Conservatives Smear Slain ISIS Hostage Kayla Mueller Because She Cared About Palestinians Too, Zaid Jilani, AlterNet, February 11, 2015
26 year-old Kayla Mueller accomplished much before her death while in ISIS custody. She traveled the world, working for various international nonprofits. By all accounts, she was a big-hearted humanitarian and represented the best of America’s values abroad.
But all of that is unimportant to a group of Islamophobic conservatives who took issue with Mueller’s advocacy for the Palestinian cause – which included joining protests against the Israeli occupation.
SF/F Saturday: The Years of Rice and Salt, Adam Lee, Daylight Atheism, November 15, 2014
The classic strategy of alternate history is to pick some important historical event, assume that it turned out differently, and explore what the consequences would be for human society. [Kim Stanley] Robinson’s chosen divergence point is the Black Death, which in our world wiped out about a third of Europe’s population. In his book, it kills 99% of the population.
With no European civilizations, new national powers rise to prominence, and the history of the world develops along a recognizable but distinct parallel track. Chinese sailors discover the New World and seek to colonize it; Muslim explorers create a new Al-Andalus and spread north into a vacant Europe; Islamic experimentalists and mathematicians spark an Enlightenment in the Middle East; India kickstarts the Industrial Revolution.
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[S]omething I especially appreciated was Robinson’s depiction of the Native Americans. The more I learn about just how vast, creative and complex were the civilizations that existed in the New World before the arrival of European colonizers and European diseases, the more I realize what a tragedy it is how many of them were destroyed with scarcely a trace besides mute ruins. I would gladly read more about an alternate history where the Native American civilizations survive, and in Robinson’s telling, they do – and eventually become a world power.
Click to embiggen.
Newsflash: the Firefly guys were villains, Misterkristoff, February 9, 2015 (h/t Marc)
You’ve got a collection of ex-soldiers, fugitives, psychotics and ragtags now operating as a mercenary band, paying no attention to laws and regulations that govern civilized areas of space. They willingly do business with pimps, organized criminal cartels, corrupt bastards and full-tilt, pants-on-head-crazy sociopaths. And worst of all, with the exception of Simon and River, this is a life they CHOOSE. Mal, Zoe, Wash, Kaylee and Jayne are career criminals, who believe that the rules applying to everyone else in the universe simply don’t apply to them. People who freely lie, cheat, steal and murder their way across the galaxy in a desperate and misguided attempt to remain “free” from Alliance “control”. Because fuck you buddy, you can’t take the sky from me, and if you try, I swear me and my pretty floral bonnet will end you.
Now. The justification we’re given to excuse Mal & Co’s flagrant disregard for the laws of civilization are that the Alliance are “bad m’kay”. But what evidence are we really presented for this rationale?
Photo credit: B. Munro, via AlternateHistory.com.
