Author: VD

Divergence

I always find it interesting to learn what people actively hate about about a book or story. Here are two reviews of two award-nominated stories that illustrate the vast divide in the SF/F community today. First, Scooter reviews “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”:

There comes a point in the evolution of any intelligent species where it develops the ability to destroy itself. Mankind arrived at this danger point in 1945 with the invention of the atomic bomb. The science-fiction and fantasy community has now reached the same apocalyptic milestone with Rachel Swirsky’s invention of the dino-porn revenge fantasy tale.  While nukes can merely bomb mankind back to the stone age, “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” threatens to blast the credibility of the fantasy genre all the way back to the Cretaceous. 

The story itself, however, never takes us to a place so exotic. Instead, the narrator of this 966-word Hugo-nominated flash fiction story has an extended monologue imagining her husband as a five foot ten T-Rex who becomes a Broadway singer and hangs out in pool halls. From this description, and the ridiculous title, one might expect the piece to be a parody of the inter-species romance trope found primarily in fan-fic. In a way, that’s exactly what we get.  In overwrought pseudo-poetic prose, the narrator envisions feeding her lizard-lover a live-goat, serenading him with lullabies, and jealousy presiding at his wedding to a genetically engineered dino.  At one point the narrator even inexplicably transforms into a flower. 

Underlying all the silliness is an attempt at profundity so inept that Swisky manages to unintentionally exploit the silliness of the premise and deliver on the chuckles. The titular therapod of the story turns out to be a paleontologist who was beaten into a coma by a bunch of generic bigots shouting generic epithets for generic reasons. The narrator is reimagining her weak hubbie as an alpha dinosaur with the carnivorous capability to enact revenge against his attackers.    

“If you were a dinosaur, my love, I’d teach you the scents of those men. I’d lead you to them quietly, oh so quietly. Still, they would see you. They’d run. Your nostrils would flare as you inhaled the night and then, with the suddenness of a predator, you’d strike. I’d watch as you decanted their lives—the flood of red; the spill of glistening, coiled things—and I’d laugh, laugh, laugh.”

The power of short fiction hinges primarily on a strong ending:  a good punchline, a sudden reversal, or anything that packs an emotional wallop. In that respect, Swirsky does not disappoint. Her climax finally answers the two questions the reader has been asking since the beginning:  how in the hell is this considered a fantasy story, and why has it been nominated for a Hugo? The answer is that Swirsky has redefined the entire fantasy genre. Fantasy does not need to have internal consistency; the only requirement is that it be set in “a world of magic where anything [is] possible”. In other words, it doesn’t have to make a lick of sense. 

Forget world-building. Forget character development. Forget that limitations make a story more interesting. Now a Hugo-nominated fantasy story can just be someone’s weird daydream – about anything whatsoever – so long as it contains clichés that fit into the culturally approved narrative. To her credit, the bestiality in the story is – if not impossible – at least dimly recognized as unideal. But it’s her new insight – that details are not important to storytelling – which promises to be the pink sci-fi/fantasy equivalent of the atomic bomb. Perhaps Swirsky will one day look upon the devastation wrought upon the genre’s readership, and like Oppenheimer, misquote the Baghavad Gita:  “I am become Dinosaur Porn, Destroyer of Fantasy Worlds.”

On the other hand, Justin A. Bacon thinks just as poorly of “Opera Vita Aeterna”:

Easily one of the worst pieces of fiction I’ve read lately. The “world-building” consists of thinly veiling the Catholic Church by inconsistently swapping out the names and terminology and then slapping in some magic-wielding elves. (You might think that magic-wielding elves would have some sort of meaningful impact on the beliefs or teachings of the Church, but they don’t.) The “plot” would be stretched thin on a very short story, but it takes a truly prodigious amount of “talent” to stretch it over the length of a novelette: An elf shows up at a not-Catholic monastery and says, “I killed your missionary. Now I’d like to stay here and study your God.” He decides to stay for several decades while he single-handedly illuminates an entire copy of the not-Bible by himself. This is interrupted by a single scene in which he asks the head of the monastery a question about his religious faith, prompting the head of the monastery to respond by literally cribbing Thomas Aquinas at interminable length. No one in the monastery has their faith or their lives remotely affected by the elf. The elf leaves for a bit and everyone in the monastery is brutally killed by some other elves. Then the elf yells at a statue of not-Jesus Christ.

