Links,Thursday 20th August

I apologise for wandering into such an economic policy-heavy region of the blogosphere, but this is actually quite good/interesting.

"Direct provision of public goods has market forces on its side, while subsidies for private purchases work against the market. Call it progressive supply-side policy. Call it the general case for public options. The fundamental point is that, in the presence of inelastic supply curves, demand-side subsidies face a headwind of adverse price effects, while direct public provision gets a tail wind of favorable price effects. And these effects can be quite large."

The author then goes on, using the same logic, to argue that a basic income guarantee or negative income tax will likely have a much better effects on welfare and wages than wage subsidies.

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There's a whole catalogue of horror to choose from, but I'll quote just one for now:

"Inspectors discovered 99 pregnant women had been held in the Bedfordshire centre [Yarl's Wood] in 2014, of whom only nine were removed from the UK, despite Home Office policy stating expectant women should not normally be detained."

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"As I drew nearer to look at it, the spider called out, “Hello!” It did not seem at all strange to me that a spider should say hello (any more than it seemed strange to Alice when the White Rabbit spoke). I said, “Hello, yourself,” and with this we started a conversation, mostly on rather technical matters of analytic philosophy... (Decades later, I mentioned the spider’s Russellian tendencies to my friend Tom Eisner, an entomologist; he nodded sagely and said, “Yes, I know the species.”)" New Yorker

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Comedy is finally learning to punch up (on some topics, at least)

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"it turns out that having a child can have a pretty strong negative impact on a person's happiness... In fact, on average, the effect of a new baby on a person's life in the first year is devastatingly bad — worse than divorce, worse than unemployment and worse even than the death of a partner."
Washington Post

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"Fascism happens when a culture fracturing along social lines is encouraged to unite against a perceived external threat. It’s the terrifying “not us” that gives the false impression that there is an “us” to defend." New Statesman

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Early humans probably ate lots of cooked starches. In other news, maybe we should stop drawing dietary advice from highly speculative evolutionary arguments.

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Useful as it is to crunch these numbers, I think the exercise kind of misses the point. Sure, most people are in prison because of violent offences rather than drug offences... but a lot of the violence only happens because drug production, distribution and consumption are criminalised.

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"One of the most remarkable gene groups is the protocadherins, which regulate the development of neurons and the short-range interactions between them. The octopus has 168 of these genes — more than twice as many as mammals. This resonates with the creature’s unusually large brain and the organ’s even-stranger anatomy. Of the octopus's half a billion neurons — six times the number in a mouse — two-thirds spill out from its head through its arms, without the involvement of long-range fibres such as those in vertebrate spinal cords. The independent computing power of the arms, which can execute cognitive tasks even when dismembered, have made octopuses an object of study for neurobiologists such as Hochner and for roboticists who are collaborating on the development of soft, flexible robots." Nature

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"After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?" - Bertolt Brecht, "Die Lösung"

The Independent

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"37 per cent of those surveyed felt their jobs were not making a meaningful contribution to the world – although half did feel that their jobs were." Indepedent

Though the Economist's response to Graeber is still an excellent piece of analysis:

"the efficient way to do things is to break businesses up into many different kinds of tasks, allowing for a very high level of specialisation. And so you end up with the clerical equivalent of repeatedly affixing Tab A to Frame B: shuffling papers, management of the minutiae of supply chains, and so on. Disaggregation may make it look meaningless, since many workers end up doing things incredibly far removed from the end points of the process; the days when the iron ore goes in one door and the car rolls out the other are over. But the idea is the same."

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Anyone can be a hero.

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It's touching that he takes cops at their word about not being racists, but this is still a good point.

"I kept trying to understand this dynamic, and the more cops I met—people who were not racist, but had produced a racist outcome—there more it came into focus. More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites. You have pressure on you from above to get results. There has to be a certain number of busts, day after day, week after week. So you go after the weak. It’s not like you are framing them—they are, in fact, breaking the law. You keep targeting the weak. And you try not to see the wider picture." - "Chasing the Scream", Johann Hari

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"I don't understand why the obviously smart thing to do would be to kill all the humans. The smarter I get the less I want to kill all the humans! Why wouldn't these really smart machines not want to be helpful? What is it about our guilt as a species that makes us think the smart thing to do would be to kill all the humans? I think that actually says more about what we feel guilty about than what's actually going to happen." Vox

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"Bullying creates a moral drama in which the manner of the victim’s reaction to an act of aggression can be used as retrospective justification for the original act of aggression itself.

Not only does this drama appear at the very origins of bullying in early childhood; it is precisely the aspect that endures in adult life. I call it the “you two cut it out” fallacy. Anyone who frequents social media forums will recognize the pattern. Aggressor attacks. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor ramps up attack. Target tries to rise above and do nothing. No one intervenes. Aggressor further ramps up attack.

This can happen a dozen, fifty times, until finally, the target answers back. Then, and only then, a dozen voices immediately sound, crying “Fight! Fight! Look at those two idiots going at it!” or “Can’t you two just calm down and learn to see the other’s point of view?” The clever bully knows that this will happen—and that he will forfeit no points for being the aggressor. He also knows that if he tempers his aggression to just the right pitch, the victim’s response can itself be represented as the problem." Baffler

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"Huitzilopochtli is the Aztec god of war and the sun. He is depicted either as a hummingbird itself, or as a warrior with hummingbird feathers on his helmet. When Aztec high priests cut out the hearts of enemies and slaves, it was to honor and feed the hummingbird god." Slate

Links, Wednesday 12th August

A overview of what is currently known about biological sexual diversity. Basically, it's really complicated, we should trying to impose binaries on people and we should *especially* stop imposing "corrective" surgeries on infants who are too young to consent or express a gender identity.

"Last year, for example, surgeons reported that they had been operating on a hernia in a man, when they discovered that he had a womb. The man was 70, and had fathered four children."

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This is good

"After WWII, the U.S. military did studies on how many men would shoot at the enemy on their own accord. The results showed that only about 15 to 20 percent of men would voluntarily fire upon the enemy. The rest just would not fire unless an officer was present and specifically ordering them to do so."

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"“Nobody can control me! I do what I want!”

