Les Liens du... Jeudi!

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes:

• Luke Beck (SMH, Oct 6), Right to be a bigot hidden inside the government's religious freedom bill
  
• Amanda Meade (Guardian AU), Ita Buttorse calls for more media diversity, but derides 'political correctness'. Trying to have her cake and deride it too, I see.
  
• SkyNews UK, Woman who regretted giving up baby wins her back from adoptive parents. Just... geez. A clusterfuck.
  
• James Purtill (TripleJ Hack), I'm not allowed to speak to my mum: Climate protesters slapped with absurd bail conditions.
  
• The Journal (Ireland), Toilet paper manufacturer says UK supplies 'will not withstand' a no-deal Brexit.
  
• Hannah Ryan (Buzzfeed AU), A Man Handed Over Sexually Explicit Photos To Prove He Was Gay. A Tribunal Said He Staged Them..
  

Good News:

• BBC News: South-west Atlantic Humpback whales on recovery path.
  
• Colm Gorey (Silicon Republic), Cork's unique LGBTQ history preserved forever in digital repository. OK so I laugh hollowly at 'preserved forever' and 'digital repository' being in the same sentence, but the basic development is good news.
  

Longer political and/or climate science pieces

• 7:30 Report transcript, The country town that's running out of water: on Murrurundi, in the Upper Hunter, which reached water day zero six months ago.
  

Longer cultural / historical / scientific / other

• Captain Awkward, Cool new friend spooked by 'romantic' feelings I don't actually have. Oh man. Good advice.
  
• Anne Ewbank (Atlas Obscura, 2018), Why an English museum has a collection of magic potatoes. I asked on twitter the question of 'why did the potatoes not turn to pocket vodka'. Answers included: 'because they WERE absorbing the rheumatism, obvs'; 'only the ones that didn't go mushy survived to be in the Pitt Rivers' and 'something to do with the size and breed of potato used'.
  
• Joey Murphy (Pittsburgh Public Source, April 2019), Women my age weren't called 'Autistic' growing up. We were awkward or rude.
  
• UQ press release, Sept 2018, Antidepressants may cause antibiotic resistance. Found this while on one of my meds-info binges, and wondering if this might explain why I got a mild infection after wisdom tooth removal, despite the standard dose of antibiotics. (It's floxetine they were looking at, not all antidepressants at large.) Research paper abstract here.
  
• Die, Workwear, Too Much of a good thing: on branded totes. As a tote bag afficionado I resemble this remark (but I rarely own 'branded' ones - it's conferences and redbubble for me).
  

  Affordability, identity, and imagination are a potent mix for impulse shopping. I made it to the Shopify checkout page before stopping myself. As a sanity check, I reached back to the nether regions of my closet, where I extracted a beige, cotton canvas tote smushed somewhere between my raincoats and umbrellas. I found four smaller totes scrunched up inside — totes within a tote — like nesting matryoshka dolls.
  Totes are taking up an expanding part of our lives. If you live in a major US city, there’s a good chance you have them hidden somewhere – in the back of your closet, under your sink, or in your car’s trunk. As counties and states are imposing fees or outright bans on plastic bags, many people are carrying lightweight totes as a way to save money. But totes have also become the new graphic t-shirt. Culturally, they’re everything: a useful item for daily carry, an inexpensive thing to manufacture, a cheap item to purchase, a marketing tool, and a symbol of identity. If you understand what’s happened to totes in the last 20 years, you can understand a lot about American consumer culture.

  
  
• Georgie Burgess (ABC Radio Hobart), Tasmanian magpies don't swoop, but no one knows why.
  
• Sam Killerman (It's Pronounced Metrosexual), One huge, prickly reason why anti-LGBTQ folk don't change their views. I'm not sure that I agree with Killerman that 'social justice' has to change as a result, but the pinpointing of the problem (an ethical one - if one does x because one believes y, to adjust one's belief to acknowledge y is wrong also means facing that you did x and it was also wrong. But it is ONLY wrong if you challege y. Not if you double down).
  
• Margaret Brady (Verily Mag), Diagnosis at 23: How Autism in girls looks different than boys.
  
• Michael Bérubé (Public Books), Autism Aesthetics:
  

  About 10 years ago, I began to get impatient with disability studies. The field was still relatively young, but it seemed devoted almost entirely to analyzing how disability was represented—in art, in culture, in politics, et cetera—especially in the case of physical disability. This, I thought, fell short of the field’s promise for literary studies. Where, I wondered, was the field’s equivalent of Epistemology of the Closet, the book in which Eve Sedgwick showed us how to “queer” texts, such that we will never read a narrative silence or lacuna the same way again? Put another way: I wanted a book that showed how an understanding of disability changes the way we read.
  Melanie Yergeau and Julia Miele Rodas have written that book I dreamed of a decade ago, but they’ve written it independently, as two books. Both writers start by challenging the premise that autism—as an intellectual concept and as a personal diagnosis—is antithetical to speech, rhetoric, and literature.

  
  I don't think I fully understood this article/review, but I wanted to flag it because it's something I think I would *like* to understand, but won't come to understanding of by re-reading it. One day I'll read something ELSE and think 'aha, that's what that guy was talking about' and either realise how right he was or where he was wrong.
  
• Rhian E. Jones (New Socialist), Remembering and rebuilding socialist culture: a talk given at The World Transformed:\
  

  A fundamental, material part of this infrastructure was something called the miners’ institute. These were buildings, sometimes known as working-men’s institutes, or workmen’s halls, which were constructed in industrial communities as a multipurpose social and cultural space. Again, these places were built on collectivist principles, with workers paying a proportion of their wage into a communal fund, usually something like a penny per week, to pay for the construction and running of the building – sometimes even carrying out the construction work themselves. This then entitled them to use it. These buildings were created in order to be part of the community, part of the social fabric: they could be used for community meetings or to hear political speakers, there was usually a bar or a space for dancing, a pool or snooker room, a cinema room, so it was a social, cultural and political space at once.
  Crucially, these buildings also usually contained a library and reading room, where members could freely access both books and newspapers. This point highlights the tradition of self-education that was also important in these communities: the idea of educating yourself, the autodidactic tradition which defined so much of this early working-class culture. This is something that’s been lost sight of in an age where education is now associated with class mobility, “aspiration”, and transcendence into the middle class. When people say ‘education’ they tend to mean ‘university education’ and to assume that this somehow excludes working-class people. But in early working-class communities, self-education and access to knowledge could be seen as an obvious part of the cultural fabric – you gained knowledge in order to understand the world and understand your own conditions, not necessarily to transcend your class individually but to improve yourself as part of that class, and to collectively improve your situation.

  
  I would really like to know if Australian unionism had this same tradition - you'd think it ought to, as the logical underpinnings of early Labor party politics and the like. But I've only *ever* heard about workers' self-education in the context of UK labor history. It's like talking about learning stuff would damage our hard-working larrikin image down under, or something.