Ben Harris-Roxas

In 2017, we were almost 4 per cent of the population calling for Voice, Treaty and Truth-Telling. As of Saturday, we are nearly 40 per cent, walking together. Almost seven million Australians voted “Yes”. Both major parties would kill for a first preference vote like that.

Probably the most important analysis from the referendum was that polling booths in predominantly Indigenous communities across the entirety of the country overwhelmingly voted “Yes”. We have thoroughly established that this is fact: a great majority of Indigenous people support constitutional recognition through a Voice to Parliament. We seek self-determination over who speaks for us. Claims otherwise are an incontrovertible lie.

The movement that follows the Voice - Thomas Mayo

I tweeted in response to the homework algorithm “hack” that if it’s not worth a teacher reading the assignment/assessment, then it’s not worth the student writing it. That robot grading is degrading. I believe that firmly. (Again, think of that Gates grant. Who has a teacher or peer read their paper, and who gets a robot?) Almost a thousand people responded to my tweet, most agreeing with the sentiment. But a few people said that robot grading was fine, particularly for math and that soon enough it would work in the humanities too.

Robot Teachers, Racist Algorithms, and Disaster Pedagogy

A good piece of journalism by Mostafa Rachwani:

Upon hearing my explanation that the story is about loneliness, one of the staff members scoffs.

“Atilla was many things, but he was not lonely. He was a legend, funniest guy you’ll ever meet,” he says.

Atilla died alone, and seemed to have no family. But a sex shop told a surprisingly different story

scientists appear to be divided between those who think Neanderthal dignity calls for a recognition of their similarity to us, and those who think it calls for a recognition of their difference. It is striking that the camps are of one mind in thinking that dignity – or respect or something of that kind – is owed here, and that fact itself needs an explanation.

Justice for Neanderthals! What the debate about our long-dead cousins reveals about us

A great aacademic article that articulates clearly many of the reasons I don’t like Cixin Liu’s Dark Forest trilogy. The politics espoused in them is dehumanising garbage.

If you have trouble accessing the article please let me know.

I have been arguing that Liu’s novels, which precisely imagine the common enemy for humanity that Schmitt could not, show how the urge to accept violent conflict as the essence of political life quickly gives way to dehumanization and an absolute, unfettered destruction. Whereas the Holocaust may have finally moderated some of Schmitt’s faith in agonism, Liu adopted such historical violence as the motivating cause for his characters to embrace existential conflict. Ken Liu, the preeminent translator responsible for two volumes of the Remembrance trilogy, remarked in an interview that there were only “two historical events Liu Cixin could think of that would cause somebody to be so utterly disappointed by human nature that Ye’s willing to trust a higher power from outside to redeem humanity: The Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution” (Pandell)…

Liu’s choices in characterization would be shortcomings in a realist novel; for this science fiction trilogy, however, his sacrifice of deliberative planning and emotional appeal for raw decisions serves to discredit liberal values in favor of “totalitarian” order, an aesthetic politics defined—as it was for Schmitt—by a core belief in existential antagonism. Later in the narrative, officials interrogate a crew member from another vessel that had been isolated in space. He explains that, once their connection to Earth was severed, “I gave up my individual self. My existence would be meaningful only if the collective survived” (Death’s 113). In a striking passage, he compares this shift to the famous “Third Wave” experiment of 1967, in which a high school teacher from California showed that it took his students only five days to embrace authoritarian rule (114). When trapped in space, the crewman insists, “we formed a totalitarian state as well. Do you know how long it took? Five minutes” (114)…

Liu’s novels do not merely thematize authoritarian ideas; his aesthetic choices and cosmological premises serve to make this drift toward centralized political power appear necessary to characters and readers alike.

Carl Schmitt in Outer Space: On Cixin Liu’s “Dark Forest”

The United Kingdom, which oversaw Chagos — sometimes called the British Indian Ocean Territory or BIOT — had secured the land for the base in 1965, just as the U.S. was in the midst of a Cold War drive to expand its military presence in strategic locations. Leasing Diego Garcia to the U.S. took the heat off after London’s refusal to commit troops to the Vietnam War effort and came with a discount on much-needed Polaris missiles for the U.K.’s own arsenal. But to build the base, first the roughly 1,500 residents of the island, Nellan’s grandparents included, would need to be relocated. It was a brutal, untidy affair.

A Tiny Archipelago in the Indian Ocean Is at the Heart of a Major Political Struggle

Yesterday, a threat actor named ‘Golem,’ who is allegedly behind the 23andMe attacks, leaked an additional 4.1 million data profiles of people in Great Britain and Germany on the BreachForums hacking forum.

This additional leak includes 4,011,607 lines of 23andMe data for people living in Great Britain.

Hacker leaks millions of new 23andMe genetic data profiles

To make a bigger difference, the programs need to bring in the “upstream” producers—those that create virgin plastics and polymers, like Exxon, Dow, Sinopec, and Saudi Aramco. An overwhelming 98% of plastics come from fossil fuels, and plastic production and use accounts for 3.4% of humanity’s carbon emissions. Many big plastic producers—such as the world’s biggest, ExxonMobil—are highly entangled with Big Oil or representatives of it. “Beyond a physical pollution crisis, it’s becoming an energy crisis,” says Katrina Knauer, a polymer scientist with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “The amount of plastic on our planet—it’s like one big oil spill.”

Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.

While the author has clearly been having a bad day, or maybe year, this is an interesting acknowledgement of our material reality:

Jamie’s 5 Ingredient Meals has the air of an educational state broadcast made to raise morale after a national catastrophe – inevitably, perhaps, because that’s more or less what it is.

Jamie’s 5 Ingredient Meals review – his shows get bleaker by the second