Hell O'Kitty @theshadowkitty - Tumblr Blog

It's kind of incredible just how much the Country House Murder Mystery genre is, at its roots, a reaction to WWI and the social change that sprang from it.

lilietsblog

go on

earlgraytay

So I've been healing up from surgery, meaning I've been catching up on my TBR pile, and my three great loves are a) middle grade anything, b) SF/F with good worldbuilding and characterization, c) murder mysteries without too much grit or grime.

In the pursuit of c), I've been playing Ace Attorney, but I've also been reading whatever Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers I can grab off Project Gutenberg. Since it's exclusively the ones in the public domain, it's their oldest stuff- pre 1924.

And the thing about all of these 20s murder mysteries is that they're incredibly haunted by The Great War, in the same way that most mysteries from the 2000s are haunted by the War on Terror or many mysteries coming out now are Haunted by COVID.

Lord Peter Wimsey has screaming dissociative PTSD flashbacks from the trenches. In Murder on the Links, Poirot is a displaced person- Belgium isn't a safe place to be an aging police inspector at the moment- the narrator has been discharged with an injury, and one of the main suspects is working as an army nurse.

And like... you can pull a couple threads through here. But if we're talking about the stereotypical Country House Murder Mystery- the two big ones are a) the end of the Old Order, and b) you always find the body and know the cause of death.

A) is pretty obvious- the death of a patriarch (or matriarch) is a microcosm of the slow decline of the British nobility. It's a way to give the sense of "Everything Your Worldview Depended On Has Fallen Apart" a face. Every dirty secret we don't speak of has come to light, all at once; every lie that supported The Way Things Are is revealed for what it really is. (Dulce et decorum est, anyone?) The local lord is dead, and no one is going to replace him. The world has irrevocably changed.

B) is something that @bespokeminutiae pointed out to me when I mentioned this- in a country house murder mystery, you always know where the body is, and you always know what happened to it. In a world where a lot of people lost loved ones in some far off place, without getting to see the body or say goodbye? That's a hugely comforting fantasy.

(Incidentally, this is why Knives Out is the best Country House Murder Mystery of the past 25 years- it understands that some themes are inherent to the genre and says something new that still engages with those themes.)

soleminisanction

Ooooo, this conversation continues very interestingly with the Japanese literary equivalent -- honkaku-ha (本格派), the "orthodox school" of "classical whodunnits," which by definition followed the rules of detective fiction codified in the west by the Golden Age writers and gained prominence just before, during and after World War 2.

I say during and after because that's when Edogawa Ranpo was active, by far the most famous and prominent Japanese mystery writer of the era. Ranpo started in the 1920s and wrote well into the 50s. He's best known in the west for his recurring detective character, Kogoro Akechi, who's basically the Japanese Sherlock Holmes -- complete with being mostly an urban character who lives and works in and around Tokyo.

Though I'm personally more familiar with Yokomizo Seishi and his Kousuke Kindaichi mysteries, which started in the aftermath of the war and hew very close to the Country House Murder Mysteries, with the twist that said country houses tend to be former samurai estates on tiny isolated islands or in rural mountain villages. Kindaichi himself is also a detective much more in the vein of Dame Agatha, being a young war vet with some odd ticks that make people underestimate him (he has a stutter and always looks frumpy because he scratches his head really hard when he's thinking) but nonetheless solving his cases with keen observation and patient deduction.

And in the same way, you can feel the haunting presence of the war and the dissolution of old social orders. In place of declining British nobility, you have the crumbling remnants of samurai families. There's a nine-year timeskip between Kindaichi's first and second novels, during which he gets drafted and winds up in a POW camp; he stumbles into like the next three cases just trying to bring his dead war buddies' last messages back to their families. And there's this looming specter of westernization, what it means for the old traditions, which should be preserved and if it might not be better to let some of them die.

One thing honkaku-ha introduced to the mix that sets them apart from the western tradition is a tone and aesthetic taken from Japanese horror. Where western mysteries can be familiar and almost comforting enough to earn the label 'cozy,' honkaku-ha are often stark and cold, with murders defined by their violence or grotesque stagings and the stories themselves seeped in elements of supernatural or erotic overtones (Edogawa in particular had a fascinating friendship with an anthropologist known for his research on the history of homosexuality in Japan). The two best-known Kindaichi novels, The Inugami Curse and Village of the Eight Graves, toe the line between classical whodunnits and gothic horror.

