Author: VD

The banning of an SJW

One of Wikipedia’s worst SJWs, the anti-GamerGate Ryulong, has been banned indefinitely for his all-too-typical thought-policing:

Ryulong banned

5.3) (Was 4.5) Ryulong (talk · contribs · logs · edit filter log · block log)
is indefinitely banned from the English Language Wikipedia. They may
request reconsideration of the ban twelve months after the enactment of
this remedy, and every twelve months thereafter.
Support:

  1. (first choice) As always, banning someone is not something we should want
    to do, but sometimes it is the best thing for the project. Ryulong has
    acted very poorly in this topic area, and it is clear that previous
    sanctions and blocks have failed to have the desired effect of ending
    disruptive behavior. A revolving door of speedy topic bans, chasing the
    problem from area to another, is not the answer. This is. I sincerely
    hope that at some point in the future he will be able to return and be a
    productive member of this community again, but for now he needs to go. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:15, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
  2. Will prioritise later if need be,  Roger Davies talk 23:38, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
    Equal first choice,  Roger Davies talk 11:31, 21 January 2015 (UTC)
  3. First choice. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs(talk) 23:56, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
  4. Last Choice I would love to not do this but I don’t think anything else has a snowball’s chance of passing —In actu (Guerillero) | My Talk 01:15, 21 January 2015 (UTC)
  5. First choice. Salvio Let’s talk about it! 10:46, 21 January 2015 (UTC)
  6. Last choice of presented options (Right now). I think if we’re
    dealing with this on a purely pragmatic level this might be best for the
    project, but I do think that it would only be fair to attempt to apply
    some of the alternatives first, although I’m a bit concerned as to their
    potential efficacy, given the history. NativeForeigner Talk 07:26, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
    Nonetheless, support. NativeForeigner Talk 19:48, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
  7. T. Canens (talk) 17:12, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
  8. If the 1RR does not pass, then first choice of what’s left. Still
    oppose if the 1RR somehow moves back to passing. The more I look at the
    history here, the more I am sure the problems are far wider than just
    this single topic, as I see it, Ryulong doesn’t seem able to “hold his
    fire”, and not get into edit wars. This also, per his block log, is
    independent of topic areas. Without very, very strong measures to stop
    them from continuing to edit war throughout the encyclopedia, I don’t
    think we have any other choice. Also, even to this morning, I still see
    evidence of ongoing battleground mentality. I really, really don’t like
    this, but I can’t support their staying on the project without a strict
    1RR and a topic ban at this point. And only one of those is going to
    pass. Courcelles 22:02, 26 January 2015 (UTC)

Oppose:

  1. My mind is open on the other proposed remedies, but I will certainly not be supporting this. Newyorkbrad (talk) 03:41, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
    • Neither will I. Need to contemplate the rest of it, but this is not the solution. Courcelles 03:48, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
    • Excessive in the circumstances. I’m open to some alternative. DGG ( talk ) 05:33, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
    • I would like to try something else. —Guerillero | My Talk 07:53, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
  2. I’ve decided to oppose this, albeit weakly. I’m hoping that the
    other remedies regarding Ryulong will end this situation, but I don’t
    quite think a siteban is the best course forward here. GorillaWarfare (talk) 02:32, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
  3. — Euryalus (talk) 05:13, 23 January 2015 (UTC)
  4. Given the circumstances here, I don’t think this is called for. For
    clarity’s sake, though, this is very likely the absolute last chance. Seraphimblade Talk to me 01:14, 24 January 2015 (UTC)
  5. LFaraone 18:45, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

Abstain:

  1. I find my view on this changing from day to day, so it would be fairer if I abstained. DGG ( talk ) 20:47, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

Comments:

Noting that I skipped this intentionally—still thinking on it and will come back soon. GorillaWarfare (talk) 17:23, 22 January 2015 (UTC)

  • @NativeForeigner: I tried to fix the numbering, but clarification of your exact meaning would be useful here. Courcelles 20:01, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Of course, a perusal of the process tends to illustrate why Wikipedia is so hapless when it comes to policing outrageous behavior by its editors. Because it was started by an SJW-sympathetic individual and was rapidly taken over by SJWs of varying rabidity, the site remains hopelessly biased and largely worthless on anything of even moderate political contention.

