Author: VD

É dia de Português

O planeta independente Rhysalan oferece Asilo para 1.462 governos
exilados. É responsabilidade do departamento de Xenocriminologia e
Relações Alienígenas da Divisão Militar de Investigação de Crimes manter
a rédea curta com as centenas de milhares de xenos residindo no
planeta. Assassinatos, revoluções, guerras civis e tentativas de
genocídios planetários fazem parte da rotina de trabalho do Subtenente
Comandante Graven Tower, da DMIC-XRA.

Em acréscimo a um aerovar armado com mísseis, à sua confiável Sphinx
CPB-18 e às políticas extremamente liberais da DMIC com relação a danos
colaterais e vítimas civis, o Comandante Tower é estimulado por sua
extrema xenofobia, assim como por uma inteligência de máquina com
aumento de realidade de categoria militar que acredita que encontrou
Deus. No meio deste cenário, quando os restos desintegrados do herdeiro
legítimo de uma casa real alienígena são descobertos nas ruas de Trans
Paradis, a questão não é tanto se no final os assassinos serão
encontrados, mas se são os criminosos ou os investigadores criminais que
vão contribuir mais para a soma total de mortos.

QUANTUM MORTIS é a série de mistério de Ficção Científica Militar
repleta de ação de Vox Day – indicado para o prêmio Hugo e autor da
série de fantasias épicas As Artes da Escuridão e da Luz – e Steve
Rzasa.

Thanks to Israel and Daniel, Castalia House has released its second and third books in Portuguese today. Two QUANTUM MORTIS books, Um Homem Desintegrado and Gravidade Mortal, have joined Uma Magia Perdida in our Portuguese language catalog. This should be useful for those, like The Perfect Aryan Male, who are brushing up on their Brazilian Portuguese. Please note that both Gravidade Mortal and Uma Magia Perdida will be free downloads tomorrow and Thursday.

And in other Castalia House news, we’re pleased to announce the first of our new bloggers. Jeff Johnson of the Space Gaming Blog will be posting on Mondays. Yesterday he got off on exactly the right foot with a review of the first of the new Traveller novels from Marc Miller, Fate of the Kinunir. The Castalia House blog is rapidly becoming a destination in its own right, with four new bloggers joining Daniel, Mascaro, and Anson in posting essays, book reviews and interviews of independent and established authors alike. So, if you’re interested in following the Blue SF revolution as it proceeds, you’ll want to check it out on a regular basis.

Not a bad summary, actually

Our new friend Damien nicely summarizes the heart of the SF/F Left-Right divide on Twitter. A more succinct paraphrase:

Right-wing sci-fi is about shooting the Other. Left-wing sci-fi is about fucking the Other.

This does explain the incessant Pink SF/F obsession with necrobestiality. As well as, for that matter, Larry Correia.

Speaking of Twitter, John Scalzi is, as usual, spinning, ever spinning. There are spiders who look at him in awe, and wonder where on Earth he finds the energy.

Once in a while I check to see if the racist sexist homophobic dipshits
are still railing that I exist in the world. They are. I smile.

Sure you’re smiling, Johnny. That’s why you stopped reporting your annual numbers in 2013. That’s why you shut down your Quantcast reports. That’s why you don’t post a traffic meter anywhere on your site. That’s why you threatened to quit SFWA. No one is “railing that [you] exist in the world”. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find your constant snake oil salesmanship genuinely amusing. You’re the Bernie Madoff of science fiction and you’ve got the Participation Hugo to prove it.

Now, did you forget that you tried the “I’m so loving this” routine before you finally cracked and let your real feelings show? Look, there is nothing wrong with being upset and embarrassed about being caught out inflating your bio. But piling on lie after lie after lie just isn’t convincing very many people anymore.

June will mark the fifteenth straight month that my average site traffic exceeds your best month ever… by more than 120,000 pageviews. And the main reason your blog is in relative decline is because you lack the self-confidence to be honest with your readers.

