Links - 5th July 2024 (2 - General Wokeness)

Meme - Expose Racism: "We need to #BoycottRoyalMail until after July to let them know we are appalled with them delivering Reform hate mail"
Alexander Mark: "Expose racism? Bunch of labour voters I assume. The only British political party to be investigated for racism and found guilty."
The left want you to be denied public services if you dare to engage in Wrongthink

Meme - GameCharactersAI @ @GameCharacterAl: "Quick and dirty! But that flatness bothered me enough. #FalloutOnPrime #Fallout"
sunny @selenitacs: "i hate men, i hate men, I HATE MEN"
H.P. Greencraft @SaintGreenPact "A woman edited it."
You can always blame "the male gaze", i.e. men, anyway

University of Oxford museum withheld African mask that 'must not be seen by women' - "A University of Oxford museum would not show pictures of an African mask because the culture which created it forbids women from seeing it.  The decision by the Pitt Rivers Museum is part of new policies in the interest of “cultural safety”.  The museum has also withheld online photos of the mask made by the Igbo people in Nigeria, which would originally have been used in a male-only ritual.  Masks are a central part of Igbo culture, and some masquerade rituals carried out by men wearing the ceremonial objects are entirely male-only and carried out in secret away from female spectators.  The new policy, a first for a major British collection, comes as part of a “decolonisation process” at the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is aiming to address a collection “closely tied to British Imperial expansion”. An online trigger warning on the museum’s collection database states that the Igbo mask “may be culturally sensitive” and “not normally be used in certain public or community contexts”.  The wooden mask has been given the label “must not be seen by women”, is not on display, and has no photographs available to view online.  A note on the museum website explains that, while photographs exist, curators “are unable to show the media publicly”... A set of policies drafted in 2024 state that trigger warnings must be added to the museum database for objects which could be “culturally sensitive”, and particularly sensitive items should be hidden from view.  Other items traditionally intended for men, including a mask from Papua New Guinea, have remained on display, but are marked “sensitive” and their photos are not shown on the museum website... Other museums have hidden a specific set of artefacts for religious reasons.  A number of tablets sacred to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church are held in the British Museum, and other collections. But, as the objects are traditionally only viewed by priests, curators keep the artefacts out of sight and they are never studied... Other objects could become restricted on the basis of gender in future, but the museum said: “These restrictions only refer to a tiny number of objects where we have received specific requests from communities. There is a lot more work to be done and we are keen to work with communities on the care of these objects.”  Ruth Millington, an art critic and author, whose book Muse tackles the female subject, has raised concerns about the push for synergy creating a dangerous precedent.  She said: “To deny all women, of all cultures, sight of something because that is a taboo in one particular culture seems an extreme stance, particularly given that this country is a modern, liberal and enlightened society.  “Surely women should be given the right to decide, after reading about any cultural sensitivities, if they wish to look upon the artefact or not. When it comes to art, we should all have equal rights, regardless of sex, to view what we would like to.  “Does this position also imply that only male curators in the museum can handle, care for and interpret this object? This stance seems to imply that no woman has ever seen the mask, which I think is highly unlikely.  “As a feminist art historian, I now want to see it all the more.”"
The progressive stack means that racism is worse than sexism

Islamist extremism 'not being effectively tackled by Government' - "Islamist extremism is not being effectively tackled by the Government, the independent reviewer of Prevent has said, as he warned it was fuelling a “dangerous” surge in anti-Semitism.  In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, William Shawcross said the Government had failed to fully implement his proposals to overhaul Prevent, its counter terror programme, which meant the public faced an increased threat from extremists and terrorists.  He said the failure to take tougher action stemmed from a continuing bias within Prevent towards tackling the rise in Right-wing terrorism rather than the main threat of Islamist terrorism.  Mr Shawcross said he warned ministers a year ago about the need to tackle the “pernicious” threat from the Hamas support network in the UK which had now become “more dangerous” following the terror group’s attack on Israel on October 7... Mr Shawcross, whose report was published a year ago, said he believes the bias towards Right-wing terrorism is partly driven by Prevent staff’s fears of being labelled racist or Islamophobic. He cited MI5 data that 75 per cent of its caseload was focused on Islamist threats, yet the latest figures for referrals to the Prevent programme showed just 11 per cent related to Islamist terrorism... “I have Jewish friends whose children are at universities around the country who are frightened for the first time in their lives. It is an appalling situation. I never thought that we would see on the streets of Britain, British citizens shouting death to the Jews. It’s absolutely appalling,” he said.  He urged the Government to enshrine the new approach to Prevent in the counter terrorism act of 2015, as he recommended. “This is because Prevent over-focuses on personal and social vulnerabilities at the expense of ideology as a motivation of terrorism. This hasn’t been amended in law. It must happen to ensure we are doing everything we can to protect the public,” he said."

Meme - "MAGA IS A CULT! VOTE JOE TO BE NORMAL, LIKE US! *Supporters of Ireland at Eurovision*"
Oli London on X - "Irelands Eurovision entry holds a TRANS flag, instead of holding the Irish flag. Non-binary singer Bambie Thug, who uses They/Them/Fae and identifies as a ‘witch’ is set to perform a song promoting witchcraft and satanic sacrifice in the upcoming semi-final. 📸 @JohnJamesNI" *Trans flag demon, other demon holding trans flag, other odd people holding Irish flags*

Meme - "America's state is not authoritarian it's a militant democracy, yet it has created a cultural totalitarianism. Every single aspect of your lived experience is infected with the regime's ideology. Everything has to be gay, brown and lame
Great Value. Celebration. Pride
Twink Flavored Fudge Packed Ice Cream with Com and Peanut Bits
Keep Away From Children *Pride Flag*"

Alexander on X - "Individuals who are more likely to hold “blank slate” beliefs about human psychology seem to become quite biodeterministic on this question.  71% of liberals but only 33% of conservatives believe people are “born gay.”  Exploring the “nature vs nurture” of this question, I want to point out that scientists use the exact same methods that are used for exploring the “nature vs nurture” of sex differences in personality more broadly.  We can look at things like twin studies (that show about 25% heritability).  We can look at GWAS. This has found a few thousand associated genetic variants - kind of like what you see with the genes that contribute to intelligence or other personality traits - with smaller variance explained than in twin studies (the missing heritability question).  We can also look at the organizational effects of hormones in the prenatal environment (e.g. how does exposure to androgens shape the brain of a developing fetus to produce sex differences, personality traits, sexual orientation, etc.). This can be tricky to study, but it’s up there as one of the big potential biological causes.  Or it’s learned - your sexual orientation, or your gender itself - was produced by early experiences in child development.  The current perspective is (like everything in the psychology of personality) that both nature and nurture contribute to the development of sexual orientation in individuals.  But in our folk psychology, the same people who would like to believe that all sex differences in personality and behavior are caused by social role learning also seem inclined to believe that sexual orientation is produced by a “gay gene.”  Somehow biology can produce this one very sex-typical behavior (with all sorts of variations of it on a spectrum), but beyond the “gay gene” that’s all genes can do apparently - everything else is learned!"
Zkauba on X - "I think we've established by now that "bio-determinism" is a caricature ascribed to evolutionary psychologists that none of them actually believe in, as evolutionary psychology is fully interactionist in its outlook."

Protesters try to topple Queen Victoria statue near pro-Palestinian encampment in Montreal : r/montreal - "You'd be surprised how many jaded profs in the social 'sciences' know that what they are doing is total bullshit but 'too late now'. Do you really think all profs listing pronouns, making land awknowledgments, and writting DEI statements really believe that bullshit? You sould hear them behind closed doors. MANY are doing this shit out of fear of reprisal for not being a good enough 'ally'. It's compelled speach. Luckily, good schools like MIT are ending that garbage."

AJAC on X - "When I was in high school, there were 2-3 kids who were gay. They were quietly open about it, no one cared   Gay marriage was talked about in the late 2000s  I always found it odd. It wasn’t illegal to be gay, why did gays want to get married?   Tax purposes?  It didn’t seem like a big deal though   then I went to college in San Francisco   Whereas before I’d been neutral to favorable to “gay rights”   Living in SF had the opposite effect  I learned that gay male community had explosive STDs, insane number of sex partners   Freshmen year I went to Pride, Folsom street fair   It was straight up Sodom and Gomorra  Every kind of sexual debasement was on open display   To say I was grossed out was an understatement   I met lots of lesbians. At least half of them had stories of being sexually abused by men   I’ve always been studious, I looked into research on homosexuality  Child sex abuse was rampant. At least half of homsexual men in some studies reported abuse as children   All that research got buried over the years   I researched the origins of gender dysphoria,   Dr John Money was a pedophile who sexually abused two boys by trying to turn them into girls. Both committed suicide later  That’s the father of the term gender   I realized over time that the entire moral paradigm of the LGBT movement was predicated on sexual deviancy   After college i moved to Hollywood, I trained people who worked in the entertainment industry  The gay mafia is real. It was open secret what directors and actors were gay. It was open secret what actors were abusive freaks and would have teenage boys at their house for pool parties   You have to realize, these people’s ethical filter for the world, their highest good   It is sexual hedonism. That is it.   The religious warnings in every major religion against this, they are accurate.  Regardless, Ive never hated gay people.   There probably is some errant genetics at play for why some people are gay.   That’s okay.   But LGBTQ+<£^^{{>?  It is total Perversion of Normality   There comes a time to draw line and say “Enough”   That time is now."

Libs of TikTok on X - "People walk around n*k*d with their junk hanging out at Toronto’s “family friendly” all ages pride event."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Isn't this just felony illegal, all gay/straight stuff aside?"

The Post Millennial on X - "A group of nudists walks through the scene as the pro-Palestinian protestors who blocked the Toronto Pride Parade start listing their demands. Footage by @BethBaisch"
Jonathan Kay on X - "Toronto Pride: Come for the antisemitism Stay for the obese men showing everyone their junk"

Savanah Hernandez on X - "San Francisco pride has been the most disturbing experience of my life. Fully erect nudists exposing themselves in front of children, adults peeing on each other in public while others masturbate to it. I feel physically ill after witnessing this public event."
Libs of TikTok on X - "Police confirm that full n*dity in San Francisco is allowed and legal in front of kids at pride events because it’s not “for s*xual gratification” .@TaylerUSA"

Gad Saad on X - "Typical emails that professors receive now from universities:
1) Congratulations to individual X on being the first transgender racialized person to pass the CFA exam;
2) Congratulations to graduates of race Y on having finished your degrees. Unlike other races, you deserve special mention;
3) Congratulations to PhD candidate Z for having developed a Queer framework for combatting the systemic racism of climate change;
4) Congratulations to Assistant Professor A for having their groundbreaking paper on the dismantling of whiteness in topological algebra;
5) Are you a nonbinary person of color? Please apply to our internal research grants to promote your unique epistemology because nonbinary people do science differently;
6) Are you an undergraduate looking to dismantle the patriarchy in the neurosciences? Apply for our feminist neurosciences summer internship. Let's eradicate sexist views of brain synapses;
7)Are you looking for ways to indigenize and decolonize your teaching? We are holding six seminars to remove whiteness and heteronormativity from the classroom. Join us but only if you are a racialized minority.
[This is not hyperbole. It captures the reality.]"

@DRJessieNYC 🇵🇸 on X - "Post something to show you're one of the #NiceWhiteLadies putting their shoulder into upholding oppressive systems."
Brianna Wu on X - "Am I the only progressive that rolls her eyes when someone points out your race for no reason as an insult? We’ve tried this culture of battling to have the most oppression for the most clout for 10 years, and it doesn’t lead to better public policy. It mostly makes the people doing it seem like assholes."

