The fact of higher protein content appears to be true (without going back to find and critique all the original studies). Explanations are much harder to ‘prove’ for questions like this.

We can’t do experiments on the evolution of tears, so all we can do is come up with plausible theories and look at how they fit with the body of evidence. With enough evidence, from enough different angles, we might one day be able to say which proposed explanations fit the facts (and which don’t). It’s how we (eventually) proved smoking was killing people (another question we cannot do experiments on human beings to prove one way or the other) but not all questions are as important as smoking was and there isn’t necessarily a neat, single factor explanation to find even if someone was willing to fund all the necessary research.

Not my area but, for example, I recently saw a study claim that sniffing women’s tears makes men less aggressive. That’s an angle that might help build some support for, or knock down, the theory that emotional tears are useful for social communication (ie help get women killed slightly less often). Did those studies use sad stories or onions? Did any study compare sad stories to onions? If we’re seeing hints of differences between sad stories and onions, that would tend to support the social communication element of the explanation. Unless we think there’s a difference between sad tears and frightened tears, which there probably is, so we should check that too. And the rest of the literature on tears, if it’s considered important enough to get the theory right. And we need to remember that sticky tears are not the same thing as smelly tears, so can we do experiments where non-emotional tears are made sticky, and non-sticky tears made to smell frightened?

Etc etc.

Explaining things we observe but cannot directly experiment on is a process, a process which typically takes many years and dozens of research groups. And a lot of funding. And decades of exhausting battles, if there is a lot riding on the answer (as it did with Big Tobacco vs Public Health).

They get away with it if the people they attack are less powerful than they are, yeah. Power is a thing.

No it doesn’t. The dean who made this decision, as with most people in stable positions of power, does not need telling what to do because he will do it anyway.

Rutledge clerked for Clarence Thomas, and is featured in a painting included in ProPublica’s reporting on Republican donor Harlan Crow’s gifts to the Supreme Court Justice.

I didn’t say you denied the Holocaust. I said you implied that it is the first example of European antisemitism.

I agree with a lot of this but this bit is a non-sequitur:

One thing many people don’t realize is that the Zionist colonial project was in motion long before WWII, as far back as the late 1800s.

Political zionism did get started in the late 1800s, as a proposed solution to the centuries of pogroms, expulsions and discrimination against Jews in Europe. Prior to the horrors of WWII, most Jews considered it literal heresy. It was the Holocaust that convinced many that Zionism was their only option, not least because most of the free world closed its borders to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and its aftermath. There was nowhere else to go.

This is a very useful short piece by a Jewish anti-zionist, pleading with the pro-Palestinian movement to take more care with their understanding of history: Zionism, Antisemitism and the Left Today

The Palestinians are paying the price for Europe’s crimes. The problem cannot be solved by denying that those crimes ever happened.

Statutory rape does not exist as an offence in English law. The offence is sexual contact with a minor.

The age of consent is 16 but 18 if the older party is in a position of responsibility (like a teacher). So whether or not she had unlawful sexual contact with the second boy would depend on how that law was interpreted, as well as when the first contact took place.

I’m used to that having full articles

Quite a lot of communities ban posting of full articles, including this one:

Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post.

Helluva headline given the story is about tied labour.

The event is called the Madrid Open.

It doesn’t matter? This incident was doubly antisemitic, preventing someone from protesting because they are Jewish, and assuming that pro-Palestinian protesters would attack them simply because they were Jewish (ie equating Jewishness with support for Israel and criticism of Israel with antisemitism).

Yes, he’s a provocateur. So what? If the copper had said it was because they wanted to keep the two groups of protesters apart (as they routinely do, or are supposed to do), that would be fine. But he decided to be racist about it instead.

She was crap at her job but she was also too inexperienced for it and employed to do it by cost-cutting producers who took so many shortcuts on set safety, half the crew walked out before this happened.

More powerful heads need to roll.

What high profile court case?

Oh, please! Streisand the fuck out of it. Plenty of people have done what he did without ever being forced to acknowledge it was rape. Keep this story going for the sake of everyone, everywhere.

This is an easy statement to make but context matters. In this case, he was not named by the media but had they not covered the story, he would never have been charged because it suited the political establishment to do nothing at all.

Higgins alleged she was raped by a colleague in an exclusive 2021 television interview with the Network Ten’s “The Project” program, which also raised questions about the official response by ministers and political staffers in the aftermath of the alleged assault.

After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.

The legal system didn’t deal with it, as per fucking usual. He decided that he would use that fact to prove he was innocent, giving the court an opportunity to explain very carefully why he is quite clearly guilty.

This was a huge political scandal. It’s not reasonable to declare that the media should not have reported it.

The data showed that the chance of scoring rose when teammates showed their support through touch. The effect only appeared after a failed first shot, which makes sense because such a scenario is likely to spike stress levels.

Of course, the data is not shown. And the study is not able to draw causal conclusions. In this case, they’ve hunted around and found a subset of shots (second shots after a first failed shot) where it’s true. And it’s easy to make up reasons after the fact why that might make sense.

It does seem very reasonable to hypothesise that supportive team mates make it less likely you choke on the second shot. But they haven’t shown this is down to touch (they just used that as a proxy for supportive team mates). Nor that the percentage of successful second shots after a failed first shot would be improved by more touching regardless of whether team mates are genuinely supportive or quietly seething…

It was known that the software was shitty and buggy before it was foisted on the Post Office, having been rejected by DWP (and the Post Office right up until they were given no choice). It was Blair’s decision, he didn’t want to upset Fujitsu or discourage investment from Japan.

Short and long versions of a report into that on the JFSA website.

Pressure from govt to pretend that it worked, and to make the business profitable for privatisation, caused this inhuman clusterfuck.

Your point only makes sense if you believe that Rudy Guede was telling the truth. It’s possible but she was acquitted so you probably shouldn’t libel her here.

You don’t have to be an Italian for that advice to be good.

It’s always the police who write up what you say, then they ask you to sign it. They wrote up what she said and she signed it. The following day she wrote a long letter saying that she didn’t think it was true because she’s been under duress. That is why the conviction for slander has been quoshed and this new trial is now happening.