#IAmWatching Manus

Decay, despair, defiance: inside the Manus Island refugee camp (GA, 16 November 2017)

PM Malcolm Turnbull dodged a meeting with NZ PM Jacinda Adern on the refugee situation. Meanwhile, Peter Dutton acknowledged that New Zealand doesn't need Australia's permission to resettle however many refugees it wants.

NZ has also offered PNG $3 million to improve services on Manus Island. (Services are already scant for local people, so permanent improvements to the underresourced hospital would be a mitzvah - and perhaps cool tensions?)

The New Zealand Herald analyses propaganda about the Manus detainees in the Australia media, which has been dismissed by the NZ government. (It's hard to know whether the allegations of child sexual abuse are just rumours or something more serious; what's certain is that they're being used to smear hundreds of men as criminals.)

Meanwhile Up Over

After Trump's election, Masha Gessen wrote an opinion piece called Autocracy: Rules for Survival. A year later he's revisited that piece, examining how well events have matched his predictions. Two points in particular caught my attention: the denial - which extends to the belief that if and when everything about Russia comes out, Trump will lose his support - and the need to stay outraged, not to accept a new normal.

In Year One: It's Up To Us, ACLU's national director David Cole wrote about how the "checks and balances" in US society, notably the courts, have been able to halt some of Trump's activities. Gessen, though, warns about Trump's continuing assault on the judiciary. Both Cole and Gessen note the reinvigorated role of journalism, which is heartening, given the continuing impact of propaganda.

The classic Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell. See if you can read the sample paragraphs he cites without mentally rewriting them. (Or is it just because I'm editing my novel?) Strunk and White have similar things to say about prose; like much writing advice, their points aren't inviolable rules, they help because they make you think about the words you're putting down on the page.