Balderdash

HDB vs NKF

2013-05-10T14:31:00.000+08:00

As we know, HDB Singapore (seems the acronym is also the stock ticket for HDFC Bank Limited) changed its pricing model from a cost-plus model (they based a flat's selling price on how much it cost to build it) to a market-minus model, which explains why "the HDB resale price... more than quadrupled in five years from 1990 to 1996" (Factors Affecting Housing Prices in Singapore, Tan & Liu 1998).

In this sense, HDB's subsidy is just like that of the old NKF's - they "subsidise" you in the sense of selling you the product for less than you would get in the open market, but they still make money.

Given this, I was quite surprised to read Mah's claim in 2010 that some BTOs,

can be below cost. For example, for Punggol Spectra and Fernvale Crest - two recent Build-To-Order (BTO) projects - the average development cost per flat was $220,000 to $240,000, while the average selling price was $160,000 to $200,000, or $40,000 to $60,000 below cost

Of course, this conundrum can be resolved by remembering that HDB "purchases" land from the SLA (so it's just an internal transfer price). In other words, it's taking from the left pocket to put in the right pocket.

Anyhow, politically this is convenient too, for the stock of existing home owners (who are happy when flat prices rise since they feel richer) is larger than the stock of prospective home owners (who are unhappy when flat prices rise, since they will have to pay more for their first property). Of course, once the latter purchase their first property, they enter the former group and want prices to go on rising (besides the illusion of wealth, they also won't be underwater on their mortgages).

The old policy is supposedly changing, but there is still talk of HDB paying "market rate for its land and construction costs", and coupled with the usual naive market fundamentalism (e.g. public transport must be privatised, because private is always better) I don't think there will be too much of a change.

Three course meals and sandwiches

2013-05-09T23:48:00.002+08:00

"Sex can be just gorgeous—and sometimes it is the most beautiful thing that can happen between a man and a woman. But don't you also think that it can be just practical? Like when you're hungry and don't want a three-course meal with wine, music, and ambience; you just want a sandwich. You don't love the sandwich. You don't hate the sandwich. You just want to eat the sandwich and feel satisfied."

- Pepper Schwartz

Links - 8th May 2013

2013-05-08T00:23:00.002+08:00

Evidence to Suggest that Copulatory Vocalizations in Women Are Not a Reflexive Consequence of Orgasm - "With regard to the reasons females gave for making copulatory vocalization, 66% reported using these to speed up their partner’s ejaculation. This was done to relieve discomfort/pain, boredom, and fatigue in equal proportion, as well as because of time limitations. Importantly, 92% of participants felt very strongly that these vocalizations boosted their partner’s self-esteem and 87% reported using them for this purpose. To further emphasize the secondary nature of a female’s orgasmin their motivation towards engaging in sexual intercourse, 68% of females responded positively (i.e., [5 cm approximate mid point on the 10 cm visual analogue scale used) to the question asking whether they would stay with an otherwise satisfactory partner, even if they never reached orgasm with them... all women in this study made copulatory vocalizations and that at least some of these were under conscious control... the intensity of vocalizations increased prior to the male orgasm and coincident with this. Once male orgasm had been achieved, however, lower levels of female vocalization were reported. Together, these data clearly illustrate that human female orgasm and copulatory vocalizations are dissociated during sexual intercourse... These are reflexive, honest or dishonest signals of their state of arousal. To reinforce the point concerning conscious control, nearly 80% of females reported making copulatory vocalizations even when they knew they were not going to orgasm themselves. As such, the expression of these vocalizations can and probably is used to manipulate the behavior of the partner and in particular to influence the timing of his orgasm... These data were remarkably consistent with findings reported in non-human primates, where, for example, in Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) the likelihood of male ejaculation is related to the intensity and speed of female vocalizations during copulation (Todt, Hammerschmidt, Ansorge,& Fischer, 1995; Todt&Pohl, 1984) and this appears to be independent of the male’s copulatory effort"
"Their recent observations of a clan of horny Barbary macaques revealed that when the females made noise during sex, the males ejaculated 59 percent of the time, as opposed to less than 2 percent of the time when the females kept quiet. The scientists also noticed that the females made more noise when they (the macaques, not the scientists) were most fertile, and the power and speed of the male macaque's thrusting increased accordingly"

Why There Will Never Be Viagra for Women - "Psychologist Richard Lippa teamed up with the BBC to survey over 200,000 people of all ages from all over the world concerning the strength of their sex drive and how it affects their desires. He found a similar inversion of male and female sexuality: for men, both gay and straight, higher sex drive increased the specificity of their sexual desire. Straight guys with higher sex drives tended to be more focused on women, while higher octane gay guys were more intent on men. But with women—at least nominally straight women— Lippa found the opposite effect: the higher her sex drive, the more likely a woman was to report being attracted to both men and women. Self-identified lesbians showed the same pattern as men: a higher sex drive meant more women-only focus. Perhaps this explains why nearly twice as many women as men consider themselves bisexual, while only half as many consider themselves to be exclusively gay... Sexologist Lisa Diamond spent over a decade studying the ebb and flow of female desire, finding that many women experience sexual attraction to specific people, rather than to a particular gender. She writes, “The hypothesis that female sexuality is fundamentally fluid provides the most robust, comprehensive, and scientifically supported explanation for the research data.”"

Women in Bed: What's All the Noise About? (Part II) - "British primatologist Stuart Semple found that, “In a wide variety of species, females vocalize just before, during or immediately after they mate. These vocalizations,” Semple says, “are particularly common among the primates and evidence is now accumulating that by calling, a female incites males in her group….” Precisely. There’s a good reason the sound of a woman enjoying a sexual encounter entices a heterosexual man. Her “copulation call” is a potential invitation to come hither, thus provoking sperm competition. Semple recorded more than 550 copulation calls from seven different female baboons and analyzed their acoustic structure. He found that these complex vocalizations contained information related both to the female’s reproductive state (the vocalizations were more complex when females were closer to ovulation) and to the status of the male “inspiring” any given vocalization (calls were longer and contained more distinct sonic units during matings with higher-ranked males). Thus, in these baboons at least, listening males could presumably gain information as to their likelihood of impregnating a calling female, as well as some sense of the rank of the male they’d find with her if they approached. Primatologist Meredith Small agrees that the copulation calls of female primates are easily identifiable: “Even the uninitiated can identify female nonhuman primate orgasm, or sexual pleasure," she says. "Females,” Small tells us, “make noises not heard in any other context but mating”... William J. Hamilton and Patricia C. Arrowood analyzed the copulatory vocalizations of various primates, including three human couples going at it. They noticed that “female sounds gradually intensified as orgasm approached and at orgasm assumed a rapid, regular (equal note lengths and inter-note intervals) rhythm absent in the males’ calls at orgasm.” Still, the authors can’t help sounding a tad let down when they note, “Neither sex [of human] … showed the complexity of note structure characteristic of baboon copulatory vocalizations.” But that’s probably a good thing, because elsewhere in their article we learn that female baboons’ copulation calls are clearly audible to even human ears from three hundred meters away."

Weight gain in smokers after quitting cigarettes: meta-analysis - "Smoking cessation is associated with a mean increase of 4-5 kg in body weight after 12 months of abstinence, and most weight gain occurs within three months of quitting. Variation in weight change is large, with about 16% of quitters losing weight and 13% gaining more than 10 kg."

Momentous Corp.’s Company’s ban on smokers leaves people asking ‘Who’s next?’ - "if smoking were to be a protected status, it would have to be on the grounds of disability. Both the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability. “Nicotine addiction might be treated as a disability under human rights legislation, as is alcohol or drug addiction. If that is the case, then a rule banning smoking during leisure time would probably amount to unlawful disability discrimination, as would asking questions during recruitment about whether the employee smokes,” said David Doorey, professor of employment and labour law at York University... Much of the debate over such policies centres around the question: Who’s next? The obese? People who like to hanglide?... Michael Lynk, law professor at the University of Western Ontario, said companies who ban smokers argue they tend to have more illnesses, and be away from work more often. The same thing, he said, can be true for someone who has cancer, or heart disease... “We wouldn’t say [that] an employer could say ‘We don’t want to hire someone with one leg’ unless that’s a bona fide occupational requirement, like you’re a place-kicker for the Argonauts”... The one organization Mr. Lynk believes has a good argument on those grounds is the Canadian Cancer Society (which has a no-smoker policy), since so much of their work revolves around the advocacy of tobacco cessation."

Ship just got real in Leviathan: Warships trailer - "At some point, if you’ve seen enough indie game trailers, you might start to sour on how each game acts completely unaware that it’s just another physics-based puzzle platformer with a “retro” aesthetic. The developers behind Leviathan: Warships seem to be fully aware that strategy games are slow and difficult to convey as exciting in a short trailer. So, they thankfully played to that, and gave the world one of the best video game trailers we’ve seen in recent memory."

Secretly photographed? - Krystal Choo on moral courage for kids - "offenders repeatedly intrude upon the modesty of such girls, unfairly robbing them of their dignity... Girls need not be afraid to speak up and should not fear that others might accuse them of “asking for it” when they become such victims. This is because no one ever asks for violation and there is never a good reason to violate anyone. Knowing that society is always on your side and not the pervert’s side can also help girls overcome the fear and shock that such violation inflicts."
Excellent - taking photos of women in public is intruding upon their modesty and "violation" (note the similarity to rape rants). Now we can throw them in prison (as long as they're not STOMP contributors)!

Study: Belief in an angry God associated with variety of mental illnesses - "belief in a forgiving, loving God is associated with positive psychological traits, “almost protecting against psychopathology”"

Jason Collins Is No Hero; Mark Bingham Was - "You see, I'm old enough to know black people who weren't allowed to eat in the same places I did. And if they tried, they'd see the hurtful end of a water hose and German Shepard. I just can't get excited about Collins' news. Big deal. He had nothing on the line. His "coming out" benefits no one but himself. If a ton of endorsements were in jeopardy, or if his spot on a team were in doubt and he came out anyway ... well, then that would be impressive. Let's be honest: Collins is an uber-wealthy and talented super athlete in our celebrity-obsessed society. I doubt he has much to worry about outside of his bubble. So I'm sorry if I can't get worked up about this... Was I always rejecting gay heroes? Perhaps the problem is who the gay community chooses to hold up for praise: Barney Frank, Dan Savage, Rosie O'Donnell. These people aren't heroic, they are attractive meme-advancers. All three are quite mean human beings, I might add."

The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy - "As the first full-length study of conspiracy theories in the Middle East, The Hidden Hand reveals how such theories play a powerful role in the political life of the region. Placing conspiracy theories in their historical context, Daniel Pipes shows how the idea of the conspiracy has come to suffuse life in the Middle East, from the most private family conversations to the highest and most public levels of politics. Pipes then looks at conspiracies and their strength as a partial explanation for much of the region’s problems, including its record of political extremism, its culture of violence, and its lack of modernization"

Not for the first time: Oborne and Morrison wrong on Iran - "Some people can be accused of warmongering against Iran. Others can be accused of completely denying reality... The article goes on for some time afterward, and not a single mention of Iranian’s regional destabilization is mentioned. In fact, in the entirety of the piece, one would be hard pressed to find a reason to fear the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal by clerical fascists. Claims of ‘sheer ignorance’ regarding Iran’s aggression are deliciously funny when one can point to a bare-faced terrorist organization like Hezbollah... It is of course no secret that Hezbollah is sponsored to the sum of $200 million annually from Tehran and has received training from the Revolutionary Guards. Oh, and did anybody notice the Iranian-built rockets flying from Gaza in December? Not Oborne and Morrison it would appear. Instead the pair issue a compulsory dig at Israel"

So who owns oppression, really?

2013-05-07T15:28:00.001+08:00

So who owns oppression, really?

"One of the chapters in Bertrand Russell’s Unpopular Essays (1950) is The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed. In the essay, Russell criticises the tendency of those who marched with him in support of various social justice issues to not simply stand against oppression, but also to insist that the oppressed are somehow epistemically privileged. They were wiser, more experienced, perhaps even more objective than those who were not oppressed. An uncharitable reading (Russell’s) would be that it’s actually good for you to be oppressed...

The same mistake can manifest in the opposite sort of way. It manifests when we dismiss somebody else’s opinion because of their perceived privilege – because they haven’t been there, or experienced that (namely, the places and things you have, or those you presume to speak for have). Mostly, we make this mistake when we talk about racism and sexism...

Why trust the view from the oppressed perspective to be more reliable than the non-oppressed view? Perhaps oppression brings with it such epistemic distortion that you’re less able to understand even your own situation, never mind that of others...

A phrase such as “check your privilege”... is meant to simultaneously destabilise your interlocutors epistemic foundations, as well as to shame them. Either or both of these effects result in a rhetorical victory for you, while making it less likely that she will ever again dare to express the heresy in question.

In arguments which pivot on oppression via sexual identity, this trick is accomplished through using a word like “mansplaining” in place of “explaining”. If the man then accuses you of being blinded by your rage, you could then deploy the word “ableism”, which accuses him of thinking blindness to be something negative. If you’re really lucky, the man in question would be both white and wealthy, in which case his “neoliberal whiteliness” will hopefully shut him up for good...

There is nevertheless a vast difference between being blind to privilege of various forms on the one hand, and thinking that privilege makes you wrong (or rather, that absence of privilege makes you right) on the other. Yes, people have different viewpoints, and those viewpoints are always a factor of their class, race, gender and so forth. But if we think it offensive that negative traits are attributed to people because of these secondary characteristics (insert your preferred gender/race stereotype here), why is it not also wrong to attribute positive traits on the grounds of those characteristics?

You can’t be guaranteed to understand a situation better than someone else simply because you think you inhabit that situation. Yes, it is a factor, and it’s a factor which might even contribute to understanding, on average. But it might sometimes blind you to reality through confirmation bias, or through an overly emotive and maybe irrational interpretation. Meanwhile, someone speaking from a different position might have done sufficient homework, or be sufficiently sensitive, to have a better understanding than you do – even if she’s not a “representative” of the group in question...

It’s also a legitimate problem, and an evasion of your epistemic responsibilities, to refuse to question your own opinions simply because the questions are being raised by a rich, white, heterosexual man. To do so is to take a few external (and often arbitrary) signs as representing the totality of a person and the justification they have for their opinions. It’s a bold claim to make that “whiteness” or “maleness” overrides everything else about a person. In fact, in another world we might call these claims racist or sexist."

Where is she from?

2013-05-07T00:51:00.001+08:00

My friend sent me a video and said the girl was Singaporean. However, I am positive that she is not (despite claiming that she's from Singapore) because of her accent in English. The title of the video is probably correct - she is Taiwanese, as those from Mainland China have a somewhat different accent in English. However I am throwing this open to the court of public opinion. Where do you think she is from?

Note: these 2 minutes of a longer video are excerpted under fair use provisions

PS: I have no idea where the original video came from. Do let me know if you know.

Tim Ho Wan queue a few minutes ago

2013-05-06T11:30:00.003+08:00

Entertainment for the exams

2013-05-06T11:22:00.000+08:00

Looks like someone just finished exams over at NUS Confessions:

"I'm a girl from SOC who just finished her last final exams in NUS. Looks and figure wise, I consider myself slightly above average only but not so much that I attract too much attention generally except in SOC. I would probably be nothing if I'm in FASS. Even so, let me recall dating record, 7 propositions from guys in SOC throughout my 4 years, one from FASS and one from Business. I dated 2 guys from SOC for just 6 months in total, FASS guy for 6 months and the Business guy for my final year. We are still together.

Now, this is generalisation, but I feel being in a male-dominated faculty like SOC or Engin really makes me feel like a piece of meat being mentally undressed wherever I go for classes. I seemed to get most of the attention and hence switch off from SOC guys totally. All the SOC guys who propositioned me are either ugly immature nerds or are just plain jocks who chose SOC only because it was the only course they could get with their results. There seems to be a variance between the the number of eye-candies in Business/FASS vs Computing/Engin.

I dated the 2 guys in the hope that their hearts are better than their outside appearances. Sadly, it was not the case. They are more willing to spend time understanding their video games and computers more than they spent understanding me or women in general. Come on, even though unlike most girls, I know programming and algorithms, must you discuss those topics again outside class? Women are not like logical machines, we need the emotional connection.

Dress sense in SOC is clearly no where near the league as in Business for example. Even on important presentations, most of you dress worse than a Business student in his slackest days. In fact, I got weird comments for overdressing when my group of guys chose to present in their shorts and slippers.

I find Business and FASS guys way more articulate and mature. Their command of English seems light years ahead compared to the stuttering nerds. Business guys especially, seem to have the aura of ambition that SOC students seem to lack. They can voice out their inner thoughts and emotions much better, know how to cheer me up when I'm down etc. It seems all the SOC guys are horny copies of each other whereas the non-Science guys have a more unique flavour to them. About the FASS guy, it was only because his parents didn't approve of us because of differing religions.

Fitness wise, I seem to feel that Computing guys are not as physically fit in general. I know they are exceptions so don't flame me, its just that the majority are short, skinny, nerdy dudes who seriously need more time out in the sun and on the track than behind the screen. Business guys seem to be taller, more buff and give me the feeling of protection.

Oh and finally the fun part, the sex bit. I admit my sample size is small, but from the 4 guys I had, the FASS guy was the most creative (sorry my bf, but thats true) followed by my current bf with the 2 SOC guys far behind. I chalk it up to them being inexperienced virgins and if they have, its probably from porn. I know the argument, you can't get better without more experience but seriously as a girl with modern sexual needs, I don't care about your excuse of me being your first gf. It just proves how much of a loser you are for being a virgin or having your first relationship only in Uni. Either you give me a good time or I show you the door, the fairer sex is the one that decides when to spread our legs for you so we make the rules. My rule is that you don't waste my time learning on the job, you better know how to do yours before you start. Your learning should have started on innocent girls from your JC or poly. Imagine applying for a a fresh grad job when you are in your 40s. Uni girls like me have higher expectations of sex as we climb the academic ladder and gain more sexual experience.

So as a piece of advice to girls in NUS, date FASS and business guys. They are more mature, posses greater awareness of the real world outside the land of the Matrix and communicate better with you. Poor communication in a relationship is as good as bad or no communication. Sex with SOC guys, totally cmi, feel more like an emotionless porn actress after the act.

For my final advice to my male SOC mates before I leave, watch less porn and jerk off less, it is not only bad for you, its totally inaccurate. Dress better, go to the gym more often, take up those CELC speaking and writing classes then maybe you stand a better chance with women in the dating game. Remember, computers don't propagate your genes, women do.

#from a girl who actually feels disadvantaged in the dating game in the land of nerdy guys with so few eye-candies."

France 2012 - Day 2 - Montmartre

2013-05-06T00:07:00.001+08:00

France 2012
Day 2 - 14th October - Montmartre

Having arrived at almost midnight the previous day, I set my alarm for 8:30am but woke before 7. It seemed the gods wanted me to roam and not chill, so who was I to deny them?

I had a lunch appointment, so I deigned to take the hotel breakfast (it was still kind of dark) and decided to walk around in the morning.

What happens with Air France cost cutting - the most austere boarding pass I'd seen from a full-fare airline (someone left this boarding pass in the toilet - it was after the time printed on the boarding pass so I guessed he didn't need it anymore)

"Square Caulaincourt"
I was curious about why it wasn't "Place Caulaincourt". "Square" is borrowed from English and refers to "Petit jardin public, souvent établi au milieu d’une place".

