Links, Wednesday 23rd March

"It was Fan Hui’s first major tournament after his loss to AlphaGo, and at the outset he felt uncertain. “Everything was broken,” he told me. But he went on to win all his games. At the final awards ceremony, while accepting his trophy, he bent back and let out a victory roar. He was flouting the usual decorum of Go tournaments, but the crowd rose to its feet anyway, applauding the man who had lost to the machine." New Yorker

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This is pretty great. From about 40s in, the big white dude starts getting thrown about like a rag doll

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Great post title: Make Buses Dangerous

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Very useful piece. I don't think school independence is in itself a bad policy. I think it would make sense, for instance, to have a school be controlled by a board consisting of representatives from teachers, students and parents (as opposed to a local authority). But the actual academy system being constructed doesn't in any way resemble this, and is actually a means for private interests to extract money from the public schooling system.

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This is coming from an (acknowledged) very privileged perspective, but has some good insights into why "love your work" ideology has become so entrenched amongst the professional classes at least.

"Spending our leisure time with other professional strivers buttresses the notion that hard work is part of the good life and that the sacrifices it entails are those that a decent person makes. This is what a class with a strong sense of identity does: it effortlessly recasts the group’s distinguishing vices as virtues."

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"The study... found that when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography... The reverse was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige." NY Times

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Well this is an extremely worrying turn of events. Very obviously a targeted attempt to harass and gather intelligence on a part of the political opposition, as opposed to a simple robbery.

“We arrived to find the security guard handcuffed to the railing. He said that two men had entered the premises and had taken him to the basement. From there he made a phone call and white combi with four people, all of them well dressed and one of them with a shotgun, arrived. Three of them went upstairs and unlocked the security gate to our offices. A woman had a notebook and knew exactly what they wanted. They then received another call, took documents and the computers and they left,”

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Great profile piece on Jacobin Magazine and its editorial staff and policies

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"[Gentrification] brings newcomers to neighbourhoods with nonwhite populations, sometimes with atrocious consequences. Local newspaper The East Bay Express recently reported that in Oakland, recently arrived white people sometimes regard “people of color who are walking, driving, hanging out, or living in the neighborhood” as “criminal suspects.” ... What’s clear in the case of Nieto’s death is that a series of white men perceived him as more dangerous than he was and that he died of it." Guardian

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Wow, the level of frankness here...

"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”"

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"I continue to believe that the political path of reconciliation forged by Nelson Mandela and the ANC was appropriate for the time: It was built on a commitment to peace, which was necessary during turbulent transition. As it came to power, the ANC exercised the gracious restraint that is the preserve of the victorious. But in a plural democracy such as ours, one where so much time and energy has been put into forgiveness, the voices of the hurt and the outraged have a place too." Guardian

Links, Wednesday 16th March

I have to say, the racial disparity really did jump out at me when I saw the trailer for the new Ghostbusters.

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Amazing

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"As poverty and prostitution increase so does criminalisation. We are currently fighting legal cases with women imprisoned for brothel-keeping because they worked in a flat with friends – obviously much safer than working alone. We are also working with women street workers, who are having their IDs confiscated by police before being told that they can only get them back if they show plane tickets back to Romania. This is happening despite these women having the right to reside in the UK." Open Democracy

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"the mice were offered two sweet solutions, one with sugar, and one with artificial sweetener. The solution with the sweetener tasted sweeter—and so, one would think the more attractive of the two. And indeed, for the first day, the mice consistently drank the sweeter water. But then something happened: They began to ignore the artificial sweetener and instead focused exclusively on the real sugar solution. “Somehow the brain knows when something is purely sweet and good-tasting versus when that good taste comes along with energy,” de Araujo said. In other words, we have two separate systems that signal the value of food." New Republic

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Not sure how seriously to take the Sapir-Whorf thesis being applied in the article, but this is interesting.

