Del.icio.us links for March 30th through April 24th:
- My big feminist wedding – When Jessica Valenti started planning her wedding, she was determined to avoid sexist traditions. But she hadn’t predicted the strength of reaction from family, fellow feminists and the blogger who termed her a ‘ball-cutting cybersuccubus’.
Tags: feminism marriage relationships gender society - Pankaj Mishra on the epoch of world literature – In 1827, fresh from his reading of a Chinese novel, Goethe pronounced to Eckermann that “national literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”
Tags: books writing literature publishing europe northamerica india pakistan - “WIPED OFF THE MAP” – The Rumor of the Century by Arash Norouzi – Analysis of the quote commonly and falsely attributed to Ahmadinejad.
Tags: middleeast Iran Israel language translation propaganda rhetoric - Robert Fisk: How can you trust the cowardly BBC? – The trust – how I love that word which so dishonours everything about the BBC – has collapsed, in the most shameful way, against the usual Israeli lobbyists who have claimed – against all the facts – that Bowen was wrong to tell the truth.
Tags: bbc media propaganda robertfisk middleeast palestine Israel zionism - Manchester Orchestra on MySpace Music – Lush.
Tags: band music - LEBANON-SYRIA: Wretched conditions for Syrian workers – Rights and labour groups say almost all the estimated 300,000 Syrians working in Lebanon have no official status, often endure dangerous conditions, and earn about US$300 a month doing jobs shunned by most Lebanese.
Tags: lebanon syria labour class nationalism vigilantism violence criminality regulation employment middleeast - 3-D Printing Hits Rock-bottom Prices With Homemade Ceramics Mix – This story is, literally, stone age meets digital age: University of Washington researchers are combining the ancient art of ceramics and the new technology of 3-D printing. Along the way, they are making 3-D printing dramatically cheaper.
Tags: technology 3dprinting design ceramics fabrication - $6 Solar Cooker Wins $75K Climate Change Prize – Made out of basic, 5th-grade-science-experiment type materials, the Kyoto box solar cooker offers a life-altering solution for thousands of people: the ability to cook and heat water without burning wood. The cost of the box will be a mere 5 euros.
Tags: energy environment innovation poverty resourcescarcity climatechange developingworld - Obama: wise potentate? – Obama’s position on state secrecy and torture not only adopts the most authoritarian and extreme positions of the Bush administration, but goes farther by claiming a radical kind of “sovereign immunity” to ensure that torture victims get no redress and no one ever finds out about it.
Tags: politics internationalaffairs middleeast USA asia afghanistan pakistan barackobama waronterror - Free Music Archive – 5,000+ free, legal songs, all Creative Commons-licensed.
Tags: music free creativecommons - Nielsen Study: Majority PC Gamers Female, Solitary – Nielsen’s latest gaming data has been published in the form of The State of the Video Gamer (pdf). Gathering PC gaming data from the “Nielsen MegaPanel”, more than 185,000 PCs were tracked by their system in the US. The findings include that “PC gaming is alive and well,” showing growth, and that females aged 25 and older make up the largest block of PC gamers, responsible for 54.6% of all game play minutes in December 2008.
Tags: videogames gaming gender statistics pcgames - MILLA on MySpace Music – Estonian white noise. Soothing!
Tags: band music - Crisis and accumulation – “The aim of leading capitalist states at the moment is to restore the neoliberal system intact, with a further concentration of power and wealth at the top. [...] The question is, can they fix it? Can it work this time? [...] Realistically, the only way they could possibly restore even an attenuated neoliberalism would be to hammer the working classes, plunder public spending, and savagely repress wages. [...] The main difference between the two parties at the moment is not whether to do this, but how.”
Tags: UK capitalism neoliberalism freemarkets financialcrisis politics - Punknews.org | About The Marked Men – Full album stream from a quality fast-paced foot-stomping punk ‘n roll band.
Tags: band music hotdamn! - Paris liberation made ‘whites only’ – Papers unearthed by the BBC reveal that British and American commanders ensured that the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 was seen as a “whites only” victory.
Tags: history ww2 europe france paris africa senegal racism colonialism imperialism - Schneier on Security: Stealing Commodities – Security can be viewed as a tax on the honest, and these thefts demonstrate that our taxes are going up. And unlike many taxes, we don’t benefit from their collection. The cost to society of retrofitting manhole covers with locks, or replacing them with less resalable alternatives, is high; but there is no benefit other than reducing theft.
Tags: security theft tax society crime economics resources sustainability profit - The Good Fight – Everyone knows “tai chi” — it’s that arm-waving thing old ladies do in urban parks. The Whole Foods yuppie crowd swears by it as a way of learning how to “relax.” Taiji quan (same thing, somewhat more accurate transliteration) started out, however, as a powerful martial art.
