Author: VD

In over his head

Now, I generally enjoy reading both John Derbyshire and Zman, and I think they’re both intelligent iconoclasts, but every now and then I am surprised to discover how conceptually limited various would-be critics can be when they attempt to criticize me. They preen, they posture, and they pontificate even as they demonstrate that they neither understand me nor know whereof they speak. That may sound a little arrogant, but bear with me a moment and you’ll see what I mean.

The Zman mentioned this in his interesting summary of attending the Mencken Club:

John was first up and he used Vox Day’s 16-points blog post as the framework for his talk. He made the point that Vox is by no means the leader of the alt-right or the voice of it, but a representative sample that is useful for analyzing the movement. His comments about item number eight were laugh out loud funny, to the empirically minded. What John was doing was introducing the general ideas of the alt-right to a crowd that is not spending their evenings in the meme war. He did a good job presenting the broad strokes.

This is all very well, but it led to the following string of comments which revealed some unexpected conceptual limitations on the part of the Zman. His failure to grasp either the obvious linguistics involved or to understand the basic nature of science is, to put it mildly, surprising. I find myself wondering if these failures are a logical consequence of his atheistic philosophical incoherence running headlong into its own conclusions, a kneejerk reaction to displeasure with something I have said, or simply an indication of his cognitive limitations.

Toddy+Cat
Personally, I’d be very interested to hear what John Derbyshire had to say about Vox’s point number eight. Derbyshire is great intellect, a fantastic writer, and has enough moral courage for several men, but he (like all of us) is a product of his Time, and sometimes has way too much respect for “science” and the “scientific community”. He sometimes does not seem to realize just how politicized “science” has become in our day. As much as both he and I might regret it, this ain’t 1955.

thezman
He comically analyzed the possible entomology of the words, “scientodific” and “scientody”. He also pointed out the absurdity of the claim that scientific conclusions are liable to future revision. For instance, Mars is closer to the sun than Jupiter, a conclusion of science that will never be liable to revision. John correctly pointed out that number eight is gibberish.

I’ve written a little about this topic. I’ll be revisiting it frequently. I think there may even be a book in it, if I can manage to squeeze more than 24 hours from each day. Suffice it to say that I don’t think science and technology can be jammed into the moral philosophy of the 17th and 18th century. Therefore, we wither kill all the scientists or create a new moral philosophy.

Heywood
Mars is closer to the sun than Jupiter… Anyway, that’s a stupid argument. While facts may be immutable – for a time, which may be long, like in the case above – our interpretations in the form of theories are always placeholders. Good till something better comes along, which, btw, must have the same predicative power as the old theory had where it was applicable, while extending the range of predictability. See classic Newtonian mechanics vs. theory of relativity. And as it happens, neither addresses Vox’s point of all so many modern “scientists” who employ the trappings and outer forms of science while gleefully ignoring everything that makes it actually useful. Nothing of this strikes me as overly difficult to either comprehend or establish, given the state of sciences today.

thezman
I’ve heard every iteration of factual nihilism and I have no interest in taking it seriously. It’s just another way of putting the goal posts on roller skates.

Man of the West
Zman said: “He also pointed out the absurdity of the claim that scientific conclusions are liable to future revision” I am assuming and hoping that what John meant is that SOME scientific conclusions are not open to revision, as his example — though questionable as science — shows. Because if not, and if the above statement is what he actually meant, then it is foolishness of a high order given the provisional nature of science and the fact that we know that there are unknown errors in scientific conclusions (as the replication crisis is presently showing us) that may be discovered at a later time.

Of course, John may have a unique definition of ‘science’ or of the word ‘conclusions’ which gives him some wiggle room, but then he is just playing semantic games.

thezman
Think of it this way. There is a set of things that have to be true or nothing is true. There is a set of things that are most likely true, but have yet to be conclusively proven. There are a set of things that may be true, but there’s either no way to test them or the efforts to prove them have fallen short. Finally, there is the set of things that are unknown.

Scientific conclusions are the first set. The second and third sets are open to revision and challenge. It’s not a matter of semantics. It is about definitions. People tend not to grasp the definitions of science, because the have had little exposure to math or science.

Byzantine_General
Your first category encompasses logic and mathematics. Your second includes theories of gravitation, where Einstein’s superceded Newton’s. But your words seem to place today’s scientific “conclusions” in the first category, rather than the second. Can you explain without casting nasturtiums?

