Author: VD

Rand Paul drops out

Showing more sense than Jeb Bush and the other no-hopers, Sen. Rand Paul ends his presidential campaign:

Rand Paul on Wednesday dropped out of the race for president, saying he will now focus on his reelection to the U.S. Senate.

“It’s been an incredible honor to run a principled campaign for the White House. Today, I will end where I began, ready and willing to fight for the cause of Liberty,” Paul said in a statement.

It’s a pity, as his father’s supporters were more than ready to support him, but Paul shot his presidential aspirations in the foot by moving to the center even as the center was moving to the nationalist right.

Despite being good on foreign policy, he got it hopelessly wrong on immigration and that rendered him moot in 2016. He’s not bad, as politicians go, but he’s simply not worthy of carrying his father’s torch nor is he capable of doing so.

Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Fan Writer

The preliminary recommendations for the Best Fan Writer category.  

Compare and contrast the impressive and substantial work of these fan writers with the lightweights and pro authors favored in recent years by the SF-SJWs. The difference is downright risible.

Other 2016 Hugo categories

The news, converged

Oliver Campbell observes that SJWs, especially SJWs in the media, always lie. A staff reporter for The Intercept is busted impersonating his editor and fabricating quotes:

The Intercept recently discovered a pattern of deception in the actions of a staff member. The employee, Juan Thompson, was a staff reporter from November 2014 until last month. Thompson fabricated several quotes in his stories and created fake email accounts that he used to impersonate people, one of which was a Gmail account in my name.

An investigation into Thompson’s reporting turned up three instances in which quotes were attributed to people who said they had not been interviewed. In other instances, quotes were attributed to individuals we could not reach, who could not remember speaking with him, or whose identities could not be confirmed. In his reporting Thompson also used quotes that we cannot verify from unnamed people whom he claimed to have encountered at public events. Thompson went to great lengths to deceive his editors, creating an email account to impersonate a source and lying about his reporting methods.

We have published corrections and editor’s notes to the affected pieces, and we will publish further corrections if we identify additional problems. We are retracting one story in its entirety. We have decided not to remove the posts but have labeled them “Retracted” or “Corrected,” based on our findings. We have added notes to stories with unconfirmed quotes.

We apologize to the subjects of the stories; to the people who were falsely quoted; and to you, our readers. We are contacting news outlets that picked up the corrected stories to alert them to the problems.

What does convergence mean in an already SJW-infested media? It means that the news goes from being openly biased to entirely fictional. Remember, SJWism requires not only being delusional about reality, but relentlessly selling those delusions to the rest of the world, no matter how contradictory they are.

That’s why any SJW in your organization should be Identified, Expelled, and Ignored. IEI. Where the president of the R Foundation failed was in not maintaining the second I; he apparently submitted to internal pressure and retracted. Don’t ever give in to the entryists and activists no matter how much they whine, cry, and lobby; you will regret it.

I somehow doubt the editor of The Intercept will make the same mistake.

SJW attempts to block Weir nomination

From File 770:

steve davidson on February 2, 2016 at 7:48 am said:
I asked Weir to publicly repudiate the slate inclusion. He has responded that he does not get involved with politics.

(laughs) They are a predictable lot, are they not? Especially when I’ve made it perfectly clear that there is no “slate” per se, there is simply a list of the sort of personal recommendations that many other individuals who read science fiction and fantasy are making. And since we are reliably informed that very few individuals read this blog, it seems strange that so many SJWs get so worked up over what I have read, and what I recommend.

It is hardly my fault that I have such exquisite taste that is so broadly echoed by hundreds of fellow science fiction and fantasy readers.

As for why I did not recommend Mr. Weir as Best New Writer last year, it was for a very simple and straightforward reason: I had not read his novel. Unlike so many of the SJWs, I do not recommend novels I have not read, writers whose books I have not read, or artists whose work I have not seen. Those who have not brought their works to my attention have only themselves, and their publishers, to blame if I remain unfamiliar with them. I am but a mere superintelligence; I am not omniscient.

