Les Liens du... Jeudi

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Caster Semenya update: Swiss court granted a stay against the CAS ruling, IAAF is going to fight it. The stay currently only applies to Semenya, not to any other women with hypoandrogenism wishing to race in the 800ms while Semenya's full case is being heard.
  
• Australia facing A class action for crimes against humanity on Manus and Nauru. Why a class action? Because you can't prosecute for crimes against humanity (or anything else) without the AG's Department being involved, and the govt obviously isn't about to prosecute itself. There was a class action settled out of court back in 2017 for physical and mental injuries; the new action will focus on negligence leading to a range of wrongs including torture and crimes against humanity. As well as being Fair Enough, and probably a sobering test of just how far the Aus government will go in justifying inhumane acts, it's going to be an interesting example of the crossover between civil and criminal law.
  
• Speaking of, Australia returned 20 asylum seekers to Sri Lanka last week after a suspiciously fast 'processing' on Christmas Island, no details of which have been released.
  
• Related, Reports of 'alarming' self-harm crisis on Manus Island. In addition to the crimes against humanity, we're doing such a disservice to the people of Manus, whose health infrastructure cannot cope with this. And then if you read the comments to Behrouz Bouchani's tweets (... pretty much any of them) there are people smugly informing him we, in Australia, must treat our own first. UGH.
  
• All children in NT detention are Aboriginal. That is... not actually surprising, but, wow. That's fucked-up.
  
• Israel auctions off prefab classrooms donated by the EU to Palestinian schools. You can't make this stuff up.
  
• Disney CEO says it will be unlikely to film in Georgia if abortion ban goes ahead.
  
• Times of Israel reports that a new book, following up from Fire and Fury details Trumps anti-semitic comments after Cohen's plea deal.
  
• Amazon bans Australians from shopping on its non .au portals to pressure govt to rescind tax rule.
  
• Turkey puts novelists including Elif Shafak under investigation. Because fictional depictions of child abuse are the same as advocating child abuse, as much of the Internet will happily tell you.
  

Good News:

• A group of SA Indigenous women have made a pair of large-scale paintings, one as a gift to Adelaide's Muslim community and one to be sent to Christchurch, out of desire to 'put love out there' and grieve with the communities harmed by the Christchurch attacks.
  
• Gina Rushton (Buzzfeed News, AU) reports that the man who assaulted sex worker Nikki Cox has changed his plea to guilty. This is a real landmark case for QLD, first as precedent for 'rape against sex workers is still rape', and second, as an application of the recently-changed law that now qualifies forced oral sex as rape.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Gillian Brockell (WaPo), The Statue of Liberty was created to celebrate freed slaves, not immigrants. Even the verses on the base were added later.
  
• Maia Szalavitz (Pacific Standard), What I've finally concluded about 12-step programs.
  

  Adopting an addict identity is especially problematic for young people whose identities are not yet fully formed. Doing so may make what may well be a transient problem into a long-term one, by teaching them that addiction is inevitably chronic and relapsing. Since no one can predict which youth will mature out of addiction and which will not, teens should never be forced to attend 12-step groups—nor should they be made to label themselves as addicts.

  Another danger, which primarily affects both youth and women, is particularly acute at meetings where large numbers of people are court-mandated to attend. Since these programs quite rightly do not exclude anyone who has an addiction, some of those in attendance may be actively criminal or sexual predators.

  
  
• Carolyn Said, (SF Chronicle), Kiwibots win fans at UC Berkley, but if you read futher into the article, these 'bots' are remotely driven, on the cheap, by operators in South America.
  
• Alex Reilly (The Conversation), Cruel, and no deterrent: on Australian asylum policy. Seems to (gently) advocate the '2011 Malaysia arrangement', which... I'm not sure was all that great.
  
• Garnett et al (The Conversation), Adani's finch plan approved just weeks after being sent back to the drawing board. The authors are not impressed: apparently the final plan is very big on 'we will research', despite Adani having had eight years to conduct research into the black-throated finch and its habitats in the area of the mine.
  
• Kon Karapanagiotidis and Jane Favero (The Saturday Paper), Saving Asylum Seeker's Lives. I'm... not super impressed with this piece, tbh. It's 40% defending his NGO from critics of its involvement in the Medevac campaign (on grounds that Medevac is not a solution to indefinite detention and shouldn't be hailed as a win), 40% praising their other work, and only about 20% commenting on the current sitch and projecting forward.
  

