Links, Tuesday 15th August

"Nouns can have three different genders and four different cases. Verbs also have a lot of different forms. The exact meaning of a sentence relies on the correct use of gender and case pertained to the eventual meaning, affecting how humour can be delivered. Basically, it’s harder to pun in German when the grammar makes things so much less ambiguous." BBC

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"Like most who tell people not to think too much, you already have your mind made up as to what is valued, and you'd rather not have it questioned." <3

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Yes, 3.6 more years to sit on the sofa eating vegan junk food...

"And the old hippies were right—sticking with a plants-only diet for the long run had the most benefits. People on a vegetarian diet for more than 17 years increased their life expectancy by 3.6 years, compared to short-term vegetarians who saw smaller benefits." Vice

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"That white resentment simply found a new target for its ire is no coincidence; white identity is often defined by its sense of being ever under attack, with the system stacked against it. That’s why Mr. Trump’s policies are not aimed at ameliorating white resentment, but deepening it. His agenda is not, fundamentally, about creating jobs or protecting programs that benefit everyone, including whites; it’s about creating purported enemies and then attacking them." NY Times

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Of course, it's still monstrous to choke someone to death even if they *are* trying to swallow drugs... :/

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Fascinating

"All of this pointed to a stunning conclusion: despite being more complex than sponges and placozoans – which lacked nerve cells and muscles and virtually every other specialised cell type – ctenophores were actually the earliest, oldest branch on the animal tree of life. Somehow over the subsequent 550 to 750 million years, the ctenophore had managed to evolve a nervous system and muscles similar in complexity to those of jellyfish, anemones, sea stars and many types of worms and shellfish, cobbled together from an alternative set of genes."

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The idea of the (invariably male) geek is uniquely talented at coding and other technical skills is a particularly Western cultural construct.

"While only 16% of computer science undergraduates in the UK – and a similar proportion in the US – are female, the balance is different in India, Malaysia and Nigeria. “I walk into a classroom in India and it’s more than 50% girls, the same in Malaysia... They are so passionate about coding, Lots of women love coding. There just aren’t these gender differences there.”"

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"Onstage intimacy and fighting have a lot in common. In fact, many intimacy directors started in stage combat." Leo Weekly

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"Ask a white-collar professional what it means to do a good job at the office, and odds are they’ll need at least a few minutes to explain their answer, accounting for politics, the opinion of their boss, the mood of their client, the role of their team, and a variety of other external factors. Ask someone what it means to do a good job at their next race, however, and the answer becomes much simpler." Outside

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Kind of unethical on the part of the speculators, but I can't help laughing at the prospect of some of San Francisco's richest residents losing access to their own sidewalks! :D

Also, this: "There’s a bit of irony in the couple’s purchase. Until a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling banning the enforcement of racial covenants, homes in Presidio Terrace could be purchased only by whites." (The couple are both of Asian descent)

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If there's any comfort to be had in all this mess, it's from realising that the far right are usually so breathlessly, tragicomically incompetent.

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Kind of an awesome study

"The team hypothesized that people who hear voices would be more likely to “believe” in auditory hallucinations. That’s precisely what they found: Both the schizophrenics and self-described psychics were nearly five times more likely to say they heard the nonexistent tone than healthy controls. They were also about 28% more confident that they had heard the tone when none was there"

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Clearly the cops in this country are much more concerned about enforcing meaningless 'brothel keeping' and immigration laws than they are about actually protecting sex workers :(

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Just learned this term, and it is great! The use of spiritual practice to avoid difficult emotions (both at the level of individuals, and of hippie culture generally disallowing certain expressions of emotion)

"We need to remember that spiritual practice and emotional growth are not about achieving a particular quality of feeling ("good"). Being a human being on a spiritual journey isn't about getting cash and prizes all the time, it is about being in the present moment, whatever it happens to look like. What are you experiencing right now? And how about now? Can you be present to all of your feelings without any one of them defining you?"

