An Explanation Comes To Mind

That.
Well, in Ms Edell’s case, it’s worth noting how vague and unsubstantiated are her claims of being oppressed and of thereby feeling fraudulent, of feeling that her “success is a result of luck rather than ability.” One might think that our Philosopher Queen, our self-styled intellectual, would be accustomed to offering evidence, even some suitably damning anecdotes. One might think that this would be felt as an obligation, even a reflex, a habit. But no. Instead, and like so much else, we’re expected to take this alleged victimhood on trust – which, given her tendency to declare things that are clearly untrue, is a big ask.
And as Ms Edell’s supposedly macho and oppressive workplace is, or was, the Clown Quarter of academia, where lefties dominate, are we to assume that this crushingly-oppressive-yet-oddly-unspecified sexism, the cause of all her insecurity and woe, is coming from other lefties?

Regarding Miss Edell, a blast from the past…

Bridget loves that Celia’s posts strike the perfect balance between style and substance. And maybe there’s something more to be said about Millennials desire to have the whole package (be smart, dress smart).

Two swings, two misses.

Perhaps it’s the same as older generations, but where they turn to for the advice has moved onto an entirely new platform with an entirely new, diverse (and nontraditional) group of voices.

Three strikes, and she’s out.

Claims of systemic this and that are so tiresome.

The only thing truly ‘systemic’ is the utter bad faith of those employing the term.

She’s a “philosopher
“Did you BS last week…”

Interesting. I would say that maybe the idea of imposter syndrome is not quite right in this situation. Some other term is needed.
I think we all to some degree have, from time to time, suffered from imposter syndrome. I know that at work when I have been promoted or a particularly difficult problem arises, I wonder if I am really in the right job. It’s then that I compare myself to others who seem so much more on top of their brief. It’s only when you talk to each other that you realise that we all (mostly) suffer from this condition.
In contrast I’ve been in meetings where people talk absolute rubbish about something I do understand, yet they do it with supreme confidence, sufficient to impress others. B*ll-sh*tt*rs lik ethis will almost certainly never suffer imposter syndrome. {I was going to say, these people are called salesmen but that’s a common, rather than absolute match}. Cynically, these people seem to get promoted.

It may be that many people use imposter when they are talking about garden-variety insecurity. I see this a lot among high-earning indie authors who worry that the gravy train they’re riding (which they richly earn, I might add; it’s tough writing consistently appealing books in commercial fiction), would end with their next book.
Fortunately, I don’t suffer from that. My sales are shit, so I know I’m incompetent.

Is “Brit” derogatory?
Um, no.
Zit-faced shitbag is, but not Brit.

Rule Zit-Faced Shitbaggia, Zit-Faced Shitbaggia rules the waves !!

“It seems only us hosers…”
TAKE OFF!
This has been a Canadian Corner moment.
Coming up next…how the Commander of our largest airbase got away with serial murder and the theft of tens of thousands of panties…

The woke eat their own.

…how the Commander of our largest airbase got away with serial murder and the theft of tens of thousands of panties…
Presumably he got away with it by never making mean tweets and not getting “Welcome Aboard” tattooed on his penis.

This book won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best novel.
That is appallingly bad prose. Further evidence of the politicization of the awards.

This book won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best novel.
From the Amazon description:

The Calculating Stars, explores the premise behind her award-winning “Lady Astronaut of Mars.

Good. Mars. Needs. Women.

Is “Brit” derogatory?
I believe it was originally meant to be offensive when widely used by Irish republicans in the 1970s. This backfired rather badly when many, particularly younger, British people enthusiastically appropriated it.
Historically it’s been quite hard to insult British people as we generally don’t rise to the bait (which really winds them up), However this may be changing as the recent influx of “new Brits” includes many whose forbearance of any perceived slander is sadly lacking.

Blimey. I’m assuming the recipient was chosen for something other than literary deftness.
As I understand it, the book is a sort of science-fictional Hidden Figures–so prose quality doesn’t matter, only relentless promulgation of racial and sexual politics.

