mythago performs a blog dance for your amusement

Ursula LeGuin has a funny essay cautioning against actually meeting the writer behind the breathtaking works of genuis that you love to read, because you might find out that the creative genius is kind of a weirdo who mumbles and has bizarre theories about tungsten poisoning.

Well, Jonathan Tweet just managed to prove LeGuin right. Robin Laws tries to moderate the dumbth of this post a little, but good grid, I thought the “but girls just don’t naturally WANT to play D&D cuz they’re girls!” thing was something most gamers got out of their system after, oh, losing their virginity or so. I didn’t realize there was a kind of middle-aged Saturn Return on this one.

I already commented on Tweet’s blog, but for the slow or LJ-averse: “they just don’t want to” is a convenient excuse. It means never having to think about whether something about, I don’t know, behavior puts females off gaming; much less stressful to pretend instead that was fixed in our genes for all time hundreds of thousands of years ago, as Early Man strode across the savannah with his spear in a Museum of Natural History-approved manner, hunting for wildebeest. (No doubt these thrifty hunters carved primitive 20-siders from animal bone.)

I’m old enough to remember when gaming-store owners gave me funny looks, instead of helping me find the latest Trail of Cthulhu supplement; when I literally had guys crowd around my gaming table at a con staring at me, not because I had a nice rack or killer boots, but because I was a female DM and such a thing had never before been heard of. I rather like not being the only girl in the room. I just wish clueless dorks would quit fucking that up with their half-assed evo-psych intellectual masturbation.

Samwise is kind of avoiding me today because I am stalking around muttering under my breath about how the fucking Baby Boomer generation needs to grow the fuck up, after reading an article that exemplifies everything about the stereotype of the ivory-tower policy wonk you can imagine.

Frank Micciche writes about how the recession is hitting over-50s, and he’s right; it’s hard to compete for jobs against people half your age who are willing to work for peanuts, it’s difficult to face retirement when your nest egg got flushed to pay for executive ‘retention bonuses’ at AIG. His solution to this? Screw the next generation, of course. That’s what we’re for.

. . . .Restoring Medicare as the primary payer for all seniors would reverse this calculus.

. . .Elimination of all payroll taxes for those over 60 would not only leave more money in their weekly paychecks but also make them cheaper to employ for businesses, which would be spared their share of the payroll tax on these workers.

…On the savings side, policymakers could temporarily quadruple the amount of savings that households headed by individuals 50 or older are allowed to put into retirement savings tax-free.

Huh. And what are we going to do to cover that extra Medicare and those payroll and retirement-savings taxes? It’s as if Micciche thinks that we can just have the Summer of Finance, where if we all hold hands and think love of money at the world, the recession will go away, like, by the power of our minds alone!

Because the alternative is that he knows, but isn’t saying, that the lost tax income and the increased Medicare expenditures have to come from cutting services to and/or raising taxes on existing taxpayers.  Apparently Micciche doesn’t think or care about how that will affect Generation X and own down, since those are the people largely starting, raising and supporting families of their own – and often, their aging parents.

Hey, that’s what everybody else is for, right? Keeping the Boomers happy?

Fuckers.