Resources for November 16, 2014

"Manilla in the Claws of Light." Critics Round Up (Ongoing Archive)


“Over the longer-term, the biggest threat to terrorists is not the power of missiles – it is the politics of inclusion. It’s peaceful societies and respect for human rights. It’s education, jobs and real opportunity. It’s leaders who listen to their people and uphold the rule of law. Missiles may kill terrorists. But good governance kills terrorism.” Ban Ki-Moon, (September 14, 2014)

Brand, Russell. "On Revolution, Fighting Inequality, Addiction, Militarized Policing & Noam Chomsky." Democracy Now (November 14, 2014)





"Glenn Greenwald: Constitutional and Civil Rights Lawyer/Journalist (Peace and Conflict Studies Archive)'" Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)

Marlow, Jonathan. "Why Lists?: The List of Lists." Keyframe (November 10, 2014)

Sauter, Molly. "The Coming Swarm." Berkman Center for Internet & Society (October 29, 2014) ["In her new book, The Coming Swarm: DDoS, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet, Molly Sauter examines the history, development, theory, and practice of distributed denial of service actions as a tactic of political activism. Together in conversation with journalist and activist Laurie Penny, Molly will discuss the use of disruptive tactics like DDoS, online civil disobedience, and the role of the internet as a zone of political activism and speech."]





Merriam-Webster Word-of-the-Day:

meliorism \MEE-lee-uh-riz-um\

noun: the belief that the world tends to improve and that humans can aid its betterment

Examples:

The author's meliorism is evident in such statements as, "I believe that peace is inevitable."

"Eric Schlosser's fine Fast Food Nation wavered between a pragmatic meliorism, devoted to reforming the meatpacking and restaurant industry, and a visionary despair over the conditions of modern American life." — Stephen Metcalf, Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2001

In 1877, British novelist George Eliot believed she had coined meliorist when she wrote, "I don't know that I ever heard anybody use the word 'meliorist' except myself." Her contemporaries credited her with coining both meliorist and meliorism, and one of her letters contains the first documented use of meliorism, but there is evidence that meliorist had been around for 40 years or so before she started using it. Whoever coined it did so by drawing on the Latin melior, meaning "better." It is likely that the English coinages were also influenced by another melior descendant, meliorate, a synonym of ameliorate ("to make better") that was introduced to English in the mid-1500s.