Links - 16th August 2019 (1)

California Interest Groups Decide Hydroelectric Power Doesn't Count as Renewable Energy - "these interest groups have decided that the way to meet the renewable energy goal is to have more solar and wind power even if hydroelectric power is cheaper. They are set on their solution. Notice that that means that they don’t really want renewable energy. They want solar and wind"
Environmentalism: where means become ends

The Brain Needs Animal Fat - "although DHA does exist in algae, algae are not plants, and we don't know if we can access the DHA within edible algae without special extraction methods. Prior to the availability of algae-derived supplements (which only became available recently), the only pre-formed DHA naturally bioavailable to everyone would have come from animal foods"

Busy Boyfriend Makes Chatbot To Reply His GF; She Ends Up Sending It 300 Texts A Day - "Luckily for Mr Li Kaixiang, he works as a software engineer. He hatched a brilliant plan to keep his girlfriend company while he’s busy at work.According to Abacus News on Tuesday (11 Jun), Mr Li secretly created a chatbot to send ‘his’ girlfriend messages throughout the day."

Anne Lister, the Real 'Gentleman Jack' | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "[On her diaries] Anne Lister had almost seduced every woman of her acquaintance, and written in lust and pleasure about that. No guilt, no lesbian self hatred, no desperation, but having fun. And so the friend Arthur Burrell advised John Lister to burn these diaries immediately. But John Lister did not. I have the feeling that these diaries are bigger than we are, and we may not burn them. What he did, in fact, was hiding them...
There have been homosexual acts all through history. But the awareness of being different is the modern part of it. So historians tend to say this happened in the late 19th century, this awareness of homosexuals of being different, and so on. So letting your sexuality give you an identity...
She gave life to everything in the in the act of writing. Living without writing was incomplete to her. See, she's quoting her orgasms and the orgasms of her partner. She is giving credits. Was it good? Was it not so good? She gives us exactly time and place. We learn about a quickie she and Mariana needed during the day only seven minutes to close the door. to take off their clothes, have sex, put on their clothes again and open the door again. That was seven minutes... Men did not write so openly about their day to day sexual practices like Anne Lister. For sure we do have the pornographic discourse since antiquity. But pornography belongs to literature and follows the rules of narration. So confessions on a non literate level, like this of and Lister’s are extremely rare. And now it's not from a man, it's from a woman. And then from a lesbian one, that's unique."

Bad translation : SWGalaxyOfHeroes - "The german translation for Shaak Ti's first special ability is not well thought out. The "Sturmabteilung" (literally: storm detachment) was Nazi Germany's paramilitary organization."

Get Woke, Go Broke: Evergreen State College Is Down To 300 New Enrollments - "the price of going "full woke" is evident: the school is welcoming the smallest incoming freshman class on record. Only 300 students have selected Evergreen State College for their education. "This fall, we expect less than 300 freshmen to attend Evergreen, a fifty percent drop from two years ago," one Evergreen professor admitted on the site, Heterodox Academy. "It is the only four year institution in the state of Washington that has seen a decrease in applications, and is currently publicly funded for 4200 students, far greater than this year’s anticipated total attending class of 2800.""

𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐢 波 on Twitter - "don’t let this tainted ‘self love’ trend have you 50 & alone because you walked away from everything that ‘didn’t serve you’ instead of learning conflict resolution."

Effects of sexualized video games on online sexual harassment.
Oddly, the study's official abstract doesn't mention that it was women who were doing more harassing in *both* the pre- and post-treatment conditions - of both men and women, or that men were sexually harassed more than women. Doubtless, it will then be used to bash men for being creeps. Indeed I have seen popular coverage of the study gloss over the results, just lamenting about how video games make women get sexually harassed (with the unspoken implications that it's men doing the harassing and that men don't get harassed)
The authors posit that the moral panic about men sexually harassing women could have led to these results - women don't see what they do as sexual harassment, and men aren't seen as objects of sexual harassment. Which shows the obvious harms of bashing men

We tried to publish a replication of a Science paper in Science. The journal refused. - "Science is supposed to be self-correcting. Ugly facts kill beautiful theories, to paraphrase the 19th-century biologist Thomas Huxley. But, as we learned recently, policies at the top scientific journals don’t make this easy.Our story starts in 2008, when a group of researchers published an article (here it is without a paywall) that found political conservatives have stronger physiological reactions to threatening images than liberals do. The article was published in Science, which is one of the most prestigious general science journals around. It’s the kind of journal that can make a career in academia... We drafted a paper that reported the failed replication studies along with a more nuanced discussion about the ways in which physiology might matter for politics and sent it to Science. We did not expect Science to immediately publish the paper, but because our findings cast doubt on an influential study published in its pages, we thought the editorial team would at least send it out for peer review.It did not. About a week later, we received a summary rejection with the explanation that the Science advisory board of academics and editorial team felt that since the publication of this article the field has moved on and that, while they concluded that we had offered a conclusive replication of the original study, it would be better suited for a less visible subfield journal. We wrote back asking them to consider at least sending our work out for review. (They could still reject it if the reviewers found fatal flaws in our replications.) We argued that the original article continues to be highly influential and is often featured in popular science pieces in the lay media (for instance, here, here, here, and here), where the research is translated into a claim that physiology allows one to predict liberals and conservatives with a high degree of accuracy. We believe that Science has a responsibility to set the record straight in the same way that a newspaper does when it publishes something that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. We were rebuffed without a reason and with a vague suggestion that the journal’s policy on handling replications might change at some point in the future. We believe that it is bad policy for journals like Science to publish big, bold ideas and then leave it to subfield journals to publish replications showing that those ideas aren’t so accurate after all... Open and transparent science can only happen when journals are willing to publish results that contradict previous findings"