"Every language first had a word for black and for white, or dark and light. The next word for a color to come into existence — in every language studied around the world — was red, the color of blood and wine.

After red, historically, yellow appears, and later, green (though in a couple of languages, yellow and green switch places). The last of these colors to appear in every language is blue."

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"When he first played the Google machine, he was ranked 633rd in the world. Now, he is up into the 300s. In the months since October, AlphaGo has taught him, a human, to be a better player. He sees things he didn’t see before. And that makes him happy. “So beautiful,” he says. “So beautiful.”" Wired

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I remember reading an article a while ago arguing that people are often willing to be led by men (mostly men) with antisocial behaviour traits, because those men are good at breaking rules to the benefit of their friends and followers. I think the example the author used was of someone who figures out a way to jump a queue and so gets everyone into a venue sooner. In this context, evidence of a willingness to be unethical can actually be seen as a positive recommendation for leadership positions.

Struck by this dynamic and the Trump phenomenon, where he has explicitly argued that he wants to be "greedy" on behalf of the American population.

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"Groups of signers will naturally form circles or arcs to include everyone. They avoid long, rectangular tables, which impede views. The least Deaf-supportive space Bauman could think of, when I asked him what it might be, was the traditional classroom with straight rows of desks; that layout breaks up lines of communication, except between student and teacher. Many classrooms at Gallaudet have round or horseshoe-shaped seating arrangements. Meeting rooms may have oval desks; lecture halls are raked, and ideally have multiple aisles so an audience member can easily take the stage when he or she wants to ask a question." Curbed

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Could chimpanzees be engaging in ritual?

"What we have found might be more symbolic than a male display, and perhaps more reminiscent of our own past. Marking pathways and territories with signposts such as piles of stones is an important stage in human history. Mapping chimps’ territories in relation to stone accumulation sites could give us insights into whether this is the case here."

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Wow, Los Angeles literally confiscating homes from homeless people on (completely spurious?) safety grounds.

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I find these kind of statistics so wonderful, but also feel strangely envious. Kids nowadays obviously feel much more supported in their identities than would have been possible for most people during my adolescence. Progress :)

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This is pretty good advice for all relationships, actually, not only those with kids. It's all to easy to let conflict devolve into a power struggle, rather than a calm negotiation over the best course of action.

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This article goes to something I've been thinking a lot about lately, about how we all need opportunities to fail early and often (and starting with low stakes), so we're able to learn about our own capabilities in a safe environment. So there's a good point in here about young girls and physical risk, but you could also write a piece about young boys and emotional risk, and lots of broadly analogous other issues.

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Climate change is proceeding at a breakneck pace... :/

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So good

"Like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl before her, the Manic Pixie Dream Feminist is every brogressive's fantasy – an intelligent, socially aware woman whose liberal sexual politics mean she's also a freak in the sack. The MPDF is passionate, but not too passionate – she will never call you out on your shit, but patiently and gently hold your hand through the tricky maze of social justice, a human search engine with bottomless emotional labour available at your disposal.

This slimy fetishisation is a reconstitution of the male gaze for self-congratulating leftist men who loudly proclaim that they love smart, opinionated women, but are intimidated as hell when push comes to shove. Having their problematic views challenged or their offensive jokes called out tips the power balance scales away from the smug, comfortable patriarchal throne they've been sitting on all their lives – and boy, do they hate it."

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Fascinating history of Baghdad

"Under strict supervision [the Caliph] had workers trace the plans of his round city on the ground in lines of cinders. The perfect circle was a tribute to the geometric teachings of Euclid, whom he had studied and admired."

Links, Monday 7th March

Heh

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Getting on board the train...

