Category: Uncategorized

Victimless sex-trafficking

The reason all sane and responsible people don’t give a damn about this so-called “sex trafficking” is that the girls involved are, quite literally, asking for it. In fact, they’re not so much asking for it as demanding it:

A 2002 Justice Department study suggested that more than 1.6 million American juveniles run away or are kicked out of their home each year. Ernie Allen, a former president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, has estimated that at least 100,000 kids are sexually trafficked each year in the United States.

Perhaps they aren’t a priority because they’re seen as asking for it, not as victims. This was Emily’s fourth time running away, and she seems to have voluntarily connected with a pimp. Based on text messages that her family intercepted, Emily was apparently used by a pimp to recruit one of her girlfriends — a common practice.

“Made about 15 or 16 hundred,” Emily boasted to her friend in one text. “Come make money with me I promise u gonna be good.”

So it’s true that no one was holding a gun to Emily’s head. Then again, she was 15, in a perilous business. And, in this case it turned out, having sex with a half-dozen men a day and handing over every penny to an armed pimp….

Maria is bitter that the police haven’t done more. She has been pleading for months for help, hounding the police — and now she finds that her daughter has been advertised in four states on multiple prostitution websites and no one seems to have checked or noticed.

“I feel very strongly that it was racism,” Maria says. In fact, the Boston police force is admired nationally for its three-detective unit that fights human trafficking. This is the gold standard, yet, even here, a missing 15-year-old girl seemed to slip through the cracks.

If a girl is old enough to be permitted to make legal decisions about murdering her unborn child, then surely she is old enough to decide if she wants to sell her body for money. It’s not racism, it’s simple common sense to leave an idiotic young whore to suffer the obvious consequences of her decisions. What are the police supposed to do, waste time and resources bringing her back so that she can run away again? That’s ridiculous.

If the mother put half the effort into raising her daughter that she appears to have put into hounding the police to fix her maternal failures, perhaps her daughter wouldn’t have run away so many times. No doubt Mr. Kristoff’s bleeding heart is in the right place, but he
would do better to concentrate his efforts on saving those who want to
be saved, not those who not only revel in their moral squalor, but
attempt to infect others with it.

God abandons the human trash determined to go its own way and leaves it to its inevitable destruction. Man should follow his example.

Darkened hearts, poisoned minds

Kate Paulk is amused by the spectacle afforded by the SFWA devouring itself:

It’s funny as hell, but it’s also sad to watch. The organization founded to help authors and act as their advocate has become a grotesque carnival freak show devouring its own newborn children, as often as not with the publishers who are busily devouring the slightly older authors watching on and approving. Not a word is said about the contracts that try to stop authors writing anything except what the publisher approves (even when it’s a totally different genre and a totally different name), or the contracts that claim the rights to your first born and your dog for all of eternity and beyond (yes, I’ve seen these. I didn’t sign). Oh well. Time to break out the popcorn and enjoy the show.

And, since one of her commenters saw fit to complain about the fact that she made a factual observation about “the current SFWA president (you know, the one whose first major action as SFWA president was to expel the losing candidate)”, I should point out that Steven Gould’s hypocrisy was actually worse than that. As I pointed out in my response to the SFWA’s “investigative report”, Steven Gould was guilty of the exact same act for which I was purged from the SFWA, and he was guilty of it before I was. He used an official SFWA communications channel, in this case, the SFWA Forum, to link to an attack on an SFWA member.

The only difference? I used the SFWAauthors Twitter account to post the link to my blog, Gould posted the link to NK Jemisin’s blog in the SFWA Forum on the SFWA web site.

Sarah Hoyt, meanwhile correctly points out that the SFWA is perfectly content to point-and-shriek at the small fry while ignoring the abuses of the very publishers the organization was formed to fight:

Nota bene that all the fields taken over by “progressives” end up with unpaid work where the exploited ones – interns, adjuncts, beginning writers – are told that to complain would be unprofessional and where the weak people are held to much higher standards of behaviors than their masters.)

This flaw in the design of SFWA has always been apparent, and therefore the people inside chose the other route.  “Act like we’re a big bad union, but co-opt the employers, make nice to them.  We can at least secure good deals for ourselves and our friends.” Note that everyone they go after, and everyone they pound on are small presses or things their pet authors disapprove of: write for hire, Amazon.

