Posts Tagged ‘civil rights movement’
Infinite Sunday Infinite Reading
* From last week, a rare “actual content” post: White Male Critic Asks Why If Wonder Woman Is Really So Great Why Didn’t She Prevent the Holocaust.
* Princess Buttercup Became the Warrior General Who Trained Wonder Woman, All Dreams Are Now Viable. The Strange, Complicated, Feminist History of Wonder Woman’s Origin Story. Who mourns for the space kangaroos? I’m Pretty Sure Steve Trevor Lied About His Dick Size in Wonder Woman. Classic DC.
* Black Panther next! Everything We Learned From the Black Panther Teaser Trailer.
* Why you should go to the Octavia Butler sci-fi conference at the Huntington. I’ll be there!
* Bob Dylan Delivers His Nobel Prize Lecture, Just in Time.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Evergreen.
* Evergreen headlines: Humanities Majors Drop.
* Eight reasons why universities can’t be the primary site of left organizing.
* UWSP student asks court to force poetry professor to give her an A.
* The Poverty of Entrepreneurship: The Silicon Valley Theory of History.
* Fifty years of One Hundred Years of Solitude. No Magic, No Metaphor.
* Corbynmania! How Labour Did It. Why Corbyn Won. Theresa May’s desperation could undo peace in Northern Ireland.
* Excerpts from James Comey’s Opening Statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee or from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day? The Comey testimony was riveting reality TV. I asked 6 legal experts if Trump obstructed justice. Here’s what they told me. Trump Can Commit All the High Crimes He Wants. Republicans Aren’t Going to Impeach Him. How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money into His Business. Trump’s DOJ says Trump can still get paid. Our A.I. President. A Noun, a Verb, and Vladimir Putin. All this and Trumpcare isn’t even dead. What Will Happen to Us? Four Cartoonists on A Life Without the Affordable Care Act.
* Reporter Covering Inauguration Protests Now Faces 75 Years in Prison.
* I think we may have had the Russians all wrong.
* Noam Chomsky explains the twentieth century.
* What if Your Cellphone Data Can Reveal Whether You Have Alzheimer’s?
* What’s really warming the world?
* Twilight of the comics direct market.
* Before I go: A mother’s hopeful words about life in its waning moments.
* The toddler survived with some scar tissue—but not everyone who gets Powassan, POW for short, is so lucky. With no treatment available, half of all people who contract the virus suffer permanent brain damage; 10 percent die. And while POW is nowhere near as prevalent as that other tick-borne summer scourge—Lyme—it is starting to show up more often.
* People tend to avoid sick people, even if they don’t consciously now that they are sick, according to a new study published in PNAS.
* The addicts next door. Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever. In one year, drug overdoses killed more Americans than the entire Vietnam War did. The last words of a ‘heroin junkie’: There seems to be no escape.
* Not only will this happen in your lifetime — this tweet has accelerated the process.
* Shock finding: Tax evasion is shockingly prevalent among the very rich.
* On Aug. 15, 1977 at 10:16 p.m. ET Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope detected a curious signal from deep space. Nearly 40 years later, we finally know what caused it and, sadly, it’s not aliens.
* Donald/Donald. Don’t stop till you find the panda. How to succeed. Now my story can be told. Should we be concerned about that? What’s the problem with Florida? Can I interest you in a war on non-transport accidents? If you want a vision of the future. The state is that human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Zoos.
* In tiny Townville, S.C., first-graders are haunted by what they survived — and lost — on a school playground. Gut-wrenching.
* How Bostonians Defeated the Olympics.
* White supremacists love Vikings. But they’ve got history all wrong.
* Peanuts and the Civil Rights Movement.
* ‘Life or death for black travelers’: How fear led to ‘The Negro Motorist Green-Book.’
* For the first time ever, a video game has qualified for an Academy Award.
* When David Fincher nearly directed a Star Wars sequel trilogy.
I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man…
* How Wookieepedia Tackles the Insanely Difficult Task of Chronicling the Entire Star Wars Universe.
* This week in the richest society in human history.
* At $75,560, housing a prisoner in California now costs more than a year at Harvard.
* I’ve always known this is how it will end for me.
* Everett Hamner will be recapping Orphan Black season five for LARB.
* Some economies just can’t be disrupted. Grilled cheese for instance.
* So is — Mary Poppins? Fine, I guess.
* C. L. R. James in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Unexpected Afterlife of American Communism.
* Al Franken was a great guest on Marc Maron, if you missed it. Crazy to say it, I think he might actually run for president. Then again, why not him?
