Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Short essays, current affairs, hot takes:

• ABC Illawarra report on a community-owned and -run funeral service offering woven coffins and choral music. Neat concept, deserves expansion.
• Al Jazeera on twitter has a good informational video on the history of country music and the banning of Lil Nas X's 'Old Town Road' from the Bilboard Country Music Charts. Video doesn't have audio (subtitles only).
  
• Australian parliament clusterfuckus: Liberal politicians announce environment grant recipients before applications open.
• Golriz Gharaman (NZ Green party MP) on the limited rights protections in NZ law. Follow through for video:
  

  We're not immune from the politics of hate speech leaking into NZ from all over the world and allowed to grow here unchecked.
  Most of us would be shocked to find our laws don't protect religious groups, gender or the Rainbow community.
  Time for change! pic.twitter.com/a20fMBAdYf

  — Golriz Ghahraman (@golrizghahraman) April 3, 2019

  
  
• NYT interview with Hannah Gadsby on autism, Douglass, and the risks of failure after Nanette.

Longreads - essay, memoir, natural history, other

• Louis Beckett (The Guardian): Fifty Shades of White: the long fight against racism in romance novels. Like everyone else on Twitter, I read this and was both flabbgergasted at some specific quotes and deeply unsurprised over all.
• Mark McKenna (Meanjin): In Search of Emily. McKenna revisits a historical court case he included in his book Looking for Blackfellas' Point. A white woman, Emily Wintle, who had been a foster child (/domestic servant) in the household of a rich white landowner near Bega, came forward to police after her marriage with an account of the secret birth of a mixed-race child to one of the landowners daughters, and the subsequent infanticide of the child. McKenna included the court records in his book. Now, armed with the greater resources of Trove's digital archives, and multiple different people's family oral history accounts, he assembles Emily Wintle's life story. The subject matter is pretty rough going at times, but engaging, and McKenna does a glorious job of both presenting a readable narrative and showing his working as an archival historian.
• Pang Khee Teik (Queer Lapis), Selective liberal outrage against Brunei is missing the point:
  

  Judging from the news and accompanying outrage against Brunei, one would think that gays have been specially singled out for violent capital punishment in that country. However, the fact is that the Sharia Penal Code (SPC) that go into effect this week in Brunei includes amputation for theft, death penalty for apostasy, as well as stoning to death for adultery and same gender sexual acts. Non-Muslims are not spared and minors could be whipped too. As an LGBT rights activist working in Malaysia, I am disturbed by this global trend of reporting which gives the impression that the killing of gay people is the only crime worth the outrage. Should we not be equally outraged by amputation of limbs, death for apostasy, whipping of children, and other crimes against humanity?

  It makes me wonder if this baiting of liberal outrage has an undercurrent of Islamophobia driving it. If so, this allows countries like Brunei to frame human rights not only as oppositional to Islamic laws, but as an attack on their sovereignty. This selective liberal outrage unhelpfully lends itself to the narrative that the west is encroaching upon their Islamic values through LGBT rights, justifying their attempt to keep out all things un-Islamic.

• Carolyn Centeno Milton (Forbes), Does unconscious bias effect our sustainable lifestyle choices. Including such ridiculous (but not really surprising) news as 'give a man a pink gift card and he's less likely to choose an eco-friendly shopping bag, apparently as a way of balancing his masculinity'.
• Julie Jargon (The Star, but I think syndicated from the Wall Street Journal?), Why video games trigger the nightly meltdown and how to help your child cope. An astonishingly balanced and insightful approach, including specifically advising not to take your child to a therapy centre focusing on video-game addiction because 'they will deal with the gaming addiction and give you your depressed child back'.

Caveats for readers: I like comments. I am, broadly speaking, open to discussing the things I post! I am not, however, happy for anyone to turn up and drag the lowest common denominator down below 101 level. I teach critical thinking for a job, I have no intention of doing so here. Whatabout-ery, sealioning, dragging in stale talking points from dudebro athiests of the early 21st century, covert white supremacist dogwhistles, whatever else you come up with to drag the conversation back to the lowest common denominator, will not be met kindly.

I can't guarantee I will never circulate a Bad Take, of course not. I read too widely outside my own experience / field of expertise to be sure of that. And I know perfectly well that within a given marginalisation there can be wildly different stances. But for the sake of everyone's sanity, it would be vastly appreciated if, when you read a piece by someone [in x category you're not in], and you find them to be, shock, Wrong On The Internet, you think for twenty seconds about the possibility that they might be right and your critical frameworks wrong.

(From personal experience, I can suggest that if you keep seeing wildly conflicting internet takes, or are observing someone else's intra-community fight from the outside, it helps... to go read a book. A book by and about the community in question (so no, Dawkins on Islamophobia doesn't count. Negative points). The internet versions are always the most shouty, and usually presume a range of pre-existing assumptions that a book will either unpack, or flag in its introduction as foundational concepts.)