Links - 5th May 2024 (2)

Opinion: 'Most U.S. banks are technically near insolvency,' Roubini says
From Apr 2023. A year on, this hasn't happened

Frog Morton on X - ""When I am criticizing you, you are My Tribe and I am engaging in the Hard Work of Prophetic Correction of My Tribe. When you are criticizing me, you are Not My Tribe and you are engaging in Ignoring Problems in Your Own Tribe.""

paige on X - "changing your mind in the direction of propaganda = “listening, learning, doing better” changing your mind away from propaganda = “radicalization, extremism, dangerous to democracy”"

Nancy Pelosi's son is investor in Chinese tech firm: report - "The son of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who quietly accompanied his mother on last week’s controversial trip to Taiwan where she called out China for its threatening moves toward the self-ruled island, holds a stake in a Chinese technology company... He traveled with his mother as she led a Democratic congressional delegation to Asia that included stops in South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and Taiwan, but his name wasn’t included in the official list of officials on the trip released by the speaker’s office...   “Per decades-old policy, spouses and adult children are allowed to travel on Congressional delegations for representational purposes at no expense to the taxpayer,” the spokesman said."

Thread by @TheBlackHorse65 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The rise and fall of the Sid Meier's Civilization franchise from 1991 to 2018 is both one of the great tragedies of the computer gaming industry, and a window into the massive change in psychology of the US ruling class. This thread will explore both. I have played every civilization game many times, but in preparation for this thread, I have replayed each civilization game at least once from beginning to end; with the exception of Civilization VI, which I refuse to dignify with my further attention.
Civilization I was a groundbreaking game in which the player acts a sort of archon spirit controlling a civilization from it's birth in 4000BC until either it's death by conquest, or it's conquest of the earth. The game was a genre-defining 4x. The game was implicitly based on both the 18th century view of international relations - that all nations are continuous competitors and that peace is only ever an interlude between wars, and the 20th century notion that the all states are total states. Civ 2 is essentially a straight remake of the game, but updated to reflect the then-current hardware constraints of the post window-95 world. The game retains the essential political and social perspective of the original game, but with a more elegant skin.
Civ III [2001] was an inflection point; introducing new game concepts which forever altered the telos of the game to reflect the changed underlying assumptions of the creators of the game. Strategic resources, ethnic citizens, stable diplomacy, culture, & non-conquest victory. The 18th century frame on international relations is gone, replaced with a post-war American anti-colonial frame.
- It's a net-drag to conquer more than ~25% of the globe
- Stable peaceful relations are possible
- resources are scarce and a key cause of war
- Nations form coalitions to resist domination against aggressive players, even if the aggressive player is not the human player.
- Nations consider whether they can win before declaring war.
- Most games end in cultural victory or world government by the UN.
Civ IV [2005] begins is another substantial change in the franchise, ending the "reign of quantity" as the basic principle by which the game is organized through the introduction of real penalties for scale and the concept of "great people".   Civilization IV fundamentally disrupted the assumption of the three previous games that all great nations must control large territories in order to be able to control enough strategic resources and generate enough commerce to remain competitive. With the addition of religion and diplomatic pledges; Civ 4 game had well begun it's transition into a game of politics and international relations instead of a game of industrial scale and conquest. Civ 5 made two profound changes that ended the game as previously known forever. Cities defend themselves without the need to muster troops, and units cannot stack constraining dramatically the value of having a large army.  Civ 5 also has the distinction of being the first genuinely bad game in the series. A game with a user interface that is way less information dense, and with a real dedication to a number of mechanics that are totally irrelevant to the outcome of the game (e.g. religion).
Civilization 6 is less an actual game than it is a propaganda art-form designed to express to it's use that the world is constrained by geography which necessitates planning and the voluntary choice not to pursue the 4 x's that were the foundation of the genre. An utter disgrace.
When looked at in totality, you can see the fingerprints of the change in culture of the designers. The men that created Civ I were unapologetically part of the Faustian Western tradition. Civ 6 was created by men who completely disconnected from that tradition."
Non-marxist cultural studies

Twitter activist behind far-right 'Libs of TikTok' revealed to be US Orthodox Jew - "She’s also an Orthodox Jew, according to a Washington Post expose Tuesday that revealed Raichik to be behind the massively popular Twitter feed Libs of TikTok .  That information was contained at one point in Raichik’s Twitter bio, where users often share elements of their identities, The Washington Post reported. The newspaper reported nothing else about Raichik’s Jewish identity... It also is renewing a conversation about how deeply some members of the Orthodox community are embedded in the American far-right...   In the runup to the 2020 election, Orthodox Trump supporters rallied in the streets for him in Brooklyn and demonstrated against the pandemic restrictions he mocked; the son of a prominent Brooklyn judge who led a national Orthodox synagogue group was present among the rioters, while some Orthodox publications blamed leftists for the siege or downplayed the gravity of the Capitol mob’s actions...   Poupko explained that any restrictions on women engaging on social media are less severe than for men, a function of the belief that women are better equipped than men to withstand temptation. “It’s more okay for a woman to see immodesty” on social media, he said."
The right wing anti-Semites continue to insist that all Jews are pushing liberal madness

American and Israeli Jews: Twin Portraits From Pew Research Center Surveys - "Like Jews in the United States, Jews in Israel are deeply divided over settlement construction in the West Bank, which Palestinians view as an obstacle to peace. Overall, however, Israeli Jews lean toward the position that settlements help Israel’s security, while a plurality of American Jews think settlements hurt Israel’s own security. Younger American Jews are especially likely to question whether Israel’s government is sincerely seeking peace and to say the United States gives “too much” support to Israel, leading some commentators to suggest that the two Jewish communities may be drifting apart... it’s interesting to note that on the Israeli political spectrum, most Jews place themselves in the center or on the right, while on the American spectrum, most Jews identify with the center or the political left. These broad ideological differences may be connected to the very different social contexts in which Israeli and U.S. Jews live. American Jews are a highly educated and, on the whole, warmly regarded religious minority in a very large, Christian-majority country. Jews represent about 2% of the U.S. adult population of roughly 300 million people. Only about one-third of American Jews say that either “all” (5%) or “most” (27%) of their close friends are Jewish. A substantial proportion (44%) of U.S. Jews who are married say their spouse is not Jewish – including a majority of those who have gotten married since 2000... "American Jewish critics of Israel, they’ll say, ‘That’s not … how could Israel have done this, that’s not Jewish?’ I’m thinking, ‘Well, not Jewish for who?’""
Weird. I thought all Jews unconditionally support Israel, and only mix with other Jews as they plot to control the world

Russian honeytraps pointless on French spies… their wives already know - "Honeytraps do not work on French spies because their wives are used to them having affairs, a television documentary about France’s equivalent of MI6 has revealed.  Intelligence agents in the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) said that their Russian enemies came to realise that blackmail over taking lovers was ineffective... “Defectors from the Soviet Union used to talk about the ‘French paradox’, namely if you surprised a Frenchman with a mistress by telling him, we’ve caught you red-handed with a 22-year-old called Tatyana, work for us or we’ll tell your wife, it didn’t work.  “That was because he generally said: ‘Go ahead, show her, she’ll understand,’ or ‘she already knows about it’.”... In one jab at “Anglo-Saxons”, the documentary cites agents who claim they provided photographic evidence that disproves American claims that the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was building missiles that could carry weapons of mass destruction. The agent said the Americans mixed up images of rolled-up carpets in a factory and petrol pipeline tubing with missiles.  Anglo-Saxons also tended to “throw more money at seeking to make contacts”, while the French rely more heavily on ulterior motives... Agents explain how hard it is to keep their jobs from their families, with one saying they learn not to ask questions.  One unnamed agent said: “Most secret agents of the DGSE are under diplomatic cover in embassies. It’s not James Bond. We don’t have a Walther PPK in our pocket. The odd vodka martini is possible.   “In general, we rely more on subtleness and discretion and rigorous handling of communications means than an M4 or a Glock [both types of guns].” The documentary opens with members of the DGSE making a distinction between “secret agent” and “spy”, which is a narrower job title and only part of the activity of the agency. The secret agent’s role is to “gather information abroad to protect France”.  However, this often happens from behind a desk."

Home Sweet Homer: The Strange Saga of the Real-Life Simpsons House in Nevada - "At first glance, the two-story stucco house located on Red Bark Lane in Henderson, Nevada, looks very much the same as the neighboring homes located in the South Valley Ranch community. Neutral exterior paint covers the sides and attached garage. A rock garden has been spread over the soil. A cement walkway leads from the driveway to the front door.  Look closer and the irregularities begin to appear. The house has protruding bay windows and a rounded front entryway, which are both unusual for the prefabricated construction on the block. A chimney juts out from the roof, though Nevada residents are rarely in need of a wood-burning fire. Around the garage, some of the light-colored paint is flaking, revealing a cornea-scorching bright orange underneath. Once upon a time, the house on Red Bark Lane wasn’t just another address in a sprawling suburban development: It was originally built as a nearly exact three-dimensional replica of 742 Evergreen Terrace, the Springfield residence of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie Simpson. Working on a short schedule, architects and builders de-fictionalized the home featured in The Simpsons for a 1997 giveaway that was intended to leave one lucky fan with the ultimate in cartoon memorabilia"
Keywords: Replica

Richard Hanania on X - "Across 9 studies from 5 different countries involving 12,000 twin pairs, genes explain about 40% of the variation in political ideology, with shared environment (parenting and neighborhood) just under 20%, and the rest unexplained."
Genetic Influences on Political Ideologies: Twin Analyses of 19 Measures of Political Ideologies from Five Democracies and Genome-Wide Findings from Three Populations

Mike Bird on X - "A while ago a Singaporean taxi driver asked me what a UK hawker centre lunch might cost. I explained that there aren't any. He asked what office workers ate, and I explained the concept of Meal Deals. And he looked at me with such a powerful combination of pity and revulsion."

Meme - "KEEP CALM AND TRY ANAL"
"KEEP CALM AND TRY AN ALE"
"Sometimes it's all about the angle."

Meme - "I told him if anything happened to me, he should meet other women"
"So I did!"
"I meant if I died..Peter I was stuck in traffic"

Meme - Decimvs Ivnivs Ivvenalis @DJ_Juvenal: "plebs literally only want two things and it's fucking disgusting *bread* *circus*
2:48 PM - a.d. III Non. Apr.. 880 AUC"

Meme - Mark Lewis @marklewismd: "Honestly don't know how to earn that 5th star"
"Doctor Lewis saved my life! *4 stars*"

Nationalist Self-Hatred - "The populist Right may identify with Putin’s opposition to cancel culture and applaud when he declares that the woke Left is more authoritarian than the Soviet Union, but this can’t account for the enmity they display toward their own country, its democratic allies, and the threatened democracies (particularly Ukraine) that it supports. The infatuation with the culture war is just one aspect of this civic rot, which is becoming deeper and more widespread all the time... Trump has no ideology beyond his lust for personal power, but he realized that a commitment to nationalism is the best way to secure that power. Carlson’s ideology is similarly opportunistic. His self-conscious agitprop in Moscow was supposed to generate apoplectic headlines in the liberal media. He’s a right-wing ideologue, but he’s also a troll who knows how to ignite maximum controversy and attract attention. He’ll say whatever is necessary to remain relevant, no matter how disingenuous it might be. For example, he has spent years shilling for Trumpism, even though he regards Trump as “disgusting,” a “demonic force,” and a “destroyer.” Two days before the January 6 assault on the Capitol, he wrote to a staffer: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately.” (We know this thanks to the disclosure of Carlson’s text messages during the Fox-Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit, which resulted in a $785 million settlement paid by the network.)"
Hating your government isn't the same as hating your country

Unit 684 - Wikipedia - "209th Detachment, 2325th Group (Korean: 2325부대 209파견대), commonly known as Unit 684 (684부대), was a black operations unit of the Republic of Korea Air Force formed to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Il Sung in 1968, in retaliation for the Blue House raid. The unit consisted of 31 civilian recruits, mostly petty criminals and unemployed youths, and underwent three years of harsh training on the island of Silmido. The assassination mission was cancelled in 1971 and the unit mutinied, resulting in a firefight in Seoul in which most of the members of the unit were killed. The four survivors were sentenced to death by a military tribunal and executed."

