The New York Times paywall has arrived for us Canadians, and it will be arriving stateside shortly. There is already considerable discussion on the Internet about it, and how it is generally fairly easy to evade. For example, of the total 20 free articles/month, any links from social networking sites don’t count, and any links from Google are counted seperately to a total of five.
But, there are a number of easy ways to get around the paywall without searching around Twitter for links
- Cookie blocking or cookie clearing. Yup, New York Times tracks your clicks in a cookie. If you delete the cookie periodically (or block it in the first place) you can read articles without restriction. Choose your favourite Firefox or Chrome extension to help with this.
- Read on Instapaper (Read it Later or Read it Now). Once you reach your 20 article limit the screen is blocked with a large advertisement asking you to sign up. You can click on links back to the home page, or press your browser’s back button, either of which will allow you to browse the New York Times webpage, but any time you click in to a link you will see the text momentarily, and then the advertisement will swoop in and block everything. The blocking, however, leaves the underlying HTML untouched, so if you use a tool that reads the HTML instead of the rendered version you can still get the article. Instapaper’s bookmarklet adds a POST form to the page which is used to scrape the HTML and send it back to Instapaper for viewing, so if you use either the Read it Now or the Read it Later bookmarklets you can view the page without problem (in Instapaper’s clutter-free rendition of the page).
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Into the Friar | Our Town | Chicago Reader
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/franciscan-friar-profile-cliff-doerksen/Content?oid=2935899
“Actually, I can tell you a funnier story than that,” Welle went on. “I used to volunteer at a place called the Port Ministries in Back of the Yards—they run a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, a wide range of social services stuff. One day I was walking in my habit at 51st and Ashland—kind of a rougher neighborhood, you know? And a woman with a very small son came up to me and stopped me, saying ‘Hey brother, brother, brother! I just want to thank you for wearing your habit today, because I know that you don’t have to, and our neighborhood is starved for signs of hope. I want my five-year-old son to meet a man who’s living his life for God.’
“And I was just shocked! I stopped and prayed with them for a second, and blessed her son, and it was the sweetest thing that anyone has ever said to me. “So they leave and I’ve got the warm fuzzy butterflies. I keep walking down the street. I don’t take more than ten steps before I run into a teenager who looks at me and goes, ‘Who the fuck are you, Harry Potter?’”
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In Negative Dialectics, Adorno gives the weakest hint that some people may experience occasional glimpses of real freedom:
If a stroke of undeserved luck has kept the mental composition of some individuals not quite adjusted to the prevailing norms - a stroke of luck they have often enough to pay for in their relations with their environment - it is up to these individuals to make the moral and, as it were, representative effort to say what most of those for whom they say it cannot see or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see. Direct communicability to everyone is not a criterion of truth.
This is, in many ways, a more snobbish version of the Marxist idea of ‘false consciousness’. I can’t help reading the Adorno quote above and seeing it as a euphemism for “if, like me, you’ve been reading Kant and playing Beethoven since you were five”. ‘False consciousness’, meanwhile, may not have quite the patronising implications that liberals accuse it of, or that vulgar Marxists lend it. Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice includes a defence of the idea, on the basis that a false consciousness may be ‘objectively’ correct, in terms of the knowledge and theories that are available to an individual in a given time and place.
The entire article is quite interesting too.
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The Gravity of Pure Forces | Jenkins | continent.
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/17
Heidegger writes, rather beautifully,
This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter evening time (197).
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n+1: A Moral Baseball Bat
http://nplusonemag.com/a-moral-baseball-bat
The violent fringes of the 1968 movement eventually even invoked the name of Auschwitz to justify lethal attacks on Jews
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A recent Hacker News discussion made me realize that many people
(ahem, Americans… and far too many Canadians) don’t understand
poverty. In fact, what became obvious in the discussion is that many
people don’t even believe that poverty exists (a galling belief). In
an effort to bring some reality to the discussion I attempted to
locate some links of good journalism and good statistics showing just
how pervasive poverty is (globally, but especially, in North America).
The Hacker News discussion was only the most recent dispute I’ve had
about the issue—-evidently the Horatio Alger myth is pervasive and
not slackening despite the recent economic meltdown (shedding jobs
from at-risk/poor people, but not the wealthy). Although I’ve read (and seen) many compelling examples of poverty and
economic disparity, I found it difficult to come up with really
provocative accounts on the fly, so I decided that I needed a
ready-reference for information about poverty and economic disparity.
My hope is that the next time some unethical jerk tries to tell me
that poor people (if they even exist) should just try working harder
(because, you know, *so-and-so* grew up “poor” and managed to become a
wealthy ), I can give them a handy link with lots
of great references! There’s no end to the bottomless pit of the
wealthy denying cold hard facts, but at least this gives them
something to read while progressives can attempt to actually change
things.
So, with this in mind, please send me any good accounts (stats,
journalism) of poverty and economic disparity. I hope to have a nice
diverse mix that cuts across race, gender, ability, etc (as poverty
does), everything from first-person accounts to theory to quantitative
measures. I’ll post the links for your use too! Check out
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Rob Ford doesn’t need to work very hard to ensure the city stays without bike lanes—-the previous (NOT-left wing) mayor Miller did a fine job.In 2001 the City of Toronto created the Toronto Bikeway Network (
PDF), realizing that residents wanted safe bike routes. At the time, only 35 km of bike lanes existed. Now, a decade later, there are 117 km of bike lanes, 378 km short of the projected 495 km. Mayor Miller managed to put in a paltry 82 km of bike lanes, only 17% of the projected total. Rob Ford wants to ensure that number does not increase, and (likely, if we are being honest) to decrease.
BlogTO remarks that Toronto has not done quite as poorly with shared lanes and off road bicycle paths, but these simply do not count for an active, cycling city. Shared lanes, as anyone that has ridden a Toronto street knows, are never recognized by motorists, and usually, simply covered with parked cars (hello College St.). Shared lanes are obviously and manifestly a political maneuver to boost sad bike infrastructure numbers. Off-road paths are great for bike enthusiasts or the family going for a weekend jaunt, but they are not intended to carry people around the city. Including off-road paths in the calculation is rather like including forestry areas in the calculation of city parks.
Toronto gets to keep its image as the SUV-driving, Bay Streeting, “center of the universe”, bike smoke city.
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