Links - 11th September 2016

Alton Sterling: police appear to take gun from body after fatal shooting - "Officer 1: “He’s got a gun! Gun!”
Officer 2: “If you fucking move, I swear to god.”
Officer 1: “He’s going for the gun!”
[At least two shots are heard]
Officer: “Shit!”
Officer: “Get on the ground!”
[Three shots]
Officer to radio: “[Inaudible] shots fired, shots fired.”
Officer: “Fuck!”
[Officer removes gun from pocket]"
Why do Americans think it's a good idea to resist arrest while reaching for a gun?

Acevedo: Austin officer wounded after struggle with suspect - "the security guard tackled the man to the ground, Acevedo said. The suspect got up and the security guard tackled the man again, Acevedo said. The police officer pulled up in his patrol car and jumped out to help. He and the security guard tried to restrain the man, but he was extremely combative, Acevedo said. The officer repeatedly yelled for the man to show his hands, but the suspect would not, Acevedo said. The officer radioed for more help. The suspect then pulled out his pistol, he said. The security officer yelled “Gun!” and the suspect shot the police officer in the lower right abdomen below his vest"
Just because someone is tackled to the ground doesn't mean he can't shoot you

Man shot dead by Minn. police during traffic stop GRAPHIC CONTENT - "She said that he was reaching for his wallet before the policeman shot around four times"
Sadly, the obsession over faux racist police cases distracts from real cases of police brutality

SECOND Swedish music festival sex victim reveals she was groped by a mob of men - "Ms Florman added: 'The ironic thing was that they were wearing the police bracelet with the text 'don´t grope', everything was really surreal now that I remember it.'"

Why We Swedes Are So Lonely - "there has been an ideology here in Sweden that is pretty unique to this country, and that is the idea that the citizens should be independent and free from one another. When the idea was implemented there was this notion that no adult should be financially dependent on their relatives and so we created a society where no old person should have to live with their children and no young person should have to live with their parents after the age of eighteen. A sociologist named Zygmunt Bauman who is featured in the film, claims that "independence have stripped you from the ability of socializing". Something that fits well with the Swedish social model."

Driving While Black - "The data from our survey allowed us to distinguish stops to enforce traffic safety laws—like speeding at fifteen miles per hour over the limit—from stops to investigate the driver. Our key finding is that these two types of stops differ from start to finish. In traffic safety stops, based on clear violations of the law, officers quickly issue a ticket or warning and let the driver go. In investigatory stops officers drag the stop out as they try to look at the vehicle’s interior, ask probing questions, and ultimately seek consent for a search (drivers almost always agree, telling us that they feel they have no real choice in the matter). The key influence on who is stopped in traffic safety stops is how you drive; in investigatory stops it is who you are, and being black is the leading influence. In traffic safety stops, being black has no influence: African Americans are not significantly more likely than whites to be stopped for clear traffic safety law violations. But in investigatory stops, a black man age twenty-five or younger has a 28 percent chance of being stopped for an investigatory reason over the course of a year; a similar young white man has a 12.5 percent chance, and a similar young white woman has only a 7 percent chance. And this is after taking into account other possible influences on being stopped, like how you drive"
Age and sex discrimination

George Takei Reacts to Gay Sulu News: "I Think It's Really Unfortunate" - "Takei wasn't overjoyed. He had never asked for Sulu to be gay. In fact, he'd much prefer that he stay straight. "I’m delighted that there’s a gay character," he tells The Hollywood Reporter. "Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate." Takei explains that Roddenberry was exhaustive in conceiving his Star Trek characters. (The name Sulu, for example, was based on the Sulu Sea off the coast of the Philippines, so as to render his Asian nationality indeterminate.) And Roddenberry had always envisioned Sulu as heterosexual... Takei tried to convince him to make a new character gay instead. "I told him, 'Be imaginative and create a character who has a history of being gay, rather than Sulu, who had been straight all this time, suddenly being revealed as being closeted.'""
George Takei must be a homophobe!

Cops Shoot White Guy in Fresno; Nobody Pays Attention - "Unlike the shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, which have created yet another firestorm complete with accusations of police racism, the media is ignoring the death of Dylan Noble, a 19-year-old white man, on June 25."

NRA’s offensive hypocrisy: When will the organization demand justice for black gun owners shot by police?
I can't find instances of the NRA protesting white gun owners being shot, so this is a great straw man
Comment: "Salon will be the first publication to accuse the NRA of appropriating the racial justice movement should they choose to make a statement."

