Category: Uncategorized

Engagement is impossible

The other day, I visited Mike Glyer’s File 770 in response to his post that Sad Puppies 4 has been announced, with the infamous Kate the Impaler taking up the black flag from Brad Torgersen.

Kate the Impaler, of the Evil Legion of Evil, will be picking up the banner for Sad Puppies 4 and running with it. I even promised not to impale anyone with it (it’s such a pretty flag, and getting blood and… stuff… all over it would make those poor sad puppies even more sad. Even the Evil Legion of Evil has standards, you know. We’re completely against letting Sad Puppies stay sad. We want them to be happy).

There won’t be much action from Sad Puppies 4 for quite some time, but rest assured I will be lurking in the shadows looking for worthy candidates for the campaign to End Puppy-Related Sadness. When the time is right, announcements will be made and campaigning will begin in earnest. In the meantime, I shall rub my hands together and practice my evil cackle.

This is good news, of course, for those of you who were unable to join the Legion in the Sad Puppies 3 campaign. In any event, I explained that a number of the commenters had some fairly basic misconceptions about Sad Puppies in the following manner.

With all due respect, Mr. Fitch, I suggest that a popular movement led by a woman named “Kate the Impaler” is not overly concerned with an appearance of dignity. In fact, her appellation tends to suggest what the members of the movement believe can be done with those historical concerns about professional dignity.

As for the notion of being scorned, well, that’s the benefit of having been roundly scorned before. It renders one immune. They had one bullet. It’s been fired. And it is worth noting that Sad Puppies are simply following the advice of Mr. John Scalzi.

“Change the Hugos by nominating, voting and participating, or (much more slowly and far less reliably) actively making your case to the people who are nominating, voting and participating. As a pro tip, explicitly or implicitly disparaging their intelligence, taste or standing to make choices when you try to do that is unlikely to persuade them to decide anything other than that you’re probably an asshole.”
– John Scalzi, April 5, 2013

After answering a number of questions, correcting still more misconceptions, ignoring numerous passive-aggressive shots at me, and deflecting Andrew Marston’s usual nonsense, that led to this comment from one Martin Wisse:

Vox Day loves to play the victim, loves to fall back on his 1/8 Cherokee princess ancestory when called on his racism and it’s never, ever his fault that people are mean to him, despite his long and sordid history of being a racist, sexist gobshite.

He doesn’t care about science fiction, not even to the extent a Correira or Torgedsen still care about it, he just cares about sticking it to the liberals in his head.

What the Sad Puppies are doing is just your bog standard wingnut culture war, fighting an imagined persecution of their “art” when the truth is that their work is at best mediocre and worse, not nearly as popular of that of their perceived enemies. It burns them up inside to have Redshirts winning the Hugo and optioned for a tv show.

On top of that, James May posted a Twitter stream at Brad Torgersen’s site by some of the very people who were “engaging” with me at File 770. As you can see, they don’t appear to have been doing so in good faith:

Cora Buhlert ?@CoraBuhlert 3h3 hours ago @PrinceJvstin @shaunduke @SFReviewsnet Are we talking about VD vomitting all over File770?

Paul Weimer ?@PrinceJvstin 3h3 hours ago @CoraBuhlert @shaunduke @SFReviewsnet yes, and how I’m crazy for trying to engage with him.

Cora Buhlert ?@CoraBuhlert 3h3 hours ago @PrinceJvstin @shaunduke @SFReviewsnet I tried to engage with these people, too, at first, but I really think they’re beyond engaging.

shaunduke ?@shaunduke 2h2 hours ago @CoraBuhlert @PrinceJvstin @SFReviewsnet It would be nice if one could reasonably expect an actual engagement, but you can’t, really.

Paul Weimer ?@PrinceJvstin 2h2 hours ago @shaunduke @CoraBuhlert @SFReviewsnet I’ve tried. Lord knows I have tried

shaunduke ‏@shaunduke 3h3 hours ago @PrinceJvstin @SFReviewsnet
After all, calling him out for being racist and sexist is just fact. He
is both of those things.”

