Quick links

[oyceter]

• Interesting article about the growing prison population in the US.


• Big Picture on Lunar New Year - love how many diasporan Chinese communities they got in there, and really am glad they acknowledged that it's new year for non-Chinese people as well. Also, Choco Pies! (Would love more about new year celebrations world-wide, since obviously non-Chinese people have significant diasporan communities as well.)


• Human Transit blog - Almost as bad as TV Tropes for me! I hate driving, I grew up in a fairly walkable neighborhood, and I associated public transit with freedom and maneuverability, not cars, as a teen. (Driving age in Taiwan is 18, and while I grew up in the suburbs, being able to go downtown by bus was basically everyone's way of meeting up without parents.)
  
  I think I vaguely knew a lot of the things the blogger talks about, but it is so geekily awesome to see everything explained in such detail. Also, it makes me want to tear my hair out over my current commute, as well as the general state of public transportation in the Bay Area. Does anyone know of blogs like this that cover more Asian locales? Also, now I miss Seoul Metro.


• chromatic_podfic sign ups end Jan. 28! You don't have to sign up to participate. Also, you can add your name to the open authorial permission list or offer services as a beta.

Comments

[daedala]

I'm reading the prison article RIGHT NOW and it is FANTASTIC! My favorite quote so far:

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, [Stuntz] argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I really like that! It reminds me a lot of Dorothy Roberts' talk about negative vs. positive liberty in Killing the Black Body.

[jiawen]

Thank you for the New Year link. Lots of beautiful, useful photos in there. I may use it in class.

[oyceter]

Sure thing!