- Critics See Efforts by Counties and Towns to Purge Minority Voters From Rolls – The New York Times
The logic of the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision was that we no longer needed the preclearance mandate in this day and age. But Republicans have been proving the Supreme Court wrong all over the country by trying to keep minority voters from voting. They haven’t changed at all since the 1960s. (Indirect link.) - Everyday Feminism Is Bad At Feminist Theory Again | Thing of Things
“But this article adopts entirely the wrong approach. I want men to become less sexist because I think it will help other people, yes. But I also want them to become less sexist because I think it will help them.” - Hillary, Bernie, and the DNC: Dirty tricks?
Cathy Young examines the arguments that Hillary stole the election from Bernie, and finds them underwhelming. - Wild Gorillas Groom U.S. Tourist in Uganda
“Local rangers were also stumped, telling King that, while baby gorillas sometimes interact with humans, the rangers had never known adult animals to take such an interest.” - Pirate Printers: Shirts and Totes Printed Directly on Urban Utility Covers
- Hitting people is not “soft”: Reporting and police tactics « Now Face North
- To Diet Or Not Diet: Science Weighs In
I’d heard of this study before, but I didn’t know about Judith Stern’s role in it before. Reassuring if true. - The Sitcom Trope About Fat People That’s Way More F*cked Up Than You Might Think — Everyday Feminism
The trope in question is having a former fat character played by a thin person (the most famous example being Monica from Friends). I thought the author’s point about how this reinforces a “your life begins after you get thin” thought process was very interesting. - The strange case of Marina Joyce and internet hysteria | Technology | The Guardian
A popular Youtube makeup blogger’s fans decided that she was being held hostage and forced to make videos selling dresses. - Humpback whales around the globe are mysteriously rescuing animals from orcas | MNN – Mother Nature Network
A much more scientific discussion of this here. - The Secret To KFC’s “Eleven Secret Herbs and Spices” Is That There Are Only Four Not-So-Secret Ingredients | JONATHAN TURLEY
- Sargon of Akkad launches petition to save free speech by censoring SJW professors :: We Hunted The Mammoth
Over 80,000 people signed the petition, which says something about how strong anti-free-speech sentiment among anti-SJWs can be. Admittedly, this petition is too inept to be dangerous. - Trump’s Indecent Proposal — Crooked Timber
What can McCarthy and “have you no sense of decency” tell us about Trump and this moment? - What Happens if Trump Drops Out?
- Report: GOP Strategists Hoping to Distance Trump From Downticket
- Texas to execute man for sitting in a truck while his friend unexpectedly murdered someone in a store.
Also, yet more evidence that the death penalty has no deterrent effect. - Social justice, shipping, and ideology: when fandom becomes a crusade, things get ugly – Vox
- Obamacare Appears to Be Making People Healthier – The New York Times
Interesting study treating Texas’ refusal to expand Medicaid as a “natural experiment.” (Indirect link). - Mercy in the Age of Mandatory Minimums | Cato Institute
- Mercedes-Benz Reportedly Working On Line Of Electric Vehicles To Take On Tesla – Consumerist
- Minnesota Carpet Cleaning Business Sues US Olympic Committee Over Its Ridiculous Social Media Rules | Techdirt
- “I wasn’t expecting to burst into tears:” the surprisingly emotional experience of Clinton’s nomination – Vox
- Your kid is way more likely to be poisoned by crayons than by marijuana – The Washington Post
- Language Policing: Intersectionality | Thing of Things
- Only 20 Percent Of Voters Are ‘Real Americans‘ | FiveThirtyEight
- Innovation and Its Enemies
“People almost never reject technological progress out of sheer ignorance. Rather, they fight to protect their own interests and livelihoods, whether that be operating a dairy farm or running a government.” - Study: Top Bank Execs Saw the Crisis Coming and Sold Their Company’s Shares | naked capitalism
- Senator Tim Scott’s Speech on Race and Policing – The Atlantic
- Box Turtle Bulletin » Today In History: 1962: New York’s WBAI Radio Broadcasts Talk Show Featuring Eight Gay Men
- Consent and Altsex Cultures | Thing of Things
- Climate scientists are under attack from frivolous lawsuits | Lauren Kurtz | Environment | The Guardian
- End Needless Interactions With Police Officers During Traffic Stops – The Atlantic
- Giving up on the “American Dream”? – Open City
Interesting article featuring brief interviews with Asian immigrant street merchants. - Future of Film I: Why Summer 2013 was Destined for Losses – Liam Boluk | Ivey Business Review
This longform 2014 article, about the economics behind the increasing dominance of ultra-expensive “tentpole” films in movie offerings (even though many of them are expensive flops), is really interesting and still applicable. - Ethics Hero: Angela Martin, As St. Paul Strangers Prevent A Suicide | Ethics Alarms
- Is Watching Gymnastics Worse Than being an NFL Fan?
