Author: VD

The end of the beginning

The French have taken out all three of the Muslim killers:

French police on Friday killed the two brothers suspected of massacring
12 people at a Paris newspaper on Wednesday and freed a hostage they had
been holding unharmed, the authorities said. The police launched a
simultaneous raid on a kosher supermarket in Paris where an alleged
associate of the brothers was holding an unnamed number of hostages.
That hostage taker was also killed, according to a senior French police
official, and at least five hostages were freed.

Now that the urgent work is done, it’s time for the West to elect nationalist governments and start discussing the best way to encourage their co-religionists to repatriate back to the Dar al-Islam. Steve Sailer put it best:

Westerners and Muslims don’t agree on the basics of social order and don’t want to live under the same rules. That shouldn’t be a problem because that’s what separate countries are for. We should stop occupying their countries and stop letting them move to ours.

To paraphrase E.M. Forster:

“Only disconnect.”

Islam is not compatible with Christendom. It is not compatible with Western traditions and values. It is not compatible with the secular West either. Muslims themselves will tell you this, that’s why 40 percent of Muslims resident in Great Britain are seeking to establish Sharia rule over the British. Only disconnect.

It is no longer possible to pretend that multiculturalism is viable. It is no longer possible to pretend that moderate Islam can reform the more fundamentalist forms. It is no longer possible to pretend that we can all get along in one country. That’s what separate countries are for.

They should not interfere with us here, and we should stop interfering with how they choose to live over there. The disconnect will take place eventually, the only question that remains is if the process is relatively peaceful or if it is massively violent. Any sane and decent Westerner should actively support the former option.

Mailvox: Did Charlie Hebdo have it coming?

MB asks a pertinent question:

Although it may appear to be like pouring salt on a wound, it occurs to me (and also from your POV) that the people at Charlie Hebdo were quite a bit involved in their own demise (which I do not celebrate or condone).

Just as the nations of the West can’t help but reap what they have sown, so too, the satirists at CH never seemed to accept the consequences of their actions and weren’t prepared to defend themselves very well. They attacked religions in the most vulgar terms (from what I’ve read) and thought it rather a lark. Although their offices were firebombed, they promised to continue to poke jihadis in the eye. But it appears they blithely thought giving offense to seriously nasty people should be inconsequential given their own finely ordered sense of c’est la vie and “can’t you take a joke?”

Back in 1981, I once attended a show in a small comedy club in San Francisco near the Haight. A very small young comedian who I thought was quite funny did some sort of riff that an older man in the audience was offended by and made it known. The comic tried to play it for a joke, but in this tiny venue (30- 40 people at best), the offended gentleman stood up and made it known he was going to kick the punk comic’s ass. He was a large man who looked like he could do it. All of a sudden, things, the comic, didn’t seem so funny as he tried to find a way to defuse the situation humorously, and it didn’t work.

The comedian feigned mock fear, for example, but the angry man was not impressed or deflected and made to approach the small, low stage. The fear in the comedian’s eye’s was not simulated. Members of the audience prevailed upon the the angry man to relinquish his complaints and let it pass, but the damage had been done. The event was no longer any fun.

Like Bill Maher et al, Charlie Hebdo felt it could attack other people’s most cherished beliefs with impunity, and their targets should simply take it in the spirit of ‘damn you if what we say offends your pathetically stupid sensibility’. It is horrific what happened in Paris, but should we wonder about those who sow literary contempt and reap violent physical contempt?

Charlie Hebdo was a self-conscious standard-bearer for secular France. Unlike most secular standard-bearers, unlike today’s SJWs, the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo actually stood by their professed principles of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and disrespect for the sanctity of sacred cows. They were true Voltaireans; I don’t know enough about them to know if they were consistent or not (we know they attacked Christian symbols as well as Muslim symbols, but did they refrain from attacking Jewish and secular ones?) but they were certainly more consistent and catholic in their satires than the average Western secularist who heaps contempt on Christianity and Western tradition while remaining dead silent about Islam, Judaism, and the various shibboleths of political correctness.

Amused by him or not, the jester who enjoys immunity from the king has long been a feature of Western civilization. Charlie Hebdo was one such jester. I didn’t find their cartoons to be amusing, or of any artistic value, but then, I am not French. More importantly, they were acting under the long-respected Western principle of jester’s immunity, and by doing so in the expectation of continued immunity, they were upholding Western civilization in their own way.

