One of Simon & Schuster’s recent court filings in defense against Yiannopoulos’ lawsuit has ended up including the entire text of Milo’s book, with the editor’s comments off to one side.
I’d never suggest anyone put themselves through reading the text, but the editor’s comments are interesting as they slowly start to sound more and more exasperated with the author. Some choice examples are in the below twitter thread.
Unless it gets sealed for some reason, there’s only a short number of steps if you want to check it out for yourself:
enter “Simon & Schuster” (without the quotes) in “Party Name” and select “Defendant”
click the number next to the 2017 New York Supreme Court action
click “Show eFiled Documents”
scroll down to 12/21/2017, and look for Exhibit B in a set of exhibits A - D. Click on “EXHIBIT(S)”, and it should download the right one… if not, try a different exhibit B on the same day
As for the text itself… ugh. It starts with every chapter titled as “Why [insert group] Hates Me” (progressive left, feminists, muslims, even ugly people), immediately jumps into praising himself for being such an awesome troll, and (from what little I looked at) keeps rolling downhill from there.
I’ve seen a lot of comments on Twitter along the lines of, “He was getting paid to explain why he attacked Leslie Jones!” or “So this was supposed to be a talking points primer for conservatives! Why was Simon and Schuster publishing this?”
And I know Twitter would have a feeding frenzy if I put it there, but I want to write back: “Why are you going with the premise that publishers behave ethically?”
Well, to argue against that last point, they do, after a fashion. Those editorial comments and this lawsuit are doing us the favour of showing what that looks like.
Actually, any good editor is going to rip apart a manuscript like this… or at least they should. The point is always to help the writer be more concise and be able to get their point across to the reader in a way that serves their interests.
Honestly, the vast majority of these are not really out of the ordinary from what I’ve seen of these sorts of editing rounds.
What’s so hard to imagine is that Milo thinks his comments would be acceptable to a serious mainstream publisher. But I guess he’s used to outlets with no standards.
Despite being an atheist I often reference Jesus and the other prophets. One of Jesus’s comments is that it is not what goes into people that defiles them but what comes out of their mouths. It ought to be tattooed backwards on the heads of Republicans and religious fundamentalists so they can read it in the mirror.
I’ve always wondered: does a hard drive filled totally with zeros weigh microscopically less than one that’s filled with a series of 1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0 . . . ? Due to entropy and energy being equivalent to mass and so on. I haven’t been able to get a decent answer to the question.
id say no. because it takes as much energy to record something deliberately random as it does something intended to have meaning.
the key word, i think, being “record”.
the planning for something meaningful generally takes longer than something random, so the entropy payment is there. ( tho why there is any payment due milo’s drivel from any publisher is an exercise left ( right? ) to the reader. )
to go further, decoding also takes the same time - but understanding does not. so, all in all, the device is pretty passive re: entropy. ( and, thank goodness. otherwise the message i hid yesterday in pi would have wreaked tire fuel efficiency for decades. )
