Links, Tuesday 26th December

As if it isn't already, but still...

“MPs should think about whether they will be able to look their constituents in the eye when the place floods, or burns down – and Britain becomes a global laughing stock.”

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The scary politics of Peter Thiel...

"Thiel is obsessed with the apocalypse. After the election, he told the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd that one of the reasons he had been drawn to Trump was the mogul’s manner of speaking in a way that was “apocalyptic and funny at the same time.” It’s not that Thiel wants the world to end to bring on the Second Coming: He’s not that kind of Christian. As an immortality-obsessed survivalist, Thiel is presumably terrified at the prospect of a nuclear war. But his fascination with dark, anti-modern thinkers like Schmitt and Strauss, with their apocalypse-tempting beliefs in vast social and political changes just around the corner, legitimizes a kind of politics that skids right past liberal safeguards."

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Interesting little bits and pieces...

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Incredible film, would really recommend it. You are probably not going to get a better chance to see authentic emotion and healing. It's available for streaming also!

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"Current theories propose that when we imagine something, we try to reactivate the same pattern of activity in our brain as when we saw the image before.

And the better we are able to do this, the stronger our visual imagery is. It might be that aphantasic individuals are not able to reactivate these traces enough to experience visual imagery, or that they use a completely different network when they try to complete tasks that involve visual imagery." Science Alert

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"Manhattan has two genetically distinguishable groups of rats: the uptown rats and the downtown rats, separated by the geographic barrier that is midtown. It’s not that midtown is rat-free—such a notion is inconceivable—but the commercial district lacks the household trash (aka food) and backyards (aka shelter) that rats like. Since rats tend to move only a few blocks in their lifetimes, the uptown rats and downtown rats don’t mix much." Atlantic

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Great long read on Portugese drug policy, focusing not only on decriminalisation (which is only one, and quite an imperfect, aspect of it) but also on changes in public health provision

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How's this for a headline...

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I'm reliably informed that this is extremely accurate...

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Great additional commentary about the short story 'Cat Person'

"Young women say yes to sex they don’t actually want to have all of the time. Why? Because we condition young women to feel guilty if they change their mind. After all, you’ve already made it back to his place, or you’re already on the bed, or you’ve already taken off your clothes, or you’ve already said yes. Do you really want to have an awkward conversation about why you want to stop? What if it hurts his feelings? What if it ruins the relationship? What if you seem like a bitch? ... The hard truth is that we teach young women and girls to not make a scene, even when there’s no one else in the room. Don’t be difficult, don’t be selfish, don’t be inconvenient, don’t be rude. Your discomfort is less important than his comfort. Your feelings are less valid, less valuable than his feelings." Elle Dawson

And an interview with the author...

"The moment when I feel the most sympathy for Margot is when, after she spends the entire story wondering about Robert—what he’s thinking, feeling, doing—she is left marvelling the most at herself, and at her own decision to have sex with him, “at this person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing.”"

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"By the turn of the twentieth century, only a handful of countries were still insisting on passports to enter or leave. It seemed possible that passports might soon disappear altogether." - Tim Harford, "Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy"

Yep, that's right. A century ago, the idea of restricting people's right to enter and leave a place on the basis of something so arbitrary as their *nationality* was rightly seen as oppressive and antiquated. Yet now it's accepted as completely normal and appropriate. Why don't we all have a think about that?

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Crikey

"The moment we made the decision, Cooper said, “She’s going to die. Dogs don’t live very long, so we’re going to see her die.” In her birth and in her coming to us, we were also mourning her death. Something about that felt right, knowing that everything you meet or love is going to die. I was in awe of my kids that they were able to hold both things in their heads at the same time. That’s who they are now. And it hasn’t stopped them from loving this little creature (her name is Puddles) scampering around our apartment. None of them wants to hold back. They’ve given their hearts to her, without hesitation or reservation." Vogue

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VR-induced out-of-body experience as treatment for death anxiety?!

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"baseball has also shaped Palau. It’s more than a national pastime here. It’s an organizing principle—or, more accurately, a re-organizing principle. Before the 20th century, Palau was a matriarchy. Women controlled most aspects of society, and men were limited to fishing, fighting, and handling village-to-village diplomacy. Then colonial rule brought centralized government—and baseball—to the archipelago. Ever since, these two male-dominated worlds have fed on each other, with Palau’s baseball leagues serving as a kind of farm system for government service. Scores of congressmen, senators, diplomats, and heads of state have passed through Palau’s dugouts on their way to political power." Deadspin

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Trlolololol

"The irony is that the UK could have had a blue passport while an EU member. EU member state Croatia currently has a blue passport, after all. In any case – the “iconic” blue passport was imposed from abroad back in 1920 – thanks to the the League of Nations. The EU never mandated burgundy passports: it simply produced a standard format that many member states chose to use for the sake of convenience. I imagine that the then UK government assumed that nobody cared that much about the colour of passports. It’s now clear that apparently trivial symbols of national identity are very meaningful for a lot of people." Guardian

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Now this is putting your money where your mouth is...

