Les Liens du... Jeudi

[highlyeccentric]

Supplement to monday links, occurs irregularly.

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:

• Alexandra Erin on twitter, thread on the 'Shirley Exception'.
  

  So I just saw someone wondering how liberals can cut ties with conservative friends and family members over immigration policies when most Americans (including most conservatives) support immigration reform.
  
  I'm going to talk about what I call the Shirley Exception.

  — Alexandra Erin @ WisCon (@AlexandraErin) June 6, 2018

  
  
  Problem is, it never becomes clear whether Erin is addressing 'how can they' in the sense of 'by what means can they' or the sense of 'how dare they'.
  
• HRLC launches an abortion decriminalisation campaign for NSW. (I... had no idea it was still criminalised.)
  
  

Auspol post-election special

• This one from before the election: Danny Tran Michael Workman and Lachlan Moffat Gray (ABC), 'Death taxes' scare campaign continues but Labor says its fake news.
  
• I think I linked to this one last week but it's a follow-up to the above: Knaus and Karp, 87 cases of election ads breaching the law.
  
• Dana McCauley (SMH), Employers demand crackdown on unions and casuals double-dipping. TL,DR, what happened here is a court ruled that a man employed on a casual basis (zero hours, at-will; gets paid more per hour than a part-timer or full-timer because not entitled to holidays or sick leave) but on a regular schedule for x amount of time is entitled to have holiday pay after all. Obviously the employers want legislation changed so it's clear he's not. I'd like legislation changed so you can't *do* that, employ someone as a casual on a regular basis for so long, but... I actually do think that, assuming you *are* employed as a casual, on casual rates, then it is reasonable that you not be given holiday pay.
  
• Elizabeth Humphrys (Overland), We live in anti-political times.
  

  Anti-politics is not a left or right phenomenon, but a hatred of the previously dominant political parties and a process whereby parties and projects attempt to capitalise on that. It is not a phenomenon that is only outside the established political parties, but one that also occurs within them.
  On the right internationally, politicians like Trump and events like the Brexit vote are expressions of anti-political sentiment and attempts to capture that for political ends. On the left, we can see it present in the 15M movement in Spain (and their slogan ‘they do not represent us’) and, before that, the explosion of popularity for Comedian Russell Brand and his (rhetorical) calls for revolution. There are also parties like Italy’s Five Star Movement, that are harder to categorise in a left-right schema. Populist parties, that appeal to the idea of ‘ordinary citizens’ rather than more established ideologies, are also becoming more prevalent.
  In Australia, both One Nation and Clive Palmer tap into the anti-political sentiment, as do the Greens (although their ability to do this was weakened by its relationship to the Gillard Government). It is also useful to think of Kevin Rudd’s significant popularity in light of anti-political sentiment, given he positioned himself as outside the normal power structures of the Labor Party and ‘play[ed] to public bitterness at the self-interested Canberra elite’.

  
  
• Annabel Crabbe (ABC), Plibersek won't contest the Labor leadership, so what went wrong. Makes the fair point that if MPs spent more time in their electorates, it wouldn't be so hard for women/parents to take on leadership roles in parliament.
  
• Sydney Criminal Lawyers, Morrison's victory and what the nation has agreed to. Of particular concern: everything, but the one that was news to me is the Identity-Matching Services Bill 2018, a pet project of Dutton's that I had forgotten about.
  

Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Steve Salaita (blog), James Baldwin and the Jewish State. Among points that are unsurprising to anyone who's met evangelical Christians:
  

  For Baldwin, Zionism isn’t an atavistic cultural or religious attribute, but the modern articulation of an age-old colonial logic.  “In order to be a Zionist,” he notes, “it is not necessary to love the Jews.  I know some Zionists who are definitely anti-Semitic.” This point impugns some of Zionism’s basic premises:  that Israel embodies Jewishness; that Israel is a necessary response to anti-Semitism; that Israel offers a utopian model of nationhood. Among other uses, the ideology shows how likely, even necessary, it is in imperialist cosmologies to uncouple humans who occupy a territory from the economic utility of nation-states that exist in their name.

  
  This is not an easy read (look at that last sentence, that's... a lot packed into one sentence), but a worthwhile one, imho. It's a bit slippery, though, because it's not Salaita writing an essay on Israel (he has done that before), it is him offering a reading of Baldwin on Israel. He could be wrong in his understanding of Baldwin (although he addresses several other common interpretations); certainly Baldwin could be disputed one some points.
  
• Isabel Debre and Raphael Satter (AP news), Facebook busts Israel-based campaign to disrupt elections. This one from the department of misleading headlines: it should read 'Israeli company selling election-disrupting services'. Current headline can easily be misconstrued as implying an *Israeli* campaign, or indeed a single campaign, when it's actually a company selling misinformation-campaign services to many bidders. Has largely flown under the radar because the elections in question have mostly been in sub-Saharan Africa, South America and SE Asia.
  
• NBC news, Russian documents reveal desire to sow racial discord in the US. Unclear whether the plan was ever acted on; possibly Russia concluded the US generates its own racial discord.
  
• Amanda Glindemann (Archer Magazine), girlfriends, gal pals, partners. Claims use of 'partner' to refer to a non-spousal but romantic/sexual wossname was a response to the AIDS crisis, which... seems plausible, but also contradicts what I am fairly sure was true everywhere except maybe the US, that the term came into by straight women in cohabitating partnerships with men they weren't married to, and divorced people who felt boy/girlfriend was infantalising in the 1980s. I'm *sure* it went hand-in-hand with 'Ms', and wasn't exclusively queer. But I wasn't alive in the 80s; perhaps the explanations I received in the 90s and early 2000s were wrong. Generally I find Americans asserting it's an exclusively queer term, and other Anglophones confident it has never been, so this article is... interesting, as it's the first Australian I've seen asserting the queer origin narrative. She has US sources, though.
  
• Mats Wiklund (The Independent), Murky truth of how a neutral Sweden covered up its collaboration with Nazis.
  
• Anna Carlisle (Inclusive Education blog), My four-year-old goes to school this September. Will he be bullied for having two mums?. UK-based, makes links with the lgbt-inclusion vs freedom-of-religion stoush going down in Birmingham.
  
• Courtney Hagle and Grace Bennet (MediaMatters), A Fox host lobbied trump to pardon accused and convicted war criminals.. Did that happen, anyone know? I think it was supposed to happen on Memorial Day.
  
• Melissa Davey (Guardian), One in seven young Australians say rape is okay if women change their minds, and other depressing news.
  

Useful links (for varying definitions of 'useful')

• Guante, For people who want to do something. Zine guide to figuring out where and how to start making change. Not actually as concrete as I'd hoped, but useful.
  

Comments policy: As per this post. I am a teacher, but not *your* teacher; thus I am not obliged to abide by the fallacy that there is no bad contribution to discussion.