Links, Monday 6th April

"Anti-trafficking policies do a great disservice to migrating people, especially the most vulnerable. By diverting our attention away from the practices of nation-states and employers, they channel our energies to support a law-and-order agenda of ‘getting tough’ with ‘traffickers.’ In this way, anti-trafficking measures are ideological: they render the plethora of immigration and border controls as unproblematic and place them outside of the bounds of politics. The reasons why it is increasingly difficult and dangerous for people to move safely or live securely in new places are brushed aside while nation states rush to criminalise ‘traffickers’ and (largely) deport ‘victims of trafficking.’" Open Democracy

>>><<<

"Psychedelic drugs like MDMA and magic mushrooms are as safe as riding a bike or playing soccer, and bans against them are “inconsistent with human rights”" Newsweek

>>><<<

“We had to write ‘ordinary posts’, about making cakes or music tracks we liked, but then every now and then throw in a political post about how the Kiev government is fascist, or that sort of thing,” Guardian

>>><<<

If you're interested in technical and regulatory issues around condoms, then this is the long-form piece for you (also some good stuff about the relationship between how good they feel and getting people to use the things reliably)

>>><<<

"There has never been a verifiable reported instance of a trans person harassing a cisgender person, nor have there been any confirmed reports of male predators 'pretending' to be transgender to gain access to women's spaces and commit crimes against them." MIC

>>><<<

"Every day, the bedside cardiac monitors threw off some 187 audible alerts. No, not 187 audible alerts for all the beds in the five ICUs; 187 alerts were generated by the monitors in each patient’s room, an average of one alarm buzzing or beeping by the bedside every eight minutes. Every day, there were about 15,000 alarms across all the ICU beds. For the entire month, there were 381,560 alarms across the five ICUs. Remember, this is from just one of about a half-dozen systems connected to the patients, each tossing off its own alerts and alarms. And those are just the audible ones." Medium

>>><<<

I'm not going to comment on the costs or benefits on this particular proposal, but I think it is significant that the major institutional approach to the availability of online pornography in the UK is still censorship rather than better sex education. Kids acquire harmful ideas about sex through a variety of channels - pornography is only one of these, and I sincerely doubt it is the worst. This is the basic issue that needs to be addressed. The first time kids see porn ought to be in a classroom, under the guidance and supervision of a trained instructor. Any effort to shut it out will inevitably fail, not least because kids eventually turn 18. Guardian

>>><<<

This is great. Reading this, it strikes me that we could all stand to be better educated about the basics of neurochemistry, and how psychoactive drugs actually alter consciousness.

>>><<<

On that note... a drug has been developed that has similar anxiety-reducing properties to alcohol, but without the negative side-effects (aggression, loss of coordination, etc). Alcohol affects a wide variety of GABA receptors, whereas pagoclone is much more specific to the receptor type that produces the desired effect. There is also an antidote, so it's effects can be eliminated within minutes. Wouldn't we all like to see this drug brought to market? Wikipedia

>>><<<

"Take away anything to react to and people stop reacting." iO9

[Some disturbing discussion of child abuse]

>>><<<

Obvious, but worth repeating

"In places [and times] where women have very few economic opportunities, they can't afford to be too choosy about marriage partners. Where women are more empowered, they become choosier. At times, this greater choosiness leaves them with less money than they would otherwise have. But that's the point. It's precisely because women are more empowered that they can afford to trade off economic security for other benefits." Vox

>>><<<

Very important information about blood diamonds in Angola and the failure of the Kimberley process

>>><<<

"a story in which a privileged elite uses its political power (albeit through the planning system) to create economic rents for the few fits Mr Piketty's argument to a tee. Well-off homeowners may for the moment be more responsible for rising wealth inequality than top-hatted capitalists or famous hedge-fund managers. But their NIMBYism is a very Piketty-like phenomenon." Economist

>>><<<

A reminder that Rhodes made his wealth primarily by wielding state coercion to extract cheap labour from colonised people

>>><<<

"Just when nation-states have made it next to impossible to legally live and work in their territories as rights-bearing persons, anti-trafficking measures have been adopted into national laws. Tales of ‘trafficking’ (or ‘smuggling’), which have led to calls for heightened state intervention at the border and more punitive measures for traffickers and/or smugglers, do the crucial work of legitimising further controls on global human mobility, all in the name of ‘helping’ victims of trafficking. By ideologically filtering their efforts through the politics of rescue, anti-trafficking campaigns provide a crucial veneer of humanitarianism to the exploitative and repressive practices of states and employers." Open Democracy

>>><<<

Quite a few of these look really good, and I've never been...

