The Bluestocking, vol 94: Lobsters and coders
Happy Friday!
I thought I would have to spend this week in a fortified bunker, because on Tuesday GQ published the video of my interview with Jordan Peterson, but it really hasn't been so bad. First off, he has (commendably) stopped inciting pile-ons by copying his antagonist's handle into his tweets. Second, Twitter has drastically improved its notification filters (mine are currently set only to people who follow me). It does feel as though we are socially and technologically groping towards an accommodation with the new powers that social media has given us.
The new issue of GQ has an abridged version of the Q&A, or you can watch all ONE HUNDRED MINUTES of it here. I howled at some of the YouTube comments, including this precious gem: "I was rather board because she's nothing but a emotional leftist Parrott who is intellectually inferior but probably book smart with an average IQ with low comprehension skills. " His debating skills presumably left me emotionally leftistly pining for the fjords.
Overall, it seems to have been a Rorschach blot of an interview. British media twitter howled at it, thinking Peterson came off as absurd. His fans on Reddit are split between thinking he trounced me, and worrying he looked tired. The YouTube commenters were... YouTube commenters, ie madly rightwing and vicious.
The surprising (and heartening) thing has been how many tweets/emails I've had from Peterson fans thanking me for challenging him but being fair and respectful. Now, there's a school of thought which says that views like his shouldn't be engaged with or platformed at all, but this experience has moved me further away from that. Lazy oppositional head-to-heads, along the lines of the Today programme going "Climate change: yes or no?" are a problem, but I hope something like this has merit.
So much of modern politics is violently tribal, and so much of it is founded on a feeling of being patronised/belittled/dismissed by an elite. For Peterson's fans, it's college liberals. For Corbyn supporters, it's the MSM. For Brexiteers, it's the Remoaners who control the BBC/businesses/economics departments etc. So taking the piss out of an ideological opponent - while absolutely gold in terms of firing up your own side - drives the other side further into their silo.
I think it all breaks down with Trump, mind. There can't be any conciliation with him, because he has no real ideology or consistency. His voters, on the other hand...?
Helen
Europe at war
The date is October 29, 2018, and Britain faces its darkest hour. On the battlefields of Europe, our Armed Forces have been humiliated.
In makeshift prison camps on the continent, thousands of our young men and women sit forlornly, testament to the collapse of our ambitions.
From the killing grounds of Belgium to the scarred streets of Athens, a continent continues to bleed. And, in the east, the Russian bear inexorably tightens its grip, an old empire rising from the wreckage of the European dream.
Massively enjoyable bit of future-gazing from 2011 about how a European summit on eurozone bailouts would lead to the apocalypse. In fairness, Russia did annex a nearby country and Europe let it. But the bit about the Flemish and the Walloons being locked in civil war has thankfully not yet come to pass.
How to kill your tech industry
In 1965, a young computer worker named Anne celebrated her retirement. Decked out in a punched paper tape train that was made to resemble a bride’s veil, Anne celebrated the end of her career with her fellow twenty-something women colleagues at the computer company. To modern eyes, a retirement party thrown for a woman in her twenties might seem incongruous—all the more so because Anne’s technical skills were much in demand. British businesses and government agencies were scrambling to hire people who had computer skills, and yet here was a computer worker retiring from the workforce at the beginning of her career.
Fascinating piece about a pattern that has repeated in other industries: women allowed to do a job right up until it became prestigious (and well paid). I read a book last year called The Glass Universe about female astronomers at Harvard in the nineteenth century, who made all kinds of discoveries because it was assumed that cataloguing glass plates from telescopes was basically admin, and therefore ladies could do it.
Here, women were allowed to code because it looked like rote calculations, and computers weren't deemed to be that important. Once they became THE FUTURE, the women got squeezed out. That has had grave implications for the British computer industry.
Quick link:
- A Tommy Robinson supporter tries to quote Orwell. Or is it Voltaire? Like a great Monty Python sketch.
Guest gif: how could I not?
See you next time . . .