Links - 20th March 2018 (2)

Conspiracy Theorists Have a Basic Cognitive Issue, Say Scientists - "the compulsion to find patterns in an observable situation was in fact correlated with irrational beliefs: People who saw patterns in random coin tosses and chaotic, abstract paintings were more likely to believe in conspiratorial and supernatural theories... “Following a manipulation of belief in one conspiracy theory people saw events in the world as more strongly casually connected, which in turn predicted unrelated irrational beliefs”"

FACT CHECK: Was a Woman Attacked on Camera for Wearing a 'Make America Great Again' Hat in Hollywood? - "WHAT'S TRUE
YouTube star Blaire White did get into an altercation over her red "Make America Great Again" hat when she went to an anti-Trump protest on Hollywood Boulevard.
WHAT'S FALSE
Police said White and her boyfriend initiated the altercation by crossing an LAPD dividing line meant to keep opposing sides separate to prevent violence."
Comments: ""Yeah people beat the shit out of her, but hey she was asking for it by just being there. Verdict: MIXED" Wow, fuck Snopes."
"By this logic, you could say of a woman who was raped upon entering a dark alley at night while wearing provocative clothing that it was only "partly true" that she got raped. This is worse than victim blaming, it's intentionally obscuring the fact that there was a victim in the first place"

Vancouver Island University didn't protect women from student with diaper fetish, complaint alleges - "Is it sexual harassment or a simple misunderstanding of a man’s disability? That’s the issue currently confronting the Vancouver Island University in British Columbia, Canada, after its former director of human rights and workplace safety filed a complaint alleging that the school didn’t do enough to protect women from a student in his 40s with a possible diaper fetish. But the man, who remains unnamed, told CBC that “I am special needs and 3, so I am not in my 40s”... the student engaged in “fetishistic behaviour in and out of the classroom” that included: talking and acting like an infant in classes, following women to isolated areas and leering at them before asking them out on dates, the Journal reported. Roth originally submitted the complaint in July, also alleging that the student included an image of himself wearing nothing but a diaper in a 2015 English essay and asked a nurse practitioner at the university to change his soiled diapers twice
Given trans mania logic...


The Ignorance of Mocking Mormonism - "it’s precisely the pro-social beliefs of Mormons—the eternal nature of families, obligations to the poor and oppressed, accountability to God, the importance of clean living, and the value of self-reliance and personal agency—that result in specific shared behaviors and actions by the likes of Flake and Romney... As much as South Park or Andersen desire to decouple behavior from belief, the reality is that, in the words of the columnist David Brooks, “Vague, uplifting, nondoctrinal religiosity doesn't actually last. The religions that grow, succor and motivate people to perform heroic acts of service are usually theologically rigorous, arduous in practice, and definite in their convictions about what is True and False.”"

The Words Men and Women Use When They Write About Love - The New York Times - "When writing about love, men are more likely to write about sex, and women about marriage. Women write more about feelings, men about actions. Even as gender roles have merged and same-sex romance has become more accepted, men and women still speak different languages when they talk about love — at least, if Modern Love essays submitted to The New York Times are any indication."
Stereotypes!

Canadian driver fights to keep 'Grabher' registration plate - "A Canadian man whose surname was deemed too offensive for his personalised car registration plate says it is a case of "bureaucratic hypocrisy". Lorne Grabher argues in a recently filed affidavit that there are plenty of potentially offensive signs and place names dotted across Canada. Those include Crotch Lake (in Ontario) and Dildo (in Newfoundland). Mr Grabher's personalised plate was cancelled because it could be seen as a "socially unacceptable slogan"."

Indulgent grandparents 'bad for children's health' - "grandparents are often inclined to treat and overfeed children. The study also found some were smoking in front of their grandchildren and not giving them sufficient exercise.

Thomas Salbey who stood up to Munich shooter facing charge for insulting killer - "Thomas Salbey, 57, saw the shooting happening from his balcony in the Bavarian capital on July 22. In an attempt to stop 18 year old Ali Sonboly from further slaughtering people, he swore at the shooter as he was standing in a car park below... Loner Sonboly had just shot dead nine people, mainly young teenagers he had lured to McDonald’s on the premise of free food. The German-Iranian also injured 16 others during the rampage before he killed himself a kilometre away from the Munich Olympiad shopping centre he carried the shooting out at. Now, in a twist of German justice, Mr Salbey is now facing charges for standing up to the killer who shot himself in the head."
Priorities!

