Links, Tuesday 12th July

Amazing URL squatting :D :D

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""I can't provide refugees fast enough for all the Canadians who want to sponsor them," John McCallum, the country's immigration minister, said in an interview." Vox

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"Why were these Europeans heading east? Around the year 1944, the Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration (MERRA) began opening camps in Syria, Egypt and Palestine. With promises of a safe place to wait out the war and escape the bloody conflict, people of all ages and classes began the long journey... Just 70 years ago, blonde haired Europeans were fleeing east. Now the situation has been reversed. Will we return that kindness?" So Bad, So Good

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:( :( :(

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This is disgusting and horrifying - Hackney council is basically closing down support services for sex workers, and switching all its focus to enforcement (i.e. harassing and arresting already-vulnerable people).

If you live in Hackney, please right to your local representatives. Everyone, sign this petition.

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"Nations with high religious diversity and high religious attendance had respondents who were significantly less likely to say they could generally trust other people. Conversely, nations with high religious diversity, but relatively low levels of participation, had respondents who were more likely to say they could generally trust other people." Society Pages

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An alternative perspective on monetary policy and money supply. I think the graph by itself makes a pretty good case for more expansive monetary policy in the UK - the overall present money supply is far below the long-term trend of where we'd expect it to be.

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"No governing body has so tenaciously tried to determine who counts as a woman for the purpose of sports as the I.A.A.F. and the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.). Those two influential organizations have spent a half-century vigorously policing gender boundaries. Their rationale for decades was to catch male athletes masquerading as women, though they never once discovered an impostor. Instead, the athletes snagged in those efforts have been intersex women — scores of them." NY Times

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"Conceivably, if you showered every day for 30 minutes after waking up, there would be the same kind of antidepressant action I measured in our clinical trials.” Nautilus

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Behold!

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This does not look good for Labour - although I imagine the next general election won't be a simple Pro- vs Anti-Brexit matchup. How would Labour do running on a pro-EEA platform, along Norwegian lines, against a Tory party promising to end free movement of labour?

"Although the referendum result was close nationally, Remain piled up many of its votes in a relatively small number of constituencies (London and Scotland being prime examples). As a result, the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system would produce an extremely skewed result. In our projection, Leave would win 421 seats across the UK, while Remain would win just 229."

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"...socialist politics is inevitably a task of “building the crisis.” And the great tragedy of postwar socialism was the perverse division of political labor it gave rise to, between revolutionaries who refused to engage with reformist politics, and reformists who were unable or unwilling to deal with the crisis that their victories inevitably produced." Jacobin

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"What if evidence-based policy ideas are coming up against a public that is not actually sceptical of experts, but of public relations? Of advice generated by thinktanks and advisory bodies that are either simply created to be biased or refracted through the prism of media organisations that struggle to recognise their own systemic bias? A news media that regularly portrays commentators with vested interests as impartial and thinktanks with neoliberal sympathies as neutral obviously runs the risk of losing its audience’s trust." Guardian

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"Perry believes that the council's strategy for Open Doors is part of a wider move to shift "undesirables" from Hackney. As the borough becomes gentrified, penalisation of the homeless and outdoor sex workers has increased. Last year, Hackney council's plans to issue rough sleepers with court action and fines of up to £1,000 was only quashed after a campaign by homelessness groups and local residents. This year, once again, the homeless – and now sex workers – appear to be in the firing line." Vice

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"Abolishing the police is an extreme measure, but as a measure of justice, it should be our ultimate goal." The Nation

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The curious case of an utterly bankrupt country with an avowedly socialist government that continues to service its international debt religiously...

"since Chavez swept into office 17 years ago, the country’s bonds have handed investors a total return of 517 percent."

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This is so upsetting :'( :'( :'(

[CN for police violence, esp if you watch the video]

""I wanted to put it on Facebook and go viral so the people could see," she told reporters Thursday. "I wanted the people to determine who was right and who was wrong.”

Then she wept.

"They took my lifeline," Reynolds said. "That was my best friend.""

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Well, great.

"“All SIM cards in Zimbabwe are registered in the name of the user. Perpetrators can easily be identified,” Potraz said in a public notice on Wednesday.

The notice further stated that “any person caught in possession of, generating, sharing or passing on abusive, threatening, subversive or offensive telecommunication messages, including WhatsApp or any other social media messages” will be arrested."

