Links, Monday 28th Sept

"Britain’s establishment, at least in part, can be visualised (for those of strong stomach) as a group of powerful men standing close together, each with the balls of the man next to him held in a powerful grip. Michael Ashcroft just squeezed" Rob Fahey

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Some striking points of similarity between Buddhism and Hume's philosophy might not be coincidental

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Ibubrofen is basically the best of the standard painkillers.

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Let's all hear it again: drug dependency is extremely contextual, and people will often recover spontaneously if removed from the situation that caused it.

"One of the largest studies of recovery ever conducted found that, of those who had qualified for a diagnosis of alcoholism in the past year, only 25 percent still met the criteria for the disorder a year later. Despite this 75 percent recovery rate, only a quarter had gotten any type of help, including AA, and as many were now drinking in a low-risk manner as were abstinent." PS Mag

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A good overview of what is known scientifically about multitasking, and some guidance on how to do it well

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Apparently poor people in the US get a smaller proportion of their calories in the form of fast food than rich people. Which makes sense, if you think about it, though it is contrary to the common narrative.

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"In the original version of Ithkuil, the word Ithkuil literally means “hypothetical representation of a language,” which reflects the fact that it was never meant to be casually spoken. It was an attempt to demonstrate what language could be, not what it should be. “The idea of Ithkuil is to convey deeper levels of human cognition than are usually conveyed in human language,” Quijada told me. For example, the phrase “characteristic of a single component among the synergistic amalgamation of things” is a single adjective: oicaštik’." New Yorker

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"Trans peoples' body alterations must be seen. Trans people who do not body modify are ridiculed, or presumed not to exist." Verso

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Relating to the previous post, can anyone suggest a good reason why the state should make any official determination of a person's sex or gender at all? After all, we hope that the state will not treat us differently according to our gender (or lack thereof).

(When I've asked this previously, the most cogent reply I got was along the lines of "Well, if the state doesn't know your gender, how will it know which prison to put you in?". This, I think is quite telling in itself)

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"Both the low-wage job and the low-end day care center count as part of GDP for the purpose of measuring "the economy," whereas the labor done by full-time parents and homemakers does not. But from a social welfare perspective, the relevant issue isn't whether child care is performed as market- or non-market labor — it's whether it's performed well." Vox

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Thoughts?

"The working age cohort was 685m in the developed world in 1990. China and eastern Europe added a further 820m, more than doubling the work pool of the globalised market in the blink of an eye. "It was the biggest 'positive labour shock' the world has ever seen. It is what led to 25 years of wage stagnation,"" Telegraph

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LOL

“To have [the close of nominations] at 12 o’clock on a Monday – we must have been on fucking crack cocaine. You can’t get to anyone, so people were wandering in after a weekend of spending time with their bloody constituency secretary or their leftwing wife, they just fucking wander off the train and hadn’t even had a cup of tea in the tea room by 12 o’clock on a Monday. They go straight down to the PLP office and do something stupid. The people that are around on a Monday morning are the London lot – and for fuck’s sake, it’s the home of the left, it’s all the fucking mayoral candidates and deputy leader candidates.”

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Nice piece on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and how it has become such a powerful resource for the discipline.

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This is a perspective we don't hear from often enough

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Apparently a schoolkid represents a security concern if he is a) Muslim and b) talks *about* terrorism at school (it doesn't even have to be religiously motivated terrorism)

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Good throughout, but this point jumped out at me

"The reality, however, is life for middle-class blacks in South Africa is defined by precarity. The only general exceptions are those who have been middle class for several generations or have proximity enough to the state to live from it. For the rest, the status of “middle class” means accumulating debt while drowning in the costs of servicing it, supporting unemployed or under-educated family members, and holding on to whatever semblance of sanity and normalcy you can as you do."

