We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The correct response to this is… The correct response to this is…
“I should give a shit why exactly? But please leave your name, address and accomplishments so I can critique your sartorial style in the unlikely event you are ever involved in something never done before in human history.”
But Matt, listen to me buddy… never apologise. Seriously, your friends do not need it and your enemies will still hate you regardless, so either ignore your detractors, or better yet, tell them to shove it.
hat tip: Darryl Watson
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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What the fuck is it with guys these days? Tearful apology? FFS, grow a pair! You’re a world class scientist you brainy cleaver dumb fuck! These people ain’t worthy for you to piss on! So yeah, seconded: never apologise! Jesus!
His shirt was childish but cheerful, but his response to the criticism was to throw away his manhood.
Well, you have to concede that it was a ridiculous shirt to wear in a series of news conferences. Pro tip, Matt: if you want to be taken as a serious scientist you should make at least a minimal effort to look the part, and not like an extra from The Big Lebowski. (A white lab coat isn’t necessary, but a tie is.)
But then I see the gross tattoos all over his arms and have to conclude that the man has absolutely no sense anyway, so the shirt is unsurprising.
A government employee.
From my years in bioscience labs:
Shirts: No
Ties: = Sales rep
Women: here and there.
Taste: Electron microscope dept. still looking.
PC: μmol concentration.
i expect the tears are the result of discovering that it didn’t matter that he was an academic, and had voted properly for years, he could still be tossed up on the altar and sacrificed.
I can’t imagine anyone taking this crap seriously. The response from my lunch friends would be several suggestions about what she could do to herself, and the horse she rode in on.
I’m glad I missed out on being a modern, sensitive male. It seems so weepy…
A shirt depicting cartoon oversexed women wearing skimpy lingerie and leather goods is just another part of the rape culture, you insensitive louts! This is why there are so few women in the Sciences!
Feminists bellyaching about what sort of shirt this guy was wearing is just another episode of ‘Blessed are the Cheese-makers’, while one of the most significant events in human history, that of landing a robot on a tumbling comet for the first time, is kind of ignored.
Hah, the shirt is nothing. I heard he has a penis.
The shirt was the only part of the Philae landing that the media could understand, so that’s what they talked about.
Back when it was being debated whether to let women take degrees and vote and stuff, one of the arguments against all that was that women were naturally focussed on the personal and the emotional and had no capacity for “male” subjects like scientific endeavour. Try to talk to them about science, it was said, and all the dear creatures would be interested in would be how the scientist was dressed!
Feminists. Proving sexists right since 1960.
“Try to talk to them about science, it was said, and all the dear creatures would be interested in would be how the scientist was dressed!”
And another thing. Wendy Davis (the not entirely successful Democrat candidate for Governor of Texas) was constantly celebrated in the liberal American meejah for the outstanding feminist achievement of……..wearing pink sneakers. Somewhere along the way, the basic principles of feminism have snuck past me.
Ms. Solent:
ITYM 1860s. That’s when the backwards-ass state of Wyoming extended the franchise to women.
As to the whinging about the shirt and bozo the clown weeping on public television, what do you expect, manliness? Backbone? This is (basically) Academia you’re talking about. Men with steel in their spine work for places like Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic (GALACTIC, not Virgin SOLARSYSTEM or Virgin LUNAR ORBIT, these guys aren’t shooting for the moon, they want hte STARS).
Oh, and as to the shirt? Tasteless, and inappropriate for work. But I think that about almost all Hawaiian style shirts whether they’ve got parrots, posies or penii on them. Rudimentary Penii doubly so.
Not surprising the way they went after a straight cisgendered white man. They’re the source of all evil in the world, don’t you know? And the Rosetta project was only possible due to all that vibrant diversity with women, muslims and blacks in key positions.
Natalie: Thanks for the laugh!
My mother was an assistant to WWI ace/textile mogul Elliot White Springs. When I was in college I often wore on of his Springmaid shirts to class. No one ever complained…they all loved it. Here’s a photo of him modeling one. BTW, his book “Warbirds: The Diary of an Unknown Aviator” is great! Money quote:
“After we’ve won this war by drowning the Hun in our own blood, in five years’ time the sentimental fools at home will be taking up a collection for these same Huns that are killing us now and our fool politicians will be cooking up another good war.”
https://shrineodreams.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/springs_shirt.jpg
https://shrineodreams.wordpress.com/tag/leroy-springs/
http://www.amazon.com/War-Bird-Times-Elliott-Springs/dp/080781752X
http://www.waterfrontpix.com/warbirds.htm
Did no-one look at the clip?
In tears?
What I saw was a guy who’d got it in the neck from the suits of the ESA on his sartorial provocation of the feminist storm troopers & laying on deep contrition with a trowel. Thought the other members of the interview panel kept straight faces remarkably well & the reassuring touch of sympathy from the guy on his left was particularly good acting.