"After a piece of land has been cleared of mines, as part of the handover ceremony to the community, Apopo staff will run across it to prove to sceptical locals that it is safe."

Links, Wednesday 29th November

"Female comics do a lot of calculating, finding alternate routes to a career.

“I just won’t try to get a spot at that club tonight — he’s there.”

“I just won’t perform at that club ever — he runs it.”

“I just won’t get on that TV show — he books it.”

For me, all of those “I just won’ts” now look like a lifetime of “I didn’ts.” So many missed opportunities. The truth is, if you are a woman in most professions, there are a bunch of extra rungs on your ladder to success." NY Times

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Most of us should be doing more squatting! (he says, sitting in a chair...)

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I understand this is an experience common to everyone who isn't a straight dude: the desire for mentorship from older guys that is motivated by actual care for younger people and not the desire to sexually exploit them.

"I benefitted immensely from the friendship of a couple of older gay guys who worked at the small-town theater where I helped out in the office and on the stage crew after school. They talked to me about sex, helped me sneak into a gay club, gave me some sense of a language of camp and reference that I’d theretofore never had, smoked weed with me, but never once tried to fuck me. I was a gangly, awkward, weird-looking teenager, so who knows: maybe I just wasn’t the immemorial ideal of youthful male beauty. I like to think, though, that they were just decent guys." Baffler

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"when drugs or alcohol are prohibited, they will be produced in black markets in more concentrated and powerful forms, because these more potent forms offer better efficiency in the business model—they take up less space in storage, less weight in transportation, and they sell for more money. " Wiki

Case in point: drug dealers in Canada are now basically importing chemical weapons... :/

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"...the only options taken seriously by most scholars in the 18th century were that philosophy began in India, that philosophy began in Africa, or that both India and Africa gave philosophy to Greece.

So why did things change? As Park convincingly argues, Africa and Asia were excluded from the philosophical canon by the confluence of two interrelated factors. On the one hand, defenders of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) consciously rewrote the history of philosophy to make it appear that his critical idealism was the culmination toward which all earlier philosophy was groping, more or less successfully.

On the other hand, European intellectuals increasingly accepted and systematised views of white racial superiority that entailed that no non-Caucasian group could develop philosophy. (Even St Augustine, who was born in northern Africa, is typically depicted in European art as a pasty white guy.) So the exclusion of non-European philosophy from the canon was a decision, not something that people have always believed, and it was a decision based not on a reasoned argument, but rather on polemical considerations involving the pro-Kantian faction in European philosophy, as well as views about race that are both scientifically unsound and morally heinous." Aeon

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We can dream eh?

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Interesting/disturbing - it's possible to temporarily change people's political opinions by altering how physically threatened they feel

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Yikes, this is extremely frightening

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“Sandwiches freed us from the fork, the dinner table, the fixed meal-time. In a way, they freed us from society itself.” Guardian

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“It looks like our species was already present probably all over Africa by 300,000 years ago. If there was a Garden of Eden, it might have been the size of the continent.” Guardian

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This is too real...

"when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women. This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, and that these personality characteristics are not equally common in men and women."

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"Young people have curled around their economic situation “like vines on a trellis,” as Harris puts it. And, when humans learn to think of themselves as assets competing in an unpredictable and punishing market, then millennials—in all their anxious, twitchy, phone-addicted glory—are exactly what you should expect." New Yorker

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I'd like to say it's unbelievable, but Theresa May and her allies have always been very clear that immigration enforcement takes precedence over just about anything, including dealing with actual crime and common human decency.

"A Freedom of Information request by Politics.co.uk earlier this year revealed that the police were routinely referring victims and witnesses of crime to the Home Office for immigration enforcement. Tip-offs from the police shot up from 634 in 2014 to 3,372 in 2015."

Links, Sunday 12th November

A lot in this piece really resonates with me.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been reckoning deeply with my felt need to be emotionally "self-reliant". I feel comfortable having others rely on me, and can be emotionally intelligent in that context, but I find it extremely hard to trust others with my own pain and vulnerability. This can mean I hold things in until I break, behaving in unpredictable and sometimes oppressive ways to those around me. It also means I rely too much on the small number of people I do feel able to trust, who obviously have their own issues to deal with.

This is a common pattern with men, and speaks volumes to male socialisation. We are encourage to be in denial about our own pain and vulnerability, and this is frequently reinforced by others around us. In my case, this pattern was reinforced by the death of my father when I was 13 years old. This experience 'taught' me that people can disappear suddenly and can't be relied on. It also placed me firmly in the role of the "the man of the family", reinforcing damaging male socialisation. I have a clear memory of a family friend praising me for being "strong" immediately after my father's death - which basically meant not crying or expressing my pain.