“Factual nihilism”. Hmph.

thezman
I wrote, “Scientific conclusions are the first set.” That seems to cover it. Science, like mathematics, is about the accumulation of axioms, things that are assumed to be true by their nature. Put another way, if everything is open to revision, there is no truth.

Byzantine_General
I am gobsmacked, and I say this lovingly, by your wrong-headedness.

Science deals in theories, not conclusions. Theories are always contingent; we strenuously fail to falsify them, accumulate partial belief in them, build on and with them, but can never reach axiomatic mathematical certainty.

Not long ago, the best available theory was that neutrinos had zero mass. It could have been loosely said that science had concluded that this was the case. But the progress of science demands that it does not make conclusions.

A pesky observation (that the wrong kind of neutrinos were arriving on Earth from the Sun) forced that theory to be abandoned. A better theory accounted for the observation (and all previous observations), and entailed a non-zero mass. This is a perfect example of scientific progress.

Axioms are not subject to abandonment. Had the zero mass of the neutrino been treated as an axiom, we would have been forced to reject the observation and the better theory, because the contradiction of an axiom is automatically false.

Karl Popper’s criterion for deciding whether a theory is scientific is whether it could by some conceivable observation be falsified. Theories that can withstand any contrary evidence are called “religions”.

thezman
Karl Popper was wrong. If everything can be falsified, then there is no truth. That’s nihilism.

This is one of those moments when you suddenly realize that someone simply isn’t as intelligent as you had previously thought they were. One does not need to be a Popperian to recognize the obvious fact that many, if not most, scientific conclusions are intrinsically provisional, if not based entirely on false foundations. The Zman is making a common error in confusing the scientific method with a means of determining absolute truth; scientody is actually nothing more than a tool for determining what is not true from a material perspective and therefore can only ever be a means of narrowing the possible scope of the truth of things that remain firmly within the temporally accessible aspects of the material realm.

History, for example, is a matter of firmly established fact, and yet remains largely outside the realm of science and its conclusions.

In claiming that a correct understanding of science is nihilism, he confuses the subset of observable facts with the much larger set of scientific conclusions. And in asserting that science is about the accumulation of axioms with the alternative being nihilism. he demonstrates that he understands neither science nor mathematics nor the philosophy of science. Or, for that matter, nihilism.

Speaking of etymology, it seems we’re going to need to coin a new term for this sort of high midwittery.

UPDATE: I don’t think the Zman properly grasped what John Derbyshire was saying at all. But I will post my response to Derb’s comments in a separate post.

UPDATE: Yeah, he’s just not very bright. He didn’t even hesitate to double down in response to this post.

Much more is known now about the natural world, than was known fifty years ago, and much more was known then than in 1580. So there has been a great accumulation or growth of knowledge in the last four hundred years.

This is an extremely well-known fact. Let’s call this (A). A person, who did not know (A), would be uncommonly ignorant. To assert that all scientific conclusions are open to revision, as Vox Day has done, is to deny the existence of (A). I see he is now pushing around the goal post on wheels to try and obscure the fact he made a ridiculous statement, but that changes nothing.

Classic headlines

This was simply too good not to mention.

Transgender Woman Danica Roem Elected To Virginia HouseLeft Celebrates Another White Man In Office

If you’re not relying upon Infogalactic News for your daily headlines, you are missing out in more ways than one.

I haven’t spoken about Infogalactic much because we are in pure heads-down development mode. But rest assured, progress continues and the Burn Unit resources are not only not being wasted, we are using them more economically and efficiently than ever. This is a long game, more akin to an ultra-marathon than the proverbial sprint, and we are actively working on adding features that no one presently even imagines.

Book Review: SAPIENS by Yuval Harari IV

Review of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by C.R.Hallpike
The complete PDF

Part IV of IV

Harari’s next major turning point in world history he refers to, reasonably enough, as  ‘The Scientific Revolution’.  Around AD 1500 ‘It began in western Europe, a large peninsula on the western tip of Afro-Asia, which up till then played no important role in history.’ (p. 272) This is a unconvincing assessment of a region that had been the seat of the Roman Empire, the Christian Church, and Greek science which was one of the essential foundations of the Scientific Revolution. Harari’s opinions about how this got started are even less persuasive:

The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has above all been a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important question. (p. 279).

This is a statement whose truth is not immediately obvious, and he justifies it as follows:

Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions (pp. 279-80).

