Wednesday Links!

* Call for Papers, UWM/Marquette Graduate Student Humanities Conference: “Conflict and Liberation.”

* Call for Papers: Posthuman Futures.

* Your SF short film of the week: “Stealing Time.”

* Fifty years ago today, the United States of America dropped four nuclear bombs on Spain. It was an accident.

Fail safe systems in the weapons mostly worked

Uh, mostly?

and none of the four bombs experienced a nuclear reaction upon impact, sparing the region and its hundreds of inhabitants from multiple nuclear blasts that would’ve dwarfed the explosion over Hiroshima. “Only a fortunate stroke of luck saved the Spanish population of the area from catastrophe,” a Soviet official said at the time.

well that’s good

But the conventional high explosives on two of the bombs did detonate, essentially turning those weapons into dirty bombs that blasted plutonium radiation across the countryside.

oh

* Democracy, Disposability, and the Flint Water Crisis.

Local, regional, and state governments are removing the basic, infrastructural supports that are necessary for the reproduction of life. As a consequence, residents of cities like Flint and Detroit, in particular black and immigrant populations, have been subjected to increasing vulnerability in forms like declining life expectancy and appalling infant mortality. “Disposability” and “surplus population” sound like abstract concepts, but they’re a tangible, visceral reality for folks on the ground in Flint. “We’re like disposable people here,” one resident told the Toronto Star the other day. “We’re not even human here, I guess.”

* Detroit’s Teachers Want You to See These Disturbing Photos of Their Toxic Schools.

* The Color of Surveillance: What an infamous abuse of power teaches us about the modern spy era.

* This is the exam from a class that MLK taught at Morehouse in the early 1960s.

* So you want to read Infinite Jest.

* These 11 laws are what keep space from becoming the wild west.

* America’s Other Original Sin.

* How the shining architectural optimism of the 1960s and 70s has ultimately produced buildings such as supermarkets, open-plan offices and other spaces of control.

* The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it.

* Even Insured Can Face Crushing Medical Debt, Study Finds. ‘I Am Drowning.’ The Voices of People With Medical Debt.

* The Nation: Bernie Sanders for President.

* And in anti-endorsements: Sanders and Reparations. Rejecting Bourgeois Feminism.

* When I was younger, someone took a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me. I blamed my mother. I despised her. I loved her.

* Jay Edidin on his recent top surgery.

* The University of Victoria, in Canada, has announced the establishment of what it says is the world’s first endowed chair in transgender studies.

* HBO to air the rarely seen Godfather Epic cutting Parts I and II together.

* Tennis match fixing: Evidence of suspected match-fixing revealed.

* “Someone in Florida had made a second-mortgage loan to O.J. Simpson, and I just about blew my top, because there was this huge judgment against him from his wife’s parents,” she recalled. Simpson had been acquitted of killing his wife Nicole and her friend but was later found liable for their deaths in a civil lawsuit; that judgment took precedence over other debts, such as if Simpson defaulted on his WaMu loan.

“When I asked how we could possibly foreclose on it, they said there was a letter in the file from O.J. Simpson saying ‘the judgment is no good, because I didn’t do it.’”

* “The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter.” Weird! Kooky! Zany!

* After Oil.

* Sick Woman Theory.

* “In Oklahoma, now the country’s earthquake capital…”

* Steven Moffat reveals the BBC almost canceled Doctor Who in 2009.

* Young People Used These Absurd Little Cards to Get Laid in the 19th Century.

* Shocking study reveals physics teachers give girls lower grades than boys – for the exact same answers.

* A major new finding about the impact of having a dad who was drafted to Vietnam.

* Former Nazi Medical Orderly to Stand Trial for Deaths of 3,681 People at Auschwitz.

* Writing is hard: “Shut up, Wesley!” did irreparable damage to Wesley Crusher’s role in TNG.

* WHAT YEAR IS IT

* Unbreakable! They alive, damnit!

