G-Spots

My Google Reader Starred Items

[davidmarsden]

My 'Google Reader' starred items feed

There seems to be a problem with my IFTTT recipe, which I use to publish my 'Google Reader' starred items here.

I can't be bothered to spend time figuring out what the problem is and how to fix it.

And, of course, I no longer use Google Reader.

If you happen to subscribe to this Tumblr, and wish to continue to subscribe to the things I like to read in my preferred Feedbin reader, you can do so with this:

https://feedbin.me/starred/edcMOVpk4dyFvOc--VNb5Q.xml

[davidmarsden]

What Do Animals See In A Mirror?

A controversial test for self-awareness is dividing the animal kingdom.

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via The Feature http://nautil.us/issue/13/symmetry/what-do-animals-see-in-a-mirror

[davidmarsden]

The Female Sociopath

Amy Dunne of “Gone Girl,” Lisbeth Salander of “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Cersei Lannister of “Game of Thrones.” If there’s one thing these cold, calculating ladies can teach us, it’s that we’re captivated by the female sociopath. But how did she rise to such prominence in our cultural imagination? The answer has everything to do with corporate “feminists” and the way they teach women to “have it all.”

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via The Feature http://digg.com/2014/the-female-sociopath

[davidmarsden]

On A Norweigan Tragedy And The Killer's Book

When a person commits an atrocity, our immediate, stuttering questions are why and how; in providing us with 1,500 pages of explanation for his actions, perhaps Breivik had perversely given us something to be grateful for.

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via The Feature http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/aage-borchgrevinks-norwegian-tragedy-anders-behring-breivik-massacre-utoya-anders-breiviks-2083-european-declaration-independence

[davidmarsden]

“Who?” and “How?” – What the public thinks of a Basic Income

Exploring a future welfare state

When Sheffield Equality Group considered how to combine informing public attitudes to welfare alongside researching alternatives, Basic Income was an easy choice.

Jason Leman of the Sheffield Equality Group writes:

The group lobbies for reducing the gap between high and low incomes, in response to evidence (such as that presented in The Spirit Level) that societies with a narrower income gap have better social outcomes. Yet there are many barriers to reducing this income gap. One of these is the negative perception of those needing social support. This stigmatisation is encouraged by politicians who, like all bullies, look strong by punishing the powerless and a media who sell more copies if their copy inflames indignation. A Basic Income offers a transparently equitable way of reducing income differences, removing the stigma of benefits.

Drawing on Malcolm Torry’s book Money For Everyone along with other research, the group developed a questionnaire on Basic Income. The questionnaire presented evidence about the failings of the current welfare system and proposed Basic Income as a solution. After testing out a draft with each other we cut the questionnaire in half and simplified the language. Then we went out, to friends and acquaintances, and onto the streets of Sheffield, exploring what a future welfare state might look like.

Perhaps the first surprise was that people were generally positive about the idea. Four out of five supported the introduction of a Basic Income, with common responses being along the lines of… “that’s clever”, “I like that, I hadn’t thought of it”, “what a great idea”. One key argument for a Basic Income may be the growing precariat, the low-paid poor-conditions workers struggling with a shrinking welfare state. There seemed to be recognition that if business demands temporary and flexible workers a system of support is needed. This also applied to young people moving into and out of training schemes and education.  So is an Unconditional Basic Income about to sweep the nation?

There were three main questions that made support for a Basic Income more qualified. First was the detail. Our outline suggested progressive taxation would fund it – the rich would pay more, the poor would pay less, and everyone would get the same out. However, this does not explore the detail of what it would mean for people in practice. There are many models of what would fund a Basic Income and arguments about how realistic these mechanisms are. Public discussion around a Basic Income may need to extend to ideas such as Land Value Tax, negative interest rates, monetary reform, and so on. Without a clear funding mechanism the Basic Income could remain in the “nice idea but it’s not going to happen” basket of public perception.

Second came the immigrants. Who is defined as a “citizen” is key to the concept of “Citizen’s Income”. This issue is difficult to explore, as some people don’t want to appear prejudiced whilst others enjoy self-righteous exclusion of the ‘other’. To enjoy support from middle-England a Basic Income may need to be exclusive or demand a quid-pro-quo. In the future this might be an ignorant worry from when nations still meant something. On Sheffield streets decorated with tabloid headlines, community tensions, and everyday resentment, it was a live issue.

