BoREXIT is go

The Mayor of London declares his support for reclaiming British sovereignty:

Boris Johnson tonight declared he will campaign for Britain to leave the EU because it would save money and regain control for the British Parliament.

The Mayor of London electrified the EU referendum campaign by ending months of speculation and dismissing David Cameron’s EU deal as insignificant, saying he could not turn down this ‘once in a lifetime’ chance to quit the EU.

And he told the Prime Minister he was making the announcement by text just nine minutes before he appeared on live TV outside his north London home.

Mr Cameron was said to be ‘absolutely furious’ with the Mayor of London’s decision and earlier today he made a last ditch attempt to persuade him to join the In campaign by warning against ‘linking arms with Nigel Farage and George Galloway’.

Good on him. Johnson not only just ensured that he will become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, he just significantly increased the probability that the title will actually mean something.

If you are British, vote BREXIT. Vote leave. Vote out. Escape the Fourth Reich while you can.


The evils of SF fandom

It’s time to shut down all science fiction-related conventions. They are obviously dens of pure racist, sexist, homophobic iniquity. Frankly, it is very, very hard to read this tale of SJW-on-SJW woe without shedding a tear or three. Of pure schadenfreudesque amusement:

On Friday night, at a room party in the main hotel, my partner Baize was sexually and racially harassed by someone attending the same dance party: Liz Gooch. At multiple points during the evening, she gestured behind him as if she were going to grab his butt. She kept referring to it as his “juicy booty.” She danced around him and told me to “not let this sweet piece of chocolate go.” Despite that our body language clearly showed discomfort, Liz would not stop harassing either of us. We had to move to another side of the room, and we eventually told the person running the party what she was doing. We both considered that perhaps she had been so forward and gross because she was drunk, but I had multiple interactions with Liz Gooch when she was sober following that night. The next morning, she was leaving an elevator as I was getting in a different one. She turned around and made a number of sexual gestures while pointing at Baize, which including kissing faces, winks, and licking her lips in an exaggerated manner.

On Sunday afternoon, I was the moderator on a panel titled, “Erasure is Not Equality.” This panel was specifically about the erasure of people of color in historical fiction, fantasy, and other genres. I was the only person on the panel who was not white. Furthermore, not one person on the panel seemed to understand the point of the panel, which was to talk about erasure. Instead, the conversation teetered between self-righteous back-patting and flat-out racism. Within the first five minutes of the start of the panel, I brought up a topic for us to discuss: how “historical accuracy” is often poorly used as a defense of the erasure of people of color. One panelist, Chris Gerrib, then began to talk about how people misunderstood history. The “Indian” people in Central America were already busy “killing each other” by the time the Spaniards arrived. When I asked for clarification, Gerrib confirmed that he believed that the Spaniards were “unfairly blamed” for the genocide of the indigenous cultures in Central America. I was so horrified by his continued talk of this ahistorical point that, after very little conversation, I asked that we change topic.

This set a tone for the remainder of the panel, which was easily the worst panel I have ever been a part of. All three of the white panelists confidently stated things that were simply not true; each of them kept saying “Indian” when they actually meant Native American or indigenous; every few minutes, more than half the audience was viscerally horrified by what the other panelists said. At one point, Jan Gephardt derailed the panel into talking about women instead of race and said that she was “happy to see any sort of women, like black or white or green.” Gerrib then chimed in with, “Or purple.” She also responded to a lengthy point that myself and an audience member made about the physical and emotional injury that can come from experiencing racism by reminding us that “racism is not real” because race “is just a social construct.” During a different conversation about how many authors mistakenly blur the line between different cultural groups, Chris Gerrib jokingly said, “Did you know that the Japanese aren’t the same as the Chinese?” Jan’s response? The Japanese and Chinese just think they’re different in their heads. She heavily implied that they were mistaken in this belief.

Holly Messinger, a ConQuesT staff member, was also on the panel. She spent a great deal of time talking only about her own work, repeating the message that she had read “five books on Indians” and that she had written her first black character, who kept the white character “sane.” She stated at one point that she was “terrified” about the response her book would get because people would get “mad” about her writing an “Indian” character. When I asked for clarification – specifically, was she worried about getting representation wrong? – she told the room that she had no concern about that. She’d read five books about “Indians.” She was concerned that people of color would misinterpret her.

