As the nation celebrates #MLK Jr day — it's important to remember that people today are more critical of the movement for black lives than they were of the civil rights movement in the 60's.
17 January 2017
Quartz: An analysis of 10,000 scientific studies on marijuana concretely supports only three medical benefits
More than half the states in the US now allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes, as well as at least 16 other countries. Yet of the hundreds of purported medical benefits, only three are concretely supported by scientific evidence: treating chronic pain, nausea after chemotherapy, and symptoms of multiple sclerosis. This is the conclusion of a new 400-page report from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, which analyzed more than 10,000 scientific studies.
One of the biggest benefits of such large reviews is that they put in context the weight of evidence supporting the many claims made in the name of cannabis. To help you understand those, we’ve coded the claims about both benefits and harms of cannabis. The ones with the strongest evidence are in bold, those with mild evidence in normal text, and those with limited or no evidence grayed out.
Quartz: Martin Luther King Jr. was decades ahead of his time in advocating for a universal basic income
In 1967, the year before he was assassinated, King published a book titled, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? In it, King held up a basic income as a solution to the poverty that afflicted people of all races in the United States. “In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derived from racial discrimination, I will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike,” he wrote. He went on to add that “ the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
The poverty that King spoke of afflicting white and black Americans alike is today threatening those people who have been replaced in offices and on assembly lines by robots that can do the same job more cheaply. Experts have pointed to the “economic anxiety” of voters in the Rust Belt states, where manufacturing jobs have declined steeply, as one of the primary reasons for Donald Trump’s victory. Trump blamed trade policy for the job losses, though the real culprit is technology.
Politico: Make internationalism great again
Those who favor globalism, liberalism and openness need to stop dismissing nationalism and instead reclaim the term from the loud-mouthed nativists, bigots and Putin-lovers. They have to show the national interest is not advanced by empty promises of manufacturing jobs, immigration bans and ethnic homogeneity. Instead, it is best served by economic openness, international engagement by liberal democracies and reasonably liberal immigration policies. [...]
And yet, the attempts to do away with nationalism are utopian. Arguments for a cosmopolitan view of the world might be morally and intellectually compelling, but they run contrary to most people’s intuitions. To provide justification for their existence and to get through tough times, human societies — just like families, firms, or other organizations — rely on narratives that stress the bonds that tie them together. [...]
The visceral, zero-sum nationalism offered by Donald Trump or French National Front Leader Marine Le Pen offers only a nostalgia for a past that never really existed. Its chimeric proposals — of industrial jobs that are never displaced by foreign competition or technological change, stable social hierarchies, ethnic homogeneity — are the fastest route to economic stagnation and backwardness.
16 January 2017
VICE: Inside the Thriving Online Market for Women's Dirty Underwear
You've heard about Japan's used-underwear vending machines. They were in the Telegraph; they were in countless listicles about why Japan is a wacky place full of things that scare people from Middle England; they were probably referred to in one of those shit jokes Jimmy Carr does at the beginning of 8 out of 10 Cats. You know about them.
However, what you're possibly less familiar with is the UK's steady trade of soiled-to-order knickers. Should you want, you can get your hands on pants stained with whatever manner of bodily fluid you desire, all of them produced bespoke by local British underwear artisans. [...]
Sixty percent of buyers are under 40, he told me, and 92 percent are men. The other 8 percent, as you might have guessed via a basic knowledge of human biology, are women, some of whom are sellers on the site. A third of the buyers are married and most are regular customers. Paul also gave me a breakdown of what the buyers do when they receive the used knickers; according to his stats, 31 percent masturbate with them, 30 percent smell them, 13 percent wear them, 12 percent put them in a drawer, 8 percent lick them, 5 percent just look at them, and 1 percent wash them and wear them. [...]
According to Paul, buying the pants is a means to an end for most of his customers. He says that what the guys really want is someone to chat to—an online girlfriend. He told me the women who sell the most on his site are those who interact with their customers the most and build up their confidence in them. He admits that they also tend to be quite pretty, but makes it clear that "that's not the main criteria." What the guys really want, he says, is "open mindedness—someone who's open to discussion, who'll be a psychologist and a confidant."
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