Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 69

Friday Morning Links!

*��The S. T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship, for research relating to H.P. Lovecraft, his associates, and literary heirs.

* Candyland and the nature of the absurd. #academicjobmarket

*��Why some studies make campus rape look like an epidemic while others say it’s��rare.��‘1 in 5′: how a study of 2 colleges became the most cited campus sexual assault��statistic.��Study Challenges Notion That Risk of Sexual Assault Is Greater at College.��Justice Dept.: 20% of Campus Rapes Reported to Police.

*��University Of Missouri-St. Louis Says Ferguson Shooting Caused Enrollment Drop.

* Greenpeace sorry for Nazca lines stunt in Peru. Oh, okay then.

* Yes we can! The measure, championed by Senate Democrats, would cut Pell Grants in order to free up money to pay companies that collect student loans on behalf of the Department of Education.

* Down and Out:��The Democratic Party���s losses at the state level are almost unprecedented, and could cripple it for a long time to come.

* 21st-Century Postdocs: (Still) Underpaid and Overworked.

* We asked a legal evidence expert if Serial’s Adnan Syed has a chance to get out of prison. Meanwhile, allow Matt Thompson to tell you how Serial is going to end a week in advance.

* Good news from Rome: “All Animals Go to Heaven.” I’m really glad we settled this.

* My new sabbatical plan: NASA Will Pay You $170 Per Day To Lie In Bed.

* UC Berkeley Lecturer Threatened For Offering Injured Student Protesters Extra Time On Papers. On university administrations and the surveillance state.

*��CIA defenders are out in force now that a historic report has exposed a decade of horrific American shame. Torture didn���t work, but why aren���t the architects of torture in jail?��Every discussion of this question begins from the false premise that the torturers were well-intentioned truth-seekers who “went too far.” The CIA knew, like everybody knows, that the point of torture is to extract confessions regardless of their truth. That’s why they did it.

* First, do no harm:��Medical profession aided CIA torture.

* The Supreme Court Just Rejected A Wage Theft Suit Against Amazon. What Does It Mean For Other Workers?

* Capitalism’s gravediggers.

* “Late in life, Michel Foucault developed a curious sympathy for neoliberalism.” A response from Peter Frase: Beyond the Welfare State.

* Also at Jacobin: Interstellar and reactionaries in space.

* Behold the nightmare Manhattan would become if everyone commuted by car.

* Why James Cameron���s Aliens is the best movie about technology.

* Why we can’t have nice things: Marvel Wanted Spider-Man For Captain America 3, But Sony Said No. But the next 21 Jump Street movie can cross over with Men in Black because life is suffering.

* 7 Terrible Lightsaber Designs From the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I love the guy who is just covered in lightsabers from head to toe.

* Elderly man nailed for clever identity theft scheme: prosecutors say he changed victim’s name to his own.

* Censorship (Pasadena, California).

* The nation’s millionaires are #Ready4Hillary.

*��Student athletes at public universities in Michigan would be prohibited from joining labor unions to negotiate for compensation and benefits under legislation the state House approved Tuesday.

* Meet��The Oldest Living Things in the World.

* And this used to be��a free country: One of two concealed gun permit holders involved in a rolling shootout down Milwaukee streets and freeways last year was turned down Thursday when he asked a judge to order the return of the gun seized after the incident.

Wednesday Everything

* Too big to disaccredit: I should have realized the insanity at Oregon was because of college football.

*��Keywords for the Age of Austerity 14: Failure.

* One weird trick to actually get a cop fired��for��brutally assaulting someone. You’ll never guess what makes this case special!

* Meanwhile:��Grand Juries Should Be Abolished.

*��Even if you think that IQ tests are unscientific mumbo-jumbo, it’s amazing to learn that some US police departments don’t, and furthermore, that they defended their legal right to exclude potential officers because they tested too high.

* 20 Key Findings about CIA Interrogations.��The Intercept’s live blog.��The Torture Apologia Chart.��Obama, war criminal.��But the ACLU has One Weird Trick to fix everything.

America Announces It Will Donate 15% of Net Proceeds to Anti-Torture Charities

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 9, 2014

Got Caught Torturing, Pay $15

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 9, 2014

Release Torture Report, Lose a Turn

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 9, 2014

* Today’s science fiction, tomorrow’s light switch:��22 unexpected sources of power that will exist in the future.

*��Ultimately, the Lovecraft statue must go. He may be replaced by Butler, or Carrie Cuinn���s sea serpent wrapped around the world idea or any of the many other options, but the fantasy community cannot embrace its growing fanbase of color with one hand while deifying a writer who happily advocated for our extermination with the other.

*��The College Rape Overcorrection.��I know this article is infuriating a lot of people, but I must admit I found it informative, and challenging despite its flaws.

*Best Way for Professors to Get Good Student Evaluations? Be Male.

* The death of cinema. The death of television.

* Scenes from the charter school scam: an exciting opportunity for administrative bloat.

