Category: Uncategorized

Liberals giving awards to each other

Justin Landon of Staffer’s Book Review appears to be about as impressed with the Hugo Awards as I am with the SFWA’s Nebula Awards:

The Hugos are utter twaddle.

Although the Hugos present the image of something more cosmopolitan
or representative than the standard convention award, it’s becoming
increasingly apparent every year that, despite being the most
recognizable award in science fiction and fantasy cultural awareness,
the Hugos are nothing more than an amalgamation of like minded WorldCon
members, or agendized voting blocs, bent on vociferous back patting. I
apply that statement broadly, although it is most obviously associated
with the down ballot. Before I get too far into that rabbit
hole, let me first place ‘best novel’ squarely in my sites where the
only explanation is that the average Hugo voter reads somewhere been
four and six novels a year.

Often when critics rail against the Hugo’s best novel category it’s
to attack lack of sophistication. The Clarke Award, British Science
Fiction Award, the Kitschies, Tiptree Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and
others spend some time examining science fiction and fantasy literature
through a critical lens. Anyone expecting that from the Hugo Award isn’t
just off the mark, they might as well be trying to stick ‘it’ in the
sarlacc.

No, the Hugo voter has a certain style it looks for in its
fiction. Hugo-style, if you will, is like Gangnam-style only without the
distracting Korean guy riding a horse, replaced with Charles Stross and
Connie Willis on a podium holding a. . . rocket ship. I admit
Gangnam-style doesn’t have nearly as much sex appeal. In other words,
Hugo nominated books tend to be recognizable. On the one hand because
they are mostly written by Stross, Willis, John Scalzi, China Miéville,
Robert Charles Wilson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Ian MacDonald, and active
members of the Live Journal community, but also because they fit a
certain motif that’s difficult to pin down. I’ll fall back on the old
pornography argument, ‘I know it when I see it.”

I have to admit, I don’t pay any more attention to the Hugo Awards than I do the the Dove Awards, the Christie Awards, the Academy Awards, the Emmy Awards, or the Tony Awards. The only reason I care about the Nebula Awards is because I am a Lifetime member of the organization that gives them out and I find it embarrassing that the SFWA so often honors mediocre novels at the expense of much more worthy ones.

The only award I’ve truly cared about in the last few years was Adrian Peterson’s MVP award for his heroic performance this past season; yes, it’s a quarterbacks’ league now but if the NFL MVP is only going to go to quarterbacks, then simply rename it the MVQ and be done with it.

And when I say I don’t care about awards, I mean it quite literally. I didn’t even know that Summa Elvetica had been nominated for an award until I saw it on Wikipedia a few years later, and when Marcher Lord was warned that A Throne of Bones would not be eligible for a certain award if I did not edit some of its more offensive bits, I cheerfully told them to go ahead and disqualify it.  I’m with Raymond Feist on this, who knows perfectly well that he’ll never win an award until he is declared an SFWA Grandmaster, probably after he is safely dead.  He is, quite simply, too successful to merit them.

Everyone has different goals. Rabbits need the group affirmation that these sorts of political awards offer them. Not-rabbits don’t. Psykosonik once beat out Prince for Best Dance Record at the Minnesota Music Awards for a song I wrote; I didn’t know we’d won until months later because not only did I not bother going, my bandmates who did didn’t even see fit to mention it because they knew I didn’t care. I didn’t even know I had been a three-time Billboard top 40 recording artist for about 16 years until I looked it up a few months ago when I was pointing out the dirty laundry of  the “New York Times bestselling” authors.

When you are fortunate enough to experience success, you learn to value certain aspects of it and to disvalue others.  My objective is to write a great epic fantasy series that is capable of creating the same feeling in its readers as Dune once created in me. That’s why I simply laugh when people claim I’m jealous of McRapey, or I’m imitating George Martin, or my feelings are wounded that A Throne of Bones wasn’t nominated for any awards.  Because in the game I’m playing, those things don’t even enter into it. They’re not relevant to my metric for success.

Perhaps I’ll succeed.  Perhaps I’ll fail. Most people would probably, and quite reasonably, bet on the latter. But regardless, talking about how people are performing in the shotput or the pole vault and who is winning those events means absolutely nothing to me over here in the blocks with Frank Herbert, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Richard Adams, and Neal Stephenson.