* Why Is Sperm So Damn Expensive?

* A 120,000-Piece Lego Model of the Titanic Breaking in Half.

* The Illegitimacy of Aragorn’s Claim to the Throne.

Given that the Númenoreans ruined their civilization to the point that it was personally destroyed by God Himself, the Gondorrim probably shouldn’t have been so quick to crown a long-lived, pure-blooded Númenorean like Aragorn. They’d probably have been better off elevating Pippin Took to the throne. Hobbits at least dally with the good things in life: hearty food, heady ales, fireworks, and weed.

* I don’t know why I’ll watch basically anything involving Pee Wee Herman, but.

* ‘Man flu’ is real. I’m taking the month off.

* Synergy killed the Fantastic Four.

* The Weird Way That Standing (Not Walking) on Escalators Helps Move People More Quickly.

* Race and gifted and talented programs.

* News you can use from the Financial Post: Here’s how to crush student activists once they become your employee.

* The genetic breakthrough that could change humanity, explained.

* Is it still possible to get away with a heist?

* And for real though this is aliens.

What Day Is It? Links

* Later today, at UC Davis: Environments & Societies: Gerry Canavan, “Science Fiction and Utopia in the Anthroposcene.”

* Marquette Protest on Diversity, University Seal.

* The LAO and Permanent University Austerity.

* Proclaims British economist Noreena Hertz, who recently surveyed more than 1,000 teenage girls in the United States and England: “This generation is profoundly anxious.”

* Failing the entire class.

* Rebirth of the Research University.

* Our research indicates children learn 4% more efficiently when being slowly boiled alive.

* Natalia Cecire on resilience and unbreakability.

* The Brutality of Police Culture in Baltimore. The Mysterious Death of Freddie Gray. Nonviolence as Compliance. Images of the Unrest in Baltimore. “I Blame The Department.” “Those Kids Were Set Up.” The Baltimore Riots Didn’t Start the Way You Think. In Freddie Gray’s Baltimore neighborhood, half of the residents don’t have jobs. Why Baltimore Rebelled.

* How Often Do Officers Lie Under Oath?

* Police Cadet Turns in Cop for Turning Body Cam Off Just Before Pummeling his Victim.

* Sneaky crosswalk law in Los Angeles is a tax for the crime of being poor.

* How Photography Was Optimized for White Skin Color.

* The disturbing differences in what men want in their wives and their daughters.

* It was a group assignment for four of them, but one of them did any actual work.

* The Shining, Retold as an Atari 2600 Game.

* If a bug in a slot machine says you’ve won $41.8m, can you claim it? Not in the case of Pauline McKee, 90, denied the payout after Iowa’s supreme court sided with the house.

* I didn’t become a doctor for the money.

* Netflix’s numbers are much less impressive than you would have thought.

* I will burn this fucking place to the ground before I get rid of that mirror.

* The struggle is real: Zoo Keeper Helps Constipated Monkey Pass Peanut By Licking Its Butt For An Hour.

* Your Tumblr of the day: Samplerman.

* “Sucralose, better known as Splenda, and acesulfame potassium, which is often called Ace K”: parent, talk to your kids about drugs.

* Men Accused of Sexual Assault Face Long Odds When Suing Colleges for Gender Bias.

* Jane Goodall Says SeaWorld ‘Should Be Closed Down.’

* Wisconsin’s roads are the third-worst in the nation. That’s pretty grim: how could two different states possibly be worse?

* Sounds like Age of Ultron will disappoint you twice.

* Scenes from the class struggle in California.

* Who created Caitlin Snow on #TheFlash? According to @DCComics, nobody.

* And why not him? The Bernie Sanders Decade.

 

Happy Halloween Links!

* China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween. “Halloween, for a rigorous socialist, is worth defending.”

* A new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television has come out, a special issue on SF anime. This is the last one before I became an editor, but read it anyway!