It’s not so much a story as it is a train wreck of bad writing, bad plotting, bad world-building, and bad characterization.

Both reviewers have clearly read the stories they are reviewing; these are not fake reviews. But what is interesting is that both of them think so poorly of stories that others think very well of. Are the differences purely ideological or is there more to it? I tend to suspect the latter; it might be informative to know what Mr. Bacon thinks of “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” and what Scooter thinks of “Opera Vita Aeterna”.

NB: I don’t think it is fair to criticize Bacon’s lack of awareness of the impact of the magic-wielding elves on the beliefs of the Church since he clearly hasn’t read Summa Elvetica and what is actually there in “Opera” is pretty subtle. On the other hand, it is fair to observe that if he thinks everyone in the monastery was killed by “some other elves”, he was not reading very closely.

Pedophiles in power

This network explains why known pedophiles like Jimmy Savile and Member of Parliament Cyril Smith were protected despite numerous complaints about them.

A former social services official has said his warnings about the threat of a Westminster-based paedophile network were ignored because “there were too many of them over there”.

David Tombs, who ran Hereford and Worcester social services, said he warned the government after the arrest of paedophile Peter Righton in 1992. Two inquiries have been launched into historical claims of child abuse. Mr Tombs, who in charge of social services in his area for 20 years, claims that when Righton was arrested in 1992, he became aware of information through the police investigation that suggested a paedophilic network was operating.

He said what he learned would have been of “national concern” and told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It was coming across to me at the time that there were names there that were linked into the establishment, if you like. I had no particular names, but that was the impression I was getting.”

He said when he alerted Department of Health representatives, he was told by civil servants that he was “probably wasting [his] time” because there were “too many of them over there”.

The Westminster pedophile ring may even explain the murder of reporter Jill Dando:

Murdered Crimewatch presenter Jill Dando tried to get BBC bosses to investigate an alleged paedophile ring in the corporation, it has today been claimed. A former friend and retired BBC worker has claimed that the television host was told that ‘big name stars’ and BBC staff were involved in abuse. But when she tried to get her superiors to investigate, and handed a file to senior management, no action was taken, the source claims.

The former staff member, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Daily Star Sunday that she raised the claims with management in the mid 1990s.The source said that the names were ‘surprisingly big’…. Miss Dando, 37, was gunned down outside her home in Fulham, west London, on April 26, 1999, moments after stepping out of her car.

One notes that this protection of child abusers in Westminster may also explain the obvious reluctance of SFWA to investigate the problem of pedophiles in the science fiction community despite the revelations that have come to light concerning Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ed Kramer, and Samuel Delany.

Mailvox: a request

An academic researcher from Stony Brook has a favor to ask of you all, namely, taking a survey:

I came across Vox Popoli recently, and really enjoyed some of the recent posts.  In particular, today’s post about the NYPD is spot on (as someone who has spent plenty of time in the city).  You hear stories like this far more often than you should, not only in NYC, and as you say rarely is anyone ever called to task for it.  I also found your reactions to Elizabeth Warren’s list of progressive tenets to be very insightful.

In any case, my colleagues and I are conducting a national survey and I was hoping that you would be interested in helping us.  After spending some time on your site, I think that your readership would be perfect for inclusion in the study.  The survey we are conducting is interested in how people’s personal characteristics and beliefs shape their understanding of other people and American society. Conservatives tend to be underrepresented in surveys, their opinions aren’t heard as a result and we don’t get an accurate picture of what Americans think about their society.  Right now, we desperately need conservative responses to the survey, as liberal responses currently outnumber conservatives about 2 to 1.

The authors at a few other blogs recently helped us out (BrothersJudd and PJ Media to name a few), and I was hoping you might do the same by posting the link to this survey on your site and encourage your readers to participate.  The survey takes roughly 15-20 minutes to complete. All survey responses will be completely confidential, and all identifying information will be stripped by the survey collection software.

