It appears that the latest people to join the Out Campaign clown car are Doctor Death and vile former NME hack Tony Parsons. They join such luminaries as Iain Duncan-Smith, George Galloway and David Icke. With friends like those…
Great post by sociology professor Peter Dreier on his Sokal-style hoax in which he managed to troll a conference in Tokyo with a conference paper extract that was in fact complete gibberish.
This panel addresses absences—the gaps, silences, and remains within the construction of knowledge and ignorance—in order to contribute to an ongoing STS dialogue; one that has roots in Bloor’s “sociology of error” to more recent work in agnotology (Proctor and Scheibinger) and in residues (Bowker and Star). From feminist and postcolonial theory, we have learned to be continually vigilant about the dynamics and non-dynamics in knowledge construction and application. This panel addresses these negations, unseen crevices, deletions, and leftovers from multiple perspectives. Its aims to identify and theorize some of those areas that demand our vigilance in order to broaden and provide systematic ways to understand how absences and gaps are a continual part of social interactions and our STS studies. Interested Presenters: Please send us a brief abstract and title of your talk with your name, email and affiliation. We would like contributions no later than 15 January to compile and submit the session.
And that’s not gibberish itself; it’s the call for submissions to which he responded.
The whole thing is well worth a read as a polemic on the opaque and pretentious nature of so much academic writing, especially in the social sciences.
Panic Room have announced rwo of the support bands for the Panic Room Convention at Bilston Robin 2 on May 21 and 22, joining Panic Room’s acoustic side-project Luna Rossa on the bill.
First, Panic Room guitarist Dave Foster with his own band, including drummer Leon Parr and vocalist Dinet Poortma, along with one or two members of Panic Room, playing material from his two solo albums “Gravity” and the forthcoming “Dreamless”.
And on the Sunday Night, Halo Blind, the project from singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Chris Johnson, featuring Panic Room’s Gavin Griffiths on drums. Although she wasn’t on their most recent album “Occupying Forces”, Anne-Marie Helder was a member of an earlier version of the band, and it would not be a surprise for her to join them on stage.
If Twitter had got its act together on harassment five years ago they wouldn’t now be in a position where suspending the accounts of a handful of right-wing loudmouths seemed like a good idea.
Freedom of speech means you can speak truth to power without government or corporate interests acting as a gatekeeper over what speech is acceptable.
But freedom of speech also means you can voice controversial opinions without being shouted down. The “heckler’s veto” of the mob is as much a censor as any bureaucrat with a red pen.
Unless you refuse to accept the existence of the heckler’s veto, freedom of speech isn’t as simple as absolutists would make out; there is some speech which can only exist at the expense of other speech. If you operate any space on the web, from a community site to a large social network, sooner or later you’ve going to have to decide who’s speech has the most value, the heckler or the heckled.
This is not a defence of Twtter’s recent actions; the arbitrary nature and the complete lack of transparency ring all sorts of alarm bells, and paints a picture of a clueless management flailing around with desperate short-term fixes. It comes over as little more than simplistic virtue signalling, which very few people are impressed by. It’s got to the point where nobody trusts them any more.
James Worrad writes in general agreement with an earlier post by Mark E Lawrence on the politicisation of SF fandom.
For my own part, jumping on the right wing Sad puppies foam-fest is utterly, comprehensively unthinkable. Just no. Writing impassioned common-all-garden social justice speeches is a lot more attractive (I agree on the basic stuff after all. I consider myself left wing) and in my needier moments I’ve thought about doing so. But, ultimately, I feel it would be to betray the multicultural British city that raised me (Oddly, social justice terms and philosophies become more impractical the deeper into a multicultural provincial UK city you go, in the same manner you saw less and less jingoism and flag-waving the closer you got to the trenches in World War 1. People are too busy just getting on with things).
I have a lot of sympathy for this. I have noticed that his post coming under fire from some of the usual suspects on Twitter. which is predictable if depressing. It gives the impression that the SF world is dominated by two rival cliques who wear rheir (American) politics on their sleeves, and those who aren’t willing to adopt the dogmas of either tribe are feeling increasingly alienated. When you hear people implying that being a political moderate is a symptom of privilege…
Last year I bought some recently-released SF/F novels without waiting for them to come out in paperback, with a view of nominating one or more them for a Hugo award, as a supporting member. But I’m come to the conclusion that I’d probably be wasting my money. What’s the point of paying good money to nominate something you think is worthy, only to find its nomination was championed by the wrong people, and either the author will be forced to decline the nomination or be ostracised, or it will be voted down by massed no-awards.
I’m still an SF reader. But when it comes to fandom, it’s a case of not my circus, not my monkeys.
A rather splendid evisceration of Boris Johnson by Nick Cohen in The Spectator
Johnson believes in the advance of Johnson. That’s all there is. There’s nothing else. Most politicians, and many of the rest of us, are ambitious, of course. But politicians normally hope to advance a cause as they advance themselves. Johnson would have you believe that he is breaking with the establishment, risking all, because of his sincere conviction that we must advance the cause of saving Britain from the European Union.
His colleagues do not believe him. Nicholas Soames called him a liar on Twitter yesterday. Jerry Hayes called him a ‘copper-bottomed, hypocritical little shit.’ The wonder of it is that they may have been understating the case for the prosecution.
As recently as last year Boris Johnson was stating publicly that it wasn’t in the nation’s interests to leave the European Union. Which makes it very hard to see his move to be the face of the Vote Leave campaign as anything other than a cynical move which is really about his ambitions to become David Cameron’s successor as Prime Minister.
As Nick Cohen rightly says, the only thing Boris Johnson believes in is Boris Johnson. Which makes him David Cameron turned up to Eleven.
Terrible news posted on Riverside’s Facebook Page.
In our deepest pain and disbelief we would like to inform you that our dearest friend and brother Piotr Grudzinski has passed away this morning. We kindly ask you to respect the privacy of his family and friends.
Sad and shocking. Riverside are one of the best contemporary bands in progressive rock to emerge in recent years. One of the highlights of last years’ Ramblin Man festival, and their album “Love, Fear and The Time Machine” was my album of the year for 2014. Piotr Grudzinski distinctive less-is-more style was a key part of their sound, with more than a hint of Rush’s Alex Lifeson about his playing
A terrible, tragic loss.
You want a twenty minute video of a 2mm fine-scale model railway set in the heyday of the Western Region diesel-hydraulics? Of course you do.
The layout is a “might have been” based on Penzance as it was before it was rebuilt and much enlarged in the 1930s, but operated with 1960s motive power.