Polarizing stories spotted in the news

[robkelk]

A thread for the stories that might not be suitable for the rest of the forum.

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I don't normally link to Sankaku Complex, so ,,, SITE IS NSFW, but this story is okay. Or as okay as the subject matter can be.

Power Girl Co-Creator Labels Manga as “Sexist & Misogynistic”

Yeah.

Funny how Gerry Conway had no problem with misogyny in illustrated serial works when his stories outsold the imports.

And just how much misogyny is there in stuff like Ah! My Goddess or Cardcaptor Sakura or Doraemon, just to name three?

[hazard]

Oh there's plenty of misogynistic stuff in Ah My Goddess and Cardcaptor Sakura. I mean, the main heroines are basically caricatures of traditionalist femininity.

(And if you think that's misogyny, you do not understand how any of that works. And ignores a few very important underlying facts about how neither Belldandy nor Sakura are props for the men in the story. Try that with either of them, I dare you, I'll be hiding in a bunker from far away.)

[Labster]

Sailor Moon Got Me Into This Business and I'm Exhausted

Starts with "an extremely late rant about the horrors of the DiC dub" but eventually moves into IRL allegations of sexual assault. If there's sexism in anime, then it's on our side of the ocean in localization and dubbing.

[robkelk]

Texas valedictorian ditches approved speech to speak out against new abortion law

I have dreams and hopes and ambitions. Every girl graduating today does. And we have spent our entire lives working towards our future, and without our input or consent, our control over that future has been stripped away from us.

I am terrified that if my contraceptives fail, I am terrified that if I'm raped, then my hopes and aspirations and dreams and efforts for my future will no longer matter. I hope that you can feel how gut-wrenching it is. I hope you can feel how dehumanizing it is to have the autonomy over your own body taken away from you.

I cannot give up this platform to promote complacency and peace, when there is a war on my body and a war on my rights. A war on the rights of your mothers, a war on the rights of your sisters, a war on the rights of your daughters.

The school district said that it would review student speech protocols before next year's graduation ceremonies. I wonder how much good that'll do, considering Ms. Smith went off-script from her approved speech.

[nemonowan]

The school district said that it would review student speech protocols before next year's graduation ceremonies. I wonder how much good that'll do, considering Ms. Smith went off-script from her approved speech.

They'll just put someboy to monitor with the preapproved transcript and a mic kill switch. Like these guys.
And add some clause that allows them to deny the diploma to whoever goes off-script.

[robkelk]

The school district said that it would review student speech protocols before next year's graduation ceremonies. I wonder how much good that'll do, considering Ms. Smith went off-script from her approved speech.

They'll just put someboy to monitor with the preapproved transcript and a mic kill switch. Like these guys.
And add some clause that allows them to deny the diploma to whoever goes off-script.

According to the article, they already have both of those.

[Labster]

Heh, just learn to project your voice. People have been filling theatres and gymnasia with just the volume of their own voice since Ancient Greece so you should be able to do it. When a mic goes out on me for any reason, I just get louder.

Withholding the diploma is another joke to graduation speakers. All they have to do is say to their university, "I can't give you my graduation record because look at these stories in the national press," and an exception will quickly be made. As usual, secondary schools are ignorant of the Streisand Effect, but higher ed is very much in the know.

But really, it's surprising how even at the end of their sentence these kids are still disobeying the warden. Even with our twelve year mandatory minimums you can't shake the criminality out of the criminal.

[hazard]

Trying to deny a student their government backed certification because they said inconvenient things at the graduation ceremony is a bold concept here in the Netherlands.

And by that I mean the government will simply provide you the documentation the school should've provided on the government's behalf as a government organization. It's not the school that provides you with your diploma, after all, but the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

And the school's likely to find itself in considerable hot water for attempting to politicize a non-political issue, that being the graduation ceremony.

[Labster]

It’s fairly routine here, though. Here’s one from today, High school senior denied diploma after wearing Mexican flag over gown. They say they’ll give him his diploma if he apologizes, which sounds a lot like government-compelled speech. But this is what happens in our highly decentralized system, where each school district is its own fiefdom. A few are going to end up making mountains of molehills.

