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Why does the black man get shot by police and the white man deosn’t? Mother Jones looks at the Implicit Association Test – a test of “racial prejudices that we cannot consciously control”.
Sometimes you’re asked to sort African American faces and “good” words to one side of the screen. Other times, black faces are to be sorted with “bad” words. As words and faces keep flashing by, you struggle not to make too many sorting mistakes.
And then suddenly, you have a horrible realization. When black faces and “bad” words are paired together, you feel yourself becoming faster in your categorizing—an indication that the two are more easily linked in your mind. “It’s like you’re on a bike going downhill,” Amodio says, “and you feel yourself going faster. So you can say, ‘I know this is not how I want to come off,’ but there’s no other response option.”
You think of yourself as a person who strives to be unprejudiced, but you can’t control these split-second reactions. As the milliseconds are being tallied up, you know the tale they’ll tell: When negative words and black faces are paired together, you’re a better, faster categorizer. Which suggests that racially biased messages from the culture around you have shaped the very wiring of your brain.
As Xeni notes:
The good news: “Research suggests that once we understand the psychological pathways that lead to prejudice, we just might be able to train our brains to go in the opposite direction.”
Now that is terrifying.
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Anorak
Posted: 16th, December 2014 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
Court artist sketch by Elizabeth Cook of Chris Denning who has been jailed for 13 years for sexually assaulting 24 boys – including one allegedly at Jimmy Savile’s house.
Jimmy Savile – revered as a Knight of the realm and Papacy in life who became the Devil incarnate in death – is to pay out.
The Times reports:
Around 200 victims of sexual abuse by the television personality Jimmy Savile are in line for compensation after a ruling by appeal judges today.
Can all the victims be proven?
Three judges in the Court of Appeal in London rejected a challenge by a charitable trust which is one of the main beneficiaries of the Savile estate to the £3 million compensation scheme that has been set up. Lawyers representing the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust had argued that the scheme – agreed between the estate executor, the NatWest bank, and lawyers representing alleged victims – was not able to assess the ‘’validity’’ of claimants and lacked a ‘’process of evaluation’’.
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Anorak
Posted: 16th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
Should police wear body cameras? And if they should, what punishment if they ‘forget’ to turn them on?
After the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, confidence in police is low.
Over the last two years, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) has disciplined police officers on 24 occasions for disabling or failing to activate body-worn cameras, newly released public records show. The City of Oakland did not provide any records prior to 2013… The records show that on November 8, 2013 one officer was terminated after failing to activate his camera. Less than two weeks later, another resigned for improperly removing the camera from his or her uniform. However, most officers received minor discipline in comparison.
Next question: who watches the footage and how often?
No camera. No job.
In the UK:
As non-evidential footage is deleted after 31 days, members of the public should be aware that any complaint that references the use of BWV needs to be made in a timely fashion to ensure that any evidential footage can be retained in line with force policy in the event that an investigation needs to take place.
After the initial 31-day period, deleted BWV footage that has been deemed as non-evidential cannot be recovered.
Why not? Storage is not that expensive.
Anorak
Posted: 16th, December 2014 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
As murderous Islamist Man Haron Monis/Sheik Haron held hostages in a Sydney chocolate shop, the BBC wrote this:
As a gunman holds people hostage in a cafe in Sydney, thousands of messages of support have been posted online for Muslims in Australia who are afraid of an Islamophobic backlash.
Got that? It’s not the jihadi with the gun and the bloody threats made true (two innocent people dead) we should worry about, it’s us. People tuning in on the telly and commenting online are so slack-jawed and reactionary they will see the gurning maniac and think they should race riot.
Idiots don’t need telling. They’re already in the club:
Did the ADL storm Lakemba, a suburb in south-western Sydney with a sizaeble Muslim population? No. It was just white fascists identifying with a deeply troubled, mentaly negligible man who posed no threat to Australian society as a whole. They saw in him a kindred spirit.
What Monis did was terrorise and kill people in a cafe. Terrible stuff. But let’s not amplify it. Let’s not magnify the lone nutter’s impact. Well, not unless in doing so it can make us look good in public.
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Anorak
Posted: 16th, December 2014 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (5)
Tabloid tropes: we’ve seen that 2014 was a big year for Madeleine McCann news (surely no news – ed), Alzheimer’s cures, Big Brother and miracles in diabetes. 2014 is also the year when the Daily Express realised that the best way to stop its readership falling is to keep its readership alive for longer.
