Links, Monday 27th July

My god, maybe something good will actually come out of this whole "elected police commissioner" wheeze

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As a South African who has been detained and faced deportation at Heathrow, this hits pretty close to home for me (it bears mentioning that UKBA's decision eventually to let me through probably has something to do with the fact that I'm white and don't have a Muslim name)

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As it turns out, when you share salary information to gather evidence about gender disparities, your boss won't like it (whatever their public-facing rhetoric)

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The proletarianisation of the creative classes

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"Perhaps the strongest mouth-body association found so far is between gum health and cardiovascular disease. In 2007, D’Aiuto published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that deep-cleaning teeth and gums under local anaesthetic resulted in healthier, more elastic arteries six months later. Then, in 2012, the American Heart Association published a statement confirming that periodontal disease is associated with atherosclerosis – a condition whereby arteries become clogged up by fatty substances – even after common causes such as socio-economic factors and smoking are taken into account." Guardian

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Photography has a race problem

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Another excellent harm reduction initiative

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This doesn't go far enough in acknowledging that ACAB, but there's a sound point in here. I don't think we really approach the allocation of state resources as the optimisation problem that it is. So we never really ask about the marginal benefit of, say, punishing one more person who steals something or gets in a fight vs the marginal benefit providing free school meals to one more child for a year. Criminal "justice" isn't thought of as something that should be optimised in that way - it's simply axiomatic that all criminals should be punished, and resources are dedicated accordingly. Other social needs are much more readily put on the chopping block.

"D has form. Earlier in the week he had rung my bell, this time in the middle of the night, asking for money. He knows I won’t give him any, but he’s desperate with uncontrollable shivers, piercing migraines and terrible cramps in his legs. He can hardly stand. Can he get methadone from A&E, I ask? Apparently not. He tells me the only way he can get methadone is if he gets arrested. The police have access to it, he tells me. As the police arrest D after that morning’s fracas, I wonder if he has got himself arrested deliberately."

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"Those who relentlessly excuse all anti-black state violence cheerlead when people born of their same complexion resist cops & presidents." Colorlines

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Shades of this in London too.

"As the city got more and more expensive, progressive housing policy shifted gradually to a sad, rearguard movement to protect the people already here from being displaced. No longer would San Francisco even try to remain open as a refuge for immigrants and radicals from around the world. The San Francisco Left could never come to terms with its central contradiction of being against the creation of more “places” that would give new people the chance to live in the city. Once San Francisco was no longer open to freaks and dissidents, immigrants and refugees, because it was deemed to be “full,” it could no longer fulfill its progressive values, could no longer do anything for the people who weren’t already here."

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If you want to institute rent control, you should think about it *very, very* carefully: waiting times for an apartment in central Stockholm are now about 10-20 years.

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Unusually for a leftie, my default position on free trade is very much in favour. I agree there are often problems, and almost always some people who lose out, but overall the benefits exceeds the costs. So that's the context for this post.

In the context of the TPP and the TTIP agreements currently being negotiated, a lot of fellow lefties seem really concerned about Investor-State Dispute Settlements, which are basically mechanisms for corporations to sue states if the latter violate the terms of these agreements. I hear a lot of people complaining about how these settlement mechanisms violate "democracy", because they allow corporations to sue elected governments...

But corporations can already sue governments, yeah? And those disputes are usually resolved by a bunch of unelected lawyers called "judges". In the UK, the Tory government is under a lot of criticism for wanting to repeal the Human Rights Act, which is basically a mechanism for unelected judges to overrule elected officials if individual people have had their rights violated. So I'm not sure whether people are objecting to the idea of corporations as opposed to natural persons suing governments, or specifically *foreign* corporations suing governments, or what.

Obviously it's possible that the ISDS mechanisms might end up being poorly designed, with bad rules or with unqualified people making the decisions. But it seems ludicrous to object on the *general principle* that unelected lawyers should never be allowed to overrule the decisions elected officials. Cos that's the whole basis of the rule of law right there.