But hey, keep smiling!

They are not members of US society

The federal government is aiding and abetting a large-scale invasion of the USA:

“We’re taking a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement announcing the plan.

“How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings — many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking — goes to the core of who we are as a nation,” he said.

Known as unaccompanied alien children, they are generally from Central America, are escaping poverty, abuse or dangerous gangs back home, and make the harrowing trek through Mexico and across the U.S. border.

The government expects more than 90,000 of the children to be apprehended on the U.S. side of the border this year and more than 140,000 to be caught next year. That doesn’t include the tens of thousands more who avoid capture.

This Children’s Crusade is more than three times larger than Napoleon’s army at Waterloo.  The USA should be defending the borders against them, not hiring them lawyers. And Cantor and company should be impeaching Obama for this, not trying to help him push through the amnesty program for illegals that sparked this latest invasion.

If it was not already obvious that the post-1965 immigration program will destroy the USA, this latest twist should make it abundantly clear. Perhaps we should simply send one unaccompanied immigrant child to every voter who has supported immigration in the past. And this puts the lie to the myth that immigrants are just hard-working people seeking opportunity.

An informative police lesson

It should be educational to discover if it is now deemed more acceptable for the police to murder unarmed civilians than to refuse to work at a gay pride parade:

A Salt Lake City police officer has been placed on leave after refusing an assignment to work at a gay pride parade. The officer was among about 30 officers assigned to provide traffic control and security for the annual Utah Pride Parade on Sunday in Salt Lake City, said department spokeswoman Lara Jones.

“We don’t tolerate bias and bigotry in the department, and assignments are assignments … To allow personal opinion to enter into whether an officer will take a post is not something that can be tolerated in a police department,” Jones told KSL.

Now, in fairness, most police officers who shoot and kill grandmothers, puppies, and people living at the wrong address are placed on leave too. But they are subsequently found not guilty of any wrongdoing and eventually return to their jobs without any fanfare. It will therefore be interesting to learn if this Salt Lake City officer is eventually fired or not.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the police would have been arresting all of the exhibitionists flaunting their sexual abnormality. Some call this progress. But not, I think, for very much longer.

Why Amazon are the good guys

Hugh Howey makes many of the same points I have concerning the Amazon-Hatchette battle, only in more detail, and he reminds everyone that the behavior of the Big 5 publishing cartel from which Amazon has liberated authors is worse than most people know:

The real monopoly, once you start examining business practices and attitudes, is Big Publishing itself, a group so entrenched with one another and indistinguishable from one another that they simply go by the collective moniker: The Big 5.

Their contracts are functionally identical. Their e-book royalties (and most others terms and clauses) are lockstep and are not negotiable. They have a history of working together in a noncompetitive fashion in order to raise prices for their customers (prices that they would love to set at twice what mass market paperbacks formerly cost). Conferring by phone or email in this culture is considered polite, not illegal. It wasn’t long ago that top editors at the major houses would meet on Wednesdays to discuss the bestseller list, to congratulate one another on acquisitions, and to discuss business plans and practices. All completely normal. Celebrated, even.

When members of the Big 5 do compete (truly compete, not just offer varying marketing promises and sizes of advances), the offender needs to be reigned in quickly. When Simon & Schuster innovated with print-only deals—thereby landing bestselling authors who were otherwise never going to sign with any major publisher—the resulting press on these deals (and likely pressure from other publishers) caused an immediate retreat. The poor publisher who stepped out of line dutifully pulled back into rank. Print-only deals were no longer on the table. Contracts snapped back to their immutable and noncompetitive form.

Or what about the “most favored nation clauses?” These pernicious contractual entities stipulate that any authors who get higher royalties in the future will trigger a retroactive match in royalties for select existing authors. This is like a sports contract that simply stipulates “I’ll always be the highest paid player.” It hamstrings all the publishers in a knot of anti-competitiveness. Where is the outrage or the reporting? Once again, we have a hardening of the monoculture where dissent is impossible and innovation stifled. Instead, the major publishers play Monopoly like my boss used to.