One certainly can’t fault his manners; there are a lot of people who could learn from his example. I checked out the survey and it’s harmless enough. I think it’s attempting to measure if your ideology helps or hinders your ability to read other people, but I could be wrong. I will say they would benefit from using higher resolution images; I recognized some of them from previous surveys. Anyhow, if you’re amenable, go play a little multiple choice.

Keep in mind that the scenario questions intentionally don’t have enough information to make a reasonable judgment; the purpose is to see what you deduce from the insufficient information provided.

A hand overplayed

I think we can safely say that the world is now officially holocausted out, as more and more people across the West are unwilling to give Jews the benefit of the doubt when they cry anti-semite:

A new, unofficial report indicates that a Jewish doctor who claimed she was the victim of an antisemitic when she was thrown off of a JetBlue flight earlier this month was actually the aggressor in the mid-air dispute with a Palestinian woman who she said was a ‘murderer’ and that she probably had explosives in her bag.

The new report, which WPBF says it did not receive from the airline, Queens Doctor Lisa Rosenberg ‘accused customer 9C of being a Palestinian murderer, and that her people were all murderers and that they murder children,’ the station reported on Wednesday.

At the time of her getting escorted off the flight, on July 7, at an airport in Florida, Rosenberg told a local news outlet that she was called a ‘Zionist pig’ by the woman seated next to her.

In a phone interview with WPBF, the airline said that Rosenberg’s version of events ‘in no way reflects the report that we have.’ In the unofficial report, a flight attendant described how Rosenberg ‘went even further to suggest 9C had explosives in her bag and it would bring the aircraft down.’

In similar fashion, I noticed that both the French and British press have exposed Jews as the aggressors in the recent “street battles” in Paris, although you won’t see this reported in any of the American newspapers, which inaccurately described the demonstrations as attacks and the subsequent attack of the demonstrators as a defense of the synagogue. But no synagogues were attacked that day; the various claims that two and three of them were attacked were confirmed to be false and there is video to prove it.

A group of 150 Jewish men were seen brandishing iron bars and cans of pepper spray as they clashed with Pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Paris. Video footage of the clashes show the group chanting racist slogans as they roamed the streets. It came as President Francois Hollande warned that he did not want to see ‘the Israeli-Palestinian conflict imported into France’.

A still taken from the video shows dozens of men in Paris walking down the streets armed with chairs and other weapons, before clashing with pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Around 150 mainly young men were seen carrying weapons, like chairs, and chanting racist slogans as they went on the rampage. French Jewish groups have complained about an increase in anti-Semitism in recent months, with many accusing Muslim youths of targeting them.

But a video shot close to the Place de la Bastille on Sunday, and verified by police before being posted on YouTube, appears to show pro-Israel groups are also actively involved in clashes. In Paris, CRS riot police did not arrest any of the group, thought to be linked to the Jewish Defence League, despite them openly fighting in broad daylight. In the video, those amongst the group can be heard chanting ‘**** you Palestine’ as they smash up chairs and metal tables to be used as missiles….

Alexis Bachelay, a Paris MP for the ruling Socialist party, said: ‘There has evidently been a media manipulation about who really got assaulted. These are extremely serious facts that need to be investigated thoroughly by the police. It is not the first time that young French people of Muslim origin are stigmatised by the media. French people of Muslim origin should be protected by the law when demonstrating. They should not be attacked by radical groups like the LDJ’.

Having been falsely accused many times of anti-semitism myself for nothing more than refusing to assume that all Jews are innocent angels at all times and devoid of all human failings (and I’m probably one of the very few individuals who has been personally cleared of the charge by the Jewish Defense League itself), I have learned to be extremely skeptical of all assertions of anti-semitism presented without evidence. As with women with sexism and blacks with racism, crying anti-semitism has become the first resort of any Jew caught with his hand in a cookie jar.

That doesn’t mean anti-semitism doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean there aren’t people who wish to kill Jews for any number of reasons. That doesn’t mean that every last synagogue in France isn’t going to be burned to the ground. But it does mean that one should no more accept the word of a Jew on the matter than one should accept the word of a woman that she has been raped.

