Sorry, This Is My Reality, Not Yours

Many self-help gurus and two-bit philosophers insist that we are each able to shape our personal realities by force of will.

If I can change my reality by simply altering my thoughts and desires, and you can change your reality by altering your thoughts and desires, then at the very moment that our wills diverged from each other's, so too did our realities. You and I are not living in the same universe.

Neat, huh? It gets better.

Nobody on earth views the world in exactly the same way. Everyone thinks a little differently. Everyone wants something different. Therefore...

Everyone is living in a separate universe.

It then follows that all of the people you see walking around and interacting with your own pretend reality aren't actually real people at all, or, at best, are merely the shadows of people who only fully exist in universes of their own making.

Nobody is real. Nobody exists. Except you.

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Of course, that's all complete bunk. There is one reality, and you're stuck in it with all the rest of us schmucks. No way out. No escape. You can't even get out by dying. If you die, you just move on to another mode of existence in this one and only reality.

Truth, facts, reality... These things can't be changed by fantasizing new facts. There is one God, one way of eternal salvation, and only two human genders. Everything else is just wishful thinking. Deal with it.

The Marching Sanders Morons

I just heard the most idiotic thing from an Occupy Wall Street proponent. He suggested that we should have two separate economies: the "easy stuff" economy and a "sports" economy.

The easy stuff economy would provide the basic necessities of life to all people for free. This includes food, shelter, clothing, and basic healthcare. You know. The "easy" stuff that we can do with little to no effort and our eyes closed.

The sports economy would be for the rich and elite to play with entertainment, gadgets, and other non-essential stuff. We can contain all the evil capitalists there so they can't take unfair advantage of the helpless masses.

This is so mind-numbingly idiotic, that I find it difficult to believe that this guy somehow manages to get dressed in the morning.

Who is going to pay for the easy stuff? Who's going to grow the food, harvest it, process it into food-like substances suitable for consumption by Wall Street Occupiers? Who's going to transport it, store it, stock it, serve it? All that stuff just happens magically? Or maybe he thinks we should raid Africa and build a new slave economy.

Who decides what is the easy stuff? What will be grown, where, and how? I'll tell you: Monsanto. The military industrial complex. The evil capitalist cabal that wants to starve all the poor people. That's who. (Sarcasm? Sort of.)

Seriously, it won't be you and me who makes these decisions, and I guarantee you, 100% absolutely, that somebody will be making them. All of this would have to be controlled by a central bureaucracy, which means rich people. Who controls the food-related bureaucracies now? Monsanto & company. Who will control the food-related bureaucracies in OWS Boy's rainbow utopia? Monsanto & company. This means there will be no food on the shelves. There will only be food-like substances, genetically modified, and heavily dosed with subtly toxic chemicals, because that's the "easy" way. At first, you'll be able to buy better food if you really want, but before long, that will become illegal. It's already largely illegal. Just try to buy raw milk from a local farmer. Those companies do not care about you. They do not care about your health, about the environment, or about social justice. They care about profit and control, and that's all they care about.

OWS Boy is typical of Bernie Sanders lemmings. They are easily manipulated pawns with the long-term, critical thinking skills of a mosquito. Promise them free rainbows and they'll gleefully castrate themselves and put bullets in the heads of anyone who uses unapproved language on Facebook.

Let Them Know They're in a Fight

I hate threatening someone else's job. I don't care for boycotts. Honestly, the whole #OpTorDrop thing makes me a little sick to my stomach. I'd rather just let people know what I think by supporting things I like and not supporting things I don't. In return, I'd like to be free to support a worthy cause with my own resources, to point out obvious truths in a public forum, or to wear a gaudy Hawaiian shirt without fear of being fired and blacklisted.

Unfortunately, the world today just doesn't work that way.

The other side declared war on us decades ago and we didn't believe them. Who usually wins a fight? The first one to know he's in a fight, which is why we keep losing.

So swallow your bile and start hitting back. Let them know that they're finally in a fight.

I'm not buying another Tor book until Irene Gallo and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden have quit or been fired. I'll buy two on that day. It seems like a small thing, but every war consists of numerous small battles. Start small, start big...just start.

In the meantime, I'm looking for the next fight.