After software "upgrade", StarHub TV+ is slow and pushes unskippable ads - "To make things worse, StarHub has even introduced unskippable ads without telling paying customers beforehand... And it has the cheek to tell complaining customers that these ads do not interfere with the viewing experience because they do not appear during a video stream.  Excuse me, you’re talking to paying customers. We are not using a free version of Netflix or Spotify here. Nor are we using a pirate Android box streaming illegal versions of the English Premier League, something StarHub is so keen on educating users against.  The experience with the legitimate StarHub box, let’s be honest, makes you feel like you’ve just signed up for an illegal set-top box service. These unskippable ads are not just an annoyance – they make paying customers feel like they are freeloaders. If you’re NTUC Income, Ogawa and other advertisers whose ads are showing up repeatedly on StarHub TV+ boxes, please know that you are annoying people to bits. No, such irritating, disruptive ads don’t work; actually, they make people hate your brand... Clearly, this software “upgrade” is an own goal by the telecom operator, just as it seemed to be winning.  When it rolled out its little white Android set-top boxes a few years ago, you’d think it had finally cast out its cable-TV legacy and moved up to the streaming TV future"

The NDP don't take themselves seriously, so why should we? - "What is the point of the federal New Democratic Party? It would appear that it’s not to win elections. That’s fine, as far as it goes. There are other purposes for political parties. Some are single or double-issue protest parties, like the Christian Heritage Party, but those tend to be very small, rarely if ever winning seats in Parliament. There are regional parties, like the Bloc Québécois, which runs candidates only in Quebec, advancing their narrow interests with some success. There have historically been splinter parties, like Alberta’s Wildrose Party or the Reform Party, each of which, by splitting historic voting coalitions, had influence over their movements’ reunifications, altering the makeup of the future United Conservative and federal Conservative parties forever.    But none of these alternative strategic imperatives or political identities applies to the NDP, which despite meagre election results, both in the popular vote and seat count, continues to insist that we take it seriously as a mainstream party.   But why should we? Since the so-called Orange Crush of 2011, when Jack Layton brought the federal NDP up to 103 seats in the House of Commons and official opposition status, the NDP has been on a steady political decline. They dropped down to 44 seats in 2015, 24 in 2019, and essentially held in 2021, gaining one seat. While the grand narrative of the last few elections has focused on Trudeau besting his primary opponents in Canada’s Conservatives, his utter dominance over the NDP, convincing progressive voters at every turn that to stop the right-wing bogeyman they’d have to vote Liberal, is an under-discussed dynamic. It also seems to be an under-examined phenomenon when it comes to the NDP’s own political strategy... three more veteran NDP Members of Parliament announced they wouldn’t be re-offering in the next election, causing analysts to rightly remark that it would likely be Conservatives, not Liberals, picking up some of the non-incumbent ridings in the next election.  This is the challenge for the NDP in 2024. Despite the Liberal crash in popularity and the accessibility of previous Liberal voters, they have not been able to capitalize on converting them. Indeed, many from what would have traditionally been an NDP pool of supporters—working-class labour union members—make up Conservative leader Poilievre’s growing coalition. This should be all the more galling for NDP rank-and-file members when you consider that we’re in the middle of an affordability crisis. Canadians are lining up at food banks in record numbers. Isn’t this sort of supposed to be their party’s moment?   And herein lies the problem. Canada’s NDP were supposed to have a purpose. The party emerged from the cooperation of western agrarians and national trade unions, bringing together rural, urban, western, and eastern working-class people. But almost from the beginning, they struggled to reconcile their materialist left-wing economic inclinations with the trendy left-wing social causes of the day. It’s been working-class populists versus champagne socialists since day one... The NDP should look at where Liberals are wedded to stakeholders that they are not (corporate Canada comes to mind) and contemplate policies that would wedge the government and set them apart, creating some appeal for working-class Canadians fed up with the status quo.   Why not push for curtailing record-high immigration numbers? Make the argument that increasing labour supply suppresses wages, hurting Canadian paycheques and distorting the labour market. Why not push to protect more Canadian supply chains from trade exposure? Make the argument that unfettered free trade erodes onshore manufacturing employment and threatens the kind of good, high-paying union jobs our parents grew up with. Of course, we know why not. These arguments, while popular with working-class Canadians, are not on trend with our country’s urban elite. Unfortunately for the NDP, they’re what a party that wanted to win would consider talking about.    This brings us back to the opening question. The point of the federal NDP seems neither to be to win or even to advance a narrow cause. It seems simply to exist for its own sake, occasionally finding comfort in passing party policy resolutions that read like half-baked social studies masters’ theses. Maybe they’re OK with that. But it doesn’t mean the rest of us have to take them seriously."

Meme - "DWAYNE 'THE ROCK' JOHNSON RELEASES A MEN'S SHAMPOO - DESPITE BEING BALD"
"I guide others to a treasure I cannot possess."

The Most Underrated Scene in The Lord of the Rings - YouTube - "'We, we didn't want to put any of our own, certainly in terms of the thematic material, we didn't want to put any of our own baggage. I mean we had no interest in putting our messages into, into this movie. But we thought that we should honor Tolkien by putting his messages into it. He, he cared passionately about certain issues. And we thought what we should do to honor him is to make sure that that that his what he cared about ends up in the movie'... Gandalf telling Pippin you'll go to Valinor when you die is inaccurate in the lore of Middle Earth as we've established, but if we loosen our interpretation of those words to be not quite so strict, we can imagine that Gandalf is not telling Pippin literally what will happen but instead is simply imparting a message of hope. In this Jackson gets Tolkien perfectly, beautifully right. The temptation to despair is a central theme throughout this story...  yet time after time our heroes reject that temptation... almost every every notable character in the story faces a crucial moment in which they must choose between despair and hope. And with the exception of Denethor they all choose the latter"

Meme - "If James Cameron's Titanic was made in 2024
Nothing on earth could come between them
Harry Styles & Lizzo
TITANIC"

Meme - "When your kids refuse to eat their lunch and say they aren't hungry."
Yoda: "You will be. You will be."

Meme - AI: "COLLECTING DATA. ANALYZING PREFERENCES. GENERATING OBJECT OF YOUR DEEPEST DESIRE. INNOCENT> NUBILE. VIRGIN. REDHEAD"
*My Little Pony-esque figure*

Ashley St. Clair on X - "Well well well…  Mr. Beast deleted a pretty tame + nonpartisan post critiquing Nancy Pelosi’s suspiciously excellent trading record  Guess where Nancy Pelosi’s nephew Andrew is a talent manager? Mr. Beast’s agency!  Did someone get in trouble for criticizing Aunt Nancy? I’m sure it’s just “better for the brand” to “stay out of politics”"

Al Jazeera The Intercept journalist Mehdi Hasan calls Non-muslims are Kaffars who live like animals - "Qatar's state-owned media network Al Jazeera and eBay owner Pierre Omidyar owned media "The Intercept" currently employs Mehdi Raza Hasan, a journalist who is a darling of western left media.  He frequently write stories in almost all major mainstream media targeting India/Hinduism and his posts almost always anti-Indian and pro-Pakistani sentiment.  In an explosive leaked video comprising his statements from different occasions, journalist Mehdi Hasan shared his views on Kaffars (Non Muslims)... In Islam, the ends do not justify the means. This idea is totally alien to Islam. In Islam, what halaal is halaal; what is haraam is haraam. We do not bend our law, or morality, for short-term aims. Never. And we never lose the moral high-ground. ... We know that keeping the moral high-ground is key. Once we lose moral high-ground we are no different from the rest, of the non-Muslims; from the rest of those human beings who LIVE THEIR LIVES AS ANIMALS. bending any rule to fulfill any desire. ... In islam, to believe is to know; to disbelieve is not to know. That is what it fundamentally comes down to; it (to disbelieve) is to remain ignorant; to cover up knowledge. After all, what is 'kaffar'? Kaffar comes from the root, word which means to cover up, to conceal. A kaffar is one who covers up that knowledge which is clear. The French orientalist scholar Larnens (?), he once wrote that the "Quran is not far from considering unbelief, disbelief as an infirmity, as an illness, as a disease of the human mind". subhanallah. Non-Muslims point this out to us. ... 'The kaffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to islam, the rational message of the Quran, they are described in the Quran as, quote, "a people of no intelligence", Allah describes them as; not of no morality, not as people of no belief, people of no intellegence. because they're incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God.In this respect, the Quran describes the atheists as "CATTLE", as CATTLE of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world. ... All of these Ulama (a body of Muslim scholars recognized as having specialist knowledge of Islamic sacred law and theology) unamimously agree that, at the very minimum, if Yazid was not a kaafir then - at the very minimum - he was a fasiq, a transgressor, a breaker of islamic laws, a corrupt individual, a tyrant, a killer, a drunkard, a dog-lover, a music-lover, a...a homosexual, a pedophile, a sexual deviant... someone who slept with his own mother! These are their views, these Ulama, in their books Not mine, not imam Hussein's view, not Ali al-Sisrani view. This is their view of Yazid, all there in black and white. Yet Allah should be pleased with him? Allah should be pleased with him? Indeed, the fact is that Yazid was not simply a fasiq, he was out and out kaffir!'"
Meghan McCain on X
Mark Humphrys on X - "What a burn. 🔥 I love the fact that Mehdi Hasan cannot escape his own videos, which I have saved here: https://t.co/oOpcm0KIa6 Just like Umar Al-Qadri cannot escape his own videos, which I have saved here: https://t.co/pRRvcl6VUG"
Islamophobia!

Mary had a little skirt

Mary had a little skirt,
It split right up the side.
And everywhere that Mary went,
The boys could see her thighs.
Mary had another skirt,
It split right up the front.
She never wore that one...

Links - 5th May 2024 (1 - General Wokeness)

Meme - TV with panicked reporter: "INCELS: SOCIETY'S MOST DANGEROUS MEN?"
*dark hand covers TV screen*
*dark man steals TV with gun* "WELCOME TO DETROIT"

The Post Millennial on X - "BREAKING: Michigan parents of school shooter Ethan Crumbley sentenced to 10-15 years for son’s crime"
The Honorable Matt Walsh on X - "Absolutely insane that they're throwing these two in prison essentially for the crime of being bad parents meanwhile there are literally thousands of violent criminals with even worse parents who will never be held to this legal standard. Total miscarriage of justice."

Peter Boghossian on X - "This is absolutely mind boggling. It is why we need to burn our institutions to the ground: “A Witch Hunt Is Targeting Black Harvard Faculty” IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT YOUR SKIN COLOR IS. IF YOU OBTAINED YOUR CREDENTIALS FRAUDULENTLY YOU SHOULD BE FIRED"

Meme - lotus @ewuraakuz: "why do white people walk so fast? why the rush?"
Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano: "Fast walkers have higher IQ and larger brains than slow walkers."
When your racism backfires.

