Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Tweet thread, in response to this news:
  

  Is anyone else uncomfortable with cutting down over 100 mature oaks, which are hundreds of years old, to rebuild #NotreDame?
  There must be alternatives for replacing the timber, while replacing the ecosystem provided by centuries-old trees takes centuries. https://t.co/fTowjVDozY

  — Jack Ashby (@JackDAshby) April 26, 2019

  
  
  
• This thread, by NK Jemisin, to which I can only say 'WORD'. She later qualified her comments about 'hopepunk' but I thought she was right on the mark:
  

  Minor drug-fueled rant incoming.
  
  But can we stop with the wholesale dismissal of dystopian fiction? I'm seeing this most often, quite frankly, from reviewers & fans of significant privilege -- white, male, whatever -- who yearn for a return to fiction as uplifting escapism.

  — N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) April 26, 2019

  
  
  
• ABC defence news: Culture clashes dividing french and Australian staff working on 'attack class' submarine development. Culture clashes such as 'lunch breaks' (the French believe in them) and 'meeting start times' (the French do not believe in them).
  
• ISU news, Skaters pushing the limits with new jump combinations and quads.
  
• Eponymous Fliponymous reports that a new Norton reader on Psychology of Women and Gender' is bluntly defining bisexual as 'attraction to men and women' (while giving several other more inclusive definitions for identities such as pansexual), and also, incidentally, drawing its table of applicable sexual and gender identities from freaking tumblr. This is an absolute fucking disgrace, but here we are.
  
• La Trobe University press release, Study looks at bisexual mental health. Largest ever (internationally largest, Australian only sample group, I believe) study of bisexual wellbeing finds three key factors in low bisexual mental health: being in heterosexual relationships; believing their sexuality to be bad or wrong; and partners with low support or understanding. I think I need to read the actual paper, because the last point is interesting and likely to get glossed over (I can see the lesbian community, for example, receiving this as 'well we TOLD you dating men is what gives bi women such bad health out comes'. I'm hoping the actual study explicitly looks at unsupportive same-sex partners).

Good News:

• Bi+ Australia is now a service that exists. Founded by the PhD researcher who lead the study above.

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Patrick Thomsen (e-tangata.co.nz), Israel Folau's demise is also partially ours.
  

  As a marginalised ethnic group living in settler colonies, a lot of us, as visibly brown bodies (like Folau), are dispensable to the needs of the dominant groups. As a collective, our community suffers and navigates difficult issues related to race and class and their merging together, that contribute to our lowly positioning in many fields. We all work together to try and overcome and resist our marginality.

  Within this collective, however, there exists diverse views and stances — on interpretations of the Bible, religious beliefs, the melding of indigenous ways and modern ways — and differing prescriptions of how we should live our lives.

  What holds us together, though, is our ability to respect the vā, the relational space that places all Pacific people in a myriad of vital relationships with each other. Folau’s inability to respect this vā, and extend and maintain the relationship between him, his church, and his sport with the Pacific LGBTIQA+ community, to me amounts to a rejection of a Pacific itulagi.

  
  
• Caroline Fonda (Women's Agenda), reporting on speech by Prof Marilyn Waring CNZM, Women undertake 72% of unpaid work in Australia and the consequences are egregious.
  
• Pamela Clark (as told to abc.net.au news), How the Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book Changed the Shape of Birthdays for Kids:
  

  I think the success behind this book is the dagginess of the cakes.

  They look rough and ready, they were rough and ready, and they're not scary at all, and I think most people, even if they've never made a cake before, will give those cakes a go.

  Kids are daggy, let's face it, and they like something that's approachable.

  They want to wolf those lollies down as fast as they can.

  The kids don't care about the details of the cake, how messy it might look, the fact that the icing doesn't go right down to the board. They don't care.

  They realise that this cake has been made with love for them.

  
  
• Tim Jones (Australian Independent Media Network), The Not-So-Happy Clapper: an evisceration of Scott Morrison's public religious identity in relation to his actual policy and practice.
  
