Posts Tagged ‘Eichmann’
Get June Started Right with June Links
* CFP for the first issue of Fantastika Journal.
* David Higgins reviews Paradoxa 27: The Futures Industry.
* This Is What Extinction Sounds Like.
* “Society doesn’t need a 21-year-old who is a sixth century historian.”
* So here’s my question: if this is all so “common sense” and “modest” then why do you have to lie so much about process and intentions? Why are people who drone on about “accountability” for others allowed to act without any accountability to the institutions they are supposed to represent?
Where genre is concerned, this means that our goal is no longer to define a genre, but to find a model that can reproduce the judgments made by particular historical observers. For instance, adjectives of size (“huge,” “gigantic,” but also “tiny”) are among the most reliable textual clues that a book will be called science fiction. Few people would define science fiction as a meditation on size, but it turns out that works categorized as science fiction (by certain sources) do spend a lot of time talking about the topic.
[whispers] Well, my dissertation and book-when-I-finally-get-around-to-massively-revising-it does define science fiction as a meditation on size…
* Bonus Ted Underwood content! The Real Problem with Distant Reading.
* In response to McGurl’s call we intend to create a digital database along with a visualization tool that can be used to map the professional itineraries and social networks of everyone who ever studied or taught creative writing at Iowa since the Workshop’s inception to the present date.
* Duke University enters hotel business with $62 million project. You know, nonprofit for educational purposes.
* University Of Akron President Resigns After Financial Controversies.
* Is It Time for Universities to Get Out of the Hospital Business?
* …if you take up these old positions about what a higher education in the humanities should involve, you end up dancing with some very conservative people. I found myself in very strange company when I began to hold out for education, not as a credentialising process, but what I think of as encouragement for the revolutionary force of individual curiosity–pursued without limit.
* On some campuses, a dogmatic form of identity politics clearly has taken hold. But what’s too often missing from this picture is the very thing that opponents of political correctness so often decry: a sense of proportion and judgment, and an awareness that what transpires on the radical edges of elite universities is not always an accurate barometer of what’s happening in the wider world.
* Rule-Breaking Iceland Completes Its Miracle Economic Escape.
* Middle Eastern Writers Find Refuge in the Dystopian Novel.
* Which City Has the Most Unpredictable Weather? Of course Milwaukee makes the top-ten for major metropolitan areas.
* It’s 2016. Why is anyone still keeping elephants in circuses?
* How rich does a black criminal have to be to get treated like a white one?
* Vindicated! A new meta analysis in Perspectives in Psychological Science looked at 33 studies on the relationship between deliberate practice and athletic achievement, and found that practice just doesn’t matter that much.
* 11 History Books You Should Read Before Writing Your Military SF Novel.
* On Early Science Fiction and the Medieval.
* Careerism and totalitarianism.
Genocide, she insisted, is work. If it is to be done, people must be hired and paid; if it is to be done well, they must be supervised and promoted.
Progressive racism is how racism is enacted by being denied: how racism is heard as a blow to the reputation of an organisation as being progressive. We can detect the same mechanism happening in political movements: when anti-racism becomes part of an identity for progressive whites, racism is either re-located in a body over there (the racist) or understood as a blow to self-reputation of individuals for being progressive. This term “progressive whites” comes from Ruth Frankenberg important work on whiteness studies. She argues that focusing on whiteness purely in negative terms can “leaves progressive whites apparently without any genealogy” (1993, 232). Kincheloe and Steinberg in their work on whiteness studies write of “the necessity of creating a positive, proud, attractive antiracist white identity” (1998, 34). Indeed, the most astonishing aspect of this list of adjectives (positive, proud, attractive, antiracist) is that antiracism then becomes just another white attribute in a chain: indeed, anti-racism may even provide the conditions for a new discourse of white pride.
* When we peel back its progressive pedagogical covering, the teaching-tool defense is embodied in unequal reasoning. It is embodied in racist logic: our national inability to value the same, to reason the same, to think the same for different racial groups.
* What effects has “ban the box” had so far? Two new working papers suggest that, as economic theory predicts, “ban the box” policies increase racial disparities in employment outcomes. So disheartening.
* Shady accounting underpins Trump’s wealth. No! I won’t believe it!
* What’s the Matter with San Francisco: How Silicon Valley’s Ideology Has Ruined a Great City.
* Well, the establishment’s also pretty bored by literary work that deals with our treatment of the rest of being — you know, other animals, the rest of life on Earth, the creatures beyond the man-apes. Like the tragedy of how our men treat our women, the tragic way humans treat nonhumans is still, to many U.S. fiction arbiters, also irrelevant as a conversation, often dismissed as a boutique topic that’s the fodder of cranks and tree huggers. Women and the rest of species in existence: two flaming badges of uncool.
* Harambe launches a thousand thinkpieces.
* The Black Film Canon: The 50 greatest movies by black directors.
* Jessica Valenti: my life as a ‘sex object.’
* How an industry helps Chinese students cheat their way into and through U.S. colleges.
* Nearly half of young black men in Chicago out of work, out of school. All told, over that same 14-year stretch, Chicago’s black population decreased by an estimated 200,000 residents, or nearly 19 percent. Illinois now has the highest unemployment rate in the United States.
* AP FACT CHECK: Clinton misstates key facts in email episode. Hillary Clinton vs. Herself. Hillary Clinton Remains the Most Likely 45th President of the United States.
* After Being Called Out, Trump Hastily Donates the Veterans’ Aid Money He Said He’d Already Donated. Meet David French: the random dude off the street Bill Kristol decided will save America from Trump.
* This is good fun but pretty seriously slanders Magneto and the Joker.
* The Republicans’ Military Budget Could Make Every Homeless Person In America A Millionaire.
* The Male Gaze in a Math Book.
* Coming from Pixar, 2022: Swarm of bees follows woman’s car for two days to rescue their queen.
* The paralogisms of pure dismissal.
* Fandom Is Broken. A Retort. I’m mostly just impressed with how hard I nailed it.
* Baby abandoned at SF State now one of its grads.
* Quitting Your Job to Pursue Your Passion is Bullshit.
* Hyperattention and hyperdistraction.
* Not a Review of Neoreaction a Basilisk. I for one welcome our artificially intelligent overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted writer and educator, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground zinc caves.
* Make Bayesianism Work for You.
* A Renegade Muscles In on Mister Softee’s Turf.
“Let me tell you about this business,” Adam Vega, a thickly muscled, heavily tattooed Mister Softee man who works the upper reaches of the Upper East Side and East Harlem, said on Wednesday. “Every truck has a bat inside.”
* A Fascinating Video Essay Explores the Key Reason Why Calvin and Hobbes Remains So Beloved Today.
* This is a little old, but DC has basically gone ahead and made it real, so…
* David Mitchell buries latest manuscript for a hundred years.
* Algorithms: The Future That Already Happened.
* Judith Butler on the Value of the Humanities and Why We Read.
* Time to panic about Rogue One.
* I still can’t believe The Cursed Child is a real thing. Even photographs can’t convince me.
* [somberly drags FerrisBueller.privilege.Salon.docx to the trash can]
* Business Of Disaster: Insurance Firms Profited $400 Million After Sandy.
* Over a third of coral is dead in parts of the Great Barrier Reef, scientists say.
* And to imagine the ocean of the future: picture a writhing mass of unkillable tentacles, forever.
Point & Counterpoint
Alexis Madrigal: Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike.
Instead, it’s a dozen scared kids and a police officer named John Pike spraying them in the face from three feet away. And while it’s his finger pulling the trigger, the police system is what put him in the position to be standing in front of those students. I am sure that he is a man like me, and he didn’t become a cop to shoot history majors with pepper spray. But the current policing paradigm requires that students get shot in the eyes with a chemical weapon if they resist, however peaceably. Someone has to do it.
And while the kids may cough up blood and writhe in pain, what happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.
Marc Bousquet: Sympathy for Eichmann?
The lesson of Lt. Pike is not that he’s the victim of a lousy policy (“just the end point” of a system of which he “is a casualty too,”as Madrigal says). The lesson is that even within a flawed system he could and should have chosen better. So can we all.