Setting aside the observable absurdity of calling someone racist then openly mocking his Native American heritage, what is important is for us to understand that there is no point in even trying to engage with these SJWs because they quite clearly believe that we are beyond engagement.

Well and good. That is a feature, not a bug, as far as I am concerned. There is no reason to bother trying to convince them otherwise, as we shall simply cease to engage with them. When the SJWs whine and complain and cry and beg for mercy, they will hear nothing from us. From now on, let the only engagement we give them be the bottoms of our boots treading upon their fat, tear-stained, and screaming faces.

You can smell the SJW fear already. And however acrid and reminiscent of Cheetohs it may be, the scent is sweet indeed:

If there is proof on the Gator thing (and it is certainly wretchedly plausible, since Beale threw in with them early in one of his desperate bids for fanboys) I will be angry, and a little frightened, since coming to the attention of that particular group has proved very unsafe.

At the same time–and this is the part that frustrates me–a vote from someone who wants to watch the world burn is just as good as a vote from someone who read and agonized and voted for books they loved, and the judges can’t distinguish because then we careen down the slippery slope–and the extra maddening bit is that there doesn’t seem to be anything to DO about it!

How do you bring the weight of community disapproval on someone who isn’t part of the community? 

They had one bullet. Or rather, they thought they did. It turned out to be a blank. What’s amusing is that last year they were busy victory-dancing and babbling about how upset the Sad Puppies were about our failure to win any awards. I said, entirely truthfully, that I didn’t give a damn about awards. I never have. Perhaps now they are starting to understand that I do not lie.

And I didn’t throw in with GamerGate. GamerGate is MY community. It has been for my entire life. GamerGate is my brothers and my sisters. And while I’m not the smallest billy goat in #GamerGate, I’ve certainly got some big brothers who are much bigger and badder than me.

Transgenderism is child abuse

Words don’t suffice to describe how intrinsically harmful the evil, unscientific nonsense of “transition” is to the children of the psychological freaks involved:

My biggest concern at age nine was how to keep my daddy’s secret, the one he revealed to me as we sat alone on a hill near our home. In a sense, I lost my dad that day, when he told me he wanted to become a woman. As I tried to process that revelation, he blindsided me with another. He told me he never wanted to have children. To him, my siblings and I were mistakes, because we did not align with his desires.

His confessions left me confused and hurt. After all, I just wanted a dad who would love and cherish me, who would make me feel special as a daughter. I felt rejected and abandoned by my own father. By the time I was eleven, my dad had begun to abuse me emotionally and sexually. Even so, I continued to keep my dad’s secret locked away, deep down in my heart.

My dad created a home environment that made me feel as if I was walking on pins and needles. His resentment over my possession of what he so deeply desired for himself—a woman’s body—turned into anger and abuse. As his desires intensified, he began to borrow my clothing. Many times I discovered my underclothes and tops under bathroom towels, or in the attic—often in places I had not been. I learned to organize my clothes just so, in order to know if he had been in my dresser drawers. When I confirmed that he’d worn an article of my clothing, I simply could not bring myself to ever wear that item again.

The thing that is so ridiculous about “transgenderism” is that it flies completely in the face of both science and religion. You have to be an indoctrinated moron to take the concept seriously; most people that make a big production about saying “she” where “he” is the genetically appropriate pronoun obviously know better. As Orwell pointed out, the more ridiculous the concept in which you are willing to feign belief, the more complete your intellectual submission.

To look at a man and say “she is a woman” is on the level of insisting that 2+2=5. It’s all about control of the narrative. Never, ever, submit to it.

Nor should it be any surprise that those who are so transgressive as to mutilate themselves in order to pretend to be something they are not are going to be inordinately inclined to maltreat and abuse others. Including their own children.

“A necessary supplement to Clausewitz”

A HISTORY OF STRATEGY: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

Martin van Creveld ranks high among military historians, and given the changes in technology since Napoleonic times, his work is a necessary supplement to Clausewitz. His reflections have influenced strategists and grand tacticians since his first books appeared, and as an Israeli historian, he has been in a unique position to observe the changing nature of modern warfare on both the grand strategic and tactical levels, particularly with regards to asymmetric warfare. Scholars and military planners ignore his thoughts at their peril.
 
