Author: VD

When rabbits rage

I don’t know about you, but one of the things I found most illuminating about the inevitable reaction of various angry rabbits to the featuring of the fraudulent reviewer was the strength of their expressed emotions.  I mean, even if I was absolutely everything they claimed me to be: insecure, childish, a baby, bratty, thin-skinned, small, unprofessional, pathetic, out-of-line, and so forth, why would that be so observably upsetting to them?

Why would they go out of their way to declare, with considerable umbrage, that they would never read a book of which they had never heard before and which they never had any intention of reading anyhow? Why would they find it to be “utterly reprehensible” to do what literally dozens of other sites were already doing?  Why did they find me to be “scary” when they presumably don’t feel that way about MyAddress or Google Street View?  Why would they feel the urgent need to follow the fraudulent reviewer’s example and “warning other to stay away” from my terrifying books? 

Part of the answer can be found inadvertently provided in the comment of Farida Y.  “He deliberately posted the address of a woman as a clear target of contempt.”  Remember, we usually give away our values in the process of attacking others.  Because I most typically deride others as weaklings, fools and idiots, I betray the fact that I value strength, wisdom, and intelligence, and aspire to those things.

From their insults, we can see that Rabbit People place particular value on being viewed as sane, grown-up, mature, professional, and in-line.  For example, if you see a blog that describes itself as “thoughtful”, you can be sure that it belongs to a rabbit.  This doesn’t mean, of course, that they actually are any of those things, it merely means that those things are what they aspire to, and what they erroneously believe everyone else aspires to as well.

Now, the main reason the Rabbit People were offended was that they correctly interpreted my action to be one of contempt.  They know that I do not see them as equals, but as inferiors whose opinions are not to be taken seriously and are useful only for the purpose of amusing me and my readers.  This tends to infuriate those who consider themselves to be thoughtful, grown-up, and responsible because one of their primary objectives is to be taken seriously by the herd, thereby elevating their status within it.

But if the correctly perceived contempt explains the offense, and therefore the nature of the responses, it does not explain their vehemence or the level of emotions that fueled them.  To understand this, you must first understand that the Rabbit mind is fundamentally feminine, and the feminine mind is ruled, first, foremost, and forever, by fear.

This is why, in addition to the previously listed descriptions, I was also described as: angry, scary, frightening, psychopathic, creepy, unstable, and obsessed.  These labels are not meant literally, they are simply code words meant to warn fellow rabbits ELIL AHEAD: BEWARE THE PREDATOR.  In addition to being offended, the rabbits are also afraid on two counts.  First, I have demonstrated that I am immune to their weapons of excoriation and exclusion, which, being herd animals, is something they find inexplicable and frightening.  Second, I have shown that I am willing to step “out-of-line”, which means that I am capable of taking actions that they cannot imagine, anticipate, or control.  The combination of these two things is enough to strike absolute terror in the rabbity heart; it quite literally panics them even when, as in the case of the fraudulent reviewer, no one was threatened in any way, shape, or form.

Their antics weren’t inspired by the fact that my actions were intrinsically dangerous, as they obviously were not, but rather, from the fact that those actions were outside the boundaries defined by the rabbits as being safe.  Rabbits bolt from big scary noises; they don’t stop to reflect upon whether it is a hungry bear with a particular hankering for rabbit or a truck that isn’t anywhere near them and isn’t even capable of being aware of their existence.  The simple act of stepping outside the lines is, from the rabbity perspective, an inherently dangerous act, because their way of life revolves around the dynamic construction of rules designed to circumscribe the behavior of others.

Jack Amok explained it correctly: “Rabbit/Lefty people count on this, that their opponents will hold
themselves to civilized rules of conduct the lefties will themselves
aggressively ignore. Like a woman who screams, spits and throws things
at a man, confident he wouldn’t dare backhand her across the room in
response.  The shock when he doesn’t conform to expectations is usually dramatic.” 

