[A Pleasurable Headache] Indiana Jones and Forty Years of Social Atomization
Project Greenfingers, as I've previously called it here, is done.
Take what you fear and stick it in a story - climate change, responsibility, parenthood, all that good stuff. Anyway, the story just needs a home now, so the usual feelers will go out into the world and see what comes up.
Once again I'm thinking of shaking things up with the newsletter. I'm subscribed to quite a few already so inspiration is everywhere. That said, are there any favourites amongst the readership? If so, forward them on.
Links
Animals ‘shapeshifting’ in response to climate crisis, research finds
Animals ‘shapeshifting’ in response to climate crisis, research finds | Animals | The Guardian
Warm-blooded animals are changing beaks, legs and ears to adapt to hotter climate and better regulate temperature
Once again, climate change is proving to cause irreversible and lasting change, this time at a genetic and evolutionary level.
The Education of Melvyn Bragg
The Education of Melvyn Bragg | The New Yorker
In his teens, Bragg was saved by books. He’s now spent more than fifty years championing the joy, value, and fascination of knowledge.
I don't find myself calling many links I post here lovely, but this is such a thing, a cosy and heart-warming profile on the host of probably the sole remaining good part of the BBC, In Our Time.
Speaking of...
Gaslighting The Public: Serial Deceptions By The State-Corporate Media
https://www.medialens.org/2021/gaslighting-the-public-serial-deceptions-by-the-state-corporate-media/MediaLens on the ongoing complete and utter lack of journalistic inquiry or teeth by the mainstream British media.
The Deeply Personal Horror of “Midnight Mass” – Guest Essay by Filmmaker Mike Flanagan
The Deeply Personal Horror of "Midnight Mass" - Guest Essay by Filmmaker Mike Flanagan - Bloody Disgusting
Midnight Mass has been part of me for so long, it’s difficult to remember when exactly it started. There has probably never been a project more personal to me. Its journey to the screen was very long, I’ve changed enormously since I began working on it (as has the world in general) and as of […]
Mike Flanagan has written up a heartfelt, personal and engaging essay to accompany the release of his latest project, Midnight Mass. In the piece he covers the project's origin, the frustrations along the way and how personal the subject matter is to him as a person and a creator.
The Golden Age of Dread
The Black Barony 1. |
A couple of years back I wrote this essay for Dark Discoveries as a feature of my Black Barony column. Images via Amazon. The Golden Age of Dread by Laird Barron The Sun’…
An older post, but one that resurfaced on Twitter recently. I never read it the first time around. Author Laird Barron discusses his first experiences with the 'weird' genre as well as discussing some of the foundational classics in the genre and its assorted sub-genres.
Conspiracist Thinking Is the Result of 40 Years of Social Atomization
Conspiracist Thinking Is the Result of 40 Years of Social Atomization
Amid a disorienting explosion of crises and social shifts, there are worrying signs that some parts of the Left are becoming more susceptible to conspiracist ways of thinking. It’s a symptom of social atomization in the neoliberal era — but we don’t have to accept it as inevitable.
Jacobin interview George Monbiot over a recent column of his that featured over at The Guardian. There are some interesting, sobering thoughts from Monbiot on the recent lurch to the right and the conspiratorial in the U.K.
"It seems to me that another big factor has been the profound discouragement and sense of betrayal on the part of formerly left parties, which succumbed — really from the late seventies onwards — to neoliberalism and became often very hard to distinguish from conservative parties. Parties of the traditional left toned down their language, toned down their attempts to restrain economic power, and toned down their redistributive and justice agendas. What we’ve seen, to quite a dramatic extent, has been language swap on the part of the formerly left- and new right-wing parties. So left-wing parties now talk about security and stability. Just yesterday, Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, published a fourteen-thousand-word essay called “The Road Ahead,” and people have literally found the exact same phrases in the 2015 Conservative manifesto. It just lifted chunks out of that. So you’ve got these highly conservative framings about how Labour is going to offer you stability, it’s going to offer you security, hardworking families (as opposed to those scroungers we don’t like) — this highly conservative approach using language literally borrowed from the Conservatives."
Bonus: Monbiot's other recent piece Spirited Away.
The Scientist and the A.I.-Assisted, Remote-Control Killing Machine
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-fakhrizadeh-assassination-israel.htmlIf it wasn't already evident, we are living in interesting times. When I say interesting, I mean terrifying. This piece at The New York Times describes Israel's assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist.
The Israelis pulled this off without having an operative anywhere near the so called target, choosing to use a remote controlled machine gun. Artificial intelligence assisted the operator to compensate for the slight delay between picture and reality as well as the subsequent recoil from the gun itself.
What boggles my mind more than this use of tech, is the fact the Times and other elements of the media are so open and brazen about an assassination of this nature with little to no dialogue on how this kind of thing can be silently allowed.
20 Reasons To Quit Social Media
https://durmonski.com/life-advice/reasons-to-quit-social-media/I mean, do you need 20?
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RIght, I'm off to wait for the army to deliver our weekly petrol ration. See you in two!