These traditions may have claimed to know all that was essential to salvation and peace of mind, but that kind of knowledge had nothing whatsoever to do with pre-modern traditions of science. In Europe this meant Aristotle and Greek natural philosophy but about which, astonishingly, Harari has nothing at all to say anywhere in his book. Apart from a willingness to admit ignorance and embrace new knowledge, science

…has a common core of research methods, which are all based on collecting empirical observations – those we can observe with at least one of our senses – and putting them together with the help of mathematical tools (p. 283).

This is a nineteenth-century view of what science does, whereas the really distinctive feature of modern science is that it tests theory by experiment, and does not simply collect empirical observations. On why modern science developed specifically in Europe Harari has the following explanation:

The key factor was that the plant-seeking botanist and the colony-seeking naval officer shared a similar mindset. Both scientist and conqueror began by admitting ignorance – they both said ‘I don’t know what’s out there.’ They both felt compelled to go out and make new discoveries. And they both hoped that the new knowledge would make them masters of the world (pp. 316-17).

Botany was actually of quite minor importance in the early stages of modern science, which was dominated by studies of terrestrial and celestial motion (Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton), and by chemistry which involved the revival of Greek atomism. And Columbus, to take a useful example of ‘a colony-seeking naval officer’ knew quite well what was out there. He knew that the earth is round, and concluded that if he sailed west for long enough he would find a new route to the East Indies. So when he reached the islands of the Caribbean he was convinced that their inhabitants were ‘Indians’ and never changed his mind. I think we can perhaps do a little better than Harari in explaining the European origin of modern science.

Greek science was dominated by the belief that reason, and particularly mathematics, was the true path to knowledge and its role was to be the tutor of the senses, not to be taught by them. The idea of performing an experiment did not really exist, and the great Alexandrian engineer Hero, for example believed that water pressure does not increase with depth. He defended this belief with an ingenious theory from Archimedes, but ignored the practical experiment of taking a glass down to the bottom of a pool where it could easily have been seen that the water rises higher inside the glass the deeper it is taken. Aristotle’s theories of terrestrial and celestial motion, and Ptolemy’s elaborate geometrical model of the heavens, for example, were seen as triumphs of reason, and were inherited by the medieval European universities who began a critical study of them. The importance of Greek science, however,  was not that it was right – it contained fundamental errors – but that it presented a coherent theoretical model of how the world worked that stimulated thought and could be tested.

The Islamic world had transmitted much of Greek science to medieval Europe, and Aristotle in particular was greatly admired by Muslim scholars as ‘The Philosopher’. But under the influence of the clerics Islam eventually turned against reason and science as dangerous to religion, and this renaissance died out. In rather similar fashion, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian closed the philosophy schools of Athens in 529 AD because he considered them dangerous to Christianity. But while in the thirteenth century several Popes, for the same reason, tried to forbid the study of Aristotle in the universities, they were ignored and in fact by the end of the century Aquinas had been able to publish his synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology in the Summa Theologica.

This illustrates a vital difference between Europe and the other imperial civilisations. Whereas the Caliph and the Byzantine Emperor had the authority to impose intellectual orthodoxy, in Europe the Popes could not enforce their will on society, and neither could the secular authorities, because there were too many competing jurisdictions – of the Holy Roman Emperor, of kings, of free cities, of universities, and between church and state themselves. Another vital difference was that in the other imperial civilisations there was that basic gulf between scholars and artisans and between merchants and the rest of the upper classes to which I referred earlier. Medieval European towns and cities, however, were run by merchants, together with the artisans and their guilds, so that the social status of artisans in particular was very much higher than in other cultures, and it was possible for them to interact socially with learned scholars. This interaction with scholars occurred in the context of a wide range of interests that combined book-learning with practical skills: alchemy, astrology, medicine, painting, printing, clock-making, the magnetic compass, gunpowder and gunnery, lens-grinding for spectacles, and so on. These skills were also intimately involved in the making of money in a commercially dynamic society.

It is highly significant that this interaction between scholars and artisans also occurred in the intellectual atmosphere of ‘natural magic’, the belief that the entire universe is a vast system of interrelated correspondences, a hierarchy in which everything acts upon everything else. Alchemy and astrology were the most important components of this tradition, but by the thirteenth century Roger Bacon, for example, was arguing that by applying philosophy and mathematics to the study of nature it would be possible to produce all sorts of technological marvels such as horseless vehicles, flying machines, and glasses for seeing great distances. It was not therefore the admission of ignorance that was truly revolutionary, but  the idea that science could be useful in mastering nature for the benefit of Man.

