Category: Uncategorized

For the record

I would like to thank everyone who helped with my response to the SFWA Board report, regardless of whether they helped publicly, privately, or anonymously.  I’ve now completed what turned out to be a mere 32-page response in the end, thanks to my need to avoid violating discussion forum confidentiality by providing links rather than direct quotes of various statements made in the forums.  Also, as per the formal process, I have sent some 200 or so statements relevant to the matter to the Canadian Regional Director to be entered into the official record.

I also appreciate the staunch support that so many readers here have shown me in the face of the many false and absurd accusations contained in the report. As I’ve attempted to point out from the beginning, this affair is merely a microcosm of what can happen in nearly any organization in America today.  If your church, or your scout troop, or your neighborhood association, doesn’t deal firmly with the interlopers and busybodies who like nothing better than to invade organizations and “improve” it by constantly interfering with the other members, you may well find yourself on the business end of a similarly selective witch hunt.  If that happens, I hope my response here has provided you with a useful model with which to begin your own.

Even though I have been denied access to the discussion forums, I am still obliged to respect their confidentiality. So, while I can’t present the evidence here, SFWA members who are interested may find the following links to be useful in deciding whether personal attacks made in SFWA spaces have historically been considered an offense meriting official sanction or are simply part of the normal intra-organizational discourse.

Carlos Danger for President

I have to say, I like the cut of his jib. We’ve already got the idiocracy, now all we need is the leader with the insane and unfounded confidence of Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.  And I say Carlos Danger, aka C. Anthony’s Weiner, may be just that man.

When the first texts were revealed two years ago, Mr. Weiner lied about
it, saying he had been the victim of hackers. Then he owned up,
tearfully abandoned his office and retreated into private life. Then he
was back, telling the world that therapy and his wife’s forgiveness had
turned him around and that he was ready to begin a new chapter. That
turned out to be the mayor’s race, which he entered in May. What he did
not say then, and what voters did not realize until Tuesday, was that
his resignation had not been the end of his sexual misconduct.

The timing here matters, as it would for any politician who violates the
public’s trust and then asks to have it back. Things are different now,
he insists. “This behavior is behind me,” he said again on Tuesday. He
suggested that people should have known that his sexting was an
unresolved problem well into 2012.

That’s ridiculous and speaks to a familiar but repellent pattern of misleading and evasion.

To the contrary, I say a ridiculous candidate is ideally suited for an American democracy that knowingly re-elected Bill Clinton, Bush the Younger, and Barry Soebarkah. Carlos Danger would be the perfect president to lead America into its final collapse.  As the economy contracts and interracial violence erupts from Florida to California, the citizenry would be cheered and inspired by frequent press conferences featuring the presidential weiner. 

Why should the New York Times be perturbed by what Carlos Danger does with his dongle?  After all, his wife clearly doesn’t care what he does with it so long as he keeps it away from her.

Carlos Danger in 2016!

SFWA 3.0’s target market

It’s truly not fair to say that there is no market for the necro-bestial love triangles and transgendered Regency romances of color in space so beloved of the new SFWA.  The market definitely exists, as evidenced here:

it’s funny tho when ppl give u shit for not reading or wanting to get
into “classic novels” like im sorry why do i wanna read about the
ramblings of some crusty old white dude who doesn’t even know what 
clitoris is when i can read about time traveling interracial lesbian
romances in space

As to whether that is a market that merits pursuing to the exclusion of works in the mode of crusty old white dudes such as Asimov, Card, Heinlein, Herbert, Tolkien, Lewis, and Verne is a question I quite happily leave to fine SF/F publishers such as Tor Books, Night Shade Books and Golden Gryphon Press.

Ignorance of the law

Is no excuse for looking like a moron.  Instapundit wonders what the vibrant ignorati posturing publicly about Florida law will do when they realize that Florida is not the only state in question here:

WHAT WILL THEY DO WHEN THEY FIND OUT THAT CALIFORNIA, MASSACHUSETTS AND PENNSYLVANIA HAVE STAND-YOUR-GROUND LAWS, TOO? Some of the music industry’s biggest acts are joining Stevie Wonder in boycotting Florida over the state’s controversial “stand your ground” law. UPDATE: Illinois has “Stand Your Ground” Too — And Obama Voted For It. Will they boycott White House performances? Dumbasses.

