Links, Tuesday 2nd June

Of course, the City could make lots more money, and house lots more people, if it actually resolved the legal difficulties preventing new development on the remainder of the wasteland we call District 6. With the sums at stake, you could set aside huge amounts to compensate victims of forced removals and still pay for social housing.

But no, far easier just to evict poor people in the few homes that do remain to put in upper class tenants instead.

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"I think a lot of people saw the Bendy Pole Men and thought, I never realised how terrified I am of Bendy Pole Men, I shall add it to my list of fears. Props for coming up with a new fear, George." Buzzfeed

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"The next day, when America woke up to the confirmed reality of a black president, roughly 1 in 100 searches for “Obama” also included [the n-word] or “KKK” in the query string."

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"Once more, as drug reform takes place all over the world, Britain's drug policy is still being dictated by right-wing scaremongers armed with disinformation, bad science and shonky statistics." Vice

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"Even more bizarre is the African-American man, who, after returning to his childhood home at a project housing unit in the Bronx, was arrested for trespassing in front of his own relatives. He even had the address of the building tattooed onto his forearm, but that didn't matter—he spent the night in jail." Vice

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Thoughts?

"If Napoleon had remained emperor of France for the six years remaining in his natural life, European civilization would have benefited inestimably. The reactionary Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia and Austria would not have been able to crush liberal constitutionalist movements in Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe and elsewhere; pressure to join France in abolishing slavery in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean would have grown; the benefits of meritocracy over feudalism would have had time to become more widely appreciated; Jews would not have been forced back into their ghettos in the Papal States and made to wear the yellow star again; encouragement of the arts and sciences would have been better understood and copied; and the plans to rebuild Paris would have been implemented, making it the most gorgeous city in the world." Smithsonian


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I doubt the US government would actually commission the relevant research, but I consider it very likely that the Silk Road massively reduced harms for drug users. He still shouldn't have tried to have those people murdered though.

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This is good

"When it comes to the Holocaust, a gentle heads up may sound like common sense rather than censoriousness. The struggle taking place on campuses now is, in part, a way of asking faculty to see rape and racialized or gendered violence on a continuum with such self-evidently difficult topics."

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You can ignore most of the charts discussing prevalence, unless you take it as an a priori truth that drug use is bad. The most important things are that rates of drug-related deaths and new HIV cases in Portugal have both plunged since decriminalisation.

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[Discussion of abortion and the death penalty]

On the concept of "quickening" and it's legal implications

"For centuries the quickening also had important legal ramifications. British common law, eventually imported to Colonial America, outlawed abortion only if it took place after the quickening. Likewise, a pregnant woman could not be executed post-quickening. The English jurist William Blackstone wrote in 1770, “To be saved from the gallows a woman must be quick with child—for barely with child, unless he be alive in the womb, is not sufficient.”"

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“It is a lie that there is any optimism. There is no optimism. What the so-called optimism is about is stopping panic-stricken Greeks withdrawing deposits from banks,” Guardian

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Slightly technical argument about the Greek government's strategy in debt negotiations. I'm slightly sceptical, given that the author is an advisor to the German government, and so has some vested interest in rejecting ECB liquidity assistance to Greek banks. Nevertheless interesting

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"I’m talking about the men who just really, really, REALLY want you to make you come. Not in a nice, caring way — generally more in a “I will rub your clit for the next SEVENTY TWO YEARS if I have to” kind of way. I’ve slept with some, my friends have slept with some, they could be sitting next to you right now and you’d have no idea. I basically think that the issue with those guys is that they genuinely don’t care about women’s pleasure... They don’t want to make women because it’s basic bloody courtesy, they just like the general, vague idea of being ace in bed, which is obviously —  I’m assuming — tied to their need to comfort their own sense of masculinity." Medium

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Like in other countries, "anti-trafficking" NGOs in South Africa (often in fact religious organisations who object to the existence of a sex industry at all) are hard at work inflating and manufacturing false statistics to scare the public into compliance.

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A translation of Finnegan's Wake is a massive publishing success in China

Links, Friday 29th May

"I experienced a number of small epiphanies — self-realizations actually — but one in particular remained with me. As the drug wore off, I went indoors to take a hot bath. For a moment I thought that might not be a good idea, as bath time is when women in middle age can be very self-critical and unforgiving, and I didn’t want the sight of my waistline to veer me into a bad trip. But while in the tub I envisioned my body as a ship that was taking me through life, and that made it beautiful. I stopped feeling guilty about growing older and regretful about losing my looks. Instead, I felt overwhelming gratitude. It was a tremendous relief that I still feel." NY Times

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"“Colonel” is pronounced just like “kernel.” How did this happen? From borrowing the same word from two different places. In the 1500s, English borrowed a bunch of military vocabulary from French, words like cavalerie, infanterie, citadelle, canon, and also, coronel. The French had borrowed them from the Italians, then the reigning experts in the art of war, but in doing so, had changed colonello to coronel." Mental Floss

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"If he simply steals one cup of coffee for himself, his power affordance shrinks slightly. If, on the other hand, he steals the pot and pours cups for himself and the other person, his power affordance spikes sharply. People want this man as their leader." Atlantic

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A hoverboard!

(Though note this is basically a small-scale hovercraft, operating by the displacement of air. The one's from Back to the Future appeared to operate by some sort of anti-gravity technology).

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Only a single district in Ireland voted against marriage equality

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"Democrats don't like to talk about it too loudly, but quietly there's considerable optimism that a white candidate could drastically outperform Obama in Greater Appalachia, strengthening the party's hold on Pennsylvania and putting Missouri back into contention. Conversely, many Republicans are hopeful that Obama's successor won't be able to maintain his extraordinary performance with black and Latino voters." Vox

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Yikes. How the "purity culture" associated with certain US churches facilitates sexual coercion

[TW: for sexual abuse]

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The age of male Hollywood stars, graphed against the age of the their female love interests.

