Category: Uncategorized

I blame Howard Stern

This news report is so unbelievably awesome, it just makes me glad to be alive at such a glorious moment for humanity:

The interpreter who signed Nelson Mandela’s memorial on Thursday for deaf viewers was a fake, according to experts. The man, who signed for a portion of the ceremony including US President Barack Obama’s speech, was simply making up his own signs, the Deaf Federation of South Africa has said…. David Buxton, the CEO of the British Deaf Association, said the unidentified man, who was supposed to be signing in South African, was “waving his hands around but there was no meaning.”

I’m guessing that one of those signs had a meaning. And that meaning was “Baba Booey to y’all!”.

The Glory of Man is his instinct to take the piss out of the powerful and the self-important. About the only thing that would have been funnier would have been a U.S. drone attack accidentally ordered by Obama on the collection of “world leaders”.

That is what a hero looks like. If I were on the Nobel Committee, he’d get my vote.

Race, crime, and (r)

From Explorable:

Statistical correlation is measured by what is called coefficient of correlation (r). Its numerical value ranges from +1.0 to -1.0. It gives us an indication of the strength of relationship.


In general, r > 0 indicates positive relationship, r < 0
indicates negative relationship while r = 0 indicates no relationship
(or that the variables are independent and not related). Here r = +1.0
describes a perfect positive correlation and r = -1.0 describes a
perfect negative correlation.
Closer the coefficients are to +1.0 and -1.0, greater is the strength of the relationship between the variables.


As a rule of thumb, the following guidelines on strength of
relationship are often useful (though many experts would somewhat
disagree on the choice of boundaries).

Value of rStrength of relationship
-1.0 to -0.5 or 1.0 to 0.5Strong
-0.5 to -0.3 or 0.3 to 0.5Moderate
-0.3 to -0.1 or 0.1 to 0.3Weak
-0.1 to 0.1None or very weak

From Ron Unz:

[O]ver the last twenty-five years the weighted correlations for each of
the crime categories against the percentages of whites, Hispanics, and
“immigrants” (i.e. Hispanics-plus-Asians) have fluctuated in the general
range of -0.20 to -0.60. Interestingly enough, for most of the last
decade the presence of Hispanics and immigrants has become noticeably
less associated with crime than the presence of whites, although that
latter category obviously exhibits large regional heterogeneity.
Meanwhile, in the case of blacks, the weighted crime correlations have
steadily risen from 0.60 to around 0.80 or above, almost always now
falling within between 0.75 and 0.85.

That’s not the interesting part, however. At this point, only a complete idiot or the willfully blind will deny the relative African predilection for crime. What is interesting is his conclusions regarding how the supposedly anti-racist liberals are addressing this very strong correlation and how immigration factors into it:

America’s ruling financial, media, and political elites are largely
concentrated in three major urban centers—New York City, Los Angeles,
and Washington, D.C.—and all three have contained large black
populations, including a violent underclass. During the early 1990s,
many observers feared New York City was headed for urban collapse due to
its enormously high crime rates, Los Angeles experienced the massive
and deadly Rodney King Riots, and Washington often vied for the title of
American homicide capital. In each city, the violence and crime were
overwhelmingly committed by black males, and although white elites were
rarely the victims, their fears were quite palpable.

One obvious reaction to these concerns was strong political support
for a massive national crackdown on crime, and the prison incarceration
of black men increased by almost 500% during the two decades after 1980.
But even after such enormous rates of imprisonment, official FBI
statistics indicate that blacks today are still over 600% as likely to
commit homicide than non-blacks and their robbery rate is over 700%
larger; these disparities seem just as high with respect to Hispanic or
Asian immigrants as they are for whites. Thus, replacing a city’s
blacks with immigrants would tend to lower local crime rates by as much
as 90%, and during the 1990s American elites may have become
increasingly aware of this important fact, together with the obvious
implications for their quality of urban life and housing values.

According to Census data, between 1990 and 2010 the number of
Hispanics and Asians increased by one-third in Los Angeles, by nearly
50% in New York City, and by over 70% in Washington, D.C. The
inevitable result was to squeeze out much of the local black population,
which declined, often substantially, in each location. And all three
cities experienced enormous drops in local crime, with homicide rates
falling by 73%, 79%, and 72% respectively, perhaps partly as a result of
these underlying demographic changes. Meanwhile, the white population
increasingly shifted toward the affluent, who were best able to afford
the sharp rise in housing prices. It is an undeniable fact that
American elites, conservative and liberal alike, are today almost
universally in favor of very high levels of immigration, and their
possible recognition of the direct demographic impact upon their own
urban circumstances may be an important but unspoken factor in shaping
their views.

