Links, Monday 23rd October

What a hero <3

"I tell him it all sounds pretty crazy, this idea that acid can change the world, and he throws his hands into the air and says: "Being straight is the craziest thing you can do, kid. Look at all the crap we do when we are straight. All the time, every fucking day, just keep peddling!""

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Nice work Victo!

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Yet to try them out myself, obviously, but still... gosh

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The Polish government is blatantly attempting to intimidate feminist groups :(

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Really important investigative work here, showing the links between various "alt right" figures, and showing that they're all explicitly cooperating on a white supremacist agenda. People like Milo Yiannopoulos portray themselves as "free speech advocates" who are simply going for shock value. They are seldom explicitly racist or anti-Semitic in public, but position themselves as defending vague notions like "Western values"

In private, their content is written in close collaboration with neo-Nazis and open white nationalists. They are very clear about the fact that they're trying to move the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, with a view to making open white supremacism politically viable in the mainstream.

"In an April 6 email, Allum Bokhari mentioned having had access to an account of Yiannopoulos’s with “a password that began with the word Kristall.” Kristallnacht, an infamous 1938 riot against German Jews carried out by the SA — the paramilitary organization that helped Hitler rise to power — is sometimes considered the beginning of the Holocaust. In a June 2016 email to an assistant, Yiannopoulos shared the password to his email, which began “LongKnives1290.” The Night of the Long Knives was the Nazi purge of the leadership of the SA. The purge famously included Ernst Röhm, the SA’s gay leader. 1290 is the year King Edward I expelled the Jews from England."

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Some researchers confirm my existing prejudice

(Could be the title of most of my posts, bth)

"Downtown residents – packed together in tight row houses or apartment blocks – are more active and socially engaged than people who live in the sprawl of suburbia,"

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"In the Ganges during pilgrimage season, there are levels of antibiotics in the river that we try to achieve in the bloodstream of patients" Guardian

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This is great! The actor who played the farmer in Babe became a vegan in the course of making that movie!

"What's the moment when Farmer Hoggett makes the switch?

The moment when he feels he has made a snap judgment—that the pig is somehow responsible for the dogs getting in and killing his sheep. He doesn't even know about the dogs. He thinks that Babe has done this. So he gets his shotgun out and he is going to shoot the pig. At that moment, something intervenes and he withholds it. He has the opportunity to readjust his point of view and learn something. Farmer Hoggett's consciousness and our consciousness—if you'll allow yourself to take the time—will arrive at the same conclusion: that we have no right to usurpation of another sentient being's destiny for our own needs and self-interests."

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Some thoughts provoked by this review of James C. Scott's latest book...

I accept the core anarchist position, which is essentially a general critique of concentrated power. This power is obviously incarnated in the state, but also in many other places. Within other institutions - corporations, within capitalist economies, but also schools, voluntary organisations and other bureaucracies. Within the family and intimate relationships. Within communities and groups of friends where there are no formal power structures at all.

The nearest ape relatives of human beings form dominance hierarchies without any need for language or other symbolic representation of these relations. There is no reason to be believe pre-state humans were any different. Informal power can be every bit as tyrannical as formal power, and often even less accountable.

"Civilisation" is an extremely broad term, capturing not only the formation of states, but also sedentary living, mass societies, and the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge and technology. All of these attributes are, in principle, separable. Over the course of their modern evolution, nation-states have accumulated vast amounts of power but also, to an extent, surrendered it back to other institutions and to individuals.

I hope and believe that states will continue to diminish and eventually be eliminated. I think there is an optimum pace for this, and that we should exercise humility in believing we have found adequate replacements. Moreover, I believe the future of humanity will be characterised by technological advance, the global movement of information, objects and people, economic specialisation, and mass living.

In other words, post-state humanity will be different in many ways from pre-state humanity. Those of us currently living in modern states can learn a lot from "uncivilised" peoples, but we also need to think carefully and creatively about our own future.

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"In 1984, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to investigate one of the best-known ways of catching a cold. They infected volunteers with a cold virus and instructed them to kiss healthy test subjects on the mouth for at least one minute. (The instruction for participants was to use whichever technique was “most natural”.) Sixteen healthy volunteers were kissed by people with colds. The result: just one confirmed infection." Guardian

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Can't speak to all the details of this. But yeah, let's not kid ourselves about how relentlessly we as a society cover up the sexual abusiveness of powerful men.

