, it became roti canai. In Singapore, it is called roti prata.The main difference between the original paratha and its adaptations in Southeast Asia is the preparation of the dough. In South Asia, the dough is rolled. In Southeast Asia, the dough is flipped and spun in the air, and thrown against the oiled work surface until paper thin. In South Asia, the thinly rolled dough is folded like a paper fan. In Southeast Asia, the paper-thin dough is folded like an envelope. Irrespective of the preparation, the cooked bread is layered, flaky on the outside and slightly chewy inside."
Martin Scorsese says he 'doesn't have time’ to write female characters - "The Oscar-winning filmmaker was speaking at an Italian press conference for The Irishman when he rejected claims that his work isn’t diverse in terms of gender... "Am I supposed to? If the story doesn’t call for it, then it’s a waste of everybody’s time. If the story calls for a female character lead, why not?” Emma Tillinger Koskoff, a producer on The Irishman who was at the press conference, also refuted the claim, suggesting the 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore as an example of a Scorsese film with a female lead. “Oh, that’s only one film. They don’t count that,” Scorsese replied. “Age of Innocence – they don’t count that. Casino – Sharon Stone’s great in that. They don’t count that. Forget it. It’s all these men.”... Asked if he would like to write more female characters, Scorsese said he would. “But you know what, I’m 76 now. How am I going to have the time? I don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know. I don’t have time anymore.”"
Of course, The Independent has to come up with an inflammatory clickbait headline. Apparently pandering is a good thing
Natural History Museum is branded sexist... for not having enough female animal exhibits - "A study of five museums found that women weren't the only females forced to fight sexism – apparently leopards and lions face it, too, with the famous London collection and others accused of being prejudiced... Male birds outnumbered females by 60 per cent to 40 per cent, while mammals were 52 per cent male... Perhaps it's the peacock's showy tail, the lion's mane and the antlers grown by stags that can make them bigger crowd-pleasers... It is harder to classify females into the correct species when there are not many to refer to"
Bangladeshi MP allegedly hired eight lookalikes to take her place in exams - "A Bangladeshi politician has been expelled from university after allegedly hiring as many as eight lookalikes to take her place in exams.Tamanna Nusrat, from the ruling Awami League party, is accused of paying the lookalikes to pretend to be her in at least 13 tests. The scandal emerged after the private broadcaster Nagorik TV entered a test hall and confronted one of the women posing as Nusrat... “The proxy students were protected by the MP’s musclemen when they sat for the tests. Everybody knew it but nobody uttered a word because she is from a very influential family.”... Test fraud, cheating and leaking of question papers ahead of exams are common in Bangladesh, prompting authorities frequently to cancel results."
Since even the Guardian has published this, is it still racist to say that cheating is a big problem in Bangladesh?
Are tattoos associated with employment and wage discrimination? Analyzing the relationships between body art and labor market outcomes - "Previous research has found that tattooed people are widely perceived by hiring managers to be less employable than people without tattoos. This is especially the case for those who have visible tattoos (particularly offensive ones) that are difficult to conceal. Given this backdrop, our research surprisingly found no empirical evidence of employment, wage or earnings discrimination against people with various types of tattoos. In our sample, and considering a variety of alternative estimation techniques, not only are the wages and annual earnings of tattooed employees in the United States statistically indistinguishable from the wages and annual earnings of employees without tattoos, but tattooed individuals are also just as likely, and in some instances even more likely, to gain employment. These results suggest that, contrary to popular opinion as well as research findings with hiring managers and customers, having a tattoo does not appear to be associated with disadvantage or discrimination in the labor market."
'Baby Shark' song used to soothe toddler becomes rallying cry in Lebanon - "A popular children’s song became a rallying cry in Lebanon after protesters in Beirut spontaneously sang the hit to calm a toddler caught in the midst of a noisy demonstration... the crowd spontaneously broke out into a rendition of the song “Baby Shark”, complete with hand gestures depicting a shark’s bite, and big smiles."
S’pore primary school boy asks dad why is he talking to opposition politicians if they’re ‘bad’ - "the man’s son apparently asked his father who Yee was after witnessing their meeting.After the man told his son that Yee was from an opposition political party, his son allegedly said:“Why are you talking to them? They are against the government and they are bad, right?”"
Lawrence Solomon: If Alberta turns separatist, the Rest of Canada is in big trouble - "Canadians don’t value our fossil fuel economy, which explains why so many are OK to trash pipelines and see Alberta tank. Only 19 per cent think it more important to pursue oil and gas development than to go green and regulate oil, according to EKOS polling. That 19 per cent figure shrinks to eight per cent for Canadians who consider themselves Liberals, six per cent for NDPers and two per cent for those who vote Green, meaning that politicians of most stripes have no interest in alienating their supporters to help Alberta’s energy economy recover.Those figures also explain why Alberta’s sense of alienation is on the rise. According to Ipsos, fully 62 per cent believe Alberta “does not get its fair share from Confederation” (up from 45 per cent two decades ago), 46 per cent feel more attached to their province than to their country (up from 39 per cent) and 34 per cent “feel less committed to Canada than I did a few years ago” (up from 22 per cent). Just 18 per cent of Albertans believe “the views of western Canadians are adequately represented in Ottawa.” One-quarter of Albertans now believe Alberta “would be better off if it separated from Canada,” a number that may well rise if the provincial economy founders, and would certainly rise if Albertans realized that they need Canada a lot less than Canada needs them. Without Alberta’s wealth and foreign-exchange earnings, the living standard of Canadians outside Alberta would drop and the Canadian dollar would plummet, likely leading to inflation as the cost of imports rose. Albertans, in contrast, would see their affluence rise and, because oil sales are denominated in U.S. dollars, Alberta would be largely insulated from the inflation to its east and west... Anyone thinking that Alberta would be unable to police its borders needs to be reminded that, for the past 70 years, Alberta’s patrols have made it the continent’s only rat-free jurisdiction."
Kouign-amann: The French pastry's history, origin, pronunciation. - "“Not before the cheese,” Genevieve told me. Of course, the cheese. As the 19th-century French food writer, Brillat-Savarin, once wrote, “Un dessert sans fromage est une belle à qui il manque un oeil“—a dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman without an eye. (His words, not mine.)"
SJWCentral - @allirothberg Allison Rothberg on Jordan Peterson: "he just cries and shakes for 50 minutes. what a terribly stupid weak man"
"Imagine crying about toxic masculinity for years and when a man breaks down because of his wife having cancer you call him weak for crying. What a terrible woman"
The only emotions feminists allow men to feel are shame and disgust for being male
Woke segregationism - "Sheffield University Students’ Union has banned white students from attending anti-racist meetings... The union says this is part of its shift from ‘a non-racist to an actively anti-racist’ stance... Asking for a clear hierarchy of racial groups according to their ‘power’ (sounds a bit racist, doesn’t it?) always proves fruitless, so we’re left in the dark to work out who exactly can be discriminatory to who on the basis of their race. But generally speaking, it is okay to be nasty to white people (not racism), but not okay to be nasty to every other racial group (racism)."
Actually this is a pretty blatant admission that anti-racism is about hating white people
Anti-racism event hosted by Edinburgh University bans white people from asking questions - "The conference has been organised by the Resisting Whiteness group which opposes racism and describes itself as a QTPOC (queer and trans people of colour) organisation... There will be two “safe spaces” at the event one of which white people will be barred from entering... "We will therefore not be giving the microphone to white people during the Q&As, not because we don't think white people have anything to offer to the discussion, but because we want to amplify the voices of people of colour.".... "Imagine if this event was called 'Resisting Blackness' and non-white people were told they could not ask questions, nor access a room because they were the 'wrong' colour."
China’s pork shortage puts dog and rabbit meat back on the menu in rural communities - "In a supermarket in the county’s town centre, the price of lean pork was 72 yuan (US$10) per kilogram while pork rib cost 74 yuan (US$10.50) a kilogram – more than double what was being charged a year ago and at least as high as prices in major cities like Shanghai and Beijing."
Teachers are increasingly becoming sugar babies to supplement salary - "US public school teachers are paid notoriously low wages and are often forced to work multiple part-time jobs just to meet their basic needs. Rather than drive Uber or tend coffee shop counters, an increasing amount of these educators are choosing to supplement their income by going on dates with wealthy "daddies."... just over 10,000 of the site's members self-identified as educators.Teacher salaries vary widely by state, but nationwide the average public school teacher can expect to bring home $60,483. In some states, like Mississippi and West Virginia, teachers on average make less than $46,000 per year. The average Sugar Baby, according to Seeking Arrangement's own stats, supposedly brings in $2,800 every month from their dates. That comes out to $33,600 per year. For some educators, that's nearly equivalent to working a second full-time teaching job."
Rubbish clickbait article. Median household income for West Virginia was $43,469 in 2017. Median household income in Mississippi is $43,529. Apparently a few teachers earning more than an entire household means teachers are underpaid
Malaysian Roti Canai Recipe - "In Indonesia, paratha roti came to be known as roti cane. In Malaysia, it became roti canai. In Singapore, it is called roti prata.The main difference between the original paratha and its adaptations in Southeast Asia is the preparation of the dough. In South Asia, the dough is rolled. In Southeast Asia, the dough is flipped and spun in the air, and thrown against the oiled work surface until paper thin. In South Asia, the thinly rolled dough is folded like a paper fan. In Southeast Asia, the paper-thin dough is folded like an envelope. Irrespective of the preparation, the cooked bread is layered, flaky on the outside and slightly chewy inside."
Martin Scorsese says he 'doesn't have time’ to write female characters - "The Oscar-winning filmmaker was speaking at an Italian press conference for The Irishman when he rejected claims that his work isn’t diverse in terms of gender... "Am I supposed to? If the story doesn’t call for it, then it’s a waste of everybody’s time. If the story calls for a female character lead, why not?” Emma Tillinger Koskoff, a producer on The Irishman who was at the press conference, also refuted the claim, suggesting the 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore as an example of a Scorsese film with a female lead. “Oh, that’s only one film. They don’t count that,” Scorsese replied. “Age of Innocence – they don’t count that. Casino – Sharon Stone’s great in that. They don’t count that. Forget it. It’s all these men.”... Asked if he would like to write more female characters, Scorsese said he would. “But you know what, I’m 76 now. How am I going to have the time? I don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know. I don’t have time anymore.”"
Of course, The Independent has to come up with an inflammatory clickbait headline. Apparently pandering is a good thing
Natural History Museum is branded sexist... for not having enough female animal exhibits - "A study of five museums found that women weren't the only females forced to fight sexism – apparently leopards and lions face it, too, with the famous London collection and others accused of being prejudiced... Male birds outnumbered females by 60 per cent to 40 per cent, while mammals were 52 per cent male... Perhaps it's the peacock's showy tail, the lion's mane and the antlers grown by stags that can make them bigger crowd-pleasers... It is harder to classify females into the correct species when there are not many to refer to"
Bangladeshi MP allegedly hired eight lookalikes to take her place in exams - "A Bangladeshi politician has been expelled from university after allegedly hiring as many as eight lookalikes to take her place in exams.Tamanna Nusrat, from the ruling Awami League party, is accused of paying the lookalikes to pretend to be her in at least 13 tests. The scandal emerged after the private broadcaster Nagorik TV entered a test hall and confronted one of the women posing as Nusrat... “The proxy students were protected by the MP’s musclemen when they sat for the tests. Everybody knew it but nobody uttered a word because she is from a very influential family.”... Test fraud, cheating and leaking of question papers ahead of exams are common in Bangladesh, prompting authorities frequently to cancel results."
Since even the Guardian has published this, is it still racist to say that cheating is a big problem in Bangladesh?
Are tattoos associated with employment and wage discrimination? Analyzing the relationships between body art and labor market outcomes - "Previous research has found that tattooed people are widely perceived by hiring managers to be less employable than people without tattoos. This is especially the case for those who have visible tattoos (particularly offensive ones) that are difficult to conceal. Given this backdrop, our research surprisingly found no empirical evidence of employment, wage or earnings discrimination against people with various types of tattoos. In our sample, and considering a variety of alternative estimation techniques, not only are the wages and annual earnings of tattooed employees in the United States statistically indistinguishable from the wages and annual earnings of employees without tattoos, but tattooed individuals are also just as likely, and in some instances even more likely, to gain employment. These results suggest that, contrary to popular opinion as well as research findings with hiring managers and customers, having a tattoo does not appear to be associated with disadvantage or discrimination in the labor market."
'Baby Shark' song used to soothe toddler becomes rallying cry in Lebanon - "A popular children’s song became a rallying cry in Lebanon after protesters in Beirut spontaneously sang the hit to calm a toddler caught in the midst of a noisy demonstration... the crowd spontaneously broke out into a rendition of the song “Baby Shark”, complete with hand gestures depicting a shark’s bite, and big smiles."
S’pore primary school boy asks dad why is he talking to opposition politicians if they’re ‘bad’ - "the man’s son apparently asked his father who Yee was after witnessing their meeting.After the man told his son that Yee was from an opposition political party, his son allegedly said:“Why are you talking to them? They are against the government and they are bad, right?”"
Lawrence Solomon: If Alberta turns separatist, the Rest of Canada is in big trouble - "Canadians don’t value our fossil fuel economy, which explains why so many are OK to trash pipelines and see Alberta tank. Only 19 per cent think it more important to pursue oil and gas development than to go green and regulate oil, according to EKOS polling. That 19 per cent figure shrinks to eight per cent for Canadians who consider themselves Liberals, six per cent for NDPers and two per cent for those who vote Green, meaning that politicians of most stripes have no interest in alienating their supporters to help Alberta’s energy economy recover.Those figures also explain why Alberta’s sense of alienation is on the rise. According to Ipsos, fully 62 per cent believe Alberta “does not get its fair share from Confederation” (up from 45 per cent two decades ago), 46 per cent feel more attached to their province than to their country (up from 39 per cent) and 34 per cent “feel less committed to Canada than I did a few years ago” (up from 22 per cent). Just 18 per cent of Albertans believe “the views of western Canadians are adequately represented in Ottawa.” One-quarter of Albertans now believe Alberta “would be better off if it separated from Canada,” a number that may well rise if the provincial economy founders, and would certainly rise if Albertans realized that they need Canada a lot less than Canada needs them. Without Alberta’s wealth and foreign-exchange earnings, the living standard of Canadians outside Alberta would drop and the Canadian dollar would plummet, likely leading to inflation as the cost of imports rose. Albertans, in contrast, would see their affluence rise and, because oil sales are denominated in U.S. dollars, Alberta would be largely insulated from the inflation to its east and west... Anyone thinking that Alberta would be unable to police its borders needs to be reminded that, for the past 70 years, Alberta’s patrols have made it the continent’s only rat-free jurisdiction."
