Author: VD

Maybe they’re just not very good

In which we are supposed to be very concerned that there are insufficient numbers of people of color nominated for awards given in Hollywood:

For only the second time in nearly two decades, the 20 Academy Awards acting nominations went to a group made up entirely of white actors and actresses. Among the notable snubs was David Oyelowo, who received praise for his turn as the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma.

In 2011, the 20 nominees also were entirely white. Before that, one has to go back to 1998 for an all-white acting group.

The all-white nominees list comes at a time when Hollywood is fielding criticism for not doing enough to promote diversity in filmmaking. And just last month, Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin were apologizing for leaked emails that appeared to be racially insensitive. Rudin was nominated this morning for producing best picture nominee The Grand Budapest Hotel.

What I find amusing about this is that while we’re informed that if right-wing writers aren’t nominated for awards, this is an indication of their lack of talent, but if Africans or women aren’t nominated for awards, this is an indication of racism and sexism.

Meanwhile, none of the science fiction SJWs celebrated the fact that a Hispanic man and a Indian were nominated for Hugo Awards last year. In fact, some of them are still openly decrying those nominations. The racists.

Another thing that is modestly amusing is the way in which the SJWs don’t understand the way in which a relative nonentity being given an affirmative action award when very young, then winning nothing afterwards, will be used as evidence against their accomplishments in the future. See the Sports Guy’s dissection of Wes Unsfeld’s MVP award in his rookie year, followed by a subsequent lack of honors, in The Book of Basketball for details.

Boom!

The Euro dropped from 1.20 to .85 against the Swiss Franc last night. That was nearly a 30 percent move overnight! It’s now down to 1.16 against the US Dollar. This is the result of the Swiss central bank giving up its attempt to peg the Franc at 1.20.

These wild currency swings are great if you can time them correctly, but it’s also a good way to lose your shirt. As usual, I was too early and missed out on the big move. Be careful out there.

This kind of monetary volatility is a strong indicator that deflation is defeating the central banks. They simply can’t print enough borrowers.

Graphic design needed

A message from Castalia House’s art director.

As Castalia House continues to grow we need another graphic design
professional to help with cover typography and pre-press needs. Ideally
the candidate will have a strong background in graphic design with a
love of composition, type, and an understanding of the pre-press process
including ICC color profiles, color conversion from RGB to CMYK for the
press, and how to read and understand provided print specs and
templates. A typical project will include the typography for a cover
design with both the artistic cover type over a provided illustration
for an eBook cover, and then prepping select covers for printing
including laying out the body copy on the cover, designing the spine and
back cover based upon the font illustration, and all pre-press work to
create a make-ready file for the printer based upon a template. The
designer will need to have industry standard software and be able to
provide an X-1a compliant pdf for print.

The work and pay is
based upon the project and an online portfolio for evaluation of your
work is a must. Please email books AT castaliahouse DOT com with COVERS
in the subject, provide a link to your work, and include your rates for
the work specified above. Not all books will require print layout. If you want to help the Blue SFF revolution
and work with a talented and very dedicated team of professionals, this
is your opportunity.

See, THAT is why they hate you

A Jewish woman in Britain worried about anti-semitism in the UK inadvertently demonstrates one reason many decent individuals in Britain are increasingly inclined to dislike the Jews in their midst:

There may
be only 260,000 of us in the UK but if we don’t lead, how can the rest of
society follow?

It’s just so hard to imagine why so many of the 64 million people in the UK might not want this woman living among them and so graciously deigning to lead them. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most of them would now like to punch her in the face.

“If we don’t lead, how can the rest of
society follow?” How indeed. Pat Buchanan asked a pertinent question in his article on Unz: “Muslims in the banlieues wonder why insulting the Prophet is a protected freedom in France, while denying the Holocaust can get you a prison term.”

Speaking of the Islamic banlieues, across the English Channel the failure of French diversity and multiculturalism is highlighted by the reaction in them to the ridiculous “unity” march meant to defend the tottering status quo:

The sense of marginalization did not disappear with the massive solidarity march across Paris on Sunday, which drew more than one million people and 40 presidents and prime ministers to Mr. Hollande’s side. For some banlieue residents, it seemed an almost surreal display that had nothing to do with them.

