Links - 3rd September 2019 (2)

We can probably measure media bias. But do we want to? - "Eighty-seven percent of Republicans and 53 percent of Democrats think news organizations tend to favor one side when reporting on political and social issues... Maybe journalists shouldn’t dismiss this opinion out of hand. After all, while 28 percent of journalists identify as Democrats, just 7 percent identify as Republicans. (A full 50 percent identify as independent.) Most reporters will claim they know how to keep their opinions out of their reporting—but with humans notoriously bad at recognizing and managing their own biases, there’s a case that media companies really should care about this issue... economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro analyzed the 2005 Congressional Record to find phrases frequently used by either liberal or conservative members of Congress, and compared these to the news content of over 400 newspapers over the same time period. Their 2010 analysis found that newspapers’ political slant correlated fairly well with the public’s perception of them: The Washington Times slanted right, The Washington Post slanted left, and so on... Google “media bias,” and you’ll find Media Bias/Fact Check, run by armchair media analyst Dave Van Zandt... A similar effort is “The Media Bias Chart,” or simply, “The Chart.” Created by Colorado patent attorney Vanessa Otero... Both efforts suffer from the very problem they’re trying to address: Their subjective assessments leave room for human biases, or even simple inconsistencies, to creep in. Compared to Gentzkow and Shapiro, the five to 20 stories typically judged on these sites represent but a drop of mainstream news outlets’ production."
Liberal logic: if a field is dominated by whites, it will be racist to non-whites due to unconscious bias. But if a field is dominated by liberals, it will be fair and unbiased

MMA Fighter Refuses to Take Photos With Ring Girl After Being Accused of Sexual Harassment - "After being unjustly accused of sexual harassment, South Korean fighter Park Dae Sung has learned to stay away from ring girls.Park, who won the “Road FC 036 $1M Tournament” on Saturday in Jangchung Gymnasium, can be seen running away from a ring girl, and at one point even shouted “Don’t come!” at her during the usual photo-taking ritual held after a match."So much for nothing will happen to you if you're not a creep

You Can’t Have #MeToo Without Free Speech. Just Ask Australians. - ""Australia is the only Western democracy without an explicit constitutional protection for freedom of speech," Matt Collins, a defamation lawyer and the president of the Victorian Bar, told me. "People say that Sydney is the libel capital of the world," he added...
Australia's limits on speaking freely go beyond libel laws. An Australian court has even barred news outlets from reporting on the sexual abuse allegations levelled against a Catholic cardinal, George Pell...
That's why it's so frustrating to watch many activists, often on college campuses, complain that they are insufficiently protected from hate speech. "Hate speech" is a component of free speech, and if the First Amendment ceased to protect the former, we could quickly find ourselves in the sort of society where speaking truth to power was subjectively considered "hateful" by the relevant adjudicators."

Kevin Spacey: Massachusetts prosecutors drop sex assault case - "The accuser was ordered to take to the stand this month after he said he lost the phone he had used on the night of the alleged assault. Mr Spacey's lawyers had accused the man of deleting text messages and said the phone could be used to prove their client's innocence. However, he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and refused to testify... Amid multiple allegations of misconduct, the Oscar-winning actor was dropped from Netflix series House of Cards in 2017 and had his scenes edited out of the film All the Money in the World.The Nantucket case was one of few criminal cases to be brought as a result of Hollywood's #MeToo scandal."
So much for 'believing 'victims''
This might just be a first - the alleged victim pleading the fifth. Too bad he's already been un-personed

CJ #ClimateChangeIsReal on Twitter - "Lena Dunham awkwardly tries to kiss Brad Pitt on the red carpet
"I'm sorry but Lena Dunham just assaulted Brad Pitt and I'm unamused about the lack of narrative here"
"I honestly think if she were a man, we’d be hearing Harvey Weinstein level stories about her. I also think she believes because she isn’t conventionally attractive, she’s allowed to violate the boundaries of people"
"That’s basically what she said when she attacked Odell Beckham Jr. for not speaking to her at the Met Gala in, like, ‘16 or ‘17 and when she got called out for lying she essentially said “Well, women traditionally weren’t allowed to be assholes, so what I did was fine.”"