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I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry: some set up a facebook page for Yarl's Wood. It has pretty poor reviews

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I'm not sure what to make of Zuma's "collaborationist history", but this is a good point:

"To ask why so many Africans collaborated in the destruction of African polities and, with them, African sovereignty is to ask a simplistic and patronising question. It is to assume that African polities were somehow apolitical entities without differences and discord. These were complex societies riven with all sorts of fissures. As scholar Mbongiseni Buthelezi shows in his work on the Ndwandwe and historian Michael R Mahoney argues in his 2012 book, The other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial SA, there were many so-called Zulus who did not identify as Zulus in precolonial Zululand. There were many polities, like the Ndwandwes, who had been defeated by the Zulu kingdom and then forced to become Zulus."

Links, Wednesday 22nd July

This is pretty cool

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The clue to what they actually think of their customers is in the name...

"In 2000, R.J. Reynolds—the parent company of Camel, Pall Mall, and several other popular cigarette brands—sparked controversy when confidential documents labeled “Project SCUM” (SubCulture Urban Marketing) were leaked to the press. The documents outlined plans for an ad campaign targeting two distinct “consumer subcultures” in San Francisco: young gay men in the Castro and the homeless in the Tenderloin."

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This is kind of great - a black actor on being asked to perform "blackness" for auditions

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"Ayatolla Khomeini, too, waffled on Esperanto. Shortly after the Iranian Revolution, he urged his people to learn the language as an anti-imperialist counterpoint to English, and an official translation of the Qur’an followed. But adherents of the Baha’i faith had been fans of Esperanto for decades, and Khomeini was definitely not a fan of Baha’i, so his enthusiasm dimmed." The Verge

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"To tell people apart I have to find a distinguishing feature. And context is huge. If I’m expecting to see somebody, I’ll figure out who they are by observing their body language, listening to their voice. Good-looking people are the most difficult to recognize" NY Mag

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"There, there, it's not your fault. It's just that the demands of racist voters are more important to me than you being able to stay in your home." Haaretz

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"What Merkel really means is that there are currently millions of people in the world who could have valid asylum claims, and she's worried they'll all come to Germany if it seems even slightly welcoming. So Germany deports people like this young Palestinian and her family to set an example that's just cruel enough to serve as a deterrent." Vox

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"As a clinical social worker, I have been trained to assess the “validity” of transgender clients’ identies. One of the classic psychiatric criteria that exists and is widely used to this day is the question of how such individuals feel about their bodies: to qualify for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (ie, to be ‘really’ transgender), trans people must often express complete repudiation of their genitals and secondary sex characteristics... The result is that transgender identity becomes defined in terms of disgust, hatred, dysphoria, disease. Our bodies become a condition to be cured, a mistake to be corrected, freakish, abominations." XO Jane

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“I think another question to ask that’s just as relevant is why is sarcasm considered cool by the same people who often decry puns as uncool?” he asks. “Both are a way of saying one thing and meaning another. In an age of cynicism it’s safer, socially, to tear something down through sarcasm or irony than it is to build something up through punning.” Atlantic

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"Germany has managed to turn the euro into a mechanism for transferring wealth into its own coffers. As Bernanke notes, it could fix this situation at virtually no cost to itself by borrowing at historically low rates to invest in infrastructure and perhaps by shifting policy to increase worker pay. But, instead, it has obsessively clung to its idea of fiscal prudence—for itself and for the rest Europe. And you can see the results very clearly in the disparate unemployment stats." Slate

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"Colonial history is not examined in all of its brutality in schools, nor is it properly remembered in Britain’s collective consciousness. Missing are the Mau Mau who were burned alive by colonialists, the Boers (themselves colonialists) and black Africans who were kept by the British in the first ever concentration camps, the thousands of Chinese people killed in the Opium Wars, the peaceful protestors who were slaughtered at Jallianwala Bagh massacre by the so-called British Raj, or the millions who died in the 1943 Bengal famine." Media Diversified

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Profile of Tsipras. I agree that his handling of negotiations with the Eurogroup has been poor, though maybe that's just the benefit of hindsight.

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This is where we're at

"Every single of the nation’s top cops felt their duty was to thwart the legitimate enquiries of an official commission of inquiry. Every single one of the national and provincial commissioners decided to hold with the blue line of silence and lies."

