Links - 2nd December 2019 (2)

Malcolm Gladwell's 'Talking to Strangers' Doesn't Say Much - "his attitude to social science remains unquestioning. When he encounters a study published in a journal with a complicated name, he defaults to swallowing it whole. At times he approaches self-parody. Just follow the footnotes... Gladwell often builds his arguments from other peoples’ sketchy statistical manipulations and the far-fetched results he’s managed to cull from social-science journals. The data, taken uncritically, served to buttress anecdotes that were intended to dramatize some general truth about the human animal. What’s new in Talking to Strangers is that Gladwell doesn’t use these bits of pseudo-science to point to any larger lessons. It seems he’s no longer trying to explain much of anything. By book’s end, the best he can do is counsel a sense of realism about what we can and cannot know—a kind of epistemological modesty... Talking to Strangers can also be seen as an advance for the author—an unexpected step in the right direction. Rather than offering made-up rules and biases and effects, Gladwell has chosen to issue a plea, asking that we recognize how difficult it is for us to understand one another. Of course, if Malcolm Gladwell had practiced epistemological humility for the past 20 years, he would have sold millions fewer books."

Imam of Peace on Twitter - "I sat in front of Tommy for over an hour. He had EVERY opportunity to attack me, but didn’t. He was actually interested in what I had to say even though he disagreed with most of it. Let’s disagree peacefully and move on. “Far-Right Extremist” is a lie—He’s actually a Liberal."

Couples who have sex weekly are happiest: More sex may not always make you happier, according to new research - "Although more frequent sex is associated with greater happiness, this link was no longer significant at a frequency of more than once a weekthese findings were specific to people in romantic relationships and in fact, there was no association between sexual frequency and wellbeing for single people... Sex may be more strongly associated with happiness than is money... there was a larger difference in happiness between people who had sex less than once a month compared to people who had sex once a week than between people who had an income of $15,000-$25,000 compared to people who had an income of $50,000-$75,000 per year... There wasn't a strong link between sexual frequency and overall life satisfaction"

Sexism vs cultural imperialism - ""Does physician gender have a significant impact on first-pass success rate of emergency endotracheal intubation?" and showed the abstract which began,
    It is unknown whether female physicians can perform equivalently to male physicians with respect to emergency procedures...
The first thing that struck me was the author affiliations - both are associated with hospitals in Seoul, South Korea... It hardly seems a stretch, therefore, to assume that female Korean doctors experience persistent sexism in their work. And here we have a doctor at the beginning of her career trying to tackle that sexism by providing incontrovertible evidence that she and her female colleagues are every bit as capable of performing a life-saving procedure as her male colleagues... They spent 3 years (2013-2016) collecting data and it's taken until now to get it analysed and through peer review to be published. This isn't something cobbled together one night over beers.It finally gets published online, gets spotted by someone on Twitter and all hell breaks loose. No matter the cries of people who try to provide context. it's apparently been decided that the paper is sexism at its worst and must be stopped.So now we have a woman at the start of her career who was probably incredibly proud that she’d not only got a paper published, but in an international journal and on a subject that matters to her and her colleagues.  Her paper might even reduce the sexism they face every time they perform an intubation. And she’s worked with an established male researcher who has used his position of authority to help guide this paper to publication because he’s aware that the sexism in Korea is rife and needs challenging. These are two people doing good work that should be celebrated and applauded.But instead we have this... Feminists who support equality and want women to enter into traditionally-male fields have forced a woman at the beginning of her career to withdraw a paper from publication because it wasn't framed the way they wanted. This paper could have been the ammunition female physicians around Korea needed to shut their sexist colleagues up when they attempted to perform an intubation but instead they'll have nothing... Just because it's published in an American journal doesn't mean the primary audience is American and to impose American moral frames is cultural imperialism. No one has disputed the evidence, only the way it was framed."
Apparently in science there are questions that you're not allowed to ask - even if the answers are politically correct

U.K. Politician David Smith, Advocate For Gender Neutral Bathrooms, Charged With 9 Counts Of Child Sex Offenses - "According to a report published on July 15th, 2019 on the BBC, the 30-year-old Smith resigned from the Conservative party when the allegations first appeared, but he’s claiming that he’s innocent.Smith stated that the charges against him are “spurious” and that he will fight them, telling the media outlet... it looks like this is yet another entry for the SJW Sexual Misdonduct master list, which seems to grow at a steady clip each month."

Policewoman who revealed the truth about Rochdale sex gangs breaks her silence - "On July 7, 2005, four home-grown terrorists had exploded bombs in London, killing 52 people and injuring almost 800. The last entry on the Augusta database had been made on July 6 — and the operation had been shut down the following month. To the police, I believe, revealing the extent of child grooming of white girls by Muslim men would have been akin to adding petrol to an already inflammatory situation.By shutting down the operation, the police could avoid accusations of Islamophobia and the threat of riots on the streets... There was a lot of boasting from the abusers about ‘chilling with white girls’. Indeed, looking back, I believe strongly that we should have brought in a ‘racially aggravated’ element to the investigation. There was no doubt these girls were being targeted for their ethnicity — and the perception that white girls are ‘easy’... My heart ached for Ruby as she named the men and identified where they’d taken her. At one address, they kept a list of 20 names on the back of the door. Each man would tick a box to say he’d had sex, and then leave cash in a paedophile ‘honesty’ box for use of the premises... Only one white girl was abused at a time, no doubt because a lone child is more vulnerable and easier to control. There are also no witnesses should she one day decide to cry rape."