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Great piece on anti-languages. Fun bit of trivia: "naff" is originally an acronym meaning "not available for fucking"

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Reproductive labour and academia

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"So many questions went unanswered during those seventy-two hours [offline] —so many curiosities cast aside and forgotten without being pursued. I was less harried, I suppose, but I was also far less informed, and not as advanced in my understanding of all sorts of things that interested me. I felt as though I were standing still rather than moving forward. And while standing still for a while can be pleasant, it’s not without its drawbacks. Instead of feeling more relaxed, I mainly felt unfulfilled." New Yorker

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"Having a white actor in this film turned out to be a financial imperative" MIC

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"Every year my white friends “condemn all violence and intimidation” when lectures are stopped by the power of song and dance, but are silent when violence breaks out shortly after. Every year white people pretend they didn’t call the police." Daily Maverick

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“When economic development happens, metal scenes appear. They’re like mushrooms after the rain,” WSJ

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[TW: rape, sexual assault]

Very good and important article, really gets to the core of how sexual coercion plays out at an emotional level

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"the evidence of a link between childhood misfortune and future psychiatric disorder is about as strong statistically as the link between smoking and lung cancer." Guardian

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"Only when people can stop in the middle of the street to talk without fearing what may be bearing down on them will we have fully restored the social function of streets." Washington Post

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Interesting piece about the escalating costs of nuclear power, and how it might be contained. This might all soon be rendered irrelevant, of course, as the costs of renewables keep coming down...

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"We're taught Lord Acton's axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don't believe it's always true any more. Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals. When you have enough power to do what you always wanted to do, then you see what the guy always wanted to do." Guardian

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Wow, someone in Sweden has opened an entirely automated, 24-hour convenience store

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Great piece of analysis - so much commentary on Nene's firing describing Des van Rooyen as an "obscure backbencher", neglecting to mention that he's the secretary of the MK Veteran's Association and thus an important member of the securocrat cabal who are slowly capturing the South African state.

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Chess visualised!

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Hardly a surprising result - the widely publicised campaign encouraging people to report on benefit 'fraud' has nothing to do with catching actual fraud, and everything to do with destroying solidarity and undermining the welfare system.

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"Data reliably shows we have more leisure time than in the past, not less... All of which isn’t to say that the epidemic is imaginary – we really do feel too busy, after all – but that the real problem is the feeling, not the sheer number of things on our plates." Guardian

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" If everyone with a pointless, wasteful, or destructive job simply refused to show up to it, we would learn a lot about how much of our time is taken up with “work” that has everything to do with our dependence on wage labor, and nothing at all to do with the things we need to run a decent society." Jacobin

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This story is frankly quite upsetting, but still amazing

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"Society needs to be deprogrammed, subverted, or queered, and that involves a process of unlearning and deconditioning white supremacist, cisnormative and heteronormative behaviour and values. Straight and cisgender people engaged in that work could be considered queer but I feel it's not a label/identity cis and straight people are entitled to claim, more one that they need to earn. In the same way cisgender men can't just declare themselves feminists, or white people can't just declare their activism intersectional, they have to be held accountable to the people society places beneath them." Vice

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A reminder that the founding issue of the religious right in the US was not opposition to abortion, but opposition to racial desegregation

Links, Thursday 18th Feb

"The key to learning a new motor skill - such as playing the piano or mastering a new sport - isn't necessarily how many hours you spend practising, but the way you practise, according to new research. Scientists have found that by subtly varying your training, you can keep your brain more active throughout the learning process, and halve the time it takes to get up to scratch." Science Alert

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Wow, Australian birds of prey may deliberately help fires to spread in order to hunt more easily

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The world can be divided into 4 rough clusters of countries on the basis of mutual visa-free travel, with China the outsider

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Amazing. Pretty much any academic paper that has ever been published, readily available, FOR FREE!

How it works and the motivation behind it is explained here

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Huge trigger warning for racism, colonialism, slavery

This is really horribly grim, but needs to be reckoned with.