[robkelk]

Tiananmen Square Tank Man vanishes from Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo, other search engines – even in America

[robkelk]

Report commissioned by Google says Google isn't to blame for the death of print news

[Labster]

Sure, we stole half your advertising income, but we also made Google News where more people can expect to read your product for free. Fair trade, right?

[robkelk]

I'll just leave this here.

[Black Aeronaut]

Rob, I tried that page in Firefox, Chrome, and even MS Edge. There is something wonky with that page.

[robkelk]

Rob, I tried that page in Firefox, Chrome, and even MS Edge.  There is something wonky with that page.

Yeah, the header's laid out poorly. Doesn't stop folks for being able to read the article, though (at least in Firefox).

[Bob Schroeck]

I'll just leave this here.

They've found over 750 more unmarked graves at another residential school. And again, this wasn't a case of a mass burial but of the deliberate removal of headstones and markers in an apparent attempt to hide how many children died there.

[robkelk]

Add another 100+ unmarked graves to that list, at yet another residential school.

That story's ten days old.

We've already passed the "million is a statistic" threshold... and we're only at a thousand children's bodies.

Mind you, there's a push on to not celebrate Canada Day this year, in memoriam.

[robkelk]

I have to think that these are related...

Overnight fires destroy 2 Catholic churches in Okanagan
Fire destroys 147-year-old church in Lax Kw'alaams First Nation
2 more Catholic churches burned down in B.C.'s Interior

[Jinx999]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/j...hite-house

Don't know if the papers are accurate or a clever forgery. The Guardian is left wing, but a serious paper that does due dilligence. It's also published in the Daily Mail, for what little that's worth.

[robkelk]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/j...hite-house

Don't know if the papers are accurate or a clever forgery. The Guardian is left wing, but a serious paper that does due dilligence. It's also published in the Daily Mail, for what little that's worth.

The Guardian is the the newspaper that broke the story about by the Obama administration secretly collecting Verizon telephone records. I doubt they care about US politics sufficiently to pander to either side.

As for the papers being either accurate or forgeries, the article says:

The Guardian has shown the documents to independent experts who say they appear to be genuine. Incidental details come across as accurate. The overall tone and thrust is said to be consistent with Kremlin security thinking.

EDIT: The most telling line in the article might be the final one:

Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

This guy tweets at the drop of a hat (or he used to before his account was blocked) - there's no way he'd refuse to offer a sound bite to a newspaper that has the gravitas that only an establishment that predates the US Civil War can have... unless doing so would make him look bad. They gave him a chance to defend his name and he didn't take it.

[Jinx999]

The other possibility is that the leak is deliberate disinformation to make American politics even worse.

And Trump's spokesthing has released a message saying that it was "Fake News". I am shocked to hear this claim. Shocked I tell you.

Also "nobody was tougher on Russia than me, including on the pipeline, and sanctions. At the same time we got along with Russia." Because contradicting yourself in two sentences is a brilliant rhetorical trick.

[Black Aeronaut]

I find it to be believable because there was also this article before as well...

https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-c...spy-2021-1

Which was also run not only by The Guardian, but numerous other reputable news outlets as well.

Man, the McCarthyism Crowd must all be rolling in their graves.  I can almost here it.

[nemonowan]

The other possibility is that the leak is deliberate disinformation to make American politics even worse.

Or even, deliberate TRUE information to make American politics even worse.

[robkelk]

Facebook pulls plug on mind-reading neural interface that restored a user's speech

What kind of barbaric country do they live in, where they're allowed to stop developing medical tech because it won't make a profit?

Oh, right. The USA.

[hazard]

Now now, it's entirely fair for them to refuse development because it's not profitable, it's not their job to provide medical services without turning a profit.

If they try to sit on the tech though they better be prepared to cough it up for the nominal sum of 1 cent on the basis of it being in the definite interest of society for this technology to be available and thus be available for eminent domain. Failure to cough it up should be very... unpleasant, for them.