Stair going down from Square

Rue Pierre Dac

Métro with old-style sign

Rue St Vincent

Dalida
Presumably the bust is not of her at 54

View of Sacré-Cœur

Legend of St Denis

St Denis statue in garden, with him holding his head in his hands

Ship mosaic

Avenue Junot

According to the guidebook, this was the only original windmill left in the area.

Windmill

Creative vandalism. I asked 2 guys at the bistro door smoking and talking. They didn't know what CVD was (Google gives me results on the French Paradox about diet).

I like the elaborated sign

The man emerging from the wall was weird enough, but look at the buttocks on the right.

Ship. Presumably this was the coat of arms of the area.

No dog-walking

Ostrich graffiti

Rue Norvins, Sacré-Cœur in fog

Engravings evocative of La Belle Epoque

Rue des Saulles, with artist
I thought he was an Asian Asian but then he spoke in French. I suppose most Asians wouldn't waste their time sketching.

It was about 9am on a Sunday morning and there were a lot of Asians, and not just tourists. I counted 3 East Asian lady shopkeepers and one black. Caucasian shopkeepers were nowhere to be seen (IIRC).

Sacré-Cœur in mist

St Pierre

Sign about St Pierre, church dating to the 12th c. This sign was covered by commercial operations:

Wine - cheaper than hot chocolate.

"Tu veux connaître et aimer Jésus, viens nous rejoindre !"
You don't vouvoyer sheep.

Jesus behind a dustbin
I hope they at least get kickbacks from the concessionaires, who had set up in the courtyard

"The parish of St Pierre has fallen to a strange sickness : the parishioners have lost their appetite, they don't eat anymore, they don't drink anymore and worst... they've lost their spiritual hunger (drumroll). Father Francis, the doctor J.C and the cook Claude have the mission of giving Life back to the parish (drumroll). Do you want to help them??? Every positive response will let the parishioners regain their physical and spiritual health"
You can't fault their marketing

"No shorts or extravagant informal clothes"
Whatever "extravagant informal clothes" are

Notre Dame of Montmartre

There was mass ongoing I counted 15 atendees, a priest, his assistant and an organist somewhere.

The church was quite plain, with modern stained glass.

Church door

In a sign of old age, I took my time browsing and enjoying the market stalls near the church.

Sausagefest - stall with regional hams and sausages

"Liberty. Equality. Leftist Front"
Notice they don't mention Fraternity - rich people are presumably not brothers of the Left.

Sacré-Cœur in mist

Café culture, aka people-watching (and presumably gossiping about them)
Inside there was a table of 3-4 people, all of whom were facing the window

I don't know why I took this

You know things are bad when you have a map of dustbins

"Militant du goût"
This is an organisation dedicated to gastronomy

"A little too much Franche-Comté"

View from top of the butte

Sacré-Cœur

"If you love birds, don't feed them"
Feed the birds... NOT

Even at this early hour (9:45am) individuals from a certain demographic were alreay there. From above I saw them scamming hapless tourists.

I decided to skip Montmartre cemetery due to time constraints - Offenbach and Berlioz could wait. The rain would've made it gloomy and treacherous anyway.

Human statue, and not a very good one too. He fidgeted and talked to someone, and moving.

Sacré-Cœur

It was my third time Sacré-Cœur, but it was always nice to walk through.

Door

View from Sacré-Cœur

To crypt

I couldn't remember visiting the crypt, so I went there (turns out it was closed in 2006). I asked the staff member what was inside and she said "les reliques de la basilique". I was quite annoyed because there was almost nothing inside: just stuff not ostentatious enough to go upstairs.

Chapel

Altar

"Anonyme"

Houses of God in France

Stuff

St Denis and St Genovefa (Geneviève). The latter is the patroness of Paris.

Sts Donatien and Rogatien

Bourru - new wine
This was 3-4% and was like a soft drink!

Pork sandwich specialis "Sandwich Raclette". Their motto: "Some lard or some pork"

I went back to St Pierre, and there was another service ongoing with 2-3 times the people and 3 times the priests. I was impressed.

"A bit too much of Franche-Comté" again
The stalls were part of the "Fête des Vendanges" (grape harvesting festival)

All I can say is "mmm"

It was quite fun visiting the stalls and talking with the stallholders. I was very surprised at how friendly they were, and remarked on this to one stallholder, who said they came from all over France. On hearing this, I suddenly understood: they were not Parisians. I told the stallholder that Parisians were not nice, and he diplomatically said "it's different".

Hunny. I can't tell if this was supposed to be Winnie the Pooh in his honeybee guise:

Ivy-covered house

Vineyard
Would you dare drink wine made from these grapes? The terroir is rich with vehicle fumes

Artificial cigarette ad

Random street

"Marriage and PACS Salon"
Civil unions are not left out!

"Daily produce is expensive. FALSE!... Superior cooked ham"
So what does one do with inferior ham?

Ad for flowers
There were 5 men in the series (from a static display I saw) but the videos only featured the black guy

"Sex beasts: seduction in the animal world"
Too bad I wouldn't be in Paris to see this (well it's on until August this year)

"97% of people who try SKYN recommend it... It changes everything. Skyn Original: the sensation of not wearing anything"
They can go fight with Okamoto
Are the 97% women who recommend it?

Line 5 of the Métro actually stops *inside* Gare d'Austerlitz. That was quite cool.

"Bachelorette: (un)faithful, rebellious/beautiful, (im)perfect... These girls have everything to (dis)please"

"No: not everything was better in the past"
Against uncritical romanticisation of the past!
I was amused by the cod liver oil - I used to consume that

I was waiting for my lunch appointment with a Selebriti, and a Jehovah's Witness passed me a pamphlet. One guy then came to argue with them, saying they were criminals and condemned them as 5 centuries out of date. Then the Jehovah's Witness said the Nazis condemned too.

I went to eat Laotian food with the Selebriti, at "Lao Douang Chan".

Lao Douang Chan menu: it seemed mostly Vietnamese. Notice the menu was in French and Chinese - but not Lao.

Amusingly the guy spoke Mandarin (it was run by Laotian Chinese).

Laotian Laksa (pork), item 45. It wasn't very spicy.

Noodles with 3 Treasures (char siew, sio bak, chicken). I tasted onion oil, and it was like Indomie. This was Cantonese.

Beef skewers, served with medical gauze. This was Laotian-Vietnamese

Mussels (Thai). These were the only bad item, as they weren't very fresh and the Chili-Basil didn't quite work. They were also small.

Selebriti

Another table had something that looked like bak zhang. I asked and it was an off-menu item like amok. It was alright.

The spring rolls were alright.

How the beef satay worked: the gauze was to keep the skin of the rolls separate

Perles de coco à la cacahuète (coconut balls with peanut)
This was like mua chee with coconut and peanut inside

Coconut ice cream. This was super gao.

"Caroline Vigneaux loses her dress"

"14 years of line 14. Come share a moment of conviviality with our staff on Monday 15 October from 7am onwards"
Erm. Good luck for the morning rush hour.

In Rennes station, one of the huge ads had stickers on it denouncing large ads, saying 50x70 was enough. Ahh, socialism!

"C&A" ads with stickers: "Stop looking for disaster. Stop advertising"

The website is hilarious. Here is a translation:

"Stop the advertising invasion in the Paris metro. I am upset and disgusted to be subjected to innumerable ads in the metro. They attack me and fatigue me. I cannot escape without closing my eyes. They are often sexist, the hype encourages overconsumption, wastage and spending more. I am not opposed to commercial and cultural information.

This is why I ask:
- that we remove all advertising brackets/frames in the Paris metro
- that we replace them with a maximum of 4 non-luminated panels of 2 square metres per station, on which will be posted posters which are no larger than 50x70cm... this will let the user come closer to know more according to his needs rather than imposing on users. This will be 8 square metres of posters per station, rather than 144 today on average
- that in corridors non-luminated panels will have a space of at least 30 metres between them

I support the non-violent action and civil disobedience of Reposeurs"

I suppose the same people will complain when fares went up if their measure is accepted. The solution, undoubtedly, is higher taxes!

"(Re)disover your colleagues!"

"We love, we support... 3rd National Day of Listening. Listening to the excluded"
Taxpayer money supporting subversive social enterprise!

I tried to get a SIM card, but the normal Relay (bookshop chain) didn't sell SIM cards. I was asked to go to a tabac (tobacconist) - perhaps mobile phones are addictive. Yet, Relay sold porn. At one tabac I said I was in France for 2 weeks and they told me they couldn't get me a SIM card: they had to courier the card and stuff like that, so I was asked to go to an operator's office... but they were closed on Sundays. Gah.

La fille du régiment

"For you to play"

"Carole, fighting cancer
Paul, sick with Alzheimer's
Jean, victim of a stroke
The most intolerable would be to have to choose between these sicknesses
With the Foundation for Medical Research, you choose to fight against all sicknesses"

"Some men have problems expressing their feelings. Not our designers" (Renault ad)

One good way to tell that you're in a Third World country is to see whether you need to throw your toilet paper in a dustbin instead of the toilet bowl. Yet, how do women tell? Female toilets are not always furnished with dedicated feminine hygiene bins (I've been to unisex toilets in developed countries where they just have a normal bin), so how do you know if the dustbin is for toilet paper, or just for your used amenities? One suggested solution to this conundrum was to see what other people threw in (or just to see if there is a lid) (a frequent traveller to Burma tells me there you throw the paper into the toilet bowl).

You can't drink alcohol in public in France anymore. I was quite surprised by this law. Apparently it was enacted in 2009.

My original route for my week-long vacation had been to start in Toulouse and go north. Now it was the reverse, so I would be able to make "Stravinsky and Dance". But I decided not to waste 16€ and torture myself. Unfortunately I only had a week or I would've visited Cordes-sur-ciel and Gordes.

France 2012 - Day 1 - Arrival

2013-05-04T02:42:00.001+08:00

France 2012
Day 1 - 13th October - Arrival

Note: This series is called "France 2012". In January 2012 I also visited France, but that is tagged "Europe CNY 2012" since I spent most of my time in Great Britain.

I wasn't intending to go to France again in 2012, but I won the Runme Shaw Cup at the Alliance Française and so got a free air ticket on Air France (sans taxes) and a week at a school, Institut International de Rambouillet.

My journey didn't start well. Because of a delay in the arriving plane, my flight was delayed by 15.5 hours.

The A380 was indeed more spacious than other long distance planes. I couldn't quite remember the last time I'd been on an A380 (October 2010) but I think it was also better than other planes then.

The flight was quite empty. Possibly people had booked other flights in order to reach France earlier.

Some Air France aircrew had red badges to indicate that they were "Safety" staff. This was puzzling: shouldn't all aircrew have safety training? What additional training is required? Or is this like Range in the SAF - they just get arrowed with a few additional duties?

Annoyingly there were no aircon vents to control the flow of air to my seat (weirdly there was one in the toilet). And occasionally snow (ice chips) fell from above).

I was very impressed with the in-flight entertainment. There were more than 200 music CDs, and the movie selection was huge.

"kids" was not localised into French

World Cinema - in English and the original language (e.g. "Indian"), with no French.

One could load one's USB drive with useful information. Unlike the Dutch they didn't translate "infos pratiques" as "practical information" (i.e. there's impractical information). Perhaps this is an endemic European problem, since there're examples from the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Colombia, Spain and Austria. Actually I don't think there's a good translation in English for the concept of "practical information". Perhaps "logistics"?

One movie had a soundtrack in both Cantonese and "官話". I was quite pleased to finally sight this term in the wild.

The baguette was very slightly crusty, though it was cold. Note the two desserts.
The appetiser looked good but wasn't very flavourful. The fish was tasteful though it wasn't good quality fish.

No pork. Gah.

I was amused to be offered a digestif (I wasn't offered an aperitif but I guess I could've asked for one). Hoho. So I got a pear liqueur. It was very sweet and smooth, slipping down the throat. Though I spilt half of it. Grr.

Air France had a self-service beverage bar (with snacks like Breton chocolate cookies, les galettes sablées vanille à l'ancienne and cheese crackers - albeit with palm oil in the latter). They had Sprite from 3 countries (the US, China and Singapore), Champagne Brut and lemon - but no Häagen-Dazs, as I'd been told (cost-cutting, perhaps). I sneaked upstairs to see if we lesser mortals were getting stiffed but the selection looked the same. I asked a stewardess and she said it depended on the flight, and there would be fruit salad, sandwiches and soup in the second half of the flight (there wasn't - I got conned).

I found Air France service to be better than both KLM and Lufthansa, making it the best European airline I'd flown. They were not friendly, but at least were polite (and not just because I spoke French, from what I heard of their interactions with other passengers). The self-service bar got refilled with stuff (and different stuff too!) Even the ice got refilled. KLM had had the self-service bar too, but it hadn't been refilled.

Since my flight would arrive at almost midnight, I employed my anti-jetlag technique of matching the timezone and ended up consuming more in-flight entertainment than normal. I watched "As One", which was shameless feel-good Korean propaganda. This would be considered gauche if it were in Western Cinema (e.g. Special Forces got bashed as propaganda because it was not critical). As One made the Chinese look bad, the South Koreans look good and the North Koreans less bad than they probably are.

There was a documentary from Arté on "It girls" (i.e. girls who are famous for being famous [and pretty]). My comment: "tout le monde aime une jolie fille" (everyone loves a pretty young girl).

It Girls are 16-20 years old and they fan the endless flames of desire and consumption. The idea of an It Girl is "the shoes you gotta have, the bags you gotta have, even the girls you gotta have". It was quite critical as befitted a French production, and was very honest about Cory Kennedy (no wonder Sandra Chung refused to be interviewed); she said she had become an adult, so it was no fun being an It Girl (interestingly enough, since she was 21 it was considered daring to still feature her).

They also featured Blake Lively, 23 (I thought that was supposed to be too old) and Kim Kardashian (29 - definitely too old).

The documentary "Profession It Girl" quoted Peaches Geldof: "Every girl wants to be an It Girl" since one gets to "be celebrated publicly for being yourself". She then said there was lust in every girl.

The image of an It Girl is that they don't have to work. Young girls who idolise It Girls have work as a big part of their lives, but they want a life of leisure, branded goods and doing what they want.

The script was great, with the narrator having lines like "the problem with becoming famous without having put any effort into it is you are dependent on others", "[It Girls are a] product of the narcissistic illusion that you have several lives and when you put it into action something creative is bound to come out of it", "the trials and tribulations of New York city youth fluctuate between partying and shopping", "the apparent ease with which [Taylor Momsen] assumes her lolita trash image serves as an inspiration for all young girls searching for their identity" and "that's the future of the feminine condition in the West. To have money and spend as much as possible and to have an okay job".

One of the staff serving an It Girl: "You've grown up. You have breasts. You've slept with men"
It Girl: "I know"

"How else can we enjoy life by spending" - some girl

Perhaps the most fun part of the documentary was when I listened to the French version, and I could hear the contempt dripping from the narrator's voice.

The moral of the story for It Girls is that it is a great example of the objectification of women by themselves and other women - for the consumption of other women (I don't think you can deny that this is primarily about the Female Gaze, not the Male one).

The in-flight entertainment told you, while watching a movie, the time to your destination. In retrospect this seems very obvious, so I'm not sure why it struck me (perhaps I didn't notice it on other airlines).

There was another documentary: "les ados: métro, boulot, dodo" (Teens: the soul numbing drudgery of wage slavery) where they were interviewed about what they thought of wage slavery. It was very depressing. Interestingly, the presenter had a sociology/philosophy degree and shadowed adolescents for a year (that was not the depressing bit).

I was lying down when the seatbelt sign came on. I got up but the attendant was okay with me putting on the seatbelt when I was lying down. However she fastened a seatbelt around my neck, so when the turbulence came I got strangled. So much for safety!

This one had no "no pork".

15.5 hour delay aside, why would one fly "Can I helpch you?" (SIA) instead of Air France?

On being a moral agent

2013-05-03T13:46:00.001+08:00

"Garcin turns out to have the worst case of "bad faith" of all three characters in this section. He can't decide on his own that he is not coward, but will only believe it if Estelle says so herself. Even though he later says that he made his choice "deliberately" and that a man is what he "wills himself to be," Garcin wearily explains that he can't decide for himself if he is a coward or not. He says that he is unsure of his motives and that he has been unable to be honest with himself about why he ran for the border. He also obsesses about the people who are judging him back on earth. He claims that he has left his "fate in their hands."

This classic example of bad faith stems from Garcin's complete inability to accept responsibility for is actions. Rather than acknowledge his freedom to choose his own personality, Garcin surrenders his free will to other people. He becomes a "being-in-itself," whose essence is determined by the look of the "other." This is why he can't leave when the door opens. He can't imagine existing on his own, knowing that Inez will be judging him and that he won't know what she is saying. Just like Estelle's inability to feel that she exists without seeing herself in a mirror, Garcin is unable to exist without other people defining his essence for him.

Garcin also remains a prisoner of his past. He keeps "listening" to what people are saying about him rather than listening to his own voice in the present. Even when he attempts to convince Inez that he is not a coward in the present, he continually justifies his actions in the past. For instance, he suggests that he died "too soon" and "wasn't allowed time" to act, forgetting that he will be stuck in hell for eternity. Sartre wrote that the responsibility for one's freedom was so overwhelming that we are "condemned to be free," a statement literally played out by Garcin's inability to leave the room. Unable to exist without people judging his past, Garcin condemns himself to remain in the eternal present of the room.

It is fitting that Sartre originally entitled the play The Others. Suffering under the German occupation, Sartre wrote that he began to understand that Evil was just as absolute and independent as Good in society. By simply placing three individuals in the same room, Sartre not only suggests that hell naturally exists on earth but that "hell is other people." As Garcin discovers, there is no need for physical torture: the gaze of the "other" reduces and "devours" his individuality. He is unable to do anything, even kiss Estelle, when Inez is watching. Ignoring his innate freedom and responsibility, Garcin thinks Inez's judgment is the only proof of his existence."

--- SparkNotes: No Exit: Section 3

Best Iron Man 3 Trailer

2013-05-02T23:11:00.001+08:00

"IRON MAN 3 Trailer - Thai sweded by FEDFE"

BKK 2012 - Day 3, Part 2 - Bangkok National Museum

2013-05-02T18:11:00.000+08:00

BKK 2012
Day 3, Part 2 - 9th September - Bangkok National Museum

Some building

Buddhaisawan Chapel

Unfortunately the signage was not as good outside of the first gallery, like in the Red House.

Bed of Queen Sri Suriyenthra

Red House

Next was the Buddhaisawan Chapel.

Vishnu holding weapon

Chapel entrance

Inside the chapel

Mural

Altar

Window in chapel

Rooms in the museum

Pavilion

Next was a gallery with various royal stuff.

Clothes "made under the suggestion of Her Majesty Queen Sirikit"

Masks

Khon Mask

Box, cassettes

Monk's fan

Carved Wooden Door Guardian

Bussabok Kroen Throne

Throne detail

"Replica of combat aircraft" (there was no model indicated, but I think it was an F-16)

Overall, more than half the museum was non-airconditioned with stuff just in cabinets (sadly - the 19th century museum model).

Though the museum's approach to Thai history left much to be desired, I was very impressed that they had, not just non-Thai Asian stuff, but non-Asian stuff.

Roman jars

Sino-Thai Bencharong covered jars
The Sino-Thai stuff was not as nice as the Chinese stuff

On the jars

Guardian (davarapal) fragment

Tang Dynasty tomb relief

Tang tomb ware

Very ugly Chinese tomb figurine

Wood carvings

Mythical bird Kinnari

Crouching elephant

Monkey, Demon and unlabelled item

Wood carvings

Sadly the Mother-of-Pearl gallery was closed. The ivory room was closed for lunch (2 hours from 11:30-1:30 - how French) so I had to return later.

