Links, Monday 19th March

This is too real. NRA conventions are associated with large declines in accidental gun injuries because all the gun owners are too busy talking about guns to actually be playing around with them!

"A decline of 63% was seen in the states where the conventions were being held, apparently due to large numbers of gun owners being at the events, as well as, in some cases, gun venues such as firing ranges or hunting grounds having closed while their staff attended the convention."

>>><<<

"Some historians estimate that as much as 10 percent of a working family’s income in industrializing Britain was spent on opium. ... It was as if the shift toward modernity and a wholly different kind of life for humanity necessitated for most working people some kind of relief — some way of getting out of the train while it was still moving. It is tempting to wonder if, in the future, today’s crisis will be seen as generated from the same kind of trauma, this time in reverse. If industrialization caused an opium epidemic, deindustrialization is no small part of what’s fueling our opioid surge." NY Magazine

>>><<<

Very interesting review of Black Panther's aesthetics and cultural references (no major spoilers), though I think there's a conversation to be had about the weight of expectation placed on the film. Science fiction about, and made by, white people is free to imagine a future radically different from the past and the present... but only because the past and present of white people is *already* so thoroughly represented. Viewers can be relied on already to have taken that all on board and be ready for something radically new.

So I can totally see why the film-makers, when finally given a massive Hollywood budget to depict Africa, would focus on representing so much of the actually-existing cultural richness that has been hidden from Western eyes (of all races). It's a lot to ask that they do all this *and* represent an entirely novel, utopian future, all in the space of one movie!

"To be truly utopian, a narrative must move beyond simply re-assigning the present to a future time. For Black Panther, this would mean beginning from a utopian archive. It would mean fashioning a radically new African world from a backcloth that is itself utopian and not merely anthropologically available."

>>><<<

"The collision of technology and commercial sex makes many reach for criminalisation, seeking to “solve” the problem of prostitutes encroaching on your leafy suburban street or your holiday let. But if the government were really interested in reducing harm or tackling exploitation – which it largely isn’t – it would end immigration detention or increase the resources given to trafficking survivors and asylum seekers, not embark on more failed and harmful attempts to eradicate commercial sex through criminalisation." Guardian

>>><<<

It would be kind of funny if it weren't so tragic... The police definition of "gang" is much more "group of ethnic minority kids who like hanging out together" than "people who are jointly involved in a violent or otherwise criminal enterprise"

"Although young black people are more likely to be suspected by the police of being gang members, they commit a proportionally small amount of violence. In their study, published in 2016, Clarke and Williams found that 81% of the individuals on Greater Manchester police’s list of suspected gang members were black. Yet during the same period, black youth were responsible for just 6% of serious violence by young people in Manchester. Similar patterns were found in London, where Metropolitan police data showed that in 2015-2016 less than 5% of serious youth violence was linked to alleged gang members...

When you plot the youth violence data on a map, you see these hotspots in north Manchester and Wythenshawe, and little ones in central-south. About 70% of the people who represent all of the marks on those hotspots were white British. But when you look at the map of alleged gang members, “there’s just this one big hotspot, right in Moss Side.” [a predominantly black area]"

>>><<<

Interesting question!

"The case of Singapore is more than just a funny gotcha to use against right-wingers. It actually raises an interesting question about what it is people care about when it comes to “capitalism” and “socialism.” Is capitalism primarily about markets or private ownership? Relatedly, is socialism primarily about ending markets or promoting collective ownership? Often these things are bundled together, but they are logically and practically separable. Singapore (and Norway, among others) shows that it is quite possible to collectively own the means of production while also using price systems to assist in the allocation of productive factors. This is what market socialists have been saying for a hundred years."

>>><<<

Really helpful article re Jordan Peterson. It does clarify for me that he's basically a standard patriarchal, authoritarian conservative, dressed up in confusing language. So, while I loathe his politics, I think my earlier interpretation of him as exactly "a fascist apologist" was simplistic. This was rooted partly in my own instant dislike of him (which I stand by), and partly in his obsession with Soviet and especially 1930s history, which is something fascists are also super into.

"A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected."

