This fortnight, I don't know what I've been doing, besides not reading enough:

• Opinion: How Artists And Fans Stopped Facial Recognition From Invading Music Festivals — Evan Greer and Tom Morello in BuzzFeed: Industry giants like Ticketmaster invested money in companies like Blink Identity, a startup run by ex–defense contractors who helped build the US military’s facial recognition system in Afghanistan. These vendors, and the venture capitalists who backed them, saw the live music industry as a huge potential market for biometric surveillance tech, marketed as a convenient ticketing option to concertgoers. […] Over the last month, artists and fans waged a grassroots war to stop Orwellian surveillance technology from invading live music events. Today we declare victory. Our campaign pushed more than 40 of the world’s largest music festivals — like Coachella, Bonnaroo, and SXSW — to go on the record and state clearly that they have no plans to use facial recognition technology at their events. Facing backlash, Ticketmaster all but threw Blink Identity under the bus, distancing itself from the surveillance startup it boasted about partnering with just a year ago. This victory is the first major blow to the spread of commercial facial recognition in the United States, and its significance cannot be overstated. In a few short weeks, using basic grassroots activism tactics like online petitions, social media pressure, and an economic boycott targeting festival sponsors, artists and fans killed the idea of facial recognition at US music festivals. Now we need to do the same for sporting events, transportation, public housing, schools, law enforcement agencies, and all public places. And there’s no time to lose.
• These ‘job snob’ claims don’t match the evidence — Greg Marston et al. in the Conversation: Between 2015 and 2018, we were part of a team studying the well-being, social networks and job search experiences of unemployed Australians. Our study, funded by the Australian Research Council, involved policy analysis, surveys and in-depth interviews. We talked to the employment service providers and 80 job seekers in regional and urban areas of New South Wales and Queensland. We found no evidence that job-seekers preferred not to work. In fact, based on the considerable “job search activity” required of them to meet Centrelink’s stringent “mutual obligation” conditions, we had to conclude that, whatever the reasons for their joblessness, unwillingness to work was not one of them.
• Bernie Sanders Is the Best on the Minimum Wage and It’s Not Near — Ted Rall:
  
• Why do so many Americans hate the welfare state? — Elizabeth Anderson interviewed by Joe Humphreys for the Irish Times: One way to think about it is this is another bizarre legacy of Calvinist thought. It’s really deep in Protestantism that each individual is responsible for their own salvation. It’s really an anti-Catholic thing, right? The Catholics have this giant institution that’s going to help people; and Protestantism says, no, no, no, it’s totally you and your conscience, or your faith. That individualism – the idea that I’ve got to save myself – got secularised over time. And it is deep, much deeper in America than in Europe – not only because there are way more Catholics in Europe who never bought into this ideology – but also in Europe due to the experience of the two World Wars they realised they are all in the boat together and they better work together or else all is lost. America was never under existential threat. So you didn’t have that same sense of the absolute necessity for individual survival that we come together as a nation. I think those experiences are really profound and helped to propel the welfare state across Europe post World War II.