My god, maybe something good will actually come out of this whole "elected police commissioner" wheeze
>>><<<
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."
>>><<<
"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."
>>><<<
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.
>>><<<
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.
>>><<<
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry: some set up a facebook page for Yarl's Wood. It has pretty poor reviews
>>><<<
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."
>>><<<
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)
>>><<<
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)
>>><<<
The proletarianisation of the creative classes
>>><<<
"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
>>><<<
Photography has a race problem
>>><<<
Another excellent harm reduction initiative
>>><<<
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."
>>><<<
"Those who relentlessly excuse all anti-black state violence cheerlead when people born of their same complexion resist cops & presidents." Colorlines
>>><<<
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."
>>><<<
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.
>>><<<
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.
>>><<<
I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry: some set up a facebook page for Yarl's Wood. It has pretty poor reviews
>>><<<
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."
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