Links - 13th July 2014

California Has Realized that Sex Offender Registries Don't Work - "all California sex offenders, no matter their offense, have to stay registered for life, including public urinators, underage sexters, and women who flash their tits at concerts. The last of these leads to "hilarious" articles like this one featuring lists of babealicious babes who are sex offenders! I wouldn't mind one of them molesting me! It's funny because sex offender registries are a waste of public funds, and do nothing except punish sex offenders for life with unnecessary inconvenience and bureaucracy! LOL... When they were in a public registry there was "a slight increase in how much they recidivated," although "a slight deterrent effect for first-time offenders. But as the registry size grows, it seems like that recidivism effects swamps the first-time registrant effect. And so, we get kind of an overall increase in sex crimes." Are you getting this? Sex crimes increased. One possible reason she cites is opportunity cost. Good citizens who don't commit sex crimes have a lot to lose. Registered sex offenders on the other hand, "are somewhat more isolated from society, and that may make it so if they are thinking about committing a crime, the costs that we may think of—the cost that we may lose our job, that we may lose the ties to our families—those costs don’t exist for them anymore"... That the board that oversees the registry itself is now calling for a change is an indication that they may have finally noticed the problem. The steps they're proposing would bring California's sex offender registry down to the relative sanity of most other states, i.e. from draconian to just useless... But legislators won't listen to reason. They literally said they won't. One particular California state assemblyman named Jim Nielsen, from Yolo County, said, "I'm willing to work in a responsible way on legislation that builds in the highest level of protections for the public. This proposal concerns me enormously. I think the risks are too great to try to intellectualize this stuff.""

Prisoners of Sex - NYTimes.com - "instead of media restraint we’ve had a splendid little culture war over the significance of the Santa Barbara killer’s distinctive stew of lust, misogyny and rage. Twitter movements have been created, think pieces written, and all kinds of cultural phenomena — from Judd Apatow movies to “pickup artists” and Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret” — have been invoked, analyzed and blamed... as sex looms ever larger as an aspirational good, we also live in a society where more people are single and likely to remain so than in any previous era. And since single people have, on average, a lot less sex than the partnered and wedded, a growing number of Americans are statistically guaranteed to feel that they’re not living up to the culture’s standard of fulfillment, happiness and worth... feminism, too, is often a prisoner of Hefnerism, in the sense that it tends to prescribe more and more “sex positivity,” insisting that the only problem with contemporary sexual culture is that it’s imperfectly egalitarian, insufficiently celebratory of female agency and desire. This means that the feminist prescription doesn’t supply what men slipping down into the darkness of misogyny most immediately need: not lectures on how they need to respect women as sexual beings, but reasons, despite their lack of sexual experience, to first respect themselves as men... A culture that too tightly binds sex and self-respect is likely, in the long run, to end up with less and less of both."

Drunk People Passed Out in Japan Get Turned Into PSA Billboards While They Sleep

10 Celebrity Tombstones Worth a Laugh

Want a better sex live? Post-coital cuddles are key, researchers say (especially if you have kids)

The Battle of Bagan: Burma’s struggle for UNESCO World Heritage Sites - "In addition to construction, the military have built on top of old structures, or reconstructed them completely. Scholars, in particular Don Stadtner, have disputed the military’s interferences, deeming them to have damaged Bagan’s archeological integrity. Stadtner opposes Bagan’s classification for UNESCO World Heritage Site status saying:"

Mankind initiative video shows public reaction to woman abusing a man in female on male domestic violence advert - "Members of the public laugh or pay no attention as the woman assaults and belittles her partner... The video was released a week after we saw CCTV footage of Solange Knowles attacking brother-in-law Jay Z in the lift after the Met Ball, an incident that reignited the issue of how we perceive female on male violence."

The invisible domestic violence – against men - "If the empirical research is correct in suggesting that between a quarter and half of all domestic violence victims are men, a question follows: why has women's domestic violence towards men been unreported for so long, and what has changed in the last five years to make it more visible? One reason may be the feminist movement. Feminism took up the cause of domestic abuse of women in the 1970s, with the world's first women's refuge being opened by Erin Pizzey in 1971. Feminism understood domestic violence as the natural extension of men's patriarchal attitudes towards women, leading men to feel they had the right to control their partners, using violence if necessary. Feminists campaigned successfully to bring the issue into the public arena, thereby securing resources to establish services to help victims. This activism and advocacy led to governmental and public acceptance that "domestic violence" was synonymous with violence against women. Paradoxically, feminist concerns for female victims may also have led to the recent increase in arrests of female perpetrators. The disparity between prevalence study statistics and criminal conviction data of male domestic violence perpetration led US feminists to successfully campaign for mandatory arrest policies for domestic violence call-outs. Mandatory arrest policies coincided with a three-fold increase in the number of women arrested... As men appear to be more ready, willing and able to use violence outside the home, the logical extension is that men are more violent than women per se. This argument has frequently been cited by researchers such as Professors Russell and Emerson Dobash as evidence against the veracity of figures showing large numbers of male victims of domestic violence, while ignoring the fact that men's aggression in public places is almost always directed towards other men"

