Links, Thursday 19th Feb

"He said the government was struggling to “align Eskom’s message to our political message”." M&G

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"the ASTM Playground Surfacing Committee is proposing to significantly increase the resilience requirements for playgrounds. The motivation appears to be that the goal of improving playground safety with the current standard has not significantly reduced the number of hospital visits. To my mind this is not unlike the logic of the medieval doctor who, when their patient did not get well with one blood letting concluded that they needed more blood letting." Playground Guru

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"Remittances from the Somalian diaspora amount to $1.2-billion to $1.6-billion a year, which is roughly 50% of the country’s gross national income, and on which 40% of the population relies for survival. Over the past 10 years the money known to have been transferred to suspected terrorists in Somalia amounts to a few thousand dollars. Cutting off remittances is likely to kill more people than terrorists will ever manage." M&G

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"What morality comes down to is making relationships right. Morality is realizing, improving, and enhancing the kinds of relationships that are regarded as ideal in your culture. Sometimes violence is used to do that." Marshall Project

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Look at this ridiculous, moralistic shit. BBC conducts a "string" operation to confront a woman running a brothel with Chinese workers. Are we gonna describe *putting an ad in the newspaper* as "trafficking" now? Do we think that migrant women have so little agency of their own that they should be prevented from answering job adverts now? This is pretty much the same attitude which holds that Asian women needed to be locked up "for their own good" to be prevented from doing sex work (and yes, that is a thing that happens). BBC

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"What I found alarming about Fifty Shades of Grey was the overlap between my experience as an abuse victim and the specific way the audience was being conditioned to accept Christian as a romantic lead." Mary Sue

(This, of course, also goes for just about the entire Romance genre)

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Beautiful. I really want to see this film. Does anyone know where/when it might be showing in Cape Town?

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Nature is pretty neat!

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Thoughts? Slate

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Very interesting long read about the theological underpinnings of IS, particular it's obsession with the apocalypse. It's kind of as if fans of the "Left Behind" novels acquired an army, territory and control over a helpless population. That is, it's pretty scary.

"Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates." Atlantic

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"The ANC has put away the big stick, and is now using state resources, patronage and state power to reshape the media to its liking." Daily Maverick

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Just a reminder that George Washington was a committed slaveholder, and went to great lengths (including some of dubious legality even at the time) to retain his human property. NY Times

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Some of these ideas are no doubt half-baked, but the general point is correct: a major factor in the current crisis is excessively conservative monetary policy Guardian

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This is really important, and I haven't seen it reported on enough. The draft Gender Identity law in Malta will prohibit surgical intervention on intersex children unless it is actually medically required. Too many healthy children are still being given surgery at birth to force them into the standard sex binary that our society deems compulsory. This very frequently damages sexual function and fertility, and very often results in gender dysphoria when these children enter puberty (especially if their medical condition is kept secret from them, as is also often the case). The law is a massive leap forward, and should be widely emulated. Times of Malta

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This is pretty cool

"As there was also protection against very high doses, equivalent to the amount of new virus that would be produced in a chronically infected patient, the researchers believe the approach may be useful in people who already have HIV." BBC

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Some interesting stuff on non-celiac gluten sensitivity. There is some evidence that the placebo effect plays a role

BUUUT... some people who report gluten sensitivity might in fact be sensitive to non-gluten compounds called FODMAPS which are also often found in grains

Links, Sunday 15th Feb

LOL

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LOL, it turns out there's *already* an FW de Klerk Street in Cape Town (quite near to Marthinus van Schalkwyk Street!)

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Well, this is intense. A geopolitical motivation taking precedence over actual energy needs?

"Once the agreement comes into force, the Russians will have a veto over South Africa doing business with any other nuclear vendor. And it will be binding for a minimum of 20 years, during which Russia can hold a gun to South Africa’s head, in effect saying: “Do business with us, or forget nuclear.”" MG

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The growth in renewable energy would appear to be unstoppable. (Check out the "Terrordome" graph!) Bloomberg

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Damning inside information about just how far Zuma has gone in turning the South African state into a vehicle for his own interests

"Mostly, the executive is held together by mutually reinforcing relationships of patronage. Provincial politicians with vested economic interests often owe their positions to lines of patronage both up and down the political chain." RDM

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For anyone looking for insight into the state of our collective erotic imagination, you should look no further than this - a livestream of all the search terms entered on a major porn streaming site (in the "straight" section). Obviously VERY VERY NSFW, and often offensive on many levels.

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Africa Check gives a good rundown of the SONA, fact-checking where it has info.

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[Some explicit discussion of sexual coercion and some consensual sexual behaviour that might nevertheless be distressing]

A good piece, really trying to address the paradox of acknowledging the fucked-up power structures in our society that shape our enjoyment of certain things while also actually enjoying them at a personal level.

"Even in my blog you’ll see me waver between “my cunt likes what it likes, leave it be” to “how has cultures shaped and perhaps fucked up my sexuality”. I understand this is an unpleasant discussion and will make you second guess yourself. But I still think it needs to happen." Medium

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[TW: sexual assault]

Can we be clear that DSK is simply a rapist? The fact that the woman he assaulted (in this case) happened to have been paid for performing *a different sex act* to the one he actually performed on her doesn't make him any less a rapist. You do a massive disservice to sex workers by conflating sexual assault and the consensual sex they have with boundary-respecting clients. The Local

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This is basically Pony Mac​'s experience of South Africa. ZANews

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Amazing. The Google "Deepmind" initiative unveils an algorithm that will, with a few hours of learning, be able to play simple video games better than any human can.

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No killer robots any time soon; probably many economic, social and legal challenges due to AI, however. Fusion

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The rest of the review isn't particularly informative, but this is a good bit

"In the social contract, individuals are a premise, not a product. In economics, the satisfaction of individual preferences is the self-evident goal, but this is never explained or justified, even though it is an astonishingly rare commitment across the sweep of time. Siedentop wants to treat such first principles as the result of a history that made liberalism conceivable in the first place." Boston Review

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Well shit

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Good profile, and an insight into the current Greek negotiating position

“We are a party of the left, but what we are putting on the table is essentially the agenda of a reformist bankruptcy lawyer from the City of London,” he says. “The bailout was not a bailout of Greece in 2010, it was a bailout of the German and French banks. The German public was misled into thinking that this was money going to the Greeks, the Greek public was misled into thinking that this was our salvation.” Guardian

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Ah yes, the EFF is a conspiracy of the media and Western governments. South African politicians are sounding more and more like Russian politicians every day... M&G

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So Kate Smurthwaite panics at some *rumours* that people might picket outside her event and essentially calls it off herself (notice that even an actually-occurring picket is hardly a threat to life and limb). Then calls up the media and tells people she's been "censored". This convinces a whole lot of radfems (along with some people who should know better) to write a letter to the Guardian opposing "censorship" at universities. What a sorry mess.

