Links, Wednesday 30th July

"A sweeping gagging order issued in Australia to block reporting of any bribery allegations involving several international political leaders in the region has been exposed by WikiLeaks." Guardian

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I'm gonna join the chorus of people expressing shock and disappointment at this. Requiring people to submit to contraception... does nothing strike them as wrong about this? IOL

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Interesting piece about identifying as black American as opposed to African American.

"... the rise of black nationalism in the ’60s and ‘70s coincided with a growing emphasis, among white Americans, on the idea of America as a “nation of immigrants.” He argues the two phenomena are not unrelated:

This blunted the charges of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and eased the conscience of a nation that had just barely begun to reckon with the harshest contours of its history forged in white supremacism.

Americans who traced their ancestries to the Great Wave of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island at the turn of the 20th century couldn’t be blamed for the horrors of slavery or Reconstruction, or so the thinking went." Slate

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Holy hell. Greek farmers who admit to shooting and seriously injuring Bangladeshi migrant workers who were demanding back pay are... acquitted. Guardian

Links, Tuesday 29th July

Very interesting interview with a former IRA bomber.

""You can't expect 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds, the main fodder of the campaign, to have a depth of morality beyond the crude teenage desire to get back at their enemy. Get revenge for the murders of their friends. I'm not going to attribute any retroactive moral depth for it. The breakfast meeting for IRA kids at the time was 'How many can we kill before they kill us?'"" Cracked

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"“It’s as if prostitutes don’t want to be saved,” said a surprised manager of a Rescue Foundation shelter in India. The rescuers had once again made a raid on a brothel, after which the women had been forced into a shelter they weren’t allowed to leave. Again and again women escaped, continually protested their imprisonment in the shelters, and returned to their old workplaces as soon as they were able to make a run for it. It was as if the women were working as prostitutes of their own accord, didn’t view themselves as victims, thought of the rescue missions as threats to their human rights and livelihoods and for the most part felt victimized by the rescue industry." Link

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Bonobos: a more complicated story than the one we usually hear.

"The bonobo had lost the race, Hohmann said, but if it had laid a hand on the duiker in its first lunge the results would have been bloody. Hohmann has witnessed a number of kills, and the dismembering, nearly always by females, that follows. Bonobos start with the abdomen; they eat the intestines first, in a process that can leave a duiker alive for a long while after it has been captured." New Yorker

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"The literal othering of Palestine: Washington Post subhead reads, “13 Israeli soldiers, 70 others killed.”" Jacobin

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This is fascinating mainly for the details of how diplomacy actually plays out in private. New Republic

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I'm not convinced by claims that the IDF used to be all that great, but this piece reminds me somewhat of the history of Allied bombings raids in WWII. Roughly: Start with strict focus on military targets, then accept some damage to civilian targets, then attack specific civilian targets, then drop bombs indiscriminately on cities, then drop atom bombs on cities. Guardian

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This is a useful point, though perhaps I don't understand enough about the context to have a detailed sense of what other practices she has in mind.

"...trigger warnings cannot be viewed in isolation. Rather, they are part of a larger complex of practices designed to de-privatize and collective healing. They came out of the recognition that we are not unaffected by the political and intellectual work that we do. These practices also recognized that the labor of healing has to be shared by all. Trigger warnings are one of many practices that insist that one does not have to be silent about one’s healing journey – that one’s healing can occupy public and collective spaces. And healing can only truly happen when we take collective responsibility for creating structures and practices that enable healing." Link

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"Of all of the symptoms of head trauma, this has to be the one the patient's friends and family are the least prepared for. When Augusto's friends came to visit, he would whip his dick out and show it to them. And yes, this is a symptom of a head injury, not something he always secretly wanted to do...

Incredibly, this is a common symptom -- a lot of patients become sexually uninhibited following such an injury. Becoming a dick-flasher falls on the more extreme end of the scale, so Augusto has that going for him. But he's also far from the most extreme case -- there are rare head trauma cases where heterosexual patients have woken up after a brain injury identifying as gay, and vice versa. And while you'd presumably adjust to that, it pales in comparison to the truly horrifying situations where survivors of brain trauma come out at the other end as pedophiles." Cracked

Links, Friday 25th July

Related to the earlier article about Sweden, essentially accusing US charter schools like KIPP of "teaching to the test" at the expense of more substantive learning.