HT: Vox Day "A necessary endorsement"

Mad Max and the Anti-Feminist Truth

The preview for Mad Max: Fury Road made it look like a grrl-power movie and some people were touting it as a great feminist flick, so I wasn't very excited about it. After a few friends assured me that it had been misrepresented, I relented and bought a ticket for this past weekend. I'm glad I did.

Fury Road is full of absurdities and impossibilities, but plausibility has never been a major element of the Mad Max franchise. In such an unlikely world, feminism wouldn't be so out of place. I mean, why not? Spiked and armored columns roaring about the desert wouldn't exactly be a realistic feature of a fuel and water starved post apocalyptic world, so it's no more implausible to posit a female warrior woman ruling the nightmare metropolis of Barter Town or taking on the mutant armies of Immortan Joe. Everything is bigger and badder than it could ever be in the real world and that's one of the things we love about these movies. More guns, more insanity, big explosions, and bigger bad guys. But when it comes to feminism, this movie is much more consistent with the facts of life in the real world than it is in other areas.

In fact, Fury Road is one of the most anti-feminist movies I've seen in a long time.

Here are a few anti-feminist principles that it gets right:

• Without a gun or comparable weapon, almost no woman has a reasonable chance in a fight against a below average man. Without Max to fight for them, Furiosa and Joe's harem girls would have been killed or captured very early in the story.
• Objective, widely accepted and enforced moral standards are essential for civilization.
• The physical infrastructure of civilized society (buildings, roads, farms, machinery, weapons, etc.) is almost exclusively created and maintained by men.
• Women are at the mercy of men. They always have been and always will be. If a woman is not under the protection of one man (father, husband, policeman, soldier, etc.), she will be easy prey for some other man. If there is a woman living in peace, she is either isolated from the rest of humanity or else there is a man somewhere threatening violence against anyone who might wish her harm.

You don't have to like it. You can rage against it all you want. It remains the truth:

Feminists are living out a fantasy that is only made possible by a solid--if understated--patriarchy.

2015 Hugo Award Nominees

I'll keep this post updated as I read through the 2015 Hugo Award Nominees. I have a lot of reading to do in a short period of time because I had only read one of the written works before it was nominated. My comments will be in blue.

Update 5/18/2015: Just downloaded my Hugo packet. Got some reading to do...

Best Novel - No contest. The Three Body Problem. It only remains to determine which I'll rank below it and which won't even make my ballot.

• Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie (Orbit US/Orbit UK) - I'm not going to bother reading a book by an author who thinks calling everyone "she" is clever or poignant. It's moronic. Worse, it's evil, and that's not hyperbole.
• The Dark Between the Stars, Kevin J. Anderson (Tor Books) - ★★ I got 14% of the way through the ebook and decided my free time is too valuable to waste on a mediocre novel with shallow characters and sluggish plot. There is some SJWism going on, but it's half-hearted, as if Anderson doesn't buy into it enough to make it real.
• The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette) (Tor Books) - ★★★ Better than Dark Between the Stars. At least I made it through 25% of this one. It started alright but got bogged down in too much exposition about who ascended which stairs in what order and wore what color combination to which social event. The place names are a mouthful, but as long as you don't actually try to pronounce them, that's not fatal. What is fatal is that the protagonist probably would have lost his head, literally, in the first two chapters if any of the court conspirators actually cared about the power they appeared to be pursuing. He's a naive, effeminate nice-guy who would be helplessly out of his depth in a real political situation.
• Skin Game, Jim Butcher (Orbit UK/Roc Books) - Since the entire book wasn't included in the voter's packet, I saved this one for last. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have time to read it. I've heard good things about it.
• The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu, Ken Liu translator (Tor Books) - ★★★★★ Fantastic book. I loved the glimpses into Chinese culture, but especially the way that Liu unfolded one dimension of insanity after another. Some of the characters seemed pretty cardboard, some seemed very odd (but that might be cultural or linguistic barriers), but I thought that the two primary protagonists (is that the right word?) were very well done. I might take a look at the other nominees, but I seriously doubt that any will surpass this one.

Best Novella - And the winner is... Big Boys Don't Cry!

