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- “Science-Fiction Fandom in United Berlin” by Sonja Fritzsche | World Literature Today – On November 9, 1989, the night the wall fell, several Andymon members crossed over the border into West Berlin to celebrate. Lost on a side of Berlin they had never seen, they decided to contact one of the West Berlin fans from their earlier visit. Luckily, they found her, and this second meeting, now on the other side of the border, helped to cement a future collaboration between both Berlin fan clubs.
- Rachel Dolezal and the Trouble with White Womanhood – racismreview.com – “The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”
- ladybusiness | Hey, Mainstream Venues! Your SF Summer Reading Guides are Boring. Here’s 25 Rad Suggestions. –
- Six ways Nick Clegg steered the Liberal Democrats to disaster | David Steel | Comment is free | The Guardian – Holding the coalition together is less praise worthy than David Steel thinks it is, considering the damage it has done to the UK and the poorest and most vulnerable people in it.
- Pacific Rim and Lessons in Positive Masculinity – Paging Dr. NerdLove – But when you look even a little deeper, it’s almost gleefully subversive of action movie tropes. It’s the woman of color who gets the full Campbellian journey rather than Johnny Action Hero and the hot-shot maverick pilot who doesn’t play by the rules… doesn’t exist, actually. In fact, Pacific Rim is one of the best examples of what non-toxic masculinity looks like.
- The Westminster child abuse ‘coverup’: how much did MPs know? | Politics | The Guardian – Another day, another set of shocking headlines about allegations of historical child abuse and high-level coverups, this time a dossier being handed over by the Metropolitan police themselves to the Independent Police Complaints Commission to examine 14 allegations of Scotland Yard’s own complicity in the alleged coverup of a high-level paedophile ring.
- On the “dispute” between radical feminism and trans people – In a world where left-wing politics has often derided LGBT identities as “bourgeois” and then accused us of splitting the movement, it infuriates me that I’ve had to take a break from writing a piece on the Tories’ “liberation” of the NHS to write 8,500 words to debunk a sexological concept that was shown to be untenable before the start of the First World War.
- Featured news – Skeletons uncovered at Ipplepen reveals major Roman cemetery – University of Exeter – The significance of the discovery took on further importance when one of the skeletons was found to date from around 250 to 350 years after the Roman period, an era often referred to as the ‘dark ages’. These discoveries are of both national and regional value in providing a glimpse into Romano-British life and how the settlement continued into post-Roman times.
- Minister-President over discriminatie: oplossing ligt bij slachtoffers – "Eén van de dingen die ik [van leerlingen] leer, is hoe ingrijpend discriminatie is. Dat het in Nederland nog veel voorkomt en het echt uitmaakt of je Mohammed of Jan heet als je solliciteert. Ik heb daar over nagedacht en ben tot de conclusie gekomen dat ik dit niet kan oplossen. De paradox is dat de oplossing bij Mohammed ligt. Ik kan tegen Nederland zeggen: ‘discrimineer aub niet, beoordeel iemand op karakter en kennis.’ Maar als het wel gebeurt, heeft Mohammed de keus: afhaken wegens belediging of doorgaan. Nieuwkomers hebben zich altijd moeten aanpassen, en altijd te maken gehad met vooroordelen en discriminatie. Je moet je invechten."
- Who wants to be a millionaire? Peter Oborne on Tony Blair – But Tony Blair has made a fortune. A J P Taylor, in his masterpiece English History 1914-45, noted that Lloyd George was the first prime minister since Walpole to leave office considerably richer than when he entered it. Blair falls into the tradition of Walpole and Lloyd George (though his exploitation of the office of prime minister came after he left Downing Street).
- Malaysian SFF writers and projects: a directory | Zen Cho – I’ve been conscious for a while that I’m no longer able to keep up the list of Malaysian SFF writers in English that I put up awhile ago — because I’m busy, but also because there are more of us than ever! I think it is helpful to have a directory for interested readers and people who want to connect with other local writers, but it needs to be updated regularly if it’s to be of use.
- Google Bullies, Censors MintPress & AntiWar.com Over Abu Ghraib Photos – On March 12 Google AdSense contacted MintPress News threatening to disable our Google Ads if we did not remove gruesome and now infamous photos of American soldiers torturing Iraqis in the Abu Ghraib prison.
- Miwa Hirono: my Home Office hell | Opinion | Times Higher Education – Because of this policy, I am now forced to quit my permanent position at the University of Nottingham after six and a half years of dedication and contribution to the university and to the wider policy and scholarly communities. My family and I will be removed from this country as of next Sunday.
- Student political protest is under threat, not free speech | Comment is free | The Guardian – We are deeply concerned about the letter “We cannot allow individuals to be censored and silenced” on 15 February, which contained serious inaccuracies. For example, neither Kate Smurthwaite nor Germaine Greer were no-platformed; poor ticket sales were a factor in the cancellation of Smurthwaite’s show and Greer’s talk went ahead.