Third was the undeserving or the unmotivated. The “free-rider” problem is the universal thorn in the side of a Basic Income. For example, 85% of our respondents supported introducing a Basic Income for young people to support them in education or training. This support faltered if the Basic Income was made unconditional. Partly in mind was the lazy slob watching TV all day at the taxpayers expense; 42% thought that would happen with a Basic Income. Yet also in mind was a belief that a Basic Income could take away the motivation to engage with life. Speaking of a young family member who spent their days stoned and playing computer games, one (also young) respondent worried an Unconditional Basic Income would keep them in wasted comfort. As we are seeing with the current welfare reforms, conditionality can mean starving people into unpaid work, but the issue of motivation is well-intentioned and would need addressing.

A difficulty in exploring a Basic Income is that what someone thinks they would do in a given situation does not always match the reality. Most people in our survey said they would still work in an interesting flexible job if receiving a Basic Income. This dropped to 56% saying they would take a boring job with a long commute, especially younger respondents. This does have potential to raise a debate about whether boring jobs with poor conditions have any part in a decent society. However, this distracts from the reality that where a Basic Income has been introduced people keep working, allbeit sometimes on reduced hours

There were other indications that it is difficult to judge what people would really do if receiving a basic income. Four out of five people said they would take up a full-time voluntary post, however those already in a position to do voluntary work were less confident. Indeed, a Basic Income would entail such radical social change it may be difficult to predict precisely what social changes would result. Any future implementation would need to be adaptable and responsive to uncertainty.

Our research raised questions needing further investigation. Public support for a Basic Income has the potential to be strong. The faults of our complex, unresponsive and punitive welfare system are clear. The benefits of a Basic Income are self-evident. There is no problem with the “why?”. The challenge for gaining public support is to provide clear answers, or at least a clear way forward, where there questions over “who?” and “how?”. We hope to carry out a wider survey exploring some of these questions further.

You can read the full report at:

http://sheffieldequality.wordpress.com/next-steps/basic-income-survey/

The post “Who?” and “How?” – What the public thinks of a Basic Income appeared first on Basic Income UK.

via Basic Income UK http://basicincome.org.uk/article/2014/05/public-thinks-basic-income/

[davidmarsden]

Show #115 – Barbado’ed – early slavery in America and the Caribbean

Slaves in the sugar fields of Barbados

From the end of the 16th Century until the late 17th, thousands of people from England, Ireland and Scotland – from criminals and street children, to people who fought against Cromwell’s army, we sent into slavery in American and the Caribbean. Many more were hoodwinked or kidnapped into “indentured servitude” that, for most, led to them being worked to death. When these European slaves joined with the new African slaves to rise up against the slave masters, the horrors of perpetual slavery and modern racism were born.

In this show, Donnacha talks to Don Jordan, one of the authors of White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America, about the forgotten period of slavery.

Listen now: http://thecircleda.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/circled-a-show-may-14th-2014.mp3

And, if you liked the snippet of Damien Dempsey’s song at the end, here’s the full nearly 8 minutes of it:

via The Circled A http://thecircleda.com/2014/05/15/show-115-barbadoed-early-slavery-in-america-and-the-caribbean/

[davidmarsden]

OXFORD UNIVERSITY : MYSOGYNY STUDIES AUTUMN TERM 2014

http://www.independent.co.uk/student/oxford-city-centre-rape-chant-video-sees-notorious-cambridge-drinking-society-investigated-by-police-9369002.html

Learn how to swagger through a town centre chanting ‘RAPE RAPE’ and ‘she’s too young’ at any girl under 16. Truly empowering.

http://www.cherwell.org/news/town/2014/02/27/inquest-hears-deceased-student-was-harassed-by-tutor?track_latestinsection=17196

Learn how as a tutor you can sexually harass a student till she kills herself and be told by the authorities ‘best stay away for a few days’

http://www.independent.co.uk/student/news/free-pussy-oxford-college-rugby-club-banned-from-competing-8922464.html

A handy guide on how to spike the drinks of vulnerable freshers while ‘crewdating’.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2586882/Oxford-University-accused-betraying-alleged-victims-sex-attacks-hushing-reports-assaults-carried-students-professors.html

How to develop a culture of silence over sexual assault claims even when there are dozens of them.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/07/oxford-union-president-arrested-rape-inquiry

Leadership from the top

via Ian Bone http://ianbone.wordpress.com/2014/05/15/oxford-university-mysogyny-studies-autumn-term-2014/

[davidmarsden]

How A Mayor’s Quest To Unmask A Foul-Mouthed Twitter User Blew Up In His Face

An angry backlash shows that online overreach won’t “play in Peoria.”

