Posts Tagged ‘social democracy’
Wednesday Night Links!
* Somehow, Grad School Vonnegut has returned.
* I’ll be giving a talk at UCSB next Tuesday as part of my ongoing Aurora project. Email me for details if you want them!
* What Is It Like to Be a Robot Fish Man? A Conversation with Ted Chiang.
* The Personal Works of Samuel R. Delany.
* She’s appeared in over 100 Star Trek episodes and three films — meet Tracee Cocco.
* The Planet after Geoengineering, at Biennale Architettura 2021.
* ‘A Watershed Moment’ for Shared Governance. AAUP Report: Survey Data on the Impact of the Pandemic on Shared Governance. Austerity Pedagogy and Unilateral Leadership Decisions. University of California Lecturers Unanimously Authorize Potential Strike. Why does college cost so much? Don’t save the university — transform it.
* A New Hire, a Koch Grant, and a Department in Crisis. A Poisonous Atmosphere at the County College of Morris. What Do You Do with a BA in English? The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t. How Many Black Women Have Tenure on Your Campus? On Decolonisation and the University. Academic Freedom on the Ropes.
* COVID-19 left college students depressed and anxious. Who will pay for their therapy?
* Oklahoma teacher says summer class canceled due to bill that bans teaching critical race theory. Why Social Justice Triggers Conservatives. Words That Mean Nothing. The Republican Party, Racial Hypocrisy, and The 1619 Project. Nikole Hannah Jones, A Mega-Donor, and the Future of Journalism. Behind Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Tenure Case. “Cancel Culture,” Hypocrisy, and Double Standards. Cancel culture telephone. Wild.
* Imani Perry: Ok, here’s some of the CRT books that I’ve taught and read over the years.
* We’ll Innovate Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis or Die Trying. Prayer for a Just War: Finding meaning in the climate fight. Why two women sacrificed everything to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Eight children and an octogenarian nun took the Australian Minister for the Environment to court, to establish whether there is a ‘duty of care’ to future generations. What’s Worse Than Climate Catastrophe? Climate Catastrophe Plus Fascism.
* We’re Not Ready for the Next Pandemic. The End IS Near. No, Seriously. The unseen covid-19 risk for unvaccinated people. New Mask Guidelines Don’t Take a Huge Number of Americans Into Account. Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19. How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible. If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake.
* We Should Applaud the Cuban Health System — and Learn From It.
* Queer Girls in The Wilds: Refusing White Feminism’s Settler Colonial Fantasy.
* An Elementary School Teacher’s Secret Life As A White Nationalist Writer.
* 500+ Biden/Dem staffers call on Biden “to end the…occupation, blockade, and settlement expansion that led to this exceptionally destructive period in a 73-year history of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The resulting status quo is…apartheid.” Biden Steps Back On Student Loan Debt Forgiveness, Leading To Major Criticism.
- Texas Republicans finalize bill that would enact stiff new voting restrictions and make it easier to overturn election results. The election investigator hired by Vos wrote a police report that spawned partisan fight over voting rules in 2008. Are Democrats sleepwalking toward democratic collapse? Can Trump Run for President from Prison?
* Small Businesses Have Surged in Black Communities. Was It the Stimulus? What happened to the $45 billion in rent relief? Hospitality Workers Struggle to Find Reliable, Affordable Ways Home. Giving people money makes them happier and safer.
* The Graveyard Doesn’t Like: The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says.
* We’re Being Worked to Death by Capital. Work Isn’t Fulfilling Because Capitalism Is a Death March. Bosses are acting like the pandemic never happened. The Luddites Were Right. The Blue Welfare State. On Chandler Bing’s Job.
* Hard to Read: How American schools fail kids with dyslexia.
* Wisconsin Republicans advance ban on transgender athletes in girls’ and women’s sports.
* The Professor Who Became a Cop. The Lies Cops Tell and the Lies We Tell About Cops. And on the carceral futurism beat: How Will Radical Life Extension Transform Punishment?
* U.S. Soldiers Accidentally Leaked Nuclear Weapons Secrets Online: Report. Let’s hope the Russians haven’t heard about flashcards.
* The Spacefaring Paradox: Deep-space human travel is a lose-lose proposition.
* Crowdfunding is killing board game expansions. Video games have turned my kids into wage slaves – but without the wages. The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly.
* Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie.
* Question time: my life as a quiz obsessive.