As an anecdotal example, consider the case of Matthew Yglesias, a
prominent young liberal blogger living in Washington, DC. A couple of
years ago he recounted on his blogsite
how he was suddenly attacked from behind and seriously beaten by two
young men while walking home one evening from a dinner party. At first
he was quite cagey about identifying his attackers, but he eventually
admitted they were blacks, possibly engaged in the growing racial
practice of urban “polar bear hunting” so widely publicized by the
Drudge Report and other rightwing websites.

Few matters are more likely to trouble the minds of our
Harvard-educated intellectual elite than fear of suffering random
violent assaults while they walk the streets of their own city. Yet no
respectable progressive would possibly focus on the racial character of
such an attack, let alone advocate the removal of local blacks as a
precautionary measure. Instead Yglesias suggested that housing-density
issues might have been responsible and that better urban planning would
reduce crime.

But consider that support for very high levels of foreign immigration
is an impeccably liberal cause, and such policies inevitably displace
and remove huge numbers of urban blacks; it is easy to imagine that
Yglesias quietly redoubled his pro-immigration zeal in the wake of the
incident. Multiply this personal example a thousand-fold, and perhaps
an important strand of the tremendous pro-immigration ideological
framework of American elites becomes apparent. The more
conspiratorially-minded racialists, bitterly hostile to immigration,
sometimes speculate that there is a diabolical plot by our ruling power
structure to “race-replace” America’s traditional white population.
Perhaps a hidden motive along these lines does indeed help explain some
support for heavy immigration, but I suspect that the race being
targeted for replacement is not the white one.

Indeed. One might reach the same conclusion when looking closely at the consequences of liberal policies on welfare and abortion. Never look at the selling points, look at the consequences. If the course is not subsequently changed in light of a divergence between the two, it is safe to assume that the consequences were planned from the start.

Remember, extrapolating current trends to predict the future is reliably a failure. In 1900, it was widely believed that the black race was inevitably headed for extinction. 100 years later, it looks like the whites are on the way out. But it’s not hard to imagine ethnic cleansing in Europe combined with ethnic strife in the Americas and ruthless Chinese colonization in Africa leading to the revival of concerns for the black race in 2100.

McRapey on rhetoric

It’s as if Aristotle were walking among us! John Scalzi instructs one of his commenters on rhetoric:

Riccola: Mr. Scalzi, while you have certainly drawn your own conclusions regarding Mr. Beale, I would say you are incorrect in stating that he is a case example of the Dunning Kruger effect. He is often humble about his ability to design games, write articles, and write books. He has never stated he considers himself great or even good at any of these things. If you are referring to rhetoric I have seen no evidence to indicate he is not skilled. All those who have fully engaged him, a good example would be the ArizonaAtheist, have actually found him to be proficient at rhetoric. From what I have observed only those who do not engage him in discussion believe he is deficient in this area.

I also struggle to see how he has failed to recognize genuine skill in others. There are a plethora of examples of him praising both those he ideologically agrees with and those who despise him. He often praises your ability to market yourself. To me, that does not sound like someone incapable of recognizing genuine skill in others.

On the third plank of the Dunning Kruger effect, fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy, I would not contest as it depends entirely on your metric and perspective.

The fourth part of the effect, recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill if they are exposed to training for that skill, there is no evidence as to this to be applicable to him. I am not aware of him being trained for anything, or his reflections on being trained.

With only one part of the Dunning Kruger effect possibly applying to Mr. Beale I would hazard that you are completely unfounded in saying that he is their favourite son. I can only guess your own contempt for the man has inhibited your ability to describe him.

McRapey:  “If you are referring to rhetoric I have seen no evidence to indicate he is not skilled.”

Speaking as someone whose degree is Philosophy of language (ie, rhetoric), I see lots of evidence to the contrary, I’m afraid. He’s not bad at sounding like he knows what he’s talking about as long as you don’t know what he’s talking about, but that’s not the same thing as being rhetorically skilled, except to the limited extent that “rhetoric” means “ability to spew bullshit.”

