Updated This week in The Slacktiverse, June 23/24 2012

The Blogaround

This week Ana Mardoll posted:
Deconstruction: An Intersection of Privilege and Pain
And it's true: privilege makes it easier to write about marginalization. Fat Acceptance advocacy is easier when paired with romantic privilege. Disability advocacy is easier when paired with financial privilege. Feminist advocacy is easier when paired with the privileges of education, of erudition, and of articulation.

TRiG writes: If we run out of money, we have to reduce our expenses. What expenses should we, as a society, choose to prioritise and to protect? Sweden has chosen to protect its pensions.

The open source business model has become highly successful, but there are no open source equivalents of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. That's because the open source model is explicitly designed not to produce billionaires. It spreads the profits more evenly.

And, finally, a round-up on forms the apocalypse will and will not take.

Froborr writes: I have a post up at Animated Discussions on the new Pixar movie Brave, the season finale of the Nickelodeon cartoon The Legend of Korra, and genderfail issues in both: Brave Princesses, Avatars in Refrigerators, and the Trouble with Tomboys. Spoilers abound!

This week, Storiteller stayed on the beaten path on her bike, as it wandered along city streets, to giant churches, and through forests, as she describes in Ride Report: Along the River and Through the Woods. Inspired by the recent conversations about food on the Slacktiverse, she contemplates what values about food her parents have passed on to her and what she hopes to pass on to her children in The Family Meal.

gleomstapa reports: I saw Snow White and the Huntsman, which I found thought-provoking in its failures. Following up on a new experience last week, I reflected on accordion-playing as gender transgression.

Coleslaw writes: This week I wrote a brief review of Prometheus. I learn of the Generosity of some Choctaw toward starving people in Ireland back in 1847. For a short time around the turn of the millennium, I was the most dangerous person on earth. (Trigger Warning: references to violent events/crimes in the United States) As they say, be careful What You Wish For. Finally, (Trigger Warning: responses to comments about rape convictions)the verdict in the Jerry Sandusky case leads me to revisit the Law of Holes.

Ross writes: Last week, I made up a bedtime story titled "Dylan and the Bears" for my son. This week, I decided to write it down and post it to my blog. It's a short piece about a little boy, some bears, and neighborliness.

yamikuronue reports: This week I reposted something I posted to facebook a couple years ago: a lyrical deconstruction of the song OMG by will i am, as well as a musing about linguistics. In deconstruction news, TPD begins the chat with Harmel, which is going to be covered more in-depth than usual, and Easily Amused brings back Piper.

Laiimaresports: In the last two weeks I posted about rediscovering music, wondered if my inevitable clutter may be related to hoarding, part 1 and part 2 and about living with emotional intensity.

Michael Mock reports: Over at Mock Ramblings, Secondborn took a moment to demonstrate just how much We're Doomed (which made for an interesting start to the week). Most of the rest of the week has been fiction of one sort or another: the fifth (and for the moment, final) piece of Into the Game, a collection of random Science Fiction Headlines, and the second section of Until The Rainbow.

In other news, I think my wife may be planning to stage a Bacon Intervention for me.

Last week katster reported: I write a fanzine, generally for the science fiction community, but of course, fanzines can wander off onto all sorts of topics. This one ended up being about depression, particularly how it affects me. Obviously, it's triggery with regards to depression and mental illness, and I do make one mention of suicide, but it's mostly about the isolation and loneliness.

You can find the blog page with the link to the PDF of the fanzine here.

I hope you all like.

Last week TRiG reported: Last week on my links blog I posted a quick note on feminism and confidence and a remark on the hypocrisy of what the religious right choose to make their priorities, and this week I was snarky to a preacher and concerned about even more sexism in the atheist community.

Last week Ana Mardoll posted:
Twilight: Vampire Cliques
Edward doesn't want to eat humans for the same reason that Bella (presumably) doesn't want to eat humans. And if Bella doesn't understand that, I'm not sure she should be a vampire.

Last week Ana Mardoll posted:
Deconstruction: The Power of Normalization
I haven't seen "Brave". I hope it will rock; I'm terribly afraid it may not. We'll see. But even if the movie is dreadful, it has accomplished at least one valuable thing: it's provided one more Disney princess as a point of normalization for thousands of little girls. We need more points, so many more points, of every size, color, facial structure, and body shape. Because each one of these data points, when added to the overall picture, can serve to reinforce the absolutely necessary message that it's Okay To Be You.

