Alas, a Blog

1. Bell v Tavistock quashed on appeal – Gendered Intelligence Blog
   Some extremely good news from the UK.
2. The EU is Praised for Vaccine “Donations.” Behind Closed Doors, It Quietly Blocks Poor Countries’ Efforts to Increase Vaccine Manufacturing. – by Sarah Lazare – The Column
   “’Global vaccine apartheid’ isn’t some theoretical future danger. It is the most accurate way to describe a situation where the U.S. is debating booster shots while only 3.27% of the entire continent of Africa has been fully vaccinated.”
3. COVID and the moral panic over obesity – Lawyers, Guns & Money
   As is usually the case, the actual numbers are much more nuanced, and show that the large majority of fat people have – well, not nothing to worry about, Covid is still frightening, but no more to worry about than non-fat people.
4. On Voting Rights, There Are No Moderates in the GOP – Democracy Docket
   I’m so much more appalled by the GOP’s anti-voting-rights stance, then by their many other horrific stances, because it’s so foundational. Without democracy, it’s hard to see how ANY issue can advance without violence.
5. What if the US didn’t go to war in Afghanistan after 9/11? – Responsible Statecraft
6. Whitest paint in world created at Purdue, may help curb global warming
   “The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power.”
7. The evidence for violence interrupters doesn’t support the hype – Vox
8. Eyebombing Bulgaria (7 photos) | STREET ART UTOPIA
   An artist and a group of schoolkids look for shapes that can be improved with eyes.
9. The heritability fallacy
   “Contrary to popular belief, the measurable heritability of a trait does not tell us how ‘genetically inheritable’ that trait is. Further, it does not inform us about what causes a trait, the relative influence of genes in the development of a trait, or the relative influence of the environment in the development of a trait.”
10. One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia | WIRED
    “When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.””
11. The Roberts Court Has Normalized Racism in America | Balls and Strikes“As Roberts and his colleagues have normalized this insidious racism, too many Democrats have remained deferential to the Court, fearful of “politicizing” an institution that, in reality, has always been political, and has led the charge in right-wing, partisan warfare. We can’t delude ourselves any longer.”
12. A Pennsylvania community is divided over anti-racism book ban at school board meeting; – CNN
    “The fact that all the banned materials are by or about people of color is just a coincidence, according to Jane Johnson, the school board president.” Gosh, what a surprising coincidence that is.
13. Texas GOP sees Haitian migrant border crisis as a political opportunity – But it’s actually a humanitarian disaster exacerbated by Biden.
    The racist fear-mongering by the GOP is unsurprising. Biden’s continuation of Trump’s cruel policies is just as disgusting, though.
14. A Modern Feminist Classic Changed My Life. Was It Actually Garbage? Rereading Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth 30 years later.
15. US officials to probe whip-like cords used against migrants | Human Rights News | Al Jazeera
16. Opinion | It’s All or Nothing for These Democrats, Even if That Means Biden Fails – The New York Times. And an alternate link.
    “What is true of both explanations is that they show the extent to which moderate Democrats have made a fetish of bipartisan displays and anti-partisan feeling. And in doing so, they reveal that they are most assuredly not the adults in the room of American politics.”
17. The art accompanying this link farm comes from Jack Kirby’s comics adaptation of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

1. When Thin is a Trans Requirement | Autostraddle
   “These experiences are rarely given airtime, partly because the few trans people in the public eye are almost universally thin, and partly because fatness and transness together bring a double burden of stigma: they’re both seen as a form of excess & violation of public norms, and they’re both met with community policing and shaming.”
2. US State Policies, Politics, and Life Expectancy – MONTEZ – 2020 – The Milbank Quarterly – Wiley Online Library
   “Results show that changes in life expectancy during 1970-2014 were associated with changes in state policies on a conservative-liberal continuum, where more liberal policies expand economic regulations and protect marginalized groups. States that implemented more conservative policies were more likely to experience a reduction in life expectancy.”
3. Afghanistan: 3 Unlearned Lessons – by Nonzero – Nonzero Newsletter
   And a fourth lesson: We really should stop attempting “interventions” like this.
4. Opinion | Anna Harris of Texas who works with indigent defendants says she was arrested in retaliation for her work – The Washington Post
   Interesting stuff about a “holistic” model of providing legal defenses to people who can’t afford their own, versus the standard model.
5. Texas has betrayed women – UnHerd
   “Not content to simply outlaw abortion, they have constructed a law that maximises the humiliation, stigma and degradation on any woman who seeks to end a pregnancy. In Texas, every woman’s entire community has been deputised to police her most private choices.”
6. On Twitter, I discussed why we shouldn’t infer a lot from that study which found that spoilers make readers enjoy stories more.
7. The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms – The Markup
   “Holding 17 different factors steady in a complex statistical analysis of more than two million conventional mortgage applications for home purchases, we found that lenders were 40 percent more likely to turn down Latino applicants for loans, 50 percent more likely to deny Asian/Pacific Islander applicants, and 70 percent more likely to deny Native American applicants than similar White applicants. Lenders were 80 percent more likely to reject Black applicants than similar White applicants. … In every case, the prospective borrowers of color looked almost exactly the same on paper as the White applicants, except for their race.”
8. How Oslo Achieved Zero Pedestrian and Bicycle Fatalities, and How Others Can Apply What Worked | TheCityFix
9. Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue – Scientific American
   Good article from 2016; unfortunately, I don’t think much has changed since then. “Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. And yet, you might still open a study on genetics in a major scientific journal and find categories like “white” and “black” being used as biological variables.”
10. Human races are not like dog breeds: refuting a racist analogy
    “But because the analogy between races and dog breeds incorrectly privileges biology over the social and historical factors that have led to the development of racial constructs, here we demonstrate how genetic data fails to substantiate the racial categorizations used in the U.S. today and their equivalence to dog breeds.”
11. Will the Child Tax Credit End Traditional Welfare? – The Atlantic
    The headline should replace “end” with “replace,” and “traditional welfare” with “TANF.” And, I doubt it will, but I wish it would.
12. Don’t Believe the Hype (About Believing): You Don’t Need Religion to be Happy | Religion Dispatches
13. Amia Srinivasan · Does anyone have the right to sex? · LRB 22 March 2018
    “The question​, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.”
14. The Ides of August
    A persuasive essay about what happened in Afghanistan. “I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were.”
15. ‘For me, this is paradise’: life in the Spanish city that banned cars | Cities | The Guardian
    “On the same streets where 30 people died in traffic accidents from 1996 to 2006, only three died in the subsequent 10 years, and none since 2009. CO2 emissions are down 70%, nearly three-quarters of what were car journeys are now made on foot or by bicycle, and, while other towns in the region are shrinking, central Pontevedra has gained 12,000 new inhabitants.”
16. To survive, China’s biggest gay dating app became a pharmacy – Rest of World
    “It’s trying to make sure the state will not mistake it as a gay activist organization,” said Chan. “It must, in order to survive.” The app was founded by a gay cop who was forced to resign after he was outed.
17. Podcase recommendation: Dead Eyes.
    Somewhere within the show, Connor Ratliff describes his podcast as being a lot like “Serial,” if the mystery were about something of no importance whatsoever. In this case, Ratliff – an actor – “embarks upon a quest to solve a very stupid mystery that has haunted him for two decades: why Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in the 2001 HBO mini-series, Band Of Brothers.” I’ve listened to the whole first season now, and it’s surprisingly entertaining.
18. What podcasts are y’all enjoying? I’m particularly interested in non-political podcast recommendations.

Top image: Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
Bottom image: Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash