Eugene Fischer

Tag: Molly Crabapple

Tabclosing: Ferguson Edition

Season's Greetings

Reuters/Jim Young

  • “Officer Darren Wilson’s Grand Jury Testimony” – The New York Times with relevant excerpts from the released testimony. It is, unsurprisingly, full of dehumanizing imagery right in line with the racist stereotype of the monstrous black man.

    And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.
    […]
    The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked. He comes back towards me again with his hands up.
    […]
    At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him.

  • “On Being a Black Male, Six Feet Four Inches Tall, in America in 2014” – W. Kamau Bell on the lengths men in big, black bodies have to go to seem unthreatening. Notable is that, at 6’4″, Bell is the same height as Michael Brown was. And Darren Wilson is.
  • “Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid” – The always-crucial Ta-Nehisi Coates on the historical trends evident in the President’s response to the grand jury’s failure to indict. The subtitle of the piece is “Violence works. Nonviolence does to.” Which leads me to…
  • “In Defense of Looting” – Willie Osterweil writing for New Inquiry, and making many important points. I don’t know that I agree with all of them, but I agree with a lot. My position on looting was best captured by someone on twitter who, in linking to this same article, said she was “anti-anti-looting.” (And the article itself has a footnote about the clunky yet necessary phrase, “not-non-violent.”) That’s where I am. When systemic protections have failed a community as profoundly as the police have failed the citizens of Ferguson, there should be a severe cost and a varied response. Nelson Mandela was, by his own admission, a saboteur and a terrorist. After the cops get away with killing and demonizing an unarmed child of your community, I understand the desire to set flame to a squad car, or smash a window. I’m not for it, but I get it, and I’m deeply suspicious of the motives of those in power who hand-wring about how terrible looting is while police seem able to kill with impunity.
  • “Ferguson Shows How the Police Can Kill and Get Away With It” – Molly Crabapple on just how severe this problem is, and how the people marching in protests “are too clear-eyed to accept courts rigged in favor of murderers. They do not believe that victims must only respond with passive grace.”
  • Finally, when something makes me as angry as this does, I try to give money to people I believe might know better than I do how to take action against it. I’ve donated to the NAACP, the ACLU, and Amnesty International, and would encourage others to do the same.

 

Tabclosing: By The Numbers

A few (how many?) articles and sites that I want to save.

  • “The $9 Billion Witness” – An article about the woman who was willing to whistleblow on J.P. Morgan-Chase’s misconduct during the financial crisis. I just keep reading these articles. I want to remember, always, that these people are crooks, and that they own us. A fun excerpt about former Attorney General Eric Holder:

    In September, at a speech at NYU, Holder defended the lack of prosecutions of top executives on the grounds that, in the corporate context, sometimes bad things just happen without actual people being responsible. “Responsibility remains so diffuse, and top executives so insulated,” Holder said, “that any misconduct could again be considered more a symptom of the institution’s culture than a result of the willful actions of any single individual.”

    In other words, people don’t commit crimes, corporate culture commits crimes! It’s probably fortunate that Holder is quitting before he has time to apply the same logic to Mafia or terrorism cases.

  • “War of the Words” – Long article about the conflict between Amazon and the Hachette group, incorporating more context than those articles usually do.
  • “Tabletop Whale” – A Seattle designer’s tumblr, where he posts some very impressive infographics in animated .gif format.
  • “Scientists Have Discovered How Common Different Sexual Fantasies Are” – There’s an article, but the interesting bit is the table at the bottom, where all the fantasies in the survey have their responses broken down by percentage.
  • “These Are The Movies Recommended By The Church of Satan” – I have a real soft spot for the Church of Satan. Part of that is because, despite the words of reactionary Christians who want to use them as a rhetorical cudgel, it’s members are very open in not believing Satan exists, which tickles me. Another part is that they serve as a weird, fifth column force in support of separation of church and state, as in this recent example, where schools were handing out bibles and not letting atheists hand out books–until the Church of Satan started handing out coloring books. Then, suddenly, it was decided that maybe religious proselytization on school grounds was a bad idea. “Lucien’s Law. It’s like the nuclear option of church/state separation cases. When nothing else works, count on Satanists to settle the matter!” Anyway. I kind of like the Church of Satan, and found this interview in io9 delightful. I didn’t bother to count how many movies are discussed, but it’s some integer.
  • Greg Egan’s Foundations – A series of articles by the most rigorous hard science fiction writer who has ever lived on the topics of physics that most inform modern hard science fiction. “These articles are for the interested lay reader. No prior knowledge of mathematics beyond high school algebra and geometry is needed.” Though, as is always the case with Greg Egan, that doesn’t mean the reading will be easy. Egan, always, asks you to think.
  • Theorem of the Day – Robin Whitty curating an online museum of mathematical theorems.
  • “Molly Crabapple’s 15 Rules for Creative Success in the Internet Age” – Just what it says on the tin. Things like, “Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.”
  • Finally, a video of Anna-Maria Hefele, demonstrating the many ways she is able to sing two notes at once. I’d heard some examples of polyphonic singing before, but nothing like this.

An Overdue Return to Tabclosing

My tabs have gotten so extensive that I’ve outsourced the problem and started banishing them to my Pocket queue rather than keep them in the browser. Time to start recording this stuff again. There will be much more of this to come.

  • “Zac Efron and Michelle Rodriguez, Romantic Human Couple” – To start off with something amusing, a brief photoessay from Mallory Ortberg at The Toast. Includes rumination on the placement of the human carapace and the line, “I can love you better from up here, alone.”
  • “40 plus 5” (NSFW) – Following up with something raw and occasionally harrowing, a long photoessay from Ruth Fowler about the birth of her son Nye. She had a complicated home birth, and her photographer husband Jared Iorio captured the whole thing though his lens. The photos are graphic and powerful, and Ruth writes about the experience of giving birth with taught, unsentimental description, which I found incredibly affecting. I’ve also been reading the other essays on Fowler’s site.
  • “On Turning 30” – Molly Crabapple writing in Vice about age and gendered expectations. She and I are the same age. Our experience getting here has been different in important ways.
  • “When Hitting ‘Find My iPhone’ Takes You to a Thief’s Doorstep” – Article in the New York Times that was sent to me by many people. They sent it to me because they know I did this. When my iPad was stolen, I tracked the thief’s location and used some social engineering to spook his roommates into revealing him, then sent the police to his door. I got the iPad back, and the thief was arrested. At no time did I ever consider bringing a weapon with me.
  • “The Myth of the Veneer” – Ursula Le Guin, at the Book View Cafe, writes about the myth that civilized, prosocial behavior is a superficial mask for an anarchic human nature.
  • “The Teaching Class” – Rachel Reiderer writing for Guernica Magazine about the corporatization of higher education and the current state of the things where the janitors make more than the professors. Basically, a long essay about why I’m bailing out of the sad, sucker’s game that is modern humanities academia.
  • And finally, an excellent video about patterns of discourse on the internet: “This Is Phil Fish”