This is something most people don’t realize about the SFWA. It’s not merely that they are ideologically and politically corrupt, but they have totally given up on their primary purpose. As proof of Sarah’s accusations, consider this exchange between one member and a former SFWA president, Michael Capobianco:

Capobianco: “I’m informed that some DAW anthologies pay less than 5 cents a word.”

SFWA member: “How are they therefore able to keep their pro status?”

Capobianco: “The lapses are overlooked because declaring DAW to not be a professional market would be counterproductive.”

Counterproductive…. The SFWA defends authors from big publishers about as effectively as they defend free speech.

Was Robert Heinlein ripped off?

By his traditional publishers, I mean to say. We already know beyond any shadow of a doubt that he was ripped off by the Bernie Madoff of science fiction. At Castalia House, a review of the traditional publishing model, based in part on records from the Heinlein estate, shows that an author with a traditional publisher has to sell at least 12.5 times more copies just to break even with the shared risk/reward independent publisher.

By the way, his advance from Putnam for Stranger in a Strange Land? $3,000. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
UPDATE: I think I figured out what happened. In March 1967, Putnam sold the exclusive
paperback rights to Berkeley for $1. This permitted Putnam to reduce the
royalties that came in from Berkeley with Heinlein. As it happened,
Putnam had bought Berkeley two years before.

So, by selling Heinlein’s paperback rights to themselves for $1, they managed to cut his royalty from 12 percent to 6 percent. An examination of the Berkeley reports and a comparison of them with the pricing of their books over the years shows that from 1968 to 1978, Berkeley sold 2,281,668 paperbacks for $3,234,147.40 in retail revenue. Heinlein received  $223,756.29 in royalties for a royalty rate of 6.9 percent. On a contract that called for him to receive 15 percent for sales over 10,000 units.

Traditional publishing for the win! Unless, of course, you’re the author.

Trolls are psychos

I’m sure it won’t come as a shock to anyone here to discover that scientists at the University of Manitoba have discovered that trolls really are horrible people. In fact, they are psychopathic and spend an inordinate amount of time on the Internet:

5.6 percent of survey respondents actually specified that they enjoyed “trolling.” By contrast, 41.3 percent of Internet users were “non-commenters,” meaning they didn’t like engaging online at all. So trolls are, as has often been suspected, a minority of online commenters, and an even smaller minority of overall Internet users.

The researchers conducted multiple studies, using samples from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk but also of college students, to try to understand why the act of trolling seems to attract this type of personality. They even constructed their own survey instrument, which they dubbed the Global Assessment of Internet Trolling, or GAIT, containing the following items:

I have sent people to shock websites for the lulz.

I like to troll people in forums or the comments section of websites.

I enjoy griefing other players in multiplayer games.

The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt.

Yes, some people actually say they agree with such statements. And again, doing so was correlated with sadism in its various forms, with psychopathy, and with Machiavellianism. Overall, the authors found that the relationship between sadism and trolling was the strongest, and that indeed, sadists appear to troll because they find it pleasurable. “Both trolls and sadists feel sadistic glee at the distress of others,” they wrote. “Sadists just want to have fun … and the Internet is their playground!

Anyhow, one need have no sympathy for psychos like Andrew Marston, Hunt Stoddard, Greg Tingey, and Tad in his various identities. They are seeking attention and pleasure in the distress of others, which is why it is always a mistake to engage with them. That’s why I no longer bother to engage with them and simply ban them the moment it is obvious they have popped up again.

This also may explain why I am not inclined towards trolling. I test lower than the average on psychopathy, despite having other Dark Triad traits. And obviously I am not sadistic, since the only individual I take any pleasure in tormenting has repeatedly assured us that he actually enjoys the attention on the rare occasions that he notices it at all. It’s a real win-win situation.

The desolation of The Hobbit

In which John C. Wright explains how Peter Jackson rapes the corpse of JRR Tolkien’s beloved book in the first unnecessary cinematic sequel:

Where is the Hobbit in this film, allegedly called THE HOBBIT, again?