* Submission guidelines for Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. A really interesting document of the new fandom.

* How much is revenge worth? The Life Aquatic: A Stanley Kubrick Film.

* William Gibson: The Future Will View Us “As a Joke.”

* SimCity isn’t a sandbox. Its rules reflect the neoliberal common sense of today’s urban planning.

* This Is What Happens When You Criticize Teach for America.

* How My Employer Put the “FML” in FMLA.

* “Do you know about Jian?”

* Vowing to break “one of the only remaining public monopolies,” Gov. Cuomo on Monday said he’ll push for a new round of teacher evaluation standards if re-elected. Democrats! Catch the fever!

* Cops shows and the denial of death.

* “My whole life has been affected by a fight that I was in when I was 14,” she says. “It’s not something that you can take back and not something that was premeditated, and I still have to deal with the consequences every day.” Racist policing of African-American kids in Minneapolis.

* The implicit idea here is that our professional and financial growth depends on our spiritual merit, not on the presence or absence of social structures and biases. Spiritual meritocracy.

* Ebola and quarantine. The Grim Future if Ebola Goes Global.

* Hidden secrets of the MIT Science Fiction Society.

* Civility is truly an intricate riddle, friends.

* Mitch Hurwitz is so hurt that you didn’t like Arrested Development Season 4 that he’s going to waste his time reediting the whole thing his chronologically.

* If this catches on my daughter could be in some serious legal trouble: Court orders man to stop pretending to fall over.

* Hobby Lobby redux: Inmate Sues Prison Claiming His Religious Liberty Entitles Him To Dress Like A Pirate.

* Report: Piece of Amelia Earhart’s Plane Found on Island Where She Died.

* Non-Violence In Gaming.

* Incredibly, nearly half of North Americans say they’ve succumbed to mate poaching attempts at some point. One estimate suggests that 63% of men and 54% of women are in their current long-term relationships because their current partner stole them from a previous partner. I can’t work out the math on this but including the relationships that ended after a partner was “stolen” from a previous partner you’re dealing with an overwhelming supermajority of relationships beginning with cheating/”poaching.” That just doesn’t seem plausible to me on its face.

* Meanwhile, the film industry seems pretty worried that a man could fall in love with a computer.

* Michael Showalter is developing a sci-fi comedy for FX. A dark, gritty reboot of The Bearded Men of Space Station 11 or I walk.

* Paying an exorbitant monthly fee to feel like you have friends can get expensive, and the New York Times is on it.

* So you want to troll an academic.

* Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

* Disney Princesses with realistic waistlines.

* Now we see the violence inherent in academia.

* Rest in peace, Galway Kinnell. A favorite:

She is leading her old father into the future
as far as they can go, and she is walking
him back into her childhood, where she stood
in bare feet on the toes of his shoes
and they foxtrotted on this same rug.
I watch them closely: she could be teaching him
the last steps that one day she may teach me.
At this moment, he glints and shines,
as if it will be only a small dislocation
for him to pass from this paradise into the next.

* And your SF short story of the day: “How to Get Back to the Forest.”

Wednesday Links!

* CFP: World Science Fiction Studies.

* We apply because it is absurd: The academic job market: A Kierkegaardian perspective. Also good from Adam: Some reservations about non-violent resistance. To what are “contrarians” contrary?

* 100 Years of Sun Ra.

* Can a Pope Help Sustain Humanity and Ecology?

* How The “Trigger Warning” Took Over The Internet.

* There’s an old joke about economists: A mathematician, a statistician and an economist apply for a job. The interviewer asks, “What’s two plus two?” The mathematician says, “Four.” The statistician thinks for a second and says, “On average, four.” And the economist gets up, closes the door, turns to the interviewer and says, “What do you want it to be?”

* BREAKING: The U.S. Constitution Is Impossible to Amend. This is why we need to start over.

* BREAKING: New Report Finds Climate Change Already Having Broad Impact. This is why we need to start over.