>>><<<

"If the United States were trying to build a broad anti-Chinese coalition in the Pacific Rim, it would be offering generous terms to our Asian partners to entice them into a deal. In practice, we seem to be doing the opposite — taking advantage of Pacific Rim fears of China to coerce other countries into adopting policies that are friendly to big American companies." Vox

>>><<<

I'm gonna link to this directly because it's so good:

"It’s not clear that a country’s affection for the US will increase after being required to rewrite its patent and copyright law every few years on a model dictated by, respectively, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. The US itself does not offer much liberalisation. It is highly unlikely to substantially dismantle its agricultural subsidy and protection regime to allow Australian and New Zealand farmers abundant access to its dairy market or stop its rice subsidies disadvantaging Vietnamese rice exports in world markets. America’s trading partners are thus on a permanent treadmill of enforced policy change in order to keep their trade access to the US." FT

>>><<<

“The only interesting question is how much GDP has been lost as a result of austerity” Independent

>>><<<

Gosh, the government agents who shut down the Silk Road are hugely corrupt? What a surprise!

>>><<<

"In later years, outsiders would listen incredulously to the wooden pronouncements of the Soviet leadership and ask whether they could possibly be sincere. Kotkin’s answer is yes. Unlike the uneducated cynic of Trotsky’s imagination, the real Stalin justified each and every decision using ideological language, both in public and in private. It is a mistake not to take this language seriously, for it proves an excellent guide to his thinking. More often than not, he did exactly what he said he would do." Atlantic

>>><<<

Guys, so many veggie places in Cape Town that I haven't even tried! News24

>>><<<

"Which brings us to the second benefit of ending America’s cold war with Iran: It could empower the Iranian people vis-à-vis their repressive state. American hawks, addled by the mythology they have created around Ronald Reagan, seem to think that the more hostile America’s relationship with Iran’s regime becomes, the better the United States can promote Iranian democracy. But the truth is closer to the reverse. The best thing Reagan ever did for the people of Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. was to embrace Mikhail Gorbachev." Atlantic

>>><<<

A list of resources analysing the Garissa attack

>>><<<

This sounds about right to me. Yes, comedians need to be given the space to express themselves and explore ideas... but they also need the good grace to accept when they've been called out, and to work on doing better. Indiewire

>>><<<

Yes

"Being anti-racist doesn’t mean that you are never racist, it means that you recognize and battle racism in yourself as hard as you battle it in others." Medium

>>><<<

I'm pretty much in agreement with the Economist on this one: land needs to be taxed more effectively, and planning authority must be vested in political entities larger than neighbourhoods.

>>><<<

"Whether today’s slow-growth activism owes more to the racist tradition of restrictive covenants, to concerns about property values, to a knee-jerk resistance to change, to misguided environmental activism, or to worries about aesthetics and traffic, is hard to say. All these things are comfortably couched in the rhetoric of “preserving neighborhood character." Salon

Links, Monday 30th March

“The demand would be a 10- or 12-hour working week, a guaranteed social wage, universally guaranteed housing, education, healthcare and so on,” he says. “There may be some work that will still need to be done by humans, like quality control, but it would be minimal.”

(There are some criticisms to be made of this piece for ignoring care work and reproductive labour, which is a problem with orthodox Marxist thought generally)

Guardian

>>><<<

This is the sort of situation where facile defences of gentrification fall short. It's not simply a case of poor people responding to market forces and selling up. It's a case of poor people receiving eviction notices en masse to accommodate development. City Press

>>><<<

Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee won a Nobel Peace Prize partly for organising a sex strike. Why is she not a household name?

"Then we launched the sex strike. In 2002, Liberia's Christian and Muslim women banded together to refuse sex with their husbands until the violence and civil strife ended." Telegraph

>>><<<

Bummer :(

"According to the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), global violence — as defined by a range of measures from conflict deaths, to displaced persons, to homicide rates — has been rising since 2007. This news is in many ways surprising because up to 2007, the data suggested the world was becoming a much safer place." Reuters

>>><<<

"A sewage treatment facility in Tokyo that has already started extracting gold from sludge has reported a yield rivalling those found in ore at some leading gold mines." Guardian

>>><<<

A really thorough demolition of the idea that encouraging weight loss is a useful medical intervention. Of people who diet, only around 3% manage to lose weight and keep it off, and that requires huge, enduring lifestyle changes. And there's not even any good evidence that people who successfully lose weight have better health outcomes than people who stay fat. Slate

>>><<<

On US gun culture:

"You have guns because you like guns! That's why you go to gun conventions; that's why you read gun magazines! None of you give a shit about home security. None of you go to home security conventions. None of you read Padlock Monthly. None of you have a Facebook picture of you behind a secure door." Vox

>>><<<

"In effect, the police officer was merely pointing out where these communities live or work. And, yes, different ethnic groups will have different crimes – often due to their national history or culture – but that in no way means one ethnicity is inherently more criminal than another.

