Links - 14th June 2020 (1)

Jamie Loftus, the Comedian Who Infiltrated Mensa | The New Yorker - "Loftus took Mensa’s I.Q. exam while hungover on shandies, scored in the ninety-eighth percentile, and celebrated her admission with a triumphant blog post titled “Good News, They Let Dumb Sluts into Mensa Now.” Soon after, a Mensa member contacted her to warn that the group is not all “silly fun, board games . . . and happy nerds” but has a “nasty alt-right undercurrent.”... Loftus sold “Shrek nudes,” naked photos of her body painted green, to raise funds for Planned Parenthood... She used a company printer to print the photos of her green body, and the company kitchen to film herself laying pages of the book on mustard-covered bread, as if they were delicate slices of ham... The ordeal ended with Loftus fishing a yoni egg out of her vagina and flashing her pubic hair, which glowed in the dark, to the audience... Loftus concedes that she made mistakes, too, including the way she dealt with Mensa’s so-called boob thread. In 2015, a Firehouse member posted, “I want to see some boobs! Help me out ladies! #boobthread,” and the women of Mensa flooded the comments section with twelve hundred photos of their breasts. The overwhelming supply spawned a secondary boob thread, which garnered more than five hundred more. Loftus tweeted about it, to make fun of Mensa’s adolescent horniness. In retrospect, she reflected that the thread happened between consenting adults, and worried that her earlier criticisms had come off as slut-shaming"
Liberals like to crow that college educated people being more likely to be liberal shows liberalism is a superior position and that only stupid people are conservative. So if Mensa, which has the super smart people, is an "alt right" bastion...
The gynocentrism is clear - slut shaming is bad, but shaming men is good

UPDATE: I (28) think my girlfriend (26) has been using my gym socks to wipe after going to the bathroom. : relationship_advice - "I told her sister the reason she was there was because earlier I had found out my girlfriend had been going to the bathroom and wiping herself with my socks. Everything went silent. Like, no one said a word. Out of nowhere they both start crying. Her sister stared yelling at me and told me I shouldn't be talking about things I don't understand. When I asked her what in the world she was talking about she just kept on yelling at me and shouted back that it was normal and that I need to mind my own business."
"Relationship: Solving problems together that you wouldn't have if you are single."

Major crime soars by 22% in New York City as police blame bail reforms - "Major crimes grew 22.5% in February according to the NYPD with a 7.1% increase in shootings. robbery, assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand larceny auto crimes... During the first 58 days of 2020, 482 people who had already been arrested for committing a felony such as robbery or burglary were then rearrested for committing an additional 846 crimes... Officials say that all of the suspects that were arrested would have usually ended up in jail prior to new bail reform laws.The amount is triple that of those committed in the same 58 days in 2019... 'New York is now the only state in the nation that requires judges to entirely disregard the threat to public safety posed by accused persons in determining whether to hold them pending trial or to impose conditions for their release,' Shea said in an editorial for the New York Times in January. 'It eliminates cash bail and the possibility of detention for a wide array of offenses, including weapons possession, trafficking of fentanyl and other drugs, many hate-crime assaults, the promotion of child prostitution, serial arson, and certain burglaries and robberies.'... 'Fewer people held pending trial and the early release of the names and contact information of victims and witnesses — places some of these victims and witnesses at risk of intimidation or retaliation. Violent criminals are being returned to the community and will know the names of their accusers and where to find them.'There have been a number of high-profile cases in recent weeks.One concerns a a serial thief who has racked up 139 arrests in New York City for pickpocketing unsuspecting subway commuters. He even had the gall to thank the Democrats because bail reform allows him to commit more crimes... ‘I take $200, $300 a day of your money, cracker! You can’t stop me!’Barry has been arrested six times so far in 2020 -  and each time he has been freed without paying bail thanks to a new state law that went into effect on January 1... ‘It’s the Democrats! The Democrats know me and the Republicans fear me. ‘You can’t touch me! I can’t be stopped!’... Supporters of the reform say it is necessary to reduce the pre-trial jail population and combat mass incarceration.Opponents say that it allows recidivist criminals to continue committing crimes without a deterrent... ‘We adamantly oppose any changes to the bail law as it is written,’ The Legal Aid Society said in a statement.The LAS, which is representing Barry, says putting him in jail does no one any good"