*��The Best Children���s Books of 2014.

* You thought you had Frozen Fever before.

*��“I can even go back to being Ronnie Bridgeman, but I’m not,” he said. “They killed Ronnie Bridgeman. They killed his spirit. They killed everything he believed in, everything he ever wanted. I wanted to be something, too. I could have been a lawyer possibly. I could have been Barack Obama. Who knows?”

* From the McSweeney’s archives: I’m an English Professor in a Movie.

* Easily the most Harvard thing that’s ever happened.

* The Left Can Win.

��* And because you demanded it: The Superman prequel will finally tell the story of Superman’s grandfather. Decades of waiting, redeemed��at last!

Super Ultra Mega Monday Links, Supplemental

* Anyway, I have no solution to this. It just really struck me at the symposium, because the whole thing felt good. It was rich and exciting and fun. And we were talking about ideas, in much the same way that scholars talk about ideas (four of us teach at universities for goodness’ sake!). So you tell me. Why do scholars have to be so miserable? What is it about our culture–let’s say US academic culture, to keep it simple–that creates this desire for the downtrodden, humiliated, suffering (humanities) scholar? Of course we like suffering artists as well��� hmm. But artists suffer and are adored, while scholars suffer and are despised. Artists, when they suffer, are ritual sacrifices; scholars are the meanest sort of criminals.

* A new survey shows that Americans, on average, think that Santa Claus should make $140,000 / year. “Perhaps more interesting is that 29% think Santa should make nothing at all whereas 29% think he should make $1.8 billion.”

* You Can���t Make a Living: Digital Media, the End of TV���s Golden Age, and the Death Scene of the American Playwright. The author, Alena Smith, has been making waves in an entirely different context today.

* In a creditocracy, the goal is to keep debtors on the hook for as long as possible, wrapping debt around every possible asset and income stream to generate profit. Figuring out which debts we can legitimately refuse may turn out to be the only way of salvaging popular democracy. Education is the best place to start. Though it is supposed to serve as the incubator for a free-thinking, active citizenry, it is fast becoming its opposite���a chop shop where the life choices and optional political imagination of young people are downsized to fit the lifelong demands of financial contracts.

* This city where sidewalks burn and sewers fill with oily ooze is a city built here almost specifically for that very reason; Los Angeles, in many ways, is a settlement founded on petroleum byproducts, and the oil industry for which the city was once known never actually left. It just got better at hiding itself.

* The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate. Unarmed People of Color Killed by Police, 1999-2014.

* After Tamir Rice Was Shot, Cleveland Police Allegedly Handcuffed His 14-Year-Old Sister.

* Luke Cage was created in 1972. Four years earlier, in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed. Five years before that, in 1963, Medgar Evers was shot and killed. Eight years before that, in 1955, a young Black man named Emmett Till was tortured, then shot and killed. These events, and numerous others with frightening similarity, happened in a line, and in the early years of the first decade to reap the social benefits of the Civil Rights Movement, Marvel Comics gives the fans (and the world) a Black male superhero whose primary superhuman aspect��� is that he’s bulletproof.

* A One-Way Trip to Mars? Many Would Sign Up.

* What the World Doesn’t Need Are Steampunk Luxury Condos.

* Democrats have a truly heroic devotion to continuing to lose despite ever-increasing demographic advantage.

* What Tolkien got wrong.

My defense was simple but impassioned: Tolkien explicitly stated in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings that he was merely translating the Red Book of Westmarch, not writing an original story. Since Tolkien claimed the Red Book is over 6,000 years old, it must be in the public domain and so open to everyone to reinterpret and repurpose as they see fit. The Red Book didn���t belong to the Tolkien Estate, it belonged to the world.

* Parable of the Polygons.

* And/but the kids are all right.

Super Ultra Mega Monday Links

* That is what America does. It is not broken. That is exactly what is wrong with it.��The American Justice System Is Not Broken.

*��Why Should Anyone “Respect” the Law?

*��Autopsy: Milwaukee cop shot mentally-ill black man from above and behind, 14 times.��Wave of Protests After Grand Jury Doesn���t Indict Officer in Eric Garner Chokehold Case.��But they did manage to indict the man who filmed the murder.��Worse Than Eric Garner: Cops Who Got Away With Killing Autistic Men and Little Girls.��Prosecutors throwing grand jury inquiries to save killer cops.��NYPD Abuse Increases Settlements Costing City $735 Million.��Rookie NYPD cop who shot unarmed black man texted union reps before radioing for help.��The cop who murdered Tamir Rice should never have been a cop.��Grand Jury Clears Two Former Jasper Cops Who Beat Woman in Jail.��Seattle Cop Who Punched a Handcuffed Woman in the Face Won’t Be Charged.��Coastal Carolina students detained after writing unapproved chalk messages about Ferguson on campus sidewalks.��Cop Fired for Beating a Non-violent, Handcuffed Man On Video, Gets Job Back AND Back Pay.��Inside the Twisted Police Department That Kills Unarmed Citizens at the Highest Rate in the Country.��The Deadly Self-Pity of the Police.��Police Reforms You Should Always Oppose.��Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are.��Where Are All the Good Cops?��Ferguson Police investigating whether Michael Brown’s stepfather intended to incite a��riot.��If It Happened There: Courts Sanction Killings by U.S. Security Forces.��The real scandal of police violence is what’s��legal.