"Sharon Waxman, a former reporter at the Times, writes in The Wrap how she had the story on Weinstein in 2004—and then he bullied the Times into dropping it. Matt Damon and Russell Crowe even called her directly to get her to back off the story. And Miramax was a major advertiser. Her editor at the Times, Jonathan Landman, asked her why it mattered. After all, he told Waxman, “he’s not a publicly elected official.”"

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""interesting" is basically definable as "that which is enjoyable to think about." A definition of curiosity follows naturally: seeking out that which is interesting, (ie enjoyable) to think about. Food for thought. Enjoyment might seem like a secondary feature, but is in fact the central characteristic of human intelligence. The capacity to find thoughts interesting is what separates us. Our intelligence is defined by this capacity to a far greater extent than the intelligence of other curious, playful intelligences like those of cats, monkeys, or octopi. For those creatures, thinking for pleasure is a minor hobby, and usually directed along functional pathways (cats play in ways that are related to how they hunt for instance). For us, it can become all-consuming, and break out of functional pathways." breaking smart

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"In a colour picture, every pixel needs three values — corresponding to the amounts of red, green and blue at that point. But in most cameras, every pixel records just one colour, and the camera fills in the gaps by taking the average values of the pixels around it. This means that, for any given colour in an image, each missing pixel has a particular correlation with its neighbours, which will be destroyed if we add or airbrush something, and we can detect that.

Another technique is JPEG compression. Almost every image is stored in a JPEG file, which throws away some information to save on storage. There is a huge amount of variation in how each camera does that. If a JPEG is unpacked — opened in Photoshop — and then put back together, it is always repackaged slightly differently, and we can detect that." Nature

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Maybe the modern decline in sleep is a myth!

"Analyses revealed no significant association of sleep duration with study year. The results are consistent with recent reviews of subjective data, which have challenged the notion of a modern epidemic of insufficient sleep."

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"Melbourne’s Chinatown, for instance, underwent revitalisation work in the 1970s that included the construction of “Chinese archways” and “celestial avenues” which were intended “to inject ‘Chinese’ character into the area” in keeping with Australia’s turn towards a new era of official multiculturalism.

Chinese residents fought the city’s plan, stating in the national press that they wished “to be treated as Australians and with dignity” and did not want their streets to be turned into “items of curiosity” that would isolate them “as different, queer, quaint”. The residents lost their fight and and city bylaws would later enforce the use of “Chinese colours” and vertical signage that would, as the mayor said in 1986, give greater “definition to the precinct”." Guardian

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“It’s more powerful than previous approaches because by not using human data, or human expertise in any fashion, we’ve removed the constraints of human knowledge and it is able to create knowledge itself,” Guardian

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Should emphasise that this is quite preliminary research but... The rolling out of Craigslist erotic services reduced violence against sex workers to such an extent that the overall reduction in the murder rate *for all women* was about 17%

CW for some quite offensive language from the authors, and various discussions of violence. But the paper actually goes into some detail about the various mechanisms at work (mainly that street sex workers were able to start working indoors, which is much safer and allows for more careful screening)

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Fascinating. The growth of online dating seems to have massively increased the proportion of marriages in the US that are interracial

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Body cameras on cops may not have as big an impact on their behaviour as previously thought...

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Wowzers

"Of all the metered water (which excludes leakage) used by Cape Town over the course of a ‘normal’ year, 4.7% is used by informal settlements; 15% is used by retail, offices and manufacturing; 7.7% is used by government and government facilities; and 6.2% is classified as “other” uses. That means the remaining 66%, ie two-thirds, is used by formal residential areas. If you live in a house, especially if that house has a garden or a pool, that means you." UCT

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Great...

"“If your device supports wifi, it is most likely affected. In general, any data or information that the victim transmits can be decrypted … Additionally, depending on the device being used and the network setup, it is also possible to decrypt data sent towards the victim (e.g. the content of a website).”

Links, Wednesday 4th October

Again on the topic of biological control! Using the mass release of sterile males to disrupt the breeding of a pest insect.

