Links - 18th August 2017 (1)

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Me and the President - "[On not celebrating Trump's win] It's a bit disappointing to see when two parties can't come together and drop some of the campaign rhetoric and just for one day root for the country to come together. There's plenty of time for the Democrats to be in opposition...
[Gorsuch]'s someone that was a very smart pick by the Trump administration because it is very tough to oppose someone that the Senate voted unanimously in favor of just ten years earlier. I think at some point the Democrats' sort of hypocrisy is going to wear thin on the the travel ban, on the court nomination. But on the same token they have nothing else. You know the party has been voted out of office of the House, the Senate and the White House. There is nothing they can do but obstruct or protest. So buckle up I guess. We should be in for a very long four years...
I don't think the media have a right to have this understanding that they're somehow immune from criticism from the people they cover. It's almost like there's this false pretense of incorruptibility that the White House press corps wants to operate in...
I think the first hundred days have been successful. And I think the biggest failure whether people want to hear it or not is the failure of the media who's been obsessed with this Russian collusion. I mean, these type of stories have run like a blooper reel for the first hundred days and yet still after all this time ever since the election there is not one credible bit of evidence to support it... The Trump economy is surging. Investor confidence is high. Consumer confidence is high in this country. And nearly every economic indicator that's been released since Trump's inauguration has been positive. These are good things"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Robots' Story - "'Do you find that some of your customers are very, become quite isolated from the rest of the world?'
'Well I've never looked at the dolls or the robot as any kind of replacement for a regular relationship. I look at it as an alternative. Many of the people who you describe where isolated and alone probably were that way already and for that reason in those particular cases the doll or the robot might be a very good fit for them. There are people who do not have social lives. There are people who are very lonely. So should we just ignore them should we say oh well it's their fault that they're not getting out there making friends or meeting a partner? Or should we look at the reality that perhaps it's not their choice and they still really long for companionship. And if the robot makes them happy, I think that only a very short sighted and cruel person would say: don't let them have that'
I guess feminists are very short sighted and cruel

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Khan Mutiny - "[On the Muslim Bollywood stars] When you talk about the Khans you have to understand that these men are essentially one man studios. So when they say they want to do a film the film happens. There is no studio above and beyond and bigger than them that can stand in the way and say no. I mean for example when Brad Pitt was making a film called Moneyball with Sony Pictures but a few weeks or even days before that money, that film was going to start the plug was pulled because the script wasn't convincing enough or interesting enough. That's impossible in India. There's nobody who has the authority or the clout or anything to pull the plug on a Khan film"

Disabling the "Enable notifications?" popup in Firefox - "Go into about:config and set dom.webnotifications.enabled to false. This seems to work for me in FF 47."

/pol/ News Forever on Twitter: "Leftists are shocked that Trump would let a gay teacher pose w/ him. News flash: he's the first President elected as pro-gay from the start. https://t.co/WDXX3MjMzF" - "Leftists are shocked that Trump would let a gay teacher pose w/ him. News flash: he's the first President elected as pro-gay from the start."

Terrorist attack on UK’s Finsbury Mosque: Why this vigilante snapped - "Of course, it was wrong that Osborne decided to fight terrorism with terrorism, and that is indeed what his act was. (That particular mosque has been a terrorist recruiting mosque for years. It’s inaccurate to think of it as a house of worship; comparing it to a Hells’ Angels clubhouse is more accurate.) Now remember, after the Manchester concert bombing, lefties said, as they always do: Keep on acting as if nothing has changed. But there was none of that today. London Mayor Sadiq Khan always says that Muslim terrorist attacks are, “part and parcel of living in a big city.” Of course, he rarely uses the word "terrorist," and rarer still “Muslim terrorist”. But he sure used the word terrorist last night — and certainly didn’t call for people to accept it. It’s a double standard. Which is why this vigilante snapped."
Comments from elsewhere: "You know the best way to tell if it's perpetrated by a POC or religious minority is if the initial reports forgo all mention of name or race even if the subject is in custody."
"The real victims of the Finsbury Park van incident are white people who will have to deal with the anti-white backlash. Muslims are just going to have to accept that terrorism is part and parcel of living in a big city."
"We may never know the motives for attack on the Muslims at Finsbury Park mosque in London... This will increase Christianphobia and Anglophobia. The more we criticise their community the more we will alienate them. We should go out and hug a white person. Most white people are peaceful and hard working."