The police officer could equally have pointed to the City, and said that here white people commit banking fraud; or to Wapping, where they hack phones; or to Westminster, where they plot illegal wars." Guardian

>>><<<

The creation of patriarchal, polygynous societies in the wake of the agricultural revolution is visible in our genetic inheritance. PS Mag

>>><<<

"The photo is exploitive, in the most deliberate sense—the site, Truthdig, is using the women in the photo as a way to provoke titillation and/or moral outrage and/or (more likely) both. The fact that the women are ... available is itself a selling point for the audience. Hedges condemns sex work, but he also participates in it. The main difference between Truthdig and the owner of that brothel is that the brothel owner presumably provided the women in the picture with a cut. Truthdig shows its higher morals by keeping all the money for itself." Ravishly

>>><<<

"“The first Gilded Age, despite its glaring inequities, was accompanied by a gradual rise in the standard of living; the second by a gradual erosion,” he writes. In the first Gilded Age, everyone from reporters to politicians apparently felt comfortable painting plutocrats as villains; in the second, this is, somehow, forbidden." New Yorker

This reminds me of this comment: "With results like these, what will the epitaph for neoliberalism look like? I think historians will conclude it was a form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. 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." Baffler

>>><<<

Friends, comrades: the War on "Drugs" Washington Post

>>><<<

"Some Germans today insist that a debt is a debt, and that Greece must repay in full. They should know better from their own history, starting with Keynes’s unsuccessful plea to lower Germany’s reparations burden. They should recall the relief that Germany was granted through the Marshall plan, and the 1953 London agreement on German debts. Did Germany “deserve” the relief in 1953? That was not the right question. Germany’s new democracy needed the relief, and Germany needed a fresh start." Guardian

>>><<<

Post-wine headaches are not caused by sulfites, just regular old alcohol in excess Wall Street Journal

>>><<<

"All seemed to go pretty well; she was nodding all the time while saying, “yes, yes, you are so right…” But then I said something like: “well Ms Johnson, we….” She interrupted: ” Sorry, my name is Petersen, not Johnson.” I then experienced a terrible sinking feeling, because I then saw before me the horoscope of a Ms Johnson, but the person before me was surely not this Ms Johnson! Apparently I had taken the wrong chart from my file cabinet!" Link

>>><<<

Interesting. It now appears that a key risk factor for myopia is lack of exposure to bright light (such as one might encounter outdoors on a sunny day). The traditional explanation, that myopia is caused by excessive close work, is the result of a spurious correlation - close work just often happens indoors. Nature

Links, Monday 16th March

"The guanine nanocrystals are arranged in a lattice throughout the cell, the spacing of which determines the cell’s colour. When the chameleon is calm, the crystals were found to be organised into a dense network, reflecting blue wavelengths most strongly. When excited, the chameleon was found to loosen its lattice of nanocrystals by about 30%, allowing the reflection of yellows or reds. " Guardian

>>><<<

"It could be argued that anything that humanises and shows Arab women not being beaten, enslaved, force married or honour-killed is a good thing. But when everything that is not that is treated as a novelty, one is effectively reinforcing the stereotypes by saying, “Look! Here is a woman NOT being beaten, enslaved, force married or honour killed. How about that?” It is not worthy of reporting because it shows a woman defying the norms and prejudices of Arab society; it is newsworthy because it challenges your views and prejudices about Arab society." Guardian

>>><<<

What I'm finding interesting about this piece is the extent to which it focuses on the *visibility* rather than the *fact* of inequality in South Africa. As in, what's the significance of building a massive luxurious golf estate right next to Diepsloot as opposed to in the middle of nowhere? I agree it definitely provokes more discomfort, but what are we to make of that discomfort?

Kind of reminds me of that Jonny Steinberg piece going around a while ago where he describes the discomfort of living in such an unequal society, but also *wanting* that discomfort, for aesthetic and professional reasons.

But does it matter to poor black people in South Africa whether Jonny (or a golf estate dweller) continues to be rich here or in England, except insofar as Jonny being rich in South Africa might mean a bit of that wealth gets directed their way?