Bail reforms take center stage as budget battle looms - "The Speaker has labeled anecdotal reports of repeat offenders committing crimes while awaiting trial as “misinformation.”Some Assembly members have painted the new proposal as “racist” and assailed their counterparts in the Senate as “fake a-- legislators.”... “These changes were long overdue, make sense, and will save money while protecting families and making our communities more safe," said. "The case in favor of rolling back bail reforms is less than anecdotal – it is non-existent, and is nothing more than fear-mongering, complaints without evidence, and a desire to return to the old days of locking up the poor for minor offenses and throwing away the key.”However, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore argued in her State of the Judiciary address last week that judges should be afforded discretion if a defendant poses “a credible risk of danger to an identified person or group of persons.”... As the political battle over bail has strained relations in the Capitol, public support for the reforms has plummeted. Nearly 60% of New Yorkers oppose the current laws"
Fighting crime is racist

New sneakers claimed to resemble Adolf Hitler - "New sneakers from Puma have been met with a mixture of ridicule and amusement on social media after users noted that from above, the shoes bear a certain resemblance to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler... The shoes’ name — Storm Adrenaline — wasn’t helping much either, with some noting the word’s appearance in the name of the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing the Sturmabteilung (“Storm Detachment”), or SA. Others begged to differ with the comparison, claiming the shoes were if anything more reminiscent of writers Nikolai Gogol or Edgar Allan Poe, both also fond of the wavy forelock and mustache combination... Noting the similarities of various objects and animals to Hitler is something of a popular pastime on the internet, with anything from cats to kettles accused of resembling history’s most notorious dictator."
When life is too good

Uncovering the History Behind the Myth of Troy - "“It is questionable whether we can have complete confidence in Homer’s figures, which, since he was a poet, were probably exaggerated.” So reasoned the Greek historian Thucydides, writing at the end of the 5th century BC, who downplayed the number of combatants who were said to have taken part in the Trojan War in order to demonstrate the unrivaled magnitude of the great war of his own day.A generation earlier, the historian Herodotus had also questioned the account of the siege of Troy as told by Homer, the presumed author of the Iliad and Odyssey. Herodotus is inclined to accept an alternative version where Helen–the beautiful queen whose escape with, or abduction by, her lover Paris started the hostilities–never actually arrived in Troy. Instead, after her ship was blown off course, Helen landed in Egypt where she then sat out the ten-year war. Herodotus’ reasoning is that Helen could not have been in Troy because surely King Priam, Paris’ father, would have handed her back to the Greek expeditionary force once they laid siege to his city, rather than endanger his entire people over the actions of his son."

Invaluable Manuscripts Fuel International Tensions - "Upon his death in 1730, Árni Magnússon left his collection to the University of Copenhagen, in what is now the Arnamagnæan Institute. Iceland, which was a Danish colony from the 1600s until 1944, has long demanded the return of their cultural patrimony"
Good illustration of how anachronistic projecting modern politics onto cultural patrimony is, and of how it's ridiculous to retroactively demand items back (see also: the Elgin Marbles, as well as all the other demands for repatriation of museum objects)

The Cyanide Tooth Is a Cold War Fairy-Tale - "“I think the reason it’s become such a popular pop culture trope is because there have been a number of people who have hidden cyanide capsules in their mouths, and certainly they use their teeth to use it,” says Vince Houghton, curator at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. “Himmler’s a good example of this. Actually there are a lot of Nazis that chose that way out.”... Surprisingly, fake teeth with hidden compartments also have a basis in reality. “There are hollow teeth that have been used in espionage, but most of the time it’s been used to conceal film, microdots, those kind of things”... “There’s no evidence that I’ve seen that there is anyone who had any kind of hollow tooth made for any kind of cyanide capsule. It would have to be a massive tooth. Most of these cyanide capsules are pretty large, so it seems more anecdotal or apocryphal.” In addition to the danger of accidentally swallowing a pill hidden in the mouth, the cyanide pills of World War II were around the size of a pea, which would be too large to hide safely or securely within a false tooth. There are confirmed instances of suicide pills hidden in the temples of glasses and the ends of pens, where they could be inconspicuously chewed, and even of pills being hidden in someone’s mouth, but seemingly never in a tooth... rarely did captured spies actually use suicide options, even if they were available. “It’s so rare that it’s just not something that happens in the real world.”"

