Comments Elsewhere

tiago,

Actually, I think Ctrl-Z should work fine for undoing the Textile-to-HTML conversion without needing to add a toggle button, and you could just click the button a second time for the redo. At least, the Instant Markdown script that I hacked together based on Instant Textile allows for a normal Ctrl-Z undo, and I don’t think I changed anything that would affect that.

Thanks for this post. On a related note:

I suggest to you that transformation of the male sexual model under which we now all labor and “love” begins where there is a congruence, not a separation, a congruence of feeling and erotic interest

I think that the primary thing that the “definition” demonstrates is the kind of gibberish that you get out when you assign writing tasks to a committee.

Pham, blaming the lack of non-white characters on the lack of non-white authors doesn’t really tip the scales at all. There’s no reason why white authors can’t be expected to write stories with sensitive and intelligent portrayals of non-white characters. If they can manage non-human races, they can surely manage to think up a non-white human if the existence of such people crosses their minds, and they put a good faith effort into it. If it doesn’t cross their minds, or they don’t put a good faith effort into it, then that’s something to worry about in itself.

Also, while the invisibility of non-white characters is one of the worrying things about Golden Age sci-fi, as far as race goes, it’s hardly the only thing. I can think of some pretty nasty cases of overtly racist stories from Golden Age heavies. To take a rather egregious example, Heinlein’s Sixth Column is pretty embarassing more or less from start to finish. (To be fair, Heinlein later on said he was really dissatisfied with Sixth Column, and that the idea had really come from John W. Campbell. But then, that only relocates the problem.)

Anyway, I’m not at all sure that this is what the Seattle school officials were referring to. Then again, I’m not at all sure that they were referring to anything concrete or identifiable at all.

A special, degenerate subspecies resulting from the crossing of the Copy/Paste and MRA Talking Points trolls is the Horror File Quote List Troll. This troll is too stupid to even copy and paste an argument related to the discussion at hand; it prefers to paste in endless lists of cherry-picked and wilfully misrepresented quotes allegedly penned by feminist authors. For an example, you can see one in action in three different threads on Feministing: [1], [2], [3]. The basic M.O. is to find some thin reed by which you can connect your favorite list of Evil Feminist Quotes to the current conversation (even the most tangential connection will do), and then you fire up the Cut-‘n’-Paste from a series of lists of dishonestly presented and wildly out-of-context quotes intended to prove the malicious, man-hatin’ intent of the monolithic conspiracy running The Feminist Movement.

The quote lists themselves are a sort of ever-mutating parasite that spreads through the trolls’ activities; they’ve actually been circulating among anti-feminist trolldom since the days of Usenet, and many of them can have their histories traced by the typographical errors, attributions errors, and other mistakes that have been endlessly replicated through their cut-n-paste vectors for over a decade now.

earlbecke:

I have to seriously question anyone who claims to be an ally who is willing to use gender-based, anti-gay, racist, ablist, etc., slurs. (Not in a reclaimatory sense, of course. Totally different discussion.)

Robert:

Translation: you’ll extend the courtesy of accepting intentionalism to people you like.

Except, Robert, that the difference between “reclamatory” and “non-reclamatory” uses of slurs doesn’t just have to do with the intentions behind them. It also has to do with substantive differences in how they are used. So treating “reclamatory” uses of slurs differently from more mundane uses of them need not have anything in particular to do with “intentionalism.”

I know how you love to fire off a good zinger over Lefties holding their comrades to lower standards than everyone else, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to try harder than this.

Jill: This will surely be an unpopular argument with some people here, but completely open borders would wreak havoc on both our economy and our national security, …

Why?

Jill: And like I said in the post, we really need to loosen up our asylum policies. When I said “anyone and everyone,” I was referring to immigrants in general, not just asylum-seekers.

