Les Liens du Lundi
Apr. 15th, 2019 06:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentric- Palestine Post 24 report Netanyahu says killing 300 Gaza protestors was a 'wise' decision. Chilling soundbite, followed by some interesting-and-also-worrying dissection of Netanyahu's recent policy statements on re-occupying Gaza.
- Melissa Davey (Guardian AU), Anti-abortion activists lose bid to overturn clinic safe zones in two states. Straightforward report on the High Court case. Doesn't contain the delightfully thorough takedowns of free-speech arguments which were imported holus bolus from the US (via US activist networks funding the case), without sufficient adjustment for Australian context and law. I don't seem to have kept links to those, but I really ought ot have.
- ABC news Tasmania makes gender optional on birth certificates. I understand from Twitter this was part of the same package of laws that removed the requirement for legal gender transition before marriage, but I actually haven't been able to find news reports on that, only activist facebook/twitter posts.
- Annabel Crabb (ABC news), The Secret Life of Utes: "The Australian democratic system has taken a few kicks to the cods in the last decade. But one of its special superpowers has remained — preserved, miraculously, like a half-played game of chess found in the ruins of Hurricane Katrina. And that superpower is: the capacity to reduce any political question to an equation employing the metric of utes."
- Sam Langford (Junkee), Some enemies of Get Up have created a superhero to take down Get Up, and oh boy. Summary of the total WTF that is 'Captain GetUp'.
- SMH Rugby Australia set to sack Israel Folau for anti-gay posts. I understand they have done so, and the NRL has expressed that Folau is not welcome there either (more nebulously, one of my colleagues says several team owners overseas have expressed the same, too, but I have no evidence).
- BBC news Swiss court orders re-run of a 2016 referendum on the basis that incorrect information was disseminated and may have influenced the close-run result.
- NYT How Katie Bouman became the face of the black hole. TL,DR, there were about forty women involved in the 200 person team, and understandable efforts to elevate Dr Bouman out of range of the predicted 'Rosalind Franklin' effect have... left those other women out of the discussion.
- Maxine Beneba Clarke (The Saturday Paper), The Changemakers, A Hot Take in poetric form on the upcoming election
Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other
- Adam Harris (The Atlantic) The Death of An Adjunct:
Nearly 80 percent of faculty members were tenured or tenure-track in 1969. Now roughly three-quarters of faculty are nontenured. The jobs that are available—as an adjunct, or a visiting professor—rest on shaky foundations, as those who occupy them try to balance work and life, often without benefits. And Thea wobbled for years.
She was on the tenure track, and then she wasn’t. She had a promising job lead, and then it wasn’t so promising. She was on her way to publishing, and then that fizzled. Meanwhile, her hopes and setbacks were compounded by an underlying reality that many adjuncts face: a lack of health insurance. She was a black woman in academia, and she was flying against a current. Some professors soar; adjuncts flap and dive and flap again—until they can’t flap anymore.
- Gretchen McCullough (Wired) Coding Is For Everyone - As Long As You Speak English. What it says on the tin.
- Anke Richter (The Spinnoff NZ), I'm German and I live in Christchurch, let's talk about swastikas.
We didn’t expect such volatile clashes when we marched peacefully through our Garden City, pushing a stroller. But we also didn’t expect to be joined by a dozen National Front members. It was the first time I saw swastikas up close on real people. They’re illegal where I’m from.
I say “joined” not because these neo-Nazis supported our march – they were opposing it of course, and pathetically small in numbers – but because everyone was so civil with them. They were even handed the megaphone for the sake of balance. Only one left-winger who came from Switzerland tried to interfere, aghast. He almost pulled out his dreadlocks in despair over this act of courtesy. In Europe we were doing anything legally possible to prevent these groups from being vocal and gaining notoriety.
The next surprise was seeing Māori among the white supremacists. One guy had a swastika tattooed on his forehead, which historically didn’t make much sense – indigenous people ranked low in the race hierarchy of Nazi eugenics. I didn’t know back then that the Mongrel Mob Kingdom had “Sieg Heil” as their war cry (they dropped it after the mosque attack) and a “Heil’s Kitchen” cooking group, with more than 90,000 members on Facebook (still going). The gang used the martial greeting out of ignorance, not ideology. For 50 years. Did no-one tell them?
At the end of the 2004 Christchurch march, we all sang the national anthem together, left and right. I had to tackle this phenomenon with sarcasm: in Aotearoa, even neo-Nazis were apparently bicultural, and everyone gets along.
- Paola Balla (NITV, keynote address for the Stella Prize), Why should I suck my belly in?.
- Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (Meanjin Summer 2018), Ngajjurlangu - Me Too. A very moving essay, with some assumptions and policy directions that I know are hotly debated from within the indigenous community.
There are many who believe the disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal people today is caused solely by colonisation, racism and governments. This argument has sat at the forefront of political debate and brought about much needed change. Now it is drowning out the voices of those who are being victimised by our own forms of oppression.
If we want to address the current crisis affecting Aboriginal families and communities, we must look within. Why is it Aboriginal women are hospitalised at a rate 35 times higher than the national average? Why is that rate up to 80 times greater in the remotest communities, where culture and language are still strong?
We must be willing to analyse our culture critically to decide what should be kept and what should be discarded. Whitefellas can’t do that for us. We must address these issues from within our cultures, our societies and our families. And this means acknowledging the very real beliefs that exist in Aboriginal cultures contributing to the use of violence and the subjugation of women.
For context/background, a couple of additional links:- Kishor Napier-Rahman (Crikey), How Jacinta Price became a darling of the alt-right
- Indigenous news site Welcome To Country very definitely don't like Price, and list Ten Things you need to know about Jacinta Price
- Marcia Langton (The Saturday Paper), The Folly of Jacinta Price - the only piece I could find that, as well as articulating Price's personal political failings, digs into the problematic anthropology/history she relies on. That's the part I'm most interested in.
- Kishor Napier-Rahman (Crikey), How Jacinta Price became a darling of the alt-right
Only about 20 years ago, Wood said, there were 7.4 people of working age for every one over age 65. By 2015 that had fallen to 4.4.
Bad luck for younger Australians, she said, but that’s an inevitable consequence of an ageing population.
“But what I find less easy to accept is a series of policy decisions that have substantially increased the size of the transfers to older households – expanding their good fortune at the expense of subsequent generations.”
The age pension, for example, had increased as a share of average weekly earnings from 30 per cent to 37 per cent over the past two decades. Yet the unemployment payment, Newstart, had not increased.
Insofar as I am leaning on my parents for support in the next year or so, more than I have since undergrad, I'm a beneficiary of these 'transfers to older households', but... only by good fortune of heredity. I like to think I can find something both personally advantageous and Unethical Policy at a national level.
Items of interest and/or amusement:
- Marcy Cambpell (Electric Lit, 2016) Please read our agency's updated submission guidelines. Notable: "11. Assuming you have followed the above instructions correctly, our interns look forward to rejecting your work!"
That is, I think, enough for one post. I'll hold the rest for Thursday, or next Monday if I don't get a chance to post on Thursday.
Comments policy: I am *not* going to be tolerant of trolling, whataboutery, outright bigotry, white supremacist dogwhistles, or general stupidity. Particularly in the cases where I've linked to something that's *an intra-community debate within a marginalised group neither you nor I belong to*, think twice before offering your twenty cent pronouncement (but if you have links to other intra-community contributions, by all means hit me up). 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'.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-14 09:55 pm (UTC)