Links, Tuesday 29th July

Very interesting interview with a former IRA bomber.

""You can't expect 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds, the main fodder of the campaign, to have a depth of morality beyond the crude teenage desire to get back at their enemy. Get revenge for the murders of their friends. I'm not going to attribute any retroactive moral depth for it. The breakfast meeting for IRA kids at the time was 'How many can we kill before they kill us?'"" Cracked

>>><<<

"“It’s as if prostitutes don’t want to be saved,” said a surprised manager of a Rescue Foundation shelter in India. The rescuers had once again made a raid on a brothel, after which the women had been forced into a shelter they weren’t allowed to leave. Again and again women escaped, continually protested their imprisonment in the shelters, and returned to their old workplaces as soon as they were able to make a run for it. It was as if the women were working as prostitutes of their own accord, didn’t view themselves as victims, thought of the rescue missions as threats to their human rights and livelihoods and for the most part felt victimized by the rescue industry." Link

>>><<<

Bonobos: a more complicated story than the one we usually hear.

"The bonobo had lost the race, Hohmann said, but if it had laid a hand on the duiker in its first lunge the results would have been bloody. Hohmann has witnessed a number of kills, and the dismembering, nearly always by females, that follows. Bonobos start with the abdomen; they eat the intestines first, in a process that can leave a duiker alive for a long while after it has been captured." New Yorker

>>><<<

"The literal othering of Palestine: Washington Post subhead reads, “13 Israeli soldiers, 70 others killed.”" Jacobin

>>><<<

This is fascinating mainly for the details of how diplomacy actually plays out in private. New Republic

>>><<<

I'm not convinced by claims that the IDF used to be all that great, but this piece reminds me somewhat of the history of Allied bombings raids in WWII. Roughly: Start with strict focus on military targets, then accept some damage to civilian targets, then attack specific civilian targets, then drop bombs indiscriminately on cities, then drop atom bombs on cities. Guardian

>>><<<

This is a useful point, though perhaps I don't understand enough about the context to have a detailed sense of what other practices she has in mind.

"...trigger warnings cannot be viewed in isolation. Rather, they are part of a larger complex of practices designed to de-privatize and collective healing. They came out of the recognition that we are not unaffected by the political and intellectual work that we do. These practices also recognized that the labor of healing has to be shared by all. Trigger warnings are one of many practices that insist that one does not have to be silent about one’s healing journey – that one’s healing can occupy public and collective spaces. And healing can only truly happen when we take collective responsibility for creating structures and practices that enable healing." Link

>>><<<

"Of all of the symptoms of head trauma, this has to be the one the patient's friends and family are the least prepared for. When Augusto's friends came to visit, he would whip his dick out and show it to them. And yes, this is a symptom of a head injury, not something he always secretly wanted to do...

Incredibly, this is a common symptom -- a lot of patients become sexually uninhibited following such an injury. Becoming a dick-flasher falls on the more extreme end of the scale, so Augusto has that going for him. But he's also far from the most extreme case -- there are rare head trauma cases where heterosexual patients have woken up after a brain injury identifying as gay, and vice versa. And while you'd presumably adjust to that, it pales in comparison to the truly horrifying situations where survivors of brain trauma come out at the other end as pedophiles." Cracked