There was a room for kids.

Ladies of the palace

Fashions of Siamese courtesans
Someone should point out to them that courtesans are not the same as ladies of the court

Window

"Please take off your shoes and carry them with you to prevent the loss"
This was sad. People steal shoes in museums?!

Saweta Chatra Throne

Tang ceramics

Guardian Lion - possibly plundered from Angkor!

Buddha on Naga

Buddha under Naga

9 Deities

Birth of Buddha

Nagapasa scene

Lion

Metope with Elephant

Lion

Lion

There was some Chinese stuff (some from the Royal Collection, but not all) and some Indian stuff (some presented by India or excavated by the Musée Guimet - perhaps there had been a swap). There was also a Byzantine oil lamp from the Israeli ambassador. There were also Japanese and Chinese Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. So there was some form of Pan-Asian perspective. Notably, not all the foreign stuff had been given by foreign dignitaries (this ties in to museums in the Third World being used for political purposes rather than educational ones).

Standing Buddha (from India). Notice the long, disproportionate arm

Meditating Buddha (from India)

"Indian Arts, Gandhara Style"
I wonder if they didn't label it as a Buddha because it was Greco-Buddhist art (i.e. it didn't conform to their idea of what Buddha should look like)

Kannon

Clay Plaque with (?) Minotaurs

I found the Burmese stuff the most interesting, because I'd not seen much of it elsewhere. The proportion was off, but that added to its charm somehow

Crowned Buddha (Burmese)

Votive stupa

Crowned Buddha (Burmese)

Crowned Buddha (Burmese)

Image of Buddha in Bhumisparasa Mudra
Even though this was 19th century the proportion was still off. Ironically the 1st-4th century Greco-Buddhist Buddha was a lot more lifelike.

Votive tablets in "pagan style" (hah!)

Buddha in 8 episodes

Stucco fragment of the image of Buddha. Greco-Buddhist art, 1st-4th centuries, escavated in Afghanistan by the Musée Guimet (!)

Standing Buddha

Lokesvara Bodhisattva (Indian)

Rubbing of a bas relief "depicting the Buddha and Hindu God"

Ganesa (from Java)

There was some other Javanese stuff - I wonder how they got it.

Agastya (Shiva in the form of Maha Guru) obtained via exchange with the Dutch

Apsara

Buddha sheltered by Naga Hoods. Despite being from 1183 this was very well preserved.

Avalokitesvara

Padmapan
Interestingly though this was from Thailand it had Javanese influence

Vishnu

Vishnu

Singha (who says hi)

Shiva and Parvati

Dvarapala

Musicians

Brahma on Swan

Flying Deity, Relief of Human or Deity

Sketch of reconstruction of stucco fragments

"Divine of Bodhisattva"

High ranking woman (ahh, the days when high ranking women went around topless!)

Sima with Buddha descending from Tavatimsa heaven

Avalokitesvara

Buddha descending, showing the great miracle

Deity

Buddha meditating

Deer crouching

Buddha

Wheel of Law

Votive tablets. 9th-21st century
This was very useful dating

Face of Singha

Wheel of Law and Deer

On "Dvaravati Arts"

Wheel of Law, Crouching Deer

I was surprised by this critical evaluation of the Dvaravati period: whether it was a "Kingdom, State or Urban Community". In fact this was the first critical commentary I'd seen in the museum.

Brahma

Female figure. Nice figure, and topless too.

Apsara

Standing Buddha

Radiating avalokitesvara

Prajnaparamita

Avalokitesvara

Buddha Descending from Tavatimsa Heaven

Pilaster

Lintel

Lintel

Lintel with Krisna killing Naga

The prehistory section was closed for lunch, but I didn't care.

Shiva Linga

Base for a sculpture (yoni)
I love the description of it as a "base". And how "linga" and "yoni" were not translated.

Vishnu

Vishnu

Surya (sun god)

Maitreya Bodhisattva

Bodhisattva head

Singha

Garuda holding Naga

Ornaments

More Ornaments

I don't know why I took this

Palanquin parts

Building roof

Naga head

Garuda seizing naga

Buddha subduing Mara

Buddhist pedestal

Pedestal of a Buddha subduing Mara

Pediment

Annoying, the whole northern wing with art from the 13th century on was closed.

Naga head

Spirit house of the front palace

I then adjourned to the museum restaurant for lunch.

The ever-important Thai iced tea. It was small though.

Fried noodle with pork, chilies and hot basil leaves (Pad Kimao). Cheap at 35B
This was the closest to the true street price I'd ever see
It was great, but quite fiery even though I'd picked out the chili. It was an exception to the "Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums" rule
I was tempted to order fried rice also (the portion wasn't that big) but it'd have been too much, so I decided to eat more mystery street food on the way back

One white guy came in and ordered pad thai. Hey, I like pad thai and I'm sure it'd have been very good, but I didn't go to Thailand for pad thai.

Next was some royal vehicles.

Royal Chariot of Great Victory
There was a "lesser-type" chariot, but it was as grand as the main chariot (this one)

Mechanical hoist. Apparently 1811 is "the ancient era"

???
I suppose non-Thais would not have been interested

Yellow nipples? The previous night all the ones I'd seen had been brown. I suppose this is a divine creature, so that's the difference.

Meanwhile the male figure had no nipples

The various royal things (building, chariots with very tall lightning rods etc) were hard to snap in their entirety.

???

Phra Ti Nang Rachendrayan State Palanquin

Top

I then returned to the ivory room. I was glad that I had, despite the lack of English. Maybe this was to deter CITES inspectors.

Ivory room

On elepehants

Sleeping Buddhas

Buddhas

Tusks

Tusk detail

Tusk detail

Tusk detail

Boys

Pond fascinating: German girls playing with flowers

A principled museum would've announced at the entrance that part of the collection was unavailable for viewing (I think there was some water damage to the roof). This one didn't. I didn't expect a reduced entrance fee, but at least a disclaimer would've been nice.

There was a bilingual book in the bookshop: "les messagers divins / divine messengers".

A tuk tuk driver offered me 100B to get back to the hotel. I said that was expensive. He then offered 20B, which shocked me, but he said I needed to make 2 stops at his sponsors. So I took the water taxi again.

Mysterious drink. 2 hawkers quoted me 20B. A third one further away quoted me 15B - I managed to apply economic principles to get the invisible hand to undermine the cartel due to imperfect information!
It was possibly a grass drink, and had an indescribable taste

Thai Cap cai png (mixed rice)

Curry puffs

"Be careful. Don't believe outside people which give you false information"

Temple beside navy HQ

Pagoda

There was a house with a huge portrait of the King and Queen above its door - facing the water.

There was a Holy Rosary Church built in Neo-Gothic style.

There was a "Happy Air" airlines.

"Passengers who would like to take Durian into the aircraft, please contact airline staffs at check-in counter"
"Passengers who would like to load firearms into the aircraft, please contact airline staffs at check-in counter"
Durians are as bad as guns

"Suggestion"

"Reception room for Buddhist monks"
Note also that there is a prayer room for Muslims - but not others (Buddhists?)

Muslim prayer room: "No: smoking, eating, drinking, talking, sleeping, littering"

Avis: "Please ask AVIS Counter for Special Rate. You'll get discount"
If everyone gets a discount, no one gets a discount

We then went to the food court, which was like the staff canteen.

"No pork"

Kway zhap, teochew style porridge (rice in water)

Green papaya salad with crispy chicken skin, crispy papaya salad. For some reason there was corn in the dip for the latter.

Amusingly more than half the food in the airport food court was Chinese.

Nestea does Thai Iced Tea. Hah.

I don't know why I took the meal tickets.

Tom yam with pork! Or "any kind of balls"

Sauces galore. And sugar

This was probably Tom Yam with pork ribs. The chili was a timebomb which only hit later.

I was told: "Most Thais dress like HDB people in their 60s... not just any HDB. Must be Queenstown, Redhill, Outram Park". I ws of the opinion that the age group was more like the 40s.

More delicious pork dishes

Hainanese Chicken Rice. I believe there was a mutton option. And the sauces were suspicious.

My note for this is : "Emirates - business class perks?"

There was a liquid disposal bin (for you to drain liquids into) - after security screening. They should've put it before so no one would throw away their bottles pre-emptively. I swear, it's all a scam with budget airlines involved so they can sell drinks.

On exiting the country, we again got our photos taken (like on entry). One UAE woman lifted her face veil. And you cannot wear a hat, but her head was still covered. I wonder what would happen if you went in with no hat but a tudung. Arab men also have headgear which is like a hat - must they remove it?

There was a counter where one could pay fines for overstaying. Hah.

One of the eternal mysteries: what is the smoke that airplanes blow into the cabin? I have added this question to Quora and one answer says "It's just condensation (water vapor). Think of it as fog."

Chewing gum was not on the list of articles prohibited in Singapore, perpetuating the myth that it is alright to bring chewing gum in for personal use. Also it's a bit late to ask people to "Please do not bring these items into Singapore" (they are already in Singapore)

I was amused that even the Budget Terminal got free phone calls.

Redundant Carl's Jr opening hours sign

Something that struck me: I didn't see pineapple fried rice, olive fried rice, pandan chicken or Thai fish cake. And I think the only green/red curry I'd seen was in Thai mixed rice.

Magic & Religion

2013-05-02T09:24:00.000+08:00

Everyday Ethics: Margaret Thatcher and Kester Brewin (Sun, 14 Apr 13)

"William Crawley (WC): Is religion just magic by sleight of mind, rather than by sleight of hand? Certainly there are elements of worship that use drama, colour, sound, even, perhaps, special effects to enshrine divine moments, and Christianity does take many of its symbols and rituals from the world of Druids and Witches. Let's talk to Kester Brewin. He's the author of a new book called "After Magic"...

He finds the angle no one else find into the story. Tell us about this magic dimension to religion.

Kester Brewin (KB): Well, it just struck me that, particularly through a film called The Prestige, by Christopher Nolan... Michael Caine... says, there are three elements to every trick. Where you've got the Pledge, where something is presented. You know, the magician presents a card, or a bird or something, the Turn, where the magician makes it disappear, and he said, but the audience will not yet applause, but it's the third part of the trick, the Prestige, where the bird, the card, whatever, is brought back, and then the audience will go absolutely wow, it struck me... there's your Resurrection Moment.

There's also this same kinda moment in terms of the Mass or the Eucharist, or whatever. So I began to explore how that three part magic trick actually impacts upon religion, and if it's possible to read the Gospel in a way through that three part trick...

What's really interesting... the inspiration for the book actually came from another source. It came from watching Shakespeare's play, the Tempest. Where, very interestingly, at the end of that play, his main character, Prospero in the play gives up magic. And it struck me as this fascinating question: why would he give up this fantastic art? Actually, reading more into the play...
magic had become a really dehumanising influence for him. It had really taken him away from family, it had taken him away from his work, his position. It kind of destroyed his life. So his giving up magic actually returns him to a place of humanity.

... That happens in a lot of books, in a lot of films. In fact, oddly enough, in the Harry Potter series. Harry Potter, right at the end, after he's done all this, he says "I've had enough. It's been enough trouble for me in one lifetime". Magic, really, almost destroyed him too.

And then you've got the whole Batman series of films... right at the end of those, Bruce Wayne gives up Batman. He kind of fakes Batman's death, and off he goes into the night. Why? Because Batman had ended up a destructive influence on Gotham City. With Batman, you see the parallel rising of Bane, it ended up destroying the city.

These archetypal moves in all of these stories and films, where pushing beyond supernature, as I call it, pushing beyond magic or super power, actually enhances people's humanity and leads on to this moment of love...

WC: Social anthropologists... use the term "magic" in a very specific sense. How are you using this?

KB: Well actually, magic and religion, in a kind of historical sense, are completely interchangeable, whether it's the shaman or the priest, whatever. So I'm using it in a number of ways.

In the book I'm talking about magic as a kinda sleight of hand art, in one sense.

WC: Which has an aspect of deceptiveness to it.

KB: Absolutely, but it's also got this aspect of creating a demand on the audience. And I think that's what really interesting. Interesting that people go to a magic show, not because they believe in magic, and not because they want to find out how the whole thing's done. There's a kind of third space... you suspend your disbelief. And I'm arguing that that might be a helpful way to look at going to church... you suspend your disbelief, you go to a place to receive a gift from that place, but it doesn't mean that you're saying, "I want to work out exactly how it's done", nor, actually, "I'm confident I believe in all this". But there are gifts there to be had. But on the other hand, I'm talking about magic as in, accessing the whole idea of religion and supernature. And the supernatural too.

That presents a serious problem, because you know Dostoevsky said, you know "without God, everything is permissible". And actually, it's more like, with God, everything becomes justifiable, and you know, you just talking about the Israel-Palestine situation, which again: so much has been done in the name of God, so many people killed, so much destruction, so much violence. And similarly, with the Troubles too [in Northern Ireland]...

The problem with God is that it presents this infinite demand that, "If God has told me to do it, how can anybody doubt that, how can anybody tell me that I'm wrong"

So in a sense, God's got this very real problem of existence. You know, "Help, if I exist, people are going to do completely crazy things in my name"

So, the lovely moment in that great film, the Usual Suspects, where the guy says "the greatest trick the Devil ever played was convincing the world he didn't exist". That's genius, because by not existing he doesn't have to be troubled with the problem of existence and therefore he can get on with existing without being worried about it.

So I kind of take a spin on that in the book and say, "What if God plays the same trick? What if God plays this trick of not existing in order to get beyond this crazy demand of actually existing?"

And that's my reading of the Resurrection, of this turn of the Prestige.

What about if God actually did die? Where's the Prestige? Well, the Prestige is the Church. The Prestige is the Church living out this godly life, living out God's actions, without God needing to still exist, because that escapes this problem of the infinite demand, because God's not there, you don't have to worry about doing crazy things in the name of God"

BKK 2012 - Day 3, Part 1 - Bangkok National Museum

2013-05-01T19:38:00.000+08:00

BKK 2012
Day 3, Part 1 - 9th September - Bangkok National Museum

I spent this day in the Bangkok National Museum. I took the river taxi up to avoid being swindled.

"Safety Fun Relaxation"
Amusing cruise slogan

Super long barge convoy

River Taxi, with boy enjoying his ride in style

Royal Seminary. Curiously, very European in style.

Even Bangkok hawkers are on Facebook nowadays

Grilled bananas

Was this advertising underwear... or sunglasses?

Thai magazine: "The toilet"

Mystery meat
I love mystery meat. This was 1 stick for 10B, so I had 2. It was very lean. Maybe it was rat?

tuffed baby crocodiles

"Thammasat University: ... this university has played several outstanding roles in Thai politics as well as igniting many political changes in the Thai history"
I love the references to Revolution

On "National Museum Bangkok"

Vendor and my 20 mystery drink. I suspect I was overcharged for this drink (possibly Thai orange) which was too sweet at the start but was alright once the ice kicked in

Museum

German, Japanese language services

The museum café sold fried rice for 75B. Bear in mind that my supper the previous night had been 70B - and that had been coked by a street hawker. But you know what? I had stopped caring, since I had long ago shed my illusions that the Third World was cheap, or that people there were honest.
Actually it was very cheap for a museum café

I didn't think there was any advantage in a squat toilet being raised. In fact, this would give rise to the possibility of falling down.

Toilet for junior. Aww.

The museum was 200B (S$8.50). On a PPP basis this was very expensive. I wonder if the locals paid the same.

The first building was a summary of the History of Thailand. It had air-conditioning and lots of information panels.

"Origins and habitations of the Thais... there is no clear conclusion as to the origin of the Thais"
On Thai foundation myths

The women's clothing (properly woven and cut cloth) seemed to come from a different era from the men's (roughly hewn rags)

Everything here was a replica for some reason. I looked for the replica Roman lamp but even though it was a replica it was missing

Sukhothai stone inscription, an early use of the Thai alphabet

"Pho Khun Ram Kham Haeng... during his reign, it was ruled like father and son. The people were able to complain directly about their trouble"
O RLY
As the saying goes, 'Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'

On the Sukhothai Kingdom: "In the reign of King Li Thai, there was a riot. The king, therefore, re-organized his administration into a more complex. Status of the ruler was then changed to obtain more power. Rulers were, then called Phraya and became absolute monarchy"
Translation: "In the reign of King Li Thai, there was a riot. This was brutally suppressed. The king, therefore, re-organized his administration into a repressive state, which was more complex. He became an absolute monarch and controlled his people with an iron fist"

In the pictures of Sukhothai, it looked to be in a different style from Ayutthaya, and also quite nice.

Buddhist Disciples

Founding of Ayutthaya

"The settlements of the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the Japanese lied along the Chao Phraya River outside the city. Only the Mon and the Chinese were allow to live inside the wall"
Racism!

Some of the 500 Jatakas (previous lives of the Buddha)

Why does the Buddha look so simian?!

"The most important duty of every king of Ayutthaya was to uphold the Buddhist faith and patronize all Buddhist activities. A most outstanding example was King Boromtrailokkanat... entered the priesthood for 8 months after he ascended the throne"
A priest-king is a good king? What if he neglects the realm by entering the priesthood?

Ayutthaya gold

This queen maneuvered her elephant between her king's and another's. I can't tell which one she is.

"King Naresuan firing across the Sittang river" (attacking the Burmese)
"Surakamma was finally shot dead by Prince Naresuan... The gun which Prince Naresuan used to shoot Surakamma was then called Phra Sang Pun Ton Kham Mae Nam Sittang or the royal gun shot across the Sittang river, and has since been used as one of the royal weapons in the Coronation Ceremony"
And you wonder why ASEAN still has so many problems today.

Bonus: here is a very interesting painting from the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta called "ASEAN in Harmony". It's by Adiyo and presumably dates from 1997, ASEAN's 30th anniversary.

"ASEAN in Harmony"

"The king appointed Phraya Chakkri, to be the commander. Unfortunately, Phraya Chakkri was a Burmese spy, He, therefore, used many tricks to weaken Ayutthaya. Finally Ayutthaya, one of the great empires of the area, fell under Burma in 1569 A.D."
I'm very curious what the Burmese say about this episode. If the situation had been reversed, naturally they would have praised Phraya Chakkri for his cunning and ingenuity in saving Ayutthaya.

Prince Naresuan declaring independence in 1584. Notice that the Mon chiefs who disclosed the Burmese King's plans to Prince Naresuan are not condemned as scurrilous traitors.

"In Pegu, Prince Naresuan's cock defeated the cock of the Pegu Crown Prince"
I'm looking for any hidden meaning here

King Naresuan dueling on elephant-back

"The people of Ayutthaya were also influenced by Portuguese foods and desserts. Bread was accepted and was named in Thai as 'pang' after the Portuguese word. Many of their desserts became part of Thai cuisine"
Maybe one was the use of rice as a dessert

"The Glory of Foreign Relations", aka "look what we learnt from the Europeans"

"Although the French played their role in Ayutthaya for a short time, their records about Siam of that period are now very valuable for the study of Ayutthaya"
Learn about Ayutthaya from the French! Presumably Thai records weren't very good - but why?

A valiant defence against the Burmese

"Phraya Tak (Sin)... was appointed Phraya Wachira Prakan to rule Kamphaeng Phet... [he] could see no hope to protect the city for long. He and a group of 1,000 soldiers fought their way out of the city on January 3, 1767, three months before the loss of Ayutthaya"
If he had fought on to the end, he would've been valorised for fighting to the end.