Finsbury Park suspect 'turned against Muslims' after London Bridge attack - "After being dragged from the van by an angry mob, he was protected by the Imam of the mosque, Mohammed Mahmoud, who ordered people not to attack him, but hand him over to the police. Describing what happened, Mr Mahmoud said: "By God’s grace we managed to surround him and to protect him from any harm. We stopped all forms of attack and abuse towards him, that were coming from every angle. Mr Mahmoud has been hailed a hero by members of the community for upholding the law."

AK-47 training held at London mosque - "British Islamic extremists have been involved in weapons training with assault rifles at a mosque in London, intelligence sources have told The Observer. The disclosures that hardline Islamists practised with Kalashnikov AK-47s at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London underline the pivotal role that Britain has played in the recruitment of volunteers to fight alongside Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group all over the world... a video showing the execution of Algerian conscripts by hardline militants had been circulated at the mosque... MI5 has been told by their agents that scores of young men were being sent from the mosque for training at camps in Afghanistan. They reported that consignments of supplies including radio and telecommunications equipment were dispatched to Pakistan for eventual distribution in the Afghan training camps allied to or run by al-Qaeda. They also revealed a complex operation run by some men attending the mosque to provide volunteers with false documents. Although the men recruited by MI5 were not directly involved in the logistics of supplying overseas Mujahideen, the operation was openly talked about at the mosque. Several men involved with the al-Qaeda group have already been linked to Finsbury Park mosque"

A programmer came up with a hilarious way to shut down dangerous Windows scammers - "He built the bot army after a telemarketer called his house and used nasty language with his son, now he sells it as a service to businesses and consumers. When a telemarketer calls, you transfer the call to the bot service and the bot gabs with the telemarketer as long as the telemarketer wants, until the telemarketers figure out they are being played and hang up. It wastes their time so they’ll stop calling... “I called 100 times on 20 simultaneous channels. They answered, talked to my bots. Then they started to put my bots on hold. Then they started swearing, shouting to each other, about what is going on, I could hear in background. Then I made 500 calls on 20 simultaneous channels to the number. After 300 phone, they disconnected the number,” he laughs. It took about 15-20 minutes to put them out of business, he said. “I completely annihilated them.” Anyone else getting that pop-up with that number will find it out of service"

News exposure predicts anti-Muslim prejudice - "News coverage of Islamic extremism is reigniting debates about the media’s role in promoting prejudice toward Muslims. Psychological theories of media-induced prejudice date to the 1950’s, and find support from controlled experiments. However, national-scale studies of media effects on Muslim prejudice are lacking. Orthogonal research investigating media-induced prejudice toward immigrants has failed to establish any link. Moreover, it has been found that people interpret the news in ways that confirm pre-existing attitudes, suggesting that media induced Muslim prejudice in liberal democracies is unlikely. Here, we test the association between news exposure and anti-Muslim prejudice in a diverse national sample from one of the world’s most tolerant societies, where media effects are least likely to hold (N = 16,584, New Zealand). In support of media-induced Islamophobia, results show that greater news exposure is associated with both increased anger and reduced warmth toward Muslims. Additionally, the relationship between media exposure and anti-Muslim prejudice does not reliably vary with political ideology, supporting claims that it is widespread representations of Muslims in the news, rather than partisan media biases, that drives anti-Muslim prejudice."
This was reported in the media as "People who read the news more likely to be Islamophobic, study finds" but the abstract is more nuanced
Maybe it will later be found that people who read the news more are likely to disapprove of Donald Trump

