Friday Ephemera

Oh my, another woke-while-white UK knitter bitching about too many ypipo exhibitors at Yarndale.

So yes, I’m on the exhibitor list of a very white show. I’ve both emailed and spoken with the @yarndale organisers about this over the last few months. As a consequence they did create a diversity statement for their website, though I can’t now find it. I’ve stressed to them that positive discrimination is currently required to counteract the effects of structural racism. I don’t think they’ve yet taken that on board. The more knitters, crocheters and exhibitors that contact them about this, the more likely it is that they will engage in the learning and change-making that are required to make this show more equitable. Please do so! I was particularly disappointed to find when I spoke with them last month that I was the only exhibitor who had contacted them to express concern about how white the show is. I’m wary of publicly expressing how I feel about this because I don’t want to centre my feelings, which are vastly less important than the feeling of erasure that BAME/BIPOC folk are experiencing in the yarncrafts community. That said, I feel lonely and disappointed.
#yarndale #yarndale2019

No word yet if she’s turned over her spot at the fair to a BAME/BIPOC at her expense.

Now that’s just offal: Heap of pig guts hog road after truck spills load in Kansas City

The Interstate 670 was turned into a porcine lot as three of four lanes were closed after the goregasm at 9am local time, . . . People stuck in the traffic would have been boared out of their minds . . . An emergency response vehicle was dispatched with sty-le . . . no live animals were injured in the ham-fisted snafu.

Who knew that knitting was so controversial. https://www.purlsoho.com/create/2008/11/14/whits-knits-baby-mocs/

I understand MENSA members’ disdain for humanity based on their relative intelligence but it’s downright terrifying to a common idiot such as myself to realize that these people are running the show.
I could squeak into that particular organization, had I any interest in doing so.
Having an unusually high IQ does nothing to prevent one from becoming foolish, or damned foolish, or outright malignantly disordered.

Who knew that knitting was so controversial.

We have permanently removed this pattern but are leaving this page active in order to publicly apologize for having shared it in the first place. We are deeply and truly sorry that we exploited and commodified Indigenous culture by taking what is not ours to take. We cannot undo the damage of having created these “moccasins,”

Yes, tears and wailing. Over knitted baby bootees. These clowns like to imagine themselves as enlightened and forward-looking, but the comparison that comes to mind is with the dupes of Victorian spiritualism. It’s like a modern analogue of table-tipping and regurgitated ectoplasm, and where devotees get very excited, even hysterical, about imaginary phenomena.

We can only have TRUE diversity when the world is free of the scourge of wypipo!
IIRC, about a year ago there was a California public school which touted their diversity for being entirely devoid of wypipo students. Very telling.

David, do I have a MENSA related comment stuck in the spam filter?

“We are deeply and truly sorry that we exploited and commodified Indigenous culture by taking what is not ours to take.”
Modern Leftism: the belief that scarce goods should be free to all and a strict policy of property rights on nonscarce mental abstracts must be rigidly, even violently, enforced.

There’s nothing in the spam filter.
Found a copy still in Notepad. (Hit Ctrl-Z and there it was.) So…
“I understand MENSA members’ disdain for humanity based on their relative intelligence but it’s downright terrifying to a common idiot such as myself to realize that these people are running the show.”
and
“I could squeak into that particular organization, had I any interest in doing so. Having an unusually high IQ does nothing to prevent one from becoming foolish, or damned foolish, or outright malignantly disordered.”
Indeed, indeed.
And the older I get, Sam, the more respect I have for “common idiots”.
In my experience, and according to various friends who are in MENSA, MENSA members tend to have personality problems (autism spectrum?) and many are singularly foolish. Lots of book-learning but no damn sense, as my grandmother might have said.
Isaac Asimov wrote that he declined to join because MENSA members showed an annoying tendency to be engage in antisocial behavior intended to prove that they were smarter than others: The higher your reputation the more you would attract the malign attention of MENSA *ssh*les. As someone who preferred congenial company, Asimov decided to avoid MENSA. I was told I qualified but found the people off-putting. A joke I have heard now and then is that MENSA is for people who are not yet mature enough for science fiction fandom.

