AREN’T THE CRITICS ASSUMING THE ROBOT’S GENDER IDENTITY?:  Calvin Klein apologizes after critics argue he should have used a lesbian model instead of a heterosexual one in advertisement featuring a woman kissing a female-looking robot.

JOHN FUND ON THE AUSTRALIAN UPSET:  Hell hath no fury like a disappointed leftie.

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WHEN TURKEY DESTROYED ITS CHRISTIANS:

Between 1894 and 1924, the number of Christians in Asia Minor fell from some 3-4 million to just tens of thousands—from 20% of the area’s population to under 2%. Turkey has long attributed this decline to wars and the general chaos of the period, which claimed many Muslim lives as well. But the descendants of Turkey’s Christians, many of them dispersed around the world since the 1920s, maintain that the Turks murdered about half of their forebears and expelled the rest.

The Christians are correct. Our research verifies their claims: Turkey’s Armenian, Greek and Assyrian (or Syriac) communities disappeared as a result of a staggered campaign of genocide beginning in 1894, perpetrated against them by their Muslim neighbors. By 1924, the Christian communities of Turkey and its adjacent territories had been destroyed.

Over the past decade, we have sifted through the Turkish, U.S., British and French archives, as well as some Greek materials and the papers of the German and Austro-Hungarian foreign ministries. This research has made it possible to document a strikingly consistent pattern of ethno-religious atrocity over three decades, perpetrated by the Turkish government, army, police and populace.

The concentrated slaughter of Turkey’s Armenians in 1915-16, commonly known as the Armenian genocide, is well documented and acknowledged (outside of Turkey, which still bitterly objects to the charge). But the Armenian genocide was only a part, albeit the centerpiece, of a larger span of elimination that lasted some 30 years. Our work provides the first detailed description and analysis of the 1894-96 massacres and the destruction of the region’s Greek and remaining Armenian communities in 1919-24 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic.

The bloodshed was importantly fueled throughout by religious animus. Muslim Turks—aided by fellow Muslims, including Kurds, Circassians, Chechens and Arabs—murdered about two million Christians in bouts of slaughter immediately before, during and after World War I. These massacres were organized by three successive governments, those of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II, the Young Turks and, finally, Atatürk. These governments also expelled between 1.5 and 2 million Christians, mostly to Greece.

The book is The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924.

OPEN THREAD: Still a few hours of weekend left. Where better to spend them than here?

HMM: “I suppose that I chose to write out of a fear of handling more concrete and dangerous forms of power.”

I’m sure that, somehow, that fear is the fault of the patriarchy. Plus, from the comments: “You get the feeling that if the NYT cut out the ‘Women bitching about something’ articles they’d lose 25% of the newspaper.”

In her classic, Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness — and Liberalism — to the Women of America, Myrna Blyth notes that according to research, when women complain to each other their brains release the bonding chemical oxytocin, while men do not experience the same phenomenon. That explains a whole lot about women’s media.

UPDATE: Flashback to this piece by the late, and much-missed Cathy Seipp.

DON’T TRUST SILICON VALLEY: How tech companies are shaping the rules governing AI.

HOW DUMB IS THIS WASHINGTON POST REPORTER? This dumb: She repeats the canard that Trump was the “motivation” behind the tragic murders at the Capital Gazette, yet the very article she cites says expressly:

“Ramos held a long-standing grudge against the The Capital. It began with an article in the newspaper in 2011 that detailed a criminal harassment charge that a woman filed against Ramos, a former high school classmate of hers.”

Of course, this video game is objectionable, but no more so than the wildly popular “Grand Theft Auto” series, which allows players to murder sex workers and homeless people.

TWO NYC WOMEN FLEW ALL THE WAY TO IOWA SO MAYOR DE BLASIO WOULD FINALLY ANSWER THEIR QUESTIONS: “Tita Concepcion lives in public housing in New York and came all the way to Sioux City to confront Mayor de Blasio about the problems at [the New York City Housing Authority]. New Yorkers, if you want some face time with your mayor, he’ll be in South Carolina today and tomorrow morning.”

HMM: 57% BELIEVE TRUMP LIKELY TO WIN IN 2020… UP FROM 54% A MONTH AGO, 46% IN FEBRUARY.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The truth about sex: we are not getting enough.

How comforting this sex-positive vision is. How sophisticated and liberal we are.

Except. A paper in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal summed up the findings of three huge national surveys into sexual attitudes, called Natsal, the latest of which was in 2012. Natsal is British in focus, but some of its findings are reflected globally: worldwide, we are having less sex less frequently and are more upset about it. In Britain, most of the decline in sexual frequency is in people aged over 25 and in long-term relationships. In the US, the over-50s reported the largest decline in how often they had sex, though Finnish middle-aged men reported they were getting sex more frequently. In Japan, the most sexual inactivity was in young single people. Millennials are having less sex than their parents; young people, we are told, are in a “sex drought”.

