[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Architectuul reports on its Forgotten Masterpieces campaign, aiming to promote overlooked and endangered works of 20th century architecture.
• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reports on how the mass of the Milky Way Galaxy has just now been calculated at 1.54 trillion solar masses.
• blogTO reports that three thousand students at the University of Toronto apparently fund their education through sugar daddies.
• The Broadside Blog’s Caitlin Kelly writes about how she found a new tribe at a journalism conference.
• Centauri Dreams notes that black hole starship engines count as a detectable technosignature for SETI searches.
• John Holbo at Crooked Timber considers the emotionalism of Peterson and Shapiro versus facts in the light of Plato.
• The Crux notes how, before settling the Moon, we have to first develop the techniques necessary for mining the Moon.
• D-Brief notes the threats posed by humanity to the ecosystems of Antarctica.
• Bruce Dorminey notes a proposal before NASA to dispatch a smallsat probe to asteroid Pallas.
• Andrew LePage at Drew Ex Machina takes a look at the first test flights, in the 1960s, of the reusable space plane the X-15.
• Far Outliers looks at the separation of Muslims from Hindus in Calcutta, and the subordination of the former to the latter.
• Gizmodo reports on an exciting new display of the Tyrannosaurus Rex at the American Museum of Natural History that features, finally, feathers.
• Keiran Healy crunches the numbers to notes how the hierarchy of academic institutions in the United States has scarcely changed over the previous century.
• Joe. My. God. notes that the 1971 marriage in Minnesota of Michael McConnell and Jack Baker has been officially recognized.
• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the overlooked radical politics of Frida Kahlo.
• Language Hat looks at the mysterious choice in names for the pre-Columbian Adena culture of North America. Why “Adena”?
• At Language Log, Victor Mair shares a post by a Chinese father who calls for a liberation of Chinese languages from their traditional script.
• Steve Attewell writes at Lawyers, Guns and Money about the history of the Marvel Universe’s Hellfire Club, memorably created by Chris Claremont.
• Marginal Revolution shares a paper supporting the thesis of Jared Diamond about the importance of the axes of continents in explaining biological and cultural diffusion.
• The New APPS Blog reports on the complicated trajectory from Marx to Foucault.
• Rachel Aspden writes at the NYR Daily about the political economy of safari tours.
• Casey Dreier at the Planetary Society Blog notes a fiscal year 2020 proposal before NASA for a sample return mission to Mars.
• The Russian Demographics Blog notes that the Global Data Lab has just had a paper published in Nature on their database of subnational entities’ rankings on the Human Development Index.
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel argues that the new Trump budget for FY2020 would cause terrible damage to NASA.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that the Putin government’s policies are driving more rural-to-urban migration in Russia.
• Frances Woolley writes at Worthwhile Canad8ian Initiative about the relationship, under the Ford government of Ontario, of age limits for professors with tenure.
• Arnold Zwicky considers the lovely clematis.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• The Dragon’s Tales notes that, to cut costs for its Ariane 6 rocket, the European Space Agency is no longer going to try to source parts for the Ariane 6 across its member-states, insteading aiming for more efficient distribution of suppliers.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig wonders about the consequences Spain’s offer of citizenship to the descendants of Jews deported in 1492 might have. How many will take up Spain on the offer?
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen is not a locavore at all.
• The Planetary Society Blog’s Emily Lakdawalla wonders, with others, just what Mercury’s unique hollows are.
• Strange Maps chronicles the “hippie trail”, a route popular with backpackers in the 1960s and 1970s that stretched from Europe through Turkey and Afghanistan towards Southeast Asia.
• Towleroad notes the vicious homophobia of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little chronicles the not-entirely unreciprocated sympathy of Karl Marx for the liberator Abraham Lincoln.
• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that immigration is unlikely to increase the size of the American welfare state. (If anything, as European rhetoric suggests, it might decrease it.)

[LINK] Jameson on the future, innovation, and Marxism

If I were a Marxist, it would ideally be in the scholar of American cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, a scholar whose writings–it seems to me–do engage with reality and do not retreat into ideological blind alleys and flights of meaningless rhetoric, an awareness that capitalism hasn’t reached a climax phase, all produced by a man who’s aware of the liberating potential of the shock of the new.

Gerry Canavan linked to an interview with rabble.ca’s Aaron Leonard on the occasion of Jameson’s new book Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One, a revisiting Marx’s capital. Canavan highlighted in hsi link the same passage that caught my attention on reading the interview.

AL: In the book you write, “Marx alone sought to combine a politics of revolt with the “poetry of the future” and applied himself to demonstrate that socialism was more modern than capitalism and more productive. To recover that futurism and that excitement is surely the fundamental task of any left ‘discursive struggle’ today.” Could you talk more about this, and how one might begin to conceive a futuristic socialism?

FJ: Marx himself was always quite excited about new discoveries — things like chemical fertilizers (which don’t seem so good today, but lead to a green revolution in their time), undersea cable, and other discoveries of the day. It is very clear that he thought of socialism as more advanced technologically and in every other way. Raymond Williams wrote about how people think that socialism is a nostalgic return to a simpler society. Williams challenged that saying socialism won’t be simpler, it will be much more complicated.

There is a tendency among the Left today — and I mean all varieties of the Left — of being reduced to protecting things. It is a kind of conservatism; saving all the things that capitalism destroys which range from nature to communities, cities, culture and so on. The Left is placed in a very self-defeating nostalgic position, just trying to slow down the movement of history. There is a line by Walter Benjamin that epitomizes that — though I don’t know how he thought of that himself — revolutions are “pulling the emergency chord,” stopping the onrush of the train. I don’t think Marx thought about it like that at all. It seems to me that Marx thought that productivity would increase by getting rid of capitalism. On the level of organization, technology and production, Marx did not want a return to handicraft labour, but to go on into all kinds of complex forms of automation and computerization [as it would emerge] and so.

The historical accident of something like socialism or communism taking place in a place what was essentially a third world country, Russia, an underdeveloped country, that’s made us think of socialism in a way that was not Marx’s way of imagining it. The socialist movement has to itself be inspired by this other type of vision.

Thoughts?