Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Andrew Roff (Meanjin Blog), No Vogel: we are not worthy. Hardly a hot take now, it's a month old, but I'm still catching up on Vogel Takes.
  
• Haaretz report, Israel denies arming Myanmar but its representatives are still at the Tel Aviv arms expo. This one struck me, because I've been wondering for a while now why so few people talk about Israel's polity and politics in relation to or comparison to some of the other mid-20th-c-formation states that feature major human rights abuses and internecine violence (eg. the states of the former British Raj). I mean, I get why the US/UK/Australia are the big comparisons, but... if the problem is 'what happens when two sets of people claim indigeneity to the one place, and one of them was disproportionately advantaged in state-formation by the withdrawing colonial power', then you've got to look elsewhere than Australia or the US.
  
• SBS news, Elderly LGBTQI aged care residents forced back into the closet.
  
• ABC news, drone footage shows adani doing illegal work at mine site, environmental group claims.
  
• Alexandra Petri (WaPo), Look out, here comes the Straight Pride Parade!
  

  Next comes Wearing a Hat And Thinking It’s a Personality.
  The next float is an enormous ball and chain, 50 feet high. Beneath it is an enormous speaker that plays the muttered words, “Oh, you!”
  ...
  The next float is Adam blaming Eve for being cast out of paradise. Many people follow this float handing out pamphlets, and only some of them look happy.
  Then — covering a space of miles — come marching the women performing emotional labor without being consulted or thanked, and the little girls being told to be ladylike.

  
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Warren Hogan (The Conversation), Cutting interest rates is just the start. The Reserve Bank of Aus is lowering interest rates again, and plans to do so again in the next six months, which will bring the rate closer to zero than it has been for a very, very long time. This is because (despite the Coalition election schtick), the economy has been stalled for three quarters.
  
• Jack Peat (The London Economic), Economic Growth is an Unnecessary Evil and Jacinda Adern is right to deprioritise it. Despite my side-eyes at the above, I think I agree with the above. I would have no problems with the Aus govt overseeing low or zero economic growth, if that were a result of investing in citizen wellbeing instead.
  
• Greg Jericho (Guardian Grogonomics), The government has run the economy into the ground
  
• Joli Jensen (The Chronicle), How to Cope with Multiple Project Paralysis. 50% useful 50% smug, as many things on The Chronicle are.
  
• On Light and Shadow: Polyamory's #metoo and assorted documents associated with it. This is, largely, devoted to a narrative of misconduct surrounding Franklin Veaux, one of the authors of the book 'More than Two'. I had some problems with the way that book presented open relationships (it's surprisingly didactic for a book that advocates against rules-based polyamory, and it leans *very* heavily into the 'you're responsible for your own emotions and needs' narrative in a way that probably more men need to hear but which can easily be toxic to a lot of women). Anyway. This cluster is mostly not about that book, but about his memoir The Game Changer, which I never read because tbh it sounded supremely self-indulgent. Some of the testimonies in this 'calling-in'/survivorpod/whathaveyou site do have pretty good insight into the problems one is likely to encounter when applying the strict 'no rules, manage your own shit' style of relationship maintenance. I particularly liked Amber's comments in this post on needing consistency vs needing control ("Every single nesting partner Franklin has had eventually comes off as being controlling and hysterically unstable. The 'control' comes basically just from this desperate need to get some kind of stability - but it's actually not control, it's actually not a bid for control, it's a bid for consistency, trust, a safety net.") I don't really know what I think of the highly performative 'survivor pod' situation, and I don't know the work of anyone involved. I am, however, familiar with Eve Rickert's work (Veaux's co-author from More than Two) and am inclined to trust her judgement.
  
• Heather Goodall (The Conversation), Hidden Women of History: Isabel Flick, the tenacious campaigner who fought segregation in Australia.. Rural indigenous anti-segregation action, predating the Freedom Rides.
  
• Oprah Magazine, 50 unapologetically queer authors share the best LGBTQ books of all time. Added a fair few to my tbr list.
  
• Jia Tolentino (New Yorker), Please, my wife, she's very online. I... did not have the pop culture knowledge or the meme recognition to understand this, but perhaps some of you will!
  

Academic:

• Robyn Ochs, "Biphobia: It Goes More Than Two Ways", first published in Bisexuality: The Psychology and Politics of an Invisible Minority ed. by Beth A. Firenstein pp. 217-239. Reproduced online by the author.

Fun things:

• This Pride.com list of artists who didn't change pronouns in cover songs. As well as the Usual Suspects, it listed this, which I was entirely unaware of until now:
  
  "The White Stripes-Jolene" (Watch on YouTube)

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'. I particularly don't want to hear your hot take on polyamory ethics unless you are or have been yourself non-monogamous.