Beta57 BiDaily Trawl October 17, 2012

[mcduff]

Originally published at Beta57 Digest. You can comment here or there.

The collected detritus and flotsam from my internet browsing ends up collated at www.beta57.com. Here’s what I’ve been linking to recently:

• On Ruining Violentacrez’ Life
  “I’d suggest that while of course men and women both value their employability (and the ways in which their names appear in Internet searches), only women stand to have their lives ruined in this other manner, which goes unnamed and unrecognized because a) it happens offline (while bad Google results are visible, it’s much more difficult to point to or describe the dissemination of your body and the consequences, b) it involves “social” as opposed to economic ruin to which men are less vulnerable (unless they’re sex offenders) and c) it only involves female “victims” who are quite easy to blame. If your uncle stumbles on a nude photo you sent an ex-lover on one of the sites he visits and forwards it to family and friends, oh well-you were the agent of your own ruination.”
• IMF Suddenly Decides It Might be OK to Loosen Austerity Tourniquets Now that Gangrene is Setting In
  Christine Lagarde has taken too small a step in the right direction far too late to do much good. At the current IMF annual meeting in Tokyo, she’s made dramatic-sounding pronouncements consistent with the rather embarrassing admission in the Fund’s latest quarterly report that austerity is working less well than voodoo (I’ve never tried it myself, but some correspondents give it high marks).
• Rage running out | DAWN.COM
  It’s funny how similarly people can react, at every level, in supposedly disparate cultures.
• A dying star weaves a spiral in the night | Bad Astronomy
• The 3d printed future and its enemies :: Jacobin
  This is where the intensification of the surveillance state, throughout the Bush and Obama administrations and under the rubric of the “war on terror”, becomes important. The post-9/11 security state has gradually rendered itself permanent and disconnected itself from its original justification. We will be told that our purchases and downloads must all be monitored in order to prevent evildoers from printing arsenals in their living rooms, and it will just so happen that this same authoritarian apparatus will be used to enforce copyright claims as well. Meanwhile, the military will of course proceed to use the new technologies to facilitate their pointless wars.
• Misreading Environmentalism
  ” As for the crying wolf nature of environmentalism, it might not make good politics. People don’t want to hear that climate change is going to radically change life on earth. But so what. The problem with criticizing environmentalists for this is that climate change is indeed going to radically change life on earth, and almost entirely for the worse. There is virtually nothing within human existence that is sustainable over a long period of time and very little that is sustainable for the next century. We waste resources with abandon, poor farming practices slowly erode away the breadbaskets of the earth, we have a petroleum based economy with declining petroleum reserves, etc. All of these things are true. It may be against human nature to respond to apocalyptic calls, but when the apocalypse is upon us, what are environmentalists supposed to do? Not tell the truth?”
• If you’ve read the Mail’s climate lies from today, here’s what they didn’t print.
• Obama’s Secret Weapon In The South: Small, Dead, But Still Kickin’
  So plankton remain a force in Southern elections - though not always, not continuously.
• Actress supports Romney, gets slammed by racist Obama voters
  ” But when the 15 seconds of attention this story has received evaporates, let’s try to hang on to the lesson here that being racist and sexist for Obama still makes you racist and sexist, OK?”
• Rescuing a sex slave/worker in a novel: The Darkest Little Room | The Naked Anthropologist
• "The ability to store data in DNA is an important breakthrough because it allows you to back your data up to a gerbil."
• How Quantum Mechanics Was Born From the Need For a Better Lightbulb
• Debunking a Progressive Constitutional Myth; or, How Corporations Became People, Too
• Ministry of Truth :: Deborah Orr and the Abortion Debate
• Denmark Hits 200 Megawatt Solar Capacity Goal 8 Years Ahead of Schedule
• GE’s New Flexible Gas Turbine: All the Power, None of the Waste
• Ministry of Truth :: Maria Miller, Abortion and Common Sense
• No Safe Haven: Shrinking Pool of Affordable Housing Creates Additional Hardship for Survivors of Domestic Abuse | RH Reality Check
  For survivors of domestic violence (DV), the need for affordable housing is dire. According to the 2011 Domestic Violence Counts National Census, lack of housing comprised 64 percent of reported unmet needs for DV survivors. DV has long been cited as a cause of homelessness. And in order to avoid homelessness, many DV survivors choose to stay with abusers because they cannot afford to live on their own.
• Screen Stockport Film Festival brings talent to town | UK news | guardian.co.uk
• Religious Leaders With HIV Fight Multiple Stigmas in Kenya | Global Press Institute
• Illiterate Women Push for Girls Education in Nepal | Global Press Institute
• Mehdi Hassan, man, explains the reasonableness of his opinion.
  Why is is that whenever quasi-liberal men get the need to explain why they should get to tell women what to do they always resort to the same tired arguments and special pleading. You think they genuinely believe they’re the first to come up with them?
• What the US Election is costing, and why
• 83-year-old grandmother calls 911, police arrive and shoot her three times, dead - Detroit liberal | Examiner.com
  Apparently the NRA are still using the rationale that if everyone has guns, everyone is safer. Can’t see that working here.
• Experts Debate Cause of Increased Flooding in Cameroon | Global Press Institute
  People who argue about the costs of dealing with climate change seem blissfully unaware of the much bigger costs of not dealing with it.
• Sex Workers’ Daughters Access Education in India | Global Press Institute
• The clobber verses of slavery & the slavery of clobber verses | slacktivist
• The return of Kony 2012 | FP Passport
• Why I am a liar straight from the pit of hell :: Starts With A Bang

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