I guess my worry is that our aesthetic reactions (positive or negative) to visible inequality risk obscuring the argument that needs to be head about the structural conditions of equality, and how they are to be tackled. But maybe we need to experience that discomfort before we can address the structural issues, idk. Thoughts?

>>><<<

"Large-scale intervention in eastern Ukraine by regular Russian troops began last August, reaching a peak of 10,000 in December, and Moscow has been struggling to maintain operations on such a scale and intensity, according to a report." Guardian

>>><<<

"The novel therapy involves taking stem cells from HIV-infected patients and using a gene editing tool to cause them to form into white blood cells with a specific mutation. The mutation affects a protein known as CCR5, and interferes with the virus’s ability to latch onto blood cells. The mutation occurs naturally in a small percentage of the world’s population and gives these individuals a life-long resistance to HIV infections." Medical Daily

>>><<<

"For the first time in human experience, people had watertight containers readily available in any desired shape. With their new ability to boil or steam food, they gained access to abundant resources that had previously been difficult to use: leafy vegetables, which would burn or dry out if cooked on an open fire; shellfish, which could now be opened easily; and toxic foods like acorns, which could now have their toxins boiled out. Soft-boiled foods could be fed to small children, permitting earlier weaning and more closely spaced babies. Toothless old people, the repositories of information in a preliterate society, could now be fed and live longer. All those momentous consequences of pottery triggered a population explosion, causing Japan’s population to climb from an estimated few thousand to a quarter of a million." Discover

>>><<<

The enforcement of austerity towards Greece and other EU countries in economic trouble is often justified by reference to "EU rules". But here's a little-known fact: Germany is also in defiance of EU "macroeconomic balance" rules, which prohibit maintaining a current account surplus greater than 6% of GDP for 3 years or more. Germany has in fact exceeded this threshold for 7 of the last 8 years, with a record high of 7.5% in 2014 (the rules have only been in place since 2011 however). Who thinks that this brazen rule-breaking will result in the German economy being subjected to external supervision by EU institutions?

>>><<<

"Being in Yarl’s Wood opened my eyes to a lot of things I never knew went on in this country. That place was worse than a prison. There were so many women who, like me, were innocent of any crime, but had been locked up." Guardian

>>><<<

What an excellent idea

>>><<<

"White people in South Africa live by the grace of blacks’ willingness to pursue reconciliation, and therefore many of us would like for Mr. de Kock to remain “Prime Evil” so that we ourselves can escape blame; we prefer that he not change so that the rest of us, who find it hard to confess our beneficial co-culpability in apartheid, need not change ourselves." NY Times

>>><<<

I'm currently reading up about slavery in the Cape and the related practices of Arab slavery in the Indian Ocean.

One thing I'm finding interesting is to the extent to which these practices, while abhorrent, were somewhat less predicated on racial ideology than slavery in the United States and were consequently less rigid. The manumission of slaves was far more common and protected by custom, slaves were able to own some property, there were substantial populations of "free blacks" who lived alongside free whites, and interracial unions were not prohibited. Indeed, in the Cape, many slave women were freed so that they could marry free white settlers (though this has enormously coercive implications in itself).

Also interesting to read about people of African descent in the Middle East and South Asia who are descended from slaves. Again, although they suffer discrimination, they are less of a distinct minority in these places than African Americans are in the US.

Links, Wednesday 11th March

Was just reminded of these wise words

"I am not suggesting that we give up looking for ways to create jobs. Of course not. But once we recognise that full employment is a pipe dream, that vast sections of our country are destined to transmit joblessness to their children and their grandchildren, the idea of welfare takes on new meanings. It is not something that pushes people away, making them idle and useless. On the contrary, it brings them in from the cold. It gives them some control over their destinies and thus renders them more alive, more like us." BD

>>><<<

 "In January 1945 — two days before Franklin Roosevelt was to meet with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Yalta — the Japanese were offering surrender terms almost identical to what was accepted by the Americans on the USS Missouri in the Japan Bay on September 2, 1945.

