Why the publishing industry might not listen to you · 4:22pm May 5th, 2016
Last September, Sherman Alexie, a Native American who was selected as editor of the Best American Poetry 2014, wrote a blog post explaining why he published a poem by Yi-Fen Chou in it even after Yi-Fen Chou wrote him to say that he was actually a white male poet named Michael Derrick Hudson.
I've slandered Best American Poetry many times, not for its racial or gender balance, which I've never paid any attention to, but because, year after year, it's full of obscure, boring poems. (I think 1995 was okay.) But I don't have time to talk about that.
Hudson sent his poems out first under his own name, and then, if they were rejected, sent them out again under the pen name Yi-Fen Chou, finding, he said, that they were more often accepted under that name. Alexie admitted that he set a lower bar for the poem because he'd thought it had been written by a minority. That is an episode in itself worth exploring, but I don't have time to talk about that today. I want to talk about a post referenced by a post referenced by that post.
PEN, the... well, I thought it was an acronym, but if it is, they've forgotten what it was. Anyway, it's a very old organization that's basically Amnesty International for writers. They oppose censorship and the persecution of writers around the world. They hosted a blog post by Antonio Aiello titled "Equity in Publishing: What Should Editors Be Doing?", which was mainly about that poem. Predictably, everyone was horrified that a privileged white man would dare to exploit the publishing industry's bias against the colored to get his poems published by pretending to be one of them. Some also accused Alexie of white man privilege, showing they hadn't even read the post they were criticizing, since in it Alexie wrote (as he always does) about being Native American. But I don't have time to talk about that today, either.
No, what I want to talk about is the most-common talking point in that blog post, Mira Jacob's Sept. 17 2015 post “I Gave a Speech about Race to the Publishing Industry and No One Heard Me”, which was cited by 4 different people in that post alone, and quickly spread throughout the blogosphere. Jacobs wrote:
We are ready for a publishing industry that represents the world we live in, and it will ignore us — writers and readers of color — at its peril.
A few weeks ago, when Publisher’s Weekly asked me to give the keynote speech in a night honoring the industry’s young publishing stars, I jumped at the chance. Talk about your last year, they told me. Talk about what it was like getting published.
My last year has been intense. My book The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing came out, I spent a few months touring internationally, and from a distance, it looked like one big party. Up close, it looked a bit different. This was something I really wanted to get into, as sometimes when we talk about the sad statistics facing writers of color in publishing, they become just that: statistics. I wanted to back that up by talking about what it actually looks like.
But fate wasn’t with me last night. The sound system at the event was terrible, which was a real problem. But even as I stood up on a chair and yelled to deliver my speech, half the room turned away and started talking over me. By the time I was done, I was talking to a very small ring of people, which felt, well, awful. More awful were the disappointed faces of the minorities in the crowd, the few who hugged me as I walked out and whispered, We wish they had heard it.
Well, I do, too. Anyone got a chair?
A drawing with the article showed an audience of white people walking away from a darker speaker while talking. How rude! Quite hostile to racial equity, it sounds like.
But part of being a writer is listening to stories for whether they ring true, or hollow. Members of the NYC publishing industry walking out on a speech on diversity? That had a distinctly hollow sound.
So I looked at the event announcement online:
PW is proud to announce the names of the 40 honorees (including four finalists and one superstar) of its inaugural Star Watch program, which recognizes young publishing professionals who have distinguished themselves as future leaders of the industry.
Star Watch was developed in association with the Frankfurt Book Fair, and as part of the program, superstar Helen Yentus, the art director at New York City’s Riverhead Books, has been awarded an all-expenses-paid trip to the international fair next month. All 40 stars will be honored at a party in N.Y.C. on Wednesday, September 16. Mira Jacob, author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (Random), will be the emcee for the event.
There's a link to a page with bios of all 40 winners. 35 are white, 4 are black, and 1 is Hispanic. None of them are authors. The winner was an art director. They're people who probably never won anything before for their jobs: an editor, a VP of Marketing & Publicity, a book-buyer, a Director of Subsidiary Rights, and other job titles you've probably never heard of.
Googling the date turns up a Facebook page with the location: Pergola Restaurant, 36 West 28th Street, New York, NY, US.
So: It was a dinner party to honor generally-ignored people, which she'd been invited to emcee.
That's it. That's the full width of the place. But it's bigger on the inside, right?
No.
So here is my best guess at what happened: There was a small dinner party giving awards no one would remember to people no one had heard of, which, given the venue, could hardly have even held the honorees themselves plus their dates. Mira Jacob was asked to emcee, and instead of telling funny, MCish stories to honor these people who thought they were finally getting their 15 minutes of fame, she stood on a chair and yelled at them (her words) to tell them their awards should have been given to people of color, during a dinner in a crowded restaurant / hookah bar.
So, no, "the publishing industry" might not listen to you if you do it that way.
Lel.
Poets are easily offended though. Even more so than stand up comedians, I've found.
As long as society heaps fame and attention to anyone who declares themselves a victim (real or manufactured) this sort of thing will continue.
And most importantly, as long as people can make money and a career on being a victim, there will always be stunts like this. Whether its faking events like the Cake incident, or putting swastikas on your own house, people like attention and money.
We have to stop celebrating Victimhood as a form of virtue. Help real victims, yes. Give it monetary value, no.
Well dang. I guess Abe Lincoln was right when he said you shouldn't trust everything you read on the internet.
In b4 racist accusations
3922034 That's genrist!!
Sensitive Artist Discovers New Yorkers Are Rude.
3922054 it's nevertheless true.
Obama on similar matters.
3922047 inb4 someone points out that an object must be hollow in order to ring
3922116
I'm not trying to say she was a professional victim. It sounds like it began with bad communication when she thought she was going to give a speech--though she should have had the sense not to use the MC position to criticize the awards [if she did that], and she should have had the honesty to describe the scene as taking place at a small dinner party in a crowded bar rather than making it sound like she was giving a presentation at a conference.
But I don't care so much about deciding on Jacob's moral status, as about the fact that a Google search for her speech now produces 3,000 hits. All of the ones I clicked on took her at face value, as if the impression she gave--that she'd been giving a "keynote speech" at a conference and people walked away--were true. No one bothered to check the facts.
(Nor am I saying that progressives are bad at fact-checking. Conservatives are, if anything, worse at it. This happens to be a piece of fact-checking in a larger debate that I'm interested in.)
3922146
My cell phone isn't hollow.
BAM
How they DARE to not give absolute full attention to every word I have to say !!!! This is clearly a racism problem, not a problem with the content of the speech (IT SHOULDN´T BE A SPEECH !), nor a problem with the sound (I´m relevant...listen to me !) nor the fact that it was just a party...not a Capitoluim Presidential Speech (or whatever you call when the President have something relevant to say to the nation).
You've got a good BS sniffer on that nose of yours.