It feels good to be able to cry while writing this, and know that others will see it. Thank you <3

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The ECP are campaigning about this at the moment.

Absolutely shocking - police far more interested in prosecuting prostitution-related offences than investigating violent robberies against sex workers

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I suppose nothing should shock us by this point, but it just keeps coming...

"We know that Zuma fears the corruption charges. That's common knowledge. But that's nothing in comparison with his potentially huge tax bill, the fact that his household may have received proceeds of smuggled tobacco... He would never have survived it. He could even have been sequestrated ultimately. That was his biggest fear. And he knew these guys hardly lost cases in court. There was, of course, the last and final solution for Zuma; the ultimate way out of his tax problems. This is the one I am suggesting was the reason for the upheaval at SARS and the removal of the "Gordhan Four"."

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I was quite struck by the discussion of economies of scale vs individual incentives as competing forces determining the structure of an economy. That is, will a small number of large businesses with concentrated ownership and stratification of employees be more or less economically productive than a large number of small owner-operated businesses? Thinkers like Smith and Paine argued that small, independent businesses were both better for worker autonomy AND economic efficiency, but ultimately their arguments were superseded by the enormous economies of scale achievable by industrialisation.

So the question becomes: How can we harness these economies of scale while maintaining worker autonomy? Marx, of course, advocated collective ownership of large-scale production. The present author advocates greater regulation of privately held corporations. Is there an argument for sacrificing certain economies of scale in favour of greater worker autonomy, ala hipster artisanal production?

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[CN: suicide, including particular methods]

Really interesting discussion of the ethical quandaries surrounding euthanasia, especially for mental health conditions which are arguably "treatable" (if not, in fact, successfully treated)

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Quite startling to read this stuff as a trainee counsellor, especially given the obvious connections to person-centred (Rogerian) practice...

"The most important relationship he measured was between “yield” – information elicited from the suspect – and “rapport” – the quality of the relationship between interviewer and interviewee. For the first time, a secure, empirical basis was established for what had, until then, been something between a hypothesis and an insider secret: rapport is the closest thing interrogators have to a truth serum."

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"Despite Kaufmann’s research, it is hard to swallow the idea that black people were not treated as extreme anomalies (or worse) in Tudor England. “We need to return to England as it was at the time,” says Kaufmann – “an island nation on the edge of Europe with not much power, a struggling Protestant nation in perpetual danger of being invaded by Spain and being wiped out. It’s about going back to before the English are slave traders, before they’ve got major colonies. The English colonial project only really gets going in the middle of the 17th century.” That said, she does leave a stark question hanging in the air: “How did we go from this period of relative acceptance to becoming the biggest slave traders out there?”" Guardian

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I mean...?

"The Bolshevik coup was always going to end in terror, and they all knew it at the time... nevertheless I celebrate it."

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Can't even say how angry this makes me. Central London borough councils are confiscating rough sleepers' tents, just as the weather is turning cold. Absolutely cynical, no concern for basic human decency.

"the programme was partially motivated by complaints from a hotel group – "concerns from tourists coming to the area, saying, 'Look, this is great accommodation but I'm looking out at rough sleepers on the streets.'"

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Putting aside the horrific environmental effects of this for a moment, my understanding is that this renders the *economics* of bitcoin deeply unsustainable... Very few people actually making transactions would be willing to pay that energy cost if they were bearing it directly. It's instead being paid by bitcoin miners, who are speculatively relying on the price of bitcoin consistently increasing. If the price ever decreases, they will stop mining, which means transactions won't be processed in time, which means it will be ever less useful as a currency, which means the price will then go down further. I suspect there'll be a death spiral at some point. Though good work if you can ride the speculative wave until then!

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Call me a cynic, but I don't see any mention of the council actually providing decent housing for these folks...

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Pretty cool. The first-ever observation of a body from another solar system in our astronomical neighbourhood

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"Krista and Tatiana Hogan share the senses of touch and taste and even control one another’s limbs. Tatiana can see out of both of Krista’s eyes, while Krista can only see out of one of Tatiana’s." CBC

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"For too long, we’ve lauded men’s domination and aggressiveness as a sign of leadership rather than possible red flags. When men talk over everyone else in a room, we call it confidence rather than entitlement. If they berate others in meetings, we call them powerful and passionate, not bullying. And when they treat women at work differently than they do men, we’re told that they’re not sexist – they’re just “old-school”." Guardian

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"Behind the Facebook profile you’ve built for yourself is another one, a shadow profile, built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections." Gizmodo

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It obviously wasn't perfect, but it often blows my mind how progressive the Weimar Republic was for the time. It's one of the great tragedies of world history that it was destroyed by the Nazis

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Great bit of counterfactual history: could ancient Rome have experienced an industrial revolution?

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There are literally dozens of substances out there that are cheaper, more fun, better for your body *and* more ethical than cocaine. Consider using some of them instead!