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Backfire

In which John C. Wright explains how reading an slanderous anti-Christian short story helped him move on from atheism and embrace Christianity:

Mr. Chiang’s short story, as far as I was concerned, not merely failed of its object, but was counter-productive. One of the things that made me suffer no regret when I was called away from the cramped intellectual jail of atheism into a wider and more wonderful world, was my growing conviction that my fellow atheists were shallow, men without insight into real human nature. I read Chiang’s story and I thought: is this the best my side can do? Is this cheap slander the best argument we can muster against our hated enemies, the Christians? In those days I kept wondering why, since my side had the Sixteen-Inch Guns of Truth and Logic, our gunners kept shooting blanks. Why were we sneering all the time, instead of setting out the evidence?

To get a notion of the depth of the contrast I saw, find a comfy chair by the fire, read HELL IS THE ABSENCE OF GOD by Ted Chiang, and then, without rising from the chair except perhaps to toss another log on the fire, pick up and read SMITH OF WOOTTON MAJOR by J.R.R. Tolkien, or perhaps LEAF BY NIGGLE. It does not matter whether you are an Atheist or a Christian or are another faith or uncommitted: anyone reading those two author’s work in contrast will see that one has an insight into human joys and human woes, a compassion toward even human folly or pride or sloth. And the other one shows nothing, no humanity, no understanding. The heart of Chiang’s work is not in the right place. Even though I thought Chiang’ world view was true and Tolkien’s was false, I concluded Tolkien’s insight into real life was keen-eyed, and Chiang’s was superficial.

He cites an earlier review of Chiang’s short story, written when he was, as he described at the time, “an unrepentant atheist”:

“The satire “Hell is the Absence of God” reads like it was written by someone who never met a Christian, or read anything written by a Christian. In this tale, those who see the light of heaven are grotesquely disfigured (their eyes and eye sockets are removed) and loose free will, and become perfect in faith, so that they are automatically assured of entrance into paradise. The main character, mourning after the death of his wife, seeks to find a spot where an angel is leaving or entering the world, so that he can, if only for a moment, glimpse the light of heaven, so that he can loose his eyes and his free will, but be assured of meeting his wife again in heaven. All goes as planned, but God capriciously sends the man to Hell in any case. Hell is not a place of torment, but a bland area much like earth, merely separate from God, peopled by Fallen Angels who sin was not rebellion, but free-thinking. Hence, out of all created beings, only the main character is actually suffering in Hell, since he is the only one who longs not to be there, and, thanks to his free will being destroyed, is the only one who loves God wholeheartedly. Again, all efforts of the main character to rejoin his wife are futile. There are secondary characters whose lives are also ruined and for no particular reason.

“I myself am an unrepentant atheist, but I would never pen such trite antichristian propaganda. If an author is going to set a story in an alternate universe where the Christian myths happen to be true, the author should become familiar with (or, at least, hide his contempt for) the source material. Read Thomas Aquinas or John Milton. Christians may be wrong, but they are not stupid.

“Over all, Mr. Chiang is an excellent writer, who writes wonderfully about big ideas, but weds them to a theme of dispirited nihilism. He is capable of subtle and penetrating characterization, except when he trots out a tired leftwing cliché, whereupon suddenly everything becomes flat and predictable (see, for example, his treatment of the CIA, Big Business, the Military, and the Victorian Age).”

And so we see that even shadow testifies to the existence of the Light. I thought Wright’s take on Chiang was spot-on. I have the collection of short stories to which he refers, and while I found them intriguing, and even bordering on brilliant, I also thought it was remarkable how every single one of them felt essentially flat. I didn’t know why at the time, but now I do. Put simply, Chiang is a tremendous talent crippled by postmodern secularism.

He is, as I once explained to R. Scott Bakker, a color-blind painter. It makes no difference how flawless his technique and his skill are, because when the sun is green and the grass is purple, there is a certain disconnect from the human experience that cannot be avoided.