None of this really surprises me, because people have always been led easier by emotions than facts, and they don't like giving others the benefit of the doubt.
3922184
Whoops, back up. Sorry, I inferred that. She criticized the treatment and under-representation of racial minorities in the publishing industry in a speech that was supposed to honor the awardees. For all I know, she might have praised the awards for being diverse, since the 12.5% given to racial minorities was about proportionate to their representation in the publishing industry.
I doubt it, but she might have.
Humans are predisposed to remember information that, when presented, form a good story, whether or not that information is true. Misinformation that fits into a good narrative (i.e. has the quality Stephen Colbert called "truthiness") is more likely to go viral than the the subsequent corrections that muddles some of the compelling aspects of the narrative (e.g. clear good guys vs bad guys), which was the subject of a really nice article from FiveThirtyEight on the topic. But perhaps it is no surprise that writers will stretch facts to fit into a larger narrative.
3922081
Uhhhh, honestly, that's kinda bullshit. The value of social movements is, and always has been, that power concedes nothing without a fight. The point of social movements is to be the fight.
And I actually agree that social movements can't run on yelling and shaming. That just makes them politically impotent and unpleasant to listen to, because every adult knows that feelings of shame aren't really well-aligned with facts about how we can act and how the world can be.
But if you're not threatening power's bottom line, or generating your own bottom line out of somewhere, then your "seat at the table" is just an opportunity to look really shiny while conceding things.
3922036
Or we could just build a society in which there aren't so many actual victims of actually terrible things. Like malnutrition and getting shot. Or maybe if we gave more craps about malnutrition, disease, and getting shot, people would have far less need to capture attention and money by manufacturing fake controversies around themselves.
Or maybe we could just throw attention whores to the soul-eating tentacle monster in the pit over there.
3922059
3922959
Actually, it isn't bullshit.
Let me just give you a clue-by-four:
If you're actually threatening people, they should shut you down and crush you under their heel. If they aren't, they're being stupid.
A social movement needs to be about building up society, not trying to pull down those above you. Otherwise, the people above should just destroy you.
Pretty much no one in our society is malnourished or shot.
If all your generated controversy is false, all intelligent people should be able to recognize that your movement is worthless and everyone in it is as well.
After all, there's a word for this: moral panic.
3923101
I think you wrote that meaning something like, "Pretty much no one compared to every non-Western society throughout all of history, and compared to societies organized along the lines advocated by the people in these movements." But people in those movements will hear it as "Pretty much no one important is malnourished or shot."
3922959
As far as BlackLivesMatter, blacks are killed by policemen at the same ratio at which blacks commit violent crime. There is outrageous police brutality, but it's indiscriminate. Interestingly, though, white policemen are murdered at a higher rate than black policemen.
(And if you say "Michael Brown" I'm going to be disappointed in you.)
As far as malnutrition, it's the numbers quoted in the press that are bullshit. If you read the data behind the "1 in 6 Americans are hungry" figure, what it actually means is that 1 in 6 Americans live in households in which someone sometimes worries about food. This is called "food insecurity". The category below that is called "low food security", which means "reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet." The only category that has actual hunger is "very low food security", which means "multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake." The most-recent survey indicates 1.1% of American children have very low food security. That's 1/20th of the fraction of Americans on welfare. They're getting assistance. I would venture that most of them are hungry because far more than 1.1% of households have seriously fucked-up parents. 1.1% isn't bad considering each year 18.5% to 25% (depending who's talking) of Americans have an episode of mental illness, 6% have a serious mental illness like schizophrenia, major depression, or bipolar disorder, and about 6% are alcoholics.
As to where you get the idea that America doesn't care about disease, I have no idea. It was just the biggest political battle of the past 10 years.
3923101
That malnourishment bit isn't right. I live in Ohio. 2010 statistics here, and i'd consider 16% with 20% of children suffering food insecurity a lot more than 'pretty much no one'.
And in 2013 we had 33,636 firearm fatalities out of 2,596,993 deaths - approximately 1.2% of all total deaths. I'd call that too more than 'pretty much no one', and I'd suspect in terms of 'Expected years of life remaining if cause of death where undone', guns take off way more years proportionally than say, cancer does.
Also the people on top not crushing you aren't being stupid, because do it too much and out comes the mob. That said the people protesting are often being stupid, but more in failure to outreach and enlist allies with a 'for us or against us' mentality.
On the subject itself - I remain torn on this as I do on other subjects. The end-game should be an author-blind submission; at the same time I recognize that in certain fields going in blind won't help solve the problem. It was great for orchestras, but for writing I don't think it will replicate as easily. I lean towards-ish the George R.R. Martin idea of 'Keep establishing societies/awards to promote underrepresented groups'; rather than try to overturn the Hugos, if you feel right-wing fiction is underrepresented in Scifi/Fantasy, then create your own con and work to build it up. There's plenty of space for us all to co-exist, and aspiring to make everything have an equivalent of the Oscars - well, we all know how shitty those are in terms of film diversity.
I state that in terms of genre far moreso than ethnicity, though the latter is an issue too.
3923651
Per tracking done by the Washington post, we have 2015 statistics on White vs Black shootings by police :
494 Whites killed by police - 32 unarmed, 22 toy weapons, 10 unknown
258 Blacks killed by police - 38 unarmed, 5 toy weapopns, 7 unknown
That makes 14.7% of all black fatalities those of unarmed individuals, compared to only 6.4% of white individuals. Unarmed black fatalities occurred at more than double the rate. If there is not a systemic issue here, then what would you cite as the cause of the discrepancy here?
I didn't crunch toy weapons in here because I will accept that as a much more valid 'I thought they were armed' explanation, since in the moment yea, that's a much more understandable mistake to make.
3923619
True malnourishment is actually very rare in the US period. The problem is the use of misleading terms. 3923683 notes "food insecurity".
Food insecurity does not mean malnourishment. In fact, food insecurity doesn't even mean you go hungry.
If you look at the actual guidelines:
Moreover, these figures are given on a yearly basis; i.e. did they suffer from it at all during the year.
Only 14% of households had any level of food insecurity, and only 5.6% had very low food security. It is only in very low food security households where " the food intake of one or more members was reduced and eating patterns disrupted because of insufficient money and other resources for food." But note that "In most, but not all households with very low food security, the survey respondent reported that he or she was hungry at some time during the year but did not eat because there was not enough money for food."
So that 5.6% is somewhat higher than the true rate of people who end up going hungry in any given year.
Once you drill down:
As they note:
Basically, food insecurity doesn't mean people are starving. In fact, it doesn't even mean they're going hungry. Moreover, the statistic is an annual measurement; daily numbers are significantly lower, meaning far fewer people go hungry at any given point in time. Food shortages are occasional or episodic, but not chronic - in other words, people who are food insecure only very rarely are food insecure all the time - in fact, most very low food security people were insecure only 1-7 days per month (guess: probably on the days before they got paychecks/government aid/ect., knowing shopping patterns).