Immigrants are good for the economy

So much for that tremendously sophisticated theory:

In Stockton, Calif., which has just entered into Chapter 9 bankruptcy,
41 percent of the people do not speak English at home and 21 percent
cannot speak it very well, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The problem facing immigration advocates is that once they admit that the quality and quantity of the immigrant population has an effect on the economy, their entire rational for replacing the native population goes out the window.  They were able to successfully deceive the public in 1965 and 1986, but not any longer.  The effects of the foreign pigeons invading to roost and crap all over the US economy can no longer be denied.

How many more cities have to go bankrupt before it becomes obvious to everyone that immigration is not an intrinsic element of economic growth.  It is more than a little ironic that in the name of free trade, Americans have somehow managed to accept a system that involves the free movement of labor as well as restrictions on the movement of capital.

Productivity

It is said that men are always proud of the wrong things.  That may be, but I think everyone here will most certainly agree that working in “aw, he got the velcros” into the conversation, in correct context, makes the week productive, by definition.

Didn’t Kordell Stewart retire?

The rumor is that four homosexual NFL players are all going to come out and announce their shared sexual abnormality at the same time:

The one reason to worry about an NFL player coming out as gay would be the inevitable avalanche of horrible jokes, hateful responses, and insane scrutiny, all directed at one human being. Nobody deserves that, and it would be ugly. But as Ayanbadejo says, “If they could share the backlash, it would be more positive.”

In addition to muting the backlash toward any one player, four players coming out in four different cities — AT THE SAME DAMN TIME — would get all kinds of love and support, too, spreading the acceptance around the country, making this a more universal sign of progress in the NFL and the sports world, in general.

First of all, as Juvenal suffices to prove, it’s not progress, it’s decline. Second, I suspect it’s not going to go quite as well as the men in cheerleader skirts would like to imagine.  Not that anyone is likely say anything in public; Roger Goodell and the various teams have made it perfectly clear that this is one area where freedom of speech and expression are absolutely frowned upon and anything but unabashed approval will be punished.

But NFL players are now very good at mouthing all the right platitudes in front of the cameras and then expressing themselves on the field.  They will, quite rightly, resent having this sort of nonsense crammed down their throats while simultaneously being muzzled.

I think it would be amusing if four other players announced they are pedophiles and demanded the same sort of saintly treatment from the league and the media that the other pioneers will be receiving.  And it would be even more amusing to see the media whiplash that would take place if Tim Tebow happened to be one of the four players.

Speaking of category errors

It’s really remarkable how more than 80 years later, Paul Krugman and the Keynesians are STILL attacking Andrew Mellon despite the fact that his liquidationist policies weren’t implemented back in 1929 and they’re not being implemented now:

When the Great Depression struck, many influential people argued that the government shouldn’t even try to limit the damage. According to Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, his Treasury secretary, urged him to “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers. … It will purge the rottenness out of the system.” Don’t try to hasten recovery, warned the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter, because “artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone.” 

Like many economists, I used to quote these past luminaries with a
certain smugness. After all, modern macroeconomics had shown how wrong
they were, and we wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of the 1930s, would we….

So what should we be doing? By all means, let’s restore the kind of
effective financial regulation that, in the years before the Reagan
revolution, helped deter excessive leverage. But that’s about preventing
the next crisis. To deal with the crisis that’s already here, we need
monetary and fiscal stimulus, to induce those who aren’t too deeply
indebted to spend more while the debtors are cutting back. But that prescription is, of course, anathema to Mellonites, who wrongly
see it as more of the same policies that got us into this trap. And
that, in turn, tells you why liquidationism is such a destructive
doctrine: by turning our problems into a morality play of sin and
retribution, it helps condemn us to a deeper and longer slump. 
The bad news is that sin sells. Although the Mellonites have, as I said,
been wrong about everything, the notion of macroeconomics as morality
play has a visceral appeal that’s hard to fight. Disguise it with a bit
of political cross-dressing, and even liberals can fall for it. 
But they shouldn’t. Mellon was dead wrong in the 1930s, and his avatars
are dead wrong today. Unemployment, not excessive money printing, is
what ails us now — and policy should be doing more, not less.

Notice that despite the complete failure of the concept due to the stagflation of the 1970s, Krugman, ever the True Keynesian, still believes that there is some kind of meaningful tradeoff between unemployment and inflation. There isn’t. Neither printing money nor increasing credit necessarily creates any jobs.

And how is it possible for liquidationist policies to be failing today when none of the insolvent banks have been liquidated?

Is reality misogynistic?

This was an interesting exchange over at Susan’s place.  Mike C asked her if  something I wrote merited being described in a certain manner:

Does this language from Vox Day also count as misogynistic? I am trying to figure out if this also falls into your categorization of misogynistic? 