I don’t entirely agree with him on the effectiveness of guerilla operations absent a sanctuary, or with his conclusions concerning Viet Nam, which I consider to be a victory won, then given up. And while the Iraq War was certainly unwise, I don’t believe that it was necessarily unwinnable, as the U.S. military was given an impossible mission, then undermined by political errors made above their pay grade. That being said, if winning is defined as a nation being better off after the war than it was before, it is hard to see how winning in Iraq was ever possible. So perhaps we agree after all.
 
But whatever your position on modern conflicts might be, Martin van Creveld’s writings are worth reading and they are vital to reaching informed conclusions about the art of war.

Jerry Pournelle
Studio City, California

Castalia House has published a lot of books over the last twelve months. I’m proud of those books and I believe all of them are worth reading by at least one specific group of readers or another. But most books, even the excellent ones, are not what I consider to be absolute must-reads by everyone of sufficient intellect to comprehend them. Such books are very few and far between; the last one we published that I personally felt this strongly about was AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND by John C. Wright.

I feel much the same way about A HISTORY OF STRATEGY: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind by Martin van Creveld, although for very different reasons. Most of you are aware that I am very well-read in strategic matters. I read Caesar and Mahan and Oman for entertainment, I rely heavily upon Frontinus, and to a lesser extent, Onasander and Vegetius, in my fiction, and I am no stranger to the great works of military strategy and tactics from the ancients to the moderns.

And yet, in A HISTORY OF STRATEGY, van Creveld not infrequently cited military thinkers of whom I’d never even heard before, let alone read. This is not a history of war, but a history of thinking about war, and it is arguably one of the most masterful summaries of a single millennia-spanning train of thought ever written. It’s not long, it’s not deep, and it’s not hard to follow, but it is an education in 116 pages. Read this and you will be better-informed on the subject of war than 99.99 percent of the human race.

Better still, you will be in a position to dive deeper into any one of a hundred areas and to understand where you are diving as well as the historical significance of that area. Van Creveld begins at the beginning, with the ancient Chinese, and proceeds methodically through time, crediting each cognitive breakthrough to its author before explaining its significance as well as its consequences.

I highly recommend this book, especially to parents who are homeschooling teenage boys. Featuring the foreword by Dr. Jerry Pournelle quoted above, it is available for $4.99 at Castalia House in both EPUB and Kindle formats and at Amazon.

Iran’s nukes: an Israeli perspective

Last week, a number of people were expressing their opinions concerning the prospects that Iran would obtain nuclear weapons as a result of the Lausanne talks and what this meant for the USA, Israel, and the Middle East. Most of those opinions, including mine, were largely uninformed, but then it occurred to me that Castalia House’s newest author, Martin van Creveld, was someone who has spent a good deal of time thinking about this very subject, and as Israel’s leading military historian, he is in a position to know considerably more about the situation than anyone else here.

Later today we will be announcing a second Castalia House book by Dr. van Creveld that I cannot recommend highly enough. Perhaps reading this response to my question about his perspective on the likely consequences of the prospective Lausanne treaty will help you understand why.

“More may be better” was the title of an article published back in 1981 by the redoubtable political scientist Kenneth Waltz. Going against the prevailing wisdom, Waltz argued that nuclear proliferation might not be all bad. Nuclear weapons, he wrote, had prevented the US and the USSR from going to war against each other; as, by all historical logic since the days of Athens and Sparta in the fifth century B.C, they should have done. Instead they circled each other like dogs, occasionally barking and baring their teeth but never actually biting. Such was the fear the weapons inspired that other nuclear countries would probably follow suit.

To quote Winston Churchill, peace might be the sturdy child of terror.
Since then over thirty years have passed. Though Waltz himself died in 2013, his light goes marching on. At the time he published his article there were just five nuclear countries (the US, the USSR, Britain, France, and China) plus one, Israel, which had the bomb but put anybody who dared say so in prison. Since then three (India, Pakistan, North Korea) have been added, raising the total to nine. Yet on no occasion did any of these states fight a major war against any other major, read nuclear, power.

