HE CAN'T BE RACIST, BECAUSE HIS WIFE IS ASIAN. LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE THE REAL RACIST, LIBTARDS!
Check out the front page. Taki Mag is a home away from home for racists. Pat Buchanan, Steve Sailer... is Gavin McInnes the guy from Vice?
This is so precisely what I expected from clicking on the phrase "methodical inquiries in the human sciences".
Can someone identify this guy's avatar?
Holy crap. That goes astonishingly deep into fuck-the-what in a hurry. Even for Derbyshire.
I realize this isn't exactly how it works, but I just wish I could figure out how you could be stupid enough to be that racist (and that variety of racist) and still able to type.
I mean, did he take a statistics class in a room with an electrified floor?
6: not only can Derbyshire type, he's the author of a well-received popular book about the Riemann Hypothesis. It's amazing.
every link on that front page is about how black people are terrible despite what the tyranny of PC says. It's astonishing.
Huh, I saw some of these excerpted on LGM and assumed that this was some paraphrase of some more veiled racist comment. Nope, just super super racist for realz!
||
Conversation at dinner with our 4 year old...
"Daddy when we die we can grow again!"
"Where did you hear that?"
"I found the word in my room!"
"In the Bhagavad Gita?"'
"No, not there."
*2 year old chimes in*
"Not the bagavita!"
|>
To his credit, Josh Barro calls the foul on his own team.
The use of the Fields Medal as proof that black people are inherently dumb is kind of funny, given how the French are disproportionately represented among the winners.
Also, no Canadian has ever won a Fields Medal. Just sayin'!
The really scary thing is that Derbyshire, horrific as he is, has on several occasions (eg Schiavo, Dover vs Kitzmiller) been the voice of reason at NRO.
Look at the bright side. He's a feminist :
... which I'll just trim down to "Standard Model" in what follows. According to this doctrine, all observed group differences are the result of social forces. ...
... Note that, taking group differences in all generality, the Standard Model is not preposterous. The social and economic underachievement of women in Moslem countries, for example, or for that matter in our own countries in times past, easily yields to a Standard Model analysis. Make some key changes in your laws and customs, and the men-women gap disappears. ...
Btw a woman has yet to win a Field's medal.
I must admit that I started laughing when I got to the part about what you should do to prepare yourself to claim that some of your best friends are black.
This was my first chuckle: A small cohort of blacks--in my experience, around five percent--is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us. your so ... quantitative Derb.
Holy shit, that is some batshit whackery.
Btw a woman has yet to win a Field's medal.
Of course, I had this thought too, when I got to that point.
Heebie, if I see you, I will hurriedly usher my child across the street, because you and your kind have not won a Fields medal.
Not me individually. But if you're at an event which suddenly starts to swell with my kind of people, get the fuck out of there stat.
Is the world ready for a Canadian woman to win the Fields medal?
18: yes. and then he moves on from there to say that because so many other people also want to have some black best friends "as status markers" (of course), there's like this weird black best friend shortage. have we reached peak black best friend?
if he's having this talk with his children, then they are laughing at him, to his face.
The best mathematician of my grad school cohort could satisfy 25! Actually she's from South America, but she's working in Canada.
"Honey... honey! I don't think anybody here has won a Fields medal. I think we had better go!"
I also love
Your own ancestry is mixed north-European and northeast-Asian, but blacks will take you to be white.Those devious blacks! Here's the very first thing they will do to you! As opposed white people like us, who are really nuanced about this sort of thing.
...where they will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by whether they've won the Fields Medal...
[early draft]
I would totally watch a reality show called "Racist Swap" where they take someone like Derbyshire and have him live with a black family for six months. Time to pitch that somewhere.
Racists are probably standing by ready to declare that the Fields medal never really meant much and that a new "Shire" Medal will now stand as the most prestigious math medal.
There's a book, "Why Men Rule" which explains that women should be kept powerless because they never have produced a top mathematician, music composer, or mathematician. And I tried to imagina a world in which only mathematicians, chess players, and composers held power.
"Today President Paul Erdős...."
"Today President Paul Erdős applauded the methamphetamine makers of America for their commitment to making the tools of mathematics available to all."
"Deprived children will be issued 'speed stamps' in order to make it possible for them to compete on an equal basis."
a mathematicianmeth addict is a machine for turning coffee crystal into theorems skin sores.
Oh, wow. I didn't think it could be that bad. He's trolling, tying to get page clicks. I assume.
It's weird to encounter stridently racist people in person. I think I've told the story of coming to look at the house I ended up moving into. As I returned to my car from seeing the house, an elderly white neighbor yelled to me from his front porch, "You moving into that house?"
To which I replied, "Looks that way."
And he said, "Good. We could use more good people around here," glancing sideways at his black neighbors who were out in their yard.
Does anyone else find the use of "black" as a noun unsettling (e.g. "If accosted by a strange black in the street")? It makes the whole article feel that much more halting and archaic.
One of the leading candidates for a Fields medal in the next cycle is an Iranian woman.
In case you want to decide which nationalities to respect based on their fields medal prowess, you may find this table useful.
I think what's weird about it is that you'd think -- I'd think -- that people know by now that it's very, very wrong. Unacceptable, like, and not funny, and not cool, in fact quite stupid and disgusting. Not just wrong according to the PC police, but wrong on the merits.
I may have told the story here before of my family's moving in with my grandmother, oh, 30 years ago, and my sitting in the living room with her one day to hear her observe (on seeing a black person walking by on the sidewalk outside), "There are just more and more of those people walking around these days, it's just terrible and I don't know what's happening at all."
Bit of a hullaballoo in the family, as I yelled at Grammy (I was 13) and had to be talked down. But Grammy was born in 1898, you see. I don't know what anyone else's excuse is.