It’s certainly true I don’t think much of him (both in that I don’t think much of him when I don’t have to, and don’t think much of him when I do have to), but in both cases, based on my experience of having to deal with him, I’m very comfortable with my assessment. And in any event it’s not a checklist; one does not need to fulfill all possible conditions to be fully in the grips of Dunning Kruger.

Riccola:  Mr. Scalzi, I do not see why you would consider possessing a bachelors degree in Philosophy of Language would given you any indication that you are proficient or familiar with rhetoric. All it means is twenty years ago you sat in at a desk, someone taught at you, and you received a piece of paper. A degree does not make you, or anyone else, an authority on a subject. Do you think there has never been a bad engineer?

McRapey: And? As I don’t know you or know your capacity to make any sort of assessment of anything (except to the extent that you’ve asserted Mr. Beale is not unskilled, which is an assertion I find dubious for several reasons and does not put you in good stead regarding my assessment of your own evaluative skills), I would say that you not seeing why it matters really is your problem and not mine. Likewise, perhaps your school gives out bachelor degrees as if they were issued from a gumball machine. Mine doesn’t, and in particular did not in my case.

What I found so amusing about this is that McRapey clearly hasn’t changed his debating technique since at least 2005.

  1. Make an obviously questionable assertion.
  2. When the assertion is questioned, appeal to bachelor’s degree.
  3. When the appeal to the bachelor’s degree is questioned, question the questioner’s intellect and/or good will.
  4. Avoid further questions.
  5. Posture as if one has thoroughly proved one’s point.

Riccola isn’t the first to discover John Scalzi’s rhetorical limitations. In addition to my first encounter with them in 2005, Agathis had much the same experience. Not only does McRapey have no observable capacity for dialectic, his rhetoric is almost entirely limited to name-calling, argumentum ad hominem, inept satire, and the sophistic technique known as “ambiguity”. The irony of Scalzi’s position should be readily apparent when one compares his observed lack of rhetorical skill with the Dunning-Kruger effect checklist.

Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

  1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill; (check)
  2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others; (check)
  3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy; (check)
  4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they are exposed to training for that skill. (NA)

McRapey not only hits squarely on three of the four checkboxes, but his exhibited behavior is even worse than Dunning and Kruger conceived. He claims to have had rhetorical training, and yet he STILL doesn’t acknowledge his near-complete lack of rhetorical skill. Now, I tend to suspect this is because he genuinely doesn’t realize that he’s had no real rhetorical training, but is rather operating on the false assumption that Riccola already noted.

McRapey went on to dig himself in deeper by revealing that despite his BACHELOR’S DEGREE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, he was incapable of following the Latin into Greek:

You’d have to ask him; he came up with the “Vox Day” name. Note that it’s a play off of “Vox Dei,” i.e., “The Voice of God,” which is amusing for several reasons.

As for besting me in argument, well, no, not at any point I can remember. Bear in mind I haven’t engaged him in discussion for years now, so this claim is not based on anything recent. With respect to me, I am aware of him not being able to understand what satire is until it was pointed out to him and then compensating for his error by calling me “McRapey” as salve for his ego; I’m also aware that because he doesn’t appear to understand what “up to” means, that he likes to say I lie about my readership numbers here. I’m not entirely sure either of those qualify as excellent arguments, based as they are on weak foundations.

This is not to say Mr. Beale is absolutely incapable of creating a sound logical argument. But in my experience in looking at his arguments, he does it rarely, in no small part because his ground level assumptions are complete shit. If you build your arguments on shit, they’re going to topple over regardless of how you construct your edifice. It’s not his arguments’ only problem, but it’s their first problem, to be sure.

Let’s just say I am not greatly impressed by his ability to argue. Again, you are free to disagree.

Since “theos” in Greek is god, well, unlike Mr. Philosophy of Language, I suspect most of you should be able to figure out the secret etymological chain that has been lost upon so many would-be outers over the years. He’s very nearly correct about my not besting him in argument, because beyond that first encounter he has resolutely run away from debate with me, even when it was publicly proposed by third parties.

I’ve already proven beyond any shadow of doubt that John Scalzi lies about his blog traffic, which is now less than two-thirds of my own. I not only understand what “up to” means, (and “~” as well), and how it can be used to mislead people, but I also caught him when he tried to drop the “up to” on at least two occasions earlier this year. As for his claims about my inability to recognize satire, I am content to respond by pointing to the second item on the Dunning Kruger effect checklist in combination with this quote: “I’m very comfortable with my assessment.”