Tomato, tomahto….  Stevie Wonder declares: “I decided today that until the ‘stand your ground’ law is abolished in
Florida, I will never perform there again,” he said. “As a matter of
fact, wherever I find that law exists, I will not perform in that state
or in that part of the world.”

From Wikipedia: “Many states have some form of stand-your-ground law. Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.”

Blindness isn’t merely a physical phenomenon. It should be amusing to see how quickly Mr. Wonder backs down once he realizes he just effectively ended his career outside the recording studio.

Mailvox: open homeschool thread

HHS asks for curriculum advice:

Would you mind putting up a homeschool open thread? My wee one is
finally getting to that age, and while she’s learning to read now, we’re
looking for our first well-rounded curriculum.

Have at it.  SB uses Saxon math, Trivium Pursuit, and the Well-Trained Mind, which has met with some very good results.  I don’t have much to offer in this regard, as my only responsibilities in this regard fall in the very important areas of Video Game History and Philosophy of Gaming.

That being said, I generally prefer starting a child off on Spacewar rather than Pong.  And one can only truly appreciate the Intellivision if one has first been thoroughly exposed to the Atari 2600.

But I congratulate HHS and his wife on their decision.  After all, America’s best educated kids don’t go to school.

Mailvox: what martial art

The Baseball Savant has been bulking up:

I remember asking you this
awhile back but I’ve went through some physical changes. I’m going to
start to really try and master a martial art. I remember talking about
brazilian jiu-jitsu because I thought at 5’10 it might be better to
ground fight given my lack of height but I think I remember you saying
something about akido because of my strength at potentially being a
striker. I think when I e-mailed you I was around 200lbs but now I’m 245lbs and have been doing some lifting. My best lifts are:

BENCH: I can do 225lbs for 49reps and my last max was 430 although it might be higher.
SQUAT: 550lbs
MILITARY: I do bells for this and my gym only goes up to 135lbs but I can get reps (6-8) with these

DEADLIFT: 600lbs for one

What is your recommendation on this? Is it still strike-oriented?

Okay, that’s ridiculous.  That’s 3x more reps than I can do at 225, or rather, than I could do before I dinged my shoulder.  Anyhow, with that sort of power at his disposal, BS probably doesn’t need to do much in the way of strike-oriented training.  Strike-training allows one to deliver more power through speed and technique, but when one already has power in truckloads, it’s not necessary.

However, all the power in the world doesn’t do much good when one doesn’t have the reflexes, moves, and combinations that come from training.  So, I would look at something in the grappling range that still uses strikes, in other words, aikido rather than judo.  But some strike-oriented sparring is still a good idea. Ender does judo and I’ve noticed that while he and his fellow judoka have an enhanced ability to defend themselves, it hasn’t given them the heightened sense of alertness or the hair-trigger fighting reflexes one is accustomed to seeing in a well-trained strike-oriented fighter.

Aikido may do so; I don’t know.  But either way, I would encourage BS to look for an aikido school that utilizes multi-discipline sparring.  At the end of the day, there is simply no substitute for getting hit.

For the anglophiles

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have a baby boy.  Which, I imagine, makes all the Constitutional issues considerably less controversial.

The defense isn’t resting

Blogging will likely be a little light today, since I’m in the process of putting together all the information I’ve gathered into a coherent response to the SFWA Board.  Anyhow, I also found these particular quotes to be interesting, considering the way in which the SFWA president has handled the complaint process in a manner not dissimilar to his previous approach to differing opinions.

Steven Gould ::: (view all by) ::: March 05, 2005, 12:15 PM:

Does this mean we can’t make fun of Vox Day (Or VD as I like to call him) for his distressing use irrational arguments?  Of course we can. It’s like finding one of those dishes of leftovers in the back of the refrigerator that is busy creating it’s own little ecosystem. You comment on it, you drop it in the trash, and you don’t swallow it. 

