Linkage

It is impossible to read anything by Mehdi Hasan without hearing it in his voice. Fact.

Consider the record of recent weeks and months:

• Israel’s prime minister, while standing on stage at the UN general assembly, denounced the body as “contemptible”, a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile”.
• Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the UN shredded a copy of the UN charter with a miniature paper shredder while also standing at the podium of the general assembly, and later said the UN headquarters in New York “should be closed and wiped off the face of the Earth”.
• Israel’s foreign minister falsely accused the UN secretary general of not having condemned Iran’s attacks on Israel, declared him “persona non grata in Israel” and announced that he had “banned him from entering the country”.
• The Israeli government actively obstructed a UN-mandated commission of inquiry trying to collect evidence on the 7 October attacks.
• Israel’s parliament is in the process of designating a longstanding UN agency, Unrwa, as a “terrorist organization”.
• The Israeli military has bombed UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps in Gaza for 12 consecutive months, and killed a record 228 UN employees in the process. “By far the highest number of our personnel killed in a single conflict or natural disaster since the creation of the United Nations,” to quote the UN secretary general.
• The Israeli military is now also attacking UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. According to the UN, “five UN ‘Blue Helmets’ serving with UNIFIL in Lebanon have been injured as Israeli forces inflicted damage on UN positions close to the ‘Blue Line’.”

How is any of this OK? Acceptable? Legal?

Perhaps the biggest question of all: how is Israel still allowed to remain a member of the UN? Why has it not yet been expelled from an organization that it is relentlessly and shamelessly attacking and undermining? Sure, there are other human rights abusers that remain card-carrying members of the UN – Syria, Russia and North Korea, to name but a few – but none of them have killed UN employees en masse; none of them have sent tanks to invade a UN base; none of them have “refused to comply with more than two dozen UNSC resolutions”. It has been more than 60 years since any country in the world dared make the UN secretary general himself “persona non grata”.

In Australia, we do much the same by putting a cost premium on dangerous knowledge.

Florida’s public universities are purging the list of general education courses they will offer next year to fall in line with a state law pushed for by Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting “woke ideologies” in higher education.

These decisions, in many cases being driven by the university system’s Board of Governors, have the potential to affect faculty and thousands of students across the state. Hundreds of courses are slated to become electives after previously counting toward graduation requirements, which university professors and free speech advocates fear is just the first step toward those classes disappearing entirely.

The state’s involvement in a curriculum process — which has historically been left to universities — is riling academics and students who oppose how officials are using new authority to weed out courses like Anthropology of Race & Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender, and Women in Literature.

“This sort of state overreach could spell disaster for student and faculty retention, and the academic standing of Florida institutions,” said Katie Blankenship, who leads a state office for free speech advocacy group PEN America.

Yet the Board of Governors maintains that the state is merely carrying out the intent of the GOP-dominated Legislature, which in 2023 called for a wholesale review of general education offerings to ensure the courses stray from teaching “identity politics” and avoid “unproven, speculative, or exploratory” content.

This is from a few years ago, and fits with first-hand experience.

The class action comes as Coles faces legal action from the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) over alleged underpayment of its managers. The FWO puts the underpayment at more than $100 million between 2017 and 2020.

In a statement made after filing proceedings in the Federal Court last week, the FWO alleges one worker was underpaid $471,647 during the period.

Beneath those hard numbers are the personal stories of almost 8,000 Coles managers like Ms Macdonald, for whom the allegations represent not only underpayment but years of stress and anxiety while working for the supermarket giant.

[…] Adero Law principal Rory Markham, who is running the class action against Coles, says the company has vastly underestimated the underpayments.

"When you're paid a flat salary, as in the case of Coles managers, there's no allowance for overtime or excessive hours," he says.

He says information from the roughly 2,200 salaried staff who have signed up for the class action show they were working an average of 55 to 65 hours a week — well above their typical contracted roster of 40 hours.

In any big trial that attracts public interest, a defendant can hope to draw on public sympathy. Except in this case.

In 2024 the social licence of the big supermarkets is utterly broken — their reputations befouled, their brands synonymous with impersonal corporate rapacity. This is an awful time for them to be attempting to mount a defence to a major charge.

[…]

I’m going to share a quote from Chief Justice of the High Court Stephen Gageler, one of Australia’s senior jurists, that ACCC boss Cass-Gottlieb recently highlighted in a speech. It talks about the definition of “unconscionable conduct” and points out that what is unconscionable must depend on society’s values.

“For a court to pronounce conduct unconscionable is for the court to denounce that conduct as offensive to conscience informed by a sense of what is right and proper according to values that can be recognised by the courts to prevail with contemporary Australian society,” she quoted him.

Contemporary Australian society is not interested in giving the supermarkets an easy pass. In this case a tiny fine will not satisfy the public. The customers of Woolworths and Coles include Australia’s most vulnerable people.

It's also worth remembering that supermarket employees include Australia's most vulnerable people.

It clears up a lot of confusion when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run nonstop military operations, it’s a nonstop military operation that happens to run a national government.

The wars are not designed to serve the interests of the United States, the United States is designed to serve the interests of the wars. The US as a country is just a source of funding, personnel, resources and diplomatic cover for a nonstop campaign to dominate the planet with mass military violence and the threat thereof.

This campaign is not waged to benefit the American people or their security, but to benefit the loose international alliance of plutocrats and unelected empire managers whose wealth and power are premised on the world order of continuous violence, exploitation and extraction which the campaign of global domination upholds. This campaign of global domination and its manifestations as a whole may be referred to as the US empire, which has very little in common with the US as an individual nation.