And how about Iran? First, note that no country has taken nearly as long as Iran did to develop its nuclear program. Started during the 1970s under the Shah, suspended during the 1980s as Iranians were fighting Saddam Hussein (who invaded Iran), and renewed in the early 1990s, that program has still not borne fruit. This suggests that, when the Iranians say, as they repeatedly have, that they do not want to build a bomb they are sincere, at least up to a point. All they want is the infrastructure that will enable them to build it quickly should the need arise—a desire they have in common with quite some other countries such as Sweden, Australia, and Japan.

Second, the real purpose of the Iranian program, and any eventual bomb that may result from it, is to deter a possible attack by the U.S. Look at the record; one never knows what America’s next president is going to do. With another Clinton, who attacked Serbia, and another Bush, who attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, in the White House a distinct possibility, caution is advised. The Mullahs have no desire to share the fate of Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Khadafy.

The latter’s fate in particular gives reason for thought. In 2002-3, coming under Western pressure, Khadafy gave up his nuclear program.  As his reward, no sooner did the West see an opportunity in 2011 than it stabbed him in the back, waged war on him, overthrew him, and killed him. Leaving Libya in a mess from which it may never recover.

Third, Israel is in no danger. Alone among all the countries of the Middle East, Israel has what it takes to deter Iran and, if necessary, wage a nuclear war against it. What such a war might look like was described in some detail by Anthony Cordesman, an American political scientist a former member of the National Security Council. His conclusion? The difference in size notwithstanding, the outcome would be to wipe Iran, but not Israel, off the map.

Netanyahu has Iran in his head and effectively used it to win the elections. Yet truth to say, no Iranian leader has ever directly threatened Israel. To be sure, neither Iran’s presidents nor the Mullahs like the Zionist Entity. They do not stand to attention when Hatikvah is played. They have even had the chutzpah to deny the Holocaust. Yet all they have said is that, if Israel attacked them, they would respond in kind. Also that “rotten” Israel would end up by collapsing under its own weight. All this serves to divert attention away from their real purpose. That purpose, as I just said, is to deter the U.S. And to draw as much support in the Moslem world as verbal attacks on Israel always do.

Finally, morality. Are the Iranians really as bad as some people claim? Taking 1981 as our starting point, we find that in the three and a half decades since then the U.S has waged war first against (or in) Grenada; then Panama; then Iraq; then Serbia (in Bosnia); then Serbia again (in Kosovo); then Afghanistan; then Iraq again; then Libya. In some of these praiseworthy enterprises it was supported by its allies, the Netherlands included.

The Iranians are not angels—far from it. They have meddled in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, as they still do. They have also assisted terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas. But everything is relative. They have not waged large-scale warfare against any other country. Let alone bombed it or invaded it.

And that, in the final analysis, is all that matters.

Now, Martin van Creveld is the very opposite of an innocent on this subject. He knows more about war, the history of war, and the strategy and tactics of war than nearly anyone on the planet. And so when a world-famous military expert, who lives in the heart of the land that is most threatened by Iranian weapons, contradicts the neocons living in the USA who have been beating the war drum for a decade and claiming that the mad mullahs are simply slavering to hurl nuclear-tipped missiles at Israel the moment they have them, I suggest that it is wise to listen to the former, not the latter.

Her precious….

You may recall that the Toad of Tor said this yesterday:

1. I have less power than I feel I should have.
2. I feel those people over there have power I don’t have.
3. They must have stolen mine!

A clear case of psychological projection, one would have to conclude. Especially after reading her subsequent statement today:

“The Hugos don’t belong to the set of all people who read
the genre; they belong to the worldcon, and the people who attend
and/or support it. The set of all people who read SF can start
their own award.”
– Teresa Nielsen Hayden, March 29,
2015, 03:43 PM

That’s coming right from the Toad’s mouth. And yet, here is what Sasquan itself has to say about the Hugo Awards.

Worldcons are the site of the Hugo Awards, the premier awards in the science fiction field, recognizing the greatest books and stories, related works, film, television, podcasts, and fan works.

