Repost: There are no Marching Morons

I just saw a reference to Kornbluth’s story, The Marching Morons, and I’m also working up a talk on the perils of excessive adaptationism, and together they motived me to repost this article from Scienceblogs. It’s always bugged me: it’s saturated with the unthinking assumption that human diversity is hardwired and fixed, and built on a racially invariant biological foundation. And it largely went unquestioned by science fiction fans.

I was sent a link to this editorial by the science-fiction writer, Ben Bova. I like part of the sentiment, where he’s arguing that it’s worth the effort to try and change the world, but a substantial part of it bugs me.

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They’re made of PEOPLE!

I can’t really recommend this long article about MRAs. It’s not awful, but it seems determined to demonstrate something no one had questioned: “golly, not all MRAs are neckbearded trolls. They’re humans too!” OK, I know and agree; there are circumstances in which anyone could have a civilized conversation with them…which the author proceeds to do, talking to a random MRA named Max in Chicago, and also calling up Paul Elam and Roosh, and in every case doing his very best to put them in a good light, while not easing up on their awful opinions.

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I entered a free contest! You should too!

One of the more trivial ways the trolls carry out a campaign of harassment is to sign me up for random newsletters, getting me on mailing lists for organizations I have no interest in following. For a while, I was getting gay magazines and all kinds of strange porn offers; I laughed those away. Then I was getting signed up for church email newsletters. I get regular updates from the City of Riverside, California — the last I looked at one, which was sometime ago, I was getting information about their sewage treatment plant. You get the idea. Of course, all I do is flag them as spam, my email software then automatically dumps all future email from that source into a junk mail folder, and once a week or so I have to remember to trash the tens of megabytes of crap in that folder.

Now someone has ever so cleverly signed me up as a supporter of the National Association for Gun Rights, which has offered me a chance to enter a drawing, and being a generous sort of person, I thought I’d share it with all of you. Please do sign up for it.

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