Category: Uncategorized

Larry Correia fisks the latest SF-SJW drama

In which the an insufficiency of Negroes publishing short science fiction stories is lamented:

While science fiction can be found across novels, television, and film, the short fiction market is a particularly important marketplace to consider. It publishes a relatively high level of content, and allows newer authors to break into the field with their own fiction.

Eh… Sort of. In reality the short fiction market is a good place to get started because it is easier to finish a 5,000 word piece than a 100,000 word novel. Shorts are good practice but the pay is awful. I’ve known some of the most prolific and successful short fiction authors alive, and they don’t make enough off of it to live on. Also of those 2,000 short stories, probably half of them were written by the same 100 or so, already popular/prolific short fiction writers, which will further skew the stats.

Successful authors such as Ken Liu, N.K. Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, and Paolo Bacigalupi each got their start writing shorter stories for a variety of magazines, which helped them as they began writing novels.

Yep. Good for them. Luckily for you there are a hundred ways to get into this business.

Short fiction also allows authors to experiment with form, style, and narratives which can have great impact on the field as a whole.

Uh huh. That sounds great and all, but it’s really kind of bullshit. Not the authors experimenting part. That’s cool. That’s how we learn. The “impact on the field” part, that there is some pretentious literati twaddle. Outside of a tiny circle jerk of critics, nobody cares. Your story probably isn’t got to blow any minds or shake the foundations of the world.  Just write your shit, and if it is entertaining and good enough, people will want to give you money for it.


Barriers for specific groups of people hurts the field as a whole by blocking new voices and styles from reaching a wider audience.

Funny, when I said that same thing years ago I was the bad guy.

I actually think the most ridiculous thing about the SJW lamentation is the idea that Charlie Jane Anders is a successful author. He’s published one novel. Its Amazon rank is unimpressive and it’s got fewer reviews (163) and a lower rating (3.9) than either A Throne of Bones (180, 4.2) or SJWs Always Lie (453, 4.6).

If Anders is a successful author, then everyone is a successful author. Anyhow, read the whole thing. It’s vintage Larry.

It’s strange, but they never seem to be concerned about the plight of the American Indian in science fiction.

Globalists caused US decline

Pat Buchanan rightly condemns the globalists for their foolish abuse of American power that has led to a decline of that power:

“Isolationists must not prevail in this new debate over foreign policy,” warns Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The consequences of a lasting American retreat from the world would be dire.”

To make his case against the “Isolationist Temptation,” Haass creates a caricature, a cartoon, of America First patriots, then thunders that we cannot become “a giant gated community.”

Understandably, Haass is upset. For the CFR has lost the country.

Why? It colluded in the blunders that have bled and near bankrupted America and that cost this country its unrivaled global preeminence at the end of the Cold War.

No, it was not “isolationists” who failed America. None came near to power. The guilty parties are the CFR crowd and their neocon collaborators, and liberal interventionists who set off to play empire after the Cold War and create a New World Order with themselves as Masters of the Universe.

The USA will retreat from the world whether Americans want to or not, whether the globalists want them to or not, because America has been invaded, parasited, and financially raped, and its military has been methodically misused, since 1965.

The US government is no longer by, of, or for the American people. And that is why it can no longer harness American power. The globalists broke the nation, and in doing so, broke its power.

The importance of illumination

Status 451 contemplates the damage caused to organizations and individuals by “value-extractors”:

There’s a pattern most observers of human interaction have noticed, common enough to have earned its own aphorism: “nice guys finish last.” Or, refactored, “bad actors are unusually good at winning.” The phenomenon shows up in business, in politics, in war, in activism, in religion, in parenting, in nearly every collaborative form of human undertaking. If some cooperative effort generates a valuable resource, tangible or intangible, some people will try to subvert the effort in order to divert more of that resource to themselves. Money, admiration, votes, information, regulatory capacity, credibility, influence, authority: all of these and more are vulnerable to capture.

