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
>>><<<
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.
>>><<<
"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
>>><<<
"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
>>><<<
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)
>>><<<
[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
>>><<<
"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
>>><<<
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
>>><<<
The French solution is no doubt a bit distasteful, but how about the Italian option? Guardian
>>><<<
The economic problem remains with us, for now. Vox
>>><<<
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
>>><<<
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.
>>><<<
"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
>>><<<
"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
>>><<<
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)
>>><<<
[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
>>><<<
"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
>>><<<
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
>>><<<
The French solution is no doubt a bit distasteful, but how about the Italian option? Guardian
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