Category: Uncategorized

Delenda est

I couldn’t help but smile yesterday when the gentleman at File 770 mentioned that he had asked several pro-Puppies what they wanted and they answered “SJW delenda est.” That was beautiful. It touched me to such an extent that a single tear trickled down my cheek beneath the iron mask. And speaking of tears, this cri de coeur by Zoe Quinn about her unemployed and now-unhireable boyfriend is a good summary of what we want to see repeated over and over by SJWs in science fiction in the future:

How has the industry responded to his loyalty? Dubbing him a hiring risk. Too hot to touch. Heaven forbid some teenagers spam them with meme-laden emails. SmegmaDan’s blog said Alex hated gamers, better not hire him it could be risky.

Elephants afraid of mice.

God could you imagine how much worse it’d be if he was a marginalized person? Look at what happened to The Mighty No 9’s Dina Abou Karam? Look at her google search.

When you combine this with all of the other barriers marginalized people face, combined with how they are targeted for mob hatred at an exceptionally higher rate, it has a chilling effect on speaking out. There are countless marginalized people I’ve spoken to in the industry who are too afraid to support their friends in even the most lukewarm ways because they don’t want their employers to retaliate. There are so many women and people of color that have expressed private support alongside an apology for their fear of making it public because they have to keep their search results clean for a potential studio’s HR department.

You know that’s done to people like us on purpose, right? That running away at the first sign of smoke without fire is a tactic used against targets of online mobs CONSTANTLY? That they abuse SEO as a tool of social warfare? That the only power this carries is the kind major companies give to them by not bothering to see if it’s smoke without fire?

What if someone like Alex wants to go independent (leaving aside the question of if indies even hire producers for a second)? I cast a long shadow. He gets fucked over not just once from the industry’s general fear, but twice because his story has been looked over or lumped in with mine because he wasn’t “loud enough” about his own trouble. Not only does he get targeted because of being with me, but people look past his suffering, sacrifice, his work, and efforts to rebuild. People thoughtlessly treat him as an appendage. It’s infuriating. Look at some of the articles written about Crash Override. Look how often he’s missing or thought of simply as “a boyfriend” and not the cofounder he is. Look at how people attribute his work to me.  The man works his face off, gets results, and still gets screwed out of some of the credit.

Does that sound familiar? It does to me. I’ve fucking been there myself. It sounds like what USUALLY happens when I work with any men on a project. If you’re a marginalized person at all, you KNOW this feeling of frustration, of being whitewashed, of seeing your work being downplayed.

It’s not just Alex either. I’ve watched people who have been targets keep their heads down to try to keep themselves safe, just to have people all collectively forget what has happened to them. They’re stuck in a no-win position because speaking out means more hurt gets hurled their way, and more of their privacy is lost, but the cost of staying silent is that it seems that the world forgets about what happened to you at all. You’re left to wonder why people weren’t standing up for you like that, and if they cared about your suffering at all.

And since people with the power and reach need to speak up when those without are being hurt. Since I have been given the privlege to have this platform, I can’t just watch this, I have to speak up: THIS INDUSTRY IS CREATING A RISK OF SPEAKING OUT BY CALLING THOSE WHO SPEAK OUT A RISK.

We are bleeding assets to this industry, to this medium, at an alarming pace because of this risk aversion and shortsightedness. I would be dead or totally lost if not for Alex and the other folks who have been targeted by GamerGate and quietly faded away because it got to be too much. To see so many of them treated as footnotes is heartbreaking. To see my partner who has endured all of the hell I have and more treated as a fashion accessory and not the fully fledged and fucking impressive human being he is insults both of us and the things we have built *together*. For a risk adverse industry to treat him and other activists like lepers because a teenager might go “ur game sux” shows some pretty fucked up priorities.