By the time of Galileo, whom Harari does not even mention, the idea that science should be useful had become a dominant idea of Western science. Galileo was very much in the natural magic tradition and was a prime example of a man of learning who was equally at home in the workshop as in the library – as is well-known, when he heard of the Dutch invention of the telescope he constructed one himself and ground his own lenses to do so. But Galileo was also enormously important in showing the crucial part that experiment had in the advancement of science. He was keenly interested in Aristotle’s theory of terrestrial motion and is said to have tested the theory that heavier bodies fall faster than light ones by dropping them from the leaning tower of Pisa. This is somewhat mythical, but he certainly carried out detailed experiments with metal balls by rolling them down sloping planks to discover the basic laws of acceleration. He did not simply observe, but designed specific experiments to test theories. This is the hall-mark of modern science, and it emerged in the circumstances that I have just described so that reason and the evidence of the senses were thus harmonized in the modern form of natural science. (On the origins of science see Hallpike 2008:288-353; 396-428).

Science, then, is not exactly Harari’s strong point, so we need spend little time on the concluding part of his book, which is taken up with speculation about where science and technology are likely to take the human race in the next hundred years. He concludes, however, with some plaintive remarks about our inability to plan our future: ‘we remain unsure of our goals’, ‘nobody knows where we are going’, ‘we are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power’ (pp. 465-66). He has just written a book showing that mankind’s social and cultural evolution has been a process over which no-one could have had any control. So why does he suddenly seize upon the extraordinary fiction that there ought to be some ‘we’ who could now decide where we all go next? Even if such a ‘we’ existed, let us say in the form of the United Nations, how could it know what to do anyway? 

Throughout the book there is also a strange vacillation between hard-nosed Darwinism and egalitarian sentiment. On one hand Harari quite justifiably mocks the humanists’ naive belief in human rights, for not realising that these rights are based on Christianity, and that a huge gulf has actually opened up between the findings of science and modern liberal ideals. But on the other hand it is rather bewildering to find him also indulging in long poetic laments about the thousands of years of injustice, inequality and suffering imposed on the masses by the great states and empires of history, and our cruelty to our animal ‘slaves’ whom we have slaughtered and exterminated in such vast numbers, so that he concludes ‘The Sapiens reign on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of’. But a consistent Darwinist should surely rejoice to see such a fine demonstration of the survival of the fittest, with other species either decimated or subjected to human rule, and the poor regularly ground under foot in the struggle for survival. Indeed, the future looks even better for Darwinism, with nation states themselves about to be submerged by a mono-cultural world order, in which we ourselves are destined to be replaced by a superhuman race of robots.

It has been rightly said that:

Harari’s view of culture and of ethical norms as fundamentally fictional makes impossible any coherent moral framework for thinking about and shaping our future. And it asks us to pretend that we are not what we know ourselves to be – thinking and feeling subjects, moral agents with free will, and social beings whose culture builds upon the facts of the physical world but is not limited to them (Sexton 2015:120).

Summing up the book as a whole, one has often had to point out how surprisingly little he seems to have read on quite a number of essential topics. It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously. So we should not judge Sapiens as a serious contribution to knowledge but as ‘infotainment’, a publishing event to titillate its readers by a wild intellectual ride across the  landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny. By these criteria it is a most successful book. 

The cancer spreads in comics

This is MOST EXCELLENT news for the future prospects of  Alt★Hero.

Brian Michael Bendis, one of Marvel’s most prolific writers, is moving over to DC Comics. The news broke this morning via a tweet from DC Comics, which read, “We are beyond thrilled to welcome Brian Michael Bendis exclusively to the DC family with a multiyear, multifaceted deal.”

From Bleeding Cool:

The word is out and it hit with a bang. Brian Michael Bendis, who has been writing continuously for Marvel Comics since 2000 has signed an exclusive contract with DC Comics. But why. No doubt there will be PR-friendly soundbites with the words “challenge”, “fresh start”, or “a whole new universe of characters to play with” but from involved sources, Bleeding Cool has been able to put together this timeline. All of this is unofficial, of course.

Much of it was spurred by the Marvel Comics Writers Summit that occurred last month just before New York Comic-Con, which we dubbed Fear And Loathing Before NYCC 2017.