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"So, in the face of my efforts to overcome race, I am vexed to wonder whether, given the evidence, had my name been John Smith, I would have been extended the benefits of Paragraphs 19 and 19A. But my name is not John Smith, and I have been to Yemen. That I believe sealed my fate at Heathrow and led Border Force officials to think that they could not take a chance on me, to decide that given all the options at their disposal, they would enact the harshest. Had John Smith’s circumstances of 19 years in the UK been mine, would British Border Force officials have cancelled his life on the spot?" Africa is a Country

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:D

“Stonewall couldn’t be more whitewashed than if it was doused in Clorox Bleach and thrown into the laundry three times over.” Autostraddle

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"Some have argued that intersectional understanding creates an atmosphere of bullying and “privilege checking.” Acknowledging privilege is hard — particularly for those who also experience discrimination and exclusion. While white women and men of color also experience discrimination, all too often their experiences are taken as the only point of departure for all conversations about discrimination. Being front and center in conversations about racism or sexism is a complicated privilege that is often hard to see." Washington Post

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Worth noting that that douchebag was only able to jack up the price of that drug because of bizarre and counterproductive regulations in the US. The drug is out of patent and the exact same compound is available for $0.05 a pill in India. The issue is simply that competitors were not able to bring those equivalents to market in the US.

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I imagine an advertising campaign that quite dispassionately and factually outlined animal welfare conditions in the meat, dairy and egg industries would prompt quite a large number of people to become vegetarians, or at least provide significant political support for reform of those industries. Conveying factual information to the public about food they eat every day is, however, an unforgiveably fringe and "cranky" concern

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"The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities. The animals suffer greatly, yet they live on and multiply." Guardian

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Today I'm reminded of this piece. The core problem of gentrification is rising rents and, in the face of an inexorably increasing population in London, that can ONLY be averted by increasing the housing stock. Both national and local governments have failed to a staggering degree to either build houses themselves or encourage private actors to do so. So long as that's the case, ANYONE who rents or purchases a home anywhere in London is a gentrifier.

This is not to defend wankers who sell overpriced cereal, but simply to point out that it's very convenient for the rest of us that they exist. We get to displace all the guilt for gentrification onto a few people (who we're conveniently able to cast as eccentric social deviants), rather than face up to a massive collective failure that we're all complicit in.

"You can't escape the role you play in displacement any more than a white person can escape their whiteness, because those are both subject to systemic processes that have created your relevant status and assigned its consequences. Among the classes, there is no division between "gentrifiers" and "non-gentrifiers." If you live in a city, you don't get to opt out."

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"Hughes, who studied the dynamic flow of pilgrims in a fatal crowding episode at jamarat in 1990, said the flawed concept of a violent and irrational crowd entered popular culture during the French Revolution of the 1790s. It was, he said, the result of “sociological writings by aristocrats.”" LA Times

Links, Monday 21 Sept

Just thinking about the genders of the emotion characters in Inside Out (with Toni​). If I recall, in Riley, the main character (who is a pre-teen girl), Joy, Sadness and Disgust are all portrayed as women. Fear and Anger are men. In her father, all the emotions are men; in her mother, they are all women.

What is all this saying? Are children's emotions less gender essentialised than adults'? Anger is a stereotypically masculine emotion, so does that mean Joy and Sadness are feminine? Joy and Sadness are also the main characters, and portrayed as the main players in Riley's emotional life. So emotion itself is kind of feminised in the movie, which I suppose fits the stereotype. Disgust is also a woman, and I suspect this is because she is assigned the role of making fashion choices. Lots to chew on, anyway!

(And yes, I'm still thinking about this movie after a few weeks)

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"Perhaps developing nations have reached “peak stuff”?  That may mean the Chinese manufacturing model, along with the manufacturing models of other nations, will prove less potent than we had thought." Marginal Revolution

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Wow, so it turns out Eric Clapton is a big ol' racist :(

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*Vegan propaganda alert*
[Seriously, some very upsetting images and videos at the link]

Basically, the egg industry is terrible and produces huge amounts of unnecessary suffering. The focus here is on the US, but my understanding is that there are similar practices in most developed countries.

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There's really a missed opportunity for engagement here. It was not that long ago that evolutionary theory was abused to justify denying rights to black people, and black South Africans in particular. So Vavi's comments are not coming out of nowhere. Scientists need to acknowledge this history and engage with these fears, rather than simply asserting that everything is different nowadays.

