Category: Uncategorized

“You’ll be in jail”

And that’s why his idiot handlers should just stay out of the way and let Trump be Trump:

Clinton established herself as a superior bureaucrat Sunday night with more mature knowledge of foreign policy minutiae and a more intelligible way of communicating details about how laws are made. But Trump won on points in what has become the Year of the Outsider, playing to a national television audience that polls show are weary of Washington’s same-old same-old and eager for new blood.

He had Clinton playing defense for most of the 90-minute clash, saying she would be ‘in jail’ if he ran the Justice Department – a reference to her classified email scandal – and declaring that she had ‘tremendous hate in her heart’ when she branded ‘half’ his supporters as ‘deplorables.’

He even bested her on her recollection of her own tenure at the helm of the U.S. State Department.
Trump recalled that Clinton was secretary of state when President Barack Obama drew his now-infamous rhetorical ‘red line’ in Syria, ineffectively warning Bashar al-Assad not to use chemical weapons against insurgents and civilians.

Clinton insisted she had retired from the government by the time that happened. Not so: Obama dared Assad to cross his line in August 2012, six months before Clinton’s term ended.

As Milo put it on Gab: “Daddy is killing it”. If this builds momentum that Trump can carry through to the third debate, we’re going to see the Trumpslide.

Remember, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, Trump doesn’t constantly push. He relaxes, coasts, and then pushes strongly again. There is nearly one month to go. He’s running against a criminal and he’s already ahead in some national polls. The final push hasn’t even begun.

Frank Lutz Focus Group: Who are you willing to vote for?

BEFORE #DEBATE
• Hillary: 8
• Trump: 9

AFTER DEBATE
• Hillary: 4
• Trump: 18

NFL Week 5

And the Vikings shoot to make it five straight against Houston. This is the weekly NFL open thread.

Okay, now this is going to sound crazy, but rest assured, it has NOTHING to do with my being a Vikings fan. A friend who shall go unnamed subscribes to the scripted theory of the NFL, by which he means that the probable outcome of the season is more or less determined in advance.

It doesn’t always hold up, of course, due to the unpredictable elements of the game, but he points out that there are observable primary, secondary, and tertiary narratives. And here’s where it gets interesting: for the first time, I’m picking up a narrative that suggests the Vikings are scripted to win the Super Bowl this year.

One example, and far from the most egregious:

The play of their defense has been the biggest on-field factor in their success, which should sound like a familiar formula to those with memories long enough to remember how the Broncos fueled their run to the Super Bowl last season. One member of that Broncos team is now in Minnesota and running back Ronnie Hillman has found more links the two clubs than a standout defense.


“The big thing is the camaraderie,” Hillman said, via the Pioneer Press. “This team plays for each other, and that’s the biggest part. This team has the same brotherhood — these guys treat each other like family the exact same [as in Denver], and that’s what you need to have a championship team. I saw it here right away, how these guys treat each other with respect and without excuses — they’re accountable for what they do, and that’s definitely a good trait to have as a whole. The guys are cool.”


There’s a lot of time between Week Five and the Super Bowl for those comparisons to grow stronger or prove to be superficial, but the Vikings have already shown an ability to overcome adverse developments that they’ll need to go the distance.


I picked up on this after watching their Week Two win and hearing the announcers go on and on about a very different game than the one I’d just watched.

Wait, they’re going to police US?

The lesser SJWs of SF fandom belatedly discover that SF’s thought police don’t only intend to police the speech, thoughts, and behavior of science fiction’s right wing:

The illiberal factions in fandom just want power. They don’t care much whom they go after, as long as they can flex their muscles. The Worldcon 75 committee has offered the latest sample of this, shoving Dave Weingart out as the filk head.

Dave discussed what happened here. In brief: Someone got the notion that Dave should never talk to her. He respected this. One day he inadvertently posted a Babylon 5 video link to a chat group which this other person was also in. For this, he was told he could continue to run filk only if he agreed to end all staff contact outside his division. Of course, it’s impossible to run a part of the program that way, so his only choice was to withdraw.

The concom’s action makes no sense of any kind. It grows out of the notion that “feeling offended” trumps every other consideration and entitles someone to claim any remedy. Well, listen, Helsinki gang. I’m offended. I hope every filker who was planning to go cancels out on you.

I once got a supporting membership. Some early suspicions that people of this kind were running the con led me to back out on it. I never had any real plans to go there, so there’s only one thing I can stop doing. I run a Twitter account called Filk News, which contains various tidbits about what’s happening in the filk world. From here on, I’m giving the Helsinki con no publicity there.