In Vaulx-en-Velin, the only Charlie reference to be seen was a sign for the Charlie Chaplin cultural center across the street from City Hall, which is topped with a drawing of a flag of its sister city, the West Bank town of Beit Sahour.

Residents there ridiculed the “I am Charlie” marches. Some said the terrorist attacks had been staged. While many strongly condemned the attackers for the murders, others insisted the cartoonists had gotten what they deserved….

“I totally feel cut off from France,” said Karim Yahiaoui, 15, who added that he had not left this suburb more than twice in the past year. Over the past few decades, the Muslim community in Vaulx-en-Velin has become increasingly insular. “Many people only believe their own values now, not those of the republic,” said Anne Dufaud, director of the Mission, a nonprofit organization. She has worked in the community for 20 years. When Mr. Hollande led a moment of silence across France last Thursday for the victims of the attacks, two students and a teacher at a local high school, who declined to be identified, said many students refused to stand.

Patrick Kahn, a manager at the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism in Lyon, who operates a weekly tolerance program in the schools of Vaulx-en-Velin, said simply, “The integration policy failed.”

Integration has failed. Diversity has failed. Multiculturalism has failed. What options does that leave?

How to hunt trolls

In light of the conclusion of the successful hunting of one of the Internet’s more notorious trolls, a few people have asked me to explain how to go about doing the same. Here are some of the observations I have made along the way.