Ah, but then we see Bilbo. After his friends are captured by wood elves, using his ring of invisibility, he sneaks into the buried palace of the elf lord. Unseen, his wily eyes spy out that the elves drink wine imported from Laketown, and float the empty barrels downstream as part of their trade and traffic with the human settlment.

He waits until the jailor is drunk, steals the keys, frees the dwarves, and, instead of attempting to sneak them past the heavily guarded upper gates, takes them to the loading dock beneath the wine cellar, seals them in the barrels, and clings, still unseen, to a barrel himself as the unsuspecting elf prentices pole the empty barrels downstream to the Laketown. It is simple and brilliant. Unfortunately, he gets a wetting, and takes a headcold: little bit of realism, if not comedy relief.

Oh, no, wait. That is not what happens.

Just then, just when I thought I would be free from the repeated blows to my tender head of the Stupidity Hammer, the Stupidity Hammer rose up from the shining screen, drew back, whirled hugely and with great force and might and main slammed me right between the eyes so my brain squirted out my ears a yard past my shoulders in both directions.

Bilbo does not seal the barrels.

I will wait for you to recover in case you just got the sensation of a Stupidity Hammer clonking you from the computer screen. They I will repeat myself, because it is so dumb you might not believe me:

Bilbo does not seal the barrels. He leaves the tops open.

So the dwarves are perfectly visible, by which I mean visible to the eye, by which I mean not hidden. By which I mean people with eyeballs can see them, such as the elf-people from whom they are allegedly trying to escape.

Bilbo leaves the barrel tops open when he is dumping the barrels into the water, which is a substance, so I am given to believe, that enters openings and makes things wet inside, and sometimes even sinks things….

Just when I picked myself again off the sticky floor of the theater, blearily wondering where the Hobbit character was after whom this movie was apparently named might be, BAM! The familiar Hammer came down again. This time, it was a scene where Orlando Bloom is standing a zillion feet away from the evil orc bounty hunter Slopgog the Unmentionable or whatever his name is, and he does not shoot him with an elf arrow.

I sat there, rocking back and forth with my eyes crossed, and through the stream of drool and vitreous humor leaking down my chin I muttered again and again, “Shoot him with an elf arrow. Shoot. Him. With. An. Elf. Arrow. SHOOT HIM WITH AN ELF ARROW!”

But no. No elf arrow was forthcoming.

Blogsnog the Debunker or whatever his name is strolled in a leisurely fashion down the narrow walkway of Laketown, not ducking for cover, and meanwhile no one was calling for the town guard, and the elf guy continued not to shoot him with an elf arrow.

You see, the film slimer, er, maker, wanted this scene to be like a gunfight in an iconic Western, with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne staring at each other with narrowed eyes as each strides menacingly ever closer, spurs jangling with each step. Of course, in a Western, both are armed with revolvers, and both are wary of making the first move lest the other man prove fast enough to draw and shoot first, but then both shooters want to close the distance to improve their aim. That is what makes such scenes tense.

Here was what makes a sense spectacularly NOT tense. One guy has a gun and the other had a knife, or a club, or maybe strangling wire or even a stick of butter, because no one gives a rat’s fart for what the other guy has because you can shoot him first.

If you have the weapon that, you know, shoots, you can shoot the guy who has no weapon that shoots, and so there is no downside to letting him see you go for your gun, or, for that matter, use a winch to load your crossbow in a leisurely manner, because you can raise it and turn him into a pincushion before he can attack you with his club or strangling wire. Or stick of butter.

In such a case, he will be running toward you at full speed, because if he walks a menacing walk, well, that give you time to roll a cigarette, light it, put your foot in the stirrup thingie on the crossbow, clamp it to your belt winch, and crank the string back, yawn, read a magazine, drop a bolt in the slot, check the grease on the bolt, aim, make vacation plans, check the wind speed, and fire a bolt through this heart and left lung and out his back in a three-dee spray of unnamed orcish life fluids.

Unless you are superspeed acrobat the wonder elf, in which case you can shoot him nine times a second and spell out your monogram in his vital organs.

