Category: Uncategorized

The Ones Who Walk Away from Fandom

by Brian Z on File 770

Justice! How is one to tell about justice? How describe the citizens of Fandom?

Some do not write vintage pulp, you see, though there is message. But we do not hear the words story first much any more. Prose has become obtuse. Given a description such as this some might make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this some might look next for a King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or a snowy tavern with no spaceships. But there was no king. They did not use gendered pronouns, or foreshadow. They were not Stephen Donaldson. I do not know the rules and laws of their writing, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they had strange plot and character, so they also got on without immersion, pacing, rhythm, and emotional payoff. Yet I repeat that these were not pulpy folk, not Charles Gannons, John Ringos, Eric Flints. They were no less fen than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and instapundits, of considering message as something rather boring.

Do you believe? Do you accept the linkfests, the ceremony, the awards? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

In a basement under one of the public forums, or perhaps in the cellar of a blog, there is a bar. It has one door. A few sympathetic reviews seep in dustily between cracks in the boards. In one corner is a pile of schlock paperbacks with banal, cloying, smutty covers, sold through a rusty e-bookstore. A mere broom closet. In the bar a Sad is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. The door is unlocked, but nobody will come.

They all know it is there, the citizens of Fandom. Some have read, others merely tweet about it. They all understand that the reputation of their genre, the wisdom of their bloggers, the trajectory of their authors, the complacence of their nominators, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend on the pup’s opuscular misery.

There might not even be a kind word spoken to the pup.

At times one of the younger fen who go to see the pup does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also an older fan falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. Each one goes alone. They walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the place with the Hugos. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Fandom.

It’s more than a little amusing. And those who walk away are the wise ones, because, as it has been sung:

Never kick a dog
Because it’s just a pup
You’d better run for cover when the pup grows up!

Publishing: the negative-sum game

It is both amusing and a little tragic to see the brave face that the File 770 wannabes put on when contemplating the state of the traditional publishing world. They keep insisting that it is not a zero-sum game, which is true in a sense, because it is actually a negative-sum game.

The most difficult problems are negative-sum situations, where the pie is shrinking. In the end, the gains and losses will all add up to less than zero. This means that the only way for a party to maintain its position is to take something from another party, and even if everyone takes his or her share of the “losses,” everyone still loses in comparison to what they currently have or really need. This type of situation often sparks serious competition.

However, negative-sum disputes are not always lose-lose because if the parties know the pie is shrinking, it is possible their expectations will be low. A perfect example of a negative-sum dispute is the allocation of budget cuts within an organization. In this case, each department expects to have some funds taken away, but whether the outcome is a win or loss depends on how much money a particular branch gets in comparison to what they expected to have cut from their budget. So, if a branch was expecting to get a 30 percent cut and they only got cut 20 percent, which would be a win, even in a diminishing resource situation.

The present negative-sum situation was probably inevitable, not only due to the primary factor of men’s increasing preference for electronic forms of entertainment, but there is also the secondary factor of changing ethnic demographics. In the USA, for example, Hispanics don’t read as much as Anglos and they don’t buy as many books.

Among all American adults, the average (mean) number of books read or
listened to in the past year is 12 and the median (midpoint) number is 5. The White average is 13 and the median is 5, the Black average is 12 and the median is 4, the Hispanic average is 7 and the median is 3.

Throw in the number of non-English speakers into the mix and it should not be a surprise that prospects for the traditional publishing world were not good despite a growing population even before the SJW invasion of genre publishing is taken into account. But that doesn’t mean that the advocates of Pink SF haven’t made the situation worse, as the corporate masters are apparently beginning to understand. “Tor’s editorial director Julie Crisp has left Pan Macmillan following a
review of the company’s science fiction and fantasy publishing.”

Does that mean that Castalia has stupidly entered a declining market in the hopes of carving off a slice of a shrinking pie? Not at all. Because we have no intention whatsoever of becoming a traditional publisher, our cost structure will keep us competitive despite the higher royalties and lower prices we offer, and we know there is still a significant market for the Campbellian science fiction created by beardy, middle-aged white men in which the traditional SF publishers are aggressively disinterested.