 That being said, it is good to see that Wikipedia is trying to clean up its act, even if it is going about it in a manner that makes Sisyphus look productive. But they simply refuse to see that the way they cherry-pick which sources are deemed reliable and which are not is what produces the intrinsic left-wing bias. The SJW editor who sits on the Wikipedia page about me and tries to publicize as much negative information as possible while minimizing any positive information shows how he evades the point on the Talk page there:

Many of the recent additions to this article seem to be the direct result of Mr. Beale’s recent blog post
in which he commented that Wikipedia is unfairly and dishonestly
excluding material on his views: “Does [the ‘Views section in the
Wikipedia article] describe my views at all? Are the totality of my
views really limited to little more than a feud with John Scalzi and my
expulsion from SFWA? Do I have no opinions on economics, politics,
philosophy, literature, and religion despite having written books on the
former and the latter? It’s telling, too, to observe that if the
so-called feud and the expulsion are the only significant aspects of my
views, there is no mention of the connection between the former and the
latter.”

Mr. Beale then gave a brief description of his views on economics — he feels that the Austrian School
is currently the best explanation available, but is ultimately flawed
for various reasons — and stated that “(t)hose are my actual views on
the subject. That is the absolute truth. Post them on Wikipedia and
they’ll be suppressed within 24 hours.”

This, I believe, is indicative of a general misunderstanding. Of
course Mr. Beale has a great many more views than are provided in this
article; for instance, he has expressed an appreciation for the writing
of Frank Herbert and a dislike for that of Patrick Rothfuss.
I’m certain he also has food preferences, and opinions on the best way
to teach mathematics to children. He may even have discussed these views
in posts to his blog. But the mere fact that Mr. Beale has a view on a
subject does not indisputably lead to the conclusion that the view
should be included in Wikipedia’s biography of him, not even if he has
made a blog post in which he explicitly states that view. Rather, the
views which are (or should be) included are those which have drawn significant independent external attention. I hope that this explanation will satisfy the readers of Mr. Beale’s blog, and possibly even Mr. Beale himself. DS (talk) 14:42, 8 August 2014

This is the height of absurdity. I misunderstand nothing. Nor do you, my readers. There is FAR MORE significant independent external attention that has been paid to my views on economics, religion, and the history of war than have ever been paid to my views on immigration or race, much less my “Feud with John Scalzi”. I have NEVER done an interview about the latter; Scalzi himself did only one. I did over thirty interviews, some on national radio, about economics subsequent to the release of THE RETURN OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION and more than twenty related to THE IRRATIONAL ATHEIST.

Transcripts and links to some of those interviews are available on my blog. My views are clearly expressed in them – again, on national radio shows, and even in one case, television – and yet every last trace of those views have been methodically scrubbed from Wikipedia by the likes of DragonFlySixtyseven.

Here is just one of many possible examples pulled from my email. There are over 75 similar emails from different media outlets ranging from Fox News to the Saturday Evening Post. But in the impartial eyes of the Wikipedia editors, the cumulative total of that independent external attention is less significant and notable than John Scalzi talking about himself on his blog that gets less than half the traffic of this one.

INTERVIEW CONFIRMATION
NAME:  Vox Day                     
TOPIC:  The Irrational Atheist
DATE:  Tuesday, October 21, 2008
INTERVIEW TIME:  11:15 – 11:55 am ET
LENGTH OF INTERVIEW:  40 minutes
MEDIA:  Christian Radio Network – over 200 stations in 34 states, 19 affiliates and in Canada

I can’t speak to the accuracy of the rest of Wikipedia, but my page is mostly nonsense from start to finish. I mean, it actually says that I was born in Minnesota.