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"It would be a mistake to say that science fiction as such is “about” laziness—no genre reducible to such a singular point of significance can flower long—but it is uncommonly good at animating fantasies about avoiding labor." Slate

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"The hero cop narrative is also belied by the facts. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, police work does not crack the top-10 list of most dangerous jobs. Loggers have a fatality rate 11 times higher than cops, and sanitation workers die in the line of duty at twice the rate that police do... In fact, if you compare the murder rate among police officers with the murder rate in several American cities, you find that it is far safer to be a NYPD officer than an average black man in Baltimore or St. Louis." Slate

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Just finished reading Maus. Broken

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A history of state massacres of political opponents in Angola

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Very interesting discussion on the contrasts between studio and independent filmmaking, and the nature of the actor's art generally

(Also, it turns out Robert Downey Jr says some hella racist stuff)

"There’s a special political failing that results—the self-congratulatory good feelings of the overtly liberal cinema. And there’s an aesthetic failing that follows as well: the shibboleth of the self-effacing director who gives his or her performers the space in which to shine, and who, in fact, makes films in which the actors are compelled to do the bulk of the work. The special mediocrity of independent films is the lack of direction and of production alike, the sense that there’s neither an infrastructure surrounding the set nor a stimulus on the set, but, rather, a faux stage on which the actors give boundlessly of themselves without keeping any true creative control."

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Some profiles of people from communities that are identified as "culturally Muslim", but who are not religious. Interested to hear thoughts

“The other day I ordered some food online – pork buns – and afterwards a guy called me up from the company and he said ‘Nasreen, do you know it’s not halal?’ I said yes, I’m not a Muslim, but afterwards I wish I’d said ‘Who are you to police what I’m eating? How dare you call me up to remind me.’ But that’s how people think: you’re a Muslim, you’ve got a Muslim name.”

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What strikes me about this is the extent to which debates about "service delivery" actually obscure deeper debates about the legal status of informal settlements. I think the real challenge, in the longer term, is making these settlements formal, with all that entails - access to land rights and tenure, but also the construction of infrastructure, applying building codes and lots more.

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"The result is a turbine that’s 50 percent less expensive than a bladed one, nearly silent, and, as one of the turbine’s engineers put it, “looks like asparagus” (sorry, Quixote). And while each Vortex turbine is also 30 percent less efficient at capturing energy, wind farms can double the number of turbines that occupy a given area if they go bladeless. That’s a net energy gain of 40 percent ... Plus, the turbine has no gears or moving parts; theoretically maintenance could be much easier than a traditional bells-and-whistles spinning one." Grist

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Great cartoon about greeting customs in different cultures.

"The earliest recorded mention of kissing in human history is in India's vedic texts, first written down in 1500 BCE... Some believe that social kissing originated as a way to smell the person they were greeting. In fact, the word for "kiss" in those vedic texts is the same as the word for "sniff"."

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A criticism of consensus decision making. All thoughts welcome

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On why Max Max is such a great piece of filmmaking

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I guffawed

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Gosh, criminal law being misused to police social deviance? Who could have imagined?!

Links, Monday 25 May

TW: mental health, torture

"Inmates at the ADX spend approximately 23 hours of each day in solitary confinement. Jones had never been so isolated before. Other prisoners on his cellblock screamed and banged on their doors for hours. Jones said the staff psychiatrist stopped his prescription for Seroquel, a drug taken for bipolar disorder, telling him, “We don’t give out feel-good drugs here.” Jones experienced severe mood swings. To cope, he would work out in his cell until he was too tired to move. Sometimes he cut himself. In response, guards fastened his arms and legs to his bed with a medieval quartet of restraints, a process known as four-pointing." NYTimes

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Defeat the patriarchy with the power of tampons

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 "The EU leaders present themselves as modern-day William Wilberforces, embarking on a high-minded crusade. But this is patently false and entirely self-serving. What is happening in the Mediterranean today does not even remotely resemble the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans did not want to move.

Today, those embarking on the journey to Europe want to leave their home countries. And if they were free to do so, they would be taking advantage of the safe flights that budget airlines operate between north Africa and Europe at a tiny fraction of the cost of the extraordinarily dangerous sea passage." Guardian

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"In her college-level physics classes, Dr. Crenshaw saw a familiar pattern emerge. White male students, who were the minority in the classroom, often positioned themselves on the “winning” side of binaries that abound in popular understandings of physics. For example, physics is understood to be rational not emotional, theoretical not practical, elite not common. By referring to themselves as the most experienced, the best, they experts, the most rational, the most logical, the male students were able to create an environment where they were understood to be the best. They quickly assumed they were experts and acted like it." Feministing

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Racial segregation increased in every region of the US between 1880 and 1940, at a pretty uniform pace

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"If you just forget about the world "immigration" and think about "a place that lots of people are moving to," I think it's obvious that for most people with most sets of skills "a place that lots of people are moving to" is a place with more job opportunities (you could teach their kids or clean their houses or cure them when they're sick or fix their electricity) than "a place that nobody wants to move to."" Vox

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Decriminalisation of sex work. Still very, very obviously the correct policy

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Great rundown on the emerging *strictly financial* case for renewables over fossil fuel energy

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An incredibly principled man is on trial for exposing corruption, murder and torture by top government officials in Angola.

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So here's a 2004 report from the Norwegian Ministry of Justice basically acknowledging the criminalising the purchase of sex has life more difficult for sex workers in Sweden. (see especially pp. 12-14 "Violence" and pp. 19-20 "The consequences of the law)

Note that the Norwegian government nevertheless did criminalise the purchase of sex in 2009, mostly because of racist attitudes towards the Nigerian migrant women who started doing street based sex work in Oslo from around 2003.

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A lot of these are pretty hilarious, tbh

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I don't think you can dispute that industrial agriculture and food processing are absolutely essential. They have allowed us collectively to massively reduce the proportion of our time obtaining and preparing food.

But I think the author overstates the *immediate* benefits of industrial food processing to the European working class. It may have reduced drudgery, but it also had serious health consequences in the short term.

"A detailed re-reading of Victorian sources, however, reveals that diet and public health reached a high point in the mid-Victorian era, to decline noticeably at the end of the 1870s with the introduction of the first generation of processed foods. The increased sugar intake alone caused such damage to the nation's teeth that many people could no longer chew tough foods, thereby reducing their intake of vegetables, fruits and nuts."

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"During the debate, panelist Fiona Broadfoot showed her colours when she claimed that since clients were criminalised in Sweden, the country had become "less sexually deviant" because there was less prostitution. Are we really going back to the days when consenting sex between adults, in this case where payment is involved, is labelled deviant? What a dangerous precedent." Politics.co.uk

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Everything I thought I knew is wrong 

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So here's a controversial question... What is the *optimal* amount of food wastage? It's obviously not zero, because ensuring that you use every scrap of food will end up using far more resources than you conserve. Supermarkets are much easier to regulate than individual households, but, by the statistics, they're already the least wasteful element in the supply chain. How much more efficiency is it worth squeezing out of them?

