Author: VD

NFL Week 5

And the Vikings shoot to make it five straight against Houston. This is the weekly NFL open thread.

Okay, now this is going to sound crazy, but rest assured, it has NOTHING to do with my being a Vikings fan. A friend who shall go unnamed subscribes to the scripted theory of the NFL, by which he means that the probable outcome of the season is more or less determined in advance.

It doesn’t always hold up, of course, due to the unpredictable elements of the game, but he points out that there are observable primary, secondary, and tertiary narratives. And here’s where it gets interesting: for the first time, I’m picking up a narrative that suggests the Vikings are scripted to win the Super Bowl this year.

One example, and far from the most egregious:

The play of their defense has been the biggest on-field factor in their success, which should sound like a familiar formula to those with memories long enough to remember how the Broncos fueled their run to the Super Bowl last season. One member of that Broncos team is now in Minnesota and running back Ronnie Hillman has found more links the two clubs than a standout defense.


“The big thing is the camaraderie,” Hillman said, via the Pioneer Press. “This team plays for each other, and that’s the biggest part. This team has the same brotherhood — these guys treat each other like family the exact same [as in Denver], and that’s what you need to have a championship team. I saw it here right away, how these guys treat each other with respect and without excuses — they’re accountable for what they do, and that’s definitely a good trait to have as a whole. The guys are cool.”


There’s a lot of time between Week Five and the Super Bowl for those comparisons to grow stronger or prove to be superficial, but the Vikings have already shown an ability to overcome adverse developments that they’ll need to go the distance.


I picked up on this after watching their Week Two win and hearing the announcers go on and on about a very different game than the one I’d just watched.

Wait, they’re going to police US?

The lesser SJWs of SF fandom belatedly discover that SF’s thought police don’t only intend to police the speech, thoughts, and behavior of science fiction’s right wing:

The illiberal factions in fandom just want power. They don’t care much whom they go after, as long as they can flex their muscles. The Worldcon 75 committee has offered the latest sample of this, shoving Dave Weingart out as the filk head.

Dave discussed what happened here. In brief: Someone got the notion that Dave should never talk to her. He respected this. One day he inadvertently posted a Babylon 5 video link to a chat group which this other person was also in. For this, he was told he could continue to run filk only if he agreed to end all staff contact outside his division. Of course, it’s impossible to run a part of the program that way, so his only choice was to withdraw.

The concom’s action makes no sense of any kind. It grows out of the notion that “feeling offended” trumps every other consideration and entitles someone to claim any remedy. Well, listen, Helsinki gang. I’m offended. I hope every filker who was planning to go cancels out on you.

I once got a supporting membership. Some early suspicions that people of this kind were running the con led me to back out on it. I never had any real plans to go there, so there’s only one thing I can stop doing. I run a Twitter account called Filk News, which contains various tidbits about what’s happening in the filk world. From here on, I’m giving the Helsinki con no publicity there.

I know Dave personally. He’s a friend and a hard worker with a lot of integrity. Filkers know that. Maybe the Helsinki clique decided filk is beneath their idea of a con. They forget that filkers aren’t just filkers; we include pro writers, regular supporters of conventions, and other people who’ve helped to build and maintain fandom. If the con had just decided to drop filk — well, it can do that. But using bullying tactics to drive us away was a serious mistake.

And the Dark Lord laughed. It’s more than a little amusing to see how these hapless idiots obviously didn’t see it coming despite the fact that the same pattern has played out ever since the Montagnards turned on the Girondins. So, it should come as no surprise that the freakiest SJW, such as Mr. Alexandra Erin, publicly applaud the thought police, despite their hilarious incompetence.

I think no one would dispute to Mr. Weingart’s contributions to cons actually have been tremendously valuable. But as fannish circles and conventions embrace community standards and commitments to safety and work to be more welcoming to people from every walk of life, we really have to internalize the lesson that nobody is irreplaceable….

Even if he’s 100% right that this is just bad optics, even granting he’s 100% right that the restrictions he’d have to agree to would prevent him from doing his job, we can’t agree to treat women’s (and others’) safety concerns seriously right up until the moment that it’s inconvenient. That’s not how it works.

Translation: Everyone who doesn’t submit to the latest version of the Narrative will be replaced. And once they scent blood, the zharks will swarm. And really, if the safety of the delicate flowers is paramount, wouldn’t it be best for everyone if they just canceled the convention and everyone stayed home, safely ensconced in their blankets and covered with a thin, comforting coating of stale Doritos dust?

I look forward to the first accusations being directed at the Finns running Worldcon 75 and charging them with being secret Castalia operatives seeking to destroy the Hugo Awards.