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Ha!

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A really clear explanation of why sex work legalisation (NOT decriminalisation), along German lines, is a terrible idea.

"It is easy to predict that only a few brothels will be able to get the necessary certification by state authorities. This will lead to an artificial shortage of legal workplaces. Let’s just think for a minute about supply, demand, labour exploitation and who will be the most vulnerable link in this capitalistic chain. It will probably not be the big brothel owners, but rather us workers. We will be caught between the exploitative practices of big brothels and illegality, where we risk abuse and blackmail by third parties."

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"... the coupling of saving money with mental health outcomes has become acceptable in a way we would not see with, for example, cancer treatment. We do not, would not, hear that chemotherapy is worth funding because it helps the public purse through getting people back to work. The emphasis is rather on quality of life and the reduction of suffering, precisely the kind of outcomes mental health service users are most interested in. Yet these ideas are not challenged in mental health because of the ongoing link between mental distress and moral failure, or failure to have sufficient willpower." Huff Post

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Looking forward to a world without work :)

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This is a really good comment, and I think expresses my feelings about Corbyn and Sanders. I don't think either of them is a particularly talented politician, or that their positions are especially appealing (relative to other possible platforms that would still count as left wing). It's simply that they were the only options available!

"And so it is that we enter a period of renewed left organizing with men like these as our figureheads. Their particular combination of idealism, ruthlessness, and iconoclasm made them well-suited to the dark years of “lifeboat socialism” that they survived. These traits do not, however, make them particularly well-matched to the period we are now entering. And so we will need to find new leaders from the ranks of organizers who have been radicalized over the past decade."

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"Has it really come to this? Yes. Yes, I’m afraid it has. There are few neater indicators of quite how far we’ve travelled over the past 14 days than to find so many people, particularly non-Tory voters, now actively yearning for it to be Theresa May. “Christ,” muttered one friend with wry despair, “I now want this more than I did Obama.” Yup, we’re all realpolitikos now. Stick a fork in my dreams. They’re done." Guardian

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"“The cosmopolitan life here [among the Philistines] is so much more elegant and worldly and connected with other parts of the eastern Mediterranean,” Stager said, adding that this was in contrast to the more modest village lifestyle of the Israelites who lived in the hills to the east." Guardian

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Wow, so utterly blatant

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OMG, baby pandas just WILL NOT let her rake up the leaves!

Links, Friday 1st July

Oh my god, laughed so hard at this! 😂

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Thomas Mair, killer of MP Jo Cox, is a long-standing supporter of neo-Nazi groups. Let's not forget this when we hear politicians on the right work hard to characterise him as a "loner" with "mental health issues". On the basis of what we know so far, this looks like a political assassination, and should be treated as such.

Thanks to James Mackenzie, who has been tweeting on this

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Horrible :(

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A report about the absolutely horrifying conditions prevailing in the offshore immigration centres maintained by Australia on Manus Island and Nauru. It's very clear that this system is utterly contradictory to the protection of basic human rights

[CW: self-harm, detention]

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"When consumed, those old-school hallucinogens could cause assorted unpleasantnesses—including nausea, vomiting, and skin irritation. What people realized, though, was that absorbing them through the skin could lead to hallucinations that arrived without the unsavory side effects. And the most receptive areas of the body for that absorption were the sweat glands of the armpits ... and the mucus membranes of the genitals." Atlantic

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George Monbiot is really good on this - 'agricultural' subsidies are enormously wasteful, regressive and environmental destructive. They're probably the single worst thing the EU does. And yet the Leave camp is at great pains to assure votes that they will be retained in the event of an Out vote!

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Big news!

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I just thought of this again, and thought I should share it... I think e-cigarettes are, on the whole, an excellent harm-reduction measure and probably a much better way to consume nicotine than inhaling tobacco smoke. *However*, there is good reason to think that the flavouring in many brands can cause significant lung damage.

Rather stick to unflavoured nicotine juice!

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"the oldest evidence of domesticated rice has just been found in China, and it’s about 9,000 years old" U Toronto

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What a great article - starting with the fad of watching TV shows at higher-than-normal speed, somehow seguing into the innovation of silent reading during the Middle Ages (and its implications for free thought in Europe), before returning to neurology and then Game of Thrones.