"Of the 7.1m tonnes of food wasted in France each year, 67% is binned by consumers, 15% by restaurants and 11% by shops." Guardian

The provision to stop supermarkets from deliberately destroying food is good, but maybe that should be paired with measures to encourage tipping, rather than giving to charity (governments will always prefer "proper" charities to self-help). Like, what if you require that supermarkets just set out a table at the end of the day where anyone can take what they want, and in return they're legally absolved of any responsibility towards the people eating that food?

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Breastfeeding is super duper overrated as a health intervention

"Many women find breastfeeding to be an enjoyable way to bond with their babies. There is certainly no evidence that breastfeeding is any worse for a baby than formula. And maybe there are some early-life benefits in terms of digestion and rashes, which you may or may not think are important. But what the evidence says is that the popular perception that breast milk is some kind of magical substance that will lead your child to be healthy and brilliant is simply not correct."

Links, Wednesday 20th May

Related

"Geolibertarians consider land to be the common property of all humankind. They say that private property is derived from an individual's right to the fruits of their labor. Since land was not created by anyone's labor, it cannot be rightfully owned. Thus, geolibertarians recognize a right to secure possession of land (land tenure), on the condition that the full rental value be paid to the community. This, they say, has the effect of both giving back the value that belongs to the community and encouraging landholders to only use as much land as they need, leaving unneeded land for others."

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Loads of old photos of Cape Town.

... which got me looking at this old map too

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Offering smokers a reward of $800 to quit is successful in about 15% of cases. Since nicotine is just about the most addictive drug known to science, this is actually a pretty impressive result.

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"while 17 percent of the traditional sex education programs lowered rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, 80 percent of the programs that address gender and power lowered rates. All told, programs that addressed gender or power were five times as likely to be effective as those that did not." NPR

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Fascinating results on what women search for in porn. Girl-on-girl and boy-on-boy material tops the list. Women also much more likely to search for solo male, group sex and "rough sex" than men. (despite being Pornhub link is SFW)

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Lots of these are great. Foot fetishists seem to be highly concentrated in the Middle East, a region known for strong purity taboos around feet (hence hitting someone with your shoe as a sign of disrespect)

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Scientists devise means for cheap, decentralised manufacture of safe opiates; immediately narc on themselves.

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"It has proven to be such a valuable psychotherapeutic adjunct, I truly believe it will persevere in therapeutic use for a long time to come, despite the structuring of the law that has come about in many countries to prohibit its use and discourage its study. As one psychiatrist put it, "MDMA is penicillin for the soul, and you don't give up penicillin once you've seen what it can do.""

- Alexander Shulgin, PiHKAL

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“The problem of migration, of desperate people, will not be solved with these [military] measures. It will assume other forms. They will try to find other ways.” Guardian

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"In the first half of the 20th century, rules began emerging for pink and blue, but they were loose, with some seeing blue as a girl's colour because of its association with the Virgin Mary. The rules often had nothing to do with gender. "I've seen paper dolls up through the 1920s and 30s," says Paoletti, "where the pattern was blue for blue-eyed children, and pink for brown-eyed children. There were lots and lots of little brown-eyed boys who got pink presents for their first birthday."" Guardian

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Good summary of the events surrounding the Marikana massacre, including all the evident that emerged from the Farlam commission. Some shocking details of police complicity with the Lonmin mine owners, and the degree to which they planned for the use of deadly force

Links, Monday 18th May

What in the name of everloving Christ is the EU thinking? So *suppose* this ridiculous plan succeeds on its own terms, and they successfully destroy or seize boats and other assets of people smugglers. Does this mean all the migrants congregated by Libya's Mediterranean shore just go back to where they started? Or... do they just try make the journey in even worse boats, organised by people with even less skill at safely sailing these boats?

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Some great history here... Like the launch of Sputnik was a great relief to the American government, because it established a legal precedent for space travel in other countries' 'airspace'

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"To equate crime with undocumented people in our society is not tackling xenophobia, it is legitimising xenophobia," Al Jazeera

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So austerity in the UK made a pretty big dent in GDP (and GDP per capita), but hardly affected the overall level of employment. Some hypotheses around this are discussed.

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This is something I've never heard of before: individuals who consider themselves to consist of multiple individual people. Like multiple personality disorder, except they don't consider it disordered, and prefer "person" to "personality"

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I know I'm late to the party here, but check out my awesome friend Ayesha Krige​ doing some advocacy here

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MLK loved Star Trek

"[O]n Saturday night, I went to an NAACP fundraiser, I believe it was, in Beverly Hills. And one of the promoters came over to me and said, Ms. Nichols, there's someone who would like to meet you. He says he is your greatest fan.

And I'm thinking a Trekker, you know. And I turn, and before I could get up, I looked across the way and there was the face of Dr. Martin Luther King smiling at me and walking toward me. And he started laughing. By the time he reached me, he said, yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your greatest fan. I am that Trekkie."

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John Legend (aka John Stephens) performing a cappella, during his college days.

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This makes a lot of sense, as a first application for autonomous vehicles. It functions like an autopilot and can handle the relatively simple task of highway driving, leaving the human operator rested to handle more complex tasks.

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Least surprising result ever: white people prefer to live in all-white neighbourhoods, even controlling for apparent prosperity and availability of amenities.

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"One final look at the numbers. If we assume real growth of 2.5% (again a consensus view at the time) and 2% inflation, then a debt to GDP ratio of 40% would imply that the sustainable deficit was 1.8% of GDP. As the estimate of the output gap at the time was around zero, there was no reason to adjust this for the state of the cycle. The actual deficits for financial years 2006-7 and 2007-8 were slightly over 2.5% of GDP. The difference is what I call mild imprudence, and would have been fairly easily to correct in subsequent budgets. By 2009-10 the deficit had risen to 10.2% of GDP because of the recession. So the deficit in 2010 was a consequence of the recession, not Labour profligacy before the recession.

And if you cannot shake off that idea that Gordon Brown was profligate, one final set of figures. Between financial years 1979 to 1996 (the 18 years of Conservative government), the deficit averaged 3.2% of GDP. From 1997 to 2007 it was 1.3%. Now maybe the Conservatives were a bit unlucky with having two recessions on their watch, so the equivalent cyclically adjusted figures are 2.6% and 2.1%. One last time: Labour fiscal profligacy is as mythical as the unicorn." Mainly Macro

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Map of Anglo-Saxon London, lots of recognisable place names (quite a large file)

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"The portrayals of Natasha and Laura rankle at some level, for me, not because they are stories about a woman traumatized by not having children and a woman waiting for her husband to come home, but because it's another story about those two women rather than any of the other bazillion women who could exist in this universe and don't. If you had five butt-kicking women in this movie, it would seem perfectly logical that one of them might have a story related to getting pregnant or not. Why wouldn't she?" NPR

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"As for why historical female works were buried after they’d been so widely shared, that’s a question without a clear-cut answer. In the case of Du Châtelet, Janiak says the philosopher’s reputation shifted over the years from that of a writer to that of a translator, an activity that was deemed more socially appropriate for an intellectual woman.

