Sunday, September 21, 2014

Crap from Facebook on September 21st, 2014

http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/09/white-privilege-explained/

While the entire notion of a monolithic "privilege" of any sort is dubious, and those who champion such notions invariably seem to cite a variety of things as some sort of demonstration of how said "privilege" works. It's almost as though individual people aren't actually caricatures, and such nuances about what privileges one may or may not have shouldn't be conflated in that manner. But hey, that's a topic for another post. This time, I'm willing to play along...

With that in mind, I submit a category of privilege that I haven't seen anyone else describe. I call it "stupid privilege." The link above contains some blatant misuse of statistics, along with poor reasoning in general. But the author and fans of this piece, and I've seen others like it, are unaware of this. Those of us who actually understand statistics are incensed by this sort of thing, but to the people who apparently consider this to be a good argument, the source of our frustration is invisible. I've always heard that privilege is invisible to those who have it, and I think that's what's going on here!

Edit (February 12th, 2015): I need to post more on this blog. Anyway, I just saw something that reminded me of this post.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/1554461_912550998796760_3417606612807962835_n.jpg?oh=d98b152346b917da98e96fc0bfda26c5&oe=555BBAD4&__gda__=1431963881_8579007edf527b7d84fa66896a2e49b2

So apparently "A Feminist Fantasy" is to have someone to reject.

Monday, September 1, 2014

The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Year's Best SF 17

I've mostly been reading books in the Sword of Truth series and I may or may not make a long post about that, but I also read these two. I'm intrigued enough that I really do want to finish the Edgar Rice Burroughs series eventually. As for the science fiction anthology, which was something I checked out in a hurry to have for reading in hotels while out of town for work, it was tolerable, but not good enough to make me want to pick up more anthologies like this. However, I was impressed with Elizabeth Bear, Karl Schroeder, Judith Moffett, Madeline Ashby, and Pat MacEwen.