I just wanted everyone to know that I have a brilliant post on the whole Derbyshire thing. Completely brilliant. Apparently, I didn’t save it? My brilliance has been completely undermined by myself. Story of my life…
(Of course, if I do find it, I’ll have to walk back the “brilliance” part. So, I’m brilliant or I get my writing back. Win/win or lose/lose, depending on how you look at it.)
Yeah, okay, I found it and will be walking back the “brilliant” part:
The National Review did not take long in firing John Derbyshire. There is little in the way of congratulations headed their way, though, because they’d kept him on the payroll for as long as they have (as well as perennial criticisms of the right and racism).
I don’t have a strong opinion on whether they should be congratulated or not for what they did, though my reasons pro and con differ from others. So, of course, I thought I would write a post about it.
I do think that it is to their credit not that they fired him, but that they fired him as quickly as they did after this erupted. We can dismiss this as CYA, but I think that oversimplifies the situation. It has long been my experience that the longer you associate with someone, the more forgiving you are. As such, I think the “line” to be crossed was further out for Derbyshire than it would have been for a new writer saying the same things (whether with regards to race or the multitude of other ways he departs from NR norms). The ability to turn around and fire someone that quickly is, I believe, harder than it looks. They’ve known him a long time and I’m sure a number of people there consider him a friend. I knew that Derbyshire would be sacked, but I honestly thought it would take longer than it did (and not because they were okay with what he said).
That being said, I am not going upon the hill that they fired him because it was the “right thing to do.” I think that there was the recognition early on that they needed to fire him for their own interest (so the CYA explanation isn’t wrong). As others have pointed out, their readership is not necessarily happy about their response to the whole thing. However, their readership isn’t actually where they make their money. Especially not their online readership.
Rather, the National Review makes its money on people that will go on their cruises. That will donate money to them. That will advertise with them. The people that probably have better things to do than get into online comment conversations (put that mirror down!). These people are going to fit a different profile than the average commenter. These people are much more likely to be offended by what Derbyshire said, or at least more anxious not to be associated with it. It is these people that the National Review simply cannot afford to lose. (There is a hole in this theory, though: RedState does rely on these people and has not given much indication that it would have behaved differently. Hmmmm. Maybe the desire to become more well-known as the NR is?)
The other thing is this: Whether they get a gold star or not, the bleeding is much more likely to end quickly this way. Minimizing damage isn’t the same thing as being healthy, but it’s better than bleeding out. The people that hate the National Review will continue to hate the NR. They also have a new band of haters among the people that either are racist or would rather act that way than give an inch to the other side. But among the people that matter to them the most, they’ll accept it and move on. (And there is not much in the way of the casual observer here. If you know about the National Review, and/or you are a part of this conversation at all, you already have an opinion of it. Probably a strong one.)
You can rebuild it. You can make it better than it was before.
There’s a software design philosophy that advocates writing your code, throwing it away, and writing it again now that you’ve discovered all those things that you realize only after you’re halfway through the code and past the point where you could account for them gracefully. Maybe it works for essays as well. I wouldn’t know — I’ve never tried it in either venue.
I divide a project into four quarters. The first is just playing around while the business analysts do their interviews, writing little chunks of HelloWorld code, finding out where everything will have to live. The second quarter is coding the first draft. Third quarter, all that code gets checked in and everything gets rewritten. Second quarter code never makes it into third quarter. Fourth quarter is all testing and user acceptance.
@Will, install Subversion and use it. If you’re over Windows, use TortoiseSVN. If not, use SubCommander. SVN has saved me times without number.
I knew i sensed the death scream of either 400 Vulcans or one human blogger crying out over the distance between us.
I feel your pain, man. It’s happened to me before. Sometimes it happens with my pleadings — I have a brilliant argument with awesome research that vanishes, poof!, into the aether, and a client who doesn’t particularly like paying for that sort of thing.
I had a depressing thought. Derbyshire has cancer — I hope he wasn’t getting his health insurance through NR.
Hadn’t been aware he had cancer. Ugh.
I actually once had an employer who had a machinist who was near-dead with cancer. The boss absolutely did not want to let him go, in good part because of the insurance issue and because he was universally respected, but when I say “near-dead” I am not exaggeration. There were discussions about what would happen if he just dropped dead on the job. It was a dark sort of levity when someone asked if that meant we would have to start over the “No accidents in X days” count. He literally died in the car as his wife was driving him home from work.