Links, Monday 20th March

Two of the substances hypothesised to function as pheromones in humans appear to have no effect on sexual desire

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This is infuriating. Despite headline-writers' love of the term "sex slaves" and its synonyms, so-called "pop-up brothels" involve - surprise! - extremely few cases of actual coercion. They're mostly just forcibly deporting destitute migrants, as per usual.

Oh, and the whole "pop-up" phenomenon is itself a product of the police occasionally forcing sex workers to move, under the threat of prosecution.

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Is it just me, or is this exactly how you go about building a police state? You identify an unpopular minority (in this case, migrants who have the wrong colour skin or speak the wrong language), and gradually corrupt every public and private institution to monitor, harass and punish people in that minority. Then the architecture of repression is already in place for the next time.

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There's a lot to reflect on here for all men who identify as feminist allies. It's really easy to comfortably broadcast our politics in the hopes of receiving praise. My mind definitely goes back to times when I've posted feminist content on here and enjoyed watching the engagement roll in (mostly from women, it should be noted). That also applies, of course, to the praise we direct at ourselves.

It's also easy to use feminist politics as a way of deflecting attention from those occasions where our behaviour actually hasn't been that good (both the attention of others and our own self-criticism). I may or may not be a "good man", but I'm definitely not the best man I can be.

All welcome to comment of course, but I would particularly love to hear from other men on this topic!

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A really fascinating look at underground psychedelic therapy. People are taking real risks to help others.

[CN: sexual violence, drugs]

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[CN: sexual violence]

Great, nuanced piece on the 'South of Forgiveness' controversy at Women of the World. Very much speaks to what I was talking about earlier.

"...had Tom Stranger decided to speak at the Southbank’s Being A Man festival, I would have at least seen the point. Men are overwhelmingly the people who rape. Repentant rapists should look towards other men, not at women who have their own trauma to deal with."

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"It's really strange that only humans have chins. When we're looking at things that are uniquely human, we can't look to big brains or bipedalism because our extinct relatives had those. But they didn't have chins." Atlantic

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"Andrew Lilico, a thoughtful proponent of leaving the EU, told me during the campaign that he wished the bus had displayed a more defensible figure, such as £240m. But Lilico now acknowledges that the false claim was the more effective one. “In cynical campaigning terms, the use of the £350m figure was perfect,” he says. “It created a trap that Remain campaigners kept insisting on jumping into again and again and again.”" Financial Times

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"When they hear if you go to the doctors, the Home Office might be knocking on your door, they choose to stay away. The results have serious implications; we see women who are nine months’ pregnant coming to our clinic. We assume that some people are giving birth at home" Guardian

Links, Wednesday 8th March

Very long, but interesting blog post for all the public policy geeks. TL;DR Why are so many different services mediated through large public and private institutions (education, healthcare, public transport) increasing so rapidly in price over time, all the while delivering worse outcomes AND declining or stagnating salaries to the people who actual work there? It's alarming, and no-one really knows the answer!

"my workplace offered me three different health insurance plans, and I chose the middle-expensiveness one, on the grounds that I had no idea how health insurance worked but maybe if I bought the cheap one I’d get sick and regret my choice, and maybe if I bought the expensive one I wouldn’t be sick and regret my choice. I am a doctor, my employer is a hospital, and the health insurance was for treatment in my own health system. The moral of the story is that I am an idiot. The second moral of the story is that people probably are not super-informed health care consumers."

"some of this probably relates to a difference between personal versus institutional risk tolerance. Every so often, an elderly person getting up to walk to the bathroom will fall and break their hip. This is a fact of life, and elderly people deal with it every day. Most elderly people I know don’t spend thousands of dollars fall-proofing the route from their bed to their bathroom, or hiring people to watch them at every moment to make sure they don’t fall, or buy a bedside commode to make bathroom-related falls impossible. This suggests a revealed preference that elderly people are willing to tolerate a certain fall probability in order to save money and convenience. Hospitals, which face huge lawsuits if any elderly person falls on the premises, are not willing to tolerate that probability. They put rails on elderly people’s beds, place alarms on them that will go off if the elderly person tries to leave the bed without permission, and hire patient care assistants who among other things go around carefully holding elderly people upright as they walk to the bathroom... As more things become institutionalized and the level of acceptable institutional risk tolerance becomes lower, this could shift the cost-risk tradeoff even if there isn’t a population-level trend towards more risk-aversion."

