Links - 6th May 2019 (1)

Tourists who take selfies on famous airport beach will receive the death penalty - "Tourists taking beach selfies while planes take-off have angered airport chiefs in Thailand - who warned the maximum penalty for distracting pilots is the death sentence."
Maybe they're distracted by people suntanning on the beach too

The New Centre - "Teen Vogue nixed an op-ed written by two professors about school shootings because they did not blame "toxic masculinity" and misogyny. The professors felt this was unscientific - they only wanted to stick to the science available.This is only coming to light because Teen Vogue decided to tweet (months later) about it, misrepresenting the professor's views on the matter. The professors felt they had to respond, since it was forced into the public through Twitter..."

Patrick Markey on Twitter - "At the end of the day - our op-ed was spiked not due to its theme or accuracy but simply because we didn't want to add in the word "toxic masculinity" as a cause of school shootings. It is ironic that the main theme of the op-ed was that when we wrongly blame things (like video games) for causing school shootings this sometimes has unintended consequences... here is the addition of the word "misogyny" into our op-ed by the editor."
Feminism poisons everything

Not just an environmental crisis - "I recalled a comment by Dr. Gus Speth, former environmental advisor to two US Presidents: “I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy.”"
30 years didn't teach him that predictions of environmental catastrophe don't play out

Why is $350,000 in Canadian aid being used to send homeopaths to Honduras?

Josh on Twitter - "My co worker tried to clown on me for being 5’10 saying I’m not a real man. I lowkey ran out of comebacks so I just called her fat lol .... and now everybody is saying I crossed the line
She can lose weight, I’ll always be 5’10!"
Double standards are good if they help women

Sadiq Khan calls for overhaul of Scotland Yard's gang matrix as 4 in 5 names on it are shown to be black - "Sadiq Khan is calling for an overhaul of Scotland Yard’s controversial gangs database after it was found to include a “disproportionately” high number of young black men.The Mayor today published a review of the confidential Gangs Matrix, which was created after the 2011 riots to identify those considered at risk of becoming involved in gangs.City Hall found that of the 3,200 names listed on the database, three quarters are under the age of 25 and four-in-five are black.It said that while there is evidence the list has helped to reduce offending rates, measures were required to “restore trust” and ensure it is used “lawfully and proportionately”... local borough police forces have since deleted their informal gang databases"
Ignorance is bliss

Uber drivers sue Sadiq Khan for discrimination against ethnic minority drivers - "Private hire vehicle drivers are mounting a legal challenge against London mayor Sadiq Khan after he proposed new rules which require minicab and Uber drivers to pay the congestion charge.United Private Hire Drivers, a branch of the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain, claims that the rule change indirectly discriminates against ethnic minority drivers and breaches their human rights... Black cab drivers, in contrast, will continue to be exempt from paying the charge."

Watertown, New York, Tops a Scale of Political Tolerance - "These are places where people can disagree on politics but still, it appears, give one another the benefit of the doubt.Watertown is the seat of Jefferson County, a generally conservative place, which Trump won by 20 percentage points in 2016. But people here tend to be less likely than Americans elsewhere to say they’d be upset if a family member married someone from the other party... This matters because political disdain has begun to distort our perception of reality. Democrats now think Republicans are richer, older, crueler, and more unreasonable than they are in real life, according to multiple studies, including one by Douglas Ahler and Gaurav Sood published in The Journal of Politics in April. Republicans, meanwhile, think Democrats are more godless, gay, and radical than they actually are. The more righteous we get, the more mistakes we make. As is the case anywhere else in the world, demonization eventually bends toward violence. Already, nearly 20 percent of Democrats and Republicans say that many members of the other side “lack the traits to be considered fully human,” according to a 2017 survey by the political scientists Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason. Even more chilling: About 15 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats agree that the country would be “better off if large numbers of opposing partisans in the public today ‘just died.’” The most politically prejudiced people in America right now don’t seem to be the most vulnerable ones. The PredictWise analysis showed that the most judgmental partisans tend to be white, urban, older, highly educated, politically engaged, and politically segregated... The first secret to making these conversations work is to meet face-to-face... The second secret is to talk for a long time... Watertown is a nine-square-mile town, population 26,000. In general, the most politically open-minded places tend to be rural or suburban, not big cities. In smaller communities, people cannot easily avoid one another based on politics—or anything else, really... the Stanford political-science professor Shanto Iyengar, working with PredictWise’s Tobias Konitzer, found that much of the increase in political animosity over the past 20 years is due to the rising intolerance of politically homogeneous families... In this moment of political division, Garry sees a spiritual test. The temptation to discard others has always been strong, and in some ways it is stronger than ever. But this is an old problem, maybe the oldest, he says. The Bible is all about overcoming the temptation to discard, to dismiss, to unfriend. If it were always easy to love your neighbor as you love yourself, it wouldn’t be a commandment."
Of course, people on Facebook were condemning this
Political engagement and education aren't always good

