Links, Friday 28th October

Awwww sad :(

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"Police swooped in and rescued 10 women" Standard

Hmmm, could it be that the 10 women taken away for "rescuing" were the ones who didn't have their papers in order?

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Yep, in their own words:

"Those arrested by Met officers include a 55-year-old woman arrested on suspicion of possession of a firearm (a stun-gun) and a 37-year-old woman arrested on suspicion of fraud.

Four other women (aged 25, 35, 22 and 49) and a 37-year-old man were arrested on suspicion of being involved in prostitution for gain.

The remainder were detained on suspicion of immigration offences."

That's 6 people for actual charges (one of them obviously carrying a stun gun for protection), the remaining 12 for immigration offences. Disgusting.

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Holy Moly

"Gollakota, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, invented a way for devices without batteries to communicate and power themselves by recycling signals from Wi-Fi devices or radio and TV stations"

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Well, the future is here, and not in a good way

"at least five "major police departments," including those in Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles, "either claimed to run real-time face recognition off of street cameras, bought technology that can do so, or expressed an interest in buying it.""

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"Sex Worker Open University is calling for the immediate release of the women arrested last night, the return of their money to them, and an end to racist, anti-migrant, anti-prostitution raids in Soho and Chinatown. " SWOU

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Toni wrote this, about the Chinatown raids the other night. So important, and so well done

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Not only is a practical safety measure, but "the Dutch reach" sounds vaguely like it might be a sex act!

"For decades now in the Netherlands, many drivers have been trained (and tested for their licenses) on a behavior that dramatically reduces the risk of doorings. They do not even have a name for it because it is simply how one opens a car door. Basically, instead of using their door-side (left) arm, they reach over with their other (right) arm. This simple behavioral shift causes drivers to look back naturally and see whether or not there are oncoming bicyclists."

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"As it happens, Chinese people rarely talk about renminbi or yuan. The word they use is "kuai", which literally means "piece", and is the word used historically for coins made of silver or copper." BBC

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As a general rule, I tend to be in favour of incremental economic pressures to change harmful behaviour as opposed to brute-force regulation (i.e. just banning things). Although brute-force regulation seems "stricter", usually people figure out ways around them and so seriously reduce their impact. For instance, assuming the third Heathrow runway is blocked, people on long-haul flights will instead go via different hubs (which is already happening, and why Heathrow management are pushing so hard to expand), and travellers into the UK may opt for different regional airports (and then spend carbon travelling into London).

If there was any sort of general carbon tax in the offing politically, this would be a far more valuable cause to spend political capital on than on opposing airport expansion. A carbon tax would likely also eliminate the business case for airport expansion anyway, since more expensive flights would mean fewer travellers.

Sadly, it doesn't seem like any British government will be contemplating a carbon tax in the near future. And aviation does create disproportionately high carbon emissions. So, for better or worse, this is the struggle in front of us.

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Slightly dodgy sentence in there comparing tattoos to black women's hair (I don't think it's the same, and being tattooed isn't a marginalised identity), but still some useful tips.

"It’s still my body that you’re commenting on, and that can be uncomfortable."

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Despite many of them being labelled "flushable", wet wipes should never be flushed down the toilet, as they cause a huge amount of damage to sewer systems!

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Wow, this sounds great - a major therapeutic breakthrough in addressing some of the symptoms of autism.

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Another cry-laugh...

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These are perfect from start to finish, but the first one is the best, in my opinion:

"There is a particular look about a teenage boy that lets you know what kind of man he’ll be. A certain fullness of lips, a frank sensuality in his gaze. We all know what the word for that is, but it’s not polite to use it until he’s proven he’s that kind of boy."

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Just wow. "If I didn't do this horrible thing, then someone else would". Has that ever been a good justification for anything?

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"Once you've been put into detention and queued up for deportation, you have to fight your case – apply for asylum, show you have a right to be here. Even if you're a victim of trafficking, the whole thing is a nightmare. Women Against Rape are working with genuine victims of trafficking and it doesn't matter how traumatised you are, the system is against you." Vice

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Absolutely disgusting. If you're absolutely DETERMINED to demolish the shelters where people are living, could you not at least register them and provide alternative accommodation BEFORE going ahead with the demolitions?!

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"There is longstanding social science evidence that people with fewer resources, educational or economic, tend to look heroes — or villains even— to stand up for them. Somebody they think has some kind of power that they don’t have. The exception is when you have a union. The one time that you don’t see that in action, at least so much, is when an area is unionized. Then, because workers have some kind of collective power, they’re not so likely to turn toward some authoritarian demagogue." Vox

Links, Thursday 20th October

The Socialist Party politician who pushed drug decriminalisation in Portugal will be the new UN Secretary General :)

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Yup

"Few Americans would cop to wanting to live in a town without poor people, but that’s the effect of their actions when they oppose a trailer park or dense or affordable housing."

