Except it isn’t a theory, it’s mere dogma.

“Sexual orientation and sex differences in socioeconomic status: A population-based investigation” by Kerith Conron and two other authors uses a pretty unusual definition of who might be gay or lesbian in its evaluation of the economics of same. In this paper, which used a separate longitudinal study of over 20,000 persons in the U.S., straight-up gays were neatly classified as such, but 528 respondents were classified as “sexual minorities” – the paper’s Orwellian catchphrase – if they had reported one sexual encounter with a member of the same sex.

(Careful with those freshman blowjobs, boys. As the saying goes: “Fix one pipe, they don’t call you a plumber.”) [continue with: Gay-money research disproves intersectionality theory →]

When I first heard about these I thought it was a case of “surprise transgender.” It seems like violence often breaks out.

Of course everyone wants a boy.

In 1995 I put huge effort into writing an article for Publish, a magazine now completely forgotten, about another magazine, Colors. My copies of the resulting January 1996 issue are somewhere, except I cannot put my hands on them because I foolishly didn’t put them back in their one and only designated place.

Luciano Benetton had hired Tibor Kalman, late of M&Co and a god of ’80s graphic design, to run this Benetton-funded quarterly, which had less to do with the company than any in-flight magazine does with its parent airline. It was an editorially independent division of a retail and manufacturing behemoth; the magazine and the behemoth were decades ahead of their time. I liked Colors a lot.

Tibor was halfway dying of cancer when I talked to him. I have no notes confirming my direct memory of writing the phrase “describing his health as ‘moderate,’ ” but that’s what Tibor had told me on the phone.

While beloved blinkered progressive Pentagrammer Mr. MICHAEL BIERUT has his own style of blowing jovially through client objections like a ribbon at a finishing line (discernible in his Studio 360 segment about redesigning Christmas), nobody, at all, was like Tibor, least of all Paul Rand.

He couldn’t draw a straight line, let alone a square. He couldn’t render, sketch a comp, or do even one single thing that could be described as design or illustration. Yet he is one of the greatest designers of the 20th century.

Tibor was so brusque and impatient that his manner was offensive even by New York standards. While his primary client cohort (artists, musicians [Talking Heads]) acted as a sort of bubble wrap around Tibor’s popping firecrackers, even M&Co had the occasional client that was vaguely corporate. Tibor got away with murder with all of them.

Mr. BIERUT is not really Tibor’s converse; Spiekermann is. (Note the disparity in how these designers are referred to. Maybe – maybe – Spiekermann’s wife calls him Erik.) Spiekermann’s abrasiveness with a smile means he works best with a CEO or somebody else he can just be honest with. (Paraphrased: “You have hired us to do something you yourselves cannot. You should trust us.”)

I recall the one and only time I was ever allowed to speak at ATypI (Vancouver, a mere 15 years ago). Rest assured it’ll never happen again. My esteemed colleague and I had separate presentations scheduled, but we sat at the same table, and lo there came a moment when Spiekermann introduced my esteemed colleague as just that: a colleague, but of everyone in the room. Spiekermann didn’t know him from Adam, really, though of course he’s highly competent or he couldn’t be my friend in the first place.

Tibor sidestepped his unpalatability with legit corporate clients by running off to Italy to edit Colors. Spiekermann got screwed in the business more than once, though that didn’t stop him from installing a full Bulthaupt kitchen. (Apparently a barter deal, and, according to my acquaintance who saw it, almost beyond belief.) Now he’s pumping out shitty letterpress agitprop in his dotage.

Here, in the vernacular, “is where I’m at” vis-à-vis Tibor and Spiekermann.

I can improve anything (often dramatically and in one fell swoop – the Spiekermann example is opening up the tracking on the Economist’s pages and the job was halfway done right there). Canada, the industrialized nation most hostile to expertise in general and to design in specific, has a shitload that needs improvement.

The shyster who took Paul Arthur for a ride in the latter’s last years of his life told me once I couldn’t be put in a room with a client. I would agree. Pace Miles Drentell, clients may be necessary but are not really important, and indeed are sometimes irritants.

I now think Spiekermann’s charm offensive at ATypI was insincere. I think his entire bonhomie act is, too. He fooled us all. But if there’s any impulse he and I share, it’s toward rigour.

Now imagine a design consultancy that barely designs anything but instead severely unfucks severely-fucked-up failed design. Like asset-stripping, but what you’re stripping away is incompetence and an inability to communicate. I have another esteemed colleague, who was always nice to me until he was as nasty as anyone has ever been, who rescues failing nonprofits, and demands 70% of his fee up front. Here we rescue failed design.

The whole enterprise would be predicated on two scenarios that exclude each other: We’d have nothing but clients who could handle my blurting “Jesus fucking Christ, you people are incompetent” to them in a meeting whose time they’re paying for and I’d never actually have to deal with clients in the first fucking place, merely doing what they themselves cannot.

I’d need one or more partners who were as competent as I am and wouldn’t vote me out of my own company, or connive to take the place over, indeed as Michael and Elliot did with Miles Drentell’s company, DAA. (Miles admired the audacity and kept them on staff.)

I’ve had 15 years to mull over what couldn’t ever happen in the first place. Tibor is deceased and I don’t trust the gloss of the Spiekermann story. There aren’t any designers who get away with murder anymore.

1. Rusty Rifraff (no relation):

   

2. Runner-up: Massive.

   

   “Not quite everything that’s wrong with ‘LGBT+’ in a single picture, but that’s not for lack of trying,” I wrote.

