Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Guardian report: new airport for Macchu Picchu sparks outrage
  
• Scott Bixby (Daily Beast): Trump Administration to LGBT couples: your 'out of wedlock' kids aren't citizens
  
• New Matilda, Pinched some post-its? Check your super before you return them. News that surprises no one, employers are not paying their required superannuation contributions.
  
• Star Observer, This is not a one-off: Hares and Hyenas raid shows reality of violent policing (for those not familiar with Melbourne's indie scene, Hares seems to fill a role comparable to Gays the Word (London) and News From Nowhere (Liverpool). I'd never heard of it before but
  
• Herald Scotland report: allegations of bullying in the office of MP Joanna Cherry. Of particular interest in that some of the allegations pertain to homophobic bullying, and Cherry is one of the set of public spokespeople who consider themselves to have been bullied by trans activists for holding tranphobic views.
  

Good News: I haven't even got halfway through the list of things I read last week, and none of them are good news. Fortunately, this rolled out last night:

• Swiss voters approve tighter gun control in line with EU laws.

Auspol election / final campaign week, various:

• Terry Carney (The Conversation AU), Danger! Election 2016 delivered us robodebt: promises can have consequences.
  
• Mark Seccombe (Saturday Paper), Are the Nationals still the party of the bush?. Answer from yesterday would appear to be: yes.
  
• Karen Middleton (Saturday Paper), Election 2019: the final hours. I read this *after* the results came out, and. Hah. Ouch. The Keating comparison seems particularly... something.
  
• Paul Keating called for a voter-driven stake through Dutton's heart. He didn't get it. In fact, he may have made it worse? A lot of people my age and slightly older admire Keating, but the generations before us remember him as 'up himself'.

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Adam Shatz (LRB), Trump's America, Netanyahu's Israel. A lot of interesting stuff, but this para struck me as particularly ominous. I hope it doesn't prove prophetic.
  

  The Trump administration recently prevented the Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of the BDS movement, from entering the US. Barghouti, a permanent resident of Israel who has a valid US visa, was scheduled to do a speaking tour and go to his daughter’s wedding. He is a non-violent activist, but this doesn’t count in his favour among those who used to deplore Palestinian armed struggle. On the contrary: now that the Palestinians are practising effective non-violent protest, Israel claims that it is worse than terrorism because it ‘delegitimises’ the Jewish state. Anti-Zionism, on this view, is not simply an occasional cover for antisemitism; it is antisemitism. The Trump administration has signed up to this thesis; so has Emmanuel Macron. But if anti-Zionism is antisemitism, one would be hard pressed to find a Palestinian, or an Arab, or a Muslim, who is not an antisemite. And if anti-Zionism is the only form of antisemitism that Israel, the state of the Jews, considers a threat, then Hungary and other Central European states intent on revising their histories of collaboration in the Holocaust, purging their public life of ‘globalists’ such as George Soros, and pursuing draconian policies towards ethnic minorities (Roma, above all), can declare themselves friends of Israel and get a kosher seal of approval.

  
  
• Dominic O'Sullivan, Racism alleged as indigenous children taken from families - even though state care often fails them. Focus on a recent Kiwi case, with comparisons to Aus and elsewhere.
  
• Liam Mannix, Do chickens actually like being free range. Cites evidence that free range chickens will tend to huddle in or near their shelters, links this with the behaviour of wild jungle fowl, who live amongst the undergrowth and will naturally fear open spaces (predators). Strangely, does not consider the possibility that a valid farming policy response would be to require low-level shrubbery in areas where free range chickens are raised (given the strictures on free range certification, this could totally be done).
  
• LARB 'Dear Television' team, Game of Thrones, 'The Bells'. Decent (afaik, i don't watch the show) analysis. This para was particularly good:
  

  But a deeper problem is that we don’t want to admit that Daenerys is right, because we don’t want to admit what monarchy is. There are no good kings and queens, something Varys should have known (Jon Snow would be a good king, maybe, and his reign would be extremely short). Kings and queens are selfish people who will kill you when they need you to die; while Tyrion should have been reading Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt, Daenerys was out learning, in the field, what exactly the throne is. She is open about it. She is honest. She had wanted everyone to love her, and tried to make it happen. But as the people who loved her kept dying — and as her “allies” turned against her and her enemies grew stronger — she correctly identified the failure of this strategy, and changed tactics. Just like she attacked the ships from the sun — ambushing them instead of letting them ambush her — she has abandoned a failing tactic, based on her knowledge of the field of play, and adopted a winning one.

  
  
• Eli Saslow (WaPo), Who's going to look after these people?: a look at US health care failure through a study of one local hospital on the brink of closure due to its private owner going bankrupt. What struck me was the contrast between the shocking service level on ground and the geographic availability. While everyone in this article and everyone I saw talking about it on Twitter was talking about the difficulties of US geography, I'm like... these people have a local hospital, that by the sounds of it once provided services equivalent to what in Aus is known as a 'Base hospital', AND the nearest major hospital is 90 minutes away by road / 15 by medevac helicopter. I don't think there's any base hospital in Aus that's THAT close to its nearest major hospital! I grew up an hour from a major hospital, and we had a polyclinic (half an hour in the other direction) that provided *fewer* services than this local hospital does now (in that it was never intended to provide beds, and also doesn't do x-rays, etc. Stitches, snake bite first aid, maybe oxygen tanks, walk-in GP services when the doctors are closed, and I think it has a helipad for the rescue helicopter). Anyone saying the US's health services are terrible because it's so big can... please look at a comparison other than the UK, for once?
  
• Adrian Humphreys (National Post), The unknown person: for six years a man who refuses to identify himself has been held in a Canadian maximum security prison.
  
• D.R. Baker (BookRiot), Redwall, determinism, and making piece with flawed favourites.
  
• Joanna Scutts (LitHub), how we find, and lose, women writers.

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

[conuly]

Liam Mannix, Do chickens actually like being free range. Cites evidence that free range chickens will tend to huddle in or near their shelters, links this with the behaviour of wild jungle fowl, who live amongst the undergrowth and will naturally fear open spaces (predators). Strangely, does not consider the possibility that a valid farming policy response would be to require low-level shrubbery in areas where free range chickens are raised (given the strictures on free range certification, this could totally be done).

Unless free range is VASTLY better regulated in Australia than in the US - a distinct possibility! - it fails in the very first three sentences. Free range in the US does not require "a green paddock full of grass and dust". It requires that the chickens aren't confined and can go outside. That's it. Conditions don't have to be good.

[highlyeccentric]

Well yes that’s my point in my commentary: Mannix seems to think the options are ‘current free range system’ or ‘barns’. I believe free range standards are SOMEWHAT better regulated than in the US, enough that it would be completely feasible to add restrictions about the TYPE of pasture as well as the amount of pasture per chook, but he doesn’t consider that at all.