Links, Monday 29th Dec

This is a simple point, but a very useful one to make. People on the left, who I consider allies, are often instinctively hostile to pricing and I think this is a mistake. Pricing can help us use limited resources more efficiently, which benefits everyone. HOWEVER, these efficiency gains can only be realised if there is sufficient equality in cash incomes. I'm inclined to think the best possible formula would be a generous universal basic income funded out of general taxation (firmly a left-wing view), combined with quite a lot more pricing than we have now (generally considered a right-wing view). Vox

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There's some cool stuff in the world. Cracked

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"We cannot know if the cotton industry was the only possible way into the modern industrial world, but we do know that it was the path to global capitalism. We do not know if Europe and North America could have grown rich without slavery, but we do know that industrial capitalism and the Great Divergence in fact emerged from the violent caldron of slavery, colonialism, and the expropriation of land." Chronicle

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The second in our series on logistics and shipping. First entry was pallets; now barrels.

"The barrel, Work points out, is a far from simple idea. Many civilisations came up with buckets, probably first by hollowing out logs and then by binding slats of wood together, but barrels tapered at both ends seem only to have been devised by Northern European Celts." Spectator

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"In the Western world, the front crawl was first seen in a swimming race held in 1844 in London, where it was swum by Native North Americans. The Anishinaabe Flying Gull and Tobacco easily defeated all the British breaststroke swimmers. English gentlemen, however, considered this style, with its considerable splashing, to be barbarically "un-European" and the British continued to swim only the breaststroke in competition." Wikipedia

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""If you make your students do well in their academic career, you get worse evaluations from your students," Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don't enjoy learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some good." NPR

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"the automobile and the elevator have been locked in a “secret war” for over a century, with cars making it possible for people to spread horizontally, encouraging sprawl and suburbia, and elevators pushing them toward life in dense clusters of towering vertical columns." Boston Globe

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"To be considered ‘vulnerable’ in this investigation they had to fulfill one of the criteria, of which working in a brothel was one, which labeled the whole group as ‘vulnerable’. Other criteria were having an economically disadvantaged position (not speaking English, not having had an education), having a disadvantaged social position (being an illegal immigrant for example), being wrongly informed (it was sufficient if you were working in a different city than had been agreed on) or having been abused/having been forced (was found only rarely). Four of these criteria were enough to be considered a ‘victim of human trafficking’ in this report, regardless of whether you actually were a victim of human trafficking. 11% of the women included in the investigation complied to these criteria. Next, this percentage was raised considerably based on preconceptions (“this has to be too low, in reality there must be more women from vulnerable countries”) and the results were presented to the world: thousands of victims of human trafficking in the UK! They hadn’t found even one…"

Marijke Vonk

Links, Sunday 21st Dec

This is utterly disgusting. BBC

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WTAF

"There will also be a €600 fine for showing a lack of respect to anyone in uniform" RT

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"Forbes awarded the humble dabba-wallahs a 6 Sigma performance rating, a term used in quality assurance if the percentage of correctness is 99.9999999 or more. In other words, for every six million tiffins delivered, only one fails to arrive. This error rate means in effect that a tiffin goes astray only once every two months.

It is a rare day indeed when a customer's deep-fried rotis fail to turn up. The sigma rating was the same as that given to the top bluechip company Motorola - not bad considering that most dabba-wallahs are illiterate." Guardian

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Well done. Huff Post

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This is a good one. All cops are bastards, so let's just not have any. Rolling Stone

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Incredible story about the sheer scale of air pollution in Beijing. Guardian

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Such good work at the demo last night: marching to commemorate sex workers who have been killed in the past year, and to fight creeping criminalisation in the UK. Vice

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Amazing that, in some ways, we're still technologically behind the Romans. iO9

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I keep thinking that basic income is probably *the* most important political project of our generation. Let's try make it happen!

"To appreciate the full extent of the emancipation, one should hear the story of the young women who at first wore veils and were reluctant to offend their elders when having their photographs taken to obtain eligibility for the basic income. Within months, they had confidence enough to be sitting and chatting in the centre of the village unveiled. They had their bit of independence." Guardian

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Very nice overview of the electricity situation in South Africa, along with some usefully specific policy proposals at the end. Daily Maverick

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"When we talk about diversity and inclusion, we necessarily position marginalized groups as naturally needing to assimilate into dominant ones, rather than to undermine said structures of domination. Yes, we need jobs; we need education; we need to access various resources. What we don’t need is to relegate ourselves to the position of depending on someone else to offer us inclusion and access to those resources. Inclusion is something they must give, but our liberation is something we will take." MVC

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It's pretty thoughtless to state that "all" Americans are in as much danger as Eric Garner (since not all Americans are black and working class), but this is a pretty shocking statistic:

"Husak cites estimates that more than 70 percent of American adults have committed a crime that could lead to imprisonment." Bloomberg

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"Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a “unit load”—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century." Cabinet

Links, Friday 12th Dec

South African Home Affairs is refusing to renew asylum seekers' temporary papers, exposing them to arbitrary arrest. Some of them have been waiting for permanent papers for more than a decade.

Groundup

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The Cracked "personal experience" stories have generally been very well done, and are actually some of the more insightful bits of journalism I've seen lately. Here is an article talking about the editorial process. Spectator

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This column conflates two issues. On the one hand is the issue of government financing. The present regime of "quantitative easing" involves central banks buying government bonds and other securities. This increases the price of assets and decreases borrowing costs in the short-term, but actually isn't very inflationary in the long-term - everyone knows that the central bank will eventually sell those bonds again. If they really wanted to "print money", they could announce they were buying bonds and *never getting rid of them*. This would essentially create money out of thin air, which the government could do with as it pleased. As it happens, I think printing money, in limited quantities, would probably be a good thing, since much of the rich world is suffering deflation right now.

On the other hand is the question of what a government should do with borrowed (or printed) money: buy corporate bonds, prop up banks, build infrastructure, hand out cheques to people, etc. As it happens, I think handing out cheques would also be rather a good use of money. But where the money comes from and what you do with it are separate issues! Guardian

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Some of this resonates, but I also see how it could be used by the "Social Justice Warriors are censoring me! *boo hoo*" crowd. Thoughts? McGill Daily

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LOL. "The geek hierarchy"

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"Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time. There is every reason to believe that destroying job security while increasing working hours does not create a more productive (let alone more innovative or loyal) workforce. Probably, in economic terms, the result is negative—an impression confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties.

But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and overdetermining the future. Economically, the growth of armies, police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. It’s possible, in fact, that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it’s also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project."