Kouign-amann: The French pastry's history, origin, pronunciation. - "“Not before the cheese,” Genevieve told me. Of course, the cheese. As the 19th-century French food writer, Brillat-Savarin, once wrote, “Un dessert sans fromage est une belle à qui il manque un oeil“—a dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman without an eye. (His words, not mine.)"
SJWCentral - @allirothberg Allison Rothberg on Jordan Peterson: "he just cries and shakes for 50 minutes. what a terribly stupid weak man"
"Imagine crying about toxic masculinity for years and when a man breaks down because of his wife having cancer you call him weak for crying. What a terrible woman"
The only emotions feminists allow men to feel are shame and disgust for being male
Post ID: 3388983344456625162
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
Links - 25th December 2019 (2) (Nationalism/Patriotism/Liberals hating their countries)
In an age of identity politics, inclusive national identity matters more than ever - "diversity is not an unalloyed good. Syria and Afghanistan are very diverse places, but their diversity has yielded violence and conflict rather than creativity and resilience. In Kenya, where there are sharp divisions between ethnic groups, diversity feeds an inward-looking political corruption based on ethnic ties. Ethnic diversity led to the breakdown of the liberal Austro-Hungarian Empire in the decades prior to the First World War, when the Empire's component nationalities began to rebel against living together in a common political structure. At the fin de siècle, the imperial capital of Vienna was a melting pot that produced such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, novelist and poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and composer Gustav Mahler. But when the narrower national identities of peoples within the Empire ― Serbs, Bulgarians, Czechs and Austro-Germans ― asserted themselves, the region descended into a paroxysm of violence and intolerance... National identities can be built around liberal and democratic political values, and around the shared experiences that provide the connective tissue allowing diverse communities to thrive. Canada, France, India and the United States are examples of countries that have tried to cultivate national identities along these lines. Such an inclusive sense of national identity remains critical to maintaining a successful modern political order.... national identity is important for the quality of government. Good government ― which entails effective public services and low levels of corruption ― depends on state officials placing the public interest above their own narrow interests. In systemically corrupt societies, politicians and bureaucrats divert public resources to their own ethnic group, region, tribe, family, or political party ― or into their individual pockets ― because they do not feel obligated to serve the wider community's interests... facilitating economic development. If people do not take pride in their country, they will not work on its behalf. The strong national identities in Japan, South Korea and China produced elites who were intensely focused on their countries' economic development rather than on their own personal enrichment, particularly during these countries' early decades of rapid economic growth... In contrast to these examples of identification with the country as a whole, many identity groups based on ethnicity or religion prefer to trade among themselves and, when they have access to state power, use it to benefit their group alone... A fourth function of national identity is to promote a wide radius of trust, which acts as a lubricant facilitating both economic exchange and political participation. Trust is based on what has been called social capital... national identity encourages countries to maintain strong social safety nets that mitigate economic inequality... The final function of national identity is to make possible liberal democracy itself... all liberal democracies are built on top of states, whose jurisdiction is limited by their territorial reach. No state can take on an unlimited obligation to protect people outside its jurisdiction, and it is far from clear that the world would be better off if all states tried to do so. While countries rightly feel a moral obligation to shelter refugees and may welcome immigrants, such obligations are potentially costly both economically and socially, and democracies need to balance them against other priorities. Democracy means that the people are sovereign, but if there is no way of delimiting who the people are, they cannot exercise democratic choice. Thus political order at both the domestic and the international level depends on the continuing existence of liberal democracies with the right kind of inclusive national identities."
By demonising national identity and promoting identity politics, liberals are destroying democracy
Nationalism Is a Form of Love, Not Hate - The Atlantic - "Critics of nationalism contend that it is a relatively recent phenomenon, a contrivance of modern rulers to control and manipulate their populations, and is therefore inherently illegitimate. The Maid of Orléans tells us otherwise... Whether in the United States or anywhere else, critics of nationalism would be better advised to hone it for their own ends rather than shun it or pretend it will go away. Nationalism, or at least national feeling, isn’t new or manufactured; the idea is quite old and entirely natural. It’s based not on hatred, but on love—on our affection for home and our own people. It is caught up in culture, in the language, manners, and rituals that set off any given country from another. It represents a deep-seated force that can’t be effaced without government coercion, and even then has proved impossible to wipe out. Empires and totalitarian ideologies alike have failed to eradicate it... The great Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, the 19th-century writer and activist who agitated for the unification of Italy under a republican government, expressed this feeling: “Our country is our home, the home which God has given us, placing therein a numerous family which we love and are loved by, and with which we have a more intimate and quicker communion of feeling and thought than with others.” His sentiment underlines how loyalty to nation is ultimately built on a foundation of love—for its landscape, arts, traditions, and people; for, in short, what is ours... anyone who thinks that America is immune from nationalism, or that it represents only what’s worst in our history, hasn’t truly grappled with a tradition that runs through Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, and is inseparable from such high points of our story as the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution... Indeed, modern nationalism developed in the 19th century as largely a liberal movement, intimately associated with the rise of popular sovereignty over monarchs who considered nations their personal fiefs. It is not just a coincidence that the era of the modern nation-state has overlapped with the rise of democracy... Undergirding the nation is, most important, a common language and an associated distinct national literature. The spark for nationalist movements has often been historians, writers, lexicographers, and folklorists who celebrated and promoted vernacular languages and excavated a glorious literary past. Poets came to exemplify the national traditions and aspirations of their countries: The Irish had W. B. Yeats, the Poles had Adam Mickiewicz, the Zionists had Haim Bialik, and so on. When common bonds are missing, it spells trouble. In former colonial territories in the Middle East and Africa, proper nation-states struggled to develop, partly as a function of artificial borders. These places weren’t more enlightened or peaceful for their lack of strong national feeling, but the opposite—often blighted by ruinous tribal and ethnic conflict. Likewise, when a political authority runs against the grain of a nation’s culture and identity, its legitimacy inevitably comes into question. The old multinational empires of Europe—the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires—all dissolved as their repressive apparatuses gave way and the drive toward national self-determination gained ground. Empires can’t rely on the fellow feeling and social trust that are at the foundation of democracy. John Stuart Mill wrote that such states are beset by “mutual antipathies” and that “none feel that they can rely on others for fidelity in a joint resistance.” He concluded that it is “a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.” This has been borne out. Azar Gat, a scholar of nationalism, writes, “While there have been many national states without free government, free government has scarcely existed in the absence of a national community.” National loyalty gives everyone in society a common interest that is deeper than any specific power struggle. It transcends tribe and sect. It establishes the parameters within which a discrete people and its government can arrive at something approximating the social contract imagined by philosophers such as John Locke. It renders a society, as the philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, in the first-person plural we. Only on this basis is it possible to create citizens with equal rights and reciprocal obligations, living together under the rule of law. This arrangement, in turn, makes possible the social trust that lubricates everyday life and the market economy. In short, nationalism isn’t just old, natural, deep-seated, and extremely difficult to suppress. It is also the foundation of a democratic political order. Regardless, anyone who believes that it can be easily repressed in favor of some other, supposedly more broad-minded loyalty is profoundly mistaken."
Make Men Men Again - Posts - "Fun fact: there were more flags on the moon
Than any of the Democrat debates"
In defence of patriotism - " ‘Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism’, Orwell wrote. ‘It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same, like the devotion of the ex-White Bolshevik to Russia. To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon'... ‘To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during “God Save The King”. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so enlightened that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.’... we see how much we have changed over the past 80 years, but also how some traits march on.
‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.’ ...
I spent many years among the leftist intelligentsia and I can report that it was considered blasphemous to support the England football team during World Cups – it even appeared as an agenda item at Socialist Workers’ Party branch meetings. Should England actually ever win the World Cup, it was believed that it would necessarily feed the right in British politics. Culturally, the left locate their tastes overseas, which they consider a mark of sophistication. When Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was asked about his reading habits, he naturally spoke about Nigerian novelists. One couldn’t imagine him, or anyone in the current Labour leadership, citing Evelyn Waugh, and I can well remember being at an SWP meeting in the 1980s when the speaker, journalist Paul Foot, said he thought Brideshead Revisited was a great novel. Almost the entire room booed him... In 2014, Emily Thornberry, now a Labour leadership candidate, tweeted a photograph of a house in Rochester with flags of St George outside. She was canvassing ahead of the Rochester and Strood by-election, and the inference of course was derogatory. She was rightfully accused of snobbery, but there is another question here. Why did she assume that the people who lived there would not be Labour supporters? That this marked Rochester out as infertile territory for socialists? Because being patriotic is now considered to be incompatible with the left. Incompatible because the left believe it to be veiled racism, and when expressed by the working class, a whisper away from fascism... Instead of despairing and posting a photograph of the front of the house online, Thornberry would have been better knocking on the door and opening a dialogue. As Orwell puts it: ‘An intelligent Socialist movement will use [people’s] patriotism instead of merely insulting it.’ In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, Orwell extols what he considers to be the innate, natural anti-authoritarianism of ordinary people in England, summed up as an attachment to liberty and to privacy... Orwell would despair at the England of today, where people are reported and even arrested for what they have written online, for expressing an opinion, for refusing to write something on a wedding cake. He would recognise it as befitting the totalitarian regimes he satirised in his fiction... English literature, he writes, ‘like other literature, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.’ Eighty years and numerous wars later, I think this is still the case — we have remembrance rather than glorification. Yet the left’s antipathy towards patriotism in England is more exaggerated than ever. It is at the heart of their reaction to Brexit. The Leave vote can usefully be described as intrinsically patriotic since it expresses a desire for national sovereignty; characteristically, the left defamed the vote as racist and did all they could to block the implementation of the result. Indeed, during the General Election, Labour engaged in Orwellian doublethink, by talking about ‘the many, not the few’ while campaigning against the will of the majority. It made Labour increasingly sound like an Eastern European Communist Party, and a major part of its problem is its growing remoteness from ordinary people... At the risk of sounding patriotic, [Orwell] is among the greatest of Englishmen, a patriot and an internationalist – and that is a perfectly possible and admirable thing to be."
'Oikophobia': Our Western Self-Hatred - "she could never speak ill of another culture. Not only was she unable to do so, but in fact she emphasized that she did not even have the right to do so. When I asked her, alluding to her own Austrian roots, what she might say of a culture that produced, say, Adolf Hitler, she replied that she as an Austrian European may criticize European and Austrian culture, and consequently that brutal dictator.My follow-up question, whether then by her logic a non-Austrian or non-European should not be allowed to criticize Nazism, did not receive a clear reply. But my fellow diner continued to insist that we should only criticize our own cultures, never others. I thus had one of my frequent meetings with the intellectually bankrupt posture of oikophobia, the hatred or dislike of one’s own cultural home... This exchange was similar to many that I have had in countries all around the Western world. They reveal a civilization that has stopped believing in itself, that hates itself, and that is therefore unwilling to defend the values of individual freedom, democracy, and scientific and scholarly skepticism that have been handed down to us since antiquity... the San Francisco School Board voted to remove a mural of George Washington from one of its public schools because of its purported racism; the group leader of American volunteer teachers in Africa some years ago informed the volunteers that residing in a foreign culture had taught her that the United States deserved the 9/11 terrorist attacks because of U.S. foreign policy (I know this because I was one of the volunteers). Actions and statements of this kind have become perfectly commonplace by now, and we all know about them, but most people cannot explain why things are this way. How can it have come to such cultural self-hatred? The answer lies in an oft-repeated historical process that takes a society from naïve and self-promoting beginnings to self-contempt and decline. The simplest way of defining oikophobia is as the opposite extreme of xenophobia... The reason why we are experiencing oikophobia in the United States today is that we are in about the same phase of historical development now as England was after World War II, or a little earlier: a great power, but on the decline... Diverse interests are created that view each other as greater enemies than they do foreign threats. Since the common civilizational enemy has been successfully repulsed, it can no longer serve as an effective target for and outlet of people’s sense of superiority, and human psychology generally requires an adversary for the purpose of self-identification, and so a new adversary is crafted: other people in the same civilization. Since this condition of leisure and empowerment, as well as a perception of external threats as non-existential, are the results of a society’s success, success is, ironically, a prerequisite for a society’s self-hatred. What Freud has called the “narcissism of small differences” (in Civilization and Its Discontents)—the urge to compete against others even through minor distinctions like a virtuous action or the newest gadget—becomes one motivation through which a particular interest expresses its superiority over others. This “domestic” competition means that by rejecting one’s culture as backward, one automatically sets oneself above all the other interests that are parts of that culture"
So much for it being a myth that liberals hate their countries and their culture
This is a much more sophisticated and well-supported version of "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times"
Nationalism vs. patriotism: Trump’s “nationalism” is not what makes him radical. - "Donald Trump finally came out as a nationalist last month. The president thrilled the crowd at a Ted Cruz rally by declaring, “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist! Use that word! Use that word!” Reactions were predictable. Liberals gnashed their teeth, Breitbart cheered, and white supremacists called it the greatest thing since Birth of a Nation.America’s European allies have condemned Trump’s embrace of nationalism. French President Emanuel Macron declared on Nov. 11 that “nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.” To Macron, nationalism, exemplified by Trump’s “America First” slogan, means “pursuing our own interests first, with no regard to others.” The proper attitude of loyalty to one’s nation, Macron said, is patriotism, which he said is “the exact opposite of nationalism.”... Patriotism is generally understood to mean citizens’ love and loyalty to their country. How it differs from nationalism is not altogether clear, in part because nationalism has no agreed meaning"... The distinction between patriotism and nationalism has a Goldilocks quality. It suggests that nationalists have too much devotion to their nation, while patriots have just the right amount. But how much devotion to one’s nation is too much?"
British army officers are told soldiers calling themselves 'patriots' could be extremists - "A guide to help high-ranking British officers spot right-wing extremists in their ranks has been leaked - and the signs include people calling themselves 'patriots' and making 'inaccurate generalisations about the Left'.The leaflet, made in 2017, is titled 'Extreme Right Wing (XRW) Indicators & Warnings' - and advises senior army staff to look out for people who 'use the term Islamofacism' [sic] and call people who challenge their 'XRW' views 'indoctrinated'... It is not known whether similar literature has been produced on how to spot left-wing extremists or Islamists...
