Kara Jean

acid-bubble-gum:

via siberianpine

At Mosaic — a new online publication funded by the Wellcome Trust that features long reads on science and medicine — Rose George has followed the story of Radha, a 16-year-old Nepali girl forced by custom into unsafe and unsanitary conditions every time she has her period.

We walk up a steep hill, through long snake grass, to a small lean-to structure. It looks like an animal shed, but it is smaller and meaner. This is the shed where the village’s menstruating women and girls sleep. In the winter, Radha sleeps on the tiny enclosed ground floor, no bigger than a crawl space. The summer accommodation is an earthen floor on a platform above, four-foot square. Except for a grass roof, it is open to the elements.

There is not space even for one person to lie down, but tonight there will be three. Radha’s relative Jamuna is also menstruating, and she’ll be sleeping here along with her one-year old son. Still, Radha appreciates the company, as another woman is some protection against drunken men who conveniently forget about untouchability when it comes to rape. Although the stigma keeps women silent, rapes of women sleeping in these sheds are common enough to appear as occasional items in newspapers in faraway Kathmandu, and common enough for women to look down when they are mentioned. Also common are snake attacks.

These conditions are forced on women not just by men, but by other women and the individual woman's own feelings that she must follow the rules. If she doesn't, bad things could happen. That fear stems not from physical threats, but from metaphysical ones. In parts of Nepal and Bangladesh, menstrual blood and menstruating women are thought to be powerful — but powerful in a dangerous, evil way that destroys anything associated with them, whether that be cows whose milk they drank or even nail polish applied during period week.

It's a fascinating look at the way religious and cultural beliefs can drive people to do horrible things to themselves, things that they will objectively tell you they hate, but believe must be done all the same.

Dishaster (Zimag - 2600 - 1983)

Dragon Master (UNiCO - arcade 1994)

bison2winquote:

- Gloria, Dragon Master (Unico)

elliotexplicit:

Deleted scene from the critically acclaimed film, Gravity.

Way up in Maine, where everyone is probably literally dead from cold and snow, an intrepid rabble-rousing blogger dug up a bunch of awful that had spewed from the mouth of newbie Republican state legislator Lawrence Lockman. Apparently Lockman has been a perennial culture scold, losing candidate, and general nutbar up in Maine for years, but only recently got himself elected. Too bad he came with a ridiculous amount of word baggage.

Lockman falsely suggested HIV and AIDS could be spread by bed sheets and mosquitos, and he also said the progressive movement helped spread the virus by claiming “the practice of sodomy is a legitimate alternative lifestyle, rather than a perverted and depraved crime against humanity.”

The post also quoted a 1995 press statement by Lockman, then part of the Pro Life Education Association, comparing abortion to rape.

“If a woman has (the right to an abortion), why shouldn’t a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman?” Lockman said. “At least the rapist’s pursuit of sexual freedom doesn’t (in most cases) result in anyone’s death.”

Hey hey hey hey now, he said in MOST cases. Cut the guy some slack!

Lockman, of course, didn’t just limit himself to obsessing over how the gays have buttsecks or how rape is totally cool if you’re the stronger one. He also went full stupid about the IRS.

In 1981, Lockman founded a group called Maine Patriots (almost 30 years before Amy Hale would form a tea party group by the same name) and began espousing an extreme-right conspiracy theory that federal and state income taxes were voluntary and tax enforcement by the IRS was unconstitutional. He had stopped paying his own taxes in 1975 and gave speeches and held meetings urging others to follow his lead.

Even a hearing in federal tax court in Boston in 1983 during which his arguments were found to be “frivolous” and he was found to owe more than $17,000 didn’t seem to slow him down. In a 1984 interview with the Lewiston Daily Sun he declared that “according to the Constitution of the United States, the federal government has no authority to force people to pay income taxes” and expressed his admiration for tax resister Gordon Kahl, a Posse Comitatus leader who had recently died in a shootout with law enforcement after he and his men killed two U.S. Marshalls.

He sounds great. But does it get stupider?

In 1986, Lockman dressed up like Dracula and stood outside the Federal Building in Bangor in order to protest the “vampire-nature” of the IRS and its “tyranny and police-state methods of tax collection.”

Who among us has not dressed up like Dracula to protest the IRS? But now that the liberal gay abortioneer activists have his back against the wall, Lockman has been forced to repudiate his beliefs just like a Communist show trial.

“I have always been passionate about my beliefs, and years ago I said things that I regret. I hold no animosity toward anyone by virtue of their gender or sexual orientation, and today I am focused on ensuring freedom and economic prosperity for all Mainers.”

So basically he’s a friendly animosity-less gay-basher and rape advocate, but please forgive him because he really really hates taxes and will help everyone in Maine pay no taxes, for freedom, and then the state will run itself on magic fairy dust, but not gay fairy dust because ewwww. Neat!

