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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"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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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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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
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