Well, who cares? Neither character was in the book anyway. I think I lost consciousness overcome by the fumes of the butter-substitute substance coating the theater floor between the seats. I woke a little later, and elfboy still had not shot Urgslug the Irkisonic, or whatever his name is. My wife had to stuff a wide handful of popcorn flavored food substitute into my face, in order to smother the broken, wretched burbling — shoot him … with …  an elf arrow.

I didn’t bother seeing the second and third movies in the Matrix trilogy. I didn’t bother seeing the second and third movies in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. And I don’t think I’ll bother seeing the second and third movies in The Hobbit, ah, trilogy either.

You know it is bad when even hardcore Tolkien fans not only can’t be bothered to see it, but devoutly wish to avoid ever being forced to lay eyes upon it. A commenter named Rainforest Giant summarizes the problem, not only with Peter Jackson ruining The Hobbit, but with the entire edifice of Pink and Postmodern SF/F:

“Jackson… ruins heroics because he cannot
understand heroism. He ruins a fairy tale because his world lacks the
deep magic. His villains are straight out of Scooby Doo. His special
effects mere lights smoke and mirrors. His understanding of war and
conflict as meaningless as Xena or Buffy. Tolkien understood war, sacrifice, magic (as a storyteller and
father), heroes and villains, hope and despair. Jackson lacks a deeper
soul thats why he writes bad fan fiction and cartoon action.”

It could have been even worse. At least the dwarves weren’t offering each other blow jobs because ground forces. Imagine if McRapey had chosen to rip off Tolkien instead of Heinlein, Dick, and Star Trek. “Famine for the spirit” and “a hog trough for the mind” is an exact description of the state of SF/F today.

Women not in combat

One aspect of the Amazonian warrior woman that is never considered by its SF/F proponents is the female ability to override any combat assignment at will:

Nearly 100 female British soldiers have been sent home from Afghanistan after finding out they were pregnant. Between January 2006 and December last year, 99 servicewomen on operations have been flown back to the UK under strict military rules that ban mothers-to-be from serving in a war zone.The women were flown back on flights usually reserved for injured troops, meaning the true figure could be higher if other female soldiers came home via routine flights.

That is 1.2 percent of all the women serving in the British Army.  The percentage of women serving in Afghanistan is even higher, though unknown. And keep in mind that only three women have been killed in Afghanistan. This should suffice to demonstrate the complete absurdity of women in combat.  Even if one assumes a 10:1 kill ratio in Afghanistan, it means an Amazonian warrior woman is more than three times likely to get pregnant than to kill a single enemy troop.

In battles between reasonably equivalent forces, such as the Eastern Front in WWII, the kill ratio is 2:1. So, for every enemy soldier killed by a female soldier, the superior army can assume that it will lose 16.5 of its troops to pregnancy.

Mailvox: compare and contrast

  1. Josh observed: “It looks to me like the prestige of being published by a traditional
    publisher is a commodity paid for by allowing them to rape you on the
    royalties.”
  2. McRapey defended Tor: “I actually like my publishers, and they add value to my work and don’t rip me off in the process. Please don’t consider them evil (at least in their involvement with me), or try to cut them out of the pay loop. Thank you.”
  3. Jerry Pournelle cited history: “As to conceding 30% to Amazon, I’m damned happy to do it, since publishers take 90%, and back in the bad old days hardbound publishers got 50% of the 5% we got from paperbacks as well. And tried to grab half the movie rights.”

I suggest a look at the facts are in order. Here are the specific terms from a Big Five publisher on a one-book contract offer with a $40,000 advance. Except for the retension of multimedia rights and the unusually high ebook royalties I negotiated, the terms are very similar to contracts with both larger and smaller advances from fellow Big Five publishers.