No doubt he is.

It is hardly surprising that McRapey doesn’t try to critique any of my arguments or show a single example of one that is incorrect, but merely waves his hand and provides a naked assertion that my “ground level assumptions are complete shit”. If called on this, no doubt he will point out that he has a BACHELOR’S DEGREE….

A scientist admits science corruption

And attacks the major science publications, or what he calls the “luxury journals”:

I am a scientist. Mine is a professional world that achieves great
things for humanity. But it is disfigured by inappropriate incentives.
The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement
mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best.
Those of us who follow these incentives are being entirely rational – I
have followed them myself – but we do not always best serve our
profession’s interests, let alone those of humanity and society.

We
all know what distorting incentives have done to finance and banking.
The incentives my colleagues face are not huge bonuses, but the
professional rewards that accompany publication in prestigious journals –
chiefly Nature, Cell and Science….

It is the quality of the science, not the journal’s brand, that
matters. Most importantly of all, we scientists need to take action.
Like many successful researchers, I have published in the big brands,
including the papers that won me the Nobel prize for medicine, which I
will be honoured to collect tomorrow.. But no longer. I have now
committed my lab to avoiding luxury journals, and I encourage others to
do likewise.

It should be interesting to see if the science fetishists who attack me for being “anti-science” when I point out the many problems with the science industry will do the same to this Nobel prize-winner.

This is one aspect of the problems I have been pointing out. One doesn’t have to know ANYTHING about science to know that the incentive system will lead to major problems, one only has to know about the existence of the incentives and been in contact with the occasional human being.

Sic transit gloria campi

I received some sad news yesterday. The captain of my varsity soccer team, the 25th Anniversary team that won the MISSL and went to State, died last week at the age of 46. It seems absolutely impossible, not because we’re in our forties or because it shatters some illusion of youthful immortality, but because for me he was an acquaintance who was just a little larger than life.

I met him in 7th grade when I was sent to private school for the first time; we were two of the original class of 1986 that gradually swelled each year. We weren’t friends, but neither were we enemies. He was at the top of the social ladder of our class from the start and I was pretty damn near the bottom for our first three years there. We both played soccer, but as a bigger, more developed, and more skilled player who was the varsity coach’s son, he played two teams ahead of me, on the C-squad.

I didn’t start to get to know him well until we both started taking German classes in 8th grade from his father, who like most coaches was a teacher at the school. An Austrian immigrant, his father was a good coach and a superlative language teacher. Unlike most kids who take high school languages, all of us were fully and comfortably conversational in German after five years in the program. From day one, we were forbidden to speak English in the classroom and only referred to each other there by our German names. His German name was Max, and I will henceforth refer to him that way.

Max was a bully, but not a mean one. He was an Alpha male maintaining his place at the top of the social order, not a cruel individual torturing the bottom-dwellers in order to impress others. He was mercurial, quick to anger and even quicker to smile, laugh, and forget whatever had set off his temper. He was stocky, but not heavy-set, just above average height, with dark blond hair parted in the middle and the sort of pugnacious good looks that are adorable on a little boy, but can look thuggish on the face of an adult.

He was the private school version of a bad boy who sneaked beers into parties, radiated a vague sense of danger, and was usually involved with one of the more attractive girls in our class. His longtime girlfriend, “Liesl”, was a slender athlete who wasn’t especially pretty in the conventional manner, but was the prototypical cool chick everyone liked. We voted her homecoming queen our senior year. When my parents went to Europe for a month during my senior year, I threw a Super Bowl party. Max brought the keg.

I was always wary of Max although he never really hassled me. It was clear that he wasn’t the sort of boy it was wise to cross. But despite having class with him literally every school day for four years, it wasn’t until I finally made the varsity team, on which he’d already been playing for two years, that I discovered his true colors. He was one of the team’s three captains, but there was no question to whom everyone looked for direction. This wasn’t because he was the coach’s son, but because the other captains were both highly gifted players who were too laid-back and self-contained to concern themselves much with what everyone else was doing.

We were supposed to be mediocre that year, since the team only had four lettermen returning after the previous team had gone to the State tournament for the first time since the varsity lost the State championship game when I was in 8th grade. (That made a huge impression on me in junior high, going to the night games with the stands full of cheering, chanting fans.) Prior to the start of the season, we were playing Apple Valley, the defending state champions, in a preseason scrimmage and we were losing one to nothing at halftime.

