Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

I have finally, as of 7pm Sunday when I'm queuing this post, caught up on my links.

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• As self-harm crisis spikes, Manus governor demands action from Australia.
  
• Only the abstract available out of paywall (thus, a 'short piece'), but according to Daniel Janini and Talia Konkle (Nature Human Behaviour 3), children who grew up playing Pokémon have developed a specialised brain region for Pokémon recognition'.
  
• Vivienne Kelly (Mumbrella), Press Council rules against Miranda Devine's 'mutilating our children' column. Sadly, not against the 'mutilation' phrasing, which they deem to be within the bounds of robust debate for an opinion column, but she is liable for misrepresenting facts on medical opinion vis a vis trans children and puberty blockers.
  
• European Court of Justice rules that products made in Israeli settlements occupied since 1967 must be so labelled. Martin Kohnecny of EuMEP (European Middle East Project, which seems to be a thinktank) has a thread breaking down the key components of the ruling:
  

  EU Court of Justice just issued Advocate-General's Opinion on labelling of Israeli settlement products. Confirms they must be marked as coming from an Israeli settlement and thus backs EU's 2015 guidelines on this. https://t.co/Bmm2bRMsSY /1

  — Martin Konecny (@MartinKonecny) June 13, 2019

  
  
  This is an interesting development, as it will give (to Europeans) a viable consumer choice other than 'boycott all Israeli products' or 'boycott nothing at all'.
  
• A prominent Sydney Endocrinologist, Dr Jonathan Garth Hayes, who treats a significant number of trans patients, abruptly announced the closure of his practice, citing (in a letter to patients, which I have not seen) pressure from the NSW Medical Council on account of his focus on trans medicine.
  The NSW Medical Council have issued a statement, which can be found as text on a number of Syndey trans-inclusive group facebook sites (eg The Gender Centre or as PDF from the Council site. Reddit has a follow-up letter purporting to be from Hayes insisting the NSW Medical Council have placed unreasonable restrictions on his practice. The Medical Council will not comment on ongoing complaints, unless they are upheld, so we do not know if, for instance, the issue (and the 'unreasonable' restriction) is due to something other than or tangential to the mere fact of practicing transgender medicine.
  
• Tarpley Hitt (Daily Beast), Nicholas Sparks tried to ban LGBT club and student protests at his Christian school. Who knew Nicholas Sparks *owned* a school? That's a thing that happens? Anyway. The article is mostly a long interview with the school's former principal, who was driven out by Sparks and the board for pursuing too progressive an agenda. The educator in question, Saul Benjamin, is a Jewish-born Quaker, and I am... mostly baffled that he didn't *expect* that when he went to work for an Evangelical start-up school? How does a man grow up Jewish and then live as a Quaker without being aware how... very not good Evangelicals are???
  
• First Dog on the Moon (Guardian cartoon), Adani: it all looks dodgy as hell and none of it has been explained properly
  
• Alessio Perone (The Independent), Arctic permafrost thawing at rates not anticipated until 2029.
  

Good News:

• Bruny Island introduces very strict new regulations on pet cats, including, reportedly, a requirement to leash them if outdoors. A++ decision, Bruny Island. (H/T lilysea for the link)
  
• Hong Kong's leader Carrie Lam delays the extradition bill indefinitely. She does fully intend to revive it, but it won't be until at least August.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Michael J.I. Brown (The Conversation), Why old-school climate denial has had its day. A comforting read after my least conservative colleague asked me 'what percentage of scientists actually believe in climate change though?'
  
• Becca Schuh, interview with Juliet Escoria (Electric Lit), Juliet the Maniac is a raw portrait of a bipolar teenage girl.
  
• Martin McKenzie-Murray (Saturday Paper), Divisions over religious freedom. I am full of cynicism:
  

  Labor’s new deputy leader in the senate and shadow Home Affairs minister, Kristina Keneally, has been busy commending the same. “I am a person of faith,” she said this week. “Every job I have ever had before I entered politics in my adult life was in the Catholic Church … There would have been a time when Labor would have been seen as a natural home for people like me. I think that perhaps in the embrace of a broader agenda – that I think is right about inclusion and equality – we haven’t always taken people of faith with us.”

  
  Keneally's biggest flaw as a progressive commentator is her unwillingness to believe that, perhaps, 'people of faith' in general and the Catholic Church in particular *does not want to come with us*.
  
• Margaret Andersen (Bitch Media), BDSM teachers teach women to be more assertive. Nothing you haven't seen before, if you were on the sex-positive internet in the first decade of this century. Except now not all the pro-doms interviewed are white, so that's something. (On a side note, I'm really... personally squicked, not politically or anything, by the pronouncement that when you start practicing domination you *must* adopt a 'Mistress name'.)
  
