Les Liens du... Mardi

[highlyeccentric]

Managed neither this post nor a health update yesterday, on account of... well, health. Teeth, mostly.

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes:

• Nick Baker (SBS news), Kurdish refugee Behrouz Boochani warns of genocide in northern Syria.
  
• Sam Leith (UnHerd), The booker judges had one job. More than just these two books, the situation flouts an explicit ruling and opens up for further shenanigans down the line.
  

Good News:

• Chapatte cartoon celebrates Vague verte en politique Suisse.
  
• SwissInfo.ch, Landslide Greens gain tips Parliament to the left. It's not a complete about-face: the centre-right UDC/SVP still hold the largest number of seats per party (no one has an outright majority), while the green vote is split between two Green parties whose capacity to work together is not fully tested. But the numbers are such that there could be a case for ONE of those parties (with the support of the other) to put forward a candidate to the Executive Council.
  

Longer political and/or climate science

• Emma Kathryn White (Guardian AU), We can't drought-proof Australia, and trying is a fool's errand.
  
• Amy Remeikis (Guardian AU), Religious discrimination bill would create barrier's to women's healthcare, advocates warn.
  
• Kevin Blowe (copwatcher, Medium blog), It's not just a bunch of flowers: "This is why for me, supporting Extinction Rebellion in a spirit of cooperation and friendship over the first week of its protests has, at times, been extraordinarily difficult — particularly due to its invariably tin-eared insensibility about the nature of policing and the state."
  
• Jeff Sparrow (New Matilda), Anti-Vietnam War protests also outraged politicians, conservatives and media. Offers historical comparisons and perspectives to contextualise XR protests and reactions to them in Australia.
  

Historical, cultural, scientific, misc

• Cat Pausé (The Conversation), Changing the terminology to 'people with obesity' won't reduce stigma and may in fact worsen it.
  
• Indiana Seresin (The New Inquiry), On heteropessimism:
  

  “Heterosexuality is a prison!” a chorus declared, vocalizing one of heteropessimism’s central maxims. Many of those who seized the opportunity to mock Straight Pride and its appropriately drab flag were, unsurprisingly, queer, yet a sizable number of straight people could also be found in the fray. A quick Twitter search of the phrase “heterosexuality is a prison” reveals that it is attached just as often to complaints made from within heterosexual experience as to queers thanking their lucky stars they were born gay.
  Confronted by Straight Pride, many are keen to emphasize that they are not that kind of heterosexual, that they are, in fact, ashamed of being straight, and that, not to be dramatic, they see heterosexuality as a prison within which they are confined against their will. (The prevalence of the prison metaphor could be taken as a reassuring indication of abolitionism going mainstream or a worrying reminder of how easily incarceration is still trivialized in the popular imagination.) Their disavowals are akin to white people making jokes about “stuff white people like,” a connection that makes sense given the sinister intimacy between Straight Pride and white-supremacist organizing. Yet while trying to redeem oneself from whiteness or heterosexuality through performative distancing mechanisms might seem progressive, the reality is usually little more than an abdication of responsibility. If heteropessimism’s purpose is personal absolution, it cannot also be justice.

  
  As a bi woman with a growing (?) preference for women, I... have a lot of feels about this. I sure am pessimistic about dating (straight?) men, but I take that as a sign that, well, I shouldn't... do that then? I am both sympathetic to and alienated by Straight Women Complaining About Heterosexual Life. (And likewise by many spiels about how their *particular* marriage is different.)
  
• Josefin Waltin (personal blog), Flax retting. Now I know how flax is processed.
  
• Jude Rogers and Ammar Kalia (Guardian UK), Grassroots music: the rebirth of political folk. Grace Petrie's wish is granted and the Guardian believes that she exists.
  
• Gastro Obscura, Moose cheese at the Elk House. Where to eat moose/elk cheese: Sweden.
  
• Minda Honey (LitHub), Finding the freedom to rage against our fathers.
  
• Cynthia Graller, (Electric Lit), Literary lists are records of female desire:
  

  Are women’s literary lists intrinsically different from men’s? It’s tempting to see them as a part of a larger effort by female authors over the centuries to claim agency through fragments like diary entries or letters. Unlike a collection, which subsumes parts in a whole, a list yearns with each entry, honoring its disparate items. In the case of many female lit listers, their catalogs desire to transform both author and readers through that longing.

  
  
• Katie Simon (The Lily), The sexual abuse I experienced as a young girl was overlooked. After 20 years, I found a story that speaks to me.
  

Comments

[dragonlady7]

Oh that's a fantastic link about the flax!
I grew flax this year and have gotten as far as the rippling stage. I have. Uh. Rather a lot. So I'm delighted to see someone really spinning theirs.
Flax was a huge industry locally, here, but rather abruptly vanished around WWI, so. There's hackles hanging up in every old barn, but all the other equipment is long-vanished. I've just managed to get myself a set of plans to make reproduction tools, today.

[highlyeccentric]

I think it was your photos of flax that sent me researching!

[dragonlady7]

LOL, fantastic!
I keep coincidentally finding more links about flax-- a city only about three hours away from me had an event where they processed somebody's flax last Saturday and if I'd known about it in any kind of advance I could've shown up, it's just the opposite direction from where I usually travel. Er, that's not that well-phrased, it wasn't a city-sponsored event, it was some people who were in the city... near the city... anyway. Sorry I've been awake like five minutes and am not at my best expressing myself.

Literally yesterday my former coworker handed me a folder full of giant folded bits of paper with architectural-style plans for how to build flax equipment, which his mother had borrowed from a museum where she used to work, and I'm very excited not to have to improvise or invent tools-- though the link you had up there did give some good ideas for improvising the various equipment, I have about ten times as much to get through-- twenty times, if you count unicornduke 's stuff-- and it'd take me years at that rate. I'm hoping to get enough local interest that people will want to come help me...

[wrabbit]

Your link posts are great and I appreciate them!

[highlyeccentric]

Thanks!