  The announcement by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg that repealing the medivac legislation would be one of the first priorities of the government has shocked the refugee sector. The spikes in suicide attempts on Manus and Nauru in the aftermath of the election should have been a wake-up call to all of us – those in detention knew the re-election of the Morrison government would spell dark changes for refugee policy.
  Yet it still came as a shock that the government would – as a priority – use its power to deny sick refugees medical care. Let that sink in. Denying people medical care is a priority for our government.
  We all know that the men and women on Manus and Nauru need a solution, not a medical Band-Aid. That is, to be resettled safely now. A great place to start would be for the Coalition government to finally accept New Zealand’s offer

  
  
• Gary Rundle (Meanjin Winter 2018), Every time I see you falling. This is... a frustrating piece. It's a memoir, it's largely a nostalgic navel-gazing about 80s student politics, focused on the sandstone echelons. I love the parts that wholeheartedly embrace nostalgia - the description of sharehouses of the period, for example, or of photocopied theoretical texts handed around like contraband. Some of the commentary parts are really interesting, in that they gesture at things I am also grasping to get my head around: like how much left-ish discourse right now seems to be the 80s rehashed. The feminist sex wars are back on, representation is to be dissected endlessly, et caetera. But Rundle doesn't really get to places I couldn't have got to myself. On the other hand, I rather enjoyed his narrative account of 80s theoretical waves, swirling around in different cities, institutions and departments.
  

Comments policy: Everything I said in the caveats to this post applies. I teach critical thinking for a living, but I'm not *your* teacher, and this blog is not a classroom. That means I don't have to abide by the fallacy of 'there's no such thing as a bad contribution to discussion'.

Les Liens du... Jeudi

Part two, because apparently I've been binge-reading The Entire Internet.

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Going to Ibiza: Austria's right-wing governing party collapses amid scandal, involving a senior politician and video footage from Ibiza. This sends the Vengaboys to the top of the Austrian charts. Yes good.
  
• Apple is shutting down iTunes. Cue momentary panic, but it turns out that the Apple Music apps currently operating on iPhones will remain (along with the Podcasts app, and so on) and now be available on Macbooks. Unclear if they'll be available on Windows - I hope so???
  
• Paul Bongiorno (The Saturday Paper), Morrison and Albanese set out their plans. Post-election coverage.
  
• Behrouz Boochani (The Guardian), How many more people must die on Manus before Australia ends indefinite detention?
  
• Sydney's light rail bill exceeds 3 million, as the govt settles lawsuit out of court. TL,DR they were charged with misleading and deceptive conduct in relation to the tender.
  
• ABC Media Watch Aunty bows to Adani. The ABC was due to air a segment criticising Adani's plans, following from an op-ed in the SMH that argued the mine might actually never be built. A young journalist worked on the story for some time. The ABC pulled it after the company called them to complain. (Then a DIFFERENT arm of the ABC ran a story about the story that wasn't)
  
• Then the next day the AFP raided the ABC headquarters in Ultimo, seeking details (including source names) related to last year's Afghan Files story. Christopher Knauss (Guardian Aus) reports that Whistleblower and lawyer to whistleblowers Bernard Collarey describes Australia as an 'oppressive democracy'. Collarey has moved overseas to prepare his defence for an upcoming whistleblower case.
  
• NSW police have issued a court-ordered apology for dressing up as Palestinians in a security training exercise.
  
• ANU's databases of student, visitor and staff data have been breached. If you've been to ANU, for any reason at all, in the last 20 years, you're probably vulnerable.
  

Good News:

• Lost Lewis chessman found in a drawer

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Christiana M. Coleman (Lightspeed Magazine), Interview with Nnedi Okorafor, subsequent to reading the Binti trilogy.
  
• Violet Blue (Engadget), Sex, Lies and Surveillance: something's wrong with the war on sex trafficking. Mostly to do with FOSTA, but drops links to evidence that the big three religious anti-trafficking groups (already known to include far more than sex trafficking in their purview, including strip clubs, camgirls, non-trafficked sex work, and so on) have all falsified data and told straight up lies in their campaigns. I wish I'd known that back when I knew a whole bunch of people invested in the Not For Sale campaigns (instead I was just... creeped out by the lightly-sexualised-but-modestly-dressed selfies they were posting with 'Not for Sale' branded across their bodies).
  
• Don Apattu (The Nation, 2004), Interview with Avi Shlaim on a bunch of things, including America, Israel, and Palestine.
  
• Sally Davies (Aeon), Women's minds matter: on feminist theory and embodied cognition.
  

