Posts Tagged ‘religious freedom’
Weekend Links!
* C21 2015 call for papers: “After Extinction.”
* More 2014 postmortems: The Democrats Have Two Choices Now: Gridlock or Annihilation. And in Michigan: Democrats Get More Votes, Lose Anyway. Davis Campaign Marked by Failed Tactics, Muddled Messages. Stop denying the truth: The Democrats got walloped. What happened to that Democratic turnout machine? Game Change ’14. What Does It Mean for Hillary? Stop Whining About Young Voters, You Jerks. Shockingly, my call to abolish the Constitution altogether has received little traction.
* Thankfully, it’s not all bad news: I was about to hype up a Scott Walker 2016 run. Then I watched his victory speech.
* Elsewhere in the richest, most prosperous society ever to exist in human history: Ninety-year-old man faces jail for giving food to homeless people.
Can we use freedom of religious expression to overturn this bullshit law against feeding the homeless in Florida? http://t.co/RAyanjofW9
— @jsench (@jsench) November 6, 2014
* The 85 richest people on the planet now have as much money as the poorest 3.5 billion.
* It’s Cheaper to Buy a Judge Than a State Senator.
* Uber Is Pushing Drivers Into Subprime Loans. If you want a vision of the future: Amazon Is Beta-Testing Uber to Deliver Packages.
* What I’m not concerned with here is achieving some final and total harmony between the interests of each and the interests of all, or with cleansing humanity of conflict or egotism. I seek the shortest possible step from the society we have now to a society where most productive property is owned in common – not in order to rule out more radical change, but precisely in order to rule it in.
* Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing. Flipping Schools: The Hidden Forces Behind New Jersey Education Reform. Massachusetts Committed to Chasing Teachers Away.
* Are We Forgiving Too Much Student-Loan Debt? CHE is ON IT.
* What could possibly go wrong? Obama Vows to Work With Republicans on College Costs.
* Oh, right, that. Banks Urge Investors To Buy For-Profit College Stocks Now That The GOP Is Taking Back Congress.
* Seems like a great bunch of guys: For-Profit Groups Sue to Block Gainful Employment Rules. The estimate is that 65% of for-profit students are enrolled in programs that wouldn’t pass.
* Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it’s not exactly news that the country’s biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.
* R0y Lichtenstein’s “Whaam!” painting is based on one of my panels from an old DC war comic. Roy got four million dollars for it. I got zero.
* Violence Is Currency: A Pacifist Ex-Con’s Guide To Prison Weaponry.
* How GamerGate Is Influencing MIT Video Game Teachers. I’m wrestling with how much this needs to take over the syllabus of my “Video Game Culture” seminar next semester.
* It’s hard to study Scientology.
* “For those of us born in a post-Reagan America, having operated within this system our whole lives, there can be no doubt that Michel Foucault’s thinking describes our present.”
* In search of oil realism. I’ve just submitted an abstract for a chapter title “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking,” so this is definitely on my mind.
* NYC pastor: Starbucks is flavoured with the semen of sodomites. It’s called pumpkin spice, sir.
* My evil dad: Life as a serial killer’s daughter.
* Scenes from the class struggle in the legal industry.
The Force Hits the Snooze The Force Checks Its Phone The Force Brushes Its Teeth The Force Cannot #%^ing Believe It Forgot It Was Saturday
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2014
I actually don’t think this sounds terrible. I like the hint of menace I hear in “The Force Awakens,” as if the Force itself could be the enemy in the new trilogy. Who put this unelected energy field in charge of everything, anyway? Abolish the Force.
* Abolish the CW: Physicists determine that being rescued by The Flash is worse than being hit by a car.
* If you want a vision of the future: Disney announces Toy Story 4. More below the hilarity.
TOY STORY 4: The toys suffer an unspeakable existential dread but a saccharine happy ending dulls the pain TOY STORY 5: The toys suffer an u
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 7, 2014
I’ve seen a lot but I really don’t know that I can face whatever they’re going to do to those poor toys in TOY STORY 4.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 7, 2014
“Woody, I can’t believe we’re sitting on Andy’s grave.” “Everything dies, Buzz. Everything but us.” #ToyStory4 #youknowforkids
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 7, 2014
The year is 1,000,000 AD. All life on Earth is extinct. In a putrid hole somewhere in the empty ruins, half-buried in trash, Woody and Buzz
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 7, 2014
* I regret to inform you the ideology at its purest contest has closed. Thank you for your submission, but we have a winner.