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Oh great, Cape Town is #1 pick for white supremacists :/

"Postings focus on local news items like “Zuma sings Shoot the Boer”, some take the form of jokes and others recommend the “best” city for whites to live in. The answer to that last question, apparently, is Cape Town, followed by Bloemfontein and Pretoria. A user named Boer Resistance chimes in: “What about the Tokai neighbourhood of Cape Town? Is almost 90% white!”"

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"He is also able to cut discarded produce from 50 percent to just 10 percent of the harvest, compared to a conventional farm. As a result, the farms productivity per square foot is up 100-fold, he says. By controlling temperature, humidity and irrigation, the farm can also cut its water usage to just 1 percent of the amount needed by outdoor fields." GE Reports

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How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang

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Ah, to be out in the fresh air

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Tyler Cowen's summary of Eurogroup behaviour: "Sometimes politicians do things that they know are stupid because of political pressure from their constituents to do exactly those stupid things"

Links, Thursday 17th July

"For orca, or killer whales, diet itself is a cultural statement. Fish-eating or meat-eating orca define themselves by their consumption, to the extent that captive whales accustomed to dining on seals will starve rather than eat proffered salmon." Guardian

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The technology of human locomotion through water continues to improve

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Horrifying story about how many drug courts in the US force opiate addicts to end maintenance treatment, which is often the only thing keeping them stable and keeping them safe from overdosing.

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I have been having trouble understanding why the Syriza government has capitulated so thoroughly to European creditors on bailout terms after the "no" result in last Sunday's referendum. This makes *some* sense of it, though I still feel like I'm missing something

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I've heard the argument that Tsipras has wanted Grexit all along, but knew that it was political suicide to actually argue for it, so has instead manoeuvred Greece's creditors to the point when they will essentially "force" him into it. I'm not sure I buy this theory, but if that is his plan, it's working out rather well...

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This is a good explanation of why so much of the software that runs huge organisations ends up buggier than it could be, but I'd like to see a more general discussion of what amount of bugginess is *optimal*, given the diminishing returns to debugging as software becomes more functional.

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[CN: rape]

Irish cop receives a slap on the wrist for raping a sex worker he had arrested earlier that day for "brothel-keeping" (i.e. working with a friend for safety). This is why we *need* decriminalisation, so cops have no legal power over sex workers.

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Varoufakis was willing to go all the way to the brink, in the hopes that the Eurogroup would back down. I don't get the impression that gamble would really have paid off either. Right from the get-go, it's clear it was either going to be capitulation or Grexit.

"The Eurozone can dictate terms to Greece because it is no longer fearful of a Grexit. It is convinced that its banks are now protected if Greek banks default. But Varoufakis thought that he still had some leverage: once the ECB forced Greece’s banks to close, he could act unilaterally.

He said he spent the past month warning the Greek cabinet that the ECB would close Greece’s banks to force a deal. When they did, he was prepared to do three things: issue euro-denominated IOUs; apply a “haircut” to the bonds Greek issued to the ECB in 2012, reducing Greece’s debt; and seize control of the Bank of Greece from the ECB."

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"Seeing an opportunity, U.S. beverage producers followed Perrier’s lead. In 1994, Pepsi launched Aquafina. Coca-Cola joined the club with Dasani in 1999. Homegrown brands, though, couldn’t boast glamorous European roots. So instead, they made Americans afraid of the tap. One ad from Royal Spring Water claimed that “tap water is poison.” Another, from Calistoga Mountain Spring Water, asked: “How can you be sure your water is safe? . . . Unfortunately, you can’t.” Fiji Water infuriated Ohio with the tagline “The label says Fiji because it’s not bottled in Cleveland.” The insinuation, of course, was that there was something wrong with local water." Washington Post

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"The story of the eurozone’s relationship with Greece post-crisis is a story of external powers trying to restructure an entire political system from outside, using the crude tools of control that are available to them. The situation is somewhere between the kinds of Washington Consensus restructuring and conditionality that the IMF used to impose as a quid-pro-quo for emergency loans to countries in crisis, and the massive efforts to restructure the political systems of Afghanistan and Iraq post invasion. Obviously these past efforts have mostly turned out pretty badly (perhaps you can argue some of the IMF cases – but you’d have an uphill battle if you really wanted to make a general defense)." Crooked Timber

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This actual makes a whole lot of sense.