41: Yeah, my (quite racist against black people but otherwise genuinely delightful) grandfather says things like, "And then the blacks moved into the neighborhood and it was all downhill from there." It's...uncomfortable.
43: I didn't even know that car ownership rates had declined among blacks. Learn something new every day, I guess.
44: He thinks things got easier once blacks moved in? Why?
Or do they just find it hard to go uphill now that they have to walk?
45 is to 43?
Per KR in 13, Josh Barro has the right idea. (Page 2 of that post is not relevant to the Derbyshire thing, and can be skipped.)
I'm a fan of shunning.
For anyone interested in the case for shunning of Derbyshire by now, this is good.
This has been driving me crazy all day, even though I know I shouldn't let it. I was just apoplectic that someone even remotely 'respectable' would actually write and publish such a thing with no sense of shame. And the idea that he was trying to pass off his racism as okay because he was selling it to his hapa kids just made me more apoplectic.
I did note that a previous Taki piece from a few weeks ago was about how he is undergoing chemotherapy for Lymphoma and alternating between bursting highs of aggression and libido (because of the steroids) and long lows of chemo brain. The only remotely forgiving thing I can think of is that someone fucked up his dosage and brain damaged him and now his previously inchoate and subtle racism has mutated and multiplied and uninhibited itself into this vile piece of craziness.
I also felt terribly sorry for his kids. If there's any chance they haven't been fully indoctrinated, this must be humiliating.
I like this bit from the link in 48:
Think of how your PBS station always trots out the stars-of-the-1970s concerts and River Dance whenever pledge drive comes around. That's where Derbyshire comes in.
First image: "On my left, MOR Irish music and power ballads. On my right, spittle-flecked racists! I know, it's hard to choose."
Second image involves Derb cavorting in from stage right in a Michael Flatley shirt and KKK hood.
Maybe this will get him fired, but it's not like all the other shit he's written about, say how he loves pubescent girls or his sympathy for Nazi racial science regarding Jews has done it.
Also from the link in 48:
And Jonah Goldberg, the editor of National Review Online, tweeted, "For the record, I find my colleague John Derbyshire's piece fundamentally indefensible and offensive. I wish he hadn't written it."
So the only real problem is that he wrote it? Goldberg has an eye out for the racistriverdancer audience, I guess. Or he's just a quieter racist.
50: Sigh. I guess the idea was supposed to be that people pull cliches out of their butts when they're trying to .. soothe the audience? No idea, actually, what the idea was.
53: No, no critique intended; I really was just bemused by the image of Derby-a-la-Flatley.
NMM 2 Thomas Kinkade, one of nation's most popular painters, dies suddenly in Los Gatos at 54.
55: I hope he died as he lived, embroiled in litigation and unashamedly pissing on a statue of Winnie the Pooh.
In Los Gatos? The downtown of that place is sprinkled with little lights in the trees, like Christmas all year round. Not that that means anything, and 54 is rather too young.
58: Yeah, at fifty-four I was starting a whole new episode of life. Don't much like that style of painting or what I've read about him but that is too young.
Off-topic, but your whole new phase of life experience is an inspiration, Biohazard, just so you know. I nod, tip my hat, and/or curtsy in your general direction.
47: Why else would more be walking around?
His wife is Asian so he isn't a racist. Hahahahahahaha!
I do kind of think it would be super hypocritical of NRO to fire him now, when he's said many little things that, taken together, fully add up to this particular horror. I don't know, the article about his having chemo brain is affecting my reasoning somehow. Why do horrible people have to get horrible diseases? It short circuits my irateness.
it would be super hypocritical of NRO to fire him now
Big Gay Al fixed that for you.
You're goddamn right it's too young.
40: Overt racism shocked my native white Alabama neighbors years ago. Man & woman in a pick-up truck come around the corner, see a bunch of us standing around gossiping, and he shouts "We're looking at houses for sale, any ni**ers living in this neighborhood? There was a moment of silence and then a chorus of "Yes" and they sped off. Lots of head-shaking afterward.
My neighbors weren't color-blind by any stretch of the imagination but still far from KKK types.
Parsi, thanks. The cancellation of my last series was a shocker. Now it's time to figure out what my next and most likely last one should be. I'm debating among (between?) photographer, therapist, software developer, or freelance assassin.
64:You're right, I should have no pity for him. But somehow there's something skeazy about all these equally sleezy, almost-as-bad editors (Lowry, Goldberg, D'Souza) using his insane foolishness to purchase themselves some 'gap' of respectability by firing him when he's dying. I want them to say, "This is reprehensible, it's our fault, we encouraged him, we've said almost as bad things, we will try to be reflect on our own racism and decrease it in the future, and while he's never writing for us again, we're going to let him die without having to pay COBRA." Yes, I know, it's never going to happen. . .but I don't want them to make a martyr of him.
66: Do you think times are getting worse? The last few weeks I've really begun to feel like things are getting worse after they got better. It's slightly terrifying. I find myself fantasizing about finding a Canadian to marry, though who knows, maybe that wouldn't help.
67.2 is not posed to me, but let me say this about that: hell in a goddamn handbasket. But, you know, there's no where you can go to escape a bad president (or culture) of the United States. Or to put it another way, the only difference between Onion Lake Saskatchewan and where you are right now is your own level of engagement in the more negative aspects of the American empire.
There's no where you can go that John Derbyshire's foul 'logic' won't follow you.
67.2: I think it's mostly internet and TV noise getting amplified like a bad PA system squealing. Anyone who wants one can have a platform now and the loons have taken full advantage of that. (The DE said, "Good, it keeps them off the streets.") What used to be local news now is national outrage.
The realities on the ground don't seem to have changed much (despite Zimmerman/Martin) the actual violent assault numbers have been going down for quite some time and are now at around 1960s levels. Given the end of civilization as we know it things will get bloody very quickly. Absent that, not.