• Big Boys Don’t Cry, Tom Kratman (Castalia House) - ★★★★★ High-caliber, SciFi gun porn at its finest. Good, solid science fiction, and the message resonated with me. I've never been where Maggie was, but I saw the possibility and walked away.
• “Flow”, Arlan Andrews, Sr. (Analog, 11-2014) - ★★ I got about 1/3 of the way through "Flow" and couldn't stand it anymore. It appears to be entirely written from the POV of an effectively blind and retarded midget. 
• One Bright Star to Guide Them, John C. Wright (Castalia House) - ★★★★ A little rambling at times, it seemed that Wright was trying to cram a trilogy into a series of flashbacks. This story and "The Plural…" both seemed to be exercises in the advice Wright gives in his "Patented One-Lesson Session in the Mechanics of Fiction" from Transhuman: lots of contextual gaps for the reader's own imagination to fill in. For the most part, he does a great job with the technique, but I think that sometimes he pushes it a little too far. The main fault I found with this story is that it is much too large in scope. Unfortunately, none of his nominated works quite measure up to Awake in the Night Land, which I thought was brilliant.
• “Pale Realms of Shade”, John C. Wright (The Book of Feasts & Seasons, Castalia House) - ★★★★ Overall, this was a very good story. Wright's Catholic theology leaks through all over the place, so if you find that offensive, you'll have a hard time appreciating the story. I thought this was the best of the three Wright novellas.
• “The Plural of Helen of Troy”, John C. Wright (City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis, Castalia House) - ★★★★ Fascinating world! I'm definitely going to want to read more of City Beyond Time. On the other hand, some of the theological flourishes seemed tacked on as if the story changed destinations midstream.

Best Novelette - I'm not super excited about any of these stories, but only two of them warrant being left off the ballot so far. Hopefully I'll get to Flynn's story before I vote.

• “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium”, Gray Rinehart (Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, 05-2014) - ★★★★ Entertaining story with an interesting take on human-alien relations. Not inspiring or jaw dropping, but good, entertaining SF.
• “Championship B’tok”, Edward M. Lerner (Analog, 09-2014) - ★★★ Not a bad story idea & the writing is competent, but not great. Too many awkward subordinate clauses and word orders plus an overly abrupt cliff-hanger ending left me unsatisfied. The story would have been much better without the Interveners. Lerner didn't relate the two major conflicts in any meaningful way.
• “The Day the World Turned Upside Down”, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator (Lightspeed, 04-2014) - ★★ Juvenile, narcissistic, pointless, and creepy. Heuvelt gives us a thinly disguised revenge-porn fantasy with a very dream-like feel. Almost everything about this story rubbed me the wrong way except for the way the water didn't fall up unless it was separated from the main body. The technical writing--grammar, vocabulary, etc--itself isn't terrible.
• “The Journeyman: In the Stone House”, Michael F. Flynn (Analog, 06-2014)
• “The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale”, Rajnar Vajra (Analog, 07/08-2014) - ★★★ Cross-cultural miscommunications take center stage in a fun first contact story told in a light-hearted voice. Unfortunately, Vajra lost a lot of points with the abrupt ending. I flipped back and forth several times trying to figure out where the missing pages went.

Best Short Story - I'm undecided between "Samurai" and "Turncoat" right now, but these are all excellent stories. 

• “On A Spiritual Plain”, Lou Antonelli (Sci Phi Journal #2, 11-2014) - ★★★★ Good story. The questions of spirituality of humans on other worlds doesn't get enough serious treatment in the industry.
• “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds”, John C. Wright (The Book of Feasts & Seasons, Castalia House) - ★★★★ If Aesop were more concerned with telling a good story, his fables might have looked something like this.
• “A Single Samurai”, Steven Diamond (The Baen Big Book of Monsters, Baen Books) - ★★★★★ Great adventure story highlighting honor and virtue. 
• “Totaled”, Kary English (Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, 07-2014) - ★★★★ I really enjoyed "Totaled." My only complaint is that I never really felt like I was inside Maggie's head, but then neither was Maggie. It could have been me. I dunno.
• “Turncoat”, Steve Rzasa (Riding the Red Horse, Castalia House) - ★★★★★ Great story. I stumbled a bit on the idea that an extremely advanced AI unable to understand that particular bit of text. (If you've read it, you know what text I mean.) The bare meaning seems pretty straight forward. Perhaps if TX had instead understood it perfectly but wrestled with whether the meaning of the text has legitimate applicability in his own existence.

Best Related Work - Transhuman is the hands down winner in this category.

