In which I actually agree with Ed Brayton for once:
Category: Uncategorized
More fun with Twitter
This exchange resulted from my tweet in response to Piers Morgan’s statement concerning his view of the constitutionality of Congressional arms bans.
voxday: Yes, Piers, wanting America to ban assault weapons & high-capacity magazines is ‘anti-constitutional’. #GunControlNow #AdiosPiersMorgan
DonaldJChump: So is trying to punish somebody who is using his/her right to free speech, more so even #hypocrisy
voxday: He’s not an American. He’s British. He has no right to free speech or any other freedom guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
DonaldJChump: So free speech is a right reserved only for Americans? And we wonder why the rest of the world us as ignorant
voxday: Do you believe Piers Morgan has the right to vote, bear arms, or run for the Senate? Do you think the UK has free speech?
DonaldJChump: Rights are imaginary, as the internment camps & that petition prove. Cause of Americans like you they are privileges & nothing more
voxday: If rights are imaginary, then why are you appealing to them? Your argument is totally incoherent.
DonaldJChump: more incoherent than the petition. It’s fighting for a right while while taking another one, showing that rights aren’t rights
voxday: You’re still missing the point. The British don’t have US Constitution-guaranteed rights. Neither do the Chinese.
Shout them down again
It’s time to begin cranking up the volume and sending the anti-gun politicians scurrying back under their rocks again:
In January, Senator Feinstein will introduce a bill to stop the sale,
transfer, importation and manufacturing of military-style assault
weapons and high-capacity ammunition feeding devises.
- Bans the sale, transfer, importation, or manufacturing of:
- 120 specifically-named firearms
- Certain other semiautomatic rifles, handguns, shotguns that can
accept a detachable magazine and have one military characteristic- Semiautomatic rifles and handguns with a fixed magazine that can accept more than 10 rounds
We all knew it was coming. You know the drill. If there is even the slightest squishiness on the part of your elected official, squeeze him until he squeals like an NRA piggy.
Amazon, the SFWA and authorial corruption
Amazon is entirely correct to limit author reviews on its site:
Scores of authors in Britain and across the Atlantic have recently reported
that their reviews have either mysteriously disappeared or were never
published. Amazon has now admitted that it has introduced a ban on authors leaving
reviews about other people’s books in the same genre because they may pose a
“conflict of interest” and cannot be impartial about their rivals.This means that thriller writers are prevented from commenting on works by
other authors who write similar books. Critics suggest this system is flawed because many authors are impartial and
are experts on novels.
Now, I can quite reasonably argue that I am one of the most impartial author-reviewers to have written a book review in the last 20 years. My integrity as a reviewer is literally unquestioned; I was the only active game developer permitted to write computer game reviews in Computer Gaming World, and I was allowed to do so under two different editors because they knew I would never sacrifice my credibility as a reviewer for any reason. Many readers know that I have quite favorably reviewed books by individuals whose politics I consider loathsome, whose opinions I consider idiotic, and whose characters I consider to be contemptible. To my eyes, a book stands alone; its provenance is irrelevant.
Unlike the vast majority of book reviewers in the SF/F industry, I simply do not permit my subjective opinions to color my objective reviews. It’s not that I don’t have any opinions, I simply refuse to take them into account when reviewing a book, a game, or a movie.
And yet, I not only don’t write reviews on Amazon, I fully support Amazon’s decision to bar authors from reviewing books and assigning them stars there. Why? Because for the last ten years, I have been privy to the corruption that is absolutely rife within the organization of the SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Organization, as well as to the ideological corruption of the SF/F industry on the part of the publishers, the reviewers, and even the bloggers.
Read the rest at The Black Gate.
UPDATE: An SFWA insider confirms my observations: “[Vox] is correct when it comes to the inbred logrolling. As SFWA Bulletin editor from 1999-2002 I can attest to this first hand. A small clique and their “in” friends control quite a bit of what goes on in SFWA (at least it did back then and I have no reason to doubt that things have changed).”
UPDATE 2: I would be remiss if I left off this reviewer’s hilarious description of the Nebula award-winning Quantum Rose: “Kamoj Quanta Argali is the 18 yr old governor of a planet of former
slaves. When a newcomer on the world Havyrl arrives to recover from an
ordeal which left him half mad, he spies Kamoj taking a bath in a river
and falls for her. Impulsively Havryl offers to marry her which causes
strife and conflict throughout the region, as Kamoj’s spurned fiancee
vows revenge.”