The #GamerGate response has been worthy of the Vile Faceless Minions themselves: “Schadenfreudelicious!” One thing we’ll be discussing at Brainstorm tonight is how to bring successful #GamerGate tactics into science fiction, as Zoe Quinn points to one obvious possibility. It’s readily apparent that Tor Books doesn’t care in the slightest that PNH calls himself a racist or that John Scalzi launches vulgar attacks on everyone to the right of Hilary Clinton who crosses his path. But then, Tor Books is not their ultimate employer….

The employer stood behind us. They saw the horde for what it was. But
it didn’t stop there. Studios he never worked at got brigaded. Then his
employer’s employer got brigaded, and upped the pressure. One of the
things that makes mob harassment so insidious is how it attacks from
every possible angle, and some you didn’t even think of. All it takes in
any system is one point of failure, one person to make the wrong
decision, one person to not understand what’s going on, one person to be
a coward.

The SJWs have been playing this game of DISQUALIFY for a long time. They love to hurl the threat “you’ll never work in this industry again” at their enemies; Charles Stross, to his eternal credit, even warned me about it ten years ago. So it’s tremendously rewarding to see an SJW literally crying over the tactic being successfully brought to bear against them.

The secret of #GamerGate’s amazing success is emails, sent out on a daily basis in a series of coordinated campaigns against specified targets. Few corporations can resist a steady barrage of emails; as Quinn herself points out, it only takes one person somewhere in the system to crack and the target will be cut loose. And given the poor sales and financial performance of the science fiction publishing houses in recent years, it is unlikely that their corporate masters are likely to continue to tolerate actions and behavior which have quite observably turned a statistically significant percentage of the science fiction-buying public against them.

Zoe Quinn claims “20 accounts owned by 3 guys” have been sufficient to DISQUALIFY her boyfriend from industry employment. There are 364 Vile Faceless Minions. There are another 200+ Dread Ilk, plus an unknown quantity of Ilk, Rabid Puppies, and #GamerGate sympathizers. Even if we assume that Ms Quinn is lying (she is an SJW after all), I expect we can accomplish more than most of us might think if we were to follow #GamerGate’s lead in this regard. And in case you’re feeling sorry for the unemployable SJW lowlife, do keep this in mind.

|



SJWs only get sick of culture wars when they start losing. Until then it’s “Full Speed Ahead!” and “Remember the Misogyny!” 
– Daddy Warpig

Brainstorm May

We have 92 participants for the first Brainstorm (which will be at 7:30 PM Eastern regardless of what it says on the invite), and the event is now closed. The invitations for tomorrow will be going out within the hour; Dr. Greg Anderson will be serving as the sole panelist for this particular session. We THINK we’ve figured out a way to make it more organized, with Markku running the show as I focus on the topics at hand, but we’ll see how it goes. Please keep in mind that we’re new to the system and it won’t be surprising if it’s less than entirely smooth.

One thing I am pleased to announce is that although the system software does not have an audience chat feature, we’ve installed one on our own server so attendees can chat directly with one another in a second window. Instructions will be provided along with the invites.

And since there isn’t much to discuss in this regard, here is an email from #21, a Rabid Puppy asking for the chance to discuss the Hugo-nominated works now that the Hugo Packet has been released.

I request a post in which to discuss the Hugo Award finalists, now that the packets are out. That is to say, I just read some of them and I really, really need to vent.

I am kind. Vent away.

King Log or King Stork?

The only question is who will be king? Chris Hensley usefully summarizes the core issue underlying the conflict in science fiction at File 770:

It is helpful to understand the context in which the Puppies were started. There has been a debate going on for a number of years at this point, predating the Puppies and one which they are involved in like or not, about what, and who, we actually should accept and tolerate within the community. There has been a growing sentiment that maybe not everybody should be welcomed with open arms, maybe some people should be excluded.

I could spin it to sound more palatable, but it is a grave and terrible thing and as someone who supports sometimes excluding people for their actions it would be dishonest for me to do so. Fandom has had a tradition of not excluding anybody for any reason, including some pretty horrendous behavior up to and including sexual harassment and assault. This has finally come back to bite the community in the posterior, as well it should. A lot of this push back has been from the left-leaning end of fandom, and good for them, which has flavored both the community’s response and the reaction to that response. A lot of this is working how the details of what is, and is not, acceptable in what spaces.