* In a era without heroes, his website was our last hope: Meet the Mysterious Creator of Rumor-Debunking Site Snopes.com.
* The original version of Being John Malkovich, which I have fond memories of, would have been almost completely unwatchable.
* The Slow Unveiling of James Tiptree Jr.
* About 200,000 years ago, it was determined that spaceships could be powered by ennui.
* The Innocence Project was the last thing I believed in. Now I’m finally purged of hope.
* And they say this society can no longer achieve great things: Reality TV’s New Extreme: Being ‘Eaten Alive’ by a Giant Anaconda Snake.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 7, 2014 at 8:37 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, #nodads, academia, Africa, Alice Sheldon, Amazon, animals, art, austerity, banks, Barack Obama, Being John Malkovich, Center for 21st Century Studies, CFPs, class struggle, college, Colonization, comics, communism, debt, decadence, democracy, Democrats, Disney, elections, Episode 7, First Amendment, for-profit schools, Foucault, Gamergate, games, general election 2016, gerrymandering, Great Recession, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, hydrofracking, ideology at its purest, imperialism, Innocence Project, James Tiptree Jr., kakistocracy, law school, lawyers, let's just start over, mass extinction, Massachusetts, Michigan, midterm election 2014, Milwaukee, Morgan Spurlock, neoliberalism, New Jersey, now we see the violence inherent in the system, oil, Peak Oil, pedagogy, Philadelphia, politics, princesses, prison-industrial complex, prisons, pumpkin spice, reality TV, religious freedom, Republican primary 2016, Republicans, revolution, Roy Lichtenstein, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, Scientology, Scott Walker, serial killing, snopes.com, Star Wars, Starbucks, student debt, superheroes, teaching, Texas, the Anthropocene, the Constitution, the courts, the Flash, the Force, the law, the rich are different, the richest nation in the history of the world, Toy Story 4, Uber, urban legends, UWM, violence, war on education, web comics, Wendy Davis, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, young voters, zoos
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.
* 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.
* 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.”
Written by gerrycanavan
October 31, 2014 at 9:01 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Africa, Amelia Earhart, Andrew Cuomo, anime, Arrested Development, Berkeley, Bill Maher, cheating, China Miéville, civility, class struggle, death, deep state, democracy, Democrats, Disney, Ebola, Ex Machina, fandom, FML, FMLA, fraternities, futurity, Galway Kinnell, games, gaming, Halloween, Her, Hobby Lobby, horror, How the University Works, Jian Ghomeshi, karma, kids today, Kubrick, love, Marxism, meritocracy, Michael Showalter, misogyny, MIT, Mitch Hurwitz, mortality, my media empire, neoliberalism, Netflix, nonviolence, now we see the violence inherent in the system, obituary, Pastafarianism, poetry, politics, pregnancy, princesses, public health, quarantine, race, racism, rape, rape culture, religion, religious freedom, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, sexism, shadow government, SimCity, socialism, sororities, Teach for America, television, The Bearded Men of Space Station 11, the courts, the law, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the new fandom, The State, trolling, voting, William Gibson, writing, Zoey
Literally Every Weekend Link There Is
* It’s official: J.J. Abrams will ruin Star Wars (more).
* More drone fiction, please. Tweets not bombs. Lip-syncing the poetry of empire.
Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here?
* Anti-war activism at the University of Wisconsin, c. 1940.
* Stunning read on living as a victim of child abuse from the New York Times: The Price of a Stolen Childhood.
* David Foster Wallace and depression, in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
* Steve Benen and Maddowblog has been all over the Republican vote-rigging scheme, even going so low as to cite one of my tweets. What The 2012 Election Would Look Like Under The Republicans’ Vote-Rigging Plan. Scott Walker, of course, is rigging-curious. And a delicious little bit of schadenfreude.
