Does Competition Eliminate Discrimination? Evidence from the Commercial Sex Market in Singapore
"The canonical discrimination model in economics, Becker (1957), predicts discrimination cannot survive in a competitive equilibrium. In contrast, Diamond (1971) implies the opposite: discrimination can prevail in a competitive equilibrium even when the search cost is small. In this paper, I test these two competing theories in the highly competitive sex market of Singapore and find that discrimination persists. Moreover, sex workers engage in both statistical and taste-based discrimination, with the former being the most dominant force. They discriminate based on the client’s willingness to pay by using ethnicity as an indicator. They also practice taste-based discrimination against ethnic groups with darker skin tones and odor.
Becker argues that discrimination cannot survive in a competitive equilibrium because competitive forces will drive prejudiced participants out of market. Applied to my setting, sex workers who discriminate would lose out to other sex workers who are willing to sell their services at a lower price...
I examine equilibrium discrimination in a unique real market setting: the commercial sex market in Singapore. It is an ideal setting due to the presence of a large number of nearly identical sex workers selling homogeneous services to clients who search at negligible cost, thus forming a highly competitive market...
This study also contributes by distinguishing the sources of discrimination. During the interviews, the sex workers revealed that they price services differently based on the client’s ethnicity, which they take as a signal of the client’s willingness to pay. They tend to actively approach Caucasians, Japanese, and Koreans, which are the ethnic groups whom they believe to be wealthier. Thus, the sex workers inflate the prices quoted to these clients. On the other hand, sex workers express animus towards ethnic client groups who have darker skin tones and who are perceived to be more sexually violent (such as Indians). They report that they avoid these clients or ask for higher prices to compensate for the disutility from working with them. The former hints at statistical discrimination (Arrow, 1971; Phelps, 1972) while the latter suggests tastebased discrimination...
The largest portion of the commercial sex industry consists of illegal brothels and illegal sex workers who come mainly from China, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines (Agency France Press, 2008). The business follows a seasonal trend with peak months in June, September and December following Singapore’s tourism industry. Business is slowest during the Chinese New Year period when both supply and demand are low. This study presents several prominent features of the commercial sex industry in Singapore. First, the supply of sex workers is highly diversified in terms of country of origin, while domestic supply is low. Concurrently, the demand for prostitution is also diversified in the sense that clients are of different ethnic backgrounds. Second, the legal and illegal segments coexist within the flourishing underground market. Third, the illegal market consists of low-, middle-, and high-end market segments featuring sex workers of varying quality and targeting different segments of demand.
Singapore has one of the best educated populations in the world. 95 percent of its female population are literate and 63 percent of female residents have secondary or higher educational qualifications (Ministry of Statistics, Singapore, 2013). Therefore, there is less incentive for a local female to be a sex worker. Moreover, being a prostitute in the small conservative island is threatening to a woman’s reputation. Thus, the Singaporean sex industry is populated by sex workers from poor neighboring countries who travel to Singapore to sell their bodies after being attracted by the high returns. The high returns appear even more attractive due to the high income differential between Singapore and poorer neighboring countries. Furthermore, working as a sex worker away from home mitigates the risk of being judged by one’s own society. For these reasons, girls from poorer neighboring countries are willing to accept the high risks that come with being a sex worker, although it is also possible that they are not fully aware of the risks in the first place. However, it is worth noting that not all of these sex workers work permanently in Singapore. Most of them are on short-term visitor passes. They visit Singapore from time to time not only to seek lucrative earning opportunities but to pursue marriage opportunities with Singaporean men and Western males. The low domestic supply and high foreign supply is consistent with Edlund and Korn (2002) who predict that the number of the domestic sex workers will decrease as domestic income rises...
The demand for prostitution stems from both locals and expatriates of different ethnic backgrounds. Over the years, female undergraduates in Singapore have outperformed males in many professions. The existence of 300,000 white-collar male workers in Singapore who cannot find wives made headlines around 2005. Few women are willing to marry men below their education and economic status. At the same time, Singapore has a large population of expatriates... The majority of the non-PMET workers who are in the construction and manufacturing sectors are men. Bangladeshi construction workers in particular are frequent visitors to the Geylang red light district, representing a sizable demand for affordable sexual services. In addition, Singapore is a popular tourist hub. In 2011, it attracted 13.2 million tourists and generated S$22.3 billion in tourist receipts (Singapore Tourism Board, 2012). It is fairly common for tourists to visit an international destination in order to seek sexual services. According to the US ambassador Harry Thomas, 40 percent of male visits to the Philippines are for sex (Australia News Report, 2011). Thus, the influx of male tourists, to a certain extent, creates a stream of demand for prostitution in Singapore as well.
Besides the legal brothels in Geylang, there are three main segments in the illegal market. When defining the segments by the quality and price of the service, we can categorize the best-known red light areas Geylang (even-numbered lanes) as the low-end segment, the renowned Orchard Tower Bars as the mid-tier segment and the nightclubs as the high-end segment of the market. The sex workers in Geylang and Orchard Tower Bars are mostly freelancers operating with tourist passes. Many of the Geylang streetwalkers are associated with pimps who are backed by gangs. They are full-time sex workers with no other source of income. In contrast, many women working in the nightclubs are hired by the clubs as artistic performers (i.e dancers, singers and hostesses) under a legal work permit. They make money as sex workers on a part-time basis. Sex workers solicit only within their own segments. For example, a Chinese street sex worker in Geylang will not solicit in Orchard Towers. The Thai and Vietnamese girls who solicit in the bars inside of Orchard Towers will not go over to Geylang for business either. This is because they fall into the different segments based on their own characteristics and networks. Trespassing across the segments may risk their safety and earnings. Sexual services typically take place in venues like motels and hotels, as well as in cars or the client’s residence. A full-time sex worker will return to her original venue immediately after finishing with a client. Any costs, such as taxi fare and hotel room charges are usually borne by clients.
Other, more scattered forms of illegal prostitution typically operate as KTVs, massage parlors and social escort. KTVs are entertainment pubs where clients can book rooms to sing songs with friends and be entertained by friends or by the hostess. Prostitutes in the KTVs are managed by the KTV manager, and therefore have less freedom to decide work hours, prices and which customers to take. The owner of a KTV is subject to a jail sentence if he or she is caught running a prostitution business. Massage parlors are also popular places to seek sexual services. Massage girls offer massage service followed by sexual service for a “tip” Massage girls enjoy the benefit of an “earlywarning” system, where a warning will be given to the parties involved when the police are on their way, so that they can dress before the police arrive. There are hundreds of massage parlors throughout the city with entrance fees ranging from 28 to 80 dollars. Most of them are licensed business premises with a Public Entertainment license. Also, there are other social escorts who advertise their services on the Internet and on flyers. Some social escorts can be very expensive. Together, sex workers from these venues represent a relatively small portion of the total sex worker population in Singapore.
This paper focuses solely on the low-end market (Geylang). Geylang stands alone as the largest market in Singapore’s commercial sex industry, as its size and popularity make it a top destination for prostitution. The services found venues like Orchard Tower Bars and nightclubs are not perfect substitutes for those found in Geylang, because services offered in the higher-end venues are more diversified and target wealthy individuals. The Geylang market is highly competitive. Prostitution activities are concentrated in a small zone of 25 lanes. Within it, large numbers of nearly homogeneous prostitutes publicly solicit on the streets and sell similar services. Differences in sex workers’ characteristics may make one more desirable than the other. Nevertheless, they are nearly perfect substitutes in the clients’ eyes. On the other hand, clients bear a negligible search cost in the red light district. First, there is zero risk of being penalized for patronizing the prostitutes. Second, there is minimal social cost in terms of reputation loss by walking in the red light district, because Geylang is a popular tourist and dining destination. Most importantly, clients are able to easily locate a match within 2-5 minutes due to the high density of prostitutes on the street.
Chinese and Vietnamese sex workers dominate the scene and are patronized by mostly Singaporean men, Caucasian men and Bangladeshi construction workers. As a place for cheap sexual services, it is a favorite destination for construction workers and other less wealthy clients. The plentiful supply of Chinese women also makes Geylang the preferred choice for Chinese clients who desire a “girlfriend” kind of experience with the sex worker. It is also a particularly attractive venue for elderly single men who desire companionship. Sex workers in Geylang start work late in the afternoon or early evening and finish work in the morning. Because the initial engagement of the prostitutes and clients takes place on the public street, flirting and negotiation time are relatively short in this segment of the market, as both parties prefer to maintain minimum public exposure. All the sex workers solicit within the areas of even-numbered lorong (lanes) between lane 1 and lane 30. There is little differentiation in the services offered and the large number of the suppliers make this micro-market close to a perfectly competitive market. The service rate is set to float around S$30-S$200 with a median price of $60 and standard deviation of $35. Freelance street sex workers solicit independently but are collectively overseen by pimps, depending on the areas of their business. Each lorong (lane) is controlled by a pimp who oversees the business (protects the women from abnormal clients), provides the girls’ accommodation, and protects them from being arrested in the event of police raids. In return, they ask for a cut of the unit service price (normally about 30 -40 percent) as compensation and $10 a day for accommodation and transport services...
The enumerators had a higher chance of interviewing less attractive sex workers, as they have longer unemployment periods during each shift and are more tempted by the gift voucher we offer...
The sample consists of 177 street sex workers from Geylang with a total number of 805 transactions. The average number of transactions the sex workers reported is 4. There were 674 transactions where the sex workers initiated the price and 131 transactions where the clients initiated the price. The latter 131 transactions are used as a basis for checking the clients’ pricing behavior and consumption capability.
Singapore has a rich composition of sex workers in the illegal market. My sample includes street sex workers from Thailand, China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore (see Table 5). Sex workers from Myanmar, Cambodia and Sri Lanka are less common but are also active and concentrated in the low-end market. As expected, the sex workers in my dataset have low educational attainment. 72 percent of the sample completed only primary education, and 21 percent of these women are illiterate. Less than 10 percent of the sample have been educated beyond high school. The average age of the sex workers is 20, with the youngest aged 18 and the oldest aged 39. The majority of the sex workers in the sample are single (82.5 percent) and 23 percent have at least one child. Over half the sample have at least 2 years’ experience as a sex worker prior to working in Singapore. The average sex worker works in Singapore for about 2 years.
Sex workers on Geylang Street are full-time sex workers. It is reported that they work 6-7 days a week (see Table 6). The average daily working hours are 9 hours on weekdays and 11 hours over the weekends. The average number of customers the sex workers have a day is about 4. Earnings from providing sexual services are a major source of the sex worker’s income. Other forms of income are tips or earnings from being booked by the clients for a whole day. The average unit price for sex is S$70 with lowest rate of $30 and highest rate of S$200. The average service duration is around 55 minutes when excluding overnight services...
The Chinese, Caucasians, Indians and Bangladeshis are the major consumers of adult services in Geylang (see Table 7). Together, the Chinese and the Caucasians represent 50 percent of our client sample. One out of five clients in our sample are regular customers, and about 30 percent of the total clients are tourists. Most of the transactions take place in either motels (70 percent) or hotels (22 percent). Only about 6 percent of the transactions occur in the client’s residence. There is very high awareness of contraception among both clients and sex workers in Singapore. Over 99 percent of the transactions in my sample involve the use of condoms.
Price differentials in adult services among racial groups were documented by Levitt and Dubner (2009) in Super FreakEconomics. They report that white people pay $9 extra per sexual service than black customers, while the Hispanic customers lie somewhere in between in Chicago’s prostitution market. A similar type of price discrepancy is observed in Geylang. Sex workers ask Caucasians for an extra S$17 per sexual service relative to the Chinese. Bangladeshi clients are asked for S$25 less than the Chinese. The final price that Caucasians will pay for sexual service is S$13 higher than what the Chinese pay, while the final price the Chinese pay is S$25 higher than what Bangladeshis pay (see Table 1)...
The sex workers reveal distinct attitudes towards clients of different ethnicities. They consistently favor Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Caucasian clients. On a scale of 1 (dislike) to 5 (like very much) with 3 being “like”, these three client groups earn an average rating of 4 (see Table 2). The sex workers collectively express their fondness towards these clients for the following reasons: (1) Chinese clients are more likely to be returning customers; and, (2) the Caucasian, Korean and Japanese clients are more willing to pay. This observation is uniform even across the more attractive and less attractive sex workers, as well as across sex worker’s country of origin (see Table 2). However, the less attractive sex workers rate Caucasian, Korean and Japanese more highly by a magnitude of one, as compared to the more attractive sex workers.
In contrast, the Malay and Indian clients earn low average ratings of 2.74 and 2.07, respectively. The rating disparity is more exaggerated among Indian and Bangladeshi clients. Bangladeshis receive a higher rating than both the Malays and the Indians at 3.10, despite having the lowest reservation price. It turns out their rating is inflated by the preference of the less attractive sex workers who give them a rating of 3.29. Attractive sex workers give the lowest rating of 1.77 to Indians.
To understand the motivation behind sex worker’s preference against Indians, we asked “Given the same price and equally attractive client, do you prefer ethnic X to ethnic Y and why?” and “What is the reason for a failed bargain?” in the survey. 24 subjects on Geylang Street responded to the former question with a combined total of 66 responses from all the venues (street, bars and nightclubs). Based on these responses and informal conversation with sex workers and pimps, we firmly believe Indian clients are less popular among sex workers mainly because of their body odor, dark skin tone, less expected wealth, and to a lesser extent, because they are more demanding/rough and bargain a lot. The characteristic of being demanding/rough could take the form of requesting a longer or more strenuous service or more adventurous activities during the service. Many sex workers make direct comparisons between seemingly similar groups like Bangladeshis and Indians, and voiced their preferences for the former over latter specifically because Indians take more service time and are often not able to match the price for it. Some interviewees justify their distaste towards Indians by claiming that Indian men have a higher probability of being sexually violent*.
* - According to Survey International Men and Gender Equitable Survey (IMAGES) by the Centre of Research on Women, US, 24% of Indian men have committed sexual violence at some point in their lives and 20% admitted to having forced their wives or partners to have sex. In contrast, only 2% of Brazilian men and 9% of men in Chile, Rwanda, Croatia and Mexico have committed sexual violence.
The sex workers’ distaste towards dark skin tones places the Malays, Indians and Bangladeshis at a disadvantage...
There are moderate degrees of matching between sex workers and the clients. Over 80 percent of transactions (see Table 3) involving the perceived wealthy client groups (Caucasian, Korean and Japanese) are associated with more attractive sex workers. Most of the less attractive sex workers are attached to less desired clients (Bangladeshis, Malays and Indians). In particular, 93 percent of all Caucasians are attached to more attractive sex workers and 93 percent of Bangladeshis are attached to less attractive sex workers. Singaporean Indian sex workers, the least favored group because of their dark tone, are mainly attached with either with Indian men or Bangladeshi men. Nevertheless, every sex worker has Chinese clients. Half of Chinese men in my sample deal with more attractive sex workers and the remaining half go with less attractive ones. No specific sex worker type is matched to a particular clients’ age group.
In addition, sex workers have a set of criteria that determine whether they will approach potential customers and how they set the initial price. The top three factors influencing such behavior are: “the money the client spends on them”, “Ethnicity of the client” and the “Looks of the client”. It is evident that sex workers rely on the client’s ethnicity as a critical signal to make business decisions...
The sex workers place an 18 percent premium on services with Caucasians and a 18 percent discount for Bangladeshis in comparison to the Chinese (see column (3)-(5) in Table 8). More attractive sex workers place 16 percent higher initial prices on Indians as compared to Chinese... On the other hand, no significant initial price disparity is observed between the Chinese and the Malays for any identical sex worker.