There were many more incidents on this panel, and I could not recount them all here. The panel ended on a sour note, too. Baize spoke up and pointed out that part of the problem with erasure was that there was only one person of color on a panel about race. Holly Messinger shot back, “Well, we’re in the Midwest.” I left the panel feeling drained and numb. If you were at ConQuesT that weekend and you wondered why Closing Ceremonies started late, it’s my fault. I dashed up to my hotel room to cry because I felt so triggered, rejected, and alone. I’ve been on uncomfortable panels, but this was unique. The entire panel was argumentative; my questions as moderator were constantly avoided or ignored; anything I tried to state was fought or dismissed or contradicted. It was exhausting.

On the plus side, reading this was considerably more entertaining than the entire Best Novel shortlist for the Nebula Award:

  • Raising Caine, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
  • The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
  • Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
  • The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu (Saga)
  • Uprooted, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
  • Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard, Lawrence M. Schoen (Tor)
  • Updraft, Fran Wilde (Tor)

The Nebula Award is so predictable now that Chaos Horizon nailed all seven of seven before they were announced. Here’s what I predicted would be in the awards mix back in December, prior to reading any of them, and based on nothing but who the author is.

  • Uprooted by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
  • Ancillary Mercy by Anne Leckie (Orbit)
  • Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
  • The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

They ought to just change the name of the Nebulas to the Science Fiction Affirmative Action Awards for Women and Minorities Who Don’t Write Good.


Mailvox: why turn your back on conservatives

Doc Rampage doesn’t understand why I’m not courting conservatives in building a new social media alternative:

The words in parenthesis are not inherent characteristics of the group, but are prominent in the current environment.

    Left: envy, greed, (hatred)
    Conservatives: justice, propriety, (resentment)
    libertarians: pride, rationality
    Alt-right: clannishness, loyalty, (spite)

The Left is always talking egalitarian, but a Leftist never passes up a chance to get ahead of his fellows and they are always trying to create hierarchies with themselves on top. This is because they only want egalitarianism due to envy–they don’t want anyone to have an advantage they don’t have.

Everyone hates conservatives for being unreliable political partners. The reason is that their primary loyalty is not to a group but to abstract principles like justice, and they will follow their idea of justice even at the group’s expense, or even at their own expense.

Libertarians are drawn to their beliefs in large part because they think that starting on a completely level playing field, they would come out near the top. Many of them are right–they tend to be intelligent and well-educated. But their pride in their own ability makes them unable to sympathize with the fact that most people need social support of various kinds.

As to the alt-right, it is clannishness and spite that drives someone on the alt-right to capriciously insult conservatives in a message where they might instead be finding common ground and help in a common cause, driving them away instead of inviting them to help.

It’s interesting to see how Doc Rampage’s observations are so perspicacious while his conclusions about the alt-right are so wrong. It’s not spite that causes me to turn my back on conservatives, but rather, the very conservative unreliability he points out that is why I have no interest in finding common ground with them. They are worse than useless; it would be a tremendous mistake to rely upon them because they are unreliable.

Moreover, as Red Eagle and I showed in Cuckservative, conservatives don’t actually have any principles. They think they do, but what they really have is an attitude; one can hardly call it a philosophy. That’s why conservatives are forever going on about who is “electable” or which candidate is “serious”; those are not the words of abstract thinkers who reject pragmatism in the name of principle.

Even their oft-proclaimed self-definitions are unreliable.

If there are conservatives who want to help because what I’m doing will better serve their abstract principles than the alternatives, that’s great, but I’m not going to depend upon their support because I don’t trust them one little bit. I will place my trust in those who have repeatedly shown they have my back, in those who will not bug out the first time they get called names by SJWs or decide they don’t completely approve of my every word or action.

What are the VFM? What are the Dread Ilk? Are they conservative? Are they libertarian? Are they alt-right? I neither know nor care. What I know is that they will be there when called. They will show up when needed. They are implacably opposed to my ideological enemies. And that’s all I need to know.

Conservapedia is a good demonstration of what a social media project that relies upon conservatives looks like.


South Carolina results

This is the open thread to discuss the results in South Carolina and Nevada. On the Democratic side, I understand Fox has called Nevada for Hillary Clinton, but it’s close.

