This week, I have been mostly reading:

• HIA should have backed Labor’s tax reforms — Leith van Onselen at MacroBusiness shows what negative gearing and capital gains tax exemptions haven't done for new housing construction, with this particularly explicit bit of chart porn:
  
• 2008 All Over Again — Chris Hedges interviews Michael Hudson, Truthdig: If there is anyone who is responsible for the Brexit it is Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama […] They destroyed Libya. They turned over Libyan weapons to ISIS, Al Quaeda and Al Nusra. It was their war in Syria, where many of these weapons ended up, that created the massive exodus of refugees intoEurope. This exodus exacerbated nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Clinton and Obama are also responsible for a huge exodus of Ukrainians. This is all a response to American war policy the Middle East and Ukraine. In central Europe, with the expansion of NATO, Washington is meanwhile demanding that governments spend billions on weapons rather than on recovering the economy.
• What next after Brexit? — Steve Keen appears to be saying that Brexit will be nowhere near as devastating as Thatcherism. Well, yes, obviously.
  
• Syd/Melb house price-to-income ratio hits record high — Leith van Onselen at MacroBusiness. Important to note these are median household, not individual, incomes: In March 2016 the ratio of house prices to annual household income in Sydney was 9.8 and for units it was 7.2. Both property types are currently recording a record-high ratio. 12 months ago these ratios were recorded at 8.9 for houses and 6.8 for units. Note that the data goes as far back as September 2001 and at that time the ratios were recorded at: 6.0 for houses and 5.7 for units.
• Brexit is a 'heartbreaking wake-up call' – and other meaningless political clichés used this week — Robert Fisk, the Independent: Corbyn […] moved inexorably into this horrible language when he talked, in his first reaction to the Brexit vote, about immigrants’ “skill sets”. […] It was almost a relief to hear poor old Jeremy banging on about the need for the poor to get “a fair crack of the whip”. But why didn’t he just say “equal chance” or, if he wanted to be inventive, use that wonderful Australian expression “a fair suck of the sauce bottle”? Anything rather than whips.
• Lessons From the Past: The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) revisited — Phil Zimbardo plugs the new film in Psychology Today: In 2004, people around the world witnessed online photos of horrific actions of American Military Police guards in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison against prisoners they should have been caring for. It was portrayed as the work of a “few bad apples” according to military brass and Bush administration spokesmen. I publicly challenged this traditional focus on individual dispositions by portraying American servicemen as good apples that were forced to operate in a Bad Barrel (the Situation) created by Bad Barrel Makers (the System). I became an expert witness in the defense of the Staff Sergeant in charge of the night shift, where all the abuses took place. In that capacity I had personal access to the defendant, to all 1000 photos, many videos, to all dozen military investigations, and more. It was sufficient to validate my view of that prison as a replica of the Stanford prison experiment—on steroids, and my defendant, Chip Frederick, as a really Good Apple corrupted by being forced to function 12-hours every night for many months in the worse barrel imaginable.
• Control: beyond left and right — Chris Dillow: Consider some popular political positions. There’s support for immigration controls and fiscal austerity on the one hand but also for nationalization and even price controls on the other: one Yougov poll found (pdf) that 45% of people favour rent controls and 35% even controls on food prices. These positions make no sense if you think in terms of left and right. But they become perfectly consistent once you see that people want things to be controlled: the popularity of austerity, I suspect, arises from the view that the public finances are “out of control.” This demand for control is, if not the sigh of the oppressed, then the sigh of the insecure. When faced with uncertainty – not just about their economic lives but about cultural change too – people want a sense of control. […] Herein, however, lies a massive opportunity for the left. We should be offering solutions to uncertainty – a stronger better social safety net and a job guarantee.
• (Marketing) Virtual Reality in Education: A History — Audrey Watters: According to the marketing hype – offered with very little recognition of any media research or media history – VR will be a new and unique “empathy machine.” A century after Thomas Edison’s famous assertion that “books will soon be obsolete in schools” thanks to the wonders of film, watching movies in class is re-presented as progressive pedagogy, as technological innovation.
• The myth of public opinion — Clive Hamilton in the Conversation: When a party leader declares victory by saying “Australians have spoken”, he or she is doing a number of things. Firstly, he is making a claim to personify the collective psyche, the spirit of the nation that rises above all social divisions to express the pure will of the people. It is what gives a great leader a kind of mandate of heaven, and can be a very dangerous thing. Second, he is asserting his right to govern unopposed against the claims of the losers who may see themselves as a powerful voice that must be heard. The claim that “Australians have spoken” is a means of putting the losers in their place even if they secured 49 per cent of the vote.
• Theresa May, Your New Islamophobic Prime Minister? — Craig Murray: Britain has draconian anti-terrorism laws that would make a dictatorship blush. It is an offence to “glorify” terrorism. It is specifically “terrorism” for me to write, here and now, that Nelson Mandela was justified in supporting the bombing campaign that got him arrested. I just knowingly committed “glorifying terrorism” under British law. It is specifically “terrorism” to deface the property in the UK of a foreign state with a political motive. If I spray “Gay Pride” on the Saudi embassy, that is terrorism. We also have secret courts, where “terrorists” can be convicted without ever seeing the “intelligence-based” evidence against them. We have convicted young idiots for discussing terror fantasies online. We have convicted a wife who “must have known” what her husband was doing (at least that one was overturned on appeal).