Links, Sunday 22nd Feb

"‘It wasn’t so much that Dawkins was so convincing, or interesting even,’ Yanky told me between short sips of beer. ‘It was just, I was sitting there with this whole group of people who were having this one viewpoint.’ He experienced for the first time what religion looked like from the outside, a series of often ridiculous and always questionable ideas shattering its absolute hold on his psyche." Aeon

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This is good throughout

"Here’s the thing though: if she had been thinking “intersectionally” enough, she would have known that had the policewomen been sufficiently provoked, it is not her, a white woman, who would have been hauled off to jail and kept there. It is not her, a British citizen, who would have been asked to leave the country. It is not her name and her face which would have made headlines the next day. Corralled between police officers with the authority to arrest us and white anarchists with little personally at stake if they did, my enthusiasm about participating in a public queer event for the first time gave way to unease and insecurity." Autostraddle

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Correcting some misconceptions about medieval Europe iO9

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Hatred of the homeless is so intense that it's in some ways immune to parody.

"Sculptor Fabian Brunsing brought a satirical eye to the issue by creating the “pay bench”, an art installation of a park bench that retracts its metal spikes for a limited time when the prospective sitter feeds it a coin. Chinese officials, completely missing the joke, thought that this was a great idea and installed similar benches in Yantai Park of the Shangdong province." Guardian

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"More and more, however, we are being asked to suppress our judgment in favor of that of an artificial intelligence... It will be alienating in some ways. We won’t feel that comfortable with it. We’ll get a lot of better results, but it won’t feel like utopia." Marginal Revolution

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"A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today." Guardian

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The Jihad for an erection must be fought by all means available

"The Isis men seem to be sex-mad. They are always confiscating Viagra from pharmacies, which people think they use themselves." Guardian

(In seriousness, I'm sure much of the appeal of IS for young men arises from the "crisis of masculinity" and the promise of claiming a status as patriarchs in a patriarchal society)

Links, Thursday 19th Feb

"He said the government was struggling to “align Eskom’s message to our political message”." M&G

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"the ASTM Playground Surfacing Committee is proposing to significantly increase the resilience requirements for playgrounds. The motivation appears to be that the goal of improving playground safety with the current standard has not significantly reduced the number of hospital visits. To my mind this is not unlike the logic of the medieval doctor who, when their patient did not get well with one blood letting concluded that they needed more blood letting." Playground Guru

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"Remittances from the Somalian diaspora amount to $1.2-billion to $1.6-billion a year, which is roughly 50% of the country’s gross national income, and on which 40% of the population relies for survival. Over the past 10 years the money known to have been transferred to suspected terrorists in Somalia amounts to a few thousand dollars. Cutting off remittances is likely to kill more people than terrorists will ever manage." M&G

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"What morality comes down to is making relationships right. Morality is realizing, improving, and enhancing the kinds of relationships that are regarded as ideal in your culture. Sometimes violence is used to do that." Marshall Project

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Look at this ridiculous, moralistic shit. BBC conducts a "string" operation to confront a woman running a brothel with Chinese workers. Are we gonna describe *putting an ad in the newspaper* as "trafficking" now? Do we think that migrant women have so little agency of their own that they should be prevented from answering job adverts now? This is pretty much the same attitude which holds that Asian women needed to be locked up "for their own good" to be prevented from doing sex work (and yes, that is a thing that happens). BBC

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"What I found alarming about Fifty Shades of Grey was the overlap between my experience as an abuse victim and the specific way the audience was being conditioned to accept Christian as a romantic lead." Mary Sue

(This, of course, also goes for just about the entire Romance genre)

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Beautiful. I really want to see this film. Does anyone know where/when it might be showing in Cape Town?

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Nature is pretty neat!

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Thoughts? Slate

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Very interesting long read about the theological underpinnings of IS, particular it's obsession with the apocalypse. It's kind of as if fans of the "Left Behind" novels acquired an army, territory and control over a helpless population. That is, it's pretty scary.

"Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates." Atlantic

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"The ANC has put away the big stick, and is now using state resources, patronage and state power to reshape the media to its liking." Daily Maverick

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Just a reminder that George Washington was a committed slaveholder, and went to great lengths (including some of dubious legality even at the time) to retain his human property. NY Times

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Some of these ideas are no doubt half-baked, but the general point is correct: a major factor in the current crisis is excessively conservative monetary policy Guardian

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This is really important, and I haven't seen it reported on enough. The draft Gender Identity law in Malta will prohibit surgical intervention on intersex children unless it is actually medically required. Too many healthy children are still being given surgery at birth to force them into the standard sex binary that our society deems compulsory. This very frequently damages sexual function and fertility, and very often results in gender dysphoria when these children enter puberty (especially if their medical condition is kept secret from them, as is also often the case). The law is a massive leap forward, and should be widely emulated. Times of Malta

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This is pretty cool

"As there was also protection against very high doses, equivalent to the amount of new virus that would be produced in a chronically infected patient, the researchers believe the approach may be useful in people who already have HIV." BBC

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Some interesting stuff on non-celiac gluten sensitivity. There is some evidence that the placebo effect plays a role

BUUUT... some people who report gluten sensitivity might in fact be sensitive to non-gluten compounds called FODMAPS which are also often found in grains

Links, Sunday 15th Feb

LOL

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LOL, it turns out there's *already* an FW de Klerk Street in Cape Town (quite near to Marthinus van Schalkwyk Street!)

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Well, this is intense. A geopolitical motivation taking precedence over actual energy needs?

"Once the agreement comes into force, the Russians will have a veto over South Africa doing business with any other nuclear vendor. And it will be binding for a minimum of 20 years, during which Russia can hold a gun to South Africa’s head, in effect saying: “Do business with us, or forget nuclear.”" MG

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The growth in renewable energy would appear to be unstoppable. (Check out the "Terrordome" graph!) Bloomberg

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Damning inside information about just how far Zuma has gone in turning the South African state into a vehicle for his own interests

"Mostly, the executive is held together by mutually reinforcing relationships of patronage. Provincial politicians with vested economic interests often owe their positions to lines of patronage both up and down the political chain." RDM

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For anyone looking for insight into the state of our collective erotic imagination, you should look no further than this - a livestream of all the search terms entered on a major porn streaming site (in the "straight" section). Obviously VERY VERY NSFW, and often offensive on many levels.

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Africa Check gives a good rundown of the SONA, fact-checking where it has info.

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[Some explicit discussion of sexual coercion and some consensual sexual behaviour that might nevertheless be distressing]

A good piece, really trying to address the paradox of acknowledging the fucked-up power structures in our society that shape our enjoyment of certain things while also actually enjoying them at a personal level.

"Even in my blog you’ll see me waver between “my cunt likes what it likes, leave it be” to “how has cultures shaped and perhaps fucked up my sexuality”. I understand this is an unpleasant discussion and will make you second guess yourself. But I still think it needs to happen." Medium

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[TW: sexual assault]

Can we be clear that DSK is simply a rapist? The fact that the woman he assaulted (in this case) happened to have been paid for performing *a different sex act* to the one he actually performed on her doesn't make him any less a rapist. You do a massive disservice to sex workers by conflating sexual assault and the consensual sex they have with boundary-respecting clients. The Local

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This is basically Pony Mac​'s experience of South Africa. ZANews

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Amazing. The Google "Deepmind" initiative unveils an algorithm that will, with a few hours of learning, be able to play simple video games better than any human can.

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No killer robots any time soon; probably many economic, social and legal challenges due to AI, however. Fusion

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The rest of the review isn't particularly informative, but this is a good bit

"In the social contract, individuals are a premise, not a product. In economics, the satisfaction of individual preferences is the self-evident goal, but this is never explained or justified, even though it is an astonishingly rare commitment across the sweep of time. Siedentop wants to treat such first principles as the result of a history that made liberalism conceivable in the first place." Boston Review

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Well shit

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Good profile, and an insight into the current Greek negotiating position

“We are a party of the left, but what we are putting on the table is essentially the agenda of a reformist bankruptcy lawyer from the City of London,” he says. “The bailout was not a bailout of Greece in 2010, it was a bailout of the German and French banks. The German public was misled into thinking that this was money going to the Greeks, the Greek public was misled into thinking that this was our salvation.” Guardian

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Ah yes, the EFF is a conspiracy of the media and Western governments. South African politicians are sounding more and more like Russian politicians every day... M&G

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So Kate Smurthwaite panics at some *rumours* that people might picket outside her event and essentially calls it off herself (notice that even an actually-occurring picket is hardly a threat to life and limb). Then calls up the media and tells people she's been "censored". This convinces a whole lot of radfems (along with some people who should know better) to write a letter to the Guardian opposing "censorship" at universities. What a sorry mess.

