Open Thread and Link Farm: In A World Of Sheep Edition

  1. Undocumented immigrants in Flint say they’re denied water | Fusion
    The official policy was changed so that undocumented immigrants could get water – but not all government officials are obeying the new policy. And emergency flyers on how to get water are in English only.
  2. What Went Wrong In Flint | FiveThirtyEight
    A well-done, detailed overview.

  3. Rape and Justice in Mozambique | World Policy Institute
  4. Hey Vox you can’t be a feminist and be “pro-life” | Dr. Jen Gunter
  5. And then a partial counterpoint: Wanted Pregnancies and Unwanted Abortions: “So yes, in fact, affordable daycare can (and sometimes does) prevent abortions.”
  6. Han Solo: All Things Must Pass
    “In The Force Awakens Han has been distanced from us. Rather than the heroic male figure that we look up to, he’s now a figure looked up to by other figures that we’re watching. His death scene isn’t for us – it’s for Ren and Rey and Finn.”
  7. Nobody Catcalls The Woman In The Wheelchair – The Establishment
  8. A Real Dialogue for a Change | The Weekly Standard
    This is a Cathy Young article, so it has the predictable anti-feminist snark (“thoughtcrime” “unsafe space” etc), but Cathy also includes some interesting thoughts from Mary Koss.
  9. White House bans Federal prisons from putting juveniles in solitary.
  10. American democracy is doomed – Vox
    Clickbait title aside, this longread is an interesting article about Democratic failures. Basically, presidential democracies almost always collapse. The US hasn’t – but, arguably, the factors that made us distinct from other presidential democracies have faded. Also interesting: Dylan Matthews responds by arguing that what we’re going to see is not collapse, but the continued increase of Presidential power.
  11. Denying women abortion increases their risk of serious illness and death – new study
  12. Oregon ranchers who sparked standoff threatened to wrap official’s son in barbed wire and drown him
    I am feeling less sympathy for the Hammonds now.
  13. Tackling the Dreaded Bio – SFWA
    Luna Lindsey gives advice on how to write an author bio – which I’ve always found to be a very difficult task, and I think most authors have.
  14. WashU Expert: Proposed Missouri law revoking scholarships violates First Amendment | Newsroom | Washington University in St. Louis
    But remember, only lefties are attempting to censor on campus!
  15. Discrimination against Queer Women in the U.S. Workforce
    A study finds that otherwise-identical resumes get 30% fewer callbacks if the applicant appears to be a queer woman. (“One woman’s résumé was randomly assigned leadership experience at a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) student organization to signal queer identity, while the other résumé, a control, was assigned experience at another progressive student organization.”) I suspect the difference would have been even larger if the organization was specifically a transgender organization, alas. (BTW, this and the next two links come via Slater Star Codex).
  16. The New Debate Over the Mariel Boatlift | RealClearPolicy
    A persuasive (although not conclusive) argument against a classic Card study that I’ve probably cited at some point, hence my including the link here. It should be noted, however, that the Card study is hardly the only piece of evidence indicating that employment effects of immigration on native wages are minimal.
  17. Anonymous Mugwump: The Empirics of Free Speech and Realistic Idealism: Part I, and Part II.
    These are very good (although there are bits I disagree with – for example, in the section on “The Effects of Money and Lobbying in Politics,” I don’t see how he can be certain that a 2002 study on campaign spending – before the recent jump in superpac spending and before Citizens United – is still relevant), but also very, very long.
  18. A new way of measuring sexism in ‘The Little Mermaid’ and other Disney movies – The Washington Post
    Although I don’t think this is a good stand-alone method of looking at a single movie – the story of Mulan genuinely requires most characters to be male, for example – it is a good way of noticing a troubling pattern across many movies.
  19. Austrailian Study Has Now Identified The Leading Causes Of Suicide In Men – Pedestrian TV
    One of those leading causes: “Unhelpful conceptions of masculinity – the ‘tough Aussie bloke’ stereotype in particular.” What’s that word? Oh, yes: toxic.
  20. The Republican myth of Ronald Reagan and the Iran hostages, debunked – Vox
    This is a side issue to the article’s main point, but if the allegations about William Casey are true, that’s just one more way he was a miserable scumbag.
  21. I find the special effect used in this music video (similar to the special effect used in Ex Machina, and with the same actress a supporting actress from that movie) utterly hypnotic to look at.
  22. A freestyle called “Seven Years” that Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote and performed during “In The Heights.”
  23. Study Shows That Male and Female Students Hold Female Professors to Gender-Based Double Standard | The Mary Sue
  24. MRAs are right, false rape accusations don’t happen at the often cited 8%. It’s more like 3%. (Lot’s of sources inside.) : SRSArmory
    I haven’t gone through this carefully and vetted it, but I’m saving the link here because even if I don’t turn out to agree with every argument (and maybe I will), the author has collected a lot of useful links.
  25. “No Cost” License Plate Readers Are Turning Texas Police into Mobile Debt Collectors and Data Miners | Electronic Frontier Foundation
    This is super-disturbing.
  26. Bernie Sanders has the most realistic plan to boost wages and job creation – Vox
    In the past I’ve been going back and forth between favoring Sanders and favoring Clinton. This – that Sanders is willing to use monetary policy to push down unemployment – in combination with Clinton’s hawkishness, now makes me favor Sanders.
  27. Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bernie Sanders and the Liberal Imagination – Ta-Nehisi Coates
    “A Democratic candidate who offers class-based remedies to address racist plunder because that is what is imminently doable, because all we have are bandages, is doing the best he can. A Democratic candidate who claims that such remedies are sufficient, who makes a virtue of bandaging, has forgotten the world that should, and must, be. Effectively he answers the trenchant problem of white supremacy by claiming ‘something something socialism, and then a miracle occurs.'”
  28. I’m a fan of the 2000 film Timecode, which told its story with four simultaneous shots, each taking up a quarter of the scene. The same director, using the same technique, made a three-minute PSA asking Londoners to be more polite on the bus.