[Bangor Daily News/Raw Story/Morning Sentinel]

The Chicago Police Department has ramped up the use of its "predictive analysis" system to identify people it believes are likely to commit crimes. These people, who are placed on a "heat list," are visited by police officers who tell them that they are considered pre-criminals by CPD, and are warned that if they do commit any crimes, they are likely to be caught.

The CPD defends the practice, and its technical champion, Miles Wernick from the Illinois Institute of Technology, characterizes it as a neutral, data-driven system for preventing crime in a city that has struggled with street violence and other forms of crime. Wernick's approach involves seeking through the data for "abnormal" patterns that correlate with crime. He compares it with epidemiological approaches, stating that people whose social networks have violence within them are also likely to commit violence.

The CPD refuses to share the names of the people on its secret watchlist, nor will it disclose the algorithm that put it there.

This is a terrible way of running a criminal justice system.

Let's start with transparency, because that's the most obviously broken thing here. The designers of the algorithm assure us that it is considering everything relevant, nothing irrelevant, and finding statistically valid correlations that allow them to make useful predictions about who will commit crime. In an earlier era, we would have called this discrimination -- or even witchhunting -- because the attribution of guilt (or any other trait) through secret and unaccountable systems is a superstitious, pre-rational way of approaching any problem.

The purveyors of this technology cloak themselves in the mantel of science. The core tenet of science, the thing that distinguishes it from all other ways of knowing, is the systematic publication and review of hypotheses and the experiments conducted to validate them. The difference between a scientist and an alchemist isn't their area of study: it's the method they use to validate their conclusions.

An algorithm that only works if you can't see it is not science, it's a conjuring trick. My six year old can do that trick: she can make anything disappear provided you don't look while she's doing it and don't ask her to open her hands and show you what's in them. Asserting that you're doing science but you can't explain how you're doing it is a nonsense on its face.

Now let's think about objectivity: the system that the CPD and its partners have designed purports to objectivity because it uses numbers and statistics to make its calculations. But -- transparency again -- without insight into how the system runs its numbers, we have no way of debating and validating the way it weighs different statistics. And what about those statistics? We know -- because of transparent, rigorous scholarship, and because of high-profile legal cases -- that police intervention is itself not neutral. From stop-and-search to arrest to prosecutorial zeal or discretion, the whole enterprise of crime statistics is embedded in a wider culture in which human beings with social power and representing the status quo can and do make subjective decisions about how to characterize individual acts.

Put more simply: if cops, judges and prosecutors are more likely to give white people in rich neighborhoods in possession of cocaine an easier time than they give black people in poor neighborhoods in possession of crack (and they do), then your data-mining exercise will disproportionately weight blackness and poorness as being correlated with felonies. Garbage in, garbage out -- there's nothing objective and scientifically rigorous about using flawed data to generate flawed conclusions.

But even assuming that this stuff could be made to work: is it a valid approach to crimefighting?

Consider that the root of this methodology is social network analysis. Your place on the heat-list is explicitly not about what you've done or who you are: it's about who your friends are and what they've done. The idea that people's social circles tell us something about their own character is as old as the proverb "A man is known by the company he keeps." Certainly, it wasn't a new idea to the framers of the Constitution (after all, the typical framer was both a member of a secret society and had recently participated in a guerrilla revolution -- they knew a thing or two about the predictive value of social network analysis).

But the framers explicitly guaranteed "freedom of association," in the First Amendment. Why? Because while "birds of a feather stick together," the criminalization of friendship is a corrosive force that drives apart the bonds that make us into a society. In other words: if the Chicago PD think that crime can only be fought by discriminating against people based on their friendships, they need to get a constitutional amendment before they put that plan into action.

Finally, this program assumes that its interventions will be positive, and this assumption is anything but assured. The idea that being told that you are likely to commit crimes will prevent you from doing so is no more obvious that the idea that being treated as a presumptive criminal will lead you to commit crimes. What's more, well-known, well-documented cognitive biases (theory blindness, confirmation bias) are alive and well in the criminal justice system: if someone on the blacklist is suspected of doing something minor, we should expect the police, prosecutors and judge to treat them more harshly than they would someone plucked from off the street. If you're already in a machine-generated ethnicity of pre-criminals, society will deal with you accordingly.

What's more, this will lead to more arrests, harsher charges and longer sentences for pre-criminals -- seemingly validating the methodology. It's the Big Data version of witchburning, a modern pseudoscience cloaked in the respectability of easily manipulated statistics and suspicious metaphors from public health.