#HimToo? Katy Perry's music video co-star accuses her of sexual assault at party - "A male model has accused pop star celebrity Katy Perry of pulling down his pants and exposing him in front of a group of people at a party without his consent.Josh Kloss, who played a “love interest” in Perry’s “Teenage Dream” music video, claimed that the former Christian music singer pulled down his pants and exposed his genitals to her friends at costume designer Johnny Wujek’s birthday party."

Henry Cavill is scared to date because of #MeToo - "“There’s something wonderful about a man chasing a woman. There’s a traditional approach to that, which is nice. I think a woman should be wooed and chased, but maybe I’m old-fashioned for thinking that,” he said. But Cavill says it’s “very difficult” to pursue a woman that way “if there are certain rules in place.” “Because then it’s like, ‘Well, I don’t want to go up and talk to her, because I’m going to be called a rapist or something,’” he continued. “So you’re like, ‘Forget it, I’m going to call an ex-girlfriend instead and then just go back to a relationship, which never really worked.’ But it’s way safer than casting myself into the fires of hell, because I’m someone in the public eye, and if I go and flirt with someone, then who knows what’s going to happen?”... But he isn’t the only man who is feeling this way. Licensed clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula, author of Should I Stay or Should I Go?, tells Yahoo Lifestyle that some of her male clients now say they feel “censored” when it comes to dating"
Of course he got slammed for going against the narrative, and unfortunately apologised

Turning Pages: Romance and the influence of #MeToo - "A bestselling Australian romance author recently declared she was ashamed of some of her early books, and she wished she could go back and rewrite them... "Many of the behaviours that are now being called out – sexual innuendo, workplace advances, stolen kisses because the kisser couldn't resist – feel in many ways like an old friend," Cuthbert said. "They exist in the romance bubble … and they readily tap into that shared emotional history over and over again in a way that feels familiar and safe."... Romance writers have the potential to affect women around the world, Cuthbert says, and the obligation to create the books that women need to read now. So how would the new romance novel look? Sex has to include active, informed consent for everything. Make sure your lovers practise safe sex – and if there's an unwanted pregnancy, don't romanticise it. "We need to divorce the idea of sexy from the idea of surprise. Your heroine can be pursued, but she must not be prey."... The alpha male of traditional romantic fiction teeters right on the brink of toxicity: it's a short step from gorgeous bad boy to domineering brute, and much of the appeal lies in flirting with danger. The idea of rules for writing also worries me a little. But then the romance genre has always had its own rules, and it's inevitable they should shift with the times. Over the years, many of these novels have become a lot more raunchy. It will be interesting to see how they meet the challenge of being raunchy, responsible and feminist."
The difference between romance and sexual harassment is how attractive you are

Ex-US Senator Al Franken regrets resigning over sexual misconduct claims - "The Minnesota Democrat stepped down just three weeks after allegations of unwanted touching first surfaced, amid mounting pressure from colleagues.Mr Franken told The New Yorker he wished his case had first been examined by the Senate Ethics Committee.Now, seven of the 36 Democrats who demanded he resign say they regret it. Mr Franken's hastened resignation came after Los Angeles radio host Leeann Tweeden claimed the former Saturday Night Live comic "aggressively" kissed her while they rehearsed a scene during a 2006 tour to entertain US troops in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Ms Tweeden's account was bolstered by a photo of the two, in which Mr Franken appeared to touch her breasts while she slept. Her accusations were quickly followed by claims from seven additional women of groping or unwanted touching."
So much for believing women

