Author: VD

Mailvox: of division and hypocrisy

One of Baen’s many authors had this to say about John Scalzi’s attack on what he claimed was Baen Publisher Toni Weisskopf’s divisiveness:

John Scalzi is annoying, yes.  But his straw-manning of Toni really, really set me off.  I’ve been trying to figure out why. Tonight I think I’ve figured it out. Scalzi attacked Toni (falsely) for being a “divider” in the field for one of the very rare times when Toni politely and eloquently editorialized.  Toni does this so seldom, it’s remarkable that anyone could have an issue with it.  Especially when Toni worked hard to be non-combative, non-confrontational in tone and word choice.

Scalzi’s editor Patrick Nielsen-Hayden has been a rather routine and divisive voice on his Making Light blog for many years now.  Often combative, often confrontational.  Both he and his wife.  How much division have the Nielsen-Hayden duo sown?  How much has their invective and their involvement in various controversies helped to put up walls in fandom?  Has Scalzi ever once called either of them out for it?

Of course he hasn’t.  And he never will.  Because Patrick Nielsen-Hayden is Scalzi’s lifeline at TOR. I mean, I get it, it’s a smart business move, but it’s incredibly dickish on his part to ignore PNH/TNH then go after Toni like Toni is some kind of pest spreading discord.  That’s fucking hypocritical and untrue.

Of course, this also makes me think of Larry Correia’s rule for arguing with libs:

LIB: ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK!
CON: respond.
LIB: HOW RUDE!

The demonstrable fact is that the Nielsen-Haydens have been rudely and divisively attacking people in the genre since at least 2005. The first I’d ever heard of either of them was when they were attacking me on Making Light for a political op/ed column I’d written for WND and Universal Press Syndicate. I wrote a serious piece which observed in passing that women who were capable of writing hard science fiction did not do so because they were observably disinclined to put in the necessary time and effort required, which led to Patrick Nielsen-Hayden declaring me to be an anti-Semite and his semiaquatic life partner asserting that I could not get laid. Naturally.

John Scalzi not only didn’t take them to task for being divisive and confrontational, he did his best to pile on in his own lightweight, bachelors-degree-in-philosophy manner. Furthermore, it should be noted that John Scalzi and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden were the two individuals most responsible for creating the precedent that SFWA could purge members at any reason at any time. They put direct pressure on the current SFWA Board by threatening to not renew their memberships if I was not expelled.

From the SFWA report: Most prominently, an outgoing Board Member indicated that he intended to let his membership lapse until Beale was no longer a member: “My membership is due and I can’t in good conscience renew it until SFWA finds the means or moral backbone or whatever’s ultimately required to expel someone as hateful and wilfully destructive as Beale—not just from the organisation but from the culture present within it.”

From Twitter less than two hours after I announced the Board’s action:

John Scalzi @scalzi
I just renewed my @sfwa membership!
2:18 PM – 14 Aug 2013

P Nielsen Hayden ‏@pnh Aug 14
@scalzi So did I! What a coincidence! @sfwa

So, John Scalzi’s inept attack on Toni Weisskopf is not only hypocritical, but is indicative of the very divisiveness that he feigns to be criticizing. It is no more credible than his false claim to have 50,000 daily readers. The fact is that the SF/F Left has been divisive and confrontational ever since Damon Knight began publicly denigrating AE van Vogt for ideological reasons. The difference now is that the Left’s attacks have grown louder and more frequent while the SF/F Right no longer needs to placate and put up with their antics. They don’t want us and we most certainly don’t need them.

US drone intercepted

It appears as if both sides of the Ukraine tinderbox are now assuming a war footing:

A United States surveillance
drone has been intercepted above the Ukranian region of Crimea, a
Russian state arms and technology group said Friday.

“The
drone was flying at about 4,000 metres (12,000 feet) and was virtually
invisible from the ground. It was possible to break the link with US
operators with complex radio-electronic” technology, said Rostec in a
statement. The drone fell
“almost intact into the hands of self-defence forces” added Rostec,
which said it had manufactured the equipment used to down the aircraft,
but did not specify who was operating it.

“Judging
by its identification number, UAV MQ-5B belonged to the 66th American
Reconnaissance Brigade, based in Bavaria,” Rostec said on its website,
which also carried a picture of what it said was the captured drone.

The Obama administration is flirting with an incredibly stupid war. Talk about cashing in one’s military credibility unwisely! Not only does the USA have zero support from the American people for a war against Russia over Ukraine, it’s entirely possible that more than half the American population believes Russia to be in the right.

