Del.icio.us links for January 20th through January 21st:
- Science fiction is really beginning to annoy me… – Give the reader or the audience an opportunity to explore an issue – that’s what you want to do if you want to morally engage with them. Use the speculative powers of science fiction to design a thought experiment – a problem to solve. Have the protagonist attempt to solve it, and if the dilemma is resolved then have it done in a sufficiently morally ambiguous fashion that the reader can’t deduce endorsement from the choice of the protagonist. And have the decision weigh on the characters. Have them doubt themselves.
Tags: sciencefiction writing deusexmachina cliche prophecy narrativedevices genreconvention - How I fought to survive Guantánamo – It is not hot stabbing pain that Omar Deghayes remembers from the day a Guantánamo guard blinded him, but the cool sensation of fingers being stabbed deep into his eyeballs. He had joined other prisoners in protesting against a new humiliation – inmates being forced to take off their trousers and walk round in their pants – and a group of guards had entered his cell to punish him. He was held down and bound with chains.
Tags: guantanamobay torture usa resistance islamophobia courage - “There are no security issues”. – This message, now coming from aid workers in the Red Cross and Partners in Health, starkly contradicts the racist coverage of the wire services, the mainstream newspapers, and the television channels and the websites belonging to all of the above – the capitalist media in toto. Take this, for example: a wire story, reproduced in newspapers and on television programmes across the world, uncritically reproducing the claims of the Haitian police, using less than a handful of named and unnamed witnesses as editorial sock puppets to justify the attempts to spread terror and organise vigilante violence – to actually create the very suspicion, mayhem, and bloodshed that has so far been notable by its absence.
Tags: haiti imperialism humanitarianintervention politicalengineering usa unitednations naturaldisaster shockdoctrine