It's a very interesting contrast, given that this (honkaku-ha) is very much a genre that's always been in part about opening a line of conversation with the western tradition, to see how the threads of influence get carried over.

magicratfingers

adhd is fun bc everything I got taught is backwards

a good day makes good sleep

starting with a lil treat gets the work done

More things to do is less overwhelming

don’t make a plan just get in there

you’ll never take good care of what you don’t like so throw it out (this one is my favorite bc it’s easy to see what you don’t like)

magicratfingers

Incredible addition

don’t put the thing on the shelf put the shelf under the thing

magicratfingers

there is no work there is only fun there is no good it is only done

cephalopod-celabrator

I think it's really funny that reading the discworld witch books (at least the ones that are Weatherwax+Ogg+Magrat), Granny immediately seems like the scariest one by far. She seems like a terrifying force of nature accompanied by a jovial old grandma and an insecure young woman. But as the series progress, the times when Granny holds back and Nanny and Magrat jovially engage in brutal physical violence add up. Now I'm not saying you *shouldn't* be scared of Granny, I'm just saying that she has a rather strong conscience in her way, whereas Magrat and Nanny will both sucker punch you, kick you between the legs and happily step over your groaning body. Granny is to be feared, but Nanny doesn't fight fair and Magrat will kill a motherfucker. Terry Pratchett really knew how to write female characters.

oma-goodness

Too right to stay in the tags

astralbondpro

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine // S06E11: Waltz

majormiles

requested by @muirmarie

genderfluid-druid

hurr hurr I'm a human body hurr hurr I'm gonna solve all my problems using mucus

genderfluid-druid

"i require more fluids" well what did you do with the fluids I already gave you. hmm? did you make more mucus with them? you made more mucus with them.

prokopetz

Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.

writebastard

So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.

prokopetz

Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.

roachpatrol

THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING

roachpatrol

vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core

humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast

vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast

humans: hahaha yeah

humans: it did tho

vsa: IT EXPLODED

humans: it exploded twice as fast

froborr

I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.

megabeeprime

Yeah, I love this.

underscorex

Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.

Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.

All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.

roachpatrol

klingons: okay we don’t get it

vulcan science academy: get what

klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way

klingons: why do you let them run your federation

vulcan science academy: look

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.

vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.

vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.

klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation

the-real-seebs

Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.

dragon-in-a-fez

you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.

dragon-in-a-fez

you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus, testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do? do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey, while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.

“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.

“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.

there must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten it.”

sameenbyhat

Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.

Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”

“That was ONE TIME.”

There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.

And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”

There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”

jazzybot4

reblog for new meta. RE that last line: McGuyver.

deadcatwithaflamethrower

“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.

roachpatrol

during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.

“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”

“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”

there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg

The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans

The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light

keeper-of-the-flames

Well don’t forget that humans also have the capacity to not overthink things. Cause Picard showed that you can go low tech with fighting the Borg in First Contact. Cause only a human would think “hmm, if they keep adapting to energy weapons, let’s see how they handle low tech things like tiny metal projectiles launched at high speeds in their direction via small, focused explosions. Aka: Bullets!”

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

Captain Picard deciding to literally just take on the most terrifying beings in all of space with a tommy gun is without a doubt one of my favourite moments from Next Generation and one of the reasons why I adore Picard <3

vittyyluvscookies

Am I wet? Am I on my period? Did I pee my pants?- next on wtf is going on down there.

submissivefeminist

I’m so glad this is a universal wondering among vagina-owners, haha.

chaotichowlite

‘Vagina-owners’

anxiousnerd

Tune in next time for: Are these menstrual cramps? Am I pregnant? Is it just gas? I wouldn’t have to ask these questions if I didn’t have a damn uterus

sexylibrarian1

Next week: Is it a bladder infection? An ovarian cyst? Do I have endometriosis? Oh God please do not let it be cervical cancer! A 20/20 special

occupyvenus

Y'all are forgetting the all-time classic: Is it just my period or is my appendix about to burst? Some nice tea and a heatpack or 911 and emergency surgery?

phantoms-lair

There is actually a test for that last one!

Place your hand over the pain, press down slightly and release. If the pain doesn’t change by any great margin, you’re fine. If it suddenly becomes some painful you can barely stand, Get thee to an Emergency Room

taysweetbae

reblog for the safety of vaginas and their owners

greedyagain

The appendix test works with or without a vagina so reblogging for everyone.

sexhaver

at this point the most charitable interpretation of tumblr's moderation is that

terfs on this site (users, not employees) have figured out that they can weaponize the automated banning system with mass reports on trans women

at best, nobody on staff has noticed this pattern of behavior for several years despite it being explicitly pointed out to them multiple times; at worst, there is at least one terf on staff making it so that mass reports of trans women get acted on instantly and are rarely if ever reviewed