"King Tak Sin the Great reigned for a period of fifteen years... King Tak Sin the Great died on 6th April 1782, at the age of 48"
I was suspicious of his dying at such a young age, and put a note in my notes to check the true story. In reality he went mad and the future Rama I launched a coup and killed him.

Buddhist manuscript cabinet

Symbol of Department of Recruiting

"Somdet Chao Phraya Maha Kasatsuk... while commanding his troops, a miraculous event occured, his body radiated a glow. All the soldiers and other persons saw this, and immediately paid homage to him in the belief that he would become the next King"
Justification for Rama I taking over the country

On the 9 Battalion war (with Burma, naturally). The National Museum of Myanmar in Rangoon would have a different story and would condemn Thai trickery.

Model depicting Ramayana story

Marionette heads

"Vietnam was becoming as powerful as Siam, trying to take control of Laos and Cambodia. In order to prevent a Vietnamese invasion, Siam declared war on Vietnam in 1833, It was not until 1846 that Vietnam called for peace with Thailand"
Doctrine of pre-emptive war!

What's even more interesting than the justification of pre-emptive war is how it differs from Wikipedia's account:

Siamese–Vietnamese War (1831–34) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"The Siamese-Vietnamese War of 1831-1834, also known as the Siamese-Cambodian War of 1831-1834, started when Siam (Thailand) tried to conquer Cambodia but was repelled by Viet Nam... a 15,000-man Vietnamese army marched against the Siamese in 1833 and assisted Ang Chan in returning at Udong, the Cambodian capital (north of Phnom Penh). With the retreat of the Siamese, Vietnam exercised almost total control over Cambodia."

Siamese–Vietnamese War (1841–45) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"The 1841–1845 Siamese-Vietnamese War in Cambodia was a war between Vietnam (then under the rule of the Nguyen Dynasty) and Siam (Thailand), triggered by Siam's attempt to expand its influence in Cambodia and to prevent its rival, Vietnam, from territorial gains the region at the expense of the declining Khmer Empire.

After Viet Nam defeated Siam in the 1831–1834 war, a Vietnamese-installed Queen Ang Mey reigned on the Cambodian throne as her country increasingly came under the yoke of Viet Nam... Vietnamese reinforcements from Huế and central Vietnam quickly moved to the Mekong River Delta and effectively stopped the Siamese onslaught. Then, in May, a strong Vietnamese counter-offensive smashed the Siamese troops, retook Cô Tô captured a large amount of prisoners of war.

Meanwhile, in Cambodia, the Siamese occupying forces repeated the same mistakes of the Vietnamese, and as a result they lost the locals' trust... Phnom Penh fell. Chao Phraya and Ang Duong retreated to Oudong...

Encircled, Chao Phraya sought for peace, and in November 1845, both nations sign a peace agreement, bringing the war to an end. Cambodia was placed under joint Siamese-Vietnamese protection."

Ahh, it's almost as if they were describing 2 different wars!

"Shirt and hat with cabbalistic writing"

Tubular for keeping document

On Siamese imperialism in Indochina in the 19th century.

"Map of territories yielded to France and England" aka how Thai imperialism yielded to Western imperialism

"Dr. Bradley and his friend"
Poor friend, with no name

Stupa Model

Thai Manuscript

Impractical railway equipment used by King Chulalongkorn and Queen in 1892 railway ceremony

Chulalongkorn's modernisation (which was probably forced upon his people)
Note also the double standards: "He allowed foreign guests as well as Thai officials to stand up and bow to him and to sit on chairs when he asked them to sit. However, when meeting only Thais, the old custom still applied"

Model of floating house

French military pilot qualifications for some member of royalty

Thailand sent 1200 Thai "volunteer" troops into World War I in 1917 (less than a year before the Central Powers surrendered), and 19 of them died. That's an impressive casualty rate. I wonder what they did in the war.

"King Vajiravudh acting as Nai Man Puen Yao in his own play Pra Ruang"

This should be Rama VII

From my studies of Thai history I recall some Thai kings in the 20th century were embroiled in controversy, or had strange things happen to them. Naturally this was glossed over. The military coups in the second half of the 20th century were not mentioned either.

Prajadhipok

They excused the episode of World War II collaboration with the Japanese in a novel war:

At the beginning [of World War II] Thailand did not take side. The Thai government signed an agreement with Britain and France, not to invade each other. However, Thailand vigorously pursued a nationalistic policy, opposing France on her territory in Indo-China, and increasing the tension between the two countries. Japan reconciled them in a dispute, which led to the Tokyo Peace Treaty in 1941.

However, Japan invaded French Indo-China and marched troops through Thailand heading for Burma. The landing of Japanese troops on the south of Thailand cause a great lost of civilian and officer lives, the government of Thailand then signed an agreement with Japan on 9 December 1941 which causing internal conflict. The active group of Seri Thai, an underground organization led by Pridi Banomyong, was formed. Some Thais who did not agree with the government joined in an effort to resist Japan...

In January 1942, the Allies began to bomb Bangkok and the BBC broadcast that the government of Thailand had united with Japan, declaring war on Britain and the United States...

At the end of World War II Japan surrendered. Mr Pridi Banomyong, who was the Regent for King Ananda Mahidol issued a proclamation that the war against the Allies declared by the former Prime Minister, Field Marshal Luang Phibulsongkhram was invalid. The Thai people did not agree upon Field Marshal Luang Phibulsongkhram. Some of them worked underground against the Japanese during the war."

Most people were okay with photo taking - even in temples. Thais also took photos.

The Third World has poor tourist infrastructure: a lack of signs, free maps, maps, tourist offices, information plaques, clearly signposted transport and more.

Links - 1st May 2013

2013-05-01T11:26:00.005+08:00

Trolling in asynchronous computer-mediated communication: From user discussions to academic definitions - "none of the research above takes its definitions from extended analysis of user-discussions of trolling. This work seeks to elaborate a more robust understanding of trolling, to argue for its validity as an object of research within the field(s) of im/politeness... A primary issue with any im/politeness definition involves group norms of legitimate behaviour. In the case of trolling, one person’s active debate is another person’s troll, and as Donath (1999: 47) suggests, a group’s character will determine not only whether a troller is harmful to the individual or the community, but whether a user is even deemed a troller at all... this paper suggests the following, working definition of the term “troll”: A troller is a CMC user who constructs the identity of sincerely wishing to be part of the group in question, including professing, or conveying pseudo-sincere intentions, but whose real intention(s) is/are to cause disruption and/or to trigger or exacerbate conflict for the purposes of their own amusement... It seems clear that part of the human condition is to find a degree of entertainment in conflict, whether in the form of high-risk sports, action films, violent computer games, or linguistic aggression in television programs"

Tracking down my online haters - ""They never think that the person receiving the message might be a real human being." That's why, when journalists take the time to respond personally to venomous notes, proving that they are made of flesh and blood, the reaction is strikingly -- and puzzlingly -- positive."

Online manhunt for Boston bombers raises concerns - "Rick DesLauriers, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) chief in Boston, made clear his frustration at the proliferation of amateur sleuthing that filled the vacuum of information from real investigators until Thursday. Unveiling photos and videos of two suspects with black backpacks, one of whom was seen placing a bag at the scene of one of the blasts, he said: "These images should be the only ones... that the public should view to assist us. "Other photos should not be deemed credible. They unnecessarily divert the public's attention in the wrong direction and create undue work for vital law enforcement resources," he added... "Real law enforcement is a skill, and even they get it wrong sometimes with horrible results for those affected," she said, citing cases of mistaken identity at the 1996 Atlantic Olympics and the 2004 Madrid bombings. "So it's important that amateurs trying to help exercise discretion and avoid jumping to conclusions.""

Is the Tort of Wrongful Seduction Still Viable? - "Hardin acknowledged the viability of a civil seduction claim when "intercourse was induced by deception, enticement, or other artifice," and when the plaintiff was, at the time of the seduction, an "innocent" and virtuous woman. Kantor, according to her complaint, fits the bill: She alleges herself to be "chaste, innocent, and virtuous," and alleges the sexual act to have been the product of deception, coercion, or artifice. What if Kantor had been unchaste? She still might have been able to sue. Under Hardin, a woman who had been unchaste, but had reformed herself could become "an innocent woman in the eyes of the law." Hence, she could sue for wrongful seduction although, the court noted, she might have her damages reduced because of her prior unchastity... establishing a sex-by-trickery action may assume that sex itself harms women, by robbing them of their chastity"

Tensions Mount After North Korea Destroys All Of Asia - YouTube

Watch LG Use IPS Displays to Make Men Stop Peeing at a Urinal

Bulgaria: street art or vandalism? - "In downtown Bulgarian capital city of Sofia, the monument to the Soviet army has been desecrated four days before the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (WWII).On June 18th, a group of unknown people painted the bronze sculptures of Red Army soldiers to look like Superman, Santa Claus, Ronald McDonald and other heroes of American pop culture."

Four things Game of Thrones fans need to stop saying - "1. “Don’t spoil me for the next episode, you guys!”
Do you guys all remember when the Harry Potter movies came out, you all had that one friend who got really, really mad if you discussed anything that happened in the movies because you would “spoil” them? Wasn’t that friend the worst? Didn’t you want to shake them and because oh my god, it was a book first, and that book’s been out for, like, five years now, and it’s really not your job to police yourself if someone hadn’t read it? Because this is approximately how I feel every time I see a spoiler column that’s all “you’ll never believe what happens next on Game of Thrones!” or there’s the inevitable bitchfest that you’re caught in the middle of because someone “spoiled” an episode that person hadn’t seen yet. It’s a book! And it’s been out now for a while! Fun fact, did you know that If you go to Wikipedia at any point in time, you are going to get “spoiled”? Because you will. Also, while I’m at it, I feel like I should tell you all that Darth Vader is Luke’s father, Rosebud is a sled, Soylent Green is people, and Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in Fight Club? Same guy.
3. “[Character A] is so much better than [Character B]!”
I think the worst instance I ever saw of this was a giant spat between a bunch of Cersei fans and a bunch of Tyrion fans. Cersei was an incestuous bitch! Tyrion was a womanizer! Cersei pushed a kid out a window! Tyrion raped a lady! You don’t like Cersei because you’re sexist! You don’t like Tyrion because you’re anti-dwarfist! (Is there a PC term for that?) A bunch of other stuff I don’t remember because it was all really stupid!"

Superstar Kurt Tay went 4 a 395cc Breast Implant in Bangkok,Thailand - YouTube - "Superstar Kurt Tay went 4 Breast Implant/Augumentation in Bangkok,Thailand on 5April2013.Ever since I was a kid,since I was 4yrs old,I always wanted 2 hav breast,but like many ppl,fear of how d society will c,so I didnt do it.My friends says if u do breast,u wont be able 2 get a gf.So I didnt do & I still didnt able 2 get gf.I join SDN Events 4 many yrs & never had a gf.Finally,I think its time 2 do what I wants.Its my childhood dream 2 hav breast.So I finally took d courage 2do it.Spore costs too expensive.Government would costs $10K & Private Clinic in Spore would costs $16K!So I decided 2 go Bangkok,Thailand.Only $4K-$5K.I fly over 2 Thailand at 7.30pm on 4April2013 & on 5April2013,I had my breast implant surgery at Yanhee Hospital at Bangkok,Thailand.I actually wanted 2 do 525cc(D Cup)Breast Implant.But Doctor says he can only do Max 400cc cause my skin tissue(flat chest),he unable 2 insert 525cc Silicone.So I choose 395cc which is no difference from 400cc.Below 400cc costs 95,000 Thai Baht=$4100.But 400cc-525cc costs 110,000 Thai Baht=$4700.Air Ticket etc u spend total less than $5K,u save half d price compare 2 Spore.After d surgery,I feels so happy 2 hav breast.Yes!Yes!Yes!Yes!I finally hav breast.Having Breast brings me happiness,confident,motivation & d will power 2 survive & overcome all odds.Oh!Its true!Its true!Its real!Its real!U will feels v shiok & comfortable having breast.I strongly encourage all men 2go 4 Breast Implant.I really regret....I regret I didnt do d Breast Implant earlier.If can,I would do breast implant 10+yrs ago."
"Since I was a kid, 4 years old, I always wanted to have best... I strongly encourage all men who got no best, go and do the best implant. Yes, baby. You'll feel shiok, you'll feel comfortable, you'll feel great... I finally have best, baby. Yes, yes yes!"

Men more concerned with penis size when with other men - "A majority, 65 per cent, said their ideal male body size would be smaller than the ideal size suggested by others. The men were also asked whether they believed they would be a better sexual partner if they had a bigger penis. Ms Chan said the men were "more concerned about how their overall body size compared to the perceived male ideal than they were about how their size might impact on their sexual relations"... Men with larger than average penises also reported higher levels of self-esteem, better general health and higher overall body satisfaction Men who were happy with the size of their penis were also less likely to have used an online dating service, or to have used Viagra Overweight men had lower self-esteem, higher body dissatisfaction and greater use of the internet for socialising. "We have relatively little data about the body image of men because most of the research in this area concentrates on women," Ms Chan says. "It means men don't really get much help in terms of therapy and options out there to get help.""

Disabled men have sexual needs too says sex surrogate - "ONE of my favourite clients is a quadriplegic — he has no arms and no legs. I have been having sex with him for about 18 months, at least once every two months... People think sex workers are unemotional but often I only just make it to the car before I burst into tears. Imagine life with no sexual gratification? These men can’t meet girlfriends in the normal way. I have 40 regulars, aged from 21 to 71, their disabilities range from learning difficulties to cerebral palsy, quadriplegia and autism. I charge £150 for the first hour, £100 for the following hours... when I was studying law at university I worked in the sex industry to fund my studies. So having sex with strangers was nothing new to me but learning how to work with disabled people has been a steep but rewarding learning curve... Sexual surrogacy has to be a business arrangement. I don’t think clients want to feel the surrogates are doing what they are doing out of pity. As a disabled person, I would never want someone to feel sorry for me."

Russian paratroopers deploy inflatable Orthodox church - "This is a film of a training session of the Russian Army deploying an inflatable Orthodox church and paratrooping priests"

What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage - New York Times - "I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband. The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband. Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller... I also began to analyze my husband the way a trainer considers an exotic animal... After two years of exotic animal training, my marriage is far smoother, my husband much easier to love. I used to take his faults personally; his dirty clothes on the floor were an affront, a symbol of how he didn't care enough about me. But thinking of my husband as an exotic species gave me the distance I needed to consider our differences more objectively. I adopted the trainers' motto: "It's never the animal's fault"... I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away. You can't stop a badger from digging, and you can't stop my husband from losing his wallet and keys. PROFESSIONALS talk of animals that understand training so well they eventually use it back on the trainer. My animal did the same"
Good luck to a man who wrote about how to "train" women, or of a woman as an exotic species

Is Love Colorblind?

2013-04-30T14:35:00.000+08:00

Steve Sailer: "Is Love Colorblind?" - Interracial Marriage

"Interracial marriages are increasingly recognized as epitomizing what our society values most in a marriage: the triumph of true love over convenience and prudence... What's fascinating, however, is that in recent years a startling number of nonwhites -- especially Asian men and black women -- have become bitterly opposed to intermarriage...

Intermarriages show that integration can churn up unexpected racial conflicts by spotlighting enduring differences between the races. For example, probably the most disastrous mistake Marcia Clark made in prosecuting O. J. Simpson was to complacently allow Johnny Cochran to pack the jury with black women. As a feminist, Mrs. Clark smugly assumed that all female jurors would identify with Nicole Simpson. She ignored pretrial research indicating that black women tended to see poor Nicole as The Enemy, one of those beautiful blondes who steal successful black men from their black first wives, and deserve whatever they get.

The heart of the problem for Asian men and black women is that intermarriage does not treat every sex/race combination equally: on average, it has offered black men and Asian women new opportunities for finding mates among whites, while exposing Asian men and black women to new competition from whites.

In the 1990 Census, 72 percent of black - white couples consisted of a black husband and a white wife. In contrast, white - Asian pairs showed the reverse: 72 percent consisted of a white husband and an Asian wife.

Sexual relations outside of marriage are less fettered by issues of family approval and long-term practicality, and they appear to be even more skewed. The 1992 Sex in America study of 3,432 people, as authoritative a work as any in a field where reliable data are scarce, found that ten times more single white women than single white men reported that their most recent sex partner was black.

Few whites comprehend the growing impact on minorities of these interracial husband - wife disparities. One reason is that the effect on whites has been balanced. Although white women hunting for husbands, for example, suffer more competition from Asian women, they also enjoy increased access to black men. Further, the weight of numbers dilutes the effect on whites.

In 1990, 1.46 million Asian women were married, compared to only 1.26 million Asian men. This net drain of 0.20 million white husbands into marriages to Asian women is too small to be noticed by the 75 million white women, except in Los Angeles and a few other cities with large Asian populations and high rates of intermarriage. Yet, this 0.20 million shortage of Asian wives leaves a high proportion of frustrated Asian bachelors in its wake.

Black women's resentment of intermarriage is now a staple of daytime talk shows, hit movies like Waiting to Exhale, and magazine articles. Black novelist Bebe Moore Campbell described her and her tablemates' reactions upon seeing a black actor enter a restaurant with a blonde: ``In unison, we moaned, we groaned, we rolled our eyes heavenward . . . Then we all shook our heads as we lamented for the 10,000th time the perfidy of black men, and cursed trespassing white women who dared to 'take our men'''... [Asian] women retort that the men are racist and sexist for getting sore about it. All they can agree upon is that Media Stereotypes and/or Low Self-Esteem must somehow be at fault.

LET'S review other facts about intermarriage and how they violate conventional sociological theories.

1. You would normally expect more black women than black men to marry whites because far more black women are in daily contact with whites... black women are far more prevalent than black men in universities (by 80 per cent in grad schools), in corporate offices, and in other places where members of the bourgeoisie, black or white, meet their mates.

Despite these opportunities to meet white men, so many middle-class black women have trouble landing satisfactory husbands that they have made Terry (Waiting to Exhale) McMillan, author of novels specifically about and for them, into a best-selling brand name. Probably the most popular romance advice regularly offered to affluent black women of a certain age is to find true love in the brawny arms of a younger black man. Both Miss McMillan's 1996 best-seller How Stella Got Her Groove Back and the most celebrated of all books by black women, Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, are romance novels about well-to-do older women and somewhat dangerous younger men. Of course, as Miss Hurston herself later learned at age 49, when she (briefly) married a 23-year-old gym coach, that seldom works out in real life.

2. Much more practical-sounding advice would be: Since there are so many unmarried Asian men and black women, they should find solace for their loneliness by marrying each other. Yet, when was the last time you saw an Asian man and a black woman together? Black-man/Asian-woman couples are still quite unusual, but Asian-man/black-woman pairings are incomparably more rare.

Similar patterns appear in other contexts:

3a. Within races: Black men tend to most ardently pursue lighter-skinned, longer-haired black women (e.g., Spike Lee's School Daze). Yet black women today do not generally prefer fairer men.

3b. In other countries: In Britain, 40 per cent of black men are married to or living with a white woman, versus only 21 per cent of black women married to or living with a white man.

3c. In art: Madame Butterfly, a white-man/Asian-woman tragedy, has been packing them in for a century, recently under the name Miss Saigon... Maybe Shakespeare did know a thing or two about humanity: America's leading portrayer of Othello, James Earl Jones, has twice fallen in love with and married the white actress playing opposite him as Desdemona.