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"Publishing photos of sensitive keys, after all, is a well-understand screwup in the world of physical security, where researchers have shown for years that a key can be decoded and reproduced even from a photo taken from as far away as 200 feet and at an angle." Wired

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I certainly don't agree with everything in this piece, but this is good:

"Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense. Have you ever been to corporate sexual harassment training? If you have, you may have been struck by how little such events have to do with preventing sexual harassment as a matter of moral necessity and how much they have to do with protecting whatever institution is mandating it. Of course, sexual harassment is a real and vexing problem, not merely on campus but in all kinds of organizations, and the urge to oppose it through policy is a noble one. But corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them, and so these efforts are often designed to spare the institutions from legal liability rather than protect the individuals who would be harmed by sexual harassment. Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions." NYTimes

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I should think the intersection of Harry Potter and formal logic fandom is actually quite high (mostly because the first set is just so large)

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Love me some logistics :)

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"A third of all premature deaths [due to air pollution] were the result of using smoky fuels such as wood and coal for heating homes or cooking and using dirty diesel generators for electricity, all well-known hazards. This domestic energy use causes half the 645,000 annual deaths in India and a third of the 1.4 million annual deaths in China.

But the research found that agricultural emissions of ammonia had a “remarkable” impact, according to Professor Jos Lelieveld, at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, who led the research. A fifth of all global deaths resulted from these emissions, which come mainly from cattle, chickens and pigs and from the over-use of fertiliser." Guardian

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“In terms of bang-for-buck and desired effects, I don’t think there’s a single research chemical out there that competes with MDMA. Drugs are a capitalist commodity; people have a finite amount of money to get off their faces and they make choices based on availability, quality and risk. And I think they make the right choice.” Guardian

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This is glorious

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This is exciting

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Quite long, but very worthwhile

"An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge." PSMag

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Good piece on the economics of Dark Web drug markets. Particularly interesting to see how dealers mitigate the risks of ordering in bulk through the mail

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Thoughts?

"Until now, at any rate, the poor have in the main remained loyal to the African National Congress. Everyone, even those in the remotest villages, has seen someone they know rise.

The politics of the poor has been suffused with hope.

The lion’s share of discontent has instead come from the first three or four deciles of earners, among them those battering their fists against the glass walls of an elite steeped in white culture." BD

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If any of you find my body, no need to suspect foul play. It's quite likely I'll die laughing some time today :D :D :D

Links, Wednesday 9th September

Basically as many people as possible should switch over from cigarettes to e-cigarettes as fast as possible.

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Huh, so the alpha/beta wolf thing is apparently a total myth.

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"[O]ne thing that the party of small government being so nutty does is to allow the party of big government to be incredibly lazy.

Rather than public services needing to clear a bar like "is this a good use of money?" or "is this program being run well?" it only needs to clear the dramatically lower bar of "is this a better use of money than giving a giant tax cut to millionaires?" You can clear that bar with a pretty crappy and totally mismanaged bus system. But then you get a crappy and mismanaged bus system. Which is, in fact, what we tend to have." Matt Ygelsias

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"Asperger’s syndrome, which has been dropped from the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the textbook of American psychiatry, has been criticised for its focus on brilliant oddballs and also for its basis in a small number of observed cases. Yet Mr Silberman shows that Asperger, who was working in Nazi-controlled Austria, deliberately played up the brilliance of his patients in the hope of saving them from murder, and that his work was in fact based on the study of a large number of children who were less obviously gifted." Economist

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"We know that Microsoft named the font "Wingdings" by combining "Windows" and "dingbat." But what's a dingbat?

When using a printing press, printers needed a shortcut when it came to ornamenting their text. Every figure or letter had to be hand-carved and laid out before anything could be printed, so it was too laborious to make a new template for every drawing or figure.

Enter dingbats. These tiny pieces included a variety of reusable shapes that could be slotted into text and used as ornamentation in a book." Vox

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Just leaving this here...

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Disruption.

"The only part of the journey that most migrants still pay traffickers for, he said, is the crossing from Turkey to Greece. Many migrants now feel able to make the rest of the journey on their own with a GPS-equipped smartphone and without paying traffickers."

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Ha!

"Voters have signed up to support it, and Labour has reacted with a purge of such generalised unfairness that I’m almost starting to doubt that its leading lights really wanted to bring democracy to Iraq." Guardian

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Well done to all 330 000 people making the UK a better place in the face of intense resistance from its ever-more-overtly xenophobic ruling class. I'll be included in the figures for next year - maybe we can make it to half a million! (Go team bloody foreigner!)