Linkspam #1

Top Links

The Supermanagerial Reich by Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaële Chappe at the LA Review of Books:

Supermanagers provide a very specific kind of governance needed in very specific kinds of regimes. The supermanager and their seemingly outsized share of national income is not merely a phenomenon of our own neoliberal era, from the Reagan/Thatcher “revolutions” to the Clinton/Blair era. It was a conspicuous feature of Nazi Germany (and although the data is thinner, it would seem 1920–’30s fascism in general). The most plausible explanation for this compensation draws not from any particularly radical theory of value, nor from moralistic parables about corruption, nor from fairy tales about superheroic capacities. The most plausible explanation is that supermanagers are paid for governance where the state has been redeployed elsewhere or, even, effectively dissolved.

Aftereffects: In the U.S., Evidence Says Doing More Time Typically Leads to More Crime After by David Roodman at the Open Philanthropy Project:

After tough review, the bulk of the evidence says that in the United States today, prison is making people more criminal. The short-term crime reduction from incarcerating more people gets canceled out in the long run. […] If the aftereffects of incarceration at least cancel out the during effects, and the before effects are practically zero, as the intro post essentially concludes, then at current margins, building and filling prisons is not making people safer. It may even be endangering the public. In that case, the cost-benefit case for decarceration is a no-brainer: all benefit and no cost.

I never signed up for this! Privacy implications of email tracking by Steven Englehardt at Freedom to Tinker:

What happens when you open an email and allow it to display embedded images and pixels? You may expect the sender to learn that you’ve read the email, and which device you used to read it. But in a new paper we find that privacy risks of email tracking extend far beyond senders knowing when emails are viewed. Opening an email can trigger requests to tens of third parties, and many of these requests contain your email address. This allows those third parties to track you across the web and connect your online activities to your email address, rather than just to a pseudonymous cookie.

Fundamentalism is Not Conservatism (Biblically or Constitutionally) by Fred Clark at Patheos:

Again, that dismissal of every other view means this is not a conservative-vs.-liberal argument, no matter how much fundies love to portray it as such. It’s a fundamentalist-vs.-non-fundamentalist argument meant to dismiss and belittle everything in the entire universe other than its own brand of reflexive fundamentalism. It dismisses every conservative tradition just as much as it does every liberal tradition. In a sense, its disdain for tradition and precedent may be more offensive to conservatives than to liberals.

I was going to add a link to “‘Terrible Purity’: Peter Singer, Harriet McBryde Johnson, and the Moral Significance of the Particular” but it is no longer open access.  Fie!

Other Favorites

Source Code Review for Thee… But Not For Me… by Paul Rosenzweig at Lawfare - source code review, government contracting, and national security

Outlawing War? It Actually Worked by Oona A Hathaway and Scott J Shapiro at the New York Times - how the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 ended territorial conquest

On the fetishization of money in Galt’s Gulch by Benjamin Ross Hoffman at Compass Rose - Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and money as ritual

Why Do Teen Magazines Idealize Relationships Between Underage Girls And Adult Men? by Erika W Smith at The Establishment - spoiler: it’s because our culture is fucked up

Surviving sexual assault in Japan, then victimized again by Megha Wadhwa and Ben Stubbings at the Japan Times - other cultures are fucked up too

The different media spheres of the right and the left — and how they’re throwing elections to the Republicans by Lisa Wade at Sociological Images - the right is locked into an unaccountable bubble of polarized and untrustworthy news

Facial Recognition for Porn Stars Is a Privacy Nightmare Waiting to Happen by Samantha Cole at Motherboard - how PornHub is risking the safety and privacy of porn actors

Vested interests in ‘openness’ by Mark Carrigan - on the ways major tech companies benefit from free/open content

Who gets to have a good death? by Tessa Love at The Establishment - “A good death is often a privileged one. The bad deaths — violent, patterned deaths — are disproportionately experienced by the marginalized.“

And, let’s end on a lighter note… Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil.