Posts tagged Science Fiction

Friday Lazy Linking 3:00 pm / 12 February 2010 by Rad Geek, at Rad Geek People's Daily

  • Help Noam Chomsky Find His Inner Anarchist. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-10). A reader tipped me off that Noam Chomsky has agreed to answer the top-rated questions submitted via this reddit page; the reader suggested that I condense my “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism” gripes into a question. So I did. Here’s my question for Chomsky: Although as an anarchist you favour a stateless... (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
  • DAVID T. BEITO: Rand Paul is No Libertarian. Liberty & Power: Group Blog (2010-02-10). "This first advertisement for his U.S. Senate campaign ... is quite simply terrible. It not only panders to the darkest side of American conservatism but to the basest emotions of voters." Like pappy, Ron's boy Rand has chosen to emphasize absolutely the worst parts of his platform in his early campaign advertisements. Here, the current poster-boy for Chairman Ron's Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution comes out for "strong national defense," an immigration police state, and overseas legal black holes for "enemy combatants." (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
  • How to split up the US. pwarden, PeteSearch (2010-02-06). As I've been digging deeper into the data I've gathered on 210 million public Facebook profiles, I've been fascinated by some of the patterns that have emerged. My latest visualization shows the information by location, with connections drawn between places that share friends. For example, a lot of people in... (Linked Wednesday 2010-02-10.)
  • Bear Becomes Mushroom; Trout Implicated. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-11). So the picture on the left of a girl leaning against a bear is an image that appears on merchandise produced by independent artist Hidden Eloise; and the picture on the right of the same girl in the same pose, leaning against empty air in the vague vicinity of a... (Linked Friday 2010-02-12.)

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Monday Lazy Linking 3:00 pm / 08 February 2010 by Rad Geek, at Rad Geek People's Daily

  • Anarchists in Space. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-07). Paul Raven reviews Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, a tale of the confrontation between an anarcho-syndicalist culture and a state-capitalist culture. (CHT François.) Though Le Guin’s personal sympathies were with the anarchists, she doesn’t stack the deck (unlike most political science fiction): the anarcho-syndicalist culture is actually... (Linked Monday 2010-02-08.)
  • Comment on Anarchists in Space by Roderick. Roderick, Comments for Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-08). Back in 1980, when Broach came out, perhaps Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism or Railroads and Regulation, and then follow it up with stuff from Left & Right and the early years of Libertarian Forum. If it were nowadays, Kevin Carson’s books would obviously be essential. The crucial point is this:... (Linked Monday 2010-02-08.)

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Monday Lazy Linking 3:00 pm / 14 December 2009 by Rad Geek, at Rad Geek People's Daily

  • We Need More Truants. Andrew B. Watt's Blog (2009-12-13). "There’s no way that the educational system, a monoculture if there ever was one, is going to manifest the kind of reform needed at every level. We’ve designed our schooling system to clamp down on unorthodoxy in a big way. Even if we allow the unorthodox to thrive in our monolithic system, it becomes a cult of personality. ... These kind of polymathic geniuses can really make a school hum, but once they go, a program often dies with them. ... Maybe what we need in order to reinvigorate American school systems is a broad-based buy-0ut, a sort of inverse-voucher program, where parents say, 'this school has failed my kid for the last time. I’m going to plop him down in front of Sesame Street reruns and YouTube videos, and give him a library card, and see if those stopgap measures can do better.'" [R.G.: I'd just like to add that the notion of an "American school system" is probably part of the problem; what 'we' need is to stop thinking about what 'we' need, and start thinking about how this here individual child or adolescent or adult can live a better, smarter life in the near-, middle-, and long-term. The answer often isn't going to be the same from one person to the next. And it often isn't going to be institutional schooling in any recognizable sense. (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • The strange consensus on Obama's Nobel address. Glenn Greenwald, Salon: Glenn Greenwald (2009-12-11). (updated below - Update II - Update III) Reactions to Obama's Nobel speech yesterday were remarkably consistent across the political spectrum, and there were two points on which virtually everyone seemed to agree:   (1) it was the most explicitly pro-war speech ever delivered by anyone while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize; and... (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Today in Rape Culture. Shakesville (2009-12-13). "Why is it always more important to lecture women on what they should be doing to avoid rape than to talk to men about the fact that they do not have the right to women's bodies without explicit consent?" (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Dear Barack, Spare Me Your E-Mails. Commondreams.org Views (2009-12-13). Left flank (cont'd): "The insurers are not really upset with what may survive as a minuscule public option, for they have won the big prize: Everyone must buy insurance from them under penalty of law, and there will be no built-in requirement for cost control. Their so-called opposition to the current plans has to do with fine-tuning the president’s guarantee of their future profits." (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Art Interpretation and Climate Change. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2009-12-09). Jens Galschiot's sculpture Survival of the Fattest features an obese white goddess of justice on the shoulders of a frail African. There's an inscription: "I'm sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under the burden. I would do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his... (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Protecting America's Borders Against Musical Miscegenation. Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2009-12-13). La Migra Vs. Cultural Exchange. "The evidence repeatedly suggests the group performs a hybrid or fusion style of music...[which] cannot be considered culturally unique to one particular country, nation, society, class, ethnicity, religion, tribe or other group of persons," Therefore, you can't come to the U.S. to play your bastard music, I guess. (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • The Thin Blue Line That Protects Us From Canadian Science Fiction Writers. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2009-12-13). Peter Watts writes: If you buy into the Many Worlds Intepretation of quantum physics, there must be a parallel universe in which I crossed the US/Canada border without incident last Tuesday. In some other dimension, I was not waved over by a cluster of border guards who swarmed my car... (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Nevada trucker wants confiscated $550000 back - Las Vegas Sun. 89119 - Google News (2009-12-13). In which the Shawnee County Sheriff is trying to keep over half a million dollars in cash that it stole from Eduardo Arencibia -- even though he never consented to a search of the cab, and even though the government prosecutors never introduced any direct evidence at all to indicate where the money came from, and even though Eduardo Arencibia was never convicted of any crime, and had all charges against him dropped. (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • Magic Highway USA. Daring Fireball (2009-12-13). The tomorrows of yesteryear. Technological civilization is awesome, even if it hasn't quite realized the specific forms of awesomeness that Disney might have thought. (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)
  • On Baked Potatoes. ongoing (2009-12-08). I recently remarked “There are very few foods indeed that compare with a high-quality Russet potato, properly baked.” A voice in the comments wondered “And what do you call ‘properly baked’?” A harmless enough question, but then aluminium foil was mentioned; shudder. Please don’t do that. Here’s how to bake... (Linked Sunday 2009-12-13.)

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