The reason why they switched over to the terms they used is because it more accurately reflects the true situation. The problem is it also obscures the meaning for a lot of people, so people report these numbers as if they mean something completely different from what they actually mean. I suspect this was also intentional; after all, saying people are going hungry conjures up the idea of starvation. Also, by rolling together those who go hungry to those who worry about it, you end up making the problem look bigger than it actually is in an attempt to get more attention.
EDIT: Ugh you already covered this in a post and I didn't see it. Sorry. :|
3923701
The FBI's server is down now, so I have to use the 2012 UCR stats, which I have on my computer.
Arrests for violent crime: 236,394 white, 155,088 black.
258 / 155088 = .00166
494 / 236394 = .00209
I said, "blacks are killed by policemen at the same ratio at which blacks commit violent crime."
As you see, whites being arrested for a violent crime are 1.26 times as likely to be killed by police as blacks are, unless the arrest rate ratio has changed since 2012.
I don't understand the logic by which someone would say that policemen are more likely to kill unarmed blacks than to kill unarmed whites, yet are less likely to kill armed blacks than to kill armed whites. The sample size is much larger for the armed, so that's the statistic that I would use.
If you use the Post's filters to count just unarmed victims with no sign of mental illness who weren't attacking the police when shot, you're left with 17 blacks, 18 whites. You could go through those cases individually and look for patterns. If you do that, as I tried to, you'll find some involve suspects at crime scenes who the police think are reaching for a weapon, some involve stupid confusion, and some sound like asshole cops. So, maybe 5 cases per year each, black and white, that are really egregious, and a grand total excess of blacks actually murdered by cops per year for being black of maybe 2. Larger if you want to count the "reaching for a weapon" cases because the police might have given them the benefit of the doubt if they were white.
If I believed this difference were significant, rather than a random deviation from the more significant statistic showing police are more likely to kill whites during an arrest, and I were going to look for a systemic explanation, I would at least consider the hypothesis that blacks are more likely to run from and struggle against the police because they've been told police are more likely to shoot them.
3923701
White people are more than twice as likely to own guns than black people - only 19% of black people own firearms, compared to 42% of white people. The fact that the disparity is that low is quite surprising given underlying gun ownership rates. That alone may explain it.
That said, I suspect the underlying factor is something else: in NYC, blacks are about twice as likely to resist arrest as whites are. If that holds nationally, you'd expect about twice as many blacks to be shot as you'd expect by chance.
A third issue is that blacks are considerably more likely than whites to commit assault.
And a fourth issue is just tiny sample sizes - they probably aren't even statistically significant.
If you look at the individual incidents, you see:
Resisted arrest:
Struggled with police officer
Struggled with police officer
Crashed vehicle and fled
Fled from police, resisted arrest
Fled from police after trying to get a fake prescription filled, confronted police
Crashed car into dealership, was working on robbing it when cops arrived, tried to flee, confronted police inside
Got in fight with police officer while being arrested
Police get report of woman crying and screaming at address at motel. Man flees out window, is shot by police. Example of one drop rule; dude had blonde hair.
Shoplifting suspect shot while struggling with police officer
Flees traffic stop, gets in struggle with cop. Shocked and shot.
Breaks into grocery store, confronts police while leaving and struggled with them. Had crowbar at some point, but was apparently unarmed when he confronted police
Fugitive wanted for string of crimes including kidnapping (and with past history of violent crime) made as if to charge police trying to arrest him and was shot. Police officer cleared of wrongdoing (happened to find follow-up article on it)
Cops responding to burglarly confront resident of another apartment; he got in a fight with cops and was shot.
Cops responding to burglar alarm confront man, who gets in struggle with cop and is shot.
Man stopped and told to get out of vehicle after car chase. Got out of vehicle, then when ordered to raise hands reaches back inside vehicle and was shot
Attacked police officer:
Physically attacked police officer
Crashed vehicle, fled on foot, attacked and bit police officer, was stunned and shot
Punched police officer in face when told to leave area, shocked, shot.
Suspect crashed vehicle into police intentionally, rammed police cruiser during drug sting. Fled, turned towards police and was reaching for waistband when shot.
Naked man charged police officer after erratic behavior. Crazy.
Homeless mentally ill man confronted police and was shocked and shot.
Tried to grab gun:
Tried to grab an officer's gun
Fled from car crash, got in fight with officer, tried to grab gun
Involved in fight:
Was involved in assault; some claims he was shot in handcuffs, but other claims otherwise
Involved in fight, fled when cops showed up, then got in fight with cops. Shocked, then shot.
Police called to domestic dispute. Suspect threatened to commit suicide while officers were on their way, pretended he had weapon when cops showed up. May have been suicide by cop
Got in fight with bouncer, then got in fight with police when they showed up
Attacked people on street, ran through traffic, attacked police officer when they showed up to arrest him. Was high on shrooms
Mistakenly believed armed:
Mistook cel phone for gun
Accidental shooting:
Accidental shooting (were shooting at someone attacking a police officer, missed, and struck and killed them)
Was in vehicle with murderer. Murderer got into shootout with cops. Both the murderer and his unarmed passenger were killed
Killed when suspect in undercover bust pulled gun on police officer; police struck bystander and killed them
Cop pulled gun instead of taser and shot suspect while being subdued
Misclassified (vehicle):
Suspect got pulled over, didn't have license, got in fight with police officer, and tried to drive off.
Man was passenger in car. Car was stopped by police. Man acted strange, asked to get out of car, did so, was searched, ect. Afterwards, while other occupants of car were questioned, he climbed into front seat and tried to drive off with five year old girl in back of car. Police officer jumped in other front seat and tried to get him to stop; guy struggled with cop and was shot and crashed vehicle. Cop injured in crash.
Misclassified (improvised weapon):
Suspect fled from police who wanted to interview him about robbery. Grabbed one cop's radio and struck cop on head with it.
Shoeless, pantless man charged police with large tree branch used as club. Crazy.
Man in underwear with improvized club (broom handle) shot after he refused to comply with police. Crazy.
Note that some of the more brazen instances (the guy who pulled his gun instead of a tazer) resulted in criminal prosecution.
Anyway, if you look at this list, first off you'll see that five of them were misclassified to begin with. Of the remainder, four were accidental (one of them clearly a case of gross negligence at best (and the guy is being prosecuted), the other three instances where an armed suspect got in a fight with police and police struck and killed bystander/fellow vehicle occupant) and one involved someone mistaking a cel phone for a gun.
Two were people who were killed after trying to grab an officer's weapon, which is a good way to die.
11 involved either a pre-existing fight or someone attacking a police officer. Basically all of these also involved resisting arrest.
That leaves 15 cases of resisting arrest. Most of them were noted as involving struggles; it is unclear in some cases if all of them did.
