J Thomas

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• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  I'm out of here. It was mostly fun but I can't stay....
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  Ms.Ms. Ore, thank you for making my undergrad years a lot more pleasant through your alien trilogy. Ore, thank you for making my undergrad years a lot more pleasant through your alien trilogy. Ditto. Also Gaia's Toys. And Time's Child....
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  "Posting this threat and then denying you had anything to do with it is a trifle disingenuous, no?" Only if you believe I can summon hordes of Chaos Hounds You made the claim, repeatedly. Then you threatened me, and my...
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  I can honestly say that both causally and intentionally, I had nothing to do with said events. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/08/where-have-all-the-women-gone.html#_login_6GxsJIEneS1BsTDiMt1YQvQsOqQoBVI5IKIU5cNR Dude, you fucked up. She is a little bit pissed at the EM nuke on the laptop (not hers) and called in...
• Commented on Random thought for the day
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Economy Fascist economics supported a state-controlled economy that accepted a mix of private and public ownership over the means of production.[173] Economic planning was applied to both the public and private sector, and the prosperity of private enterprise depended on...
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  We all remember what a joy J Thomas in conversations about feminism on Crooked Timber before he was banned, yes? You may not have noticed, but a moderator here told me to stop talking about it and I stopped talking...
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  that story about his computer blowing up, well, perhaps he is just a bumbling fool You posted about an associate's laptop blowing up and blamed me. Two days later my own computer blew up. I figured it was a coincidence...
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  Is there a reference resource that the general public can access to look for writers .... along the line of 'if you like author A, you might also like author B'? You could try gnod. Gasdive sugggested it here earlier....
• Commented on Random thought for the day
  What do you feel is the best way to balance the common interest against the individual rights of property owners? You got me there. Any amateur auto mechanic can listen to your engine and say it's out of tune. It...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  Couldn't meet sales expectations no matter what name I wrote under. No one could ever figure out why. I concluded that I'm a writer's writer and readers don't generally see the point. That could partly be a failure of marketing....
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  When next I need a sterling example of false equivalency, I'll link to this. I don't at all say those are equivalent. While the claims made by you and by Puppies are quite similar, and the way the claims are...
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  My intent has always been to point out that although you may think that you are saying one thing, you are often saying or implying something else and illuminating your own bias. Your idea of my implications might of course...
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  Physically unattractive males don't have power in fandom? I'm not part of fandom myself, so I could be wrong with this, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that physically unattractive males basically are fandom, so of course they have power....
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  and, women aren't the only ones suffering discrimination (so this sexism stuff isn't important in the big picture). I haven't found a way to compile good statistics about this yet. I have one proposal that might tell something useful, and...
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  ... it's really depressing how often comments fall back into the orbit of the twin attractors: But I'm not sexist, look at all the great stuff I read (so how can this sexism stuff be real); The second part of...
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  There's the "few beautiful girls who liked to be admired", and the "rather more fat girls", and there's the "woman who's more than arm candy", who "can get quite a coterie because lots of guys want her". ... Where are...
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  One thing about SF is that often younger or newer male writers make their bones attacking or belittling older women writers. Older male writers too. Damon Knight got prestige attacking van Vogt. Alexei Panshin got his start attacking RA Heinlein,...
• Commented on Random thought for the day
  "Investor freedom to do whatever they want with their own money, maybe." Well, I have to say that this is a goal that I've never felt particularly concerned about. Why do you want to maximize that one? It's maybe an...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  Her work showed quite clearly how to construct commons that don't undergo the Tragedy of the Commons, based on research into commons that lasted for decades to centuries with their resource base intact. To put it bluntly, the Tragedy of...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  I'm doubtful about the quality of the awards data as a representative sample and have made a number of suggestions for expanding the data set to get better data, as have others. Awards data is definitely not representative of writers...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  Are you trying to say that the system is unfair because people use their own judgement rather than some "buy one male author/buy one female author" type system? That's one way it's unfair. Your judgement may have unconscious bias against...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  Its very easy to throw conceptual stones without actually thinking through the difficulties of getting better data. Yes, and it's easy to go after bad data and try to draw conclusions from it, because it's available. GIGO. To do any...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  We have some numbers around some of the major awards. We have a big wasteland of no data in the middle. Yes. This is an example. I think that all corporate data should be free to anyone in the cloud....
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  ... I'd have my doubts about how representative a sample of the population they are. OTOH it's an easily accessible data set, well publicised and easily accessible. Choosing an unrepresentative sample because it's easy to get, is precisely the error...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  There are 7 pools, there's an empty pool of men writing about women/girls which we really shouldn't expect to be empty. The way I count it, that's one of the six. Three varieties of main characters for men, and three...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  No need to invoke explicit institutionalised sexism, nor to exclaim "something must be done" - it's pretty much self correcting. Well, you might be right. On the other hand we have more than forty years of studies showing that there...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  I worry about the relative lack of women's voices. That is, stories written by women about women. You have six categories, women about men, women about women, women about both, and similarly for men. If each category got the same...
• Commented on Where Have All the Women Gone?
  One other thing -- women who try to do massive sorts of self-promotion tend to have that count against them, not for them. Ouch! Appearing to be a man is looking better all the time. Maybe find ways to do...
• Commented on Random thought for the day
  Resource management is a problem that has no single objective answer. It all depends on what goals you want to achieve. Yes. Maximum GDP is inconsistent with reduction in wealth disparity. Unregulated markets are inconsistent with public safety. Maximizing job...
• Commented on Data, books, and bias
  OK. I will stop it now. I know when to back down and obey the power structure....