"Anti-trafficking policies do a great disservice to migrating people, especially the most vulnerable. By diverting our attention away from the practices of nation-states and employers, they channel our energies to support a law-and-order agenda of ‘getting tough’ with ‘traffickers.’ In this way, anti-trafficking measures are ideological: they render the plethora of immigration and border controls as unproblematic and place them outside of the bounds of politics. The reasons why it is increasingly difficult and dangerous for people to move safely or live securely in new places are brushed aside while nation states rush to criminalise ‘traffickers’ and (largely) deport ‘victims of trafficking.’" Open Democracy
>>><<<
"Psychedelic drugs like MDMA and magic mushrooms are as safe as riding a bike or playing soccer, and bans against them are “inconsistent with human rights”" Newsweek
>>><<<
“We had to write ‘ordinary posts’, about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing,” Guardian
>>><<<
If you're interested in technical and regulatory issues around condoms, then this is the long-form piece for you (also some good stuff about the relationship between how good they feel and getting people to use the things reliably)
>>><<<
"There has never been a verifiable reported instance of a trans person harassing a cisgender person, nor have there been any confirmed reports of male predators 'pretending' to be transgender to gain access to women's spaces and commit crimes against them." MIC
>>><<<
"Every day, the bedside cardiac monitors threw off some 187 audible alerts. No, not 187 audible alerts for all the beds in the five ICUs; 187 alerts were generated by the monitors in each patient’s room, an average of one alarm buzzing or beeping by the bedside every eight minutes. Every day, there were about 15,000 alarms across all the ICU beds. For the entire month, there were 381,560 alarms across the five ICUs. Remember, this is from just one of about a half-dozen systems connected to the patients, each tossing off its own alerts and alarms. And those are just the audible ones." Medium
>>><<<
I'm not going to comment on the costs or benefits on this particular proposal, but I think it is significant that the major institutional approach to the availability of online pornography in the UK is still censorship rather than better sex education. Kids acquire harmful ideas about sex through a variety of channels - pornography is only one of these, and I sincerely doubt it is the worst. This is the basic issue that needs to be addressed. The first time kids see porn ought to be in a classroom, under the guidance and supervision of a trained instructor. Any effort to shut it out will inevitably fail, not least because kids eventually turn 18. Guardian
>>><<<
This is great. Reading this, it strikes me that we could all stand to be better educated about the basics of neurochemistry, and how psychoactive drugs actually alter consciousness.
>>><<<
On that note... a drug has been developed that has similar anxiety-reducing properties to alcohol, but without the negative side-effects (aggression, loss of coordination, etc). Alcohol affects a wide variety of GABA receptors, whereas pagoclone is much more specific to the receptor type that produces the desired effect. There is also an antidote, so it's effects can be eliminated within minutes. Wouldn't we all like to see this drug brought to market? Wikipedia
>>><<<
"Take away anything to react to and people stop reacting." iO9
[Some disturbing discussion of child abuse]
>>><<<
Obvious, but worth repeating
"In places [and times] where women have very few economic opportunities, they can't afford to be too choosy about marriage partners. Where women are more empowered, they become choosier. At times, this greater choosiness leaves them with less money than they would otherwise have. But that's the point. It's precisely because women are more empowered that they can afford to trade off economic security for other benefits." Vox
>>><<<
Very important information about blood diamonds in Angola and the failure of the Kimberley process
>>><<<
"a story in which a privileged elite uses its political power (albeit through the planning system) to create economic rents for the few fits Mr Piketty's argument to a tee. Well-off homeowners may for the moment be more responsible for rising wealth inequality than top-hatted capitalists or famous hedge-fund managers. But their NIMBYism is a very Piketty-like phenomenon." Economist
>>><<<
A reminder that Rhodes made his wealth primarily by wielding state coercion to extract cheap labour from colonised people
>>><<<
"Just when nation-states have made it next to impossible to legally live and work in their territories as rights-bearing persons, anti-trafficking measures have been adopted into national laws. Tales of ‘trafficking’ (or ‘smuggling’), which have led to calls for heightened state intervention at the border and more punitive measures for traffickers and/or smugglers, do the crucial work of legitimising further controls on global human mobility, all in the name of ‘helping’ victims of trafficking. By ideologically filtering their efforts through the politics of rescue, anti-trafficking campaigns provide a crucial veneer of humanitarianism to the exploitative and repressive practices of states and employers." Open Democracy
>>><<<
Quite a few of these look really good, and I've never been...
