What's going on

Cobb has a rather extensive post up about the various political/cultural struggles going on in Black America (inasmuch as there is a culturally/politically separate Black America, and I'm dubious about that) but the one that has always fascinated me is the first one: the old, continuous fight between the followers of W.E.B. DuBois and those of Booker Washington. DuBois and his followers in the NAACP won the early rounds, breaking the Tuskegee Machine and then Marcus Garvey's Black Peoples' Improvement Association before moving on to marginalize Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, but now that the big civil rights have been fought and won the working-class/bourgeois vision of Booker T. Washington and his successors has risen again, reaching out over the Internet to find new adherents. This is a history that hasn't been talked about or discussed much, partially because of its isolation in the ghetto of black studies, but also because it would call into question a lot of things that have been done in the name of civil rights over the last century. Perhaps the reason black Americans couldn't follow the path of the Irish, Italians and other immigrants had as much to do with the poor choices of their "leadership" (or even the existence of such self-anointed leaders to begin with) as with the racism of the society at large.

What's going on

Cobb has a rather extensive post up about the various political/cultural struggles going on in Black America (inasmuch as there is a culturally/politically separate Black America, and I'm dubious about that) but the one that has always fascinated me is the first one: the old, continuous fight between the followers of W.E.B. DuBois and those of Booker Washington. DuBois and his followers in the NAACP won the early rounds, breaking the Tuskegee Machine and then Marcus Garvey's Black Peoples' Improvement Association before moving on to marginalize Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, but now that the big civil rights have been fought and won the working-class/bourgeois vision of Booker T. Washington and his successors has risen again, reaching out over the Internet to find new adherents. This is a history that hasn't been talked about or discussed much, partially because of its isolation in the ghetto of black studies, but also because it would call into question a lot of things that have been done in the name of civil rights over the last century. Perhaps the reason black Americans couldn't follow the path of the Irish, Italians and other immigrants had as much to do with the poor choices of their "leadership" (or even the existence of such self-anointed leaders to begin with) as with the racism of the society at large.

Suspension pending! Oh noes!

Ganked from marainsanity and deathquaker
( Mom warned me about this sort of thing...okay, actually she didn't. )

jamestrainor and I put in a little over three hours on the lviing room, generating a couple bags of trash & recyclables while repacking three boxes of books and CDs. It's a start.
We're going to start earlier tomorrow and pick up some of stuckintraffik's leftover boxes, of which he has a metric buttload; we're also going to make a pile of stuff that belongs to other people, since we've found some stuff that definitely doesn't belong to me aside from Detour records and the like. Onward.

Suspension pending! Oh noes!

Ganked from marainsanity and deathquaker
( Mom warned me about this sort of thing...okay, actually she didn't. )

jamestrainor and I put in a little over three hours on the lviing room, generating a couple bags of trash & recyclables while repacking three boxes of books and CDs. It's a start.
We're going to start earlier tomorrow and pick up some of stuckintraffik's leftover boxes, of which he has a metric buttload; we're also going to make a pile of stuff that belongs to other people, since we've found some stuff that definitely doesn't belong to me aside from Detour records and the like. Onward.

WILLIAM GIBSON & FRANK TIPLER GIVE UP: FUTURE OVER

Silicon.com interviews the founder of cyberpunk regarding his new novel Spook Country and how Neuromancer has aged.
Apparently things are changing too fast for Mr. Gibson to write SF any more. WTF?

Sort of related: Frank Tipler bitches out Professor Death for living in the past when it comes to interstellar travel. Quoth Tipler:

Human will NEVER engage in interstellar travel. Only human downloads and artificial intelligences. Carrying full size human bodies, active or frozen, is too inefficient.

Fine, Frank, you stay here and send your starwisp to Alpha Centauri; the rest of us have a rendezvous with destiny out beyond the Hinder Stars. Guys like you used to say Goddard's rockets wouldn't work and Oppenheimer's bomb wouldn't go off, so I'm not too worried about your defeatist attitude on star travel.

WILLIAM GIBSON & FRANK TIPLER GIVE UP: FUTURE OVER

Silicon.com interviews the founder of cyberpunk regarding his new novel Spook Country and how Neuromancer has aged.
Apparently things are changing too fast for Mr. Gibson to write SF any more. WTF?

Sort of related: Frank Tipler bitches out Professor Death for living in the past when it comes to interstellar travel. Quoth Tipler:

Human will NEVER engage in interstellar travel. Only human downloads and artificial intelligences. Carrying full size human bodies, active or frozen, is too inefficient.

Fine, Frank, you stay here and send your starwisp to Alpha Centauri; the rest of us have a rendezvous with destiny out beyond the Hinder Stars. Guys like you used to say Goddard's rockets wouldn't work and Oppenheimer's bomb wouldn't go off, so I'm not too worried about your defeatist attitude on star travel.