Baffler

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"A local Tumblr account, Suburban Fear, highlights just how common racial profiling is in the community forums and neighbourhood watches of South Africa’s suburban neighbourhoods and how self righteous volunteers proudly speak of “taking back the streets” as they continue to enforce informal apartheid in South Africa 20 years after democracy." Daily Vox

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"Personal injury lawyers have become so familiar with such vehicular niceties that they've coined a term for them: the "wave of death." Cracked

Links, Wednesday 26th November

This guy. What an asshole. Guardian

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"For all the recent talk of a surveillance state created through the National Security Agency, an oppressive low-tech surveillance state has been in place for decades — and it’s been directed at many of America’s poorest people." NYTimes

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They guy is obviously odious in many ways, but here's a good quote:

"But I have a slightly different cut on the Snowden revelations. I think it shows the NSA more as the Keystone Cops than as Big Brother. What is striking to me is how little James Bond-like stuff was going on and how little they did with all this information. That's why I think, in some ways, the NSA is more in this anti-technological zone where they don't know what to do with the data they find. So they just hoover up all the data, all over the world. I think it was news to Obama that he was tapping into [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel's cell phone.

One way to think about this is that if the NSA bureaucracy actually knew what they were doing, they would probably need way less information. What's shocking about Snowden is how much information they had and how little they did with it." Vox

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Amazing. When they discover a new empty shell, hermit crabs arrange themselves into a queue by size to optimise their new living arrangements. io9

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This is admittedly a relatively dispute between different groups of rich people, but it's still interesting to observe the legal weight attached to particular conceptions of "family". Courant

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According to Darren Wilson's sworn testimony, Mike Brown repeatedly physically attacked him without provocation and actually dared him to shoot. Does this occur to anyone as even remotely plausible? Does this occur to anyone as a story so solid it doesn't even need to be tested in court? Vox

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While the world's eyes are on Ferguson, Hong Kong authorities take the opportunity to arrest the leaders of the protests happening there. Guardian

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"Ditching the myth of South African exceptionalism must reverse this. Democracy wasn’t a ‘miracle,’ it was the result of hard work." Daily Maverick

Links, Monday 24th November

This all smells of moralistic nonsense. There are lots of good reasons to think that e-cigarettes are considerably less harmful than the tobacco kind. Surely they should be promoted as a replacement? M&G

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The economic problem remains with us, for now. Vox

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This little anecdote should make it clear just how much objections to trans athletes participating in their preferred categories are the result of bigotry, rather than genuine concern for fair play.

"But if the existence of openly transgender athletes complicates the question of who belongs where, one might assume it’d be less of an issue in eSports, where physical advantages are minimized. All of the frantic intergalactic combat of StarCraft is performed through the proxy of a mouse and keyboard, meaning it has more in common with, say, Scrabble than MMA fighting. Yet when Hostyn won the Iron Lady, a StarCraft tournament for women only in 2011 and 2012, her victory elicited outcries similar to those that Fox faced." AV Club

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I think this is broadly accurate in describing the increasing role that white, working class identity politics is playing in Europe and North America (I guess Australia too?).

I think there's also something to be said for how basically reasonable policies can become flashpoints for popular dissatisfaction with government. It Ireland right now, it's charging for water. In South Africa, it's road tolling. In Britain and the US, fears about immigration are definitely rooted in racism and xenophobia, but they also serve as a symbol of dissatisfaction generally. Both of these are reasons why the anti-immigration lobby is so easily able to dismiss economic arguments demonstrating that immigration materially benefits the native-born.

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"According to the DA, the records suggest that confidential oral representations by Zuma’s lawyers, Kemp J Kemp and Michael Hulley – later described by two senior NPA officials, Thanda Mgwengwe and Sibongile Mzinyathi, as “blackmail” – were intended to shock the NPA into dropping the charges without regard for the strength of the case.

These included claims of serious wrongdoing by McCarthy, Ngcuka, Downer, former justice minister Penuell Maduna, then-deputy national director of public prosecutions Willie Hofmeyr “and many other prominent politicians and members of the intelligence services”.

Recorded notes quote Zuma’s lawyers as saying that whether the information was lawfully obtained “is beside the point – we will release it”, and that, in a plea for a permanent stay of the charges, “we will mention the issue of senior NPA officials involved in political machinations. Whether we win or lose … people won’t forget it”." M&G

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"Beckert argued that cotton exemplifies how early forms of capitalism depended not on free wage labour, but on slavery and other unfree forms of labour. His argument that slavery shaped the structure and development of capitalist relations of work has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the history of capitalism, and calls into question key assumptions on which the discipline of sociology has rested." UCT

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I'm enjoying the new quantitative approach to book reviewing.

"The Kindle company from Amazon keeps track of the last page of
your highlighting in a downloaded book (you didn’t know that, did you?). Using the fact, the mathematician Jordan Ellenberg reckons that the average reader of the 655 pages of text and footnotes of Capital in the Twenty-First Century stops somewhere a little past page 26, where the
highlighting stops, about the end of the Introduction."

(review by Deirdre McCloskey)

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[TW: sexual violence]

"Well-intentioned people are backing laws that lead desperate women to get into cars with known rapists. Anti-prostitution activists say that prostitution is violence in and of itself, as if the levels of violence experienced by sex workers cannot rise or fall, as if the scene has always been as violent as it has been post-2007. But it hasn’t, and the women on the streets know this." Feminist Ire

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"This open hatred of sex workers is a sadly familiar situation at London RtN. Events in previous years have seen the sex worker bloc attacked by some women on the main march, and RtN stewards/organisers directing the police to interrogate women marching in the sex worker bloc. This makes clear that the organisers seek not to end violence against women, but violence against some women - and that way they seek to achieve that is through supporting and perpetrating increased violence against women who they deem as not deserving of safety, rights and justice." SWOU

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A pretty fascinating piece of colonial history, exploring the relationships between FGM, colonialism and post-colonial identities. [Some of the graphic content might be a bit upsetting]

"How, in the context of a renewed global effort to denounce clitoridectomy as “female genital mutilation,” are historians to understand the ngaitana’s act of self-circumcision and Gikuyu adherence to the practice more generally, even in the face of criminalization and punishment?" Notches

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The French solution is no doubt a bit distasteful, but how about the Italian option? Guardian

Links, Saturday 22nd Nov

"Not every woman wants to insert her own speculum, or peer at her own cervix. Kapsalis actually said that far fewer women are taking her up on the offer to insert their own speculum than they used to. But for some women—particularly those with a history of sexual violence or bad experiences with pelvic exams in the past—it can be a huge help. “If we’re going to put energy into that exam, I think more energy needs to go into the communication and the context and the sharing of power,” Kapsalis said." Atlantic

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"The hearts have become a way to express white hipsters’ love for the oppressive city we live in: the segregation, the racism, the capitalist exploitation, which all becomes hidden when we are merely told to love and forgive and forget the injustice." Con Mag

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"In its early days, Anonymous was a gang of white men who systematically terrorized minorities and women, with the often explicitly stated goal of driving them from an Internet the men had once totally dominated." Nation

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"the curators make a little joke about our embarrassment when it comes to sex by juxtaposing a 19th-century French booklet praising “Les charmes de la masturbation” with an English publication, The Secret Companion, in which a gentleman is shown lying exhausted on a chaise longue in a section called “On Onanism as a cause of sexual debility”." Guardian

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“With the nil policy, there’s essentially no competition any more,” explains Lamort. “Existing venues aren’t forced to improve, as there’s no incentive. It reduces our power in the labour market, putting us in a much tougher position.”