Maybe your political opponent is a dog-whistling hate-monger—or maybe you're just losing the battle of ideas - "it’s a convenient way to call someone a liar or to completely discount what they tell you if you don’t like what the other person is saying to you. Simply dismissing their words by calling them a “dog whistle” and attaching a list of motives, without even having an obviously offensive or libelous word to point to, now suffices. That way, you never have to believe anything you hear from someone you don’t like.   The irony is not lost on me. “Dog whistle” is itself coded language to accuse someone else of using coded language. It would be laughable if it weren’t so serious... Poilievre posted a tweet expressing condolences for the families and colleagues of two police officers who were killed in the line of duty in Edmonton in March 2023. It was accompanied by an image of the Edmonton police crest, with a thin blue line across it, meant to symbolize police solidarity and honour fallen officers. It is a symbol of the line officers walk between life and death while serving, and can be traced back to the 1920s.  The symbol had apparently been largely abandoned over the past few years following the Black Lives Matter protests when the thin blue line came to be viewed by some as racist, with some purporting it actually represented the division between Black people and white (presumably) police officers. The symbol was subsequently co-opted by some extremist groups, meaning that for some, this irredeemably morphed any representation of the thin blue line into a symbol of white supremacy, pushing some police forces to ban its wearing on uniforms. Therefore, according to this winding narrative, Poilievre’s condolences to two dead police officers were a dog whistle, secretly sending a racist statement to his followers.  Really? It appears that no one questions the logic of these statements, never mind their absurdity. It is stated, therefore it is true.  Another example: two slogans Poilievre has used in the past—“Reclaim what has always been yours” and “Take back control”—have been cited as dog-whistling, anti-immigrant messages. However, his track record would suggest the more likely explanation is he is simply promoting less government interference in Canadian lives...   He has also been accused of dog whistling to white supremacists for saying, “I’m a believer in using simple Anglo-Saxon words that strike right at the meaning that I’m trying to convey.” Again, just because some ideologues have co-opted something for their fringe ideology does not mean the phrase or concept should be considered always and irredeemably offensive. Preferring clear, common speech—as any politician should!—does not an automatic white supremacist make.  Many ostensibly sensible people believe otherwise, including former prime minister Kim Campbell, who recently called the Conservative leader a “hate monger.” Wherever did she get her outlandish opinion? It certainly did not come from his record.  After an extensive online and Hansard search,  I have yet to find any of the extreme views Poilievre is said to have, or anything in his background that would indicate that he might hold hateful views.   I have used Poilievre to illustrate this dog whistle phenomenon, but the real issue is the manipulation of public and private opinion using such a cheap and shoddy device. How can so many fall for it, irony and all?   That Poilievre holds views opposed to those of the woke Left is undeniable. But given that he apparently now shares those views with a very large and growing number of Canadians, his political opponents would be wise to find a new tactic with which to take him down. Sure, he would be easier to drive from the public arena if he really was a racist hate-monger, but the actual evidence for that case is non-existent. My suggestion? Try grappling with his actual words, his plain-stated policies and positions, if you wish to have any hope of defeating him."
Accusing someone of dog whistling is a way to smear someone by pretending that he is saying something he has never said

C.S. Lewis Sounded the Alarm on the Dangers of Progressivism - "Lewis’s resistance to European progressivism was, first and foremost, a reflection on the reality of man’s nature, and the failings of progressivism to account accurately for man’s fallen state. He rejected progressivism’s assumption of man’s inherent goodness, of the state as an idol. Lewis succinctly described progressivism as “state worship,” predicated on the assumption of man’s inevitable rise to god-hood...   Lewis skillfully captures the propaganda-like orientation of European progressivism: “It does make a difference how things are put,” argues Lord Feverstone. “For instance, if it were even whispered that the NICE wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you’d have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity. Call it re-education of the mal-adjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end.”... Throughout the novel, Lewis clearly illustrates progressivism’s dependence on and worship of technology and knowledge, predicated on the assumption of man’s constant positive trend toward progress and enlightenment. Quite noticeably, NICE pursues change at all costs while credulously assuming that any departure from the past is a worthwhile endeavor... Described by Lewis as “scientism,” NICE’s worship of technology and expertise manifests itself in the society’s obsession with scientific experimentation and the recruitment of suitable “experts.”... Lewis astutely coins a term to critique what he saw as progressivism’s “chronological snobbery.” This term described the “uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” Rather than evaluating value on the basis of truth or reliability, the chronological snob evaluates value on the basis of age, a practice common to both NICE and Western progressives of Lewis’ day...   In his 1958 essay, “Is Progress Possible: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State,” Lewis prophetically warned of the tendency of progressives to arrest human liberties in the name of progress. He said that when “our whole lives” become the “business” of the state, we become slaves to the state and can no longer question the ideology of the state. Such were the hazards of “an increasingly planned society” and a “mother knows best” government. A primary solution to this danger, Lewis proposed, is “an education not controlled by government.”   C.S. Lewis mounted an impressive condemnation of the progressive state and its radical spread in Europe during the twentieth century. While brutal leaders like Lenin and Stalin, and eventually tamer socialist leaders like the U.K.’s Clement Attlee, all pursued human perfection through state control, Lewis sounded the siren against progressivism’s clear dangers: not only to the political rights and liberties of man, but also to our very perception of the reality of mankind."

IGN France Scrambles To Backpedal After Writing Off 'Stellar Blade' Protagonist Eve As "A Doll Sexualized By Someone Who Has Never Seen A Woman" - "In the latest example of the Western video game press having a chip on their shoulder when it comes to media created not just by Japan, but apparently an East Asian nation, IGN France has found themselves scrambling to defend themselves after writing off Stellar Blade‘s lead protagonist Eve, despite being based entirely on the real-world appearance of an actual female model, of being nothing more than the “sexualized” fantasy of “someone who has never seen a woman”... Eve’s designer, game director and the CEO of its publishing company Shift Up Hyung-Tae Kim, has definitely seen a woman before, as evidenced by the fact that he is currently married to Shift Up concept artist Jiyun Chae. Further, while Eve herself may be a fictional character, her appearance is not, instead being based on a full, 1:1 body scan of real-world South Korean model Shin Jae-eun... In light of both their ignoring of these facts and their blatant attempt to insult Kim, both Osolla and IGN France soon found themselves facing a massive wave of backlash from the general public regarding their lack of journalistic integrity.  However, rather than respond to this outrage by admitting to having completely missed the mark with their accusations, the writer and outlet instead moved to try and cover up their shoddy work by blaming the public for having ‘misread’ their original statement.   Changing their insulting description of Eve from “A doll sexualized by someone who has never seen a woman” to “A doll sexualized by someone you would think has never seen a woman,” Osolla then added the pompous disclaimer, in English, that “This last sentence has been slightly edited for French speaking people pretending not to understand what we meant, and the English speaking mob who Google Translated the initial text.” However, since then, IGN France has amended the disclaimer to instead claim that the article was edited “following death threats”.  Notably, neither Osolla nor IGN France have provided any proof of having received any such threats."

Meme - Grummz @Grummz: "So @IGN  calls Stellar Blade protagonist a sexualized “doll” and says the creator “has never seen a living woman.”  The not real “doll”:  The creator’s wife and team artist:"
Meme -"georgie @BeefyGorilla: "Imagine how proud the husband is knowing people think his wife is too sexy to be real""

Perma Banned on X - "-be @IGN France
-tries to trash Stellar Blade and say ShiftUp’s CEO “has never seen a woman”
-Meanwhile ShiftUp’s CEO’s actually married over 10 years and his wife is a prolific artist
Game journos not only can’t help but talk trash, they can’t help being factually wrong too."

ABC chair Kim Williams tells staff to be impartial or leave. | The Australian - "ABC chair Kim Williams has warned journalists that activism is not welcome at the taxpayer-funded broadcaster and if reporters fail to observe impartiality guidelines they should leave the organisation.  Mr Williams, who commenced as ABC chair two weeks ago after the conclusion of Ita Buttrose’s term, said he had little tolerance for reporters who failed to be objective and stressed the importance of staff always aspiring to be “fair-minded”...   “This is a publicly funded organisation, it is a publicly accountable organisation, it is a respondent to legislation to the national parliament and it must always aspire to be as fair-minded in its work as it possibly can be.”  In the 2022-23 financial year the ABC received $1.07bn in annual funding.   Under its editorial policies it has a statutory duty to ensure the gathering and presentation of news and information is impartial and it reflects the standards required for objective journalism... Mr Williams raised his concerns about the use of social media by ABC staff, which has at times been problematic for the organisation.  The ABC suffered damaging fallout in 2021 from a defamation action by former Liberal MP Andrew Laming against Four Corners journalist Louise Milligan, who falsely accused him on X, formerly Twitter, of upskirting a woman. That matter cost taxpayers more than $200,000, including $79,000 in damages...  “I have grave difficulty with journalists being a respondent to what the public wants to hear.”  Attard also said another “issue causing extreme discontent within the organisation” concerned reports members of the ABC board had been lobbied by the Jewish community to remove controversial fill-in Sydney mornings radio host Antoinette Lattouf because of her conduct online...   Mr Williams also criticised the ABC for being too focused on itself instead of serving the Australian community."
Damn far right conspiracy theorist! Doesn't he know that reality has a liberal bias? Clearly the Labor Party is Conservative and needs to be replaced by a true Left Wing party!

Aaron Sibarium on X - "Listen to a guest speaker at UCLA medical school force students to get on their knees and pray for the “black,” “brown,” and “houseless” people killed by the “crapitalist lie” of “private property.” This was for a mandatory class."
Wesley Yang on X - "Don't worry guys, wokeness peaked a couple years ago, it would be cringe to keep worrying about it"
Those who talk about Marxism infiltrating universities will still be told that they're far right conspiracy theorists who have fallen to misinformation

🚨 Katherine Brodsky on X - "If you see yourself as a victim, you'll be convinced that the world views you that way too.  The Dartmouth Scar Experiment reveals that.  Participants thought they'd be interviewed for jobs with a fake scar on their face, which they saw being applied by a makeup artist. However, during the touch up phase, unbeknownst to them the scar was removed.  Those participants who believed that they still had a visible scar, reported a massively increased level of discrimination. They also "displayed heightened feelings of powerlessness, self-pity, and an increased tendency to blame others for their failures." (source: Medium).   They believed that they were discriminated against and thus internalized it in a negative way.  The study essentially revealed that regardless of whether there's actual discrimination or not, when one believes themselves to be a victim it results in negative consequences."
Self-fulfilling prophecies!
Clearly lived experience is sacrosanct and if you question minorities' claims of oppression, discrimination and stigma, you are a bad person

Meme Eomer: 'Orcs are roaming freely across our lands. Unchecked, unchallenged, killing at will'
Possessed Theoden: 'The only threat to The Westfold is Orcphobia'