Not exactly the most earth-shattering of lists, and almost all of them were cases of people resisting arrest - which, as noted, may be significantly more likely if a suspect is black than white. If so, then the risk factor is not the same. Moreover, accidental deaths are also more likely if you are more likely to be around violent criminals, so if blacks are more likely to be around violent criminals (and they are - about 2-3x more likely than background population, and even more so than whites) then you'd again expect a disproportionately large number of innocent bystanders being shot being black.
3923690
You've been anticipated. The social justice crowd is not arguing for equal opportunity or fairness. You'll see that if you read the article, or their current theory and rhetoric. Read the first "further reading" link in the PEN article: “From the Editors: The Politics of Blind Submissions Policies”. It's an argument that author-blind submissions are racist and sexist because they allow the perpetuation of genres and social preferences and values as they are now. The same argument is made in another entry in "Further Reading", “Why the Submission Numbers Don’t Count” by Danielle Pafunda, an argument that giving women merely an equal chance at being published instead of a deliberate advantage is sexist.
This isn't a new thing; this is why the movement is now called "social justice" instead of "civil rights" or "equal opportunity". Equality is now said to be inherently discriminatory because it perpetuates the existing power hierarchy.
Everything that's part of a minority or "oppressed" culture, say, rap music or romance novels, is allowed to continue being dominated by that group, and it's completely cool to ridicule someone for listening to rap or sitar music by a white guy. Everything that could be called white male culture, say hard science fiction or video games, must be destroyed or changed until it no longer has any aspects that appeal primarily to white males and the audience and writers are both 50/50 male/female and have a population-proportional representation of all minorities. The unspoken claim is that white males are not humans--they have no culture, no value, nothing to contribute to diversity. Everything they do must be levelled, and white males in that field discriminated against until the patriarchical pattern underneath it has been destroyed, while everything everyone else does must be kept as a preserve free from white males and their cultural appropriation.
(As if African, Indian, Arabic, or Asian cultures were not almost all--maybe all?--more conservative and patriarchical than Western culture.)
What's worse, all Italian culture, German culture, English culture, Irish culture, French culture, American culture, is counted simply as white male culture.
3923839
I have yet to hear about the protest movement being about armed perpetrators who are then shot; at least to my knowledge at this time people aren't protesting 'He was armed, the police shot him!' and so I wouldn't really consider that relevant. The question is 'How often are unarmed civilians being shot?'
And, well, if you get shot -running- from the police, I'd call that a fuckup. Cops aren't supposed to shoot fleeing suspects, and fleeing from the police should not at all be justification for them killing someone.
3923861
I'm willing to concede there are plenty of scenarios people go too far, as we saw last November with the attempted suppression of press activity on campus protests; that professor was rightly dismissed in that scenario.
At the same time simple full-blind admissions/submission/whatever is, yes, more likely to perpetuate the existing system - not through any conscious bias but rather through unconscious or unrelated issues such as access to mentorships. Consider Fimfic; if you take a new author and pair them up with bookplayer or horizon as a mentor who then works with them for six months, they are much more likely, all other things being equal, to produce something 'better', as I am sure you are aware of. Many, many areas are much like that - though I will admit that the whole thing is a heavily complex scenario.
But, I mean, to some degree they are right - genre/social preferences right now do favor white males. Part of its population demographics, part of its power hierarchy, part of its inertia. Now, that's of course only on a macroscopic scale; you go to depressed former manufacturing hubs and you see formerly affluent white society being ravaged.
I wouldn't call total blindness 'inherently discriminatory'; I disagree with someone making that assertion. I would say that because of external factors the end result is a favoring of whomever has the existing advantages. So, I get then why efforts are made to counteract that effect, and I wish that those doing so would focus more on the positives of such efforts rather than turning it into a constant us vs them which perpetuates the existing divisions.
You have successful white rappers. Not as many, certainly, but they exist. Nobody is saying Eminem isn't the genuine deal. You can still write hard Sci-Fi all you want. I'd be willing to say if Asimov were still round today and still churning out stories of the caliber of The Last Question, Nightfall, or The Ugly Little Boy, he'd still be a dominant force in the industry. If I were to pick a principle cause of the downfall in truly hard Sci-Fi it's that the barrier to entry is much higher than it was 60 years ago, because the science has advanced so much. Every time I read modern hard Sci-Fi my reaction is usually 'This is too information-dense'; the story suffers because of the sheer volume of information that must be conveyed.
I won't say there aren't people out there who aren't exemplars of the 'burn it all down' crowd. But at the same time I would argue the white guy's doing just fine, what with George R.R. Martin dominating the airwaves right now. Yea, fine, he's more Fantasy, but if you look at the dominant mass-market fantasy authors - Gaiman, Mieville, Sanderson, and so forth - I'd contend white guys are still finding plenty of success.
I'm not deeply involved in the Puppies affair, but from what I can tell pretty much nobody is upset with the Sads anymore because they've started playing the game the way everyone else has - and come 2017, the Sads are almost certain to get at least 1 entry into consideration per category each year because E Pluribus Hugo will benefit them. The Rabids are going to get stomped as a movement, but I shed no tears for them.
I'm generally in the pro social justice crowd, but thing is? It's a super nuanced issue. It does not boil down to black and white issues and every time I see people on either side trying to put it as a single point or two, it only alienates people further. If I had to pick? I tend to like the white-guy-produced stuff the most, thusfar. At the same time? I'm all on board that Overwatch's hero cast is all over the place in terms of nationality, ethnicity, gender, and body shape. It's cool to find that character every now and again I really identify with, after all.
3923651 See, part of why these discussions get so damn heated is the difficulty of getting believable numbers. For instance, you've implied that 20% or so of Americans are on welfare. This is impossible, since "welfare" as such was abolished in 1996. Nobody today is "on welfare". It doesn't exist. If you're using "on welfare" to mean something other than Aid for Families with Dependent Children, then firstly, please don't, and secondly, specify what you actually mean. Because, for instance, I've seen conversations get very slippery when, for instance, some guy at a dinner party insists 47% of Americans are parasites because they don't pay net taxes, while ignoring how many of those might be, for instance, students in their late teens, actual poor people who don't have the money to be taxed away, and of course old retired people.
So terms like "on welfare" somehow end up referring to my grandma, whose Social Security and pension checks fuel her stock-market speculation habit and whose assets came to more than a million bucks when she went into assisted living and her accounts were divided among the rest of the family (a tax thing, apparently).
And how was disease a major political battle? If you're talking about the ACA, well, health insurance isn't really about disease. Seriously. You know they still have diseases in Europe, right?
And then of course, to give a layperson's reference, there's the issue of actually checking where we see two-tailed, high-entropy distributions like the Gaussian, and where our references to "average" are completely misleading because they're arithmetic means over a power-law distribution.