Derbyshire has always refused to learn statistics because it bears the negro taint.
Oh, somehow I thought that chemo brain was Taki. Well, then let them not fire him for the health insurance but not let him write anymore. He's shut up (and humiliated) and they're still on the financial hook.
Woah holy fuck I finally got around to reading that article and woah holy fuck what the hell? IWSB? What the fucking fuck? Who even thought it was a good idea to publish that?
72. Just because you people lead the world in Fields medals, you can be all judgmental...
I confess I only read a few paragraphs, does it get worse? Presumably if your starting position is that you have a wanker like that on your staff (he's a borderline paedophile too, amiright?), firstly your sense of what's fit to publish is already fubar and secondly you're too idle not to run with whatever he submits.
66.2 Go with photographer. You want something where you can choose your own hours. Save freelance assassin for when you get diagnosed with something terminal, cf. Jack Ruby.
It gets appallingly bad. Like, ok, sure, be a racist, but do you have to introduce the super awkward concept of the intelligent and well-socialised black, and then give it the super super awkward acronym IWSB, and then say that there's a structural under-supply of such people? Apparently you do.
As I suspected it appears NRO doesn't provide him health insurance. See here .
...How much are they going to fine me? It starts at one percent of my income in 2014, rising to two and a half percent by 2016. Two and a half percent for me would be $2,000. So ... Uncle Sam is going to force me to buy insurance, which at my current rate costs me $12,000 a year. If I refuse, he'll fine me $2,000. If I refuse and get sick, I can buy insurance at the regular rate anyway. Er, have the congresscritters really thought this through? ...
Chris, it gets so very, very much worse.
Racism is bad but, if there were a time when writing racist things should be indulged, it wouldn't be during Holy Week.
I suffered a delusional, hallucinatory passage yesterday, imagining a world in which the Derb or someone like that charged me with hypocrisy for condemning his race/ethnicity-specific antipathies while maintaining a cheerful wholesale misanthropy of my own. Then I felt guilty.
OT: A girlfriend who wants to go out to dinner makes it difficult to fast on Good Friday, as one has occasionally done.
Sounds like an Even Better Friday.
re: 66.2 and 74
Photographer would be great -- it's be one of my daydream 'other jobs' -- but it doesn't seem like many people are making a living at it these days.
Dream jobs: wine critic, lottery winner, kept man.
Hey let's all say how many Fields Medals we've won.
One day I will stop confusing Jonah Goldberg and Jonah Falcon.
Dream jobs: Batman, James Bond, pre-Biblical priest-king, daredevil, Pikachu wrangler, Joe Paterno grave-desecrator, public transportation critic ("I found this light-rail system substantial but lacking a certain spark of imagination. Two stars.").
49: Yeah, the kids. Man. How fucked up would it be to the mixed-race kid of a white guy whose professed thoughts on multiculturalism are that racism doesn't exist, and Enoch Powell was right?
82
Hey let's all say how many Fields Medals we've won.
None, but I once coauthored a (very minor) paper with Curtis McMullen.
What about those of us that are now officially too old to win Fields Medals? Do we become menacing by default?
"If you're approaching a crowd of over 40s, discretely cross to the other side of the street. Better safe than sorry."
His wife is Asian so he isn't a racist.
Northeast Asian, though. That's important.
...How much are they going to fine me? It starts at one percent of my income in 2014, rising to two and a half percent by 2016. Two and a half percent for me would be $2,000. So ... Uncle Sam is going to force me to buy insurance, which at my current rate costs me $12,000 a year. If I refuse, he'll fine me $2,000. If I refuse and get sick, I can buy insurance at the regular rate anyway. Er, have the congresscritters really thought this through? ...
I doubt anyone was thinking of this as accurate reporting, but I feel compelled to point out that it's very wrong, because (a) the whole point of the mandate is to reduce premiums for people with preexisting conditions by getting everyone else into the risk pool, and (b) more directly, even if that fails, the penalty doesn't apply if insurance would be more than 8% of your income, and based on his numbers his current insurance is 15%.
And when he wrote that, he was 64 years and 9 months old. Christ, he's the poster child for the existence of Medicare.
I've also coauthored exactly one paper with a fields medalist.
This has now found its way into the international media. I predict a futile gesture from the publishers.
There's been some scary racist stuff in my neighborhood the last couple days.
Dream job, hm. Mexican restaurant reviewer. Kitten psychoanalyst. Professional train rider. Intellectual crowd socialite/hanger-on.
So, given this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/womens-reproductive-rights_b_1345214.html
And this: http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2012/04/heavily_armed_neo-nazis_patrol.php
Can someone remind me why I am not arming myself and going underground? 'Cause it seems like the justifications I can muster are getting pretty flimsy at this point. I mean, armed neo-Nazis are patrolling the streets of an Orlando suburb and Roe v. Wade is about to become a legal fiction. What precisely have I got to lose at this point. Sure, maybe we're not at the point of mass genocide yet (except for black men, of course), is that supposed to be comforting? Is it only when mass genocide threatens that it's appropriate to take action?
Oh, but maybe I can vote the fascists away! And we have to protect their freedom of speech, otherwise we're just as bad as they are!
Total self-abnegation = Total liberation
Derb is probably very, very happy with the reaction.
This is what he does. His fellow travelers can distance themselves, providing an air gap, and at the same time he had the opportunity to rationalize white-pride style victimization crap in public.
Derby-badger don't give a shit.
94: What action could you take that might change the course of events as you see them happening? Off a few neo-shitheads before getting SWATted? That's perhaps worth doing after the final and fatal diagnosis just for the kicks but it's not likely to divert whatever is on the tracks and could easily be counter-productive.