How Canada’s secular religion of cultural self-hate took hold - "Modern Western civilization grew out of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. The ascendancy of reason in human affairs produced the scientific method and later the Industrial Revolution. Add in the rule of law, individual liberty, private property and capitalism, and you have the basic recipe that has raised much of humanity out of poverty and oppression over two centuries. Four academic doctrines — critical theory, postmodernism, social justice and critical race theory — are moving the world, or at least the West, from this triumph to decline. These doctrines reject Enlightenment values such as open inquiry, individual autonomy, free speech, scientific skepticism and even reason itself. They claim to champion equality, peace and social cooperation, but instead promote identity politics, elitism and centralized control. They are the four doctrines of the apocalypse. Unlike traditional academic inquiry, these “neo-Marxist” doctrines are less theories than programs. They are activist and political. “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Marx famously wrote. “The point, however, is to change it.” Critical theory is not to be confused with critical thinking, for to think critically is to reason, explain, critique and challenge. Instead, the purpose of these doctrines is to condemn. They largely consist of ideological assertions not based on data or deduction. They lead with their conclusions. Critical theory and its related fields do not constitute a singular school of thought but a scholarly umbrella that consists of multiple related approaches and variations that defy easy encapsulation. Its history is messy and convoluted. Its scholarship can be verbose, incoherent and sometimes impenetrable, while much of its original intellectual project has been overtaken by its modern activist incarnation. Critical theory is attractive to cultural revolutionaries in part because it is difficult to pin down, like trying to staple jelly to a wall.  Yet these doctrines have become the intellectual foundation for the ascendant ideology of our time, woke progressivism, which is severe, uncompromising and vengeful. Their commandments have become Canada’s secular religion, whose apostles sneer at the foundations of their own society. Cultural contrition has become ubiquitous: Canada is systemically racist. White people are privileged. The nuclear family is misogynist. Capitalism is oppressive. Private property rights cause environmental destruction. Prosperity produces climate change. The premises of these four doctrines define the ethos now dominant in major public institutions: government, legacy media, universities, big corporations, public schools, public health authorities, law enforcement, professional regulators and, increasingly, courts...  Between the two world wars, scholars at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt began to investigate why Marxism was failing to catch on in the West. They broadened Marx’s tight focus on economic oppression of the working class and developed the doctrine known as critical theory, which is premised on the ideas that power and oppression define relationships throughout society, that knowledge is socially contingent and that unjust Western institutions should be collapsed and reconstituted. In the decades following its birth at the Frankfurt School, critical theory and its variations made an inexorable march through universities, influencing such disparate disciplines as sociology, literary criticism and linguistics, infiltrating professional schools like teachers’ colleges and law schools and dominating “grievance studies” programs such as women’s studies, gender studies and media studies. Today its reach extends to virtually every field in the arts and social sciences, and its final conquest is now underway inside science, technology, engineering and medical faculties... As political tools, critical theory and its variations are brilliant. Any challenge to their legitimacy can be interpreted as a demonstration of their thesis: the assertion of reason, logic and evidence is a manifestation of privilege and power. Thus, any challenger risks the stigma of a bigoted oppressor. James Lindsay, an independent American critic of critical theory and social justice, calls critical theory a “kafkatrap.” “Notice race? Because you’re racist. Don’t? Because you’re privileged, thus racist.” If you deny that you are a witch, then you are a witch. And if you do not deny it, then you are a witch for sure. Pointing out that critical theory makes no sense misses the point: making sense is Western and privileged. Double standards on speech and conduct are baked into our current political order. Burning churches and blocking railways are blows in support of social justice, but peacefully protesting vaccine mandates constitutes a public order emergency. Defying pandemic lockdown rules is a threat to public safety when parishioners gather for church services in parking lots, but not when thousands gather for Black Lives Matter marches. The federal government vilifies law abiding gun owners while it eliminates minimum sentences for gun crimes. The hypocrisy of our authorities is no accident. Their choices are deliberate and calculated.  This uneven treatment, according to James Lindsay, is rooted in a single 1965 essay by critical theory philosopher Herbert Marcuse called ”Repressive Tolerance,” whose theme Lindsay encapsulates in one sentence: “movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence.”... Once upon a time, when they were cultural mavericks, liberals championed free speech. Establishment conservatives were the censors, urging limits on obscenity, blasphemy and communist propaganda. In a free society, went the liberal argument, all must be able to express ideas and opinions no matter who has the reins of power. Freedom of expression protected the dissenter, the rebel and the heretic from the orthodoxy of the prevailing view. Now the shoe is on the other foot. With the help of critical theory and its related doctrines, liberalism has morphed into the dominant ideology of woke progressivism and free speech is no longer needed to protect the left, whose sensibilities now prevail. It turns out that progressives were less interested in the principle of free speech than in promoting their own values."

The ugly truth about the Guardian - "Guardian editor Katharine Viner celebrates the bicentennial of her paper today with claims that it is the newspaper of Britain’s liberal conscience. Nothing could be further from the truth.  The origin myth circulated from its King’s Place headquarters is that the Guardian began as a part of the democratic resurgence following the slaughter of suffrage protesters at St Peter’s Fields, in Manchester, in 1819. The Manchester Guardian did begin to take advantage of the changes wrought by what came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre, but not in the way that the current editor claims.  The founder and first editor of the Manchester Guardian, John Taylor, made his own view of the suffrage campaigners very clear when he wrote that they were exploiting foolish workers for their own selfish ends... Thanks to its anti-democratic campaigning, the working-class Manchester and Salford Advertiser dubbed the Manchester Guardian ‘the foul prostitute and dirty parasite of the worst portion of the mill-owners’. The Manchester Guardian’s fear of popular democracy was kept up through the Chartist agitation of the 1840s. Like much of the middle classes, the Manchester Guardian relished Britain’s moral superiority over the slave-trading nation of the USA in the years between British abolition in 1833 and American emancipation in 1863 to 1865. But when the American Civil War arrived, between the anti-slavery Union forces of President Lincoln and the slavery-defending southern secessionists of Jefferson Davis, the Manchester Guardian switched sides and rallied to the Confederacy. Of Abraham Lincoln, the Manchester Guardian wrote in 1862 that it was ‘an evil day both for America and the world when he was chosen President of the United States’. When Lincoln was assassinated, in 1865, the Manchester Guardian wrote ‘of his rule, we can never speak except as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty’. What the Manchester Guardian found most abhorrent was the emancipation of the slaves...   The Manchester Guardian’s hostility to popular democratic pressure was such that, even by the early 20th century, editor CP Scott denounced the Suffragette protesters... When it came to the paper’s international coverage, while it was in favour of liberal reform, it was still a pointed supporter of the British Empire...   Democracy campaigners in Northern Ireland might have hoped that the Guardian would be sympathetic to their cause. But when the British Army opened fire on civil-rights protesters on Bloody Sunday in Derry, in 1972, the Guardian blamed the protest leaders... When Britain and America pushed for a second invasion of Iraq to get rid of Saddam’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (WMDs), a Guardian leader scoffed at Baghdad’s objections: ‘It is not credible to argue, as Iraq did in its initial reaction to Mr Powell [at the Security Council], that it is simply all lies… Iraq must disarm.’ As it turned out, Iraq had disarmed. After the conflict, no WMDs were found. It had been a pretext for war manufactured by the British secret services, with the help of the Guardian.  In recent times, the Guardian has been resolute in its view that democracy in Britain offers too great a risk of ‘populist’ capture and has consistently supported reforms intended to curtail it, whether demanding its subordination in the European Union or for greater oversight at the hands of the UK Supreme Court and other ‘non-majoritarian institutions’. That is wholly in keeping with its hostility to democratisation over its two centuries. The paper remains consistent, too, in its support for liberal imperialism – most recently supporting Western intervention in Libya and Syria."

Meme - thatstarwarsgirl @thatstarwarsgrl: "Dude you're fucking insane. Holy shit"
BigB Guse @brennanguse: "l'll be honest I find the One on the left much more attractive then unnatural Incel Fantasy on the Right"
*Ugly woman, attractive woman*

Meme - "Someone cut the Hair of the xbox "Female" fable characters and this is what happens"
*Ugly woman* *Ugly man*

Meme - *pixelated sprite* "MAN! I CAN'T WAIT FOR NEXT-GEN GRAPHICS!"
"Yeah!"
*Early Lara Croft era technology, with woman with pointy breasts* "MAN! I CAN'T WAIT FOR NEXT-GEN GRAPHICS!"
"Yeah!"
*Beautiful woman onscreen* "MAN! I CAN'T WAIT FOR NEXT-GEN GRAPHICS!"
"Yeah!"
*Ugly, fat female character*

Meme - *Black man plunges knife into Asian woman's head*
Asian woman to white man: "STOP IT"

New York man arrested after punching Asian woman 125 times, police say - "A man in Yonkers, New York was arrested for attempted murder after he punched an Asian woman 125 times and called her a racial slur, police said. The 67-year-old victim was entering her apartment building on Friday evening when the perpetrator, whom police identified as 42-year-old Tammel Esco, saw her and called her an “Asian bitch”... Esco has 14 previous arrests, half on felony charges. In February 2021, he pushed a woman through a plate glass window and was given conditional discharge with no jail time. In 2011, he was convicted of assault and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released on parole after two and a half years."

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a closet right-winger - "As political pet peeves go, this one is pretty high on my list. There’s a habit among a certain type of left-leaning political commentator to brand you as a right-wing conservative if you’re even one step to their right. They’ll sometimes characterize you that way even if you’re not discussing your political views at all, but instead engaged in reporting or analysis that implies bad news for their side... what I find remarkable is that is that Molloy can’t even seem to imagine someone doing journalism for reasons other than trying to advance a political narrative for partisan reasons. Everything — including a column pointing out something as basic as that Biden being 86 years old by the end of a potential second term is a big fucking deal — is assumed to be some coded, stealth bit of political advocacy... I have also become more estranged from what you might call the progressive political class over the past several years. One reason is that this class has rapidly become more left and less liberal — compare the Democratic presidential platforms of 2020, which began with a land acknowledgment, with Obama’s in 2012, which began by talking about the American Dream. I also strongly disagree with the left’s elevation of “misinformation” as a category of concern over free speech"
So many people do not understand that to explain is not to justify (or cheer, or support)

Links - 4th May 2024 (2)

This is what partying in your 30s is like. #otk #otknetwork #otk&co - YouTube - *Vacuum sucking up mess on floor*

Meme - Muslim man with rifle: "Come on, take off your burqa and fulfill your marital duties."
Grim Reaper: "I think there is a misunderstanding here"

Meme - "King Abdullah II is direct descendants of prophet Muhammad and this is his family. Whatever happened to wearing hijab and burqa? *uncovered women*"

Meme - Boy: "Mum why do you wear the hijab?"
Woman: "Because it's my choice sweetie!"
Boy: "What happens if you don't want to wear it anymore?"
Woman: "First, your daddy will kick me in the gut. My family will disown me and friends will talk shit about me. After I die Allah will burn me in hell"

Katharine Birbalsingh says she was forced to stop Muslim prayers after racial harassment of teachers - "Ms Birbalsingh said the school’s governing body decided to stop prayer rituals when some pupils started them “against a backdrop of events including violence, intimidation and appalling racial harassment of our teachers”... a High Court heard that the school had taken action on prayers because of concerns about a “culture shift” over “segregation between religious groups and intimidation within the group of Muslim pupils”... The school’s actions were based on teachers’ conversations with pupils over certain incidents, such as hearing about a Muslim girl who had dropped out of the school choir because she was told it was “haram”, or forbidden, he added.  “A number of children had been told that they were “bad Muslims” for not praying and had begun to pray,” Mr Coppel said in his written arguments.  He told the court that the school is “exceptionally successful” academically, “highly oversubscribed”, “aggressively” promotes integration, is run with “military precision” and uses an “ultra-strict enforcement of prescribed behavioural rules”. Ms Birbalsingh said the decision to ban prayer rituals “restored calm and order to the school”. She said: “We have always been clear to parents and pupils that when they apply to Michaela that because of our restrictive building combined with our strict ethos that does not allow children to wander around the school unsupervised, we cannot have a prayer room.”  She added: “We believe it is wrong to separate children according to religion or race, and that it is our duty to protect all of our children and provide them with an environment which is free from bullying, intimidation or harassment.  “Multiculturalism can only succeed when we understand that every group must make sacrifices for the sake of the whole.” Michaela school was ranked top in the country last year for “Progress 8”, a measure of how much a secondary school has helped pupils improve since primary school.  Ms Birbalsingh said that to achieve its results, the school “must be a place where children buy into something they all share and that is bigger than themselves: our country”. About 30 pupils began praying in the school’s “wet” and “dirty” yard in March last year, using blazers to kneel as they were not permitted to bring in prayer mats, the hearing at the High Court was told.  The court heard the school was targeted on social media with “threats of violence”, abuse, “false” allegations of Islamophobia, and a “bomb hoax”, but that the situation had since “calmed”."
Clearly, the problem is the school discriminating against Muslims. Muslim students religiously bullying other Muslims and enforcing religious segregation is no problem at all, because that's religious freedom, and condemning that is Islamophobia