The Greatest Living SF Author

Philip K. Dick is dead, alas. As are Frank Herbert and Isaac Asimov. (And, apparently, Arthur C. Clarke.) So, who would you nominate for a poll on this subject? Here are my nominees, in no particular order:

Neal Stephenson
China Mieville
John C. Wright

Orson Scott Card looked like a contender early on, but he did his best work first, in my opinion. Good, to be sure, but not great. Charles Stross has declined from his breathtaking Accelerando days; I enjoy his Laundry novels but while they are fun, they are not the stuff from which greatness is made. Lois Bujold is very good, but not on the level of the three men listed above. Once the Fourth of the original Big Three, Arthur C. Clarke is overrated and hasn’t written anything worth reading in years, presumably because he is still dead. William Gibson isn’t so much in the limelight these days, but he continues to write interesting books. Tanith Lee is a fabulous stylist, but she has faded from the Secret Books of Paradys days and she wrote fantasy, not science fiction, anyhow.

Perhaps the New Heinlein, Mr. John Scalzi? A mere jest, in more ways than one. Anyhow, if we can narrow the list to 10, then I will post a poll tomorrow and we can sort out everyone’s opinion on the matter. If you have a potential nominee, please make the case here.

Three possible nominees from three recognizable authors who shall remain nameless unless they wish to identify themselves: Gene Wolfe, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle. A fourth author seconds the nominations for Niven and Pournelle, and, (rather dubiously in my opinion), throws David Weber’s name into the hat. I say this as one who has recently revisited the Honorverse.

The man who should have been president

Ron Paul points out that Vladimir Putin is in the legal right and it is the USA and EU who have violated the relevant agreements:

The West will claim “everything Putin does is illegal,” but while Ron Paul notes “he’s no angel,” the former congressman adds Putin “has some law on his side.” America has a right of secession and Crimea should have it too – “it’s such a facade,” Paul explains, noting that “contracts, and agreements, and treaties” linked to the Sevastopol base provide Putin with a legal basis to militarily occupy Crimea, “Russia could accuse America of occupying Cuba because it, too, holds a lease on the land around the Guantanamo Bay prison.”

Paul goes on to note the hypocrisy of the West and alleges US and European participation in the overthrow of Yanukovich….

This is a showdown that USSA and the EUSSR intentionally sought. They are the aggressors, not Russia, and no amount of ex post facto cheerleading from the mainstream media can conceal that.

And it is particularly rich to hear the Eurofascists complaining about the Crimean referendum on Sunday. The unelected EU Commission has not only denied most of the people of Europe referendums on independence, but forced the people of Ireland to repeatedly vote until they produced the result that the Eurofascists wanted. Since they actively oppose the right of the people of the UK to self-determination, it should be no wonder that they also oppose it for the people of the Crimea.

If the USA was genuinely interested in human liberty, democracy, and self-determination, it would be placing economic sanctions on Brussels, not Moscow.

China chooses deflation

This announcement by the Chinese government should indicate a near-term end of the global asset bubble, as it seems unlikely that the deflationary contagion can be restricted to China, particularly given the situation in Ukraine.

China is braced for a wave of industrial bankruptcies as its slowing economy forces companies with sky-high debts to the wall, the country’s premier has said. Premier Li Keqiang told lenders to China’s private sector factories they should expect debt defaults as the world’s second largest economy encounters “serious challenges” in the year ahead.

Speaking after the annual session of the national people’s congress, Li Keqiang said: “We are going to confront serious challenges this year and some challenges may be even more complex.” He told lenders to China’s private sector factories they should expect debt defaults.

Li said China must “ensure steady growth, ensure employment, avert inflation and defuse risks” while also fighting pollution, among other tasks. “So we need to strike a proper balance amidst all these goals and objectives,” he added. “This is not going to be easy,” he said.

Li’s warning followed the failure of Shanghai Chaori Solar Energy to make a payment on a 1bn yuan (£118m) bond last week. The default was the first of its kind for China and widely seen as pointing to the end of 11th-hour government bailouts for troubled enterprises.

I’m not terribly surprised that China has decided to bite the bullet sooner than the USA, Japan, or the EU. Their banks are considerably less politically powerful and they have no need to worry about maintaining their social spending in order to appease the electorate.

