Will Shetterly's Blog, page 133

XKCD doesn't understand free speech—or the difference between legal and moral rights

The cartoon


Its mouseover text: "I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express."


My analysis
Panel One: This only refers to the legal right of free speech, and it's objectively wrong. Every country can arrest you for what you say. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden will happily assu...

What 92% of Americans consider ideal is only possible under socialism

This is a few years old, but I happened on it again today, and was struck by this: The distribution of wealth that 92% of Americans want is impossible under capitalism, but very possible under socialism.

Here's the reality:

In case you missed it:

I just figured out how to do racial reparations!

I'm a great fan of Matt Bruenig's work, but I was disappointed with Glaring limits of the Civil Rights Act: We need to redistribute wealth. He says, "Ideally, we could work towards reparations in the form of redistributing wealth along racial lines."

In the comments, I said,

How do you redistribute along racial lines? Do you exclude the descendants of black slaveowners? And when you do the redistribution, what do you do about the white poor? Should one racial group suffering from gene...

An essential point about averages

At Are Americans really jingoistic yahoos? A cautionary statistical tale, Gibby the Fifth commented, "My boss taught me another lesson about averages – always look at the range as well as the mean. To illustrate, he pointed out that the average American has one tit and one ball."

a bad day for feminism and social work, and a fine example of fooling a mob

via Sociopath woman pushes a man off a ledge, then gets cheered by a crowd for the deed:



MTSU student jailed in assault of preacher: "A female Middle Tennessee State University student was booked for simple assault at the Rutherford County jail Tuesday after a confrontation with a visiting preacher a few hours earlier at the university. Michaela Morales, a junior social work major, according to Sidelines newspaper, faces charges after visiting preacher John McGlone fell in an altercation...

Regarding Damien Walter's "Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer"

At Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer, I left this comment: "I'm surprised Walter thinks SF didn't get to the subject until the 1960s. Theodore Sturgeon's "The World Well Lost" is from 1953."

I read Sturgeon as a kid. Maybe he made me think the field is more accepting than it is, but Sturgeon seemed to set the tone for the field as I have known it all my life. I rather like Tom Cram's comment on the article:

Sci-Fi has been at the forefront of exploring/exploding gen...

simplifying my online life

I'm doing a little online life simplification. I'll confine link-sharing to my twitter account. My G+ and Facebook accounts will be for interacting there—and I don't plan to do that much. This blog will be my only active one, and what it'll become, I dunno. I suspect I'll be focusing more on basic income, which I continue to like because it's a program that capitalists and socialists can support.

ETA: And there will be dancing—because Emma Goldman was right.

Would Basic Income administrators become corrupt?

At reddit, historyandproblems noted, "That is a LOT of money feeding through the system to tax and then distribute a basic income to everyone."

Indon Dasani ansered,

You know what part of the US government has very little problem with corruption? The Social Security Administration. You know what part of the US government is rife with corruption despite there being far less money passing through it? The Department of Defense. Basic Income is less prone to corruption than the average governm...

this week's quote on the state of the plutocracy

“Since the 1960s, the richest one-thousandth of U.S. households, with a minimum net worth today above $20 million, have more than doubled their share of U.S. wealth, from around 10 percent to more than 20 percent. Take a moment to process that. One-thousandth of the country owns one-fifth of the wealth.” —Jordan Weissmann, The Shocking Rise of Wealth Inequality: Is it Worse Than We Thought?

why you should doublecheck your Google directions

Let's say you're planning to take the light rail to the Mall of America to see Captain America today, so you google the directions. Google says you'll arrive at the Transit Station and take 8 minutes to walk 0.5 miles to the Mall of America.

That's because Google thinks you're drunk: