Category: Uncategorized

Hugo recommendations: Best Novella

Equoid by Charles Stross. I am a fan of the Laundry novels. After Accelerando, they are Stross’s best work. Equoid is a Laundry novella, so I went into it with high expectations, having recently read and enjoyed The Rhesus Chart. Unfortunately, Equoid is absolutely void of the humor and light-hearted feel of the novels in the series, its attempt to subvert the “virgin tames unicorn” trope reads more like tentacle rape slash child abuse porn (talk about sending the very wrong message in light of the recent MZB/Kramer revelations), and Stross’s attempt to recreate HP Lovecraft’s style in a series of letters falls more than a little flat. As the reviewer at Tor.com noted: “it’s the sort of confounded feeling I get when I’m sure that a writer
was trying to gross me out on purpose with some problematic imagery and
succeeded, yet I’m not sure that the depths gone to were necessary in
the story.” As if monsters raping young girls isn’t enough, there is also a government project entitled EMOCUM. Get it? Stross has written fiction that merited awards in the past. He may well do so in the future. This isn’t it. This is something he’ll want to disown someday.

The Chaplain’s Legacy by Brad Torgersen. I read this when it was published as part of Torgersen’s collection Lights in the Deep, and while it wasn’t my favorite of the stories in that collection, it’s not at all difficult to see why Torgersen keeps getting nominated for awards; more than any SF/F writer today, he sits astride the fence that separates Blue SF/F from Pink SF/F. The novella is a tale of alien enemies forced to join together in cooperation by circumstance; somehow Torgersen manages to seamlessly blend Pink tropes such as female military commanders with Blue tropes such as devout religious characters, combining them with a dash of Golden Age optimism. Stylistically, he writes well, and if the we-can-all-get-along theme seems a bit vanilla, it can also be taken as rather brilliant metacommentary on the current SF/F divide. I mean, religious people on one side, insect army on the other? Anyway, it’s the best of the bunch.

The Butcher of Khardov by Dan Wells. A surprisingly sensitive take on an epically brutal monster from a game-tie in series. This was, in some ways, my favorite of the five nominees; Wells portrays a man unhinged by loss in an adroit manner, so much so that the reader is momentarily confused at times as to what is story-reality versus story-delusion. Stylistically, Wells is competent, but he’s not at the same level as the other four writers (if one counts Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages as one writer) and worse, his take on human sexuality is the same “I’m not worthy” gammatude of Joe Abercrombie. His nominally badass slaughtering machine, who doesn’t shirk at butchering large quantities of men, women, and children, would faint at the very thought of ever raping a woman. The psychological inconsistency is jarring. It’s a good story and a worthy nominee, but I’d put it at number two.

Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne M. Valente. The title is good. The story isn’t. It’s a haphazard, incoherent attempt to force-fit the Snow White story into the Wild West, complete with a weird attempt to also bring in Indian folklore. Continent-spanning cultural appropriation doesn’t even begin to describe this admittedly creative attempt to find a new way to portray more kick-ass women. Yawn. That being said, it is identifiable as fantasy. Credit where credit is due.


Wakulla Springs by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages. This pair are easily the best writers of the lot from a stylistic perspective. Unfortunately, as with several works in other categories, this novella isn’t science fiction or fantasy. It’s much more concerned with historical racism in the American South, (with repeated reminders that black folk weren’t permitted to swim in certain places or stay in certain hotels, and this made the black individual feelbad) than with any science fictional or speculative elements. There are the occasional nods to magical realism, such as Cheeta the chimp who may or may not be talking, but this novella simply isn’t of the genre.


My vote for Best Novella, and my suggestion to others, is The Chaplain’s Legacy by Brad Torgersen. My vote will go as follows:

  1. The Chaplain’s Legacy
  2. The Butcher of Khardov
  3. No Award
  4. Six-Gun Snow White

I recommend leaving the other two novellas off the ballot.

OTHER HUGO AWARD RECOMMENDATIONS

Best Novel
Best Novelette
Best Short Story
Best Editor 
Retro 1939 

Mailvox: contra suffrage

Chris Gerrib asks

VD, why shouldn’t every free adult human be able to vote in the country they are a citizen of?

For the same reason unfree children who are not citizens are not permitted to vote: it is expected that their votes will not be in the long-term interests of the country or its citizenry.

Another commenter, Shelles, appears to be of the David Futrelle school of debate, in which her inability to imagine an effective argument is confused with the nonexistence of such arguments. Which I found a little amusing here, since she somehow manages to touch on two effective arguments while missing the aspects that make them effective.

The only way to win the argument that women should not have the vote is to be able to successfully equate them with others that do not have the vote: minors, felons. The condition of being a woman is in no way like either of these.

The other possibility is to argue that the country will be better off if women don’t vote because women have a tendency to for for X, Y and Z, all of which will harm, if not destroy the country. The obvious problem with this argument is that it depends on one’s personal on view of exactly how the country ought to operate. This is countered by offering another personal view of how the country ought to be that is best advanced by women having the vote.

Done.

In essence the argument is: Women should not have the vote because it’s in the interests of a certain group.

It is certainly not the only way, but it is true that one will win the argument that women should not have the vote when one is able to
successfully equate them with others that do not have the vote: minors,
felons, and so forth. However, the fact that “the condition of being a woman is in no way like either of
these” is irrelevant and does not suffice as a counterpoint. The way women are successfully equated with others who do not have the vote is to demonstrate that their votes are equally incompatible with the long-term national interest as the other classes of current non-voters.

This can be done using a variety of metrics, including what Shelles describes as another possibility to the only way. Just to give one example, if the reason children are not permitted to vote is due to their limited time preferences, a comparison could be made between children’s time preferences, women’s time preferences, and men’s time preferences. If women’s time preferences were determined to be more akin to those of children than those of men, that would be a clear justification for denying the vote to them.

But to return to the option to the only way, Shelles says “the obvious problem with this argument is that it depends on one’s personal on view of exactly how the country ought to operate”. But since the argument rests on the country’s freedom, well-being, and future existence, her counter relies upon arguing that the country should be unfree, worse-off, and nonexistent. This is not a successful or convincing counter, even if it truly represents the personal view of the interlocutor rather than a hypothetical position of Shelle’s imagination.

One should always be careful when attempting to summarize an opponent’s position. Words like “in essence” or “basically” tend to be red flags alerting a critic to holes in one’s arguments.  They aren’t necessarily so, but in this case, they are. Because the statement is true: Women should not have the vote because it’s in the interests of a certain group, so long as that “certain group” is defined as “all the citizens of the country, including the women”.

There are very solid rational, Constitutional, and historical reasons for denying female suffrage. John Adams summarized them best in his famous written exchange with his wife:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.

“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.
 
“Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
– Abigail Adams, 31 March 1776

“Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects.

“We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight.”
– John Adams, 14 April 1776

Events have proven John Adams correct. Free men are accustomed to voluntarily limiting the use of their power and not pushing it to the full extent of its capabilities. Women, to say the least, are not. Just as an angry woman does not pull her punches, women in politics do not restrain their instincts to attempt to control the uncontrollable. Abigail Adams is projecting: she wrongly assumes all men would be tyrants if they could because she knows that is true of herself and other women. And women do not hold themselves bound by laws in any case, regardless of whether they have had voice or representation or not. They are bound by fear.

This is why a nation that wishes to remain wealthy and free does not permit female involvement in its governance, and why totalitarians from the Italian Fascists to the Soviet Bolsheviks have historically made a priority of female involvement in the political process.

Mailvox: maintain the frame

Paleo asks about teaching Christian submission:

My wife and I (deacons / community group leaders) have been helping a late-twenty something single woman understand what it means to be a Godly woman. Surprise, surprise, *submission* and male-only eldership have been huge stumbling blocks for her. She is familiar with the pertinent scripture (she is a PK) so we decided to do two things:

  1. let her see how it works in practice (My wife is a successful business executive – VP level – who puts her family first and has no problem reconciling wifely submission)
  2. begin sharing a (non-biblical, secular) historical rationale for the idea that civilization is predicated on patriarchy. And conversely that Feminism and civilization are ultimately incompatible.