Scalzi and the safe space

Brad Torgersen has a theory about why the Chief Rabbit of Whatever will not leave the safety of his warren:

I no longer directly engage Scalzi — on anything. I used to engage him routinely. But an argument is only an argument if both parties take each other seriously enough to argue. In late 2012, I reached the point where I couldn’t take Scalzi seriously anymore. Mostly because I realized that Whatever is primarily his marketing tool, and that by partaking in his comments (and engaging him in argument there), I was merely playing along with the marketing. Marketing which was helping Scalzi financially as well as emotionally, and all I was getting for my trouble was an ever-increasing sense of frustration.

Now I observe Scalzi from afar. And if he occasionally makes me think he could use a good boot to the head, his denizens, (and the sort of person easily attracted to his blog, and therefore Scalzi’s very effective cult of personality he maintains via that blog), make me think this even more so.

You cannot argue with that sort of group inside the walls of its own house. The house and the landlord both reflect back to the group precisely what they each need to hear and see, in order to remain convinced that they — and they alone — have all the right ideas.

And so I remain disengaged. Because (to paraphrase the W.O.P.R.) the only winning move (with Scalzi and Whatever) is not to play.

It might be different if Scalzi ever stepped beyond his “safe space” in order to defend himself and his invective in an environment where he isn’t lord of the manor. But because Scalzi has created a “safe space” in which he never has to be made to feel demonstrably wrong for any length of time longer than it takes him to ban/deride a critic, he is not what I’d call an honest participant in the larger cultural, political, and philosophical debate. He needs his “safe space” too much.

Which is probably why most people (on Scalzi’s side of this) make such a noise about “safe spaces”, in all kinds of different arenas. They have concluded that any forum for interactivity that does not immediately affirm them — and all of their many smelly little orthodoxies and prejudices — is not “safe”, and therefore they will go to great lengths to whine about, pester, or attack, anyone who does not enable them in their need to be “safe.”

Mr. Torgersen is correct about the insidious and pernicious nature of rabbit warrens. They are intellectually enervating; Mr. Scalzi’s inflated opinion of his argumentative skills have always been illustrative of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but after years of neither permitting substantive discourse on Whatever nor engaging in it outside that safe space, they will have deteriorated from even that low standard.

That is why I encourage SUBSTANTIVE intellectual disputation here. That does not mean that I tolerate the trivial and superficial stuff; there is nothing to be gained in the dialectical contemplation of whether X is or is not a poopyhead. And it is why I accept debate challenges whether they are hosted here or elsewhere and why I accept invitations to a black man’s blog when he wishes to discuss imputations of raciss.

I make no pretense of always being right and that is why I have no fear of taking the risk of being shown to be wrong. But for those who have built up a vast and illusory web of deceit, exaggeration, and spin, the risk of being exposed for who and what they truly are is simply too great. And so they are left posturing to their retarded rabbit choir.

I have to disagree with Mr. Torgesen, however, when he declares that the only winning move with McRapey is not to play. I think the fact that McRapey has stopped his previous practice of divulging his site traffic and his sales numbers, and hidden his previously available blog statistics at Quantcast, is sufficient evidence that shining a light on his web of deceit is also an effective strategy. Here were the last three months of Whatever traffic that were available to the public prior to him shutting it down; contrast them with the year before, when I began exposing his various deceits and con games:

Nov 2013: 407,363 (Nov 2012: 768,725,  down 47 percent)
Dec 2013: 475,543 (Dec 2012: 861,912, down 45 percent)
Jan 2014: 542,192 (Jan 2013: 840,874, down 36 percent)

My own monthly traffic went up 36 percent, from 786,956 to 1,076,538, during that same time period. That monthly average is more than Scalzi’s all-time peak of 1,027,644 in May 2012, which marked the only time Whatever exceeded one million pageviews.

So, disengagement and retreat is certainly an option, but it is a tactic that ensures intellectual stagnation and eventual irrelevance. More to the point, McRapey used to benefit from his appeal to the political moderates and right-wingers who did not realize that he was their self-appointed enemy; like Marko Kloos and David Weber, he had the rare advantage of being able to successfully sell to both sides of the political aisle.

But no longer. Now that he has been unmasked as a particularly deranged leader of the SF/F Left, I suspect there are more than a few of his former fans, perhaps as many as four in ten based on the site traffic, who are no longer willing to support him or his work. The ideological division of SF/F has observably begun and I strongly suspect that the authors and publishers of the SF/F Right will do to the mainstream SF/F publishers precisely what Fox News has done to the mainstream media.

The posturing of the fetishist

Maddox quite rightly skewers the public posturing of the faux science fans, most of whom can’t even differentiate between science proper and political propaganda:

Any time I see people on Facebook simultaneously liking “iCarly, One Direction” and “The Pauly D Project” while also liking fucking loving science, it raises some red flags. The problem is, people who claim to “fucking love” science don’t. They don’t even like science, let alone “fucking love it.” Want proof? Here are two posts from IFLS. On the left is a typical post, and on the right, a rare scientific post. Note the number of “likes” each post received….