West’s Batman/Bruce Wayne is, and will always remain, the single most important screen incarnation of the character, for better or worse: For better because it was the most surprising, at times confounding, interpretation of the Caped Crusader, feather-light and hilarious precisely because of the character’s seeming lack of self-awareness; for worse, in the eyes of some fans, because it encouraged millions of people who had never picked up a Batman comic, or any comic, to be amused by the sight of adults dressing up in wild outfits and pretending to punch each other in the face. Every subsequent, high-profile reinvention of Batman, whether in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, Tim Burton’s alternately perverse and sincere Batman and Batman Returns, Christopher Nolan’s operatic trilogy, and Zack Snyder’s funereal Batman vs. Superman, is, first and foremost, a reaction against the Adam West–driven Batman series.
* And the bad news never stops: Sleeping In Is Deadly, Popular People Live Longer, Adolescence Lasts Forever, and So Does High School.
Friday Morning Links
* 10 Forgotten Photos of The Civil Rights Struggle.
* The world’s ten oldest trees.
* Putin’s $50-billion Olympic Games. White Snow, Brown Rage. Primetime TV schedule.
* On Occupy, climate justice, and climate democracy.
* River Contaminated With High Levels Of Lead, Arsenic, Mercury After NC Coal Ash Spill.
* Fracking Is Stressing Water Supplies In Areas Already Wracked By Drought.
* AOL’s Miserly New 401k Policy Will Ruin It For the Rest of Us. Why have these sick babies betrayed us?
* FBI Checks Wrong Box, Places Student on No-Fly List. Just ten years and $4 million later, though, it’s all resolved.
* And a little something for the sports nerds: a new basketball stat.
Depressing Sunday Links
Establishment Democrats are enthusiastically betraying their constituents, and gloating about it. I’ve already committed to not giving money and not volunteering in 2012, but the sticker’s coming off the car if the deal as described goes through. I’m done.
While the New Deal stoically awaits the guillotine, some links, many shamelessly stolen from zunguzungu’s supersized edition of Sunday Reading:
* Congressional Black Caucus: Use the 14th Amendment.
* Jeffrey Sachs: “Every part of the budget debate in the U.S. is built on a tissue of willful deceit.”
* The basic error was that Buchanan approached American politics in procedural or legal terms at a moment when the reigning political conflicts in American life were no longer in any sense shaped or resolved by procedural or legal processes. Obama as James Buchanan. More here from John Judis:
Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to, and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.
* In a nutshell, what’s going on is something that hasn’t happened in American politics for 50 years: an ideologically coherent social movement with clear political aspirations has taken shape out of murkier antecedents and disparate tributaries and at least for the moment, it has a very tight hold on the political officials that it has elected. The movement is not interested in the spoils system, its representatives can’t be quickly seduced into playing the usual games. And the movement’s primary objective is to demolish existing governmental and civic institutions. They’ve grown tired of waiting for government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub, so they’re setting out with battleaxes and dynamite instead.
Social movements that aren’t just setting out to secure legal protection and resources for their constituency, but are instead driven to pursue profound sociopolitical transformations are unfamiliar enough. What makes this moment even more difficult to grasp in terms of the conventional wisdom of pundits is that this isn’t a movement that speaks a language of inclusion, hope, reform, innovation or progress. It speaks instead about restoration of power to those who once held it, the tearing down of existing structures, about undoing what’s been done. This movement is at war with its social and institutional enemies: it has nothing to offer them except to inflict upon them the marginalization that the members of the movement imagine they themselves have suffered.
* Ezra Klein dangles the carrot: maybe Obama won’t capitulate on the Bush tax cuts again. Sure, maybe.
* Surely there must be a name, in advertising parlance, for the figure of the anthropomorphized food item that happily consumes a non-anthropomorphized version of itself?
* The great teddy bear shipwreck mystery.
* On misremembering the victims of injustice as small children.
* Julian Sanchez: “The very existence of such massive trade in “defensive patents” is, in itself, pretty strong evidence that there’s something systematically quite wrong with the American patent system—because a patent that’s useful for “defensive” purposes is very likely to be a bad patent.“ I love that Planet Money and This American Life got non-IP people talking about this.
* And I may have done this one before, but what the hell: Inside an abandoned East Berlin amusement park.
Happy MLK Day Links
* American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white. Via MeFi.
* Tim Wise on the disappearance of the real MLK.
So we compartmentalize the non-violence message, much as we compartmentalize books about Dr. King and the movement in that section of the bookstore established for African American History; much as we have compartmentalized those streets named for the man: locating them only in the blackest and often poorest parts of town.