"But to think about American slaves merely as coerced and unpaid laborers is to misunderstand the institution. Slaves weren’t just workers, the Sublettes remind the reader—they were human capital. The very idea that people could be property is so offensive that we tend retroactively to elide the designation, projecting onto history the less-noxious idea of the enslaved worker, rather than the slave as commodity. Mapping 20th-century labor models onto slavery spares us from reckoning with the full consequences of organized dehumanization, which lets us off too easy: To turn people into products means more than not paying them for their work."

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TW: racism, violence

I'm going to post this on its own because just so horribly fucking grim... Basically, "The Star Spangled Banner" contains a verse promising to murder slaves who turn on their masters. Unsurprisingly, this verse is not usually sung these days, nor is it much talked about

"No refuge could save the hireling and the slave
From the terror of night or the gloom of the grave
Oh, say, does that star spangled banner yet wave"

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Have seen quite a few shares of the "microcephaly is being caused by a pesticide, not by Zika virus" claims, which smells strongly of a conspiracy theory ("Monsanto is peripherally involved, clearly there's a cover-up!"). Here's a good debunking

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The simple fact is that there's now very good evidence that MDMA and psychedelics can be highly effective in therapeutic settings.

"When MAPS’s first PTSD study in the USA was published in 2011, the results were eye-opening. After two psychotherapy sessions with MDMA, 10 out of 12 participants no longer met the criteria for PTSD. The benefits were still apparent when the patients were followed up three to four years after the therapy." Vice

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Well, this is heartening

"The events also revealed that the two more recent plutocratic dynasties – the Motsepes and the Guptas – are increasingly at daggers drawn as they vie for influence over the ANC. Deputy President Ramaphosa is backed for the succession by the Motsepes. He is married to Patrice Motsepe’s sister Tshepo but is trailing Zuma’s former wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, in the succession stakes. She is backed by her former husband and the Guptas. Motsepe’s other sister, Bridgette, a billionaire in her own right, is married to Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe, a Ramaphosa ally."

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UNAIDS reaffirms that the decriminalisation of sex work (alongside other marginalised activities) is essential if HIV/AIDS is to be tackled effectively

Links, Monday 8th Feb

"Most domestic minors in the sex industry are not kidnapping victims. They’re children who have fallen out with their parents (often because they are gay or trans), or been forced from their homes, and who sell sex to survive. And the biggest danger they face is not from organized rings of predatory criminals, but from the police." New Republic

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Amazing speech. "The Australian Dream is rooted in racism."

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Legit criticism: given that it's created with literal magic, the candy in the Harry Potter universe is definitely disappointing

"Think about that: The candy is imbued with magic, but instead of giving your tongue an orgasm or changing flavors to adapt to your mood or making everything you eat taste like candy for the rest of the day, the chocolate frog just tries to escape. As if the one thing missing from my real-life candy experience is that it isn't a big enough pain in the ass."

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"The Economist had a remarkable statistic. The IMF makes forecasts for every country every April. There have been 220 instances across several decades and some number of countries where growth was positive in year T and negative in year T+1. Of those 220 instances, the IMF predicted it in April in precisely zero of those 220 instances. So the fact that there’s a sense of complacency and relative comfort should give very little comfort." Marginal Revolution

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Heh

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Google AI researchers have beaten Go.

"our program AlphaGo achieved a 99.8% winning rate against other Go programs, and defeated the human European Go champion by 5 games to 0. This is the first time that a computer program has defeated a human professional player in the full-sized game of Go, a feat previously thought to be at least a decade away."