Moreover, as the Brainstorm crowd knows, we are developing the technology to massively expand that market by reaching the young men who have, quite reasonably, abandoned the traditional SF market. I started reading Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Seveneves, and it is truly depressing. Less because nearly everyone on Earth dies than because he appears to have gone full SJW with a Gamma sauce. It’s the first time I’ve found it necessary to force myself to keep reading one of his books, and the first time one of his books has struck me as being proper Pink SF. Female presidents, token ethnic melanges, you name it, he’s got it to such an extent that were it not for Stephenson’s past gamma markers, I would almost suspect an epic, master-class trolling of the current genre.

On a tangential note, as Aristotle has informed us, some people are simply incapable of learning.

Julie Crisp ‏@julieacrisp May 20
So I’ve had a lot of submissions in recently. And do you know how excited I am to see how many of those are SF novels written by women?!!

Julie Crisp ‏@julieacrisp May 20
The answer is VERY!! 🙂

Her doubling-down on her enthusiasm for female SF authors is intriguing in light of this news report from 2011:

But with the hiring of Bella Pagan away from Orbit, Tor UK does hope to grow — and diversify — its line. Crisp explains:

With Bella joining us, we’re looking to grow our list in size, direction and selection. While, as of yet – everything is still under wraps concerning the new innovations we’ll be putting in place (watch this space!) I can tell you that Bella has a particular interest in urban fantasy and paranormal romances – an area that Tor UK hasn’t explored to its potential previously. So that’s one area we’ll be looking to expand into.

It doesn’t look like that strategy worked out all that well, does it. I’ve even seen some rumors floating around that Pan Macmillan is in the process of shutting down Tor UK altogether. Meanwhile, Tor.com is abandoning the novel in favor of the novella:

When the book wars sweep across the galaxy, and the blood of publishers runs down the gutters of every interstellar metropolis, the resource we fight for will not be paper, or ink, or even money. It will be time. For our readers, time is the precious commodity they invest in every book they decide to purchase and read. But time is being ground down into smaller and smaller units, long nights of reflection replaced with fragmentary bursts of free time. It’s just harder to make time for that thousand-page novel than it used to be, and there are more and more thousand-page novels to suffer from that temporal fragmentation.

Enter the novella, an old form with a new lease on life. We expect that the reader who has to fit their reading into their daily commute will appreciate a novella they can finish in a week, rather than a year. We’ll be releasing books that can be begun and completed on just one of those rare evenings of uninterrupted reading pleasure.

Apparently they believe Pink SF is more digestible in smaller doses.

One tit is never enough

JCCarlton explains why Eric Flint owes Brad Torgersen an apology:

The best thing the CHORFs could have done is lived by the principles they say that they said the Hugos represented.  They cold have welcomed the puppies as new blood.  At the very least they could have remained silent and accepted the fact that things are going to change.  Instead they created a huge media smear campaign against, among other people, Brad.  Frankly, accusing BRAD of being anything other than the nicest guy you will ever meet is just weird and I don’t think I’ve ever met Brad personally.  But when you play by Alinsky rules, facts aren’t relevant, the narrative is.

Along with that they are trying to “fix” the Hugos to make sure that only the “proper Worldcon membership,” the TRUFAN is allowed to pick who SF awards the Hugos to.  They are trying as hard as they can to make the Hugos the comfortable racket they like so much.  I don’t think that they realize just how much the nastiness they’ve been spreading around is losing them friends

Of course it doesn’t help that the CHORFs have been diligently creating their own monster.  I suspect that they thought that Vox would just fall apart and blow away like dust when they went all Alinsky on him at SFWA.  The problem is that Alinsky tactics only work when the other side accept you definition of them.  And Vox didn’t believe what the CHORFs were saying he was and frankly was able to turn their constant distortions and half truths against them.  Making false assertions doesn’t work as well on the internet where almost nothing is permanently forgotten and everything can documented.  It’s hard to make false assertions when the truth is a Google search away.

What the CHORFs don’t seem to be able to understand is that once you put up something in a blog, you might as well be broadcasting your actions to the other side.  And while most of us don’t care what’s on the CHORFs’ blogs on or another of us will probably see it and pass it around.  And Vox is not above pointing out the other side’s strategies and saying to his readership, tit for tat.