Anti-gun prof calls for shooting up NRA, ensuring 'no survivors'

Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 158 - Dr. George Ainslie on "Negotiating with your future selves" - "no animals aside from us have any real capacity to plan for the future, even our closest relatives, the great apes, the chimpanzees, plan ahead no more than an hour or two. It's just not something that most anybody else is wired to do. Other animals, if they have to do something far-sighted, will have an instinct for it. They will have something that makes building a dam fun or hoarding nuts fun, and so they're in a different situation"

There's No Hiring Bias Against Women In Tech, They Just Suck At Interviews - "men are “advancing to the next round” around 1.4 times more often than women, and that men were being rated an average of 3 stars out of 4, compared to the 2.5 stars that women received. Interviewing.io’s Aline Lerner, who authored the report, originally hypothesized that differences in real-world interview results was down to employer discrimination against women, but the results quickly forced her to rethink her view... Their test, designed to provide empirical ballast to a feminist agenda, ended up completely torpedoing it. Worse, it suggested that employers actually discriminate in favor of women, choosing them in favor of men when they believe them to be competent enough... women are around seven times more likely to quit the platform after underperforming in an interview. According to a published graph featured in the report, men are more likely to continue, giving it more of a shot on the second interview as opposed to completely giving up like their female counterparts."
Possibilities:
- Will accept lower pay (though liberals mock the fact that in a competitive market, if employers can get away with paying a type of workers less than others and get similar results they will prefer to hire them, this provides empirical evidence that this phenomenon might exist)
- employers are liberal
At first I thought maybe women have lower turnover, but there's no proof for that

The Relationship Between Crime Rates and Poverty - "According to FBI statistics, crime rates went down across the board in 2009. Way down. Murder, rape, robbery, assault, auto theft—plummeted, one and all. Then, this week, the FBI released preliminary data for the first six months of 2010, and again the same pattern emerged. Violent crimes and property crimes alike have been falling in every region of the country. What gives? Have experts just completely misunderstood what causes people to commit crimes?"

To have and have not | The Economist - "when he looked at families which had started poor and got richer, the younger children—those born into relative affluence—were just as likely to misbehave when they were teenagers as their elder siblings had been. Family income was not, per se, the determining factor.
That suggests two, not mutually exclusive, possibilities. One is that a family’s culture, once established, is “sticky”—that you can, to put it crudely, take the kid out of the neighbourhood, but not the neighbourhood out of the kid. Given, for example, children’s propensity to emulate elder siblings whom they admire, that sounds perfectly plausible. The other possibility is that genes which predispose to criminal behaviour (several studies suggest such genes exist) are more common at the bottom of society than at the top, perhaps because the lack of impulse-control they engender also tends to reduce someone’s earning capacity. Neither of these conclusions is likely to be welcome to social reformers"

Students complain about professor's Black Lives Matter shirt. The professor's response is priceless. - "A law professor received a written complaint from “Concerned Students” about his Black Lives Matter shirt, and she responded by brilliantly turning the letter into a teachable moment, taking apart their arguments and the assumptions behind them, literally and figuratively schooling the authors of the complaint with wit, clarity, and moral authority."
The differing response to this and Halloween costumes (and all the other SJW hissyfits) is telling

Dylann Roof vs Black Lives Matter

Here's Why Cops Often Shoot Suspects Multiple Times - "“Hollywood has us believing that if you shoot someone once or twice, they fall,” former police chief Chuck Drago told BI over the phone. But, he added, “I’ve seen people shot many times, and they don’t even slow down.” Police often keep firing because they don’t even realize they hit the person, Drago says. Cops are also taught to fire three times before reassessing the threat — a procedure known as “triple tap,” according to Dr. Daniel Kennedy, a forensic criminologist"

As cobras and vipers spread their deadly venom, it’s getting harder to save lives - "It is estimated that a resurgence of the scourge of snakebites in Africa and Asia could soon account for a quarter of million deaths every year. In the past, deaths from snakebites have been poorly reported and the extent of the crisis underestimated. However, doctors in India recently carried out a detailed survey and discovered that around 46,000 people in the country died from snakebites every year. Official statistics had suggested that the figure was only around 1,000. Similarly in Bangladesh, a detailed survey revealed that the annual snakebite death toll there was around 6,000."

Best of Today, 24 Jun EU referendum: The UK votes Leave · BBC - "the first time I appeared on this program with you was 17 years ago and we were considered to be a complete joke party with a manifesto that was sort of for the mad and the bad and now 70 million people have voted for it and I couldn't be more delighted"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Agrippina the Younger - "[On Messalina] 'She is said to have competed with prostitutes through the night and-'
'And won. And won, she won against Rome's chief prostitute... The satirist Juvenal has this picture of her with gilded nipples and exposing the belly that bore... Britannicus. So this sort of sense that, he calls her in fact Meretrix Augusta... She was the Emperor's wife and she was also a prostitute, Meratrix. She's a public figure in the worst possible way. So there are stories about her love affairs with actors like Menaster (sp?)'...
'We heard about Messalina being sexually loose. So is Agrippina. She sleeps with a lot of people, according to the sources, but there's a difference. Messalina does it for her own pleasure. Agrippina does it always spae dominataeus (sp?) Tacitus says: in the hope of power, in the hope of control.'"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Tess of the d'Urbervilles - "The editor of Macmillan rejected it because of its succulence. It was too succulent... it's that dwelling of the physical
I think that they found so-"