"With few exceptions, the curriculum was characterized by a narrow interpretation of state standards at the expense of all other material. Students rarely learned local history or current events. Instead, science and social studies were relegated to ancillary classes in the elementary school and reduced to the accumulation of vocabulary and lists of facts at the middle school. Teachers stopped introducing new material a month prior to state assessments in order to begin review." Jacobin

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"New research published in the Lancet found decriminalising sex work would have the greatest effect on the course of the HIV epidemic of all the interventions modelled, averting between a third and 46% of HIV infections among sex workers and their clients in the next 10 years." Business Day

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A good 101 about public sexual harassment. Robot Hugs

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Some shocking statistics about gender-based violence in Africa (and elsewhere)

"A 2013 report developed by the World Health Organization, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the South African Medical Research Council, presents further data on violence by an intimate partner. In terms of a lifetime prevalence of physical and/or sexual violence among women in a relationship, sub-Saharan Africa was third with 36.6% of women abused, just behind South East Asia with 37.7% and the Eastern Meditteranean region with 37% - the Eastern Meditteranean includes Africa’s northern countries." M&G Africa

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"big companies are good at recruiting the best workers from all demographic cohorts and that's part of the reason they pay more. But a lot of the wage increases remain. The exact same worker can earn an approximately 10 percent raise (11 percent for high school graduates, 9 percent for those with at least some college) by moving from a small company to a large one.

Moving from a small store to a big store has an even bigger effect — 19 percent for high school graduates and 28 percent for those with some college." Vox

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A really great resource for sex and relationship education, aimed at high school level. UCT

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A kind of obvious point, but worth making - emotional intelligence is also a prerequisite for effective emotional manipulation. 

"Recognizing the power of emotions, another one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century spent years studying the emotional effects of his body language. Practicing his hand gestures and analyzing images of his movements allowed him to become “an absolutely spellbinding public speaker,” says the historian Roger Moorhouse—“it was something he worked very hard on.” His name was Adolf Hitler." Atlantic

Links, Thursday 24th July

A summary of "The Invention of the White Race", for anyone who is interested. Link

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Now here's a great idea: vegan cheese made from actual milk protein Slate

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This is applicable to the issue of sharing domestic labour more generally (even if you don't have kids), and gets at some of the issues around gendered division of labour.

"When I ask my happily married parents, who both worked while raising three children in the 1970s and 1980s, about division of labor, my father says, “I was always willing to do whatever your mother told me to do.” That’s exactly the problem: I don’t want to be the Captain. My mom was the Captain for our family, and now she organizes compulsively, unable to get rid of the habit. I’m the Captain in my house already when it comes to boring inventory-related things like remembering whether or not we have paper towels, and I don’t much like the feeling. When I hear somebody referring to a “honey do” list—a common cultural artifact of women’s captaincy—I want to puke." Slate

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A good little comic about how the "narratives" around sexual assault get in the way of calling it what it is [TW] Medium

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"Helsinki aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use." Guardian

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"To a sociologist, the reason people drink alcohol is that they have been socially taught to. That is, we like alcohol because we’ve been taught to overlook the negative side effects or we have redefined them as positive." Sociological Images

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"if we are measuring by the risk of premature death, then 79% of the people we currently shame for being overweight or obese would be recategorized as perfectly fine. Ideal, even. Pleased to be plump, let’s say, knowing that a body that is a happy balance of soft and strong is the kind of body that will carry them through a lifetime." Sociological Images

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School choice is not a panacea - by all objective measures, the Free School experiment in Sweden has led to worse student outcomes. Slate

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"Going to the bathroom in space is awesome" Cracked

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"By 2000, airline travel [in the United States] (3,892 BTU per passenger mile) officially became greener than driving (3,926 BTU per person, per mile.) The trend has continued so that in 2010, flying burned just 2,691 BTU per passenger mile—an improvement of 74 percent since 1970. That was 57 percent better than driving the average car, which gets about 21.5 miles per gallon (4,218 BTU per passenger mile). It was better than buses as well." Slate

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"At the time, ideas of race in America were quite literally black and white. In some places, if you could pass yourself off as something other than black, you could circumvent some amount of discrimination. People of color — both foreigners and African-Americans — employed this to their advantage. Some did it just to get by in a racist society, some to make a political statement, and others — performers and businessmen — to gain access to fame and money they wouldn't have otherwise had." NPR

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"Over 2,000 Palestinians were killed in all three military operations in Gaza, not including the Second Intifada. Most of them were civilians. I’ve exchanged emails with people in Gaza in the past few days. These are people who don’t care much for Hamas in their everyday lives, whether due to its fundamental ideology, political oppression or other aspects of its rule. But they do support Hamas in its war against Israel; for them, fighting the siege is their war of independence. Or at least one part of it." 972

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"There was one fatal flaw in the Stanford prison experiment: The guy in charge was stage directing the whole thing. Zimbardo didn't step back and watch the events unfold as an observer; he played the part of head guard, even going so far as using these totally scientifically unbiased instructions to his student guards: "In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none."