Steven Gould ::: (view all by) ::: March 05, 2005, 09:57 PM:

Vox Day  From Dictionary.com:

Hack
5. Slang. To cope with successfully; manage: couldn’t hack a second job.

Yeah, you can’t front on that, Laura.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What language is this guy speaking? Is he from this dimension?… Why are we wasting so much time on this guy? When they came up with the phrase ‘kneejerk’ reactionary, they were thinking of him. 

Steven Gould ::: (view all by) ::: March 06, 2005, 10:39 AM:

Vox Day: “I do find it more than a little ironic that the very people who entered the fray making personal attacks are such delicate flowers about enduring them in return. People disagree with me. Fine. People think it’s appropriate to attack me, and not my ideas. Also fine. But it seems a little much for people to expect to be able to do so without taking any return fire.”
~~~~~~~~

Hmmmm. Listen to another series of overwritten, not-on-topic responses or wax the cat? Hear kitty, kitty….

As a person of color, I find it incredibly amusing that the painfully white Mr. Gould clearly did not understand the term
“you can’t front on that”.  In 2005.  And I find it tremendously hurtful that he would so insensitively imply that I am some sort of alien, presumably illegal.

Boehner prepares his latest betrayal

It amazes me that John Boehner is still the head of the House Republicans after single-handedly saving the Obama administration by raising the debt ceiling.  Now it looks as if he is preparing to mortally wound the Republican Party in the short term and permanently segregate the American two-party system in the long term:

While House Speaker John Boehner is keeping a tight lid on his personal position on immigration reform, conservative activists and lawmakers fear the Republican leader may rubber-stamp Democrats’ controversial legislation in a backroom deal with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Boehner declined to answer whether he supports what many on the left have come to term a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants during his appearance on CBS News’ Face The Nation on Sunday morning. For conservative lawmakers, that does not assuage fears that he and his deputies House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Whip Kevin McCarthy, and Budget Committee chairman Rep. Paul Ryan could be working behind the scenes cut a deal with Reid and President Barack Obama to achieve amnesty for illegal immigrants in America.

“We are scared to death of what we figure is already Boehner’s end game,” a senior congressional GOP aide told Breitbart News. “There are so many forces within the GOP establishment pushing for their interests that it’s hard to conceive that Boehner will not cave to them.”

By adding tens of millions of new Democratic voters who are, for the most part, to the left of the Democratic Party’s center, more whites are going to gravitate towards the Republican Party than has been seen since Nixon first successfully launched his Southern Strategy.

Few “anti-racist” white liberals tend to remain that way once they are surrounded by  vibrant neighbors and find themselves living in the diversity they once supported so enthusiastically from afar.  Remember, “white flight” is mostly an urban liberal phenomenon.

100 more bankrupt cities

So much for the vaunted urban model of the American liberal:

Detroit Mayor Bing and Michigan Governor Snyder have been quite vocal. Bing made it clear that “a lot of negotiations will go into fixing our city,” and when asked whether he will seek a Federal bailout, he responded, “not yet.” The decisions following this huge bankruptcy are likely to be precedent-setting as Bing noted that more than 100 urban US cities “are having the same  problems we’re having.” As the WSJ reports, Bing warned, “We may be one of the first. We are the largest. But we absolutely will not be the last. And so we have got to set a benchmark in terms how to fix our cities.”

Imagine how much worse the financial situation would be if the exurban proletariat and suburban bourgeoisie had listened to the progressive experts and moved en masse to the cities the way they were supposed to in the 70s and 80s.

And ask yourself this question.  If the Fed/USG can simply “print” credit money between them and “stimulate” the economy through massive urban bailouts, why are they not doing so already?  This solution would appear to kill three birds with one stone:

1. Preventing the insolvent cities from defaulting
2. Making up for insufficient private and public spending
3. Reducing unemployment via subsized local government employment.

So, why would neither Ben Bernanke nor Barack Obama be pursuing, or even proposing, such an economic program?  What is it that prevents them from “fixing” these three problems in this manner?