People love science in the same way they love classical music or art. Science and “geeky” subjects are perceived as being hip, cool and intellectual. So people take a passing interest just long enough to glom onto these labels and call themselves “geeks” or “nerds” every chance they get.

 It’s impossible to argue with his logic: “If you ‘fucking love science’, why don’t you do some?”

I also found the incipient cult of the midwitted junior co-signer Neil deGrasse Tyson to be interesting, mostly for the insipid and inadvertently revealing banalities he utters:


“One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.”

I’ll ignore the ironic bait of the obvious and customary oxymoron involved and observe that it should be no surprise that Tyson harbors considerable appeal for the less intelligent. This is a literal paean to cluelessness. Don’t understand X in the slightest? That’s just an indication of how open-minded and progressive you are!

“Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.”

Judging by Tyson and his observed historical illiteracy, it works about as well as the MMR vaccine on a highly allergic child who ends up in a post-jab coma as his parents are financially compensated by VAERS.

“Not only are we in the Universe the Universe is in us. I don’t know of any deeper spiritual feeling than what that brings upon me.”

Ah, the profound depths of Deepak Chopra lite. Again, this is a literal paean to cluelessness; Tyson is openly confessing to his own ignorance of spirituality. How fortunate that it indicates his openness to new ideas. All of this is simple religion-substitute, which is explains how Tyson has become the new softer and cuddlier Dawkins-replacement that Peter Boghossian wanted to be.

“Anti-racism” is a code word

What is meant by “anti-racism” is nothing more and nothing less than “anti-European”. The attacks on “racism” have never been anything more than cynical attempts to leverage minority power in America at the expense of the majority.

A group of employees at South Puget Sound Community College sent out an invitation to all 300 staffers.

The “Staff, Faculty and Administrators of Color” encouraged employees to reply to the invitation to find out the confidential date and time of what was being called a “happy hour” to “build support and community” for people of color.

The invite made it clear white people were not invited.

The email read: “If you want to create space for white folks to meet and work on racism, white supremacy, and white privilege to better our campus community and yourselves, please feel free to do just that.”

If you haven’t figured out that “raciss” is merely a rhetorical weapon and minorities have no more interest in equality than feminists do, you are very, very slow on the uptake. Once Europeans are no longer the majority in a given country, they’ll very soon learn how little interest all the various competing minorities who accused them of racism have in “colorblindness”, “racial equality”, “affirmative action”, “proportional representation” and all the other useful little rhetorical fictions that have been successfully used to prevent Europeans from pursuing any group interests.

Of course, we’re already seeing this develop in the United States, as European-Americans not only flee minority-run homelands such as Detroit and Los Angeles, but the Democratic Party as well. This is why amnesty is so important to Democrats, as they are hoping to import sufficient numbers of Hispanics to counter the transition to race-based power politics.

What they will learn, however, is that La Raza is considerably less amenable to political control than the descendants of slaves have been, and they will be rapidly cast aside by those they thought to “lead” and “represent”.

Obsidian cries raciss

I’m only surprised it took him this long to get around to it. I’ve been waiting for him to take a public shot at me ever since I humiliated him when he was strutting around boasting about “chin-checking chumps” or however it was that the Jive talk went:

Following up on my question above, I note that you cite two very well known bloggers in the Manosphere, who would be considered to fit Kimmel’s characterization like the proverbial hand in glove: Chateau Heartiste, formerly known as Roissy, and Vox Day, of the blog Alpha Game. Both have been cited for their racist views of people of color, and neither seem particularly interested in being inclusive of Men of Color under their tents (in fact, I would go so far as to say that they are both actively hostile to such inclusiveness – I say this based on direct observation and experience of both). As noted above, their astute observations and the like, many of which I do agree with, are utterly undermined by their racism, and gives folks like Kimmel, et al a smoking gun with which to discredit the entirety of the MRM cause.

My response is at Alpha Game. But suffice it to say that my deep and abiding concerns for the African-American community are only exceeded by my dedication to the plight of the Heian Japanese. Of course, I am hostile to “inclusiveness”. As an open and avowed elitist, it tends to come with the territory.

