The police appear to have a very self-serving definition of “cowardice”:
The fired LAPD officer suspected of terrorizing Southern California in a bloody rampage opened fire on two Riverside police officers with a rifle in a “cowardly ambush” early Thursday morning, Riverside police Chief Sergio Diaz told reporters at a morning news conference.
Let me get this straight. We’re supposed to believe that a one-man war against the entire LAPD is cowardly, whereas those armed and armored SWAT teams that break in without warning and not infrequently shoot pets and unarmed people are courageous? Christopher Dorner may be foolish. He may be evil. He may be in the wrong. But the one thing he quite clearly is not is “cowardly”. What on Earth is such a stupid and obviously false declaration supposed to do, dissuade anyone tempted to follow Dorner’s example?
These are indeed Orwellian times. It’s rather like reading Robin Hood and being expected to cheer for the Sheriff of Nottingham. Here is a hint for the police: if you’re wearing black armor, killing innocent animals, lying about your actions, and on top of it all, you outnumber the other guy several thousand to one, you’re the bad guy.
“The thesis of The World Until Yesterday is that we in industrialized societies have much to learn from people who make (or recently made) their living by hunting-and-gathering or small-scale farming.” – National Public Radio on Jared Diamond’s latest ode to the primitive life in Papua New Guinea
“A young mother was tossed screaming on to a pyre of tyres and burned alive after being accused of killing a neighbour’s six-year-old son with sorcery. Kepari Leniata, 20, ‘confessed’ after she was dragged from her hut, stripped naked and tortured with white-hot iron rods. She was then dragged to a local rubbish dump, doused in petrol and, with hands and feet bound, thrown on a fire of burning tyres. As the mother-of-two screamed in agony, more petrol-soaked tyres were thrown on top of her…. The tragedy unfolded after Miss Leniata’s young neighbour fell sick on Tuesday morning. He complained of pains in the stomach and chest and was taken to Mt Hagen hospital where he died a few hours later. Relatives of the boy were suspicious that witchcraft was involved in the death and learned that two women had gone into hiding in the jungle. After they were tracked down, the pair admitted they practised sorcery but had nothing to do with the boy’s death. Miss Leniata, they said, was the person responsible.” – Mail Online
Clearly we have a lot to learn from such a simple and noble way of life. I don’t know about you, but I find it more than a little amusing that the poster boy for modern pop science is advocating a Rousseauean idealization of a state of nature that happens to include the great historical secular bugaboo, witch-burnings. As I have repeatedly pointed out, far from being progressive, secular post-Christianity is more regressive than 7th century Islam. It’s ultimately a return to the mores of precivilized paganism.
Phoenician presents a fascinatingly ironic defense of McRapey:
Your attempt to smear him is a joke, and you’re a joke, you twerp – and what you don’t get is now you’re an even bigger joke known to many, many people who had no clue you existed. Scalzi has pwned you. You might as well drop your pants, paint your ass red, and bend over.
So he can do what, gently massage my gluteal muscles? Surely Phoenician doesn’t mean to suggest McRapey would, you know, sexually assault someone! It appears that Mr. Scalzi’s fans share his public fascination with “cranial-rectal insertions”, “assbags”, and rape. Now, perhaps I am a joke, an even bigger joke than before, and yet I can’t help but notice that the Dread Ilk appear to be the only ones laughing. Phoenician, for one, appears to be a good deal more angry than amused.
Here is the question: If l’affaire McRapey is going so fabulously well for the Gamma Rabbit, why is it only his fans who are urging me to stop? My readers don’t appear to mind a daily update on the latest gamma antics and one would certainly hate to see the poor little gay black children shortchanged. Does Phoenician simply hate little gay black girls? I am absolutely committed to ensuring that they get every last penny of the $50,000$60,000 now pledged to them; I do wish there was an official counter or something to which I could link just to keep track. In additional to the charitable imperative, I note that not only has Mr. Scalzi never once asked me to stop referring to him as McRapey, but has repeatedly professed his delight at all the attention he is receiving.
I, for one, would be devastated to see the anticipated recipients of such charitable largesse deprived of 95% of what they are expecting. I expect that even if Mr. Scalzi no longer enjoys the attention, he would be loathe to make any request that would cause them to lose out on $57,000 in donations. If he genuinely wished me to stop, then surely it would behoove him to simply ask me to do so rather than engage in all of these theatrics.
