Interesting Links for 30-09-2019

[andrewducker]

People are reporting collisions with Tesla's Smart Summon feature

(tags:cars automation fail )

A French Tunnel Sculpture That Took 30 Years to Complete

(tags:France sculpture history )

Margaret Beckett emerging as favourite to be caretaker prime minister

(tags:UK politics Labour Europe )

On Philip Lee, homophobia, and the Liberal Democrat party leadership not listening

(tags:LGBT libdem OhForFucksSake )

A Public Service Announcement About Bamboo Straws

(tags:advice food )

A viral fake news story linked trans health care to 'thousands' of deaths

(tags:transgender LGBT OhForFucksSake fraud )

Opposition parties pour cold water on SNP plan to bring down Boris Johnson this week

(tags:UK politics )

Vaccinations could be made compulsory for schoolchildren

(tags:school vaccination )

The Uterati Founders Disrupting the Vagina Economy

(tags:vagina health business )

China is stealing back its looted heritage

(tags:art theft history museums China )

BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? snubbed Christopher Eccleston because his family was too working class

(tags:family class history TV BBC )

Jane Eyre translated: 57 languages show how different cultures interpret Charlotte Brontë's classic novel

(tags:language translation ViaDrCross )

"What in Harry Potter did you think was magic but later found out was just British?"

(tags:harrypotter UK school magic )

Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads

(tags:advertising discrimination Facebook jobs )

Daily Mail owner leads race to buy the i newspaper

(tags:newspapers uk )

Austrian elections: support for far-right collapses

(tags:austria politics )

We urgently need a long term plan to deal with social care in the UK. Signing this petition was the least I could do

(tags:care UK politics petition viaFrancescaElston )

Comments

[cmcmck]

And then there's the Lib Dems and transphobia................

Why is it the 'nice people' who are doing this stuff?

[cmcmck]

And that 'thousands of deaths' thing? Didn't someone wise up to the fact that there aren't thousands of us out there on pre-med treatment at any one time or that hormone blockers are only ever a short term pre-op treatment for the great majority trans people?

[miss_s_b]

Oh nooooooooo not the fucking Daily Mail...

Margaret Beckett emerging as favourite to be caretaker prime minister

[jack]

Oh! I wondered why, with a majority in parliament eager for SOME alternative to Johnson, even if they couldn't agree what, there wasn't already more clarity on what to replace the current government with (either direct control of parliament, or a caretaker government or what).

I'm glad they're converging on SOMETHING. In retrospect, a labour figure who's not a plausible future labour leader, was probably the option that requires both Corbyn and Corbyn-skeptics to bend the least. Fingers crossed they get it done QUICKLY.

[redbird]

I hadn't realized you don't already have mandatory* vaccination of schoolchildren: the US does, and it's easy to think assume that if the US makes parents do something for their children, other countries do too.

*For values of "mandatory" that include medical exemptions, and religious or "personal belief" exemptions in most U.S. states. Yes, another thing that the US does state-by-state.

[jack]

My impression is that there wasn't a need: that before the anti-vax scare, when you had a baby, you were just told what you needed, or later on the school arranged vaccinations, and most people went along with it, and the number that just couldn't be bothered wasn't big enough to make a problem, so there'd never been any need to legally force people to do it. Now people are deliberately leaving their children vulnerable for fear of some other worse problem, it may need to be made mandatory.

[redbird]

*nod* There's a weird sort of "don't tell me how to raise my children" mixed into US anti-vax stuff, which leads to weirdly revealing statements like "the State doesn't own the children, the parents own the children" from people arguing against mandatory vaccination.

The US Supreme Court decision saying that the government can mandate vaccination is over a century old, and was originally about the smallpox vaccine. (Vaccination is definitely a net win there as well, of course, but the anti-vax arguments then were more "cross your fingers and hope there's no actual epidemic, because sometimes kids do get sick from this vaccine," not the fairy-tale "this will make my kids autistic/ I want my real child back."

If I actively believed that a public health measure was harmful, I wouldn't be also thinking "but it's okay to do it to all my neighbors" or "to lots of children elsewhere." The anti-fluoridation campaigners have a weird tinge of paranoia, but if people think fluoridation is harmful, it makes sense that they want the government to stop fluoridating everyone's water, not just their own. (Me, I'm happy that my water is fluoridated.

re: Harry Potter / British things

[darkoshi]

I had no idea that "pudding" was a generic British term for dessert. I always thought the Pink Floyd lyric referred to the specific dessert that Americans call pudding. That didn't seem odd to me, as the after-school daycare I went to for a while in Germany often had pudding for dessert.