Links, Monday 29th June

Thoughts?

"The common denominator seems to be the stakes, and orientation mismatches are just one way the stakes of indicating interest in another person can be lowered enough to facilitate flirtatiousness. A great many of the most egregious flirts I’ve come across were very old men (presumably heterosexual), who seem to find the knowledge that young women no longer take them seriously as romantic prospects liberating, rather than discouraging. Old ladies who flirt with anyone and everyone don’t seem uncommon, either, and gay men who flirt with women, particularly older ones, are definitely A Thing." Slate

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"A few years ago, the Casa dos Frescos had been the site of what locals refer to as “the incident of the golden melon.’’ An enraged French customer, having paid a hundred and five dollars for a single melon, sued the store for profiteering. The case was thrown out of court, in part because the man not only bought the melon but also ate the evidence." New Yorker

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Remember that borders are violence, and not only in the developed world. States all over the world brutally oppress migrants and people understood as foreigners.

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Laverne Cox is literally the best

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Lots of farmland in the UK is only economically viable because of subsidies. Under a free market, it would revert to the wilderness. And then there'd, you know, be some wilderness, instead of a soulless agro-industrial wasteland.

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"Polar bears mate with grizzlies in the Canadian Arctic along the Beaufort Sea to produce “pizzly bears.”" Quartz

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Horrifying before-and-after photos illustrating the effects of forced removals under apartheid.

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SA govt closes offices where refugees can have their paperwork renewed... then arrests them for not having up-to-date paperwork.

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Good long-form piece about the decline of work in the developed world, and how society might adapt

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LOL

"By and large, the policy heavyweights of the day... believed there was a “categorical no-bailout injunction.” As such, it was expected that markets would understand that European governments were more likely to default once their devaluation option was taken away and that financial markets would price the sovereign debt of countries differently depending on the health of their public finances."

Seriously, though, it's a good article - a very strong argument that the basic reason why we're now facing another crisis in Greece was the decision to bail it out in 2010, rather than allowing an orderly default.

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Authoritarianism is Turkey has suffered a setback, but is not defeated.

Links, Wednesday 17th June

This is utterly shocking. Watch both the videos.

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Interesting history of the racial tensions around public swimming in the US. Basically, as public swimming pools were steadily desegregated, whites first resisted violently and then refused to use them, and the institution eventually went into decline. Little has changed, it seems.

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"the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died." Guardian

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Check it out: vegan meringues!

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South Africa is an extraordinarily violent country. Other than that, there are several interpretations you might apply to these statistics.

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I find these sorts of arguments entirely dishonest. Not because they're necessarily wrong on their own terms, but because they're  used almost exclusively to defend behaviour that they don't even remotely support. I've never met a meat eater who strictly adheres to any rigorous ethical code about what kind of meat is and isn't allowable, but I've met many who gesture vaguely in the direction of such a code to justify their actual behaviour.

"So you concede it would be OK to eat the flesh of a cow that was pasture-fed on non-arable land for its entire life, all the while fitted with a methane-reclamation device, and then killed suddenly in its sleep?"
"Uh, yeah, I guess..."
"Cool, I'm gonna eat all the McDonalds!"

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"More than 21 years after the end of racial apartheid, there is frustration among black writers who cannot get published or whose works are not available in their own communities. They point to the expense of books and a continued lack of diversity in bookshops, publishing houses, awards committees, and among event organisers and audiences. Some have called for a boycott of literary festivals." Guardian

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"It is a reminder of deportee Jimmy Mubenga, killed under restraint by G4S guards while pleading that he couldn’t breathe, and whose three killers walk free today. Of Isabella Acevedo, paid £22 a week for seven years working for ex-immigration minister Mark Harper, and deported minutes before her own daughter’s wedding. Of Yashika Bageerathi, sent back to Mauritius six weeks before her A Level exams, despite a petition of 183,751 calling for her to remain. Of the nine cleaners of SOAS, ambushed by forty immigration officers after organising for their rights at their workplace. And of the women of Yarl’s Wood detention centre, over three quarters of whom are survivors of sexual violence, facing daily humiliation and abuse at the hands of the same detention system which has caged 900 international students this past year." NUS

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Thoughts?