We were playing poorly and the coach was disgusted. He waved his hand, said he had nothing to say to us, and walked away. Max stood up and promptly lit into every single one of us, sparing no one, not even the bench players. I have no idea what he said, I just remember the raw fury in his eyes as he yelled at us. We went back onto the field, angry and embarrassed, and promptly outplayed the best team in the state. The game ended in a tie.

That set the stage for the season. We destroyed many of the teams we played. Both of the other captains got hat tricks in the first two games, I got mine in the third one. We had an eclectic group of players, a mix of popular boys and outsiders, and although we didn’t necessarily all like each other, we all really enjoyed playing together. We came together as a team in the purest sense of the word; it wasn’t a social group, it wasn’t a gathering of friends, it wasn’t a family, it was a group that came together for a single purpose: every time we stepped onto the field together, we were there to win.

That didn’t mean there weren’t some bumps and bruises in practice. Max was our number 10, and he was a bruiser. He wouldn’t so much steal the ball as bulldoze the player on it before taking it and turning up the field. One day, in practice, he came charging at me and kept coming after I passed the ball away. I saw that he was intending to flatten me, so I swung my elbow around and caught him in the jaw, hard enough to knock him down. I swear, he bounced right off the ground and chased me halfway across the field before enough of our teammates managed to corral him and calm him down.

A few days later, in the middle of a game, I got into some fisticuffs with two Hill-Murray players and was in the process of getting soundly thrashed. Max came flying in, literally threw himself into their bodies and knocked both of them off me. He stood over me until I could scramble to my feet, swearing a blue streak at them all the while. If you were his teammate, he had your back. I’ve played on and against many teams since then, some of them championship teams, and some of them that featured players from Europe’s most famous soccer clubs. But I’ve never known a better team leader than Max. In 27 years of track, martial arts, and soccer since, I’ve never met anyone who was more willing to stand up or throw down on a moment’s notice for a teammate.

We went on to win the conference, defeating an SPA team had two future US National team players and would go on to win two consecutive State championships. Max was named All-Midwest, some of the other players were named All-State, but we didn’t win the State championship. After defeating our hated archrivals, Minneapolis Washburn, in the quarterfinals, a game followed by a brawl so epic it made the 10 PM news, Max scored a goal that was disallowed (erroneously) against Bloomington Kennedy. They scored in overtime to knock us out of the tournament in the semifinals. It was an especially bitter defeat because Kennedy was the team that had defeated our varsity team in the State championship game four years before.

Max and I only saw each other again once after graduation. It was on our home soccer field, an alumni game against a varsity that included two of my younger brothers. They had two 30-goal scorers, one of whom did those fancy flip throw-ins. They were undefeated, and they were more than confident that they would beat up on the old guys without breaking a sweat, as the varsity teams usually did. I scored twice and we won 3-1. It didn’t matter if it was a scrimmage, a State tournament, or an alumni game, if you were playing with Max, then you were going to play to win.

It was a privilege to play with Max, even if only for one season. I wasn’t the only player to feel that way. One of his college teammates, someone I’ve never met, wrote: “He was an unselfish leader and I loved playing with him.” To this day, when I think of a leader, he is the very first individual of whom I think. And if there is a Valhalla for soccer players, I am absolutely certain he will be there in the midfield, taking no prisoners, and inspiring his teammates by word and by deed. Rest in peace, #10.

Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

     
But I with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

     
Fallen cold and dead.

An embarrassing failure

I tried. So help me, I tried. I honestly thought I had pulled it off, but the verdict is in and I simply didn’t manage to do it. McRapey writes:

From January 1 through today, Mr. Beale has mentioned me by name (or by nickname) on those two sites 145 times. This is defined as references in blog posts; other references — references in comments, persistent sidebar links, or comments by others weren’t counted, nor were Twitter or other social media posts. If you want to do the math, that means Mr. Beale invoked me on his blogs on average once every 2.366 days. Which is rather a lot! There are 22 days left in the year, which means if Mr. Beale follows his average, he’ll mention me nine more times before the ball drops in Times Square. So, for my purposes, I am using 154 times as the official tally number.

I had pledged $5 per reference up to $1,000, which (again with the math) means that Mr. Beale would have had to reference me 200 times over the year for the full payout. 154 times turns out to be 77% of that.

