Les Liens du ... Samedi!

[highlyeccentric]

Because I have only just caught up with myself-a-week-ago. Apparently I read a LOT of things online the week after the election, surprise surprise.

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Bloomberg Law news [US]Labor board plans restrictions on worker protests and student organising.
  

• 1/ BIG news today for London: TfL is announcing that it is rolling out technology to track passengers using wifi full time from July 8th.
  
  I’ve written about this story for some time, so if you’ll forgive me, a little thread on why this is cool but also… controversial!

  — James O'Malley (@Psythor) May 22, 2019

  
  
  Actually doesn't look like it's as sinister in practice as it could be, but the technical surveillance capacities are worrying even as the data implications are super cool.
  
• UK Government may face court after many EU27 citizens were denied votes in the EU elections, due to egregious admin errors.
  
• Greta Thunberg and the school climate strike organisers calling for adults to join them starting with mass demonstrations in September.
  
• The Museum of London Docklands is staging an exhibition on London's hidden rivers and I am envious.
  
• Mark Joseph Stern (Slate), Trump administration releases plan to let health care providers refuse to treat transgender people. More than that, the plan seems to include stipulations that interpret Title IX as *requiring* discrimination against transgender people in some cases.
  

Good News:

• SBS news, Truth of Wadjemup being told through new tourism operator. Indigenous tour group leads tours of Wadjemup (Rottnest Island). Either I never knew, or I had forgotten, that the island had been inhabited by Indigenous australians in the past, although it was uninhabited when WA was settled, and then used as a penal colony housing Indigenous men.
  
• From the department of very qualified good news, More than 40 refugees transferred from Manus and Nauru since medevac laws. But only 14 of them transferred *under* the medevac laws - the remainder were transferred under existing refferal systems, that medevac seems to have galvanised the govt to start using again. (Cynically, I'm guessing they're using the existing transfer system again so that when they come to repeal the Medevac bill, as they intend to do, they can point to the non-medevac transfers as proof they're not being inhumane. And then right after, go back to ignoring referrals and refusing transfers, as they had been doing for five years.)
  

AusPol Specials:

• Tiernan, Deem and Menzies (The Conversation), Queensland to Quexiteers: don't judge try to understand us. Notable for being one of the few 'you just don't understand Queensland' pieces I read that... actually explains things, instead of bleating vaguely about jobs.
  

  Queensland’s regions, therefore, developed as separate economic entities, with limited connection to the rest of Queensland (including the capital Brisbane), or indeed Australia. This geography also informs the way people have historically voted. Any threat to the economic viability of hinterland industries had a spillover effect on the regional towns that serviced them.

  
  
• Phillip Almond (The Conversation), Five aspecs of pentecostalism that shed light on Scott Morrison's politics.
  
• Ben Smee (Guardian AU), Clive Palmer says he decided to polarise the electorate with anti-labor ads to ensure a Coalition win. TL;DR: Clive Palmer, despite heading a party that was actually running in the election, spent his money not on convincing people to vote for him, but on convincing people the Labor Party are evil tax fiends. Insofar as this did result in some first-preference gains for the UAP, it's not Palmer's main goal: UAP preferences flow LibNat, and his real aim was getting a LibNat slate across QLD.
  
• Laura Gartry (ABC news), Mega mine next to Adani put on hold, thousands of jobs in doubt. Not only were Adani lying about how many jobs they can offer, a neighbouring development that depended on their infrastructure has now pulled out.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, politics, other

• Nic Holas, Police Raid at Hares & Hyenas Building.
  

  Hares & Hyenas has been a fixture of Melbourne’s queer community since 1991. More than a bookstore, it is also a licensed performance venue that hosts queer theatre, cabaret and storytelling along with an endless stream of community launches, events and support groups.
  Ro Allen, Victoria’s first gender and sexuality commissioner, was “appalled” by the raid at the Hares & Hyenas building. Allen described Crusader Hillis, Rowland Thomson and Nik Dimopoulos as “Victorian LGBTIQ royalty”.
  For Melbourne’s queer community, the violence of the incident has triggered not-too-distant memories of a time when the gay rights movement often found itself brutalised at the hands of a homophobic police force. Of the Tasty nightclub raid in 1994, during which Victoria Police detained the patrons of the gay nightclub in Melbourne’s CBD and subjected them all to a demeaning stripsearch over the course of seven hours.

  
  The upside of this is that, like the fire at News From Nowhere, the coverage means I now know about a cool bookshop I need to visit. On the other hand I showed this article to the Older Gay Man at work and got a patronising talk about 'that ugly word' (queer) for my pains.
  
• Matthew Wade (Star Observer) This is how the Star Observer changed my life. The Star is in voluntary administration and up for sale.
  
• Sophia Shalmiyev and Leni Zumas, Letters to mothers. A conversation in letters (stylised with knowledge they intended to publish) about motherhood, work, pregnancy, and writing. At times a little... blinkered. They quote Eileen Myles' 'men should stop writing books', without, apparently, having put any thought into into the fact that some men's voices are less heard than others.
  
• Ian Wright (The Conversation), Why Sydney residents use 30% more water than Melbournians.
  
• Elise Worthington (ABC news), Married to the alt-right: profile of a young couple who were involved in a clandestine plot to seed neo-nazis in the Young Nationals and stack their exec, with the ultimate aim of swinging the Nationals further right.
  
• Karina Manta (NYT, Modern Love College Essay contest), I can't hate my body if I love hers. I was on board with this (it is well established that women who date women are less anxious about their weight, etc than straight women) right until its big finale, which rests on their bodies being *exactly the same*. Gals. One of you is an elite athlete. By definition, any body that is 'just like mine' to Karina Manta is *a very narrow outlier of a body*, even if Manta is no longer starving herself to compete.
  
• Grace Lavery, You keep using this phrase Adult Human Females. A piece notable for dissecting the rhetoric of Kathleen Stock et al, and also for perfectly encapsulating how infuriating philosophers are to deal with.

Historical Accuracy check.
A few weeks back I linked to this old article by John Pilger, which asserts that Gough Whitlam was deposed because the GG at the time was under the influence of the CIA or MI6 or both, and the CIA in particular didn't want Whitlam opening an investigation into Pine Gap. It seemed... a bit far-fatched but also kind of plausible, and he seemed to have sources. Well.

• Back in 2016 Matt Novak of Gizmodo filed a FOI request for the CIA report on John Kerr, the aforesaid GG. It's innocuous. Certainly they could have other files on Kerr other than this, but apparently it's remarkable that they only have one - on Pinochet they had several biographical reports, which they released to Novak. It looks like Kerr was pretty uninteresting to the CIA, *or* he was so interesting that they won't release further papers. Novak also dismisses Pilger's source re: a CIA agent having referred to Kerr as 'our man Kerr'. The source, who Pilger did not name, was a former US intelligence decoder, later turned Soviet spy. Not exactly a winning example of reliability.
  
• John Stapleton (The New Daily) reports that Academic consensus is that the US did not meddle in the 1975 election after the Whitlam dismissal. Yes, the US was not impressed with Whitlam, and doubtless happy to find Fraser elected in his place. But Dov Levin (Carnegie Mellon Univ) explains to Stapleton why he elimited the Aus 1975 election from his list of 81 US-fixed elections, and USyd's James Curran pretty much concurs: bad blood between Nixon and Whitlam, but no evidence of election fixing.

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

[lilysea]

They quote Eileen Myles' 'men should stop writing books', without, apparently, having put any thought into into the fact that some men's voices are less heard than others.

Indeed.

Gay men;
bisexual men;
trans men;
men of colour;
first-nations men are all under-represented voices...