Stickwick added: “For the rabbit people, any behavior that isn’t sufficiently supplicating
in response to their attempts to shame and cow probably does have the
appearance of psychopathy.”

And Allyn asked an apt question:

“A question for those that have a better understanding of rabbit behavior.  Do rabbit folk go blind during their rage and lose the ability for reading cognitive recognition?  This question is a direct result of observing today’s acts.

Vox claims “For my next trick I will make the rabbits appear and then dance and hop on one foot”.

On
command the rabbits appear, raging at Vox for being a Nazi, homophobic,
poopy head that is not smarter than them. What they seem to miss is
they are doing this while dancing and hopping on one foot.”

 Yes, that’s exactly what they do.  They go blind with rage and fear.  A sufficiently angry rabbit, (which is essentially synonymous with a sufficiently frightened rabbit), is hopelessly irrational and possesses mere fragments of the cognitive abilities it usually has.  They are rendered intellectually tharn.

Let me give you an example from an exchange that followed yesterday’s chorus line of hopping, dancing rabbits between an SFWA member and me.  Unfortunately, I can’t quote the other individual due to where the exchange took place, but the summary should suffice to illustrate the point.  Being a candidate for the office of president, I was asked to explain my actions related to the fraudulent reviewer, which I did as follows:

“[I]t was part of a larger point I was making about Rabbit People and one of their common tactics. I knew several Whatever readers would attack my books by using the reviews because that’s the sort of readership Mr. Scalzi has. I had a similar experience with Richard Dawkins’s fans after publishing TIA. There were a number of other fake reviews posted yesterday that I reported in the conventional manner and were immediately removed by Amazon, such as this one: “Vox Day” is not only a bad writer; he’s also an angry, racist psychopath. Stay far away from this mediocre book.””

This led to a response from one gentleman who rejoices in sprinkling his missives with lawyerly idioms.  He claimed that because he happened to provide a few of Whatever’s 7.8 MILLION PAGEVIEWS in 2012, I had personally insulted him by accusing him of engaging in unprofessional tactics, and furthermore, had attacked the SFWA membership as well.

Now, it shouldn’t be terribly difficult for anyone who has graduated from elementary school, much less law school, to realize that an insignificant number of readers are not synonymous with the entire readership.  Still less does the subset necessarily have anything to do with a separate organization, even if that organization happens to have some degree of overlap with the set.  But the rabbit, esq. was so angry and tharn that he manufactured a nonsensical ex post facto justification for his wounded feelings, which of course required me, as a known healer and teacher, to gently explain the errors in his reasoning to him.

Which explanation I provided with such care and compassion that one giant of science fiction was moved to exclaim in open amazement and wonder.

I have to admit, I wasn’t particularly sanguine about my electoral prospects before yesterday, but I’m feeling pretty optimistic about them now.  After all, even rabbits like seeing a lawyer get bitch-slapped.

The UK and the “triple-dip”

Forget the “double-dip”.  Now we’re expected to believe that a “triple-dip” recession is nigh:

Economists believe the chances of such a scenario are high, given
that there has been no let up in the pressure on consumers and
businesses and snow disruption threatens to cost the economy an
estimated £500 million a day.

There is no official definition of a
triple dip, but it is widely accepted to mean that the economy has
fallen into recession three times without returning to a period of
robust growth in between. The UK plunged into a double dip
recession last year, contracting for three quarters in a row before
bouncing back with growth of 0.9% in the three months to September.

According
to the Office for National Statistics, there has not been a triple dip
recession since its records began in 1955, with Britain last suffering
such economic gloom in the Great Depression. 

There is no triple-dip recession.  There was no double-dip recession.  This is, as I have been saying since 2008, the Great Depression 2.0.  It is larger in scope than its predecessor and it is gradually revealing the concrete shortcomings of the reported economics statistics.

It is also interesting how we don’t hear much about the ongoing “economic recovery” in the USA anymore even though the GDP numbers are still nominally positive.