Now, I had begun writing this post with the intention of saying that Charlie Hebdo should have taken more responsibility for its actions, and taken better defensive precautions, and therefore it was negligent in that regard, but in the course of thinking through that argument, I find that it is fundamentally flawed. The jester is neither knight nor king. It is not his job to defend himself, but rather, it is the responsibility of the warriors of the society whose hypocrisies and inconsistencies he criticizes to defend him.

So, my answer is no, Charlie Hebdo did not have it coming. It is the responsibility of the king and his knights to defend their jester, even though they are the primary target of his jests. (Of course, it also behooves the jester to listen to his king when he is warned that he has gone too far in offending the king; at the end of the day, he serves at the king’s pleasure. His immunity is not total.) And moreover, any party that insists it possesses a king’s veto over the king’s jester is a usurping party that presents a direct challenge to the king’s lawful authority and therefore must be expelled from the kingdom.

In fact, through their deaths, the men of Charlie Hebdo have fulfilled their traditional jester’s role of warning the king that his policies are false and harmful. Had they focused instead on defending themselves, they would not have been able to do so. Now it is time for the king and his knights to fulfill their traditional roles and address the active threat to the kingdom.

UPDATE: at least two people killed after shooting at kosher grocery in eastern Paris in which at least five were taken hostage

Three more counts

Three more counts of sexual assault against McRapey’s partner in psychological projection:

Canadian radio star Jian Ghomeshi was charged with three more counts of sexual assault in a court appearance on Thursday in a widening sex scandal that has prompted suspensions at the country’s national public broadcaster.

The three new charges, linked to three more women, bring the total number of charges facing Ghomeshi to eight and the number of complainants to six. A publication ban prevents naming any of the women.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp fired Ghomeshi as host of Q, an internationally syndicated CBC Radio music and arts program, in October. The CBC said it had seen graphic evidence that he had injured a woman in what Ghomeshi said were consensual sex acts involving bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism.

Remember, John Scalzi has not only openly admitted to being a rapist and sexual batterer himself, he has also spent considerably more time attacking me than he has Mr. Ghomeshi. In fact, he barely ever refers to Mr. Ghomeshi at all. It tends to make one suspect that McRapey has some other agenda in mind than his professed purpose in defending women. And speaking of McRapey, here is the full extent of his Twitter commentary on the massacre in Paris.

As a non-Muslim, I’d like to apologize to Muslims for the non-Muslims
demanding that all Muslims should apologize for the attacks today.

Worked at a newspaper; made people angry with words. I was what those cartoonists were. I am still. #JeSuisCharlie 

Followed by extensive cat pictures to change the subject. Seriously, that’s John Scalzi’s reaction after Muslims murder more people… to apologize to Muslims. He’s exactly the sort of left-wing writer whom Sarah Hoyt decried as “asinine cowards, these craven and self-regarding poltroons… who routinely, three times a day, post some dig at Christianity, some mockery of Americans, some pseudo-witty comment about Republicans. But see, none of those people threaten to kill them. The brave social(ist) justice warriors are ever ready to speak truth to the power that will not hurt them. Towards Islam, otoh they adopt the crouching position and kiss the terrorists gangrenous blood-soaked pudenda.”

Scalzi isn’t what the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were. Whatever else they may have been, they were brave. He is the precise opposite; a contemptible moral and physical coward. What a craven, self-promoting fraud. As one noTrust aptly tweeted: “The bodies aren’t even cold, and here’s Scalzi & other libs publicly fondling their own Moral Supremacy.”

The rabbits quiver

Two posts in which File 770 compares Sad Puppies to National Socialism, me to a disease, and science fiction writers to dogs.

A comment by Daniel on Vox Day’s blog put this amusing spin on yesterday’s story about the 2014 Worldcon financial report:

    Semi-on topic: thanks to record memberships, LonCon finished with a cash surplus of…

    …about £1,000.

    Without Larry and Vox last year, they would have been deep in the red.

There you have it: all the people who joined to stuff the ballot box for Larry Correia’s “Sad Puppies” slate kept the Worldcon afloat. Now I know how that English schoolboy felt in Hope and Glory when he discovered his school had been bombed by the Luftwaffe — “Thank you Adolf!”