Non-Western Immigrants Consume 59% Of Denmark's Tax Surplus - "A recent study conducted by Denmark’s Ministry of Finance concluded that in 2014, immigrants and their descendants cost Danish taxpayers at net loss of 28 billion Crowns per year. Furthermore, when Western immigrants were removed from the equation, the net cost rose to 33kr billion... Consider that ethnic minorities, who are by definition immigrants to Denmark, represent 84% of all welfare recipients, as of 2016... non-ethnic Danes are 2-3 times more likely to commit crimes than Danes... healthcare costs for immigrants groups are proving significant. For example, 40% of patients in Denmark’s largest mental health hospital have immigrant backgrounds."

Kids for cash scandal - Wikipedia - "The "kids for cash" scandal unfolded in 2008 over judicial kickbacks at the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were convicted of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit youth centers for the detention of juveniles, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh adjudications on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of residents in the centers"

The Ukrainian famine | Podcast | History Extra - "Activists both from Russia and Ukraine went village by village and went into people's homes and literally confiscated all of their food. So people came into other people's houses, they took all of their food and they took it away. And that's not a normal famine. It wasn't even just grain that they were taking away - they took away corn, and they took away seeds that people were storing, and they took away bread that was in the oven, and they took away soup that was on the stove, and they took away vegetables and they took away carrots and squash and beans so that really people had nothing at all to eat. And then the second thing that was done after that, they essentially closed the borders of Ukraine so they took food out of people's homes, they shut the borders so that people couldn't leave to find food anywhere else and that meant that people stayed inside Ukraine and died and so that, there's really no more direct way to cause a famine than that...
[On the activists] These were people who had been brought up to believe that you know the revolution was all important, revolution was in danger and the biggest threat to the revolution, the sort of thing that was standing in the way of its success and the reason why it wasn't succeeding and remember by the end of the twenties it was clear that it wasn't succeeding, it wasn't bringing people paradise on earth and people were not richer, they were poorer and so on. So why wasn't it succeeding? And problem was the peasants. You know the backwards looking, you know sort of Luddite, anti-Soviet, surly, uneducated peasants were standing in the way of our great revolution and progress and therefore the peasants need to be eliminated. And therefore they are the barrier that's keeping all of us from success and the reason why the workers are hungry is the recalcitrant peasants are preventing them from progressing. And that mentality coupled with a kind of blind faith in the system urged on also by really a decade's worth of kind of fanatical hateful rhetoric about the peasantry and about the so called kulaks or the rich peasants and then also about Ukrainians shaped people's minds. You have to think today of fanatical groups fed on you know hatred who go off and do terrible things. We can all think of modern and twentieth century, other twentieth century powers - that's essentially what this was"

Christianity and the classical world | Podcast | History Extra - "There are these people who are so keen to be martyrs that they don't even wait to be killed they just commit suicide. These extraordinary people in North Africa called the Circumcellions who terrify North Africa because they would just do things like set themselves on fire or jump off cliffs or drown themselves... they are promised specifically by one text one hundred times what everyone else will get in heaven. Origen says you're going to get a hundred times the children, one hundred times the oxen, one hundred times everything... you will be lording it over everyone else in heaven it's not a humble thing... they took themselves to Roman governors, they say, they turn up ready chained and say I'm ready to die a martyr...
'Well he doesn't want to kill them. He will kill them, right he's Pliny, he's a Roman. He has a job to do, he has a province to keep quiet but he would really rather not. And you get these amazing martyrdom tales where the Roman governors say things like are you sure you want to kill yourself? Look outside, it's a really sunny day.'
'What about your poor mother?'...
'What a lot of people don't really understand either about persecutions is no ancient Roman governor or Greek governor or Syrian governor under the Roman Empire, whatever, remotely cared what you actually believed inside your head either. They didn't care. It was all a matter of whether or not you attended public city sacrifices... It's a bit like Obama being made sure that he lowers, lowers his head you know during a prayer or something... they would not do this and in fact when they all get into power as well actually interrogating what's deep inside your head. Right, they actually did want to thought control and stop people'...
'Standing up during the National Anthem. Or something like that. It was just doing what you did to be a good citizen'"

Nigerian Youths take lizard dung and gutter water to get "HIGH"

ISIS fighters packing human bodies, kids' toys and fridges with BOMBS as they flee Iraq's towns and cities - "The situation is so grim that one man a day from Iraq’s bomb disposal teams is being killed by the devices.