Unable to tolerate a move toward democratic literature, where any voice is free to publish, where authors are paid 70% of list price instead of a mere 17.5%, they rely instead on appeals to litigation, on a public relations campaign within the press, and on collusion.

Another point that I have not seen anyone touch upon is that unlike the Big 5, Amazon gives authors direct access to international book-buying markets. Tomorrow, Castalia House will be releasing its second and third Brazilian Portuguese books, Um Homem Desintegrado and Gravidade Mortal. That simply would not have been possible if Steve and I were publishing through a traditional publisher.

However, this is the core point: “Why show support for a corporation that may lower royalties to 30% in the future when you can celebrate a corporation that pays 17.5% today? Why show support for a corporation that may raise prices in the future when you can champion a corporation that colludes to raise them today? The groupthink and absence of reason is baffling.”

There are two reasons. The first is that authors are conditioned to kowtow to the traditional gatekeepers. The second is that authors who are doing well under the current system are terrified that they may not be able to compete as effectively without being the structurally favored sons – and daughters – of the gatekeepers. And given what the gatekeepers have been favoring for the last two decades, I suspect their fears are well-justified.

One final note: it is ABSOLUTELY INSANE that the conventional publishers aren’t leveraging their one area of historical expertise by doing print-only deals. It’s the one thing they can do very well that the independents and self-publishers can’t as easily do, and in many cases, that the two groups won’t even bother doing. Instead, by insisting on being granted both print and ebook rights, they’ll usually end up with nothing.

Speaking of Amazon, the Hugo-nominated novelette “Opera Vita Aeterna” is a free download from Amazon today and tomorrow. Not only do the Big 5 publishers give away only a small fraction of the free books that Amazon does, but they junk their unsold stock rather than let anyone read them.

UPDATE: The Amazonians are voting with their downloads.

Lady Astronaut of Mars: #1,942 Free in Kindle Store
Opera Vita Aeterna:
#628 Free in Kindle Store

(Relax, I know the rankings are dynamic. This is more of that strange and unfamiliar concept called ‘humor’.)

It’s a mystery

What we have here is a failure of basic logic:

U.S. fertility is not recovering from the financial crisis — and demographers aren’t sure why. The fertility rate fell to a record low 62.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2013, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

The total number of births, at 3.96 million, inched up by a mere 4,000 from 2012, the first increase since the financial crisis. But the total fertility rate, or TFR, the average number of children a woman would have during her child-bearing years, fell to just 1.86, the lowest rate in 27 years. TFR is considered the best metric of fertility. A TFR of 2.1 represents a stable population, with children replacing parents as they die off.

Demographers expected the fertility rate to fall during recession, as financially strapped families put off childbearing. But what has surprised some demographers is both the depth of the decline and the fact that fertility has continued to drop even over the course of the country’s five years of slow but steady recovery. The rate has fallen steadily each year since 2007, when it stood at 2.1 percent.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and point out that since it is known that the economic statistics are massaged and seasonally-corrected and smoothed and retrofitted to the point of literal fiction (try to find the 2001 recession in the GDP statistics now), the more reasonable conclusion is that rather than an inexplicable change in historically observed human behavioral patterns, the U.S. economy has simply not been in the slow, but steady recovery reported by the relevant government agencies. Occam’s Razor indicates that the economy is not in a recovery, but an ongoing six-year depression, and as it happens, this can not only be seen in the falling fertility rates, but also in statistics that are not so easily manipulated as GDP, U3, and CPI-U.

An angry terror

It appears we may need to petition the White House to classify angry black women as a terrorist movement. I tend to suspect President Obama would be more than happy to sign it himself.

N. K. Jemisin ‏@nkjemisin 7h
They’re already watching my group

N. K. Jemisin @nkjemisin  ·  Jun 6
Everybody’s got a bomb

N. K. Jemisin @nkjemisin  ·  Jun 6
So I have to make choices. Burning bridges is unavoidable; whose gets set on fire first?