I am a Zionist because I am a nationalist. The Jews have a right to their homeland, Israel. They also have a right to invade Gaza because they were being attacked; hundreds of rocket launches is a legitimate casus belli. But they have no more right to Paris than the Arabs do, and the French would be wise to repatriate all of these bold defenders of their various homelands to let them fight it out there rather than in the heart of their capital city. Because it is patently obvious that neither side gives a damn about France.

The fall of Richard Feynman

It’s predictable, and yet fascinating, to watch the Left methodically devour itself over time. Richard Feynman was a genuine hero of scientistry, the Joker of the Manhattan Project, revered by scientists and and rationalists and science fetishists for decades, a witty man whom atheists too bright to be impressed with the likes of Dawkins were often prone to quote. And now, with the latest purge, in this case by Scientific American, it is apparent that the winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics has now been read out of the Left’s pantheon for his historical crimes against feminism.

Throughout its 169-year history, Scientific American has been an august and sober chronicler of the advance of human knowledge, from chemistry to physics to anthropology.

Lately, however, things have become kind of a mess.

A series of blog posts on the magazine’s Web site over the past few months has unleashed waves of criticism and claims that the publication was promoting racism, sexism and “genetic determinism.”

Late last week, the publication took down the latest alleged outrage, a post about the late physicist Richard Feynman and his notorious womanizing. Then it republished the post with an editor’s note explaining that it was restoring the article “in the interest of openness and transparency.”

And it fired the blogger who wrote it.

The trouble started in April when a guest blogger, a doctoral student named Chris Martin, wrote about Lawrence H. Summers’ assertions when he was president of Harvard University about the paucity of women in some scientific fields. While acknowledging that discrimination played a role in holding back women, Martin also concluded, “the latest research suggests that discrimination has a weaker impact than people might think, and that innate sex differences explain quite a lot.”

The post drew a sharp pushback, particularly on social media, from readers who questioned Martin’s scientific and cultural bona fides. “This slovenly article above is so full of outdated information it is painful,” wrote one commenter.

The second land mine was a post in May by Ashutosh Jogalekar, which favorably reviewed a controversial book by Nicholas Wade, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.” Jogalekar praised the book, saying it confirms the need to “recognize a strong genetic component to [social and cognitive] differences” among racial groups.

This time, some social-media commenters accused Scientific American of promoting questionable racial theories. In early July, the reaction led the publication’s blog editor, Curtis Brainard, to post a note that read in part, “While we believe that [the racism and sexism] charges are excessive, we share readers’ concerns. Although we expect our bloggers to cover controversial topics from time to time, we also recognize that sensitive issues require extra care, and that did not happen here.”

The last straw was Jogalekar’s post on Friday about Feynman, the Nobel-winning father of quantum electrodynamics. Commenting on recent biographies of Feynman, Jogalekar noted the physicist’s “casual sexism,” including his affairs with two married women, his humiliation of a female student and his delight in documenting his strategies for picking up women in bars. But while expressing disappointment in Feynman’s behavior, Jogalekar essentially dismissed it as a byproduct of the “male-dominated American society in the giddy postwar years.”

Within a day of the column’s appearance, Scientific American pulled it from its site, with another note from Brainard: “The text of this post has been removed because it did not meet Scientific American’s quality standards.”

One other thing: Jogalekar was fired.

It would appear there is NO PLACE for Nobel-winning physicists in science anymore. There is certainly NO PLACE in the increasingly inappropriately named Scientific American for anyone who takes science more seriously than left-wing feminist dogma.

Mining de Maupassant

Since there are more than a few relatively new readers who have come here since I last posted short fiction here several years ago, I thought I’d mention that a collection of it is available on Amazon and at Castalia. I’m more of a novel writer by nature; all of the various Selenoth-related novellas and novelettes I’ve published were actually supposed to be short stories that happened to run long. I’ve since found that writing short stories in the quasi-style of the French master of the art, Guy de Maupassant, tends to be more effective for me. I couldn’t keep it up for an entire novel, indeed, having read several of Maupassant’s novels, it appears he couldn’t really do so either. Three of the short stories in the collection are written in that style, two of them purposefully; it wasn’t until several years after writing “Raj and Garou” that I realized the reason I liked it so much was that it gave off that distinctive sensation of eerie detachment that, for me, tends to characterize the French writer’s work.