UPDATE: Fox News is running a non-stop commercial for Ted Cruz in the last 30 minutes of the SC polls being open. Doubt it will do them any good at this point. But it’s good to know who the cuckservatives are pulling for now.

UPDATE 2: “Preliminary exit poll results indicate that three-quarters of the
state’s primary voters support temporarily banning Muslims who are not
U.S. citizens from entering the United States. That’s even more than the
support for this proposal among GOP voters in New Hampshire, 65 percent
– a core support group for Trump in that state.”

UPDATE 3: Decision Desk has Trump winning at 32.8 percent with 44.4 percent reporting. Fox News has called South Carolina for Trump. Now the only question is how big he will win it.

So much for Trump being finished in Iowa….

I enjoyed this exchange with GOP media guy Rick Wilson:

Rick Wilson ‏@TheRickWilson
Anything less than 50% is a huge loss for @realDonaldTrump  #SCPrimary

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
You’d say anything short of collective mass suicide by the other candidates was a huge loss for Trump.

Rick Wilson ‏@TheRickWilson
LOL grow a sense of humor, Vox.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
So you didn’t think the idea that the SC mall shooter was a deranged Jeb Bush triggered by Trump’s victory was funny?

Rick Wilson
‏I have no idea what you’re on about.

For some reason, my sense of humor frequently goes unrecognized.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Active shooter reported at South Carolina mall. Wow, @realDonaldTrump’s success is really getting to @JebBush!


“We need alternatives”

Melampus the Seer sees the future:

We need alternative platforms. Deplatforming is the very basis of SJW institutional tactics, and it works. Let’s use it ourselves, on our own platforms.

A related question: why haven’t conservatives built their own platforms? I’ve worked for a number of startups. They were all hard left to the core. Why so few conservative entrepreneurs?

We do. And literally scores of VFM and Dread Ilk are in the process of making it happen. You will be called on to help in various ways soon. Be ready.

Why haven’t conservatives built their own platforms? Because conservatives are conservative. I could have built a search engine back when Yahoo was just getting started, but I could see why people would pay to play games. I couldn’t see how one could make money simply by collecting free traffic, and in fact, one can’t do so unless one can a) rely on an unending supply of free labor or b) find investors who are either 1) willing to lose it all in order to be ideologically supportive or 2) are only buying in long enough to flip the company to the public.

Guess what sort of people are happy to work for free, lose vast quantities of money to further their ideological goals, or work for predatory investment banks? Hint: they’re not conservatives.

Conservatives are much more likely to build up their businesses organically, often by bootstrapping themselves. They would rather be building up their business than running around trying to play the flim-flam game of “raising money”. And that’s now how any of the social media giants were constructed.

In the rare instance a conservative is involved in a project like this, he’s often pushed out by his former partners. One of the reasons Wikipedia has been going nowhere for years is because the guy with the actual vision, Larry Sanger, was pushed out by an SJW flim-flam artist, Jimmy Wales, who promptly surrounded himself with mediocrities who don’t know how to do anything but continue what they’ve been doing from the start while begging for money they don’t actually need to not do what they aren’t doing.

And finally, conservatives tend to be paralyzed by the fear that someone, somewhere, might make money from their efforts. For leftists and SJWs, donating publicly is a form of virtue-signaling. They love to give both time and money and will do so at the drop of a hat if they think doing so is going to generate social credit for them.

A conservative, on the other hand, doesn’t value that sort of social credit, and has historically been much happier giving to a charity that will buy Rolls Royces and hookers for its executives or a church that will use his money to house illegal aliens next door than to a prospective techno-magnate, because at least the former won’t make any profits off his donation.

This is beginning to change, of course, now that conservatives realize they have been totally outflanked and lost the techno-cultural high ground. How much it has changed, we will see in the next six months.


Twitter takes out McCain

The thought police at Twitter are ramping up their activity:

Robert Stacy McCain is an American success story. He has built a nationwide, dare I say worldwide following presenting his viewpoint and highlighting the public viewpoints of others who would rather keep their actual words and opinions under the radar because Robert Stacy McCain is loyal to his family, his God, his friends and the Truth.

I know this because I’m proud to say he is my friend. I’ve learned an awful lot from him the most important thing being there is no substitute for actually being there, gathering factual evidence, seeing for yourself and reporting the truth.