I caused quite a stir at work by alleging that in a technical field there was no such thing as impostor syndrome – there is by definition a right and wrong way to do it, and if you don’t know the right way and how to evaluate your work against it you’re incompetent rather than an impostor. Boy, did that agitate the front-end developers.
The woke eat their own.
I read all the extant Valdemar books in my twenties. My recollection was that they were fairy tales for bookish thirteen-year-old girls. The first book is very much an allegory for the aforementioned bookish thirteen-year-old girl running away from home and discovering SFcon culture. All of the much vaunted First Gay Characters in SF were the typical happy fluffy bunny types (basically moon-eyed thirteen-year-old girls in men’s bodies). They’re popular, but so are the Sweet Valley High novellas.
I do wonder how important the con circuit is any more to F/SF authors; my impression is that with the fandom having gone both mainstream and digital it’s probably become irrelevant.

the woke eat their own
In the latest installment of this shameful episode, the SFWA which banned Mercedes Lackey for saying “colored” tweeted a tasteless joke making reference to the comfort women of WWII: “Comfort elves” are available free of charge for conference members.
I have a fairly live-and-let-live attitude towards humor, but the bullies at SFWA deserve no forbearance whatsoever.

The disease festers: “He’s a good boy. He didn’t do nuffin.”

and not getting “Welcome Aboard” tattooed on his penis.
Nah, mahn. Dem say, “Welcome to Canada and have a nice Moose Head”.

It may be that many people use imposter when they are talking about garden-variety insecurity.
I agree.
I caused quite a stir at work by alleging that in a technical field there was no such thing as impostor syndrome – there is by definition a right and wrong way to do it, and if you don’t know the right way and how to evaluate your work against it you’re incompetent rather than an impostor.
Most of us don’t work in technical fields though.
Imposter Syndrome is a major issue in teaching. It causes good teachers, or potential teachers, to freak out and lose the plot. I know I have suffered it several times, when changing schools, teaching new courses etc, taking on new resposibilities.
But Imposter Syndrome should be a brief thing. If it doesn’t fade, then it would seem that you are either fundamentally incompetent or insecure.

I read all the extant Valdemar books in my twenties. My recollection was that they were fairy tales for bookish thirteen-year-old girls.
Umm…I have questions. Am I the only one with questions?

Imposter Syndrome is a major issue in teaching. It causes good teachers, or potential teachers, to freak out and lose the plot.
Rabbit hole there a couple of directions but as something of an aside…I never felt true “imposter syndrome” but there were so many things that I thought were bad ideas that were the Rules Of The Day. Caution, geek speak… Top-down development was what I was taught in school. I would write code “inside-out” as I called it. Modules to do specific functions. I would hide my designs as much as I could, of course back then code reviews were a joke…kinda still are. Just a few years later, object-oriented development was a thing.
I wasted considerable credibility arguing against waterfall-style development. Things needed to be sketched out first, assumptions proved, and façades or similar to allow for tool replacement if/when possible (though I’m not convinced myself on this latter bit). Spiral development I called it. Bah…I didn’t understand that REAL engineering gets all the requirements 100% correct up front thus there is no need to revisit code. Say what you will about Fragile but waterfall is (hopefully?) dead.
I could say similar things about investment and finance but I’m a big ignoramous there as well. Stupidly trying to tell people their $240K home bought three years earlier was not truly worth $420K in 2007. Or at least it wouldn’t be some time shortly after 2007.

Darleen: “…preaches that “all texts grapple with race…”
Not really, they mostly surrender abjectly.

As Mr Francis notes in the piece:

Maybe all this concern about imposter syndrome is just caused by those with a political agenda grasping at straws to claim their favourite groups are oppressed in insidious ways. But with substantial affirmative action for women and ethnic minorities, I wouldn’t really be surprised if many had got into prestigious positions with a sense of being an imposter. Any intelligent black person at an Ivy League must wonder whether their admittance had something to do with their race.

Given the prevalence of racial favouritism in admissions policies, and given the desperation to find even remotely qualified applicants, with all the inadequacy and barrel-scraping that entails, the rise of ‘imposter syndrome’ is hardly surprising. Not only will there be doubts as to competence for the reason quoted above, which can be rather unfair to the capable, but there will also be plenty of actual and obvious incompetence – people invited into an environment for which they have neither the temperament nor cognitive wherewithal. Many of whom will drop out of courses beyond their abilities and find consolation, of a sort, in Angry Studies activism.
Heather Mac Donald has been documenting this for decades.
As Amy Wax put it not too long ago,

On the one hand, all good people are for affirmative action. That’s a sign of virtue. On the other hand, to talk about the predicate, the reason that affirmative action is needed, which is that there are these gaps in educational achievement and proficiency, is verboten. So, we kind of twisted ourselves in knots that we have to embrace something but deny the factual underpinning of it.