Cumberblunder

As always, a public apology only compounds the error by displaying weakness to those who are always hunting for it:

Devastated’, ‘a complete fool’ and ‘an idiot’; ‘thoughtless’, ‘inappropriate’ and ‘shaming’: that is how the actor Benedict Cumberbatch described himself and his actions this week in an elegantly worded but nonetheless grovelling apology.

It was fully 150 words of heartfelt self-flagellation, in which the actor all but stripped naked and covered himself in ashes before lashing himself to the mast of public opinion.

And all for what? A well-meaning slip of the tongue.

He used the term ‘coloured’ during an interview on an American chat show. Perhaps not the most politically correct racial terminology, but certainly not the most derogatory either.

At worst, perhaps, rather old-fashioned. The kind of thing your granny might say, and which might compel you to lean over and gently whisper in her ear: ‘No one says “coloured” any more, gran, it’s not the done thing.’ To which she might reply: ‘Really, dear? I had no idea.’

A term, moreover, contained in the very name of one of America’s leading African-American civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People….

Of course, in today’s world the poor fellow had no choice but to apologise.

Not only does he inhabit the oh-so-progressive world of entertainment, where to deviate even slightly from the accepted nostrums of liberalism can mean instant alienation, he also has as an ancestor an 18th-century sugar plantation owner in Barbados which, in the eyes of some, practically makes him a slave-trader himself.

As a Person of Color myself, I should like to absolve Mr. Cumberbatch of any lingering guilt over his PR faux pas. And to advise him, as I have myself been reliably informed, that time is rapidly running out on the term “People of Color” and that the next politically approved appellation for individuals of African descent residing on the North American continent is still being discussed by the Grand Council of Racial Relations and will be announced to white people sometime in the next 18 months.

I understand “Basketball American” is the present frontleader, but the situation is fluid as “Shaded Americans” or “Shades” also has its advocates. As for we Native Americans, the correct form of address will be the individual’s tribe, with all of the onus being placed on the individual addressing the erstwhile Native American to correctly identify his tribe prior to addressing him. An incorrect tribal identification will, of course, be considered greatly offensive and will require a placatory offering of money, alcohol, or sexual favors to set straight.

Don’t call me Cherokee.

Cuckoo for peer review

Scientistry at its finest:

Shrime decided to see how easy it would be to publish an article. So he made one up. Like, he literally made one up. He did it using www.randomtextgenerator.com. The article is entitled “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs?” and its authors are the venerable Pinkerton A. LeBrain and Orson Welles. The subtitle reads: “The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals.” Shrime submitted it to 37 journals over two weeks and, so far, 17 of them have accepted it. (They have not “published” it, but say they will as soon as Shrime pays the $500. This is often referred to as a “processing fee.” Shrime has no plans to pay them.) Several have already typeset it and given him reviews, as you can see at the end of this article. One publication says his methods are “novel and innovative”!. But when Shrime looked up the physical locations of these publications, he discovered that many had very suspicious addresses; one was actually inside a strip club.

Many of these publications sound legitimate. To someone who is not well-versed in a particular subfield of medicine—a journalist, for instance—it would be easy to mistake them for valid sources. “As scientists, we’re aware of the top-tier journals in our specific sub-field, but even we cannot always pinpoint if a journal in another field is real or not,” Shrime says. “For instance, the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology is the very first journal I was ever published in and it’s legitimate. But the Global Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology is fake. Only someone in my field would know that.”

You can trust scientists. Because global warming. And they have proven that birds are, indeed, cuckoo for cocoa puffs.

Pinkshirts killing SF/F 2

It was rather amusing to see some people attempting to shake off yesterday’s post on the decline in science fiction by pointing to the fact that overall print fiction had declined 8 percent, so the 7 percent decline in science fiction meant that the genre was actually outperforming. Never mind the fact that it had declined 21 percent the year before…. and after a little more research, I discovered that it had declined 21 percent the year before that as well.