4. The civil-rights revolution left husband - wife balances among interracial couples more unequal... the relatively high proportion of Asian-man/white-woman couples in 1960 was a holdover caused by anti-Asian immigration laws that had prevented women, most notably Chinese women, from joining the largely male pioneer immigrants. As late as 1930 Chinese-Americans were 80 per cent male. So, the limited number of Chinese men who found wives in the mid twentieth century included a relatively high fraction marrying white women. In other words, as legal and social discrimination have lessened, natural inequalities have asserted themselves...

SINCE these inequalities in interracial marriage are so contrary to conventional expectations, what causes them? Academia's and the mass media's preferred reaction has been to ignore husband - wife disproportions entirely. When the subject has raised its ugly head, though, they've typically tossed out arbitrary ideas to explain a single piece of the puzzle, rather than address the entire yin and yang of black - white and white - Asian marriages. For example, a Japanese-American poetry professor in Minnesota has written extensively on his sexual troubles with white women. He blames the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Presumably, the similarity of frustrations of Chinese-American men is just a coincidence caused by, say, China losing the Opium War. And the problems of Vietnamese men stem from winning the Vietnam War, etc. But piecemeal rationalizations are unappealing compared to a theory which might explain all the evidence...

The usual sociological explanations for who marries whom (e.g., availability, class, and social approval) never work simultaneously for blacks and Asians. This isn't surprising because these social-compatibility factors influence the total number of black - white or white - Asian marriages more than the husband - wife proportions within intermarriages.

By emphasizing how society encourages us to marry people like ourselves, sociologists miss half the picture: by definition, heterosexual attraction thrives on differences. Although Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering are so compatible that they break into song about it (``Why Can't a Woman Be More like a Man?''), Higgins falls in love with Eliza Doolittle. Opposites attract. And certain race/sex pairings seem to be more opposite than others. The force driving these skewed husband - wife proportions appears to be differences in perceived sexual attractiveness. On average, black men tend to appear slightly more and Asian men slightly less masculine than white men, while Asian women are typically seen as slightly more and black women as slightly less feminine than white women.

Obviously, these are gross generalizations about the races. Nobody believes Michael Jackson could beat up kung-fu star Jackie Chan or that comedienne Margaret Cho is lovelier than Sports Illustrated swimsuit covergirl Tyra Banks. But life is a game of probabilities, not of abstract Platonic essences.

So, what makes blacks more masculine-seeming and Asians more feminine-seeming? Media stereotypes are sometimes invoked... try channel-surfing for minority women. You'll see black women dancing, singing, joking, and romancing. If, however, you even see an Asian woman, she'll probably be newscasting -- not the most alluring of roles.

Conventional wisdom sometimes cites social conditioning as well. But while this is not implausible for American-born blacks, who come from a somewhat homogeneous culture, it's insensitive to the diversity of cultures in which Asians are raised. Contrast Koreans and Filipinos and Cambodian refugees and fifth-generation Japanese-Americans. It's not clear they have much in common culturally other than that in the West their women are more in demand as spouses than their men.

One reasonable cultural explanation for the sexual attractiveness of black men today is the hypermasculinization of black life over the last few decades. To cite a benign aspect of this trend, if you've followed the Olympics on TV since the 1960s you've seen sprinters' victory celebrations evolve from genteel exercises in restraint into orgies of fist-pumping, trash-talking black machismo. This showy masculinization of black behavior may be in part a delayed reaction to the long campaign by Southern white males to portray themselves as ``The Man'' and the black man as a ``boy.'' But let's not be content to stop our analysis here. Why did Jim Crow whites try so hard to demean black manhood? As we've seen, the chief reason was to prevent black men from impregnating white women.

So, did all racist whites a century ago make keeping minorities away from their women their highest priority? No. As noted earlier, the anti-Asian immigration laws kept Asian women out, forcing many Asian immigrant bachelors to look for white women (with mixed success). While white men were certainly not crazy about this side effect, it seemed an acceptable tradeoff, since they feared Asian immigrants more as economic than as sexual competitors. But why did whites historically dread the masculine charms of blacks more than those of Asians? Merely asking this question points out that social conditioning is ultimately a superficial explanation of the differences among peoples. Yes, society socializes individuals, but what socializes society?

There are only three fundamental causes for the myriad ways groups differ. The first is unsatisfying but no doubt important: random flukes of history. The second, the favorite of Thomas Sowell and Jared Diamond, is differences in geography and climate. The third is human biodiversity. Let's look at three physical differences between the races. 1) Asian men tend to be shorter than white and black men. Does this matter in the mating game? One of America's leading hands-on researchers into this question, 7'1", 280-pound basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, reports that in his ample experience being tall and strong never hurt. Biological anthropologists confirm this, finding that taller tends to be better in the eyes of most women in just about all cultures...

2. This general principle -- the more racial integration there is, the more important become physical differences among the races -- can also be seen with regard to hair length. The ability to grow long hair is a useful indicator of youth and good health. (Ask anybody on chemotherapy.) Since women do not go bald and can generally grow longer hair than men, most cultures associate longer hair with femininity. Although blacks' hair doesn't grow as long as whites' or Asians' hair, that's not a problem for black women in all-black societies. After integration, though, hair often becomes an intense concern for black women competing with longer-haired women of other races. While intellectuals in black-studies departments' ebony towers denounce ``Eurocentric standards of beauty,'' most black women respond more pragmatically. They one-up white women by buying straight from the source of the longest hair: the Wall Street Journal recently reported on the booming business in furnishing African-American women with ``weaves'' and ``extensions'' harvested from the follicularly gifted women of China.

3. Muscularity may most sharply differentiate the races in terms of sexual attractiveness. Women like men who are stronger than they; men like women who are rounder and softer. The ending of segregation in sports has made racial differences in muscularity harder to ignore. Although the men's 100-meter dash is among the world's most widely contested events, in the last four Olympics all 32 finalists have been blacks of West African descent.

Is muscularity quantifiable? PBS fitness expert Covert Bailey finds that he needs to recommend different goals -- in terms of percentage of body fat -- to his clients of different races. The standard goal for adult black men is 12 per cent body fat, versus 18 per cent for Asian men. The goals for women are 7 points higher than for men of the same race.

For interracial couples, their ``gender gaps'' in body-fat goals correlate uncannily with their husband - wife proportions in the 1990 Census... men want women who make them feel more like men, and vice versa for women.

Understanding the impact of genetic racial differences on American life is a necessity for anybody who wants to understand our increasingly complex society. For example, the sense of betrayal felt by Asian men certainly makes sense. After all, they tend to surpass the national average in those long-term virtues -- industry, self-restraint, law-abidingness -- that society used to train young women to look for in a husband. Yet, now that discrimination has finally declined enough for Asian men to expect to reap the rewards for fulfilling traditional American standards of manliness, our culture has largely lost interest in indoctrinating young women to prize those qualities.

The frustrations of Asian men are a warning sign. When, in the names of freedom and feminism, young women listen less to the hard-earned wisdom of older women about how to pick Mr. Right, they listen even more to their hormones. This allows cruder measures of a man's worth -- like the size of his muscles -- to return to prominence. The result is not a feminist utopia, but a society in which genetically gifted guys can more easily get away with acting like Mr. Wrong.

George Orwell noted, "To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.'' We can no longer afford to have our public policy governed by fashionable philosophies which insists upon ignoring the obvious. The realities of interracial marriage, like those of professional sports, show that diversity and integration turn out in practice to be fatal to the reigning assumption of racial uniformity. The courageous individuals in interracial marriages have moved farthest past old hostilities. Yet, they've discovered not the featureless landscape of utter equality that was predicted by progressive pundits, but a landscape rich with fascinating racial patterns. Intellectuals should stop dreading the ever-increasing evidence of human biodiversity and start delighting in it."

BKK 2012 - Day 2, Part 4 - Ping Pong Show

2013-04-29T19:28:00.000+08:00

BKK 2012
Day 2, Part 4 - 8th September - Ping Pong Show

Finally, I was going to see what I had been wanting to see for several years now - the Ping Pong Show, a tribute to the power of the Human Body.

(for obvious reasons there won't be any photos for most of this post)

Amusingly, the woman at the door remembered me. There was no cover charge, so I ordered a Sprite (and got a receipt, wow) for 125B and sat back to watch the action. The UV light in the bar made it a bit more sleazy but it helped me scribble my notes so that was good.

While waiting for the main event, there were some girls dancing. They were more active than earlier in the evening, and even engaged in a spot of pole dancing.

I was not the only one in the bar, which was a good sign (that they wouldn't rip me off or drug me and steal my kidneys). I even took a seat near the exit so I could run out if there was trouble, but my fears were overblown.

After a while, one girl finally came up to me, but she gave up after a while because she could tell I was not interested.

Intriguingly, all of the staff were female. Even the girl at the bar and what seemed like the boss (a male bartender appeared later). So whatever you might say, this was not about men exploiting women (unless you want to claim, like a good conspiracy theorist, that the big boss in the shadows was male).

Finally, a girl came out with 3 ping pong balls in her hand. A Thai song was played and after insertion the balls were shot into a glass on the bar. Except that she cheated sometimes, using her thighs and calves to guide the ball down. There wasn't the shooting of ping pong balls that I had heard so much about, so I was disappointed.

Then 2 girls came out. They started doing a bartop dance, then they pulled out what must've been 2m garlands from their nether regions, and used them as props for a dance while other girls pranced around them.

Next, 6 girls went up with short sarongs at their hips and garlands around their chests. They dragged out their performance and just gyrated their hips. This lasted for at least 15 minutes and was boring. Maybe it would've gotten more interesting if I had drunk alcohol, which might've been the point. The Asian uncle beside me lost patience and left - not even finishing his Diet Coke. I held out, though.

I noticed other Asian guys in the bar, but like me they were mostly ignored. A white couple came in, and then some white guys BYO-ed Thai girls.

Finally the good stuff came back. To Aerosmith's "I don't wanna miss a thing", the girl smoked a cigarette with her fanny. Then she played a bicycle trumpet to Queen's "We are the champions". Then candles on a birthday cake were blown out. Next she put a banana inside and shot it out.

One girl looked at my sheet of paper and was shocked.

One girl came to me and said she wanted a Cola. I felt sorry for her, so I tipped her 100B (so she would get 100%) and told her I was just there to watch.

Then 3 girls came out with candles in each hand and performed a choreographed dance. They dripped hot wax on their tongues and chests, and continued holding candles above themselves. This bizarre S&M display was not very synchronised, and not very professional either (one kept brushing wax off herself). They would've done better to stick to their core competencies.

Next came a fun part - the audience participation round. The guy in front of me (Asian, of course) refused to take part, so I took over the balloon. The same girl from previously (it seemed very few of them had the natural talents and/or skills necessary to take part in the Ping Pong Show - if she runs away, they're dead) then came back. Significantly, her hair was in a practical ponytail. First she pulled a long string with something sharp (razor blades, I think) from inside her, to the same Aerosmith song. She then disappeared and returned with a short blowpipe.

I got to hold a balloon aloft (the Thai girl beside me declined, so I decided that the worst that could happen was that I would be crippled for life from dart damage and possible infection from her vaginal lubrication and bit the bullet), and the girl popped my balloon with a dart from her blowpipe.

I noticed some local groups. One had 2 guys and 4 girls. The Ping Pong Show was almost family entertainment!

After the previous stunt, 16 girls came on stage (the bartop) and "danced". It was really crowded so there was no room to dance. Maybe they were waiting for guys to take them back. After a while I concluded the show was over and made ready to leave. I was aided in my decision by the fact that the bartop dancing was about as erotic as a viewing of Eyes Wide Shut (for one, a lot of them used their hands to cover their gonads, which was really unprofessional).

Overall, I was really impressed. I'd read that the Ping Pong Show girls were bored and ugly. Except for the first Ping Pong stunt (ironically the titular act was one of the less impressive) I was quite entertained and amazed, and I'd seen all of the acts described except for the writing of "Welcome to Thailand" with a marker, and the shooting of ping pong balls at guests (maybe this was because of Health & Safety concerns, so I was unable to emulate the guy who I heard produced a ping pong bat and hit the ball back at the girl).

I was almost moved by the establishment's commitment to Health and Safety - the Ping Pong Show and Candle show performers had tied their hairs to minimise fire risks, and they didn't wear shoes so they wouldn't fall off the bartop.

Sign: "Bar fine/pay bar
Lady dance 600B
Sexy show 800B"
Presumably the bar fine depended on how attractive the girl was.

Are there any PRCs in the Thai sex trade? I doubt it, but is this due to protectionism by the mafia or are they unable to compete on Thai girls' native ground due to local knowledge and an uncompetitive cost structure?

One of the bar's management asked me if I was a student. I said I'd tell my friends to come, as the show was very good. She didn't seem convinced, and later chased me out by asking if I wanted another drink. I had set a 1 hr time limit anyway and as previously mentioned it didn't look like there was going to be anymore Ping Pong antics, so I left the overcrowded fish in the tank.

There was an auntie going down the street at midnight peddling soft toys. Uhh.

At this hour the metro no longer worked so I got a tuk tuk back. He quoted me 400B but I managed to knock it down to 200B.

Death defying tuktuk ride

The brake lights were cute

Carpark shrine

I was peckish. Luckily there were hawkers at the foot of the hotel.

"Thai Food. Cheap & Delicious". And no English menu, so I went to the next place.

"Kob's Kitchen"

Stir fried wild boar with chili sounded interesting but was 130B. So I went for ribbon noodles with pork for 70B. Beside the canal, I got to enjoy the authentic smell of Thailand (and at that point, what was probably a sewage truck rolled past, intensifying the experience).

This was good (even if essentially fried horfun) but it was a ripoff at about S$3. What does it say if the price is about the same as in Singapore?

Street seating

"Healthy Boy Light Soya Sauce"

"TGM: Thai-German Meat Product"
I thought of "Transsexual Genital Mutilation"

Longan drink. It tasted like longan red date. The ingredients: longan extract, sucrose (i.e. sugar) and fructose syrup (i.e. sugar). Somehow water was missing.

I want to be a SPG too. Note that "SPG" is a registered trademark.

Why Soldiers March

2013-04-29T10:51:00.000+08:00

"Perhaps the quirkiest expression of the insurrectionary idea was the Turnbewegung, or gymnasts’ movement, founded by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn in 1811 in the Hasenheide park in what is now the Berlin suburb of Neukölln. The aim of the movement was to train young men for a coming war against the French. The objective was not to train paramilitaries, but to evolve specifically civilian forms of bodily prowess and patriotic commitment in preparation for a struggle in which the people as a whole would be pitted against the enemy. The gymnasts were not ‘soldiers’, a term that Jahn despised for its mercenary associations (‘Sold’ is the German word for wage), hut citizen-fighters whose participation in the struggle was entirely voluntary, because it was motivated by love for the fatherland. Gymnasts did not ‘march’, Iahn pointed out in The Art of German Gymnastics, the official catechism of the early movement, because marching killed the autonomous will and was intended to degrade the individual to the mere tool of a higher authority. Instead they ‘walked’, swinging their legs in a flowing, natural motion, as befitted free men. The art of the gymnast, Jahn wrote, ‘is an enduring site [eine bleibende Stätte] for the building of fresh sociable virtues [ .. . ] of a sense of decency and law and [of feeling for] cheerful obedience without prejudice to freedom of movement and high-spirited independence’.’

In order to facilitate this freedom of movement, Jahn developed a special costume, whose loose jacket and wide-legged trousers of grey unbleached linen were designed to accommodate and encourage the free forms of bodily movement so prized by the gymnasts. Here again, there was an antimilitary dimension: ‘The light and austere, unpretentious and thoroughly functional linen costume of the gymnast,’ Jahn wrote, ‘is unsuited to [. . .] braids, aiguillettes, armbands, dress swords and gauntlets on the leaders of processions etc. The earnest spirit of the fighter (Wehrmannsernst) is thereby transformed into idle play.” Coupled with this hostility to the hierarchical order of the traditional military was an implicit egalitarianism. Jahn’s followers were encouraged to address each other as ‘du’, and their distinctive costume helped to dissolve harriers of status by removing the outward signs of social difference.” The gymnasts were even known to sing songs proclaiming that all members were ‘equal in estate and rank’ (‘Au Rang und Stand sind alle gleich'). Jahn's outdoor displays, in wnicn young men swung, twirled and twisted on raised bars that were the prototypes of today’s gymnastic equipment, attracted huge crowds. Here was a clear demonstration of how patriotism could provide the key to a reconceptualizarion of political culture as rooted in voluntary allegiances rather than hierarchical structures of authority."

--- Iron Kingdom: The Rise And Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 / Christopher M. Clark

BKK 2012 - Day 2, Part 3 - Nightlife

2013-04-28T23:51:00.006+08:00

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it" - Oscar Wilde

***

BKK 2012
Day 2, Part 3 - 8th September - Nightlife

For dinner we decided to pick on street food. The taxi fare was 77B according to the meter, but when I accidentally passed the taxi driver 5 x 20B notes, the guy pretended and I had to ask for the extra note back. Bloody hell. In countries where people are honest, one does not need to ask. Of course one can always indulge in victim blaming (even if the drivers refuse to use meters), but that is frowned upon in one other context, which is allegedly the only one where it happens.

I was tempted to call the "Passenger Protection Center"

"buy 1 get 1 free" - in Russian

Sawadee Ronald

To start the evening off, I had a Samurai Pork Burger.

Inside. 68B (128B in a set). The patty was similar to the breakfast sausage (the real one, not the rubbish you find in Singapore).

Interestingly, there was both "tomato" and "American ketchup"
Tomato was lighter in both colour and taste than "American Ketchup". It tasted less processed, and a bit sweeter and nicer.

"What men ♂ really want" - a woman to drag them to a sale?

"It's not just fashion. It's your identity"
A monument to consumerism

Flower vendors for shrine

Idol at Thao Maha Brahma

Amusingly the sign at the front of the Vietnamese embassy was in neither Vietnamese nor Thai - but in English.

THAT'S A MAN, BABY

The size and arrangement of the shopping centres in this part of Bangkok were very vulgar, and to make things worse they were playing some music very loudly

Outdated French cultural festival sign (2007)

Herbal chicken noodles
The dark thing was congealed blood. It was like fresh tofu - fresh-tasting and wobbly.

Crepes with various sweet fillings

Mass Production Pad Thai

There was a ride from the late 90s with a trailer playing on a monitor:

Ymax. Before this there wa sa shot of 3 ladies all in masks
The CGI was more than a decade behind (ergo my dating it to the late 90s)
One course was called 'space hole'. It was a space dogfight. Right.

Banana margarine prata with egg and condensed milk, 40B. It wasn't that cheap.

Various fried stuff: 6B per half wing, and you could choose what you wanted

Pandemonium

Maneki-neko shop

Headache inducing array of Maneki-nekos

I hope the Lucky Cats boosted Kin's business

20B orange juice. The previous day's was better as it had been sweeter and more refreshing

On a shopping centre's screen, there was an amusing ad for Wacoal Must Haves, which I didn't manage to film as it went by quite quickly and the repetition schedule was uncertain. I think this is it:

I don't speak a word of Thai, but although lots of products feature in the ad, I'm quite the "must have" the ad refers to is a pushup bra, like the girl in the ad. Do note also this very suggestive part of the ad:

I checked, and this is NOT the Wacoal logo

When you gotta go you gotta go

Funny ad of people being knocked down. VRZO

His sausage is huge

Squid

I then made my way to Soi Cowboy, a "nightlife" district. I had one and only one aim for the night. I had considered going to Patpong, but apparently it was more dodgy. The compact size of Soi Cowboy (one alley) also helped.