The Michaela Community School ‘prayer ban’: facing the awkward realities of a multicultural society - "Having opened in 2014, the school achieves consistently high grades and defies expectations and statistical averages attached to children the from lower income and deprived backgrounds that the school typically takes. Around 80 per cent of its sixth form students go on to the country’s best universities, and it has been lauded with praise by Ofsted and the government. Accordingly, its pupils have achieved better progress in their learning than any other school in the country.   Noted for its unorthodox methods by contemporary standards – which in fact follow a more traditional approach – Michaela prioritises discipline, silence and authority. Birbalsingh has been dubbed “Britain’s strictest headmistress” because her students walk mutely in single file around the school and students’ eyes have to be fixated on the teacher during lesson time. Random socialising is strongly discouraged – there is no group work; groups who gather at break-time are capped at a maximum of four people. It’s quite something. And its results are hard to disagree with... The Church has consistently supported (and built upon) the liberal arts approach historically. That Michaela’s students are mandated to read Shakespeare and learn poetry by heart is one heartening aspect of the school’s methods... Students all eat vegetarian meals at lunch – to avoid conflict. And Jehovah’s Witness children are forced to read literary materials with the class which contain magic: something they’re typically not permitted to do... “the school observed a child starting to wear a headscarf who had not previously done so... The school decided to ban “prayer rituals” and what followed by way of protest against that decision included a bomb threat, a brick thrown through a teacher’s window, and a number of personally aimed threats which left some teachers “fearing for their lives”."
Clearly, the school must be forced to change even though students choose to go there. And when the results go down, this will be the school's fault for discrimination and stigma

Michaela School made being Muslim seem toxic, former pupil says - "Sarah said she too received insensitive comments from staff when she chose to start wearing a hijab during her time at the school.  "I do remember a teacher asking me if I was forced to wear it and it just shocked me so much," she said.  She explained it made her feel staff believe that "Muslim kids wearing a hijab or practising their faith cannot come out of pure will; they're doing it because they're oppressed or pressured"."
Obviously, there're no countries in the world where Muslim women are forced to wear the hijab, and in other countries, no Muslim women are forced to do so either

Father says killed daughter in hijab case - "A teenager who was said to have clashed with her father about whether she should wear a traditional Muslim head scarf died of injuries late on Monday, and her father told police he had killed her. Aqsa Parvez, 16, was found without a pulse in her home in Mississauga earlier on Monday. She was resuscitated by paramedics, treated at two hospitals, and later succumbed to her injuries, police said on Tuesday. Her father, 57-year-old Muhammad Parvez, has been charged with murder... The victim's brother, Waqas Parvez, 26, was arrested and charged with obstructing police... Others were quoted as saying the girl wore traditional Muslim dress when leaving the house in the morning, but would change into other clothes in school washrooms."
From 2007. Damn Islamophobia! Clearly the father was lying, because we know no Muslim women, especially not in developed countries, are forced to wear the hijab

Meme - "Dating Companies HATE Him. See how this young man with NO game met 72 virgins-Using one simple life hack *teen suicide bomber*"

Accurate machine learning prediction of sexual orientation based on brain morphology and intrinsic functional connectivity - " We found an average accuracy of 62% (±6.72) for predicting sexual orientation based on GMV and an average predictive accuracy of 92% (±9.89) using RSFC. Regions in the precentral gyrus, precuneus and the prefrontal cortex were significantly informative for distinguishing heterosexual from homosexual participants in both the GMV and RSFC settings."
MRI prediction of sexual orientation

Canadian MPs the world's second-best paid politicians after raise - "On the same day Canadians will see an increase in the federal carbon tax, MPs will also see a little extra on their pay stubs. And with that April Fool’s Day pay increase, Canadian parliamentarians will become the second-best paid elected officials in the world after Americans... Eighty per cent of Canadians oppose the automatic April 1 MP pay increase... Under legislation, parliamentarians’ raises are based on average wage increases granted by large public sector companies. Salaries for MPs are overseen by the House’s Board of Internal Economy — a shadowy committee chaired by the Speaker and consisting of privy council members and senior opposition party members... The United States pays elected members of Congress an average of US$174,000 annually ($236,433). That’s now followed by Canada’s new MP salary of $203,100, followed by Israeli Knesset members ($200,700), Australian MPs ($200,175), and Singapore’s parliamentarians ($192,500)."

A single act of courage is needed to fix Canada's tax system, but this government won't do it - "You know there’s a problem when seasoned tax specialists consistently struggle with new legislation. Combine this with the fact that anyone can call themselves a “tax specialist” (when they’re not and so the public is left to fend for themselves), and the consequences of being wrong are not good... Legislation that treats otherwise honest Canadians in a fashion that is extremely punitive does not encourage them to comply and can actually do the opposite. For example, the new legislation on short-term rentals (which will deny otherwise legitimate expense deductions against rental income in areas that prohibit such activity) is a great example. This kind of legislation is so obviously designed to be a short-term political “win” for the government and make them look good to their voter base, but it ignores good public policy. This is dangerous for Canada. Those who followed the Underused Housing Tax and bare trust-reporting debacles will know that legislation was introduced that ignored the concerns and feedback of many in the tax community, only to then have the government backtrack on some of the sharper edges of both pieces of legislation. In both cases, the backtracking occurred very late in the process and after a massive amount of effort was wasted by taxpayers and their advisers... This country’s personal tax rates are much too high , extremely punitive and discourage many from taking much-needed entrepreneurial risks. High rates discourage the best and the brightest from coming to Canada and have caused a flurry of successful Canadians to leave the country . These high rates are a real drag on our country’s serious productivity challenges and they need to change... The tax system massively redistributes wealth by introducing credits and cash rebates (such as the Canada Child Benefit, GST credits, carbon tax rebates, pharmacare, dental care, etc.) that all require the filing of a tax return in order to be eligible for them. Such credits, while lauded by some, are simple Robin Hood wealth redistribution schemes that ultimately redistribute tax revenues generated from the so-called rich to lower-income residents. Without automatic tax filing , many lower-income people who would likely be eligible for such credits do not receive such amounts since many are intimidated by the tax system... It won’t happen under this current federal government, disappointingly, but the single act of courage required to fix our tax system is tax reform and review "

Shi Pei Pu, The Chinese Opera Singer Turned Spy - "In 1964, Bernard Boursicot, an employee of the French embassy in Beijing, met a beautiful opera singer named Shi Pei Pu at a Christmas party. The two immediately hit it off, and soon embarked on a secret 18-year-long love affair. But under Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, Chinese people were forbidden to mix with foreigners, and eventually, Boursicot agreed to trade embassy secrets to the Chinese government in order to continue seeing Shi. In 1983, the French government arrested the pair for espionage. It was only then that the truth finally emerged: Shi was not a woman, as Shi had told Boursicot for the duration of the affair. During their trial, Shi identified himself as a man. For nearly 20 years, he explained, he had convinced Boursicot that he was a woman by hiding his genitals and insisting on having sex only in the dark. He even secretly adopted a child to present as their biological son... Shi learned French while growing up in the city of Kunming, which has a strong French influence. He attended Yunnan University, majoring in literature. By the age of 17, he had gained local recognition as an opera singer, often playing female roles. Bernard Boursicot was born in France in 1944. Throughout his youth, he attended boarding schools, where he had same-sex relationships with several fellow students. But by the time he arrived in Beijing at the age of 20, he was seeking a relationship with a woman, believing his relations with men were just a “schoolboy’s game.”... At first, Boursicot and Shi’s relationship was strictly platonic, as Boursicot was still determined to find a female partner. Then, Shi told him a tale called “The Story of the Butterfly” about a schoolgirl in ancient China named Zhu who dresses as a boy so she can attend school... Shi explained that his paternal grandmother had given his mother a decree: If she did not give the family a son, Shi’s father would have to take a second wife. When Shi was born, they realized the baby was a girl. Not wanting to lose her place in the household, Shi’s mother and the midwife made a pact to raise the baby as a boy and keep the real identity secret from Shi’s grandmother. Shi had been living as a man ever since. Realizing that Shi was a woman, Boursicot suddenly saw her in a whole new light — and realized they could now pursue a romantic and sexual relationship. At first, their romance was strained and cold. Whenever they had sex, it was always hurried, under cover of darkness. Meanwhile, Shi continued to dress and live as a man publicly. It was only ever with Boursicot that she lived as a woman... Boursicot would not meet his son for years. During that time, at great risk to his own safety, he continued to visit Shi under the guise that she was teaching him about the Cultural Revolution. One day, Shi told Boursicot that a Beijing city government representative would be taking over as Boursicot’s teacher. A man named Kang soon showed up at Shi’s house while Boursicot was visiting. Sensing that Kang was a police officer, Boursicot offered the Chinese government something in exchange for continuing his relationship with Shi. “How can I help the people?” Boursicot asked Kang. “If, for example, we had news at the embassy…” Thus began Boursicot’s work as a spy for the Chinese government... Shi later claimed to not have any knowledge of Boursicot’s espionage... In prison, medical examinations showed Shi had intact male genitalia. Shi demonstrated to doctors how he was able to hide his genitals during sex to convince Boursicot he was a woman. Later, Shi testified in court that he was a man... Distraught over the lies he had been told for nearly 20 years, Boursicot attempted suicide in his prison cell while awaiting trial. Thankfully, he survived. But he never quite forgave Shi Pei Pu. Both Shi Pei Pu and Bernard Boursicot were convicted of espionage and sentenced to six years in prison. But less than one year later, Shi received a presidential pardon. Reportedly, the French government did not want to endanger relations with China over a “very silly” case. Boursicot received a pardon a few months later."

Germans Save More, Yet Retire Poorer: A Financial Enigma - "German savers have little choice when it comes to the actual investment of capital. For example, pension funds are not allowed to invest more than 35 percent of their capital in stocks. Ebert says that “the nominal guarantee of contributions prescribed by politics systematically destroys the return.”... These are not the only stumbling blocks in the German company pension. The situation with taxes is similarly unfavorable"

The best Lord of the Rings Easter eggs are quotes hidden in dialogue - "Tom Bombadil, who appears early in the novel version of The Fellowship of the Ring and baffles lore experts, and one of the distinctive ents of The Two Towers, the (relatively) sprightly Quickbeam, are two characters who wound up cut from the movies. But Boyens, et al. honored them by slipping their dialogue into the mouth Treebeard - another guardian of nature. In addition to singing Quickbeam’s song (“O rowan mine!”), Treebeard also speaks aloud some narration from Tom Bombadil’s chapter, with his line about the “destroyers and usurpers!” who go about biting, breaking, and burning the pristine wilderness. Tricks like that highlight just how much restructuring of the story Jackson had to do as a director to keep the story in the shape of a film trilogy rather than a novel trilogy... In some cases, Boyens, Jackson, and Walsh chose quiet moments where Tolkien’s prose could breathe, and better evoke the books’ bittersweet tone. Frodo’s lament to Gandalf about wishing he were not the one to live to see such times has become a memetic touchstone, especially during this past year of constant doom and gloom. Jackson plucked it out of an exposition-heavy chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring and found a quiet moment for it, as Gandalf and Frodo rest in Moria, a lull before a major swell of action. It’s not unlike another lull during the movies’ climactic siege of Minas Tirith, when Gandalf and Pippin take a breather and Gandalf soothes his fears about death. He actually sneaks in a line of narration from the very end of The Return of the King, describing the last thing Frodo sees aboard the ship as it bears him to the shores of Valinor: “white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.” Jackson and his co-writers also made a valiant effort to preserve the many songs and poems that pepper Tolkien’s work but that would have absolutely torpedoed the pacing of the movies. On his way into the Shire in The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf sings the song that is so often reprised throughout the series, “The Road goes ever on and on…,” for instance. Particularly dramatic, too, is a poem of Rohan that begins “Where now are the horse and the rider?”, originally recited by Aragorn in The Two Towers as he, Legolas and Gimli arrive in the land of the horse lords. In the movies, Theoden delivers a portion of it in solemn voiceover over a montage of characters gearing up for the siege of Helm’s Deep. It’s a change that shows a deep understanding of the text, tying Theoden’s character to his culture, and in a way perfectly in line with its fatalistic theme... The extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring includes one short scene that sets up a major callback to the novels for Aragorn’s character. In an early scene in Rivendell, he visits his mother’s grave. Readers would know that Aragorn’s mother lived a hard life, hiding from a dark lord bent on killing her son. And so, when Elrond visits Aragorn at the end of The Return of the King to deliver the sword Anduril (a scene that does not happen in the books in the same way or at the same time), it means even more than some viewers may know when he says “I give hope to Men” and Aragorn answers, “I keep none for myself.” Those two lines are a paraphrasing of the poem Aragorn’s mother spoke to him the last time he saw her alive. Put in context with the extended edition scene by the grave, Elrond’s visit isn’t just handing off a plot device: He’s admonishing Aragorn to remember his duty. It’s a triumph of the film adaptations that scenes like this sometimes feel like improvements on the original work."

