Kerim's Micro Blog

20/11/2022

This page will be shutting down sometime later this week. If you want to continue to get the kind of stories I posted here you will have to follow me on Mastodon (sorry).

kerim at zirk dot us

(FB won't let me post the URL, which is one reason among many I want to be less dependent on this site for sharing stuff.)

PS: Mastodon sites have RSS feeds if you would prefer to follow it that way.

10/11/2022

Andrew Cuomo stacked New York’s highest court with conservatives who hijacked the state’s redistricting process.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/11/2022-midterms-new-york-republicans-cuomo-maloney.html

10/11/2022

The Story of Baby O—and the Case That Could Gut Native Sovereignty | The Nation

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/icwa-supreme-court-libretti-custody-case/

09/11/2022

How Taiwan’s Midterm Elections Work – Lev Nachman in The Diplomat

https://thediplomat.com/2022/11/how-taiwans-midterm-elections-work/

09/11/2022

Algorithms quietly run the city of DC—and maybe your hometown | Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/11/algorithms-quietly-run-the-city-of-dc-and-maybe-your-hometown/

09/11/2022

Mastodon's Founder Has a Vision to Democratize Social Media (Nice interview in Time Mag)

https://time.com/6229230/mastodon-eugen-rochko-interview/

07/11/2022

Coming to terms with Korean forced-labor history

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2022/10/14/national/diplomacy/hashima-korea-japan/20221014164953231.html

When I started to research industrial heritage sites in Japan and Japan’s denial of wartime Korean forced labour, little did I know that it would lead me to acquaintance a Korean former communist guerrilla soldier...

03/11/2022

The Trial of the Rats of Autun

On the Prosecution of Animals and Historians

30/10/2022

No, Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating. - by Dave Troy

Wherein I attempt to clarify a number of ridiculous and false narratives currently taking hold about Musk and Dorsey’s “rivalry.”

24/10/2022

What if We Let Majoritarian Democracy Take Root?

Majority rule is not perfect, but rule by a narrow, reactionary minority is far worse.

20/10/2022

No, the West Didn’t Halt Ukraine’s Peace Talks With Russia - Russian diplomacy was always a smokescreen

In a recent article for Novara Media, Oliver Eagleton argued that the UK halted early peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. Volodymyr Artiukh and Taras Fedirko say he’s mistaken – and that diplomacy alone couldn’t have stopped the war anyway.

19/10/2022

Hindutva appropriations of indigeneity

Hindu nationalists frequently anoint themselves the Indigenous people of India. This identity claim—informed by upper-caste sensibilities and a core part of Hindutva mythology—is misleading and harmful to numerous minoritized Indian...

19/10/2022

Dr Anthony Fauci: long Covid is an ‘insidious’ public health emergency

Exclusive: America’s top disease expert speaks to the Guardian about the dangers of long Covid and urges US Congress to avoid complacency

19/10/2022

Beijing’s favorite Bolshevik

In this excerpt from "Destination Peking," author Paul French introduces us to Lev Karakhan, a Bolshevik whose work as the Soviet Union’s first ambassador to China earned him the trust of the early Chinese republic’s most powerful leaders.

15/10/2022

The ghosts of colonialism at the Pitt Rivers Museum

As the museum changes displays to acknowledge its colonial heritage, should something more fundamental be done with the UK’s historic collections?

15/10/2022

Elsevier admits taking Merck money for scientific journal lookalikes

Testimony in an ongoing lawsuit against Merck & Co in Australia has stated that Merck paid the renowned scientific publisher Elsevier to produce marketing material designed to look like independent scientific journals with names such as The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.

12/10/2022

John Cleese on GB News: the hero of the right

The Monty Python comic, and latest GB News signing, was once anti-establishment. Now he is merely “anti-woke”.

11/10/2022

Why So Many People Still Don’t Understand Anti-Semitism

Unlike many other bigotries, anti-Semitism is not merely a social prejudice; it is a conspiracy theory about how the world operates.

11/10/2022

Who, Indeed, Are the ‘Urban Naxals’ Who Delayed the Sardar Sarovar Project?

When PM Modi calls people forcibly displaced by 'development' projects and who are fighting for their own survival, 'urban Naxals', he not only demeans people's struggles but also ignores government actors who actually delayed the project.

11/10/2022

$100 billion later, autonomous vehicles are still a car-wreck

No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.

11/10/2022

Latour and the Vineyard

I am from the typical French provincial bourgeoisie, from Burgundy where my family has produced wine for generations, and my only ambition is that people would say ‘I read a Latour 1992& #8217…

10/10/2022

The hard problem of consciousness is a distraction from the real one | Aeon Essays

It looks like scientists and philosophers might have made consciousness far more mysterious than it needs to be

09/10/2022

Bruno Latour, French philosopher and anthropologist, dies aged 75

Latour’s work on how humanity perceives the climate emergency won praise around the world

09/10/2022

Leicester Tensions Have Roots in India - The New York Times

Violent confrontations in Leicester have prompted soul searching in an area long heralded as a success story of diversity and integration among its large Indian diaspora.

08/10/2022

Time seems to accelerate as we get older, but there’s a tested way to tap the brakes | Aeon Videos

Time seems to accelerate as we get older, but there’s a tested way to tap the brakes

05/10/2022

Wall Street Is Behind The Jackson, Mississippi, Water Crisis

A major credit rating agency jacked up interest rates in Jackson, Mississippi, curtailing infrastructure investments in the years leading up to the city’s recent disaster.

04/10/2022

This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.”

Long-running satirical publication files legal document relating to case of man who was arrested for making fun of police

03/10/2022

Mahsa Amini: Afghan women see own struggle for rights in Iran protests

Afghans say they are 'moved' by the Iranian demonstrations but warn there's a long road ahead before they can follow in their footsteps

03/10/2022

Afghan women protest Hazara ′genocide′ after Kabul su***de bombing

The protesters claimed that a recent su***de bombing in Kabul was specifically meant to target girls of the historically oppressed Hazara community. The UN says 35 were killed and 82 wounded.

01/10/2022

Mixed Background Indigenous Peoples and Their Struggle for Legal Reform - New Bloom Magazine

In 2017, Nikal Kabala’an, an Amis woman, carried her first newborn daughter to the Taipei City Da’an District Household Registration Office to register her baby’s birth. Nikal and her husband…