"I can’t believe I’ve even had to write this. It’s such a non-story that I’m impressed Kate has got so much mileage out of it." Goldsmith Comedy

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Man, this is a window into a different time and place. Thanks Melissa​! Vice

Links, Friday 13th Feb

This is unbelievably gross. The right-wing government of Norway - richest country in Europe, recall - intends to criminalise giving money or any other kind of assistance to beggars. And this is pretty explicitly motivated by racial antipathy towards an 'influx' of Roma migrants. Local Newsweek

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Thinking about the previous post... The 'Nordic model' is basically premised on maintaining a clear distinction between an ingroup - people who will get access to all kinds of nice welfare and social services - and an outgroup. You could argue that that's necessary for any welfare system, but there's definitely a dark side to it operating at the psychological level. It involves a certain willingness to draw a firm boundary and dismiss the needs of anyone thought of as being outside that line. Hence the poor treatment - often 'unbelievably poor', given our stereotype of 'nice' Nordic countries - of people in the outgroup: homeless people, sex workers, undocumented migrants, racial minorities, etc.

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Interesting piece. It turns out much of the increase in prison population in the US since 1980 is due to prosecutors electing to level more serious charges at offenders than they used to.

"the real growth in the prison population comes from county-level district attorneys sending violent people to prison. And there’s a lot to be said for nonprison approaches to a lot of people who are in prison for violent crimes. But that’s a political issue that we haven’t even begun to address, in part because it’s politically scary." Slate

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This piece doesn't relate that much to my own experience of Afrika Burn, since I've only ever been a casual attendee, not heavily involved with volunteering or management. Nevertheless, probably a worthwhile piece of criticism.

My own take on AB, incidentally, is that it's a pretty fun festival for the participants. Some people probably even have new experiences and learn something about themselves while they're there, which is obviously nice for them. But I don't think it's doing anything to change the world, and I think the most annoying thing about the whole scene is that many people imagine that they *are* changing the world for the better simply by showing up an doing a fun thing for themselves and their friends.

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Sometimes I wonder why people agree to be profiled in rags like the Daily Mail, but with these two I reckon the sole motivation is to be like "Check out how cool we are and how awesome our life is"

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This is pretty spot-on. A citizen's income paves the way to a different sort of economy and society, and needs to be sold as such. It's implications would be massive, and you can't just sell it as a fix to some specific problems in the function of the existing welfare state. Guardian

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"The tourist attraction was also something of a non-starter because Manson believes he is immortal." Independent

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This is dreadful. Also a reminder that anti-religious violence is definitely a thing, and it tends to be directed mainly at Muslims these days. Middle East Eye

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[TW: sexual assault]

Very telling example of how the law and society conflates sex work with violence, to the detriment of everyone concerned. This woman, giving evidence, clearly describes being sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He wanted to engage in "a specific act" and she responded by crying and “I showed my reticence with gestures … gestures that made myself understood". But "he smiled and went ahead anyway". And yet DSK is only being charged with "pimping". Consenting to one sort of sex act does not mean consent to *any* sex act! Whether money changes hands or not is utterly irrelevant! Guardian

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The US government alone provides $70 million a year in funding to "anti-trafficking" organisations, including Julie Bindel's utterly shoddy "research" (mostly restatements of sex industry myths and misleading statistics that were already discredited some time ago). In contrast, ALL funding for sex worker rights organisation WORLDWIDE amounts to about €8 million a year. And yet Bindel describes these organisation as "well-funded" fronts for the "pimp lobby". Vice

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"Eddie Redmayne is literally flawless in this film. Eddie Redmayne knows Jupiter Ascending is bad. Eddie Redmayne knows this perhaps better than anyone else in our solar system, and he does what needs to be done. He swooshes around without a shirt but with a black cape for two hours, speaking only in whispers except for the very occasional ridiculous outburst. He is so over-the-top I am not sure where the top even is anymore. He should win an Oscar." The Mary Sue

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Yeah, this is totally reasonable and proportionate - sending in *riot police* to catch people suspected of benefit fraud. Funny how you never see these aggressive tactics directed at all those bankers and company CEOs who commit multi-million pound white collar crimes. Croydon Advertiser

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So this is obviously shocking:

"The survey, also carried out in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Italy and Norway found that teenage girls in England reported the highest rates of sexual coercion, with about one in five (22%) saying they had suffered physical violence or intimidation from boyfriends, including slapping, punching, strangling and being beaten with an object."

But in this report, they feel the need to mention that "a high proportion of teenage boys regularly viewed pornography", as if these are obviously related. A high proportion of teenage boys also play football. If you're going to draw a causal connection between two things, you've got to do better than appealing to moralistic handwringing Guardian

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"At around midnight, [Lee Chang-hyun] goes online with a couple of friends and performs his meal, spicy raw squid one day, crab the next. "Perform" is the right word. He is extravagant in his gestures, flaunting the food to his computer camera to tantalise the viewers. He eats noisily and that's part of the show. He's invested in a good microphone to capture the full crunch and slurp.

This is not a private affair. Some 10,000 people watch him eating per day, he says. They send a constant stream of messages to his computer and he responds verbally (by talking) and orally (by eating, very visibly and noisily)." BBC

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[TW: sexual assault]

The Occidental case is very complicated and definitely interesting from a legal perspective. But I have my doubts by how much attention it's drawing. I think the vast majority of sexual assault cases are much more straightforward, and we risk undermining genuine progress by focusing on one particular case where the new regulations have *arguably* produced a paradoxical result. Any thoughts appreciated. Slate

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In light of the mooted (but thankfully unsuccessful) ban on begging, it's noteworthy that the homeless population in Norway numbers only about 1000 (the police estimate 2000, a number that most authorities consider to be inflated. As Tyler Cowen remarks, this is a society that is "not very good at processing discord"

Incidentally, if you recall the debate before the French ban on burqas and niqabs, it emerged there that only about 2000 women living in France at the time actually wore these types of veil (out of a Muslim population of around 5-6 million)

In both cases, it's not so much the scale of the "problem", but so much as how the visible existence of a certain kind of person makes the majority *feel*

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South African democracy in action.