So no, you don’t pretend that the legion of Eichmanns are master villains. But you don’t make excuses for them, either. You try them for their crimes–and you hunt down the little Eichmann in your own soul.
‘District 9’
In an interview with slashfilm.com, Blomkamp said he wanted to make a film that “didn’t depress the audience and kind of ram a whole lot of ideas down their throat that maybe they didn’t feel like hearing.” Could there be a more disheartening statement of purpose by a young artist, or a more cynical underestimation of an audience’s intelligence? — Chris Stamm, Willamette Week (via)
There’s a lot to be said for District 9, but I’m afraid I really don’t connect with the reviews calling it the best SF of the year. (Both Star Trek and Moon were, I think, better films, just off the top of my head.) District 9 is good, and there are aspects of it that are very good—I’m especially fond of the gorgeous establishing shots with the mothership hanging in the sky over Johannesburg—but while the South African setting is a nice change of pace at its core this is still a fairly pedestrian alien-refugee story of the kind we’ve all seen umpteen thousand times before. (And I find there’s something a little bit embarrassing in all the reviewers jumping to name apartheid, as if merely being able to recall the word were criticism enough. Apartheid is surely a red herring in all this; the film is much more about directly about the apartheidic horrors of globalization’s slums than about apartheid proper.)
The film’s best section is its first half-hour, which is presented to us in the form of documentary footage that darkly hints at events to come later in the plot. (During this period I thought it might actually be the best SF of the year.) It’s spellbinding; the entire film could and should have been like this. But the film, bizarrely, abandons this structure—it begins to show us nondiegetic scenes which were not and could not have been filmed interspersed with the documentary material, undercutting and ultimately destroying its own formal conceit. Likewise, the film’s striking setup—the arrival of a dank, apparently damaged mothership filled with starving insectoid worker drones whose temporary sojourn on Earth slowly turns permanent, much to the frustration of their human “benefactors”—seems largely forgotten in a plot that rapidly degrades into a silly fight over futuretech lasers and a MacGuffin rocket fuel that also (funny coincidence!) magically recodes human DNA. Important questions about global capitalism, the dark side of humanitarianism, and the legally precarious outsider status of the world’s poor are raised, only to be abandoned. Even the Eichmannesque unlikeability of the film’s protagonist goes essentially unexamined; he suddenly morphs into a conventional hero when the clock demands he must, and that’s that.
This film should be great, but it’s merely good, because it suffers badly from the aesthetic cowardice that causes mainstream films to retreat from their own best ideas, in favor of banal familiarity, whenever things threaten to get completely awesome.
What I’m saying is, District 9 is a romp, and a fun one—but it’s nowhere close to pushing the boundaries of cinematic SF. Let’s not lose our heads.
Another Monday Linkdump
Monday links.
* Vernor Vinge guarantees the Singularity by 2030. Take it to the bank. Via Boing Boing.
* They’ll get the stone wall around East Campus when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
* Today’s most useful single-serving site: http://shouldibeworriedaboutswineflu.com/.
* The judgment against Eichmann speaks to Bybee: Far from absolving him of guilt, his remoteness from the actual torturers—his thoughtlessness—increases the degree of his responsibility. His is a special kind of evil—the evil of nonchalance where there should be outrage.
* Geoengineering and the New Climate Denialism.
* Meanwhile, Krugman seeks to tell the future by looking at programs Republicans have most recently tried to cut funding for.
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains for the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. That is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.
That’s Hannah Arendt putting imaginary words into the mouths of Eichmann’s judges at the close of her excellent Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which I’ve been reading this week. The book inaugurates what looks to be the second theme of my summer reading, following apocalypse: evil. (Next up: Badiou’s Ethics.) The Eichmann trial was one of the most important twentieth-century events I knew almost nothing about, informing everything from the subtext of The Remains of the Day to the trial of Gaius Baltar last season on Battlestar Galactica—so I’m very glad to finally know a little something about it. And Arendt’s book is, again, very, very good—much if not nearly all of the criticism I’ve seen lobbed against it strikes me as without merit.
YouTube has your vintage newsreels:
Gerry Canavan 