To which my friends responded:

…and you know what? You’re white, so it makes complete sense that you’d feel that way." Everyday Feminism

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Gladwell doesn't play up the racial element of this, but it's surely worth thinking about. Italian American gangsters largely got away with distributing illegal drugs and so on, and were able to propel their children and grandchildren into the respectable middle classes. African American gangsters are subject to the most tenacious and sophisticated law enforcement apparatus in the history of the world, and tend to either be killed or spend most of their lives in prison

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"But there is nothing funny about political behaviour on this issue. They think it fine to smoke a few spliffs as students, then go on to uphold outdated laws that ensure others who are less fortunate, less wealthy or less white end up with a criminal conviction for doing the same thing. More than 25,000 people annually receive a criminal conviction for cannabis offences, each one seeing career and travel prospects blighted." Independent

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"Like a very stark relief in a painting, the book shows that these black inmates were deliberately, as a matter of tradition and policy, denied adequate medical staffing, hospital facilities and medical supplies.... Until recently some Afrikaners in South Africa claimed a sole martyrdom, arising from the terrible deaths of 26,370 Afrikaner women and children in the concentration camps. Kessler’s book shows that view of the past to have been too narrow. He documents the deaths of more than 21,000 black men, women and children in the camps established by the British in South Africa. There was a shared martyrdom between black and white and the suffering in the camps was something that united black and white." BD Live

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I'm posting this as an example of what really shitty left-identifying politics can look like. Framing the issue as "Well there's a few sex workers in this camp and there's a few sex workers in that camp" is so misleading as to be kind of Orwellian. In fact kind of like the Cosby tactic Lewis herself cites of identifying *some* right wing black person as a means to derail clear collective demands. There are literally hundreds of thousands of sex workers represented in various organisations globally who are collectively organising for decrim (http://www.nswp.org/members), and that demand is framed pretty much entirely in terms of labour and human rights, not about having "positive experiences" of their work. In fact, sex worker led orgs are typically the ones helping people in coercive situations when the cops either don't give a shit or think abusing sex workers is a more fun and lucrative use of their time.

This article is also a really good example of how the language of "identity politics" is used to shut down the voices of marginalised groups who are actually speaking quite coherently and collectively on an issue. Lewis would do well to remember that women in left wing circles have been accused of "identity politics" when they get quite rightfully pissed off about the way they have been treated by male "comrades".

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This piece does oversimplify some issues, but I think it's accurate in the broad strokes. We're now living in a monetary and policy regime that promotes the interests of asset owners over those of wage earners.

"If they wanted to drive down rents, government could fund the construction of public housing, as they did during the Golden Age. More quality housing would increase its stock, and with supply rising to meet demand, prices would fall. This would be great for young renters, bad for middle-aged property owners, bad for banks. Thus it is not likely to happen. Property prices, at an all time high, are not likely to fall, and if they do, expect the government to put a floor under them.

During the Golden Age, affluence flowed toward labor. Today it flows toward asset owners. I think my retirement is safe. I’m not so sure about my children’s work prospects."

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"Hurting immigrants is obviously the most important goal in the world, much more important than upholding human rights, common sense or basic human decency. So if the only way to hurt immigrants is by hurting UK citizens too, then by golly, that's just what we'll have to do!" Basically Tory policy right now

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Yes! Amnesty meeting votes for sex work decriminalisation! Sex workers' rights are human rights

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"the rise of social has flipped the old writer/reader balance, restoring power to the reader. On social media, you share an article because you agree with the take, sure, but also because it says something about you, whether that fact is that you're angry about a political issue, or that you like cute bunnies, or that you love Back to the Future. Your social media feed is a curation of things you want people to know about you. Inconvenient truths, negative views, or anything too dark will be pushed aside." Vox

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"From the perspective of the boss, replacing a worker with a machine will be more appealing to the degree that the machine is (1) cheaper than the human worker and (2) more convenient and easier to control than the human worker. This implies that if workers win higher wages and more control over their working conditions, their jobs are more likely to be automated...

I regard such warnings not as arguments against higher wages, but arguments for them. Workers, in the course of fighting for their interests, drive the dialectic that forces capitalists to find less labor-intensive ways of producing. The next political task, then, is to make sure that the benefits of such innovation accrue to the masses, and not to a small class of robot owners." Jacobin

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"“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all”, goes the old adage from Joan Robinson. Then again, says Marx, “to be a productive laborer is not a piece of luck, but a misfortune. In the short run, labor complementary technology may employ more people, which is better than them not being exploited at all. But in the long run, the jobs thus created tend to be terrible, and our real goal ought to be to channel technical change toward labor saving innovation." Peter Frase

Links, Friday 7th August

"between 800 and 300 BC the Greeks’ cultural achievement was supported by sustained economic growth, and that economic growth was in turn supported by an exceptionally participatory mode of politics." Times HE

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"You're not allowed to work, but neither are you allowed to receive benefits. Through the munificence of Her Majesty's government you are, however, allowed to starve." Guardian

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"Amnesty found that sex workers in Norway were routinely evicted by the police. The organisation’s report states that “a number of migrant sex workers were violently attacked and raped … They reported the incident to the police … they returned to their apartment to find the police have removed all their money and electronic equipment. Four days after the attack they were forcibly evicted.”

It’s hard to believe that those Hollywood signatories read this and thought: “Brilliant, the police evicting migrant women when they report rape sounds like the feminist solution to prostitution; we should support the legal model where this occurs.” But that is what appears to have happened – unless they signed up to attack Amnesty over a document they had not read." Guardian

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"The UK, which is cutting renewable energy subsidies, permits $41bn a year in fossil fuel subsidies, which is $635 per person." Guardian

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"Amnesty directors need to stand behind the organisation’s own research and vote in favour of decriminalisation. Sex workers around the world expect – and deserve – nothing less." Guardian

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I have nothing to add to this. Basically, Erdogan seemed like an ok guy for a while, but it turns out he's a total dick

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"If I'm going in for the role of a nice father, I'll talk to everybody," Sayed tells the table. "But if you're going for a terrorist role, don't fucking smile at all those white people sitting there. Treat them like shit. The minute you say hello, you break character." GQ

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"we can reduce jealousy by making it everyone’s responsibility to support and recognize all existing relationships within the community.  Polyamory experts advise a jealous person to turn to his/her partner for reassurance that their relationship is important. But social network research indicates that dyads need support from the networks in which they are embedded; support that shows the relationship is recognized and valued.  Polyamory experts say the purpose of meeting your partner’s partners is to soothe your own jealousy or to find out if you happen to like the person (once again, the individualistic, what’s in it for me?).  But from a social standpoint, the purpose of meeting a partner’s partner is to make a contribution to reducing jealousy in your community by letting the person know that you recognize and value of the relationship they have with your partner." Salon

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You'd think the punishment for scamming IS militants would be some sort of medal...

