CaspianReport is a YouTube channel I came across which has some very intelligent analysis of world politics from outside the North American/Western viewpoint.
As such, I’d like to bring to your attention their analysis of the current political situation in North Korea and how it might evolve:
Here is a humorous description of the background information.
It seems that he is eager to demonstrate his position as an appropriately humble dhimmi!
Yet another confirmation that Christianity will never stand up to Islam…
Perhaps he’ll become known as the ‘Dhimmi Pope’!
In other news this fine Easter, Cadbury gets ‘Halal’ certification for their chocolate Easter eggs, making them unsuitable for consumption by Christians.
Happy Easter everyone!
UPDATE: Here is an article showing the various labels used to denote Halal-certified foods.
And here are some links to sites that let you check which restaurants and stores are ‘halal’.
If you have not heard of ‘Donglegate’, you are likely not plugged in to the IT world – because anyone even remotely connected to the tech world has not been so lucky.
In a nutshell – Adria Richards, a non-technical person whose job was to make life easier for socially-awkward software developers (her actual job title was ‘developer evangelist’) eavesdropped on a ‘big dongle’ joke by a couple of socially-awkward software developers at a Python software developers conference and made such a public spectacle of just how offensive that was that she managed to get the guy who told the joke fired from his job. Anonymous – the hactivist group – took exception to her actions and targeted both her blog (where she continued to make a big fuss over the dongle joke and revealed herself to be an even more unstable flake than before) and her employer with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks – until, that is, her employer realized that Adria was not, after all, very good at evangelizing on behalf of developers, making the world a nicer place for them… and fired her.
Here is a most excellent account of the event and its fallout.
And, since he’s been talking about feminism lately, here is Thunderf00t’s take on it:
Frankly, I think people like Adria Richards should never work in a position of influence or power over anyone – and hope she never does!
UPDATE: A couple of days before she overheard the ‘dongle’ joke, Adria Richards Tweeted a sexist joke about a male friend stuffing a sock down his pants to appear to have a larger penis.…’Nough said!
This is an excellent video that demonstrates some of the big differences between libertarians and conservatives.
Even though I am not a fan of Ann Coulter, I do think she represents the conservative position rather accurately – or, perhaps that is why I am not a fan of Ann Coulter…
Just received this:
Dear Internet Defense League member,
Last year, right on the heels of our historic victory against SOPA, a piece of really nasty legislation almost passed that would have radically undermined online privacy.
It was called CISPA. And it raced through the US House of Representatives, passing before any of us had a chance to react. We stalled the bill in the Senate, but now CISPA is back, and we don’t want to make the same mistake twice. Before there is *any* movement on the bill, we want to send a strong message to Congress that CISPA shouldn’t pass.
That’s why we’re partnering with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to launch an Internet Defense League action starting tomorrow, Tuesday March 19th.
Can you participate? If so, get the code for your site here: http://members.internetdefenseleague.org
And help get more people signed up by sharing this page with your social network:
Wait, what is CISPA? And why does it matter so much?
CISPA (the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) would give companies complete freedom to share your personal data with the US government. It doesn’t *require* them to do so, but if the government asked it would be hard to say no, and they’d have no reason to– CISPA would free them from any promises made to customers in public statements or privacy policies.
Your emails, your Facebook account, your bank statements, the websites you visit, your real-time location (courtesy of your cellphone company)– all of it could soon belong to a slew of government agencies and even local police, who could use it against you without a warrant.
Get the code: http://members.internetdefenseleague.org
The IDL action will display only tomorrow. The banner looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/mVG9kVX.png The modal looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/tCOtoEC.png
And they both link to this action page hosted by the EFF: https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=9048
Please spread the word.
Thanks! Sincerely,
Holmes Wilson – Internet Defense League
P.S. If you’d like to learn more about CISPA, the EFF has a great FAQ page here: https://www.eff.org/cybersecurity-bill-faq
It seems timely that, just after publishing Thunderf00t’s critique of a particularly silly feminist and the comments to it (one of which, CodeSlinger’s, I had turned into a post of its own), I came across an interesting article.
In it, a self-described feminists recounts a talk by a former radical feminist, attended by (among others) feminists from modern academic circles. Her article is titled ‘Why women’s studies needs an extreme makeover’. It is a most interesting read…
In it, the author, Emma Teitel, quotes the speaker, Janice Fiamengo, as well as gives her own opinions on the evening. I’d like to pique your curiosity with little quotes from both (or, rather, Teitel quoting Fiamengo).
The discipline has devolved into an “intellectually incoherent and dishonest” one, she argued, replacing a “callow set of slogans for real thought.” It’s man-hating, anti-Western, and fundamentally illiberal. “It champions a “kind of masculinity that isn’t very masculine at all,” and shuts down freedom of debate, hence the fire alarm. [the fire alarm was used in an attempt to cancel the event]
…
She referenced the male to female death ratio on the Titanic, and declared that “self sacrifice and heroism are not exclusive to men,” “but they are distinctive to men.” Students scowled behind their wayfarers. She railed against affirmative action, a family court system skewed unjustly to favour mothers over fathers, and the deep vein of anti-Western sentiment running through academic feminism that makes it okay to decry gender inequality in the West, and keep quiet about vaginal mutilation and honour killings in the East. [my emphasis]
The women’s studies crowd looked constipated. Fiamengo’s arguments weren’t going down easy, this one—her best—in particular: women’s studies “can’t be about the pursuit of truth” because it has an “ideological base.” Its goal is to push the ideology that women are victims and men are perpetrators. Therefore, any evidence to the contrary, regardless of its veracity, is unwelcome. In other words, ideology censors truth. “If you believe you are righteous,” she said, “you don’t challenge other views.”[my emphasis]
She also writes about the Q&A that followed:
Almost every pro-women’s studies person who approached the mic last night, spoke another language, a jargon you might misconstrue as scientific–only the words they used weren’t shortcuts meant to simplify or summarize complex concepts, they were used to make simple concepts sound complex: Hegemonic, racialized, problematic, intersectionality. It was pure obfuscation, 1984 with tattoos and septum piercings. Some of the students couldn’t even string together a single lucid sentence. All they had were these meaningless, monolithic words. I felt like I was on a game show, the exercise being how many times can you say patriarchal, phallocentric hegemony in 45 seconds or less. It was frankly, for a feminist, depressing.
A thoroughly thought-provoking read!
H/T: BCF