* But body cameras that the cops can freely turn on and off and whose footage they completely control will definitely solve it. You don’t have to take my word for it.

* Hey!��My tuition bought you that shotgun.��More links under the photo.

*��Stories of unseen lives and the effects homelessness in Milwaukee.

* Racial inequality is objectively worse than 30 years ago.��And another deBoer instant classic:��Tell Stephen Glass I said hey and shut out the lights on your way out.

*��On Being a Black Male, Six Feet Four Inches Tall, in America in 2014.��Chris Rock vs. the industry.

*��Marquette University response to Westboro Baptist Church protest.

*��Rolling Stone just wrecked an incredible year of progress for rape victims.��What happened at Rolling Stone was not Jackie���s fault.��Blame Rolling Stone.��The lesson of Rolling Stone and UVA: protecting victims means checking their stories.��Reporters are not your friends.

* And just when I was thinking The Newsroom had actually gotten pretty good: Emily Nussbaum on The Newsroom‘s Crazy-Making Campus-Rape Episode.��The AC Club: D-.

* Something I’d somehow missed when it was new, but came across in research for a new piece on zombies I’m working on: Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home.

* Science fiction after Ferguson: An interview with��Walidah Imarisha.

* SF as R&D for the very powerful:��U.S. spy agency predicts a very transhuman future by 2030.

* Imagining an open source Star Wars.

*��On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF.

* Scenes from the class struggle at Oregon: Admin threatens to deport striking international grad students, just straight-up make-up grades.��U Oregon and the Academic Labor System.��Megapost at MetaFilter.

* Meanwhile, at Columbia.

*��The Democrats’ Education Plan: Class War. Resegregation.

*��Cal Refuses to Pay Berkeley Minimum Wage.

*��Colleges that pledged to help poor families have been doing the opposite, new figures show.

* An update on the Salaita case from Corey Robin.

* “If students have time to get drunk, colleges aren’t doing their job.”��MetaFilter links to the full series��at CHE.

*��The Equipment 117 Colleges Have Acquired From the Dept. of Defense.

*��What I’ve Learned from Two Years Collecting Data on Police Killings.

* The latest New Inquiry on illness is another stellar issue from a publication that always delivers. This piece on love and schizophrenia is the one making the rounds currently.

*��Kerry Puts Brakes on CIA Torture Report.��John Kerry’s sad legacy.

*��It Takes Nearly $100,000 a Year in Earnings Just to Buy a Crappy House in L.A.

* “Suicide Is My Retirement Plan.”

*��Why Poor People Stay Poor.

* Milwaukee after the recession: the jobs are going to the suburbs.

* Social justice as a means to social capital.

*��12 Female Characters Who Keep Shaving Despite Constant��Peril.

* The music industry is a horror show, like everything else.

* Remembering Bhopal, the worst industrial disaster in the history of the world.

* We nearly saved the world, but we couldn’t give up our precious academic annual meetings.

*��California drought the worst in 1,200 years, new study says.��Won’t someone cancel the MLA before it kills again!

* This doesn’t look so bad.

*��First ever British sci-fi feature film released. Congratulations, England! Looking forward to your next one.

*��40 Years Ago, Earth Beamed Its First Postcard to the Stars.

* Court Hears Second Case for a Chimpanzee���s Legal Rights.

* Sony has apparently gone to war with North Korea. The future is weird, y’all.

*��

* Shimer College: The Best Worst College in America.

* I mock the idea of “the law” around here a lot, but I never for the life of me imagined a scenario where the emergence of a video that��shows a��man��accused of murdering his stepdaughter defiling her��corpse��could be bad news for the prosecution.

* Breaking news: the rich are different.

* So, for some reason, are the left-handed.

* But it’s not all bad news:��The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like.

*��“It is no longer true that the divorce rate is rising, or that half of all marriages end in divorce. It has not been for some time.”

*��The British Government Wants To Build A Tunnel Under Stonehenge.

*��If I’m being perfectly honest��I got bored watching the three-minute ���What if The Hobbit��was one movie?�����trailer.

* Scholars, start your syllabi:��New novel from Toni Morrison coming in April.

* Wes Anderson’s The Force Awakens.��If only!

*��And about 100 brains are missing from University of Texas. I’m late posting this, alas; all the easy jokes have already been taken…

Wednesday Links! Some Especially Good Ones!

* Paradoxa 26,��“SF Now,” is on its way, and has my essay on Snowpiercer and necrofuturism in it. Mark Bould and Rhys Williams’s introduction to the issue is online.

