1. Camille Paglia: save the arts with religion
2. Gayle King flirted with me a lot
3. What’s a nerd anyway? No way is it, at its core, "a rebellion against the cool white kids and their use of black culture…" Genetics, anybody?
4. Let companies run for electoral office?
5. How are autistic and aspie girls different from the boys? In the article, Skuse is the guy who nails it.
“Nerdiness, [Mary Bucholtz] has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.†
Long considered victims in their own right, the nerds are now herded into the ranks of the oppressors.
“the code of conspicuous intellectualism in the nerd cliques Bucholtz observed may shut out “black students who chose not to openly display their abilities.† This is especially disturbing at a time when African-American students can be stigmatized by other African-American students if they’re too obviously diligent about school. Even more problematic, “Nerds’ dismissal of black cultural practices often led them to discount the possibility of friendship with black students,†
Right… it’s all the nerds’ fault.
But I guess that the code of political correctness prevents her from writing that “black culture’s dismissal of scholasticism often leads African-Americans to discount the possibility of friendship with nerds.”
In England a corporation can hire an MP and put them on their payroll. It puts the influence buying, etc., out in the open.
So when a firm’s MP speaks on or proposes legislation that impacts that industry everyone know where the MP is coming from. OK, he is speaking for the firms interest and that can be taken into consideration when evaluating what the MP says.
I’ve never looked into this in detail, but my first impression is that it seems to be a good idea.
The problem is not corrupt individuals. Its offices with too much power that are, as a result, corrupting. A company would have the same, if not worse, incentives as any individual in that office.
Hmm, where are the Asian nerds in this research?
If the NYT argument on the racial component to nerddom were correct, nerdcore wouldn’t exist, and Weird Al couldn’t have based White and Nerdy on ChaMillionnaire.
Now I can say: I’m not a nerd, I’m Asian.
Reading about autism and aspergers is very interesting and very painful.
Ironically it has become easier to raise my autistic son (high functioning)
than my aspergers son as they’ve gotten to the middle school years.
At worst my autistic son is treated with benign neglect; it is obvious
that he is developmentally disabled. My second son, with aspergers, is
subjected to the cruelest sort of treatment – ridicule and exclusion.
I am reminded of what a very dear friend related to me when he was
discussing his daughter’s condition with a doctor soon after diagnosis.
After they discussed medication possibilities for his daughter, he asked
if there was anything that the doctor could prescribe for him.
Tyler – your anti-robot protection screen not only screens out robots, but people with poor or failing vision. Like me.
Instead of “hyper-whiteness” I would instead say that nerds try to signal superior intelligence in relatively cheap ways: maximizing syllables, proper grammar, memorization, and academic preparation in general. They tend to be over-literal, rigidly objective and obsessed with the future. One female nerd that comes to mind is Ayn Rand.
tahnk you , it’s very good
If the NYT argument on the racial component to nerddom were correct, nerdcore wouldn’t exist, and Weird Al couldn’t have based White and Nerdy on ChaMillionnaire.
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