But what if Phoenician is correct and it is the Gamma Rabbit’s approach that is proving to be the more effective? In that case, then logic clearly dictates we must follow the man’s charitable example. Here’s what I’m going to do: From now until the end of 2013 (and backdating to January 1st), each time John “I am a rapist” Scalzi forces himself on a woman “without their consent or desire and then batter(s) them sexually”, I’m going to put $5 into a pot. At the end of the year, I’m going to tally it up. All the money, up to $1,000, will be donated to Victoria’s Secret, a stripper named Sunshine, a restaurant called The Black Cat, and the Sexual Assault Response Network of Central Ohio.
Nothing is going to stop Gamma Rabbit from doing what rabbits do. But at least the thought of all that money going to causes the Chief Rabbit of the Whatever warren hates will enrage him to much the same extent that the idea of FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS pledged to Emily, rain, Rainbow Pride, and the Colored People infuriates me.
Dear Members, SFWA.org has been experiencing a DDoS attack since approximately 10am EST this morning. Our webstaff has been working to restore the site. Please be patient while they continue their efforts. Members may have difficulty accessing the main sfwa.org site and the content within. The forums at sfwa.org/forum are also experiencing intermittent outages as well.
This event prompted an amount of speculation that the DDoS attack might possibly be related to certain differences of opinion between the current and future presidents of the SFWA. As it happens, I had nothing whatsoever to do with it, (I was not even aware of it until after it had already been resolved), and neither did the Dread Ilk. The reason, of course, is that it is the easiest thing in the world to determine if the Dread Ilk were involved in something within 24 hours of an event taking place.
Were firearms involved?
Was the caliber larger than 9mm?
Is the body count in excess of 20?
Are the fires still burning?
If the answer to all of these questions is no, you can be absolutely certain that the party responsible was not a regular reader of this blog.
It is educational to see that when a former policeman strikes out violently at the police, he does what the police all too often do, which is target their families. This is a dangerous development I have been expecting ever since the militarization of the USA has increasingly led to family members and dogs being killed by police as a result of the dynamic entry tactics now being used on a regular basis:
In the online postings, Dorner specifically named the father of Monica Quan, the Cal State Fullerton assistant basketball coach who was found dead Sunday, along with her fiance, Keith Lawrence. Her father, Randy Quan, a retired LAPD captain, was involved in the review process that ultimately led to Dorner’s dismissal.
A former U.S. Navy reservist, Dorner was fired in 2009 for allegedly making false statements about his training officer…. Dorner complained that Quan and others did not fairly represent him at the review hearing.
“Your lack of ethics and conspiring to wrong a just individual are over. Suppressing the truth will lead to deadly consequences for you and your family. There will be an element of surprise where you work, live, eat, and sleep,” he wrote, referring to Quan and several others.
Based on what we know about the police departments, the way they treat whistleblowers, and the way they resolutely cover up the violent and criminal acts of the “one or two bad apples” that somehow never seem to be weeded out from any department, it would not surprise me to learn that many, if not most, of the allegations of LAPD misbehavior contained in Dorner’s manifesto are true.
I’m sure it will shock everyone to learn that the brave police who put their lives at risk every day are now inexplicably on edge and shooting at anything that moves. One local resident emails to tell how the media is not reporting the entire story:
I wanted to get this information to you directly because the media will squelch the parts of the narrative they don’t want aired. You know by now that a manhunt is underway for an EX COP that murdered two kids in Irvine while they sat in their parked car close to the UC Irvine campus. This guy is ex-military and was fired from the force for issuing false statements …which is all the media is revealing at this time. He is now embarking on retribution against those that got him fired and other cops. He shot two cops in a squad car that was following him and killed one of them.
Most of this is really unremarkable but the part I wanted you to know about was that they have shot up two trucks matching the description of the killers truck in the city of Torrence. The first truck had two older Asian ladies in it that were delivering newspapers,,,and they must have had it coming because they did not comply fast enough to satisfy the jittery cops. If that wasn’t bad enough… they shot up a second truck just down the street. They told the owner to turn his truck around but again, it wasn’t fast enough for the cops because they shot his truck up too!
It seems the police behave rather differently when they know that the other side is as willing to shoot as they are. This looks to be an interesting experiment in what we were discussing here a few weeks ago, namely, how effective the force wielded by the government against a single armed man truly is.
Okay, but I’ve never seen this explanation offered: successful priming studies stop replicating after awhile because they basically aren’t science. At least not in the sense of having discovered something that will work forever.
Instead, to the extent that they ever did really work, they are exercises in marketing. Or, to be generous, art.