 When I gently argued that female suffrage is directly related to the precipitous decline of the family and that the current declining peace and prosperity is directly related to that – well she lost her mind and has just notified us that she’s leaving the church.

Long set-up for my question: Is it possible to winsomely argue against feminist disasters like female suffrage in this day and age?

Is it possible? Of course. Does that mean a stubborn, prideful, rebellious woman is going to accept a logically flawless train of reasoning? To ask the question is to answer it.

The extent to which these attitudes are rooted in sinful rebellion are obvious from the fact that women holding them would rather leave the church than accept the Biblical and historical truths. And the church is as much better off without them in the fold as it is without unrepentant murderers, adulterers, thieves, and homosexuals. This may be a sub-optimal outcome, but it is by no means a negative one.

Paleo did make one mistake. He “gently argued”. He says that he would like to “winsomely argue” with these women and logically convince them of the error of their ways. (I will pause so the veteran players and masters of Game can stop laughing before I continue. Everybody done? All right then.) The problem is that women simply don’t respond to logic and sweet reason. They’re not wired that way. They respond to strength, confidence, and authority, all of which a man in a position of legitimate authority throws away when he starts treating her as if he’s insecure and afraid of hurting her feelings with the truth.

The Church grows when men thunder from the pulpits. The pews are filled when its leaders fearlessly reject sin and tell the sinners they must repent before they can stand in communion with the Body of Christ. If anyone is offended by the Word, the problem is with him, not with the man who speaks it.

Now, I don’t wish to be hard on Paleo or even to criticize him. He’s doing a lot more than the average feminized Churchian, who fears the female membership more than the Lord God Almighty and worships the unholy spirit of equality. But the fact that his heart is in the right place doesn’t mean that he’s going about it in the right way.

Jesus said “Fear not”. Game says “be bold”. The fact that the lesser truth is in harmony with the greater Truth should lend confidence that speaking the truth boldly, whether it makes the listeners uncomfortable or not, is the only way for every leader in the Church. Never back down. Never temporize.

How to win a debate every time

David Futrelle demonstrates his mastery of dialectic in a remarkably brief debate with me concerning women’s suffrage on Twitter:

David Futrelle
I’ll take on any “dark enlightenment” bloggers (that’s hard to say w/ a straight face) in a cat pic duel.

Vox Day
Why not take me on in an actual debate. An easy topic like: should women have voting rights?

David Futrelle
Yes, women should have voting rights, because they, like men, are human. I win the debate! The end. Thanks!

Vox Day
Sorry, David, you haven’t won yet. Yes, you are human. Did you vote in the recent EU elections?

David Futrelle
No. I vote where I live, in the US.. So are you contending that no women live in the countries they vote in?

Vox Day
I’m demonstrating to you that merely being human grants no voting rights. Do you concur?

David Futrelle
There are a few basic requirements for having the right to vote besides being human but being male isn’t one

David Futrelle
There is no reasonable reason to deny anyone the vote because of gender.

David Futrelle
… and that’s preetty much the end of the argument, despite whatever spurious reason you come up with to deny women the vote. Debate over.

A performance for the ages! Socrates had nothing on this guy. I had no idea that simply begging the question was sufficient to declare a debate over and announce yourself the winner. But I can see where this tactic would be extremely useful and plan to incorporate it into all my online discourse in the future. I shall be unstoppable! There is more at Alpha Game.

You feel poorer because you are poorer

This proves that various “recovery packages” which amount to tens of trillions of issued credit and trillions in federal government spending were all predicated on a lie. Just as the money nominally spent to “save” the household sector went directly to the mortgage banks as housing prices continued to plunge, the money that was supposed to “stimulate” the economy stimulated nothing but Wall Street and the bottom lines of the financial institutions. Notice that this supports what both Karl Denninger and I have been saying for years: there has been ZERO REAL ECONOMIC GROWTH in the USA for more than 30 years.

