68 Ways to Be Better at Life (Ep. 419) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "KELLY: In Taiwan, it is a national thing that they do. I haven’t been there in a couple of years, but at least when I was in Taiwan, in the afternoon, everybody in the office had put their head on the desk and was asleep. And the office just closed down... I’m very anti-conspiracy theory, because generally— conspiracies require a lot of coordination and aptitude that most systems and institutions don’t have. So it’s usually incompetence rather than conspiracy. So I’ve had the privilege to talk to C.E.O.’s of Fortune 500 companies, to be in the highest levels of governments and three-letter agencies and other kinds of things. And when you get there, you realize there is no adult supervision. It’s sort of frightening and alarming. There isn’t a “them” trying to do something to “us.” And I think that kind of a stance is actually harmful and is something that would diminish your chances of accomplishing good things, because that kind of us-versus-them stance consumes way too much resources and energy. And if you can be released from that, you’ll be unleashed in a way that’s very powerful."
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, China and Africans : A Pandemic of Prejudice - "[On Johannesburg]”This house is not just [Masala Matata’s {sp?}] home. It's also her latest work of performance art, the occupation of an abandoned property that exposes racial injustice in South Africa. Just 7% of urban property belongs to black people who make up nearly 80% of the population. In rural areas, they own just 1% of land. Of course, squatting is nothing new in South Africa. Many of the country's poor and dispossessed have invaded vacant land where they build temporary houses. But Masala says they should be taking white owned property on prime real estate, rather than the barren wasteland, where they usually construct their shacks. We have to reverse the years of dispossession that our people have suffered under colonialism, she says. It's hailing a thick cloud of smoke into an otherwise empty room. The following day, we crawl beneath the rusted fence that marks the perimeter of her property. A guard dog barks ferociously from a neighboring home. It's never seen an African before jokes Masalo. Or it may have just been startled by her neon pink braids and matching tights. We are on our way to Alexandra, one of South Africa's infamous townships. Under apartheid, millions of black people were forcibly evicted from the exclusively white urban centers and moved to these overcrowded townships beyond the city limits... Apartheid may have officially ended 26 years ago, but its physical legacy is still etched across the city. We are there to meet a group of architects who calculate that in Alexandra 750 people live in the same number of square feet, now occupied by Marcello in an area that had been left abandoned by its owner for nearly 20 years. A crowd forms as she starts performing a historical reenactment of black dispossession in the middle of the narrow street. If we want our dignity back then we need our land. To explain to an inquisitive member of the audience. No one is going to give it to us, so we must take it ourselves. Her dream is a mass occupation of white owned property in South Africa. It's unfortunate then, that during my stay last year, Marcello discovered that her village is owned by a black South African who has properties across the country. That evening, shortly after an awkward phone call with her unwilling landlord. Marcello and her fellow occupier Yvan promised to leave the property and continue their project elsewhere. 16 months on and Marcello is still squatting in the property on Linksville Ridge."
This is a great parable of grievance politics
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Black lives in Minnesota - "Whenever I run around Goma on my motorbike, I'm subject to shouts and incredulous stares from other road users. It's not often that you see a woman riding a bike, particularly not a foreign one. Motorcycle taxi drivers overtake me giving me thumbs up signs and yelling courage ma soeur! Courage my sister. To this I tend to reply on est ensemble! We are together. Traffic policeman stationed at roundabouts wave as I go past and phone credit sellers on the pavement holler out greetings. But ever since Coronavirus became a global pandemic, which so far has hit Europe harder than Africa, I've been subject to considerably less friendly shouts. Pausing at a traffic clogged roundabouts, I hear the words, Corona Corona, echoing around me. Men on motorbikes wag fingers at me and shout things in Swahili, another language spoken in eastern Congo. Generally, I understand little of what they're saying, save two words: mizzougou, white person and Corona. At the bank, a cashier asked where I've come from. She looks vaguely reassured to hear that I'm based in Goma and haven't been back to England since Christmas. I don't much like being seen as the walking embodiment of a deadly disease. But locals in Goma are right to worry. So far there are just over 3000 registered cases of Coronavirus in the country. Most of them are in the distant capital Kinshasa."
White privilege! Presumably it is/was wrong for Westerners in western countries to worry about Chinese-looking people
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Indigenous Australians and the police - "Many international borders were closed in Europe during lockdown. But nevermind the regulation. Love, as they say, will find a way. And the destination for some lovers has been a historic hotel in an Alpine village on the Franco Swiss border...