Politicians are lying bastards

And in other news, water is still wet:

[B]efore Senator Joe Manchin III invited a group of 15 businessmen and community leaders to lunch last week to discuss the topic, he had only a vague idea of how anxious many of his supporters were.

“How many of you all believe that there is a movement to take away the Second Amendment?” he asked.

About half the hands in the room went up.

Despite his best attempts to reassure them — “I see no movement, no talk, no bills, no nothing” — they remained skeptical….

On Thursday a group of Democratic senators led by Dianne Feinstein of
California plans to introduce a bill that would outlaw more than 100
different assault weapons, setting up what promises to be a fraught and
divisive debate over gun control in Congress in the coming weeks. 

I imagine the other half are just as skeptical now.  How out of it, or how dishonest, does a senator have to be to fail to see a bill as obvious as Feinstein’s coming only a week before it is announced?  Public Enemy had it right when Chuck D rapped about the fact that is corrupt like a senator.  But I think Nate may have had it right when he concluded that the pile of executive orders that Obama dropped on the nation last week represented him backing down on guns after Sandy Hook failed to be the game changer the media billed it as.

Can you even imagine how much trouble the guy in charge of orchestrating false flags is right now?  No doubt he’s desperately defending himself.  What’s he supposed to do for an encore, find some patsy, drug him up, and turn him loose in an animal shelter to shoot up puppies and kittens?

The American people have made it eminently clear that even if 100 kindergartens are machine-gunned tomorrow, they’ll pull their kids out of school and take them shopping at the gun store rather than disarm.

Rush and the bifactional ruling party

It’s a little late, but Rush Limbaugh has finally begun to realize that he’s been played for decades by the Republican branch:

You know what this was? This was perhaps, folks, one of the best
illustrations of the whole concept that we’ve spoken here about on
numerous occasions of the ruling class, the political class. It doesn’t
matter what party, they’re all part of the ruling class, the political
class in DC, and when the rubber hits the road, they all circle the
wagons around each other. Well, the Republicans join in circling the
wagons. The Democrats never do when it’s a Republican involved, but for
the most part they do. They close ranks, and they protect one another
because what they’re protecting is themselves.

They’re protecting the ruling class, the political elites, and they’re maintaining the status quo….  So what we had here, folks, was the ruling class circling the wagons
and protecting each other. Party affiliation did not matter. We’re
always hoping at hearings like this that somebody on our side is gonna
stand up and give the Democrats what-for, somebody is gonna stand up and
nail ’em to the cross or whatever, ask the tough questions, get to the
bottom of it just as the Democrats do with our judicial nominees or
anybody in our party who falls in the crosshairs.
We keep waiting for it, and it never happens. They never do it. 

Now, I have no idea if he is right about setting the stage for Hilary in 2016.  I don’t care.  After the last election showed that I have been too long gone to have any ability to correctly read the US electorate, I am officially out of the business of political predictions.  But it is interesting to see the man who was once Mr. Republican finally beginning to understand that there is not a real two-party system in the USA, there is merely one ruling party with two cooperative factions.

Warning: spoilers ahead

Since there has been so much discussion of reviewing A THRONE OF BONES of late, I’ve decided that enough time has passed to permit a Q&A about the book with those who have read it.  If you have not yet read the novel, but intend to do so, I strongly recommend that you not read the comments.  And if you have, this is your place to ask me questions concerning the events and characters of the existing book and the novellas, NOT the one that I am currently writing.

On a related note, A Wardog’s Coin won’t be out until next month because I have been occupied with working on Book Two as well as a Selenoth-related social game that is going to be a fantasy epic in its own right.

Women to the front lines

Tell me again about how the People will never be able to resist the assembled might of the US military?

Women in all branches of the military soon will have unprecedented opportunities to serve on the front lines of the nation’s wars.

Leon Panetta, in one of his last acts as President Obama’s defense secretary, is preparing to announce the policy change, which would open hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and potentially elite commando jobs after more than a decade at war, the Pentagon confirmed Wednesday.