At this point our only option to get rid of the immigration crisis is to vote purple. : r/CanadaHousing2 - "You might notice one of the sub rules is "no false claims of racism"  You said there is proof that Maxime Bernier The Leader of the PPC is a racist, so the burden to provide proof is upon you making the claim."
"Your heavy far right bias is showing."
Asking for evidence is proof of a "heavy far right bias"

Hamilton police still using force disproportionately on Black people: report | CBC News : r/Hamilton - "Some extra content that a non-sensationalized journalist wouldve put in their article (from the data the police published):  Of the 76 black subjects in the use of force report, 31 (41%) had a firearm.  Of the 40 middle eastern subjects in the use of force report, 19 (48%) had a firearm.  Of the 17 indigenous subjects in the use of force report, 8 (47%) had a firearm.  Of the 287 white subjects I the use of force report, 88 (31%) had a firearm.  Of the 450 subjects in the use of force report, 157 (35%) had a firearm. There is a disporpotionality of bipoc community members carrying firearms during a use of force interactions."
Hamilton police still using force disproportionately on Black people: report | CBC News : r/Hamilton - "Selective published stats AND selectively asked the same 3 activists used in every article cbc hamilton has written."

Democratic Nominee for Fort Bend Commissioner Arrested on Charges of Faking Racist Posts Attacking Himself - "Taral Patel, a Democratic candidate for Fort Bend county commissioner, was arrested last week on charges of creating at least one fake social media account he used to post racist content attacking himself and the South Asian, Indian American community, allegedly to bolster his campaign and discredit his opponent... Patel created a Facebook profile under the name “Antonio Scalywag,” which he used to make multiple offensive posts “with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten.”  For Scalywag’s profile picture, Patel used a photo of a “white male and female…with two children,” which investigators determined to be of Fort Bend County resident Patrick Ernst along with his wife and two minor children. Posts from the Scalywag account included support for former President Donald Trump and other Republicans, but others were critical of Fort Bend County Commissioner Andy Meyers (R-Pct. 3). After Patel announced plans to run as a Democrat for the commissioner’s seat, “Antonio Scalywag” shifted to making positive comments about Meyers but with a racist tinge.  In September 2023, the account sent out a press release with images of social media posts that called Patel a “dirty Pakistani” and other incendiary terms, and accused him of worshiping “Monkey and Elephant.” Although not all the posts appear to have been from “Antonio Scalywag,”  investigators were able to tie several to the account... Meyers told The Texan that he had become concerned after seeing Patel’s press release and contacted Fort Bend County District Attorney Biran Middleton’s staff to investigate the matter last fall... Meyers said Fort Bend County is often listed  as the most diverse county in the United States that includes a nearly even split of anglo, African-American, Hispanic, and Asian residents.   “This situation that Patel is accused of creating is not healthy for Fort Bend County residents,” said Meyers."

FIRST READING: U.S. probes provide clues to where Canada's anti-Israel money is coming from - "[Elenore] Sturko is a gay ex-RCMP officer who used to be one of B.C. United’s main spokespeople on gay rights. This is bad news for B.C. United’s apparent strategy of trying to brand their B.C. Conservative rivals as gay-hating “lake of fire” ideologues. One B.C. United spokesman reacted to the news by saying that Sturko was abandoning “her values and priorities”"

If Kemi Badenoch hates identity politics, why is she using it? - "‘A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only Black woman in government.’ That was Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch’s response this week to actor David Tennant after he – albeit clumsily – expressed support for the transgender community... The fact is, the right engages in identity politics just as much as the left"
"The right has used identity politics too. Therefore they use it as much as the left". Such stunning logic

Christopher Dummitt: Canadian Encyclopedia succumbs to the wokification of history - "Over the last several years, what was once a bastion of national fairness has abandoned its raison d’être to become, in too many cases, a one-sided resource of wokery... you’ll find the encyclopedia repeating the activist line and either minimizing or eliminating counter-evidence. Take Egerton Ryerson, for example, the founder of Canada’s public school system and a man who the activists tell us helped create the Indian residential school system. The encyclopedia’s entry on Ryerson claims that he “influenced the development of Canada’s devastating residential school system.” It explains the various campaigns to dishonour him, including removing his name from Ryerson University. But it fails to mention conflicting information. It neglects to tell you that Ryerson wanted voluntary schooling, run by Indigenous teachers and situated in Aboriginal communities. That is, he was talking about a system of education entirely unlike what came under the church-run and government-funded residential system. To not mention this is an astounding omission. And the Ryerson entry isn’t the only one in which the encyclopedia’s editors have decided to get rid of pesky evidence that runs counter to the activist line. Just look at the entry for “The White Paper, 1969.” This was a plan proposed by the government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to eliminate Indian status. To say that the topic is controversial would be an understatement. A whole slew of Indigenous leaders rejected the white paper, seeing it as just another version of assimilation. And yet, proponents of the white paper were motivated by a desire to end racial discrimination and to improve the status of Indigenous people. They wrote in the same language as Martin Luther King Jr. One can criticize the Trudeau government’s white paper for a lot of things (certainly for how its authors ignored what Indigenous leaders had been telling them), but to completely overlook the motivations of the policy is another dumbfounding omission. And yet this is exactly what the Canadian Encyclopedia entry does. It’s no different when you turn to other hot-button topics like the so-called Sixties Scoop. This is the name activists now give to the process whereby large numbers of Indigenous kids from troubled homes were apprehended by child welfare services and put up for adoption. Here again, the Canadian Encyclopedia presents an entirely one-sided story. It seems as if government agencies came into Indigenous homes and forcibly took kids for absolutely no reason. Again, one can certainly criticize the policies of the era for being culturally insensitive. But to fail to explain that the children were being removed from homes because of serious problems of alcoholism and abuse is to leave the reader entirely ignorant of fundamentally important information. And yet, that is what the encyclopedia does. Its current editors seem much more interested in towing the activist line than in doing what an encyclopedia is supposed to do: fairly and accurately summarize what we know about a topic. Even more unbalanced are the teaching materials that the encyclopedia wants teachers to use in schools, including one on “The Justice System in Canada.” This resource reads more like a social-justice primer than an educational tool. Almost every element focuses on human rights, racial and gender discrimination, and Indigenous issues. It starts off with references to slavery in New France, and yet somehow the existence of slavery amongst Indigenous peoples isn’t brought up. Remember, this is supposed to be a resource to teach about the whole justice system in this country. Reading the guide, you’d be inclined to think that no Canadian has ever committed murder, let alone a slew of other crimes. The resource overlooks almost every issue of the justice system that isn’t related to identity politics."

Lime Scooters Will Now Shut Down If Driven Over Pride Flag Crosswalk In Spokane, WA - "Lime, a popular electric scooter and bike rental service, has announced it will be implementing a “no-go zone” around a crosswalk painted with a large Pride flag mural in Spokane, Washington. The crosswalk has become the center of much discussion after the arrest of multiple teens for making skid marks on the painted pavement... Many users on X (formerly Twitter) posted in support of the teens arrested, while others questioned why a mural had been painted at a busy intersection if it was never intended to be scuffed by tire marks... Lime has now implemented a “no-go zone” over the crosswalk, meaning scooters driven over the mural will be remotely shut down. According to the company’s website, entering a “no-go zone” will cause a Lime vehicle to “gradually come to a stop,” forcing a rider to walk their scooter until it is outside the zone."
Left wingers still deny the power the left has, because they always demand more

Roland Fryer Refuses to Lie to Black America

Roland Fryer Refuses to Lie to Black America - Freakonomics

"FRYER: I have been on an absolute quest for the last 25 years to catch up. Because I spent the first 20 goofing off and being angry at the world... Andrei Schleifer, who is a dear friend of mine, he said to me, “I don’t know, Roland. Do you even know what police do?” And it was like a gut punch. Man, I didn’t know, right? The truth is, I was biased. I don’t like police. I don’t like them now... I decided maybe I should go embed myself in police departments. And so I did just that. I went to Camden and did a couple double shifts in Camden riding around, went to Houston and did that and even did some simulation and de-escalation training with another police department. The truth is, I didn’t like who I became riding around in a police car after three to four hours. If you ride around looking for bad guys, lo and behold, you see bad guys, right? I was the worst police officer you can imagine. They kept saying, “Roland, it’s not illegal to dribble a basketball.” I was like, “I’m not sure.” But what was interesting, though, in all seriousness, was in Camden, I met police officers who walked the beat. What happens there is that when you see someone who might look dangerous or at least uncertain or random to me, because they know the person, they’re just like, “He’s like that on Thursdays.” It was really interesting for me to see them say that. Because most police officers see you at your worst. But if you’re hanging out in the communities, it gives you a denominator for which to understand the other behavior...

What were we missing in the videos? You know, we’d only seen 12. We had all made these huge conclusions because we had seen 12 horrific videos. But police stops happen thousands of times a day. Look, 80 percent of the police shootings in our data came from a 911 call — not someone pulling someone over and it escalating, which is how we typically see it on T.V. — but a 911 call where the police show up, the person has a weapon, there are multiple witnesses, and a shooting happens. And if that’s 80 percent of the data, it’s not that surprising that there are no racial differences, right? Whenever we talked about lethal uses of force, they would become very earnest and say things like, “discharging your weapon is a life-changing event.” I heard that in city after city. “Discharging your weapon, sir, is a life-changing event.” Not one police officer told me, “Roughing up a Black kid in an alley is a life-changing event.”...

I had colleagues pull me to the side and say, “You’re crazy. Don’t publish this. You’re going to ruin your career.”... they came to me and said, “Look,” after a seminar, “Here’s what you do. You take the lower-level uses of force. Publish that, don’t publish the other.” And I said to this person, “If the results were that there were racial differences in lethal use of force that looked like discrimination, do you think I should publish them then?” And they said, “Yeah, because then it would fit with the first part.” And I said, “Well, then you just ensured I’m going to publish it all because I’m not going to hide a result because you don’t like it.”

DUBNER: I have heard you refer to other researchers who analyze police bias and police behavior as “cowards.” Is this what you’re talking about, that scholars are withholding either evidence or emphasis, at least, on the lack of racial bias in police shootings?

FRYER: Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. Because you can look at the papers and people have similar findings, but it’s in appendix table 157. And they bury it...

My life’s work is about making those communities better. And I refuse to lie to them. I just refuse. Because the folks in those communities they know when they’re being lied to. And we think we’re making all this progress because we, you know, now capitalize the letter ‘B’ in Black. No one in that neighborhood gives a crap about that. They don’t. These are real issues. And I’m not going to bury the truth that can actually help folks just because people are going to be upset about it. The thing about lower-level uses of force is that actually for me provides some optimism because that’s a place that, with the police, we can dig in and try to actually make real progress together. If folks would just stay true to the data instead of trying to make it be what they want it to be, we’d all be in a better place...

A hospital network reached out to us and said, “We have a 33 percent difference in wages, so women earn 33 percent less in our hospital. We’ve done all the training we can do, implicit bias, we’ve done everything. And so what can we do?” We got their data. And that 33 percent was true on average. But, it’s a hospital network. You can’t compare doctors’ salaries with nurses’ salaries, and things like that. And so once you actually accounted for some basic demographics to compare apples with apples, that 33 percent went down to 8.9 percent... once you accounted for overtime hours, that’s what explained the 8.9 percent... many of the female employees who were working those shifts told the administration, “It’s really hard to find childcare in the morning, but if I can get my kids to school and come to work, it’s easier to find in the evenings. And so therefore if you shift the schedule back, we can work as many hours because we want to work hours.” They were demanding more. The c-suite of this hospital network had put themselves in pretzels trying to understand why these big 33 percent disparities were going on. It turns out it was actually 8.9 percent. Turns out, if you made a scheduling change, even that was dramatically reduced. And so by using data, in a matter of a few weeks, it completely transformed how they thought about the disparities in their organization...

FRYER: There are many [school] incentive programs going on across the country. They’re just not well publicized because they’re still controversial, oddly enough.

DUBNER: Controversial because of the idea that learning should be driven intrinsically, right, by the love of learning versus rewards?

FRYER: Yes. Absolutely. Yes.

DUBNER: What do you think of that idea?

FRYER: I agree with that. I also think there should be peace in the Middle East. And I think global warming should stop. Anything else? But no, seriously, I took it the opposite direction. They thought, you’re going to destroy the love of learning. I thought this is a way to cultivate it.

