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).”
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