Up until the last few years I don’t think that many of us fans really cared about the Hugos very much.  The one time I’ve been able to attend a Worldcon I don’t think I even voted.  I’m absolutely sure that I didn’t participate in the nomination process the next year.  One thing the response the CHORFs have made many of realize for the first time is just how rotten the Hugo Awards have gotten.  I think that up until the CHORFs  declared total war on the puppies none of us on the other side really understood how far those people were willing to go for little plastic rocketships.

I have to admit that I don’t give a damn what Eric Flint thinks. He need not apologize to me, regardless of what he may have said. I know that some of his fellow Baen writers think well of him, but I’ve never read anything he’s written and I don’t know anything about the man except for the fact that he’s published by Baen and he’s said to be an unreconstructed socialist.

So, I don’t know if JCC is correct or not. But he’s certainly correct to claim that I am not above recommending tit for tat. Indeed, I am considerably below that, being a devotee of the tactical philosophy that requires three or more tits for every tat.

Scientistry is not scientody

And as for those who claim that I am anti-science because I am anti-corrupt scientistry, I’ve got two appeals to scientific authority that will trump yours right here:

In the past few years more professionals have come forward to share a truth that, for many people, proves difficult to swallow. One such authority is Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.

Dr. Horton recently published a statement declaring that a lot of published research is in fact unreliable at best, if not completely false.

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

This is quite disturbing, given the fact that all of these studies (which are industry sponsored) are used to develop drugs/vaccines to supposedly help people, train medical staff, educate medical students and more.

It’s common for many to dismiss a lot of great work by experts and researchers at various institutions around the globe which isn’t “peer-reviewed” and doesn’t appear in a “credible” medical journal, but as we can see, “peer-reviewed” doesn’t really mean much anymore. “Credible” medical journals continue to lose their tenability in the eyes of experts and employees of the journals themselves, like Dr. Horton.

He also went on to call himself out in a sense, stating that journal editors aid and abet the worst behaviours, that the amount of bad research is alarming, that data is sculpted to fit a preferred theory. He goes on to observe that important confirmations are often rejected and little is done to correct bad practices. What’s worse, much of what goes on could even be considered borderline misconduct.

Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ), which is considered to another one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, makes her view of the subject quite plain:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine”

I note that it isn’t any of the pro-vaxxers, the climate change scammers, the “I fucking love science” crowd or the True Believers in evolution that are calling out this vast quantity of scientific fraud, but rather the science skeptics, like me, who have repeatedly and reliably observed that the human element of the profession has indelibly tainted all confidence in the process.

And then recall that this is what Sam Harris believes can and should replace philosophy and traditional morality as an effective guide to human behavior.

The Olympian indifference of Johnny Con

John Scalzi attempts to spin the narrative about his book deal on Twitter:

John Scalzi @scalzi
I’d like to thank @torbooks for taking a chance on me even though I don’t actually sell any books.

John Scalzi @scalzi
Also, yeah, if you’re one of those people who thinks I’m ruining science fiction, it’s gonna be a bad next decade for you. Oh well!

John Scalzi retweeted
Jim C. Hines @jimchines
1. @scalzi signs a $3.4 million deal with Tor.
2. People authorsplain how he’d have earned even more if he’d only done ________.

#Facepalm

John Scalzi @scalzi
Reading commentary on the deal reminds me that a large majority of people do not know how publishing works. Which is fine, but interesting.

John Scalzi @scalzi
Most people don’t HAVE to know publishing economics, mind you. Why would they? But if you’re going to opine on them, it does help.

John Scalzi @scalzi
Schadenfreude: Watching people who’ve been sooo wrong about my career desperately try to spin this deal as a bad thing for me. Wrong again!

John Scalzi @scalzi
For those interested in compare and contrast: The advance for my first published novel — “Old Man’s War” — was $6,500.

John Scalzi@scalzi
Someone living off of daddy’s money probably shouldn’t try to lecture others about finances.

What else is new? SJWs always lie. Mike Cernovich summed up the salient point yesterday.

Mike Cernovich @Cernovich
As a white straight male capitalist, I’m happy for @scalzi’s $3.4 million book deal. But how many women/POC are squeezed out because of it?

