Interesting Links for 18-04-2019

[andrewducker]

Remainers are making a pig's ear of the European elections

(tags:voting europe elections )

EU introduces new minimum rights for "gig economy" workers like Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders

(tags:work rights europe )

Grenfell survivors regret not installing stained glass windows to ensure a quick rebuild after fire

(tags:fire death society satire )

The British political parties are too weak and too during

(tags:UK politics )

Reddit NSFW ads: Viagra is good, sex toys are shameful

(tags:reddit sex advertising OhForFucksSake )

What the Uber prospectus actually means

(tags:business fail viaDanielDWilliam )

Google starts putting ads in Maps

(tags:Google maps advertising )

Revealed: Brexit group covered up its targeting of right-wing extremists (Head of BBC Westminster was apparently "helpful")

(tags:bbc uk europe politics media OhForFucksSake fascism )

Woman in charge of UK borders admits that there are no technological solutions for a hard border in Ireland

"What you need is, at the very least, something that looks like a customs union, plus something that looks like a single market"
(tags:ireland NorthernIreland europe uk trade customs )

'Bubble Boys' Cured in Medical Breakthrough Using Gene Therapy

(tags:immune_system genetics amazing )

Tolkien was right: Scholars conclude Beowulf likely the work of single author

(tags:language Tolkien writing statistics history )

Evidence of rabbits in UK in Roman times

(tags:rabbits UK history )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I'm still mulling over my response to the fund-raising response to Notre-Dame.

It's an important building. Currently important to the French. Currently important to people who love buildings. It is also historically important and important in that it is one of the buildings that we have used to inform ourselves what it means to be human.

I think it ough to be repaired and renewed.

On the other hand, I am very conscious of the contrast in treatment between Notre-Dame and e.g. Grenfell, or the African American churches burnt down in Louisiana or literally billions of every cases where poverty could be alliviated.

There's also an element of the role of the state in things like Grenfell. Grenfell Tower was part of the state provision of housing. It's perhaps not the responsibility of individual benefactors to fix a failure of state provision or mitigate the consequences of corruptions and incompetence in state organisations.

And there is the question about what private property means if you can't actually spend it on things you want to spend it on.

The main thought that I have is that the speed with which the Notre-Dame appeal has been funded and the narrowness of that funding tells us a lot about the political choices we make. There is money available in the system for fixing other stuff. We, through our politics and our capitalist system have decided both not to fix that other stuff and to leave the decision making about what gets fixed to a small number of rich people. We, as political actors need to accept that we are the bad guys here. Capitalism also needs to explain very clearly the way in which it operates is the least-bad option - that a situation where we tap billionaires for buckets oc cash everytime something goes wrong is worse for us all in the long term. That's a challenge I don't see Capitalists taking up with much gusto in the early 21st century. As ideological salesmen they compare badly with their equivalents in the early 19th and mid-20th centuries.

[danieldwilliam]

I think a counter-point to the article about Remainers in the Euro elections is that it is not clear that there is a Remain campaign that trumps other considerations.

If successful the Remain leaning parties will expect their MEP's to be MEP's for 5 years. A Green standing aside for rabid neoliberal or a a TIGger standing aside for some hippy-dippy Green eco-socialist might not be so palitable if we Remain and they therefore remain in the European Parliament.

[calimac]

The article on Beowulf is just a little misleading on what Tolkien's argument was. Yes, Tolkien believed that the poem dated from around the 8th century and was by a single author. But he wasn't plunged into a hot debate over whether it was by a single author or a compilation. Tolkien's argument was that the poem was coherent and well-structured, and he was responding to a long-standing critical view that it was incoherent and imbalanced. That Tolkien's view implies a single author and the other suggests possibly multiple authors just didn't come up in the course of his discussion, unless I've quite forgotten something.

Ads on Google Maps

[dewline]

Okay, that's disturbing for both individual users and for small business owners, in different ways for each of those groups.

On the Follow-Ups to the Notre Dame de Paris Fire

[dewline]

I tend to think it less likely in the case of the Canadian Parliament Centre Block, or the East and West Blocks for that matter, due not only to construction methods, but due to ongoing efforts to keep our Parliament's buildings viable.

So this was also disturbing to read...

https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2019/04/17/the-lesson-of-notre-dame-it-could-happen-to-parliament-at-an

[nancylebov]

"The British political parties are too weak and too during"

I guessed during was autocorrupt for strong.