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Anorak
Posted: 15th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
To Sydney, where a bearded gunman is holding around 12 people hostage at the Lindt Chocolat Cafe in Martin Place. The hostages are holding aloft an Islamic flag.
The Sun translates:
“There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of God.”
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Anorak
Posted: 15th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
The Sony email hack has attracted no headlines decrying an invasion of privacy. Nick Gillespie wonder why this double standard exists?
It was just a few months ago that everybody and his grandmother was truly livid—or at least feigned anger before firing up our search engines—when hackers released naked pictures of celebrities ranging from Jennifer Lawrence to Kate Upton to Dave Franco. Curiously, such outrage is almost completely missing in the media’s response to the massive hack attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment, which may be linked to the North Korean government and has dumped private emails, contracts, files of unreleased movies, and more all across the Internet.
This time around, there is unapologetic prurience at the chance to get a real behind-the-scenes look at an industry long notorious for its wicked, backbiting, and hypocritical ways. Big-shot producer Scott Rudin tells Sony co-chair Amy Pascal he thinks Angelina Jolie is “a minimally talented spoiled brat”? A-List director David Fincher is as difficult as Hitler was anti-Semitic? Tell us more!
Whatever the differences in public responses, the episodes underscore two basic points that are worth learning fast: First, nobody cares about other people’s privacy, especially if the divulged material is juicy enough. Second, privacy is itself a highly fluid concept that will have probably changed yet again by the time you finish reading this article. Once upon a time, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that federal agents didn’t need warrants to tap phones. Privacy is invented more than it is discovered.
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Anorak
Posted: 14th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
Are all anti-gay pastors nutjobs? To Mississippi, where a pastor has dressed a horse in a wedding dress to protest gay marriage.
Neigh, neigh and thrice neigh!
Pray silence for Edward James of the Betha Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Jackson:
You should see the mother-in-law:
As Charlotte grazed, James told the Clarion-Ledger that he hoped his protest would make Judge Reeves reconsider his ruling “and that Mississippi will stay a state that will only recognize marriage between a man and a woman.”
…One passing driver yelled, “Your horse is pretty!”
“The next unnatural law… Do you take this horse to be your unnatural wedded spouse to have and to hold?” one sign read.
“Marriage is one man and one woman… anything else is a perversion,” another sign read.
Reeves struck down Mississippi’s ban on same-sex marriage Nov. 25, but same-sex couples cannot legally wed until the federal court of appeals hears the case Jan. 9.
James said he arrived to the courthouse at noon and will continue protesting until 2 p.m.
Meanwhile…equal right for centaurs!
Spotter: Christian Nightmares
Anorak
Posted: 14th, December 2014 | In: Reviews, Strange But True | Comment (1)
Best hurry with that Alzheimer’s cure:
An Iowa state lawmaker says he loved visiting his wife at a nursing home before her death at age 79. But prosecutors have filed felony charges against him, saying that her Alzheimer’s made her unable to consent to his sexual desires… Henry Rayhons, 78, now out on a $10,000 bond, has declined to run for a 10th straight term in the state House, saying his reputation is ruined.. “My wife just died and you’re charged with something like this because you prayed by her bed,” he says, sobbing. “It hurts. It really hurts.”..
The daughters had Donna placed in the home, where Rayhons visited often and wanted sex once or twice daily, one of the daughters said. “Henry likes this a lot,” Donna reportedly said while pointing between her legs, and staffers were said to be “sickened.” Rayhons was given a physician-approved document saying that Donna couldn’t consent to sex, but he allegedly continued and may have admitted as much to a state investigator. “It was not a regular thing,” Rayhons told him, saying he “never touched her when she didn’t want it and I only tried to fulfill her need when she asked for it.” Iowa state law doesn’t help him, stating that sex with a permanently mentally ill lover is illegal unless that person “is both a spouse and cohabiting,” the Post notes. Charged with third-degree sexual abuse, Rayhons is scheduled to begin his trial on Jan. 28 in Garner.
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Anorak
Posted: 14th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
Forget the terror and torture:
British soldiers have “lost their capability” to interrogate terrorist insurgents because of strict new rules on questioning that even ban shouting in captives’ ears, military chiefs have warned. The rules — detailed in court papers obtained by The Telegraph — also prevent military intelligence officers from banging their fists on tables or walls, or using “insulting words” when interrogating a suspect.
