Links - 6th January 2014

Horror: Violent mob of topless pro-abort feminists attacks praying men defending cathedral (VIDEO) - "The women, many of them topless, spray-painted the men’s crotches and faces and swastikas on their chests and foreheads, using markers to paint their faces with Hitler-like moustaches. They also performed obscene sexual acts in front of them and pushed their breasts onto their faces... some of the women chanted a song, with the lyrics: “To the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, who wants to get between our sheets, we say that we want to be whores, travesties and lesbians. Legal abortion in every hospital.” During the attack some men were visibly weeping. None of them retaliated against the abuses heaped on them... After unsuccessfully trying to get into the building, the women burned a human-sized effigy of Pope Francis. “If the pope were a woman, abortion would be legal,” they shouted. The attack took place on Sunday, November 24th during the National Women’s Encounter, which annually brings together Argentinean feminists who support “women’s rights.” The police reportedly told the media they were unable to intervene because “they are women"... The National Women’s Encounter takes place every year in different Argentinean cities, sponsored by the Department of Culture as a “social interest” event. According to the Argentinean pro-life site ArgentinosAlerta.org, this is not the first time that the feminists wind up in public violence against churches and Catholics. In past protests, the cathedral of Bariloche, Paraná and Posadas have also suffered damages from these groups. “These encounters of women represent today’s civilization that seeks to impose it’s own rules,” reads the site. “On one side, they try to impose political agenda that international organizations dictate: population control, abortion, contraception, homosexualism. On the other side, they become barbaric in the most literal sense.”"

Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government? - "This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross‐sectional time‐series data for 1870–1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did."

Milton Friedman had it right, cut equal pay legislation - "He argued that if you look at employers who hire men over women they have their reasons. These reasons might stem from sexist tendencies, or they may not. But if the offended group offers to receive less in wages to do the same labor, then now the employer bears a cost for this discrimination which is the difference between what he would pay the man versus the woman. The woman has a trump card to fight against discrimination which is that she can offer to work for less. No matter how sexist and chauvinistic the employer might be, he will be forced to recalculate whether his outdated beliefs are worth the cost. Now add equal pay for equal work legislation into the scenario. Now the woman has lost her trump card because the employer is forced to pay the same wage. Now his sexism does not cost him anything and he is free to employ men over women without bearing the cost he would have absent the legislation."
"I'm on your side, but you're not"

Warren Buffett's Son: Charity Fuels a 'Perpetual Poverty Machine' - "Buffett’s own son, Peter, is saying that charities don't work as well as they should and just create a "perpetual poverty machine." He also says that rich people giving to charities is akin to "conscience laundering"... the "charitable-industrial complex" is not all it's cracked up to be... He then relayed a story of the unintended consequences of such philanthropic efforts. He noted that in one case when he convinced sex workers at an unnamed brothel to use condoms, instead of merely stopping disease and protecting sex workers from AIDS, his efforts actually created a new market: higher prices for special "unprotected sex." Buffett criticized the propensity of big-money charities for imagining that it was a natural fit to transplant business practices onto charitable efforts. He also said it was a mistake to assume that if something works in one part of the world it is a perfect, one-size-fits-all model for every such situation in all parts of the world. The Buffett scion also pointed out that even as non-governmental charitable organizations have grown exponentially, "inequality is continually rising." Buffett said that, "the nonprofit sector has been steadily growing. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits increased 25 percent. Their growth rate now exceeds that of both the business and government sectors. It’s a massive business, with approximately $316 billion given away in 2012 in the United States alone and more than 9.4 million employed.""

Pop neuroscience is bunk! - "By now you’ve seen the pretty pictures: Color-drenched brain scans capturing Buddhist monks meditating, addicts craving cocaine, and college sophomores choosing Coke over Pepsi... The brain has even wandered into such unlikely redoubts as English departments, where professors debate whether scanning subjects’ brains as they read passages from Jane Austen novels represents (a) a fertile inquiry into the power of literature or (b) a desperate attempt to inject novelty into a field that has exhausted its romance with psychoanalysis and postmodernism... As one scientist remarked, brain images are now “replacing Bohr’s planetary atom as the symbol of science”... Despite well-informed inferences, the greatest challenge of imaging is that it is very difficult for scientists to look at a fiery spot on a brain scan and conclude with certainty what is going on in the mind of the person. Neuroimaging is a young science, barely out of its infancy, really. In such a fledgling enterprise, the half-life of facts can be especially brief. To regard research findings as settled wisdom is folly, especially when they emanate from a technology whose implications are still poorly understood. As any good scientist knows, there will always be questions to hone, theories to refine, and techniques to perfect. Nonetheless, scientific humility can readily give way to exuberance. When it does, the media often seem to have a ringside seat at the spectacle... It’s all too easy for the nonexpert to lose sight of the fact that fMRI and other brain-imaging techniques do not literally read thoughts or feelings. By obtaining measures of brain oxygen levels, they show which regions of the brain are more active when a person is thinking, feeling, or, say, reading or calculating. But it is a rather daring leap to go from these patterns to drawing confident inferences about how people feel about political candidates or paying taxes, or what they experience in the throes of love... in a world where university press releases elbow one another for media attention, it’s often the study with a buzzy storyline (“Men See Bikini-Clad Women as Objects, Psychologists Say”) that gets picked up and dumbed down... if every behavior is eventually traced to detectable correlates of brain activity, does this mean we can one day write off all troublesome behavior on a don’t-blame-me-blame-my-brain theory of crime? Will no one ever be judged responsible?"