Entrance

There was a dodgy place with 24 hour room rental.

There was a white guy smoking in front of a no smoking sign.

Sin street

"The Old Dutch Corner. The place for steak, burgers and BBQ. Thai menu available"
I had my doubts

"Inside: more ladies than you can handle"

"Family is your life. Drug is evil"
Presumably it's okay to fool around, just don't take drugs

"hotel going to Rise the price
Short time: 400 up to 450 bath
long time: 1300 up to 1400 bath"
Me love you short time?

Amusingly, someone tried to recreate the scene (with limited success):

A very "..." ad

Annoyingly what I had come for was only available at one place, Rawhide, and it was not available until 11pm. I asked another girl and she said it was the only place in the whole stretch that I could get what I wanted. I peeked in and at this time (just before 9) there were just girls doing bartop dancing (the proper sort - nude and in heels, not the crap version you have in Singapore). And they weren't very enthusiastic either, just making slight motions. So I had to kill 2 hours, and that wasn't enough time to look for Baron Sukumvit.

110B Thai Iced Tea. It was nice but Shaw Towers's Ah Loy Thai was as nice, at half the price. Ah well, at least I got Wifi.
Actually what was more annoying was that Asahi and Sangsom/Mea Kong whiskey were cheaper than the Thai Iced Tea.

Wine List. I had to commend the Sommelier (silently anyway) for the matching of alcohol to specific dishes and spiciness levels. Or maybe it was just random matching, since no one would be able to tell the difference.

Drinks menu

I had too much time to kill so I ordered cake. Which was served in an ashtray.

One of the spillover bars along the main road (not in the Soi Cowboy alley)

At 11pm when I returned to Cowhide, the crowd was a lot thicker. None of the girls solicited me, so I railed silently at being a victim of racism.

What I did at 11pm will be the subject of the next entry.

A sufficient condition for a Third World country: a dustbin in the toilet for your used toilet paper

The Value of Privacy

2013-04-27T12:30:00.000+08:00

“I’VE GOT NOTHING TO HIDE” AND OTHER MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF PRIVACY

"The argument that no privacy problem exists if a person has nothing to hide is frequently made in connection with many privacy issues. When the government engages in surveillance, many people believe that there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. Thus, if an individual engages only in legal activity, she has nothing to worry about. When it comes to the government collecting and analyzing personal information, many people contend that a privacy harm exists only if skeletons in the closet are revealed. For example, suppose the government examines one’s telephone records and finds out that a person made calls to her parents, a friend in Canada, a video store, and a pizza delivery shop. “So what?” that person might say. “I’m not embarrassed or humiliated by this information. If anybody asks me, I’ll gladly tell them what stores I shop at. I have nothing to hide.”

The “nothing to hide” argument and its variants are quite prevalent in popular discourse about privacy. Data security expert Bruce Schneier calls it the “most common retort against privacy advocates” Legal scholar Geoffrey Stone refers to it as “all-too-common refrain.” The “nothing to hide” argument is one of the primary arguments made when balancing privacy against security. In its most compelling form, it is an argument that the privacy interest is generally minimal to trivial, thus making the balance against security concerns a foreordained victory for security. Sometimes the “nothing to hide” argument is posed as a question: “If you have nothing to hide, then what do you have to fear?” Others ask: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, then what do you have to hide?”...

In order to respond to the “nothing to hide” argument, it is imperative that we have a theory about what privacy is and why it is valuable. At its core, the “nothing to hide” argument emerges from a conception of privacy and its value. What exactly is “privacy”? How valuable is privacy and how do we assess its value? How do we weigh privacy against countervailing values?...

Most replies to the “nothing to hide” argument quickly respond with a witty retort. Indeed, on the surface, it seems easy to dismiss the “nothing to hide” argument. Everybody probably has something to hide from somebody. As the author Alexander Solzenitsyn declared: “Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.” Likewise, in Friedrich Durrenmatt’s novella Traps, which involves a seemingly innocent man put on trial by a group of retired lawyers for a mock trial game, the man inquires what his crime shall be. “An altogether minor matter,” the prosecutor says, “[a] crime can always be found.” One can usually think of something compelling that even the most open person would want to hide. As one comment to my blog post noted: “If you have nothing to hide, then that quite literally means you are willing to let me photograph you naked? And I get full rights to that photograph - so I can show it to your neighbors?”2 Canadian privacy expert David Flaherty expresses a similar idea when he argues:

There is no sentient being in the Western world who has little or no regard for his or her personal privacy; those who would attempt such claims cannot withstand even a few minutes’ questioning about intimate aspects of their lives without capitulating to the intrusiveness of certain subject matters.

Such responses only attack the “nothing to hide” argument in its most extreme form, which is not particularly strong... In its more compelling variants, the “nothing to hide” argument can be made in a more general manner. Instead of contending that “I’ve got nothing to hide,” the argument can be recast as positing that all law-abiding citizens should have nothing to hide. Only if people desire to conceal unlawful activity should they be concerned, but according to the “nothing to hide” argument, people engaged in illegal conduct have no legitimate claim to maintaining the privacy of such activities...

Therefore, in a more compelling form than is often expressed in popular discourse, the “nothing to hide” argument proceeds as follows: The NSA surveillance, data mining, or other government information-gathering programs will result in the disclosure of particular pieces of information to a few government officials, or perhaps only to government computers. This very limited disclosure of the particular information involved is not likely to be threatening to the privacy of law-abiding citizens. Only those who are engaged in illegal activities have a reason to hide this information. Although there may be some cases in which the information might be sensitive or embarrassing to law-abiding citizens, the limited disclosure lessens the threat to privacy. Moreover, the security interest in detecting, investigating, and preventing terrorist attacks is very high and outweighs whatever minimal or moderate privacy interests law-abiding citizens may have in these particular pieces of information.

Cast in this manner, the “nothing to hide” argument is a formidable one. It balances the degree to which an individual’s privacy is compromised by the limited disclosure of certain information against potent national security interests. Under such a balancing scheme, it is quite difficult for privacy to prevail...

Many commentators had been using the metaphor of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to describe the problems created by the collection and use of personal data.48 I contended that the Orwell metaphor, which focuses on the harms of surveillance (such as inhibition and social control) might be apt to describe law enforcement’s monitoring of citizens. But much of the data gathered in computer databases is not particularly sensitive, such as one’s race, birth date, gender, address, or marital status. Many people do not care about concealing the hotels they stay at, the cars they own or rent, or the kind of beverages they drink. People often do not take many steps to keep such information secret. Frequently, though not always, people’s activities would not be inhibited if others knew this information.

I suggested a different metaphor to capture the problems – Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used. The problems captured by the Kafka metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition or chilling. Instead, they are problems of information processing—the storage, use, or analysis of data—rather than information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but they also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.

I explored the ways that legal and policy solutions were focusing too much on the nexus of problems under the Orwell metaphor – those of surveillance – and were not adequately addressing the Kafka problems – those of information processing. The difficulty, I noted, was that commentators were trying to conceive of the problems caused by databases in terms of surveillance when, in fact, these problems were different. The way that these problems are conceived has a tremendous impact on the legal and policy solutions used to solve them. As John Dewey observed, “a problem well put is half-solved.” “The way in which the problem is conceived,” Dewey explained, “decides what specific suggestions are entertained and which are dismissed; what data are selected and which rejected; it is the criterion for relevancy and irrelevancy of hypotheses and conceptual structures"...

*author presents a taxonomy of privacy to deal with the plurality of privacy issues*

Many theories of privacy view it as an individual right. For example, Thomas Emerson declares that privacy “is based upon premises of individualism, that the society exists to promote the worth and dignity of the individual. . . . The right of privacy . . . is essentially the right not to participate in the collective life—the right to shut out the community.” In the words of one court: “Privacy is inherently personal. The right to privacy recognizes the sovereignty of the individual.”

Traditionally, rights have often been understood as protecting the individual against the incursion of the community, based on respect for the individual’s personhood or autonomy. Many theories of privacy’s value understand privacy in this manner. For example, Charles Fried argues that privacy is one of the “basic rights in persons, rights to which all are entitled equally, by virtue of their status as persons. . . . In this sense, the view is Kantian; it requires recognition of persons as ends, and forbids the overriding of their most fundamental interests for the purpose of maximizing the happiness or welfare of all.”

Many of the interests that conflict with privacy, however, also involve people’s autonomy and dignity. Free speech, for example, is also an individual right which is essential to autonomy. Yet in many cases, it clashes with privacy...

Etzioni is right to critique those who argue that privacy is an individual right that should trump social interests. The problem, however, is that utilitarian balancing between individual rights and the common good rarely favors individual rights—unless the interest advanced on the side of the common good is trivial. Society will generally win when its interests are balanced against those of the individual.

The deeper problem with Etzioni’s view is that in his critique of liberal theories of individual rights as absolutes, he views individual rights as being in tension with society. The same dichotomy between individual and society that pervades liberal theories of individual rights also pervades Etzioni’s communitarianism...

In contrast, John Dewey proposed an alternative theory about the relationship between individual and community. For Dewey, there is no strict dichotomy between individual and society. The individual is shaped by society, and the good of both the individual and society are often interrelated rather than antagonistic: “We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social beings. Hence we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and of their good.” Dewey contended that the value of protecting individual rights emerges from their contribution to society. In other words, individual rights are not trumps, but are protections by society from its intrusiveness. Society makes space for the individual because of the social benefits this space provides. Therefore, Dewey argues, rights should be valued based on “the contribution they make to the welfare of the community.” Otherwise, in any kind of utilitarian calculus, individual rights would not be valuable enough to outweigh most social interests, and it would be impossible to justify individual rights. As such, Dewey argued, we must insist upon a “social basis and social justification” for civil liberties...

The problem with the nothing to hide argument is with its underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things. Agreeing with this assumption concedes far too much ground and leads to an unproductive discussion of information people would likely want or not want to hide. As Bruce Schneier aptly notes, the “nothing to hide” argument stems from a faulty “premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong.”

The deeper problem with the “nothing to hide” argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of concealment or secrecy. But understanding privacy as a plurality of related problems demonstrates that concealment of bad things is just one among many problems caused by government programs such as the NSA surveillance and data mining...

Many scholars have referred to the information collection as a form of surveillance. “Dataveillance,” a term coined by Roger Clarke, refers to the “systemic use of personal data systems in the investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons.” Christopher Slobogin has referred to the gathering of personal information in business records as “transactional surveillance.” Surveillance can create chilling effects on people’s conduct by chilling free speech, free association, and other First Amendment rights essential for democracy. Even surveillance of legal activities can inhibit people from engaging in them. It might be that particular people may not be chilled by surveillance – indeed, probably most people will not be except those engaging in particularly unpopular speech or associating with disfavored groups. The value of protecting against such chilling is not measured simply in terms of the value to those particular individuals. Chilling effects harm society because, among other things, they reduce the range of viewpoints being expressed and the degree of freedom with which to engage in political activity...

The NSA programs are problematic even if no information people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior, but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system’s use of personal data and its exclusion of the protagonist from having any knowledge or participation in the process. The harms consist of those created by bureaucracies – indifference, errors, abuses, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability. One such harm, for example, which I call “aggregation,” emerges from the combination of small bits of seemingly innocuous data. When combined, the information become much more telling about a person... Moreover, data mining aims to be predictive of behavior. In other words, it purports to prognosticate about our future actions. People who match certain profiles are deemed likely to engage in a similar pattern of behavior. It is quite difficult to refute actions that one has not yet done. Having nothing to hide will not always dispel predictions of future activity.

Another problem in the taxonomy, which is implicated by the NSA program, is the problem I refer to as “exclusion.” Exclusion is the problem caused when people are prevented from having knowledge about how their information is being used, as well as barred from being able to access and correct errors in that data. The NSA program involves a massive database of information that individuals cannot access. Indeed, it was kept secret for years. This kind of information processing, which forbids people’s knowledge or involvement, resembles in some ways a kind of due process problem. It is a structural problem involving the way people are treated by government institutions. Moreover, it creates a power imbalance between individuals and the government. To what extent should the Executive Branch, and an agency such as the NSA, which is relatively insulated from the political process and public accountability, have a significant power over citizens? This issue is not about whether the information gathered is something people want to hide, but rather about the power and the structure of government...

A related problem involves “secondary use.” Secondary use is the use of data obtained for one purpose for a different unrelated purpose without the person’s consent...

Therefore, the problem with the “nothing to hide” argument is that it focuses on just one or two particular kinds of privacy problems – the disclosure of personal information or surveillance – and not others...

One of the difficulties with the “nothing to hide” argument is that it looks for a visceral kind of injury as opposed to a structural one... [Some] examples aside, there is not a lot of death and gore in privacy law... The purpose of my article was to explain why there is still a harm even though blood is not oozing out of a victim...

At the end of the day, privacy is not a horror movie, and demanding more palpable harms will be difficult in many cases. Yet there is still a harm worth addressing, even if it is not sensationalistic.

In many instances, privacy is threatened not by singular egregious acts but by a slow series of relatively minor acts, which gradually begin to add up. In this way, privacy problems resemble certain environmental harms...

The problem caused by breaches of confidentiality do not merely consist of individual emotional distress; they involve a violation of trust within a relationship. There is a strong social value in ensuring that promises are kept and that trust is maintained in relationships between businesses and their customers... any stated limits become meaningless, and companies have discretion to boundlessly use data. Such a state of affairs can leave nearly all consumers in a powerless position. The harm, then, is less one to particular individuals than it is a structural harm...

The security interest should not get weighed in its totality against the privacy interest. Rather, what should get weighed is the extent of marginal limitation on the effectiveness of a government information gathering or data mining program by imposing judicial oversight and minimization procedures

Against Equality Again

2013-04-26T14:00:00.000+08:00

Against Equality Again

"Equality in the present age has become an idol, in much the same way as property was in the age of Locke. Many people worship it, and think that it provides the key to the proper understanding of politics, and that on it alone can a genuinely just society be reconstructed. This is a mistake...

The concept of equality belongs, properly speaking, to the mathematical disciplines. Numbers, lengths, angles, vectors, tensors can be said to be equal to one another without any trace of metaphor. There are some attributes of men where questions of equality can be raised without any conceptual strain. We can ask whether one man is as tall as another, or we may, like Procrustes, seek to establish equality among all men in this respect... most human attributes cannot be quantified without distortion. I cannot have as much education as you, nor as much love, nor as much happiness, because education, love and happiness are not commodities that can be measured and thus compared. One fundamental objection to egalitarianism is that it encourages people to view the good things of life in depersonalised, homogenized terms so that politicians can argue about how much should be assigned to anybody, but nobody can actually engender or enjoy them. It misconceives our human nature to see us primarily as possessors rather than as agents. Although we have feelings of pleasure and pain, and can have possessions, we are first and foremost agents, who do things. We are happy, we love, we are educated, in and by doing things, not in having things done to us or being given them. To talk abstractly of these goods as something that we can have is subtly to misconstrue their real nature and thus prevent our achieving them...

Instead of saying that we shall all die---which is true but not very grandiloquent---we talk of death being the great equaliser. Equality before the law does not mean that the law metes out the same sentence to us all, innocent and guilty alike, but only that we are all under the law and all answerable for our illegal acts...

Discrimination between the sexes has been called in question in recent years `because, it is argued, no one has yet shown good enough reasons for thinking a person's sex relevant to the income he should earn---and the burden of proof rests on the discriminators'. But sometimes a practice is not called in question or is thought to be justified, as Benn goes on to point out: `On the other hand, discrimination according to sex for military service has been generally accepted without much question and is usually considered well grounded: so it is rarely called an inequality'... It is easy to ask questions, and easy not to be satisfied with the answers given. But not all questions ought to be answered, and often merely by asking a question one is committed to waiting for an answer and not dismissing it out of hand. Moreover, without considerable qualification the presumption of equality is bound to prove internally inconsistent. It cannot be a presumption we are always entitled to make...

It is dangerously easy in seeking a rational justification to smuggle in an assumption of omnipotence. In our age of unbelief we tend to be `egotheists' and to assume that we, or the State at our bidding, can arrange everything as seems best. But not everything is possible to the State, nor should it be. If we insist on the State's being answerable for all the arrangements of society, we implicitly concede to it absolute power. Unless we are totalitarians, we must be prepared on occasion to disclaim responsibility, and to refuse to offer a justification in the terms desired of some social arrangement which has attracted criticism. In an imperfect world inhabited by imperfect men, many things will go wrong, which are indubitably wrong, but which cannot be remedied except at the cost of much greater evils. Egalitarian sentiment leads easily to totalitarianism, and if we abhor totalitarianism we must be prepared on occasion to rebut the presumption of the egalitarians, and concede that not everything in our society can be justified...

If the egalitarian is entitled to call any form of discrimination in question, then the anti-egalitarian can reduce the presumption of equality to absurdity by calling in question some form of discrimination the egalitarian is disposed to accept. American advocates of Women's Lib who believe that considerations of chivalry should secure them exemption from the Draft Law are being inconsistent if they base their claim for equal treatment on a general refusal to allow that differences of sex can ever be relevant to the treatment meted out to a citizen by the state. Often in politics criteria of relevance are difficult to determine, and we have to take into account many different considerations based on different facts. The presumption of equality, however, focuses on just one factor, and ignores all the rest. At one time advanced educationalists get hot under the collar about inequalities of opportunity, and ask indignantly why the son of a rich man should be given a public school education while the much abler son of poor parents is denied one. No fluffy answers are accepted, and under the concentrated gaze of public scrutiny it becomes evident that what sort of education you get should not depend on who your parents are. A generation later the centre of indignation has shifted, and advanced educationalists ask indignantly why the education a boy gets should depend on the genes he happens to have inherited from his parents, and left-wing thinkers extol comprehensive schools with the aid of the same arguments that old Etonians used to use against the grammar school brigade in the days of the Butler education act. We may smile ironically, but should recognise that education is being grievously damaged and clarity obscured by a scheme of argument which presents issues in terms of a few arbitrarily selected black- and-white distinctions instead of a multitude of grey ones. The presumption of equality concentrates our attention on one distinction and leads us to ignore all the others. But whether a distinction is relevant or not cannot depend on whether the egalitarian happens to question it or not. It may be that at present no one questions the 18-plus selection for the university on the basis of academic ability. But if egalitarians aver that intellectual ability is no justification for giving one child an academic education denied to another, then I am anxious to know what, should the question of university entrance ever be raised, their answer will be. Ought I to be preparing myself to lecture on Aristotle's Ethics or on First-Order Predicate Calculus to people who know no Greek and cannot do Logic, but have come to Oxford in order to play rugger or row? It is, of course, a rhetorical question. But it shows the weakness of a schema of argument which depends on asking questions that are rhetorical in as much as no serious answer is sought for or listened to. We cannot avoid every sort of distinction or discrimination. If we set out to establish equality in one respect, we shall thereby establish some other inequality in another respect. The free use of the presumption of equality is bound to lead to inconsistency. It must, therefore, be, at best, a principle of only restricted applicability, and before the egalitarian can apply it, he needs to show that the case is a suitable one for its application...