As I said to Tom Kratman yesterday, in the end, WHAT you write is considerably more important than HOW you write. An accurate truth, even clumsily described, is more significant than a pretty lie, no matter how eloquently the lie is told.

The bassline thickens

Have we approached the point of statistical unlikelihood yet?

Yet another banker has committed suicide, with a JP Morgan forex trader leaping to his death from the top of the firm’s Chater House headquarters in Hong Kong.

Over the past few weeks at least seven bankers have died under mysterious circumstances, including another JP Morgan senior manager who jumped off the top of a skyscraper in London last month.

Speculation is rife that the series of deaths are connected to some kind of looming financial crisis or a huge legal case targeting bankers for malfeasance, although no definite link has been established.

Not that I’m any fan of bankers, but this is getting a little weird. Especially the suicide by nail gun.

The Age Monster

It gets everyone eventually. We can train, we can eat right, we can think positive thoughts, but every year that passes, the opponents get younger, the pains get sharper, and the effort gets more strenuous.

Yeah, we had our first soccer practice of the year last night.

It actually went surprisingly well, mostly because I’ve been running 40 minutes twice a week over the offseason in preparation for a season at right wing. My side played a man down in the scrimmage, but I was arguably, (no, definitely), the worst player on my side and I was able to shut down the best player on the other side. This is a decided advantage.

I mostly hung back, with occasional sprints forward when the other team wasn’t looking and managed to score our first goal that way. More importantly, it took the new guy, who was, in the immortal words of Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 3, “a handful”, a while to learn to respect the lingering remnants of my speed, so he kept trying to blow past me to no avail. And when he switched to trying to use his vastly superior ball skills to fake me out, I simply refused to commit, thereby forcing him to finally pass off after my teammates were already back on defense.

So old age and experience really can overcome youth and skill. And a little treachery combined with upper body strength doesn’t hurt either. After practice was over, the new guy came over and introduced himself. He looked a little surprised to discover that he was 20 years younger. It’s a bit of a backhanded compliment, to be sure, but these days, I’ll take it. It’s certainly better than the alternative.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to win a regular starting position again this year or not, but the initial omens appear to be good. We crushed the other half of the squad despite playing a man down the whole time, so that should help. I know that in our captain’s eyes, reliability tends to trump talent.

Battling the new guy to a draw reminded me of our indoor tournament the week before, which was the most fun I’ve ever had at a soccer tournament. 12 teams were invited, good teams, including all three of our primary rivals. We figured we would probably finish fourth of six in our group, with the possibility of a shot at third. The tournament went until after midnight, with copious beer flowing throughout the course of the evening.

The first game was easy. We won 3-1, but it should have been 6-1. I got the third goal when S picked me out and rifled a pass right to the corner of the goal; I just had to stick out my foot and deflect it in. The second game was my best; it was against the team that has been my personal bete noire, but I got two goals and we put them away 3-1 as well. Then we played our derby game, which was incredibly annoying because despite dominating the ball, we somehow managed to lose 3-2.

So, it looked like third-place group finish was in the cards, and that’s when things got exciting. We destroyed the fourth team 6-0, then watched as they played our neighbors without much hope of them scoring an upset. But their best player was the coach of our first team squad, and he ripped off an early goal from 25 meters that briefly would have put us in second place. Then our neighbors came back and took the 2-1 lead that they held until the last minute. The other team got a goal to tie it with 50 seconds left, but a tie didn’t do us any good since we knew we probably couldn’t beat our arch rivals, who have supplanted us as the league’s dominant team, in the final game.

However, with 11 seconds left, the ball was passed back to the coach, who was nearly the entire length of the indoor field from the goal. He pushed it forward a step, picked his spot, and put it right in the upper corner for the win with three seconds left. Phenomenal shot. The entire gymnasium went nuts. The upset meant that we were guaranteed second place in the group, and first if we could beat our rivals.