"the only way for Jurassic Park to get its hands on any dinosaurs would be to have their geneticists build them from scratch, which would explain why all the dinosaurs in the movie look like how we, the ignorant public, imagine dinosaurs look, as opposed to how they actually appeared in nature. For instance, in real life, a velociraptor was the size of a chimpanzee, whereas in Jurassic Park, velociraptors are large enough to play professional basketball. Also, they had feathers. Most dinosaurs probably had feathers."

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"Our results on vegetarianism were particularly striking. In a survey of professors from five US states, we found that 60 per cent of ethicist respondents rated ‘regularly eating the meat of mammals, such as beef or pork’ somewhere on the ‘morally bad’ side of a nine-point scale ranging from ‘very morally bad’ to ‘very morally good’. By contrast, only 19 per cent of non-philosophy professors rated it as bad. That’s a pretty big difference of opinion! Non-ethicist philosophers were intermediate, at 45 per cent. But when asked later in the survey whether they had eaten the meat of a mammal at their last evening meal, we found no statistically significant difference in the groups’ responses – about 38 per cent of professors from all groups reported having done so (including 37 per cent of ethicists)." Aeon

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"The slave-backed securities of the early 19th century worked in the same way as the mortgage-backed securities of the early 21st. They spread the risks and provided a means by which capital from all over the world could be channelled into the Deep South. This also meant that, even after abolition, British investors could still profit from the slave trade. They no longer owned slaves. Instead, they owned slave-based derivatives; financial instruments made up of mortgages on enslaved people." Flipchart Fairy Tales

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Agree so strongly on this. The ongoing economic disaster in Europe is fundamentally a monetary phenomenon, and will only be resolved by a concerted effort to put more money in circulation. And yet the ECB is apparently content to let the inflation rate hover around 0% for the indefinite future.

Zimbabwe managed to achieve inflation rates in the millions of percent, and yet we're really being asked to believe that Western central banks, with all their sophistication and expertise, can't even manage 2%?

"Obviously the Greek economy does have some real issues. Maybe these OECD "toolkit" ideas will even [improve] things. But one problem Greece definitely has is the ongoing suction of money out of the Greece economy and into the coffers of Greece's creditors. But those creditors don't particularly need the money. Europe as a whole has lots of high unemployment and low inflation. Heck even in Germany inflation is running below two percent. If European states want more Euros, the European Central Bank should print up some Euros and start handing them out." Matt Yglesias

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Generally interesting piece on girls with autism conditions

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My view of this is that some degree of rent control can be a good thing so long as you keep an eye on the underlying economics. Trying to keep rents significantly lower than the market-clearing price for any length of time will almost certainly lead to problems, but this kind of rent "brake" could conceivably "smooth out" sharp changes to prices that might otherwise occur due to sudden supply or demand shocks.

It's difficult to know what to do if the supply is constrained by exogenous factors (as it is in London and the Southeast by strict planning rules and the political refusal of government to build any more social housing). Rent control is somewhat more defensible, since supply isn't going to rise much anyway in response to price increases. But you're then effectively taxing landowners and handing the value over to whoever happened to be renting the property at the time rent controls came into operation (and their descendants) - not a terrible outcome, but somewhat arbitrary. Much better to sharply increase the actual tax on land/property ownership to reflect the windfall value of supply restriction and distribute that value in a more considered way.

Best of all, obviously, simply to build enough homes!

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"The revolution will not come on the tidal wave of your next multiple orgasm had with your seven partners on the floor of your communal living space. It will only happen if you have an actual plan for destroying systems of oppression and exploitation." Yasmin Nair

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Great piece on the appropriation of Soho's sex industry glamour by giant corporations (all while actual sex workers and being steadily forced out)

"As the reality of sex work in Soho disappears, its essence has become a marketing tool. Brothel chic. A Disneyland version of what was for many, a life, work – a world that wasn't particularly exotic or glamorous but simply the thing they did for a certain number of hours a week to pay the bills."

