What Experts Know About Men Who Rape →

A great overview of the studies on why people rape, beginning with a little history:

The most pronounced similarities have little to do with the traditional demographic categories, like race, class and marital status. Rather, other kinds of patterns have emerged: these men begin early, studies find. They may associate with others who also commit sexual violence. They usually deny that they have raped women even as they admit to nonconsensual sex.
Clarifying these and other patterns, many researchers say, is the most realistic path toward curtailing behaviors that cause so much pain.
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Early studies relied heavily on convicted rapists. This skewed the data, said Neil Malamuth, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been studying sexual aggression for decades.
Men in prison are often “generalists,” he said: “They would steal your television, your watch, your car. And sometimes they steal sex.”
But men who commit sexual assault, and are not imprisoned because they got away with it, are often “specialists.” There is a strong chance that this is their primary criminal transgression.
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Men who rape tend to start young, in high school or the first couple of years of college, likely crossing a line with someone they know, the research suggests...

Insectageddon →

This is not to downgrade the danger presented by global heating – on the contrary, it presents an existential threat. It is simply that I have come to realise that two other issues have such huge and immediate impacts that they push even this great predicament into third place.
One is industrial fishing, which, all over the blue planet, is now causing systemic ecological collapse. The other is the erasure of non-human life from the land by farming.
And perhaps not only non-human life. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, at current rates of soil loss, driven largely by poor farming practice, we have just 60 years of harvests left. And this is before the Global Land Outlook report, published in September, found that productivity is already declining on 20% of the world’s cropland.
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The profits of these companies depend on ecocide. Do we allow them to hold the world to ransom, or do we acknowledge that the survival of the living world is more important than returns to their shareholders? At the moment, shareholder value comes first. And it will count for nothing when we have lost the living systems on which our survival depends.

To save ourselves and the rest of the living world, here’s what we need to do: ...

The tax on women in national security →

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Reading all of these responses, what struck me was the ongoing tax that most of these women reported experiencing. Even if not facing outright harassment, they had to constantly navigate a work environment in which inappropriate or problematic norms were on display. Each of these women reported constant internal debate over when and if to protest “minor” infractions.
These are problems I have never had to deal with during my entire professional career. I can only imagine just how less productive I would have been coping with this additional layer of challenges.

The Fundamentals Favor Democrats In 2018 →

Democrats had a really good night on Tuesday, easily claiming the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, flipping control of the Washington state Senate and possibly also the Virginia House of Delegates, passing a ballot measure in Maine that will expand Medicaid in the state, winning a variety of mayoral elections around the country, and gaining control of key county executive seats in suburban New York.
They also got pretty much exactly the results you’d expect when opposing a Republican president with a 38 percent approval rating.
That’s not to downplay Democrats’ accomplishments. Democrats’ results were consistent enough, and their margins were large enough, that Tuesday’s elections had a wave-like feel. That includes how they performed in Virginia, where Ralph Northam won by considerably more than polls projected. When almost all the toss-up races go a certain way, and when the party winning those toss-up races also accomplishes certain things that were thought to be extreme long shots (such as possibly winning the Virginia House of Delegates), it’s almost certainly a reflection of the national environment.
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Something is wrong on the internet →

We haven't begun to figure out how technology is affecting us as a species, yet it's changing our social world more and more, faster and faster. One small, bizarre, and extremely creepy product of automated video creation on YouTube is the massive pile of hour-long bot-generated toddler/kid videos, which are flagged as kid-safe, but never reviewed by an actual person. The volume and speed of production is so great, it would be impossible to moderate. What do we do?

Superheroes BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video For Kids. For More Rhymes Please Subscribe Our Channel

This video, BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video, contains all of the elements we’ve covered above, and takes them to another level. Familiar characters, nursery tropes, keyword salad, full automation, violence, and the very stuff of kids’ worst dreams. And of course there are vast, vast numbers of these videos. Channel after channel after channel of similar content, churned out at the rate of hundreds of new videos every week. Industrialised nightmare production.

 

I didn't understand how widespread rape was. Then the penny dropped →

What I really want to draw attention to here is my initial reaction of disbelief: “Sure things are bad; but it can’t be that bad.” Even a lefty academic versed in feminist theory instinctively rebelled against the idea that rich and powerful men regularly rape or attempt to rape the women cleaning their rooms, that this happens all the time, that everyone in the hotel industry knows it happens (since they must know), and that those rich and powerful men in turn know they could get away with it because if any woman they attacked did protest too strenuously, everyone would move in lockstep to do whatever was required to make the problem go away. 
It’s of course this very disbelief that allows such things to happen. We are loth to accept people we might know might practice pure, naked aggression. This is how bullies get away with what they do. I’ve written about this. 
Bullying is not just a relation between bully and victim. It’s really a three-way relation, between bully, victim and everyone who refuses to do anything about the aggression...

Quick primer on what came out today in the Mueller investigation

Analysis from a former federal prosecutor.

On the basics of today's indictment of Papadopoulos:

On how this fits into the larger investigation:

And more summary, and strategy: