In the Netherlands, a televised alert was issued warning people about the 'Superman' tablets containing deadly PMMA (instead of relatively innocuous MDMA). In consequence, no-one died from the pills. In contrast, although health agencies in the UK received the same information, no warning was given and 4 people died. Just goes to show what a difference aggressive harm reduction measures can make. Guardian
>>><<<
"One of the most glaring threats that HONY makes to humanity lies in its pretension of representing all of its diversity through the lens of a single individual. While claiming to define the population of New York, it presents a whitewashed image of an earnest, vibrant city that takes place predominantly in Manhattan, during the day. The individuals featured are only those Stanton feels comfortable approaching, those he deems interesting enough to photograph, who do not take offense to an intrusive white man’s request to commodify their images." Warscapes
>>><<<
That awkward moment after you make "benefits tourism" a central plank of your political platform, and then it turns out that your own citizens receive more in benefits from other EU countries than the reverse... Guardian
>>><<<
Legalised marijuana in Colorado: basically a huge success. Slate
>>><<<
[CW for simulated child sex abuse]
Animated child pornography presents an interesting conundrum, in that no-one is harmed in the making of it, but it satisfies a desire that is repugnant. We're quite rightly horrified by *actual* child abuse! In some ways the debate parallels the case of simulated violence in movies/video games. Basically two schools of thought arise: the "reinforcement theorists", who think that enjoying a simulation of a activity reinforces people's inclination towards it, and so makes them more likely to engage in the reality; and the "dissipation theorists", who think that enjoying the simulation somehow dissipates the underlying urge harmlessly (kind of like a Freudian "hydraulic" theory). The two mechanisms may of course both be acting at the same time (simulation could reinforce the impulse but nevertheless alleviate actual harm on average if similar simulations are in fact always present to satisfy it).
Anyway, it's interesting that the different theories broadly line up with conservative vs liberal political impulses, but are (at least in principle) empirically testable. BBC
>>><<<
In case anyone missed the news, the South African National Aids Council has come out strongly in support of sex work decriminalisation.
"Sanac chief executive Fareed Abdullah said that ... the fact that sex work was illegal in South Africa made it difficult to address the “heavy social stigma” associated with the profession, as well as their low access to health services." M&G
>>><<<
"That October [of 1993], De Klerk became the first SA – and perhaps only – head of state, let alone Nobel Peace Prize nominee, publicly to claim credit for a massacre." IOL
>>><<<
The map and the territory... Vice
>>><<<
"The pernicious, toxic and inescapable lifelong effect of being disciplined physically – either to the point of abuse, or to the point that the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable blurs in your mind – is that you almost have to say you turned out fine, just to redeem the fact of being who you are. That you “turned out fine” is the only way to make sense of having once felt total terror or uncontrollable shaking rage at the sight of one (or both) of the two people expected to care most for you in the world. The thought that you might have ended up relatively OK or perhaps even better without all that fear is almost unbearable: the suffering only doubles if you admit that it truly had no purpose." Guardian
>>><<<
Complex, moving piece by a woman who has experienced clitoridectomy/FGM (her preferred terms), and how this has affected her relationship to sex, her family, and her religious community. The Big Round Table
>>><<<
Interesting article on the art of inventing new names for things. Good stuff in here about the physical and emotional connotations of different sounds (fricatives convey speed or motion, for instance). NYTimes
>>><<<
"A woman earning a couple of hundred quid for engaging in consensual photography is the least offensive thing in The Sun." (Whore)dible
>>><<<
Interesting thesis, that early capitalist institutions and practices in Europe were substantially borrowed from the Islamic world.
"Crusaders and religious orders settling in Palestine observed other Islamic practices and institutions that proved useful back home. When a certain Walter de Merton in thirteenth-century England vested assets to endow an institution for educating scholars in Oxford, the terms of the legal agreement to all intents and purposes replicated those of a waqf to set up a madrasa. By then, waqfs had been in operation for many centuries in Islamic societies, but in England the concept had never been applied before." Islamic Commentary
>>><<<
Good piece. It's pretty well established by now that dieting and other forms of behavioural weight management just don't work. Yet doctors continue to harass fat patients about losing weight. Would they be plying them with drugs that had a *97%* failure rate?