Price discrimination is often observed in markets where the customers have identifiable traits and services are not resalable. In my study, in addition to ethnicity, these traits include the client’s outfit and whether the client is a tourist. But, the most important factor is the client’s ethnicity. Ethnicity alone explains 46 percent within variability in price differentials... better-dressed customers are quoted prices that are 9 percent higher than those who are less well-dressed. Tourists also pay a 7 percent price premium compared to local customers."
(Continued)
L'origine de Bert
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Does Competition Eliminate Discrimination? Evidence from the Commercial Sex Market in Singapore (1/2)
Post ID: 5022733470883651
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Links - 29th October 2014
How to Develop Your Attraction to the Right Person - "Many others only date people on the high end of their attraction spectrum, because they believe that’s where real love and passion lie. With someone who is a “high number” on your attraction spectrum, you can tell that you’re attracted in a fraction of a second. This can be achingly exciting, but it’s rarely comfortable or secure. In my experience, people who only date those on the high end of their attraction spectrum are much more likely to remain single. By contrast, however, attraction to people in the middle of our spectrum is rarely immediate; it usually takes more time to get a sense of how interested we really are in such people. People who are willing to date in the mid-range are more likely to find real and lasting love. It’s not a matter of selling out, because immediate attraction isn’t the best forecaster of future passion. Intense immediate attractions can blind us to the actual quality of our interactions with others, and to the actual characters of the people we date. Attractions can grow—and many of us have had the experience of becoming more attracted to someone as we got to know him or her better."
Too Much Air in Potato Chip Packets? Students Make a Boat to Prove It - Korea Real Time - WSJ - "Ever get that feeling when you open a bag of potato chips that you’ve mostly paid for air? A group of South Korean college students have, and to prove their point, on Sunday they used a raft made of unopened potato chip packets to traverse Seoul’s main river. Two male students crossed the Han River on a boat made with 160 unopened bags of potato chips bound together near 0.8-mile-long Jamsil Bridge in the city’s east."
Elliott Chen's answer to Why is Chinese fashion less attractive and elegant than Korean and Japanese fashion? - Quora - "Chinese aesthetic tastes are a bit backward and uncouth... However there are some innate cultural differences in aesthetics. The Japanese in comparison have put a lot more attention and thought into visual aesthetics than the Chinese, who tend to favor more bold and gaudy sensibilities"
Secrets of the sushi shops: 10 tips and tricks the chain restaurants don’t want you to know - "Do you want your egg fresh from the frying pan, or straight from the freezer? Tamago-yakishould have a slightly uneven, hand-cooked appearance, says Mr. Kawagishi. If it’s the same yellow shade all over, it’s probably been made with liquid egg from a bottle, too... Judge on appearances. Without even entering a restaurant, you can tell a lot about it. If the shop’s outside is clutter- and garbage-free, and if the staff uniforms look clean and well looked-after, the kitchen will probably be clean too. And you’ll never get tasty sushi from a dirty shop, says Mr. Kawagishi."
You can judge a sushi shop from its exterior
Burning Question: Does Reading in Dim Light Hurt Your Eyes? - WSJ - "Turns out, our parents were wrong. "There is no reason to believe nor evidence to support that any long-term damage to the eyes or change in the physiology to the eyes can be caused by reading in the dark," Dr. Sheedy says. That is not to say that nocturnal page-turning won't lead to discomfort or fatigue"... "The predominant determinant of myopia is genetics." No link to long-term damage has ever been conclusively shown, says Dr. Sheedy. "It's an old tale, a ploy used by moms to get kids to go to sleep when they wanted them to," he says. Reading on a tablet device won't damage your eyes, Dr. Sheedy says. His team has studied various fonts, computer displays and pixel resolutions, and found the difference in effect on the eye between reading e-ink and the printed word to be negligible... "Ever wonder why a pirate wears patches? It's not because he was wounded in a sword fight," says Dr. Sheedy. Seamen must constantly move between the pitch black of below decks and the bright sunshine above. Smart pirates "wore a patch over one eye to keep it dark-adapted outside.""
Meet the 3-boobed woman - "A woman has spent $20,000 on surgery to get a third breast, and her dream is to become a celebrity... Tridevil said that while she wanted fame and fortune, this was not why she had the surgery. “I got it because I wanted to make myself unattractive to men. Because I don’t want to date anymore,” she said."
Pirate Bay fools the system with cloud technology - "Today The Pirate Bay has 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) scattered around the globe with cloud-hosting providers, and the new setup works just fine, reported TorrentFreak, having anonymously questioned the Pirate Bay team. The cloud technology made the site more portable, eliminated the need for any crucial pieces of hardware and therefore made the torrent harder to take down. Costs have decreased and better uptime is now guaranteed."
Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule for deliberate practice is wrong: Genes for music, IQ, drawing ability, and other skills. - "Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill unexplained than it explained. For example, deliberate practice explained 26 percent of the variation for games such as chess, 21 percent for music, and 18 percent for sports. So, deliberate practice did not explain all, nearly all, or even most of the performance variation in these fields. In concrete terms, what this evidence means is that racking up a lot of deliberate practice is no guarantee that you’ll become an expert. Other factors matter... Wouldn’t it be better to just act as if we are equal, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding? That way, no people will be discouraged from chasing their dreams—competing in the Olympics or performing at Carnegie Hall or winning a Nobel Prize. The answer is no, for two reasons. The first is that failure is costly, both to society and to individuals. Pretending that all people are equal in their abilities will not change the fact that a person with an average IQ is unlikely to become a theoretical physicist, or the fact that a person with a low level of music ability is unlikely to become a concert pianist. It makes more sense to pay attention to people’s abilities and their likelihood of achieving certain goals, so people can make good decisions about the goals they want to spend their time, money, and energy pursuing... Pushing someone into a career for which he or she is genetically unsuited will likely not work. The second reason we should not pretend we are endowed with the same abilities is that doing so perpetuates the myth that is at the root of much inaction in society—the myth that people can help themselves to the same degree if they just try hard enough. You’re not a heart surgeon? That’s your fault for not working hard enough in school! You didn’t make it as a concert pianist? You must not have wanted it that badly. Societal inequality is thus justified on the grounds that anyone who is willing to put in the requisite time and effort can succeed and should be rewarded with a good life, whereas those who struggle to make ends meet are to blame for their situations and should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps"
The tablua rasa myth need not result in blaming people for their failures - one could always blame discrimination (i.e. blame other people)
What do SAT and IQ tests measure? General intelligence predicts school and life success. - "The SAT does predict success in college—not perfectly, but relatively well, especially given that it takes just a few hours to administer. And, unlike a “complex portrait” of a student’s life, it can be scored in an objective way. (In a recent New York Times op-ed, the University of New Hampshire psychologist John D. Mayer aptly described the SAT’s validity as an “astonishing achievement.”) In a study published in Psychological Science, University of Minnesota researchers Paul Sackett, Nathan Kuncel, and their colleagues investigated the relationship between SAT scores and college grades in a very large sample: nearly 150,000 students from 110 colleges and universities. SAT scores predicted first-year college GPA about as well as high school grades did, and the best prediction was achieved by considering both factors. Botstein, Boylan, and Kolbert are either unaware of this directly relevant, easily accessible, and widely disseminated empirical evidence, or they have decided to ignore it and base their claims on intuition and anecdote—or perhaps on their beliefs about the way the world should be rather than the way it is... test score (SAT or ACT—whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year... Test scores also predicted whether the students graduated... A 2007 Science article summed up the evidence succinctly: “Standardized admissions tests have positive and useful relationships with subsequent student accomplishments”... SAT scores even predict success beyond the college years... the SAT in fact goes a long way toward leveling the playing field, giving students an opportunity to distinguish themselves regardless of their background. Scoring well on the SAT may in fact be the only such opportunity for students who graduate from public high schools that are regarded by college admissions offices as academically weak... Research has consistently shown that prep courses have only a small effect on SAT scores—and a much smaller effect than test prep companies claim they do... it is clear that SES is not what accounts for the fact that SAT scores predict success in college. In the University of Minnesota study, the correlation between high school SAT and college GPA was virtually unchanged after the researchers statistically controlled for the influence of SES... The content of the SAT is practically indistinguishable from that of standardized intelligence tests... Synthesizing evidence from nearly a century of empirical studies, Schmidt and Hunter established that general mental ability—the psychological trait that IQ scores reflect—is the single best predictor of job training success, and that it accounts for differences in job performance even in workers with more than a decade of experience. It’s more predictive than interests, personality, reference checks, and interview performance. Smart people don’t just make better mathematicians, as Brooks observed—they make better managers, clerks, salespeople, service workers, vehicle operators, and soldiers. IQ predicts other things that matter, too, like income, employment, health, and even longevity... the bottom line is that there are large, measurable differences among people in intellectual ability, and these differences have consequences for people’s lives. Ignoring these facts will only distract us from discovering and implementing wise policies... disregarding IQ—by admitting students to colleges or hiring people for jobs in which they are very likely to fail—is harmful both to individuals and to society... the policies of public and private organizations should be based on evidence rather than ideology or wishful thinking"
EU Right to be Forgotten: 5 random NYT stories removed from Google search results. - "The harm to people mentioned in newspaper stories that are searchable online is relatively easily demonstrated. In contrast, the harm inflicted to the public at large by removing those stories via an opaque and seemingly arbitrary process is impossible to gauge."
Cellphones at gas stations: Mythbusters debunk one of the biggest myths in tech. - "it’s not the cellphone, but static sparks created when drivers rub themselves on the car that cause most of these fires. A lot of times, the drivers talk on their phones when the spark happens, so it just looks as if the cellphone is the cause of the fire, when it’s actually irrelevant."
George Spencer Millet, kissed to death in 1909 - "Lost life by stab in falling on ink eraser, evading six young women trying to give him birthday kisses in office Metropolitan Life Building"
Did the pro-life movement lead to more single moms? - "In conservative communities, the hardening of anti-abortion attitudes may have increased the acceptance of single-parent families. And by contrast, in less conservative communities, the willingness to accept abortion has helped create more stable families... This creates the dilemma Douthat identified for those who see abortion as immoral. The Christian right preaches that contraception is not perfect, sex inevitably risks pregnancy, and abstinence provides the only solution. Indeed, as the number of abortions has dropped, the rate of unmarried women giving birth has increased. And nonelite young women often give their opposition to abortion as an explanation for why they went ahead and had the child, even if in other ways religion has not influenced them much. In their book Premarital Sex in America, sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker report on a conservative, moderately religious young couple who have a child without marrying: “Some semblance of Christian morality may have prompted Andy and his girlfriend to keep their baby rather than elect abortion,” they write, “but beyond that, the evidence of religious influence on sexual decision-making is slim.”"
Too Much Air in Potato Chip Packets? Students Make a Boat to Prove It - Korea Real Time - WSJ - "Ever get that feeling when you open a bag of potato chips that you’ve mostly paid for air? A group of South Korean college students have, and to prove their point, on Sunday they used a raft made of unopened potato chip packets to traverse Seoul’s main river. Two male students crossed the Han River on a boat made with 160 unopened bags of potato chips bound together near 0.8-mile-long Jamsil Bridge in the city’s east."
Elliott Chen's answer to Why is Chinese fashion less attractive and elegant than Korean and Japanese fashion? - Quora - "Chinese aesthetic tastes are a bit backward and uncouth... However there are some innate cultural differences in aesthetics. The Japanese in comparison have put a lot more attention and thought into visual aesthetics than the Chinese, who tend to favor more bold and gaudy sensibilities"
Secrets of the sushi shops: 10 tips and tricks the chain restaurants don’t want you to know - "Do you want your egg fresh from the frying pan, or straight from the freezer? Tamago-yakishould have a slightly uneven, hand-cooked appearance, says Mr. Kawagishi. If it’s the same yellow shade all over, it’s probably been made with liquid egg from a bottle, too... Judge on appearances. Without even entering a restaurant, you can tell a lot about it. If the shop’s outside is clutter- and garbage-free, and if the staff uniforms look clean and well looked-after, the kitchen will probably be clean too. And you’ll never get tasty sushi from a dirty shop, says Mr. Kawagishi."
You can judge a sushi shop from its exterior
Burning Question: Does Reading in Dim Light Hurt Your Eyes? - WSJ - "Turns out, our parents were wrong. "There is no reason to believe nor evidence to support that any long-term damage to the eyes or change in the physiology to the eyes can be caused by reading in the dark," Dr. Sheedy says. That is not to say that nocturnal page-turning won't lead to discomfort or fatigue"... "The predominant determinant of myopia is genetics." No link to long-term damage has ever been conclusively shown, says Dr. Sheedy. "It's an old tale, a ploy used by moms to get kids to go to sleep when they wanted them to," he says. Reading on a tablet device won't damage your eyes, Dr. Sheedy says. His team has studied various fonts, computer displays and pixel resolutions, and found the difference in effect on the eye between reading e-ink and the printed word to be negligible... "Ever wonder why a pirate wears patches? It's not because he was wounded in a sword fight," says Dr. Sheedy. Seamen must constantly move between the pitch black of below decks and the bright sunshine above. Smart pirates "wore a patch over one eye to keep it dark-adapted outside.""
Meet the 3-boobed woman - "A woman has spent $20,000 on surgery to get a third breast, and her dream is to become a celebrity... Tridevil said that while she wanted fame and fortune, this was not why she had the surgery. “I got it because I wanted to make myself unattractive to men. Because I don’t want to date anymore,” she said."
Pirate Bay fools the system with cloud technology - "Today The Pirate Bay has 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) scattered around the globe with cloud-hosting providers, and the new setup works just fine, reported TorrentFreak, having anonymously questioned the Pirate Bay team. The cloud technology made the site more portable, eliminated the need for any crucial pieces of hardware and therefore made the torrent harder to take down. Costs have decreased and better uptime is now guaranteed."
Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule for deliberate practice is wrong: Genes for music, IQ, drawing ability, and other skills. - "Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill unexplained than it explained. For example, deliberate practice explained 26 percent of the variation for games such as chess, 21 percent for music, and 18 percent for sports. So, deliberate practice did not explain all, nearly all, or even most of the performance variation in these fields. In concrete terms, what this evidence means is that racking up a lot of deliberate practice is no guarantee that you’ll become an expert. Other factors matter... Wouldn’t it be better to just act as if we are equal, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding? That way, no people will be discouraged from chasing their dreams—competing in the Olympics or performing at Carnegie Hall or winning a Nobel Prize. The answer is no, for two reasons. The first is that failure is costly, both to society and to individuals. Pretending that all people are equal in their abilities will not change the fact that a person with an average IQ is unlikely to become a theoretical physicist, or the fact that a person with a low level of music ability is unlikely to become a concert pianist. It makes more sense to pay attention to people’s abilities and their likelihood of achieving certain goals, so people can make good decisions about the goals they want to spend their time, money, and energy pursuing... Pushing someone into a career for which he or she is genetically unsuited will likely not work. The second reason we should not pretend we are endowed with the same abilities is that doing so perpetuates the myth that is at the root of much inaction in society—the myth that people can help themselves to the same degree if they just try hard enough. You’re not a heart surgeon? That’s your fault for not working hard enough in school! You didn’t make it as a concert pianist? You must not have wanted it that badly. Societal inequality is thus justified on the grounds that anyone who is willing to put in the requisite time and effort can succeed and should be rewarded with a good life, whereas those who struggle to make ends meet are to blame for their situations and should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps"
The tablua rasa myth need not result in blaming people for their failures - one could always blame discrimination (i.e. blame other people)
What do SAT and IQ tests measure? General intelligence predicts school and life success. - "The SAT does predict success in college—not perfectly, but relatively well, especially given that it takes just a few hours to administer. And, unlike a “complex portrait” of a student’s life, it can be scored in an objective way. (In a recent New York Times op-ed, the University of New Hampshire psychologist John D. Mayer aptly described the SAT’s validity as an “astonishing achievement.”) In a study published in Psychological Science, University of Minnesota researchers Paul Sackett, Nathan Kuncel, and their colleagues investigated the relationship between SAT scores and college grades in a very large sample: nearly 150,000 students from 110 colleges and universities. SAT scores predicted first-year college GPA about as well as high school grades did, and the best prediction was achieved by considering both factors. Botstein, Boylan, and Kolbert are either unaware of this directly relevant, easily accessible, and widely disseminated empirical evidence, or they have decided to ignore it and base their claims on intuition and anecdote—or perhaps on their beliefs about the way the world should be rather than the way it is... test score (SAT or ACT—whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year... Test scores also predicted whether the students graduated... A 2007 Science article summed up the evidence succinctly: “Standardized admissions tests have positive and useful relationships with subsequent student accomplishments”... SAT scores even predict success beyond the college years... the SAT in fact goes a long way toward leveling the playing field, giving students an opportunity to distinguish themselves regardless of their background. Scoring well on the SAT may in fact be the only such opportunity for students who graduate from public high schools that are regarded by college admissions offices as academically weak... Research has consistently shown that prep courses have only a small effect on SAT scores—and a much smaller effect than test prep companies claim they do... it is clear that SES is not what accounts for the fact that SAT scores predict success in college. In the University of Minnesota study, the correlation between high school SAT and college GPA was virtually unchanged after the researchers statistically controlled for the influence of SES... The content of the SAT is practically indistinguishable from that of standardized intelligence tests... Synthesizing evidence from nearly a century of empirical studies, Schmidt and Hunter established that general mental ability—the psychological trait that IQ scores reflect—is the single best predictor of job training success, and that it accounts for differences in job performance even in workers with more than a decade of experience. It’s more predictive than interests, personality, reference checks, and interview performance. Smart people don’t just make better mathematicians, as Brooks observed—they make better managers, clerks, salespeople, service workers, vehicle operators, and soldiers. IQ predicts other things that matter, too, like income, employment, health, and even longevity... the bottom line is that there are large, measurable differences among people in intellectual ability, and these differences have consequences for people’s lives. Ignoring these facts will only distract us from discovering and implementing wise policies... disregarding IQ—by admitting students to colleges or hiring people for jobs in which they are very likely to fail—is harmful both to individuals and to society... the policies of public and private organizations should be based on evidence rather than ideology or wishful thinking"
EU Right to be Forgotten: 5 random NYT stories removed from Google search results. - "The harm to people mentioned in newspaper stories that are searchable online is relatively easily demonstrated. In contrast, the harm inflicted to the public at large by removing those stories via an opaque and seemingly arbitrary process is impossible to gauge."
Cellphones at gas stations: Mythbusters debunk one of the biggest myths in tech. - "it’s not the cellphone, but static sparks created when drivers rub themselves on the car that cause most of these fires. A lot of times, the drivers talk on their phones when the spark happens, so it just looks as if the cellphone is the cause of the fire, when it’s actually irrelevant."
George Spencer Millet, kissed to death in 1909 - "Lost life by stab in falling on ink eraser, evading six young women trying to give him birthday kisses in office Metropolitan Life Building"
Did the pro-life movement lead to more single moms? - "In conservative communities, the hardening of anti-abortion attitudes may have increased the acceptance of single-parent families. And by contrast, in less conservative communities, the willingness to accept abortion has helped create more stable families... This creates the dilemma Douthat identified for those who see abortion as immoral. The Christian right preaches that contraception is not perfect, sex inevitably risks pregnancy, and abstinence provides the only solution. Indeed, as the number of abortions has dropped, the rate of unmarried women giving birth has increased. And nonelite young women often give their opposition to abortion as an explanation for why they went ahead and had the child, even if in other ways religion has not influenced them much. In their book Premarital Sex in America, sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker report on a conservative, moderately religious young couple who have a child without marrying: “Some semblance of Christian morality may have prompted Andy and his girlfriend to keep their baby rather than elect abortion,” they write, “but beyond that, the evidence of religious influence on sexual decision-making is slim.”"
Post ID: 5948038755398902220
Observations - 29th October 2014
“It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there.”- Elsie de Wolfe
***
Chinese Privilege means minorities get to go off early for Chinese festivals, but Chinese can't go off early for minority ones.
"Show off your Chinese privilege to a makcik and you will get 1/8 of an egg with your mee rebus, and it will still cost 50 cents more."
It's not necessarily a bad thing to lose closed-minded, intolerant friends.
The next time someone asks me a question, I'm replying IT'S NOT MY JOB TO EDUCATE YOU!!!
If it's so bad for your achievements to be dismissed because you're a beautiful woman, why is it okay for them to be dismissed because of "privilege"?
"When the majority complains about the minority, it's called intolerance. When the minority complains about the majority, it's called being brave and standing up for what's right or something like that."
If healthcare is a human right and there needs to be universal coverage, why don't people call for intervention in the food and housing markets? In other words, provide people with food and housing for free.
Maybe deaf activists need to start critiquing auralnormativity and surduphobia.
Perhaps those who keep mistaking descriptive statements for prescriptive ones do so because they are the ones with an agenda. Example: Focus on the Family's Sex Education.
If sex does not mean a woman has implicitly consented to have a child, why do fathers have to pay for child support?
"victim blaming" is that fun buzz phrase people turn to when they're burning with self-righteous rage and don't understand the concept of culpability
If we should let babies be breastfed in public view should we let them pee in public too?
If you can compel doctors to give abortions against their morals, can you compel them to euthanise people?
If Singaporean fairy tales about fertility produced with government support mean that the government is sexist, does the government funding arts group which make works with anti-government messages mean that the government is anti-government? And if the government funds two groups which produce material with contradictory messages does it mean that the government is incoherent?
It's very telling that feminists always assume that those who disagree with them don't understand. This arises from the assumption of infallibility and is also why dissenters are so easily dismissed as trolls or evil.
Maybe the next time feminists accuse me of male privilege I'll say they're forbidden from commenting on NS.
"i don't get it, why do people gleefully declare that they didn't read the article
and then proceed to make snap judgments"
"It's interesting how said readers "hadn't the time to read the article in full", but had the time to be outraged."
Use a unique password for each site… and forget it, be unable to sign in and waste time resetting it.
I hate sites that turn perfectly good text into an image (e.g. Parents Send Son To Catholic School To Get Better At Math. Then This Happens.)
RT @ShunfuMart: I hereby pledge never to use any product that has an ad which delays my youtube video viewing by more than 5 seconds.
The best approach to controversial issues is apathy - because you alienate neither side.
***
Chinese Privilege means minorities get to go off early for Chinese festivals, but Chinese can't go off early for minority ones.
"Show off your Chinese privilege to a makcik and you will get 1/8 of an egg with your mee rebus, and it will still cost 50 cents more."
It's not necessarily a bad thing to lose closed-minded, intolerant friends.
The next time someone asks me a question, I'm replying IT'S NOT MY JOB TO EDUCATE YOU!!!
If it's so bad for your achievements to be dismissed because you're a beautiful woman, why is it okay for them to be dismissed because of "privilege"?
"When the majority complains about the minority, it's called intolerance. When the minority complains about the majority, it's called being brave and standing up for what's right or something like that."
If healthcare is a human right and there needs to be universal coverage, why don't people call for intervention in the food and housing markets? In other words, provide people with food and housing for free.
Maybe deaf activists need to start critiquing auralnormativity and surduphobia.
Perhaps those who keep mistaking descriptive statements for prescriptive ones do so because they are the ones with an agenda. Example: Focus on the Family's Sex Education.
If sex does not mean a woman has implicitly consented to have a child, why do fathers have to pay for child support?
"victim blaming" is that fun buzz phrase people turn to when they're burning with self-righteous rage and don't understand the concept of culpability
If we should let babies be breastfed in public view should we let them pee in public too?
If you can compel doctors to give abortions against their morals, can you compel them to euthanise people?
If Singaporean fairy tales about fertility produced with government support mean that the government is sexist, does the government funding arts group which make works with anti-government messages mean that the government is anti-government? And if the government funds two groups which produce material with contradictory messages does it mean that the government is incoherent?
It's very telling that feminists always assume that those who disagree with them don't understand. This arises from the assumption of infallibility and is also why dissenters are so easily dismissed as trolls or evil.
Maybe the next time feminists accuse me of male privilege I'll say they're forbidden from commenting on NS.
"i don't get it, why do people gleefully declare that they didn't read the article
and then proceed to make snap judgments"
"It's interesting how said readers "hadn't the time to read the article in full", but had the time to be outraged."
Use a unique password for each site… and forget it, be unable to sign in and waste time resetting it.
I hate sites that turn perfectly good text into an image (e.g. Parents Send Son To Catholic School To Get Better At Math. Then This Happens.)
RT @ShunfuMart: I hereby pledge never to use any product that has an ad which delays my youtube video viewing by more than 5 seconds.
The best approach to controversial issues is apathy - because you alienate neither side.
Post ID: 4822736771608561766
Illegal Ice Cream
Useless Information Podcast #76 - A Life Forgotten:
"And I hope you'll find this next story as amusing as I did.
It's dated October 15th of 1963 and deals with the House of Representatives overturning a law of Critical National Importance. It has to be really really important right, for them to deal with it?
Believe it or not, for 42 years prior, it had been illegal to sell ice cream in cones, sandwiches and cups anywhere within our Nation's Capital.
That means that some of our most trusted citizens were in direct violation of this law. That includes teachers, church groups, small businesses and small children - thrown all in jail.
At the time it was a misdemeanor to keep or serve ice cream in anything but the authorised units. Those were one half pint, a pint, quart, half gallon, gallon, two gallons, two and one half gallons and any multiple of the gallon. Anything else was not allowed.
So you're probably wondering why they'd have such an absurd law. Well it wasn't absurd when President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law on March 3rd of 1921. You see, back then modern refrigeration was rare, so it was not considered possible to package small quantities of ice cream without it spoiling.
In other words this law was put into place to protect the consumer."
"And I hope you'll find this next story as amusing as I did.
It's dated October 15th of 1963 and deals with the House of Representatives overturning a law of Critical National Importance. It has to be really really important right, for them to deal with it?
Believe it or not, for 42 years prior, it had been illegal to sell ice cream in cones, sandwiches and cups anywhere within our Nation's Capital.
That means that some of our most trusted citizens were in direct violation of this law. That includes teachers, church groups, small businesses and small children - thrown all in jail.
At the time it was a misdemeanor to keep or serve ice cream in anything but the authorised units. Those were one half pint, a pint, quart, half gallon, gallon, two gallons, two and one half gallons and any multiple of the gallon. Anything else was not allowed.
So you're probably wondering why they'd have such an absurd law. Well it wasn't absurd when President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law on March 3rd of 1921. You see, back then modern refrigeration was rare, so it was not considered possible to package small quantities of ice cream without it spoiling.
In other words this law was put into place to protect the consumer."
Post ID: 6534510961402328483
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Links - 28th October 2014
WATCH: CNN asks, 'Does Hamas use human shields?' - "KAYE: Another of the group's political leader said this about their tactics during a 2008 battle between Israel and Gaza.
FATHI HAMAD, FMR. HAMAS INTERIOR MINISTER: They have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the Mujahideen in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine...
Listen to what a spokesman for Hamas said on AL Aqsa TV in July.
MUSHIR AL-MASRI, HAMAS SPOKESPERSON: Stay in your homes as we promised you and do not comply with the war of rumors and psychological warfare the Zionist enemy is waging on you.
KAYE: The IDF released this video of Israeli military firing a warning shot. Then moments later, civilians emerge on the rooftop acting according to the IDF as human shields.
In Gaza, believing Hamas' word could mean the difference between life and death."
Why Freud Still Matters, When He Was Wrong About Almost Everything - "Freud’s legacy has transcended science, with his ideas permeating deep into Western culture. Rarely does a day go by where we don’t find ourselves uttering a term drawn from his work: Mommy and daddy issues. Arrested development. Death wishes. Freudian slips. Phallic symbols. Anal retentiveness. Defense mechanisms. Cathartic release. And on and on and on."
How (Not) To React to Anti-Feminist Women | The Vagenda - "I began to feel if we were being too shouty, too quiet, too victimising, too forceful then we have already started to fail and I hated it. On the ‘Women Against Feminism’ blog I can see posts by people saying that have received hate messages from ‘feminazis’. There is so much about that sentence that is sad. All I can think as I scroll through the fast accumulating likes and posts is: how the fuck how did this happen? I feel like I’m spinning on the spot, arms outspread, looking at my fellow feminists and asking – seriously guys, where the hell were we? Then I remembered where I was. Back at the party. “I am not a feminist.” After this calm, totally genuine admission from this woman I went on what can only be politely described as a tirade. Pummeling with facts and figures, trying to convince her that she was wrong, that she was mistaken, that she just didn’t understand what feminism was. Slowly as I began to tire and my face melted from determination to utter disbelief, hers hardened in quiet confidence that she had just been proven right. That we feminists were all the same. Shouty, elitist and actually a little bit mean. Men haters and blamers, women victimisers and blamers. I pawed at her with words, desperately trying to persuade her she most definitely was a feminist because (here comes my moment of glory) “you’re a woman, how could you not be?” Ugh. She got up and walked away and on reflection I would probably have done the same. What an epic fail. People shouldn’t feel they have to tip toe around feminism for fear of angering the beast. In order for feminism to be truly powerful it needs to be accessible and engaging, to everyone, and at the moment it’s just not, not yet"
Wine tasting is bullshit. Here's why. - "In 2001, researcher Frédéric Brochet invited 54 wine experts to give their opinions on what were ostensibly two glasses of different wine: one red, and one white. In actuality, the two wines were identical, with one exception: the "red" wine had been dyed with food coloring. The experts described the "red" wine in language typically reserved for characterizing reds. They called it "jammy," for example, and noted the flavors imparted by its "crushed red fruit." Not one of the 54 experts surveyed noticed that it was, in fact a white wine... he served wine experts a run-of-the-mill Bordeaux in two different bottles:
One bottle bore the label of a fancy grand cru, the other of an ordinary vin de table. Although they were being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the bottles nearly opposite descriptions. The grand cru was summarized as being “agreeable,” “woody,” “complex,” “balanced,” and “rounded,” while the most popular adjectives for the vin de table included “weak,” “short,” “light,” “flat,” and “faulty”... In 1996, research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology concluded that wine experts cannot reliably identify more than three or four of a wine's flavor components. Most wine critics routinely report tasting six or more...
In 2008, a survey comprising more than 6,000 blind tastings found a positive correlation between price and enjoyment – for individuals with wine training. In other words: if you're a wine expert, there's a chance you'll enjoy expensive wines more than cheaper ones... among amateur wine drinkers (which, let's face it, you are), the survey found the opposite, i.e. a negative correlation between price and happiness, “suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.” This lead the researchers to conclude that "both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers.""
Just how 'gay' is anal play, really? - "In 2012, one-year before what is called a “watershed moment” for LGBTQ folks in America by many due a burst in progress, Esquire magazine asked 500 men another question: “During foreplay, what’s the one thing that you want more of from your current partner?” Blowjobs, apparently on the wane, were mentioned by 46% of the men surveyed; “a little rough play” sat at 6%. And rim jobs – or, to the unfamiliar, the act of having your anus stimulated orally – came in at 14%, which is quite surprising because straight men and their own behinds are rarely talked about in the same breath ... unless they’re used in the same breath as a homophobic slur."