East End Review

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In light of the uproar about that horrible Jezebel article, I found this detailed research into the life of Saartjie Baartman quite enlightening. JH Mag

[Some potentially upsetting content relating to racism and slavery]

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"Rawls himself said in the opening pages of A Theory of Justice that we had to start with ideal theory because it was necessary for properly doing the really important thing: non-ideal theory, including the “pressing and urgent matter” of remedying injustice. But what was originally supposed to have been merely a tool has become an end in itself; the presumed antechamber to the real hall of debate is now its main site. Effectively, then, within the geography of the normative, ideal theory functions as a form of white flight. You don’t want to deal with the problems of race and the legacy of white supremacy, so, metaphorically, within the discourse of justice, you retreat from any spaces worryingly close to the inner cities and move instead to the safe and comfortable white spaces, the gated moral communities, of the segregated suburbs, from which they become normatively invisible." Daily Nous

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Wow, this could end up very much like open war. Guardian

Links, Tuesday 18th November

Here's a way to really ruin your evening... Tumblr

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Why the US Democratic Party consistently loses with the white working class: racism, basically. Slate

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In case anyone was wondering about the motivations between Canadian bill C-36 (criminalising many aspects of the sex industry), it is explicitly *against* safety for sex workers. Youtube

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Under South Africa's Constitution, the President is effectively both head of state and head of government, and wields vast power. He is even more powerful than the Prime Minister under the Westminster system since, under a proportional representation system, being head of the ruling party gives the President much greater power over backbench MPs than the Prime Minster does. Mover, the House of Commons is counterbalanced by strong independent institutions like the judiciary, civil service and House of Lords. In South Africa, only really the judiciary is strong and independent, and, as pointed out here, this independence is being steadily eroded by the power of appointment also enjoyed by the President.

This immense concentration of power makes South Africa particularly prone to the 'Bad Emperor' problem. That is, we are very vulnerable to the whims of bad leaders, or even generally good leaders who occasionally make poor decisions. It also leads to bitter, winner-takes-all struggles for power. These tendencies have been observable under both the Mbeki and Zuma presidencies. Daily Maverick

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If you're really concerned about protecting women and girls from being coerced into selling sex, consider that purchasers of sex are just about the only people who are in a position to discover coercive practices. Would this man have called the police if he believed he would face criminal charges himself?

"One of the johns blew the lid on the whole operation after the girl who came to his door on May 18, 2012 told him she was underage and was forced to be there. Her story shocked him, he testified, so he gave her some clothes, called her a cab, and called police." Metronews

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Some good ones in here.. Cracked

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Existential angst werewolf SMBC

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If you don't want protests in front of the children, maybe you SHOULDN'T DO RACISM in front of the children!

"Everyone can talk about Black Pete's colour but you can't disturb a children's party like that," Al Jazeera

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Chris Rock's delivery is consistently hilarious, but this joke is pretty terrible. Salon

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"Numerous media outlets recounted how the noble gays and lesbians fought that night – never mentioning trans folk… carrying on that long and painful tradition of ciswashing queer history - especially Stonewall history." Transadvocate

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Dammit, it turns out even synthetic clothing may cause big pollution problems :( Guardian

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Some commentary about the alternative map of Africa I posted the other day... Africa is a Country

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Some great photos of underground London Slate

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Well shit. :(

"It appears that the police presence was carefully planned.

In the days leading up to the fight, the police presence at parliament was beefed up to levels not seen before, with about a dozen police vehicles descending on the square in front of the National Assembly at one point on Tuesday afternoon.

Parliament had taken the unusual step of putting members of the riot police on stand-by in anticipation of an opposition ruckus. They were allocated a committee room on the third floor of the National Assembly to use as a holding venue during sittings of the House." Times

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What a surprise - the 2002 Zimbabwe elections were not free and fair. M&G

Links, Friday 14th November

Hi all. Remember when there was that uproar about the guy who assaulted a domestic worker thinking she was a sex worker, and I was like "actual sex workers get assaulted all the time, and no one gives a shit"? Well, it turns out that same guy HAD assaulted an actual sex worker prior to this, and she hadn't gone to the police until the later story broke (probably, quite rightly, believing that they wouldn't give a shit). News24

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"When the headline maintained that “We have failed to prevent global warming, so we must adapt to it”, the “we” referred in these instances to different people. We who live in the rich world can brook no taxation to encourage green energy, or regulation to discourage the consumption of fossil fuels. We cannot adapt even to an extra penny of taxation. But the other “we”, which turns out to mean “they” – the people of the tropics – can and must adapt to the loss of their homes, their land and their lives, as entire regions become wastelands." Guardian

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"One captain came up with the idea where they would just pick out a white kid and a black kid and let them fight in a cage for five minutes once a month, and that's how it was done. I had to fight like this on two different occasions. Even though I didn't want to do it, I knew that if I didn't, the guards would just take out their sticks and beat both of us senseless. So I fought." Cracked

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An interesting little piece of Soho local history. 

"In this post, I’ve chosen to commemorate some drunk Canadians in London in 1916, the police who impersonated them, and the women who sold sex in the bars that they frequented." Notches

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Here's just a reminder that, when he was in a position to actually expressed a considered opinion on the matter, even David Cameron supported drug liberalisation. 

"David Cameron, the Tory leadership contender, believes the UN should consider legalising drugs and wants hard-core addicts to be provided with legal "shooting galleries" and state-prescribed heroin." Independent

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A little titbit for the vegan propagandists out there...

"a new study from researchers in Uppsala University in Sweden suggests that consuming more milk could actually be associated with higher mortality and bone fractures in women and higher mortality in men." Washington Post

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Drug laws are stupid, mkay?