And, art wears off.
The power of a work of art to prime emotions and actions changes over time. Perhaps, initially, the audience isn’t ready for it, then it begins to impact a few sensitive fellow artists, and they begin to create other works in its manner and talk it up, and then it become widely popular. Over time, though, boredom sets in and people look for new priming stimuli.
For a lucky few old art works (e.g., the great Impressionist paintings), vast networks exist to market them by helping audiences get back into the proper mindset to appreciate the old art (E.g., “Monet was a rebel, up against The Establishment! So, putting this pretty picture of flowers up on your wall shows everybody that you are an edgy outsider, too!”).
So, let’s assume for a moment that Bargh’s success in the early 1990s at getting college students to walk slow wasn’t just fraud or data mining for a random effect among many effects. He really was priming early 1990s college students into walking slow for a few seconds.
Is that so amazing?
I find it informative that the grand self-appointed defenders of Science Reason are always focused on the nonexistent enemy of Religion while showing absolutely no interest in real land of Woo, which is academic pseudoscience. As a general rule, it is safe to assume that if midwitted charlatans such as Malcolm Gladwell or Jared Diamond are basing conclusions upon it, the scientific aspects, to the extent that they exist at all, will be more than a little shaky.
I would go so far as to point out that the MAJORITY of what passes for science today is, in fact, nothing of the sort. It’s not experimental. It’s not replicable. Despite the credentials attached to it, it has nothing more to do with science than the proverbial PhD defecating in the woods. Science is not simply “what scientists do”.
Ireland’s government rushed through emergency legislation early on Thursday to liquidate the failed Anglo Irish Bank as it tries to secure a deal with the European Central Bank to ease the country’s debt burden….
President Michael D. Higgins will sign the bill into law later on Thursday. He cut short a state trip to Rome to ensure he could consider it. Anglo Irish and its casino-style lending were at the heart of Ireland’s financial crisis. The bank’s near collapse in 2008 pressured the government into guaranteeing the entire financial sector, sucking it into a downward spiral and in late 2010, a €67.5bn EU-IMF bailout.
Three of the bank’s former executives, including its former CEO, will go on trial next year on fraud charges. Under Dublin’s plan, the €28bn in promissory notes will be replaced with long-term government bonds, meaning that Ireland can make more gradual repayments, a source familiar with the discussions told Reuters.
So, instead of simply letting the bank go into liquidation in 2008, the Irish government saddled the Irish people with nearly $100 billion in debt, and now the bank is going to go into liquidation anyhow.
In contrast, thanks primarily to the courage of the Icelandic prime minister, Iceland let its casino banks go bankrupt and resisted the global pressure to saddle the Icelandic people with the bankers’ debts. Iceland has now put the debt bubble behind it and is growing again; the Irish can’t even make the upcoming payments on a debt that extends for another 10 years.
This is why the bankrupt US banks should have been allowed to fail back in 2008. Bank bailouts are seldom a solution, they are almost always a simple matter of delaying the day of financial reckoning long enough for the parties responsible to successfully abscond with the gains they have collected from gambling with other people’s money.
We can envision, then, a sectarian war raging across the whole of the Fertile Crescent, drawing in all the former territories of Turkish Arabia. The prospect will be a frightening one for the region’s major powers. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia could one day find chaos rather than functioning states on their permeable borders. If Al Qaeda/Nusrah can establish a base in Jordan, Saudi Arabia will find itself threatened by Al Qaeda franchises on both north and south that will be well-positioned to resume the pursuit of Al Qaeda’s core goal of toppling the Saudi monarchy and “liberating” the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
The Saudis showed great resiliency in defeating a serious Al Qaeda insurrection in 2004-2008, but that was a strictly internal threat that lacked a real foreign base. Simultaneous Al Qaeda bases in Jordan and Yemen would pose a more serious, if not an existential, threat to Saudi rule. If watching the fall or near-fall of half a dozen regimes in the Arab Spring has taught us anything, it should be that the Arab states that appeared serenely stable to outsiders for the past half century were more brittle than we have understood. The implosion of Turkish Arabia would test those regimes to the limit, and we cannot assume that the rulers of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait would be any better equipped to defeat the potential challenge than Muammar Qaddhafi and Bashar al-Assad were.
The rulers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran are surely not blind to this nightmare scenario. As the situation in Turkish Arabia continues to unravel, those regional powers will be compelled to become ever deeper involved in an attempt to keep the tide of war from breaking on their own lands. This conflict could very well touch us all, perhaps becoming an engine of jihad that spews forth attackers bent on bombing western embassies and cities or disrupting Persian Gulf oil markets long before the fire burns out.