The minority report: Chicago's new police computer predicts crimes, but is it racist? [Matt Stroud/The Verge]

(Woodcut-1598-witch-trial, Wikimedia Commons)

There’s this useful phrase, “Not even wrong,” used to indicate an argument that so completely and sloppily misses the point being discussed that it can’t even be assessed as an argument — for instance, a creationist who asks if evolution is real, why don’t we see dogs giving birth to leopards, huh? Not only is that question not right, that’s not even wrong. We mention this because we’re going to be taking a look at the latest brilliant thoughts by crazed WND columnist Matt Barber, who applies his critical thinking skills to a Salon think-piece by Katie McDonough and manages to completely refute something that has no resemblance to anything McDonough actually says. It’s actually rather impressive how thoroughly not even wrong Barber manages to be.

By way of background, McDonough uses the recent reports of sexual assaults at a private Christian college in Virginia as the jumping-off point for a discussion of ways that fundamentalist beliefs about sexuality and gender have made their way into mainstream culture, particularly in Republican attempts to regulate women’s lives. Somehow, Matt Barber read McDonough’s article and decided that what she was really arguing was “Women should fuck a lot, whenever and whomever they can, because being a slut is more fun than obeying God.”

Consider his lede, for instance:

Hey, gals, want to avoid being raped? Put away that Lady Smith 38. No need for pepper spray. Self-defense classes? Not necessary. The solution is simple. The best defense against rape is to just cast away your “deeply troubling” Christianity and become a secularist slut.

Um. Yes. Except that McDonough doesn’t actually talk about women “defending themselves” against rape; what she’s getting at is that in a fundamentalist worldview, responsibility for rape lies not with rapists, but with women, who have to keep men from raping them — but thank you, Mr. Barber, for providing Exhibit “A.”

Barber doesn’t even seem to notice that McDonough is writing about the treatment of rape victims at Patrick Henry College — he dismisses it as a “hit piece,” because come on, good Christian girls don’t get raped. And then we get to what passes for his thesis:

Christianity causes rape, McDonough asserts, warning us that we suffer a “convergence of rape culture (whatever that is) and evangelical culture.”

Get that? In this woman’s “progressive” mind, when the lady says, “I’m saving myself for marriage,” the bad guy hears, “Come and get it!” Still, Ms. McDonough does have this much right: It can’t be rape if you’re giving it away like peanuts on the plane

At this point, we do feel obliged to remind you all that Matt Barber is an actual lawyer, with a law degree and everything — admittedly, it’s from Pat Robertson’s Regent University. But obviously, there is no such thing as “rape culture,” so why even try to understand what McDonough is getting at — obviously, she’s saying that Christianity causes rape. And again, look once more at who makes rape happen even in his straw-slut version of what he thinks Mcdonough is saying. If anything, McDonough would more likely put it this way: When a girl has to save herself for marriage, she won’t dare speak up if she’s raped, because some asshole like Matt Barber will ask her what she did to lead the boy on.

McDonough says that patriarchal Christianity’s obsession with purity necessarily puts women in a subservient role; Barber translates that to

So, get it? Purity and virginity bad. Impurity and promiscuity good. I’ll give Ms. McDonough this: She calls it like she sees it.

Yes. That’s exactly what she was saying. And so on; what Barber decides McDonough is really getting at is this:

McDonough’s advice? Girls, give away that milk now, ya hear! (To which the frisky-frat-boy “bro-choice” choir sings: “Amen!” Hey, “pro-choice” gals, you do know that most “pro-choice” guys only support your so-called “abortion rights” so that you’ll put out, right?)

Yep. Nothing twisted about deciding that women are the gatekeepers of sexual morality, because men will just take all they can get — that’s just how they’re made, after all, and sluts can’t very well complain about rape — if they let one guy fuck them, they have no cause to complain when more come after them.

The main thing we come away from after reading this? Matthew Barber is a professor in the Liberty University College of Law, specializing in “sexual behavior and the law.” We can only imagine what gets taught about rape and sexuality in those classes.

[WND / Salon / New Republic]

The 600-year-old, strangely-illustrated Voynich Manuscript (which resides at Yale University) has been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world. Not a single word of the secret language has been decoded, at least not until now. Stephen Bax of the University of Bedfordshire says he has decoded ten words from the Voynich Manuscript. This seems to indicate that the document is not a hoax filled with nonsense words, as some scholars have concluded.

Stephen Bax, who teaches at the University of Bedfordshire, has produced a paper and a video where he details his theories on the text and provides translations of ten words from the manuscript, which are proper names of various plants that are depicted in the manuscript. Professor Bax explains, “I hit on the idea of identifying proper names in the text, following historic approaches which successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and other mystery scripts, and I then used those names to work out part of the script.

I have not yet watch Bax's 47-minute video, above.

Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds (Thanks, Gareth and Syd!)