DUBNER: Do you think you were mostly right then, or no?

FRYER: I think both of us were wrong. I think it had no effect because we measured — lo and behold, there’s that data again. We measured using their measures pre- and post-, love of learning and the coefficient was positive, but it wasn’t statistically significant. So we had no real effect or big effect on love of learning either way. What we did have an effect on is test scores went up.

DUBNER: And is that not enough?

FRYER: To me, that’s fantastic. And so if you can get test-score gains and you don’t change the love of learning, that to me is a policy worth doing. Nevermind it’s really inexpensive relative to other reforms. This isn’t changing the number of kids in a classroom, which is really expensive, but this is something where you can actually increase student achievement at a relatively low price."

Too bad he didn't know that he was a victim of structural racism
We know we can Trust The Science because whatever perpetuates White Supremacy does not get published
Too bad everyone will continue to obsess about the student-teacher ratio rather than try incentive programs. Maybe because teachers love lowering the ratio, since more of them get hired

Links - 5th July 2024 (1 [including French Election])

French election: Le Pen's party now dominant force in France - "Right now, the seat projections give the RN anything from 260 to 310. Given that 289 seats is an absolute majority, there is obviously a lot still to play for. To limit the damage to their cause, French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrists and the left-wing New Popular Front alliance will call on their supporters to vote tactically in round two on 7 July. Even if their own candidate has been knocked out, voters will be urged to choose whoever it is in their constituency that is up against the RN. But the trouble with this kind of party order is that fewer and fewer people listen to them anymore. The disappearance of the shame that used to attend a vote for the RN has been a long process, but it can now surely be declared to be complete."

Imtiaz Mahmood on X - "Marine Le Pen is set to humiliate Macron, the far-left and EU establishment. Turnout at 5 pm was 60% significantly higher than 47.5% in 2022. This is the highest turnout in last 25 years, indicating this election matters to the people. The French have had enough Islam. France is boarding up in preparation for far-left riots if and when Le Pen’s party wins. One week of rioting is expected."
Clear proof that the "far right" cause violence and they need to be banned and arrested to "protect democracy"

PeterSweden on X - "HUGE NEWS The leader of the Communist party in France LOST his seat as an MP to Marine Le Pen's right-wing party. The right-wing got 58% of the votes, massively defeating the Communist in his own seat."

PeterSweden on X - "Incredible bias from the BBC tonight. They are calling Marine Le Pen's party for "far-right". Meanwhile the Socialists/Communists are being called just "left-wing"."

Chris Rose on X - "Left wing protests have started in Paris following the National Rally's victory in the first round. Very striking that there are far more Palestine, Pride and Algeria flags then the French flag. A bit of a clue as to why Le Pen did well."

Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura on X - "I understand that Americans are freaking out and many are thinking about moving out of the States and I would genuinely recommend they do not do that. Fascism is on the rise literally everywhere, esp in Europe. You will not be saved by just moving away."
akhivae on X - "Fascism is rising almost nowhere in the West. They want fewer immigrants and an end to post-2010 progressive politics. There's very little desire to invade neighboring nations for lebensraum or start goose-stepping in military parades."

Macron warns voters against the far right and hard left ahead of crucial parliamentary elections - "French President Emmanuel Macron is warning voters against choosing the far right or the hard left, asserting that their divisive policies increase the risk of political “conflict and civil war”"
If elites push France to civil war because they cannot accept the public's rejection of them, it's the fault of the "far right"

Adam Pankratz: Macron stares into the abyss as French election run-off nears - "Macron gambled that French voters would rally to the presidential party following its poor European results. With his characteristic arrogance, he assumed the population would recognize its error and vote for the correct party: his. His gamble to dissolve the parliament has backfired in spectacular fashion... A unique twist of the French run-off is that more than two candidates can advance to the runoff stage if they receive over 12.5 per cent of the vote in Round 1. This is rare, but as a consequence of the very high turnout for this election, the initial number of second-round three- and four-way races exploded from seven in 2022 to 306 this year. Enormous pressure has been put on third-place candidates to stand down and indeed over 210 — 130 from LFI and 82 from the president’s party — already have . This massive movement to block the RN at any cost may look decent on paper, but Macron must know the fire he is playing with. In order to block the spectre of Bardella and Le Pen, Macron has been forced to make deals with Mélenchon and LFI. This is a man and party who in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks refused to condemn Hamas’s murderous rampage and blamed Israel . This is the scale of Macron’s desperation. The gamble is huge. No one can know for certain where the votes will actually go in the attempt to unify the left. And, even if it works to some degree in blunting the RN juggernaut, Macron has set the French parliament up for gridlock and dysfunction. Further, regardless of the deals made, it does seem a near certainty that the RN will be the largest party in parliament next week. Longer term, it’s hard to see the situation getting better for French voters who, fed up with government and presidential incompetence, may well return the RN a true majority next time around. The RN’s success has rocked French politics to its very core. Macronism is dead and a new era of uncertainty lays ahead. It remains an open question as to whether that new era will tear French society apart as extremists on the right and left take over. The only thing currently certain is that Macron is set to leave politics as he entered it: alone."
Allying with anti-Semites only makes you an anti-Semite if that pushes the left wing agenda

The French rejected Europe. Emmanuel Macron's humiliation is next - "For followers of European and French politics Macron’s marketing of the situation must be taken with a decent dose of incredulity. Has Emmanuel Macron — the most out of touch man in western politics, best known for his strident arrogance and derision of the unwashed masses — suddenly found religion and decided the people know best?... Either Macron has acted because he thinks the RN isn’t actually that strong and will lose his snap election, or he is playing the very long game and calling the RN’s bluff. By doing so, he hopes to force the RN into controlling parliament, where Macron would choose a prime minister from its ranks, with the hope that the party’s popularity will be dragged down by the realities of governing. That would eliminate Le Pen and the French right as a serious threat to him in the 2027 presidential elections. Either way, it is an enormous gamble by the French president... Under Le Pen the RN has managed to rebrand. Many French no longer consider her or her party to be a far-right threat. Though not by any means moderates, the RN is now considered a credible alternative in a country frustrated by out-of-control immigration, lack of public safety, a sluggish economy and a president whose instinct has generally been to dismiss anyone who raises these issues."

Meme - "When you find a username without having to add a number at the end
... FIRST OF HIS NAME"

Meme - ライオン Lion @LionBlogosphere: "I watched the first episode of 3 Body Problem.  I can believe that the laws of physics have changed, but what I can't believe is that the two top physicists in the United Kingdom are a hot girl and a black guy. That's the real alternate-universe science-fiction thing.
This is what real-world top physicists look like:
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023, 2022, 2021
The Big Bang Theory may have been a show for stupid people, but at least the actors who played physicists looked like physicists. And the hot girl, Penny, was a ditz who worked as a waitress."

What’s Stopping Us From Curing Rare Diseases? - "Having the power to cure genetic diseases by editing the human genome is a dream come true for geneticists. But when it comes to using that power to help people, the story gets more complicated.
URNOV: Many a time, when parents of children with severe genetic disease send me a note saying, “Dr. Urnov, is there anything you can do?” If they are willing to share what the mutation is, I can load it into some software in my computer — which is available to all, I wanna be clear, not some proprietary U.C. Berkeley software — and you can basically engineer, if you know what you’re doing, a CRISPR to fix that mutation. For many diseases, that engineered CRISPR on my computer screen can become a vial with that CRISPR that we can pretty quickly test for whether it can repair the defect safely and effectively. Start to finish, if you know what you’re doing, it’ll take well under a year. So do I write back to the parents and say, “Hi, guess what?” No. And here’s why. Engineering the medicine is the first step of probably a four-year process to protect patients from faulty medicines. I wanna really emphasize, I’m not sitting here and saying, “Get rid of the laws to protect patients from faulty medicines.” But going through that four-year process just to get to the clinic takes anywhere between eight to $10 million for one disease. If the disease is relatively prevalent, like sickle cell disease, And then if they charge what is currently being charged for these types of medicines, which is 1 to 2 to $3 million a patient, I can see why a company would invest years and millions to build a medicine. Okay, now I get this email from somebody and they have two children, and both children have this change and it’s unclear that anybody else on planet Earth has that genetic change. So who exactly is going to spend four years and $10 million building a medicine that’s gonna be used to treat two kids? Many of these diseases are individually so rare that they do not form, a viable commercial proposition under the current system. We need to face the remarkable reality that our ability to engineer these CRISPR medicines has far outpaced how these medicines are actually built, tested, and put into human beings. We have never had a technology like CRISPR. We owe it to the patients and the families to aggressively build a new framework to provide these medicines to these individuals.
JENA: It scares me because it’s one thing to say to somebody that we don’t have a treatment because the biology doesn’t exist to provide that treatment. It’s another thing to say that we don’t have a treatment because there’s not sufficient commercial incentive to develop that treatment, to evaluate it, to test it, to market it, or that we have a set of regulatory policies that aren’t adept enough to recognize that there are some patients with some diseases who, you know, literally months matter in terms of getting access to care. We wanna get medicines to people faster, but we wanna make sure that we do so in a way that’s safe. And the F.D.A. is really tasked with managing that speed/safety tradeoff. But, of course, that trade-off should change when the parameters change, right? So if you have a new technology that will allow for personalized intervention in people with life-threatening diseases for which early treatment really does matter, we should be able to create a regulatory pathway that would allow for that. And then there’s the other bucket of alright, well, how do we pay for that? That commercialization issue is equally important."

Meme - "r/OldSchoolCool
Marisa Tomei's yearbook from 1982.
MARISA TOMEI
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Goal: Actress"

Meme - Spike Cohen: ""For the greater good" almost always means "this will be bad for you". And it's almost always said by someone it will be good for. "Greater" just means them."

Meme - "Mount Touchmore"

Meme - True Discipline @TruueDiscipline: "Old poll, but shows pro-nationalist double standard that is the norm for most groups around the world:"
"The Right to Recieve Education In Mother Tongue According to Turkish Public
The Turkish children in Germany should recieve education in their native language *73% Strongly Agree / Agree, 8% Strongly Disagree or Disagree*
The Kurdish children in Turkey should recieve education in their native language *41% Strongly Agree / Agree, 41% Strongly Disagree or Disagree*"
Nothing to see here, since left wingers say it is right and proper that the West be judged by a higher standard. The soft bigotry of low expectations strikes again

Crémieux on X - "The web is undergoing constant decay, as webpages become inaccessible over time. Look back about a decade, over a third of webpages from the time are no longer accessible."

Meme - "This could be us but you won't do sex magic in the forest with me while praying to the ancient gods"

Ford government to employers: No more ghosting job-seekers - "A survey of more than 1,000 American managers by Clarify Capital late last year found 43 per cent admitted to posting “ghost jobs.” While 37 per cent said they did it to keep a pool of candidates in case a job became vacant, others said it was to “placate overworked employees.”"

'Anus-eating' virus that kills 30% of people is spreading – 'something has happened' - "A mystery flesh-eating disease that kills around 30% of people who become infected is spreading rapidly around Japan.  In the first two months of 2024, some 378 cases of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS) were detected in the country. Last year it is believed there were 941 cases, which has caused concern that this year is set to surpass that number by some distance.  STSS is caused by a more severe form of the bacteria that causes Streptococcal A, the strep A throat infection common in children."

