Linkage
Pics of a hand-made dolls house of Bag End.
About how to use a semi colon.
Losing massive amounts of weight through yoga.
10 oddest legal defences: I like the attempt to call a parrot as a witness the most.
A very personal account of dealing with a pregnancy where the child was identified as severely handicapped.
The American Association of Pediatrics has significantly softened its opposition to female genital mutilation.
Mapping the history of the horn of Africa since 1829.
A Chinese Indonesian who is breaking a stereotype.
Unearthing an early C20th sex survey of women.
An amusing blog war over allegations of plagiarism.
A case of mutilating misogyny in Afghanistan.
Robert Fisk highlights Western indifference to those languishing in Arab Gulags.
Worrying that the social division and immobility plaguing Britain might be replicated in the US.
White separatist Eugene Terreblanche hacked to death by two farmhands who worked for him.
Arguing that authoritarianism is on the march:
The books identify a convergence of forces: the influence of China's authoritarian capitalism, skepticism over free markets in the wake of the financial crisis, and the willingness of millions of people to exchange individual rights for a secure middle-class life.
Arguing Turkish politics are displaying ominous tendencies. 16 years after the genocide, Rwanda is a safer, cleaner place but not a freer one.
The experience of being a Jew in Damascus:
My German friends were often greeted by shop-owners with a Heil Hitler while expressing their love for the Third Reich. …
Against this backdrop of hatred and indoctrination were the good people, those whom I could tell I was Jewish and had been to Israel. They were, more often than not, minorities who felt threatened by the government or the majority Sunni population. They were Armenians, Christians, Muslim Kurds, seculars and homosexuals--this last minority group officially does not exist in Syria.
Migration and fertility are trending in the favour of Israeli Jews and against Palestinian Arabs.
A moving rendition of a life burdened by mental illness:
So it came as a shock, some months into her travels, to receive the phone call. Jill was in an Irish insane asylum. My beautiful, intuitive, intelligent aunt, who had introduced me to the films of Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, who explained history and geography and philosophy to me, who took me to book stores, was restrained with leather straps in a hospital for the deranged.
There had been some kind of psychotic episode. A major one, clearly. We learned just how major when Jill returned to Australia. Previously slender, she was now desperately gaunt. Previously expressive, she was now an automaton. Previously my aunt, she was now a stranger.
Clive Hamilton plain just doesn’t like people:
But this often anti-capitalist posing is no friend of the people. Rather, what emerges from the misanthropic wreckage of Requiem for a Species is a distaste for the aspirations not just of CEOs or their cohorts in the political class, but of ordinary people, too. And no wonder. Because we are what really sticks in Hamilton’s craw. It just doesn’t add up for Hamilton: why do the vast majority of the world’s population not act on the moral lesson?
The ethical dilemmas of our time:
Did you know that a sustainably reared chicken, because it lives longer and eats more, has 20 per cent more impact on global warming than an intensively farmed battery chook?
And also:
Recently when I was chatting with some expats in a nearby village, one of them, a green economist, rounded on me furiously. Why hadn’t I converted to solar? Did I not realise that I was single-handedly destroying the planet? In some indignation I questioned her about her own use of solar. A pause. Actually she didn’t use it at all because, she explained, solar panels were forbidden in her village, and besides her property was far too small to accommodate them. I asked her if she could lend me about €20,000. “Are you insane?” she yelped. “Who has money like that lying about?” Exactly.
About workshops on eliminating one’s inner racist:
Even basic communication with friends and fellow activists, I observed, was a plodding agony of self-censorship, in which every syllable was scrutinized for subconscious racist connotations as it was leaving their mouths.
While politically correct campus activists often come across as smug and single-minded, I realized, their intellectual life might more accurately be described as bipolar -- combining an ecstatic self-conception as high priestesses who pronounce upon the racist sins of our society, alongside extravagant self-mortification in regard to their own fallen state.
Also, the notion that capitalism and racism have some intimate connection is deeply stupid.
