Look, we can’t just change the whole system every single time someone’s mommy says “brain damage.” And for lots of poor kids, getting bashed in the face for the amusement of wealthy alumni is the only path to college success.
— Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s incisive analysis of college football. See also Pro Football’s Violent Toll. I am increasingly skeptical of college sports in general, and football in particular.
I was trying to configure our file server to be a media server, specifically to play music with MPD and to make its speakers available as a PulseAudio output for laptops on the wireless network. This wound up being far harder than it seems like it should have been, and involved learning (among other things) that SELinux has failure modes I didn’t even know existed. And it let me explore the wonders of systemd some more.
So, here’s how I did it. All of this is on Fedora 17 with RPMFusion (for MPD). The goals are:
I thought first of asking whether you meant to describe the President as someone who was bullied as a child by people like you, but rose above it to find a way to succeed in life as many of my fellow Special Olympians have.
Then I wondered if you meant to describe him as someone who has to struggle to be thoughtful about everything he says, as everyone else races from one snarkey sound bite to the next.
Finally, I wondered if you meant to degrade him as someone who is likely to receive bad health care, live in low grade housing with very little income and still manages to see life as a wonderful gift.
Because, Ms. Coulter, that is who we are – and much, much more.
After I saw your tweet, I realized you just wanted to belittle the President by linking him to people like me. You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult and you assumed you could get away with it and still appear on TV.
— Down Syndrome sufferer and Special Olympics athlete John Franklin Stephens responding to Ann Coulter calling President Obama a “retard”.
Transportation takes up a huge portion of a family’s annual income. Behind housing and food, transportation is the third largest expenditure of most Americans. Many Americans live in places where having access to your own car is a prerequisite for getting a job or getting to food. Those that cannot afford a car, are usually left no other option but to use under-funded public transportation that is ill-adapted to the existing physical environment. An automobile-human cyborg quite often requires a normal-functioning human body. Anything from ADHD, vision problems, paralysis, or limited dexterity make it more dangerous -if not impossible- to drive a car. This leaves the elderly stranded in their homes, and turns neighborhoods into deadly obstacle courses.
— Criticizing Other Things Like We Criticize the Internet — an inversion of certain critiques of the Internet’s impact on society to apply (rather aptly) to automobiles and their related infrastructure.
Let’s continue to build gardens and live in walkable neighborhoods, but we should also recognize the sociotechnical structures that prevent fundamental change. Opting out of fast food and cars would undeniably help the environment and society, but to ask any one individual to forego the efficiencies of modern life is a demand on their own personal resources. Instead of asking individuals to give up their Facebook accounts and their cars, academics and activists need to find new ways of providing the same or comparable services that embody a different sort of politics. Build a world where Facebook is obviously the inferior mode of communication and fast food just seems gross. It means building the capacity for critical human engagement outside of the confines of capitalist notions of efficiency.
— The Cost of Opting Out, on how individualistic non-participation fails as a critique and corrective of problems in modern society.