Were this tendency to render King divisible on multiple levels — abstracting non-violence from justice, colorblindness from racial equity, and public service from radical social transformation — merely an academic matter, it would hardly merit our concern. But its impact is greater than that. Our only hope as a society is to see the connections between the issues King was addressing and our current predicament, to see that what affects part of the whole affects the greater body, to understand that racism and racial inequity must be of concern to us all, because they pose risks to us all.
* But let us never forget that the civil rights movement was completely unnecessary in the first place; a “truly free market” would have ended segregation on its own.
* Martin Luther King in science fiction.
* Why we can’t have nice things: Jon Hamm is just too damn old to play Superman.
* Schwarzenegger says being governor cost him 200 million dollars. You’re welcome, California.
* When assassins get results: Arizona law could force Gabrielle Giffords out of her seat within months.
* The Edge Question 2011: What scientific concept would improve everyone’s toolkit? There are some good nominations, but for a twenty-first century civilization teetering on the brink of ecological suicide there’s only one right answer: TANSTAAFL.
* Towns for losers: the highway’s jammed with broken heroes fleeing the ruins of New Jersey. Let’s hope Chris Christie isn’t next to make the big move to D.C.
* And naturally you had me at Soviet workplace safety posters. Via MeFi.
Tuesday Night Links
* The Daily Show rally backlash has begun in earnest, with worries that the rally will sap GOTV efforts alongside well-founded attacks on its basic premise. Still, I think we’re going, if only as an excuse to see my D.C. friends.
* How segregated is your city? Via MeFi.
* “In 1946, 53 percent of articles mentioning a research university were about that university, focusing on its research or activities,” the authors wrote. By 2005, “Just 15 percent of articles mentioning a university are about that university: the remaining 85 percent simply cite high-stature faculty for soundbite commentary on current events.”
* Being Franklin W. Dixon, author of The Hardy Boys.
* Kos, Josh Marshall, and Nate Silver see possible good news in Democratic poll numbers. Still, Democrats will lose big this November.
* Mad Men vs. the civil rights movement?
* And Amazon is having a huge sale on the entire run of Scott Pilgrim. Enjoy.
Links for Tuesday
* This compilation of “near-misses” is pretty spellbinding, even if in some cases it’s clear that some people have been seriously injured or killed off-screen, and in others we’re dealing with thrill-seeking asshats who don’t deserve the attention. (via)
* Ernest C. Withers, a famed photographer who chronicled the civil rights movement in photographs and was able to sit in on some of the most sensitive strategy meetings, also worked as an informant for the FBI, Memphis’ Commercial Appeal reports.
* Jon Hamm as Superman? I could live with that.
* Harry Potter and winner-take-all capitalism.
* Eight of the Most Toxic Energy Projects on the Planet. Deepwater Horizon isn’t even one of the eight.
* A comprehensive Wonk Room survey of the Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate finds that nearly all dispute the scientific consensus that the United States must act to fight global warming pollution….
Remarkably, of the dozens of Republicans vying for the 37 Senate seats in the 2010 election, only one — Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware — supports climate action. Via Steve Benen. I feel torn between hoping Castle loses today so Democrats have a shot at winning the seat, and hoping Castle wins today so at least the seat won’t go to O’Donnell. But Kevin Drum isn’t torn at all:
I’m rooting for O’Donnell with no quiet mourning for Castle at all. I’m not sure at this point why Dionne still wonders “if” there’s room in the modern GOP for guys like Castle, since that seems about as clear to me as anything could possibly be. The answer is no, and Castle’s fate won’t change that one way or the other. The die has been well and truly cast here for some time: the GOP is irrevocably committed to the undiluted Fox/Limbaugh/Drudge party line, and there’s no going back. They’re either going to stand or fall on that. So I say: let ’em do it. No excuses, no scapegoats. Finish up the Texification of the Republican Party and see how it goes. Only then is there any hope of a return to common sense.
* If you don’t call it high fructose corn syrup, it’s suddenly healthy again. Fact.
* And your crazy blast from the past: Feldstein also has uncovered new evidence that documents one of the more outrageous schemes of the Nixon presidency: a plot to assassinate Anderson by either putting poison in his medicine cabinet or exposing him to a “massive dose” of LSD by smearing it on the steering wheel of his car. While the aborted scheme to murder Anderson has been reported—and disputed—before, Feldstein found new corroboration: A confession before his death by ex-White House “plumber” Howard Hunt.