So, we’re supposed to believe that the premier awards that recognize the greatest books and stories in science fiction don’t belong to the set of all science fiction readers?  Then what makes them “the premier awards”? Why are they even supposed to be relevant, if they mean nothing to anyone who isn’t one of the small number of people who attend “the worldcon”?

No income growth in two decades

Despite two stock market booms, there has been no real income growth since 1994:

Real Median Household Income Has Been Flat for 20 YearsDespite ultra-loose monetary policies over the past several years,
incomes adjusted for inflation have fallen for the median U.S. family.
With the benefits of monetary expansion going to a small share of the
population and wage growth stagnating, incomes have been essentially
flat over the past 20 years. In the long run, however, classical economics would tell us that the
pricing distortions created by the current global regimes of QE will
lead to a suboptimal allocation of capital and investment, which will
result in lower output and lower standards of living over time. In fact,
although U.S. equity prices are setting record highs, real median
household incomes are 9 percent lower than 1999 highs. The report from
Bank of America Merrill Lynch plainly supports the conclusion that QE
and the associated currency depreciation is not leading to higher global
output. The cost of QE is greater than the income lost to savers and
investors. The long-term consequence of the new monetary orthodoxy is
likely to permanently impair living standards for generations to come
while creating a false illusion of reviving prosperity.

Karl Denninger was among the first to point out that even if it worked, Quantitative Easing could not possibly do what was claimed of it. Thus demonstrating what I pointed out, which is that it was merely about buying more time for the bankers to make hay before the eventual crash of the global economy. We’re already seeing signs of the wars that conventionally accompany depressions, and depending upon your definition of depression, we’re only six years into this thing.

Asymmetric warfare

The war in Yemen has now gone regional:

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman said the military operation against the Houthis would not stop until Yemen was stable and secure. It will continue “until it achieves its goals for the Yemen people to achieve security,” he said.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi, meanwhile, endorsed the creation of a joint military force, saying the Arab world was at a crucial crossroad and facing unprecedented difficulties. “The challenges are grave,” Sisi told the Arab leaders, like Salman not mentioning Iran by name. “It is a huge responsibility, heavy and burdensome.”

A Houthi spokesman countered Saturday that Hadi was a “puppet” of the United States and Saudi Arabia. “Yemenis may not have great and strong weapons like Saudi Arabia and their allies, but they have strength, and faith in God will win this battle,” said Dhaif Allah Shami of the Houthi political office.

In Tehran, a government TV station reported that thousands of people took to the streets of Sana to voice their readiness to confront Saudi aggression. The station also reported Houthi militias moving toward the border of Saudi Arabia. A third night of airstrikes targeted military bases and air defense sites around Sana and destroyed stockpiles of weapons that the Houthi militia had seized, said Ahmed Hassan Asiri, a spokesman for coalition forces. There were also late-night reports of airstrikes on Sana’s civilian airport.

Yemen airspace remained exclusively under the control of the coalition, Asiri said, and the Houthis suffered “grave losses.” He said their capability is “weakening on a daily basis.” But he acknowledged that the Houthis were continuing a push toward the port city of Aden and were also mobilizing near the Saudi border.

As always, combined arms are the most effective. What appears to be happening so far is air forces versus ground forces, and the latter usually win as long as they can reach the enemy. But it appears that the Saudis are not confident that their ground forces will be sufficient to repel a Houthi invasion, otherwise they would not be looking for help from Egypt and other Arab countries.

Brad Torgersen breaks the narrative

As you might expect, Brad Torgersen’s response to the Toad of Tor and the carnival of the grotesque on display at Making Light is considerably more polite and measured than mine. But it is equally dismissive in substance:

We’re about a week out from the release of the final ballot results, for the 2015 Hugo awards. These results will determine which picks are available for your choosing when it comes time for you to cast your ballot. Best Novel, Best Short Story, etc. Already, the critics of Sad Puppies 3 have been laying the groundwork for de-legitimizing SP3. To include statements which completely misunderstand the point of Sad Puppies. Some of it is innocent. Not everybody’s had time to do a deep-dig on the history of Sad Puppies, nor to be able to discern that each iteration of the project has tended to assume its own personality. What they’re hearing about SP3 is probably hear-say from friends, and much of that is at least one to two years out-of-date. And even then, many of the “facts” put forth are demonstrably wrong.