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via The Feature http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/how-a-mayors-quest-to-unmask-a-foul-mouthed-twitter-user-blew-up-in-his-face/

[davidmarsden]

David Renton: The Killing of Blair Peach

‘As a campaign meeting, it must have been one of the biggest yet, a hundred National Front supporters, three and a half thousand police and thousands of Asian demonstrators.’ This was the way News at Ten began its report of the clashes in Southall on 23 April 1979, midway through the general election campaign that would end with the victory of Margaret Thatcher. The report contained footage of police officers arresting middle-aged men in turbans, women sitting down in the road and demonstrators with their heads swaddled in bandages. via London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/david-renton/the-killing-of-blair-peach

[davidmarsden]

John Lanchester: fUKd

via London Review of Books http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/john-lanchester/short-cuts

[davidmarsden]

Adjusting to the Apocalypse

The news that a section of the West Antarctica ice sheet is now irreversibly melting into the ocean is awesome and terrifying. As a vivid illustration of the scale of climate change, it merits the aghast reactions that I’ve seen from the lefties around me.

Yet I can’t help but think about what I wrote recently, about another prediction of ecologically driven disaster. That prediction of civilizational collapse turned out to be based on tendentious speculation, while the findings about the Antarctic ice are the product of extended research by two separate teams of serious researchers. So in this case, it’s tremendously valuable to know what’s happening no matter what the political impacts are.

But I once again wonder if the publicity around these findings will wind up doing much good. It certainly could, if the combined enormity and easy comprehensibility of this new finding gets more people to take climate change seriously.

Yet I fear it will, instead, mostly be taken up by people who already make “being very serious about climate change” a significant part of their identity. And if the news is read in an apocalyptic way, it can as easily breed fatalism as political will.

While the irreversible nature of the melting ice sheet is touted above all else, just as important is the time scale over which it will unfold. The rise in sea levels, which could be five feet, ten feet, or even more, will occur over the span of a century or more. From the New York Times article:

The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.

While 100 years is an infinitesimal amount of time in geological terms—hence what makes the phenomenon so shocking and important—it is nevertheless an extremely long time in the context of an industrialized human society. It’s hard to imagine human society dealing with environmental changes of this magnitude, but perhaps no more so than picturing the regimes of 1914 reckoning with the upheavals of the past century.

Societies will adapt, even if those adaptations will entail enormous expenses and dislocations. And indeed, adaptation is already happening. This mostly doesn’t mean fanciful geoengineering schemes, but rather things like the secretary of Housing and Urban Development working with a water management expert to bring Dutch water-control techniques to the United States, or congress debating the impacts of flood insurance policy on low income homeowners.

It’s true, as Matt Karp writes at Jacobin, that overturning the fossil fuel-based economy will require a monumental political struggle and a massive redistribution of wealth. But we should not think merely in terms of an epochal battle to either defeat Big Oil and “save the planet” or else perish. Equally important is to contest the adjustments and adaptations that we now know must be made, even if we could somehow decarbonize the economy tomorrow.

These adaptations will impose costs and burdens, and the ruling class will do what it can to impose those burdens on those who can least bear them. In other words, the politics of climate change are and will continue to be intertwined with class struggle across all domains, not just in the fight against the fossil fuel industry. I believe, of course, that socialism is also the best answer to the ecological crisis. But I also agree with Christian Parenti that “in the short-term, realistic climate politics are reformist politics, even if they are conceived of as part of a longer-term anti-capitalist project of totally economic re-organization.”

To me, Marco Rubio’s climate change denialism and Obama’s dithering over the Keystone pipeline are at least as terrifying as the latest word from Antarctica. As is the rise of a climate apartheid that allows the rich to evade the consequences of a warming world. Fortunately, our immediate political obstacles, unlike the movements of the glaciers, are at least potentially susceptible to change through collective action.

via Peter Frase http://www.peterfrase.com/2014/05/adjusting-to-the-apocalypse/

[davidmarsden]

Resilience in the face of genocide

The book is at the printer's and approved the final proofs this morning. Also as if this moment there are exactly 72 copies yet to be claimed, so please place your order if you haven't done so already. This week we showcase an article by Jason Heppenstall, a travel writer. He wrote about his experiences in a small riverside village in the world's poorest and most heavily bombed country on earth, showing us how its people survived and recovered, with their traditional culture intact.

Read more » via ClubOrlov http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2014/05/resilience-in-face-of-genocide_13.html

[davidmarsden]

Why Did AIDS Ravage The U.S. More Than Any Other Country?

Solving an epidemiological mystery.