Ye cats! The punchline? That’s from a reader who actually thought the book was all right and gave it three stars! It also appears Asaro is from the Isaac Asimov school of nomenclature.
Running down John Scalzi
John Scalzi is understandably pleased by Whatever’s 8 million views in 2012.
Just passed the number. Thanks to Hacker News for the assist; someone there linked to “A Self-Made Man Looks at How He Made It,” sending a flood of programmers over to read it. You can follow their own discussion of the article here. I’ll note again that this is just the views recorded by WordPress’ software; the actual number of views is higher. I’ll have a full report early in 2013. But still: 8 million views. It doesn’t suck. Thank you.
He is, of course, welcome, as a few of them came from various posts here. Eight million is a certainly a lot of pageviews. It is an impressive number and clearly there must be a lot of Rabbit People who are fascinated by what McRapey has to say about life, the universe, and everything, or are at least interested in currying favor with the current president of the SFWA. It will be interesting to see if his traffic continues to increase once he steps down from office.
What I found most interesting was his post about Whatever’s views from previous years:
2009: 4,488, 281
2010: 5,131,194
2011: 5,409,015
2012: 8,000,000
Here is why I found it interesting about those numbers. The combined Sitemeter pageviews for Vox Popoli and Alpha Game for 2012 were 5,023,130. (Sitemeter visits were 3,412,014).
2008: 2,713,293
2009: 3,396,001 +25.2%
2010: 3,713,218 +9.3%
2011: 4,463,247 +20.2%
2012: 5,023,130 +12.5%
Is it credible that the readership for VP+AG is actually that close to the Whatever readership? No, I don’t think so. I think Scalzi is using the term “view” improperly and should be using “visit”. Since, like many other bloggers, he elects to hide his statistics rather than permitting Sitemeter or some other service to display them openly, it’s difficult to compare apples to apples here. Clearly some sort of scientific experiment is in order, which will require me to become president of the SFWA as well as the author of a NYT best-selling science fiction novel derived from a cancelled television show. Does anyone have any ideas? I’m thinking either ALF or CHiPs.
For what it’s worth, Alexa has scalzi.com, which hosts Whatever, at 12,996 in the USA. Vox Popoli is 29,426. Alpha Game is 73,183. Which makes it very clear that in the grand scheme of things, we are all more or less irrelevant.
Five lessons of the Newton shootings
Glenn Reynolds lays them out in USA Today. The first one is particularly important.
1. When Twenty Minutes Is Forever.
According to the CNN timeline for
the Sandy Hook tragedy, “Police and other first responders arrived on
scene about 20 minutes after the first calls.” Twenty minutes. Five
minutes is forever when violence is underway, but 20 minutes — a third
of an hour — means that the “first responders” aren’t likely to do much
more than clean up the mess.
When seconds count, the police are minutes away. Lots of minutes away. That’s the primary lesson one should take away from the Newtown massacre. Self-defense is no different than nearly everything else, if you want it done right – or at all – then you have to do it yourself.
This is #GunControlNow
If you’re not already following me on Twitter, this extremely illuminating discussion of gun control is the sort of thing you are missing. Gun control advocates, note that this is what often passes for your ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’. Colleen aka @mushadamama is a perfect example of the dialectically challenged individual Aristotle described as being incapable of following a chain of reasoning and therefore ineducable by reason. As you will see, it is literally impossible to reason with them.
Note that I did not expect to convince the woman that she was wrong. Telling a stupid person precisely how stupid they are is seldom a successful rhetorical device. But I wanted to see how far she would go before retreating into her rhetorical tortoise shell. As it happens, she was willing to not only defy reason, but deny math itself, rather than even consider the possibility – or in this case, the undisputed statistical and mathematical reality – that her position on #GunControlNow was wrong.
voxday: Those who reject their own God-given and unalienable right to bear arms reject their own status as adult human beings.
fmudd101: I know right! Those child-like Europeans and Japanese with their low gun crime and murder rates.
voxday: Europeans have higher rates of gun ownership and much lower rates of gun crime and murder than African and Latin countries.
mushadamama: You can not compare their gun laws to ours. They are MUCH more restrictive. Wikipedia link.
voxday: The gun laws in Brazil and South Africa are even more restrictive. Yet they have far more gun deaths per capita.
mushadamama: Is that where you want to be? US is not first, so it’s ok? Link to murders with firearms by country.
voxday: Don’t be stupid. You can’t compare absolute numbers between nations of vastly different sizes. Look at per capita.
