Linkage

Right now, it seems to me that, in a number of respects, we are at the stage that the American environmental movement was at in the 1950s or 1960s. At that time, there were people-supporters of the park system, hunters, birdwatchers and so on-who cared about what we would now identify as "environmental" issues. In the world of intellectual property we now have start-up software engineers, libraries, appropriationist artists, parodists, biographers, biotech researchers, and others. In the 1950s, there were flurries of outrage over particular environmental crises, such as proposals to build dams in national parks. In later years, the public was shocked by burning rivers and oil spills. In the world of intellectual property, we currently worry about Microsoft's allegedly anti-competitive practices, the uncertain ethics of patenting human genes, and the propriety of using copyright to silence critics of the Church of Scientology. We are notably lacking two things, however. The first is a theoretical framework, a set of analytical tools with which issues should be analyzed. The second is   perception of common interest among apparently disparate groups, a common interest which cuts across traditional oppositions. (Hunter vs. Birdwatcher, for example.)

What kinds of tools am I talking about? Crudely speaking, the environmental movement was deeply influenced by two basic analytical frameworks. The first was ecology, the study of the fragile, complex and unpredictable interconnections between living systems. The second was welfare economics, which revealed the ways in which markets can fail to make economic actors internalize the full costs of their actions. The combination of the two ideas yielded a powerful and disturbing conclusion. Markets would routinely fail to make economic actors internalize their own costs, particularly their own environmental costs. This failure would routinely disrupt or destroy fragile ecological systems, with unpredictable, ugly, dangerous, and possibly irreparable consequences. These two types of analysis pointed to a general interest in environmental protection, and thus helped to build a large constituency that supported governmental efforts to that end. The duck hunter's efforts to preserve wetlands as a species habitat turn out to have wider functions in the prevention of erosion and the maintenance of water quality. The decision to burn coal rather than gas for power generation may impact everything from forests to fisheries.

It's all true girls! If you see a cartoon illustration of one kiss you'll be on a slippery slope to living in your bedroom, with a bin full of exhausted AA batteries, and an excess bandwidth bill you'll have to sell a kidney for.

On November 14, a 20-year-old woman named Lanah Burkhardt appeared before the school board of the Conroe Independent School District in Texas. Burkhardt told the board that, when she was 11, she read a Scholastic book that introduced her to "a single kiss." According to Burkhardt, her exposure to this Scholastic book was directly responsible for her developing a debilitating addiction to pornography.

Burkhardt said that after reading the Scholastic book with the "single kiss," she "looked for other books that gave me pleasure." This "led to internet searches" that Burkhardt will "never forget." By the time she was 13, Burkhardt says her porn addiction left her depressed and suicidal.

[…] 

Burkhardt's appearance was promoted by SkyTree Book Fairs, a newly formed organization marketing itself as "an alternative to the sexually explicit content distributed in Scholastic's book fairs." 

While SkyTree Book Fairs presents itself as an independent non-profit organization, it appears to be a hastily assembled offshoot of Brave Books, which publishes children's books by right-wing pundits and pseudo-celebrities.

[…]

Neither Brave Books nor Burkhardt disclosed that Burkhardt is an employee of Brave Books. According to her LinkedIn profile, Burkhardt is the company's "public relations coordinator."

Burkhardt's employment was first reported by Frank Strong. It is unclear how an 11-year-old Burkhardt obtained the Scholastic book that allegedly caused her porn addiction. It appears she was home-schooled. Burkhardt did not respond to a request for comment sent via Facebook.

In bigger cities, Amazon has its own distribution network, which takes some of the pressure off the post office. But in rural areas, where carriers drive miles of lonely routes in their personal vehicles, the arrangement has caused problems.

In the mountains of Colorado, biologists in Crested Butte are struggling with the delay of time-sensitive samples, the Denver Post reported in September, while mail carriers in Carbondale say they are overwhelmed by Amazon packages. Other Minnesota towns including Brainerd and La Porte have been hit hard by Amazon in the past, carriers said. And in Maine, carriers organized a symbolic strike in protest of the Amazon onslaught a year ago — though a postal audit found that the delays were caused by staffing issues, not prioritizing packages.

In Bemidji, the mayor has complained to local members of Congress, who say their ability to control the post office is limited. Last week, Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) sent a letter to DeJoy to ask about reports that “Amazon is interfering with timely deliveries and stretching the agency’s already-overburdened workers too thin.”

“As Postmaster General, you are responsible for ensuring that the Postal Service meets its service standards, and it is clear right now that things are not working as they should,” said the letter, a copy of which was shared with The Washington Post. “Entering into contracts that your system cannot support is a breach of your responsibilities.”

On its surface, Khan’s clean air zone is hardly the stuff of revolution. Called the London Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), it imposed a daily charge of £12.50 (about $15) on highly polluting vehicles traversing the central parts of the capital and enforced the sanctions with roadside cameras. Yet its expansion in late August has distorted U.K. national politics and Khan’s political prospects, and would even come to pose a threat to his personal safety.