" If Jordan Peterson is the most influential intellectual in the Western world, the Western world has lost its damn mind. And since Jordan Peterson does indeed have a good claim to being the most influential intellectual in the Western world, we need to think seriously about what has gone wrong. What have we done to end up with this man? His success is our failure, and while it’s easy to scoff at him, it’s more important to inquire into how we got to this point. He is a symptom. He shows a culture bereft of ideas, a politics without inspiration or principle. Jordan Peterson may not be the intellectual we want. But he is probably the intellectual we deserve."

>>><<<

I don't love David Brooks generally, but this is a good point. Trump in the US can be thought of as broadly analogous to Berlusconi in Italy. He arose out of a loss of faith in democracy and democratic institutions, and will probably further undermine that faith by his extreme statements and inability to govern effectively. If we don't make a concerted effort to correct the ship, there's no reason we won't see increasingly political extremism in subsequent election cycles.

>>><<<

Speaking of legalisation, Los Angeles' cannabis ordinances sound so positive and radical I keep wondering if there's a catch somewhere...?

"The new ordinances in L.A. create a “social equity” tier of applicants who will receive priority for licenses to own and operate marijuana businesses. These are people who have past convictions for marijuana-related crimes, or who live in an L.A. neighborhood that was a verifiable target of enforcement during the drug war. It’s an attempt at restorative justice for the minority communities most negatively impacted by marijuana prohibition."

>>><<<

"The question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion. It is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalisation with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, women who experience sexual marginalisation typically respond with talk not of entitlement but empowerment. Or, insofar as they do speak of entitlement, it is entitlement to respect, not to other people’s bodies." London Review of Books

>>><<<

This piece crystallises some of my own ephemeral musings on (the crisis of) masculinity. In brief: we are fragile pieces of flesh in the midst of a vast, overwhelming and indifferent universe. Masculinity* is fundamentally an ideology that evades this tragic reality. Boys don't cry; instead they construct elaborate fantasies of power and control, and then try to act them out. But the small pieces of control we achieve, often at the expense of others, are pretty worthless in the face of our own insignificance and mortality. I like the author's plea not to "waste the crisis". If we feel the control slipping out of our hands, let's not redouble our efforts and try grip even harder. Let's instead try to recognise that it was always illusory.

(*In one particular sense of the word. Masculinity can also refer to perfectly fun and harmless things, like certain aesthetic choices)

"Certainly, men would waste this latest crisis of masculinity if they deny or underplay the experience of vulnerability they share with women on a planet that is itself endangered. Masculine power will always remain maddeningly elusive, prone to periodic crises, breakdowns and panicky reassertions. It is an unfulfillable ideal, a hallucination of command and control, and an illusion of mastery, in a world where all that is solid melts into thin air, and where even the ostensibly powerful are haunted by the spectre of loss and displacement."

>>><<<

"In pre-colonial societies ... ethnicity was a fungible cultural artefact, one that was not necessarily encoded into one’s genes, attached to particular homelands or imbued with ideas of political sovereignty. Individuals and even entire societies could navigate in and out of them. In fact, even the ideas of kinship and shared ancestry were “notoriously malleable to serve contemporary social or ideological purposes. But once rooted in the social consciousness, mythology convincingly impersonates reality.”... However, for a colonial administration that required order and control in order to facilitate its extractive aim, such inexactitude was unacceptable. Confronted with the reality of the diversity on the African continent, the European colonisers tried to hammer it into compliance with their preconceived ideas. Much of this was accomplished using administrative measures and backed up by brute force." The Elephant

>>><<<

"Overall, the results of this study suggest that naturalistic [dog-directed speech], comprising of both dog-directed prosody and dog-relevant content words, improves dogs’ attention and may strengthen the affiliative bond between humans and their pets." Discover

Links, Monday 26th February

Quite a bit of Silicon Valley inside baseball, but an interesting read.

"But people who know him say that Zuckerberg has truly been altered in the crucible of the past several months... And he’s also worried. “This whole year has massively changed his personal techno-­optimism,” says an executive at the company. “It has made him much more paranoid about the ways that people could abuse the thing that he built.”"

>>><<<

By no means supporting everything argued for on this blog, but I think this is actually a pretty good point:

"I think of respect for free speech as a commons. Every time some group invokes free speech to say something controversial, they’re drawing from the commons – which is fine, that’s what the commons is there for. Presumably the commons self-replenishes at some slow rate as people learn philosophy or get into situations where free speech protects them and their allies.

But if you draw from the commons too quickly, then the commons disappears. When trolls say the most outrageous things possible, then retreat to “oh, but free speech”, they’re burning the commons for no reason, to the detriment of everybody else who needs it.

(this is how I feel about everything Milo Yiannopoulos has ever done or said.)"

>>><<<

The rise and fall of the waterbed

>>><<<

"One evening during the rainy season in Kenya, a black rhinoceros mother and her baby came to a clearing where salt had been left out to attract animals. After licking up some of the salt the mother moved away, but the rhino calf got stuck in the deep mud. It called out, and its mother returned, sniffed it, examined it, and headed back into the forest. The calf called again, the mother returned, and so on, until the calf was exhausted. Apparently the mother rhino either could not see the problem—the calf was uninjured—or did not know what to do about it.

A group of elephants arrived at the salt lick. The mother rhino charged the elephant in the lead, who sidestepped her and went to a different salt lick a hundred feet from the baby rhino. Appeased, the mother went to forage in the woods again. An adult elephant with large tusks approached the rhino calf and ran its trunk over it. Then the elephant knelt, put its tusks under the calf, and began to lift. As it did so, the mother rhino came charging out of the woods, and so the elephant dodged away and went back to the other salt lick. Over several hours, whenever the mother rhino returned to the forest, the elephant tried to lift the young rhino out of the mud, but each time the mother rushed out protectively and the elephant retreated. Finally the elephants all moved on, leaving the rhino still mired. The next morning, as humans prepared to pry it loose, the young rhino managed to pull free from the drying mud on its own and join its waiting mother."

JF Masson and S McCarthy, "When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals"

>>><<<

This is so upsetting. :'( How many people have to die of fentanyl or other opioid overdoses before the state wakes up to the need for prescribed heroin and supervised injection facilities? Simple measures like this would prevent pretty much all deaths and also save huge amounts of money in averted crime, medical bills and policing. Yet the government is incapable of doing anything but parroting the same old "tough on crime" slogans.

>>><<<

Apparently Dutch "tulip mania" wasn't all that irrational, or really a big deal in the larger picture.

>>><<<

I mean, what do you expect to happen with such incoherent policy-making? "Coffee shops" in the Netherlands are allowed to *sell* cannabis, but production and distribution are still criminalised. So... obviously criminal gangs are going to be capturing that market?

>>><<<

Enjoyable social interaction is apparently somewhat like getting high on opioids...

"Our results show that pain tolerance positively predicts social network size. This therefore supports our hypothesis

that variation in the μ-opioid system underlies individual differences in sociality"

>>><<<

This is kinda great

"Adults, Holt thought, needed to stop when they felt that potent reaction to cuteness bubbling up within them, and think about why they were feeling it. Often, he argued, that gush of “gah-so-cute” came out of a feeling of misplaced superiority over children. (Sianne Ngai, a more recent critic of cute, has called cuteness “a way of aestheticizing powerlessness.”)" Slate

>>><<<

What's interesting about this study is not the headline "antidepressants work"... It's kind of obvious, and also very different classes of drugs of grouped under the category "antidepressant". What is interesting is exactly *which* drugs turn out to be most effective, on average.

Most effective in absolute terms: Amitriptyline (tricyclic antidepressant, serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor), Mirtazapine (tetracyclic antidepressant, blocks histamine, adrenergic and serotonin receptors) and Venlafaxine (selective serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor)

Best when accounting for both effectiveness and tolerance: Agomelatine (melatonin receptor agonist, serotonin recept antagonist), Escitalopram (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor, SSRI), Vortioxetine (serotonin re-uptake inhibitor and modulator - affects various different serotonin receptors in different ways).

Yet when people think "antidepressant", they're overwhelmingly thinking of SSRIs! There are actually many options available and different things might work for you depending on your individual brain chemistry.

>>><<<

Another great interview, completely different content to the Vulture one, all totally amazing. What a life.

>>><<<

“To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun.” Guardian

(I have to say, even with a gun and firearms training, it's quite a thing to confront someone actively shooting at people. I don't know if I'd be able to do it. I don't think we should be relying on people being able to do it to keep anyone safe.)

