I was traveling when the whole thing about the cartoons of Mohammed his the world media. My first reaction was to think, “Jeez, guys, chill out. It’s just cartoons by infidels! It’s not as if your media doesn’t make nasty cartoons too, you know. Now, I know that it’s considered wrong to depict Mohammed, and that in Islam that’s rooted in a more deep and lasting taboo on pictorial depictions of Allah. Okay, fine, that’s their religion. But the thing is, nobody has any right to force others to obey their religion. For example, Muslim extremists would probably also like …
Tag: politics
Different Meanings of “Colonize”…
The bits I agreed with in this article on colonization of space and colonization in history at The Space Review only had the effect of making me feel more uneasy about the bits I disagreed with. Colonization in the past always involved other humans, which is a big difference. Though I think if Mars does contain basic life of any kind, we’d have to refrain from settling there — at least, we couldn’t stay for too long.
Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read (according to China Miéville)
Instead of the Lunar New Year Readathon I did last year, I’m considering trying to work my way through China Miéville’s list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read over at Fantastic Metropolis. Some of those books will be difficult-to-get, but I just got a credit card approved, so it might be possible to order them, used, if I really want to make my way through the whole list. (Meaning, the books I haven’t read, which is the majority of Miéville’s selections.)
Not Impressed With Your Choice, Canada
While I am not surprised, I am also no impressed that Harper is in office in Canada. Here we go, back to the days of Mulroney lapdogging to America. And just when America’s doing so well on the world stage. Sigh. At least it’s a minority government. They won’t be able to crucify gays in the street and give the death penalty for people with recriminalized pot. Not till they get a majority government, anyway. And before you ask, no, I did not vote. I would have to lie — to claim I had an intention to return to Canada …
The Living Wage on a Dying Planet
Over at TomPaine.com, I was reading through some letters on the subject of “The Dying Wage”, and ran across an interesting one: The problem with the wage ethic article is that when foreign-made goods can be produced with a lower wage then they will not be produced here. We have only three choices: 1. Let the American worker work for the same wages they do in China or India and suffer a similar deprived lifestyle because the imports are cheaper. Real American wages have been declining since 1977. 2. Keep the minimum wage in place, let untaxed cheap imports flood …
Though it’s probably the basis of pragmatic socialism, really, and therefore nothing new…
… it just struck me in a fundamental, pragmatic way that the idea of “surplus labour” kind of depends on the people who are “surplus” allowing such a fundamentally oppressive system to exist. And while the utopian vision of a society in which a concerted uprising puts a stop to such a system was (supposedly) trampled in 1989, there’s another version of the uprising–one that depends on an unconcerted attack on the system, a continuous, distributed, disorganized form of resistance that, instead of collapsing the oppressor system, transforms the system into something more universally oppressive. The name of this distributed, …
Viridian Note #00456
Right now on the front page of the The Viridian Design Movement site, you can read the current Viridian Note, number 00456, which sums up the “State of the World 2006”. Included are a summary of a dozen bizarre weather moments from 2005, and a mockery of Thomas Friedman’s latecomer handwringing about the “oil problem”. Also is included a link to a pretty interesting conversation with Bruce Sterling on The Well. Worth checking out, for more than just this one strange link.
What To Do With Snake Oil Salesmen (and Other Spammers)
Another day, another wave of spam in my inbox. It’s very easy to pick out, for me, but my webmail provider doesn’t seem to have a system sophisticated enough to catch only the bad stuff; as soon as it starts blocking spam, it also starts blocking everything else along with it. My first instinct, like that of many people, is to think up and appeal for highly punitive responses to spam. After all, spammers — at least, the ones who’re pushing viagra and seething malware through unsolicited email, and through comments and trackbacks on blogs — are committing a much …
Racism shock therapy
The author of the site American Pictures bills his work as “Racism shock therapy”. It’s a fascinating, and rather saddening, collection of photos by a Dane named Jacob Holdt who traveled as a vagabond among the poor classes in America back in the early 1970s. The thematic focus is systemic racial oppression. Worth a look.
Hate torture? Consider boot camp – Los Angeles Times
Yes, the premise of the article I just read is as bad as you think from the title of this post. It’s that bad. What the difficulties of boot camp do to justify torturing Iraqis and other “suspected terrorists” — and let’s remember that in America now, a feminist T-shirt is enough to place you under enough suspicion to block you from attending a Presidential speech — is beyond me. Yet this is, well, at least for a little while, the thrust of Max Boot’s “opinion” piece in the L.A. Times, titled “Hate torture? Consider boot camp”. Oh, wait, there’s …