Unfortunately, we lost 3-1. But it was a good, hard-fought game, and there was a funny moment after the young Serie B ref, who is a friendly acquaintance of mine, told me before the game that I couldn’t stop him. About halfway through, he had the ball on the left side I was defending, and I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, there was zero chance he was going to pass the ball. Despite my best efforts, he did manage to turn on me, but I kept just enough shoulder on him to force his shot wide of the goal. He laughed, offered a high-five, and decided we could call it a draw as his teammates shouted at him for not passing the ball.

That is precisely what I will miss most about competitive sports when the time finally comes to hang up my soccer boots for the last time. The competition. The physical testing. The going head-to-head to find out who is better. And the mutual respect that so often results from the process. Whether one wins or one loses, it is the battle, not the result, from which the pleasure is derived. I’ve won league and conference championships. I’ve coached a team that never won a single game. But the teams I remember most fondly aren’t necessarily the championship teams, they are the teams that never stopped competing until the final whistle blew, no matter what the score.

The Age Monster will get me in the end. I know that. I accept that. The time will come when the young guys will blow right past me, when their speed and power will be simply too much to handle. But I am going to keep that bastard at bay as long as I can, and I will keep playing as long as I can help my team win.

You can’t stop the signal

But you can delay it. Should have done this yesterday, but better late than never. Amping Larry Correia’s current Book Bomb, Chuck Dixon’s Bad Time series:

Four men. Four Days. For the fight of their lives. It was just a walk
in the desert to a place 100, 000 years in the past. They thought they
knew what to expect but they were wrong. Now a team of scientists is
trapped in a world they were not prepared for and can never return from.
Their only hope lies in quartet of former US Army Rangers willing to
travel to prehistoric Nevada and face unknown horrors and impossible
odds bring them home from Bad Times.

Book 1: Cannibal Gold
Book 2: Blood Red Tide

Is it just me or do those titles have a distinct Glen Cookian sound to them. Chuck Dixon is a comic writer and the creator of Nightwing and Bane; he has now moved into writing novels. Not being a graphic novel guy, this the first I’ve heard of him myself, so I’d welcome any comments from those who have read his books.

Question of the Day: can the books be legitimately classified in the “Space Marine” category when the gentlemen involved are snake eaters?

UPDATE: Take that, Larry! Cannibal Gold had fallen back to #2,123 when this posted. Now it’s up to #1,156. It would be amusing to see it top the #911 that Larry’s readers managed.

Women in combat: a prelude

The Sochi Winter Olympics are providing a useful service in demonstrating the complete absurdity of the woman warrior meme:

Sarka Pancochova, a Czech snowboarder, led the slopestyle event after the first run. On her second trip down the course of obstacles and jumps, she flew through the air, performed a high-arcing, spinning trick and smacked her head upon landing. Her limp body spun like a propeller into the gully between jumps and slid to a stop.

Pancochova was soon on her feet, and the uneasy crowd cheered. Her helmet was cracked nearly in half, back to front. She was one of the lucky ones, seemingly O.K., but her crash last week was indicative of a bigger issue: a messy collage of violent wipeouts at these Olympics. Most of the accidents have occurred at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, the site of the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events like halfpipe, slopestyle and moguls.

And most of the injuries have been sustained by women….

The Winter Games have always had dangerous events. But the Extreme Park,
as the name suggests, is built on the ageless allure of danger. All of
the events there have been added to the Olympic docket since 1992, each a
tantalizing cocktail of grace and peril.But
unlike some of the time-honored sports of risk, including Alpine
skiing, luge and ski jumping, there are few concessions made for women.

For both sexes, the walls of the halfpipe are 22 feet tall. The
slopestyle course has the same tricky rails and the same huge jumps. The
course for ski cross and snowboard cross, a six-person race to the
finish over jumps and around icy banked curves, is the same for men and
women. The jumps for aerials are the same height. The bumps in moguls
play no gender favorites.