‘Gone Girl’ misogyny claims reflect an attitude that is the enemy of art - "Given my choice between allowing portrayals of women who are sexually manipulative, erotically aggressive, fearless in a deranged kind of way, completely true to their own temperament, desperately vital, or the alternative – wallowing in feminist propaganda and succumbing to the niceness plague – I’ll take the former. If Gone Girl is sending the wrong message about women, then Emma Bovary should have gone to medical school instead of cheating on her husband, Anna Karenina should have been a train engineer rather than throwing herself on the tracks, and Eve Harrington should have waited her turn. The idea that every portrait of a woman should be an ideal woman, meant to stand for all of womanhood, is an enemy of art – not to mention wickedly delicious Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies. Art is meant to explore all the unattractive inner realities as well as to recommend glittering ideals. It is not meant to provide uplift or confirm people’s prior ideological assumptions. Art says “Think” not “You’re right”."
Horrifying: Teen Kills Mother, Has Sex With Corpse to 'Lose Virginity'
Feminist hysteria is causing the infantilization of women - "Dunham told NPR that the phrase “too much information” — “TMI” for short — is a sexist phrase that “trivializes female experiences”... TMI is just the latest word or phrase being flagged as sexist. In 2012, the Women’s Media Center created a list of more than 100 words and phrases that are harmful to women, including “aggressive” and “complain.” Singer Beyonce and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg added a new word to that list in March — “bossy.” Suddenly women were told they were being marginalized if they were called bossy, even though some men are called far worse (far too colorful to mention here)... Women are even being told flat-out that they aren’t making their own decisions but are following a path set for them by a patriarchy. When challenged on the wage gap, a common response from those pushing this myth is that the only reason women choose less lucrative, more flexible careers such as teaching and nursing is because society pushes them toward those jobs. As if no strong woman would willingly choose a path that defies the feminist vision. Add this all up and you have today’s “thought leaders” telling women they need to be spoken to gently, need the government to guard them from harsh words and uncomfortable topics, that their setbacks are always someone else’s fault and that they aren’t in control of their own lives."
Let's repeal reality - "There's plenty to resent about nature. Why do only women get pregnant and give birth? Some men would like the chance, and some women would gladly change roles. Why are men bigger? Why are some people unattractive and others boring? That doesn't seem fair. And why must we die? These mortality assignments are a terrible form of oppression. If we declared ourselves "death neutral," would that make it so?"
Bacon: Why America's Favorite Food Mania Happened - "For years, fast-food outlets had been offering extra-lean burgers and sandwiches. At the same time, they were responding to the increased liability from food poisoning lawsuits (especially after the deadly 1993 E. coli outbreak at Jack in the Box) by cooking all their burgers to well done. Lean hamburgers tended to taste like dry cardboard. “Remember when McDonald’s came out with the McLean? Well, that was a flop. It was a burger that had zero flavor,” says Leathers. “Now, if they were to put bacon on that, it would have been a huge success.” Adding a single slice of bacon to those sandwiches not only improved the taste and mouthfeel by multiples, but bacon’s low cost meant that they could be sold at a premium, tacking a healthy profit margin—Leathers estimates 50 percent to 60 percent—onto burgers."
Tipton Laffin Few pub ignores its own anti-drugs message - growing cannabis in the ladies' toilet
New research on plant intelligence may forever change how you think about plants - "The new research, he says, is in a field called plant neurobiology — which is something of a misnomer, because even scientists in the field don't argue that plants have neurons or brains. "They have analagous structures," Pollan explains. "They have ways of taking all the sensory data they gather in their everyday lives ... integrate it and then behave in an appropriate way in response. And they do this without brains, which, in a way, is what's incredible about it, because we automatically assume you need a brain to process information." And we assume you need ears to hear. But researchers, says Pollan, have played a recording of a caterpillar munching on a leaf to plants — and the plants react. They begin to secrete defensive chemicals — even though the plant isn't really threatened, Pollan says. "It is somehow hearing what is, to it, a terrifying sound of a caterpillar munching on its leaves." Pollan says plants have all the same senses as humans, and then some. In addition to hearing, taste, for example, they can sense gravity, the presence of water, or even feel that an obstruction is in the way of its roots, before coming into contact with it. Plant roots will shift direction, he says, to avoid obstacles. So what about pain? Do plants feel? Pollan says they do respond to anesthetics. "You can put a plant out with a human anesthetic. ... And not only that, plants produce their own compounds that are anesthetic to us.""
Glut of postdoc researchers stirs a quiet crisis in science - "The life of the humble biomedical postdoctoral researcher was never easy: toiling in obscurity in a low-paying scientific apprenticeship that can stretch more than a decade. The long hours were worth it for the expected reward — the chance to launch an independent laboratory and do science that could expand human understanding of biology and disease. But in recent years, the postdoc position has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank. Some of the smartest people in Boston are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a biomedical underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand."
Sperm-Producing Cells Coaxed to Produce Insulin - "Researchers have been able to prod human cells that normally produce sperm to make insulin instead and, after transplanting them, the cells briefly cured mice with type 1 diabetes."
FATHI HAMAD, FMR. HAMAS INTERIOR MINISTER: They have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the Mujahideen in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine...
Listen to what a spokesman for Hamas said on AL Aqsa TV in July.
MUSHIR AL-MASRI, HAMAS SPOKESPERSON: Stay in your homes as we promised you and do not comply with the war of rumors and psychological warfare the Zionist enemy is waging on you.
KAYE: The IDF released this video of Israeli military firing a warning shot. Then moments later, civilians emerge on the rooftop acting according to the IDF as human shields.
In Gaza, believing Hamas' word could mean the difference between life and death."
Why Freud Still Matters, When He Was Wrong About Almost Everything - "Freud’s legacy has transcended science, with his ideas permeating deep into Western culture. Rarely does a day go by where we don’t find ourselves uttering a term drawn from his work: Mommy and daddy issues. Arrested development. Death wishes. Freudian slips. Phallic symbols. Anal retentiveness. Defense mechanisms. Cathartic release. And on and on and on."
How (Not) To React to Anti-Feminist Women | The Vagenda - "I began to feel if we were being too shouty, too quiet, too victimising, too forceful then we have already started to fail and I hated it. On the ‘Women Against Feminism’ blog I can see posts by people saying that have received hate messages from ‘feminazis’. There is so much about that sentence that is sad. All I can think as I scroll through the fast accumulating likes and posts is: how the fuck how did this happen? I feel like I’m spinning on the spot, arms outspread, looking at my fellow feminists and asking – seriously guys, where the hell were we? Then I remembered where I was. Back at the party. “I am not a feminist.” After this calm, totally genuine admission from this woman I went on what can only be politely described as a tirade. Pummeling with facts and figures, trying to convince her that she was wrong, that she was mistaken, that she just didn’t understand what feminism was. Slowly as I began to tire and my face melted from determination to utter disbelief, hers hardened in quiet confidence that she had just been proven right. That we feminists were all the same. Shouty, elitist and actually a little bit mean. Men haters and blamers, women victimisers and blamers. I pawed at her with words, desperately trying to persuade her she most definitely was a feminist because (here comes my moment of glory) “you’re a woman, how could you not be?” Ugh. She got up and walked away and on reflection I would probably have done the same. What an epic fail. People shouldn’t feel they have to tip toe around feminism for fear of angering the beast. In order for feminism to be truly powerful it needs to be accessible and engaging, to everyone, and at the moment it’s just not, not yet"
Wine tasting is bullshit. Here's why. - "In 2001, researcher Frédéric Brochet invited 54 wine experts to give their opinions on what were ostensibly two glasses of different wine: one red, and one white. In actuality, the two wines were identical, with one exception: the "red" wine had been dyed with food coloring. The experts described the "red" wine in language typically reserved for characterizing reds. They called it "jammy," for example, and noted the flavors imparted by its "crushed red fruit." Not one of the 54 experts surveyed noticed that it was, in fact a white wine... he served wine experts a run-of-the-mill Bordeaux in two different bottles:
One bottle bore the label of a fancy grand cru, the other of an ordinary vin de table. Although they were being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the bottles nearly opposite descriptions. The grand cru was summarized as being “agreeable,” “woody,” “complex,” “balanced,” and “rounded,” while the most popular adjectives for the vin de table included “weak,” “short,” “light,” “flat,” and “faulty”... In 1996, research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology concluded that wine experts cannot reliably identify more than three or four of a wine's flavor components. Most wine critics routinely report tasting six or more...
In 2008, a survey comprising more than 6,000 blind tastings found a positive correlation between price and enjoyment – for individuals with wine training. In other words: if you're a wine expert, there's a chance you'll enjoy expensive wines more than cheaper ones... among amateur wine drinkers (which, let's face it, you are), the survey found the opposite, i.e. a negative correlation between price and happiness, “suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.” This lead the researchers to conclude that "both the prices of wines and wine recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine consumers.""
Just how 'gay' is anal play, really? - "In 2012, one-year before what is called a “watershed moment” for LGBTQ folks in America by many due a burst in progress, Esquire magazine asked 500 men another question: “During foreplay, what’s the one thing that you want more of from your current partner?” Blowjobs, apparently on the wane, were mentioned by 46% of the men surveyed; “a little rough play” sat at 6%. And rim jobs – or, to the unfamiliar, the act of having your anus stimulated orally – came in at 14%, which is quite surprising because straight men and their own behinds are rarely talked about in the same breath ... unless they’re used in the same breath as a homophobic slur."
‘Gone Girl’ misogyny claims reflect an attitude that is the enemy of art - "Given my choice between allowing portrayals of women who are sexually manipulative, erotically aggressive, fearless in a deranged kind of way, completely true to their own temperament, desperately vital, or the alternative – wallowing in feminist propaganda and succumbing to the niceness plague – I’ll take the former. If Gone Girl is sending the wrong message about women, then Emma Bovary should have gone to medical school instead of cheating on her husband, Anna Karenina should have been a train engineer rather than throwing herself on the tracks, and Eve Harrington should have waited her turn. The idea that every portrait of a woman should be an ideal woman, meant to stand for all of womanhood, is an enemy of art – not to mention wickedly delicious Joan Crawford and Bette Davis movies. Art is meant to explore all the unattractive inner realities as well as to recommend glittering ideals. It is not meant to provide uplift or confirm people’s prior ideological assumptions. Art says “Think” not “You’re right”."
Horrifying: Teen Kills Mother, Has Sex With Corpse to 'Lose Virginity'
Feminist hysteria is causing the infantilization of women - "Dunham told NPR that the phrase “too much information” — “TMI” for short — is a sexist phrase that “trivializes female experiences”... TMI is just the latest word or phrase being flagged as sexist. In 2012, the Women’s Media Center created a list of more than 100 words and phrases that are harmful to women, including “aggressive” and “complain.” Singer Beyonce and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg added a new word to that list in March — “bossy.” Suddenly women were told they were being marginalized if they were called bossy, even though some men are called far worse (far too colorful to mention here)... Women are even being told flat-out that they aren’t making their own decisions but are following a path set for them by a patriarchy. When challenged on the wage gap, a common response from those pushing this myth is that the only reason women choose less lucrative, more flexible careers such as teaching and nursing is because society pushes them toward those jobs. As if no strong woman would willingly choose a path that defies the feminist vision. Add this all up and you have today’s “thought leaders” telling women they need to be spoken to gently, need the government to guard them from harsh words and uncomfortable topics, that their setbacks are always someone else’s fault and that they aren’t in control of their own lives."
Let's repeal reality - "There's plenty to resent about nature. Why do only women get pregnant and give birth? Some men would like the chance, and some women would gladly change roles. Why are men bigger? Why are some people unattractive and others boring? That doesn't seem fair. And why must we die? These mortality assignments are a terrible form of oppression. If we declared ourselves "death neutral," would that make it so?"
Bacon: Why America's Favorite Food Mania Happened - "For years, fast-food outlets had been offering extra-lean burgers and sandwiches. At the same time, they were responding to the increased liability from food poisoning lawsuits (especially after the deadly 1993 E. coli outbreak at Jack in the Box) by cooking all their burgers to well done. Lean hamburgers tended to taste like dry cardboard. “Remember when McDonald’s came out with the McLean? Well, that was a flop. It was a burger that had zero flavor,” says Leathers. “Now, if they were to put bacon on that, it would have been a huge success.” Adding a single slice of bacon to those sandwiches not only improved the taste and mouthfeel by multiples, but bacon’s low cost meant that they could be sold at a premium, tacking a healthy profit margin—Leathers estimates 50 percent to 60 percent—onto burgers."
Tipton Laffin Few pub ignores its own anti-drugs message - growing cannabis in the ladies' toilet
New research on plant intelligence may forever change how you think about plants - "The new research, he says, is in a field called plant neurobiology — which is something of a misnomer, because even scientists in the field don't argue that plants have neurons or brains. "They have analagous structures," Pollan explains. "They have ways of taking all the sensory data they gather in their everyday lives ... integrate it and then behave in an appropriate way in response. And they do this without brains, which, in a way, is what's incredible about it, because we automatically assume you need a brain to process information." And we assume you need ears to hear. But researchers, says Pollan, have played a recording of a caterpillar munching on a leaf to plants — and the plants react. They begin to secrete defensive chemicals — even though the plant isn't really threatened, Pollan says. "It is somehow hearing what is, to it, a terrifying sound of a caterpillar munching on its leaves." Pollan says plants have all the same senses as humans, and then some. In addition to hearing, taste, for example, they can sense gravity, the presence of water, or even feel that an obstruction is in the way of its roots, before coming into contact with it. Plant roots will shift direction, he says, to avoid obstacles. So what about pain? Do plants feel? Pollan says they do respond to anesthetics. "You can put a plant out with a human anesthetic. ... And not only that, plants produce their own compounds that are anesthetic to us.""
Glut of postdoc researchers stirs a quiet crisis in science - "The life of the humble biomedical postdoctoral researcher was never easy: toiling in obscurity in a low-paying scientific apprenticeship that can stretch more than a decade. The long hours were worth it for the expected reward — the chance to launch an independent laboratory and do science that could expand human understanding of biology and disease. But in recent years, the postdoc position has become less a stepping stone and more of a holding tank. Some of the smartest people in Boston are caught up in an all-but-invisible crisis, mired in a biomedical underclass as federal funding for research has leveled off, leaving the supply of well-trained scientists outstripping demand."
Sperm-Producing Cells Coaxed to Produce Insulin - "Researchers have been able to prod human cells that normally produce sperm to make insulin instead and, after transplanting them, the cells briefly cured mice with type 1 diabetes."
Post ID: 5281206272155017311
Ched Evans
Continuing a long trend of feminists (or those with a feminist agenda, at any rate) coming onto the media and making no sense (of course, later feminists will claim that these feminists are not representative, that the media likes to showcase hysterical people [while somehow most of the other Moral Maze guests make more sense], on convicted rapist Ched Evans playing football:
Claire Fox: But I'm just wondering, as a sports commentator, that's why I was asking you about everybody else's [attitudes]. Are you going around checking on the attitudes of everyone you comment on?...
Charlie Webster: He's a convicted rapist. I'm not talking about other footballers. I'm a- Michael said.
Claire Fox: Rape is more important than manslaughter?
Charlie Webster: Not at all. Not at all. However, I am a campaigner against sexual abuse... I am also a Sheffield United Fan...
Michael Portillo: I wonder if your issue with this would be addressed by rape sentences being longer... This man has done the sentence that it was decided he should serve. He's come out and there's now a question of punishing him a second time. Are you really campaigning for longer rape sentences?
Charlie Webster: I am a patron of Sheffield United Community Foundation. I will not stay its patron because I don't believe a convicted rapist should be playing football. And should be idolised. That's what I am campaigning for right now.