"I can’t believe I’ve even had to write this. It’s such a non-story that I’m impressed Kate has got so much mileage out of it." Goldsmith Comedy

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Man, this is a window into a different time and place. Thanks Melissa​! Vice

Links, Friday 13th Feb

This is unbelievably gross. The right-wing government of Norway - richest country in Europe, recall - intends to criminalise giving money or any other kind of assistance to beggars. And this is pretty explicitly motivated by racial antipathy towards an 'influx' of Roma migrants. Local Newsweek

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Thinking about the previous post... The 'Nordic model' is basically premised on maintaining a clear distinction between an ingroup - people who will get access to all kinds of nice welfare and social services - and an outgroup. You could argue that that's necessary for any welfare system, but there's definitely a dark side to it operating at the psychological level. It involves a certain willingness to draw a firm boundary and dismiss the needs of anyone thought of as being outside that line. Hence the poor treatment - often 'unbelievably poor', given our stereotype of 'nice' Nordic countries - of people in the outgroup: homeless people, sex workers, undocumented migrants, racial minorities, etc.

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Interesting piece. It turns out much of the increase in prison population in the US since 1980 is due to prosecutors electing to level more serious charges at offenders than they used to.

"the real growth in the prison population comes from county-level district attorneys sending violent people to prison. And there’s a lot to be said for nonprison approaches to a lot of people who are in prison for violent crimes. But that’s a political issue that we haven’t even begun to address, in part because it’s politically scary." Slate

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This piece doesn't relate that much to my own experience of Afrika Burn, since I've only ever been a casual attendee, not heavily involved with volunteering or management. Nevertheless, probably a worthwhile piece of criticism.

My own take on AB, incidentally, is that it's a pretty fun festival for the participants. Some people probably even have new experiences and learn something about themselves while they're there, which is obviously nice for them. But I don't think it's doing anything to change the world, and I think the most annoying thing about the whole scene is that many people imagine that they *are* changing the world for the better simply by showing up an doing a fun thing for themselves and their friends.

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Sometimes I wonder why people agree to be profiled in rags like the Daily Mail, but with these two I reckon the sole motivation is to be like "Check out how cool we are and how awesome our life is"

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This is pretty spot-on. A citizen's income paves the way to a different sort of economy and society, and needs to be sold as such. It's implications would be massive, and you can't just sell it as a fix to some specific problems in the function of the existing welfare state. Guardian

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"The tourist attraction was also something of a non-starter because Manson believes he is immortal." Independent

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This is dreadful. Also a reminder that anti-religious violence is definitely a thing, and it tends to be directed mainly at Muslims these days. Middle East Eye

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[TW: sexual assault]

Very telling example of how the law and society conflates sex work with violence, to the detriment of everyone concerned. This woman, giving evidence, clearly describes being sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He wanted to engage in "a specific act" and she responded by crying and “I showed my reticence with gestures … gestures that made myself understood". But "he smiled and went ahead anyway". And yet DSK is only being charged with "pimping". Consenting to one sort of sex act does not mean consent to *any* sex act! Whether money changes hands or not is utterly irrelevant! Guardian

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The US government alone provides $70 million a year in funding to "anti-trafficking" organisations, including Julie Bindel's utterly shoddy "research" (mostly restatements of sex industry myths and misleading statistics that were already discredited some time ago). In contrast, ALL funding for sex worker rights organisation WORLDWIDE amounts to about €8 million a year. And yet Bindel describes these organisation as "well-funded" fronts for the "pimp lobby". Vice

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"Eddie Redmayne is literally flawless in this film. Eddie Redmayne knows Jupiter Ascending is bad. Eddie Redmayne knows this perhaps better than anyone else in our solar system, and he does what needs to be done. He swooshes around without a shirt but with a black cape for two hours, speaking only in whispers except for the very occasional ridiculous outburst. He is so over-the-top I am not sure where the top even is anymore. He should win an Oscar." The Mary Sue

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Yeah, this is totally reasonable and proportionate - sending in *riot police* to catch people suspected of benefit fraud. Funny how you never see these aggressive tactics directed at all those bankers and company CEOs who commit multi-million pound white collar crimes. Croydon Advertiser

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So this is obviously shocking:

"The survey, also carried out in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Italy and Norway found that teenage girls in England reported the highest rates of sexual coercion, with about one in five (22%) saying they had suffered physical violence or intimidation from boyfriends, including slapping, punching, strangling and being beaten with an object."