* Extrapolation‘s current call for reviewers.

* UCR is hiring:��Jay Kay and Doris Klein Science Fiction Librarian.

* African SF: Presenting Omenana 1.1.��Of particular��note:��“The Unbearable Solitude of Being an African Fan Girl.”

* Nnedi Okorafor, Ytasha Womack, Isiah Lavender, and Sigal Samuel discussion #BlackStormTrooper.

*��NASA Officially Announce Plans To Put Humans On Mars With Orion Space Capsule.

* UAB shuts down its football program. Of course, the reason is austerity:

“The fiscal realities we face — both from an operating and a capital investment standpoint — are starker than ever and demand that we take decisive action for the greater good of the athletic department and UAB,” Watts said in a statement released by the university. “As we look at the evolving landscape of NCAA football, we see expenses only continuing to increase. When considering a model that best protects the financial future and prominence of the athletic department, football is simply not sustainable.”

We just can’t afford to throw bricks at students’ heads any more — not in these tough times.

* Teaching fellows strike at the University of Oregon.

* “Hypereducated and On Welfare”: The adjunct crisis hits Elle.

* Stefan Grimm and academic precarity: 1, 2.

* Meanwhile:��College Hilariously Defends Buying $219,000 Table.

* Work, the welfare state, and what counts as “dignity.”

* It really pains me to say it, because I think the consequences for anti-rape activism will be dire, but significant questions have been raised about Rolling Stone‘s UVA story that neither the journalist nor the magazine have good answers to. It’s a good day to think carefully about what Freddie deBoer says here: “…it���s an inevitable result of associating the work of progressive politics with having a hair trigger, with demonizing those who ask us to be careful and restrained, and of treating overwhelming digital character assassination as a useful political tool.”

*��Imagine a World Without Prisons: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Superheroes, and Prison Abolition.

* Against New Atheism: The ���New Atheists��� have gained traction because they give��intellectual cover��to Western imperialism.

* The mass transit system Milwaukee didn’t know it needed. Now, if you could just snake another couple lines up the lake side… More links below the map.

* The Ferguson PD victory lap continues: Ferguson Police investigating whether Michael Brown’s stepfather intended to incite a riot.

*��How Police Unions and Arbitrators Keep Abusive Cops on the Street.

*��How One Woman Could Hit The Reset Button In The Case Against Darren Wilson.

*��Utah���s Insanely Expensive Plan To Seize Public Lands.��“…a price tag that could only be paid if the state were able to increase drilling and mining.” Oh, so not insane, then, just evil.

* There are boondoggles and there are boondoggles:��Federal prosecutors subpoenaed dozens of records and documents relating to the Los Angeles Unified School District���s iPad program, including emails, proposals and score sheets dealing with the bids that led to a multi-million Apple contract with the district.

* For $5 I promise not to orchestrate this situation, and for $25…

* Why I Am Not Coming In To Work Today.

* Keeping Kayfabe.

* And the market for Girl Scout cookies is about to be disrupted. I gained ten pounds just reading this story.

I Just Can’t Believe It’s December Links

* Over the weekend, of course, we celebrated the first Star Wars Trailer Day in a decade. Your shot-for-shot dissection.��A deeper look.��Digging deeper still.��The George Lucas Special Edition. Elsewhere on the Star Wars beat:��Physicist Proves That R2D2 Is Lighter Than Styrofoam.

* English and foreign language jobs are down nearly 10% again, down almost 40% since 2007.

*��New NEH Grants Will Promote Popular Scholarly Books.

*��Call for Papers: Marx, Engels and the Critique of Academic Labor.

* Why colleges haven’t stopped binge drinking.

* Donors getting bold in Illinois:��U. of Illinois Could Lose Big Gift by Rehiring Adjunct.

* A long, interesting piece on an anti-bullying measure passed by Madison faculty.

*��When Black Friday devours Thanksgiving, capitalism consumes one of its sustaining myths.��Black Friday, Or the Circulation of Commodities.

*��In not one of those cases did a coal mine owner face criminal charges for the loss of life. That history ended in November, with the indictment of Donald L. Blankenship, the chief executive whose company owned the Upper Big Branch mine near here, where an explosion of methane gas in 2010 spread like a fireball through more than two miles of tunnels, feeding on illegally high levels of coal dust.

* Afrofuturism: The Sonic Companion.

*��Putting The Sidekick In The Suit: Black Captain America, Female Thor, And The Illusion Of Progress.

*��Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question.