>>><<<

I remember this blew my mind when I read about it a while ago... Some languages have abstract words for smells (i.e. they wouldn't say "it smells like a lemon", they'd name a general property shared by lemons and the thing they're describing). Wouldn't it be useful if we could import this vocabulary into English? Think how useful it would be in food preparation and any number of other activities...

"Speakers of Jahai and other related languages have precise words for different smells. They're equivalent to the range of words—red, blue, pink—that English has for colors..."

>>><<<

Perhaps unsurprising, but good that the research is being done.

"When it came to self-reported depressive symptoms or anxiety, researchers found there was no difference between transgender kids who were allowed to transition and their peers and siblings — nor did they differ from national averages. Likewise, transgender children scored just as developmentally normal as their peers on measures of self-worth."

>>><<<

Such heady cultural-political theory, opinions welcome.

"The crucial point here is that the destabilisation of Fordist [assembly-line] industrial culture was well under way long before Thatcher came on the scene in any significant way, and that that destabilisation was driven as much by the attempts of the most radical sections of the working class to to transcend its limitations as by any other factor. Everything Mason says about the ultimate outcomes of that history is true. But left thought and left politics are not served at all by any conception of this history which imagines that the Fordist world would have been sustainable if only it hadn’t been for Thatcher. Working people themselves had done with it long before 1979. The elements of the industrial working class who Thatcher assaulted in the early 80s were already residual, and their leaderships realised far too late what the New Left had been trying to tell them since the early 60s: that without a radical democratisation of their aims and their practices, without an embrace of feminism and cosmopolitanism, without an understanding of the technological revolutions which were already well under way - they would be doomed."

>>><<<

Really worth reading this to get an understanding of how sexual predators are actively protected and enabled by communities. Even if someone is popular and charismatic, and has always been nice to *you*, they may still be assaulting and hurting others - especially younger and more vulnerable people.

[CN for quite graphic description of sexual assault - in the main article, not what I've quoted here]

"“At that point, I basically turned on the guy,” Singh says. He stopped engaging with him, and began warning others about Morgan. Then, he says, the scene began to close ranks. “I was initially taken aside by a couple of people and bought coffee to have a friendly chat—and basically told everything I’ve heard is a lie, and it’s not true, and he’s a lovely man and you just don’t know him, you shouldn't listen to the lies.”

When he continued, he and Emma’s social lives in the group began to peter out. People stopped contacting them. They stopped being invited to parties and gigs. By 2005, he says, they were cut off, and he’d basically stopped engaging with the Goth crowd at all."

>>><<<

“If you’re anti-rape, you’re going to have to be anti-prison.” Vice

[CN: general discussion of sexual violence, no graphic descriptions]

>>><<<

One of the more important/frightening bits of news I've heard in a while: Xi Jinping appears to be setting himself up as dictator for life. This probably won't change much in the short term, but will mean that political tensions can't be released by the change over in leadership every tens years and will continue to develop over the course of his reign. Expect the world's largest economy to become much more chaotic and unpredictable when he starts losing his faculties and grip on power.

Links, Thursday 15th February

Important piece. The most effective (and compassionate) ways to prevent crime are to offer more services to children and teenagers, and better mental health services. Yet the political conversation is all about more cops and increased sentences.

>>><<<

"...were we to switch to a plant-based diet in Britain, we could feed all the people of this country on just 3m of our 18m hectares of farmland. Alternatively, we could use the land here to feed 200m people. In a world threatened by starvation and ecological collapse, it seems perverse to do otherwise." Monbiot

>>><<<

Wowzers

>>><<<

Now this is news!

>>><<<

A tiny reflection on the "crisis of masculinity"... The whole discussion is increasingly reminding me of "Downtown Abbey", where a lot of the characters (especially the older ones, though not only the actual toffs) continually express these great existential doubts about the decline of the aristocracy. What's great about that show is that it really allows us to emphathise with these characters, however privileged and outright objectionable they may be. Their lives have, until that point, being given meaning by their relationship to the institution of aristocracy, and yet it becomes increasingly clear over the course of that series just how nonviable (and indeed obsolete) that institution is becoming.