One of the most heated debates, and the one the Puppies tapped into, is when speech should be excluded and when people can be excluded for their speech. The community traditionally leaned towards “never”, but the consensus has moved on that.

The moment that the SJWs in the science fiction community decided they could exclude individuals from it (and whether the SFWA expulsion was technically real or not is irrelevant in this regard), that meant the open community concept was dead. The principle was established. Now we can exclude Eskimos, people with big noses, people with little noses, people who look funny, or people who smell bad; in short, we can openly exclude anyone we have the power and the desire to exclude.

There is no longer free speech in science fiction. There is no longer freedom of expression or thought. It is now a simple ideological power game and we are ready to play that game with extreme prejudice. There is no need for discourse. There is no need for dialogue, for compromise, or negotiations. There is nothing to discuss.

They laid out the new rules. They laid out the new consensus. We not only accept them, we’re going to use make far more ruthless use of them than they ever imagined. Once we were content to let the twisted little moral freaks do and think and say what they wanted, but now they have claimed the right to tell US what to do and think and say we’re not going to tolerate them anymore. We are the sons of the Crusades and the daughters of the Inquisitions. This is a game we know how to win.

Remember, they didn’t exclude rapists. They didn’t exclude child molesters. They didn’t exclude Communists. They didn’t exclude monsters. They only excluded those with whom they ideologically disagreed. CMM observed:

I was reading the discussion from a 1960s fanzine which contained the discussion of whether Worldcon should ban the man who later became her husband (and still later died in prison after being convicted of child molestation).

In their attempts to keep up their ideal that everyone is welcome in fandom, the fans doing the discussing go to amazing lengths to deny that the guy is a problem and as they do so they reveal behavior they and people known to them have personally witnessed that made my hair stand on end, including groping the children of mutual friends in front of the friends and other guests at their house.

Remember, the science fiction community was absolutely fine with open child molesting. They still defend and honor child molesters and the sexually aberrant, even as they mock and exclude their ideological opponents. That is the sickness of the community over which the Evil Legion of Evil will methodically march. And speaking of the long march, now that the Hugo Packets are out, I should have my Totally Personal List Of Merest Voting Inclinations That Absolutely No One, Not Even The Vilest of Minions, Has To Follow To The Letter ready in about two weeks. I trust that description should suffice to keep everyone who has been whining about slates and bloc votes satisfied.

Mike Glyer adds:

It’s possible for people to exclude themselves from community with others they disapprove, but there seems to be no literal way of excluding anyone from fandom, which is why it has that misunderstood reputation for unlimited tolerance. I remember the time I passed Walter Breen in the aisle of a con huckster room, at first being astonished, then wondering “Should I tell someone?” Then, “Tell them what? They already know, he’s wearing membership badge.”

He’s absolutely right. It’s possible for a large group of people to exclude themselves from community with others they disapprove. All that we’re initially sorting out right now is who is on the Blue SF side and who is on the Pink SF side. Which, of course, is why many of those on the latter side are suddenly rushing to deny that there are two sides; they know theirs is much smaller. And they know we aim to misbehave.

UPDATE: This sums up our position nicely.

I did ask some pro-puppies that very question about how much they want. The answers I’ve gotten in emails have been very much along the lines of “Delenda Est”.

The Legion marches.

Credit is money

Shades of the old inflation/deflation debate. Zerohedge points out the vast imbalance between credit money and cash.

1)   The total currency (actual cash in the form of bills and coins) in the US financial system is a little over $1.36 trillion

2)   When you include digital money sitting in short-term accounts and long-term accounts then you’re talking about roughly $10 trillion in “money” in the financial system.

3)   In contrast, the money in the US stock market (equity shares in publicly traded companies) is over $20 trillion in size.