I actually find it vaguely surprising that people are still trying to play the race card in 2014. Hispanics quite openly hate Blacks and are actively driving them out of their most archetypical communities. Whites and Jews are “gentrifying” them out of their historic homes, which is the genteel way to say “financial ethnic cleansing”. I mean, who is still pretending that desegregation is even remotely viable? Who is still dumb enough to pretend that the Civil Rights Movement wasn’t a fundamentally wrong-headed failure?

It’s even stranger that they still attempt to play it on me. First, I can trump it with my own Man of Color card. Second, I should think I have made it abundantly clear that I am not in the least bit afraid of being labeled anything from Toddler Slayer to RSHD.

“All men are created equal” cannot possibly apply in a material sense in any world where all men are not even equally homo sapiens sapiens.

The mysteries of TENS

Dr. James M. Tour of Rice University confesses he simply cannot grasp what everyone at Scienceblogs and the Panda’s Thumb and Richarddawkins.net just knows to be true. Because science.

I will tell you as a scientist and a synthetic chemist: if anybody should be able to understand evolution, it is me, because I make molecules for a living, and I don’t just buy a kit, and mix this and mix this, and get that. I mean, ab initio, I make molecules. I understand how hard it is to make molecules. I understand that if I take Nature’s tool kit, it could be much easier, because all the tools are already there, and I just mix it in the proportions, and I do it under these conditions, but ab initio is very, very hard.

I don’t understand evolution, and I will confess that to you. Is that OK, for me to say, “I don’t understand this”? Is that all right? I know that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t understand anything about organic synthesis, but they understand evolution. I understand a lot about making molecules; I don’t understand evolution. And you would just say that, wow, I must be really unusual.

Let me tell you what goes on in the back rooms of science – with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. I have sat with them, and when I get them alone, not in public – because it’s a scary thing, if you say what I just said – I say, “Do you understand all of this, where all of this came from, and how this happens?” Every time that I have sat with people who are synthetic chemists, who understand this, they go “Uh-uh. Nope.” These people are just so far off, on how to believe this stuff came together. I’ve sat with National Academy members, with Nobel Prize winners. Sometimes I will say, “Do you understand this?”And if they’re afraid to say “Yes,” they say nothing. They just stare at me, because they can’t sincerely do it.

I was once brought in by the Dean of the Department, many years ago, and he was a chemist. He was kind of concerned about some things. I said, “Let me ask you something. You’re a chemist. Do you understand this? How do you get DNA without a cell membrane? And how do you get a cell membrane without a DNA? And how does all this come together from this piece of jelly?” We have no idea, we have no idea. I said, “Isn’t it interesting that you, the Dean of science, and I, the chemistry professor, can talk about this quietly in your office, but we can’t go out there and talk about this?”

If you understand evolution, I am fine with that. I’m not going to try to change you – not at all. In fact, I wish I had the understanding that you have.

But about seven or eight years ago I posted on my Web site that I don’t understand. And I said, “I will buy lunch for anyone that will sit with me and explain to me evolution, and I won’t argue with you until I don’t understand something – I will ask you to clarify. But you can’t wave by and say, “This enzyme does that.” You’ve got to get down in the details of where molecules are built, for me. Nobody has come forward.

The Atheist Society contacted me. They said that they will buy the lunch, and they challenged the Atheist Society, “Go down to Houston and have lunch with this guy, and talk to him.” Nobody has come! Now remember, because I’m just going to ask, when I stop understanding what you’re talking about, I will ask. So I sincerely want to know. I would like to believe it. But I just can’t.

Now, I understand microevolution, I really do. We do this all the time in the lab. I understand this. But when you have speciation changes, when you have organs changing, when you have to have concerted lines of evolution, all happening in the same place and time – not just one line – concerted lines, all at the same place, all in the same environment … this is very hard to fathom.

I was in Israel not too long ago, talking with a bio-engineer, and [he was] describing to me the ear, and he was studying the different changes in the modulus of the ear, and I said, “How does this come about?” And he says, “Oh, Jim, you know, we all believe in evolution, but we have no idea how it happened.”

Smells like quality science. And before the usual science fetishists leap in to assert the obvious and declare: “yeah, well, that doesn’t prove God exists,” I will readily admit that it does not. But, (and here is the point), it does prove that there are very rational reasons to doubt the unevidenced assertion that “evolution is a fact”.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, I am an evolution skeptic, not an evolution denier. I do not judge the truth of the belief by the behavior of the believer, although if I did, the behavior of the evolutionary true believers would be sufficient to convince me that the existence of unicorns, fairies, and leprechauns combined is considerably more likely than fish magically turning into monkeys over time due to beneficial mutations taking advantage of the multitude of changes in the water.