A joke I have heard now and then is that MENSA is for people who are not yet mature enough for science fiction fandom.
I was told that their parties are boring.
And the older I get, Sam, the more respect I have for “common idiots”.
I’ve met guys who were downright Forest Gumps, when it came to intelligence, but who showed themselves to be better men than I was.
“Experts should be on tap, not on top.”
A downside to expertise is that management or leadership is less likely to promote you to a position beyond where your expertise is being applied full-time and directly. This may stick in the craw of many who believe their intelligence, or reputation, or paper qualifications entitles them to a higher status.
Generally speaking, I’ve long held it a maxim that the unusually intelligent or highly schooled tend to be easier marks for confidence artists. They are just that much better equipped, or inclined, to fool themselves into the belief that they are not being fooled.

men in their own speciality to which they have devoted themselves with great industry and zeal. But outside this special knowledge they are generally as foolish and ignorant as any person one could pick up in the street, with no broad knowledge of society or the general principles of legislation.”
This dovetails somewhat (well, yes a hammer may be required) with something I’ve observed about exceptional athletes. The Babe Ruths, Ted Williams, Michael Jordans, Magic Johnsons of American sport, though presumably applies further afield. Those who achieved and reached the pinnacle of their game are often harangued into leadership positions as head coaches or specialty coaches and such, but more often than not fail. My theory on why such otherwise driven people so often fail is that their knowledge is so intuitive to them that it is very hard for them to teach it to others. They don’t really understand why they know how to do those things better than others who may have practiced even harder than the star. The athlete that struggled, the one who almost made it or was marginally talented relative to the highest levels, had to study the game harder looking for every advantage that they could tweek out of whatever skills that they had and/or by studying the weaknesses of their opponents. They consequently have a much broader understanding of the game and thus can relate to a much more diverse group of younger men when put in position to do so.
While the autism spectrum may play a role in some of this, the idea that because someone is “smart” at one thing they thus understand most other things, while a tempting assumption to make, this capacity is not often transferable. Sure there are some polymaths out there, but not every knowledgeable person, and I’d say very few of them, has that broader capacity. This is part of what makes me suspicious of IQ. Not saying it’s irrelevant, but so many other factors go into success such that many, many high IQ people are about as useless, and more likely to do far more damage, than an average IQ or even slightly below IQ person. I mean look at what that Gruber guy from MIT has done to the US healthcare system. You’d think you couldn’t possibly make things worse with an MIT guy designing things, and yet…

WTP: Good point.
Also: The skills that make a good engineer/scientist/athlete/etc are not the same as the skills that make a good manager/team leader/etc. Thus, a superior engineer may do poorly if asked to lead a team or manage a project. People skills, planning skills, etc, etc, etc.

Hal:
1. I got my information from Asimov’s autobiography, which would have been relating events of the 1950’s.
2. Would you please, please stop linking to Google searches? Take the time to choose a single link and quote the relevant passage from that link. Okay?

“You keep repeating that he didn’t join.”
What repeating? I wrote it once in this thread. My subsequent reply to you stated that I was relying on his autobiography, and in particular the part dealing with the 1950’s. (Or maybe a little earlier? Certainly not the 1960’s.) That is not a denial that he joined later.
“Except that the results there remind you several times over that he did join.”
None of the readers of this blog need to be “reminded” several times. (And isn’t “reminded” a rather obnoxious phrasing?)
“As I keep pointing out, reality is reality, and it just don’t change ’cause mere belief would like reality to not be.”
Again with the obnoxiousness.
“Sometimes there is one instance that can be cited…sometimes there is an entire stream of sources…”
You do not need a “stream” of sources to establish that Asimov was a member of MENSA, and most helpfully to inform us of the year in which he joined.

Woke James Bond.
Very funny.
007: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: No, I expect you to pontificate.
The new Bond will not need a gun, because she will kill people with her tedious wokeness.

I didn’t care about woke Ghostbusters, the Captain Marvel controversy whooshed past me like the insignificance it was, and I actually thought the Dr Whoman thing was a good, interesting and logical (to a point) plot twist (who seriously expects a two-hearted space alien with magical regenerative abilities and multiple bodies to confine himself to one gender???) But I always thought ‘they can’t make James Bond woke, that’d just be exposing their own hand and revealing the lameness of their strategy’. Well, they just did expose their hand – and they’ve got one pair while the person they’re playing against has got a straight flush. Laaaaaaaaaaaaame.
One point to take into consideration: every Bond movie after the first two or three has been lame anyway.
Another point: technically it’s just the 007 title that’s being taken over by a woman; the old James Bond character – Daniel Craig – has just been retired.

“You keep repeating that he didn’t join.”
What repeating? I wrote it once in this thread.
Well, in your own words—or at least the words attributed to you—
Isaac Asimov wrote that he declined to join because MENSA Cite #1, and Asimov decided to avoid MENSA, cite #2 . . .

Hal, I wrote that once.
And yet you even type that out after being reminded that your typed out the two statements.

Pst, Code 9000.

One comment, Hal.
Do you enjoy being an obnoxiously obtuse asshole?
I wouldn’t know, would I?
Since you seen fixated, what does that look like in your mirror?