“We did not in our fact-finding observe any obvious relationship between the toughness of a country’s enforcement against drug possession, and levels of drug use in that country,” Guardian

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"The brainchild of women of color in the reproductive health and rights movements more than two decades ago, the reproductive justice framework came about due to their frustration with the “choice” framework. These activists were frustrated that most reproductive rights activism focused narrowly on abortion and the desire not to have kids when they knew that Mexican-American and indigenous women, as well as other low-income women of color on Medicaid, were getting coercively sterilized." Feministing

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The Australian government, on average, spends $440,000 to detain an asylum seeker offshore, and $239,000 onshore. All this spending supposedly justified by the costs that asylum seekers would impose on the state if allowed to settle. But giving cash to giant corporations is *obviously* a better use of state resources then helping a destitute and desperate person settle in a new country. Guardian

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"A media diet too rich on long gazes and sex that happens between new lovers without a word spoken spoiled us for the reality that communication before and during sexual intimacy can both minimize the likelihood of hurting another person – which should be a desire as base as any other – and even enhance the experience of sex. Consent is seen by BDSMers and vanilla folk alike as boring, plebian, with the sought-after relationship goal being to “just have chemistry”." Guardian

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[TW for sexual assault]

Another big fat rape culture story, I'm afraid. MIC

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What an asshole.

"Turkey’s new president has been accused of behaving like a “sultan” after he installed himself in the biggest residential palace in the world, built for a price tag of £384 million. Recep Tayyip Erdogan now resides in the White Palace, which was constructed in breach of court orders in protected forest land in the capital, Ankara." Telegraph

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"They work in the expectation they will collect their earnings when they return to North Korea, but according to a series of testimonies from defectors and experts, workers receive as little as 10% of their salaries when they go home, and some may receive nothing. One North Korean worker at a construction site in central Doha told the Guardian: “We are here to earn foreign currency for our nation.”" Guardian

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Zuma seems to think of the state as an extension of his own household, and thus feels free to use its resources to benefit his friends and family. I get no sense that he feels any shame about this. M&G

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LOL 

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"The bottom line is this. When someone says they don’t regret their abortion or their sex work, or anything else that some people find traumatising, then, absent real (and individualised) evidence to the contrary, there’s really only one acceptable response. It’s along the lines of “That’s great, I’m glad that you’re OK with your experience.” Anything else amounts to wishing trauma on someone – and it’s a short hop from there to thinking they deserve trauma for making a choice you disapprove of." Feminist Ire

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Another example of the hypersexualisation of black women's bodies Daily Life

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If anyone thinks that Fiona Mactaggart or other sex work prohibitionists have any credibility, here's a reminder that they have been using the same dodgy statistics for *years*. Mactaggart quoted the same statistic in parliamentary debate just the other day. She must by now know full well that it is simply a fabrication, and simply has no concern for actual facts.

"In November 2008, Mactaggart repeated a version of the same claim when she told BBC Radio 4's Today in Parliament that "something like 80% of women in prostitution are controlled by their drug dealer, their pimp, or their trafficker." Again, there is no known source for this." Guardian

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"This practice is called nyumba ntobhu in western Tanzania. It is a traditional form of same-sex marriage. The two women share a bed as a couple, they live together, bear children in their union; they do everything a married couple would, except have sex... To bear children, women who are married under nyumba ntobhu usually hire a man and pay him when the younger woman falls pregnant." M&G

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Police entered the South African Parliament to remove a member, apparently in violation of the Constitution. :( M&G

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For all those labouring under the delusion that white South Africans are now somehow disadvantaged in the labour market...

"I recently heard of a disturbing story of a black person who works for a reputable firm in the financial sector. A senior individual was going to vacate the position; the process took almost two years. It was a given that the person who would logically fill the post was a black female who had been with the firm for some time and had been performing some of the tasks. During the two years, she prepared for the position. Yet, when the time came, she was passed over and the job was given to someone who was her junior – and white." M&G

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An interesting exercise in alternative history, though I can think of a number of problems with it. For one, it seems to presuppose large-scale state consolidation along European lines. Big Think

A larger version is available here

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I agree with this sentiment, though if we think a thing is valuable, perhaps we could subsidise it directly rather than via regulatory barriers to entry?

"Ultimately, the case to make for the Knowledge may not be practical-economic (the Knowledge works better than Sat-Nav), or moral-political (the little man must be protected against rapacious global capitalism), but philosophical, spiritual, sentimental: The Knowledge should be maintained because it is good for London’s soul, and for the souls of Londoners. The Knowledge stands for, well, knowledge — for the Enlightenment ideal of encyclopedic learning, for the humanist notion that diligent intellectual endeavor is ennobling, an end in itself." NY Times

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Make no mistake, laws against "sex trafficking" end up targeting sex workers themselves. And that isn't accidental.

"In January of 2013, a few months after the law was passed, police went to a massage parlor in Kenai, a town south of Anchorage with a population of about 7,000. They arrested a 49-year-old woman, and a 19- and 20-year-old. All three were charged with prostitution. But the 49-year-old was also charged with first, second, and third degree sex trafficking, apparently because she was accused of owning the business." truthout

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"There was also a turn-of-the-century vibrator, with the unfortunate name Veedee; a pun on the Latin phrase, “Veni, vidi, vici”. The packaging made ambitious claims for it as a panacea, able to cure everything from colds to neurosis with its “curative vibration”. The device resembles a bulky hairdryer and was once a serious medical tool, used by doctors to induce the orgasms thought to reposition the wandering womb believed to cause hysteria." Guardian

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"Despite it all, none of the women I talk to want to be rescued from the industry. In fact, they feel reforms to the licensing laws brought in in 2003 and rules introduced in 2009 that allow councils to put a block on the granting of any new licences - both promoted by those who profess to be acting in dancers interests - have seriously damaged their working conditions. " Vice

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"“Something broke tonight.” Those were the words of DA parliamentary leader Mmusi Maimane, speaking to the Daily Maverick just around midnight on Thursday, after a day of sheer chaos." Daily Maverick

Links, Tuesday 11th November

This is unreal. A guy who was laid off from a company was then required by DWP to do unpaid work *for the same company* on pain of losing his jobseeker's allowance. The company was also probably paid by the state for its "good work" in providing work experience for the unemployed. Guardian

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Some good advice to men who want to be allies to feminists. mic

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This is great - you can match immigrant communities to London neighbourhoods very easily. Tube Tongues

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This is precisely why British people ought to be more sceptical about the Poppy Appeal and associated elements of Remembrance Day. These acts of remembrance are directed specifically only at *British* casualties and veterans. And yet soldiers and civilians from plenty of other places died in the First World War and subsequent conflicts. And, lest we forget, many of these conflicts were caused or exacerbated by British colonialism or otherwise morally unsound foreign policy. Guardian

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This appears to confirm an anecdotal suspicion of mine that cycling in painted (i.e. not physically segregated) bicycle lanes is actually more dangerous than being in general traffic.