Even Voltaire, with whom she’d had a very public and long-lasting relationship, played a role in minimizing her legacy. He’d praised her intelligence and ideas in some works, but after she died at age 43, Voltaire also referred to her as translator and framed her thoughts as derivative, according to Janiak. “She had understood science in a way he didn’t,” Janiak said. “I think he was jealous.”" Atlantic

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This is the kind of thing students at Stellenbosch have been dealing with. Solidarity.

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"The new study by University of Oxford, University of Leeds and used  4,830 16-year-old twins to rule out genetic factors – and found that both cannabis use and psychotic episodes were triggered by environmental factors, including being poor, or bullying. In other words, cannabis doesn’t cause the episodes – children who are under stress for other reasons tend to smoke dope, and are also at higher risk of psychotic episodes." Metro

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Very good paragraph

"No wonder people hate Burning Man, I thought, when I pictured it as a cynic might: rich people on vacation breaking rules that everyone else would be made to suffer for not obeying. Many of these people would go back to their lives and back to work on the great farces of our age. They wouldn’t argue for the decriminalisation of the drugs they had used; they wouldn’t want anyone to know about their time in the orgy dome. That they had cheered at the funeral pyre of a Facebook ‘like’ wouldn’t play well on Tuesday in the cafeteria at Facebook."

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So anti-capitalist market anarchism is a thing...

Links, Wednesday 13th May

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the issue of NHS "privatisation" is secondary to the issue of *trust*. Like, I think what people want is a medical service that is a) of good quality; b) widely available; c) free at the point of use; and d) not an excessive burden on the public purse. This is in principle compatible with some kinds of private provision. I mean, the NHS doesn't manufacture any of its own equipment under the status quo, but buys it from private providers.

Why I think the issue is one of trust is simply that people don't believe a Tory government (or a Labour government, for that matter) is genuinely trying to achieving these good things when they push through more privatisation. We think their long-term plan is to reduce service provision,  impose costs on patients, provide profits to friendly corporations, or simply privatise as an ideological imperative regardless of how well it actually works in particular cases. So I wish we could have a conversation about these issues, rather than debating endlessly about whether "privatisation" is a good or bad thing.

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SA prevents the UN special rapporteur on violence against women from making an official visit to the country. No doubt because her findings would be extremely embarrassing.

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This is still an isolated case, but an immense step forward

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This is South African immigration policy.

“We were sleeping,” Samadziripi told me, “when the police and the soldiers came. They did not give us time to change from our nighties. They just took us outside and said, ‘Where are your papers?’”

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Where sex work is criminalised, as in South Africa, the police will feel free to rob sex workers or coerce them into sex. Ordinary citizens will feel free to assault them. I'm sorry, residents' feelings about *seeing* sex workers in public spaces just do not rate.

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"Most historians side with a single narrative, captive to stories of capitalism as either liberating or satanic, springing from below or imposed from above. In order to plumb the past of global capitalism, however, they need a stock of global narratives that get beyond the dichotomies of force or free will, external or internal agents. To explain why some parts of the world struggled, one should not have to choose between externalist theories, which rely on global injustices, and internalist ones, which invoke local constraints." Foreign Affairs

Links, Tuesday 12th May

How to pick a lock

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"Guantánamo Diary, Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s extraordinary account of rendition, captivity and torture reveals, more vividly than any book in the previous decade of shock-and-awe ferocity, how he and countless other men became victims of a profound sense of individual and collective emasculation." Guardian

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Conditions of material scarcity promote poor decision-making (which it turn tends to lead to more material scarcity)

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April Brogan died from heroin withdrawal in a Florida jail cell. Staff were aware of her condition and failed to provide her with necessary medical attention. Make no mistake, the hatred that state officials have for sex workers and drug users kills people every day.

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I just watched "Top Five", the new Chris Rock movie. I have concerns with some of his politics around gender, as always, but this is a seriously funny film. Would recommend.

(And now I reflect on the fact that I feel the need to add the political caveat, which I wouldn't do for your standard action movie, however fascist its politics. Perhaps comedy is just inherently a more serious genre and so should be criticised more seriously, idk)

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SA government directing joint police/army raids for undocumented migrants. I can't even *quietly despairs*

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"Who is a foreigner? Certainly not Radovan Krejcir, the Czech fugitive who is suspected of running a vast criminal enterprise in South Africa and whom the authorities allowed to flourish here. A foreigner seems to be, once again, anyone who is dark-skinned, cannot speak Zulu and cannot produce some form of dompas." Times

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EU states are committed to migration policies that are essentially premised on keeping foreigners out by any means necessary, up to and including their deaths. UK government ministers, for instance, are on record opposing rescue operations in the Mediterranean on the grounds that people drowning will discourage other migrants. There is also an EU policy of confiscating migrant boats that are intercepted, essentially encouraging traffickers to move people on the least valuable, least seaworthy boats available.

On the other hand, while there are doubtless many unsavoury practices in the industry, people traffickers in the Mediterranean are fundamentally providing a service that migrants want and are willing to pay for. So the people who engage in voluntary transactions to help people migrate are framed as violent criminals, against whom military action is warranted, whereas the people who are willing to let migrants die in order to limit further migration are framed as having the moral high ground.

Recognise that this framing is the entire *purpose* of "anti-trafficking" rhetoric: to serve the interests of the powerful and amoral against those of the poor and desperate. Military action against "traffickers" is just the logical conclusion of this way of thinking

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More "anti-trafficking" nonsense. Probably not actually killing anyone this time, just making it extremely difficult for minors to travel into or out of South Africa.

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"Sociologists sometimes call the management of familial duties “worry work,” and the person who does it the “designated worrier,” because you need large reserves of emotional energy to stay on top of it all.

I wish I could say that fathers and mothers worry in equal measure. But they don’t. Disregard what your two-career couple friends say about going 50-50. Sociological studies of heterosexual couples from all strata of society confirm that, by and large, mothers draft the to-do lists while fathers pick and choose among the items." NY Times

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"Pre-crisis Britain wasn’t fiscally profligate. Debt and deficits were low, and at the time everyone expected them to stay that way; big deficits only arose as a result of the crisis. The crisis, which was a global phenomenon, was driven by runaway banks and private debt, not government deficits. There was no urgency about austerity: financial markets never showed any concern about British solvency. And Britain, which returned to growth only after a pause in the austerity drive, has made up none of the ground it lost during the coalition’s first two years." NY Times

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The Chinese government is engaged in a concerted campaign to eliminate the Cantonese language.

