Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Samantha Maiden (The New Daily), Anthony Albanese wants to remove LGBTIQ references from Labor policies. He's decided that was what brought them down at the election. He pushed back a bit against this headline, but did so only in reference to 'gay and lesbian people', so. Guess that's trans rights under the bus then.
  
• NewEurope, Catalan nationalist MEPs take their case to ECJ. Now this is a LOT more interesting than the antics of Brexiteer MEPs.
  
• Princess Haya, wife of the sheikh of Dubai, has reportedly sought asylum in London
  
• Andrew Brown (Canberra Times), Why does Canberra Bashing exist? New research is trying to find out why
  
• Boarding schools in Xinjiang being used to separate Uighur children from their families
  
• Yang Zhuang (The Age), Two year old in detention with head injury refused hospital care for seven hours. Pretty much all detention stories are horror stories, but this one REALLY got me. One of my early memories is of my brother getting a concussion at that age, which really baked in for me that when a kid is puking from a head injury you drop everything, literally everything, and deal with it (baked it in because I was having my usual emetephobic panic attack and got rightfully shoved to the very back of the priority queue. Which, yanno, further entrenched the phobia, but what else was mum supposed to do?).
  

Good News:

• Equality Australia (ie, the former Marriage Equality activist group), Christians and LGBTIQ people stand together. A statement calling for consultation with lgbtiq affirming religious groups in relation to proposed religious discrimination laws. They're right: if the new bill doesn't protect the rights of any believer who so chooses to interpret their faith as lgbtiq inclusive, it's worth bunk. This is good news, because Equality Australia have pretty massive public reach, thanks to everyone who signed up during the marriage survey.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Jess Zimmerman (Hazlitt), Hunger Makes Me. I think I remember every straight woman on the internet circulating this c. 2016. It's definitely a Straight Woman piece (it frames all its key problems in terms of women-and-men, with only one throwaway about anyone else), but... damn.
  

  To desire effort from a man, we are taught, is to transgress in several ways. (This is true even if you’ve never had or wanted a romantic relationship with a man.) First, it means acknowledging that there are things you want beyond what he’s already provided—a blow to his self-concept. This is called “expecting him to read your mind,” and we’re often scolded for it; better, we learn, to pretend that whatever he’s willing to give us is what we were after anyway.

  Second, and greater, it means acknowledging that there are things you want. For a woman who has learned to make herself physically and emotionally small, to live literally and figuratively on scraps, admitting that you have an appetite is a source of cavernous fear. Women are often on a diet of the body, but we are always on a diet of the heart.

  
  If that's what it is to desire effort from a man, what is it to desire effort from another woman (or an other non-man)? To place demands on someone else already wrung dry by the demands placed on women (non-men?)? To withhold validation by demanding more?
  
• Lisa Hajjar (Jadaliyya.com), Is Palestine still occupied and does it matter? Goes into details of international laws of war and occupation. I followed a link here after reading a semi-viral twitter post that addressed the fact that the NYT has had *since the 1990s* (ie, long before the 2005 troop withdrawal) a house policy of never printing the words 'occupied Palestine'.
  
• Nummenmaa, Glerean, Hari, and Hietanen (PNAS 11:2 (2014), 645-651), 'Bodily Maps of Emotions'. What it says on the tin. Heat maps of where people 'feel' different emotions.
  
• Nick Riemer (Overland), On Free Speech on Campus and why the French code will be no help. French here is the name of the author of a 'code' some campuses have adopted, not the nation. Meanwhile, it sure is *something* reading a polemic on inclusivity in academia from a man who, when I worked with him, refused to offer lecture capture because it made students lazy, and forbade tutors to offer any extra assitance to students unless it was ordered by Disability Services (who took two weeks minimum to process a claim, even an emergency one).
  
• Sainty and Taylor (Buzzfeed, 2017), 65 Times the Same-Sex Marriage Debate Was Definitely Not Respectful. Re-read, from a twitter circulation it got prompted by the current... everything.
  
• Emma Doolan (The Conversation), Australian Gothic: From Haning Rock to Nick Cave and Kylie, this genre explores our dark side. Doesn't really get into the deep colonial anxieties of Australian Gothic.
  
• Louisa Lim (NYT), Hong Kong Has Nothing Left to Lose
  
• Naaman Zhou (Guardian AU), Do you understand the HECS changes? Read this and be afraid for the entire economy. A few posts back I said we didn't have much of an equivalent to the US 'benefits cliff'? Well, here it is. It cuts in much higher up the income scale (c. 45 000 AUD per annum), but it's there and it's not pretty.
  
• Matthew Sharpe (The Conversation), A history of free speech from the forbidden fruit to Facebook. A++ title.
  
• First Dog on the Moon (Guardian AU), Look, life is really tough even when it isn't. You're allowed to feel shit.
  

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'.