Extreme right-wing indicators and warnings, according to the army:
Become increasingly angry at perceived injustices or threats to so called 'National Identity'
Refer to individuals ready to challenge their XRW views as being 'indoctrinated'
Make generalisations about Muslims and Jews
Involve colleagues in closed social media groups
Refer to Political Correctness as some left wing or communist plot
Make inaccurate generalisations about 'the Left' or Government
Actively seek out impressionable individuals to indoctrinate or recruit"
Looks like the Overton Window moves awfully fast
Presumably making inaccurate generalisations about the Right is a good thing
Presumably if you challenge this pamphlet, you are 'indoctrinated'
These Left-wing slurs on Churchill are part of a bigger war on British history - "The campaign against Winston Churchill is becoming unhinged. Consider this complaint from the popular Corbynite website The Canary: “On the 14 February edition of the BBC‘s Question Time, Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg attempted to defend Churchill’s use of concentration camps during the Boer War.”Seriously, comrades? His use of concentration camps? The main connection Churchill had with camps in the Boer War is that he was interned in a PoW camp – by the Boers. He escaped, made it back to Britain and was elected to Parliament where, in a startlingly magnanimous maiden speech in 1901, he called on his countrymen to deal generously with the enemy who were, he said, simply fighting for their homes. Of course, the Leftist attempt to blacken Churchill’s name isn’t really about Churchill. It begins with its conclusion, namely that Britain is always and everywhere in the wrong, and then casts around for any argument, however absurd, to sustain that conclusion. Here’s a handy rule of thumb. Anyone who claims that Britain invented concentration camps is more interested in name-calling than in historical accuracy. The use of that loaded phrase is meant to make us think of the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka.But the camps set up during the Boer War were there to contain Afrikaner non-combatants driven from their homesteads. They were not there to work people to death, let alone to murder them en masse... The Momentum numpties currently repeating this claim might be surprised to learn that it originated with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief. It shouldn’t need saying that it is bunkum. Internment camps are as old as war itself.Extermination camps, by contrast, were a Nazi speciality – though Stalin’s gulags were also used deliberately to work inmates to death. Even the name “concentration camps” did not originate in the South African war. It had been used, for example, by Spain to describe its detention centres in the Cuban war. Goebbels would have recognised what the contemporary Left is doing, namely snatching at any historical myths that might serve its purpose. The anti-Churchill campaign, which has now been sanctioned by the shadow chancellor, who calls Churchill a “villain”, is a case in point. It is possible to construct a case against Churchill. He could be self-absorbed, inconsiderate and vain. He could be a bully. His obsession with his reputation was unusual, even in a politician. But pointing out these mundane flaws is no fun. If you want kudos in today’s public sphere, you have to adopt the angry, monotonous tone of the identitarian Left. “Churchill was a racist! Churchill was an imperialist! Churchill was a white supremacist!” These accusations are not primarily about Churchill. They’re primarily about the people making them. What they are really saying is: “Look at me! I’m so perceptive! I can see the flaws in a national hero! That means I must be more sensitive than the rest of you! In fact, it makes me a better person than Churchill!”To repeat, Churchill should not be beyond criticism. But criticisms that are primarily a form of virtue-signalling are, almost by definition, bad history. If I were constructing a case against the cigar-chomping aristocrat, I would include the following: his defection to and from the Liberal Party on largely careerist grounds (“ratting and re-ratting” as he himself described it); the Gallipoli fiasco; his decision, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1925, to rejoin the Gold Standard at the pre-war rate, thus prompting a recession; and the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of his second ministry, after 1951, when he was no longer fully capable, but would not stand aside.To be clear, a defence can be made of him in each of these cases, as Andrew Roberts shows in his definitive new biography. But let’s agree that a case can at least be made.Making that case, though, is no fun. It doesn’t raise your status in woke circles. So Churchill is instead attacked for being too Right-wing and, in particular, for not sharing our generation’s obsession with anti-racism... The Bengal famine was caused by a cyclone and exacerbated by the Japanese invasion of Burma. It is true Churchill prioritised feeding the Indian army. Given what had happened elsewhere in Asia, can we say with confidence that he would have been wiser to let the soldiers go hungry and risk a Japanese conquest? Of all the fashionable attacks on Churchill, only one has force. He was, by the standards of his own age, an outlier in his opposition to Indian self-government."
More on the "myth" that liberals hate their countries
Is The American Flag Offensive? Harvard University Students Sure Think So — Hear The Story That Made Megyn Kelly Burst Into Laughter - "a Harvard student who hung an American flag in his dorm room was asked by his roommate to remove said flag. Why? The flag “represented a political statement” the roommate was “not willing to make.”... '“I used to believe that open discourse was a value all Americans hold dear. I presumed that when asked about what makes America so unique, many Americans would respond that our pluralistic society is the foundation of so much of our success. That it was understood that without a marketplace of ideas, our society simply could not flourish. “But then I started college.”'... Perhaps one of the more extreme cases of hypersensitivity at Harvard was the story of a pro-choice student who found out her fellow students’ positions on abortion so that she could avoid sitting near pro-life learners... a student named Bridget Kerrigan hung a Confederate flag in her dorm room window in the winter of 1991, and refused to remove it despite multiple complaints and protests."
Massachusetts college stops flying American flag after it becomes focus of dispute over Trump - The Washington Post - "The day after the election, some people at Hampshire College reacted to the news of Donald Trump’s victory by calling for the removal of the American flag at the center of campus, saying it was a symbol of racism and hatred. That night, some lowered it. And the following night — sometime before dawn on Veterans Day — people burned it.The flag was quickly replaced, but the college board announced that it would be flown at half-staff, “both to acknowledge the grief and pain experienced by so many and to enable the full complexity of voices and experiences to be heard.”That didn’t work... Lash told the campus community that its efforts to convey respect and sorrow had had the opposite effect, and he announced that the college would remove the flag entirely for a while... At Brown University, some students tore up and stomped on flags from an event honoring veterans... At American University the day after the election, students upset about Trump’s victory burned flags and shouted “F— white America!” Two days after the election, an American flag in St. Mary’s City was founded shredded and flying at half-staff"
By demonising national identity and promoting identity politics, liberals are destroying democracy
Nationalism Is a Form of Love, Not Hate - The Atlantic - "Critics of nationalism contend that it is a relatively recent phenomenon, a contrivance of modern rulers to control and manipulate their populations, and is therefore inherently illegitimate. The Maid of Orléans tells us otherwise... Whether in the United States or anywhere else, critics of nationalism would be better advised to hone it for their own ends rather than shun it or pretend it will go away. Nationalism, or at least national feeling, isn’t new or manufactured; the idea is quite old and entirely natural. It’s based not on hatred, but on love—on our affection for home and our own people. It is caught up in culture, in the language, manners, and rituals that set off any given country from another. It represents a deep-seated force that can’t be effaced without government coercion, and even then has proved impossible to wipe out. Empires and totalitarian ideologies alike have failed to eradicate it... The great Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, the 19th-century writer and activist who agitated for the unification of Italy under a republican government, expressed this feeling: “Our country is our home, the home which God has given us, placing therein a numerous family which we love and are loved by, and with which we have a more intimate and quicker communion of feeling and thought than with others.” His sentiment underlines how loyalty to nation is ultimately built on a foundation of love—for its landscape, arts, traditions, and people; for, in short, what is ours... anyone who thinks that America is immune from nationalism, or that it represents only what’s worst in our history, hasn’t truly grappled with a tradition that runs through Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, and is inseparable from such high points of our story as the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution... Indeed, modern nationalism developed in the 19th century as largely a liberal movement, intimately associated with the rise of popular sovereignty over monarchs who considered nations their personal fiefs. It is not just a coincidence that the era of the modern nation-state has overlapped with the rise of democracy... Undergirding the nation is, most important, a common language and an associated distinct national literature. The spark for nationalist movements has often been historians, writers, lexicographers, and folklorists who celebrated and promoted vernacular languages and excavated a glorious literary past. Poets came to exemplify the national traditions and aspirations of their countries: The Irish had W. B. Yeats, the Poles had Adam Mickiewicz, the Zionists had Haim Bialik, and so on. When common bonds are missing, it spells trouble. In former colonial territories in the Middle East and Africa, proper nation-states struggled to develop, partly as a function of artificial borders. These places weren’t more enlightened or peaceful for their lack of strong national feeling, but the opposite—often blighted by ruinous tribal and ethnic conflict. Likewise, when a political authority runs against the grain of a nation’s culture and identity, its legitimacy inevitably comes into question. The old multinational empires of Europe—the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires—all dissolved as their repressive apparatuses gave way and the drive toward national self-determination gained ground. Empires can’t rely on the fellow feeling and social trust that are at the foundation of democracy. John Stuart Mill wrote that such states are beset by “mutual antipathies” and that “none feel that they can rely on others for fidelity in a joint resistance.” He concluded that it is “a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of government should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.” This has been borne out. Azar Gat, a scholar of nationalism, writes, “While there have been many national states without free government, free government has scarcely existed in the absence of a national community.” National loyalty gives everyone in society a common interest that is deeper than any specific power struggle. It transcends tribe and sect. It establishes the parameters within which a discrete people and its government can arrive at something approximating the social contract imagined by philosophers such as John Locke. It renders a society, as the philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, in the first-person plural we. Only on this basis is it possible to create citizens with equal rights and reciprocal obligations, living together under the rule of law. This arrangement, in turn, makes possible the social trust that lubricates everyday life and the market economy. In short, nationalism isn’t just old, natural, deep-seated, and extremely difficult to suppress. It is also the foundation of a democratic political order. Regardless, anyone who believes that it can be easily repressed in favor of some other, supposedly more broad-minded loyalty is profoundly mistaken."
Make Men Men Again - Posts - "Fun fact: there were more flags on the moon
Than any of the Democrat debates"
In defence of patriotism - " ‘Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism’, Orwell wrote. ‘It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same, like the devotion of the ex-White Bolshevik to Russia. To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon'... ‘To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during “God Save The King”. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so enlightened that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.’... we see how much we have changed over the past 80 years, but also how some traits march on.
‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.’ ...
I spent many years among the leftist intelligentsia and I can report that it was considered blasphemous to support the England football team during World Cups – it even appeared as an agenda item at Socialist Workers’ Party branch meetings. Should England actually ever win the World Cup, it was believed that it would necessarily feed the right in British politics. Culturally, the left locate their tastes overseas, which they consider a mark of sophistication. When Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was asked about his reading habits, he naturally spoke about Nigerian novelists. One couldn’t imagine him, or anyone in the current Labour leadership, citing Evelyn Waugh, and I can well remember being at an SWP meeting in the 1980s when the speaker, journalist Paul Foot, said he thought Brideshead Revisited was a great novel. Almost the entire room booed him... In 2014, Emily Thornberry, now a Labour leadership candidate, tweeted a photograph of a house in Rochester with flags of St George outside. She was canvassing ahead of the Rochester and Strood by-election, and the inference of course was derogatory. She was rightfully accused of snobbery, but there is another question here. Why did she assume that the people who lived there would not be Labour supporters? That this marked Rochester out as infertile territory for socialists? Because being patriotic is now considered to be incompatible with the left. Incompatible because the left believe it to be veiled racism, and when expressed by the working class, a whisper away from fascism... Instead of despairing and posting a photograph of the front of the house online, Thornberry would have been better knocking on the door and opening a dialogue. As Orwell puts it: ‘An intelligent Socialist movement will use [people’s] patriotism instead of merely insulting it.’ In ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, Orwell extols what he considers to be the innate, natural anti-authoritarianism of ordinary people in England, summed up as an attachment to liberty and to privacy... Orwell would despair at the England of today, where people are reported and even arrested for what they have written online, for expressing an opinion, for refusing to write something on a wedding cake. He would recognise it as befitting the totalitarian regimes he satirised in his fiction... English literature, he writes, ‘like other literature, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.’ Eighty years and numerous wars later, I think this is still the case — we have remembrance rather than glorification. Yet the left’s antipathy towards patriotism in England is more exaggerated than ever. It is at the heart of their reaction to Brexit. The Leave vote can usefully be described as intrinsically patriotic since it expresses a desire for national sovereignty; characteristically, the left defamed the vote as racist and did all they could to block the implementation of the result. Indeed, during the General Election, Labour engaged in Orwellian doublethink, by talking about ‘the many, not the few’ while campaigning against the will of the majority. It made Labour increasingly sound like an Eastern European Communist Party, and a major part of its problem is its growing remoteness from ordinary people... At the risk of sounding patriotic, [Orwell] is among the greatest of Englishmen, a patriot and an internationalist – and that is a perfectly possible and admirable thing to be."