Social engineering, as a field, thus far has focused primarily on hit-and-run tactics: get in, get information (and/or leave a device behind), get out. Adversaries who adaptively capture value from the organizations with which they involve themselves are subtler and more complex. Noticing them, and responding effectively, requires a different set of skills than realizing that’s not the IT guy on the phone or that a particular email is a phish. Most importantly, it requires learning to identify patterns of behavior over time….

In Chapman’s analysis, a subculture’s growth passes through three phases. First come the geeks, the creators and their True Fans whose interest in a niche topic gets a scene moving. Then come the MOPs, short for “Members Of Public,” looking for entertainment, new experiences, and something cool to be part of. Finally, along come the sociopaths, net extractors of value whose long-term aim is to siphon cultural, social, and liquid capital from the social graph of geeks and MOPs. Sociopaths don’t just take, unless they’re not very good at what they do. Many sociopaths contribute just enough to gain a reputation for being prosocial, and keep their more predatory tendencies hidden until they’ve achieved enough social centrality to be difficult to kick out. It’s a survival strategy with a long pedigree; viruses that burn through their host species reservoir too quickly die off.

Corporations, of course, have their own subcultures, and it’s easy to see this pattern in the origin stories of Silicon Valley success stories like Google — and also those of every failed startup that goes under because somebody embezzled and got away with it. Ditto for nonprofits, activist movements, social networking platforms, and really anything that’s focused on growth. Which is a lot of things, these days.

Organizations have a strong incentive to remove net extractors of value. Would-be net extractors of value, then, have an even stronger incentive to keep themselves connected to the social graph. The plasticity of the human brain being what it is, this sometimes leads to some interesting cognitive innovations…. If you’ve ever seen an apparently-thriving group suddenly implode, its members divided over their opinions about one particular person, chances are you’ve seen the end of a sociopath’s run.

This is why sociopaths and predatory narcissists hate and fear people like Mike Cernovich and me. Both being Sigmas and more than a little inclined to march to our own beat, we are not vulnerable to the social pressure that silences most people when they get suspicious about a sociopath. Remember, sociopaths are always on. They are always scanning, trying to get a read on who might be aware that they are not what they pretend to be.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve caught in the middle of a hyperaware perusal of the group they are in, like a wolf in disguise surveying the sheep around him. They always react physically when caught out, often physically recoiling. Even more damning, they react in one of two ways. They either stay away from me and begin exhibiting signs of extreme personal dislike or they suddenly get very friendly in an attempt to figure out if I’m really onto them or if it was just a coincidence. If I don’t respond in a warm and clueless manner, they soon turn openly hostile.

Most people have some inkling that there is something off about the sociopath, but they simply can’t get their heads around believing what their subconscious is telling them. But if you get that ping from your subconscious radar about someone, don’t ignore it, start watching him closely. Make a habit of it. More often than not, you’ll soon see something that will justify your suspicions that everything is not as it should be.

Reprisal

Dear SJW who has been running around signing me up for various email lists,

Please be advised that for every email subscription for which you sign me up, an SJW will be subscribed to all of them.

Love,
Vox

Below are the organizations to sign them up for. To receive your very own SJW, email me with your VFM number. You can request, but I can’t guarantee you’ll get the one of your choice.

  1. info_BWC@betterworldcampaign.org
  2. gmfa@gmfa.org.uk
  3. ministrynews@worldimpact.org
  4. marketing@worldofchildren.org
  5. info@feedingamerica.org
  6. communications@comms.crisis.org.uk
  7. koen@sahaya.org
  8. newsletter@vodoustore.com
  9. info@liveyourdream.org
  10. rosey@womankind.org.uk
  11. info@joyfulheartfoundation.org
  12. info@ifcj.org
  13. feedisrael@yadezra.net
  14. info@hillaryclinton.com
  15. website@em.aspca.org
  16. hello@build-africa.org.uk
  17. email@e.savethechildren.org
  18. info@sharsheret.org
  19. hrc@hrc.org
  20. info@pointfoundation.org
  21. info@feminist.com
  22. ktuff@naplesshelter.org
  23. no-reply@londonfriend.org.uk
  24. info@galop.org.uk
  25. info@waawfoundation.org
  26. team@charitywater.org
  27. newsletter-reply@soschildren.org
  28. info@womenonwings.nl
UPDATE: We have a surfeit of VFM volunteers, so we’re good.