The regulations replaced a previous policy that had to be withdrawn after a series of legal challenges and the death in custody of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi detainee in Basra.
But there is growing disquiet within the ranks that the latest guidelines, officially called Challenge Direct, are so stringent that it makes interrogation pointless….
Col Tim Collins, who made a celebrated eve-of-battle speech during the Iraq war and now runs a private security company with expertise in intelligence gathering, said: “Since I was serving, the rules on interrogations have been tightened up because of the lawyers. We [the military] are no longer able to carry out tactical questioning. The effect of the ambulance-chasing lawyers and the play-it-safe judges is that we have got to the point where we have lost our operational capability to do tactical questioning. That in itself brings risks to the lives of the people we deploy. These insurgents are not nice people. These are criminals. They behead people; they keep sex slaves. They are not normal people.”
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Anorak
Posted: 14th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
AsapSCIENCE have produced a video on what happens to your brain on alcohol. This delicious “feelings of release and freedom” allow you to “think very little, but with great clarity.”
And now for the banned substance: marijuana:
Anorak
Posted: 13th, December 2014 | In: Reviews, The Consumer | Comment (1)
The hipsters at East London’s Cereal Killer breakfast bar are unhappy with how Channel 4 portrayed them. Gary Keery, one of the twins who run the prelude to the runs, writes:
In tomorrow’s Channel 4 exclusive: TV executive passes council estate on way to sushi power lunch.
Anorak
Posted: 13th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
Westminster paedophiles: a look at the story of child abuse in the 1970s and 1980s.
Midhurst and Petworth Observer: “No plans to re-open Vishal murder case at Rogate”
SUSSEX police say there are no current plans to reopen the investigation into the murder of the eight-year-old boy whose remains were found in Rogate in 1982. Last week his father Vashambar claimed his son may have died at the hands of a Westminster paedophile ring and said he feared Scotland Yard helped ‘cover up’ the crime.
A spokesman for Sussex police told the Observer: “This Sussex investigation has been reviewed as a matter of standard policy for such unresolved serious crimes. There are no current developments, but of course we would look into any new information that could lead to a new line of enquiry. Vishal Mehrotra disappeared from Putney in London on the day of the royal wedding,
July 29 in 1981, and was found dead in woods at Rogate in 1982. This was therefore initially a Met missing person case and then a Sussex murder enquiry.”
Pigeon shooters had found the skull and ribs of Vishal in remote marshland at Durford Abbey Farm.
At the inquest into his death, West Sussex coroner Mark Calvert Lee recorded an open verdict, but he said ‘foul play’ was likely.
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Anorak
Posted: 13th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
A few postings on the door of Peabody Hall related to the Phi Kappa Psi gang rape allegations at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va., Monday, Nov. 24, 2014. The university has suspended activities at all campus fraternal organizations amid an investigation into a published report in which a student described being sexually assaulted by seven men in 2012 at the Phi Kappa Psi house. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Rolling Stone’s pisspoor story on an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia continues to unravel:
The Post’s T. Rees Shapiro, whose previous reporting prompted Rolling Stone to issue an editor’s note Friday acknowledging some discrepancies, has now interviewed three students mentioned in the story as friends of Jackie, the alleged victim.
The three students — identified by Rolling Stone and the Post as “Randall,” “Andy,” and “Cindy” –- gave an account to the Post for Wednesday’s story that differed significantly from the one described by contributing editor Sabrina Rubin Erdely in her explosive 9,000-word article about Jackie’s ordeal published online Nov. 19.
Did they abandon their friend, cowed by the patriarchy?
The three students recall Jackie, in tears, telling them on the night of Sept. 28, 2012, that she had been forced to perform oral sex on five men. In the Rolling Stone article, Jackie recalled seven men brutally raping her on top of broken glass at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house that night. The students told the Post they urged Jackie to call the police. In the Rolling Stone story, they are depicted as advising her not to report the crime.
All three students told the Post that Erdely never contacted them for her Rolling Stone article. Erdely wrote in the article that “Randall” declined an interview about the rape because of “loyalty to his own frat.”
Rolling Stone acknowledged Friday that Erdely did not try contacting the alleged attackers for comment because of an agreement with Jackie, who had expressed fears of reprisal.