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17 Responses to Open Thread and Link Farm: In A World Of Sheep Edition

  1. 1
    LTL FTC says:

    http://flavorwire.com/558004/beyond-hillary-bots-and-bernie-bros-why-democrats-need-to-move-beyond-stereotypes-and-ad-hominem-attacks

    Just a friendly reminder that Democrats are choosing between Clinton and Sanders, not Sady Doyle and the Bernie brigade that descends comments sections like a swarm of socialist flies. They’re decent people who would both probably do decent things if elected.

  2. 2
    Jeffrey Gandee says:

    Is there a meaningful distinction between progressivism and feminism? I ask because of the way “anti-feminism” is used to describe the snark in articles like Cathy Young’s. I realize that she has a history of going after feminists, but I wonder if she is really just going after a subset of feminists who embrace progressivism? Perhaps mainstream feminism is so on-board with progressivism that the distinction is meaningless, but things could change in the future (I predict that anti-progressive feminism is on the horizon, what better way for the next generation to rebel against the millennials.)

  3. 3
    Doug S. says:

    I’d say that US democracy did collapse once – it was called the American Civil War.

  4. 4
    Charles S says:

    re: #15 and the Mariel boatlift, intersting. I had previously found Kevin Drum’s reporting on Yeri and Vasanov’s analysis of Borjas’s work convincing: Borjas’s sample size is ridiculously small and weirdly chosen, and any effect he sees (even the large effect he reports) is indistinguishable from noise, but that article disputes that claim. The conclusion of that article that doing this sort of study correctly is basically impossible is interesting.

  5. 5
    Copyleft says:

    Cartoonist Scott Meyer (of “Basic Instructions”) once commented on writing his own author bio and the absurdity of getting stuck: “The author expects to make a living off his writing and yet can’t come up with a single, simple paragraph on his favorite subject in the entire world: himself.”

  6. 6
    RonF says:

    Re: #1 – while I’ve long held little sympathy for illegal aliens, I do draw the line at public safety. In a situation such as the one that Flint residents are in water should be provided to anyone regardless of whether they are here legally or not.

    #24 – here is another article on that that I got off of Instapundit.

    As Glenn Reynolds says on Instapundit, “The ruling class sees us as cattle to be milked.”

  7. 7
    Duncan says:

    Evidently the woman in the Chemical Brothers video is the actress who played Kyoko in Ex Machina.