"Cycle lanes protect cyclists: Another controversial one; on roads with 40mph or 50mph speed limits, University of Leeds academics found that cars leave themselves less space to pass bikes when there are lane markings. This may be because cars pay less regard to cyclists who appear to be in a different lane, says professor John Parkin of UWE." Guardian

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Some good stuff here. Cracked

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"In the past it’s been hard for sex workers, burdened by illegality and stigma, to speak up. Not this time. Scores of women, trans and male sex workers wrote to MPs, outraged that their views, and the experiences of Swedish sex workers in particular, were being ignored. Swedish sex workers have said that since clients have been criminalised, they have been treated worse by the authorities; as the stigma attached to prostitution has increased, women have become less able to report violence to the police, some have had their children taken away and there have been reports of suicide." Guardian

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A defence of market socialism, which gives the proper attention to the problems of economic coordination which are often ignored by naive formulations of socialism (and often quite effectively addressed by market mechanisms). I'd be interested to know what any economists have to say about it. Jacobin

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The SAHRC just did a review of working conditions at Mavericks, a major chain of strip clubs in South Africa. The conclusions: no evidence of coercion or "trafficking" (foreign nationals knew what sort of work they were entering into, etc). Of course there are problems, as there often are at strip clubs, mostly related to the workers being legally defined as 'independent' contractors rather than employees. If you want to help sex workers, help them deal with these issues, rather than trying to shut down the industry, ok? SAHRC

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Britain accepts pitifully few asylum seekers, despite all the fuss that is made about them, and the degree to which British military adventures *create* asylum seekers in the first place.

"How do we compare with our European neighbours, who are supposedly much less of a soft touch? Germany received 127,000 applications for asylum last year, France 65,000, Sweden 54,000 and Britain just 30,000 (Sweden’s population, for the record, is a sixth the size of ours)." Spectator

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LOL. Twisted sifter

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smfh

"The Minister then invited Mpumalanga Chief Moses Mahlangu to share his comments. He announced to the crowd that women must be submissive to their husbands. Princess Dineo, from the Northwest Province, then stood up to tell us that feminism is un-African and encouraged the Minister to cut all funds for centers for abused women and children, as they should be dealing with these issues at home. Both speakers received nods from the Minister on the dais and applause from the audience. Others followed decrying women’s abuse of men and women’s aggression as the biggest challenges." Feminists SA

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Reflecting further on this article from earlier today, and my experience of eating at two different vegan restaurants on my recent trip to New York City. One specialised in "soul food", a style of cuisine popular with African Americans in the South; the other had more classic hippie food, lots of raw vegetables and the like. The customers at the latter restaurant were almost entirely white, whereas the former had a much more racially diverse client base (and better food, generally).

The contrast makes me realise the extent to which "vegetarian food" is so often coded as "white food" and is prepared in styles familiar to white people. So even well-meaning efforts to make vegetarian/vegan catering the default often end up as de facto cultural imperialism (I had this example in mind, perhaps unfairly). This is a shame, because almost all human cultures have a tradition of preparing tasty plant-based meals. It would be entirely possible to make catering both more vegetarian and more inclusive at the same time.

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This is well worth a read, and really reinforces the point that no amount of money and social status can totally protect a black person from racism in a racist world. The long list of rules the author enforces on his kids to try protect them from being attacked or unjustly arrested by the police is kind of heartbreaking. Washington Post

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"Essentially, the message is the same: unless women dress modestly and conservatively, they look out of place in academia, because fundamentally, they don’t have the right bodies to be academic authorities.

This infuriates me, and I refuse to accept it. My intellectual abilities as an academic should be judged on my work: my research, my publications, and my lectures. This is how I have earned and now own my place in academia, regardless – or in spite of – my “feminine” appearance." Guardian

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A fascinating look at the business of kidnap for ransom. Very knotty moral problems here, as you will imagine. Though this is simply shocking:

"To minimize the risk to their fighters, the terror affiliates have outsourced the seizing of hostages to criminal groups who work on commission. Negotiators take a reported 10 percent of the ransom, creating an incentive on both sides of the Mediterranean to increase the overall payout, according to former hostages and senior counterterrorism officials." NY Times

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"Changing how people act is hard, unpleasant work. Heffernan goes on to note a survey that found 85 percent of executives admit that there are problems at their companies that they have "issues and concerns at work they are afraid to raise." Again, that's executives: these are the people most empowered to criticize and change organizations. The point, Heffernan says, is that organizations need cultures capable of not just handling, but actually encouraging, conflict. But that's really hard. "We have to resist the neurobiological drive that makes us prefer people like ourself," she says." Vox

Links, Monday 3rd November

"“The British government seems oblivious to the fact that the world is in the grip of the greatest refugee crisis since the second world war. People fleeing atrocities will not stop coming if we stop throwing them life-rings; boarding a rickety boat in Libya will remain a seemingly rational decision if you’re running for your life and your country is in flames. The only outcome of withdrawing help will be to witness more people needlessly and shamefully dying on Europe’s doorstep." Guardian

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"Iain Duncan Smith has denied setting staff targets for sanctioning benefits claimants; but this paper has found evidence, not only of targets but even league tables for job centres to compete against each other in keeping claimants away from their money." Guardian

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"Last Wednesday, a massive feminist strike paralyzed the streets of Barcelona, with thousands of women and their allies shutting down traffic and the subways, spray-painting feminist slogans all over city walls and occupying the offices of powerful political and economic institutions." MIC

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"The transitional GDR government, in desperate need of foreign currency, eventually overcame moral reservations on 4 January 1990, ordering the [Berlin Wall's] dismantlement and granting the “commercial use of complete segments”. With a grim stroke of historical irony, border guards were made to protect the wall from acts of vandalism." Guardian

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"The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has estimated that meat production accounts for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. These are generated during the production of animal feeds, for example, while ruminants, particularly cows, emit methane, which is 23 times more effective as a global warming agent than carbon dioxide." Guardian

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"It was 10:02 AM local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 1,300 miles away in the Andaman and Nicobar islands (“extraordinary sounds were heard, as of guns firing”); 2,000 miles away in New Guinea and Western Australia (“a series of loud reports, resembling those of artillery in a north-westerly direction”); and even 3,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues, near Mauritius* (“coming from the eastward, like the distant roar of heavy guns.”1) In all, it was heard by people in over 50 different geographical locations, together spanning an area covering a thirteenth of the globe." Nautilus

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"A groundbreaking Home Office report which concluded that tougher enforcement of drug laws does not lead to lower levels of drug use was “suppressed” by the Conservatives, a Liberal Democrat minister has said." Guardian

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This guy is my new hero.