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 196 - Eric Schwitzgebel on "Weird ideas and opaque minds" - "We take these things that we visibly think of as being crazy views and we say, "Well, the philosopher couldn't really have meant that so let's interpret them more charitably, more reasonably," and preventing us from seeing how different the philosopher's view might really be.We kind of tame the philosopher, translate into modern terms and then we actually lose an important part of the value, I think, of reading cross-culturally and reading the history of philosophy, as you get exposed to views that are radically different from your own.You get a sense of how, things that you might perceive as crazy, people actually thought were maybe, literally true, in other cultures or other times. If you're overly charitable, then you lose one of the important values you can get from reading broadly in philosophy...
When I was an undergraduate, one of my friends was taking a women's studies class and he was very upset because the women's studies professor said, "All men are attracted to rape." He's like, "I really don't think that."... he could have steel manned what she said. But one possibility is that she really meant that literally, and that what she wanted him to do was, really, much more seriously consider the possibility that, literally, all men are attracted to rape...
Gopnik and Flavell both thought that children about three or four years old could just make these whopping mistakes about their own experiences, their own attitudes, their own stream of conscious experience. Especially Flavell. I thought Flavell made a good case, and we could talk about the case if you want. The summary version is I thought Flavell made a good sense of four-year-olds could be radically mistaken about their stream of experience, and it's a little hard to reconcile with the idea that maybe adults will be completely infallible...
people in the '50 in the United States and the '40s thought that dreams just generally were black and white. I don't think that they thought it was just dreams in the United States, as influenced by media. I think they just thought dreams are a black and white kind of thing. Most people thought that in the 1950s.It's related to the presence of media in the culture, so if you look pre-20th century, very few people will say that dreams are black and white. If you look 21st century, very few people will say that dreams are black and white. You look at the arc of it and it relates to the dominance of black and white film media in the culture. And we got some cross-cultural evidence for this. This guy emailed me and said, "We should try this in China," because this was about the year 2000. He said, "Well, in rural China, most people are exposed to black and white media, their TVs are black and white, whereas in urban China, most people -- especially the wealthier people -- are exposed to mostly color media." So we asked about their dreams and we found rural people in China in the early 2000s tended to say that their dreams were black and white, and urban people tended to say their dreams were colored"

Peter Shawn Taylor: Voltaire wasn’t prepared to die defending the right to free speech, but we can still learn from him - "Consider again the predicament of Niedzviecki, who resigned as editor of Write after penning a defence of free speech and encouraging writers of all cultures to explore the lives of others. “An editor of a writers’ magazine expresses his opinions about writing and the need to see the world through others’ eyes. And for this, the writers’ union apologizes and the editor is removed,” says Kors. “Surely that is Voltairian irony in and of itself.”"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, D-Day 75th Anniversary - "‘There's a lot of people who think because warfare, the character of warfare is constantly evolving, therefore, the rules of war are also constantly changing. But actually, the core principles remain the same. They just need to be interpreted in light of the changing circumstances of the time, the changing character of war, obviously needs to be taken into account is to how you interpret the rules’...
‘When I looked at a project recently, on urban warfare… an awful lot more was changing, than just the technology getting quicker, more deadly, more intense, it was quite possible that you would have a lot of killing happening, without really ever knowing who had pressed the button, who was even behind it, that must change something of the moral calculation, doesn’t it?’
‘I think, if you consider the archers at Agincourt, then I'm not sure it really has. The penance that archers had to pay after a battle in the Middle Ages took into account that they wouldn't know who it was that they'd have killed.’...
'Isn’t really your first duty to your own fighters? And therefore, I mean, things like drones, your duty is to risk your own people as little as possible. I mean, it is not more moral, is it, to throw people into the Battle of the Somme and suffer 20,000 casualties in a day - that is not more moral than using drones is it?'...
‘If you only fight without putting your people in harm's way, if you only wage war without risk to your own people, then what you're actually demonstrating is a willingness to kill but not to die for your cause. And I'm not sure that we should be getting involved in wars where we're not prepared to actually pay a blood price of our own people’"