I guess that’s why Twitter’s new Star Chamber has decided to Suspend him sometime yesterday evening:

    I’m Robert Stacy McCain. I’ve been a journalist since 1986. My account @rsmccain was suspended tonight. #FreeStacy #tcot @ToniMZ81

    — Sex Trouble (@SexTroubleBook) February 20, 2016

    “@citznsoldier: This account suspension stuff is getting stupid. @twitter @rsmccain pic.twitter.com/dlckr17fsw” Very stupid

    — headnev (@headnev) February 20, 2016

Ironically this caused the hashtag #freestacy to trend on twitter overnight until it suddenly no longer was able to autocomplete

    The hashtag associated with McCain’s suspension (#FreeStacy) was actually allowed to trend, at one point, but as Mike Cernovich points out, now it won’t even autocomplete. That’s one of the tools Twitter has been using to slow down hashtags, as of late. GamerGate no longer autocompletes, either, even though several anti-GG hashtags do.

    #FreeStacy is trending. @instapundit pic.twitter.com/y4C2azmWzr

    — Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) February 20, 2016

Now in fairness Twitter is a private company and they do have the right to run their business as they see fit.

But I submit and suggest to twitter & their investors that the way to success is not to alienate half of your potential customer base particularly in an election year, furthermore as anyone who knows anything about tech can tell you today’s popular site can become tomorrow’s AOL & Compuserve in a heartbeat.

Glenn Reynolds is not the only one losing patience with Twitter.


They may want to rethink the curriculum

What exactly are they teaching in those “how to treat women” courses?:

A teenage Afghan immigrant has been charged with raping a female worker at an asylum seekers’ centre in Belgium, authorities said, prompting outrage from anti-immigrant politicians.

The 16-year-old Afghan asylum seeker followed a worker from a catering firm into the basement and raped her at the centre in Menen, near the French border, prosecutors said….

“Two weeks ago we gave a course about how to treat women in Flanders and the boy was present there,” the spokeswoman said.

They might as reasonably teach them calculus and astrophysics for all the good it is going to do them. Post-secular Europe can’t even appeal to basic morality.

Immigration is rape culture. Immigration is culture rape.


Morto lo scrittore

Morto lo scrittore Umberto Eco. Ci mancherà il suo sguardo sul mondo. Aveva 84 anni. E’ stato filosofo, semiologo e grande esperto della
comunicazione. Non ha mai perso la voglia di osservare la politica.

Morto lo scrittore Umberto Eco. Ci mancherà il suo sguardo sul mondo

A great loss to Italy, literature, philosophy, and the world. It’s not often that I personally mourn the death of a public figure, but to the extent that I had an intellectual idol, it was him.

He was as brilliant in person as he was in print, but he was also friendly and even charming. He was not merely kind to his intellectual inferiors and his awestruck fans, he was patient and generous. And although his later novels never reached the heights of his first two, those two, Il Nome della Rosa and Il Pendolo di Foucault are two of the greatest ever written in the Italian language.

He was one of the few modern immortals and I am deeply saddened that he will write no more. Addio dottore.


Winning the war on free speech

Mike Cernovich has launched the Kickstarter for his documentary Silenced: Our War on Free Speech:

Things are different than they used to be. We all know the feeling of
dread when posting or talking about something controversial, and this
dread has silenced us. It’s not censorship. The government isn’t doing
it. We are. To ourselves. Across business, education, politics, and
entertainment. Many comedians are even refusing to tour college campuses
due to the sensibilities of students, and posting one wrong Tweet can
get you fired from a job – or worse.

I’m a backer. I’d encourage you to have a look and consider doing the same.


A possible harbinger

It will be interesting to see if this incident marks the beginning of the British Reconquista or if it was simply a pedophile going after the wrong child.

The imam of a mosque in Rochdale has died after being found with head injuries in a children’s playground.

The man, named locally as Jalal Uddin, was believed to be walking home on Thursday night when he was injured.

Passers-by found him with a serious head injury in the playground in South Street shortly before 9pm.

Mr Uddin had attended evening prayers before visiting a friend for dinner and was taking a short cut while walking home, ITV News reported.

Police and paramedics were called to the scene but he died of his injuries in hospital.

In a children’s playground….