"Three young Chechen women are in trouble after being caught scamming Islamic State (IS) fighters out of thousands of dollars by posing as wannabe jihadi brides, according to reports in Russia."

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Some good ideas in here - the elimination of excessive agency fees and a rent insurance scheme - but I still maintain that rent control can't address, and may exacerbate the underlying economic issue. Until you boost supply, increased demand for housing will result either in prices going up or new tenants being shut out of the market. (Discouraging non-occupancy, incidentally, is a pretty good way of boosting supply)

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Some guidelines on sitting with emotions, with reference to the movie Inside Out

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Love this. I think a lot of us men who date women feel really good about ourselves when we tell our female partners that they're beautiful and they "don't need makeup"... but forget about all the times we've told women they look "tired" when we see them without makeup. Maybe we should all, collectively, just stop having unsolicited opinions about women's faces, yeah?

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"as long as Miss Major is alive, I'm not letting that fictionalized whitewashed trans free Stonewall narrative even gain a foothold because it's a crime against history...

The reality coming from multiple witnesses to the original event say that it was Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, butch lesbians and other gender variant persons of color who jumped off the riot in 1969 while the Fire Island gays were still cowering in their closets." TransGriot

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I'm fully on board with this, tbh. If you want conservation, do proper conservation, with actual wildlife reserves and parks. Don't just set aside a bunch of land that could house millions of people as a giveaway for rich suburbanites and farmers

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Good news for chilli lovers

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This reflects some of John Gray's usual (and rather annoying) preoccupations, but is a good summary of Hayek's life and thought.

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Excellent critical review on Fukuyama's "The End of History" and "Political Order"

Personally, I'm inclined to partially accept Fukuyama's thesis, that liberal-capitalist-bureaucratic-representative democracy represents at least *an* end of history, with the disputes between neoliberals and social democratics being more a matter of detail than fundamental disagreement.

I think the challenge for those of us on the Left is to formulate a radical alternative that has the sort of coherence and appeal that revolutionary overthrow of the state and statist communism seemed to enjoy in its heyday.

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Michel Sidibe, Executive Director of UNAIDS, writes to Amnesty International urging them to stand strong in supporting sex work decriminalisation.

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So it turns out that Louis C.K. is a sexually abusive asshole too :( :(

[some very general discussion of sexual assault at the link]

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A controversial thesis, but with some resonance. Just anecdotally, many of the people I've spoken to who have really hard-line opinions on drug criminalisation live in working class communities that are really terrorised by gangs with links to the drug trade. I think that's a pretty understandable reaction, and one that needs to be engaged with really seriously.

"The book looks at how growing disorder and addiction drove many working- and middle-class people in Harlem and elsewhere to mobilize for tougher crime policies. When Nelson A. Rockefeller staged a news conference promoting his antidrug proposals, Fortner writes, the New York governor was joined by five leaders from the country’s most famous black neighborhood."

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"The cyclotrons’ huge magnets would send metal tools flying across the room like shrapnel, and the machines were so poorly insulated electrically that you could touch a light bulb to any nearby metal surface and make it glow. Cyclotron scientists were also pretty casual about the radioactive materials they studied. The zipper on one scientist’s fly got so contaminated with radioactivity that he was ruining experiments just by standing near them." American Scholar

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Again, the central bank of *Moldova* is able to generate inflation pretty much instantly, but we're expected to believe that the ECB can't manage it?

"The fraud left the three banks insolvent, so the National Bank of Moldova, the central bank, has taken them over, injecting 12.5 billion Moldovan lei ($660m) in new capital. It did not have such a sum to hand, however—it had to create it. The huge expansion of the money supply caused inflation to double to 8% and the currency to drop."

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Failure to properly regulate opioids in the US is killing loads of people

"By 2008 drug overdoses, mostly from opioids, overtook car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death."

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Never forget: Opponents of Amnesty's draft sex work decriminalisation policy simply oppose the existence of sex work itself; they have no interest in the safety of sex workers.

"At a 2014 hearing on whether or not Canada should adopt something like Norway’s sex work law, Senator Donald Plett remarked, “We don’t want to make life safe for prostitutes, we want to do away with prostitution.” Sweden’s trafficking unit head Ann Martin has defended their anti-sex work law, from which Norway’s and Canada’s were drawn, telling the London Review of Books, “Of course the law has negative consequences for women in prostitution but that’s also some of the effect that we want to achieve with the law.”"

Links, Monday 3rd August

"The short-sighted notion that we should always protect ourselves endangered us more in the long term." Washington Post

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"Perhaps the most famous self-mailer is Henry “Box” Brown, an escaped Virginia slave who mailed himself to Pennsylvania, a free state, in 1849. Brown severely burned his hand to get out of work one day, then, in collusion with abolitionists in Philadelphia, had himself packaged into a box equipped with a bottle of water, a few biscuits, and a rough blanket, and shipped via the Adams Express Company, now an investment firm that in the 19th century was a shipping and freighting company known for its privacy. The shipping cost Brown $86, just over $2,500 in today’s dollars, and took an extremely uncomfortable 27 hours. But he was delivered successfully, and became a well-known abolitionist speaker and entertainer later in life. " Atlas Obscura

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"Ecstasy, so it happens, was the drug people turned to over the last period of Tory rule. "At the height of the 80s' go-for-it, go-it-alone, enterprise boom, ecstasy catalysed an explosion of suppressed social energies," wrote the music journalist Simon Reynolds in 1998. "Rave's values – collectivity, spirituality, the joy of losing yourself in the crowd – were literally counter to the dominant culture. Ecstasy's empathy and intimacy-inducing effects didn't just offer a timely corrective to Thatcher-sponsored social atomisation; the drug was also the remedy for the English diseases of class-consciousness and emotional reserve."" Vice

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A very important read [CN for rape]

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"This spring, a Greek Web site speculated that Jarvis Cocker, the former lead singer of Pulp, was referring to [Danae] Stratou [wife of Yanis Varoufakis] in “Common People,” the band’s much-loved 1995 single. The autobiographical song starts, “She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge / She studied sculpture at St. Martin’s College.” It goes on to quote her: “I want to live like common people / I want to do whatever common people do.” Varoufakis later told me that Stratou was the only Greek sculpture student at St. Martin’s at the time." New Yorker

