I see that the ever-awesome Sarah Kendzior feels the same way about the tabletization and dumbing down of every piece of software out there.

Go to her main profile page to see what she’s talking about. Twitter is basically unusable now from a content consumption perspective for anyone with an IQ above that of a turnip.

If the idiotic fuck-up misogynist Elliott Rodger hadn’t killed a bunch of people, we’d be better off.

But that’s not what happened. So at least we got the #yesallwomen movement out of it.

Should be required reading in all schools across the land.

Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf is better than Heaney’s as it is more like the original poem; which is also why people claim that Tolkien is a bad writer. That is to say, that Tolkien mostly wrote even his original works as if they were Old English literature translated as faithfully as possible into modern English.

I’ve read all of Heaney’s translation, and some of Tolkien’s, and Tolkien’s feels foreign, meaning that it feels spawned by far different consciousnesses, living in a different world. Which of course is exactly how in my view it should feel. Those who wrote Beowulf were very, very different from us.

How much have white Americans benefited from slavery and its legacy?

Note: I am not endorsing this post. Not everything I post here is an endorsement. But I unlike most people do like examining things from all angles.

But, not quite on the same tack as Cowen, some other thoughts.

Sometimes there is a difference between what is morally correct and what makes economic sense, or even what would actually help. Understanding that is important, even (and especially) if one decides to do something immediately harmful for some hoped future gain, or just for the perception of righting past wrongs.

Personally, I think dismantling institutional racism is far, far more important than reparations, which would utterly divide the country.

Reparations are likely only to reinforce racism among those already prone to its worst manifestations, and would not have any lasting positive effect among black Americans. It’d be better that money were given to all poor people, white, black, or other, or even just $100,000 (for example) given to every person in America regardless of color or wealth (probably the most ideal solution most likely not to promote deranged animosity).

Anyway, arguing about reparations is about like arguing about meeting Albus Dumbledore, in that it’s about as likely to occur.

Why is it that literary writers rarely can write a good story – some of them being so idiotically preposterous or non-existent that the whole work is unreadable – and “genre” writers often have such terrible writing?

Do good ideas make for terrible writing? And does decent writing somehow make one have no ideas?

That’s not universally true, but it’s 98% true. Most literary writers can barely write a story that a 3-year-old would find plausible or interesting, and most genre writers don’t do much better at writing than a semi-talented 10th grader.

But I can’t understand why.

Here I stand and here I’ll stay.

This reminds me of my childhood and being told that I couldn’t possibly understand things that I very much did understand, often better than the adults pillorying me did. Children – even ones not as wildly precocious as I was – understand and realize far more than most adults give them credit for.

Even if you aren’t reading Moby Dick when you’re eight, most kids are extremely perceptive about their social milieu and what’s expected of them. Girls especially get told how they should be, and who they should be, more often and more forcefully than boys do.

I suspect that girls of the age 7-13 understand a lot of the messages in Frozen better than adults watching it do (if many of the adults understood it, they probably wouldn’t let girls watch it).

When I hear that people miss living in NYC, I can’t believe it. It’s like my brain really hears, “I miss living in Port-a-Potty.”

There are some things so foreign to me that it’s like I can’t process them. I mean, I believe them, but it’s also like a part of me that says, “Surely they must be talking about something different, or they’ve misspoken.”

It is amazing how different people can be.

I was aware that Google provided something like 70% of the funding to the Mozilla foundation which builds Firefox.

The more I think about it, the more it seems plausible that “Australis” is an instance of deliberate sabotage to drive users to Chrome, at the behest of Google.

What other explanation for such an interface apocalypse could there be? It’s like a poor copy of Chrome, which of course means that users will then just use Chrome.

If in fact the new Star Wars has only one token woman character, I will not be watching it ever. I don’t like Star Wars much anyway, but it can be good entertainment. But no women == no watch.

Some of my favorite times are someone thinking that I am stupid for liking things like Suzanne Collins books, and for not having a college education – and then I proceed to intellectually destroy them, leaving them gutted and gasping for air.

Fun stuff.

Look, look: I’ve read more this month than you’ll read your entire life.

Huh, the LA Times’ website was just tablet optimized, meaning I will never, ever go there again.

I bet fewer than 20% of their readers visit it on a tablet or phone, but there you go.

I’ve only seen a bit of Game of Thrones, and read half of one of the books, but don’t need to see or read any more of the series to know this essay is full of idiocy. (As many of the commenters point out.)