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Review of a major US establishment figure's book on nuclear weapons policy. Lots of interesting tidbits, but this jumped out at me:

"Then as now, Perry writes, he believed that America would possess all the deterrence it needs with just one leg of the so-called triad: the Trident submarine. It is very difficult for armies to track and destroy it, and it contains more than enough firepower to act as a deterrent. The bombers provide only an insurance policy for the unlikely contingency of a temporary problem with the Trident force, and also have a dual role in strengthening our conventional forces. Our ICBM force is in his mind redundant. Indeed the danger of starting an accidental nuclear war as a result of a false alarm outweighs its deterrent value."

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Heh

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"33 different families of fish have at least one species that demonstrates some terrestrial activity and, in many cases, these behaviours are likely to have evolved independently in the different families." Science Daily

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"[Vote Leave] responded to all who predicted the chaos now engulfing us like an unscrupulous pundit who knows that his living depends on shutting up the experts who gainsay him. For why put the pundit on air, why pay him a penny, if experts can show that everything he says is windy nonsense? The worst journalists, editors and broadcasters know their audiences want entertainment, not expertise." Guardian

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Saw this being shared around earlier. What do people think?

"The Brexit leaders now have a result that they cannot use. For them, leadership of the Tory party has become a poison chalice."

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LOL, strangely happy to see that South Africa is not alone in experiencing credit rating downgrades :P

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So good and important. Go to the end and watch the video in full

"...we know that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what’s going to happen is we’re going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours."

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Just a quick reminder that Ruhama, Irelands premier anti-sex work organisation is (a) funded by the Irish state and (b) was set up and continues to be directed by nuns from the same orders who ran the Magdalene laundries. These orders have the frankly Orwellian chutzpah to describe themselves as having “a long history of involvement with marginalised women, including those involved with prostitution”. Their involvement mainly consisted of illegally detaining and torturing those women as a means of forcing them to work without payment but, you know, it's still "involvement".

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Here's some very good news!

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"Based on evidence it received from Just Fair and other civil society groups, the [UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights] concludes that austerity measures and social security reform breach the UK’s international human rights obligations." Centre for Welfare Reform

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Ha!

"One argument against Brexit, and in favor of a literal conservatism in many spheres of life, is simply that big changes can induce a lot of stupidity from the other players in the system... For many international policy issues, it is worth asking the simple question: “which action or inaction of mine is likely to induce the smallest number of stupid actions in response?” That won’t always give you the right answer, but often it is a good place to start."

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Amazing! The Home Affairs Select Committee has - rather surprisingly, given its initial terms of reference - recommended the decriminalisation of sex workers in England and Wales! It's not perfect, but it's a big step forward. Well done to everyone to who submitted evidence :)

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Great piece on the opium poppy, the disinformation deliberately spread about it - that it is an unusual type of poppy, that it only grows well in certain (faraway) climes, that it is difficult to extract opium from it, and so on - and the vagaries and illogic of the "war on drugs".

"It is said that members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union would relax at the end of a day spent crusading against alcohol with their cherished “women’s tonics,” preparations whose active ingredient was laudanum—opium. Such was the order of things less than a century ago."

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Oh god, now we're going to have to be on tenterhooks about this AGAIN! What is up with this last week in politics, seriously?

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This is quite useful and important - the EU has been implementing austerity polices for the last few years, policies which have largely been set by the centre right parties currently dominating the European Parliament. But where is the European centre left?

"Right now, elected social democratic governments in places like France and Italy find themselves implementing a slight variant of the same agenda of austerity and deregulation that their opponents on the right favor — given the structure of EU policy, they have no choice. In country after country this means bleeding supporters to further-left populist movements. And the example of Greece’s Syriza suggests that even if these parties gain power they’ll simply be in the same trap."

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"Gero says that Caribbean sperm whales spend most of their time in families of 5-7 animals rather than multi-family groups. Within these families, it's possible to observe friendships forming between individuals who spend more time together than with other family members. Caribbean whales also form friendships at the family level; often the same two families will swim together over the years while others basically ignore each other. In the Pacific, by contrast, scientists have never observed friendships between individuals. No two adult whales are ever spotted together more than once. That said, clans in the Pacific are much more tightly knit. Pacific sperm whales who speak the same dialect will form groups without any apparent preferences for certain families or individuals. Though these are clan differences, there are cultural differences at the family level too. In some families, calves are nursed by multiple females, while in others the calf nurses only from its biological mother." Ars Technica