Posts Tagged ‘South Park’
Couldn’t Write a Damn Word Today, So: Links!
* Capitalism didn’t liberalize China; it made America more authoritarian. More on that first one here, more on that second one here and here. When you’ve got me rooting for South Park things have gone very wrong.
* Sad Dad Space Movies: A Taxonomy.
* Tananarive Due: Inside My 90-Minute Visit With Octavia Butler.
* Think I forgot to promote this one: Call for papers: UC Riverside Symposium on speculative futures and education.
* Get ready for the next recession.
* John Henry vs the steam engine, 2019 edition.
* Dive deep into the latest Elizabeth Warren controversy.
* Poll: Majority of Americans say they endorse opening of House impeachment inquiry of Trump. Romney v. Trump.
* A truly heroic commitment to corruption at every scale.
* You don’t have to work for ICE. We will help you find a better job.
* Greta Thunberg Heads to Standing Rock to Support Indigenous Activists.
* News of the weird! This nearly fatal shooting may have you barking with laughter.
* For $29, This Man Will Help Manipulate Your Loved Ones With Targeted Facebook And Browser Links.
* The Concern Troll in Everyone.
I think this is all tied to the much more abstract, multivalent erosion of 19th and 20th Century conceptions of publics and citizenship in the direction of the constellation of ideas and practices that we often call “neoliberalism”. The advantages of this deferral of direct responsibility for advocacy are obvious for individuals and institutions. David Brooks or Bret Stephens can throw up their hands and say that they’re not responsible for gross errors of fact or tendentious constructions of argument, because they’re only serving as a messenger for what is said and claimed by others that they believe their readers should know about. Institutions can shield themselves against risk and liability if they are only conforming to or compliant with decisions and practices adopted elsewhere. The failure of solutions can be blamed on the subcontractor that supplied them or simply on the intractability of the problem itself without putting any values or beliefs in danger.
* The Comic That Explains Where Joker Went Wrong.
* Pope Francis considers lifting celibacy requirement for priests.
* “every time i think about this poem i need to lie down.”
* Don’t Be Fooled. Chief Justice John Roberts Is as Partisan as They Come.
* I can’t buy pizzas for an event without three signatures and I’m not allowed to tip over 16%, and I once exchanged an hour of emails with our accounting office over (literally) four cents, but ex-prof’s strip club habit sticks Drexel University with $190K bill.
* Lyft and Uber Are Having a Terrible, Awful, No-Good Time.
Thursday Night Links!
* New Photo Seems To Prove Amelia Earhart Survived Plane Crash, Was Captured By Japanese.
* If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45 a.m. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Impossibly Hungry Judges.
* Free download: Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America.
* On My High School Obsession with UFOs.
* It’s in the National Review — and it describes a phenomenon at work in many departments along many political axes — but this piece describes a problem academics should take more seriously than they do. This is probably the most crimethink intellectual position I hold.
* Head of Office of Government Ethics resigns, sending President Trump a serious message. The message is “you can do whatever you want and nobody will stop you.”
* 4 dumb ideas that centrist Democrats simply adore.
* Mark Penn has been giving shitty advice for literally forever. But don’t worry, we’ve got this.
* Meet the populist Wisconsin Democrat looking to dethrone Paul Ryan.
* But in truth the Declaration wasn’t quite the singular achievement we remember it to be. As it turns out, nearly 100 other “declarations of independence” had already been issued in the months leading up to July 4th, 1776, by states, towns, counties, and assorted other bodies. The Declaration of Independence endorsed at the Continental Congress that July wasn’t a bolt out of the blue: It was more like a final draft in a loose, many-centered, wide-ranging process, authored not by one man but by a chorus of voices in a fledgling nation whose people had caught independence fever and were suddenly proclaiming it with contagious enthusiasm.
* Hobby Lobby Agrees to Forfeit 5,500 Artifacts Smuggled Out of Iraq.
* No SWAT Zone: Resisting police militarization under Trump.
* Mom Feared Beating by United Employees — So She Gave Up Toddler Son’s $1000 Seat to Standby Passenger. It’s clear the time has come for United to be abolished.
* Rick Perry left his smart-guy glasses at home today. Check out 2nd Term SS 1970.
* Arizona Court Overturns In-State Tuition for Some Immigrants.
* Facebook and Google gobble ’99 per cent of new digital ad cash.’ Media buyers warn Facebook viewability ‘diabolical and horrible.’ Taxonomy of Humans According to Twitter.
* Easily the most boundary-pushing, offensive path they should have chosen: South Park to Lay Off Trump Jokes, Focus on Childhood Antics.
* The poverty of expanded universes: Man, Rey and BB-8 Went Through a Lot During Their One Night on Jakku.
* This is how climate change will shift the world’s cities.
* When your book only sells sixty copies. Don’t tell me what to do. Or, the utopian impulse. And they hated Jesus because he told them the truth.
‘Why We Love Sociopaths’
Kotsko has an extended excerpt from his sociopaths book up at The New Inquiry. I read the book while we were in the hospital post-Zoey; it’s a truly great take on the last decade’s Second Golden Age of Television. Check it out!
Tuesday Night
* Today in science: Australian scientists are describing “fat” as a taste. Those more sensitive to fat consume less and have a lower BMI.
* Today in science 2: Doctors are gross, not washing hands.
* Support for health-care reform growing as Obama gets more publicly involved? Quick, somebody please tell Congressional Democrats.
* Urban farming in Detroit and mall farming in Cleveland.
* Ana Marie Cox explains Washington as the Venn intersection of science fiction geeks, politicians, indie rock fans, and gay people.
* In short, this entire genre of political coverage is useless. If/when the economy picks up, Obama’s speeches will start “connecting” and everyone will marvel at how effective the White House political team has become. Via Matt Yglesias.
* South Park Reenacts Actual Thing Blackwater Did.
* Winning fifteen-year-old arguments: Clintons cleared in FBI Filegate.
While this Court seriously entertained the plaintiffs’ allegations that their privacy had been violated–and indeed it was, even if not in the sense contemplated by the Privacy Act–after ample opportunity, they have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode–about which they do have cause to complain–was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu.
* Continental Will Cancel Flights To Avoid Fines For Late Takeoffs. I’m sure their customers will understand.
* The 10,000th Glenn-Beck-related outrage of the day: The Census Is The Government’s Attempt To ‘Increase Slavery.’
BECK: Why were they asking the race question, you said when, in 1790? … Right, they want to know, do you count as three-fifths? Do you count at all? So, you have to know how many slaves did you have? People find that offensive today because the idea was, if we’re going to count, we want to know how many are here for services etc. etc. and slaves would get less. Well that’s not right. One. One. ‘I’m not three-fifths, I’m one. Whites are not worth than me.’ Now reverse it, why are they asking this question today?
CO-HOST: Because minorities are worth more than whites.
BECK: Exactly right. So you will get more dollars if you are a minority. So you are worth more as a monitory. Well there is no difference. The reason you don’t answer the race question is because one, everyone counts as one. All men are created equal. If you were offended back in 1790 about slavery and that everyone should count the same, do not answer the race question. How dare you. How dare you. At least in 1790, they were doing it to slow the South down on slavery. To try to stop it as much as they can. Today they are asking the race question to try to increase slavery. Your dependence on the master in Washington. No way, don’t answer that question.
Gerry Canavan 