No doubt the pinkshirts will try to deny it, but there is no question that Sad Puppies was to the financial benefit of Worldcon. Some have tried to claim that the huge increase in memberships was the result of the con being based in London rather than the reaction to the nomination of works by Larry, Brad, me, and others, but you have only to compare the percentage increase in voting memberships to the increase in nominations to see that Sad Puppies not only inspired more involvement on the Right side of the science fiction spectrum, but on the Left side as well.

Did you hear the mournful baying of the Sad Puppies this morning? Yes, the pack is back in 2015, this time under the direction of Brad Torgersen. And his arguments for renewing this bloc voting campaign are one dogwhistle after another. Usually you can’t see these kinds of contortions outside of a circus.

  • The Hugos are a popularity contest – but not the right kind of popularity.
  • The Hugos don’t necessarily correlate with sales success – but neither did last year’s Sad Puppies slate, once you got past Larry Correia.
  • The Hugos “skew ideological” – Did you know they were trying to cure
    that problem when Vox Day got a Sad Puppies endorsement last year? (I
    thought it was only on House they try to cure patients by giving them another disease…)
  • The Hugos often ignore “successful ambassadors of the genre to the
    consumer world at large” – That dogwhistle is at a frequency almost too
    high for me to hear, but I believe he has a particular New York Times bestselling author in mind.

Anyway, if you felt something pushing against your “Worldcon fandom
zeitgeist” today — that’s because the dogs are off the leash!

As one might expect, he’s missing the points.

  1. Mournful? They may not be enjoying this, but we certainly are.
  2. The pinkshirts have long denied that the Hugos are a popularity contest. Sad Puppies belied, and continues to belie that argument.
  3. No one has ever claimed Sad Puppies was about sales. That being said, an endorsement by Larry Correia can absolutely be proven to boost sales.
  4. Again, the pinkshirts have always denied that the Hugos skew ideological. Sad Puppies disproved, and will continue to disprove that denial.
  5. It’s not just the Hugos. For example, Chaos Horizon noted the refusal of mainstream reviewers to even review Monster Hunter: Nemesis, considered to be a likely Hugo nominee.

This is what diversity looks like

As usual, we’re seeing most of the usual suspects telling the usual taqiyya, claiming that murdering people is against Islam, that it’s just a few bad apples, that Christians do it too, that Charlie Hebdo had it coming, and so forth.

They are all lies. Islam is a religion of the sword and has been since its inception.

Christian popes are given names like Pius and Benedictus and Clemens. Islamic caliphs were proud to bear names such as al-Mansur “the victorious”, which the Caliph of Cordoba assumed after his victory at the Battle of Torrevicente in 981. Furthermore, if it is reasonable to hold Christians today responsible for the actions of other Christians during the Crusades nearly one thousand years ago, how is it unreasonable to hold Muslims today responsible for the action of other Muslims yesterday?

As I have repeatedly observed, we are about fifty years into the third great wave of Islamic expansion in the West. It was previously turned back at Tours, and again at Vienna. Given the delusions that still persist among the Western governments and the left side of the West’s electorates, it seems unlikely that the murderous assault on the Charlie Hebdo offices mark the high water mark of the third wave of Islamic aggression.

But the first shots in Reconquista 2.0 have already been fired; they were fired in Norway by Anders Breivik. And that is the terrible point to which multiculturalism and diversity and tolerance has brought the West: the choice between Breivik and Hebdo. Many have embraced the hashtag #JeSuiCharlie, but as Iowahawk wisely noted, never bring a candlelight vigil to a gunfight.

It will, of course, take time for people to understand that there is no third option, that reinforcing not only decades of failure, but irrational ideological dogma, is absolutely and utterly doomed to even more cataclysmic failure. It will take more attacks by the invaders, more innocent deaths, more dead Westerners, before the people throw out their traitorous governments and their ridiculous pleas for “unity” and true national leaderships arise to expel the invaders.