New pride flag divides Philly’s gay community - "A flag meant to bring the gay community together has ended up ripping it apart. Last week, the city of Philadelphia revealed a revamped version of the gay pride flag, a collaboration between the city’s Office of LGBT Affairs and Philadelphia design firm Tierney. The revised flag has a black and brown stripe added on top of the traditional rainbow flag, meant to represent people of color who are ”marginalized, ignored, and even intentionally excluded,” according to the More Color More Pride website... some LGBT activists think that the addition is unnecessary at best and divisive at worst. Charley Beal, a friend of the original flag’s designer Gilbert Baker, told NBC: “The stripes were not chosen for skin color — they were chosen to reflect the spectrum of color in nature”... The original flag had eight colors that represented sex, life, healing, sunlight, nature, art, harmony and spirit. Eventually pink and turquoise were eliminated for practical reasons, leaving red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple."
How come there's no yellow stripe? Or white one?

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar - Posts - ""Arguing that Islamist terror attacks are a direct result of western foreign policy is the same as arguing that anti-Muslim attacks are a direct result of Islamist terror attacks. Either you can acknowledge the role of hate narratives and individual vulnerabilities in both forms of extremism or claim they are merely reactive. You can't be selective"
G. Hussein"

Faisal Saeed AlMutar on Twitter - Reza Aslan: "What would you do if foreign country dropped a bomb on your apartment building killing your wife and children. Seriously, what would you do?"
Faisal: "Not joining a murderous, religiously fundamentalist, yazidi raping, gay beheading terrorist organization is what I would do."

Remembering Helen Reece - "In 2010, she attracted opprobrium for arguing that a blanket ban on those convicted of sexual offences being allowed to adopt was disproportionate and wrong. In the last paper she wrote before she died, she argued that judges should be wary of considering sexual ‘deviance’ as a factor in family-law disputes when considering which parent a child should live with. Those who understood her work saw that this was far from contrarianism; every piece she wrote was shot through with a deep humanism, a desire to protect people’s rights and to enable them to live their lives with as much independence as possible. This was why she was willing to mount thoughtful and profound defences of people’s right to intimacy and privacy, even in the most difficult cases and circumstances, despite knowing that doing so might make her unpopular... The debate was titled ‘Rape and the law: he said, she said?’. Again, Helen’s concern was with people’s ability to live their private and intimate lives without being unnecessarily fearful of others. She was sceptical of the idea that the public did not understand what rape was, pointing to the positive rates of jury convictions and the lack of evidence for any bias against rape complainants. She also questioned advocacy research that suggested women held other people ‘responsible’ for being raped. She argued that women in general have a complex idea of responsibility that allowed room for individual agency in sexual interactions. She was adept at identifying the nuance in excessively polarised debates. In 2013, her contributions to that debate were developed into an academic paper, titled ‘Rape myths: is elite opinion right and public opinion wrong?’, which was published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. Helen questioned whether ‘rape myths’ were preventing society from dealing with rape and sexual violence. She was concerned that society’s response to rape was being distorted by a focus on people’s ‘attitudes’, when there was scant evidence that public attitudes were the real problem. This involved challenging the methodology of researching rape myths. She claimed that one of the key scales used to measure rape myths failed to account for nuance in public opinion. And she questioned whether many ideas about rape, which are often described as ‘myths’, should be described as myths at all. The paper caused an outcry. But the problem for those who sought to present the paper as bigoted or ignorant was that Helen’s work resisted such caricatures. Even the paper’s harshest critics conceded that it was meticulous in its research and consistent in its argument. What makes this article so hard to write is that Helen had so much more to say. In 2013, I saw her speak at an LSE event called ‘Is Rape Different?’. The auditorium was packed, and the debate combative. In the months afterwards, a petition was organised by a group of academics calling for the LSE to apologise for holding the debate. The LSE stood by Helen, recognising that her willingness to ask difficult questions was precisely why she was such a necessary voice in the academy. She was a thinker with a willingness to upset orthodoxy; and she had the independence of mind to commit to arguments that are unpopular but which she felt were right."