The Japanese population was famished, the country’s war machine was out of gas, and the government had capitulated. The Americans were unmoved. The firebombing and the nuclear attacks were heartlessly carried out." Jacobin

>>><<<

"The organisation of the Soviet Union was directly modelled on the German postal service." FT

>>><<<

The new MacBook is probably about as small as a laptop can get until we make some serious advances in battery technology Vox

>>><<<

Part of the tragedy of this is that the criminalisation of assisted dying not only causes unnecessary suffering, but often ends up shortening the lives of the terminally ill. If this man had been assured that his wishes would have been respected, he would have been wiling to go to hospital and receive care. Instead, he opted to kill himself before being hospitalised, while he was sure he still had the physical capacity to do so. Daily Maverick

>>><<<

"Hall describes four key changes since 1994. Commercial farm ownership is more concentrated. Fewer people are employed in the agricultural industry. Large companies in agribusiness have been the big winners from the state's policies, rather than farmers. And many families who have land through reform or in communal areas cannot use it effectively. Meanwhile, the state has re-opened restitution claims, which if processed at the current rate could take over 200 years to complete, suggesting some claims from connected applicants and traditional leaders could succeed while others are added to the thousands that have been uncompleted since 1998." Daily Maverick

>>><<<

"The Violence Policy Centre, a thinktank in Washington DC, has counted the cases on the public record of permit holders firing their weapons. Over the past seven years, at least 722 people have been killed in at least 544 concealed-carry shootings. The deaths included 17 police officers. Only 16 shootings were ruled by the court to have been in self-defence." Daily Maverick

>>><<<

"The civil court decision was made after a massage parlour offering sex services in the city was raided by labour inspectors." Independent

Oh, for a world in which the *only* people raiding brothels were labour inspectors, trying to make sure the workers get their social security benefits...

>>><<<

I saw a dance performance earlier today: "We Left" at Infecting the City in Cape Town. I highly recommend it, while it's still on. It explores masculinity and intimacy between men. There's one very poignant scene featuring a smaller man repeatedly seeking physical contact with a larger man and being pushed away (I read it as the interaction between son and father).

What really got to me was that the audience reacted to some of the movements with a loud "Whooo!" noise, obviously thinking it was sexually suggestive. Again, I read this as a very sad scene. And I can't imagine how you'd interpret it that way, unless you think that physical intimacy involving a man is automatically sexual. Which, together with homophobia, is basically the reason men feel forced to shy away from physical intimacy! So the reaction of the audience was kind of a symptom of the attitudes the piece was attacking. Really sad :(

>>><<<

The Irish parliament convenes an "emergency sitting", to prevent the horror of basically harmless drugs being legal for any period of time. Well done. Breaking News

>>><<<

Here's something to play around with: a Watson application that tries to assess your personality from a sample of your writing. I can't say seems particularly accurate with me - it gives extremely low scores for extraversion and agreeableness. But then, I've only given it samples of academic writing, which maybe is too contrived. Let me know what you think!

>>><<<

"Why do we only expect "empowerment" of sex work, and not of other jobs? In this patriarchal society a lot of labour is gendered, most of it in service industries of one sort of another, from nursing to child care. We don’t demand that waitresses feel "empowered" in their jobs for us to recognise their agency in choosing the work, and we don’t tell other workers who serve male customers that they can’t be feminist. The empowerment fallacy is only applied to the sex industry - and it’s deeply insidious." New Statesman

>>><<<

"But the reason Shanghai’s schools are recognised as among the best in the world is because their teachers never stop thinking about how to get better at teaching... Staff meet once a week by grade and subject, and break into teams to work on problems of their choice – at one school, the teachers had rearranged their floor plan so that teachers from the same grade level shared an office. Every young teacher has an older mentor, of proven achievement, assigned to them. The Shanghai system, Tucker said, revolves around the premise that “not only is it possible for you to get better, it is your job to get better and it never ends”." Guardian

Links, Sunday 8th March

"The World Health Organization estimates that 80% of the world population lives in countries with limited or no access to opioid pain medicines, and that 5.5 million terminal cancer patients die each year without proper pain control. As in India, it is generally not financial constraints that prevent people from receiving these medicines, but ill-conceived drug regulations or irrational fears surrounding their use." LA Times

>>><<<

"Imagine if you could say to a casual partner, “I love you. It’s no big deal. It doesn’t mean you’re The One, or even one of the ones. It doesn’t mean you have to love me back. It doesn’t mean we have to date, or marry, or even cuddle. It doesn’t mean we have to part ways dramatically in a flurry of tears and broken dishes. It doesn’t mean I’ll love you until I die, or that I’ll still love you next year, or tomorrow.”" Carsie Blanton

>>><<<

If you want to understand why people in Ferguson rioted, read about the long history of racist abuse and violence that its citizens suffered at the hands of the police. The killing of Mike Brown was only the tip of the iceberg. Vox

>>><<<

"Just as “Fight Club” showed that manliness and violence were imaginatively inseparable, “Gone Girl” raises the possibility that marriage and victimhood are inseparable, too... To be in a couple, in short, is to be in a power relationship. And in power relationships, there are always winners and losers." New Yorker