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This is absolutely outrageous! :( :(

"school administrators are being turned into border guards as part of the government’s attempts to create a hostile environment for migrants."

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Drug criminalisation has to end :'(

"Every 25 seconds in the United States, someone is arrested for the simple act of possessing drugs for their personal use... And despite officials’ claims that drug laws are meant to curb drug sales, four times as many people are arrested for possessing drugs as are arrested for selling them.

As a result of these arrests, on any given day at least 137,000 men and women are behind bars in the United States for drug possession... Their criminal records lock them out of jobs, housing, education, welfare assistance, voting, and much more, and subject them to discrimination and stigma. The cost to them and to their families and communities, as well as to the taxpayer, is devastating. Those impacted are disproportionately communities of color and the poor." Human Rights Watch

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"In Monderman’s artfully ambiguous squareabout, drivers are never given the opportunity to glaze over and switch to the automatic driving mode that can be so familiar. The chaos of the square forces them to pay attention, work things out for themselves and look out for each other. The square is a mess of confusion. That is why it works." Guardian

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Well, this is bizarre. Could it be that the UK government's spectacularly ill-advised plans for building new nuclear power plants are simply a smokescreen for... it's spectacularly ill-advised plans for building new nuclear SUBMARINES?!

"If the Hinkley plan seems outrageous, that’s because it only makes sense if one considers its connection to Britain’s military projects — especially Trident, a roving fleet of armed nuclear submarines, which is outdated and needs upgrading. Hawks and conservatives, in particular, see the Trident program as vital to preserving Britain’s international clout."

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Well done to the amazing @pastachips for utterly demolishing this anti's arguments!

"here’s my ambition: I’d like for people talking about sex work policy to treat the safety concerns that sex workers raise as actually important. Not to immediately try to pivot away; not to bizarrely dismiss our legitimate safety concerns as “not looking beyond our experience;”" Prospect

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Great piece, worth quoting at length...

"Porn is heterogeneous. When we criticize the movie industry for pushing sexist tropes and/or racist stereotypes, we don’t mean all films, or even all Hollywood films, but rather a set of industry tendencies. We assume that they can be changed, and we don’t call for the end of movies. If we accept the ubiquity of porn, and that it can be changed but not discarded, we can concede one point to the pearl-clutching anti–sex work crusaders: Online porn plays a powerful formative role in young lives (and not-so-young lives), and it can, like any other industry, oppress the people who work in it. Given this fact, the need for political and ethical critiques toward a better world of porn is obvious.

...

Would-be ethical consumers place a great deal of responsibility on the growing cadre of socially conscious porn companies. We look to figures like Stoya, Joanna Angel, and Jiz Lee to “fix” the industry, while also demanding that they—as marginalized and stigmatized workers—defend it from arcane moralists. Suffice it to say that it should not be assumed to be the role of a few committed pornographers to slay the corporate beast and undo the worst vagaries of mainstream porn."

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Really identify with this (although the "family" in question was my extremely articulate and passionate debating family)

“People think I mean everything I say and am full of conviction, often, when I’m actually just floating balloons and ready for a discussion or argument or further pursuit of the subject. It’s my fault—I speak so passionately. Probably because, as the youngest and shrillest child of an extraordinarily articulate and passionate family, I could only be heard by charging over the top, shouting, ‘Marchons, marchons! Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!’ every time I entertained a passing opinion.”

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"Yet, the dominant voice in at least some parts of UCT, and certainly in the law school where I am based, has been one-dimensional: you are either for the protesters “who are disrupting classes” or for the students “who want to learn”, even though, as their leaders keep pointing out, the protesting students also want to go back to class – but not until their demands are met." Daily Maverick

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We all have days like this, tbh

Links, Monday 10th October

I partially agree with this, so wanted to share. The ethical issues I think do depend in particular what drugs you buy, and how they get to you. Somewhat contrary to expectations, drugs extracted from natural products tend to be more harmful, since the crop needs to be grown in a territory controlled by a drug cartel and then shipped across international borders (cocaine and heroin being the prime examples here). Synthetic drugs or compounds diverted from the mainstream chemical industry are relatively blameless, though again, depending how nasty your local distributors are.

LSD, for instance, is a semi-synthetic, and I believe most manufacturers grow the required fungus themselves. MDMA *used* to be based on wild safrole, with the concomitant environmental damage, but the relevant precursor is now obtained from the mainstream chemical industry. Meth also, is mainly manufactured from over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, though the people producing it often put *themselves* at considerable risk.

