• Shakesville: The Bargain, and Its Alternative. shakespearessister.blogspot.com (2009-10-07). (Linked Wednesday 2009-10-07.)

• FBI Investigated Programmer for Liberating Paywalled Court Records. Wired Top Stories (2009-10-07). In which the Law Mafia decides that its online database is "compromised" with a "security hole" when a coder starts using it to actually release public legal records for free access by the public. (Linked Wednesday 2009-10-07.)

• Smells like improbable cause. Thoreau, Unqualified Offerings (2009-10-05). By Thoreau You know how a cop can search any car/person/house/apartment/boat/plane/train/automobile/blimp/etc. he wants if he claims that a dog did something to suggest that it  might smell drugs?  Well, a couple  of bloodhounds in Texas reacted to the smell of a deputy sheriff during a murder investigation, and the guy… (Linked Wednesday 2009-10-07.)

• The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted... Thomas L. Knapp, Center for a Stateless Society (2009-10-05). ... at least not if "law enforcers" get their way. During the G-20 summit in the Pittsburgh area last week, police arrested two activists. These particular activists weren't breaking windows. They weren't setting cars on fire. They weren't even parading around brandishing giant puppets and chanting anti-capitalist slogans. In fact,… (Linked Wednesday 2009-10-07.)

• On Becoming Ungovernable. Brad Spangler, BradSpangler.com (2009-09-30). "This movement should create a situation in which authorities will control empty stores, but not the market; the employment of workers, but not their livelihood; the official media, but not the circulation of information; printing plants, but not the publishing movement; the mail and telephones, but not communications; and the… (Linked Wednesday 2009-10-07.)

• RPS. xkcd.com (2009-10-04). (Linked Sunday 2009-10-04.)

• Polanski, "Hounddog" and 13-year-old voices. Kate Harding, Salon: Broadsheet (2009-10-02). Earlier this week, I was talking to a friend about l’affair Polanski, and she brought up a really good point: Remember the "Hounddog" controversy? (No? Then you might remember the "Dakota Fanning Rape Movie" controversy.) In that case, a female writer-director, Deborah Kampmeier, was excoriated for depicting a fictional child… (Linked Monday 2009-10-05.)

It’s Sunday. Shamelessness is in the air.

What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you want to talk about.

• Misleading pseudo-scientific argument of the week. Mark Liberman, Language Log (2009-09-03). According to Abigail Norfleet James, Teaching the Male Brain: How Boys Think, Feel, and Learn in School (2007), p 37: The shape of the inner ear is not the same for boys and girls. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the female cochlea responds more quickly to sound… (Linked Wednesday 2009-09-30.)

• Semantic fail. Mark Liberman, Language Log (2009-09-03). Leena Rao at TechCrunch points out a case where semantic search turned into anti-semitic search. This morning I wrote about NetBase Solutions' healthBase, a semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites including WebMD, Wikipedia, and PubMed. But is it a semantic engine or an… (Linked Wednesday 2009-09-30.)

Observed in the midst of Jeff Fecke’s post at Alas, A Blog, which is otherwise mostly quite good, on media responses to the recent arrest of child rapist film director Roman Polanski:

Many, many articles cited the fact that the victim, now grown up and 45 years old, has said she wants the case to be let go, because each time it gets dredged up it brings up painful memories of her being raped. I choose the Telegraph because its headline puts the word victim in scare quotes, because...something:

In January, [the victim]1 filed a legal declaration in Los Angeles formally requesting that the outstanding charges against Polanski be withdrawn.

She said Los Angeles prosecutors' insistence that Polanski must return to the United States before dismissal of the case could be considered as a "cruel joke being played on me".

She also voiced anger that authorities had detailed her grand jury testimony in related hearings to the case.

"True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children and my mother," she said, adding that it was time for closure.

"I have survived, indeed prevailed, against whatever harm Mr Polanski may have caused me as a child," she said. Polanski had taken flight, she said, "because the judicial system did not work."

— Jeff Fecke, Alas, A Blog (2009-09-28): Rape Apologists: Roman Polanski's Rape of a Child Not That Bad

Jeff’s reply:

I understand the victim's feelings on this. And I sympathize, I do. But for good or ill, the justice system doesn't work on behalf of victims; it works on behalf of justice. …

— Jeff Fecke, Alas, A Blog (2009-09-28): Rape Apologists: Roman Polanski's Rape of a Child Not That Bad

No doubt.

And that’s exactly why 90% of rapes still go unreported.

Because the government court systems which rape survivors are expected to go through, if they report the crimes committed against them, are deliberately unresponsive to women’s wishes, take control out of women’s hands, and do it all because they believe that there is some kind of justice that can be gained independently of, or even in direct violation of, the wishes of the victim for safety and restitution for past wrongs. That, in the alleged interests of society (which, typically, means the interests of the state, or, even more typically, the ambitions of the prosecutor), are willing to go on with the prosecution of a woman’s rape, whether or not she wants them to, and even if she publicly states that the government’s prosecution is proceeding against her will, out of her control, and it will hurt her for it to continue.

When the justice system doesn’t work on behalf of victims, the justice system is an asshole.