* The end of Florida.

* “Check your privilege!” is a speech-act that intends the maintenance of anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-capitalist groups against the persistent threat of auto-corruption. One only says “Check your privilege!” to comrades, to those with whom you co-incline. It’s a locution that keeps political lines of communication clear from all of the fucked-up shit we bring, and can’t not bring, to our collectivities. … A simple way of putting this: One checks the privileges of one’s friends. One destroys those of one’s enemies. One does the former in the service of the latter.

* Charter Schools Gone Wild: Study Finds Widespread Fraud, Mismanagement and Waste.

* Los Angeles now spending more on Wall Street fees than on maintaining roads.

* The Silencing Of Cecily McMillan.

* Advocates Respond to White House Report on College Sexual Assault.

* Universities and researchers all over the world have a problem with Microsoft. It’s not just that the company forces expensive and dated software on customers. Using products like Microsoft’s email service Outlook is potentially in breach of the ethical contracts researchers sign when they promise to safeguard the privacy of their subjects.

* The nursery and the sitting room are part of a Mehrgenerationenhaus, literally a “multigeneration house”, which is a kindergarten, a social centre for the elderly and somewhere young families can drop in for coffee and advice. In theory, the sitting room is reserved for the over-60s, but in the practice the door to the kids’ area rarely stays closed for long.

* “With Porn Studies, there is no such ambiguity about the sheer world-making power of pornography.”

* Re-headlining the news.

* I just can’t accept that a movie starring a 72-year-old Harrison Ford is going to be called “The Ancient Fear.”

* If the Center for Teaching and Learning were supported by a Center for Teaching and Learning, then all stakeholders could join the circle of excellence.

* Obama’s pretending he cares about climate again. Vox is straight-up advocating that America invade Iran I guess.

* W. Kamau Bell and Tressie McMillan Cottom discuss Leslie Jones, blackness, and Saturday Night Live.

* Great moments in poorly thought-out pedagogy.

* Amherst College Officially Bans All Fraternities And Sororities — though friends of Facebook familiar with the place tell me that it’s not as big a deal as it sounds.

* Gasp! Conservative Money Front Is Behind Princeton’s “White Privilege” Guy.

* Teen Pregnancies Are Plunging Because Young People Are Making Responsible Sexual Decisions.

* Science reporting is abysmal, sexual difference edition.

* Disruptive innovation, Soylent Green edition.

* Abolish prom.

* A college degree is worth $831,000.

* And the future is finally here: Grilled Cheese Delivered By Parachute, Coming Soon to NYC.

Sunday Afternoon

* ICYMI: Dr. Seuss Explains Assessment, Metrics, Administrative Blight, and Pretty Much Every Aspect of the Contemporary Education System.

* This is, I think, literally the first time I have ever heard of university budget cuts impacting administration. Meanwhile.

* Meanwhile meanwhile, Congress talks adjuncts and adjunctification. I’m sure they’ll come up with a good solution soon.

* Tressie McMillan Cottom on race and adjunctification.

* Yo novel so staid and conventional, it’s taught at over 50 MFA programs.

* Submitted for your approval: An OCR of the MLA JIL list, 1965-2012.

* For some reason I’m seeing a ton of links to Bousquet’s “Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers” this weekend.

*  Bérubé’s last post on MLA 2014.

* Harvard, MIT Online Courses Dropped by 95% of Registrants.

* Inside a for-profit college nightmare.

* Inside the “longform backlash.”

* How Student Activists at Duke Transformed a $6 Billion Endowment.

* “Income inequality” has proved a very successful framing for Democrats discussing a massive social problem, so of course the Obama White House is rolling out a much worse one.

* Pope Francis Is Drafting An Encyclical On The Environment.

* xkcd explains climate.

* Demographics is destiny: Latinos overwhelmingly want action on climate change.

* How nonviolent was the civil rights movement?

