Les Liens du ... Dimanche

[highlyeccentric]

I'm travelling around at the moment, link schedules likely to be disrupted

Short pieces, current affairs, hot takes:

• The Saturday Paper, Lebanese band Mashrou' Leila's festival appearance cancelled over homophobic threats. A substantial proportion of the complaints (related to the lead singer's homosexuality and the band's general pro-LGBT stance) seem to be coming from the Maronite Catholic church.
  
• Guardian, More than 5000 march in Warsaw to support LGBT rights. This following homophobic violence at a Pride parade in Bialystok.
  
• +972 Mag, Israeli Conscientious Objector Sentenced to 20 Days Prison
  
• ABC Newcastle, Gay conversion therapy nearly killed me: survivor backs NSW push for national ban.
  

Good News:

• Montreal Gazette, Bisexual asylum seeker will not be deported, while UN authorities look into his case. It's not clear (from this article or from the Gazette's reporting on the court decision not to grant asylum last week) what the basis for rejection is; I suspect it may be that the asylum seeker has a strong relationship with his wife.
  
• ABC News,Saudi Arabia lifts travel restrictions on women, and grants greater control over family matters - including the ability to act as guardian for children.
  
• HelloCare (Aus), Nursing Home night staff wear pyjamas to encourage residents to sleep. The facility in question has also shifted from uniforms to providing a clothing allowance to staff, to create a more comfortable environment for residents.
  

Longer pieces - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Anonymous, The Saturday Paper, The Casualisation of Academic Teaching:
  

  Last year, a truck driver employed as a casual in the mining industry took his employer to the Federal Court to argue he was entitled to annual leave, and the court found in his favour. The case rested on the nature of his working arrangements – they were regular and predictable, with the employee working a seven-day-on, seven-day-off continuous roster, which was set in advance for a year. The court found he was not a casual employee. Prima facie, this decision has implications for casual academic work.
  The court ruled that the “essence of casualness” is that there is “no firm advance [mutual] commitment … to continuing and indefinite work according to an agreed pattern of work”. The common characteristics of casual work were described as irregular work patterns, uncertainty as to the period over which employment was offered, discontinuity, intermittency of work and unpredictability. Casual academic work has none of these features. If it did, the teaching programs at Australian universities would be rendered completely unsustainable.

  
  
• Corinne Manning (Bitch Media), adrienne maree brown wants activists to prioritise pleasure
  
• Maya Wei-Haas (National Geographic), A tectonic plate is dying under Oregon: here's why it matters. This was interesting, and nothing struck me as immediately wrong, but - can we trust National Geographic on, well, geography? Because their track record on history and social sciences and pretty much anything I have expertise in is terrible. Would appreciate opinions here.
  
• Bhasin, Holman, Alexander and Melin (Bloomberg.com), Victoria's Secret has more than a Jeffrey Epstein problem. I mean, a Jeffrey Epstein problem is a pretty big problem. This story is full of... wow. Like: I did not know that the chain was founded by a man who went lingerie shopping with his wife and felt uncomfortable because, basically, It Are Not About Him. So he made a chain where men *would* feel comfortable: This explains... a lot.
  
• Zuleyka Zevallos (The Other Sociologist blog), Whitewashing race studies.
  
• Rachel Charlene Lewis (Bitch Media), Take it or leave it: Sizzy Rocket on creating pop music just for queer women.
  
• Libby Anne (Love, Joy, Feminism), Josh Harris is no longer a Christian but I'm still angry. That would be Josh Harris of 'I kissed dating goodbye'.
  
• Rachel'i Said (+972 Magazine), Why is Israel still denying the kidnapping of Yemenite children. "Between the years 1948 and 1952, thousands of babies, children of mostly Yemenite immigrants to the newly-founded State of Israel, were taken away from their parents. After decades of being silenced, it is time to look those parents in the eye and say: you were wronged."
  
• Michael Camilleri (Therapeutic Advances in Gastroenterology 5.6, 2012), Irritable Bowel Syndrome: how useful is the term, and the diagnosis?.
  

Caveats commenter: I've banned the person for whose benefit I have been issuing bi-weekly warnings, apologies to the rest of you if I've been patronising the shit out of you for months. Continue demonstrating medium levels of critical literacy and a basic ability to read the room, it's much appreciated.

Comments

[meneltarma]

I found myself wanting ... more substance ... on the Josh Harris piece, as someone who was harmed by the anti-dating movement and homeschooled, but I get it's not meant to be a substance critique but an emotional one. The fact he has a seminary degree but has never dragged his ass back to university for a BA but feels entitled to jump into "branding" using his own corpse as proof of his success sure is Something. I was peripherally aware of it but I find myself wanting to dig deeper into how, why, what it means, that Josh Harris' cis male whiteness lets him be an expert without any credentials when his expertise is in, um, using his privilege to sell content he now claims to disavow. There's a lot happening there.

I'm Full Of Feelings about The Problem Of Ex-Evangelical Public Figures and I keep cycling around that response and others about Harris' exit from Evangelical Christianity and his public announcement of his divorce, and how much people yearn for them to be accountable for their actions and theologies of harm and how the structure of supremacist Christianity doesn't allow for people to say "I made a mistake and I'm sorry" but only to say "I've grown and changed so you can't be angry anymore about how I used to be" and how that continues to play out even when people disavow Christianity entirely.

(If people are mad at me for who I was when I was in a Christian cult or any other cult I got sucked into, G-D knows they're entitled to be. The harm didn't go away just because I stopped believing those things and now work to dismantle their power in the wider world. But "you might be rightfully angry about things I no longer/perhaps never believe(d) but did in fact say for complex reasons I take ownership of" seems to be beyond people like Harris.)

[highlyeccentric]

I'm Full Of Feelings about The Problem Of Ex-Evangelical Public Figures and I keep cycling around that response and others about Harris' exit from Evangelical Christianity and his public announcement of his divorce, and how much people yearn for them to be accountable for their actions and theologies of harm and how the structure of supremacist Christianity doesn't allow for people to say "I made a mistake and I'm sorry" but only to say "I've grown and changed so you can't be angry anymore about how I used to be" and how that continues to play out even when people disavow Christianity entirely.

That's... what I took away from the article, that it's staking a right to anger, in the face of this exact problem?