'Oikophobia': Our Western Self-Hatred - "she could never speak ill of another culture. Not only was she unable to do so, but in fact she emphasized that she did not even have the right to do so. When I asked her, alluding to her own Austrian roots, what she might say of a culture that produced, say, Adolf Hitler, she replied that she as an Austrian European may criticize European and Austrian culture, and consequently that brutal dictator.My follow-up question, whether then by her logic a non-Austrian or non-European should not be allowed to criticize Nazism, did not receive a clear reply. But my fellow diner continued to insist that we should only criticize our own cultures, never others. I thus had one of my frequent meetings with the intellectually bankrupt posture of oikophobia, the hatred or dislike of one’s own cultural home... This exchange was similar to many that I have had in countries all around the Western world. They reveal a civilization that has stopped believing in itself, that hates itself, and that is therefore unwilling to defend the values of individual freedom, democracy, and scientific and scholarly skepticism that have been handed down to us since antiquity... the San Francisco School Board voted to remove a mural of George Washington from one of its public schools because of its purported racism; the group leader of American volunteer teachers in Africa some years ago informed the volunteers that residing in a foreign culture had taught her that the United States deserved the 9/11 terrorist attacks because of U.S. foreign policy (I know this because I was one of the volunteers). Actions and statements of this kind have become perfectly commonplace by now, and we all know about them, but most people cannot explain why things are this way. How can it have come to such cultural self-hatred? The answer lies in an oft-repeated historical process that takes a society from naïve and self-promoting beginnings to self-contempt and decline. The simplest way of defining oikophobia is as the opposite extreme of xenophobia... The reason why we are experiencing oikophobia in the United States today is that we are in about the same phase of historical development now as England was after World War II, or a little earlier: a great power, but on the decline... Diverse interests are created that view each other as greater enemies than they do foreign threats. Since the common civilizational enemy has been successfully repulsed, it can no longer serve as an effective target for and outlet of people’s sense of superiority, and human psychology generally requires an adversary for the purpose of self-identification, and so a new adversary is crafted: other people in the same civilization. Since this condition of leisure and empowerment, as well as a perception of external threats as non-existential, are the results of a society’s success, success is, ironically, a prerequisite for a society’s self-hatred. What Freud has called the “narcissism of small differences” (in Civilization and Its Discontents)—the urge to compete against others even through minor distinctions like a virtuous action or the newest gadget—becomes one motivation through which a particular interest expresses its superiority over others. This “domestic” competition means that by rejecting one’s culture as backward, one automatically sets oneself above all the other interests that are parts of that culture"
So much for it being a myth that liberals hate their countries and their culture
This is a much more sophisticated and well-supported version of "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times"
Nationalism vs. patriotism: Trump’s “nationalism” is not what makes him radical. - "Donald Trump finally came out as a nationalist last month. The president thrilled the crowd at a Ted Cruz rally by declaring, “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist! Use that word! Use that word!” Reactions were predictable. Liberals gnashed their teeth, Breitbart cheered, and white supremacists called it the greatest thing since Birth of a Nation.America’s European allies have condemned Trump’s embrace of nationalism. French President Emanuel Macron declared on Nov. 11 that “nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.” To Macron, nationalism, exemplified by Trump’s “America First” slogan, means “pursuing our own interests first, with no regard to others.” The proper attitude of loyalty to one’s nation, Macron said, is patriotism, which he said is “the exact opposite of nationalism.”... Patriotism is generally understood to mean citizens’ love and loyalty to their country. How it differs from nationalism is not altogether clear, in part because nationalism has no agreed meaning"... The distinction between patriotism and nationalism has a Goldilocks quality. It suggests that nationalists have too much devotion to their nation, while patriots have just the right amount. But how much devotion to one’s nation is too much?"
British army officers are told soldiers calling themselves 'patriots' could be extremists - "A guide to help high-ranking British officers spot right-wing extremists in their ranks has been leaked - and the signs include people calling themselves 'patriots' and making 'inaccurate generalisations about the Left'.The leaflet, made in 2017, is titled 'Extreme Right Wing (XRW) Indicators & Warnings' - and advises senior army staff to look out for people who 'use the term Islamofacism' [sic] and call people who challenge their 'XRW' views 'indoctrinated'... It is not known whether similar literature has been produced on how to spot left-wing extremists or Islamists...
Extreme right-wing indicators and warnings, according to the army:
Become increasingly angry at perceived injustices or threats to so called 'National Identity'
Refer to individuals ready to challenge their XRW views as being 'indoctrinated'
Make generalisations about Muslims and Jews
Involve colleagues in closed social media groups
Refer to Political Correctness as some left wing or communist plot
Make inaccurate generalisations about 'the Left' or Government
Actively seek out impressionable individuals to indoctrinate or recruit"
Looks like the Overton Window moves awfully fast
Presumably making inaccurate generalisations about the Right is a good thing
Presumably if you challenge this pamphlet, you are 'indoctrinated'
These Left-wing slurs on Churchill are part of a bigger war on British history - "The campaign against Winston Churchill is becoming unhinged. Consider this complaint from the popular Corbynite website The Canary: “On the 14 February edition of the BBC‘s Question Time, Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg attempted to defend Churchill’s use of concentration camps during the Boer War.”Seriously, comrades? His use of concentration camps? The main connection Churchill had with camps in the Boer War is that he was interned in a PoW camp – by the Boers. He escaped, made it back to Britain and was elected to Parliament where, in a startlingly magnanimous maiden speech in 1901, he called on his countrymen to deal generously with the enemy who were, he said, simply fighting for their homes. Of course, the Leftist attempt to blacken Churchill’s name isn’t really about Churchill. It begins with its conclusion, namely that Britain is always and everywhere in the wrong, and then casts around for any argument, however absurd, to sustain that conclusion. Here’s a handy rule of thumb. Anyone who claims that Britain invented concentration camps is more interested in name-calling than in historical accuracy. The use of that loaded phrase is meant to make us think of the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka.But the camps set up during the Boer War were there to contain Afrikaner non-combatants driven from their homesteads. They were not there to work people to death, let alone to murder them en masse... The Momentum numpties currently repeating this claim might be surprised to learn that it originated with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief. It shouldn’t need saying that it is bunkum. Internment camps are as old as war itself.Extermination camps, by contrast, were a Nazi speciality – though Stalin’s gulags were also used deliberately to work inmates to death. Even the name “concentration camps” did not originate in the South African war. It had been used, for example, by Spain to describe its detention centres in the Cuban war. Goebbels would have recognised what the contemporary Left is doing, namely snatching at any historical myths that might serve its purpose. The anti-Churchill campaign, which has now been sanctioned by the shadow chancellor, who calls Churchill a “villain”, is a case in point. It is possible to construct a case against Churchill. He could be self-absorbed, inconsiderate and vain. He could be a bully. His obsession with his reputation was unusual, even in a politician. But pointing out these mundane flaws is no fun. If you want kudos in today’s public sphere, you have to adopt the angry, monotonous tone of the identitarian Left. “Churchill was a racist! Churchill was an imperialist! Churchill was a white supremacist!” These accusations are not primarily about Churchill. They’re primarily about the people making them. What they are really saying is: “Look at me! I’m so perceptive! I can see the flaws in a national hero! That means I must be more sensitive than the rest of you! In fact, it makes me a better person than Churchill!”To repeat, Churchill should not be beyond criticism. But criticisms that are primarily a form of virtue-signalling are, almost by definition, bad history. If I were constructing a case against the cigar-chomping aristocrat, I would include the following: his defection to and from the Liberal Party on largely careerist grounds (“ratting and re-ratting” as he himself described it); the Gallipoli fiasco; his decision, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1925, to rejoin the Gold Standard at the pre-war rate, thus prompting a recession; and the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of his second ministry, after 1951, when he was no longer fully capable, but would not stand aside.To be clear, a defence can be made of him in each of these cases, as Andrew Roberts shows in his definitive new biography. But let’s agree that a case can at least be made.Making that case, though, is no fun. It doesn’t raise your status in woke circles. So Churchill is instead attacked for being too Right-wing and, in particular, for not sharing our generation’s obsession with anti-racism... The Bengal famine was caused by a cyclone and exacerbated by the Japanese invasion of Burma. It is true Churchill prioritised feeding the Indian army. Given what had happened elsewhere in Asia, can we say with confidence that he would have been wiser to let the soldiers go hungry and risk a Japanese conquest? Of all the fashionable attacks on Churchill, only one has force. He was, by the standards of his own age, an outlier in his opposition to Indian self-government."
More on the "myth" that liberals hate their countries
Is The American Flag Offensive? Harvard University Students Sure Think So — Hear The Story That Made Megyn Kelly Burst Into Laughter - "a Harvard student who hung an American flag in his dorm room was asked by his roommate to remove said flag. Why? The flag “represented a political statement” the roommate was “not willing to make.”... '“I used to believe that open discourse was a value all Americans hold dear. I presumed that when asked about what makes America so unique, many Americans would respond that our pluralistic society is the foundation of so much of our success. That it was understood that without a marketplace of ideas, our society simply could not flourish. “But then I started college.”'... Perhaps one of the more extreme cases of hypersensitivity at Harvard was the story of a pro-choice student who found out her fellow students’ positions on abortion so that she could avoid sitting near pro-life learners... a student named Bridget Kerrigan hung a Confederate flag in her dorm room window in the winter of 1991, and refused to remove it despite multiple complaints and protests."
Massachusetts college stops flying American flag after it becomes focus of dispute over Trump - The Washington Post - "The day after the election, some people at Hampshire College reacted to the news of Donald Trump’s victory by calling for the removal of the American flag at the center of campus, saying it was a symbol of racism and hatred. That night, some lowered it. And the following night — sometime before dawn on Veterans Day — people burned it.The flag was quickly replaced, but the college board announced that it would be flown at half-staff, “both to acknowledge the grief and pain experienced by so many and to enable the full complexity of voices and experiences to be heard.”That didn’t work... Lash told the campus community that its efforts to convey respect and sorrow had had the opposite effect, and he announced that the college would remove the flag entirely for a while... At Brown University, some students tore up and stomped on flags from an event honoring veterans... At American University the day after the election, students upset about Trump’s victory burned flags and shouted “F— white America!” Two days after the election, an American flag in St. Mary’s City was founded shredded and flying at half-staff"
Post ID: 704864675626389996
How a New Jersey brewery unwittingly became the latest culture war battleground
How a New Jersey brewery unwittingly became the latest culture war battleground | Spectator USA
"The party capped off a day-long conference called ‘Ending Violence, Racism and Authoritarianism,’ put on by Mythinformed, Subverse and minds.com, three organizations bound by the common conviction that promoting viewpoint diversity and freedom of expression are the only antidotes to an ever-more fractured and polarized America...
A targeted harassment campaign led by ‘No Hate NJ,’ a group whose social media presence seemed to have only spawned spontaneously around August 18, was purportedly successful in getting the original conference venue, the Broadway Theater, to cancel the contract, leaving organizers scrambling to find a new host just two weeks before the event’s scheduled date on August 31, 2019.
Speakers and attendees – all 485 ticket holders – were informed of the new location, the Sugarhouse Casino located across the Delaware River in Philadelphia, just two hours before doors opened. The entire operation had a clandestine feel, as if the organizers were running a pop-up speakeasy during Prohibition. The casino’s air-tight security prevented protesters and hecklers from disrupting the event, but that was of scant comfort to Rich Myers and his business partner, Megan Myers, co-owners of the Human Village Brewing Company who hosted the official conference after-party. Despite facing harassment from all fronts, Rich and Megan refused to cancel their contract with the organizers.
The ensuing ordeal has transformed their story into yet another flashpoint in the wider outrage mob-fueled political and cultural war. ‘We’ve been getting terrible reviews on Google as far as like “these guys are Nazis”, “Nazi supporters” and they started a call campaign against us,’ Rich said. ‘There were three days solid of phone call after phone call, from as far away as San Francisco.’...
This caught Rich Myers completely off-guard, so he decided to take a closer look at the ‘Minds IRL’ speakers. ‘When we host events we don’t ask many questions. They’d tell us if it’s a wedding or christening or baby shower. As far as details about guests, we don’t care,’ he said. The first speaker he researched was Tara Devlin, a comedian and progressive commentator who founded the unapologetically liberal website RepublicanDirtyTricks.com. Stumbling upon a YouTube video where she opened with the phrase ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,’ Rich found it incongruent with the protesters’ accusations and so, he went down the political YouTube rabbit hole, consuming video after video for three days straight, just to get a better idea of the people who were going to be attending this maligned after-party. ‘It was clear that there was just no way this was a white supremacy meeting,’ he said. ‘You don’t bring in gay people, black people, trans people – the gambit of people that were represented by this, or the number of women that were represented by this, made the protesters’ claims extremely unlikely.’...
Initially, when the onslaught first began, he had naively attempted to engage in good-faith debates with the callers. He asked the first activist who called the brewery’s business line, ‘have you actually listened to a single one of these speakers?’ His interlocutor replied, ‘I’ve seen enough of this stuff online.’
Rich told the caller he had taken the time to sit down and evaluate the content for himself and provided examples of speakers with bona fide liberal cred... Someone called in with a lead-in story about wanting to patronize the business but then abruptly changed her mind because she had apparently found out that they were ‘hosting Nazis.’ Rich asked her if she knew who the keynote speaker, Daryl Davis, was.
She didn’t.
He described how Davis was single-handedly responsible for pulling 200 people out of the Ku Klux Klan by infiltrating the group, befriending his enemies and de-radicalizing them in the process. ‘She said, “I don’t care who else is going to be there, but you got some terrible people coming,”’ Rich said.
This appears to be a strange application of a political version of the One Drop Rule: the social principle of classification where an event featuring just one person with remotely right-wing views is grounds for condemning it entirely as a ‘neo-Nazi’ or ‘far-right’ rally... the entire affair is judged only by its most extreme participant and thus branded accordingly. This same concept also extends to evaluating individuals and businesses in the public show trial of performative wokeness, often by making tenuous connections via guilt by association.
Megan Myers, whose personal social media accounts were linked to the brewery’s business pages, faced a barrage of personal insults online. She was first accused of hosting Nazis, and before long, the charges evolved and escalated to her being called a Nazi herself. As a Jewish woman, she considers the malicious use of the epithet ‘Nazi’ morally unconscionable. ‘You cannot idly use the word “Nazi” and not offend me,’ she said. Rich agrees: ‘I had family disappear in Germany in World War Two. There are a couple of ancestry lines that stopped around the time of concentration camps. To be throwing these words out, it’s really offensive.’...
The outrage mob, intent on destroying the lives and careers of innocent bystanders who refuse to conform to their orthodoxy, employs a form of guerrilla warfare. Campaigns are launched by a faceless, amorphous adversary well-versed in weaponizing online review systems for political and social gain, all made possible by an asymmetry of power and reputational risk between the activists and their targets. A small, anonymous activist mob with copious amounts of free time, nothing to lose and an infinite will to prevail has a far lower opportunity cost associated with waging this proxy battle across platforms. ‘It is funny listening to the narrative of these hate groups saying “we’re here defending our home town.” Well, none of you are from here – you’re not defending, you’re just coming here and attacking’...
The most recent sacrificial lamb to the altar of wokeness is the Manhattan-based Lucky Lee’s. Owner Arielle Haspel, a white female former health coach, was excoriated by the outrage mob for opening a restaurant which served up ‘sanitized’ Chinese cuisine, adapted to meet healthier, clean-eating standards. This drew charges of both cultural appropriation and racism, especially for implying that Chinese food is, by default, ‘unclean’ (read: greasy). Yelp temporarily suspended reviews and removed politically-motivated ones due to high levels of ‘unusual activity.’
In a world where everything is politicized, no business owner or individual is safe from the mob... Apart from refusing to cower to the morally callous agenda of the protesters who nonchalantly throw around the word ‘Nazi,’ she also believes that, just as the El Tiempo case had proven before, apologies to the mob are futile."