  But the mind-matter split, and its cognitive-computational descendants, are not logical necessities that follow from all attempts to understand the nature of thought. They’re really more like points of departure or grounding intuitions, and not everyone is going to share them. Elisabeth [of Bohemia], for one, told Descartes that she leant towards physical reductionism over a dualist approach: ‘I would find it easier to concede matter and extension to the soul than to concede that an immaterial thing could move and be moved by a body.’ Her vignette about housework also serves as a sly criticism. She knows first-hand that a body enervated by the duties and niceties that attend on being a woman affects one’s capacity to think. Likewise, writing two years later from a Belgian hot-spring town, Elisabeth’s experience of illness makes her doubt Descartes’s assertion that virtue is largely about having the mental fortitude to follow the cool dictates of reason. ‘I still can’t rid myself of the doubt that one can arrive at the beatitude you speak of without help from things that don’t absolutely depend on the will,’ she says. Surely doing the right thing depends on many things beyond our control, Elisabeth argues – freedom from too many burdens, the correct upbringing, good health.

  
  
• A.C. Shilton (NYT), You accomplished something great: now what? What Shilton has to say about the arrival fallacy holds pretty true for PhDs, but his framing - one of career success not bringing happiness is kind of hilarious, when no one except possibly your family supposes 'completes PhD' translates to career success anymore.$
  
• Dan Dixon (Meanjin Winter 2018), I haven't yet learned to speak as I should. A memoir account of his friendship with a woman he isn't dating but rather wishes he was, and also his relationship with his mother. And a little bit his father, but, despite the fact that his father's cancer is a plot hinge, his father isn't really a character here. Anyway. There's some good insight but the whole thing is just... ugh, ironic and then something at the end, where he reveals the woman he's written about was uncomfortable with the way he portrayed her. The *real* insight here is hers, that when men write about women the women are reduced to mere characters in the man's personal drama.
  
• Jennifer O'Mahony (BBC World), The future of French is African. Really interesting - parallel to the discussion about the future of English being 'global English', the language of second-language-speakers. Most African Francophones speak three or four languages, and their usages are unique, but some are drifting back into mainstream French.
  
• Dominque Matti (Scaling the Gate blog), Getting Mad at Good Men
  

  So I took my mom’s rhetorical question sincerely and found myself growing angry at the spectrum of it. Right and alone vs. suppressed and together? What kind of love expects you to swallow your feelings or it strays? No matter how many directions I veered from the original question, I wound up with the same translation:
  The love that women receive is conditional. It’s contingent on carefully curating the way we vocalize and advocate for our needs. The better the man, the more reckless the woman who asks for anything more.

  
  
• Ruby Bilger (Bitch magazine) How conspicuous consumption became the theme of Sweet Sixteen parties. I had somehow existed unaware of 'Sweet Sixteen' as anything other than a trite alliteration, and I rather wish I'd stayed ignorant.
  
• Kate Aronoff (Dissent magazine), The far right's environmental turn. In the wake of the EU elections, far right parties are shuffling toward re-branding as environmentally friendly. Borders are good for the environment, now.
  
• Max Fisher and Amanda Taub (NYT), On YouTube's digital playground, an open gate for pedophiles. It's been known for a while that if YouTube's recommendations algorithm is fucked. Turns out if someone's watching sexualised content - say, adults in bathing suits, or adults engaging in childish play for titilation - YouTube just starts up and recommending people videos of actual kids.
  
• Chongyi Feng (The Conversation), Thirty years on China is still trying to whitewash the Tiananmen crackdown from its history.
  
• Joshua Badge (Junkee), My long and painfully awkward quest to buy legal poppers. In banning over-the-counter sales of amyl nitrate, the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration) insist the drug, often used as a muscle relaxant in preparation for anal sex, is not banned, because it can be obtained on prescription. So Joshua Badge set out to get some, causing much embarrassment to doctors and pharmacists all over Melbourne.
  

  I book an appointment at one of the city’s LGBTIQ sexual health clinics (which already puts the prospect of legal poppers out of reach for many rural queers). A week later, though, I’m talking to a gay doctor who is familiar with queer cultural norms around the safe use of poppers.“Can you prescribe them?”
  “I don’t see why not.”
  Success! One small hitch: he doesn’t know what strength or quantity to order. In all likelihood, no one has prescribed poppers in decades. I need to talk to a chemist, so I start calling compound pharmacies, which are a mixture between a pharmacy and a laboratory, where they tailor your drugs especially for you.

  
  

Comments policy: Everything I said in the caveats to this post applies. I teach critical thinking for a living, but I'm not *your* teacher, and this blog is not a classroom. That means I don't have to abide by the fallacy of 'there's no such thing as a bad contribution to discussion'.