  • full term of copyright
  • Hardcover: 10 percent of catalog retail price on first 10,000 copies, 12.5 percent on the next 5,000 copies, and 15 percent on 15,000+ copies.
  • Trade Paperback: 6 percent of catalog retail price on the first 20,000 copies and 7.5 percent on 20,000+ copies.
  • Mass Market Paperback: 9 percent on first 150,000 copies and 10 percent on 150,000+.
  • Ebook: 50 percent of revenues received.(1)
  • Foreign language: 25 percent of proceeds from foreign publisher. Which, if similar to these terms, means 2.5 percent on hardcover and 6.25 percent on ebook.
  • All multimedia rights to games, films, and so forth were retained by the author.(2)

Now, keep in mind that this was considerably better than the boilerplate (see points 1 and 2 below). And there are certainly some authors who are able to command better terms than that, Hugh Howey being the prime example of an ideal model to follow. But before you dismiss me as someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about or blithely accepts bad contracts, how many authors do you know receive bigger advances than 8x the median SF first novel advance in 2005, (and I’ve heard they’re down to around $3,000 now, in which case 13.3x), while not giving up any film or game rights and receiving twice the standard ebook royalty?

Keep in mind that Jerry and I are not the horror stories. We’re simply pointing out how bad traditional publishing contracts have been even though we are both relative success stories! Bruce Bethke, on the other hand, wasn’t so fortunate. Consider the fate of Cyberpunk: “Initially written as a series of short stories in 1980, the novel was purchased by a publisher via an exclusive contract which
forbade Bethke to sell the novel to any other publisher. The publisher
decided not to release the novel, causing several years of legal battles
over the rights to the book.”

So, while Tor may not be ripping off McRapey, who happily accepts making less money per unit in return for primary author status at the largest SF publisher, they are most certainly taking advantage of their lesser auhors. Compare who the names of the writers they published 10-15 years ago to the names being published now. What you will see, and what you will see if you look at any major publisher’s list of authors published over time is a regular new author churn, with low-cost authors providing 1-3 new books before being dropped and replaced when they fail to achieve sufficient sales velocity. It’s a constant churning process, and sometimes the publisher gets it wrong, such as when Pocket Books dropped Dan Brown prior to him writing The Da Vinci Code, which is a sequel to the Pocket-published Angels and Demons.

As one of the people involved in that decision once told me: “Nobody knows what they’re doing in this industry. We act like we do, but we really don’t.”

For the most part, publishers don’t really care who makes it and who doesn’t, because there are always new replacement writers to pour into the publishing mill. And there is nothing wrong with this process at face value, after all, publishers can’t afford to keep publishing authors who don’t sell in sufficient numbers. The problem is that the winners and losers are, to a large part, predetermined by the gatekeepers within the publishing house due to print runs and decisions to reprint books that have sold through their print runs or not. In my experience, these decisions are seldom based in ideology or malice, but are mostly rooted in happenstance and bureaucratic inertia.

Also, I should correct a previous statement. John Scalzi did not denigrate “self-publishers” when he went on his anti-Random House rampage in his swan song as SFWA president. He explicitly denigrated independent publishers operating on the no-advances model.

So why are so many eBook-only publishers attempting to run with the “no advances” business model? If I had to guess, I would say because many of these then-erstwhile publishers assumed that publishing electronically had a low financial threshold of entry (not true, if you’re serious about it) and they fancied being publishers, so they started their businesses undercapitalized, and are now currently in the process of passing the consequences of that undercapitalization unto the authors they would like to work with. Alternately, as appears to be the case with Random House, they’re looking for a way to pass as much of the initial cost of publishing onto the author as possible, and one of the best ways to bring down those initial costs is to avoid paying the author anything up front. Both of these are bad business models, although one is more maliciously so, and both are to be avoided. Just because someone has stupidly or maliciously planned their business, doesn’t mean you’re obliged to sign a contract with them.

There is nothing stupid or malicious about a shared risk/shared reward model. Only a rabbit who is afraid of risk could possibly suggest that there is. I leave it to the reader to compare the royalty terms of the traditional publishers shown above to the 25 to 65 percent royalties on revenues received offered by independent publishers utilizing the “no advances” shared-risk model, and to decide whose business model is disadvantageous to the author and which sort of contracts are therefore best avoided.

(1) With the Big Five these are now a standard 25 percent.
(2) I have a copy of the contract with the boilerplate struck out. They actually tried to grab 100 percent of the net proceeds from British Commonwealth rights, foreign language translation rights, motion picture and television rights, and commercial merchandising rights.