Until you understand this, nothing the US government or the US war machine does will make sense.

This isn't earth-shatteringly important. Just kind of sweet.

I had become resigned to living the rest of my life as if it belonged to someone I emailed with a few times but never actually met, but then came an unexpected 12-month span that turned everything around. My son had graduated from college and my daughter had just started, so they had clearly moved on with their lives. I discovered home movies of my biological dad, who had died before I was born so I’d never seen anything but some photos of him. I turned 60. And there was a pandemic, which brought with it endless hours of isolation and contemplation.

[…]

Once you’re past 60, your internal “fuck counter” hits zero, so I have none left to give. I don’t have time to waste worrying about what others think of me. I only have time to let others see that it’s never too late to be who you’ve always wanted to be.

It’s taken so long for me to find my path, but now that I have, walking along it appears to suit me. Recently, I had drinks with some friends I hadn’t seen for a while. After a couple of minutes, one of them stared at me, waving her hands in my direction, and said, “This just feels right.” That was a phrase I honestly never thought I’d hear.

In retrospect, the most honest and accurate rendering of Biden’s policy was found in his remarks to donors last December, in which he assured them that, while his administration would continue seeking to build a broader regional security architecture, “we’re not going to do a damn thing other than protect Israel in the process. Not a single thing.” If he was willing to constrain Israel at all, it was mainly in preventing the war from spreading beyond Gaza. This was perhaps his true and only red line for many months. Israel would be free to turn Gaza into a killing field, provided it didn’t escalate regionally. Yet today, Netanyahu is rolling over that red line too in Lebanon, and possibly soon in Iran, to the exultation of all of those who have been most stupendously and consistently wrong about the region over the past 20 years.

And why shouldn’t he? By taking the option of suspending military aid off the table, Biden signaled from the outset that his red lines were meaningless. 

[…]

The story that is now being crafted through friendly journalists is that Biden tried his best but his effort to bring the war to an end was ultimately frustrated by Netanyahu’s shenanigans. But Biden wasn’t hoodwinked by Netanyahu any more than he was by George W. Bush when he chose to back the Iraq War. He chose this path, and stayed on it despite constant warnings of exactly where it was leading. Having done so, when he exits the White House, he and his team will leave this world a more dangerous and lawless place, America’s credibility more broken, the so-called “rules-based order” even more “so-called” than when he entered. 

“The costs of these new rules of war” that Biden has co-authored in Gaza, wrote Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, “will be paid with the blood of civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the U.S. responsibility for enabling, defending, and normalizing these new rules, and their horrific, dehumanizing consequences will not be forgotten.”

This is why I find the "attacking LGBTQ people is a vote loser," arguments no consolation. There are six good (i.e. bad) reasons why fascists do it, and winning votes is only one of them:

This report explores the connection between two escalating crises: the systematic targeting of LGBTQ communities and democratic backsliding worldwide.

It examines how the rhetorical, political, and physical attacks targeting the LGBTQ community are, in addition to a critical rights issue, a key tactic in the authoritarian playbook, cloaking themselves as culture war politics as usual. 

[…]

It outlines six goals of LGBTQ scapegoating: 

• Stigmatize: By censoring discussions and depictions of marginalized groups, perpetrators further stigmatize them, reinforcing their status as scapegoats.

• Mobilize a Base: Turning LGBTQ communities into a common enemy energizes and consolidates political support among certain factions.

• Win Elections: Exploiting fears related to the scapegoat helps gain electoral support and secure victories in political contests.

• Polarize: Manufacturing controversies along fault lines unifies authoritarian movements and sows divisions within a political opposition.

• Distract: Inflaming fear, disgust, and anger at scapegoats diverts attention from critical issues, government failures, or unpopular policies.

• Normalize Political Violence: Targeting LGBTQ individuals through intimidation, violence, and militia activities desensitizes the public to violence against this group and society at large.

Today both researchers and policy-makers agree that refugees admitted to the European Union constitute a net cost and fiscal burden for the receiving societies. As is often claimed, there is a trade-off between refugee migration and the fiscal sustainability of the welfare state. In this lecture, Peo Hansen shows that this consensual cost-perspective on migration is built on a flawed economic conception of the orthodox “sound finance” doctrine. By shifting perspective to examine migration through the macroeconomic lens offered by Modern Monetary Theory, Hansen is able to demonstrate sound finance’s detrimental impact on migration policy and research. Most importantly, this undertaking offers the tools with which both migration research and migration policy could be modernized and put on a realistic footing. Empirically, the lecture brings these tools to bear on the case of Sweden, the country that, proportionally speaking, has received the most refugees in the EU over the years while also having one of the most comprehensive welfare states in the EU.

This is genius:

Academic publishers claim that they add value to scholarly communications by coordinating reviews and contributing and enhancing text during publication. These contributions come at a considerable cost: US academic libraries paid ($1.7) billion for serial subscriptions in 2008 alone. Library budgets, in contrast, are flat and not able to keep pace with serial price inflation. We have investigated the publishers’ value proposition by conducting a comparative study of pre-print papers from two distinct science, technology, and medicine corpora and their final published counterparts. This comparison had two working assumptions: (1) If the publishers’ argument is valid, the text of a pre-print paper should vary measurably from its corresponding final published version, and (2) by applying standard similarity measures, we should be able to detect and quantify such differences. Our analysis revealed that the text contents of the scientific papers generally changed very little from their pre-print to final published versions. These findings contribute empirical indicators to discussions of the added value of commercial publishers and therefore should influence libraries’ economic decisions regarding access to scholarly publications.