When white-knighting goes awry

Gammas never grasp that the crowd is always going to choose the Alpha male over them, no matter how adroitly they virtue-signal:

House Speaker Paul Ryan was shouted down by chants of “Trump” at his Fall Fest event Saturday in Wisconsin. Ryan, who kicked off the speech talking about the “elephant in the room,” said that Trump’s banter with Billy Bush before taping an Access Hollywood segment in 2005 was “a troubling situation.”

The chants for “Trump” start at about the 6:40 mark in the video below.

Ryan was joined onstage by Wisconsites Ron Johnson and Scott Walker after the “Trump” shouts began, at the end of Ryan’s speech. Some also shouted, “God bless Trump,” and “See ya, Paul! Jackass!”

Ryan’s miscalculation wasn’t quite as bad as Ted Cruz’s at the RNC, but it was still pretty impressive.

You don’t need to die

Paisley Park opened to the public:

The complex opens one week before a memorial tribute concert in St. Paul, which is adjacent to Minneapolis. The public opening of the studio complex is a milestone for music lovers and historians. The complex opened in 1987, and was a fully functional recording studio used by a number of artists during its peak in the 1990s, including the Stone Temple Pilots, REM and Madonna.

Among the various acts that recorded there was Psykosonik. We recorded and mixed Unlearn there, although I spent almost no time in the studio since my only meaningful input on that CD was lyrical. Dan and Paul were going in a mellower, more ambient direction, and both Mike and I were not interested in it. We both left the band at the same time, after the CD was recorded, but before it was released, to focus on computer games.

However, I thought that one song off Unlearn, “Need to Die”, would be of interest in light of yesterday’s post about the way in which the choice to confront one’s fears or run from them as a young man tends to play a significant role in an individual’s life. Keep in mind that the song was written 22 years before “The Broken Freaks of Fandom”.



Caught in the mist like a rain shower
Life’s got you between your eyes
And wishful thinking don’t make it go away
That’s no surprise, yeah
There’s no surprise
Of living a lie
There’s no surprise


Face your fears alone now
And make them fly
When your dreams come home now
You don’t need to die


Been holding back on your inside
Looks like you hide it well
But laughing faces can’t cover all your pain,
That keeps you in Hell
That keeps you in Hell
If only for a day
That keeps you in Hell
If only for a day


Face your fears alone now
And make them fly
When your dreams come home now
You don’t need to die

Open trade and open borders

That’s Hillary’s dream and America’s nightmare:

“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere,” Clinton told Banco Itau, a Brazilian bank, on May 16, 2013.

Of course, she isn’t likely to tell the voters that, since everybody’s watching and “you need both a public and a private position.”

Thank you, Julian.

SF-SJWs devour zhemselves

Once zhey’ve pushed everyone else out of their safe spaces, zhey turn on each other. SJWs are rather like sharks, in that zhey have to be attacking someone in order to survive. Big, fat, toothless, mentally ill zharks.

Effective today I am no longer running music at Worldcon 75. To say that I am angry about this is putting it somewhat mildly. I’m actually pretty fucking furious and I’m currently trying to decide if I can be bothered to go to the convention at this point. That also makes me angry. I campaigned for Helsinki. I pushed for Helsinki. I’ve been to Helsinki several times and I think it’s a great city, but at this point I don’t know that I’d feel welcome at the convention (and who knows, perhaps I wouldn’t be, given this).

I note that I don’t expect that this post will change anything, but it’s important to me personally to write it. If the convention wishes to justify their decision, to me at least, they’re welcome to do so. I don’t expect that it’s important enough for them to address, however.

I’m going add some background here that some of you may already know. It was written in a friendslocked post which is now public so that people can have some frame of reference for what’s come to pass. It’s not something that I’ve spoken about much because I considered it over and done with but it’s relevant now, and directly related to why I’m no longer involved with the convention.

In the middle of August 2014 I met [name redacted] at the World Science Fiction Convention in London. We were friendly and connected on Facebook and Twitter, had lunch together, and she offered me crash space if I ever wanted to visit her area of Sweden. I took her up on it at the end of September 2014 for a weekend. We had a nice weekend and parted as friends. A little later, she messaged me on FB that she wanted to spend less time talking, so we stopped chatting in FB Messenger (the way we would normally communicate) and I didn’t talk with her other than liking posts, occasionally commenting on FB or Twitter. She indicated a week or so after that that even that was too much, so I acknowledged, wished her well and honored her request. That’s mid-to-late-October 2014. She’s since blocked me on Facebook so I can’t look up the exact dates as I no longer have access to those messages, but I know that I have friendly comments from her in my FB from after I got back to London from Sweden.