* It’s 1968, and Esquire is interviewing James Baldwin.

* Chris Christie says no to dashboard cameras.

* The coming Common Core meltdown.

* The headline reads, “Chinese restaurant owner told to pull down two gigantic 50ft naked Buddhas from establishment’s roof.”

* Highly Educated, Highly Indebted: The Lives of Today’s 27-Year-Olds, In Charts.

* America’s nuclear corps are a mess. Dr. Strangelove was a documentary.

* A journey to the end of the world (of Minecraft).

* Science has finally proved that sex reverses cognitive decline in rats.

* This World Map Shows The Enormity Of America’s Prison Problem.

* The New York Times has the tragic story of a man with a million dollars in his retirement account struggling to scrape by on just $31,500 a month. Truly, there but for the grace of God go we.

* Bucking trend, Wisconsin union membership grows.

* Fox to strand reality show contestants on an island for an entire year.

* Woody Guthrie’s daughter wants to preserve Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.

* The “okay, fine, let’s abolish all marriages” response to marriage equality is so strange to me. I know things like this happened during the civil rights movement — and one might argue that precisely the same thing has been happening in slow-motion to public education over the last few decades — but it still seems like such a strange, uniquely twenty-first-century temper tantrum.

* Behold, the 90s! The Most Impressive Costumes from Star Trek: TNG’s First 3 Seasons.

* Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath.

* We Didn’t Eat the Marshmallow. The Marshmallow Ate Us.

* And Stephen Hawking wants to destroy all your silly, silly dreams.

Friday End of the Semester Why Aren’t I Already Sleeping Links

* Don’t Sanitize Nelson Mandela: He’s Honored Now, But Was Hated Then. Apartheid’s Useful Idiots. History Needs to Be Honest. The National Review, American Conservatism, and Nelson Mandela. Six Things Nelson Mandela Believed That Most People Won’t Talk About. The Island. Mandela will never, ever be your minstrel. Some reservations about non-violent resistance. Mandela and the Pistons. The inevitable Žižek. Be Nelson Mandela.

* The 130 cities where fast-food workers struck Thursday.

* Graduate students and labor organizing after NYU and UAW.

* Many New Ph.D.’s Emerge Deeper in Debt Than in the Past, Survey Shows.

* It’s Not Just Football: Other college athletes are actually more likely to suffer concussions.

* Great moments in legal absurdism: Unarmed Man Is Charged With Wounding Bystanders Shot by Police Near Times Square.

* The climate of Middle Earth.

* And the US has drawn an epically bad World Cup group. Well, there’s always 2018…

Tuesday!

* Well, it was nice while it lasted: Guatemalan Court Overturns Genocide Conviction of Ex-Dictator.

* College sports as investment bubble? Reform or Retreat?

* MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used.

* One of 500. Come for the thoughtful and reflective essay, stay for the shit-stirring, dickish comments…

* How the US Turned Three Pacifists into Violent Terrorists. The headline is a bit misleading; this is about word games prosecutors play.

* ‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz on His Two-Year Odyssey to Revive the Show.

* And over at Dear Television Lili Loofbourow has a good thing on the latest Mad Men episode, too.

Lots of Wednesday Links

* It’s damn cold in Chicago: water is freezing to the sides of burning buildings.

* The reality of being an adjunct. MOOCs for Credit. Why We Should Talk About the Football Coach’s Salary When Faculty are Let Go. Please consider not doing a PhD.

• According to this link (which has information I cannot independently verify), the athletic budget for 2011 was $16 million, a 9.2% increase over the previous year. $9 million of that budget came from student fees.
• The reduction in faculty is expected to save $5.2 million.

* Lynda Barry’s course at the University of Wisconsin. I should be taking this.

* Liberal pundits and Republican congressmen agree: Barack Obama’s second inaugural was the most liberal speech of his presidency. They may be right. But just what kind of liberalism is this?

