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