And remember, Zimbardo wasn't just the researcher/fake guard/sadistic mastermind of the experiment; he was a teacher, therefore an authority figure. There was pressure on students to please the researcher -- they were getting paid $15 a day for the experiment, and the department had clearly spent a lot of money building the fake prison. They were acting like sadistic guards because they wanted to please, not because their mock professional role emboldened them to do so. They knew what they were there to do. Oh, and a former San Quentin prisoner who served as a consultant on the experiment later admitted to feeding Zimbardo and his students suggestions on how to abuse their prisoners. So much for assuming decent, upstanding people spontaneously invented ways to be abusive." Cracked

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Links, Monday 14th July

"Everyone knows the story of the early 20th-century ANC leadership, with so many of them coming from this mission-school rural background, and all these connections between them. That’s why I use the term “kinsmen” – the families were all intermarried. These elite networks are still really important. Half of today’s Constitutional Court judges were Bantustan-educated." M&G

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"Researchers at the Centre for Law, Race and Gender at the University of Cape Town have referred to this as the “reBantustanisation” or Balkanisation of rural society: the boundaries of the old homelands are being reinscribed. Increased powers are being given to traditional leaders, for instance by customary law provisions, which risk creating parallel legal systems for rural communities living under their jurisdiction and strengthening patriarchy while exacerbating gender inequalities." M&G

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Because punishing foreigners for lacking proper paperwork is clearly a more important goal than allowing them access to basic medical treatment. Guardian

Links, Thursday 10th July

I will make no broader political comments here, simply noting that this is the reality for many black working-class people in South Africa (and that is for those lucky enough to have a job). Daily Vox (note that there are some objections to the fact that the piece was written by a white journalist from the perspective of a black domestic worker)

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Interesting proposals for reforms to sexual assault law coming out of New Zealand. Firstly, and most significantly, once it has shown that sex has occurred, the burden of proof for demonstrating consent would fall on the defendant. Secondly, evidence would be examined under an inquisitorial system - i.e. the complainant would not be subject to cross-examination. I think these sound like pretty solid ideas, but I'd be interested in comments? NZ Herald

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Unreal. This for unlicensed serving of alcohol!

"Only then did masked figures with guns storm the crowd, shouting, “Get on the fucking ground! Get down, get down!” ... Some forty Detroit police officers dressed in commando gear ordered the gallery attendees to line up on their knees, then took their car keys and confiscated their vehicles, largely on the grounds that the gallery lacked the proper permits for dancing and drinking." New Yorker

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They don't mention institutional racism and classism much, but otherwise Cracked is doing a pretty good job of reporting on the increasing militarisation of US police forces. Cracked

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How the electric car-sharing scheme in Paris works. Definitely the wave of the future, especially as self-driving cars start to come online! Guardian

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An interesting example of white, middle-class, developed world feminists attempting to characterise the issues that affect themselves specifically as "women's issues", and so side-lining the problems affecting other women. Not the only place where this comes up...

"After the 1995 Nairobi Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women, Hassim writes, an anti-feminism attitude within the ANC was fuelled...This was because there was a push from some international feminists there ... to de-politicise the conference to keep it focused on pure women’s issues. The US delegation, led by Maureen Reagan, opposed a resolution against Apartheid, for instance." Daily Maverick

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The case against privatisation is not so universal as made out here - it has  tended to work out rather well in telecommunications, for instance. But a clear look at the evidence should demonstrate that it also has failed in many circumstances. Should we have been able to predict these failures in advance with proper economic analysis? Guardian

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Outrageous

"A 17 year-old Virginia teenager who is under investigation for sending a consensual sext to his 15-year-old girlfriend may be forced to have an erection in front of police as evidence in the case." Think Progress

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"“When I was a prosecutor in DC in the early ’90s, the jurors in DC were mainly African-American,” he explains. “It was commonplace in the prosecutor’s office that if we had a young black defendant and it was a nonviolent drug crime, the jury was not going to send him to jail. They would acquit him.” Butler says that such juries recognize the overrepresentation of African-Americans in the criminal justice system, and decide that, as long as there is no violent threat, they will not send another black person to prison. “Those are political acts by jurors, even if they’re not explicitly political,” he says." The Nation

Links, Tuesday 8th July

"In the most, ahem, shocking study, subjects were wired up and given the chance to shock themselves during the thinking period if they desired. They’d all had a chance to try out the device to see how painful it was. And yet, even among those who said they would pay money not to feel the shock again, a quarter of the women and two thirds of the men gave themselves a zap when left with their own thoughts. (One outlier pressed the button 190 times in the 15 minutes.) Commenting on the sudden appeal of electricity coursing through one’s body, Wilson said, “I’m still just puzzled by that.” Atlantic