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"The global supply chain that brings us those tablets and phones, and pretty much everything else from our clothes and food to our toys and souvenirs, is nothing short of a moon shot itself – a vast, unprecedented engineering solution to a truly astronomical logistics problem. The fact that it's hidden from most people's sight, and that it has become so utterly reliable and efficient to the point of transparency, doesn't make it any less of an achievement of human technical endeavour." BBC

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"With the Arbitration Committee opting only to ban the one woman in the dispute despite her behavior being no worse than that of the men, it’s hard not to see this as a setback to Wikipedia’s efforts to rectify its massive gender gap." Slate

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Gah, why is South African immigration policy so bizarre and xenophobic!?!?!

"a “uni-visa” system for the 15 countries of the Southern African Development Community, a bloc dominated by South Africa, is nowhere near to being ready, despite having been mooted in 1998. One big sticking point has been South Africa’s fear of a deluge of illegal immigrants." Economist

Links, Sunday 8th Feb

The headline of the article is kinda exclusionary in itself - when they say "the problem nobody's talking about", what they mean is "the problem that white people and white-dominated media aren't talking about" MIC

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This sounds excellent. Spread the word if you know anyone who might want to contribute.

"… So much of Black History Month takes place in the passive voice. Leaders “get assassinated,” patrons “are refused” service, women “are ejected” from public transport. So the objects of racism are many but the subjects few. In removing the instigators, the historians remove the agency and, in the final reckoning, the historical responsibility … There is no month when we get to talk about [James] Blake [the white busdriver challenged by Rosa Parks]; no opportunity to learn the fates of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who murdered Emmett Till; no time set aside to keep track of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, whose false accusations of rape against the Scottsboro Boys sent five innocent young black men to jail. Wouldn't everyone–particularly white people–benefit from becoming better acquainted with these histories?" Africa is a Country

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Interesting. Sincere opinion or typical Motlanthe diplomacy?

"During a question and answer session later in the day, however, Motlanthe expanded that to say he endorsed “Oom Kathy” [Ahmed Kathrada]’s support for the renaming of Table Bay Boulevard after FW de Klerk, describing it as “the right thing to do”." Daily Maverick

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[TW for graphic descriptions of violence]

"I still suffer from memories of the British apartheid system [in Kenya] and numerous instances of arbitrary killing and brutality by British forces, Kenya police and Kenyan African Rifles. In reality we protected land-grabbing British farmers and enriched UK companies.

Young troops were encouraged to shoot any African on sight in certain areas. Prize money was offered by senior officers for every death." Africa is a Country

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Rational economic policy and now rational immigration policy! What further surprises can we expect from the new Greek government? Greek Reporter

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A few wince-worthy turns of phrase, coming as this does out of an Israeli context, but some good theorising about terrorism as a political strategy.

"Why are [states] so sensitive to terrorist provocations? Because the legitimacy of the modern state is based on its promise to keep the public sphere free of political violence. A regime can withstand terrible catastrophes, and even ignore them, provided its legitimacy is not based on preventing them." Guardian

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Nice piece about colour technology in movies, and how filmmakers haver responded to technological developments. (I enjoyed the video showing Kubrick's use of bright reds)

Atlantic

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Great piece about Ponte tower in Joburg, and it's place in a city of migrants. Roads and Kingdoms

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From a couple of years ago, but timely nevertheless.

"The European crisis, in other words, had nothing to do with thrifty Germans and profligate Spaniards, but with policies aimed at boosting German employment, which also forced up German national savings rates. These excess savings had to be absorbed within Europe, and the subsequent imbalances were so large (because German’s savings imbalance was so large) that they led to today’s circumstances." Foreign Policy

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Putting game theory to work

"Imagine what would happen if the federal government were to offer a million-dollar reward and promise safety to anyone — Islamic State militant or not — who provided information that led to the rescue of American hostages, and the capture or killing of their kidnappers. Holding an American hostage would then become fraught with peril, no matter where the kidnappers might hide, as anyone, even one of their own, might turn on them at any time." NY Times

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I'm sure this is old news to people who know their Middle Eastern history, but I wasn't aware of the extent to which Jaffa was destroyed as a centre for Palestinian population and culture.

"In November 1947 the UN published its plan for dividing Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. Jaffa was made a Palestinian island within Jewish boundaries. In the fighting that followed, paramilitaries commanded by Menachem Begin, a Tel Avivan who later became Israel’s prime minister, rolled barrel bombs down the alleyways into Jaffa’s cafés and fired mortars into residential districts. By the time Israel declared independence on May 14th 1948, prompting Arab armies to move in, Jews had chased Jaffa’s Arabs out of the city, leaving less than a 20th of the population behind." Economist

Links, Friday 6th Feb

Cape Town local politics are absolutely poisonous, as evidenced by events at the first city council meeting of the year. First, the motion to rename Table Bay Boulevard after FW de Klerk was passed, a move that mayor Patricia de Lille described as "progressive". Second, and more troubling from a constitutional perspective, ANC councillors were effectively barred from the meeting by several means (including literally being physically barred from entering the meeting room). IOL
Discussed by Jacques Rousseau here

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Any thoughts as to the plausibility of this? With all the shenanigans on the part of the various South African security agencies, it's pretty hard to sort fact from fiction, tbh. IOL

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Good piece, about the lack of non-derogatory terms for LGBTQI people and practices in indigenous South African languages, and how this is related to colonialism and the lack of institutional support for scholarship in these languages. HOLAA

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This is helpful, as I certain found a lot of the coverage around this confusing.

"an American first lady went to a Muslim country and followed completely normal protocol by going unveiled. There was very little reaction within that country, and no reaction among her hosts. The American media completely freaked out, got a number of basic facts wildly wrong, and did so all in a way that insulted that country and its citizens by perpetuating racist stereotypes." Vox

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Although Greece's national debt is extremely high as a percentage of GDP, because most of this debt has long maturities and relatively low interest rates, it only pays 4.3% of GDP to service this debt. Compare this to the UK, which pays about 3% of GDP. This is the headline figure to bear in mind when we talk about the necessity for debt relief or the plausibility of ending austerity. FT

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What the United Front (the political formation created by NUMSA) is up to these days, including a much more forthright condemnation of xenophobia than we've seen from either the ANC or the EFF. Daily Maverick

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Huh. An entire Truman Show village in the Netherlands designed to make people with severe dementia feel at home. Atlantic

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"I am so fucking confused about what kind of sex other feminists think I should have in order to be liberated. Want my authentic opinion? I care a hell of a lot more about labor practices and ethics on porn sets than I do about if I have to fake an orgasm on camera or not." Tits and Sass

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"Shortly after he was sworn in, Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras found himself inside the Maximos Mansion without some basic necessities. “They took everything,” he said. “I was looking for an hour to find soap.”

