Les Liens du ... Jeudi?

[highlyeccentric]

Supplement to monday links, occurs irregularly.

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:

• NITV report on One Nation's plan to DNA test claimants for Indigenous-specific support (hot tip: it's not only racist bullshit, it's impractical racist bullshit)
  
• Kidspot.com.au reports that Participation requirements for the new 'Parents Next' support scheme are bizarre, to the point of requiring working mothers to attend playgroup without their school age children
  
• Elad Nehorai has a good tweet thread on anti-semitism as a mythology, one that people use to make sense of the world - in this case, as a simple explanation for the complex problem of Israel's relationship with Palestine and the US's with Israel.
  

  The story can be applied to a nation of Jews as much as Jews as a collective. Just as some rich Jews also fill that role.
  
  When you refuse to see how discussions about Israel controlling the world or America’s government are connected to the myth, you are erasing anti-Semitism.

  — Elad Nehorai (@PopChassid) March 7, 2019

  
  
  

Special list of George Pell related Links is back again, thanks to the sentencing hearing

• Arthur Moses, SC (The Saturday Paper), Suppression Orders and Open Justice
  

  The Law Council of Australia is calling for national uniformity of suppression orders and an examination of whether these laws need to be reviewed in the digital era, to ensure these mechanisms remain fit for purpose. We have asked the attorney-general, Christian Porter, to refer the matter to the Australian Law Reform Commission for inquiry.
  Harmonisation must be a key consideration. This was put on the table 10 years ago by the standing committee of attorneys-general and nothing has occurred to bring it to fruition. The time to act is now. One tenet of the rule of law is that legislation must be knowable and able to be obeyed. Current laws create confusion and uncertainty for journalists and the public.

  
  
• Guy Rundle (Meanjin blog), A hell in heaven's despite, which I link to primarily because it gets the dubious honour of being the worst take I've read from someone who isn't actually supporting Pell. The article is strung around the optics - which apparently struck Rundle - of the contrast between the groomed professional journos outside the court, and their immediate neighbours, members of a survivor's group. The way Rundle talks about 'them', the CLAMP members, as a rowdy, uncouthly colourful group of broken people s just... gross.
  
• John Passant (New Matilda), Intervention, anyone? If the Catholic Church were an Aboriginal community: this take is, well, entirely justified, but at the same time... there's suddenly a lot of white commentators renewing outrage about the Intervention (which they keep talking about as a thing of the past, which afaik it is not, although the army presence is reduced or gone), because now it's good for point-scoring.
  
• Patrick Parkinson (ABC Religion and Ethics), The Cardinal and Mr Anonymous. This piece, from a leading law prof, devout Catholic and acquaintance of Pell, is masterly.
  

  However, we lawyers can become too convinced by our own sophistry about proof. The jurors seem to have been given a choice between a detailed account maintained through intense cross-examination, and a brief denial on videotape. If we could hear from the anonymous complainant, we too might find ourselves persuaded as the jury was. We might come to admire, respect and empathise with him, acknowledging his enormous courage and determination.

  We won't hear his voice because he owes no obligation to the public. He has no responsibility to persuade the powerful people who have leapt to Cardinal Pell's defence. He deserves his privacy and anonymity now.

  Why do I speak up for him? Because the Christian faith requires me to treat everyone as equal in God's eyes, whether they are princes of the Church or anonymously ordinary. Because I know how hard it is for victims of sexual crimes to get through the multiple stages of the criminal trial process. Because I know the different ways in which, through intensive and lengthy cross-examination, defence counsel seeks to undermine the victim's credibility. Because in nearly twenty-five years of engagement with the issue of child sexual abuse in church communities, I know how often men like this complainant have not been listened to. And because I recall how often I have heard from senior Catholic leaders that the scurrilous accusations being made by victims are an attack on the Church; or that complainants are just making up claims in order to get compensation.

Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Mukahang Limbu (Poetry Society), Review of 'The House of Thirst', a special issue of Poetry In Translation, which I think I may need to read.
  
• David Schraub, How to avoid the trap of House antisemitism. Link via muccamukk, last week. Note this piece was written *before* the resolution that eventually passed was modified to condemn 'hate of all kinds'. I wonder if Schraub considers that to be a step in the right direction? Here he makes a distinction in *kind* rather than *degree* between the anti-semitism in Omar's remarks and the 'Soros-style antisemitic conspiracy theories' of the GOP, and argues that the former should not be singled out for House resolutions unless the latter is also condemned. That perplexed me a little, because as I understood it the problem with Omar's comments (especially the original comments about AIPAC and 'the benjamins' - which I had to research to realise was a reference to Benjamin Franklin's figure on US dollars, not to a common Jewish name) was precisely that they are either an accidental recycling of tropes related to money, global networks, etc, or an active dog-whistle to said 'soros-style antisemitic conspiracy theories'.
  
• I also read a handful of good - if wildly conflicting - takes on the Omar controversy via Haaretz.com, but it looks like they were only temporarily out from paywall, because I can't access them again now.
  
• Sarah Hall (Meanjin summer 2018), The Unsung Hero of the Dish. It's nigh impossible to say what this piece is *about* but the writing is beautiful. Sometimes it is easier to follow a recipe for mushroom noodle soup than to put on a brave face. But only once have I made the soup.
  
• Amy Littlefield (Rewire News), Not dead enough: public hospitals deny life-saving abortion care to people in need. Deals with US jurisdictions.
  
• Damon Young (Meanjin Summer 2018), Why are swords still a thing?. Hits on some good points, in other parts is hilariously thin (at least, if you've done any reading on medievalisms and nostalgia and/or the european history of combat weaponry).
  
• Briohnny Doyle and Mandy Ord (Meanjin Summer 2018), Time Machine
  

  I’s [sic] 1991 and my parents unveil a small grey box with a small dark screen. They have bought a special table for it. They plug it in and stand back. It is the future, they say. A time machine. The screen emanates light. The box is quiet, smells of static. They place me in front of it. I am to be captain, it’s understood. I am eight and suddenly here is a thing I will always know more about than my parents. What a development! I click around. My parents gasp as I squiggle something in paint. A marvel like a moon landing. In its low light, my parents are projected back to their own childhoods; an old anticipation. Vannevar Bush in 1945: ‘The world has arrived at an age of cheap, complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.’ They watch me and wait. Dad smokes, chews his nails.

  Each day after school I spend an hour in front of an educational game designed to teach geography and history. Mum hovers, excited, but it’s boring. I like the TV more—a pool you fall into, accepting each wave as it comes. The time machine knows that in the future children will not be bored like this, and in the future I will be an adult who feels nostalgic for this boredom. When I am a child I tell mum I’m bored and she says go run around the block. I never take this suggestion but somehow I fill the time and years pass. We put a faded sheet over the time machine so the dust won’t damage its gears.

  
  
• Tom Faber (The Guardian), Mashrou' Leila: The Lebanese Indie Band Championining LGBT rights. Really interesting profile, and has resulted in a pleasant Spotify expedition or two on my part.
  
• Hasslam, McGrath and Wheeler (The Conversation AU), Chaning morals: We're more compassionate than 100 years ago, but more judgemental too
  

Items of humorous interest:

• If you are not already aware of the instagram-based comic Strange Planet, please be informed. It is an adorable exercise in defamiliarisation.

Comments

[greghousesgf]

that parents' program sounds batshit nuts.

[highlyeccentric]

WELCOME TO AUSTRALIA. Spectacular lack of thinking-through.