voxday: Also, the nations ahead of the USA HAVE STRICTER GUN CONTROL LAWS. The problem is racial, as I’ve already shown.
mushadamama: The numbers I’ve given ARE per 100k population. Perhaps the stupid one is one who doesn’t read fine print.
mushadamama: Stricter gun control=less gun crimes. #fact
mushadamama: You’ve shown nothing.
voxday: No, you stupid, stupid woman, they are not. The USA is #4 in absolute terms, #27 per capita. Link to gun homicides and gun ownership by country.
voxday: That’s not a fact, you stupid, stupid woman. That is absolutely and provably false.
voxday: You’re either lying or stupid, Colleen. White US rate=0.32/100k. Black US rate=12.5/100k. Link to US firearms homicide rate by race.
mushadamama: Yes, my chart is total gun murders @ 9369. Does not count accidents or suicides. US ranks 4th! My crime rate chart was per 100k.
mushadamama: Your chart, however, uses some kind of fuzzy math to come up with that
ridiculous #. I can only assume it is more of a probability.
mushadamama: Of which, I am not interested. We’re not playing lotto. People are dying. Your comments on race, I’ve tried to ignore…
mushadamama: Are we supposed to be relieved or delighted to know more black people are killed by guns than white people? I don’t understand.
voxday: NO! The math is 9,369 gun murders divided by 310 million pop, multiplied by 100,000. That is the correct per capita number.
voxday: You are supposed to understand legal guns are not the problem. So banning them, as they are banned elsewhere, WILL NOT WORK!
mushadamama: You’re a fool. If manipulating numbers makes you feel better, fine. But, it’s not the truth.
mushadamama: We are not going away this time. Those babies did not die for nothing. We’re going to stay loud until something changes.
voxday: Excellent. The more you talk, the less credible your position is. Everyone should read this exchange. #GunControlNow
Merry Christmas
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.
The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
A MAGIC BROKEN free on Kindle
A MAGIC BROKEN is free today from Amazon. If you already have a copy, you may wish to go ahead and grab the new one as it fixes six errata found in the previous version.
There are still some spots left for those interested in reviewing THE WARDOG’S COIN. So, if you wish to do so, please let me know via email. However, just to be clear, I’m not sending out the books for at least a month, because I’m not finished with the second of the two stories. A few of you will have already read one of the two, as an earlier version of QALABI DAWN used to be posted on my old Eternal Warriors site.
UPDATE: A MAGIC BROKEN has cracked the top 100 Free on Amazon and is now at #3 in Fantasy Epic, #97 overall. It will be interesting to see how high it can go, and if this will spark any consequent interest in A THRONE OF BONES.
UPDATE 2: Black Gate informs its readers about the Amazon offer and includes a mini-review of the novella.
UPDATE 3: As does the indefatigable Instapundit.
WND column
This Christmas is a season for despair and disquiet for many Americans. Approximately 47.7 million of them, one in every six, are on food stamps. That is 16.1 million more than were being fed by government assistance in December 2008. More than 100 million working-age Americans do not have a job. The U.S. share of global wealth, as measured by GDP, has fallen from 31.8 percent to 21.6 percent in the last 10 years. A full 28 percent of Americans have no savings, not even for emergencies.
Most of us are having smaller and less luxurious Christmas celebrations this season. We are buying fewer and less expensive presents for each other. What has been a vague feeling of uncertainty has given way to the sober realization that we are facing more than an economic bump in the road; many are beginning to recognize that the decades-long party has ended, and the consequential hangover is just beginning.
I’m not keen on judging a blog by its comment section either, except in that one can judge the character and self-confidence of the blogger by how he manages his comment section. Here at VP, for example, there is actual debate among people who disagree with each other and with me. In the posts this week alone, there are numerous regulars disagreeing with me about the limits of the Constitution’s ability to guarantee God-given rights as well as a vigorous debate on the permissibility of gun control between commenters.
PZ, as far as I have seen, is actually quite good about permitting critics to comment freely at Pharyngula, the problem there is not that he cannot bear dissension, but rather that his commenters are such a clueless collection of mid-witted ideologues that most critics stop uselessly banging their head against the wall of idiocy there before long. I actually respect him much more than many other bloggers in that particular regard.
But Brayton is entirely correct to point out that the self-styled skeptics are every bit as tribal and superficial as those they make a habit of denigrating. This is a point I have been making for literally years, and it is good to see that some of the more vocal members of the skeptic community are willing to openly acknowledge it.