An admission by urgent action

The Washington Post rushes – and I mean RUSHES – to try to defuse the troubling issue of Hillary Clinton’s increasingly obvious health problems:

The first week of August was a rough one for Donald Trump’s campaign; by coincidence, it was also a busy one for Trump supporters, who see a media coverup protecting Hillary Clinton. Over the weekend, the Trump campaign released a Web ad that mocked Clinton’s admission that she “short-circuited” by giving a misleading answer about the investigation into her emails.

“She took a short-circuit in the brain,” Trump said at a Saturday night rally. “She’s got problems. Honestly, I don’t think she’s all there.”

At the same time, the Drudge Report, WorldNetDaily and a small army of would-be Twitter sleuths tried to build the case that the Democratic nominee for president has serious health issues and only they had noticed. Clinton’s age and health had been subject to parody by some conservative media, but the new speculation was completely serious.

None of the evidence, often shared (or sent to reporters) with the hashtag #HillarysHealth, held up. In every case, a Clinton moment that had been captured by the media was reinterpreted and wrenched out of context….

Indeed, for other websites critical of Clinton, the “stairs” photo was just one part of a #HillarysHealth mosaic. It gave WorldNetDaily a hook to resurrect “a July 21 video posted on YouTube [which] shows Clinton’s head suddenly turning and shaking vigorously for several seconds.” That video, titled “Hillary Clinton has seizure/convulsions – tries to play it off making fun of seizures,” was also robbed of its context. Two clips of Clinton bobbing her head had been looped and slowed down, as ominous music and voice-overs played behind them — a combination that helped the clip score 1.4 million views.

The clip wasn’t from July 21, and (as the scrum of media should have indicated) it wasn’t rescued from pro-Clinton censors. It was from June 10, when Clinton, fresh off a series of wins that effectively locked up the Democratic nomination, held a few events ahead of the District of Columbia’s primary. Beat reporters followed Clinton to a coffee shop in the Shaw neighborhood; CNN’s Dan Merica, to her left, asked her about the breaking news of President Obama’s official endorsement. Then, to her right, the Associated Press’s Lisa Lerer asked a question about Elizabeth Warren, whom Clinton had met with as vice presidential speculation swirled.

The reporters, who had covered Clinton for a year, interpreted her exaggerated head-bobbing as a joke at how she’d been suddenly surrounded — and as a successful attempt at ending the scrum. It did not occur to them that it would become seen as evidence of a “seizure,” as people suffering from seizures do not typically laugh and continue to hold cups of coffee.

In WorldNetDaily’s coverage, the evidence that Clinton’s bobble-head moment resembled a seizure is that bloggers said it did. At InfoWars, the conspiracy news site founded by Alex Jones, the investor Martin Shkreli explained that Clinton was revealing a “cardinal symptom of Parkinson’s disease.”

Even when Clinton remained controlled, steady and unsmiling, #HillarysHealth sleuths were ready. Mike Cernovich, a self-help author best known as the attorney for a central figure in the “Gamergate” saga, seized on the speculation about Clinton to ask if Clinton traveled with a private doctor. “Remember when you thought famous people like Michael Jackson and Elvis had good medical care?” he asked. “What’s Clinton on?”

Cernovich’s speculation started with an incident from last week, when Clinton was campaigning in Las Vegas. Mid-speech, she paused and narrowed her eyes to look at protesters. Secret Service Assistant Special Agent in Charge Todd Madison rushed to her side, telling her that the situation was under control, and that she could keep talking.

And now we have a name: Secret Service Assistant Special Agent in Charge Todd Madison. It should be interesting to see how long he’s been with the Secret Service and learn what his medical qualifications are.

What we’re seeing this year is the mainstream media finally taking off the mask and the rise of an alternative media that is going to replace them, at least in part. The mainstream media is no longer able to completely control the narrative, as the alternative media is now driving it.

