Christmas Leftovers Links
* Listen, when Chris Ware tells you to buy a book, you buy it.
* For a small group of comedy writers, however, their yearly viewing couldn’t be further from Bedford Falls. Instead, they gather ’round a never-aired 1996 Comedy Central special: Escape From It’s A Wonderful Life.
* Caganer — the strangest, most scatological part of Catalan nativity scenes — explained.
* Jacobin remembers the Christmas truce, one hundred years old yesterday.
* Let 2015 be Year One of the post-carbon future. 4 Legal Battles This Year That Were All About Climate Change. Sewage in the streets of Miami. Could flooding finally wake Americans up to the climate crisis? Irreversible But Not Unstoppable: The Ghost Of Climate Change Yet To Come.
* The crazy history of Star Wars.
* The Class Struggle in the North Pole.
* Elsewhere on the local beat: A Milwaukee doctor says he has the answer to concussions.
* And, sadly: Milwaukee’s poet laureate passes away.
* Among recent graduates ages 22 to 27, the jobless rate for blacks last year was 12.4 percent versus 4.9 percent for whites, said John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
* I missed this one in August: Tobias Wolff on the heart of whiteness.
* Subway sandwiches and the halo effect.
* 90-Year-Old Vet Arrested For Feeding Homeless Will Hand Out Christmas Eve Dinner.
* I can’t believe they made a movie out of Bill, The Galactic Hero. I can’t wait to see it.
* A look inside 8chan, the worst place on the Internet: “The Mods Are Always Asleep.”
* There’s magical thinking, and then there’s “Believing in Santa Claus could help your kids develop a cure for cancer.”
* Behold, the baby in the sun from Teletubbies.
* This was a nice, short, readable explanation of how all the statistical analysis in The Bell Curve was bullshit.
* 10 Story Decisions Scifi And Fantasy Writers Ended Up Regretting. Tough list to get down to just ten!
* In the 1950s, Egypt and Britain played an old version of tit-for-tat. Egypt took the Suez Canal. The British decided to pay them back by stealing the river Nile itself. Yes, the whole Nile.
* A very J.R.R. Tolkien Christmas.
* Parents Are Moving To The Same Towns Where Their Kids Go To College. When my kids go to college, I’m enrolling in their freshman classes. I don’t want to miss a moment.
* New York City Sends $30 Million a Year to School With History of Giving Kids Electric Shocks.
* Pope Francis: ‘One in 50’ Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals is a paedophile.
* Pious Anxiety: Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal.
* On Facebook and Algorithmic Cruelty.
* The Marvel Movie Universe, In Completely Chronological Order.
* The melancholy of all things done” is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point he was selling cars. Buzz Aldrin and the dark side of the Moon.
* Of course you had me at “There’s a serious proposal to send astronauts to a floating cloud city in Venus’s atmosphere before heading to Mars.”
* A public service announcement: Black Mirror: White Christmas was fantastic. Find a way to watch it!
* And if you squint just right it looks like the world isn’t ending. Happy Holidays indeed!
Gerry Canavan 
Dan Olson’s article has “inspired” the GooberGaters to claim his images are proof he’s distributing child pornography on the internet, that he should be arrested for seeking it out, etc. and that if the accusations were real, he should have reported it to the FBI. There’s even been attempts by GG’ers to have the FBI (or the Canadian equivalent) arrest him or pay him a visit.
I haven’t seen any condemnation of 8chan, however. Just lots of excuse making about how the board can’t control what gets posted, claims that CP is removed immediately, etc. The usual excuses and projection and so forth.
Someguy
December 26, 2014 at 9:39 pm
Wow, that’s military-grade malicious bullshitting.
gerrycanavan
December 26, 2014 at 10:20 pm
Indeed. It seems to be the go-to response. If they’re called out on [X], then the people calling them out are the REAL [X] perpetrators!
It’s amazing how the whole GG thing mirrors the GOP’s Voter ID strategy. The Voter ID laws have their genesis in racism and hatred of the poor. It was being sold as an anti-fraud movement, and there might have been adherents who honestly believed that, but it can’t shake its origins (and popularity with) racist groups. Also, it seeks to address a problem that really doesn’t exist in any meaningful way. This resulted in the Voter ID right-wingers starting to ludicrously claim those opposing them were “the real racists.”
Similarly, GG can’t get away from its origins in the hatred of women making inroads in the gaming industry and that demographic (along with many others) desiring more to their games than dumb bro-shooters with huge boobs and blood everywhere. They can’t escape their 4chan origins (and 8chan continuation) and all that entails, CP being among its many, MANY facets that most people would find objectionable if brought into the sunlight. They’ve had it both ways for so long, being able to harbor the worst of the internet while being occasionally lauded or tolerated for going after various “bad guys” (like the Steubenville rapists) that when their anonymous clubhouse is being seen as a childish haven for awful people, they have nothing left but flailing around with the playground’s “I’m rubber, you’re glue” defense.
Someguy
December 29, 2014 at 9:10 am