Joan Smith points out some implications of the Cyprus outrage:

This sequence of events is a stain on the Cypriot justice system, but what lies behind it is a hugely disproportionate anxiety about false accusations. Indeed it is one of the principal myths that undermine rape investigations, even though the idea that there are high levels of false allegations is unsupported by evidence. In the UK, a handful of widely publicised cases that ended in acquittals or a decision not to proceed to trial has tainted the entire system for investigating rape. Many people do not understand that a decision not to prosecute reflects an assessment of the available evidence, and does not mean the victim was lying.

The Crown

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New rule for women: don’t report gang-rape, because if you do you could find yourself convicted of lying.

The UK government is to raise concerns with the authorities in Cyprus over the fairness of a trial in which a British teenager was found guilty of lying about being gang-raped.

A judge ruled on Monday that the 19-year-old wilfully indulged in public mischief in claiming she was raped by a group of Israeli males aged between 15 and 22 while she was on holiday in Ayia Napa in July.

The ruling by Michalis Papathanasiou at Famagusta’s district court in Paralimni was immediately and strongly condemned by the defence team and rights groups. They claimed the trial was full of legal

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What is transphobic? Saying that a man competing against women in sport is unfair is transphobic. We’re told.

https://twitter.com/DaveDavidDave_/status/1212053730176184322

Advantage? What advantage? What advantage could that doctor in the middle possibly have?… Read the rest

Mike Bloomberg describes for us his vision of hell plan to get lots done because desks and screens.

As president, I'll turn the East Room into an open office plan, where I’ll sit with our team.

I’ll use the Oval Office for some official functions – never for tweeting – but the rest of the time, I’ll be where a leader should be: with the team. https://t.co/zIU3ZL5uIv pic.twitter.com/jLwWKJCmxw

— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) December 30, 2019

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Dallas News:

Since my younger daughter is only 11, I didn’t expect the weight of the letter she brought me that night around 11 p.m., hours after I’d put her to bed.

In glittery red ink, the same she used for her Christmas list, her words sank my heart. At a friend’s birthday party, they were playing on the little girl’s phone. The girl handed it to my daughter and said, “Boys are disgusting.” My daughter clicked on a male classmate’s Snapchat story to find a video of him and a few other boys from her class laughing as they watched rape porn. She said the woman was bound up, saying “no” as a masked man approached her.

Her

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Princess Ivanka gets another fawning interview with people who should know better:

[T]hings got worse at the end of the interview when Brennan went to extreme lengths to portray her as a moderating force in her father’s White House.

On the topic of immigration, Brennan described Ivanka as “vocal in your opposition” to the inhumane family separation policy her father implemented in April 2018, noting that she described the policy as a “low point.” But Ivanka was not in fact “vocal” in opposition to the policy — in fact, the opposite is the case.

As my colleague Emily Stewart chronicled at the time, Ivanka — supposedly an advocate for women and families in the administration — only spoke out

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Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Hey, how about interviewing the people at Ma’s Pie Shop?

I just wish for someone who I feel good about voting for

Honestly, that’s not a realistic wish, unless your bar for “feel good about” is fairly low. (And maybe it is for you, in which case the rest of this post will seem like I’m jumping on you. I’m really just using your post to take aim at a commonly-expressed sentiment that I think is a problem in general, even if it isn’t a problem in your specific case.)

Even if all of politics came down to a simplified one-dimensional ideological spectrum, you would have to be one of the relatively few … Read the rest

What on earth is Google doing giving money to Devin Nunes’s campaign?

I ask not because he’s a Republican but because he’s a lying Trump-enabler.

In November, Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) was in the spotlight — the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, which was leading the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. He used his star turn to push “fantastical conspiracy theories” about Democrats. Nunes falsely accused Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) of trying to obtain nude photos of Trump. He promoted the discredited notion, advanced by Trump but rejected by the intelligence community, that Ukraine took significant steps to meddle in the 2016 election. The debunked contention is part of a broader Russian

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That’s alarming.

https://twitter.com/athornehere/status/1211635972032598019 https://twitter.com/athornehere/status/1211635974654111752 https://twitter.com/athornehere/status/1211635976180838401

That is very alarming. It seems likely that social workers tend to move in Woke circles; if that’s true they likely feel immense pressure to silence the relevant dissenting views.… Read the rest

Everybody’s favorite Veronica Rachel winning hearts and minds some more.

https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1211082109747695616 https://twitter.com/SportIsARight/status/1211448697671819264

Gotta love an academic who calls people “dumbass” on Twitter.… Read the rest

You’d think this was satire but apparently it isn’t. Hold the presses: facial recognition technology “misgenders” trans and nonbinary people. You don’t say! How very shocking!

