I think they should be shunned and punished for being the bigots that they are.
Gary Gygax
Thoughts on his suggested reading list:
Ideological diversity in science fiction and fantasy was a given in the seventies. We are hopelessly homogenistic in comparison to them.
The program of political correctness of the past several decades has made even writers like Ray Bradbury and C. L. Moore all but unreadable to an entire generation. The conditioning is so strong, some people have almost physical reactions to the older stories now.
All part of the reason that I don’t read anywhere near as much SF as I did as a kid.
Columbus Day
Some perennial thoughts from Instapundit (and Jim Bennett).
I agree that Columbus gets too much credit, and I don’t disagree that his behavior was depraved by modern lights. But the Carib Arawak were hardly the noble savages that the SJWs would have us believe. They had themselves subjugated the Taino, killing, raping, assimilating, into a brutal patriarchal society that practiced human sacrifice and, by some accounts, cannibalism. So it’s amusing to see all the whining about Columbus in that context.
It’s Like It’s The Nineties Again
Gennifer Flowers is back:
Asked what she thinks of Hillary’s candidacy and her platform focusing in part on women’s issues, Flowers began by explaining, “You know, people criticize me for talking about her because I had an affair with her husband.”
“And I don’t blame them for that,” she continued. “I understand that. I understand that they can be mad at me. I get it. I accept my responsibility. … But she’s never accepted her responsibility at being an enabler. She’s been an enabler that has encouraged him to go out and do whatever he does with women.”
“Woman’s rights. Ha!” Flowers retorted. “I personally have worked my tail off to get where I am in the entertainment business, which has not been easy since the Clinton scandal, by the way. … Hillary never put up a shingle and worked for her clients and built her clientele. She always got things on the back of her husband. … I think it’s a joke that she would run on women’s issues.”
…Klein referenced an interview from this past week in which Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report asked on Alex Jones’ radio show, “Why aren’t we seeing Hillary’s lovers? … Where’s the cover-up on this? … So many issues that are suppressed on a daily basis.”
Listen to Part 2 of Gennifer Flowers talk with Aaron Klein:
Affirming comments she made in 2013 to the Daily Mail, Flowers replied to Klein, “I know that Bill acknowledged to me that he was aware that she had a propensity for women and he didn’t care.”
“I’m not saying that she is a lesbian, but he acknowledged that she, as we say down on Arkansas, took a liking to women.”
Like Drudge, Flowers also asked, “Why something hasn’t come out on that? That’s amazing.”
I wish it were. I knew about it twenty years ago.
I blame Hillary for this. If she weren’t such a power monger, we wouldn’t have to go through all this again. This time, the gatekeepers are gone, and it will come out.
The Alleged Rules Of Writing
…are actually superstitions. An interesting essay from Steven Pinker:
I have long recognised the need for a style guide based on modern linguistics and cognitive science. The manuals written by journalists and essayists often had serviceable rules of thumb, but they were also idiosyncratic, crabby, and filled with folklore and apocrypha. Linguistics experts, for their part, have been scathing about the illogic and ignorance in traditional advice on usage, but have been unwilling to proffer their own pointers to which rules to follow or how to use grammar effectively. The last straw in my decision to sit down and write the book was getting back a manuscript that had been mutilated by a copy editor who, I could tell, was mindlessly enforcing rules that had been laid out in some ancient style book as if they were the Ten Commandments.
As in many other life activities, it’s OK to break the “rules” if a) you know the rules and the reasons for them and b) you know what you’re doing. Unfortunately, that’s a rare combination.
I liked this:
The real problem is that writing, unlike speaking, is an unnatural act. In the absence of a conversational partner who shares the writer’s background and who can furrow her brows or break in and ask for clarification when he stops making sense, good writing depends an ability to imagine a generic reader and empathise about what she already knows and how she interprets the flow of words in real time. Writing, above all, is a topic in cognitive psychology.
It’s what I try to do when I write, though it’s always best to have someone else read it to say, “what do you mean by that?”
Hillary’s Server
What the FBI is up to. And fresh evidence continues to undermine her email defense.
And, no Barack, it’s actually kind of stupid to think that this wasn’t a major breach of security. And it’s corrupt to weigh in with your opinion on an ongoing investigation as you did here (and with the “not a smidgen of evidence” about the IRS). Now the FBI has to operate under the burden of knowledge that you won’t be happy if they dispute the president.
How Scientists Fool Themselves
…and how they can stop.
How Red Was My Hollywood
Yes, those on the blacklist really were communists, and were trying to subvert the culture. And yes, there was something wrong with that.
Now, of course, you’re blacklisted in Hollywood for opposing socialism.
El Nino
…is too big to fail.
We need the rain, but I suspect we’ll get a lot of it in places that hurt rather than help. But the old saying is that droughts always end with floods. And it’s not clear that the drought will be over with a single wet winter. There’s a lot of snowpack to build and reservoirs to fill to get back to sufficient margin.
Global Warming Scare Tactics
…environmental groups have known since 2000 that efforts to link climate change to natural disasters could backfire, after researchers at the Frameworks Institute studied public attitudes for its report “How to Talk About Global Warming.” Messages focused on extreme weather events, they found, made many Americans more likely to view climate change as an act of God — something to be weathered, not prevented.
Some people, the report noted, “are likely to buy an SUV to help them through the erratic weather to come” for example, rather than support fuel-efficiency standards.
Since then, evidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.
Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts.
But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming simply can’t be supported by the science. Our warming world is, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increasing heat waves and intense precipitation in some places, and is likely to bring more extreme weather in the future. But the panel also said there is little evidence that this warming is increasing the loss of life or the economic costs of natural disasters. “Economic growth, including greater concentrations of people and wealth in periled areas and rising insurance penetration,” the climate panel noted, “is the most important driver of increasing losses.”
People like the Bills McKibben and Nye look like fools when they seize on every weather event to evangelize their religion.