>>><<<

“There has been a large long-term increase in the share of net income from housing for every country in the sample except Germany," Rognlie explains. "Meanwhile, the non-housing capital share shows no clear trend.” Bloomberg

>>><<<

This guy attending elite universities in the US and Canada for years without paying any tuition fees. What a hero. (Too bad about his frankly creepy job now) Fast Company

>>><<<

OK, so this probably won't be real for a long time, what with the difficulty of regenerating severed spinal nerves. But, supposing my body was riddled with metastatic cancer or something, I'd happily take a body transplant simply as a life support device. Sure, I'd only be able to move my head, but that's actually better than what Stephen Hawking has at the moment! Guardian

>>><<<

"In a blind tasting, Laughlin’s guinea pigs found that copper and zinc were the sourest, while the spoon to end all spoons was, of course, made of gold. “Mango sorbet with a gold spoon is just heaven,” she sighs. “Mango never tasted so mangoey.” But too bad if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth: in the blind tasting, it came out near the bottom." Guardian

>>><<<

The sheer pettiness of life in the occupied territories: a newly built Palestinian town is denied connection the water network. Washington Post

>>><<<

"I don’t know how many times I’ve been chattering along about something and accidentally make some careless, general statement about something, when whamo! I see that gleam in my philosopher’s eyes and I know the next thing out of his mouth is going to be something along the lines of, “So you think in all cases . . .” or “Do you really want to commit yourself to that?”" Philosiology

>>><<<

"But because the job involves working with vulnerable kids and adults I'd have to have a full police check. The job would have been ideal for me, but I couldn't even say I was interested or I would have lost my own daughter. As she's classed as a vulnerable adult and I have a record for prostitution, they could have said my house wasn't a suitable environment for her." Vice

>>><<<

Awesome work, SAPS, using stun grenades on peacefully protesting high school students. Groundup

>>><<<

So many lols 

>>><<<

Remembering $pread magazine Animal Tits & Sass

>>><<<

"Such cases always come up against athletes of the third world. I've never heard of an athlete facing a similar ban from the developed countries," Vice

>>><<<

"In September last year, Xola, a SAMU (South African Municipal Workers Union) member who worked in the procurement department of the parastatal, BloemWater, and who had uncovered tender irregularities, was murdered. He was shot three times outside his girlfriend’s house in Bloemfontein’s Hillside Township shortly after handing a dossier detailing the fraud to the Hawks. No one has yet been arrested for his murder." Daily Maverick

>>><<<

"Porn is not monolithic, and it’s not even a genre – it is a medium. Yes, a lot of porn is sexist and too much of it has historically been made by men for men, but claiming that all porn is sexist because you’ve only seen the worst of it is like saying that all TV is sexist because you’ve only ever watched Top Gear." Pandora Blake

(Some images NSFW)

>>><<<

I wasn't even aware this was a distinction, but I'm definitely towards the latter.

""Many studies have found that there are two domains of extraversion based on self reports," Tara White, study co-author and professor at Brown University, told Mic. First there's the "go-getter," who's more assertive, persistent and achievement-driven, the kind of person always raising their hand in class. This is called "agentic extraversion." Then there's the "people person," who is friendly, emotionally warm and great with ice breakers, known as "affiliative extraversion."" MIC

>>><<<

That awkward moment when an ex-director of Mossad (i.e. hardly a dove) calls out Netanyahu for creating an "apartheid state" Telesur

>>><<<

Slavery existed in the US for as long as it did because it was highly profitable, and contributed massively to industrialisation in Britain and North America.

"Many enslaved cotton pickers in the late 1850s had peaked at well over 200 pounds per day," Baptist notes. "In the 1930s, after a half-century of massive scientific experimentation, all to make the cotton boll more pickable, the great-grandchildren of the enslaved often picked only 100 to 120 pounds per day." Huff Post

>>><<<

This is completely shameful, but remember that it exists in a context where people of colour are utterly economically marginalised. I don't think we should be more shocked by this than we are by the underlying fact that the circumstances of many citizens of Worcester are such that they are willing  to suffer this indignity in order to compete for poorly paid jobs as gardeners and domestic workers. IOL

Links, Wednesday 4th March

An analysis of Putin's increased willingness to engage in confrontation with the West Atlantic

>>><<<

Appropriation in the most direct and literal sense of the word Die Antwoord

>>><<<

Yet more detail about the shocking human rights abuses occurring at Yarl's Wood. Independent

>>><<<

"if you look, for example, at Milton Friedman’s more polemical works, he says that if you want to cut the welfare system, you cut the subsidies and run it on deficit for a few years so that the quality drops — then people won’t be interested in defending the welfare system.