It is perhaps worth noting, again, that I do not care in the least what a writer or an artist happens to think about being recommended; die Gedanken sind frei. People can recuse themselves, publicly repudiate, or virtue-signal, or perform interpretive dance to express the depth of their feelings about Rabid Puppies. It makes no difference to me.

That being said, it appears Marc Miller is not eligible for Best New Writer despite having published his debut novel in 2015. I shall have to revisit that category at a later date.

How to eject an SJW

See, now, this is how you jettison the officious little creatures from your project:

I’ve done my best to create a more welcoming environment: I serve on the Scholarship Committee for UseR 2016 Stanford and the R Foundation Task Force on Women, have written a load of things in blog or twitter form about the need for a stronger community and a more representative Foundation, and helped Kara Woo and Gavin Simpson draft the open letter to the R Foundation that mandated a code of conduct for real-world events. With all of that I think it’s fair to say that while I’m not a Hadley, I’m at least a moderately-useful member of the community.

Rewind a week, to last Monday: I’m wandering around Twitter seeing what everyone is up to, reading through, and spot a tweet that immediately makes me headdesk. It points to a line in the R source code containing a variable called, with all seriousness…

    iGiveHead

I don’t think that this is an intentional sexual reference – far from it, I’m certain it’s just due to an absence of familiarity with one particularly crass English idiom, and I have only ever known the developer who wrote the code (whose first language is not English) to be entirely proper, entirely reasonable, and the model of what a productive Core member should be.

But it needs to go anyway: it’s exclusionary as all hell to have language like this in the core implementation and we can’t expect people to instantly understand intentions.

So I grabbed the latest development version of R, generated a patch that changed the name, and submitted a bug report with the patch that made clear I didn’t think this was anyone’s fault and I was sure it was unintentional and there were no accusations of sexism or bad intent in play here….

Pretty quickly, two email threads kicked off. One involved a lot of members of core individually asking me to stop tapping people in (apparently every Bugzilla email bothers all of core) and explaining that my suspicion that it was unintentional was in fact correct.

The second – oh, the second.

The second was a set of emails from Duncan Murdoch, President of the R Foundation and an R Core member, in which he dismissed my “bug report” (note the skeptical scare quotes he put on it) “about some variable name that you find offensive is clearly an example of nothing more than shit-disturbing” and stated that myself, and those who had commented in favour of changing it, were no longer welcome to participate in R’s bug-tracker.

I independently confirmed that our accounts had been banned and locked – as had the bug, and replied to Duncan explaining my thinking and motivation and asking in what capacity the ban had been made.

The variable name is still there. I never got any reply to my email.

The result

So: unintentionally offensive variable name leads to a patch and the indication that it is much more than one person finding it offensive, leads to the President of the R Foundation dismissing the concerns as “shit-disturbing” and punishing the people who surfaced said concern.

That’s not an environment I want to be a part of. That’s not an environment I want to contribute to. That’s not an environment in which I can have any faith that there is a strong interest in creating a safe and inclusive space for computing.

Don’t cut them any slack. Don’t give them any second chances. Identify, eject, and ignore.

That’s how you treat an SJW. Every single time. Duncan not only handled the situation Like. A. Boss. but he prevented the useless little SJW from wasting dozens of man-hours on pointless SJW-created drama. And he even used the situation to smoke out other would-be thought police.

I don’t know if Duncan read SJWAL, but he’s definitely going to be featured in SJWADD. The best part is the fact that Duncan not only ejected the initial SJW, but everyone who went along with the SJW’s attempt at destructive virtue-signaling. And then refused to explain his action or engage with them. He knows damned well there is no benefit to doing so.

Don’t hesitate. Do likewise.

Just wait

There is a lot of anger boiling just beneath the surface all across Europe. A LOT of anger that is simply waiting for an excuse to unleash itself. And keep this incident in Sicily in mind if you think that age is the primary determinant of combat effectiveness.