Beachgoers spot monster jellyfish and crab 'that can wipe out a town' as some boycott sea

Did the Carpal Tunnel Epidemic Ever Really End? - The Atlantic - "Henriques would join the legions of Americans considered to have a repetitive strain injury (RSI), which from the late 1980s through the 1990s seized the popular imagination as the plague of the modern American workplace. Characterized at the time as a source of sudden, widespread suffering and disability, the RSI crisis reportedly began in slaughterhouses, auto plants, and other venues for repetitive manual labor, before spreading to work environments where people hammered keyboards and clicked computer mice. Pain in the shoulders, neck, arms, and hands, office drones would learn, was the collateral damage of the desktop-computer revolution. As Representative Tom Lantos of California put it at a congressional hearing in 1989, these were symptoms of what could be “the industrial disease of the information age.”  By 1993, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reporting that the number of RSI cases had increased more than tenfold over the previous decade. Henriques believed her workplace injury might have had a more specific diagnosis, though: carpal tunnel syndrome... But the epidemic waned in the years that followed. The number of workplace-related RSIs recorded per year had already started on a long decline, and in the early 2000s, news reports on the modern plague all but disappeared. Two decades later, professionals are ensconced more deeply in the trappings of the information age than they’ve ever been before, and post-COVID, computer use has spread from offices to living rooms and kitchens. Yet if this work is causing widespread injury, the evidence remains obscure. The whole carpal tunnel crisis, and the millions it affected, now reads like a strange and temporary problem of the ancient past... Research showed that people whose work involves repetitive and forceful hand exertions for long periods are more prone to developing carpal tunnel syndrome, Rempel told me—but that association is not as strong for computer-based jobs. “If there is an elevated risk to white-collar workers, it’s not large,” he said. Computer use is clearly linked to RSIs in general, however... White-collar workers with hand pain and numbness might have naturally presumed they had carpal tunnel, thanks to news reports and the chatter at the water cooler; then, as they told their colleagues—and reporters—about their disabilities, they helped fuel a false-diagnosis feedback loop.  It’s possible that well-intentioned shifts in workplace culture further exaggerated the scale of the epidemic. According to Fredric Gerr, a professor emeritus of occupational and environmental health at the University of Iowa, white-collar employees were encouraged during the 1990s to report even minor aches and pains, so they could be diagnosed—and treated—earlier. But Gerr told me that such awareness-raising efforts may have backfired, causing workers to view those minor aches as harbingers of a disabling, chronic disease. Clinicians and ergonomists, too, he said, began to lump any pain-addled worker into the same bin, regardless of their symptoms’ severity—a practice that may have artificially inflated the reported rates of RSIs and caused unnecessary anxiety... As it happens, a very similar story had played out on the other side of the world more than a decade earlier.Reporters in Australia began sounding the alarm about the booming rates of RSIs among computer users in 1983, right at the advent of the computer revolution"

Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses - The Atlantic - "Pepsi Co., facing a lawsuit from a man who claims to have found a mouse in his Mountain Dew can, has an especially creative, if disgusting, defense: their soda would have dissolved a dead mouse before the man could have found it... This seems like a winning-the-battle-while-surrendering-the-war kind of strategy that hinges on the argument that Pepsi's product is essentially a can of bright green/yellow battery acid"

Domino’s ‘Paving for Pizza’ Stunt Fills Potholes in American Cities - "For over two months now, pizza giant Domino’s has dipped its toes into the world of urban renewal. Back in June, the company announced it would help a handful of American cities and towns fix some of their chronic pothole problems: “We don’t want to lose any great-tasting pizza to a pothole, ruining a wonderful meal,” a press release fretted.  In the “Paving for Pizza” program, Domino’s handed over cash to municipalities across America, cities arranged for workers to repair cracks and potholes, and a Domino’s logo was spray-painted onto some of the newly smoothed streets... All up, the promotion means cities get free money for repairs, and Domino’s quietly works in the background to get some goodwill and publicity out of it. The chain did not attach major strings to the money: a representative tells Eater that cities were completely free to choose which streets would be repaired, meaning the pizza chain did not ask them to repair streets around their own stores (some cities confirmed this). Plus, Domino’s did not require the cities to plaster its logo over the repaired streets, although stencils for this were supplied, and some, such as Bartonville, opted to do that. But beneath the surface, the willingness for cities to take this money is an indictment on the state of American infrastructure funding. Several mayors suggested that getting the money to keep streets in good condition was a major challenge, in some cases blaming a lack of funding from states, or the general difficulties of raising enough tax money to keep roads from falling apart."

120-Year-Old Harpoon Fragment Found Lodged In Bowhead Whale - "a 50-ton bowhead whale was found in Alaska with fragments of a 19th-century harpoon lodged in a shoulder bone.  It’s quite a clue for biologists. The weapon was used more than a century ago by whalers from New Bedford, Massachusetts. This allowed researchers to estimate the bowhead whale to be at least 115 years old and supports their belief that bowhead whales are one of the longest-living mammals on earth, surviving up to 120 years...   A biologist in Alaska was the one who noticed the fragments as they were being pulled from the whale’s blubber by the Eskimos that killed the whale.  The biologist then sent them to Bockstoce, who identified them as part of an exploding lance made in New Bedford in the late 1800s. This happens to be the same time as when the city was known as the world’s whaling capital. When the hunters would spear the whale with this weapon, it would detonate once inside. Bockstoce and his colleagues believe the whale was shot sometime between 1885 and 1895."

Americans Are Losing Faith in the Value of College. Whose Fault Is That? - The New York Times - "After World War II, the G.I. Bill flooded the American labor market with college diplomas, and for a few decades, the gap between the median income of high school graduates and that of college graduates remained pretty narrow; having a college degree produced an income boost of 30 percent or so. But in the early 1980s, the college wage premium began to rise steadily. In the early 2000s, it surpassed 60 percent, and ever since, it has hovered around 65 percent.  In theory, today’s sky-high college wage premium should mean a surge of young people onto college campuses, not the opposite. But as a measure of the true value of higher education, the college wage premium has one important limitation. It can tell you how much college graduates earn, but it doesn’t take into account how much they owe — or how much they spent on college in the first place. For a long time, there were no good alternative measures to the college wage premium. But a few years ago, a group of economic researchers in St. Louis introduced a new one: the college wealth premium. Unlike the college wage premium, the college wealth premium looks at all your assets and all your debts: what you’ve got in the bank, whether you own a house, your student-loan balance. It addresses a simple but important question: How much net wealth does a typical college graduate accumulate over their life span, compared with that of a typical high school graduate?  These three researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — Lowell Ricketts, William Emmons and Ana Hernández Kent — used the Fed’s survey of thousands of American households to consider the financial advantage that college graduates receive. When they analyzed the data through the lens of wealth, as opposed to income, the benefits to a college degree began to evaporate... When the researchers looked at young Americans who had gone on to get a postgraduate degree, the situation was even more dire. “Among families whose head is of any race or ethnicity born in the 1980s and holding a postgraduate degree, the wealth premium is ... indistinguishable from zero,” the authors concluded. “Our results suggest that college and postgraduate education may be failing some recent graduates as a financial investment.”  These are startling data, and they present a kind of paradox. Millennials with college degrees are earning a good bit more than those without, but they aren’t accumulating any more wealth. How can that be? Lowell Ricketts told me he had a pretty good idea of the cause, even though the group’s data couldn’t be conclusive on this point. The likely culprit, he said, was cost: the rising expense of college and the student debt that often goes along with it... On average, more education still means more income. What has changed, he has written, is that the premium now varies much more than it used to among individuals and groups: The “downside risk” to enrolling in college, he argues, has become “nontrivial.” When you look at Webber’s data, higher education no longer resembles a safe, reliable blue-chip investment, like buying a Treasury bill. It’s now more like going to a casino. It’s a gamble that can still sometimes produce a big windfall, but it can also bring financial disaster.  A few years ago, Webber set out to try to make sense of that variability. For whom does college pay off, and for whom does it not? He analyzed the data by college major, by academic ability and by tuition costs, and was able to show in more detail exactly who was winning at the higher education casino and who was losing... If you choose a business or STEM degree, your chance of winning the college bet goes back up to 3 in 4, even if you’re paying $50,000 a year in tuition and expenses while you’re in college. But if you’re majoring in anything else — arts, humanities or social sciences — your odds turn negative at that price; worse than a coin flip. In fact, if your degree is in the arts or humanities, you’re likely to lose the bet even if your annual college expenses are just $25,000... there is some objective data to substantiate the leftward lean of American college campuses. The Higher Education Research Institute at U.C.L.A., which regularly surveys students, found last year that three times as many American college freshmen identified as liberal or far left as said they were conservative or far right. Among college faculty, the ratio is even more pronounced, and it has been growing more unbalanced over time, shifting from a 2-to-1 left-right ratio in the mid-1990s to a roughly 5-to-1 ratio in the early 2010s. Then there are the administrators. A separate poll from 2018 found that among student-facing university administrators, 12 times as many defined themselves as liberal as defined themselves as conservative.  This leftward shift on American campuses corresponded with a realignment in the American electorate...  the children of the richest American families are twice as likely to be admitted to an Ivy-Plus college as middle-class students with the same standardized test scores."

Why You Feel The Need To Poop When You Go To A Bookstore - "There's a name for this very common occurrence: the Mariko Aoki phenomenon. The name comes from a woman who mentioned it in a magazine article in 1985, but it quickly spiked into a TikTok trend... "In the colorectal world — where I spent most of my time at the University of California, San Francisco — it could be related to the person finally 'slowing down,'" Nurse Wong told BuzzFeed. "For instance, sitting to read a book, or perhaps the sitting position on the chair. This could stimulate someone to feel as if they needed to defecate. The calming environment probably was helpful too. Along with the possibility of having some other triggers — like having a cup of tea or coffee before going into the bookstore or during her visit to the bookstore."... Dr. Sameer Islam, MD, a Texas-based gastroenterologist, stated, "In a library or bookstore specifically, what's likely happening is the effect arises from feelings of nervous tension in the face of all the information represented on the bookshelves. This has more scientific support and evidence, at least. But we really have no idea."  "The mere position of sitting, bending forward to read a book could have also stimulated and simulated the perfect setting for the gastrocolic reflex to react, hence having a bowel movement. People may have repeatedly experienced this and associated the 'bookstore' as the trigger, rather than all of the other factors that I have mentioned before." "

Florida Deputy Fabricated Story About Being Carjacked, Shot by Black Men After Accidentally Shooting Himself - "Dakotah Wood, 21, of Weeki Wachee, Florida, initially told deputies that the two men shot him in the leg and he returned fire. However, it was later revealed that he accidentally shot himself"

Does Health Insurance Make You Healthier? - "The RAND Health Insurance Experiment was conducted from 1971 to 1986 and directed by the economist Joe Newhouse. To this day, it’s the largest health policy study in U.S. history.
BAICKER: And what that studied was the effect of different patient copays or cost sharing on healthcare use and health outcomes. And they found that when patients have to pay more for healthcare, they use less of it. Now, for anyone who’s taken econ 101, higher prices mean lower demand. But it actually is surprising in healthcare because I don’t think that’s how most of us imagine consuming healthcare... it was surprising to a lot of people that patients were sensitive to prices in that way — even for drugs that are potentially life saving!... It turns out doctors are also sensitive to prices. When you pay doctors more for stuff, they do more stuff. Nobody thinks of physicians as making decisions based on those payments. But doctors are people too, and they also respond to the incentives that the system generates."
It's amazing how many people think that when it comes to healthcare, people don't respond to incentives

Links - 4th July 2024 (2)