There's only one way an all-out armed-mob race war could end given the numbers, do you want to be the guy who started it?
96: Where would General Giap have gotten with that attitude? Not victorious at Dien Bien Phu, that's for sure.
97: Hell, if you have enough soldiers, go for it, and we'll name a city after you win. IMO, Vietnam and the US don't map on each other. I'd be thinking of the Twenties and Thirties and the hard edge of the labor movement.
97
Where would General Giap have gotten with that attitude? Not victorious at Dien Bien Phu, that's for sure.
General Giap had an army. Which reminds me of the quip, "the problem with Leninists is that they all think they are Lenin".
Once you escape from small-number statistics, France does best in Fields medals. I've read that math is taken more seriously in French education than anywhere else, and that the level of mathematical knowledge among non-mathematicians is remarkably high.
@100
Interestingly, somewhere over at Cosma Shalizi's site he reviews a book by Pierre de Genne (Nobel prize, physics) in which de Genne laments the state of physics education in France because it's too overly formalized and mathematical.
@102
Thanks. And I see I misspelled de Gennes.
HuffPo link in my FB feed says NRO fired Derb.
National Review has in fact fired Derbyshire.
Huh. Closed to comments, apparently.
It'll be interesting to see how NRO addresses the fallout.
His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible.
It seems like there's a word missing here. Oh, it's also "outlandish".
Now that I've been informed that (a) he self-described as racist, and (b) he unabashedly said women's suffrage was bad, I'm thinking the real scandal is that he was ever in any stratum of polite DC society and not confined to VDARE and the like.
108: Right. NRO has been an embarrassment for some time now; I thought they knew that and didn't care. It'll be interesting to see whether they face up to it.
98,99: It's true, by the time he was my age, he'd already been leading the Viet Minh for a couple of years. But only a couple. Before that he was...wait for it...a radical journalist. And of course, Michael Collins, former financial adviser, had already been dead for several years when he was my age. Some people are just late bloomers though. You never can tell.
Is peaceful revolution possible in this country? If not, what's inevitable? Anyone? Bueller?
96/110: and the whole exercise only cost, what, two or three million civilian dead? But, you know, omelets, eggs, etc.
I have just been informed that John Derbyshire is apparently a British citizen. I am really sorry.
I have just been informed that John Derbyshire is apparently a British citizen. I am really sorry.
Your apology is in order, but he has said he no longer considers himself a British citizen.
I should be surprised if he gave up the free healthcare.
So would I, but if he was willing to pay $12K/year for insurance here, he probably wasn't using it much at all.
114: Link doesn't work! Did they memoryhole the guy?
I get "The requested URL /derbyshire/derbyshire042302.asp was not found on this server."
Although it works if I open in a new tab. Weird.
119: same here.
The site has been swamped. Apparently a number of NRO commenters are declaring that they're canceling their subscriptions to the magazine -- which, I didn't particularly realize there was an actual magazine any more, but wevs.
They're in a tough position: free speech yes, censorship no, but on the other hand, uh, you'd basically have to say then that Derbyshire is free to be a complete asshole, since his essay is indefensible. Which is roughly what Lowry said, adding that he wasn't welcome to be an asshole in their pages. I'm a little surprised that they find they have a conscience and some integrity.
The second link in 108 upthread contained a quote from Ann Coulter (about withdrawing the vote for women) that I hadn't heard about before. Apparently National Review fired Coulter back in 2001. That crap (from the link in 108) about women being responsible for the rise of the welfare state is being peddled again lately by Phyllis Schlafly.
122
... Which is roughly what Lowry said, adding that he wasn't welcome to be an asshole in their pages. ...
Not exactly since the essay didn't appear in NR. Lowry said that the main reason anyone cared what Derbyshire wrote was because Derbyshire was a NR writer and that Lowry was going to deny Derbyshire the credibility that came with being a NR writer by ending Derbyshire's association with NR.
They're in a tough position
No, they really aren't. What Derbyshire wrote would get you sacked at any media organisation in the Western world. Hell, racist op-eds far less extreme got the person who runs the site Derbyshire posted it on sacked from his own gig at a British conservative magazine.
108, 109: See, this is just going to prove that no racists work at NRO, because they fired Derbyshire, right? But the left won't ever fire that nogoodnik racist Obama! Add some burping and make it a Jonah Goldberg column.
Didn't Derb also claim that a woman's (or girl's) sexual attractiveness peak between the ages of 15 and 20? Hasn't this sacking been a long time coming?
125
Didn't Derb also claim that a woman's (or girl's) sexual attractiveness peak between the ages of 15 and 20? ...
Not exactly, he claimed women look best naked between 15-20. Which seems like a matter of taste.
Immaterial, I know, but if the Derb proves the most impressive scalp that social media can claim in the ripples around Trayvon Martin's death, I shall be very disappointed in the era of the smartphone charivari new media-enabled populism.
125: He is still saying he likes to look at 15-year-olds naked in a sexual context. That is ungood.
129: Didn't we thread Derb-as-pedophile? to death a while ago? I recall a surprisingly emotional debate.
121.2: Is there some way "free speech" is anything more than a smokescreen here? Not providing someone column space is fundamentally different from preventing them from speaking.
129: Maybe he studied cases eighteen and older but put the data into a model to impute back to younger people.
130: I know we talked about it here, because that's where I heard about it. I don't remember bad feelings, but I tend to be oblivious to such things. Sorry, if I was poking at old wounds.
123: Right, but I meant that they're in a tough position for them, for their readership. They publish utterly shitheaded crap all the time, and their readership is used to it and laps it up; it's tough for the editors to now explain why Derbyshire's thing over at TakiMag crossed a line. (I'd actually like to see them explain, plainly, why it did.)
