Links - 5th August 2013

"Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" - Marie-Jeanne Phlippon Roland

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Boomer Sex With Dementia Foreshadowed in Nursing Home - "In Alzheimer’s patients, touch is often the last sense to deteriorate... Nursing homes have long struggled with episodes of rape in which victims clearly didn’t consent. Sex between the demented raises more-nuanced questions that make it difficult for facility staff to know whether they should report cases of potential abuse to authorities... While there was little doubt that the demented couple had had intercourse, Drobot, whose formal training is in health administration and sociology, had to determine whether they had the capacity to consent to it. He wasn’t required to report consensual sex if there were no physical injuries or other threats to either resident’s safety. Federal and state laws require elderly care facilities to respect residents’ rights to privacy and safety. Married couples in Iowa and 17 other states have legal rights to share rooms or have conjugal visits; Colorado goes as far as to allow “private consensual activity” without stipulating a couple be married... Someone with dementia who lacks the clear-headedness to parcel out her estate might still be able to decide whether to become sexually involved. Said Lachs: “‘Do you want to have sex with this person?’ One could argue that requires very little capacity.” “In dementia, especially of Alzheimer’s type, the continuum constantly changes,” said Ed McMahon, national director of quality for Golden Living, a Plano, Texas, company that operates more than 300 nursing homes. “A person can be more high-functioning in the morning than they are in the evening.”

28 "Favorite" Books That Are Huge Red Flags - "8. Eat Pray Love. How about Walk Jog Sprint away from me before I heave with frothy revulsion over your awful taste and Tory Burch flats?
16. The Perks of Being a WallflowerSensitive teenagers get lines from this book tattooed on them and sensitive teenagers are the scum of the earth. Move on
23. Pride and Prejudice. You think waiting around is going to turn jerky-but-hot Blake from advertising into Mr. Darcy? No, the only thing you’re going to be waiting for is your cats to eat your face after you die of loneliness. Settle for a loser like the rest of us.
24. Prozac Nation. If someone you know “just loves” books like this, or that James Frey lie, they love reading about the breakdowns of others. This means they either A) Seriously relate to breakdowns or B) Take undue pleasure in the breakdowns of others. I’ve got enough schadenfreude for both of us, thanks.
25. All the Narnia books. If you’re going to say this is your favorite book, you might as well tell the truth: The Bible is your favorite book, and no amount of Santa Claus giving out swords to children to slay infidels is going to change that."

Noises in tourist's head were from flesh-eating maggots

Long distance relationships have their advantages - "couples who live apart have more meaningful interactions and stronger bonds than those who see each other every day. In a new study, couples in long distance relationships maintained over phone calls, texting, emailing and video chat were also more likely to idealize their partner’s behaviours, leading to a greater sense of intimacy"
It is easy to idealize what you don't have to confront

Will Sex Help Sell ‘The White Queen’? - "Fortunately the actors are not plagued by the usual health and dental issues that affected people of all rank in the Middle Ages. As tastefully shot but historically dubious soft-core porn, The White Queen certainly ticks all the available boxes. The real problems, of course, arise when our principals put their clothes on and attempt to act their way through a script that charges through its plot with expository dialogue that we expect from a Lifetime movie, not a distinguished 10-part epic. It could have been a classic had it not taken so many wrong turns. The endless barrage of errors (Drainpipes in the Middle Ages? Zippers? You cut your own neck hard enough to draw blood, and it doesn’t even leave a mark?) gives an impression of laziness. You know that things are not really going to end well for this show when, sometime around the midway point, you find yourself urgently rooting for the brooding Earl of Warwick to get his ass back to England to overthrow Edward and his blasted White Queen."

The White Queen's attempted rape scene: producers respond to criticism - "To a modern audience, it is completely unpalatable and incomprehensible for a woman to fall in love with and marry a man who tried to rape her. But, if one looks at the available information, it does appear that that is indeed what happened between Elizabeth Woodville and King Edward IV. Morality was different then. It makes life complicated for TV producers and dramatists. We were highly aware of the difficulty that this scene would pose to a modern audience... Of course, for a modern woman, the word "no" should always be sufficient, but we tried to find the best middle ground between what is alleged to have happened: what a modern audience would accept and understand, and what we were ideologically comfortable with. Later in the series, another character is raped by her new husband. Again, this scene was much discussed and shot in a way that doesn't titillate, and that shows the female character's fear. The scene is not used as a lazy dramatic trope, and neither glamorises nor condones the act of rape: rather it is designed to show the powerlessness of women in this situation at this point in history."

RDFRS: The poverty of boycotting Israel - "As a woman, a Muslim and as a physician of Pakistani descent, I can attest personally to the inordinate importance of academic freedom in Britain and the United States. This freedom was extended to me even during the time I was practicing medicine in Saudi Arabia, where - like all women — I was subject to gender apartheid. Because of this experience, I can only see the closing of the academic mind in the form of the 'academic boycott' of Israeli citizens and institutions as the act of invertebrate hypocrites. Boycotting Israel, whether academic or cultural is not an act of moral indignation, but an act of moral turpitude. Academic freedom builds relationships, tolerance, and opportunity... While I lived and worked in a country where as a Muslim I could worship but my mentor and his coreligionists could not, I was given every opportunity to develop in the American academic space because of his intellectual generosity. While I was subject to legislated male supremacy and relegated to being a legal minor, no Western academic suggested boycotting the medical academe hosting me in the Kingdom. Academic freedom was in fact my only freedom at the time... boycotting Israeli entities penalizes apolitical individuals, their institutions, their innovations and ultimately, stymies a global market of ideas which benefits humanity. Perhaps it's possible to make a more generous assessment of why the various scholars, writers and entertainers who call for a boycott of 'apartheid Israel' claim to act in the interests of Palestinians: That it's based on simple ignorance. They would certainly be wiser if they had had the same opportunity that I recently enjoyed when I visited Israel to meet Israeli academia, and — critically — examined how such a boycott, whether overt or covert, particularly damages Israeli Arabs, or Palestinian citizens of Israel."