"Anti hatred" seems remarkably hateful
Since Daryl Davis was mentioned, I will repost something from October, a great example of the incredible hatred and spitefulness of performative wokeness, where antifa anti-racists called him, a black man who has spent over 3 decades of his life countering Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, a white supremacist:
Daryl Davis
"Hey Folks,
You want to hear a good one?...
I have spent 30+ years talking with Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, White Nationalists, White Supremacists, White Separatists, Black Supremacists, Black Separatists, Alt Right members and just about every other group you can imagine with a superiority complex. The purpose of which, is bring some reconciliation amongst different ideological groups to reduce violence and racism and bring about a sense of normalcy and civility among my fellow Americans.
For my efforts, many of which have been successful, I have been called a nigger, a porch monkey, a pavement ape, by racists, an Uncle Tom, an Uncle Ruckus, an Oreo, a race traitor, a sellout, both a pimp and a prostitute, by some of those who look like me and who claim to despise racism. When you add it all up, I've been just about called every name but my own name.
In my 61 years on this Earth, i've seen a lot and I've heard a lot. But a few nights ago I was called something I could not imagine being called in a million years. I was part of a panel in Philadelphia, assembled by the conference organizers to discuss ways to de-escalate racism, antisemitism and violence in our country.
Meanwhile, a group known as Antifa (short for /Anti- Facist), threatened to do violence to the conference organizers and panel speakers and burn down the building where we were to speak. Despite the threats, we had a very successful conference. We celebrated with an after-party in a room filled with people from all walks of life and every political persuasion from MAGA hat wearing Trump supporters to supporters of those at the opposite end of the Make America Great Again people and everyone in between on the spectrum. We ALL got along fantastically.
Meanwhile, the police department shut down the streets surrounding the site of the party as a crowd of about 40 Antifa members gathered outside the building to protest, accusing the the speakers and organizers of being racist
We invited the Antifa members to come in a join the party and have an opportunity to talk with us. They refused. I thought I had seen and heard it all in my 61 years and nothing would surprise me, but I was mistaken. Now are you ready for this? The Antifa people called me a White Supremacist. What??? Are you kidding me??? Wow!!! That's right, you heard me!!! They called ME, a White Supremacist. Now, I KNOW I've heard it all. It's good to be colorblind sometimes, but this is ridiculous!!!"
"The party capped off a day-long conference called ‘Ending Violence, Racism and Authoritarianism,’ put on by Mythinformed, Subverse and minds.com, three organizations bound by the common conviction that promoting viewpoint diversity and freedom of expression are the only antidotes to an ever-more fractured and polarized America...
A targeted harassment campaign led by ‘No Hate NJ,’ a group whose social media presence seemed to have only spawned spontaneously around August 18, was purportedly successful in getting the original conference venue, the Broadway Theater, to cancel the contract, leaving organizers scrambling to find a new host just two weeks before the event’s scheduled date on August 31, 2019.
Speakers and attendees – all 485 ticket holders – were informed of the new location, the Sugarhouse Casino located across the Delaware River in Philadelphia, just two hours before doors opened. The entire operation had a clandestine feel, as if the organizers were running a pop-up speakeasy during Prohibition. The casino’s air-tight security prevented protesters and hecklers from disrupting the event, but that was of scant comfort to Rich Myers and his business partner, Megan Myers, co-owners of the Human Village Brewing Company who hosted the official conference after-party. Despite facing harassment from all fronts, Rich and Megan refused to cancel their contract with the organizers.
The ensuing ordeal has transformed their story into yet another flashpoint in the wider outrage mob-fueled political and cultural war. ‘We’ve been getting terrible reviews on Google as far as like “these guys are Nazis”, “Nazi supporters” and they started a call campaign against us,’ Rich said. ‘There were three days solid of phone call after phone call, from as far away as San Francisco.’...
This caught Rich Myers completely off-guard, so he decided to take a closer look at the ‘Minds IRL’ speakers. ‘When we host events we don’t ask many questions. They’d tell us if it’s a wedding or christening or baby shower. As far as details about guests, we don’t care,’ he said. The first speaker he researched was Tara Devlin, a comedian and progressive commentator who founded the unapologetically liberal website RepublicanDirtyTricks.com. Stumbling upon a YouTube video where she opened with the phrase ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,’ Rich found it incongruent with the protesters’ accusations and so, he went down the political YouTube rabbit hole, consuming video after video for three days straight, just to get a better idea of the people who were going to be attending this maligned after-party. ‘It was clear that there was just no way this was a white supremacy meeting,’ he said. ‘You don’t bring in gay people, black people, trans people – the gambit of people that were represented by this, or the number of women that were represented by this, made the protesters’ claims extremely unlikely.’...
Initially, when the onslaught first began, he had naively attempted to engage in good-faith debates with the callers. He asked the first activist who called the brewery’s business line, ‘have you actually listened to a single one of these speakers?’ His interlocutor replied, ‘I’ve seen enough of this stuff online.’
Rich told the caller he had taken the time to sit down and evaluate the content for himself and provided examples of speakers with bona fide liberal cred... Someone called in with a lead-in story about wanting to patronize the business but then abruptly changed her mind because she had apparently found out that they were ‘hosting Nazis.’ Rich asked her if she knew who the keynote speaker, Daryl Davis, was.
She didn’t.
He described how Davis was single-handedly responsible for pulling 200 people out of the Ku Klux Klan by infiltrating the group, befriending his enemies and de-radicalizing them in the process. ‘She said, “I don’t care who else is going to be there, but you got some terrible people coming,”’ Rich said.
This appears to be a strange application of a political version of the One Drop Rule: the social principle of classification where an event featuring just one person with remotely right-wing views is grounds for condemning it entirely as a ‘neo-Nazi’ or ‘far-right’ rally... the entire affair is judged only by its most extreme participant and thus branded accordingly. This same concept also extends to evaluating individuals and businesses in the public show trial of performative wokeness, often by making tenuous connections via guilt by association.
Megan Myers, whose personal social media accounts were linked to the brewery’s business pages, faced a barrage of personal insults online. She was first accused of hosting Nazis, and before long, the charges evolved and escalated to her being called a Nazi herself. As a Jewish woman, she considers the malicious use of the epithet ‘Nazi’ morally unconscionable. ‘You cannot idly use the word “Nazi” and not offend me,’ she said. Rich agrees: ‘I had family disappear in Germany in World War Two. There are a couple of ancestry lines that stopped around the time of concentration camps. To be throwing these words out, it’s really offensive.’...
The outrage mob, intent on destroying the lives and careers of innocent bystanders who refuse to conform to their orthodoxy, employs a form of guerrilla warfare. Campaigns are launched by a faceless, amorphous adversary well-versed in weaponizing online review systems for political and social gain, all made possible by an asymmetry of power and reputational risk between the activists and their targets. A small, anonymous activist mob with copious amounts of free time, nothing to lose and an infinite will to prevail has a far lower opportunity cost associated with waging this proxy battle across platforms. ‘It is funny listening to the narrative of these hate groups saying “we’re here defending our home town.” Well, none of you are from here – you’re not defending, you’re just coming here and attacking’...
The most recent sacrificial lamb to the altar of wokeness is the Manhattan-based Lucky Lee’s. Owner Arielle Haspel, a white female former health coach, was excoriated by the outrage mob for opening a restaurant which served up ‘sanitized’ Chinese cuisine, adapted to meet healthier, clean-eating standards. This drew charges of both cultural appropriation and racism, especially for implying that Chinese food is, by default, ‘unclean’ (read: greasy). Yelp temporarily suspended reviews and removed politically-motivated ones due to high levels of ‘unusual activity.’
In a world where everything is politicized, no business owner or individual is safe from the mob... Apart from refusing to cower to the morally callous agenda of the protesters who nonchalantly throw around the word ‘Nazi,’ she also believes that, just as the El Tiempo case had proven before, apologies to the mob are futile."
"Anti hatred" seems remarkably hateful
Since Daryl Davis was mentioned, I will repost something from October, a great example of the incredible hatred and spitefulness of performative wokeness, where antifa anti-racists called him, a black man who has spent over 3 decades of his life countering Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, a white supremacist:
Daryl Davis
"Hey Folks,
You want to hear a good one?...
I have spent 30+ years talking with Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, White Nationalists, White Supremacists, White Separatists, Black Supremacists, Black Separatists, Alt Right members and just about every other group you can imagine with a superiority complex. The purpose of which, is bring some reconciliation amongst different ideological groups to reduce violence and racism and bring about a sense of normalcy and civility among my fellow Americans.
For my efforts, many of which have been successful, I have been called a nigger, a porch monkey, a pavement ape, by racists, an Uncle Tom, an Uncle Ruckus, an Oreo, a race traitor, a sellout, both a pimp and a prostitute, by some of those who look like me and who claim to despise racism. When you add it all up, I've been just about called every name but my own name.
In my 61 years on this Earth, i've seen a lot and I've heard a lot. But a few nights ago I was called something I could not imagine being called in a million years. I was part of a panel in Philadelphia, assembled by the conference organizers to discuss ways to de-escalate racism, antisemitism and violence in our country.
Meanwhile, a group known as Antifa (short for /Anti- Facist), threatened to do violence to the conference organizers and panel speakers and burn down the building where we were to speak. Despite the threats, we had a very successful conference. We celebrated with an after-party in a room filled with people from all walks of life and every political persuasion from MAGA hat wearing Trump supporters to supporters of those at the opposite end of the Make America Great Again people and everyone in between on the spectrum. We ALL got along fantastically.
Meanwhile, the police department shut down the streets surrounding the site of the party as a crowd of about 40 Antifa members gathered outside the building to protest, accusing the the speakers and organizers of being racist
We invited the Antifa members to come in a join the party and have an opportunity to talk with us. They refused. I thought I had seen and heard it all in my 61 years and nothing would surprise me, but I was mistaken. Now are you ready for this? The Antifa people called me a White Supremacist. What??? Are you kidding me??? Wow!!! That's right, you heard me!!! They called ME, a White Supremacist. Now, I KNOW I've heard it all. It's good to be colorblind sometimes, but this is ridiculous!!!"
Post ID: 3517222887058004764
Links - 25th December 2019 (1)
Why a former CIA spy stops at every yellow light - "CIA spies learn to master skills regular people do not, and they stick with you.They learn to be so immersed in their cover that they can pass a polygraph test, to spot the perfect meeting site that is just isolated enough to avoid the eyes and ears of the enemy but also can be explained if discovered, and to handle tails — surveillants that could jeopardize an entire operation... she felt more comfortable with her back to the wall in restaurants and that she tends to take note of entrances and exits wherever she goes... "When you do countersurveillance training, one of the things that you are taught is not to piss off your surveillant and make them think you are trying to lose them," Fox said."So, if the light turns [yellow], you stop so that they don't get the sense you shot through it with an attempt to lose them"... Handling a tail is not like what most people have read or watched in spy thrillers."The way these operations are portrayed on TV and in movies, where someone jumps on a train and loses the surveillant, or they jump between rooftops with their weapon drawn, nothing could be further from the truth and the reality of deployment"... "That would draw a huge amount of attention to the officer, even if they got away that one time. Their cover is then blown," Fox told Insider. "A lot of the training involves being very non-alerting, pretty much just very boring so that we aren't drawing attention to ourselves.""
Inmate with HIV squirted toothpaste tube filled with urine and excrement into prison guard's mouth - "An inmate with HIV squirted a disgusting mix of urine and faeces over prison guards.Miles Atkinson left the officers fearing they had contracted the virus by claiming the mixture he fired from a toothpaste tube also contained semen... he walked free from court with a suspended sentence... they had to undergo blood tests and receive Hepatitis B injections... "Urine and faeces do not transmit the HIV virus. This attack, while understandably shocking, did not expose anyone to HIV risk."
George Lucas is a Genius & ‘REVENGE OF THE SITH’ May Be the Greatest Work of Art in Our Lifetimes… - "Lucas and the prequel trilogy have become so widely misrepresented as ‘bad’ that most people don’t know how to deal with someone like Paglia sincerely proclaiming “Nothing in the last 30 years has been produced – in any of the arts – that is as significant or as emotionally compelling as Revenge of the Sith…”.. a Rotten Tomatoes poll last October found that Revenge of the Sith (and not Empire Strikes Back) scored as the best-regarded of the movies according to aggregation of archived reviews... To really understand those films [the prequels], you have to go back to some of the historical epics of the fifties and sixties, particularly films like Ben-Hur, Cleopatra or Spartacus. If you watch any of those films (and all three are timeless, truly marvelous cinematic works) and then watch the three Star Wars prequels, it will suddenly make much more sense. The acting style, the dialogue style, the themes, the epic scope and settings, the vast mythologizing, the way the films are scored, even the intricate costume design – all of it.There’s nothing surprising about that. After all, it’s easy to overlook the fact now from our current vantage-point, but the original Star Wars trilogy movies weren’t contemporary in style either – they were stylistically based on things like Kurosawa, Flash Gordon and the Saturday matinee serials of the 1930s and 40s. The original trilogy films made no stylistic sense in terms of contemporary cinema or sensibilities in the late 70s or early 80s – they were, in style, a homage to a long-gone era.So too were the prequels – just a different homage to a different era... someone trying to build a Tower of Babel is inevitably going to experience more hitches than someone building a new Starbucks on the high street."
Iconoclasm: Famous Igboukwu Roped Pot Broken in Lagos Museum - "The 13-century-old archeological masterpiece, which was unearthed 50 years ago in Igboukwu, Anambra state of Nigeria by Professor Thurstan Shaw, is broken and thus withdrawn from public exhibit at the National Museum in Lagos. The roped pot, which was produced through an indigenously derived lost-wax casting technique belongs to a collection of ancient Igbo archeological treasures that have been described by world-class connoisseurs as the most technically sophisticated bronze craft ever made by man"
I've seen this and it was indeed amazing
More Japanese are marrying friends and acquaintances because they don’t want to bother with dating - "A handful of celebrity marriages have apparently helped spark the new trend of “kousai zero nichikon” (roughly translated, “marrying without dating”). Famously, actress Maki Horikita married co-star Koji Yamamoto in 2015 after just a month and change of dating, sparking some Twitter users to share stories of their own shotgun marriages... the rate of arranged marriage divorces is actually dwarfed by the divorce rate of traditional modern marriages, implying, possibly, that love can blossom from even the most unorthodox of couplings."
Japanese women categorise male friends by levels of intimacy, from hugging to bathing - "Hafure (“Hug Friend”)
This term is used for people you can hug, which may sound a little odd to the rest of the world, but here in Japan, it’s not customary to hug family and friends, so a hug can be quite an intimate act.