As noted in my post in July of last year, I was warned by someone pre-Archipelacon to “stay away from her” — unnecessary IMO, since I had no intention of speaking to someone who’d specifically asked to be let alone, but whatever. No idea how many people [name redacted] complained to, but I get the impression that it was more than one. Only one spoke to me though. Post-Archipelacon, I did sent her an apology for however I’d managed to scare or offend her and left it at that.

It sure would be a shame if anyone were to exploit this zhelf-devouring tendency of SJWs, considering that all one has to do is electronically breathe on zhem online in order to trigger zhem.

Lockdown in Germany

More refugee drama in Germany:

Heavily-armed officers are surrounding a home in the town of Chemnitz

A German town is in lockdown as armed police are hunting for a man suspected of planning a bomb attack on an airport. The suspect has been named locally as Jabir A – a Syrian who was under surveillance by the Federal Office for Constitutional Protection in Cologne, say reports. He is suspected of plotting a bomb attack on a German airport, according to Online Focus.

It is understood the suspect entered Germany last year with refugees from Syria. Residents have been ordered to remain indoors as large-scale closures and evacuations take place in the town and the suspect remains at large.

Ah, those poor Syrian refugees. I’m sure the good people of Chemnitz are so glad now that they opened their hearts and homes to them. After all, who could possibly have predicted something like this would happen!

It won’t be too long before refugees will be shot on sight and the policy will be celebrated by many of the very people who welcomed them. I said at the time they should have simply sunk the boats and blocked the borders. Now the moral cost of resolving the situation will be considerably higher.

Mailvox: category error

Do you discuss ‘category error’ somewhere in your past blogs?

No, but here is a brief explanation, although upon looking at it, it really could be considerably improved as the examples are rather pedantic.

A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. An example is the metaphor “time crawled”, which if taken literally is not just false but a category mistake. To show that a category mistake has been committed one must typically show that once the phenomenon in question is properly understood, it becomes clear that the claim being made about it could not possibly be true.

Category errors are very common, particularly when engaged in discourse with intellectually sloppy or dishonest individuals. For example, after I pointed out that weakness combined with a request for help was not “true strength”, or even strength at all, Mark Butterworth responded by quoting a Psalm about David’s sacrifice to God.

He wasn’t merely wrong, by which I mean a failure to successfully make a point, he committed an error of category, because offering up one’s weaknesses to God in praise is fundamentally different in nature than determining if the characteristic one possesses is a weakness or a strength.

The abstract category under discussion was “the nature of human strength.” To respond by pointing out that God does not despise weakness offered up to Him as sacrifice is to shift the discussion to a different and tangential category, “things that God values”, which is a category that is simply not relevant to the matter being discussed.

So, to point out that someone has made a category error does not necessarily mean that one is saying their statement is intrinsically false or incorrect, only that it is irrelevant. People usually commit category errors out of carelessness or ignorance or a desire to virtue-signal; when they do so out of dishonesty it is often as part of a bait-and-switch technique to which they resort because they know they cannot defend their position within the bounds of the relevant category.

Cuckservatives signal their virtue

You know the GOP establishment cucks were just waiting for the opportunity to have an excuse to wash their hands of Donald Trump:

House Speaker Paul Ryan will not campaign with Donald Trump Saturday as he had previously planned. Ryan made the decision after Trump’s lewd comments about women were leaked Friday afternoon.

“I am sickened by what I heard today,” Ryan said in a statement Friday evening. “Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified. I hope Mr. Trump treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests. In the meantime, he is no longer attending tomorrow’s event in Wisconsin.”

The House speaker’s staff said the event in Wisconsin was a Ryan event at Fall Fest at the Walworth County Fairgrounds, and that Trump was disinvited after the Washington Post published video of Trump talking on a hot microphone in 2005 about kissing and having sex with a woman, in which the GOP nominee can be heard saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

If you ever wanted to know why I’m not a conservative or a Republican, this craven pandering to women pretty much sums it up. I’m not sickened by Trump’s locker room talk. I’m sickened by the fact that weak little gamma males like Ryan and Erickson have any influence in Western society at all. The only correct response to this “scandal” should have been a single question: “so the fuck what?”

Never trust a moderate, a Churchian, or a cuckservative. Never. They will stab you in the back in order to virtue-signal every single time. Trump made a big mistake in trying to accommodate them and play nice with them rather than treating them with the contempt they deserve.

We’re getting ominously close to war with both Russia and China, and these idiots are preening and posturing over the fact that an Alpha male talked like an Alpha more than 10 years ago? At least we know one thing. If the USA does get into a war, it’s going to lose. I don’t care what its advantages in men and material might be. Leadership matters, and we don’t have it.