It’s a waste of time to refute it all point by point, but briefly, Martin covers the characters involved in the war; the whole land of Westeros is not affected by the conflict, only a small portion. Of course telling stories about those involved in a brutal war in the conflict area in wartime will, duh, have loads of violence, mercenaries, killings and worse.

Strangely, just like a real fucking war!

The land is not always riven by violence, but in a real war, much, much violence occurs some of it so foul and nearly-unbelievable that the survivors aren’t believed.

And at least in the parts of that show that I saw, there was at least one food riot, much talk about preparing for the long winter, and discussion thereof. Many characters opined about who would and would not survive the winter with the implication that they would starve.

Of course a TV show does not show anyone farming. Who wants to watch someone farm? What is this guy, on crack?

I don’t know anything about Jacob Bacharach, but let me do some guessing without even glancing at his bio or using Google: he’s probably a professional writer, with one or two novels that sold poorly. Takes jabs at popular things routinely as he thinks he’s above them, that he’s better than them.

Probably went to an Ivy league school, or at least a well-respected one. Probably has a degree in English, or something similar. Has a job at maybe a college or a theater. Has never been in a fight, and has never lived in another country.

Probably lives in NYC or San Francisco, or maybe Boston. Never shops anywhere but Whole Foods.

Ok, let’s see how I did.

Ha, damn, I am that good. I got nearly all of them right, except he lives in Pittsburgh. That I was not expecting. And he didn’t go to any Ivy. He went to Oberlin.

This stuff is just too easy.

I read somewhere that women will typically only apply to a job posting if they feel they meet 100% of the requirements, while men will typically apply if they feel they meet just 60%.

In IT, this would not be a successful tactic even for men. Generally, I’d recommend applying for an IT job even if you meet only 20% of the “requirements.”

A lot of those are put in there either as “weeders,” that is plausible deniability if they don’t hire you for some other reason (illegal or legal) besides your skills or qualifications, or they are included because HR pulled them from some 10-year-old or otherwise irrelevant list.

So in IT, it pays to apply to jobs where at least according to the job listing if you have only 20% of the “requirements."

In IT, I have applied to and gotten jobs where I have met that few requirements, and no, I did not lie on my resume, etc. Just nailed the interview portion, and got the interview because no one closer to all the requirements applied.

I am sure that John Green is a fine writer. But I’ve also noticed the strange spate of articles that seem to imply that he invented the YA genre.

Now I’ve been reading YA for many years now, since my late 20s. (I didn’t read YA at all when I was a Y – I skipped straight from reading primers to National Geographic and Moby Dick.) And I know for a fact that YA existed well before John Green, even “realistic” YA, whatever the hell that means.

So the peculiar canonization of John Green and this string of bizarre articles that anoint him as the vanguard of a post-sparkly-vampire seriousness in YA isn’t simply about taking a white male more seriously than everyone else. It’s also about privileging a certain narrative structure—the dominant narrative’s dominant narrative. It’s not only that Green is a straight white man, it’s that he writes in the way that generations of straight white men have deemed important and Literary.

I also like how the piece explored how to a certain class of critic (also known as “bad, useless critic”) the only valid literature is the one tiny genre of “realism.” Though of course realism is a construct like any other, and just as fictional as anything else.

But thank you, time-traveling John Green, for rescuing us from all these women and their lady books! We all really appreciate it.

One of the strongest disagreements I have with the liberal left is that if you criticize Islam, you are either racist (even though Islam is not a race!) or some other very bad type of person. Who fucking cares. How Islamists treat women is fucking inexcusable. Fuck Islam. Fuck cultural relativism. And fuck all ya’ll who think any differently. I don’t care.

First we stop pretending. Call out the hate for what it is. Resist cultural relativism and know that even in countries undergoing revolutions and uprisings, women will remain the cheapest bargaining chips. You — the outside world — will be told that it’s our "culture" and "religion" to do X, Y, or Z to women. Understand that whoever deemed it as such was never a woman.

No, no, misogyny isn’t specific to Islam. Of course not. But I’ve lived in an Islamic country. I’ve seen it for myself. And trust me, other than if you are in some cult here, the worst of what Christians do to women is usually better than the best treatment a woman gets in an Islamic country.

I don’t care about nuance, Yes, I know about the history of colonialism in Arab countries and how this reinforced and promoted misogyny, the “patriarchal bargain.” Yes, I know about Wahhabism and its history.

And you can take your nuance and shove it right up your ass.

The fact is millions and millions of women are treated every day like animals. No, there’s not much we can do about it. No. But pretending that this culture is equally valid or that we should respect it in any way is absolute insanity.

I won’t have any part of it, ever.