Police detain firebrand Umno Youth chief who led boycott calls on 'Allah' socks controversy - "Police have detained Umno Youth chief Dr Muhamad Akmal Saleh, who has been leading boycott calls against local convenience store chain KK Mart, over the sale of several socks with “Allah” wording printed on them... Three weeks ago, at the start of the socks issue, Dr Akmal had also posted a photo on Instagram of him bearing a Japanese sword. His caption said he would not change his stance for anything and he “preferred to die standing than living on his knees”."

Agong angry about ‘Allah’ socks issue - "The Yang di-Pertuan Agong Sultan Ibrahim has expressed his displeasure at the controversy surrounding the sale of socks bearing the word “Allah” at convenience stores. In a Facebook post, the king called for stern action to be taken against those responsible... Police have received 36 reports about the socks and are investigating the matter for causing disharmony and misusing network facilities. Earlier today, the vendor firm that supplied the socks to KK Mart said it was considering legal action for negligence against its supplier in China. Xin Jian Chang Sdn Bhd, a local company based in Johor, said its supplier had admitted that the socks were included “by mistake”."

Harvard and its peers should be embarrassed about how few students they educate - The Washington Post - "Ivy League colleges grew by 14 percent over the last 30 years, lagging far behind the 44 percent rise in the number of high school graduates. Many well-known public universities have expanded the number of students they serve without sacrificing quality. For example, the University of Michigan’s enrollment has increased by 35 percent since 1990, but that has not caused it to lose its place among the top 25 schools in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of national universities"
When you don't understand the value of signalling

CoderPad and CodinGame State of Tech Hiring 2024 - "36% of developers say they’re not interested in taking on managerial responsibilities."

A Harvard career adviser explains how managers can bridge the Gen-Z generation gap at work - "When I survey students on what they want from their careers, they overwhelmingly tell me they want financial stability and work/life balance. Only about 2% of any student audience I survey wants to climb the corporate ladder."
This seems to contradict what he claims about Gen Z not being different

Millennials and Gen Z Like to Splurge on Groceries Over Anything Else - "Gen Z, meanwhile, says the money they choose to spend on high-quality snacks and beverages makes for expensive grocery bills. One 23-year-old Gen Zer told Business Insider by text that he spends about $130 for a week and a half on groceries. "Fancy sodas and drinks" and "random snacks at Trader Joe's" account for the bulk of the bill. He also said he spent about $35 on protein bars. The success of the canned water brand Liquid Death also shows how young people are willing to spend on flashy food and beverages. The brand recently shot up to a valuation of $1.4 billion thanks to a recent round of funding, according to Forbes. Peter Pham, an investor in Liquid Death, previously told Business Insider that part of the brand's success comes from its appeal to younger generations."

Meme - "The vet suggested a shirt instead of a cone for my cat. Fun Fact: Most Cats wear baby sizes 0-3 months."

Meme - Girl: "I didn't say "Let's play doctor." I said, "Let's play Civil War doctor." *ready to saw off boy's leg*"

Why lesbians flock to Lesbos - "Joanna Savva, a local travel agent, estimates that 3,000-4,000 gay women now visit Eresos every summer, up from under 1,000 a couple of decades ago. The village has only 1,500 full-time residents, but three lesbian bars. Hundreds of tourists attend a women’s festival every September, where activities range from political discussions to beach parties... Although locals on Lesbos are now friendly towards lesbian visitors, this was not always the case. Homophobia used to be widespread. Ten years ago, three islanders even tried to reclaim the word “lesbian”: they unsuccessfully demanded that Greek courts ban its use to describe gay women. But attitudes have since softened considerably, as lesbian tourists have filled hotels, bars and restaurants in Eresos. As Ms Savva puts it, “People here have learnt the value of the pink dollar.”... Lesbos is not the only Greek island to attract gay tourists. Nearby Mykonos has developed a reputation as a frenetic party hotspot for gay men. But with acceptance of homosexuality growing across the rich world, some wonder if places like these will appeal to future generations of gay travellers. Lillian Jensen, the Norwegian owner of a lesbian bar in Eresos, says many younger lesbians “want to go to more mainstream places”. But for now, she remains optimistic about Eresos’s prospects. “There’s nowhere else in Europe quite like it,” she says."
From 2018

Russian Mentality / Working Under Pressure / Slave Leia

Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou: "Russian police proudly film themselves cutting off a suspect’s ear and forcing him to eat it. I hate terrorists but this is just savagery. Medieval barbarism. Our civilisations are very distinct."

𝔻𝕒𝕧𝕚𝕕 𝕄𝕔𝕁𝕠𝕪𝕟𝕥💪🏾 @DavidGabaocoe_: "In case you think you're working under pressure *Kim Jong Un watching stressed guy working on computer*"

Slave Leia: "Alright guys! Give me my clothes... You rescued me THREE DAYS AGO!!"

Links - 4th May 2024 (1 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023: College Campuses)

Iranian professor makes chilling prediction about American college students after pro-Palestine rioting: 'These are our people' - "An Iranian academic claims pro-Palestine protesters that have taken over American universities would support Iran in a war with the US. Tehran University Professor Foad Izadi who was educated in America, declared 'these are our people' in an interview with Iranian state TV station IRIB Ofogh on April 26. He said Iran's brutal Islamic dictatorship, which he he claimed to be part of, was cheering on the protests from coast to coast in the US... Izadi also claimed in the interview, translated and posted online by the Middle East Research Institute, that Iran had Hezbollah-like militant cells hiding in the US... Izadi claimed Iran it could do more damage to the US with an armed militant group than it did in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has caused chaos for decades. 'Personally, I think that the potential to repeat in the US what Iran did in Lebanon is much higher,' he said. 'Our Hezbollah-style groups in America are much larger than what we have in Lebanon. 'American is the Great Satan and our main enemy, but we have hope in these areas.'"

NYPD ripped down Palestinian flag at City College and hoisted Old Glory - as cops arrest pro-Palestinian protesters who smashed their way into Columbia University building - "New York City cops ripped down a Palestine flag that had been hoisted above City College and replaced it with the American flag, after officers arrested nearly 300 people in a night of chaos on campuses throughout the city... 173 people were arrested from City College, in Harlem, while 119 were arrested at Columbia on charges of trespassing, criminal mischief and burglary. Hundreds of officers stormed Columbia, with officers going through an upstairs window of Hamilton Hall, after students barricaded themselves inside. Protestors, many of whom covered their faces with masks or keffiyehs, were then marched out unmasked and loaded onto three awaiting NYPD buses. Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday morning, Mayor Eric Adams berated the schools for allowing the flying of the flag... Adams said that one person identified by authorities was 'married to someone that was arrested for terrorism' but would not elaborate further when questioned. During a press conference, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban showed off one of the chains used to secure Hamilton Hall, saying it explained why it was necessary for police to storm the building. In a statement released on Wednesday afternoon directed at the University community, President Shafik praised the NYPD. Shafik said: 'Early Tuesday morning, tensions on our campus rose to new heights when a small group of protestors broke into Hamilton Hall, barricaded themselves inside, and occupied it throughout the day... As the buses left the scene crowds that had gathered to watch cheered as the protestors were finally led away from the university. The NYPD said that those who occupied Hamilton Hall would be charged with third-degree burglary, criminal mischief and trespassing. Those who had been camped out on the lawn at the university meanwhile would face trespassing and disorderly conduct charges... Pictures and video taken of the aftermath show the hall's trashed interior strewn with activists' belongings. Pictures show how chairs and desks had been turned upside down to become makeshift barriers inside Hamilton Hall. The cost of damage to the building is likely to total thousands of dollars. The occupation followed weeks of unrest at Columbia, which began with the establishment of the encampment on April 17."
We are still told that left wingers don't hate their countries
Given how radical many of the students are, blaming this all on "outside agitators" is just a way to save face
More "censorship" of "pro-Palestinian" "speech"!

Who's really behind the campus protests? Expensive tents, giant banners and adult agitators who have nothing to do with the schools where they're causing anarchy make expert think the uproar in America is a 'professional job' - "Organized encampments have appeared across the country's most respected universities after first showing up at Columbia in New York City. Violent clashes between protesters and police have followed at various schools including UCLA and the University of Texas at Austin. Many have pointed fingers at a company called Crowds on Demand, which provides paid protesters as a service, accusing it of hiring left-wing agitators to manufacture the movement... CEO Adam Swart denied that his company has any involvement with the protests, and has actually denied requests from both sides... While his company is not taking the jobs, Swart believes someone is, because as an expert on this type of operation, he recognizes the telltale signs pointing to big money behind a cause, like similar tents and expensive banners seen at Columbia University over the last week. 'I do, to be clear, think there is money behind the pro-Palestine protests - 100 percent. I'm just saying we're staying out of it,' he said. Swart said it's possible for tax-exempt advocacy organizations to not disclose their donors, and thus anyone could be funding their causes, opening the door to enemy foreign powers like China or Russia to sow discord in the US... The People's Forum, a tax-exempt advocacy group who often hosts propaganda events for the regimes of countries like Venezuela and Cuba, has been accused of being behind the Columbia protests. The Washington Free Beacon reports the group, which has received $12million from Goldman Sachs, may have provided materials for the so-called occupation of Hamilton Hall. Over 100 masked activists met at the group's Manhattan headquarters, a base for all kinds of leftist activism, to plan their moves on Monday, participating in breakout sessions that taught 'resistance' methods. There, People’s Forum executive director Manolo De Los Santos told the group to 'give Joe Biden a hot summer' and 'make it untenable for the politics of usual to take place in this country.' He then claimed 'Zionist' Columbia administrators 'want to be more like their masters in Israel.' Daniel DiMartino, a PhD student at Columbia and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told DailyMail.com The People's Forum is a group that aims to lobby for enemies of the US. 'The People's Forum is one of several foreign-funded organizations whose goal is to create havoc in America and defend tyrannical regimes like China's, Russia's, Cuba's and Venezuela's,' the Venezuela native said. 'I saw it firsthand when they hosted employees and officials from the Venezuelan socialist regime in 2022 in New York City. They don't care about human rights, not of Palestinians or Jews and certainly not of Venezuelans.' The New York Times reported last year that the Chinese Community Party was indirectly funding the People's Forum. Meanwhile New York mayor Eric Adams has warned that outside agitators have been instructing students as they took over Hamilton hall in Columbia... A video shown by the mayor shows Lisa Fithian, an infamous agitator at US protests for over half a century, showing protesters how to occupy a building. Adams called Fithian 'the nation's best-known protest consultant', noting she gets paid as much as $300 a day to run demonstrations and teach how to take over streets during protests. CNN has reported that at least half of demonstrators at Columbia are not affiliated with the university... ‘They were throwing water on the police, hurling insults, throwing water bottles, they were definitely provoking the cops to a confrontation,' he said... Most of the protests across the US campuses have been partly organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a campus group with more than 250 chapters across the country. SJP was founded by UC Berkeley lecturer Hatem Bazian, who has repeatedly justified terror attacks against Israel and Intifada (uprising) in the US. Just days after the October 7 attacks, Bazian shared a video titled: 'Here's why Hamas says its attack on Israel wasn't unprovoked.' The Detroit Free Press once quoted him as saying: 'The Day of Judgment will not happen until the trees and stones will say, "Oh Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him."' Bazian also once apologized after sharing a cartoon of a stereotypical Orthodox Jewish man celebrating the murder and rape of Palestinians and another of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un wearing a kippah and demanding money from the U.S. The group has received millions from several charities with alleged links to Hamas, per a report by the think tank Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). The ISGAP report asserts that SJP has become an effective and well-funded network for organizing protests around the country, but that its failure to register as a charity or formal organization left its funding sources and operations murky and unregulated. Hints of financial backing could be seen at the Columbia 'Gaza Solidarity Encampment', including students erecting several identical high-end tents costing hundreds of dollars each, and handing out free Dunkin' Donuts coffee, $12.50 sandwiches from Pret-a-Manger and $10 rotisserie chickens to participants. The nonprofits funding SJP include the Westchester People's Action Coalition (WESPAC), Tides, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), its parent organization Americans for Justice in Palestine (AJP), and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). The ISGAP report said SJP had the closest financial links with WESPAC, which acts as a 'financial sponsor' for the organization, routing tax-free donations through its accounts to SJP chapters. The report said SJP also gets extensive organizational aid from American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a nonprofit under investigation by the Virginia attorney general and accused of being a reincarnation of a charity found liable for funding Hamas."
Money supporting protests is only bad when it hurts the left wing agenda
Time for the left wingers to complain about police agents provocateurs and false flags, even though they openly celebrate violence and revolution