• Sezin Koehler (Bitch Media), Mother Mayhem: "Ma" honours black women's rage. A paeon to Octavia Spencer's performance in a new revenge-horror flick. Which I probably won't see, because I never see movies, let alone horror movies, but I'm pleased to know it exists out there in the world and Octavia Spencer is kicking butt in it.
  
• ABC radio, Teachers have been in Mardi Gras since 1978. But the Teachers Federation only started marching in 2015. (For the furriners, Mardi Gras is Australia's biggest pride parade)
  
• Jessica Irvine and Matt O'Sullivan (SMH), Sydney CBD congestion tax would hit the wealthy the hardest. *bangs clipboard* congestion tax! Congestion tax! Congestion tax!
  
• Chris (the partner of Dr Melania Geymonat, who was with her bashed on a London bus last week), You saw me covered in blood on a bus. But do you get outraged about all homophobia? Turns out she's a raging bisexual with a conscience.
  

  A refrain I’ve heard ad nauseum is “I can’t believe this happened – it’s 2019”. I disagree. This attack and the ensuing media circus are par for the course in 2019. In both my native United States and here in the United Kingdom, it always has been and still is open season on the bodies of (in no specific order) people of colour, indigenous people, transgender people, disabled people, queer people, poor people, women and migrants. I have evaded much of the violence and oppression imposed on so many others by our capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal system because of the privileges I enjoy by dint of my race, health, education, and conventional gender presentation. That has nothing to do with the merit of my character.

  
  
• Isabella Alexander (The Conversation), Explainer: our copyright laws and the Aboriginal Flag.
  

  A change.org petition started by Spark Health, whose brand Clothing the Gap raises money for Aboriginal health, states: “This is not a question of who owns copyright of the Flag. This is a question of control.”
  However, the two cannot be separated: it is the owner of the copyright who has control over how a work may be used.
  As copyright owner, Thomas has the right to grant licences to whomever he pleases, whether Indigenous or not.
  A former head of the Australian Copyright Council Fiona Phillips has said there could be an argument for the Government to buy back the copyright licence from Thomas. But could this work?
  Asking the government to intervene in this way could be seen as yet another appropriation of Aboriginal property rights – in this case, the rights of an artist to maintain ownership of his work.
  At the same time, enforcing copyright of such a powerful and well-loved symbol against those seeking to use it to express their cultural identity, solidarity or sympathy, or for charitable causes, gives rise to justifiable resentment.

  
  Emphasis mine, because the 'why doesn't the government just buy out the copyright' question keeps coming up.
  
• Kasy Chambers (not the musician, the head of Anglicare, in the SMH), Australia takes from the poor to give to the rich:
  

  These numbers tell us that something has gone badly wrong. The eighties were the decade of trickle-down economics, where taxes were cut for the richest with the promise that everyone else would soon feel the benefits. But now it’s worse – we’re in an era of trickle-up economics where subsidies, tax breaks and concessions for the richest are paid for by everyone else.

  
  
• Richard Cooke (Saturday Paper), Free Speech, Censorship, and Media Raids. Takes a sharp skewer to the notion bandied about by both sides of politics that Australia has a long tradition of free speech (we don't. We had the most draconian censorship regime in the Anglosphere, until the 1970s).
  

  50 years later Australia is again an international laughing stock over our blundering brand of intimidation and censorship. The motive differs although security and puritanism have a shared imperative: they are supposed to be for our own good. The Australian Federal Police raids on the offices of the ABC and the home of a News Corp journalist keep being described as “unprecedented”. They are certainly a degeneration, though these goonish interventions have always been there. Only their targets and locations have changed
  In 2015, it was an Adelaide bookshop selling unwrapped copies of American Psycho; in 2013, a St Kilda art gallery, with the seized works celebrating the artist Mike Brown, who was convicted of obscenity in the 1960s. An unbroken chain of raids, prosecutions, bannings, destructions, libel suits, intimidation and blacklistings drags its way through our history, all the way to the early colony.

  
  
• Jeff Sparrow (Guardian), Australia has been seduced by creeping authoritarianism and its citizens need to wake up. Sparrow literally wrote the book on Australia's censorship history, he knows what he's talking about.
  
• Suketu Mehta (NYT), Why should immigrants 'respect our borders'? We never respected theirs. Part polemic, part... scheme that actually would be a good idea if only you could get anyone to agree to it (and to ensure that the US, and with it all the other former colonies turned excessive-power-over-reacher-neocolonialists, eg, Australia, didn't get off scott free): he proposes that countries ought to have mandatory immigration targets from the countries or regions they specifically fucked over. That Belgium should take an annual crop of immigrants - not 'guest workers' but immigrants - from the Congo, say, and the British from pretty much everywhere. His proposals for the US include numbers of Iraqi migrants to match the numbers of Iraqi civilian dead since the War on Iraq began. Obviously the idea has no chance on a global political scale, but damn, wouldn't it be nice. (Australia would be looking at a bill specifically from the citizens of Manus and Nauru, just to start).
  

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'.