Traditionally, a defeated Greek prime minister will wait until their successor has been anointed to wish them well. But Antonis Samaras was in such a rush to go that he even failed to leave the Wi-Fi password." Guardian

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A mind-boggling rundown on some recent research about the placebo effect. Including the fact that it still works even if patients are *specifically told* that what they're receiving is a placebo. Cracked

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Linguists *are* pretty hardcore. XKCD

Links, Saturday 31st Jan

Video game makers are doing a better job of managing their in-game currencies right now than Eurozone governments are doing with the euro. Vox

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A good rundown on the systematic miscarriages of justice that happen in the US legal system (starting from elected judges who campaign on the promise of being "tough on crime"). Cracked

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Good piece about the illogical and moralising regulations governing strip club licencing in the UK. These regulations are actively harming workers. Vice

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They may be going overboard here in trying to identify a single small factor that made a big difference, but these are still some interesting stories Cracked

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LOL, these are brilliant

"You’re going to have to go through the asteroid belt you’d hoped to avoid at the beginning of this journey." The Toast

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This is a serious national problem. In South Africa medical professionals are systematically denying women termination of pregnancy services to which they have a legal right. It is absolutely shameful that women in this country are still being forced to use improperly trained and unregulated "backroom" providers. M&G

Links, Wednesday 28th January

"the EU/IMF strategy for dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 crisis is in tatters. They have destroyed centrist politics in Greece: first by forcing political leaders to sign up to austerity, then acquiescing as those political leaders indulged in their tradtional game of graft, patronage and double dealing." Channel 4

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Bummer, it seems that e-cigarettes deliver considerably more formaldehye (a carcinogen) than regular cigarettes. The overall risk profile may still be better though, since formaldehyde is by no means the only carcinogen in cigarette spoke. Perhaps this problem could also be fixed by improving the technology? NEJM

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"So now that Mr. Tsipras has won, and won big, European officials would be well advised to skip the lectures calling on him to act responsibly and to go along with their program. The fact is they have no credibility; the program they imposed on Greece never made sense. It had no chance of working." NYTimes

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Wowzers, in 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riots escalated to the point where white pilots dropped *firebombs* on black neighbourhoods (in addition to all the white folks starting fires on the ground). There was mass destruction, with as many as 300 people dying. Cracked

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Alongside the offensive language, can we note the irony of Cumberbatch empathising with black actors who find it difficult to get roles... having himself recently taken a role originally written for a person of South Asian origin? Guardian

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Reading this, it occurs to me that those lists of "famous people you wouldn't believe are scientologists" typically neglect to mention that even these famous and wealthy people are very likely, at least in some respects, also victims of extremely violent and manipulative organisation.

"Taylor brought Travolta into the church, but, having since defected, admits that his allegiance isn’t entirely voluntary: After years of spiritual “auditing”—the process by which members reveal their deepest secrets and desires in order to go “clear”—the church has enough dirt on Travolta to keep him loyal." Slate

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You all know I support a basic unconditional income, but it matters how the policy is designed. It's definitely unrealistic to expect that all means testing could be eliminated immediately, and *some* means testing would probably have to exist even in the longer term (a person with a serious disability, for instance, would probably require more than the standard rate). Guardian

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It's a mystery to me that the people who devote the most energy to actually thinking through the long-term consequences of policies are also prepared to say "just vote with your heart" come election time. Hell, if you're a proper radical, you probably think electoral politics is a mere mockery of real democracy, so *all* voting is tactical voting. Guardian

Links, Monday 26th Jan

This is so typical of South Africa - the people in charge aren't willing make a very simple compromise that would go along way to recognising the dignity of poor working people.

"Brink, Johnson, Beukes and their colleagues work for Sannicare, which has a portable toilet cleaning contract for the City of Cape Town. They spend the whole day emptying and washing the portable toilets, sluicing the contents and the dirty water down a drain in the floor of the depot. At the end of their shift they have to leave without taking a shower.

There are showers at the depot, but the City of Cape Town keeps these locked and reserved for municipal employees. There is a canteen at the depot but it is also used by the City council employees only, and no contract worker is allowed to eat inside." Groundup

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"Here’s a strange thing about freedom as recognition. In SA, the experience of this freedom has, for many, taken the form of fantastical voyage, or, to say the same thing in another way, it has taken the form of watching, with a combination of sympathy and longing, a voyage somebody else is making.

Freedom defined this way surely cannot last forever. Slowly, invisibly, it loses its charm. There comes a time when people tire of watching the journeys of others. They come to ask why they themselves are standing still. I told the audience in Bergen that SA was reaching this point." Business Day

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Wow, beautiful Slate

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Misandry champion

"Gallan told the newspaper that her "secret to a long life has been staying away from men. They're just more trouble than they're worth."" HuffPost

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The ECB does a good thing (however, notice the Germans in bizzaro-land warning about the dangers of inflation, while inflation runs at *half* the target rate!) Guardian

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These are all actually pretty cool Cracked

(Though why they can't just say "things that look pretty cool in slow motion" escapes me)

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Disturbing account of how tensions between foreign shop owners and locals in Soweto eventually escalated into xenophobic violence and looting this week. Daily Maverick

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"Tony Blair wrote to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to thank him for the “excellent cooperation” between the two countries’ counter-terrorism agencies following a period during which the UK and Libya worked together to arrange for Libyan dissidents to be kidnapped and flown to Tripoli, along with their families." Guardian

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Interesting discussion of same sex unions in early modern Europe and North America. Guardian

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Ha, why am I even surprised by this stuff any more?

"Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry’s dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Without them, today’s more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away." Washington Post

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Hmmm, a suggestion that the power crisis in SA is attributable more to lack of transmission capacity than generating capacity, in which case building more power stations won't necessarily solve the problem. A worrying prospect indeed. Business Day

Links, Thursday 22nd January

In the Netherlands, a televised alert was issued warning people about the 'Superman' tablets containing deadly PMMA (instead of relatively innocuous MDMA). In consequence, no-one died from the pills. In contrast, although health agencies in the UK received the same information, no warning was given and 4 people died. Just goes to show what a difference aggressive harm reduction measures can make. Guardian

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"One of the most glaring threats that HONY makes to humanity lies in its pretension of representing all of its diversity through the lens of a single individual. While claiming to define the population of New York, it presents a whitewashed image of an earnest, vibrant city that takes place predominantly in Manhattan, during the day. The individuals featured are only those Stanton feels comfortable approaching, those he deems interesting enough to photograph, who do not take offense to an intrusive white man’s request to commodify their images." Warscapes

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That awkward moment after you make "benefits tourism" a central plank of your political platform, and then it turns out that your own citizens receive more in benefits from other EU countries than the reverse... Guardian

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Legalised marijuana in Colorado: basically a huge success. Slate

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[CW for simulated child sex abuse]

Animated child pornography presents an interesting conundrum, in that no-one is harmed in the making of it, but it satisfies a desire that is repugnant. We're quite rightly horrified by *actual* child abuse! In some ways the debate parallels the case of simulated violence in movies/video games. Basically two schools of thought arise: the "reinforcement theorists", who think that enjoying a simulation of a activity reinforces people's inclination towards it, and so makes them more likely to engage in the reality; and the "dissipation theorists", who think that enjoying the simulation somehow dissipates the underlying urge harmlessly (kind of like a Freudian "hydraulic" theory). The two mechanisms may of course both be acting at the same time (simulation could reinforce the impulse but nevertheless alleviate actual harm on average if similar simulations are in fact always present to satisfy it).

Anyway, it's interesting that the different theories broadly line up with conservative vs liberal political impulses, but are (at least in principle) empirically testable. BBC

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In case anyone missed the news, the South African National Aids Council has come out strongly in support of sex work decriminalisation.

"Sanac chief executive Fareed Abdullah said that ... the fact that sex work was illegal in South Africa made it difficult to address the “heavy social stigma” associated with the profession, as well as their low access to health services." M&G

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"That October [of 1993], De Klerk became the first SA – and perhaps only – head of state, let alone Nobel Peace Prize nominee, publicly to claim credit for a massacre." IOL

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The map and the territory... Vice

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"The pernicious, toxic and inescapable lifelong effect of being disciplined physically – either to the point of abuse, or to the point that the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable blurs in your mind – is that you almost have to say you turned out fine, just to redeem the fact of being who you are. That you “turned out fine” is the only way to make sense of having once felt total terror or uncontrollable shaking rage at the sight of one (or both) of the two people expected to care most for you in the world. The thought that you might have ended up relatively OK or perhaps even better without all that fear is almost unbearable: the suffering only doubles if you admit that it truly had no purpose." Guardian

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Complex, moving piece by a woman who has experienced clitoridectomy/FGM (her preferred terms), and how this has affected her relationship to sex, her family, and her religious community. The Big Round Table

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Interesting article on the art of inventing new names for things. Good stuff in here about the physical and emotional connotations of different sounds (fricatives convey speed or motion, for instance). NYTimes

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"A woman earning a couple of hundred quid for engaging in consensual photography is the least offensive thing in The Sun." (Whore)dible

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Interesting thesis, that early capitalist institutions and practices in Europe were substantially borrowed from the Islamic world.

"Crusaders and religious orders settling in Palestine observed other Islamic practices and institutions that proved useful back home. When a certain Walter de Merton in thirteenth-century England vested assets to endow an institution for educating scholars in Oxford, the terms of the legal agreement to all intents and purposes replicated those of a waqf to set up a madrasa. By then, waqfs had been in operation for many centuries in Islamic societies, but in England the concept had never been applied before." Islamic Commentary

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Good piece. It's pretty well established by now that dieting and other forms of behavioural weight management just don't work. Yet doctors continue to harass fat patients about losing weight. Would they be plying them with drugs that had a *97%* failure rate?

"I have been fat my whole life. So when healthcare professionals ask me—in the middle of a consultation about something completely unrelated—whether I know that my BMI is too high and whether I’m engaged in any weight management, I’m always a little surprised when they act like they might be the first to have ever brought it up. As if I might have made it through my 30 years without ever once noticing that I was fat and that some people think that fat is bad." BMJ

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Apologies for the weird framing of this article, which no doubt has something to to with Telegraph editorial policies (what the hell does Germaine Greer have to do with anything?!). The basic claim is, however, quite interesting. It argues that labour shortages brought about by the Black Death increased the economic bargaining position of women in Western Europe, with lasting positive effects on their social position. It sort of reminds me of the situation around WW1 and WW2, which brought about increased demands for labour and thus increasing impetus for women's rights. Telegraph

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I'm sure there are minor issues I'd disagree about, but overall I think the English/Welsh Green Party have a pretty great platform Guardian

(However, while the UK retains a plurality voting system, it remains advisable to vote strategically. Here is a list of constituencies that the Greens are actively contesting, and I'd suggest checking up-to-date polling information before casting your ballot. If you happen to be polled, it's probably advisable to state your *favourite* party, even if you might vote for another party strategically - this indirectly allows you to signal voting intentions to other voters, thus building a "critical mass" that can switch over from strategic to preference voting en masse)

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I'm all for restorative/transformative justice as a general principle, but it makes me somewhat cynical to see it disproportionately being applied to overprivileged scumbags who can afford decent legal representation. Why don't we pilot the experiment with truly desperate perpetrators who could really do with a more supportive judicial process? IOL

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Huh. Apparently a Charlie Hebdo cover mocking the murder of protesters in Egypt during the July 2013 coup is protected free speech, but a cartoon mocking the murder of Charlie Hebdo journalists is “defending terrorism". I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that MOCKING PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN MURDERED IS A TERRIBLE THING TO DO, but probably shouldn't be a crime one way or the other.

Electronic Intifada

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*sings* I see your truuuue colours shining through... *sings* Guardian

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"In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency's day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds." The Week

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One woman's experience of forced plural marriage in a fundamentalist Mormon sect. Cracked

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Amartya Sen makes a strong case for state-financed universal healthcare provision in developing countries.