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Gosh, how unexpected. It turns out that if you give refugees the right to participate in normal economic activities, they're largely able to support themselves. Voices of Africa

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"They have been told to "disrupt and upset" them – in other words, bullying. That's officially described, in Orwellian fashion, as "offering further support". As all ESA claimants approach the target deadline of 65 weeks on benefits – advisers are told to report them all to the fraud department for maximum pressure. In this manager's area 16% are "sanctioned" or cut off benefits.

Of course it's not written down anywhere, but it's in the development plans of individual advisers or "work coaches". Managers repeatedly question them on why more people haven't been sanctioned. Letters are sent to the vulnerable who don't legally have to come in, but in such ambiguous wording that they look like an order to attend. Tricks are played: those ending their contributory entitlement to a year on ESA need to fill in a form for income-based ESA. But jobcentres are forbidden to stock those forms." Guardian

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There is a gross under-allocation of resources to treating mental illness in South Africa, despite the vast scale of the problem. This is Africa

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"Far too often, exhortations to reject “identity politics” in favor of “class” amount to an insistence that the unmarked worker be taken as the definitive example of the genre. Appeals to class thus degenerate into a kind of cultural populism, more comfortable visualizing the typical worker as a white coal miner rather than a black woman in an elementary school or behind a McDonald’s counter. Higher wages can be a “class” issue but abortion or police brutality cannot, because the latter are too closely identified with the part of the working class that is marked by gender and race." Jacobin

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"Israeli police, intelligence officials and Netanyahu knew within hours of the kidnapping and murder of the three teens that they had been killed. And they knew who the prime suspects were less than a day after the kidnapping was reported.

Rather than reveal these details to the public, Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency imposed a gag order on the national media, barring news outlets from reporting that the teens had almost certainly been killed, and forbidding them from revealing the identities of their suspected killers. The Shin Bet even lied to the parents of the kidnapped teens, deceiving them into believing their sons were alive.

Instead of mounting a limited action to capture the suspected perpetrators and retrieve the teens’ bodies, Netanyahu staged an aggressive international public relations campaign, demanding sympathy and outrage from world leaders, who were also given the impression that the missing teens were still alive." Electronic Intifada

Links, Wednesday 2nd July

"while it's not surprising that Martin's epic has spawned fan websites (even exhaustive ones like Garcia's Westeros.org), what's remarkable is that when George R.R. Martin wants to know some detail about the ASoIaF universe, he fucking asks Garcia. By virtue of having maintained an exhaustive database of every single character, location, and event in the series over the last 17 years, he's become the man Martin calls when he's forgotten some element of his own goddamned story:

"[Martin calls] when [he] has an idea and he wants to make sure that he hasn't used this character before, or he hasn't mentioned this particular detail previously, because he doesn't want to contradict himself or trap himself."" Cracked

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"In the last 10 months, dozens have been arrested and at least 18 homosexual and transgender people have been jailed under the country’s draconian legislation criminalizing “sexual deviance,” “debauchery” and “insulting public morals.”   The prison sentences have ranged from 3 to 12 years...

Abdel-Hamid thinks it’s part of a PR campaign by new President Abdel-Fattah Sisi’s administration, to prove it is more “Islamic than the Islamists” and to curry favor with the population, that sees homosexuality as a sin. It’s also a handy tactic to distract people during election time." Daily Beast

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Interesting piece about the off-label use of misoprostol as a safe abortion drug in Latin America and now in areas of Texas where abortion access has been cut off.

"As miso became more popular, Latin American doctors from Peru to Brazil started noticing a trend: They were seeing, it seemed, a dramatic decrease in abortion-related complications. Fewer women were carted through hospital doors with gruesome infections from back-alley botched abortions, and ob-gyns saw a reduction in the grisly abortion complications that had so frequently plagued providers, including perforated uteruses, heavy bleeding, and fallen intestines, according to a 2012 study by the global health organization Ipas.

The only explanation “was the mass distribution of miso at the community level,” concluded a Colombian ob-gyn in the Ipas study. In the same report, other doctors note that the discovery and circulation all took place outside hospital walls. Word of misoprostol spread at the grassroots level, working its way up from Brazil and snaking from one Latin American country to another." Atlantic

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I lack the expertise to evaluate this intelligently...