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"Fred said: “I have never been this scared in all my life”. He says he knows no one in Sierra Leone, and has lived in the UK since he was 11. He is being deported solely on the basis of intelligence supplied by the Metropolitan Police to immigration officials under Operation Nexus. That’s a joint police and Home Office scheme that puts Border Agency staff into police custody suites and permits the deportation of people only suspected of crime, without any judicial process." Open Democracy

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"Until recently, psychologists and historians have agreed that ordinary people commit evil when, under the influence of leaders and groups, they become blind to the consequences of their actions. This consensus has become so strong that it is repeated, almost as a mantra, in psychology textbooks and in society at large. However critical scrutiny of both historical and psychological evidence ... has produced a radically different picture. People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right. This is possible because they actively identify with groups whose ideology justifies and condones the oppression and destruction of others." The Psychologist

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"Across practices, across cultures, and throughout historical periods, when people support and engage in violence, their primary motivations are moral. By ‘moral’, I mean that people are violent because they feel they must be; because they feel that their violence is obligatory. They know that they are harming fully human beings. Nonetheless, they believe they should. Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations." Aeon

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“The roots of Afrikaans can be traced back to Cape Town, where it started as a pidgin language … Everyone should know where they come from. We want these kids to be proud of their heritage,” Daily Maverick

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"Many new studies compare neighborhoods, cities, or counties to assess the relationship between local concentrations of immigrants (or of Latinos) and rates of crime or violence. The general conclusion is that the higher these concentrations in a community, the lower the rates. A couple of studies find that the connection depends on the local context. In more impoverished neighborhoods or in cities with historically larger numbers of immigrants or with immigrant political power, additional immigration seems to push crime down yet more." Society Pages

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This is why we need a basic income

"Even more disturbing from the point of view of the capitalists was that government, or at least its recently expanded social safety net, was actually subsidizing the working-class rebellion.

A nationwide strike against GE in 1969 helped crystallize the issue. Strikers were not only receiving strike funds from their union — tens of thousands of them were also drawing welfare checks." Jacobin

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"Heese writes that while the slaveowners could rise above the "temporary financial setbacks" that resulted from the emancipation of their human property, the same cannot be said for the descendants of slaves.

"These farm labourers were unable to escape from the master-servant relationship which had existed for so many years. The British government and subsequent governments — including the present government — are partly responsible for this unfortunate situation," Heese says.

He is aghast at the erasure of the history of slavery in SA. In political discourse, apartheid and colonialism occupy the top spots, with scant bandwidth afforded to slavery." BD Live

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Hurray for science!

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6 women arrested for "brothel-keeping" in Ireland, all of whom were selling sex from a single venue. These laws do not target management (even supposing that was a good idea), but only punish sex workers who want to work together for safety.

Links, Monday 27th July

My god, maybe something good will actually come out of this whole "elected police commissioner" wheeze

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As a South African who has been detained and faced deportation at Heathrow, this hits pretty close to home for me (it bears mentioning that UKBA's decision eventually to let me through probably has something to do with the fact that I'm white and don't have a Muslim name)

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As it turns out, when you share salary information to gather evidence about gender disparities, your boss won't like it (whatever their public-facing rhetoric)

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The proletarianisation of the creative classes

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"Perhaps the strongest mouth-body association found so far is between gum health and cardiovascular disease. In 2007, D’Aiuto published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that deep-cleaning teeth and gums under local anaesthetic resulted in healthier, more elastic arteries six months later. Then, in 2012, the American Heart Association published a statement confirming that periodontal disease is associated with atherosclerosis – a condition whereby arteries become clogged up by fatty substances – even after common causes such as socio-economic factors and smoking are taken into account." Guardian

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Photography has a race problem

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Another excellent harm reduction initiative

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This doesn't go far enough in acknowledging that ACAB, but there's a sound point in here. I don't think we really approach the allocation of state resources as the optimisation problem that it is. So we never really ask about the marginal benefit of, say, punishing one more person who steals something or gets in a fight vs the marginal benefit providing free school meals to one more child for a year. Criminal "justice" isn't thought of as something that should be optimised in that way - it's simply axiomatic that all criminals should be punished, and resources are dedicated accordingly. Other social needs are much more readily put on the chopping block.

"D has form. Earlier in the week he had rung my bell, this time in the middle of the night, asking for money. He knows I won’t give him any, but he’s desperate with uncontrollable shivers, piercing migraines and terrible cramps in his legs. He can hardly stand. Can he get methadone from A&E, I ask? Apparently not. He tells me the only way he can get methadone is if he gets arrested. The police have access to it, he tells me. As the police arrest D after that morning’s fracas, I wonder if he has got himself arrested deliberately."

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"Those who relentlessly excuse all anti-black state violence cheerlead when people born of their same complexion resist cops & presidents." Colorlines

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Shades of this in London too.

"As the city got more and more expensive, progressive housing policy shifted gradually to a sad, rearguard movement to protect the people already here from being displaced. No longer would San Francisco even try to remain open as a refuge for immigrants and radicals from around the world. The San Francisco Left could never come to terms with its central contradiction of being against the creation of more “places” that would give new people the chance to live in the city. Once San Francisco was no longer open to freaks and dissidents, immigrants and refugees, because it was deemed to be “full,” it could no longer fulfill its progressive values, could no longer do anything for the people who weren’t already here."

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If you want to institute rent control, you should think about it *very, very* carefully: waiting times for an apartment in central Stockholm are now about 10-20 years.

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Unusually for a leftie, my default position on free trade is very much in favour. I agree there are often problems, and almost always some people who lose out, but overall the benefits exceeds the costs. So that's the context for this post.

In the context of the TPP and the TTIP agreements currently being negotiated, a lot of fellow lefties seem really concerned about Investor-State Dispute Settlements, which are basically mechanisms for corporations to sue states if the latter violate the terms of these agreements. I hear a lot of people complaining about how these settlement mechanisms violate "democracy", because they allow corporations to sue elected governments...

But corporations can already sue governments, yeah? And those disputes are usually resolved by a bunch of unelected lawyers called "judges". In the UK, the Tory government is under a lot of criticism for wanting to repeal the Human Rights Act, which is basically a mechanism for unelected judges to overrule elected officials if individual people have had their rights violated. So I'm not sure whether people are objecting to the idea of corporations as opposed to natural persons suing governments, or specifically *foreign* corporations suing governments, or what.

Obviously it's possible that the ISDS mechanisms might end up being poorly designed, with bad rules or with unqualified people making the decisions. But it seems ludicrous to object on the *general principle* that unelected lawyers should never be allowed to overrule the decisions elected officials. Cos that's the whole basis of the rule of law right there.