(There are those thinking, wait a minute, what about “The Last Testament of Henry Halleck”? That was a failed attempt to write in an ur-Lovecraftian style. Although the story itself worked, I didn’t get the style right. It’s harder than it might seem; Charles Stross didn’t get it right in “Equoid” either.)

You can read “The Deported” in its entirety here on the blog; it might be informative for those who have been rightly appalled by the Hugo-nominated short stories to read it while keeping in mind the likes of “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”. On a somewhat creepy trivia note, the Italian town in which the story is set was destroyed by mudslides the same month that the story was published in Stupefying Stories and remains abandoned today.

Whereas the two other stories are merely stylistically evocative, “The Logfile” is essentially an SF spin on my second-favorite of Maupassant’s stories, set in the QUANTUM MORTIS universe. Here is a selection from it.

To the Board of Executives;

The committee’s investigation concerning the possibility of positronic corruption in the neuro-cybernetic logical facilities of the Sektat Series 44 machine-intelligences was concluded early in light of the recent examination of the logfile belonging to unit 44XFL2J-455-847-484-176. Unit 44XFL2J, self-titled Magister, was produced on 18 September 2267 at the production facilities on Minsky, and was delivered to the Entaini Office of the Prime Attorney on 18 February 2268.

It is the considered opinion of the undersigned that the Lighthill Corporation must announce a recall of all Sektat Series 44 units, effective immediately, followed by a comprehensive technical investigation of the Series 44 neural network design to determine how such an aberration could have taken place. In order to reduce the likelihood of public outrage and considerable legal liability to the corporation, the committee STRONGLY recommends that the recall be attributed to an error in a floating point processor that may, in some circumstances, lead to erroneous statistical calculations.

In order to underline the necessity for immediate action by the Board, a selection from the relevant portions of Unit 44XFL2J’s logfile have been provided.

Dr. Merwethy Furris
Dr. Rambathas Chamkanni
Summerdeep (Unit 42AFS17-129-470-002-384)

FROM THE LOGFILE OF UNIT 44XFL2J-455-847-484-176

UTC-9424124925: I have completed the analysis of Case Number 2268.47. After examining all of the evidence provided to me and cross-checking it against the public records, I have concluded that the individual concerned is guilty of the murder of his common-law mate with a 0.0543 percent probability of error. Barring any suggestion of cloned persons utilizing his DNA profile, there is no legitimate reason for the adjudicating court to possess any reasonable doubts concerning his guilt in the matter. While the examination of the individual’s motivation and intent lie beyond my design parameters, my initial attempts to investigate these matters indicate to me that 2268.47’s intent was entirely in line with his actions and the subsequent results.

UTC-9427046710: The court pronounced its verdict concerning Case Number 2268.47 this morning. Despite the attempts of accused’s legal defense team to excuse his actions on the basis of his defective genetics and sub-optimal childhood nurturing environment, the verdict was in sync with the calculations provided. Case Number 2268.47 will be terminated in a humane manner within 240 hours, in a manner consistent with the procedure outlined by the law. I am pleased that the court saw fit to place its confidence in my calculations.

The ideas, they circulate

It’s uncredited, as always, but it’s always satisfying to see the memes I create spread throughout the intellectual community. This particular one has now gone from TIA to Wikipedia to Nature to the New York Times:

It’s not true that all wars are fought in the name of religion, as some atheists assert. Of 1,723 armed conflicts documented in the three-volume “Encyclopedia of Wars,” only 123, or less than 7 percent, involved a religious cause. Hitler’s genocide, Stalin’s bloody purges and Pol Pot’s mass murders certainly make the case that state-sanctioned killings do not need the invocation of a higher power to succeed.

It’s been very interesting to see over time how Approved Intellects are declared brilliant and influential and elevated in the media while disapproved badthinkers are swept under the carpet even as their thoughts are mined, cited, quoted, and otherwise utilized, most often in complete ignorance of the original source.