In fact, SF print sales are now about half what they were in 2008. I don’t place TOO much confidence in this chart, because it shows around 4 million in 2012, whereas the PW numbers indicate they should be around 5.6 million. But it does suffice to indicate that what we are witnessing is a pretty serious trend and one that involves more than the mere shift to ebooks.

A decline from a combined 26 million in print sales to 12.7 million in only five years is bordering on the cataclysmic; remember, ebooks eliminate any need for the expensive structure of the mainstream genre publishers, a fact that has probably not escaped the owners of Tor and other imprints. I’ll put together some charts once I get some better numbers, but the point is that the anecdotal evidence of people increasingly avoiding the Pink SF produced by the self-appointed gatekeepers is supported by the data trend.

Abolishing the Air Force

Jerry Pournelle wants to get rid of the Air Force:

I also intend to do an essay on why we should abolish the Air Force
and return to an Army Air Force which is not a separate service. The
purpose of military forces is to win wars. The purpose of the Air Force
is—well, they no longer know. When we had SAC we knew – “Our profession
is peace” was not just a slogan – but that too is neglected in the
Modern Air Force. Deterrence and maintenance of nuclear weapons, being
ready to use weapons when your fondest wish is that they will never be
used – that does require a different kind of military. We once had that
in SAC but the end of the Cold War was the end of SAC, and the nuclear
deterrence force is, well not what it once was. It is subject to the
Iron Law now.

As to the rest of the Air Force, it is more interested in the Air
Force than winning wars, and considers supporting the field army as
beneath contempt. A slow old Warthog does a much better job, but there
is no glory in that. Best to use fast jets… which of course are
imprecise and cause a lot of collateral damage. Everyone knows that a
force of propeller driven P-47 fighters of WWII would be more effective
for supporting the field army than what we use. And the Army must be
crippled, not allowed to have effective air power in taking territory.
You must use modern jets at high speed.

Now the Air Force has a mission that the Army at present does not
have: Air Supremacy. And that is a different mission from supporting the
field army. It involves engagements with Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs)
as well as strikes against the enemy base of operations. The glory is
in air to air combat, but that is not the effective way to air
supremacy.

That is the main argument for an “Independent Air Force” and the
bitter fights that ended with creation of USAF. It is true, ground army
commanders tend to select the wrong targets to sortie against, and
endanger air supremacy; thus the argument for independence, which USAAF
eventually won (before SAC existed or any but a few knew would be
needed.) Hiroshima ended the debate. But now the Cold War ended and USAF
killed SAC as not glamorous – not career building any longer. As to the
Warthogs, give them to the National Guard! Real pilots don’t need them!

Sure, I exaggerate but not much: the Air Force keeps trying to get
rid of the Warthogs, but never by giving them (and the ground support
mission) to the War Department. Better that GI’s die than USAF give up a
mission even though it does not want it.

Drones will change all this, but why wait?

Actually, as Eric S. Raymond demonstrated in both “Sucker Punch” and “Battlefield Lasers”, the Air Force is very close to obsolete anyhow. My expectation is that they’ll try to survive by moving their mission upward, to space, in order to compensate for the vanishing ability of their planes to survive in the atmosphere.

A proper Hobbit

TolkienEditor has cut Peter Jackson’s abusive monstrosity in half and thereby, in large part, restored Tolkien’s much-beloved tale:

I decided to condense all three installments (An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies) into a single 4-hour feature that more closely resembled Tolkien’s original novel. Well, okay, it’s closer to 4.5 hours, but those are some long-ass credits! This new version was achieved through a series of major and minor cuts, detailed below:

The investigation of Dol Guldor has been completely excised, including the appearances of Radagast, Saruman and Galadriel. This was the most obvious cut, and the easiest to carry out (a testament to its irrelevance to the main narrative). Like the novel, Gandalf abruptly disappears on the borders of Mirkwood, and then reappears at the siege of the Lonely Mountain with tidings of an orc army.

