I want to mention what some may consider a spoiler for Sherlock, so I’m putting it in the comments section.
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Women in the TARDIS
River Song and Amy Pond - the two most important female characters that Steven Moffat has created for DOCTOR WHO
Teresa Jusino loves the way Steven Moffat writes female characters for Doctor Who. (See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.)
Nivair Gabriel hates the way Steven Moffat writes female characters for Doctor Who. (See here.)
Funny thing is, I’m largely in agreement with both Jusino and Gabriel; they just focus on different things. There are good and bad aspects of Moffat’s portrayal of women, and Jusino and Gabriel between them provide helpful analyses of each.
(In related news, I enjoyed Moffat’s satire on gender roles in his earlier series Coupling; but he clearly takes those roles to be largely innate whereas I take them to be largely constructed, so I actually enjoyed the humor in a somewhat different manner from what Moffat intended. It’s like the different ways one would enjoy Yes, Minister depending on whether one thought that a viable alternative to bureaucratic government was possible – laughing at foibles that one takes to be inevitable features of the human condition versus laughing at foibles in a way that can lead to discrediting and combating them.)
A Slightly Less Unknown Ideal, Part 2
Sheldon’s American Conservative article on left-libertarianism is now online.
C4SS Appeal
Guest Blogs by Brad Spangler and Kevin Carson
C4SS 1st Quarter 2011 Fundraiser
by Brad Spangler
Dear Supporters of the Center for a Stateless Society,
I hope everybody had a happy holiday season and has been staying warm so far this Winter. Now it’s time to pay some bills …
Between now and March 31st, we hope to raise $8,000. That goal covers an unpaid balance of roughly $500 remaining for October of 2010 as well as $2500 in monthly expenses for November 2010, December 2010 and January 2011. Nearly all of our expenses are for our labor. The matter of whether or not to support us really boils down to a simple question: Do you think our folks deserve to get paid for what they do?
To donate, just click on the “Contribute!” button on the fundraising widget you’ll find on the right side of any page of our web site.
Please support our work. Tomorrow is Groundhog’s Day and we have people who haven’t been paid yet for work they did before Halloween of last year.
Brad Spangler,
Director, Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS)
First Quarter C4SS 2011 Fundraiser: Help!
by Kevin Carson
Brad Spangler announces a fundraiser to cover the operating expenses of Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) from late October 2010 through January 2011. The target is $8000 by March 31, which includes $500 for the remainder of October and $2500 per month for the period through the end of January.
As Director Brad Spangler points out, almost all of this goes toward paying the writers as well as the folks engaged in various support activities.
Under the heading of “support,” we can include – for example – Thomas Knapp, who’s compiled an email distribution list of thousands of newspapers grouped by country and by region of the United States. He distributes all of C4SS’s material every week and handles dealings with a whole buttload of op-ed editors, and has managed to regularly get C4SS material into a growing number of print outlets. I strongly suspect this entails a lot more than the twenty hours a week he’s budgeted for, at barely minimum wage.
For my part, I’ve asked Brad to reduce the request for January by $50 in order to accommodate a cutback in my research papers to two a year rather than four. And starting today, I’ll be cutting back my commentary by two pieces a week.
I’ve cut back in part because I find it difficult to come up with fresh ideas for three op-ed pieces a week.
But I’ve also been ruminating in recent months on the fact that our fundraisers have consistently fallen short of their goals, month after month, and we keep falling further and further behind in paying for operations. We’re three months behind in payments to our writers and support staff, and at the rate it’s been going we’ll keep falling further behind every month.
If contributors make it clear, month after month, that they don’t think it’s worthwhile to contribute the full amount of funding our operations, it seems to me that the only solution is to adjust our output downward to what people are willing to contribute. To quote Brad,
The matter of whether or not to support us really boils down to a simple question: Do you think our folks deserve to get paid for what they do?
…Tomorrow is Groundhog’s Day and we have people who haven’t been paid yet for work they did before Halloween of last year.
You can contribute by clicking on the fundraising widget on any page at http://c4ss.org/.
A River Runs Through it
The Egyptian government’s ability to cut its subjects off from the internet is the bad news. But the good news is that modern economies are so intertwined with the internet that states can’t afford to suppress it for long without wrecking their own source of revenue. More here. And here.
How Roger Pilon Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Empire
Bradley Manning and Julian Assange should be treated like a thief and a fence respectively, because our rulers need to conspire secretly with each other, and it would be gauche for the rabble to inquire into the doings of their betters. Thus speaks the director of Cato’s Center for Constitutional [sic] Studies. (CHT Walter Grinder and Stephan Kinsella.)
By the way, a special prize to anyone who can figure out how to make sense of the word “duplicity” in Pilon’s final paragraph.