Also, if you're (quite legitimately) worried about violence in the local supply chains for your substance of choice, consider ordering on the dark web. You will often be buying from relatively high up the supply chain, or even from producers themselves. This also has the handy side-effect of meaning you tend to get cheaper and higher-quality stuff.

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"During the 12 months before the study, a total of 1,539 complaints were lodged against police in the areas examined, amounting to 1.2 complaints per officer. By the end, the number of complaints had fallen to 133 for the year across all sites – 0.08 per officer." Guardian

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I would say speculative investment in London property (by both foreigners and UK citizens) is an effect rather than a cause of a dysfunctional housing market. People know that population will keep increasing, that the supply of new homes will not be increased an adequate pace, and so they buy in the expectation that prices will go up.

Wouldn't it be radical if a UK government actually declared that the price of homes was too high and they were going to enact policies to *reduce* prices? But, of course, they don't, because there's now a massive vested interest of people who want to see the value of their 'investments' only ever go upwards.

Much easier just to blame foreigners and do nothing.

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The under-acknowledged role of diplomats from developing countries in putting human rights on the international agenda

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Robert Smalls was born into slavery and escaped (along with his family and many other slaves) by *stealing a Confederate warship*. He later served as a state legislator in Reconstruction-era North Carolina - authoring the first legislation in the US providing for universal public schooling - and a member of the federal Congress.

Yet, this year, the life story of yet another *white* hero of the US Civil War is being given then Hollywood treatment. Not to say Newton Knight wasn't a good guy, or worthy of being celebrated, but come on!

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Holy shit, this is horrible. It is so deeply unfair and horrifying that women are primarily expected to take responsibility for contraception in the first place, and then they can suffer these sorts of consequences for *decades* without it ever being systematically studied.

"Researchers found that women taking the combined oral contraceptive were 23% more likely to be diagnosed with depression and those using progestin-only pills (also known as “the mini-pill”) were 34% more likely. Teens were at the greatest risk of depression, with an 80% increase when taking the combined pill, and that risk is two-fold with the progestin-only pill. In addition, other hormone-based methods commonly offered to women seeking an alternative to the pill – such as the hormonal IUS/coil, the patch and the ring – were shown to increase depression at a rate much higher than either kind of oral contraceptives."

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Everything we think we know is a lie

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Nice to see a piece on the fees protests in SA that has a bit of nuance.

"Vice chancellors need to say one thing and one thing only: “We support the call for free education and we are saying to students we will march with you”. That is the only thing they need to say. But they are not doing that. They are thinking this will just end by some miracle – that this will just go away. In fact they are protecting the state."

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"“cycling segregation” is a product of city planners prioritising the demands of real estate developers... Rather than build bike lanes to connect marginalised communities with public transport, cycle paths are often used to encourage investment in gentrifying neighbourhoods." Guardian

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This is horrible, but I think it's worth noting that she starts from an accurate premise - educated elites are indeed more likely to think of themselves as "citizens of the world" than less privileged people. If you're one of the less privileged people, I can see why that hurts. But what she does with that observation is a typical move in the politics of resentment, i.e. assuming that anything enjoyed by privileged people must be *bad* in virtue of that.

The revolutionary thing about the EU is that it allows a far greater number of ordinary Europeans to be citizens of the world in the concrete sense of being able to travel and work in a country other than that where you were born - a privilege that has hitherto *only* been accorded to elites. Privileges aren't best tackled by removing them, but by extending them to everyone.

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One of my favourite quotes, applicable to many situations...

"[Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: ‘Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis? I replied: ‘I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.’ ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?’"

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Point; counterpoint

"The space agency also distanced itself from astrology. “Astronomers and other scientists know that stars many light years away have no effect on the ordinary activities of humans on Earth,” Nasa said.

Russo still saw dark forces at the space agency. “Don’t be fooled to think that astrology isn’t real or valuable,” he wrote on Facebook. “The 1% have been using it in secret for centuries. There’s evidence of this everywhere. We have entered the Age of Aquarius. It’s time for all of mankind to become wise to the stars.”"

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No shame

"In some cases British officials claim to have “misplaced” requests from the French to help children"

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Amazing pictures of industrial-scale food processing

"Taylor Farms doesn’t grow vegetables — it processes them, taking produce from some 200 farms and and preparing products consumed by one in three Americans. This entire facility follows the lettuce-growing season, moving 1,400 tons of machinery from Salinas, Calif., to Yuma, Ariz., in November, then back again in April. Each move only interrupts processing — like the washing lines seen here — for 56 hours."

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"British Columbia has already demonstrated that a [carbon] tax can help reduce emissions without damaging individuals or productivity. Though the tax led to an increase in energy prices, officials offset the harm by using the revenue to give tax credits to low-income and rural residents and by cutting other taxes." NY Times

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