  1. Stay calm. The troll’s primary objective is to upset you. Trolls feed off attention and negative emotion, so it’s important to control your own reactions and deny them both. Staying calm serves two positive purposes, as it prevents you from establishing an emotional relationship with them as well as forcing them to increase their efforts in order to achieve the desired effect, thereby increasing the likelihood they will make a mistake or cross a line.
  2. Be patient. A security expert has told me that no one can regularly comment without giving away their true identity within one year. Remember, the troll is in it for the attention, so hiding even the smallest significant aspects of his identity places him fundamentally at conflict with his own instincts and desires.
  3. Directly inform the troll that he is banned from visiting your site and from commenting under all current and future identities, and that if he persists in his activity, he is engaged in illegal trespassing and cyberstalking. It is vital to put them on notice. For some reason, many people who are capable of understanding that physical trespassing is not only illegal, but can permit them to be legally shot in some places tend to find it hard to grasp that online trespassing is illegal. The fact that you CAN access a site does not automatically give you permission to do so any more than the fact that you CAN physically access someone’s lawn gives you permission to walk on it.
  4. Don’t delete the troll’s comments. It took me a long time to learn this; even though I saved them in a separate text file, I sometimes got lazy or couldn’t be bothered. It’s best to have them there, in the blog, where they can be easily produced as evidence or mined for investigative purposes.
  5. Don’t permit the readers to engage with the troll. They may mean well, but their reactions to the troll are usually a bigger problem than the troll’s comments are. Set a policy of “Comments responding to a troll will be deleted” and delete them on sight. Commenters cannot shut down a troll because he seeks their negative attention; them saying “shut up” and “go away” is something he desires, so their effort on your behalf are counterproductive. Don’t let them feed him.
  6. Look for the troll’s other identities. Trolls always have sockpuppets, and often they are less careful when using them. Yama had over 30. Even a cursory glance at the mined comments shows that NTA has at least three. And often, the sockpuppet identity is the troll’s primary identity on other sites. Yama did not use Yama here at all, he primarily used Will leFey, Dan Picaro, Luscinia, and Alauda. But once I was able to link him to the Yamamanama and Yama the Spacefish identities, I was able to learn considerably more information about him and those around him.
  7. Identify their literary tics. We all have them and they are nearly as reliable as fingerprints. Once you develop some skill at this, you’ll be able to recognize a troll under a new identity within two or three posts. It doesn’t hurt that they always gravitate towards the same bugaboos no matter what identity they present.
  8. Join forces with the troll’s other targets. You are probably not his first or only target. Comparing notes will almost always prove informative and multiple complainants make it impossible for the troll to claim it is a “he said, she said” situation or to blame everything on you once you bring the situation to the attention of third parties.
  9. Once you have the troll’s IP address, research the cyberstalking laws in their legal jurisdiction. Most communities consider cyberstalking to be a felony and penalties tend to be steeper than you probably expect. Jail sentences of up to 5 years and fines in the five digits are common.
  10. Don’t bother with threats and warnings. The troll habitually makes empty threats himself, so he’s not going to take yours seriously.
  11. Don’t pay undue attention to the troll’s assertions. Given that he is on your site under a false identity, why would you believe anything he says? Observe how trolls are very quick to claim entirely factual statements made by you and others are lies; this is psychological projection on their part.
  12. Don’t bother contacting his friends, employer, and family except to gather more information. They already know something is off about the troll and are accustomed to turning a blind eye to his activities. They will be very reluctant to cooperate in any way and may even try to put you off the trail. For example, Yama’s friend Emma lied to me about knowing him when I contacted her, and if she hadn’t overdone the fake sympathy I might have even bought it. Don’t be upset with them, after all, they know him and they don’t know you. Just don’t expect assistance from them or to be able to use them to put any pressure on him. Again, you’re not dealing with a normal individual here. Never forget that.
  13. Expect the troll to try to spin the situation as you harassing him as the net tightens. This is actually a very good sign of progress. It means that he is frightened and that his confidence has been shaken. Trolls like to think of themselves as the cunning masters of the situation, so the switch to helpless victim role marks a significant change. It also confirms that you are dealing with a genuinely aberrant psychology, as no normal individual would ever reach the same conclusion.
  14. Don’t contact the police until you have prepared a succinct summary of the troll’s activity on your site, dating back to the documented beginning, and organizing the various evidence in detail to be available upon request. The summary that I sent to the Marshfield police was only two pages long, but included a description of what additional information I could provide. If possible, provide multiple summaries, from as many of the troll’s other targets as possible. These summaries will not only articulate the complaint, but will save the police a considerable amount of time in substantiating it. Th easier you make it for them to do their job, the sooner they are likely to do it. The detective who addressed Yama’s case specifically commented on how useful the summaries were to his investigation.
  15. Before you call the relevant police department, check their website and see if they have an officer or a department specializing in online crimes. Most do. Those are the only officers to whom you should talk, as their colleagues tend to regard computers as akin to magic and beyond their ability to address.
  16. Be prepared to press charges, but be open to the possibility of other desirable outcomes. The objective should not be vengeance, but simply to end the trolling. For the most part, trolls are disturbed and damaged individuals; the primary reason they have the time to wage their bizarre campaigns is because they are not normally functioning adults with responsibilities.
  17. Above all, don’t be afraid. The troll is targeting you because he hates the fact that other people think you matter and he feels he does not in comparison. He’s trying to bring you down to his level, to enmesh you in his petty hatred and fear. Don’t permit him to do that. Remember that people snipe from cover because they are too psychologically weak to dare engaging in open and direct confrontation.

UPDATE: Yama surfaced here. Several people spotted him and it’s been reported.

    The end of the troll hunt

    I spoke with a representative of the Marshfield police department yesterday, and I can declare, with a reasonable degree of confidence, that the great troll campaign of the last five years appears to be more or less at an end. The police had Yama (whose identity, it turns out, was correctly identified) down to the station with his caretakers, none of whom knew anything at all about what Yama had been doing online for the last 12 years. I have been assured that there will be no further trolling of this blog, or of the many other blogs that have been trolled in the past, and that Yama will not be permitted unrestricted access to the Internet going forward.

    While Yama did subsequently take advantage of what I suspect was access outside his home to post a short comment on Brad Torgersen’s blog under the name of Alauda yesterday, I have already reported it to the police and they are addressing the matter. If Yama posts additional comments anywhere else, please bring
    them to my attention right away so that I can report them. I expect there will be a few more minor incidents of a similar fashion as Yama attempts to evade his newly imposed restrictions.