3922162
Since when does the Internet ever bother to check facts before getting outraged?
3924128
Don't all Americans pay at least some taxes? Sales taxes, for instance? 6-10% or so per every transaction? It add up, especially seeing as sales taxes are pretty damn regressive. That comment always confused me. Okay, sure, they might not pay income taxes, but then again, neither do most rich people. They pay capital gains tax.
Weird.
3923861
And may I just say that this invention of white identity makes Europeans really weirded out. Or this European, at any rate. We rather think we have a bunch of different cultures with different languages, tropes, authors, and a centuries long tradition of alternatively loathing and loving our neighbors, while all you Americans have the same—American—one. If I go to my local library I'm going to find all American authors under 'American Literature.' We don't segregate by race.
3923912
That's the question they're asking, but it's the wrong question to ask. If you want to know if police are discriminating against blacks in deciding who to shoot, you look at who they shoot. You choose the most-powerful statistic; you don't fish for the statistic that gives you the answer you want.
No; actually, publishing is stacked heavily against white males in every category. White males today have a lower chance of getting published, a lower chance of winning awards, a lower chance of being anthologized, and a lower chance of being assigned in college reading. I checked the numbers on publication and on Hugo awards in science fiction & fantasy last week, and they're from 3:1 to 4:1 against. The numbers on getting assigned in college courses for living white males are about 8:1 against. The numbers on getting included in anthologies I've counted vary from 1:1 (an anthology edited by a white male) to 17:1 against (an anthology edited by a woman). The only studies in which white males sometimes have an equal chance, proportional to manuscripts submitted, is in studies of whose books get reviewed. Meanwhile, the ratios in these same categories for ethnic minorities are favorable, and stack with gender biases, so a Chinese woman gets her odds ratio bonuses multiplied. Native Americans appear to have the largest bonus.
The handicapped appear to be the trending minority--not yet advantaged, and hard to discriminate in favor of, because they don't have handicapped-specific names, but people are talking about them and starting to count them in statistics. This is going to be especially nasty, because when someone says, "There aren't enough CEOs who are handicapped," the right answer will be, "It's hard to be a CEO when you're handicapped, by definition; that's what the word means," but no one will want to hear that. And if "ableism" means "thinking more able people are better at what they do," you can see we're going to need another shot of post-modern epistemology before we can all say we're not "ablist" with a straight face.
3924324
How are European libraries organized? Isn't having a shelf for French authors the same as having a shelf for American authors? Weird would be having a shelf for white straight authors. We sort of do that, though, because now black authors, gay & lesbian authors, and in some bookstores Asian, Hispanic & Latino, & Native American authors have their own shelves.
(Also, Isaac Asimov.)
Barnes & Nobles online has sections for American, African American, Women's (this isn't fiction by women, but "women's interest" fiction), Gay & Lesbian, & then a "Peoples & Cultures" section which is pretty extensive and includes European groups, though they're all underrepresented--there are 5605 European books, 4980 African American books, and 1372 Native American books. "American Fiction" has African American, Asian American, Hispanic & Latino, Jewish, & Native American subsections.
3924529
By nationality or dominant language of the author, chiefly. And, yeah, there's a "French Literature" shelf and an "American Literature" shelf and so on. That was my point. There's no 'White Literature' section. The concept would be risible, as would, indeed, be a 'Black Literature' section. Though, there is some grouping involved. I think I saw 'Swahili Literature' as a section and 'Arabic Literature' is, I am certain, also on its own.
3924128
"Welfare" is a dictionary word which has been in use for a long time and is still in use, not just a specific program. You're right; I should have cited the specific statistic I was using. But my point there is that the number of people receiving government handouts is many times larger than the number of people identified as being hungry, and that will hold for any reasonable set of programs you choose. You will not find many hungry, malnourished people in America who aren't eligible for enough assistance to feed them. You might not find any. I used to date a woman whose job largely consisted of trying to get those people in danger of hunger and exposure to come in off the streets often enough, stay sober long enough, and take their free, government-provided mental health medication reliably enough, that they could keep one mailing address long enough to get their government subsidies. It is a hard and mostly thankless job. The people getting these free subsidies were more likely to spit at her and call her a racist white bitch than to thank her. Meanwhile she didn't get any health insurance at all. So excuse me if I take offense at the idea that we just don't care about
3924128 3923912 3923800 I'll add that there are systematic injustices and inequities, but these are not they. Race, sex, and hunger are smokescreens. When I was growing up in Detroit in the 1970s, which had been one of the most intensely strained places in America in terms of race relations in 1968, the racism then was less intense than it is now. There were black kids and white kids, but they grouped lower-class vs. middle-class, not black vs. white (and each group fought more among itself, for dominance, than with each other). The racism we have today is of recent manufacture.
The people in power are the wealthy, not the white males. The people they're afraid of are the middle class, not the poor, the black, or the women. I would not be surprised if the massive tensions in the US today over race, gender, and poverty were all deliberately manufactured in the parlors of Cape Cod mansions. The social justice movement doesn't take very seriously the idea that, if there is a secret power elite that has deliberately oppressed the 99% for centuries, they might be good at it.
3924475
It's not the wrong question, though. Shooting an armed violent suspect is, generally speaking, considered justified.
Shooting an unarmed suspect is a different category altogether. I consider every single one of those a failing of policing - it may be a failure to ID a wallet instead of a gun, or a failure to subdue without fatality, or a failure to talk a mentally ill person down. It's still a failure, and it happens proportionally more to Black People - and at more than twice the rate than whites.
It's like, well, war. It's fair game to shoot enemy soldiers in uniform. It's a war crime to murder civilians. 'But equal number of soldiers are getting shot' isn't really relevant to 'This side is killing civilians to a far greater degree' (I'm avoiding WW2-style scenarios here because munitions bombing is a whole different beast).
I just looked at every winner of the 2014 Hugos, which are the most recent to not get Puppy-Bombed. I counted anyone who had received an award, so for example Game of Thrones has 3 people associated with it.
Ethnicity of Winners :
1 East Asian
1 Black
2 Hispanic
18 White
Gender of Winners :
9 Female
13 Male
Of those 22, 10 of them are white males. If you cut only allow 1 person per category, it drops to 6 white males, and you lose 1 Hispanic male as well, out of 17 total. So by the worst metric white males still captured a third of the awards, and by the best, nearly half. I wouldn't call that biased against them. Of the 6 writing awards, 2 of them go to white males, 3 to white females, 1 to an Asian male.
To me? I'd say that awards by gender are doing fine by the 'lesser' metric - that one is 9 women, 8 men - and women are underrepresented by the 'greater' metric with it being 9 female to 13 male.
Awards by race? That has some ground to still gain for minorities. Whites are over-represented relative to US demographics, at least, although if you take the Hugos as worldwide English-language I suspect it's much less of an issue, but don't know what that breakdown would be offhand.