133: No, no, I was just recalling hazily. I don't think anybody would be personally offended by our debate (by Derb and his Rube Goldberg Li'l Offender's Kit of Stupid Arguments to Make and Share,* sure).
* I recall him once using (and, for the stupid cheap seats, explaining (!)) the word "Sippenhaft" w/r/t poor Ch/els/ea Cl/int/on. I oppose the dynastic principle in American politics pretty sincerely, whether it comes as President George W. Bush, Senator Hillary Clinton or appointing a late Representative's wife to his seat, but come on, man.
Addendum to 135*: Exceptions for JFK and RFK.
OT: You know what's really fun? Applying to jobs that expect you to have several publications in your very specific field, and would really love it if you spent half your time on campus teaching intro-level foreign languages (bonus for all three they need coverage in). Is there an oven I can get my head into?
138: Is someone at that institution trying to inspire a new series of David Lodge-esque satires of academia?
I'm waiting for the days when, to get an entry-level 4/4 appointment on two campuses of a school in the middle of a desert, you need a Nobel Prize in literature and also don't mind maintaining the Anthropology department's Excel spreadsheets.
"And this is Professor Something Something, our Shakespearean specialist, department medic and faculty club bootblack."
What's pathetic is that my first kicked-puppy reaction to that was to think if I could get the boarding school where I tutored Spanish as a starving MA student to write a recommendation for me. Maybe I could also get one from the spa where I cleaned the bathrooms and offer janitorial services, to get that edge.
I remember stories that weren't far from that concerning jobs in English departments in the early 90s. One bit that stood out was some guy writing about, IIRC, around 3,000 applicants for some job in Michigan and three or four of the applicants had Pulitzer's and many more had various other prizes.
You know what's really fun? Applying to jobs that expect you to have several publications in your very specific field, and would really love it if you spent half your time on campus teaching intro-level foreign languages
I don't know what schools are thinking when they set people up for failure like that.
I'm coming from the science side of things rather than the humanities, but I've heard of certain East coast small colleges that apparently have no idea what doing research involves.
One in particular apparently hasn't promoted any junior faculty in years because they are under the impression that it's totally reasonable to expect someone to teach a 3/3 schedule, have only undergrads to work with, have a negligible budget and publish regularly in good journals.
Which disciplines are notorious for only wanting to hire a sub-sub-specialist in a specific area, and which disciplines does it tend to be be-whatever-you-are-specialty? My understanding is that sociology, frex, is the latter, English is the former, and math is in the middle.
Do we have to talk about academia all the time? All the time? Sheesh!
As you were.
Do let us know when the list of parsimon-approved conversation topics is ready. We're flying blind here.
I'm about to vomit, if that is of interest.
Whenever parsimon orders: "as you were", I hear a top sergeant (or my grade school gym teacher) and I get confused. What was I doing before she gave the previous order? And what was that damned order that I didn't hear? I flail about, mentally, between attention and parade rest.
Moby, I'm sorry you're about to vomit.
Obviously people can talk about whatever they like.
Every time I smell food, I have to fight the urge.
Splurge should really be an onomatopoeia for vomit.
That was very much not pleasant. But I feel better now.
Anyway, I think I really lowered the bar on live blogging.
A friend of mine once proposed a vomit-themed niche publication, to be named SPEW! He is now married to a very nice professor of REDACTED literature at REDACTED.
Now I have the chills.
Easy, Moby. SPEW! was just a crazy dream.
I spent the afternoon violating copyright laws. It was enjoyable.
"Spewy" was Moby's nickname at Eton in 1928. Some rum times with Reeky, Scaley, the Dauphin d'Earwax and the chaps, what? Lighting the master's pet ferret on fire for the Boat Race.... [Brushes away tear.] Our salad days.
I spent the afternoon doing taxes*. It was not enjoyable.
*And I think TurboTax interprets a key part of the 1098-T Form differently from how some schools do (n=2 at least), and in a way disadvantageous to the taxpayer (it's not a required form, so you can just put the numbers in, but I was lucky to catch it). Still not 100% sure. Going to sleep on it.
"Spewy" was Moby's nickname at summer camp in 1986. He ran with Stinky, Sores, Long Dong and the shrimps. Remember that time they shanked Pigtails' pants at the talent show? Bug juice!
Well, you know that ogged would throw up* a dating thread or something.
What's in the news these days? Hilary for President in 2016? Eh? The woman is tired, for god's sake! Taxes are due soon: don't forget to take your Making Work Pay deduction if you make less than $96k per year (I think). Also: I paid off one, the largest, of my student loans, yay. What else? The septic tank replacement affair is going much better than expected.
Also, Mike Huckabee is starting a new radio program to challenge and replace Rush Limbaugh, who was just too extreme, you know, and this will be more advertiser-friendly.
* I've always thought that "throwing up" a post was a hilarious image.
"Spewy" was Moby's nickname at Microsoft in 2001. He ran with Sweatsack, Saddle Sores, Deep Diver and the Dataheads. Remember that time they snuck whiskey in, the day before the big deadline, and got so drunk that they puked in the boss's trashcan? Stock options!
The septic tank replacement affair is going much better than expected.
That is good news. Household repairs like that seem to have great potential for trouble.
173
*And I think TurboTax interprets a key part of the 1098-T Form differently from how some schools do (n=2 at least), and in a way disadvantageous to the taxpayer (it's not a required form, so you can just put the numbers in, but I was lucky to catch it). Still not 100% sure. Going to sleep on it.
Speaking of TurboTax a word of warning. If you are using TurboTax and you have long term capital gains make sure TurboTax is correctly treating them as long term. If my case it wasn't (due to what I believe is a program bug) which would have cost me a lot of money if I hadn't discovered the error more or less by accident.
178: Yeah. I can't say how much of a relief it is. We won't have to tear out the pretty 3-foot-high stone wall, a retaining wall -- that prospect had been bumming me out -- and no permits are needed, and just many other worries are removed. Woo!