Check your privilege! Whatever that means - "now we get to the fun bit of check-your-privilege's story, when it stopped being a calm, thoughtful and still faintly academic phrase, and became the subject of ferocious debate among, first, those on the left and, now, those on the right. First, it is important to remember we are dealing with interactions on social media here, a medium that is to "calm" and "thoughtfulness" what the Daily Mail is to reasoned political debate... According to Mensch: "'Check your privilege' is a profoundly stupid trope that states that only those with personal experience of something should comment"... it's just as easy for certain media figures to forget that theirs is not the only voice that matters. Ultimately, a well-meaning reminder to listen to other people occasionally has been turned into an angry cliche through misunderstanding, mockery and overuse. Maybe it's time for the phrase itself to check its privilege."

The latest Lefty mantra: Check Your Privilege - "Apparently, if any of us wish to comment on a particular issue we have to first “check our privilege”. It’s like a sort of moral entry exam. Before expressing a point of view we must first establish our bona fides. So for example, if you want to talk about an issue such as welfare reform, you have to consider whether you are middle-class or not. If you are, then sadly you fail the test. You can’t comment. Or if you do comment, then your point of view is in some way invalidated... I’d given my privilege a thorough going over, and everything looked to be in good working order. But then to my horror I realised this was in fact a catastrophe. Unless the debate veers off towards comprehensive education for the partially sighted, I literally have nothing to contribute. Or if I do contribute, who will listen? My privilege will act like a gag. A beautiful and very expensive Liberty silk gag. But a gag none the less... how do we actually define privilege? Let’s go back to the example I gave about welfare. Who really holds the privilege in this debate? Is it someone like me, who has never taken a penny of welfare, except to make regular withdrawals from the bank of mum and dad.? Or is it those who are actually subsisting on, and benefiting from, welfare themselves? Who, in this case, actually enters the debate from a position of self-interest? Shouldn’t it be those Shameless types who we all know are merely idling and scrounging and swinging the lead, who should be giving their own privilege the run down?"

Why Don't You Try This?: 12-Year-Old Discovers All U.S. Presidents Are Direct Descendents Of King John Of England

Noah's Ark Found in Turkey? - ""I don't know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn't find it," said Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist specializing in the Middle East at Stony Brook University in New York State... Skepticism of the new Noah's ark claim extends to at least one scholar who interprets the Bible literally... Wood thinks Noah's ark will never be found, because "it would have been prime timber after the flood," he said."

"Noah's Flood" May Have Triggered European Farming - "The deluge may have also contributed to an explosion in European agriculture—especially throughout inland regions near the Black Sea, where farms were previously scarce, the researchers found. "

Scrabble at the North Pole - The People's Funny Pictures Blog - Quora

Lulu App, Review Men, Revenge on Boyfriend, Yelp for Girls, Dating App - "Things just harken back to a simpler time with the Lulu app, a time when men were men (with lots of money and cars and love-believing!) and women were kind of sad and desperate with no real personality to speak of... we’re not in favor of anything that offers a space for people to say mean things about other people* under the guise of helping… though the glossy, airheaded faux female empowerment makes it even harder to swallow."
Apparently this is "empowering" for women "When I first heard about this app from one of my male friends, the first thing he said was, if Lulu was an app for men to rate women, sexual harassment lawsuits would ensue" "Some of the bad hash tags include “still loves his ex,” “baby daddy” and “perfect for my sister.”" "On Lulu, the answer to “what women want” is simple: someone fun to make out with who isn’t a total jerk"

Do human females use indirect aggression as an intrasexual competition strategy? - "Indirect aggression includes behaviours such as criticizing a competitor's appearance, spreading rumours about a person's sexual behaviour and social exclusion. Human females have a particular proclivity for using indirect aggression, which is typically directed at other females, especially attractive and sexually available females, in the context of intrasexual competition for mates. Indirect aggression is an effective intrasexual competition strategy. It is associated with a diminished willingness to compete on the part of victims and with greater dating and sexual behaviour among those who perpetrate the aggression."
If bitchy girls put out more, this could answer the question posed by the book: Why Men Marry Bitches: A Woman's Guide to Winning Her Man's Heart

Women's Magazines Objectify Women Just as Much as Men's Magazines Do - "Sharon Marcus's 2007 book Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England provides some possible, and surprising, answers. The basic argument of Marcus's book is that, in Victorian England, intense friendships between women were seen as an essential part of heterosexual female identity. These friendships might be platonic, they could also be sexual, or they could be somewhere in the middle. But sexual or platonic or in the middle, they were perceived as normal. In other words, during this period, an eroticized interest in other women did not mean that a woman was a lesbian. It simply meant that she was a woman"
Self-harm! Sexism is men doing to women what women do to each other Apparently it's empowering for women to objectify other women