But in this report, they feel the need to mention that "a high proportion of teenage boys regularly viewed pornography", as if these are obviously related. A high proportion of teenage boys also play football. If you're going to draw a causal connection between two things, you've got to do better than appealing to moralistic handwringing Guardian

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"At around midnight, [Lee Chang-hyun] goes online with a couple of friends and performs his meal, spicy raw squid one day, crab the next. "Perform" is the right word. He is extravagant in his gestures, flaunting the food to his computer camera to tantalise the viewers. He eats noisily and that's part of the show. He's invested in a good microphone to capture the full crunch and slurp.

This is not a private affair. Some 10,000 people watch him eating per day, he says. They send a constant stream of messages to his computer and he responds verbally (by talking) and orally (by eating, very visibly and noisily)." BBC

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[TW: sexual assault]

The Occidental case is very complicated and definitely interesting from a legal perspective. But I have my doubts by how much attention it's drawing. I think the vast majority of sexual assault cases are much more straightforward, and we risk undermining genuine progress by focusing on one particular case where the new regulations have *arguably* produced a paradoxical result. Any thoughts appreciated. Slate

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In light of the mooted (but thankfully unsuccessful) ban on begging, it's noteworthy that the homeless population in Norway numbers only about 1000 (the police estimate 2000, a number that most authorities consider to be inflated. As Tyler Cowen remarks, this is a society that is "not very good at processing discord"

Incidentally, if you recall the debate before the French ban on burqas and niqabs, it emerged there that only about 2000 women living in France at the time actually wore these types of veil (out of a Muslim population of around 5-6 million)

In both cases, it's not so much the scale of the "problem", but so much as how the visible existence of a certain kind of person makes the majority *feel*

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South African democracy in action.

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"The global supply chain that brings us those tablets and phones, and pretty much everything else from our clothes and food to our toys and souvenirs, is nothing short of a moon shot itself – a vast, unprecedented engineering solution to a truly astronomical logistics problem. The fact that it's hidden from most people's sight, and that it has become so utterly reliable and efficient to the point of transparency, doesn't make it any less of an achievement of human technical endeavour." BBC

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"With the Arbitration Committee opting only to ban the one woman in the dispute despite her behavior being no worse than that of the men, it’s hard not to see this as a setback to Wikipedia’s efforts to rectify its massive gender gap." Slate

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Gah, why is South African immigration policy so bizarre and xenophobic!?!?!

"a “uni-visa” system for the 15 countries of the Southern African Development Community, a bloc dominated by South Africa, is nowhere near to being ready, despite having been mooted in 1998. One big sticking point has been South Africa’s fear of a deluge of illegal immigrants." Economist

Links, Sunday 8th Feb

The headline of the article is kinda exclusionary in itself - when they say "the problem nobody's talking about", what they mean is "the problem that white people and white-dominated media aren't talking about" MIC

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This sounds excellent. Spread the word if you know anyone who might want to contribute.

"… So much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice. Leaders “get assassinated,” patrons “are refused” service, women “are ejected” from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility … There is no month when we get to talk about [James] Blake [the white busdriver challenged by Rosa Parks]; no opportunity to learn the fates of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who murdered Emmett Till; no time set aside to keep track of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, whose false accusations of rape against the Scottsboro Boys sent five innocent young black men to jail. Wouldn't everyone–particularly white people–benefit from becoming better acquainted with these histories?" Africa is a Country

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Interesting. Sincere opinion or typical Motlanthe diplomacy?

"During a question and answer session later in the day, however, Motlanthe expanded that to say he endorsed “Oom Kathy” [Ahmed Kathrada]’s support for the renaming of Table Bay Boulevard after FW de Klerk, describing it as “the right thing to do”." Daily Maverick

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[TW for graphic descriptions of violence]

"I still suffer from memories of the British apartheid system [in Kenya] and numerous instances of arbitrary killing and brutality by British forces, Kenya police and Kenyan African Rifles. In reality we protected land-grabbing British farmers and enriched UK companies.

Young troops were encouraged to shoot any African on sight in certain areas. Prize money was offered by senior officers for every death." Africa is a Country

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Rational economic policy and now rational immigration policy! What further surprises can we expect from the new Greek government? Greek Reporter

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A few wince-worthy turns of phrase, coming as this does out of an Israeli context, but some good theorising about terrorism as a political strategy.

