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

Links, Monday 6th April

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Some disturbing discussion of child abuse]

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Obvious, but worth repeating

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A list of resources analysing the Garissa attack

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

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Yes

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

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

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

Links, Monday 30th March

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

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

Guardian

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

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

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

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Bummer :(

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

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

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

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On US gun culture:

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

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

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

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

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

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

This reminds me of this comment: "With results like these, what will the epitaph for neoliberalism look like? I think historians will conclude it was a form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time." Baffler

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

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

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

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

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

Links, Monday 16th March

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What an excellent idea

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

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

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

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

Links, Wednesday 11th March

Was just reminded of these wise words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links, Sunday 8th March

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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So many lols 

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Remembering $pread magazine Animal Tits & Sass

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

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

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

(Some images NSFW)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links, Wednesday 4th March

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links, Monday 2nd March

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Here's the answer, ok everyone? Wired

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Cooking with physics XKCD

Links, Sunday 22nd Feb

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

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This is good throughout

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

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Correcting some misconceptions about medieval Europe iO9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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