Will Shetterly's Blog, page 102
June 26, 2015
My favorite cartoon about the Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling, and a comment
ETA: The legal issue should be simple. When segregation was legal, forbidding interracial marriage made legal sense; when black folks got equal rights, that had to include the legal right to marry. The situation is no different with gay folks.
June 25, 2015
Two examples of the unexpected consequences of banning (pornography and swastika)
History Lesson: what happened when Canada enacted a feminist anti-porn law? | A Glasgow Sex Worker: Within the first two and a half years after the Butler decision, well over half of all Canadian feminist bookstores had had materials confiscated or detained by customs. Swastika (banned in Germany): A controversy was stirred by the decision of several police departments to begin inquiries
Two favorite versions of The Internationale. What are yours?
Tony Babino - L'Internationale: Soul Flower Mononoke - The Internationale: For those who don't know the song, here's a more traditional take in Russian from the movie Reds:
June 24, 2015
On subverting symbols, why I wrote Captain Confederacy, and the current Confederate flag controversy
Let's get the big one out of the way: No Confederate flag should have a place of honor on a US federal, state, county, or town government building. They are the flags of a 19th-century slaveocracy, 400,000 rich Americans of all races who seceded because they wanted to keep owning humans. Most of them were white Christians, but the group included black men and women like William Ellison and Maria
June 22, 2015
Falcon by Emma Bull — now available as an ebook!
Currently available for $3.99 at Amazon.com: Falcon Barnes & Noble: Falcon Smashwords: Falcon His life is a race against time. And time is winning. He was a prince, until his world was plunged into civil war. He was a son, until he discovered his mother’s secret. He was an exile, until he became Niki Falcon, piloting a ship linked to his nervous system, crossing light-years in a breath,
June 21, 2015
Why the two translations of Blaise Pascal's quote about brevity make me smile
Blaise Pascal offered one of the great writing quotes: Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. It's usually translated as "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." The more literal translation is "I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter." I smile because the less
June 20, 2015
A handy list of female mass murderers
Someone on Facebook claimed mass murders had to do with maleness. While mass murderers are disproportionately male and male aggression shouldn't be ignored if you hope to understand and end mass murder, maleness doesn't explain any of the following: 1. Vehicular Homicide Olga Hepnarová, a Czech woman, deliberately hit a crowd of people with a truck, killing eight of the twenty that she struck.
June 19, 2015
Hotel California-Dance Precisions 2-15
I don't think the dance serves the song, but the effect's oddly like watching a kaleidoscope.
Why identitarians are offended by discussing the whiteness of Jews
The reactions to yesterday's post,For anyone who thinks Jews were not always white in the US, surprised me. A Jewish friend said I was showing "an unfortunate bias" for suspecting that Chesnutt was right about Jewish wealth in the South in the 19th century, and someone linked to the post through http://www.donotlink.com/framed?727825so it would not get any Google juice and their readers could
