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

Links, Thursday 16th October

"A sense of superiority, left over from apartheid, fuels this misplaced sense of being democracy’s victim. If you conceived of the possibility you might not be the best, other responses to failure beyond shock will open up. Apartheid’s beneficiaries aren’t yet in that head-space." IOL

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"These days you often hear people say things like "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product." There is something to this, but the Tirole-Rochet paper shows that this same dynamic exists in a variety of industries. Any time the market is two-sided you are both the customer and the product simultaneously. That's true whether the platform owner is charging you or not." Vox

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"A decade ago, Leith Residents Association was organising against the women who worked in the tolerance zone by forming vigilante gangs and going out and threatening the women with baseball bats. The tolerance zone was closed due to this local campaign, leading to a huge spike in violence against street-based sex workers perpetrated by men posing as clients." Glasgow Sex Worker

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"The truck driver shows his passport then the officers ask for the passengers’ passports. The driver replies, reaches for his wallet and takes out R100. The officer refuses.”These people paid you more than this”, he says. He is offered R200 and lets us through." Groundup

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Journalism is so weird: he "risks a row". Why not just say "Here's David Cameon with a bunch of people in blackface. They're dicks; he's a dick."? Guardian

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Little slice of life piece about the market for prefab shacks in Cape Town. M&G

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These actually are rather good ideas. Cracked

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[TW: sexual assault]

"If we didn’t put ourselves in dangerous situations, we never go anywhere. Ever. Because we don’t know who’s a threat. We can’t tell. It could be the old dude in the bank or the suit on the bus. It could be the hobo with a shank or the coworker after hours or the men who ambushed me on my own block. Can’t be sure. Never totally sure." Medium

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The overall message of this is pretty obvious - it's not the progressivity of the tax system so much as the entire fiscal apparatus (i.e. including expenditures) that should be relevant to the left wing. Vox

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This is kind of terrifying. For the record, I have nothing against private property developers, in principle. They certainly *could* play a role in increasing and improving the housing supply. But we've now reached a point where new construction is sufficiently constrained - by zoning restrictions and anti-development bias, by the demise of new social housing, by speculative incentives to leave land undeveloped, - that there is essentially a fixed amount available, and councils have enormous incentives simply to transfer it from the poor to the rich. Guardian

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Raging, despairing criticism of the JSC and of South African institutions generally.

"What does a woman have to do in this country to be treated as a human being and humanely?" Times Live

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A nice little video concisely stating the evidence for evolution, focussing on the whales and dolphins. Youtube

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An inheritance tax actually seems like a terrible idea compared to an annual wealth tax. A tax applied only once a generation, and a high rate, offers both strong incentives and relatively easy options for evasion. I also don't see why someone who dies with all their wealth intact ought to be taxed more heavily than someone who gives it away to their relatives piecemeal over the course of their life. The latter is arguably a greater contributor to inequality anyway, since the children of rich people tend to become rich well before their parents die. Jacobin

Links, Monday 13th October

I'm pinning my colours to the wall. This sort of nostalgic NIMBYism is the purest of bullshit. Are people seriously arguing that maintaining an utterly obsolete piece of industrial equipment is a more valuable use of this land than new homes? In a city with some of the highest rents in the world? Why are we even hearing the opinion of a dude who directly profits from the area's post-industrial chic as opposed to, say, prospective tenants?

"Jordan Gross owns Oval Space which overlooks the gas holders. He told Time Out: “Not only are the gas works an iconic part of Oval Space but they’re also an iconic part of the whole area. Replacing them with soulless cookie cutter apartments of the kind that are blighting our whole city would be a travesty.”" Dalstonist

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“thanks to the militarization and expansion of the ‘border’ region, 197 million Americans now live within the jurisdiction of US Customs and Border Patrol” Jacobin


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The clitoris and the penis side-by-side. From here

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"It’s not that sex work isn’t sexist (or oppressive in all the regular ways). It’s just not special. Thinking that sex work is by nature sexist–and that the rest of the world isn’t, or that in the rest of the world, women can resist sexism but not sex workers–is based in contempt for sex workers." Born Whore

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"One of the most fascinating stories that emerged from the Indian Ocean region, which included Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan, was that India had African rulers, notables and chief ministers. This was not the case with African diaspora in any other place..." Scroll

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A brief history of the "umbrella movement" in Hong Kong. Financial Times

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Good article on a project to help young women and girls who are often engaged in 'survival' sex work. Notice that at no point does it suggest that criminalising transactional sex will help them. What they need is an alternative means of securing basic necessities. Voice of Africa

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"The report found that many women and girls do not attend clinics until the latter stages of pregnancy because they have been led to believe an HIV test is compulsory. In the report, some women who did attend clinics described how their HIV status could be revealed through negligence, inconsiderate processes and even workplace gossip." Guardian