“Because women are collectively more short-sighted and more
self-centered than men, giving them an equal voice in society is
tantamount to a slow-motion execution for any society. This is not
theoretical, it is observable, as the equalitarian societies of Europe
are already demographically in demise and in the process of losing their
democracies and their property rights.

I understand that many people believe women’s rights are important.
But are they more important than property rights? Are they more
important than democracy? What those who support women’s rights are
understandably reluctant to accept is that equalitarianism necessarily
requires the elimination of democracy, property rights, freedom of
movement, and even, in the end, capitalism and most of the tenets of
Western civilization. But like it or not, that is the choice that has
been made, and is being made, even today.

The Founding Fathers of the USA were no more mindless sexists than the Conscript Fathers of the Roman Senate. They
knew full well what would happen if sexual equality was ever granted.
It is not a coincidence, still less ironic, that those who built the
greatest and freest human societies have always vehemently opposed
women’s rights, while the totalitarians who most avidly sought to curtail human freedom it have tended to support them.”

To which Susan replied:  “Totally.”

I don’t think this is correct.  I don’t think it’s even possibly correct, in fact, I will assert that the notion is a simple category error. To claim that the observable, demonstrable, and provable
contradiction between women’s rights and the rights upon which Western
civilization were historically founded could even theoretically be described as misogynistic is tantamount to setting oneself
against logic, against history, and against reality itself.

As the Castrate said, it is so or it is not so.  If women’s rights contradict the rights of natural law, or the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, then they contradict them.  If I am correct, and they do, then it is a simple matter of fact and neither my feelings about women or Susan’s feelings about Martians have anything whatsoever to do with the matter. The idea is not misogynistic for the same reason it is not romantic or anti-semitic or happy or purple. The term simply cannot apply, not even hypothetically.

But no one need take my
word for this.  I plan to methodically prove it, conclusively, in a
series of forthcoming posts.  As I mentioned on her blog, I’d even welcome Susan’s contribution, if she would care to provide
me with what she would consider to be the definitive “women’s rights”.

I would also welcome a comprehensive list of “women’s rights” as they are distinguished from simple non-sexually based rights from anyone, male or female, who considers himself to be a feminist or even just a defender of “women’s rights”.  I can, of course, simply resort to Wikipedia, but I would prefer to utilize the list provided by a self-professed champion of them.

Incestuous homogamy

Jeremy Irons identifies one of the many problems with legal homogamy:

Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons was today embroiled in an extraordinary row after he suggested that same sex marriage could lead to fathers marrying their own sons to avoid inheritance tax. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Mr Irons made a series of highly inflammatory statements and even denied that such a union would be viewed as incestuous as ‘men don’t breed.’

Hey, if nothing makes God happier than when two individuals – as we were informed with great emphasis, ANY two individuals – love each other, then they should be able to “marry”, right?  Are a man and his son somehow not included in “any”?  Or a mother and her daughter? Grandfather and grandson?  I’d always assumed that the primary problem was that once it is decided that marriage could not longer be limited by sex, obviously it could not justly be limited by quantity either.  But, as Irons has correctly perceived, merely removing the sex limit is sufficient to produce a truly perverse set of incentives. 

After all, if we are to accept the idea that homosexuality is no longer immoral, what grounds do we have for not similarly declaring incest to be morally acceptable as well. The homosexual lobby has not answered this question with anything but rhetoric and faux outrage, mostly because they have no answer for it.

The fact is that two men or two women cannot ever marry because marriage is a particular relationship between a man and one or more women.  The various governments can pass all the laws declaring fish to be fowl they like, but the chromosomes remain. Government didn’t create marriage. Government doesn’t define marriage.

The state is going to have to get out of the marriage business if it doesn’t wish to impair the institution entirely.  I note that already, in British Columbia, the government has resorted to imposing marriage on the cohabitating because so many men are now actively avoiding it thanks to previous state interventions.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if the more intelligent homosexuals, especially of the male variety, eventually come to regret their campaign to mock the institution when they find themselves being “married” against their will by the state.

In fact, under the BC law, many college roommates would find themselves inadvertently married, having passed the required two-year cohabitation limit.

Don’t trust the media

Joe Blow explains why:

The Smartest Attorney I Have Ever Known (SAIHEK) is a former White House Counsel. He tells the story of when the NY Times approached him about writing an essay defending a Bush 41 or maybe a Reagan policy. He asked, “you’re not going to get me to do all this work, then give it to an op-ed writer who will write something debunking this, then not publish my essay, are you? Because you guys did that to ______ and he told me about it.”