Conrad Black: Britain's Conservatives deserve to lose - "The election in the United Kingdom next week will mark another stumbled step in the descent of Britain into unprecedented political absurdity. It will bring in the sixth prime minister in eight years, a performance rivalling Third and Fourth Republic France, when General de Gaulle said that he often could not remember the name of the current head of the French government, so rapid was their turnover. (He was the only person in the history of France who served in cabinets in three different Republics.) The only time in British history when there has been such a frequent rotation of prime ministers was between 1827 and 1835, (Liverpool, Canning, Goderich, Wellington, Grey, Peel, and Melbourne, but Liverpool governed for 15 years, Grey for four, and Melbourne for six, and Canning died in office; all of them were statesmen of considerable or even great stature). The present cavalcade has been a broadening shambles, unlike anything in modern British history. It is almost certain to continue, as there is no indication that the incoming prime minister, Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, possesses what will be required to bring Britain out of this nosedive. The only leader in the history of the Labour Party capable of winning consecutive full terms in office was Tony Blair, and that was largely because Margaret Thatcher and John Major had left the country in such excellent condition. Starmer has no such good fortune and there is no indication that he possesses any comparable aptitude to govern. This difficult period has been chiefly the consequence of Britain’s inability to come to grips with the European issue, aggravated by the deep seated tradition of treachery and chicanery in the Conservative Party, (the last five p.m.’s have all been Conservatives). Britain in 1975 voted to approve entry into the European Economic Community, (common market). Without any consultation with the British public, the common market evolved into the European Union, gradually and stealthily, with the avowed goal of “an ever-closer Union,” i.e. a federal state of Europe subsuming the sovereign power of its constituent national governments... Margaret Thatcher, the first British politician to lead a party to three consecutive full-term victories since before the First Reform Act in 1832, was pushed out of office by her own party, essentially because of differences over Europe. John Major succeeded her and was unable to resolve those differences and the succeeding Conservative leaders, William Hague, Iain Duncan-Smith, Michael Howard, all unsuccessful, and David Cameron, attempted to finesse the issue. Cameron was finally pushed into promising a new referendum which he thought he could win by a brinkmanship choice of question: remain in Europe as it steadily federates or leave altogether. Cameron, a keen remainer, believed he could placate those minded to leave Europe by his promise to negotiate “full-on treaty change.” But after arduous negotiations he came back from Brussels with less than Neville Chamberlain brought back from Munich in 1938. He won the right of the United Kingdom to vary social benefit levels but only with the approval of all the other 27 EU member states. As all the world knows, he lost the so-called Brexit referendum in 2016 by a narrow margin and honourably resigned at once. The real British problem with the EU was a lack of democracy. Unlike the French and Italians, who generally consider government to be a nuisance and don’t feel very constrained to take most laws too seriously, or the Germans, who are accustomed to regimentation and are in any case the most influential country in Europe, the British like to be law-abiding but they like the laws to be sensible and democratically legislated. Once appointed, the Commissioners of Europe have practically unlimited power in their fields and are not subject to review by the European Parliament, which is a talking shop with more interpreters than members. Britain was not prepared to subordinate the system of government it had developed relatively peacefully over nearly a thousand years to the well-intentioned but fledgling and authoritarian bureaucracy in Brussels. Nor was it prepared to see its relations with the senior Commonwealth countries such as Canada and with the United States, subsumed into Brussels’ relationships with those countries. (When, in 2003, in my capacity as a Conservative member of the House of Lords, I asked our leader in that house, Lord (Geoffrey) Howe, the former chancellor and foreign secretary, if we could not establish a House of Lords committee on foreign affairs, he stared at me as if I had two heads and said that all that had been delegated to the European relations committee.)... The profound and almost equal division of British opinion between leaving Europe and remaining was aggravated by the tendency of the British Conservative Party to overthrow its own leaders. The last British Conservative party leader who retired voluntarily in good physical and political health was Stanley Baldwin in 1937... The Conservatives deserve the loss, but Labour is very undistinguished and does not deserve the victory and will have no idea what to do with it. The long and farcical national nightmare will end: the Conservatives will rediscover conservatism, will absorb or merge with the Reform Party, will develop a serious plan to exploit Britain’s independence of Europe, and will be back in government with a competent leader and excellent program in almost exactly four years. The intervening years will be thin gruel, but Britain has come through worse."

Meme - Licensed Memes: The Banterbury Tales: "Absolute state of Brit pol. Centre left party (Labour) acknowledges that other centre left party (Tories) are not controlling immigration (True) then delete it as the implication that they would do better is ray cist. Far left then accuse centre left of trying to be """far right""" party (equivalent to conservative 40 years ago but with de facto LGBT tolerance)"
Sooz Kempner is doing Edinburgh and then a tour @SoozUK: "Why'd they delete it? I thought Labour wanted to be the acceptable face of Reform in this election."
Labour to Win: "Let's be clear here. Rishi Sunak is the most liberal Prime Minister there has ever been on immigration. #BBCDebate
This post has been deleted."

Thread by @joshwhiton on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - " A crazy experience — I lost my earbuds in a remote town in Chile, so tried buying a new pair at the airport before flying out. But the new wired, iPhone, lightning-cable headphones didn't work. Strange.  So I went back and swapped them for another pair, from a different brand. But those headphones didn't work either. We tried a third brand, which also didn't work.  By now the gift shop people and their manager and all the people in line behind me are super annoyed, until one of the girls says in Spanish, "You need to have bluetooth on." Oh yes, everyone else nods in agreement. Wired headphones for iPhones definitely need bluetooth.  What? That makes no sense. The entire point of wired headphones is to not need bluetooth.  So I turn Bluetooth on with the headphones plugged into the lightning port and sure enough my phone offers to "pair" my wired headphones. "See," they all say in Spanish, like I must be the dumbest person in the world.  With a little back and forth I realize that they don't even conceptually know what bluetooth is, while I have actually programmed for the bluetooth stack before. I was submitting low-level bugs to Ericsson back in the early 2000's! Yet somehow, I with my computer science degree, am wrong, and they, having no idea what bluetooth even is, are right.  My mind is boggled, I'm outnumbered, and my plane is boarding. I don't want wireless headphones. And especially not wired/wireless headphones or whatever the hell these things are. So I convince them, with my last ounce of sanity, to let me try one last thing, a full-proof solution:  I buy a normal wired, old-school pair of mini-stereo headphones and a lightning adapter. We plug it all in. It doesn't work.  "Bluetooth on", they tell me.  NO! By all that is sacred my wired lightning adapter cannot require Bluetooth. "It does," they assure me.  So I turn my Bluetooth on and sure enough my phone offers to pair my new wired, lightning adapter with my phone.  Unbelievable.  I return it all, run to catch my plane, and spend half the flight wondering what planet I'm on. Until finally back home, I do some research and figure out what's going on:  A scourge of cheap "lightning" headphones and lightning accessories is flooding certain markets, unleashed by unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers who have discovered an unholy recipe:  True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make. So instead of conforming to the Apple standard, these companies have made headphones that receive audio via bluetooth — avoiding the Apple specification — while powering the bluetooth chip via a wired cable, thereby avoiding any need for a battery.  They have even made lightning adapters using the same recipe: plug-in power a fake lightning dongle that uses bluetooth to transmit the audio signal literally 1.5 inches from the phone to the other end of the adapter.  In these remote markets, these manufacturers have no qualms with slapping a Lightning / iPhone logo on the box while never mentioning bluetooth, knowing that Apple will never do anything.  From a moral or even engineering perspective, this strikes me as a kind of evil. These companies have made the cheapest iPhone earbuds known to humankind, while still charging $12 or $15 per set, pocketing the profits, while preying on the technical ignorance of people in remote towns.  Perhaps worst of all, there are now thousands or even millions of people in the world who simply believe that wired iPhone headphones use bluetooth (whatever that is), leaving them with an utterly incoherent understanding of the technologies involved.  I wish @Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this. And I wish humanity would use its engineering prowess for good, and not opportunistic deception. I ended the last paragraph hastily. What I would say instead is that despite the manufacturer outright lying on the packaging, Apple did create this mess with Lightning and removing the headphone port. They should’ve opened sourced Lightning and I’m glad it’s going away.
Since this went viral I'll add some details:  The shop workers did not know why these devices needed Bluetooth (I do speak some Spanish), or which ones needed Bluetooth (since the packages didn't say so), or when they needed Bluetooth (since most people just leave BT/WiFi/everything on all the time). It was a confusing situation but we were all respectful while trying to figure it out.  It was clear from our conversation that being surrounded by wired headphones and plug-in dongles that need Bluetooth (without any explanation or mention of Bluetooth on their packaging) had left them pretty confused about what Bluetooth is or what it's for. It doesn't mean they're stupid; technology can already be very confusing enough without being surrounded by crazy hacks like these devices.  If writing this again I wouldn't say they had "no idea" what Bluetooth is. I was trying to drive home the hilarity that knowing a lot about Bluetooth and technology in general was only making the situation even more maddening than it would be to someone who never thought about digital wireless communications or analog audio signals at all. It was to highlight the epistemologically comical setup, not to insult anyone.  As for why I didn't want wired-bluetooth-headphones, it's because simple wired headphones have better sound quality, lower-latency, comparably zero EMF, and don't present a potential security threat, which should be considered when a sketchy gadget unexpectedly asks to connect to your phone.  If anyone agrees on anything (a miracle on X), it's that Apple created this problem by removing the mini-stereo port, either out of misplaced minimalism or greed, and making Lightning too costly.  I'll also admit that the comments have made me slightly more appreciative of the clever workaround by these device manufacturers. And I've enjoyed learning the Hindi word and spirit of "jugaad". Still, these "wired" gadgets should disclose the Bluetooth requirement on their packaging.  I do sympathize with businesses owners and retail workers (both jobs I've had) and so did buy a bunch of chocolate bars from the gift-shop to give them some profits. And since the shop probably got these wired-wireless devices for under $1 each, I do think my chocolate bar purchase ultimately put them ahead. I also think the employees got to keep the headphones, instead of them ending up in the trash or entirely unused as would have happened if I had kept them."

Thread by @rosaticorp on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - " 🚨 Just received a phone call from the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office this afternoon. Officer reads off his badge number & proceeds to ask if this is [my name] located at [my address] w/ SSN# [reads last 4 of my social]. Fuck. Was walking through Costco as I took the call. I confirmed accuracy. The officer proceeded to tell me that I failed to appear for jury duty & currently have a civil citation as a result, which can lead to an immediate arrest. He proceeded to ask if I was able to come down to the sheriff's office in town. He gave the address. I quickly Googled the address, confirming it is in fact the sheriff's office in town. Damn, legit. I proceeded to tell him that I never received a jury notice. He says that a common scam is going around. Scammers are forging jury summons, causing all sorts of problems. I had just moved into a new home a month ago. He listed off the date in which the letter should have arrived, and of course it was during the week I was moving. It all added up. The officer stated that I had two choices: 1) drive down to the sheriff's office today or 2) an officer would come to my house. I immediately hopped in my truck and started driving there. I'm anal, zero chance I missed jury duty, I'm 100% innocent. Orange isn't my color. Once I got in my car, I asked the officer for more proof that he was legitimate. He suggested I google the # that I took the call from. I did, it matched. He repeated his badge number, full name, the judge's name, etc. Google matched everything to a local corresponding person. I asked if I could patch in my lawyer as I drove. The officer stated that I could call him once I arrived at the station, and that there is currently a gag order in effect due to the high profile case at hand. In his words, they were attempting to entrap the scammers. After about 15 minutes on the phone, I was ~5 minutes away from the sheriff's HQ. The officer told me that I needed to bring two forms of ID, in addition to payment for the civil fines. He said I would be reimbursed once I could prove it was a forged signature. Once I confirmed that I had the cash, the officer notified me that I needed to make payment at an alternate location prior to arriving to the sheriff's office. He re-routed me to a "federal payment processing location"❗️ And there I am, 20 minutes into this phone call... after ditching my Costco basket mid-aisle, realizing I was getting scammed. THESE GUYS WERE GOOD. Their script was perfect. I fell hook, line & sinker. Every single data point matched. I'm young, and consider myself relatively tech savvy. Yet, I fell hard. I got off the phone and called the sheriff's office, who unfortunately told me that I wasn't their first call today. Multiple people are getting scammed on a daily basis. I only realized it once payment had to be posted somewhere other than the sheriff's office. I called back the scam number an hour later, no answer. They then called me back a few minutes after, starting the scam all over again. I went with it, only to feel more ashamed the second time. Once they realized I was screwing with them, they hung up. Some call center somewhere is absolutely RAKING in the cash on this. And whoever is coaching them deserves every bit of their bonus this month. I respect the hustle. I want to punch them in the face just as much as I want to hire them. Please roast me at your dinner table tonight, hopefully this story saves your mom, dad, grandma, whoever from falling for this insanity. If this post saves one person though, it's worth it. Thank you for attending my real world scam artist TED talk 🫡...
Some qualifying points for the keyboard warriors:
1. It's easy to say "never pick up a number you don't know". A lot of careers depend on answering the phone. Mine is one of them. Also, you're telling me you won't pick up the Amazon or Uber Eats driver's call? Lots of examples. Hard to hide entirely on DND.
2. Law enforcement does call civilians, that's a normal thing. Law enforcement will *not* push you to pay or meet for payment. They didn't do this until 20 minutes into the call. I have personally received phone calls from law enforcement in my life for other events in the past. As a business owner, it's a thing that happens.
3. For those tough guys who act like they would've sniffed it out in the first minute, just realize that every single piece of info was accurate. My personal data + sheriff's address + judge, etc. Yes, all things available online. If they had led with "come pay us", of course i would've known from the start. American accent, calm, level-headed "officer". They were trained well.
4. The even more detailed aspect of the scam was that they knew I had just moved. Their storyline was that scammers were fraudulently signing summons for civilians, and they just needed to confirm my signature in person to confirm this is what happened. Dumb in retrospect? Of course.
5. You can both respect a scammer's hustle & sophistication while also wanting to lock them up. Both things can be true. As an entrepreneur, I appreciate their talents. Just wish they would devote them to legitimate careers.
6. Roast me all you want, but this post is serving it's purpose. 2M+ ppl now know about a scam that they did not previously. It's gut wrenching to read the stories of those who lost their life savings. No, this isn't click-bait. I don't have anything to sell you."

