Linkage

Believe it or not, a whole lot of what you’ve heard about being trans—from this to the whole “born in the wrong body” thing to a lot of other stuff—was made up by cisgender doctors back in the 1960’s, because they believed it was their duty to keep as many people from transitioning as possible. It’s… kinda messed up.

In reality, there’s no one way to be trans. There are no rules, no requirements, no “you must be this trans to count.” If you want to be a gender that’s not your AGAB? You’re one of us. Period.

Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for the foreign invaders.” “They can’t get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry.” “Millions of ordinary people up and down Britain are utterly fed-up with how immigration is driving up house prices, rents and flooding social housing.”

Three quotes spanning 120 years, the first from the Tory MP for Stepney, William Evans-Gordon, speaking in a parliamentary debate in 1902; the second from a newspaper interview in 2006 by New Labour minister and Barking MP Margaret Hodge; and the third from a Spectator article last month by the academic Matthew Goodwin. A century across which the language has changed but the sentiment has remained the same.

And now we hear that the Tories are preparing to launch a scheme to provide “British homes for British workers”, promising to make it more difficult for migrants to access social housing, which most cannot access anyway. 

[…] 

“British homes for British workers” may be an empty slogan but it is one that Evans-Gordon would have understood. Implicit is a sentiment that echoes across the century, at the heart of which is a concern less for working-class wellbeing than for pinning on immigrants the blame for the failures of social policy to improve working-class lives.

Audio from a small Twitter Space featuring legislators from Ohio and Michigan was automatically posted publicly, wherein Republican legislators revealed the "endgame" of anti-trans legislation was to ban trans care "for everyone."

[…]

While the beginning of the Space focused more on transgender care for youth, 49 minutes into the discussion, attention turned to transgender adults. Representative Shriver asked, "In terms of endgame, why are we allowing these practices for anyone? If we are going to stop this for anyone under 18, why not apply it for anyone over 18? It's harmful across the board, and that's something we need to take into consideration in terms of the endgame."

Representative Click then responded, "That's a very smart thought there. I think what we know legislatively is we have to take small bites.”

"In Soviet Russia… erm, I mean, oh, whatever… products buy you."

It's clear that HP's tactics are meant to coax HP printer owners into committing to HP ink, which helps the company drive recurring revenue and makes up for money lost when the printers are sold. Lores confirmed in his interview that HP loses money when it sells a printer and makes money through supplies.

But HP's ambitions don't end there. It envisions a world where all of its printer customers also subscribe to an HP program offering ink and other printer-related services. "Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription. This is really what we have been driving," Lores said.

[…] 

HP has faced numerous lawsuits in relation to blocking device functionality due to third-party ink and has paid out millions as a result. So why is it still continuing down this road? That might be partially explained by the company's perspective on the vendor-customer relationship.

When people buy an HP printer, they consider it an investment. But HP thinks that when you buy a printer, the company is investing in you.

As Lores put it:

"This is something we announced a few years ago that our goal was to reduce the number of what we call unprofitable customers. Because every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We're investing [in] that customer, and if this customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment."

Because in the ’80s and ’90s office buildings were designed to accommodate large swaths of cubicles, the distance between a building’s envelope and its core — usually occupied by elevators and washrooms — tends to be larger than in a typical residential building.

To make the financials work for a project, a certain number of units is required per floor, which results in a layout of long and skinny apartments. As a result, providing access to daylight and natural ventilation to all living spaces at a reasonable cost is a challenging, if not impossible, endeavour.

[…]

“This is not the kind of housing that any of us, if we can afford it, would live in,” Grittner says, pointing at evidence of detrimental effects of insufficient exposure to daylight on people’s health, which includes eye conditions and mood disorders.

Moreover, researchers have found that the presence of windows with an outdoor view creates a sense of safety and control over one’s environment, an important aspect to consider when designing affordable housing.

“When you look at vulnerable populations, who would most likely be living in this type of housing, it’s incredibly important that they have a restorative and nature-connected space,” Grittner says, emphasizing the significance having a connection to the outdoors represents for people living in affordable and supportive housing.

“One of the cornerstones of trauma-informed design is enabling a connection to the outdoors, and understanding the impact of the quality of housing, as well as the surrounding environment.”

