Links - 15th August 2013

"In politics you must always keep running with the pack. The moment that you falter and they sense that you are injured, the rest will turn on you like wolves." - R. A. Butler

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Too clever to be a mother? The maternal urge decreases by a QUARTER for every 15 extra IQ points
Comment: "I am a highly intelligent woman (I'm in MENSA!!!!) and I have maternal urges, therefore this study is wrong." Translation? "The interpretation of statistical data in an article which doesn't even talk about methodology is hurting my ego!"

The Contempt of Women - Stephen Marche on the Contempt of Women - Esquire - "In the constantly progressing and deteriorating and rapidly revolving kaleidoscope of misunderstanding and disgust and hunger that constitutes gender relations in the twenty-first century, a new gesture has emerged to define us: the sneer, the female gaze of contempt... the sexual always morphs into the political. Contempt for men has become so widespread and acceptable that it's a commonplace for politicians' wives. Michelle Obama loves to describe her husband's morning breath and struggles with smoking and failure to put away his socks. Her pull quote: "He's a gifted man, but he's just a man." Got that, boys? You can be editor of the Harvard Law Review, first African-American president, director of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, loving husband and father, and an innovator of "absorption marijuana ingestion" to boot, but in the end "just a man." Michelle uses that hokey line because it inevitably provokes warm ovations and knowing laughter. The wife of the British prime minister, David Cameron, has borrowed the technique, moaning about how Cameron "makes a terrible mess" when he cooks and can be "quite annoying." This is what the political operatives call "humanizing the candidate": Contempt for men is what ordinary women understand. There's a well-developed intellectual expression of contempt for men, too, encapsulated in the idea of the "masculinity crisis" — men are doomed, in this argument, by their own inherent natures to flounder in the emotionally complex, predominantly social postindustrial world... That old La Leche League idea that once women were in power there would be no more wars? Women in power are not meaningfully different from men in power. When a reporter asked Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, what she would tell Greeks suffering under austerity policies, she replied, "Pay their taxes." That's how much compassion you can expect from female political leaders"
Sidebar: "The Glass Cellar: One of the real triumphs of American men over the past thirty years is that they've never taken to gender-based political activism. The arguments have been there to make: There's a "glass cellar" in the American workforce (men work almost all of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs), male life expectancy is much lower than female life expectancy, and so on. But a politics of male resentment is virtually nonexistent. Organized whining remains, for the overwhelming majority, unmanly... Contempt is
one of the world's great pleasures — look at France — but ephemerality is one of its dominant features."
"As women on television have become smarter and more powerful with every passing year, culminating in Liz Lemon of 30 Rock, the men on television become dumber and grosser and more useless... The world's leading exporter of absurdity has shown the way: Women in Saudi Arabia earn more than half of all undergraduate and doctoral degrees — then they have to be driven to their jobs."
"It is weird, and somewhat embarrassing, that The End of Men was written by a woman. It's as if The Feminine Mystique had been written by a guy named Fred."

French vegan couple face jail for child neglect after baby died from vitamin deficiency - "Both are militant vegans whose diet forbids them eating any animal products whatsoever, and they only use alternative medicine. They took up the lifestyle after watching a TV programme about cows being slaughtered, with Mr Le Moaligou setting up a biological food business which recently went bankrupt... Prosecutor Anne-Laure Sandretto told the court: ‘If the mother was not consuming enough vitamin B12, then the child would not be either’... Mr Daquo said both Mr and Mrs Le Moaligou were also opposed to traditional medicines, and used alternative therapies instead."

Answer to Feminism: Should male passengers offer their seats to women on trains/buses? - Quora - "the other passengers had started staring at me and giving dirty looks. She shouted back, "Don't try to act smart. I know what you meant." A few other female passengers (who were sitting) shouted something like, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" Then the girl slapped me! I WAS SLAPPED FOR OFFERING THE GIRL A SEAT! I just can't express how embarrassing that was. I wanted to argue back, but I knew that, with the female passengers ganging up on me (along with a few male passengers as well) and no one supporting me (the guy next to me didn't utter a word), I stood no chance. I sat there silently for the next 10 min, with a burning red cheek and quietly alighted the bus when my destination arrived. That day I decided, I am never going to offer a seat to a women unless she is really old and literally can't stand or handicapped."
And they ask why chivalry is dead...

The village where HALF the population are sex offenders: Idyllic Florida community built for convicts who are banned from living near children - "Forced out of densely populated areas, Miracle Village offers sex offenders a place to live away from those restrictions - and it's proved so popular there are between 10 and 20 applications from potential residents every week... 'We had searched for places to live and nobody would rent to us,' Lecil Woods told the New York Times. 'If it wasn't for this place we would be homeless.' The village does not allow offenders who are convicted of violent sex crimes against strangers. Jerry Youmans, the intake coordinator for the ministry who is also a registered sex offender, told the BBC: 'We try not to accept people with a history of violence or drugs, or to take any diagnosed paedophile - that is, someone who can only become sexually aroused by a child... Some children do live in the village, however, as state laws allow sex offenders to live in the same neighborhood as minors, although some may be banned from having contact with them. One such resident is 22-year-old Christopher Dawson, who is barred from speaking to anyone under 18 after he had sex with a 14-year-old who he believed was older. He was sentenced to two years' house arrest followed by probation for eight years."

