Posts Tagged ‘a vague mish-mash of identitarian buzzwords’
Tuesday Links! Too Many of Them! Send Help!
* Don’t forget! Just two weeks until the “Global Weirding” deadline!
* And tomorrow night in Missouri! Marquette Professor to Present ‘After Humanity: Science Fiction After Extinction.’
* CFP: Radical Future and Accelerationism.
* Evergreen headlines: The Shrinking Ph.D. Job Market.
* Last year’s Pioneer Award winner: “Improbability Drives: The Energy of SF.”
* The Anthropological Unconscious, or How Not to Talk About African Fiction.
* AfroSF Now: A Snapshot, Seven Novels and a Film.
* Africa Has Always Been Sci-Fi.
* Cost Control Is a Progressive Value.
* Grade Inflation, Forever and Ever Amen.
* Dueling letters: President Lovell. Professor McAdams.
* Cheating Incidents Blemish NCAA’s Marquee Event.
* Honors Colleges Promise Prestige, But They Don’t All Deliver.
* The Humanities in the Anthropocene.
* Extinction: A Radical History.
* Art in the Age of Economic Inequality.
* Manifesto of a Future University.
* 30 Cities Where America’s Poor Are Concentrated. You know where this is going.
* It’s Probably First Ballot Or Bust For Donald Trump At The GOP Convention. And a bit on the nose, don’t you think? Jeffrey Dahmer’s House Is Up for Rent During the Republican National Convention.
* More politics watch! The Democrats Are Flawlessly Executing a 10-Point Plan to Lose the 2016 Presidential Election. Sanders +2.6! Trump -4.1! Go vote Wisconsin!
* It’s Really Hard To Get Bernie Sanders 988 More Delegates.
* My analysis of the latest federal data shows that, on average, these families’ income — including tax credits and all sources of welfare — is about $9,000 below the poverty line. That means ensuring no children grow up in poor households would cost $57 billion a year. (To put that in perspective, that’s how much money we’d get if Apple brought back the $200 billion it has stashed overseas, and paid just 29 percent tax on it – it’s a big problem, but it’s small compared to the wealth of our society.)
* Unionizing Pays Big Dividend for Professors at Regional Public Universities. What Tenured and Tenure-Track Professors at 4-Year Colleges Made in 2015-16.
* The villain gap: Why Soviet movies rarely had American bad guys. Risk time in the gulag by reading about Soviet-era underground media. Cold War board games explore the conflict’s history, spycraft, and humor. Soviet sci-fi: The future that never came.
* This Genius Twitter Feed Is Turning Classic Kids’ Books Into Nightmares.
* Superman And The Damage Done: A requiem for an American icon. An oral history of Superman. A Brief History of Dick: Unpacking the gay subtext of Robin, the Boy Wonder. Death to All Superheroes. Yes, chum, there’s more links below the picture.
* The Antonin Scalia School of Law, or…
* Retirees Are Handing Wall Street Billions For No Good Reason.
* All politics is local: I grew up being compared to my overachieving cousin. Now he’s a Supreme Court nominee.
* Imagine living in a cell that’s smaller than a parking space — with a homicidal roommate.
* Up to half of people killed by US police are disabled.
* “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
* The Panama Papers: how the world’s rich and famous hide their money offshore.
* Study Confirms World’s Coastal Cities Unsavable If We Don’t Slash Carbon Pollution. But I say that’s not thinking big enough! 12 Ways Humanity Could Destroy The Entire Solar System.
* This Is How We Could Hide Our Planet From Bloodthirsty Aliens.
* Dibs on the screenplay: Japan’s Lost Black Hole Satellite Just Reappeared and Nobody Knows What Happened to It.
* Researchers Just Discovered a New State of Matter.
* Hot take watch: Aaron Burr, Not So Bad? I wish I knew the Hamilton soundtrack well enough to make a proper joke here.
