Author: VD

The sickness in the SFWA

Believe it or not, the current President of the SFWA is defending the pedophiles and child molesters of her organization and attempting to sweep Moira Greyland’s damning bestseller under the rug, probably because they have never expelled its inactive members who are convicted pedophiles or looked into the behavior of its Grand Masters such as Arthur C. Clarke and Samuel Delaney. John Del Arroz has more about the vile behavior of Cat Rambo.

It’s no wonder these people are so obsessed with “harassment policies”. One innocuous off-color joke by a Tor editor several years ago sent all of fandom spiraling and signalling. He was fired and ostracized from conventions after that. But it’s as they say, SJWs always project. The reason they focus so hard on what they call harassment, is they have far darker skeletons in their closets.  They know the actions they and their friends engage in, and so they have a hyper focus on the public appearance, the social element. They witch hunt average men to call harassers, all while on the other hand promoting the most deviant, pornographic lifestyles imaginable. Ironically, my wife, a far more beautiful woman than anyone you’ll see at a sci-fi con, has only had problems with men creeping on her and going over the line twice in her life — both by self-professed male feminist science fiction professionals and at science fiction conventions.

It was no wonder that yesterday, SFWA President Cat Rambo made a vile attempt to downplay Moira’s story of the abuse she suffered at the hands of Marion Zimmer Bradley. To someone like Rambo, MZB’s identity as a feminist and gay icon is far more important than the real human who was hurt. In her capacity at SFWA, Rambo should be championing Moira, a  best seller with a related work in the field — instead, she downplays the relevance in order to make more politically charged and wholly irrelevant attacks on the president. She’ll go so far as to protect the pedophiles in sci-fi that she’ll label anyone concerned over what happened to a real human being “alt-right” in order to dismiss them.

Sick. She refuses to disavow a dead pedophile and deflects. Why? We can only speculate, but from what I’ve observed in Sci-Fi fandom in conjunction with Moira’s story, MZB and Breen are not isolated incidents. The exposure of their story frightens the gatekeepers of the industry who have pushed an agenda of this lifestyle for decades.

Cat Rambo is a complete trainwreck. She makes Stephen Gould look sane by comparison, and Gould actually honored the author of Hogg by naming him an SFWA Grand Master. I have never been so proud to be the first SFWA Life Member to have had the SFWA Board vote for my expulsion. What sane, psychosexually healthy individual would want anything to do with such a deviant-filled degenerate organization?

Twitter was unimpressed.

J_Ishiro‏ @J_Ishiro
The SFWA and World Fantasy are so quick to condemn #hplovecraft’s racist opinions, yet won’t touch Marion Zimmer Bradley’s ACTUAL CRIMES? In her daughter’s own words, Bradley was a monster.

An Eclectic Scribe: Richard Paolinelli‏ @ScribesShade
 Actually, just wondering how many more of them are being sheltered by the SFWA now like the one you just referenced. BTW, I never supported either Moore or Trump so your deflection attempt, much like your leadership of @SFWA, seems to be a complete failure.

superversivesf‏ @superversivesf
It is rather telling that you decline to denounce the behaviour of convicted pedophiles and child abusers with “What does it matter at this point?” WTF is wrong with you?

Henry Vogel‏ @HenryVogel_
SFWA Pres, who believes it’s more important to dig up a 60-year-old corpse than deal with the 20-year-old one in her organization’s basement.

BADKarma‏ @karmalysing
The Fascist Left, where viciously denouncing the victims of pervert abusive pedophiles is “being on the right side of history” if said pedophiles happen to be homosexual and famous.

What’s Cat Rambo going to do for an encore, name the corpse of Marion Zimmer Bradley the 2018 Damon Knight Grand Master, then dig her up for the ceremony? If Rambo isn’t pressured to resign by the SFWA membership, that will speak absolute volumes about the deviants and pedophiles who are still lurking in their midst.

You CAN judge the artist by the art

And in some cases, most definitely should. The Dark Herald reviews The Last Closet:

I first ran into Marion Zimmer Bradley’s work in college.  A friend who had steered me right on several occasions, (Dune, Canticle for Leibowitz, Lefthand of Darkness) strongly recommended City of Sorcery to me.

He was overdue for a clinker.  City of Sorcery had a number problems for me.  It wasn’t an ideal first entry to the Darkover world.  It was jumping into the middle of an established universe.   If you weren’t all that familiar with the rules of this world as established by the author, then you had to puzzle out a lot stuff as you read the book.  Bradley was disinclined to fill in the blanks.  Also, back in those days I was Science Fiction Snob.  Sure I’d read Tolkien and Leiber and yes, I played Dungeons and Dragons.  But as an SFS I viewed science fiction books as vastly superior not least because they didn’t run to eight hundred pages and fantasy was starting to do that…a lot.