“The outcry has evidently hit him hard though. During a press briefing this morning, he broke down in tears and apologised for his choice of clothes”
William, let me fix that for you – men and women with steel in their spines work for Scaled and Xcor and SpaceX and Blue Origin. They want the stars. Meanwhile they work hard and patiently ” turning cold refined steel into the dreams of space flight” as the song goes.
If you space flight enthusiasts haven’t gone to YouTube and looked up ” Minus Ten and Counting” do so.
“ooh look, he’s wearing a rude lady shirt.”
“Be quiet. The grownups are talking.”
Very good, Natalie and Roue le Jour.
Sadly, the shirt is sold out. A pity as, despite not liking Hawaiian shirts, I’d have worn one anyway, on principal.
Jesus, third wave feminists are such joyless fucks. And ugly too judging by social media.
“Try to talk to them about ANYTHING, it was said, and all the dear creatures would be interested in would be how the ANYTHING was dressed!”
In the US we have a “metropolitan” magazine called The New Yorker….
I would think that landing a dishwasher on a comet would be enough to get him taken seriously in most sane circles. Then again, you seem to think this same high achiever has no sense. Think of what he could have accomplished with your pro tips.
The science involved in the landing is well-establshed, they are standing on the shoulders of a Giant. Sir Isaac Newton and his formula to establish the motion of celestial bodies, the acceleration due to gravity from the Sun, various planets and the feeble gravity of the comet itself, the inverse square law for the solar power. Others have provided some marvellous rocketry, decades old, and superb telemetry systems and some ingenious engineering and materials to create an object capable of functioning in those conditions. ‘I, pencil’ on steroids as it were.
Of course, it would not be scientific to judge Dr Matthew Taylor’s science by his shirt choices, but he is not at present judged by scientific yardsticks. He has reportedly tattooed an artist’s impression of the landing on his leg.
It turns out that I was in error, regarding the source of the shirt. See here.
i expect the tears are the result of discovering that it didn’t matter that he was an academic, and had voted properly for years, he could still be tossed up on the altar and sacrificed.
Yep. It’s frustration. He’s wearing a shirt a female friend gave him. If he’s in academia he’s probably publicly self-identified as a feminist over the years, too.
And now that he’s abased himself instead of telling them where to go they’ll keep ratcheting up the demands. You’re already seeing feminists demanding to know how he’s going to make this right for the billions of women who had to take to their fainting couches as a result of his shirt.
Laird “Pro tip, Matt: if you want to be taken as a serious scientist you should make at least a minimal effort to look the part”
And what are your qualifications to declare what a real scientist looks like? I know quite a few, and they vary quite widely in the clothing they prefer.
Mr Ed “The science involved in the landing is well-establshed, they are standing on the shoulders of a Giant. Sir Isaac Newton…”
This comment demands a photoshop: Sir Isaac Newton wearing that shirt.
Laird did not say ‘real scientist’, he said ‘serious scientist’, you have fallen into the error of misreading and/or misquoting that which you question. Lawyers love this sort of thing.
Consider who it is who is doing the ‘taking’, is it not the public at large? I would venture that Laird’s case is that if you wear shirts like that, you will not be taken seriously by the generality of the public. That is the choice of the ‘taker’, whether the taker or takers are right or wrong is immaterial, it is their individual takes that are at issue.
Mr Ed: It’s not “the public at large”, it’s a small segment, made up of fascistic fanatics.
And the scientists I know are all serious about science. They are not dilettantes or whatever.
Very retired “I can’t imagine anyone taking this crap seriously. The response from my lunch friends would be several suggestions about what she could do to herself, and the horse she rode in on.”
I think this is a case of “grovel or lose your job and your career…and then what will happen to your wife and children?”
GO,
You have answered a question that I think is Laird’s to respond to, as to whom he was referring to, I think we are at cross-purposes. Someone here magnificently described Twitter as, iirc ‘The Stasi for the Angry Birds Generation‘. It seems that to be the cause of a ‘Twitterstorm’ is the ultimate disgrace in the eyes of the fascistic fanatics. It is very sad that he did not respond to his critics in terms suggested on this post. HIs reaction is a kind of ersatz Maoist self-criticism session*, watered down (caution: link contains the most astonishingly windy diatribe I have ever seen).
* Not only are true Marxist types deranged, murderous destroyers, they are mind-f***ingly boring bastards too.
“I think we are at cross-purposes”
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that the non-face-to-face, textual, type-fast-and-move-on nature of the web led to misunderstandings.
“It is very sad that he did not respond to his critics in terms suggested on this post.”
I suspect that he was told by his employer to apologize and lose his job. We might decide to do otherwise, hoping to use such internet resources as Samizdata and Instapundit to shame the employer into not throwing an employee to the wolves. But Matt Taylor may not even be aware that there are people out there who have the resources to create an internet firestorm on his behalf…or he may have felt that he could not afford to risk his family’s well-being.
Well we appear to have the beginnings of a crowdfunded British moonshot.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30102343