112: At least the right side won.
We cleaned the porch today! It is so much cleaner! And I installed a new DIY bike rack as well. It's not quite as cool as the neighbors' hanging one, and 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but 'tis enough,'twill serve.
The cat DID NOT LIKE the fact that all the people were out on the porch and she was not. She was very perturbed.
Only 4 weeks until May Day!
Round #2 is over. I still had food in my belly. I'm going to sleep. That should be easier because I did my taxes the day after Stanley was bragging about doing his.
Idle thought: If you get a one of those lap bands in your stomach, is it harder to vomit because some of the future-vomit needs to get past an additional narrow point or easier because your gut is smaller? Does it matter if you had a bypass or not?
I don't think the former, because I don't think it's a choker exactly. But possibly not the latter, either. Is it "hard" to vomit?
What is a lap band in your stomach?
Oh, never mind, I'm sure I can look it up.
One of those obesity-surgeries to surgically restrict how much you can consume.
I figured it was something like that.
Moby, why are you throwing up, dear? Maybe Moby has gone to bed with the shivers.
Round #3. Volume decreasing at about 1/4 per incident. I've considered plotting the function for an estimated time to V=0 but really there isn't a reason to assume it will stop then.
I don't know why I'm sick because nine of us had the same meal at the same time. I'm well tended in a house with many adults. No need to worry about a serious problem.
I had the function wrong. Each time is about 1/4 of the last.
Fortunately Σ (1/4)^i is a convergent series.
Utterly OT: Apparently there is some large-ish controversy in the SFF world about Charlie Stross? And the Clarke Award, and one Christopher Priest who wrote a derisory post about the award and about Stross. This has been going on for a week, I gather. (Making Light has a post about it, in the context of the grief uppity women receive online, but I had no idea the controversy was occurring in the first place. Which just goes to show that one must get out more.)
Believe me, Parsimon; I'm just as sick of myself as you are.
AWB, I didn't mean that at all, really. This blog has just been talking about academia quite a bit lately, and I think sometimes of the readers and commenters who aren't involved in that world. I'm not sick of you, for heaven's sake. I just like talking about other areas from time to time.
Here's something on the SFF thing I described in 191. Warning: feminist content.
192: yea, I managed to entirely cover myself in not-glory over at Scalzi's place talking about it. Apparently subjectivist aesthetics is a highly touchy subject for well known sf authors, who knew?
Obviously it is entirely true that if P had been a women he would have got a lot difference reaction, but then it is pretty unlikely that female-P would even exist. Which is again a part of the problem.
My uncharitable reaction to Priest's comments about Stross's writing (uncharitable because I've never read Stross) was finding it extremely plausible that Stross is, indeed, a clunky writer/bad prose stylist, even if he does have interesting ideas.
Microbrewers and vintners -- the goddam meadery -- having to shut down live music because of the copyright goons. I blame Halford.
195: I've never read Stross either, but this from Priest is just so funny and evocative:
Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet.
The linked post up there is long, and the Stross remark is buried in it; the entire post is plain-spoken and becomes hilarious (cf. the part about Greg Bear).
I have no idea whether it's fair to Stross. And yes, a woman would probably have suffered abuse for it. Unless she were, I don't know, Ursula LeGuin or Margaret Atwood.
I don't like going on about Stross, because he has a lot of skill in some ways, and even in ways that often he doesn't get respect for. But he also has some real weaknesses, and you really get the feeling that at this rate he'll be a classic ghettoised sf author who will date very very quickly.
(In fact, even his older stuff is visibly dated -- Accelerando, frex --- and not just in the way in which all novels date.)
Priest's comments all seem pretty accurate, and not particularly harsh, which is why I am kinda confused at the reaction it got.
That Christopher Priest piece is remarkably well-crafted. Apparently like many others, I really love the line: "Have we lived and fought in vain?" I haven't read most of the books in question, so I can't evaluate his aesthetic judgment on the whole, but for me it counts decidely in his favour that he dislikes the ghastly writing of Sheri S. Tepper.
198.last: SF fandom, and much of its writer-dom, seem to become acutely defensive whenever someone mentions that writing ought to aspire to some artistic quality. They know, after all, that a lot of SF is seen as hackwork by those outside the genre.
How about it first aspires to be entertaining? That would beat the hell out of artistic turgidity.
Literature has failed. It's like Yahoo -- an enterprise that long ago outlived its usefulness, but has too much built-up infrastructure to die gracefully.
I'm not sure what Priest's criticism has to do with feminism, save for the fact that it engages in male privilege by virtue of being written by a man.
I guess he doesn't like Sheri Tepper, who is a well-known feminist science fiction writer, but I'm pretty sure I haven't read anything she's written since Grass so I feel unqualified to judge whether that criticism is anti-feminist.
202: If you mean literature crafted like fine artisanal cheeses with subtle after-tones of gym socks, then yes.
203: The feminist bit has nothing directly to do with Priest. Rules for Anchorites (linked above) wrote a post arguing that if a woman wrote that article, the response would be much shriller, and that she would get a billion rape threats. Which is probably true.
I've read a lot of Sheri Tepper (though like snarkout, nothing since Grass). I was talking to some woman a couple of months ago where it came up in the conversation that I'd read a lot of Tepper, and some other feminist sci-fi authors like Joanna Russ. It was sort-of clear that she found this incredibly attractive. Sorry, Sheri Tepper fans of the world, I'm taken!
206: And granted! It's just that given parsi's introduction, I expected this to be #GENDERFAIL. But it seems to be a donnybrook I've totally ignored about whether Christopher Priest is a bitter old man or the only person willing to speak harsh truths. (And I think saying women aren't allowed to fill either of those roles is probably even true, just orthogonal to the actual kerfluffle.) Maybe talking about self-policing and the gender politics of orking is more interesting than discussing whether Christopher Priest should fuck off and die (or, contrawise, is science fiction's only hope).