This book was clearly fantasy mascaraing as science fiction.

Also it was just a little bit…off.  There was no one thing I could really put my finger on.  Just a general feel of something that wasn’t quite right here.  Sort of when you walk in to a mist spray of fine vinegar, you know something’s wrong but it’s a little too diffuse to say what.

There was a miasma of something very off putting with the women in this book. An unpleasant edge, almost like they were the anti-Bujold characters.  The heroines were the Renunciates.  It wasn’t explicitly stated what they had renounced but it was obviously heterosexuality.  It was  a club for angry lesbians with the quasi religious overtones of a goofy hippy religion,  (which as as Gen-Xer I had little use for). The protagonist was the Chief Terran Agent on Darkover who had gone native and married another woman and were somehow raising a kid together.  The enemy was a bunch of evil space lesbians who were plotting…something(?),..I forget what. It was the characters that mattered in this book and I didn’t like any of them.

When my friend asked me about it, I made some joke about, The Lesbians In Spaaaaaace.  He didn’t like the joke at all and told me so.  I replied that the author was clearly writing about that of which she knows.  My friend laughed a little too loudly because he was about to ‘one up’ me, in true Gamma fashion.

“Nope, she’s happily married with two kids,” he smirked.

“Yeah, I got my doubts about the happily part,” I replied.

Holy crap, I never spoke truer words.

People often talk about the necessity of distinguishing between the artist and the art, but usually in the context of not rejecting the art on the basis of the behavior or character or politics or ideology of the artist. And this is correct, because to do so is to commit the genetic fallacy.

However, it is right and proper to judge the artist on the basis of the art. More often than not, the art created by the artist provides relevant insight into his psyche; it is very difficult to write the opposite sex well and it is also very difficult for a man to write characters who are different than his own socio-sexual rank.

Read Louis L’Amour and Robert Ludlum. Then read John Scalzi and Neil Gaiman. The difference is readily observable. Then read Piers Anthony and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Notice the creep factor? Exactly. This is one area where you can reliably trust your feelings.

“Equality” means the girls must win

AD relates a tale of competition, such as it is:

Last year, my homeschooled son participated in a team puzzle-solving competition at the local college.  He had a blast, and when the alert came out for the event this year, he was the first to sign up.  My daughter wasn’t old enough last year, but was the second person to sign up this year.

The woman running the groups this year contacted my wife last night to inform her that my son had been cut from the team.  “Why?”

The woman admitted that my son had done quite well last year, had not upset or annoyed anyone, contributed heavily, and was definitely an asset to the team.  After quite a bit of beating around the bush, the woman finally admitted that the rest of the team was entirely female and she was afraid that they “might feel uncomfortable with one boy in the group.”

“So, you’re telling me that you cut my son from the team solely because he is MALE?”

“Um…well…er…yes, I guess.”

The punch line…the woman asked if my daughter would mind being the only girl on an otherwise all-male team.

The woman delayed talking to us (due to “bad email address, sorry”) until it was far too late to form a team of our own.

My son quit on the spot, knowing he was not welcome.  My daughter immediately quit in solidarity with her brother.  Both are looking forward to next year, when they form their own separate homeschoolers team and get even for the insult.

That’s the spirit. And this is an example of why no man should ever be chivalrous in competition with women. Crush the opposite sex without mercy every time they dare to step foot on a level playing field. Because far too few of them have any intention of playing fair with men and boys.

I’ve mentioned before that when I coached a boy’s soccer team, we once played in a tournament against all-girls team that was blatantly favored by the referee, so much so that my players were being called for their fouls and even had a goal disallowed for a nonexistent foul AFTER the goal was scored. And this was after I’d taken out all my starters since we were up 3-0.

So, I taught the opposing coach, the referee, and my boys a lesson by putting all of the starters back in and telling them to score at will. I don’t remember what the final score was, but it was in the teens and the girls never even came close to scoring. The boys were brutally unmerciful; both the starters and the subs were furious and each unnecessary goal was cheered as if  it was the winning one. The lesson was this: those who don’t play fair don’t merit any sporting mercy.

I don’t have any objection to genuinely gifted girls who really need to play with the boys in order to fully develop their skills. My favorite player on one of Ender’s teams a few years ago is now a junior international and will probably be called up to the women’s national team within the next two years. But in 42 years of playing soccer, she is the only girl I ever met who merited that sort of accommodation.