It’s very simple to see. Just compare the increase in real GDP to the increase in credit. Is the ratio above or below 1.0? If the growth in the amount of credit is greater, then there has been no real economic growth. Since GDP is measured in monetary terms, this means the nominal growth is merely the increase in the number of promises to pay in the future chasing each other around.

That’s why the infrastructure is crumbling. That’s why fewer people are working. That’s why you feel stressed. American median wealth has substantially declined even as the amount of debt has skyrocketed. The Samuelsonians claim this doesn’t matter, because Peter still owes Paul. But both common sense as well as the wealth statistics demonstrate otherwise.

Key quote: “a full 25% of American Households have a net worth of just $3,200; and that 5% (1 out of 20) households has a negative net worth of -$27,416!”

As a youth, I never understood the Biblical concept of a 50-year debt jubilee. It sounded so ignorant and prehistoric. Now, as an adult trained in various schools of economics and having witnessed two major boom-bust peaks in Japan and the United States, I tend to regard it as one more example of the divine inspiration of Scripture.

This chart from Steve Sailer might put the matter more starkly to those who prefer numbers to pictures. Note that the 27 million additional immigrants who entered the USA from 2003 to 2013 have not, contrary to the insistence of neo-classical and Samuelsonian economists, enriched the economy or the native population.

Gun rights in the capital

It’s another step forward for Gun Freedom in America:

A federal judge on Saturday overturned the Washington, D.C., ban on carrying handguns outside the home, saying it was unconstitutional.

“There is no longer any basis on which this court can conclude that the District of Columbia’s total ban on the public carrying of ready-to-use handguns outside the home is constitutional under any level of scrutiny,” said Judge Frederick J. Scullin Jr. of the District of Columbia District Court.

“Therefore, the court finds that the District of Columbia’s complete ban on the carrying of handguns in public is unconstitutional,” he added in his 19-page ruling on the case, Palmer v. District of Columbia, which has been dragging on for five years.

The court ordered the city to allow residents to carry handguns outside their homes and to let nonresidents carry them as well.

I’d prefer to see the Constitutional language implemented more completely and for all gun-related laws to be thrown out, but it’s good to see gun rights advancing, however slowly. Always make it harder for the government to kill its people. The harder it is for the government to do it, the higher the risk to its agents to try it, the less likely it is to happen.

Celebrate Palmer this week and buy a handgun.

Hamas is Israel’s al-Qaida

Keep the history of Hamas in mind when you read about how terrible they are and how Israel has no choice but to eradicate it due to its implacable religious opposition to the existence of Israel. And notice that the article is twelve years old, although it reads as if it was published yesterday.

Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years.

Israel “aided Hamas directly — the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),” said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.

Israel’s support for Hamas “was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,” said a former senior CIA official.

According to documents United Press International obtained from the Israel-based Institute for Counter Terrorism, Hamas evolved from cells of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Islamic movements in Israel and Palestine were “weak and dormant” until after the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel scored a stunning victory over its Arab enemies.

After 1967, a great part of the success of the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood was due to their activities among the refugees of the Gaza Strip. The cornerstone of the Islamic movements success was an impressive social, religious, educational and cultural infrastructure, called Da’wah, that worked to ease the hardship of large numbers of Palestinian refugees, confined to camps, and many who were living on the edge.

“Social influence grew into political influence,” first in the Gaza Strip, then on the West Bank, said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to ICT papers, Hamas was legally registered in Israel in 1978 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the movement’s spiritual leader, as an Islamic Association by the name Al-Mujamma al Islami, which widened its base of supporters and sympathizers by religious propaganda and social work.

According to U.S. administration officials, funds for the movement came from the oil-producing states and directly and indirectly from Israel. The PLO was secular and leftist and promoted Palestinian nationalism. Hamas wanted to set up a transnational state under the rule of Islam, much like Khomeini’s Iran….