* How many American children have cut contact with their parents?
* Disaster patriarchy: how the pandemic has unleashed a war on women.
* When Watchmen Were Klansmen. Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood found prosperity after the 1921 massacre. Then the highways arrived. Tulsa and the Myth of Objectivity.
* Let’s review how Bill and Melinda Gates spent billions of dollars to change public education.
* “Effective Altruism” and Disability Rights Are Incompatible.
* Spare a Thought for the Billions of People Who Will Never Exist.
* You can’t outrun a nightmare: The lasting trauma of rape.
* Dangerous Bodies & Dress Codes.
* QAnon Now as Popular in U.S. as Some Major Religions, Poll Suggests.
* Potatoes exonerated. Cleared of all charges!
* Scientists now think that being overweight can protect your health.
* Not great: The Age of Autonomous Killer Robots May Already Be Here. Yikes.
* The world’s riskiest project.
* Neuralink Brain Chip Will End Language in Five to 10 Years, Elon Musk Says. Well, if Elon Musk says it…
* The Oral History of A Different World.
* And Wes Anderson’s next movie has a release date. Nature is healing.
Thursday Afternoon Links!
* Mark Z. Danielewski has written a pilot for a potential House of Leaves TV series. It’s good! The question of adapting the novel wound up being a minor subtheme in our discussion of the book in my summer grad class last month, so I was gratified to actually get to see the script — and directly incorporating the novel into the storyworld of the TV series seems like an intriguing solution to the book’s basic unfilmability. I think I hope someone makes it!
* I haven’t had a chance to see Ant-Man and the Wasp yet, so I’m gratified someone went ahead and wrote my triennial rant about franchise fictions and narrative closure on my behalf.
* Texas Studies in Literature and Language has a special issue on Wes Anderson.
* CFP for the SFRA guaranteed panel at ASLE 19. ASLE 19 (in Davis, CA) is a week after the planned dates for SFRA 19 in Hawaii, so if you’re going to the West Coast anyway it could be almost like a two-for-one…
* The second issue of Fantastika Journal is now available.
* That the things that gave my life meaning growing up have all become vectors for recruitment to misogynistic and white nationalist hate groups is the bitterest surprise of my middle age. That and Trump. Two bitterest surprises.
* Nominations Are Open for the 2018 Brittle Paper Awards.
* Ken Liu Presents Broken Stars, A New Anthology of Chinese Short Speculative Fiction.
* The Fall of Wisconsin. How to win Wisconsin back.
* Shakespeare in the state parks.
* The Self-Helpification of Academe: How feel-good nostrums cover up the university’s cruelty.
* Another piece on searching for work outside academia.
* Professor Faces Fraud Charges for False Job Offer. Reading the confession letter just makes me cringe.
* His University Asked Him to Build an Emoji-Themed Parade Float. Then It Fired Him.
* Why Donald Trump Nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh Will Mean Challenging Times For Environmental Laws. The Vice Report. The Coming Era of Forced Abortions. The end of net neutrality. The imperial presidency 2.0. Trump’s Supreme Court Pick Could Spell a Fresh Hell for Workers’ Rights. Brett Kavanaugh Ruled Against Workers When No One Else Did. The issue with Kavanaugh is that he seems completely reactionary, bouncing from one indefensible position to another, without applying any judgment whatsoever. Liberal media in full effect. The Liberal Case for Kavanaugh Is Complete Crap. He’s a very normal Republican pick — that’s the problem. Establishment Extremist. What’s coming. It’s bad y’all. Someone investigate precisely how this deal was made and what the terms were. And from the archives: The Three Alitos.
* The Supreme Court: still bad.
* Capitalism is ruining science. The Business Veto: The demise of social democracy shows the precariousness of any project of reform under capitalism.
* Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras.
* Technoleviathan: China, Silicon Valley, and the rise of the global surveillance state. How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order.
* Silicon Valley Is Bending Over Backward to Cater to the Far Right.
* How Silicon Valley Fuels an Informal Caste System. Rule-Making as Structural Violence: From a Taxi to Uber Economy in San Francisco.
* Former Obama Officials Are Riding Out The Trump Years By Cashing In.
* The end of NATO. ‘They Will Die in Tallinn’: Estonia Girds for War With Russia.