MAGGIE OLIVER reveals what happened after she exposed the Rochdale grooming gang - "one of the Operation Span officers came out of the meeting and walked over to my desk. ‘I can’t believe it, Maggie,’ she said. ‘They say they’re not going to use Amber any more.’‘What!’ I looked at her with astonishment.‘They’re saying she could undermine other witnesses,’ she continued. ‘I honestly can’t believe it.’Unfortunately, I could. The police already had form on pulling back from prosecuting Asian paedophiles.By ignoring what Amber had said on tape [the tapes], and all the evidence to back up her allegations, they’d hit on a convenient way to reduce the number of Asian defendants.Why? Because the people at the top perceived the ethnicity of the offenders and the low status of poor white girls as a toxic mix. I’d go further: by putting fewer Muslim defendants in the dock, the police calculated they’d be less likely to incite accusations of Islamophobia.After six months of work, after pursuing Amber on the direct orders of senior officers, after all the gold-plated assurances we’d given the sisters that they could trust us this time — well, here we were again.Yet Amber’s evidence made it impossible to pretend that there wasn’t an epidemic of abuse in Rochdale. How could I, as a police officer, live with that knowledge?... ‘senior officers make the decisions, and as a detective constable, you do as you’re told. Simple as that. You carry out orders — and if you can’t do that, then maybe you’re in the wrong job.’I couldn’t help thinking back to a recent speech by the Manchester Chief Constable, in which he’d said the police should always ‘do the right thing’ and ‘challenge policies when we think they are wrong’.That was precisely what I was doing, but it wasn’t getting me anywhere.It was at this point that I had a light-bulb moment: my loyalty, I realised without a shadow of doubt, belonged to the children. And so I started raising my concerns with everyone I could think of, including the Chief Constable himself. He replied with a bland email. In the end, my only recourse was to go through the police’s grievance procedure.Among the things I pointed out in my complaint was my belief that Manchester police were ‘knowingly failing in their duty to properly investigate horrendous crimes . . . and as a result we are allowing offenders to escape justice and failing to protect the most vulnerable in our society’.The verdict? ‘No case to answer.’... Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, there was a horrific development.The Crown Prosecution Service had belatedly realised that they did need some of Amber’s evidence for the trial, after all. Unfortunately, they had alienated her to the point where they knew she wouldn’t help.So they did something utterly inhumane. They listed Amber as an offender so that some of what she’d said on tape could be used in court. To cap it all, they didn’t even tell her.This meant Amber couldn’t have access to legal representation and had no chance of defending herself. I’d never heard of anything like this in my life; nor has any lawyer I’ve spoken to since."

Bishop to spray holy water over city from helicopter in mass exorcism of 'demons' this weekend - "A Catholic bishop will spray holy water over an entire city from a military helicopter in an attempt to conquer the demons he believes are plaguing it.Monsignor Rubén Darío Jaramillo Montoya will perform the mass exorcism for the Colombian seaport of Buenaventura during the city’s annual patron saints’ festivities."

Meet Wrinkles the Clown, the Real-Life Pennywise Who Scared Kids Into Behaving - "In 2014, a couple of fed-up parents in southern Florida paid Wrinkles the Clown to hide under their unruly daughter’s bed. Wrinkles was to scare her so that they could spend the rest of her young life threatening to bring him back if she ever put another toe out of line... “No one was hiring me when I was just a regular clown”"

If you love milk chocolate, but don’t like dark chocolate, you actually like sugar more than chocolate. : Showerthoughts - "If you like pickles but dont like cucumbers you actually like vinegar more than cucumbers."
"If you like roasted chicken but not raw chicken, you actually like the heat from your oven more than chicken."

martin lucky charms jr on Twitter - "The cool part about the increasing popularity of both the clinical language of abuse and astrology is that we’ve created a world where you can be accused of gaslighting by someone who thinks the planets told them to cheat on you"

Karen McGrane on Twitter - "Unpopular opinion: your just-for-fun flirtation with astrology apps is normalizing belief in anti-scientific bullshit that undermines important, life-and-death public health and policy debates."
"@seldo Unpopular opinion: hating on astrology is masculine distaste for female-coded interest in emotions and psychology which feeds misogyny that denies women access to scientific spaces"
"Everybody I know who talks about astrology is a gay man so that interpretation has never occurred to me."

Does pizza protect against cancer? - "We analyzed the potential role of pizza on cancer risk, using data from an integrated network of case-control studies conducted in Italy between 1991 and 2000. Cancer sites were: oral cavity and pharynx (598 cases), esophagus (304 cases), larynx (460 cases), colon (1,225 cases) and rectum (728 cases). Controls were 4,999 patients admitted for acute, non-neoplastic conditions to the same hospital network as cases. Odds ratios for regular pizza consumers were 0.66 (95% confidence interval, CI = 0.47-0.93) for oral and pharyngeal cancer, 0.41 (95% CI = 0.25-0.69) for oesophageal, 0.82 (95% CI = 0.56-1.19) for laryngeal, 0.74 (95% CI = 0.61-0.89) for colon and 0.93 (95% CI = 0.75-1.17) for rectal cancer. Pizza appears therefore to be a favorable indicator of risk for digestive tract neoplasms in this population."

Mark on Twitter - "The world in 2019
Women have penises, men have periods
Temperature change is a climate crisis
Real socialism has never been tried
Authoritarianism is liberalism
You cant be racist to white people
Democracy is voting till you get the right result
Disagree? You're a Nazi"

【 奇正武術論壇 】 - "左鈎拳" (funny animated GIF)

on Twitter - "I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You, as a black man, cannot be pro black while dating/marrying/procreating with non black women. It cannot be. These rules do not apply to black women because the men outside the race who date them are surrendering privilege."
How convenient. You'd almost think this was working backwards from a conclusion