Links, Wednesday 29th November

"Female comics do a lot of calculating, finding alternate routes to a career.

“I just won’t try to get a spot at that club tonight — he’s there.”

“I just won’t perform at that club ever — he runs it.”

“I just won’t get on that TV show — he books it.”

For me, all of those “I just won’ts” now look like a lifetime of “I didn’ts.” So many missed opportunities. The truth is, if you are a woman in most professions, there are a bunch of extra rungs on your ladder to success." NY Times

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Most of us should be doing more squatting! (he says, sitting in a chair...)

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I understand this is an experience common to everyone who isn't a straight dude: the desire for mentorship from older guys that is motivated by actual care for younger people and not the desire to sexually exploit them.

"I benefitted immensely from the friendship of a couple of older gay guys who worked at the small-town theater where I helped out in the office and on the stage crew after school. They talked to me about sex, helped me sneak into a gay club, gave me some sense of a language of camp and reference that I’d theretofore never had, smoked weed with me, but never once tried to fuck me. I was a gangly, awkward, weird-looking teenager, so who knows: maybe I just wasn’t the immemorial ideal of youthful male beauty. I like to think, though, that they were just decent guys." Baffler

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"when drugs or alcohol are prohibited, they will be produced in black markets in more concentrated and powerful forms, because these more potent forms offer better efficiency in the business model—they take up less space in storage, less weight in transportation, and they sell for more money. " Wiki

Case in point: drug dealers in Canada are now basically importing chemical weapons... :/

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"...the only options taken seriously by most scholars in the 18th century were that philosophy began in India, that philosophy began in Africa, or that both India and Africa gave philosophy to Greece.

So why did things change? As Park convincingly argues, Africa and Asia were excluded from the philosophical canon by the confluence of two interrelated factors. On the one hand, defenders of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) consciously rewrote the history of philosophy to make it appear that his critical idealism was the culmination toward which all earlier philosophy was groping, more or less successfully.

On the other hand, European intellectuals increasingly accepted and systematised views of white racial superiority that entailed that no non-Caucasian group could develop philosophy. (Even St Augustine, who was born in northern Africa, is typically depicted in European art as a pasty white guy.) So the exclusion of non-European philosophy from the canon was a decision, not something that people have always believed, and it was a decision based not on a reasoned argument, but rather on polemical considerations involving the pro-Kantian faction in European philosophy, as well as views about race that are both scientifically unsound and morally heinous." Aeon

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We can dream eh?

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Interesting/disturbing - it's possible to temporarily change people's political opinions by altering how physically threatened they feel

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Yikes, this is extremely frightening

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“Sandwiches freed us from the fork, the dinner table, the fixed meal-time. In a way, they freed us from society itself.” Guardian

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“It looks like our species was already present probably all over Africa by 300,000 years ago. If there was a Garden of Eden, it might have been the size of the continent.” Guardian

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This is too real...

"when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women. This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, and that these personality characteristics are not equally common in men and women."

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"Young people have curled around their economic situation “like vines on a trellis,” as Harris puts it. And, when humans learn to think of themselves as assets competing in an unpredictable and punishing market, then millennials—in all their anxious, twitchy, phone-addicted glory—are exactly what you should expect." New Yorker

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I'd like to say it's unbelievable, but Theresa May and her allies have always been very clear that immigration enforcement takes precedence over just about anything, including dealing with actual crime and common human decency.

"A Freedom of Information request by Politics.co.uk earlier this year revealed that the police were routinely referring victims and witnesses of crime to the Home Office for immigration enforcement. Tip-offs from the police shot up from 634 in 2014 to 3,372 in 2015."