And so, to a very large extent, the feelings of mismatch and fraudulence, of being an imposter, and any consequent alienation and resentment, and crippling debt, are caused by the very people who claim to be fixing things.

They were held up to me as a shining example of fantasy written by and for women. I didn’t find the comparison flattering.
And yet you say that you read all of them. And according to Wikipedia there are dozens. [ Riffles memory for old jokes. ]

“all texts grapple with race, either explicitly or implicitly,”
Implicitly present in all the texts: “How much must the material be dumbed down to enable the affirmative action students to pass the tests?”

“all texts grapple with race, either explicitly or implicitly,”
How about Euclid’s Elements? I’d like to see them try and demonstrate that. Actually, on second thought, I wouldn’t.

I know lots of US legal immigrants. They are aware that they have disadvantages: no family connections, thick accent, cultural differences (which means you miss jokes and social cues), difficulty with English, starting with no $. Their response is to work their butts off and stay out of trouble. They focus their kids on school. Instead of rioting and shoplifting. I know, it is crazy, who would have thought that would work?

While faults can be found*, that is a great article and not only because, with the exception of the Hanania tweet, no one else seems to have asked the question.
That alone makes it worth reading.
That and the sly humour in this carefully placed paragraph:

An analogy to this whole situation would be defining obesity as people who are substantially overweight, despite eating less than 2,500 calories a day. You can’t simply define an illness to exclude causes you do not want to think about.

There’s no way the author isn’t aware of this kind of thing.
*I’m not unaware of the irony.

no one else seems to have asked the question.
As with so much of the woke blather we cover here, it’s not that the rebuttals that come to mind are arcane or require some esoteric knowledge. It’s usually quite the opposite. What’s remarkable is just how often, and how strenuously, the obvious is avoided by those doing the blathering.

The disease festers: “He’s a good boy. He didn’t do nuffin.”
The author of the article has a degree in “rhetoric” from Berkeley. She misspelled “rhethoric” (sic) on her LinkedIn page.

argued that those affirmative action candidates would catch up with the rest.
High drop-out and dismal graduation rates would argue otherwise.

High drop-out and dismal graduation rates would argue otherwise.
The activists continue to not care about this–which shows that they do not actually care about human beings.

And yet you say that you read all of them
There were…twenty or so at the time? They’re pretty thin. I was blowing through one and a half a day or so, they’re not deep texts. As I said, they’d be fine as a tween fantasy series. I just found the number of women in their thirties raving about the books to be a bit incongruous.

As I said, they’d be fine as a tween fantasy series.
Speaking of which, I still have some of the paperbacks I bought when I was a pre-teen. Funny, because there is virtually no chance that I’ll want to re-read James Blish’s short story adaptations of Star Trek episodes.

Sounds sort of like the old Tom Swift books
That’s a good analogy. Something you might casually enjoy as an adult, in a kind of nostalgia way, but if one were to hold them up as Works of Great SF that would be stretching it a bit and earn one some sidelong glances.
I’ve never read any of Mercedes Lackey’s books
The Valdemar series has some potentially good ideas in there, like the basic trope that problems are solved without resorting to the Howard-esque method of stabbing it in the face. The notion of a kind of non-violent knighthood acting as a fantasy civil service seemed like it could have gone somewhere. But the notions are executed by the author simply deciding by fiat that nobody in the world ever resorts to violence and everyone always listens to the eminently reasonable Queen’s Cavaliers. Which is what relegates the books to the children’s section.
By comparison, the Sector General novels by James White, a pacifist, do cracking good space opera medical drama without any stabbery. I’ve often thought those would make a good TV series, although I expect the lack of stabbery would make it an impossible sell.

That’s a good analogy. Something you might casually enjoy as an adult, in a kind of nostalgia way…
Now and then I track down a book I enjoyed as a child, and am usually disappointed–sometimes very much so. Perhaps the most psychologically revealing thing is seeing that passages which made a big impression on me as a child turn out on re-reading to be very short, even things mentioned in passing. I think there’s a clue there regarding how kids see things.
…but if one were to hold them up as Works of Great SF that would be stretching it a bit and earn one some sidelong glances.
I believe there are a few people I know casually who still have large Tom Swift collections. I’d like to think that these are all books left over from their childhoods, except that they have sometimes talked at length about them–and even about the original Tom Swift Sr series. 😉

By comparison, the Sector General novels by James White, a pacifist, do cracking good space opera medical drama without any stabbery. I’ve often thought those would make a good TV series, although I expect the lack of stabbery would make it an impossible sell.
Yes, very good mention.
James White did write some novels which had their share of violence, but it was always depicted as horrible. See, for instance, The Dream Millennium and All Judgement Fled.