The groundbreaking move recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff overturns a 1994 rule banning women from being assigned to smaller ground combat unit

Between the reduced female capacity for fighting and the inevitable dissension and lack of unit cohesion that will result from putting women into front-line companies and commando units, I can only conclude that this is ultimately a positive development for long-term American freedom.  Give it enough time and the military will go the way of the Fortune 500 companies, HR commissars will be assigned to each unit, and the combat rifle will be replaced with a lighter .22 caliber carbine that comes in fashionable teal, mauve, and eggshell.

To be honest, I’d like to see the Obama take it even farther and make it an all-female military.  Somewhere, there is a Chinese general reading his tablet and laughing.

Jared Diamond and the Grass Hut Imperative

At least there is one left-liberal who is honest about his heartfelt desire to return to the Great Grass Hut Matriarchy:

….The World Until Yesterday, a vanity project marketed as anthropology. In this book, Diamond draws from his extensive field research in New Guinea to share his views on the shortcomings of contemporary American society. Primitive approaches to social problems, he thinks, would better serve our society. For example, he argues for: dedicating more resources to mediation as an alternative to civil lawsuits, establishing “conventional monopolies” to smooth out trade fluctuations, deemphasizing competition and the desire for excellence among children, on-demand nursing for infants, spending more time talking to our children, devising new living conditions for the elderly, accepting that the gulf between rich and poor in the United States provides an explanation of the popularity of religion in our country, preserving language diversity, and ending obesity.

At its core, the book is based on a fundamental contradiction. Diamond explains that the customs of primitive societies are not applicable to the characteristics of our society; then he proceeds to use those customs as the basis for recommendations for improving everything in our society from parenting to diet.

Apparently it’s not enough that we’re basing our trade policy upon early 19th century illogic, our monetary system upon early 20th century fraud, our economic system upon Depression-era nonsense, and our immigration policy upon a play written by a Jewish immigrant to Britain in 1908, Diamond wants us to go all the way back to cannibalism, huts, and throwing rocks at one another.

What I don’t understand is why?  I mean, they don’t actually ever go and live in Papua New Guinea or Deepest, Darkest Africa themselves, so why do they think that the primitive lifestyles that they favor should be imported and imposed upon the West?

A Day of Resistance

If the Rabbit People are frightened over the exposure of a single fake book reviewer, this announcement of a large scale public protest by gun owners should have them seriously popping pellets:

While Barack Obama is calling for Americans to give up their freedom, their rights, and their guns, we’re calling for Americans to resist. We’re calling on Tea Partiers, moderate Republicans, Libertarians and even moderate Democrats to stand up one month from today, on the 23rd of February and say, “No more!” Right Wing News is joining Dustin Stockton, Western Representation PAC and The Tea Party.net in calling for rallies all across the nation next month on the 23rd. It’ll be a Day of Resistance where gun owners and patriots can peacefully gather and show Barack Obama, the media, and the knockkneed Republicans in Congress that we may have lost a battle last November, but we haven’t lost the war. Don’t meekly give up your 2nd Amendment rights when you can stand with us and RESIST!

Tea Party II, this time with guns.  What is not to like?  You can almost hear the theme from Muse playing already.

The bright lights of the hrududu

You may recall that I’ve mentioned how the Rabbit People have three basic weapons to which they resort.  One of their most important ones is exclusion; to a herd animal exclusion is the worst of all possible fates because they are incapable of even imagining survival on their own.

Now consider in this light an intriguing one-star review of A THRONE OF BONES that appeared yesterday courtesy of one Virginia Conterato of EdinaMinneapolis.

It’s very difficult to review a book so badly written. The wordiness
attempts to disguise the utter lack of decent storytelling and world
building. There is a whole lot of NOTHING happening along with badly
written dialogue and poorly developed characters. It is not often that I
write negative reviews, but I felt I needed to warn others away from
this terrible book. THis book is truly terrible. Don’t waste your time,
much less your money. 