I'm with the Ministry of Justice, on the victims panel, to try and make sure that victims are looked after better in the justice system and prosecutions go through.
Now my worry about this is that only 15% of people that are raped come forward. What message are we sending out to people that have been raped this week?... Would they come forward? No. Because what happens is you get berated and you say it's not fair on the perpetrator Ched Evans, but it's neither fair on the victim who is not on trial and hasn't done anything wrong. And Ched Evans, if he wants to, could have come forward today and apologised for the victim.
Michael Portillo: But he thinks, he says he's innocent, you see.
Charlie Webster: He's still, morally, he was wrong...
Michael Portillo: Well, he's-
Charlie Webster: His fans,have run a hate campaign against him. So he could call for his fans to stop the hate campaign against him.
Michael Portillo: Let me try and ask you some other questions.
So it is for you particularly about rape. So if it were another issue, you wouldn't be talking about this. And if it were another profession other than football you wouldn't be talking about this.
Charlie Webster: I am talking as a football fan, as a Sheffield United fan who is a campaigner against sexual violence. As somebody who has been sexually abused-
Michael Portillo: I know, but this is a program about morality, so we have to try and test these propositions. We have to try and broaden them. If the crime were not rape, and he were not a footballer, would you feel the same about it?
Charlie Webster: I wouldn't be sat here. Because as I said I'm here as a football fan.
Michael Portillo: Yeah, I know.
But don't you feel some obligation to make what you're saying logical, to make it be something that stands up on its own? In other words, would it be the case that if he were a murderer who'd done his time, and he was not a footballer but a violinist in an orchestra, that you would feel the same about it?
Charlie Webster: He's not, though, so I'm not gonna answer that question. I think that one: the FA should have a code of conduct if we're talking about-
Michael Portillo: Okay, let me try another line.
Charlie Webster: If he were a violinist, I don't know,, because I have no experience of violining.
Michael Portillo: Okay, let me try another line.
Charlie Webster: However, a lawyer wouldn't be allowed back in his job. A teacher wouldn't be allowed back in his job. Because they would have a role of responsibility.
Michael Portillo: That's right. Those things-
Because they're absolutely specified. That's why those people aren't allowed in their jobs. There are no specifications to say that a person may not go back and play football.
Let me just test you on this role model point.
If you're worried about the role model for young people, isn't it important that here is a young man who's been to prison, who's done 2 1/2 years in prison. Doesn't that send a message to young people?
Here's a person whose career hangs by the thread. Doesn't that send a message to young people?
And here's a person going to have his case reviewed because in our society we believe in justice and in this case it's been thought that it's proper for this case to be reviewed.
Aren't those three amazing messages to send to young people?
Charlie Webster: That surprises me, that is the message that you see and question me on. It really really does, and I find that very uncomfortable.
Michael Portillo: Answer the question.
This reminds me of Christian apologetics - the logic of exceptionalism (no external consistency) and not answering the question. But I guess it beats labelling everyone else as a misogynist.
Ched Evans Row Deepens As Sister Brands Sheffield Utd Patron Charlie Webster A 'Hypocrite'
"She was immediately branded a "hypocrite" by Evans' sister Kylie. She retweeted a message the presenter posted last month saying she wanted to get a photograph of former heavyweight boxing champion and convicted rapist Mike Tyson."
Shamed evans asks for second chance
"Former Downing Street spin doctor Alastair Campbell told BBC3's Free Speech that he supported the idea of criminals being reintegrated back into society.
He said: "I think we've got to be very careful to say that somebody who has committed a crime, and has then served their sentence, and then should never, ever, ever be accepted back as a, if you like, a good member of society again."
TV presenter Judy Finnigan sparked controversy last week during a panel discussion on ITV's Loose Women by claiming that Evans' crime was "non violent" and did not cause "bodily harm".
Her comments caused a wave of criticism, abuse on social media and also sparked threats against her daughter, fitness instructor Chloe Madeley, wishing rape on her."
Evidently, rape is so serious that we should wish rape threats on people who 'defend' it (or their children).
Sex on the Bench: Do Women and Men Have Different Moral Values?
"• When looking at pictures of immoral acts, women's judgments of severity correlate with higher levels of activation in emotion centers of the brain, suggesting concern for victims, whereas men show higher activation in areas that might involve the deployment of principles (Carla Harenski and collaborators).
• Women are more likely to factor personal cost into decisions about whether to punish an unfair stranger, which suggests that women are more context-sensitive, and men adhere to principles (Catherine Eckel and Philip Grossman).
• Women are more likely than men to think it is okay to imprison a person on trumped up changes in order to stop violent rioting in the streets (Fiery Cushman and Liane Young). But women are also less likely to endorse diverting a runaway trolley down an alternate track where it will kill one person instead of five (John Mikhail)."
Addendum: "women seem to be more empathetic and more focused on the collective good. This is broadly consistent with Gilligan's suggestion that women are more likely than men to base moral decision an a care orientation, whereas men gravitate more towards principles"
This shows that women are less likely to apply consistent moral principles than men and more swayed by feelings, i.e. female morality is more subjective and less just (at least if you have a traditional conception of justice).
In a 2018 context it also explains why women are more comfortable with tossing out due process and tolerating false accusations, since to oppose them will hurt women as a group.
Also from this episode:
David Walsh:
"If we've allowed our kids to see our celebrity sports, professional sportspeople as role models, we as adults have failed"
"Not all rapes are exactly the same. Some are conducted with shocking violence, some are not quite like that. And I think that we shouldn't be afraid to make that distinction"
Addendum 2: His conviction got squashed, so.
Post ID: 7073484097003071367
Monday, October 27, 2014
Links - 27th October 2014
Malala – the girl who hates Britain - "So while in the West we wish Malala to be a courageous fighter for western liberalism, maybe it’s Marxism that inspires her courage and determination; Marxists are often the bravest fighters in the struggles against dreadful regimes precisely because Marxism is a sort of quasi-religion. Alas liberalism is not quite so muscular and people are reluctant to go out of their way to die for it; on a state v state basis liberal democracies win because their economies are far more effective and they can adapt better, not being led by paranoid lunatics, but on the ground it’s not something people are often willing to die for. Religious extremism is the number one threat in the 21st century, and we should treat secular movements, however dangerous they may once have been, as potential allies against the Taliban or al-Qaeda. But we should at least give Marxists credit where it’s due, especially in the area of women’s education"
MIT students predict Mars One colonists will suffocate in 68 days - "The Mars One plan calls for the habitats to be within the same space as the crops are grown. This saves weight on the trip and simplifies the design of the habitats. At about 68 days, the first wheat crop will reach maturity and the level of oxygen will spike. To avoid a huge fire hazard, the oxygen will need to be vented, but there is not yet a reliable way to preferentially vent oxygen without also venting the nitrogen used to maintain pressure. Thus, the colony will run out of nitrogen almost immediately. The end result, says the paper, is suffocation due to low air pressure. Well, that or the habitat explodes and the survivors suffocate outside"
Matters of the Brain: Why Men and Women Are So Different - "A prevalent understanding, particularly in the 1980s, was that boys and girls are born cognitively the same. It was the way parents and society treated them that made them different. Since then, a preponderance of research has called this belief into question. The majority of today's psychologists agree that some of the differences exhibited by male and female brains are innate. "We do socialize our boys and girls differently, but the contribution of biology is not zero," said Diane Halpern, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College in California, who has been studyingcognitive gender differences for 25 years. Halpern was a keynote speaker at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference here last Thursday (April 19). How much, rather than whether, biology contributes is where the unusually heated debate is now focused, she said... Some of the many gender differences that float in popular consciousness have more support than others. The ones that have been consistently found across cultures, life spans and even across species are the most likely — but by no means guaranteed — to have some biological underpinning. Across age groups, species and nations, males tend to be better at various spatial skills... Females, on the other hand, tend to have more verbal fluency and greater memory for objects... In more gender-equal societies, "the male advantage in math virtually disappears," Halpern said, but other differences grow. When given more equal encouragement and access to education, on average, girls become even better at reading than boys and boys further outstrip girls in visual-spatial tasks."
On the Mechanics of Defamation : Sam Harris - "Both Greenwald and Aslan know that those words do not mean what they appear to mean. Given the amount of correspondence we’ve had on these topics, and given that I have repeatedly bored audiences by clarifying that statement (in response to this kind of treatment), the chance that either writer thinks he is exposing the truth about my views—or that I’m really a “genocidal fascist maniac”—is zero. Aslan and Greenwald—a famous “scholar” and a famous “journalist”—are engaged in a campaign of pure defamation. They are consciously misleading their readers and increasing my security concerns in the process... Aslan and Greenwald know that nowhere in my work do I suggest that we kill harmless people for thought crimes. And yet they (along with several of their colleagues) are doing their best to spread this lie about me. Nearly every other comment they’ve made about my work is similarly misleading. Both Aslan and Greenwald are debasing our public discourse and making honest discussion of important ideas increasingly unpleasant—even personally dangerous. Why are they doing this? Please ask them and those who publish them"
Hiding the Words Doesn’t Make the Problem Go Away - "I talk about language use because I think it’s important and because I think some words should be used with care, but I don’t think these words should be eradicated. In fact, I think they should be preserved, not just in conversations about their meaning but in general usage, because if we try to wipe them off the slate, we do ourselves, and our history, a tremendous disservice. Not talking about these words would mean that people wouldn’t have a framework of understanding and a starting point for talking about the ideas behind them; ‘racism’ carries more impact when you link it with racial slurs, for example. Explaining why ableism is an issue is a lot easier when I can point to a book with a disabled protagonist who gets called ‘r#tarded’ by other characters... we all know that for progressives, the worst thing ever is to be accused of being -ist. So it’s better not to talk about it at all, to pretend that it isn’t happening and never happened. To erase the -ist parts of history, literally, in the case of books altered to remove key aspects of their content. Because if you make the word go away, that means there’s no idea left, right?"
The N-word belongs in “Huckleberry Finn” - "The book, which deals directly with racism, is not better served by erasing the racial slur. The only purpose is to ease the tension that is felt by parents and teachers of students who would read it. To pretend this is for some higher good is to insult the intelligence of the American public... America talks about race like scared parents talk with their kids about sex. We’re vague, sometimes terribly misleading and on occasion leave out huge aspects of the situation that would allow kids to make better decisions about how they conduct themselves. If we continue with our horrendously skewed and willfully ignorant interpretations of history, we will find ourselves with a generation that’s woefully misinformed and it will be completely our fault."
Can Liberalism Be Saved From Itself? : Sam Harris - "Affleck was gunning for me from the start. What many viewers probably don’t realize is that the mid-show interview is supposed be a protected five-to-seven-minute conversation between Maher and the new guest—and all the panelists know this. To ignore this structure and encroach on this space is a little rude; to jump in with criticism, as Affleck did, is pretty hostile. He tried to land his first blow a mere 90 seconds after I took my seat, before the topic of Islam even came up... imagine that the year is 1970, and I said: “Communism is the Mother lode of bad ideas.” How reasonable would it be to attack me as a “racist” or as someone who harbors an irrational hatred of Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, etc. This is precisely the situation I am in. My criticism of Islam is a criticism of beliefs and their consequences—but my fellow liberals reflexively view it as an expression of intolerance toward people... Kristof made the point that there are brave Muslims who are risking their lives to condemn “extremism” in the Muslim community. Of course there are, and I celebrate these people too. But he seemed completely unaware that he was making my point for me—the point being, of course, that these people are now risking their lives by advocating for basic human rights in the Muslim world... I don’t know how many times one must deny that one is referring to an entire group, or cite specific poll results to justify the percentages one is talking about, but no amount of clarification appears sufficient to forestall charges of bigotry and lack of “nuance.” One of the most depressing things in the aftermath of this exchange is the way Affleck is now being lauded for having exposed my and Maher’s “racism,” “bigotry,” and “hatred of Muslims.” This is yet another sign that simply accusing someone of these sins, however illogically, is sufficient to establish them as facts in the minds of many viewers. It certainly does not help that unscrupulous people like Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald have been spinning the conversation this way... Rather than trust poll results and the testimony of jihadists and Islamists, they trust the feeling that they get from the dozens of Muslims they have known personally. As a method of gauging Muslim opinion worldwide, this preference is obviously crazy... what we need is honest talk about the link between belief and behavior. And no one is suffering the consequences of what Muslim “extremists” believe more than other Muslims are. The civil war between Sunni and Shia, the murder of apostates, the oppression of women—these evils have nothing to do with U.S. bombs or Israeli settlements... To say that we should have left Saddam Hussein alone says some very depressing things about the Muslim world"
The Disruption Machine - "Disruptive innovation as a theory of change is meant to serve both as a chronicle of the past (this has happened) and as a model for the future (it will keep happening). The strength of a prediction made from a model depends on the quality of the historical evidence and on the reliability of the methods used to gather and interpret it. Historical analysis proceeds from certain conditions regarding proof. None of these conditions have been met."
How Moore, Burchill and Featherstone all had a lovely bitch fight - "One of these days, not too far away, the entire bourgeois bien-pensant left will self-immolate entirely leaving behind nothing but a thin skein of smoke smelling slightly of goji berries. Please let that day come quickly. In the meantime let us simply enjoy ourselves watching them tear each other to pieces, mired in their competing victimhoods, seething with acquired sensitivity, with inchoate rage and fury, inventing more and more hate crimes with which they might punish people who are not themselves... she was cissexist. Now there’s a term. Have you heard it before? I hadn’t. It is a wonderful day when we can stumble across a new hate crime of which we might all one day be accused: cissexism is the suspicion that transsexual people’s ‘identified gender’ is somehow less genuine than that of people born to the gender in which they remain. Are you guilty of cissexism? You bastard... the government got involved. No, it really did. Its most idiotic minister, the Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone — again utilising that conduit for the shriekingly self-obsessed and vapid, Twitter — described Burchill’s article as ‘bigoted vomit’ and suggested that both she and the editor of the Observer, a man called John Mulholland, should be sacked immediately. Should government ministers do that sort of thing, demand the sacking of newspaper editors? Even if they are incalculably stupid ministers with a track record of saying incalculably stupid things? She is the minister for International Development these days, Featherstone, so it is not even part of her brief. Although I suppose it is part of her brief as a non-cissexist heterosexual woman, in a very real sense... the metro-left is filled with loathing — self-loathing and a loathing it disperses to anyone who might even mildly offend its sensibilities"
It saddens me that supporting freedom makes me an opponent of equality - "The wrath of the transgender community has been insane. They say I haven't apologised enough and I probably haven't. No one has apologised to me for saying that I should be decapitated and I support the English Defence League... I feel increasingly freakish because I believe in freedom, which is easier to say than to achieve and makes me wonder if I am even of "the left" any more. I am a freak because I question certain words: cis, date rape, Islamofascist, for instance. I am a freak because I believe in sexual liberation, which is not the same as equality. And I am serious about freedom of speech. If Lynne Featherstone can call for a journalist and an editor to be sacked, this does not bode well for having politicians and lawyers running the press, does it? Do you actually want to be governed by humourless, authoritarian morons? Don't answer that, I may be offended... How has the left ceded the word "freedom" to the right? It maddens me. We can argue about sexuality and gender till the sacred cows come home. Obviously my politics come out of feminism and did I need to say that I have never personally condoned the murder of a single woman, Brazilian, trans or otherwise? Nor did I make up stuff; I merely reported what is actually happening in Brazil. According to an Associated Press report: "The trans-models have a proverbial leg up on their female colleagues. Unlike even the thinnest of women, without cellulite and stretch marks ... once they've lasered away facial and body hair, they can look more feminine than models who were born female." This description has as much to do with the average transgender person as I do with Naomi Campbell, but the artificiality of femininity is something I often write about. Is this hatred to say so?"