4)   The US bond market  (money that has been lent to corporations, municipal Governments, State Governments, and the Federal Government) is almost twice this at $38 trillion

5)   Total Credit Market Instruments (mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, junk bonds, commercial paper and other digitally-based “money” that is based on debt) is even larger $58.7 trillion.

6)   Unregulated over the counter derivatives traded between the big banks and corporations is north of $220 trillion

When looking over these data points, the first thing that jumps out at the viewer is that the vast bulk of “money” in the system is in the form of digital loans or credit (non-physical debt).

Put another way, actual physical money or cash (as in bills or coins you can hold in your hand) comprises less than 1% of the “money” in the financial system.

The simple facts tend to make the whole “war on cash” concept look absolutely absurd, as well as entirely obvious that it is about political control, not economic growth. The reason the central banks want to ban cash is because the credit money system is on the verge of collapse and they see it as a straw that could nevertheless cause the whole damn thing to collapse.

Which, of course, it is going to do anyhow. The map is not the territory and it will never be the territory.

SJWs eat their own

There is a wonderful scene in Garrison Keillor’s Wobegon Boy when the protagonist, a true red SJW who runs a public radio station at a private university, returns from a conference where he received an award for excellence in public broadcasting to learn that the women who report to him have turned on him and are accusing him of sexism in order to oust him from his position as the station manager. Led by his secretary, a card-carrying member of Wounded Daughters of Distant Fathers, they plant a story in the local media prior to taking their manufactured complaints about him to the university administration.

The reporter was Sandra Welles, who had called me the day after my dinner with Jean. The story was a real torpedo… It said that I had “a problem” with assertive women, being from the Midwest, and that I tried to “psychologically seduce” women in meetings and charm my way around them. I had paternalized the decision structure and made women afraid to speak up….

My heart sank. These slanders had come from people who knew me. They worked at WSJO and had come to my house and drunk my wine and eaten my Chinese spareribs…. Why would people be so angry and bitter toward me? I had built this station from the ground up and had managed it reasonably well, and what was their beef?

Their beef, of course, was that said protagonist, John Tollefson, was a white man from the Midwest who played white male classical music at the station he built and managed. Ergo, he had to go in order to make way for the station’s transformation into a vehicle for social justice and women’s issues. After his ouster has been successfully orchestrated and is all but complete, Tollefson reflects on what will happen to the station, but like a good SJW, he completely fails to learn anything from his experience.

I sat in bed, drinking water and gazing out at the snowy backyard and thinking about the radio station and Dean Baird. In a few months, WJSO would change over, from classical music to talk: the Gay-Lesbian Parenting Hour at one P.M. and the Men Dealing with Impotence Hour at one-fifteen, the Hearing Impaired Hour at one-thirty, Wounded Nephews of Distant Uncles at one forty-five, People in Grief for Former Lovers at two, the Herpes Hour at two-fifteen, People in Search of Closure at two-thirty – each with its own smug host and tiny clientele, its own style of vacuity – and should I fight this? No, I did not think so.

This seemed apt in light of the recent SJW declaration of disavowal of George R.R. Martin, who has gone from repeatedly attacking the wintery, chaotic evil of the Rabid Puppies and Vox Day to refusing to talk about the feminist attacks on him and his television show.

I am getting a flood of emails and off-topic comments on this blog about
tonight’s episode of GAME OF THRONES. It’s not unanticipated. The
comments… regardless of tone… have been deleted. I have been
saying since season one that this is not the place to debate or discuss
the TV series. Please respect that….

There has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material, by and large (if you doubt that, talk to the Harry Dresden fans, or readers of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, or the fans of the original WALKING DEAD comic books)… but the longer the show goes on, the bigger the butterflies become. And now we have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms, like the one presently engulfing my email.

Prose and television have different strengths, different weaknesses, different requirements.

David and Dan and Bryan and HBO are trying to make the best television series that they can.

And over here I am trying to write the best novels that I can.

And yes, more and more, they differ. Two roads diverging in the dark of the woods, I suppose… but all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place.