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Some commentary on the political calculations surrounding (and thus the likelihood) of another indy ref in Scotland

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"In the past four years, Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, one of India’s richest temples in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, has deposited more than five tons in a state-run bank in a “gold for gold” program where the goods are melted down and held and the interest is paid back to the temple in gold." Washington Post

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Loving this

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Elon Musk is obviously cool and successful and stuff, but damn he sounds like a creepy guy 

Links, Friday 8th May

"Prices, a Federal Trade Commission report found in 1968, were 2.5 times higher for identical goods in the city as they were in the suburbs. If a family couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make their payments, repo men would come to their house, take their television, and then sell it to someone else. Repossessions were public affairs that everyone in the neighborhood could see, publicly shaming the family. When rioters broke into appliance stores in the 1960s and took TVs it looked, to outsiders, like brazen theft of a sought-after big-ticket item. To rioters whose TVs had be repossessed, however, it must have felt like they were taking back property for which they had already paid for many times over. And, perhaps, it was a chance to exorcise some of the shame of repossession as well." Slate

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How to figure out where the most racists are? Use Google search data, of course!

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Many of these are actually kind of great

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Hopefully this will put the poor civets out of a job

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“You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in transformation. Sometimes the longest connections yield very little growth, while the briefest of encounters change everything." PolySinglish

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So much yes.

"The choice to present complex conversations and decisions as simple “choice feminism” flattens womens’ lives (and the lives of femmes of other genders) into simple binaries, and seems designed to enable columnists to then patronisingly explain, “no, not every choice is feminist” (again and again and again). It also functions as a derail: sex workers often have conversations about our rights and safety dominated by people saying “choicy choice McFeminism”, or arguing over whether our “choice” is “feminist” (who cares?). The fiction that marginalised women invariably seek to focus on “choice” (rather than survival, rights, resistance) is used to as a bludgeon to caricature conversations that mainstream feminists can’t be bothered to listen to – or don’t want to happen, because those conversations might de-centre their concerns." Glasgow Sex Worker

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"Immigration restrictions in high income countries are comparable to global apartheid." Discuss.

"So if we're talking about immigration policy, the question "Does migration substantially harm low-income countries?" is the same as the question "Does forcibly stopping people from leaving low income countries substantially help those countries?" To put it mildly, social science has absolutely no evidence of such a effect.

Would it be different in poor countries? How about in poor areas of Africa? We do not need to wonder that either. Parts of Africa that are as prosperous as parts of Europe – Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town – have spent several generations actively blocking most black Africans from living and working there. Many people in those enclaves claimed that this was somehow beneficial to black Africans, encouraging them to "develop" their own lands. There is no evidence at all of such a positive effect." Vice

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Last past: I take it as obvious that human beings have a natural right to freedom of movement. That is, we all have the natural abilities to move around using our own resources, and obtain the means of our own survival through access to the land or via voluntary cooperation with others. In general, it is possible to exercise these natural abilities without harming others in any way. To restrict the right to freedom of movement is therefore coercive, and a strong argument should be offered in its favour.

Have you ever seen such a strong argument? We tend to view the existing regime of nations and borders as natural, but it is a highly artificial system of coercion. Can you offer reasons as to why it might be defensible?

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There are heroes among us #wrongtowork

"Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it."

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“Many of the soldiers testified that the rules of engagement they were provided with before the ground incursion into Gaza were unclear and lenient. The soldiers were briefed by their commanders to fire at every person they identified in a combat zone, since the working assumption was that every person in the field was an enemy,” Independent

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Hmmm. So the way to tackle "tensions and communities and foreign nationals" is... to arrest foreign nationals! Obviously. Well done SA government.

"The mandate of this [inter-ministerial committee on migration] has been broaden to deal with all the underlying causes of the tensions between communities and the foreign nationals... Government is determined to restore and maintain order within our communities. Operation Fiela – Reclaim is an operation to rid our country of illegal weapons, drug dens, prostitution rings and other illegal activities. This operation is a multidisciplinary interdepartmental operation.

Fiela is a Sesotho word for sweep/ ukushanela ngesiZulu.  And that is exactly what we intend to do. We want to sweep our public places clean so that our people can be and feel safe. The focus of Operation is, amongst others, will be on the following crimes:

Illicit Drugs
Contraband
Undocumented migrants
Human Trafficking and Prostitution
Hijacked and condemned buildings
Illegal possession of firearms and ammunition
Unlicensed businesses
Management of RDP houses
Illegal occupation of land
Illegal goods and products"

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"Because water is liquid in the physical sense, it is not at all liquid in the financial sense." Grist

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“LSD terrifies governments; it is their ultimate fear because it changes the way people look at the world,” NY Times

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"True beauty is a severe brow, a no-nonsense haircut, and an armful of male limbs you’re about to rip off someone’s torso. That’s what Real Women look like." The Toast

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"business interests dislike Keynesian economics because it threatens their political bargaining power. Business leaders love the idea that the health of the economy depends on confidence, which in turn – or so they argue – requires making them happy." Guardian

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"In 2012, a wide-ranging WIN/Gallup International poll found that 5 percent of Saudi citizens—more than a million people—self-identify as “convinced atheists,” the same percentage as in the United States. Nineteen percent of Saudis—almost six million people—think of themselves as “not a religious person.” (In Italy, the figure is 15 percent.)" New Republic

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Wowzers, that's amazing.

"A broader solution exists in Norway, where the government makes it possible to look up anyone's tax return online, thus ensuring full transparency of all salaries. Any person at any job can go look up any of their colleagues' pay or pay received by people doing comparable work at a competing firm."

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In light of the UK election results, just having a think about nationalism and immigration policy. I'm talking about status quo immigration policies that most people think of as basically reasonable. Policies that can result, for instance, in people being detained for months at a time (often under unhealthy and abusive conditions) and separated from their families, friends, homes and sources of income. These being consequences that can often result from filling in paperwork incorrectly, as opposed to say committing a crime or doing anything else that might actually hurt anyone.

My question: how much low-level, normalised hatred do you have to feel for foreigners to think of this sort of treatment as reasonable? As an exercise, imagine how bad a thing a friend of yours would have to do to for you to feel OK about them being treated that way. Now take the difference between how bad the thing you just imagined is and how bad it is to fill in paperwork incorrectly - this is a measure of how little humanity you vest in people with foreign nationality.