In case you missed this

June 23 2012 is Alan Turing's 100th birthday. (Trigger Warning: homophobia) Turing was a pioneer computer scientist and was one of the cryptographers and mathematicians who worked to decipher the ENIGMA code during WWII. In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality. Turing agreed to undergo chemical castration in order to avoid being sent to prison. In 2009 Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister of Britian issued an apology for the way in which Turing was treated however that conviction has never been overturned. The BBC reports that although Turing death in 1954 was ruled a suicide by the coroner, some Turing experts have described that finding as "not supported."

Cnet's Chris Matyszczyk explains "Google's impossibly clever Alan Turing doodle."

This week the White House posted a PSA, 1 is 2 Many. The video about dating and domestic violence features the President, the Vice President and various sports figures.(Trigger Warning: This video includes no images of violence but the descriptions and statements may be triggering) A transcript of the PSA (and alternative downnload/streaming site) available at feministing.com

Things you can do

[From Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières]:
Multiple crises in the Sahel region of Africa have left hundreds of thousands of people in urgent need of medical care.

Over 160,000 refugees have fled conflict in Mali, crowding into camps that lack enough clean water or food. In some areas, like Chad, severe malnutrition threatens the lives of thousands and leaves others more vulnerable to deadly diseases.

Make your donation to help save lives in the Sahel and bring critical medical care to patients in nearly 70 countries around the world.

--Co-authored by the Slacktiverse Community

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Comments

[Gotchaye]

I just this moment realized that the Avatar Book 1 episode by episode analysis I'd been reading after getting through Book 2 the other day was by the Froborr I'd seen commenting on here. I would love to read this new post but I've been trying very hard to avoid spoilers. Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting to the Legend of Korra posts, and I liked the older ones. Thanks!

[Froborr]

I really ought to get back to doing those...

[kisekileia]

I can't get over what absolutely stunningly gorgeous hair the girl in Brave has. I haven't seen the movie, just a picture or two, but OMG that hair. I want to pet it and play with it.

Also, for "Things you can do":

http://www.indiegogo.com/BethaniesMentalHealth
This is for a longtime (10 years!) online friend of mine who's gotten a seriously rough deal in life, and could really use the help. She has a beautiful daughter and really wants to be a good mother, but she needs to be stable to be the best mother she can be. She's not asking for much relative to her needs, only enough to fund a month or two's worth of meds and psych visits. Anything you can donate would be very much appreciated by both Bethanie and me.

[kisekileia]

Sorry, that link should have trigger warnings for discussion of serious mental illness and self-harm.

[truth is life]

Supreme court upholds individual mandate!

Link

And evidently John Roberts was the key vote. A bit...unexpected.

[Mmy]

@truth is life: Yeah, who would have that that Roberts would be the swing vote? That is usually Kennedy.

[Froborr]

The whole decision is slightly weird. The plaintiffs were arguing that the individual mandate is unconstitutional because it compels people to buy a product. The government argued that it's interstate commerce, which the government has power to regulate. The SC ignored both and upheld the individual mandate by reinterpreting it as a tax (the fine for not having insurance) that is waived for people who by a particular product (the insurance), for which there is precedent.

That bit of weird logic, in combination with Roberts uncharacteristically voting against the Republican party line, suggests to me there was quite a bit of negotiation between the justices over this one, and this was the compromise.

[Ross]

I notice it did not take long for conservatrolls to change Justice Roberts's wikipedia page to describe him as "Supreme Court Justice and Coward"

On balance, I think the one provision they did strike down, about the medicare expansion, will work out for the best. Had they left it in, I suspect that some GOP governors would have cut off the noses of their elderly to spite Obama's face.

[cjmr, on her son's netbook]

How it is being reported it did strike me as kind of 'Roberts falling on his sword'. I hope I can find the decision (for that and the Arizona immigration case, and the 'life without parole for minors' case and get them downloaded and in my Kindle before I go on vacation). Not everyone's idea of light vacation reading, but it will be a nice break from lesson planning, which is what I usually do on vacation whilst the grandparents amuse the offspring.