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Kenya: election rerun exposes chasms - "Many Thais worry that he's got a rather cruel streak to him. There's many rumors that we can't discuss here but things that we know on the public record: we know that when he divorced his third wife a couple of years ago, he then jailed almost all of her family. Including her parents and her three brothers and so on. We know that he operates a private prison in one of his palaces where people who displease him can be punished without really any oversight. And there's been at least five unexplained deaths of people in his inner circle over the last few years which the Thai authorites really struggled to give a proper explanation for"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Lifting of Saudi Arabia driving ban a political distraction? - "This is a long story of dictators engaging with women rights. From Saddam Hussein and Bashar Al-Assad and Bourguiba in Tunisia, we find that they all champion them, women's rights. For a particular reason - they feel that this goods them a good, feel good factor, divert attention from real political reform"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Niall Ferguson on social media and revolution - "I just moved quite recently out to near Silicon Valley, from Harvard to Stanford and I was amazed to find that people there essentially don't care about history at all because they think that history began with the Google IPO or the founding of Facebook... it's not entirely unique what we're seeing today. There have been periods in the past when social networks have been empowered by new technology and have been hugely disruptive of established hierarchical structures... When Martin Luther launched the Reformation. If there had been no printing presses in Germany in fifteen seventeen we'd never have heard of him...
Mark Zuckerberg I think very sincerely believes that if you connect the whole world and he's now got past two billion users on Facebook, you'll create a global community. And the general assumption in Silicon Valley - he's not alone in this - has been really since the nineteen nineties is that everything will be awesome if we are all connected. The bad news from history is that it doesn't work that way. That actually when you connect everybody networks have a tendency to polarize because of something called homophily... Birds of a feather flock together on social networks and what you see is the kind of polarization that happened in the Reformation because not everybody agreed with Luther...
Socialism starts to look attractive when inequality reaches a certain level and one of the interesting things about the network world is that it does actually amplify inequality... young people have no memory of the last great experiments with Socialism that the UK ran in the mid to late twentieth century which went pretty horribly wrong. Old geezers is like me can remember double digit inflation, three day weeks and so on. My kids have absolutely no memory of that and I think from that point of view are tempted by the promises that the Labour Party offers of jam today and jam tomorrow"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Today at 60: How our attitudes to sex have changed - "Allison Webster was to become the last principal Page Three photographer. She lost that job when Rupert Murdoch gave way to the rising chorus of protests and said enough. To this day Ms Webster regrets the passing of Page Three.
'Yeah, everyone's entitled to criticize things. I think banning things is wrong because I think we should all be allowed to do what makes us happy as long it's not hurting anybody else and I don't think physically it was hurting anybody else'
'Weren't the women exploited?'
'I would say not. They would say that they were exploiting the Sun. They worked very little for a fair amount of money and had a great time doing it so where's the exploitation in that?... in America where they create more porn than any other place in the world you're not allowed to sunbathe topless on a beach. I just think it'll go round in a circle and come back to somewhere again'"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, John Grisham on new novel and Trump - "I don't like the idea of taking down historical monuments because I don't think it's one generation's right to go, to view history differently. The monuments tell only one side of a conflict. I think there should be other monuments next to the Confederate monuments that tell the rest of the story. To honor the slaves who suffered, the abolitionists who were brave enough to stand up to the slave owners and those people should be studied and honored and memorialized but I just, I have not come to the point where I think the monuments should be removed. But they should be there to, so to tell the entire story"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, How fake news works - "We do know that in the Summer election here in the UK that both, that all of the major political parties used these tricks. So unfortunately this is now a normal part of modern political campaigning, even in democracies'
'So political parties are using computational propaganda. In other words, trying to get the conversation moving their way with false users and robotic accounts'
'Right. And spreading rumours about your opponents'"

Helena Schrader's answer to Why did King Richard I execute the civilian population of Acre after capturing the city during the Third Crusade? - Quora - "To ensure that Saladin upheld his part of the bargain, an estimated 2,500 men (accounts vary) from the garrison were held as hostages. It is important to note that these hostages were not women or children, not innocent civilians, nor were they technically prisoners; they were hostages. According to the rules of war at this time, their lives were forfeit if the terms of the surrender agreement were not met. Saladin, possibly because he had not been consulted about the terms the garrison negotiated, or possibly because he couldn't raise the money or find the hostages or didn't have the True Cross any longer, failed to comply with the terms of the agreement. He asked for first one extension and then a second, but still failed to deliver.;.. To this day, the massacre of hostages at Acre is almost always cited by Richard's detractors as an act of "barbarism." It was far from that, but it was an act of cold-blooded realpolitik in a brutal age."