"Why are [states] so sensitive to terrorist provocations? Because the legitimacy of the modern state is based on its promise to keep the public sphere free of political violence. A regime can withstand terrible catastrophes, and even ignore them, provided its legitimacy is not based on preventing them." Guardian

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Nice piece about colour technology in movies, and how filmmakers haver responded to technological developments. (I enjoyed the video showing Kubrick's use of bright reds)

Atlantic

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Great piece about Ponte tower in Joburg, and it's place in a city of migrants. Roads and Kingdoms

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From a couple of years ago, but timely nevertheless.

"The European crisis, in other words, had nothing to do with thrifty Germans and profligate Spaniards, but with policies aimed at boosting German employment, which also forced up German national savings rates. These excess savings had to be absorbed within Europe, and the subsequent imbalances were so large (because German’s savings imbalance was so large) that they led to today’s circumstances." Foreign Policy

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Putting game theory to work

"Imagine what would happen if the federal government were to offer a million-dollar reward and promise safety to anyone — Islamic State militant or not — who provided information that led to the rescue of American hostages, and the capture or killing of their kidnappers. Holding an American hostage would then become fraught with peril, no matter where the kidnappers might hide, as anyone, even one of their own, might turn on them at any time." NY Times

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I'm sure this is old news to people who know their Middle Eastern history, but I wasn't aware of the extent to which Jaffa was destroyed as a centre for Palestinian population and culture.

"In November 1947 the UN published its plan for dividing Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. Jaffa was made a Palestinian island within Jewish boundaries. In the fighting that followed, paramilitaries commanded by Menachem Begin, a Tel Avivan who later became Israel’s prime minister, rolled barrel bombs down the alleyways into Jaffa’s cafés and fired mortars into residential districts. By the time Israel declared independence on May 14th 1948, prompting Arab armies to move in, Jews had chased Jaffa’s Arabs out of the city, leaving less than a 20th of the population behind." Economist

Links, Friday 6th Feb

Cape Town local politics are absolutely poisonous, as evidenced by events at the first city council meeting of the year. First, the motion to rename Table Bay Boulevard after FW de Klerk was passed, a move that mayor Patricia de Lille described as "progressive". Second, and more troubling from a constitutional perspective, ANC councillors were effectively barred from the meeting by several means (including literally being physically barred from entering the meeting room). IOL
Discussed by Jacques Rousseau here

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Any thoughts as to the plausibility of this? With all the shenanigans on the part of the various South African security agencies, it's pretty hard to sort fact from fiction, tbh. IOL

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Good piece, about the lack of non-derogatory terms for LGBTQI people and practices in indigenous South African languages, and how this is related to colonialism and the lack of institutional support for scholarship in these languages. HOLAA

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This is helpful, as I certain found a lot of the coverage around this confusing.

"an American first lady went to a Muslim country and followed completely normal protocol by going unveiled. There was very little reaction within that country, and no reaction among her hosts. The American media completely freaked out, got a number of basic facts wildly wrong, and did so all in a way that insulted that country and its citizens by perpetuating racist stereotypes." Vox

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Although Greece's national debt is extremely high as a percentage of GDP, because most of this debt has long maturities and relatively low interest rates, it only pays 4.3% of GDP to service this debt. Compare this to the UK, which pays about 3% of GDP. This is the headline figure to bear in mind when we talk about the necessity for debt relief or the plausibility of ending austerity. FT

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What the United Front (the political formation created by NUMSA) is up to these days, including a much more forthright condemnation of xenophobia than we've seen from either the ANC or the EFF. Daily Maverick

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Huh. An entire Truman Show village in the Netherlands designed to make people with severe dementia feel at home. Atlantic

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"I am so fucking confused about what kind of sex other feminists think I should have in order to be liberated. Want my authentic opinion? I care a hell of a lot more about labor practices and ethics on porn sets than I do about if I have to fake an orgasm on camera or not." Tits and Sass

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"Shortly after he was sworn in, Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras found himself inside the Maximos Mansion without some basic necessities. “They took everything,” he said. “I was looking for an hour to find soap.”

Traditionally, a defeated Greek prime minister will wait until their successor has been anointed to wish them well. But Antonis Samaras was in such a rush to go that he even failed to leave the Wi-Fi password." Guardian

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A mind-boggling rundown on some recent research about the placebo effect. Including the fact that it still works even if patients are *specifically told* that what they're receiving is a placebo. Cracked

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Linguists *are* pretty hardcore. XKCD