Part of the problem with this is that not everyone agrees on legitimate reasons for granting asylum, and if you allow the politicians to pick and choose who to let in, then the kinds of people they recognize as “real” refugees are going to be limited by the political blinders that mainstream politicians or immigration bureaucrats happen to have on when they approach the issue. To take a real world example, it’s been like pulling teeth getting the immigration bureaucracy to recognize the threat of almost certain death as cause for granting asylum, if the threat comes from your abusive ex-husband — because wife beating is not considered a “political” issue by the immigration inquisitors or their political bosses, and so doesn’t really come into their worldview when they ask themselves who counts as a political refugee. People written off as “economic” refugees are routinely turned away, as if starvation were somehow less of a crisis for the refugee than near-certain murder. Generally speaking, political agencies respond to political incentives, and frankly I don’t trust politicians to pick and choose who counts as a “real” refugee, especially not when most of the candidates already come from marginalized groups that are routinely misunderstood and ill-served by politicians here as well as abroad.

“Now, I’m not arguing that we have to let in anyone and everyone…”

Well, why not?

It is criminal that there’s a single refugee in this world who cannot immediately find asylum and a new life for herself in another country. It is inexcusable that this system of international apartheid is maintaining the

• feministe

Randy:

This is no longer a debate about right and wrong. It is a debate about the will of the people, and the will of the people is to stop illegal immigration.

If political debate is not debate about right and wrong, then political debate must be changed. There’s no sense talking strategy until you’ve first settled on the right goal, and thus no sense talking practical politics except in light of principled convictions about how people ought to be treated. And while I’m a lot more dubious than you are that there are easy and reliable ways to determine what “the will of the people” is, I do know that if the will of the people demands immorality, in the form of an injustice against innocent people, the will of the people must be ignored, evaded, or resisted.

The best the illegals who are here can hope for is a legal path to citizenship through a guest worker program. Every other option involves their being forced to leave. Only the form of the force used differs from option to option. Deny them jobs and benefits or arrest them – its all the same. They have to go.

Don’t talk bosh. There is a perfectly valid third option:

Stop attacking peaceful immigrants.

ariadne:

I can’t believe how much we’ve all been duped into thinking it’s more important than, say, health care, securing nuclear materials, capturing OBL……

I think it’s pretty important to the immigrants.

PJGoober:

For all the libertarian commenters, you need to recognize the negative externalities imposed by tons of poor immigrants due to the welfare state, and then realize that the welfare state is probably never ever going away. I’m choosing my battles wisely, and ending massive unskilled immigration seems more doable.

The existence of the welfare state is not immigrants’ fault, and in point of fact they are able to take considerably less advantage of it (especially if they don’t have their papers) than any new brat born to upstanding U.S. citizens. So why are you willing to take it out on immigrants but not on elderly citizens drawing Social Security checks, suburban kids getting a government-funded education, American citizens drawing TANF, WIC, food stamps, SSI? American farmers drawing agriculural subsidies or American business owners taking grants and loans from the Feds?

All of these people are imposing “negative externalities” on their neighbors by means of government programs, yet I see no proposals for rounding up the urban poor, deporting the disabled, putting the elderly into “detention centers,” or building guarded barricades to block surburban kids from getting to the government schools. It is only immigrants that you’re willing to forcibly restrain, beat, shoot, confine, and exile from their current homes (all at further taxpayer expense, mind you; “enforcement” is not any more free than welfare benefits are), in order to make some inroads on the negative externalities being imposed by a welfare state that they played no role in creating. Why? Because, apparently, they are politically vulnerable and you have no trouble using government force against innocent third parties when you feel it’s more politically expedient to do so than working to change or resist the system that robs you in the first place.

That is, frankly, despicable.

… and that’s why I’ve given up on electoral politics as a serious means to social change.

If I spend 30 years’ worth of time and money that I’m never going to get back on organizing, and all I can expect to get at the end of it is a bunch of hang-wringing quasi-liberal Democrat politicos sitting in the existing institutions of power, then I may as well save myself the trouble and just bang my head into a brick wall for the same length of time. At least the brick wall won’t fill my mailbox with fundraising junk mail, too.