*��But where does it come from? My new answer: nobody builds a megadungeon. Megadungeons build themselves. They are the guilty conscience of rulership; the truth commission against power. Great power corrupts, and absolute power does what we’ve been told. Even those who want to rule well feel the attraction of expedient murder and petulant torture, the convenience of imprisoning one’s enemies without trial, buying off the priesthood and covering it all in a glaze of ceremony and pretty words. On this world, this eventually provokes its own reaction. Beneath the seats of power – castle; trading house; senate building – the accumulated sins happening above begin to literally undo the foundations. Dungeons grow. It might not be so tidy as: 60 starved prisoners in the last few decades means 60 skeletons, with hallways for them to roam through; 20 goblins and some rooms for them to squat in appear as a direct result of last year’s punitive expedition against the recalcitrant border villages; one ghoul for each speech in which you cloak your appetites in the honeyed words of dead philosophers, etc.

* How many people are locked up in the United States?

*��Officers Who Shot 12-Year-Old Holding Toy Gun Refused To Give Him First Aid.��The video that caught the cops lying about Tamir Rice.��White Cops File Suit, Claim They Are Punished Too Much For Shooting People.

*��Grand Jury Won’t Indict Officers In Ohio Wal-Mart Shooting, Either.

* Missouri almost out of money to attack Ferguson with.��St. Louis police officers��� group demands Rams players be disciplined for ���hands up, don���t shoot.��Ferguson: Message from the Grassroots.��No healing.

*��Why Every Struggle Is Now a Struggle Against the Police.

*��Similar cases yield very different results in Wisconsin prison system.

*��Georgia���s Top Court Reins In Private Probation Firms For Illegally Extending Sentences.��Reined in! The arc of history is long, but!

* Full Nihilism: “Six Reasons I’m Thankful for a Republican Congress.”��Two of the six were “I’m bored.” Media professionals!

* One of the worst “errors” of the Obama presidency was the pivot to deficit reduction, when literally no one cares about deficit reduction.

*��Like uninsured New Agers afflicted by terminal illness, journalists facing the collapse of their industry are turning in desperation to faith healers, quacks, and hucksters of all sorts. Amway Journalism.

* Abolish the Senate.

* Officials with a Northern California school district expelled a live-in nanny���s 9-year-old daughter after hiring a private investigator to ascertain where she lived, the Contra Costa Times reported.��Having been caught, the school district has now reversed itself.

* Life after people:��Someone Flew a Drone Through Chernobyl and the Result Is Haunting.

* Science proves people who still read fiction really are just better.

*��How Often Do ���Disruptive��� Business Practices Actually Mean ���Illegal��� Business Practices?��The Uberiest thing Uber’s done yet.

*��Philanthropic Poverty:��Bono and other philanthropic capitalists push charity to defend property.

*��When an assisted living home in California shut down last fall, many of its residents were left behind, with nowhere to go.��The staff at the Valley Springs Manor left when they stopped getting paid ��� except for cook Maurice Rowland and Miguel Alvarez, the janitor.

*��The Super Mario 64 Goomba Nobody Has Ever Killed.��The Coin That Took 18 Years to Collect.

* The real roots of midlife crisis, or, the second decade of this blog is going to be a shame. At least we have Charlie Stross’s thought experiments to comfort us.

* How Not to Get Away with Murder.

*��My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK.

* An Open Letter to the Administration of Vassar College.

* This TNR piece on the Rolling Stone UVA expos�� actually raises some relevant journalism questions, but my sense is this happens entirely��by accident in the course of a kneejerk attempt��to discredit the story.

*��The false rape accusation as��witchcraft.

. CTRL-F revenue, CTRL-F income, CTRL-F profit:��Vox Media Valued at Nearly $400 Million After Investment.

*��The 22-year-old appeared to have killed himself, police said. A handgun was found near his body inside the dumpster. The text he sent said he was sorry, ���if I am an embarrassment, but these concussions have my head all f���ed up.���

*��Even a single season of high school football might have harmful impacts on the��brain.

* Your panel-by-panel breakdown of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s Watchmen pastiche��Pax Americana #1,��this year’s instant-classic comic book.

* You don’t have to beg, borrow, or steal anymore: Black Mirror is finally on Netflix.

* Wanderers.��Time Trap.��Five Minutes.

* And finally, we get to the meat:��Pope’s astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him.

��

Friday Links!

* TNI CFPs we have believe in: “The Stars.”

*��How America���s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future.

*��Childhood, Emergency.

The child was too young to have a criminal record. Young enough, at 12, that to claim he was ���no angel��� would have been extraordinarily obscene. Yet it did not take long before media agencies began looking into his parents��� past. Around dinner tables across the country, some black uncle or aunt or mother or father or grandparent or brother or sister is asking why the parents weren���t there, didn���t or couldn���t do more to protect him. People will solemnly nod, but they will know the truth. For too many black childhood is a gestation period, an interlude between a period of less-than-innocent babyhood and maturation into full social pathology. Black children, but not just black children, are denied childhood. Instead, they come to be the stuff of nightmares, youths who are simply younger versions of the terror they will embody. ���A hallucination of your worst fears.���

*��Police officer Darren Wilson is not a monster; he is the mundane and day-to-day face of white supremacy as experienced by people of color in the United States.