So: If you made a pledge to support the Counteract a Bigot fund drive earlier this year, please donate at least 77% of your pledge amount to the organizations you pledged to fund.

I say at least because, of course, I encourage you to donate the full amount of your pledge if you can. I will be doing so, I have just done so, as well as adding in another $250 to my pledge as thanks to the friend who kept track of Mr. Beale’s sites so I didn’t have to. But even if everyone sticks to just 77% of their full pledge amount, we’ll still have donated at least $46,000 dollars to charities and organizations dedicated to fighting bigotry and/or sexual assault in its various forms. And that ain’t bad.

As for Mr. Beale, well. He’s Dunning-Kruger’s favorite son. As such he’s incapable of imagining himself in anything other than a victory condition, so I’m sure he’ll imagine one here, too. Let him. The rest of us know better.

The idea that I am incapable of imagining myself in anything other than a victory condition is an interesting one; I am admittedly good at many things, but I’m not THAT good. Indeed, one need merely look at my failure to mention McRapey the requisite 200 times to see that I am not always triumphant. I am embarrassed. I am chagrined. And I would also be remiss if I did not bring the following facts to the reader’s attention. (The numbers in parentheses are global Alexa rankings.)

Alexa USA rankings 12/12/12
12,996 Whatever
29,426 Vox Popoli
73,183 Alpha Game

Alexa USA rankings 12/12/13
6,690 Vox Popoli (55,972)
14,181 Alpha Game (101,337)
50,207 Whatever (143,885)


Google Pageviews November 2012
745,857 “those two sites”
726,445 Whatever

Google Pageviews November 2013
1,058,663 “those two sites”
384,958 Whatever

Considering that the victory conditions last year were established as blog traffic, with members of the Whatever warren taunting me about Whatever’s supposedly gargantuan blog readership and McRapey himself pounding his chest about his 8 million pageviews in 2012 when he wasn’t advertising his “50,000 DAILY READERS”, in this case, the facts speak rather clearly for themselves. McRapey is unlikely to even hit 7.5 million Google pageviews this year; imagine how much more his readership would have declined if “those two sites” hadn’t mentioned him 145 times, to say nothing of the copious references on Heartiste and other sites.

I note that the Dunning-Kruger effect is “a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority.”  I leave it to the reader to determine who the description fits more closely.

But at least he’ll always have his Participation Hugo.

The war on grammar

As the rape of science fiction was apparently not enough for the pinkshirts, some of them are now attempting to destroy programming in the name of sex equity as well:

One of the node.js core contributors, Ben Noordhuis, rejected a pull request that eliminated the use of a gendered pronoun in libuv. Now, this was quickly reversed by node.js project lead Isaac Schlueter (that is, Isaac accepted the patch eliminating the gendered pronoun), but because this is a Joyent-sponsored project, many made the reasonable inference that Ben is a Joyent employee—and have called Joyent to task for tolerating such poor behavior. (Especially when that poor behavior transcended into the gobsmackingly inappropriate as Ben tried to revert Isaac’s commit.)

But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn’t be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent. On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to fire someone over a pronoun — but to characterize it that way would be a gross oversimplification: it’s not the use of the gendered pronoun that’s at issue (that’s just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered. To me, that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software, and that’s not an attitude that Joyent tolerates. This isn’t merely a legalistic concern (though that too, certainly), but also a technical one: we believe that empathy is a core engineering value—and that an engineer that has so little empathy as to not understand why the use of gendered pronouns is a concern almost certainly makes poor technical decisions as well….

But just so you heard it from
us: if this were the act of a Joyent employee, we would—to
deliberately use a gender-neutral pronoun—fire them.

I would avoid using any of Joyent’s products, given that it is clear that as a company, they are far more concerned about ideological correctness than with working code or the abilities of their programmers. They are actually insisting upon the use of grammatically incorrect language and threatening to fire those who are unwilling to use the improper form. It would be fascinating to investigate their employment practices and determine if they have 50 percent female programmers, and if not, to learn why they are operating in such an overtly sexist manner.

As a game developer, I am a potential customer of “high-performance cloud infrastructure and big data analytics company”. And I certainly will not be using, or recommending, Joyent.