Remember, the mainstream media is known to have colluded to hide the debilitating health issues of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Kennedy. There is little doubt that they are doing the same thing for Hillary Clinton now.

UPDATE: SJWs always lie and so does the mainstream media. I suspected the “Todd Madison” angle was a point of vulnerability for the cover-up, and, sure enough, The Ralph Retort is on it.

Does anyone honestly think that the Washington Post would actually publish the real name of a Secret Service agent, who has been known to be extremely close to Hillary, at almost all times she’s in public? And because we know that Secret Service often use fake names, it just doesn’t make sense for the WaPo to have endangered the life of Hillary by giving ISIS the full name of her closest and most trusted personnel — it’s far more likely that the guys name is not Todd Madison, at all.

So what might his real name be? The Conservative Tree house thinks they may have found the true identity of Clinton’s handler, and located his medical practice.

Allegedly, his name is Dr. Oladotun Okunola, and he is a neurologist.

Neo-Babelism in stone and steel

If you think this is unintentional, you don’t understand the symbolic language of architecture. Globalism is the modern version of Satanic Neo-Babelism. God created the nations; the Prince of this World wishes to eradicate them under the Satanic principle One World, One Race, One Ruler.

Evil always repeats itself, which is why History always rhymes. Evil is always there, always lurking, always working towards its ultimate objective, which is the complete domination of Man.

Keep that in mind when you hear the anti-racists and anti-nationalists and antifas proudly declaring that there is only one race. The object is to unify humanity in permanent slavery.

The Book of the Week


Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the West and What Can Be Done About It, by Martin van Creveld, is the Book of the Week. Martin is always a must-read for anyone interested in military history or strategy, whether he is published by Castalia or, as in this case, not.

We’ll have a pair of new books out from him in the near future, but in the meantime, this book about the decline of Western military power should tide van Creveld fans over nicely.

The “West,” a term which from this point on will refer to the countries of Western Europe and North America while excluding Russia and Japan, reached the peak of its power just before 1914. Later, owing partly to the casualties sustained in World War I and partly to a loss of self-confidence, it found that its rule over subject peoples became harder and harder to sustain. During the interwar period several colonial countries in the Middle East, including Egypt, Iraq and Jordan, gained at least nominal independence. Translating that into real independence took longer; but by the second half of the 1950s that, too, had been achieved.


Here we are concerned with the strategic aspect of the matter, not the moral one. Still staying in the interwar period, struggles such as the one against the Rif of Morocco, when some 250,000 well-equipped, highly-trained, French and Spanish troops took several years to defeat a loose coalition of mostly barefoot, mostly illiterate, Moroccan tribesmen, pointed to the direction in which things were moving. By 1939 many colonial peoples around the world were preparing to challenge their masters. Although, in the event, it took World War II, in which those masters tore each other to pieces, to set the stage for the conflagrations that followed.


Since then almost the only time Western countries gained a clear military victory over their non-Western opponents was during the First Gulf War. In 1991 NATO, as the most powerful military alliance in history, had just emerged triumphant from the forty-five year struggle known as the Cold War. But its members had not yet begun to dismantle their armed forces as the European ones in particular were to do later on. As a result, they were free as never before or since to send those forces to any spot they wanted to wage any war they wanted against any opponent they wanted. Though few people realized it at the time, in retrospect to challenge NATO, reinforced by several other countries, with a conventional army, as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did, represented the height of folly. Even so the US and its allies did not complete the job. With good reason, as it later turned out.


This episode apart, practically every time the West, or some country that was part of it, fought the rest it was defeated. Conversely the wars in question, and the people who waged them and fought in them, succeeded in liberating—whatever that might mean—entire continents with populations numbering in the hundreds of millions.

Smack my atheist up

In which Stickwick and I tag-team a pair of godless self-appointed wonderboys. First up, DookerT:

On people like Sam Harris. I don’t know how anyone can really debunk anything he says, you can just make your own subjective moral arguments of why you think he’s wrong and you’re right. As far as the final word goes, it’s in the eye of the beholder. The Christian will generally see people like Vox as being correct and an atheist might generally agree with Harris . There simply are no certainties in this realm of debate, at least in my opinion.

