You’re all dead. Your culture is basically extinct…or more accurately, has evolved into something that doesn’t involve sea-faring raids and pillaging and slave-taking, all those stereotypical things associated with Vikings. You weren’t even all that a thousand years ago — the Vikings were one aspect of a complicated culture of farmers and merchants and politicians and fishers and city builders.

So I’m afraid that if you are calling yourself a Viking now, you’re just a silly poseur^*. If you’re trying to live up to Viking ideals today, you’re mistaken — no one wants to live with Vikings around anymore. Imagine a time a thousand years from now, when people try to claim the revered traditions of Americans by insisting on being called Footballers and running about in pads and cleats and punching their spouses in the head. That’s what I see in modern “Vikings”, and I say that as someone who can also claim Scandinavian descent.

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You know, that moment in an interview where suddenly the subject goes wandering off script, and becomes fervent — obsessed even — on a subject that makes your eyebrows rise up and reach for your hairline, and you’re beginning to wonder whether someone will kick the person under the table or make that throat-cutting motion with their hand or something, anything, to get them to shut up because you can’t believe that they’re saying such hateful, stupid stuff? Yeah, that happened.

Mathew Klickstein has a niche: he’s fanatical about old kid shows on Nickelodeon. It’s a weirdly twee sort of thing to care so much about, but I can sort of see it — my kids were big fans of shows like Rugrats and The Adventures of Pete & Pete (that one had Iggy Pop on it, which I thought was awesome) and Clarissa. So he’s doing a show in New York about these old cartoons, he’s written a book about them, and he’s getting interviewed, and yes, he really, really knows a lot of minutiae about Nickelodeon cartoons.

Then they ask him about diversity.

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I do not trust the police at all any more. The news has utterly destroyed their reputation, and it’s damned clear that they have a screwed-up idea of their mission.

Case in point: this is how Indiana police respond to a seat belt infraction. That’s right, a woman forget to fasten her seat belt when she was rushing to the hospital.

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When the sides are divided, when they start making accusations, it’s always enlightening to look at what each side considers an insult. On my side, we see the other as agents of oppression, misogynists and racists, people who want to discriminate and maintain an unjust status quo. On their side…

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Demonstrators intrude on St Louis Symphony Orchestra concert with a little musical interruption.

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A few years ago, Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award. Okorafor is a Nigerian-American writer. The World Fantasy Award is a bust of HP Lovecraft. You can guess where this is going, because Lovecraft was a flamingly awful racist. How awful? Read the poem at that link and suppress your gag reflex.

Which obviously causes some conflict. Okorafor wrote to China Mieville for advice, since he’d also won the award, and he wrote back with a suggestion.

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Good question.

I have been down the rabbit hole. I got sucked down into a prolonged web search on the matter of pre-WWII eugenics, which is more than a little squicky, but was fascinated to discover a thriving community of correspondents which reminded me precisely of the various flavors of blog commenters today — that is, opinionated, sometimes pretentious, and often liberally sprinkled with asses. I started picking out names and searching for their contributions.

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