San Zhi, Taiwan. Forgotten houses of the future. // Tales of Tomorrow. Leslie Nielsen mines Martian uranium. (1952) // More boomerangs in space. // The Beast in Space. Cheesy sci-fi porno. (sfw) // Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four. Crap, redefined. // Superhero fashion. Gas masks, girdles, a jaunty hat. // Cutie Honey. She fights crime, I think. // Ophelia Benson on God, types 1 and 2. // Mary Jackson on Boris Johnson. // Charles Murray on educational romanticism. // Deogolwulf on the sound of one hand slapping. // Slow motion raspberry. And. // More robotic exoskeletons. // The android keyboardist. (1985) // The Spirit. // Bomb shelters of Nazi Germany. // Smoking tourism. (h/t, 1+1=3.) // San Francisco panoramas. Sunset, dawn and twilight. // Lamps made from sheep stomach. // The Anatomical Theatre. Morbidity and wax. // Tulip farms. // Plant rights now! Two legs bad, no legs good. // The Internationale in 40 languages. Sing, comrades, sing. // Design for despots. (h/t, Things.) // Retro design. // The Virtual Museum of Vintage VCRs. (h/t, Coudal.) // Wooden shortwave radio. Mp3 compatible. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s the Reverend Robert Wilkins. 

Speaking of Sam Harris, in this clip he touches on a blind spot shared by many commentators, especially on the left.

Here’s the money quote:

I think liberals, almost by definition, don’t know what it’s like to really believe in God. They don’t know what it’s like to be sure that the book they keep by their bedside is the literal word of the creator of the universe and that death is merely a passage to an eternity of happiness. And so they find it very difficult to believe that anyone actually believes this stuff and is motivated by the content of their religious beliefs. And so liberals, when they see the jihadist look into the video camera and say things like “we love death more than the infidels love life” – and then he blows himself up – it’s the liberal in our society, the religious moderate or the secularist, who is left thinking that’s just propaganda. 

Indeed. This disbelief in belief, as it were, helps explain the extraordinary denial of jihadists’ and former jihadists’ self-declared motives, and the hugely selective, often absurd, declarations of “root causes.” As Tawfik Hamid, a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, pointed out:

Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it… It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence… The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Sharia. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts.

It is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals have become obstacles to reforming Islam… They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism… If the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror… All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices.

As explained at length here, the size of an extremist “fringe” and how it relates to mainstream conceptions of the faith, and its theology and history, is a matter of some importance and has to be considered as it actually is, not as one might wish. And, as Tawfik Hamid, Tanveer Ahmed, Hassan Butt, Tahir Aslam Gora and others have argued, omitting the role of Islamic theology, whether for reasons of preference or embarrassment, leads one to inaccurate or perverse evaluations of what we are faced with and how it might be stopped.

Further to this, readers may be interested in Philosophy and Literature’s gone but not forgotten Annual Bad Writing Contest. The rules are simple enough:

The Bad Writing Contest attempts to locate the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article published in the last few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, etc. are not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from actual serious academic journals or books.

The winning entries are, alas, not quite so clear. This, from 1997, is Professor Rob Wilson, writing in The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, a collection of essays published by the University of Minnesota Press and edited by Richard Burt:

If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the ‘now-all-but-unreadable DNA’ of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.

The publisher’s blurb informs us that the purpose of the book quoted above is to “seek a deeper understanding of what ‘censorship’, ‘criticism’ and the ‘public sphere’ really mean.”

There’s more, of course.  (h/t, Stephen Hicks.)

Here’s the third episode of the excellent BBC documentary series, The Planets. Titled Giants, the film follows the ingenuity and serendipity of the 1977 Voyager mission and its “grand tour” of the outer planets.

Part 1:

A happy alignment. Slingshot. Magnetic Jupiter. 3 million amps. Rings and ghosts.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Part 2: 

Fearsome weather. Saturn’s other side. Shattered. Perfect timing. Still listening.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Other episodes can be viewed here.

Over at Easily Distracted, Tim Burke highlights two recent academic news stories and finds a common theme.

This is what I call the porcupine strategy. Make yourself as pointy, sharp and inflated as you can, and hope that any predators will just go away. The problem with this particular porcupine act is that it’s not fooling anyone. Scholars who know something about the theories [Aliza] Shvartz is fumbling to deploy know full well that she’s said very little that makes sense in this passage, that it’s close to being a random assemblage of words. Observers who don’t know anything about those theories just see it as babble.

In fairness to casual readers, several, more seasoned, purveyors of postmodernist theory have also lapsed into random assemblages of words. Even those figures held in great esteem by other likeminded theorists have often proved no less impervious to comprehension. Oddly, this tendency hasn’t stopped many of their admirers from hailing the results as “skillfully poetic”.