The tiny village of La Cure has a population of just 1900. High in the *something* mountains above Lake Geneva, up a very windy road, it's a remote place nestled among rushing streams and dark forests. La Cure is also cut in half by the border between France and Switzerland. For many years this has made little difference. The two countries are both in the Schengen Area, their populations free to work and play together whenever they like. The border reduced to a mere road sign. No guards, no barriers. Until March that is, when countries across Europe hastily shut their borders amid the Coronavirus pandemic. Farewell to free movement. And for villagers like La Cure, farewell to friends, neighbors and even family members. But in La Cure, there's a curious anomaly to the border closures that no one seems quite sure how to resolve. The hotel Franco-Suisse sits right on the border. It has an entrance in France and an entrance in Switzerland. When I arrive, owner Alexander Peirong ushers me in with a wink. Be careful, he whispers, with a nod to the border guards just metres away. They will see you. In fact, throughout the three month border closure, the guards have been vigilantly patrolling right outside the hotel, but have stopped short of investigating what's going on inside. A tactic, as I soon discovered, with a long history. Once inside, we sit at the same table in the bar. Only I'm in Switzerland, and Alexander is in France. His family has run the hotel for four generations. The building itself has been here since 1863, when a canny villager saw an opportunity once the French and the Swiss finally agreed where the border would lie after years of squabbling. He bought a plot of land on the border says Alexander, and built a shop and a bar. A good move. La Cure at the time was on the main route from Paris to Milan. But there were more nefarious reasons. He was a smuggler says Alexander. His own family took over the business now also a hotel in 1921. And over the years that border position became increasingly useful. In the Second World War, Alexander's grandparents helped Jewish refugees and allied pilots to escape occupied France. They would sneak them through the hotel, often under the noses of German soldiers enjoying a beer, to neutral Switzerland. My grandmother told the Germans that if they crossed the hall, they would be invading Switzerland, says Alexander. They were very obedient. On the wall, there's a certificate signed by Britain's wartime commander Field Marshal Montgomery thanking the family for their service. There's a picture of the late French President Charles de Gaulle as well. In 1961, his team of French diplomats arrived at the hotel to negotiate the Evian Accords, which led to the independence of Algeria. The Algerian team, understandably cautious, arrived from the Swiss side. And over the last three months, true to family tradition, Alexander has been using his hotel’s position to advantage during Europe's lockdown as well. I got a call from a French woman, he says, with a gleam in his eye, she told me she was in love with a Swiss man, and the border guards had stopped her crossing into Switzerland. I said, don't worry, I've got a solution for you. The distraught young woman was ushered into the hotel from the French side. Meanwhile, Alexander welcomed her boyfriend on the Swiss side. I put them in room nine, he explains the border goes right through it. And I told the young man, you'll sleep all night in Switzerland, your girlfriend will sleep all night in France. But you will be in the same bed. They stayed the whole weekend. They loved it. This week, the borders reopen, and there will be no more need for illicit lovers meetings"
Albert Wilson, convicted in Lawrence rape case, could get a new trial - "Wilson, now 24, was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison on April 3, 2019, after a jury found him guilty of raping a then-17-year-old girl he met at a bar near the University of Kansas campus... Wilson met the girl at the Jayhawk Cafe, aka the Hawk, late on Sept. 10, 2016. The two started kissing in the club, went together to his nearby home for a few minutes, and then returned to the bar.The all-white and mostly female jury heard drastically different accounts of what happened in those few minutes from the young white girl and from Wilson, who is black. Many of Wilson’s supporters — who have launched a website and social media campaign using the hashtag #FreeAlbertWilson — believe the makeup of the jury was a dooming factor for the defendant... The psychologist also testified about how the girl had withdrawn from her friends and focused extensively on her schoolwork, yet according to Whalen’s motion, exculpatory evidence from her phone showed more than 100 photos of her at a school dance with friends within a week of the reported rape, plus thousands of messages that showed regular interactions with peers... The girl went to the hospital for a sexual assault examination the morning after the reported rape, but Wilson’s DNA was only found on her chest, where he had admitted to kissing her. Though she said he raped her, he said they never had sex. The rape kit found no pubic hair or other bodily secretions; yet, Whalen wrote, Lowry didn’t consult a DNA expert who could have testified that the evidence did not support the elements of rape.Wilson had originally been charged with two counts of rape, but the jury was hung on one of them"
When #MeToo/#BelieveWomen clashes with #BLM