Obama’s speech was a far cry from the message of the modern Republican Party. But much of it would fit snugly in a handbook from Human Relations: Discrimination will not be tolerated. Active citizenship is everyone’s responsibility. Work harder.

* Dr. King would be proud to see our Global Strike team – comprised of Airmen, civilians and contractors from every race, creed, background and religion – standing side-by-side ensuring the most powerful weapons in the US arsenal remain the credible bedrock of our national defense. Would he, though? Would he really?

* Cheat to win: Virginia wants to rig the Electoral College too.

In addition to disenfranchising voters in dense areas, this would end the principle of “one person, one vote.” If Ohio operated under this scheme, for example, Obama would have received just 22 percent of the electoral votes, despite winning 52 percent of the popular vote in the state…

It’s also worth noting, again, that this constitutes a massive disenfranchisement of African American and other nonwhite voters, who tend to cluster near urban areas. When you couple this with the move on Monday to redraw the state’s electoral maps — eliminating one state senate district and packing black voters into another, diluting their strength — it’s as if Virginia Republicans are responding to Obama’s repeat victory in the state by building an electoral facsimile of Jim Crow.

* Brain scans performed on five former NFL players revealed images of the protein that causes football-related brain damage — the first time researchers have identified signs of the crippling disease in living players. The impending death of pro football. See also: Junior Seau’s Family Is Suing The NFL.

* There’s a gold rush going on right now. Man is breaking the earth, looking for natural gas — just as we always have. It’s a mad scene, with hucksters on every side of the issue. And that’s just on the surface. You won’t believe what’s happening underground. Thank You for Fracking.

* U.S. scientists will retire most research chimps.

* House Republican Leader Blames Gun Violence On ‘Welfare Moms.’

* Searching for Star Wars artifacts in the California desert.

* Rejected movie ideas: Age-Reversed Home Alone Reboot.

* Internet argument perfect storm: The woman who hired a hitman to murder her abusive husband.

* Happy Objectify A Man in Tech Day.

* Supreme Court upholds radical notion that the Environmental Protection Agency has the right to protect the environment.

* Loyalty oaths in Arizona high schools.

* How it feels to be stalked.

* War machine decides blood is blood: Pentagon Lifts Ban on Women in Combat.

* The LA that never was.

* And from the too-good-to-check file: The Fascinating Business Cards of 20 Famous People.

Violence and Nonviolence

“Non-violence” takes a distinction created by the state (between violence and non-violence) and then applies this moralistically to the tactics of the movement, such that any stepping outside of these boundaries becomes, not a disagreement about tactics, but an occasion for condemnation (this reminds me of re-reading King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” recently, and being struck by the way in which King puts forward a clearly moral position without seeming to me to be moralistic; I’m interested in tring to figure out exactly where the distinction lies). The situation where “non-violent” activists cooperate with the state in condemning their supposed comrades is not accidental, but flows directly from their philosophy; it is to the credit of those non-violent activists who refuse to do this that they put solidarity ahead of their philosophy.

Some interesting thoughts on violence and nonviolence in activism at An und für sich. I especially appreciated this citation of David Graeber:

“I remember my surprise and amusement, the first time I met activists from the April 6 Youth Movement from Egypt, when the issue of non-violence came up. “Of course we were non-violent,” said one of the original organizers, a young man of liberal politics who actually worked at a bank. “No one ever used firearms, or anything like that. We never did anything more militant than throwing rocks!”

Thursday Links

* Today is our last day discussing John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, and conveniently the headline at io9 right now reads “Gonorrhea is becoming untreatable.” The prophecy was true!

*  In an 8-1 vote, the City Council of Greensboro, North Carolina approved a resolution opposing a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban any legal recognition of same-sex couples. Greensboro joins Raleigh and Chapel Hill all in opposition to Amendment 1, which comes to a vote on May 8. The Durham City Council opposes the measure too.