One thought on the argument's applicability to South Africa: he argues that healthcare provision is often relatively cheap in poor countries because it's relatively labour intensive and wages tend to be low there. However, SA is one of the most unequal societies in the world, and  expanded public provision means luring doctors away from lucrative private practice. How much more difficult does this make things? Guardian

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Preach

"the second world war is, for British culture... a comfortable bolthole for some wish-fulfilment, where our judgment is always sound and our strength only boosted by the severity of the test. It would be much more fruitful for us, in the quest for self-awareness, to make films about the Boer war, but for some reason we never do. Downton Abbey, likewise, pretends with the odd subplot to have something to say about haves and have-nots, but is in fact telling a very photogenic, undemanding story about wealth." Guardian

Links, Friday 16th January

[TW for police violence]

Police work: shooting kids, standing around watching them bleed out, tackling family members who try to give assistance. Also this:

"Officer Loehmann, 26, who fired the fatal shot, had quit a suburban police force after his supervisors determined two years ago that he had had a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training and was emotionally unprepared to cope with stresses of the job. The Cleveland police acknowledged that they had never reviewed the previous police personnel file of Officer Loehmann." NY Times

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Horrible story about the first concerned effort to document the camp-based Holocaust in Western Europe, and how it was suppressed by the UK government. (I add the qualifier to emphasise that the camps were not  the full story of the Holocaust - the Einsatzgruppen, who operated in Eastern Europe, murdered comparable numbers of people, but left less documentary and physical evidence. And fewer surviving witnesses.) Guardian

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Good piece on the intellectual connections between intersectional feminism and animal rights activism. Everyday Feminism

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This is just horrible. This journalist followed around a police squad around for the whole of NYE in Hillbrow. They aggressively searched people, broke down doors, broke up parties, destroyed or confiscated property, just generally made life unpleasant for residents. They didn't uncover evidence of a single actual crime - the closest they came is finding one guy who was carrying a pair of scissors, which they think identifies him as a possible mugger. This is a community with real problems, and obviously people shouldn't be throwing bottles from balconies. But how is this sort of confrontational policing supposed to address any of these problems? The police are conducting a war against this community, not trying to help it. I think it's telling that the only times the author reports anyone actually being *hit* by projectiles is when they were specifically aimed at police vehicles.

10and5

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"Police originally thought Bathily was a conspirator when he managed to escape through a goods lift. “They told me, ‘get down on the ground, hands over your head’. They cuffed me and held me for an hour and a half as if I was with them,” he added. Once freed he was able to give them details of the layout of the store and where people were hiding." Guardian

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Some resources about the rescue industry, aka "white saviour industrial complex". Storify

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Response to Russell Brand's poorly thought out views on drug policy reform.

"The ‘addiction-as-disease’ model is highly contested, since it is based on an arbitrary and changeable set of ‘symptoms’ that principally revolve around the labelling of people who use drugs as sick and dangerous, disempowered, and unable to exercise agency, choice, and self-determination." INPUD

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"One of my oldest and kindest friends from Paris, a man with a beautifully aristocratic last name, made a point the other day that seems to have become one of the default rationales: “But Charlie Hebdo offended everyone the same. My grandmother, who is a practicing Catholic, will tell you they are harsher with the Pope than with anyone else.” While this may even be true, Anatole France had the right of it when he said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”" N+1

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[TW: emotional abuse]

Long, but insightful, piece about emotional abuse in the context of a poly relationship. Really good at underlining how guilt can paradoxically be used as a weapon of control by an abuser. Medium

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Good piece by Feminist Fightback. 

"Women, Black and Queer workers turned to feminism, antiracism and gay liberation, not because they couldn’t find a trade union or a Marxist group to join, but because existing forms of politics (predicated upon the white male subject) failed to respond to their needs as workers. Of course, there were many complex reasons why worker militancy went into retreat from the 1970s onwards, but the notion that this was due to all those selfish, feminist and gays preoccupied with their identitarian agenda is ridiculous. The rich, multiple and various currents of feminist/anti-racist/Queer politics that have emerged over the last forty years or so should not be viewed as a threat to class struggle, but, to the contrary, as a way to make struggles around class and labour at the point of production more effective, more widespread and more powerful."

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Pretty sound article. The drop in oil prices is a rare moment of political possibility, and governments should use it to stop subsidising fossil fuel production and consumption and start taxing it.

"The most straightforward piece of reform, pretty much everywhere, is simply to remove all the subsidies for producing or consuming fossil fuels. Last year governments around the world threw $550 billion down that rathole—on everything from holding down the price of petrol in poor countries to encouraging companies to search for oil. By one count, such handouts led to extra consumption that was responsible for 36% of global carbon emissions in 1980-2010." Economist

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Ha, yes.

"Woman: I just want to be left alone when I walk down the street.
Dude: THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO OTHER WAY FOR ME TO INTERACT WITH A WOMAN" Medium

Links, Saturday 10th January

Yay, a new antibiotic on the horizon! Guardian

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Ha, this is good. On the oft-repeated canard that Islam "needs a reformation" on the grounds that this would obviously produce a separation of church and state.

"But no one seems to be calling for an Islamic Henry VIII to reinvent Muslim society — and that isn’t just because the king had a penchant for beheadings. There is no getting around the fact that Henry technically transformed England into a theocracy. The king declared himself England’s supreme political and religious leader, the very role that Islamists imagine a caliph would enjoy. (To this day, Queen Elizabeth vies with the Dalai Lama for the title of World’s Most Endearing Nominal Theocrat.)" Foreign Policy

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Would you rather live on $100k a year now, or in 1964 (holding the *nominal* amount fixed)? How about $20k a year? This interesting little thought experiment illustrates how technological progress has exacerbated rather than alleviated the effects of growing nominal income inequality. Marginal Revolution

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Catching up stuff from a few days ago... The UK government denied the UN special rapporteur on violence against women access to the Yarl's Wood immigration detention facility, presumably because she would in fact have found significant evidence of violence against women. Can we talk for a second about how abhorrent this is? Guardian

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“We always say that, for us, conservation is all about killing things.” New Yorker

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This confirms all my prejudices and I'm not even sorry. Slate

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Your cat probably doesn't like you, and probably doesn't even like being petted. 