Question

I find it a little hard to summon any massive outrage on this basis:

The last time I blogged about the Author Solutions subsidiary iUniverse, I highlighted a typical marketing move. Just before Christmas last year, iUniverse mailed their existing customers with a very special “deal” where they offered to turn their print books into e-books and upload them to the various retailers for free. The catch was that customers would then have to fork over 50% of their royalties from every single sale to iUniverse. Needless to say, formatting and uploading is a trivial task. For those unable to do it themselves, that service can be purchased for a nominal up-front fee, leaving a writer’s royalties intact.

50 percent of their sales? Hmmm. Looking back at my original Simon and Schuster contract, it appears that they took 93 percent of my sales in mass market paperback. While I don’t use any Author Solutions services and never have, I fail to see how their overpriced services are any more abusive than the way conventional publishers have been treating the vast majority of their authors for decades.

Most of the publishing industry is set up specifically to exploit writers. That’s the stone cold reality. Castalia House isn’t, but then, as the shambling shoggoths will readily testify, we are extremists very far outside the pale of the mainstream publishing industry.

Do they have a script or something?

Awareness gradually dawns:

If the account of my reader’s experience is fiction, oh well. I got punked. Dumb ol’ me. I got lied to. But here’s the thing: That doesn’t really matter all that much, because the issue is not whether some local group of DE types goes in for silly rituals or uses goofy code words lifted from Tolkien or has a kinkyboots fascination with inspecting your phenotype. It’s not whether a couple of rich guys have decided to patronize this stuff as their latest boutique cause. It’s that, yes, this stuff really is about racialism and the inculcation of pride. And you need look no further than the comments from DE types in my comboxes who show up to laugh at my gullibility in the matter of gnats and stay to swallow the camel of racialist pride (and, by the way, contempt for the Church, particularly among Reactionary Catholics)

Even after getting trolled and being shown for a reactionary buffoon, Mark Shea still hasn’t grasped the essential point. There is no movement. There is no “Dark Enlightenment”. There are no secret meetings and oaths sworn on On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. None of it is real. None of it exists. I’m not a Sith Lord.

The amusing thing is watching Shea attempt to simultaneously a) admit that he was wrong, b) claim that it doesn’t matter, c) stand by his claim that the Dark Enlightenment is a deadly danger, and d) pretend that one of its supposed leaders is unimportant. He adds this in the comments:

As near as I can tell, Vox Day is a non-denom Protestant of some sort
who has cobbled together a do-it-yourself theology from the stones and
bones of the American Christian landscape and is now alloying it with
some crap stuff about being among the High IQ elect. A sort of
Calvinized racialism. And judging from the number of flying monkey he
sends my way, he seems to have a bit of a following. Beyond that, I
don’t pay too much attention.

I would say he doesn’t pay any attention at all. I’m not sure which is more absurd, the SFWA Board’s claim that I am a white supremacist or Shea’s idea that I am some sort of Calvinist. And while it’s absolutely fine that he pays no attention to me, that would appear to be a little strange considering that I am supposed to be one of the Sith Lords of the movement that concerns him so greatly.

I find it bemusing how a certain sort of critic always seems to be torn between warning everyone how Very Bad and Dangerous you are while simultaneously attempting to play down your influence. I suppose it’s not surprising that they don’t tend to be the sort of critics who are capable of mounting credible logical challenges.

Anti-democracy in America

It’s hard to deny that the Swiss people are considerably more free and democratic than the American people when one compares the results of two referendums. In Switzerland, the entire national government is forced to bow to the will of the people. In the USA, a single judge can completely and unilaterally override it:

A federal judge on Thursday evening declared that Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, in the strongest legal reversal yet of restrictive marriage amendments that exist throughout the South.

“Our Constitution declares that ‘all men’ are created equal,” wrote Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen of United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, in Norfolk. “Surely this means all of us.”

The ruling, which overturned a constitutional amendment adopted by Virginia voters in 2006 as well as previous laws, also said that Virginia must respect same-sex marriages that were carried out legally in other states.

I look forward to men stepping forward and mounting legal challenges to women’s bathrooms, the Selective Service, female preferences in the family law, high school sports for girls, and the WNBA. After all, if equality means all of us, all of these outdated sexual distinctions are clearly unconstitutional, not merely those related to marriage.