There is a lot of that childish thinking on the left. A lot.
A group of very progressive gamers created an RPG setting book based unofficially on Valdemar while dialing up the wokery to ludicrous heights, and a reviewer commented that because they’d made it magically impossible for anyone in the setting to act against, or even disagree with the benevolent pacifist authority, what they’d created was in fact a Brave New World style dystopia that would be horrifying to anyone living in it.
You will have a nice day, citizen.

In today’s ‘Guardian’, a secondary school teacher in London writes:
“Unless you’ve experienced it, it’s hard to put into words how it feels to meet yourself in a book for the first time. The first time I did, I was an A-level student faced with Othello, whose contested “Moorish” background was the closest to my north African heritage I’d ever encountered on the page. And who did I meet? A man whose violence was likened to a wild beast and whose race rendered him a savage, a danger to white women.”
Err….

But the notions are executed by the author simply deciding by fiat that nobody in the world ever resorts to violence and everyone always listens to the eminently reasonable Queen’s Cavaliers. Which is what relegates the books to the children’s section.
As to why Mercedes Lackey would write so many books built on an impossible and childish idea: Yesterday I ran across a social media post from her husband bemoaning her mistreatment by SFWA, in which he said that among her personal difficulties are dyslexia and chronic depression. And so we return, once again, to the observation that badly broken people are attracted to “woke” ideology. (Apologies: Five minutes search in my browser history did not locate the thread in which her husband commented. If I find it later I will update here.)

Dyslexia has to be a good start for an author. Thank god for competent text editors.
Many decades ago, I read a comment by Samuel R Delany saying that he was extremely dyslexic and crediting his editors for putting his manuscripts into usable shape.

By “into usable shape” I meant “as-is they were essentially unreadable”. At least that’s the impression I retain from 40 years ago.

“Misty is dyslexic, depressive, has panic attacks, chronic pain, poor eyesight, & crippling anxiety.“
Those are symptoms, not conditions. There’s something else going on.
But yes, I can see how someone with those disorders would want to create a stress- and conflict-free fantasy world to hide in.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find quite a lot of very well written children’s fantasy…
Now I’m wondering if I’d still enjoy the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories that I read when I was about 10 or 11 years old.

Oh, I didn’t mean to correct you
But feel free to do so! Please! I know that is an area where my knowledge is not deep, and I also know that I am sometimes careless in my choice of words. This is a forum where the folks are all generally quite congenial (unlike others I could name where every disagreement or question becomes an exchange of insults) and it is a pleasure to learn more about things.
I find them dreadfully dry and slow-moving, but that was the norm for the time.
I’ll just have to give them a try and find out. (“I’m not a pulp fiction reader. I just heard that pulp is really bad and wanted to find out for myself.”)

Many decades ago, I read a comment by Samuel R Delany saying that he was extremely dyslexic and crediting his editors for putting his manuscripts into usable shape.

A biography of Gerald Durrell, read some years ago, stated his spelling was so atrocious his first wife had to largely rewrite his manuscripts. His inability to spell was attributed by the biographer to his rather eccentric education. In these hypochondriacal times it would likely be put down to dyslexia.

Never heard of him.
Must not be a fan of Masterpiece Theatre. The Durrells in Corfu. A romanticized view perhaps, but taken from Gerald Durrells’ memoirs.

Not surprising, that seems to be the usual practice: romanticization and invention of drama and comedy to liven things up. I’ve noticed, for instance, how the BBC’s “All Creatures Great and Small” differs from the books.
I just finished that series of books in audio format, and from what I understand even the books themselves are a mix of autobiography, romanticization, and dramatization of real events. They make for a cracking good story though – swerve right from laugh out loud to there’s dust in my eye from one chapter to the next.

I’ve noticed, for instance, how the BBC’s “All Creatures Great and Small” differs from the books.
Now do Sex and the City.