Links - 3rd January 2019 (1)

Does murder rate go up without the death penalty? - "“The idea that the death penalty would reduce crime is a little bit like saying rain dancing is going to produce rain,” said John Donohue, a law professor at Stanford University, who has evaluated a number of studies on whether the death penalty deters crime. “It’s probably about as strong a finding as you can get. There is no statistical study that has given us any reason to believe the death penalty reduces murder.”"

ASIO says it would cost at least $1billion A YEAR to monitor 400 people on the terrorist watch list - "It would cost the Australian government $1 billion a year to hire the 9,000 additional staff needed to monitor those on the terrorist watch list... The alarming figures from the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation come after it emerged Friday's Bourke Street terrorist Hassan Khalif Shire Ali was not being actively monitored by police despite being on their radar... Dutton also revealed 14 terror attacks had been prevented, but seven had resulted in serious adverse results, including Sydney's Lindt Cafe siege in 2014 which saw two hostages killed.Victoria's Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton says hundreds of radicalised potential terrorists who aren’t being monitored at all times have the potential to carry out a atrocity similar to the Bourke St tragedy."
$1 billion a year is a small price to pay for hummus

Science Shows That Torture Doesn’t Work and Is Counterproductive - "compelling scientific evidence is emerging that torture and coercion are, at best, ineffective means of gathering intelligence. Worse, as Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin, wrote in a recent book, Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation, torture can produce false information by harming those areas of the brain associated with memory... Indeed, the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school used to subject U.S. soldiers to waterboarding as part of their resistance training (it stopped in 2007), and former instructor Malcolm Nance says the procedure does not elicit reliable information. It does, on the other hand, generate false confessions. “The captive will say absolutely anything and agree to anything to make the torture stop,” says Nance. Most of those subjected to waterboarding, he says, confess as a result—and their distress is so intense, they do not even remember confessing"
A lot of the enthusiasm for torture, as with that for the death penalty and corporal punishment, is really just a desire for retribution - even though that supposedly doesn't motivate criminal justice nowadays

Sympathizing with Minorities - "the more I thought about it, the more I agree that I am unsympathetic to minorities. The reason is that I object to dealing with people in terms of their allocation to gross, demographic census categories. Are we to think of individuals only or primarily in terms of whether they a member of one or another racial, gender, ethnic, sexual, or religious category? This is a form of reductionism that “disappears” the individual human being into a few general features, implies if not asserts that this is the most important things about them, advises treating them according to their categories, and succeeds in dividing our society into opposing and conflicting regiments... Through the magic of “intersectionality” we can discover who are the worthy victims; the more victimhood categories someone can claim, the more worthy they are... You may wonder where all of this oppressor-victim categorization comes from. It is drawn in the first instance from Marxism, which posits class conflict between the exploited proletariat and oppressing bourgeoisie as the dynamic that will destroy capitalism and establish socialism. That was not popular in North America, where most people see themselves as middle class. But sociologists who came to define their field as “the study of inequality” extended class conflict to other, non-economic classes: genders, races, ethnicities, sexual subgroups, religions, etc. The sociologists added that the oppression and victimization was “structural,” with individuals’ intentions unimportant... the opposite of bigotry is not more bigotry, but fairness... Although the history of Asians in North America shows centuries of prejudice, discrimination, and disadvantage, today, Asian Americans and Asian Canadians are discriminated against because they study too hard, work too hard, conform too well, and are successful. They are no longer victims, and so must be victimized!"
So much for stereotypes being bad. Stereotypes of oppression are good

Swivel 1M 1MB USB 2.0 Flash Drive Memory Drive Storage Thumb Stick Pen Design White - intl | Lazada Singapore
In this day and age you can still buy 1MB thumb drives. That's even worse than a 1987 3.5 inch floppy disk

No One At Work Had Any Idea I'm Trans. Here's Why I Decided To Tell Them.
"Everyone was treating me like the gender I preferred so I decided I needed more attention"

JUNIPER on Twitter - "Now available for speaking gigs! As the author of the 1st children’s book to talk about sex work, as well as a mother and former sex worker (with a grown up book on the way!), let’s talk feminist/queer theory + praxis ♥️"
???

