Interesting Links for 23-12-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Glaswegian who invented chicken tikka masala dies

(tags:India Glasgow food history obituary )

2. Gender reform bill to make it easier for transgender people to self-identify passes in Scotland

(tags:Scotland transgender LGBT GoodNews )

3. Large swathes of English people use "English" and "British" interchangeably

(tags:UK nationality England britain viaDanielDWilliam )

4. Mastodon is hurtling toward a tipping point

(tags:mastodon socialnetworking )

5. A look behind the scenes at how Scotland finally passed a Gender Recognition Reform Act, and how the Tories, knowing they would fail to vote it down, tried to filibuster it.

(tags:LGBT transgender Scotland politics conservatives )

6. The law of participation inequality (that the vast majority of users of a social network read, but don't interact, some interact a bit, a tiny number provide most content)

(tags:socialnetworking )

7. Spain approves self-id transgender bill

(tags:Spain LGBT transgender GoodNews )

8. Strange, tentacled microbe may resemble ancestor of complex life

(tags:life )

Comments

[cmcmck]

The tikka masala up there and the balti down here! :o)

6. Participation Inequality

[snippy]

I remember reading sometime earlier this year that my level of engagement with twitter is in the upper 1% which makes me a power user...and I almost never post original content! I just repost things from people I follow!

[hairyears]

5: I dropped in a reply to Jane's post, and it's worth reproducing here:

I had sort-of-known that there was a cruel and shabby inequality lurking in the gap between civil partnership and marriage: now you have forced me to confront it.

Thank you, Jane.

...And the short point I take away from your political reporting, here - which really is as long and as detailed as it actually needs to be - is that Holyrood and the wider polity of Scotland has the all same idiots, and the same corrupting influences, as Westminster.

But you are a lot more adult about it, in Scotland.

I worry, about what kind of attention I might draw from this: but if enough straight white middle class people stick our heads over the parapet and draw fire, there's less of it directed at people who are vulnerable in ways that we are not.

[andrewducker]

The difference in Scotland is largely that 43% of the vote doesn't give a single party a massive majority and total control.

[hairyears]

It's one difference among several: I would label it 'structural', 'procedural', 'enabling' and, perhaps, ''empowering'.

Other difference are:

1. Better media;
2. The population are engaged with politics in a way that 99% English people seem not to be;
3. And it's healthy engagement, for the most part. Self-awareness seems to be more common than in England: in Ireland it's caught in the phase "Jeeezus, can ye feckin' HEAR YOURSELF saying shite like that?'" but I'm not sure how it plays-out in Scotland;
4. The 'Wee Free' effect in which closed-worldview people have walled themselves off into toxic waste dumps that only seep a little bit into the groundwater. Like (say) the Scottish Labour Party. Smelly and smoky when it's exposed to air and starts to burn, but it's not the Westminster We're all living in a massive tyre fire, Hurrah!" toxicity.

[andrewducker]

Having more options to vote for, because of PR, has definitely led to greater engagement. The ability to vote for other parties without letting in the Conservatives definitely led to more people taking an interest in what was available, and the newspapers got dragged along with that.