• “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military SF”, Ken Burnside (Riding the Red Horse, Castalia House) - ★★★★ Practical technical advice on writing hard SF in space vs fantasy in an SF setting. Reminiscent of Michael McCollum's nitty-gritty how-to series from more than a decade ago.
• Letters from Gardner, Lou Antonelli (The Merry Blacksmith Press)
• Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, John C. Wright (Castalia House) - ★★★★★ Fantastic writing advice, biting & humorous criticism of SFF works, intellectual consideration of SFF themes... Excellent work.
• “Why Science is Never Settled”, Tedd Roberts (Baen.com)
• Wisdom from My Internet, Michael Z. Williamson (Patriarchy Press) - ★★★★ Otherwise known as The Collected Proverbs of MZW, Who is Very, Very Different than MZB. Wisdom is full of biting truths that every liberal should have tattooed on the palms of his hands, but the only thing that makes it more related to science fiction & fantasy than to westerns or mystery is the author's credentials as an SFF writer.

Best Graphic Story - Who reads this garbage? I looked at three of these works and decided this entire category needs to be destroyed. No Award.

• Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal - ★★★ Boredom, action, woe-is-me, boredom, action, boredom, woe-is-me. Islam is a religion of peace and apple pie. Not terrible, but not terribly interesting either. Existential naval gazing is fine to an extent; there's room for a bit of it in almost any super hero story. But can we get back to comic book heroes who are actual heroes already?
• Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery - ★★ Pretty decent artwork. Trash, otherwise. Stick-limbed, wide-hipped womynz who are still stronger, faster, & smarter than everyone else, but talk about little more than sex and penis jokes.
• Saga Volume 3 -
  
• Sex Criminals Volume 1: One Weird Trick - ★ Pornographic comic book with only competent artistry. No SF or F at all that I could tell, but then I did skim over 95% of it.
• The Zombie Nation Book #2: Reduce Reuse Reanimate -

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - 

• Captain America: The Winter Soldier - ★★★★ Entertaining action movie. Unfortunately, it's been too long since I watched it to remember much more than that. One thing to remember with almost all super hero movies is that they are more fantasy than science fiction. As long as you keep that in mind, they're pretty enjoyable.
• Edge of Tomorrow
• Guardians of the Galaxy
• Interstellar
• The Lego Movie

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form - 

• Doctor Who: “Listen”
• The Flash: “Pilot”
• Game of Thrones: “The Mountain and the Viper”
• Grimm: “Once We Were Gods”
• Orphan Black: “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried” - ★★★ Orphan Black didn't have a single positive portrayal of a straight, white male until season 2, and then it was only 1. Every single "positive" (using the word very loosely) character was female, gay, or black. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, except that the SJW subtext is so overpowering, it's clear that it was a deliberate slight and not just incidental to the story. It was such a promising idea for a series, it could have been great. Instead, by the middle of season 2, it was piling stupid on top of stupid. Despite that, I still give this episode 3 stars because it wasn't as stupid as some of the others.

Best Editor, Short Form - 

• Jennifer Brozek
• Vox Day - ★★★★★ Five stars not because his technical skills as an editor are so outstanding, but because of what he's done to the field at large. I'm going this way in the short form category because Riding the Red Horse is an outstanding collection, and that because it brings usefulness & relevance back to science fiction, not necessarily because the contents are so brilliantly composed.
• Mike Resnick - 
• Bryan Thomas Schmidt - 

Best Editor, Long Form - 

• Vox Day - ★★★★★ See my comments on Editor, Short Form.
• Sheila Gilbert - ★★ I haven't read anything that Ms. Gilbert has edited, but that's no coincidence. Browsing through her titles, I noted that very few of them looked like anything I'd care to read.
• Jim Minz - 
• Anne Sowards - 
• Toni Weisskopf - ★★★★★ I've read more BAEN books in the last few years than from any other SFF publisher.

Best Professional Artist - A lot of great work from all nominees. I'll have to decide between Greenwood and DouPonce for first place.