Is a libel action looming? Send for the lawyers – if you can find them:
For eight years, Ms. [Dana] Rosen seems to have gotten along swimmingly, citing the defeat of Britney Spears in the pop star’s defamation claim against US Weekly as a particularly satisfying win and sending around a funny memo about the need for employees to maintain their cool amid the excitement of filming of the MTV reality show I’m From Rolling Stone.
And then something curious happened. After the UVA story was published on November 19 but before things started to unravel in early December, Ms. Rosen, who had once professed to having “had nothing but good experiences with [Jann],” suddenly left the company. She took a job as general counsel at ALM, the respected publisher of legal trade properties including Corporate Counsel, The National Law Journal and The New York Law Journal. A fine collection of titles, to be sure, but one would imagine there’s far less chance that Bob Dylan saunters through the offices of The American Lawyer.
In a brief conversation with the Observer, Ms. Rosen could not recall exactly when she tendered her resignation.
“Really, the dates are irrelevant. My resignation had nothing to do with that story. I just had a great opportunity that came up at ALM, and I chose to take it. But it really unequivocally had nothing to do with that story.”
Asked if she participated with the reviewing of the UVA story, Ms. Rosen, replied, “I’m not going to comment on the process. That’s really all I want to say. Again, it really—unequivocally—had nothing to do with that story. Without a doubt.”
According to Ms. Rosen’s close friend, documentary filmmaker Pamela French, Ms. Rosen started at ALM this past Monday, December 8, and “had given her month’s notice right before the story hit.” That would put her date of resignation somewhere around Friday, November 7. The UVA story was certainly already going through legal channels by that point, but it’s unclear what degree of fact-checking and legal review had been completed.
Can we fact check Jackie?
Genever Overholser explains:
No surprise then, that for so many years, newspaper editors have agreed to “protect” rape victims by refusing to name them. So why hasn’t this helped correct the underreporting and reduce the retaliation? Maybe because the anonymity, rather than being part of an effective solution to an unacceptable reality, contributes to its prolongation. In other words, it does more harm than good.
You don’t have to believe that there are many women bringing false charges of rape (I don’t) to understand that a fundamental unfairness lies waiting to be exploited when one person is named and another is not, particularly in a crime as inevitably private as rape.
And exploited, it regularly is, as we see again and again — vividly in the case of those bringing allegations against Cosby, and in the appalling New York Times magazine story on sexual assault in the military People react angrily to the woman who “takes down” a beloved old comedian, a talented airman, a great football player – or just a cool frat guy.
If anonymity’s silencing keeps the crime’s dimensions hidden, and its unfairness feeds the fires of those disinclined to hear victims’ truths, anonymity has yet another worrisome trait: It prevents the public from fully engaging with the problem. As journalists well know (but choose distressingly often to ignore) nothing affects public opinion like real stories with real faces and names attached. Attribution brings accountability, a climate within which both empathy and credibility flourish…
Journalists are avidly tearing apart the Rolling Stone for its appalling dereliction of duty, and rightfully so. But all who have shared in this idea of anonymity as a protection of rape victims have played a role in bringing us to this moment. We have been participants in the notion that rape and silence go hand in hand. It’s a notion outmoded at last, and those who pursue it become more and more irrelevant.
Tell and stick to the facts…
Anorak
Posted: 12th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
A British soldier in Belfast, Northern Ireland stands outside a new all weather shelter in October 1969. (AP Photo/Peter Kemp)
Patrick Corrigan links the CIA torture units to the British Army in Northern Ireland. The British taught the American all they know about “enhancned interview techniques”.
In August 1971 the UK authorities arrested and interned hundreds of men in Northern Ireland. Fourteen of them were selected for “special treatment” – torture in a specially-built interrogation centre at a British Army camp. The men were subjected to the soon-to-be infamous “five techniques” of hooding, stress positions, white noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and water – combined with brutal beatings & death threats.
Allegations soon emerged of abuse. Amnesty International sent its first ever research mission to the UK to investigate, interviewing the men and finding some of them to still be black and blue with bruises.
In it’s October 30 1971 report, Amnesty found a “prima facie case of brutality and torture”.
…
In 1976, the European Commission on Human Rights found that the UK had tortured the men, but the UK appealed the decision claiming that the techniques used had no long-term impact.
The appeal succeeded and in 1978 the European Court of Human Rights found that the interrogation amounted to “inhuman and degrading treatment” but not torture.