"I think it's complete bullshit that the internet is making us dumber. I think the internet is making us smarter. There's this new morality built around guilt and shame in the digital age." Vice

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"It is deeply disturbing that a hundred years on from 1914, we can only mark this terrible war as a national tragedy. Nationalism – the 19th-century invention of nations as an ideal, as romantic unions of blood and patriotism – caused the great war. What does it say about Britain in 2014 that we still narrowly remember our own dead and do not mourn the German or French or Russian victims? The crowds come to remember – but we should not be remembering only our own. " Guardian

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"So how can we counter this shameless use of World War I to re-militarise the present? By celebrating and commemorating those who, in their foresight, opposed or questioned the industrial slaughter of World War I. These included women’s activists, Christians and political radicals who strove to recapture visions of a unified and pacific Europe – as well as the many workers who went on strike and soldiers who mutinied." No Glory

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I linked to this via Medium, but that summary was poorly written and confusing. The actual article is much better, and provides some food for thought. I like the argument about GMO technology making monoculture more likely, not sure about other specific arguments. arxiv

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Surprise, surprise. Support for UKIP is inversely correlated with immigration in any given area. So all those people loudly complaining about immigrants have likely never even met one. City AM

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I'm just gonna leave this here... Onion

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"Basically Rob Bliss is a rich white guy with a vested interest in portraying poor black men as the sole perpetrators of street harassment... A white guy takes the oppression of women and uses it as a tool to further the oppression of people of colour. #NYCcatcallvideo" Storify

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"Teaching children anatomically correct terms, age-appropriately... promotes positive body image, self confidence, and parent-child communication; discourages perpetrators; and, in the event of abuse, helps children and adults navigate the disclosure and forensic interview process." Atlantic

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Fellow white people: it's not OK to wear Day of the Dead-style makeup for Halloween. Yes, it looks cool, but it's not ours.

"I’m learning my history and my place through the colonizers children. They are teaching me that my way of seeing the world can only be justified and deemed safe on white skin. If not worn by you, it’s just another savage “Aztec” practice. Somehow this tradition of honoring those who have passed from this world survived 500 years of colonization and genocide, but not a couple generations of blind white privilege." Black Girl Dangerous

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"When consumed, those old-school hallucinogens could cause assorted unpleasantnesses—including nausea, vomiting, and skin irritation. What people realized, though, was that absorbing them through the skin could lead to hallucinations that arrived without the unsavory side effects. And the most receptive areas of the body for that absorption were the sweat glands of the armpits ... and the mucus membranes of the genitals.

So people used their developing pharmacological knowledge to produce drug-laden balms—or, yep, "witch's brews." And to distribute those salves with maximum effectiveness, these crafty hallucinators borrowed a technology from the home: a broom. Specifically, the handle of the broom. And then ... you get the idea." Atlantic

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"In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among. They’re what botanists would call an indicator species. It’s almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the U.S. preparing to invade a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean up the devastation. In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework, more or less shorn of a political or historical context." Massalijn

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I'll just bang that old drum again, aided by Yglesias and Krugman: the world economy needs debt forgiveness, either directly through debt restructuring, or indirectly through much higher inflation.

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Until reading this, I was shamefully unaware of the situation in West Papua, which, unlike Timor-Leste, remains under Indonesian occupation. Jacobin

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I've heard this analysis from other people. Having no personal experience to draw on, I'd be very happy to hear opinions...

"For all men, harassment of women has more to do with establishing power than it does sexual interest; they do it to control space, both public (the very street you both walk on) and personal (a woman’s self-set boundaries). Men of color catcall vocally and visibly on the sidewalk because they have to—not that there’s ever excuse for harassment. They need the “Sexy!” and “Smile!” to create the illusion of dominance in shared public spaces that social constructs and institutional racism have never afforded them control over." Slate

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"Just as opponents of reproductive self-determination rely heavily on the images of babies murdered by their mothers in an attempt to shame women seeking abortions, those that oppose sex work use the specter of trafficked young women to condemn any movement seeking to decriminalize sexual labor." Jacobin

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This is actually quite good.

"if we avoid mysticism, and assert simply that there must come a time when there is relative abundance, compared to the scarcity that has driven all previous economic models, then Marx is saying the same thing as John Maynard Keynes said in the 1930s: one day there will be enough goods to go around and the “economic problem” will be solved." Guardian

Links, Tuesday 28th October

"Amazon's view is that since "printing" an extra copy of an e-book is really cheap, e-books should be really cheap. Publishers' view is that since "printing" an extra copy of an e-book is really cheap, e-books should offer enormous profit margins to book publishers. If you care about reading or ideas or literature, the choice between these visions is not a difficult one. The publishing incumbents have managed to get some intellectuals sufficiently tangled-up to believe that it is. But ask yourself this — do you regret the invention of the printing press? Of the paperback? Do you think public libraries devalue books and reading?" Vox

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Toni and I watched Gone Girl the other night. Much to chew over, and would like to discuss with anyone who has an opinion on it. Here is a rather good review (with spoilers).

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Marcel Golding describes how he has been put under pressure by SACTWU (an e.tv shareholder) to change the political coverage of that channel. Biznews

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[TW: rape]

"In other words, my partners have been normal men, and I have had a conservative sex life. But none of my partners were taught to actively seek consent, and in some cases they were not really taught to seek consent at all. Because of the rape that I experienced, I usually felt terrified and paralyzed during sex, but I had no idea how to communicate that fact to anyone" Atlantic

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So very true...

"We’ve all see papers with gratuitous formalism (I confess, I’ve even written some). The use of LaTeX to prepare ones academic papers is just another instance of this phenomenon - giving ones papers the outward appearance of a paper in physics or mathematics in order to bask in the glow of intellectual seriousness and indispensability that we attach to those disciplines. But using LaTeX does not make you a mathematician any more than building a runway makes you an airport." Josh Parsons

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"Jose Calzada, 35, placed a call to a suicide prevention hotline at 4:00 a.m. Tuesday morning and threatened to kill himself, seven hour later he was shot and killed by police" Free Thought

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Another attack on middlemen. Vox

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I'm not on board with all of this, but I think it makes a valid point about private property development. In cities where housing supply has been constrained for some time, *at the margin* new development will likely cater mostly to the rich, and in effect remove affordable housing from the market. This is not to deny that mass-scale private development would *eventually( reduce the cost of housing and so improve affordability. But, under present political circumstances, this appears to be impossible in many places (e.g. London, New York) - we are effectively stuck at the margin. I think you would probably have to bring a huge amount of supply online via public housing before market forces would really start to bring prices down. Jacobin

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Very important piece.