This is actually what the right wing normally does when it comes to power: they cut subsidies so that the quality of, for example, public schools drops, and then they propose private schools. People start saying, “Well, if public schools are so bad, then we have to have a private alternative for those who can afford it.” This was an ideological attack and an explicit strategy to undermine trust in the welfare system." Jacobin

>>><<<

"When his issues with women do leak through, like when he becomes momentarily furious that a female detective is telling him what to do in his own home, he blames it on being raised by his father and thinks his self-awareness will absolve him. He is the classic male victim. Even his misogyny is something that was done to him." The Awl

>>><<<

"Both marriage and polyamory require risk-taking — maybe not quite the same level or type of risk, but not as far from each other on the continuum as we might think. Meanwhile, remaining forever single — even while being a parent — is arguably the least-riskiest choice you can make. The only variable you have to deal with is you." The Week

>>><<<

"What we have done over the past thirty years is to build a creditor’s paradise of positive real interest rates, low inflation, open markets, beaten-down unions, and a retreating state — all policed by unelected economic officials in central banks and other unelected institutions that have only one target: to keep such a creditor’s paradise going." Jacobin

>>><<<

"The reaction wasn't "there's a rapist among us!?!" but "oh hey, I bet you're talking about our local rapist."  Several of them expressed regret that I hadn't been warned about him beforehand, because they tried to discreetly tell new people about this guy.  Others talked about how they tried to make sure there was someone keeping an eye on him at parties, because he was fine so long as someone remembered to assign him a Rape Babysitter." Pervocracy

>>><<<

"Okay," Tsemberis recalls thinking, "they're schizophrenic, alcoholic, traumatized, brain damaged. What if we don't make them pass any tests or fill out any forms? They aren't any good at that stuff. Inability to pass tests and fill out forms was a large part of how they ended up homeless in the first place. Why not just give them a place to live and offer them free counseling and therapy, health care, and let them decide if they want to participate? Why not treat chronically homeless people as human beings and members of our community who have a basic right to housing and health care?" Mother Jones

>>><<<

"There is a possible alternative, however, in which ownership and control of robots is disconnected from capital in its current form. The robots liberate most of humanity from work, and everybody benefits from the proceeds: we don’t have to work in factories or go down mines or clean toilets or drive long-distance lorries, but we can choreograph and weave and garden and tell stories and invent things and set about creating a new universe of wants. This would be the world of unlimited wants described by economics, but with a distinction between the wants satisfied by humans and the work done by our machines. It seems to me that the only way that world would work is with alternative forms of ownership. The reason, the only reason, for thinking this better world is possible is that the dystopian future of capitalism-plus-robots may prove just too grim to be politically viable." LRB

>>><<<

If you liked woodpecker-riding weasel, you'll *love* hippopotamus-riding heron. 

Links, Monday 2nd March

"“Who gave this sonofabitch his green card?” Sean Penn demanded before presenting Mexican film-maker Alejandro González Iñárritu the best picture Oscar for Birdman" Guardian

>>><<<

"When Mason and his friend aren’t punished for drinking and driving – indeed, when we are left longing so clearly for Mason’s success despite his being a rather mediocre shit – it reinforces a supremacist mindset about the value of darling white boyhood, while black and Hispanic boyhood, not to mention girlhood of any race, is not considered even worthy of mention." Guardian

>>><<<

"Ulbricht began as an idealist, setting out to build a market free from what he described as the ‘thieving murderous mits’ of the state. He ended up paying muscle to protect the bureaucratic system that he had created." Aeon

>>><<<

"According to one intelligence officer with extensive experience in South Africa, the NIA is politically factionalised and “totally penetrated” by foreign agencies: “Everyone is working for someone else.” The former head of the South African secret service, Mo Shaik, a close ally of the president, Jacob Zuma, was described as a US confidant and key source of information on “the Zuma camp” in a leaked 2008 Wikileaks cable from the American embassy in Pretoria." Guardian

>>><<<

This study reiterates a useful point: that racism often operates at the level of discretion, i.e. whether or not someone in authority is willing to bend the rules to help someone out.