It’s quite easy to debunk much of what he says, as it happens. Sam Harris makes many arguments that are based on objective assertions. They can be, and have been, conclusively debunked by the simple mechanic of showing those assertions to be factually false. There is nothing subjective about it. A very good example can be found in the appendix of On the Existence of Gods.

The ironically named Mr Rational picked the wrong blog to try to dazzle with pseudo-intellectual posturing when he responded to a statement about the Big Bang theory:

You do realize that the current model of cosmology is a creationist theory, do you not?

That statement utterly discredits you.  Creationists may have tried to claim Big Bang/Inflation theory as their own, but it is utterly without theistic implications.  If you are listening to people who claim it does, you are listening to liars.  The left has its own liars telling lies which support its dogmas; if you commit the same errors you are no better than the left.

I am moderately familiar with the theory of inflation (far more than most readers here, I’m certain).  The fluctuations in the temperature of the Cosmic Background Radiation associated with quantum density variations frozen in the cosmic fireball as space expanded too fast for them to reach equilibrium again is predicted by WHAT holy book in WHAT passage, precisely?  If it is fair for Vox to demand a specific list of mutations to turn organism X into organism Y, it is eminently fair for me to demand this specificity in theological claims and pronounce the theology worthless if it fails.

I responded to this myself, by pointing out that a) the Big Bang Theory and expansion were conceived by a Belgian priest, and b) the Big Bang Theory is a necessary, though not sufficient requirement for the Bible to be true, but Stickwick’s response is better. She is, by the way, a very well-regarded astrophysicist with a bibliography of published scientific papers on esoteric cosmological matters that is much longer than my list of publications:

I can’t decide if this is the stupidest thing ever said here or the funniest. Others have done a sufficient job explaining to you why this is wrong, but I’ll add one thing. A few years ago, I was present as a Nobel laureate and one of the greatest living physicists explained to a group of non-scientists that the multiverse hypothesis was developed at least in part because of the theistic implications of the big bang.

You’re doing something very annoying, which is attempting to dazzle people with the details of science instead of addressing the heart of the matter. Unless you’re an expert, this is a bad idea, because not everyone is going to be bowled over by your ability to parrot this information. I’m certainly not, because you’ve failed to realize that inflation is not yet a theory with any predictive power. The recent BICEP2 results that supposedly confirmed it were disproven. Inflation is a nice idea, and one that I think is probably correct, but let’s be honest — so far there is no conclusive evidence supporting it.

In any case, it’s absurd to say that the theistic implications of a theory hinge on whether a holy book mentions one particular unproven detail of the theory. It’s like the idiot biologist I talked to who said Genesis was bogus, because out of the dozens of scientifically-testable statements made by Genesis 1, she could find no mention of bacteria. The theological implications of a theory do not hinge on whether it contains every possible detail of the theories of the natural development of the universe, but on whether it says anything that confirms or denies a central tenet of a religion.

As Vox already explained to you, the big bang confirms the first three words of the Bible. The Bible begins with Genesis 1, because, among other things, it establishes God as the sovereign creator of all things. Without this, the Abrahamic religions are meaningless. If the universe is eternal, that’s obviously a big problem for Christianity. Scientists in the 1950s and 1960s understood this very well, which is (partly) why there was so much initial resistance to the big bang and why physicists continue to try to find loopholes in the theory that imply the universe is de facto eternal.

Now, before any atheist gets his panties in a bunch, I hasten to add that I know perfectly well that neither DookerT nor Mr Rational speak for all atheists nor are representative of the best that they have to offer. There are atheists I like, respect, and even admire.

But I think it would be wise for the average Internet atheist to understand that not only are there Christians who are better-educated and more intelligent than they are, but that there are actually more highly intelligent Christians than there are highly intelligent atheists. According to the GSS, in the United States, there are 11.4x more +2SD theists who either know God exists or believe God exists despite having the occasional doubt than there are +2SD atheists who don’t believe God exists.

And if you don’t understand why that is, you’re really not equipped to even enter the lists here.