Canyon (Rauschenberg) - Wikipedia - "Canyon was subject to an ownership controversy after the death of its owner, Ileana Sonnabend. This was due to the work’s inclusion of an endangered species: the taxidermied golden eagle. According to U.S. law, Canyon could never be sold because of the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The prohibition of its sale ultimately resulted in the work’s donation to the Museum of Modern Art in 2012... Sonnabend's heirs had little choice but to donate the piece after the IRS established the piece's value at $65 million and charged the Sonnabends $29.2 million in taxes to keep it. However, due to the golden eagle attached to the canvas, the sale of the painting would have been a felony; as such, the estate's appraisers placed a value of $0 on the painting"

Baby elephant tries to hide behind a light pole after being caught eating sugarcane in Thailand

NBC station WRC, Pat Collins Wears Grape Costume to Interview Student Suspended For Banana Costume - YouTube
Meme - "When a reporter wore a grape costume to support a boy suspended for wearing a banana suit."

Photoshop Terms of Service grants Adobe access to user projects for ‘content moderation’ - "Photoshop’s newest terms of service has users agree to allow Adobe access to their active projects for the purposes of “content moderation” and other various reasons.  This has caused concern among professionals, as it means Adobe would have access to projects under NDA such as logos for unannounced games or other media projects. Sam Santala, the founder of Songhorn Studios noted the language of the terms on Twitter, calling out the company’s overreach. Tech companies are increasingly eager to supervise and spy on their users, recently Microsoft announced an AI powered product called Recall. Recall scans the screens of users, allowing them to search their past activity in common terms.  The user agreement also leaves open the possibility to train AI using user-generated content, saying they can use the content they retrieve to “improve our Services and Software“."

Meme *Who wants to be a millionaire*
"Which of the following is morally wrong?"
"Hitting Your Wife"
"Slavery"
"Marrying a child"
"Eating bacon" *correct answer*

Meme - SNICKERS @SNICKERS: "You asked for it, and we listned. Just in time for Pride Month,we have added the huge dick veins around the whole bar! Snickers REALLY satisfies!"

Meme - *Hunter with rifle and scope*
*Deer in sights* "Gotcha"
*Deer shoots pistol like in James Bond introduction*
*blood drips from top of rifle barrel*

Meme Trinity from the Matrix: "Lesbian checking out a twink thinking "damn she's cute""
Neo from the Matrix: "Twink checking out a lesbian thinking "damn he's cute""

Meme - "Seng Kitchen. Welcome to our Shop ! ! !
15/5 - 17/5. To celebrate the inauguration of the Prime Minister, our restaurant has all the fishes 50% off"

Meme - *Condoms*
"SCORE GREAT TIMES WiTH 7-Eleven"

Meme - "Dolly Parton Pet Peeves
1. Nobody notices I've got a great ass, too!"
This is "real" too

Aldi shopper shocked by 'rude' find on a packet of red onions: 'What's going on?' - "An Aldi customer was left in disbelief after making a rude discovery while unpacking her groceries.   The Irish shopper discovered an insulting image of a hand with the middle finger sticking up on the label of a bag of red onions."

Meme - "My girlfriend kept making fun of me during our walk because I wouldn't let go of this icicle I found, I have a feeling the boys will understand. *sword shape*"

Operation Flagship - Wikipedia - "Operation Flagship was a sting operation jointly organized by the United States Marshals Service and the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. that resulted in the arrest of 101 wanted fugitives on December 15, 1985.  The fugitives voluntarily went to the Washington Convention Center, responding to an invite sent by law enforcement posing as a fictitious television company, to claim two free tickets to watch the Washington Redskins home game against the Cincinnati Bengals and for a chance to win tickets to Super Bowl XX. A total of 166 marshals and police officers were involved in the operation, several of whom were disguised as tuxedo-wearing ushers, cheerleaders, emcees, caterers, mascots, and maintenance staff... Female undercover officers posing as cheerleaders were tasked with discreetly frisking the fugitives for concealed weapons by offering hugs and putting their arms around their waists while escorting fugitives to the next area."

owl on X - "I very briefly worked at a petroleum engineering ‘AI’ startup right out of college because I wanted to see if I would like non-healthcare/biology work   It sucked   But what I *did* learn was that picking well locations for oil companies is an incredibly challenging problem. To the point where ML models and fluid dynamics simulations alike were both bad at the problem  But you know what was really good at it?   An old dude named ‘Hans’ who was paid exorbitant amounts by BP to come in every now and then to the office, pick some points off a map, and go back home. Those points would be drilled down into and usually yielded pretty decent results in oil yield, often better than simulations alone. He worked for less than 5 hours a week, amortized over a year  Hans, as I understood it, was just some person at BP who’d worked there for decades and had an intuitive sense of what was and wasn’t a good place to drill down into. He wasn’t alone, multiple, but less than a dozen, employees at BP existed just like him. He wasn’t unique to BP either, apparently all major oil companies had a team of Hans-esque figures that helped pick the wells. It was just widely agreed upon that human intuition is really important in well picking and story was left at that   The whole thing really weirded me out and it felt like a ghost story told amongst petroleum engineers, because literally nobody knew more information about him or other people like him beyond what I’ve said here. Multiple people corroborated the story of these figures existing, but nobody had actual details  What were their backgrounds? Were the accuracies actually *that* high? What were they picking up on?   never found out the answer to any of these   oil is such a bizarre field"

Meme - es @cirkelnio: ""anomalous precision" reminds me of how one of the suggested SI redefinitions of the kilogram in 2018 relied entirely on one german man making a perfect silicon sphere with his super hands"
"Achim Leistner. Australian optician of German origin. Achim Leistner is an Australian optician of German origin. During his retirement, he was asked to join the Avogadro project to craft a silicon sphere with high smoothness, as automated machining does not match his precision. In addition to precision instruments, Leistner uses his hands to feel for irregularities in the roundness of the sphere. The research team has called his extraordinary sense of touch "atomic feeling'. As a result the sphere is the roundest man-made object ever manufactured in the world. If the sphere was scaled to the size of Earth, it would have a high point of only 2.4 m (7 ft 10 in) above sea level"

Meme - John Cheeseman: "Not exactly the pot of gold I was hoping for.  *rainbow ending at portaloo*"

29-year-old Tokyo man arrested after letting schoolgirl live with him - "Among the anime that premiered this spring was "Higehiro: After Being Rejected, I Shaved and Took in a High School Runaway." The lengthy title covers most of the premise, as it’s a story about a single young adult salaryman who lets a runaway schoolgirl live with him while she figures out what the next stage of her life is going to be.  It’s not the most preposterous setup ever for an anime series, but it’s definitely a case where the situation would quickly lose just about any pretense of wholesomeness in real life. As proof, 29-year-old Takeharu Komiya has been arrested following four days of cohabiting with a high school girl who ran away from home.  The two became acquainted through social media, where the girl had posted about wanting to leave home, eventually telling Komiya “I’d be happy if you’d give me the option of running away to your place.” He agreed, and on June 13 the girl made her way from her home in Saitama Prefecture, which borders Tokyo to the north, to Komiya’s condominium in Chiyoda Ward.  The girl’s parents, who were unaware of what their daughter had done, contacted the police when she didn’t come home that night. The ensuing search led them to Komiya’s condo, where he and the girl were both present. Komiya has admitted to the course of events outlined above and was placed under arrest on suspicion of abducting a minor. The girl showed no sign of injuries.  There’s perhaps a claim to be made that since the girl was apparently the one who initially floated the idea of living at Komiya’s condo, and came of her own free will once he agreed, that “abducting” isn’t the right word for what he did. That’s a semantics argument, though, and in the eyes of the law, saying “Sure!” when a minor asks if they can live with you without their parents’ consent, that’s still generally considered kidnapping."

Meme - *action figures around table (Dragonball characters (?) with Dodoria (big ugly purple being))*
*whatever podcast with Gorlock with Destroyer*

Two teachers in Guelph scolded after field trip down a storm drain

Meme - Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps: "Sweden's porn preferences vs radiation received from Chernobyl"
"Most popular porn categories Density of radioactive fallout per region from Chernobyl"

Wearing White Hair / Officer Bear / First Time with a Black Guy

@Blackkout _: "Maybe I missed it. But white women wear bonnets to bed now ???"
CHAPO SZN @ChvpoSZN: "Black women wear white women's hair all their lives"
The Unfriendly Hotti ... @The_Glam_Guru: "Not a single person buys Caucasian hair that's a fact"
*The Unfriendly Hotti ... @The_Glam_Guru with straight, blonde hair*

Black woman: "Wow I didn't do nuffin. This fool better not George Flyod me. I'd rather be pulled over by a bear than a cop"
*Bear Police Officer*
Black woman: "Umm, officer?"
*Bear Police Officer roars*

"SORRY FOR BEING SUSPICIOUS, IT'S MY FIRST TIME WITH A BLACK GUY ..." *naked woman in bed with naked black guy, with woman clutching her pouch*

Links - 4th July 2024 (1 - Cancel Culture)

Cancel Culture is Girl Culture - by Louise Perry - "Differences between male and female desire for sexual variety, for example (also known as sociosexuality), could be represented as overlapping bell curves. Women with an unrestricted sociosexual orientation exist, but they are rare. To run with the comparison with male and female height, someone very sexually adventurous like Aella should be thought of as the equivalent of a 6 foot woman.   When I spoke about this sociosexuality difference between the sexes at a literary festival a couple of years ago, a woman in the audience reprimanded me during the Q&A. What she objected to, specifically, was my use of the word “abnormal” to describe people at the tails. It was “unkind”, she said, to use that kind of language. I pointed out that, since I was talking about a normally distributed trait, the word “abnormal” was the correct technical choice. Was there some synonym that she would prefer? Outlier, unusual, anomalous? None of these were acceptable, she said, since they all served to make some people feel “excluded.” So I sat there onstage, condemned as unkind for expressing a statistical truth.   In a sense, I was the abnormal person in that interaction – that is, unusual for a woman. When it comes to most of the major psychological sex differences, I am typical of my sex. I am more agreeable, risk averse, and neurotic than the average man, and I also have a restricted sociosexual orientation (or, colloquially, I like being monogamous and vanilla). I’m generally more interested in people than in things. I regard spending time with my children as more important than my career, and have turned down a lot of professional opportunities as a result (one of the causes of the gender pay gap). I cry easily, particularly in response to the suffering of vulnerable people and animals. I enjoy sewing, interior design magazines, and cooking. I have no interest in watching sports.   But on one crucial point, I am abnormal. When behavioural scientist Cory Clark appeared on my podcast earlier this year, she spoke of the tendency for women to prioritise being kind over being truthful – a tendency that I don’t share. A tendency that I regard, in fact, as very bad and very stupid, which apparently makes me unusual for a woman."