But other commentary is not so innocent. There are people who find the very existence of Sad Puppies 3 to be an affront to their personhoods. A sinister outside force come to trouble their precious genre and its establishment. For the people deliberately misconstruing the purpose and thrust of Sad Puppies 3, it’s all about getting out in front and shaping a narrative. They’re smart. They know that truth can be overwhelmed with lies if you just spin your narrative adroitly, and with enough volume.

Thus the charges, in no particular order.

● SP3 is a trojan horse effort conducted by and for the benefit of authors who cannot earn a Hugo award the honest way.

● SP3 is just ballot-stuffing, which ought to be disallowed according to precedent and the rules of ballot-counting established through WSFS.

● SP3 is artificially trying to warp the Hugos out of true; an outside effort conducted by and involving people who are not real fans.

● The SP3 slate works are substandard based on (insert garbledy-garble talk about taste here.)

● The SP3 slate is just a bunch of right-wingers who should go set up their own awards, and leave the Hugos alone.

● SP3 is not legit because its participants were drafted for the effort, and are not willing participants.

● SP3 is not legit because Larry Correia is a terrible human being who is hated by all real fans.

● SP3 is not legit because Vox Day is also running Rabid Puppies and everybody knows Vox Day is also a terrible human being who is hated by all real fans.

● SP3 is a trojan horse for GamerGaters, and all real fans hate and loathe GamerGaters.

● SP3 is just a bunch of straight white guys who are terrified of women, gays, trans, and folks with brown skin.

● SP3 would never happen in the first place if (resurrected conservative editor of the past) could lecture them about their wrongdoing.

● SP3 is a fringe minority faction that does not represent the “main body” of real fans.

● SP3’s slate selections are not the “natural” selections of real fans.

There’s more, but I think you get the gist of it.

Much of this is simply the “in” crowd reacting badly to watching the “out” crowd take a seat at the lunch table. As I’ve mentioned before in this space, according to the dyed-in-the-wool denizens of WSFS and Worldcon, a “real fan” is defined as someone who has been attending Worldcon (and other cons) for a long time, has been properly inculcated into the specific culture of Worldcon and con-going fandom, is someone who volunteers time and effort to cons, generally makes Worldcon (and con-going) a “family” affair, etc. So if you don’t go to Worldcon and you’ve not been part of that culture for a number of years, you don’t qualify as a “real fan” in their definition. And they resent the hell out of anyone who is not a “real fan” showing up to vote on the “real fan” award.

Imagine that, an SJW trying to deceitfully shape the narrative in her favor. Keep in mind that Brad is addressing those who are still running around saying demonstrably untrue things like “Vox Day is the originator of Sad Puppies” and “Spacebunny does not exist”. These SJWs are not so much insane as willfully delusional. I have no doubt that I could show up at Sasquan with Spacebunny and some of them would claim that I somehow managed to find and hire an escort who happens to look just like the model whose pictures I’ve been using to make it look as if I am married to a slender and attractive woman. Because #GamerGate. And also, raciss.

Of course, they know better, but they’re perfectly willing to lie for rhetorical effect. Which raises the question: once you know that, why would you believe a single word that comes out of their mouths? The good thing is that it is easy to destroy their narrative. Because it is false, all that is necessary to do so is to relentlessly tell the truth.

Since 1986, Tor Books has 84 Hugo and Nebula Best Novel nominations. In 2014, Tor.com had 50 percent of the short story nominations, 40 percent of the novella nominations, and 20 percent of the novelette nominations. Tor has also won the Locus Award for Best Publisher for 26 straight years, beginning in 1988.

Keep that in mind when you read the Toad of Tor’s claims about people being afraid of losing their privilege.