MIT students predict Mars One colonists will suffocate in 68 days - "The Mars One plan calls for the habitats to be within the same space as the crops are grown. This saves weight on the trip and simplifies the design of the habitats. At about 68 days, the first wheat crop will reach maturity and the level of oxygen will spike. To avoid a huge fire hazard, the oxygen will need to be vented, but there is not yet a reliable way to preferentially vent oxygen without also venting the nitrogen used to maintain pressure. Thus, the colony will run out of nitrogen almost immediately. The end result, says the paper, is suffocation due to low air pressure. Well, that or the habitat explodes and the survivors suffocate outside"
Matters of the Brain: Why Men and Women Are So Different - "A prevalent understanding, particularly in the 1980s, was that boys and girls are born cognitively the same. It was the way parents and society treated them that made them different. Since then, a preponderance of research has called this belief into question. The majority of today's psychologists agree that some of the differences exhibited by male and female brains are innate. "We do socialize our boys and girls differently, but the contribution of biology is not zero," said Diane Halpern, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College in California, who has been studyingcognitive gender differences for 25 years. Halpern was a keynote speaker at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference here last Thursday (April 19). How much, rather than whether, biology contributes is where the unusually heated debate is now focused, she said... Some of the many gender differences that float in popular consciousness have more support than others. The ones that have been consistently found across cultures, life spans and even across species are the most likely — but by no means guaranteed — to have some biological underpinning. Across age groups, species and nations, males tend to be better at various spatial skills... Females, on the other hand, tend to have more verbal fluency and greater memory for objects... In more gender-equal societies, "the male advantage in math virtually disappears," Halpern said, but other differences grow. When given more equal encouragement and access to education, on average, girls become even better at reading than boys and boys further outstrip girls in visual-spatial tasks."
On the Mechanics of Defamation : Sam Harris - "Both Greenwald and Aslan know that those words do not mean what they appear to mean. Given the amount of correspondence we’ve had on these topics, and given that I have repeatedly bored audiences by clarifying that statement (in response to this kind of treatment), the chance that either writer thinks he is exposing the truth about my views—or that I’m really a “genocidal fascist maniac”—is zero. Aslan and Greenwald—a famous “scholar” and a famous “journalist”—are engaged in a campaign of pure defamation. They are consciously misleading their readers and increasing my security concerns in the process... Aslan and Greenwald know that nowhere in my work do I suggest that we kill harmless people for thought crimes. And yet they (along with several of their colleagues) are doing their best to spread this lie about me. Nearly every other comment they’ve made about my work is similarly misleading. Both Aslan and Greenwald are debasing our public discourse and making honest discussion of important ideas increasingly unpleasant—even personally dangerous. Why are they doing this? Please ask them and those who publish them"
Hiding the Words Doesn’t Make the Problem Go Away - "I talk about language use because I think it’s important and because I think some words should be used with care, but I don’t think these words should be eradicated. In fact, I think they should be preserved, not just in conversations about their meaning but in general usage, because if we try to wipe them off the slate, we do ourselves, and our history, a tremendous disservice. Not talking about these words would mean that people wouldn’t have a framework of understanding and a starting point for talking about the ideas behind them; ‘racism’ carries more impact when you link it with racial slurs, for example. Explaining why ableism is an issue is a lot easier when I can point to a book with a disabled protagonist who gets called ‘r#tarded’ by other characters... we all know that for progressives, the worst thing ever is to be accused of being -ist. So it’s better not to talk about it at all, to pretend that it isn’t happening and never happened. To erase the -ist parts of history, literally, in the case of books altered to remove key aspects of their content. Because if you make the word go away, that means there’s no idea left, right?"
The N-word belongs in “Huckleberry Finn” - "The book, which deals directly with racism, is not better served by erasing the racial slur. The only purpose is to ease the tension that is felt by parents and teachers of students who would read it. To pretend this is for some higher good is to insult the intelligence of the American public... America talks about race like scared parents talk with their kids about sex. We’re vague, sometimes terribly misleading and on occasion leave out huge aspects of the situation that would allow kids to make better decisions about how they conduct themselves. If we continue with our horrendously skewed and willfully ignorant interpretations of history, we will find ourselves with a generation that’s woefully misinformed and it will be completely our fault."
Can Liberalism Be Saved From Itself? : Sam Harris - "Affleck was gunning for me from the start. What many viewers probably don’t realize is that the mid-show interview is supposed be a protected five-to-seven-minute conversation between Maher and the new guest—and all the panelists know this. To ignore this structure and encroach on this space is a little rude; to jump in with criticism, as Affleck did, is pretty hostile. He tried to land his first blow a mere 90 seconds after I took my seat, before the topic of Islam even came up... imagine that the year is 1970, and I said: “Communism is the Mother lode of bad ideas.” How reasonable would it be to attack me as a “racist” or as someone who harbors an irrational hatred of Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, etc. This is precisely the situation I am in. My criticism of Islam is a criticism of beliefs and their consequences—but my fellow liberals reflexively view it as an expression of intolerance toward people... Kristof made the point that there are brave Muslims who are risking their lives to condemn “extremism” in the Muslim community. Of course there are, and I celebrate these people too. But he seemed completely unaware that he was making my point for me—the point being, of course, that these people are now risking their lives by advocating for basic human rights in the Muslim world... I don’t know how many times one must deny that one is referring to an entire group, or cite specific poll results to justify the percentages one is talking about, but no amount of clarification appears sufficient to forestall charges of bigotry and lack of “nuance.” One of the most depressing things in the aftermath of this exchange is the way Affleck is now being lauded for having exposed my and Maher’s “racism,” “bigotry,” and “hatred of Muslims.” This is yet another sign that simply accusing someone of these sins, however illogically, is sufficient to establish them as facts in the minds of many viewers. It certainly does not help that unscrupulous people like Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald have been spinning the conversation this way... Rather than trust poll results and the testimony of jihadists and Islamists, they trust the feeling that they get from the dozens of Muslims they have known personally. As a method of gauging Muslim opinion worldwide, this preference is obviously crazy... what we need is honest talk about the link between belief and behavior. And no one is suffering the consequences of what Muslim “extremists” believe more than other Muslims are. The civil war between Sunni and Shia, the murder of apostates, the oppression of women—these evils have nothing to do with U.S. bombs or Israeli settlements... To say that we should have left Saddam Hussein alone says some very depressing things about the Muslim world"
The Disruption Machine - "Disruptive innovation as a theory of change is meant to serve both as a chronicle of the past (this has happened) and as a model for the future (it will keep happening). The strength of a prediction made from a model depends on the quality of the historical evidence and on the reliability of the methods used to gather and interpret it. Historical analysis proceeds from certain conditions regarding proof. None of these conditions have been met."
How Moore, Burchill and Featherstone all had a lovely bitch fight - "One of these days, not too far away, the entire bourgeois bien-pensant left will self-immolate entirely leaving behind nothing but a thin skein of smoke smelling slightly of goji berries. Please let that day come quickly. In the meantime let us simply enjoy ourselves watching them tear each other to pieces, mired in their competing victimhoods, seething with acquired sensitivity, with inchoate rage and fury, inventing more and more hate crimes with which they might punish people who are not themselves... she was cissexist. Now there’s a term. Have you heard it before? I hadn’t. It is a wonderful day when we can stumble across a new hate crime of which we might all one day be accused: cissexism is the suspicion that transsexual people’s ‘identified gender’ is somehow less genuine than that of people born to the gender in which they remain. Are you guilty of cissexism? You bastard... the government got involved. No, it really did. Its most idiotic minister, the Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone — again utilising that conduit for the shriekingly self-obsessed and vapid, Twitter — described Burchill’s article as ‘bigoted vomit’ and suggested that both she and the editor of the Observer, a man called John Mulholland, should be sacked immediately. Should government ministers do that sort of thing, demand the sacking of newspaper editors? Even if they are incalculably stupid ministers with a track record of saying incalculably stupid things? She is the minister for International Development these days, Featherstone, so it is not even part of her brief. Although I suppose it is part of her brief as a non-cissexist heterosexual woman, in a very real sense... the metro-left is filled with loathing — self-loathing and a loathing it disperses to anyone who might even mildly offend its sensibilities"
It saddens me that supporting freedom makes me an opponent of equality - "The wrath of the transgender community has been insane. They say I haven't apologised enough and I probably haven't. No one has apologised to me for saying that I should be decapitated and I support the English Defence League... I feel increasingly freakish because I believe in freedom, which is easier to say than to achieve and makes me wonder if I am even of "the left" any more. I am a freak because I question certain words: cis, date rape, Islamofascist, for instance. I am a freak because I believe in sexual liberation, which is not the same as equality. And I am serious about freedom of speech. If Lynne Featherstone can call for a journalist and an editor to be sacked, this does not bode well for having politicians and lawyers running the press, does it? Do you actually want to be governed by humourless, authoritarian morons? Don't answer that, I may be offended... How has the left ceded the word "freedom" to the right? It maddens me. We can argue about sexuality and gender till the sacred cows come home. Obviously my politics come out of feminism and did I need to say that I have never personally condoned the murder of a single woman, Brazilian, trans or otherwise? Nor did I make up stuff; I merely reported what is actually happening in Brazil. According to an Associated Press report: "The trans-models have a proverbial leg up on their female colleagues. Unlike even the thinnest of women, without cellulite and stretch marks ... once they've lasered away facial and body hair, they can look more feminine than models who were born female." This description has as much to do with the average transgender person as I do with Naomi Campbell, but the artificiality of femininity is something I often write about. Is this hatred to say so?"
Post ID: 7955783758919403606
Men Are Harassed More Than Women Online
Exploding yet another feminist myth:
Men Are Harassed More Than Women Online
The difference in abuse between the sexes online isn’t in the amount but the type. Data shows men get more hate, while women say they get it because they’re women.
The issue of Internet misogyny has received a great deal of attention in recent weeks, between the feminist website Jezebel battling rape GIFs repeatedly posted to their comments section and videogame critic Anita Sarkeesian having to leave her home after a series of Twitter threats that included her home address. There is a common assumption that the targets of such vile behavior are overwhelmingly women who are abused because they are women—to the point where “women aren’t welcome on the Internet,” as Amanda Hess argued in a widely discussed article in Pacific Standard magazine this year. Reviewing women’s online tribulations in the last month in The Daily Beast, Samantha Allen asks, “Will the Internet ever be safe for women?”
At the same time, there was little reaction to a report contradicting the narrative that male public figures get considerably less Twitter abuse than their female counterparts. While the study, conducted by the British think tank Demos, was limited to a fairly small sample of British celebrities, journalists and politicians whose Twitter timelines were tracked over a two-week period, its findings are nonetheless interesting. On the whole, 2.5 percent of the tweets sent to the men but fewer than 1 percent of those sent to women were classified as abusive. Male politicians fared especially badly, receiving more than six times as much abuse as female politicians.
The only category in which women got more Twitter abuse than men was journalism: abusive messages accounted for more than 5 percent of the tweets sent to the female journalists and TV presenters in the study and fewer than 2 percent of the ones sent to the male journalists. (However, the most abused male journalist in the sample, controversial ex-CNN host Piers Morgan, was counted as a “celebrity” rather than a journalist; otherwise, he would have single-handedly raised the proportion of abusive tweets to male journalists to almost 6 percent of the total.) While about three-quarters of the offenders were men, about 40 percent of the abusive tweets to women were sent by other women.
Are women really singled out for abuse on the Internet—or is it more the case that Internet abuse of women, at least when committed by men, is singled out for special concern and opprobrium? Many feminists would argue that there are good reasons to treat it differently. Sexual slurs toward women evoke the threat of real-life sexual violence; they are also perceived as intended to “put a woman in her place” and tell her that her opinion is worthless because she is a woman. (A sexual slur toward a man is considered just a personal insult.) But the double standard also has overtones of traditional chivalry which views women as more delicate and deserving of consideration—while nastiness toward men is treated simply a part of the rough-and-tumble of public life, to be taken in stride and shrugged off.
The Demos report on Twitter abuse toward public figures is only one of several studies that cast doubt on the assumption that the Internet is a hotbed of male hostility toward women. In an earlier Demos analysis, women on Twitter were almost as likely as men to use “gendered” derogatory language.
A survey of Internet users conducted by the Pew Research Center last year found that 13 percent of female respondents and 11 percent of male respondents said they had been harassed or stalked online. (While Hess’s Pacific Standard article drew on that survey to note that “5 percent of women who used the Internet said ‘something happened online’ that led them into ‘physical danger,’” it made no mention of the fact that 3 percent of the men also reported such an experience.)
Women and men also had very similar concerns about Internet privacy and security; while more women than men (77 vs. 61 percent) had changed their privacy settings to restrict some people from seeing their activities, women were only marginally more likely to have blocked or unfriended someone in the social media or to have asked someone to remove online information posted about them.
The most dramatic claim of pervasive online misogyny—that Internet accounts with feminine usernames get an average of 100 threatening or sexually abusive messages a day, to just four for male usernames—comes from a 2006 study conducted in Internet relay chatrooms, hardly typical of today’s social media use. Women also account for 72 percent of those reporting harassment incidents to the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse. But this is a self-selected sample, and the disparity may well reflect the fact that it’s more socially acceptable for women to seek help when they are harassed. (It should also be noted that the website’s annual rate of complaints from women is fewer than 300—obviously a cause for concern, but hardly an epidemic level.)
If women are unsafe or unwelcome on the Internet, it’s hardly borne out by the numbers. Women consistently use social networking sites more than men, outnumbering men on Facebook by about 10 percentage points; while there is conflicting evidence on whether Twitter has shifted from a majority-female demographic to a more male-skewed one, the likely reasons include the growing popularity of other platforms such as Pinterest and Tumblr along women.
Of course, none of this diminishes the deeply disturbing fact of female journalists, bloggers, and activists—Hess among them—who have been targets of threats to themselves or their families. But are men really immune from such attacks? One blogpost (civilly) critical of Sarkeesian and her supporters offers a fully sourced compilation of online comments wishing death, rape, mutilation and deadly diseases upon Jack Thompson, an activist critical of violent and sexual content in videogames—as well as death threats directed at male videogame developers who ran afoul of their fans. Meanwhile, role-playing game designer James Desborough claims to have been viciously threatened for defending the use of sexual violence as a plot element in games. And film blogger Alex Sandell (Juicy Cerebellum) has described receiving not only a deluge of hate mail but threatening phone calls—sometimes in the middle of the night, and sometimes made to his relatives—after writing negative reviews of the first two Lord of the Rings movies.
In the political sphere, several conservative male writers and activists have been targeted for rape and death threats, with their phone numbers publicly posted, after producing a documentary critical of the Occupy movement. Right-wing bloggers involved in the bizarre war with leftist activist Brett Kimberlin that David Weigel recently chronicled in The Daily Beast have faced scary cyber-harassment from some of Kimberlin’s supporters, including graphic fantasies of violent revenge, lurid sexual slurs, and accusations of child pornography. (Particularly disturbing examples are documented in a blogpost by First Amendment advocate Ken White.) On the other side, Charles Johnson, who runs the blog Little Green Footballs, relocated to a gated community because of threats he received after breaking with the right and embracing more liberal politics.
One male victim of cyberstalking, British expatriate novelist James Lasdun, told his story in the 2013 memoir, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. Lasdun’s stalker, a former creative-writing student whose romantic overtures he had rejected, not only barraged him with abusive messages but emailed his colleagues accusing him of stealing her work, preying on female students, and even setting her up to be raped; she posted similar slanders on websites including Amazon.com and Wikipedia. But an experience like Lasdun’s gets no political sympathy; indeed, the review in The New Yorker chided him for failing to admit his “crush” on the woman and his role in leading her on.