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The caring professions, and society generally, need to adopt a more understanding and non-judgemental attitude towards self-harm

[CN: some specific examples mentioned, but nothing graphic]

"Self-harm is a form of self-soothing, albeit a morbid one. It is unreasonable to expect people to change this behaviour unless we provide environments where individuals can feel safe and validated enough to explore other ways of surviving. For who among us would risk our only point of consistency when we feel judged and under threat? Who among us would not just cling more tightly to what we know?"

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This shouldn't come as any surprise, but does bear repeating over and over: immigration removal centres are characterised by large-scale and systematic abuse, and need to be shut down ASAP

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:D :D

"I took LSD when I was working on Return of the Jedi. I could communicate with my cat Brian, and Brian took me on a journey.

I crawled into this cupboard with Brian the cat and we went to the centre of the Earth for like three billion years and I was just in this world of molecules. It was fine, it was very calming."

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I've occasionally seen people complain that people "gossip" about them when they have a complaint rather than approaching them directly. I don't think it's a conscious calculation so much as a bias formed via experience, but I think it's highly noticeable that the people who prefer to address conflict via open confrontation are precisely the ones who tend to get their way in open confrontation. They are physically more imposing, have louder voices, are less willing to display vulnerability or be self-critical, and have the kind of social capital that allows them to gain the sympathy of bystanders.

Basically, the powerful embrace open conflict, and the marginalised have to build their support networks behind the scenes. There's an obvious gender divide on this, with women being regularly accused of "gossip" when they warn each other about the bad behaviour of men.

My suggestion is that, if people are gossiping about you, they probably have some reason to believe that addressing the issue openly will not go well for them irrespective of the merit of the complaint. So maybe ask yourself how you're contributing to that.

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A lot of us still tacitly assume the Freudian picture of moral development - i.e. that children intrinsically start out with only self-interested emotions, and they must be actively taught to take the needs of others into consideration (the formation of the superego). There's an element of truth in this, but I believe we also come with an enormous empathetic capacity, and that this too is actively suppressed by our parents and other caregivers.

I've spoken to so many people who have formative experiences of "moral instruction" relating to meat eating. They realise that meat is actually the flesh of animals and immediately refuse to eat it. They are then eventually persuaded by caregivers that this empathetic response is inappropriate and revert to meat meat eating.

The same, of course, happens with other human beings. Children are taught that their empathetic responses to people who are obviously hurting or marginalised are inappropriate and that this suffering is normal and natural. Thus the oppressive social order is maintained across the generations.

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Reading an advance copy of Julie Bindel's book, which thankfully I did not have to pay for. I'm only a little way in, so maybe I'm yet to be surprised, but it is... bad. Not bad as in "I disagree with key assumptions and its conclusions". But bad as in "totally lacking in intellectual integrity". She, personally, has been correct about everything her whole life; everyone who disagrees with her has drunk the liberal kool aid and/or is being controlled by pimps; 'sex worker' is always in quotes, never just a straightforward description of someone's identity; etc. Plus there's some truly petty shit. It's telling that her stand-out memory from this conference is her annoyance that a sex worker earned more than she did... "Julia, who described herself as a street sex worker, used a large flip chart to list her weekly expenses and expenditure, arguing that she needed a job that would pay at least £600 a week to be able to give up selling sex. At that time, my salary as Assistant Director of a research unit at Leeds Metropolitan University paid less than half of the amount Julia said she needed."

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Quite an interesting read. On occasions when I've had both a car and a bike available to me (as in South Africa), I've definitely opted for the car quite a few times when I could have managed by bike. Just a testament to my love of convenience and idleness! I've ridden a bike much more living in the inner boroughs of London, where having a car seems more trouble than it's worth, given congestion and the availability of public transport.

"Stevenage has a fast, high-capacity road system, which makes it easy to make journeys by car. Residents have largely been insulated from the effects of traffic growth and congestion and generally there is little incentive for people to use modes other than the private car … [The] propensity to cycle [appears to] depend on factors other than the existence of purpose-built facilities."

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Obviously better if it was transparent and consensual, but I'd personally rather pay for web services in clock cycles than attention (i.e. looking at ads). Maybe we should just be offered the choice?