"A police officer is an out-and-out bigot if she targets innocent blacks for speeding tickets. But an officer who is more likely to give a pass to white motorists who exceed the speed limit than to black ones is also discriminating, even if with little or no conscious awareness. This is one reason the Twitter hashtag #crimingwhilewhite is so powerful: It draws attention to the racially biased exercise of discretion by police officers, prosecutors and judges, which results in whites getting a pass for the kinds of offenses for which minorities are punished." NYTimes

>>><<<

"The chorus was made up of both People of Color and white people. The white people, however, weren’t singing. They simply marched in step, and side by side with the Black people on the stage. The only voices we heard were the voices of POC. White people showed UP. They walked. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder. They marched. And they let the people of color do the talking. They stood silently so Black voices could be heard. What a brilliant piece of staging that should really resonate, I thought." Broad Side

>>><<<

And yet, so far as I know, a true land value tax has never been implemented.

"Contemporary sources and historians claim that in the United Kingdom, a vast majority of both socialist and classical liberal activists could trace their ideological development to Henry George. George's popularity was more than a passing phase; even by 1906, a survey of British parliamentarians revealed that the American author's writing was more popular than Walter Scott, John Stuart Mill, and William Shakespeare." Wiki

>>><<<

Here's one for LSE grads. Basically arguing that NATO should have allowed Qadaffi to crush the Libyan rebels back in 2011 and allowed the country to reform gradually under the leadership of Saif Qadaffi. The benefit of hindsight is much in evidence, as you'd imagine. Foreign Affairs

>>><<<

Trying to prevent drugs being used recreationally in rich countries often puts them out of reach of medics in both rich and poor countries. This article related to ketamine specifically, but I'm aware that opiates are generally under-prescribed for pain management. That is to say, the "war on drugs" hurts not only informal drug users, but even people within formal medical settings.

"A proposal that is about to come before the UN to restrict global access to ketamine, a drug abused in rich countries, would deprive millions of women of lifesaving surgery in poor countries, according to medicines campaigners." Guardian

>>><<<

Here's the answer, ok everyone? Wired

>>><<<

Cooking with physics XKCD

Links, Sunday 22nd Feb

"‘It wasn’t so much that Dawkins was so convincing, or interesting even,’ Yanky told me between short sips of beer. ‘It was just, I was sitting there with this whole group of people who were having this one viewpoint.’ He experienced for the first time what religion looked like from the outside, a series of often ridiculous and always questionable ideas shattering its absolute hold on his psyche." Aeon

>>><<<

This is good throughout

"Here’s the thing though: if she had been thinking “intersectionally” enough, she would have known that had the policewomen been sufficiently provoked, it is not her, a white woman, who would have been hauled off to jail and kept there. It is not her, a British citizen, who would have been asked to leave the country. It is not her name and her face which would have made headlines the next day. Corralled between police officers with the authority to arrest us and white anarchists with little personally at stake if they did, my enthusiasm about participating in a public queer event for the first time gave way to unease and insecurity." Autostraddle

>>><<<

Correcting some misconceptions about medieval Europe iO9

>>><<<

Hatred of the homeless is so intense that it's in some ways immune to parody.

"Sculptor Fabian Brunsing brought a satirical eye to the issue by creating the “pay bench”, an art installation of a park bench that retracts its metal spikes for a limited time when the prospective sitter feeds it a coin. Chinese officials, completely missing the joke, thought that this was a great idea and installed similar benches in Yantai Park of the Shangdong province." Guardian

>>><<<

"More and more, however, we are being asked to suppress our judgment in favor of that of an artificial intelligence... It will be alienating in some ways. We won’t feel that comfortable with it. We’ll get a lot of better results, but it won’t feel like utopia." Marginal Revolution

>>><<<

"A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today." Guardian

>>><<<

The Jihad for an erection must be fought by all means available

"The Isis men seem to be sex-mad. They are always confiscating Viagra from pharmacies, which people think they use themselves." Guardian

(In seriousness, I'm sure much of the appeal of IS for young men arises from the "crisis of masculinity" and the promise of claiming a status as patriarchs in a patriarchal society)

Links, Thursday 19th Feb

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

>>><<<

"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

>>><<<

"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

>>><<<

"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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

"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)

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

Nature is pretty neat!

>>><<<

Thoughts? Slate

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

"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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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.

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

[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

>>><<<

[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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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.

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

Well shit

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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.

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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.

>>><<<

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"

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

[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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

"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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

"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

>>><<<

[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

>>><<<

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*

>>><<<

South African democracy in action.

>>><<<

"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

>>><<<

"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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

[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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

"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

>>><<<

"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

>>><<<

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

>>><<<

Linguists *are* pretty hardcore. XKCD