*��Who Killed Robert McCulloch���s Father?

*��Why Americans Call Turkey ‘Turkey.’

* BREAKING:��Algorithms Can Ruin Lives.

* Kitty Queer.��On the queer subtext of Chris Claremont’s long run on X-Men.

*��Hooray! 83 episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 are now available to��download.

*��Can the NFL survive its concussion��crisis?

* Great moments in not thinking of an elephant:�����The only people with the right to object to immigration are Native Americans.�����This has got to be the worst imaginable framing to argue on behalf of kindness or generosity towards immigrants.

* A theory of politics predicated on ���how to convince your right-wing uncle to act on climate change��� isn���t one.��Unless ���Uncle Richard��� is Cheney, and not even then.

* Excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s contract��rider.

*��The Mysterious Antikythera Mechanism Is More Ancient Than We Thought.

* The long-awaited final��book in Adam Kotsko’s psychology trilogy, Creepiness, is now available for preorder.

* And maybe we should just try to figure out who’s cloning all these Hitlers.

Avoid Your Family with This Very Special Thanksgiving Edition of Thursday Links

* America’s Founding Myths.

* 100 New Debate Topics You and Your Uncle Can Turn into an Argument about Republicans.

* Ferguson. Ferguson.��Ferguson.��Ferguson.��Ferguson.��Ferguson.��Police violence.��Ferguson.��America.��Ferguson.��Turkey pardons.��Ferguson.��New York. Cleveland.����Utah. Everywhere.��Everywhere.

*��Winners are mad when winning lights the shadows.

*��Nation Doesn���t Know If It Can Take Another Bullshit Speech About Healing.

*��We should get rid of local policing. Ferguson shows why the system just doesn���t work.

* All my heroes are monsters.

* Rescind Cosby’s honorary doctorates?

* “Suicide Is My Retirement Plan.”

*��An expert hired by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) argued in court that a 9-year-old girl seeking damages after she was sexually assaulted would be protected from emotional stress by her low IQ.

* It���s almost as if the profit motive and what���s best for our schools and students are not well aligned!

*��Accumulation by Lockout.

* 41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed: US drone strikes.

* While Detroit contended with largest municipal bankruptcy, its lawyers were robbing it blind.

* Tyler Cowen, for one, welcomes the hyper-meritocracy.

* Anthropology as white public space.

* In praise of Lovecraft.

* The Downside of the Boom.

* Here’s the guy who wants to run to Hillary Clinton’s left.��Democrats! Catch the fever.

* While he wasn’t second in command of the United States nuclear arsenal, Rear Adm. Timothy M. Giardina not only had a 15 hour a week gambling habit he also may have had a one-man poker chip counterfeiting operation in which he used paint and stickers to make $1 poker chips into $500 poker chips. This led to repeated bans from local casinos, eventually a lifetime ban and finally his nuclear weapons were taken away.

* What is your research agenda for the coming year?

* Just another Afrofuturism megapost.

* Town Bans Winnie The Pooh For Lack of Genitals, “Dubious Sexuality.”��Finally, someone said it.

* At some point this guy��took a moment and smiled to himself, secure in the knowledge that he’d covered all his bases.

*��SDSU suspends all frat activities after members wave dildos, throw eggs at rape protesters.

*��UVA has expelled 183 students for honor code violations ��� and none for sexual��assault.

*��End Fraternities.

* Alexey Pajitnov, hero, creator of Tetris.

*��Frederik Pohl Made Doing Literally Everything Look Easy.

* Strange Horizons reprints Darko Suvin’s “Estrangement and Cognition,” with a 2014 postscript.

All of us on the planet Earth live in highly endangered times. Perhaps the richer among us, up to 5% globally but disproportionately concentrated in the trilateral U.S.A.-western Europe-Japan and its appendages, have been cushioned from realizing it by the power of money and the self-serving ideology it erects. But even those complain loudly of the “criminality” and in general “moral decay” of the desperately vicious outside their increasingly fortress-like neighbourhoods. We live morally in an almost complete dystopia���dystopia because anti-utopia���and materially (economically) on the razor’s edge of collapse, distributive and collective.

In a look backwards to my writing of the 1960s from this most endangered cusp of history, I see a main limitation to my “Poetics of SF” essay in its innocently and naively Formalist horizon. That is, I presupposed the tide of history was flowing, even if with regrettable eddies, towards socialism or democratic communism, and concentrated on the problems of understanding, pleasure, and form within that tide. Thus I seem to have felt I could freeze or even freeze out history, as all pursuits of aesthetics do: transcending the moment. I was wrong.

* The official SF short film of the Thanksgiving holiday:��Survivors Of A Nuclear War Find A Secret Bunker���But There’s A Catch

* Maybe the most twenty-first-century artifact possible:�����Sunburn!���, A Gravity-Based Puzzle Video Game Featuring a Doomed Spaceship Crew That Is Determined to Die Together.