N. K. Jemisin @nkjemisin  ·  Jun 6
Just offered to kill one of my oldest friends

N. K. Jemisin @nkjemisin  ·  May 28
It needs to be made clear that the privileging of straight white male voices at the exp of all others won’t be tolerated.

N. K. Jemisin @nkjemisin  ·  May 15
We kinda need to see some shit blow up.

N. K. Jemisin @nkjemisin  ·  May 15
One of my co-workers just came into my office, took one look at my face, and walked out. #RestingKILLFace

It is not surprising that Jemisin is against the rights of men. She is, after all, a faux equalitarian, a race-baiting coward who tries to hide behind the idea that she is hated for her genetics and/or her sex rather than for her ideas and her actions. There is no reason to despise the woman for her melanin content, especially not when there is already so much to despise about her dishonesty, her emotional incontinence, her pinkshirted progressive neofascism, her overrated fiction, her slander of the living and the dead, and her avowed opposition to legal self-defense as well as the Constitutional rights to a) free speech, b) free association, and c) bearing arms.

Consider her bizarre concept of “harassment” and keep in mind that this is the very same woman who was “harassing” me five years before I had ever even heard of her:

N. K. Jemisin ‏@nkjemisin Jun 6
I can’t do – not to my fullest – if I have to constantly interact with people who *hate* me, not b/c of my actions but who I am.+

Vox Day ‏@voxday 3h
@nkjemisin Never fear, Ms Fully Savage and Proud of It, we only despise you for your actions. Just like the other pinkshirted fascists.

N. K. Jemisin ‏@nkjemisin 28m
@voxday Oh, look, fresh harassment. Must have missed this handle of yours. Welp, blocking you now. Don’t talk to me again.

Her courage never ceases to inspire! And I never cease to find it satisfying that so many of those who attack me unprovoked end up running away, pretending I don’t exist, and desperately wishing that I’d never mention them again. After more than 10 years of this blog, you’d think people would have learned better by now, but there is always some brave new progressive champion who can’t resist the urge to stick his hand into the woodchipper.

Mailvox: a case for the Singularity

James Miller, an econ professor at Smith and the author of Singularity Rising, asked if he could present his case for
the future likelihood of a Singularity. Or, as the Original Cyberpunk has described it, “the rapture of the nerds”. Since this is a place where we are always pleased to give both space and genuine consideration to diverse points of view, I readily agreed to his request.

I define a Singularity as a threshold of time at which AIs at least as
smart as humans and/or augmented human intelligence radically remake
civilization. 

1.  Rocks exist!
Strange as it seems, the existence of rocks actually
provides us with evidence that it should be possible to build computers
powerful enough to take us to a Singularity. 
There are around ten trillion, trillion atoms in a one-kilogram rock,
and as inventor and leading Singularity scholar Ray Kurzweil writes: “Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are
all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and
generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields.  All of this activity represents computation,
even if not very meaningfully organized.”

If the particles in the rock were organized in a more
“purposeful manner” it would be possible to create a computer trillions of
times more computationally powerful than all the human brains on earth
combined.   Our eventual capacity to
accomplish this is established by our second fact. 

2.  Biological cells exist!
The human body makes use of tiny biological machines to
create and repair cells.  Once mankind
masters this nanotechnology we will be able to cheaply create powerful
molecular computers.  Our third fact
proves that these computers could be turned into general purpose thinking
machines. 

3.  Human brains exist!
Suppose this book claimed that scientists would soon build a
human teleportation device.  Given that
many past predictions of scientific miracles—such as cheap fusion power, flying
cars or a cure for cancer—have come up short, you would rightly be suspicious
of my teleportation prediction.  But my
credibility would jump if I discovered a species of apes that had the inborn
ability to instantly transport themselves across great distances.