As a junior high schooler, I was puzzled by Tepper's (IIRC, mostly bad. But explicitly feminist!) Mavin Manyshaped fantasy series. Ladyeez.
179 Besides the long term capital gains thing, TurboTax also failed to carry over my capital losses on my state return (Wisconsin only lets you deduct $500/year).
I liked Grass and Gate to the Women's Country. I picked up something more recent by Tepper a few years ago and it was... not good. No idea about her newest novel.
The discussion of Cat's piece over at Scalzi was derailed by an arguably dubious example cited by Cat. But since most of the commenters making that point were stipulating that Cat is right, and only objecting that there is a difference between drive by vicious sexism and garden variety insults towards the end of a nasty personal argument between a blogger and author which has descended into back and forth name calling. The blogger in question was a good example, however. Well written over the top nasty rants making reasonable points with serious blindspots gets really horrible sexist attacks by commenters rather than just the variants on 'fuck you asshole' that a male blogger would get. (Blindspot example: An attack on a notorious urban fantasy series that descended into bad porn as sexist because the author has contempt for almost all her female characters except the protagonist. True, but maybe it's worth a mention that the protagonist, who we're meant to like and see as a really good person, routinely rapes men and whose only guilt over that fact is at engaging in casual sex. A bit more disturbing IMO than the low level sexism.)
I haven't read most of the Clarke nominees, but I have read all the Hugo ones except for the Walton. Rather disappointing. Three mediocre generic crap, one decent but not great entry by Mieville. Is the nod to the worst thing Abraham has written an attempt at some sort of restitution for having ignored his excellent earlier stuff, leading to his decision to write generic crap that will put food on the table?
176: TurboTax may not have given me the Making Work Pay thing. Can I file an addendum? How would I know?
Also shitty, MA will let you deduct undergraduate student loan interest that you haven't already deducted on your Federal return, so if you paid like $3,000 in interest and $2500 was for your postgrad degree, you could deduct the $500 that went to undergrad loans. The Feds do not provide you with the breakdown, so you have to add it up.
211.last Huh, Among Others got nominated? I really enjoyed it and suspect you might too, but for some reason
I'm surprised it's winning popularity contests. I can't think of a way to say this that doesn't sound dismissive, which is not at all what I mean. But even more than being about being a teen SF fan, it's about being a teen girl, and I'm glad that's not keeping the broader audience from taking it seriously.
211.last again I've only read the Walton and Mieville, but strongly disliked Mira Grant's previous zombie book. I'm sure I'll still read this one at some point, but the plot was ridiculous and the writing worse, plus I thought its version of a blog-centered world seemed implausible. One of my knitting group peers thinks it's fantatic, though, so I'm probably the outlier.
I thought that Embassytown was a real disappointment actually. The last third of Embassytown was pretty meh. I liked heaps of the book, but. (The same with The City and the City, although I thought that was a more successful book overall.)
I am pretty disappointed at the way nobody really seemed to bother discussing the actual claims Priest made, or even really think about the point of awards, or criticism, or anything. It all just seemed to degenerate into partisan arguing, and lots of #fails #wanks etc, which I dunno, fucking sf can be hugely depressing sometimes for a sheer lack of rigour or standards.
I agree about Embassytown's ending and I had a lot of quibbles with it even before then. I'm more torn about The City and the City, thinking that maybe it's deliberately frustrating at the end but also that by the time I get to the third half I'm sort of drunk on the story and just willing to go along with it. I'll probably read it again, but my last reread didn't resolve my uncertainty.
There was no round #4, in case anybody had a bet or something.
I agree on Embassytown vs. City and the City. I found the first two thirds of the latter absolutely amazing and while I felt the last third was lackluster, two thirds of an amazing book is still very good. Embassytown on the other hand had less of a drop off, and I'd even say that the last third was better than the last third of The City and the City, but it was still nowhere near as good overall.
I'm hoping I'll love Among Others since I don't want an excellent multiple award winning author to get yet another award for a below par book, yet it's clearly better than the other three. And if they were going to give a nomination to Abraham couldn't they do it for the good mindless entertainment epic fantasy rather than the mediocre mindless entertainment space opera?
191: One hesitates to suggest that (i) reading M/aking L/ight is a waste of time cough Racefail cough Doesn't what's-her-name earn her daily bread protecting C/or/y D/oct/or/ow from all the mean commenters who don't want to powder his EFF-logo diapers? cough and (ii) a certain class of SFF fans on the Internet are too quick to haul out the racist/sexist/classist/homophobic artillery whenever anyone says anything negative or even harsh about something, in defiance of the cruel fact that sometimes something sucks.
From our Department of Unfortunate Timing, Andrew Sullivan has taken a vacation and left Charles Murray as one of his guest posters.
221: I think Lady Bracknell's maxim applies here.
221 for reals this time: Getting comment numbers wrong certainly looks like carelessness.
219: Eh, Racefail as well as other failures on TNH's part do put one off, but I like Abi Sutherland (though I disagree with her about the necessity for an iron-fisted moderation policy). And sure, some SFF fans are too quick to haul out the blah blah blah, which renders the field a fucking minefield and at times kind of ... dare I say it, unserious.
I was mostly amused last night to discover that while certain sectors of the academic blogosphere have been tying themselves in knots for the past week over David Graeber, over yonder a bunch of people are tying themselves in knots about something else entirely! Who knew?? As I said, one should probably get out more.
Gate to the Women's Country
Have I commented here that I think there are some interesting parallels to be drawn between the city-state in Gate To Women's Country and The Republic?