The Toad of Tor croaks

This ludicrously dishonest croaking from the Toad amused me. It demonstrates how completely, how utterly, how absolutely, the SJWs in science fiction have no conception whatsoever of the zeitgeist. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who may or may not have already been fired from Tor, croaked:

A sense of injured privilege is what PUAs, Gamergaters, and Sad Puppies have in common. Their fury at SJWs comes from a sequence of assumptions that’s very common in individuals and groups that are smarting from a sense of wounded self-importance:

1. I have less power than I feel I should have.
2. I feel those people over there have power I don’t have.
3. They must have stolen mine!

And poof, there’s their evil enemy, made to order.

Gamergaters think gaming belongs to them, and should answer solely to their preferences. PUAs hate women who selfishly consult their own feelings and preferences, then turn them down. Torgersen wants awards to go to the people and works he thinks should win, rather than the ones the voters would naturally vote for.

In the long run, this is doomed. What the Sad Puppies are doing will not make disinclined readers love their work or respect them as authors — readers really are stubborn that way — but they might conceivably do a lot of damage along the way.

She might as easily have written “ribbit, ribbit, ribbit” for all that it has any relationship to reality except for her statement about Brad.  Let’s identify and count the errors just from the quoted section:

  1. Pick-Up Artists do not have a sense of injured privilege. They have a sense of mastery. Because they are sexually successful men who have sex with large quantities of women much more attractive than the Toad of Tor ever was. They don’t hate women who turn them down; the abundance mentality teaches precisely the opposite. She has literally NO IDEA what she’s talking about here. Or she’s simply lying.
  2. GamerGaters do not have a sense of injured privilege. They don’t think gaming belongs to them. They have a sense of being betrayed by the gaming media, which they no longer can trust to honestly review games, and a correct sense of being attacked by people for developing the games they want to develop and playing the games they want to play. The entire core message of GamerGate is simple: fuck off and leave us alone to play what we want to play, not what you think we should be permitted to play. Again, the Toad is saying things that are demonstrably false.
  3. Yes, Torgersen wants awards to go to the people and works he thinks should win. So does the Toad of Tor. Notice the deceit here about what the voters would “naturally vote for”. What is this “natural vote” and how does the Toad somehow know what it is? Isn’t that what the actual vote is meant to determine?
  4. What is doomed in the long run? Long after the Toad of Tor is dead and forgotten, pick-up artists will be picking up women, game developers will be developing games, and gamers will be playing them. As for Sad Puppies, here is a prediction: Sad Puppies will outlast Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s career at Tor Books.
  5. It’s true that Sad Puppies will not make disinclined readers love anyone’s work or respect anyone as authors. Now, I can’t speak for any other supporter of Sad Puppies, but as for me, the Toad is ludicrously mistaken if she genuinely believes I give even the smallest fraction of a damn. And Sad Puppies don’t have less power than they think they should have or that anyone stole their nonexistent power. This sounds a lot like psychological projection coming from someone who was until recently associated with Tor Books, the winner of the Locus Award for best SF publisher 20 years in a row and a sizable chunk of all the major science fiction awards given out over the last two decades.
  6. Our contempt for SJWs is because they are obnoxious individuals like the Toad of Tor who believe they have the right to tell other people what to write, what to read, what to develop, what to play, and for what it is natural to vote on the basis of their pinkshirted ideology. We stand for freedom. They stand for them being in control. And we do not accept it.

SJWs are the people of the lie. They are Aristotle’s people who are intellectually limited to the rhetorical level. We all know that no amount of new information will change the Toad’s mind. We all know that the Toad will not address any of this honestly. She will not recant her observably false claims. She’ll simply tell more lies about what other people really think and produce more incoherent rhetoric. And that is why she merits nothing but the utmost contempt. As disgusting as the Toad of Tor may be on the outside, she’s even worse on the inside.

All you need to know who is right and who is wrong in this is to note who is able to directly quote the other side, and who almost invariably has to resort to writing complete fiction about the other side’s thoughts and motivations. I don’t give a damn why the Toad thinks what she thinks. I don’t give a damn what her motivations might be. All I need to know, all anyone needs to know, is what her words are in order to reach an accurate conclusion and dismiss her accordingly.