Yet, for all its advances, facial recognition technology—created by training computer vision algorithms on massive datasets of photographs of faces—might have a critical shortcoming: only being able to “see” two genders.

Sexes, you mean. The average differences in male and female faces aren’t a matter of gender but of sex. They’re physical. Vision algorithms don’t know from people’s inner feeling.

New research by Jed Brubaker, Jacob Paul, and Morgan Klaus Scheuerman (lead author) in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Information Science department reveals that many major facial recognition services misclassify the gender of

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Oh please.

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron agreed that both of their papers have to do a better job of covering President Donald Trump’s supporters.

Not this crap again. They do cover Trump’s supporters. We hear endlessly about forgotten people in forgotten small towns and their forgotten hatred of immigrants; we hear far more about forgotten small town Murika than we do about big city Murika, where a vastly larger percentage of people live.

Baquet and Baron joined NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday to talk about how the Trump administration has waged war on fact-based reporting, and what news outlets should do to push back against disinformation. When asked

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Cute.

Festive Xmas message from the Coalition Against Trans Antagonism:

2019 CATA community Transmas

“Pin the tail on the TERF / SWERF fascists!”

Haw haw obliterate their eyes, geddit?

Here we have what these men’s rights advocates pretending to be oppressed minorities think of Judy Graves. A woman who has dedicated 33 years of her life advocating for the homeless. Her crime was sharing 1 (one) article critical of men in women’s sports. pic.twitter.com/BbHX3XVEoH

— Holly (@holly_hutt_1) December 29, 2019

https://twitter.com/holly_hutt_1/status/1211170423968165888

Oh those people. Yes, I remember them.

Scrolling down the Facebook page I get the feeling the “group” is one very angry person. Possibly as many as two.… Read the rest

Trump is ratcheting up the crazy and disgusting.

California and New York must do something about their TREMENDOUS Homeless problems. They are setting records! If their Governors can’t handle the situation, which they should be able to do very easily, they must call and “politely” ask for help. Would be so easy with competence!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2019

Which they should be able to do very easily – oh yes it’s dead easy to provide abundant housing for non-rich people in a week or two, especially in a system that is categorically hostile to all forms of public housing.

So sad to see that New York City and State are falling apart. All they want to

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Hmm. Science! And skepticism! Science and skepticism! Together! Jonathan Jarry’s Twitter profile:

Science + skepticism for the public. Podcasting, writing & talks.
@McGillOSS
. One half of The Body of Evidence (w/
@DrLabos
). Feelings don’t care about facts.

Sounds good. Yay science, yay skepticism, yay for the public. The slogan makes more sense as “facts don’t care about feelings” but maybe he’s being playful.

Any trends to talk about?

https://twitter.com/crackedscience/status/1210724744053420033

How much time do you have?

https://twitter.com/crackedscience/status/1210960657035780103

Uhhh…denialists? Seriously? It’s “denialism” to say that people can’t change sex? (And it’s the opposite of denialism to say that men are not men if they say they are not men?)

I wouldn't want to be a feminist online, interested in

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Psychology Today:

Here’s what really happened: On November 21, Kayum Ahmed, a South African and an adjunct member of the Columbia University Law School faculty, spoke at Fieldston about apartheid. In the Q & A, which was recorded on video, in response to a student’s question, he said that “xenophobic attacks are a shameful part of South African history, but in some ways it reflects the fluidity between those who are victims becoming perpetrators,” and that he uses the same example in talking about the Holocaust. “Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and established the State of Israel,” he told them, “today perpetuate violences against Palestinians that are unthinkable.”^*

If a speaker had made comments such as these

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Meryl Streep made an important point in this 2012 interview on Fresh Air:

GROSS: You gave a terrific commencement address at Barnard in 2010. And one of things you talked about was that the hardest thing in the world is to persuade a straight, male audience to identify with a woman character. It’s easier for women because we were brought up identifying with male characters in literature. It’s hard for straight boys to identify with Juliet or Wendy in “Peter Pan,” whereas girls identify with Romeo and with Peter Pan. What led you to that conclusion?

STREEP: What let me to that was I have never – I mean, I watch movies. And I don’t care who is the

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