Links, Tuesday 28th April

I'm leaving for Afrika Burn later this morning, so this will be the last post for another week or so...

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Heh. Furious 7 is basically a live-action remake of Cars

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Huh. I know its a day late, but here's the actual history of the use of "420" as a code for cannabis

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You know, I'm sure foreigners living in South Africa *are* disproportionately represented amongst drug dealers. When selling an internationally traded product, it helps to have international connections, whether those products are electronic goods or mind altering substances. Many foreigners also aren't granted permission to work, and so have to rely on black market sources of income.

Anyway, what's wrong with being a drug dealer? Most drug dealers are genuinely trying to help their customers get access to a quality product, often under very difficult conditions and at some risk to themselves. People want their product, and they are supplying it. I'd be much more scathing about alcohol firms in this country, who have been exploiting South Africans for generations and more-or-less exemplify the term "white monopoly capital". Alcohol also contributes far more to violence and public health problems than any illegal drugs do.

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Inheritance taxes seem to me like a very silly idea. 1) Even when they work well, they are extremely arbitrary - the effective rate a given estate will pay will basically depend how often its inheritors die. 2) There are many ways around them and, because it's a huge amount of money levied for one specific event, a lot of effort can be concentrated into avoidance and evasion. I'm also not sure why intragenerational concentrations of wealth should be considered blameless relative to intergenerational ones. Rather just levy an annual tax on wealth, at a rate that will steadily erode large fortunes, unless they are invested extremely (and consistently) wisely.

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Now this I did not know. Early in his career, Hendrik Verwoed was a highly respected academic and actually something of a liberal. He argued that "There are no biological differences among the big race groups". It was only later that he was drawn into the orbit of Afrikaner nationalism and became the terrible human being that we all know from the history books.

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This is so fucked up I cannot even. Indian couple come to the UK for a holiday for *10 days* end up getting detained for *2 months*. Husband dies in detention (no doubt of a highly preventable illness), wife still not allowed to leave.

We can talk about immigration reform in abstract terms all we like, but we shouldn't lose sight of the basic fact that the people who have designed and administer this system lack even the faintest modicum of human decency. Until they are removed from office and the institutions they have constructed are laid to waste, there will not be justice.

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"But sex work has another gloss. It’s said that these people don’t actually want their rights; the management who will profit from the industry is just whipping them up.

But in the US the very organisations that represent either the porn industry or strip club industry are advancing positions that are the opposite of what the [sex worker rights movement] is advancing. So it just doesn't hold up. The businesses are not advocating for decriminalisation, and the majority of sex workers are. They are advocating for a business model that allows them to continue to have dominance over the industry, which is legalisation, which is what keeps them in business." Red Pepper

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"In 2014, at least 40,000 Syrians crossed the Mediterranean to seek asylum in European countries via Italy. But approximately 35,000 Eritreans also made the voyage... Young Eritreans are fleeing mandatory and indefinite military conscription and imprisonment and torture for political organizing; there are also reports of growing famine. Yet in sharp contrast to the coverage of Syrian refugees, the Western English-language media has barely registered the escalating Eritrean refugee crisis." Africa is a Country

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This relates to some of what I said the other day, how as I white South African, I feel more included in the national project than migrants from elsewhere in Africa. This is despite my status as an oppressor and, frankly, the differences in culture and lifestyle that separate me from most other South Africans. Could it be that it is *precisely* my status as an oppressor that connects me to the national project?

"South Africans may not always like each other across so-called racial lines, but they have a kinship that is based on their connection to the apartheid project. Outsiders – those who didn't go through the torture of the regime – are juxtaposed against insiders. In other words foreigners are foreign precisely because they can not understand the pain of apartheid, because most South Africans now claim to have been victims of the system. Whether white or black, the trauma of living through apartheid is seen as such a defining experience that it becomes exclusionary; it has made a nation of us."

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This is totally on point, drawing the connection between the explicit, street-level violence of xenophobic attacks and the violence meted out more insidiously in the form of visa regulations and border controls. It's the same ideology, just different methods, and the South African government is complicit.

"I was here during the last “hunting season”. The difference, this time, is the emergence of the rudiments of an “ideology”. We now have the semblance of a discourse aimed at justifying the atrocities"

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Women understand #wrongtowork

"The way women respond to price changes is much closer to the ideal of economic rationality. In particular, women tend to drop out of the labor force when it no longer makes “economic” sense for them to be working. Men, for reasons that are not difficult to imagine, tend to keep on working regardless of how the numbers come out—as a matter of principle, one is inclined to suggest."

From "Economics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism", by Joseph Heath

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"It is also important to note that the Swedish welfare state has achieved greater equality of income than was ever achieved under Soviet communism. That’s worth repeating for emphasis: Swedish capitalism is more egalitarian than Soviet communism." ibid

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Reducing the length of copyright protection is obviously a good policy, people. Maybe 14 years after publication is too short, but 70 years *after the author's death* is far, far too long.

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"When we have statistics on homeless youth, that forty percent of homeless youth are queer, and we know that homeless youth are particularly vulnerable to trading sex for what they need to survive, and don’t have a lot of control. That’s not a problem of scary men, that’s a problem of: Where else are these kids supposed to sleep? What else are they supposed to do? It’s so much more appealing to say that it’s men’s demand for young people to have sex with, rather than to look closer to home: Why don’t you want that queer youth shelter in your neighborhood? Or: why is our mayor prioritizing this level of mass surveillance in New York, rather than creating shelter beds for young people who are very vulnerable?" The Awl

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"Remember all those cold war movies where nuclear missile crews are frantically dialing in the secret codes sent by the White House to launch nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles? Well, for two decades, all the Minuteman nuclear missiles in the US used the same eight-digit numeric passcode to enable their warheads: 00000000." Ars Technica

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I mean, this seems ridiculous (and possibly harmful to the actual kids concerned), but it's an obvious consequence of a genuine shortage. If you don't want parents to drill their kids to get into quality schools, build more quality schools (and maybe make sure there are paths to success other than attending the right schools.

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Good little review of the problems with housing policy in the UK. Short version: planning regulations are far too restrictive, and are most restrictive in areas with highest demand for housing (i.e. London and the Southeast). This is largely because vested interests have far too much power to limit the construction of new housing, including by influencing the regulatory climate.

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Ordinary Europeans are generally much nicer people than you'd think based on the sorts of leaders they elect, and the policies instituted by those leaders.