The Tauriel-Legolas-Kili love triangle has also been removed. Indeed, Tauriel is no longer a character in the film, and Legolas only gets a brief cameo during the Mirkwood arrest. This was the next clear candidate for elimination, given how little plot value and personality these two woodland sprites added to the story. Dwarves are way more fun to hang out with anyway. 😛

The Pale Orc subplot is vastly trimmed down. Azog is obviously still leading the attack on the Lonely Mountain at the end, but he does not appear in the film until after the company escapes the goblin tunnels (suggesting that the slaying of the Great Goblin is a factor in their vendetta, as it was in the novel).

I was pleased to learn that in addition to getting rid of “Tauriel”, the ridiculous barrel-fight is also gone. The Hobbit: The Tolkien Edit is a 6GB MP4 file, available by either torrent or direct download. Not all of Jackson’s egregious stupidities have been excised, but most of them have been surgically removed.

UPDATE: Another, even more reduced option:

After about 312 new edits and cuts and almost 5 hours removed
from the trilogy, this single film combines the three Peter Jackson
movies into one immense epic that accurately tells the story of Bilbo,
while maintaining what new ideas and battles have been implanted in
Jackson’s retelling (such as the Battle of the Five Armies containing
orcs instead of goblins). 

The following is a list of all the major
edits/alterations to the films for this single edit. Scenes aren’t
always simply removed, sometimes they are repositioned or sometimes
specific elements are taken out or added in for coherency or pacing:  
  • Removed all of Elf-Dwarf Love Triangle Plot
  • Removed all of Gandalf’s necromancer adventures
  • Removed most of orc scenes/battles/mentions in first 2/3’s of
    the film (including removing frames with orcs from the post-goblin
    escape scene at the end of “Unexpected Journey”)
  • Removed Bilbo killing a wolf – the first thing he kills is the spider in Mirkwood forest, giving the sword the name “Sting”
  • Removed all of (elder) Bilbo’s introduction to the lore
  • Removed all of the heavy foreshadowing for LOTR and the evil of the ring – kept to the spirit of the book, it was a playful invisibility ring!
  • Added a deleted scene of the Shire villagers as an intro to the film
  • Reduced much of the Dwarves’ dinner at Bilbo’s
  • Created faster transition to Bilbo getting out of the house
  • Reduced Rivendell
  • Reduced Stone Giant scene
  • Reduced goblin scene, re-ordered dialogue to mirror book interactions between Thorin & Goblin King
  • Kept Gollum scene entirely intact – no cutting between that
    and the goblin lair, although shortened as well as removed Gollum
    beating the corpse in the beginning
  • Created voice-over transition into Beorn scene at the beginning of “Desolation of Smaug”
  • Reduced Mirkwood forest & Woodland Realm capture scenes
  • Heavily reduced Laketown capture (all of Laketown is about 10 minutes total now)
  • Removed Smaug battle scene with dwarves in the mines (kept
    Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug, the battle was outrageously cartoonish
    and long)
  • Removed Bard using his son as a bow, the shots dance around it and the scene is intact 
  • Rearranged much of Battle of Five Armies for coherency of
    Bilbo concealing and giving away the Arkenstone without the need for so
    many silly slow-motion Thorin bits
  • Removed many elements of the Battle of Five Armies that
    contained too much CGI monsters or silly battle actions (like repeated
    head-butting) 
  • Reduced and rearranged the battle to get to Thorin quicker
  • Removed elves from the final fight scene (Kili fights the orc in order to protect Bilbo instead of his elf love interest)
  • Removed final flash-forward scene, the film ends with Bilbo finally coming home

Stop the Ensaddening!

Larry Correia explains the vital importance of joining the Crusade to End Puppy Related Sadness and getting a supporting membership to vote in the nominations. Because only you can tie SJWs to stakes and burn them.

