Links - 25th August 2019 (1)

Here’s how you can report errant PMD riders in S’pore with your phone from July 31, 2019 - "If you’ve ever wanted to report an errant personal mobility device (PMD) or personal assisted bicycle (PAB) user for breaking the road traffic rules, you’ll soon have the chance. This is thanks to a new feature on the government’s MyTransport.SG mobile app, that will be launching on July 31."

A sea change for sexual conduct on campus - "“Respondents overwhelmingly agreed that due process is necessary for those accused of the heinous crime of sexual assault. Sixty-five percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Republicans, and 67 percent of Independents told researchers they agreed with the statement: ‘Students accused of crimes on college campuses should receive the same civil liberties protections from their colleges that they receive in the court system.’”"

Opinion | I’m a Democrat and a Feminist. And I Support Betsy DeVos’s Title IX Reforms. - The New York Times - "the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, ruling in a case from Michigan, declared that if a public university adjudicates what is essentially a “he said, she said” case, “the university must give the accused student or his agent an opportunity to cross-examine the accuser and adverse witnesses in the presence of a neutral fact-finder.” This year, two California appellate courts have overturned university decisions to suspend students for committing sexual assault because their procedures were so lacking in basic due process... Under the rules set up by the Obama administration, hundreds of colleges, including many in California, were placed under federal investigation and threatened with the loss of funding for failing to adequately investigate sexual assault complaints. The definition of what constituted an assault was vastly expanded. Nonpunitive resolutions such as mediation were forbidden, even if that is what both sides wanted... The Office of Civil Rights does not collect data on race in Title IX cases, but the little we know is disturbing: An analysis of assault accusations at Colgate, for example, found that while only 4.2 percent of the college’s students were black in the 2012-13 school year, 50 percent of the sexual-violation accusations reported to the school were against black students, and blacks made up 40 percent of the students who went through the formal disciplinary process.We have long over-sexualized, over-criminalized and disproportionately punished black men. It should come as no surprise that, in a setting in which protections for the accused are greatly diminished, this shameful legacy persists."

Ideologues react hysterically to the Trump administration’s suggested reforms to campus-rape tribunals. - "the feminist establishment has reacted with hysteria, characterizing the draft regulation as an assault on sexual-assault “survivors.” Maintenance of the campus-rape myth, it turns out, is incompatible with due process. Whether feminism itself is compatible with Enlightenment values appears increasingly doubtful... In 2014, a Title IX officer at Washington and Lee University issued a lugubrious warning to a male student—“a lawyer can’t help you here”—before expelling him for sexual assault. The proposed Education Department regulation tries to end these abuses. Ironically, in an administration regularly charged with ignoring the law, the DOE has carefully followed the legal framework for promulgating new federal rules. The 2011 Obama guidance was issued as a fait accompli; Donald Trump’s DOE, by contrast, is giving the public the opportunity to comment on the proposed rule before it becomes final. And the feminist establishment is responding as it does to any challenge to its ideological hegemony: with an attack of the vapors. The manager of Know Your IX, an advocacy group, first heard about the new regulation in a grocery store and sank to the ground in shock... What the advocates really mean is that defendants should have essentially no rights... Any cross-examination is “likely to jeopardize the rights and safety of student survivors,” the Center for American Progress announced. The senior legal counsel for the Victim Rights Law Center explained to the Chronicle of Higher Education that “rape is about power and control and not about sexual desire. Therefore, it is a bad idea to give the person with the power even more power to intimidate and hurt the victim.”... The narcissism that sees cross–examination as simply about “intimidating” the victim rather than about establishing the truth is typical of feminist identity politics, whereby all ideas are judged by one litmus test: are they good or bad for females?... Being convicted of campus rape is no big deal, say the activists, so why force an accuser to establish her case by “clear and convincing evidence?” These are the same avengers who have destroyed careers over a pat on the butt or a predilection for adolescent sexual humor. Yet we are supposed to believe that they will let bygones be bygones when a student falsely convicted of campus rape tries to enter the job market... Many of [the proposed] measures—such as escorts and increased security and monitoring of certain areas of the campus—play into the fiction that predatory rapists furtively roam college grounds, hoping to pounce in the dark. In fact, most of the “rapes” in question are foreseeable and avoidable events, the result of deliberate participation in drunken hook-ups with a chosen partner."