Anyhow, I hope the reader’s homeschooled team goes in and crushes the competition, particularly the team that wouldn’t have him.

Never trust the moderates

They will sell out you and their previously professed principles in favor of their new friends on the other side in a heartbeat, as the True Finns learned the hard way.

The Finns Party, formerly called “True Finns”, rose from obscurity during the euro zone debt crisis with an anti-EU platform, complicating the bloc’s bailout talks with troubled states. It expanded into the second-biggest parliamentary party in 2015 and joined the government, but then saw its support drop due to compromises in the three-party coalition.

This June, the party picked a new hard-line leadership and got kicked out of the government, while more than half of its lawmakers left the party and formed a new group to keep their government seats.

Huhtasaari, 38, who was picked as deputy party leader in June, said voters were still confused after the split-up but that the party would eventually bounce back.

“The game is really brutal. The biggest parties want us to disappear from the political map. No one is in politics looking for friends.”

The Finns party ranks fifth in polls with a support of 9 percent, down from 17.7 percent in 2015 parliamentary election, while the new “Blue Reform” group, which has five ministers, is backed by only 1-2 percent.

This is why moderates can only be permitted in support positions and should never be allowed in positions of leadership, policy-making, or personnel. They love to talk about principles for the reason that they don’t actually have any, and use these nonexistent principles as an excuse to break promises and commit betrayals whenever it suits them.

It’s not necessary, and it’s not possible, to spurn them entirely. There are enough of them that they have to be accepted. And this is fine, this is not a problem, so long as they are not allowed into any positions of power or influence despite their best efforts.

That being said, it won’t be surprising if the True Finns end up outperforming their 2015 results, while their short-sighted sell-outs vanish from the political scene.

Denying the faith

The Churchian cucks destroying their families with their virtue-signaling little know the evil they are doing:

I heard of a very good, decent family who regularly shared how they were called to have “an open house.” They hosted events, had people over for lunch, and enjoyed great discussions around the table with interesting people. All decent things to do.

Yet their desire to be hospitable went farther than it should have. They also rented a room to a foreign college student (they viewed this as a ministry opportunity), took in homeless men and let people in need stay in their home for months or even years at a time.

And their children paid for it. One of the sons was deliberately exposed to homosexual pornography as a young teenager thanks to their international renter (who, after leaving the house, came out as gay much to the Christian family’s surprise). Another of the family’s daughters left home early since she was uncomfortable with how one of the homeless men the parents helped had a habit of showing up in the yard outside her bedroom window.

Another time I heard the story of a Christian family who allowed a Russian exchange student to stay with them as a chance to “witness.” The night before he returned to Russia, he raped their teenage daughter.

Yet another Christian parent sent his young brain-damaged daughter to a special school program where she was raped by two boys who rode with her on the bus.

With tears in his eyes, he “forgave them.”

To hell with that.

The Bible is very clear that a man’s responsibility is to his family first, then to his ministry. That’s why Paul praised those with the gift of celibacy, because they are able to prioritize their service to God. But one is not doing right, or serving God, by putting one’s ministry ahead of one’s family. As Lee Jackson reminds us, those doing so are actually denying the faith.

One more thing. It is not your place to forgive a crime committed against your child. To the contrary, you should be begging forgiveness for your failure to protect them.

The Deep State and degeneracy

Anonymous Conservative sees a connection between The Last Closet and Pizzagate:

The media conglomerates formed because someone realized that if the microwave company owned the TV Station, they would get free mentions for their microwave, and sell more and make more profit, and then they would get the profits from the TV Station too. It was win-win, times a hundred.

Soon, the media company formed as TV stations bought radio outlets, publishing houses, movie production companies, and magazines. It could put mentions in books, magazines, in news stories on the radio station, in news broadcasts on TV stations, and on and on. Wasted airspace in the news show was now producing income because of stories about products the media company sold. The softdrinks in the concessions at the theme parks could be in paper cups with the latest movie’s graphics, while the soft drink company bought advertising on the TV station that featured the movie’s actors promoting their movie in the softdrink ad. It is all one giant corporate advertising circle-jerk, which will drown out any smaller business beneath the tsunami of free mentions for the big company’s products. Use things like hypnotic techniques and market analysis to optimize the return on advertising effort and investment, and nothing could stop the machine.

The media companies either formed or bought publishing houses because it was easy money. Take something cheap to produce and utterly moronic like Fifty Shades, and promote it for free on your media platform with news stories and puff pieces, and you can reap hundreds of millions from the books, movies, and whatever else. Licensed sex toys, clothing, posters, and on and on. And as Fifty Shades takes off, you use it to build actors and talent that can promote other stuff, and mention products in the movies which you want mentioned for other profits elsewhere. Even the first book promoted the second and third, which themselves promoted other stuff. It was the world’s biggest corporate advertising circle-jerk.