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Great video, contrasting consciousness raising (connecting our own felt experience to larger social structures) with "consciousness deflation" (the systematic prevention of this awareness)

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"Perhaps the best thing Hefner left us is a cautionary tale of ally worship. Hefner’s image gave us so much by giving space for others to do what they wanted to do. But we cannot keep excusing allies the way Hefner was excused, and allowing them to take the credit Hefner hoarded. We need to be better at cutting out the middle-man and just handing the microphone directly to those with something to say. We should be expanding rights and actually reaching for equality rather than giving women out as prizes to the privileged. We cannot let allies sit in the editor’s chair, having final say on how liberation is reported.

In the end, I guess I am glad for Playboy and what Hefner enabled to happen, for the effect it had on me and my life. But I hope that with his passing we also see the end of an era where aging heroes are above reproach and old rapist white men are still given top billing in the revolution." Tits and Sass

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OMG a friend was just telling me about her plans for the day, saying she was going to cancel a date because she just felt like "netflix and chill". I was a bit confused by this... TURNS OUT SHE'S BEEN USING IT LITERALLY THIS WHOLE TIME!!!

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An overview of deep learning and its current limitations (which are significant)

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*Rolls eyes*

"The Sunday Times reported that Johnson may be trying to get May to sack him because he is struggling to fund all his personal obligations on a cabinet minister’s salary of more than £140,000 a year."

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"This apparent moderation partly explains why they tend to have much bigger online audiences than even the most important alt-right figures — and why Hope Not Hate describes them as “less extreme, more dangerous.” Alt-light sites like Breitbart, formerly home to Mr. Yiannopoulos, as well as Prison Planet, where Mr. Watson is editor at large, draw millions of readers and are key nodes in a hyperkinetic network that is endlessly broadcasting viral-friendly far-right news, rumors and incitement.

Fluent in the language of online irony and absurdism, and adept at producing successful memes, alt-lighters have pulled off something remarkable: They’ve made far-right ideas hip to a subset of young people, and framed themselves as society’s forgotten underdogs. The alt-light provides its audience easy scapegoats for their social, economic and sexual frustrations: liberals and feminists and migrants and, of course, globalists." NY Times

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"More than 20 large scale epidemiological studies all report the same clear relationship: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. To take just one example, adults aged 45 years or older who sleep less than six hours a night are 200% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven or eight hours a night (part of the reason for this has to do with blood pressure: even just one night of modest sleep reduction will speed the rate of a person’s heart, hour upon hour, and significantly increase their blood pressure)." Guardian

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Heh

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Just because the Spanish state has used horrific violence to try and suppress the referendum, it doesn't mean Catalan independence is itself the best, or most democratic outcome. The last polls indicate that about 40% of Catalans actually support independence (though about 70% would like a referendum to settle the question). The overwhelmingly vote in favour of independence yesterday largely reflects selective turnout, with those in favour of union with Spain staying away from the polls.

I'd say the nationalists currently running the region are behaving pretty cynically, essentially trying to escalate conflict with the Spanish state to force the issue. Agents of the Spanish state are likewise cynically using the crisis to assert their own power. Ordinary Catalans deserve a voice, but they're currently being used as pawns in a political game.

The best solution is obviously a political agreement that would involve changes to the Spanish constitution to allow a legal, binding and properly held referendum that would properly reflect the will of residents.

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"The fight isn’t between survivors and “happy hookers”. Nor is it between abolitionists and “pro-prostitution lobbyists” (as Bindel charmingly labels me). It is between those who call for the Nordic Model and those who call for labour rights and an end to the criminal charges which trap people in prostitution (charges which, yes, the Nordic model retains). Misrepresenting an entire movement takes the conversation nowhere." New Statesman

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I love this music video so much <3 <3

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"It’s tempting to associate a refusal of female body modification with a kind of wokeness, an insistence that women don’t “have to” change to appeal to men. But a love of apparently unmodified bodies isn’t any more virtuous or intellectual than an appetite for huge fake tits. Men who tweet at porn stars to say “you don’t have to get implants” might not realize it, but they’re still trying to exert control over women’s bodies, albeit in a different way... “You don’t have to” is rarely, if ever, an earnest attempt to convince women that they’re fine just the way they are, but rather a demand — veiled maybe even from the men uttering it themselves — that women not change their bodies in a way that might negatively impact boners." Mel Magazine