You’ll notice that no one on-board the bus lifted a finger to stop the driver, or even urge him to stop. That, in a microcosm, is what is the most likely outcome of the migrant crisis in Europe.

“That’s how you handle these freaking illegals who wants to come over and think they going to come over and violate your rights!”

Iowa: Cruz 28, Trump 24, Rubio 23

First, congratulations to Farmer Tom, who got the order correct. Second, and unexpectedly, the big news isn’t on the Republican side, but on the Democratic one, as Bernie Sanders shocked the Clinton campaign by effectively fighting Hillary to a draw.

Third, the real score is this: Cruz 8, Trump 7, Rubio 7, Carson 3. That’s how many delegates were awarded.

The only real surprise on the Republican side is that Rubio did much better than anyone expected, including the pollsters. While the media narrative is that Trump is done and dusted, they’ve been saying the exact same thing since last August, so that’s entirely irrelevant. Given that the headline two days ago was “Donald Trump reclaims lead in latest Iowa Poll”, it should be obvious that he was never the favorite in Iowa, and indeed, it looks rather like the GOP and the media colluded to try to make a result that would have been considered beyond Trump’s reach six months ago appear like a disappointing, campaign-destroying failure. As for the record turnout on the Republican side, I suspect it happened for much the same reason it did in the Hugos last year; to stop the interloper.

The only serious candidate who is done now is Jeb, and it appears the establishment will be lining up behind Rubio in his place. Jeb himself will probably follow suit after New Hampshire. I think Cruz will ultimately be the real GOPe candidate as he is the more formidable of the two Cubans. It’s now a three-man race; what would throw a real twist into it is if Trump can win Ben Carson’s support. Forget Trump-Cruz, the most politically effective combination would be Trump-Carson.

Think about it. Trump’s two main weaknesses with Republicans is religion and character. Besides being black, Carson’s two greatest strengths are religion and character. And Trump is already popular among blacks due to his big-man swagger, so if I’m Trump, I’m getting together with Carson and working out a deal to be announced after New Hampshire, but before South Carolina.

And if I can see it, I expect Trump can see it too.

Now onto New Hampshire, where it’s going to be interesting to see how the Iowa results affect the Democratic primary. Sanders is going to win, but how will it affect the race if he crushes Hillary there?

One last thing: say what you will about Trump, but he makes the campaign about 200 percent more interesting. I met him back in 1988 at the Republican convention in New Orleans and he’s very likable. What seems blustery and over-the-top on camera comes off as more expansive and charming in person. Wherever he is, there is a lot of laughter, and not all of it is obsequious. The man is genuinely funny. I mean, who else would end a concession speech like this?

“I don’t know who’s going to win between Bernie and Hillary. I don’t know what’s going to happen with Hillary, she’s got other problems, maybe bigger than the problems she’s got, in terms of nominations, but we’ve had so many different indications, and polls that we beat her, and we beat her easily. And we will go on to get the Republican nomination, and we will go on to easily beat Hillary, or Bernie, or whoever the hell they throw up there. Iowa, we love you. We thank you. You’re special. We will be back many, many times. In fact, I think I might come here and buy a farm, I love it.”

And that’s why the American public loves Trump and the establishment fears him. You just can’t be entirely sure he won’t actually go and do it.

“They said there was nothing they could do.”

It appears there is nothing the German police can do about the invasion.

Shocking footage has surfaced online appearing to show a group of young migrants attacking two German pensioners after they stood up for a young women the men were harassing on a subway train.

Recorded on a mobile phone, the disgraceful video shows the men – of Eastern European or Arabic origin – holding one man by the arms as they verbally abuse him.

The second victim is seen grappling with one of the migrants, before he is held up by the neck and threatened….  The situation was brought under control. When the train reached the station I called the police. They said there was nothing they could do.

If there is no longer anything the police can do, I expect PEGIDA will be able to come up with a few ideas.