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I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry: some set up a facebook page for Yarl's Wood. It has pretty poor reviews

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I'm not sure what to make of Zuma's "collaborationist history", but this is a good point:

"To ask why so many Africans collaborated in the destruction of African polities and, with them, African sovereignty is to ask a simplistic and patronising question. It is to assume that African polities were somehow apolitical entities without differences and discord. These were complex societies riven with all sorts of fissures. As scholar Mbongiseni Buthelezi shows in his work on the Ndwandwe and historian Michael R Mahoney argues in his 2012 book, The other Zulus: The spread of Zulu ethnicity in colonial SA, there were many so-called Zulus who did not identify as Zulus in precolonial Zululand. There were many polities, like the Ndwandwes, who had been defeated by the Zulu kingdom and then forced to become Zulus."

Links, Wednesday 22nd July

This is pretty cool

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The clue to what they actually think of their customers is in the name...

"In 2000, R.J. Reynolds—the parent company of Camel, Pall Mall, and several other popular cigarette brands—sparked controversy when confidential documents labeled “Project SCUM” (SubCulture Urban Marketing) were leaked to the press. The documents outlined plans for an ad campaign targeting two distinct “consumer subcultures” in San Francisco: young gay men in the Castro and the homeless in the Tenderloin."

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This is kind of great - a black actor on being asked to perform "blackness" for auditions

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"Ayatolla Khomeini, too, waffled on Esperanto. Shortly after the Iranian Revolution, he urged his people to learn the language as an anti-imperialist counterpoint to English, and an official translation of the Qur’an followed. But adherents of the Baha’i faith had been fans of Esperanto for decades, and Khomeini was definitely not a fan of Baha’i, so his enthusiasm dimmed." The Verge

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"To tell people apart I have to find a distinguishing feature. And context is huge. If I’m expecting to see somebody, I’ll figure out who they are by observing their body language, listening to their voice. Good-looking people are the most difficult to recognize" NY Mag

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"There, there, it's not your fault. It's just that the demands of racist voters are more important to me than you being able to stay in your home." Haaretz

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"What Merkel really means is that there are currently millions of people in the world who could have valid asylum claims, and she's worried they'll all come to Germany if it seems even slightly welcoming. So Germany deports people like this young Palestinian and her family to set an example that's just cruel enough to serve as a deterrent." Vox

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"As a clinical social worker, I have been trained to assess the “validity” of transgender clients’ identies. One of the classic psychiatric criteria that exists and is widely used to this day is the question of how such individuals feel about their bodies: to qualify for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (ie, to be ‘really’ transgender), trans people must often express complete repudiation of their genitals and secondary sex characteristics... The result is that transgender identity becomes defined in terms of disgust, hatred, dysphoria, disease. Our bodies become a condition to be cured, a mistake to be corrected, freakish, abominations." XO Jane

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“I think another question to ask that’s just as relevant is why is sarcasm considered cool by the same people who often decry puns as uncool?” he asks. “Both are a way of saying one thing and meaning another. In an age of cynicism it’s safer, socially, to tear something down through sarcasm or irony than it is to build something up through punning.” Atlantic

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"Germany has managed to turn the euro into a mechanism for transferring wealth into its own coffers. As Bernanke notes, it could fix this situation at virtually no cost to itself by borrowing at historically low rates to invest in infrastructure and perhaps by shifting policy to increase worker pay. But, instead, it has obsessively clung to its idea of fiscal prudence—for itself and for the rest Europe. And you can see the results very clearly in the disparate unemployment stats." Slate

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"Colonial history is not examined in all of its brutality in schools, nor is it properly remembered in Britain’s collective consciousness. Missing are the Mau Mau who were burned alive by colonialists, the Boers (themselves colonialists) and black Africans who were kept by the British in the first ever concentration camps, the thousands of Chinese people killed in the Opium Wars, the peaceful protestors who were slaughtered at Jallianwala Bagh massacre by the so-called British Raj, or the millions who died in the 1943 Bengal famine." Media Diversified

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Profile of Tsipras. I agree that his handling of negotiations with the Eurogroup has been poor, though maybe that's just the benefit of hindsight.

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This is where we're at

"Every single of the nation’s top cops felt their duty was to thwart the legitimate enquiries of an official commission of inquiry. Every single one of the national and provincial commissioners decided to hold with the blue line of silence and lies."

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Oh great, Cape Town is #1 pick for white supremacists :/

"Postings focus on local news items like “Zuma sings Shoot the Boer”, some take the form of jokes and others recommend the “best” city for whites to live in. The answer to that last question, apparently, is Cape Town, followed by Bloemfontein and Pretoria. A user named Boer Resistance chimes in: “What about the Tokai neighbourhood of Cape Town? Is almost 90% white!”"

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"He is also able to cut discarded produce from 50 percent to just 10 percent of the harvest, compared to a conventional farm. As a result, the farms productivity per square foot is up 100-fold, he says. By controlling temperature, humidity and irrigation, the farm can also cut its water usage to just 1 percent of the amount needed by outdoor fields." GE Reports

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How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang

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Ah, to be out in the fresh air

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Tyler Cowen's summary of Eurogroup behaviour: "Sometimes politicians do things that they know are stupid because of political pressure from their constituents to do exactly those stupid things"

Links, Thursday 17th July

"For orca, or killer whales, diet itself is a cultural statement. Fish-eating or meat-eating orca define themselves by their consumption, to the extent that captive whales accustomed to dining on seals will starve rather than eat proffered salmon." Guardian

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The technology of human locomotion through water continues to improve

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Horrifying story about how many drug courts in the US force opiate addicts to end maintenance treatment, which is often the only thing keeping them stable and keeping them safe from overdosing.

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I have been having trouble understanding why the Syriza government has capitulated so thoroughly to European creditors on bailout terms after the "no" result in last Sunday's referendum. This makes *some* sense of it, though I still feel like I'm missing something

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I've heard the argument that Tsipras has wanted Grexit all along, but knew that it was political suicide to actually argue for it, so has instead manoeuvred Greece's creditors to the point when they will essentially "force" him into it. I'm not sure I buy this theory, but if that is his plan, it's working out rather well...

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This is a good explanation of why so much of the software that runs huge organisations ends up buggier than it could be, but I'd like to see a more general discussion of what amount of bugginess is *optimal*, given the diminishing returns to debugging as software becomes more functional.