If you do feel like a safari through the SJW fever swamp, I would encourage you not to leave any comments there. You cannot engage in rational discourse with the intrinsically irrational and Making Light is not a place where you are going to find anyone even remotely capable of dialectic. Treat it like the zoo it is, just drive through and marvel at the grotesquerie.

Punch harder

It’s amusing how many SJWs don’t understand how this “Internet” thing works. A woman whines about being criticized by Dalrock, among others.

A group of supposed “Christian” men bantered back and forth under a blog written with the sole intention of saying that women divorce so they can profit off of it by writing about it and I Laura Lifshitz, am one of the most evil women profiting off her dissolved marriage. Oh and by the way, the article is categorized under “ugly feminists.”

First, the comments focused on how terrible I was for writing about my divorce not only for The Huffington Post, but also for the New York Times because you know, the divorce must be my fault since I write about the experience, and I’m an evil Jewish feminist. And not only must the divorce be my fault but that I am a selfish mother who cares not for her own child and how she feels in the matter. In addition, let’s not forget to add that female writers writing about divorce are a bunch of leeches set to destroy our families all in the name of money.

Because, you know, I’m just filthy rich. It’s too bad my student loan lender doesn’t realize this.

Then, the commenters started to focus on my last name: Lifshitz.

“Ha, Ha, Ha! Is it even a real name?” joked one commenter.

Then the other commenters joined in to bash my last name, these anti-Semitic, vile, and immature babies (I mean men).

Now why would anyone be moved to criticize a woman who calls them “anti-Semitic, vile, and immature babies”? What is the bright line that separates a woman calling men “vile and immature babies” and a man calling women “rancid cunts”? And for crying out loud, look at her name. “Is it a real name” is about the mildest possible sport anyone could make of it. As for people getting personal about Ms Lipshits, it’s not hard to see why they might feel justified in doing so:

There is this one dude at the gym who is very buff. He’s not my bag of treats, but apparently he feels that any woman who looks in his direction must be interested. He has this stone face grimace. I see him at least three times a week. Smile you grouchy fuck! I am not interested in you, but I just hate looking at such a crabby face.

Any woman who writes like this has made herself entirely fair game for any verbal abuse anyone wants to pour out upon her. Like the McRapeys and McRacists of the world, she wants to be able to dish out abuse without being subjecting to it in return. Women like this are in shock that men on the Internet aren’t treating them the way that men in their daily life do, and that they can’t get away with talking about others in public the way they do in private.

The thing is, if you’re going to be a public figure and express your opinion on the Internet, you are going to upset a subset of the people who encounter it. A subset of that subset are going to respond by attacking you using nothing but rhetoric. I’ve had people calling me nearly every name in the book on the Internet since 2001. So what? It clearly hasn’t harmed me in the slightest. I quite like that it also gives me complete carte blanche to call everyone else anything I please since it seems to bother most of them considerably more than it bothers me.

The first rule of dealing with SJWs is Andrew Breitbart’s: always punch back twice as hard. The second rule is this: keep punching. Women are particularly susceptible to attacks on their appearance and their sexual behavior, so those are the most effective subjects to target with rhetoric. Once it is clear that they’re not engaging in honest dialectic or rational discourse, your best bet is to either ignore them or nuke them rhetorically.

The third rule is this: quote them and quote them ruthlessly.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a self-admitted racist. John Scalzi is a
self-admitted rapist. NK Jemisin is a self-admitted savage… and proud
of it.

The SJWs have to choose. Either they can engage in rational discourse or they can accept being called sluts and savages and racists and evil, ugly feminists on a regular basis. What is not on the table is one-way communication where they attack and lecture us and we humbly accept it in dutiful silence.

There are some things I cannot understand — like internet trolls and
people who hate chocolate — but there is one thing that I do know is
that I will never stop writing. I don’t care if they come to my house
and call me the ugliest cunt on the planet. I will never stop writing my
story.

Oh, I don’t think there was every any chance that Ms Lipshits was going to stop talking about herself. But she can be assured that as long as she subjects the public to her story, the public is going to talk back.