I had estimated 680 on the basis of other SF publishers’ current initial advances, but I stand corrected. According to McRapey(1) himself, Tor is funding 13 more John Scalzi books at the opportunity cost of no less than 523 initial advances to new science fiction authors. As a side note, it is informative to see how much initial advances from major publishers have shrunk over time; the advance for my first published novel in 1996 was $20,000 $25,000.

CORRECTION: For the benefit of those who don’t know, I brought in Bruce Bethke as a co-writer AFTER being offered my first book contract with Pocket Books. Also, it was the advance for my first solo novel, The War in Heaven, that was $20,000. Those who think publishing isn’t a zero-sum game are correct in a sense, it is worse than a zero-sum game. It is a negative-sum game, which is why first advances are now one-fifth to one-tenth of what they were 20 years ago.

Those who have thrown hissy fits over Sad Puppies supposedly slate-blocking as many as 12 authors and preventing them from receiving recognition for their work at the Hugo Awards would do well to consider the fact that Patrick Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi have combined to prevent more than 500 authors from getting published and receiving paid advances. Opportunity cost is a bitch, especially when you’re the one upon whose fingers the window of opportunity has closed.

As Scalzi himself says, it’s going to be a bad decade for them. But at least we’ll have a few more snarky, derivative and mediocre novels from Tor to not read. So that’s nice.

It’s a little strange that people have claimed that my head is exploding or that I’m somehow upset by this deal. That’s not the case at all. In fact, I’m very, very, very pleased that Tor has decided to bet its future on John Scalzi rather than on any of the 523 other authors in whom they could have invested. I wish it had been a 13-book deal at $3.4 million per book. Scalzi isn’t the problem, after all, Scalzi is just one of the uglier public faces of the problem.

Castalia House was never going to publish Johnny Con because we don’t publish Pink SF snark-fic or work with people we know to be liars. But if you’re one of those 523 authors left out in the cold and you have a really good science fiction novel you want to publish, then we would certainly be interested in hearing from you.(2)

(1) I have been asked if John Scalzi will be relinquishing the “McRapey” title in light of George R.R. Martin’s astonishing accomplishment in rape fiction. Upon consideration, the answer is no, but GRRM will henceforth be known as “George Rape Rape Martin”.  

(2) Yes, we are behind in responding to our submissions. I’ll be working on them this weekend.

Neocons attack Paul, the sequel

Now the people who brought you failure in Afghanistan, failure in Iraq, a puppet government in Ukraine and the Islamic State are gunning for Rand Paul because he is willing to tell the truth about them and the foreign policy failures of the last Republican president. Roger Simon is running around claiming that Paul has “shown his true colors” and “destroyed himself”:

Alas Rand (I had higher hopes for him), like father Ron, has a mega-chauvanistic view of the world.  The USA is so big and strong it causes everything, including, at one point, 9-11, and now ISIS, if you can believe that. Never mind that the Islamic State is just another avatar of Islamic imperialism’s desire for a world caliphate that has been going on for centuries, long before our country was in existence — the Battle of Tours (732), the Siege of Vienna (1683) and on and on. The violence has been there forever, too.  As any literate person knows, it’s in the Koran and the Hadith.  Beheadings were part of Mohammed’s game plan. It’s what he did and what he called for. This was not invented by a cabal of neocons in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 2003.

And of course ISIS is part of a straight line that goes from the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in Egypt in 1928, long before the current crop of Republicans were even alive) to Al Qaeda via Zawahiri and on into the modern age with ISIS, all working from the same ideological playbook, as are Boko Haram, Hamas, al Shabab, al Nusra, etc., etc.

Rand, again like father Ron, is essentially racist in blaming this on America and not recognizing other cultures have belief systems to which they truly adhere and that those belief systems may be dangerous, even evil.  America did not evolve Islamist ideology anymore than it did Nazism, but the Islamists have the potential to wreak just as much havoc if they are not stopped.

And what did Paul actually say?

The freshman senator from Kentucky said Wednesday that the GOP’s foreign policy hawks “created these people.” . . .  “ISIS exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately,” Paul said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” He continued: “They created these people. ISIS is all over Libya because these same hawks in my party loved – they loved Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya. They just wanted more of it.”