In the meantime, we hope that the readers and viewers both enjoy the journey. Or journeys, as the case may be. Sometimes butterflies grow into dragons.

((I am closing comments on this post. Take your discussions to the other sites I have mentioned….)

They’re just doing the best they can, people! Translation: “Please stop hitting me! Also, please go away and leave me alone.” What a complete fucking coward! Whatever happened to all that “debate and honest dialogue” for which you were calling, George? I also enjoy his resort to the patented Sam Harris Defense, in which the ex post facto claim of having anticipated a response is considered tantamount to rebutting it.

Keep in mind that Wobegon Boy was published in 1997. SJW women turning on the white men in their midst is nothing new, and yet every Tollefson and Martin and Scalzi and Sanford and Hines believes it can’t possibly happen to them because their little SJW hearts are pure.

Hugo Packet available

HUGO NOMINEE PACKET AVAILABLE
Spokane, Washington, 18 May 2015

A digital file of many of the Hugo Award nominees is now available for members of Sasquan to download at http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/packet_download/.
This free download is supplied by the creators and publishers of works
that are nominated for the awards. It is free to all current Supporting,
Attending and Young Adult members of Sasquan, and those who become
members before 31 July 2015. Its purpose is to allow those who are
voting on the Hugo Awards to be able to make an informed choice among
the nominated works.

All of the short fiction and graphic novels are included in their
entirety (((assuming Zombie Nation comes through!))). The packet
contains the full text of three of the novels: The Dark between the
Stars by Kevin J. Anderson, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, amd
The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. Skin Game by Jim Butcher and
Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie are represented by extensive excerpts. One
of the five finalists in the Related Work category is represented by an
excerpt: Letters from Gardner, by Lou Antonelli. There is some material
in each of the other categories except the Dramatic Presentations, but
not everyone wanted us to include their work in this packet.

Voting on the Hugo Awards is open to all Supporting, Attending or
Young Adult members of Sasquan. More information about voting and a
ballot may be found at  http://sasquan.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2015-Hugo-Ballot.pdf. In order to vote, you will have to enter your membership number and Hugo PIN at http://sasquan.org/hugo-awards/voting. Sasquan membership and registration information is available at https://sasquan.swoc.us/sasquan/reg.php

The Excluded

This concept of intellectual exclusion may help explain why the credentialed elite are so often at odds with me. They can’t believe I am willing and able to challenge them so successfully, and I can’t believe what clueless idiots they are despite their credentialed positions of intellectual authority. It explains an awful lot; I thought they were smarter than they apparently are:

The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133. It then falls about 1/3 by 140. By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%! In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions.

“Over an extensive range of studies and with remarkable consistency, from Physicians to Professors to CEOs, the mean IQ of intellectually elite professions is about 125 and the standard deviation is about 6.5.  For example, Gibson and Light found that 148 members of the Cambridge University faculty had a mean IQ of 126 with a standard deviation of 6.3.  The highest score was 139.”

“From a theoretical standpoint, democratic meritocracies should evolve five IQ defined ‘castes’, The Leaders, The Advisors, The Followers, The Clueless and The Excluded. These castes are natural in that they are the result of how people of different intellectual abilities relate to one another.  This is based on research done by Leta Hollingworth in the 1930’s and the more recent work of D.K. Simonton.”

“Leta Hollingworth studied profoundly gifted children.  She reported them as having IQs of 180+, which was a R16 score.  As such, on today’s tests this equates to 159+.  Her conclusion was that when IQ differences are greater than 30 points, leader/follower relationships will break down or will not form.  It establishes an absolute limit to the intellectual gulf between leader and followers.”

In other words, more than a few PhDs at elite universities are more than two standard deviations below me in IQ terms. And here I am supposed to be impressed by a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy of Language from a second-tier Midwestern university? In fact, given the ability of the Ilk and my Vile Faceless Minions to not only follow my lead in a disciplined manner but also correctly anticipate my intentions without having them explained, the evidence would tend to suggest that the mean intelligence of the regulars here is higher than the Cambridge faculty.