Now our SP3 spokesmanatee would like to share a few thoughts about
why it is so important that you help to combat the scourge of PRS.



wendell2 (2)

Thank you, Wendell. That was so profound I may have shed a single manly tear.


This year we will be expanding the suggested slate to include several
other authors, artists, and creators who are usually locked out by the
SJW voting block. 

(sniff) Damn, but Wendell is one eloquent manatee, isn’t he? You just can’t argue with that. Keep in mind that you’ll get a bunch of ebooks for your $20/year membership (you pay $40 for two years), and the more nominations Sad Puppies gets, the better the books you’ll get will be. Last year voters got the complete set of The Wheel of Time as well as all three volumes of Larry’s Grimnoire trilogy; which was pretty good value for the $20.

Pinkshirts killing SF/F

Publisher’s Weekly reports on the growth or decline of various categories in 2014:

Adult Fiction (unit sales, in thousands)
Genre20132014% change
Classics7,8177,578-3%
Fantasy8,6157,526-13%
Graphic Novels7,6598,66913%
Mystery/Detective14,88414,304-4%
Science Fiction4,4484,142-7%

Remember, science fiction was also down 21% in 2013, which means that science fiction unit sales have declined 1,488,000 in just two years. It’s down more than one-quarter in two years and is now only half the size of the Graphic Novel market, which is not only growing, but is presently dominated by men writing and drawing for male customers.

The “women destroy science fiction” meme isn’t even remotely ironic. Women, and the gamma males who cater to them, are literally destroying the adult science fiction and fantasy markets.

To put it in perspective, ONE edition of one of my games sold more copies than the ENTIRE science fiction market sold in print last year.

The face of the Devil

The Church of England is marking a new era in its history as the Rev Libby Lane becomes the first woman to be ordained as a bishop. More than 100 members of the episcopate from England and other parts of the worldwide Anglican Church will lay hands on the 48-year-old vicar from Hale, Greater Manchester, to formally consecrate her during a service at York Minster. The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu will anoint her with oil in an ancient tradition tracing its origins to the prophets of the Old Testament.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, will also be present, alongside female bishops from churches in other parts of the world.

The consecration marks the conclusion of a decades-long wrangle over the role of women in leadership in the established Church, the last great institution of British public life to open itself to full gender equality.

Does that look like someone who is sobered by the burden of assuming spiritual leadership? Or the smirking triumph of someone who has finally managed to corrupt a once-great institution?

As the Church of England finally succumbs to its entryist invaders, we can safely predict that the church leaders will be disappointed in their expectations: “Church leaders hope it will mark a moment of reconciliation between
traditionalists and reformers on the issue.”

It won’t. It marks the death knell of the Church of England. The “new era” that is marked is the end.

The real fear of the Eurocrats

Daniel Hannan observes that it isn’t a Greek bankruptcy that would be the real catastrophe as far as the EU is concerned:

A default and devaluation would offer a fresh start. Although the economy has been pummelled by six years of Euro-austerity, some of the fundamentals have improved. The bureaucracy has been slimmed, taxes are now collected and, if debt repayments were taken out of it, the budget would be in balance. In truth, this is what EU leaders fear. Not that Greece will leave the euro and collapse, but that Greece will leave the euro and prosper.

A competitive Greek economy, exporting its way back to growth, might inspire Spaniards and Italians, who have also been paying the price of the euro, to follow. For those Eurocrats who see the single currency as a component of political integration, that prospect is too horrible to contemplate.

We’ve been here before. Two years ago, when it looked as if Cyprus might leave the euro, Brussels went so far as to lift money directly out of private bank accounts to pay off the country’s creditors.

The extreme measure was necessary, the European Central Bank admitted, ‘to prevent worries over the reversibility of the euro resurfacing’.

I observe that Iceland, which rejected the EU’s bank-first dictates, is doing considerably better than Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, which obediently followed the EU’s instructions. I tend to doubt this observation has escaped the new Greek government.