Will Shetterly's Blog, page 149

Lawrence Sterne on race

From The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Wikipedia:

In 1766, at the height of the debate about slavery, Ignatius Sancho wrote to Laurence Sterne [19] encouraging the famous writer to use his pen to lobby for the abolition of the slave trade.[20]"That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many - but if only one - Gracious God! - what a feast to a benevolent heart!"In July, 1766 Sancho's letter was received by R...

from a writer's perspective, the greatest evil of capitalism is...

Too many people write for money instead of love, so the world of literature fills with jabber, to use Charlie Brooker's term.

It's amazing how much jabber I endure in the search for meaningful and entertaining words—but the jabber's wearing me down. It may be why I don't read much fiction anymore.

Yes, Samuel Johnson said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" but what's clever isn't necessarily true. If he'd simply said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote," I'd agree with him.

T...

"I'm not humorless, but...": Salon.com vs. Patton Oswalt

Thinking about the liberal equivalent of the conservative "I'm not racist, but...", I googled "I'm not humorless but". Among the results were a slapfight between Salon. com and Patton Oswalt:


Patton Oswalt | A SALON I USED TO KNOW

If your first response to a joke is to ask whether your politics should keep you from laughing, you don't understand humor or human nature. In the case of Oswalt's initial joke, if...

Do gun laws make it safe for white people to kill darker-skinned people?

In her Continuum GoH Speech, N. K. Jemisin says, "Right now there are laws in places like Florida and Texas which are intended to make it essentially legal for white people to just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence."

Malcolm X would've disagreed:


So would the Black Panthers. From Fred Hampton's Power Anywhere Where There's People:

Huey Newton went and got Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther Party on a national leve...

On the female gaze, Vampire Diaries, gothic romances, and SFWA

In her Continuum GoH speech, NK Jemisin says "two of the genre’s most venerable white male writers made some comments in a series of recent articles which have been decried as sexist". She's speaking of Resnick and Malzberg, who reminisced in the SFWA Bulletin that editor Bea Mahaffey was "competent, unpretentious, and beauty pageant gorgeous".

In Is it too late for SF?, Jemisin begins, "So yesterday I went to Crunch Gym to take part in my first Cardio Sculpting class. The instructor...

on the female gaze, Vampire Diaries, gothic romances, and SFWA

In her Continuum GoH speech, NK Jemisin says "two of the genre’s most venerable white male writers made some comments in a series of recent articles which have been decried as sexist". She's speaking of Resnick and Malzberg, who reminisced in the SFWA Bulletin that editor Bea Mahaffey was "competent, unpretentious, and beauty pageant gorgeous".

In Is it too late for SF?, Jemisin begins, "So yesterday I went to Crunch Gym to take part in my first Cardio Sculpting class. The instructor...

On name-calling and ad hominem, the bottom-feeders of Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement

Yesterday, I was listening to the radio, and a psychiatrist was talking about people who hear an insult and cannot separate themselves from it. He was restating an old idea: the mature response to an insult is not to feel hurt, but to see that the person making insults is suffering.
Insults have fascinated me since I was called a nigger-lover as a boy: insults tell you little about their target, but they tell you everything about what the insulter fears. Since I had been taught that loving eve...

three reasons economic class does not fit in identity politics

In a capitalist society, class is a relationship to economic power, not a social identity. Here's why:

1. The goal for social identities is social equality. The goal for the working class is a fair distribution of wealth for everyone, regardless of social identity.

2. Most members of a social identity want to keep their identity. Few members of the working class want to keep working for capitalists.

3. In a capitalist society, anyone with capital is a capitalist; anyone without it is working cla...

fat women will kick your ass at Zumba

Dance classes are a great place to be reminded that general rules are essential for betting and useless for understanding individuals. A quarter to a third of fat people are medically healthy, and I suspect most, if not all, of them get their share of exercise. At the Y's dance classes, some of the most impressive dancers are fat.

If you're out of shape, you're out of shape, whether you're fat or thin. So if you decide to start exercising after a period of inactivity, don't think about your we...

the counties with the US's shortest life expectancy are white

The worst US county for life expectancy for males is McDowell County, West Virginia. It's 89.1% white. The worst for females is Perry, Kentucky. It's 97.34% white.

Counties identified in Life Expectancy in Some U.S. Counties Is No Better Than in the Third World - NationalJournal.com

Related: Facts are Cool: race and gender, now with class! which notes that the poorest counties in the US are also mostly white.