Les Liens du ... Jeudi?

[highlyeccentric]

Supplement to monday links, occurs irregularly.

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes: some of which are now cold takes, because moving ate my brain

• Paul Bongiorno (The Saturday Paper), The politics of hate - good job contextualising Australian politician's responses to Christchurch. Take-away: ' Revulsion at racism and bigotry only goes so far when self-interest is involved.'
  
• Statement from the Australian Muslim community on Christchurch and Islamophobia. Does a solid job connecting pervasive racist and discriminatory sentiments with major violence.
  

  We remember when Liberal Party Senators openly congratulated Fraser Anning after his explicit reference to a ‘final solution’ when discussing Muslim immigration.
  We remember when Peter Dutton suggested that sections of our community should never have been allowed into this country in the first place.
  We remember when elected Liberal Party representatives campaigned to remove Section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act under the guise of protecting ‘free speech.’
  We remember when Liberal Party Senators joined One Nation to vote in favour of the white nationalist slogan ‘It’s OK to be white.’
  This climate of hostility breeds discrimination, harassment and ultimately violence.
  A truly safe society is one where no community should fear that they will be made scapegoats or demonised for the sake of cheap political point-scoring.

  
  It shouldn't need specifying, but the statement is signed by a number of Australia's high profile white/convert Muslims. They have no trouble seeing Islamophobia as a species of or at least coterminus with racism. Comments along the lines of 'but what about WHITE muslims / islam is not a race' are not welcome in my journal.
  
• Too Poor to Play (Guardian UK): in sequel to the 'poor doors' development, children in affordable housing blocked from the nice shared playgrounds in new London developments.

Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Dougless Quenqua (The Atlantic), The secret Jehovah's Witness database of child molesters. Just in case you thought the Catholic church was uniquely despicable here.
  
• Cynthia Green (History Workshop UK), Yellow Vests in Context: Haussman, urban transformation, and street violence. Do you like your social movements contextualised in relation to the history of urban planning? If so, this is for you!
  
• Michael J Seidlinger interviews Halle Butler (Electric Lit) about her book 'The New Me' and the relationship between self and the 9-5 job
  
• Anne Ewbank (Atlas Obscura) Before food trucks, Americans ate 'Night Lunch' from horse-drawn wagons.

Short subsection on Jordan Peterson: twitter sent me down a thread of 'best analyses of What's Terrible About Peterson's Work (in response to someone asking for resources to redirect students with):

• Kate Mann (TLS): Reconsider the Lobster.(scathing review of 12 Rules).
  
• Pankaj Mishra (NYR Daily): Jordan Peterson and Fascist Mysticism. This is really fascinating: links Peterson's appalling misuse of mythology to a broader trend in reactionary thinking.
  

  In all respects, Peterson’s ancient wisdom is unmistakably modern. The “tradition” he promotes stretches no further back than the late nineteenth century, when there first emerged a sinister correlation between intellectual exhortations to toughen up and strongmen politics. This was a period during which intellectual quacks flourished by hawking creeds of redemption and purification while political and economic crises deepened and faith in democracy and capitalism faltered. Many artists and thinkers —ranging from the German philosopher Ludwig Klages, member of the hugely influential Munich Cosmic Circle, to the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich and Indian activist Aurobindo Ghosh—assembled Peterson-style collages of part-occultist, part-psychological, and part-biological notions. These neo-romantics were responding, in the same way as Peterson, to an urgent need, springing from a traumatic experience of social and economic modernity, to believe—in whatever reassures and comforts.

  This new object of belief tended to be exotically and esoterically pre-modern. The East, and India in particular, turned into a screen on which needy Westerners projected their fantasies; Jung, among many others, went on tediously about the Indian’s timeless—and feminine—self. In 1910, Romain Rolland summed up the widespread mood in which progress under liberal auspices appeared a sham, and many people appeared eager to replace the Enlightenment ideal of individual reason by such transcendental coordinates as “archetypes.” “The gate of dreams had reopened,” Rolland wrote, and “in the train of religion came little puffs of theosophy, mysticism, esoteric faith, occultism to visit the chambers of the Western mind.”

  
  
• Emily Pothast Jordan Peterson is a Very Poor Researcher Whose Own Sources Contradict His Claims: specific look at Peterson's misuse of the Babylonian Enuma Elish, often straight up ignoring the editors of the editions he cites.

Of Academic Interest

• Mounawar Abouchi (in Medieval Feminist Forum) has put out a parallel text and translation of Yde et Olive, the most difficult-to-find of the medieval French crossdressing romances. Open access PDF. Everyone rejoice!