  8. 8
    Ampersand says:

    Thanks, Duncan! I’ve corrected my link text.

  9. 9
    closetpuritan says:

    The unsexy truth about why the Arab Spring failed

    Tunisia’s story is, yes, one of brave protesters and noble-minded individual Tunisian leaders, but it’s also one of strong institutions and civil society that allowed those individuals to succeed.

    That’s not a particularly emotionally compelling story. As a former lawyer, I know all too well that no one has ever written a revolutionary ballad romanticizing the heroism of a lawyers association’s participation in a series of meetings, and I suspect no one ever will. But without lawyers and trade unions and NGOs willing to step in to do the dull work of civil society, it’s not clear that Tunisia would be the success story we consider it today.

  10. 10
    Harlequin says:

    Re the correction for the Chemical Brothers video actress–Amp, is that a face blindness thing, do you think? I was trying to get an intuitive sense for what that was like. (Obviously, don’t answer if that’s too personal etc)

  11. 11
    RonF says:

    #1 followup:

    This hits home to me. I spent much of my life in biology and biochemistry labs. One of my first jobs was spending 2 years in a water analysis lab. I know how these things work. I’ve been in the lab analyzing those samples and I’ve been in the field in buildings and a boat taking those samples. Protocols are important. Damned important. Everything has to be done strictly to protocols and documented, with the documents open to audit (I had the job of auditing such documentation as well for a couple of years). And if they got datapoints they wanted to eliminate, they needed a very good documented reason and they needed to go back and resample the place that produced that datapoint.

    And this isn’t just too much chlorine in some boiler water that will lead to pipes being corroded faster, this is lead in kids, for God’s sake. Whoever the fuck looked at a 100+ppb lead assay result and said “Oh we can toss this” without some kind of double-check should never work anywhere in public health again, and maybe be criminally prosecuted.

  12. 12
    RonF says:

    Re: The link in closetpuritan’s comment.

    In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak Chicago, Mayor Daley began preparing for revolution long before it came. In the nearly three decades of his rule, he systematically ensured that no opposition party or civil society institution grew strong enough to challenge him.

    I just wanted to see how it looked. Don’t think that this only happens in benighted 3rd World countries. The perversion of government institutions from serving the people to serving the party in power is gutting cities all over the U.S.

  13. 13
    Harlequin says:

    My parents live in Iowa, and my dad’s registered independent. My parents have been getting 5-10 political phone calls per night, and also getting door-to-door campaigners coming by. (My mom particularly mentioned Carly Fiorina’s campaign as one that contacted them a lot; my parents don’t traditionally go to the caucuses, so I wonder if she’s aiming to raise her standing by recruiting new people, rather than convincing the usual caucus-goers.)

    My mom also mentioned an interesting anti-Ted Cruz ad (not sure who funded it). It’s two people discussing Cruz, and one describes how he gives 1% of his income to charity–the second person says, in horror, “He doesn’t tithe?” I think we knew the establishment, such as it is, was trying to take down Cruz, but it’s interesting that they’re attacking his religious base.

  14. 14
    Ampersand says:

    I just wanted to see how it looked. Don’t think that this only happens in benighted 3rd World countries. The perversion of government institutions from serving the people to serving the party in power is gutting cities all over the U.S.

    Eh. Government institutions never run perfectly; but it remains the case that Chicago has a functioning government in ways that Libya does not. The mere fact that we can expect that elections will lead to peaceful transfers of power, proves that.

  15. 15
    Jake Squid says:

    RonF was referencing Egypt which does have a functioning government, Amp.

  16. 16
    closetpuritan says:

    @17–I think “Princess and the Frog” might be my favorite “princess” movie, but man does it do poorly on % of female dialog.

    I think the sidekick/comic relief characters part is important. They are almost always male. Even Mulan would have had a lot more female dialog if they had simply made Mushu female. (I don’t think Mushu needed to be male–you’d sort of expect based on the storyline that he should be male in order to help Mulan pretend to be male, but his advice along those lines turns out pretty badly.)

  17. 17
    Ben Lehman says:

    The military coup in Chicago after Daley died was particularly brutal, though.