About how to use a semi colon.
Losing massive amounts of weight through yoga.
10 oddest legal defences: I like the attempt to call a parrot as a witness the most.
A very personal account of dealing with a pregnancy where the child was identified as severely handicapped.
The American Association of Pediatrics has significantly softened its opposition to female genital mutilation.
Mapping the history of the horn of Africa since 1829.
A Chinese Indonesian who is breaking a stereotype.
Unearthing an early C20th sex survey of women.
An amusing blog war over allegations of plagiarism.
A case of mutilating misogyny in Afghanistan.
Robert Fisk highlights Western indifference to those languishing in Arab Gulags.
Worrying that the social division and immobility plaguing Britain might be replicated in the US.
White separatist Eugene Terreblanche hacked to death by two farmhands who worked for him.
Arguing that authoritarianism is on the march:
The books identify a convergence of forces: the influence of China's authoritarian capitalism, skepticism over free markets in the wake of the financial crisis, and the willingness of millions of people to exchange individual rights for a secure middle-class life.
Arguing Turkish politics are displaying ominous tendencies. 16 years after the genocide, Rwanda is a safer, cleaner place but not a freer one.
The experience of being a Jew in Damascus:
My German friends were often greeted by shop-owners with a Heil Hitler while expressing their love for the Third Reich. …
Against this backdrop of hatred and indoctrination were the good people, those whom I could tell I was Jewish and had been to Israel. They were, more often than not, minorities who felt threatened by the government or the majority Sunni population. They were Armenians, Christians, Muslim Kurds, seculars and homosexuals--this last minority group officially does not exist in Syria.
Migration and fertility are trending in the favour of Israeli Jews and against Palestinian Arabs.
A moving rendition of a life burdened by mental illness:
So it came as a shock, some months into her travels, to receive the phone call. Jill was in an Irish insane asylum. My beautiful, intuitive, intelligent aunt, who had introduced me to the films of Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, who explained history and geography and philosophy to me, who took me to book stores, was restrained with leather straps in a hospital for the deranged.
There had been some kind of psychotic episode. A major one, clearly. We learned just how major when Jill returned to Australia. Previously slender, she was now desperately gaunt. Previously expressive, she was now an automaton. Previously my aunt, she was now a stranger.
Clive Hamilton plain just doesn’t like people:
But this often anti-capitalist posing is no friend of the people. Rather, what emerges from the misanthropic wreckage of Requiem for a Species is a distaste for the aspirations not just of CEOs or their cohorts in the political class, but of ordinary people, too. And no wonder. Because we are what really sticks in Hamilton’s craw. It just doesn’t add up for Hamilton: why do the vast majority of the world’s population not act on the moral lesson?
The ethical dilemmas of our time:
Did you know that a sustainably reared chicken, because it lives longer and eats more, has 20 per cent more impact on global warming than an intensively farmed battery chook?
And also:
Recently when I was chatting with some expats in a nearby village, one of them, a green economist, rounded on me furiously. Why hadn’t I converted to solar? Did I not realise that I was single-handedly destroying the planet? In some indignation I questioned her about her own use of solar. A pause. Actually she didn’t use it at all because, she explained, solar panels were forbidden in her village, and besides her property was far too small to accommodate them. I asked her if she could lend me about €20,000. “Are you insane?” she yelped. “Who has money like that lying about?” Exactly.
About workshops on eliminating one’s inner racist:
Even basic communication with friends and fellow activists, I observed, was a plodding agony of self-censorship, in which every syllable was scrutinized for subconscious racist connotations as it was leaving their mouths.
While politically correct campus activists often come across as smug and single-minded, I realized, their intellectual life might more accurately be described as bipolar -- combining an ecstatic self-conception as high priestesses who pronounce upon the racist sins of our society, alongside extravagant self-mortification in regard to their own fallen state.
Also, the notion that capitalism and racism have some intimate connection is deeply stupid.