We have reordered our customs in order to satisfy a noisy minority, and it seems to have made the majority less happy.

BLOGGING HAS BEEN LIGHT because I spent the weekend in the mountains with my crowd of high school friends. When we gathered at our friend Joel’s funeral last fall we vowed not to wait until someone else died to get together again. We hiked in the mountains, drank beer, and — thanks to the generosity of a former student who owns it — got a VIP tour and tasting session at the Sugarlands Distillery in Gatlinburg. A good time was had by all.

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

The “have you no decency?” schtick, and the concern-trolling about “divisiveness” and “name-calling” and “undermining institutions” only goes one way. Because it’s all partisan schtick.

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CHANGE: Volvo to Start Using Electrically Driven Superchargers. It’s amazing to me that these can perform competitively with gear- or belt-driven superchargers.

RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES, SMASH ALL THE STATUES: Pete Buttigieg wants Thomas Jefferson events and buildings renamed.

PROGRESSIVE COLONIALISM, SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT:

I’m so sorry. Really, just very sorry. Here entitled Yankees like the NYT’s Ginia Bellafante thought the American South existed to give Millennial Brooklynites a place to reproduce Park Slope, but more affordably, and now we’ve gone and ruined it for them with our deplorable social and religious views.

* * * * * * * *

I concede that it’s interesting to talk to progressive Northerners who moved South, thinking that the Grand March of Progress would inevitably make the benighted (but cheap) metropolises of Dixie into non-deplorable locales — but who are learning that they, in fact, live in the South.

What chaps my butt about the piece is the assumption by the author (and those she writes about) that the South ought to assimilate to the dominant progressive culture. The message of this piece is, If you Christianist troglodytes don’t let us progressives have our abortions, we’re not going to move there and contribute to your economies. 

I have an idea! All y’all could pack up your progressive colonialism ethic and go the hell back home.

Read the whole thing. Billionaire GOP contributors and libertarian-types like the Koch Brothers really need to get going on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon idea.

OLD SCHOOL: Concealed-Carry Revolvers: Still Solid for Self-Defense.

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21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: For Teens, Romances Where the Couple Never Meets Are Now Normal: A generation that lives online is redefining dating; ‘We only met for 20 minutes and that was the first and last time we ever saw each other.’

If we’re looking for an explanation of why today’s teens are having less sex than previous generations, there’s this: Many of them spend months or even years dating without ever meeting face to face.

When Nicole Nguyen was 16, she met her first serious boyfriend for the first and last time—after they’d broken up. They had 20 minutes. They hugged once. It only happened because that day, they just happened to find themselves in the same state.

Yet for an entire year, they spent almost every waking moment texting each other, talking on voice-chat apps, and even communicating over webcams through Skype and Oovoo. Ms. Nguyen, 24, is now a pre-kindergarten teaching assistant living in Brooklyn Park, Minn. To this day her parents have no idea they ever dated in the first place.

They might sound unusual: online relationships that bloom, reach a fever pitch of teenage intensity and—possibly—even wither before the two parties ever meet. But they’re becoming more common than ever. Ask any teenager—if they haven’t been in a relationship like this themselves, they can probably name friends who have.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this isn’t great.

DOCUMENTARY: ‘Cold Blue’ Shows the B-17 Bomber Like You’ve Never Seen It Before.

THE SELF-DRIVING THING WON’T BE A DEFENSE UNTIL IT’S A REAL SELF-DRIVING THING: Thanks Autopilot: Cops stop Tesla whose driver appears asleep and drunk.

PROSECUTORIAL DISCRETION: Shoplifter finds Rachael Rollins’ no-prosecute list not at work in Norfolk County. “An admitted career crook who saw the news about Suffolk DA Rachael Rollins’ no-prosecute list on a jailhouse TV couldn’t believe it when cops in Weymouth slapped cuffs on him for shoplifting $126 worth of goods from a Stop & Shop. ‘It’s not a crime, I thought. I saw it on TV when I was in prison,’ Glenn Kerivan griped to the Herald on Thursday.”

IT’S NOT AN “OPEN AIR CONCENTRATION CAMP” IF YOU CAN’T BLAME ISRAEL: Hamas said to impose restrictions after young, educated Gazans exited for ‘vacations’ through reopened Rafah Crossing to escape and seek better lives in Europe.

What percentage of those who complain about Israel imposing restrictions on Gaza for security reasons are going to complain about Hamas imposing further restrictions to prevent people from escaping Hamas rule? An initial estimate of “zero” seems right.