[BLOG] Some Thursday links

[rfmcdpei]

• In a guest post at Charlie Stross' blog, Kari Sperring takes issue with the idea of of a primeval Celtic paradise for women, based purely on myth and imaginings
• blogTO's Chris Bateman explains how different Toronto neighbourhoods--Parkdale, Rosedale, and so on--got their names.
• Eastern Approaches notes the ongoing scandal in Poland over that country'

Comments

[springheel_jack]

I think the whig ideal has other problems; it just turns out there's nothing very interesting on the moon.

[mmcirvin]

You know, when I was a kid, the line was always "we can put a man on the moon, but we can't [X]". It was the middle of the Cold War. People talked about how humanity's technical achievements had outstripped its moral evolution, and the discrepancy was probably going to kill us all.

Today, for all the terrible things we still hear about on the news, the world as a whole is actually much more peaceful than it was then. While inequality's increasing in the US, it's decreasing globally, with more and more people in the world's poor countries getting access to things like clean drinking water, electricity and cell phones. There are big environmental and resource challenges, but in a way they're the challenges of success.

So we grouse about how we've done all this boring [X] but we can't put a man on the moon.