Of course the Deep State has its tentacles in the machine too. Where there is power and money there is control, and Deep State made sure it owned the key players in that machine, so it could control the machine.

One does wonder how so many broken, damaged, dysfunctional people seem to somehow keep winding up on top, no matter how often they underperform or fail. It’s almost as if someone, somewhere, wants those sort of people running things.

But then, it is always wise to remember that when Satan offered Jesus Christ all the kingdoms of the world, Jesus didn’t see fit to dispute whether the offer was a genuine one.

“an extraordinarily important book”

Peter Grant, who as priest and soldier has witnessed more things that should not be seen than most of us will see in 100 lifetimes, expresses his thoughts on Moira Greyland’s new book:

I’ve written more than once about child sexual abuse, particularly in the context of the Catholic Church’s clergy crisis.  I also had not inconsiderable contact with child molesters and abusers as a prison chaplain.  I wrote about some cases in my memoir of prison ministry.

However, nothing can capture the agony of child abuse, mental, spiritual and physical, like the recollections of an abused child.  Moira Greyland is one such person….

I think this is an extraordinarily important book.  I believe we all need to understand the horrifying impact of child sexual abuse on its victims.  Most of them can’t speak for themselves.  I commend and applaud Ms. Greyland’s courage in speaking out, not just for herself, but on their behalf, too.

On a personal note, I find this book a ghastly reminder of why I took the stand I did when the Catholic Church hierarchy signally failed (and has continued to fail to this day) to address the issue of clergy sexual abuse in any meaningful way. I don’t think the bishops, archbishops and cardinals in general have any idea of just how horrifying is the reality of child sex abuse. If they did, I can’t believe they would have allowed their neglect of the situation to continue for so long. Nevertheless, they did . . . and the result for the Church has been catastrophic.  By their wrong actions and deliberate inaction, they have destroyed the faith of millions – their faith in the Church, certainly, and in tragically many cases, their faith in God too. That destruction will be weighed in the scales against them when they come to the Judgment we all must face. I would not like to be in their shoes when that happens.

I can only suggest most strongly that you read Ms. Greyland’s book for yourself.

From the first reviews of THE LAST CLOSET: The Dark Side of Avalon:

  • This is a painful book to read, especially if you have children or loved ones. Doubly so if you have the latter who have suffered sexual abuse. Nevertheless, it is a book which absolutely has to be read. I feel almost embarrassed to add it also is an excellent guide to the inner workings of the science fiction circles of 70s and 80s as well but it is. This is a painful book to read about some bizarre grotesques but the sad fact is the very human Alice in her distorted terrible Wonderland was forced to keep much of this secret until now. 
  • A hard book to read, not because of the writing, but because of the subject. But this is a book that should be read. If it can inspire more victims to speak out and educate people to the hidden-in-plain-sight depredations that surround them then it will be worth the struggle of the author to put her life out for all to see.
  • I obtained this book through the Kindle Unlimited program. Here’s how important it was to me: I had a backlog of 9 books to read and review, 9 books by 9 good authors, that I expect to enjoy reading. THIS book was just released today, and I grabbed it up, and started reading immediately. Because it was important. It IS important. I just finished about 30 minutes ago; and I found myself being continually astounded that this person is ALIVE, much less strong enough to speak out. 
  • This is an important book. A book of horror and redemption. A book that needed deep courage to write and deep courage to publish. A book that churns the unchurnable stomach. A book that needs bravery to read, bravery to acknowledge the horror, the deep evil, that exists in our fallen world.
  • I didn’t mean to even start it, but now that I have, I can’t put it down – no matter how much I want to. It is a VERY important book. Astounding.
Today’s #DailyMemeWars

SJW as far as the eye can see

One of the most SJW-converged corporations on the planet just extended its tentacles even further:

Disney on Thursday announced a deal to acquire many parts of Twenty-First Century Fox for $52.4 billion in stock. The company will get Fox’s movie studios, network Nat Geo, Asian pay-TV operator Star TV, stakes in Sky and Hulu and regional sports networks. The acquisition bolsters Disney’s plans to become a dominant streaming service platform, making it a bigger threat to Netflix.

“The more desirable content they have, the better they will be able to compete in terms of trying to sell a subscription offering at a time there’s so much competition for subscription-based services,” said eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna.

Bob Iger will remain Disney’s chairman and CEO through the end of 2021, at the request of the board of directors of both companies. Disney emphasized the importance of Iger to integrate the acquisition, saying in a statement that “extending his tenure is in the best interests of our company and our shareholders.”

