Linkage

In a bizarre new article titled “White House frustrated by Israel’s onslaught but sees few options,” The Washington Post reports that the Biden administration believes Israel has gone too far and is killing too many civilians in its assault on Gaza, but are powerless to do anything about it.

[…] 

In summary, this Washington Post article is telling us that Biden is powerless to stop the genocidal massacre in Gaza because he really likes the people doing the genocide and doesn’t want to stop them from doing it.

We’ve been asked to believe a lot of very stupid things since this onslaught began last month, but the idea that the Biden administration is powerless to stop a genocide that it is directly arming and supplying has got to be the absolute stupidest.

This looks very good. (Of course it's very good; Jeremy Keith wrote it.) Just read the first part and I'm hooked. So little time…

The World Wide Web has been around for long enough now that we can begin to evaluate the twists and turns of its evolution. I wrote this book to highlight some of the approaches to web design that have proven to be resilient. I didn’t do this purely out of historical interest (although I am fascinated by the already rich history of our young industry). In learning from the past, I believe we can better prepare for the future.

You won’t find any code in here to help you build better websites. But you will find ideas and approaches. Ideas are more resilient than code. I’ve tried to combine the most resilient ideas from the history of web design into an approach for building the websites of the future.

This paper examines whether homeowner opposition to nearby housing development affects local councillors’ votes on housing bills. Homeowners benefit financially from restricted housing supply through increased housing prices. City councillors, who approve housing development applications, cater to the needs of homeowners who are often long-term resident voters with a financial stake in neighbourhood amenity levels. Using data from Toronto, Canada from 2009 to 2020, we identify housing bills through a machine learning algorithm. We find that councillors who represent more homeowners oppose more housing bills. In particular, councillors are significantly more likely to oppose large housing developments if the project is within their own ward.

We are Jewish writers, artists, and activists who wish to disavow the widespread narrative that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. Israel and its defenders have long used this rhetorical tactic to shield Israel from accountability, dignify the US’s multibillion-dollar investment in Israel’s military, obscure the deadly reality of occupation, and deny Palestinian sovereignty. Now, this insidious gagging of free speech is being used to justify Israel’s ongoing military bombardment of Gaza and to silence criticism from the international community.

We condemn the recent attacks on Israeli and Palestinian civilians and mourn such harrowing loss of life. In our grief, we are horrified to see the fight against antisemitism weaponized as a pretext for war crimes with stated genocidal intent.

Last month, Israel arrested over 2,000 Palestinians, subjecting them to degrading treatment that amounts to torture. The failure of our governments to demand the release of these hostages exposes their rank hypocrisy.

Loyalty is often touted as a moral principle, or virtue, worth exemplifying in social and business relations. But is it always beneficial to be loyal? We investigate possible negative consequences of being a loyal employee in the workplace. Instead of protecting or rewarding them, loyal employees are selectively and ironically targeted by managers for exploitative practices (Studies 1–2). The targeting of these loyal workers is mediated by the assumption that loyal individuals are readily willing to make personal sacrifices for the objects of their loyalty (Study 1). We then find evidence for the reverse causal pathway: workers who agree (versus refuse) to be exploited in the workplace acquire stronger reputations for loyalty (Studies 3 and 4). These bidirectional causal links between loyalty and exploitation have the potential to create a vicious circle of suffering. We discuss the implications of these results for obtaining a reputation for loyalty.

The owners of the Corkman hotel site in Carlton will build a replica of the heritage pub they illegally demolished seven years ago.

In 2016, Raman Shaqiri and Stefce Kutlesovski knocked down the pub that had stood on the site since 1854. They had no planning permission or building permit.

The pair bought the Corkman Irish Pub for almost $5 million in 2015 and plans obtained by The Age soon after the demolition showed them considering a 12-storey student housing project on the site.

After public outrage at the brazen demolition, then planning minister Richard Wynne ordered that the pub be immediately rebuilt. But after a drawn-out legal battle, the pair were given an alternative: get a new plan for the site approved by the planning minister or rebuild the heritage facade.

The mainstream, elite media seems especially flummoxed by the new Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson was an obscure back-bencher on Capitol Hill and remains a man of mystery with no apparent bank account or tangible assets. But the extremism of his Christian nationalist views — more radical than anything seen in American history — are no secret. Johnson believes that our country should be ruled by his own brand of religious fundamentalism which posits that the Earth is only 6,000 years old but inspires hateful policies toward the LGBTQ community and fringe opposition to women’s abortion rights.

That danger isn’t conveyed in business-as-usual fluff pieces like the Washington Post’s “House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana hometown guided by faith and family” article in which neighbors hailed the softer side of a man who was at the center of schemes to block the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Another Post piece questioned whether Democrats could truly make a political boogeyman out of Johnson given “his low profile and quiet tone” — as if Christo-fascism isn’t so bad when delivered in a gentle drawl, from behind oversized dad glasses.

Photographer Andrew Chapman was 20 years old and at photographic college in 1974 when he started an assignment documenting the housing commission flats around Melbourne.

‘Back in those days you could just walk into a block of flats, take the lift up to the top floor and take photographs. It’s hard to believe it was that easy, but they were different times’

Johnson is a perfect avatar for this project of marrying Christian nationalism with Trumpism. He’s soft-spoken in ways that hide his extremism. He’s a folksy fanatic—as Nelson notes: “Even some LGBTQ activists have acknowledged his winning ways, as he undermines their very right to exist. After the prolonged, acrimonious process of selecting a Speaker, his humorous, aw-shucks manner may have come as a relief to his weary colleagues.”

But make no mistake: He is among the most extreme Republicans around. Speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox, Johnson described himself as “a Bible-believing Christian” and said that if you want to understand his politics, “pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”

In a 2003 article, Johnson wrote an editorial declaring, “States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe [forbid] same-sex deviate sexual intercourse…. Proscriptions against sodomy have deep roots in religion, politics, and law.” He has described abortion as “a Holocaust.”