That’s absolutely true. Simon and the other neocons can sing and dance all they like, but the fact is that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq created ISIS. Military experts like William S. Lind even predicted it back in 2003:

The current phase of the war in Iraq is driven by three different
elements: chaos, a war of national liberation (which is inflicting most
of the casualties) and 4th Generation War. In time, the 4th Generation
elements will come to predominate, as they fill the vacuum created by
the destruction of the Iraqi state.

He then pointed out how it would proceed in  2004:

An article in the Friday, March 29 Washington Post pointed to the long-expected opening of Phase III of America’s war with Iraq. Phase I was the jousting contest, the formal “war” between America’s and Iraq’s armies that ended with the fall of Baghdad. Phase II was the War of National Liberation waged by the Baath Party and fought guerilla-style. Phase III, which is likely to prove the decisive phase, is true Fourth Generation war, war waged by a wide variety of non-state Iraqi and other Islamic forces for objectives and motives that reach far beyond politics.

    The Post article, “Iraq Attacks Blamed on Islamic Extremists,” contains the following revealing paragraph:

    In the intelligence operations room at the 1st Armored Division’s headquarters (in Baghdad), wall-mounted charts identifying and linking insurgents depict the changing battlefield. Last fall the organizational chart of Baathist fighters and leaders stretched for 10 feet, while charts listing known Islamic radicals took up a few pieces of paper. Now, the chart of Iraqi religious extremists dominates the room, while the poster depicting Baathist activity has shrunk to half of its previous size.

The article goes on to quote a U.S. intelligence officer as adding, “There is no single organization that’s behind all this. It’s far more decentralized than that.”

Welcome to Phase III. The remaining Ba’athists will of course continue their War of National Liberation, and Fourth Generation elements have been active from the outset. But the situation map in the 1st Armored Division’s headquarters reveals the “tipping point”: Fourth Generation war is now the dominant form of war against the Americans in Iraq.

The neocons are desperate to avoid responsibility for their failures because they want to keep doing the same stupid shit that caused the current problems. Far from destroying himself, Paul is telling Americans what is necessary just to begin saving what is left of their nation. Ron Paul was right back in 2001. Rand Paul is right now.

Registration required

I’m sorry, but it looks like Sunday’s Open Brainstorm event with Martin van Creveld is not going to be as open as I planned. Thanks to corporate bureaucracy, it appears that we’re not going to be able to increase our current limit of 100 participants to 500 until sometime next week.

Emails have been sent out to a) the Annual Brainstorm members and b) the May Brainstorm members. Members have 24 hours to register for the event. If you haven’t received an email – and please check your spam filters – email me tonight and let me know if you would like to attend. On Saturday morning I’ll post how many open spots remain. Those remaining spots can be claimed by those signing up for c) the June Brainstorm or an Annual membership.

If there are any spots left after that, they’ll be first come, first serve after I post the link on the blog about 15 minutes before the event. I’m sorry that it’s not possible to provide for any more seats, but we’ve been trying to order the upgrade for over a week now and it simply could not be done. We will keep trying, but at this point, we have to assume it won’t happen before Sunday.

Transcripts from the May session will go out to May and Annual members late tonight; I’m still cleaning it up. A transcript from the open event will be sent free to all May/June/Annual members, and since there will be people who won’t be able to attend who were planning to do so, we’ll make it free for a week for everyone else on the Castalia store.

George Martin really really likes rape

Like the worm, the SJW always turns on his own:

Rape acts in Game of Thrones the TV series (to date): 50
Rape victims in Game of Thrones (to date): 29

Rape acts in ASOIAF the book series (to date): 214
Rape victims in ASOIAF (to date): 117

The books contain over 4 times as much rape as the show (and probably even more; the method of analysis likely underestimates the rape in the books – see below).

Before the barrage of anon hate mail floods in: that’s not to say the show’s not problematic. It’s to say that the books are problematic. ETA: Please see A Song of Ice and Fire Has a Rape Problem for a detailed discussion on why the rapes in the books aren’t any better than those in the show. Spoiler: the only women who get vengeance on their rapists are villains.

Those 214 rape acts are particularly astonishing if you compare them to the number of times a married couple has sex. Which, if my memory serves correctly, happens about twice in five books.

Nor are the various defenses of Martin that have been offered valid. As Tafkar notes: “the only thing that protects a woman from rape is being one of Martin’s POV characters.” 

