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- Strange Horizons – Freshly Remember’d: Kirk Drift By Erin Horáková
- A lengthy essay arguing that the popular image of Shatner’s Kirk isn’t what the original episodes of Star Trek portray (but that the reboot has picked up the stereotype and run with it).
(tags: star-trek kirk james-t-kirk science-fiction television)
- BENDOCKERY.COM: The Anatomy of Swing
- A series of articles with examples. The bit about “laying back” was new to me.
(tags: swing music jazz)
- Starships – a multifandom space vid by bironic – YouTube
- Nicki Minaj’s Starships with a supercut of a bunch of sci-fi ships and whatnot. Good fun.
(tags: scifi music star-trek starwars science-fiction)
- Global Swing Broadcast | Music * Videos * Photography
- Swinging internet radio station. Nice.
(tags: music streaming swing radio)
- Brown Pundits: Unreal Islam
- “As someone in love with the cultural traditions of Islam and as a diligent student of its history, I agree that the acts of the jihadis do not represent the vast majority of Muslims today or in history. Humans are a violent species and Muslims have contributed their share, but it is completely asinine to think that Muslims have been, historically, any more violent than other groups. However, it is equally absurd to deny that the ideology underlying jihadism draws upon mainstream Islamic beliefs and is, therefore, undeniably a form of “real Islam” – albeit of a very extreme form. It is more accurate to say that this extremism is “not the only Islam”, and, by historical standards, it is a version very different from what the vast majority of Muslims have practiced.”
(tags: islam religion islamism history pakistan)
- Satanists want to use Hobby Lobby decision to exempt women from anti-abortion laws
- This is win. Hail Satan, and His only Son, Harry Potter.
(tags: satanism abortion law)
- Harry Connick Jr & French Rhythm Accents – YouTube
- Harry Connick Jr sorts out the audience’s clapping (from 1&3 to 2&4). Can you spot how? Genius.
(tags: music clapping afterbeat)
- Between the Hammer and the Anvil: On Countering The Ukip Cri-de-Colon
- Author shares my frustration that Labour apparently has no balls: “Every unchallenged Question Time assertion that people aren’t allowed to talk about the topics that they are themselves talking about on national television at that very moment. Every word from the party’s self-appointed detectors of the legitimate feelings of thick-headed bellends. All of it has been leading to precisely this point, at which politicians explicitly talking about sending them back are seen as engaging in respectable conjecture, and posting a picture on the internet is a sackable offence.”
(tags: ukip politics immigration racism labour)
- Why Are All The Good Guys Always Taken, Gay, Dead, Or Available? | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
- “When you finally do come across one of the good guys out there, why does it always turn out that he’s either taken, gay, dead, or available?” Via Phil.
(tags: dating funny parody onion)
- “Everything is problematic” | The McGill Daily
- “Perhaps the most deeply held tenet of a certain version of anti-oppressive politics – which is by no means the only version – is that members of an oppressed group are infallible in what they say about the oppression faced by that group. … Let me give an example. A gay person is typically much better acquainted with homophobia than a straight person. Moreover, a gay person has a much greater stake in what society does about homophobia, so their view on the matter is more important. However, there is nothing about the experience of being gay in itself that enlightens a gay person about the ethics of sexual orientation. To take a dead simple case, you don’t have to hear it from a gay person to know that homosexuality is ethically just fine.”
(tags: politics feminism activism culture rationality problematic)
- Top Level Telecommunications: INCENSER, or how NSA and GCHQ are tapping internet cables
- Cornwall is the centre of GCHQ/NSA’s taps on undersea cables. This blog post puts the picture together from a bunch of sources. Via Bruce Schneier.
(tags: gchq cornwall cable interception nsa undersea)
- A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies – Less Wrong
- Yvain/Scott Alexander on why it might be a bad idea to continue to espouse a belief in God, the Devil and whatnot while having a sort of private understanding of what that means, even if that understanding is more palatable than the original theology.
(tags: psychology religion rationality hitler)
- The Definitive History Of The West Wing
- (tags: west-wing aaron-sorkin television politics)
- The Fox Trot in the Jazz Age – YouTube
- What they called Foxtrot in the 1920s was rather different to the modern ballroom version.
(tags: dancing foxtrot jazz)
- Jazz Age Ballroom Dancing (“The Modern Dances”) | Mass Historia
- A set of web pages on the Jazz Age ballroom dances.
(tags: 1930s 1920s dance jazz foxtrot ballroom)
- Take The A Train
- The AABA structure of “Take the A Train” illustrated in a neat little presentation which tracks the music.
(tags: jazz music)