“No, of course not,” the NY Times editor said. “We’d never.”

So the SAIHEK, a guy who should have known better, spent several hours out of a couple very busy days where he really didn’t have several hours to give, writing a cracking essay defending Administration policy. He faxed it to the Times. He waited several days and was thinking about calling the editor, when he happened to open the Sunday Times, and there was an op-ed thoroughly hammering the Administration policy. There were several arguments in it, and each was a clever rebuttal to the arguments of the SAIHEK. They were even in the order that they’d be written, if they were directly in response to the order of the Smartest Attorney & etc.’s op-ed. He didn’t bother calling the editor back because he presumed he’d be told they never got the fax.

As the SAIEK puts it, “I learned a very important and highly sophisticated lesson from that experience. Don’t trust the media.”

It is amazing how many intelligent people who know the media is not on their side readily fall for this sort of thing.  I turned down several requests to appear on Alan Colmes’s show a few years ago after I wrote certain columns that proved to be controversial because I knew that I would only be there to serve as cannon fodder. At the time, my media jujitsu was insufficiently developed to permit me to go on a national show with the confidence that I could get my points across no matter how the host tried to spin things.

The thing to always keep in mind is that the media are two-faced and shamelessly dishonest.  They always smile and act friendly when they are hunting for a get.  They are friendly right up until the moment that the microphone goes live, at which point everything changes.  Their voice, their demeanor, even the look in their eyes is transformed.  And if you betray any sign of weakness, they are very good at identifying and exploiting it to rhetorical effect.

This is why so many guests on various news shows so often look bewildered and taken aback when they are being interviewed.  You are seeing, or hearing, the guest’s first introduction to the media figure with their attack face on.  They’ve been told how interesting their thoughts are, how fascinated the viewers or listeners will find them, and how much the media figure has wanted to discuss this with them.  They’ll be assured that it is not a hostile interview, not at all.  And then, the moment the red light goes on, the mask drops.

However, if you are sufficiently prepared and you understand their tendencies, you can use their instinct to attack perceived weaknesses against them. As Jill once pointed out, they are binary thinkers, and binary thinkers are the easiest people to manipulate no matter how smart they are.  The key is that they are superficial and limited to rhetoric so they have neither depth nor the ability to distinguish between real and false dialectical weaknesses.  Get them lunging for X, and then you have them by simply showing X to be Not-X.  And the more controversial or outrageous to PC sensibilities X happens to appear, the more irresistible they find the lure.

Remember, the media game is all about perceived credibility as opposed to the real thing.  They are in the business of producing rabbit food.

Mailvox: combatting ignorance

Phoenician, in his imitable style, can’t even understand Wikipedia when he quotes it:

“The 2000 Equality amendment to the Military Service law states that “The right of women to serve in any role in the IDF is equal to the right of men.” As of now, 88% to 92% of all roles in the IDF are open to female candidates, while women can be found in 69% of all positions. […]

A combat option for women is the Caracal Battalion, which is a highly operational force that is made up of 70 percent female soldiers. The unit undergoes training like any combat infantry. The IDF commando K9 unit, Oketz, also drafts females as elite combat soldiers.”

You’re a moron, Dipshit.

I do so enjoy when Pharyngulans comment here.  All they ever manage to do is publicly demonstrate that their IQs are at least two standard deviations below mine.  In this case, he clearly fails to understand the significance of the fact that 8 to 12 percent of the roles in the IDF are closed to women; those are the actual combat roles.  Women in the IDF are simply not permitted to serve in any combat role.  They haven’t served in them since 1948. They are allowed to train for combat, but they are not permitted to actually perform any combat role for the very reasons I originally cited and more.

“Women serve in support and combat support roles in the IDF, recently they have been allowed additional options but they still do not serve in active combat.  Around the world there has been some discussion about whether or not women should serve in active front-line combat. In Israel it is clear that despite the vast contribution of women in the military, active combat is not an option. This decision is based on the physical and biological differences between men and women but also for moral reasons. As Michal, a combat fitness instructor in the IDF, says, “No one wants to even think of the possibility of an Israeli girl falling into the hands of the enemy.” Our history is already filled with too many such stories of atrocities.