I know Dave personally. He’s a friend and a hard worker with a lot of integrity. Filkers know that. Maybe the Helsinki clique decided filk is beneath their idea of a con. They forget that filkers aren’t just filkers; we include pro writers, regular supporters of conventions, and other people who’ve helped to build and maintain fandom. If the con had just decided to drop filk — well, it can do that. But using bullying tactics to drive us away was a serious mistake.

And the Dark Lord laughed. It’s more than a little amusing to see how these hapless idiots obviously didn’t see it coming despite the fact that the same pattern has played out ever since the Montagnards turned on the Girondins. So, it should come as no surprise that the freakiest SJW, such as Mr. Alexandra Erin, publicly applaud the thought police, despite their hilarious incompetence.

I think no one would dispute to Mr. Weingart’s contributions to cons actually have been tremendously valuable. But as fannish circles and conventions embrace community standards and commitments to safety and work to be more welcoming to people from every walk of life, we really have to internalize the lesson that nobody is irreplaceable….

Even if he’s 100% right that this is just bad optics, even granting he’s 100% right that the restrictions he’d have to agree to would prevent him from doing his job, we can’t agree to treat women’s (and others’) safety concerns seriously right up until the moment that it’s inconvenient. That’s not how it works.

Translation: Everyone who doesn’t submit to the latest version of the Narrative will be replaced. And once they scent blood, the zharks will swarm. And really, if the safety of the delicate flowers is paramount, wouldn’t it be best for everyone if they just canceled the convention and everyone stayed home, safely ensconced in their blankets and covered with a thin, comforting coating of stale Doritos dust?

I look forward to the first accusations being directed at the Finns running Worldcon 75 and charging them with being secret Castalia operatives seeking to destroy the Hugo Awards.

When white-knighting goes awry

Gammas never grasp that the crowd is always going to choose the Alpha male over them, no matter how adroitly they virtue-signal:

House Speaker Paul Ryan was shouted down by chants of “Trump” at his Fall Fest event Saturday in Wisconsin. Ryan, who kicked off the speech talking about the “elephant in the room,” said that Trump’s banter with Billy Bush before taping an Access Hollywood segment in 2005 was “a troubling situation.”

The chants for “Trump” start at about the 6:40 mark in the video below.

Ryan was joined onstage by Wisconsites Ron Johnson and Scott Walker after the “Trump” shouts began, at the end of Ryan’s speech. Some also shouted, “God bless Trump,” and “See ya, Paul! Jackass!”

Ryan’s miscalculation wasn’t quite as bad as Ted Cruz’s at the RNC, but it was still pretty impressive.

You don’t need to die

Paisley Park opened to the public:

The complex opens one week before a memorial tribute concert in St. Paul, which is adjacent to Minneapolis. The public opening of the studio complex is a milestone for music lovers and historians. The complex opened in 1987, and was a fully functional recording studio used by a number of artists during its peak in the 1990s, including the Stone Temple Pilots, REM and Madonna.

Among the various acts that recorded there was Psykosonik. We recorded and mixed Unlearn there, although I spent almost no time in the studio since my only meaningful input on that CD was lyrical. Dan and Paul were going in a mellower, more ambient direction, and both Mike and I were not interested in it. We both left the band at the same time, after the CD was recorded, but before it was released, to focus on computer games.

However, I thought that one song off Unlearn, “Need to Die”, would be of interest in light of yesterday’s post about the way in which the choice to confront one’s fears or run from them as a young man tends to play a significant role in an individual’s life. Keep in mind that the song was written 22 years before “The Broken Freaks of Fandom”.



Caught in the mist like a rain shower
Life’s got you between your eyes
And wishful thinking don’t make it go away
That’s no surprise, yeah
There’s no surprise
Of living a lie
There’s no surprise


Face your fears alone now
And make them fly
When your dreams come home now
You don’t need to die


Been holding back on your inside
Looks like you hide it well
But laughing faces can’t cover all your pain,
That keeps you in Hell
That keeps you in Hell
If only for a day
That keeps you in Hell
If only for a day


Face your fears alone now
And make them fly
When your dreams come home now
You don’t need to die

Open trade and open borders

That’s Hillary’s dream and America’s nightmare:

“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere,” Clinton told Banco Itau, a Brazilian bank, on May 16, 2013.

Of course, she isn’t likely to tell the voters that, since everybody’s watching and “you need both a public and a private position.”

Thank you, Julian.

SF-SJWs devour zhemselves

Once zhey’ve pushed everyone else out of their safe spaces, zhey turn on each other. SJWs are rather like sharks, in that zhey have to be attacking someone in order to survive. Big, fat, toothless, mentally ill zharks.