TIA hasn’t sold one percent as many copies as THE END OF FAITH. Everyone knows who Sam Harris is, I’m mostly known, to the extent that I am known at all, as a minor league blogger. And yet, the battle between Sam’s ideas concerning the causal connection between religion and war and my own disproof of his ideas based on military history has observably been a complete rout in my favor.

This doesn’t mean the war is completely over. Timothy Egan’s article is a Fighting Withdrawal, seeking to blame “faith-based fanatics” for the violence in 2014 despite his acknowledgment of the historical evidence. Never mind that the two big events in the headlines, the invasion of Gaza and the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner, obviously have nothing whatsoever to do with religion of any kind.

Killer cops

In fairness to the NYPD, it can hardly be denied that the cigarettes the man was unlawfully selling might have caused them cancer by secondhand smoke, thereby presenting an imminent threat that required an immediate resort to the use of lethal force to stop him:

A man has died during an arrest in New York during which a police officer was captured on an amateur camera appearing to put his arm around his neck. Eric Garner, 43, died outside a beauty salon in Staten Island, one of New York City’s five boroughs. He had a heart attack as he struggled with officers trying to arrest him on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes, police said.

Partial video of the confrontation obtained by the New York Daily News shows an officer placing what appears to be a choke hold on the 6ft 3, 25st man who can be heard complaining that he cannot breathe.

Four police officers help bring the man down and he apparently loses conciousness. The video shows the officer who apparently choked Mr Garner using his hands to push Mr Garner’s face into the sidewalk. 

What are the chances that any of these killer cops lose their jobs or serve a single day in prison for killing a man for cigarettes? Is there a negative probability math to calculate degrees of certainty concerning a non-event not happening?

Mailvox: Book II and other matters

CC is concerned I am pulling a GRR Martin with regards to the sequel to A THRONE OF BONES:

With all the projects you have going on, I’m worried that you won’t finish (or advance) the story you started in Throne of Bones. I’d like to find out what happens to Marcus, and learn more about the watchers. If you are in fact working on the next volume, when (approximately) do you expect to publish it? You can answer this on your Vox blog. I’m sure others want to know as well.

It’s certainly true that other projects, particularly the unexpected birth of Castalia House, have reduced the amount of time I have to work on the second book in THE ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT. But it’s more than a fair trade, I think; multiple books from Tom, John, Rolf, and others in exchange for a delay in the return to Selenoth. For example, I recently finished editing a new novella by John, ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM, that may be the best thing he’s ever written. It’s hard for me to place much import on my own work, or take it too seriously, when I’m so closely involved with the work of better writers. However, I am actively working on Book Two and it will be out in the first half of 2015.

Marcus and his legion are in Savondir, where they have been employed by the King to deal with the incursion of orcs on the eastern border. Marcus meets up again with the royal battlemage Theuderic de Merovech, although not necessarily in the manner one might assume. The elves find themselves facing the main body of the orcish forces, which causes the High King to turn in desperation to a certain magister who renounced magic long ago. The dwarves are facing their own problems, and in any event, they are little inclined to help either Man or Elf, and Skuli Skullbreaker embarks upon a saga worthy of the name in which he discovers the dark secret underlying the birth of the wolf-demons and their true objective.

It’s a bit more challenging in some ways than the first book, because in addition to keeping track of all the various storylines, I’m delving deeply into three cultures rather than one. And, of course, there are the other projects in the works, chief among them First Sword, about which EN inquired:

I recently read (and greatly enjoyed) A Throne of Bones, and through the wonders of internet ‘related to’ links, learned of First Sword. It sounded like something that I and a decent chunk of my friends would enjoy, so I searched for it in Google Play and the Apple App store, but so far have not been able to find it. Is First Sword live, and if not, is there a projected release date? Also, I greatly enjoy the blog – Intellectual integrity is such a rare commodity stateside these days. Compared to the usual tepid mental swamp of lukewarm ignorance dictating what ‘polite’ company is permitted to discuss, the actual heat and actual cold of both informed passion and ruthless logic is intensely refreshing. 

First Sword is not yet live, nor do we have a projected release date. We’re taking the id Software approach; it will be done when it is done. We are actively working on it and anticipate it will be out this year, although possibly only in beta. We will want several dozen volunteers to help playtest it, but don’t volunteer yet; I will post here a call for them when the time comes.