But first, what was going on with Bendis at Marvel? He was writing Jessica Jones, Guardians Of The Galaxy, Defenders, Spider-Man, Spider-Men II, Invincible Iron Man and Infamous Iron Man. He had written the Civil War II crossover event. But he deliberately stayed well away from Secret Empire. His books didn’t crossover with the big event, and Guardians only did when he left.

However his books weren’t getting the big numbers like they used to. And a number of them were subject to being later than usual. His contract was up, the likelihood of getting a raise was low. The Marvel Comics Creative Committee of which he played a strong part no longer had any influence on the films, after Kevin Feige at Marvel Studios stopped reporting to Ike Perlmutter but to Disney instead. Bendis, who wrote the first of the Marvel end credit scenes with Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury in Iron Man, was no longer a part of that mix. Bendis had written pretty much every Marvel character he was interested in – and there was no chance of Marvel publishing a Fantastic Four comic now.

So, the Marvel Comics Writers Summit, before New York Comic Con. We mentioned how the issue of increased diversity of Marvel Comics and how to deal with negative reaction towards that, was a significant aspect. I am told that Brian Bendis, creator of Miles Morales and Riri Williams, had quite the disagreement with David Gabriel, whose interview with Miles Griepp for ICV2 regarding diversity at the publisher needed repeated clarifications.

That there was a decision made to give the title called simply Spider-Man to the Peter Parker iteration of the character in 2018, rather than the current Miles Morales, which would become Miles Morales: Spider-Man again, a battle Bendis thought he had previously won for Marvel Legacy.

That Gabriel told Bendis that diversity doesn’t sell. The counter to that being, what does at Marvel aside from Dan Slott’s Amazing Spider-Man and Star Wars?

We’re thrilled too. If Bendis succeeds in doing for DC Comics what he did for Marvel, the resulting vacuum is going to create an even bigger opportunity for alternative comics than we had previously imagined. Consider some of the comments by comics fans there.

  • Hope that Bendis won’t destroy DC like he did Marvel.
  • Most of what I’ve picked up from dc over the past two years has been a worthwhile read. But I’d given up on marvel, in part because of how many series they’ve let bendis ruin. I’m really hoping dc doesn’t pick the trash from marvel and end with the same bad books and terrible sales numbers.
  • DC went crazy! Bendis sucks!!!
  • Marvel is on a downward spiral, and Bendis doesn’t want to be caught up in it. That, and he just doesn’t have the pull he once had.

Jon Mollison has some related thoughts at Castalia House:

The flailing death throes of Marvel Comics represents only the latest softening of the permafrost. The phenomenal success of Alt★Hero represents the most obvious green shoot, but the most important sign of the coming spring is the reaction of fans to both events. No longer content to turn their backs on the cold and sterile offerings, comic book fans are turning up the heat and demanding better.

With the vast array of forces aligned against the common man, it is more important than ever that fans step back and reassess the history of the medium. Pushing back against the winds of winter and preparing the ground for the coming planting season takes some thought and effort, to be sure. But the rewards are well worth the effort. To that end, let’s turn the weapon of deconstruction around and use it against those who would replace genuine virtue in comics with the empty simulacrum of Diversity Uber Alles.

Foreign corruption

Imagine how much worse this sort of thing is likely to be in the USA:

Priti Patel is facing the sack today after Theresa May ordered her to cancel an Africa tour and return to the UK. The Aid Secretary’s fate appears to be sealed after two further secret meetings with Israeli officials emerged on top of the 12 that had already been revealed. The latest developments appear to have hardened the mood in Downing Street, where there had already been fury at Miss Patel’s ‘freelancing’.

No10 sources said the minister had been told to return to the UK from Nairobi for a showdown, cancelling plans for her to fly to Uganda with Trade Secretary Liam Fox. The row over Miss Patel’s extraordinary breach of government protocol while on a ‘family holiday’ to Israel surfaced last week, but erupted again on Monday when she admitted there were more undeclared meetings, including with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mrs May demanded an apology from Miss Patel and formally reprimanded her, hoping that would draw a line under the furore. However, it has now been revealed that she held two further unauthorised meetings with senior Israeli political figures which were not attended by UK Government officials. Miss Patel narrowly avoided the sack following the initial wave of revelations after the PM decided she could not risk destabilising the Government further after Sir Michael Fallon quit over sexual harassment claims last week. But Downing Street’s stance changed yesterday after it emerged that Miss Patel had tried to divert some of Britain’s aid budget to humanitarian work by the Israeli army in the disputed Golan Heights.