Includes some stunning photographs of elite female gymnasts by Andres Kudacki, including the photo of Madison Kocian seen below. - At the 2016 Rio Olympics, What to Make of the Bedazzled Femininity and Ferocious Athleticism That Defines Women’s Gymnastics? – The Atlantic
Madison Kocian competes on the balance beamr during the U.S. women’s gymnastics championships, Friday, June 24, 2016, in St. Louis. (Photo/Andres Kudacki)
Hooray, a link to me writing about a pet peeve!
On the theme of interesting articles about women’s gymnastics and how it’s covered, I liked this one. Not least because I learned a bunch of things about gymnastics from it! It’s puzzling that the powers-that-be think that ignorant viewers wouldn’t want to learn anything from the commentators about a sport that they’re watching. Sports are always more interesting to watch when you know something about what’s going on!
From the gymnastics article, in the context of how gymnastics coaching is changing:
I think this line drove home for me how strict gymnastics training is. They talked about pushing through injuries and enforcing diets, coaching through constant criticism and destroying the girl’s self esteem. That’s all awful, and I don’t want to diminish that.
But it boggles my mind that allegedly buying pizza for the team once can be used as a sign of how different things are.
Aren’t most elite sports like that? In every article I’ve ever read about a high-profile Olympic athlete, there’s been a mention of how they’re on a strict diet, with the coach and a dietician telling them exactly what to eat. Gaining or losing a couple of pounds can make a big difference in gymnastics, where you’re throwing your own body weight — you want to find the right balance between having enough muscle and having a low enough weight. (I think that this is why the Chinese team hasn’t been doing too well for the past few Olympics — the Americans and Russians have been training more to the muscular side, and that’s allowing them to do moves that require more power. The Chinese gymnasts are tiny, and have practically no muscle compared to the Americans and Russians, and they can’t do the more powerful moves, though their lighter weights do let them fly really high, but that’s not enough to compensate in points.)
Years ago, back when younger teens could compete (the age limit now is that you have to turn 16 during the Olympic year, or older, and four of the five members of the US team this year are 18 or older), more countries trained for the tiny little graceful flying girls thing, and even back then, the Chinese were pretty notorious for practically starving their gymnasts. For a good look at how things have changed, look at Dominique Moceanu, the favorite of the 1996 Olympics at age 14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s42CWpGADEk and Simone Biles, this year’s favorite, age 19, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o5ObZ5wcwk
Clicking links from Ruchama’s video links (thanks, Ruchama!) led me to this video, which was pretty neat:
The gravity-defying physics of Simone Biles – YouTube
As well as the rules change about how old you have to be to compete, there’s also been significant changes to the scoring rules, which now give a significant advantage to gymnasts who can perform more difficult skills: Don’t see a perfect 10 in Rio? Blame today’s gymnastics scoring system. – The Washington Post
And once the competition is about who can perform the most difficult feats, an athlete like Simone Biles can pull well ahead of her competition. (Sorry if you already knew all this; I’m mentioning it mainly because I find it really interesting.)
Another neat Biles-related link: The Times uses composite photographs to show some of Biles’ moves: Frame by Frame, Moves That Made Simone Biles Unbeatable – The New York Times
As well as the rules change about how old you have to be to compete, there’s also been significant changes to the scoring rules, which now give a significant advantage to gymnasts who can perform more difficult skills: Don’t see a perfect 10 in Rio? Blame today’s gymnastics scoring system. – The Washington Post
One problem with age rules without some other system added on is that you wind up incentivizing the trainers to try to delay the onset of puberty – unless you specifically make the scoring so as not to favor a “pixie-like” body type, the goal will be to get 16-year-olds to have 12-year-old bodies.
I believe I read somewhere that this is one reason they added an “artistic” score to the figure-skating competition – to avoid having it become a young girls’ sport without encouraging people to try and stop puberty (larger breasts and rear ends tend to make it harder to do moves that involve spinning, because more mass is further away from the center of gravity).