The quotation from J. C. Davies, `I am as good as anybody else; I may not be as clever or hard working as you are, but I am as good as you are'. But this, although a genuinely egalitarian doctrine with characteristically untoward consequences, is not what the principle of proper consideration of interests establishes. What the principle establishes is `I am a man. I am not to be ignored, nor should my interests be systematically discounted'. To go further and to claim that I am as good as anybody else is to divorce goodness from all possible criteria, and ultimately to devalue personality. If I am as good as you no matter what you do and I fail to do, then it does not matter what you do or what I do; similarly, if my view is as good as yours, irrespective of the fact that you are clever and I am not, and you have examined the evidence and considered the arguments while I have just opined, then it means that there is no right or wrong in our thinking, and that any view is as good as any other... To reason is to lay oneself open to the possibility of being wrong, and if the egalitarian is so wedded to the principle of non-discrimination that he cannot entertain the possibility of anybody's being wrong unless everybody else is too, then he is committed to irrationality.

The peer-group argument goes back to Plato. We need to treat some men---colleagues, friends, partners---as equals, peers standing in the same relation to oneself as one does to them. Although not all relations between men need be, or are, reciprocal, groups of fellow citizens, fellow officers, fellow rulers, played a central part in Greek social life, and still meet important emotional needs in our own society. Plato envisaged the rulers of his ideal state being so much of a peer-group that they would have everything, even wives and children, in common, so much so that the use of the first- and second- person pronouns---I, me, my, and you, your--- should be replaced by the first person plural (Republic, V, 451c-469b). Likewise in the sub-ideal community for which he laid down the Laws, he is aware of the importance of fellow-feeling and peer-group behaviour (Laws, VI, 777d5 and XI, 919d7). We may distinguish two strands in the argument: one is that of anti- selfishness. Plato was appalled at the me-firstism rampant in Athenian society, and so he opposed to amoral self- aggrandisement the selfless pursuit of the common good. So, too, many modern egalitarians are moved primarily by a detestation of the profit-motive. But the alternatives are not exhaustive, and the dangers of corporate selfishness are no less great, indeed they are more insidious, than those of simple, individual greed. The first-person plural is still the first person, and in danger of excluding third personal outsiders. Within the group there is total equality: but the group is restricted, and there is no equality between members and non-members of the group. Plato's peers, like the peers of England, are more noticeable for the inequality which separates them from everybody else, than for the equality which does exist among them. So, too, modern denunciations of the profit-motive have been the pretext on which bureaucratic empires have been built up, and have resulted in an inequality of power which is both more unequal and more dangerous than the inequality of wealth to which objection was originally made...

The argument from fraternity to equality fails in two respects. It fails first because we are not all brothers. Half the human race are disqualified by sex from being even metaphorical brothers, and although the advocates of Women's Lib seem to suppose that Sorority should be the watch-word of the Sexual Revolution, it seems to me that the aspirations of most women are deeply unsisterly. Young women give few indications of seeing themselves as sisters or wanting to be treated in a sisterly fashion by the young men of their acquaintanceship, and in later years maternal and grand- maternal affection loom much larger in their life than any desire to gatecrash other people's peer-groups. It is no accident that we find Plato's treatment of sex the most repugnant part of his programme in the Republic. Sexual relations are essentially asymmetric, and the emotions they engender are not only intense but necessarily exclusive. In addition to the exclusive love between husband and wife, many other relationships, both within the family and outside it, are similarly asymmetric. I cannot really regard even all male men as my brethren, without misrepresenting the true state of my feelings for my father, my sons, my ancestors and my possible descendants. Similarly, the regard I have for my teachers and tutors, mentors and benefactors is necessarily asymmetric, as is the concern I feel for my pupils and possible recipients of my advice or benefactions. It is essential to society, and, as I shall argue more fully later, essential to each man's emotional fulfilment that there should be some differentiation in the structure of our society and in our social relations one with another. The full-blooded argument from fraternity to equality fails because it is founded on a premiss which is false in fact. We are not all brothers.

Fraternal feeling is none the less a good thing. It needs to be cherished and catered for, and sometimes calls for some equality in treatment or circumstance. But it neither requires, nor can endure, total equality... It is not equality but justice that is essential if fellow-feeling is to flourish. I can identify with you and enter into your aspirations and purposes so long as I believe that you and I are tied together by bonds of mutual respect, and that each will accord the other a consideration which we both believe will be reasonable. Equality of circumstances may conduce to fellow-feeling, but need not, and will not if in fact it seems unjust. Equal conditions often fail to engender feelings of fellowship: and even in the small, cohesive peer-group there is, and has to be, some recognition of the differences between different members...

The argument from Universal Humanity can be called in aid of inegalitarian, as well as egalitarian, conclusions. Many inegalitarian societies show more respect for each individual man than supposedly egalitarian societies do. Marx saw merit in feudalism, in contrast to the liberal societies of his own day, because in a feudal society each man had his own place, and was respected in that place. It is better to be a bathroom attendant in an Oxford college than to be a prosperous proletarian in an amorphous plebs, because the bathroom attendant, although he occupies a relatively lowly place in the college hierarchy, nevertheless is enabled to feel that he is a valued member of that society, making a real and definite contribution to its well-being. In comparison, a modern egalitarian society can be very heartless, showing no concern for any individual as such. Although the prosperous proletarian has more money than the college servant, and although he is not obliged to regard anyone as his superior, he does not feel that he is valued for himself alone, or that society cares for anything but his cash. A society which accords respect to each man in his place is appreciated because it seems to individuate individuals in a way in which societies committed to the egalitarian ethos are unable to do. If the only social relations are transitive symmetric relations, then I necessarily stand in exactly the same relationship to society as anybody else, and therefore I can have no social position which is peculiarly my own. Since my relationship to the rest of society is the same as yours, it would not make any difference if I were replaced by you; and from this it follows that I in myself am replaceable, and therefore dispensable. In a totally egalitarian society I am always potentially redundant. I am merely a unit, not a unique individual. If I see myself as a man, with a real personality and a real contribution all of my own to make to my fellow men, then I shall reject the ethos of egalitarianism and see positive merit in a social order which acknowledges the distinctiveness of the individual and therefore the differences between men.

A status society does not have to be strictly ordered. It is compatible with there being some ordering-but the ordering does not have to be complete, and, more importantly, does not have to be all important. What is desired is that each man should stand in regard to the rest of society in a relation which other men do not, and that this relation should itself be the ground of respect. The village cobbler performs a different function from the squire or the parson, and one that is needed, and cannot be performed, by them, however wealthy or well educated they may be. Each man wants to be respected. The egalitarian seeks to satisfy this need by ensuring that no man is ever in an inferior position vis-…-vis anybody else, and so insists that all social relations shall be equivalence relations. That fails to meet the need, which is much better met by allowing relations which are asymmetric but securing for each man that there is some relation with respect to which he is superior to other people. No one should be always the underdog...

Two inequalities are better than one. It is better to have a society in which there are a number of different pecking orders, so that a person who comes low according to one order can nevertheless rate highly according to another. One advantage that English society used to have over American was that whereas in America wealth was the only criterion, in England social standing was largely independent of wealth, and could, therefore, act as a corrective. More generally, it is good that there should be an athletic hierarchy besides the academic one, so that boys who are not blessed with brains may nevertheless be, and feel themselves to be, the stars of the football field. A man may not be a great success economically but still can be a big noise in the Boy Scout Association or the pigeon fanciers' club. So long as we have plenty of different inequalities, nobody need be absolutely inferior. It is only if, in the name of equality, we set about eliminating them all, that we shall succeed in eliminating many of them and thereby make those that remain far more burdensome.

Egalitarians are angered when the argument from Universal Humanity is called in aid of inegalitarian conclusions, and produce vehement counter-arguments against it. They will not accept that the college servant is really better off than the prosperous proletarian, however much happier he may subjectively suppose himself to be, because the mere fact that the society recognises a difference in status between the college servant and, say, the fellows is itself an affront to human dignity. If we differentiate at all between one man and another on account of the social functions they fulfil, then we are no longer regarding them as men but merely as performers of certain roles. The bathroom attendant may think that he is valued for himself alone, but he is wrong; he is valued merely as a cleaner of baths and lavatories, merely as a pair of hands, merely as a useful automaton and not at all as a person, a child of God, a human being, an immortal soul, the bearer of an eternal destiny. This argument has powerful emotional appeal, but it is confused. It confuses the minimal and the maximal respect we may pay to a human being... I respect another man's humanity by observing a certain set of minimum conditions towards him---by not killing him, by not torturing him, by not leaving him to starve by not depriving him of civil rights---and it is important to see these conditions as minimum conditions which must be fulfilled rather than as maximum conditions to which we should aim but which we cannot be blamed if we fail to achieve. If we set our sights too high, we shall secure nothing. It may---or it may not---be desirable that I should identify fully with the bath attendant, and seek to enable him to fulfil his potentiality in every way; but it is a fact that most people can, or at least do, identify with most other people only to a very limited extent; and if we want to ensure that there shall be nobody who is not identified with at all, we must accept the consequence that the extent to which identification is achieved will be a fairly minimal one...

Although I may object to being regarded merely as the performer of a certain role, I do not normally object to being regarded as a person who does perform a certain role, or who has carried out certain achievements. The reason is that these roles and achievements are activities or actions of mine, and therefore manifestations of my own personal choices, and so very much part of what I essentially am. What I do is the mark I make upon the world. I am different from everybody else, and one chief way in which my being different from everybody else is made plain is in what I choose to do. Even if what I choose to do is something fairly humdrum, like cleaning baths, it nevertheless is what I have done, my own special contribution to making the world a better place. A society which differentiates between people on the basis of what they do is not denying their humanity, but emphasizing a most important facet of it...

Liberty requires that we let people be different, justice that we treat them differently: the one because it is for them, rather than for us, to decide what they shall do, and different men decide to do different things. the other because all the relevant factors should be taken into account, and these will often be different and demand different sorts of treatment. Radical egalitarians recognise the incompatibility between their ideal and the ideals of liberty and justice, and say, simply, that these ideals are less important and ought to give way when they conflict with the overriding claims of equality. Most egalitarians, however, seek to reconcile the various ideals by claiming that the uniformities they seek to ensure are compatible with the exercise of liberty and positively required by justice. They envisage a society in which each man does his own thing, but important equalities between different people are not upset by the different things they do. It is permissible to hope for this, but not reasonable to expect it. Unless our liberties are so circumscribed that we can make choices on our own account only about matters that are essentially trivial---if we can choose our hobbies and the decor of our flats, but not our jobs or where we are to live some of our choices will impinge on the way important affairs turn out, and will work out well or ill for us not only in our own estimation but in that of others too. Contrary to the belief of some lovers of liberty, our values are not entirely our own but have some tendency to be shared. In any society there must be some shared values, and therefore some shared assumptions about what is to anyone's advantage or disadvantage, and so some common standards of success. This is why, although there is no necessity for social relations to be ordering relations, nevertheless a social order tends to establish itself. Although I may, in accordance with the Declaration of Independence, pursue happiness in my own way, and although many Americans have in fact set themselves idiosyncratic goals of success, nevertheless for most Americans success is to be measured in pecuniary terms. We want to succeed not only in our own eyes but in the eyes of other men too: we are competitive creatures, who value goals not because we have assessed them independently on our own account, but because others do and we want to outdo them. If we allow men liberty in things that matter, they will soon establish inequalities that signify. hence, if we value liberty at all, we cannot abolish all inequalities, but only, at best, reduce their impact by multiplying them...

The argument from justice is more difficult. Whereas most people sense some difficulty in reconciling liberty and equality, many think that justice and equality are not only compatible, but come to the same thing. Nevertheless, justice is not equality, even though it sometimes requires that people be treated alike, as equality always does. We can see that justice is not the same as equality, because we sometimes stigmatize as unjust laws imposing `strict liabilities', although they are evidently unobjectionable on the score of equality, since they apply to everyone without exception. If there were a law imposing the death penalty on the driver of a motor vehicle involved in a fatal accident, it would be unjust in spite of---indeed, because of---its treating all such drivers the same. We fail to do justice to the individual unless we give due consideration to the circumstances of his case. Equality, because it focuses attention on only a few circumstances, may well lead us to ignore some other circumstances that are relevant, and thus to be unjust. Again, justice gives rise to certain procedural requirements, while equality is concerned only with results, not processes. Equality does not insist upon the principle audi alteram partem: audi neutram partem would be just as good so far as equality is concerned. justice is much more complicated than equality...

The divergence of justice from equality is particularly important in economic affairs. Many people have argued against economic equality on the score of expediency, and some weight should be given to the need to provide people with adequate incentives. But for many people, particularly for members of trades unions, the question of expediency looms less large than that of justice. So long as money plays an important part in our way of life, it will be a tangible token of esteem and gratitude which ought not to be withheld from those who have done well by us and deserved well of us. Much of the current concern with differentials is concerned less with incentives than with respect. People ask for more not because there is an imbalance between supply and demand for their services---though this may well have a bearing on the readiness of employers to concede their claims---but because they think existing remuneration does not reflect the real value of what they do, and they are unwilling to acquiesce in other people putting a low valuation on their efforts. Although on occasions, under limited conditions, for set purposes, we may agree on a flat rate irrespective of effort or skill, there remains an obstinate feeling that those who have borne the heat of the day ought to be more handsomely rewarded than those who have laboured only briefly or made only a slight contribution to the success of the enterprise. Economic justice can argue in the opposite direction to economic equality.

Arguments from social expediency can also be urged. The argument from incentives is too well known to need elaborating here. The argument from innovation is not so well known. Professor Hayek and Lord Hailsham point out that inequality has been the means whereby economic progress has been achieved. If there had not been some rich people in the early part of this century who could afford to waste a lot of money on horseless carriages, there would be no production of cars now...

It is difficult and costly to initiate action. If private individuals are to be able to take certain sorts of initiative effectively, they need to be rich. Not all people can be rich. If from this we infer that nobody should be rich, then we are precluding private individuals from starting things on their own, and thus are conferring a monopoly of initiative power on officials. And this is dangerous and illiberal. We want there to be at least some citizens outside the state bureaucracy who not only can resist the official point of view, but can get new ideas off the ground, because otherwise we shall be not only defenceless against the bureaucratic juggernaut but soon as obsolescent as the dinosaur... rich men are useful to have around, because they are easier to persuade to back their fancy than cautious committees or government officials...

I was fighting a motor manufacturer about the exclusion clauses in their guarantees, and my being an Oxford don was of crucial importance in securing the attention of a shareholders' meeting for two decisive minutes. In a finite world we cannot expect people to give adequate attention to everyone, and if everyone is to have equal attention then all will be equally ignored. Freedom of speech generates a lot of `noise' which may well drown the significant signals unless we have some pre-set filtering devices. Many of our social institutions have the important function of telling the world at large who it is they ought to listen to. What is a university degree but this? The university certifies to all those it may concern that Mr John Smith has shown himself capable of thinking for himself, and that his opinions therefore should be treated, if not with deference, at least with some respect. If you opine that I have got myxomatosis, it will not give me pause to think, but if a doctor does, I shall act on it at once. In a world of imperfect information we cannot take everyone for what he is really worth, and since it would be unwise to take everyone at face value, we are bound to rely on distinctions to enable us to discriminate between one man's judgment and another's, which therefore are inherently inegalitarian. It is as foolish to lament this fact as it is to worship it. If, in the name of equality, we attempt to disallow all social distinctions, we prevent people from making up their minds for themselves, and leave them all prey to the manipulators of the admass society. Better an inequality between doctors and the medically unqualified than that we should all be taken in by a plausible charlatan... in the rush of ordinary life we shall go on having to make snap judgments about people we do not really know, and must rely on socially established criteria. When the garage attendant tells me he has discovered a practicable way of obtaining energy from nuclear fusion I shall continue to be much less interested than if a professor of physics had said the same.

We need inequality because we are limited beings only imperfectly informed. If I were God, and could look into each man's heart, I could respond to him fully and totally as the person he was: but since I am only a man, I can know only the outer man, and must of necessity judge by appearances. It makes a great difference if the man at the door is a doctor, a colleague, a former pupil, a business man or an itinerant salesman. In a very small society where everyone knows everybody else, we know who each man is, what role he plays, and therefore what response is appropriate on our part. But we do not---cannot-live all our lives within the confines of a face-to-face society, and are constantly seeking for clues to enable us to address ourselves appropriately to strangers. How many young men on seeing a pretty girl glance at the fourth finger of her left hand to see whether they should be merely chivalrous or should risk rebuff by being something more?... Egalitarians find all such distinctions offensive; and often, indeed, they have their offensive features. But egalitarians fail to recognise the deep social needs that give rise to such distinctions--- our need to classify people in order that we may know what to expect from them and how far it is safe to relax our guard against them. Take away all outward and visible signs of friendliness and trustworthiness, and everyone will be treated as a debt-collector or high-pressure salesman. The effect of egalitarian principles is to ensure that each man is treated as every man's enemy.

Class distinctions enable a man to know where he stands... in some cultures men---like many other animals, according to the ethologists---reserve their enmity for their equals, and are remarkably forbearing to those evidently weaker than themselves.

We return to morality. It is forbearance and consideration of others that we want---not necessarily equal consideration, but consideration suited to the circumstances. The virtue of visible distinctions is that by indicating the sort of consideration that is appropriate they encourage us to give it. We cannot extend maximal consideration uniformly to everyone. If we are all equal, we are all competitors, since each of us, not being ready to merge his identity in Plato's ideal society, knows that sometimes he is seeking his good in rivalry with others. Few men feel willing---or can afford---to be always uncompetitive. If only equal consideration is to be extended to everyone, then everyone must be treated equally guardedly, and there will be no occasions on which it would be reasonable to go the second mile or give the other man the best of the bargain. De Tocqueville ascribed the acquisitiveness he noted in America to the egalitarian tenor of American society; and the connection is due in part to the way in which egalitarian assumptions structure men's concepts, so as to foreclose the possibility of one's sometimes having special obligations to extend extra consideration. Noblesse oblige does not flourish in a climate of egalitarianism. And whatever we may think of the noblesse, we can ill afford to dispense with the oblige.

Noblesse is, in fact, inevitable. The social advantages of inequality are so great that, however equal we try to make society in some respects, there are bound to be other respects, if not money then power or prestige, in which some people are markedly better off than others. If we will admit this, we can control it. We can take steps to prevent classifications being unjust or irrelevant, or becoming obsolete, and we can encourage those who enjoy advantages to take on corresponding responsibilities. We can ensure that degrees are not awarded on a basis of self- assessment or replaced by a form of self-advertisement, and the Queen can ennoble trades union leaders and can confer knighthoods not only on rich businessmen as of yore but on those who have proved their prowess in the field of football battle. The egalitarian, because he will not allow the existence of inequalities, is unable to ameliorate them or make them work out for the benefit of all concerned. It is no accident that in societies supposedly imbued with egalitarian sentiment snobbery abounds and public relations men prosper. Again, if we acknowledge the fact of inequality, we can adjure people to accept an inequality of obligation too. Our society is one that in fact confers great privileges on many men---perhaps deserved, but great all the same. Trades union officials, civil servants, chartered accountants, university graduates and all those in receipt of grants for higher education are very well done by, and do very well in consequence. But the fact and its concomitant obligations are not readily recognised. Pupils are surprised when I point out that a degree now is in effect a patent of nobility. The protagonists of the student movement were unable to see that because they were given advantages denied to other people, therefore their responsibilities were correspondingly different; and the reason why they were unable to see this was that they were so deeply imbued with the belief that privilege was wrong that they could not really accept the fact that they themselves were privileged, or that their being privileged could be a ground of obligation. Egalitarianism induces blindness. It not only leads us to avert our gaze from those inequalities not currently under attack, but it makes us unready to recognise in our own case benefits which perhaps, if egalitarian arguments were valid, we ought not to receive, but which, as a matter of fact, we do receive and enjoy. The rich egalitarian agrees that riches are wrong, and that the whole system ought to be changed; but meanwhile he remains rich, and he is tempted, having decided against riches in principle, not to allow the fact of his still being rich to enter into his moral reckoning. Moral reasoning is best based on facts as they are: and if, for whatever reason, there are in fact significant inequalities in our society, it is well that those who benefit most should operate with a scheme of thought which enables them to come to terms with the facts and recognise the responsibilities they engender...