"Imagine if tomorrow, the price of water dectupled. Suddenly people have to choose between drinking and washing dishes. Activists argue that taking a shower is a basic human right, and grumpy talk show hosts point out that in their day, parents taught their children not to waste water. A coalition promotes laws ensuring government-subsidized free water for poor families; a Fox News investigative report shows that some people receiving water on the government dime are taking long luxurious showers. Everyone gets really angry and there’s lots of talk about basic compassion and personal responsibility and whatever but all of this is secondary to why does water costs ten times what it used to?"

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Oh good, more creeping fascism...

"The major overhaul of the Official Secrets Act – to be replaced by an updated Espionage Act – would give courts the power to increase jail terms against journalists receiving official material... The changes do not allow for a statutory public interest defence."

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Quite interesting. Real wages for British workers stagnated and even decreased slightly until about 4 or 5 decades into the Industrial Revolution (from 1760 until about 1810), which certainly goes a long way to explain ordinary people's dissatisfaction with the process!

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“My nagging suspicion is that the White House is very happy to have a vacuum in the under-secretary and assistant secretary levels, not only at state but across government agencies, because it relieves them of even feeling an obligation to consult with experts before they take a new direction.” Guardian

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Just a reminder that sniffer dogs kill people on a regular basis - often young women, who are more susceptible to MDMA overdoses.

If they actually wanted to keep people safe in these venues, there are many options available to them: drug testing, confidential and non-judgemental advice and medical services, etc. But the prosecutors of the drug war are not concerned about safely, only about frightening and criminalising people. This is the result.

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Amazing, a system of *seven* roughly earth-sized planets, some of which are probably at the right temperature to have liquid water! 🎉🎉🎉

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Disturbing news, though I'm a bit unclear on what actually happened... This article claims that "mass blackouts and load shedding was engineered as part of a senior Eskom manager’s plan to get wealthy through irregular contracts", but the details are mainly talking about irregularities in procurement of emergency coal. That doesn't necessarily mean the person doing those dodgy contracts 'engineered' the blackouts, but maybe simply exploited them? Or is there additional evidence relating to this?

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Just came across this passage, written by Stanislav Grof:

“The original form of baptism practiced by the Essenes [a mystical Jewish sect] involved forced submersion of the initiate under water for an extended period of time. This resulted in a powerful experience of death and rebirth. In some other groups, the neophytes were half-choked by smoke, by strangulation, or by compression of the carotid arteries.”

Any thoughts on a) the historical plausibility of this; and b) whether George R.R. Martin was thinking of this when coming up with Ironborn religious practices?

Some commentary on the idea here

Some very suggestive passages from Romans 6:3-6: "Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his."

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Really great piece, got me thinking a lot. I would love to hear any of your thoughts and reflections

"society labels men creepy when they are open about their sexual feelings. And, I think because men are too ashamed to claim ownership of their sexual feelings, they push responsibility for their desire onto the bodies of the (usually) women that they’re with. It’s telling that gay men have body image issues more than lesbians. If the whole “warping female minds with super hot models” theory were true, you’d expect all women (straight and lesbian) to have body image issues, and all men to feel super fab. But, instead what we see, is that people who sleep with men tend to feel worse about how they look than people who sleep with women."

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Amazing story <3 <3 <3

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This story is so horrible 😡😡 Be aware that the Home Office systematically deports people before they have a chance to exhaust their legal options. The statement that "We expect those with no legal right to remain in the country to leave" is therefore pure bullshit. That legal right often hasn't even been properly tested. They just want to get rid of as many people as they can, the legal and moral niceties be damned.

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Interesting. Using subtle cues in word choice plus computational analysis to figure out who Shakespeare's co-authors were...

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Prescription heroin is such a good idea that even the *cops* are getting in on it!

(In fact, they're mostly just trying to reduce their own workload, since a huge proportion of acquisitive crime is committed by people with opioid dependencies who can't afford to buy it on the black market)

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"Charities almost never have good evidence that what they want to spend money on is better than what poor people would choose to spend the money on if they just got the cash themselves. I certainly don't trust myself to know what the world's poorest people need most." Vox