“Most
of the courses are built for the big show, for the men,” said Kim
Lamarre of Canada, the bronze medalist in slopestyle skiing, where the
competition was delayed a few times by spectacular falls. “I think they
could do more to make it safer for women.”

Compare
the sports with downhill skiing, in which women have their own course,
one that is shorter and less difficult to navigate. Or luge, in which
female sliders start lower on the track than the men. Or ski jump, in
which women were finally allowed to participate this year, but only on
the smaller of the two hills. The Olympics have a history — sexist,
perhaps — of trying to protect women from the perils of some sports.

But equality reigns at the Extreme Park, even to the possible detriment of the female participants.

Actually, equality doesn’t reign. Because the inferior and uncompetitive female athletes don’t compete against the superior men. But the young women are such stupid herd animals that they will literally kill themselves in their incoherent denial.

“I see it every contest,” Cusson said. “Unless they are forced to hit
the smaller side, the best ones will always go for the bigger jumps.
They want to prove to everybody that they are capable. And then all the
other girls will follow.”

As usual, the end result of feminism is more dead and injured women. If one simply judges by the consequences, it should be obvious that feminists hate women far more passionately than even the most virulent misogynist.

They can’t even compete in competitive leisure pastimes without half-killing themselves and requiring surgery, but they’re going to hold their own in combat, where the enemy is actually trying to harm them?

Statistical misleadings

I’ve been pointing out for years now that scientists simply don’t have the statistical mastery required to back up the statistics-based results that they’ve been pointing out:

The results were “plain as day”, recalls Motyl, a psychology PhD student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Data from a study of nearly 2,000 people seemed to show that political moderates saw shades of grey more accurately than did either left-wing or right-wing extremists. “The hypothesis was sexy,” he says, “and the data provided clear support.” The P value, a common index for the strength of evidence, was 0.01 — usually interpreted as ‘very significant’. Publication in a high-impact journal seemed within Motyl’s grasp.

But then reality intervened. Sensitive to controversies over reproducibility, Motyl and his adviser, Brian Nosek, decided to replicate the study. With extra data, the P value came out as 0.59 — not even close to the conventional level of significance, 0.05. The effect had disappeared, and with it, Motyl’s dreams of youthful fame.

It turned out that the problem was not in the data or in Motyl’s analyses. It lay in the surprisingly slippery nature of the P value, which is neither as reliable nor as objective as most scientists assume. “P values are not doing their job, because they can’t,” says Stephen Ziliak, an economist at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois, and a frequent critic of the way statistics are used.

For many scientists, this is especially worrying in light of the reproducibility concerns. In 2005, epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford University in California suggested that most published findings are false; since then, a string of high-profile replication problems has forced scientists to rethink how they evaluate results.

Of course, if one considers the nonsensical hypotheses many of these scientists are attempting to statistically test, it is abundantly clear that they also lack a sufficient mastery of basic logic.

And notice that it is an economist who is a critic of the unreliable methods being used by the scientists. That’s not a coincidence. Economists are some of the biggest skeptics in the academic world, mostly because they see their models failing almost as soon as they are constructed. The fact is that the scientists quite literally have no idea what they’re talking about:

For all the P value’s apparent precision, Fisher intended it to be just one part of a fluid, non-numerical process that blended data and background knowledge to lead to scientific conclusions. But it soon got swept into a movement to make evidence-based decision-making as rigorous and objective as possible. This movement was spearheaded in the late 1920s by Fisher’s bitter rivals, Polish mathematician Jerzy Neyman and UK statistician Egon Pearson, who introduced an alternative framework for data analysis that included statistical power, false positives, false negatives and many other concepts now familiar from introductory statistics classes. They pointedly left out the P value.