The difference was subsequently seized upon by those who wanted to use similar interrogation techniques.
n 2002, Jay Bybee in the US Attorney General’s office prepared legal advice on what could and could not be done to interrogation subjects. He quoted liberally from the Ireland v UK 1978 decision in the infamous ‘torture memos‘
Read it all.
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Anorak
Posted: 11th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
In this April 7, 1933 file photo, Ruby Bates sits in the witness stand in a courtroom in Decatur, Ala. Saying that Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick had urged her to tell the truth, Bates denied that the nine black teenagers, known as the Scottsboro Boys, had assaulted her and her companion Victoria Price.
Remember the Scottsbroro Boys? They were the nine Afro-American men tried and jailed for the rape of two white women in 1930s Alabama. The men – all of them – were innocent.
The State made the people fit the cime.
Today, so-called lad culture is being used to portray men on the street and on university campuses as rapists-in-waiting. We live in more equal age: whites and black men are all as guilty.
Professor Dan Carter first published his book on the Scottsboro Boys trials as long ago as 1969. He wrote:
“One day in the spring of 1931 a group of hobos, black and white, were travelling on a train in north Alabama. A fight broke out and the train had to be stopped near the town of Scottsboro. Nine young black men – the youngest was 13 – were arrested.
“But then the Deputy Sheriff realised two of the white hobos were in fact women. The young women worried they might be accused of prostitution, so they accused the black boys of having raped them.
“I think anyone today who studied the evidence would conclude no rapes occurred. In any case, what happened after March 1931 took on an astonishing life of its own. What happened on the train was just a part of the story.”
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Anorak
Posted: 10th, December 2014 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
When lawyers for Shrien Dewani slapepd his bisexuality on the table in a South African court they quashed the entertainment and the case against their client. Not gay, Shrien could still fancy his murdered wife Anni Dewani. We would not have his sexuality exposed by cros-examination and with get to know the ‘secret’ that allegedly drove him to fund a murder.
Writing in the Times Sathnam Sanghera looks at the sex:
As for coming out as gay when you’re Asian: I cannot even fathom the stress that might be involved. Indian society, even in Britain, is still struggling to get used to the notion of people marrying spouses of their own choosing, let alone same-sex partners. Indeed, not only is homophobia a fact of life in many Asian communities, but I have heard it claimed that homosexuality doesn’t even exist in Indian culture.
It doesn’t surprise me that Shrien Dewani kept his bisexuality hidden from his family — until he was facing a murder charge. By outing himself on the first day of his trial in South Africa, he pre-empted the prosecution’s case that he murdered because he felt trapped in his marriage…
Of the ten or so gay British Asians I know, all of them successful professionals, only one is fully “out”. Most have only come out to select trusted relatives or remain firmly in the closet. One of my oldest friends recently came out to his relatively liberal mother at the age of 39. She responded: “So what? It does not mean you cannot marry someone anyway, hunna?” He’ll be at a gay club on a Saturday night and on Sunday afternoon will be sitting in the living room at his parents’ home being introduced to yet another prospective bride over tea.
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Anorak
Posted: 10th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Have you see the Ugly Girls’ Club? Members convene at the Royal Holloway’s feminist society.
Natasha Barrett, president of the society and a second-year English Literature student, said:
“It started very small, as a joke between society members that was a bit tongue-in cheek.” With hundreds of selfies posted on Twitter in under two weeks and 4,000 Facebook fans, the campaign is blossoming into more than they could ever have imagined.
“We’ve had a lot of support from Exeter University and their feminist society there. They showed a massive amount of enthusiasm for it and we realised we should get in touch with more feminist societies. It’s becoming the case that there aren’t very many university feminist societies left that we haven’t heard from. We’ve had support from America, Canada and Australia as well. It’s really cool – even people from Oklahoma!”
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Anorak
Posted: 9th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story on gang rape at the University of Virginia was all about the narrative. She looked for a tale that would fit her agenda. Even when JAckie asked for it to be pulled, Rolling Stone and the writer oushed it through. Not need for facts, proof nor a right to reply from the men accasued of rape.
Glen Reynolds:
The story was quickly picked up nationally. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., cited it as a reason to pass federal legislation on campus sexual assault. People who questioned the story were accused of sexism. And University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan suspended the entire Greek system — not just the fraternity in question — in response. The U.Va. campus was rocked by protest, the fraternity house was vandalized, people were arrested, and U.Va. faculty members even staged their own protest.