Europe’s Elites Seem Determined to Commit Suicide by ‘Diversity’ - WSJ - "There is also, for Europe, the sense of what I call tiredness—the feeling that the story might have run out: that we have tried religion, all imaginable forms of politics, and that each has, one after another, led us to disaster. When we taint every idea we touch, perhaps a change is as good as a rest. It is often argued that our societies are old, with a graying population, and so we need immigrants. When these theories are challenged—by asking, for instance, why the next generation of Germany’s workforce might not come from unemployed Greece rather than Eritrea—we are told that we need low-skilled workers who do not speak our languages because it makes Europe more culturally interesting. It is as though some great hole lies at the heart of the culture of Dante, Bach and Wren. When people point out the downsides of this approach—not least that more immigration from Muslim countries produces many problems, including terrorism—we get the final explanation. It doesn’t matter, we are told: Because of globalization this is inevitable and we can’t stop it anyway... They tell me with fury that it “must” work. I suggest that with population change of this kind, at this speed, it may not work at all... Earlier this year, a poll of European attitudes was published in which citizens of 10 countries were asked a tough question: whether they agreed that there should be no more Muslim migration into their countries. Majorities in eight out of the 10 countries, including France and Germany, said they wanted no more Muslim immigrants... Today “more diversity” remains the cry of the elites, who insist that if the public doesn’t like it yet, it is because they haven’t had enough of it."

Why Islam doesn’t need a reformation | Mehdi Hasan - "The truth is that Islam has already had its own reformation of sorts, in the sense of a stripping of cultural accretions and a process of supposed “purification”. And it didn’t produce a tolerant, pluralistic, multifaith utopia, a Scandinavia-on-the-Euphrates. Instead, it produced … the kingdom of Saudi Arabia."

The law on sex - Factsheets - "In Scotland the range of sexual assault offences relating to ‘sexual touching’ is similar, with the addition of sexual penetration of the vagina, anus or mouth; ejaculating semen onto someone; spitting or urinating onto them"
Maybe the Scots are very kinky

Why do police shoot so many times? FBI, experts answer on officer-involved shootings - "police shooting scenarios often occur in poorly lit places with "little to no warning." The consequence of missing the shot, he said, can be the potential death of the officer or others. In addition, he said most local police officers or sheriff's deputies carry pistols, which are more difficult to aim than other types of guns... Wounding someone in the leg or another less lethal body part will not stop the person from potentially inflicting serious injury or death on an officer or another member of the public, he said. Thus police are trained to aim for the torso or the middle of a person's body... Unless an airway or certain parts of the central nervous system, such as the brain stem or upper spinal cord, are struck by a bullet, a person isn't guaranteed to lose consciousness until they lose about 40-to-50 percent of their blood, Huber said. If a person does not lose enough blood, he or she is "still able to fight," he said. That's why officers are trained to fire multiple times when they are justified in doing so... many of the gunshots generally miss the target... a more critical factor than the number of total shots fired when evaluating proper use of force is the number of bursts. For example, some guns fire a handful of shots in quick succession before there's a lapse in time. "If we're talking about four-or-five shots in a single burst, it is not that unusual"... in a life-or-death situation, a toy gun, which can look nearly identical to a real gun, is just as threatening to an officer. He showed side-by-side examples of a real gun and a fake gun. The only difference was the orange tip on the fake gun. Some officers have encountered situations where a subject has colored or painted the orange tip black, to look more like a real gun, he said. Likewise, a fake orange tip can be added to a real gun to make it appear real... Huber said any situation in which an officer is unable to see what a non-compliant subject may or may not be holding is a dangerous one. "The time you can't see his hands is the time you need to stay worrying"... Scharf said most law enforcement officers are generally restrained when it comes to using deadly force, considering the number of scenarios that occur when it is constitutionally acceptable to fire their weapons. "When a police officer wakes up in the morning, they want to go home," Scharf said. "They don't want to get into a shooting.""