Links - 29th June 2019

Dutch minister resigns over manipulated report of crimes committed by asylum-seekers - "The Netherlands’ minister for migration, Mark Harbers, resigned Tuesday (21 May) after a parliamentary outcry over elided data on crimes committed by asylum-seekers, in a bad blow to the government just ahead of European elections... In the report, misdemeanours such as shoplifting had their own separate categories but serious crimes such as sexual assault, murder and manslaughter were lumped together under the category “other” with no disaggregation... Harbers announced he had offered his resignation. He assumed “total responsibility” for not correctly informing the chamber but said it was “not deliberate,” Dutch media reported... Rutte’s governing coalition already suffered a shock two months ago when provincial elections made the Forum for Democracy party — an anti-immigration populist party that backs a Netherlands exit from the European Union — the biggest party in the senate"

Austria: Four out of Ten Underage Migrants Lied About Their Age - "in 2017, four out of every ten migrants who claimed to be underage were lying in order to have a better chance of getting asylum.The statistics come after medical tests showed that 347 migrants out of 867 who were flagged as potentially being adults, were found to be at least 18 or older... The asylum seekers in questions were subjected to medical examinations including X-ray and physical, dental, and radiological tests which cost the Austrian taxpayer 1.2 million euros. The results follow similar tests done in 2015 and in 2016 where nearly a thousand migrants were found to be lying about their real age. “Underage” migrants have also been involved with several high-profile crimes in both Austria and neighbouring Germany where some cities, such as Hamburg, have found that up to half of the underage asylum seekers are over the age of 18. The most well-known case of a migrant claiming to be underage and going on to murder a young woman was that of Hussein Khavari, the rapist and killer of German student Maria Ladenburger. Tests found that he was an adult, while his own father claimed that Khavari could be as old as 33."

Trump Doesn't Need to Attack Iran: He’s Winning Already. - "What we’re seeing unfold in the Persian Gulf is a confrontation between a U.S. president who doesn’t know when he’s winning, and a Supreme Leader who doesn’t know when he’s losing. If Donald Trump changes his mind again and orders an attack on Iranian targets, he will have played into Ali Khamenei’s hands... Trump seems to have lost sight of the fact that his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against the Islamic Republic is working: Iran’s economy is feeling great pain, and its isolation is deepening. For all of its proclamations of resistance and resilience, the regime in Tehran is plainly alarmed. In its panic, it has started to lash out in ways that hurt its own interests, and erode the sympathy it has enjoyed in international circles since Trump pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal last year. The threat to resume uranium enrichment, and to exceed agreed limits, is already losing Iran the support of the Europeans, as are the attacks on neutral shipping near the Persian Gulf. Khamenei’s humiliation of the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who made a good-faith effort to mediate an end to the confrontation, has cost Iran more goodwill. The shooting down of an American drone was yet another demonstration of the regime’s capacity for self-harm. And Trump was, for once, playing his cards reasonably well. He stated his openness to negotiations and his desire to avoid war. He dismissed the tanker attacks as “very minor” and attributed the downing of the drone as the work of a “loose and stupid” individual. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also let the Iranians know that if their future actions caused the death of an American service member, it would trigger reprisals.This is exactly the right response to Iran’s provocations: To brush them off and allow the regime to damage itself in the court of world opinion, even as it is continually weakened by sanctions"

GENDER GAP? This conservative scholar's findings challenge popular narrative on the Left - "since 1982, 13 million more college degrees were awarded to women than to men.The analysis comes from Department of Education data and represents the gender gap across all degrees, including associate’s, bachelor’s, and graduate school degrees, according to a recent analysis by American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar Mark Perry, who is also an economics and finance professor at the University of Michigan-Flint... "Given the phenomenal academic success of women in higher education over the last 35 years...how do we justify the continued gender favoritism for college women in terms of female-only scholarships, awards, fellowships, programs, and many other campus resources?”... “The goal of Title IX was gender equity in higher education, not the gender favoritism for women we see today, and I think the Office for Civil Rights largely agrees, based on their recent Title IX rulings against sex discrimination against men.”... “Our schools offered admirable and effective programs to strengthen girls in areas where they languished—in sports, math, and science. Where are the programs to help boys in areas where they falter: reading, writing, grades, school engagement, and college matriculation?”"
Feminist logic: If men are falling behind, it's because they suck
If women are falling behind, it's because men are oppressing them, i.e. men suck