“The best estimate of the average impact of microcredit on the poverty of clients is zero.” Guardian

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This seems to me like one of the clearest statements on this sorry saga

"She says she’s black, but we don’t know if she’s always black. Is she black when she’s purchasing a home? Talking to the police? Or is she black only when vying for a role where lived experience would help her odds?"

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Very interesting piece, arguing that much of recent economic 'growth' in China is in fact a monetary phenomenon.

"Just as in the 1600s, the basic underlying logic of China's economic boom after 1980 was the import of money in exchange for the export of goods. This influx of money supported the full remonetization of the Chinese economy. Goods and services that the state or the work unit had previously provided now had to be bought in the marketplace."

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"while it may not make for an exciting backstory, six in 10 women in real federal prison are there for nonviolent drug crimes... Frequently, low-level assistants serve more than their own bosses. Why? Like Dorothy Gaines, most defendants can't afford a private attorney, and court-appointed attorneys often barely have time to read a defendant's case before defending them in court, much less conduct the research needed for a decent defense. In addition, prosecutors reduce sentences for those who furnish "valuable" information, like the men who testified against Dorothy. The low-level employees have no valuable information to give." HuffPost

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Pretty interesting piece on the biochemistry of creating convincing vegan "meat"

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TW: Child sexual abuse

I'm generally a support of Tor and the dark web, but this is really troubling. There are admitted methodological problems with this study, but it seems to indicate that a very large proportion of dark net traffic is associated with child pornography and child abuse

Links, Tuesday 9th June

Remember that the Catholic church practised slavery in Ireland until the last Magdalene laundry was shut down in 1996. It boggles the mind that this institution or anyone associated with it is accorded moral authority on any topic whatsoever, let alone "human trafficking".

"A previously unpublished 2012 HSE report on Bessborough, which examined the institution’s own records, show a system of “institutionalisation and human trafficking”, where “women and babies were considered little more than a commodity for trade amongst religious orders”"

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Useful 

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Great piece on male privilege by someone who has been read as both a woman and as a man.

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"Development politics generally happens along a city's gentrifying fringe. The places where land prices are high enough to make new projects worthwhile, but where incumbent residents are politically weak enough that at least some projects get approved. That tends to distract attention from the areas where the deadweight loss of zoning restrictions is actually highest, the very affluent areas where new building is essentially inconceivable." Matt Yglesias

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Really good piece on how attempts to crack down on "abuse" of prescription drugs can really harm a lot of people.

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Wowzers, I wasn't even aware of this history

"Canadian governments and churches pursued a policy of “cultural genocide” against the country’s aboriginal people throughout the 20th century, according to an investigation into a long-suppressed history that saw 150,000 Native, or First Nations, children forcibly removed from their families and incarcerated in residential schools rife with abuse."

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A history of the massacres committed against Indonesian Communist Party members in the mid-60s, with the full support and assistance of Western powers (some of which went so far as to provide names of activists to be targeted for murder).

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Keynes was once described as an “iron copulating machine”. What an epigraph.

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"My two kids at home almost lost their mother because someone decided that my life was worth less than that of a fetus that was going to die anyway. My husband had told them exactly what my regular doctor said, and the ER doctor had already warned us what would have to happen. Yet none of this mattered when confronted by the idea that no one needs an abortion. You shouldn’t need to know the details of why a woman aborts to trust her to make the best decision for herself. I don’t regret my abortion, but I would also never use my situation to suggest that the only time another woman should have the procedure is when her life is at stake. After my family found out I’d had an abortion, I got a phone call from a cousin who felt the need to tell me I was wrong to have interfered with God’s plan. And in that moment I understood exactly what kind of people judge a woman’s reproductive choices." Salon

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"The implication of this usage ["identity politics"] is that somehow an identity is something only women or African-Americans or perhaps LGBT people have. White men just have ideas about politics that spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal." Vox

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"The public debt-to-GDP ratio was very considerably larger in Britain in every year for two decades, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, than it has been at any time since the crisis of 2008. And yet there was no panic then (when Britain was confidently establishing the welfare state), in contrast to the confused anxiety, not to mention the orchestrated fear, that seems to run down the spine of the terrorised British today, making austerity look like a fitting response." New Statesman

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"The head of Sweden’s anti-trafficking unit told a journalist last year, “of course the law has negative consequences for women in prostitution, but that’s also some of the effect that we want to achieve with the law.”

