[BLOG] Some Monday links

[rfmcdonald]

• Bag News Notes reacts to two photos reflecting the debate on gays in Scouting in the United States, one showing two proud parents with their two happy gay Scout sons, the other an anti-gay protesters standing in front of a crowd of silent Scouts.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster reacts to the news that a significant number of red dwarfs might support Earth-like worlds, noting that an Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri--the dimmest and most distant member of the Alpha Centauri trinary--hasn't been excluded.


• Daniel Drezner thinks that rhetoric on Iran has become so clichéd one may as well automate blogs about the ongoing crisis.


• At False Steps, Paul Drye considers Soviet plans in the 1980s for a successor to the Mir space station, noting that some design elements made it into the International Space Station.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's DJW argues that complementarian views of gender are wrong and destructive for men and for women, not least because it forces real people to conform to abstract--even unreal--ideologies.


• New APPS Blog's Mohan Matthen wonders about the implications of Judith Butler's support for the Brooklyn College conference on divestment from Israel.


• Norman Geras is rather unfair in thinking that Judith Butler opposes Jewish self-determination. It would be more accurate, given her support for diaspora communities, for her to argue that she doesn't think Jewish self-determination should come at the expense of others.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer argues that fracking is going to be delayed if not blocked outright in Europe by the wastewater "flowback" produced by the process.


• Torontoist's Kevin Plummer describes the sensational trial of Carrie Massie, an English servant in Toronto who, in 1915, shot her employer Charles “Bert” Massey after he allegedly tried to sexual assault her. (She got off.)


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble notes that Russian opposition to recognition of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States is continuing to harden.