Tags: martialarts taiji exercise fighting nickmamatas - Social Anarchism, Leninism and the State – Part 2 of a good blog post discussing the differences between Leninist and anarchist conceptions of the state, government, as well as a fascinating history of CNT strategy before and during the Spanish Civil War. Well worth a read.
Tags: anarchism leninism marxism socialism spain history politics revolution - farah mendlesohn – Extract from Rhetorics of Fantasy (the Introduction) – I want to reach out for an understanding of the construction of the genre, and very specifically to consider its language and rhetoric, in order to provide critical tools for further analysis. During the research for this book I became aware that while there are many single author or single text studies in genre fantasy criticism, there is relatively little comparative criticism beyond the study of metaphorical and thematic elements. There is almost nothing which deals with the language of the fantastic that goes beyond aesthetic preference. My contention is that if we do not have a critical tool which allows us to collate texts in any yielding way (note that I do not insist on quot;meaningfulquot;), we cannot engage in the comparative research which illuminates a genre.
Tags: books fantasy genre farahmendlesohn literarycriticism - Tom Gabel (of Against Me!) Interviews Chris Hannah of Propagandhi – Tom Gabel (right) of Against Me! recently had a chat with Chris Hannah, co-founder of Canadian punk band Propagandhi, while playing the Harvest of Hope festival in Florida. In the conversation below they get into the nitty-gritty of recording Propagandhi’s new album, promo demands, (not) making music videos, and much more.
Tags: music punk propagandhi tomgabel interview - Burners Torched Over Native Party – More than fifty Bay Area Native American rights activists converged on the historic East Oakland property at 9:30 p.m. to ensure the shutdown of popular Burning Man group Visionary Village’s “Go Native!” party. The fired-up Hopis, Kiowas and other tribal members spent more than four hours lecturing the handful of white, college-class Burners about cultural sensitivity until some of them simply broke down crying.
Tags: race USA culturalappropriation appropriation nativeamericans sanfrancisco hippies whiteness - Maths on MySpace Music – Fucking AWESOME UK hardcore band. Do I need to say more than “awesome”? Passionate, raw, fuzzy screamo with a perfect mix of mellow slow bits and explosively violent cathartic moments.
Tags: band music hotdamn! - LTA on MySpace Music – Surprisingly great UK hardcore band. I was a bit “meh, this sounds like Louisville hardcore circa ’04″, but some of the later songs blew me away. Good shit.
Tags: band music hotdamn! - FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate – This is new to me: “Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
Tags: economics politics history USA greatdepression franklindelanoroosevelt government stimulus financialcrisis studies - A Brief Peek At UCLA’s Anti-FDR Propaganda – I also went out to find a counterargument: “The authors claimed the Depression should have ended in 1936, but that would have meant FDR being responsible for completely reversing, and obliterating the negative effects of almost 3 ½ years in only a slightly longer period of time. This struck me as such an incredibly high growth rate requirement any competent economist would have to object to it as completely unrealistic.”
Tags: economics politics history USA greatdepression franklindelanoroosevelt government stimulus financialcrisis studies - “Recognizing sharia” in England – Ongoing developments in Britain bring the questions raised by special religious tribunals into sharper focus. Do the tribunuals provide a useful model for legally recognizing the equal standing of an immigrant community? Or do they threaten the integrity of law and democracy, and promise—as some argue—the unequal treatment of women in that community? Much depends on the details, not on sweeping generalizations about law, citizenship, religion, or Islam.
Tags: england britain sharia law marriage divorce civilrights islam muslims - Neurosis on MySpace Music – Excellent metal band. ‘Stones From The Sky’ is particularly awesome, love the glitchy outro.
Tags: band music - The Agonies of a Tortured Palestinian Soul – I woke up this morning with an abject pain in my soul. This pain has been nagging me lately, sometimes even preoccupying my moral sensibilities, especially since Israel tightened its economic stranglehold on the Gaza Strip and commenced a bombing campaign that killed over 1000 Palestinian civilians. I am an educated man; I read the appropriate progressive magazines, so I know just how hard this genocide has been on Israeli liberals.
Tags: Israel palestine gaza operationcastlead liberalism media progressivism appropriation - Gary Younge on Muslims and Labour’s anti-terror strategy – Somewhere out there is the Muslim that the British government seeks. Like all religious people he supports gay rights, racial equality, women’s rights, tolerance and parliamentary democracy. He abhors the murder of innocent civilians without qualification – unless they are in Palestine, Afghanistan or Iraq. He wants to be treated as a regular British citizen – but not by the police, immigration or airport security. He wants the best for his children and if that means unemployment, racism and bad schools, then so be it.
Tags: britain islam muslims multiculturalism newlabour racism representation satire