I wonder what would happen if the special counsel were to investigate Israeli interference with the US government with the same energy he has shown in the futile RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA probe.

I understand that Israel is in a geographically precarious position and is always looking for ways to improve the odds of its survival, but this sort of thing is absolutely the wrong way to go about strengthening one’s alliances and pretty much guarantees a backlash that could be worse than any potential benefit gained.

UPDATE: This affair may take down May as well as Patel now. Total incompetence on the part of the Prime Minister, who should have fired Patel immediately.

Number 10 instructed Development Secretary Priti Patel not to include her meeting with the Israel foreign ministry official Yuval Rotem in New York on 18 September in her list of undisclosed meetings with Israelis which was published on Monday, the JC has learned.

Ms Patel listed 12 meetings in the statement, and the emergence of two more last night is thought to have made her sacking imminent.

But the JC understands, from two different sources, that Ms Patel did disclose the meeting with Mr Rotem but was told by Number 10 not to include it as it would embarrass the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

It would be ironic as well as unfortunate if this diplomatic debacle helped Jeremy Corbyn, the avowedly anti-Zionist Labour leader, come to power.

Virginia is a Democratic state

Congratulations, civic nationalists. This projected win in the gubernatorial race in Virginia is what is absolutely bound to happen when you import sufficient not-American people, as anyone who has ever lived in a not-American country should recognize.

Ralph Northam (D) has been elected next governor of Virginia, defeating Ed Gillespie (R).

The result is hardly a surprise even though the Democratic Party is in complete disarray across the country. Enough Americans have been replaced with Fake Americans in the home state of Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee that neither Donald Trump nor an establishment Republican are able to win there.

The God-Emperor is unconcerned.

Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!

The ride never ends

#GamerGate never forgets:

Bob Chipman @the_moviebob
There’s like a 50/50 shot that I will live to see Marvel and DC “Universes” consolidated into a single publishing continuity.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
More like 2/98. You’re a fat bastard who is likely to die of apoplexy sometime during the reign of the God-Emperor Trump.

Even if you combine all the SJW convergence with Alt★Hero, I don’t think we’re going to be able to compete with Mr. Chipman’s relentless need to stuff his maw.

Book Review: A THRONE OF BONES by Vox Day

A review by Dystopia Soak. I always find it intriguing to discover how few of my blog readers read my fiction. That’s fine, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest, as everyone has different tastes and preferences. It’s not as if most regulars here get into Eco, Hesse, and Murakami either. But it is still satisfying to hear when someone finally gets around to giving it a shot and then discovers that it’s really not that bad.

After Tolkien, no fantasy novel captured my attention again, though not for lack of trying. Over the decades, I picked up a lot of authors, each of them creating worlds and plots as anaemic and derivative as the rest. Few held my attention for even a chapter. By the late 90s I had stopped picking them up altogether. As far as genres went, fantasy was a dead end.

Then my wife heard about a new television series, and we binge watched a couple of seasons. No prizes for guessing what it was. After the first few episodes, I was so inspired I took a ‘look inside’ the first instalment on Amazon. George R.R. Martin was as good on paper as Benioff and Weiss were on screen. This was good stuff, and I started to wonder if I had finally found what I was looking for.

Alas, no. By the time I got my hands on a copy of Game of Thrones, Martin’s predilection for proving points by killing characters had become tiresome. As had his points about the cartoonish nature of good battling evil. I watched on, losing interest, putting aside the book, which I never started. Besides, my wife heard about Breaking Bad, and GoT faded into the background.

I could be forgiven, then, for skipping over reviews extolling the virtues of a new epic high fantasy by Vox Day when they first started appearing. For several years, I ignored advice to read Throne of Bones from people who struck me as otherwise sensible. I had had enough. It was one thing to read the man’s blog, but quite another to have my antipathy towards the genre confirmed.

That turned out to be a foolish mistake, because Vox Day is not like other fantasy writers. Where others try to mock and tear down all that is central to Western civilisation, Day has returned to the very heart of what makes the West great. And by doing so has provided us with the first true epic high fantasy since Tolkien to confront the consequences of losing out to barbarism.