Effective today I am no longer running music at Worldcon 75. To say that I am angry about this is putting it somewhat mildly. I’m actually pretty fucking furious and I’m currently trying to decide if I can be bothered to go to the convention at this point. That also makes me angry. I campaigned for Helsinki. I pushed for Helsinki. I’ve been to Helsinki several times and I think it’s a great city, but at this point I don’t know that I’d feel welcome at the convention (and who knows, perhaps I wouldn’t be, given this).

I note that I don’t expect that this post will change anything, but it’s important to me personally to write it. If the convention wishes to justify their decision, to me at least, they’re welcome to do so. I don’t expect that it’s important enough for them to address, however.

I’m going add some background here that some of you may already know. It was written in a friendslocked post which is now public so that people can have some frame of reference for what’s come to pass. It’s not something that I’ve spoken about much because I considered it over and done with but it’s relevant now, and directly related to why I’m no longer involved with the convention.

In the middle of August 2014 I met [name redacted] at the World Science Fiction Convention in London. We were friendly and connected on Facebook and Twitter, had lunch together, and she offered me crash space if I ever wanted to visit her area of Sweden. I took her up on it at the end of September 2014 for a weekend. We had a nice weekend and parted as friends. A little later, she messaged me on FB that she wanted to spend less time talking, so we stopped chatting in FB Messenger (the way we would normally communicate) and I didn’t talk with her other than liking posts, occasionally commenting on FB or Twitter. She indicated a week or so after that that even that was too much, so I acknowledged, wished her well and honored her request. That’s mid-to-late-October 2014. She’s since blocked me on Facebook so I can’t look up the exact dates as I no longer have access to those messages, but I know that I have friendly comments from her in my FB from after I got back to London from Sweden.

As noted in my post in July of last year, I was warned by someone pre-Archipelacon to “stay away from her” — unnecessary IMO, since I had no intention of speaking to someone who’d specifically asked to be let alone, but whatever. No idea how many people [name redacted] complained to, but I get the impression that it was more than one. Only one spoke to me though. Post-Archipelacon, I did sent her an apology for however I’d managed to scare or offend her and left it at that.

It sure would be a shame if anyone were to exploit this zhelf-devouring tendency of SJWs, considering that all one has to do is electronically breathe on zhem online in order to trigger zhem.

Lockdown in Germany

More refugee drama in Germany:

Heavily-armed officers are surrounding a home in the town of Chemnitz

A German town is in lockdown as armed police are hunting for a man suspected of planning a bomb attack on an airport. The suspect has been named locally as Jabir A – a Syrian who was under surveillance by the Federal Office for Constitutional Protection in Cologne, say reports. He is suspected of plotting a bomb attack on a German airport, according to Online Focus.

It is understood the suspect entered Germany last year with refugees from Syria. Residents have been ordered to remain indoors as large-scale closures and evacuations take place in the town and the suspect remains at large.

Ah, those poor Syrian refugees. I’m sure the good people of Chemnitz are so glad now that they opened their hearts and homes to them. After all, who could possibly have predicted something like this would happen!

It won’t be too long before refugees will be shot on sight and the policy will be celebrated by many of the very people who welcomed them. I said at the time they should have simply sunk the boats and blocked the borders. Now the moral cost of resolving the situation will be considerably higher.

Mailvox: category error

Do you discuss ‘category error’ somewhere in your past blogs?

No, but here is a brief explanation, although upon looking at it, it really could be considerably improved as the examples are rather pedantic.

A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. An example is the metaphor “time crawled”, which if taken literally is not just false but a category mistake. To show that a category mistake has been committed one must typically show that once the phenomenon in question is properly understood, it becomes clear that the claim being made about it could not possibly be true.

Category errors are very common, particularly when engaged in discourse with intellectually sloppy or dishonest individuals. For example, after I pointed out that weakness combined with a request for help was not “true strength”, or even strength at all, Mark Butterworth responded by quoting a Psalm about David’s sacrifice to God.

He wasn’t merely wrong, by which I mean a failure to successfully make a point, he committed an error of category, because offering up one’s weaknesses to God in praise is fundamentally different in nature than determining if the characteristic one possesses is a weakness or a strength.

The abstract category under discussion was “the nature of human strength.” To respond by pointing out that God does not despise weakness offered up to Him as sacrifice is to shift the discussion to a different and tangential category, “things that God values”, which is a category that is simply not relevant to the matter being discussed.

So, to point out that someone has made a category error does not necessarily mean that one is saying their statement is intrinsically false or incorrect, only that it is irrelevant. People usually commit category errors out of carelessness or ignorance or a desire to virtue-signal; when they do so out of dishonesty it is often as part of a bait-and-switch technique to which they resort because they know they cannot defend their position within the bounds of the relevant category.