It’s even harder to convincingly review a book one hasn’t read.  Or, as appears to be the case, even bought.  Isn’t it amazing how strongly some of these one-star reviewers feel they need to “warn others” and save them from exposure to the terrible, horrible, doubleplusungood novel?  As if otherwise, they might inadvertently read such a miniscule tome?  It tends to remind one of McRapey warning his readers not to read this blog or even mention Lord VoldemortRSHD.  This is classic Rabbit People behavior, especially in light of how Mrs. Conterato clearly hasn’t read the book.  You’ll note that attack reviews are usually phrased in the most general of terms; if they do provide details, they usually just happen to come from things that take place in the text selection available on Amazon.  Seriously, is there anyone who genuinely believes that Kay is one of the very few people who bought the hardcover?

Although I have to admit, the idea of an angry little rabbit flipping furiously through all 854 pages just to write a credible-sounding fake review does amuse me.  It’s worse than TIA’s unclimbable Mount Chapter Four.

Now, why would a married woman in her late forties be so upset that she would go to the trouble of posting a fake review at this particular time?  The answer, I suspect, is to be found at Change.org, where last year Kay signed the petition “Senator Amy Klobuchar: Publicly Come Out in Support of Same-Sex Marriage”.  Logic suggests the following scenario: McRapey repeatedly pounds the homophobic drum, Kay’s little rabbit ears perk up, and she bravely hops forth to do battle on behalf of the Whatever warren and her lesbian writer friends at The Loft.

And then the bright lights appeared….

Now, you’d have to have lived in the Twin Cities to fully appreciate what I find funniest about the good doctor’s wife.  You see, when Kay signed the petition, she claimed to live in Edina.  But she doesn’t.  As it happens, in high school I dated a few girls from Edina, including one who lived just down the road from Southdale. Which, you see, is why I happen to know that Kay, like many others in certain parts of Richfield and southwest Minneapolis, only affects to live in the more prestigious city….

I now await, with no little amusement, the declarations of how scary the Rabbit People find it to discover that Lord Voldemort now has the dark and dangerous powers of Google-fu at his disposal.  I have to confess, I’m more than a little tempted to knock on her door and offer to sign her nonexistent hardcover the next time I’m in EdinaMinneapolis.

The other interesting thing, in addition to the fake reviews, is that there are at least two rabbits who are giving helpful ratings to all the negative reviews and rating all of the positive reviews unhelpful.  Given the timing, one of them is likely our little friend Kay.  It’s not so much the review as the rating of the review that is of interest here:

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

1 out of 5 stars: hard to follow yet very predictable January 21, 2013
By  Tracy

This a long book, very slow read. Not a lot of action or suspense. You can tell whats going to happen almost every step of the way. It is layed out like it is 7 or 8 books stuck together. The chapter titles are just the name of the character that will be prominent for that chapter. Then the next chapter is for the storyline of the next character and so on. After forcing myself to finish the book, it is only a lead up to a second book! It does’t even stand on it’s own! Horrible!  

Helpful indeed.  This is how the Rabbit People fight; it’s all nonsensical, passive-aggressive attacks intended to be plausibly deniable, sniping from behind corners, and appealing to the herd; the correct way to respond is not through reactive passive-aggression, but rather to shine a light on the little critters’s activities.

We are not like them, we are better than them.  They know it.  And they know we know it.  That is why they hate us.

UPDATE: Some are incredulous that I would post information that is freely available to the public about a suspected fraud here on this blog.  Very well, let me be clear.  I am demanding an admission from Mrs. Conterato that she neither purchased the hardcover nor the Kindle version, nor did she read the book in its entirety prior to posting her review.  On a related note, I am requesting the order records from my publisher today; since the book is not available in retail bookstores, I should be able to confirm within days that she did not, in fact, ever purchase the hardcover that she claimed to have reviewed.  I will remove the public information from this post if a) Mrs. Conterato admits she did not buy the book and her review is a fake one, or b) if she proves that she did purchase the book and read it in its entirety.

