Del.icio.us links for July 13th through July 26th:
- The only way is down – Forget about green shoots, and don’t be taken in by chipper ‘investors’. The UK is tanking. In the year to June, UK GDP declined by 5.6%, a fall almost identical to that in the first years of the Depression. Unemployment made a record rise in the first quarter of this year, despite the fact that public sector employment rose. Corporate profits continue to tumble (only boosted a little by hypertrophic profits from ‘continental shelf’ companies). Unlike in the US where massive, centralised intervention and public spending higher than its peak in the 1930s may well have mitigated the crisis (and state spending has had to soar because consumer spending is not recovering), the UK is still in freefall.
Tags: economics politics britain recession financialcrisis - Afghanistan’s bravest woman brings her message to UK – It is a year since I last saw Malalai Joya. She was at Stansted airport preparing to return to Afghanistan: a tiny figure clutching a large holdall and a gold-coloured trophy. It was the Anna Politkovskaya Award for human rights campaigning and Ms Joya was the second recipient. Some might say the trophy brings with it a curse. It was created in memory of the Russian journalist gunned down outside her Moscow apartment in 2006. The first recipient, Natalya Estimerova, was murdered last week in the Chechen capital. As Ms Estimerova passed on the trophy to her in 2008, her message was blunt: “Malalai, be brave.”
Tags: afghanistan humanrights activism war fundamentalism feminism politics - US teen pregnancy and syphilis rates rose sharply during George Bush’s presidency, Centres for Disease Control finds – Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush’s evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US’s major public health body.
Tags: USA studies research sex health disease politics teenagers religion - The racial politics of the Christian Right – Fascinating essay about the language and strategies developed by the Christian Right (and their adopted masters, the Republican Party) in response to continued efforts to end segregation in the USA throughout the 1970s and 80s. Well worth a read.
Tags: USA history politics race racism christianity rightwing activism segregation regulation - Such purificatory feats – Social Darwinism maintained that human behaviour could be explained by the same evolutionary pressures of struggle, competition and selection as exerted . This meant that there was a constant struggle between different biological entities, whether individuals or groups, for survival and supremacy. Both the defenders and opponents of social Darwinism discerned in it a defence of bourgeois economic interests, even if it stripped away some forms of bourgeois idealism.
Tags: socialdarwinism evolution science pseudoscience history politics biology genetics research eugenics race racism class classism - Clear and frozen danger (Why we need to reclaim our stone-making names before the state better learns to turn them outwards like Perseus) – We need to make Communism as deadly serious, impossible to imagine, and unincorporable into this economic order as it once was. Only then does it gain the chance of being a medusa head shared collectively, halting this long trainwreck of the new century, an idea that moves differently, bound to everyday practices of want and discontent and moving from them to an air heavy with the threat of no more deferral of what is all of ours.
Tags: socialism communism history future politics society futurism - Natalia Estemirova: Award-winning human rights campaigner murdered in Chechnya – Russia’s human rights record tonight came under severe criticism after one of the country’s most famous human rights campaigners was abducted from her home in Chechnya and brutally murdered.
Tags: russia chechnya humanrights activism murder stateterror - Neo-Nazi intent on bombing ‘non-British’ found guilty of terrorism | UK news | guardian.co.uk – “A neo-Nazi, who turned his bedroom into a bomb factory, is facing years in jail after being convicted today of terrorism and explosives offences.” Hoorah!
Tags: UK politics terrorism racism whitesupremacism justice - Amelia Gentleman on a day in the life of a care home for older people – Most of us will end our lives in an old people’s home just like this one. The care is good; the staff are lovely. And yet it’s hard not to be shocked by the reality of daily life here
Tags: age nursinghomes death society culture britain selfishness individuality communality - Katherine Rake: Feminism’s calm champion – Katherine Rake has led The Fawcett Society, the UK’s leading campaign for human rights, for seven years. On the day she bows out, she tells Kira Cochrane about being vilified as ‘worse than Hitler’, the postcode lottery for rape victims – and why she never gets angry
Tags: UK feminism activism politics sexism gender crime - Does the Book Industry Want To Get Napstered? – It doesn’t make me a defender of illegal file-sharing to say that the music industry goofed by waiting until 2003 to agree to sell individual tracks for the reasonable price of 99 cents. Its absence from the electronic-music market in those early years allowed illegal file-sharing to take root and spread, and it helped shape the perception, especially among younger consumers, that music “should” be free.
Tags: publishing books ebooks markets digitaldistribution filesharing - Rubbing Sh*t in God’s Eyes – Anyone pandering to what they think their readers want is already dead and buried. Any magazine currently doing market research will be gone within two years. Have the courage of your convictions, otherwise what’s the fucking point? You’re the so-called expert. Be a fucking expert, don’t ask your readers what they already know before telling them about it. Jesus fucking wept.
Tags: music musicjournalism writing criticism - Work-Rest-Play-Die: The Subhumans – “Fatalism, transformation, and the re-release of a classic British punk band’s six greatest albums.” Fantastic essay written by Franz Nicolay.
Tags: punk music history essays - There’s Still A Place Where Albums Outsell Singles – Many say that the album is dead and they have the proof. According to Nielsen SoundScan, sales of individual digital tracks led digital album sales by 16 to 1 (1.07 billion to 65 million) in 2008.
Tags: digitaldistribution music musicindustry records album - Stuart Jeffries on science-fiction writer Alastair Reynolds – His latest book is set 6.4m years in the future, he admits to stealing other writers’ ideas – and he’s just secured a £1m book deal. Stuart Jeffries enters the fantastic world of Alastair Reynolds.
Tags: interview alastairreynolds sciencefiction writing books novels - Your Favourite Show Sucks – Patrick West watches Torchwood and asks why are the British incapable of making decent television science fiction? There are two main problems with this: a) Holding Torchwood up as an exemplar in this way is like scrapping up a plateful of sick from the pavement outside Leicester Square tube and presenting it as proof the British can’t cook. b) No one is capable of making decent television science fiction (at least on the available evidence).
Tags: television sciencefiction britain culture writing - Movie “review” – This movie is a neutron bomb of stupidity which pops your lobes and blasts your wallet, a shameless two-day-long structureless glurge of Lord of the Rings and Pan’s Labyrinth rip-offs trying so hard to be POST-9/11 that you can hear Rumsfeld grunting like a hog at several points, and Ron SHITTING Weasley is eating jelly in my nightmares. Magic spells occupy the same plot role as the CTU building occupies in 24 and the idea that you’d even call it ‘fantasy’ is so insulting to me that I’ve TOLD MICHAEL MOORCOCK WHERE YOU LIVE.
Tags: harrypotter jkrowling film review funny awesome
- Movie “review” – This movie is a neutron bomb of stupidity which pops your lobes and blasts your wallet, a shameless two-day-long structureless glurge of Lord of the Rings and Pan’s Labyrinth rip-offs trying so hard to be POST-9/11 that you can hear Rumsfeld grunting like a hog at several points, and Ron SHITTING Weasley is eating jelly in my nightmares. Magic spells occupy the same plot role as the CTU building occupies in 24 and the idea that you’d even call it ‘fantasy’ is so insulting to me that I’ve TOLD MICHAEL MOORCOCK WHERE YOU LIVE.
Tags: harrypotter jkrowling film review funny awesome