But...I'm having a hard time seeing bias there. 2013's winners have 2 white guys, 1 white female, 1 asian guy for the 4 major writing awards, Related Work has 5 authors of which 4 are white guys and 1 is a white female, and graphic novel was 1 white guy, and I admit I'm not 100% sure on Fiona Staples's ethnicity as I don't want to claim the wrong one; to me she looks white, but I'm not comfortable saying that with certitude.
So 2013 white guys do even better than 2014. By a lot. I'm....really having a hard time seeing bias in the Hugo, at least, so I would question where your numbers come from since my analysis is showing something totally different.
3924679
Well, this part? This I agree with, that the real division here is between the Haves and Have-Nots, and that, yea, there has been a fairly well-waged war of cynicism to keep it that way.
I mean...it kinda was a major Republican strategy since the Nixon era to do just that, stoke racial divisions in the South. And Reagan's whole 'welfare Queens' bit was dog-whistle for just that. 'Urban Youth'. Etc. The right in particular has used such coded language for decades to inflame racial tension in that regard.
I will never vote for the man and I hope to whatever deity may or may not be out there he loses in November, but one thing I am grateful to Trump for is that in some ways he has shattered that hellish alliance to pieces. The only problem now is it looks like he's choosing to stoke white working class voters against both minorities and the rich, instead of all of the have-nots against the have-too-muches.
3923912
Actually, they've "protested" that sort of thing several times. There were riots in St. Louis after Mansur Ball-Bey was shot after pulling a gun on police. He ran after being shot once, but didn't make it very far and collapsed and died.
And remember, we know from the Michael Brown case that people are happy to lie about how evulz the police are, claiming variously that he was shot in the back (he wasn't), that he put his hands over his head and surrendered (he didn't), and that he was executed while on his knees (he wasn't).
It is called "being racist human garbage". It is the same thing you used to see in the South back in the bad old days with lynch mobs directed at black people.
Yes. And that's because that person is better than other people. That's what matters.
Not all people are equal. That's reality.
The idea of equality of outcomes is deeply evil.
Total blindness IS going to inherently not be discriminatory; it is purely meritocratic in nature.
This is pure doublethink.
The reason why blacks are less successful than whites is because blacks fall a standard deviation below whites in terms of intellectual and academic ability in the United States.
Even if you compare rich blacks - people whose families make $100,000+ per year - to poor whites - people whose families make $10,000 or LESS per year - you see a ten point gap in the favor of the poor white people on the SATs. Those rich black kids have enormous advantages over those white kids, go to better schools, and still do worse.
And yet, if you look at actual performance, people who do about as well on IQ tests and about as well on SAT tests do about as well on other things as well - in other words, if you're black or white, if you have the same IQ, you do about as well on all the things that correlate positively with IQ. The same goes for the SATs.
This suggests that blacks are not being somehow systematically discriminated against by these tests. The tests aren't racist. The tests are real measures of ability. And they really do mean something.
So long as a performance gap exists between groups, you're going to see inferior outcomes from the group which performs worse. The cause is not outcomes; it is what is coming in at the start. If you want to fix the problem, the place to go is not the end; it is the point of divergence, which is decades earlier - possibly before people even going to school.
Highly successful black people do just fine - the top-tier black professional makes 96% of what the top-tier white professional does. The reality is that affirmative action is a way for well-off minorities to screw over disadvantaged white and Asian people. Well-off white and Asian people aren't affected so much, but the poor fuckers from Appalachia are.
Do you think that the present-day over-representation of blacks in the NFL and NBA is because of discrimination against white people? Do you think that the fact that the overwhelming majority of people who have run sub-10 second 100 meter dashes being from sub-Saharan Africa is coincidental? Or do you think there is something in their genes or in their culture which leads more of them to push to the very top of these sports?
Yes. People prefer those genres. Why is that bad?
I don't like most superhero movies. But I don't think people should have to stop making them, or that they should be forcibly disadvantaged out of some stupid idea of equality.
3924324
Capital gains taxes are a form of income tax which is taxed at a lower rate.
As far as sales taxes go, they're applied by cities/states; there is no federal sales tax in the US. I live in Oregon, which has no sales tax at all; all of our taxes are property and income taxes.
3924679
I've met 1%ers; I've never met one who was afraid of the middle class. Heck, most of the ones I've met didn't really have exceptional lifestyles, they just had really big houses on a bunch of land. The only exceptions were religious; one was the Indian family (from India), but their kid was very, very American; his parents were very strange by American standards, though (and drug him back to India once to dip him in a river after he ate a hamburger). The other was a pair of upper-class hyper-conservative homophobes who, of course, had a gay son who had to hide it from them (unsuccessfully). He was kind of messed up, but I think that was understandable given the circumstances. I only knew those parents via their kids, though; I saw them, but I certainly never spent any amount of time with them.
The middle class is what enables the upper class to have a lot of nice stuff, and a lot of stuff they have isn't really very different from what the middle class does. I mean, I guess they have somewhat nicer cars? But even that wasn't terribly consistent, because some of them thought that splurging on cars was dumb. Of course, they got the upper end (more like $35-40k cars) of the normal cars, but it wasn't like they were all driving expensive rich people cars. Their kids were pretty indistinguishable from the upper middle class kids, by and large, at least from my perspective.
Why would they fear the middle class? The middle class is mostly pretty lazy, frankly, because things aren't so bad that they actually need to care.
I think they're much more concerned about hatemongers like Trump and the extremist eat the rich types.
I dunno. Most rich people I've met were just people. They were civilized. Being a bigot was for poor people, or was simply totally alien to them. And honestly, even there, most of them either felt sorry for poor people or treated them with benign neglect. Actually caring about poor people would require, you know, emotional investment.
The most racist people tend to be people who live in close proximity to members of other races. If you're rich, you don't spend enough time with poor black people to hate them.
Frankly, the overall impression I got from the better-off people was that they didn't particularly care what people did, because it didn't actually affect them in any way.
Of course, I never spent time with like, Bill Gates or something, so maybe the billionaires are reptilian humanoids.
They'd have to be insanely stupid to want any of that. Conflict is bad. People getting along is good. People got along pretty well in the 1990s, and there was a huge amount of prosperity and stability.
If you're rich, you have a lot more to lose. Having rioters and protesters out on the streets is bad for business.
Frankly, if people actually controlled the world, it would be run a lot better.
3925045
There's more to it than just that. What I'd want to see is for someone to develop a culturally 'black' SAT, and then compare performances across that while controlling for other factors. If your hypothesis is correct then we'd see the white students do comparatively better - right now the big argument I see staged is that the SAT is biased due to cultural issues as well as socioeconomic.
