That Frontier Spirit
Time, I think, for another classic Guardian sentence. A headline, in fact:
How can our future Mars colonies be free of sexism and racism?
The author of this latest ostentatious fretting session, Martin Robbins, is concerned by the “white and male race to conquer Mars.” The rest is pretty much what you’d imagine:
The first woman to be raped in space has probably already been born.
And,
The only population on Mars that we know of is a handful of rovers, but no doubt we’ll start a war anyway, before dragging them into some form of slavery or oppression. It’s just what we do.
And so on, and so forth.
Oh, for the love . . .
You know, you people invented golf. Why don’t we start a Kickstarter campaign for a set of clubs, a few dozen balls and two weeks on the links in Scotland for Robbins so he doesn’t bother the rest of us for awhile. Lord knows, it’s a better hobby than fretting about social justice on a planet that, as yet, has no flipping human beings.
Um, cart before horse?
Clearly he’s as poorly read as you might imagine. I think this is more likely:
http://xkcd.com/1504/
-XC
I think this is more likely
Heh.
Incidentally, NASA currently lists 16 non-white astronauts, which, given a current astronaut community of 43, hardly suggests Old Whitey Being Bad Again™. A glance at the NASA website reveals that half of their new trainee astronauts are female, with a total of 23 female astronauts listed, and a further 49 women of various ethnicities who’ve flown on NASA projects in a range of scientific and engineering capacities. There are six female cosmonauts in the Russian space programme, one female astronaut in China’s state programme, and various women involved in non-NASA space projects in the U.S. and Europe.
If the Racist-Sexist-Heteronormative-Patriarchy-Machine is actually still working, it’s doing a shit job.
I don’t know about Mars colonies, but someone put this guy aboard the B-Ark, ASAP. He’s just the calibre of person that mission needs!
opptny rejects the carbon unit infestation.
Mr Robbins shouldn’t worry about racism on Mars because Africa has its own space program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR97o_FuX-c
(check out the uniforms!)
You have to marvel at the inexhaustible supply of pretentious, anhedonic toss. I’m trying to picture the Guardian’s coverage of Apollo 11. “Privileged white men walk on moon, women and minorities hardest hit.”
At this point, are they just trolling their readers?
David –
The first woman to be raped in space has probably already been born.
I’m a simple man. I like cats, power tools, the Eurovision song contest, and making fun of lefties.
But how am I supposed to make fun of people who fantasise about space rape? It’s not just beyond the parody horizon, it fell down the gravity well of a black hole at relativistic speeds and somehow escaped our universe, transported to a dimension without sight or sound or chuckles.
I suppose it does make the tagline from Alien sound rather molesty.
But why restrict one’s ostentatious moral one-upmanship to fretting about hypothetical future rape victims on Mars?
What about the Octophallic Surprise-Sexers of Sagittarius A*?
What about the rampaging Pleasurebots of the Large Magellanic Cloud?
What about all the Martin Robbinses who are being raped this very minute by lusty space lizards in alternate dimensions?
I pity his parochial mentality. Some of us are just a bit more enlightened.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rishathra
LOL. Those NASA pikers? Fah!
I personally am working on a concept originally developed by another hateful white male – HG Wells. He proposed a space capsule propelled into space by a cannon – and I think it a viable concept.
I will be soliciting resumes for crew positions exclusively from the approved cultural tokens, the affirmative action seekers, and those that can be visually identified by their unsavoury colours, creeds, sexualities, and other politically correct identifiers.
The success and/or failure of this mission, however, will EXPRESSLY not be the responsibility of the management and/or the project backers…HAR HAR HAR!!!
“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” – Robert Kennedy
I suppose if Bill Clinton is still tottering around when the time comes…
“I don’t know about Mars colonies, but someone put this guy aboard the B-Ark, ASAP. He’s just the calibre of person that mission needs!”
That is the most vitally important space colonization project, and should take priority over all others.
“hypothetical future rape victims on Mars?”