How, then, is the law sold as “feminist?”

Partly because, while sex workers may be focused on our own safety, people who don’t sell sex have a lot of feelings about more abstract concepts —the idea of what “message” the law sends, for example, or an interest in indulging feelings of disgust regarding men who pay for sex. That distorts the debate." New Republic

Links, Tuesday 2nd June

Of course, the City could make lots more money, and house lots more people, if it actually resolved the legal difficulties preventing new development on the remainder of the wasteland we call District 6. With the sums at stake, you could set aside huge amounts to compensate victims of forced removals and still pay for social housing.

But no, far easier just to evict poor people in the few homes that do remain to put in upper class tenants instead.

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"I think a lot of people saw the Bendy Pole Men and thought, I never realised how terrified I am of Bendy Pole Men, I shall add it to my list of fears. Props for coming up with a new fear, George." Buzzfeed

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"The next day, when America woke up to the confirmed reality of a black president, roughly 1 in 100 searches for “Obama” also included [the n-word] or “KKK” in the query string."

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"Once more, as drug reform takes place all over the world, Britain's drug policy is still being dictated by right-wing scaremongers armed with disinformation, bad science and shonky statistics." Vice

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"Even more bizarre is the African-American man, who, after returning to his childhood home at a project housing unit in the Bronx, was arrested for trespassing in front of his own relatives. He even had the address of the building tattooed onto his forearm, but that didn't matter—he spent the night in jail." Vice

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Thoughts?

"If Napoleon had remained emperor of France for the six years remaining in his natural life, European civilization would have benefited inestimably. The reactionary Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia and Austria would not have been able to crush liberal constitutionalist movements in Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe and elsewhere; pressure to join France in abolishing slavery in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean would have grown; the benefits of meritocracy over feudalism would have had time to become more widely appreciated; Jews would not have been forced back into their ghettos in the Papal States and made to wear the yellow star again; encouragement of the arts and sciences would have been better understood and copied; and the plans to rebuild Paris would have been implemented, making it the most gorgeous city in the world." Smithsonian


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I doubt the US government would actually commission the relevant research, but I consider it very likely that the Silk Road massively reduced harms for drug users. He still shouldn't have tried to have those people murdered though.

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This is good

"When it comes to the Holocaust, a gentle heads up may sound like common sense rather than censoriousness. The struggle taking place on campuses now is, in part, a way of asking faculty to see rape and racialized or gendered violence on a continuum with such self-evidently difficult topics."

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You can ignore most of the charts discussing prevalence, unless you take it as an a priori truth that drug use is bad. The most important things are that rates of drug-related deaths and new HIV cases in Portugal have both plunged since decriminalisation.

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[Discussion of abortion and the death penalty]

On the concept of "quickening" and it's legal implications

"For centuries the quickening also had important legal ramifications. British common law, eventually imported to Colonial America, outlawed abortion only if it took place after the quickening. Likewise, a pregnant woman could not be executed post-quickening. The English jurist William Blackstone wrote in 1770, “To be saved from the gallows a woman must be quick with child—for barely with child, unless he be alive in the womb, is not sufficient.”"

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“It is a lie that there is any optimism. There is no optimism. What the so-called optimism is about is stopping panic-stricken Greeks withdrawing deposits from banks,” Guardian

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Slightly technical argument about the Greek government's strategy in debt negotiations. I'm slightly sceptical, given that the author is an advisor to the German government, and so has some vested interest in rejecting ECB liquidity assistance to Greek banks. Nevertheless interesting

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"I’m talking about the men who just really, really, REALLY want you to make you come. Not in a nice, caring way — generally more in a “I will rub your clit for the next SEVENTY TWO YEARS if I have to” kind of way. I’ve slept with some, my friends have slept with some, they could be sitting next to you right now and you’d have no idea. I basically think that the issue with those guys is that they genuinely don’t care about women’s pleasure... They don’t want to make women because it’s basic bloody courtesy, they just like the general, vague idea of being ace in bed, which is obviously —  I’m assuming — tied to their need to comfort their own sense of masculinity." Medium

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Like in other countries, "anti-trafficking" NGOs in South Africa (often in fact religious organisations who object to the existence of a sex industry at all) are hard at work inflating and manufacturing false statistics to scare the public into compliance.

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A translation of Finnegan's Wake is a massive publishing success in China