And what of Turkish Arabia in the long run? One eminent scholar of the Middle East assures me that the borders drawn by the British and French were artificial, yes, but now have staying power. The people of the region are too used to the lines to erase them, even if they don’t love them. I don’t doubt him, and I am sure that whatever else happens, there will continue to be a Syria, a Lebanon, a Jordan, and an Iraq. But those countries are about to pass through a crucible, a painful test in which their peoples will be sorted by sect; driven from traditional homelands; starved, taxed, or pressed into service by warlords; terrorized by militant Islamists; forced to witness their ancient heritage destroyed by bombs; and live without the rule of law. It will be terrible to watch, and we will not be left unsullied in our watching.
If it weren’t for the oil of the Middle East, this would be a solution, not a problem. As it stands, I can’t help but wonder if the potentates of the EU are praying for just such a distraction, as it would allow them the freedom to aggressively address their own Muslim problem. The principle of Distract, Divide, and Conquer would indicate that once the war got started, there would be no coherent force supporting the Muslims of Europe, who for all their press make up less than 5 percent of the European population.
I tend to doubt that the atheists in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin are any fonder of Muslims than they are of Christians and the ideological and demographic forces of Islam are already much more troubling to the godless potentates in the various capitals than the weak and toothless version of Christianity that is perhaps best exemplified by the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury. The grandees may be afraid of conflict with the Ummah now, but that fear will likely vanish should war erupt throughout the House of Submission.
And Israel would certainly be delighted to see the Islamic world tearing itself apart; one tends to imagine it will do what it can to light whatever fuses might be on hand to help set its enemies at each others’ throats.
One attempts to move on, but they keep pulling one back in. And honestly, how can anyone not enjoy watching their tiny little rabbit minds so furiously at work?
staranise says: Asking for “debate” confuses me simply because it presupposes that it would accomplish something different from the current situation, in which any parties concerned have an unlimited personal platform to put forward their ideas and reasoning. It supposes that the parties are unfamiliar with each other’s positions and reasoning. This isn’t true, so there’s not much new to say. Nothing significant would change. Ah. Except, of course, RSHD would get happy pantsfeelings from being paid attention to. The call for debate is the same as standing outside Scalzi’s house with a boombox over one’s head. It’s not going to work! Turn off the Peter Gabriel. Go home.
John Scalzi says: Guys, I think we can give the topic of a debate a rest.
MMAH says: Oh, and look–front page at Salon this morning, too.
Yes, I’ve noticed many things confuse them. What is particularly funny about this little dialogue is that I never challenged McRapey to a debate. The challenge came from Ed Trimnell, who happens to be a critic of mine, and it would be Ed, not me, who is metaphorically standing outside in the rain.
But to return to the rabbit logic, apparently I would get “happy pantsfeelings” from Ed’s call being answered and thereby having to spend a modicum of effort to kick around McRapey in front of a few thousand blog readers, but was devastated by the brilliant way in which McRapey and Ensign Wesley banded together in order to draw attention to me in the Guardian, the BBC, and Salon, among others.
It’s rather like watching them try to add 2+2+2 and coming up with the answer “purple badger”.
Here’s how you beat the trolls: Turn their hatred into cash for charities they despise.
That’s what science-fiction writer John Scalzi has done — and in the process, he’s raised more than $50,000 in pledges for Emily’s List and the Human Rights Campaign, specially chosen to earn the ire of a blogger Scalzi calls “my racist sexist homophobic dipshit.”
Every time Scalzi’s online nemesis — a former WorldNetDaily columnist who writes under the name Vox Day – used his name or called someone by a derogatory nickname, Scalzi set aside $5 for charity — and his readers pitched in, too, raising tens of thousands for charities designed to uplift women, minorities and gays. Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network and the NAACP also benefit; Scalzi capped his own donation at $1,000 and his readers took over from there.
“The whole point of this is not to intimidate him to stop speaking. You will not get this guy to stop speaking. He sees this as a contest, as a battle of wills,” said Scalzi, in an interview with Salon. Giving money to charities like RAINN and the NAACP is, he says, “an extra stab in the eye.”
I am, of course, frothing with rage at the unspeakable generosity being shown by the dastardly Rabbit People. Oh, how the anger courses through my body, from clenched fist to clenched fist! First Emily’s List, then RAINN? It’s like a one-two punch!