The above image is by artist Sabo, who wants us to look again at Lena Dunham, UVA and Bill Clinton in fake Rolling Stone Covers:
In an email, Sabo told The Hollywood Reporter: “Remember (Dunham) accused a Republican of raping her in college, and that story is falling apart. Then you have the politics of Hollywood with her, Cosby, the Rolling Stone article that is being detracted. Last but not least, our beloved Bubba Clinton’s blast from the past and the double standard of why Rolling Stone didn’t run with his rape allegations but they ran with the UVA false story.”
Natasha Vargas-Cooper nailes it:
Here’s something that’s also sort of “unfair:” not talking to seven unconvicted, alleged criminals about their involvement in a purported horrendous crime! It is not rude, shaming, or belittling to seek quotes from alleged rapists. Actually, it is what a responsible journalist does, even when it makes said journalist’s source uneasy. And if making a source uneasy makes a journalist uneasy, it’s time for the journalist in question to find another profession.
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Anorak
Posted: 9th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
Can you hear the trees talking? No. Maybe you should try writing to them. It turns out that trees love to email:
SOME might think they are barking mad, but sappy Melburnians have started emailing trees.
And sometimes they reply.
In what is believed to be a world first, Melbourne City Council says all of its 70,000 trees can be contacted and wants more people to join the “correspondence program” set up to connect people with the green environment.
So far, emails seen by the Herald Sun include conversations about moving overseas, Melbourne’s weather and even the Brownlow.
One emailer told a tree: “I am stuck inside and am so jealous of you soaking up the sun. You seem to be having a ball out there.”
The Chinese elm replied: “Sorry that you are stuck inside. I am really enjoying stretching my stomata and giving my chloroplasts a good workout. I spent the weekend well hydrated and preparing for the summer ahead.”
No word from the Christmas trees yet…
Anorak
Posted: 9th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
The Daily Mail has news:
If you didn’t know better, you’d be excused for thinking the Mail was illustrating why immigration works.
As for builders, well…
Anorak
Posted: 9th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
What do People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have against women?
Peta thought it an idea to slap up a billbaord poster of a woman with a dairy bukake facial by Notts County Football Club.
The slogan told locals “some bodily fluids are bad for you – Don’t Swallow. Ditch Dairy”. Peta calls the add “cheeky”.
PETA Director Mimi Bekhechi said:
“The billboard was a cheeky way to alert passers-by to the dangers of drinking cows’ milk.”
But milking the bull can be far more hazardous…
Anorak
Posted: 9th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
Madeleine McCann: A look at the missing child in the news.
BBC: “Madeleine McCann: British police to observe questioning in Portugal”
British police investigating Madeleine McCann’s disappearance in 2007 have arrived in Portugal to observe the questioning of 11 people. It is the biggest number called in for questioning since the Met’s Operation Grange began in 2011.
Who are the 11?
Among those being interviewed – although not as suspects – are Robert Murat and his wife.
He’s innocent. All 11 are innocent. The febrile reporting that would have portrayed all as “suspects” is now surely passed.
BBC correspondent Christian Fraser said they would be looking for “inconsistencies” with any answers given seven years ago.
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Anorak
Posted: 9th, December 2014 | In: Madeleine McCann, Reviews | Comment
Judith Levine on the culture of using racism and bigotry to attack anyone who seeks evidence of a rape:
Just before Thanksgiving, Richard Bradley sensed something was wrong with the story inR olling Stone of a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity. On his blog, Bradley, editor-in-chief of Worth magazine, suggested some possible consequential omissions in Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s reporting. Why, for instance, was there no response—or even a “no comment”—from any of the alleged offenders?…
Bradley’s questions unsettled Reason staff editor Robby Soave, who had until then taken Erdely’s narrative at face value. Soave followed up. His headline was hyperbolic: “Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?” But the piece was a straightforward skeptical inquiry, which, after all, is Reason’s raison d’être.
This did not go over well in certain feminist circles. It didn’t help that the two skeptics were men.
On Jezebel, Anna Merlan expressed her opinion with characteristic Jezebelian eloquence:“‘Is the UVA Rape Story a Gigantic Hoax?’ Asks Idiot” And typically, readers chimed in with gender-baiting:
“But never mind Erdely’s months of work. Two guys who have no idea what they’re talking about don’t believe it. Case closed.”
“Newsflash: Most libertarians are misogynist/racist white men.”
“What an asshole.”
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Anorak
Posted: 8th, December 2014 | In: Reviews | Comment