Kisufure (“Kiss Friend”)
This term is for people you can kiss, which is another level-up on the scale of intimacy in a world where friends and family generally don’t even peck one another on the cheek.
Sofure (”Soine Friend”)
This refers to people you can “soine”, or sleep next to (without engaging in sexual activity). According to pundits, this act is something you can enjoy on special occasions like birthdays, as it gives people a similar level of intimacy as a post-coital lie-down, but without the feelings of guilt that may come after doing the deed, potentially ruining the friendship for good.
Kamofure (“Camouflage Friend”)
This describes those you can pretend to date, under the guise of friendship as a camouflage. The merits for this type of relationship include the fact that you can go out on dates that aren’t officially discussed as being dates, and even hold hands, hug, or kiss, without having to deal with the pressure of officially dating. However, this can lead to confusion for a lot of men.
Sanfure (“Sandbag Friend”)
“Sandbag” is the Japanese word for punching bag, and as such, this term is reserved for people you can use as a punching bag — mentally, not physically. This is great for women who want someone to listen as they unload all their stresses on them, but many say this is the worst category for men to be in, as they do all the giving and get nothing in return.
There are a number of other “friends” that don’t appear on the televised list above, including “Birifure” (“Rehabilitation Friend“), who helps you rehabilitate after a breakup, and “Sefure” (“Sex Friend“), a friend with all-the-way benefits... Ofure stands for “Ofuro Friend”, meaning a friend you take baths with. And that’s not necessarily referring to mixed-gender public bathing, but private bathing, like the type you take at home... one in five women surveyed have a male friend that they take baths with."
Japanese man receives Airdrop message from tailgating driver - "The ability to Airdrop strangers in our vicinity has become a controversial topic recently, with media reports on “AirDrop Chikan” (literally “Airdrop Perverts”) causing fear amongst iPhone users, especially on public transport.While perverts use Airdrop to send obscene photos to people within a nine-metre (29.5-foot) radius, this wasn’t the intended purpose of the file-sharing service... the note from the driver behind simply says: “Unchi ikasete kure” (“Poop. Let me pass.”)Needless to say, @km03728012 was relieved that the tailgating driver simply needed to defecate, which explained his erratic behaviour."
Woman Yelling at a Cat | Know Your Meme - "Woman Yelling at a Cat refers to a meme format featuring a screen cap of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast members Taylor Armstrong and Kyle Richards followed by a picture of a confused-looking cat sitting behind a dinner plate. The format gained significant popularity across the web in mid-June 2019 and the cat was later identified as Smudge the Cat."
RHOBH: Taylor vs. Camille - S2 Taylor's Meltdown - YouTube
Comments: "The cat is on instagram @smudge_cat the cat is not from the show"
"The other image (cat) comes from a Tumblr account know as "All Things Beautiful," which mostly shares photographs of a white cat exasperated at the prospect of having to eat vegetables."
High Court overturns conviction of doctor fined S$50,000 for giving out patient’s details - "A doctor who was fined S$50,000 for giving out a patient’s detail had his conviction overturned by the High Court... SMC had filed the appeal after receiving new information in the case of Dr Soo Shuenn Chiang, who was fined in March by an independent disciplinary tribunal. The psychiatrist had been fined for failing to verify the identity of a caller claiming to be the husband of one of his patients and for giving a memo containing confidential medical information about that patient to her brother... In 2015, Dr Soo, the director of Neuroscience Clinic at the National University Hospital (NUH), passed a memo containing the patient’s medical information to his clinic staff to give to the patient's family. The brother, who had posed as the patient’s husband during a call to the hospital, later collected that memo and used it to obtain a personal protection order against the patient.The patient later filed a complaint with SMC... SMC found new evidence that raised doubt about the circumstances surrounding the incident.The patient's brother had put his version of what happened on Facebook, saying that he had not impersonated the husband, who in fact had contacted Dr Soo.SMC then approached both the patient’s brother and husband to record new statements.It found that the brother’s and the husband’s account was different from that set out in the Agreed Statement of Facts, based on which Dr Soo had pleaded guilty.With this new information, SMC applied to the High Court to overturn the conviction. The court later decided to disregard the new information because they were not satisfied that the brother and husband's accounts were reliable.However, having examined the record of proceedings, they questioned whether Dr Soo was even guilty of breaching the patient's confidentiality in the first place.Upon considering the issues, the court decided that Dr Soo had taken reasonable, appropriate steps and had good reason in disclosing the patient’s confidential information.“As a preliminary point, a doctor may disclose a patient’s confidential medical information without her consent when he reasonably regards it as necessary to protect the patient from potentially serious self-harm; disclosure is in the patient’s best interests; and the patient’s consent cannot reasonably be obtained"... "In such circumstances, the disclosure should be made to those closest to the patient, such as her next of kin"... The court also decided that Dr Soo could not possibly be held responsible for how the husband might choose to use or misuse the memo, if the memo had in fact been delivered to the husband as Dr Soo had instructed."That part of the charge which alleged that Dr Soo had failed to take appropriate steps to ensure that the complainant’s confidential medical information in the memorandum was not accessible to unauthorised persons was unacceptably broad," it said."Any administrative failings of the clinic staff in handing the memorandum to the brother contrary to Dr Soo’s instructions would fall outside the scope of Dr Soo’s duty to maintain the complainant’s medical confidentiality""
Italy's Only Malaysian Food Truck Draws an Unlikely Crowd: Italians - "Italy’s international food scene leaves much to be desired. Justin Yip pulls no punches: “It’s the worst place in the world for non-Italian food.” Two years ago, he opened the first and likely only Malaysian food truck in the country. In many ways, Yip’s truck, Sate & Sake, is the antithesis of Italy’s food culture. Selling traditional satays and currys to the robust student population of Turin, Malaysian-born Yip stands for fast-casual foreign fare in the home of three-ingredient masterpieces and the Slow Food movement. He’d hoped to build a business by feeding Asian exchange students. Instead, it’s the Italians themselves who are the backbone of his clientele—over 90 percent, by Yip’s estimate... The culture isn’t exactly begging for alternative eating formats. In 1986, hundreds gathered at the Spanish Steps in Rome to protest the opening of Italy’s first McDonald’s franchise by handing out free bowls of penne. The protests birthed the Slow Food Movement, whose ranks now number in the millions, spanning more than 160 countries. It’s headquartered in Bra, Italy – an hour from Yip’s truck.Italians don’t have the world’s most adventurous palates, either. “My friends say it’s too spicy,” says Andrea Fogli, an Italian engineering student who travels alone to eat Yip’s food. “I think it’s because they’re wary to try something new.” Another Sate & Sake regular, Malaysian-born transportation student Hasan Rosman, runs into the same issue cooking for Italian friends. “They’re very arrogant about foreign food. They’re used to simple ingredients, so when they try something more colorful and vivid, they worry they’ll have stomach problems.”... Given this lack of appetite for foreign fare, Turin, like many Italian cities, offers little in the way of non-Italian cuisine. The handful of Chinese buffets and sushi restaurants it does offer, says Rosman, “lack a certain level of emotion.” If the generalizations are just that, municipal legislation is illuminating. In 2009, the Tuscan city of Lucca stopped issuing permits to non-Italian eateries, as one city council member said, “to preserve our cultural and historical identity.” The same happened in Forte dei Marmi in 2011, and again in Florence in 2016. Culinary patriotism hit a fever pitch when the Minister of Agriculture appeared in a news conference to back these measures that banned foreign cuisine. Asked if he’d ever eaten kebab, he replied, “No. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I refuse to even eat a pineapple.”... unrealistic food-truck regulations made simply parking his truck a challenge all its own. By law, the truck must be relocated every hour, even though it takes him 15 minutes to set up and another 15 to pack up. He’s also barred from operating within 200 meters of a school or 100 meters of a church. “But this is Italy,” he says, “there’s a church on every corner.” Yip quickly learned that if he parked under a pedestrian bridge between two buildings, the authorities would leave him be. The son of a nurse and a surgeon, he’s not sneaky by nature. To run his business, however, “I’m totally flouting the law,” he says, “but I guess that’s a very Italian attitude itself.”... he cut the spiciness and sweetness from Malaysian standards (“Sweet and savory don’t mix here”)"
Italian town bans any new kebab shops or other 'ethnic food' - ""This measure has nothing to do with xenophobia – it is about protecting and valuing our culture," said Umberto Buratti, the centre-Left mayor of the town. "We would also say no to American hamburger chains."... More than 40 per cent have never eaten foreign offerings such as sushi, curries and kebabs, according to a survey released this week by Coldiretti, the national agricultural association."Notwithstanding the rapid spread of restaurants offering ethnic food, only seven per cent of Italians eat on a regular basis in a foreign takeaway and only five per cent in a foreign restaurant," the report said."
Inmate with HIV squirted toothpaste tube filled with urine and excrement into prison guard's mouth - "An inmate with HIV squirted a disgusting mix of urine and faeces over prison guards.Miles Atkinson left the officers fearing they had contracted the virus by claiming the mixture he fired from a toothpaste tube also contained semen... he walked free from court with a suspended sentence... they had to undergo blood tests and receive Hepatitis B injections... "Urine and faeces do not transmit the HIV virus. This attack, while understandably shocking, did not expose anyone to HIV risk."
George Lucas is a Genius & ‘REVENGE OF THE SITH’ May Be the Greatest Work of Art in Our Lifetimes… - "Lucas and the prequel trilogy have become so widely misrepresented as ‘bad’ that most people don’t know how to deal with someone like Paglia sincerely proclaiming “Nothing in the last 30 years has been produced – in any of the arts – that is as significant or as emotionally compelling as Revenge of the Sith…”.. a Rotten Tomatoes poll last October found that Revenge of the Sith (and not Empire Strikes Back) scored as the best-regarded of the movies according to aggregation of archived reviews... To really understand those films [the prequels], you have to go back to some of the historical epics of the fifties and sixties, particularly films like Ben-Hur, Cleopatra or Spartacus. If you watch any of those films (and all three are timeless, truly marvelous cinematic works) and then watch the three Star Wars prequels, it will suddenly make much more sense. The acting style, the dialogue style, the themes, the epic scope and settings, the vast mythologizing, the way the films are scored, even the intricate costume design – all of it.There’s nothing surprising about that. After all, it’s easy to overlook the fact now from our current vantage-point, but the original Star Wars trilogy movies weren’t contemporary in style either – they were stylistically based on things like Kurosawa, Flash Gordon and the Saturday matinee serials of the 1930s and 40s. The original trilogy films made no stylistic sense in terms of contemporary cinema or sensibilities in the late 70s or early 80s – they were, in style, a homage to a long-gone era.So too were the prequels – just a different homage to a different era... someone trying to build a Tower of Babel is inevitably going to experience more hitches than someone building a new Starbucks on the high street."
Iconoclasm: Famous Igboukwu Roped Pot Broken in Lagos Museum - "The 13-century-old archeological masterpiece, which was unearthed 50 years ago in Igboukwu, Anambra state of Nigeria by Professor Thurstan Shaw, is broken and thus withdrawn from public exhibit at the National Museum in Lagos. The roped pot, which was produced through an indigenously derived lost-wax casting technique belongs to a collection of ancient Igbo archeological treasures that have been described by world-class connoisseurs as the most technically sophisticated bronze craft ever made by man"
I've seen this and it was indeed amazing
More Japanese are marrying friends and acquaintances because they don’t want to bother with dating - "A handful of celebrity marriages have apparently helped spark the new trend of “kousai zero nichikon” (roughly translated, “marrying without dating”). Famously, actress Maki Horikita married co-star Koji Yamamoto in 2015 after just a month and change of dating, sparking some Twitter users to share stories of their own shotgun marriages... the rate of arranged marriage divorces is actually dwarfed by the divorce rate of traditional modern marriages, implying, possibly, that love can blossom from even the most unorthodox of couplings."
Japanese women categorise male friends by levels of intimacy, from hugging to bathing - "Hafure (“Hug Friend”)
This term is used for people you can hug, which may sound a little odd to the rest of the world, but here in Japan, it’s not customary to hug family and friends, so a hug can be quite an intimate act.
Kisufure (“Kiss Friend”)
This term is for people you can kiss, which is another level-up on the scale of intimacy in a world where friends and family generally don’t even peck one another on the cheek.
Sofure (”Soine Friend”)
This refers to people you can “soine”, or sleep next to (without engaging in sexual activity). According to pundits, this act is something you can enjoy on special occasions like birthdays, as it gives people a similar level of intimacy as a post-coital lie-down, but without the feelings of guilt that may come after doing the deed, potentially ruining the friendship for good.
Kamofure (“Camouflage Friend”)
This describes those you can pretend to date, under the guise of friendship as a camouflage. The merits for this type of relationship include the fact that you can go out on dates that aren’t officially discussed as being dates, and even hold hands, hug, or kiss, without having to deal with the pressure of officially dating. However, this can lead to confusion for a lot of men.
Sanfure (“Sandbag Friend”)
“Sandbag” is the Japanese word for punching bag, and as such, this term is reserved for people you can use as a punching bag — mentally, not physically. This is great for women who want someone to listen as they unload all their stresses on them, but many say this is the worst category for men to be in, as they do all the giving and get nothing in return.
There are a number of other “friends” that don’t appear on the televised list above, including “Birifure” (“Rehabilitation Friend“), who helps you rehabilitate after a breakup, and “Sefure” (“Sex Friend“), a friend with all-the-way benefits... Ofure stands for “Ofuro Friend”, meaning a friend you take baths with. And that’s not necessarily referring to mixed-gender public bathing, but private bathing, like the type you take at home... one in five women surveyed have a male friend that they take baths with."
Japanese man receives Airdrop message from tailgating driver - "The ability to Airdrop strangers in our vicinity has become a controversial topic recently, with media reports on “AirDrop Chikan” (literally “Airdrop Perverts”) causing fear amongst iPhone users, especially on public transport.While perverts use Airdrop to send obscene photos to people within a nine-metre (29.5-foot) radius, this wasn’t the intended purpose of the file-sharing service... the note from the driver behind simply says: “Unchi ikasete kure” (“Poop. Let me pass.”)Needless to say, @km03728012 was relieved that the tailgating driver simply needed to defecate, which explained his erratic behaviour."