• Tanya Gold (Unherd.com), How Jane Austen Makes Fools of Her Fans. Rather shallow, definitely clickbait, I couldn't endorse it as a serious analysis. But. As someone who's always found Austen drearily middle-class, marriage-focused and just... alienating, I took a certain pleasure in reading it anyway.
  
• Timothy Ogden (Washington Post), More states a forcing students to study personal finance. It won't work. TL;DR, financial literacy courses have zero measurable impact on debt or financial stress levels, probably because they don't address the actual problems causing those, but also because giving people information doesn't reliably change behaviour.
  
• This week's Dear Prudence is a cracker. The response to the mother of a gay pre-teen who's got her knickers in a knot really... really Got Me In The Feels, shall we say:
  

  My sense in your letter is that you feel a little bemused: We’re not homophobic, we have a couple of gay friends, we’ve mentioned a handful of times that “love is love,” maybe we were hoping a little bit that she’d end up being straight just because that’s a bit more convenient, but it’s fine that she’s gay, so why does she seem so sensitive about it? Those are all wonderful things, but it’s still possible for a kid to get a pretty clear message about how much homophobia still exists, such that “love is love” doesn’t immediately quell her anxiety. Hearing “I still love you” in response to “This is the truth about me” isn’t always useful—sometimes a kid hears that and thinks, “OK, they don’t technically love me less as a result of me being gay, but it’s not exactly welcome and exciting news. If I ever talk about someone I like, they might get a little stilted and awkward, and then I’ll feel guilty for making things more difficult, and we’ll just grow apart from there.”

  
  
• New York Times report: Sri Lanka was warned of possible attacks. Why didn't it stop them? Because the president and the PM aren't speaking to each other, and the security forces are taking sides.

Notable Dreamwidth Content, much of it obtained via silveradept:

• elf has a currently-two-part series on Reasons Pillowfort is doomed. TL;DR, there's no money plan, no sense of what features are likely vs wishlist, and the content policies are still a hot mess.
  
• slashmarks packs a punch on reforming schools.

Comments policy: 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'.

Comments

[monksandbones]

The Australian Women's Weekly birthday cake book! As I may or may not have told you at some point, my mom got her hands on a copy of it early in my life, possibly via our family friends the Ms (an Australian-Canadian couple). Many of my childhood birthday cakes started with me browsing it for inspiration, just like Pamela Clark suggests here! I'm pretty sure my parents had to fall on the sword of making the dump truck/tip truck cake for one of us at some point! NOSTALGIA EXPLOSION!

[highlyeccentric]

My mum skillfully evaded the tip truck, but the second edition had a castle in it, which Joel demanded (under the erroneous belief he would get new lego men to decorate it). It suffered from serious subsidence mid-party.

[shy_magpie]

it was especially nice to see that thread in defense of dystopian fiction as tumblr has been trying to paint any story that isn't healthy adults with absolutely no possible power imbalance having a picnic in good weather as problematic.

[highlyeccentric]

I find it sort of reassuring that isn't just a tumblr trend, nor just a fanfiction thing. It's a faultline (or, actually, several faultlines) running through a LOT of popular culture right now.

[shy_magpie]

Good point! I'd say it was a panic reaction in the face of cultural upheaval but the more history I learn the less I find any other time looks calmer.

[samskeyti]

I know far too many Australians who seem not to believe in meeting start or finish times!

[highlyeccentric]

Oh, we don't MEET the meeting start times. But the French believe that, universally, a 10am meeting starts at 10.15. Australians will straggle: the French will turn up en masse at quarter past!

[nineveh_uk]

I disagree with Ashby on this one. One-off projects of immense cultural value are exactly what we should be cutting down mature oak trees for, especially when they were oak trees actually planted for such purposes in the first place. This is, ironically, an example of good practice in managed timber use. The problem is that it is taking place within a much bigger context of massively unmanaged threats to trees and forestry. The big threat to oaks in the UK isn't a relatively small number to Notre Dame, it's environmental issues of climate change and acute oak decline disease - I'd rather use giving some timber to a high profile public project like Notre Dame as a way to highlight these other issues: "If we don't do something about this, then next time a cathedral burns down we literally won't have the trees to repair it."