This pattern of Quislingesque behavior on the part of the Western elite is nothing new. A reader, JS, notes:

I’ve been reading Kissinger’s Diplomacy, and noted that in the lead-up
to WW2, many leaders in Europe and England were much more favorably
disposed towards a hostile and rearming Germany than they were to the Right
in their own countries. Like the Left today, their tactic in response to a
challenge was to attempt to cover themselves in ‘moar’ humiliation,
abase themselves even further. According to Kissinger,
they received grand accolades from other world leaders while betraying
their own peoples and increasing the death toll of WW2 by orders of
magnitude by disarming when they should have been attacking Hitler’s
Germany before Germany was prepared for offensive warfare.

Look at the picture above. Look at the terror and helplessness of the French policeman in his last moments. Look at what his surrender and willingness to appease his Muslim killer accomplished. That is what diversity looks like. That is what diversity means.

Then again, in the end, it may be that #JeSuiCharlie will turn out to be an appropriate slogan. After all, there was once another Frenchman named Charlie who was not afraid to confront the Islamic invader, Charlie Martel.

UPDATE: More blessings of diversity in Paris today:

Terrified workers in Paris’s business district were warned not to leave their office after a gunmen was seen outside – just hours after a female police officer was shot dead by a ‘North African wielding an assault rifle’. 

The costs of scientistry

A scientist laments the loss of scientific credibility:

If we want to use scientific thinking to solve problems, we need people to appreciate evidence and heed expert advice. But the Australian suspicion of authority extends to experts, and this public cynicism can be manipulated to shift the tone and direction of debates. We have seen this happen in arguments about climate change.

This goes beyond the tall poppy syndrome. Disregard for experts who have spent years studying critical issues is a dangerous default position. The ability of our society to make decisions in the public interest is handicapped when evidence and thoughtfully presented arguments are ignored.

So why is science not used more effectively to address critical questions? We think there are several contributing factors including the rise of Google experts and the limited skills set of scientists themselves. We think we need non-scientists to help us communicate with and serve the public better.

At a public meeting recently, when a well-informed and feisty elderly participant asked a question that referred to some research, a senior public servant replied: “Oh, everyone has a scientific study to justify their position, there is no end to the studies you could cite, I am sure, to support your point of view.”

This is a cynical statement, where there are no absolute truths and everyone’s opinion must be treated as equally valid. In this intellectual framework, the findings of science can be easily dismissed as one of many conflicting views of reality.

Such a viewpoint is dangerous from our point of view.

This is the result of scientists passing off their unscientific opinions as expertise for decades. No one trusts “science” anymore because no one trusts scientists. Everyone has seen too many idiots with advanced degrees and white coats trying to pull the Dennett Demarche, in which the scientist argues that biologists can be trusted because physics is very accurate.

This is why a clear distinction between scientody, the scientific method, and scientistry, the profession of science, is absolutely necessary. But because men are corrupt and fallen, too many scientists find it too useful to be able to cloak their unscientific (and all too often uneducated), opinions under the veil of scientific expertise.

And the writer undercuts his own argument when he laments that “evidence” (which may be scientific) and “thoughtfully presented arguments” (which have absolutely nothing to do with science) are ignored. Because the fact is that logic is not science, it is philosophy, and philosophy is exactly what scientody is designed to counteract.

Furthermore, science is intrinsically dynamic. So listening to the “real experts” in science is a guaranteed way to ensure that one ignores both logic, and in many cases, reality.

The three laws of behavioral genetics

JayMan explicates them:

  • First Law. All human behavioral traits are heritable.
  • Second Law. The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of genes.
  • Third Law. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

These laws are more controversial than they should be. No one who comes from a large family will find it easy to take exception to them, and anyone who does must be put to the objective test.

What, specifically, is a behavioral trait that is not heritable? And how would one go about demonstrating that? My impression is that as with many other issues, the fact that most people are binary thinkers renders it very difficult for them to grasp the truth of probabilistic matters. If it can’t be answered with an absolute “yes, always”, then they assume that the answer must necessarily be “no, never”.

The decline of science fiction

It is well known that science fiction sales have declined since the 1980s, but what Daniel demonstrates in Evidence for the Bust Years is that the perceived quality of science fiction, as measured by average Amazon ratings for books representational of their year, have fallen as well:

What this chart argues is that science fiction of the 50s and 60s
averages better than a 4.3 rating at Amazon (and you’ll note that all
decades average more than 350 reviews per book, so small groups of rabid
reviewers really don’t factor in). The quality slides in the 1970s,
plummets in the 80s, recovers slightly in the 1990s, but falls back
below 4 throughout the 2000s.

