Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• City of Sydney steps in to ban a wine bar from hosting petanque games after noise complaints.
  
• ABC news, Vegandale Sucks - on backlash in a Toronto neighbourhood against aggressive vegan gentrification
  
• Rosanne Barrett and Ben Cheshire (ABC News), Menindee Four Months On From Mass Fish Deaths. TL;DR, residents do not trust the yellowish treated river water the council water supplies deliver.
  
• David Crow (SMH), Why this was the most compelling moment of this election campaign: on Bill Shorten, the Daily Tele, and Shorten's mum.
  
• BBC news, Khazakh detained over empty placard vigil. Wanting to prove that all forms of demonstration are effectively banned, Aslan Sagutdinov stood in a city square with an empty placard, proclaiming no protest or slogan, and was arrested. He was later released, apparently because they could not find anything to charge him with. Last I heard, via twitter, at least one person had taken to the streets to mime holding a placard and see where that got him.
  
• Guardian UK Shrinking break times in English schools impacting social skills.
  
• Overland Magazine, Stop Scapegoating International Students: open letter from NTEU members. Response to the 4 Corners 'Cash Cows' documentary, and the NTEU's problematic use of it.

Good News:

• BBC news reports, based on a large group study, that social media use has a 'trivial' effect on teenage life satisfaction or wellbeing.

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• kaberett presents How To Spoil Your Ballot (UK). There are, as it turns out, not many ways to spoil your ballot in the UK, short of defacing it entirely or writing something that can be traced back to you. (I also did some research and am pleased to report that, while Aus is much stricter - because preferential voting - the AEC also instructs the returning officer to, wherever possible, apply the principle of 'is the intention of the voter clear'.)
  
• Mikaela Clements (The Outline), Notes on Dyke Camp. I'm not entirely convinced here (and specifically, not convinced that 'camp' is the right word for the phenomenon she identifies), but I did enjoy the piece.
  
• Tim Robertson (Meanjin Summer 2018), Cows for Piece. Robertson travels to rural Rwanda and interviews two neighbours who have participated in a program which grants joint ownership of a cow to Hutu and Tutsi neighbours who formally reconcile after the civil war. (So, uh, content warnings for... the entire Rwandan genocide.) Robertson has some astute insights into the role of the current government in providing simplistic answers for the genocide, and probes insightfully but not didactically into some of the glaringly obvious problems of restorative justice.
  

  It seems wrong that, even now, it’s the victims who are forced to make all the sacrifices. But I suppose that is, to some degree, inevitable: their loss can never be replaced; their suffering can never be erased. Similarly, in a country in which so many people were implicated in the genocide, traditional notions of justice—notions of what constitutes a free and fair trial and standard sentencing procedures, for example—can’t apply; they simply can’t be implemented practically. There are no perfect solutions in Rwanda; there are, perhaps, not even any just ones. But there can be solutions that foster peace and guard against further ethnic violence. Yet they’re all untested and, therefore, not without risk.

  
  
• Darcy Lockman (NY Times), What Good Dad's Get Away With. (One of the list of articles I wish to shove in the faces of everyone who responds to 'men are terrible' with 'but there are good men!' (yes, i know queer men exist and are probably hopefully less terrible than cis straight men but glod that's a low bar to clear).
  
• Eric Alterman (The New Yorker), The Decline of Historical Thinking:
  

  Lately, I’ve noticed a feature of economic inequality that has not received the attention it deserves. I call it “intellectual inequality.”

  I do not refer to the obvious and ineluctable fact that some people are smarter than others but, rather, to the fact that some people have the resources to try to understand our society while most do not. Late last year, Benjamin M. Schmidt, a professor of history at Northeastern University, published a study demonstrating that, for the past decade, history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, even as more and more students attend college. With slightly more than twenty-four thousand current history majors, it accounts for between one and two per cent of bachelor’s degrees, a drop of about a third since 2011. The decline can be found in almost all ethnic and racial groups, and among both men and women. Geographically, it is most pronounced in the Midwest, but it is present virtually everywhere.

  
  I have some Questions here, particularly about Alterman's narrow focus on history. Schmidt did not say that History is declining compared to STEM majors: his data suggests the decline is in comparison to *all* majors, including other Humanities majors. Although Schmidt shows a decline in English majors, it's at -20% compared to -34% for history, and a key factor Schmidt points to is 'the relatively steep decline in women’s interest.' Now, Schmidt explains that in terms of 'pre-professional' majors opening up to women in the past fifty years, but I don't think that's sufficient to explain why history should show a more marked decline than other humanities majors. Women are now *more* underrepresented in US History majors than they were ten years ago, and Schmidt notes the decline is not among white women: it's among hispanic and asian female students. I'm fairly certain women still make up more than 50% of English majors, although I don't know if the percentage is shrinking, or what the racial balance is like. My point being, neither Alterman nor Schmidt are considering that possibly history is becoming more *hostile* to women, especially ethnic minority women, in comparison to other majors. I know in my field, it's always historians complaining that lit scholars keep trying to *import* fancy notions like 'race is an issue we should talk about* into their precious domains. (Come to think of it, Schmidt's data covers 1950-present. Many of the women bleeding off into other majors have probably gone to majors like gender studies, African American Studies, etc - disciplines that produce historical scholarship, but not history majors).
  
• Ruth Padawer (NY Times, 2016), The humilating practice of sex-testing female athletes: provides both immediate background (focused on Duthee Chand) and a long history to the Semenya case.
  
• The Tetrapod (a SEN educator blog), Everything I've learned about so-called 'cognitive ability' after getting a brain injury.
  
• Luisa Beck and Griff Witte (The Independent UK), Germany's refugee intage begins to boost the economy - particularly because refugees are entering apprenticeships, which German young people have been eschewing for some time.
  
• Casey Baseel (SoraNews24), Survey Claims 30% of Boys Love fans in Japan are men. Based on the most recent publicly-available data from the Yano Research Group. Baseel talks through some of the gaps in the data.
  
• Jessica Gittel Cornish (Archer Magazine), Doesn't every family have a Leon?: on her grandparents and their partner, Leon.

Amusing Items:

• The guy behind Mincing Mockingbird's Guide To Troubled Birds also makes notebooks under the name of 'Frantic Meerkat'. These feature titles like 'Strange Ideas and Impure Thoughts' and 'Half-assed ideas'.

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

[rymenhild]

I love the one about the grandparents and Leon.

[highlyeccentric]

It is a Good Piece. 'Doesn't everyone have a Leon?'