Equality as a general goal of political endeavour is impossible to achieve, and in any case undesirable. Worse than this, the effort to establish equality everywhere has diverted the energies of many good men from more worthwhile endeavours. Because they have confused equality with humanity or with justice or with equity, men have thought that in endeavouring to establish equality they were ensuring that these other goods would be enjoyed by everyone, and have therefore been blind to the subtle ways in which our society has come to care less for men's humanity, has been less sensitive to considerations of justice, and has been more ready to countenance iniquity. Why is it that over the last thirty years our society has become more uncaring, more impersonal, more brutal? Other factors, no doubt, are also responsible, but one is our obsession with equality. It has blunted our perceptions and diverted our efforts. Instead of considering each man in his own individuality, equality has encouraged us to consider people in the mass, and in regard to those facets of their lives that can most readily be quantified and compared. If we had laboured to secure justice or humanity with half the zeal with which we have secured the more jealous god of equality, things might not have come to their present sorry pass."

--- from Philosophy 52, 1977, pp.255-280.

This has implications for objectification also. Basically objectification need not be all or nothing.

Also, equality, by seeing everyone as identical, objectifies them.

If you don't scream at 'Homophobia', you must be a 'Homophobe'

2013-04-25T16:48:00.003+08:00

Earlier this week, a student posted a picture of GP notes from her JC as an example of "homophobia". Naturally, this got heated responses:

I Will Survive:

"Shocking example of homophobia (& dreadful grammar) in the lecture notes for General Paper (GP), from *** Junior College (***) for 17 - 18 year-old students, dated 2012:

"To protect the rights of children, it may be necessary to restrict the rights of the homosexuals."

"A government may also justify discriminatory policies on ground [sic] of social order and stability."

"In fact, under the law Section 377A, homosexual acts are considered a criminal offence although this law has not been enacted [sic].""

This person is not the only one to decry this example of "homophobia".

It seems that many gay activists are so blinded by their pro-gay ideology and hatred of "homophobia" that they are unable to distinguish between description and endorsement.

Let us look at the context (such as it is) of the offending lines:

"*** JC1 GP Notes — Prejudice & Discrimination 2012

- Walmart have also created affirmative action programmes for hiring and selecting supplies at their own initiative. According to Economics Professor Rick van der Ploeg, the policy has been relatively effective in creating a large African-American middle-class. Four decades after the introduction of the policy, the percentage of black households earning over $50,000 a year more than tripled from 9.1% in 1967 to 27.8% in 2001. More people of colour hold top jobs in the public and private sector than anywhere else in the world, although a large black underclass remains.
- Another possible objective is to alleviate social and economic inequality, which may not have been caused by discrimination. For example, under the ‘Bumiputra’ Policy in Malaysia a special quota for the bumiputras or "sons of the soil" is set for places in the university in business enterprises and in public service to help them catch up economically with the other races. (Refer to Poverty Package Pg 59-60)
- Both cases are examples where a particular group receives special treatment favours or opportunities.

2. Discriminatory policies by governments or organisations to safeguard the welfare of the vulnerable. A government may feel obligated to support the kind of family living that it believes is the best.
- For example, in Britain, applications from homosexual couples to adopt children will not normally succeed since it is believed to be in the interest of a child to grow up with two parents of opposite sex. To protect the rights of children, it may be necessary to restrict the rights of the homosexuals.
- Another example could be the upper age limit for women receiving IVF treatment. One key argument by clinics for refusing women above 50 the treatment is the ability of an older mother to care for her child In advancing years. Many argue that it is unfair on the child to have a parent who may die when they are still very young. Clinics that reject older women argue that the welfare of the child is being lost amid the efforts to push the scientific boundaries ever further. Moreover, medically IVF in older women as not without its risks and the older a woman the higher the risk of her developing complications during pregnancy and childbirth. (Note: Supports of IVF for the over 5Os argue that youth is no guarantee of life expectancy and the most important thing is that the child has a loving home, Moreover, women with other traits, such as alcoholism and physical disabilities, which could jeopardise their child’s well-being are not denied motherhood.)
- A government might also justify discriminatory policies on ground of social order and stability. For example, in Singapore, there is no legalisation of homosexual marriages. In fact, under the law Section 377A, homosexual acts are considered a criminal offence although this law has not been enacted. A repeal of the law has been rejected by the
government ground that the relatively conservative and multi-religious society is not ready for the change, and that the government needs to heed the sensitivities of its people.

E. WHO are discriminated against: TYPES OF DISCRIMINATION

1) Discrimination based on race and ethniçity
- Racial discrimination is often called racism, a term coined in the 1930s primarily as a response to the Nazi project of making German judenrein, or ‘clean of Jews’.
- The other group is often viewed as 'worse' than..."

All this puts me in the mind of history texts. Let us take one example:

"In Mein Kampf, [Hitler] explained race as the most important principle of human life, and he tried to show that since the beginning, history was a story of the conflict between the Aryans and the Jews. "The racial question," he wrote, "gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture." Therefore, civilizations rise and fall depending on how they take care of the "racial preservation of the nation." "In the blood alone resides the strength as well as the weakness of man," so the "resurrection of Germany" depends on "the clearest knowledge of the racial problem and hence of the Jewish problem."

"The "Aryan" race was the champion of "human cultural development." By their nature and their "blood," the "Aryans" were chosen to rule the world. The whole existence of human civilization, then, depended on safeguarding the purity of the "Aryan" race."

--- Hitler's War Against the Jews - The Holocaust: A Young Reader's Version of the War Against the Jews: 1933-1945 / Lucy Dawidowicz

Clearly, this is a vile example of anti-Semitic, racist, Neo-Nazi propaganda. Hell, it even quotes Hitler in his own words approvingly. We must burn this book forthwith! Never mind that Lucy Dawidowicz was not just a Jew but a famous author of books on modern Jewish history, especially on the Holocaust.

Going back to the original GP notes, we can see that the author (and thus, by extension, the school, the Ministry of Education [MOE], the Singaporean government and everyone in Singapore) is also endorsing, besides 377A and the restriction of gay rights:

- Affirmative action in the USA
- The bumiputra policy in Malaysia
- Older women who want to have children
- Anti-Semitism

Nevermind that the sort of people who would endorse affirmative action would most likely be for gay rights - the mere fact that discrimination against homosexuals was mentioned but not immediately excoriated means that the notes are endorsing it.

By now, it will be clear to the objective reader that the JC GP notes in question are written in a very objective, matter-of-fact manner, describing the rationales given for discrimination. Indeed, I would wager that the first page of notes read something along the lines of: "We think that equality is good and that discrimination is bad. However, in some cases people justify discrimination. Let us look at some examples".

This is what comes of the hysterical activism that equates non-condemnatory communication about homosexuality with homophobia.

You're either with us, or against us.

You're either an anti-gay activist, or a homophobe.

Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

Of course, this sort of Manichean logic gets condemned when George W. Bush voices it, but in the cause of Virtue, it is justified. Nevermind the complexities of the real world, or giving students the facts instead of trying to brainwash them.

A good girlfriend

2013-04-25T14:40:00.002+08:00

(A good girlfriend can save 200GB of your HDD - Imgur)

Comments:

"Hard drives are still cheaper."

"Um, if she's a really good girlfriend, you'll need a 2TB external HD because home videos take up a LOT of space."

"She can also save you lots of money....she looks cheap"

"They make 200GB HDD?"

"TIL girlfriends grow on trees."

Links - 24th April 2013

2013-04-24T14:43:00.005+08:00

Find broken links on your site with Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM) - "13. Can I have the source code?
Hahahahahaha!
14. Can I buy the source code?
Sure, make me "an offer I can't refuse".
15. Just for fun, I checked Tilman's web site, and found many broken links. Why?
I check my own web site every week on friday. Nevertheless there are always broken links:
- Links that I know to be broken: I keep them like that to remind me to find these people some day. The web page itself has a notice that the link is broken."

The homepage of Tilman Hausherr - "Jerry Ladd researched about Xenu and came up with a different explanation. According to him, Xenu was good, but an evil guy with the name "Phatmanotoo" framed him to cover up his failure in nuclear science class. He created the Knights of Xenu, a loose community of good people. There's no sign-up, no contract; just affix KoX to your signature and you're in.
How does Xenu look? See Xenu's vacation in Ann Arbor, Michigan (formerly here). There are two other theories. My theory is that Xenu is the monolith from 2001: A Space Oddysey. Scientologists were forbidden to watch the film, because it contains restimulative material. Another theory is that Xenu is Deana Holmes' grey adopted cat. Deana's mom is somewhat anxious about the name. Xenu was pregnant; this didn't keep her from whispering encheferated documents in Deana's ear. Xenu is now a Mom, and gave birth to five kittens! Deana adopted one of the kittens, and gave her the name Zoe. This wonderful story does not end happily for Deana: Xenu is a deadbeat mom.
Steve Fishman's daughter Elysia presented Xenu as work for her creative writing class, but got only a B+ because her teacher considered it unrealistic!"

Relief teacher took student's virginity, promised her marriage - "A district court heard that the two became close after a salad-making competition at the end of July 2009... She treated him as an older brother with whom she shared her problems. He also treated her as a younger sister and asked her out for meals... After taking her virginity, he promised to marry her...
March 14, 2013: A 32-year-old teacher, a married mother of three, was sentenced to a year's jail for having sex with her student, who was then 13. They had sex four times, oral sex once and she committed an obscene act with him once.
Oct 29, 2011: A 32-year-old teacher was sentenced to one-year jail for having sex with her then 15-year-old student. The married teacher in a top school had sex with the boy nine times.
Feb 23, 2009: A former primary school teacher was jailed 10 months for having sex with a 15-year-old boy. She was the first woman in Singapore to be hauled to court for being sexually intimate with an underage boy. She had sex with him six times"
Since he is male he was sentenced more heavily (18 months) than the 3 women

Germans too small for condoms? - "In 1996, in order to promote economic and cultural exchange throughout Europe, the European Union decided upon a standard size of condom — 6.63 inches in length and a range of 1.7 to 2.2 inches in width, to be exact. According to Focus, a study conducted by the German condom manufacturer Condomi found that the standard European condom fell off of half of the men polled. “The average German penis is about 3.5 to 4 millimeters (0.13 to 0.15 inches) too narrow for the standard EN 600 condom”"

Chinese protesters demand a boycott of former Japanese AV star Sola Aoi amid Senkaku row - "At 10:00 a.m. the march reconvened, this time with more placards, one of which read, “Boycott Japanese goods, including AV actress Sola Aoi!” Aoi, who made her name in such classic AV pics as “Big Tits Zombie” and “Revenge: A Love Story,” is a popular figure in entertainment in China. The 28-year-old’s account on Sina Weibo (similar to Twitter) has attracted over 13 million followers. The anti-Sola sentiment is contrary to a slogan that spread through China starting in April, when Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara announced his plan to purchase the controversial outcroppings: “The Senkaku Islands belong to us; Sola Aoi belongs to the world!”"

Why I walked out of Les Miserables - "I wasn’t the only one who hated almost every minute of it. At work the next day, a colleague quietly admitted to having watched it stony-faced as the cinema audience sobbed around her. Anthony Lane, one of the world’s most eminent film critics, also demolished it, saying: “I screamed a scream as time went by.” Les Misérables is about poverty, pain, isolation, frustration, suffering. The songs are, in every way, “big”. And that’s where, for me, it fell so woefully short. Where Hugh Jackman, as the long-suffering central character Jean Valjean, imprisoned for 17 years for stealing a loaf of bread, should have soared in moments of anger or pain, his vocals died. Instead of following through on the long, sustained notes – of which there are many in Les Mis – he cut them off with a weak, nasal vibrato. It was as if Jackman was afraid to go for it... the singing wasn’t meant to be technically perfect, but “raw and real”. Well, I’m fine with raw and real. I don’t believe singing has to be technically perfect but it does need to express emotion. And for me, at key moments in the score, the vocals just weren’t raw and real enough. They weren’t sung from the gut... In [Marni Nixon's] opinion, the Les Misérables film was misconceived. “If you’re making a musical, you should hire singers,” she tells me. “Singers who can act. In a musical, you want singing that’s technically good. It’s cruel to make people who can’t sing, sing.” For Nixon, Jackman wasn’t a bad singer, just miscast... “It doesn’t suit this score to have actors speak-singing it. Les Misérables is written to be sung operatically, with long lines to make it come off.” She chuckles, adding: “Maybe the director told the actors, 'You don’t have to hold the notes that long, because it’s silly. It sounds like you’re singing!’ ” She gives short shrift to Crowe’s “raw and real” defence: “We’re talking about a musical. Is that real? People don’t go around singing 'La la la la’ to each other all day!”"

Top des traductions de merde - la compilation

School Recess Gets Gentler, and the Adults Are Dismayed - New York Times - "No longer could they let off their youthful energy — pent up from hours of long division — by cavorting outside for 22 minutes of unstructured play, or perhaps with a vigorous game of tag or dodgeball. Such games had been virtually banned by the principal, Mark S. Johnson, along with kickball, soccer and other “body-banging” activities, as he put it, where knees — and feelings — might get bruised. Instead, children are encouraged to jump rope, play with Hula Hoops or gently fling a Frisbee. Balls are practically controlled substances, parceled out under close supervision by playground monitors... Many parents are still not satisfied, however, saying that such coddling fails to prepare children for adulthood. “Life is competitive,” said Shari Clewell, the mother of a fifth grader. “Kids compete for attention. They compete for grades. You compete for a job. You compete from the time you’re little all the way to the end.” Pretending otherwise is pointless, she said. “They’re kids. They are competitive. They can play jump rope and jacks and make it competitive”... [Some schools] citing liability concerns, have banned sports like dodgeball, where children are the targets. In Cheyenne, Wyo., one school has banished tag from the playground as being too rough but allows other contact sports, like touch football. Several schools in Colorado have banned tag for the same reason... In Wyckoff, N.J., freestyle recess has become a “midday fitness” class. Student have fewer options for activities and are told to keep moving. By applying recess to the gym requirement, the schools have freed up time for academics... “Children need to engage in games such as this in order to develop social skills, to learn to handle themselves, to avoid obesity, and to get the activities they need, and these are traditional games, going on for centuries,” Dr. Frost said. “It’s just difficult to imagine how a person in education could come up with such a bad idea.” As for playground bullies, he said: “There are ways for teachers to handle bullying without stopping the play for all the children. This is a teacher problem. This is not a child problem.” But to Mr. Johnson, who has been a school principal for five years, it is the lack of structure that places recess out of sync with the educational and moral instruction provided the rest of the day"

Photo : une série d'images qui illustrent le passage du temps

How China's Top Digital Spies Got Outed by Facebook and Twitter

Bad Guy Japan: Our Reporter Stumbles Upon Anti-Japanese Shooting Game in Myanmar Arcade - "the cabinet actually originated from a company called Dragonwin Animation in Guangzhou, China. The game’s obscure title of PK918, meanwhile, is believed to be a reference to the Mukden Incident, which took place on September 18, 1931 in Manchuria, leading to the Japanese invasion of the country"

How to Attract Protesters to Your Wedding - China Real Time Report - WSJ - "The crowd has risen up in response to her widely republished Facebook posting earlier this month: “I’m not opening a charity….If you really only want to give me a HK$500 [US$65] cash gift, then don’t bother coming to my wedding”... nearly 1,000 people said they were planning to attend a wedding-day protest, organized via Facebook, at the hotel where she’s getting married... “What a person wants to give and how much your wedding costs are separate things,” Mr. Lai, a logistics worker, told China Real Time. “You can have these thoughts inside your heart, but you have to keep them to yourself.” Mr. Lai says he is considering attending the wedding protest. “I’ll have to check my schedule first and see if I have the time,” he said"

Housewife Charged In Sex-For-Security Scam | The Onion - America's Finest News Source - "Area resident Helen Crandall, 44, was arrested by Akron police Sunday, charged with conducting an elaborate "sex for security" scam in which she allegedly defrauded husband Russell Crandall out of nearly $230,000 in cash, food, clothing and housing over the past 19 years using periodic offers of sexual intercourse... According to Agee, undercover agents spotted Crandall's husband handing her $50 in cash at approximately 4 p.m., just 30 minutes after the two had sex. Crandall then drove off in her car, returning home two hours later with five bags of groceries. "That's when we made the arrest," Agee said. "After tracking her for years, we finally had proof that she was buying all those goods with dirty money"... Perhaps the most damaging testimony has come from Mr. Crandall himself, who on Tuesday told police that while the couple was dating in 1977, Mrs. Crandall—then known as Helen Steuben—demanded that he buy her a ring worth over $1,000 before he could have sex with her. The first sexual liaison took place some six months later at Bob's Honeymooner Hotel during an all-expenses-paid trip to Niagara Falls. It was also in 1977, Mr. Crandall said, that his wife quit her job at Shippee Shoes in downtown Akron. "Clearly," Summit County prosecutor Andrew Dravecky said, "after quitting her job, the accused began receiving money under the table from some other source: How else could she have afforded to not work? It's now pretty apparent that at that point she began supporting herself by providing a certain service to Mr. Crandall"... The Crandall case is not an isolated incident, said criminologist John Ohlmeyer, who said there are "literally millions" of such cases across the U.S. each year that never come to court. "This kind of thing isn't as uncommon as we'd all like to think," Ohlmeyer said. "A woman finds herself in a situation where she isn't employable. Or maybe she has interests like child-rearing, cooking and home-maintenance that keep her from getting a job. So what does she do? She cooks up a scheme to entrap a man using her body as the bait. It's frightening, but it happens every day in this country.""

"I know my place" - YouTube
On the Class System in the UK

Psy's Gentleman banned from Korean TV due to depiction of anti-social behaviour

LOL

2013-04-23T12:17:00.001+08:00

"WARNING: To all my fellow Christians, be Wise and Aware!!

We all may have been wrong about "LOL" meaning "laugh out loud."
An image posted is warning everyone that when writing "LOL" means praying to the prince of darkness satan because it actually means "Lucifer our lord."
"Beware, stop using the abbreviation 'LOL'," reads part of the warning. "Satanists end their prayers by saying 'Lucifer our Lord', in short, 'LOL'. Every time you type 'LOL you are endorsing Satan."
From everything we can gather, "LOL" still means "laugh out loud", but if this were the case there are a lot of people who bow down to Satan on the Internet. It's used on the social media site more dozens of times a minute.
Even more Unholy abbreviations:

● YOLO - "Youth Obeying Lucifer's Orders"
● SWAG - Satan's Wishes Are Granted
● ROFL - Rise, Our Father Lucifer
● BRB - Beelzebub Rules Below.
● ASL - All Supreme Lucifer

We are the Children of GOD in heaven and we only belong to Him!!"

Some have said that this might be satire, but viewing the Facebook Timeline of the person who posted it, I'm not so sure (perhaps it's just bad writing skills).

Amusingly the watermark reads "eatliver.com", where one finds "Crazy funny pictures of insane internet".