"Finally, there's some evidence, turned up by Mills, that many cats don't actually like being petted by humans at all. In a 2013 study, he and other researchers measured levels of stress hormones in cats, with the intention of figuring out whether having multiple cats in the same household is a bad idea. That didn't turn out to be true, but they did find that the cats who allowed themselves to be petted had higher stress levels afterward than the cats who disliked it so much that they simply ran away." Vox

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This is unbelievable. Boko Haram have just massacred more than 2000 people in a single attack on a town in northern Nigeria :( :( Washington Post

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Huh. In 2007, while President Ahmadinejad was very publicly denying the Holocaust, Iranian state TV was broadcasting a hit show *about* the Holocaust, including sympathetic portrayals of French Jews in danger of deportation. The story is loosely based on the life of Abdol Hossein Sardari, an Iranian consular official who saved the live of hundreds of French Jews by issuing them fraudulent Iranian passports. WSJ

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More Iran trivia... Apparently it's normally considered very rude to accept a give the first time it's offered - you should refuse three times, allowing the giver to insist. Here is my favourite quote from the article:

"It is possible to ask someone not to t'aarof ("t'aarof nakonid"), but that raises new difficulties, since the request itself might be a devious type of t'aarof." Wiki

Links, Wednesday 7th January

I can't pick only one quote out of this - it's basically a litany of systematic abuses of sex workers committed police, prosecutors and judges in NYC. This in a jurisdiction which is now supposedly focussed on "protecting victims of trafficking".

Vice

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Any experts on Tanzanian history? This new books seems to suggest that the Ujamaa programme was originally conceived around voluntary "villagization" and that the later, more coercive, phases of the programme was in some way forced upon Nyerere by local elites. This is contrary to what I remember being told, basically that Nyerere got impatient and pulled the trigger himself. I remember that Scott talks about it in "Seeing like a state", but can't remember his analysis of the political context. M&G Global Women's Strike

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Some good discussion of why philosophy as a discipline remains so apparently hostile to women and people of colour. Guardian

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Never forget: Drug criminalisation continues to kill people. It's important that we hold politicians and the law enforcement authorities accountable for this. Guardian

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God, this is terrifying. I remember kind of panicking the first time I ate mochi, feeling that I was choking. Turns out this was not a completely irrational fear! Guardian

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Interesting commentary on where the South Africa left (i.e. NUMSA and compatriots) is at politically. My own feeling is that the programme of the Brazilian Worker's Party (at least in its first decade or so) is probably a good model for South Africa. Thoughts? M&G

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An explanation of how cold whether may actually make us more susceptible to rhinoviruses (i.e. "getting a cold"). Globe and Mail

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The German government is so irrationality committed to austerity that it's pretty much giving away free money for the chance to run a budget surplus. Vox

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This I did not know. Harry Truman, who originally set up the CIA, later reckoned it had gotten too involved in nefarious activities, and argued it should be disbanded. Al Jazeera

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Just a reminder that the criminalisation of migration kills people, and that our governments need to be held accountable (both in Europe and South Africa). Here's a passage that really jumps out at me:

"The boats that reach Italian waters are often impounded, so smugglers prefer to make the trip using the most expendable vessels. This means the sailors sometimes force the migrants to move from new boats to smaller and older ones several days into their voyage – a frightening and dangerous procedure that risks overloading already rickety vessels. Survivors of the catastrophic sinking in September, which killed more than 300 off the coast of Malta, say the crash occurred after the migrants were asked to change boats."

So people smugglers are often *able* to convey migrants safely, but are basically disincentivized from doing so. Why not simply announce a policy that ships carrying illegal migrants will be escorted back to their port of origin, but never impounded? Why not, for that matter, just grant a certain number of visas to Syrian passport holders every month and let them catch a f*king flight?

Meanwhile:

"The European Union has scaled back its Mediterranean rescue operation, in the hope that a reduction in the number of coastguards will discourage migrants from attempting a voyage that claimed more than 3,000 lives in the past year."

Imagine if we took this "harm exacerbation" approach to other matters... "Smoking is bad for you, so to discourage it, we're now going to stop treating people for lung cancer". It's infuriating and frankly just surreal in its sheer wrongheadedness. Guardian

Links, Tuesday 6th January

Touching piece about racism in childhood. Guardian

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Good piece. It's reasonable to acknowledge that the stereotypical straight/white/male nerd is oppressed in his own way, while also calling him to account for his oppression of others. New Statesman

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Some interesting anecdotes about changing sexual mores during the British Industrial Revolution.

"The autobiography of Ellen Johnston offers an example of how factory work allowed her to raise a child outside marriage and dispense with a male breadwinner altogether. Ellen was born in Glasgow in the 1830s and started working in one of the city’s many cotton factories at the age of 11. By her late teens she was sexually active and before too long found herself expecting an illegitimate child. But it was not the disaster it might have been and Ellen appears to have made no effort to use the pregnancy to precipitate a wedding. Instead she embraced the prospect of single-motherhood. She ‘longed for the hour’ that her child would be born and was delighted to become ‘the mother of a lovely daughter’. After the birth Ellen lived with her mother, who took care of her daughter, while she returned to the factory to earn a living for all three." History Today

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Very interesting maps. I'd say Joburg is quite a bit denser than London, at least in the built-up parts. Vox

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This is a truly excellent takedown. Please do read [Discussion of transphobia, suicide]

"You don’t want to “sensationalize” a suicide in order to inspire “copycat suicides.” You don’t want to intrude on a private moment of grief. You don’t want to “politicize” something personal.

But hang on a bit. That, again, presumes that Leelah Alcorn’s death was an isolated incident. That suicide of transgender young people denied support by their parents is rare, and therefore inspiring new incidents—putting the thought in people’s heads—is the largest danger here. It presumes that there isn’t a massive epidemic of trans suicides already happening. It presupposes that the reasons for Leelah Alcorn’s death are mysterious, individual, and personal to her case and that there isn’t a huge, glaring societal problem that can only be addressed if we as a society take collective action."

Daily Beast
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Some aesthetically pleasing designs for power lines.

Viral nova

Links, Monday 29th Dec

This is a simple point, but a very useful one to make. People on the left, who I consider allies, are often instinctively hostile to pricing and I think this is a mistake. Pricing can help us use limited resources more efficiently, which benefits everyone. HOWEVER, these efficiency gains can only be realised if there is sufficient equality in cash incomes. I'm inclined to think the best possible formula would be a generous universal basic income funded out of general taxation (firmly a left-wing view), combined with quite a lot more pricing than we have now (generally considered a right-wing view). Vox

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There's some cool stuff in the world. Cracked

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"We cannot know if the cotton industry was the only possible way into the modern industrial world, but we do know that it was the path to global capitalism. We do not know if Europe and North America could have grown rich without slavery, but we do know that industrial capitalism and the Great Divergence in fact emerged from the violent caldron of slavery, colonialism, and the expropriation of land." Chronicle

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The second in our series on logistics and shipping. First entry was pallets; now barrels.