U.S. Counties Vary by Their Degree of Partisan Prejudice - "We are now judging one another’s fundamental decency based on whether we eat at Chipotle or Chick-fil-A. This may seem silly—harmless, even. But it is uncomfortably reminiscent of stories from conflict zones abroad. In Northern Ireland, for example, an outsider visiting during the Troubles had no way to tell unionists and nationalists apart. They were pretty much all white Christians, after all. But the locals themselves routinely guessed one another’s identity based on their names, the spacing of their eyes, their sports jerseys, the color of their hair, their neighborhood, or even how much jewelry they wore­. This process came to be known as “telling.” If a reliable cue didn’t exist, people would make one up. It was a way to move about in the world in a time of profound tribalism, during which 3,600 people were killed... In a 2012 experiment, the political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood gave nearly 2,000 Americans implicit-bias tests and found that partisan bias was more widespread than racial bias."

Ancestry Testing Company: It's Our 'Moral Responsibility' To Give The FBI Your DNA - "FamilyTreeDNA raised privacy concerns after BuzzFeed revealed the company had partnered with the FBI and given the agency access to the genealogy database. Law enforcement’s use of DNA databases has been widely known since last April when California officials revealed genealogy website information was instrumental in determining the identity of the Golden State Killer"

Why I’m a Public-School Teacher but a Private-School Parent - "The kids take pride in their personal character, and they admit that they love learning.My 4-year-old daughter, for now, is just like them. And I’ve always found that it’s exponentially more fun, fulfilling, and productive to engage in activities with other people who have "bought in" to whatever they’re doing with the same level of enthusiasm.. In general, the teens at the public school don’t appear to have bought into an educational environment like that at SLOCA—and for good reason: There's nothing to buy. It’s difficult for them to show personal choice in their schooling because they’re obligated to be there regardless of whether they want to... After tax dollars, support for everything from extracurriculars to learning materials is expected to come through fundraisers, and schools can’t require that the students—the actual beneficiaries—participate in the fundraisers themselves... I chose to teach in a public high school precisely because I pitied the children who felt forced to be at school, who felt trapped like I did when I was their age... Vox editor Matthew Yglesias claims the country should tax private schools even more because, "At best private school is a private consumption good, like buying your kids expensive clothes." Gawker writer John Cook argues that private school should be illegal. A "public school dad" recently published a "plea to private school parents" on ABC.com that efforts like mine to "get the best education possible in the land of the free … sucks on a bunch of levels." And at least 70,000 people on Facebook liked the "manifesto" against private schools written by Slate senior editor Allison Benedikt, whose many points included: "If you send your kid to private school" then you are "a bad person … ruining one of our nation’s most essential institutions.""
I don't see why this is an issue, unlike people who rail against private schools - then send their children to one. And justify this hypocrisy as making that decision as parents, to boot

How the Great Depression Still Shapes the Way Americans Eat - "“Built on self-denial, scientific cookery not only dismissed pleasure as nonessential but also treated it as an impediment to healthy eating.”Accordingly, ethnic foods with their (supposedly) hunger-triggering spices were vilified and considered “stimulants” along the lines of caffeine and so, in their stead came prune puddings, canned-meat stews, and dairy-heavy vegetable casseroles featuring America’s first fortified foods"

Why Self-Checkout Is and Has Always Been the Worst - "For every automated appliance or system that actually makes performing a task easier—dishwashers, ATMs, robotic factory arms, say—there seems to be another one—self-checkout kiosks, automated phone menus, mass email marketing—that actively makes our lives worse.I’ve taken to calling this second category, simply, shitty automation... For most of the first half of the 20th Century, American shoppers would show up to the market, give the clerks a list of what they wanted, and wait while the professional fetched the goods... In 2018, Walmart rolled out Scan and Go systems in 150 stores, forced employees to learn it, then dumped it a few months later. All this, Mateescu says, is invisible labor; the kind of work that’s absolutely necessary, but isn’t recognized by management—and employees are rarely trained or compensated for... theft rates at self-checkout is a lot higher than regular checkout. It’s so widespread that an entire subculture and attendant vernacular has developed around ripping them off. One study found that a truly crazy 20 percent of people who’d used self-checkout admitted to stealing from them"