Half of Belgium's euthanasia nurses admit to killing without consent
Another slippery slope which slipped (as with the euthanasia of children)
Amusingly, according to one critic, getting relatives' input (not even consent) is considered consent for euthanasia

Peter Lloyd: 'Why I'm suing my gym over their sexist women-only hours' - "they ban all men and boys for 442 hours every year - simply because they are male. Adding insult to injury, they still charge them the same full-price membership fee as women, but refuse to offer the equivalent option of male-only sessions... 'A report by the Women Sport and Fitness Foundation showed that a significant proportion of women (26 per cent) “hate the way they look when they exercise”.' they replied in an email. 'This takes on an even greater significance when you consider that women feel even more self-conscious when taking part in sport and physical activity when men are present. If you are wondering who or what [we are] it's a charity that specialises in increasing women’s physical activity levels.' Translated into plain English, this means that a group of agenda-driven feminists say a minority of women 'feel' bad about their bodies. And because heterosexual men are naturally attracted to women, their very existence makes it worse, so they should be banned. No, seriously. That's like trying to clean a dirty face by rubbing a mirror. It also assumes that all men in the gym are straight, when many of them are gay and have no interest in the female aesthetic. In fact, if they really wanted to, these men could be voyeuristic in the showers. So what next - gay and straight hours? And what about lesbians - can they attend women-only sessions, or would it make their straight sisters uncomfortable? Gimme a break."
Naturally, Jezebel calls him a "jackass"

Outrage grows as Google axes some Chrome extensions - "Complaints are numerous, and judging by the 42 pages of angst in Google's own product forums, voluminous. They can be summarized as general outrage at being told what to install on their computer, and specific frustration with not being able to use an extension that was part of a program they paid for... "Microsoft used to make mistakes like this," he said, "but learned a long time ago not to.""

Answer to Faith Healing: What do atheists think after seeing people being healed in churches like in the following videos? Can they claim this is not spiritual? - Quora - "I used to be a Charismatic minister. I have seen, literally, thousands of healings. I have personally seen Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar, Reinhardt Bonke and TB Joshua and many more doing healings. THEY NEVER LAST. As a minister, one of our greatest frustrations was that people would head off to these miracle services, chuck away their glasses, their insulin, their wheelchairs, and lo and behold a few (hours, days, weeks) later, they would be right back on the insulin, the glasses, the wheelchairs... I have seen (non-religious) doctors pitching up at services in awe that their terminal cancer patient has suddenly tested free of cancer, even testifying to that fact. That same doctor usually signed the death certificate. And we (the clergy) buried them and had to deal with the shocked family"

American Employees Prefer Their Bosses Male - "intolerance among women is entirely mutual, and women are just as difficult for women to employ as they are for women to report to. Female subordinates are often less respectful of, and deferential to, their female bosses than they are to their male bosses. They question more, push back, and expect a certain level of familiarity or camaraderie that they don’t expect from the men. This speaks to the long tradition of women being notoriously hypercritical of one another, an assertion proven by science: a study published in the journal Psychological Science concluded that women form a negative view of other women in their lives—including friends, co-workers, and, yes, bosses—far more quickly and freely than men do of other men. Research confirms that female employees hold their female managers to different standards than they do their male managers"

Workers 'prefer male bosses' - "Two thirds of employees agree they would rather work for a man than a woman. Female bosses were accused of being moody and incapable of leaving their personal lives at home. A third of those polled claimed women in charge are 'loose cannons' - ready to stab colleagues in the back at any time, and who constantly feel threatened by other people in positions of authority. By contrast, both male and female workers believe male bosses were less likely to get involved in office politics, were easier to reason with and rarely suffered from mood swings. Men are also said to be more straight-talking than women and rarely talk about others behind their backs, it emerged."