"The barrel, Work points out, is a far from simple idea. Many civilisations came up with buckets, probably first by hollowing out logs and then by binding slats of wood together, but barrels tapered at both ends seem only to have been devised by Northern European Celts." Spectator

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"In the Western world, the front crawl was first seen in a swimming race held in 1844 in London, where it was swum by Native North Americans. The Anishinaabe Flying Gull and Tobacco easily defeated all the British breaststroke swimmers. English gentlemen, however, considered this style, with its considerable splashing, to be barbarically "un-European" and the British continued to swim only the breaststroke in competition." Wikipedia

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""If you make your students do well in their academic career, you get worse evaluations from your students," Pellizzari said. Students, by and large, don't enjoy learning from a taskmaster, even if it does them some good." NPR

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"the automobile and the elevator have been locked in a “secret war” for over a century, with cars making it possible for people to spread horizontally, encouraging sprawl and suburbia, and elevators pushing them toward life in dense clusters of towering vertical columns." Boston Globe

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"To be considered ‘vulnerable’ in this investigation they had to fulfill one of the criteria, of which working in a brothel was one, which labeled the whole group as ‘vulnerable’. Other criteria were having an economically disadvantaged position (not speaking English, not having had an education), having a disadvantaged social position (being an illegal immigrant for example), being wrongly informed (it was sufficient if you were working in a different city than had been agreed on) or having been abused/having been forced (was found only rarely). Four of these criteria were enough to be considered a ‘victim of human trafficking’ in this report, regardless of whether you actually were a victim of human trafficking. 11% of the women included in the investigation complied to these criteria. Next, this percentage was raised considerably based on preconceptions (“this has to be too low, in reality there must be more women from vulnerable countries”) and the results were presented to the world: thousands of victims of human trafficking in the UK! They hadn’t found even one…"

Marijke Vonk

Links, Sunday 21st Dec

This is utterly disgusting. BBC

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WTAF

"There will also be a €600 fine for showing a lack of respect to anyone in uniform" RT

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"Forbes awarded the humble dabba-wallahs a 6 Sigma performance rating, a term used in quality assurance if the percentage of correctness is 99.9999999 or more. In other words, for every six million tiffins delivered, only one fails to arrive. This error rate means in effect that a tiffin goes astray only once every two months.

It is a rare day indeed when a customer's deep-fried rotis fail to turn up. The sigma rating was the same as that given to the top bluechip company Motorola - not bad considering that most dabba-wallahs are illiterate." Guardian

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Well done. Huff Post

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This is a good one. All cops are bastards, so let's just not have any. Rolling Stone

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Incredible story about the sheer scale of air pollution in Beijing. Guardian

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Such good work at the demo last night: marching to commemorate sex workers who have been killed in the past year, and to fight creeping criminalisation in the UK. Vice

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Amazing that, in some ways, we're still technologically behind the Romans. iO9

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I keep thinking that basic income is probably *the* most important political project of our generation. Let's try make it happen!

"To appreciate the full extent of the emancipation, one should hear the story of the young women who at first wore veils and were reluctant to offend their elders when having their photographs taken to obtain eligibility for the basic income. Within months, they had confidence enough to be sitting and chatting in the centre of the village unveiled. They had their bit of independence." Guardian

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Very nice overview of the electricity situation in South Africa, along with some usefully specific policy proposals at the end. Daily Maverick

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"When we talk about diversity and inclusion, we necessarily position marginalized groups as naturally needing to assimilate into dominant ones, rather than to undermine said structures of domination. Yes, we need jobs; we need education; we need to access various resources. What we don’t need is to relegate ourselves to the position of depending on someone else to offer us inclusion and access to those resources. Inclusion is something they must give, but our liberation is something we will take." MVC

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It's pretty thoughtless to state that "all" Americans are in as much danger as Eric Garner (since not all Americans are black and working class), but this is a pretty shocking statistic:

"Husak cites estimates that more than 70 percent of American adults have committed a crime that could lead to imprisonment." Bloomberg

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"Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a “unit load”—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century." Cabinet

Links, Friday 12th Dec

South African Home Affairs is refusing to renew asylum seekers' temporary papers, exposing them to arbitrary arrest. Some of them have been waiting for permanent papers for more than a decade.

Groundup

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The Cracked "personal experience" stories have generally been very well done, and are actually some of the more insightful bits of journalism I've seen lately. Here is an article talking about the editorial process. Spectator

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This column conflates two issues. On the one hand is the issue of government financing. The present regime of "quantitative easing" involves central banks buying government bonds and other securities. This increases the price of assets and decreases borrowing costs in the short-term, but actually isn't very inflationary in the long-term - everyone knows that the central bank will eventually sell those bonds again. If they really wanted to "print money", they could announce they were buying bonds and *never getting rid of them*. This would essentially create money out of thin air, which the government could do with as it pleased. As it happens, I think printing money, in limited quantities, would probably be a good thing, since much of the rich world is suffering deflation right now.

On the other hand is the question of what a government should do with borrowed (or printed) money: buy corporate bonds, prop up banks, build infrastructure, hand out cheques to people, etc. As it happens, I think handing out cheques would also be rather a good use of money. But where the money comes from and what you do with it are separate issues! Guardian

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Some of this resonates, but I also see how it could be used by the "Social Justice Warriors are censoring me! *boo hoo*" crowd. Thoughts? McGill Daily

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LOL. "The geek hierarchy"

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"Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time. There is every reason to believe that destroying job security while increasing working hours does not create a more productive (let alone more innovative or loyal) workforce. Probably, in economic terms, the result is negative—an impression confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties.

But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and overdetermining the future. Economically, the growth of armies, police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. It’s possible, in fact, that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it’s also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project."

Baffler

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"A local Tumblr account, Suburban Fear, highlights just how common racial profiling is in the community forums and neighbourhood watches of South Africa’s suburban neighbourhoods and how self righteous volunteers proudly speak of “taking back the streets” as they continue to enforce informal apartheid in South Africa 20 years after democracy." Daily Vox

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"Personal injury lawyers have become so familiar with such vehicular niceties that they've coined a term for them: the "wave of death." Cracked