    I have decided not to press criminal charges at this time due to my opinion that the individual responsible for the cyberstalking is not entirely capable of controlling his behavior. I’m not even certain he’d be considered sufficiently competent to be held liable for them. I do, however, retain the option to press charges if it turns out that the individual’s caretakers prove unable, or unwilling, to control his online activity in the future. I can also assure those who have been concerned about various threats made by Yama to various parties over the last 12 years that he poses absolutely no physical threat to anyone. So, the good news is that it looks like it’s all over.

    As an occasional critic of the American police, I would be remiss if I failed to note that the Marshfield police were thorough and professional throughout the course of their investigation. They were also very considerate with regards to some of the more sensitive aspects of the affair, and their temperate actions have permitted us to reach a much better outcome than I had originally imagined possible. I was very impressed by them, as I cannot see how they could have handled the matter any better than they did.

    I won’t go into any details about Yama except to say this: he is not someone to be hated or feared. He is someone to be pitied. That doesn’t excuse his execrable behavior, but it does, to a certain extent, explain it. You could do worse than to pray for the poor bastard.

    As for the other trolls, who don’t have a similar explanation for their behavior, I hope you will have the sense to see this as a warning. Cyberstalking is a crime in most jurisdictions, and the police do take it seriously when a properly documented complaint is lodged with them.

    The tipping point

    It appears Netanyahu should have addressed the Jews of Britain, as well as the Jews of France:

    More than half of British Jewish people fear Jews have no future in
    the UK, according to a new study which also reveals that antisemitic
    sentiments are more prevalent than widely believed. British society is at a “tipping point” with Jewish families
    increasingly questioning whether to stay in the country, campaigners
    claim today.

    The warning is bolstered by a new YouGov poll showing
    that 45 per cent of Britons agreed with at least one of four
    antisemitic statements put to them. Some 25 per cent agreed with the
    idea that “Jews chase money more than other British people” while one in
    five accepted as true that “Jews’ loyalty to Israel makes them less
    loyal to Britain than other British people”. A further 13 per cent
    said of those surveyed in the poll commissioned by the Campaign Against
    Antisemitism (CAA) agreed that “Jews talk about the Holocaust too much
    in order to get sympathy”.

    It seems rather obvious that they don’t have any long-term future in the UK. Great Britain is no more the proper home of the Jewish people any more than France, the USA, or China. The diaspora is over and it is absolutely absurd to say that France and Britain and the USA are all part and parcel of a vast globe-spanning home for less than 15 million people.

    I tend to think the 45 percent figure cited is far too low. I cannot imagine that four out of five British people genuinely believe that any Jew, particularly one with an Israeli passport, is as loyal to Great Britain as an actual Brit is, unless by “other British people” they were thinking of the mainstream political elite. I daresay most Jews in Britain not named “Milliband” are considerably more loyal to Great Britain than David Cameron or Nick Clegg. But it’s a stupid characterization anyway, as it’s not “anti-semitic” to believe a Jew is primarily loyal to Israel. I should think it’s downright anti-semitic to insist otherwise. Every American living in London I know would be downright offended at the idea that he might be more loyal to the Queen of England than to the Stars and Stripes.

    Hell, it’s hard for most of them to go more than a week without reminding an unsuspecting Englishman that “we kicked your ass in 1776 and if it weren’t for us, you’d be speaking German.” On the other hand, some of my English friends do still insist on referring to the US as “the Colonies”.

    What I think most people fail to understand is that nationalism is not rooted in hate, but in love. It is love for one’s own people, one’s own kind. The artificial substitution of “country”, as in the sense of “geographical place with a government” for “nation” in the sense of “genetically kindred people”, has confused the issue for a long time.

    Nationalism is why “Sweet Home Alabama” strikes a deep chord in everyone who hears it, even if they have never been in the United States and couldn’t find Alabama on a map. It’s a love song by a southern man to his own people, and even if we don’t share that particular love, we understand it, we recognize it. And anyhow, Southern Man need not hate Neil Young to know he doesn’t need Neil Young around.

    Citizenship is ersatz nationalism. It is false, it is fake. Unless you understand the difference between citizenship and nationalism, you will not be able to make much sense of the events of the coming decades.