• Julie Dillon - ★★★★ Not a bad artist. Sci-fi & fantasy featuring very masculine women, men primarily in visually inferior position, lots of people of color. As I've said elsewhere, there's nothing wrong with any of those things, but I do wonder at the artist's motivation.
• Kirk DouPonce - ★★★★★ Great stuff. Sci-fi & fantasy. Detailed realism with dream-like qualities
• Nick Greenwood - ★★★★★ Warhammer-like dark fantasy, sci-fi, & book covers.
• Alan Pollack - ★★★★ Book covers, sci-fi, fantasy, gaming, etc. High adventure, action-oriented images. Nice. Mildly irritating that his website is completely nonfunctional without enabling javascript from a dozen different domains.
• Carter Reid - Comics, zombies, and more zombies. No art was included in the Hugo packet. Reid was nominated in the Graphic Story category also, so maybe there's something there. More later.

Best Semiprozine - 

• Abyss & Apex
• Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine
• Beneath Ceaseless Skies - ★★★ Some good stories sometimes, but some really awful stories too.
• Lightspeed Magazine - ★★★ Some good stories sometimes, but some really awful stories too. A little heavy on the SJW preaching.
• Strange Horizons

Best Fanzine - 

• Black Gate
• Elitist Book Reviews
• Journey Planet
• The Revenge of Hump Day
• Tangent SF Online

Best Fancast - 

• Adventures in SciFi Publishing - ★★★★ I've been listening to this show for about a year and I'm still getting caught up on old episodes. I think they do a great job overall. They usually stay away from politics, which might keep them from being SJW targets temporarily, but it's not in the nature of SJWs to allow neutral parties. Today's moderates become tomorrows intolerable "extremists". Best of luck, guys.
• Dungeon Crawlers Radio - ★★★ The interviews can be good, but the endless banter makes this show too annoying for regular listening.
• Galactic Suburbia Podcast
• The Sci Phi Show
• Tea and Jeopardy

Best Fan Writer - It seems to be like much of the included matieral ought to be in the Related Works category, leaving this one for fiction, but whatever. Not my call. Or maybe they should have named this the Mad Genius Club category this year. I haven't read any of these writers' fiction, but I've read most of their blogs at least once before. Sarcasm, SF history, politics, and more. I don't know quite what to write about the individuals, so I'll leave most of them blank. Jeffro Johnson will get the top spot on my ballot.

• Dave Freer - ★★★★
• Amanda S. Green - ★★★★ 
• Jeffro Johnson - ★★★★★ Analysis of historical greats in SF. Johnson's articles bring back some memories.
• Laura J. Mixon - ★★★★ A little obsessive and possibly unbalanced, but Mixon's expose of Requires Hate is an important addition to the anti-SJW case. The Clarion story... I don't know what to think of that just now.
• Cedar Sanderson - ★★★★   

Best Fan Artist - Elizabeth Leggett will get my vote in this category. I have my doubts about whether she should be in the "Fan Artist" category, but of the nominated artists, I like her work the best.

• Ninni Aalto - ★★★ Pen and ink (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), comics, and lots of rabbits.
• Brad W. Foster - ★★★ Pen and ink, comic books, book covers, and more. Not bad.
• Elizabeth Leggett - ★★★★★ Lots of really cool work.
• Spring Schoenhuth - ★★★ Jewelry and painting. I'm not impressed by the one painting included in the Hugo voter packet, and, although the jewelry doesn't look bad, I don't know enough to judge it fairly.
• Steve Stiles - ★★★ Comic books, covers, and caricatures. A little retro, which is cool and understandable since Steve's been at it a long time. Overall, not bad.

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer - 

• Wesley Chu - ★★★ The included work wasn't to my taste.
• Jason Cordova - ★★★★ I enjoyed Hill 142. I'm mostly impressed that it is as good as it is apparently unedited. With some polishing it could be great. There is the problem of overgrown arachnids, however. See Hank Davis' introduction to "The Baen Big Book of Monsters."
• Kary English - ★★★★ I was very impressed with "Totaled."
• Rolf Nelson - 
• Eric S. Raymond - 

Ray Bradbury and the Minority Defense League

In light of the recent controversies over the SFWA’s internal censorship policies, consider these excerpts from the author’s afterword to Fahrenheit 451:

“About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.

But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea…to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?

A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail…complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I ‘do them over’?

Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped….

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches. Every minority…feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blancmange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Fire-Captain Beatty…described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever….

If the Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters….If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my ‘Wonderful Ice Cream Suit’ so it shapes ‘Zoot,’ may the belt unravel and the pants fall….