>>><<<
"If the United States were trying to build a broad anti-Chinese coalition in the Pacific Rim, it would be offering generous terms to our Asian partners to entice them into a deal. In practice, we seem to be doing the opposite — taking advantage of Pacific Rim fears of China to coerce other countries into adopting policies that are friendly to big American companies." Vox
>>><<<
I'm gonna link to this directly because it's so good:
"It’s not clear that a country’s affection for the US will increase after being required to rewrite its patent and copyright law every few years on a model dictated by, respectively, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. The US itself does not offer much liberalisation. It is highly unlikely to substantially dismantle its agricultural subsidy and protection regime to allow Australian and New Zealand farmers abundant access to its dairy market or stop its rice subsidies disadvantaging Vietnamese rice exports in world markets. America’s trading partners are thus on a permanent treadmill of enforced policy change in order to keep their trade access to the US." FT
>>><<<
“The only interesting question is how much GDP has been lost as a result of austerity” Independent
>>><<<
Gosh, the government agents who shut down the Silk Road are hugely corrupt? What a surprise!
>>><<<
"In later years, outsiders would listen incredulously to the wooden pronouncements of the Soviet leadership and ask whether they could possibly be sincere. Kotkin’s answer is yes. Unlike the uneducated cynic of Trotsky’s imagination, the real Stalin justified each and every decision using ideological language, both in public and in private. It is a mistake not to take this language seriously, for it proves an excellent guide to his thinking. More often than not, he did exactly what he said he would do." Atlantic
>>><<<
Guys, so many veggie places in Cape Town that I haven't even tried! News24
>>><<<
"Which brings us to the second benefit of ending America’s cold war with Iran: It could empower the Iranian people vis-à-vis their repressive state. American hawks, addled by the mythology they have created around Ronald Reagan, seem to think that the more hostile America’s relationship with Iran’s regime becomes, the better the United States can promote Iranian democracy. But the truth is closer to the reverse. The best thing Reagan ever did for the people of Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. was to embrace Mikhail Gorbachev." Atlantic
>>><<<
A list of resources analysing the Garissa attack
>>><<<
This sounds about right to me. Yes, comedians need to be given the space to express themselves and explore ideas... but they also need the good grace to accept when they've been called out, and to work on doing better. Indiewire
>>><<<
Yes
"Being anti-racist doesn’t mean that you are never racist, it means that you recognize and battle racism in yourself as hard as you battle it in others." Medium
>>><<<
I'm pretty much in agreement with the Economist on this one: land needs to be taxed more effectively, and planning authority must be vested in political entities larger than neighbourhoods.
>>><<<
"Whether today’s slow-growth activism owes more to the racist tradition of restrictive covenants, to concerns about property values, to a knee-jerk resistance to change, to misguided environmental activism, or to worries about aesthetics and traffic, is hard to say. All these things are comfortably couched in the rhetoric of “preserving neighborhood character." Salon
>>><<<
"Psychedelic drugs like MDMA and magic mushrooms are as safe as riding a bike or playing soccer, and bans against them are “inconsistent with human rights”" Newsweek
>>><<<
“We had to write ‘ordinary posts’, about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing,” Guardian
>>><<<
If you're interested in technical and regulatory issues around condoms, then this is the long-form piece for you (also some good stuff about the relationship between how good they feel and getting people to use the things reliably)
>>><<<
"There has never been a verifiable reported instance of a trans person harassing a cisgender person, nor have there been any confirmed reports of male predators 'pretending' to be transgender to gain access to women's spaces and commit crimes against them." MIC
>>><<<
"Every day, the bedside cardiac monitors threw off some 187 audible alerts. No, not 187 audible alerts for all the beds in the five ICUs; 187 alerts were generated by the monitors in each patient’s room, an average of one alarm buzzing or beeping by the bedside every eight minutes. Every day, there were about 15,000 alarms across all the ICU beds. For the entire month, there were 381,560 alarms across the five ICUs. Remember, this is from just one of about a half-dozen systems connected to the patients, each tossing off its own alerts and alarms. And those are just the audible ones." Medium
>>><<<
I'm not going to comment on the costs or benefits on this particular proposal, but I think it is significant that the major institutional approach to the availability of online pornography in the UK is still censorship rather than better sex education. Kids acquire harmful ideas about sex through a variety of channels - pornography is only one of these, and I sincerely doubt it is the worst. This is the basic issue that needs to be addressed. The first time kids see porn ought to be in a classroom, under the guidance and supervision of a trained instructor. Any effort to shut it out will inevitably fail, not least because kids eventually turn 18. Guardian
>>><<<
This is great. Reading this, it strikes me that we could all stand to be better educated about the basics of neurochemistry, and how psychoactive drugs actually alter consciousness.
