Tuesday 29 March 2016

Links 29/3/16 compact edition

Politics: 

On Brussels, in  many ways the centre of the European Union, a place that means nothing without freedom of movement: 
Brussels, that magnificent repository of history, with its Renaissance guild houses and nineteenth-century palaces built on fortunes made in the Congo, is the capital of Belgium, but few Belgians take much pride in it, in the way the French are proud of Paris, or the British of London. Flemish politicians and businessmen prefer to live in Antwerp or Ghent. To many Belgians, Brussels is a strange city of immigrants, refugees, and foreign grandees. It is still a capital in search of a nation. And if you include the EU, it is also a capital in search of an empire, or a federal state, or whatever it is that Europe is destined to become. 
The New York Review of Books: In the Capital of Europe

Death by Gentrification in San Francisco:
Nieto died because a series of white men saw him as a menacing intruder in the place he had spent his whole life. They thought he was possibly a gang member because he was wearing a red jacket. Many Latino boys and men in San Francisco avoid wearing red and blue because they are the colours of two gangs, the Norteños and Sureños – but the colours of San Francisco’s football team, the 49ers, are red and gold. Wearing a 49ers jacket in San Francisco is as ordinary as wearing a Saints jersey in New Orleans. 
Anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara creates short films that create a picture of what it is like to live in Syria.

About the ethics of growth-attenuation for severely disabled children: 
At its core, the battle over growth attenuation is a battle between old and new ways of thinking about disability: the old “medical model,” which regards disabilities as a problem to be fixed, and the new, “social model,” which frames disability as a natural facet of the human experience. The social model promotes self-determination for those who have even the most complex disabilities; society should adapt to them, not the other way around. 
NY Times: Should Parents of Children With Severe Disabilities Be Allowed to Stop Their Growth?, March 22, 2016
Buzzfeed on how the black people are shut out of the boom in the legal marijuana business.

This is a horrible story about male entitlement and sexual hostility in American national parks. 

Pop Culture: 

Ellen Page's and Ian Thomas' Gaycation. a four-part series on LGTBTQI communities in Japan, Brazil, Jamaica and the US, was a careful, insightful masterpiece driven by humanism - and at the same time endlessly frustrating, as attempts to make homophobes and misogynists comprehend that they are talking to and about other humans continually failed. 

Statistics on what it is like to watch television as an LGTBTQ viewer.

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