On blindness, my point here is that total blindness is a good endgame - but right now there are other systemic factors at play. Again - my job came about due to an opportunity through my social network. Had that not happened? I'd be in way different shoes. Subsequently I had opportunities to practice, develop, and so forth; so if I then submitted to a different job, well, I'd be a better candidate - but much of that betterness is because I was /lucky/, or I had people who wanted to mentor me.
So it becomes a self-reinforcing spiral. People can't compete in the truly blind tests because they can't get the experience to out-compete the existing favored power structure. There are good and bad ways of combating this, and while I can see reasonable disagreement on the methods? Yea.
On genre, my point is that white-male preferences are most catered to, and that the ecosystem could and should be bigger.
3925100
Being rich doesn't stop you from being stupid. The whole point of the Southern Strategy after all was 'Get the poor white worker to vote for us for social reasons, then throw them a social bone or two and cut our taxes/cut worker protections/cut regulations/etc, etc, etc. Which worked pretty well until Trump came and laid a lot of it much more bare.
3925270
Being rich doesn't stop you from being stupid, but IQ and income correlate positively. There are a lot more poor dumb people than dumb rich people, even on a per capita basis.
3925268
The inferior performance of blacks on SATs is predicted by their inferior performance on IQ tests. SATs are basically an academic IQ test, combining academic knowledge with, well, an IQ test. SATs don't care about your culture. And IQ tests are very race neutral. Moreover, if these tests were "culturally biased" against blacks, we wouldn't expect their performance in academia, their income, ect. to correlate with the SAT or IQ tests in the same way as white people do. However, they do; IQ tests and SATs predict black and white performance equally well.
Moreover, if it was culturally biased, then we'd expect Asians to do poorly as well; instead, they do a bit better than white people do, just as they score a big higher on IQ tests.
Thus, cultural bias is pretty danged unlikely.
"But what about the oarsman-regatta question?"
I had no idea what a regatta was when I first saw that question but still got the right answer.
The reason is pretty simple:
If we look at these, all of these analogies are related. This, of course, means that we know that it must be pretty specific. An envoy works at an embassy; a martyr is killed in a massacre, a referee runs a tournament, and a horse lives in a stable.
A runner runs/competes in a marathon. Merely being IN something isn't enough, because all of these are related. A marathon is an event; an embassy is not. Likewise with horse:stable. These are both effectively the same answer, AND they are both physical locations, so both are wrong.
That leaves martyr:massacre, oarsman:regatta, and referee:tournament. Looking at these, there's no clear distinction between martyr:massacre and referee:tournament; both are involved, but neither is involved in the same way as a runner is in a marathon (as a competitor). Ergo, the correct answer must be oarsman:regatta by process of elimination.
A lot of the SAT's harder questions are designed in this way, both to require you to exhibit knowledge AND to be able to logically deduce the correct answer.
3924948
I counted winners from, IIRC, 2006-2014.
Men and women come out about equal in awards.
The problem with that is that men write and submit 3 to 4 times as many stories to fantasy and science fiction magazines as women do. (Note the words "proportional to manuscripts submitted" in my earlier comment.) You can look this up with google; there are at least 3 different studies of it and they all conclude nearly the same thing.
3925100
When I say the rich "fear" the middle class, I mean the middle class is the greatest threat to them economically. Expanding or enriching the middle class reduces their status and power. Status and power are zero-sum.
The rich have managed, over the past 40 years, to capture all of the additional wealth created by our increased productivity. That is the big story here, the systematic exploitation. In terms of total dollars, the middle class are the biggest losers.
The race and gender wars have been useful to the rich because when equal opportunity requires reducing the number of white males admitted to college / hired / given awards / etc., the reduction has been taken from the middle class. In the case of college admissions to elite universities, white less-than-upper-middle-class-but-above-lower-class students were nearly eliminated from them between about 1970 and 2000. Similarly in jobs; equal opportunity in hiring has no effect on somebody from Harvard or Yale. The effect has been to reduce the encroachment on the domains of the upper class by the middle class.
(Feminism, of course, was directly useful to the rich in nearly doubling the labor force.)
I admit there's no need to posit a conspiracy. But it does make it more understandable that media conglomerates owned mainly by rich people are run mainly by leftists. At some point, some rich person must have realized how convenient it was that Marxists hate the middle class even more than rich people do.
3929212
The thing I guess for magazines is that if people don't agree with the editorial policies of existing ones, they totally can launch their own. But...and yea, this is personal opinion, and yea, I understand that part of the effect is that some other people have to lose out, but I do want more representation overall.
There's nothing inherently masculine in scifi/fantasy, and the output levels wont change until the gender-involvements equalize, as it were - aka when fandom is relatively comparable to the cultural whole. I think it is a good thing to positively encourage growing the tent. I'm opposed to 'divide and conquer' strategies, which far too many employ.
But in publication? It's a good-good decision. Either you take the long-term view of 'Try to showcase more women authors to inspire more women to write' which is laudable, or you go 'Choose the best stories I find period' knowing you're gonna have a much more homogeneous community. Neither is /wrong/ exactly, but they are mutually exclusive, and which one you prefer is a values statement.
3929232
Neither of those things are true. Status and power aren't zero sum; we have more celebrities than we did historically, and more power than we had historically.
This isn't actually true. In fact, it is outright untrue.
Here's the standard chart:
stateofworkingamerica.org/files/Median-income-productivity-growth-47-11.png
OMG THE RICH ARE STEALING FROM US!
The problem is that over the same time period, non-financial compensation has gone up enormously. In particular, health care costs have gone up staggeringly - about four times, after adjusting for inflation.
Charts like this show the effect:
blogs-images.forbes.com/chrisconover/files/2012/12/healthprices.jpg
Non-financial compensation has been going up over time primarily as a result of health care costs going up by so much. The extreme rise in the cost of health care between the 1970s and today is the primary driver of the divergence between productivity and wages.
The ballooning cost of housing has also had an effect - my parents bought a house down in the Bay Area for $30,000 in 1974. That house today is worth about $1 million. This advantaged old people - people who were already in the real estate market before the big rise in prices.
If you look at American society's breakdown by income class, we actually see the exact opposite of what you claim:
espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/pew11.png?w=310&h=501
More people are going up than down - since 1971, there are only 4% more people in the lowest segment of society, but there are more than twice as many people in the top segment of society by income, and the upper-middle class has grown as well. Overall, the "decline" of the middle class is 4% moving down and 8% moving up. That suggests twice as many people are rising as falling..
Moreover, actual material poverty has diminished. Poor people aren't as poor as they used to be. The number of people living in material poverty has declined, not gone up.
The whole "war on the middle class" is a big fat lie. What we've seen is pretty much what you'd expect - a decline in fortunes of the people who had no useful skills but were being paid a fairly large amount for doing basic manual labor which we've now automated, combined with a rise in the fortunes of a much larger group of people who are now college-educated professionals who work new, better jobs than people did in the past. Of the decline in the middle class, 2/3rds of it has been people going upwards, not downwards.