Gray (Literature) Matters: Evidence of Selective Hypothesis Reporting in Social Psychological Research - "Selective reporting practices (SRPs)—adding, dropping, or altering study elements when preparing reports for publication—are thought to increase false positives in scientific research. Yet analyses of SRPs have been limited to self-reports or analyses of pre-registered and published studies. To assess SRPs in social psychological research more broadly, we compared doctoral dissertations defended between 1999 and 2017 with the publications based on those dissertations. Selective reporting occurred in nearly 50% of studies. Fully supported dissertation hypotheses were 3 times more likely to be published than unsupported hypotheses, while unsupported hypotheses were nearly 4 times more likely to be dropped from publications"

Return of the King screenwriter reflects on Éowyn’s ‘I am no man’ moment - "“The truth of storytelling is, and I think female audiences especially prove this, is that you don’t need ‘strong female characters,’” says Philippa Boyens, speaking to Polygon about writing the scripts for the Lord of the Rings movies with Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. “I mean, you write strong female characters because they’re authentic to the story and they are real, and they reflect something that young women can relate to.”... she feels real, rather than standing in for an archetype or simply ticking a box.“If you set out to write a ‘strong female character,’ quote unquote, they’re going to smell it a mile off,” Boyens says. “And they do smell it a mile off. It’s always presumptuous, I think, that people believe — and it’s not just that they believe this for women, it’s also that they believe it for young men — that they cannot relate to a story where the main character is not the same sex as them. Of course they can.”"

Students Against Sleep - SAS - "*tiger chasing duck* sneak and confusion 100"

Sens. Marco Rubio and Cindy Hyde-Smith: Congress should 'see the light,' make daylight saving time permanent - "97 percent of Americans will be forced to change their clocks once again, “springing forward” an hour into daylight saving time (DST)... Originally conceived in 1916 as a wartime effort to conserve fuel in Germany, daylight saving time actually has a varied history in our nation. It only lasted half the year for most of its implementation until 2005, when it was extended to the current eight months. Yes, we endure the hassle of changing our clocks to spend 16 weeks – 33 percent of the year – on Standard Time. Research sheds light on the significant health benefits of extending DST for the entire year. By recalibrating the portion of the day spent in sunlight to standard work hours, studies suggest that we would see advantages to Americans’ public health, including reduced risks of seasonal depression, cardiac problems and strokes. Children exercise more during DST, and adults spend substantially more time engaged in pedestrian, cycling and other recreational activities. Similarly, year-round DST would boost public safety. A Brookings study suggests it would bring a 27 percent reduction in robberies committed during the evening hour of gained sunlight, with the overall daily rate dropping by 7 percent. Another group of researchers found permanent DST could also result in fewer car accidents, reducing the rate of vehicle collisions with wildlife as traffic patterns shift an hour away from nocturnal animal behavior.Extending DST to last the entire year would also spur the economy. A JP Morgan Chase study found that Americans experience decreased economic activity while not on DST, a drop that could be avoided by making daylight saving permanent. It would also benefit our nation’s agricultural sector, which ends up disproportionately affected twice a year through disruptions between farmers’ schedules and their supply chain partners. Several studies also suggest that it would lead to greater energy savings... it represents a commonsense solution – one supported by states as varied as Maine, Florida, California, Tennessee, South Carolina, Delaware, Oregon and Washington, and under consideration by dozens more, including Mississippi."

The Yukon is no longer going to observe Daylight Saving time change - "The decision comes after a majority of Yukon citizens said they were in favour of keeping the same time year-round... Saskatchewan similarly abolished the time-change tradition in 1959, as have parts of Quebec and Ontario. Although a staggering 93 per cent of B.C. residents said they would prefer to scrap daylight savings, the province has yet to put any change into action."