Photo Matt has an ego the size of Cleveland and will ban anyone who incidentally bruises it while lying through his veneers about the reasons why when they are blatantly obvious to anyone with eyes

i'm genuinely not sure whether Matt is garden-variety transphobic, or if he hates everyone who shit-talks him and it just so happens (for no reason at all) that the trans women on this site dislike him and his moderation team more than most other groups so he just hates the fact that they keep making him look transphobic when he systematically bans them for hating him

tumblr's legal and PR teams are waking up right now, checking Slack on their phones before getting out of bed, and are probably screaming into their respective pillows

Ch👍

ACAB

I fucking love when cops are such losers that you don’t even need to clown on them, they just do it themselves

homunculus-argument

Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "being stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.

thoodleoo

been reading cicero's rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don't think i've ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before

thoodleoo

had a couple people be like "i have no idea what this means" so to clarify: the word penis in latin originally meant tail and only later got the sense of, uh. penis. so this is cicero complaining that nowadays all these hooligans are using the word "penis" for naughty purposes

atii-uqaulahaluanngilutit

Thank you for this post, I will be showing it to every boomer who ever complains about how the kids these days are butchering the language.

foone

Which is especially funny because the Romans had a very rich vocabulary for being rude. And a lot of it got very well preserved, unlike some other ancient cultures where the only people who could write were scholars and priests and the like, who weren't going around talking about slurs all that much. Not the Romans. We have a city full of rude graffiti that got preserved when the nearby volcano asploded, and poets like Catullus who loved to get FILTHY. He wrote poems about love and lust, for men and women, and he wrote poems about people he fucking hated, and he spared no invective.

So the Latin has a bunch of rude words, we still know about them, and the hilarious thing about this quote is that it's an ancient Roman complaining about a word for penis... And it's the one WE STILL USE, SOME TWO MILLENNIA LATER.

I sorry Cicero, you lost this battle, hard.

He could have been complaining about peniculus (little brush), mentula (prick), sopio (penis), vomer (plowshare), verpa (hard on/ literally penis with retracted foreskin).

But nope. He picked the one word that ended up in English.

BTW one of my favorite things about English vocabulary that you can't not see once you realize it's there: there was a period in Englandwhere the upper classes spoke romance languages and the lower classes were germanic, before this all melted together into the Frankenstein's monster we call English

So English has a lot of cases where we have two words for the same thing, but one is formal and medical and polite, and the other is rude.

Why is copulation clinical and fucking rude? Because "copulation" is Latin and "fucking" is germanic. Same goes for "feces" and "shit", "vagina" and "cunt", and so on.

Interestingly this goes for some other words too, in a way that makes sense if you think about it. You know how we have different words for some animals and the food made from those animals? Like, "cow" vs "beef", "sheep" vs "mutton", "deer" vs "venison".

It's the same thing! Just not always going back to Latin, sometimes it's just to old French. The animal is germanic, the meat is romance/Latin.

Why? Well, think about it. You've got a class system. You've got upper-class rich people eating their fancy meals, and a bunch of poor working class people raising the animals on the farms. The animals get germanic names, and the meat get romance names, because Lord Snooty What'sHisFuck only ever sees a cow when it's cooked up and on his plate. So he calls it "beef", since he speaks something like French, and the guy who raised Tasty Betsy called her a "Cow" because he speaks something like German.

English has centuries of linguistic classism built into our very vocabulary! And it's really neat to notice and see how prevalent it is.

BTW to get back to Latin, another fun thing about how their assorted dirty words worked is that it implies a lot about their value system, and how they saw gender and sexual roles. See, they had a real thing about what we now would call "top" vs "bottom". We still have some of that, of course, but we tend to make it more gendered, and more about straight vs. gay.

The Romans didn't think "gay" was an insult. They did have a word for that! But they did use "cinaedus" as an insult, and the closest term we have is "cocksucker". Except they didn't really imply the homosexual nature of that insult... For them it was just about being the bottom in oral sex. "cocksucker" or "pussylicker", it's all the same. Similarly they had "irrumo, irrumare", which means "to make someone suck your cock", which is an expression of dominance. Again, it's not about the possible homosexuality: it's the topping.

And similarly, they had "pathicus", an insult that means something like the f-slur. But as always, it's not about homosexuality, as that's fine: it's about being the bottom. One of the worst slurs you could call a Roman man was one that meant he let people fuck him in the ass.

The bottom line (no pun intended): Linguistics are always interesting because they tell you so much about the culture that speaks that language. Romans had a culture-wide hang-up about topping and bottoming, and to this day English has a big formal/informal divide in our vocabulary because of who won The Battle of Hastings in 1066.

fickdichistwarum

The bit about English having two sets of words is a linguistic phenomenon called a stratum. English adopted a wide array of Norman and Latinate terms - many of the more technical and clinical terms were actually adopted directly from the Latin used by scholars, which is why you'll also see them in other languages like German - which settled themselves in as a formal stratum. It also has a couple of others with more restricted uses, eg. a Greek stratum mostly used for science and an Italian stratum mostly used for music.