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[CN: rape]

Irish cop receives a slap on the wrist for raping a sex worker he had arrested earlier that day for "brothel-keeping" (i.e. working with a friend for safety). This is why we *need* decriminalisation, so cops have no legal power over sex workers.

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Varoufakis was willing to go all the way to the brink, in the hopes that the Eurogroup would back down. I don't get the impression that gamble would really have paid off either. Right from the get-go, it's clear it was either going to be capitulation or Grexit.

"The Eurozone can dictate terms to Greece because it is no longer fearful of a Grexit. It is convinced that its banks are now protected if Greek banks default. But Varoufakis thought that he still had some leverage: once the ECB forced Greece’s banks to close, he could act unilaterally.

He said he spent the past month warning the Greek cabinet that the ECB would close Greece’s banks to force a deal. When they did, he was prepared to do three things: issue euro-denominated IOUs; apply a “haircut” to the bonds Greek issued to the ECB in 2012, reducing Greece’s debt; and seize control of the Bank of Greece from the ECB."

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"Seeing an opportunity, U.S. beverage producers followed Perrier’s lead. In 1994, Pepsi launched Aquafina. Coca-Cola joined the club with Dasani in 1999. Homegrown brands, though, couldn’t boast glamorous European roots. So instead, they made Americans afraid of the tap. One ad from Royal Spring Water claimed that “tap water is poison.” Another, from Calistoga Mountain Spring Water, asked: “How can you be sure your water is safe? . . . Unfortunately, you can’t.” Fiji Water infuriated Ohio with the tagline “The label says Fiji because it’s not bottled in Cleveland.” The insinuation, of course, was that there was something wrong with local water." Washington Post

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"The story of the eurozone’s relationship with Greece post-crisis is a story of external powers trying to restructure an entire political system from outside, using the crude tools of control that are available to them. The situation is somewhere between the kinds of Washington Consensus restructuring and conditionality that the IMF used to impose as a quid-pro-quo for emergency loans to countries in crisis, and the massive efforts to restructure the political systems of Afghanistan and Iraq post invasion. Obviously these past efforts have mostly turned out pretty badly (perhaps you can argue some of the IMF cases – but you’d have an uphill battle if you really wanted to make a general defense)." Crooked Timber

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This actual makes a whole lot of sense.

"the only way for Jurassic Park to get its hands on any dinosaurs would be to have their geneticists build them from scratch, which would explain why all the dinosaurs in the movie look like how we, the ignorant public, imagine dinosaurs look, as opposed to how they actually appeared in nature. For instance, in real life, a velociraptor was the size of a chimpanzee, whereas in Jurassic Park, velociraptors are large enough to play professional basketball. Also, they had feathers. Most dinosaurs probably had feathers."

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"Our results on vegetarianism were particularly striking. In a survey of professors from five US states, we found that 60 per cent of ethicist respondents rated ‘regularly eating the meat of mammals, such as beef or pork’ somewhere on the ‘morally bad’ side of a nine-point scale ranging from ‘very morally bad’ to ‘very morally good’. By contrast, only 19 per cent of non-philosophy professors rated it as bad. That’s a pretty big difference of opinion! Non-ethicist philosophers were intermediate, at 45 per cent. But when asked later in the survey whether they had eaten the meat of a mammal at their last evening meal, we found no statistically significant difference in the groups’ responses – about 38 per cent of professors from all groups reported having done so (including 37 per cent of ethicists)." Aeon

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"The slave-backed securities of the early 19th century worked in the same way as the mortgage-backed securities of the early 21st. They spread the risks and provided a means by which capital from all over the world could be channelled into the Deep South. This also meant that, even after abolition, British investors could still profit from the slave trade. They no longer owned slaves. Instead, they owned slave-based derivatives; financial instruments made up of mortgages on enslaved people." Flipchart Fairy Tales

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Agree so strongly on this. The ongoing economic disaster in Europe is fundamentally a monetary phenomenon, and will only be resolved by a concerted effort to put more money in circulation. And yet the ECB is apparently content to let the inflation rate hover around 0% for the indefinite future.

Zimbabwe managed to achieve inflation rates in the millions of percent, and yet we're really being asked to believe that Western central banks, with all their sophistication and expertise, can't even manage 2%?

"Obviously the Greek economy does have some real issues. Maybe these OECD "toolkit" ideas will even [improve] things. But one problem Greece definitely has is the ongoing suction of money out of the Greece economy and into the coffers of Greece's creditors. But those creditors don't particularly need the money. Europe as a whole has lots of high unemployment and low inflation. Heck even in Germany inflation is running below two percent. If European states want more Euros, the European Central Bank should print up some Euros and start handing them out." Matt Yglesias

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Generally interesting piece on girls with autism conditions

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My view of this is that some degree of rent control can be a good thing so long as you keep an eye on the underlying economics. Trying to keep rents significantly lower than the market-clearing price for any length of time will almost certainly lead to problems, but this kind of rent "brake" could conceivably "smooth out" sharp changes to prices that might otherwise occur due to sudden supply or demand shocks.

It's difficult to know what to do if the supply is constrained by exogenous factors (as it is in London and the Southeast by strict planning rules and the political refusal of government to build any more social housing). Rent control is somewhat more defensible, since supply isn't going to rise much anyway in response to price increases. But you're then effectively taxing landowners and handing the value over to whoever happened to be renting the property at the time rent controls came into operation (and their descendants) - not a terrible outcome, but somewhat arbitrary. Much better to sharply increase the actual tax on land/property ownership to reflect the windfall value of supply restriction and distribute that value in a more considered way.

Best of all, obviously, simply to build enough homes!

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"The revolution will not come on the tidal wave of your next multiple orgasm had with your seven partners on the floor of your communal living space. It will only happen if you have an actual plan for destroying systems of oppression and exploitation." Yasmin Nair

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Great piece on the appropriation of Soho's sex industry glamour by giant corporations (all while actual sex workers and being steadily forced out)

"As the reality of sex work in Soho disappears, its essence has become a marketing tool. Brothel chic. A Disneyland version of what was for many, a life, work – a world that wasn't particularly exotic or glamorous but simply the thing they did for a certain number of hours a week to pay the bills."

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"Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts." Toast

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"The World Health Organization (WHO) recognises a global ‘water poverty line’ of 1,000m3 per capita per year, and yet in 2009 the World Bank estimated that Yemen had only 120m3 of water available per person each year, one of the lowest figures in the world. This water scarcity is believed to be a key reason behind as much as 70 to 80 per cent of the country’s violence, according to a study by Sana’a University researchers." Geographical

Links, Thursday 9th July

Some helpful notes on the Marikana report

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Good piece on capital controls in Greece and why reports of a bank run and long lines at are overstated. In brief, the bank run has already happened, and any assets that Greeks currently hold in domestic banks are probably offset by debts (which would also be redenominated if Greece exits the euro).