Why Sexism and Racism Never Diminish-Even When Everyone Becomes Less Sexist and Racist - "in a thought-provoking new paper in Science the all-star team of Levari, Gilbert, Wilson, Sievers, Amodio and Wheatley show that what we identify as blue expands as the prevalence of blue decreases...
'When blue dots became rare, purple dots began to look blue; when threatening faces became rare, neutral faces began to appear threatening; and when unethical research proposals became rare, ambiguous research proposals began to seem unethical. This happened even when the change in the prevalence of instances was abrupt, even when participants were explicitly told that the prevalence of instances would change, and even when participants were instructed and paid to ignore these changes... in 1960, Webster’s dictionary defined “aggression” as “an unprovoked attack or invasion,” but today that concept can include behaviors such as making insufficient eye contact or asking people where they are from. Many other concepts, such as abuse, bullying, mental disorder, trauma, addiction, and prejudice, have expanded of late as well... Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism'
The paper also gives us a way of thinking more clearly about shifts in the Overton window. When strong sexism declines, for example, the Overton window shrinks on one end and expands on the other so that what was once not considered sexism at all (e.g. “men and women have different preferences which might explain job choice“) now becomes violently sexist... the presence of extremes can help others near the middle by widening the set of issues that can be discussed or studied without fear of opprobrium.
Or, why activists don't disband after they have achieved their aims - they just look for new targets.
Or, the slippery slope (concept creep) is very real
Or, a good illustration of moral relativism
Or, if Nazis don't exist, it would be necessary to invent them

Your Brain Is Constantly Searching for Problems to Fix - "Why can’t people help but expand what they call threatening when threats become rare? Research from cognitive psychology and neuroscience suggests that this kind of behavior is a consequence of the basic way that our brains process information—we are constantly comparing what is front of us to its recent context. Instead of carefully deciding how threatening a face is compared to all other faces, the brain can just store how threatening it is compared to other faces it has seen recently, or compare it to some average of recently seen faces, or the most and least threatening faces it has seen... It turns out that for your brain, relative comparisons often use less energy than absolute measurements"

Barack Obama: Nasa must try to make Muslims 'feel good' - "Charles Bolden, a retired United States Marines Corps major-general and former astronaut, said in an interview with al-Jazeera that Nasa was not only a space exploration agency but also an "Earth improvement agency".Mr Bolden said: "When I became the Nasa administrator, he [Mr Obama] charged me with three things."One, he wanted me to help reinspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.""
So that's where the NASA budget goes to

Canadian Government Imposes 'Social Justice' on All Universities - "The Liberal government of Canada has formulated a new program to which all universities are expected to commit. It is called “Dimensions: Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” A “Charter” for “Dimensions” has been distributed to all university presidents, who are urged to sign, endorsing the program for their universities.Minister for Science and Sport Kirsty Duncan launched this program, using the “independent” funding councils—The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), The National Science and Engineering Council (NSERC), and The Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)—as the conduit for “Dimensions” grants. This is not the first time that Minister Duncan has imposed “equity, diversity, and inclusion” conditions for grants; in 2017, new diversity criteria were enunciated for the Canada Research Chair grants.The pressure continues through subsequent grant years... The NSERC press release announcing the Dimensions program claims that “Evidence clearly shows that increasing equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in research environments enhances excellence, innovation and creativity.” In fact, no such evidence is adduced or cited, and readers should be skeptical of unsubstantiated claims. Without evidence, it would be prudent to assume that the asserted relationship is fabricated and imaginary. What does “equity, diversity, and inclusion” mean in practice? It means that certain categories of people must favoured in academic competitions, while unfavoured categories of people must be excluded. The favoured must be put up for grants, or else the grants would not be forthcoming; conversely, unfavoured categories of people must be excluded from the competition, or else the grants would not be forthcoming... “Equality of results” is far from the liberal idea of “equality of opportunity,” in which occupational, monetary, and academic achievement results vary according to the motivation, preferences, abilities, and commitments of individuals. The theory of “systemic barriers” assumes that there is no material difference among people in regard to motivation, preferences, abilities, and commitments, and that all differences in statistical representation are the result of prejudice and discrimination. This is clearly false. One kind of evidence is the impressive statistical overrepresentation in prestigious fields by members of unpopular minorities, such as African Americans in professional sports, and East Asians and Jews in academia and other professions, which clearly was not the result of prejudice and discrimination against whites, people of European descent, and Christians... Will “diversity” be satisfied when universities are 70% female, 80% female, or when males are totally excluded? “Inclusion” of First Nations individuals is fine, but when they are exclusively included, there is no room for others"