It’s also informative to learn it has now been established that the deliberate choice of pronouns is a fireable offense. This means those of us who speak proper English and understand, as Churchill used to say, that the masculine embraces the feminine in English grammar, are now free to fire anyone who deliberately uses a gender-neutral pronoun such as “he or she” or “them”.

This gender-policing of the language is such a stupid, left-wing, and above all, parochial attitude. It should be amusing to see them clumsily attempt to covert all gendered articles to “das” in German and to attempt to impose gender neutrality upon la lingua bella and le français.

The Scholar’s Edition

RG kicks it SERIOUS old school style:
Habitabilis facta et condita anno
MMDCCCX, Ryshalan mundus insignis
in regione Kantillona prope extremos fines Dominationis Terranei Maioris
celeriter fiebat. Propter locum pollentiorem
ipsa saepissime oppugnata victaque erat dum, anno MMCMXXXV, facta sit
mundus liber a Pronavarcho Classis Beze Davenant, imperatore Classis
XXIo
Imperii, qui erat primus Dux Ryshalanis. Post Seditionem Machinarum
Divinarum anno MMCMXCIX et natum Unitatis, Ryshalan primum destinatum
victorum administratorum et nationalum et mundanorum
fiebat. Quartus Dux, arbitrans
haec crebra proelia infinitum numerum exsulum opulentorum creatura,
primus morem Asyli praebendi instituit.
–
“Annales Ducum Ryshalanis” scripti a Thucidean Marcel

QUANTUM MORTIS: The Scholar’s Edition. It’s certain to be a classic in the mode of De Bello Gallico.

We already ran into one major translation issue. The primary Latin endearment used in the sense that we English-speakers use “baby” is cara. If you’ve read the book, then you can probably see the problem there. But, as it happens, RG managed to resolve the issue in an exquisitely appropriate manner worthy of William Weaver himself.

This is a very high tone blog, you see. Don’t forget to keep your pinky out while you’re reading.

In not-entirely-unrelated news, the QM hardcovers are at the printers and should be shipping this week to the preorders. Thanks very much for your support!

“Send the lot back”

An English UKIP politician is attacked for saying what most English people now fervently believe:

A high-profile UKIP politician is facing a racism storm after being caught on camera saying all immigrants to Britain should be sent back home. Victoria Ayling, who made headlines when she defected from the Tories in March, made the inflammatory comments in a 20-minute video seen by The Mail on Sunday. On the subject of immigration she talks about restricting the numbers of foreigners entering the UK, but then adds: ‘I just want to send the lot back, but I can’t say that.’

Of course, she and UKIP are making a huge mistake by backing down and trying to hide behind the “illegal immigrant” fig leaf.  But the problem with mass immigration is not whether the immigrants are legal or not, it is that there are simply far too many of them.

No nation can survive an immigrant population, including second and third generations, of more than five percent without seeing its legal and cultural traditions significantly transformed.  That transformation is precisely why anti-American forces have been pushing mass immigration since 1965. And it is why the EU elite has been forcing it on the European nations as well. But the tide is rapidly turning, as the Labour party leaders have learned:

Mr Morris, a former No 10 adviser to Tony Blair at the time of the ‘open-door’ policy, used the social-networking website Twitter to announce on Monday evening: ‘Recipe for a miserable evening:  off to do focus groups on immigration.’

And afterwards, he wrote, in a line dripping with sarcasm: ‘Tonight’s focus groups as progressive as  I hoped,’ adding: ‘Their plan: end migration and fill jobs with Brits who have to take job.’ He declared that it had left him ‘depressed, as you might imagine’. The liberal views on immigration of many of Labour’s frontbenchers are not shared by most voters.

In a recent opinion poll, 72 per cent of respondents favoured slamming the door on unskilled immigrants, while 59 per cent thought we should allow fewer relatives of people already living in Britain into the country to join them.

Multiculturalism and mass immigration are already mortally wounded, even as the Obama administration tries to figure out how to ram immigration amnesty through Congress. Legal immigrants are now being openly attacked across continental Europe, from Hungary to Greece. Saudi Arabia has announced plans to deport 2 million immigrants, which represents nearly 7 percent of its total population, and has already deported over 100,000.

And on the Daily Mail site, a considerable portion of the 2300+ comments are strongly in favor of Ms Ayling’s opinion. The top-rated comment on the article, with 11,105 upvotes to 3,751 downvotes, was this: “How 95% of the UK feels but are for some Reason shouldn’t say!”