On the plus side, there isn’t much at Fox to ruin. On the downside, this acquisition puts the SJWs in an even stronger position in the cultural war.

This is why it is so important to start and support independent endeavors such as Castalia House and Alt★Hero. Because if we don’t, there will be no alternative to the converged content being piped directly into everyone’s brains like a metaphorical Matrix.

Speaking of which, we need ten more beta testers. If you’re a gamer and you’re interested, please email with ELVETEKA in the subject. Old school Karateka-style arcade action.

Amazon goes after fake reviewers

Amanda at Mad Genius Club alerts us to a major change in policy at Amazon:

Since Amazon first opened its virtual doors, there have been concerns about reviews. Not just for books but for all the products sold through its site. It is no secret that authors have paid for reviews — and some still do. Or that there have been fake accounts set up to give sock puppet reviews. There have been stories about sellers and manufacturers planting fake reviews as well, all in the hopes of bolstering their product rankings and ratings. From time to time, Amazon has taken steps to combat this trend. One of the last times they did it, they brought in a weighted review system. This one differentiates between “verified purchasers” and those who did not buy the product viz Amazon. Now there is a new policy in place, once that should help — at least until a new way around it is found.

Simply put, Amazon now requires you to purchase a minimum of $50 worth of books or other products before you can leave a review or answer questions about a product. These purchases, and it looks like it is a cumulative amount, must be purchased via credit card or debit card — gift cards won’t count. This means someone can’t set up a fake account, buy themselves a gift card and use it to get around the policy.

Eligibility
To contribute to Customer Reviews or Customer Answers, Spark, or to follow other contributors, you must have spent at least $50 on Amazon.com using a valid credit or debit card. Prime subscriptions and promotional discounts don’t qualify towards the $50 minimum. In addition, to contribute to Spark you must also have a paid Prime subscription (free trials do no qualify). You do not need to meet this requirement to read content posted by other contributors or post Customer Questions, create or modify Profile pages, Lists, or Registries

Whether this change will work in the long run, I don’t know. But, for now, I welcome it.

As a frequent target of fake reviewers, I think this is fantastic. It should work brilliantly, because fake reviewers almost invariably try to hide their identities. Now that reviews will be tied to actual Amazon accounts, it’s very easy for Amazon to see whether the reviewer has a pattern of reviewing books that he has actually bought or not as well as giving Amazon the ability to deny the fake reviewer future access to Amazon’s retail channel if he makes a habit of regularly posting fake reviews or is the recipient of a large number of complaints about abusive reviews.

It was pretty clear that Amazon was already beginning to target fake reviews earlier this year. One SJW who left a fake review of SJWAL back in June even complained about his previous fake review being removed by Amazon.

Interesting that VD presents himself as an enemy of the “thought police”–he has already had my review taken down once, simply because it was negative. SAD!

First, I did not take the review down, Amazon did. And they did so, not because it was negative, but because it was obviously fake. Demonstrating, once more, that SJWs always lie. And given that SJWADD, published in October, has no fake reviews while the most recent fake reviews for SJWAL and ATOB are both from October 2017, I conclude that it was Amazon’s more aggressive policing of fake reviews this fall that led to this new policy. I also think Amanda’s wish for Kindle Unlimited subscribers to be permitted to post reviews is unwise because in my experience, I have already seen how some KU subscribers will download a book they have no intention of reading in order to be able to post a fake review that is marked as a Verified Purchase.

Since Amazon can see exactly how many pages a KU subscriber has read of the book he nominally reviewed, I have no doubt that they saw enough reviews being posted by KU non-readers to decide that KU subscribers cannot be trusted to post honest reviews. Amazon also appears to understand how permitting KU subscribers to post reviews creates a disincentive for authors to put their books in Kindle Select.

Amazon’s decision is an excellent application of Taleb’s “skin in the game” and I expect it will significantly improve the quality of Amazon’s reviews.

Speaking of Amazon, now that I’m able to return to finishing a certain extended edition, I’ve decided to celebrate by making A THRONE OF BONES free on Amazon tomorrow and the rest of this weekend. And if you’ve already read it, then perhaps you should consider getting the hardcover for your bookshelves.

Global Justice needs heroes!

The first Alt★Hero shirt is here! This one features a design that is very similar to the poster previously featured on Dangerous.

This one says, “The Struggle for Human EQUALITY and PROGRESS Needs Heroes Who Fight For GLOBAL JUSTICE”

Hey, we want to bring over all those Marvel and DC readers, right? Can’t hook them without bait.