Politics:
And more, on toxic masculinity and the system that caters to it:
Men who are likely to commit sexual assault will do so drunk or sober. (Women can be aggressors and men can be targets; we’re focusing here on the vast majority of assaults, in which men are the aggressors and women the targets.) “Men who commit sexual assault when drinking alcohol are similar to men who commit sexual assault when sober in most aspects of their personality and attitudes,” found one meta-analysis (a study of many studies). Factors like hypermasculinity and belief in rigid gender norms were what mattered, not alcohol consumption.
The Washington Post: Alcohol isn’t the cause of campus sexual assault. Men are., June 10, 2016
On the legally precarious situation of LGBTQI refugees:
All refugees carry with them a range of intersecting identities which they hope to be able to express, even as policy and media discourses often construct certain favourable identities within the framework of asylum and migration while ignoring a wide array of other identities. In some cases, refugees are often stripped of their individuality because they have been identified singularly as refugees. Within the context of this identity politics, LGBTI refugees learn to carefully adapt their identity to manoeuvre through the power relations of everything from securing housing and employment to interactions with local authorities and international NGOs.
openDemocracy: Fleeing for simply being: the legal and subjective battles faced by LGBTI refugees, June 13, 2016
I haven't written about the upcoming Brexit vote at all (this is horrible), but living abroad, I have had a few conversations attempting to explain the European Union, and its benefits beyond a simple economic analysis - in short, the European Union as an evolving but miraculous project that is problematic in many ways (not only for having been guided primarily by neo-liberal principles for so long) but also historically unique.
To put the matter in perspective, imagine for a moment how the world would look if the international system worked like the EU.
First off, suppose that entry into global free trade arrangements was conditional on the more or less genuine implementation of democracy and human rights. Imagine, say, that a state couldn’t join the IMF, the WTO or the World Bank without demonstrating that it complied with the Universal Charter of Human Rights and accepting the jurisdiction of an International Court of Human Rights to which its citizens could appeal and which, unlike the International Criminal Court, actually worked.
Now suppose, in this world of democracies, that the General Assembly of the United Nations had real authority which it used to regulate on matters of global importance beyond the competence of any one state, upholding environmental, labour and safety standards, holding transnational corporations to account and ensuring that free trade wasn’t a race to the bottom.
openDemocracy: We can only contemplate leaving the EU because its miracles have become banal, June 13, 2016
But, talking about the dark side of the European Union, The EU-Turkey migration agreement is terrible.
There is now a potential visible future in which Hillary Clinton is the first female President of the United States and Elizabeth Warren, who eviscerates Donald Trump into nothingness, is her Vice President. Oh the wonders and horrors of 2016. Also, Bernie Sanders seems to have dropped out of the race.
A detailled aesthetic analysis of why suburbs are soul-crushing hell zones.
I've read a lot of articles after Orlando, but this one by Sean Kelly in The Monthly, about the privileges that straight couples enjoy in public spaces, stood out.
So this is an attack on freedom, yes, but more particularly it is an attack on those in our society who have proved how truly awesome that freedom is by fighting for it, and by continuing to fight for it long past the point where all the freedoms which add up to equality should have begun to look like common sense.
The Monthly: An act of hatred in Orlando, June 14, 2016
Pop Culture:
The Toast is doing a glorious victory lap before closing down.
About Joan Didion's politics/conservatism.
I watched The VVitch recently and... liked it a lot, anyway here's an insightful interview about the historical accuracy of religious thought in 17th century Puritan America.
All of the IPA (except flavoured, obviously).
Evelyne Brochu is a troll and also these two weeks will bring the end of Person of Interest (HOW APOCALYPTIC WILL IT BE?) and the fourth season of Orphan Black, which has been renewed for a fifth and final season.
No comments:
Post a Comment