"In a groundbreaking experiment, the Paris researchers used the droplet setup to demonstrate single- and double-slit interference. They discovered that when a droplet bounces toward a pair of openings in a damlike barrier, it passes through only one slit or the other, while the pilot wave passes through both. Repeated trials show that the overlapping wavefronts of the pilot wave steer the droplets to certain places and never to locations in between — an apparent replication of the interference pattern in the quantum double-slit experiment that Feynman described as “impossible … to explain in any classical way.” And just as measuring the trajectories of particles seems to “collapse” their simultaneous realities, disturbing the pilot wave in the bouncing-droplet experiment destroys the interference pattern." Wired

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Unbelievable that the speaker allowed things to escalate to this point. Is it really intolerable to just let the EFF have a minor propaganda victory?

"The EFF still refused to budge, so police officers spoke to them, but the MPLs vowed to stage a sit-in and even sleep there overnight if necessary.

A scuffle broke out when the police tried to physically remove the offending MPLs, with one EFF member shouting “Let them do what they did in Marikana”." IOL

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Single female non-celebrities were turned away from the lounge of the New Yorker hotel, even if they were paying guests, and “hen parties” attracted horrified disdain from the guardians of glamour. Women could meet their female friends in dull, obscure restaurants, but they couldn’t hunt in “Sex and the City”-style packs. So what was a single girl to do when the best tables were behind closed doors? ... Ted Peckham, a foppish Midwestern arriviste in his early twenties, spotted this opening in the market soon after he arrived in New York. In 1935, he founded the Guide Escort Service—essentially, a way for women to rent out men." New Yorker

Links, Tuesday 1st July

"In the wake of decades of financial scandal—much of it linked to creative accounting, or to no accounting all—the Dutch tradition of accounting art suggests it might be us, not the Dutch, who have misjudged accounting’s importance in the world. Accounting in the modern sense was still a new idea in the 1500s, one with a weight that carried beyond the business world. A proper accounting invoked the idea of debts paid, the obligation of nightly personal reckonings, and even calling to account the wealthy and powerful through audits." Boston Globe

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Techno-utopianism goes to work on food. A very interesting movement.

"Soylent-producing algae would make food a little like that: there would be no more wars over farmland, much less resource competition. To help a village full of malnourished people, “you could just drop in a shipping container” full of Soylent-producing algae. “It would take in the sun’s energy and water and air, and produce food.” Mankind’s oldest problem would be solved. Then, he added, all we’d have to do is fix the world’s housing problem, “and people could be free.”" New Yorker

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"To me, there’s nothing creepier than a man who is bothered about how you modify your body, or how much make-up you wear. Of course, no one should be pressured to make changes to their physical appearance. So if a guy wants to personally challenge a system in which women feel that pressure, the most effective thing he can do is to stop talking about the way her face looks. Go and write to the cosmetics giants if you must. But stop telling me that my smoky eyes are holding back the sisterhood." Telegraph

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Ah, a nice level-headed, factual discussion of the current situation with respect to Gauteng e-tolling. EWN

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Yikes. 

"In 2010, doctors performed 62.8 million of these routine pelvic examinations on women across America. In total, gynecological screenings cost the U.S. $2.6 billion every year. And yet, a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine reports that there is no established medical justification for the annual procedure. After scouring nearly 70 years of pelvic exam studies, conducted from 1946 to 2014, the researchers found no evidence that they lead to any reduction in “morbidity or mortality of any condition” among women." Slate

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"Since the detention facility was set up, Israeli immigration police have imprisoned more than 2,500 African asylum seekers under the country's so-called "Infiltrators Law", which allows Israel to detain, without charge or trial, migrants who have entered the country without legal documentation.

The Israeli Ministry of Interior does not process individual asylum requests; according to human rights groups, the country has recognised less than 200 asylum seekers as refugees since its creation in 1948." Al Jazeera

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"Airplanes have to keep the cabin artificially pressurized -- to keep your brain from swelling and leaking out of your ears. The problem is that, according to modern research, the cabin's pressurization combined with the plane's white noise can numb your taste buds, suppressing your ability to taste salt and sugar in non-fatal doses.

Obviously, airlines tend to use the cheapest ingredients possible in their in-flight meals, but even a steak with a 10-minute-old kill date would still taste like ass when your senses are literally and figuratively so high, they can hardly feel their face. Cabin air is another problem. It's usually recycled every two to three minutes with the humidity kept below 20 percent, drying not only the food but also your nose, which further impacts your sense of taste... But as luck would have it, airplanes don't affect your ability to taste bitterness or umami. It would explain why people usually go for bloody Marys or tonic water inside planes: Oftentimes it's the only thing their bodies recognize as having a taste." Cracked