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via The Feature http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117691/aids-hit-united-states-harder-other-developed-countries-why

[davidmarsden]

Why sacking the manager does add up

Premier League clubs trying to escape relegation are likely to benefit from changing managers, a study has found. via BBC Sport - Football http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/27391542

[davidmarsden]

England set for hurt, says Whitehall

There is a "high probability" England will miss the later stages of the World Cup, a government document says. via BBC Sport - Football http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-27396376#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

[davidmarsden]

An assessment of the FA Chairman’s England Commission Report

About six months ago the FA Chairman, Greg Dyke, declared that the small number of Englishmen playing in the Premier League was a problem, and announced the creation of a Commission to investigate the matter. Last week the Commission published its report, calling for some radical changes in the structure of League competition.

The main proposal is the creation of a “B League” for Premier League clubs, in which their younger players could gain competitive match experience. This, it is argued, would benefit the Premier League clubs by helping in the development of their trainees, while giving more English players an opportunity.

The other proposals include a development of the loan system which would enable the lending club to have a greater say in the training and development of the players they loan, an increase in the number of home grown players to be fielded and tighter government controls on the granting of visas to non-EU players.

On reading the document three thoughts came to my mind:

Why is the falling number of Englishman playing in the EPL a problem?

The most shocking thing about the report is that it nowhere explains what the problem is. The comment that comes nearest to an explanation is that “A direct relationship can be drawn between the numbers of available players playing regularly at the highest level in the best performing teams and the performance of a national squad.”

This is justified only by referring to Germany and Spain, and no serious statistical evidence is offered. As stated the argument appears circular- if the national team is one of the best performers then wouldn’t it have the best players, who would therefore play for the best clubs? Surely such an important claim requires a little more serious analysis? Above all, if the argument is right and opportunities for English players have been declining, shouldn’t we expect that the performance of the England team has also declined?

We commented on this issue in Soccernomics, and I posted a blog about it when Dyke’s first announced his Commission. A reasonable evaluation of the evidence suggests that as the number of Englishmen in the EPL has fallen the performance of the national team has improved, and certainly not worsened. I think it is in fact substantially better. The reason is that the national team relies on a small number of players, and the rising quality of the EPL has given the top English players better exposure.

What would this mean for the structure of league competition in England?

The proposals all seem to enhance the power of the Premier League clubs, most likely at the expense of smaller clubs. While the B League teams would not be allowed to rise above the level of League One, by creating a new source of competition to attract fans would put pressure on existing teams that already endure very small gates. The report harps on parallels with Germany and Spain- which have always been dominated by teams in the top tier.

England has always been an exception with 92 professional teams in four tiers since the 1920s, and there have been calls to rationalize this structure since the 1960s by reducing the number of professional teams. This proposal is more subtle, but is likely to have a similar effect, both in giving more control to lending clubs and creating more competition for the smaller clubs.

In many ways the B League proposals sound a bit like the takeover of the minor leagues in baseball by the major league clubs since the 1950s- many fans still bemoan the loss of truly independent minor league teams, even in a system without promotion and relegation.

Will restricting player mobility and increasing the power of big clubs really produce better English players?

At one point in the report the Commission seems to give the game away. All of the arguments are couched in terms of the superiority of Spain and Germany- more players from these countries play at the highest level- but a large fraction of them do not play in their home country. Englishmen almost exclusively play in England. To put it another way, if opportunities are restricted in England- why haven’t English players sought out opportunities in countries like the Netherlands, France and Denmark?

In Soccernomics we argued that the lack of an international outlook has been a significant barrier to the acquisition of the skills which make for a competitive national team. Instead of addressing this issue, the FA wants to adopt measure which restrict opportunities for foreign players.

History shows that a policy of grand isolation almost never improves your international competitiveness, but just makes you weaker until one day you are forced to open your borders again on worse terms. The FA are not calling for a complete ban, but surely limiting opportunities to face competition from foreign players will not help to improve quality.

via Soccernomics Agency: Consultancy, Research, Ideas http://www.soccernomics-agency.com/?p=601

[davidmarsden]

Moneybag logic

In case you missed it, the US is not a democracy. A Princeton University study by Gilens and Page performed a regression analysis on over a thousand public policy decisions, and determined that the effect of public opinion on public policy is nil. That's right, nil. It doesn't matter how you vote, it doesn't affect the outcome in any measurable way. By extension, that also goes for protesting, organizing, dousing yourself with gasoline and setting yourself on fire on the steps of the US Senate, or whatever else you may get up to. It won't influence those in power worth a damn.

Read more » via ClubOrlov http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2014/05/moneybag-logic.html