UPDATE II: I just got an email from the publisher containing a list of the books sent to Minnesota.  None was sent to anyone named Conterato or to the address shown above.  Or to Edina…. This is not yet conclusive proof as one more possibility exists that I am presently having tracked down, but it is a significant step in that direction.

Digging out the Rabbit People

A few people have asked me what I mean by “Rabbit People”.  It is a term that derives from an outmoded, but still relevant concept from biology, r/K selection theory, which was coined by the famous biologist E.O. Wilson and refers to evolutionary pressures causing population groups to evolve in one of two different directions.  There are a lot of problems with this, both empirically and logically, but that’s beside the point.  A useful metaphor doesn’t depend on its literal truth, much less the current scientific popularity of the theory from which it derives.

The fact that it does not actually “rain cats and dogs” in either the scientific or the colloquial sense does not render the expression either inexplicable or useless, although one does tend to wonder how it was originally coined.

Anyhow, Wikipedia explains r-selection as follows: “In unstable or unpredictable environments, r-selection predominates as the ability to reproduce quickly is crucial. There is little advantage in adaptations that permit successful competition with other organisms, because the environment is likely to change again. Traits that are thought to be characteristic of r-selection include: high fecundity, small body size, early maturity onset, short generation time, and the ability to disperse offspring widely.  Organisms whose life history is subject to r-selection are often referred to as r-strategists or r-selected. Organisms who exhibit r-selected traits can range from bacteria and diatoms, to insects and weeds, to various semelparous cephalopods and mammals, particularly small rodents.”

Rabbits are one of the more commonly cited examples of an r-selected species and a number of people have taken r/K selection theory, traced out the logical consequences of it in modern societal terms and applied it to politics.

“Obviously, from avoiding conflict and competition, to single
parenting, to low-loyalty to in-group, this r-selected Reproductive
Strategy is the psychomotive origin of the Political Left, or as it is
known in America, Political Liberalism. It produces a model of human
which is cowardly, competition averse, promiscuous, supportive of single
parenting, supportive of earlier sexualization of young, and which has
no real embrace of loyalty, honor, decency, or any other pro-social
trait designed to foster group cohesion and functionality, or success in
group competition. Females will become manly, to provision and protect
their young, which they raise alone, while men become effete castrati,
designed for fleeing and fornication, and capable of little else of
meaning.  As we see in any society which begins to produce resources freely and
copiously, it will gradually begin to trend “r” as time goes on,
further highlighting this relationship of resource availability to
political psychology, and reproductive strategy.”

It doesn’t hold up perfectly and its scope is excessively broad as one would expect from any binary heuristic, and yet it is much more strongly supported by the empirical evidence than many familiar political tropes such as the idea of a causal relationship between poverty and crime or the fear that carry laws will result in increased firearms homicides, road rage-inspired gun fights, and blood running in the streets.

Now, my minor contribution to the concept came about when I was reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric last summer.  One part in particular caught my attention, namely, this paragraph towards the beginning:  “Rhetoric is useful because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over
their opposites, so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be, the defeat must be due to the
speakers themselves, and they must be blamed accordingly. Moreover, before some audiences not even the possession
of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge
implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.”

I realized that there is a very strong correlation between the people identified r-selected and the individuals that Aristotle described as being incapable of dialectic.  In other words, rhetoric is the language of the Rabbit People, just as their preferred form discourse is alternatively described as postmodern and sensitivity-driven.

Now, it is important to note that theory notwithstanding, the communication-based division is observably not a direct function of politics, ideology, sex, religion, or even intelligence, although there are clear patterns and relationships that can be observed in those regards.  Most people have at least a bit of rabbit in them, and although insufficient intelligence restricts many people to the rhetorical level, there are many highly intelligent people of both sexes who are capable of the dialectic who nevertheless shun it, or worse, utilize a perverted, rhetorical form of it.

In my next post on the subject, I’ll explain how the Rabbit People communicate, how one must communicate with them, and provide some examples of rabbitry both high and low.