- We cannot allow censorship and silencing of individuals | letters | World news | The Observer –
- What is Twine? (For Developers) | Liz England –
- Black Nerds, Black Cool, and Afrofuturism | Troy L. Wiggins – Still, Afrofuturism serves as a ideological wrecking ball to the staled and played out construction of whites-only nerd identity, and allows practitioners and followers to douse themselves in blackness, Black Cool, and black nerd stuff while building a healthy dose of pride about their own blackness and nerd identity.
- Social Text Afrofuturism issue, Table of Contents — Summer 2002, 20 (2 71) –
- Artwork from hard work. | Brandon Graham –
- James W. C. Pennington, 1807-1870. The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, Pastor of a Presbyterian Church, New York, Formerly a Slave in the State of Maryland, United States –
- Tell us the truth about the battle of Orgreave | David Conn | Comment is free | theguardian.com – The referral was for some of the most serious criminal offences police officers can commit: the alleged assault of miners at Orgreave during the mass picket of 18 June 1984, principally battering them on the head with truncheons and then allegedly perverting the course of justice, committing perjury and misconduct in public office in the failed prosecutions of 94 miners for riot and unlawful assembly.
- 46 Reasons You Should Never Leave Amsterdam – lies, all lies.
- Taizong’s hell – The Chinese hell scrolls presented here treat the afterlife as a spectacle, as a display intended for public consumption. Ostensibly based on popular tales such as Tang Emperor Taizong's visit to hell in the first half of the seventh century C.E., they attract their viewers through their dark and yet cartoonish torture scenes, appealing to the same morbid curiosity fed by gothic novels, horror movies and Halloween ghosts in the West. Yet their main function was not entertainment but didactic, propagating a basic message of retribution. Every act of goodness will be rewarded; every act of evil will be justly answered.
- Tax Research UK » The personal tax statement George Osborne doesn’t want you to see – Linkis.com – Add together the cost of subsidies to banks, the subsidy to pensions and the subsidy to savings (call them together the subsidy to the City of London) and they cost £103.4bn a year – more than the cost of education in the UK.
- Greek Bronze Age ended 100 years earlier than thought, new evidence suggests – Conventional estimates for the collapse of the Aegean civilization may be incorrect by up to a century, according to new radiocarbon analyses. While historical chronologies traditionally place the end of the Greek Bronze Age at around 1025 BCE, this latest research suggests a date 70 to 100 years earlier.
- Leefbaar hangt stad vol met Pieten – NOS Nieuws – In Rotterdam zijn honderden Zwarte Piet-poppen opgehangen aan lantaarnpalen. Om hun nek hangt een briefje met de tekst "Wij willen blijven". De pietjes zijn door de stad verspreid door de politieke partij Leefbaar Rotterdam.
- Budapest autumn: hollowing out democracy on the edge of Europe | World news | The Guardian – Eva Acs, an agronomist who has run the thriving organic farm for 22 years, is at her wits’ end. “The state just took the farm away. We were absolutely punished and rubbed out. Then the private security firms came in and closed down the roads and blocked the tractors. The new owners destroyed all our plants and crops. Just to bankrupt us and hurt us.”
- DWP orders man to work without pay for company that let him go | Society | The Guardian – A man who was let go at the end of a temporary job has been ordered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to work for the same firm for six months without pay.
- Dear Griff Rhys Jones: if you don’t like tax, why not move to the Central African Republic? – Fleet Street Fox – Mirror Online – You’d have to be a complete idiot to leave a country where many of the citizens give you lots of cash and you live in great comfort, writes Fleet Street Fox
- shapeless, I’ve had a lot of people ask why I’m retracing… –
- Miles Davis Albums From Worst To Best – Stereogum – Ranking a catalog the size of Miles Davis’ is an impossible task. There are so many lavish boxed sets, live releases, compilations issued during his hermit period, etc., that in order to make this article at all manageable, major cuts had to be made before it could even be begun. So here’s how this is going to work: I chose studio albums only. But to truly understand Davis’ catalog, there are a bunch of essential live releases, including Live-Evil, In Concert: Live At Philharmonic Hall, Dark Magus, Agharta, Pangaea, and The Bootleg Series Vol. 1: Live In Europe 1967. So consider the 30 albums below a starting point. There’s so much more.
- A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names | Laura J. Mixon – Friends, the tl;dr of this very long, comprehensive, analytical report is that up-and-coming John W. Campbell nominee Benjanun Sriduangkaew (who is also rage-blogger Requires Hate, who is also several other internet personalities including Winterfox, pyrofennec, acrackedmoon, and others) (oh yes, the list goes on), is VERY BAD NEWS.
- Cat Trap – Trends Addict – it's a cat trap Billy — and you're already caught!
- Women Rise in Sci Fi (Again) – The Atlantic – Like the fighters she wrote about, Hurley says that female science-fiction writers are often forgotten. “It’s always Asimov and Hineline,” she says. “You don’t hear about Russ or LeGuin. And there are very particular ways that people talk about it. One of those is by saying ‘well she did it, but it wasn’t really science fiction,’ or ‘her husband has a big impact.’”
- 179 RR Accountability and Diversity with Meagan Waller – DevChat.tv – a treasure trove of insights and info about unconscious biases , diversity, employment, culture, tech, and more.