juliet

Just to get rid of open FF tabs again...

• Sexism at Newsweek: in 1970 and now; also a comment piece over at Racialicious drawing attention to the very-white-focussed nature of the Newsweek article.
• The Economist on the demise of cap-and-trade in the US. Unfortunately this appears to be largely down to public denial in the face of climate change, rather than, e.g., because carbon trading fundamentally sucks.
• What to do now the Digital Economy Bill has been rushed through Parliament (aka: it's not quite over yet).
• Drugs, maths, hallucinations, and the visual neurons (with thanks to doop). Well worth a read. I particularly like the research scientist who conducted his research by taking peyote. Sadly this was in the 1920s, and his modern equivalents do not do such things; or at least, they don't admit to it.
• Apparently this is very good chocolate. I would like to buy some, but the shipping is as much as the chocolate, so I'll wait till I'm next over in Kensington & can visit Rococo, which sadly will take rather longer to happen than it would have done when I was still working in Kensington. OTOH, this way I don't drop nearly a fiver on chocolate, which is quite a lot of money however good the chocolate is.

ION: have had a lovely fortnight's holiday in, variously, Northern Ireland, and Boston (Lincolnshire, not the other one); of that latter, more anon. Now I am back in London & surprisingly busy for someone whose work is only full-time in the loosest possible sense (i.e. that sense in which it is the only thing that I am doing in the paid work line, rather than any sense in which I actually work an approximation to what this society considers to be full-time hours. I like it very much this way.). The dog continues to be adorable, time-consuming, and an agent of chaos. And it is spring properly today ftb I wore my sandals to the park. Down with proper shoes! Also the first tiny asparagus shoots are appearing in the allotment.

It occurred to me after ConFest last weekend that I didn't see anywhere (on the tickets, on the programme thingy, anywhere else) any acknowledgement to the traditional owners of the land. This struck me (although I confess to not noticing it at the time), because that acknowledgement is something I have seen at most official/governmental establishments (including museums and suchlike), and also something I saw at Exodus, the other festival I've been to in Australia (psytrancery). There wasn't (as, again, there was at Exodus) as far as I could see (and I did look for this) any explicit involvement of the traditional owners. Given the hippy/alternative/etc background of ConFest, the omission surprises (and saddens) me.

This also links to my discomfort with what felt like not just cultural appropriation, but fairly incompetent cultural appropriation, at one of the workshops I went to[0]. Lots of banging on about 'traditional medicine wheels' and 'tribes' and 'Father Sun' and a whole lot of similar stuff. Now, I am aware that making assumptions about people's cultural/racial/ethnic backgrounds based on appearance is very dodgy, so yes, it's possible that the two leaders of the workshop were screwing around with their own cultural background. They didn't make any claim to that, though, and if that was the case, I still think they were doing it in a very dubious fashion. (It *sounded* very like random mix-&-match wet liberal hippy nonsense, with which I am depressingly familiar, and it didn't match up with anything I have learnt about the way the culture of the Indigneous peoples here works.)

Unfortunately, of course, this isn't that unusual; liberal/alternative/etc != aware of this shit. And when chatting to a couple of people involved with the organising co-op (about totally unrelated matters), I was struck by what seemed like a fairly aggressive attitude, and not all that much self- or other-awareness :-/ (Some of which I tried to challenge a bit, but, hm. With I think maybe limited success, and I'm not good at pushing, especially given the social context of the conversation.)

[0] I should note that I did actually get some useful stuff from the workshops; but I was uncomfortable with the way they packaged it up.