This is not something unique to English or even European languages. Thai has an extensive Indic stratum stratum drawn from Pali and Sanskrit that dominates formal vocabulary in a similar way to English's Romance stratum. Bahasa melayu has both an Indic stratum and an Arabic one, covering domains such as government and religion respectively. Japanese has an extensive Classical Chinese stratum, preserved in the on-readings of kanji.

stevviefox

Reblogging as this is an interesting read.

datasoong47

So, the really odd thing about this Latin word? Latin pḗnis is derived from Proto-Indo-European *pesnis which in turn is from the root *pes meaning ... penis! *pesnis is also the ancestor of Hittite pešnaš "man, husband". Other descendants of *pes include Greek péos and Sanskrit pása both meaning "penis", and with a different suffix, Old English fæsl meaning "offspring, progeny" and German Fasel meaning "young sexually mature bull or cow"

So, "tail" appears to actually have been a secondary development rather than the original meaning, and Cicero mistakenly assumed it was the original meaning and that "penis" was a contemporary development! Or possibly even weirder, it changed from "penis" to "tail" at some point and then went back to "penis"

substitious-bastard

stuck in the time loop but i just use it as a free day off. im not even trying to get out. i am teaching myself to knit. i am crocheting. i am cooking. not even doing anything crazy. just escaping capitalism for a week. day 375 and im not sure what lesson it's trying to teach but i've taught myself to hand make lace so all is well

crimsonclad

reminder that (spoilers) this was literally the solution to the movie Groundhog Day (1993). He learned piano and the Heimlich and multiple languages and basic car maintenance and the universe was like “now you get it”

Oh boy. And to complement his other’s day post about “fun with lay-offs”, Tumblr/Automattic’s CEO has been interviewed on a podcast where he:

Calls Diversity & Inclusion efforts ‘exclusionary’.

Drops the idea that Black history month maybe shouldn’t exist because ‘other heritages’ don’t have something similar for themselves,

“And so part of me really identifies with Martin Luther King being, I want my children judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” <- whatever this is. I wonder what would be the significant difference between MLK children and yours, Matt (who is the whitest boy alive), and if that significant difference could somewhat be a core part of the message of that quote.

https://stellarwp.com/podcast/special-episode-with-matt-mullenweg/

There is something else than is less obvious but it’s incredibly shitty and toxic, specially given the position of Matt Mullenweg. I’m talking about this:

This also fits with a lot of things Mullenweg mentions all along the interview:

It’s, basically, the good old “I don’t see color” argument.

This is a very common argument being thrown in the right-wing tech circles lately. The “meritocracy” one. The “There should be no quotas, just the the best people for every job”. That’s where Matt’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion rejection comes from.

Now, this argument is just a politically correct way of saying something much, much uglier.

You see, tech is an incredibly homogeneous world. The majority of the people involved are guys. White guys mostly. Just focusing on the project M. Mullenweg directs, WordPress, we can take the 2020 data they published (there’s probably more recent data, but I have the 2020 at hand and I’m too lazy to search for updates): 79% of the contributors to the project identify as male. 18% identify as female. This is a common gender distribution within tech projects: as I say, it’s all guys.

Now, when you talk about this fact, there aren’t a lot of explanations you can come to. It’s mostly variations of two opposite ideas:

The lack of diversity on tech is due to diverse social factors and systemic inequalities that make it easier for certain groups (white guys) to thrive in the industry

The lack of diversity on tech is due some kind of humans (males of certain ethnicities) having a natural advantage on certain activities related with logic, math, etc.

Obviously, the first one is the one that the people who care about DEI initiatives believe, and the second one is the one defended by conservative assholes.

But then there’s people like Matt, who won’t say “if there’s 80% guys contributing to my project is because guys are just smarter”, but who deny any kind of systematic inequality to exist, and demand their right to just “pick the best people for the job” without any further consideration. But hey, if choosing the “best people for the job” ends meaning “80% of white guys”, and the white guys doesn’t have it any easier than anyone else… what are you really saying there?

Yes, you are saying that the white guys are just more apt. You are just saying that the white guys are just smarter. You don’t even need to come up with a bullshit evolutionary pseudoscience to justify your bigotry, because you just want everyone to be judged as just a single human, right? Humanism!

Bullshit. Toxic, ultraconservative bullshit.

When some of the most powerful people on the internet industry says shit like this, when they insist on painting their bigotry as meritocracy… we have a big problem.

sophsun1

Arrested Development – 2.02: The One Where They Build A House

kushblazer666

somethingusefulfromflorida

I'd call it that too if it happened to me

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