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"black women’s emotional labor is more exhausting and strenuous because it lies at the intersection between the demands that are bestowed upon our womanhood and the demands that come with presenting our blackness as fit for public consumption in a white supremacist society." Scenarios

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Ugh :(

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"The military governments [of Burma] adhered to a strict labor code for elephants drawn up in British colonial times: eight-hour work days and five-day weeks, retirement at 55, mandatory maternity leave, summer vacations and good medical care. There are still elephant maternity camps and retirement communities run by the government. In a country where the most basic social protections were absent during the years of dictatorship, elephant labor laws were largely respected, partly because an overworked elephant is a very dangerous animal," NY Times

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Some helpful tips for getting to sleep in here

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Great work by James Mackenzie​, co-authoring a report advocating a Basic Income Guarantee in the UK! It's very heartening to see costing and other questions of implementation worked out in detail

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Good piece, summarising where things stand on the use of ketamine as a rapid-acting antidepressant

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How much of an indictment would it be on all of us if we aren't able to accomplish open borders in the remaining 84 years of this century?

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What an amazing person and amazing story

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This is horrible :(

Links, Monday 25th January

Really good piece on assisted dying, giving fair due to potential problems and to the race/class/disability dimensions of the debate, while still making clear that it needs to be allowed in some form

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I feel extremely vindicated by this

"An escalator that carried 12,745 customers between 8.30 and 9.30am in a normal week, for example, carried 16,220 when it was designated standing only."

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"Carol‘s director, Todd Haynes, who was also snubbed by the Academy for the first time this awards season, not only refused to center on masculine experience...; he also made the bold decision to allow Carol‘s audience to laugh at men." Autostraddle

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The mishmash Native American decor and stuff at Spur has always occurred to me as both bizarre and extremely problematic. But it turns out that they actually decided that this theme was *more* racially sensitive than what they had before! Just... wow

"When the first Spur restaurant opened in Cape Town in 1967, during the depths of apartheid, it had a “Western” theme, with a cowboy spur as a logo. This changed to a “proud American Indian chief” logo in the mid-1980s, Van Tonder said, to “signal” to a changing South Africa that people of all races were welcome at the restaurants."

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"Note to the Academy: Please for the love of all that is holy, give Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar so that he can start playing attractive people in movies again. I have had it with him growing beards and panting and urinating into long rows of bottles. It is a much rarer talent to be charming on camera than people seem to realize, and we are forcing this charming man to grow awful beards and go galumphing through the woods like an enraged opossum. Enough." Washington Post

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"Like many of this city’s businesses, sleep vendors are both highly organized and officially nonexistent. In Mr. Khan’s neighborhood, four quilt vendors have divided the sidewalks and public spaces into quadrants, and when night falls, their customers arrange themselves into colonies of lumpy forms. Some have returned to the same spot every night for years." NY Times

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"But if you ask that same 22-year-old American about some of the most pressing problems in a place like Uganda — rural hunger or girl’s secondary education or homophobia — she might see them as solvable. Maybe even *easily* solvable.

I’ve begun to think about this trend as the reductive seduction of other people’s problems. It’s not malicious. In many ways, it’s psychologically defensible; we don’t know what we don’t know." Medium

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Good piece on an elderly couple who took a well-informed, reasoned decision to end their own lives together.

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"At some SAPS stations, “riotous behaviour” is the go-to charge for officers without other cause for arrest. In our experience it is most commonly applied in the wealthy and upper-middle class suburbs and business districts of South African cities where officers use it to detain car guards, the homeless, sex workers, and other vulnerable people perceived as disruptions to the order they seek to bring about. Too often however, as appears to have been the case with Grebe, it is simply used to punish those deemed disrespectful of SAPS authority." Daily Maverick

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Apparently Tinder calculates an internal "desirability score" for every user. Would you want to know yours?

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Legal trolling, feudal-style

"Some villagers also found they didn't have right of way into their properties, as Mr Roberts was claiming ownership of grass verges, and they ended up paying him for access. In one case, a resident paid £15,000 for land next to his house."

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"Communities report that photographers are often sent to take photographs without being accompanied by reporters to interview them.