"I have been fat my whole life. So when healthcare professionals ask me—in the middle of a consultation about something completely unrelated—whether I know that my BMI is too high and whether I’m engaged in any weight management, I’m always a little surprised when they act like they might be the first to have ever brought it up. As if I might have made it through my 30 years without ever once noticing that I was fat and that some people think that fat is bad." BMJ
>>><<<
Apologies for the weird framing of this article, which no doubt has something to to with Telegraph editorial policies (what the hell does Germaine Greer have to do with anything?!). The basic claim is, however, quite interesting. It argues that labour shortages brought about by the Black Death increased the economic bargaining position of women in Western Europe, with lasting positive effects on their social position. It sort of reminds me of the situation around WW1 and WW2, which brought about increased demands for labour and thus increasing impetus for women's rights. Telegraph
>>><<<
I'm sure there are minor issues I'd disagree about, but overall I think the English/Welsh Green Party have a pretty great platform Guardian
(However, while the UK retains a plurality voting system, it remains advisable to vote strategically. Here is a list of constituencies that the Greens are actively contesting, and I'd suggest checking up-to-date polling information before casting your ballot. If you happen to be polled, it's probably advisable to state your *favourite* party, even if you might vote for another party strategically - this indirectly allows you to signal voting intentions to other voters, thus building a "critical mass" that can switch over from strategic to preference voting en masse)
>>><<<
I'm all for restorative/transformative justice as a general principle, but it makes me somewhat cynical to see it disproportionately being applied to overprivileged scumbags who can afford decent legal representation. Why don't we pilot the experiment with truly desperate perpetrators who could really do with a more supportive judicial process? IOL
>>><<<
Huh. Apparently a Charlie Hebdo cover mocking the murder of protesters in Egypt during the July 2013 coup is protected free speech, but a cartoon mocking the murder of Charlie Hebdo journalists is “defending terrorism". I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that MOCKING PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN MURDERED IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO, but probably shouldn't be a crime one way or the other.
Electronic Intifada
>>><<<
*sings* I see your truuuue colours shining through... *sings* Guardian
>>><<<
"In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency's day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds." The Week
>>><<<
One woman's experience of forced plural marriage in a fundamentalist Mormon sect. Cracked
>>><<<
Amartya Sen makes a strong case for state-financed universal healthcare provision in developing countries.
One thought on the argument's applicability to South Africa: he argues that healthcare provision is often relatively cheap in poor countries because it's relatively labour intensive and wages tend to be low there. However, SA is one of the most unequal societies in the world, and expanded public provision means luring doctors away from lucrative private practice. How much more difficult does this make things? Guardian
>>><<<
Preach
"the second world war is, for British culture... a comfortable bolthole for some wish-fulfilment, where our judgment is always sound and our strength only boosted by the severity of the test. It would be much more fruitful for us, in the quest for self-awareness, to make films about the Boer war, but for some reason we never do. Downton Abbey, likewise, pretends with the odd subplot to have something to say about haves and have-nots, but is in fact telling a very photogenic, undemanding story about wealth." Guardian
>>><<<
"One of the most glaring threats that HONY makes to humanity lies in its pretension of representing all of its diversity through the lens of a single individual. While claiming to define the population of New York, it presents a whitewashed image of an earnest, vibrant city that takes place predominantly in Manhattan, during the day. The individuals featured are only those Stanton feels comfortable approaching, those he deems interesting enough to photograph, who do not take offense to an intrusive white man’s request to commodify their images." Warscapes
>>><<<
That awkward moment after you make "benefits tourism" a central plank of your political platform, and then it turns out that your own citizens receive more in benefits from other EU countries than the reverse... Guardian
>>><<<
Legalised marijuana in Colorado: basically a huge success. Slate
>>><<<
[CW for simulated child sex abuse]
Animated child pornography presents an interesting conundrum, in that no-one is harmed in the making of it, but it satisfies a desire that is repugnant. We're quite rightly horrified by *actual* child abuse! In some ways the debate parallels the case of simulated violence in movies/video games. Basically two schools of thought arise: the "reinforcement theorists", who think that enjoying a simulation of a activity reinforces people's inclination towards it, and so makes them more likely to engage in the reality; and the "dissipation theorists", who think that enjoying the simulation somehow dissipates the underlying urge harmlessly (kind of like a Freudian "hydraulic" theory). The two mechanisms may of course both be acting at the same time (simulation could reinforce the impulse but nevertheless alleviate actual harm on average if similar simulations are in fact always present to satisfy it).
Anyway, it's interesting that the different theories broadly line up with conservative vs liberal political impulses, but are (at least in principle) empirically testable. BBC
>>><<<
In case anyone missed the news, the South African National Aids Council has come out strongly in support of sex work decriminalisation.