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"The average person on a bike is arguably no more likely to break a law then their peer in a car. However, when they do so it’s more obvious, less normalised. People notice a cyclist pedalling through a red light, whereas speeding – which 80% of drivers admit to doing regularly – is often ignored, despite the immeasurably greater human cost this causes." Guardian

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"The debt, in other words, isn't about money. It's about political control. If the debt is formally forgiven then not only do Greece's creditors need to write down some money, but they need to let Greece go on its merry way. If the debt is merely subjected to repeated rounds of extend and pretend then Greece's creditors get to keep making various demands about structural reform." Vox

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"It turns out that global “seasonality” – or the difference across the year in terms of temperature and rainfall – was extraordinarily high right around the time agriculture first popped up in the Fertile Crescent... six of the seven independent inventions of agriculture appear to have happened soon after increases in seasonality in their respective regions. This is driven by an increase in seasonality and not just an increase in rainfall or heat: agriculture appears in the cold Andes and in the hot Mideast and in the moderate Chinese heartland." A Fine Theorem

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"Governments have become “managers”, he says. They have no vision, “whereas meet the people in Google, in Facebook, they have tremendous visions about the future, about overcoming death, living for ever, merging humans with computers. I do find it worrying that the basis of the future, not only of humankind, the future of life, is now in the hands of a very small group of entrepreneurs.”" Guardian

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Posting this again, because I giggle every time I think about it :D

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Great interview with a sex worker about the daily realities of the job.

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"People have a difficult time recognizing women’s pain. Not in an abstract sense, but in an actual, practical, “Does that expression on her face mean she is in pain?” way. People are much better at reflexively decoding pain when a man’s face reflects it than when a woman’s does.

This is also true when a white person is experiencing pain versus a black person. Interestingly, when a person’s face is androgynous and displaying pain, observers identify it as male. Even if and when girls and women say, out loud, that they are experiencing pain, people, including medical professionals, are more likely to minimize or dismiss what they say. On one end of the spectrum, this problem results in real discomfort for girls and women, on the other, misdiagnoses, exacerbated pain, and higher likelihood of mortality." Role Reboot

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Hairstyle as GoT spoiler

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"Half the expenses [of poverty reduction programmes] are for supervision. What if we dropped this paternalism? If benefits fall by less than half, then the program breaks even much sooner.

We tried this in Uganda. Compared to cash and training with expensive supervision, cash and training alone had almost identical effects on consumption after a year. Some businesses were more likely to stay open, and profits were a tiny bit higher. But it’s hard to believe supervision passes a cost-benefit test." Chris Blattman

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"What brought [GMOs] to everyone's attention was, quite frankly, the sellers of many natural foods and organic products. I don’t want to say that they were stoking people’s fears, but they kind of were, at least to the extent that that helps sales of their own products. So there was some of that advertising, and the advertising that pitched products as not containing GMOs, which raised consumer awareness." Washington Post

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"Medieval portraits of children were usually commissioned by churches. And that made the range of subjects limited to Jesus and a few other biblical babies. Medieval concepts of Jesus were deeply influenced by the homunculus, which literally means little man. "There's the idea that Jesus was perfectly formed and unchanged," Averett says, "and if you combine that with Byzantine painting, it became a standard way to depict Jesus. In some of these images, it looks like he had male pattern baldness."" Vox

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The current state of practice in psychiatry is, if you think about it, very odd. Psychiatric diagnoses, based in the DSM, are almost entirely symptomatic, based in the subjective experience of the individual patient. Treatments are almost entirely pharmaceutical, designed to alter brain chemistry. And the basic *causes* of mental illness must be some combination of underlying brain physiology with the psychosocial circumstances in which the patient finds themself. Modifying brain chemistry isn't by itself necessarily a terrible idea (though it's only one half of the equation), but the diagnostic categories don't even refer to that! Jacobin

Links, Monday 29th June

Thoughts?

"The common denominator seems to be the stakes, and orientation mismatches are just one way the stakes of indicating interest in another person can be lowered enough to facilitate flirtatiousness. A great many of the most egregious flirts I’ve come across were very old men (presumably heterosexual), who seem to find the knowledge that young women no longer take them seriously as romantic prospects liberating, rather than discouraging. Old ladies who flirt with anyone and everyone don’t seem uncommon, either, and gay men who flirt with women, particularly older ones, are definitely A Thing." Slate

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"A few years ago, the Casa dos Frescos had been the site of what locals refer to as “the incident of the golden melon.’’ An enraged French customer, having paid a hundred and five dollars for a single melon, sued the store for profiteering. The case was thrown out of court, in part because the man not only bought the melon but also ate the evidence." New Yorker

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Remember that borders are violence, and not only in the developed world. States all over the world brutally oppress migrants and people understood as foreigners.

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Laverne Cox is literally the best

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Lots of farmland in the UK is only economically viable because of subsidies. Under a free market, it would revert to the wilderness. And then there'd, you know, be some wilderness, instead of a soulless agro-industrial wasteland.

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"Polar bears mate with grizzlies in the Canadian Arctic along the Beaufort Sea to produce “pizzly bears.”" Quartz

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Horrifying before-and-after photos illustrating the effects of forced removals under apartheid.

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SA govt closes offices where refugees can have their paperwork renewed... then arrests them for not having up-to-date paperwork.

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Good long-form piece about the decline of work in the developed world, and how society might adapt

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LOL

"By and large, the policy heavyweights of the day... believed there was a “categorical no-bailout injunction.” As such, it was expected that markets would understand that European governments were more likely to default once their devaluation option was taken away and that financial markets would price the sovereign debt of countries differently depending on the health of their public finances."

Seriously, though, it's a good article - a very strong argument that the basic reason why we're now facing another crisis in Greece was the decision to bail it out in 2010, rather than allowing an orderly default.

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Authoritarianism is Turkey has suffered a setback, but is not defeated.

Links, Wednesday 17th June

This is utterly shocking. Watch both the videos.

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Interesting history of the racial tensions around public swimming in the US. Basically, as public swimming pools were steadily desegregated, whites first resisted violently and then refused to use them, and the institution eventually went into decline. Little has changed, it seems.