This would be why

From Wikipedia Talk: Vox Day

In what sense is Vox Day a philosopher? The article only lists some half-baked (and eminently controversial) positions on race. It does not appear that he has been published in any academic journals or contributed anything to the philosophical discourse.
 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.232.78.130 (talk) 21:07, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Concur; removed. The “philosophical views” section was a political views section, so I’ve also renamed that accordingly
– David Gerard (talk) 21:44, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Meh. I think it could be included due to his publication of The Irrational Atheist, which is a philosophical work. Kelly hi! 11:20, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

I believe his work on Social Justice Warriors was the #1 seller in political philosophy for quite some time.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:182:C902:479A:ED91:3D5B:56A6:2252 (talk) 02:01, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Per the section immediately below this one, you can get #1 in an Amazon section with literally three sales. It’s not evidence of any sort of notability
– David Gerard (talk) 18:38, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

It’s not evidence of notability, unless, of course, the category happens to be the one that contains every philosopher from Aristotle to Machiavelli and Rousseau. It’s been a year since SJWAL first became the #1 bestseller in Political Philosophy. And do you know what, it still is!

This usefully demonstrates, by the way, why you can never take anything an SJW says at face value. Even when he tells the absolute literal truth, he is often doing so in a deceptive manner to cloak an obvious falsehood. For example, it is absolutely true that one “can get #1 in an Amazon section with literally three sales”, at least as long as that category is Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Movements > Transpersonal, where a bestseller only needs to hit #70,000 on Amazon to reach #1.

On the other hand, to hit #1 in Romance, you need to hit #3 overall. So, Mr. Gerard’s statement is clearly false, as a #1 Amazon category bestseller may, or may not, be evidence of notability. It depends upon the category. So, does the Political Philosophy category suffice to establish notability? One would presume so, particularly if one is attempting to determine whether the author is a philosopher or not.

The SJW will not hesitate to substitute the general for the particular, or the particular for the general, depending upon what he is trying to prove or disprove. It’s a standard trick upon which they rely heavily. Don’t fall for it.

Hillary’s handler

Mike Cernovich asks the crucial question: who is this man and why does he keep closer to Hillary than the Secret Service?

Michael Jackson, Prince, and Elvis would travel with a personal doctor who could administer needed life-saving drugs and attention during a crisis. Remember when you thought famous people like Michael Jackson and Elvis had good medical care? What’s Clinton on?

Hillary appears to travel with her own Michael Jackson/Elvis style doctor. Who is he?

We saw this first “doctor” or handler during Hillary’s recent freeze-up. You can see Hillary’s handler, who at first glance would not be considered the alpha male of the group, reassure Hillary, speak to her using hypnotic language, and then move the Secret Service Agents out of the way. This handler is not an ordinary SS agent.

Reactions to the first video were similar. This is a weird situation, and clearly the handler is not ordinary Secret Service.

Hillary’s handler is part of her inner circle.

Huma Abedin is the only person closer to Hillary than this man who handles her, pictured on the left.

The Ralph Retort has more, noticing that the man carries a device that appears to be a delivery system for an anti-seizure drug called Diazepam.

Twitter detectives found a new picture of Hillary’s handler — a mysterious man with what looks like a medical lapel-pin that follows Clinton everywhere she goes, helps her up stairs, and calms her down when she’s seizing up because of stress.

Knowing what we know now, and looking at the above video, it looks like after Hillary seized up like a deer in headlights, the medic tries to calm her down, but was having problems because the Secret Service members on stage were freaking her out.

The medic must have realized he wasn’t going to calm her down until Secret Service got off stage, so he went up to each of them individually, telling them to go away.

Now, check at 18 seconds. It looks like a different Secret Service guy pulls out a syringe out of his jacket, and was getting ready to inject her if the seizure got worse. It seems like stress can cause Hillary Clinton to have seizures, which is why her medic ordered all the Secret Service to get off the stage, in order to calm her down and end the seizure she was having.

All of this leads to the obvious question: is Hillary literally unfit for office? Because it certainly looks that way.