If you haven’t read A THRONE OF BONES yet, it’s available in Kindle, KU, hardcover, and paperback. And audiobook fans will be pleased to know that Jeremy Daw has begun recording what will be a 36-hour monster. He has already recorded THE LAST WITCHKING & OTHER STORIES if you want to hear what he sounds like.

Those who have expressed interest in giving out copies of SJWADD to members of their organizations should be pleased to know that the paperback should be available on Amazon by the end of the week. And speaking of reviews, of a sort, it was nice to see this in a piece on Hollywood Values champion James Toback over at Taki’s place:

Regarding the allegations being made against him, Toback told the up for sale ass brownie known as Rolling Stone:

The idea that I would offer a part to anyone for any other reason than that he or she was gonna be the best of anyone I could find is so disgusting to me. And anyone who says it is a lying cocksucker or cunt or both. Can I be any clearer than that?

Toback’s statement signals that he’s either well versed in Vox Day’s 2015 masterpiece SJWs Always Lie, a psychopath, or both.

Read the whole thing there. But as grateful as I am for Mr. Spielman’s praise of my book, I can’t say that I agree with his hypothesis. As Nick Cole and I have both independently concluded, the Hollywood Values scandal is not aimed at Warren Beatty (who, as an Alpha, never needed to engage in the predatory Gamma behavior exhibited by Weinstein and Toback), but rather, is primarily a defensive burn by the powerful Hollywood gays to try to distract from their exposure and eventual reckoning.

As Nick pointed out, Dustin Hoffman? How long has it been since he was even remotely relevant? That is the desperate behavior of evil men on a sinking ship throwing out everyone and everything they can get their hands on in a futile attempt to keep the ship from going underwater.

The sex suicides begin

Although apparently as a result of the Pestminister scandal rather than the Hollywood Values meltdown:

Top Welsh Labour politician Carl Sargeant is found dead days after being suspended by the party over ‘shocking’ sex allegations. A senior Labour politician has been found dead in apparent suicide today just days after he was suspended from the party over claims of sexual misconduct. Former Welsh Government minister Carl Sargeant, 48, is believed to have taken his own life at home in Connah’s Quay, North Wales.

I do wonder, however, about the recent suicide of actor Brad Bufanda. He had a pretty serious case of gayface and “began his acting career before his teens”. One wonders how close he was to the power centers of the Hollywood Values crowd.

In the meantime, the New York Times is VERY unhappy about their lawyer David Boies running interference for Harvey Weinstein in order to kill stories by New York Times reporters.

“We learned today that the law firm of Boies Schiller and Flexner secretly worked to stop our reporting on Harvey Weinstein at the same time as the firm’s lawyers were representing us in other matters,” the statement read. “We consider this intolerable conduct, a grave betrayal of trust, and a breach of the basic professional standards that all lawyers are required to observe. It is inexcusable and we will be pursuing appropriate remedies.”

How very shocking to learn that a lawyer representing the New York Times would not be a paragon of ethical or professional behavior! No one finds it harder to believe he has been robbed than a thief.

Mailvox: convergence kills the cons

A former conference speaker who is still very much in demand explains why he doesn’t even attend technology conferences anymore. Sounds like we don’t just need #AltTech, but #AltCon as well.

These technology conferences are usually run by community-minded people, not corporates, by people who devote themselves to the endeavor, enter into huge financial risk and often wind up losing money at the end of it. Yet this kind of over-the-top virtue display is becoming increasingly common. Once upon a time I seriously considered launching a conference myself, but there’s no way I’d expose myself to this kind of drama, which is almost guaranteed now.

These tech community controversies fall into 3 broad categories:

1. Not enough speaker diversity.
You’re guaranteed this kind of outrage now if you don’t have 50{b05c51a15f0a42d8e7dd687f4cc4bfffd66a97ee173a2742c6182468204332c9} or more women speakers. I’m certain the bar will move once parity is achieved and you then need PoC, then trans, then … You even have popular speakers now making statements like “I won’t speak at a conference or be on a panel unless there are least 50{b05c51a15f0a42d8e7dd687f4cc4bfffd66a97ee173a2742c6182468204332c9} women and PoC” such as this fellow. ElectronConf is a hilarious example of this controversy. Electron is an important and rapidly growing technology. It’s what applications like Slack, Skype and Brave and many other desktop applications are built on. It’s an open source project run and owned by GitHub. They announced their first conference in 2016, got speaker proposals, and even did a blind speaker selection, but ended up with all male speakers, which is obviously not surprising to the rational observer. This kicked off a controversy. The conference was initially postponed, then went dark and completely disappeared. It’s supposedly back again for 2018 and calling for speakers, but there is no reason to assume the same thing won’t happen again.