Mars Needs Women!
There’s outside the box and then there’s out of your mind.
The first woman to be raped in space has probably already been born.
That is a cisheteronormative statement as it implies a cismale will rape a female of some undisclosed orientation, and therefore also a microaggression against the entire LGBTRCMP community for what if the first person to be raped is actually a male of undisclosed orientation ?
What about the rampaging Pleasurebots of the Large Magellanic Cloud?
Um, what about them? Could you give us another 2000 words or so?
Asking for a friend.
it fell down the gravity well of a black hole
Why it gotta be a black hole?
And so on, and so forth.
Clearly Mars needs to have a proactive and far ranging police force.
There is one available that extends across 33 US states and into Mexico.
Regarding any claims of current difficulties, I wonder if the issue was the uniforms.
It was Jules Verne who wrote about the space cannon, not H.G.Wells. Even back then Verne realized that the acceleration within the cannon bore would smosh anybody but he decided that a cannon sounded more plausible than a rocket or antigravity paint (which H.G.Wells DID write about).
Incidentally, Verne’s spacecraft was launch from a spot near Orlando Florida, about 50 miles from Cape Canaveral, where Apollo 11 was launched, in an aluminum capsule, which landed (splash-down) in the Pacific Ocean where it was picked up by an American warship.
They are trying to book Lady Gaga for the spaceport down a little south of here in New Mexico. I guess Richard Branson and his seventy two Virgin Galactic spaceships need a little pop to make it work.
Carnivals, carnivores. At least that seems OK. Until the high desert has her way.
They say some of those actors get asthma from actually breathing on camera.
Some of that is probably radioactive. Best to use protection.
The Clangers disappeared from our TV screens shortly after The White Man landed on the moon.
Coincidence?
I think not.
Just imagine being trapped on Mars with an automated gaggle of Moni-bots policing everyone. They would be equipped with exquisitely sensitive apparatus for the detection of any micro-dissent.
It would be like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zhe85spsw
Except not just
swearingverbal morality code violation!Studies have shown that 1 out of 5 female astronauts will be raped on Mars (was that in bad taste?)
What about the Leather Goddesses of Phobos?
How can our future Mars colonies be free of sexism and racism?
People like the twit who wrote the article could stay on Earth. That would be a big help.
What about the rampaging Pleasurebots of the Large Magellanic Cloud?
Do they look like Daryl Hannah?
The last thing we need is to wake up in 50 years and find that a bunch of #gamergate nobheads are running Mars.
Mr Robbins’ closing and supposedly damning example of “racism and sexism,” the apparent threshold for such sin, is, from what I can make out, a loose association of people who oppose cronyism and bias in gaming journalism. A group that includes gay people, brown people and, ahem, disabled lesbians. So is Christina Hoff Sommers, a GamerGate guest of honour, a racist, sexist “nobhead”?
This first Martian rape victim: will she have three tits and work in a space brothel?
This first Martian rape victim: will she have three tits and work in a space brothel?
And did the rapist wish that they had three hands.
Mr Robbins’ closing and supposedly damning example of “racism and sexism,” the apparent threshold for such sin, is, from what I can make out, a loose association of people who oppose cronyism and bias in gaming journalism. A group that includes gay people, brown people and, ahem, disabled lesbians. So is Christina Hoff Sommers, a GamerGate guest of honour, a racist, sexist “nobhead”?
The ramblings of the indomitable social justice stormtrooper Arthur Chu would make for an interesting addition to Elsewhere.
At this point, are they just trolling their readers?
That’s the thing. Although Mr Robbins has chosen not to respond to his many and varied critics, he has been busy on Twitter. And there too, he’s avoided addressing anything of substance, as if it were beneath him. As if being glib and wrong about, say, GamerGate – the punchline of his article – were unimportant and in no way raised questions about his broader claims, or his credibility as a journalist. Judging by his tweets, he seems amused by the fact that lots of people are saying how pretentious and ill-informed his article is, as if their mockery somehow validates it.