And, for one more comparison, this year’s Team China. On average, they weigh something like 20 pounds less than Team USA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE61cYavRSc
And, well, since I linked 2016 and 1996, might as well go back another 20 years, because really, Nadia is a huge part of all of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r4j2iB77aI
The older age limit also probably decreases some of the pressure on the younger girls’ bodies — it’s possible to delay puberty long enough to look like Nadia or Dominique at 14, but a lot less likely for that to work by 16. So, rather than trying to intensively train in order to get to an Olympic level while they’re still tiny, it gives a little space to breathe. Like, missing a couple months from an injury isn’t as big of a thing if you’re not racing the puberty clock. The girls who competed at 14 tended to have a huge growth spurt right after the Olympics, and then had a lot of trouble essentially learning how to move a new body, and were never at that same level again. A lot of the gymnasts who have their first Olympics at 16 or 17 come back for a second one at 20 or 21, and basically look the same, except more muscular.
Regarding #32:
Really? Says who? How many incidents go wrong, and how many incidents discover an outstanding warrant, etc.? Or, as also happens, someone who has just committed a crime? This is a rather glib statement to make without backing it up with actual facts.
A car driving around without a functioning taillight can get someone killed at night. There’s a reason why the law says that your car has to have two functioning taillights. And if people have an expectation that they’ll get stopped for minor problems, they’ll be more likely to maintain their cars and keep them from having major problems. That’s the theory, anyway.
From the citation of Sendhil Mullainathan’s work:
They are being killed disproportionately on the basis of population. But they are NOT being killed disproportionately on the basis of something far more relevant:
A fair consideration of this question requires that the reasons for that should not be glossed over but should be examined in detail. Taking a closer look at the facts reveals that there’s a very good reason why blacks have a very large number of encounters with police officers (proportionate to their percentage of the population) – they commit an equally disproportionate percentage of violent crimes.
The author of the original posting is mixing together two different issues to support his call to stop having the cops stop people for broken taillights, etc. One is what he calls “needless interactions” with police, and the other is the overall question of blacks getting killed by police during those interactions. What that glosses over is the issue of how many people are killed during “needless interactions” and how many are killed during needful interactions; the latter including in my opinion people who are or have just committed felonies or dangerous crimes.
Really? How many? The study this posting cites starts off with “Tamir Rice. Eric Garner. Walter Scott. Michael Brown. Each killing raises a disturbing question: Would any of these people have been killed by police officers if they had been white?” So here we see the killing of Michael Brown, who had just committed a strong-arm robbery and then assaulted a police officer, equated with others for whom it is reasonable to presume that they should NOT have been shot.
This posting appears to me to be trying to support the proposition that police stopping people for broken taillights and other such things carries a risk of injury or death to the people being stopped that outweighs the utility of the stops. But it uses emotional and philosophical statements without providing any facts. How many people are stopped for broken taillights and other such things? How many such stops result in people being found with illegal firearms or weapons, illegal drugs, outstanding warrants, fleeing a crime scene, etc., and how many result in injury or death unrelated to such things? You can’t weigh risk vs. reward without doing a reasonable quantitation of what the risk and reward levels actually are.
RonF, but bold mine:
Nope, for two reasons. First of all, most police interactions are not related to violent crimes–indeed, that’s what post #32 is talking about! And second–for one thing, we can’t know that, because people are less likely to get arrested for crimes if they interact less with police, so this is a bit circular anyway; but, even granted that black people are more likely to commit certain types of violent crimes, the amount of stops is disproportionate. If you haven’t read any summaries of the DoJ report on the Baltimore PD (or the report itself), you really should. Here’s the Atlantic, for example. Two quotes from the report:
And, yes, there are terrible problems with the BPD. But that second statistic, that searches turn up contraband far more often–proportionally–in stops of black people than stops of white people? You can find similar statistics for many police departments.
But you’re doing this, too. You say that black people have more interactions with the police because they commit more violent crimes, and you say you support needful interactions when they involve violent crimes. But you also spend a large part of your comment addressing the plausibility of a need for police interactions for broken taillights. If broken taillights are a reasonable situation for police intervention, then violent crime rates are irrelevant and we shouldn’t see much racial bias in how many people are stopped (since violent criminal offenders are rare). But we do see racial bias.
I’m going to be honest, I’m stunned by this comment. It seems to imply that it IS reasonable to presume that people should be or could be shot for strong-arm robbery and assaulting a police officer. (I’m leaving aside the many objections I could raise to this characterization of what happened.) That’s a horrifying implication. And most police officers would tell you it’s horrifying, too–they’ve got pretty specific rules for when they’re allowed to use lethal force, and most police officers take those rules, and their duty to protect people, much more seriously and thoughtfully than that.