Links, Monday 7th August

"The polling company Gallup has, since the 1960s, measured the frequency of mystical experiences in the United States. In 1960, only 20 per cent of the population said they’d had one or more. Now, it’s around 50 per cent. In a survey I did in 2016, 84 per cent of respondents said they’d had an experience where they went beyond their ordinary self, and felt connected to something greater than them. But 75 per cent agreed there was a taboo around such experiences." Aeon

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"Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view." Atlantic

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Really want to read this book...

"What made cool cool, Dinerstein argues, is the braiding together of jazz, film noir and existential literature; the first as an African American mask of cool (poise, virtuosity and “a blank facial wall, suggesting both a resistance to white social norms and an inner complexity”); the second, a delayed working-class response to the Great Depression (gritty but righteous loners in an unjust world); the third, an ethical expression of “rebellion-for-others” in 1945, “year zero” Europe after collaboration, genocide and atomic destruction. Cool contains and enacts “truths we don’t know we know”."

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Just enjoyed this tidbit. I've had a similar experience of London

"in just about any test that's ever been run in New York City, the bicycle outperforms all other modes of transportation at peak periods" The Verge

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"A 2014 review of 53 trials that compared elective surgical procedures to placebos found that sham surgeries provided some benefit in 74 percent of the trials and worked as well as the real deal in about half." fivethirtyeight

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No shit :/

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Labour leadership are currently enjoying the benefits of being very ambiguous on this question. The principle of free movement is unarguable though - if you're on the left, the freedom of *people* should in fact be far more important to you than the freedom of goods, services or capital.

“A system of free movement is the best way to protect and advance the interests of all workers, by giving everyone the right to work legally, join a union and stand up to their boss without fear of deportation or destitution. Curtailing those rights, or limiting migrants’ access to public services and benefits, will make it easier for unscrupulous employers to hyper-exploit migrant labour, which in turn undermines the rights and conditions of all workers.”

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:D

"How do you maintain an interest in poetry or science or philosophy without the foundational belief that it's all for revenge?"

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Yikes! :( :( :(

"... finally, facebook decided to take action. What did they do? Did they suspend any of the people who threatened me? No. Did they take down Twitchy’s post that was sending hundreds of hate-filled commenters my way? No. They suspended me for three days for posting screenshots of the abuse they have refused to do anything about."

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I've had occasion to think about this more than I'd like recently - how a movement supposed to be defined by "critical thinking" has ended up as a breeding ground for far-right politics. Interested to hear thoughts on causation here. Is it just when you get together enough white men who like debating on the internet, and no moderating influence, the inevitable result is fascism? (I joke, but only partially)

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Is there anything sweeter than the hypocrisy of one's enemies? :D

(In this case, the fact that a major architect of the USAID anti-prostitution pledge was in fact a client)

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Very interesting. The same divide-and-conquer politics happens with regard to housing in London. Middle and upper class property owners are able to block new construction of all kinds, essentially forcing private developers and proponents for affordable housing to fight over the scraps that remain. And then private developers inevitably win *that* struggle, leading to gentrifcation and social cleansing.

Might be worth remembering that both developers and people who want affordable housing are united by the demand for *more construction*, in opposition to incumbent property owners, and could be organising along those lines.

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"So why don’t our teeth fit properly in the jaw? The short answer is not that our teeth are too large, but that our jaws are too small to fit them in... our ancestors didn’t feed their children the kind of mush we feed ours today. Our teeth don’t fit because they evolved instead to match the longer jaw that would develop in a more challenging strain environment. Ours are too short because we don’t give them the workout nature expects us to." Sapiens

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Finally, some integrity!

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I'm working very hard to challenge my own conditioned conflict avoidance at the moment!

"Why does middle class conditioning include conflict aversion? The economic purpose of middle class people’s socialization is to prepare them for middle class jobs. Do you know a management or teaching job where the way to get ahead is to have a fair amount of turbulence going on among the people you supervise or within your classroom? Middle class jobs emphasize smoothness, rationality, calming the waters, linear progress, appearing “in charge.” That’s the goal of owning class socialization, too. So how can people brought up that way really appreciate — let alone participate in — a good fight?" Waging Non-Violence