Ingrid Burrington @ingrid@everything.happens.horse

A good time to read some Stuart Hall. From “Race and ‘Moral Panics’ in Postwar Britain,” 1978:

“There is an overwhelming tendency to abstract questions of race from their internal social and political contexts—to deal with ‘race’ as if it had nothing intrinsically to do with the present ‘condition of England.’ It is viewed as an ‘external’ problem, foisted on English society from the outside, which has simply been visited on the society from the skies….These poor, benighted people—for reasons which the British now find it hard to bring to mind—picked themselves up out of their villages and plantations and, uninvited, made this long, strange and apparently unpredictable journey to the doors of British industry—which, out of the pure goodness of their hearts, gave them employment. Now the ‘good times’ are over, and the kissing has to stop.

“The tendency to abstract race from the internal dynamic of the society, and to repress its history, is not confined to the political ‘Right.’ It is also to be found on the ‘liberal Left.’…Neither side can bring themselves to refer to Britain’s imperial and colonial past, even as a contributory factor to the present situation. The slate has been wiped clean. Racism is not endemic to the structures of British social life, it has nothing intrinsically to do with the dynamic of British politics, or with the economic crisis: it is not part of English culture—it does not belong to the ‘English Ideology.’ It is an external virus, injected into the body politic. Its control is a matter of policy— but not of politics.

“I hope to persuade you that this cannot be true.”

#UK

The Space Shuttle had a 59-pound printer on board, known as the Interim Teleprinter. Putting this heavy printer in orbit cost $1.5 million per flight, but it was a key piece of flight hardware,
providing the astronauts with mission plans, weather reports, and other documents from Mission Control. Let's take a look inside... 1/12