But while the rivals feuded — Neyman called some of Fisher’s work mathematically “worse than useless”; Fisher called Neyman’s approach “childish” and “horrifying [for] intellectual freedom in the west” — other researchers lost patience and began to write statistics manuals for working scientists. And because many of the authors were non-statisticians without a thorough understanding of either approach, they created a hybrid system that crammed Fisher’s easy-to-calculate P value into Neyman and Pearson’s reassuringly rigorous rule-based system. This is when a P value of 0.05 became enshrined as ‘statistically significant’, for example. “The P value was never meant to be used the way it’s used today,” says Goodman.

Tilting the level playing field

The mainstream media’s attempts to ignore, belittle, and compete with the independent media has failed, so now they are desperately trying to appeal to anyone, from the government to Google, who will stack the odds in their favor:

Who, for example, could object to a paper that opens with something as reasonable as:

“At a time of extraordinary domestic and international policy challenges, Americans need high-quality news. Readers and viewers must decipher the policy options that the country faces and the manner in which various decisions affect them personally. It often is not readily apparent how to assess complicated policy choices and what the best steps are for moving forward.”

You know you are wading into difficult waters, however, when in the very next paragraph West and Stone quote warnings about the perils of the present political polarization from Brookings’ Thomas Mann and the American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein. AEI is indeed a conservative think tank, and a jewel of one at that, but any idea that coupling these two scholars from AEI and Brookings produces a balanced analysis should go out the window. Ornstein is AEI’s resident liberal and about as representative of the scholarship at AEI as I am of the Harlem Globetrotters. Mann and Ornstein are themselves very partisan players who would like nothing better than to go back to the old days when Tip O’Neill got the better of Bob Michel in the House of Representatives; they blame all of Congress’s dysfunctions on the Republicans, especially the Tea Party branch. So when West and Stone blame the role the news media are currently playing in the polarization that Mann and Ornstein decry there is more than just the sound of academic “tsk, tsking”—there’s also a slight whiff of “here’s hoping that we could set this darn clock back.”

In fact, attempts to do just that permeate the entire paper and its recommendations. West and Stone even chide the practice of pairing conservatives and liberals on TV to comment on issues, which they say results in “polarization of discourse and ‘false equivalence’ in reporting.” Getting both views means there is a lack of “nuanced analysis,” which “confuses viewers,” they write. As with all liberal grousing, there is also throughout the paper the suspicion that the average American is not capable of filtering the news by himself. Another passage reads, “the average reader’s ability to critically judge this new presentation of digital data is still developing and is lagging behind the ubiquity of interactives and infographics on the web.”

So journalists should lead the average American reader out of his torpor by linking to thoughtful commentary that give the context the reader needs, just like in the old days. And who might be good examples of such much-needed context-givers? West and Stone observe that “Platforms such as the Washington Post’s Wonkblog and Andrew Sullivan’s “The Dish” provide daily developments in policy news for those seeking to understand the intricacies of complex issues.” And, no it doesn’t end there. They also recommend Democracy Now!, which they describe as “a daily, independent program operated by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. It runs stories that have ‘people and perspectives rarely heard in the U.S. corporate-sponsored media.’ Among the individuals it features include grassroots leaders, peace activists, academics, and independent analysts. The program regularly hosts substantive debates designed to improve public understanding of major issues.”

Both Sullivan and Klein are uniformly liberal in all issues and supportive of Barack Obama’s agenda. They are also, however, deep-thinking innovators who explain things thoroughly in their respective sites, even if from their perspectives. Not so for Goodman and Gonzalez, who can only be described as neo-Marxist apologists for Chavez, Castro and the Sandinistas.