In some alternate universe that had different laws of
physics, it’s perfectly possible that intelligent machines couldn’t be created.  But human brains provide absolute proof that
our universe allows the construction of intelligent, self-aware machines.   And, because the brain exists already,
scientists can probe, dissect, scan and interrogate it.  We’re even beginning to understand the
brain’s DNA and protein-based ‘source code’. 
Also, many of the tools used to study the brain have been becoming
exponentially more powerful, which explains why engineers might be only a
couple of decades away from building a working digital model of the brain even
though today we seem far from understanding all of the brains operations.  Would-be creators of AI are already using
neuroscience research to help them create machine learning software.   Our fourth fact shows the fantastic
potential of AI. 

4.  Albert Einstein existed!

It’s extremely unlikely that the chaotic forces of evolution
just happened to stumble on the best possible recipe for intelligence when they
created our brains, especially since our brains have many constraints imposed
on them by biology: they must run on energy obtained from mere food; must fit
in a small space; and can’t use useful materials such as metals and plastics,
that engineers employ all the time.

But even if people such as Albert Einstein had close to the
highest possible level of intelligence allowed by the laws of physics, creating
a few million people or machines possessing this man’s brain power would still
change the world far more than the industrial revolution. We share about 98% of our genes with some primates, but that
2% difference was enough to produce creatures that can assemble spaceships,
sequence genes, and build hydrogen bombs.  
What happens when mankind takes its next step, and births lifeforms who
have a 2% genetic distance from us?  

5.  If we were smarter, we would be smarter!

Becoming smarter enhances our ability to do everything,
including our ability to figure out ways of becoming even smarter because our
intelligence is a reflective superpower able to turn on itself to decipher its
own workings.  Consider, for example, a
college student taking a focus-improving drug such as Adderall, Ritalin or
Provigil, to help learn genetics.  After
graduation, this student might get a job researching the genetic basis of human
intelligence, and her work might assist pharmaceutical companies in making
better cognitive enhancing drugs that will help future students acquire an even
deeper understanding of genetics. 
Smarter scientists could invent ways of making even smarter scientists
who could in turn… Now, throw the power of machine intelligence into this
positive feedback loop and we will end up at technological heights beyond our
imagination.  

I hereby recuse myself from the position of critic, mostly since my position on the concept can be best described as “mild, but curious skepticism”. But everyone should feel free to either express their doubts or offer additional arguments to bolster Prof. Miller’s case.

Another science fiction fraud?

I quite like David Brin’s Uplift Saga, particularly Startide Rising. It is innovative, insightful, and original. While it does betray a few hints of what would, in many later SF writers’ less-capable hands, blossom into full-blown political correctness, such strands do not detract from the story. Unlike the award-winning pinkshirts of today, Dr. Brin never sacrifices the story for his ideology.

There is no question that David Brin is an accomplished science fiction writer. His various awards are well-merited. However, it is apparent that in the course of debate, he likes to throw his weight around as a credentialed scientist, which one gentleman who has had a run-in or two with him is now calling into question:

You have repeatedly used your qualifications as a scientist to denigrate those who disagree with you, particularly on this issue…. If you are a scientist, where’s your scientific publications?  Your public sources list 6 papers in the scientific field in which you trained.  Based on your published Bio, three-to-four were from your Master’s, and two don’t really count, since they constitute a two-part paper authored by your Advisor with you in the “courtesy student author” slot. 

You have one main publication obviously from your PhD dissertation, but absolutely nothing for the next 8 years – where was your scholarly output as a post-graduate professional scientist?

You have only four scholarly papers since your PhD – one was SETI, three in fields other than what you trained, and one of those clearly marked “speculation” – where is there any evidence of you doing science?

All of your academic positions are for “instructor,” “post-doctoral fellow,” “associate,” “visiting scholar.” Nowhere do you list any faculty or academic scientific positions, neither do you list any actual scientific jobs – so how are you a practicing scientist without working in science?

You have 4 scientific publications in over 30 years, and no publications relevant to your scientific training in over 25 years.  How is it that you can currently claim to be a scientist?