Fairness For All Students Under Title IX - "Four feminist law professors at Harvard Law School have called on the U.S. Department of Education to revise the previous Administration’s policies on sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus. In a memo submitted to the Education Department yesterday, they set out an agenda of fairness for all students, accusers and accused. In recent years the Education Department has pressured colleges and universities to adopt overbroad definitions of wrongdoing that are unfair to both men and women, and to set up procedures for handling complaints that are deeply skewed against the accused and also unfair to accusers.Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk Gersen, Elizabeth Bartholet, and Nancy Gertner are professors at Harvard Law School who have researched, taught, and written on Title IX, sexual harassment, sexual assault, and feminist legal reform. They were four of the signatories to the statement of twenty-eight Harvard Law School professors, published in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2014, that criticized Harvard University’s newly adopted sexual harassment policy as “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused” and “in no way required by Title IX law or regulation.” Janet Halley said “The college process needs legitimacy to fullyaddress campus sexual assault. Now is the time to build in respect for fairness and due process, academic freedom, and sexual autonomy.”"

The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones - "The appeal of a show that routinely kills major characters signals a different kind of storytelling, where a single charismatic and/or powerful individual, along with his or her internal dynamics, doesn’t carry the whole narrative and explanatory burden. Given the dearth of such narratives in fiction and in TV, this approach clearly resonated with a large fan base that latched on to the show.In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life... We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error."

8 Psychological Tricks of Restaurant Menus - "“paradox of choice,” which says that the more options we have, the more anxiety we feel. The golden number? Seven options per food category... “When we include over seven items, a guest will be overwhelmed and confused, and when they get confused they’ll typically default to an item they’ve had before”... Including a nice-looking picture alongside a food item increases sales by 30 percent... "If you crowd too many photos, it starts to cheapen the perception of the food,” Allen says. “The more items that are photographed on the menu, the guest perception is of a lower quality.” Most high-end restaurants avoid photos to maintain a perceived level of fanciness... making price tags as inconspicuous as possible. “We get rid of dollar signs because that’s a pain point,” says Allen. “They remind people they’re spending money.” Instead of $12.00 for that club sandwich, you’re likely to see it listed as 12.00, or even just 12. One Cornell University study found that written-out prices (“twelve dollars”) also encourage guests to spend more... “$9.95 I’ve found is a friendlier price than a $10, which has attitude to it.”... “Nested” pricing, or listing the price discretely after the meal description in the same size font, so your eyes just glide right over it... include an incredibly expensive item near the top of the menu, which makes everything else seem reasonably priced... Slightly more expensive items (so long as they still fall within the boundaries of what the customer is willing to pay) also suggest the food is of higher quality... Just like supermarkets put profitable items at eye level, restaurants design their menus to make the most of your gaze. The upper right corner is prime real estate, Rapp explains. “The upper right is where a person will go on a blank sheet of paper or in a magazine,” he says. That’s where the most profitable items usually go. “Then we build the appetizers on the upper left and salads underneath that. You want to keep the menu flowing well.”Another trick is to create space around high-profit items by putting them in boxes or otherwise separating them from the rest of the options... one review suggests that red stimulates the appetite, while yellow draws in our attention. “The two combined are the best food coloring pairings”... Longer, more detailed descriptions sell more food. Nearly 30 percent more, according to one Cornell study. “The more copy you write on the menu item, the less it costs in a customer’s mind because you’re giving them more for their money,” explains Rapp. So plain old “chocolate pudding” becomes “satin chocolate pudding.” Customers also rated the more thoroughly described food as tasting better... They make you feel nostalgic"

When Vagrants Go Viral - "Chinese social media has a habit of making homeless individuals "famous"—with unintended consequences"