The Israeli military has always combined the practically of combat with the morality of our Jewish way of life. For political reasons women’s groups have tried to break down barriers but the simple fact is that physically women are not capable of doing the job men do. There was an attempt to integrate women in the Search and Rescue units but it was discovered that a great deal of physical damage was caused to them as a result of the increased effort. Even the girls who were integrated into the anti-aircraft unit suffered great physical damage during the long hikes. They suffered more than 30% more stress factors than the boys.”

Wake Up is dubious:

Congratulations on your exploits in Tekken.

Yeah, it wasn’t a video game, it was a similarly dubious active-duty Marine officer with significant combat experience.  He doesn’t mock the martial arts any more.  Nor would you if you tried to last even one minute against me or any other Dragon from my old dojo.  I’ve seen no shortage of doubters and mockers.  No one ever remained that way after stepping onto the mats and experiencing what a combination of speed, strength, experience, and training can do to the average tough guy.  We never did any choreographed fight demonstrations either.  We simply gave people a pair of gloves and told them to take their best shot.  Most of them did exactly the same thing.  Step-step-cock-grimace-BIG rear hand.  The rest tried the midsection tackle.

RealMatt, on the other hand, is simply misinformed:

The odds of a person trained in every single martial art ever known to man, with little to no real life fight experience, performing well in an actual fight, are very low.

Totally false.  It depends upon the school and the training.  The first time I got into an actual fight after I’d had a few years of training, it took me about ten seconds to incapacitate the guy with an arm bar after breaking his nose.  There is a very real difference between the fighting schools and the non-fighting schools.  I’ve been knocked out and had bones from my nose to my toes broken in training, whereas in the four real fights I was in, no one ever even managed to touch me.  In my experience, heavy contact sparring with someone who is trained is a lot harder than real fighting, as untrained brawlers not only tend to present a myriad of open targets, they advertise what they are going to do.

For example, they have a tendency to lead with their face, which is when the guy cocks his rear arm back as he leans or actually steps forward.  This is a very, very bad mistake against a trained fighter and usually results in eating a jab.  The instinctive grapplers, on the other hand, like to tackle at the waist.  That is how the aforementioned Marine managed to put himself in position to get his neck snapped so quickly.  Go with the flow, drop the arms, slide the left up and over, grab, twist, and lock.  Then ride to the ground, but carefully.

However, most men tend to start with punches, so my preference is usually to sidestep and catch the arm as it comes at me, pull it past and pivot to either a) slam the guy face-first into a wall if it is there, or b) keep turning and put him down on the ground in an armbar if it is not.  If the wall is there, I jam his arm up high behind his back while he’s stunned, then turn him and sweep his legs to put him down.  Then I put one knee on the back of his neck while keeping his arm pinned high. I also try to speak reassuringly, telling him to calm down, it’s all right, and so forth. They can’t do anything in that position, but you don’t want them to panic and cause you to break something.  The combination of the shock, the pain, and the helplessness usually causes them to relax in short order.

The only time this didn’t work without a problem was the second time, because I stopped with the guy pinned against the wall.  He seemed calm enough, so I stepped back and let him go, at which point he lunged at my bouncer friend.  That was how I learned not to stop until the guy is not only temporarily incapacitated, but down as well.

Flirting with Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome

Because I am in the midst of reading Terms of Enlistment, a new military SF novel, I found this USMC news to be more than a little amusing:

“The only two women to participate in the Marine Corps Infantry
Officer Course (IOC) failed ongoing tests to determine which infantry
positions should be available to women, according to the Marine Corps Times: 

‘The women failed the introductory Combat Endurance Test, a
punishing test of physical strength and endurance, officials at Marine
Corps headquarters said Tuesday. The latest class began March 28 at
Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., with 110 lieutenants participating.
Ninety-six men passed the initial endurance test. Twelve men and two
women — the only female Marines taking part — failed.’

The two women both volunteered to participate in the IOC. Two other
women had previously volunteered in September but also failed.”

The Marines will have no choice but to make the Combat Endurance Test more equal.  Which is to say easier.  Because, after all, everyone knows that actual military combat is considerably less difficult than an introductory fitness test.

What I’d love to see is for the Marine Corps to address the political pressure it is facing by creating an all-female combat battalion.  Give them the very best of training, the best equipment, and then put them right on the front lines.  After one-third of them suddenly fall pregnant before the deployment, another third flee at the first sound of gunfire, and the remaining third are captured and raped, there won’t be any need to continue the debate any longer.

When faced with lunatic nonsense, agree and amplify.  To be honest, I’m genuinely surprised that none of the four female pioneers managed to break their necks or otherwise get themselves killed during the test.