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"Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts." Toast

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"The World Health Organization (WHO) recognises a global ‘water poverty line’ of 1,000m3 per capita per year, and yet in 2009 the World Bank estimated that Yemen had only 120m3 of water available per person each year, one of the lowest figures in the world. This water scarcity is believed to be a key reason behind as much as 70 to 80 per cent of the country’s violence, according to a study by Sana’a University researchers." Geographical

Links, Thursday 9th July

Some helpful notes on the Marikana report

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Good piece on capital controls in Greece and why reports of a bank run and long lines at are overstated. In brief, the bank run has already happened, and any assets that Greeks currently hold in domestic banks are probably offset by debts (which would also be redenominated if Greece exits the euro).

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"The average person on a bike is arguably no more likely to break a law then their peer in a car. However, when they do so it’s more obvious, less normalised. People notice a cyclist pedalling through a red light, whereas speeding – which 80% of drivers admit to doing regularly – is often ignored, despite the immeasurably greater human cost this causes." Guardian

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"The debt, in other words, isn't about money. It's about political control. If the debt is formally forgiven then not only do Greece's creditors need to write down some money, but they need to let Greece go on its merry way. If the debt is merely subjected to repeated rounds of extend and pretend then Greece's creditors get to keep making various demands about structural reform." Vox

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"It turns out that global “seasonality” – or the difference across the year in terms of temperature and rainfall – was extraordinarily high right around the time agriculture first popped up in the Fertile Crescent... six of the seven independent inventions of agriculture appear to have happened soon after increases in seasonality in their respective regions. This is driven by an increase in seasonality and not just an increase in rainfall or heat: agriculture appears in the cold Andes and in the hot Mideast and in the moderate Chinese heartland." A Fine Theorem

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"Governments have become “managers”, he says. They have no vision, “whereas meet the people in Google, in Facebook, they have tremendous visions about the future, about overcoming death, living for ever, merging humans with computers. I do find it worrying that the basis of the future, not only of humankind, the future of life, is now in the hands of a very small group of entrepreneurs.”" Guardian

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Posting this again, because I giggle every time I think about it :D

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Great interview with a sex worker about the daily realities of the job.

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"People have a difficult time recognizing women’s pain. Not in an abstract sense, but in an actual, practical, “Does that expression on her face mean she is in pain?” way. People are much better at reflexively decoding pain when a man’s face reflects it than when a woman’s does.

This is also true when a white person is experiencing pain versus a black person. Interestingly, when a person’s face is androgynous and displaying pain, observers identify it as male. Even if and when girls and women say, out loud, that they are experiencing pain, people, including medical professionals, are more likely to minimize or dismiss what they say. On one end of the spectrum, this problem results in real discomfort for girls and women, on the other, misdiagnoses, exacerbated pain, and higher likelihood of mortality." Role Reboot

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Hairstyle as GoT spoiler

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"Half the expenses [of poverty reduction programmes] are for supervision. What if we dropped this paternalism? If benefits fall by less than half, then the program breaks even much sooner.

We tried this in Uganda. Compared to cash and training with expensive supervision, cash and training alone had almost identical effects on consumption after a year. Some businesses were more likely to stay open, and profits were a tiny bit higher. But it’s hard to believe supervision passes a cost-benefit test." Chris Blattman

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"What brought [GMOs] to everyone's attention was, quite frankly, the sellers of many natural foods and organic products. I don’t want to say that they were stoking people’s fears, but they kind of were, at least to the extent that that helps sales of their own products. So there was some of that advertising, and the advertising that pitched products as not containing GMOs, which raised consumer awareness." Washington Post

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"Medieval portraits of children were usually commissioned by churches. And that made the range of subjects limited to Jesus and a few other biblical babies. Medieval concepts of Jesus were deeply influenced by the homunculus, which literally means little man. "There's the idea that Jesus was perfectly formed and unchanged," Averett says, "and if you combine that with Byzantine painting, it became a standard way to depict Jesus. In some of these images, it looks like he had male pattern baldness."" Vox

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The current state of practice in psychiatry is, if you think about it, very odd. Psychiatric diagnoses, based in the DSM, are almost entirely symptomatic, based in the subjective experience of the individual patient. Treatments are almost entirely pharmaceutical, designed to alter brain chemistry. And the basic *causes* of mental illness must be some combination of underlying brain physiology with the psychosocial circumstances in which the patient finds themself. Modifying brain chemistry isn't by itself necessarily a terrible idea (though it's only one half of the equation), but the diagnostic categories don't even refer to that! Jacobin