* Trump is set to separate more than 200,000 U.S.-born children from their parents. Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement Is Budgeting for a Surge in Child Separations. ‘Don’t You Know That We Hate You People?’ ICE is lawless, racial profiling edition. Where Cities and Counties Are Detaining Immigrants. Pregnant Women Say They Miscarried In Immigration Detention And Didn’t Get The Care They Needed. Government Told Immigrant Parents to Pay for DNA Tests to Get Kids Back, Advocate Says. As Migrant Families Are Reunited, Some Children Don’t Recognize Their Mothers. Deported after Trump order, Central Americans grieve for lost children. ‘What if I lose her forever?’ Undocumented Grover Beach mother deported despite community rallying in her support. Facing a Tuesday deadline to reunite about 100 migrant toddlers with their parents, feds say they’ve reunited 2. Inside The Courts Where Some Immigrants Plead Guilty Without Knowing What’s Happening. Now they’re coming for grandmas.
* Woman arrested in assault of 91-year-old Mexican man who was told to ‘go back to your country.’
* There’s been a spate of violent far-right extremism since the 2016 election.
* If you’re anti- antifa, that must mean…
* It’s Not Civil Disobedience if You Ask for Permission.
* Liberalism, legitimacy, and loving the Parkland kids.
* Why Marx’s Capital Still Matters.
* Nixon’s $7B carbon tax forms centerpiece of energy agenda.
* The Industrial Age May Have Actually Been Kind of a Bad Idea.
* An interview with Julia Salazar. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, In Her Own Words. Cynthia Nixon: I’m a democratic socialist. Meanwhile our old pal Joe Crowley looks like he’s trying to get away with something.
* We Should Embrace the Ambiguity of the 14th Amendment.
* Alan Dershowitz is ALL IN on Trump. But he’s not the only person with some truly around-the-bend ideas of what lawsuits can do.
* Weird science: Girls sometimes inherit almost two full sets of their dad’s genes, which seems to cause rare cancers.
* An Arkansas man complained about police abuse. Then town officials ruined his life.
* Did… did Milwaukee write this?
* Jeff Bezos Is Now $50 Billion Richer Than Anyone Else on Earth.
* All 12 Thai Boys Successfully Rescued from Cave after Third Dangerous Mission. The only person unhappy is Elon.
* WHO’s Language on Breastfeeding Really Is Flawed. This was our experience with breastfeeding for sure; I’m sure it’s great for a lot of people but we needed formula as a supplement from the first night on. That said, the corporate forces that promote formula over breastfeeding are utterly gross.
* When the relationship status truly is complicated.
* Scotland’s official plan if the Loch Ness Monster is found.
* Japan and the stay-at-home dad.
* Reality Winner and the espionage act.
* My Best Friend Lost His Life to the Gig Economy.
* When your child reveals sexual abuse from your parent.
* The Socialist Case for School Integration.
* Your town tomorrow: Kure residents cut off from outside world due to flooding.
* I knew wearing a tie was making me stupid.
* Bad subtitling is a daily problem for deaf viewers.
* How swimming pools became a flashpoint of racial tension in America.
* California brings emissions down below 1990 levels. But it’s not all good news.
* Feminist Apparel CEO Fires Entire Staff After They Learn He’s An Admitted Sexual Abuser. RIP, Papa John.
* There is too much uncertainty in sports; even if you bribe the officials, something unaccounted for could still cause the “wrong” result. It can be a bad idea to gather large crowds opposed to your team (and, by extension, your dictatorship). During Franco’s rule, Barcelona FC’s stadium was the only place the Catalans could wave their flag and sing their songs. Dictators are better off with tyranny and oppression. Football is for people who can accept a loss.
* David Graeber’s new book argues that many of us are toiling in dummy jobs with no ostensible purpose. Any poll will show you he has a point. But his thesis is built on scant evidence and dubious claims of a ruling class conspiring to keep us busy. Bullshit jobs exist not due to orchestrated oppression but because of something altogether simpler: bad managers.
* An even tougher review of a book that seems like a big step down from Debt.
* The SAT, constantly innovating new ways to make teenagers unhappy.
* Through such characters, Muluneh’s work explores the layered psychic realms of blackness and womanhood that the African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler, whom she cites as a major influence, explored through her otherworldly prose. In the process, Muluneh’s work has helped reorient the way black women are perceived. “As women, especially as African women,” Muluneh said, “we forget—and the world forgets—our positioning in history and religion and culture.”
* And amusing ourselves to death: 12 theme parks where the danger is real.
Gerry Canavan 