* Statistical Analysis Has Revealed Game of Thrones‘ True ‘Main’ Character.
* Data suggests a mere 94% of Tor data is malicious.
* Indigenous video games you should download.
* Scientists bemoan SeaWorld decision to stop breeding orcas.
* Dark, gritty ad absurdum: The Tick in 2016.
* Trumpism in everything, Wal-Mart edition.
* NFL Sends Threatening Letter To New York Times, Demands Retraction Of Concussion Investigation.
* The Ultimate List of Weapons Astronauts Have Carried Into Orbit.
* Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly. The end of Florida. These Maps Show What Washington Will Look Like When Antarctica Melts.
* Ambiguous utopias: In Pod-Based Community Living, Rent Is Cheap, But Sex Is Banned.
* Can an outsider become Amish?
* The strange case of Jennifer Null.
* Whatever happened to utopian architecture?
* Miracles and wonders: Treating Huntington’s With Gene Knockout Might Be Safe For Adults.
* Terry Gilliam tempts fate, again.
* The best Star Wars character you’ve never heard of.
* And the arc of history is long, but the MLA has changed its style guide again.
Spring Break Goes By Too Fast
* Colbert’s segment last Thursday on James O’Keefe, Sean Hannity, and the misleading ACORN tapes is must-see. Jon Stewart’s experiment with Chatroulette was pretty funny too.
* How porn invented the future. Via MeFi.
* Mars, bitches? “Obama to unveil ‘ambitious plan’ for NASA.”
* Steve Benen updates your dictionary.
* Top 10 Jeff Bridges movie his Oscar tonight was really for.
* Via Ze Frank, here’s a PBS Frontline piece based on perennial nonfiction workshop favorite The Undertaking.
* And I second Yglesias’s recommendation of “a great graphic in today’s NYT summing up the past uses of the budget reconciliation process and making it clear that pretty much everything Republican Senators have said on the subject is a lie.”
Saturday Politics
On the politics front, the new GOP line (apparently) is that Sarah Palin isn’t ready to be president after all—yet.
I’m certain that over the next couple of weeks the press will be pounding her and the campaign wanting to know where the access is. There’ll be a lot of process stories about why isn’t she talking to reporters. There’ll be a lot of noise that voters, frankly, don’t really care about—and as frustrated as the press is gonna be it’s a smart move by the campaign because, like I said, voters don’t really care about these process stories, but if she goes out and makes a mistake, that is something that [voters will] care about, and that’s something that will haunt [McCain] for awhile, so I think this is a smart move.
GOP strategist Todd Harris goes on to say that she’ll be getting prepped for as long as two weeks before she talks to anyone in the media. The Jed Report says it best:
This has got to be one of the craziest messaging decisions ever: Harris is conceding that Palin’s not even ready to be a vice presidential candidate, let alone be president.
Kevin Drum, too:
The McCain campaign is scared to death. They knew nothing about Palin before they announced her, they relied on a cursory vetting process that has turned out to be shot full of holes, they realize now that she has no settled views on any issue of national importance and could blurt out anything at any time, and they’re terrified about what might crop up next. So they’re keeping her in the deep freeze.
Has it really come to this? The absolute lack of confidence McCain has in his own pick to be vice president is mind-boggling; the absurdity of this past week truly marks a singular event in the history of our Republic, and if things go wrong it’ll be probably be used (alongside Florida 2000) to mark the start of its final decline.
This is monarchism, not democracy. A candidate for office needs to be accountable to the voters, not to a vague mish-mash of identitarian buzzwords. If we as a nation passively accept the Palin candidacy, if we demand nothing more than this from the Republicans or from ourselves, then American democracy is simply dead.
(Of course, a candidate should also be trusted to talk about something other than their own love of self, but we’re sitting by and letting John McCain fail that test, too.)
In more positive news, at least Joe Biden continues to win my respect. Give ’em hell, Joe.
Gerry Canavan 