[The city state is, if I recall correctly, ruled by a council of philosopher-queens, it survives surrounded by various enemies by the combination of superior technology and discipline, and they live a (somewhat) deliberately impoverished life. That's most of what I remember thinking about; I haven't read the book in years.]
Taxes are due soon: don't forget to take your Making Work Pay deduction if you make less than $96k per year (I think).
Having just filed my taxes, this had me worried that I had messed up.
No. I checked the 1040 instructions booklet again --"The making work pay credit has expired. You can not claim it on your 2011 return."
225: Oh. Huh. Thanks -- I just checked the form I printed out, and sure enough, it's for 2010. Glad I mentioned it, then; I didn't realize.
201: See, that's exactly what the first line of defense usually is! The diversion about "turgidity" is even characteristic.
224: They also identify homosexuality as a genetic disorder and breed it out of the population. Seriously.
227: So many books, so little time. I won't bring anything to the table but a willingness to be hooked in the first few pages. The author either does that or doesn't get read.
Biohazard throws down! The first few pages or nothing, he says! Of course there's no reason to think that fine, well-crafted work would lose a reader in the first few pages; it's not as through the choice is between turgid prose and talking horses with short paragraphs where the important words are in italics.
230: By my definition "fine, well-crafted work" will grab and hold on. I'm impatient; a review containing anything like "a reader will eventually rewarded..." is a warning not a recommendation.
I won't bring anything to the table but a willingness to be hooked in the first few pages.
Cat Valente at Stross's blog:
I think a lot about the relationship between the reader and the writer. ... I've heard a lot of teachers say that you should write for yourself and not an audience, and while it's true that you shouldn't pander to an audience's expectations (you can never satisfy them) to the exclusion of your own sensibilities and enjoyment, to me writing is hugely about the audience. Maybe it's my theatrical upbringing. Playing to an empty house is a fundamentally different act. And not as much fun.
So I have a number of different metaphors for that relationship. Possibly the one that gets remembered the most, which I said to a crowded room at Readercon not quite realizing the reaction it would get, is that it's a D/s relationship, and it's my book, so I'm the top. Meaning: I am creating a scene and guiding the reader through it, hoping not to screw up, to satisfy their needs, to deliver the goods with authority and power, and if they don't want to play anymore, well, safewording = closing the book.
That's the idealistic/romantic part of me, that sees the weird kind of love, that is not like anything else we call love but English is very word-poor in some areas, that happens between writers and their audience.
The hard-headed part thinks of the relationship as a creditor and a debtor. (I am quite sure this is influenced by my time as an editor, when I was very interested in the point where I could tell a story was worth reading or never would be.) The reader extends a certain amount of credit to the author--let's say 50 pages worth. And if the author can pay off that credit then that earns them more credit.
I think this proceeds very quickly: the first line earns you the first paragraph, the first paragraph earns you the first page, the first page will probably get you the whole first chapter, the first chapter will get you to chapter 3, and if a reader gets to chapter 3 and is still invested, they'll probably give you half the book if it's very long and the whole book if it's not. . . .
231: As parsimon pointed out more gently than I, this business of thinking "artistic" must mean "not crafted to entertain" is a false dichotomy. Something that is entertaining or gripping and well-written and intelligent is preferable to something that isn't.
SFF writers blog and tweet too much in general and far, far too much about "craft," "storytelling" and, especially, "worldbuilding."
One is become a curmudgeon before one's time.
"artistic" must mean "not crafted to entertain" is a false dichotomy.
Right. That's why I said "first" and not "instead".
235.2 seems way too over determined to blame on some guy tweeting.
238: Were SFF types always so thin-skinned, Biohazard? I don't even read much of the stuff's Internet manifestations and it seems like there's a new "___Fail" or "somebody called somebody not as good a writer as Charles Dickens, which is racist and classist" fiasco every week at least.
236: Well, that you contrasted it with "artistic turgidity" implied that you were positing one or the other, but thanks for the clarification. When I said "diversion" I meant that asically the whole business about "artistic turgidity" comes out of nowhere and isn't relevant to much of anything, since nobody in or connected to the conversation mentioned or recommended "turgidity" in any form.
("Turgidity" in writing, that is.)
239: The Internet means a lot more contact between writers and fans than ever before. If a writer chooses to, they can have all the direct contact with fandom they can handle and then some. For some, this proves inadvisable. Hence the events of RaceFail (where in all fairness it wasn't just the writers who were being douchebags), and various other online slapfights.
239: His Lordship has it right, I think. There've always been (that I know of) fights and factions but the firepower available was limited by only having mimeograph/Xerox machines and the Postal Service as stand-off weapons, or going to conventions and doing it face-to-face.
The hyper-emotional aspect is magnified by what the DE termed "the intimate distance of cyberspace" back in the early Nineties when talking about long-distance romances, arguments, and break-ups.
Yeah, Harlan Ellison was well known 30 years ago for calling everyone idiots in all available venues, and he's also famous for not using computers.
242, 243: I hope I wouldn't be too far away from the target if I adverted to Henry Kissinger's attribution of the bitterness of academic disputes to their very low stakes.
245: But the stakes (rather than being just an extra helping of peanut butter) are ideas and those, including Kissinger's, are what people will kill and die for.
An extra helping of peanut butter is a pretty good idea.
235 He says, writing in the style of the characters in CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series.
244: Yeah, and not just Ellison. I have some vague sense that back in the day, there was just as much in-fighting among editors and writers (maybe not so much including fans), mostly enabled by their inevitable mutual presence at Cons and the battle over awards of various kinds. There were turf wars among editors of various magazines -- Analog? not sure -- and I really don't remember the details.
The genre is thin-skinned in significant part because of its struggle over literary status, of course; while the internet has magnified some things, I'm not sure the underlying issue has changed.