We can only be thankful that West and Stone revealed their weakness for Goodman and Gonzalez for it alerts the discriminating reader to be on the lookout for danger to come, and it doesn’t take long to materialize. Buried beneath moderate-sounding verbiage there is nothing less than a call for neutering the citizen journalist through mass editing (crowd sourcing) and for making it harder for average web searchers to find ideas that do not conform to the accepted wisdom. “Citizens without journalistic training may be more likely to report inaccuracies or file misreports,” they write. “Because they are reporting of their own volition, it is possible that they might have a specific agenda or bias. They may repeat false ideas reported elsewhere and help bad ideas go viral.” Combining the mass editing of crowdsourcing (“the virtues of collective reasoning,” as the authors put it) with citizen journalism, however, would be a way to hold these untrained journalists accountable.

Perhaps even more troubling is their proposal for dealing with diversity of views on the web. West and Stone quote New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson as opining that there is “a human craving for trustworthy information about the world we live in- information that is tested, investigated, sorted, checked again, analyzed, and presented in a cogent form. …. They seek judgment from someone they can trust, who can ferret out information, dig behind it, and make sense of it.” I think we all know what the managing editor of the Times thinks when she talks about sorting and analyzing news. So here’s what West and Stone propose:

“Search engines employ many criteria in their algorithms, but many of them are based on the popularity of particular information sources. Yet these algorithms lack the embedded ethics of human gatekeepers and editors. Articles or sources that generate a lot of eyeballs are thought to be more helpful than others which do not. This biases information prioritizing towards popularity as opposed to thoughtfulness, reasonableness, or diversity of perspectives. “Digital firms should be encouraged to add criteria to their search engines that highlight information quality as opposed to mere popularity. They could do this by adding weight to sites that are known for high-quality coverage or providing diverse points of view. This would allow those information sources to be ranked higher in search results and therefore help news consumers find those materials.“

In other words, Google, Facebook et al should move up higher and promote the “high quality coverage” practiced by Abramson, Klein, Sullivan, Gonzalez and Goodman, and which would produce once again the type of politics that Ornstein and Mann find acceptable. Much lower down would be the muck-raking journalism of James O’Keefe and Breitbart, the opinions of Sean Hannity and Hugh Hewitt or pieces run by National Affairs or NRO. Sen. Cruz’s refusal to go along with higher spending, or Sen. Lee’s analysis of how our current welfare system keeps the poor poor would be about 20 clicks away, if anywhere at all.

This is precisely why I have continued pointing out the behavior of the SFWA with regards to me and other SF/F writers who refuse to join the hive mind. The Left always attempts to eliminate its opposition, by hook or by crook, because it doesn’t believe in open and honest competition, but manipulation and con artistry. This isn’t a current phenomenon; John C. Wright writes eloquently about how the founder of SFWA and the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, Damon Knight, waged a long-running campaign against one of the original Big Three of Science Fiction, A.E. van Vogt, which succeeded to the point that most people today wrongly believe the Big Three were Asimov, Heinlein, and either Arthur C. Clarke or Ray Bradbury.

(As we see time and time again, the rabbit of little ability but a highly developed talent for social manipulation and bureaucracy hated his superior in intellect and accomplishment. Knight famously claimed van Vogt was: “not a giant as often maintained. He’s only a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter.” I found this informative because after reading Knight’s fiction about ten years ago, I’d wondered how he could possibly have ever been named an SFWA Grandmaster. It turns out it was an Appreciation Grandmastership; he was the Scalzi of his day and began his now-forgotten SF career as the writer of a fanzine called Snide.)

So, we see the phenomenon writ small in the SFWA. We see it writ large in the European Union. But what we see is the same fractal political phenomenon that is always and everywhere dedicated to reducing the limits of the freedom of human thought.

Why we don’t put girls in games

Yet another clueless wonder is yapping about the absence of the unnecessary from video games:

There is a point to including playable female characters in games. I’m aware that most of the people likely to comment on this article (go ahead and bleat about misandry, you worms; I’ll enjoy a tasty cup of your male tears) don’t see that, but I’m also aware that the vast majority of people who read this article do see it, and won’t bother to leave a comment because what I’m saying in this editorial seems sensible, practical, and non-controversial. Such is the way of the Internet. So I’m not going to bother writing out a lengthy justification of why we genuinely need female characters in video games for the good of the industry financially and artistically; if you honestly can’t understand it, go forth and educate yourself. If you feel that gaming is the one thing remaining to men and girls should stop spoiling it with political correctness, then please go boil your head because I see no point in debating with people incapable of basic logic and lacking humanity.