It’s rather like when fellow Guardianista Mike Power – he of the barbecue patriarchy saga – waved aside an avalanche of mockery and corrections, and simply chose to applaud himself. In his mind he’d been proved right by people pointing out why he was wrong about just about everything. And you can’t really argue with that kind of vanity.
[ Added: ]
As we’ve seen many, many times, a lot of leftist column-writing is less about reality and coherence than it is about signalling and seeming. In general, leftist attitudes are very much concerned with in-tribe social positioning, appearing virtuous, or clever, or radical, or whatever. Which is to say, there’s quite a lot of bad faith involved. And the distinction between trolling and bad faith is… well, quite slim.
I see Samizdata covers this not once but twice.
“The last thing we need is to wake up in 50 years and find that a bunch of #gamergate nobheads are running Mars.”
That is exactly what is going to happen, because us gamergate nobheads (actually the technical term is neckbeards) are smarter and more creative than you, whereas you intolerant SJW thugs create nothing but faux outrage, grievance and a sense of undeserved entitlement to things created by better people than you.
For no reason whatsoever they seem to think this is an Onion spoof.
—
I don’t get why he thinks we’ll start a war on OUR robots surely the progressive narrative is that drones are bad; they give us an unfair advantage or something.
My personal bet is that the Guardian starts complaining about the murder of Martians. After all there’s plenty of literary evidence of their existence prior to us sending spacecraft there. If the fact of fewer woman in a particular occupation is proof of misogyny then clearly the lack of Martians is proof of genocide.
According to Peck an evil person:
Is consistently self-deceiving, with the intent of avoiding guilt and maintaining a self-image of perfection
Deceives others as a consequence of their own self-deception
Projects his or her evils and sins onto very specific targets (scapegoats) while being apparently normal with everyone else (“their insensitivity toward him was selective” (Peck, 1983/1988, p 105[7]))
Commonly hates with the pretense of love, for the purposes of self-deception as much as deception of others
Abuses political (emotional) power (“the imposition of one’s will upon others by overt or covert coercion” (Peck, 1978/1992, p298[6]))
Maintains a high level of respectability, and lies incessantly in order to do so
Is consistent in his or her sins. Evil persons are characterized not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency (of destructiveness)
Is unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim (scapegoat)
Has a covert intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury
Most evil people realize the evil deep within themselves but are unable to tolerate the pain of introspection, or admit to themselves that they are evil. Thus, they constantly run away from their evil by putting themselves in a position of moral superiority and putting the focus of evil on others. Evil is an extreme form of what Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, calls a character disorder.[6][7]
“The first woman to be raped in space has probably already been born.”
Plenty have already been so in Rotherham. The Guardianistas suppressed that knowledge for years. Clearly we know now they had loftier motives.
“It’s just what we do”
My new rule is to stop listening/caring when someone complains using “we” if it’s patently obvious that they mean “you”.
Good grief, just think of what a retarded shithole Earth will become once all the competent, adventurous, self-reliant, and sane people leave for Mars. Kind of like what happened to Europe when all of us came to America.
Good Lord, when that happens, I hope I’m able to get the freak off of this planet!
. . . I hope I’m able to get the freak off of this planet!
A new life awaits you!
Funnily enough for the Guardian there’s no mention of islam.
Is that because one answer to the question ‘How can our future Mars colonies be free of sexism and racism?’ is ‘ensure the colonies aren’t established by Saudi Arabia’?
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/05/08/boston-university-prof-flunks-white-masculinity-in-controversial-tweets/
Kinda speaks for itself.
Kinda speaks for itself.
Great, who doesn’t love free speech? It exposes people for who they really are. Now, if only US Universities could apply the concept consistently and fairly…
Jimmy, funny thing about stuff like free speech is you don’t even have to make an effort to apply it. You just let it be. Somewhat odd for me to say but if you find yourself in times of trouble, these are words of wisdom.
Ah yes, of course.