You have it entirely backwards. The white flight model is instructive.
Why don't white people live in ghettos?
Because they can afford not to.
Same goes for better-off black people.
It isn't that the upper class is using affirmative action as a tool against the middle class, it is that they are simply most able to avoid having it be used against them. There's a pretty big distinction between the two.
Controversy sells. By putting shitty controversy on TV, they can put butts in the seats. It is all about ratings. Create false controversy. Present things which aren't controversial as controversial. Show extremist blowhards to rile people up.
That's why Trump got so much TV coverage - he's good for ratings.
It is just plain old profit motive.
3924324
Well yes, which is why Romney was quite rightfully pilloried for saying that, and even if his own party picked it up as a talking-point for a while, they've mostly dropped it this time around.
What he meant was that only 47% of Americans pay net federal income tax, which is actually true. Of course, it's a particularly slippery sort of fact to invoke for political purposes, because I'd estimate 1/2 to 2/3 of the USA's subsidies to anyone for anything, in total, are paid out as funny little arrangements one writes down on one's tax forms. If your deductions and credits add up to more than you otherwise owe in taxes, then the government writes you a check, regardless of your pre-tax income. Hypothetically, with a sneaky enough tax accountant, you could be in "the 47%" while making six figures. De facto, there are a hell of a lot of professional-caste and blue-collar workers grouped into "the 47%", so treating "47% of Americans pay net-zero or net-negative income taxes" as equivalent to "47% of Americans are parasites who don't contribute to society" is pretty fucking slimy.
To give four prominent examples:
1) The Earned-Income Tax Credit is the closest thing America has to a negative income tax, guaranteed minimum income, or other direct "top-up" program for workers' and working families' incomes. Notice the words "tax credit": one of the most effective pillars of the welfare state is a tax credit.
2) The Mortgage-Interest Tax Deduction subsidizes the real-estate mortgages of the suburban middle class, such as it once was, by allowing your, well, mortgage-interest to be deducted from taxes in a way that's not allowed (at the federal level, and at most state-levels) for rent. It's a subsidy for owning real-estate over renting apartments.
3) The capital-gains tax rate is much lower than the personal income tax rate, and in fact, even fully realized (ie: cashed-out) capital gains is counted as a separate category. This is a much-discussed subsidy for people who own capital assets over people who own none, or own them exclusively through things like retirement vehicles.
4) Pension distributions, retirement vehicles, and Social Security are tax-advantaged in the sense that only so much of them counts as personal income in the first place. You can be a very well-off old person and yet have an on-paper income and tax rate that's much lower than one would expect from ranting about "the 47%".
So yeah, that all happened, and was a particularly shitty abuse of numbers.
3923912
This is simply not what actual experiments show, at least not when dealing with scientific manuscripts, resumes, or symphony tryouts. Anonymized tryouts really work, in the sense that more women and minorities are hired because, weirdly enough, all of a sudden, the judges first proclaim the submitted work to be good work, and only then find out who produced it, and have to fucking accept their own previous judgement.
The fact that there is an actual difference between these anonymized trials and non-anonymized trials, that fewer women and minorities get their work accepted when they're labelled as such, shows that we really do have a discrimination problem. I don't know if it's conscious or unconscious.
I do know that the data is in, and it's in favor of double-anonymizing tryouts, submissions, and resumes/CVs.
3929232 3924679
derpicdn.net/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTIvMDcvMDUvMDBfMzBfMzBfNjAxXzMxOTA3X19zYWZlX2FwcGxlamFja193YXJoYW1tZXJfNDBrX2hlcmVzeSJdXQ/31907__safe_applejack_crossover_reaction%2Bimage_warhammer%2B40k_artist-colon-miketheuser_imperium_heresy_inquisitor_inquisition.png
I want you to understand one thing, straight-up: all this stuff you're saying about the rich? That is Marxism. All the social-justice, identity-politics crap you hear on the internet and see on college campuses? That is not Marxism; that is the New Left. They are what you get when whole generations are fucking ignorant of economic class conflict because everyone who wasn't was ruined, harassed, and jailed, up to and including purging trade-unions of everyone who thought maybe making nice to the bosses and owners all the time wasn't such a good idea.
But let's give a quote to show how fucking stupid the New Left actually was:
Bolding mine, because no, all questions of material existence were not solved in the fucking 1960s, and they still haven't been solved today! Fuck, I don't even like the Soviet Union, but just reading about these jerkfaces makes me more sympathetic to it!
3929299
Status and power are zero sum by definition of what status and power mean. I don't mean power as in having electric power; I mean power over people. That's zero-sum. We may have more or less celebrities at any given time--and it's presumably more, since we have more people--but I doubt the demand curve for celebrities is very flexible. Perhaps it is. Status, though, is totally zero-sum. By status I mean how many people you can get phone calls (or tweets) answered by. If there are more celebrities, it means even celebrities have a tough time getting a tweetback.
Let me restate it in more precise terms that are true, which I have researched to the point where I will ignore your response if you say something like "that is outright untrue."
The wages earned in one hour by one person who is middle class or lower are, in inflation-adjusted terms, pretty close to the same as they were in 1970, certainly no more than double. The assets owned by such a person may have increased as a result of land prices going up.
The total amount possessed by the middle class is larger, because most households now have 2 workers. And of course "wages" have gone up if you count by households, which you shouldn't do.
I have researched it enough that I place no weight on one link to a chart that I can't see. It is outright true; the not-rich have, in inflation-adjusted terms, about the same deal they did in 1970 in terms of how hard they have to work for a buck.
Your health care chart only proves my point. You can't say we've gotten richer because health care costs more and so we're richer because we still get health care. The middle class is still getting the same deal they were getting in 1970. All the productivity gains and the gains in the value of things owned have gone somewhere. The capitalization of the US companies on the NYSE, inflation-adjusted, is 25 times what it was in 1970--where did that money go? Add in all of the wealth which exists in derivatives and the picture gets very confusing--you sort of get another factor of 10 on paper, IIRC, which is in one sense fake because cashing in on the derivatives makes someone else a loser so it's zero-sum, but in another sense is just a new currency printed by investment bankers, because you don't actually cash in on the derivatives (the world economy would crash), you trade them.
You're using data gathered by household. Wrong.
I agree that "stuff poverty" has diminished. Many homeless people have cell phones. Malnutrition basically only happens when people screw up dramatically. But "stuff poverty" is just part of the picture. Poor people are poorer than they used to be when it comes to being able to afford a home, or land, or a college education.
There is no distinction between the two except intent, and I don't think intent is relevant here. The upper class was in charge while a massive shift in the distribution of wealth from the middle class to the upper class took place, and part of that shift was due to policies which succeeded due to the leftist ideology of companies owned by the conservative upper class. At that point, asking whether they "intended" it is a pre-Freudian dodge.