    RIP John Hill

    I never met the man nor knew anything about him, but as a wargamer in general and an ASLer in particular, one can’t help feel a genuine sense of loss upon hearing the news of his death.

    John Hill is most known as the designer of the extremely popular Avalon Hill board game Squad Leader in 1977. Hill founded Conflict Games Company in the late 1960s and owned a hobby shop, The Scale, in Lafayette, Indiana, for several years. Among his many titles were Verdun, Kasserine Pass, Overlord, Battle For Stalingrad, Tank Leader, Eastern Front Tank Leader and many others. He also designed Hue, based upon the fighting near the City of Hue in the Vietnam War.

    In 1978, Hill was named to the Wargaming Hall of Fame, receiving the Charles S. Roberts Award at the Origins gaming convention in Chester, Pennsylvania, on June 23, 1979.

    As the developer of the morale model and the champion of the design-for-effect philosophy, he influenced a wide variety of games, both tabletop and electronic.

    The troubling math

    Percentages are not the only problem. Quantities matter too. Ian Tuttle points out the troubling math on National Review:

    Demographics may not be the whole of destiny, but they are certainly a good part, and across the Atlantic, the United States seems increasingly to be turning toward Western Europe’s most undesirable demographic trends.

    In 1992, 41 percent of new permanent residents in the United States — green-card holders — hailed from the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and North Africa, or sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Pew Research Center. A decade later, the percentage was 53 percent. Over that same period, predictably, the number of Muslim immigrants coming to the United States annually has doubled, from 50,000 to approximately 100,000 each year. In 1992, only 5 percent of Muslim immigrants came from sub-Saharan Africa; 20 years later, it was 16 percent. Of the 2.75 million Muslims in the United States in 2011, 1.7 million were legal permanent residents.

    There is no official estimate of Muslims in the U.S.; religious affiliation is not tracked by the Census Bureau. However, Pew’s estimate of 2.75 million seems to be on the lower end. The Council on American-Islamic Relations says there are approximately 7 million Muslims in the country.

    Now consider the following information about France:

    According to the French Government, which does not have the right to ask direct questions about religion and uses a criterion of people’s geographic origin as a basis for calculation, there were between 5 to 6 million Muslims in metropolitan France in 2010. The government counted all those people in France who migrated from countries with a dominant Muslim population, or whose parents did. Only 33% of those 5 to 6 million people (2 million) said they were practicing believers. That figure is the same as that obtained by the INED/INSEE study in October 2010…. A Pew Forum study, published in January 2011, estimated 4.7 million Muslims in France in 2010 (and forecasted 6.9 million in 2030).

    Translation: there may already be more Muslims in the USA than in France. (NB: metropolitan does not mean urban France, but continental France.) And in percentage terms, if one uses the maximum reported numbers on both sides, the Muslim population is 2.1 percent of the US population, versus 7.6 percent for Europe. However, the European total includes Albania, Russia, Kosovo, and Bosnia; which are either Islamic nations or contain vast semi-autonomous Islamic enclaves. Once those are removed, as Chechnya is no more properly part of Europe than Turkey or Saudi Arabia, the Islamic percentage of the European population falls to 3.9 percent. Note that about half of all Muslims resident in “Europe” are in Russia.

    As one of my friends from Minnesota noted, she sees considerably more Muslims in Minneapolis than she saw in Rome last summer. I was in a moderately sized Italian city last week and I saw precisely zero. The reason for the false impression is twofold. First, Europeans keep Muslims in what are essentially Islamic ghettos in the major cities, the notorious no-go zones. Second, with the exception of the British, the Europeans are much more openly nationalistic and few consider Muslim residents to be of their nation.

    But percentages are not magic. There is no precise quantity of individuals required to produce two, or ten, or one hundred, who are willing to engage in direct action. If the nation of Europe enjoy the advantage of their greater sense of nationalism and parliamentary systems that permit the rapid growth of non-mainstream parties, the American advantages are its stronger Christianity and its heavily armed population. But on neither side of the Atlantic should the pro-civilization forces assume that their eventual victory over the invasion is guaranteed. All civilizations fall in time, and the fact that the first two waves of Islamic expansion were turned back does not necessarily mean the third will be.