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"One of the hardest parts of coming to grips with the depth and breadth of the patriarchy is recognizing that there are no exceptions. Maybe you didn’t, personally, do anything wrong, but you were still born into a power structure that gave you unjust rewards. The system — whether it’s the patriarchy or white supremacy or capitalism — does not offer special exemptions for individuals with good intentions. And that should make you mad: The fact is that even though you know better, and are truly a male feminist, you’re still stuck being the bad guy. You can’t opt out of the privileges you inherited at birth. Or, as my (male) feminist friend once put it, “I’m not one of the good ones and neither are you and neither is anyone, FYI.”" NY Mag

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".. the biggest problem with the consent between Ana and Christian [in 50 Shades of Grey] is that it doesn’t exist in the rest of the relationship, only in relation to sex. Christian never hears Ana’s clear ‘no’ about him buying her gifts, following her on holiday, and getting involved in her work. Also both characters continually attempt to pressure, persuade or cajole the other into being what they want them to be: a submissive in Ana’s case, and a loving husband in Christian’s case. This is despite both stating very clearly that this is not what they want, several times over." Rewriting the Rules

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"It was not just anarchists but young Italian factory workers – complete with their sideburns – who first expressed the idea that liberation involves a fight against work itself. Today what the Italian autonomists said rhetorically in the 1970s has become reality: the whole of society is a factory. The struggle for social justice takes place no longer just amid lines of machinery, but in places such as the Focus E15 occupation by single mums and the Sex Worker Open University projects in London and Glasgow." Guardian

Links, Thursday 9th October

"This solidarity in workplace misery is by no means unique to PhD students, or indeed to the HE sector, and we might tend to look on such interactions with colleagues – not to mention the many and various uncritical representations of workplace misery in popular culture, the relentless drudgery of office work being a particular favourite – as harmless, even comforting and supportive. But these exchanges are just one example of the normalisation of anxiety and unhappiness in the workplace. Moreover, not only is this psychological distress normalised, it is valorised – rendered desirable because it becomes a benchmark against which to measure achievement." The Column

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Very good, nuanced piece.

"until we stop pretending that getting high is inherently bad – that drugs can never be brilliant, can never enhance human experience for the better – how can we properly deal with people whose lives have been made worse by drugs?" Guardian

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"When their lawsuit was filed, Hobby Lobby's 401(k) plan had more than $73 million invested in mutual funds with holdings in companies such as Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (makers of morning-after pills and IUDs), Pfizer and AstraZeneca (which both produce drugs used to induce abortions), and even Aetna and Humana (health insurance companies that cover various methods of abortion). For a company so offended by the thought of giving its employees access to contraceptives that aren't related to abortions, they sure are comfortable collecting a ton of money from actual abortions."Cracked

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"In France during the years before the revolution of 1789, a book “existed by virtue of the king’s pleasure; it was a product of the royal ‘grace’. . . . The book was a quality product; it had a royal sanction; and in dispensing that sanction, the censors vouched for its general excellence. Censorship was not simply a matter of purging heresies. It was positive — a royal endorsement of the book and an official invitation to read it.” Thus, the relationship between author and censor was as much collaborative as adversarial." Washington Post

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"No matter what law is passed on the niqab, it will not stop me from wearing it. I don’t want to be controlled and told what I can and can not wear: that is oppression." Guardian

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"In a startling and unexpected move, on Monday the Supreme Court refused to review seven gay marriage cases from five different states. That decision effectively legalized gay marriage in those five states—Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin—almost immediately. But within the next few weeks, the court’s move will likely bring gay marriage to six more states—meaning that, without actually ruling on the topic, the justices will have brought marriage equality to 11 states in one fell swoop." Slate

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Pretty legit advice. Robot Hugs

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LOL 

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Some insight into the nitty-gritty of corruption in US politics. Cracked

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"People often say that same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 60s. But in terms of public opinion, same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 90s, when it had already been legal nationwide for 30 years." XKCD

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"Having driven out agents of the Assad regime in 2011, and despite the hostility of almost all of its neighbours, Rojava has not only maintained its independence, but is a remarkable democratic experiment. Popular assemblies have been created as the ultimate decision-making bodies, councils selected with careful ethnic balance (in each municipality, for instance, the top three officers have to include one Kurd, one Arab and one Assyrian or Armenian Christian, and at least one of the three has to be a woman), there are women’s and youth councils, and, in a remarkable echo of the armed Mujeres Libres (Free Women) of Spain, a feminist army, the “YJA Star” militia (the “Union of Free Women”, the star here referring to the ancient Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar), that has carried out a large proportion of the combat operations against the forces of Islamic State." Guardian

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"I do not expect or accept the treatment by some in the queer community that femmes need to be tamed and controlled.

I am disturbed by what I see as a virtual absence of femme-feminist awareness in discussions around masculine of center identities.