In the end, as Hamas set up a very comprehensive counterintelligence system, many collaborators with Israel were weeded out and shot. Violent acts of terrorism became the central tenet, and Hamas, unlike the PLO, was unwilling to compromise in any way with Israel, refusing to acquiesce in its very existence.

But even then, some in Israel saw some benefits to be had in trying to continue to give Hamas support: “The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,” said a U.S. government official who asked not to be named.

“Israel would still be the only democracy in the region for the United States to deal with,” he said.

All of which disgusts some former U.S. intelligence officials.

“The thing wrong with so many Israeli operations is that they try to be too sexy,” said former CIA official Vincent Cannestraro.

According to former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson, “the Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism. The Israelis are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer. They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it,” he said.

And notice how the utterly idiotic meme that some Jews like Howard Stern are trying to push, that to be “anti-Israel is to be anti-America”, is based in part upon this 2002 theme about Israel being “the only democracy” in the Middle East.

The plan of the Israeli Right may well be at work here in the 2014 conflict. Hamas’s implacability may permit them to convince the Israeli moderates that ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank is ultimately necessary. Which, thousands of years of military history suggests, is absolutely true. But don’t shed too many tears or spare too much sympathy for a strategic plan playing out exactly as it is supposed to. If the strategists of the Israeli Right decided to sacrifice a few hundred Jews in order to justify the PR cover necessary for the expulsions, it’s a bit much to expect Americans to be overly concerned about the fate of those sacrificial lambs.

However, the growing world disapproval of Israel, and the declining level of American approval, indicates that no PR-based strategy is likely to succeed in the short- or long-term. Then again, perhaps the Hamas Plan is primarily intended for domestic consumption.

UPDATE: Speaking of Jewish strategy, I’m not sure this is the optimal way to convince Muslims that Jewish women are not the collection of whores they are often accused of being.

Women and the civilizational cycle

The materially deleterious effect of women working on a society is illustrated in a paper entitled “Women Prefer Larger Governments: Growth, Structural Transformation and Government Size”

The increase in income per capita is accompanied, in virtually all
countries, by two changes in the structure of the economy, namely an
increase in the share of government spending in GDP and an increase in
female labour force participation. This paper suggests that these two
changes are causally related. We develop a growth model where the
structure of the economy is endogenous so that participation in market
activities and government size are causally related.

Economic growth and
rising incomes are accompanied by a greater incentive for women to
engage in labour market activities as the opportunity cost of staying at
home increases. We hypothesize that government spending decreases the
cost of performing household chores such as, but not limited to, child
rearing and child care so that couples decide to engage further in the
labour market and chose a higher tax rate to finance more government
spending.

Using a wide cross-section of data for developed and
developing countries, we show that higher participation by women in the
labour market are indeed positively associated with larger governments.
Furthermore, we investigate the causal link between the two variables
using as instrumental variables a unique and novel dataset on the
relative price of home appliances across OECD countries and over time.
We find strong evidence of a causal link between participation in the
labour market and government size: a 10 percent rise in participation in
the labour market leads to a 7 to 8 percent rise in government size.
This effect is robust to the country sample, time period, and a set of
controls in the spirit of Rodrik (1998).

This is also an implicit argument against female suffrage. However, the researchers’ hypothesis is incorrect, as government spending observably does not decrease the cost of child rearing and child care; one reason European families have so few children is that the cost of raising children is exorbitant despite the greater amount of spending by European governments. Free day care and year-long maternity leave doesn’t make up for the fact that food and gasoline cost considerably more than in the USA.

Voting is not freedom. The conflation of voting with freedom is one of the key deceptions upon which feminism rests. And like all ideologies based upon deception, the more powerful feminism becomes, the more likely it is that the polity in which it has become influential will collapse on the basis of the weight of its contradictions.