Gaza’s destruction – in which more than 100,000 Palestinians have so far been either killed or seriously wounded, and two-thirds of the enclave’s homes pounded into ruins – appears to be integral to that strategy.

And yet, extraordinarily, Keir Starmer, Britain’s opposition leader, has chosen this moment to declare that, from now on, the Labour Party’s policy on Palestinian statehood will be dictated to it by the pariah state of Israel.

Reversing Labour’s stance under his two predecessors, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, who promised to immediately recognise a Palestinian state on winning power, Starmer told a meeting last week that such recognition would occur only as “part of a process” of peace talks involving Israel and other states.

Some 139 nations have recognised Palestine as a state at the United Nations, but Britain – as well as the United States – is not among them.

Labour’s shadow Middle East minister, Wayne David, expanded on Starmer’s remarks to explain that Israel would have a veto. A two-state solution would only ever come to “fruition in a way which is acceptable to the state of Israel. That is the way to bring about peace.”

Maybe the word that upsets me most is the word “we” — if you use the word “we,” and you’re not talking about eight billion people, fuck you.

[…]

For so long, you identified as Libertarian. What changed?

I completely have not used the word Libertarian in describing myself since I got an email during lockdown where a person from a Libertarian organization wrote to me and said, “We’re doing an anti-mask demonstration in Vegas, and obviously we’d like you to head it.” I looked at that email and I went, “The fact they sent me this email is something I need to be very ashamed of, and I need to change.” Now, you can make the argument that maybe you don’t need to mandate masks — you can make the argument that maybe that shouldn’t be the government's job — but you cannot make the argument that you shouldn’t wear masks. It is the exact reciprocal of seatbelts because if I don’t wear a seatbelt, my chances of fucking myself up increase — if I don’t wear a mask, the chance of fucking someone else up increase.

Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate.

Press Officers of the Meetings Coverage Section in the Department of Global Communications capture in writing the deliberations of United Nations meetings as they happen.  Within two to three hours of adjournment of a meeting, a press release in both English and French is posted on the Section’s website, giving a blow-by-blow account as well as an overview.

Coming from political science, international affairs and journalism backgrounds, Press Officers also have to have good ears and fast fingers, often “taking it from the floor” – writing a synopsis at the same time while listening to a speaker deliver a statement.  That summary must accurately render in concise, clear words, the gist of what is being said.

Many times, Press Officers will have a written copy of a delegation’s intervention and must quickly encapsulate eight or nine pages into one to three paragraphs.  The capacity for synthesizing or "l'esprit de synthèse" guides the Section and its Press Officers.

Carefully reviewed by Editors and Editorial Assistants who check the accuracy, terminology and writing quality of draft copies, these press releases are jargon-free, easily understood synopsises for the public, press, Governments and civil society to keep informed of international issues being discussed in the Security Council, General Assembly, Economic and Social Council, as well as other United Nations bodies.

Why is it clear to us that it's degrading and objectifying to measure and rank a girl’s physical body on a numeric scale, but we think it’s perfectly okay to measure and rank her mind that way?

Over the years I've watched the many ways that children try to cope with the evaluative gaze of school. (The gaze, of course, can come from parents, too; just ask my kids.) Some children eagerly display themselves for it; some try to make themselves invisible to it. They fight, they flee, they freeze; like prey animals they let their bodies go limp and passive before it. Some defy it by laughing in its face, by acting up, clowning around, refusing to attend or engage, refusing to try so you can never say they failed. Some master the art of holding back that last 10%, of giving just enough of themselves to "succeed," but holding back enough that the gaze can't define them (they don't yet know that this strategy will define and limit their lives.) Some make themselves sick trying to meet or exceed the "standards" that it sets for them. Some simply vanish into those standards until they don't know who they would have been had the standards not been set.

[…]

When a child does something you can't understand, something that doesn't make sense, when they erupt into recklessness, or fold up into secrecy and silence, or short-circuit into avoidance, or dissipate into fog and unfocus, or lock down into resistance, it's worth asking yourself: are they protecting themselves from the gaze?

For months, Israeli soldiers in Gaza have been documenting their own war crimes against Palestinians and sharing them on social media.

The Listening Post collected and reviewed hundreds of items. We asked three experts on human rights and torture to examine the material.