"The way sex workers were talked about was particularly chilling. It was noted that many trafficked people, in particular people who are selling sex, don't identity as victims. There was no reflection on the reasons why this might be. A case study about a Romanian sex worker was discussed. She had been clear that she was not a victim, that she was happy with her life and her work, and yet, we were told: "She was a victim and she was treated as such".

No-one from the women's sector seemed troubled by a case study that presented as standard the idea that a male-dominated police force should have the final say over the words and views of a marginalised woman; that the police thought they knew better than her what was "good for her"." Herald Scotland

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"It’s the unspoken belief that your day radiating sickness at the office is worth a couple of your colleagues being bedridden with your flu for a week. You may not be actively thinking that, but that’s the math your actions—and those of the 40 percent polled in that survey—imply. It’s selfishness and solipsism, pure and simple." New Republic

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Breast self-examination doesn't significantly reduce breast cancer mortality. Neither does routine mammography. Atlantic

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I certainly don't endorse every claim in here, but there is some interesting insight into existing cultural diversity around sexual behaviour, and the effect that globalised media may have on this.

"The men in the Great Lakes nations of Uganda, Burundi, Congo and Tanzania have long been inducing female ejaculation. What is a relatively modern trend in Western sexual consciousness has been used by these men to the degree that frequent female ejaculators are colloquially referred to as shami ryiikivu, or “put a bucket under her”." City Press

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"the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook." Wired

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"Earlier this year, a male Reddit user tried setting up a fake, female OkCupid profile using a picture of a friend (with permission). Seconds after he created his username, he received his first message. He finished uploading the photo and figured he’d check back in about a day. But before he could close the tab, he got another message. And another... He deleted his profile after two hours." Atlantic

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"In this case, Ghomeshi made a pre-emptive strike, setting the terms of the debate: don’t demonize me for being kinky, even if you don’t like my proclivities. But so far, this doesn’t seem to be a scandal about kink at all.... the anonymous women who wanted to get involved with him at first aren’t complaining about how gross his supposed perversions are. They’re making allegations of regular old non-consensual violence." Ms Magazine

Links, Saturday 25th October

The commitment to economic austerity in Europe and (to a lesser extent) North America is truly dumbfounding. Governments racked up truly massive debts to end the Great Depression, and much of that was essentially wasted on armaments rather than productive infrastructure, education and so on. With bond yields as low as they are, rich countries could and should spend much more. Guardian

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The author of this piece strikes me as ever do slightly self-satisfied (like, why do to the effort of defending hipsters?), but it nevertheless strikes the nail on the head with this sentence.

"The douchebag is someone — overwhelmingly white, rich, heterosexual males — who insist upon, nay, demand their white male privilege in every possible set and setting." Medium

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"The reason typos get through isn’t because we’re stupid or careless, it’s because what we’re doing is actually very smart" Wired

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Good article about an experimental treatment for teenagers and young adults thought to be at risk for schizophrenia. The evidence for it is unclear, but I think it's good that it attacks the artificial distinction between "psychological" and "organic" causes of mental illness. All mental illness is exacerbated, to on degree or another, by stressful situations, and giving people the tools to deal with these situations is always valuable. NPR

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The struggle continues. Guardian

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We shouldn't celebrate anyone being sent to prison, but I'm *almost* prepared to make an exception in this case. Guardian

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Here's a suggestion: how about we allow the *enforcement* of laws but criminalise the *making* of laws. That will target the real villains. Guardian

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Yep.

"Academics dress badly because we are so fulfilled in our work." Guardian

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So many LOLs. Existential Comics

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Some good guidance about how not to use oppressive language relating to sex work (though it still talks about 'sex trafficking' as if that concept isn't problematic in its own right). See Laura Augustin on this)

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“Lena Dunham can take off her clothes on HBO and it’s considered empowering, but Beyoncé wears a provocative outfit, and it is not OK for her to do that. It is a total double standard.” PSMAG

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Part of the explanation for why women are so under-represented in computer science and technology...

"In the 1990s, researcher Jane Margolis interviewed hundreds of computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, which had one of the top programs in the country. She found that families were much more likely to buy computers for boys than for girls — even when their girls were really interested in computers.

This was a big deal when those kids got to college. As personal computers became more common, computer science professors increasingly assumed that their students had grown up playing with computers at home." NPR

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[TW: violence, whorephobia]

It's good this guy is seeing some consequences. Times Live

However... Remember that this other guy *murdered* an *actual* sex worker and so far hasn't suffered any professional consequences whatsoever. So let's all think about how our society distinguishes "worthy" from "unworthy" victims. Daily Maverick

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"While the cat possesses the characteristics of a good hunter it is useful, “but as long as it does it remains incompletely domesticated.” Heretics, too, in a transferred sense, are not completely domesticated, since by challenging orthodox thought and roaming freely hither and thither in their interpretation of religious beliefs they resemble the bestiary definition of wildness. As symbolic animals,them, cats may be the heretical animal par excellence." Medievalists

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[TW: discussion of (fictional) child sexual abuse]

This exposes just how incoherent our thinking about paedophilia has become. This guy hasn't hurt anyone or encouraged harm to anyone. There's not even any evidence that looking at simulated images makes a person more likely to offend later. And so what if it did? Drinking alcohol makes people more likely to be violent, and that's legal. He is being convicted purely because we find his sexual desires distasteful. Can we please have a serious, scientifically informed discussion about how paedophilic impulses should be treated and managed? Gazette

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This is disheartening. The success of the Google car has been seriously overstated, and it looks like we are quite some way from a useful autonomous car. Slate

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"During his research for his doctorate he observed the [criminalisation of clients] being used to target migrant sex workers, and said that the law had been used as a way to deport migrants.

He also said: "Clients are reluctant to leave their contact details, so sex workers are inviting men into their apartments that are completely untraceable."" BBC

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"Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail."