The Conservative Manifesto Buried in 'Avengers: Endgame' - "Black Panther—which Slate described as “the most feminist superhero movie yet”—is about the hereditary monarch of a monoracial ethno-state that keeps immigrants at bay with a high-tech border wall and faces no economic slowdown because of it. In fact, Wakanda becomes the richest country in the world without any international trade whatsoever, all while maintaining traditional religious customs and above-replacement fertility rates—a kind of black Israel. (It does eventually reconcile itself to foreign aid under T’Challa, but not to immigration.) Trouble only begins when Killmonger (a foreigner) challenges Black Panther’s claim to the throne—not because he thinks the current occupant is illegitimate, but because he wants to use Wakandan technology to launch a global, race-based revolution, with no regard for national boundaries.Then in Avengers: Infinity War, Wakanda opens its border wall and promptly gets invaded by aliens.So perhaps it is fitting that Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel movie to end all Marvel movies, is even more Burkean—and badass—than its predecessors, a sustained cinematic rejoinder to everything Hollywood believes... Thanos is just one shade darker than Planned Parenthood—another magenta Moloch—whose acolytes justify abortion with strikingly similar logic: If a woman can’t give her child a comfortable life, the thinking goes—comfort as defined by elites—then maybe terminating it in utero is actually a kindness: to the child, which is saved a lifetime of suffering, and to society, which is saved a lifetime of palliative care"

Andy Ngo on Twitter - "The blurring of the line between mainstream & extremist Islam: a preacher inside the al-Aqsa mosque gives a sermon on how Muslims will establish a caliphate, lay siege to Rome, take over the White House, & impose a tax on infidels."
Transcript: Al-Aqsa Mosque Address by Abu Hanifa Awda: We Will Lay Siege to Rome, Turn White House Black, Impose Jizya Tax on London, and Pray on the Slopes of the Rockies and Andes | MEMRI TV

The moral panic over homophobia - "Once, there were moral panics over homosexuality. Now there’s a moral panic over homophobia. Consider the way in which the grotesque attack on a lesbian couple on a London bus has been used to promote the idea that LGBT people live in a state of existential danger. It comes straight from the moral-panic and crime-panic playbook: one nasty, shocking crime is used to depict society as a hotbed of rough, unenlightened beasts whose backward attitudes – in this case on homosexuality – threaten to tear apart the social fabric itself. A horrible incident carried out by five people becomes elevated into a symbol of evil that society as a whole must organise itself against... There is something nauseating about the way in which gay-rights groups and political observers held up this crime as typical, as an ordinary event in a society like ours that is apparently riddled with homophobia... the vast majority of that alleged 80 per cent surge in ‘attacks’ on gay people – which comes from a Stonewall / YouGov survey of 5,000 LGBT people in Britain – were instances of being ‘insulted, pestered, intimidated or harassed’. Nobody deserves to experience such rude behaviour, but let’s be honest about what such a broad, verbal-based category of ‘attack’ could include – everything from being called a name on Twitter to being pestered for a snog by some drunken idiot in a bar. Eighty-seven per cent of respondents said they had been pestered or insulted, while 11 per cent said they had been physically assaulted. Even this, however, is contradicted by a far larger survey of LGBT people carried out by the government, which involved 108,000 people, not just 5,000. The results were published in February. They suggest that two per cent had experienced physical violence, while 26 per cent had experienced verbal harassment, including ‘hurtful comments’... Everyone receives hurtful comments for one reason or another. And given that opposition to same-sex marriage is now considered bigotry, and saying that men cannot become women has been rebranded as transphobia, it is very likely that many of these hurtful comments or insults involved people merely expressing a particular political, moral or religious opinion about gay lifestyles or transgender issues... what we are witnessing is a classical example of ‘crime construction’ – the inflation of statistics to give the impression that a particular kind of crime is out of control. It used to be people on the right who did this, with their carefully constructed moral and crime panics about football hooligans or black muggers. Now it is increasingly done by people who are ostensibly on the left, who see hate crime everywhere, who think homophobia is rampant, who think speech is bigotry and sometimes even criminal, and who think Brexit has unleashed unprecedented levels of anti-social violence. In all these instances, crime has been overblown in order to construct an elitist, moralistic message about the vulnerability of certain identity groups and the wickedness of the uneducated, un-PC, dangerous throng"