Cameroon players 'crying and accusing FIFA of racism' after goal awarded by VAR in World Cup clash - "Cameroon manager Alan Djeumfa insisted every decision against his side had been wrong and defended his players, who claimed they were the victim of racism.'It was a miscarriage of justice. Why should I talk about anything other than that,' said Djeumfa.The 46-year-old refused to elaborate on what the injustices were, given that each of the VAR decisions had seemed accurate.He hinted that the sense of victimhood had been kindled by the VAR decision which saw fellow African nation Nigeria defeated by France last week."
If you incentivise something, you get more of it

Neighborhoods to Avoid When Visiting Minneapolis - "With a violent crime rate of 1,063 reported incidents for every 100,000 residents, nearly three times the corresponding national rate, Minneapolis is one of the most dangerous cities in the country"

Back in Omar's district, police deal with gangs, relations with tight-lipped Somali community - "In the dead of the cold, late night on Tuesday, a young Somali man was shot in the hip. Someone took him to the local trauma center, left him there, and drove off.The man told police at his bedside that he didn’t know who shot him, who took him to the hospital, or why he was targeted. “I’m intoxicated,” he told cops, while doctors tended his wound, before insisting he didn't know anything else about what happened.For the attending police officers, it was a frustrating, albeit familiar, response from a member of the Somali community, whose support in November sent one of their own, Rep. Ilhan Omar, to Congress. While Omar has spoken out frequently and forcefully on a range of issues - some that seem little connected to her district - most members of the Somali community she represents remain far more insular... According to data compiled last year by the Washington Post, more than half of all homicides statewide in Minnesota go unsolved. And that's in part because Somali-Americans in Minneapolis aren't talking enough to police, according to officers. The Somali community grew here rapidly here during the 1990s, when large numbers of Somalis fled a devastating civil war.. Omar, meanwhile, has consistently used her platform to take aim at law enforcement... For some officers, that kind of pushback from the top does more to divide than unite"

East African community reeling from weekend shootings demands solutions - "After the latest spasm of gang violence, Minneapolis’ Somali residents and business owners on Monday stepped up their calls for help from City Hall and police headquarters to help curb the senseless shootings that they say too often go overlooked... Abdi Ali sat drinking tea with friends in a coffee shop, tucked among the colorful stalls of spices and textiles and housewares. The others nodded in agreement as he questioned how seemingly so many acts of violence involving victims of east African descent go unsolved.“We’ve been here 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Ali, who owns a textile stall. “A lot of people are not coming to this area anymore.”"

Minneapolis' 'Little Mogadishu' Sees 56 Percent Increase in Violent Crimes Caused by Somali Gangs - "Violent crimes increased by more than 50 percent in 2018 in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, nicknamed “little Mogadishu,” which authorities attribute to Somali gang activity in the area... In 2008, the Minneapolis Police Department created a Somali liaison position to focus solely on addressing the issue. The department currently has 5 Somali-speaking officers to assist in outreach to the immigrant community. According an MPR report from the time, officers began to notice that Somali gangs were dividing themselves along the same clan lines of their war-torn country."

Anarchist group at UT Austin threatens to dox incoming freshmen if they join conservative campus clubs - "the network released extensive personal information of pro-Brett Kavanaugh demonstrators at UT Austin, including their names, photos and contact information. It went so far as to post some of the phone numbers of the employers of students and encouraged its adherents to call them to get them fired.Composed mostly of students at UT Austin, the group also actively encourages the harassment of conservative students, having praised the destruction of signs and tactics of physical intimidation during the pro-Kavanaugh demonstrations."

She Accused Them Of Rape. Every Witness Present Said No Sexual Contact Occurred. They Were Both Expelled. - "In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a judge in Tennessee has ruled that even a private college must provide basic due process rights to students accused of sexual assault... One witness, J.H., told campus investigators that he was with J.S. the entire time and would have seen if something happened, but he didn’t.C.S. didn't even identify J.S. (who has brought this particular lawsuit against the university) during interviews with campus investigators. She was not the one who reported the incident to the school. Rhodes opened the investigation on its own."