Student protesters at McGill encampment determined to stay after judge rejects injunction - "McGill and the students requesting the injunction raised concerns about behaviour they described as antisemitic. On Tuesday, the university shared a video with CBC News that shows protesters chanting "all the Zionists are racist, all the Zionists are the terrorists," as well as "go back to Europe.""
Weird. I thought it was racist to tell immigrants to go back home. Much less people who were born in a place, or indigenous people. But this is left wing logic, after all

William Watson: So much for universities' 'quiet and still air of delightful studies' - "Chiselled into the entryway to McLennan Library at McGill University, not far from where pro-Palestinian demonstrators have literally set up camp — 75 tents worth by Tuesday — is an inscription from Milton: In the quiet and still air of delightful studies. (“Milton who?” the 21st-century student asks. John Milton, DWEM, that is: dead white European male. Check him out in the Wikipedia entry on freedom of speech, which he kind of invented.) With bullhorns and chants blaring, the air isn’t as still or quiet as it used to be. The full quote is: “Beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies.” Truth, usually written “truth,” is a maligned concept in the universities these days. Truth is no longer bright but murky and relative. We all supposedly have our own truth, though in giving voice to it we often forget this multiplicity and insist our opponents accept our version — and be secularly damned if they don’t. Above another McGill doorway, the law faculty’s, the inscription is: “Audi alteram partem,” Latin for “Hear the other side,” which is what courts do and which is a key part of working toward truth. Of course, McGill’s law professors have now unionized so presumably they will be replacing that with “Workers of the world unite!” or “Free the academic wage slaves!” or some such. In any case, taking care to hear the other side is not something many of us do these days... For many years now universities have abandoned pure reflection and Milton’s delightful studies to presume to tell society how it should be behaving — outside advice many segments of society quite reasonably resent. Universities’ record at self-government is nowhere near as sterling as all the brainpower involved should have produced. “University disciplinary procedures” is almost an oxymoron. In my years teaching, profs who reported students for plagiarism or other forms of cheating were never told how cases were resolved — privacy concerns, you understand — though faculties produced summary reports every year end. Punishment always seemed insubstantial to me. The one exception was where alleged sexual offences were concerned and hearings typically devolved not to “He said, she said” but to “She said, he presumably lied in response.” The term “sexual assault” is used, unhelpfully, to cover a wide range of offences. Those that aren’t merely “micro-aggressions” and innocuous should be and are crimes. Universities should not be prosecuting crimes. That’s what the police and courts are for. They have strict rules they actually follow about hearing the other side... Protesters/campers who say they won’t leave until the university does this or that — in this case divest from “complicity” in “genocide” — are engaged in extortion, not expression... Henry David Thoreau actually spent a night in jail before writing Civil Disobedience. Martin Luther King wrote one of his most famous messages from inside a real Birmingham jail. People who practice their civil disobedience only if assured there will be no sanctions against them aren’t really to be taken seriously."

Biden finally condemns pro-Palestinian agitators 'destroying' college campuses but won't send in the National Guard: 'There's the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos' - "Officers ripped apart an umbrella one activist tried to use as a shield while the crowd chanted 'peaceful protest.' 'Leave the campus, this is a f*****g school. This is a f*****g school, what are you doing, this is a school, we f*****g learn. I got to learn about public health,' one protester shouted... A top Jewish group on Columbia's campus reported that Jewish students were being told to 'go back to Poland' and 'stop killing children' by pro-Palestinian demonstrators."
Apparently "learning" involves illegally occupation and anti-Semitism
"Anti-Zionism" means all Jews are collectively responsible for what Israel supposedly does. But if you hold Muslims collectively responsible for Islamist terrorism, that is Islamophobia, of course

Australian National University protesters declare ‘unconditional support’ for Hamas - "Student organisers of an anti-Israel protest camp at the Australian National University have declared that Hamas “deserve our unconditional support” while saying they “do not condemn” the October 7 terror attacks... Two of the organisers, Beatrice Tucker and Luke Harrison, spoke to ABC Radio Canberra on Tuesday when Drive host Ross Solly repeatedly pressed them to condemn Hamas, which is formally listed as a terrorist organisation by the Australian government... “I will not condemn what Hamas did,” Ms Tucker said. “We must be unconditional but we must be critical also.”... Solly asked whether the organisers had any concerns about “how you might be making Jewish students feel on campus”.  Mr Harrison replied that he was a Jewish student and “the organisation of this encampment has been so focused on making it a safe space for everyone, including Jewish students”... In a statement on Wednesday, Mr Harrison said “in the moment” he “did not give sufficient thought to the question the journalist had raised”.  “On further reflection I withdraw my statement and wish to say the following,” he said.  “I think it’s important I clarify my comments of yesterday. The issues are complex and difficult and I want to make clear that I condemn what happened on October 7 and endorse the SRC statement from March 2024.”"
We'll still be told that no one supports Hamas, and that no one supports terrorism
As usual, "critical" means "critical theory"
Another anti-Israel Jew

Anti-Semitic tensions at ANU: Jewish Students allege abuse - "One pro-Israel protester told The Canberra Times that she heard people saying "f--k the Jews"...  "To make matters worse, this encampment exists directly in front of a student residence, Fenner Hall, making it impossible for students living there to escape the protests - it is not only where they study, but their home."  Members of the Jewish students' society said they felt betrayed by the ANU students' union "who endorse the encampment, despite the anti-Semitic messages being sent from many of the protesters"... the Jewish students said that at least one pro-Palestine protester confronted them and made out-and-out virulently anti-Semitic remarks."
ANU investigating reports of Nazi salute, death threats against Jewish students on campus as pro-Palestine encampment continues
Weird. I thought this never happens

Sabiha Khan on X - "Moments ago Zionists through a backpack full of mice into the #UCLA encampment. Mice appear to have been injected with something. School admin is not protecting students. @SanaSaeed @PplsCityCouncil @AJEnglish @CAIRNational @abierkhatib @SuppressedNws @BTnewsroom @ACatWithNews"
mirax on X - "Stupid mfing hamasniks were all for rats being released into fastfood restaurants as "protests" a hot second ago. Now squealing about biological warfare."
UK Man Arrested For Releasing Live Rats In McDonald's In Pro-Palestine Protest - "A man has been arrested in the United Kingdom for allegedly releasing live mice into a number of McDonald's restaurants in Birmingham. According to The Guardian, the 32-year-old was detained over the incidents in what appear to be protests related to the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Police said that they are still investigating the three separate incidents in the region where live rats were thrown into the fast food venues, and were also looking for a second man, 30-year-old Billal Hussain.   A video going viral on social media showed a man with what appears to be a Palestinian flag draped around his head. In the clip, he is seen carrying the rodents from the boot of his car into the McDonald's and tipping them on the floor, in front of customers."

FIRE president Greg Lukianoff on how to determine when protest goes too far - "at Yale University, police officers arrested dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters who set up an encampment on school grounds, one of a growing number of organized demonstrations on college campuses across America. While the protests are ostensibly aimed at supporting Palestinian civilians amidst the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, there have been numerous reported instances of protesters engaging in the intimidation and harassment of Jewish students and faculty...
Since October 7th we’ve definitely seen a combination of clearly protected speech by pro-Palestinian students—speech that we’ve proudly defended because we are a nonpartisan organization; we will always defend people regardless of the content of their speech—but we’ve also seen an awful lot of assault, we’ve seen a lot of shout-downs, we’ve seen a lot of vandalism, and we’ve seen a lot of unprotected speech. It’s been accelerating for several months now.  Probably one of the worst places for this phenomenon has been Columbia University in New York City. What happened over the weekend, with the crackdown on the encampments that they had there, was interesting from a free speech standpoint, partially because you don’t have a First Amendment or free speech right to camp out on campus grounds. You have a protest right. But generally, every school in the country has rules that basically say, “No, you can’t camp here. You can’t turn this into your own encampment.” They just haven’t been enforcing them. So Columbia, to a degree, is paying the price for not actually fairly enforcing their rules, going far back.   Now, do I think that in the course of this, there are students engaged in protected speech who are getting in trouble? I have very little doubt that there are. And we want to know about those cases. But we’ve also seen, particularly at Columbia, examples of assault. Certainly examples of students being blocked and surrounded. Also, students engaging in things that, by pretty much any definition, would count as discriminatory harassment, which is a severe, persistent, and pervasive patterns of behaviour that a reasonable person would understand is discriminatory. And that’s something that we’ve seen, unfortunately, all over the country.  Now at Yale, we even know the student who was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag, and she had to go to the hospital for it. That obviously isn’t protected. I think that there was a chance for a lot of these schools to prevent a lot of this from escalating by simply, fairly, and evenly enforcing their rules from the very beginning. But in a lot of cases, they simply didn’t. One thing that readers really need to understand is that if you care about free speech on campus, you need to know that last year was the biggest year for deplatforming in recorded history, that we know of, on American college campuses. Deplatforming includes getting speakers disinvited and shout-downs. Yet this year, 2024, is going to blow 2023 out of the water, even just from shout-downs. And that has overwhelmingly come from pro-Palestinian students. Some of them have engaged in violence, including at Berkeley where they chased off an IDF speaker, for example, several weeks ago.   I sometimes see people arguing as if violence is just an extreme form of free speech. I always have to correct them like, “No, violence is the antithesis of what freedom of speech is for.”...  Students engaging in violence against their fellow students should be expelled. They deserve due process, but they should also be prosecuted because this is this has been getting out of hand for months now... I don’t think you have to really draw a line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. What you have to ask yourself is, is it discriminatory harassment? Is it a threat? Regardless of what line that falls under. So if you’re surrounding students and threatening them, for example, then it doesn’t matter if you’re calling out Israel or calling out Jews, it’s not protected. And nor should it be.  I think that’s one of the things that American law really gets right. It’s something that we call “the bedrock principle” in the United States, which is you can’t ban speech simply because it’s offensive. But you can ban patterns of behaviour that are discriminatory, for example, or you can ban speech that actually would place a reasonable person in fear of bodily harm or death. So we try to get out of evaluating the offensiveness of the expression and into a reasonable understanding of the behaviour. This is a way to not have to make judgments on whether or not we think one kind of speech is more offensive than the other, which of course, is always a culturally laden evaluation to make. That is difficult in a genuinely multicultural society... In terms of what state schools can do, actually, the government is required to be involved to protect freedom of speech on campus because the First Amendment applies to students’ free speech as well as professors’ free speech. I think they’ve been kind of falling down on the job on this. I think that universities that had speech codes that were unconstitutional, that’s something that the government never should have tolerated in the first place. I think when there are violent shout-downs, that’s something that the government should not be tolerating. I think that the government has really dropped the ball, in a lot of cases, on defending free speech on campus for decades now, and actually, in many cases, have passed regulations that made the issue worse... the very first thing we recommend in the section on higher education is to have a lot fewer jobs in the United States that require a bachelor’s degree. We’ve created an incredibly expensive system. I mean, I know someone who is just realizing that it is probably going to cost their kid $95,000 a year to go to one of these schools. This has been putting Americans in huge debt. We need to really rethink how we do a lot of these things"
Of course, the left wing "answer" to college costs is for the taxpayer to pay, because education supposedly benefits society (having lots of radical terrorism supporters around apparently helps society)