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Obviously I got the wrong genes...

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There's quite a lot of the author's own interpretation going into this reading. What do people think?

"If “The Second Sex” can’t be squared with the life, we are reduced to the final, depressing theory that the pact [between Beauvoir and Sartre] was just the traditional sexist arrangement—in which the man sleeps around and the woman nobly “accepts” the situation—on philosophical stilts. Sartre was the classic womanizer, and Beauvoir was the classic enabler."

Links, Tuesday 21st April

OK, this woman had two jobs: as a sex worker and as a central banker (in the austerity-promoting Netherlands, no less). In the first job, she hurt no-one, unless they specifically asked to be hurt. In contrast, central bankers in Europe have, over the last few years, wiped out trillions of euros in lost economic potential, and consigned millions to poverty. And yet it is the *first* job that is described as “indecent behaviour”. What standard of "decency" are we applying here, anyway?

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Everyone eligible to vote in the UK! Could you please take a few minutes of your time to do this, and circulate it widely in your networks? It's a clever little tool the ECP have made that makes it very easy to email your candidates for the upcoming parliamentary election about sex workers' rights. It literally will only take a few minutes, and it could make a huge difference if enough people do it!

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Incredible levels of stupidity and inhumanity on display by Scottish police. Shutting down safe working venues! Discouraging venues from stocking condoms! They apparently don't give a shit that sex workers are harmed by this.

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Good, thoughtful piece on polyamory and mental illness

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"The restaurants that you see now are the remnant of the Chinese population that used to fill the US-Mexico borderlands. Why? Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The 1882 law banned people from China from entering the US. So tens of thousands went to Cuba, South America and to Mexico. Many settled along the Mexican border, becoming grocers, merchants and restaurant owners. Others managed to cross into the US. “The Chinese invented undocumented immigration from Mexico,” Romero says. “Smuggling with false papers, in boats and in trains, the infrastructure for that was all invented by the Chinese.”" PRI

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This is a great idea 

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UK politics is a lot like a shitty high school drama at the moment...

Tories: "SNP and Labour are, like, totally in love!"
Labour: "Ewww SNP, gross!"
SNP: "Why you no love me, Labour? *sheds single tear*"

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Talk by David Kramer about South African styles of music derived from Khoisan traditions, with performances by Hannes Coetzee

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"Why is it that projects like DAN’s—projects aimed at democratizing society—are so often perceived as idle dreams that melt away as soon as they encounter hard material reality? In our case, at least, it had nothing to do with inefficiency: police chiefs across the country had called us the best organized force they’d ever had to deal with. It seems to me that the reality effect (if one may call it that) comes rather from the fact that radical projects tend to founder—or at least become endlessly difficult—the moment they enter into the world of large, heavy objects: buildings, cars, tractors, boats, industrial machinery. This in turn is not because these objects are somehow intrinsically difficult to administer democratically—history is full of communities that successfully engage in the democratic administration of common resources—it’s because, like the DAN car, they are surrounded by endless government regulation, and are effectively impossible to hide from the government’s armed representatives."

- Graeber

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"This toddler-level technique involves spreading the cards out on a table, swishing them around with your hands, and then gathering them up. Smooshing is used in poker tournaments and in baccarat games in Monte Carlo, but no one actually knows how long you need to smoosh a deck to randomize it." Quanta

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I think the more interesting question is why black South Africans aren't attacking *South African* whites. I mean, we've actually done some horrendous shit, and continue to hugely benefit from that. Foreigners who are currently alive, of whatever race (bar a few managers of multinational corporations), just haven't played as much part in the oppression of black South Africans. Not to say that I'm advocating violence against anyone, just that I'd understand anti-white violence a bit more easily. And yet not once have I ever felt threatened in South Africa because of my ethnicity. I can't even recall an instance where someone has been rude to me in a way that I would attribute to my white South African-ness.

[In case you're wondering, I am being faux naive here. I get that racial hierarchies in South Africa have been enforced for so long that they now appear "natural", whereas the appearance of relatively prosperous black foreigners is new. But still.]

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"Vexed" is the correct word here. When it comes to tackling Boko Haram, there's tendency to think that the ends justify the means. But I dunno, it leaves a very sour taste in the mouth.

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Very cool video of the surface of the sun

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How Americans were convinced to start using shopping trolleys...

"Goldman eventually had to hire attractive models to walk around the store pushing the carts to make shopping carts seem like an acceptable or even fashionable item to use."

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“We are living with 71 years of jetlag and it’s unsustainable.” Guardian

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"When stalking web-building spiders, Portias try to make different patterns of vibrations in the web that aggressively mimic the struggle of a trapped insect or the courtship signals of a male spider, repeating any pattern that induces the intended prey to move towards the Portia. Portia fimbriata has been observed to perform vibratory behavior for three days until the victim decided to investigate. They time invasions of webs to coincide with light breezes that blur the vibrations their approach causes in the target's web; and they back off if the intended victim responds belligerently. Portias that retreat may approach along an overhanging twig or rock, descend down a silk thread and kill the prey. Other jumping spiders take detours, but Portia is unusual in its readiness to use long detours that break visual contact." Wikipedia

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Fighting fatphobia

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"But perhaps boldest of all was a 1954 plan by Geoffrey Jellico, Ove Arup and Edward Mills to remake the whole of Soho as a concrete landscape of sunken roads, plazas and office towers. It would have involved knocking down much of Soho, and building a raised concrete platform, with 24-storey pinwheel towers, gardens and glass-bottomed canals over the streets beneath." Guardian

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Fun fact: Snoop Dogg and Cameron Diaz went to high school together, and he probably sold her weed at some point.

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Of course, it wasn't only UK policy, but it was a deliberate decision on the part of EU governments to cease search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean, on the full understanding that people would die.

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"Military operations" against Mediterranean people smugglers? What are these people actually thinking? Suppose that such a mission could even be successful on its own terms, and they manage to kill/arrest smugglers, and destroy their ships... then refugees are simply going to end up in the hands of less experienced smugglers, using less seaworthy ships. The *only* solution to this problem is to give refugees a safe and legal route to the places they want to be.

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Incredible levels of police brutality in South Africa. This remains an issue that isn't being taken anywhere near seriously enough.

"However, the records still reveal that 2 681 people died in police custody over the 10-year period. The cases indicate that, even though many suspects died in custody from apparently natural causes, many died due to assault. Of those who died in custody, records state nine were beaten to death with truncheons, nightsticks or riot batons."