* Cli-Fi Is Real.

*��The good news: There is no substantial technical or economic barrier that would prevent the U.S. from reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, a target that would help put the world on track to limit global average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. In fact, there are multiple pathways to that target, each involving a different mix of technologies. Achieving the goal would cost only around 1 percent of GDP a year out through 2050, and if we started now, we could allow infrastructure to turn over at its natural rate, avoiding stranded assets.��The bad news: Pulling it off would require immediate, intelligent, coordinated, vigorously executed policies that sustain themselves over decades.

*��Trotsky at the IMF.

* LEGO is dead, long live LEGO.

* But really, do they know.

* Guys, it’s not all bad news:��After The Sun Incinerates Earth, Life Could Evolve On Titan.

* And this blog’s most sacred annual tradition:��William S. Burroughs – A Thanksgiving Prayer.

Sunday Links!

* Letter of Support for Abbate from Marquette Dept Chairs. Pres. Lovell Letter to the Campus Community — November 22, 2014.

* Cold and Hungry: Discourses of Anorexic Femininity in Frozen (2013).

* We Need To Talk About Tyrion: How HBO Failed George R. R. Martin’s Iconic Character.

* Another good one from Charlie Stross: Let’s put the future behind us.

Anyway, this is the future, folks. It’s built from the bones of the past, it’s unevenly distributed, and it’s already here. And while it’s an interesting place to visit, I’m not sure I’d want to stay.

* Benghazi Is Over, But the Mainstream Media Just Yawns. Well, there’s an Ebola crisis to co– oh? really? Well, there’s Obama’s illegal executive order on immigration to cover!

* How to Shave $1 Trillion Out of Health Care.

* Under pressure, Wisconsin universities boost response to campus sex assaults.

Across town at Marquette University, three fraternities last spring received official warnings after reports of sexual misconduct. Complaints against fraternity members were handled through student misconduct channels, and the university ordered the fraternitiesto undergo training.

* UVA Suspends Fraternities Following Rolling Stone Campus Rape Investigation. As is usual with these sorts of things, what’s stunning is how clear it is they’re only doing this because they got caught. They knew everything Rolling Stone reported before RS reported it; the only difference is now everyone knows those things.

* The University of Virginia’s selection of an independent counsel to investigate rape allegations turned out to have been a member of the fraternity that is the subject of the accusations.

* Universitybot Responds: Gang Rape as “Sexual Misconduct.”

* The Historical Moment at UC Davis – Strategies for Davis Activists. Some UC Occupiers on Ferguson and the State of Emergency.

* I tell you, the ethical shambles that is today’s Young Person. Watching live college football — college football paid for by your tuition dollars, whether you like it or not — is not a right! It’s not even a privilege! It’s an obligation.

* Marion Barry has died. I’ve been learning a lot today from people talking about who he was before and besides a walking punchline.

* Transgender woman dies suddenly, presented at funeral in open casket as a man.

* And Where the Academic Jobs Aren’t: Philosophy Edition.

Right offhand, a number of notable trends pop out. First, this looks like a terrible job season so far. Over at the Smoker, Zombie has tallied only 110 tenure-track jobs [note: now, going back all the way to June, it doesn’t look quite so bad–though most AOS are still in the single digits).  Second, the most in-demand AOS this year are ethics (37 listings), applied ethics (35) jobs, open (37), and social-political (20). So, value theory’s looking comparatively good. Third, it’s surprising (to me, at any rate) how few jobs are in the “core”, though Mind isn’t doing too bad (15 listings).

From what I can gather of the contemporary philosophy discipline a lion’s share of those ethics jobs (themselves now the supermajority of the field!) are in interdisciplinary attempts to make ethics “relevant” to science, medicine, business, etc. If you want a vision of the future of the humanities…

All the Weekend Links!

* A lengthy update from IHE on the outrageous attacks on Marquette University graduate student Cheryl Abbate.

* Ursula Le Guin gave a great speech at the National Book Awards this week.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

* It’s quite a bit better than the other thing that happened that night, though Handler is trying to making amends.

* Kirkus Reviews on the radical Joanna Russ.

* A Sokal hoax we can all believe in.

* Dialectics of Serial.

* Roofs are caving in in Buffalo after a week of truly insane November storms. The temperature is projected to be 60 degrees on Monday, which means this could all melt in one day and cause a whole new set of problems.

* CFP: Hostile Intelligences and The General Antagonism.

The purpose of this conference is to organize and proliferate the material heresies that are the basis for what Matteo Pasquinelli has called “hostile intelligences” and what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have described as “the general antagonism.” Pasquinelli writes, in “The Labour of Abstraction,” “Marx’s tendency of the rate of profit to fall has to find eventually its epistemic twin.” For him, forms of knowledge and subjectivity play a prominent role in his theory of anti-capitalist revolution. Hostile intelligence is one imaginary in which the recently formed Accelerationists conceive such an epistemic twin. Moten and Harney’s category, “the general antagonism,” is no doubt the epistemic twin of “the general intellect”, and powerfully indicates a generalized disidentification with white-supremacist, capitalist culture that is an extant part of the fugitive practices of what they eloquently call “The Undercommons.”