All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch, I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m out again, giving it the old try.

And no one can help me. Not even you.

I wonder what Mr. Bradbury would think of an organization of science fiction writers that expels and campaigns against other writers who dare to pen words and ideas that offend some members of some minorities.  Not very much, I suspect.

Here are some other thoughts from prominent SF writers on this topic:

• Orson Scott Card
• Larry Correia
• Jerry Pournelle

Random Thoughts on the News

Common Sense Defended

The study asked thousands of adult children of straight, lesbian and homosexual parents dozens of questions and compared the results. While many questions did not produce statistically-significant differences, the study found major differences in a few categories. Adult children of gay couples were two to four times as likely to be on public assistance, more than twice as likely to be unemployed and more than twice as likely to have contemplated suicide.

A gay blogger is slandering and bullying a heterosexual man who says homosexual parents might not be good for children. What a shock.

A modern American university has determined that this study by one of its professors is completely above board and that he "used sufficiently scholarly methods". Universities usually bend over backwards to accomodate sexual deviants and other politically protected classes. If they couldn't find anything wrong with the study, I'm reasonably certain there was nothing wrong with it. (Unless Professor Regnerus is very well connected. There are all kinds of politics going on in our schools at every level.)

Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

The U.S. Border Patrol is reporting that shots were fired at some agents patrolling the Rio Grande near the border town of Hidalgo.

Even when our relations with Mexico were at their best, the Mexican border has always been a weak point in our national security. We can do something about it, but Washington actively undermines every attempt. I wonder why that is.
Man Likes Breasts

A high school girls basketball coach in suburban Chicago has been placed on administrative leave after writing a self-published book that includes graphic sexual content and an acknowledgement from the author that he has a "weakness for cleavage."

Seriously? This is news? Do these people really think that all high school girls coaches are asexual, homosexual men, or heterosexual women? No wonder our schools are in such trouble: they're run by morons living in a fantasy world. If they really wanted a coach who wouldn't be ogling the players, they would have to do some profiling. After all, it's ok to profile if your goal is to discriminate against white, heterosexual men.

The book is reported to contain all kinds of amoral and immoral advice. This is public school we're talking about. I seriously doubt their real objection concerns non-Christian behavior. I think they actually have a problem with men who don't behave like women. Heterosexual women, I mean. The unintended consequences of the controversy will be that Coach Player will sell a hundred times more books than he would have if left alone.

Discrimination Against Caucasian Men

Interesting article in June 19th's ComputerWorld: "100 Best Places to Work in IT 2006". Here are some of the statistics cited as justifications for three of their top five picks:

-#2 University of Miami: "74% of IT staffers are minorities."
-#3 Capital Group: "52% of the IT staffers are minorities."
-#5 Grant Thornton LLP: "43% of its IT managers are women. 29% of IT staffers are women."

I don't have anything against minorities or women. I think that if one person is more qualified to do a job, then that person should get the job. It doesn't matter to me if the person is a black woman from Atlanta or a hermaphrodite from Sacramento. If he/she/it can do the job, then great! The problem is when people start discriminating against one group in order to make up for a perceived injustice to another group.

Do minorities really make up 74% of the IT professionals in the Miami area? Or 52% in all of the Capital Group locations? I'm having trouble believing that. I think you'd have to work hard to hire that many minorities in technical fields--or you have to hire them all from India--because most IT people in the United States are white men. Even in Miami.

I work in an IT department with eight men and one woman. This department isn't unique. I've been in IT departments with ratios of 12 to 0 and 15 to 1. These companies weren't discriminating against women. It's just that there aren't many women interested in these jobs, and many of those who do apply aren't qualified. Grant Thornton must be discriminating against men from the very beginning by giving a preference to women regardless of technical ability. If the numbers of men and women who apply for positions at Grant Thornton are roughly the same as at other companies, then men competing against women for the same jobs are at greater than a 50% handicap just because they are men. They continue to discriminate against men who seek promotion. If you are competing against a woman for a management promotion, your chances of getting the promotion drop by one-third solely because of your gender.

The article should have been called "100 Best Places for Minorities and Women to Work in IT," because they don't look so great for white men.

Update 07/10/2006: Read-worthy post at http://lndavout.blogspot.com/2006/07/response-to-lee.html .