Will Shetterly's Blog, page 59

Some political whimsy from Twitter today

I tweeted this quote by an unknown writer: "Socialist jokes are only funny if everyone gets them." Which inspired these responses: "I'd tell you the joke about capitalism but I doubt you'd buy it." —@jaymiejmoore "I'd tell you the joke about socialism but I doubt you'd share it." —@WillShetterly "i'd tell you the joke about communism, but it's never really been tried" —@chaosprime "I'd tell

By Ta-Nehisi Coates' logic on Confederate, The Handmaid's Tale should be cancelled

In Don't Give HBO's 'Confederate' the Benefit of the Doubt, Coates argues that 1. "Hollywood has churned out well-executed, slickly produced epics which advanced the Lost Cause myth of the Civil War." Hollywood has also produced slickly sexist work. 2. "...while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and

Why the Libertarian Party should, by their logic, be a socialist party

Simon Kongshøj wrote in a comment at Facebook: Granting for the sake of argument that personal liberty requires economic liberty and that we value personal liberty, then every person ought to have economic liberty. Economic liberty is impossible for a person whose economic means are so meagre that he/she cannot make meaningfully free choices (slaves and serfs are the extreme of that; but the

The Goldfish Bowl Fallacy, aka The Lived Experience Fallacy

The Goldfish Bowl Fallacy: the idea that a local knows a situation better than an outsider, and a person who has lived an experience knows it better than people who have researched it. This fallacy appears regularly in the writings of people who want to justify their local customs—defenders of slavery and apartheid claimed outsiders couldn't know what was best in their land. The name comes

If the Black Panthers were class reductionists, I'm one too

“Working class people of all colors must unite against the exploitative, oppressive ruling class. Let me emphasize again — we believe our fight is a class struggle, not a race struggle.” — Bobby Seale, co-founder Black Panther Party “Those who want to obscure the struggle with ethnic differences are the ones who are aiding and maintaining the exploitation of the masses of the people: poor

Six hard questions about HBO's Confederate

To write alternate history well, you have to be accurate about history up to the moment that you change, and you have to make your changes matter to your audience, which means your story should be as complex as the history we know. With that in mind, here are some facts and questions for the Confederate showrunners: 1. Who is "white" in this timeline? Before the Civil War, different southern

The Malcolm X "Respect Everyone" Flowchart

"Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery." - Malcolm X Has someone put a hand on you? No                                                           Yes Be peaceful, courteous,                           Send them to the cemetery law-abiding, and respectful                       but stay respectful—the

The "shake" of Shakesville is for Shakedown Artist—on the greed of Melissa McEwan

I usually ignore Melissa McEwan because life's too short for feminists who don't realize that because poverty is disproportionately female, Bernie Sanders' policies would do more to help women than Hillary Clinton's would have. But she's attacking the dirtbag left, and I love the dirtbag left. One member of Chapo Trap House, Felix Biederman, made a joke that went too far—it was about rape. I

Women show more gender bias than men in Implicit Association Tests

There Are Problems With the Gender-Bias IAT, Too -- Science of Us: There Are Problems With the Gender-Bias IAT, Too -- Science of Us: "As Greg Mitchell and Phil Tetlock put it in a book chapter that is very critical of the IAT, “One particularly puzzling aspect of academic and public dialogue about implicit prejudice research has been the dearth of attention paid to the finding that men usually

Is there any evidence that Bernie Sanders ultimately helped or hurt Hillary Clinton's campaign?

There are two narratives that annoy me because I see no evidence for them. The first is the Clinton camp's insistence that Sanders hurt her chances of winning. The second is the authoritarian socialist insistence that Sanders helped the Democrats by running. I followed the polls at RealClearPolitics. So far as I can tell, Sanders had no effect on Clinton—the only effect he had was to make