Anil Dash is an Indian-American bon vivant/bipolarist whom I met once or twice and defended on several occasions, of which fact he is entirely ignorant. What he’s done is succeed upward (despite appearances to the contrary) in the Web bubble over a period of 20 years. He’s a perfect tech-industry product: “I’m an entrepreneur, activist, and writer focused on making the tech world more humane and ethical…. My work focus[s]es on ensuring that tech serves those who are most vulnerable and in the most need,” which must always be read as “Everyone but you.”

Anil, whose name I, a linguist, mispronounced for years until he corrected it to my face, which measure was what was apparently actually needed, is a “blogging pioneer” who barely ever blogs anymore. Lots of fair reasons not to. But he prairie-dogged the other day long enough to write a treatise on fast-charging an iPhone. I wrote back (edited):

In cold light of day, couldn’t [your post] (a) have just used the slug /charge/ and (ii) been reduced to a “tweet” and a link to Apple Support documents ① and/or ②?

Response from this defender of the downtrodden:

LOL don’t ever change, man. Couldn’t your email have been reduced to you shaking your fist at your computer screen?

I wrote back: “I am unlikely to change from being an editor of decades’ standing, no. Try to be nicer to fellow old-timers. We’ll all be dead soon enough.”

Like Textism. I should have mentioned that at the time.

I had previously written about being the only X in the village in any village and for any value of X. An esteemed colleague introduced me as such onstage once. I respect that colleague’s honesty in not even bothering to camouflage his exasperation sometimes; I prefer to be stabbed in the front.

I fondly recall visiting a Web-standards mensch’s midtown apartment of an Xmas. Certainly I was treated like royalty. Unlike another friend who had had a depressive break he denied (here again: to my face), were we in the same town for one reason or another right now, he would be just as thrilled to see me. The feeling would be mutual, within respective exuberance levels.

If pushed, I could not defend the following to the utmost, but my impulse is to state that Web “pioneers,” all of whom are now above age 45, have a duty to be nice to each other (term used advisedly). Certainly not snide. At the very least, put the same energy into maintaining friendships, over long timescales and distances, that you, the humane, ethical tech entrepreneur, might invest into protesting “misgendering” on Twitter.

I would positively not reject my old friends out of hand, because my kind can accept growth and disagreement. They’re all of a single kind and they can’t. I have a strong guess as to what they’d think of me now, and not a single fact or experience I could explain to them would matter.

Textism committed suicide in large part due to ostracism, which I keep telling you is fatal. Behind the scenes (nothing is ready to announce), I seem to be the only one putting any effort into forestalling a repeat.

I do find Anil Dash gratuitously nasty, but I know he, like his ilk, think it’s the least that was deserved. They agree on everything, including the unassailable fact they’re the best.

Not first use ever, as the term originated on DataLounge, merely first use in the Times, which has lied about us for decades: “With the notable exception of Christopher Isherwood, there were few benevolent eldergays in the literary scene.” (I did a database search to be sure.)

• Fontmemes (bookmarks).

  

  Helvetica not legible

• Also, I offer the worst bookmark export ever – derived from my Type à blogger folder on Instapaper. Beyond the 45 minutes I spent cleaning them up, which efforts are not really visible, I am never going to get to these. And even that piece-of-shit file is valid HTML.

  But. Honourable mention from James Montalbano: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. My country told me to fuck off.” (Later.)

Let me adapt somebody else’s geopolitical analysis (see below) to our debased “LGBT+” reality.

1. China has a naval base in Djibouti, bafflingly. (The U.S. and Japan also have bases there.) China has untold investments in Africa and halfway runs the place. Djibouti is a quick sortie by tank convoy to the hotspots of Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.

2. Han Chinese are ethnocentric, have no “white guilt,” and are not kind to their internal minorities (numbering more than 50), particularly Tibetans and Uyghurs. By no means are all those minorities “Oriental.” China floods troublesome minority provinces with Han Chinese.

3. China, like Japan, intentionally rewrites and lies about history.

4. Applying the same logic I use when trying to persuade first‑ and second-generation vizmins and children of immigrants to retain their ancestral languages (at any cost): Everything’s working great for you now in English, but spool out 500 years into the future and ask yourself how many people on Earth will be speaking your original language. (How’d that work out for the Indians?) You don’t speak it and your kids won’t, either. Maybe their kids will feel a lack, but probably not, and it might be too late anyway. Your five centuries’ worth of unilingual descendants will do nought but contribute to the death of your language.

Now picture Djibouti even a century hence. China will have flooded the place with Chinese and will have de facto control over the country. In fact, they may do a reverse Hong Kong or Macau and buy Djibouti outright. But they probably won’t need to: There will be so many Chinese in the country (true for everyone’s living memory) that they’ll be able to say with a straight face that Djibouti has always been Chinese.

What about black people? Blacks aren’t Han. But China historically has hosted many minorities, not all of them even vaguely resembling Han Chinese. Plus China is so committed to colonies off the mainland that it bought a couple of them back in a previous century. Of course the Ethiopic Djibouti blacks were always part of China. And since China will control the Internet and will write all the textbooks and run all the schools, it will be impossible to locate contradictory evidence without leaving the country, which, actually, they might make it difficult or impossible to do, or just not worth it.

Now picture “LGBT+” a century hence. [continue with: “Djibouti has always been Chinese” →]