More damning is this conclusion: “The stories of rapists are important to George R. R. Martin. Those are
the stories he tells. Our point of view characters are the rapists, not
the victims.” 

George R.R. Martin well merits his fate. 

There is no solution

It has largely ceased to be funny to see the demography ostriches burying their heads in the sand about the total failure of Melting Pot America, even as it rapidly disappears like a timer that’s been turned over.

YANKEE: VD thinks non westerners are too Dunb
to maintain a Republic like the U.S. When they are a majority.”

DAVID: And
non-Westerners continue to steadfastly prove him right. Look, it’s
really just this simple: if they were capable of doing so they would
have done so in their own countries. They have not, ergo, they can’t.

YANKEE: “Fine!
What’s the solution, VD? Furthermore, what’s your solution to America
housing all these blacks that you also believe Are incapable of
maintaining the U.S,?”

There is no solution. There is no shiny secular science fiction “It’s a Small World” societies in the making. There are only the inevitable historical consequences of the demographic destruction of Anglo-Saxon America, which will likely follow one of the usual paths: a) subjection and eventual elimination of minorities, b) subjection and eventual elimination of the majority, c) partition, d) ethnic subsumption. For various reasons, I expect (c) to be the most likely in the USA and (a) to be the most likely in Europe.

Before you stick your head back in the sand, keep in mind that I am a Native American, an American Indian. Some of my relatives live on a small reservation of worthless land their conquerors have permitted them to keep, with a handful of people who know how to speak a language that is now almost entirely extinct. So, don’t tell me that the survival of your people, of your traditions, or of your way of life is a given. Because I can assure you, they most certainly are not.

The future belongs to those who show up for it. The future belongs to those who are determined to survive and are willing to defend their culture, their language, their genetics, and their traditions. Those who aren’t, won’t.

SCIENCE is not science

Whatever happened to the idea that science is self-correcting?

Over the past few days a scandal has begun to plague political science. A UCLA graduate student, Michael LaCour, appears to have faked a data set that was the basis for an article that he published in the highly prestigious journal Science. I have examined a second paper by LaCour. As I’ll explain, I’m convinced that it also is the product of faked results.

The Science article purportedly showed that personalized, door-to-door canvassing is effective at changing political views. LaCour and his co-author, Don Green of Columbia University, enlisted members of an LGBT organization at UCLA to contact voters who had earlier indicated on a survey that they opposed gay marriage. The article shows, based on follow-up surveys, that the LGBT door-to-door canvassing had a significant effect in shifting voters toward pro-gay-marriage views.

Two graduate students at UC Berkeley, however, had significant difficulties in replicating the study. They called the private firm that LaCour had supposedly enlisted to conduct his survey. The firm, however, said that it did not conduct such a survey. LaCour had also reported to the grad students the name of an employee of the survey firm with whom he worked. The firm, however, said that it had no records of such an employee ever working at the firm.

After confronting his coauthor, Green requested that Science retract the article. LaCour still stands by his results. Science, faced with this dilemma, has not (yet) retracted the paper.

That pretty much settles the question of whether Science concerns scientody – the scientific method – or scientistry – the scientific profession. An “editorial expression of concern” is not sufficient. The study could not be replicated and there is evidence that the first study was not legitimate. Therefore, a reputable publication that was actually dedicated to scientody would retract the study immediately pending further evidence of its replicability. Science is observably not such a publication.

Especially when the man who developed the method that researcher utilized has come out very strongly against the legitimacy of LaCour’s work:

I think the bulk of the evidence suggests that LaCour faked at least some of the results of this second paper. Not only would I be willing to bet on this conclusion, I would be willing to give 10:1 odds on it. Still, I’m not certain, and I would be hesitant to give 100:1 odds. And I would refuse to give 1,000:1 odds.

Regardless, I am certain that LaCour faked the results of the original paper—the one published in Science. I predict that UCLA will refuse to award him a PhD, and I predict that Princeton will retract the assistant professorship that it offered him. I predict that UCLA or Princeton or both will conduct an investigation. I suspect that they will find that LaCour faked results in a few papers, not just one.

But the most damning thing, as far as the credibility of Science goes, is this observation, “It is very rare for political scientists to have our results mentioned alongside results from the “hard” sciences.” So why, then, was this apparently fraudulent paper selected for such unusual publication in the first place?