Having taken it as fact that there is a point to including female characters in video games, why on earth are we still hearing excuses for their absence in 2014? Because it is an excuse. There is no reason not to do it. You won’t alienate your existing market by acknowledging the existence of women. You won’t take anything away from your existing market.

I am a game designer. I am designing and producing a game that does not, and will not, have a single female character in it. This is not because I am misogynistic. This is not because I do not women to play the game. This is because putting women in the game makes no sense, violates the principle of the suspension of disbelief, and will not make the game any better as a game.

I am the lead designer of First Sword, a combat management game. The game has orcs and men, elves and dwarves. It has goblins and trolls. But it has no women.

Why not? Because the game is a gladiator game. Women cannot credibly fight as gladiators. We don’t put women in the game for the same reason we don’t put bunny rabbits or children in the game. Putting women in the game would be an act of brutal sadism, an act of barbarism even by pagan Roman standards. While the Romans did occasionally put female gladiators in the arena, they were there as a comedic act. They were occasionally matched against midgets, which the Romans apparently found hilarious.

We could, of course, throw out historical verisimilitude. But we’re not going to. Because we value that verisimilitude far more than we value the opinion of a few whiny women who don’t play the sort of games we make anyhow. And when we design a game with a particular female market in mind, we don’t worry about hurting the feelings of men who we know have no interest in that sort of game.

But the woman is right. There is no point in debating. We’re not interested in debating her. We’re not interested in listening to her. As it happens, we couldn’t possibly care less what she thinks one way or the other.

Of petitions and pettiness

Apparently I was correct to anticipate that my signature would be removed from Dave Truesdale’s SFWA petition:

“If Truesdale, a non-member, can present such a petition, Beale, a non-member, should be able to sign it. Removing someone’s name from a petition because one thinks they are an asshat is prima facie evidence that one is, onceself, an asshat. Maybe SFWA can chip in and buy an “UNCLEAN” sign for Beale to wear around his neck? SFWA’s not the fucking Pope.”

This SFF Net discussion reminded me that I had an account there, not that I’ve used it since my presidential campaign. Or… perhaps not After reading that comment, it struck me that it would be completely
characteristic for the SFWA to ensure that my account at SFF Net was
deleted. I went there, and typed in the user name and password. Sure enough:

Sorry! We can’t find a user called tbeale. Please try again or write to Tech Support for assistance. 

That made me laugh out loud. The comedy continues. But the sheer pettiness of the act makes it something useful to keep in mind for when you find yourself facing one of the nasty little rabbits caught in a trap and begging for mercy. Show them the same mercy they showed others. Cut them the same slack they offered others.

There is no need to hate them, just crush them under your heel and go on with life. One cannot forgive those who do not repent.

Put off the career, girls

Stickwick lays the smack down with all the doctoral authority that only a female physics PhD can wield:

I am a highly intellectual woman with a successful professional career, and I realize now what a mistake I’ve made by not settling down and having children early. I married 12 years ago, but put off having children in order to finish graduate school and establish my scientific career. Last December, at the age of 42, I had a baby daughter. I realize now that this would’ve been MUCH easier 10 or 20 years ago. It’s not only a struggle to care for a newborn at my age, but making the sudden shift from a woman who has, for decades, been very busy with intellectual pursuits and relatively unencumbered by responsibility to a stay-at-home mom has been unexpectedly difficult.

Read the rest at Alpha Game. However, I think she seriously underrates her intellectual activities as a stay-at-home mother, as will become readily apparent in a few months.