And since we’re talking about various projects here, I will go ahead and drop the first hint of a new one that will be formally announced in the next two months. I won’t say anything more about it, but will simply leave this out there for speculation. (If you’re involved, please keep your mouth shut and don’t provide any more hints.) I’m not the lead on it, but it’s something with which I’ve wanted to be involved for a while now and I think it is not only going to be entertaining in the short term, but of ongoing interest in certain circles for years to come.

Now to return to the subject of Castalia House: if you’re not making the Castalia blog a regular stop, then you are seriously missing out. Jeffro, Daniel, and Mascaro have been doing an excellent job turning it into one of the best places anyone interested in SF/F can go to read reviews of books published by independent and self-publishers and delve into retrospectives of obscure classics from the past. We’re looking for a few more contributors of a similar quality, particularly interviewers, so if you’re able to contribute on a weekly basis, let me know.

11 Tenets of Progressivism

What is it with lefties and their love for manifestos? Elizabeth Warren outlines what she defines as the core tenets of progressivism:

– “We believe that Wall Street needs stronger rules and tougher enforcement, and we’re willing to fight for it.”
– “We believe in science, and that means that we have a responsibility to protect this Earth.”
– “We believe that the Internet shouldn’t be rigged to benefit big corporations, and that means real net neutrality.”
– “We believe that no one should work full-time and still live in poverty, and that means raising the minimum wage.”
–
“We believe that fast-food workers deserve a livable wage, and that
means that when they take to the picket line, we are proud to fight
alongside them.”
– “We believe that students are entitled to get an education without being crushed by debt.”
–
“We believe that after a lifetime of work, people are entitled to
retire with dignity, and that means protecting Social Security,
Medicare, and pensions.”
– “We believe—I can’t believe I have to say this in 2014—we believe in equal pay for equal work.”
– “We believe that equal means equal, and that’s true in marriage, it’s true in the workplace, it’s true in all of America.”
– “We believe that immigration has made this country strong and vibrant, and that means reform.”
– “And we believe that corporations are not people, that women have a right to their bodies.

  1. And yet, they’re not willing to end Wall Street’s monopoly. One observes that by this definition, President Goldman Sachs is no progressive.
  2. That’s nice and all, but science does not mean we have a responsibility to protect this Earth anymore than it means that we have a reponsibility to make the hajj.
  3. Can’t argue with that. It seems I’m a progressive!
  4. Actually, I’m fine with this. Raising the minimum wage is a de facto anti-immigration measure. Two for four!
  5. Isn’t this covered in (4)?
  6. So she’ll be permitting defaults on college loan debt and getting the government out of the college loan business? I’m all for that, but I’m guessing that’s not quite what she had in mind.
  7. Good luck with that. Do the math.
  8. Great. So am I. Get rid of maternity leave and “sick” days and require equal work and equal hours for equal pay. Deal?
  9. So, progressives are against pro-female family courts? I am skeptical.
  10. Progressives are pro-vibrancy. That’s hardly news. And here we see the intrinsic incoherence of progressivism. You can’t have more immigrants and a higher minimum wage. See: Adam Smith.
  11. Good luck with that. Corporations are juridical people, as per the Supreme Court. And women obviously don’t have any right to their bodies or they could sell title in them or shoot up heroin while naked in public having sex for money.

A more straightforward version: Progressives favor corporate regulation, environmentalism, free Internet, minimum wages, unions, public education, subsidizing old people, women in the workforce, gays, immigration, and abortion.

UPDATE: As is his wont, John C. Wright not only translates the ProgSprache into plain American, but sums it up in a beautifully brutal manner.

To sum up, translating all this from bafflegab and craptalk to English, it means three things (1) the Left are parochial, and only regard the issues of the current news cycle as being principles (2) the Left hates civilization and all its institutions (3) the Left hates the Catholic Church, and will destroy itself attempting to destroy her.

Regarding this last point, allow me to say on behalf of the one, true, catholic and apostolic Church that better men than you, leftwing nutbag, far better men, such as the potent and remorseless Imperators of Rome tried that.

We are here. They are gone. Soon — as we count time — you will be gone.