Will Shetterly's Blog, page 132

The top three YA writers on NPR's 100 are female, plus When people learned J. K. Rowling was female

According toBest Young Adult Novels, Best Teen Fiction, Top 100 Teen Novels, the three most popular YA writers are, in order, J. K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, and Harper Lee. John Green, the first man, shows up at number four.



I looked that up because I fell into a discussion atBlindingly White: BookCon, John Green, and Knowing When It's Time to Speak Up, where Brenna Clarke Gray said,

we

Jim is not called "Nigger Jim" in Huckleberry Finn

FromList of Tom Sawyer characters - Wikipedia:

The words "nigger" and "Jim" appear side-by-side only once inAdventures of Huckleberry Finn, in Chapter XXXI, in a letter Huck writes to Mrs. Watson, but they are not used as a name. After "nigger Jim" appeared inAlbert Bigelow Paine's1912 Clemens biography, it continued to be used by twentieth-century critics, includingLeslie Fiedler,Norman

Jonas Kyratzes has the best take yet on the "free speech" XKCD cartoon

Free Speech and the Means of Communication | Jonas Kyratzes

Actually, what XKCD doesn't understand is that money is not speech (XKCD doesn't understand free speech, take 2)

On free speech in general, I still stand by what I saidabout this cartoonatXKCD doesn't understand free speech—or the difference between legal and moral rights.





But it took some discussion in the comments there before I realized how badly XKCD had addressed the issue if it's supposed to apply to Brendan Eich, the Mozilla CEO whodonated $1000 to defeat gay marriage in California and,

a "best art" award is not a "best person" award: on Vox Day and the Hugo, and Elia Kazan and the Oscar

The more repressive leftists of science fiction fandom are upset because Vox Day has a story on this year's Hugo Award ballot and are proudly announcing they will not read it and will vote against it. I, a free speech socialist who has worked and marched for many causes that Vox Days abhors, from integration to gay marriage, am entirely indifferent to his presence on the ballot and will shrug if

Haters hate haters, and the intolerant are intolerant of intolerance

Sometimes when talking about free speech and tolerance, someone will proudly say they're intolerant of intolerance. Sometimes when talking about hate, someone will say they hate haters. I've been that person. I thought I was clever, which made it harder to see I was wrong.

I've found a quote for repressive anti-racists:

"The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have

Gayatri Spivak on silenced white men

Gayatri Spivak (1990) The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Routledge: London, pp. 62-63:

I will have in an undergraduate class, let’s say, a young, white, male student, politically-correct, who will say: “I am only a bourgeois white male, I can’t speak.” In that situation – it’s peculiar, because I am in the position of power and their teacher and, on the other hand, I am

on equalism, egalitarianism, and feminism—and who's appropriating who. ETA: masculinism, too!

Someone on Reddit claimed egalitarians were "appropriating" from feminism, so I just went word nerd at the Oxford English Dictionary and found their first usages: In English, egalitarian appears in 1885 and feminism in 1895.Both words come from the French, but egalité was first there, too; Charles Fourier didn't coin feminism until 1837. So if anyone's appropriating, it's feminism.

I also

pragmatists vs ideologues: on rape culture theorists and Jim C. Hines

I reject rape culture theory for the same reason RAINN does: I'm a pragmatist. I want rape to be addressed in the most effective way possible. When I'm wrong, I'm glad to be corrected because I'm not committed to an ideology that I feel obliged to defend.

When I think of people committed to a belief, I think of the Seventh Day Adventists, who were certain Jesus would return on October 22, 1844. When that didn't happen, they tweaked their beliefs and kept going. The Adventists I've met have bee...

David Lisak on rape and rape culture

Jim C. Hines wrote RAINN on Rape Culture in response to my Has Jim C. Hines addressed RAINN's refutation of "rape culture"? If you haven't followed this issue at all, read  The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN)'s recommendations to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault (pdf) or, at the very least, my excerpt from it at Debunking rape culture theory, a linkfest.

The crucial figure in the discussion is David Lis...