Posts Tagged ‘My Lai’
Christmas and/or Fascism Megapost Forever and Ever Links – Part Two!
* Now that’s running it like a sandwich: College Can’t Prove It Taught 16,000 Online Students.
* Shockwave: A Syllabus for the End Times.
* Addressing the myths of academic job market.
* Arrival and the end of the academy.
* This was not called execution. It was called retirement.
* Colleges should invest in career services.
* The Oakland Fire Tragedy and Higher Education.
* Inside the Bob Dylan Archive.
* Afrofuturism: The Next Generation.
* Rewriting Rogue One. And more.
* Rogue One: An Engineering Ethics Story. The Death Star and poor design.
* Rogue One: The Jacobin seal of approval.
* High praise: The Man in the High Castle season 2 is the worst TV show of the year.
* Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans. Team Bernie: Hillary ‘F*cking Ignored’ Us in Swing States. Building a Mass Socialist Party.
* Cabinet of Deplorables: Rex Tillerson. Rick Perry. An Intellectual History. Trump and the Late Deciders. Yes, Pence is preferable to Trump. The supermanagerial reich. The Age of Anger. Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it. What do you do when your reporter is personally attacked by the President of the United States? Twitter, Trump’s Ring of Power. This is fine.
* tfw your research collapses and it’s too late to rewrite the book
* Politics got weird because neoliberalism failed to deliver.
* The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia’s southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.
* Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump.
* The End Is Always Near: The New Inquiry reviews Peter Frase’s Four Futures.
* The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.
* What Was James Comey Thinking? James Comey never should have been FBI director in the first place.
* Horrors in Aleppo. What Is Aleppo?
* The Business of Institutionalization.
* Michigan search for welfare fraud has a mere 93% failure rate.
* Cover Letter to the Search Committee from My Shadow Self. Eight Excuses I Have Told My Son to Use for His Failure to Hand in English Homework, Excuses I Have Learned Are Acceptable During a Thirty-Year Career in Journalism, Books, and Film.
* Climate change, meet your apocalyptic twin: oceans poisoned by plastic. Real-time interactive map shows the pollution engulfing Earth. The Greater New York City Region Must Plan for “Permanent Flooding.”
* Google and the death of knowledge.
* There’s no safe space for kids anywhere: 368 gymnasts allege sexual exploitation.
* Hey, let’s all fight about Shakespeare again.
* Living with Exploding Head Syndrome: This is what it feels like to hear gunshots in your mind.
* United Nations to Wonder Woman: Drop Dead.
* We Want To See All the Scifi Movies on the 2016 Black List.
* Sold in the room: New Star Trek Comic Imagines a World Where the Romulans Made First Contact With Earth.
* Norm Macdonald: A Raw and Uncensored Interview.
* Anne Frank may not have been betrayed to Nazis, study finds: Raid that led to her arrest could have been part of investigation into illegal labor or falsified ration coupons.
* Talk to your kids about quantum mechanics — before someone else does.
* By the numbers: the technosphere now weights 30 trillion tons.
* The CIA Is Celebrating Its Cartography Division’s 75th Anniversary by Sharing Declassified Maps.
* Mr. Thompson confronted the officer in command of the rampaging platoon, Lt. William L. Calley, but was rebuffed. He then positioned the helicopter between the troops and the surviving villagers and faced off against another lieutenant. Mr. Thompson ordered Mr. Colburn to fire his M-60 machine gun at any soldiers who tried to inflict further harm. RIP.
* My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult.
* Billy Joel is really leaving money on the table.
* And dystopian film is never going to be able to keep up with the present.
Some Sunday Reading
* A warning to college profs from a high school teacher.
* The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools.
* Pulp Science Fiction in Spain, Before And During Totalitarianism.
* Sweating Obama Admits Drone Strikes Have Been Happening On Their Own.
* SF Gate review of Kill Anything That Moves The Real American War in Vietnam.
The problem, as described in Turse’s “Kill Anything That Moves,” is the tension between the “bad apples” argument – which sees atrocities in Vietnam as the exception – and the reality of the broader, official “American way of war.” Turse came to understand the latter after he stumbled onto documents of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. The military created the group after the My Lai massacre to avoid again being caught flat-footed.
The point, Turse found, was not to prevent war crimes but to contain the damage and stay, as the euphemism might go today, ahead of the PR problem. Finding the cache of internal documents, Turse halted his academic thesis work, and lit out in his car to spend the next several days photocopying these documents. He rounded this out with interviews with more than 100 veterans, alongside those of eyewitnesses and survivors of American atrocities in Vietnam. His verdict – more than a decade later – is damning and masterful.
* In the new New Republic: Original Sin: Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people.
* There is no intrinsic value in the prescribed motion. But this needn’t necessarily make up weep.
* It’s One Of The Craziest Internet Rumors About Guns. And As It Turns Out, It’s True.
Sunday Links
As promised, some Sunday links.
* Jon Stewart had odious liar Betsy McCaughey on his show Thursday night, and you should watch it; video at Crooks & Liars. Kevin Drum says Stewart shouldn’t have had her on at all; I think the video made McCaughey look terrible and in that sense was an important public service.
* Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World’s Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica.
* Mandatory pre-Mad-Men reading: Pandagon’s defense of Betty Draper.
* Have we reached Peak Crazy? Fox forces Glenn Beck to take a vacation.
* Responding to Krugman, Glenn Greenwald considers whether Obama has lost the trust of progressives. More on the latest polls showing progressives’ loss of faith from Steve Benen, while Matt Yglesias ponders the meaning of GOP approval numbers that “appear to be stuck near some kind of theoretical minimum” and TPM reports Sarah Palin winning the all-important Birther primary.
* Margaret Atwood blogs her book tour.
* Cynical-C has the trailer for Michael Moore’s next film, Capitalism: A Love Story.
* Lt. William Calley has apologized for the My Lai massacre, though the MetaFilter thread suggests there may be significantly less here than meets the eye.
“In October 2007, Calley agreed to be interviewed by the UK newspaper the Daily Mail to discuss the massacre, saying, “Meet me in the lobby of the nearest bank at opening time tomorrow, and give me a certified cheque for $25,000, then I’ll talk to you for precisely one hour.” When the journalist “showed up at the appointed hour, armed not with a cheque but a list of pertinent questions”, Calley left.”
* Also at MetaFilter: SIGG admits to misleading the public about its water bottles and BPA.
* Inglourious Basterds as alternate history.
* Game of the night: Max Damage.
* And the Smart Set looks at The Martian Chronicles in the context of 1960s optimism and the New Frontier. My Writing 20 for the spring (“Writing the Future”) begins there as well (though with Star Trek instead of Bradbury) before veering off into The Dispossessed and, later, Dollhouse.
Gerry Canavan 