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Lancashire Cotton Famine - "If you ask the question who built America in the 19th century? You could well say the answer is the City of London. America was the preferred destination for investments in, from Britain. The export of British capital in the 19th century, more went to America than anywhere else. It was a very good bet to help build Chicago. So banks and investment houses have an enormous amount invested in the American future, and largely that is the North. And so although we think about Lancashire and its cotton interests, the City of London has great interests as well and their fear, their very considerable fear is that if Britain were to come in on the side of the Confederacy, then the loans would be lost"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Absolute Zero - "Faraday starts playing with crystals of what was called at the time chlorine hydrate. This is a basically ice with chlorine dissolved inside it. And Faraday did some experiments where he put chlorine hydrate in a sealed glass tube and heated it up. Now the problem was, that's quite a dangerous thing to do because the chlorine is released and goes to very high pressure and the glass tubes frequently exploded. So after many of these experiments, Faraday found himself with glass all over his face and had to pick them out of his eyes, the shards. So there was no health and safety of course in those days, so he was allowed to do these experiments... He then wrote in his diary, after two or three days, his eyesight returned to nearly normal. So you can see it didn't seem to bother him at all. What was important was the, was the breakthroughs... what he wanted to do was to raise the pressure inside the glass tube by heating them up. And by putting chlorine at very high pressure, what he actually achieved was, he made a little oily liquid that appeared on the inside of the glass, and this oily liquid was in fact, liquid chlorine, he liquefied chlorine. The way this works, it's the same effect that you get when you go to the top of a mountain and you try and make tea and the tea is awful. And this is because on the top of the mountain the air pressure is lower. He was doing the reverse effect. So, the tea is so awful because you boil the water at a lower temperature when the pressure is reduced"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Zeno's Paradoxes - "‘If you have a heap of grain, let's say 10,000 grains, I take away one grain, it's still a heap, I take away another one, still a heap. A grain doesn't seem to make a difference. But if I take away so many that I am only left with one grain, there's no heap any longer. Is there an exact moment where I can say it's not a heap any longer? Probably not. Philosophers have called this kind of concept vagueness concepts and there's lots of work done because it's also in some sense vague where the vagueness starts, right?… There's two reasons why they are actually very fruitful for philosophers, right. It sounds ironic, because in some sense, was a paradox you had a dead end and you could say, well, okay, now should we not give up? But they are very fruitful for philosophy for two reasons, either, because they show there's something funny about some concepts, like was the bald man right? They show, we are using some concepts that can't be fully determined in the way other concepts can. And that tells us perhaps something either about our concepts, or perhaps even about the world, that some parts of the world are best described like this right? Then paradoxes can also be fruitful in one other way. Namely that in philosophy, a lot of what we do is actually done conceptually, right? So our theories and models and concepts, very often not just falsified or verified by the world outside, right? So how do we figure out whether our models are right or not? Well, paradoxes are very important because they tell us, okay, something has gone wrong here. You have to go back at your concept and look again, whether your assumptions are really as good and true as you thought they are'...
‘The barber who only shaves those [who don’t shave themselves]. I feel that it's just a paradox of language in the sense that this thing cannot exist, right. I suppose that that's the point. You're trying to show that there can't be a barber who only shaves those who don't shave themselves.’
‘The paradox here is the barber.’
‘Yeah, the paradox is resolved by saying this person does not exist. Your hypothesis that there is such a thing’"
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (previously briefly quoted) - "‘The amazing castle that he encounters, and something that *someone* said earlier about the brilliant contrast between outside and inside. This is vital to the romance. In the romance, there are only really two places to be. There's inside the court where you're celebrated and feasted and there is outside the court where you're tested and encounter enemies and obstacles. And the brilliant thing about Bertilak’s castle is that Gawain thinks he's inside, he thinks he can relax. And in fact, this is where he is tested’...
‘She says several very dangerous things. One is she says they're in complete privacy. And the problem is that in a chivalric honor world if something isn't known about it hasn't really happened. It doesn't have consequences.’…
‘This isn't just his Christianity versus his chivalry. These are two aspects of his chivalry. That he has to be loyal to the Lord and he has to be courteous to the lady. So even chivalry itself doesn't help him in this situation.’...
'He's been stitched up... Why shouldn't I use magic he thinks?... if I could use this belt, this magic belt not to be killed, then it would be a noble device. Seems fair enough, the Green Knight used magic'...
‘As far as Gawain is concerned, he's failed miserably. The interesting thing about the poem is that everyone else thinks he's done really well. That includes the Green Knight who pats him on the back and says, well done. Arthur's Court take a similar view.’...
‘Here's the thing though. What's the green Knights moral high ground? He has been operated the whole way through by the evil sorceress Morgan le Fey. What's the court’s moral high ground? They're the people who did nothing when this crisis arose, and then when Gawain rode away said, well, that was stupid, who let that happen? So the court is hypocritical and shallow, and the Green Knight doesn't have the moral high ground. And we don't know the poet's opinion. And we don't know God's opinion. And the poet could have told us either’...
'The round table is comfortable, it's cosseted, it's secure, and the Green Knight comes along from the outside to challenge that.'"