* Program of the 2015 MLA Subconference.

* While the Regents claim to negotiate on behalf of those who use the university–students, staff and faculty–their new gambit instead shows the difference between the Regents and higher Administration, on one hand, and “those who use” the university on the other. UCOP’s Failed Funding Model.

* A Communiqué from the UCSC Occupation of Humanities 2.

* What the students were doing in 2010, and what they’re doing today, is defending art, science and philosophy against a regime that believes none of these things are of any value except as a means to wealth and power. They are quite literally defending the values of civilisation from those who have abandoned them.

* Jacobin: Higher education should be free. But we can’t just copy the flawed European model.

* In Response to Pending Grad Strike at U. Oregon, Administration Urges Faculty to Make Exams Multiple Choice or Allow Students Not to Take Them.

* Do you want to be responsible for something that’s gonna paint UVA in a bad light? Horrifying report in Rolling Stone about a young woman’s experience being attacked at a UVA fraternity and then reporting it. Please note that the description of what happened to her is quite graphic and very disturbing.

* Bill Cosby and the rape accusers: stop looking away and start believing women.

* Inside Yucca Mountain, incomprehensibly long time scales clash with human ones—pairing the monumental and the mundane.

The repository would need some kind of physical marker that, foremost, could last 10,000 years, so the task force’s report considers the relative merits of different materials like metal, concrete, and plastic. Yet the marker would also need to repel rather than attract humans—setting it apart from Stonehenge, the Great Pyramids, or any other monument that has remained standing for thousands of years. To do that, the marker would need warnings. But how do you warn future humans whose cultures and languages will have evolved in unknown ways?

* Public officials once operated for profit. Now that system has returned with a vengeance. Mike Konczal reviews The Teacher Wars and Rise of the Warrior Cop.

* Academics sometimes seek to make the world a better place, and the Chronicle is ON IT.

* Seven years in, Twitter finally puts in what you’d think would be one of its most basic features.

* Bangkok cinema chain cancels Hunger Games screenings over salute protest.

* 400 Things Cops Know Is the New Bible for Crime Writers. By MU English Alum Plantinga!

* The Singularity Is Here: 5-foot-tall ‘Robocops’ start patrolling Silicon Valley.

* NYPD Officer ‘Accidentally’ Shoots and Kills Unarmed Man in Brooklyn. Why would police officers have their guns drawn as a matter of course? How can that be protocol?

* What To Do About Uber?

* Late capitalism and the viral imagination.

* Surprise: Humanities Degrees Provide Great Return On Investment.

* Exhibit A? U. of Colorado Will Pay Philosophy Professor $185,000 to Resign.

* Mass hysteria at the Department of Education.

* Now we see the violence etc: In a blow to schoolchildren statewide, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled on Nov. 7 the State of Michigan has no legal obligation to provide a quality public education to students in the struggling Highland Park School District. The law, in its majestic equality…

* First Grader Was Told ‘Guess What, You Can’t Have Lunch’ Because His Family Was In Debt.

* Being bullied physically changes kids’ brains.

* The Horrific Sand Creek Massacre Will Be Forgotten No More.

* When My Mom Was an Astronaut.

* Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. Passwords are the new poetry.

* Accrediting commission says UNC ‘not diligent’ in exposing academic scandal. Let the stern finger-wagging commence!

* Lunatic: Keystone Pipeline Will Teach Men “What it Is to Be a Man.” Literally toxic masculinity.

* It’s one reason we’re poorer than our parents. And Obama could fix it—without Congress. Whatever Happened to Overtime? I’m sure he’ll get right on it.

* ‘Text neck’ is becoming an ‘epidemic’ and could wreck your spine.

* A new analysis by PunditFact found that of every statement made by a Fox News host or guest, over half of them were flat-out false. What’s more, only a measly 8% could be considered completely “true.”

* In a Shift, Obama Extends U.S. Role in Afghan Combat.

* No, Your Ancestors Didn’t Come Here Legally.

* Neuroscience Is Ruining the Humanities.

* The enduring legacy of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer writers’ room.

* The Ghostbusters 3 we’ll never see.

* The Empire Strikes Back we’ll never see.

* This One-Page Comic Explains Why Batman Never Seems To Die.

* From this vantage, the efficient society that terrorizes and comforts Codemus, and enfolds him in the straitjacket of a diffused, technologized fascism, resembles the experience of many workers today. Increasing numbers of people receive their instructions from, and report back to, software and smartphones.

* Flatland, at last, is truly two-dimensional.

* And this Deceptively Cute Animation Illustrates The Horrors Of My Addiction to Coca-Cola.Won’t you give what you can, please, today? The case for treating sugar like a drug.