Thursday Link Dump

[clevermanka]

This week's Link Dump on cm.net. Are people more likely to read these if I post them here, instead of making you go to the cm.net site? 

June 4 was the 30-year anniversary of Tiananmen Square (the site has an ad-blocker, but it’s written by someone who was actually there so I thought it worth sharing).

Inside Europe’s most accessible city.

Fleabag‘s menopause soliloquy.

Woman on the edge of a transformational surgery.

Although gender dysphoria is by no means new, the medical process of transition is. Devoid of the rich history of other rites of passage, I’ve struggled to find context in the months leading up to this. Should I celebrate? Grieve? Reflect? Atone? All of the above? None? In my mid 20s, I took an anthropology course on Religion and Culture. I remember my fascination with the section on ritual, and I remember the professor with her thick German accent lamenting the absence of formal rites in modern society. Rites mark transitions, often a rebirth into adulthood. They take place in the liminal, outsider space of cultural tricksters, mediating figures who balance creative and destructive forces. Raven. Loki. Eris. Yoda. Jesus. These are universally marginal characters; if they had been better integrated into society, they would not have had the freedom to question, act, or bring about change. All of this resonates with me as a trans woman on the cusp of major change right now.

WHO officially removed ‘gender identity disorder’ from its list of mental illnesses.

Margaret and Christine Wertheim teach principles of hyperbolic geometry through their collaborative art project, the Crochet Coral Reef.

Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls.

But the demand for spoken “debate” in the first place is increasingly an outright aggression: it is the favoured weapon of fluent trolls who wish to be free of the accountability to evidence that comes with written argument.

Online, meanwhile, the call to “debate” is increasingly a gendered demand, made by men as a way of attacking women with whose opinions they disagree. “‘Debate me’ is a tactic of attrition,” says the writer and critic Sarah Ditum. “When some guy shows up in my email, or on Twitter, or in comments demanding ‘a debate’, he’s not after a back-and-forth argumentation closing in on a conclusion; he’s after throwing up enough dust that I ultimately decide stating my opinion is more trouble than it’s worth.”

Yes, it’s for capitalism, but the latest Gillette ad is still important.

10 Ways To Pay Reparations If You’re a Broke Ass White Person.

The Burgomaster sent me a link to Tor.com’s eBook of the Month Club which has a Pride Month bonus of a four-book bundle from Margaret Killjoy, Ellen Klages, Kai Ashante Wilson, and JY Yang. The website is weirdly lacking details, but he says it’s free, you just have to sign up for the newsletter and the bundle is only available until 11:59 PM ET, June 7th, 2019.

Song of the century:

"Kesha - Rich, White, Straight, Men" (Watch on YouTube)