So maybe we are looking at a future without masculinity, except perhaps understood as a way of visually presenting oneself or behaving within highly stylised contexts. It's possible to have compassion for those of us whose lives have been given meaning in one way or another by this particular construct (including, you know, me) without necessarily mourning the loss in any deeper political or moral sense. At the end of Downtown, we're encouraged to cheer the younger aristocratic characters who realise "Hey, maybe I can still have a fulfilling life while leaving behind that part of my identity". Maybe we can equally manage or even embrace the decline of masculinity rather than expending our energy trying to think of ways to somehow rehabilitate or salvage it?

>>><<<

Huh. Any pharmacology experts able to explain why this is? Something to do with the way the substances are metabolised, as opposed to neurotransmitter binding?

"natural opioids seem to work differently in the body to synthetic opioids, such as oxycodone and fentanyl, which are commonly used for moderate to severe pain. While the body quickly becomes tolerant to synthetic opioids, meaning patients need more over time to get the same pain relief, that does not seem to happen with natural opioids."

>>><<<

Huh, interesting statistic - women in the UK have long tended to vote Conservative, with men tending to vote Labour; this trend only reversed in the 2015 and 2017 elections. In the US, by contrast, I believe women have been solidly Democratic for many years.

I imagine this has something to do with Labour's stronger roots in unions, which have historically been male-dominated, but I'm still trying to square it with the general claim that women are more left-leaning. I suppose third parties are stronger in the UK and this doesn't show the gender split in Lib Dem supporters, for instance...

>>><<<

"At its peak in the Maya classic period (approximately A.D. 250–900), the civilization covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, but it was far more densely populated." National Geographic

>>><<<

"The first modern Britons, who lived about 10,000 years ago, had “dark to black” skin... pale skin may have emerged later, possibly when the advent of farming meant people were obtaining less vitamin D though dietary sources like oily fish." Guardian

>>><<<

What a great interview, and what an amazing life

"You just mentioned the Clintons, who are friends of yours. Why is there still such visceral dislike of them? What are other people not seeing in Hillary, for example, that you see?

It’s because there’s a side of her — when you keep secrets, they backfire.

Like what secrets?

This is something else I shouldn’t be talking about.

You sure seem to know a lot.

I know too much, man."

... And Richard Pryor's widow confirms the goss re him and Marlon Brando!

>>><<<

"But is it really possible that wild, queer techno parties in anonymous lofts, or audiophile sound-systems in community halls, could form meaningful connections with the blokey, besuited hordes of the Labour Party?" Vice

>>><<<

This is pretty interesting, in light of the expansion of mindfulness techniques into therapy and mental health treatment more generally. I guess the question for any given person is how far along the path of ego-dissolution they really want to go...

"The practice of psychotherapy is ... dedicated to a method of healing that leaves the conventional structure of self-as-agent intact as the focal point of attention, whereas Buddhist spiritual practice engages in a sustained, methodical dismantling of our customary preoccupation with self-centered experience."

>>><<<

Maybe the Milgram experiment participants gave "deadly shocks"... because they correctly believed it was fake?

>>><<<

Hmmm... So a policy of stealing and destroying people's tents nearly leads to a person - who was sleeping in a tent - being killed in a trash compactor. What a surprise.

Note that the city hasn't agreed to, you know, STOP STEALING AND DESTROYING people's tents, only to be more careful when doing so.

If people sleeping in tents is really such a problem, why not provide them proper accommodation? Or at least provide municipal camping facilities where people can pitch without inconveniencing anyone.

>>><<<

A rough sleeper died yesterday in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament... What an indictment.

Meanwhile, local councils take ever-more-punitive action against rough sleepers rather than providing the needed services.

>>><<<

"[Away from work] the employees mainly chose “to watch TV, try to sleep, [and] in general vegetate, even though they [did] not enjoy doing these things”. US workers, the psychologists concluded, had an “inability to organise [their] psychic energy in unstructured free time”. To the post-workists, such findings are simply a sign of how unhealthy the work culture has become. Our ability to do anything else, only exercised in short bursts, is like a muscle that has atrophied." Guardian

>>><<<

"Under the Huffington Post article about the male/female vegetarian ratio [59% of vegetarians and 79% of vegans are women], a male commenter wrote, “Because women are emotionally irrational.” Another wrote, “So glad I was born a man. Enjoy your beans and salads, ladies.” And a third man chimed in with the most well-crafted and honest response: “Vegetarians scare me.” What’s scary, really, is the idea in the ether that compassion is effeminate and thereby un-American." Harper's Bazaar