- Andrew Sullivan’s impassioned personal analysis of how Catholic hangups about sex have created the kind of situation where child rape is so common. A dark view of minds so tortured by repression they genuinely don’t see their actions as crimes but as their own “sexual sins”.
- A rundown of 2 detailed studies on non-incarcerated rapist behaviour. Main points: most rapes are indeed committed by someone who knows the victim and the preferred method is drugs/alcohol followed by violence. For rapes by strangers, the study found alcohol was used all the time and violence and violent threats were never used. Yet another nail in the false and damaging violent-stranger-as-rapist public image.
- A study of paintings of The Last Supper over the last 1000 years shows a 60% increase in meal portion sizes. The biggest increase was around the time of the Renaissance!
- Very disturbing photo exhibition of Afghani women who set themselves on fire as the last cry for help in cases of domestic violence and oppression.
- Finally a breath of fresh air: court rules against prosecutors who insanely go after “sexting” teens as sexual predators (who are supposed to have committed child abuse…against themselves, and therefore obviously deserve to be on sex offender lists for the rest of their lives).
- Insane idea of the year: blaming the Srebrenica massacre on the Dutch military having a case of teh gayz
- Infant starves to death: parents too busy raising a virtual child online
- A look at a counterculture where women are fetishised for being fat: forcefed brides in Mauritania
- The pyramid of food subsidies and the food pyramid are almost complete inverses
- Take that free will!
- Christopher Hitchens on how the North Korean regime is even more evil, despicable, racist, dangerous and insane than you thought. As an aside, it’s well known in the journalist community that to go to N Korea you have to bribe officials quite blatantly. However, some of these bribes show the insane and bizarre nature of a regime. In a recent BloggingHeads interview a journalist describes an official who asked for a copy of the latest DVD series of Lost — as the pre-requisite to report on a country whose inhabitants are a full 6 inches shorter than South Koreans from lack of food.
Friday Links (26-Mar-10)
March 26th, 2010
2 comments ↓
About the Dutch military–its nothing to do homosexuality, but the actions of the Nato Peace keepers in Yugolsavia were sickening. They never put their lives at risk to protect the people they were ordered to protect. Its similar to CLinton doing nothing to intervene in Rawanda, and to Nato peace keepers there later protecting the murders in the refugee camps ‘because they can’t take sides.’
As for free will–the recent research everyone is so upset over shows that some simple decisions are made before they come to conscious awareness–they are still made by your unconscious mind–not some decision Epicurus made 2500 years ago or some atom striking another 14 billion years ago-so how does this impinge freewill?
I don’t see how Rwanda has much to do with Srebrenica — in the former it was a deliberate decision not to send troops while the latter was insufficient action by the troops which to me is very different.
Agree on free will, this study’s been out for a few years and most of the articles I’ve seen about it have the stupidity you mention in them, eg “this disturbing study shows it’s not you making the decision but your brain”…