Based on my interactions with “intellectually elite professionals” this doesn’t shock me, although I’m a little surprised that both the mean and the ceiling as as low as they are.

So it should be no surprise that I’ve been “systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded” from the science fiction community, as its mean is probably around 1.5 standard deviations below the university professors. (Although in my estimation there are a few SF people with whom I have interacted who clearly have IQs over 139.) But in most instances, the intellectual gulf is simply too great.

Garth Zietsman has said, referring to people with D15IQs over 152, ‘A
common experience with people in this category or higher is that they
are not wanted – the masses (including the professional classes) find
them an affront of some sort.’  While true, it is more likely a symptom
than a cause of the exclusion.  We need to understand why they are an
affront.

I can tell him that. People who work very hard and spend years in order to climb to what they regard as the pinnacle of achievement actively resent those who can simply leap up to the peak. And because their knowledge is hard won, they tend to cling to it much more tenaciously than the more intelligent individual who is no more tied to one piece of information than the next. What makes it worse is that they cannot fathom that the more intelligent individuals do not think like they do.

Members of high IQ societies, especially those that require D15IQs above
145, often comment that around this IQ, qualitatively different
thinking emerges.  By this they mean that the 145+ D15IQ person doesn’t
just do the same things, intellectually, as a lower IQ person, just
faster and more accurately, but actually engages in fundamentally
different intellectual processes.  

I’ve been pointing this out for years, if you recall. But because I don’t think like the less intelligent, I am regularly labeled everything from stupid to racist. In my experience, the 150 IQ individual does not resent the
individual with the 160 or the 175 IQ, and this may be because being above 145, we all tend to engage in similar thought processes, albeit with different capabilities. The 135 IQ individual dislikes
and fears the 150+ individuals, while the 115 IQ individual either
doesn’t believe the 150+ individuals exist or blithely insists that they are crazy.

That’s
why I despise midwits. You simply can’t talk to them. They don’t even
try to understand you, but instead move to disqualify you as fast as they can. I have much more sensible conversations with
people in the 75 to 100 range than I do with most in the 105 to 120
range. The 125 to 140 crowd is okay as long as they don’t have an
inferiority complex, but when they do, they’re the biggest annoyances of
all.

People with D15IQs over 150 are effectively ‘The Excluded’, routinely
finding their thoughts to be unconvincing in the public discourse and in
productive environments.  If placed in a leadership position, they will
not succeed.

Now you know why I have such an allergy to being asked to lead in any way, shape, or form. In any event, this may be one of the more interesting aspects of Brainstorm (a reminder, there are 20 places left for the Wednesday session at 7:30 PM Eastern), as even those who aren’t +3SD or higher are, at least, open in principle to the wild and crazy thoughts being expressed by the higher intelligences. If we can figure out how to best harness a community of High IQ Excluded, we should be able to come up with more than a few interesting projects.

The Greek canary

Default is coming. So is Grexit. Bloomberg’s take:

How long can Greece carry on? With revenues just about covering the pay and pensions bill, there’s not much left over to make even the small(ish) payments due to the IMF in June. If Greece and its banking sector can limp a little further, the state should get a boost from income tax receipts that usually flow in July. Unfortunately, that might come too late to pay the ECB 3.5 billion euros due on July 20, and the repayment that follows in August looks like an impossible challenge without a disbursement of Eurogroup funds.

Should Greece’s citizens begin to lose faith in a positive outcome to negotiations, it’s quite possible that receipts could falter as more of the usual tax payments are held back and taxable activity is curtailed. Still, some boost to the Treasury’s bank balance is likely in July. General government revenues could be lifted by about 3.8 billion euros compared with the average for the other months of the year. That would get some way towards the figure needed to pay the ECB, though it might not come soon enough to avoid a missed payment.