* It is a sin against the new world of mediocrity to be distinct or distinguished. We are in the chain-store, neon-lighted era. Almost every city looks the same. The same people all dress the same – kids as Hopalong Cassidy, men with loud sportshirts and Truman suits, women in slacks. Sometimes you can tell whether a trousered individual is a man or a woman only by the width of the buttocks. Only a few cities have individuality. They are the seaports, New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. Boston reeks of decay, and is not genteel. The rest are all Cleveland.
* Today in legal hyperformalism.
Would you believe me if I told you that President Obama is in constitutional trouble—with hundreds of decisions of the National Labor Relations Board from the last year now potentially invalid—over the meaning of the word the?
* When The Shining had an optimistic ending.
* So we’re going to destroy the world: Australian shale oil discovery could be larger than Canada’s oilsands.
None of these past challenges compares with the one under way now. While other humanities disciplines—philosophy, linguistics, and modern languages, for example—have relied upon a range of foundational practices at the modern mass university, many English professors have depended on literature (narrowly defined), written discourse, and the printed book as the primary elements in teaching and scholarship. But hidebound faculty members who continue to assign and study only pre-computer-based media will quickly be on their way toward becoming themselves a “historical” presence at the university.
That’s why I specialized in iPad-2-era Twitter-based fan-fiction, and frankly I’ve never looked back.
* Open, New, Experimental, Aspirational: Ian Bogost vs. “The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age.”
* New research indicates tuition has little correlation with educational outcomes.
* If markets are efficient and if markets make things better, then there is no explanation for why we have the worst media in the world rather than the best. The problem is that markets don’t really make things better or more efficient. They make things cheaper and they’re responsive. That’s why we get the news we want rather than the news we need.
* Child labour uncovered in Apple’s supply chain.
* Defending freedom: A St. Paul man who recently purchased an assault rifle out of fear of an impending gun ban threatened his teenage daughter with it because she was getting two B’s in school rather than straight A’s, according to a criminal complaint filed Friday.
* For The Sixth Time In One Week, Man Shot At Gun Show.
* Adam Mansbach: My fake college college syllabus.
* Copy Of The Scarlet Letter Can’t Believe The Notes High Schooler Writing In Margins.
* Debunkng the “the Soviets used a pencil” gag. The more you know!
* More on the Arizona “loyalty oaths” issue, with a religious freedom focus.
* New Mexico Bill Would Criminalize Abortions After Rape As ‘Tampering With Evidence.’ Republicans, honestly, we have to talk.
* Seriously, though, I could fix the whole damn system if they’d listen to me.
* Even the Pentagon doesn’t know what the the point of the draft is supposed to be.
* Xavier and Magneto Heading to Broadway for Waiting For Godot.
* And a little something just for the Harmenians: “I wanted a memorable Harmontown show in Kansas City, and for my sins they gave me one.” Dan Harmon predicts pain.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 26, 2013 at 7:03 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, actually existing media bias, America, Apple, Arizona, astronauts, atheism, Barack Obama, bin Lade, books, Captain Picard, carbon, cheating, child abuse, child labor, cities, Cleveland, climate change, comedy of a particular sort, community, Cory Booker, cosmonauts, Dan Harmon, David Foster Wallace, depression, digitality, Disney, drones, ecology, Electoral College, empire, English departments, freedom isn't free, Gandalf, guns, Harmontown, high school, How the University Works, I could fix the whole damn system if they'd just listen to me, Ian Bogost, J.J. Abrams, journamalism, Kathryn Bigelow, Kubrick, legal hyperformalism, lens flare, literature, loyalty oaths, Magneto, MLA, MOOCs, NASA, New Mexico, NLRB, oil, Osama bin Laden, outer space, patriarchy, peace movement, pedagogy, Pentagon, podcasts, poetry, politics, pornography, rape, rape culture, religious freedom, Republicans, rhetoric, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, schadenfreudelicious, Scott Walker, shale oil, Star Wars, syllabi, tar sands, Teju Cole, the draft, The Onion, The Shining, the wisdom of markets, Three-Fifths Compromise, torture, tuition, Twitter, voter suppression, Waiting for Godot, war on terror, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, World War II, Xavier, Zero Dark Thirty, Žižek