December 2010
42 posts
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Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That... →
redguard:
By China Miéville
This is not a list of the “best” fantasy or SF. There are huge numbers of superb works not on the list. Those below are chosen not just because of their quality—which though mostly good, is variable—but because the politics they embed (deliberately or not) are of particular interest to socialists. Of course, other works—by the same or other writers—could have...
“An anarchist is someone who doesn’t need a cop to make him behave.”
– This is a beautiful quote. Anarchy = order.
Ammon Hennacy (via creedminusgun)
8 tags
“As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its...”
– George Orwell (via lrn2liberty)
The Coming of The Coming Insurrection: Notes on a... →
Abstract:
A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of autonomous communist activism. A new party is expanding its ranks, The Imaginary Party, which has already unnerved the French establishment, rattled Sarkozy’s government, and penned its own intriguing manifesto: The Coming Insurrection. Everybody agrees: current society is about to explode. Even the French daily Le Monde, was forced to...
“We’re repeating everything again. Except this time, instead of Communism we have...”
– Ivan Potter, Futurist (via anthophobia)
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“My problem with the hype and pressure around DADT is that it distracts from the...”
– Why I Won’t Be Celebrating the Repeal of DADT: Queer Soldiers are Still Agents of Genocide | … Or Does It Explode? (via curate)
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Apple Removes WikiLeaks App From App Store →
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Americans Say 'No Thanks' to Online Tracking, New... →
No shit:
Most Americans do not want to be tracked by online advertisers, according to a new Gallup poll released Tuesday.
…
When asked if advertisers should be allowed to match ads to people’s specific interests based on other websites they’ve previously visited, a clear majority of 67% said no, compared with 30% who said yes.
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Tim Berners-Lee Says WikiLeaks Is Not Open... →
Berners-Lee was clear on one count: Open government data is data about a country which “is not personally identifiable information about individuals. It does not have privacy issues associated with it. And it does not military or state secrets.” That’s inline with the definition for open government that the Obama administration advanced in its directive last December, or the...
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NYT: We’re All Conservatives Now →
To be sure, there are some things to fear, but their names are not West or Chomsky or Horowitz. The forces — call them neoliberal, call them corporate capitalism, call them political indoctrination — that have in different ways turned the university away from the emancipatory project Kant called us to (and every one of these authors celebrates) are enemy enough. We don’t have to demonize each...
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Reclaim The Cyber-Commons →
They are the online equivalent of enclosure riots: the rick-burning, fence-toppling protests by English peasants losing their rights to the land. When MasterCard, Visa, Paypal and Amazon tried to shut WikiLeaks out of the cyber-commons, an army of hackers responded by trying to smash their way into these great estates and pull down their fences.
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40% of New Mechanical Turkers' Work Requests Are... →
A new study by NYU academics Professor Panos Ipeirotis, Dahn Tamir and Priya Kanth studied all the new Mechanical Turk requester accounts that have been created over the last two months and found that more than 40% of their requests were for the workers to commit acts of spam. The team used Mechanical Turk itself to evaluate the tasks submitted, but they had to take extra steps after their own...
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What's Your Beef With Consumer Crowdsourcing? →
Regardless of what they actually create, consumers are interacting with brands, and that is what is most important. What we need to accept is that the environment in which we operate has changed dramatically, and that the real ownership in the brands we represent now lies with the consumer. Everyone has a voice now, and we need to pay attention … even if the result is sometimes stupid.
...
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“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children; we can not forgive them for...”
– Golda Meir (via forzionssake)
Oh my goodness, what an absurd quote.
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"Faggot" - a bundle of sticks. It was used as a...
avod11:
Men would call women “faggots” because they were believed to be burdensome, “something that needed to be carried” like sticks. Effeminate and/or queer men were then called “faggots” to offend them for their gender expression more than their sexuality. Although men were burned at the stake for the homosexuality/sodomy, faggot was more popularly used as an insult for women before queer...
25 tags
“[T]he pejorative use of this epithet [Luddite] by information revolutionaries...”
– Nick Dyer-Witheford, in Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (1999, p. 52)
4chan Hits PayPal, MasterCard, Others for... →
It looks like several companies are learning what happens when you mess with the internet – and they’re learning it the hard way. If governments thought terrorism was hard to fight… Wait until they try to deal with the collective distributed strength of the web.
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State Dept. Bars Staffers from WikiLeaks, Warns... →
“The U.S. State Department has imposed an order barring employees from reading the leaked WikiLeaks cables. State Department staffers have been told not to read cables because they were classified and subject to security clearances. The State Department’s WikiLeaks censorship has even been extended to university students. An email to students at Columbia University’s School of International...
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