Of course, making it as far as July depends on how long the Greek banking sector can survive. Absent a change to the haircut imposed by the ECB on Greek banks’ collateral, limitations on emergency liquidity assistance are unlikely to pose serious constraints before mid-July. Greek banks have enough collateral to access 93 billion euros in liquidity. That’s 13 billion euros above the current cap. The four-week average of increases by the ECB stands at 1.5 billion. At the current pace of increase, Greek banks could keep borrowing more for about eight weeks to offset deposit flight.

The usual suspects will insist that this is irrelevant because the USA has the ability to “print” its own currency, but again, the limit has nothing to do with printing and everything to do with finding someone willing to either borrow or loan the credit money. Furthermore, the Greek public is obviously quite willing to borrow, whereas the American public is not.

But this superficial assessment omits the fact that all the “Greek bailout” money went to the Greek banks, and deposits are loans to the banks. The negative interest rates beginning to appear around the world mean that the various publics are increasingly unwilling to loan their money to the banks, which is why the various proposals for banning cash and other means of preventing individuals to keep stores of value money outside the ever-widening maw of the banking system are being floated.

It’s a complicated subject and no one understands it completely, to the best of my knowledge. But rest assured that any solution that does not involve most of the banks writing off bad loans and then going out of business will be a failure.

Second-best ending ever

I have never watched Mad Men, never had any interest in it, but after reading about the final episode, that has to be the second-best ending of a television show ever, only surpassed by the epic end of Newhart. Third, in my opinion, would be the end of The Sopranos.

I love the fact that the show’s creator absolutely must have had the ending in mind from the beginning. That’s a first-rate lesson in doing storytelling right.

Somehow, I tend to doubt that A Game of Thrones will end anywhere nearly as well. While Benioff and Weiss have generally shown themselves to have much better storytelling instincts than George Martin, I’m still trying to figure out what on Earth is going on with Danerys inexplicably deciding to marry a member of the Mereen aristocracy. Fails as drama, fails as logic, and fails as being interesting.

Sexism and ideological bias in science fiction

Since we’re often informed by the SJWs how vital it is that more women are given awards on the basis of inclusivity, let’s begin with putting the facts out there. We already know, per Mike Glyer, that Hugos have been awarded to 19 conservative winners since 1996. I went through the list of Hugo Awards by Year and counted the number of women awarded, then counted the total number of awards given out. When more than one individual was awarded, I added the relevant percentage of that particular award (so one women in a group of four counted as 0.25, for example), and rounded up to a single decimal at the end.

2014: 9 of 17
2013: 4.8 of 17
2012: 8.8 of 17
2011: 6 of 16
2010: 2.8 of 16
2009: 4.5 of 15
2008: 1.3 of 14
2007: 3 of 14
2006: 3 of 13
2005: 4.8 of 14
2004: 4.7 of 13
2003: 4 of 13
2002: 1.5 of 13
2001: 2 of 13
2000: 1 of 12
1999: 1 of 12
1998: 0.5 of 12
1997: 1.5 of 12
1996: 1.5 of 13

TOTAL: 65.7 women have won 24.7 percent and 19 conservatives have won 7.1 percent of the 266 Hugo Awards given out since 1996. This is despite the fact that conservatives outnumber liberals by a factor of 1.6 in the USA, which means that conservatives are underrepresented by a factor of 11.3, versus women being underrepresented by a factor of 2.

Now, if the SJWs are to be believed, sexism is a serious problem but there is absolutely no evidence of left wing ideological bias. They keep repeating this despite the fact that the anti-right wing bias in science fiction is observably 5.6 times worse than the purported sexism about which they so often complain.

Which merely points us once more towards the truth of the lesson: SJWs always lie. And if the numbers aren’t enough to convince the more rhetorically minded, there is also a considerable quantity of anecdotal evidence of bias such as this comment from Martin Wisse:

To be honest, Worldcon fandom has been caught with its pants down by the Puppies, too slow to react to the first two attempts to game the Hugos. We all thought, and I was no exception, that after the Puppy nominees were trashed in the actual voting last year, the spoiled brats behind it would get the hint and fuck off.

Well, not so much. But at least we all know how seriously to take their pose of inclusivity.