Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Octavia Butler


 
Octavia Butler

(Democracy Now! on YouTube)

"As Democracy Now! marks 25 years on the air, we are revisiting some of the best and most impactful moments from the program’s history, including one of the last television interviews given by the visionary Black science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. She spoke to Democracy Now! in November 2005, just three months before she died on February 24, 2006, at age 58. Butler was the first Black woman to win Hugo and Nebula awards for science-fiction writing and the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. Her best-known books include the classics “Kindred,” as well as “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talents” — two-thirds of a trilogy that was never finished. Her work inspired a new generation of Black science-fiction writers, and she has been called “the Mother of Afrofuturism.” Her 2005 interview with Democracy Now! took place shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and as President George W. Bush was overseeing the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When asked how she set out to become a science-fiction writer when there were so few examples of Black women working in the genre, Butler said she never doubted her abilities. “I assumed that I could do it,” she said. “I wasn’t being brave or even thoughtful. I wanted it. And I assumed I could have it."
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I've always been an avid reader of science fiction. Like any creative endeavor, individual examples belong on a spectrum somewhere between awful and sublime. Yet taken as a whole, across that spectrum, the motivation of the genre, what might better be thought of as "speculative fiction," is not imagining what is or was, but what might be. Yet in order to meaningfully look ahead, it helps to know some history and to pay attention to current events.

Based on over a half century of observations, I must sadly conclude that not enough people have read and understood SF. I've a feeling it's time to place your bets on the post-apocalyptic depicters, not because they were right, but because we didn't listen to them.


Monday, February 15, 2021

BOXING DAZE

 

 
Joe Louis

Boxing white supremacy
(On Contact with Chris Hedges & Professor Gerald Horne)

"On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Professor Gerald Horne about the importance of boxing in the shattering of white supremacy. Professor Horne’s new book is ‘The Bittersweet Science: Racism, Racketeering and the Political Economy of Boxing’...

So boxing is an important story to discuss when you're trying to understand social, political, and economic change in the United States of America."

______________

Sonny Liston

Song for Sonny Liston
(Mark Knopfler on YouTube)

Saturday, February 6, 2021

Socialism and The Left


Caleb Maupin

Socialism And The Left with Caleb Maupin

(The Convo Couch on YouTube)

"Craig "Pasta" Jardula and Fiorella Isabel talk to Caleb Maupin about the state of the left, socialism, and more."

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Peace and prosperity can only occur if we rein in the greed heads and build back using socialism as the model.

Capitalism's Decline


 
Professor Richard Wolff


"This week's show is dedicated to a discussion of the signs of US capitalism's decline. Wolff explores the passage of US capitalism from its birth, through its state-supported growth and expansion, to its global peaking from 1945 to 2000. He presents the causes of its ongoing decline this 21st century, and then offers a conclusion on the right, center and left political responses to decline."
 
 
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“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

― Isaac Asimov, News Week, 1980.