This is pronounced in academia, but also in lots of other industries. Media and NGOs come to mind... LSE

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"Lebanon has welcomed 1,600,000 refugees [from Syria], swelling its population by 36%. While at last count the UK had only resettled 54." Syria Campaign

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"It’s a strange and incredibly demoralizing time to be a black person in American media. The words “racist and “racism” have cynically become clickbait, all while various newsrooms are claiming that they want to hire more writers and reporters and editors of color, but don’t." New Republic

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"Working recently with the London Borough of Southwark, it was interesting to hear how they saw road-warrior cyclists roaring through the area as a hindrance to their plans for developing a bicycle-friendly corner of the city." Guardian

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"Pornhub’s Lesbian category is the leading favorite among the ladies, with Gay (male) following close at second place. The Gay category only falls into 7th place for men" Pornhub

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"Moyna, 39, had lost most of her belongings when she fled her home after the July attack that local residents and human rights experts allege were perpetrated by the ruling party activists. "They had threatened to burn the entire brothel with our families inside," she said." Yahoo

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Probably quixotic, but more power to them.

"We call on UCT to put its principles of justice where its mouth is, and to pledge to take animal suffering off the menu at university functions. Nor should the perpetuation of animal misery and death be outsourced to other campus vendors." UCT Monday Paper

Thoughts on reading Fukukaya's "Political Order and Political Decay"

I'm currently reading Francis Fukuyama's "Political Order and Political Decay" (Amazon)

Much to chew over, and I think all policy makers in South Africa should read it. For Fukuyama, "political order" refers primarily to a state that is able to enact goals effectively, but also does so on an impersonal basis, by reference to general political principles. In contrast, a state is "patrimonial" insofar as people are able to gain access to state resources by way of personal connections to state officials.

However, Fukuyama distinguishes two kinds of patrimonial states, one of which is considerably more harmful than the other. Under a patronage state, the state is treated as an outgrowth of the ruler's household, and state resources are dispensed to friends and family, all of whom come to comprise a relatively small elite class. This sort of organisation is what we normally mean when we think of political "corruption". In contrast, under a clientilist state, there is mass participation in politics, and resources are dispensed to entire *classes* of favoured people, often delineated on ethnic grounds or other markers of social identity. Fukuyama argues that clientilism is often the first step in creating an inclusive impersonal state, as it leads to some degree of accountability for elites. It is often the means by which formerly excluded classes come to make their needs known on a mass scale. One example is the inclusion of non-Anglophone, non-Protestant immigrants in the US, who were able to challenge existing power structures via participation in clientilist urban political "machines".

Relating to South Africa, it is clear that Apartheid was a form of clientilism - the National Party government was able to gain support for its political programme by preferentially handing out state resources firstly to Afrikaners and then all white South Africans. (There were also, as is well documented, more overtly corrupt patronage relationships happening at the same time.) Given full democracy, it is now possible to create a state machinery that operates along fully impersonal lines. However, it seems that the old, white, elite is continuing to shut out new, black, entrants. I think this is what Steven Friedman is getting at when he talks about the frustrations of middle class black people who are sick of racist exclusion at the hands of the existing white business elite. To the extent that frustration builds, there will be increasing pressure for clientilistic political programmes, i.e. the use of BEE and other measures to direct resources preferentially towards black people.

That's not to say that we can't make a case for BEE on the principled grounds of redress for past injustice. The worry is that the debate becomes thought of as a naked competition for resources between different groups. Given the realities of South African's demography, BEE will still happen, but it will increasingly come to resemble a clientilistic distribution of goodies rather than an impersonal process. This is already going on to the extent that political connections count for something in the award of tenders and so on. This process is in some ways necessary to break the hold of the existing elite, but if we do it on this basis, we'll find it increasingly hard to 'put the genie back in the bottle' and build impersonal institutions. Obviously, it's up to the government to apply BEE criteria personally, but I also think a lot of the onus is on the existing white elite to get fully on board with BEE and collaborate in creating inclusive institutions as soon as possible.

There's also a lot that could be said about elite patronage networks around Zuma and other ANC higher-ups, but that's a slightly different story...

Links, Sunday 19th October

"The Gauteng conference confirms that becoming middle class does not make black people here less impatient for racial change — if anything, it makes them less happy because they expected their skills and assets to free them from race prejudice and they feel they haven’t. And so one unheard message from the conference is that the growth of a black middle class does not make our racial divide go away — on the contrary, it sharpens it." Business Day

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Group that politicians want to 'help' overwhelmingly rejects the proposed 'help'. Politicians will no doubt press on, demonstrating exactly how little they cared about said group's actual interests and opinions in the first place...

"A Department of Justice commissioned survey has found that only 2% of women and men working in the local sex industry are in favour of the so-called “Swedish model”, which targets consumers rather than workers in the sex trade." Guardian

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This says it all, really.

"In Cape Town, the DA-led municipality unequivocally condemns the mass appropriation of land by the poor and the ANC quietly supports them. In contrast, in Durban, the ANC-led municipality responds harshly to any occupation, whereas the DA condemns the actions of the city as brutal and illegal." M&G

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This is something y'all need to see. Carceral feminist cat

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Relatedly and more seriously...

"Casting policing and prisons as the solution to domestic violence both justifies increases to police and prison budgets and diverts attention from the cuts to programs that enable survivors to escape, such as shelters, public housing, and welfare. And finally, positioning police and prisons as the principal antidote discourages seeking other responses, including community interventions and long-term organizing." Jacobin

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I'm looking for insightful opinions about Eastern Europe. My instinctive sympathies lie with the anti-Russian camp, as articulated here, but then these are complicated by the presence of far-right elements in the recent Ukrainian revolution (though I've never heard any satisfactory reply to the question of exactly how influential they are). Add to this the fact that everyone involved is still hashing out disputes that go back to WW2 (or before), and I don't know what to think! Slate

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"Careerism has its own moralism, serving as an anesthetic against competing moral claims. Particularly in the United States, where ambition is a civic duty and worldly success a prerequisite of citizenship, enlightened anglers of their own interest can easily be convinced that they are doing not only the smart thing, but also the right thing." Jacobin

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"Officers said they were further relieved after discovering the man had a petty theft charge on his record, ensuring they were 100 percent off the hook." The Onion

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This is what "anti-trafficking" means in reality. Women being arrested, held against their will and often subjected to forced labour. The irony is that Westerners who are so concerned about "exploitation" in the sex industry end up forcing women into the far more exploitative garment industry (and then buying the resulting cheap clothes).

[TW: for police violence] Vice

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[TW: assault, whorephobia]

This happens to actual sex workers every day, and we never hear about it. Because they're quite rightly scared to report it to the police, or because it was the police who did it, or because the newspapers don't care to publish stories about "unworthy" victims. Just saying.

"A Kenilworth swimming school owner and well-known cyclist was arrested this week after he allegedly beat up a middle-aged domestic worker in broad daylight – without the two ever having met or even exchanged a single word – then excused his behaviour by saying he had believed she was a prostitute." IOL

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Really fascinating video showing the position of the Milky Way within a larger galactic "supercluster" Nature