‘Sex Offender Village’ - NYTimes.com - "We live in a society that is terrified of sex offenders, sometimes with good reason. But in some cases the perpetrators, and not just the victims, are denied justice. Every high-profile sex crime spawns a rush to do something about the “predators” among us. Unfortunately, these so-called solutions are doing more harm than good. In the past 25 years, the laws governing sex offenses have gone from punitive to draconian to senseless. The term “sex offender” simply covers too wide a range now, painting the few truly heinous crimes and the many relatively innocuous ones with the same broad brush. This overly broad approach wastes resources that could be better spent, for instance, on clearing the huge and unforgivable backlog of untested rape evidence kits. We see even deeper problems: the explosion of sex offender registries, stringent yet demonstrably ineffective residency restrictions, and the bizarre world of “civil commitment,” where we punish what someone might do rather than what he or she has done. All of this suggests that our entire approach to dealing with sex offenders has gone tragically off the rails."
Comments: "In Florida, a minor can decide to have an abortion without parental notification, but cannot decide to have sex... In Florida, any defense which states that a person lied or put forth false identification to assert legal age cannot be used. So, if someone did their due diligence to prevent being with someone underage, but later finds that the person they are/were with is underage, they are still screwed."

Dropping word 'gay' from lyrics of popular children's song riles folks in Australia - "An Australian school principal has asked students to stop using the word "gay" when singing a classic children's song, but said today no offense was intended -- he was simply trying to keep the kids from laughing. Principal Garry Martin of Le Page Primary School in Melbourne said he instructed students to substitute the line "Fun your life must be" for the original "Gay your life must be" when singing "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree... "It wasn't misplaced political correctness, it wasn't homophobia, there was nothing really calculated in doing it"... "Some think I'm the devil incarnate," he said. Crusader Hillis, CEO of the gay and lesbian advocacy group The Also Foundation, didn't go that far -- but he did call the lyrical swap an overreaction. "It sends a signal to people that just because a word has two meanings, that one of those meanings is unacceptable and that's really putting us backwards," Hillis said. "Even if it's done for good intentions because 'gay' is being used in schoolyards as a slur, I think they need to use the word as a conversation rather than banning it.""
This is so gay
I wonder what the The Also Foundation thinks of the linguistic imperialism of the gay agenda in making "homosexual" the only meaning of "gay"

Asking Guys For Sex - Young attractive woman's YouTube experiment - "In total, Andrea had seven men take her up on her offer and seven rejections. But everyone she approached, even the men walking with girlfriends, seemed to be in a good mood when she left. She definitely had better luck than the hapless man who filmed the 'A Guy Ask 100 Girls For Sex' video, who had to deal with angry women and having a drink thrown in his face"
She's not really attractive...
Comment: "Just confirms what I've always suspected to be true. When a girl this cute asks YOU for sex, there's always a catch."

The Illusions of Big Data - "I’m afraid that more data and more analytics will create an illusion of solutions while the problems still persist. Many problems are intrinsically not possible to solve. Thousands of years of philosophy testify to that. Philosophy aside, people cannot agree on elementary things: some of us have firm reasons to vote for democrats, some of us have iron-clad arguments in favor of republicans. And after this, it is ridiculous to expect big data technologies to solve many if not all problems... Everyone of us, quick or indecisive, made bad judgments in the presence of all necessary information"

All we want are the facts, ma'am - "Having more data, and more ways to process it, means that we can develop different kinds of theories and models. But that does not mean we throw out the scientific method. It is not "The End of Theory." It it is an important change (or addition) in the methodology and set of tools that are used by science, and perhaps a change in our stereotype of scientific discovery... Using data and statistics is not a new idea in science, and it is always done with respect to a theory. To take a simple example, if you flip a coin 1000 times and it comes up heads 513 times, you could say that you have a model that predicts a 51.3% (or you might say "about 50%") chance that the next flip will be heads. But that prediction depends on theory: the theory that the future will be similar to the past; the theory that the result of the coin flip does not depend on the current exchange rate for gold, nor on whether there are a prime number of people whose middle name is "Alice" in the room, and so on... complex models may hold secrets that they are less willing to give up... Theory has not ended, it is expanding into new forms. Sure, we all love succinct theories like F = m a. But social science domains and even biology appear to be inherently more complex than physics. Let's stop expecting to find a simple theory, and instead embrace complexity, and use as much data as well as we can to help define (or estimate) the complex models we need for these complex domains."