Les Liens du... Jeudi!

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes: -

• Kevin Carrico (Foreign Policy), Universities are turning a blind eye to Chinese bullies:
  

  The next hour of harassment and intimidation laid bare the fundamental (and fundamentally flawed) logics of contemporary Chinese authoritarian nationalism on the global stage.
  First, volume is key. “Hong Kong is part of China, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Hong Kong has always been a part of China and always will be part of China.” Such declarations of absolute ownership, shouted in close proximity, overlook the realities of history, wherein it was precisely Hong Kong’s separation from China that allowed it to develop into the dynamic city that it is today. An inverse relationship is apparent between the soundness of an argument and the volume at which it is delivered, aiming not so much at winning hearts and minds as overpowering eardrums.
  Second, victimization is your best friend. Despite being the aggressors in this case, invading protesters’ personal space and menacingly shouting people down, the patriots perpetually framed themselves as victims.

  
  
• Ben Matthews (The Conversation), George Pell has lost his appeal: what did the court decide and what happens now. Content note: the usual for the Pell case.
  
• Melissa Davey (The Guardian), Vatican invoke's Pell's 'Right to appeal'.
  
• Juliette Garside (The Guardian), Malta car bomb kills Panama papers journalist. "Her most recent revelations pointed the finger at Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan."

Good News:

• Birth certificate law reform is underway (slowly, and with much public debate) in Victoria.
  

Useful information:

• The Woks of Life, How to keep food from sticking to the wok or pan.

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Colin Jones (The Japan Times), Seven lessons from a Japanese morality textbook. If nothing else, this explained for me why university students were so keen to tell me Japan has four seasons, in tones of great reverence, as if this is exceptional. They get taught about seasons alongside flags, as if they're unique to Japan.
  
• Rick Morton (The Saturday Paper), Murdoch media fuels far right recruitment. I saw some very mixed commentary on this piece, which reports on a 'world first' study which tracked far right facebook groups and quantified their media sources and relationships between media links and meme creation. Dong Won, in particular, was scathing about white people making a 'world first' realisation of something that non-white people have been saying for ages. However, the research team Morton interviews are not exclusively white, and the study *is* the first to quantify media sources used by far right facebook groups. Have we not learned that *measuring* things cultural critics observe is, yanno, actually useful?
  
• Alison Flood (The Guardian), Lost Proust stories of homosexual love to be published. For 'lost' read 'known to scholarship for at least fifty years'.
  
• Sarah Cox (The Narwhal), Canada's forgotten rainforest. What it says on the tin.
  
• Andy Cox (The Saturday Paper), The legacy of Graham Freudenberg:
  

  Freudenberg was conscious of the need for clarity, and the 1965 speech made Labor’s position unequivocal. Importantly, this stance wasn’t forged through the personal retribution or ideological attacks we see valorised in parliament today. It was based in fact, not born of ego or vendetta.
  “We oppose the government’s decision to send 800 men to fight in Vietnam. We oppose it firmly and completely.” Again, the thread of the later Gallipoli speech is evident; Freudenberg turns Calwell towards the personal impact of war. “We do not believe,” he observes, “[war] will promote the welfare of the people of Vietnam. On the contrary, we believe it will prolong and deepen [their] suffering.” Tragically prescient.
  Sadly, the suffering was real also for the almost 60,000 Australians who went on to serve in Vietnam, the 521 who died, the 3000 wounded and the generations affected since. As the son of a Vietnam War veteran, I hear Freudenberg’s warning – decades on – and I thank him, personally, for his bravery in standing against the tide. It’s why I write. It’s why I believe his legacy is so important.

  
  
• Michael W Twitty (Afroculinaria), Dear disgruntled white plantation visitors: sit down.
  
• Jane Caro (The Saturday Paper), The bullying of school leadership by parents.
  
• Catherine Ford (The Guardian), Life as a professional eavedropper. I used to do this job (I think for the rival company to Ford's employer), and yes, this.
  
• Ellie Violent Bramley (The Guardian), Desire paths: the illicit trails that defy urban planners:
  

  So goes the logic of “desire paths” – described by Robert Macfarlane as “paths & tracks made over time by the wishes & feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning”; he calls them “free-will ways”. The New Yorker offers other names: “cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails)”. JM Barrie described them as “Paths that have Made Themselves”.

  
  The article talks about some institutions which delayed installing footpaths, waiting for people to form desire paths, which were then paved in. This sounds great, but left me wondering about wheelchair users on those sites: how did they get around until the desire paths were paved (after, at least, they would have access to the same most popular routes as pedestrians).
  
• Lucy Shelley (Electric Lit), Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror unspools the chaos of the internet. I wasn't impressed with the extract from Trick Mirror I read in The Guardian, but this almost convinced me.
  
• Megan Nolan (The Guardian), The sense that I was clever was knocked out of me: confessions of a university dropout. A very good piece, although I have mixed feelings about academic twitter's response to it.
  
• Andrew Norton (The Conversation), If you have a low ATAR you could earn more doing a VET course than a uni degree: if you're a man. Acronyms for furriners: ATAR is the national ranking for university entrance; VET stands for Vocational Education and Training.
  
• Lauren Tanabe (The Lily), I was more depressed than ever during pregnancy: no one believed me.
  
• Rawah Arja (SBS Voices), Being single, Arab, and female: "The intimate details of my personal life are now displayed for all guests, which is about the same time my anxiety searches for different escape exits. ‘But why?’ they ask over and over again, and more than anything I want to say, Because the sons you raise are not husband or father material, but I stay quiet and smile through my teeth, praying that by some miracle a hole will swallow me."