Friday, 12th of May, 2006

Here’s a great post from Douglas Rushkoff’s blog in which he urges atheists to reclaim the bible. Some interesting historical hints, and some depressingly moronic comments (unfortunately from “both” sides). And a stupid commenting engine that seems to be double- and triple-posting all over the place, so it is, in any case, probably not worth reading through them all.
I look forward to reading Testament when it gets collected — it’s Rushkoff’s own attempt at reclaiming the bible stories as social commentary and “near-future sci-fi parables”.

Thursday, 11th of May, 2006

This is hilarious:

The Librarian You scored 73 erudition!

Congratulations! You’re well above average when it comes to your knowledge of English grammar, history, and literature. You may have missed a few questions, but if you keep your studies up and stay away from genre fiction, we’ll have you ready for Stanford in no time! Who knows, we just might be reading your columns in Talk of the Town a few years from now.

Note the (no doubt deliberately snarky) imprecation to “stay away from genre fiction”… Given that I read almost exclusively genre fiction (quite literally), and have never studied literature (well, except at school, where I did abominably in HSC 2Unit English) all I can say is BOO YAH SUX and other such erudite phrases.
Hm.

Monday, 8th of May, 2006

The blog seems to mostly just be a linklog at the moment, so here’s some more:
George Felis has some beautiful commens On (voluntary) Euthanasia, posted at Ophelia’s Butterflies and Wheels Notes.
And Pharyngula posts about Peter Singer in Salon. Singer is, IMHO, always good value — and I speak as someone who, nevertheless, isn’t a vegetarian. But as you can read, cutting down on meat-eating is a good thing on many levels, even discounting ethical considerations.

Thursday, 4th of May, 2006

Wow. As someone else said recently, Hitchens is an interesting fellow: you can be agreeing with thoroughly, and then suddenly he’ll be off on some warmongering rant… Juan Cole is an interesting fellow, an academic who knows more about the Middle East than most, and in trying to generate rational discourse about the region inevitably falls prey to accusations of anti-Semitism from the more embarrassing members of my hereditary culture (Alan Dershowitz, the Anti-Defamation League etc).

Regarding the article linked above, reader beware: there are some pretty gruesome images if you scroll down. They accompany a very strong anti-war message which I suspect we all need to heed. I suspect there won’t be the same level of protestation as we edge closer to war with Iran, mainly because Ahmadinejad is such a twat, with his Holocaust revisionism and calls for the destruction of Israel. Let’s remember that once again the threat that Iran poses is moot, and hot air, however putrid, isn’t in itself a good enough reason for war. Let’s look at what’s going on in Iraq now and ask ourselves whether it was ever a humanitarian effort on the part of our allies.

It turned out that war was the answer in 1939. I can’t think of any other wars that had anything like the same level of justification. Let’s not sully the memory of the Holocaust by using it to justify wars willy-nilly; and let’s not dilute anti-Semitism so far that the real anti-Semitism can be shrugged off.

Wednesday, 3rd of May, 2006

One of the big literary crutches of the science fiction world is the infodump, in which either the narrator or some character is enlisted to explain a Big Idea, fill in background, etc. Sometimes it works, oftentimes it bogs down the text terribly. So you’ll be delighted to read Jed Hartman explain:
“How I explained infodumps and saved humanity”

PS “skiffery”? “Skiffy” is a term of endearment for sf (= sci-fi = skiffy, see?)