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Wowzers, someone (it's not clear yet who) has designed a bot that is able to parse the semantic content of tweets and execute very lucrative trades on the basis of this information *within seconds*. Putting aside issues about the implications for financial markets, this is quite impressive just as  an AI exploit.

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TW: Sexual abuse, sexual harassment, rape, child abuse

Answers to the question: "Women of Reddit, when did you first notice that men were looking at you in a sexual way? How old were you and how did it make you feel?"

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"All of Europe has a responsibility to stop people from drowning. It’s partly due to their actions in Africa that people have had to leave their homes. Italy is doing so much to help save refugees and it needs support. Countries such as Britain, France, Belgium and Germany think they are far away and not responsible, but they all took part in colonising Africa. Nato took part in the war in Libya. They’re all part of the problem." Guardian

Links, Friday 17th April

"I'd like to apologise for the way I've been acting. Work has been very stressful." Dorkly

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No way.

“Natural selection in addition to good environmental conditions may help explain why the Dutch are so tall,” Guardian

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This is actually a very useful and systematic overview of the current weaknesses in the global economy. I think this is the crucial sentence:

"But the problem ... is that the industrialised world has a much greater capacity to produce things than an interest in buying things. The world is stuck with too little demand." Economist

It's only raised indirectly here, but this could also be framed as a problem with inequality: you basically need to get more money into the hands of poor people who would love to consume the output of all that excess capacity. You could do that by letting them migrate to rich countries, by investing in productive infrastructure in poor countries, by just handing cash from rich countries to people in poor countries, etc.

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Guys, check it out. They've gotten Robb Stark (!) to play Prince Charming in the Cinderella movie. Is he really the male lead you want in a royal love story? (Also, in what medieval kingdom do poor servant girls get to ride around on horseback?)

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Veganism + eating oysters is obviously the correct answer, and I only decline to eat them myself due to unwarranted squeamishness.

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"many pickpockets also operate near signs warning us to beware of pickpockets. The irony is that when people read the signs, they check their pockets or bag, thus alerting the lurking pickpocket to where their valuables are." Financial Times

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This statement very precisely captures something I've been mulling over since the beginning of the Rhodes debate at UCT. I think people who witnessed the dying days of apartheid (I include myself in this, although I was young) have internalised deep fears about inter-racial "conflict". Our instinctive fear is that any expression of anger - however justified - will lead us again down the path to violence. So, in the older generations, people of colour tone down their anger, and we whites shy away from hearing it. When I was at UCT, there was undoubtedly racial tension, but I feel that it mostly lived under the surface. We seldom called it by it's name, or really probed too deeply. I think the younger generation - including people who are now students at UCT - are much more willing to have robust debate.

"We have lived with choreographed unity for long enough to know that we now prefer acrimonious and robust disharmony. We see reconciliation as part of a narrative that was constructed on the basis of anxieties that are no longer relevant: Democracy has taught us that raised voices don’t have to lead to war."

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Racist anti-immigration sentiment: Britain has seen it all before.

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 I don't agree with every point, but this is interesting:

"social status, which was once hierarchical and zero-sum, has become more fragmented, pluralistic and subjective. The relationship between relative income and relative status, which used to be straightforward, has gotten much more complex." NY Times

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Times have changed

“[In 1951] Members of the ANC (then a purely African organisation) emerged from a rally to find police harassing Indian hawkers. The ANC supporters spontaneously formed a cordon around the hawkers, protecting them from the police”. Daily Maverick

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Fascinating little piece of history, though obviously not without its troubling aspects. Guardian

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Damn, this is good. Highly recommended

"The conversation about ‘transformation’ – which seldom deals with the fact that what we actually need to confront is deracialisation and decolonisation – has been often itself been monopolised by white staff. In some instances, even within the conversation about ‘transformation’, there is an astonishing lack of basic awareness about what racism is." Daily Maverick

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I see a variant of this argument coming up repeatedly from people on the "hard left": basically that Russian actions in Ukraine are "understandable", because Ukraine is in Russia's backyard, it's going to protect what it perceives as its vital geostrategic interests and so on. Is it just me, or is this argument bullshit? I mean, the US was arguably pursuing what it saw as its vital geostrategic interests (i.e. reliable supply of cheap oil on the world market) when it invaded Iraq, and we thought the appropriate response was criticism and opposition, no? Like, when Western governments use force to reverse the political decisions of people in foreign countries, that's worth criticising, but when Russia does it... that's just something that's gonna happen? Jacobin (interview with Noam Chomsky)

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I don't have any insightful commentary to add about all this, just :( :( :(

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"Here’s why the auto industry, the insurance industry and the officials they lobby want helmet laws. First, forcing people to wear helmets shifts responsibilities onto cyclists and absolves governments from having to build better cycling infrastructure and drivers from having to obey traffic laws.... Second, helmet laws discourage people from using bicycles for everyday transportation by making it inconvenient, and by making it seem more dangerous than it really is." Washington Post

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 “How do you become an anarchist? Well, it’s not easy. You can’t rearrange the whole fabric of western civilisation just like that. For a start, it’s against the law. So you’ll need to practice. To begin with, try breaking a few little laws: ride your bike home at night with no lights on; walk on the grass. Then, as you get more confident, move on to bigger things: commit a public nuisance; disturb the Queen’s peace. Keep practising – and before long, you’ll be robbing banks and overthrowing governments.” Guardian

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Nice quote from David Graeber's latest book:

"Humans being the social creatures that they are, birth and death are never mere biological events. It normally takes a great deal of work to turn a newborn baby into a person—someone with a name and social relationships (mother, father …) and a home, towards whom others have responsibilities, who can someday be expected to have responsibilities to them as well. Usually, much of this work is done through ritual... In most existing societies at this point in history, those rituals may or may not be carried out, but it is precisely paperwork, rather than any other form of ritual, that is socially efficacious in this way, that actually effects the change."

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Very strange review in parts, but this is a good bit:

"Unfortunately, voting sunders beliefs from consequences. The war will happen or not depending not on how I vote but on how others vote. I don’t get to choose the war but I do get to choose my beliefs and if I choose the former, I can bask in the warm glow of patriotism and righteousness... Since the only difference in consequence is the warm glow, I have little incentive not to go with the glow and vote irrationally but patriotically and righteously in favor of war... In short, politics reduces the price of irrationality so people buy more, and that is dangerous."

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"Ronson’s no 4chan troll, but So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed reads very much like a defense of unfairly victimized white men and privileged white women." Buzzfeed

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Europeans started to have pale skin between around 8000 and 5000 years ago