UPDATE: National Review is clutching at its pearls and collapsing on its collective fainting couch and the cucks are falling all over themselves to finger-wag and demand ever-more-abject apologies from Trump. He shouldn’t have even given the limited one he offered.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a similarly terse statement. “These comments are repugnant, and unacceptable in any circumstance,” he said. “As the father of three daughters, I strongly believe that Trump needs to apologize directly to women and girls everywhere, and take full responsibility for the utter lack of respect for women shown in his comments on that tape.” Like Ryan, however, McConnell gave no suggestion of withdrawing his support for Trump. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus offered his own brief rebuke: “No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever.” And yet there is no question the party chairman will continue to back Trump — in fact, a statement from the nominee’s campaign late Friday night said Priebus would be joining him in New York on Saturday for debate prep. It’s not just the party leadership in Washington that’s showing no appetite for taking on Trump.

A whole host of Republican senators, including nearly all of those facing reelection next month, issued statements Friday night expressing outrage at the nominee’s remarks. They came from: Arizona’s John McCain; North Carolina’s Richard Burr; Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey; New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte; and Ohio’s Rob Portman, among others. But not one of these senators announced any kind of opposition to Trump — whether by withdrawing their support or by calling on him to step down as the nominee.

A few Republicans, in fairness, did just that. Illinois Senator Mark Kirk, who’s facing certain defeat next month, tweeted: “.@realDonaldTrump should drop out. @GOP should engage rules for emergency replacement.” Utah Governor Gary Herbert tweeted: “Donald Trump’s statements are beyond offensive & despicable. While I cannot vote for Hillary Clinton, I will not vote for Trump.” Utah Senator Mike Lee posted a video calling on Trump to drop out. Another Utah Republican, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz, withdrew his support for Trump. And two House Republicans — Mike Coffman of Colorado and Barbara Comstock of Virginia — called on Trump to step down as the Republican nominee.

Is this going to change anything? For a few days of polling, perhaps. And then, once the virtue-signaling runs its course, everyone will remember that the alternative is letting Hillary Clinton start a war with Russia.

The Russian stance

The Saker considers Russia’s options in Syria:

The key thing to understand in the Russian stance in this, and other, recent conflicts with the USA is that Russia is still much weaker than the USA and that she therefore does not want war. That does not, however, mean that she is not actively preparing for war. In fact, she very much and actively does. All this means is that should a conflict occur, Russia you try, as best can be, to keep it as limited as possible.

In theory, these are, very roughly, the possible levels of confrontation:

1) A military standoff à la Berlin in 1961. One could argue that this is what is already taking place right now, albeit in a more long-distance and less visible way.

2) A single military incident, such as what happened recently when Turkey shot down a Russian SU-24 and Russia chose not to retaliate.

3) A series of localized clashes similar to what is currently happening between India and Pakistan.

4) A conflict limited to the Syrian theater of war (say like the war between the UK and Argentina over the Malvinas Islands)

5) A regional or global military confrontation between the USA and Russia

6) A full scale thermonuclear war between the USA and Russia

During my years as a student of military strategy I have participated in many exercises on escalation and de-escalation and I can attest that while it is very easy to come up with escalatory scenarios, I have yet to see a credible scenario for de-escalation. What is possible, however, is the so-called “horizontal escalation” or “asymmetrical escalation” in which one side choses not to up the ante or directly escalate, but instead choses a different target for retaliation, not necessarily a more valuable one, just a different one on the same level of conceptual importance (in the USA Joshua M. Epstein and Spencer D. Bakich did most of the groundbreaking work on this topic).

The main reason why we can expect the Kremlin to try to find asymmetrical options to respond to a US attack is that in the Syrian context Russia is hopelessly outgunned by the US/NATO, at least in quantitative terms. The logical solutions for the Russians is to use their qualitative advantage or to seek “horizontal targets” as possible retaliatory options. This week, something very interesting and highly uncharacteristic happened: Major General Igor Konashenkov, the Chief of the Directorate of Media service and Information of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, openly mentioned one such option. Here is what he said:

“As for Kirby’s threats about possible Russian aircraft losses and the sending of Russian servicemen back to Russia in body bags, I would say that we know exactly where and how many “unofficial specialists” operate in Syria and in the Aleppo province and we know that they are involved in the operational planning and that they supervise the operations of the militants. 

Translation: shoot down our planes and bomb our troops and we and our allies go after your “military advisors”.

There isn’t any doubt that the USA can beat Russia in Syria. The question is if they are willing to pay the price both there, and potentially, in Ukraine and the Baltics.

That this is all absolutely stupid and utterly unnecessary doesn’t mean it won’t happen. In the meantime, we should really all focus on what is truly important: did you know that Donald Trump was once ungallant in speaking about women?

Anyhow, I had been extremely skeptical about the reports that Russian missiles had taken out a command center of US and Israeli advisers, but the sudden increase in US bellicosity makes me wonder if there might have actually been some substance to it.