WARMINGTON: Naming stadium after Rob Ford a catalyst to stop cancel culture - "No politician can be judged by one moment or one speech or decision. Ford was a man of the people. He put money back in their pockets and brought some commonsense spending acumen to City Hall. All the other leaders who have had their statues taken down and names struck from history also did great things for Canadians. Eradicating them is not the answer. How they are handling the Ford stadium renaming is the answer. Rob felt this way and was supportive of renaming Toronto’s ferry dock after former federal NDP leader and councillor Jack Layton, whom he may have disagreed with politically but respected."

Sean Penn, Conan O’Brien Denounce Cancel Culture, Calling It ‘Soviet’ - "“Empathy is a very important word and also forgiveness,” said O’Brien. “We found that someone did something in 1979 that is now not appropriate. They’re dead to us.” O’Brien went on to describe cancel culture as “very Soviet,” saying, “People can also be forgiven. If they even need forgiving. What happened to that?”  Penn agreed with O’Brien, calling the practice “ludicrous.”  In illustration, Penn brought up Alexi McCammond, editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue who was fired after only a few weeks on the job for anti-Asian comments she tweeted as a teenager. “When we’re destroying careers like that, what are we really achieving? What are we doing?” the Oscar-winning star of films like “I Am Sam” and “Mystic River” wondered. The two men then turned to how the trend is impacting their particular genres of show business with Penn pointing out that he would no longer be considered for a part like groundbreaking gay activist Harvey Milk because he’s straight... He then warned that the Left has pushed the cause of “representation” too far. “When you have a period of evolution that certainly has an opportunity for people who have had less opportunities to move forward. That has to be supported, and yet in this pendulum swing society that we’re in, you wonder at some point if only Danish Princes can play Hamlet. It is, I believe, too restrictive. People are looking for gotcha moments and to criticize.” O’Brien likened Penn’s experience to the current tendency among late-night talk show hosts to make comedy political—a trend he has pointedly resisted because, he said, it can lead to “losing your way” when it comes to being funny"

Stephen Kershnar and the Importance of Unaskable Questions - "Who knew that philosophy—the domain of dusty libraries and fading leather armchairs—could still be this controversial?... So, what was the cause of the controversy? During the podcast, Kershnar had asked us to consider that not every case of adult-child sex ought to be morally impermissible. Contrary to almost every vitriolic criticism, he did not argue that all cases of adult-child sex ought to be permissible—just that there may be some cases that are. He did not deny or trivialize the suffering of victims of child rape (which he maintains is unequivocally wrong), and he certainly did not encourage or endorse paedophilia, nor any other action that may harm children. Since he began publishing his thoughts on this topic in 2001, he has argued that the case for the criminalization of adult-child sex is plausible (although he discusses the problems with this policy on our podcast). He has repeatedly and unambiguously stated that he is not a paedophile, and that he personally finds adult-child sex disgusting. Nevertheless, Kershnar believes that one of the tasks of an ethicist is to scrutinize the moral justifications for societal taboos. It is insufficient to merely assert that a kind of behavior is wrong—we ought to try to understand why it is wrong. This question is particularly important with respect to the most incendiary topics since the social enforcement of taboos means that such questions are seldom asked. He asks them precisely to challenge assumptions that are deeply held but rarely challenged. Why are we so certain that (for instance) adult-child sex is always wrong? Why exactly is it wrong? Is it wrong under any circumstances? And what harms are committed? During our podcast discussion and in his written work, Kershnar explores consent-based arguments and utilitarian accounts, and finds neither to be convincing justifications for a blanket moral prohibition of adult-child sex. Although Kershnar has suffered unwarranted—and possibly irreparable—damage to his career prospects and reputation, a number of prominent philosophers and academics came to his defense. Highly respected nonpartisan groups such as FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and the Academic Freedom Alliance, and influential philosophy bloggers, including Brian Leiter at Leiter Reports and Justin Weinberg at the Daily Nous, vehemently defended Kershnar’s First-Amendment and academic-freedom-related rights.  On February 4th, FIRE published the text of a letter it had sent to SUNY Fredonia president, Stephen Kolison, protesting the university’s treatment of its own professor. It was signed by many of the world’s leading writers and academics—including Jeff McMahan, Paul Bloom, Peter Singer, Nadine Strossen, Eugene Volokh, and Keith Whittington. The arguments of these supporters, along with those of his attorney, Barry Covert, offer a stalwart defense of Kershnar and have provided vital resistance to his cancellation. As the hosts of Brain in a Vat, we regularly invite guests to defend positions with which we disagree, just as we disagree with Kershnar’s. The entire point of this kind of philosophical discussion is to explore disagreement and the robustness of reasoning we take for granted. But an increasingly disturbing trend in universities generally, and philosophy departments specifically, demands the vilification of offensive views and dissenting voices to ensure that no such discussion or debate can be allowed to take place at all. Academic freedom is obviously valuable when it is exercised to protect discussion of questions about which disagreement is generally tolerated. But it is particularly important to protect discussion of topics that disturb us, and which ask us to question our most fundamental moral axioms. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, argues that academic freedom requires faculty and students to be able to engage in intellectual debate, on or off campus, without fear of censorship or retaliation. They must have the right to challenge views, but not to penalize anyone for holding them. Faculty must have substantial latitude in deciding how to teach their own courses, and to research topics of their choice. The political, religious, or philosophical beliefs of politicians, administrators, and members of the public must not be imposed on students or scholars.  There are many reasons why academic freedom is so valuable, but the following four are among the most important:
1. Truth
2. Democracy
3. Autonomy
4. Transparency...
Defending freedom of expression necessarily requires the toleration of views that many reasonable people find distasteful, but it does not require a defense of the views themselves or their value—the free expression of opinion is important, precisely so that the value of the opinions expressed can be debated and determined"
Many things considered true or uncontroversial today were once taboo topics

Judge aims to kick-start talks between Fredonia, professor - "SUNY Fredonia remains in a stalemate with the philosophy professor administrators banned from campus two years ago following his comments about whether adult-child sex is always wrong."
It's interesting that the response to fears of violence is not to penalise the violent, but those that the violent hate

Americans Are Self-Censoring at Record Rates - "In the 1950s, many social scientists worried that efforts by Joe McCarthy and his allies to root out left-wingers were creating a “silent generation” of Americans who were afraid to share their political opinions in public. To test whether or not this was really the case, Samuel Stouffer, a Professor of Sociology at Harvard, decided to conduct an innovative public opinion survey. “Do you or don't you feel as free to speak your mind as you used to?” he asked a representative sample of Americans.  Back in 1954, the answer Stouffer got was surprisingly reassuring. Only about one in eight Americans at that time felt scared to speak their minds. As McCarthy’s influence on the country waned, there was little evidence that he had managed to manufacture a voiceless generation.  But since the 1950s, answers to that same question have become a lot more worrying. The last time the question was asked, the percentage of Americans who fear speaking their mind had grown by threefold. At its high point in 2015, nearly half of all Americans reported that they do not feel free to express their opinions... Three of the clearest findings from our research are negative in nature. First, one might suspect that many people are afraid to speak out because they fear the coercive force of the government. But the data suggest that this is not the case... Second, there is no clear partisan pattern. The percentage of Democrats who are worried about speaking their mind is just about identical to the percentage of Republicans who self-censor: 39 and 40 percent, respectively.  Finally, there is no clear relationship between the intensity of people’s views and their tendency to self-censor. Not only are those with right-wing views as likely to self-censor as those with left-wing views; moderates are just as likely to self-censor as those who fall on either end of the ideological spectrum.  So what does predict who is reluctant to speak up? The answer is that Americans are more likely to self-censor the more urban and educated they are. In a surprising reversal of the usual trends of political participation, in which citizens who have more resources feel more empowered to take an active role in civic life, it is the urbanites and the highly educated who are most afraid to speak their mind... Far from becoming more comfortable with how to express their views as they become more educated, Americans who go to college appear to learn that they should shut up if they disagree with their peers... Decades ago, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann wrote about what she called the “Spiral of Silence.” If they dare to speak up, those holding minority viewpoints get rebuffed... The spiral of silence need not be instigated by an oppressive government determined to quash dissent. Rather, it can arise spontaneously when the social norms governing interpersonal interactions provide insufficient support for those who are in the minority—either in the country as a whole, or in some local context—to feel comfortable expressing their views.  That is why high levels of self-censorship should be treated as an ominous warning sign. They signal the development of a culture of orthodoxy that is animated by a false sense of certainty about what is true and what is false—and a proud intolerance of those who might dare to voice an opinion that conflicts with the mainstream."
Left wingers are afraid of the circular firing squad of the left too
Weird. The left keep claiming higher education is good because it promotes an engaged citizenry

Meme - Trevor Conner: "I've been tempted to go through all the laugh reacts to find anyone who has their workplaces public and make a few calls"
Why left wingers always mock those who don't have their faces on their profiles or use their real names - because they can't try to get them fired

Thread by @XVanFleet on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Real life struggle session of General Peng Dehuai, one of the 10 CCP marshals and chief commander of the Chinese army in Korean War.  What was his crime? He challenged Mao’s Great Leap Forward policy (1958-1961) which killed up to 50 million peasants.  Did the Red Guards who struggled against Peng know about the fact and history? Nope!! They were never taught the real history just like today’s American students. All they were told that Peng was a counter-revolutionary and “orange man bad”. That’s enough to trigger their deepest hatred for him!  Gen Peng had to endure more than 100 struggle sessions like this one in the video and his ribs were broken from beatings.  The man next to Peng was Zhang Wentian. His crime was that he agreed with Peng. All the Red Guards were discarded after their usefulness was no more. Some were killed by the military and the rest sent to labor camps to be re-educated through physical labor to become “real” Communists!  That the cycle of the revolution!!"

The American Soviet Mentality - "Mehdi Hasan, a columnist with the Intercept, opined to his 880,000 Twitter followers that it would be strange if Weiss retained her job now that Bennet had been removed. He suggested that her thread had “mocked” her nonwhite colleagues. (It did not.) In a follow-up tweet Hasan went further, suggesting that to defend Weiss would make one a bad anti-racist—a threat based on a deeply manipulated interpretation of Weiss’ post, yet powerful enough to stop his followers from making the mistake.  All of us who came out of the Soviet system bear scars of the practice of unanimous condemnation, whether we ourselves had been targets or participants in it or not. It is partly why Soviet immigrants are often so averse to any expressions of collectivism: We have seen its ugliest expressions in our own lives and our friends’ and families’ lives. It is impossible to read the chastising remarks of Soviet writers, for whom Pasternak had been a friend and a mentor, without a sense of deep shame. Shame over the perfidy and lack of decency on display. Shame at the misrepresentations and perversions of truth. Shame at the virtue signaling and the closing of rank. Shame over the momentary and, we now know, fleeting triumph of mediocrity over talent.  It is also impossible to read them without the nagging question: How would I have behaved in their shoes? Would I, too, have succumbed to the pressure? Would I, too, have betrayed, condemned, cast a stone? I used to feel grateful that we had left the USSR before Soviet life had put me to that test. How strange and devastating to realize that these moral tests are now before us again in America. In a collectivist culture, one hoped-for result of group condemnations is control—both over the target of abuse and the broader society. When sufficiently broad levels of society realize that the price of nonconformity is being publicly humiliated, expelled from the community of “people of goodwill” (another Soviet cliché) and cut off from sources of income, the powers that be need to work less hard to enforce the rules.  But while the policy in the USSR was by and large set by the authorities, it would be too simplistic to imagine that those below had no choices, and didn’t often join in these rituals gladly, whether to obtain some real or imagined benefit for themselves, or to salve internal psychic wounds, or to take pleasure in the exercise of cruelty toward a person who had been declared to be a legitimate target of the collective. According to Olga Ivinskaya, who was Pasternak’s lover and companion during those years, the party brass, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, was only partly to blame for the nonpublication of Doctor Zhivago. The literary establishment played an important role as well... You could join in condemning a neighbor at your cramped communal flat, calculating that once she was gone, you could add some precious extra square meters to your living space. And yet even among this dismal landscape, there were those who refused to join in this ugly rite. A few writers, for example, refused to participate in demonizing Pasternak. And is it karma or just a coincidence that most of these people—many of them dissidents, who were outside the literary establishment—remain beloved among Russian readers today, while the writings of the insiders, ones who betrayed and condemned, have been forgotten?... Those who join in the hounding face their own hazards. The more loyalty you pledge to a group that expects you to participate in rituals of collective demonization, the more it will ask of you and the more you, too, will feel controlled. How much of your own autonomy as a thinking, feeling person are you willing to sacrifice to the collective? What inner compromises are you willing to make for the sake of being part of the group? Which personal relationships are you willing to give up?"