Flirting with Hultgreen-Curie

On the plus side, at least she didn’t manage to get herself killed while sinking the ship. Compared to the average female pioneer, the soon-to-be ex-commander is practically a success story:

The first female commander of a Royal Navy warship has been sent home after allegedly having an affair with another officer. Commander Sarah West, 42, took charge of the frigate HMS Portland in May 2012, but has been sent home from duty after claims she was having a relationship with a male officer on the same ship.

This would breach the Armed Forces’ Code of Social Conduct, which prohibits personnel from having relationships with subordinates if they compromise ‘operational effectiveness’. While the Royal Navy is investigating the affair, Cdr West, from Grimsby, Lincolnshire, retains her position as commander of HMS Portland. It is not known whether the male officer is married.

It’s certainly an interesting idea to have warships commanded by women. It poses a fascinating question: does the entire ship stay in port when the captain pulls the common Navy trick of getting herself pregnant right before a scheduled deployment? Since Commander West was “sent home from duty” but “retains her position as commander of HMS Portland”, I suppose we have our answer. This may prove a whole new front of 4GW.

“Mr. Lee, this is your mission. You are ordered to seduce and impregnate Captain Mary Wettlaufer, commanding officer of the USS Stennis. Our informants report that her carrier group is being sent to the South China Sea. Under no circumstances can the Stennis be permitted to leave Bremerton!”

“Yes, sir. This agent will do his duty, sir. But what is in this bottle, suicide pills?”

“Viagra, Mr. Lee. I fear you will need it, as Captain Wettlaufer is said to put the “dog” into “running dogs of capitalism”… your sacrifice in this regard will be noted by the Party and the Central Committee.”

And now, a moment of silence

For Our Friend Damien’s abortive SF career:

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
I don’t believe I can claim to belong in SF any longer. That makes me a little sad, but also excited.

While I did advise Our Friend that he ought to go ahead and quit as per his declaration concerning his distaste for the true demographics of the SF community, I don’t think I can take all the blame for this sad loss to world literature. Any reasonable mind will clearly conclude that it is mostly the fault of that dreadful D-List author, Larry Correia: 

The Official Alphabetical List of Author Success

A List – High upon Mount Olympus They Gaze Down Upon the Pathetic Mortals = All the $

  •  Authors who are worth more than the GDP of some countries.
  •  Authors who build their houses out of gold bars.
  •  Characters from their books get their own theme parks.
  •  The lady who wrote Twilight.

B List – The King(s) =$$$$$$$$$$

  • Authors who have TV shows about their books starring Peter Dinklage.
  • Authors who sleep on large piles of money.
  • Politicians who get illegal campaign contributions masquerading as advances.
  • Oprah’s Book Club

and all the way down to:

X List – The X

  • Writes violent pornographic bondage fan fiction involving My Little
    Ponies, Voltron, and Breaking Bad on the internet, while dressed in a
    stained bunny costume that looks like a strange gimp version of that
    thing from Donnie Darko.
  • Don’t make any sudden moves.
  • We’re just going to walk away real slow now.

Y List – The Yama

  • A primordial creature barely capable of vomiting words onto a page in a
    blasphemous impersonation of the act of writing, so mind shattering and
    terrible that a single story threatened to end language forever. He is
    The Thing That Should Not Be. To read his foul creations will summon the
    Black Goat of the Woods with its Thousand Young, and it will kill your
    muse and sodomize the corpse.
  • Is confident that he’d be a much
    more successful writer than A-X, if only he wasn’t too busy stalking
    Asian women on the internet to actually submit any of his crayon
    scribbles.
  • The reason sci-fi conventions have security.

Z List –  The Guardian’s Village Idiot = ($)

  • A kind of Anti-Author.
  • Motivated by delusions of relevancy, crowd sources witch hunts against writers higher on the list.
  • Collects the opposite of royalties, and actually has to be paid a strange sort of “Book Welfare” to produce a book.

I’m sure we will all be waiting, with no small amount of anticipation, to learn what genre Our Friend Damien will be not writing in next.