Interesting Links for 05-07-2022

[andrewducker]

1. What might trigger a second US civil war

(tags:civilwar usa )

2. I was not expecting to encounter The Battle Of Verdun recreated in Lego

(tags:history wwi lego video )

3. The UK is being trolled on Twitter by China. It deserves it.

(tags:uk china NorthernIreland europe trade )

4. How autism is being missed in women and girls: 'I wasn't male enough for a diagnosis'

(tags:autism women girls gender )

5. Denver's Program to Dispatch Mental Health Teams Instead of Police is So Successful it is Expanding 5-Fold

(tags:mentalhealth police USA GoodNews viaEatSoylentGreen )

6. Home Office says terminally ill mother should not join children in the UK because 'sacrifices have to be made'

(tags:UK immigration OhForFucksSake )

7. New York is... odd

(tags:newyork )

8. The physics of the Greenhouse Effect is different to what I thought

(tags:globalwarming physics heat )

9. Tory attorney general threatens to block Scotland's reform of gender laws

(tags:LGBT transgender conservatives OhForFucksSake Scotland )

10. Edinburgh's 95% public satisfaction rate tells its own story

(tags:edinburgh GoodNews )

11. Shelved! The books abandoned by their authors

(tags:books writing )

12. 12ft Ladder - a paywall bypass

(tags:paywall )

13. Archive.today - a paywall bypass and archive site

(tags:archive paywall )

14. How normal am I? (A fascinating look at how faces are analysed, using your own face as an example, if you let it)

(tags:faces analysis surveillance )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I think the essay on the potential of a civil war is a pretty accurate description of what the South was up to in the 1840's and 1850's.

And I think the extrapolation that similar people from the same place might behave in a similar way is reasonable. As is the proposition that this is not an argument about the best way to organise society but about different conceptions of what legitimate interference in the bodies of other people is and therefore difficult to resolve through political processes which themselves rely on a mutally understood conception of citizenship, personhood and individual liberty.

So it's a bit of a worry.

[andrewducker]

It is indeed. It's a hard transition for many countries to make, from a "Here is how society is supposed to work, and people fit into it" to a "Here is how people are, and how society can support that" way of thinking, and for one as large as the USA, with different parts of the country at very different stages, it really is easy for things to go badly wrong.

[danieldwilliam]

It's a bit more fundamental than that I think.

It's a move from "It's okay for us to tell other groups of people how to organise themselves because I physically can" to "Other groups of people don't have to do what I tell them."

The Southern States were busy telling the North "You have a) allow slavery in new states b) enforce slave laws in your own states and c) literally not talk about it in Congress"

It's one thing Country A to ban chewing gum in public. It's another thing all together for Country A to demand that Country B ban any of Country A's citizens from chewing gum in Country B. And another, another thing for Country A to demand that Country By ban chewing gum in Country B as well.

People in Country A and Country B can agree to differ on whether chewing gum ought to be permitted but they can't agree to differ on whether Country A has a right to tell Country B what the laws of Country B are.

[andrewducker]

I agree that that was definitely the case for the Civil War over slavery. I'm not sure it's quite so much the case for the civil rights cases going on at the moment. They're happily restricting abortion (and by the look of things intend to carry on to marriage equality) in their own states, but are they looking to force that on other states?

[danieldwilliam]

Difficult to tell but I think one of the main thrusts of your correspondant's essay was these sorts* of people were very happy imposing and trying to enforce extra-territorial restrictions with regard to slavery on other states on the grounds that their state rules should take precedence over other state rules and so might well be okay doing the same thing for abortion or same sex marriage or voting rights - rather than the grounds on which the previous law restricted their state right to restrict civil rights i.e. that rights to privacy exist in the Constitution and apply to all US citizens.

*or perhaps exactly these people and their decendents.

So I guess we'll see but I wouldn't be sanguine about them not trying.

[andrewducker]

Turns out Pence is already pushing for it:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/24/abortion-supreme-court-trump-pence-republicans-roe/

[danieldwilliam]

Sort of. I think he's pushing for a Federal law restricting abortions rather than a Federal law demanding that one state effectively enforce another state's laws on the second state's residents.

Which is subtly different.

But I'm not at all surprised that the Republicans are contemplating a national restriction. Why wouldn't they?

[calimac]

But that is actually the direction that the slavery rulings were going in the 1850s as well. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 defined slavery as inalienable property rights, placing it both beyond the federal government's ability to regulate in the territories and the free states' ability to regulate when it impinged upon them extraterritorially, as when slavers brought their slaves to free states.

The next step, and it surely would have come, would have been for the Court to declare that free states had no right to prohibit slavery at all. When Lincoln said that the US could not continue to exist as a house divided, that it must become all one thing or the other, this is "the other" that he had in mind.

That's pretty much how established state gun-control laws are being gutted; but for now, the path with abortion is slightly different, as the Court is so far declining to impose a prohibition so that has to be pursued legislatively. But it could come, especially if the legislative path proves unfruitful.

(And I refer you to something else with the word "prohibition" on it to remind you of how disastrous it is to impose complete legal sanction on something that 1) people desperately crave and 2) is impossible to stop.)

[mellowtigger]

Just a note to say that I appreciate this thread of discussion. :) Sometimes I wish that Dreamwidth had a simple "+1" counter, like from GooglePlus days.

[channelpenguin]

Not sure I approve of paywall bypasses - surely writers should be paid ? (just as musicians, artists, photographers and programmers).

Of course who is to say the paywalled website actually pays the writers :-(.

I'd vastly prefer a per-article fee, but so few seem to do that :-(.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure how much I approve either.

But I spend money where I feel it's worthwhile. I currently have subscriptions to The Independent, I, the NYT, the Washington Post, RockPaperShotgun, and a few others, plus various Patreons. So if I want the occasional article from elsewhere then I'm happy to bypass it, and I'll take out a paid subscription if I'm getting sufficient value from it.

[calimac]

If you don't give people a fair way to access what they need - a per-article fee for sites they rarely visit would be fair - then they'll take an unfair way. That this is done by people who will happily pay a subscription to sites they use regularly (as do I) only proves that this isn't a piratical impulse but a search for reasonable access.

However, this is all moot. I came across 12ft ladder several months ago, and have yet to find a site on which it works.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I find the archive one more reliable

[qilora]

"4. How autism is being missed in women and girls: 'I wasn't male enough for a diagnosis'"

if anyone is interested, this video was very helpful to me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQLpVJOsLwE&t=146s&ab_channel=FerminRomerodeTorres

my niece has autism, it took an arm and a leg to have her receive proper care <3 bs"d

[channelpenguin]

#14 - the ai thinks I'm lying about my age! IT thinks I'm 36... lol.

[andrewducker]

It thought I was 38!

[channelpenguin]

Clearly, we're doing something right :-). Or the program needs a lot more training.

It also had a hard time deciding if I was a man or a woman (but got it right in the end).