The Real Reason Cancel Culture Is So Contentious - The Atlantic - "consider a 2021 Mother Jones article with the headline “Roxane Gay Says Cancel Culture Does Not Exist.” Indeed, that’s precisely what Gay, a best-selling feminist author, tells her interviewer: Cancel culture, she says, “is this boogeyman that people have come up with to explain away bad behavior and when their faves experience consequences. I like to think of it as consequence culture, where when you make a mistake—and we all do, by the way—there should be consequences.”  Yet in the next breath, Gay seems to acknowledge that punishments are not being meted out fairly: “The problem is that we haven’t figured out what consequences should be,” she says. “So it’s all or nothing. Either there are no consequences, or people lose their jobs, or other sort of sweeping grand gestures that don’t actually solve the problem at hand.”... The writer Wesley Yang has published videos, tweets, and essays fleshing out his theory that “cancel culture” is how activists pursue “the politicization of everyday life, the rule of didacticism in art, and the installation through coercive means of a dysfunctional new moral system by a tiny and unaccountable elite.”  Have any of the critics who dismiss cancel-culture concerns made a commensurate attempt to flesh out which punitive social norms are desirable, to define “accountability,” or to specify when it is warranted? Americans will never achieve consensus about exactly which behaviors are beyond the pale—or what should happen to those who violate accepted norms. But even contested yet clearly understood rules (like the comedian George Carlin’s famous seven words you couldn’t say on TV) are better, if adopted provisionally by institutions or consistently adhered to in public discourse, than an alternative in which taboo lines are so murky that all manner of adjacent speech is chilled and many people refrain from speaking publicly at all for fear of unwittingly transgressing.  In some cases, the standards are kept vague because more specific ones would be indefensible. If you want to know which faction is abusing its relative power in a given sphere of society, ask who sees no problem with opaque taboos versus who is worried that they will unduly stifle speech."

Words That Kill - "in the 1980s and ’90s didn’t conservative Christians pioneer the concept of advertiser boycotts? Yes they did, and my first L.A. Times op-ed (1995) was about just that, as I slammed the religious right for initiating boycotts based on the perceived moral failings of TV shows.  I criticized that kind of thing back when some of you were still riding your tricycles. So when I explain the difference between old-timey advertiser boycotts and present-day cancel culture, know that this has been my beat for a while...   The 1980s/90s boycotts failed because there was no potential for crossover. If your campaign has a narrow focus (“I raised my boy to go ‘praise Jesus’ but now because of Metallica he goes ‘attaboy Beelzebub’”), and if you can’t widen your appeal, your movement will stall.  The boycotts of old tanked because there was no “hook” with which to involve those who didn’t share the belief system of the boycotters.  “Cancel culture” is different in that regard. Cancel culture revolves around the concept of “killing words.”...   In January 2006, two things happened in the same week: There was a government-sponsored antigay pogrom in Iran, and Gene Shalit gave a negative review to Brokeback Mountain. Guess which one the bullies of GLAAD used for an outrage crusade? The Iran killings went unmentioned, but Shalit was viciously attacked as a “homophobe” and “defamatory bigot.”  Just because he reviewed a movie (which was his job).   Shalit’s son shot back, writing an open letter to the leaders of GLAAD basically saying, “Why are you doing this? You know my dad’s the exact opposite of a ‘homophobe.’”  But for Gene Shalit, the psychological distress of being targeted as a gay-hater was too much. He caved, issuing a tearful apology and promising to improve as a human being.  That the bullies broke a good man is clear, but the important question is, why did they target a good man? Well duh, because they knew he’d break. The Iranian mullahs wouldn’t have caved. When it comes to gays, they have no conscience or empathy. You can’t crack them, so you don’t try. Instead, you go after the good folks, because good folks don’t want to be tarred as haters. Or murderers... Dave Weigel, reporter for The Washington Post... got Shalited by the tranny mob.  The melee began when Weigel foolishly thought he could analyze politics (that this is his job is no more protection for him than it was for Shalit)... Weigel replied with a link to a Gallup poll showing that a clear majority of Americans (regardless of gender or age) believe that “transgender” athletes should play on the team of their birth gender, not their “chosen” gender... Weigel was analyzing political strategies (again, that’s his job). But the damage was done. The tweet went viral, with every hate-filled shemale on Twitter slamming Weigel for “transphobia.”  The initial onslaught consisted mainly of “victimized” trans folk telling Weigel to “fuck off” and kill himself (lots of “go kill yourself” tweets). But soon the angle switched to “you’re killing people,” because Weigel’s words were either getting trans kids killed or compelling them to kill themselves... Wow…not just murder but genocide? Sieg Weigel!  See the difference between 1980s/90s boycotts and today’s cancel culture? Thirty years ago, the boycotts were about spirits, souls, and saviors. Nonbelievers had no reason to play along. Today’s cancelers don’t ask you to accept their ideology; they’re telling you that your words are murdering those who do. You don’t have to accept the premise that men who think they’re women are women in order to believe that men who live by that pseudoscience might commit suicide if you question their dogma.   I find Hinduism laughable. Now, if you tell me “mock Hinduism and Ganesha will weep,” I’ll joke away. But tell me “mock Hinduism and a child will immolate himself,” I might refrain.  When Dave Chappelle was mobbed by protesters at his alma mater last year, the cancelers chanted, “Your comedy kills.”  Once you popularize the notion that words—from a comedy routine to simple political analysis—“literally murder,” the debate moves beyond free speech. Think of it like this: If you ask the average gun owner, “Do you believe in the right to bear arms?” they’ll say yes. But if you ask, “Do you believe in the right to shoot a child?” of course they’ll say no.  That’s how the American left regards speech. They’re all for the First Amendment, sure. You have a right to speak. But you have no right to murder with your words.  The popularization of the notion of “killing words” has changed the game, because even those who, on principle, reject censorship will almost always cave when faced with a “murder by words” charge... the young biological (a.k.a. actual) women robbed of their athletic careers by men in wigs have lives too. Weigel simply acknowledged a political reality: Many Americans worry that those girls’ lives are not being respected as much as the lives of the trans athletes.  To shut down that debate is to say that the lives of those young women are unworthy of discussion. They don’t matter. Over the past 15 years there’s been a correlation between a dramatic rise in teen girl suicide (the male/female teen suicide gap is almost closed for the first time ever) and schools forcing “trans acceptance” on kids... correlation ain’t causation, we all know that. But journalists with reputations and jobs to preserve are unlikely to study the question objectively; unbiased examination of any issue can’t occur if one potential conclusion will lead to firing, unhirability, social media bans, and death threats... you say words kill? I say silence kills. You say Dave Weigel’s tweet caused a tranny to slit his wrists. Can you prove it? If I were to say that a teen girl committed suicide because she was told to shut up and stay silent after a tranny flashed his junk at her in the locker room, my claim would have as much validity as yours.   Stalemate. It’s all theoretical. Murderous speech, or murderous silence.  Which is true?  Well, only one side doesn’t want to talk about it.  Make of that what you will."
A boycott is something one or one's own group does. Cancelling is trying to force other people's hands
Reality has a known transphobic bias
The TRA cope will be that TERFs deserve to kill themselves because they are "transphobic" and don't want to be flashed by MTFs - harm claims can only be weaponised in one direction

Meme - @beta.co_: "So we shouldn't have popular criticism because some people might be fired?"
And Lo, He Is On God @PandasAndVidya: ""Popular criticism" for you people means literally speaking to their manager, Karen. If it was just criticism, we wouldn't be having this wonderful discussion. But it isn't JUST criticism, is it. Karen.
@beta_co_: "So all criticism must end then, because an employer could overreact and fire someone for a trivial reason?"
And Lo, He Is On God @PandasAndVidya: ""it's just criticism" they cry, as they call the employer. "it's just criticism;" they cry, as they call the school. "it's just criticism," they cry, as they contact the domain registrar. "it's just criticism" they cry, as they post the home address. "it's just criticism," they insist, as they contact the bank. "it's just criticism," they insist, as they contact the payment processor. "it's just criticism," they insist, as they gather outside the house. "it's just criticism;" they insist, as they gather the kindling. "it's just criticism," they shout, as they swarm the car. "It's just criticism," they shout, as one fires into the passengers. "it's just criticism,* they shout, as they shatter the windows. "It's just criticism;" they shout, as they drag them out."

How to fight back against 'cancel culture' | The Spectator - "When Evergreen State College turned hooligan in 2017, the shock was not that American universities contained students unsuited to any education outside a correctional facility. Nor, frankly, was it a surprise that the college president George Bridges was so supine that he ended up begging the student protesters to allow him to go to the bathroom to pee (‘Hold it’ was the advice given by one hoodlum). What was surprising was that even when the professor who had inadvertently caused the breakdown (leftwing, Bernie-supporting, lifetime Democrat Bret Weinstein) was physically threatened, repeatedly defamed and finally chased off campus for good, not one of his longstanding colleagues took any public stance in his defence. Solidarity — perhaps the noblest aspiration of the political left — was totally absent. And these academics and administrators were not living in 1930s Moscow, but in 21st-century Washington State.   In case after case it has been the same. The problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected. The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence and slinking away of everybody else. So here is an idea. How about we start to encourage the return of what Susan Sontag once (unusually memorably) called ‘a little civic fortitude’? That we encourage people to stand up in defence of people who are being defamed? It has been suggested before. Last year after Jordan Peterson and the late Roger Scruton suffered attempted bulldozings in quick succession, Niall Ferguson wrote in the Sunday Times that perhaps public intellectuals and academics in the West ought to develop some policy like Nato’s Article 5: that is, a ‘one for all, all for one’ policy. The only problem with which, as Ferguson conceded, is that it is not as clear as it is with Nato who is in and who is out. In the intellectual Nato, who is France and who is Ukraine? Who are the Baltic states and who is Georgia?   So here is my own reduced solution. Simply stand up for your friends, colleagues or allies when you know that they are being lied about. It seems so simple and so obvious a thing to do, and yet it is a habit in exceptionally short supply today.   When that semi-literate mob claimed Bret Weinstein was a racist, why did his and his wife’s colleagues not stand up and say, ‘Hang on a second. I’ve known these people for decades. You come for the Weinsteins, you come for me.’ Or even just, ‘I happen to know they are not racists, so take that back.’  When Nicholas Christakis was surrounded by a screaming mob of Yale students we could have expected that Yale would be so avaricious and weak that it wouldn’t expel each of those students that very evening. But why did Christakis’s colleagues not rise up that night en masse to say, ‘Excuse me, but however much money they are paying, students should not be allowed to threaten, insult and intimidate academics’? Why is it that in so many areas of public life, from the lecture hall to the comedy club, when the mini-mob comes, the adults just vacate the room?... fighting for something you love will always give you an advantage over someone fighting because of hate.  There is a happy by-product of this, by the way: when you fight to defend your friends, you let them know something that you might otherwise forget to tell them."