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"the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died." Guardian

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Check it out: vegan meringues!

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South Africa is an extraordinarily violent country. Other than that, there are several interpretations you might apply to these statistics.

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I find these sorts of arguments entirely dishonest. Not because they're necessarily wrong on their own terms, but because they're  used almost exclusively to defend behaviour that they don't even remotely support. I've never met a meat eater who strictly adheres to any rigorous ethical code about what kind of meat is and isn't allowable, but I've met many who gesture vaguely in the direction of such a code to justify their actual behaviour.

"So you concede it would be OK to eat the flesh of a cow that was pasture-fed on non-arable land for its entire life, all the while fitted with a methane-reclamation device, and then killed suddenly in its sleep?"
"Uh, yeah, I guess..."
"Cool, I'm gonna eat all the McDonalds!"

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"More than 21 years after the end of racial apartheid, there is frustration among black writers who cannot get published or whose works are not available in their own communities. They point to the expense of books and a continued lack of diversity in bookshops, publishing houses, awards committees, and among event organisers and audiences. Some have called for a boycott of literary festivals." Guardian

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"It is a reminder of deportee Jimmy Mubenga, killed under restraint by G4S guards while pleading that he couldn’t breathe, and whose three killers walk free today. Of Isabella Acevedo, paid £22 a week for seven years working for ex-immigration minister Mark Harper, and deported minutes before her own daughter’s wedding. Of Yashika Bageerathi, sent back to Mauritius six weeks before her A Level exams, despite a petition of 183,751 calling for her to remain. Of the nine cleaners of SOAS, ambushed by forty immigration officers after organising for their rights at their workplace. And of the women of Yarl’s Wood detention centre, over three quarters of whom are survivors of sexual violence, facing daily humiliation and abuse at the hands of the same detention system which has caged 900 international students this past year." NUS

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Thoughts?

“The best estimate of the average impact of microcredit on the poverty of clients is zero.” Guardian

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This seems to me like one of the clearest statements on this sorry saga

"She says she’s black, but we don’t know if she’s always black. Is she black when she’s purchasing a home? Talking to the police? Or is she black only when vying for a role where lived experience would help her odds?"

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Very interesting piece, arguing that much of recent economic 'growth' in China is in fact a monetary phenomenon.

"Just as in the 1600s, the basic underlying logic of China's economic boom after 1980 was the import of money in exchange for the export of goods. This influx of money supported the full remonetization of the Chinese economy. Goods and services that the state or the work unit had previously provided now had to be bought in the marketplace."

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"while it may not make for an exciting backstory, six in 10 women in real federal prison are there for nonviolent drug crimes... Frequently, low-level assistants serve more than their own bosses. Why? Like Dorothy Gaines, most defendants can't afford a private attorney, and court-appointed attorneys often barely have time to read a defendant's case before defending them in court, much less conduct the research needed for a decent defense. In addition, prosecutors reduce sentences for those who furnish "valuable" information, like the men who testified against Dorothy. The low-level employees have no valuable information to give." HuffPost

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Pretty interesting piece on the biochemistry of creating convincing vegan "meat"

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TW: Child sexual abuse

I'm generally a support of Tor and the dark web, but this is really troubling. There are admitted methodological problems with this study, but it seems to indicate that a very large proportion of dark net traffic is associated with child pornography and child abuse

Links, Tuesday 9th June

Remember that the Catholic church practised slavery in Ireland until the last Magdalene laundry was shut down in 1996. It boggles the mind that this institution or anyone associated with it is accorded moral authority on any topic whatsoever, let alone "human trafficking".

"A previously unpublished 2012 HSE report on Bessborough, which examined the institution’s own records, show a system of “institutionalisation and human trafficking”, where “women and babies were considered little more than a commodity for trade amongst religious orders”"

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Useful 

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Great piece on male privilege by someone who has been read as both a woman and as a man.

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"Development politics generally happens along a city's gentrifying fringe. The places where land prices are high enough to make new projects worthwhile, but where incumbent residents are politically weak enough that at least some projects get approved. That tends to distract attention from the areas where the deadweight loss of zoning restrictions is actually highest, the very affluent areas where new building is essentially inconceivable." Matt Yglesias

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Really good piece on how attempts to crack down on "abuse" of prescription drugs can really harm a lot of people.

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Wowzers, I wasn't even aware of this history

"Canadian governments and churches pursued a policy of “cultural genocide” against the country’s aboriginal people throughout the 20th century, according to an investigation into a long-suppressed history that saw 150,000 Native, or First Nations, children forcibly removed from their families and incarcerated in residential schools rife with abuse."

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A history of the massacres committed against Indonesian Communist Party members in the mid-60s, with the full support and assistance of Western powers (some of which went so far as to provide names of activists to be targeted for murder).

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Keynes was once described as an “iron copulating machine”. What an epigraph.

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"My two kids at home almost lost their mother because someone decided that my life was worth less than that of a fetus that was going to die anyway. My husband had told them exactly what my regular doctor said, and the ER doctor had already warned us what would have to happen. Yet none of this mattered when confronted by the idea that no one needs an abortion. You shouldn’t need to know the details of why a woman aborts to trust her to make the best decision for herself. I don’t regret my abortion, but I would also never use my situation to suggest that the only time another woman should have the procedure is when her life is at stake. After my family found out I’d had an abortion, I got a phone call from a cousin who felt the need to tell me I was wrong to have interfered with God’s plan. And in that moment I understood exactly what kind of people judge a woman’s reproductive choices." Salon

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"The implication of this usage ["identity politics"] is that somehow an identity is something only women or African-Americans or perhaps LGBT people have. White men just have ideas about politics that spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal." Vox

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"The public debt-to-GDP ratio was very considerably larger in Britain in every year for two decades, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, than it has been at any time since the crisis of 2008. And yet there was no panic then (when Britain was confidently establishing the welfare state), in contrast to the confused anxiety, not to mention the orchestrated fear, that seems to run down the spine of the terrorised British today, making austerity look like a fitting response." New Statesman

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"The head of Sweden’s anti-trafficking unit told a journalist last year, “of course the law has negative consequences for women in prostitution, but that’s also some of the effect that we want to achieve with the law.”

How, then, is the law sold as “feminist?”

Partly because, while sex workers may be focused on our own safety, people who don’t sell sex have a lot of feelings about more abstract concepts —the idea of what “message” the law sends, for example, or an interest in indulging feelings of disgust regarding men who pay for sex. That distorts the debate." New Republic

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