"Sanac chief executive Fareed Abdullah said that ... the fact that sex work was illegal in South Africa made it difficult to address the “heavy social stigma” associated with the profession, as well as their low access to health services." M&G
>>><<<
"That October [of 1993], De Klerk became the first SA – and perhaps only – head of state, let alone Nobel Peace Prize nominee, publicly to claim credit for a massacre." IOL
>>><<<
The map and the territory... Vice
>>><<<
"The pernicious, toxic and inescapable lifelong effect of being disciplined physically – either to the point of abuse, or to the point that the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable blurs in your mind – is that you almost have to say you turned out fine, just to redeem the fact of being who you are. That you “turned out fine” is the only way to make sense of having once felt total terror or uncontrollable shaking rage at the sight of one (or both) of the two people expected to care most for you in the world. The thought that you might have ended up relatively OK or perhaps even better without all that fear is almost unbearable: the suffering only doubles if you admit that it truly had no purpose." Guardian
>>><<<
Complex, moving piece by a woman who has experienced clitoridectomy/FGM (her preferred terms), and how this has affected her relationship to sex, her family, and her religious community. The Big Round Table
>>><<<
Interesting article on the art of inventing new names for things. Good stuff in here about the physical and emotional connotations of different sounds (fricatives convey speed or motion, for instance). NYTimes
>>><<<
"A woman earning a couple of hundred quid for engaging in consensual photography is the least offensive thing in The Sun." (Whore)dible
>>><<<
Interesting thesis, that early capitalist institutions and practices in Europe were substantially borrowed from the Islamic world.
"Crusaders and religious orders settling in Palestine observed other Islamic practices and institutions that proved useful back home. When a certain Walter de Merton in thirteenth-century England vested assets to endow an institution for educating scholars in Oxford, the terms of the legal agreement to all intents and purposes replicated those of a waqf to set up a madrasa. By then, waqfs had been in operation for many centuries in Islamic societies, but in England the concept had never been applied before." Islamic Commentary
>>><<<
Good piece. It's pretty well established by now that dieting and other forms of behavioural weight management just don't work. Yet doctors continue to harass fat patients about losing weight. Would they be plying them with drugs that had a *97%* failure rate?
"I have been fat my whole life. So when healthcare professionals ask me—in the middle of a consultation about something completely unrelated—whether I know that my BMI is too high and whether I’m engaged in any weight management, I’m always a little surprised when they act like they might be the first to have ever brought it up. As if I might have made it through my 30 years without ever once noticing that I was fat and that some people think that fat is bad." BMJ
>>><<<
Apologies for the weird framing of this article, which no doubt has something to to with Telegraph editorial policies (what the hell does Germaine Greer have to do with anything?!). The basic claim is, however, quite interesting. It argues that labour shortages brought about by the Black Death increased the economic bargaining position of women in Western Europe, with lasting positive effects on their social position. It sort of reminds me of the situation around WW1 and WW2, which brought about increased demands for labour and thus increasing impetus for women's rights. Telegraph
>>><<<
I'm sure there are minor issues I'd disagree about, but overall I think the English/Welsh Green Party have a pretty great platform Guardian
(However, while the UK retains a plurality voting system, it remains advisable to vote strategically. Here is a list of constituencies that the Greens are actively contesting, and I'd suggest checking up-to-date polling information before casting your ballot. If you happen to be polled, it's probably advisable to state your *favourite* party, even if you might vote for another party strategically - this indirectly allows you to signal voting intentions to other voters, thus building a "critical mass" that can switch over from strategic to preference voting en masse)
>>><<<
I'm all for restorative/transformative justice as a general principle, but it makes me somewhat cynical to see it disproportionately being applied to overprivileged scumbags who can afford decent legal representation. Why don't we pilot the experiment with truly desperate perpetrators who could really do with a more supportive judicial process? IOL
>>><<<
Huh. Apparently a Charlie Hebdo cover mocking the murder of protesters in Egypt during the July 2013 coup is protected free speech, but a cartoon mocking the murder of Charlie Hebdo journalists is “defending terrorism". I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that MOCKING PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN MURDERED IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO, but probably shouldn't be a crime one way or the other.
Electronic Intifada
>>><<<
*sings* I see your truuuue colours shining through... *sings* Guardian
>>><<<
"In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency's day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds." The Week
>>><<<
One woman's experience of forced plural marriage in a fundamentalist Mormon sect. Cracked
>>><<<
Amartya Sen makes a strong case for state-financed universal healthcare provision in developing countries.
One thought on the argument's applicability to South Africa: he argues that healthcare provision is often relatively cheap in poor countries because it's relatively labour intensive and wages tend to be low there. However, SA is one of the most unequal societies in the world, and expanded public provision means luring doctors away from lucrative private practice. How much more difficult does this make things? Guardian
>>><<<
Preach
"the second world war is, for British culture... a comfortable bolthole for some wish-fulfilment, where our judgment is always sound and our strength only boosted by the severity of the test. It would be much more fruitful for us, in the quest for self-awareness, to make films about the Boer war, but for some reason we never do. Downton Abbey, likewise, pretends with the odd subplot to have something to say about haves and have-nots, but is in fact telling a very photogenic, undemanding story about wealth." Guardian
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