India lynchings: WhatsApp sets new rules after mob killings
Strangely no one is calling WhatsApp racist

Homeless man and N.J. couple concocted story for GoFundMe fundraiser, prosecutor says

Lalo Dagach - "I don’t have any advise as to how to distinguish between fake and real campaigns, as these are all run by random individuals, not trusted organizations (though I don’t trust most orgs either). I will say that money is actually the least relevant problem when trying to get people out of their country. It’s mostly a legal and immigration issue... since I have lived most of my life in the third world, you become less trusting of other and and see scams around every corner."
Yet some people insist the Third World isn't worse for scams

Woman Caught Having Affair When She and Boyfriend Picked Up by Husband in Uber: Report

Domestic Violence Awareness Australia - "For the first time in QLD, a new government research document has shown that more men have died from intimate partner violence during 2017/2018. This is the first time ever that this has been the case. There seems to be a role reversal happening. I personally believe this has to do with the continual ignorance towards female offenders. Domestic violence has no gender. Original document here.
http://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/Documents/TableOffice/TabledPapers/2018/5618T1802.pdf?fbclid=IwAR07muwIhoPMO77kDpn2EwG1e_VZ4XQmVW-yg01lttRG6NqDCAtzqWWqfjc"
Male privilege!

Titania McGrath on Twitter - "I'm British-Iraqi, gay, non-binary and also identify as Muslim."
"Spare a thought for those who are both gay *and* non-binary. It’s not easy to be attracted to members of your own sex when you don’t have a biological sex to begin with"

Mobile Uploads - "Giving money to beggars is not an expression of compassion so much as a reflection of your gullibility. Normal people contribute to charitable causes. Idiots contribute to an increase in beggars. Are you normal?"
"They don't put up with shit in JB "

Shaykha Alia Abeed - Posts - "In 50 years, we'll recognize that the greatest crime of our generation was forcing children to go to school without their consent. Most little kids don't want to go to school, they hate it. Despite their lack of consent, parental monsters FORCE them. This is where rape culture starts."
Brilliant, since making kids hug promotes rape culture

Comic Central - Posts
Dank comics

The memoir by Steve Jobs' daughter makes clear he was a truly rotten person whose bad behavior was repeatedly enabled by those around him
Well-behaved women seldom make history. But neither do well-behaved men

Harbir Singh - "Just got off a 7 day block. Sorry to everyone whose messages I couldn't respond to. I will no longer be using Facebook. I won’t be using messenger anymore either. When I was blocked I Tweeted: “So @Facebook blocked me for a post from 2012 in which I, an Indian, called Indians monkeys. I was talking about how we ape western innovations without adding to them. Eat shit, Zuck. You profit from my participation. If that doesn't suit you, I'm happy to take my gig elsewhere.”...
@rockprincess818 said : “I don’t want to live in a world where the use of the word “monkey” is scrutinized for meaning and context by a handful of dudes in Silicon Valley. Banished from existence for ....words. I’m so over it.”"

Palestinian Voice for Peace - Posts - ""I'm international criminal lawyer for Palestinian people... I'm working for all your people.... And you won't give me another f***ing glass of wine?! I'm a leader of the f***ing boycott movement! If I say 'Boycot f***ing Air India' — done!"- Simone O'Broin, a Belfast-based #BDS activist, connected to the Palestinian BADIL Resource Center, is standing for her rights after being refused to have an extra bottle of wine due to her level of intoxication. The incident took place at Air India flight from Mumbai to London.
The viral video shows the blonde-haired barefoot woman, swearing at crew, hurling racist slurs at the staff, threatening to 'p*** on them' in court, and calling a female staff member an 'Indian f***ing money-grabbing b*****d'.
She was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated public order and common assault."

9 Years Into Common Core, Test Scores Are Down, Indoctrination Up - "“If you are under the impression that there are good white people and bad white people, you’re wrong,” UnboundEd CEO Kate Gerson told the teachers this year, according to Hess and Addison. “Gerson informed her charges that racial biases are pervasive, universal, and something ‘you cannot be cured from.'”

Twitter 'gave Saudis information about journalist who ended up dead' - "Turki Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Jasser was arrested on March 15 for allegedly running a Twitter account called Kashkool, which exposed human rights violations by Saudi authorities and royals.He then died while being tortured in detention, The New Khaleej states – prompting fresh outrage over an alleged leak of information that lead to his capture."

Positional goods and the social rank hypothesis : income inequality affects online chatter about high and low status brands on Twitter

Does income inequality cause health and social problems? - "The literature shows general agreement about a correlation between income inequality and health/social problems.
There is less agreement about whether income inequality causes health and social problems independently of other factors, but some rigorous studies have found evidence of this.
The independent effect of income inequality on health/social problems shown in some studies looks small in statistical terms. But these studies cover whole populations, and hence a significant number of lives.
Some research suggests that inequality is particularly harmful beyond a certain threshold. Britain was below this threshold in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, but rose past it in 1986–7 and has settled well above it since 1998–9. If the threshold is significant it could provide a target for policy.
Anxiety about status might explain income inequality’s effect on health and social problems. If so, inequality is harmful because it places people in a hierarchy which increases competition for status, causing stress and leading to poor health and other negative outcomes."