Shameless Self-promotion Sunday #47
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 15 years ago, in 2009, on the World Wide Web.
It’s Sunday again.
i cannot name this
i cannot explain this
and i really don't want to
just call me shameless
i can't even slow this down
let alone stop this
and i keep looking around
but i cannot top this
What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.
Follow
Kicking some Christian ass: http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/04/11/10-answers-from-an-atheist-part-12/ http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/10-answers-from-an-atheist-part-22/
As you all may know, the Obama admin. finally succumbed to an ACLU FOIA request. Obama released these four memos:
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html
This is astonishing: “The memos show interrogators asked for a ruling on whether the placing of a harmless insect in a cramped box with al-Qaeda terror suspect Abu Zubaydah equated to torture.
The technique “certainly does not cause physical pain” and therefore could not be termed as torture, one of the memos said.”
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25345940-663,00.html
These guys really sound like sadists with issues trying to put a legal gloss over blatantly coercive techniques. Obama has said he won’t pursue criminal charges against individual CIA agents acting on Bush legal guidance. His chief of staff was asked about this and responded by saying there’s no law but only the will of men.
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/04/19/rahm-emanuel-there-is-no-law/
Reminded me of Nazi German esque statements — although, I am not accusing him of being the exact reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.
Continuing with the Porcfest plans, and as you can see, overrunning last Sunday’s comment section.
Say Charles, how did your meeting with Pete and Jason go?
I anarch’d up the tea party patheticness in nyc http://darianworden.com/blog/?p=594
Also a lot of folding and stapling of zine-age.
“Annie Rent Your Gun” provides some mild admonishment for something Israel Kirzner wrote seven years ago. I like to stay current.
Roderick Long wrote an appreciated post on the Amazon discrimination scandal. Here Wendy McElroy (whose politics have been improving again in recent years) gives much more detail:
http://wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.2404
This is important. The internet is a primary method for the exchange of goods and ideas today, and institutional discrimination by a company controlling such a large share of traffick has many of the same effects as discrimination by landlords, hotels, jobs, or newspapers. Control a necessity for functional social citizenship, exclude people… and then watch them fail and blame them for failing. Some group of people working for Amazon know this and want to see GLBT and Adult/Erotic writers denied equal access to the public. A book like this may mean the difference between self-understanding and suicide for a young queer person trapped in a conservative family, town, or nation.
Leaving aside the fact that this is obviously a form of fraud, I wonder how long it will take for some libertarian to piously remind us of the right of the private companies to discriminate? Better yet: shall some paleolibertarian speak his soul out loud and remind us of the crucial function good stakeholders like Amazon play in the maintainence of the standards of ‘natural society’? After all, sexual knowledge and imagination is an affront to the ‘right’ of static societies to remain as they are- just as books of philosophy were once deemed a threat to the ‘truth’ preached by the Church. Words do tend to deny the gods and corrupt the young. Tribes can’t have anyone being or thinking too differently.
Boycott Amazon! As a former online book dealer, I recommend addall.com as an inexpensive way to build a library (avoid anything sold by half.com; they’re unreliable, or were five years ago).
“Extremist Tide Rises in Pakistan After Reaching Deal in North, Islamists Aim to Install Religious Law Nationwide
By Pamela Constable Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, April 20, 2009
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, April 19 — A potentially troubling era dawned Sunday in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, where a top Islamist militant leader, emboldened by a peace agreement with the federal government, laid out an ambitious plan to bring a “complete Islamic system” to the surrounding northwest region and the entire country.
Speaking to thousands of followers in an address aired live from Swat on national news channels, cleric Sufi Mohammed bluntly defied the constitution and federal judiciary, saying he would not allow any appeals to state courts under the system of sharia, or Islamic law, that will prevail there as a result of the peace accord signed by the president Tuesday.
“The Koran says that supporting an infidel system is a great sin,” Mohammed said, referring to Pakistan’s modern democratic institutions. He declared that in Swat, home to 1.5 million people, all “un-Islamic laws and customs will be abolished,” and he suggested that the official imprimatur on the agreement would pave the way for sharia to be installed in other areas.
Mohammed’s dramatic speech echoed a rousing sermon in Islamabad on Friday by another radical cleric, Maulana Abdul Aziz, who appeared at the Red Mosque in the capital after nearly two years in detention and urged several thousand chanting followers to launch a crusade for sharia nationwide.
Together, these rallying cries seemed to create an arc of radical religious energy between the turbulent, Taliban-plagued northwest region and the increasingly vulnerable federal capital, less than 100 miles to the east. They also appeared to pose a direct, unprecedented religious challenge to modern state authority in the Muslim nation of 176 million.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/19/AR2009041901731_pf.html
Middle East expert Juan Cole says the U.S. government’s claim of a serious Al-Q-Taliban threat in Pakistan is warfare state fearmongering. Nonetheless, I keep running into news stories like the one above. I imagine the possession of nuclear weapons by these folks would end in an exchange with the West — particularly with continued U.S. military operations in the Middle East.
Back to environmentalism:
http://www.atlassociety.org/cth-43-2179-WOE-EarthDay.aspx
I don’t know if the facts are correct, but I like the criticisms of the religious approach to environmental issues — with all due respect to my SF Pagan friends.
Zee facts are rotten says a good source. I wondered what the claim of a global cooling was about?!?!