[Links]
[links] Link salad’s wayward son carries on
Predicting the Death of Print — Two years ago print was going to soldier on another 10 years. Now it’s five–or fewer. Uh huh.
The Language of Leaks — (Thanks to my Dad.)
Ten Infamous Islands of Exile — Established to banish dissidents and criminals, these islands are known for their one-time prisoners, from Napoleon to Nelson Mandela. (Thanks to lt260.)
Alien hunters ‘should look for artificial intelligence’ — Everybody sing: ♫ “‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.” ♫
A Milky Way Shadow at Loch Ard Gorge — Mmm, gorgeous photo. From APOD.
What would Martin Luther King Say? Mosques and the New Jim Crow in America — Juan Cole with a great deal more to say about the shameful political opportunism and race-baiting of opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”.
Who are you callin’ unassimilated? — The Edge of the American West with another take on the same topic.
?otD:
Will there be peace when you are done?
8/23/2010
Writing time yesterday: 0.25 hours (WRPA, mostly took the day off)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.25 (solid)
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Yesterday’s chemo stress index: 3/10 (fatigue, peripheral neuropathy)
Currently (re)reading: Destroyer by C.J. Cherryh
Posted: 4:40 am Mon August 23 2010 |
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You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
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Cora
August 23rd, 2010 at 5:24 pmRegarding the death of print, I don’t see it happening so soon. e-readers may be all the rage in the US (and can we really trust Amazon’s figures?), but they’re not nearly as ubiquitous elsewhere. The Sony e-reader is available in Germany and I have seen it in shops, but I have never seen an actual person use one in the wild. I have never seen an iPad at all. And if magazines and newspapers go digital only, what will happen to people like my mother who does not use computers or smartphones and is an avid reader of the local paper and of gossip/crossword magazines? She won’t use an iPad or similar device to read her newspapers and magazines. So does she suddenly no longer count as a customer? And besides, I would be very reluctant to trust the iPad as a delivery mechanism for magazine and newspaper content, given Apple’s tendencies towards censorship. Earlier this year, the iPhone/iPad edition of a German news magazine was removed from the app store, because some of the photos showed bare-breasted women, which is porn according to Apple. It’s a news magazine, it has run occasional photos of naked women since the 1970s at least and it’s definitely not porn.
e-books do have their place, e.g. I believe that e-readers will be great for textbooks and academic non-fiction. But I will never use an e-reader as my primary reading device for reading fiction. If a given book is available as an e-book only (can happen with some romance titles), it might as well not exist for me, because I don’t do e-books. And if print paperbacks become unavailable, I will likely stop buying new books and (re)read my existing library for the rest of my life (I might even read the remaining three volumes of Jean M. Auel’s stone age erotica, which have been sitting unread on my shelves for twenty years). And I sincerely doubt that I am the only one.
That Ross Douthat guy is a bigoted douchebag, plain and simple. And compared to the American brand of assimilation where immigrant kids often do not even learn to speak their mother tongue, I vastly prefer the European model. Besides, unlike what Douthat and other American rightwingers of that ilk claim, the majority of muslim immigrants in Germany and other European countries are integrated, they have jobs, own businesses, their kids attend schools and university, some are politically active. Yeah, some early immigrants did not integrate as well as they should have, but that’s largely due to failed policies, i.e. if you treat immigrants like cheap labour to be exploited and sent home, they won’t feel any need to learn the language and integrate.
As for Douthat’s claim that the European refusal to view immigration as a problem pushes anti-immigrant sentiment to the political margins, people like Geert Wilders or Jean Marie Le Pen are scum and deserve to be pushed into lunatic fringe parties. Because the US insistence on accommodating every rightwing political bigot brings people like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin into the political mainstream instead of keeping them in fringe parties where they cannot do much harm.
And besides, the September 11th attacks were not solely an American tragedy. People from many other countries died. Several muslims, American and otherwise, died. Does anyone think that the families of the muslim victims will have issues with a mosque near ground zero? Does anyone think the families of the non-American victims are happy with the US patriotic take-over of September 11th? Would e.g. Heinrich Ackermann, German businessman who got onto the wrong plane on September 11th, 2001, see himself reflected or even respected by the flag-waving official memorial ceremonies, especially since his name is mispronounced every single year during the reading out of the victims’ names? So why has September 11th been reduced only to the US victims of Jewish or Christian persuasion and their families?