Now, this is just some raw data from a list of books from the past 60
years or so, but two things stand out to me: Science Fiction has
measurably fallen off in quality, at least according to readers,
according to this relatively blind snapshot. I’m sure we could generate
different results with a different list, but I want to emphasize that
this survey was both as random and as fair as I could muster (in fact, I
noticed after the fact that my list is somewhat more heavily weighted
toward award-winners in the decade that performed the worst!)

This should surprise no one who has been paying attention to the corruption that is Pink SF as it has spread throughout the science fiction and fantasy genres. For me, the obvious point was when The Quantum Rose, a romance novel in space that was a middle book in a series virtually no one was reading, was awarded the Nebula for Best Novel in 2002. Notice that despite it supposedly being the best novel of that year, it has a paltry 29 ratings averaging 3.70.

If that was truly the best of the best, how bad was the average book that year? And if it wasn’t, then how could systematically elevating the mediocre fail to have a subsequent effect on the genre? While more comprehensive statistical work is required to make the case conclusive, this first analysis does indicate that in the eyes of the reviewers, the quality of science fiction and fantasy has objectively declined.

Twelve rational virtues

I’m no devotee of the cult of reason, and one could easily blow a hole through the philosophical underpinnings for these “virtues”, but they are genuinely good advice if you’re willing to turn a blind eye to the base assumptions involved.

The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer. The glory of glorious mystery is to be solved, after which it ceases to be mystery. Be wary of those who speak of being open-minded and modestly confess their ignorance. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance.

The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: “If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.” Beware lest you become attached to beliefs you may not want.

The third virtue is lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting; the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you. Be faithless to your cause and betray it to a stronger enemy. If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims. For you cannot make a true map of a city by sitting in your bedroom with your eyes shut and drawing lines upon paper according to impulse. You must walk through the city and draw lines on paper that correspond to what you see. If, seeing the city unclearly, you think that you can shift a line just a little to the right, just a little to the left, according to your caprice, this is just the same mistake.

Virtue isn’t really the correct term here, but that’s merely a rhetorical flourish for improving one’s rational performance. As with historical pagan sentiments, the higher paganism is often more admirable than the corrupt and imperfect realization of Christian ideals. But while those sentiments are worthy of respect and even implementation, they should never be mistaken for the genuine article of true godly virtue.

Western civilization vs SJW media

That’s what #GamerGate boils down to according to Allen Quatermain on Reaxxion:

The long range objectives of #gamergate has been summarized as less outside interference, more responsibility in the gaming media and greater accountability of game publishers and so of course we have collided with cultural Marxists, for these purposes bring us immediately into conflict with the SJW’s on two levels.

On the Ideological plain, the SJW’s seek always and everywhere to bring about more interference, less individual responsibility and an amoral way of doing things. On the plain of action, until the SJW’s can be stopped from their subjugation of all western society, there will be no opportunity for us to move forward at all. We have undertaken therefore to play a leading role in slowing down, stopping and eventually routing the SJW interlopers.

We realise that the one thing that the SJW’s cannot withstand is the light of day on their activities. What cultural Marxists fear is exposure. For this reason we do all that we can to bring to our fellow people more knowledge and a better understanding of the methods, the progress. and the menace of the SJW machine. In this undertaking we have become a new form of opposition to the SJW’s which they have never faced before in any of the vast areas they have already taken over.

The SJW’s, grasping this fact very early on, set out destroy us as a movement. The western mainstream media help the SJW’s by laying down the line for the faithful. There has not been one mainstream media publication which has not been used to attack #gamergate.

I’m not sure the Wall Street Journal has bothered to attack #GamerGate, but it was a little startling to see First Things come out and pronounce us dead for the Nteenth time, albeit in a nominally sympathetic manner.

The media has been entirely coopted and cannot be trusted in any way, shape, or form. Even the nominally conservative media readily falls in line under social pressure from more extreme SJWs. But as I noted on Alpha Game today, media reality is not synonymous with objective reality; it portrays the world as they believe it should be, not as it actually is.

This is why blogs like this one will continue to grow in popularity, as the mainstream media ratings consistently fall no matter the medium. The reason the media keeps declaring #GamerGate dead is because they need it to be dead, as the longer it persists, the more obviously doomed they are.