This is what I mean about nerd-sharming. (Though I only agree with about 50% of the piece.)

I live in a world where feminists throwing weaponized shame at nerds is an obvious and inescapable part of daily life. Whether we’re “mouth-breathers”, “pimpled”, “scrawny”, “blubbery”, “sperglord”, “neckbeard”, “virgins”, “living in our parents’ basements”, “man-children” or whatever the insult du jour is, it’s always, always, ALWAYS a self-identified feminist saying it. Sometimes they say it obliquely, referring to a subgroup like “bronies” or “atheists” or “fedoras” while making sure everyone else in nerddom knows it’s about them too.

Amanda Marcotte is one of the worst, also, for this. She really hates nerdy men. It’s a lot easier and less risky to punch down, I guess.

But since when did it become ok to shit on the downtrodden?

And the idea that there is more harassment committed by nerds — as some feminists now believe — is fucking absurd. Being a member of a frat is associated with something like a 300% increased chance of that person having raped someone. Nope, I ain’t fucking making that statistic up. And I’ve actually seen male lawyers commit sexual harassment right in front of me.  Never have seen a nerd — who is usually too shy to talk to a woman anyway — do that (though I believe it happens, just not as often).

Indeed, harassment is very real and common, but re-defining harassment to include, “Someone I didn’t like because he doesn’t fit my idea of man and was in my general vicinity and might have even looked at me” doesn’t help feminism, doesn’t help women and it ends up hurting a lot of other people.

This is where having no historical knowledge gets you.

At least some people are trying to learn, I guess. More people need to try harder.

To my grandfather, Irish and Welsh people were definitely not white. They were scum, no better than black people. But he didn’t call them black people.

Lorde would not have been white to my grandfather, being Irish and Croatian by heritage. I know this seems really impossible to some (dumb) people, but this was true for roughly ~100 years in the US.

Anyway, over the long term (100-300 years) I suspect that racism towards brown people will also disappear, and instead we’ll have racism against AIs for a while.

It’s conventional wisdom that Mockingjay is inferior to the other two books in the Hunger Games trilogy.

I’ve read the series twice now. I don’t agree. I think people are mostly reacting to the grimness of the book. For that grimness and unflinchingness, Mockingjay is my favorite of the series.

It’s comfortless by necessity. The trilogy as a whole is one of the few — in or out of YA — that grapples seriously with propaganda, responsibility for choices, the limits of one’s power and how best to use it, how even making a good and right choice might condemn others to pain and death.

Mockingjay is the mortar round that has been fired high up into the air and is whistling down on the reader, an inevitable shell of consequence from all the choices the characters made in the prior books.

(Warning: spoilers might follow.)

What’s also odd is that people — and even some of the same people! — complain about the fairy tale ending of Mockingjay. Did these folks even read the books? The denouement is survival, and barely that. It’s implied that the brutality and monstrousness of humanity has not receded, and perhaps never will. In the end, Katniss lost her sister, Gale, and 95% of the people that she grew up with.

If that’s a fairytale ending, then it’s a shitty fucking fairytale.

Mockingjay is in fact disliked because it’s not really exciting or thrilling, but rather a slog through grief and loss and the consequences thereof. (By the way, one of the points that Collins is making with the Hunger Games books is that we all still do find games of death exciting, vivifying, and that is in fact human — but it’s also an implicit criticism, forcing us to look at ourselves and ask, could we, can we be better? This criticism and examination reaches its critical turn in Mockingjay.)

It’s one of the most adult books I’ve ever read.

Most of the prissy supposed better “adult” novels about similar topics shy away; Collins never does. However, in Mockingjay she shines a million watt floodlight on it all and says, This is what we’ve built, and what we’ve built will destroy us.