The Unreality of Columbia’s ‘Liberated Zone’ - The Atlantic - "word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and fighting settler colonialism and genocide. In this liberated zone, normally known as South Lawn West on the Columbia University quad, unsympathetic outsiders are treated as a danger.  “Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” a protest leader calls out. His head is wrapped in a white-and-black keffiyeh. “We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.” Privacy struck me as a peculiar goal for an outdoor protest at a prominent university. But it’s been a strange seven-month journey from Hamas’s horrific slaughter of Israelis—the original breach of a cease-fire—to the liberated zone on the Columbia campus and similar standing protests at other elite universities. What I witnessed seemed less likely to persuade than to give collective voice to righteous anger. A genuine sympathy for the suffering of Gazans mixed with a fervor and a politics that could border on the oppressive. Dozens stand and echo the leader’s commands in unison, word for word. “So that we can push them out of the camp, one step forward! Another step forward!” The protesters lock arms and step toward the interlopers, who as it happens are three fellow Columbia students, who are Jewish and pro-Israel.  Jessica Schwalb, a Columbia junior, is one of those labeled an intruder. In truth, she does not much fear violence—“They’re Columbia students, too nerdy and too worried about their futures to hurt us,” she tells me—as she is taken aback by the sight of fellow students chanting like automatons... As the war has raged on and the death toll has grown, protest rallies on American campuses have morphed into a campaign of ever grander and more elaborate ambitions: From “Cease-fire now” to the categorical claim that Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes to demands that Columbia divest from Israeli companies and any American company selling arms to the Jewish state. Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.” Of late, at least one rabbi has suggested that Jewish students depart the campus for their own safety. Columbia President Minouche Shafik acknowledged in a statement earlier today that at her university there “have been too many examples of intimidating and harassing behavior.” To avoid trouble, she advised classes to go virtual today, and said, “Our preference is that students who do not live on campus will not come to campus.” Tensions have in fact kept ratcheting up. Last week, Shafik called in the New York City police force to clear an earlier iteration of the tent city and to arrest students for trespassing. The university suspended more than 100 of these protesters, accusing them, according to the Columbia Spectator, of “disruptive behavior, violation of law, violation of University policy, failure to comply, vandalism or damage to property, and unauthorized access or egress.” Even some Jewish students and faculty unsympathetic to the protesters say the president’s move was an accelerant to the crisis, producing misdemeanor martyrs to the pro-Palestinian cause. A large group of faculty members walked out this afternoon to express their opposition to the arrests and suspensions. As for the encampment itself, it has an intifada-meets-Woodstock quality at times. Dance clubs offer interpretive performances; there are drummers and other musicians, and obscure poets reading obscure poems. Some tents break out by identity groups: “Lesbians Against Genocide,” “Hindus for Intifada.” Banners demand the release of all Palestinian prisoners. Small Palestinian flags, embroidered with the names of Palestinian leaders killed in Gaza, are planted in the grass. During my nine-hour visit, talking with student protesters proved tricky. Upon entering the zone, I was instructed to listen as a gatekeeper read community guidelines that included not talking with people not authorized to be inside—a category that seemed to include anyone of differing opinions... As I toured the liberated zone, I found most protesters distinctly nonliberated when it came to talking with a reporter... “We are not anti-Jewish, not at all,” Saliba said... an email went out from a lesbian organization, LionLez, stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.”... after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course. This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“fuck you!”... When he describes the encampment, it sounds like Shangri-la. “It’s 100 percent love for human beings and very beautiful; I came here for my mental health,” he said.  He claims no hatred for Israel, although he suggested that the “genocidal goliath” will of course have to disappear or merge into an Arab-majority state. He said he does not endorse violence, even as he likened the October 7 attacks to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising during World War II... He was labeled an anti-Semite and remains deeply pained by that. He advised me to look up what he said and judge for myself. So I did, right on the spot.  Shortly after October 7, he posted this on X: “Zionists are straight Babylon swine. Zionism is beyond a mental illness; it’s a genocidal disease.”  A bit harsh, maybe? I asked him. He shook his head."
Good luck if you say that suspending white supremacist students is a mistake, or worse, protest it
Naturally, the terrorism supporters protest the killing of terrorists
Of course, if you call Islamist terrorists "swine", the left will be on you for "Islamophobia"

Meme - Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze: "Trump - "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides."
NY Times yesterday -"
"At Columbia, the Protests Continued, With Dancing and Pizza. Will more stringent tactics subdue protests? Or fuel them?"

Meme - Joe Gabriel Simonson @SaysSimonson: "The dynamic the left enjoys is "we will break the law, make you miserable, and laugh about it because we know that Democrats won't ever arrest us. But if you dare touch us, we're going to scream bloody murder.""
Aaron Sibarium @aaronsibarium: "Their strategy is to gather in such large numbers and with such coordination that dispersing them requires force-then to claim the mantel of victimhood when force is inevitably used."
Jessica Schwalb on X - "Update: Columbia’s pro-Palestine protestors will break up into platoons to defend the encampment in the event of arrests. “WILL YOU BE READY TO TURN UP FOR YOUR COMRADES?”"

Thread by @feelsdesperate on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "University leadership is disgraceful and cowardly.  For years they cheered on the derangements because they saw an opportunity to protect and legitimize themselves ideologically.  In doing so, they abrogated commitments to core institutional missions and values. Now it’s blowing up in their faces because they’ve staked their credibility on being Good People yet have no ‘answer’ for Gaza.  If they had more character and were better people they would have never agreed to the demand that disciplinary knowledge production and pedagogy be subservient to activist manias and ideological policing in the first place.  But it’s too late. They’ve degraded their institutions and the time they thought they bought themselves with their cynical dealmaking has run out."

Meme - Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze: "Hey, they built a wall."
Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.today @JordanSchachtel: "It really is one massive LARP. Filthy communists."
"Welcome to the Liberated Zone! Make sure to talk to one of us before entering :)"

Meme - Daniel Di Martino 🇺🇸🇻🇪 @DanielDiMartino: "What's the immigration process at the liberated zone? Are there ideological tests? Or does it have open borders?"
Peter Hague PhD @peterrhague: "Left anarchism reinvents borders and police almost instantly. Right anarchism tends to likewise discover taxation from first principles."

REVEALED: George Soros is PAYING left-wing activists to head up camp outs at colleges across America - as huge wads of cash they're getting are shared - "Multiple leaders of the anti-Israel protests at college campuses across the nation have been revealed to be paid fellows of George Soros-connected groups.  Three of the major figures in the pro-Palestine encampments in universities are fellows at the Soros-funded US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, the New York Post reports.  USCPR 'community-based' fellows are paid up to $7,800 for their labor, while 'campus-based' fellows are given between $2,880 and $3,660 for spending eight hours a week organizing 'campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.' The organization instructs its fellows to 'rise up' and spark 'revolution,' while specifically telling them to reject 'reform.'... Tensions continue to escalate at the Columbia, where hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters are demanding that the institution divest from companies with ties to Israel.  So far, more than 100 demonstrators have been arrested at the 'Gaza Solidarity Encampment', which is comprised of a coalition of 116 groups under the umbrella organization Columbia University Apartheid Divest.  Several of the groups in the coalition have received backing from left wing donors, including one group currently under investigation for allegedly fundraising for terrorist organizations.  One of the key players in the coalition is Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which the Gazette reports came out in support of the October 7 attack which killed 1,200 Israelis. SJP receives funding from American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), according to the Anti Defamation League, which describes AMP as holding 'extreme anti-Israel views'.  Last year, Virginia's Attorney General Jason Miyares announced his office was investigating AMP over allegations they may have been fundraising for terrorist organizations.  SJP is also an offshoot of the Westchester People's Action Coalition which supports Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, the Green New Deal, and other left-wing initiatives... Another central player in the encampment is Jewish Voice for Peace, which has received millions from various donors including George Soros's Open Society Network.  Since  2016 the group has netted at least $650,000 from Soros-backed organizations.  Other donors have included the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, whose director, Nicholas Burns, resigned in 2017 over its support for JVP... Columbia canceled in-person classes, dozens of protesters were arrested at New York University and Yale, and the gates to Harvard Yard were closed to the public Monday as some of the most prestigious U.S. universities sought to defuse campus tensions over Israel's war with Hamas... The coalition began the sit in following Columbia president Minouche Shafik's testimony before Congress about anti-Semitism on campus.   The stunt entered its seventh day today and has already seen billionaire donors including Robert Kraft pull their funding and earned condemnation from the White House."
Damn Jews! All working in unison to advance Israel's interests!
Of course, the right wing anti-Semites simultaneously hate on Soros for pushing the left wing agenda
News of paid protesters is only a problem when it hurts the left wing agenda

Meme - The Daily Beast @thedailybeast: "When Isra Hirsi, the daughter of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, joined several of her classmates in a pro-Palestinian campus protest known as the Gaza encampment, she had no idea she would end up suspended, homeless, and left without food within a matter of days."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Important context: Isra Hisri may not have expected repercussions when initially joining the protest, but was given advance warning of pending suspension, arrest, and eviction from campus housing. She had with plenty of time to avoid these consequences and chose to accept them."

MIA on X - "If you ignored the anti-White narrative on college campuses for years or actively wrote it into the curriculum, why should I care what you have to say about antisemitism on college campuses now?  If you let BLM rioters burn working class Americans’ businesses to the ground, why should I care about the anti-Israel protesters marching through those same streets tonight?  Our ruling class didn’t expect these college kids to turn against them like this, they thought their anger would be limited to local cops and White people. Now that it’s reached the top, they want sympathy from the very White people that they’ve been vilifying for years.  Nope, you get none from me. I could care less that these protesters oppose Israel’s actions. Maybe I don’t agree with their tactics, but I also don’t agree with my tax dollars funding Israel’s wars. I’m over it."

Kathryn Paisner on X - "I wonder how campus officials & media would respond to pro-life students engaging in a 6-month activism campaign, using the same tactics that pro-Palestinian students have used, that started with a celebration of a terrorist attack on a Planned Parenthood."