Woman Yelling at a Cat | Know Your Meme - "Woman Yelling at a Cat refers to a meme format featuring a screen cap of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast members Taylor Armstrong and Kyle Richards followed by a picture of a confused-looking cat sitting behind a dinner plate. The format gained significant popularity across the web in mid-June 2019 and the cat was later identified as Smudge the Cat."
RHOBH: Taylor vs. Camille - S2 Taylor's Meltdown - YouTube
Comments: "The cat is on instagram @smudge_cat the cat is not from the show"
"The other image (cat) comes from a Tumblr account know as "All Things Beautiful," which mostly shares photographs of a white cat exasperated at the prospect of having to eat vegetables."
High Court overturns conviction of doctor fined S$50,000 for giving out patient’s details - "A doctor who was fined S$50,000 for giving out a patient’s detail had his conviction overturned by the High Court... SMC had filed the appeal after receiving new information in the case of Dr Soo Shuenn Chiang, who was fined in March by an independent disciplinary tribunal. The psychiatrist had been fined for failing to verify the identity of a caller claiming to be the husband of one of his patients and for giving a memo containing confidential medical information about that patient to her brother... In 2015, Dr Soo, the director of Neuroscience Clinic at the National University Hospital (NUH), passed a memo containing the patient’s medical information to his clinic staff to give to the patient's family. The brother, who had posed as the patient’s husband during a call to the hospital, later collected that memo and used it to obtain a personal protection order against the patient.The patient later filed a complaint with SMC... SMC found new evidence that raised doubt about the circumstances surrounding the incident.The patient's brother had put his version of what happened on Facebook, saying that he had not impersonated the husband, who in fact had contacted Dr Soo.SMC then approached both the patient’s brother and husband to record new statements.It found that the brother’s and the husband’s account was different from that set out in the Agreed Statement of Facts, based on which Dr Soo had pleaded guilty.With this new information, SMC applied to the High Court to overturn the conviction. The court later decided to disregard the new information because they were not satisfied that the brother and husband's accounts were reliable.However, having examined the record of proceedings, they questioned whether Dr Soo was even guilty of breaching the patient's confidentiality in the first place.Upon considering the issues, the court decided that Dr Soo had taken reasonable, appropriate steps and had good reason in disclosing the patient’s confidential information.“As a preliminary point, a doctor may disclose a patient’s confidential medical information without her consent when he reasonably regards it as necessary to protect the patient from potentially serious self-harm; disclosure is in the patient’s best interests; and the patient’s consent cannot reasonably be obtained"... "In such circumstances, the disclosure should be made to those closest to the patient, such as her next of kin"... The court also decided that Dr Soo could not possibly be held responsible for how the husband might choose to use or misuse the memo, if the memo had in fact been delivered to the husband as Dr Soo had instructed."That part of the charge which alleged that Dr Soo had failed to take appropriate steps to ensure that the complainant’s confidential medical information in the memorandum was not accessible to unauthorised persons was unacceptably broad," it said."Any administrative failings of the clinic staff in handing the memorandum to the brother contrary to Dr Soo’s instructions would fall outside the scope of Dr Soo’s duty to maintain the complainant’s medical confidentiality""
Italy's Only Malaysian Food Truck Draws an Unlikely Crowd: Italians - "Italy’s international food scene leaves much to be desired. Justin Yip pulls no punches: “It’s the worst place in the world for non-Italian food.” Two years ago, he opened the first and likely only Malaysian food truck in the country. In many ways, Yip’s truck, Sate & Sake, is the antithesis of Italy’s food culture. Selling traditional satays and currys to the robust student population of Turin, Malaysian-born Yip stands for fast-casual foreign fare in the home of three-ingredient masterpieces and the Slow Food movement. He’d hoped to build a business by feeding Asian exchange students. Instead, it’s the Italians themselves who are the backbone of his clientele—over 90 percent, by Yip’s estimate... The culture isn’t exactly begging for alternative eating formats. In 1986, hundreds gathered at the Spanish Steps in Rome to protest the opening of Italy’s first McDonald’s franchise by handing out free bowls of penne. The protests birthed the Slow Food Movement, whose ranks now number in the millions, spanning more than 160 countries. It’s headquartered in Bra, Italy – an hour from Yip’s truck.Italians don’t have the world’s most adventurous palates, either. “My friends say it’s too spicy,” says Andrea Fogli, an Italian engineering student who travels alone to eat Yip’s food. “I think it’s because they’re wary to try something new.” Another Sate & Sake regular, Malaysian-born transportation student Hasan Rosman, runs into the same issue cooking for Italian friends. “They’re very arrogant about foreign food. They’re used to simple ingredients, so when they try something more colorful and vivid, they worry they’ll have stomach problems.”... Given this lack of appetite for foreign fare, Turin, like many Italian cities, offers little in the way of non-Italian cuisine. The handful of Chinese buffets and sushi restaurants it does offer, says Rosman, “lack a certain level of emotion.” If the generalizations are just that, municipal legislation is illuminating. In 2009, the Tuscan city of Lucca stopped issuing permits to non-Italian eateries, as one city council member said, “to preserve our cultural and historical identity.” The same happened in Forte dei Marmi in 2011, and again in Florence in 2016. Culinary patriotism hit a fever pitch when the Minister of Agriculture appeared in a news conference to back these measures that banned foreign cuisine. Asked if he’d ever eaten kebab, he replied, “No. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I refuse to even eat a pineapple.”... unrealistic food-truck regulations made simply parking his truck a challenge all its own. By law, the truck must be relocated every hour, even though it takes him 15 minutes to set up and another 15 to pack up. He’s also barred from operating within 200 meters of a school or 100 meters of a church. “But this is Italy,” he says, “there’s a church on every corner.” Yip quickly learned that if he parked under a pedestrian bridge between two buildings, the authorities would leave him be. The son of a nurse and a surgeon, he’s not sneaky by nature. To run his business, however, “I’m totally flouting the law,” he says, “but I guess that’s a very Italian attitude itself.”... he cut the spiciness and sweetness from Malaysian standards (“Sweet and savory don’t mix here”)"
Italian town bans any new kebab shops or other 'ethnic food' - ""This measure has nothing to do with xenophobia – it is about protecting and valuing our culture," said Umberto Buratti, the centre-Left mayor of the town. "We would also say no to American hamburger chains."... More than 40 per cent have never eaten foreign offerings such as sushi, curries and kebabs, according to a survey released this week by Coldiretti, the national agricultural association."Notwithstanding the rapid spread of restaurants offering ethnic food, only seven per cent of Italians eat on a regular basis in a foreign takeaway and only five per cent in a foreign restaurant," the report said."
Post ID: 1052644613458925028
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Links - 24th December 2019 (3)
Attacker Used Eye Reflections in Pop Star's Photos to Locate Her Home
Rent-a-troll: Researchers pit disinformation farmers against each other - "With the fictional company now having a positive social media presence, Sannikov's team engaged Dr. Zhivago to tear it down, assaulting the company by questioning its business practices. He told the researchers the full effect of the campaign would take about a month or two to kick in because "a successful disinformation operation happens in phases by gradually introducing an intentionally false narrative in an organic manner," the researchers wrote.The first stage focused on placing articles on news websites. The pricelist for targeted sites was divided into "low profile," "medium profile," and "top level" sites—with Reuters.com, Newsmax, and Mashable listed in the "top level" available resources. Once articles were posted, "aged" accounts—older social media profiles less likely to be flagged as fraudulent—would repost the stories, and then other accounts would comment and repost.The total price tag for the negative campaign was $4,200—still well within the budget of individuals or businesses looking to smear a competitor. Both disinformation operators offered to go even harder at targets. Dr. Zhivago offered to file a complaint with law enforcement claiming that the targeted (fake) company was involved in human trafficking. Raskolnikov was quick to offer negative services as well, including "takedown" operations to ruin the reputation of a competitor or "sink an opponent in an election," among other things."
I went undercover to expose Iraq’s secret sex trade, and what I discovered shocked me to my core - "“What happens if I hurt her?” I ask, wanting to see how he responds to the idea that a grown man like myself could cause physical and psychological harm to a young girl. My secret camera is cupped in my hand, pointed directly at his face. I lean back in my chair feigning nonchalance. “Don’t take her virginity, but [penetrating her] from behind is fine,” he responds. “If she gets hurt, that is between you and her if she can take the pain or not.” After the sheikh gives me some more advice – whatever you do, don’t meet her family. Don’t let them know where you live. In fact, a girl without family is better, you’ll have fewer problems that way... If anyone finds out what I’m doing, I thought, I’m a dead man."
Petition calls for BBC to delete documentary on Iraqi Muslim clerics - "More than 17,000 people have demanded the BBC take down a documentary about young Iraqi girls being sold for sex - calling it 'disrespectful' to law-abiding Shia Muslims.The corporation broadcast 'Undercover With The Clerics - Iraq's Secret Sex Trade' on October 3 - an investigation into sexual exploitation of children and young women by clerics in Iraq.Journalists caught clerics offering 'pleasure marriages' to girls as young as nine - where men banned from sex outside marriage can pay a dowry for an interim wife.The practice is banned in Iraq but eight out of 10 Shia clerics who were approached were willing to carry it out, the BBC World investigation found... The petition to the change.org petition - set up by 'Mo K' - accused the corporation of 'cherry-picking' [...] 'misguided men who do not represent Shia Islam in any way'... The petition said the programme was made to 'tarnish the image of Iraq and Shias worldwide'. It claimed the women and girls in the show 'did not know that it was being used to belittle Shia Islam' and their words 'would be used against their faith'. The petition reads: 'To the BBC. When we asked for representation, we weren't expecting this mockery... BBC Arabic's Nawal Al-Maghafi explored claims since 2003, Iraqi women have been trapped into prostitution and pimped out by the religious elite.One young widow alleged that a cleric sold her to his friends in a prostitution ring, while secret filming revealed another cleric conducting a 'pleasure marriage' with a girl, 13.In Karbala, Iraq's most important religious city, the undercover reporter is introduced to a cleric who claims pleasure marriage with a child is halal: 'Nine years old plus, there's no problem.'... Two of the three clerics secretly filmed by BBC Arabic describe themselves as followers of Ayatollah Sistani, one of the most senior figures in Shia Islam."
Interestingly, this parallels the Chinese (and postmodern) view of truth as only having instrumental value
How come the documentary makers didn't get sent to diversity training?
Turkish "defence" minister posts map of Turkey that includes pieces of Syria, Iraq, Greece, and all of Cyprus - "Turkish Minister of defense Hulusi Akar posted on his own page a map and a message in Turkish and Arabic, basically saying that Turkey is not looking to take over other peoples’ lands, but will take what is their right... the message which is accompanied by a map which includes within Turkey half of Syria, northern Greece and the Greek islands of the Aegean, and all of Cyprus. It also includes all of northern Iraq including Sulaymaniyah, Erbil, and Kirkuk"
They have learnt much from China
Norwegian Islamist Mullah Krekar arrested for Charlie Hebdo comments - "A RADICAL Islamic preacher has been arrested in Norway after praising last month’s deadly attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in Paris.The Iraqi Kurd preacher known as Mullah Krekar said in a television interview broadcast on Wednesday that “those who draw caricatures of Mohammed must die”.Krekar, who was only freed from prison late last month, was arrested on Thursday night on accusations of inciting crime, police said.“I am obviously happy with what happened in Paris,” the 58-year-old said in the interview with Norwegian channel NRK. Krekar also responded “yes” when asked if he believed those who carried out the attack were heroes.When a cartoonist “tramples on our dignity, our principles and our faith, he must die,” he said.“Those who do not respect 30 per cent of the Earth’s population do not deserve to live.”... Krekar, whose real name is Najmeddine Faraj Ahmad, has been living in Norway since 1991.He has been at risk of deportation since 2003 after Norwegian authorities ordered him to be expelled as a threat to national security.Krekar was released from prison at the end of January after serving a two-year, 10-month sentence for making threats against Prime Minister Erna Solberg before she came to office and three Kurds. While courts have upheld the ruling, Norwegian law bars him from being deported to Iraq, where he risks the death penalty.Krekar also founded the radical Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, but insists he has not led it since 2002.The preacher and Ansar al-Islam figure on UN and US lists of terrorist groups or individuals"
Norway holds Muslim cleric for 4 weeks after Italy trial - "An Iraqi-born Muslim cleric has been ordered held in custody for four weeks after he was sentenced to 12 years in prison in Italy for terror offenses.The Oslo District Court said Wednesday there is a risk that Mullah Krekar could flee.Norwegian broadcaster NRK said an Italian extradition request is expected soon.Krekar, who earlier refused to travel to Italy, fearing extradition to Iraq, was Monday found guilty in Bolzano of attempting to overthrow the Kurdish government in northern Iraq and create an Islamic caliphate."
From 2019
Do Ethicsts Steal More Books? -- Eric Schwitzgebel - "The present research examined the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity. Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books. Study 2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing."
The Moral Behavior of Ethicists: Peer Opinion -- Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust - "The majority of respondents expressed the view that ethicists do not, on average, behave better than non-ethicists. While ethicists tended to avoid saying that ethicists behave worse than non-ethicists, non-ethicists expressed that pessimistic view about as often as they expressed the view that ethicists behave better."
Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors? - Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust - "If philosophical moral reflection improves moral behavior, one might expect professional ethicists to behave morally better than socially similar non-ethicists. Under the assumption that forms of political engagement such as voting have moral worth, we looked at the rate at which a sample of professional ethicists – and political philosophers as a subgroup of ethicists – voted in eight years’ worth of elections. We compared ethicists’ and political philosophers’ voting rates with the voting rates of three other groups: philosophers not specializing in ethics, political scientists, and a comparison group of professors specializing in neither philosophy nor political science. All groups voted at about the same rate, except for the political scientists, who voted about 10-15% more often."
Ethicists' Courtesy at Philosophy Conferences -- Eric Schwitzgebel, Joshua Rust, Linus Huang, Alan Moore, and Justin Coates - "If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (vs. remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (vs. attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (vs. leaving one’s seat tidy). By these three measures, audiences in ethics sessions did not appear, generally speaking, to behave any more courteously than did audiences in non-ethics sessions. However, audiences in environmental ethics sessions did appear to leave behind less trash."
