What I’m Reading, June 5, 2014

Posted on June 5, 2014 by wellsdc

Life in the Valley of Death, Scott Anderson, The New York Times Magazine, May 29, 2014 (h/t Lucy Kafanov)

Of all the atrocities committed throughout Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, the one that compels Masovic the most is Srebrenica. In some respects, this is hardly surprising: Srebrenica has come to symbolize the Bosnian war’s unspeakable brutality and the international community’s colossal failure when confronting it. Located in a tiny valley in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was the site of one of the war’s most desperate contests, a marooned enclave in which a couple of thousand government soldiers, along with as many as 40,000 mostly Muslim refugees, held out for three years against a siege by Serb separatist fighters.

For more than half that time, Srebrenica was under international military protection, one of six United Nations-designated “safe areas” established throughout the country in 1993. That status proved meaningless when the Serbs launched an all-out assault in July 1995. Instead of resisting, the U.N. Protection Force in Srebrenica stood down, and over the next few days, the Serbs hunted and killed more than 8,000 men and boys, most of whom were trying to escape the enclave by foot. It was the worst slaughter, and the first officially recognized act of genocide, to occur on European soil since World War II.

Why does anyone care if celebrity gossip is ‘clickbaity’? Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, June 3, 2013

There is a strain of purists on the internet with a certain set of rules that they want people like me to abide by. One of which is that they want all headlines to give away all the pertinent information in the article so that they don’t have to “click” on it or, rather, read it, in order to know what’s going on. This is not always possible, if only because we just can’t actually make headlines that long. Which is why we write entire articles rather than just headlines. The point of the headline, truly, is to get you to read the article. This is not a big secret or conspiracy.

Photo credit: By Maurits90 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

What I’m Reading, March 20, 2014

Posted on March 20, 2014 by wellsdc

A Brief History of Mold-A-Rama, Rob Lammie, Mental Floss, March 18, 2014

Long before 3D printing was a thing, kids of all ages were plunking quarters into Mold-A-Rama vending machines to get plastic sculptures made right before their eyes. Let’s take a look back at the history of these mid-century manufacturing marvels.

GOP Plutocrat Ken Langone And New Dem Wall Street Shill Jim Himes Are Waging Class War Against American Families, Down With Tyranny!, March 18, 2014

Langone’s siren song, while extreme and filled with the class warfare hatred the entitled rich feel towards working families, isn’t just a Republican song. When it comes to serving the interests of great wealth, conservative Democrats– particularly Blue Dogs and New Dems– are no better than garden variety Republicans.

Two Reasons That Explain Why We’re All Obsessed with Game of Thrones, Charlie Jane Anders, io9, March 18, 2014

Why is Game of Thrones such a huge cultural phenomenon, among all other fantasy series? It comes down to two huge cultural trends, that are rooted in our widespread anxieties about life in the 21st century.

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Game of Thrones captures the real anxiety at the root of our apocalyptic fascination — the sense that disaster is coming closer at an almost imperceptible rate, and we can never really know when it will arrive. We all sense that our unsustainable economic system will collapse, and/or our biosphere will no longer support so many humans, but we don’t know if the crunch will come next week or in 50 years.

And the endless wars and scheming show how short-sighted people can overlook a looming disaster, due to political infighting and stupidity. You wonder why they don’t look over their shoulder and see the ice zombies creeping closer — until you realize that their denial is nothing compared to our own.

***

When we’re not consuming futuristic dystopias and world-breaking disasters, we’re obsessing about a somewhat idealized past in which men were men and women were women, and everybody Knew Their Place. Often, these visions of the past include a soupcon of social change, a hint that the Times They Were a-Changin’, and the seeds of today’s world were already in place.

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Game of Thrones is like the perfect idealized-but-awful past. Especially in the television version, everybody looks beautiful and has perfect teeth, but almost everybody takes a turn of being that peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who shouts, “I’m being oppressed!”

Remembering That Other European Mass-Murdering Despot

Posted on December 19, 2013 by wellsdc

$Monument \'e0 L\'e9opold II$ King Leopold II of Belgium, to phrase it in an understated fashion, was not a good person. It is important to remember that (h/t Erik Loomis):

Today [December 17] is the 104th anniversary of the death of Belgium’s King Leopold II. The book [Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness] made me loathe this greedy man who was, like many Kings of his era, a spoiled, insecure and violent maniac. Belgium, unlike its neighbors, didn’t control many colonies. Of course, Leopold thought, how could a country be influential if it didn’t have darker peoples under its boot (It should be noted, however, that Leopold’s invasion of the Congo started off as a personal investment, which makes it even more heinous). The despot’s nefarious forces, dubbed the Force Publique, invaded the Congo Free State and unleashed a horror many of us can’t even fathom. The invaders raped Congolese women, destroyed homes and villages, sucked vital resources rubber and ivory) from the country and, more infamously as shown above [I used a different picture -CP], cut off the hands of native peoples to intimidate those who didn’t produce enough rubber to meet the quota or to show military superiors that bullets hadn’t been wasted on, gasp–wait for it, animals. Those beautiful black hands, by the way, are still a presence in Belgium. I was in Brussels several years ago and a candy shop, near the European Commission’s headquarters, was selling chocolate hands. No other customer seemed to recognize the odious irony of it all. But, then again, that’s Europe for you: a lovely and historically rich continent spectacularly ignorant of its role in multiple genocides. Continue reading →

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What I’m Reading, March 20, 2014

Remembering That Other European Mass-Murdering Despot