Online abuse and trolling that doesn’t rise to the level of stalking or threats can still be toxic. When directed at women, such abuse can certainly take misogynist forms (whether because the troll actually hates women or because it’s the surest way to bait and provoke his—or her—target). But it can also come from feminists—both in internecine feminist wars, discussed recently by critics such as journalist Michelle Goldberg in The Nation, and in attacks on female dissenters. (Writer and blogger Susannah Breslin faced a particularly vicious backlash a few years ago after she criticized the then-new trend of “trigger warnings” in feminist media.) And plenty of time, such abuse is directed at men, in male-specific ways that we rarely think of as “gendered”: from questioning someone’s manhood to attacking his “male privilege,” from taunts about penis size to accusations of pedophilia, rape, or pro-rapist sympathies. The torrent of sometimes violent invective heaped last year at Dr. Phil McGraw after his tweet asking if it’s OK to have sex with a drunk girl was seen as righteous outrage against a “rape apologist” question, not online abuse.
Often, in our commitment to free speech, we have been too willing to accept toxic behavior on the Internet. Just because abusive speech is protected by the First Amendment doesn’t mean that private websites should give it a platform. There is, too, a very real need for law enforcement to catch up with technology and offer meaningful solutions to cyberstalking and threats. However, the war on online abuse, particularly with the agenda of making the Internet safe for women, has its own perils.
There is the obvious danger of censoring legitimate speech. In Canada right now, a middle-aged designer named Gregory Elliott is on trial for criminal harassment for sending non-sexual, non-threatening, but argumentative unwelcome tweets to feminist activist Stephanie Guthrie. But there is also the danger of perpetuating women’s vulnerabilities in the name of protecting them. In her analysis of videogames, Sarkeesian has been particularly critical of damsel-in-distress stereotypes and casual “depictions of female victimhood.” Yet we bolster the same stereotypes when we focus on nasty things said to women while trivializing threats against men even though men are much more likely to be victims of violence by strangers.
As long as the Internet exists, there will be rude, nasty, and unstable people on it—and sometimes, you will be attacked, especially if you write and speak on controversial subjects. We need a better middle ground between telling victims of harassment to grow a thick skin, and telling people they have a right to be shielded from all un-pleasantries. As we search for that middle ground, we should beware of paternalism based on the mistaken view that Internet nastiness is a particular problem for women.
[Addendum: Normal men also get more online harassment and physical threats than women
Pew online harassment study: Men are called names, women are stalked and sexually harassed.
Online Harassment Affects Men Too
Online Harassment | Pew Research Center
"Overall, men are somewhat more likely than women to experience at least one of the elements of online harassment, 44% vs. 37%. In terms of specific experiences, men are more likely than women to encounter name-calling, embarrassment, and physical threats."
It's not so easy to dismiss Pew as a biased conservative source.]
Men Are Harassed More Than Women Online
The difference in abuse between the sexes online isn’t in the amount but the type. Data shows men get more hate, while women say they get it because they’re women.
The issue of Internet misogyny has received a great deal of attention in recent weeks, between the feminist website Jezebel battling rape GIFs repeatedly posted to their comments section and videogame critic Anita Sarkeesian having to leave her home after a series of Twitter threats that included her home address. There is a common assumption that the targets of such vile behavior are overwhelmingly women who are abused because they are women—to the point where “women aren’t welcome on the Internet,” as Amanda Hess argued in a widely discussed article in Pacific Standard magazine this year. Reviewing women’s online tribulations in the last month in The Daily Beast, Samantha Allen asks, “Will the Internet ever be safe for women?”
At the same time, there was little reaction to a report contradicting the narrative that male public figures get considerably less Twitter abuse than their female counterparts. While the study, conducted by the British think tank Demos, was limited to a fairly small sample of British celebrities, journalists and politicians whose Twitter timelines were tracked over a two-week period, its findings are nonetheless interesting. On the whole, 2.5 percent of the tweets sent to the men but fewer than 1 percent of those sent to women were classified as abusive. Male politicians fared especially badly, receiving more than six times as much abuse as female politicians.
The only category in which women got more Twitter abuse than men was journalism: abusive messages accounted for more than 5 percent of the tweets sent to the female journalists and TV presenters in the study and fewer than 2 percent of the ones sent to the male journalists. (However, the most abused male journalist in the sample, controversial ex-CNN host Piers Morgan, was counted as a “celebrity” rather than a journalist; otherwise, he would have single-handedly raised the proportion of abusive tweets to male journalists to almost 6 percent of the total.) While about three-quarters of the offenders were men, about 40 percent of the abusive tweets to women were sent by other women.
Are women really singled out for abuse on the Internet—or is it more the case that Internet abuse of women, at least when committed by men, is singled out for special concern and opprobrium? Many feminists would argue that there are good reasons to treat it differently. Sexual slurs toward women evoke the threat of real-life sexual violence; they are also perceived as intended to “put a woman in her place” and tell her that her opinion is worthless because she is a woman. (A sexual slur toward a man is considered just a personal insult.) But the double standard also has overtones of traditional chivalry which views women as more delicate and deserving of consideration—while nastiness toward men is treated simply a part of the rough-and-tumble of public life, to be taken in stride and shrugged off.
The Demos report on Twitter abuse toward public figures is only one of several studies that cast doubt on the assumption that the Internet is a hotbed of male hostility toward women. In an earlier Demos analysis, women on Twitter were almost as likely as men to use “gendered” derogatory language.
A survey of Internet users conducted by the Pew Research Center last year found that 13 percent of female respondents and 11 percent of male respondents said they had been harassed or stalked online. (While Hess’s Pacific Standard article drew on that survey to note that “5 percent of women who used the Internet said ‘something happened online’ that led them into ‘physical danger,’” it made no mention of the fact that 3 percent of the men also reported such an experience.)
Women and men also had very similar concerns about Internet privacy and security; while more women than men (77 vs. 61 percent) had changed their privacy settings to restrict some people from seeing their activities, women were only marginally more likely to have blocked or unfriended someone in the social media or to have asked someone to remove online information posted about them.
The most dramatic claim of pervasive online misogyny—that Internet accounts with feminine usernames get an average of 100 threatening or sexually abusive messages a day, to just four for male usernames—comes from a 2006 study conducted in Internet relay chatrooms, hardly typical of today’s social media use. Women also account for 72 percent of those reporting harassment incidents to the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse. But this is a self-selected sample, and the disparity may well reflect the fact that it’s more socially acceptable for women to seek help when they are harassed. (It should also be noted that the website’s annual rate of complaints from women is fewer than 300—obviously a cause for concern, but hardly an epidemic level.)
If women are unsafe or unwelcome on the Internet, it’s hardly borne out by the numbers. Women consistently use social networking sites more than men, outnumbering men on Facebook by about 10 percentage points; while there is conflicting evidence on whether Twitter has shifted from a majority-female demographic to a more male-skewed one, the likely reasons include the growing popularity of other platforms such as Pinterest and Tumblr along women.
Of course, none of this diminishes the deeply disturbing fact of female journalists, bloggers, and activists—Hess among them—who have been targets of threats to themselves or their families. But are men really immune from such attacks? One blogpost (civilly) critical of Sarkeesian and her supporters offers a fully sourced compilation of online comments wishing death, rape, mutilation and deadly diseases upon Jack Thompson, an activist critical of violent and sexual content in videogames—as well as death threats directed at male videogame developers who ran afoul of their fans. Meanwhile, role-playing game designer James Desborough claims to have been viciously threatened for defending the use of sexual violence as a plot element in games. And film blogger Alex Sandell (Juicy Cerebellum) has described receiving not only a deluge of hate mail but threatening phone calls—sometimes in the middle of the night, and sometimes made to his relatives—after writing negative reviews of the first two Lord of the Rings movies.
In the political sphere, several conservative male writers and activists have been targeted for rape and death threats, with their phone numbers publicly posted, after producing a documentary critical of the Occupy movement. Right-wing bloggers involved in the bizarre war with leftist activist Brett Kimberlin that David Weigel recently chronicled in The Daily Beast have faced scary cyber-harassment from some of Kimberlin’s supporters, including graphic fantasies of violent revenge, lurid sexual slurs, and accusations of child pornography. (Particularly disturbing examples are documented in a blogpost by First Amendment advocate Ken White.) On the other side, Charles Johnson, who runs the blog Little Green Footballs, relocated to a gated community because of threats he received after breaking with the right and embracing more liberal politics.
One male victim of cyberstalking, British expatriate novelist James Lasdun, told his story in the 2013 memoir, Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. Lasdun’s stalker, a former creative-writing student whose romantic overtures he had rejected, not only barraged him with abusive messages but emailed his colleagues accusing him of stealing her work, preying on female students, and even setting her up to be raped; she posted similar slanders on websites including Amazon.com and Wikipedia. But an experience like Lasdun’s gets no political sympathy; indeed, the review in The New Yorker chided him for failing to admit his “crush” on the woman and his role in leading her on.
Online abuse and trolling that doesn’t rise to the level of stalking or threats can still be toxic. When directed at women, such abuse can certainly take misogynist forms (whether because the troll actually hates women or because it’s the surest way to bait and provoke his—or her—target). But it can also come from feminists—both in internecine feminist wars, discussed recently by critics such as journalist Michelle Goldberg in The Nation, and in attacks on female dissenters. (Writer and blogger Susannah Breslin faced a particularly vicious backlash a few years ago after she criticized the then-new trend of “trigger warnings” in feminist media.) And plenty of time, such abuse is directed at men, in male-specific ways that we rarely think of as “gendered”: from questioning someone’s manhood to attacking his “male privilege,” from taunts about penis size to accusations of pedophilia, rape, or pro-rapist sympathies. The torrent of sometimes violent invective heaped last year at Dr. Phil McGraw after his tweet asking if it’s OK to have sex with a drunk girl was seen as righteous outrage against a “rape apologist” question, not online abuse.
Often, in our commitment to free speech, we have been too willing to accept toxic behavior on the Internet. Just because abusive speech is protected by the First Amendment doesn’t mean that private websites should give it a platform. There is, too, a very real need for law enforcement to catch up with technology and offer meaningful solutions to cyberstalking and threats. However, the war on online abuse, particularly with the agenda of making the Internet safe for women, has its own perils.
There is the obvious danger of censoring legitimate speech. In Canada right now, a middle-aged designer named Gregory Elliott is on trial for criminal harassment for sending non-sexual, non-threatening, but argumentative unwelcome tweets to feminist activist Stephanie Guthrie. But there is also the danger of perpetuating women’s vulnerabilities in the name of protecting them. In her analysis of videogames, Sarkeesian has been particularly critical of damsel-in-distress stereotypes and casual “depictions of female victimhood.” Yet we bolster the same stereotypes when we focus on nasty things said to women while trivializing threats against men even though men are much more likely to be victims of violence by strangers.
As long as the Internet exists, there will be rude, nasty, and unstable people on it—and sometimes, you will be attacked, especially if you write and speak on controversial subjects. We need a better middle ground between telling victims of harassment to grow a thick skin, and telling people they have a right to be shielded from all un-pleasantries. As we search for that middle ground, we should beware of paternalism based on the mistaken view that Internet nastiness is a particular problem for women.
[Addendum: Normal men also get more online harassment and physical threats than women
Pew online harassment study: Men are called names, women are stalked and sexually harassed.
Online Harassment Affects Men Too
Online Harassment | Pew Research Center
"Overall, men are somewhat more likely than women to experience at least one of the elements of online harassment, 44% vs. 37%. In terms of specific experiences, men are more likely than women to encounter name-calling, embarrassment, and physical threats."
It's not so easy to dismiss Pew as a biased conservative source.]
Post ID: 7016236287804228860
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Links - 26th October 2014
'Worst' File-Sharing Pirates Spend 300% More on Content Than 'Honest' Consumers | TorrentFreak - "So what might encourage infringers to stop accessing content illegally? As usual, pricing, availability and convenience top the list. Interestingly, fears over internet disconnections in the Top 20% group trumped fears of being sued."
Illegal downloads surge after the Netherlands blockades Pirate Bay, study finds
Bikini Waxing Dangers: 5 Health Risks To Consider - ""Any infection that requires contact to spread will be more easily caught if there is any damage to the skin in the area," Krant told HuffPost in an email. "This can be anything from obvious cuts all the way to microscopic torn follicle roots that aren't visible on the surface. Herpes, HPV (genital warts and possibly cervical cancer), HIV, and other STIs also have increased risk with skin trauma.""
How To Turn A Feminist Into Your Sex Slave
This was quite funny, but unfortunately they've removed it
Why Famous Men Become Outspoken Feminists - "The fact is that their fanbases are predominantly female. Women are doing most of the subscribing/following of their social media accounts, buying most of the products they advertise, buying most of the tickets to their shows/movies, and generally providing most of the vocal support that drives their celebrity. Modern celebrity culture is highly feminized by necessity – it is built to cater to the people who fuel it most, and those people are overwhelmingly women... most high value men maintain standards that their fans wouldn’t want to hear about. More often than not, these men have extremely attractive, well-groomed, fit females on their arms. Men like John Legend (one of the more recent self-proclaimed male feminists in Hollywood) have dating histories that consist almost exclusively of relationships with physically fit, aesthetically elite models. Actions speak louder than words: these men have standards, and those standards do tend to favor fit, well-groomed women. Men like Legend cannot come out and say that, however, because if they do their female fanbases will no longer be able to delude themselves into believing that they have even the slimmest of chances of appealing to a high value male like him."
Oscar Pistorius: Salvaging the Super Crip Narrative - The Feminist Wire | The Feminist Wire - "From the vantage point of a black crip feminist, I am both fascinated and perturbed by the narratives surrounding the fatal shooting of Steenkamp. Through the lens of pop culture, what makes that which has transpired, and has yet to transpire, tragic? How are the tragedies framed in the media? And why? Here, I critically examine these and other questions to demonstrate just some of the ways in which power relations have shaped perceptions of innocence, violence, heroism, context, and death... The reality that Oscar may have shot and killed his girlfriend seems almost too ludicrous of a probability for many people to fathom because for Oscar to have “overcome” the so-called tragedy of disability means that, surely, he must be in possession of a positive disposition that (literally) enabled him to do so in the first place. Therefore, owing to that positive disposition (embodied through the active disembodiment of disability), he is seen as incapable of premeditating murder, which has manifested itself in a rather problematic presumption of innocence. To be clear, the “innocence” to which I refer functions not necessarily as an endorsement of his character, but rather as a form of ableism born out of a denial of agency to disabled bodies. Indeed, many people don’t conceive of Oscar as an active agent in his own life because, off the track, compulsory able bodiedness outperforms him."
Wut?
Chris Bast's answer to Feminism: Is it correct to state that someone who is not a feminist is by virtue of not being a feminist, a sexist or a misogynist? - Quora - "It's really tiring the way so many feminists insist that "feminism" means nothing more than "the desire for gender equality". Perhaps that was the original meaning, but definitions change over time. Words acquire new meanings and new connotations as language and ideas evolve. Once upon a time the word "liberal" referred to (among other things) a person who strongly believed in free market capitalism. And the words "left-wing" and "right-wing" referred to supporters of a French republic versus supporters of a French monarchy. Today those words obviously don't mean the same thing. They have acquired different (sometimes radically different) connotations... To say "if you are not a feminist then you are sexist / misogynist" is like saying that anyone who refuses to join a revival of the National Socialist German Worker's Party must therefore hate Germans and factory workers."