Is there a fetishization of some forms of masculinity within the queer community?

Is there a privileging of masculinity in queer spaces?

Why is it that femmes are seen to be less radical than butch or masculine of center women?" Feminist Wire

Links, Monday 6th October

This is important. Pay attention.

"Thousands of Hong Kong citizens protested across the city on Monday, blocking roads and prompting the closure of banks and schools, as they stepped up their calls for democracy." Guardian

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"There are a growing number of studies that look at people's widening definition of what constitutes sex. What they all show, and this is the same for whatever subgroup – gay or straight, across all territories – people are more likely to say that oral sex is sex, that any genital contact is sex. We've definitely been aware of an increase in other types of non-vaginal intercourse. There's been a real rise in heterosexual anal sex … the message that comes through is that there's been a genuine widening of people's repertoire." Guardian

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"When I interviewed the Abu Said family in the southern city of Rafah, I found more evidence of the wanton targeting of Palestinian civilians who spoke Hebrew. Nineteen-year-old Mahmoud Abu Said told me when Israeli soldiers arrived at his family’s home on the city’s eastern outskirts, they immediately inquired if anyone spoke Hebrew. When his father, Abdul Hadi Abu Said, answered in the affirmative, they shot him in the chest (he miraculously survived).

In Khuza’a, just east of Khan Younis, where the most grisly massacres of the war occurred, numerous witnesses told me about a similar incident in which Israeli soldiers gathered male residents in the center of town and asked if anyone spoke Hebrew. I was told by these multiple witnesses that when a middle-aged man stepped forward and answered that he did, he was shot in the chest and killed. These atrocities form a chilling pattern" Alternet

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"It is simply too early to tell which direction these protests will go. Although early indications suggest that thousands of residents began joining the students in protest on Sunday, it's not clear if this will grow significantly larger, as is probably necessary to force change, or will fizzle out under police pressure. However it resolves, though, this is a potentially decisive moment for Hong Kong and the uncertainty that has hung over its future ever since 1997." Vox

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"We call this the “polygamy hypocrisy gap” ; and the biggest gap among the countries surveyed is Swaziland, where the divergence was nearly 30 percentage points—94.1% of married Swazi men say they are monogamous, but just 66% of married women say they are not sharing their husbands, suggesting that nearly three in ten married Swazi men are “secretly polygamous”." M&G Africa

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"I have never met a white person who decided to take on anti-racism work because of the negative effects of racism on white people. Literally, never. And I don’t think I’ve ever met a man who genuinely supports feminist ideals because of the ways they benefit men first. If I did know people like this, I wouldn’t like them. I’d question why the often brutal oppression of people of color and women and especially women of color wasn’t enough to get them interested, but having an epiphany about the ways men and/or white people are kinda also hurt by these constructs because “something something society and also men should be able to cry, too” made them jump right on board." Black Girl Dangerous

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[TW: Graphic descriptions of sexual violence]

"Her study Male Rape and Human Rights notes incidents of male sexual violence as a weapon of wartime or political aggression in countries such as Chile, Greece, Croatia, Iran, Kuwait, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia." Guardian

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Very soon Bruges will boast an underground pipeline carrying beer...

"Instead of making the three-mile drive in one of dozens of tankers that traverse town each day, the award-winning beer will flow through a 1.8-mile polyethylene pipeline, making the trip in 15 to 20 minutes. The pipeline will move 6,000 liters of beer every hour," Slate

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As always, Cracked has a talent for ruining interesting source material with gratuitous use of the word "crazy" and its cognates, but this is nevertheless worth a read (listen to the audio of a Khoisan "click language" speaker!) Cracked

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"Nutt ... says the justification for banning LSD and hallucinogens was a "concoction of lies" about their health impacts, combined with a denial of their potential as research tools and treatments." Guardian

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"Fukuyama cites figures showing the worldwide middle class expanding from 1.8 billion people in 2009 to a projected 4.9 billion in 2030. As their incomes rise, he argues, they demand rule of law to protect their property and then demand political participation to safeguard their social standing. They do so not just to defend their economic interests but also for moral reasons. Beyond a certain level of status and income, people become insulted when authoritarian systems of rule treat them as disobedient children." Atlantic

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This is probably the stupidest argument I've seen in a long time. Yes, human error can cause problems when automation fails. But there probably would have been lots more human error if there had been less automation!

"Carr takes a look at two commercial airline crashes in 2009 that cost the lives of nearly 300 people. Both were blamed on pilot error. Each highly automated plane had experienced a significant but manageable malfunction. But each flight crew had reacted in exactly the wrong way — as if they’d forgotten how to fly. Excessive reliance on automation may have taken a deadly toll." Boston Globe

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Guardian piece on the porn industry in Britain. Predictably, they get many more quotes from Object and other such hand-wringers than they do from actual performers.