If what scientists do is science, and if it is true that Dr. Brin has published no scientific papers in more than 25 years, then David Brin is clearly no longer a scientist and should not be attempting to claim that he is, Wikipedia’s description of him as “an American scientist and award-winning author of science fiction” notwithstanding. In such a case, a description as an ex-scientist or a former scientist would be more apt.

Especially given that one of his three featured “science” publications on ResearchGate is “Q&A: David Brin on writing fiction. Interview by Nicola Jones“.

If the writer has his facts straight and Dr. Brin has been appealing to his scientific credentials when he is no more actively involved in science than any other SF writer with an MA in English, that would be pathetic. For example, the astrophysicist who authored our recently published Astronomy and Astrophysics curriculum has more than twice as many scientific publications, more Impact Points, and is more than two decades younger than Dr. Brin. I was the founder of an award-winning, 3x Billboard-charting techno band signed to TVT but I do not describe myself as a professional musician, not when I haven’t set foot in a recording studio in 22 years.

Now, to be clear, I am not declaring that David Brin has, like John Scalzi, committed self-inflating biography fraud. We have not yet heard Dr. Brin’s side of the story; for all I know, he has published scores of landmark papers and is actively working on some ground-breaking science today. We would owe him the benefit of the doubt even if we did not enjoy his fiction. However, these are serious charges of misrepresentation, especially the charge that Dr. Brin has “lied about [his] affiliation with Caltech” and Dr. Brin has a responsibility to answer them, especially if he is the dedicated scientist he portrays himself to be.

UPDATE: Dr. Brin responds:

A brief, measured response.

1) When people engage in a public
pillorying, it is common courtesy to let the target know. Instead of
being offered collegial opportunities for response, I learned of this
blind-side assault fifth hand. The first order conclusion is that this
is not a person who was well-raised.

2) I admit freelance is an
easier life than the academic trenches. I have no need to burnish a
vita. Getting to be a sniff-everywhere scientific generalist and
cross-fertilizer is fun and fits my personality more than specialization
did. Sorry.

3) The Transparent Society is one of the only
public policy books from the 20th Century still in print, and selling
more every year. I now fly all over the world on this topic. Open it.

4)
Beyond fiction and nonfiction, I’m a speaker and consultant on
sci-technological trends. I’m on the board of advisors of NASA’s
Innovative and Advanced Concepts (NIAC) group as well as corporations
and intelligence agencies. So far this year, I consulted in the
Pentagon, for MITRE Corp, ODNI, the Atlantic Council, Google and many
others. Funny, they keep asking to run concepts by me. But I suppose
this blogger would do things differently. Close your eyes and picture
him in charge.

4) I’ll not discuss here my early work in
astrophysics and optics, or my even-earlier career as a microelectronics
engineer (helping to invent CCDs.) But over the last decade I’ve had
papers in (e.g.) evolutionary biology journals and the volume
PATHOLOGICAL ALTRUISM. I presented new ideas at the National Institute
on Drugs and Addiction and have extensive patents. I’ll likely moderate a
SETI panel at the AAAS in February. And funny, the University of
California named me a Distinguished Alumnus, instead of asking for their
PhD back. What fools

5) I suppose I should update my
publications list, and find and correct sites that mistakenly show me
now connected to my alma mater Caltech. But in fact, I… do… not… care…
much. I do have an official scholar position at UCSD. I guess I should
note that. Some time.

Sure, my role in science tends to be as
generalist/cross-fertilizer/consultant/gadfly/reviewer, more often than
via direct publication in specialized topics. But, scientific colleagues
make liberal use of me and that is satisfying enough. Getting to hang
with and exchange ideas with some of the best minds on Earth, my sole
regret is the time I just spent answering bona fide ninnies.

Come
on by http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ and meet a better community.
Better yet, keep exploring. These are great times for those with free
minds.