>>><<<
On that note... a drug has been developed that has similar anxiety-reducing properties to alcohol, but without the negative side-effects (aggression, loss of coordination, etc). Alcohol affects a wide variety of GABA receptors, whereas pagoclone is much more specific to the receptor type that produces the desired effect. There is also an antidote, so it's effects can be eliminated within minutes. Wouldn't we all like to see this drug brought to market? Wikipedia
>>><<<
"Take away anything to react to and people stop reacting." iO9
[Some disturbing discussion of child abuse]
>>><<<
Obvious, but worth repeating
"In places [and times] where women have very few economic opportunities, they can't afford to be too choosy about marriage partners. Where women are more empowered, they become choosier. At times, this greater choosiness leaves them with less money than they would otherwise have. But that's the point. It's precisely because women are more empowered that they can afford to trade off economic security for other benefits." Vox
>>><<<
Very important information about blood diamonds in Angola and the failure of the Kimberley process
>>><<<
"a story in which a privileged elite uses its political power (albeit through the planning system) to create economic rents for the few fits Mr Piketty's argument to a tee. Well-off homeowners may for the moment be more responsible for rising wealth inequality than top-hatted capitalists or famous hedge-fund managers. But their NIMBYism is a very Piketty-like phenomenon." Economist
>>><<<
A reminder that Rhodes made his wealth primarily by wielding state coercion to extract cheap labour from colonised people
>>><<<
"Just when nation-states have made it next to impossible to legally live and work in their territories as rights-bearing persons, anti-trafficking measures have been adopted into national laws. Tales of ‘trafficking’ (or ‘smuggling’), which have led to calls for heightened state intervention at the border and more punitive measures for traffickers and/or smugglers, do the crucial work of legitimising further controls on global human mobility, all in the name of ‘helping’ victims of trafficking. By ideologically filtering their efforts through the politics of rescue, anti-trafficking campaigns provide a crucial veneer of humanitarianism to the exploitative and repressive practices of states and employers." Open Democracy
>>><<<
Quite a few of these look really good, and I've never been...
>>><<<
"If the United States were trying to build a broad anti-Chinese coalition in the Pacific Rim, it would be offering generous terms to our Asian partners to entice them into a deal. In practice, we seem to be doing the opposite — taking advantage of Pacific Rim fears of China to coerce other countries into adopting policies that are friendly to big American companies." Vox
>>><<<
I'm gonna link to this directly because it's so good:
"It’s not clear that a country’s affection for the US will increase after being required to rewrite its patent and copyright law every few years on a model dictated by, respectively, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. The US itself does not offer much liberalisation. It is highly unlikely to substantially dismantle its agricultural subsidy and protection regime to allow Australian and New Zealand farmers abundant access to its dairy market or stop its rice subsidies disadvantaging Vietnamese rice exports in world markets. America’s trading partners are thus on a permanent treadmill of enforced policy change in order to keep their trade access to the US." FT
>>><<<
“The only interesting question is how much GDP has been lost as a result of austerity” Independent
>>><<<
Gosh, the government agents who shut down the Silk Road are hugely corrupt? What a surprise!
>>><<<
"In later years, outsiders would listen incredulously to the wooden pronouncements of the Soviet leadership and ask whether they could possibly be sincere. Kotkin’s answer is yes. Unlike the uneducated cynic of Trotsky’s imagination, the real Stalin justified each and every decision using ideological language, both in public and in private. It is a mistake not to take this language seriously, for it proves an excellent guide to his thinking. More often than not, he did exactly what he said he would do." Atlantic
>>><<<
Guys, so many veggie places in Cape Town that I haven't even tried! News24
>>><<<
"Which brings us to the second benefit of ending America’s cold war with Iran: It could empower the Iranian people vis-à-vis their repressive state. American hawks, addled by the mythology they have created around Ronald Reagan, seem to think that the more hostile America’s relationship with Iran’s regime becomes, the better the United States can promote Iranian democracy. But the truth is closer to the reverse. The best thing Reagan ever did for the people of Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. was to embrace Mikhail Gorbachev." Atlantic
>>><<<
A list of resources analysing the Garissa attack
>>><<<
This sounds about right to me. Yes, comedians need to be given the space to express themselves and explore ideas... but they also need the good grace to accept when they've been called out, and to work on doing better. Indiewire
>>><<<
Yes
"Being anti-racist doesn’t mean that you are never racist, it means that you recognize and battle racism in yourself as hard as you battle it in others." Medium
>>><<<
I'm pretty much in agreement with the Economist on this one: land needs to be taxed more effectively, and planning authority must be vested in political entities larger than neighbourhoods.
>>><<<
"Whether today’s slow-growth activism owes more to the racist tradition of restrictive covenants, to concerns about property values, to a knee-jerk resistance to change, to misguided environmental activism, or to worries about aesthetics and traffic, is hard to say. All these things are comfortably couched in the rhetoric of “preserving neighborhood character." Salon
No comments:
Post a Comment