Les Liens du... Jeudi

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Caster Semenya update: Swiss court granted a stay against the CAS ruling, IAAF is going to fight it. The stay currently only applies to Semenya, not to any other women with hypoandrogenism wishing to race in the 800ms while Semenya's full case is being heard.
  
• Australia facing A class action for crimes against humanity on Manus and Nauru. Why a class action? Because you can't prosecute for crimes against humanity (or anything else) without the AG's Department being involved, and the govt obviously isn't about to prosecute itself. There was a class action settled out of court back in 2017 for physical and mental injuries; the new action will focus on negligence leading to a range of wrongs including torture and crimes against humanity. As well as being Fair Enough, and probably a sobering test of just how far the Aus government will go in justifying inhumane acts, it's going to be an interesting example of the crossover between civil and criminal law.
  
• Speaking of, Australia returned 20 asylum seekers to Sri Lanka last week after a suspiciously fast 'processing' on Christmas Island, no details of which have been released.
  
• Related, Reports of 'alarming' self-harm crisis on Manus Island. In addition to the crimes against humanity, we're doing such a disservice to the people of Manus, whose health infrastructure cannot cope with this. And then if you read the comments to Behrouz Bouchani's tweets (... pretty much any of them) there are people smugly informing him we, in Australia, must treat our own first. UGH.
  
• All children in NT detention are Aboriginal. That is... not actually surprising, but, wow. That's fucked-up.
  
• Israel auctions off prefab classrooms donated by the EU to Palestinian schools. You can't make this stuff up.
  
• Disney CEO says it will be unlikely to film in Georgia if abortion ban goes ahead.
  
• Times of Israel reports that a new book, following up from Fire and Fury details Trumps anti-semitic comments after Cohen's plea deal.
  
• Amazon bans Australians from shopping on its non .au portals to pressure govt to rescind tax rule.
  
• Turkey puts novelists including Elif Shafak under investigation. Because fictional depictions of child abuse are the same as advocating child abuse, as much of the Internet will happily tell you.
  

Good News:

• A group of SA Indigenous women have made a pair of large-scale paintings, one as a gift to Adelaide's Muslim community and one to be sent to Christchurch, out of desire to 'put love out there' and grieve with the communities harmed by the Christchurch attacks.
  
• Gina Rushton (Buzzfeed News, AU) reports that the man who assaulted sex worker Nikki Cox has changed his plea to guilty. This is a real landmark case for QLD, first as precedent for 'rape against sex workers is still rape', and second, as an application of the recently-changed law that now qualifies forced oral sex as rape.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Gillian Brockell (WaPo), The Statue of Liberty was created to celebrate freed slaves, not immigrants. Even the verses on the base were added later.
  
• Maia Szalavitz (Pacific Standard), What I've finally concluded about 12-step programs.
  

  Adopting an addict identity is especially problematic for young people whose identities are not yet fully formed. Doing so may make what may well be a transient problem into a long-term one, by teaching them that addiction is inevitably chronic and relapsing. Since no one can predict which youth will mature out of addiction and which will not, teens should never be forced to attend 12-step groups—nor should they be made to label themselves as addicts.

  Another danger, which primarily affects both youth and women, is particularly acute at meetings where large numbers of people are court-mandated to attend. Since these programs quite rightly do not exclude anyone who has an addiction, some of those in attendance may be actively criminal or sexual predators.

  
  
• Carolyn Said, (SF Chronicle), Kiwibots win fans at UC Berkley, but if you read futher into the article, these 'bots' are remotely driven, on the cheap, by operators in South America.
  
• Alex Reilly (The Conversation), Cruel, and no deterrent: on Australian asylum policy. Seems to (gently) advocate the '2011 Malaysia arrangement', which... I'm not sure was all that great.
  
• Garnett et al (The Conversation), Adani's finch plan approved just weeks after being sent back to the drawing board. The authors are not impressed: apparently the final plan is very big on 'we will research', despite Adani having had eight years to conduct research into the black-throated finch and its habitats in the area of the mine.
  
• Kon Karapanagiotidis and Jane Favero (The Saturday Paper), Saving Asylum Seeker's Lives. I'm... not super impressed with this piece, tbh. It's 40% defending his NGO from critics of its involvement in the Medevac campaign (on grounds that Medevac is not a solution to indefinite detention and shouldn't be hailed as a win), 40% praising their other work, and only about 20% commenting on the current sitch and projecting forward.
  

  The announcement by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg that repealing the medivac legislation would be one of the first priorities of the government has shocked the refugee sector. The spikes in suicide attempts on Manus and Nauru in the aftermath of the election should have been a wake-up call to all of us – those in detention knew the re-election of the Morrison government would spell dark changes for refugee policy.
  Yet it still came as a shock that the government would – as a priority – use its power to deny sick refugees medical care. Let that sink in. Denying people medical care is a priority for our government.
  We all know that the men and women on Manus and Nauru need a solution, not a medical Band-Aid. That is, to be resettled safely now. A great place to start would be for the Coalition government to finally accept New Zealand’s offer

  
  
• Gary Rundle (Meanjin Winter 2018), Every time I see you falling. This is... a frustrating piece. It's a memoir, it's largely a nostalgic navel-gazing about 80s student politics, focused on the sandstone echelons. I love the parts that wholeheartedly embrace nostalgia - the description of sharehouses of the period, for example, or of photocopied theoretical texts handed around like contraband. Some of the commentary parts are really interesting, in that they gesture at things I am also grasping to get my head around: like how much left-ish discourse right now seems to be the 80s rehashed. The feminist sex wars are back on, representation is to be dissected endlessly, et caetera. But Rundle doesn't really get to places I couldn't have got to myself. On the other hand, I rather enjoyed his narrative account of 80s theoretical waves, swirling around in different cities, institutions and departments.
  

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'.