With cordial regards,

David Brin 

I have to admit, I am more than a little puzzled that Dr. Brin would consider drawing his attention to some questions that I’m told were posted to his own Facebook page is either a public pillorying or a failure to offer an opportunity for a response.

Speaking only for myself, I’m satisfied with his response, as I think there is considerably more to science than simply publishing papers and there is no reason to conclude he is an ex-scientist or that he is, scientifically speaking, pining for the fjords. I think it’s impressive that he has gotten involved in more practical engineering applications; as regular readers here know, I regard them as the only truly reliable science. That being said, his tone and his reference to “bona fide ninnies” does tend to indicate that it is not far-fetched to believe that he might occasionally be inclined to appeal to his credentials in lieu of actually presenting a valid argument when questioned by someone he deems, rightly or wrongly, his inferior.

After all, he freely admitted that his publications list is incomplete and that the ResearchGate assertion of a professional connection to Caltech is incorrect as well. If he thinks asking obviously legitimate questions somehow makes someone a ninny, well, I would say that insulting people simply because they catch you out is unwise. Substantive criticism should always be appreciated. My conclusion is that Dr. Brin is not a fraud, but is overly accustomed to deferential treatment and therefore occasionally finds himself involved in social media debates in which he is not truly prepared to engage.

No one is above being questioned. I answer questions I find painfully stupid on a regular basis. And while Dr. Brin may have found the questions of his critic to be stupid or irritating, I have to commend him for answering them directly.

The myth of Krav Maga

I would not be at all surprised if these Krav Maga snake oil salesmen ended up getting a woman killed one day:

 “Jab your fingers into his eyes.” That’s step one if you’re confronted by an attacker, at least according to Darren Selley, 35, my self-defence Krav Maga instructor. First go for the eyes, then put a knee between their legs (assuming it’s a bloke), using their strength against them. Once they fall to the floor, kick them in the groin. Threat: neutralised.

Darren and his fellow instructor Ricky are here to lead a special seminar on self-defence for women, organised by property maintenance company aspect.co.uk. We’re learning Urban Krav Maga, a blend of nine martial arts specifically intended for use on the streets.

It’s all about quick movements designed to cause maximum impact; breaking an arm, perforating an eardrum, knocking someone out. It’s perfect for most women because it doesn’t rely on brute strength and, as I discover, it’s incredibly easy to learn.

I have no doubt that it is incredibly easy to learn. Which only confirms my impression that it is actually worse than useless, because it teaches women to expect to incapacitate an attacker.

There is a very big difference between training and the real thing. There is nearly as big a difference between drill and full-contact sparring. I’ve fought more than a few karate students, up to and including black belts, who had never engaged in any serious sparring. With NO EXCEPTIONS, they weren’t much better than a complete neophyte.

Drill-based theory is based on the concept of control, and how if you are capable of delivering a strike that stops just short of someone’s face, you could just as easily deliver one that actually hits them. This is true. However, people “fight” very differently when they are essentially shadowboxing and they know their opponent is not actually going to hit them. Furthermore, it deprives the shadowboxer of learning how to take a shot, how to exploit and follow-up openings created, and how to use combinations. Fighting isn’t just about what you can do to the other party, it’s also about what the other party can do to you.

It is very, very difficult to make a precision strike at someone’s eyes. It is even more difficult to successfully knee a man in the groin when he is in a conflict situation. And even if one makes contact, it is likely that it won’t slow him down much, as adrenaline significantly reduces the amount of pain one feels in the moment.

It’s fine to teach women how to defend themselves. But firearms, and where they are not legal, knives, should always be a part of the self-defense strategy, and women need to understand that the odds are severely against them in a physical struggle. Learning technique is fine, but doing fake routines on unresisting opponents is worse than pointless. It takes years to become an effective fighter, so it is risible to suggest that a class or two is going to accomplish anything but instill a false sense of self-confidence in a woman.

I’m also very curious to know how one puts one knee between someone else’s leg using their strength against them. A knee strike is a hard technique, not a soft one. This sounds like pure marketing babble to me.