Les Liens du Lundi

[highlyeccentric]

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• Hong Kong leader says extradition bill is dead, students not satisfied. I saw a lot of positive coverage of the 'victory', but I'm inclined to believe the case made here: it's not dead until the bill is formally withdrawn. It seems that many in HK agree, because afaik protests are ongoing.
  
• B'tselem, Human rights organizations based in Israel voice concern before Bundestag president over motion defining BDS as antisemitism.
  
• Amazon Prime day: workers to strike over warehouse conditions. That's today and tomorrow, folks. Putting my Good Omens rewatch on hold accordingly.
  
• Mercymisrule on tumblr, one of the most amazing things that has been said to me in therapy is that self-esteem doesn't exist. I'm adding this to my list of things that don't exist.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Anna Spargo-Ryan (The Guardian), Mental Illness is complex, yet patients are often left to manage their own brain:
  

  The system – not over-medicalised but under-nuanced – relies on self-advocacy. We are just not attuned enough to notice strangers with mental illness in the same way we might notice a knife sticking out of them. The need for immediate care requires someone who’s feeling god-awful to find the energy and courage to ask someone to make it better.
  Sometimes, the idea that it can get better keeps us alive. There is a hopefulness in a medical model. It says, I know you feel rotten right now, but there are treatments you can try. It says, it can be better than this one day. And it promises, I take your pain seriously.
  In Australia, it doesn’t, yet.

  
  
• Elodie Under Glass, for CaptainAwkward.com, Breaking the Low Mood Cycle. With excellent illustrations.
  
• Eve L. Ewing and Hanif Abdurraqib, Echoes on the Internet. A letter-series between creators who work as a 'poetry collective'.
  

  I think a lot of people think about collectives as primarily being about shared production—making together, or doing together. Those things can be very cool. I think in our case, I mostly think of a collective in the sense of being together, and thinking together. (Of course, all those verbs aren’t mutually exclusive.) It means a public co-sign. It means I stand with you. I’m on your team. I have your back, and I’m counting on you to have mine. That’s such a simple thing, but it counts for so much. It also feels wildly risky and dangerous, because so many people are just so terrible, and so many things are just so terrible. It’s so risky to trust anyone. And even riskier, in a sense, to tell someone else that you’re ready to be accountable to them, to keep promises, to take responsibility not only for not embarrassing yourself (hard enough) but for not embarrassing them. That’s a lot. Human relationships are so risky.

  
  
• JB Brager (The Nib), Livejournal made me gay. I resemble this remark so hard. (Although, as I said to Twitter, you could also say Sir Gawain made me queer, and if only I could draw there would be a comic in that)
  
• Lee Williscroft-Ferris (The Queerness), Album review: Kylie Minogue, Step Back in Time: The Definitive Collection. No I have no idea why I read this but it's really quite interesting.
  
• Elad Nehorai (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), Legacy Institutions don't get to dictate how Jews use the lessons of the Holocaust.
  
• Andrew Ford and Anni Heino (Meanjin Summer 2018), The Song Remains the Same: Funiculi Funicula. I absolutely loved this series of endnotes to Meanjin 2018, and I loved the prompt to look up Funiculi Funicula. What a good hilarious song.
  
• Noel Figart, Bullet journals, or: excellence v perfection.
  

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'.