2. I won’t speak if X is speaking!
Identify a problematic speaker on the list along with yourself and make a big show of how you are cancelling your talk because you won’t appear at a venue that promotes problematic Mr X. Often the timing is guaranteed to give the organizers an aneurysm. Nodevember in Nashville in 2016 was a great example of this. Doug Crockford, a well-respected old-guard from the JavaScript community,  literally wrote the book on JavaScript best practices that was a reference for many years–JavaScript: The Good Parts, was on the speaker list but had recently caused conference controversy for “slut shaming” because he was making a technical point and referred to the “old web” as “promiscuous” and the “new web” as “consensual”, the case being that he was equating promiscuity with something negative. Kassandra Perch, a typical screechy non-contributing SJW who creates controversy wherever she goes, pulled out and made a scene. She was backed up by the usual Twitter suspects in that community and caused a headache for the organizers. The organizers then had a falling out because one took it upon himself to disinvite Crockford immediately, while another organizer stepped down in protest of the first guy’s unilateral action and released a public statement about it. All hell broke lose. This is a conference organized by individuals, who invest their own time to make a fun community thing and have to go begging for sponsorships to make it happen. Somehow they survived and are still doing it each year.

3. A man looked at me! Reeeeee!
This used to be a common tactic as a tool used to justify and introduce Codes of Conduct as a standard practice at conferences in the first place, before they were pushed into our code repositories. There is rarely evidence of actual wrongdoing, just hearsay, and often even that hearsay is a head-scratcher. Now you can’t run one of these without a CoC, you just won’t get sponsors because they’ll be targeted if you don’t. See LambdaConf as the last non-CoC conf that has now introduced their own, a bit less SJWized version in an attempt to have one but not completely submit to the narrative. Now that all the conferences have CoCs, the screeching is about supposed violations that aren’t correctly handled. They are either pure virtue-signaling or an attempt to undermine the unconverged organization committee. It’s not surprising that this current controversy is around a conference in eastern Europe where they are less attuned to SJW culture and don’t properly understand how to feed that dragon. They probably stepped on a tripwire and alerted this individual that they hadn’t fully signed up to the narrative. The non-West suffers the most from this and comes because they see a need to invite Western big-names to attract ticket sales.

As that guy you interviewed in SJWs Always Double Down said, tech community conferences were the initial gateway for SJW convergence of open source, and my assessment is that they’ll be the canary in the coal mine for the costs that convergence will eventually extract from open source. Tech conferences are becoming too risky to organize. The rules around what is acceptable, who you can have speak, ratios of acceptable groups to feature in your speaker lineup, and so forth, are just too hard to understand as the SJW standards mutate over time. The financial risks are huge and you have to rely on large sponsors to fund your events; ticket sales don’t do it. But your sponsors are flighty and will withdraw at the first hint of controversy. Quality speakers are becoming increasingly difficult to book and the ratio of knowns to unknowns will deteriorate too far to attract sufficient ticket sales. Particularly when you have to insert so many token speakers who don’t contribute to the attractiveness of the conference, and will sometimes even detract from it.

Of course women and other minority groups in tech will bear the greatest cost. The rest of us will just have fewer venues to meet with our peers and hear about cutting edge developments in person. But women, PoC, trans people, etc. are already being promoted at significantly higher numbers than they exist at large in tech with the bar being set very low to make this happen. Low-quality speakers from these minority groups are all too common. The same names keep appearing and people wonder why because they never seem to have anything interesting to add. Non-technical soft talks are becoming too common, and nobody wants to go to a tech conference to be moralized at, but it’s now standard practice.

The tech community at large is being presented with artificial evidence that these minority groups are simply full of low-quality and non-contributing individuals. Then we’re told that that this is caused by rampant sexism, racism, and transphobia in tech. I don’t believe this is true but I wouldn’t blame regular conference attendees and video watchers from concluding that their non-white, non-cis, non-male peers are indeed of lesser quality considering the anecdotal evidence being force fed to them. There are great women, PoC, trans, whatever, people in tech, but the high-quality ones exist in proportion to their numbers overall. And those overall numbers are small. For all the reasons that James Damore was chastised for pointing out.