The new pollution charge has been met with a seething public backlash — one I would later encounter firsthand in a village on London’s furthest reaches.

According to a person close to the mayor — who, like others in this article, was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters — anti-ULEZ protesters have regularly turned up at Khan’s South London home, including when his two daughters were there alone. For several days, a caravan was chained outside his house bearing slogans and artwork that included swastikas. Protesters targeted his family for abuse at public events.

A town hall meeting in early November had to be moved to City Hall for security reasons. During the meeting, a man yelled that, centuries ago, Khan would have been hung from the “gallows.” Police have regularly searched the mayor’s house and car in response to written notes claiming explosive devices had been planted. In October, a letter came in the mail, addressed to him, with a bullet inside.

In the years following the 2008 global financial crisis, the “big three” housebuilders that dominate the new-build market in Britain have been able to increase their profits without significantly increasing the number of homes they build. This has happened despite political pressure to increase UK housing supply.

They were able to do this, we argue, because they have built up significant structural power: they can use their control of housing land and housebuilding to secure state support for initiatives that benefit their shareholders by pushing up their share prices and profitability.

[…] 

We argue this state support via planning liberalisation has given volume housebuilders what’s called monopsonistic market power in local land markets. In other words, it’s created a buyer-dominated market. This has kept the cost of their land relatively flat while UK house prices continued to rise. 

[…] 

When market power in local land markets was combined with structural power over the state, we believe volume housebuilders were able to increase their profit margins rather than ramp up delivery to help the government meet its target of 300,000 new homes per year in England. Our research shows it was in the interests of the volume housebuilders not to rapidly increase their housing supply for two main reasons.

Key arguments;

• Post-GFC, the big three successfully adopted a “margins over volume” strategy, allowing them to generate large amounts of cash, most of which has been returned to their shareholders.
• The state played a crucial role in increasing their profit margins, through two main interventions, both of which benefitted larger housebuilders over smaller housebuilders;
  • Mortgage market support schemes which (likely) inflated their sales prices, and allowed them to wind-down their own shared equity schemes.
  • Renegotiation of section 106 agreements and the subsequent liberalisation of the planning system.
• The state’s prioritisation of large sites in the planning system also provided the big-three with (monopsonistic) market power, keeping down the input cost of their land.
• The state shaped the land and housing market in this way because it perceived itself as a necessarily passive actor in the production of housing, reliant on the structural power of the largest housebuilders.

We conclude that in order to expand housing supply in a way that aligns with social and environmental needs, the state needs to recognise its own structural power, and assume a larger and more active role in the housebuilding and land market.

The privileging of Israeli sources and perspectives is hardly new. An internal report by the BBC into its news coverage of Israel and Palestine that was commissioned by the corporation’s governors in 2006 remarked on “how little history or context is routinely offered”.

It also noted “the failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and other lives under occupation”.

For evidence of this today, just consider the difference between the BBC’s “explainer” of what it calls the “Israel-Gaza war” whose chronology starts on 7 October 2023 and Al-Jazeera’s own version which argues that the current conflict “has its roots in a colonial act carried out more than a century ago”.

Municipal authorities in Gaza have accused the Israeli army of deliberately destroying thousands of books and historical documents. They have also called for the intervention of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to “intervene and protect cultural centers and condemn the occupation’s targeting of these humanitarian facilities protected under international humanitarian law.”

As was the case in Sarajevo in 1992—when Bosnian Serb forces, stationed in the hills above the city, razed the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the ground—the targeted destruction of Gaza’s primary public library is a stark reminder that genocide is about more than just the premeditated mass extinguishing of human life; it’s also about the calculated, and often vindictive, destruction of a people’s culture, language, history, and shared sites of community.

Entirely run by students — Iyer and Shahriari-Parsa, like Eghbariah, attend Harvard Law School — Harvard Law Review is a well-known launch pad for estimable legal and political careers. Barack Obama was the journal president during his time at the law school, and graduates regularly go on to clerkships with Supreme Court justices and jobs at top-tier law firms. With careers potentially on the line, the Harvard Law Review’s decision on Eghbariah’s essay came amid a crackdown in academia, in Ivy League schools and elsewhere, against pro-Palestinian speech following the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent onslaught against the Gaza Strip.

“I can only speculate about the reasons of individual editors,” said Ryan Doerfler, a law professor at Harvard who attended a meeting with Law Review staff about the Palestine article. “What I can observe, though, is that the vote took place amidst a climate of suppression of pro-Palestinian advocacy.”

The one-sentence description of effective altruism sounds like a universal goal rather than an obscure pseudo-philosophy. After all, most people are altruistic to some extent, and no one wants to be ineffective in their altruism. From the group’s website: “Effective altruism is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.” Pretty benign stuff, right?

Dig a little deeper, and the rationalism and utilitarianism emerges.  […]

The problem with removing the messy, squishy, human part of decisionmaking is you can end up with an ideology like effective altruism: one that allows a person to justify almost any course of action in the supposed pursuit of maximizing their effectiveness.