links for 2009-04-27
April 27, 2009-
What's fascinating here is how much of the conversation is determined by class. If a poor woman has sex for money, particularly if she's of color or trans, she's a "streetwalker," a whore, a criminal, a victim, unrapeable, subhuman, stupid, etcetera: all those comfortable cliches we don't really need to address because sex workers aren't anyone we'd know and definitely no-one we need to worry about. If a middle-class or comfortably wealthy girl does it (there's a reason why those "Hipster Hooker" and virgin-auction stories always focus on how very college-educated and middle-class and white and cisgendered and just, well, normal the women are) there's a solid chance that the words "sex worker" or "prostitute" will not even be mentioned in the story…
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7) YOUR VIRGINITY IS A PRECIOUS GIFT FROM BABY JESUS. For that reason, don't have sex until you are ready to not act like a complete tool about it afterwards. Baby Jesus doesn't want to overhear you talking about how you banged [X], possibly in the butt (no, you didn't), and it was awesome. Baby Jesus, like the rest of us, is not that impressed.
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Why did it take six days and citizen journalism to shed light on Ian Tomlinson's death? Nick Davies examines the role of the Independent Police Complaints Commission and asks who the media can trust
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Even in Econ 101, the direct inefficiency associated with setting prices above marginal cost is only part of the story. When government interference sets the price of any product above its marginal cost, it also creates the opportunity for monopoly rents—extra profits due to artificial scarcity. The rents cause producers to engage in wasteful activities that will maximize the value of their share of excess profits. These activities include lobbying politicians, pursuing expensive legal actions, advertising and marketing, and in the case of prescription drugs and medical equipment and supplies, possibly withholding relevant data on effectiveness and safety. As economic theory predicts, all of these forms of rent-seeking thrive in abundance in the pharmaceutical and medical supply industries.
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Icaro Doria is Brazilian, 25 and has been working for the magazine Grande Reportagem, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the last 3 years. He was the author of the flags campaign "Meet the World" that has been circulating the earth in chain letters via e-mail.
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Pascoe herself, who spent 18 months studying the culture in a Northern California high school, says that the boys there "have the sense that to be a man means something and is incredibly important … To not be a man is to not be fully human and that's terrifying." To not be a man is to not be fully human. To be gay is to be nothing. In case anyone was unclear on the connection between homophobia and misogyny, there you go.
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Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Skepticism and Criticism of Eugene Kanin’s Study Of False Rape Reports[Shorter Amp: Eugene Kanin famously found that 41%, or perhaps 50%, of rapes reported to police are false. Kanin's study is both badly designed and unverifiable; more reliable studies have found that between 2% and 8% of rapes reported to police are false reports.]
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And no, misogynistic defense attorneys who use rape myths in court to defend rapists aren’t actually that stupid; the problem is, they’re really, really smart. Smart enough to make this bullshit work. So I thought about it some more. What could she be trying to gain
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That study by the American Prosecutors Research Institute (pdf) that is so swiftly glossed over actually does an excellent job of debunking the bullshit Kanin study. You should take the time to read it. It not only points out that that research which is actually methodically and rigorously done shows false reporting rates consistently in the 2% to 8% area.
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None of these countries uses a government-run, Medicare-like health insurance plan. They all rely on purely private, nonprofit or for-profit insurers that are goaded by tight regulation to work toward socially desired ends. And they do so at average per-capita health-care costs far below those of the United States — costs in Germany and the Netherlands are less than half of those here.
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It obscures, rather than clarifies the tax incidence, and it's pretty clearly a political choice. We tax estates. Estates used to belong to dead people. But we're not taxing death; we're recognizing that when someone inherits, they're experiencing a material gain. There's no reason that that sort of income should be exempt from tax. So we tax the estate.
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They say America is divided, but John Oliver has never seen it more unified than at the Obama and Palin rallies.
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James Dobson accuses Barack Obama of distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview.
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But the question is: do we actually want to live in a country where banks lose money on stupid loans and make it up by socking the poor with exorbitant fees? (It’s not the rich who generally pay those $35 overdraft fees.)
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With the rampant white-collar crime, Larry Wilmore says even Republicans don't trust white people anymore.
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In his book The Myth of Political Correctness, John K. Wilson had a chapter entitled ‘Conservative Correctness’ which argues that the political attacks on PC in the US education system that began in the 1990’s are in fact an attempt to impose a conservative agenda through the tactic of labelling opposition as restrictive, ultra-left-wing madness.
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There is a strain of British conservatism that is inherently self-pitying and conspiratorial. Ed West is the equivalent of leftists who claim that democracy is no better than fascism. But while such pseudo-radicals are regularly and rightly laughed out of town, anti-PC hysteria is widely accepted in public life. It is unchallenged. It is a major factor in the resurgence of the far right. It will get worse as the recession deepens and the crowd starts looking for people to throw on the bonfire. Political correctness gone mad is the singular mainstream conspiracy theory.
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Knowing that 30% of domestic violence starts or increases during pregnancy, and I haven’t been asked about domestic violence once, is frightening. This could be the one opportunity where someone could help. I may not know of Women’s Aid, or Refuge, or that the perpetrator’s behaviour towards me is anything other than ‘normal’. My life and my child’s life could be at risk. It isn’t, but my midwife doesn’t know that if she doesn’t ask, does she?
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Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was found guily of human rights violations, specifically the deaths of 25 people during his administration, torture and kidnapping. The guilty verdict earned Fujimori 25 years in prison, a sentence that his daughter Keiko said during an interview with Jorge Ramos on Univision’s Al Punto was equivalent to a life sentence due to his age. While Alberto Fujimori plans an appeal and his daughter is thinking of running for president, another one of his war crimes hasn’t been brought up, mass sterilizations of indigenous women and men.
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Most hostages survived their ordeal, Fletcher said, although relationships, marriages, and careers were often lost. Some found, as John McCain did, that the experience even strengthened them. Yet none saw solitary confinement as anything less than torture. This presents us with an awkward question: If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?
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Thus a model where luck is the driving force tends to yield a more progressive optimal tax than a model where ability is the driving force. This is about as far as theory can take us, but it highlights the critical question: How much income results from ability and how much from luck?
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This calls out for an explanation. I think we can ignore antisemitic stupidities about Jews and money or conspiracies to control the world’s wealth. There isn’t an obvious political angle either, since Jewish or half-Jewish economists come in all stripes, from Hayek and Friedman to at least two of the contributors to this blog and, of course, Marx himself.
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The excellent and much-respected Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild of the USA and Professor of Law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, has discovered that waterboarding was first approved in July 2002 by Condoleeza Rice, specifically to force confessions of links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein.
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There was another agenda at play as well in the early years of the federal income tax: the desire to use progressive taxation as a way to “ stave off more radical calls for industrial democracy.” 97 This explains why even some high-income Republican groups supported the Sixteenth Amendment.98 Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury in the 1920s and one of the wealthiest Americans, “ believed that keeping tax schedules graduated (albeit flatter) would mitigate radical demands for restructuring the capitalist system.” 9
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I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the Tories, at least those around Cameron, don’t actually want power any more. It scares them. They’re frit. Cameron is supposed to have Blairised the Tories. But Blairism was essentially the idea that all fundamental economic questions had been settled and that government was simply a matter of deciding how to take advantage of the fact. It’s essentially an ideology for the good times, or at least one based on the idea that the good times would just roll on endlessly. Now the system’s run itself off the rails Cameron doesn’t really have a clue what to do, though he seems to be leaning towards the idea of entrenching a fully fledged Hooverite depression out of not much more than sheer panic.
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Right now, I'm thinking this might look like a bad flu season rather than 12 Monkeys. In fact, I'm really pretty sure of that one. So rather than think about this as OMG how am I going to survive the Apocalypse, think about what you'd want to be comfy if you're stuck at home for little while.
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Nonetheless, the Mexico City outbreak has a few traits which are (and should be) ringing early warning bells among experts — not ZOMG WE'RE ALL GONNA DIEEEEE, but "Let's watch this one really closely":
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There just isn’t any scientific evidence, beyond a few dubious anecdotes, to show that torture works. Obviously more research is needed on the subject to know for sure, but here’s the killer point. Torture is an extreme method, and before we even reach the ethical and moral debate over its use, the effectiveness of it must be demonstrated to some reasonable degree. The burden of proof lies with the people who seek to torture. And it’s not like they don’t have plenty of past experience to draw data from.
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The worst thing for the world economy would be to assume the worst is over
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Those who agree with this ayatollah that this isn't a rape law, including some "wives must always say yes" Christians, are practicing one of the most common forms of rape denial. For them it's not rape if the rapist doesn't follow the scary monster rapist mold.
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But one very good reason why a young woman might not be able to believe such a thing of her clean-cut, middle-class, white boyfriend is that every time something like this happens, everybody acts like it's about the most shocking thing in the world. We somehow forget not only "preppie murderer" Robert Chambers but Ted Bundy, who was famously handsome and charming. We forget that most serial killers are average-looking white dudes no one suspected. We forget that the normal-looking murderer is well-worn pop culture motif, from Dexter to "Law and Order" to Wednesday Addams wearing her everyday clothes to a costume party and explaining, "I'm a homicidal maniac. We look just like everyone else." As soon as the news breaks that another quiet, unassuming white guy whose mama loves him has murdered somebody, the mass amnesia sets in. How could someone who looks like that have done something so horrible?
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So here's my question about this nasty little attack, wrapped as it is in oh-so-reasonable sounding Guardian language.
What if we were talking about disabled people? They cost us far more money than us non-disabled folks, with all those extra health bills, not to mention all the changes we're forced to make to public buildings so they can get in. All those ramps, handles, automatic doors and disabled toilets cost a fortune.
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TAX CUTS.