* 16 Things Super Bowl Ads Would Like You to Know About Women in 2012.

* Steve Jobs’s FBI file. Academic pro-tip: when beginning research on anyone who is deceased you should immediately request their FBI file.

* Bad news folks: Obama Has Put America On ‘The Path’ Of Executing Religious People By Decapitation.

* In an interesting piece at An und für sich, Adam Kotsko tries to dive beneath the politics and explain just why it is the Catholic hierarchy is so interested in birth control.

I propose that the answer can be found in a historic compromise set forth by one of the most influential thinkers you’ve never heard of: namely, Clement of Alexandria, a second-century Christian philosopher.

* From David Graeber—Concerning the Violent Peace-Police: An Open Letter to Chris Hedges.

Surely you must recognize, when it’s laid out in this fashion, that this is precisely the sort of language and argument that, historically, has been invoked by those encouraging one group of people to physically attack, ethnically cleanse, or exterminate another—in fact, the sort of language and argument that is almost never invoked in any other circumstance. After all, if a group is made up exclusively of violent fanatics who cannot be reasoned with, intent on our destruction, what else can we really do? This is the language of violence in its purest form. Far more than “fuck the police.” To see this kind of language employed by someone who claims to be speaking in the name of non-violence is genuinely extraordinary.

* Facebook has found a way to make money from its new Timeline feature less than five months after launching it, repackaging what people “listen” to, “watch,” and “read” into ads and delivering them to their friends.

* Tomorrow’s TV Tropes today: my friend @drbluman finds another example of Sitcom Entropy, the inexorable law of nature that shows how sitcoms degrade in quality over time.

* Arizona Law SB 1467 Would Make It Illegal to Teach Law, History, or Literature, or for Teachers to Have Sex, or Pee.

* And James Fallows attempts to explain Obama.

This is the central mystery of his performance as a candidate and a president. Has Obama in office been anything like the chess master he seemed in the campaign, whose placid veneer masked an ability to think 10 moves ahead, at which point his adversaries would belatedly recognize that they had lost long ago? Or has he been revealed as just a pawn—a guy who got lucky as a campaigner but is now pushed around by political opponents who outwit him and economic trends that overwhelm him?

Occupy the GA

Traxus vs. the General Assembly.

‘Gandhi and the Politics of Nonviolence’

I want to suggest, though, that the myth about Gandhi develops in the same way that it develops about Martin Luther King so that we as a movement internalize the lesson that’s most beneficial for the 1% of society. That lesson is as follows: that we fail as movements because we are violent, not because they are; that we ought not to talk about openly defending ourselves against their violence, even though they are prepared to and talk all the time about using brutal force against us, as we saw in Oakland just last weekend; that we as a movement should police ourselves and focus on internal divisions, which they happen to sow; and we should continue to believe that the reasons they hold on to power, wealth, oppression, and arms is because we are not sufficiently pious, humble, or meek.

Snehal Shingavi at a recent Occupy Austin Teach-In.

Monday Morning

* Occupy Wall Street is a month old today, with Obama saying yesterday that Martin Luther King would have approved. (His daughter thinks so, too.) The parent group has now raised over $300,000.

* Courting King’s disapproval, Adam Kotsko questions nonviolence as a tactic.

In such a context, I’m not sure how effective non-violent methods can really be. They presuppose a level of decency and shame that I’m not sure our militarized police forces possess, at the end of the day. If they did, they wouldn’t show up with riot gear in response to what amounts to a bunch of people kind of hanging out. They wouldn’t use property damage as an excuse to exercise collective punishment. More specifically in this case: they wouldn’t arrest people who are trying to close their bank accounts.

* Cornell West arrested on the steps of the Supreme Court.

* Freddie deBoer: Blogging is a system of control.

* Derek Slater: No I’m Not Going to Law School.

* And the experts who were the only people not to see the first disaster coming say things can’t possibly get any worse. Enjoy your day!

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.