The age of mass immigration is obviously over. Multiculturalism is a failed and societally destructive concept and it is now eminently clear that large-scale immigration devastates advanced economies. Civilized repatriations must begin and they must begin within the next ten years. If they do not, history strongly suggests that the world will enter into another era of vicious ethnic cleansing and mass killings.

Here is the vital point I hope you will at least try to understand: it doesn’t matter what you think. It doesn’t matter what I think. It doesn’t even matter what Barack Obama or David Cameron think. It doesn’t matter what any of us prefer or believe to be ethically or morally right. The great historical patterns always overwhelm national politics and specific ideologies in the course of time. Just as the various mono-ethnic nations came into being in the first place, they will recreate themselves over and over again, and there is no government or ideology that is capable of standing in the way of the basic human instinct to be surrounded by one’s own kind in periods of uncertainty, economic contraction and international chaos.

Fred meets evolutionists, wins

After his long article expressing his fundamental skepticism towards the cult of TENS, a number of Neo-Darwinists didn’t hesitate to try to inform Fred that his skepticism was misplaced. This was a tactical error, as Fred responded to their various attempts to correct his heretical thinking..

The Argument from Time
Even a Federal Bureaucrat Can Get A Job Done, Given Forever

A staple of evolutionary evasion is time, lots of it. This is particularly applied to the putative formation of the OC (Original Critter). One intones “billions and billions and billions of years,” the implication being that with so very, very, very much time, so many billions of gallons of sea water, surely an OC would have to form. Why, it could hardly help it.

Not necessarily. Probabilities can be more daunting than one might expect. Things that seem intuitively likely sometimes just flat are not. To illustrate the point:

We’ve all heard Sir James Jeans’ assertion that a monkey, pecking randomly on a typewriter, would eventually produce all the books in the British Museum. This may sound reasonable, even obvious, at first glance. But would the monkey in fact ever get even one book?

No. Not in any practical sense.

Consider a thickish book of, say, 200,000 words. By the newspaper estimate that there are on average five letters per word, that’s a million letters. What is the likelihood that our monkey, typing continuously (we ignore upper case and punctuation), will get the book in a given string of a million letters?

He has a 1/26 chance of getting the first letter, times a 1/26 chance of the second, and so on. The chance of getting the book in a million characters is therefore one in 26 to the millionth power. I don’t have a calculator handy, but we can get an approximation. Since 26 = 10(log 26), then 261,000,000 = 10(log 26 x 1,000,000). Since log 10 = 1 and log 100 = 2, log 26 has to be between, somewhere on the low end. Call it 1.2.

The monkey thus has one chance in 1 followed by 1,200,000 zeros. That is what mathematicians call a GBH (Gret Big Honker). For practical purposes, one divided by that rascal is zero. If you had a billion billion monkeys (more monkeys than I want) typing a billion billion letters a second, for a billion billion times the estimated age of the universe (1018 seconds is sometimes given), the chance of getting the book would still be essentially zero.

Well, you might say, that is asking a lot of our monkey. How about the chance that the monkey would get the mere title of a book—say, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the  Struggle for Life, the original title of Darwin´s book. If my finger count was correct, that´s 117 letters and spaces. Then the probability is 1 in 26117, or 10(log 26 x  117), giving 10140 and change. Now, again taking the age of the universe as 1018 seconds, our monkey would have, sigh, essentially zero chance of getting even the title. Ain´t gonna happen.

Does the chance formation of an Original Critter involve such forbidding numbers? I don´t know that it does. Nor that it doesn´t. It is difficult to calculate the probability of an unknown process of unknown complexity under unknown conditions.

As we have repeatedly observed, biologists are reliably inept when it comes to math. This is why they repeatedly turn to the LOTS AND LOTS OF TIME argument, which is nothing more than an appeal to their own credulity. What they forget to account for properly is the even more extraordinary numbers that are required in order to account for the probabilities of the necessary mutations a) happening and b) proving to be of superior fitness.

It has been asked before why so many economists, whose own “science’ is entirely debatable, tend to be skeptical of evolution by natural selection. The answer is twofold. First, if you don’t get the math right in economics, the error will be immediately obvious even in theory. No economists will blithely carry on with his model if it produces 10,000 percent unemployment or an estimated 8 billion unmarried households in America. Second, every economics major has seen an awful lot of theoretical bullshit. So, we recognize it when we see it.