Activists from poor communities report that they only get media attention when they go to extremes, such as causing damage. Protesters told researchers that when they called the media to cover their issues, they were asked if “anything is burning”. If nothing is burning, journalists don’t come and don’t report." The Conversation

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"...as we started asking people about their actual experiences — “What did you say the last time someone asked to have sex with you?” — the differences were a lot smaller. Close to half of the time, women are saying yes to these experiences. We have a paper under review that says there are no differences between men and women if you control for two factors: pleasure, which we define as how capable they perceive their partner to be, and stigma, which we define as someone believing you’re a bad person for engaging in casual sex. I like to think of my research as trying to rule out alternative explanations in a way that evolutionary psychology doesn’t bother to do." NY Mag

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The continuing struggle between democracy and religious authoritarianism in Iran

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Annoying anthropomorphic sexism from the farmer, but ignore him and focus on the awesome honey badger!

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""May you live in interesting times" is an English expression purported to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. Despite being so common in English as to be known as "the Chinese curse", the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced." Wikipedia

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It's great to hear this story from a first-person perspective

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Great piece explaining why it is so much more difficult to pull off (and get away with) a heist than it used to be

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"one of the many ways in which medieval thought paved the way for what we should recognise as scientific study of the universe was in making this distinction between the manipulating of spiritual agencies and the manipulating of invisible forces; prohibiting the one made more space for the other." New Statesman

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So Google uses an implementation of delegative or 'liquid' democracy among employees for certain kinds of internal decisions.

Links, Tuesday 12th Jan

Thread of (mostly) women talking about emotional labour. It's a *long* read, but it's worth at least dipping into. It will definitely get you thinking about the ways in which you or the people around you do unacknowledged emotional labour, and how this labour in any given situation is probably unfairly distributed by gender.

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Another reminder that flooding in the UK is largely the result of poor land use policies, policies that are more or less directly the result of lobbying by wealthy landowners.

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Now here's an Orwellian sentence: "Adolescent youth tend to romanticise and don’t have, in many cases, the systematic point of view that includes considerations about preserving the identity of the nation and the significance of assimilation"

(i.e. "The youth can't be trusted to be appropriately bigoted.")

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"Increasing the income share to the bottom 20 percent of citizens by a mere one percent results in a 0.38 percentage point jump in GDP growth. By contrast, increasing the income share of the top 20 percent of citizens yields a decline in GDP growth by 0.08 percentage points." PS Mag

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"Why do we need gender on our driving licence? Why do we have to have it on our passport if it doesn’t really add identification? It’s not relevant." Guardian

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This story... so many layers

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Jacobin Magazine​ has been putting out some really good stuff on market socialism recently - well worth reading, even if you disagree with fundamental premises and/or detailed prescriptions.

(Of the quoted proposal, how it is financed will make a big difference in how it plays out politically, and this question isn't really addressed)

"Suppose a public common fund were established, to undertake what might be euphemistically called the “compulsory purchase” of all privately-owned financial assets. It would, for example, “buy” a person’s mutual fund shares at their market price, depositing payment in the person’s bank account. By the end of this process, the common fund would own all formerly privately-owned financial assets, while all the financial wealth of individuals would be converted into bank deposits (but with the banks in question now owned in common, since the common fund now owns all the shares)."

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A big step forward for gender-neutral bathrooms!

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More about utterly horrible conditions at Pollsmoor Prison, in Cape Town. In addition to the inhumane conditions which result in disease and death for many inmates, many prisoners are held for long stretches while awaiting trial, sometimes for longer than they would have been if actually convicted. This is completely unacceptable.

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This is just too good - the expressions on her face! :D

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...

"according to research by a Canadian organ transplant organization, 36 percent of wives who were eligible to donate organs to their husbands went ahead with the operation, whereas only 6.5 percent of eligible husbands were willing to give their wives one of their precious organs." Cracked

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The goals of shaming disability claimants and handing large sums of cash to private contractors are being met handily. Actually saving money, not so much.

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This really just confirms the bleeding obvious. Question for the day: what are the chances the Tory government will address major human rights violations if it requires offering poor women of colour more generous visa terms?