Getting into the Real Good Procrastination Now Links

* Bush-era flashback and general-election-2016 flashforward, courtesy of Chris Hayes: George Saunders’s The Braindead Megaphone.

* Today in stadium boondoggles: St. Louis has stadium debt, but doesn’t have a team.

* An ecological argument sure to catch fire: What we can do is learn to offer each other patience, compassion, courage, and love. We can learn to accept that just as every human life has its natural end, so too does every civilization. Contrary to what Purdy argues, we don’t need more politics. We need more hospice. We need to learn how to die.

* It doesn’t have to be this way, though. While neoliberal capitalism has been remarkably successful at laying claim to the future, it used to belong to the left — to the party of utopia. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future argues that the contemporary left must revive its historically central mission of imaginative engagement with futurity. It must refuse the all-too-easy trap of dismissing visions of technological and social progress as neoliberal fantasies. It must seize the contemporary moment of increasing technological sophistication to demand a post-scarcity future where people are no longer obliged to be workers; where production and distribution are democratically delegated to a largely automated infrastructure; where people are free to fish in the afternoon and criticize after dinner. It must combine a utopian imagination with the patient organizational work necessary to wrest the future from the clutches of hegemonic neoliberalism.

* Eugene V. Debs, accelerationist.

* Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical.

* Inside the Police-Industrial Complex.

* Sesame Street has heard your gentrification jokes, and they have decided they are really into it.

* From my friend James Tate Hill: On Being a Writer Who Can’t Read.

* On the Run on trial.

* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 25: Competencies.

* Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law.

* Relax, nerds: It Turns Out the Next Game of Thrones Book Isn’t Late at All.

* The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland. A counterpoint.

* My favorite little bit of fan fiction/overthinking from The Force Awakens, I think. Elsewhere on the Star Wars front: The 13 Most Nonsensical Theories About The Identity of Supreme Leader Snoke.

* The end of Mad Max?

* MST3K is that for me. It saved my life, at least twice.

* An interview with Ahmed Best. From the archives.

* Successful squirrel cyber attacks as of January 2016.

* Angry Militia Leader: Stop Mailing Us Dildos.

* Life in Wisconsin: Was it a ‘frostquake’ or an Air Force sonic boom? And then there’s the education beat.

* If left-liberal people don’t stop embarrassing themselves with this Ted Cruz eligibility stuff I might vote for Cruz in protest. Okay, no, but seriously this is embarrassing.

* More Than Half of Americans Reportedly Have Less Than $1,000 to Their Name.

* This Professor Fell In Love With His Grad Student — Then Fired Her For It. And you’ll never guess what Caltech did next!

* I’m considered adding a running closer to these link posts that’s just headlines from the day’s Journal-Sentinel that amuse me. Today, that’s Shorewood man pursues insanity defense in voter fraud case.

* But for now, nothing gold can stay: Mysterious Wow! Signal Came From Comets, Not Aliens, Claims Scientist.

Tuesday Night!

* Reviews of Disability in Science Fiction at Tor and wordgathering focus on my chapter in particular, each taking up a different half of it; read them together and you get a pretty good sense of what I was on about.

* Confirm your suspicions about who the worst people at Gawker are: What Should Be Done About Detroit? A Gawker Internal Debate.

* The corporate university and permanent crisis.

* Radicalizing Fantasy and the Power of Disidentification.

* UConn Is Under Federal Investigation For Allegedly Mishandling Rape Cases.

* American Companies Made No Progress In Gender Diversity On Boards For 8 Straight Years.

* Why U.S. Parks Are Full of Squirrels.

* The good-looking are different from you and me.

* Remembering Nelson Mandela and His Fight for Climate Justice.

* David Simon: ‘There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show.’

* Boy with Asthma Dies After School Confiscates His Inhaler. “Zero tolerance policy against asthma inhalers.”

* That’s not what the Left wants. We want to give people the chance to do something else with their lives, something besides merely tending to it, without having to take a 30-year detour on Wall Street to get there. The way to do that is not to immerse people even more in the ways and means of the market, but to give them time and space to get out of it. That’s what a good welfare state, real social democracy, does: rather than being consumed by life, it allows you to make your life. Freely. One less bell to answer, not one more.

* ‘Revenge porn’ site creator charged with extorting victims to have nude photos removed.

* And Obamacare is still a huge, huge bummer, forever and ever amen.

Frivolous Tuesday

* LEGO, you know I trust you, but I’m not sure about this.

* What is Japan doing with its super-old people?

* Psychologists use the term “irrational antagonism” to describe what happens between people isolated together for more than about six weeks… IN SPACE!

* Oregon Trail: The Movie: The Trailer. Related: No Son of Mine Plays Oregon Trail Like That.

* One cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion: an illustrated guide to beards. Via Pharyngula.

* What have you learned from your many years of monkey torture? They hate it. Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts.

Only Goofus Has Revolutionary Consciousness

Dial B for Blog, once again drawing closer to its final issue, celebrates Goofus and Gallant.

Fair enough, though Gallant’s hand appears to be slightly radioactive.

It seems unreasonable to hold Goofus responsible for this.

Gallant is a quisling. Only Goofus has revolutionary consciousness.

See also one of the best McSweeney’s pieces ever, “Goofus, Gallant, Rashomon.”

Alex, high-school teacher of Goofus:
Goofus had a top-notch bullshit detector. Most teenagers think they have one, but his was the real thing, and I’m one of the few teachers who can relate to it. I introduced him to Kerouac, Bukowski, Burroughs. He acted enthusiastic about writing a paper in which they interacted. But it turned out to be seven pages of … well, I was one of the characters in the scene, which was extremely graphic and not what we agreed on.