Ethicists' and Non-Ethicists' Responsiveness to Student Emails: Relationships among Expressed Normative Attitude, Self-Described Behavior, and Experimentally Observed Behavior -- Joshua Rust and Eric Schwitzgebel - "a large majority of professors (83% of ethicists, 83% of non-ethicist philosophers, and 85% of non-philosophers) expressed the view that “not consistently responding to student emails” is morally bad. A similarly large majority of professors claimed to respond to at least 95% of student emails. We sent these professors, and others, three emails designed to look like queries from students. Ethicists’ email response rates were within chance of the other two groups’. Expressed normative view correlated with self-estimated rate of email responsiveness, especially among the ethicists. However, empirically measured email responsiveness was at best weakly correlated with self-estimated email responsiveness; and professors’ expressed normative attitude was not significantly correlated with empirically measured email responsiveness for any of the three groups."
Are Ethicists Any More Likely to Pay Their Registration Fees at Professional Meetings? - Eric Schwitzgebel - "74% of ethicist participants and 76% of non-ethicist participants appear to have paid their meeting registration fees. This finding of no difference survives scrutiny for several possible confounds. Thus, professional ethicists seem no less likely to free ride in this context than do philosophers not specializing in ethics. These data fit with other recent findings suggesting that on average professional ethicists are no morally better behaved than are professors not specializing in ethics"
How often do ethics professors call their mothers? - "Here are the measures we looked at: voting in public elections, calling one’s mother, eating the meat of mammals, donating to charity, littering, disruptive chatting and door-slamming during philosophy presentations, responding to student emails, attending conferences without paying registration fees, organ donation, blood donation, theft of library books, overall moral evaluation by one’s departmental peers based on personal impressions, honesty in responding to survey questions, and joining the Nazi party in 1930s Germany... ethicists do embrace more stringent moral norms on some issues, especially vegetarianism and charitable donation... 'Almost everyone else is eating meat. Why should I sacrifice this pleasure, wrong though it is, while others do not? Indeed, it would be unfair to hold me to higher standards just because I’m an ethicist. I am paid to teach, research and write, like every other professor. I am paid to apply my scholarly talents to evaluating intellectual arguments about the good and bad, the right and wrong. If you want me also to live as a role model, you ought to pay me extra! ‘Furthermore,’ she continues, ‘if we demand that ethicists live according to the norms they espouse, that will put major distortive pressures on the field. An ethicist who feels obligated to live as she teaches will be motivated to avoid highly self-sacrificial conclusions, such as that the wealthy should give most of their money to charity or that we should eat only a restricted subset of foods. Disconnecting professional ethicists’ academic enquiries from their personal choices allows them to consider the arguments in a more even-handed way. If no one expects us to act in accord with our scholarly opinions, we are more likely to arrive at the moral truth.’... Most of the ancient philosophers and the great moral visionaries of the religious wisdom traditions, East and West, would find the cheeseburger ethicist strange. Most of them assumed that the main purpose of studying ethics was self-improvement. Most of them also accepted that philosophers were to be judged by their actions as much as by their words"
Brittney Cooper Suggests Black Women's Obesity Is Due to Trump - "“I hate when people talk about Black women being obese,” Cooper said on the program, which airs on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network. “I hate it because it becomes a way to blame us for a set of conditions that we didn’t create.” “We are living in the Trump era. And look, those policies kill our people. You can’t get access to good health care, good insurance,” she added. According to Cooper, who cited the expertise of “public health practitioners,” racism “literally” leads to diets being less effective for black women... Geronimus is a public health researcher who also serves as a professor of Health Behavior & Health Education at the University of Michigan."
Apparently black women aren't fat till late 2016
Rent-a-troll: Researchers pit disinformation farmers against each other - "With the fictional company now having a positive social media presence, Sannikov's team engaged Dr. Zhivago to tear it down, assaulting the company by questioning its business practices. He told the researchers the full effect of the campaign would take about a month or two to kick in because "a successful disinformation operation happens in phases by gradually introducing an intentionally false narrative in an organic manner," the researchers wrote.The first stage focused on placing articles on news websites. The pricelist for targeted sites was divided into "low profile," "medium profile," and "top level" sites—with Reuters.com, Newsmax, and Mashable listed in the "top level" available resources. Once articles were posted, "aged" accounts—older social media profiles less likely to be flagged as fraudulent—would repost the stories, and then other accounts would comment and repost.The total price tag for the negative campaign was $4,200—still well within the budget of individuals or businesses looking to smear a competitor. Both disinformation operators offered to go even harder at targets. Dr. Zhivago offered to file a complaint with law enforcement claiming that the targeted (fake) company was involved in human trafficking. Raskolnikov was quick to offer negative services as well, including "takedown" operations to ruin the reputation of a competitor or "sink an opponent in an election," among other things."
I went undercover to expose Iraq’s secret sex trade, and what I discovered shocked me to my core - "“What happens if I hurt her?” I ask, wanting to see how he responds to the idea that a grown man like myself could cause physical and psychological harm to a young girl. My secret camera is cupped in my hand, pointed directly at his face. I lean back in my chair feigning nonchalance. “Don’t take her virginity, but [penetrating her] from behind is fine,” he responds. “If she gets hurt, that is between you and her if she can take the pain or not.” After the sheikh gives me some more advice – whatever you do, don’t meet her family. Don’t let them know where you live. In fact, a girl without family is better, you’ll have fewer problems that way... If anyone finds out what I’m doing, I thought, I’m a dead man."
Petition calls for BBC to delete documentary on Iraqi Muslim clerics - "More than 17,000 people have demanded the BBC take down a documentary about young Iraqi girls being sold for sex - calling it 'disrespectful' to law-abiding Shia Muslims.The corporation broadcast 'Undercover With The Clerics - Iraq's Secret Sex Trade' on October 3 - an investigation into sexual exploitation of children and young women by clerics in Iraq.Journalists caught clerics offering 'pleasure marriages' to girls as young as nine - where men banned from sex outside marriage can pay a dowry for an interim wife.The practice is banned in Iraq but eight out of 10 Shia clerics who were approached were willing to carry it out, the BBC World investigation found... The petition to the change.org petition - set up by 'Mo K' - accused the corporation of 'cherry-picking' [...] 'misguided men who do not represent Shia Islam in any way'... The petition said the programme was made to 'tarnish the image of Iraq and Shias worldwide'. It claimed the women and girls in the show 'did not know that it was being used to belittle Shia Islam' and their words 'would be used against their faith'. The petition reads: 'To the BBC. When we asked for representation, we weren't expecting this mockery... BBC Arabic's Nawal Al-Maghafi explored claims since 2003, Iraqi women have been trapped into prostitution and pimped out by the religious elite.One young widow alleged that a cleric sold her to his friends in a prostitution ring, while secret filming revealed another cleric conducting a 'pleasure marriage' with a girl, 13.In Karbala, Iraq's most important religious city, the undercover reporter is introduced to a cleric who claims pleasure marriage with a child is halal: 'Nine years old plus, there's no problem.'... Two of the three clerics secretly filmed by BBC Arabic describe themselves as followers of Ayatollah Sistani, one of the most senior figures in Shia Islam."
Interestingly, this parallels the Chinese (and postmodern) view of truth as only having instrumental value
How come the documentary makers didn't get sent to diversity training?
Turkish "defence" minister posts map of Turkey that includes pieces of Syria, Iraq, Greece, and all of Cyprus - "Turkish Minister of defense Hulusi Akar posted on his own page a map and a message in Turkish and Arabic, basically saying that Turkey is not looking to take over other peoples’ lands, but will take what is their right... the message which is accompanied by a map which includes within Turkey half of Syria, northern Greece and the Greek islands of the Aegean, and all of Cyprus. It also includes all of northern Iraq including Sulaymaniyah, Erbil, and Kirkuk"
They have learnt much from China
Norwegian Islamist Mullah Krekar arrested for Charlie Hebdo comments - "A RADICAL Islamic preacher has been arrested in Norway after praising last month’s deadly attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in Paris.The Iraqi Kurd preacher known as Mullah Krekar said in a television interview broadcast on Wednesday that “those who draw caricatures of Mohammed must die”.Krekar, who was only freed from prison late last month, was arrested on Thursday night on accusations of inciting crime, police said.“I am obviously happy with what happened in Paris,” the 58-year-old said in the interview with Norwegian channel NRK. Krekar also responded “yes” when asked if he believed those who carried out the attack were heroes.When a cartoonist “tramples on our dignity, our principles and our faith, he must die,” he said.“Those who do not respect 30 per cent of the Earth’s population do not deserve to live.”... Krekar, whose real name is Najmeddine Faraj Ahmad, has been living in Norway since 1991.He has been at risk of deportation since 2003 after Norwegian authorities ordered him to be expelled as a threat to national security.Krekar was released from prison at the end of January after serving a two-year, 10-month sentence for making threats against Prime Minister Erna Solberg before she came to office and three Kurds. While courts have upheld the ruling, Norwegian law bars him from being deported to Iraq, where he risks the death penalty.Krekar also founded the radical Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, but insists he has not led it since 2002.The preacher and Ansar al-Islam figure on UN and US lists of terrorist groups or individuals"
Norway holds Muslim cleric for 4 weeks after Italy trial - "An Iraqi-born Muslim cleric has been ordered held in custody for four weeks after he was sentenced to 12 years in prison in Italy for terror offenses.The Oslo District Court said Wednesday there is a risk that Mullah Krekar could flee.Norwegian broadcaster NRK said an Italian extradition request is expected soon.Krekar, who earlier refused to travel to Italy, fearing extradition to Iraq, was Monday found guilty in Bolzano of attempting to overthrow the Kurdish government in northern Iraq and create an Islamic caliphate."
From 2019
Do Ethicsts Steal More Books? -- Eric Schwitzgebel - "The present research examined the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity. Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books. Study 2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing."
The Moral Behavior of Ethicists: Peer Opinion -- Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust - "The majority of respondents expressed the view that ethicists do not, on average, behave better than non-ethicists. While ethicists tended to avoid saying that ethicists behave worse than non-ethicists, non-ethicists expressed that pessimistic view about as often as they expressed the view that ethicists behave better."
Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors? - Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust - "If philosophical moral reflection improves moral behavior, one might expect professional ethicists to behave morally better than socially similar non-ethicists. Under the assumption that forms of political engagement such as voting have moral worth, we looked at the rate at which a sample of professional ethicists – and political philosophers as a subgroup of ethicists – voted in eight years’ worth of elections. We compared ethicists’ and political philosophers’ voting rates with the voting rates of three other groups: philosophers not specializing in ethics, political scientists, and a comparison group of professors specializing in neither philosophy nor political science. All groups voted at about the same rate, except for the political scientists, who voted about 10-15% more often."
Ethicists' Courtesy at Philosophy Conferences -- Eric Schwitzgebel, Joshua Rust, Linus Huang, Alan Moore, and Justin Coates - "If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (vs. remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (vs. attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (vs. leaving one’s seat tidy). By these three measures, audiences in ethics sessions did not appear, generally speaking, to behave any more courteously than did audiences in non-ethics sessions. However, audiences in environmental ethics sessions did appear to leave behind less trash."
Ethicists' and Non-Ethicists' Responsiveness to Student Emails: Relationships among Expressed Normative Attitude, Self-Described Behavior, and Experimentally Observed Behavior -- Joshua Rust and Eric Schwitzgebel - "a large majority of professors (83% of ethicists, 83% of non-ethicist philosophers, and 85% of non-philosophers) expressed the view that “not consistently responding to student emails” is morally bad. A similarly large majority of professors claimed to respond to at least 95% of student emails. We sent these professors, and others, three emails designed to look like queries from students. Ethicists’ email response rates were within chance of the other two groups’. Expressed normative view correlated with self-estimated rate of email responsiveness, especially among the ethicists. However, empirically measured email responsiveness was at best weakly correlated with self-estimated email responsiveness; and professors’ expressed normative attitude was not significantly correlated with empirically measured email responsiveness for any of the three groups."
Are Ethicists Any More Likely to Pay Their Registration Fees at Professional Meetings? - Eric Schwitzgebel - "74% of ethicist participants and 76% of non-ethicist participants appear to have paid their meeting registration fees. This finding of no difference survives scrutiny for several possible confounds. Thus, professional ethicists seem no less likely to free ride in this context than do philosophers not specializing in ethics. These data fit with other recent findings suggesting that on average professional ethicists are no morally better behaved than are professors not specializing in ethics"
How often do ethics professors call their mothers? - "Here are the measures we looked at: voting in public elections, calling one’s mother, eating the meat of mammals, donating to charity, littering, disruptive chatting and door-slamming during philosophy presentations, responding to student emails, attending conferences without paying registration fees, organ donation, blood donation, theft of library books, overall moral evaluation by one’s departmental peers based on personal impressions, honesty in responding to survey questions, and joining the Nazi party in 1930s Germany... ethicists do embrace more stringent moral norms on some issues, especially vegetarianism and charitable donation... 'Almost everyone else is eating meat. Why should I sacrifice this pleasure, wrong though it is, while others do not? Indeed, it would be unfair to hold me to higher standards just because I’m an ethicist. I am paid to teach, research and write, like every other professor. I am paid to apply my scholarly talents to evaluating intellectual arguments about the good and bad, the right and wrong. If you want me also to live as a role model, you ought to pay me extra! ‘Furthermore,’ she continues, ‘if we demand that ethicists live according to the norms they espouse, that will put major distortive pressures on the field. An ethicist who feels obligated to live as she teaches will be motivated to avoid highly self-sacrificial conclusions, such as that the wealthy should give most of their money to charity or that we should eat only a restricted subset of foods. Disconnecting professional ethicists’ academic enquiries from their personal choices allows them to consider the arguments in a more even-handed way. If no one expects us to act in accord with our scholarly opinions, we are more likely to arrive at the moral truth.’... Most of the ancient philosophers and the great moral visionaries of the religious wisdom traditions, East and West, would find the cheeseburger ethicist strange. Most of them assumed that the main purpose of studying ethics was self-improvement. Most of them also accepted that philosophers were to be judged by their actions as much as by their words"
Brittney Cooper Suggests Black Women's Obesity Is Due to Trump - "“I hate when people talk about Black women being obese,” Cooper said on the program, which airs on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network. “I hate it because it becomes a way to blame us for a set of conditions that we didn’t create.” “We are living in the Trump era. And look, those policies kill our people. You can’t get access to good health care, good insurance,” she added. According to Cooper, who cited the expertise of “public health practitioners,” racism “literally” leads to diets being less effective for black women... Geronimus is a public health researcher who also serves as a professor of Health Behavior & Health Education at the University of Michigan."
Apparently black women aren't fat till late 2016
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