Export Quality | Atanu Dey On India's Development - "While opening a pack of Haldiram’s Bikaneri bhujia last evening, I noticed the packet proclaimed “Export Quality!” I suppose they meant “Best Quality” or “First Quality” because it could not have meant “Basically Inferior Stuff”. The label implied very clearly that this stuff was good enough to be exported. That implication arose from a shared assumption that is very disturbing if one thinks about it. The shared assumption essentially was that the domestic market is not discriminating enough and can be sold sub-standard stuff; that export markets demand and deserve quality better than the domestic market. Was the assumption justified? If so, is the Indian consumer inherently incapable of recognizing quality? Or is the Indian consumer not “deserving” of quality? Or is it that the Indian consumer cannot afford quality? What are the reasons why the market delivers poor quality shoddy goods and services in India? It is undeniable that the Indian market does deliver very poor quality goods and services in general. The explanation for that is really very simple: it is a sellers’ market. The essential characteristics of sellers’ market are that there is insufficient competition on the supply side, and the supply is severely constrained which leads to intense competition for goods on the demand side. The sellers don’t have to compete for customers, while the buyers have to compete for the goods... Export quality for a poor nation means it is better than the stuff that domestic consumers can get or even afford. Export quality for rich nations could mean something entirely different. The US, for instance, sometimes exports stuff that it considers below par (such as food and military equipment to third world countries). In some cases, it exports stuff that they are legally barred from consuming in the domestic market because of health and safety issues"
Former heads of state urge EU to outlaw anti-feminism - "The proposal, titled the Framework National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance calls for “concrete action to combat intolerance, in particular with a view to eliminating racism, colour bias, ethnic discrimination, religious intolerance, totalitarian ideologies, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism and homophobia.” These “special administrative units,” the report says, “should preferably operate within the Ministry of Justice.” “There is no need to be tolerant to the intolerant,” it states, especially “as far as freedom of expression is concerned.” It also calls for actual criminal sanctions to be levied against offenders. European Dignity Watch, a civil rights watchdog group based in Brussels, has warned that this directive “aims to impose governmental control over the social and economic behavior of citizens in the widest possible sense.”"
Should drug addicts be paid to be sterilised? - "In the US, Project Prevention has been compared to the Nazis' eugenics programme, but Harris isn't bothered by her critics. "They are willing to call me Hitler, but what are they doing to help? Are they willing to adopt any of these children that they think should continue to be born? If they're not part of the solution, they're part of the problem. Everybody talks about the right of the woman – what about the rights of the children? They are the victims.""
If it's coercive to offer people monetary incentives, isn't it also coercive to subsidise education and healthcare?
Filipinos’ love for Music | basangsisiw - "If one hears a Pinoy sing his heart out in the middle of the day or for any other time of the day, for any local, is just an ordinary scene but for foreigners, it’s a different thing, especially to first- time visitors. As they say, singing is distinctly Filipino, especially when we talk of videoke singing. A Pinoy is inseparable from the art, for his mind and soul clamors for it. If rice is a staple in every Filipino meal, a videoke set is a principal commodity in every Filipino home. Showcasing the Pinoy’s natural talent, whether he is a true-blue singer or just a frustrated one, is evident more especially during fiestas, festivals and other events in the life of a belting Filipino. And this romance spans even before the time of Magellan. Even during the pre- Hispanic times, Filipinos were known to be intent music lovers. With their own ethnic musical instruments like flutes, nose flutes and guitars, they expressed their penchant for the art in any way they can."
There is no gender gap in tech salaries - "even when men and women choose the same major, graduate from similar types of colleges and receive similar grades, women still earn less than men but female engineering graduates earn 88% of what male engineering graduates earn ($48,493 for women compared to $55,142 for men). So, what we are seeing is that there are some women who get engineering degrees but then don’t become engineers. I studied computer science in high school and math in college but I’m neither a computer scientist nor a mathematician. Instead, I decided to make life choices that were more personally and spiritually rewarding: I was a rainforest conservationist in Brazil and a teacher in India. One reason that explains why there is a pay gap when measured by college major but not when measured by profession is that some female engineers abandon their careers months after starting. This would explain why overall annual incomes measured one year after graduation would be lower for these women. If employers are risk averse, wages offered will be lower where productivity is less easily predicted (and where lower productivity is already revealed). The issue in this case is not gender differences in productivity but, rather, how employers predict what kind of worker they’re hiring based on his or her previous employment history. Also, some women don’t go into the careers their college degree prepares them for because they have less attachment to the labor market... After adjusting for all the known factors, Corbett and Hill’s model showed an “unexplained” 6.6% difference in wages between men and women who are full-time workers. Conflicting data from the BLS shows that some women who work full-time have a wage premium, and earn 11% more than men. The tech industry is unique in its history of being “equal pay for equal work”: A longitudinal study of female engineers in the 1980s showed a wage penalty of “essentially zero” for younger cohorts and today, the two highest paying professions with wage equality are in technology (computer scientist and engineer)."
Pussy Riot Trial: Topless FEMEN Activist Chainsaws Memorial Cross In Ukraine (VIDEO, NSFW) - "Shevchenko's protest in Kiev, dubbed a "trash prayer" in recognition of Pussy Riot's cathedral stunt, has elicited mixed responses. While some have lauded Shevchenko's act of defiance, others say that the activist may have taken things a little too far. The cross, which bore a figure of Jesus Christ, was erected in 2005 on a hilltop overlooking Kiev's city center and served as a memorial to the victims of Stalinist repression and the famine of the 1930s, Reuters writes. The news service reports that Ukrainian religious groups and relatives of Stalin's victims condemned the action. Some critics took to social networking sites such as Twitter to express their outrage... ""FEMEN activists cut down the cross over the Maidan [Nezalezhnosti] (Kiev's central square) in support of #Pussy Riot." [I] don't consider myself a religious person. But this is fu**ed up," tweeted @avealyona on Friday. "
Attempted Murder by Suffragettes | History of Feminism - "It is universally acknowledged by historians that the suffragettes engaged in numerous terrorist acts, including attempted murder. One such case was the attempt on the life of Sir Henry Curtis Bennett, the chief magistrate for Bow Street who had tried Emmeline Pankhurst, as well as other leading feminists, for acts of terrorism such as setting fire to property and assaulting police officers"
Illegal downloads surge after the Netherlands blockades Pirate Bay, study finds
Bikini Waxing Dangers: 5 Health Risks To Consider - ""Any infection that requires contact to spread will be more easily caught if there is any damage to the skin in the area," Krant told HuffPost in an email. "This can be anything from obvious cuts all the way to microscopic torn follicle roots that aren't visible on the surface. Herpes, HPV (genital warts and possibly cervical cancer), HIV, and other STIs also have increased risk with skin trauma.""
How To Turn A Feminist Into Your Sex Slave
This was quite funny, but unfortunately they've removed it
Why Famous Men Become Outspoken Feminists - "The fact is that their fanbases are predominantly female. Women are doing most of the subscribing/following of their social media accounts, buying most of the products they advertise, buying most of the tickets to their shows/movies, and generally providing most of the vocal support that drives their celebrity. Modern celebrity culture is highly feminized by necessity – it is built to cater to the people who fuel it most, and those people are overwhelmingly women... most high value men maintain standards that their fans wouldn’t want to hear about. More often than not, these men have extremely attractive, well-groomed, fit females on their arms. Men like John Legend (one of the more recent self-proclaimed male feminists in Hollywood) have dating histories that consist almost exclusively of relationships with physically fit, aesthetically elite models. Actions speak louder than words: these men have standards, and those standards do tend to favor fit, well-groomed women. Men like Legend cannot come out and say that, however, because if they do their female fanbases will no longer be able to delude themselves into believing that they have even the slimmest of chances of appealing to a high value male like him."
Oscar Pistorius: Salvaging the Super Crip Narrative - The Feminist Wire | The Feminist Wire - "From the vantage point of a black crip feminist, I am both fascinated and perturbed by the narratives surrounding the fatal shooting of Steenkamp. Through the lens of pop culture, what makes that which has transpired, and has yet to transpire, tragic? How are the tragedies framed in the media? And why? Here, I critically examine these and other questions to demonstrate just some of the ways in which power relations have shaped perceptions of innocence, violence, heroism, context, and death... The reality that Oscar may have shot and killed his girlfriend seems almost too ludicrous of a probability for many people to fathom because for Oscar to have “overcome” the so-called tragedy of disability means that, surely, he must be in possession of a positive disposition that (literally) enabled him to do so in the first place. Therefore, owing to that positive disposition (embodied through the active disembodiment of disability), he is seen as incapable of premeditating murder, which has manifested itself in a rather problematic presumption of innocence. To be clear, the “innocence” to which I refer functions not necessarily as an endorsement of his character, but rather as a form of ableism born out of a denial of agency to disabled bodies. Indeed, many people don’t conceive of Oscar as an active agent in his own life because, off the track, compulsory able bodiedness outperforms him."
Wut?
Chris Bast's answer to Feminism: Is it correct to state that someone who is not a feminist is by virtue of not being a feminist, a sexist or a misogynist? - Quora - "It's really tiring the way so many feminists insist that "feminism" means nothing more than "the desire for gender equality". Perhaps that was the original meaning, but definitions change over time. Words acquire new meanings and new connotations as language and ideas evolve. Once upon a time the word "liberal" referred to (among other things) a person who strongly believed in free market capitalism. And the words "left-wing" and "right-wing" referred to supporters of a French republic versus supporters of a French monarchy. Today those words obviously don't mean the same thing. They have acquired different (sometimes radically different) connotations... To say "if you are not a feminist then you are sexist / misogynist" is like saying that anyone who refuses to join a revival of the National Socialist German Worker's Party must therefore hate Germans and factory workers."
Export Quality | Atanu Dey On India's Development - "While opening a pack of Haldiram’s Bikaneri bhujia last evening, I noticed the packet proclaimed “Export Quality!” I suppose they meant “Best Quality” or “First Quality” because it could not have meant “Basically Inferior Stuff”. The label implied very clearly that this stuff was good enough to be exported. That implication arose from a shared assumption that is very disturbing if one thinks about it. The shared assumption essentially was that the domestic market is not discriminating enough and can be sold sub-standard stuff; that export markets demand and deserve quality better than the domestic market. Was the assumption justified? If so, is the Indian consumer inherently incapable of recognizing quality? Or is the Indian consumer not “deserving” of quality? Or is it that the Indian consumer cannot afford quality? What are the reasons why the market delivers poor quality shoddy goods and services in India? It is undeniable that the Indian market does deliver very poor quality goods and services in general. The explanation for that is really very simple: it is a sellers’ market. The essential characteristics of sellers’ market are that there is insufficient competition on the supply side, and the supply is severely constrained which leads to intense competition for goods on the demand side. The sellers don’t have to compete for customers, while the buyers have to compete for the goods... Export quality for a poor nation means it is better than the stuff that domestic consumers can get or even afford. Export quality for rich nations could mean something entirely different. The US, for instance, sometimes exports stuff that it considers below par (such as food and military equipment to third world countries). In some cases, it exports stuff that they are legally barred from consuming in the domestic market because of health and safety issues"
Former heads of state urge EU to outlaw anti-feminism - "The proposal, titled the Framework National Statute for the Promotion of Tolerance calls for “concrete action to combat intolerance, in particular with a view to eliminating racism, colour bias, ethnic discrimination, religious intolerance, totalitarian ideologies, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism and homophobia.” These “special administrative units,” the report says, “should preferably operate within the Ministry of Justice.” “There is no need to be tolerant to the intolerant,” it states, especially “as far as freedom of expression is concerned.” It also calls for actual criminal sanctions to be levied against offenders. European Dignity Watch, a civil rights watchdog group based in Brussels, has warned that this directive “aims to impose governmental control over the social and economic behavior of citizens in the widest possible sense.”"
Should drug addicts be paid to be sterilised? - "In the US, Project Prevention has been compared to the Nazis' eugenics programme, but Harris isn't bothered by her critics. "They are willing to call me Hitler, but what are they doing to help? Are they willing to adopt any of these children that they think should continue to be born? If they're not part of the solution, they're part of the problem. Everybody talks about the right of the woman – what about the rights of the children? They are the victims.""
If it's coercive to offer people monetary incentives, isn't it also coercive to subsidise education and healthcare?
Filipinos’ love for Music | basangsisiw - "If one hears a Pinoy sing his heart out in the middle of the day or for any other time of the day, for any local, is just an ordinary scene but for foreigners, it’s a different thing, especially to first- time visitors. As they say, singing is distinctly Filipino, especially when we talk of videoke singing. A Pinoy is inseparable from the art, for his mind and soul clamors for it. If rice is a staple in every Filipino meal, a videoke set is a principal commodity in every Filipino home. Showcasing the Pinoy’s natural talent, whether he is a true-blue singer or just a frustrated one, is evident more especially during fiestas, festivals and other events in the life of a belting Filipino. And this romance spans even before the time of Magellan. Even during the pre- Hispanic times, Filipinos were known to be intent music lovers. With their own ethnic musical instruments like flutes, nose flutes and guitars, they expressed their penchant for the art in any way they can."
There is no gender gap in tech salaries - "even when men and women choose the same major, graduate from similar types of colleges and receive similar grades, women still earn less than men but female engineering graduates earn 88% of what male engineering graduates earn ($48,493 for women compared to $55,142 for men). So, what we are seeing is that there are some women who get engineering degrees but then don’t become engineers. I studied computer science in high school and math in college but I’m neither a computer scientist nor a mathematician. Instead, I decided to make life choices that were more personally and spiritually rewarding: I was a rainforest conservationist in Brazil and a teacher in India. One reason that explains why there is a pay gap when measured by college major but not when measured by profession is that some female engineers abandon their careers months after starting. This would explain why overall annual incomes measured one year after graduation would be lower for these women. If employers are risk averse, wages offered will be lower where productivity is less easily predicted (and where lower productivity is already revealed). The issue in this case is not gender differences in productivity but, rather, how employers predict what kind of worker they’re hiring based on his or her previous employment history. Also, some women don’t go into the careers their college degree prepares them for because they have less attachment to the labor market... After adjusting for all the known factors, Corbett and Hill’s model showed an “unexplained” 6.6% difference in wages between men and women who are full-time workers. Conflicting data from the BLS shows that some women who work full-time have a wage premium, and earn 11% more than men. The tech industry is unique in its history of being “equal pay for equal work”: A longitudinal study of female engineers in the 1980s showed a wage penalty of “essentially zero” for younger cohorts and today, the two highest paying professions with wage equality are in technology (computer scientist and engineer)."
Pussy Riot Trial: Topless FEMEN Activist Chainsaws Memorial Cross In Ukraine (VIDEO, NSFW) - "Shevchenko's protest in Kiev, dubbed a "trash prayer" in recognition of Pussy Riot's cathedral stunt, has elicited mixed responses. While some have lauded Shevchenko's act of defiance, others say that the activist may have taken things a little too far. The cross, which bore a figure of Jesus Christ, was erected in 2005 on a hilltop overlooking Kiev's city center and served as a memorial to the victims of Stalinist repression and the famine of the 1930s, Reuters writes. The news service reports that Ukrainian religious groups and relatives of Stalin's victims condemned the action. Some critics took to social networking sites such as Twitter to express their outrage... ""FEMEN activists cut down the cross over the Maidan [Nezalezhnosti] (Kiev's central square) in support of #Pussy Riot." [I] don't consider myself a religious person. But this is fu**ed up," tweeted @avealyona on Friday. "
Attempted Murder by Suffragettes | History of Feminism - "It is universally acknowledged by historians that the suffragettes engaged in numerous terrorist acts, including attempted murder. One such case was the attempt on the life of Sir Henry Curtis Bennett, the chief magistrate for Bow Street who had tried Emmeline Pankhurst, as well as other leading feminists, for acts of terrorism such as setting fire to property and assaulting police officers"
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